Three weeks ago breathless reports on the 'breakeven' fusion event at the National Ignition Facility began to appear. While a remarkable achievement, it's more a marker of progress along a long and difficult path rather than an event promising a hopeful turn in decarbonizing the energy supply.
Nuclear fusion has been hyped since the late 1950s. Fission based reactors turned out to be straightforward. All you had to do was refine uranium ore and then control a reaction to heat water and run an otherwise conventional power plant. The cold war led to any number of atoms for peace projects suggesting a nuclear everything future. The realization that nuclear fusion was much more efficient and "cleaner" than fission led to optimism and work on controlled fusion. After all, it happens all the time in stars doesn't it?
Power from nuclear fusion has been twenty years in the future ever since. Science and technology have made serious progress, but the challenges are great. There's also the issue of cost per kilowatt-hour. If you build a plant that produces more power than it takes to run it, will it be economically competitive with other low or no-carbon solutions?
There's a simple invention → development → application → change arc of technology mindset that doesn't describe the real world. It turns out you can travel a good distance along the arc only to see failure. The garage-worthy helicopter, supersonic airliners and dirigibles have all be built and commercialized, but have failed for a number of reasons that are likely to keep new versions failing for the foreseeable future. Somehow the dream factor persists in many of these and new failures continue to rhyme.
There are hugely successful inventions that have solved a problem, but turn out to have a deadly flaw that caused great harm. DDT, chlorofluorocarbons and leaded gasoline are obvious examples. Less obvious are inefficient transportation. Standardizing on 3,500+ pound vehicles to move people a handful of miles on average trips has led to millions of traffic deaths, a large pollution toll and a structuring of infrastructure and where and how people live that is proving difficult to change even though much better choices exist. Sometimes tend to fire, aim and then look for damage around the target. Sometimes it takes decades and change is expensive.
There are a wishlist class of inventions where some progress is made, but effective deployment is a long way off (fusion power plants) or unlikely as the underlying approaches are flawed at this point (self-driving cars, hyperloops, neural implants, space elevators, nuclear powered cars and airplanes, etc.)
It's very easy for an imaginative artist or writer to sketch an idea that is technically impossible. We have a tendency to sort through the chaff and find amazing predictions from a hundred years ago. It's useful to realize how much noise there is and that these things didn't happen in the author's or their children's lifetimes. Still - every now and again you run across something that stops you. This is one of my favorites - not only because it suggests wireless video communications, but it also nails the social element of two people ignoring each other so they can look at a screen.
Then there's a class of necessary arcs that we need to get past application and into wide-spread use. Flexible power distribution to move power from generation to where it can be stored or used. An advanced worldwide pandemic monitoring system. Water management and treatment to deal with changing local climates as well as use needs. More efficient agriculture that can deal with changing climates. Changes to transportation and housing infrastructures that are less damaging. Some of these aren't terribly sexy, but require social and political will - areas where progress is often very difficult. And in the background there needs to be investment in fundamental science. While progress can be difficult to predict, historically it's easy to predict that there will be unexpected discovery that can lead to something useful down the road.
It's fun to enjoy the stories writers and artists weave. Creating your own is a great way to work with the imagination of a nine year old on a rainy day. Time and interstellar travel won't come along with scores of other ideas that help move stories along.
building blocks
Watching Apple's Mac Studio announcement yesterday took my mind to something Carl Sagan said in the Cosmos series.
The Mac Studio's underlying technology goes far beyond the many tens of thousands of person-hours Apple has invested. The semiconductor industry that stands on the shoulders of Bell Laboratories back to the fundamental work of James Clerk Maxwell and before. Apple and others are able to come up with advances that strike us as dramatic as they make an impact on our lives. The impact of some innovations like the electric light, the telephone, the automobile, powered flight, radio, the atomic bomb and the Internet have changed how we see ourselves. But take a look and they're all built on long chains of invention and innovation that are often forgotten.
This comes to mind with the horrors going on in Ukraine. Russia has always had brilliant minds. They've made stunning advances in physics and math, but they haven't been as successful as the West in building on that. A good deal of their technology is derivative. In the past 25 years this may be by design. Most of the export value comes from extraction - oil and other natural resources. These industries seem to fall under the direct control of Putin's friends. More technical industries are still under oligarchs, but these aren't super high profit. As long as the core players can control them, the real focus of the economy is what can be run by shear force and power rather than technology and sound business practices. (note - this is speculation as I'm certainly not a Russian expert.. so take it with a grain of salt).
High tech industry is required for the military and some consumer use. Although that is supposed to be home-brew there is a lot of importing and rebranding. I've seen that in electronics used in physics experiments and am told is standard operating procedure.
So imagine you can't important and rebrand the CNC tools necessary to make jet engines. Can you make the tools yourself. What if you can't even make precision bearings? What if China doesn't allow electronics into the country (they probably will, but now they can be the Mafia dons)? Sanctions can make a medium and longterm impact.
You don't need to make your Apple pies from scratch - we have our universe - but few companies or countries have the capability to build objects of the modern world without technologies that exist outside. All of these long threads few of us think about until they aren't available. Think about all of those high value products waiting for fifty cent ICs that were designed twenty years ago...
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PS - I'd love a Mac Studio, but it's way beyond my budget.
Posted at 04:57 PM in general comments, history of science, history of technology, manfacturing, society and technology | Permalink | Comments (0)
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