Am I somehow viewing slices of two different realities?
Slice one is from December 20, 2024:
How close is nuclear fusion power?
Despite the optimism of these fusion start-ups that they will start producing fusion in the 2030s, the considered consensus of energy scientists seems to be that technological advancements have made fusion much more likely, but that it won’t be ready for widespread power generation until at least after 2050 or 2060.
Slice two is February 28, 2025:
World’s first nuclear fusion power plant in US close to historic ignition test
Helion Energy, an Everett-based fusion energy company, has announced plans to construct the world’s first fusion power plant in Malaga, Washington.
The company is working towards developing a 50-megawatt fusion power plant on land owned by the Chelan Public Utility District (PUD) near Rock Island Dam, along the Chelan County side of the Columbia River.
…
In May 2023, Helion Energy announced a groundbreaking deal with Microsoft, marking the world’s first commercial agreement for fusion energy.
Under this agreement, Helion aims to provide Microsoft with electricity generated from its fusion power plant by 2028. The deal underscores confidence in Helion’s advanced fusion technology and its potential to deliver a reliable, carbon-free energy source.
This partnership aligns with Microsoft’s sustainability goals, aiming to secure clean energy for its operations. Helion’s progress has been further bolstered by significant funding, including a major investment in January 2025, to accelerate the development and deployment of fusion energy technology.
With the planned fusion power plant in Malaga, Washington, Helion is taking significant strides toward making fusion energy a reality, reinforcing its commitment to revolutionizing the energy landscape by 2028.
I realize the concept of time is actually fuzzier than most people realize. However, these articles do not refer to events on different planets moving at relativistic velocities with respect to one another.
I suspect slice two is about 89% salesman talk, 1% technical knowledge, and 10% confidence game. I’m willing to be persuaded the salesmen talk and confidence game portions are swapped.
It’s my belief…and I majored in physics and play with radiation on a daily basis…
that useful fusion is likely not possible on planet earth. Yes…we can make fusion happen. But it’s NOT an easy thing to do and requires a massive amount of energy input to trigger it. I think we see ongoing fusion ONLY inside stars because that is the ONLY place where the proper conditions exist for it to happen. The MASSIVE gravity involved is essential for fusion to start and to continue. Outside of the huge gravity field it’s simply not feasible. And unless/until some massive discovery in physics that is heretofore unknown occurs we will be stuck wishing and trying for fusion but not succeeding. If we can ever learn the fundamentals of gravity and how to manipulate it things may change. But there is no reason to believe that such an outcome is inevitable. And such a discovery would make space travel, at least in our solar system, feasible and reasonable.
I can believe your assessment is accurate. I can also believe the “until at least after 2050 or 2060” assessment is plausible or even accurate. After all, the year 3000 is “after 2050 or 2060.”
I cannot seriously believe someone is building a commercial reactor for producing 50-megawatts and it is going online in three to four years. Yet, they apparently have Microsoft and a utility company taking them seriously. It just Does. Not. Compute.
One solution: the mainstream conventional understanding of physics is wrong, and the Electric Universe theory (or one of the other competing ideas) is right, and conventional approaches will fail because the theory is wrong; just apply the correct underlying theory and it makes an otherwise intractable problem like contained fusion suddenly do-able.
It’s obvious that conventional theory is wrong, given that nearly all cosmological predictions made by it about what we’d see with the JWST have been proven wrong, while the EU theory has largely been accurate.
Also, far to much time and manpower has been poured into fruitless variations of string theory for far to long… it’s looking more and more like a red herring to keep people occupied and away from anything that actually works, just suck up government grant money and not expose the truth (whatever that it).
I know a local guy, dabbles in physics, has pursued Ivor Catt’s work on replacing conventional electric theory where Maxwell’s Equations fail with more general wave theories based on equations for optics among other thing, in part posted about here http://www.forrestbishop.mysite.com/ (in the lower sections “The Electromagnetics of Theory C and Theory N”).
I think met the main theory guy working on that fusion stuff last year at a Republican thing, talked for a bit. Much of the details went over my head, and it can be hard to tell fact from marketing, but it sounded like they were in advanced prototype stage, getting close to proof of concept IIRC. He was very stoked about their progress and potential partners.
Fusion and anti-grav are two things that I’d not be surprised if they are proven true sometime soon. Both are mixed blessings. The economic implications of reliable fusion are big, the military implications and applications of cheap and easy anti-grav are scary.
“But it’s NOT an easy thing to do and requires a massive amount of energy input to trigger it. ”
Gates has been putting out grants for this work for awhile now.
Chelan is about as corrupt as NYC when it comes to energy.
Years ago the county sold, I believe it was Alcoa aluminum contract power super cheap, even though they were closing the plant. And were planning to sell the power on the open market.
Something the county could have done themselves and made a lot more money for their population.
That being said. Maybe Gate’s new research company needs to be next to a large source of power to do the necessary research?
My relation in Wenatchee pays 3 cents a kilowatt last we talked.
Plus, their building data centers their as fast as they can. But that’s is on the entire Columbia river.
Announcing an “ignition test” is really just marketing spin. For one thing, it doesn’t describe a successful test, only the intent to run at test. It may succeed, or not.
If it succeeds, what is the definition of “success”? The same one LLL used when they announced “ignition” in their laser based fusion system? That amounted to more energy out of the target pellet than the incoming laser pulse power. But that isn’t the same, not by a large margin, as a useable power generation system. For one thing, it takes a lot more power to run that system than just the laser energy arriving at the target.
Dan, I think you’re right about magnetic confinement (tokamak etc.) or inertial (laser) schemes. The magnetic ones are inherently only capable of D-T fusion, which means they generate large quantities of high energy neutrons (far more than fission does), which invalidates the “no radioactive byproducts” claim.
I still wonder about the possibility of electrostatic confinement systems, in particular the one developed to a pretty interesting extent by Robert Bussard, the “Polywell”. There are a bunch of interesting articles about that technology, and it has demonstrated fusion (though not “break-even” even in the LLL sense, that needs a larger machine). One interesting angle with that system is that it could in principle do other fusion reactions, in particular proton plus Boron-11 resulting in 3 fast alphas and nothing else — which lets you produce electricity directly, no thermal anything involved.
Simplest theory: Microsoft is buying goodwill among the greens with a few million dollar investment in a dubious startup that at least will create some local jobs for a few years.
They don’t need it to work, they don’t care if it works, the press release is the product they are buying.
That’s plausible. Thanks.
And same thing with their quantum computing hardware announcement. Positive spin for M$FT in the quantum playground but no real product.
At least the people peddling “Quantum Encryption Defense” actually have sellable products, and we are all probably past due to increase our key lengths and change passwords more frequently.
What I haven’t seen is a calm and rational discussion of just exactly what a hostile entity can accomplish when they finally decrypt decades-old data captures.
Re decades old data ..
Technical data and the like, probably not worth very much, no. Who today would care about the special processes for making a 68000 processor, for other than historical interest?
However, given the career lengths in many fields especially big business and politics? Leverage. Blackmail. Things preferred to not be revealed. And so forth. That sort of information could be worth a great deal indeed, decades later.
Of course that only matters if the target cares about their indiscretions or acts being exposed. But for those whose self-worth is highly based on their continued status as being among the “great and good?” Who obsess over their legacy and place in history? Well.
The data I worry about the most is national security stuff. Spy identities, methods of information collecting, etc.