How things change. When I joined AT&T Bell Labs in 1978, it was said to be the best R&D lab in the world. AT&T at that time had 1 million employees.
Bell Labs is now completely gone. Some of their military work at Whippany NJ did contract work for several years but that is gone now. AT&T is a marketing company so I don't suspect any remnants of the innovative Bell Labs remain in AT&T
Even before I joined, say in the 60's, 70;s and early 80's, places like Bell Labs and Boeing had a strong technical focus and an engaged workforce. These days finance and management are in the saddle.
Did you note the time from start-up to execution of product prototype? Amazing IMO. What humans will achieve via materials science will be fantastical, IMO.
Correction: I made a spelling error. I said "not" and it should have been "now"
Corrected sentence reads: Bell Labs is NOW gone.
I left in 2000 when Lucent had been bought out by Al Catel. Now what is left of most of Lucent is owned by Nokia.
I learned about the remnants of Bell Labs from a friend who worked at a defense contractor with ex Bell Labs employees. There were a couple of status levels for Members of the Technical Staff. The only one I recall was "distinguished MTS." There was a higher level, a Bell Labs fellow. The friend said there was a big government contract whose proposal was so bad that the government walked out of the meeting. The contract company folded and all the Bell Lab fellows and distinguished MTS were let go.
This was a project to synchronize satellite communications clocks globally for some system: weather, or something. My friend tried to get them to build special purpose hardware because specifically dedicated hardware can be an order of magnitude faster than software. They turned down his proposal and project failed.
A couple of years ago I met an ex Boeing engineer who had developed a distributed real time computer system and wrote the operating system and compiler for the system. This could have been implemented in Boeing airplanes. His reward was literally to move his office into a broom closet were mops were stored. Shortly afterwards a big wig pulled him out of the closet and they went on road shows. Years later , a couple of years ago when I met him, his son revived his old work to see if it could be applied somewhere.
that is where the innovation appears to have started.. where it stopped - hard to know.. i remember the canadian company nortel, which came out of northern telecom..
The word Tokamak is the Russian acronym for "тороидальная камера с магнитными катушками".
The advantages of fusion over fission (which is used today in nuclear power plants) are: a) it does not produce direct radioactive waste and b) it does not require a non-renewable fuel as scarce as uranium. On the other hand, it is much more difficult to start: To date, the balance point between the energy needed to accelerate and confine the plasma and that obtained by the fusion of some particles has not been reached. However, there are no theoretical reasons for this, only technical reasons.
And, like fission, fusion reactions produce a copious flow of neutrons, which must get absorbed by the nuclei of the atoms in the surrounding containment material. After eating an extra neutron, the new isotope of that atom often ends up unstable - this is true for all but a few elements (such as iron or lead). It's less of an issue with fission reactors, since there is less wizardry that has to happen in the reactor core - just a mechanical movement of some control rods. Anyway this radically limits the materials that are used in the heart of the machine - and even limits minor alloy elements that would normally be required to get useful properties and service life out of those materials.
So building a device that sustains fusion, captures the energy, has a positive net energy-flow balance, and can produce enough electricity to make the monthly payment on the construction loan... is still not nearly the end of the tech development. Just as fission reactors had to evolve for another half century after introduction to achieve safety and longevity.
It'll be done though. If anyone can pull it off today, it's PRC.
Important point. The activation of construction parts and the surrounding space by the high neutron flow is likely to be very problematic. Probably less intensive than fission products, but nevertheless, not at all harmless.
Second problem is Tritium - like hydrogen, it passes even concrete or steel, there is no realistic option for containing it. Standard argument for letting this happen is the low beta-energy of 50keV, officially rendering a quite low ionisation dosis - theoretically.
In fact it is quite critical, because once becoming part of organic compounds and being incorporated, it delivers these ionisations in a very small volume around the source, having an effect similar to incorporated alpha particles, rendering serious local damage, not stochastically distributed like other beta radiators, i.e. the common Potassium 40 with 2 MeV per decay. Their damage is stochastically distributed, allowing sufficient repair by the body.
In addition, organic compounds tend to be concentrated in biologically very active tissue, thus there is a risk of concentration in most vulnerable areas within the body - very different from solutions of potassium salts.
Two private fusion projects will use deuterium and helium-3 rather than tritium. But that’s problematic too, they’ll need to run at far higher temperatures, 1 billion degrees rather than 150 million degrees Celsius. And helium-3, although stable, is nearly as rare and hard to acquire as tritium. Most commercial sources of it depend on the decay of tritium, typically from military stockpiles. Developers are hoping that by adding extra deuterium they can breed helium-3.
Preface. Of all the hundreds of obstacles fusion has yet to overcome, its death knell could be as simple as a shortage of the essential fuel it runs on: tritium. Yes, there are some kinds of imaginary fusion reactors that don’t need it, but they require a billion degrees Celsius (1.8 billion F) of heat. Tritium fusion reactors require a “mere” 150 million degrees Celsius (270 million Fahrenheit).
Today tritium for ITER is generated by 19 Canadian CANDU fission reactors, half of them slated to shut down. Of course, more reactors could be built, but until nuclear wastes are stored, that is unthinkable until we bury existing waste to protect thousands of future generations who won’t have the energy or expertise to do so after fossil fuels are gone (Alley 2013, Stone 2016a, Stone 2016b).
And why would you pollute thousands of future generations of our descendants with nuclear wastes since manufacturing and heavy trucks, locomotives and ships can’t run on electricity? Or hydrogen, biofuels, liquefied coal, and so on as explained in my books. As it is, ITER will produce 30,000 tons of radioactive waste if it ever is started up (Jassby 2018). But the odds are that will never happen. ITER was supposed to be up and running in 2016, and now it looks like 2025 will be the earliest test of plasma, and full fusion in 2035. ITER is terribly mismanaged partly due to the enormous scope and number of countries involved. With peak oil in 2018, peak everything really since petroleum makes all other activities and goods possible, add on peak tritium and fusion was and will always be a dream.
Several years ago in an article about China's fusion and space programs, one of the reasons for the latter was the high density of Helium 3 on the moon that could be used to fuel the former. In other words, the Chinese and Russians have a plan. Heavy trucks and locomotives can and do run on electricity. Yes, ships do pose a challenge, that's why making new land-based logistics corridors are so important. Airplanes are also an engineering challenge.
"Heavy trucks and locomotives can and do run on electricity"
But not at industrial scale - good old thermodynamics means over half the weight of a large electric truck would have to be battery, at remote mining locations, with nowhere to charge them up i.e. 1000's of km from grids = 'aint gonna happen = mining and long distance transport with electric trucks will never scale up beyond marketing / investment propaganda.
Most famously the Tesla semi trucks, which are under a trial at the PepsiCo Frito-lay plant in Modesto California. It is hard to imagine an easier test to pass. It would be hard to find a lighter cargo. Lay potato chips weigh 56 kg/cubic meter (m3), lighter than rice Krispie’s 90 kg/m3, corn chips 178 kg/m3 or marshmallows 210 kg/m3. There will be no hills, central California is flatter than the Midwest. The roads are in excellent shape and so great for rolling efficiency, and wind so calm there is little aerodynamic drag.
The 15 Semis in Modesto hauling chips can go 425 miles, but the 21 in Sacramento can go just 100 miles hauling PepsiCola (Reuters 2022).
Trucks that matter can haul 30 tons of goods and weigh 40 times more than an average car. Batteries scaled up from cars for trucks are far too heavy. For example, a truck capable of going 621 miles hauling 59,525 pounds, the maximum allowable cargo weight, would need a battery weighing 55,116 pounds, and carry 4,400 pounds of cargo (den Boer et al. 2013) that would take 12 hours or more to recharge.
Or as Ryan Carlyle, oil company engineer puts it: “As far as heavy trucking is concerned, there is no replacement for hydrocarbon fuels. The physics of power/weight ratios, and existence of legal road weight limits, means you simply can’t build an “electric semi” and expect it to haul anything comparable to what diesel trucks haul today. This is not an area where Tesla can build a 30% better battery pack and suddenly it’s feasible. The necessary energy density numbers are more like 50 times less than they need to be. The truck will use over half its payload capacity just carrying its own batteries. There are chemical limits to what batteries can do. Electrochemical galvanic cells physically cannot store enough energy — ever — to approach today’s large diesel engines (Carlyle 2014).
Electric rail (all built and maintained with fossil fuels) can only go as far as the electricity pylons powering them (all built and maintained with fossil fuels). Q: what do we need to make electricity? A: 60% is fossil fuels.
I think the Russians are working on it too. There is probably cooperation between Russia and China (closer today due to stupid sanctions), like there was close cooperation between NASA and ROSCOSMOS.
Yes, tokamak is a Russian word for a very good reason. That Russia has fallen slightly behind the Chinese IMO is related to the amount of skilled people available to work on all the project's facets, which are many and very complex. The article noted that an American company is also in the game. One of the goals of the Lunar Research Project is the mining of Helium 3 for use as fusion reactor fuel. What I want to see are applications of the heat generated via fusion for things other than creating steam to drive turbines.
How things change. When I joined AT&T Bell Labs in 1978, it was said to be the best R&D lab in the world. AT&T at that time had 1 million employees.
Bell Labs is now completely gone. Some of their military work at Whippany NJ did contract work for several years but that is gone now. AT&T is a marketing company so I don't suspect any remnants of the innovative Bell Labs remain in AT&T
Even before I joined, say in the 60's, 70;s and early 80's, places like Bell Labs and Boeing had a strong technical focus and an engaged workforce. These days finance and management are in the saddle.
Did you note the time from start-up to execution of product prototype? Amazing IMO. What humans will achieve via materials science will be fantastical, IMO.
Correction: I made a spelling error. I said "not" and it should have been "now"
Corrected sentence reads: Bell Labs is NOW gone.
I left in 2000 when Lucent had been bought out by Al Catel. Now what is left of most of Lucent is owned by Nokia.
I learned about the remnants of Bell Labs from a friend who worked at a defense contractor with ex Bell Labs employees. There were a couple of status levels for Members of the Technical Staff. The only one I recall was "distinguished MTS." There was a higher level, a Bell Labs fellow. The friend said there was a big government contract whose proposal was so bad that the government walked out of the meeting. The contract company folded and all the Bell Lab fellows and distinguished MTS were let go.
This was a project to synchronize satellite communications clocks globally for some system: weather, or something. My friend tried to get them to build special purpose hardware because specifically dedicated hardware can be an order of magnitude faster than software. They turned down his proposal and project failed.
A couple of years ago I met an ex Boeing engineer who had developed a distributed real time computer system and wrote the operating system and compiler for the system. This could have been implemented in Boeing airplanes. His reward was literally to move his office into a broom closet were mops were stored. Shortly afterwards a big wig pulled him out of the closet and they went on road shows. Years later , a couple of years ago when I met him, his son revived his old work to see if it could be applied somewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell
that is where the innovation appears to have started.. where it stopped - hard to know.. i remember the canadian company nortel, which came out of northern telecom..
Check out Martyanov's for the news about Boeing.
interesting!
https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2024/06/you-know-you-are-in-trouble.html
Bell labs invented and developed the transistor, one of the greatest tools ever. They also produced 3 or 4 Nobel laureates.
The word Tokamak is the Russian acronym for "тороидальная камера с магнитными катушками".
The advantages of fusion over fission (which is used today in nuclear power plants) are: a) it does not produce direct radioactive waste and b) it does not require a non-renewable fuel as scarce as uranium. On the other hand, it is much more difficult to start: To date, the balance point between the energy needed to accelerate and confine the plasma and that obtained by the fusion of some particles has not been reached. However, there are no theoretical reasons for this, only technical reasons.
Don't forget that Rosatom has mastered the fuel cycle and will burn previously generated waste as fuel ion its 4th generation reactors.
And, like fission, fusion reactions produce a copious flow of neutrons, which must get absorbed by the nuclei of the atoms in the surrounding containment material. After eating an extra neutron, the new isotope of that atom often ends up unstable - this is true for all but a few elements (such as iron or lead). It's less of an issue with fission reactors, since there is less wizardry that has to happen in the reactor core - just a mechanical movement of some control rods. Anyway this radically limits the materials that are used in the heart of the machine - and even limits minor alloy elements that would normally be required to get useful properties and service life out of those materials.
So building a device that sustains fusion, captures the energy, has a positive net energy-flow balance, and can produce enough electricity to make the monthly payment on the construction loan... is still not nearly the end of the tech development. Just as fission reactors had to evolve for another half century after introduction to achieve safety and longevity.
It'll be done though. If anyone can pull it off today, it's PRC.
Important point. The activation of construction parts and the surrounding space by the high neutron flow is likely to be very problematic. Probably less intensive than fission products, but nevertheless, not at all harmless.
Second problem is Tritium - like hydrogen, it passes even concrete or steel, there is no realistic option for containing it. Standard argument for letting this happen is the low beta-energy of 50keV, officially rendering a quite low ionisation dosis - theoretically.
In fact it is quite critical, because once becoming part of organic compounds and being incorporated, it delivers these ionisations in a very small volume around the source, having an effect similar to incorporated alpha particles, rendering serious local damage, not stochastically distributed like other beta radiators, i.e. the common Potassium 40 with 2 MeV per decay. Their damage is stochastically distributed, allowing sufficient repair by the body.
In addition, organic compounds tend to be concentrated in biologically very active tissue, thus there is a risk of concentration in most vulnerable areas within the body - very different from solutions of potassium salts.
IMO, that's one of the major reasons why Helium 3 is the preferred fuel but is very scarce on Earth but plentiful on moon.
Two private fusion projects will use deuterium and helium-3 rather than tritium. But that’s problematic too, they’ll need to run at far higher temperatures, 1 billion degrees rather than 150 million degrees Celsius. And helium-3, although stable, is nearly as rare and hard to acquire as tritium. Most commercial sources of it depend on the decay of tritium, typically from military stockpiles. Developers are hoping that by adding extra deuterium they can breed helium-3.
Preface. Of all the hundreds of obstacles fusion has yet to overcome, its death knell could be as simple as a shortage of the essential fuel it runs on: tritium. Yes, there are some kinds of imaginary fusion reactors that don’t need it, but they require a billion degrees Celsius (1.8 billion F) of heat. Tritium fusion reactors require a “mere” 150 million degrees Celsius (270 million Fahrenheit).
Today tritium for ITER is generated by 19 Canadian CANDU fission reactors, half of them slated to shut down. Of course, more reactors could be built, but until nuclear wastes are stored, that is unthinkable until we bury existing waste to protect thousands of future generations who won’t have the energy or expertise to do so after fossil fuels are gone (Alley 2013, Stone 2016a, Stone 2016b).
And why would you pollute thousands of future generations of our descendants with nuclear wastes since manufacturing and heavy trucks, locomotives and ships can’t run on electricity? Or hydrogen, biofuels, liquefied coal, and so on as explained in my books. As it is, ITER will produce 30,000 tons of radioactive waste if it ever is started up (Jassby 2018). But the odds are that will never happen. ITER was supposed to be up and running in 2016, and now it looks like 2025 will be the earliest test of plasma, and full fusion in 2035. ITER is terribly mismanaged partly due to the enormous scope and number of countries involved. With peak oil in 2018, peak everything really since petroleum makes all other activities and goods possible, add on peak tritium and fusion was and will always be a dream.
https://energyskeptic.com/2024/fusion-may-never-happen-due-to-lack-of-tritium/
Several years ago in an article about China's fusion and space programs, one of the reasons for the latter was the high density of Helium 3 on the moon that could be used to fuel the former. In other words, the Chinese and Russians have a plan. Heavy trucks and locomotives can and do run on electricity. Yes, ships do pose a challenge, that's why making new land-based logistics corridors are so important. Airplanes are also an engineering challenge.
"Heavy trucks and locomotives can and do run on electricity"
But not at industrial scale - good old thermodynamics means over half the weight of a large electric truck would have to be battery, at remote mining locations, with nowhere to charge them up i.e. 1000's of km from grids = 'aint gonna happen = mining and long distance transport with electric trucks will never scale up beyond marketing / investment propaganda.
Most famously the Tesla semi trucks, which are under a trial at the PepsiCo Frito-lay plant in Modesto California. It is hard to imagine an easier test to pass. It would be hard to find a lighter cargo. Lay potato chips weigh 56 kg/cubic meter (m3), lighter than rice Krispie’s 90 kg/m3, corn chips 178 kg/m3 or marshmallows 210 kg/m3. There will be no hills, central California is flatter than the Midwest. The roads are in excellent shape and so great for rolling efficiency, and wind so calm there is little aerodynamic drag.
The 15 Semis in Modesto hauling chips can go 425 miles, but the 21 in Sacramento can go just 100 miles hauling PepsiCola (Reuters 2022).
https://energyskeptic.com/2024/tesla-semi-trucks-hauling-corn-chips/
Trucks that matter can haul 30 tons of goods and weigh 40 times more than an average car. Batteries scaled up from cars for trucks are far too heavy. For example, a truck capable of going 621 miles hauling 59,525 pounds, the maximum allowable cargo weight, would need a battery weighing 55,116 pounds, and carry 4,400 pounds of cargo (den Boer et al. 2013) that would take 12 hours or more to recharge.
Or as Ryan Carlyle, oil company engineer puts it: “As far as heavy trucking is concerned, there is no replacement for hydrocarbon fuels. The physics of power/weight ratios, and existence of legal road weight limits, means you simply can’t build an “electric semi” and expect it to haul anything comparable to what diesel trucks haul today. This is not an area where Tesla can build a 30% better battery pack and suddenly it’s feasible. The necessary energy density numbers are more like 50 times less than they need to be. The truck will use over half its payload capacity just carrying its own batteries. There are chemical limits to what batteries can do. Electrochemical galvanic cells physically cannot store enough energy — ever — to approach today’s large diesel engines (Carlyle 2014).
https://energyskeptic.com/2021/diesel-finite-where-are-electric-trucks/
Electric rail (all built and maintained with fossil fuels) can only go as far as the electricity pylons powering them (all built and maintained with fossil fuels). Q: what do we need to make electricity? A: 60% is fossil fuels.
https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
More here:-
https://energyskeptic.com/?s=truck
I think the Russians are working on it too. There is probably cooperation between Russia and China (closer today due to stupid sanctions), like there was close cooperation between NASA and ROSCOSMOS.
Yes, tokamak is a Russian word for a very good reason. That Russia has fallen slightly behind the Chinese IMO is related to the amount of skilled people available to work on all the project's facets, which are many and very complex. The article noted that an American company is also in the game. One of the goals of the Lunar Research Project is the mining of Helium 3 for use as fusion reactor fuel. What I want to see are applications of the heat generated via fusion for things other than creating steam to drive turbines.
fascinating karl.. thanks..
My first thought was the pic made me think of Star Trek.
Yes, Spock. Fascinating indeed 😀