I haven't come across any meaningful news on this project since the article linked here. I search every month or so. I do that with several projects that had a moment of hype.
I've thought about setting up a small site for it. Tracking promising sci/tech stories with unknown likelihood to ever actually come about. It's the kind of thing I have a natural interest in, as I think it's where the cool things happen.
Is there such a site? Dedicated to tracking the status of these kinds of things on an ongoing basis?
One of the hosts of .NetRocks does a lot of "Geek Outs" where he researches a topic then presents his research on the episode. He's done two or more on this topic. He did one specifically on this release (and other information)
http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1145
But I'd suggest you watch the first one he did on this topic.
Also if you are a C# developer you should probably be listening to this show on a regular basis anyway. Because it rocks. And they do cover a pretty wide range outside the .Net stack.
Note: I have no affiliation with the show, I just really like it.
Edit: I think it's a great idea to create a site to centralize all this information. If you do, you might find contacting Richard to be helpful to aggregate data. Sorry that was the point of me posting, but I got rushed and forgot.
I've long had a soft spot for low probability, high-return science.
I've looked around the net also, but not recently.
The problem in the past was 1) sites set up by folks looking to scam people, and 2) people who were emotionally not well and unable to discuss such matters critically without getting into conspiracy theories and emotional-reasoning-based discussions.
Both of those things kill it. If somebody could come up with a way to have reasonable and critical open-minded discussions of things like this? Sign me up.
That's the thing with these type of hyped things. General Fusion is another company that was going to do something 5-7 years ago and has received much funding from energy companies and has yet to put out anything substantial.
I was lucky enough to get a tour of their facility last June. One half was assembling and testing the most colossal plasma injection guns, driven by the biggest capacitor bank I have ever seen in my life.
The other half of the facility contained the anemone-shaped plasma compression chamber from all their promotional images. (And far more impressive than the dinky prototype from the article above.) They had a shelf full of cracked steel pistons, and I'm still not sure how they plan to solve that problem when the full-scale machine uses 200 of them instead of just a dozen or so.
(An aside, if anyone from General Fusion is reading this: my inventor friend suggested shooting slugs of molten lead into the molten lead core, instead of using the current steel-piston approach.)
I guess I'm just saying that between the facilities, and what our host (one of the project managers) was talking about, I'm satisfied that they're not dawdling. These are just some inherently hard problems they're working on.
I am not a conspiracy nut, I don't think they actually have anything yet. There was a 90s Keanu Reeves movie called Chain Reaction that had that exact plot but I don't think this is the case here. The opportunity is too big to just sit back because if it can be cracked, someone will crack it soon.
As I said, if someone can crack it they will. If the US wants to sit on the technology they can do so at a great cost to themselves and the world. We need cheap, safe energy for the world. It has the ability to literally save the world.
If you're into building such site, one thing missing from most technology stories is an in-depth explanations(or even smart analysis by the right bloggers) about the technology and how it works, and not the watered-down stuff that usually goes around.
I'm sure the community here would love such a site, i know i would.
And you don't have to write it , just aggregate stuff, and i'm sure users would be happy to share.
Most of the problem is that a lot of the *Weekly type of aggregator sites that report this kind of material seem to have an editorial aversion to linking off-site.
I'm curious how many news sites actually have a "stories can only include hyperlinks to content our own site" policy.
(Note: BBC News seems to be an exception, but still fails to include an obvious link a lot of the time)
I constantly think about a set of adult learning course for science things such as "math you need to know to understand relativity properly", be great to see this for other areas as well...
I think the problem is that these folks tend to not publicize failure. It caters to cranks after a while, all the promises with no clear acknowledgment of the failure, just that they ran out of money and had to shut it down.
Conversely, I think people have no problem making promises. As a part of that, they could advertise their promises and hopefully glean some sort of accountability by making these promises public.
So do I it's actually a pretty useful service that I have incorporated into my regular news consumption way too late :)
I currently have an Alert for "Magic Leap" for example.
nextbigfuture.com is pretty good in that regard, a little political sometimes and sometimes some things from the edges of science but the admin does a good job on tracking news for emerging tech.
That's a good question. Nothing comes to mind, but then things that live up to early promise probably just seem "obvious" in retrospect. Actively tracking the status over time might make it easier to remember those cases.
There are some things, like Amazon delivery drones, that are seeming a lot more plausible than they were initially given credit for.
It might be interesting, beyond basic news tracking for these topics to do some sort of "plausibility survey" along the way was well. See how people's opinions shift. Obviously that's a lot more work to do it right, but it could also be a lot more useful in the long run.
The successes seem to require the leadership having both incredible competency AND ironclad personal belief that the problem should be solved at almost any cost.
These mega-problems are hard. And, even down a road to eventual success, there are likely to be a lot of "we have to lay off the entire team for 6 months because we have no funding" or "everything about this current situation makes exiting and cutting our losses the smarter move" moments.
I can't imagine that gets any easier when you're talking about physical artifacts that require a much higher minimum feasible investment to even try.
When it was invented the Tokamak was talked about in similar ways - and a half-dozen more schemes after it. Only the Tokamak is still here, with the finicky details still being worked out and bigger machines necessary to bring it together.
The reason ITER is huge is because it's a lot easier to confine a big plasma then it is to confine a small one - all your path lengths mean your field strengths keep fast moving ions inside the vacuum chamber. Building compact reactors invites a whole new world of confinement problems and there's some hard limits on how much magnet you can get from materials science at the moment.
I want them to succeed but the odds are against them that they don't run into the usual crunch of balancing problems which most "otherwise stable" confinement schemes do.
As far as I can tell, this is just a magnetic mirror with neutral beam injection.
The problem with mirror devices has and always will be plasma squirting out of the sides. Sure, at any given moment, that may represent a small fraction of the plasma (only particles that have a certain velocity will exit). But collisions eventually change particles' velocity, eventually dooming them to the path outward.
It looks like they're relying upon the neutral beams to replenish particles that leave. That takes energy, and is one of the primary heating mechanisms in tokamaks. Whether they can break even with such a scheme is entirely unknown since they're not providing details.
More power to them, but I remain skeptical until they actually release details (this hardly counts). If it's secret, it's not science.
He talks about recirculation, maybe they figured out a way to plug the ends? Ie if the plasma is positive charge, then would placing negative chargs at the sides seal it? I don't know if this was ever tried.
Plasma is almost always quasi-neutral. It's very hard to separate positive and negative charges, especially along the field line. Electrons move very quickly to cancel out any excess charge.
While it's probably true that increasing the iteration time on design will get you to a stable tokamak design faster, comparing the time it took to get to ITER is not really a fair comparison.
With large scale mechanical engineering projects, scaling the size down will create a world of new problems that ITER never ran into. They will need to solve these all in house, whereas the tokamak design for ITER had the best researchers all over the world working on it.
I'm actually more surprised that skunk works makes youtube videos now. I can almost feel the engineers cringing when PR came to them with this idea...
Putting my aluminum foil hat on, and tying into your 'information obscuration' idea, I speculate the Lockheed announcement may have been diversion for some other activity they have previously or currently working on in secret.
I've thought about setting up a small site for it. Tracking promising sci/tech stories with unknown likelihood to ever actually come about. It's the kind of thing I have a natural interest in, as I think it's where the cool things happen.
Is there such a site? Dedicated to tracking the status of these kinds of things on an ongoing basis?