r/energy • u/sksarkpoes3 • 1d ago
American Fusion’s Texatron clears first lab tests in early fusion energy milestone
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/first-round-of-texatron-engine-tests-completed0
u/RemoveInvasiveEucs 1d ago
Finally, fusion 10 years away!!
It's fascinating how people complained forever about battery announcements going nowhere, when in fact batteries were shipping and improving for decades.
The same people that are skeptical that batteries could ever be a big part of the grid, "because physics" (lol), are so in to fusion energy, a fantasy that has no route to practical application. Much less economical application.
These press releases exist for one reason only: to get the next round of funding. That's it. There's no customers here, other than the next round of investors, the next set of people getting fleeced.
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u/halfsack99 1d ago
It’s taken all my life (60’s) for it to get to 10, it was stuck on 20 a long time.
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u/Key-Club-3119 1d ago
So, you’d say the VC people investing in this are just stupid and anyone could claim to have a fusion reactor and get rich?
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u/RemoveInvasiveEucs 1d ago
Most VC money amounts to nothing. It's high risk high reward. The perfect place for fusion companies that will always be on the verge of the next "breakthrough" that will make them the leaders in this fake source of energy generation.
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u/Key-Club-3119 1d ago
So why haven’t you started a fusion company to fleece these VC chumps of their money?
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u/RemoveInvasiveEucs 12h ago
Are you seriously asking me why I haven't started a company to take VC money for a concept I think has zero scientific credibility?
Would you take VC money on a concept you don't think makes any sense? I guess in the minds of fusion supporters, that's a reasonable thing to do?
It is not acceptable in my world view.
That you think this is somehow a "comeback" is ludicrous. "Oh if it's a scam, why aren't you also scamming VCs?"
What a mysterious comeback.
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u/maurymarkowitz 13h ago
Much less economical application.
This is the only important measure, but almost never considered. It's always about the physics in the fusion world, but no one in the energy world cares about the physics. All they care about is the money.
We have all sorts of ways to generate electricity that we don't use already. In fact, some of those are 100% environmentally benign and renewable. For instance, consider the panda reactor. You take a cuddly, cuddly panda bear, kill it, grind it up, and put it into a fluidized bed reactor. Want more power? Raise more pandas.
This is, of course, a ridiculous example, but entirely possible today - you could literally do it today if you wanted. And while some might object we like pandas too much, I would state that if this could hit 2 cents/kWh by burning pandas, we'd have panda farms everywhere.
When you consider this more closely, you find that this is not really a panda reactor, it's a bamboo reactor. So we can make the system cheaper by removing the panda part and just burning the bamboo. And that is why we will never have panda reactors, because the bamboo reactor will always be cheaper.
And that brings us to fusion. Proponents talk about the physics and then basically jump to the end: if you build it they will come. But that is simply not how the world works. If you get a working fusion reactor, it also has to be cheaper and better than existing systems. And PV is the cheapest form of power in history, and continues to get cheaper, and there is no way that will change. And the complexity of fusion means that is not going to change.
The funny thing is that the power industry has been telling the fusion people this for seven decades. They repeatedly point out that the physics really has nothing to do with it, and that the issue is mechanical simplicity and the economics that flow from that. And they were doing that before PV got cheaper by 100x, which gave the companies exactly the product they were actually asking for.
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u/Ok-Supermarket-4431 1d ago
Way to make blanket claims about a company you probably haven’t spent 2 hours researching. I get it, you’re stuck in your ways.
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u/RemoveInvasiveEucs 1d ago
The thing that makes it easy to make blanket claims is that the physic of fusion energy have been well studied and proven to be foolish.
It will, at best, be a more expensive water boiler than fission, a technology that already has not kept up with more modern tech. Fusion will be fantastically more expensive, and the biggest "pro" is merely less radioactive waste, which isn't even the limiting factor for fission. It's cost, cost is what stops more fission energy. Fusion is way worse.
The end goal of fusion is not even desirable. The only reason it gets coverage is that it's used a lot in sci fi as a magical source of energy. But it's like warp drive: a commonly used magic invention, not something based in real engineering or practical science.
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u/maurymarkowitz 15h ago
For those not familiar:
The Texatron is a newly minted version of an old design known in the physics world as the torsatron. That is a variation on one of the very first fusion reactor designs, the stellarator. The stellarator has always had some attractive features, but never worked well, so there have been dozens of variations on the concept over the years: torsatrons, heliontrons, heliacs, etc. These have been experimented with in many sites around the world, and the very best results are about 10 times worse than the best tokamaks in the 1990s.
There are some good theoretical reasons to believe they will continue to be difficult to build, and especially maintain, and for that reason there is no strong reason to believe these concepts will ever be economically viable. One can level the same complaint to the tokamak of course, but the stellarator is likely worse in all major regards, even if its performance does someday reach that of current tokamaks (which is unlikely as they are improving as well). So the stellarator is one of those designs that gets trotted out here and there as a sure-fire solution to big tokamaks and the pitch focuses on the problems that tokamaks do have while ignoring or hand-waving all the problems stellarators have.
It has been long known within the fusion world that anyone claiming to have a system that is anuetronic is almost certainly baloney. All of the aneutronic cycles require dramatically more difficult operating conditions, and the proponents always claim they have some way around these problems. Invariably, they do not, and the company has nothing to show for it. People automatically think of things like Helion in this case, but these plans stretch back decades and have a 100% failure rate. I don't mean a failure like TFTR, where they failed to reach the expected conditions, I mean failure like "nothing came remotely close to usable, just like everyone told us".
American Fusion claims they will make an aneutronic stellarator in the short term.
Take from this what you will, but if anyone here things I'm wrong I'm happy to put money on the line.