Energy Sources - lots of good pointers for both science and politics plus a great list of fusion innovators. Excerpted from:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/06/13/hopeful-news-for-us-from-the-horse-manure-crisis-of-1894/
Hopeful news for us from the Horse Manure Crisis of 1894
June 13, 2018
Summary: We can better prepare for future threats by seeing how we defeated past ones. Here we compare a certain doom from the past with one in our future. …
The lesson from this history is that people often assume problems are intractable – ignoring contrary evidence already visible. …
These doomsters assume that only massive government action can prevent horrific outcomes. Their confidence comes from misrepresenting or exaggerating the underlying science … They also make a second error: ignoring other solutions. Most obviously, the development of new energy sources (or large improvements to existing sources, such as solar). That is an odd oversight, since rapid tech innovation has been the story of the past 3 centuries. It is especially odd since there are indications today that a new solution might come soon.
Fusion, at last
Robert L. Hirsch ran the US fusion program in the 1970s, walking away from it after he realized that success was not 20 years away (as commonly said), but beyond the foreseeable future. Scientists relying on government grants have continued to promise results soon, without delivering on them. So climate change gurus “know” that fusion will not save us. They say that just as smart and experienced people conclude the opposite. See the following, showing increasing investments in fusion from private sources.
•LPPFusion – Created in 1994 with funding from NASA, incorporated in 2002, based in NJ. Their website. Funding: first round in 2008 raised $1.2 Million from The Abell Foundation and Individual Investors, with five more offerings completed since then (including some crowdfunding).
•TAE Technologies – Founded 1998, based in California. Their website. Rumored to have raised $150 million; Crunchbase shows 6 rounds since 2002 from 3 VC firms. See Wikipedia. Partnered in 2017 with Google.
•General Fusion – Founded 2002, based in Canada, 50 scientists. Their website. Funding: $90 million, in 8 rounds from venture capitalist, government, and energy companies. See Wikipedia.
•Proton Scientific – Founded 2005, based in Illinois. Their website. Funding: unknown.
•Woodruff Scientific, Inc. – Founded 2005, based in Seattle. Their website. Contract research in fusion, working for both public and private firms.
•Tokamak Energy – Founded 2009, based in Britain. Their website. Funding: $13 million in one round from venture funds.
•First Light Fusion – Spun out from Oxford in 2011, based in Britain. Their website. Funding: $32 million, in 3 rounds from 2 VC firms.
•Helion Energy – Founded 2013, based in Washington. Their website. Funding: $5 million seed capital from DoE, plus $12 million in 2 rounds from 2 VC firms. See Wikipedia.
•Applied Fusion Systems – Founded 2014, based in Britain. Their website. Funding: unknown, tapping individual investors.
•CTFusion – Spun off from U Washington in 2015, based in Seattle. Their website. Funding: unknown, most or all from the US government.
•Commonwealth Fusion Systems – Spun Off from MIT in 2017, based in Massachusetts. Their website. Funding: $50 million investment from ENI (a global energy corp).
•Hyperjet Fusion – Founded in 2017, merged with HyperV Technologies Corp in 2017, based in Virginia. Their website. Funding: $28 million from the US government plus an unknown sum from Strong Atomics (a VC).
One mega-corp is investing in fusion: Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works began building a compact fusion system in 2010. See their website and the Wikipedia entry. From their October 2014 press release …
“{Lockheed} is working on a new compact fusion reactor (CFR) that can be developed and deployed in as little as ten years. …The smaller size will allow us to design, build and test the CFR in less than a year. After completing several of these design-build-test cycles, the team anticipates being able to produce a prototype in five years.”
… Pundits and scientists gives us absurdly confident forecasts about the distant future, things decades or generations away. Often about certain doom, usually based on mathematical models looking at only a tiny sliver of the countless factors affecting our world. Humility about our ability to see the future too seldom appears in these. The darkest predictions are those that deliberately ignore possible non-political solutions. The shrillest calls for political action are those that see only one threat and ignore the many other dangers that threaten us.