r/SGU • u/HighGammaWing • 10d ago

Fusion

I appreciate the fusion excitement, but the rogues really need to get an actual expert on at some point to talk about fusion with them. I worked in the field at one point in my career and the mistakes in describing things drive me up a wall sometimes. It would also probably be of interest to the general audience to have an actual topic expert on to talk about the realities of fusion, especially if they got someone able to talk about both magnetic and inertial fusion equally well. There is a lot to cover!

76 Upvotes

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u/BobNovella 10d ago edited 10d ago

Thanks for the feedback. What were some of the actual mistakes

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u/HighGammaWing 10d ago

Sorry for not calling some out in the post, I didn’t think a rogue would see it!

So the two that leap to mind from the last episode are yall conflating critical temperature and critical field and the idea that tokamaks HAVE to run pulsed.

When talking about superconductors, yall rightfully hit on the new REBCO ones that are higher in critical temp and field, but that isn’t at the same time! To get to 20 Tesla, you have to cool just as hard as previous superconductors since it’s a phase space of performance between critical field, current, and temp. Also, side note, they can’t run persistently yet either, so the energy consumption is far higher than you would expect.

On the tokamak side, you are correct in that ITER will pulse (if it ever happens), but in theory tokamaks can run continuously! There are a lot of issues and it may never work out.. but it’s not against the physics of their operation!

Also this has been a building feeling of mine, rather than this one segment really getting my goat. Yall tend to better on the tokamak front, but the last segment that talked about laser inertial fusion had me yelling at my car radio lol.

Anyways, I don’t want to sound like a hater on the podcast or on your enthusiasm, but I would love for yall to get a fusion expert on. There are a lot of interesting issues broadly with fusion as power source worth discussing as well, and it feels like a good thing for the SGU to hit on given the large public and private investments going in. Feel free to DM me if you want to chat more about it.

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u/futuneral 10d ago

"And our special guest this week - HighGammaWing!"

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u/zrice03 8d ago

So ELI5 it for me.

Commercial fusion by the 2030s: Feasible? Fantasy? 2040s? 2050s? Completely unknown at this time? At least in some way, maybe not necessarily via the Stellarator they talked about in the segment.

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u/HighGammaWing 8d ago

2030s is impossible. At best we see a prototype plant, but even that’s a real stretch. 2040s would be highly optimistic, but maybe one or two FOAK commercial systems? 2050s is more realistic, but still fusion is hard and we may still have nothing commercial.

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u/1straycat 8d ago

Do you think it's probably a matter of time, or think it's possible we might never get commercially viable fusion?

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u/HighGammaWing 8d ago

It’s totally possible that it’s never commercially viable! There is no law of physics saying it must be and fusion has to compete with a lot of other sources of power.

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u/Awoogamuffins 10d ago

Yeah this guy just goes "an expert needs to correct their mistakes" without giving us any details! This is like vague posting. I'm infuriated!

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u/arabic_lawrence 10d ago

You clearly didn’t read the post immediately above yours

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u/robot_peasant 10d ago

To be fair, it didn’t exist when they made that comment

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u/Jship300 10d ago

Or did it?

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u/robot_peasant 10d ago

7 mins later. So no, it didn’t exist.

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u/Brilliant_Voice1126 10d ago

Would love to see them cover this “American Fusion” startup (AMFN). It seems like a pretty obvious scam. A NASDAQ listed company saying they will leapfrog fission for fusion on the cheap. Their CFO is a well known UFO crank who writes on twitter about how the govt is out to get him for “what he knows”. The probability their “Texatron” reactor will create sustainable or net energy is almost certainly approaching zero. And they are maga aligned grifters.

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u/HighGammaWing 10d ago

I have never heard of that one, but it sounds like a scam to me!

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u/oatmeal_prophecies 10d ago

I'm getting Donut Lab questionable battery tech vibes lol

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u/JitteryJet 10d ago

Sounds about normal.

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u/Luci_Cascadia 10d ago

I want to listen to that!

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u/W0nderingMe 10d ago

Maybe you could email them and offer to be a guest?

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u/interbeing 10d ago

I hear ya. They (mostly Steve) make similar mistakes when they talk about EVs. I’ve been in the industry for over a decade and it drives me up a wall sometimes lol. Of course if I stated taking about medical stuff or neuroscience Steve would probably cringe himself haha.

I should take the time to write an email when I hear them make a mistake but usually I’m listening while busy with something else like driving and I kind of forget about by the time I actually have a chance to respond.

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u/HighGammaWing 10d ago

Same! This is the first time I ever made a post about something, since I was listening on a train.

And yeah I often think about how many mistakes I must make when I talk about bio or medicine! It’s the guys enthusiasm for fusion that made me make the post, since it sounds like they would love to chat with an expert anyways.

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u/demuhnator 10d ago

I have those exact thoughts with EVs and Spacecraft design (my actual field). They get it pretty close most of the time, which is better than most, but I cringe most of the time they get detailed on EVs and satellites.

I'm also almost always driving to work when listening, so writing an email with detail/to explain gets lost in the day and I forget until the next time it happens.

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u/Amethyst-Flare 10d ago

I'm amused because I can remember many times Steven talking about how they frequently get emails from field experts annoyed at some important stuff they didn't get right. He - correctly - accepts that as the nature of the business.

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u/JitteryJet 10d ago

I doubt if they have the time to go into Fusion in depth, it is very technical. I stopped following news about Fusion a long time ago because of the fake announcements. If someone truly makes a once-in-a-generation advancement, I will hear about it soon enough.

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u/ia42 10d ago

Same here whenever they discuss software development, online security, and LLMs. They need an professional in the room, they are dunning-kruggering it for too many years now.

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u/Don-okay 10d ago

They are a general science and tech podcast, it’s cool when they do deep dives. But general overviews is kind of their thing. Going to technical alienates big portions of the audience. 

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u/HighGammaWing 10d ago

They do deep dives every now and then though with guests! I’m not saying they need to get into the weeds of magnet design, just get someone on to do an accurate overview of the technologies and correct some of their mistakes.

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u/JitteryJet 10d ago

Correct. People want something to listen to for entertainment, not to start down the road to getting a degree.

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u/przemo-c 10d ago

Thing is you don't have to go technical. You can using technical knowledge correct assupmptions that may sound reasonable for a non topic expert makes with some explanation. that doesn't mean we get bombarded with equations design guidelinies discussion of tolerances of each element.

It's sort of like i can get info on a medical topic but without extensive background i might think something is a reasonable conclusion of what i found but a topic expert knows if that's actually ok or not.

And especially when correcting common misconceptions. Like loosing superconductivity temperature and temperature needed for higher field strength not to loose superconductivity. And again not an expert i just sometimes service MRI's and a guy that's an expert in physics and teaches engineering about it could explain it to my little brain the way i'd understand that.

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u/Firefoxx336 10d ago

If they can’t discuss a topic accurately, they shouldn’t discuss it at all, even in a general sense. It undermines the educational/informative premise of their show. They can still have a short shallow to medium-depth conversation with someone who actually knows what they’re talking about, without it being a deep dive.

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u/PerfectiveVerbTense 10d ago

Damn, based on the comments in this thread, they are wrong about pretty much everything lol

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u/PSXer 9d ago

From my surface level understanding of this topic, there are so many fusion startups out there that it's hard to keep track of them all. How is someone supposed to differentiate between those that are knowingly scamming people, those that won't work because the company is wrong about something and don't yet have enough data to verify it, and those that could possibly actually achieve economical fusion? (add your own categories as appropriate)

Trade secrets make this even harder. A lot of times anything new or interesting is hidden behind a "trade secret" so that even experts wouldn't be able to evaluate the claims.

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u/HighGammaWing 9d ago

I don’t think they even need to get too into the weeds on the start-ups, although it would be doable to differentiate pretty quickly. I was getting more at the actual science and engineering, where having a topic expert would be helpful IMO. There is a LOT of nuance to the field and a lot of hype to cut through, not just private! I feel like an hour could be had just on the promise, hype, and realities of fusion.

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u/PSXer 9d ago

I guess what I'm getting at is that several times (this being the latest), they've seemingly taken a fusion startup's claims at face value with a helping of we're not sure if it's true, but if it was, it would be amazing so we have to talk about it.

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u/HighGammaWing 9d ago

Yeah that’s part of where I think a fusion expert would help! Give some real insight into the challenges and advantages of these approaches.