This, like all fusion startups (except maybe one), is a scam.
That is to say, none of the investors will get any of their money back. If they are OK with that, fine. But probably most are not. You can think of it as a stupidity tax: enough money to invest was also enough to hire somebody to explain how they are throwing their money away. But they didn't.
One reason (of several) that it is a scam is that, to get the power out usefully, you need a thousand tons of "blanket" to absorb kinetic neutrons and turn them into heat. You need a high proportion of lithium in your blanket, so that the neutrons hitting it can breed the tritium you will need for fuel tomorrow.
But running a full-scale power plant all day will only breed a few grams of tritium, that you must somehow sift out of your thousand tons of "blanket", at parts-per-billion concentration. Nobody knows any way to do this. But without doing it, you have no fuel to use tomorrow.
Even if you could get enough tritium, those hot kinetic neutrons are blasting all of the physical structure of your reactor, weakening it, and also making it extremely radioactive. After a remarkably short time, you have to replace all the solid parts. But they are all fantastically radioactive, so you need robots to do it with. Those robots do not exist. The used-up parts are, anyway, not like regular nuke waste; they will mostly decay in a century or two, probably.
Until then, presuming you could scare up tritium fuel, you would have a thousand tons of super-hot "blanket" you need to run water through pipes in, to boil and drive a steam turbine. But steam turbines, too, need expensive periodic overhauls.
Meanwhile, solar panels and wind turbines are producing the cheapest power the world has ever known, today. No radioactivity, no tritium, no persnickety steam turbines. Just clean power.
So, nobody would buy your super-expensive fusion plant even if it worked, because it would cost so much to operate you would need to ask a lot more money for its output than anybody will pay.
But the people running the startup have no need to care about any of that. They have fun making big expensive experiments with your money, cater in expensive lunches, and drive Ferraris, because why not? When the money runs out, they go do something else.
There is no force on Earth powerful enough to make them give any of the money back.
Another big scam, BTW, is NRGV, "Energy Vault", traded on public markets at $2B cap last I checked. Apparently it is not considered fraud to collect investment money for things that cannot work.
The paper is about how to prevent production of tritium. It mentions breeding tritium, but not how to extract grams of it, every day and at negligible cost, from a thousand tons of lithium salt. So, my point stands.
Do futile jabs at renewables, which are being deployed at industrial scale as I write this, serve to make fusion startups less scammy?
Renewables will not replace fossil fuels to an acceptable degree without first solving energy storage. The question is "is industrial energy storage cheaper than fusion energy". Not such a clear answer when the order of magnitude of either of those is not established.
Do futile jabs at fusion, but also try to keep in mind the goal is legacy, not identity.
Any civil engineer can explain numerous storage alternatives to you. It is all centuries-old tech, excepting only novel battery chemistries and catalysts.
>Meanwhile, solar panels and wind turbines are producing the cheapest power the world has ever known, today. No radioactivity, no tritium, no persnickety steam turbines. Just clean power.
That is to say, none of the investors will get any of their money back. If they are OK with that, fine. But probably most are not. You can think of it as a stupidity tax: enough money to invest was also enough to hire somebody to explain how they are throwing their money away. But they didn't.
One reason (of several) that it is a scam is that, to get the power out usefully, you need a thousand tons of "blanket" to absorb kinetic neutrons and turn them into heat. You need a high proportion of lithium in your blanket, so that the neutrons hitting it can breed the tritium you will need for fuel tomorrow.
But running a full-scale power plant all day will only breed a few grams of tritium, that you must somehow sift out of your thousand tons of "blanket", at parts-per-billion concentration. Nobody knows any way to do this. But without doing it, you have no fuel to use tomorrow.
Even if you could get enough tritium, those hot kinetic neutrons are blasting all of the physical structure of your reactor, weakening it, and also making it extremely radioactive. After a remarkably short time, you have to replace all the solid parts. But they are all fantastically radioactive, so you need robots to do it with. Those robots do not exist. The used-up parts are, anyway, not like regular nuke waste; they will mostly decay in a century or two, probably.
Until then, presuming you could scare up tritium fuel, you would have a thousand tons of super-hot "blanket" you need to run water through pipes in, to boil and drive a steam turbine. But steam turbines, too, need expensive periodic overhauls.
Meanwhile, solar panels and wind turbines are producing the cheapest power the world has ever known, today. No radioactivity, no tritium, no persnickety steam turbines. Just clean power.
So, nobody would buy your super-expensive fusion plant even if it worked, because it would cost so much to operate you would need to ask a lot more money for its output than anybody will pay.
But the people running the startup have no need to care about any of that. They have fun making big expensive experiments with your money, cater in expensive lunches, and drive Ferraris, because why not? When the money runs out, they go do something else.
There is no force on Earth powerful enough to make them give any of the money back.
Another big scam, BTW, is NRGV, "Energy Vault", traded on public markets at $2B cap last I checked. Apparently it is not considered fraud to collect investment money for things that cannot work.