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September 21, 2007
Orthodoxy
Over at Climate Audit they are discussing "Miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis". Let me relate this to my current field of study - Nuclear Fusion. The big money is going into projects like ITER (the US is spending something like $200 to $400 mil a year on this project). All the scientists involved say we are at least 30 years away from a net power reactor delivering watts to the grid. When that net power device is built it will be too big 17GW (most power plants built today are under 100MW and the largest are in the 1 GW range), too expensive (at 20X to 30X the current cost of electricity), and too late. All this is inherent in trying to get fusion by heating things up. And yet funding rolls on. Grant money is relatively easy if there is an ITER angle. Contrast this with IEC fusion. In the US there are 5 to 10 projects going on at a funding rate that is probably on the order of $20 million or less total. The thing about IEC Fusion is that instead of heating up a mass of gas to get fusion in the high energy tail, particles are accelerated directly to fusion speeds. This makes the devices much smaller, less costly, and quicker to develop. So who is doing IEC Fusion? Basically a bunch of old cranks who see ITER and the Tokamaks as useless except as science fair projects. Let me quote Plasma Physicist Dr. Nicholas Krall who said, "We spent $15 billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we learned about them is that they are no damn good." And yet the money rolls on. If I was in charge of science I would see that in any discipline 70% went to mainstream and 30% to dissenters. That would tend to keep everyone honest. Does it mean some money would go for stupidity? Sure. As Murray Gell-Mann says - there is a reason most new stuff ought not get funded, most of it is flat wrong. However, if we do not encourage dissent from orthodoxy we will never learn anything new. Our current ratios are out of balance. Let me add that a significant part of the 30% should go towards replication by dissenters. If we are really going to do good science we must encourage a climate of dissent and replication. Let me add that we see this in Cold Fusion. The mainstream derided it because at first replication was difficult. Now at least the laboratory aspects are better under control and replication is the norm. We still do not understand what is happening or why. However, finally progress is being made. So far it seems to be a low energy process. Heat is created. Just not enough to even boil the water (actually D2O) in the experimental apparatus. It is being researched. We will find out why. We lost 10 years of useful work because of clinging to orthodoxy. In many way science is like religion. Woe be unto him who strays from the canon. Interestingly enough the US Navy is funding IEC Fusion and Cold Fusion. Why? They don't look at it from a right/wrong basis. It is all about risk vs reward. They are not crazy. They do require at least a minimum of results before funding. They come at it from: "we don't know everything" and "mathematics can be helpful but is not definitive. Only real world results count". Why not more dependence on math? Because with math - if you pick the right assumptions - you can prove anything. posted by Simon on 09.21.07 at 08:37 AM
Comments
I still struggle with people who choose corelation as a prediction of causation. And while I'm not a devotee of P.K. Feyerabend, and I know a few who are extremely so, he does make a good argument for following paths that aren't recognized as "mainstream". Thanks for the post. There is no substitute for common sense. OregonGuy · September 21, 2007 12:05 PM When I was in grad school, I worked for the Center for Energy Studies at the University of Texaas (not defunct). They had a novel approach to generating the field magnets for a toroidal fusion reator . . . a single turn magnet and pulsed power. The guy in charge was brilliant and brought his somewhat unorthodox brilliance to bear on a number of subjects. Unfortunately, the project ended up being shut down for lack of funding... guess where the money went? To the conventional tokomak on campus and to ITER related projects. I had the chance to read a critique of his proposal by a group of ITER physicists (and why they were against it). Even as a lowly graduate student and non-fusion expert I could see that they were just looking for reasons to reject his idea. Some of their "problems" were easily fixable and others were just silly. His proposal was incredibly cheap compared to other programs and could have produced some very interesting data. I'm convinced that the (some) fusion researchers and affiliated politicians don't WANT to actually develop a working fusion reactor. They have lifetime funding as long as they make a little progress, but not too much. As you say, it's quite absurd to have your goal in developing a new technology to create a working, production fusion power plant. Far better to focus on developing the pieces and the technology. We won't even know what a real working fusion power plant will look like until we know more about the physics and the technology. The whole thing is also so politicized that a lot of money is wasted. Reminds me of the super conducting supercollider project in Texas... killed by politicians for stupid reasons. (Oh, and at the time I was working on this, Congress was considering a bill to forbid ANY federal funding of fusion research not related to ITER. Talk about idiotic.) EI Earnest Iconoclast · September 21, 2007 04:35 PM Um... "University of Texas" and "now defunct" Sheesh. Earnest Iconoclast · September 21, 2007 04:38 PM I remember the reaction from the Wise Old Men of physics when the story of cold fusion first broke. They essentially decided that cold fusion had none of the bad side effects of hot fusion that it couldn't be fusion! That whatever was happening could be achieved at room temperature and pressure in heavy water was all the more reason why it was impossible. Sorta gives credence to the old stories about the 100 mpg carborator. Whitehall · September 21, 2007 06:24 PM Post a comment
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As an old time Nuclear Engineer, I remember attending a seminar on Fusion at school and concluded it was at least 30 years away. That was 30 years ago.
I was back on campus recently and one of my old profs was doing interesting stuff with acoustic shock waves and fusion. Nice to see, and largely because we had no real in to bigtime funding in fusion. Leading stuff in fission at the time, but little fusion. The golden handcuffs are quite real. Once you aquire a lab and staff, you have to keep them busy.