Major Fusion Energy Breakthrough to Be Announced by Scientists

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Eddy Edson

Eddy Edson

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Time we had another nuclear fusion is imminent story. Wonder if it will get here before the cure for diabetes?
 
Docb said:
Time we had another nuclear fusion is imminent story. Wonder if it will get here before the cure for diabetes?
Click to expand...
So cynical so young! 🙂

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what the actual announcement says.
 
I did an essay about this in my final year Neutron Physics exam at Uni! It seemed quite a long way off back then, due to the containment mechanisms required.
 
Balancing skepticsm and optimism is hard.

So I work with startups. Most startups fail.

One easy strategy in dealing with them is to be relentlessly & unreflectively skeptical, because without any mental effort you'll be right usually & you can bask in an unearned gloomy guru glow of near-infallibility.

Another easy strategy is to be relentlessly & unreflectively optimistic, because without any mental effort you'll get the spectalular successful "unicorns" right & you can bask in the unearned cherry-picked sparkly glow of super guru insight.

When you're trying to do something real like making economic allocation decisions you need a more substantial strategy. So at the moment I'm looking at an interesting medical play, targeting better surgical outcomes for rare refractory types of cancer. It's about to start its Phase 2 trials. What chance of success?

For drugs in general the benchmarks show about a 12.5% success rate from this point. Overwhelmingly, regulated drugs and medical devices fail to make it through Phase 2 and Phase 3 to regulatory approval. Because this is an "orphan" indication, the reg barriers are lower and the benchmarks suggest about 25% success probability. But still, more likely than not to fail.

Now obviously one job of an investor etc is to try to work out which plays have better or worse than benchmark probabilities, and act accordingly. That really requires a mindset which tries to balance the skeptical and the optimistic, because you're probably never going to be able to do enough diligence to get the probabilities near 100%.

Too skeptical and you don't take enough risk & so don't get enough of a return to justfiy your existence. Too optimistic and you take too much risk with the same outcome.

Anyway, you need to be careful about evaluating how much the "these things are always like X" applies in each new case. It takes a lot work.
 
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Eddy Edson said:
Balancing skepticsm and optimism is hard.

So I work with startups. Most startups fail.

One easy strategy in dealing with them is to be relentlessly & unreflectively skeptical, because without any mental effort you'll be right usually & you can bask in an unearned gloomy guru glow of near-infallibility.

Another easy strategy is to be relentlessly & unreflectively optimistic, because without any mental effort you'll get the spectalular successful "unicorns" right & you can bask in the unearned cherry-picked sparkly glow of super guru insight.

When you're trying to do something real like making economic allocation decisions you need a more substantial strategy. So at the moment I'm looking at an interesting medical play, targeting better surgical outcomes for rare refractory types of cancer. It's about to start its Phase 2 trials. What chance of success?

For drugs in general the benchmarks show about a 12.5% success rate from this point. Overwhelmingly, regulated drugs and medical devices fail to make it through Phase 2 and Phase 3 to regulatory approval. Because this is an "orphan" indication, the reg barriers are lower and the benchmarks suggest about 25% success probability. But still, more likely than not to fail.

Now obviously one job of an investor etc is to try to work out which plays have better or worse than benchmark probabilities, and act accordingly. That really requires a mindset which tries to balance the skeptical and the optimistic, because you're probably never going to be able to do enough diligence to get the probabilities near 100%.

Too skeptical and you don't take enough risk & so don't get enough of a return to justfiy your existence. Too optimistic and you take too much risk with the same outcome.

Anyway, you need to be careful about evaluating how much the "these things are always like X" applies in each new case. It takes a lot work.
Click to expand...
On a tangent, it's easy to see why drugs can be expensive.

On average, a drug regulatory program costs around $100M (counting success and failures, inluding overheads). Only about 6% of drugs make it all the way through Phase 1/2/3. So for each successful drug, it costs about $1.7 billion. Say that the net margin to the pharma company is 33%. That means it needs to generate $5+ billion in sales on average from each successful drug, to break even on its R&D program ...

(Obviously the numbers increase for a real analysis, where you include time value and cost of capital considerations.)
 
Eddy Edson said:
Balancing skepticsm and optimism is hard.

So I work with startups. Most startups fail.

One easy strategy in dealing with them is to be relentlessly & unreflectively skeptical, because without any mental effort you'll be right usually & you can bask in an unearned gloomy guru glow of near-infallibility.

Another easy strategy is to be relentlessly & unreflectively optimistic, because without any mental effort you'll get the spectalular successful "unicorns" right & you can bask in the unearned cherry-picked sparkly glow of super guru insight.

When you're trying to do something real like making economic allocation decisions you need a more substantial strategy. So at the moment I'm looking at an interesting medical play, targeting better surgical outcomes for rare refractory types of cancer. It's about to start its Phase 2 trials. What chance of success?

For drugs in general the benchmarks show about a 12.5% success rate from this point. Overwhelmingly, regulated drugs and medical devices fail to make it through Phase 2 and Phase 3 to regulatory approval. Because this is an "orphan" indication, the reg barriers are lower and the benchmarks suggest about 25% success probability. But still, more likely than not to fail.

Now obviously one job of an investor etc is to try to work out which plays have better or worse than benchmark probabilities, and act accordingly. That really requires a mindset which tries to balance the skeptical and the optimistic, because you're probably never going to be able to do enough diligence to get the probabilities near 100%.

Too skeptical and you don't take enough risk & so don't get enough of a return to justfiy your existence. Too optimistic and you take too much risk with the same outcome.

Anyway, you need to be careful about evaluating how much the "these things are always like X" applies in each new case. It takes a lot work.
Click to expand...

But when the one leap of faith gives more than a profit on the ledger?
 
Sceptic? Me? I was just wondering which would come first. No suggestion that they would not happen. 😉

Trouble with technical developments, especially the hard ones, is that quite often a number of separate big developments are required to make progress. They are generally all chasing the same funding and the hypability of your project becomes a significant factor in winning that race. They all tend to forget that that is not the real race.

And, as I continually remind people, nuclear fusion is not new, it's the thing that makes life possible. All you need for success is a lab big enough to put the sun in.
 
Live stream of the announcement this afternoon.
(Depending what timezone you are in)

www.energy.gov

Livestream

Watch live events from Energy Department headquarters in Washington, D.C.
www.energy.gov www.energy.gov
 
As @Docb intimated, we are staring at a fusion reactor when we look at the sunrise. Or indeed, on a clear night, we can see billions of them in the stars you can see.But as you can see, the problem you have is containment. All the fusion reactors like the sun are contained by gravity. There is no material that you can contain the ongoing persisting fusion energy because of the temperature.

To me, it seems crazy to pursue this project when we could have endless supplies of electricity by covering the deserts of the world with solar panels, and obtaining fusion energy effortlessly. That's what the sun is for, as any tree, or plant can tell you. A free energy source.
 
mikeyB said:
To me, it seems crazy to pursue this project when we could have endless supplies of electricity by covering the deserts of the world with solar panels, and obtaining fusion energy effortlessly.
Click to expand...
Which I imagine is also pretty hard to do. You get about 1KW per square meter (when it's daytime) of possible energy from sunlight, and maybe overall you can get 10% efficiency, so 100W. How many of those do we need to get all the energy we want? It seems like it'll be a lot (I make it about a square 1000km each side, and we'd presumably need at least two of those).

I'm guessing the current view (that we need to do everything we can think of, in particular energy conservation) is probably right. And if nuclear fusion really can be done practically that would be a useful part of it.
 
mikeyB said:
As @Docb intimated, we are staring at a fusion reactor when we look at the sunrise. Or indeed, on a clear night, we can see billions of them in the stars you can see.But as you can see, the problem you have is containment. All the fusion reactors like the sun are contained by gravity. There is no material that you can contain the ongoing persisting fusion energy because of the temperature.

To me, it seems crazy to pursue this project when we could have endless supplies of electricity by covering the deserts of the world with solar panels, and obtaining fusion energy effortlessly. That's what the sun is for, as any tree, or plant can tell you. A free energy source.
Click to expand...

If we always gave up because we'd never done it before we'd still be in caves.
The world is full of materials that never existed before we found or made them.
 
I've been out all day, and just caught up with the announcement.

Sounds good science fiction stuff.
(Although it also sounds like bad science fiction stuff, with giant lasers and energy weapons)
 
travellor said:
I've been out all day, and just caught up with the announcement.

Sounds good science fiction stuff.
(Although it also sounds like bad science fiction stuff, with giant lasers and energy weapons)
Click to expand...
Maybe we'll finally get our personal rocketships and robot manservants, like they promised we would when we were kids.
 
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