Practical Fusion power? [more likely than AGI]

Henry Fountain, Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor Is ‘Very Likely to Work,’ Studies Suggest, NYTimes, Sept. 29, 2020.

Scientists developing a compact version of a nuclear fusion reactor have shown in a series of research papers that it should work, renewing hopes that the long-elusive goal of mimicking the way the sun produces energy might be achieved and eventually contribute to the fight against climate change.

Construction of a reactor, called Sparc, which is being developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a spinoff company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, is expected to begin next spring and take three or four years, the researchers and company officials said.

Although many significant challenges remain, the company said construction would be followed by testing and, if successful, building of a power plant that could use fusion energy to generate electricity, beginning in the next decade. [...]

“Reading these papers gives me the sense that they’re going to have the controlled thermonuclear fusion plasma that we all dream about,” said Cary Forest, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin who is not involved in the project. “But if I were to estimate where they’re going to be, I’d give them a factor of two that I give to all my grad students when they say how long something is going to take.” [...]

H/t Tyler Cowen.

A comment I left over at Marginal Revolution:

It could be a game-changer for the world's energy future if it works. If have no serious opinion about whether or not it will work, but note, as the article says, that we've been chasing fusion power for a long time, since before the Apollo Program and the War on Cancer.

Apollo, of course, came through. It never really was a "moonshot" if by that you mean a low probability enterprise with a potential for high gain if it succeeds. It was expensive and dangerous, some men did lose their lives, but the basic science was in place from the beginning. It just took a lot of engineering.

The war on cancer was and is different. The basic science wasn't in place and it seems as though it still isn't. We've learned a lot over the years, but not what we need to effect routine cures.

As I say, I don't what what the case is for fusion. It seems that the science is there , but the engineering is very difficult.

And then we have human-class AGI, or even super-intelligent AGI. I'm with those who think we're missing basic a lot of science and the goal is mostly a phrase with no coherent meaning. Yes, we've got chess and Go down cold, and machine translation is impressive, but you wouldn't use it for legal documents. GPT-3 is interesting and impressive too. But I think that line of development will bottom out before GPT-X consumes all the electrical power in Northern California.

We'll have practical fusion power before human-class AGI.

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Useful commentary thread on Twitter:

People are still tweeting about the NYT's piece on the SPARC nuclear #fusionenergy release, so as a fusion PhD student I'm going to explain what it is and isn't...

🧵https://t.co/cqRe3fsAx1

— Tom Nicholas (@TEGNicholas) September 30, 2020