Related: Either China or the US has the largest overall PPP-adjusted R&D budget in the world. (The US data here is 2016 while China’s is 2018 so it’s hard to tell exactly.) China’s investment is about the same % of its GDP as France’s.
Others in the top five are the EU, Japan, and Germany, followed closely by South Korea. South Korea invests the most as a percentage of GDP.
All of the “Asian Tigers”, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, appear to have been invested heavily in R&D as a % of GDP (European level or higher) for a long time, and they were the only ones in Asia crossing from third-world to first-world status after Japan, which did the same before that.
I am instantly suspicious - Research & Development conjurers an impression of lots of research and a hint of development.
However a mining corporation developing a new coal mine site counts that under their R&D budget - it is development. And I suspect the 'development' part of R&D is both substantial and possibly defined differently in different parts of the world with different norms depending on the industry.
I'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing, but this evidence is unreliable. It might be a straight proxy for industrial development.
>I am instantly suspicious - Research & Development conjurers an impression of lots of research and a hint of development.
Not to me. It could as well be an equal split of research and development, or fairly basic research focused mainly on product development.
>I'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing, but this evidence is unreliable. It might be a straight proxy for industrial development.
Industrial development still needs R&D to compete with industrial development in other parts of the world, it's not like statically applying what the state of the art was in the past.
In several areas we've seen the Chinese go from the same path the Taiwanese, South Korean, and Japanese went in the 60s to the 80s and 90s. From copy cats, to high quality manufacturers and eventual innovators.
One example whose products I've used: DJI for example is the leader in drones and perhaps gimbals, and even started to take down GoPro.
That is interesting. Do have any idea if that figure includes research done by/for the military? I could not determine that from the Wiki page and it seems like if it does not that could push the US ahead.
One area where China clearly has an advantage is massive investment in time and budget and respect for education and scholarship that pervades its culture, from individual, family, friends, up to the highest level of society.
I once rode in a taxi in Singapore and had a chat. The Chinese-speaking taxi driver expressed sincere admiration after simply learning that I had a master’s degree, to my surprise.
Just saying, while Singaporeans do out a lot of weight on educational degrees and many locals have 3rd or 4th generational roots to China, Singapore is mainly English-speaking and definitely not a part of China.
> One area where China clearly has an advantage is massive investment in time and budget and respect for education and scholarship that pervades its culture, from individual, family, friends, up to the highest level of society.
China is a very big term, with 30+ provinces and vastly different cultures, attitudes towards education can be completely different in many places. As an example, Henan province has more than 100 million people, such population size is bigger than any EU member state. Sadly it doesn't have any half decent university and it actually fought damn hard back in the late 60s to prevent one of the very best Chinese universities (USTC) from being relocated to its capital city.
Would you say the majority of Chinese people value formal education more so than people from most other cultures though?
This may stem from the Imperial Examination which has its origins in 605 CE. (I am not a historian, so please correct me if you have better information/evidence.)
> One area where China clearly has an advantage is massive investment in time and budget and respect for education and scholarship that pervades its culture, from individual, family, friends, up to the highest level of society.
My experience is that Chinese have a respect for the record that claims you are educated. Actual education or achievement is irrelevant.
My favorite example of this is a Chinese friend who cashed out of a startup for $22 million but is still a failure because he didn't get a college degree.
>My favorite example of this is a Chinese friend who cashed out of a startup for $22 million but is still a failure because he didn't get a college degree.
In such a consumerist society as the Chinese, I doubt many average Chinese consider someone with $22 million "a failure".
That could be some academically educated relatives and friends considering him a failure, sure.
But then again that could (and has been) the case in families with heavy academic backgrounds in the US too, where the doctors / university professors / etc for a couple generations parents look down upon the mere "entrepreneur" kid.
To be fair, cashing out of a startup for $22 million and being educated are 2 completely different things. I suppose with his new found wealth, he has the means to pursue success in education as well as business ;-)
> To be fair, cashing out of a startup for $22 million and being educated are 2 completely different things. I suppose with his new found wealth, he has the means to pursue success in education as well as business ;-)
Or one could begin to the see the obvious lack of correlation between having a 'formal education' and that of being financially comfortable. Wasn't the paragon in Tech to be a successful drop out because of the opportunity in this Industry after all? It being a collective big middle finger to the soul crushing nature of the corporate World, and saying to the World their is a different/better way.
In my personal opinion, I think its more one of conformity at best, and signalling of an accepted cultural identity at worst when it comes to Asian culture and degrees. I worked in a lab with almost all of them being primarily of Asian countries (including India) and all of them showed a distinct lack of understanding of what they were doing day to day, or any awareness of or the implications of what their work/labour was doing other than earning money for the company that allowed them to be employed. It was really bizarre and made me feel isolated from work place interactions.
But I came to the conclusion back then that most of it was because they were overworked (we all were, really) and had to send money back home to their respective families in other countries, and that philosophizing about the Health Sciences was just a luxury they couldn't afford as the conclusions were moot--mouths needed to be fed. I felt my position was that of an arrogant Westerner, albeit equally indebted and absorbed about the precarious and fleeting nature of my income in relation to my costs of living. Contradicting the whole 'earn a degree and you'll have it made' narrative that was sold to me since about the 1st grade.
But having spent more time with Asian cultures I think it was more of a 'keep your head down and do as your told' approach to Life, its one that seems very un-Western, as I saw the same thing in tech and even in dating Asian women--where the 'anti-authoritarian,' 'disrupter' or 'non-lemming' personality makes for a good occasional date, perhaps even boyfriend, but makes one unfit for longer term relationships let alone marriage material.
It reminded me of the overly used phrase in Japanese: Shikata-nai, or it cannot be helped to help drive this home most times.
Here is a good example of what I mean (the last paragraph underscoring my point and experiences):
> Either China or the US has the largest overall PPP-adjusted R&D budget in the world. (The US data here is 2016 while China’s is 2018 so it’s hard to tell exactly.) China’s investment is about the same % of its GDP as France’s.
On per capita term, China is sitting there not doing any real R&D. It is spending $388 per capita on R&D, that is slightly higher than 20% of what South Korea is spending. CCP owes an honest answer on that matter - why R&D spending has been kept to that low on per capita basis.
It is completely meaningless to talk about total spending. China can cut say 80% of its R&D spending and the total $ figure will still be much higher than some developed EU nations. Such total figure is nothing more than some cheap propaganda material to fool those who don't understand the simplest maths. For such total figure, 1.3 billion Chinese become the silent majority with all their potentials & benefits ignored.
The reality is simple here - China has a very long way (decades & generations) to catch up with the west on R&D spending in its per capita term. Given the population size, it is suppose to have a total spending of US, EU and Japan combined, before that anything else is nothing but propaganda.
There seems to be some confusion in the comments. This is a science machine that does not aim to set any records. It’s more akin to DIII-D/ASDEX catchup and provide a decent platform for plasma physics.
That's mostly because the article linked is not exactly subtle, complete with pictures of coronal mass ejections and other hyperbole. But there is some innovation going on here and I'm pretty curious if it will work as designed without a lot of do-over.
Yeah, this drives me crazy. You get this kind of response whenever anybody funds a new tokamak, or particle accelerator, or free electron laser, or petawatt laser, or whatever. There's over a hundred of these things, they aren't on the scale of the LHC.
To all of you worried that it will work and that China will take the lead: it doesn't matter. What matters is that once someone shows it can be done there will be a race on to copy the feat and that race won't be too long without other winners. The same thing has happened with every other key technology that might give a nation a head start in the military domain, and this definitely is one like that.
Simply knowing that something is possible is often enough to remove the political and mental roadblocks required to see it through.
Im always happy to see more funding for magnetic fusion research. Maybe this will put more pressure on US politicians to at least not renege on our existing commitments (ITER). For reference, here is how we have funded it so far: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._his...
This point needs to be stressed. It took less than 5 years for the Soviets to figure out the nuclear bomb, despite the great novelty of the idea, the many unknowns surrounding nuclear physics at the time, the scarcity of the ingredients, and the fact that U.S. research was conducted under total secrecy.
Meanwhile, the entire international community of scientists has been thinking about fusion for decades, publicly sharing their results, and scientists in every country know what the rough obstacles are. A big leap forward in fusion wouldn't even take 5 years to disseminate across the community, it would take weeks.
Sure, and nowadays any big science project has hundreds if not millions of "spies". You, too, can dig into the data and methods of many such experiments, no matter what country you liv in.
Eh, copying is not always trivial. Much of the work on computational discrete topology circa 2007-2009, for example, is still nowhere in public evidence, despite its criticality to some key domains and obvious value. No one has copied it, more than a decade hence. Information does not flow that freely even when it is old.
> What matters is that once someone shows it can be done there will be a race on to copy the feat and that race won't be too long without other winners
That's basically how "Copy to China" mode works. US proved many technology was viable.
in the book "Flight to the Stars: An Inquiry into the Feasibility of Interstellar Flight" by James Strong, the author theorizes the max-v of a generational ship would be about 15% the speed of light. It would take 450 years to get to the next closest star.
Spanning the galaxy would take hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer. There'd be next to no contact between earth and settlements more than a few light years away.
Not so sanguine about it solving near-term problems, either. We currently have exponentially more wealth than anytime in history, yet most of it is being hoarded by a small percent of the population. The benefits of cheap power will also be hoarded
> Spanning the galaxy would take hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer. There'd be next to no contact between earth and settlements more than a few light years away.
Yeah, but they'd exist, which they don't right now.
> We currently have exponentially more wealth than anytime in history, yet most of it is being hoarded by a small percent of the population.
The "wealth" of today's billionaires exists almost entirely on paper. Even if Michael Dell has a huge house and a private jet and you don't, he doesn't spend most of his billions on himself. He uses it to own shares in his company. And the company uses it to make computers.
We have more wealth in the hands of corporations than at any time before in history, and there are some serious issues with that, but it isn't that they're somehow hoarding resources. Apple having a mountain of cash in an offshore subsidiary isn't why you can't afford housing -- that money is just somebody else's debt, not an actual consumption of resources.
And if you can make fusion work, it's the opposite. It doesn't matter if some people make a lot of money from it because the only way people will buy it is if it's better than the existing alternatives, which would imply that it's better than the existing alternatives. Which means you get cheaper electricity or less climate change or both. All they get is a pile of green paper they're probably never even going to spend all of.
An average person today with e.g. a car, a shower and a smartphone with internet access is already richer than any of the kings of the past. Retirement plans also didn't exist or were not widespread. Dentistry and birthcare were either charlatanic or inaccesible etc. So no, wealth isn't "hoarded by a small percent of the population", we really are, the vast majority of us, richer than ever in history of man.
> An average person today with e.g. a car, a shower and a smartphone with internet access is already richer than any of the kings of the past.
George VI was a “king of the past”; I don't think there is any reasonable general sense in which the average person today is richer than George VI. If you go to the distant enough past, this becomes arguably (and, farther, clearly) true, but also not at all meaningful.
> So no, wealth isn't "hoarded by a small percent of the population
Yes, it is; the narrow distribution of wealth is uncontrovertible.
> we really are, the vast majority of us, richer than ever in history of man.
That doesn't contradict that wealth is narrowly hoarded (that is, both narrowly distributed and that narrow distribution being the active choice of those who are in the narrow group receiving the most), and to the extent that it is true, it doesn't matter because, in fact, wealth is narrowly hoarded and it turns out that, once you get out of the most abject poverty, relative wealth matters more to experienced utility than absolute wealth.
George VI didn't have access to millions of books at the palm of his hand, George VI couldn't get a Chevy or a flight to Tokyo, he couldn't get decent anesthesia or a quality tooth implant, and George VI couldn't play a video game for all his wealth. So no, George VI could only dream of the riches you command in your day.
No, narrow distribution of wealth IS controversible. All of the "super-rich" are mostly rich in terms of investment and assets, not actual money (i.e. wages). Jeff Bezos can't get all the hundreds of billions $$ that are attributed to him, they're not on his bank account: instead, they're paying wages to all the employees of his successful company as well as driving down costs for Amazon's customers.
And that's where you're most wrong: wealth does get shared, especially in the realms of technology. Computers, smartphones, the internet, combustion engines, electric cars, airplanes, hydroelectric and nuclear and solar energy etc. are all now accessible to the widest swathes of humanity. The rich might hold most of the worlds superyachts, but smaller yachts are much more widespread, and the vast majority of humanity can get a ship or a plane ride. What was once not affordable to a single person on Earth is now affordable by over 50% of adult population. There's no reason to believe fusion energy will be any less so.
> George VI didn't have access to millions of books at the palm of his hand
He had access to any book he wanted within short order (less than day for anything in the UK, probably less than two for anywhere in Europe - and multiple massive libraries who would not refuse him access to any item in their collection). If your goal is "better books" rather than simply "more books" this seems preferable to my case where I can get any book one of a half-dozen retailers want me to have instantly.
> George VI couldn't get a Chevy
Uh, why not?
> or a flight to Tokyo
He famously died after postponing a flight to Australia, I'm pretty sure he could've made it to Tokyo if he wanted.
> he couldn't get decent anesthesia or a quality tooth implant
Neither of these is readily within the means of much of the US population, so weird example - but osseointegrative implants were available since the early 20th century. Anesthesia also becomes recognizably modern shortly after WW1.
Between this and the Chevy, I question if you have any idea when George VI lived.
I personally could afford to do that (not everyone with a car and smartphone can), but it wouldn't be a good use of my limited budget to do that for every meal.
I like how you included your own speculations right besides a scientific (sounding - haven't read it) example :)
Wealth accumulation as many have pointed out is a very short term problem. In a way it is necessary as well if you want alternatives to depending on all powerful governments to move technology forward. In the process of the wealthy trying to multiply their wealth, they will use their current wealth as a giant amplifier. They may or may not succeed, but we can't deny that humanity moves forward as a whole with them.
Also to remain wealthy it isn't enough to just rest and vest: it is entirely possible to slip very quickly from the 0.1% to 1% to 10% to regular folk without actual tending. And no, how much ever reddit recommends it, I don't think s&p mutual funds are the answer if you are and want to keep being a part of the 0.1%. This is why I believe greed is a powerful motivator.
When you have something cheap it opens the whole new qualitative level of viable products as a result. Just like it was with aluminum. Fusion opens the access to the orbital ring family of the technologies.
At 15% of the speed of light, one gets to Alpha Centauri in about 30 years. 450 years would be the time it would take at about 1% of the speed of light.
The gist of it, according to experts, is that fusion is so cheap and powerful that it's like sailing on Earth: didn't take "that long" (few thousand years) before we circled all of it. So give us fusion, and given enough time, and few enough aliens (so far so good we've seen none), and they say we'll be all over the Galaxy, eventually even beyond.
Cool perspective if you ask me! Wish it were my time. BTW, check out "Isaac Arthur" on YouTube if you like this sorta topic, he's as hard as science-fiction gets. Awesome dude.
But unlike the multi-generational effort of cathedral-building, sailing always came with the promise that a few lucky survivors might live to see the end of the voyage. Makes me wonder if under current laws conspiring to condemn your unborn children to life in the confines of a spaceship might have legal repercussions while still in earth.
(actually I'm not even sure about cathedrals, to the best of my limited knowledge the idea of starting them as multigenerational projects might just as well be a retrospective fiction. Are there sources that show that they were not just started I unrealistic schedule expectations?)
You're right about cathedrals, and it applies to several such big architecture projects (temples, etc). It's also how science operates when you think about it — that quest so far has always been far bigger than anyone, you know you'll die trying from the beginning, that you won't see where it all leads eventually.
- such ships are likely to be orders of magnitude more 'modern', comfortable, heaven compared to anything we know in terms of habitat even on Earth — a very basic promise of space habitats is that you can make them much, much better than any planet can do 'randomly'; and that would happen far before we even think of physically going to another star.
- assuming generations on a ship, it's entirely possible that colonizing a planet feels "ancient", "backwards" to these people now born and raised in space; such "spatians" might just choose to remain so (bummer for the founders of the mission, but a decently good move for evolution too).
- there are several ways to "colonize" a distant world. One is to go there and breed on the way. Another is to send a genetic "boot" (think a few million distinct human DNAs that machines would grow in vitro just prior to arrival, AI to teach them whatever it is they need, etc). This is within known science, but maybe cryogenics are also possible (that's a third option then).
These questions become incredibly complex (and fascinating) the deeper you dig. I think we can rely on 'truths' that were valid for 'enough' generations as being 'plausibly also true' in the near future (symmetrically in time: so if something's been true for human beings for ~5000 years, then it stands to reason that it won't change before, on average, at least as long).
It should thus be observed that culturally, we are currently have an extremely short-term view in the Western world; there's a huge contrast with Asia in that regard — where it's not uncommon for businesses to plan for 2030-2040, and 2050-2060 looking at 2100 in politics. Think about it, that's only 3 generations away at the current rate. It's really not that far. It will be vastly different because tech, but also vastly the same because human beings.
Do watch that video, he talks about these things very astutely! :)
Which experts say fusion is going to be "cheap and powerful"? Because that's nonsense. I want to know which "experts" are poseurs we should be ignoring.
I hope they succeed. We desperately need to adopt nuclear energy world wide.
The success of such a project would pressure western governments into adopting the technology to stay competitive. Especially when the cost of a kilowatt hour plummets.
I sure dislike authoritarianism, but on this one I think everyone's interest are aligned. Anyone who isn't misinformed or sentimental will support modern nuclear. I'm amazed there isn't more unity here in the comment section; this is an objectively good thing for humanity. The advancement of science.
> I sure dislike authoritarianism, but on this one I think everyone's interest are aligned
This is a dangerous misreading. In environments without rule of law, you end up with constant redistribution of common goods based on personal political favor, leading to various roads fo nowhere.
It relies on the top person having a good sense for what to do, instead of institution building so that we can continue moving forward after the current generation of leaders has passed.
The main thing is resources are made available because everyone wants a great works project associated to their name. It’s good for large research projects like this, but it’s not a permanent interest alignment.
Yeah, at this point I've given up on the USA as an innovator in the nuclear field. China seems to be much less luddite in this field and AI, maybe they'll let us buy it off them as we become second or third in the field (and in science in general).
> China seems to be much less luddite in this field
If by "luddite" you mean "not building more reactors due to worries about cost and safety", then not really.
"though reactors begun several years ago are still coming online, the industry has not broken ground on a new plant in China since late 2016, according to a recent World Nuclear Industry Status Report."
"The 2011 meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant shocked Chinese officials and made a strong impression on many Chinese citizens. A government survey in August 2017 found that only 40% of the public supported nuclear power development."
"Within days of Fukushima, nuclear reactor construction in China was frozen. When building resumed months later, after a wave of inspections, Beijing insisted that future nuclear power projects adopt more advanced designs with extra safety features."
"The bigger problem is financial. Reactors built with extra safety features and more robust cooling systems to avoid a Fukushima-like disaster are expensive, while the costs of wind and solar power continue to plummet: they are now 20% cheaper than electricity from new nuclear plants in China, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Moreover, high construction costs make nuclear a risky investment."
Nuclear plants don't deal with peak energy use either. For the peak, you need a plant that can quickly regulate it's power output up and down to respond to demand. Nuclear plants only work for base load.
To me AI is machine learning. And the US is leading in that area, the forefront of which seems to be self driving technology.
Are there specific examples of cutting edge machine learning where China excels?
My understanding is they have IMPLEMENTED machine learning in an authoritarian type of way. But this implementation isn't innovative. There's no underlying tech improvement. Just the application of existing technology in a terrible way. We have the same face tracking, gait tracking tech. We just don't apply it en mass because of pesky human rights and such.
Yeah, that's not a concrete example of the SPECIFIC cutting edge area of AI that china dominates development of. At least I couldn't find it. I gave one for the US. I've yet to receive one for China. All I've seen is: "Look how known 'AI' can be applied toward totalitarianism. The US has none. We are at a disadvantage. " This is utter rubbish for reasons already discussed.
The Japanese government spent mega-bucks on a "fifth generation computer system", whereas the US government let it happen organically and had no real plan. History has proven the US approach to be correct.
Researching fusion is probably a great way to slow adoption of nuclear energy world wide.
It's always 30 years away and provides a permanent Osbourne Effect.
Research effective means of deploying low cost residential solar. Research means of decommissioning nuclear reactors and waste disposal. Research Thorium and Uranium reactors, work out the insurance problems involved.
The FA we are talking about is related to the completion of the construction of the first Fusion reactor by the end of this year.
Also, fusion has only really been seriously considered AFAIK since the 70s (yes theoretical research happened before) so not sure how you get to the 'always 30 years away' thing, which sounds like we had several cycles of Osbourne effect. Not to mention the word 'always' gives your post an 'all or nothing' type of feel which is generally characteristic of people in distress whose fight or flight mode is active, blocking more nuanced views.
You might be right that we are very far away and this is only harmful, time will tell, but I truly hope the breakthrough is here.
Fusion grad student here. HL-2M is very similar to the US DIII-D reactor in size, magnetic field strength, and plasma current. HL-2M will have 11 MW of heating power in its first stage compared to 23 MW on DIII-D according to Wikipedia, though this will likely be upgraded. But consider the fact that DIII-D was built in 1986.
JET, currently operating in the UK, is the tokamak closest to producing more fusion power than absorbed heating power. It would be a nice surprise if it achieved this in its upcoming research program using deuterium-tritium fuel. But to reliably pass this milestone and get closer to producing electricity, we need to build tokamaks bigger, like ITER, or with a stronger magnetic field, like SPARC. Neither one will produce electricity, but they will allow us to study the potentially different plasma environment and materials issues at high fusion power.
Electricity-producing tokamaks are in the extremely early conceptual design phase (DEMO, ARC) and will require much more research on tritium breeding and materials that can withstand insane levels of heating and irradiation.
This is the key question as there are quite a few Tokamaks around.
Tokamak Energy has had an operational one for a while now. But they are quite some time away from having one that can generate surplus power. Question is whether China is up to this point yet.
"Judging from several key performance parameters, HL-2M will be the most advanced Tokamak in China, and also one of the leading devices worldwide, comparable to those in the U.S. and Europe,"
Going to the moon is not comparable to obtaining fusion. The entire reason to go to the moon is political dominance. The goal of fusion is not political dominance it's nigh limitless clean energy. China would be stupid to share such a huge advantage with the rest of the world. It simply doesn't way up to the political gain.
Sure, but why not take advantage of a 3-5 years head start?
If China were close to a surplus-energy generating Tokamak, the smart thing to do would be vague about it while pumping out a lot of disinformation to confuse Western intelligence agencies about the most productive path forward for research.
Because the more fusion plants you build the easier it becomes to steal the tech. So your options are
1) Get geopolitical dominance by showing you have it first (while still trying to prevent theft of IP)
2) Use it in quiet and in low usage to decrease vulnerability to state actors from stealing the tech.
One more important thing. Hiding it only hides it from other governments' populations, not the foreign governments. Because of this, most countries go for option #1.
Option 3: Offer to license it to anyone who wants it, have orders in other countries finance your own buildout, while positioning yourself as the primary source of expertise on the technology. Establish lots of joint ventures and send lots of staff to work on the plants in other countries, further establishing interdependencies. Use this to apply soft power to the rest of the world while giving your population very cheap (subsidized by other countries) energy, and watch your economy grow. This is a strategy that is much more sensible for China than trying to keep it exclusive or hidden, assuming they have a working technology.
EDIT: If it needs further clarification, this is the French model of fission plant buildout.
> It'd be like if we went to the moon, but kept it under wraps. Like, why bother?
Much of the point of space programs is to prove we can drop bombs back on earth with precision. I don't know how fusion reactors are a threat in that fashion.
I think you have it backwards - the space program was born from the missile programs. It was more of a case of "ok, we have pushed the limits of the missile program, what can we do next?"
During the space race and Cold War, Russia and the US used surveillance to determine each other's weapons capability & capacity (and still do). There's no need for the space program to remind the enemy of what they already know.
The space program was a pissing contest, effectively, and while there was surely some military undertones, the point of our space programs was not as a deterrent - it was a show of might.
Some people claim the real goals of fusion power research have always been in support of fusion weapons development - specifically, by providing an experimental system for studying controlled fusion reactions (since uncontrolled fusion reactions are banned by treaty), and by providing a jobs program for fusion experts. I do not know enough about the practical obstacles to fusion power to judge the accuracy of this claim for myself, but there's no doubt that it's a dual-use technology, and some projects seem suspiciously like dead ends if commercial electricity generation is the real goal.
> but there's no doubt that it's a dual-use technology
I do in fact doubt this. We've been building fusion weapons for 50 years very successfully, progress in fusion power plants is negligible in comparison. If fusion power plants are a dual use technology for weapons, they must be a very inefficient way to get there.
But we haven't actually tested those weapons in decades. Ensuring that the stockpile doesn't go bad is a huge money suck for the DOE, and it's been a key factor driving supercomputer improvements. You're right that it's very inefficient, but that has to be balanced against the political cost of setting off thermonuclear explosions regularly.
If China can gain a massive energy advantage over their competitors they don't even need special weapons. If they can get a 10% per-capita energy advantage over the Americans then they win direct wars automatically by virtue of having a 3-4x manpower advantage. Economic engines win wars quite consistently.
There are a huge number of assumptions buried in that initial "If". China could just as easily blow several dozen billion dollars with no more to show for it than anyone else.
China is extremely dependent on energy imports, averaging roughly 10 million bpd. Most of that oil comes far away from the Middle East traversing long shipping lanes which are close to many regional rivals which could easily disrupt said lanes. And that's not even bringing up the USN. Having a credible domestic answer to their energy needs would be covering what is currently a clear and present Achilles heel.
A confident nation, like a confident individual, has nothing to prove to anyone else.
Just imagine a scenario where Chinese GDP doubles over 5 years, while greenhouse gas emissions drop to zero over that same period. Imagine China's glee and their cackling laughter as Westerners scratch their heads wondering why.
For the record, I am an American who reads about plasma physics in my free time, under the distant hope that I can help America win this race.
On the other hand, the world is hitting China with a lot of moralistic judgement and economic tariffs. This would give them the ability to say: “We gave you clean fusion. STFU.”
Not to mention the geopolitical advantage they would get deploying fusion plants to Africa, etc.
That's really only the case if you don't ever want anything from other people/nations. If you're going to be negotiating anything ever again, it might be useful to have chips like this to play.
Fusion would be a national security level tech - like FTL travel or general AI. Heck, it would be beyond national security level. Nobody would share that without some geopolitical considerations.
To put it in perspective, the US is fighting china over relatively mundane nonsense like 5G, semiconductors, etc. Fusion would be many orders of magnitude more important than any tech we have today.
The US exploited the control of oil to conquer and rule over the entire world. Every nation on earth is a vassal on some level ( even china and russia ) to the US because we discovered and exploited oil first and pretty much ended up controlling most of it around the world. The international world order is an american world order because of oil. If madagascar or north korea discovered fusion, they would control the commanding heights and they wouldn't share such a secret without getting something in return. If that is the case for madagascar/north korea, major nations like china, japan, france, germany, russia, india, turkey, nigeria, brazil, venezuela, etc who don't want to be under american domination would be even more incentivized to keep it for themselves.
What is the value of limitless free and environmentally friendly energy? Priceless. It's the type of tech which alters human trajectory and the world order. Not only is fusion priceless in and of itself, it's priceless in terms of it's derivative effects. Discovery of fusion can lead to general AI and vice versa.
In other words, ain't nobody sharing fusion tech - at least not without significant strings attached.
I'm a pessimist/realist when it comes to it as well. We as a global population are still figuratively learning to clean up our own feces, faffing about with useless programs and dragging dead-weight because we refuse to properly fix problems.
The pessimistic in you should see it as a massive boondoggle. For fundamental reasons, there's very little chance this, and likely other, fusion efforts will lead to a competitive source of energy.
Thank you. Every time I see a fusion article - and it’s always a breathless “just around the corner” puff piece - I scan it to see if they’ve solved neutron embrittlement, or even come close. So far, no one has.
Or volumetric power density, or simply the cost of the non-nuclear part of the power plant.
But of course no one has solved the neutron damage issue. How could they? To develop a material, if that's even possible, that could withstand 14 MeV neutrons well enough, one would need a fusion reactor to make those neutrons to test the materials (and tritium breeding to keep it running). This circular dependency would be very difficult to traverse.
Not hogwash. Just the truth. Go read the history of oil. The US was decades ahead of europe and europe never had the oil that the US did hence why major european powers like britain, france and germany relied heavily on coal. No european country had the oil fields of pennsylvania, ohio, texas, california, etc. That's why europe had to take oil from asia, africa etc. Standard Oil became the most valuable company and rockefeller the wealthiest man primarily by exploiting oil within our borders. Britain, france, etc had to steal oil from the middle east, etc. The dutch stole it from indonesia. So on and so forth. But as I said, they were decades behind the US in oil production and oil use.
If you are still unconvinced, go look up oil production before and during ww2. Before and during ww2, the US produced more oil than the rest of the world combined. And after ww2, with control over saudi/OPEC oil, venezuelan oil, canadian oil, etc, we controlled the world's oil supply.
The bountiful oil reserves within our borders and the early exploitation of it is why the US became the world's dominant power. Oil is why ww1 and ww2 was fought. Oil is why we won ww2. Oil is why we won the cold war. Oil is why the american international world order exists.
Oil limited the aggressors in ww2 and helped the US win. It was not why the war started. German logicians predicted the outcome of the western front before the fight started because of their limited resources. It was never possible to take russia. The war was commenced anyway.
I don’t know this matters. If China did make a breakthrough here it undoubtedly would be classified as a military technology. They may advertise to the world that they did it, for ego points, but I have a very hard time dreaming up a scenario where they’d actively share it.
First off, you are overestimating the extent to which the Chinese government 'screens' the publications and communications of its scientists greatly. A lot of papers have been published during development of this particular reactor for instance.
Research tends to be so international these days that the chances of any country keeping significant breakthroughs to themselves are pretty slim. Scientists from countless nations are working on ITER and pooling their knowledge.
The only way to keep these things under wraps is if you were running it as some kind of top secret project from the start and poured billions into it. And then you'd still be operating at a disadvantage because you can't bring in outside expertise. Considering the scale needed for serious Tokamaks (and not just small research models) and also the history of the field, I have a hard time imagining a scenario where such a thing would be kept under wraps.
Fusion research is really an international community. There's not much "they" to point your finger at.
I’m not overestimating anything. I agree with other comments in this thread about the geopolitical choices China would have to make if they actually did make fusion work. I think you’re underestimating what kind of groundbreaking technology this is and how quickly CCP would figure out a way to leverage it - international research involvement be damned.
Free(ish) energy is the kind of thing that fundamentally rebalances the global order. US control of shipping lanes, or consistent access to oil is what has made the US the super power it is. China inventing Fusion would make all of that obsolete.
China would no doubt take legal action to insist that other organizations and countries respect their intellectual property, license it, and pay royalties.
By the time all the agreements with China to respect IP are in place, China will be producing more patents annually than any other country.
theoretically yes, China has bluntly stolen western tech and appropriated it. But still the western "order" is based on such agreements, and if its upholders (the west) decides to forgo it, all hell breaks loose.
The US was a brazen pirate right up until the point when it became profitable to abide by international patent and copyright treaties. We don't like it when other countries do what we did, but I personally can't fault them.
It wouldn't make any difference. The US can ultimately get at any technology in China just the same as China can get to any technology in the US. It wouldn't remain secret for very long no matter what they did. In fact long before they officially figured out fusion first, the US would realize what they were on to and react; just as China would the other direction.
There's no way China would give it the technology to us. We'd have to steal it through subterfuge just like the Russians stole nuclear plans in the 50s
If China gets fusion energy first they will obtain unimaginable power, hell the same applies to the US. While stopping climate change would be great I also fear for what we might put in its place.
You don't get unimaginable power from a fusion plant.
Fusion plants don't generate unlimited energy. You'd need to build several of them to even power your country for "free". Energy is usually 20% of GDP -- probably higher in China -- so you'd get a ~20% GDP growth. It would take time to build these plants, and they're unlikely to have a 100% ROI, meaning that they'd still come at some cost.
Yes, it would be huge. Probably a one-time 20% boost in GDP. Maybe a percentage point continually for having cleaner air. Maybe a little more if they could hypothetically commercialize this for other countries.
It doesn't matter whether it's unlimited or not if it's practically free. Do you know how many manufacturing processes could become practical and how much research could be done given inexpensive energy?
The claims that it's going to be wonderful don't get subject to this sort of scrutiny, but whatever...
There are multiple reasons to think fusion can't win. The simplest is that fusion is a thermal power technology. Heat is produced, which heats a working fluid, which drives turbines, which makes power. ALL thermal power technologies are struggling now, particularly "external combustion" ones that transmit the heat into the working fluid through heat exchangers or boilers. Nuclear fission, coal, geothermal, solar thermal: all of them are having trouble competing. Only combustion turbines are doing ok (internal combustion, avoiding expensive heat transfer stages). Even if the fusion heat source were free, a fusion power plant would not be competitive. And the expensive non-nuclear part is mature technology in which not a lot of improvement can be expected.
But beyond that, there's good reason to think fusion would be more expensive than the other thermal power sources. Compare the volumetric thermal power density of ITER vs. a PWR primary reactor vessel: ITER is worse by about a factor of 400 (0.05 MW/m^3 vs. 20 MW/m^3). Smaller concepts, like ARC or Lockheed's are better (about 0.5 MW/m^3) but still far inferior to fission. A fusion reactor would be far larger, and far more complex, than a fission reactor. Fuel is not a large part of the cost of fission power, btw.
This failure to be competitive is not an accident. It follows from the square-cube law: a fusion reactor must transmit its output through the surface of the reactor vessel, while fission and coal can transfer heat to the working fluid through the surface of thin fuel rods or boiler tubes. This generic handicap, which is independent of anything to do with plasma physics, has been known for nearly four decades, if not longer.
There are other showstoppers (materials, reliability/maintainability, tritium breeding) but those two are enough.
The only hope fusion has, and it's a thin one, is advanced fuels that would allow direct conversion, skipping the thermal stage entirely. But all advanced fuel concepts will still produce a large fraction of energy in photons, which will strike surfaces and be thermalized. And they either depend on 3He, which is science fictional in its sources (moon mining?!), or H-11B, which is likely impossibly difficult at the plasma physics level (and 2000x less reactive than DT, best case.) And even advanced "aneutronic" fuels will leave the reactor too radioactive for hands-on maintenance, due to unavoidable side reactions. Given how large and complex a fusion reactor would be, that is also a showstopper.
If anyone demonstrates a 'working' (that is, economical) tokamak, that will swiftly prompt about ten other national and international projects to catch up via better funding. It's not like this is a magic ring pulled from a volcano by an elf or something; it's extremely copy-able.
having nuclear fusion available will be good in the long term because it's a clean source of energy, it won't magically give China superpowers. We already have very simple means to give anyone access to abundant energy, ordinary coal and gas plants work just fine in that regard.
This isn't a first to market huge advantage. Developing the plants is slow (many years) and the lag between super powers in cracking tech is generally only a couple of years (see space programs/nuclear energy programs)
It's playing into divisive tribal thinking, when this is literally objectively good for everyone on the planet.
They definitely aren't, because we don't see everything that gets posted here, or even close to everything. There's far too much.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Bringing that up in a thread about tokamak reactors would almost certainly break the site guideline against going on flamewar tangents.
I know that can seem arbitrary to people who have strong feelings on the topic, but it follows from HN's first principle: intellectual curiosity. We have had hundreds of generic flamewars about China. Will yet another one gratify anybody's intellectual curiosity? Of course not, because nothing new can be said about any of it. Everyone who cares about these arguments has already heard all of the lines and probably recited half of them. The only thing left to do is invent even nastier variations of the same thing. That's why flamewars get hotter as they become more predictable.
The root phenomenon is: we can have intellectual curiosity or indignation but not both. On HN, we choose curiosity. That means indignation needs to be actively contained, for the same reason that fire does.
If you want to see previous explanations about this, there are tons:
What I'm getting at is giving a tyranical, abusive, genocidal country world domination vs suffering the effects of pollution and ecological collapse isn't a choice I want to make
What is your point? They should stop consuming energy until someone gifts them some magical tech?
From the article we see they are trying better alternatives and if this would be a success maybe we could have enough energy to undo all the CO2 the industrial countries put in the atmosphere.
I think I know why there isn’t more advanced life out there: as we do bigger and bigger experiments, the chance of making a mistake that can end planets increases as we are more technologically advanced..
Funny you should mention that, because fusion plants are pretty much inherently safe from that point of view. From wiki:
>Runaway reactions cannot occur in a fusion reactor. The plasma is burnt at optimal conditions, and any significant change will simply quench the reactions. The reaction process is so delicate that this level of safety is inherent.
The main danger of nuclear fission is that it destroys your finances by going grossly over budget. Fusion is likely to be worse in that respect, being both much larger and much more complex.
Fusion isn't going to "end the planet". You really should read more about it. It's extremely hard to get fusion to happen in the first place in a controlled manner. There is 0% chance of it going critical
Others in the top five are the EU, Japan, and Germany, followed closely by South Korea. South Korea invests the most as a percentage of GDP.
All of the “Asian Tigers”, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, appear to have been invested heavily in R&D as a % of GDP (European level or higher) for a long time, and they were the only ones in Asia crossing from third-world to first-world status after Japan, which did the same before that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_researc...
Few places managed to join the developed nation status in the last half century. Chile is arguably the only other example.