Scientific Prizes – a Supplement to Research Funding?
October 24th, 2008Posted by: admin
Those following space activities are probably familiar with various forms of the X Prize, which offers healthy sums of cash for groups or individuals that manage to meet certain scientific or technical accomplishments. The most known is probably the Ansari X Prize, which was awarded to the folks behind SpaceShip One, who demonstrated private, reusable, suborbital spaceflight. You can thank them for your ability to soar up to the edge of space on Virgin Galactic sometime in the near future (should you have the $200,000 price to flight). Other X Prizes focus on space, genomics, automobiles and now, health care (Hat Tip, Scientifc Blogging). DARPA – the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – has held several Grand Challenge events, where teams compete for prizes by demonstrating certain technological feats – most recently around autonomous driving.
Given the trend in this decade for flat (or close to it) government funding for research, alternative funding really is needed in order for the desired increases to happen. However, I doubt that prizes can effectively bridge this gap. They work – but are based on a fundamentally different economics than the scientific research that relies on the federal budget. Prizes provide incentive, and the money and associated sales from the successful product or service can be used to fund other research, but the ’start-up costs’ (for lack of a better term) are born by the researchers. They are also more application or problem focused, and while it’s not a stranger to academic research, it is not the focus of the majority of that research.
In today’s economic climate, it seems less than likely that universities will commit resources to support a speculative payoff. However, private sector research has been on the decline for years, and it remains to be seen that there can be enough prizes to boost private sector activity to restore prior levels. If foundation giving does decline, as it might given the current economy, prizes themselves may have difficulty expanding. In short, it’s going to hurt all over.
October 24th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
“In today’s economic climate, it seems less than likely that universities will commit resources to support a speculative payoff.”
This is a generality that’s devoid of meaning, without any specifics.
Here is a website that claims that an MIT researcher demonstrated greater-than-breakeven fusion for a period of a week. The claimed ratio of output power to input power was a factor of 2.3.
Suppose the U.S. government offered a prize (which they SHOULD) of $1 billion to the first 5 groups who could demonstrate (using separate devices) more than 10 watts of output power, at a ratio to input power of at least 2-to-1, for a week.
The federal government would run the tests, and their decision about the results would be final.
Do you really think that most universities wouldn’t put a couple graduate students to work on laboratory apparatuses, to try to collect $1 BILLION in prize money?
October 24th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Oops. I forgot to include the website link:
http://www.std.com/~mica/jeticcf10demo.html
October 24th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
Two grad students is a relative pittance. If there is a significant technology investment required, as it often is with most existing prices, I’m not as confident that a university would be willing to commit sufficient resources to make a serious effort. The exception would be in those programs where there already is some kind of research going on in this area. But how common are those programs?
Prizes are not going to be a substitute for the increases in research support that scientists and engineers are seeking. A reasonable supplement, sure, but not a replacement.
October 25th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
“Two grad students is a relative pittance. If there is a significant technology investment required, as it often is with most existing prices, I’m not as confident that a university would be willing to commit sufficient resources to make a serious effort.”
The point I was making was that the amount of resources a university would be willing to commit would depend on: 1) the amount of the prize, 2) the amount of resources required, and 3) the percentage chance the university could win the prize.
Obviously, 2 and 3 would probably be related. That is, the more money spent, they greater the chance of winning the prize.
For example, suppose there was the prize I mentioned. One ***billion*** dollars to generate 10 watts of excess power for a week. (Let’s drop the 2-to-1 requirement.)
Now, suppose a university thought that it could spend, say $10 million, and have a 50 percent chance of collecting the $1 billion. Of course they’d spend the $10 million! And if they didn’t, plenty of other universities would!
But suppose they could spend $10 million, and have only a 1-in-20 chance of winning the $1 billion. Well, the risk/reward ratio would be a lot worse, but it would still make sense. *Someone* would probably take those odds.
“In fact, such a prize would probably draw a lot of venture capitalists to shell out money to try to collect the prize.
The exception would be in those programs where there already is some kind of research going on in this area. But how common are those programs?”
I think prizes should be awarded in areas specifically where people currently are NOT working. They should be rewarded in areas that have a potentially huge benefit to society, but currently have little activity. Fusion is probably the ultimate example. If electricity from fusion could be produced at a cost that’s less than the other methods (coal, natural gas, fission, wind) it would be a world-changing development. It would be the most important energy-related development since the discovery of fire.
But how many people are working on fusion right now? Especially, how many people are working on fusion that does *not* involve tokamak reactors. I’d bet, in the entire world (6 BILLION people, where approximately $5 TRILLION is spent every year on energy) that there are less than 500 researchers who work full time on non-tokamak fusion. And I’ll be the total world budget for nontokamak fusion research is less than $5 million.
“Prizes are not going to be a substitute for the increases in research support that scientists and engineers are seeking.”
Yes, it’s amazing what a sense of entitlement scientists and engineers have developed, taking government money without producing any useful results.
I forget the exact exchange, but “60 Minutes” had a piece on the Large Hadron Collider. Steve Kroft asked a researcher something like, “Why build this machine?” And the researcher responded something along the lines of “Why not?”
Kroft was momentarily taken aback…and responded something like, “Well it did cost billions of dollars. That’s a lot of money.”
(To be fair, the researcher then came up with some reasonably good reasons.)
Or take the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). With a lot of luck, it will cost “only” $10 billion. And with even more luck, it will be finished in “only” ten more years.
And then the scientists and engineers plan to play with it for another 30 years. And 40 years from now, it will not have put one single watt of power into an electrical grid.
Good work, if one can get it. But why in the world anyone thinks society should pay that kind of money for scientists and engineers to play with their toys is beyond me.
Technological prizes pay for performance. That’s not what scientists and engineers want to have. But it’s what society should demand.
October 25th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Some problems with the scenario you describe, aside from a focus on short-term tangible payoffs on known problems.
You assume that universities can take the kind of speculative risks that entrepreneurs can. If a university goes bankrupt because it lost too many bets chasing prizes, then it has failed not only itself, but the students and communities that it serves.
In short, you’re assuming that a university acts exactly like a small start-up/.
It’s the rare university – dependent on tuition and other donations for its budget – that can afford to gamble its money on prizes with a low chance of payoff. There are no VCs for university research, in part because the payoff – the return on investment in the narrow financial sense – is only one of a multitude of obligations.
Your scenario also assumes that these prizes pay out. In the 13 years of the X Prize Foundation, exactly one prize has been awarded. One of the reasons some claim prizes would be an efficient way to stimulate research and economic growth is that it’s pretty cheap – prizes are awarded only if conditions are met. But if the market decides that the problem is too hard – where are we?
Prizes are no good for questions that aren’t necessarily solved by throwing a lot of money and labor (not necessarily thinking) at it. If fusion gets to a point where it’s about making it produce more energy than it costs (or producing energy that is competitive with other sources of energy), than a prize would make sense. Prizes in alternative energy would be better dedicated to improving the efficiency of cellulosic ethanol, photovoltaics or fission.
October 26th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
hmmm … et’s see.
What would be wrong with taking a Bjorn Lomborg-like prioritization approach.
Oh, he’s already done a lot of the work.
October 26th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
“hmmm … et’s see.
What would be wrong with taking a Bjorn Lomborg-like prioritization approach.
Oh, he’s already done a lot of the work.”
There’s no conflict between the work Bjorn Lomborg has done and technology prizes.
The fundamental aspect of technology prizes versus standard funding of research is that technology prizes pay out only when problems are solved. In contrast, standard funding of research pays out whether problems get solved or not.
The ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) is probably the epitomy of the standard funding-failure mode of research. Construction has already started on ITER. The *present* estimate is that it will cost $10 billion, and take 10 years to finish. I’ll be shocked if it gets built for under $15 billion. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if it doesn’t ever get finished.
And even if it DOES get built, the plan is to spend 30 years *studying* fusion with the device.
But that’s energy. A couple of “Very Good Projects” identified by the Copenhagen Consensus were control of HIV/AIDS and malaria:
http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/Default.aspx?ID=158
Both those are outside my area of expertise. So I’m not speaking from education or experience. But one of the ideas that seemed cool to me is that some researchers have developed a drug that can be given to humans such that when the anopheles mosquito bites the person, the blood delivers something that essentially kills the malaria plasmodium in the mosquito. It doesn’t kill the mosquito, it just renders the mosquito no longer capable of transmitting malaria.
But one problem with that approach is that one has to give the drug to a significant part of the total population. It would be better if it were possible to get the mosquitoes to bite “blood bags.” But mosquitoes have a very big preference for humans versus “blood bags.”
So there could be a technology prize to develop a “blood bag” that was more attractive than humans to anopheles mosquitoes. That would be a very easy thing to test. Get a bunch of anopheles mosquitoes in a room. Put a human and a “blood bag” in the room. If significantly more mosquitoes bite the “blood bag,” the person wins the technology prize.
This is all hypothetical–again, malaria is outside my area of expertise–but it shows the key aspect that the government does NOT fund *studying* to make a more attractive “blood bag.” The government rewards actual solving of the problem. Only when the more attractive “blood bag” is shown to exist (by an objective test) does the prize get paid out.
October 26th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
The problem with prizes is that if the solution to the problem can’t make much money, then the incentive to risk the money to work toward the answer isn’t there. So while an HIV/AIDS vaccine would be lucrative, a malaria solution (or even a needed step toward a malaria solution) would not be lucrative, as it’s been nearly eradicated from the parts of the world with the money to pay big money for such a vaccine. Even with those prizes that are money earning (reusable space vehicles will eventually make someone rich), they haven’t spurred a great deal of research activity.
I do not accept the implication that only those research questions that can turn a profit are worth supporting. That’s why I dismiss the notion that research prizes can effectively substitute for the research support currently needed to maintain scientific and technological research.
If government stops funding the studying of research questions and only the successful answering of research problems, they may save money, but the available knowledge produced by such a system will decrease. The ability to learn unrelated knowledge lacks an effective measurement of its economic value. As a result, those favoring strict cost-benefit analysis diminish its importance, and those that are under the impression that government should make investment choices exactly like a small business see wasted money everywhere.
October 26th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
“Some problems with the scenario you describe, aside from a focus on short-term tangible payoffs on known problems.”
I don’t understand at all what you’re trying to say. Yes, “energy” is a “known problem”. Here’s just a small list of the problems:
1) It costs about 8 percent of world GDP…about $5-8 trillion per year.
2) Most oil is available only from dictatorships, and in very unstable parts of the world.
3) Coal is an environmental disaster all around. First, there’s the mining. Then, there’s the conventional air pollution (particulates, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides). And mercury.
4) All fossil fuels emit CO2.
5) Wind and solar are intermittent, and very diffuse. Further, they don’t coincide well with areas of the country that have the highest demand (e.g. the Northeast requires tremendous amounts of energy, but solar and wind aren’t strong there).
6) Very few people want to live next door to coal-fired or nuclear power plants. Or wind turbines, for that matter.
Fusion (especially “cold” fusion) is essentially the perfect energy source. It represents the ultimate in technology trends in energy…it is dematerialized, and decarbonized, and involves no long-lived radioactive wastes. It’s energy dense, and would allow essentially a complete dismantling of the electrical grid. There would be no need for interstate transfers of electricity, because each state–even each city or town–could generate its own electricity.
But if fusion is so perfect, why aren’t people working on it? Well, I think the answer is that the federal government (pushed by fusion researchers themselves) has gone down the ultimate dead-end alley.
The tokamak reactor will never work except as a huge (and expensive) piece of equipment. But that (and to a lesser extent, laser fusion) is the only form of fusion receiving any funding.
That’s the problem technology prizes (for non-tokamak fusion) would address. And the good thing about technology prizes is that the government doesn’t need to pay, if the technologies can’t be developed.
So, is cold fusion real? Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.
If it *IS* real, the U.S. federal government should be willing to pay for it, big-time. It would literally have a present value of trillions of dollars if it’s real. (Because it’s inherently so inexpensive, with both capital costs AND fuel costs that are negligible.)
And if it isn’t real, the federal government would not have to pay anything, other than the trivial cost of setting up the technology prizes.
October 26th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
“If fusion gets to a point where it’s about making it produce more energy than it costs (or producing energy that is competitive with other sources of energy), than a prize would make sense.”
No, you’ve got it 180 degrees backwards. If fusion gets to the point where people can see that it will produce energy competitive with other forms of energy, there will be no need for technology prizes. The market will take over.
That webpage that I linked to…
http://www.std.com/~mica/jeticcf10demo.html...
…talked about input power of 0.12 watts to 1.5 watts…and output power about double that.
No venture capitalist is going to give millions of dollars to a guy who has a device that costs a thousand dollars to produce less than a watt of power. That’s where the federal government could come in. As long as the energy produced is more than the energy put in, it’s a big deal.
If the guy was putting in 1000 watts and getting out 2000 watts, there would be no need to give him a technology prize. Venture capitalists would be lining up around the block (unless it involved 50 pounds of platinum, or something like that).
October 26th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
“I do not accept the implication that only those research questions that can turn a profit are worth supporting.”
I don’t know who has “implied” that. Certainly not I.
Take, for example, the DARPA autonomous vehicle challenges. They are valuable precisely *because* development of a single prototype autonomous vehicle won’t turn a profit. But if a group can win a monetary prize, it at least defers some of the cost (in addition to the publicity/prestige).
Another good example is the “blood bags” idea that I sketched out. No one is going to make a profit producing a bag that mosquitoes like to bite. But it could be very valuable as part of a method to eradicate malaria. It eliminates the potential danger to humans who would get injections of the drug that wipes out the malaria plasmodium when mosquitoes bite the people.
October 26th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
My main problem is that your writing comes across as suggesting that prizes should supplant academic research, which you seem to think is completely disconnected from reality. The suggestion that prizes should replace traditional research funding leads me to claim that you’re only interested in problems with monetizable outcomes, as they appear to be the only areas in which prizes have traction.
I was suggesting that prizes could only be one really small part of the research policy portfolio, as it only makes sense to help bridge gaps between concept and marketable/profitable device or service. Sometimes the prize encourages the proof of concept, and the market incentives are there, and sometimes the prize encourages the improvement of the proven concept to the point where a market can form around it.
With this particular passage:
[“If fusion gets to a point where it’s about making it produce more energy than it costs (or producing energy that is competitive with other sources of energy), than a prize would make sense.”
No, you’ve got it 180 degrees backwards. If fusion gets to the point where people can see that it will produce energy competitive with other forms of energy, there will be no need for technology prizes. The market will take over.]
My wording was imprecise. I think a prize would only make sense if the challenge was to make fusion produce more energy than it consumes, or if the challenge was to make fusion costs competitive with other forms of energy. Even with a prize, it sounds like the state of the art in fusion is way too far away from either of these points to see a payoff for decades. Promise of a distant payoff seems like a lousy incentive.
Where malaria is concerned, I don’t think any private concern will get involved with it because it’s not worth their money. The market can’t pay enough, which leaves foundations to foot the bill. Then the cost becomes more than the prizes, it’s a guarantee of purchasing the winning product at significant volume (as NASA how fiscally prudent their competitions for space vehicles have been).
Unless the blood bags would have applications that health care systems can turn a profit on, what’s the motivation for companies to make the investment? Given that pharmaceutical companies are already set up to make long term investments in drug research, if they thought there was money in malaria, why haven’t they made the investment?
With the DARPA prizes, you have a more successful version of NASA’s attempts to have firms compete for the right to build something. Yet there is little private sector involvement in the DARPA prizes, so the market is pretty absent here, or at the very least heavily distorted.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:14 am
“My main problem is that your writing comes across as suggesting that prizes should supplant academic research, which you seem to think is completely disconnected from reality.”
Hmmm…as the saying goes, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
I’m not suggesting anything nearly so drastic as that. I’m only making the point that engineering/scientific research–particularly related to energy, as I’m very familiar with that field–suffers from the tendency that all the effort is made to obtain the contract to look at the problem. Then the contractor finds out how the problem is more and more difficult, thus requiring more and more money.
Fusion is a very good example. The U.S. and other governments–on advice of the “fusion community”–has chosen the tokamak reactor as the way to go. But I think*** it was clear a long time ago that tokamaks will never become a signficant source of the world’s power. The plasma is simply too difficult to contain.
On the other hand, there are other methods of producing fusion–such as the Farnsworth fusor, dense plasma focus fusion, or even pyroelectric fusion–that have been shown without question to produce fusion reactions. But the problem with the Farnworth fusor, dense plasma focus fusion, and pyroelectric fusion is that they are all many orders of magnitude from generating “breakeven” levels of fusion energy. And by “many orders of magnitude” I mean like factors of a million of even a billion from breakeven. In other words, put in 200 watts, and get out 0.000002 watts of fusion power.
And then there is cold fusion, ala Pons-Fleischmann. Most scientists cold fusion ala Pons-Fleischmann say it doesn’t even exist. And a very small number of scientists insist that not only does it exist, but that it has ALREADY generated more energy out than energy put in.
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEhowtoprodu.pdf
Not even a tokamak reactor has ever generated more fusion energy than put in. (The ITER would be the first to do that. A decade from now. At a cost of $10 billion. If it gets built at all.)
So virtually all funding for fusion goes to tokamak reactor fusion, even though it almost certainly won’t generate a significant portion of the world’s energy for the next 5 decades, if ever.
So all I’m advocating is that prizes be set up, on which other forms of fusion could hope to collect. For example, I spitballed five $1 BILLION prizes for generating 10 watts of excess power for one week. That kind of money would certainly get attention!
And if one or all five of those fusion prizes were collected, it would probably be the best chunk of money the federal government has ever spent on energy research.
***P.S. If anyone thinks that tokamaks *will* generate a significant portion (say, greater than 10%) of the world’s energy in the next 50 years, I’d be happy to debate that matter on my blog or elsewhere.
October 30th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
Hi David,
You write, “If fusion gets to a point where it’s about making it produce more energy than it costs (or producing energy that is competitive with other sources of energy), than a prize would make sense.”
It’s interesting that you seem to also come from the exact opposite direction, in that you criticize prizes as being too focused only on things that make money.
But regardless, I agree that the *main* point of funding fusion technology prizes would be to (greatly) speed the day when fusion becomes competitive with other energy technologies.
But that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be prizes even though we’re a long way from breakeven. Let’s specifically take dense plasma focus fusion.
Here’s a paper that says that with a 67 Joule input, they get 36,000 neutrons per shot, and that the maximum neutron energy was about 2.7 million electon-volts (MeV). I’ll spare the math, but I calculate that to be energy-in-to-energy out of about 4.2 billion-to-1.
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0022-3727/41/20/205215
So, why not have a set of prizes that gives $1 million each to the first 5 parties who get within 1 million-to-1? And then another set of prizes that gives $50 million each to the first 5 parties that get within 1000-to-1? Then give set of prizes of $500 million each to the first 5 parties who get over breakeven?
The total expenditure if every single prize were awarded would be $5 million + $250 million + $2,500 million = $2.755 billion. And if every single prize were awarded, you’d have 5 parties who had achieved breakeven with a fusion device. And let’s suppose that the top prizes were never awarded. Well, there wouldn’t be any breakeven dense plasma focus machines, but the cost would “only” be $255 million. That’s trivial compared to, for example, ethanol subsidies of billions of dollars every year. And dense plasma focus fusion is potentially a good source of neutrons and X-rays, which can have significant benefits in other areas.
October 30th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
I think my criticism of prizes is not that they are too focused on money, is that they have a limited utility – limited to projects that just need some post-proof of concept capital to take off, financially speaking. I think prizes are fine, but they are a good complement to current research funding mechanisms, not as a substitute for any of them.
My concern with the prizes for far-off stuff is I don’t think they provide sufficient incentive. You would disagree. What might persuade me is some suggestion that there are enough researchers/companies around doing complementary work that a million-dollar or more carrot would be sufficient incentive for them to make the adjustment to fusion work. By point of comparison, I think a similarly structured prize structure for solar (with different targets, obviously) stands a better chance of encouraging more activity because there are researches and companies doing work in the area, or close enough to it, that they would put in the effort.
October 31st, 2008 at 6:23 pm
“My concern with the prizes for far-off stuff is I don’t think they provide sufficient incentive. You would disagree. What might persuade me is some suggestion that there are enough researchers/companies around doing complementary work that a million-dollar or more carrot would be sufficient incentive for them to make the adjustment to fusion work.”
The solution to prizes for “far-off stuff” is to award smaller prizes for more-easily-achievable near-term goals. For example, I proposed offering 5 prizes of $1 billion each for people who can produce 10 watts of excess fusion power for one week. But as I mentioned, there could be a series of smaller prizes, increasing in size as the ratio of output power to input power approaches breakeven.
“I think prizes are fine, but they are a good complement to current research funding mechanisms, not as a substitute for any of them.”
Well, what would you guess is the current overall money split for federal research in traditional funding versus prizes? My guess is that it’s about 99 percent (or more) traditional funding, and 1 percent (or less) of technology prizes. So even switching to a 90/10 split of traditional research versus technology prizes would be a huge difference. I think such a split, or even 80/20, would be a huge improvement. I think this is particularly true in areas of energy and the environment. For example, here’s the National Renewable Energy Lab’s website for photovoltaics projects:
http://www.nrel.gov/pv/projects.html
My guess is that not a single one of them involves a technology prize.
October 31st, 2008 at 7:14 pm
“If fusion gets to a point where it’s about making it produce more energy than it costs (or producing energy that is competitive with other sources of energy), than a prize would make sense. Prizes in alternative energy would be better dedicated to improving the efficiency of cellulosic ethanol, photovoltaics or fission.”
If fusion can be developed commercially for a capital cost of $2000/kW or less, it will make cellulosic ethanol, photovoltaics, and fission obsolete. So it makes more sense to first offer prizes for fusion, and only if they can’t be collected would it be necessary to offer prizes for any other form of energy.
October 31st, 2008 at 7:48 pm
I think we’re starting to repeat ourselves here, which suggests were at or near a natural point of agreeing to disagree.
Your arguments for prizes imply that there’s a group of researchers and/or entrepreneurs just itching to do something if only there was some extra financial incentive. Your fusion example suggests to me that the technological gap is big enough that any kind of prize structure is unlikely to spark new entrants into the field.
With technological gaps that big, prizes are empty gestures. This tells me that fusion is the last of the alternative energy technologies that would respond to a prize. Why would a prize sponsor be more interested in the biggest economic advantage if there were other improvements (other technologies) that could give significant advantages faster. Economically speaking, the discount of future rewards would make a smaller boost that happens sooner a better investment than a bigger investment that happens later.
As for boosting the prize pool as a percentage of total R&D funding, I think it should be framed differently. Some kind of assessment that would tell me which prizes are most likely to motivate action (which is not the same as which ones are most likely to pay out) would be a better rationale to boost the dollar amounts than some arbitrary quota.
November 3rd, 2008 at 11:29 am
“Your arguments for prizes imply that there’s a group of researchers and/or entrepreneurs just itching to do something if only there was some extra financial incentive.”
That is always the case. The more potentially lucrative any potential endeavor is, the more people are interested.
“Your fusion example suggests to me that the technological gap is big enough…”
My fusion example should have suggested absolutely nothing about the technological gap, because I don’t know what the technology gap is. As I pointed out, some people claim to ALREADY have achieved more fusion energy out than energy put in.
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SzpakSthermalbeh.pdf
Per my suggested prizes, these people would ALREADY be able to claim a $500 million prize (for excess energy).
The key thing would be that they would have to submit their apparatus to a U.S. federal government testing facility, and that testing facility would have to agree that exess energy (enthalpy) was indeed produced, before they would be able to collect the prize.
If they collected the first $500 million prize, I can virtually guarantee you that hundreds of other researchers would be scrambling to collect the remaining four $500 million prizes. And there would also be a scramble as they and hundreds (or thousands) of others tried to collect the five $1 billion prizes I suggested for generating 10 watts of excess fusion power for one week.
“With technological gaps that big, prizes are empty gestures. This tells me that fusion is the last of the alternative energy technologies that would respond to a prize.”
You don’t know anything about the “technology gap.” As I’ve pointed out (see link above), there are those who claim to have ALREADY generated excess energy.
And if the researchers above–Szpak, Mosier-Boss, Miles, and Fleischmann–collected $500 million, and you still claim that hundreds or thousands of others wouldn’t be jumping in to collect the other four $500 million prizes, or the five $1 billion prizes for generating 10 watts excess for one week…well, your claim simply doesn’t pass the straight face test.
No large company in the world (e.g. General Electric, American Electric Power) would pass up the chance at as much as $1.5 BILLION (if they collected prize categories) for a couple million in research expenditures.
November 4th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Here are some numbers that show the astounding promise of nuclear fusion:
1) MASS OF FUEL FOR A 1000 MWe (megawatts electric) POWER PLANT. (Note: It would take about five hundred 1000 MWe power plants, running at 90 percent capacity, to produce the average amount of electricity used in the U.S. every year.)
a) Coal: Powder River Basin coal would require 13,000 tons per day. That’s essentially 130 train cars, each holding 100 tons of coal. Every day.
b) Nuclear fission: About 75 kg per day of uranium oxide fuel.
c) Deuterium-deuterium fusion: About 0.7 kg (1.6 pounds) of deuterium (available in approximately 20 cubic meters of sea water).
2) COST OF FUEL FOR A 1000 MWe POWER PLANT
a) Powder River Basin coal = Approximately $200,000/day.
b) Nuclear fission = Approximately $7,400/day.
c) Nuclear fusion = Approximately $4,000/day (present cost, but will probably drop significantly if an industry develops to supply deuterium from sea water).
3) LAND REQUIREMENTS FOR 1000 MWe POWER PLANT
a) Photovoltaic cells = Approximately 120 square kilometers (about 50 square miles).
b) Nuclear fission = Less than 1 square kilometer for the plant, 10 square kilometers including the mining and processing.
c) Nuclear fusion = Less than 1 square kilometer for the plant, no mine necessary.
Final note: The deuterium in 1 cubic kilometer of sea water is equal to the energy content of 300 billion tons of coal (the U.S. consumes about 1 billion tons of coal per year) or 1500 billion barrels of oil (more than all the conventional oil remaining underground that can be extracted at today’s prices). And there are 1.5 BILLION cubic kilometers of sea water.
November 5th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
I don’t want to, nor do I think I could, make any claims for or against the potential of fusion. I’m trying to formulate when a prize would make sense and when it wouldn’t. For me it seems that a prize should be tied to a stretch goal, where the means are plausible, but take some effort to put together, effort that can’t easily be recovered monetarily without some assistance.
So first, I think a prize that could already be awarded is worthless. You disagree, and unfortunately neither of us has the billions to test this proposition.
I wish I could articulate this more effectively, but I’m more skeptical about the notion that simply waving money in front of companies (small or large) will make them commit significant resources (even above and beyond the value of the prize) to try and achieve the target. That’s why I think other technologies that are more mature, but still need significant increases in efficiency or output, may be more responsive to the motivation of prizes.