Nuclear fusion: it’s time for a reality check

Significant obstacles lie ahead in the quest for commercially viable nuclear fusion, writes Luca Garzotti,  https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jan/22/nuclear-fusion-its-time-for-a-reality-check

I can’t help thinking Ed Miliband has not been accurately briefed when he says a government funding pledge means Britain is within “grasping distance” of “secure, clean, unlimited energy” from nuclear fusion (Ministers pledge record £410m to support UK nuclear fusion energy, 16 January).

Before we start talking about nuclear fusion via magnetic confinement as a commercially viable source of energy, five main challenges have to be met by the scientific community, each one of them a potential showstopper. We have to demonstrate:

1) That we can run a burning plasma for hours (if not in steady state) with Q=40 (Q being the ratio between power coming from the fusion reactions and power used to heat the plasma) without disruptions. If all goes well, at some point in the future, the ITER fusion project your article mentions will run a burning plasma with Q=10 for about 10 minutes.

2) That we can handle and exhaust the heat escaping from such a plasma and impinging on the first wall of the confining device.

3) That we can breed in the blanket of a power plant more tritium than we burn in the plasma. (Tritium is not readily available in nature and must be produced.)

4) That the materials used to build such a plant can withstand the neutron fluence coming from the burning plasma without losing their structural properties and without becoming excessively radioactive.

5) That a fusion reactor can be operated reliably and maintained by remote handling, minimising the downtime needed for maintenance.

These are massive scientific and technological challenges, the solution of which (despite progress being made) is not in the near future. The reward for finding a solution will be immense and therefore research must continue with humility and tenacity, but there is no room for overoptimistic or triumphalist statements, which can only undermine the credibility of the scientists and engineers working on the problem.

January 24, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology | Leave a comment

Operation Stargate, the project to make AI an “essential infrastructure” .

Koohan Paik-Mander. 22 Jan 25

Each data center is filled from ceiling to floor with stacks of metal boxes — computers which process all the AI calculations, which are in the billions per second, and which cause the machines to heat up. To cool them, giant pipes filled with water snake through the basements of these buildings with capillaries of cooling liquid that branch off up to run alongside each of the machines. The water consumption for cooling data centers is enormous. 

Essentially, Elon Musk is rejiggering all of America’s society and economy to recalibrate itself around AI. We are expected to give up our land, water and dreams of a livable climate in order to make the data centers operational.

I fear we will very soon be seeing a pivot from endless war on other countries to a focused crushing of the American people, under the banner of Operation Stargate, the project to make AI an “essential infrastructure,” like water or electricity. How that looks on the ground will be enormous data centers that are a half-million square feet each (the size of 2-1/2 Walmart Superstores or 8.5 football fields) constructed in clusters all over the nation. Wherever they are built, all nature perishes, because it is a wholesale smothering of the earth with concrete. They are now building ten of these data centers in Texas, as the first phase of this scourge on the American people. Each one of the ten uses between 20 to upwards of 100 megawatts of power. The entire island of Hawaii, where I live, uses 180 megawatts of energy. This is why they pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Accord, which would be an obstruction to the central plan of this administration to entrench AI infrastructure — arguably more central than deportations or building a wall.

They are proposing using federal lands as well, such as national parks, for these data centers. The first $500 billion was committed to their construction at the first Trump press conference. At the press conference, they didn’t mention any of the above. They just talked about how AI was going to cure cancer. It reminded me of the U.S. general telling the Bikini islanders that the atomic tests were to be “for the good of mankind.”

Each data center is filled from ceiling to floor with stacks of metal boxes — computers which process all the AI calculations, which are in the billions per second, and which cause the machines to heat up. To cool them, giant pipes filled with water snake through the basements of these buildings with capillaries of cooling liquid that branch off up to run alongside each of the machines. The water consumption for cooling data centers is enormous. 

They want to cover the continent with these data centers, much like the initiative to cover it with interstate highways. But I don’t see it like that. For me, it is like watching the tracks being lain that would guide train-cars full of Jews and other “undesirables” to the incinerators at Auschwitz and Dachau. It is like watching the gureombi at Gangjeong be blasted, only to be paved over to build a navy base. It is like watching the limestone forest on Guam be razed to construct the live-fire training range. It is like watching the farming villages at Pyeongtaek protest the construction of one of the largest U.S. bases in the world… So I’m used to watching the horror of autocracy smashing nature and community. Only difference is, now it’s in my own country.

“This land is your land, this land is my land.” We used to sing that song in grade school — remember?

Operation Stargate is building not only the hardware of this infrastructure; it is building the software as well. It seeks to fully automate government. It is a libertarian’s wet dream. Its planners in Silicon Valley saw their wealth balloon during the pandemic when everyone went online. The idea behind a fully automated civilization is to revive that scale of profit acceleration for Silicon Valley, by getting society online as much as possible. Remember how every meeting, every lesson, every funeral, every yoga lesson — everything — was done online? They want that back again, but with many added AI “bots”, and what better place to start than government? Just as all the schools were online during the pandemic, the plan is for all of government to be online. Soon, trying to get assistance from City Hall will be as challenging as talking to a person at Yahoo. Maybe they’ll farm out the humans who answer our phone calls to our virtual City Hall with a bunch of underpaid workers in the Philippines or India. 

But full automation is not truly human-free. AI requires a constant stream of data to train it. Slave wage workers will be hired in Africa to “annotate”; that is, to sit at computers and click meaningless boxes to train the AI models. The American people will also play a role in training. We’ll be surrounded by a smart grid and smart meters, smart appliances, smart cars, smart air fryers, smart homes — everything “smart”, which really means connected to sensors that record our voices, our images, our behavior patterns and any shifts in the environment. Those recordings provide more data streams to feed AI. Did you know that the reason they no longer manufacture stick shifts is because the sensors can’t translate manual transmission into usable data?

Data is considered more valuable than money these days. In fact, the U.S. government pays for satellite rental (most likely to Musk’s Starlink) in data from surveillance. 

In the AI world, the word “surveillance” refers not only to cameras and microphones, but any of the ways these sensors are extracting data. Interaction with government agencies will be more opportunities to collect our data. Every interaction will be surveillance. You see, an AI infrastructure cannot exist without a surveillance infrastructure, a surveillance state. 

The most egregious proposal is called Medshield, which was proposed in Congress last term but is certain to return, because it would be a means for the much needed data extraction. It proposes to transform the Department of Health and Human Services into a biowarfare hub. Combined with the “AI first, regulation last” mentality of the incoming administration, it would amount to a full-spectrum assault on Nature and human rights.

Introduced by Sen. Mike Rounds (R-South Dakota), the bill came off the drawing board at the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), a think tank founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. 

The bill’s stated purpose was to require a pandemic preparedness and response program. Couched in the euphemism “surveillance,” the bill’s passage would ultimately mandate the continual extraction of DNA samples from hundreds of millions of Americans in order to train AI models, ostensibly to track and monitor biological attacks, and to create antidotes for them. There has been some talk about nationalistically spinning this as “patriotism,” as if it were the postwar Victory Garden movement. But nothing in the bill’s text hints at the egregious Constitutional violations to privacy and individual agency that this would pose. 

Nor does the Act explicate that, as a general rule, all supposedly “defensive” weapons can be inversely deployed for offense. Building an arsenal of millions of new synthetic life forms to defend against a biological weapons attack has the potential, if not the covert intent, to irreversibly unleash new viruses, bacteria, proteins and other organisms into the ecological systems. Case in point: we saw how the “defensive” development of the atom bomb played out. 

The MedShield Act would employ technology that works with large-language model AI much in the same way that ChatGPT operates. The large-language model is comprised of a maze of networks with billions of artificial neurons. It is trained by inputting hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of relevant data points. (This is why a surveillance state is essential for any nation wishing global AI dominance — to continually feed the AI’s hungry maw.) Once trained by the data set to recognize patterns and relationships, a query can be entered into the AI, which then processes it by making millions of calculations before spitting out its answer.

 For example, generative AI could be queried to “make a Covid-like virus that doesn’t show symptoms until at least five days after contraction.” Or “what should go into a vaccine to inoculate against a flu virus that was engineered to last 30 days?” The possibilities for biological warfare are endless, which is why weapons technology companies like Palantir (maker of Gaza-tested Lavender AI) is studying how to use AI to create and mitigate biological threats. Los Alamos Labs is teaming up with Open AI to do the same.

According to the SCSP, MedShield is necessary in order to keep ahead of China in the AI arms race. Here’s how the SCSP explains Medshield:What is MedShield? Imagine a system that could protect us from dangerous pathogens and bioweapons as effectively as our military would defend against inbound ballistic missiles (NORAD) or nuclear attacks (STRATCOM). That’s the idea behind MedShield. This potential national technology program is a bold, fully-integrated, AI-enabled system-of-systems that could neutralize a biological threat, whether from a state, non-state actor, or nature (biological threats go beyond pathogens into five basic types). MedShield would create one holistic “kill chain” against biological threats.

It is a discomfiting notion that protocols would be implemented that would connect our national healthcare department to the Pentagon, and would be modeled after the NORAD and STRATCOM war commands. Could a more sinister, inappropriate framing exist for the office charged with the well-being of our women, men and children? I think not.

Because all generative AI — not only MedShield — requires a surveillance infrastructure of continual data extraction. All that data could come from anywhere, both legally or, as is more often the case, surreptitiously from everyday citizens, indigenous peoples, prisoners, marginalized communities, or the Global South. The human-rights threats of an unregulated, comprehensive, AI-driven federal government would make the East German Stasi look like Munchkinland.

Essentially, Elon Musk is rejiggering all of America’s society and economy to recalibrate itself around AI. We are expected to give up our land, water and dreams of a livable climate in order to make the data centers operational. We are expected to let our government transform into a data extraction apparatus. AI runs on energy, but it lives on data. It can’t live without extracting our data. Our role in society is being reduced to “data resource.” A commodity. If we serve AI, as is the plan, we are not citizens but slaves. 

The endless war agenda of the Democrats will be allowed to wind down by Silicon Valley because they can make just as much money, if not more, installing infrastructures for domestic terror instead. Unlike the legacy warmongers like Lockheed and Raytheon, Elon Musk and his digital cabal don’t care who or what they destroy. Everything we are is fodder for their profit machine. 

The only answer is to return to an embodied existence, offline. Ditch the digital. Resist smart anything. Oppose the AI-ification of government. 

January 23, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology | Leave a comment