Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MIT and newly formed company launch effort to build compact tokamak pilot plant

news.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 74 posts

Re: MIT and newly formed company launch effort to build compact tokamak pilot plant

#51

Post by api »

mannykannot wrote: post #29
MayeulC wrote: post #14

This is yet another area where high temperature superconductors revolutionizes its engineering. I can't wait for more insights to be made in this domain: the way superconductors behave is actually becoming clearer and clearer from one year to another. Ambient temperature superconductors are the holy grail of the field, of course, but this project shows that even ~80 K superconductors can substantially reduce the size…

I cannot help but think that ITER has been a harmful mistake. With at least 17 years to go before it is operational, it already seems obsolescent in some key technological areas, such as magnets, yet it keeps on going, sucking up funds that might be better applied elsewhere (though whether they would be is an open question.) The project reminds me of Britain's attempt to build the airliner of the future in the Bristo…

ITER reminds me of the Space Shuttle, the Joint Strike Fighter, and (to give a private sector example) Intel Itanium.

Large bureaucracies seem prone to fixation on huge omnibus money sponge projects that "everyone can get behind" but that starve out everything else. The fact that these projects are so big tends to make them slow and not very innovative.

Re: MIT and newly formed company launch effort to build compact tokamak pilot plant

#52

Post by api »

markvdb wrote: post #9

Cheap nuclear fusion energy would be a great human achievement. I do wonder about its effects on society though. Any reading containing well reasoned speculation on that? Here's what I can think of myself. * A cheaper, cleaner energy source might outcompete fossil fuel. Less air polution, yay! * Cheaper energy would significantly increase energy consumption. Think Jevons paradox[0]. The effect of that increased heat…

Do the math on global solar flux. There is NO way we will ever make a dent in that with artificial heat.

Re: MIT and newly formed company launch effort to build compact tokamak pilot plant

#53

Post by dd36 »

markvdb wrote: post #9

Cheap nuclear fusion energy would be a great human achievement. I do wonder about its effects on society though. Any reading containing well reasoned speculation on that? Here's what I can think of myself. * A cheaper, cleaner energy source might outcompete fossil fuel. Less air polution, yay! * Cheaper energy would significantly increase energy consumption. Think Jevons paradox[0]. The effect of that increased heat…

How could you miss crypto mining? FusionEnergyCoin FTW

Re: MIT and newly formed company launch effort to build compact tokamak pilot plant

#54

Post by codesnik »

demxzy wrote: post #48
ScipioAfricanus wrote: post #26

It's hard to fully comprehend the impact of new energy sources on civilization. So much of what we do is only possible because we have the necessary energy at our disposal. When civilization finds new energy sources, most other technologies level up as well. Consider one of the biggest problems with desalinization systems: pumping water inland. The actual separation of salt from seawater isn't the most energy intensi…

Maybe we can reforest the Sahara which cheap transportation of water powered by fusion. Better climate control will also be probably possible

I wonder if extra dissipated heat while doing this would contribute to global warming. But probably scale of adding heat directly to atmosphere isn't comparable to insulation effect of CO2

Re: MIT and newly formed company launch effort to build compact tokamak pilot plant

#55

Post by ZenoArrow »

tinco wrote: post #5
vosper wrote: post #4

Fusion is still exciting, but with normal renewable (solar, wind) costs plummeting the way they are is there still such a compelling case for pouring money into fusion? This one aims to produce a working plant within 15 years. I'm not sure that any of the other efforts are closer to being viable (if they work at all). That's the kind of time frame in which we may master offshore wind and grid-attached storage like th…

Solar and wind will never be enough to cover all energy demand. It is a common misconception, it is not even possible to reduce energy consumption to low enough that solar and wind would be sufficient. If we want to stop burning fuel, we must research nuclear. Of course it is unlikely that we would stop burning fuel any time soon, and that's why 15 years is unfortunately not an inconvenient timeline. If you're intere…

> " it is not even possible to reduce energy consumption to low enough that solar and wind would be sufficient."

I don't think it's accurate to say it's not possible, it's clearly possible as humans have lived without electricity and fossil fuels before, and all we'd need in order to survive would be for the existing renewable energy production to be made available for water processing and transportation. However, the chances of us collectively reducing our energy consumption in time to avoid long lasting environmental damage so that we can make our current renewable energy installations to cover all energy demand is very slim, so non-renewable clean energy technology like nuclear should be made part of our energy mix.

Re: MIT and newly formed company launch effort to build compact tokamak pilot plant

#56

Post by Balero »

wongarsu wrote: post #49
jdhn wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The demand for Russian natural gas will only plummet if there's a huge shift from natgas heating to electric heat, and that would take hundreds of billions (if not trillions) of Euros to accomplish.

If electricity would be free, I would convert to electric heating in a heartbeat. Replacing a gas burner with an electric coil should be pretty cheap compared to the yearly costs of heating. The problem with that is that electricity isn't free. Even if energy production suddenly became basically free and we removed taxes and renewable energy charges, I would still pay €0.07/kWh just for using the power grid. And that…

Using fusion would only cut the cost of electricity by about a third.

About the third goes on maintaining the grid infrastructure, a third goes on building and running the power stations, and a third on the fuel.

Fusion is great, but it's not 'electricity too cheap to meter'

Re: MIT and newly formed company launch effort to build compact tokamak pilot plant

#57

Post by tinco »

marcosdumay wrote: post #37
tinco wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar and wind will never be enough to cover all energy demand. It is a common misconception, it is not even possible to reduce energy consumption to low enough that solar and wind would be sufficient. If we want to stop burning fuel, we must research nuclear. Of course it is unlikely that we would stop burning fuel any time soon, and that's why 15 years is unfortunately not an inconvenient timeline. If you're intere…

> it is not even possible to reduce energy consumption to low enough that solar and wind would be sufficient. What do you really mean by that? Solar has enough capacity to power some million times our energy usage, so you are clearly not talking about bare capacity.

So a panel is about 261 KWh per year per square meter. We need about 25PWh, so that is about 100.000km2 of solar panel. There's lots of desert in the U.S., so we could sacrifice one of them and cover it with solar panels, and cover all of our needs.

Note that a solar farms come in at around 120 million USD per square KM, that would be about 12 trillion dollars. (And those are largely the expensive import-raw-materials-from-abroad kind of dollars, not the cheap give-jobs-to-americans dollars). I suppose you could make it part of the wall with mexico to share some construction costs.

So yeah the US has enough area to solar power the US a couple hundred times over (not a couple million).

What I meant by that we can't reduce energy consumption enough is that even without our electricity costs, and reducing transport costs etc, there are still petawatts of power spent on services we have no direct control over but that make our lives easy, healthy and comfortable.

Re: MIT and newly formed company launch effort to build compact tokamak pilot plant

#58

Post by MayeulC »

Erlangolem wrote: post #38
mannykannot wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot help but think that ITER has been a harmful mistake. With at least 17 years to go before it is operational, it already seems obsolescent in some key technological areas, such as magnets, yet it keeps on going, sucking up funds that might be better applied elsewhere (though whether they would be is an open question.) The project reminds me of Britain's attempt to build the airliner of the future in the Bristo…

ITER is a political tool, not a scientific one. The real cutting edge fusion research is being done at some small private companies trying to make aneutronic fusion work, and from places like MIT. If we’re ever going to break the endless cycle of “in 50 years” it will not be a result of ITER.

ITER has some real engineering value, though. A lot of it is figuring out the missing pieces about logistics, control apparatus, material behaviour, the technologies that are actually practical to implement, and various requirements that have not necessarily been foreseen before construction.

A lot of that can probably explain the various construction delays that happened over the course of its construction, and it probably explains in part why this articles states that it is complementary to ITER.

A big part of those insights will be had before it starts operating, so I wouldn't rule out its contribution to a hypothetical sub-2050 commercial fusion industry.

Edit: and it probably has some scientific value as well, but not being a fusion expert, I can't comment on this.

Re: MIT and newly formed company launch effort to build compact tokamak pilot plant

#59

Post by jdblair »

It's said that practical fusion energy is always 10 years in the future. I see this project innovates and projects instead 15 years in the future!

In all seriousness, I'm happy to see new projects using current superconducting technology, I just wish we could build these things faster and iterate more quickly.

Re: MIT and newly formed company launch effort to build compact tokamak pilot plant

#60

Post by Lev1a »

noir_lord wrote: post #39
markvdb wrote: post #9

Cheap nuclear fusion energy would be a great human achievement. I do wonder about its effects on society though. Any reading containing well reasoned speculation on that? Here's what I can think of myself. * A cheaper, cleaner energy source might outcompete fossil fuel. Less air polution, yay! * Cheaper energy would significantly increase energy consumption. Think Jevons paradox[0]. The effect of that increased heat…

Point 2 is largely not an issue, solar insolation vastly outweighs human energy consumption in all forms. CO2 is bad because it increases the energy trapped from insolation, a CO2 free power source that double energy consumption as a whole would be far better than the effects of CO2 on the atmosphere, very much a nice problem to have tbh. > Global energy consumption is roughly 15 terawatts annually. The sun provides…

Problem being, AFAIK, that solar farms consume vast parts of surface area compared to other forms of power gen.
Post reply on HN