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Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

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Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

#221

Post by andygates »

DennisP wrote: post #194
ryanmercer wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why is it so underfunded? - Oil/coal/natural gas lobbyists and interests which hinder tax payer funded research. - The fact that there is no guarantee we will ever figure it out and no idea whatsoever as to how much it will cost to figure it out. Investors like returns, in their lifetime, leaving largely tax payer funded research as the greatest source of funds... see above. And then with government-funded research.…

Given climate change, giving it to other nations is exactly the right thing to do, even from a purely self-interested perspective. Nobody wins if coal plants in China tip us into runaway warming.

And that's another reason ITER et al are very broad international projects: everyone wins when the project wins, and nobody can stall one project by poaching Von Braun for their own scheme.

Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

#222

Post by andygates »

dmos62 wrote: post #90

Can someone comment on what kind of economic effect that working fusion reactor technology would have? I hear sometimes contradictory hear-say on the lines of "unlimited energy", "reactor would have to be fed constantly".

If we can build plants that are as huge and complex and expensive as fission plants, then about the same effect, but without the fuel / proliferation / waste problems (which is nothing to be sneezed at).

If the cost is low, a brave new world with fusion replacing fossil generation as quickly as they can be built. Energy-inefficient processes like desalination and cracking water for hydrogen become attractive.

If the cost is very high, it may be that renewables have stolen fusion's market slot. In that case we'll see some national prestige projects, but against a broader renewable energy market.

Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

#223

Post by andygates »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #191
dbingham wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, my buddy who just got a degree in high energy plasma physics working on fusion reactors might disagree with you. And really, you just sound like every crank ever who thought X technology was totally unfeasible and always would be -- until it wasn't. So currently attempts haven't found a solution to the reaction vessel destruction problem. That does not mean someone in the future couldn't figure that one out.

OP at least gave a reason: neutron radiation destroys the reaction vessel. No one who's responded has given any evidence for why this is false.

Research into vessel liners is ongoing and promising. 7-X is getting carbon-carbon, JET has an upgrade going in about now. It's a materials-engineering challenge, but not a showstopper.

Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

#224

Post by philwelch »

Balero wrote: post #220
philwelch wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though the cost of energy is divided by thirds, fusion still generates so much more power that the sheer scale can overpower lots and lots of bottlenecks. For instance, it is chemically possible to combine water (either atmospheric or from a normal water source) with atmospheric CO2 to chemically synthesize hydrocarbons. It just takes energy. So you could have a single, absolutely massive fusion plant next to an…

That's a great explanation of some of the benefits! These are the most important in my opinion: "You can make those from the air too. Drought? Use fusion power to run desalination plants. Arable land becomes a non-issue with fusion because vertical farming becomes easy." You could also use this water to stop desertification, which would be a great thing. I do disagree with you on Hydrogen fuel cells replacing electri…

> I do disagree with you on Hydrogen fuel cells replacing electric cars though.

Not what I meant to imply. You’d just use old-fashioned hydrocarbons, except reconstructed from atmospheric CO2 and water.

Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

#225

Post by thefringthing »

TomMarius wrote: post #219
philwelch wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for weather, it’s never 100 C outside, or else we’d all die.

Yeah but it's still a very useful point where 100 should be, e.g. when you go to a sauna you know more precisely what to expect.

While it's true that 100C doesn't have any weather meaning, 0F being "very cold" isn't particularly objective. I just looked it up, and apparently 0F is only about -18C. Whether -18C is "very, very cold" depends a lot on where you're from and what you're used to. I'm Canadian and I certainly wouldn't characterize -18C as "very, very cold". -30C maybe. 0C has a fairly objective interpretation in terms of weather: it's the point at which puddles start to freeze into ice slicks.

Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

#226

Post by philwelch »

thefringthing wrote: post #225
TomMarius wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but it's still a very useful point where 100 should be, e.g. when you go to a sauna you know more precisely what to expect.

While it's true that 100C doesn't have any weather meaning, 0F being "very cold" isn't particularly objective. I just looked it up, and apparently 0F is only about -18C. Whether -18C is "very, very cold" depends a lot on where you're from and what you're used to. I'm Canadian and I certainly wouldn't characterize -18C as "very, very cold". -30C maybe. 0C has a fairly objective interpretation in terms of weather: it's…

Canada is a very cold country ;)

Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

#227

Post by meowface »

bsaul wrote: post #210
philwelch wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of a tangent, but I still firmly believe that for Earth weather conditions, Fahrenheit is a more intuitive scale. 0 is a really, really, really cold day and 100 is a really, really, really hot day. 50 degrees is neither especially warm nor especially chilly, 70 degrees is warm, 30 degrees is chilly, 20 and below are truly cold, 80 and above are truly hot, and if you go into negative numbers or above 100 degrees…

Cold and warm are relative. 0 for freezing / snowing and 100 for boiling gives you a much more understandable range. Honestly, US metrics don’t make any kind of sense anymore...

Yes, they are relative. 0 for freezing and 100 for boiling works well for chemical reactions and cooking. 0 for extremely cold weather and 100 for extremely hot weather works well for knowing what to wear before going outside. Celsius requires smaller numbers with decimals for similar weather precision.

Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

#228

Post by pfdietz »

ryanmercer wrote: post #133
fyfy18 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it so underfunded? The first country to build one will be taking a big step to reducing their dependence on other countries for energy. I can understand big oil exporters not wanting to push it too much (although it's unlikely to come into fruition for the current generation of politians), but for others isn't it a no brainer?

>Why is it so underfunded? - Oil/coal/natural gas lobbyists and interests which hinder tax payer funded research. - The fact that there is no guarantee we will ever figure it out and no idea whatsoever as to how much it will cost to figure it out. Investors like returns, in their lifetime, leaving largely tax payer funded research as the greatest source of funds... see above. And then with government-funded research.…

I'd argue fusion is actually overfunded, if you go by its likelihood to actually deliver a competitive source of energy. A clean sheet energy R&D program would invest very little in nuclear fusion.

Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

#229

Post by pfdietz »

TylerE wrote: post #181
daxorid wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we already have a functioning fusion reactor. Utility-scale PV now costs only $43/MWh. Investing in developing fusion reactors makes very little economic sense compared with capturing the output of the fusion reactor we already have. The research should still be done, of course. It can have benefits to a future interstellar civilization - but until we're interstellar, PV is far, far more compelling.

We have a functioning fusion reactor for some portion of the day. It has a really annoying duty cycle though.

Cheap intermittent sources are sufficient to destroy the economic case for expensive baseload sources. The latter have to be able to sell their output most of the time or else their economic case collapses entirely.

Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

#230

Post by pfdietz »

tim333 wrote: post #157
majewsky wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wendelstein 7-X in Germany is a stellarator-type reactor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X

And YC is invested in Helion Energy using pulsed inertial fusion. Though the tokamak seems closest to being functional. The MIT ARC design is theoretically supposed to be able to work, at least on paper: >The ARC design aims to achieve an engineering gain of three (to produce three times the electricity required to operate the machine) while being about half the diameter of the ITER reactor and cheaper to construct.…

The ARC reactor would have a net power output of something like 190 MW(e). At $5B, that's $26/W(e), which is an order of magnitude too high, especially given how high the operating costs are likely to be.
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