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U.S. physicists rally around plan to build fusion power plant

sciencemag.org

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Re: U.S. physicists rally around plan to build fusion power plant

#101

Post by Lammy »

halfdan wrote: post #97
Lammy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pro-nuclear, and I think it would be a mistake to assume this article is also pro-nuclear. Heck, the very first six words ("U.S. fusion scientists, notorious for squabbling") prime a reader to see those hardworking people as bickering nerds working on fleeting, individual, theoretical interests. I sincerely doubt we will see any uranium-based energy technology ascend to dominance/ubiquity while over half of Eart…

You are talking about fission, not fusion. Nuclear plants are using radioactive sources like uranium to generate energy. Fusion tech would use hydrogen and fuse it to helium.

Yep, and it is not just feasible but easy to build fission plants right now and stop using greenhouse-gas emitters entirely, but we won't, because Reasons. Our collective focus is being distracted from that working, clean, but politically-disadvantageous tech to this non-functional speculative future-tech that the author simultaneously insults.

Re: U.S. physicists rally around plan to build fusion power plant

#102

Post by inglor_cz »

logicchains wrote: post #60
free_rms wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God I wish we could Manhattan Project this shit. I'm a layman too but I get the impression that the theory is basically there and we just need to figure out the engineering. That's a solvable problem with lots of money and lots of teams. Are we going to wait until the sea level rises 20 feet and then say, geez, compared to the costs this imposed, fusion would have been easy?

>God I wish we could Manhattan Project this shit. Interesting point of reference: the Manhattan project cost around around $25 billion in today's dollars. The US government spent at least $6 trillion on the coronavirus response, which could buy 200 Manhattan Projects. Coronavirus will kill around a million people this year at most; air pollution kills around five million per year (and sea level rises could kill a lot…

In my opinion, the main reason for success of the Manhattan Project wasn't the budget, but getting people such as Feynman, Fermi, Teller, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Szilard and Wheeler to work on the project together with a sense of urgency.

25 billion USD buys a lot of necessary stuff, but one Feynman doing his best to crack a secret of nature is priceless.

Re: U.S. physicists rally around plan to build fusion power plant

#103

Post by _0w8t »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #71
gpm wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fission seems like the better option for mars. The technology is ready now, and no one cares about a bit of nuclear waste on mars anyways.

Space probes require a minuscule amount of radioactive fuel, but launching that into space has still occasionally caused concern among environmentalists, as something might go wrong during launch. Can you imagine the resistance if someone wanted to launch enough processed uranium to support a Mars colony?

The problem with space probes is that the radioactive fuel is highly radioactive plutonium. If probe explodes and plutonium disperses in atmosphere, that causes thousands deaths via lung cancer. Uranium does not causes that.

Re: U.S. physicists rally around plan to build fusion power plant

#104

Post by thewileyone »

spo81rty wrote: post #15

Meanwhile, reportedly China has already built one and is testing it now. So the USA is 20 years behind?

https://phys.org/news/2020-12-china-nuclear-powered-artifici...

I'd say that China will have a fully functioning plant in 3-5 years.

Re: U.S. physicists rally around plan to build fusion power plant

#105

Post by jacquesm »

Xorlev wrote: post #76
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuel in the US is already much more expensive than two decades ago. I remember buying a gallon for around 90 cents in 1999, and at the same time I read a newspaper article about some immigrant-run stations on the Jersey shore that had slashed their prices to several cents below that, as they were content to make a tiny profit margin and play a long game. Now a gallon costs more than twice as much as then, but as far…

$0.90 in 1999 is $1.41 today. Near me, gas is ~$2 (give or take). So, more expensive (~40-50%), but not double.

Here it's closer to $2 / liter. (1/4 of a Gallon).

Re: U.S. physicists rally around plan to build fusion power plant

#106

Post by beowulfey »

est31 wrote: post #37
Retric wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s more lithium in earths crust than Lead yet we mine ~50x as much lead. The only limitation on mining lithium is how concentrated is making it more or less expensive to extract. Currently raw Lithium is extremely cheap, it’s highly refined battery grade lithium that’s somewhat expensive. Rank 33: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

Abundance in the crust is one thing, ability to mine it is another. That's why you need to look at reserves [0] instead of resources. And there are way more lead reserves (88 million tons in 2016 [1]) than lithium ones (17 million tons [2]). [0]: https://newpacificmetals.com/mining-101/mineral-estimates-re... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead#On_Earth [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Reserves

Because a single molecule of lead is significantly heavier than a molecule of lithium, that’s technically an order of magnitude more lithium. 2.22E12 moles of lithium vs. 3.85E11 moles of lead.

Re: U.S. physicists rally around plan to build fusion power plant

#107

Post by raverbashing »

inglor_cz wrote: post #102
logicchains wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>God I wish we could Manhattan Project this shit. Interesting point of reference: the Manhattan project cost around around $25 billion in today's dollars. The US government spent at least $6 trillion on the coronavirus response, which could buy 200 Manhattan Projects. Coronavirus will kill around a million people this year at most; air pollution kills around five million per year (and sea level rises could kill a lot…

In my opinion, the main reason for success of the Manhattan Project wasn't the budget, but getting people such as Feynman, Fermi, Teller, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Szilard and Wheeler to work on the project together with a sense of urgency. 25 billion USD buys a lot of necessary stuff, but one Feynman doing his best to crack a secret of nature is priceless.

Before the 10x programmers there were 10x physicists and the Manhattan project had a lot of those

And as opposed to the current advertisement websites with auxiliary functions, I believe they had a more physics centered role

Re: U.S. physicists rally around plan to build fusion power plant

#108

Post by kenneth »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #99
free_rms wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God I wish we could Manhattan Project this shit. I'm a layman too but I get the impression that the theory is basically there and we just need to figure out the engineering. That's a solvable problem with lots of money and lots of teams. Are we going to wait until the sea level rises 20 feet and then say, geez, compared to the costs this imposed, fusion would have been easy?

Its amazing how cutting emission by regulation is completely left out of the list of options, somehow spending infinite money is seen as easier than getting congress to act... Anyway, I let Wellerstein reply to this: """The Manhattan Project was an unusual, somewhat dubious enterprise that had massive, world-affecting consequences. Ignoring that not only misunderstands the Manhattan Project, it misunderstands what ha…

It's widely believed that the use of the bombs in WWII as a practical demonstration of the technology is what lead to there not being a WWIII and generally a period of (granted, uneasy) world stability throughout the cold war. Thanks to the bomb's use at the end of an almost-finished conflict, everyone was too afraid of the destruction to turn the cold war hot. Without it, the cold war would have turned hot and a lot more nukes would have been used. Who knows what the world would look like today without those two bombs.

Re: U.S. physicists rally around plan to build fusion power plant

#109

Post by yread »

raziel2701 wrote: post #84
divbzero wrote: post #78

Are at an inflection point for fusion power? With interest and funding for it finally gaining steam? I’ve noticed several announcements about independent efforts this past year [1–6] but not sure if (a) it’s always been this way or (b) my view is skewed by HN. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21806334 "General Fusion" [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23979608 "ITER" [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com…

I can only speak about NIF but they're under stress right now as their funding agency, the NNSA, is reviewing the progress of NIF as questions about its efficacy at achieving fusion become stronger after several failed campaigns. NIF needs to put up a pretty face so the press releases might be part of a combined effort to spin a positive picture of their progress, plus it serves as a recruitment tool since the lab is…

I always thought NIF is just a facade for weapons research, that there is no way to make it energy positive

Re: U.S. physicists rally around plan to build fusion power plant

#110

Post by olau »

free_rms wrote: post #20
wcarss wrote: post #12

Serious question: how does an article like this get written without mentioning SPARC[1] once? They're hardly secretive, they're MIT's people, they're moving on a plan to get results in ~5 years, and they're talking about the same kind of things: tokamaks, better computer modeling, and easier to make higher temperature superconductors for stronger magnets. I'm just a layperson, I only know pop science level stuff here…

God I wish we could Manhattan Project this shit. I'm a layman too but I get the impression that the theory is basically there and we just need to figure out the engineering. That's a solvable problem with lots of money and lots of teams. Are we going to wait until the sea level rises 20 feet and then say, geez, compared to the costs this imposed, fusion would have been easy?

Fusion is not going to solve the sea level rise problem.

You can see this by comparing it to fission.

Fission fuels is not expensive on a kWh base, so cheaper fuel is not really a big advantage.

Fusion plants produce radioactive waste too (perhaps less?), so you don't save yourself from that headache. Which isn't actually that big of a problem either, even if the costs are probably underestimated for fission plants.

Now, the real killer for fission is the cost of the plants. They are just so incredibly complex and expensive that they are not competitive.

Will a fusion plant be cheaper? Probably not. It will most likely, with current tech, be much more expensive. So it won't be able to compete with fission. And fission can't compete (in most parts of the world) with renewables, that are still falling exponentially in price.

So fusion may still be interesting from a scientific stand point, and perhaps things will change in the far future.

An argument I often see is that renewables need storage, and that's true. But so does a fission or a fusion plant, unless you overbuild and accept a bad capacity factor. Some amount of overbuild combined with storage looks like the most economical solution currently - the specifics depend very much on where you are in the world.

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