U.S. physicists rally around plan to build fusion power plant • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by lambdatronics » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 6:56 PM UTC

wallwart wrote: post #119

Serious question: what happens after? Will it literally be 'free energy'? And are we ready as a society to handle this properly? How do we ensure that this will benefit everyone and not create an enormous imbalance by itself? I guess the existing economics will be broken at some point if the cost of everything will be driven down in such a way. Are there any articles/works that explore this issue?

No, the cost structure of fusion is going to be much like fission: the cost of building the reactor has to be spread over time (with interest). Even though the fuel is cheap, you are (in a financial sense) 'burning' the reactor, which is expensive and must be bought up front. We don't know for sure how it will work out, but none of the predictions I've seen show fusion producing dramatically lower cost of electricity.

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

#192

Post by tuatoru » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

IanCal wrote: post #129

01100011 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you implying, intentionally or not, that a "Manhattan Project" level of expenditure, $25 billion, is enough to make meaningful progress towards commercial fusion energy production? I don't think that is a given.

That's roughly the total cost of ITER.

According to David Edgerton's The Shock of the Old, Brigadier-General Leslie Groves had previously overseen the construction of several munitions plants costing much more than the entire cost of the Manhattan Engineering District project.

1. Chapter 8, "Invention", p198 in my paperback edition.

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

#193

Post by free_rms » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

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…

Cutting emissions by regulation is a continually losing battle.

You can't tell people to live a lower-quality life and expect to win elections, and you'll have the combined lobbyists of a lot of different interests against you.

It's actually more tractable to invent fusion than to try and win that battle long-term -- at least it's theoretically possible to make fusion work. And heck, if we could put some $ in pockets while doing it, that's something that could pass!

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

#194

Post by tuatoru » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

orthecreedence wrote: post #29

kortilla wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fission is a solved engineering and science problem though and we’re still blocking it to let the sea levels rise. Point being, nobody actually cares about climate change enough to make hard decisions so a Manhattan style project is highly unlikely.

Yes, I've been saying it over and over: raise the price of oil until gasoline et al are $20+/gallon. Then nuclear will be cheap . Why are we letting a silly thing like scarcity, supply, and demand dictate whether we self-destruct?

> Then nuclear will be cheap.

But it still won't be built, because Solar PV and wind are roughly two-thirds the cost and falling. (Including the cost of backup power supplies for periods of low sun or low wind.)

(Not to mention having much shorter construction times until first revenue, lower delay risk, lower investment risk, and lower operation and maintenance costs.)

Nuclear had its chance in the 1990s. Today, we have cheaper and better options.

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

#195

Post by lambdatronics » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 7:08 PM UTC

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…

As a technical answer: this is about the federal program, and SPARC isn't part of it, while ITER is.

More practically, Commonwealth & other private fusion efforts have been advocating for (A) federal funds to be allocated to solving the thorny nuclear materials science issues common to (essentially) all fusion schemes (B) a NASA-COTS-inspired cost-share approach to building the eventual pilot plant. (Presumably the industry players would like to get federal support for building their pilot plants (like ARC), much the way SpaceX got support for Falcon 9 / Crew Dragon development.)

This plan reflects (A) for sure, and a step in the direction of (B). I was involved in the early stages of the community input to the plan. I think there's openness to increased partnership with industry like this.

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

#196

Post by raziel2701 » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

yread wrote: post #109

raziel2701 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's like 80% stockpile stewardship and 20% fusion research. The ratio has changed over time, and the big question is if the research will be driven down to zero. There's still a lot of basic research done with that 20% covering laser-matter interaction, materials science, plasma physics, x-ray tomography, computational simulations etc.

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

#197

Post by tuatoru » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 7:21 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #65

gameshot911 wrote: post #17

2040s? 20+ years from now!?! Too fuckin slow!! For all Musk's faults, he recognizes such timelines are untenable, and pushes people to do the 'impossible'.

I'm not a fan of this sentiment. Sometimes things are just really f'ing hard, and no amount of "pushing people" is going to change the reality of how long those things take. I mean, if you look at both Tesla and SpaceX, nothing they've done was thought to be "impossible" from the outset from a scientific perspective . Electric cars already existed when Tesla was started, and we've been shooting rockets into space for…

> I'm not a fan of this sentiment. Sometimes things are just really f'ing hard

You're putting the wrong construction on "too f'in' slow!!"

Technical difficulty is irrelevant to "too f'in' slow". If a technology is to make a difference now, when we need it to make a difference, it must already be deployed commercially at global scale.

Our menu of choices is: nuclear (fission), wind, and solar PV.

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

#198

Post by jl6 » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 7:25 PM UTC

alimw wrote: post #114

jl6 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t evaluate your design but I can evaluate your messaging. You need to do something to distinguish yourself from cranks and scammers, like write it up in a paper and get it published - and stop referring to yourself in plural.

Not sure about the plural thing? In my own field a paper using singular forms would really stand out. Why remind readers and reviewers that you are working alone in every single sentence? Genuinely interested to hear your reasons! This is an issue for the paper I am currently working on. Naturally I would prefer to use the singular where it is accurate, and if I were better established I would.

This answer explains nicely why the “editorial we” is OK in papers...:

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/2945/choice-of-...

Short version: because it can be read as “we, the author and the reader”.

But the site above uses phrases like “we have been granted a patent”, which come across as somewhat dishonest, making it appear on first glance as though this is the work of a team, corporate body, or at least two collaborators (and two is a huge step up from one in terms of credibility of any idea).

I’m not saying there was any dishonest intention on the part of this author - I’m just suggesting that radical transparency is a good technique for introducing an idea to a skeptical audience, in a domain which is very noisy with bad actors.

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

#199

Post by tuatoru » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 7:36 PM UTC

global-citizen wrote: post #111

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a fan of this sentiment. Sometimes things are just really f'ing hard, and no amount of "pushing people" is going to change the reality of how long those things take. I mean, if you look at both Tesla and SpaceX, nothing they've done was thought to be "impossible" from the outset from a scientific perspective . Electric cars already existed when Tesla was started, and we've been shooting rockets into space for…

I totally disagree, but accept that maybe Musk might have not been the best example. Better ones, driven by the government (albeit during a hot and cold war): the Manhattan Project and landing humans on the Moon, respectively. Both had insane timelines, no clear or certainty of success but the pressure, backing and motivation delivered. We need more of this, and yesterday.

> We need more of this, and yesterday.

But only where there would appear to be a benefit.

Fusion power generation will almost certainly operate like fission, in that it will need steam turbines, generators, elaborate cooling systems, and water treatment plants for the turbines and cooling.

The operation and maintenance on these alone is higher than that for wind or solar--never mind the operation of the reactor itself. The capital costs just for these modules are almost certainly higher too.

The project risk as seen by investors (delay, cancellation for social or undiscovered geotechnical reasons) is higher too.

So: generating electricity is not a use for fusion.

Fusion may have uses in scientific discovery. But a putative fusion power plant would operate well inside the limits of our knowledge, for reliability and safety reasons, so it would be no help there.

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

#200

Post by tuatoru » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 7:44 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #167

Hammershaft wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the physics of Fission work better (or work at all, really) at scale. Fitting the weight and size of a fusion reactor on a rocket ship strikes me as impossible for the forseeable future.

Fusion should lead to unbeatable specific impulses, so the huge size of a reactor may not be a problem at all. (Or maybe it is, I don't think anybody can be sure before there are actually working reactors out there.)

Since we're talking about things that don't exist: -

We should be able to beat fusion's Isp with direct matter to energy conversion.

Certainly the mass of fuel needed will be 3 OM lower.

Edit to add: Isp is a measure of velocity. The thing about velocity is, energy goes quadratically but momentum imparted to the vessel (the impulse) only goes linearly with velocity.

Since no process can be 100% efficient, you're dealing with quadratically more and more waste heat from the engines. And space is an excellent insulator.