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Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

imperial.ac.uk

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Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

#81

Post by tsimionescu »

mlindner wrote: post #25
akeck wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably just "plasma breakeven" Sabine talks about the issue. [1] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-close-is-nucle...

Sabine actually is completely misleading and misconstrues a bunch of facts. None of these plants are even attempting to have real energy breakeven and spend a ton of energy supplying experiments and unrelated support equipment. They don't even have a method of capturing energy as that's not the point as it would make it harder to test the physics. Additionally these plants have high amounts of "startup energy consump…

> Plasma breakeven is all anyone is really working on. Once you have plasma breakeven you have a self-sustaining heater basically, which then can be used to create energy. The point of an "ignited plasma" is that it's self-sustaining and just pumps out heat, even if most of the energy is used to keep the reaction going.

This is dead wrong. First of all, the experiment described here is ICF, in which you have to constantly re-heat new pellets of fuel. Even for MCF, you have to spend inordinate amounts of energy just containing the million kelvins plasma with few kelvin superconducting magnets, and to constantly deliver new D+T into the plasma.

If containment fails at any time for any amount of time, your reactor is instantly obliterated.

Not to mention, your source of heat only heats up by about half of the energy - the other half is radiated away as hard to capture neutrons, which are almost entirely a waste product.

I have no idea why you think that ignited plasma is enough to maintain an energy-producing reactor.

Edit: million kelvins should have been billion kelvins...

Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

#82

Post by [deleted] »

birdman3131 wrote: post #53
jacquesm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From TFA: "The pace of improvement in energy output has been rapid, suggesting we may soon reach more energy milestones, such as exceeding the energy input from the lasers used to kick-start the process."

These people grew up on Wow and are familiar with Soon™.

[deleted]

Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

#83

Post by leephillips »

tsimionescu wrote: post #74
xixixao wrote: post #16

> Fusion ignition is the point at which a nuclear fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining. This occurs when the energy being given off by the fusion reactions heats the fuel mass more rapidly than various loss mechanisms cool it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition

It should be noted that 'self sustaining' only means that the entire pellet undergoes fusion. The process still stops after a few instants of time, requiring a new pellet of fuel, a new laser burst (consuming at least twenty times the power that gets deposited in the plasma), and worst of all, a new monumentally expensive hohlraum, machined to nanometer precision.

Good points, but you mean energy, and it’s several hundred times.

Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

#84

Post by jhallenworld »

rfrey wrote: post #61

Meta-question about fusion energy -something I don't understand about the movement. I spent a few years as CTO of a company providing heat-to-electricity plants. We financed and built them off high-heat plants like natural gas turbines. The "fuel" was heat going up the stack - so it was essentially free. We still couldn't compete with conventional electricity plants, even with a $30/tonne price on carbon in Canada. G…

Study this:

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

Ignoring storage: it makes no sense now to build anything but wind and solar. Only the marginal cost of gas is cheaper (meaning existing plants, not new ones).

Including storage: conventional is still cheaper, but not by much (within a factor of 2): $81 for PV+storage vs. $44 for gas combined cycle.

We should put more resources into storage now, fusion can wait.

Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

#85

Post by bduerst »

nnamtr wrote: post #71
Iv wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 years ago we were joking about it being 40 year away. So yes, it is timely progress. I am still bitter that we don't invest more on this research which has the potential to solve the climate crisis "unexpectedly".

I'm somehow afraid of a world in which huge amounts of energy can be wasted without having a bad conscience. Probably it would lead to some new problems.

Not sure if poe's law but that's basically the way things are today.

Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

#86

Post by brightball »

vilhelm_s wrote: post #69
rfrey wrote: post #61

Meta-question about fusion energy -something I don't understand about the movement. I spent a few years as CTO of a company providing heat-to-electricity plants. We financed and built them off high-heat plants like natural gas turbines. The "fuel" was heat going up the stack - so it was essentially free. We still couldn't compete with conventional electricity plants, even with a $30/tonne price on carbon in Canada. G…

Natural gas plants are cheap but they cause global warming, so soon we will not be able to use them. For example, the U.S. target is to have zero carbon emissions from electricity generation by 2035, and zero carbon emissions at all by 2050.

Their carbon emissions are still dramatically lower than those of coal and oil. There are bigger fish to fry than NG.

NG is likely going to be a critical transitional fuel for the planet to depend on while we get to more abundant renewable options, grid batteries and nuclear/fusion/thorium.

Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

#87

Post by raywu »

rfrey wrote: post #61

Meta-question about fusion energy -something I don't understand about the movement. I spent a few years as CTO of a company providing heat-to-electricity plants. We financed and built them off high-heat plants like natural gas turbines. The "fuel" was heat going up the stack - so it was essentially free. We still couldn't compete with conventional electricity plants, even with a $30/tonne price on carbon in Canada. G…

Your question is great and barring other incentives (comments in response to this), I’m also interested in how commercial viability impedes adoption.

In your opinion, what could be done to make the energy generated by fusion competitive? Can we add storage to the mix and therefore compete on a longer time horizon? I know storage itself is expensive.

Is it to say that fusion won’t get adoption from market forces alone, until the cost of construction lowers?

Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

#88

Post by red_trumpet »

rfrey wrote: post #61

Meta-question about fusion energy -something I don't understand about the movement. I spent a few years as CTO of a company providing heat-to-electricity plants. We financed and built them off high-heat plants like natural gas turbines. The "fuel" was heat going up the stack - so it was essentially free. We still couldn't compete with conventional electricity plants, even with a $30/tonne price on carbon in Canada. G…

> even one where the onerous regulations go away and a market price on carbon is available

What do you mean by a "market price of carbon"? From context I would guess that the "market price" would be higher than the current price, but the history has told us otherwise - that is why we have regulations on carbon emissions.

Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

#89

Post by adrianN »

jhallenworld wrote: post #84
rfrey wrote: post #61

Meta-question about fusion energy -something I don't understand about the movement. I spent a few years as CTO of a company providing heat-to-electricity plants. We financed and built them off high-heat plants like natural gas turbines. The "fuel" was heat going up the stack - so it was essentially free. We still couldn't compete with conventional electricity plants, even with a $30/tonne price on carbon in Canada. G…

Study this: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... Ignoring storage: it makes no sense now to build anything but wind and solar. Only the marginal cost of gas is cheaper (meaning existing plants, not new ones). Including storage: conventional is still cheaper, but not by much (within a factor of 2): $81 for PV+storage vs. $44 for gas combined cycle. We should put more resources into storage n…

PV+storage is how many hours of storage? Storing enough power to last a night is just getting close to commercially viable afaik, but storing enough power to last a winter is still quite expensive.

Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

#90

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

jhallenworld wrote: post #84
rfrey wrote: post #61

Meta-question about fusion energy -something I don't understand about the movement. I spent a few years as CTO of a company providing heat-to-electricity plants. We financed and built them off high-heat plants like natural gas turbines. The "fuel" was heat going up the stack - so it was essentially free. We still couldn't compete with conventional electricity plants, even with a $30/tonne price on carbon in Canada. G…

Study this: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... Ignoring storage: it makes no sense now to build anything but wind and solar. Only the marginal cost of gas is cheaper (meaning existing plants, not new ones). Including storage: conventional is still cheaper, but not by much (within a factor of 2): $81 for PV+storage vs. $44 for gas combined cycle. We should put more resources into storage n…

"We should put more resources into breeding faster horses now, internal combustion can wait." - someone in late 19 century.
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