Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by leephillips » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

mlindner wrote: post #33

tantony wrote: post #2

Is this "plasma breakeven" or overall break-even?

Neither, it's inertial confinement fusion, which isn't really seen as a way to a successful commercial reactor (at least not that I've heard of) and is more a tool to study the physics of D-T fusion reaction in a controlled way that's not inside a nuclear bomb. It's a tool for experiments.

You may be surprised to know that there are loads of people working in ICF who think they're working on a plan to supply the world with energy, and have detailed and elaborate designs for commercial ICF reactors, including pellet factories, tritium extraction, and everything. With calculations of the final cost per delivered kW-hour. It’s all a fantasy, but it’s a real research activity, funded by the US DOE (mainly through the NNSA).

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

#112

Post by brightball » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #92

brightball wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With NG you also have to take into account leakage from extraction and transport. Methane is a pretty strong GHG. I've heard that if you take that into account NG is not that much better than coal.

That makes sense but it seems like a problem that could be addressed if it was focused on.

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

#113

Post by rfrey » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

Fordec wrote: post #94

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…

> We still couldn't compete with conventional electricity plants, even with a $30/tonne price on carbon in Canada. Was this Canada specific? A country with both very abundant native oil & gas and abundant hydro energy with nuclear power plants in place to boot. Not every country in the world has such abundant energy sources on tap.

We tried to build in Europe and America as well; the economics are just hard. In the US there was very little market for carbon, which is why I said "even in Canada" since there is a regulated price for carbon here.

The plants were mostly in Alberta, where NG is cheap but there is no hydro.

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

#114

Post by einpoklum » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 5:50 PM UTC

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #90

jhallenworld wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, if we'd have gone down that road, plus strong environmental awareness, maybe the Earth wouldn't be warming up so badly right now, and the oceans wouldn't have islands of plastic (= oil) waste. Now, sure, we wouldn't have enjoyed some of the benefits of car technology, but - public transport (esp. trains) makes up for a lot of that. OTOH, public transport pollutes too.

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

#115

Post by tsimionescu » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 5:51 PM UTC

f00zz wrote: post #59

ph4 wrote: post #46

So is the goal just to fuel our current patterns of consumption and development with fusion, or nuclear, or whatever?

A lot of stuff becomes feasible with free unlimited energy. For instance, carbon air capture (could even become a protein source) and green hydrogen (for applications like production of iron via direct reduction, so we can finally get rid of blast furnaces).

Why do you think fusion would provide free unlimited energy? With any design even slightly visible on the horizon right now, a single plant will cost billions of dollars and barely produce a few MW of energy. This is much worse than any equivalent investment in solar power, which similarly requires 0 fuel.

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

#116

Post by drumhead » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 5:52 PM UTC

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…

High up front costs, for Nuclear fusion/fission, geothermal and solar but cheap fuel, you can run then all day long and sell the power you generate at any price to cover the fixed costs and pay off the capital costs and of course you're not generating carbon. With carbon burning generation, the cost of the fuel is volatile, sometimes its cheap sometimes it not, so you have to be clever in buying the fuel and not get stuck just buying spot and going bankrupt because its suddenly spiked in price.

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

#117

Post by leephillips » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

amarant wrote: post #9

I thought ignition had been achieved a long time ago. Is the article saying this is the first time for this particular lab to achieve ignition, or have I confused my fusion hype-terminology? I genuinely can't tell, as the article is written in Hype rather than English...

The Univ. of CA lab that operates NIF has an entire public relations department, paid for by US taxpayers, whose purpose is to generate this hype in order to influence Congress (they are the ultimate audience for all of this) to keep spending more US taxpayer money on NIF. NIF's real purpose is stockpile stewardship, so the funding is not really in jeopardy; but they always want more.

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

#118

Post by rfrey » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

08-15 wrote: post #76

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…

How come? Conventional electricity plants also convert heat to electricity. That doesn't sound fundamentally different from your business. Was your input temperature too low? That would explain it. At low temperature differential, you have lower efficiency and need much bigger machinery for the same output. That said, fusion has a chance to be competitive, because the temperature will be higher. (Obviously, the therm…

Our heat sources were typically in the 500-600C range, with plant exhaust flows containing about 80-150MW of energy. Current tech can convert that with about 20% efficiency.

Not at all like conventional electricity plants, the heat is already being created in industrial processes and is a waste product.

We're familiar with delta-T and thermodynamics. Current off the shelf technology can easily hit half of the Carnot limit at most delta-Ts. That's not the point, the point is the "fuel" was free, and the price was "close" to existing sources as these things go (about 2x the price of natural gas) and even with a carbon market and climate mandates, it's impossible to get investment.

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

#119

Post by kragen » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

coolspot wrote: post #96

kragen wrote: post #54

Does this mean you can now build a hydrogen bomb without uranium or plutonium? If not, why not?

Man-made nuclear fusion is not self-sustaining, requires massive infrastructure to ignite very little of material. Nuclear fission of unstable isotopes is self-sustaining chain reaction that converts a lot of matter into energy without much of hardware - just put some sub-critical mass of Plutonium into a sphere lined with conventional explosives. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_fusion_weapon

Well, of course that's always been true in the past, but isn't "ignition" precisely the point at which it becomes self-sustaining? Isn't that the distinction between "ignition" and not "ignition"? I mean, you're not the right person to ask (you apparently think plutonium is a brand name), but maybe somebody reading this understands the issues.

You don't even need explosives to get a self-sustaining nuclear fission chain reaction if you don't want a bomb; Harry Daghlian did it accidentally, Fermi did it underneath Stagg Field in Chicago in 01942, we do it routinely to generate electricity, and 16 fossil natural nuclear fission reactors have been discovered in Oklo. The explosives are only there to keep a rapid chain reaction from driving the pieces apart before you get enough yield for a weapon.

It's true that the NIF would not make a very useful bomb, being difficult to deliver to enemy territory even by ship, and probably inflicting more damage on the funding agency than the destroyed enemy city. But a significant part of that is non-recurring engineering costs, and it's probably possible to miniaturize it to a significant degree.

I read Freeman Dyson's autobiography recently, and he claims (contrary to the report of continuing DOE research in the Wikipedia article) one of the things they stopped working on in the 01960s due to the arms treaties was specifically hydrogen bombs that didn't require fission igniters.

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

#120

Post by tsimionescu » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 5:56 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #54

Does this mean you can now build a hydrogen bomb without uranium or plutonium? If not, why not?

Because to achieve 1MW of energy from fusion, you put 200MW of power into the lasers. And, you have to fire these lasers with unfathomable precision at a tiny piece of gold, in order to heat up an even tinier pellet of hydrogen, which then heats up enormously for a few milliseconds before fizzing out.

ICF is a good way of studying what happens inside a hydrogen bomb, but it is in no way imaginable how you could use it as a weapon in itself. At this point, you'd be much, much better off just firing the lasers at your target (though even that wouldn't achieve much, unless you target is kind enough to step in front of a highly sensitive, gigantic laser).

Edit: corrected a typo graciously pointed out by GP.