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Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab
131–140 of 494 posts
Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not really. The equipment to seal wells and pipelines against leaks would cost billions.
We need more generation, but solar is already cheaper than new natural gas built on the leaky network. It makes more economic sense to just overbuild your solar at these prices.
[1] $250mn for a single state: https://apnews.com/article/business-environment-and-nature-c...
Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab
#133Oh, this is just laser fusion. One pulse of power. That's not a power source, even potentially. It's a lab-sized H-bomb experiment. This isn't one of the magnetic containment systems achieving ignition and sustaining the reaction. Now that would be an achievement.
Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think your statement "Once you have plasma breakeven you have a self-sustaining heater basically" is false. According to Wikipedia [1] - if I interpret it correctly - the fusion energy gain factor from plasma must be 5 (!) to have a self-sustaining heater: "Most fusion reactions release at least some of their energy in a form that cannot be captured within the plasma, so a system at Q = 1 will cool without external…
I oversimplified in that statement, you need more than a factor of 1 because of heat losses to the environment yes. However 5 is not much different than 1. We've gone from 0.0001 only a few years ago to close to 1 now.
And btw, you really want more than 5, 10 or 20 ideally, but again, that's not too hard as compared to how far we've come and new reactors will be beyond that soon.
Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab
#135Earlier 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 am still bitter that we don't invest more on this research which has the potential to solve the climate crisis "unexpectedly". Unfortunately, solving the climate crisis would put many a pundit out of a job.
Something tells me the alternative is going to do much more than putting people out of jobs.
Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab
#136Meta-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.
Worth noting that the current plan is for the minumum carbon tax in canada to increase by $15/tonne/yr until 2035, so the question might be more when will it reach a break even point? Seems like you'd want to be positioned for that.
Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab
#137Meta-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 costs don't include the external costs like climate change, so it looks better than it is. We have to stop using fossil fuel soon to prevent really catastrophic changes, so then other sources are needed.
Exactly. The costs are much more than economic. It's the Tragedy of the Commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ch…
Ignition in the case of ICF means that, for the brief time while the shockwave from the initial laser burst is still keeping the plasma together, you get to fuse all of the D+T in your pellet. Once the initial velocity is lost, the high-temperature He dissipates away. Not ahcieving ignition means that the plasma cools too rapidly and the fusion reaction stops even before the brief microseconds of inertial confinement…
Not all of it, no; your understanding of "ignition" is incorrect. cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28842919
Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab
#139Funny how this story gets posted after soon after Dr Sabine Hossenfelder's debunking and deflate the fusion power hype - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY with a genuine Hans Gruber accent :)
It's almost like this is the event that prompted her to make her video.
Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think her meaning is pretty clear and correct. As much as plasma breakeven may be the entire goal of ITER it's absolutely setting them up for a badly missed public expectation. The day they declare net positive output, the world will ask when we can start building infrastructure and the answer will be "30 more years" and then they'll get their funding yanked forever.
ITER isn't even possible to create an economic nuclear reactor out of because it's too big. The sheer size of a ITER-sized reactor doesn't get us to economical reactors. ITER is a science experiment, not a commercial reactor design. High-field strength high temperature superconductor based allows much smaller sizes than ITER, but ITER was designed with the technology that was available in the late 1990s.