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

#151

Post by cronix » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 6:11 PM UTC

aerostable_slug wrote: post #50

option wrote: post #10

fusion sound fantastic in principle. But in the meantime we can and should addressed most of our energy needs with fission.

Not sure why this is downvoted. Fission works, and it works well. The waste problem is massively overstated and also, aside from NIMBY politics, solved.

There are also things like tidal waves, earthquakes and other unforeseen things that do pop up from time to time and cause big issues. We can say it's rare, statistically very unlikely, etc., but no one wants to be a Fukushima and that image is still pretty fresh and hard to combat logically.

That said, one thing that I think would really help is to have smaller reactors, more of them, and using a standardized and approved design. I remember hearing an interview with an Oregon State University professor some 15+ years ago who was working on a project that did just that. IIRC, he said one major contributing factor to the cost of building a reactor, besides waste, is that basically each one is designed and engineered from scratch. He envisioned more of an assembly line. Universal design, universal parts, etc. I believe they went on to form a company called NuScale and a quick DDG search led to this:

> "Portland company's innovative nuclear reactor OK'd by feds (September 26 2020)" ... The modules — each capable of producing 60 megawatts of energy, which is enough to power 45,000 homes — also allow a plant to scale up as needed, with a maximum capacity of 12 modules for a total of 720 megawatts.

https://pamplinmedia.com/pt/9-news/482166-388954-portland-co...

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

#152

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 6:11 PM UTC

MauranKilom wrote: post #148

hinkley wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heat pollution. Green house gasses are not the only way to cook ourselves. Though there are some people working on beaming heat into space, I suspect they haven’t fully accounted for heat absorption by atmospheric dust.

Hm, interesting. I was initially unconvinced that this could be a problem, but some back-of-the-envelope math says it's at least conceivable: The sun deposits enormous amounts of energy onto earth every single day: Around 340 W/m² (averaged over the whole earth), or a total of 43 x 10^15 Watts. Essentially all of it is radiated back into space (mostly as infrared). We have a temperature equilibrium because energy int…

[deleted]

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

#153

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 6:11 PM UTC

Symmetry wrote: post #103

Mizza wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's political. Taxes on carbon pollution are inevitable, but for the time being there is still political blockage because of the power of the cartels.

Politically the problem is that voters want action on climate change but aren't willing to pay any visible cost associated with that action. If you put a tax on carbon that raises the price of something by $100 then that's a political no-go. But if you create a cap and trade system that raises the price by $150 that might be politically viable. Not ideal, but one has to compromise with political realities.

The answer to this is for the tax to pay out to everyone as a dividend. Then voters would be in favor because some of the tax is paid by corporations but all of the money goes to individuals, so most people get back more than they pay.

On top of that, the tax would (if enacted by most countries) crush demand for fossil fuels. So then fossil fuel prices go down by, for example, half the amount of the tax, meaning that half the tax get paid by Exxon et al. But all tax money still gets paid out to individuals.

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

#154

Post by kwertyoowiyop » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 6:13 PM UTC

beachy wrote: post #97

f00zz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I can't help feeling we'll find new ways to soak up that energy. Ad tech will start segmenting right down to the individual customer, burning thousands of watts to work out how to entice then to spend $20. Perhaps raw heat, rather than the indirect heat effects of global warming will be our next challenge.

Our current Bitcoin mining facilities will seem like child’s play.

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

#155

Post by tsimionescu » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #83

tsimionescu wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, should have said energy. As for hundreds vs twenty, my understanding was that newer lasers than what NIF is using should be in the twenty times range, but you're right that at NIF they use hundreds of times more energy than they can deliver to the plasma.

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

#156

Post by zardo » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

HPsquared wrote: post #70

hinkley wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heat pollution. Green house gasses are not the only way to cook ourselves. Though there are some people working on beaming heat into space, I suspect they haven’t fully accounted for heat absorption by atmospheric dust.

It'd be interesting to ponder whether such a "heat ray" would work, in terms of thermodynamics. Some kind of heat pump, the hot side of which is hot enough to radiate into space? I can't imagine that having a net cooling effect when considering the Carnot efficiency of a refrigeration cycle. Maybe a giant ice machine in space? (Then again, any ice would probably create more heating than cooling as it enters our gravi…

The cold side is what your heat ray hits, the idea is that would be the CMWB.

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

#157

Post by bigfudge » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #146

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 is fusion different? It's not but people don't seem to realize this or maybe just don't want to think about it. Spending $100B to produce 1GW of power (made up numbers) is not an economical source of power. So hydrogen being free (deuterium and tritium are essentially free; Helium isotopes are more complicated) is irrelevant until the capital cost of the plane is much, much lower. And even then you still have t…

> photos created at the Sun's core take ~30,000 years to escape

I’m guessing you meant photons but this still seems amazing. Is there somewhere I can find out more about that?

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

#158

Post by zpeti » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 6:16 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #146

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 is fusion different? It's not but people don't seem to realize this or maybe just don't want to think about it. Spending $100B to produce 1GW of power (made up numbers) is not an economical source of power. So hydrogen being free (deuterium and tritium are essentially free; Helium isotopes are more complicated) is irrelevant until the capital cost of the plane is much, much lower. And even then you still have t…

$100bn to get to a working fusion reactor doesn’t mean the second one will cost €100bn as well…

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

#159

Post by pstrateman » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

myself248 wrote: post #108

adrianN wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The best storage is no storage at all, it is demand-response. Things like responsive appliances and EV chargers that can schedule their load rather than insisting that limitless power be available instantaneously. I don't care when the dishwasher runs as long as the dishes are clean by tomorrow, you know? Of course right now, putting the word "smart" on an appliance doesn't imply any of that, and the way it ends up i…

There really aren't many things that can be off for significant periods of time without making them useless.

Indeed I can't think of any that can be off for more than a day.

Can you?

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

#160

Post by ohgodplsno » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 6:18 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #86

vilhelm_s wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

500 gCO2eq/kWh.

Fuck natural gas. Just because coal and oil are terrible doesn't mean that it is a good option too.

Build hydro, build nuclear, build wind and solar if you have money to waste. But natural gas is not a good stopgap measure while we get to fusion.