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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

#171

Post by mcguire »

whatshisface wrote: post #145
humaniania wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural gas is only inexpensive because of fracking. With fracking in the USA at least the people involved can set up an LLC that dissolves after the well runs out. They are not required to disclose the contents of the fracking wastewater fluid. It gets pumped back down underground where it could dissipate into the rest of the water system. These people claim that it's safe for decades when our computer models can't…

> These people claim that it's safe for decades when our computer models can't predict the weather accurately next week. The models may or may not be accurate but they have nothing to do with predicting the weather. There isn't any weather underground... It's all slow diffusion and buoyancy. A better starting place might be asking where the model inputs come from.

Doesn't "diffusion and buoyancy" technically describe the weather, too?

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

#172

Post by mikewave »

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…

> I don't care when the dishwasher runs as long as the dishes are clean by tomorrow, you know?

You can already accomplish 95% of this now with any dishwasher made within the last 20 years that has a delay timer on it. Just load it up and tell it to run in 6 hours and then go to bed.

I don't want some 3rd party company driving a huge team of middlemen sucking up a gigantic pile of data in order to determine when it might be strategically useful for my dishwasher to be on. I don't want my dishwasher on the internet. I barely want it to have any electronics at all, because I want the damn thing to last for 20 years, not the scant 5 years people seem to be getting out of major appliances these days. You wanna talk carbon footprint and recycling, making things reliable would probably save us a million times more energy than would using the internet-of-things to run this stuff at night time.

I _might_ be willing to accept a compromise where my smart power meter uses an open protocol to inform devices in my house of the current energy cost for Time-of-Use billing and then the appliance decides when to start based on a threshold I set, but even that's more implementation than is really necessary here.

Also, there are only a few appliances that can really make use of that kind of thing. As a parent, I need to run laundry all the time, non-stop, because children are filthy monsters. I can't factor energy costs into that, because laundry takes a long time to run and many loads need to be run. It's only a small number of people who can stick their one weekly load into the dryer and tell it to wait for night - and again, a timer would do 90%+ of the work spreading the load around, you don't need a gigantic network of flimsy compute doing the work here.

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

#174

Post by epistasis »

hpcjoe wrote: post #162
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…

Very likely, each fusion plant (if they ever exist) would require, ironically, a fission plant next door to provide the power required for the magnets. The magnets, and wiring won't be cheap. The power delivery and control won't be cheap. I'm not sure how this would be amortized into the cost of the power, without making it 2-3x (or more) more expensive than alternatives. We can build, and we need, nuclear plants now…

> We can build, and we need, nuclear plants now, to be able to generate cheap/plentiful electric power. And if we don't we're basically going to have to push the brakes on EV deployment. Or light up more NG/Oil plants to provide the power for those.

The real power generation tech here will be wind and solar, not nuclear. We can build lots and lots and lots of it, easily and cheaply. And using it to charge vehicle batteries doesn't even require intermediate storage.

Even construction powerhouses like China are deploying more than an order of magnitude more renewables than nuclear, because renewables will be the backbone of any future grid. Nuclear isn't getting any cheaper, yet wind solar and batteries are on exponentially decreasing cost curves.

People on HN are far better able to understand exponential technology advancement than people in the energy industries. And hopefully we can all see how renewables plus batteries is going to make nuclear obsolete.

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

#175

Post by mikewave »

pstrateman wrote: post #159
myself248 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There are companies that will drive your "smart" thermostat and purport to save you money by strategically controlling it, but in the end if you want to save money on your house's climate control, you're going to end up being warmer/colder than you would like.

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

#176

Post by 5faulker »

humaniania wrote: post #102
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 is only inexpensive because of fracking. With fracking in the USA at least the people involved can set up an LLC that dissolves after the well runs out. They are not required to disclose the contents of the fracking wastewater fluid. It gets pumped back down underground where it could dissipate into the rest of the water system. These people claim that it's safe for decades when our computer models can't…

This is definitely more of a do-it-while-you-can model.

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

#177

Post by whimsicalism »

bigfudge wrote: post #157
cletus wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It's not really "the same" photon though.

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

#178

Post by gus_massa »

kragen wrote: post #127
tsimionescu wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

What stops you from using the "even tinier piece pellet of hydrogen"[sic] from initiating fusion in a slightly less tiny pellet of hydrogen that it's sitting on top of, which initiates fusion in a slightly less tiny pellet of hydrogen, and so on? Aside from concern for your own survival, of course. Maybe if you can't fathom the precision required to irradiate the NIF hohlraum sufficiently isotropically to achieve ign…

The other two answers are probably better, but in case it's useful take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design#Two-stag...

Between the primary fission bomb and the secondary fusion bomb there is a huge shield, so the shockwave of the first one hit's the second one at the same time everywhere, instead of hitting the top.

My guess is that to put a ternary fusion bomb you will need another even bigger shield, but IANANBS.

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

#179

Post by sandGorgon »

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…

true this. In fact - im wondering why molten salt reactors which the US innovated almost 60 years back where not pursued. Thorium is plentiful and cheap - and Terrapower seems to have already productized cheap miniaturized MSRs.

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

#180

Post by meltedcapacitor »

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…

Yes, but bulk of the demand is heat and industry, so you're quickly back to having to build a lot of "storage" in the form of buildings with high thermal inertia and spare capacity for production, so that you can keep the high energy plants idle at inconvenient times. Hard to say if that is more efficient than building actual energy storage.

Every little helps I guess, but getting people not to shower on cloudy days is not gonna move the needle materially.

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