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

#221

Post by humaniania » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 6:54 PM UTC

xondono wrote: post #214

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…

What a great way to not answer what OP is asking. If you don’t like fracking, that’s alright, but sustaining ourselves without it it’s not really an option. Right now our options are: 1) Use coal, accept the consequences of the increased climate change. 2) Keep using gas, reduce the future costs of climate change, deal later with the speculative consequences you mention. 3) Switch to renewables and drastically increa…

Energy subsidies for vulnerable people are an option that negates your only argument against the most sane option of switching to renewable and nuclear ASAP, at least in extremely wealthy countries like the USA.

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

#222

Post by xondono » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 6:54 PM UTC

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #212

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…

The unpopular truth is that fossil fuels are far too cheap. If the negative externalities were priced in, they would be at least twice as expensive, perhaps as much as ten times.

> If the negative externalities were priced in they would be at least twice as expensive

Quotation needed

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

#223

Post by mastrsushi » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 6:55 PM UTC

Test

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

#224

Post by micromacrofoot » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 6:56 PM UTC

xondono wrote: post #214

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…

What a great way to not answer what OP is asking. If you don’t like fracking, that’s alright, but sustaining ourselves without it it’s not really an option. Right now our options are: 1) Use coal, accept the consequences of the increased climate change. 2) Keep using gas, reduce the future costs of climate change, deal later with the speculative consequences you mention. 3) Switch to renewables and drastically increa…

> Switch to renewables and drastically increase energy costs, which will trap millions of people into poverty, and put millions more in risk

This feels like a bad faith take out of the gate (whether or not it's intended)... are there no mechanisms for subsidies to abate these issues? are renewables more likely to increase wealth gaps than other fuels?

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

#225

Post by Robotbeat » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #209

Robotbeat wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We aren’t. MIT’s SPARC Tokamak design could be ready for commercialization by a decade. Less time than completing a high speed rail project in the US.

The word "could" is doing a lot of work, there. And how many times have we heard the phrase "a decade" in this field?

Kind of a lazy comment. There has been substantial progress with the latest development from NIF as well as SPARC demonstrating a magnet section that would enable ITER at a much smaller scale using fundamentally superior superconducting technology With NIF’s latest result, we’re no longer just generating smoke from rubbing sticks together, now we got a flame.

That’s a substantial, qualitative change in the state of the art of fusion technology. Now we need to do it dozens of times per second and make steam from it, while using efficient lasers and breeding tritium from the lithium jacket.

Works kind of like the EUV light sources TSMC uses to make the highest end computer chips, except a fuel pellet instead of a drop of tin. Like so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy

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

#226

Post by xondono » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

orangepurple wrote: post #66

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…

You can't put a price on energy independence in a free market economy. Energy independence is a military objective and a matter of national security. The costs are difficult to put in perspective.

Of course you can. The price of energy independence is the lowest total cost that can keep up with energy demand.

The question is if fusion is really the cheapest way to do it, say vs alternatives.

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

#227

Post by lazide » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 7:00 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…

There are a couple potential answers to your question.

1) ‘make it up in volume’ - part of the reason for the relatively high capital cost of the technologies you are describing, is they don’t scale well from a one-off design or manufacture vs amount of energy produced perspective. Geothermal plants require significant amounts of ‘actually sticking a very long pipe into unstable ground’ which can’t be effectively economy-of-scaled away to be cheaper. There are also only a relatively small number of locations with the right factors to make it worthwhile. Presumably the waste heat systems you are referring to require custom fitting to the plant in some way, and there are also not a huge number of places with sufficient waste heat to make it worthwhile. Both of these techs are in the sub-gigawatt (often sub-hundred megawatt) range. That adds a lot of friction, thinking, and site/location specific ness for a relatively small amount of power. IN THEORY fusion can produce massive (giggawatt) power anywhere, and there is no reason you couldn’t make one for every neighborhood if you wanted. Please be aware that practically speaking this seems to be a fantasy.

2) most people don’t/can’t understand the physics, so it is really easy to project impossible benefits onto it that will never play out in real life, and sound plausible while doing so. This makes it easier to sell to politicians in particular.

3) IN THEORY because of these factors, whoever comes up with fusion first is going to take over the world (either commercially or politically), so there is a lot of pressure to not be #2 there. This outweighs things like pesky market dynamics and concrete profit margins.

4) also, since no one has a prototype or design for a reactor that could plausibly actually be a viable commercial reactor, no one has the ability to sit down and figure out if the math works or not. This is all still research reactor space.

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

#228

Post by ChuckMcM » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 7:02 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…

I could cite you things like this: (https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6276900) but they will likely be buzzword soup.

The simplest explanation is that the fusion reactor's energy output is the _primary_ heat source for a heat engine like a steam turbine.

It sounded from your description that your company was targeting so called "waste" heat, which is a lower grade of heat (smaller delta between ambient so a smaller temperature differential to work with). There are limits to the efficiency of being able to convert heat into some other form of energy (kinetic, chemical, electric, Etc.) because that is how the universe works sadly.

That said, when you have a very large heat differential, as you do from fusion or fission reactions, converting even a small percentage of that can be a net win in terms of production.

So fusion is different in that it can take a small amount of widely available "fuel" and release a large amount of energy by "burning" it (in actuality fusing it into a new element, but the effect is that the original fuel is no longer available for use) and then using that heat to run heat engines that are producing electricity. The waste products are the fused result and heat in the form of highly energetic alpha particles.

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

#229

Post by lazide » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 7:03 PM UTC

micromacrofoot wrote: post #224

xondono wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a great way to not answer what OP is asking. If you don’t like fracking, that’s alright, but sustaining ourselves without it it’s not really an option. Right now our options are: 1) Use coal, accept the consequences of the increased climate change. 2) Keep using gas, reduce the future costs of climate change, deal later with the speculative consequences you mention. 3) Switch to renewables and drastically increa…

> Switch to renewables and drastically increase energy costs, which will trap millions of people into poverty, and put millions more in risk This feels like a bad faith take out of the gate (whether or not it's intended)... are there no mechanisms for subsidies to abate these issues? are renewables more likely to increase wealth gaps than other fuels?

Renewables as currently implemented have significant effective capacity issues - wind not blowing, or sun not shining, or whatever - and overbuilding them still won’t solve that.

Storage is currently very expensive, and this is not likely to meaningfully (as in decrease by an order of magnitude or more in cost) change anytime soon.

That means that you need to buy and maintain more equipment for the same kwh at the plug than you would with a typical power plant. Fossil Fuels are incredibly energy dense and really cheap to extract, even with the nutty new technologies required in many places.

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

#230

Post by lazide » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 7:03 PM UTC

humaniania wrote: post #221

xondono wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a great way to not answer what OP is asking. If you don’t like fracking, that’s alright, but sustaining ourselves without it it’s not really an option. Right now our options are: 1) Use coal, accept the consequences of the increased climate change. 2) Keep using gas, reduce the future costs of climate change, deal later with the speculative consequences you mention. 3) Switch to renewables and drastically increa…

Energy subsidies for vulnerable people are an option that negates your only argument against the most sane option of switching to renewable and nuclear ASAP, at least in extremely wealthy countries like the USA.

What do you think the odds of this occurring are?