301–310 of 494 posts
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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.
Call me with the second and third commercial reactors are completed . That's when we'll have an idea of the real world viability, including how to scale and deal with production concerns.
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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 tempe…
Sure, I understand delta-T, and Carnot haunts my nightmares. My question about fusion isn't about thermodynamic efficiency, but about economics. Our waste heat solutions produced electricity at about 2x the LCOE of a natural gas turbine. Since it was carbon-free electricity, by selling the carbon credits we could get close to the ROI of a natural gas plant. A NG plant might have a 20 year IRR of 14-16% - we could get…
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Your analogy falls flat because we're still decades away from a functional fusion power plant. "Why breed faster horses now when maybe my grandchildren will get to zoom around in cars?"
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.
Now, suppose you live in one of those areas. Two questions:
1) What year was solar first ready for commercialization? 2) Would you ever consider that year's solar tech outside of extremely niche applications?
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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…
Of course, the consequences of climate change are billions cast into abject poverty, wars over resources and land, and so on. Moreover, if we do away with carbon subsidies (i.e., implement carbon pricing and border adjustments), then yes the cost of fossil fuel energy goes up, the consequence is the society adapts to using power more efficiently. We make less disposable shit, our industrial processes improve to keep…
The only way to end climate change is to have a serious debate about population control. But no one wants difficult debates (at least people that matter). Nuclear fission once pulled off will make things much much worse. I foresee a population explosion into areas once uninhabitable.
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I get that, 100% props for the experience. And I totally respect it. The GP question was "what makes fusion different", and the only thing that is different really is the economics of how much it costs vs how much energy you get out. Energy out is, by definition, the amount of heat differential you can generate. Cost is, again by definition, the total operating cost of the heat source. So this is where the author and…
But the LCOE is a normalized (usually to $/kwh) price that accounts for the amount of energy produced for a given capex, plus the operating costs, plus the cost of capital, plus the lifetime of the plant. It tries to bake that all in. Your position is that LCOE will be much lower, because (as I understand you) the plant cost will scale much better than, say, 100MW natural gas plants. I totally accept that my assertio…
The future of whether or not fusion becomes the next big thing will be watching the LCOE for fusion plants vs everything else.
It is interesting to compare fusion plants to fission plants in this regard. Fusion fuel extraction is much cheaper, fusion waste byproducts are minimal, plant failure risk and mitigation is much much cheaper (no fallout, no long live nucleotides etc), and the energy cycle produces 10 - 20x as much energy as fission.
Edit: And when things get going you can get around Carnot Efficiency by converting the high speed particles directly[1]. This experiment was built at LLNL as well and shown to actually give > 50% conversion efficiency.
[1] http://www.ralphmoir.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/venBlnd....
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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.
Had we gone down this road, we'd have a thick layer of manure covering everything. Living creatures are a source of CO2 too, and a big one. Look up for a share of greenhouse gases coming form agriculture. Had we used faster horses, that volume of emissions would be effectively doubled or tripled.
CO2 emitted by horses comes from the food they eat, which is absorbed from the atmosphere in the first place by the plant when it grows.
And a ton of the greenhouse gases from agriculture come from using oil, a major component of that being from tractors and crop dusters (which wouldn't exist in a horse-only world).
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>Early reports estimated that 250 kilo-joules of energy was deposited on the target (roughly 2/3 of the energy from the beams), which resulted in a 1.3 Megajoule output from the fusing plasma. Incredible progress over where they were just a couple years ago.
For reference: 1 MJ = 0.277778 kWh. Not trying to knock the progress made or anything like that, I just needed the conversion to a more familiar unit in order to appreciate what sort of scale they're talking about.
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"We should put more resources into breeding faster horses now, internal combustion can wait." - someone in late 19 century.
The benefits of a car were immediately obvious as soon as supply lines were considered. Feed for horses was something like 30% of all deliveries in a horse-based supply chain. Railroads run off of coal, but steam-engines were huge. ICE engines were miniature engines that also ran off of a fuel source (eventually settling upon oil, but many different fuel sources were considered in those early days, including electric…
Fun fact - Rudolf Diesel's first engines were running on cooking oil. In fact, many diesel engines can operate on vegetable oils without modifications (not long term though). That sounds odd, but from the perspective of "burn hydrocarbons to generate heat", petrol, diesel, oil, body fat, coal or kerosene are all very similar to each other.
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…