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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

#311

Post by mywittyname »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #266
jhallenworld wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, well what was the rate of progress on breeding faster horses vs. internal combustion in the late 19th century? I don't imagine that the progress rate was very high for horses..

I'm not so sure about internal combustion, but I think it took steam engines 100 years to start outperforming horses. I think that that's a better technology comparison because internal combustion was able to leverage the theoretical insights originally derived for steam. There's no shoulders-of-giants effect going on for nuclear fusion, as there wasn't for steam.

Well, it kind of depends on what you define as teh first steam engines. Are you including like novelty stuff used for entertainment like magic shows and fountains? Or are we starting with the first steam engine used to do real mechanical work? The Newcomen engine came out in around 1712, but it's initial purpose as a water pump for mines wasn't really in direct competition to horse powered pumps. While they could be used to generate power for factories, that was an uncommon use case because they gradually lost power output over time.

The Watt design is when we finally saw steam engines replace animal power in the late 1770s. So not quite 100 years.

But yes, ICE development benefited from all the problems solved by steam power generation. I believe the ability to machine pistons to an accuracy of 0.1" wasn't developed until around 1750. Prior to that, people just hammered iron roundish and called it a day. Good enough for large steam engines, but not too valuable with an ICE.

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

#312

Post by throwaway894345 »

ransom1538 wrote: post #304
throwaway894345 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Of course, the consequences of climate change are billions cast into abject poverty" 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.

You can either cull billions of people or transition to clean energy, and yeah, people are rightly fixated on the latter.

> Nuclear fission once pulled off will make things much much worse.

What a foolish thing to say.

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

#313

Post by pdoege »

xondono wrote: post #222
thescriptkiddie wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For coal in the USA the stated cost for MWh in 2010 was $41. The external cost was $58.

This does not include for implicit and explicit subsidies. Including those would make the external costs higher.

The numbers change by country, time, energy source, and etc. so asking for a quotation is a bit of a fishing expedition. See Tables 1 and 2 at: https://www.climateadvisers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/2...

If you have the spare time to read 507 pages of support, please see: https://www.nap.edu/download/12794

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

#314

Post by lazide »

nitrogen wrote: post #258
lazide wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent was pointing out that the economics are also a fundamental limit of the technology/physics. If you can do a lot of work with expensive machines to get 20MW from that plant, but you can also do less work and spend less money getting an extra 20MW by burning some cheap primary fuel (with higher quality heat/aka a bigger delta), then they’re just going to burn more primary fuel. It’s a bit silly to do it any…

> > gas turbine for a pipeline compression station > primary turbine/power system could be built efficiently enough to not throw that waste heat out the back in the first place It sounds like this might be a situation where maybe an older turbine already exists for generating mechanical power (pumping), and the add-on kit is supposed to capture more energy without having to replace the existing systems?

But it doesn’t pay for itself is the problem - and I’m pointing out that the prior poster was pointing to a fundamental reason why that is not likely to change if the input fuel is cheap.

If the input is expensive, then the economics change and it’s more worthwhile to pay more in equipment to get more out of the input.

I bet someone has a really detailed set of calculations that would tell you exactly when that line is crossed. But I doubt they are hanging out here.

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

#315

Post by chmsky00 »

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…

Perhaps the cost to be concerned with is not fiat currency but more literal.

The up front costs could wipe out the routine costs and maybe we could also dispose of the “ make money selling blades not handles” monopoly fossil fuel monopolies rely on for political relevance.

Infinitely big little numbers let economists iterate forever in whatever direction they want. Physical reality has constraints their academic models omit.

We need to redefine the perimeter not iterate within the area of a well known boundary. Who cares how much it costs aristocrats in profits if the result ends up what is believed possible? I don’t have to believe any given solution or CEO is owed a market.

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

#316

Post by andrepd »

Mewit wrote: post #181
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…

I don't think it is accurate to say it "dissipates into the rest of the water system". Typically the hydrocarbon formations being fracked are thousands of feet below the water table, separated by thousands of feet of impermeable shale. It's the same, or more so, for disposal zones where the frack fluid that flows back is injected. For the fluid to mix with a potable aquifer, it would have to leak within a wellbore. T…

> In Europe, they made the decision to ban fracking, and also eliminate nuclear energy

Well the difference being fracking for natural gas is an environmental disaster that will leave untold problems for the future to clean up, and nuclear energy is one of the cleanest forms of energy we have.

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

#317

Post by akimball »

xondono wrote: post #232
micromacrofoot wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It’s just simple arithmetic, however you want to subsidize or socialize the cost, the fact is that renewables have higher cost per MW. Every dollar spent on higher energy costs is a dollar not spent in other things. This will impact growth.

Only because profits are privatized while costs and tail risks are largely socialized, for the fossil fuel industry. If they paid their environmental impact costs, no driller or coal miner could operate profitably.

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

#318

Post by dragontamer »

mywittyname wrote: post #295
Robotbeat wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, horse breeders argued the supply lines favored horses as horses could be fed by unlimited biofuels instead of limited fossil fuels. Of course, there was a difference in scale, but it’s just false to claim there weren’t major naysayers about automobiles from the horse industry.

People thought fossil fuels were a finite resource back then? I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if someone thought that, but given the frequency with which oil was being discovered, it seems reasonable that people would have assumed it to be effectively unlimited.

IIRC, people did think we were going to run out of coal back then. A minority, but yes, I do recall some quotes from the 1800s about the exponential growth of coal usage and that people were using too much coal.

But by the time ICE engines were getting invented, it was a done debate IIRC. Horses used to pull trains after all, the steam engine replaced horses in train-usage decades earlier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagonway, for the animal-based predecessor to trains)

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

#319

Post by akimball »

pstrateman wrote: post #128
BizarroLand wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oil companies are subsidized to the tune of Billions of dollars an hour. Subsidizing fusion energy would merely be redirecting that money to the greater payoff.

The hyperbole isn't needed. Billions of dollars an hour is 17 Trillion dollars a year. They're not being subsidized by that much

Count the socialized cost of environmental remediation please. It will run into the quadrillion zone

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

#320

Post by akimball »

xondono wrote: post #300
piva00 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a source for a recent meta-analysis of hidden costs of fossil fuels [1]. Findings on the abstract already corroborate the parent comment. [1] "The hidden costs of energy and mobility: A global meta-analysis and research synthesis of electricity and transport externalities" - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462962...

The problem with this type of study is that it can by definition only cover the known externalities, but most of the price of externalities is far into the future. This means that the real margin of error is huge (and unknowable at this time).

Also it misprices tail risk, marking it to zero
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