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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

#351

Post by grkvlt »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #278
AlbertCory wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skin in the game [1]. OP has actually done it ("CTO of a company providing heat-to-electricity plants"). Have you? Or you just read about it? [1] https://www.amazon.com/Skin-Game-Hidden-Asymmetries-Daily-eb... ?

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…

are you suggesting that fusion plants will be petawatt sized? because that's really not the case. i think the lcoe of fusion is predicted to be around the same as natural gas, with the DEMO reactor costing twice as much.

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

#352

Post by xondono »

outworlder wrote: post #337
xondono wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My argument doesn’t care who’s pocket is funding the renewables. As a society, every extra dollar spent on pricier energy is an extra dollar that can’t go to social programs, or to new start up, or anywhere.

> As a society, every extra dollar spent on pricier energy is an extra dollar that can’t go to social programs, or to new start up, or anywhere. If you are arguing to stop subsidies for fossil fuels, sure! Let's do it. Without any subsidies and with externalities accounted for, fossil fuels would be even more expensive than renewables.

> If you are arguing to stop subsidies for fossil fuels, sure! Let's do it.

I'll be all in on that. That's not my point at all.

> Without any subsidies and with externalities accounted for, fossil fuels would be even more expensive than renewables.

Wow, slow down there.

First, subsidies are a confounding factor. I don't care who signs the check, we're all paying for it in one way or another. Let's just assume we join all of the worlds wealth into a big pot somehow, and can magically distribute it as we desire.

Externalities are important though, because we will pay them anyway, so that one counts.

LCOE for solar and wind is lower, but we can't build a whole network with wind and solar because they're unreliable. The "popular" (hyped) solution is storage, but storage is so expensive that the LCOE for Solar/Wind + Storage blows us through the roof again!

I'd love to have some real solution, a renewable and reliable source with LCOE similar to natural gas, but until we have one we need to accept the fact that natural gas is in our mixture of energy sources is a good thing.

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

#353

Post by NullPrefix »

Jensson wrote: post #307
xxpor wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also 1 MJ = 250 calories. So like a pizza slice.

calories or kilocalories?

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

#354

Post by mywittyname »

Robotbeat wrote: post #301
mywittyname wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So we shouldn’t be investing in developing nuclear fusion power until after it’s proven and commercialized? How does that work?

No, I'm saying don't sit around talking about how this will be ready for commercial deployment in less than ten years until after it has been demonstrated to actually work in a production environment.

The first commercial production system will be an alpha build. The second and thirds are betas. It's only after those are completed that there's enough information to make commercial plans.

As of now, this system the GP is talking about hasn't even been built yet and won't be operational until at least 2025. And even when it is built, it is just a lab experiment designed to run in 10 second bursts. There are numerous more steps after this design phase before we get to commercial application.

Ten years is a pipe-dream for commercial application.

I'm excited to see progress in this field. But we are doing it a huge disservice by spreading misinformation about it. There are still a lot of problems to be solved before these are ready for prime time. And these problems will require a lot more funding to solve. If people sit around and talk about how this will be ready to go in 10 years, then who is going to want to fund it into year 11?

Scientific funding is directed largely by politicians. And there are many, many political opponents to science in our current Congress. Giving them ammo in the form of empty promises doesn't do advocates for fusion energy any good.

The honest answer is, we still don't know if tokamak will ever make for a viable commercial power plant. Best can be said is that it has been demonstrated to produce net positive energy for short periods of time, and that there is confidence that improvements can be made. That's it. The viability of commercial application has yet to be demonstrated and may never happen.

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

#355

Post by chadcmulligan »

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…

Here's an article about why fusion is a bad idea [1] and its from the bulletin of atomic scientists so they should know. I'd love to hear it refuted but doesn't seem to have happened.

[1] https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-the...

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

#356

Post by asdfge4drg »

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…

for someone who worked in this area, you have an unbelievably short term view.

humanity either has fusion reactors or it doesn't. imagine what we can do with them, the spacecraft we can build, submarine cities, one in every home. Mars, Europa. It's not where we'll be 10 years after we do it, but 100 years, 500 years. To get there, we've got to step forward now.

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

#357

Post by Gwypaas »

Jensson wrote: post #302
rfrey wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Coal plants runs on heat as coal isn't explosive enough to run turbines directly. If they are affordable then so is fusion heat. So the question is if we can generate fusion heat at low enough cost.

They are not affordable. That's why they are being replaced by gas plants and renewables all over the place.

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

#358

Post by hanselot »

javajosh wrote: post #273
specialp wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>They are not required to disclose the contents of the fracking wastewater fluid. >Majority of water used in hydro fracking is slick water. This is normal water with friction reducers added to it. Typically 1%. Though can change based on the design of the frack. These are maybe not disclosed to the public since they typically are proprietary formulas that each vendor creates on their own. Each wanting to protect the…

Yes, I was thinking the same thing. 1% is actually an enormous amount since toxins are measured in ppm. Imagine being asked, for every 100 cups of water you drink, to drink a cup of mystery fluid. Actually, it's worse because any (non volatile) additive will tend to concentrate over time in food (and then concentrate further in animals if the food used for feed), and in addition any chemical is bound to change over t…

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

#359

Post by truculent »

jhgb wrote: post #237
cletus wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this is based on mathematical modeling. Here's one reference I found [1] that estimates 5,000 years. I know I've heard 30,000 too, which is really within the same order of magnitude. [1]: https://sciencing.com/fun-sun-moon-stars-8459789.html

When I was younger (like three decades ago), the number I was taught was something like two million years (if I remember it correctly; I might still be able to find that book if I'm lucky).

To add to the confusion, I vaguely recall a number of around 125,000 years. I think it was either from "A Brief History of Time" or Jeff Forshaw's "Why Does E=mc2?".

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

#360

Post by chemeng »

snek_case wrote: post #350
wolf550e wrote: post #78

@dang This was reported and discussed 12 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28704298 The important thing to know is that the NIF is about nuclear weapons design (verification of modeling software used for nuclear weapons design), not about developing fusion power plants.

Kind of crazy that we're still spending money on this. Do we really need better H-bombs?

The US military probably thinks so, but I believe a major goal of NIF is the ability to model whether the ones the US already built will still work without setting one off.
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