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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

#371

Post by ClumsyPilot »

Robotbeat wrote: post #218
Animats wrote: post #133

Oh, this is just laser fusion. One pulse of power. That's not a power source, even potentially. It's a lab-sized H-bomb experiment. This isn't one of the magnetic containment systems achieving ignition and sustaining the reaction. Now that would be an achievement.

Internal combustion piston engines also do intermittent combustion. If you were to make a power plant based off of this, you would need dozens of these per second (and much more efficient lasers and a tritium breeding liquid lithium metal jacket and… a lot of other stuff).

The capsules are tiny and do not generate usefull amount of energy.

ITER is planned to generate 500,000,000W. Thats actually usefull

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

#372

Post by pfdietz »

Robotbeat wrote: post #196
scoopertrooper wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its power density will only be 40 times worse than a fission reactor, and made with steel operating at much closer to its strength limit (safety factor of 1.5 for the ARC design, I think, vs. at least 3.5 for steel pressure vessels in the ASME code). There is no way this will be cheaper than fission power plants, and they are already not competitive.

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

#373

Post by pfdietz »

Robotbeat wrote: post #225
mcguire wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

NIF's target cost millions of dollars to make. It produced 1.3MJ of energy, which is (generously) worth about a penny.

SPARC/ARC would enable a tokamak at a smaller scale (and self-sustaining from bootstrap current, most likely) but ITER is so far out of the running that something can be much better than it and still not be practical. ITER's gross fusion power density is 400x worse than a PWR's reactor vessel; ARC would only be 40x worse.

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

#374

Post by SuoDuanDao »

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?

>are renewables more likely to increase wealth gaps than other fuels?

Given that renewable generation solutions can be purchased by a much larger percentage of the world population than nonrenewable ones, they probably do a lot to decrease wealth gaps. Since they require more energy invested per energy paid back though, it's probably accurate to suppose that the total wealth in the system would be reduced by such a trend.

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

#375

Post by ClumsyPilot »

malchow wrote: post #240
solarhoma wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot wrong with your post. >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 the…

He's also wrong about there being a water *shortage* in California. There is water *diversion*, designed by environmentalists to save animals, that strips farmers of water.

There is a water diversion indeed, to moronic growing of almonds in a desert! Where farmers claim more water 'rights' than physically exists.

It's like you guys looked at the Aral sea disaster created by USSR and said 'hold my beer'

These crops are dead, it's just a question of time, even if you diverted every drop of water and leave households to die. The sooner we accept it the better.

http://www.ciesin.org/docs/006-238/006-238.html

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

#376

Post by pfdietz »

after_care wrote: post #141
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 want to live in a world where we work on projects that will benefit us both 5 and 50 years in the future.

Long term projects often have the problem they are solving disappear out from under them. They become obsolete before they're done. Freeman Dyson famously pointed this out and suggested anyone planning ahead more than five years was fooling themselves (and he meant that in science, too.)

Fusion seems a good illustration of this. Work started on it about half a century ago. Its motivation was "fission will be cheap, but uranium will get scarce, so let's build fusion reactors that have cheap fuel!" Except fission didn't get cheap, the cost turned out to be dominated by the cost of the power plant, not the fuel, and fusion reactors don't solve that problem AT ALL.

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

#377

Post by pfdietz »

tuatoru wrote: post #361
rfrey wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fusion plants cannot be 100x bigger. The grid doesn't cope well with current 2GWe plants going offline suddenly. It would not cope at all with a 200GWe plant doing that. Besides the waste heat dissipation issues...

Also, fusion plants have inherent diseconomy of scale, from the square-cube law. There is a limit to the energy flux through the surface of the reactor, and because of that the volumetric power density of the reactor is inversely proportional to its linear size.

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

#378

Post by cbtacy »

asdfge4drg wrote: post #356
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.

Well said and thank you (speaking as one who also has worked in this area).

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

#379

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

nitrogen wrote: post #261
cletus wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh for sure. To be clear, I meant the amortized cost, not the initial cost of, say, ITER. I could've stated that better.

Either way we (humanity) have to research these things or we are guaranteeing that we will reach an energy and materials plateau and eventual decline as a species.

This makes no sense. A plateau does not imply decline.

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

#380

Post by pfdietz »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #305
rfrey wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Exactly. 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…

> plant failure risk

You don't have to worry as much about major accidents as in fission, but the risk of minor accidents that aren't a public safety risk but are a risk of ruining the plant is arguably much larger. A fusion reactor puts a large, very complicated thing, with many non-redundant parts, into a hot zone where hands on repair is impossible.

The lesson of TMI is that even if the public is unharmed, an accident that destroys a multibillion dollar investment is ruinous for a utility.

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