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Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#81

Post by ianai »

tinco wrote: post #70
epistasis wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what sense do you think this is good for sustainable energy? Do you think it will cost less, or have less environmental impact than, say, newer deep well geothermal? I'm not so optimistic that costs could ever be competitive with geothermal.

Doesn't deep geothermal generally require fracking? At least the geothermal plants that I've seen being implemented right now do. Is there any fancy new tech breaking through there currently? I think both fusion and geothermal are very exciting, crazy thing is although geothermal sounds simpler, I have no idea what's holding it back technology-wise, yet I have a pretty good understanding of the state of fusion resear…

Geothermal is very location sensitive and requires huge outlays upfront. Maybe it’d be a clearer choice if energy storage were better solved. It also requires political support to cross NIMBYism.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#82

Post by CodeGlitch »

unfocussed_mike wrote: post #78
CodeGlitch wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is they also came up against vile, populist hate about Syrian immigrants, Romanian neighbours, people not speaking english on buses, fake news about pillow regulations; Except there is some truth/validity in all of these - they are proxies. The pillow/banana stuff was about over-regulation by the EU. People not speaking the native language on buses is an indication of a a loss of British culture (people…

The pillow stuff was fraudulent, sorry. You can't hold up a bed pillow and say all these regulations cover pillows when almost all of the uses of the word "pillow" were from engineering safety regulations (pillow blocks etc.) The Syrian immigration thing was based on a lie (and about specific fearmongering concerning Turkey's supposed accession to the EU -- a process that has entirely stalled and is even in reverse b…

> The pillow stuff was fraudulent, sorry.

That's why I said they were proxies - please read what I wrote again.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#83

Post by mirekrusin »

willis936 wrote: post #56
mirekrusin wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not quite sure why but I have this flashback-like feeling from blockchain with this Q_total < Q_plasma confusion.

Pardon the analogy, but bringing up Q_engineering in this context is like someone shopping for a car running into Ford's engine design department and complaining that the engineers are not using the car's fuel economy to increase the engine's performance. How much power the subsystems takes has no influence on the plasma's performance. How much power goes into the plasma (and what type of power and where and when, et…

We (now) know but most people don't, when somebody says it'll "produce X amount of power than you put in" any normal human being would think "it's done" but then they'll wonder for next X decades why there are no power plants yet? Because nobody told them that you need more power than it produces at the end and positive net was just for final reaction and without heat to electricity conversion.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#84

Post by biorach »

mschuster91 wrote: post #69
nicoburns wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A $50b program from 1 country would likely have the same problem (as indeed would a large private program). Injecting a large amount of capital all at once into a project just isn't efficient.

> Injecting a large amount of capital all at once into a project just isn't efficient. SpaceX would beg to disagree here. The reason why they are so cheap, agile and sustainable (=reusable rockets) is precisely because SpaceX got a load of money without the "pork" requirements that were commonplace with ULA & friends. That enabled SpaceX to embrace vertical, on-site integration and go for what was technically the bes…

ITER vs SpaceX is a really poor comparison.

ITER is a high risk foray into still-experimental technology with no hope of direct return on investment (it can not function as a commercial power plant). It had to be built at this scale because they had reached the limits of smaller-scale prototypes (tho I think there was not unanimity about this). Pooling resources makes sense here.

SpaceX is a more efficient take on technologies and processes that have been battle tested over many decades. This gives them a clear path to profitability, with some risk, but low enough to get investors on board, which ITER would have no hope of doing. Granted they are innovating, but incrementally, not from scratch. Very different.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#85

Post by danpalmer »

NGRhodes wrote: post #40

How much energy was required to start the fusion ?

Probably a lot, and while that's generally a useful question to ask about fusion research, in this case the point is not to create a sustainable fusion process but to validate specific pieces of technology, so it doesn't really matter here.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#86

Post by willis936 »

mirekrusin wrote: post #83
willis936 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon the analogy, but bringing up Q_engineering in this context is like someone shopping for a car running into Ford's engine design department and complaining that the engineers are not using the car's fuel economy to increase the engine's performance. How much power the subsystems takes has no influence on the plasma's performance. How much power goes into the plasma (and what type of power and where and when, et…

We (now) know but most people don't, when somebody says it'll "produce X amount of power than you put in" any normal human being would think "it's done" but then they'll wonder for next X decades why there are no power plants yet? Because nobody told them that you need more power than it produces at the end and positive net was just for final reaction and without heat to electricity conversion.

You should watch the hour long press release and see just how clearly they explain what has been done.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#87

Post by DrBazza »

dfdz wrote: post #80

> This is more than double what was achieved in similar tests back in 1997. The experiment produced > 11 megawatts of power and at Jet > two 500 megawatt flywheels are used to run the experiments log_2(2*500/11)*(2022-1997) + 2022 = 2185 At this rate we will have fusion by 2185 I guess?

It's 30 years time. It's always 30 years time.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/why-nuclear-fusi...

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#88

Post by jcfrei »

axg11 wrote: post #37

What is stopping one of the major western governments from printing $50B of their own currency and investing it all in an intensive fusion programme? There doesn’t seem to be much to lose (these economies are already unreasonably inflated) but so much to gain from viable fusion.

In the current economy the funding of these types of projects is usually not the bottleneck. It's finding the people and achieving the actual scientific / engineering breakthroughs. The marginal return on more money is pretty insignificant for that. If you just threw a ton of money at it much of it would probably be splurged or straight away misappropriated. Then you'll get a whole lot of terrible press, undermining other scientific funding and putting the politicians reelection at risk.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#90

Post by swayvil »

mns06 wrote: post #54
unfocussed_mike wrote: post #4

[flagged]

I found it a valid and unambiguous comment. Brexit has been a disaster for UK science. If the BBC found it relevant enough to be included in the article, surely it merits a discussion here without being downvoted.

Not just downvoted, erased.

It makes you think.

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