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Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

bbc.co.uk

91–100 of 827 posts

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#91
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?

Even if it takes 200 years it is likely still worthwhile. Unfortunately we, as a culture, have a problem seeing and planning across generations. https://longnow.org/

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#92
post #81
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Aren't we at the point where most large scale infrastructure projects require huge outlays? Unless geothermal is an order of magnitude more expensive per MW or GWH than say nuclear, is it a point against it?

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#94
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem with ITER is it's not 1 country, it's lots, and they all want their piece of the pie instead of doing it efficiently

Does one country have all the smart people needed to go it alone? (This is not a further joke about Brexit I pinky promise)

If you're willing to print enough cash to pay for the smart people to come to you, you can probably import them. It seems to be more the exception than the rule that people dislike a country so much that no amount of money could get them to go there to do research on the topic they're interested in.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#96
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In fact, it takes 4,184 joules to raise the temperature of 1kg of water by 1 degree. Or 313800 joules to raise 1kg of water by 75 degrees. That means JET could have boiled about 188 kg of water. This is missing the heat of vaporization[1] needed to actually boil the water though, i.e. to turn 100C liquid water to 100C steam. That's another 2250kJ/kg on top of the 313.8kJ/kg you've mentioned. It's why steam is such a…

> I guess you could argue that you wouldn't evaporate all water in the kettle... One does not have to argue for that interpretation - raising the temperature to boiling point, not boiling it dry, is indisputably the accepted and intended meaning of the phrase wherever English is spoken... though it would fit with a certain stereotype of scientists if a bunch of plasma physicists did not know how to make a pot of tea!

It's entirely disputable as evidenced by this conversation.

It's also an incredible waste of time to argue over definitions. They're always disputable because they always arise in response to two people using a word differently. Maybe they're wrong and you're right, or maybe others also use the word that way—it doesn't matter. Humility and aiming at mutual understanding is far more worthwhile.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#98

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…

When you are comparing across different fusion techniques, which we implicitly are in our brains (because we are not sophisticated plasma physicists and not every strategy right now is magnetic confinement), Q_engineering is important to think about: different strategies will have different capabilities of harvesting the energy and turning it into power, and maybe some of the strategies (laser inertial confinement cough cough) are super-unlikely to ever have reasonable and efficient capture strategies. It would be nice to have an "estimated Q_engineering" come out of these experiments, even if they are wildly overinflated and crap estimates (as long as the assumptions that go into that are recorded). For that matter, it's not entirely clear to me how one harvests energy from magnetically confined fusion plasmas. Can someone give me a soundbyte on that?

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#99

I love how one of the articles on the HN frontpage says "Oxford", the other says "European researchers"

EUROfusion is a consortium of national fusion research institutes located in the European Union, Switzerland and Ukraine. It was established in 2014 to succeed the European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA) as the umbrella organisation of Europe's fusion research laboratories. The consortium is currently funded by the Euratom Horizon 2020 programme. [0]

-- Wikipedia

So the reason it is called European is that it was conceived by the EU and it's partners and it primarily funded by the EU's Horizon 2020 funding programme.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20170830004728/http://horizon202...

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#100
The title is unfair in suggesting this is a result coming from Oxford institutions alone. As correctly put in the EUROfusion official press release, the EUROfusion consortium comprises "4,800 experts, students and staff from across Europe, co-funded by the European Commission".

Edited to add the link (now on HN front page): https://www.euro-fusion.org/news/2022/european-researchers-a...

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