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Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#181

Post by mattalex »

reacharavindh wrote: post #107

As an uneducated observer to nuclear physics, I could not tell the significance of this achievement. Did we finally learn how to extract more energy from a fusion rector than we supplied to operate it? Could anyone more in the know here explain in simpler and more practical terms please?

> Did we finally learn how to extract more energy from a fusion rector than we supplied to operate it?

No. The issue is that most people only report the gain over the plasma (i.e. how much energy was put into generating the plasma) rather than the full amount of energy put into the process (i.e. superconductors, magnets, generating the deuterium/tritium, maintaining the sun-like heat, etc). If you add this to the computation, you end up having to have a "fusion-gain" of around 50x to break even. The reason people report the plasma efficiency instead of the actual operating efficiency is to get funding and hype.

Don't get me wrong, this result is still impressive, but it's still orders of magnitude off of the required efficiency.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#182

Post by khafra »

ambrozk wrote: post #171
DrBazza wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 30 years time. It's always 30 years time. https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/why-nuclear-fusi...

This is a very dumb meme that people use to avoid learning anything about the actual hurdles that are currently being faced by fusion researchers. At some point, fusion will be much less than 30 years away, and at that point, I guarantee you that lazy people will still be repeating this joke, because it is literaly the only thing they know about the subject.

"Fusion is always 30 years away" is a heuristic that almost always works. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost...

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#183

Post by [deleted] »

ajuc wrote: post #137
formvoltron wrote: post #105

OK so with fusion everybody loves it because the fuel would be clean and nearly endless. Isn't that what solar power offers? Nobody wants to deploy solar due to high upfront cost. However, wouldn't the startup on a fusion reactor be much greater?

The problem with solar is unpredictability and A LOT of batteries needed to bridge the mismatch between production peaking at noon and consumption peaking at late evening. Both of these are solved with fusion power. Energy market operates on the assumption that whoever unbalances the network has to pay for balancing it. Providing too much and too little energy is both bad - you have to pay someone else to use more/le…

[deleted]

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#184

Post by nosianu »

AniseAbyss wrote: post #157
dangom wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one will get funded with that mentality in such a high-risk high-reward area like fusion. But indeed after so many headlines I agree with you that no one gets excited about these news anymore.

I'm not really sure about that. The promise of fusion power is so great that it would be idiotic not to throw money at it. The US was spending a billion a week in the Afghanistan war.

Yeah, but that helped out a lot of US companies that have significant lobbying backing and districts where those companies are located. Similar to how some NASA things get funded.

The outcome itself is not nearly enough, if it even matters (see Afghanistan, it's not like the outcome was a surprise): What needs to happen is that the money river* needs to flow through areas that have influential congress(wo)men and senators who benefit both financially (campaign contributions) and politically (good headlines, get something they can use in deals, etc.).

This is for anything where the outcomes are far away and/or uncertain. In those cases the money flow itself becomes the actual target. It is something concrete, with impact right away, compared to those types of goals.

A politician will probably support military spending in case the homeland is actually really threatened, but when it's not it's all about the benefits not of the military equipment for the troops, which are questionable (even when it works, do they actually need it?), but the benefits of the spending itself, pretty much disregarding the final products.

Example Afghanistan, which at first glance seems to fit my claim less than military spending for hardware:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/11/us-afg...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-won-in-afghanistan-private-... (paywall)

> One-third to half of that sum went to contractors, with five defense companies— Lockheed Martin Corp. , Boeing Co. , General Dynamics Corp. , Raytheon Technologies Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp. —taking the lion’s share, $2.1 trillion, for weapons, supplies and other services

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#185

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

ajuc wrote: post #156
cnasc wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you live in a smallish, not-so-sunny country like the UK. How much of your land area do you have to cover with solar panels in order to completely rid the nation of fossil fuels?

Fun fact - solar energy production over a year only differs by a factor of 4 between worst and best reasonably inhabited places.

Another fun fact. When I installed my PV array, I got the alignment of one of them wrong by 1 degree (from due south). I looked up how much power I lost from this mistake ... not much, about 1%. Then I used the same tool to check what would have happened if I had installed them facing due north. To my surprise: only 15% less power!

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#186

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

dymk wrote: post #172
ComradePhil wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Fusion is completely different from solar. It can provide steady energy without going down for years. Solar goes down multiple times a day.

Name a single fusion plant that has been running uninterrupted for years. Meanwhile Australia has retooled for 10% Solar and batteries in a matter of years, that number is rapidly increasing, and is turning off their coal plants.

> Name a single fusion plant that has been running uninterrupted for years.

Minutes, even. Perhaps you meant fission?

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#187

Post by robbomacrae »

SamBam wrote: post #176
lisper wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did we finally learn how to extract more energy from a fusion rector than we supplied to operate it? No. > Could anyone more in the know here explain in simpler and more practical terms please? It's impossible to tell because the story is incoherent. The central claim is that they "release[d] a record 59 megajoules of sustained fusion energy" but this makes no sense. One can talk about sustained power (over a perio…

I don't believe that this is entirely mis-stated. We already know that fusion power plants are going to operate by igniting plasma in short bursts -- a few seconds, maybe 10s at most -- and generating a huge amount of power during that single burst. You then ignite it again and again. The question is how much total energy you can extract from each of those bursts. By that metric, the total energy is what's important,…

Your description made me wonder if it would be possible to make an ICE to extract the power. I then found a paper called Fusion Internal Combustion Engine from 2010 [0]. Does anyone know if there was any merit to this idea and if anything else has come of it since?

0: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/215544178_Fusion_In...

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#188

Post by lisper »

SamBam wrote: post #176
lisper wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did we finally learn how to extract more energy from a fusion rector than we supplied to operate it? No. > Could anyone more in the know here explain in simpler and more practical terms please? It's impossible to tell because the story is incoherent. The central claim is that they "release[d] a record 59 megajoules of sustained fusion energy" but this makes no sense. One can talk about sustained power (over a perio…

I don't believe that this is entirely mis-stated. We already know that fusion power plants are going to operate by igniting plasma in short bursts -- a few seconds, maybe 10s at most -- and generating a huge amount of power during that single burst. You then ignite it again and again. The question is how much total energy you can extract from each of those bursts. By that metric, the total energy is what's important,…

> "59 megajoules of sustained fusion energy" means a single burst produced that much.

In what sense is that "sustained"? A typical power plant produces that much energy in less than a second on a continuous (i.e. sustained) basis. Producing 59 megajoules once is basically a joke. It is analogous to detonating a pipe bomb (at a cost of several billion dollars) and claiming that as significant progress towards an internal combustion engine.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#189

Post by mavhc »

nicoburns wrote: post #61
mavhc wrote: 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

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.

If so then it's impossible to advance, which would be annoying.

What's needed is people who know the subject matter and are experts at running large companies.

SpaceX turned rockets into a production line, experimented, blew a load up, and then fixed the problems with landing. But that's productising last year's thing, not inventing a new possibly impossible thing. Interesting to see how Starship goes.

Need a leader to stay: you do x, you do y, not a committee where every country gets to make one of the 12 magnets because they're a primary school and everything has to be "fair"

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#190

Post by jvanderbot »

nosianu wrote: post #184
AniseAbyss wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really sure about that. The promise of fusion power is so great that it would be idiotic not to throw money at it. The US was spending a billion a week in the Afghanistan war.

Yeah, but that helped out a lot of US companies that have significant lobbying backing and districts where those companies are located. Similar to how some NASA things get funded. The outcome itself is not nearly enough, if it even matters (see Afghanistan, it' s not like the outcome was a surprise): What needs to happen is that the money river* needs to flow through areas that have influential congress(wo)men and se…

Well, it's not like the US would pay someone else to develop NASA's missions, would they? Part of the point of NASA is to keep aerospace expertise thriving, (I'd argue one of the primary goals, in fact), by answering really challenging science questions. You're right in letter, but off in spirit by comparing it to war profiteering.

Just imagine where we'd be if the US had a similar "Focus here" initiative for semiconductors since the 1960s.

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