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Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#211

Post by [deleted] »

lisper wrote: post #188
SamBam wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inter…

[deleted]

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#212

Post by dymk »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #186
dymk wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, I mean fusion. The parent comment claims "[Fusion can] provide steady energy without going down for years". I want a single example of this.

Meanwhile, we have massive grids of solar and battery being installed _today_, and existing installations replacing coal plants.

I'm tired of people talking about fusion (or even nuclear, as it's so mired in public FUD) as if it's some panacea. We have a solution right now: Solar and batteries. It works in places with cloudcover. It works in cold and hot climates. It works at night. It's getting cheaper every year.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#213

Post by Mvandenbergh »

IceHegel wrote: post #120

Not to be an asshole, but I think the fusion crowd could go for more of an under promise, over deliver mentality.

Sure, that's an approach that has led to the success of Silicon Valley and the employment of most of the people on HN (as well as the fortunes of Y combinator).

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#214

Post by dang »

adg001 wrote: post #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...

We've edited the title to match the article now. Not sure if the submitted title ("Oxford's JET lab smashes nuclear fusion energy output record") was the BBC's and they've corrected it, or was editorializing by the submitter (which isn't allowed on HN - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#215

Post by xondono »

ck2 wrote: post #198

I've always wondered, can fusion be weaponized like fission? Because if so, that's the first thing governments are going to do with it, not free/cheap power for the masses.

Nuclear fusion bombs are old tech, fission research is about getting fusion without requiring detonating a fission bomb first.

Even if that wasn’t the case, why would they? Once you can kill the whole planet, there’s no extra points for killing it multiple times over.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#216

Post by willis936 »

dnautics wrote: post #98
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…

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 co…

You're asking for a simplification when there is no way to do it without lying. The fact is you do need to know more than a layman to appreciate how impractical ICF really is or how useless looking at Q is in nearly every context that matters. No MCF machine has even attempted to get a higher Q in the past 25 years. Look at lawson criterion and scaling laws for progress.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#217

Post by siver_john »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #166
limaoscarjuliet wrote: post #109

According to Sabine Hossenfelder, published numbers are frequently mis-stated on purpose. When you look at frequently reported Q Plasma (or plasma efficiency) we are not that far from it being > 1. However, we should look at Q Total (total efficiency), which is still way below https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY For years, I was hoping fusion is close. After watching Sabine's video, I'm not so optimistic anym…

Nothing concrete to add, just the anecdote that the plasma physics class I took in grad school hands down had some of the sketchiest looking physicist math I think I have ever seen. Felt like a SWAT team from the mathematics department might burst through the door at any time.

Just imagining the mathematics SWAT team coming through the door and swatting the marker out of one of my physics profs' hands when they went from ydy/dx=x -> ydy=xdx as if they were simply re-arranging a fraction, made me chuckle.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#219

Post by j245 »

adg001 wrote: post #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...

Oxford is also a geographical location. So it could be interpreted as, Research lab in town of Oxford.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#220

Post by GenerocUsername »

jfengel wrote: post #209
whimsicalism wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sabine is overly critical IMO. The distinction she is making is known to anyone who has spent a little bit of time thinking about fusion (hopefully that includes the grant writers) and projects like ITER are explicitly aiming for Q=10, not just "breakeven"

That's kind of her thing. She is usually right, but also overly pessimistic in a way opposite from the popular press over-optimism. I get frustrated because it paints science in an undeserved negative light. It is at least truthful, in a way that most anti science writing is not. Mostly I find it unhelpful in that it points out problems without either explaining why they were reasonable or giving a real alternative.

Popular 'i f#@cking love science's type science deserves to be painted in a negative light.

IFLS pushers are motivated by money, clicks, and clout and to a large extent misinform the public.

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