Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 827 posts

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#291

Post by thehappypm »

epistasis wrote: post #231
andruby wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even without fuel, geothermal still has constraints. Where can we build it? What are the build costs and costs to run (maintenance, staffing, etc)? I doubt we can scale geothermal indefinitely. Fusion might suffer from similar constraints, but afaik, doesn't need "much" space or specific geographic structures.

FWIW, drilling tech is advancing at an incredible rate, making geothermal possible in all sorts of new places all the time. But my primary concern with fusion is cost. I don't see the path to being cheaper than geothermal, nor fission, and new fission is already some of our most expensive energy. The goal may be eventual space travel, which seems like a more plausible goal to talk about than sustainable energy.

There’s nothing fundamentally expensive about a Tokamak. We’re in the phase of fusion of “computers have 1 Kb of memory and take up a whole basement.”

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#292

Post by throwaway894345 »

yholio wrote: post #284
Aperocky wrote: post #248

> This is more than double [the energy] what was achieved in similar tests back in 1997. I was excited for a little bit there.

Yup, a major breakthrough in this glacial field is doubling the energy output in 25 yeas. So by the time captain Picard is born, we might have a very expensive and massive fusion reactor that will generate the same kind of energy we can generate today with very expensive and massive fission reactors. Really now, this is pure garbage and does not solve the major problems in the field nor do most of the myriad startups…

I mean, if you don't invest in the speculative, how do you expect things to advance? Failure at any particular venture isn't a bad outcome.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#293

Post by robotresearcher »

derriz wrote: post #140
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point that your parent commenter was making is that Oxford is in the UK and the UK is no longer a member of the EU or Euratom, although it has various agreements with both.

I'm not sure it's Brexit related - but I've noticed more and more that when the UK media uses the expressions Europe or European, they are referring to the European continent as if the UK was not part of it. I've even heard it used in this capacity in a work presentation which caused confusion in the multi-national audience - "in Asia it's X, in Europe it's Y, in the UK it's Z...". I consume quite a bit of UK media s…

I can say ‘in California X and in the US Y’ without implying California is not in the US.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#294

Post by soperj »

ambrozk wrote: post #280
soperj wrote: post #265

Quoted post unavailable.

Why? He dedicates huge amounts of money to worldwide public health, and is giving away the vast majority of his fortune over the course of his life. Why shouldn't I hold such a person in high regard?

From other comment > I mean, start with why his wife is divorcing him (Jeffery Epstein) and why he's no longer on the board at Microsoft(inappropriate relationships with staffers), then go into how he's screwed up public schooling in the US, then Microsoft under him. That's the easy stuff that you can see publicly.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#295

Post by dahfizz »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #102
prohobo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadge. But I think this is the best bet for sustainable and clean energy, so why not put all the enthusiasm we can into it? A breakthrough is a breakthrough, and that's good news.

What? We have the best bet for sustainable and clean energy. Wind and Solar. They soon will beat natural gas for cheapest unsubsidized LCOE, and considering all fossil fuels are shadow-subsidized, that's huge. Fusion needs to prove is can be cheaper than old-crappy-pressurized solid rod fission first, which is right now getting killed by alternative energy. I was a big LFTR stan for a while. But wind/solar has won. K…

Wind + Solar are near useless without storage, and we do not have anything close to the storage necessary.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#296

Post by Filligree »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #289

I don't understand a lot about these fusion plans, so this might be a dumb question, but if it were to be used at scale, aside from the energy stuff, would it be a viable source of substantial quantities of helium?

Not in significant quantities.

It also produces huge amounts of activating radiation. The reactor walls will be highly radioactive, as will everything from the fuel supply to the helium itself. In principle you can split that off, but I wouldn't want to try. Fission reactors are a lot more tractable.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#298

Post by Filligree »

andruby wrote: post #151
time_to_smile wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're currently on course for having trouble existing across generations. The path we're on now I don't think meeting fusion goals will be big concern if there's anyone around to even be concerned.

True, but if we can crack fusion energy, we can stop burning fossil fuels and we might even have ample energy to extract CO2 from the atmosphere.

Fusion produces a lot more radiation than fission, AIUI.

What makes you think it will be any more politically viable to scale out than fission reactors?

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#299

Post by SantalBlush »

willis936 wrote: post #232
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?

This is a disingenuous argument. JET was not designed as a power plant. Those flywheels are used exclusively to transiently power the copper confinement coils. Since superconduction was discovered, no reactor study has had non-superconducting confinement coils because they are (very obviously) impractical.

Remember, the easiest way for uninformed people to appear scientific is to lob high-level criticisms about the topic. In this case, it's "But it only doubled the output!" or something similar.

We see this pattern on every single piece of science news that comes across the front page of HN.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#300

Post by cft »

kiba wrote: post #112
m_fayer wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy to hear someone make this point. Rather than sneering "vaporware" when decades fail to crack a problem, I would prefer us to keep in mind that if we never try multi-generational projects, we will never taste the fruit of multi-generational projects, and those are some sweet fruit indeed.

I am not sure if we have a project that spans multiple generations? It would be easier to do a project that provide some kind of immediate benefit while having long term multigenerational long term effect. Science is kinda that way. We get immediate knowledge with long term unknown payoff.

Also in the era of family businesses, businesses were much more sustainable, sometimes competitive over hundreds of years. The useful lifespan of a modern public company is much smaller.
Post reply on HN