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Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#491

Post by DennisP »

fiftyfifty wrote: post #402
ppaattrriicckk wrote: post #59

In extension to this news and the press conference, one thing I am super excited about, is the private SPARC project and the MIT-spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). If you don't know about it already, I would highly recommend checking it out (e.g. by searching YouTube for "MIT Sparc Fusion Reactor" for some fairly accessible videos on the theory behind why they should achieve fusion way faster than the current…

There are certainly some exciting projects happening in the fusion world coming up. It seems likely we will start seeing much higher energy outputs, I think for SPARC they are predicting >10x the energy produced as what it will consume (Q > 10). My biggest question is with the crazy temperatures involved will we ever see one of these things able to run for hours at a time? With SPARC they are shooting for 10 second b…

Temperature is high but total heat isn't remarkable. The atoms are moving very fast but there aren't many of them.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#492

Post by pbhjpbhj »

The timing is impeccable (making me suspicious), I was just at a UKAEA public meeting yesterday -- they're choosing a site for a new fusion project, a small "demo" reactor.

https://step.ukaea.uk/

You couldn't have better timing to encourage the public that this is a positive thing for us to develop.

FWIW I'm a big fan of JET, Wendelstein, and fusion research in general. And, I think this STEP project is very positive.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#493

Post by galvin »

emteycz wrote: post #453
civilized wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2050 is coming sooner than any of us can imagine. I'm glad there are people looking out on that horizon!

Yeah! But we need to go nuclear [fission] in the mean time... I can't imagine any other way that wouldn't devastate the environment excessively at the same time (e.g. river dams are bad IMHO).

Flamanville 3 in France was started in 2007 and is due to be launched in 2022. It's the first of its generation (in France at least) so the delays and cost overruns are not unexpected. Even so, if more are to be built they will not come into service until the mid 2030's at the earliest. I don't think we can wait that long.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#494

Post by tsol »

soheil wrote: post #401
ComputerGuru wrote: post #297

> It's not a massive energy output - only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water. This made me laugh. How much more British can you get?

You'd probably be surprised to learn that the UK is not at the top of the list of countries with the highest tea consumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tea_consu...

It's strange to me how low India is on the list. As an Indian all the Indians I know drink huge amounts of tea. Might just be an economics thing-- they can't afford to buy as much tea as they'd like to. That or it's something to do with the way the stats are collected

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#495

Post by 34679 »

moron4hire wrote: post #406
advisedwang wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Water has a specific heat capacity of 4184J/kg/C. Lets say to get to the boil you need to go from 20C to 100C and that a kettle holds 1.75L. 59MJ / (80C * 4184J/kg/C) = 176kg ~= 176L ~= 100 kettles. Water has a latent heat of vaporization of 2260 kJ/kg. So to boil it dry: 59MJ / (80C * 4184J/kg/C + 2260 kJ/kg) = 22kg ~= 22L ~= 12 kettles. I have no idea what the journalist calculated.

Did you factor in the inefficiencies of the power distribution grid and the heating element of the kettle? I'd say the journalists are just repeating what they've been told by the scientists, and the scientists factored inefficiency in on a calculation similar to your first.

There may exist inefficiencies in the transfer of heat from the element to the water, but there is no such thing as an inefficient heating element. All of the power it uses will be converted to heat. Take a light bulb for example. When used to light a space, the inefficient part would be the energy that is lost to heat. The rest is converted to light, but as soon as that light hits an object, it's converted to heat. So even a light bulb is a perfectly efficient heating element.

With this in mind, you aren't saving any money on your electric bill by turning off lights when your furnace is on.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#496

Post by DennisP »

q1w2 wrote: post #352
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.

Yep - we're still nowhere near break-even.

We're not that far off. JET previously achieved Q=0.67, ie. two-thirds as much energy output as input. (The new result has higher output but lower Q.)

For a practical reactor we need Q around 30, which might seem far away but tokamak output scales with the square of reactor volume and the fourth power of magnetic field strength. Double the field, 16X the output, and we can generate much more powerful magnetic fields with modern superconductors than we can with JET's copper coils.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#497

Post by AtlasBarfed »

dahfizz wrote: post #295
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Storage likely will be a non-issue once sodium ion batteries scale up, even cheaper and safer than LFP. A couple more years of scale efficiencies and alt+storage will be cheaper without subsidies. Consumer solar+storage will be cheaper than nat gas in a couple years with any rational subsidy.

Land issues? Seriously?

The land issue for solar is a non-issue, it's like fake hand-wringing by the oil astroturfers over birds and windmills when skyscrapers kill 100xs more birds. There's this type of land called desert. Also, there is this thing called roofs where modern solar panels only need a small part of the roof to do a suburban house or apartment building including recharging your EV.

The land issue for wind is even less on an issue:

As for wind, I don't know if you've seen windmills on farms but... yeah, the pole doesn't take up much space. Then there is offshore wind. Windmills can integrate with existing use land (why not nature preserves?), you don't need to dedicate acreage to windmill farms.

Meanwhile, fusion reactors have a wee bit of problems with neutrons flying everywhere and turning the reactor vessels slightly radioactive from neutron capture. Maybe they'll fix that with good absorption spectrum elements, but let's not pretend fusion is 100% clean.

https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-the...

But again, the promise is there for fusion and LFTR/"new" fission. Keep the research, maybe the economics will turn around. Industry sure would need it to fully decarbonize, or, heck, space colonies. Or flying cars! Or any of the other sci-fi stuff we have given up on.

Right now we have an existential threat from GW, and an actual industrialized / productized and economic path is right there: wind and solar. That's what we need money printing for.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#498

Post by mikeyouse »

zulban wrote: post #479
TrevorJ wrote: post #458

Can someone explain something about fusion for me? To make a fusion reactor that's useful you have to solve two problems: First you have to build a working fusion reactor. Second, you have to capture that energy to do useful work. Given that, wouldn't it make more sense to focus on technology to capture energy from the giant, already working fusion reactor in the sky?

In addition to what others have said, the sun isn't always in the sky.

I'd like to see a side-by-side... The sun is always in the sky, just not where power is needed. If you look at the global investment into fusion, I wonder by what order of magnitude that compares to scrapping that work and building HVDC lines East-West to major population centers and North-South to places with super-high availability wind resources. We could basically build those "tomorrow" as compared to spending billions/year in research and then tens of billions/year in actual construction cost when we figure out the technology. Not a 'fair' comparison by any stretch but I think it'd be interesting.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#499

Post by tsol »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #371
taftster wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incompatible docking apparatus, not backwards compatible. Engineers invented these doors, after all.

So? If you know there's another spaceship that you're going to pass and you need to pick people up, you make your docking apparatus backwards compatible. This isn't rocket science :-)

Yes but this spaceship was made by Apple. It's a feature.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#500

Post by whatshisface »

ambrozk wrote: post #451
whatshisface wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Claiming that the issue was Epstein is what any smart legal / publicity team would do in this circumstance. If a PR team was going to pick a fake reason to hide a blasé real reason, why would they pick the biggest scandal possible? I thought rich people tried to keep their personal lives out of the news. Saying that they had drifted apart naturally while the real reason was Epstein is something like what a PR couns…

Melinda Gates is trying to get the best possible settlement from her divorce. The Epstein issue is obvious leverage. Melinda loses nothing by Bill being embarassed in public, and she gains a lot at the negotiating table.

I haven't watched enough mobster movies to be sure, but I think you might have the order of operations inverted on the blackmailing process. The Don doesn't release the photos then start blackmailing, he shows you the photographs, then blackmails you, then maybe releases them if he has a reputation to keep and you didn't pay.
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