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

531–540 of 827 posts

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#531

Post by exitheone »

lisper wrote: post #208
rat9988 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A typical power plant Fusion power plant aren't typical though

Yes, that is exactly the problem. If they are ever going to be commercially viable they need to become typical. 59MJ per cycle isn't going to do you a lot of good if a cycle time is measured in months as is currently the case. You have to get that cycle time down to fractions of a second at this energy level before you even have a chance at commercial viability. 59 MJ is a tiny amount of energy by the standards of co…

I hope you realize that these are research reactors that are not designed to give you a low interval between cycles or produce power. They are meant so clarify some of the open research questions for the likes of ITER/DEMO that will integrate these findings into things that are actually designed to produce a lot more power quicker.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#532

Post by ambrozk »

whatshisface wrote: post #500
ambrozk wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some of the information is public. Who knows how much there is behind it?

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#533

Post by faeyanpiraat »

DennisP wrote: post #496
q1w2 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So they just need to build the same thing, but make it gigantic in size?

Why is it not yet done?

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#534

Post by jackfruitpeel »

bityard wrote: post #526
soheil wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Ireland is #2? As a culturally ignorant American, that _does_ surprise me.

We are absolute fiends for tea.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#536

Post by HWR_14 »

Out_of_Characte wrote: post #192
kiba wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Netherlands would like a word. Holding back the sea was a monumental project that will definitely last generations to come. Maybe not as exiting as high temp superconductors and fusion but still a nationwide unique product.

It may last for generations to come, but did the original development take generations?

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#537

Post by spywaregorilla »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #449
spywaregorilla wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't have working fusion power, at all. Sure we do. Look no further than this article. We can make it, but its not commercially viable. > "Cost effective" is a judgement call, not physics. If I told you that the cost of coal-generated electricity was that your great-grandchildren would live in an impoverished and difficult world, you might not view that a particular cost-effective either, yet somehow that's the…

> Sure we do. Look no further than this article. We can make it, but its not commercially viable. Q total is way below 1 (translation: it took far more energy to make the energy that was produced, than was produced). We do not have working fusion power, if "working fusion power" means "you get more out than you put in". As for the rest of this, I have no idea who you think you're replying to. Just one follow up, neve…

> Q total is way below 1 (translation: it took far more energy to make the energy that was produced, than was produced). We do not have working fusion power, if "working fusion power" means "you get more out than you put in".

That's not what it means. Working means it works. Can you produce fusion power? Yes. Can you do so in a commercially viable way? No. Q is obviously a part of this. Uninteresting semantics.

> The USA spent more than US$300M per day on the war in Afghanistan, for 20 years. I guarantee you that if "we wanted to go full solar" now, we could. US$2T buys you a lot of anything, including even today's vaguely clunky battery tech.

And I'm telling you, no, we could not, because that's not how the world works. From many perspectives, including economics of how to actually acquire all these solar assets many of which are already being consumed as fast as produced and dependent on limited metals supply chains; land availability with reasonable transmission setups; grid capacity to absorb these new generation facilities on the transmission lines; power availability during non peak times; and the preposterous externalities of trying to rapidly undermine the global energy market.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#538

Post by ggrrhh_ta »

willis936 wrote: post #245
ggrrhh_ta wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But her point stands even if there were mistakes: the press and many scientists, even if unwillingly, have failed to communicate the real state of fusion as an energy source. And I can believe that maybe some representatives did not fully understand the difference between Qtotal and Qplasma and the amount of time a reaction can be sustained (all three things that they would understand if they were explained clearly).

Some context please. Where did they make this failure in the hour long press release?

The parent comment was talking about a video outside of the context of this entry in HN. My reply was in the context of parent comment referring to that video, the video in question provides excerpts of example of that failure of communication.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#539

Post by toast0 »

bityard wrote: post #516
tomp wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes you wonder if the US idea of using just 110 volts isn't better... not from an individual viewpoint (slower to boil water) but from the grid perspective.

The US grid (the last-mile bits anyway) isn't 110 volts, it's 220. It's just our houses that are wired for (mostly) 110 V. Edit: I would love to see some sort of hybrid 110/220 V residential wiring/plug standard take hold in the US. It would require more expensive cable in the walls (since you need one additional conductor) and plugs, but it's totally doable. Most electrical products and appliances made these days ar…

There is NEMA 14, which has hot,hot,neutral,ground, but I don't think anything lower than 20amps is available, and that's a locking one, 30 amps is available without locks, but 30 amps at 220v is a lot of power for household outlets. You'd need larger wire in the walls, not just more of them.

Any sort of outlet upgrade would need a really good plan for how to make it viable, because even if 100% of new construction used the new outlet, it would be decades before you could sell devices that relied on it.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#540

Post by tinco »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #339
thehappypm wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.”

What does 'fundamentally expensive' mean? If it does not incluse precision engineering to build largest vacuum vessel, supercomputers, superconductors, generation and containment of hottest substance on the planet, and largest magnetic fields we can produce. If that's not 'fundamentally expensive', then what is? Especially when your interlocutor is asking for geothermal, a.k.a. a hole in the ground?

You mean fundamentally expensive like building billions of nano meter scale devices, aligning and wiring 24 million of them to be individually addressable on a 6 inch plane? Oh and we build those by the thousands on factory lines.

That's a whole lot more of precision engineering than is needed to build a nuclear fusion reactor, and you can buy it on the order of a hundred bucks.

And it's not just a hole in the ground, last time I checked the thermal conductivity of rocks isn't exactly stellar.

Post reply on HN