Darn, I found the article quite underwhelming. It may be a major breakthrough relative to past accomplishments in the field but it’s far from commercial viability.
Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
591–600 of 827 posts
Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
#592Earlier 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…
> 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.
Similarly, in most of continental Europe phase-to-phase is 400V but most outlets are 230V. E.g. in my apartment only the stove has a 400V three-phase (4-wire) connection.
Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
#593In 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…
The insane thing that people should realize about the 20T CFS test back in September was that it was them completing the first of 18 coils, and it performed incredibly well. The secret sauce is better high temperature superconductors, and the ridiculous magnets you can build with them. They're pretty much putting these coils together as quickly as they can accumulate the HTSC wiring, and once they have all 18, they b…
> they basically just need to put them all in a ring and light it up
Well, if that's not under understatement... There are surely many more challenges in the high-field line of research, probably more than we know of, since they're kind of pioneering this field. Large size tokamaks, depsite their huge costs, have some considerable benefits like longer timescales for MHD instabilities and smaller stresses (both thermal and mechanical).
Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
#594Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think this is a great example of why fusion will probably not drop in price. With semiconductors, prices fall continuously because there is continuous iteration, and starting from the very very first lithographic circuits there was a market. There's an entire industry, competitors, and it's a factory system. Fusion is not like that, it will be like building monuments, there's not thousands or millions of the same t…
I think you're underestimating how small fusion reactors are. We're going to be needing not just fusion reactors per city, but per city block. If we manage to get them to break-even, they're going to be super plentiful.
At least, that's what the promise is, we'll have to see of course.
Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
#595Darn, I found the article quite underwhelming. It may be a major breakthrough relative to past accomplishments in the field but it’s far from commercial viability.
Yes, but every step forward on this path is thrilling. If we crack carbon capture at scale, and unleash fusion, it would change the game for the survival of our species.
Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
#596> 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?
It's also quite a helpful metric. Most British people are aware that the national grid used to spend a lot of time making sure they had the power available to draw during the commercial breaks of mass-media TV events (series finales, half time in a cup match etc) purely for the nation boiling water with electric kettles en masse. Great intersection of hard science (energy necessary to boil water + extremely efficient…
Yes, and some places world cup viewership can take down the grid!
Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
#597Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't know about Paul Allen, but after searching it seems the top result is about how they managed to regain some friendship: https://www.geekwire.com/2019/bill-gates-patched-things-paul... I know very little about Gates but can only find information indicating Epstein wanted to do business with him under the guise of it being a great benefit to charity, which in the end turned out to be a ruse of some sort. Perha…
When Paul Allen found out his cancer was terminal, Bill phoned him a number of times and Paul refused to take those calls. So much for friendship. Do you actually believe Melinda Gates divorced him because he wanted to do business with Jeffrey Epstein in a philanthropic fashion?
I don’t believe much about situations I know only what media has enabled me to know.
If I were to assume anything, I’d first guess that a healthy marriage could endure a questionable relationship. If it did in fact end over that, it could have been due to underlying issues rather than something more scandalous.
I’d also guess that Epstein also did legitimate business, and with many people we don’t point fingers at.
Given that with the limited information available, I can’t draw a conclusion.
Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
#598Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I kinda like that all but a couple outlets in my house can't kill me. Also, I boil my water on an induction stove plugged into 50 amps at 220 volts. I'm not waiting around, to put it mildly.
110v can easily kill you. It's a little harder to get a good solid connection through your body and into the ground than 220v. But it certainly can and does happen.
Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
#599Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is a great example of why fusion will probably not drop in price. With semiconductors, prices fall continuously because there is continuous iteration, and starting from the very very first lithographic circuits there was a market. There's an entire industry, competitors, and it's a factory system. Fusion is not like that, it will be like building monuments, there's not thousands or millions of the same t…
I think you're underestimating how small fusion reactors are. We're going to be needing not just fusion reactors per city, but per city block. If we manage to get them to break-even, they're going to be super plentiful. At least, that's what the promise is, we'll have to see of course.
I've never heard anyone suggest that fusion could scale to be really tiny like that. Do you have any pointers on where I could look to learn about something like that? Because every existing thermal electricity generator scales to be really big for the efficiency gains, and fusion is a thermal electricity generator as planned so far. Tiny steam turbines in each block does not sound cost effective, even if the heat is free.
Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
#600Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we put the massive amounts of money we have put into nuclear fusion and fission into bone simple solar panel purchases. I wonder if anyone has done the math. There’s a fully functioning fusion reactor 91 million miles from us that sends a lot of energy our way.
The levelized cost of large scale solar power is about 7 cents per kilowatt-hour.
ITER alone will cost $21B minimum and won’t make power. DEMO will conservatively cost about the same, but let’s be generous and round up the total “fusion research cost” to just $30B.
That would buy about 1.5e18 joules, or around the same amount of energy as the electrical generation of the United States… for a month.
So, a drop in the bucket compared to what we use globally…
Even if you use much bigger numbers for fusion research and assume further solar power cost improvements, fusion might still be worth it.
However, it’ll only be worthwhile if the total cost the production fusion plants is not too high. If they end up costing $10B each then the whole thing will be a dead end economically.