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Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#721

Post by MadcapJake »

hattmall wrote: post #692
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to work at CFS. Cambridge, MA is right down the road from me and there is no greater cause right now than fusion energy in my opinion.

Why though, we already have Nuclear energy, we could easily build enough that it could power the world's energy needs. The issue is storage, until we have a revolutionary storage solution very little will change with fossil fuel usage.

Storage is an issue for the other renewables due to intermittent peak power. Fusion should be able to operate like a traditional power station.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#722

Post by Dylan16807 »

thedougd wrote: post #628
hedora wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just run US-style appliance circuits to your kitchen, etc. Those are sometimes three conductor and other times four conductor. However, I doubt it'd pass inspection if they were easily accessible from the counter-top. If you're going to flout building codes anyway, it'd probably be easier/more practical to just run circuits with foreign outlets instead. Also, it might be easier to find appropriate GFCI brea…

EU is on 50hz AC, where as the US is on 60hz. It would work fine for purely resistive appliances, and possibly devices with switching mode power supplies, but some devices would be unhappy plugging in to the wrong frequency at 220V. I'm not sure about the phase alignment but that may be an issue as well. US is split phase, but Europe has 220 on a single conductor?

How many non-switching power supplies will care either?

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#723

Post by socialdemocrat »

ajuc wrote: post #137
formvoltron wrote: post #105

OK so with fusion everybody loves it because the fuel would be clean and nearly endless. Isn't that what solar power offers? Nobody wants to deploy solar due to high upfront cost. However, wouldn't the startup on a fusion reactor be much greater?

The problem with solar is unpredictability and A LOT of batteries needed to bridge the mismatch between production peaking at noon and consumption peaking at late evening. Both of these are solved with fusion power. Energy market operates on the assumption that whoever unbalances the network has to pay for balancing it. Providing too much and too little energy is both bad - you have to pay someone else to use more/le…

You don't need batteries for this. You could build concentrated solar power (CSP), instead. These have trailed PV development for years because they have not been paid a premium for being able to deliver power on demand. Thus PV has outcompeted them. But with better regulation giving them a premium for delivering power at night they are getting a comeback.

Also thermal storage and cryogenic storage can easily provide enough capacity. The problem is that they are not as efficient as batteries. If you buy electricity but only get 50% of that electricity back after storage, then you need to sell at 200% the price you paid.

Electricity prices don't swing enough today to make the feasible. But if far more wind and solar was built, then you would get much cheaper power at peak, which storage providers could buy and sell with a profit.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#724

Post by Terry_Roll »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #712
HanyouHottie wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does this mean 9/10ths of the power can be sold and the other 1/10th can be re-used to power the reactor endlessly? No: https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY

That video's a bit confusing because it purely talks about watts and not everything is continuous. Anyway, the important part: In addition to the output being thermal, with losses from conversion, only the energy going into the plasma is being counted. So measuring the entire system, this reactor might still be a little short of break-even.

So they arent counting magnets/magnetism as a source of energy like a battery then? However I'm sure these newer stronger possibly more directional/controllable batteries will have an effect in electric motors in the future.

I think the newer higher temperature super conductors helps, but then I wonder if the cooling facilities of the older generation of super conductors might have been a potential future safety feature on earth but not in space.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#725

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#727

Post by Dylan16807 »

dahfizz wrote: post #446
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not nessesarily, alternative approach is to overbuild them 10x so thay we always generate more wnergy than we need and have continent spanning super-grid because it's always windy and sunny somewhere.

Today Boston has a sunrise at 11:47 am utc and Los Angeles has a sunset 1:30am utc. That is 10+ hours where the USA gets zero sunlight. Inconveniently, we also hit peak energy usage during those 10 dark hours. So if you want to ignore the storage problem, you need to rely on wind only. And if you have to dramatically over provision production to be able to meet demand, the cost benefits disappear. Storage is a must f…

> And if you have to dramatically over provision production to be able to meet demand, the cost benefits disappear.

"Not cost-effective to be the majority of power production while CO2 pollution is free." is very different from "near useless".

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#728

Post by socialdemocrat »

cnasc wrote: post #116
formvoltron wrote: post #105

OK so with fusion everybody loves it because the fuel would be clean and nearly endless. Isn't that what solar power offers? Nobody wants to deploy solar due to high upfront cost. However, wouldn't the startup on a fusion reactor be much greater?

Imagine you live in a smallish, not-so-sunny country like the UK. How much of your land area do you have to cover with solar panels in order to completely rid the nation of fossil fuels?

I have a bunch of renewable energy calculations here:

https://nextjournal.com/erik-engheim/renewable-energy-calcul...

They show that you need roughly 25 m2 to cover energy use of a family. That easily fits on most roofs. A regular apartment is at least 80 m2, so you only use a fraction of the roof space. That means regular roof could in principle cover a 3 story apartment building with all the needed power.

Of course industry and business also use power. But if every house had 50 m2 solar panels on the roof on average you would cover that as well.

Thus roofs are in principle more than enough for most countries. Sure this will not always work, but it actually works quite well to combine solar power and agriculture: Agrovoltics. It can actually improve yields and give extra income to farmer which can sell electricity.

These kinds of things is not taken into consideration when comparing land usage of nuclear power and solar power. Solar power can be mixed with residential areas and farms. Nuclear power can't. You are not going to place a fusion power plant on people's roofs.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#729

Post by socialdemocrat »

ComradePhil wrote: post #556
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.

It can do that if they manage to make it work as planned Solar, even under ideal conditions, needs backup and much more manpower and management to make it work... and even then, it is not reliable. So, solar is not a replacement for fusion, or nuclear or coal for that matter. It is great for supplementation though.

No it doesn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#730

Post by pabs3 »

If humanity switches to fusion and as a result vastly increases our energy usage, how much waste heat can we emit before it starts to affect global temperatures? Will we need to use some of that energy on carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere?
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