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Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#761

Post by sandos »

kadoban wrote: post #706
avidphantasm wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, I think fusion has the best chance of saving us from ourselves wrt to climate change, so long as the unforeseen consequences aren’t too bad.

It doesn't seem like it's quick enough. We're, at minimum, decades away from it even being built out commonly, and to _really_ save ourselves we should have already replaced a substantial portion of the world's energy generation decades ago.

It might in the future turn out to be more efficient with a "few" reactors than, say, lots of batteries and wind turbines and solar panels, from a resource perspective. But I think not even that will come true, if we optimize stuff enough, which we will have a long time to do before fusion is here.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#762

Post by tremon »

javajosh wrote: post #565
elihu wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ReBCO tape is the specific high-temperature superconducting material they're using. Another important material is FLiBe, which is a liquid that I think absorbs the energy from the fusion reactor. I don't really understand the properties that make it particularly well suited to the task, but I gather it's important. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_barium_copper_oxide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLiBe

According to the article, FLiBe has the same heat capacity of water, but a boiling point over 14x higher (1430 °C according to the article). Melting point is 359 °C, 3.5x higher. I will speculate that its basically used as a water coolant with the phase shifts shifted up and out. I bet the heat exchangers are exotic, too, having to operate at such high temps! In fact I'd expect to see a pretty sophisticated cascade o…

typo, I guess: the melting point is 459 °C, 359 degrees higher than water but 4.5x higher.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#763

Post by kuschku »

HWR_14 wrote: post #673
kuschku wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old-school land reclamation worked by putting woven fences in the water where waves would deposit sand over decades and centuries, slowly growing the land bit by bit. Those versions were already multi-generational projects. (I'm citing the techniques used in the north frisian wadden sea, I'm unsure if the same techniques were used in west frisia as well)

Oh, that's very interesting. So I'm guessing that technique was used to make areas that were put of the water during low tide, and then eventually dikes were added to make them dry land?

Exactly. But this technique only allows you to get land that's exactly at sea level, so dikes are absolutely necessary.

This also means you need drainage systems to remove the water from already reclaimed land, as it's still exactly at sea level and will be relatively wet marshland otherwise.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#764

Post by kuschku »

xxs wrote: post #639
kuschku wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

400V is only used for stoves or instant water heaters, but e.g. our stove uses 11kW actually. If you don’t have these amounts of energy available, the temperature your instant water heater can reach or the speed with which you can cook obviously suffers (which I suspect is one of the reasons why americans prefer gas stoves so much).

the 3phase is used for motors - a lot more efficient (and the better power factor) than the single phase ones.

For industrial applications definitely, but at home there's few people who power motors with triphase or five phase power.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#765

Post by mcv »

amelius wrote: post #759
lumost wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a class of problems that I've become accustomed to being forever in the future. - Nuclear Fusion - AGI - Driverless cars - Quantum Gravity - Carbon Nanotubes There appears to either be a problem where these are either convenient money sinks, problems that are missing key break-throughs or missing critical technologies. Nuclear Fusion would be easy if we had 400T magnetic fields and the structures to support…

Driverless cars really aren't that useful.

Driverless cars would be very useful; it would mean I can use my time in the car in a more useful way, like reading. Now I have to use the train for that.

But maybe that's also the risk of driverless cars: it would make them more attractive than they should be, because they're really too inefficient to be able to afford them as society's main form of transportation.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#766

Post by ricardobeat »

childintime wrote: post #760
TheProbes wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no such thing as a room temperature super-conducting magnet. You are talking about "high temperature" magnets, which are YBCO tape magnets. High temperature, in this case, means about -290 degrees F. The next breakthrough that will come will be YBCO powder-in-tube wires, that will allow much stronger fields than currently. They'll be here within a decade, probably much less, as working prototypes exist now.

> -290 degrees F -273.15°C == −459.67°F

I think they were referring to the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, at around -196°C, not being cooled by nitrogen being what makes them "high temperature".

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#767

Post by chemengds »

johnzim wrote: post #349
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?

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…

Whilst kettles are used as the unit of measurement the main driver of power consumption spikes during those breaks was electric pump for toilet cisterns.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#768

Post by foobarbecue »

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.

Did you mean power storage or waste storage?

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#769

Post by biztos »

rnk wrote: post #751
lumost wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a class of problems that I've become accustomed to being forever in the future. - Nuclear Fusion - AGI - Driverless cars - Quantum Gravity - Carbon Nanotubes There appears to either be a problem where these are either convenient money sinks, problems that are missing key break-throughs or missing critical technologies. Nuclear Fusion would be easy if we had 400T magnetic fields and the structures to support…

Used to be on the list: reusable rockets, reasonably priced electric cars with charging infrastructure, rapid development of new vaccines with direct genetic engineering mechanisms.

Pocket supercomputers, meat-like fake meat, addictive virtual dystopias, two-way wrist radios…

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#770

Post by avidphantasm »

nielsbot wrote: post #739
kadoban wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it _will_ fail at stopping global warming, there's no "may" about it. It will probably have other positive effects though. I'm very onboard for any potential fusion power generation, I just don't think it has any hope of saving us from global warming.

Can we use it to put the CO2 back in the ground? I guess there are some irreversible effects once warming reaches a certain threshold however.

Yes, this is part of what would need to happen: using a super abundance of essentially carbon-free energy to do geo-engineering on a massive scale (including artificial carbon sequestration).
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