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Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#821

Post by tsimionescu »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #817
baryphonic wrote: post #806

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an expert at all in this area, but my understanding was that CFS' design addresses the neutron bombardment problems and the tritium breeding problems by making the reactor smaller and enveloping it in some sort of molten salt. Because the wall is smaller, they plan on being able to replace the inner wall yearly via 3D printing. Wind & solar are fine where they make sense (i.e. windy or particularly sunny places),…

The LCOE of wind/solar is under natural gas, and sodium ion batteries will hit the market this year or next according to CATL press releases (always a grain of salt until you see the product on the market). They are supposed to be half the cost of LFP. And let's face it, nat gas / coal are effectively subsidized by ingrained government policy while they SHOULD be subject to a ten year escalating carbon tax. Nuclear i…

I think you're a bit too optimistic on solar deployment for residential areas. Sure, you're probably right in California, but Norway won't be powering their homes through roof-top panels.

Also, most people don't live in single family homes, they live in 30-100 family apartment blocs, where even at the equator there won't be enough roof space to power the whole building through solar.

Wind does have a massive land use problem as well (as does hydro). In most of the world outside the USA, there aren't huge swaths of unused land anywhere near residential or industrial areas.

Which is why for example France has green-lit 6 new fission reactors, and the EU in general is looking at declaring fission green energy to get the required subsidies. This is also why Germany, that went all in on wind and solar and even has a few days each year where the entire grid is running on wind+solar+hydro, still produces about twice the GHG as France (both total and per capita).

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#822

Post by spywaregorilla »

formvoltron wrote: post #671
1_player wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why you and many other commenters are so against the idea of fusion. Solar is decent, not perfect by any stretch, so we should just give up trying to solve the energy technology for the next 200 years? It's not even like it's one or the other. No one is abandoning solar to work on fusion. But fusion, if it works, is orders of magnitudes more efficient than solar is. It opens avenues that are considered im…

I'm 48. When I was 16 I remember reading a Scientific American article that was describing how nuclear fusion was around the corner. Within the next 2 years!

I hear a lot of stuff like this and it just doesn't jive with my childhood experience. I have a suspicion that bullshit was, on some specific channels like pop sci, much easier to pass in the pre-internet days. Or at least the signal : noise ratio has gotten much better with a voice of reason saying "no" whenever these things pop up.

It's always been clearly communicated to me that fusion is extremely hard and we're not that close to getting it working.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#823

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

jiggawatts wrote: post #600
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you!

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#824

Post by GavinMcG »

mannykannot wrote: post #814
GavinMcG wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not possible to fix a particular semantics outside a particular time and context, and certainly not possible to do so in general. Here, as soon as someone recognizes that the amount of energy cited is way higher or lower than would be implied by their own definition, they should 1) identify the difference ("Boil here means 'boil n kettles dry' rather than 'bring n kettles to boil'") and 2) in most cases, avoid t…

Indeed - so it is clear what one should do here, which is to begin by assuming the author is adopting a well-established meaning within the relevant context. For this, we have a couple of clues: one is British English usage, given that this is a press release from a British laboratory, and the other is that there is a meaning in which the calculation works out correctly. In the light of this, what is your objection t…

Saying "X is indisputably the accepted and intended meaning of the phrase wherever English is spoken" is not in conformance with those principles at all.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#825

Post by yholio »

jiggawatts wrote: post #600
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nothing about the current tokamak based designs suggests they will be any cheaper to build for a given power rating than existing fission designs:

- They need large, highly advanced cryocooled superconducting magnets in very close proximity to a hundred million degree plasma. This only makes economic sense in massive, and expensive plants.

- They are a very strong source of fast neutrons useful to transmute cheap depleted uranium into plutonium, so carry massive proliferation risks, need close regulatory scrutiny and will require mounts of paperwork to operate, thus exceptionally inflexible to improvements and rapid iteration. Just like the current fission crop.

- Aneutronic fusion is a currently a purely theoretical concept, in the last 70 years nobody has been able to contain even the much cooler D-T plasma for economically viable durations and temperatures.

- The structure of the reactor becomes radiologically active and cleanup operations must be considered. Highly penetrating neutron radiation means some radiation will escape regardless of containment, requiring a radiological exclusion zone. No Mr. Fusion in your car, sorry.

- They operate and must breed sensitive nuclear materials - Tritium, a well known component of boosted thermonuclear weapons. The limited efficiency of tritium production from lithium-6 might require obtaining some from fission reactors to top up the fuel cycle and keep fusion reactors operating.

So when you draw the line, a life time of magnetic containment research has produced a speculative design that even if it were to work, which it doesn't, would be, in the best case scenario, comparable to existing fission designs that are being phased out for cost and risk issues.

A PhD money pit with zero chance of ever building anything useful.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#826

Post by mannykannot »

GavinMcG wrote: post #824
mannykannot wrote: post #814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed - so it is clear what one should do here, which is to begin by assuming the author is adopting a well-established meaning within the relevant context. For this, we have a couple of clues: one is British English usage, given that this is a press release from a British laboratory, and the other is that there is a meaning in which the calculation works out correctly. In the light of this, what is your objection t…

Saying "X is indisputably the accepted and intended meaning of the phrase wherever English is spoken" is not in conformance with those principles at all.

There appears to be a certain irony in how, in your rather sanctimonious posts here, you seem to have generally failed to act in accordance with the very principles that you accuse me of violating.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#827

Post by Out_of_Characte »

kuschku wrote: post #763
HWR_14 wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thats why the netherlands built those old school windmills. thats how land was reclaimed below sea level. They no longer serve the same function but are used instead for small shops and for tourists.
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