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Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

nature.com

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Re: Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

#91

Post by freemint »

danuker wrote: post #42
gmueckl wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The German green party had made it part of their program to stop all research into all kinds of "nuclear" technologies, explicitly listing fusion research as something to be stopped. I think that this passage has been removed again, but the whole thing still serves as a good indicator for the sentiments here.

They do not mention fusion, but they are still clearly against fission: > Wir vollenden den Atomausstieg und bekennen uns zum verabredeten Pfad der Endlagersuche mit höchsten Sicherheitsstandards bei größtmöglicher Transparenz und Beteiligung der Bevölkerung. Der Rückbau der bestehenden Atomkraftwerke muss schleunigst und ohne Zeitverzögerung auf höchstem Sicherheitsniveau erfolgen. Die Atomfabriken in Gronau und Lin…

The last time I checked the sun is shining 24/7.

Re: Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

#92

Post by rhn_mk1 »

thow-58d4e8b wrote: post #88
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A dollar spent on fusion is a dollar not spent on solar panels or turbines that would displace fossil fuels immediately I see this claim a lot, but what makes this true? Why would money allocation be so inelastic, and why can't it become flexible?

Because money, in the end, is just a proxy for labor, energy, land and raw materials. One can print money, but cannot print factors of production

Sure, but then the poster said that we can't allocate labor to this specific goal without taking it away from that specific goal. Why would that be true? Energy supply takes a minuscule fraction of our total labor, and nothing stops us from supporting fusion without unsupporting solar.

Or am I missing something?

Re: Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

#93

Post by rhn_mk1 »

ncmncm wrote: post #77
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A dollar spent on fusion is a dollar not spent on solar panels or turbines that would displace fossil fuels immediately I see this claim a lot, but what makes this true? Why would money allocation be so inelastic, and why can't it become flexible?

Meaning, why can't we just spend an unlimited amount on everything we think we might like?

Who says we can't? Money is a social construct.

Re: Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

#94

Post by panick21_ »

_0w8t wrote: post #84
panick21_ wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare that to a simple molten salt fission reactor. It will simply never be cheaper.

Molten solt reactors do not solve the problem of nuclear waste. It is very expensive to deal with it as it has to be stored for hundreds of years unless some technology would appear to separate that cheaply. Fusion produce like order of magnitude less radioactive waste which will be short-lived. Plus a fusion plant can be very quick to start and shutdown or throttle down which is very useful for base load.

Molten salt reactors inherently don't. But you can burn up higher actinides resulting in waste that only needs to be stored a few 100 years and pose very little danger even in the most absurd scenarios.

You don't need to separate all the different parts. You reprocess our old waste into fuel for modern reactors. In those reactors higher actinides will be burned up. And the resulting output does not have higher actinides and only needs to be stored as long.

Moltex Energy is currently engaged with the Canadian regulator for such a facility, the process is called WATSS. Doing this is actually cheaper then the deep storage storage facilities proposed in many countries. Sadly because of political bullshit reprocessing has been made illegal in the US.

Such things would have been doable decades ago, and the money for it is already on bank accounts in most countries. But politician force the 'dig a hole for everything' solutions instead.

> Plus a fusion plant can be very quick to start and shutdown or throttle down which is very useful for base load.

Next generation fusion would also be very reactive to changes. Far more then traditional.

But the reality is you actually want to run full power as much as you can, no matter if fission or fusion.

Re: Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

#95

Post by hallway_monitor »

ncmncm wrote: post #63
rob74 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not that familiar with the subject, but this phrase sounds suspiciously like the 1943 IBM executive saying there is a market for only five computers in the world - i.e. it completely discounts technological progress. Of course, this progress has been painfully slow until now, but comparing it with fission is still unfair - fission is well-researched and it getting more expensive is tied to the inherent dangers of…

Fission getting more expensive is tied to the very lucrative fully-legal corruption industry. Once a fission plant construction project is started, the money starts flowing, and is practically impossible to stop. If it is ever finished, the money would stop, and nobody actually involved wants that ever to happen, at least not until their kids graduate college. So the project blows through deadline after deadline, and…

Wow this is brutal but feels like it's correct. What a frightening state of affairs.

Is the construction industry really so corrupt? Is government and industry unaware or unwilling/unable to detect this earlier and stop it?

Re: Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

#96

Post by panick21_ »

boomlinde wrote: post #85
panick21_ wrote: post #78

Fusion has no practice reason to exist compare to advanced fission. The improvements in energy density are not really relevant factor at that scale, meaning the difference from oil to fission, and oil to fusion doesn't really gain you much. Fusion fuel cost over the long term is likely more expensive then a fission fast breeder (not to mention a potential of thorium thermal breeder). Is a fusion reactor going to be c…

> this problem and issue that has very viable practical solutions and storage for a few hundred years is viable. So you mean to say that there is no practical reason for fusion power to exist for as long as you ignore the long term consequences of what you're doing?

What consequences. That you need a parking lot full of nuclear waste that just basically stands there and does nothing? Can we not spare a single tennis court sized storage facility?

What are the consequences you are talking about?

We are not talking about some absurd 300000 year storage facility build into the earths core. That is not needed.

Guaranteeing something for 100 years is far easier then for 300000 years. And it can be easily monitored, if one location for some reason is a an issue after 100 years, just move it to another location.

Re: Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

#97

Post by pfdietz »

joss82 wrote: post #46
ncmncm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are forever smashing this or that record, on the verge of break-even, on track to producing free energy without nasty radionuclides. But it is always a con. If they ever do get Q high enough to make energy production conceivable -- it will need Q > 100, when said and done -- a Tokamak reactor will cost 10x much as the equal-grade fission reactor, and cost >10x as much to operate. As fission reactors are today no…

> The more there is, the cheaper it gets. This also applies to nuclear fusion (and, BTW, fission) reactors.

Actually, fission power plants have shown a distressing lack of good experience effects. They got more expensive as more were built, not less expensive.

Re: Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

#98

Post by freemint »

panick21_ wrote: post #89
ncmncm wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If averting climate disruption depended on fission or fusion, we would be doomed. Fortunately, solar and wind are up to the task.

We would be doomed? Somebody should have told France who had a clean green grid 40 years ago. If everybody had simply done nuclear we would be 10000x better of now. The false promise of solar/wind held up by fossil-fuel and anti-nuclear people prevented green energy grids for literally decades. If anything we are doomed because it took so long to actually bring solar/wind practically into being. If we invested in nuc…

Why doomed? Because ever person on earth needs access to energy in the end. Simplified this leads to 5 outcomes:

- keep burning fossil fuels and have resulting climate change

- nuclear power stations in every country including unstable countries, countries with high corruption, dictatorships ... Which means proliferation risk ~1.

- nuclear power generation in "stable" countries and a world wide power grid to distribute energy

- intermittent power (solar, wind) and a world wide grid (almost no) batteries (sun always shines somewhere)

- decentral intermittent power and decentral storage

1&2 will be doom. I hope you agree. 3 is financially inferior to 4 due to the high capacity cost of nuclear compared to intermittent sources. 5 is 2 but with solar instead of nuclear so none of these problems apply. That seems to be the course we are on.

Personally I prefer 4 because we will need to cut down trade to reduce emissions too but diverse trade seems to be a quiet effective way to prevent war. So I hope that a 24/7 energy trade around the globe and "we are literally all connected" is enough to keep us from large scale war.

Re: Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

#99

Post by hallway_monitor »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #92
thow-58d4e8b wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because money, in the end, is just a proxy for labor, energy, land and raw materials. One can print money, but cannot print factors of production

Sure, but then the poster said that we can't allocate labor to this specific goal without taking it away from that specific goal. Why would that be true? Energy supply takes a minuscule fraction of our total labor, and nothing stops us from supporting fusion without unsupporting solar. Or am I missing something?

The argument is that it would be far more effective to take all of the allegedly wasted fusion research money and spend it immediately on wind and solar.

No one knows the future but with the way things have gone so far, fusion in its current form looks like a giant waste of time and money.

Re: Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

#100

Post by pfdietz »

_0w8t wrote: post #90
ncmncm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be nice if they had solutions to the other problems not addressed (see above). But operating it will necessarily still be enormously more expensive than solar or wind, which cost practically nothing. Somebody with one leg can do a lot better in a race than somebody with none, but that is not the measure to consider when the competition is with two-legged runners. (Hint: they win.)

In Europe after the last autumn when for months there were little wind and cloudy sky there is a realization that energy based purely on renewables will require much bigger storage and much more solar or at least significantly more expensive solar that works under clouds. Doable, but cost is non-trivial. So if any of fusion startups can make operating plant within the next 20 years, it can be used. But if that takes…

Long term darkness/calm is solved with hydrogen. Europe has plenty of underground geology suitable for mass hydrogen storage (it's just like natural gas is stored.) Most of the energy still would go directly from solar/wind to the grid, or through efficient batteries, so the low round trip efficiency of power to gas to power doesn't matter much.
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