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

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

#111

Post by criley2 »

ncmncm wrote: post #38
Aeolun wrote: post #17

As much as I enjoy reading this news. It is feels heavily sensationalized. "Smashes" the energy record. We're talking about a fusion generator here, that after 25 years of work, now manages to output 'double' the energy, to 59 MJ in 5s -like 20 MW- while requiring 180 MJ input power. Somewhere hidden in the article is the news that this could mean a input/output ratio of 10 in a full scale reactor, but that's also so…

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…

Solar and wind are not and likely will never be "wholly up to the task" unless you install about 4X as much as you need, which is quite the tall order and certainly changes the numbers. You might say "solar is cheaper per MW than fission" but someone planning your local grid sees "I need to setup 4X the solar MW that I do fission, and I need a battery solution as well" and the numbers look very different.

A great example is Germany over the past year had uncharacteristically low wind for months and months on end, dropping power generation by as much as 30% for the year from that source.

The result? They burned A LOT of gas and coal. A LOT.

The reality is that power use doesn't necessarily follow the sun or the wind, and so buildouts of those technologies need to be done at extreme multiples of baseline need to account for entire seasons of low output (or just burn hydrocarbons...). You have to build your wind and solar to support a hypothetical 10 or 50 year minimum production, and just overproduce at all times.

This is why baseload nuclear generation will remain a fantastic choice for nations for decades to come, even at a higher price. Nuclear runs at night. It runs when the wind is still. It runs and runs and run no matter what, providing consistent and predictable power. For every MW generated by nuclear, you need about 4 produced by solar/wind, to achieve the same up-time and reliability.

And that's before we discuss the ecological concerns of one tiny little nuclear facility versus dozens of square kilometers of solar/battery builds out to match it.

If our society abandons fission in favor of solar/wind only, it will be to our detriment

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

#112

Post by pfdietz »

d-gearloose wrote: post #11
calibas wrote: post #8

Note, the power output was about 1/3 the power needed to sustain the reaction. > JET’s latest experiment sustained a Q of 0.33 for 5 seconds, says Rimini. JET is a scaled-down version of ITER, at one-tenth of the volume — a bathtub compared to a swimming pool, says Proll. It loses heat more easily than ITER, so it was never expected to hit breakeven. If engineers applied the same conditions and physics approach to IT…

The good thing about fusion is that a lot of problems stem from the size of the surface area as compared to the volume. The bigger the reaction vessel gets, the favorably this ratio is. This experiment just shows that the predictions about ITER seem to be in a realistic region.

You have that backwards.

The bad thing about fusion is that the power has to radiate through the surface of the reactor. That means that when you are at the engineering limit of what that wall can withstand, your volumetric power density decreases as you make the reactor larger.

This is unlike a fission reactor, where heat is transferred through the surfaces of large numbers of thin fuel pins, and where the surface area increases in proportion to the volume of the core.

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

#113

Post by parkingrift »

ncmncm wrote: post #74
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fission reactors are today not competitive, and get less competitive by the day No, we are just incompetent idiots. This has nothing to do with fissions and everything to do with degradation of contruction and practical egnineering skills - now it takes 30 years and 100 billion dollars to make a small railway in California. Victorian England or China could do this without much trouble. The english-speaking western…

It is much simpler than that: fission is mature tech; its cost is not on the way down. Solar costs are still in free fall, wind almost as much so. The cheaper those get, the less competitive fission gets, just standing still. The corruption tax on fission projects just exacerbates its structural problem.

Fission costs would absolutely be on the way down if we continued to invest in it. Fission is a fundamental aspect of China’s energy strategy. They don’t spend 30 years building these reactors and they don’t consider it fully matured tech.

You can build a fission reactor in five years and it will reliably power a city 24 hours a day for decades and decades. That will never be true for solar.

The west has become comically inept at hard projects. Solar is easy. Just buy panels from China. Funny that China thinks fission is the future. I guess no one told them about solar.

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

#114

Post by panick21_ »

freemint wrote: post #98
panick21_ wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 distribu…

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

Overblown issue when you think about it. And there are many reactor designs and fuel cycles that make it totally unpractical for a whole host of reasons. Neither for dictators nor terrorist are these all that relevant targets.

It would take to long to get into this in detail but its certainty doable in a safe way.

The reality is, its a very unlikely vector, if a nation has the finances to do it, they will just do it.

-----------------------

Nuclear power with a heat-based battery driving commercial turbines places right at the location of current coal plants is likely the best possible solution.

Modern nuclear power plants already have a heat battery almost by definition, if you just circulate a larger amount of salt, you basically have the same thing as a Concentrated Solar Plant.

Every country has ample fertile nuclear material, once you give them a started reactor they can refuel it with domestically mined materials. So every country could be safe in assuming that they would continue to have power even if international trade was blocked.

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

#115

Post by Retric »

criley2 wrote: post #111
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…

Solar and wind are not and likely will never be "wholly up to the task" unless you install about 4X as much as you need, which is quite the tall order and certainly changes the numbers. You might say "solar is cheaper per MW than fission" but someone planning your local grid sees "I need to setup 4X the solar MW that I do fission, and I need a battery solution as well" and the numbers look very different. A great exa…

Base load isn’t an inherent advantage it’s strictly worse than dispatchable power unless it’s cheap, and Nuclear isn’t that cheap. Which is a problem because excess wind and solar makes Nuclear power economically worthless for much of the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation#/media...

Subsides could make up the difference for nuclear as could vastly increased nighttime prices.

PS: It’s only when your looking at islands like say Hawaii where you want that kind of massive overproduction. Across larger areas you never see 100% production from everywhere at the same time, but you also don’t see minimum production from everywhere at the same time.

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

#116

Post by merb »

criley2 wrote: post #111
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…

Solar and wind are not and likely will never be "wholly up to the task" unless you install about 4X as much as you need, which is quite the tall order and certainly changes the numbers. You might say "solar is cheaper per MW than fission" but someone planning your local grid sees "I need to setup 4X the solar MW that I do fission, and I need a battery solution as well" and the numbers look very different. A great exa…

Germany‘s Problem is different. We can generate way More wind energy but we cant Transfer it, thus we can only use the wind regionally. And our transfer projects are estimated to take longer than planned…

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

#117

Post by pclmulqdq »

cstross wrote: post #108
Aeolun wrote: post #17

As much as I enjoy reading this news. It is feels heavily sensationalized. "Smashes" the energy record. We're talking about a fusion generator here, that after 25 years of work, now manages to output 'double' the energy, to 59 MJ in 5s -like 20 MW- while requiring 180 MJ input power. Somewhere hidden in the article is the news that this could mean a input/output ratio of 10 in a full scale reactor, but that's also so…

Nope, this is good news. JET is a 1980s research project into how to contain a plasma and squish it enough to achieve fusion at all, not a practical generator. It doesn't have superconducting magnets, it runs on big lumps of copper, with limited cooling and no way of recovering output power. In the latest run, they achieved fusion and kept it running until JET ran out of power for its magnets . The plasma didn't touc…

This is a really great achievement for a fusion reactor, and actually is a breakthrough that makes me think that it might be on its way to serious commercialization.

Unfortunately, a lot of other fusion news is not similarly fundamental, though, so it can get tiring to see "we made a few extra watts but the reactor still went unstable."

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

#118

Post by parkingrift »

pfdietz wrote: post #107
ThomPete wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most of that cost is politically based not technical

Fission is being built at all only for political reasons. People who build power plants on their own dime are shunning the technology. No merchant nuclear power plant selling into a competitive market has ever been built anywhere.

China will construct 150 fission reactors between now and 2035 to produce 200 gigawatts of power at a total cost of $440B.

A similar buildout in the US would take 70 years and cost well over a trillion dollars.

Do you think China is building all those reactors for political reasons as opposed to generating reliable power 24/7 for a century?

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

#119

Post by criley2 »

Retric wrote: post #115
criley2 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar and wind are not and likely will never be "wholly up to the task" unless you install about 4X as much as you need, which is quite the tall order and certainly changes the numbers. You might say "solar is cheaper per MW than fission" but someone planning your local grid sees "I need to setup 4X the solar MW that I do fission, and I need a battery solution as well" and the numbers look very different. A great exa…

Base load isn’t an inherent advantage it’s strictly worse than dispatchable power unless it’s cheap, and Nuclear isn’t that cheap. Which is a problem because excess wind and solar makes Nuclear power economically worthless for much of the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation#/media... Subsides could make up the difference for nuclear as could vastly increased nighttime prices. PS: It’s only when…

The LCOE for utility scale solar is around $68/MWh while new nuclear is $88/MWh.

The LCOE for grid storage of power (necessary addition to solar) is $160/MWh.

Double solar with grid storage is as much as $300/MWh at the utility scale using globalized averages reported to NEA, BNEF, Lazard, IRENA 2018-2020. Obviously some countries will be a lot more or less on costs depending on their circumstances and location.

Interconnect isn't enough, all of the US is in darkness for several hours a day. (And Texas will never connect). You require storage, and I still question if 2X is enough to produce enough power during a 10 year minimum without firing up extensive hydrocarbon peaker plants.

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

#120

Post by Retric »

criley2 wrote: post #119
Retric wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Base load isn’t an inherent advantage it’s strictly worse than dispatchable power unless it’s cheap, and Nuclear isn’t that cheap. Which is a problem because excess wind and solar makes Nuclear power economically worthless for much of the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation#/media... Subsides could make up the difference for nuclear as could vastly increased nighttime prices. PS: It’s only when…

The LCOE for utility scale solar is around $68/MWh while new nuclear is $88/MWh. The LCOE for grid storage of power (necessary addition to solar) is $160/MWh. Double solar with grid storage is as much as $300/MWh at the utility scale using globalized averages reported to NEA, BNEF, Lazard, IRENA 2018-2020. Obviously some countries will be a lot more or less on costs depending on their circumstances and location. Inte…

Nuclear is nowhere near that cheap, LCOE even with massive subsides in the US sees 2020 nuclear well past 160$/MWH and rising. Wind and solar are both under 50$/MWH LCOE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy#/medi...

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