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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

#161

Post by tsimionescu »

pfdietz wrote: post #100
_0w8t wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Electricity -> Hydrogen -> Electricity is insanely wasteful. If this is the only large scale long term storage we can come up with, we have a huge problem...

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

#162

Post by zaphar »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #156
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 wholly up to the task, and just need building out. This. Every time I read a fusion "breakthrough" story I imagine the history books of the year 3000: "Back in the early 21st century, they spent billions trying to build a star on Earth, when there was a perfectly good one in the sky that produced 1000W per square meter that they could have used for free."

We do not have enough energy storage capability to rely completely on Solar and Wind yet. Both are intermittent producers so to get truly reliable power from them we need storage capacity. There are projects that promise to meet that need but positioning solar and wind as all we need is not a true statement.

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

#163

Post by hoelle »

pontifier wrote: post #159
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…

It's an easy article to write, and it's easy because so many others have written the same thing. It's like articles about Facebook and how their value fluctuates and this or that privacy issue is going to be fixed soon. People have heard about the big players, so big players get the attention. I'm trying to do some fusion research myself, but it's extremely difficult to get anyone to take what I'm doing seriously. I'…

Recommendations include:

1) ditching the toxic negative attitude. It pushes away interest.

2) spend an afternoon or a few bucks on a web designer making your site look better than the "time cube" site. It practically screams crackpot theory.

3) build credibility with academics first. People not in the field will assume you're a swindler by default.

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

#164

Post by wpietri »

garyrob wrote: post #160
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…

"They are forever smashing this or that record, on the verge of break-even, on track to producing free energy without nasty radionuclides." Hacker News comment in late 19th century: "They are forever making flying machines have a little more lift, on the verge of break-even, on track to enabling free flight without nasty immediate crashes. But it is always a con.... The only reliable product of flying machine researc…

Oh? By your logic, we shouldn't say negative things about perpetual motion machines, as they keep getting better and who knows what the future holds!

The truth is that people both over- and under-estimate what can happen in the future. You can't use simple-minded heuristics either way; technoutopianism is at least as dangerous as blind opposition to change.

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

#165

Post by pfdietz »

tsimionescu wrote: post #161
pfdietz wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Electricity -> Hydrogen -> Electricity is insanely wasteful. If this is the only large scale long term storage we can come up with, we have a huge problem...

It would be a serious problem if hydrogen were used for diurnal storage. But for rare event backup, efficiency is really unimportant, since so little of the energy produced will go through that channel. What matters for use cases like that is minimizing capital cost, not maximizing efficiency.

I'll add that the alternative proposal, excess renewables with curtailment, has 0% efficiency on the curtailed power. Using that power for anything at all, including making hydrogen, is more efficient that just dropping it on the ground.

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

#166

Post by pfdietz »

zaphar wrote: post #162
dreamcompiler wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> solar and wind are wholly up to the task, and just need building out. This. Every time I read a fusion "breakthrough" story I imagine the history books of the year 3000: "Back in the early 21st century, they spent billions trying to build a star on Earth, when there was a perfectly good one in the sky that produced 1000W per square meter that they could have used for free."

We do not have enough energy storage capability to rely completely on Solar and Wind yet. Both are intermittent producers so to get truly reliable power from them we need storage capacity. There are projects that promise to meet that need but positioning solar and wind as all we need is not a true statement.

> We do not have enough energy storage capability to rely completely on Solar and Wind yet.

How is this an interesting argument? Of course we don't have things before we build them. That's true of nuclear power plants, too. We can likely build out storage faster than NPPs, with more aggressive cost decline with cumulative production.

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

#167

Post by wpietri »

parasubvert wrote: post #126
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…

The west’s engineering skills are not in decline, though if you have a metric that indicates that, it would be interesting. Europe has not had USA-level problems with building a popular rail network, or other major works. The main differences in costs and time from 150 years ago are: (A) Accounting for Extrinsic Costs. as the nations have become more dense and more democratic, peoples voices need to be heard. Environ…

One other factor I think is really interesting is what Poppendieck calls, "the tyranny of The Plan": https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of...

The basic notion is that the way non-experts think about the work has changed in ways that have drastically increased system inefficiency.

I know zip about construction megaprojects. But this is definitely true in software. Many executives want to pretend that projects are perfectly predictable, which a) diverts a lot of effort to non-value-creating outputs (fantasy plans, fantasy schedules), b) creates huge inefficiency by favoring fantasy plans over what's actually happening, and c) creates plenty of rework and chaos trying to solve the real-world problems when the gaps between fantasy and reality become too big to ignore.

To me, this problem is mainly rooted in executive culture, and is related to the phenomenon some call managerialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism

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

#169

Post by dreamcompiler »

zaphar wrote: post #162
dreamcompiler wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> solar and wind are wholly up to the task, and just need building out. This. Every time I read a fusion "breakthrough" story I imagine the history books of the year 3000: "Back in the early 21st century, they spent billions trying to build a star on Earth, when there was a perfectly good one in the sky that produced 1000W per square meter that they could have used for free."

We do not have enough energy storage capability to rely completely on Solar and Wind yet. Both are intermittent producers so to get truly reliable power from them we need storage capacity. There are projects that promise to meet that need but positioning solar and wind as all we need is not a true statement.

Yes dispatchability is an issue with renewables. We need more transmission too. Both can be solved (and are being solved) with existing technology today, and both are improving all the time. It's both practical and economical today to build an off-grid house with PV and enough Li-Ion storage to bridge the nighttime gap and charge an EV.

With distributed electricity generation e.g. microgrids, the need for big, centralized storage decreases, as does the need for large-scale transmission.

By the time fusion generators exist in a practical form (at least 20 years from now), we won't need them.

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

#170

Post by parkingrift »

pfdietz wrote: post #129
parkingrift wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Do you think China does things without regard to politics? They have clear political motivation to continue to build nuclear power plants. For example, this keeps their nuclear sector occupied and preserves the technology against deterioration. Even if civilian NPPs are not military, the overall technology has direct connection to their military (as it does in France.) Even with that, they are installing more renewab…

China doesn't need to build 150 nuclear reactors at breakneck speed to keep their nuclear sector occupied. They're making a massive investment in this technology from the education level all the way to the construction level.

China isn't planning to realize a majority of their power supply from solar until after 2045.

Like you, I doubt they'll hit that solar goal. Instead, they'll likely build more reactors.

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