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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

#171

Post by jrbdisoshs »

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#172

Post by jfk13 »

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.

I suspect long-term, large-scale hydrogen storage is not "just like natural gas"... those pesky little H₂ molecules are awfully small, and may leak out rather easily compared to hydrocarbons.

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

#173

Post by megaman821 »

criley2 wrote: post #121
Retric wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The number I quoted is from the same Wikipedia article on LCOE that you used, and I used a globalized average as I said in my post. Your $50MWh also does not include storage LCOE, and not including secondary costs for solar when Nuclear has no secondary costs is considered "a trick" to lie about solar costs. Include the costs of gigawatts of Elon's lithium ion batteries, and include the cost of having to 2X-4X solar…

You are being unfair in the other direction. LCOE for wind/solar needs to be blended by figuring out the optimal mix of wind and solar for your area and adding on 4hrs of battery storage. There is not one set number for this but $200Wh and falling is a fair estimate.

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

#174

Post by Intermernet »

wpietri wrote: post #164
garyrob wrote: post #160

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." 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.

We have currently demonstrable laws of physics stating why perpetual motion can't be achieved. We have a visible universe of examples of fusion.

Not saying that fusion power on earth is viable (I personally think that it is), but it's disingenuous to compare it to perpetual motion.

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

#175

Post by dahfizz »

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."

Imagine if we went the other way: "they spent billions on solar infrastructure, so that they could keep the lights on only when the sun was shining".

We don't have the storage. We are not close to sniffing the amount of storage we need to be 100% reliant on solar + wind.

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

#176

Post by Loughla »

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'…

You have a 48 second youtube simulation video, and one paragraph explaining nothing.

How is this supposed to help people take you seriously? What are your credentials? Why should anyone take you seriously?

Are you an academic? Have you submitted this to academic journals or individuals? Have you tried to make or made any connections to anyone in the field?

Also, are you the guy who bought the warehouse full of CD's?

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

#177

Post by dahfizz »

dahfizz wrote: post #175
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."

Imagine if we went the other way: "they spent billions on solar infrastructure, so that they could keep the lights on only when the sun was shining". We don't have the storage. We are not close to sniffing the amount of storage we need to be 100% reliant on solar + wind.

To get a sense of scale: The USA uses on average ~76 twh per day. Tesla produced ~100 gwh of batteries over the whole last year.

So if we nationalized all the tesla gigafactories, it would take us over 760 years to produce enough batteries to store a single days worth of electricity.

I do not think grid storage is solvable with current technology.

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

#178

Post by regularfry »

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…

Interestingly one of the things they proved out in this experiment was a new core lining that doesn't get anywhere near as radioactive as the carbon walls they were using before. That was a bit of a big deal in itself: if it hadn't tracked theory as well as it did, it would have invalidated one of the material choices for ITER and knocked it back a fair bit.

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

#179

Post by garyrob »

wpietri wrote: post #164
garyrob wrote: post #160

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." 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.

I don't disagree at all with what you say above, and I do not think it's inevitable that fusion reactors will be useful in the foreseeable future. You are right that "You can't use simple-minded heuristics either way". I was just pointing out that they were being used in one direction in the comment I responded to.

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

#180

Post by dahfizz »

pfdietz wrote: post #166
zaphar wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I put numbers in another comment, but this isn't a "just build some more batteries" type of problem. The scale of storage needed completely dwarfs our current production capacity. This problem cannot be solved in the near future, with current production/technology.
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