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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

#181

Post by pfdietz »

Intermernet wrote: post #174
wpietri wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the obstacles to practical, competitive fusion power, particularly DT fusion, and especially the mainstream approach of JET/ITER, are so great that calling investment in it "the economic equivalent of perpetual motion" is not far off.

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

#182

Post by pfdietz »

dahfizz wrote: post #177
dahfizz wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What a terrible argument. A global energy supply system is a huge thing. That means it will make sense to spend literally trillions of dollars on it. This will mean building enormous capacity to build its components, including as many battery factories as we need.

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

#183

Post by idiotsecant »

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.

>We can likely build out storage faster than NPPs

First, this is yet to be determined. Even assuming it is true, which I'm not sure it is, The problem is not limited to storage - you also need massive transmission system upgrades that will cost on the same order of magnitude as an Apollo program. I think in the long term it should certainly be done, but pretending that the cost of solar and wind power is the cost of solar panels, or even the cost of solar panels + storage is not comparing apples to apples.

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

#184

Post by wpietri »

garyrob wrote: post #179
wpietri wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> they were being used in one direction in the comment

That's not correct at all. The simple-minded heuristic is along the lines of "technology is bad" or "this new thing will never work".

But the dream of fusion as "too cheap to meter" has been going on for 70 years. The comment you're replying to wasn't talking in general terms, but had specific critique of both the long track record and the practical utility of the product they're shooting for.

It might work and it might not; I have no idea. But your attacking a straw man won't help it get there.

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

#185

Post by dahfizz »

pfdietz wrote: post #182
dahfizz wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What a terrible argument. A global energy supply system is a huge thing. That means it will make sense to spend literally trillions of dollars on it. This will mean building enormous capacity to build its components, including as many battery factories as we need.

Once we agree that the solar + wind solution will cost trillions and take decades to scale up anyway, the benefits of fusion start to shine through. We may as well invest all that time and money in scalable production that doesn't exhaust the earth's supply of natural resources.

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

#186

Post by rsynnott »

hallway_monitor wrote: post #95
ncmncm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This seems... dubious at best? In terms of large nuclear reactor projects recently, we have the Finnish and Flamanville ones as examples of major overruns... but they're the first two examples of a type. Other EPR builds are going much better; one of the Chinese ones is finished and the UK one is basically on track. The timing was bad, in that EPR starts coincided with a general loss of interest in nuclear over Fukushima, but there's nothing too unusual here.

Historically the first build of a type has _generally_ been problematic.

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

#187

Post by garyrob »

wpietri wrote: post #184
garyrob wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> they were being used in one direction in the comment That's not correct at all. The simple-minded heuristic is along the lines of "technology is bad" or "this new thing will never work". But the dream of fusion as "too cheap to meter" has been going on for 70 years. The comment you're replying to wasn't talking in general terms, but had specific critique of both the long track record and the practical utility of th…

I will let other readers of this thread judge for themselves.

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

#188

Post by wpietri »

Intermernet wrote: post #174
wpietri wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good thing I didn't compare fusion to perpetual motion, then. I was pointing out that his too-simple approach could be easily misapplied, and picked an especially obvious negative example to counter his especially obvious positive one.

At this point we just don't know whether fusion is like airplanes or whether it's like perpetual motion. Unless you are proposing building an actual star, the existence of stars tells us approximately nothing about whether a fusion-based power plant is economically achievable in our lifetimes.

I think it's an interesting idea and I'd love to see it happen. But I think it's important to be realistic in our discussion of it.

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

#189

Post by boarnoah »

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'…

Can I recommend dropping the use of royal we, with respect to how you describe your work on the project.

This is usually a lot more common in software projects, and it doesn't come across well when most the effort is clearly (at least from a quick overview)from a single person.

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

#190

Post by epistasis »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #13
epistasis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fusion will not solve any energy problems we have today, and is unconnected to them. Fusion will have to, maybe, compete with solar/wind/storage in 20-30 years, and beat the prices for that 20-30 years from now. With solar+storage being cheaper than many fossil fuels today, fusion is going to have to be extremely cheap to be able to be a competitive terrestrial energy source with 20-30 years more of solar and storage…

I agree that solar/wind price points have massively gone down but how is storage a solved problem? I have only seen research projects in this field, is there anyone who has commercially deployed an energy storage solution? (other than hydro projects)

These are somewhat old stats:

> One growing solution to this, Bolinger said, is the addition of batteries to utility scale solar projects. While adding storage can increase the PPA price from $5-$20/MWh depending on the size and duration of the battery, Bolinger said, they are growing in popularity. Of 460 GW of solar projects in queues around the nation as of 2020, 160 GW included a battery.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/developers-increasingly-pai...

We are right at the inflection point of deployment, where projects are cheaper with storage than without, so the amount of projects with storage is going to skyrocket very soon. The thing that makes it cheaper to include storage is lowering of prices during peak production hours, or even curtailment. So after a state gets > ~10% or so of their energy from solar you will see far more storage.

Standalone, for-profit batteries are also becoming common these days, especially on highly-renewable grids that are purely profit driven, like Texas' ERCOT grid. And ERCOT is purely pay-for-energy, so deploying a battery there requires analysis of the arbitrage opportunities, and understanding the grid congestion, etc.

Here's a small battery deployment, but the interesting thing was this current analysis of arbitrage market depth:

> According to John Hancock’s Andrew Mazze, the first hour of energy arbitrage is the most valuable in ERCOT’s market construct and adding extra hours of storage does not justify the extra capital cost required. “I don’t need four hours to maximise the value of the battery [in Texas], you can get 90% of the value with much less capital cost, with a one or two-hour battery [system],” he said.

https://www.energy-storage.news/texas-broad-reach-power-brin...

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