Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 282 posts

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

#221

Post by zardo »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #210
dahfizz wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pumped hydro is a lot more promising than batteries for sure, in that current capabilities is off by a factor of a thousand instead of a million. The largest pumped hydro station[1] provides up to 24 gwh of storage. So three thousand of these stations (costing $12 trillion) would store one day's worth of electricity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...

Agreed that pumped hydro is the most efficient storage solution but it's limited by geography: You can only do it where there's an existing significant elevation change. Building a sufficiently elevated lake artifically by heaping thousands of cubic kilometers of dirt is not cost-effective. That is, the energy that would be required to build it would vastly exceed the total energy it could store integrated over its l…

Yeah building mountains is not a realistic solution. Thermal storage is probably the best replacement where pumped hydro isn't feasible.

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

#222

Post by ncmncm »

Angostura wrote: post #157
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…

> But it is always a con. I think you should rephrase that, because it's pretty insulting to researchers who have been working incredibly hard on taking steps towards Fusion. I think the phrase you were grasping for is: "I doubt it will ever be economically viable".

The con is in calling every last incremental improvement a "breakthrough". No, you didn't break through anything. The only upcoming breakthrough is the plasma eroding a hole in the chamber wall.

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

#223

Post by _0w8t »

gmueckl wrote: post #153
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.

If hydrogen is produced from electricity at scale, it won't be used for energy storage. It'll get sold to chemical plants first. They'll pay good prices.

Or to steel smelters.

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

#224

Post by ncmncm »

dahfizz wrote: post #194
adonovan wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So don't use batteries. Pumping water uphill is still the most efficient large-scale technology for electrical storage.

Pumped hydro is a lot more promising than batteries for sure, in that current capabilities is off by a factor of a thousand instead of a million. The largest pumped hydro station[1] provides up to 24 gwh of storage. So three thousand of these stations (costing $12 trillion) would store one day's worth of electricity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...

It is a good thing, then, that pumped hydro is not limited to existing dams, or even to places where a hydroelectric power station would be practical. Pumped hydro does not need the large watershed and elevated river valley a hydroelectric dam needs. All pumped hydro needs is an elevated depression somewhere not too porous. There are myriads of those, and building a penstock up to one is very cheap.

Some places have no hills, so are not candidates for pumped hydro storage, and would need to rely on something else, such as long-distance transmission lines, or liquified air, or synthesized hydrogen, or synthesized ammonia, or underground compressed air, or iron-air batteries, or numerous others, or (most usually) some combination of them.

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

#225

Post by dahfizz »

zardo wrote: post #220
dahfizz wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds like a proposal for just not de-carbonizing until fusion is ready. Is that what you mean? When do you think we could have say 5% of the worlds power coming from fusion reactors?

I'm happy to increase renewable energy production where possible. My point is that saying "we can just be 100% solar" is just as impractical and far fetched as saying "we can just be 100% fusion".

Renewable advocates would be more successful if they were realistic about the problems with significant solar reliance.

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

#226

Post by ncmncm »

idiotsecant wrote: post #183
pfdietz wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

We are down for many, many times the cost of Apollo, regardless. The only question is how much available power we will get for that. The very best one running is solar+wind+storage, far ahead of the others.

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

#227

Post by ncmncm »

willis936 wrote: post #127
hunter-gatherer wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent some fair amount of years as both a government employee in DoD and then some years as a defense contractor amd I can tell you the military industrial complex is a real thing. In my contracting days I worked with a handful of DoE engineers that were more familiar with reactor projects and as I understood it, reactor peojects basically follow the same type of workflow as any big DoD prohect. So OPs comment is m…

I've worked in fusion research and defense. MIC corruption and incompetance is quite high but virtually not present in the fusion research community. The researchers, you know, give a shit . They're not there to make a buck and milk the gravy train. If a machine gets greenlit then they pour everything into getting it to succeed because it might be the only research advancement greenlit in their life. Failure is alway…

The fusion researchers are not who would finance a fusion reactor. The people who finance those would be the ones financing fission plants, and then milking the project for as long as it can be made to run. Since nobody expects a fusion plant construction project to take less than 20 years and $50B after it is proved possible, they will be on it like flies.

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

#228

Post by ncmncm »

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...

Hydrogen is so useful for so many other things that its (present) poor round-trip efficiency doesn't matter much. And, that efficiency will only ever get better, not worse, and will get better faster the more of it there is.

But hydrogen is very far from the only storage choice, it is just one that is attractive for numerous ancillary reasons: we need to make the hydrogen regardless, so might as well store it too.

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

#229

Post by ncmncm »

wpietri wrote: post #167
parasubvert wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Solar costs stay in line because it is easy to count panels, and multiply by by the very public cost per panel. Similarly for wind, and for storage.

But few have the skills to estimate what any part of nuke should cost.

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

#230

Post by ncmncm »

orthecreedence wrote: post #199
pfdietz wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> They have clear political motivation to continue to build nuclear power plants. If realizing what a terrible bet solar and wind are is political, then yes I agree their motivation is political.

Strange, then, that they are building more solar and wind than fission.
Post reply on HN