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

241–250 of 282 posts

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

#241

Post by ncmncm »

dahfizz wrote: post #180
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.

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.

It is dishonest to pretend batteries are the only viable storage method.

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

#242

Post by ncmncm »

jfk13 wrote: post #172
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.

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.

Hydrogen storage is difficult only in metal tanks at high pressure and temperature. Store it underground or liquify it, and the problem dissipates.

Heating and lamp gas composed of of hydrogen and carbon monoxide (!) were once delivered throughout cities through cast-iron plumbing. That was displaced by "natural gas" as increasing numbers of people were found to have been asphyxiated after a lamp flame in their house died, typically from a pressure fluctuation.

Natural gas then had to have mercaptan odorants added after leaking gas accumulated undetected and exploded. Then, valves that would only stay open when hot came into regular use, for pilot lights. Now pilot lights are gone, replaced by spark generators. Hydrogen will displace natural gas in industrial settings, but synthetic methane or propane will probably be needed for domestic use.

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

#243

Post by ncmncm »

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.

And, anywhere it is used, it will also be stockpiled. And sold back whenever the spot price rises.

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

#244

Post by ncmncm »

orthecreedence wrote: post #240
ncmncm wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange, then, that they are building more solar and wind than fission.

Why not build both? Nuclear is great, and pound-for-pound is a much better energy source than solar, but you can build solar much more quickly than nuclear. I don't think your rebuttal is particularly damning. My points against solar I raised to you in another thread stand: to build the panels/batteries we need, it will create an extreme excess of carbon in the atmosphere. That's not to say we shouldn't build solar,…

I.e., never.

"What a terrible bet solar and wind are", as you claim immediately above, would be a reason not to build out solar and wind, if it were correct. But it's not, and they are.

And, it is at best naive to believe that it takes more energy to produce a solar panel than it will generate. People mining and refining silicon, cadmium, and tellurium and making solar panels out of them do not get power for free. They pay open market prices for energy, which they pass directly on to customers all down the chain to the final buyer. When your panel's production output pays off its purchase cost, its output has (much more than) exceeded the energy used to produce it.

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

#245

Post by ncmncm »

DennisP wrote: post #133
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…

Those interconnects take a long time to build, mostly due to political opposition, and aren't that cheap either. For example, the 2GW 400-mile Southern Cross has turned out to be a 17-year project, costing $2 billion. https://www.eenews.net/articles/what-a-2b-texas-project-says... They're not the only ones: > the 732-mile TransWest Express high voltage transmission line filed its first permit application in 2007, but…

Delays in interconnect construction call for local storage, which usually are needed anyway, because long-distance interconnect is not reliable or, often, strategic.

So, the main role of interconnect is to deliver power that is cheaper than replenishing your storage locally, or to use replenishing your storage faster than you could with local generation or by ship.

Far-northern climates will need to keep stockpiles of anhydrous ammonia or hydrogen to burn in gas turbine generators when transmission lines fail, probably synthesized using equatorial solar and shipped, or synthesized using transmission-line delivered hydro power. Each place will use the cheapest power available in each moment.

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

#246

Post by ncmncm »

panick21_ wrote: post #110
pfdietz wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear waste is not the major problem with fission, capital cost is. Fusion solves a minor problem of fission while making the major problem worse. It's a great example of misplaced focus. Cooling down the magnets of a fusion plant is not a quick process, btw. Hell, just getting a fusion plant built with RAFM steel up to operating temperature is a delicate process. Once irradiated, the temperature window that materi…

Exactly, capital cost of large civil engineering project and the financing of that is actually the driver of the cost. If you can build a nuclear plant with 500MW output and reduce the amount of concrete needed by significant factor, all of a sudden your are quite competitive. Just for comparison, this is one of the furthest along commercial GenIV projects designs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pZC_ajI8Hs No massi…

And, not building them at all is easier yet. And, massively cheaper.

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

#247

Post by ncmncm »

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…

Notably, none of the people getting big grants and promoting their flying machine experiments succeeded, or were even on track to succeed someday.

ITER is the Samuel Langley of the present day.

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

#248

Post by ncmncm »

rsynnott wrote: post #186
hallway_monitor wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Fukus…

It is, anyway, a bigger problem in the US than in some other places, and, in the US, a bigger problem in public projects than in private projects. So, we see it operating today on NASA's SLS rocket, but not on SpaceX's Starship.

But there has never been a privately financed nuke plant.

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

#249

Post by Someone »

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…

> That is, the energy that would be required to build it would vastly exceed the total energy it could store integrated over its lifetime.

Storage ‘buys’ energy when it’s cheap and ‘sells’ it when it’s expensive, where ‘cheap’ can even mean ‘free’ at times.

You would build it using averagely priced energy (using only cheap energy is impractical, as it would keep machines and personnel tied up waiting for prices to drop)

Also, having a large buffer can mean having to spend a lot less money on excess solar and wind farms. They wouldn’t have to meet all peaks in demand.

Those still could make it economically viable.

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

#250

Post by pontifier »

Loughla wrote: post #176
pontifier wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's difficult to find the right balance between details and general concepts, and it's clear that I haven't refined my message clearly enough.

I'm not an academic, but have a reasonable level of physics understanding. The concept is simple enough that it should be understandable by people that have a basic understanding of how charged particles behave in a magnetic field.

It should be taken seriously because it's a good idea, and deserves to be studied. I readily admit that a full analysis is beyond my abilities, but I haven't been able to find anyone that can do any better at evaluating it, and I've talked to a lot of people.

I'm moving forward with the self funded construction of the prototype, because with this type of thing, I don't think ANYBODY can say with certainty that it will work or not. Even simulations aren't enough to tell for sure.

And yeah, I'm also trying to restart Murfie among other things.

Post reply on HN