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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

#251

Post by pontifier »

boarnoah wrote: post #189
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'…

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.

I'm sorry I keep forgetting to ask for your permission before I hire or fire someone.

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

#252

Post by pfdietz »

vlovich123 wrote: post #142
pfdietz wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, fission power plants have shown a distressing lack of good experience effects. They got more expensive as more were built, not less expensive.

Fission did keep getting cheaper up until FUD about accidents and explosions caused regulations that strangled it (that and overblown fears about proliferation of nuclear weapons).

Yeah, like all those whiners complaining about how first generation BWR containment was totally inadequate.

Never mind what happened at Fukushima, right? /s

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

#253

Post by pfdietz »

wpietri wrote: post #188
Intermernet wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The "stars exist!" argument really annoys me. Among other objections, stars don't even use the specific fusion reactions that terrestrial fusion reactors would use.

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

#254

Post by pfdietz »

ncmncm wrote: post #222
Angostura wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Be fair. It's the relativistic electron beam from a disruption that's going to do that, not the plasma itself. :)

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

#255

Post by pfdietz »

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…

Energy is huge. The world will likely spend the equivalent of approaching a quadrillion dollars over the next century on energy. The Apollo program, in comparison, was less than a rounding error.

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

#256

Post by pfdietz »

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…

What the fusion research community has instead is people who have committed their careers or even lives to a particular field. Getting them to admit they made a mistake is very hard. What did Upton Sinclair say? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Most of them will rationalize as hard as they can for as long as they can.

You sometimes see bitter comments when they are approaching or are in retirement.

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

#257

Post by pfdietz »

ncmncm wrote: post #63
rob74 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not that familiar with the subject, but this phrase sounds suspiciously like the 1943 IBM executive saying there is a market for only five computers in the world - i.e. it completely discounts technological progress. Of course, this progress has been painfully slow until now, but comparing it with fission is still unfair - fission is well-researched and it getting more expensive is tied to the inherent dangers of…

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…

The South Caroline indictments were because some of those involved decided to pull the plug. The indictments were revenge for pulling out and derailing the gravy train.

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

#258

Post by pfdietz »

ncmncm wrote: post #238
Paradigma11 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you dont need a lot of fuel for fission and you also need many other things to keep a ship/station running. Isnt fuel in the ballpark of just one of many consumables that you need?

Fission-powered ion propulsion is the best mature tech we have. In space, the fission doesn't need containment, or even much shielding if it is far enough away from the rest of the ship. In the cloud tops of Titan, Venus, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune, a nuclear power plant may be as simple as a naked pile suspended near the bottom of a big fabric tube with wind turbines at the top. The radioactively-heated, buoyant air…

Titan is perhaps the best place in the solar system for nuclear energy. An open Brayton cycle system on Titan wouldn't even require a very hot reactor, when the inlet gas is dense nitrogen (mostly) at around 94 K.

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

#259

Post by pfdietz »

orthecreedence wrote: post #198
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…

> That is not a bad thing: solar and wind are wholly up to the task Exactly! If we just used every last drop of fossil fuels we had to build, ship, and constantly replace solar and wind generators (and do the same for the massive battery arrays we'll need), nuclear will be a distant memory. > fission reactors are today not competitive ...because price =/= cost. Fission is the least costly form of energy generation, b…

> Fission is the least costly form of energy generation

This has ceased to be true.

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

#260

Post by pfdietz »

ncmncm wrote: post #229
wpietri wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And also because the turnaround time from conception to execution is short, allowing bad practices to be identified and addressed. It also helps that solar construction at the utility scale requires lower skill labor and is more forgiving of mistakes.
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