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Tell that to the Sun. We already have a fusion reactor sufficient to meet all of humanity's energy needs, it's a gravitationally contained fusion reactor with a projected lifetime of at least one billion years, so why not just rely on that? Seems to have done wonders for the biosphere for the last one billion years, hasn't it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No shit. Turns out a daily detonation of a fusion bomb tends to wear on things and when those things fail... you've just detonated a fusion bomb.
We’re facing a catastrophe. I and others have described elsewhere that the path we’re on is much, much worse than even the most dire of predictions the IPCC makes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30947756 Teller et al anticipated your objection. It’s why the reactor is supposed to dig into sold rock. If there’s a catastrophic failure then it’s yet another subsurface nuclear test. And the more advanced designs co…
There are a lot of processes we don't fully understand so your claim is hard to substantiate. Also, if that was the case then a lot of people would probably just accept their fate.
Tell that to the Sun. We already have a fusion reactor sufficient to meet all of humanity's energy needs, it's a gravitationally contained fusion reactor with a projected lifetime of at least one billion years, so why not just rely on that? Seems to have done wonders for the biosphere for the last one billion years, hasn't it?
I'm not sure about the scale here, but is it really as crazy as the article says to use tritium that is formed from fission? What's the ratio of fusion:fission energy you'd need? I can't imagine even if it was 50% or 25% that it wouldn't be worth doing seeing as you'd just be fuelling a clean energy source from the waste stream of another energy source that doesn't produce CO2.
The reaction is supposed to be self-sustaining. The reactor walls are supposed to emit more than enough tritium to satisfy your needs. Whatever you bring from outside is just to bootstrap it once you turn it on. (I imagine they are not collecting the tritium between runs, but it's something you are expected to do.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No shit. Turns out a daily detonation of a fusion bomb tends to wear on things and when those things fail... you've just detonated a fusion bomb.
We’re facing a catastrophe. I and others have described elsewhere that the path we’re on is much, much worse than even the most dire of predictions the IPCC makes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30947756 Teller et al anticipated your objection. It’s why the reactor is supposed to dig into sold rock. If there’s a catastrophic failure then it’s yet another subsurface nuclear test. And the more advanced designs co…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article covers that. > Tritium breeding was originally going to be tested as part of ITER, but as costs ballooned from an initial $6 billion to more than $25 billion it was quietly dropped. Willms’ job at ITER is to manage smaller-scale tests. Instead of a full blanket of lithium surrounding the fusion reaction, ITER will use suitcase-sized samples of differently presented lithium inserted into “ports” around the…
$25 billion... thinking about how much money we've dedicated for active warfare in the last 2 months alone... clearly we have our priorities.
You can't respond to the bad guys with a plea for them to stop what they are doing because you would rather spend the money on something else.
That isn't to say that battles should not be picked carefully, just that sometimes you don't have a choice and have to deal with a situation and spend lots of $$$ and sometimes blood in order to avoid a worse situation. Even in the context of "last 2 months alone" it isn't clear what specific action is being referenced so the comment is just too abstract, IMHO.
In some cases it makes sense to engage, in others it doesn't. There is no single correct answer unless you want to enter into a discussion of pacifism.
This seems like a non-sequitur. If we need to keep around (or even build) a few heavy-water fission plants to enable the fusion industry, what's the problem? The simple phrasing of fission as "dirty" really shows the quotee's biases. You could easily envision a stable energy mix with a few percent of fission, the rest fusion and storage/peaking power, and that would be far, far cleaner than our current GHG/pollutant-heavy mix of fossil fuels.
It seems quite premature to call this a "crisis" since we already have proven ways of manufacturing the required ingredient. I suppose the risk is just that this pushes up the price of fusion in the initial phases of deployment, providing an "activation cost" that delays fusion from taking over, but that's quite a speculative concern at this point.
* In a perfect world, there would be a more ambitious program developing the breeding technology in parallel to ITER, Willms says, so that by the time ITER has perfected the fusion reactor there’s still a fuel source to run it
* Like many of the most prominent experimental nuclear fusion reactors, ITER relies on a steady supply of both deuterium and tritium for its experiments
* When it’s finally fully switched on in 2035, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor will be the largest device of its kind ever built, and the flag-bearer for nuclear fusion
* And as ITER drags on, years behind schedule and billions over budget, our best sources of tritium to fuel it and other experimental fusion reactors are slowly disappearing
* Right now, the tritium used in fusion experiments like ITER, and the smaller JET tokamak in the UK, comes from a very specific type of nuclear fission reactor called a heavy-water moderated reactor
* “We’re hitting the peak of this tritium window roughly now.” Scientists have known about this potential stumbling block for decades, and they developed a neat way around it: a plan to use nuclear fusion reactors to “breed” tritium, so that they end up replenishing their own fuel at the same time as they burn it
* “Calculations suggest that a suitably designed breeding blanket would be capable of providing enough tritium for the power plant to be self-sufficient in fuel, with a little extra to start up new power plants,” says Stuart White, a spokesperson for the UK Atomic Energy Authority, which hosts the JET fusion project
* “It would be an absurdity to use dirty fission reactors to fuel ‘clean’ fusion reactors,” says Ernesto Mazzucato, a retired physicist who has been an outspoken critic of ITER, and nuclear fusion more generally, despite spending much of his working life studying tokamaks
* “After 2035 we have to construct a new machine that will take another 20 or 30 years for testing a crucial task like how to produce the tritium, so how are we going to block and stop global warming with fusion reactors if we will not be ready until the end of this century?” says Mazzucato
Arthur Turrell's book, The Star Builders, is an excellent overview of the state of the art of nuclear fusion technology. Unfortunately, however, fusion is unlikely to be radically cheaper than other sources.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reaction is supposed to be self-sustaining. The reactor walls are supposed to emit more than enough tritium to satisfy your needs. Whatever you bring from outside is just to bootstrap it once you turn it on. (I imagine they are not collecting the tritium between runs, but it's something you are expected to do.)
> The reactor walls are supposed to emit more than enough tritium to satisfy your needs. Didn't know that fusion generators produced its own fuel! If it produces more than enough, then the excess tritium is considered radioactive waste?