Live data from Hacker News

Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

ft.com

171–180 of 833 posts

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#171
post #11

I guess I don't really get it. Nobody doubts that you can get a tremendous output of energy from a fusion bomb with modest inputs. This thing they've ignited is a tiny fusion weapon without a fission blanket and with a huge, inconvenient optical primary. I mean I'm all for science but I don't see the road from this to civilian fusion power as people generally understand the term.

This is like a version 1.0 steam engine. Miniaturization and optimization can come next.

The analogy doesn't really work. The utility of a steam engine was obvious to antiquity, but they did not have the materials technology to build it. They did not need basic science to do steam power. The first practical steam engine predates the understanding by chemists of combustion. It was invented when phlogiston was still the going theory.

NIF on the other hand is already a miracle of materials science. An absolute triumph. But you can't enumerate the list of unsolved problems that, if eventually solved, lead to inertial confinement fusion as a civilian energy source. On the other side you can make that list for magnetic confinement. There is a clear path from magnetic confinement research to commercialization, with a known set of major problems.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#172
post #51

Even if fusion ends up producing more power than consuming in the real world, it still has to compete on cost. People too enthusiastic about fusion tend to ignore that it might not actually be a cost effective source of power. Solar panels are cheap and batteries are easier to build and there are lots of ways of making them.

Most things don’t start off cost effective, they become so due to investment, demand, industrialisation, competition, etc.

Maybe fusion will stay a small part of the energy mix for decades even after the first commercial plants are built but be part of what eventually enables us to use orders of magnitude more energy than we do now…

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#173
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar and batteries are already cheaper than fossil fuels in most markets. Nuclear isn’t competing with renewables, it’s competing against batteries and almost free renewables that charge them. Nuclear is still possibly a great fit for niche locales where renewables aren’t feasible at all. Not a nuclear hater by any means (we need every innovation we can get), just show your math. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/…

Are solar + batteries feasible to heat every house in Minnesota with electricity when it's below -20F (-30C) for a week, we have > just show your math. I admit I can't. It's mostly gut-feeling from various science news sources I keep up with (e.g. Ars Technica; Skeptic's Guide to the Universe).

I think UMN did a study with 4 hour storage plus solar on the grid a few years back.

https://energytransition.umn.edu/modernizing-minnesotas-grid...

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you limit yourself to using solar generated with Minnesota's state borders I live in a cold state. The idea of relying on out-of-state power, regulated and controlled by people with zero accountability to you, for life-and-death energy is a tough sell.

Bad news then. You most assuredly rely on natural gas from Texas traveling through a long underground pipeline to heat your homes and businesses. Relying on solar electricity from Texas or Arizona traveling through a long wire isn't going to change the status quo much.

> most assuredly rely on natural gas from Texas traveling through a long underground pipeline to heat your homes and businesses

Last I checked, we mine our own coal, pump our own oil and put up our own wind farms [1]. Minnesota, for what it’s worth, runs on renewables, coal and nukes [2]. The fifth of natural gas it does use comes from Canada, the Dakotas and Iowa.

These cold-state energy security concerns are a big part of the political puzzle that gets missed in the national discourse.

[1] https://www.wsgs.wyo.gov/products/wsgs-2012-electricalgenera...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=MN

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#175

After a few more major breakthroughs we'll be where fission was in 1942 after Fermi made the first man made neutron chain reaction. After that, we can see what a practical electricity producing plant looks like, and see how much people actually care about small amounts of tritium radiation. At the moment fuel costs in fission are like 5-10% of total costs for a fission fleet. In fusion it could be lower, but that wil…

Fuel is hardly the only advantage, the major issue with fission is the enormous costs of trying to avoid problems or cleanup after them. Thus 24/7 security, redundancy on top of redundancy, walls thick enough to stop aircraft etc. Fission is still by far the most expensive power source even with massive subsides and is only even close to economically viable as base load power backed up with peaking power plants.

In theory much of that is excessive but there is a long history of very expensive mistakes with massive cleanup efforts. The US talks about three mile island as the largest nuclear accident ignoring the Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One that killed 3 people. All that complexity and expense comes from trying to avoid real mistakes that actually happened.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#176
post #90

One thing to consider: Even if you prefer solar, you still need to initially make those solar panels and that is an energy intensive process. I think we're still probably 20 years away from commercialization of this, but I still think this is a very big deal.

> you still need to initially make those solar panels

Can't you use energy produced from existing solar panels to create more of them?

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#177
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>vaporware Have you never heard of ITER? Its set to power on in 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

What's sort of my point: we've had big projects that would totally definitely work this time every few years since the 90s. Will ITER work? Maybe. Would it be the first to fail (or even the 10th) if it doesn't? No. Per your own link there are literally 100s of other "reactors". Its the same as crypto or emissions reductions.

What value are you contributing to this conversation?

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#178
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Looking at the Wikipedia article [1] suggest that they start out with 422 MJ stored in capacitors, turn this into 4 MJ IR laser light, convert it into 1.8 MJ UV laser light, this into x-rays of which 0.15 MJ heat the target of which finally 0.015 MJ heat the fuel. Depending on what in this chain you consider the input energy, you can get orders of magnitude different numbers - 15 kJ of energy produced could…

From https://www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fab-66ef-4e33-adec-cfc345589... > The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers, the people with knowledge of the results said, adding that the data was still being analysed. They probably upgraded the rig since the Wikipedia article was written, so most likely t…

If this is assumption is true, they only produced 0.6 % of the energy they spent. Another question would then be, how relevant this is, i.e. could the UV light be produced much more efficiently than the experiment does? Maybe some constraints forces them to use a very inefficient process? In that case it might be reasonable to use the UV laser power as the reference for the gain.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you limit yourself to using solar generated with Minnesota's state borders I live in a cold state. The idea of relying on out-of-state power, regulated and controlled by people with zero accountability to you, for life-and-death energy is a tough sell.

The state you live in has one of the highest potentials for wind power in the country, easily backed by transmission, batteries, and as a last resort, natural gas. High level, the energy transition isn't simply a fossil->renewables story, but also a centralization->highly decentralized story.

Totally agree, though I don’t know how wind performs in extended and deep subzero / heavy snow conditions. Hydropower is the traditional baseload for the Midwest, but it’s tough to square the destruction to natural beauty that entails in comparison with a remote nuclear set-up.

EDIT: It seems not too badly [1].

[1] https://empoweringmichigan.com/how-do-wind-turbines-work-in-...

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#180

Could someone break down the costs of realistic fusion for me like I am 12 please? For example, for fission, my 12 year old understanding is: Stack uranium plates until the reaction is self-sustaining, boil water to spin turbine, if reaction gets too fast, cover it with lead / cool it with water. Circulated water is slightly radioactive. Main costs are keeping reaction container / need power to circulate water coolin…

Realistic fusion (with the best understood technology): build powerful magnets around a donut shaped chamber, which allows to contain a plasma comprised of Deuterium and Tritium (both Hydrogen isotops) which is then heated by externals sources. Reach very high temperatures such that fusion reactions occur frequently. Some of this energy stays inside the plasma, and some of it escapes under the form of neutrons. Capture these energetic neutrons in a blanket around the chamber, creating fuel (tritium) and heating water pipes that then drive a normal steam turbine. Tritium is radioactive (but has a very short shell life; just wait a couple of decades), and the chamber may be slightly radioactive after decades of neutron bombardment. There are no problems of long term radioactive waste, and the reactor can't do a chain-reaction, so no Fukushima or Tchernobyl.

I need to explain what Q is in the context of fusion. Basically, you heat the plasma with some energy (Energy In), and the fusion reactions produces some energy (Energy out). Q is basically the ratio (Energy out)/(Energy In). When Q is bigger than 1, we call it break-even. However, (Energy In) is not the actual cost of energy you need to run the whole facility, it is only the Energy that reaches the plasma. The same goes for (Energy out): this energy cannot be captured 100% efficiently. Some of it will heat the plasma itself, some of it will escape but the conversion back to electricity is not 100% efficient.

So in a sense, Q > 1, aka break-even, does not mean commercial fusion, it is only a kind of a psychological barrier to achieve (so this is what the NIF announced; still a major breakthrough). We need at least to achieve (Total Electrical Energy out)/(Total Electrical Energy In) > 1 to achieve commercial fusion. But physicists consider the rest as engineering problems, not physics problems. And great news, there is no theoretical limit on how big Q can be: for example, the sun has a Q of infinity, as there is no required energy input. Current estimates put Q at least 30-40 to achieve commercial fusion (again: there is no physical limit to achieve that, only engineering difficulties).

Main costs are: difficult to define, because we haven't commercialized a reactor yet. I would say, for now, everything around it is expensive (magnets, the blanket, the fuel (tritium)). However, once we have sufficiently understood the optimal parameters on how to produce net gain energy, there is no reason why the design of the reactor can't then be simplified to be mass-produced.

Note: the technology used by the NIF is very different from what I described for a realistic fusion device: what I described is called magnetic confinement, and what the NIF did is called inertial confinement.

Post reply on HN