271–280 of 322 posts
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Makes sense. I would love to see a blog post with some progress pics, but I understand that building a fusion reactor is simply a slow process!
Their progress pics are on Instagram and TikTok (unfortunately): https://www.instagram.com/cfs.energy/
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That drives up costs because you have to maintain many gigawatts of backup capacity sitting idle most of the year. It's better to have more flexible solutions that provide value the whole year. That's either baseload (fission, fusion) or grid-scale, seasonal storage (unsolved problem).
The backup capacity is cheap (in capital cost) compared to nuclear providing the same output. Like, an order of magnitude cheaper. Combustion turbines are remarkably compact and inexpensive for their power output (this is why they power our aircraft). It's wonderful what happens to machinery when you can reduce the need to transfer heat across fluid-solid boundaries. Rocket engines are an even more extreme example of…
Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant cost $6 per Watt of installed capacity over the projected 50 years of lifetime. Simple natural gas turbines (not combined cycle) cost around $2 per Watt over 50 years in just capital costs. This doesn't take into account the cost of the fuel, or the magic infrastructure to produce, store, and deliver hydrogen.
I'm taking Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant as the base for comparison because it's an example of what you can do, when you have a "mass produced" design that you can just quickly build.
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Sorry, but this is bullshit. A steam turbine and a generator will be a _minor_ detail in the overall list of expenses building a fusion generator. It's like saying: "We should build an airport here in the desert, because we'll be able to save on cutting the grass!"
I feel like it's more like saying, we should build an airport here, because it's near a city and in a good location, and the land is cheap because no one else wants it for a number of reasons and this is the only thing that practically makes sense to go there. It's not going to save a meaningful amount of money. But that doesn't mean it's a bad idea.
I'm also in general skeptical about conversions of coal power plants into nuclear even for fission. Typical nuclear plants produce much milder steam temperatures and pressures than coal power plants, so their steam turbines are optimized for different conditions.
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You're wrong about that. Back up with green hydrogen is quite plausible. Europe has enormous salt formations in which cavities can be solution mined for gas storage (this is one of the chief ways natural gas is stored). Storing hydrogen, the cost of these caverns per unit of storage capacity in these would be about $1/kWh. The total potential capacity there is in the petawatt hours, far more than would be needed. A c…
> You're wrong about that. Back up with green hydrogen is quite plausible. I have not seen any real plan to achieve this. Right now, it's basically a giant asterisk with a footnote saying: "Magic happens here". One plan I've seen where authors went totally wild and actually tried to compute what's needed, required converting 80% of housing to district heating with molten salt storage, all kinds of energy storage, and…
There is nothing preventing this from being applied to Europe. All the technologies are available. It's just a matter of integrating existing capabilities, which is the surest kind of innovation.
No pipeline upgrades are needed for hydrogen for grid storage, since there's no need to move hydrogen away from the storage caverns. It can be created and consumed there. It could be useful to build pipelines, of course, but it isn't necessary. I am NOT suggesting using hydrogen to replace natural gas in distributed applications.
Power-to-natural-gas has the problem of where does the carbon come from. CO2 capture (either from the atmosphere, or from the exhaust of the CC plants) would add to cost, and then the CO2 needs to be stored also. And, the round trip efficiency will be considerably below that of hydrogen. Power-to-liquid fuels would make more sense; it doesn't cost that much more to turn CO2 + H2 into such fuels instead of to methane. Liquid fuels (normally for air or ship transportation, for example) could also serve as a rare event backstop along with hydrogen, for once-in-a-century events, as long as the CC plants can burn both.
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The backup capacity is cheap (in capital cost) compared to nuclear providing the same output. Like, an order of magnitude cheaper. Combustion turbines are remarkably compact and inexpensive for their power output (this is why they power our aircraft). It's wonderful what happens to machinery when you can reduce the need to transfer heat across fluid-solid boundaries. Rocket engines are an even more extreme example of…
> Like, an order of magnitude cheaper. Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant cost $6 per Watt of installed capacity over the projected 50 years of lifetime. Simple natural gas turbines (not combined cycle) cost around $2 per Watt over 50 years in just capital costs. This doesn't take into account the cost of the fuel, or the magic infrastructure to produce, store, and deliver hydrogen. I'm taking Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant as…
I also doubt anyone is going to be buying Russian nuclear power plants in Europe anytime soon. The strategic risk and associated cost (as seen with importing natural gas from Russia) would be far too high.
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Helion's fuel mix produces just 6% of its energy as neutron radiation, and if you harvest it you'll lose a third of that. As long as you have enough net energy, collecting that 4% might not make financial sense. With fuel costs insignificant, your cost per kWh is mainly capital cost. Let's say it's all capital just to keep it simple. I don't know how much the input energy will be but if your choice is between, say, g…
It does seem to hinge on the cost of fuel, I have some doubts about whether they can secure a fuel supply so cheap as to skip out on that extra 4 MW, even after factoring in the cost of a small steam turbine installation.
Helion's other fuel is helium-3 which they'll make themselves by fusing deuterium. So the helium-3 cost will directly depend on the capital cost of the reactor producing it.
(This may be the same reactor, both generating electricity and breeding He3. Or they may use dedicated He3 breeders, and minimize the D-D reactions in the generators.)
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> You're wrong about that. Back up with green hydrogen is quite plausible. I have not seen any real plan to achieve this. Right now, it's basically a giant asterisk with a footnote saying: "Magic happens here". One plan I've seen where authors went totally wild and actually tried to compute what's needed, required converting 80% of housing to district heating with molten salt storage, all kinds of energy storage, and…
Argument-from-ignorance is not an argument. If you haven't seen "any real plan" that just reflects your disinterest in seeing such a plan. There is nothing preventing this from being applied to Europe. All the technologies are available. It's just a matter of integrating existing capabilities, which is the surest kind of innovation. No pipeline upgrades are needed for hydrogen for grid storage, since there's no need…
You're making it right now.
> If you haven't seen "any real plan" that just reflects your disinterest in seeing such a plan.
No. I did a full literature search and I read most of the articles in that area.
> There is nothing preventing this from being applied to Europe. All the technologies are available. It's just a matter of integrating existing capabilities, which is the surest kind of innovation.
What is "this"?
> No pipeline upgrades are needed for hydrogen for grid storage, since there's no need to move hydrogen away from the storage caverns. It can be created and consumed there.
The thing is, most of German storage is in the northern part (Rehden, Etzel, Epe, etc) due to geology. That's not where the consumers are, so you need to build a huge amount of power lines.
To give you a perspective, a fairly typical natural gas pipeline can transfer around 1 Bcf of gas per day, which translates to about 12GW of power. This is the same as the largest ultra-high-voltage direct current (UHVDC) line in the world (in Brazil), built at the cost of around $2.5B for 2400 km.
And you'll need many, many such lines to transfer power from the points of generation and consumption to the hydrogen hubs. This is in addition to already expensive hydrogen production and gas turbines.
I don't see this ever becoming cost-competitive with plain old PWRs.
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> Like, an order of magnitude cheaper. Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant cost $6 per Watt of installed capacity over the projected 50 years of lifetime. Simple natural gas turbines (not combined cycle) cost around $2 per Watt over 50 years in just capital costs. This doesn't take into account the cost of the fuel, or the magic infrastructure to produce, store, and deliver hydrogen. I'm taking Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant as…
That's funded by a loan from the Russian government, not from private financial markets, so we can assume the rate is below market. The actual cost when real risk penalties are included (as they must be for an accurate cost) would be higher. I also doubt anyone is going to be buying Russian nuclear power plants in Europe anytime soon. The strategic risk and associated cost (as seen with importing natural gas from Rus…
Not much higher, though. Russia makes money on these contracts. South Korea has
> I also doubt anyone is going to be buying Russian nuclear power plants in Europe anytime soon. The strategic risk and associated cost (as seen with importing natural gas from Russia) would be far too high.
Of course. I'm not suggesting that Russia should be relied upon for ANYTHING at this point. It should be as isolated economically as possible.
I'm just using this as an example of what you can do with a streamlined construction pipeline for plain old PWRs. No fancy new technology, no breakthroughs, just regular old good project management.
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Doing CAD design is really interesting. A lot of stuff is just 2.5D, extrusions of 2D sketches sitting on other 2D sketches. Then you accidentally make something truly 3D by intersecting things and realize you have no idea what you're looking at, couldn't imagine it if you closed your eyes, couldn't replicate it if you had a picture of the result and didn't know the 2D inputs that made it... and then you realize ther…
CAD is hard! I think about this a lot as I'm doing a makerspace at an elementary school and adults think it needs a 3D printer, but what are kids going to print on it? I think for me, the prerequisites for mastering CAD were 1) the practice I got visualizing 3D shapes so I could translate them into unambiguous mechanical drawings on paper (I swear, I'm not that old but my college was behind and we were the last class…
I'm not a mechanical engineer, I mostly only do incidental CAD and hobby level work, so it's not really essential to have the deep understanding of space that real MEs need.
I often don't know what sequence of operations I'll need until I actually open the app. Generally it's more of an "Oh I need a mounting hole, lets look around on the screen and see where one could go" thing, a lot of the thinking is in the app rather than in the mind.
Of course you can't make nicely parametric things without a lot more thought so I will often wind up having to redo things that aren't one offs...
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Seconded. This is fascinating stuff and reminds me of some crazy rant some guy was telling me about anti-gravity and how electromagnetic “ribbons” could propel you. Obviously the guy was nuts, right? How would one go about learning more about electromagnetic plasma containment folding?
> Dr. Ning Li of Huntsville, AL passed peacefully away on July 27, 2021. She was 79 years old. One of the world's leading scientists in super-conductivity anti-gravity. Dr. Li had constructed first 12" HTSD of the world in late 90s. https://www.berryhillfh.com/obituary/ning-li?lud=4CF765EE88E...
Her claim that "You can take a bowling ball and place it and it will stay." is fascinating. I would love to see footage/video of this. Small electro marbles and globes are one thing, a bowling ball or other large non-magnetic object!? man oh man!