Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds interesting, could you post that checklist?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025969
Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
101–110 of 267 posts
Re: Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
#102Re Q>1, isn't that just the reaction making more power as heat than you put in and you need something like Q>5 to use the heat to make steam to make electricity to run the thing? (as in wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor )
Correct. Energy generation >1 is targeted for 2030. So it fits "fusion is 5 years away" trope.
Re: Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
#103[dead]
Re: Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
#104“…where we solved hard engineering problems at scale.”
But were those solutions good solutions to those problems? I’ve seen enough evidence to be reluctant to point blank take this as a positive background. If you could be more specific about which problems that could go a long way to validating your credentials in another high-risk industry where catastrophic failure has large repercussions.
MagicLeap vibes all over again.
Re: Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> An energy breakthrough is really required to get the world back on track Not really, the energy technologies we've needed have been around for about half a century, with quite reasonable economics (albeit less and less so, as the time pressure increases), especially compared to the alternative. The problems that need to be solved are political and economic, not technical.
> The problems that need to be solved are political and economic, not technical. You're saying the technical problems involved in fusion power have already been solved. They haven't.
He's talking about problems with the world, not with fusion power. We don't need a magic bullet to make all our problems disappear, we just need to apply the resources we have in a consistent and correct manner.
Re: Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
#106> One common question is, why not fission? Fission works technically, but not practically. Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) could power ships, but licensing fission reactors on land is already brutally hard and expensive—doing it for vessels moving between international ports with enriched uranium is nearly impossible
What makes you think that licensing a fusion reactor will be easier? Safely handling tritium is fantastically more complicated that the fuel of a fission power plant.
Also, do you plan on breeding your fuel aboard the ship? If no, how do you plan to produce, store the tritium and refuel the ship? If yes, I'd like to know how you are planning to host the massive chemical plant to purify coolant, recycle unburt fuel, separate isotopes, detriatiate water and refuel that comes with your tokamak.
Re: Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
#107Fusion will never be practical. Why not put it in an application that will ALSO never be practical?
Fusion for crypto?
Re: Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
#108The mere fact that you're proposing doing this on a moving vessel already tells me you're completely incompetent. No one has made fusion net positive, somehow building a net positive fusion reactor on a boat would be fine I guess but to suggest its better than enriched uranium is dishonest. You'll have more luck building a regular fission reactor on a commercial freighter than verify a fusion reactor for any ocean ca…
You'll have more luck building a regular fission reactor on a commercial freighter than verify a fusion reactor for any ocean capable ship. That part, I'm not so sure about. Enriched uranium is potentially dangerous stuff, and has to be guarded closely. In a world with literal pirates, getting one on a commercial ship sounds very, very unlikely. As you say, fusion seems equally unlikely, albeit from a physics standpo…
We already have 70 years experience of marine nuclear reactors. Most of them highly enriched uranium or plutonium.
Submarines for electrolysis of water into breathable oxygen and electrical power for propulsion and aircraft carriers for its massive power density.
On the other hand, we have 0 years of operational experience with fusion reactors. We have 0 energy positive land based designs, 0 marine adaptations. We have discovered exactly 0 benefits of fusion reactor designs over fission. and I'm certain that we'll have more than 100 years of experience in commercial fission operation before we even have a single decade of net positive fusion energy.
Highly dangerous? Absolutely, but the giant weapons attached to these nuclear marine reactors have killed far more people than those reactors. Hell, those aircraft carriers experience more radiation from coal power plants than their own reactor. And I'm not kidding.
Re: Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
#109Why specifically target maritime? Getting a stationary reactor to 25MWe at all would be an incredible feat in itself.
Probably because on-land there are better way to get the same output and it doesn't require unproven technology.
Maritime makes sense from that point of view. However, this point of view ignores that fusion is hard for us right now.
I bet it's a case of someone not understading this field properly and thinking that just throwing money at it will solve everything.
Re: Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
#110Very cool. If you could also make a smaller one with ~3kw output that fits on a locomotive frame you'd literally have the entire freight rail industry the world over as customers.
I think my induction hob is roughly 3kW. Why don't we all just put a nuclear reactor in our basement at that point? You people are all dreaming.