Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details • Hacker News Board

Re: Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

#301

Post by Crito » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 1:19 AM UTC

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #258

Zikes wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintenance costs alone would be astronomically lucrative.

But solving fusion will cut into Lockheed's mainline oil wars revenue stream.

Oil wars are old hat. They were useful for bootstrapping the system, but now that that is done we don't need them anymore. Oil wars are not preferred because they are fairly transparent and therefore give bad approval ratings for politicians.

The new system: Find a war torn area (perhaps one decimated by oil wars), dismantle their army and replace it with a wildly incompetent one. Make an earnest but fruitless attempt to train them (how humanitarian!). Give them American weapons (cha-ching) without actually solving any of the issues that were destabilizing the region. Local strive escalates to war, the incompetent army is crushed and their American weapons are seized. Use American owned and operated weapons (cha-ching) to bomb the seized American weapons back into the stone age (how humanitarian!). Rinse and repeat.

War machine get's their money, and the politicians get to pretend that they are only trying to help others.

Re: Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

#302

Post by scottlocklin » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 1:29 AM UTC

nabla9 wrote: post #164

I'm not seeing any top physicists working in this program (McGuire is not one). I would be willing to bet 1000 EUR that their math and modeling does not add up, or they have skipped some details. Problem with fusion research like this is that the closer you get self sustainment or energy generation, the harder it gets and problems pile up. This project looks like many other similar projects that have gone bust. They…

"Top physicists?" Fusion is an engineering problem. The thing to check here is what plasma temperature/densities they have achieved with their new confinement scheme. They've basically said the results are preliminary, and some of the results are from simulation (which should not be trusted; aka look at how well the NIF simulations worked). This is not particularly interesting.

Shielding was mentioned, though not enough, but it's fairly trivial: if you add enough matter with a high neutron cross section (paraffin for example), and build the mechanical components out of things with a low cross section (iron, I think) it's not a problem. Plasma is the problem.

It's interesting, but "10 years off" is not much better than the standard "20 years off" promises of fusion research. As others have pointed out, controlled fusion has been 20 years in the future since 1950 or so. "1 year off" would be a lot more noteworthy. As it stands, this is just Lockheed informing us they have a controlled fusion program. Anyway, "nice press release, dudes."

Re: Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

#303

Post by refurb » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 1:35 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #297

brc wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those oil, has and coal subsidy numbers are completely bogus if they are generated from the iea numbers. Iea is just a solar/wind lobbying front - and the bulk of the numbers are made from countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran directly subsidising the cost of petrol for their citizens. It is laughable for anyone to suggest that oil, coal or gas energy is subsidised when these numbers are calculated on wooly figures li…

A Harvard study a few years ago found the externalized cost of coal to be about $350 billion per year in the U.S. alone: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/16/usa-coal-study-idU... . You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want to bring government subsidies for renewable into the discussion, you also have to consider the externalized cost of legalized pollution. The only defensible calculation is to look…

I wouldn't be surprised if coal use is a net loss to the economy (i.e. the value of the energy generated by coal is less than the environmental cost of coal use)

That doesn't make any sense. Net loss to the economy? If you were to say a net loss overall, including environmental costs, I might agree.

Re: Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

#304

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 1:57 AM UTC

refurb wrote: post #303

rayiner wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Harvard study a few years ago found the externalized cost of coal to be about $350 billion per year in the U.S. alone: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/16/usa-coal-study-idU... . You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want to bring government subsidies for renewable into the discussion, you also have to consider the externalized cost of legalized pollution. The only defensible calculation is to look…

I wouldn't be surprised if coal use is a net loss to the economy (i.e. the value of the energy generated by coal is less than the environmental cost of coal use) That doesn't make any sense. Net loss to the economy ? If you were to say a net loss overall, including environmental costs, I might agree.

[deleted]

Re: Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

#305

Post by rayiner » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 1:59 AM UTC

refurb wrote: post #303

rayiner wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Harvard study a few years ago found the externalized cost of coal to be about $350 billion per year in the U.S. alone: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/16/usa-coal-study-idU... . You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want to bring government subsidies for renewable into the discussion, you also have to consider the externalized cost of legalized pollution. The only defensible calculation is to look…

I wouldn't be surprised if coal use is a net loss to the economy (i.e. the value of the energy generated by coal is less than the environmental cost of coal use) That doesn't make any sense. Net loss to the economy ? If you were to say a net loss overall, including environmental costs, I might agree.

Environmental costs are part of the economy. The cost of solar includes paying highly-skilled workers to build the panels. The cost of coal includes paying doctors to treat the resulting increase in lung disease, etc.

The problem is that we don't measure economic activity accurately, because we ignore draw-down of capital (human, natural, or otherwise). Fukushima actually increased Japan's GDP for a quarter, because the damage-response activity gets counted in GDP while the loss of physical capital does not. Fossil fuel use suffers from this problem in two ways: 1) the value of the capital removed from the ground isn't counted (i.e. nobody counts selling off their family furniture as net positive income, but resource-rich countries count selling off oil or minerals as such); 2) the loss of human and environmental capital is ignored (strip mining mountains causes rain to wash away river banks, and that's money directly out of someone's pocket).

Re: Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

#306

Post by twocommas » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 2:07 AM UTC

nabla9 wrote: post #164

I'm not seeing any top physicists working in this program (McGuire is not one). I would be willing to bet 1000 EUR that their math and modeling does not add up, or they have skipped some details. Problem with fusion research like this is that the closer you get self sustainment or energy generation, the harder it gets and problems pile up. This project looks like many other similar projects that have gone bust. They…

"They start by solving the easiest problems first, get some funding and hit the wall."

Exactly! Just repeat keep repeating that process!

Re: Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

#307

Post by dmfdmf » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 2:13 AM UTC

Mvandenbergh wrote: post #268

dmfdmf wrote: post #125

25 years ago my nuke professor used to scoff at some of the claims of the fusion researchers. The problem is the high energy neutrons flying out of the reactor will neutron-activate every material within the vicinity. He thought the radioactivity and nuclear waste of a fusion reactor could be worse than a fission reactor. Also he thought that fusion researchers were vastly underestimating the problem of neutron embri…

I don't know about the waste being worse, since none of it will be transuranic. All short-lived activation of a few hundred years at most, you could just switch it off and mothball it really. Totally agreed about the neutron embrittlement, I think that (IFMIF aside) this issue has just been brushed aside as a materials engineering 'detail' to be dealt with as part of commercialisation in a few decades when it might a…

I think my prof's main point was that the volume of waste could be problematic. If a fusion reactor had a 50-60 year life it could activate a lot of material. The volume of fission reactor waste is small enough to be stored on site (so far) for decades and reprocessing can reduce that dramatically.

Re: Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

#308

Post by RockyMcNuts » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 2:16 AM UTC

aortega wrote: post #299

oldmanjay wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all about the space revolution, but the only way to stop wars is to have one so big there is no one left to wage them. In a way, fusion does have that potential, but I suspect you were going for something more positive.

Of course it will not stop all wars, but it will stop most oil-related wars. You still will have resource-related wars like cultivable land, and fresh water but with the space-revolution soon humanity will have plenty of land and water too.

Well... if fusion energy is abundant, the price of oil will drop rather abruptly. A lot of people in a lot of places, where the population has been expanding, and there is a lot of religious extremism and political instability and modern weapons, will have to find a new way to feed themselves. And someone to blame if they can't. So I'm not that optimistic it will stop any wars.

Re: Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

#309

Post by ihnorton » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 2:19 AM UTC

jobu wrote: post #114

regularfry wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fusion physicists I know are very sceptical that this design can work. It's a variant on a known design with a known problem: the plasma leaks out of the ends of the magnetic containment. It's also unclear why Lockheed would be publicising it this way at this point, unless it's a naked ploy for more funding from the DoD, and an attempt to bring in money (and possibly pressure) from non-classified sources. That being…

From the Aviation Week article that flexie linked: "The team acknowledges that the project is in its earliest stages, and many key challenges remain before a viable prototype can be built." They don't actually say it, but it sounds like they've only got computer models to work with at this point. Not very likely that they've actually cracked it.

For what it's worth, in the Google [X] talk last year, they briefly mentioned running actual plasma confinement experiments (although I guess not reaching fusion conditions or that would probably have been publicized).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAsRFVbcyUY

Re: Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

#310

Post by twistedpair » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 2:30 AM UTC

etiam wrote: post #61

delinka wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I'm missing something, I think you're making a similar mistake. Submarines and carriers run on a fission reactor. And it powers everything - drives turbines for locomotion, electricity...

Maybe you're just less bothered than I about the writer conflating fission and fusion when the difference between them makes for a good deal of the newsworthiness of the article. I'm well aware of the fission reactors in large military ships, but if there is any application of nuclear fusion on them then pretty much the only option today is thermonuclear warheads. It would be really nice if that's about to change.

Most warheads have hollow plutonium pits that are filled with tritium (right before implosion) triggering a fusion reaction from the high heat of the plutonium fission reaction. So no, it's not only the H-Bombs, though those are primarily fusion while tritium is only used to "boost" classic implosion fission warheads.