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MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

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Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#101

Post by pfdietz »

nixass wrote: post #89
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The running joke has always been that “Fusion is 20 years away,” and has been, for the last 50 years. I really want this to work. I am a bit concerned, with how “the old guard” will react, once we have successful, productive, fusion. I foresee an astroturf NIMBY campaign against construction of fusion plants.

"Fusion is always 50 years away" for a reason https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/5gi9yh/fusion_i...

With respect to that graph: tokamaks turned out to not work nearly as well as the plans embodied there assumed (and because engineering obstacles were not sufficiently publicly acknowledged at the time). If funding has not been as high as hoped, it's because stakeholders don't really exist for fusion. The utilities have never thought much of it.

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#102

Post by pfdietz »

rory wrote: post #42
phicoh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the moment it is very far for clear that fusion will be cost effective. The article says this about the fuel of fusion: "The fuel used to create fusion energy comes from water, and “the Earth is full of water — it’s a nearly unlimited resource. [...]" They forgot to say that it is not the H2O that comes out of your tap. The earth is especially not full of tritium.

The fuel for fission comes from rocks. The Earth is full of rocks!

That's actually a reasonable argument if you have breeders. The U and Th in an average continental crustal rock will give that rock 20x the energy output of burning the same mass of coal.

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#103

Post by notJim »

dfdx wrote: post #54
zetalyrae wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered: why exactly is ITER so expensive, and slow? Is the engineering required at such a standard that it should takes decades of planning and construction and tens of billions of dollars? The timeline is so dilated (started in 1988, first plasma planned for 2025!) it feels like the kind of project that's expected to be cancelled from the start. It just doesn't strike me as obvious that reducing the ma…

Anecdotally, ITER was the largest of few options for a fusion researcher to run their experiment in a new tokamak. Everybody wanted to put their work into it, and as more features were added, the more funding it sucked up, leaving less money for other experiments, leading to more people wanting to put their experiment into ITER. Here's a presentation [0] that goes over why SPARC, being so much smaller and simpler tha…

This is an amazing observation, and something I've seen in many realms.

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#104

Post by pfdietz »

MauranKilom wrote: post #77
drdeca wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you clarify how to read this chart? The y axis is, funding given different plans? Or.. I got the impression that this is meant to depict a relationship between when practical fusion would be developed and how much funding it receives, but I don’t see how to get that from the chart. Also, not sure why imgur has that image marked as adult content.

These are projections made in 1976. They can be read as different project plans made at that time for different amounts of funding. For example, "if we follow the blue plan, it would require 9 billion (2012) US dollars of funding in 1982 (etc.) and we would achieve fusion by 1990." The 1976 projection was that, assuming funding was kept at the level of 1976 (~1 billion a year), fusion would not be achieved in the for…

Those plans would not have worked, though. They were for programs that assumed tokamaks worked better than they actually do. And by the 1980s it was realized (Lidsky; Pfirsch and Schmitter) that heat transfer limits would make any tokamak power plant unattractive.

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#105

Post by tibyat »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #84
orbital-decay wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expensive because it's a custom built physics lab, not a commercial power plant. Slow because it's an international project. Not just that, but it also requires lots of infrastructure to be built and entire industries to develop in multiple countries, before it can be useful. ITER is massive, but it's also just a tip of the iceberg. >It just doesn't strike me as obvious that reducing the major radius by a few meters…

Is it massive because it's 6 meters? Like - a 6 meter diamond would be "massive" - but a 6 meter boat isn't that impressive. Or is it massive like the tokamak is a 6 meter engine to a 100 km collider? Like there's a ton of other stuff being built in a massive structure?

I agree. The responses in this thread are weak. Throw out any statement and claim it supports the known conclusion, how can you be wrong?

"Well the volume (of a sphere) is proportional to the cube of its radius, so of course the cost of these physics experiments does as well" -- Why waste our time

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#106

Post by pfdietz »

rnhmjoj wrote: post #70
danans wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn't call it a "meh", even if it comes off as much more expensive than fission. It's not competing with fission, though. It's competing with renewables + storage + load shifting + efficiency. Compared to those, it might indeed be "meh".

Agreed, but grid and storage technology that will completely solve the renewable intermittence is probably as far in the future as commercial fusion reactors.

This is a gross mischaracterization of the situation. There are a wide variety of energy storage schemes that promise to make renewables + storage cheaper than fission, which in turn is likely to be much cheaper than fusion. Simply dumping excess renewable power into a resistively heated thermal mass and using that to drive a power plant is likely to be cheaper than fusion.

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#107

Post by sprafa »

pfdietz wrote: post #96
UnFleshedOne wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a species of environmentalism that would consider successful fusion or similar high tech mega scale energy source actually detrimental because you can't build one in your hippy community using old tractor parts and alternative ways of knowing. Environmentally clean energy source is not enough, it needs to be ideologically pure as well.

This is projection. The irrationality is thinking that fusion is something desirable. I suspect this follows from exposure to fusion reactors as a trope in SF stories. From a hard nosed engineering point of view fusion is just terrible.

Please tell me how it’s terrible, Mr Hard Nosed Engineer ?

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#108

Post by fragmede »

dfdx wrote: post #54
zetalyrae wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered: why exactly is ITER so expensive, and slow? Is the engineering required at such a standard that it should takes decades of planning and construction and tens of billions of dollars? The timeline is so dilated (started in 1988, first plasma planned for 2025!) it feels like the kind of project that's expected to be cancelled from the start. It just doesn't strike me as obvious that reducing the ma…

Anecdotally, ITER was the largest of few options for a fusion researcher to run their experiment in a new tokamak. Everybody wanted to put their work into it, and as more features were added, the more funding it sucked up, leaving less money for other experiments, leading to more people wanting to put their experiment into ITER. Here's a presentation [0] that goes over why SPARC, being so much smaller and simpler tha…

SPARC (as proposed this year, by CFS, which was founded in 2018) also has the benefit of 3 decades worth of advancement in materials science, computers, and other technologies over ITER, which was started sometime in the 1980's. Sometimes being first to market takes a long time and is very expensive because you first have to invent all of the components yourself.

SpaceX's advancement is impressive, but if NASA had never happened, I doubt SpaceX would even exist today.

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#109

Post by sprafa »

maccam94 wrote: post #82
pcj-github wrote: post #76

If we had "an inexhaustible, carbon-free source of energy that you can deploy anywhere and at any time" we'd wreck the planet faster than we already are... I guess at least a few could escape though.

I'm curious whether we could cool the planet by pulling CO2 out of the air with scrubbers powered by fusion reactors, or if their heat output would cancel it out. Removing the CO2 would have the benefit of being an exponential thermal decrease (the planet gets less hot from the sun each day), and heat output from fusion plants should scale linearly with the rate at which the CO2 scrubbers run, so it's possible the sc…

Unfortunately I predict that when we “stop” global warming will likely be when we stop changing the climate (at least in that way).

This is because a lot of rich countries seem to me to be well placed to benefit partially from global climate change at the moment, at least within the 1-2C range. Changing the climate past that point is likely to be controversial, since the countries who now benefit from the situation will likely not want to give those newfound advantages away.

I would think of it a lot as the end result of a war - the borders are defined by where the armies stopped ie the division of Europe and Asia after ww2. After climate change I expect whoever has benefitted from it to defend their position and reject any further alterations!

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#110

Post by gibolt »

cletus wrote: post #87

I've long been skeptical of ITER making any sense given its insane cost. I mean even it succeeds, then what? Here's the truth: there's no such thing as free energy. Even if the fuel is so abundant it's actually or effectively free (eg deuterium), the energy isn't. Say it takes $50B to build a plant that produces 1GW of power, which I'll estimate at about 7TWh/year based on [1]. Let's also say it has a lifespan of 40…

Your numbers sound like generation 1 numbers, after ITER. ITER is only a test facility to prove hopefully that it can be net positive.

However, those maintenance costs (your estimates) would be the first thing to drop. Any company producing/operating these will be competing with wind and solar, and thus highly incentivized to improve. There should be plenty of low hanging fruit, since it hasn't happened once yet.

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