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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

#121

Post by mikepurvis »

Gravityloss wrote: post #78
dfdx wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For NASA science probes, this cost increase and risk averseness spiraling is called when missions become "Battlestar Galactica".

Arguably the Shuttle suffered from this too— instead of being a tightly focused space truck, it needed to be able to do ridiculous things like fly polar missions and grab Soviet spy satellites right out of the air.

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

#122

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #115
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…

I have a pet theory that the major cause for cost/time overruns on large projects is the cost constraint itself. In other words, attempting to do things on too small of a budget results in the overall cost increasing, not decreasing. I suspect that there are a few main mechanisms for this: 1. As budget constraints tighten, the number of man-hours spent wrestling with bean counters (and/or waiting around with nothing…

Also, it’s a multi-national government funded program that was never intended to return a profit.

So there’s very little incentive to constrain costs.

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

#123

Post by ncmncm »

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #115
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…

I have a pet theory that the major cause for cost/time overruns on large projects is the cost constraint itself. In other words, attempting to do things on too small of a budget results in the overall cost increasing, not decreasing. I suspect that there are a few main mechanisms for this: 1. As budget constraints tighten, the number of man-hours spent wrestling with bean counters (and/or waiting around with nothing…

The budget overruns are the whole point of the project. Any sort of apparent science or engineering goal is a smokescreen.

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

#124

Post by pas »

fabiospampinato wrote: post #85
sbierwagen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a render of the completed reactor: https://www.iter.org/doc/all/content/com/gallery/media/7%20-... Note human for size. It's all completely bespoke scientific equipment hand made for this project only. The cryostat will be the largest stainless steel vacuum vessel ever made-- all welded by hand. After welding, a substantial number of in-vessel components have to be installed by threading them through access po…

Here's a similar picture for SPARC from wikipedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/74/SP...

It still need a lot of the (same) support infrastructure. Plus ARC will be bigger than SPARC.

That said building the first is a lot harder than scaling it up.

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

#125

Post by baryphonic »

mchusma wrote: post #112
dfdx wrote: post #34

Plenty of skepticism in these comments. I've been following CFS for a while and can present a point of view for why this time might be different. Fusion energy was actually making rapid progress in the latter half of the twentieth century, going from almost no power output in the fifties and sixties to a power output equal to 67% of input power with the JET reactor in 1997. By the eighties there was plenty of experim…

You are right, people who flippantly dismiss fusion just don't understand it. -Fusion has made consistent improvement, roughly in line with expectations for the level of investment (20 years away predictions were considering if we invested massively, which we did not). - Fusion is in theory something that could give us true energy abundance. Want to just desalinate water like crazy? Want to extract gigatons of carbon…

I'd add the sentiment of GP that this particular team also seems to have something special. I've been following them for a while as well, and they've impressed me by meeting self-imposed deadlines for project milestones (like this magnet experiment), being quite ingenious in designing economical components (the design of their original superconductor is quite simple but brilliant), and just having a no-BS approach.

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

#126

Post by ncmncm »

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.

The only open question about large-scale energy storage is which of many viable alternatives will turn out cheapest, and when their price will bottom out. Battery storage that starts at 1/3 of lithium cost, before price begins to fall, is coming to market.

Until prices do start to bottom out, investment in storage is wasteful, so dollars go to generating capacity of known utility.

Each square meter of panel that goes online delays climate disaster by a precisely understood amount. Each panel made can go into service almost instantly. No matter how big the project, it can start delivering power anytime. There is no smallest-useful facility, right down to the residential rooftop.

Every dollar diverted to Tokamak instead brings climate disaster nearer.

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

#127

Post by ncmncm »

mordymoop wrote: post #100
rnhmjoj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But are they surmountable AND cheaper than existing nuclear or other energy sources? DT fusion solves the two biggest arguments that are always raised by nuclear energy opponents: storage of nuclear waste (it doesn't produce high-level waste) and safety (it's not perfect but it can't explode). I wouldn't call it a "meh", even if it comes off as much more expensive than fission.

I had heard that one of the major drawbacks of tokamaks was the incredible temperatures lead to situations where the smallest mechanical failure will lead to an explosion of hot, radioactive gas. Is that not the case?

That would be the least of its problems.

Costing hundreds or thousands of times as much as solar + storage is a more serious problem. Since it won't be built, that is a theoretical problem. But the project can absorb an unlimited amount of money first.

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

#128

Post by pas »

mordymoop wrote: post #100
rnhmjoj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But are they surmountable AND cheaper than existing nuclear or other energy sources? DT fusion solves the two biggest arguments that are always raised by nuclear energy opponents: storage of nuclear waste (it doesn't produce high-level waste) and safety (it's not perfect but it can't explode). I wouldn't call it a "meh", even if it comes off as much more expensive than fission.

I had heard that one of the major drawbacks of tokamaks was the incredible temperatures lead to situations where the smallest mechanical failure will lead to an explosion of hot, radioactive gas. Is that not the case?

The whole amount of gas in the chamber is just a few grams.

Tritium is not pleasant though, but veeeeeeeeery far from anything that could do real harm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Health_risks (you'd need to leak a lot of it continuously)

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

#129

Post by ncmncm »

rnhmjoj wrote: post #90
speed_spread wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like the T production chain might itself be quite messy. Molten isotopes salt and lead? How much of that stuff would you need? What do you do with when it goes bad? It may not go boom Chernobyl-style, but it's still far from the birds-in-the-sky deuterium-from-the-sea fusion dream.

> It sounds like the T production chain might itself be quite messy. It is: it's definitely the biggest challenge after plasma confinement. > Molten isotopes salt and lead? There are two main blanket technology in development: ceramic and liquid breeders. They're called breeders but are very different from the kind of breeders you have in a fission reactor. Both are based on converting lithium to tritium by capturing…

Destroying your $300B power station is entirely bad enough.

If we are lucky enough, none will be built.

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

#130

Post by ncmncm »

sdeyerle wrote: post #10

In the original proposal for the ARC reactor, they were proposing making the magnet separable so the top and bottom of the reactor could be separated and the vacuum vessel removed. (See pg. 5 of https://library.psfc.mit.edu/catalog/reports/2010/15ja/15ja0... ) It doesn't look like they are targeting that here. Does anyone know if that is ARC (not SPARC) specific, or if that has been abandoned?

Since there is no actual use planned for any power released in this gadget, no maintenance will be performed. When they finish playing, they scrap it, pocket the money, and go their separate ways.

No commercial reactor will ever be built, so this is just for showing off.

The only real good to come from these efforts is employment of plasma fluid physicists. I just hope non-military work can be found for them when this stuff fizzles. Solar Physics is fascinating and important, but has limited budget.

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