No melt down? This game sucks. On a serious note: I wonder how practical and safe it would be to build fusion pants close to city centers in order to harvest the excess heat for district heating. Would be a boon in e.g. NYC which already has a large district steam system. You can do cooling too, look up "steam absorption chiller."
> I wonder how practical and safe it would be to build fusion pants close to city centers in order to harvest the excess heat for district heating The cost/benefit for doing this seems pretty similar between fusion as gas power. We don't usually do this with gas, so I guess it's probably not viable for fusion.
Fusion Power Plant Simulator
121–130 of 135 posts
Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator
#122Apologies if I've missed something, but isn't this all just a fantasy? None of the current methods for getting fusion power are even close to being practical -- even the theoretical net output experiments require extensive and sensitive measurement setups just to establish whether or not they are positive energy. We are not in a place where we expect fusion power to be incrementally achieved by the current systems. W…
That wildly overstates how far off we are. To take the most conservative example, tokamaks have very well-known scaling laws and based on those, CFS is generally expected to exceed breakeven with SPARC and get to practical power levels with ARC, over the next several years.
What is the limit on the scaling then? If we can scale up tokamaks, why aren't we right now building 10GW plants? 100GW plants?
The scaling constraints on other forms of power generation are well understood but the scaling is limited by safety/regulation and by logistics.
Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator
#123For those interested not only in simplified energy balance of a fusion power plant as shown in Fusion Power Plant Simulator, but in more realistic engineering of heat extraction from a tokamak I recommend the following lecture by Dr. Dennis Whyte from MIT Plasma Science & Fusion Center. Fusion Reactor First Wall Cooling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHJyoqDO0zw One of the designs uses 3D printed silicon carbide vac…
Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
My question is more about the safety of locating one smack in the middle of a city. There is radiation to shield but no radioactive fuel waste. HOWEVER, worn reactor parts that need to be replaced will be piping hot when measured with a Geiger counter. So is it safe to build and operate in the middle of e.g. NYC? And further, if they are safe, what is the public's perception of fusion? Do people hear "nuclear fusion"…
Judging by the comments I see most places, the general public's perception of fusion is "magical scifi tech that will never happen."
(also it was 30 years away, 30 year ago)
Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
My question is more about the safety of locating one smack in the middle of a city. There is radiation to shield but no radioactive fuel waste. HOWEVER, worn reactor parts that need to be replaced will be piping hot when measured with a Geiger counter. So is it safe to build and operate in the middle of e.g. NYC? And further, if they are safe, what is the public's perception of fusion? Do people hear "nuclear fusion"…
"My question is more about the safety of locating one smack in the middle of a city. " We don't put any other type of powerplant in a city, so why would we do it for fusion? That being said, fusion won't happen in our lifetimes and even when we do get it, we probably will never really use it. Fission is just better in almost every way. It makes 5x the power per amount of fuel, it makes far less neutrons, and the temp…
How did you write something so ignorant? NYC has multiple fossil fuel plants in the city centers. It would take you all of 15-30 seconds to look this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_New_...
Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the joke, isn't it? A fission power plant simulator lets you have fun playing through a meltdown disaster scenario. A fusion power plant simulator is "worse" because it takes away the "fun" of meltdowns. The humor is in reacting to the simulator as if it were a game (some are, but this one isn't).
The first line reads as a joke, but then they actually ask if it's safe later in the comment.
Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator
#127A good addition would be the sales price per MWh, price for the power plant, and the loan interest rate. Because IMO all that is extremely critical. I fully support the pursuit of fusion as a scientific endeavor, but given that we're probably at least 30 years away from having anything approaching commercial deployment (assuming ITER is built, works, is followed promptly by DEMO, it works, and is followed promptly by…
I think 8 billion people can manage doing two things at once.
Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
My question is more about the safety of locating one smack in the middle of a city. There is radiation to shield but no radioactive fuel waste. HOWEVER, worn reactor parts that need to be replaced will be piping hot when measured with a Geiger counter. So is it safe to build and operate in the middle of e.g. NYC? And further, if they are safe, what is the public's perception of fusion? Do people hear "nuclear fusion"…
"My question is more about the safety of locating one smack in the middle of a city. " We don't put any other type of powerplant in a city, so why would we do it for fusion? That being said, fusion won't happen in our lifetimes and even when we do get it, we probably will never really use it. Fission is just better in almost every way. It makes 5x the power per amount of fuel, it makes far less neutrons, and the temp…
From https://www.iaea.org/topics/energy/fusion/faqs
Does Fusion produce radioactive nuclear waste the same way fission does?
Nuclear fission power plants have the disadvantage of generating unstable nuclei; some of these are radioactive for millions of years. Fusion on the other hand does not create any long-lived radioactive nuclear waste. A fusion reactor produces helium, which is an inert gas. It also produces and consumes tritium within the plant in a closed circuit. Tritium is radioactive (a beta emitter) but its half life is short. It is only used in low amounts so, unlike long-lived radioactive nuclei, it cannot produce any serious danger. The activation of the reactor’s structural material by intense neutron fluxes is another issue. This strongly depends on what solution for blanket and other structures has been adopted, and its reduction is an important challenge for future fusion experiments.
Can fusion cause a nuclear accident?
No, because fusion energy production is not based on a chain reaction, as is fission. Plasma must be kept at very high temperatures with the support of external heating systems and confined by an external magnetic field. Every shift or change of the working configuration in the reactor causes the cooling of plasma or the loss of its containment; in such a case, the reactor would automatically come to a halt within a few seconds, since the process of energy production is arrested, with no effects taking place on the outside. For this reason fusion reactors are considered to be inherently safe.
Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
That wildly overstates how far off we are. To take the most conservative example, tokamaks have very well-known scaling laws and based on those, CFS is generally expected to exceed breakeven with SPARC and get to practical power levels with ARC, over the next several years.
I'm happy to find myself corrected but I'm somewhat skeptical. What is the limit on the scaling then? If we can scale up tokamaks, why aren't we right now building 10GW plants? 100GW plants? The scaling constraints on other forms of power generation are well understood but the scaling is limited by safety/regulation and by logistics.
Building extremely large plants right off the bat would be a lot slower and higher risk. I think CFS is planning a plant around 500MW, after doing a smaller prototype that should modestly exceed breakeven.
The CFS reactors are much smaller than ITER because they use stronger magnetic fields, using newer superconductors. Tokamak output scales with the square of size but the fourth power of field strength. But there are limits: how much current the superconductor can support without quenching, and the mechanical limits of the reactor. CFS is nearing those limits, so they'd have to build a much larger reactor for such high-power reactors. It's probably more economical to build lots of smaller, identical reactors.
Regulators are turning out to be pretty rational on all this. The NRC has already put fusion reactors under the same regime as medical devices and particle accelerators, rather than the extremely slow process that fission reactors have to deal with. The UK is doing the same. It makes sense due to fusion's inherent safety and lower proliferation potential.
Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the basic promise behind the "Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons" (NPT). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio... In the text of the treaty there are promises to NPT signatories, such as: Article IV "1. Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy…
Good points, but in all of that they are specifically targeting enrichment and reprocessing, while allowing nuclear power plants. A fusion reactor is a power plant. It produces neutrons but so does fission; in fact, conventional fission plants get a third of their power from plutonium that they breed from U238, and plutonium accounts for most of the long-term radioactivity in the waste. By comparison, a fusion plant…
Operation of all fission power plants, outside of countries with nuclear weapons, is subject to very strict controls by International Atomic Energy Agency, which reports to United Nations Security Council. Also because each civilian nuclear power reactor breeds enough plutonium to produce multiple nuclear weapons each year, spent nuclear fuel is subject to the same very strict controls. (I know the the isotopic composition of this plutonium is miserable for weapon production, but nuclear weapons using reactor-grade plutonium have been build and tested).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor-grade_plutonium
I don't know any thermonuclear weapon using highly enriched uranium. Highly enriched uranium is used only in few designs of nuclear weapons: nuclear weapons which you build when you don't have access to weapon grade plutonium, or nuclear weapons which have to survive strong external shocks - nuclear bunker busters. Plutonium Pu-239 based nuclear weapons are physically smaller and lighter, easier to place into missile nose cone.