131–140 of 438 posts
https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-the...
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Please tell me how it’s terrible, Mr Hard Nosed Engineer ?
Low power density (at least an order of magnitude worse than fission), high complexity, need to maintain large complex objects for which hands-on maintenance is impossible and for which there are many parts for which no redundancy is possible. Fusion reactors are the opposite of "Keep It Simple, Stupid". The engineering undesirability of DT fusion has been known for decades. All the recent excitement doesn't address…
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…
VIPER: an industrially scalable high-current high-temperature superconductor cable
The thumbnail of the youtube video made me laugh Smaller. Smarter. Sooner. 2018 Currently 2021 where is my fusion energy? But this time must be different, after this advance we are only a few years away from fusion energy?
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.
The only real open question is how long the gravy train will run before the plug is pulled. F-35 and SLS have demonstrated that with careful management, that can be longer than anyone could have believed.
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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 plan is for them to breed their own tritium, though, so the consumables coming in the front door would just be deuterium and lithium, both of which (while less common than tap water) are not rare.
Lots of negative comments in this thread. I've been following CFS for a few years now and I honestly believe this is an historic event - probably the beginning of the "fusion age".
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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…
> Fusion is what reduces energy cost potentially another 10x How did you arrive at that conclusion?
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You don't need an astroturf. Nuclear ruined it's own reputation for generations though hopeful not as long as they'll have to care for the waste we already have.
What ruined nuclear reputation is environmentalists who don't actually care for environment.
We are purely lucky that, for structural reasons, corruption is minimal on solar and wind projects. Probably this is because what it ought to cost is readily visible from the outset. There just isn't enough fat to attract graft.
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…
But every cent diverted to fusion from solar brings climate disaster closer.
Even if we can get fusion to work, it will never be economical. Just because the fuel (water) is free, that doesn't make the energy free. The fuel rods for fission power plants are already a rounding error in the cost of energy. It's the capital costs that dominate the equation, and fusion plants will be at least as expensive as fission, which is more expensive per KWh than solar. https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusi…