141–150 of 438 posts
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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 the Linux Desktop of energy projects.
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I can understand that from an enginneering perspective ITER is terrible, but fusion in general? There are all sorts of approaches to fusion, and things such as type 2 superconductors were undiscovered 30 ago and uneconomic/unpractical 10 years ago. Timing control systems for magnetised target fusion were impossible but now are doable. Our understanding of plasma has been advancing a lot, simulations are good now, we…
DT fusion looks bad even if you totally ignore anything related to plasma physics or magnetic fields. Simply handling the heat flow and neutrons from the reactor looks to make the reactor too big to compete, compared to fission reactors. And then you have the problem of having to stick sophisticated stuff in the hot zone where hands-on maintenance is impossible (compared to a fission reactor, where just the fuel and…
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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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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…
ITER is a victim of a process seen frequently in large public-works projects, but particularly those where no one understands what anything really should cost, and where there is no practical deadline for completion. It is worst when there is no expected utility when it is done. We see it lately in the numerous military procurements (particularly the F-35 program), in NASA's SLS rocket, in California's bullet train t…
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".
Yeah, any positive news on fusion progress and there always seems to be the same set of comments appear that are overwhelmingly critical of fusion development. Fusion is not well funded and imo has been let down by mismanagement of ITER, and despite this keeps making progress. I feel that fusion is one of humanity's best shots at actively reversing climate change, and it is disheartening to see such widespread pessim…
Couldn't the same thing be said about current fission reactors?
I get that fusion doesn't have the downsides of fission... but I'm also worried that people will be "scared" of fusion in the same way they're against GMO vegetables and irradiated fruits, totally irrationally...
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…
Are those calculations of net gain referring to the total energy generated, or the amount we can realistically capture and put to use?
The only useful outcome of any of this work is a generation of plasma-fluid physicists with practical experience. Pray we can find them something useful to do when the whole enterprise finally collapses.
These university press releases are always very positively framed. This one makes the new magnet seem incredibly promising and fusion seem like almost an inevitability now, but decades of failure have us conditioned for skepticism. What's the catch this time?
Agreed. Whilst it may well be the largest, highest-field "only" high Tc superconductor design in the world, it's definitely not the highest-field high Tc superconducting magnet -- I believe that honour belongs to another bit of MIT with a 1.3 GHz NMR machine [1] (but I do remember something about Bruker collaborating with the US's National Magnet Lab and building a 30T machine -- I can't easily find a link). I really…
These university press releases are always very positively framed. This one makes the new magnet seem incredibly promising and fusion seem like almost an inevitability now, but decades of failure have us conditioned for skepticism. What's the catch this time?
>> What's the catch this time? There are a bunch of issues still to be resolved. Higher magnet strength is/was just one of many.
That it would cost overwhelmingly more than solar+storage is what will ultimately kill it. Someday. Many more $B will be spent first.
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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…
Since power from a fusion plant would cost 100x+ what solar and wind cost, no. But every cent diverted to fusion from solar brings climate disaster closer.
Edit: also, your comments seem to be incredibly negative on fusion, would you mind disclosing if you have any solar or wind connected conflicts of interest?
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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…
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…