Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Will we ever get fusion power?

construction-physics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 309 posts

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#151

Post by nicoburns »

iceyest wrote: post #67
immibis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to get fine with below 99% availability.

Less then 99% means not having a working fridge for 3-12 hours or more in 30c heat so there went all your perishable foods. It means no lights in the house will work. No cooling or heating of any kind. No computers. No phone. None of your other random applicances will work either. None of the stuff you use to navigate a city like street lights will be working. Of course it can be mitigate with a generator or an expen…

> or an expensive battery bank

Expensive for now. I'd expect that to be a cheap battery bank in <10 years.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#152

Post by Someone »

choilive wrote: post #74
SoftTalker wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you have orbiting panels that will do what? Beam the energy back to earth? Isn't the sun beaming energy to earth directly? What problems do orbiting panels solve?

I actually don't think space based solar to beam it back to Earth will ever really be practical short of a space-elevator style tether to transmit the electricity down. But some of the pros would be as follows. * Capable of 100% capacity - power generation can be 24/7/365 if in orbits around the sun or stationed at the Earth-Sun Lagrange points. * Greater panel efficiency - less energy lost to the atmosphere that can…

> You get about 40% more power/area in space vs on the ground. You need about ~22 TW to "power" humanity. So you need about 70,000 km^2 of space […]. So lets round it to 100,000 km^2. But thats a significantly smaller area than the terrestrial equivalent of about 500,000 km^2.

Those number are inconsistent with each other. Seems you calculated with 400% more power/area in space vs on the ground. That seems incorrect to me, as it would make space solar convert close to 100% of incident solar energy to electricity.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#153

Post by bratbag »

pacificmint wrote: post #146
yalogin wrote: post #142

I recently started thinking that even if we master fusion and know how to keep it safe, we as a society have become way too science averse that we will not let it happen. See the reaction to nuclear fission based power plants now. Everyone is scared of it and the byproducts. Germany, one of the most progressive nations on the earth,went and shut down all of its nuclear plants as a knee jerk reaction. I don’t have hop…

> Germany, one of the most progressive nations on the earth, went and shut down all of its nuclear plants as a knee jerk reaction. Anti nuclear sentiment had been building in Germany since at least the 70s. Then Chernobyl happened in 1986 and it got even stronger. It was part of what propelled the Greens into the administration 1998. That administration reached an agreement for the nuclear exit in 2000 and the first…

50 years of many individual short sighted knee jerk reactions.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#154

Post by gd1 »

pfdietz wrote: post #108
rcxdude wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Base load" doesn't really enter into it: you just need storage to make renewables make sense by supplying when generation doesn't meet demand and recharging when demand is less than supply. (or, if you have a cheap "base load" you use storage to even out the peaks and troughs in the same way). Base load is just a somewhat arbitrary line drawn across the lowest point of demand, it's not an actual requirement of the g…

Base load was a useful concept when steady output power plants with high capital cost produced energy at the lowest cost. It then made sense to use them as much as possible -- to handle the "base load" -- and cover the rest with more expensive to operate but lower capital cost sources. But that's no longer the world we live in. The lowest cost energy is now from intermittent sources, and the optimal grid design will…

[dead]

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#155

Post by dsign »

Article is click-bait. Most of it is dedicated to general information and history, not the question. It would be a good article if its title were “All that you just suddenly wanted to know about nuclear fusion if you never got the itch before, in one big gulp.” Of course, somebody who knows nothing of nuclear fusion and want to would be better served by a tittle that says so “Have you heard the good news? Nuclear fusion is coming! Let me tell you everything about it!”

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#156

Post by ggm »

Cumulative funding required for demonstration commercial fusion reactor

Was compelling. Belief we're prepared to invest seems lacking.

I think achieving multi second "stable" plasma conditions has been amazing. But, I think that's a cigarette lighter held next to petrified wood (to use an atomic bomb era analogy) away from ignition as a useful energy over time equation.

We're also somewhat behind "what's embrittlement" or "what's xenon poisoning" problems. Things which don't emerge until a few months in your life of run-time. Again, from early fission reactor design, these things can sink a project.

Or, unexpected fission or other nasty behaviours. Things which make it hard to get inside the structure to fix it. The unknown unknowns in this feel huge. But, linear energy in, energy out, and the approach to viable ignition temperature. That's science and engineering at its best.

Fusors tapped out. "Mr fusion" isn't happening.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#157

Post by bruce511 »

more_corn wrote: post #64
RAM-bunctious wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's clear that solar panels, while working today, clearly haven't been able to solve today's problems, or else this discussion wouldn't be happening. But we should keep investing in them, one way or another. Similarly, we should keep investing in the prospect of commercially viable fusion reactors. The harnessing of fusion reactors would be instantly revolutionary as opposed to the incremental progress solar…

That’s funny. My take is exactly the reverse. Solar power can 100% solve our energy needs today. It’s cost effective at the unit level. It works at scale. It decentralizes nicely. Did I mention that it works? Every home could have rooftop solar for less than it costs to produce centralized power plants. (I have rooftop solar and it cost significantly less than a new car now my power costs won’t go up for 20 years at…

I agree with everything you say about rooftop solar. If you have a suitably unshaved roof, and you are in a reasonably sunny climate, the current economic math works. And as energy costs go up, and capital costs come down it works better all the time.

That said, we still need a grid to distribute electricity to places that consume more energy than roof space. Think apartment blocks, factories etc. And yes, a huge chunk of that load can still be supplied by grid-scale solar and wind etc.

Even with large-scale storage (another fruitful place to spent investment money) there's going to need to be peak-generation.

However you look at it, I don't think fusion will be the answer. Since fusion was first proposed and the landscape of requirements have shifted. By the time it's practical, it'll be solving a problem we dont have.

The science may lead to a working reactor. But no one will build it at scale because it simply won't solve the problem well have then.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#158

Post by mrtracy »

I think there’s some possibly good investment advice to extract here, if you’re able and willing to invest in fusion startups: based on the need to compete with renewables alone, commercial success implies that highly complex reactors simply may not have a market based on construction cost, even if they do generate power.

Of the fusion startups mentioned in the article, I’d say that makes Zap Energy the one worth gambling on (if you’re a gambler that is), as its success apparently depends on exploiting a fluid dynamics effect which was not well known in the past (“shear flow”). If this sufficiently solves the confinement problem, the resulting device looks ludicrously simple in comparison to contemporaries.

Of course it may not work at all, I sure don’t know if it will; but if you had to invest in one of these, that seems like the one where successful power generation actually creates a marketable product.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#159

Post by bruce511 »

Larrikin wrote: post #38
choilive wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily about 50% of the Earth is lit up by the sun at any moment and energy storage capabilities are advancing much faster than fusion's capabilities are. Distribution and storage are way more tractable problems than fusion. If you want to be really ambitious you can go to space and have 100% capacity :).

Needing the sun for energy and improving solar panel feels like trying to make the best ICE engine ten years ago or working on an expert system for AI in the 90s. There are obvious immediate gains in the short term, but research has shown there is something else better out there and its best if someone is doing the R&D now so we can get a leap frog moment eventually.

Improving solar panels might be nice, but the panels themselves are a cheap part of the system. And the big gains have already been made.

Solar panels are now being produced and install at gigawatt scale. Per year. (Over 400gw per year, and climbing). Capital is being supplied by individuals (rooftop) and companies (utilities).

I'm not sure what leap-frog tech you have in mind, but its not fusion.

In the 60s fusion was touted as "free energy for all". But fusion is very (very) much not "free". The cost of a fusion plant will make your eyes water. The lead-time to build it will be measured in years. The output from one plant won't move the needle (we'd need hundreds of them). Electricity from these plants will be expensive, because at the very least it'll need to generate a return to the investors. And that's before we factor in running costs which (I guess) won't be cheap.

The problem with fusion is not physics, it's economics. As long as we present fusion as a physics problem interest remains. Because once we view it as an economics problem it dies overnight.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#160

Post by vasco »

ggm wrote: post #156

Cumulative funding required for demonstration commercial fusion reactor Was compelling. Belief we're prepared to invest seems lacking. I think achieving multi second "stable" plasma conditions has been amazing. But, I think that's a cigarette lighter held next to petrified wood (to use an atomic bomb era analogy) away from ignition as a useful energy over time equation. We're also somewhat behind "what's embrittlemen…

> cigarette lighter held next to petrified wood (to use an atomic bomb era analogy)

Can you, or anyone, explain the lore here? I get it's impossible to light it on fire, but what's the context? I tried searching for the expression and couldn't find anything.

Post reply on HN