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Will we ever get fusion power?

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Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#191

Post by lambdaone »

Mistletoe wrote: post #148
orson2077 wrote: post #10

Fusion is always 50 years away for a reason: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/5gi9yh/fusion_i... IIRC, the sum total of all fusion research throughout all of history is USD$100-200B. It's obvious governments/industry/humanity doesn't really want it, or they'd go fund it.

You could put teleportation on that bottom squiggle as well. Sometimes you stop funding things because it isn't physically possible or we have better alternatives.

There's absolutely no reason to believe that fusion power is impossible. It being very, very difficult and very, very expensive to reach a practical system is the problem.

But you're right about better alternatives. Right now that alterative is a combination of solar, wind, hydro and storage, with perhaps a bit of more exotic systems (wave power? solar towers?) in the mix.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#192

Post by medoc »

Retric wrote: post #129
nox101 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to several studies you need up to 2 weeks of storage, not just 24hrs, because checking on the long term, every decade or 2 you get 2 weeks of clouds or 2 weeks of no wind, etc....

> 2 weeks of clouds or 2 weeks of no wind AND not OR. To actually need 2 weeks of storage you would need both 0 output in solar for 2 weeks and 0 wind for two weeks and 0 output from hydro. That doesn’t happen. You still get solar power on cloudy days, it just takes more panels to generate some specific level of power. The goal is to minimize X$ for generation + Y$ for storage while guaranteeing sufficient supply. An…

> You still get solar power on cloudy days, it just takes more panels to generate some specific level of power. That is wrong. On cloudy winter days the inverters often just stop. Source: have 20kW of panels on a house in the south of France.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#193

Post by derriz »

I think a line from the end of the article - part of the bear case - "fusion is just another in a long line of energy technologies that boil water to drive a turbine" - should be at the start.

The entire premise of fusion generation is based on world view where the limiting factor for generating electricity was the cost of providing fuel for combustion to generate heat. This thinking was pretty natural if you looked around the world in the first half of the 20th century when coal and steam engines were still kings of energy. This was a pre-semiconductor and pre-plastic age. That's why they ended up using long of fairly primitive technologies: a chemical (combustion) process to generate heat, a heat capture process to boil a tank of water, a mechanical process to convert the steam pressure into mechanical energy, and an electro-magnetic process to extract usable electricity.

But in an age of advanced materials and semiconductors, it feels more and more that fusion is an attempt to solve a problem that is no longer really relevant. Working towards a "better" heat source for an electricity generation process which still involves steam-age tech is akin to trying to breed faster/cheaper horses to improve modern transport.

The cost of fuel is almost negligible for fission - non-fuel operating costs are killing off perfectly functioning nuclear plants like at Indian Point[1] - so the problem that fusion will "solve" is not actually a significant problem.

I'm convinced that we have moved beyond boiling water and generating heat, etc. in electricity generation. We no longer need massive steam engines to generate electricity. Modern technologies like wind, solar and batteries dispense with all this cost and complexity and the shackles of Carnot efficiency.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#194

Post by lambdaone »

dave333 wrote: post #143
Dylan16807 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not rewriting physics. Whatever's going on over there, it's fake. Though the main suncell page mostly just claims to be a solar concentrator? Like, okay, you can do that, but carefully aimed mirrors don't really save you any money over the same surface area of solar cells. Or twice the area of solar cells, looking at the efficiency claim on that page.

They have a new (since 1990s) classical model of atomic structure that is superior to the electron probability cloud model. It models the electron as a thin fluid shell that spins around the nucleus along all great circle paths. It allows calculations of molecular structure in closed form equations. You misunderstand the suncell - the source of UV light is a hydrogen reaction when it bumps into a catalyst able to acc…

Their lack of progress in producing power from their system suggests otherwise. Meanwhile the standard quantum mechanical model of matter goes on making correct, testable predictions. Including in fusion experiments.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#195

Post by lambdaone »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #86
dave333 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been a well documented series of engineering solutions to problems in the implementation that have taken time to solve. Melting electrodes due to too much power - solved by molten stream electrodes C 2016. Melting holes in the reaction chamber eventually resolved after many different things tried by quartz that is transparent to UV. Etc. Demonstrations are offered to qualified parties.

They're not rewriting physics. Whatever's going on over there, it's fake. Though the main suncell page mostly just claims to be a solar concentrator? Like, okay, you can do that, but carefully aimed mirrors don't really save you any money over the same surface area of solar cells. Or twice the area of solar cells, looking at the efficiency claim on that page.

Well, solar concentrators can in (traditional physics-based) theory increase solar cell efficiency substantially: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0022-3727/13/5/01... . Whether that's cost-effective is a different matter.

But that's not got anything to do with Brilliant Light's claims, which so far do not stand up to scrutiny.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#196

Post by lambdaone »

dsign wrote: post #155

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 fus…

If you read to the end (or indeed just scroll down to the last few paragraphs) the answer is "almost certainly yes, but only if we have the will (and budget) to do so".

What puts fusion development in peril is the rapid improvement of known renewable technologies, and the likelihood that 100% renewables is possible in the near future using only those technologies at lower cost.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#197

Post by howerj »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #180
howerj wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that fact that the UK would depend on another country for power generation in a serious way really really dumb. There is no other way of putting it. If we did that we might as well sell off our armed forces and declare global peace unilaterally, that is how naive that option is. It would make the UK, or any country that did that, incredibly vulnerable. We cannot ever lose power.

Just wait until you find out how much oil and gas the UK imports.

I already know this, it doesn't change anything. Who is able to blockade the UK's access to oil, gas or uranium, all of which are much easier to stockpile than electricity? The only one with that capability is the USA. Who is able to attack a HVDC line? Anyone with a fifth rate navy.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#198

Post by Retric »

medoc wrote: post #192
Retric wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2 weeks of clouds or 2 weeks of no wind AND not OR. To actually need 2 weeks of storage you would need both 0 output in solar for 2 weeks and 0 wind for two weeks and 0 output from hydro. That doesn’t happen. You still get solar power on cloudy days, it just takes more panels to generate some specific level of power. The goal is to minimize X$ for generation + Y$ for storage while guaranteeing sufficient supply. An…

> You still get solar power on cloudy days, it just takes more panels to generate some specific level of power. That is wrong. On cloudy winter days the inverters often just stop. Source: have 20kW of panels on a house in the south of France.

That’s a technical problem on your end. I still get electricity on cloudy days when the panels are covered in inches of snow.

Now my personal power output does tank during this period, but such extremes are local events. Further hydro, nuclear, and geothermal just don’t care about clouds.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#199

Post by sethammons »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #173
tedd4u wrote: post #150

From 2 years ago. Large region of Australia running fully on solar/wind/storage for 10+ days. Seems like the focus has to be on storage and continued improvement of grid-scale and rooftop solar and wind. South Australia has just chalked up what is undoubtedly a world first – a run of more than 10 consecutive days over which the average production of wind and solar accounted for 100 per cent of local demand. No other…

[flagged]

We need to rebrand chatgpt and this generation of AI as "the Internet (tm)."

"Asking the Internet and it says..." Well, yeah, the Internet is full of crazy ideas and people untethered from reality and scientific inquiry. But enough people have put samples of things we do know, so sometimes The Internet gets things right.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#200

Post by nradov »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #179
jillesvangurp wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are counter arguments to this. Clouds and wind are local weather patterns. We can use cables to move power around between areas with and without clouds. Moving power over large distances has gotten more feasible with high voltage direct current (HVDC) cables. There are a few projects in the works to move power from e.g. Australia to Singapore and Morocco to the UK. And there are already cables moving power betw…

A reminder that 40% of the world's shipping is just there to move oil and gas around. If someone was starting from scratch and looking at fossils, the arguments against would be so obvious and compelling that any arguments for would look insane. Nukes aren't much better. The arguments against renewables are purely opportunistic and political. We need clean energy now , not 10/20/50 years from now. We could have clean…

Sounds good, but even in the most optimistic scenario it will take decades to build out significant storage capacity and the supporting grid improvements. None of that will be cheap. Expect electricity prices to continue rising even as the cost of solar generation falls.
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