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MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

news.mit.edu

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Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#211

Post by lwouis »

pfdietz wrote: post #202
gfodor wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is that the stigma of nuclear meltdowns hasn’t impeded the deployment of nuclear energy?

If reactors were ten times safer but no cheaper, they still wouldn't be being built. If reactors were ten times cheaper but no safer, we'd be building them like hotcakes.

I think Japan disabling their fission plants after Fukushima, and Germany following that path are clear manifestation of the opposite: that people fear nuclear and democratic governments act on this fear, against development of the technology.

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#212

Post by tcmart14 »

ncmncm wrote: post #143
pfdietz wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fusion is what reduces energy cost potentially another 10x How did you arrive at that conclusion?

Anybody looking at numbers sees fusion never, ever producing so much as a single erg of commercially viable energy. So, anybody saying otherwise is simply making it up.

And neither did any other invention until they reached a certain scale, price point or level of sophistication. The counter to your comment would be, fusion is still very much in the R&D phase. As being in the R&D phase like so many other products were at one time, of course it has not met your expectation. But neither did Airplanes after the first flight.

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#213

Post by dodobirdlord »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #84
orbital-decay wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is it massive because it's 6 meters? Like - a 6 meter diamond would be "massive" - but a 6 meter boat isn't that impressive. Or is it massive like the tokamak is a 6 meter engine to a 100 km collider? Like there's a ton of other stuff being built in a massive structure?

A 6 meter superconducting magnetic containment vessel is massive, as such things go. But ITER is also an entire facility built around the containment vessel.

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#214

Post by anonuser123456 »

snek_case wrote: post #172
worldvoyageur wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tritium is a natural byproduct of CANDU fusion reactors, of which there are some 25 or so in operation globally, mostly in Canada. CANDUs use heavy water as a neutron moderator (D20 instead of H2O), making T2O a natural byproduct. Though most of the reactors do not harvest the tritium, a small number do. CANDU operators have long been ready to make the capital investments in tritium harvesting, once demand materializ…

I'm wondering, fusion reactors themselves produce neutron radiation as a byproduct. Once you have a fusion reactor running, could you use the fusion reactor itself to breed tritium? Also thinking, we target deuterium + tritium fusion because it's the least energy intensive. However, once we have working proof of concept reactors, could we just make them slightly bigger and fuse more abundant molecules/isotopes instea…

While not listed in the article, this is the design goal of the SPARC reactor.

Their plan is to use FLiBe (Google it) blanket to breed tritium. The Be acts as a neutron multiplier.

As for non D-T fusion, the next best candidate is D-He3. Unfortunately, the only large scale source of He3 is on the surface of the moon and it would have to be mined, on the moon, and sent back to Earth.

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#215

Post by singularity2001 »

mchusma wrote: post #112
dfdx wrote: post #34

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…

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…

don't solar panel prices half every five years (similar to moores law modified)? fusion would need to speed up then to be competitive with the solar revolution

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#216

Post by tcmart14 »

maccam94 wrote: post #160
fragmede wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SPARC (as proposed this year, by CFS, which was founded in 2018) also has the benefit of 3 decades worth of advancement in materials science, computers, and other technologies over ITER, which was started sometime in the 1980's. Sometimes being first to market takes a long time and is very expensive because you first have to invent all of the components yourself. SpaceX's advancement is impressive, but if NASA had ne…

SpaceX's main innovation was that they decided to build a rocket that wasn't optimized for performance or reliability, but cost. They were willing to bear huge development risks to create a new price category and capture latent demand for cheaper launches.

I'd say yes and no. You most definitely have a point here as I agree that their model, or view, is different than NASA. However, if NASA had not happened, would even conceiving of a different model or target had happened? Not to mention just initial research into rocketry. It maybe could have happened without NASA, but probably with a severely higher initial investment.

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#217

Post by dodobirdlord »

eropple wrote: post #135
apendleton wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My understanding (and I am a layman) is that lithium isn't that accessibly common on Earth, and that we're doing a bang-up job of using as much of it as we can get our hands on already. Are there practical methods of extracting less accessible lithium that don't themselves have nasty side effects?

The amount of lithium required for these purposes is absolutely trivial.

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#218

Post by tuatoru »

pfdietz wrote: post #117
mchusma wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah, really, how?

Fusion power plants still need land, buildings, generators, switchyards, wire, own power consumption, environmental impact reports, planning permits, regulations, inspections, and all the rest. And they need exotic materials and weird engineering in their construction.

Really: how does fusion get us to ~1% (correction: ~5%) of current power prices?

I've never seen a convincing explanation. Usually it's bare assertion. Infrequently it's handwavium/unobtanium.

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#219

Post by dboreham »

singularity2001 wrote: post #215
mchusma wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

don't solar panel prices half every five years (similar to moores law modified)? fusion would need to speed up then to be competitive with the solar revolution

I have a Dyson sphere to sell you..

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#220

Post by coryrc »

ncmncm wrote: post #120
zetalyrae wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hey, that's not fair, there were many people "working" on the 2nd avenue tunnel who were never there. There's still illegal corruption!
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