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ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

bbc.co.uk

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Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#241

Post by jholman »

shadowprofile77 wrote: post #177
godelski wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I'm particularly upset about SSC's[0] failure to be built. There are many advantages to housing the smartest scientists in the world within the borders of your country, and those benefits aren't limited to scientific output. After all, a big part of these multi-national projects is the culture war. And let's be real, which is worth more? A super collider that runs for decades or the F35 (which cost more,…

What you mention about billionaires paying for it piques me especially. For someone like Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg or any number of other ultra rich individuals, the PR value of simply stating that they will themselves pay for such a collider up to the cost of its proposed budget (maybe so long as some organization or government promises to cover any cost overruns, or overruns beyond a certain percentage) would be eno…

Wow. You think that the Gates Foundation has complications and conflicts of interest, and you think that a mega-science project would be free of those?

I mean, first of all, mega-science is just as prone to grift and mismanagement as any other type of mega-project, and far more so than vaccine programs or malaria treatment. And just imagine, what would the absurd conspiracy theory nuts say about a supercollider?

Of course, hey, wait a second, Gates and/or the Gates Foundation already do this (e.g. TeraPower, e.g. CFS), so your whole line of reasoning that it'd have considerable PR benefit is proven false. Fortunately the Gates Foundation isn't very motivated by PR.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#242

Post by willis936 »

epistasis wrote: post #223
devonkim wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the opposition from our left to nuclear and painting any nuclear proponent as a right-wing science denier trying to defund renewable energy I’m not sure what we can do. Michael Schellenberger has been pilloried by our left despite the decades he put into different approaches before arriving at his nuclear advocacy (and perhaps also deeming for a lot of the climate change doom and gloom as alarmists for the 12 y…

Viewing this in terms of left-right politics rather than in terms of hard data is one of the primary reasons that nuclear fails again and again as it is tried in the West. The problem isn't politics, the problem is construction logistics. Nobody knows how to build large projects effectively anymore, whether it's the Big Dig or something super complicated like miles of piping with precision welds and specialized concr…

It’s not just about making big things. China has recently made some of the largest structures mankind has ever seen, yet their fusion program is decades behind US, Russia, Spain, UK, and France.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#243

Post by willis936 »

lopmotr wrote: post #231
usui wrote: post #7

I am going to need some help on this one as my knowledge on physics is limited: What makes scientists believe that the solution to nuclear fusion power is only a matter of scale? I desperately want nuclear fusion to work because nuclear power is the only realistic way to solve the looming energy crisis of the 21st century while still maintaining the same standard of living for everyone. It's also 500% more important…

Is it really clear the fusion power, even if it's achieved, will actually be cheap enough to use? Sure, the fuel is almost free, but the fuel for solar, wind, and hydroelectric power is also free and that doesn't make them cheap. If we're not worried about cost, we could build enormous batteries using existing technology and use solar and wind to power everything. Fusion has to be cheaper than that, and judging by th…

Well, fusion has the benefit of having much lower operating costs. Violent terminations, quench events, and tritium containment breaches are serious concerns, but a risk assessment of a fusion power plant would give a much cozier feeling than a risk assessment of a fission power plant.

The neutron activated materials are safe after a century and there is not much of it.

All of the cost in a fusion plant sits on manufacturing and maintenance. If you can build a GWe plant for $30Bn or less, then it’s a no brainer. The five trillion dollar question is how much investment fusion power research needs before we get to that point.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#244

Post by adventured »

tenuousemphasis wrote: post #215
f6v wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s so much things to divert budget from to fuel energy research. Completely unrealistic, but think luxury cars, football player’s salaries, just to name a few.

Military industrial complex? Billionaires? The things you mentioned are literally nothingburger.

It's very clearly not a nothingburger.

High paid professional athletes in the US today have the income of billionaires.

Professional athletes earn around $200 billion in league salary each decade (it excludes endorsements, which tilts the point that much further if included). It's far more than all S&P 500 CEOs combined. Just the three major sports leagues in the US are at around $14 billion per year in salary. That excludes coaches, which now have very high salaries as well. Stripping it down further, all NBA players combined (a mere ~450 players or so) earn more in salary every year than all the S&P 500 CEOs combined.

As of 2019 there were 122 players in Major League Baseball earning $10 million per year or more. The top 30 NBA players earn a combined $1 billion every year.

Pretty funny, the notion that ~$80+ billion in income taxes every ten years, is supposedly a nothingburger. It's a lot of tax revenue, even if it pales next to US Military spending.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#245

Post by epistasis »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #225
epistasis wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Can't be ignored" meaning what precisely? This is a phrase that sounds like pure FUD, and despite spending a lot of time trying to quantify where this supposed environmental damage comes from, I haven't been able to find anything of substance. Similarly, I don't think there's much reason to believe that fission nor fusion will be able to compete with renewables on cost. Even if fusion is a completely free source of…

> won't be long before renewables are cheaper than a steam turbine and cooling infrastructure on a free heat source. That's an absolutely extraordinary claim. How could a wind turbine ever be cheaper than a traditional generator and turbine, since it consists of a generator + rotor + massive tower in a remote location with a very low utilisation rate? You know you cannot just assume a trend will continue infinitely,…

The steam turbine has to endure super heated steam, requiring very specific materials. Steam turbines also require boilers, cooling, etc. Wind turbines have the potential to require far less in terms of the input materials. And with solar, who knows how efficient we can get with that!

We have been optimizing steam turbines for more than a century, but are just barely getting started on optimization for wind and solar. So far, the rate of improvement hasn't start to slow at all, so I'm fairly confident that due to greater simplicity, wind and solar will end up being less costly than steam turbines. Predicting the future is tricky business, but in the 90s it would have been foolish to think that semiconductors wouldn't get better for more than just a few years. And we are in a very similar place with wind and solar techs now as we were with semiconductors in the the 90s.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#246

Post by epistasis »

xupybd wrote: post #194
epistasis wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Can't be ignored" meaning what precisely? This is a phrase that sounds like pure FUD, and despite spending a lot of time trying to quantify where this supposed environmental damage comes from, I haven't been able to find anything of substance. Similarly, I don't think there's much reason to believe that fission nor fusion will be able to compete with renewables on cost. Even if fusion is a completely free source of…

Can't be ignored means we have not found a non destructive means of energy production yet. Waste from current renewables will build up. We still need to be on the look out for better technologies for the future. That is not to say they are not a huge leap forward but it does have to be considered.

I don't understand this. What problem do you foresee happening?

You may as well say that we can't build any more houses, or make more clothes, because of the waste. If the rate becomes a problem, in some way, we will recycle the necessary parts. But unlike, say, coal ash, the waste is easy to handle, and easy to repurpose if we find the need to.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#247

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

landryraccoon wrote: post #144
godelski wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the main issue and I don't want to make it any more complicated. But I do want to explain something because people hear arguments between fusion scientists. Within the field no one really doubts that ITER is going to work (there's a few, of course, but the majority don't doubt). The thing they are arguing over is if it is needed. The big reason for ITER is not to generate power but to demonstrate that sustain…

Without giving a strong opinion either way on whether this particular project is a good investment or not : Science, as an institution imo undervalues good marketing and good PR. For profit enterprises are under no illusion that they can succeed without good marketing and public perception. If large expensive projects like this are needed to increase public awareness and support for basic scientific research then I a…

Might be better if, when trying to promote your passion, you don’t bash others.

I’d argue getting people excited about sport, and society as a whole playing more of it, is an unbounded good.

I even know some research scientists who play sport recreationally, and follow professional-level sport.

Plenty of room and resources for both!

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#248

Post by adventured »

Semiapies wrote: post #183
thinkloop wrote: post #171

Fusion + AI = no more human labor

And always perpetually 20 years away.

Harnessing the perpetual motion required for it to always be 20 years away, is the key to fusion being able to generate infinite energy at a low cost. It's the most challenging aspect.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#249

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #178
valuearb wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My software startup was a huge beneficiary of the SSC cancellation, it freed up a nuclear physicist to write graphics software for us, which became one of our biggest products. I’m in favor of pursuing basic research, but there is always a cost. When you take a group of your smartest people and focus them on non-economic activities, the economy loses something.

That's incredibly short-sited. I'm glad for you that your startup was able to make money, but do you really think that the long-term economic value created is higher by making yet another piece of graphics software than from fundamental research? I would argue this entirely the other way; whenever the smartest people are sucked away from foundational work to make money "up the stack", it makes us all the poorer.

Or, that particular person could have been sucked up in to a huge bureaucracy and produced nearly nothing their entire career.

Hard to say.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#250

Post by peterlk »

godelski wrote: post #134
petschge wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simple answer is that the surface only goes up a factor of 4 if you increase the radius by a factor of 2, but the volume goes up by a factor of 8. So the ratio of (energy containing) volume to surface (where energy get's lost) if getting better with increasing size. There is of course much more complicated answers, all the way up to full-device simulations using gyrokinetic codes like Gene or Gkeyll that take mil…

This is the main issue and I don't want to make it any more complicated. But I do want to explain something because people hear arguments between fusion scientists. Within the field no one really doubts that ITER is going to work (there's a few, of course, but the majority don't doubt). The thing they are arguing over is if it is needed. The big reason for ITER is not to generate power but to demonstrate that sustain…

I had a conversation with nomeone who worked on ITER who was of the name opinion, and my follow-up question to him was: "how much money would I need to raise to get us over the line". His answer was calm and sincere: "I think, something like 3 trillion US dollars".

That's prohibitively expensive for private markets. No one will take that bet. It needs to be proven to be possible first.

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