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Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

nature.com

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Re: Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

#271

Post by ncmncm »

zardo wrote: post #221
dreamcompiler wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed that pumped hydro is the most efficient storage solution but it's limited by geography: You can only do it where there's an existing significant elevation change. Building a sufficiently elevated lake artifically by heaping thousands of cubic kilometers of dirt is not cost-effective. That is, the energy that would be required to build it would vastly exceed the total energy it could store integrated over its l…

Yeah building mountains is not a realistic solution. Thermal storage is probably the best replacement where pumped hydro isn't feasible.

Inventing absurd versions of sound ideas just to have something to criticize is such a standard dishonest argument mode as to have been named.

We all know the name, but its main feature is its dishonesty.

Re: Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

#272

Post by nautilius »

panick21_ wrote: post #83
markvdb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have anecdotal evidence to the contrary: myself. In the short and medium term, it's obvious that wind and solar are going to help us avoid the worst of the climate crisis. In the long term, we might need something more to reverse climate change. Existing nuclear fission energy capacity might be a short term stopgap. It's just clearly not sustainable because inherently too risky: - military/terror/nuclear proliferat…

So much misconceptions in this opinion. It seems you dupped by the anti-nuclear lobby and the pro-fusion lobby. Non of the things you suggest are even remotely true. - Fusion are as big a proliferation risk, and existing fusion reactors and GenIV reactors that are being built are very small proliferation risk. - Fusion would be equally uninsurable. Practically speaking a accident that leaves the exclusion zone is les…

>- Fusion are as big a proliferation risk

You either don't understand fusion or proliferation.

Re: Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

#273

Post by zardo »

ncmncm wrote: post #271
zardo wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah building mountains is not a realistic solution. Thermal storage is probably the best replacement where pumped hydro isn't feasible.

Inventing absurd versions of sound ideas just to have something to criticize is such a standard dishonest argument mode as to have been named. We all know the name, but its main feature is its dishonesty.

What's the sound idea for build pumped hydro storage on flat land?

Re: Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

#274

Post by ncmncm »

pfdietz wrote: post #253
wpietri wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing I didn't compare fusion to perpetual motion, then. I was pointing out that his too-simple approach could be easily misapplied, and picked an especially obvious negative example to counter his especially obvious positive one. At this point we just don't know whether fusion is like airplanes or whether it's like perpetual motion. Unless you are proposing building an actual star, the existence of stars tells…

The "stars exist!" argument really annoys me. Among other objections, stars don't even use the specific fusion reactions that terrestrial fusion reactors would use.

Stars are, anyway, not subject to economics. It is the combination of Tokamak fusion power generation with economic viability that resembles perpetual motion.

Re: Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

#275

Post by ncmncm »

zardo wrote: post #273
ncmncm wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inventing absurd versions of sound ideas just to have something to criticize is such a standard dishonest argument mode as to have been named. We all know the name, but its main feature is its dishonesty.

What's the sound idea for build pumped hydro storage on flat land?

There is such a thing as a water tower, but that also is probably not practical utility-scale energy storage.

The sound idea is water stored up an existing hill. On flat land you store your energy some other way: underground hydrogen or compressed air, or iron-air batteries, or liquified air, or any of various other choices that are more expensive and less efficient than pumped hydro. Or just run a wire over to someplace that does have hills.

Re: Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

#276

Post by ncmncm »

orthecreedence wrote: post #261
ncmncm wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I.e., never. " What a terrible bet solar and wind are ", as you claim immediately above, would be a reason not to build out solar and wind, if it were correct. But it's not, and they are. And, it is at best naive to believe that it takes more energy to produce a solar panel than it will generate. People mining and refining silicon, cadmium, and tellurium and making solar panels out of them do not get power for free.…

> as you claim immediately above The claim was regarding nuclear VS solar (either/or), in which case yet, solar is a terrible bet . I stand by that. > People mining and refining silicon, cadmium, and tellurium and making solar panels out of them do not get power for free And you say I'm being naive... Firstly, the price of the panels doesn't even match the price of production because of subsidies. Secondly, they do g…

I see that you have completely abandoned rational argumentation and are just making shit up, so I leave this here.

Re: Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

#277

Post by orthecreedence »

ncmncm wrote: post #276
orthecreedence wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as you claim immediately above The claim was regarding nuclear VS solar (either/or), in which case yet, solar is a terrible bet . I stand by that. > People mining and refining silicon, cadmium, and tellurium and making solar panels out of them do not get power for free And you say I'm being naive... Firstly, the price of the panels doesn't even match the price of production because of subsidies. Secondly, they do g…

I see that you have completely abandoned rational argumentation and are just making shit up, so I leave this here.

Guess I struck a chord somewhere.

Re: Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

#278

Post by stormbrew »

urthor wrote: post #265
stormbrew wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We definitely want to be looking at technologies that have a high ROI for emission reduction in the next 10 year span, mixed with longer term projects. This... is my point? So I think you do see it. "Fusion can't save us now so we shouldn't invest in it at all" is short-sighted. This is not an either-or proposition, and frankly people have completely out of whack ideas of the scale of money that's been invested in…

See this is the thing. People thing 10 billion dollars is a lot of money. My view is that 10 billion dollars is nothing. My view is that the total OECD investment in fusion R&D should be 10 billion. A year. For the next 50 years. The investment in the high ROI technologies, principally solar R&D and overnight energy capacity projects like water pump batteries, should be 100 billion (across the OECD). And the investme…

I don't really disagree with any of this, so I guess that's confirmation that you did see my point.

Certainly, the fact that solar and wind are sure things right now warrants massive investment. Just throwing endless gobs of money at a problem that's as-yet unsolved doesn't necessarily lead to good outcomes, it also takes directed goals and all that. That's in theory what ITER is all about, though I think the slowness with which it got started will hamper it and we'll see success on other projects before it even gets to the testing phase. It was an attempt to create a moonshot that kinda failed, but the private sector seems more interested now so it might not matter.

That said I'd actually be surprised if there isn't already much more than $200bil going into building out solar capacity worldwide. It's just not easily enumerated because it's not special anymore, and a lot of it is on small scales (ie. I'm gonna install about $20k of solar panels to my home this spring and I'm not alone, but it's hard to tell how much that adds up to).

Re: Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

#279

Post by ncmncm »

ncmncm wrote: post #264
bobsmooth wrote: post #19

As with every fusion article, I encourage anyone interested in the space to look into General Fusion. They're using liquid metal as both the reaction vessel and as a means to extract power. Really cool stuff.

This actually looks like it could be practical. Important differences from the Tokamak concept are: 1. No enormous magnets 2. No exposure of fragile equipment to hot neutrons 3. The reaction occurs in a bubble inside molten lead/lithium, compressed mechanically. 4. None of the pipes carrying hot metal (or anything else) are exposed to hot neutrons, so need not be replaced frequently. 5. The amount of molten metal is…

Guessing the lead is so the ball of molten metal to make the bubble in can be not so big as to be impractical to handle.

Re: Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

#280

Post by sbierwagen »

somat wrote: post #154
cstross wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, this is good news. JET is a 1980s research project into how to contain a plasma and squish it enough to achieve fusion at all, not a practical generator. It doesn't have superconducting magnets, it runs on big lumps of copper, with limited cooling and no way of recovering output power. In the latest run, they achieved fusion and kept it running until JET ran out of power for its magnets . The plasma didn't touc…

For what its worth, the strongest magnets in the world are not superconducting but copper. My understanding is that the high magnetic field interferes with the superconducting mode. https://nationalmaglab.org/user-facilities/dc-field/instrume... Not that it has anything to do with plasma research, I just thought it an interesting fact.

Here's a fun table at which field strengths various superconductors fall out of the superconducting mode https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Upper-critical-fields-an...

ITER uses NbTi, SPARC uses YBCO.

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