281–290 of 1001 posts
Every breakthroughs starts from government (people) funded initiatives, congrats to everyone involved, a future without the need to generate selfish profit is at reach!
Every breakthrough starts from government funded initiatives? Wilbur and Orville Wright disagree.
I tried to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations on what this means in regards to energy costs being saved, because I couldn't find a direct source (maybe GPT could help actually). Anyway, based on ITER [1] to equate the energy production of a 1000MW coal plant you would need 2.7t of coal for that plant or 250kg of deuterium and tritium for the fusion reactor (split equally). Based on [2] deuetrium costs about ~$…
[0] provides economic analysis for this type of power plant. They conclude it would not be unreasonable to get levelized cost of energy could get as low as $25/MWh. For this one really needs a high gain of 1000, although gains of 400 are a bit more reasonable, and a gain of around 100 may be economically competitive in some cases. While the gain NIF achieved was about 1.5, there is good reason to expect it can be sca…
I think the biggest reason nuclear energy stopped being built is it takes too long to get political wins.
NuScale and other SMNRs might be able to help with that.
However, the capital costs & construction time for Fusion Energy should theoretically be much lower than nuclear reactors.
But are we too far away from it being a reality that anyone is predicting how much?
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That would be a valid argument if the only alternative to fusion was petroleum.
I'm confused by this. Does the US have the productive forces and resources to replace petrolium with solar panels (and the required energy storage)? Does it have the nuclear fuel to replace petrolium with fission reactors? What alternatives to petrolium does the US have that it does not rely on others for?
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That’s only because they’re using old school flash pumped lasers, not the new solid state lasers you’d use today if you wanted to make a power plant demo.
It just seems a little strange to take credit for a milestone when the milestone everyone cares about is yet to be reached. (More energy out than in.) Good to hear that there's a laser design that might achieve that.
So the NIF is supposed to give a testbed to study implosion created fusion reactions that produce enough energy to "ignite", that is, propegate the reaction to the rest of a hypothetical bomb. In that case, the amount of energy needed for the infrastructure to produce the initial implosion doesn't matter, what matters is that the energy coming out is more then the actual energy that triggered the reaction, so that the hypothetical bomb would blow up and not fizzle.
Here's your most exciting paragraph > LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE). Many advanced science and technology developments are still needed to achieve simple, affordable IFE to power homes and busines…
Most of the funding for the Manhattan project went into the industrial infrastructure required to produce plutonium and enriched uranium. It will be time to unleash resources once they have a working fusion reactor design in order to build fusion power plants and the industrial infrastructure required to supply them. Until then they should of course get the resources they need but I don't think throwing money at them…
Plutonium was significantly more easy to produce, but it did require some novel engineering for the implosion lens. They weren't sure it was going to work and did, in fact, test the bomb before dropping it on Nagasaki.
I think the Manhattan project is a great example of where more funds can help; if the funds were more restricted, it's entirely possible they would have gone with the "sure thing" of the uranium bomb instead of spending resources on the less sure plutonium bomb. Trying out multiple ideas in parallel often "wastes" money since if you try ideas in tandem, you will always try the high-percentage ideas first.
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This is a stupid question but I don't know anything about fusion: How is it possible for X energy to create X+Y energy in output? Doesn't that violate some fundamental law of physics?
If you look at the mass before of their fuel, 1 deuterium atom + 1 tritium atom: 2.01410177811 u + 3.01604928 u = 5.03015105811 u vs the mass of the fusion products of 1 helium atom and 1 neutron: 4.002602 u + 1.008 u = 5.010602 u You'll notice that even though we started with 5 neutrons and 2 protons and ended up with the same number there was some additional binding energy that is unaccounted for in the new configu…
Please correct me if I'm saying something stupid.
If you toss a solar mass of water into the sun it just becomes fuel.
So, could a fusion reactor, when efficiency is improved, use water as fuel?
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That would be a valid argument if the only alternative to fusion was petroleum.
I'm confused by this. Does the US have the productive forces and resources to replace petrolium with solar panels (and the required energy storage)? Does it have the nuclear fuel to replace petrolium with fission reactors? What alternatives to petrolium does the US have that it does not rely on others for?
Those crazy sci-fi stories from the 30s and 50s where everyone used nuclear power (and it was so cheap they didn't bother to meter it) were all completely accurate from a non-political viewpoint
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Offset the financial viability with the cost of freedom from energy reliance and the need (more like craving) for military interventions
That would be a valid argument if the only alternative to fusion was petroleum.