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Fusion News Ignites Optimism

nature.com

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Re: Fusion News Ignites Optimism

#41

Post by GravitasFailure »

myrmidon wrote: post #32
tsimionescu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally I believe that fusion research is worthwile no matter the outcome, but calling it a "purely academic waste of ressources without positive environmental/economical ROI" might turn out to be correct (playing devils advocate here but this is important to consider, no matter how much pro-nuclear you are). One thing to remember is that a major goal of fusion research is also weapons applications, those that i…

Not sure I agree with this; I just don't see the weapon applications of fusion power... Also most participants are either already nuclear powers (US, EU, Russia, China, India) or could just build thermonuclear weapons already if they wanted to (Korea, Japan, etc.) Or maybe you had completely different weapon applications in mind?

Inertial Confinement Fusion is useful for H-Bomb research, and other styles of fusion are probably tangentially useful for understanding high energy physics.

Re: Fusion News Ignites Optimism

#42

Post by sanp »

danpalmer wrote: post #4

While I'm excited for this, I'm also cynical about the public reaction to fusion power as it gets closer to success and eventual general availability. These past 2 years have highlighted to many how a combination of poor critical thinking and politicisation of so many aspects of our lives can lead to literal catastrophes. Will the public see Fusion as the wonderful advancement for humanity that it will likely be, or…

And, will electrons generated via fusion be easier to track so that the government knows what you r doing with electricity

Re: Fusion News Ignites Optimism

#43

Post by willis936 »

I like being optimistic, but there is nothing to be optimistic about when it comes to producing electrical power from laser ICF. It's a weapons program.

Also, I spent a few years as an engineer at a stellarator. This video[0] recently came out and I find it's the best crash course on the nuances of reactor design that I've seen. It really nails the thoughts and feelings of fusion researchers. It was especially refreshing to hear in public that ECRH is the only viable heating method for a reactor.

If you watch this you might think I'm pessimistic about fusion, but I'm not. Fusion has been sold as this secret Ace up our sleeve that will come in and decarbonize our grid in a matter of decades. It isn't that. That's what's been sold because it's difficult to justify the field when the timelines don't decarbonize the grid in 50 years. The important thing to know is that the world doesn't end in 50 years. Energy demands are ever increasing and the supply is ever diminishing. Fusion science is expensive and time consuming. Humans will have to do the work if they want to stay on the current track beyond the next 100 years. It might seem like a subtle point and a doomed one to make considering how shortsighted we as a society have demonstrated to be.

0. https://youtu.be/JurplDfPi3U

Re: Fusion News Ignites Optimism

#44

Post by pfdietz »

Tepix wrote: post #2

I get the impression that the rate of progress is increasing in fusion energy research. Finally! Or is it just various fusion startups making PR waves to get more investments?

Fusion is reaching (or arguably has passed) its sell by date as alternatives crash in cost. So it's raise money now or never.

Re: Fusion News Ignites Optimism

#45

Post by PedroBatista »

Until now Nuclear Fusion has produced optimism, careers and portfolio valuations but no energy.

The theory is there, but the implementation is not and worse than that, there is no "it will get cheaper with industrialization" in sigh, because we are not even at that stage and there is no indication there is a realistic path to achieve the efficiency needed to be economically viable ( ever! ).

The best positioned to deliver something tangible seems to be ITER, many of the rest seems to be more of a pump & dump scheme than anything else.

Re: Fusion News Ignites Optimism

#46

Post by choeger »

Could someone enlighten me how laser fusion of prefabricated pellets (at least that's how I understand the idea in the article) can generate electricity? In a Tokamak or Stellarator, we collect heat on the outside, AFAIK and generate electricity in the good, old, "make something spin quickly" manner. But in a laser-ignition device, we need to shoot a pellet into some kind of chamber, so that chamber better be relatively cool or our pellet melts or deforms before it can be hit by the lasers, right? So how does one tackle that problem?

Re: Fusion News Ignites Optimism

#47

Post by Ottolay »

danjac wrote: post #37

Great! Does that mean fusion is going to be here in just 10 years in the future as opposed to the 20 years in the future it's been for the last 50 years?

Who knows. The problem is not getting fusion, but getting fusion to economically produce power. Hopefully one of the startups figure out some way to make it work.

I have a hard time seeing the NIF approach becoming economical. It's more of a science experiment.

Re: Fusion News Ignites Optimism

#48

Post by wnkrshm »

blake1 wrote: post #29
wnkrshm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use of fusion as an energy source removes a lot of threats our civilizations are facing but it also comes with some caveats rooted in human behavior. Human energy consumption has always gone up when the supply got more efficient, from coal to oil to fission. While here, the power generation itself won't have such a drastic impact (unless humanity overdoes it, though, we seem to always do that) but maybe more power me…

Your first point is not supported by the data. The US Energy Information Agency keeps track of this[1], and the per capita energy use peaked around 2000. And we are much better at running an energy-efficient economy: energy use/real $ GDP has halved in the last century. The trend may not continue. People might start to do much more air travel (which would require massive runway building). Global warming might increas…

It is good to see that the per capita trend has reversed, maybe if the global population would not increase steadily we may actually not increase energy consumption steadily.

Edit: I found an interesting nature article[0] that looks at different correlations of population and consumption to identify if there is an anthropocene epoch. There are pretty clear-cut trends but who knows, maybe Earth's population will actually reach a kind of steady state.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-020-00029-y.pdf

Re: Fusion News Ignites Optimism

#49

Post by tsimionescu »

danpalmer wrote: post #30
tsimionescu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally I believe that fusion research is worthwile no matter the outcome, but calling it a "purely academic waste of ressources without positive environmental/economical ROI" might turn out to be correct (playing devils advocate here but this is important to consider, no matter how much pro-nuclear you are). One thing to remember is that a major goal of fusion research is also weapons applications, those that i…

I have never heard of fusion weapons research, or what they would even be. My understanding is limited but where I can see fission leading to weapons, I can't see the same for fusion. Could you give some more detail? What form would a fusion weapon take? Is it about the laser technology?

The first thermonuclear weapon (or H-bomb) test was successfully completed in 1952. That is, a nuclear bomb that uses a fission reaction to create the conditions for a more pworful fusion reaction, which is either the final step, or is used to power an additional fission step, amplifying the final explosion many times more.

The NIF experiment explained here, which uses a laser to generate X rays by heating the walls of a heavy metal hohlraum, and then uses these X-rays inside the hohlraum to compress a pellet of gas to ignite a fusion reaction is very similar to the conditions inside an H-bomb, which also generates X-rays (via a fission reaction) to compress and ignite a fusion reaction.

The weapons use is relatively simple - fusion reactions expel much more energy than fission reactions, and using the power of a fission reaction to compress and to ignite a fusion reaction inside a large amount of gas expels much more energy than simply exploding the power of the fission reaction outwards.

Re: Fusion News Ignites Optimism

#50

Post by pfdietz »

tsimionescu wrote: post #23
xupybd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it will as it should be radically cheaper. It should come with an economic improvement.

Given the current trends, it seems very unlikely that fusion will be even close to competitive with solar or wind by the time it arrives (which is still probably more than 20 years away as a commercial endeavor). Fusion, in any of its forms, requires some of the highest technology ever produced by mankind. It then exposes these ultra-high-tech wonders to extreme temperatures, and extreme temperature differences, and…

It's not that catastrophic failure destroys a good chunk of the plant, it's that any accident in the hot part of the reactor becomes very difficult to repair. So even a relatively minor accident can turn your multibillion dollar investment into junk.
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