Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 833 posts

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#511

Post by Galaxeblaffer »

fundatus wrote: post #459
Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is simply not true. according to IEA https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el... LCOE of nuclear is cheaper than almost all other possibilities we have. sure nuclear is very expensive up front, but a nuclear powerplant can run for 100 years while wind and solar had to be completely replaced every 25 years. your correct that nuclear has had some very expensive accidents, but the chance of a mo…

> sure nuclear is very expensive up front, but a nuclear powerplant can run for 100 years while wind and solar had to be completely replaced every 25 years. Hinkley Point C is currently expected to cost around $31 billion once finished for a measly 3,000 MW. For that money you could build ~2,300 15MW onshore wind turbines - which would add up to roughly 34,500 MW capacity. So even under the assumptions that - you hav…

Hinkley Point C is a first of its kind project, if you want to be economical you should look to KNGR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/APR-140 they've built several in Korea and one in Saudi Arabia where the cost was $24.4 billion for 5380 MW.

it's cute that you are mentioning onshore wind but that will just never happen, takes up way too much space and most places have a capacity factor of below 20% making your 34500 Mw 6900Mw as well as giving you erratic output. so for wind to work you either need fossil fuels, power 2x or some new magical battery that will make the cost of such a solution insane because you'd have to completely overhaul your infrastructure.

offshore wind is more realistic, but costs way more than nuclear.

wind makes sense of you want to built something fast, but it won't bring down your carbon footprint. og at least it haven't in Germany or Denmark. the only reduction we've seen is because we burn trash and biomass which fair some messed up reason is considered green and renewable.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#512

Post by donquixote25 »

qayxc wrote: post #485
donquixote25 wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many fusion new articles have this problem but i would argue that this time, how FT categorized this is appropriate. This is literally the first time the scientific break-even (not engineering break-even) has been achieved by any controlled experiment, including MCF. How is that not a breakthrough?

> How is that not a breakthrough? I will try to be really positive here. The researchers managed to achieve ignition on an area less than the width of a human hair for 100 trillionths of a second. The resulting fusion may have gotten scientific break-even (again - no officially published results yet). This is great progress in terms of basic research, for sure. On the other hand, we have experiments like Wendelstein…

Sure we can wait, but there already has been publications about the August 2021 shot, in which they determined that the August 2021 met the ignition criteria. It's pretty clear that they were on the verge of achieving scientific break-even.

Maybe we are just arguing about semantics and what constitutes a breakthrough but in my mind, the hardest challenge of fusion has been getting scientific gain over 1. There are still OTHER hard problem like continuous operation, capturing energy, but ultimately, getting scientific gain over 1 is/was the most challenging. You can say it isn't but the fact is, none of the MCF concepts have achieved a scientific gain over ~.64 and have not improved since the 1990s (JET). Look, if the 7-X or ITER or JET achieves a similar scientific gain, they will get similarly applauded.

I'm not saying that fusion will become a economically viable power source now. It is just that NIF de-risked the hardest challenge of fusion from a pure physics standpoint: more energy out than in.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#513

Post by devin »

jkelleyrtp wrote: post #447

Very disappointed by the discourse in this HN thread. The same old quips over and over. "NIF is just a nuclear stewardship program", "it's not actually generating power", "fusion still 30 years away". I think it's very clear, given the past year that NIF has had, that they are very rapidly approaching a point where we have the tech to "solve" inertial fusion. https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/papers-presentations Getting…

I am not a physicist. Most here aren’t but fancy themselves experts on things they know precious little about. I’m not surprised but I agree it’s disappointing.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#514

Post by crote »

epivosism wrote: post #506
peanuty1 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear plants are also very expensive, no?

There is a lot of background on nuclear costs. From https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-nuclear-p... & other sources, I've heard safety standards around radiation were set higher than ever proven necessary, and also ratchet up to obviate any cost gains per unit output.

Safety standards were set higher and higher because accidents kept happening, resulting in some well-known extremely large scale disasters and numerous minor ones. As with every industry, the rules were written with blood.

When you are building a power plant which has the capability of making a significant portion of your country permanently incompatible with human life, you generally want to be really sure you aren't going to have an oopsie.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#515

Post by trompetenaccoun »

adamsb6 wrote: post #483
whimsicalism wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the vast majority of people, the Wright Brothers' flight was also "just another Monday [or whatever day it happened to be]". It's a bad criterion for judging something noteworthy.

In the case of the Wright Brothers, most people didn't even believe it. One factor at work was that they'd been primed by years of Respected Scientists saying that it was physically impossible. The newspapers didn't cover it until random people started asking why the feats they'd seen with their own eyes weren't being written about. https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Aviations_Attic...

I doubt that 'wright-brothers.org' is a reliable impartial source on that. The idea of heavier than air flight had been around, it wasn't conceived by them. Lilienthal was an earlier well-documented pioneer, there are pictures of his gliders in mid-flight. Just to name one. So without doing further research, the idea that actual scientists at the time thought it was impossible seems highly unlikely to me. As early as the 18th century Europeans experimented with fixed wing "flying machines". The Wright Brothers probably weren't even the ones to first archive powered flight, there are multiple contenders.

It's a bit like with Elon Musk (re-)inventing the electric car. Those popular names that went down in history are usually not the original inventors. These people were first of all successful entrepreneurs that understood business and ultimately won the patent war. But in the early 20th century, the idea of flight was already firmly established, why would any "respected scientist" have doubted what could already be observed in action around the Western world?

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#516

Post by etiam »

paxys wrote: post #466
dsr_ wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because for 90% of new products, the old stuff performs better, uses fewer resources, and has been debugged in ways the new stuff has not. All the new stuff, however, has marketing and looks shiny.

If you are always a naysayer you will be right 90% of the time and can feel smug and pat yourself on the back for it (so, like everyone here). However, progress comes from people willing to take risks and make wild bets for the small chance that they are in the 10%.

Aside from the particular percentages I don't exactly disagree with your observation about the odds of being right or wrong in the respective cases, but I think the skepticism being due to an lazy pursuit of this smugness and self-congratulation you describe is almost entirely flawed as an explanation of motivations.

Instead, I'd like to suggest, in addition to having with cumulative exposure developed a severe hype allergy, a lot of us are burnt with respect to that so-called progress. There's been a fair bit of outright corrupted delivery on the promise of new technology, not least IT, and many people here are savvy enough to see the costs of wrongheaded changes.

'Move fast or not, we don't care much, but back off breaking things we liked and leaving the rest of us picking up the shards.'

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#517

Post by paledot »

ithkuil wrote: post #509
fundatus wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, and fusion reactors will probably be even more expensive (especially the first ones). Looking at the current prices of renewables, I don't see a market for fusion reactors at all to be honest. After all we already have a giant fusion reactor just 12 light-minutes away from us! We just have to harvest that energy. The direction were already going (mostly market-driven nowadays actually!) is generation from renewa…

The distance to the sun is closer to 8 light minutes than to 12 light minutes. Or do you use heavier minutes, imperial minutes perchance?

It's an unstable isotope with only 40 seconds in it.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#518

Post by teilo »

bnjemian wrote: post #332

I'd be very interested to see the breakdown of input energy costs. Most notable is the raw energy cost required to power the lasers and control machinery in the experiment. But then there are other costs, all of which must be amortized over time for any real-world use case to exist. I say this because the journalists in this piece imply that net gain is simply based off of the amount of energy pumped into the experim…

Early reports are are not good. For every joule delivered to the chamber, it takes 100 joules of electrical power. Heat to electricity is 50% efficient at best. Reports are that with 2.1mj of input, they generated 2.5 mj of output. Taking inputs and electrical production into account, this means 0.6% is all they are getting out vs. what they put in.

These over-unity reports are meaningless, because every damn one of them only measures Q-plasma, not Q-total.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#519

Post by Schroedingersat »

Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #511
fundatus wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sure nuclear is very expensive up front, but a nuclear powerplant can run for 100 years while wind and solar had to be completely replaced every 25 years. Hinkley Point C is currently expected to cost around $31 billion once finished for a measly 3,000 MW. For that money you could build ~2,300 15MW onshore wind turbines - which would add up to roughly 34,500 MW capacity. So even under the assumptions that - you hav…

Hinkley Point C is a first of its kind project, if you want to be economical you should look to KNGR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/APR-140 they've built several in Korea and one in Saudi Arabia where the cost was $24.4 billion for 5380 MW. it's cute that you are mentioning onshore wind but that will just never happen, takes up way too much space and most places have a capacity factor of below 20% making your 34500…

Have a look at the availability factors of those 'cheap' Korean nukes, there's a lot of overlap with the capacity factor of offshore wind even including curtailment. Then the running cost differences are enough to pay for the wind farm in about 15 years.

Then also look at the $20 billion dollar 'service' contract for the Saudi one that doesn't include any labour or running costs. It suddenly costs about the same as Hinkley C even before overruns.

Once you look at the total in rather than comparing overnight costs to renewable all in costs, they're the same $8-10 per net watt as nuclear always is anywhere except china - and China's renewables are cheaper by close to the same ratio.

The penetration rates at a given cost favour renewables right up until your peaker gas plants are causing less emissions than the Uranium mine.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#520

Post by Schroedingersat »

smeagull wrote: post #499
fundatus wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sure nuclear is very expensive up front, but a nuclear powerplant can run for 100 years while wind and solar had to be completely replaced every 25 years. Hinkley Point C is currently expected to cost around $31 billion once finished for a measly 3,000 MW. For that money you could build ~2,300 15MW onshore wind turbines - which would add up to roughly 34,500 MW capacity. So even under the assumptions that - you hav…

The cost of the land required is non-trivial.

Onshore wind can overlap with pasture land.

Offshore wind pays into the public purse now via the leases and still costs about half what subsidised nuclear does. It's still a very young industry.

Post reply on HN