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Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

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Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#541

Post by seanmcdirmid »

crote wrote: post #514
epivosism wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

> Safety standards were set higher and higher because accidents kept happening, resulting in some well-known extremely large scale disasters and numerous minor ones.

I think Chernobyl was the only really big nuclear plant disaster right? And even then, what we've really learned in the long term is that human habitation is more dangerous to wildlife than nuclear radiation (the area around the plant is now a thriving wildlife preserve).

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#542

Post by crote »

Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #528
Schroedingersat wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

seriously.. bring some evidence. onshore wind is just not going to happen it just has too many problems. and offshore wind is more expensive, less reliable and takes roughly the same time to build as nuclear. Denmark is currently planning to build a 3Gw energy island that will cost a whopping 40bn dollars and is planed to be finished in 2033. insane if you ask me

Onshore wind has been happening for decades. See for example the 1.5GW farm in California, the 1GW farm in New Mexico, the 1GW one in Oklahoma, the 900MW one in Texas, or the 845MW one in Oregon.

Offshore has a rather fast construction time, it turns out. For example, the United Kingdom's Hornsea Wind Farm Project 2 was given planning permission in 2016, and it reached its full capacity of 1.4GW less than six years later. Project 1 at the same wind farm reached 1.2GW in less than five years.

And when it comes to cost, Hornsea Project 3 is to start construction next year - with commercial operation scheduled in 2025 - at $12bn for 2.4GW. Not bad when you compare it to Finland's Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant unit 3 costing an estimated $11bn for 1.6GW - which took 22 years from first license application to design output power.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#543

Post by Galaxeblaffer »

crote wrote: post #532
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…

Do you have a source for the 100-year lifetime? Currently a lot of reactors are hitting the 30-40 year mark, and they are running into significant issues with the aging equipment. We are seeing an increasing number of minor incidents, often caused due to manufacturing defects finally rearing its head, or just plain fatigue. Meanwhile, solar has a 25-year economic lifespan. At that point you can make more money by rep…

well i guess a 100 years lifetime was kind of pulled out of my ass, what i was trying to communicate is that you can I'm theory maintain a nuclear power plant to last for 100s of years but i guess if you'd just let it run without doing anything it would probably run for 30-40 years.

https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/iaea-data-animation-nuc...

solar is fine for those who can afford it, but workout subsidies and the ability to sell electricity back to the grid it's a crazy long term investment in many places of the world especially northern Europe where I'm from (for hopefully obvious reasons). so different milage may apply elsewhere. i guess we'll have to see if those 40 years are for real and if the companies offering it are even around in 20 years.

wind needs constant maintenance to have a 20 year lifespan, but beyond the 25 years you'd have to replace the whole thing. so while a nuclear powerplant also requires constant maintenance you don't have to treat down the whole plant after 40 years. even the German ones that are closing now could easily have their lifetime extended https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/could-germany-keep-i...

>When it comes to accidents, they are indeed extremely unlikely. However, the figure to look at is the potential damages multiplied by the likelyhood of the accident. When we look at those two together, they are definitely worth discussing.

i guess what I'm trying to say is that we as a civilization engage in activities that are way more risky and dangerous than the miniscule risk of a serious accident in a modern gen 3+ nuclear power plant. of course we should have strict regulation here, but it's just not that dangerous or risky

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#544

Post by pfdietz »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #58
SuperFine wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>After that, we can see what a practical electricity producing plant looks like I guess we still don't have anything better than boiling water, right?

Right. But slapping boiling water around the burning plasma is kind of a rube goldberg usually. See LLNL's LIFE design for example [1]. Things like molten salt walls circulating through a steam turbine and all that. There are other ideas too, but it's hard to beat a Rankine cycle. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy

You can't just slap boiling water around the burning plasma in a DT reactor, since you need almost all the neutrons to make more tritium. Water would absorb too many neutrons. The IFE designs use thick showers of liquid lithium or molten FLiBe for this reason.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#545

Post by robocat »

crote wrote: post #532
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…

Do you have a source for the 100-year lifetime? Currently a lot of reactors are hitting the 30-40 year mark, and they are running into significant issues with the aging equipment. We are seeing an increasing number of minor incidents, often caused due to manufacturing defects finally rearing its head, or just plain fatigue. Meanwhile, solar has a 25-year economic lifespan. At that point you can make more money by rep…

> manufacturers have already started offering 40-year warranties

A warrantee of that length is only valuable if the manufacturer is a stable business with multiple income streams (say GE) or the warrantee is backed by stable insurance (say Lloyds). Liabilities are supposed to be on the balance sheet, so they are not free to mint.

If there were a long term issue where consumers needed to claim on the warrantee, I would guess most manufacturers would just get liquidated, but the executives and owners will have already cashed out. The same business model gets used for lots of other businesses with long term warrantees - limited liability is very handy.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#546

Post by pfdietz »

moloch-hai wrote: post #495
dools wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helion tech seems to be interesting in that they use the electricity directly so avoids the costly conversion via steam/turbines etc.

It's the only one with a ghost of a chance. Still only a ghost, and the 3He supply problem looms.

They'd make their own 3He by also doing DD fusion. It's properly a DD+D3He concept.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#547

Post by Octokiddie »

Some perspective from cnet:

> But, as with all science, it's good to be cautious and not overhype results yet to be fully analyzed. We have been here before, after all. In 2013, reports swirled the NIF had achieved this exact feat. It wasn't the case.

https://www.cnet.com/science/climate/a-fusion-energy-breakth...

AFAICT, the only thing that's been publicly confirmed is that announcement will be made tomorrow.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#548

Post by pfdietz »

zaking17 wrote: post #244

Would anyone knowledgeable about the field update their priors about whether we’ll see commercial fusion in the next 30 years, after seeing these results? If not, is there a big milestone we’re waiting for? Or will fusion advancement be a slow grind with many small improvements over decades?

I don't see this as dealing with the considerable obstacles to inertial fusion. In particular: cost of lasers, size of the system with survivable final optics, cost of manufacturing the targets, and targeting of moving targets with sufficient accuracy.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#549

Post by pfdietz »

tunesmith wrote: post #349
hannob wrote: post #227

Usual caveat about all fusion "got more energy out than we put in" stories: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-close-is-nucle... From a quick skimming it seems only one of the experts quoted here even mentions that (Tony Roulstone). (Update: i wrote this comment in response to another story and the comment got moved here, so it lost a bit of context https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33958678&ref=upstrac…

So... Q-plasma is above 1 for the first time, which is a huge deal. Q-total is still below 1, but some of that can be improved through already-known laser efficiency advancements, and also by pushing Q-plasma higher. I think pushing Q-plasma above 1 is the big gate though, isn't it? I mean, partly psychologically. Showing that it's actually technically possible.

It's not really a big deal, since laser fusion needs Q of 500 to 1000 to actually make sense.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#550

Post by epivosism »

crote wrote: post #514
epivosism wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

I accept this as one point; I do question whether the opposite side of the benefit calculation was made - i.e. did we have a public debate where we correctly looked at the tradeoffs of increased fossil fuel carbon pollution, economic impacts from lack of energy and failures to advance, balanced out with honest cost estimates of disaster profiles? It doesn't seem like it. It seems the debates were fairly one-sided; this leads me to believe a better outcome would be weighted more towards pro-nuclear.
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