571–580 of 833 posts
Generating 59 MJ (11MW) in five seconds was impressive too although I didn't see what the amount of energy that was input.
I'm also curious how are they going to heat water for the steam generators? Water can't be heated to 150 million degrees C something has to moderate it down to X degrees. That seems to be incredibly wasteful.
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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 w…
Very encouraging to see at least some enthusiasm for this. This is the real way forward. We can't just stop using energy. We can't buy our way forward with "carbon offset" fees. And, most importantly, we can't just redirect all of our environmental conservation efforts to eliminating energy use. Remember when we were going to save the rainforests? Don't forget why we called these "green" initiatives in the first plac…
You are correct. We need to control our own numbers at a sustainable level.
That's not at all what GP said IMO
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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.
At the contrary in renewables the learning cycle is in months so costs fall exponentially.
That's the real reason of high costs in fission, not red tape or public sentiment.
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"Exciting" for individuals within the field often does not translate to "exciting" for everyone else. It's quite reasonable to think there's a good chance this is not the beginning of a "practical for energy generation" fusion revolution. It is very interesting, but in the same way that advances in particle physics are interesting.
An example of the context in which I want to tamper excitement comes from a post by a journalist writing for the FT, an outlet that is (relative to its peers) usually quite matter-of-fact: https://twitter.com/thomas_m_wilson/status/16020118886526320... > SCOOP: Net energy gain in a fusion reaction has been a holy grail in science for decades. Now I’m told US scientists have done it. A massive breakthrough with revolu…
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solar is fine in some places for some usecases and yes it's very cheap to add, but we've currently got no viable solution for storing the energy efficiently.
Batteries, pumped hyrdo, compressed air energy storage, hydrogen, the (large and growing) EV fleet, thermal energy storage
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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…
The ~fifty year lifespan is in part based on physical corrosion of pipes running through concrete there really isn’t a way to economically replace them all that costs less than simply building a new power plant. But even here not everything fails on the same day so there is some wiggle room.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
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…
JET Tokamak was within a factor of 2 and ITER will overshoot by a factor of 10.
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I'm a complete layman when it comes to ICF, but I'm assuming that there is a scaling factor between surface area and volume that would eventually help here? As in, the lasers initiate fusion on the surface of the fuel pellet, which propagates the fusion into the interior of the pellet in a chain reaction / positive feedback kind of way. So that if you increased the surface area of the pellet by a factor of 10, you'd…
That won’t work, I don’t think. You can’t make the pellets much larger because laser nonuniformities and hydrodynamic instabilities will kill the implosion; there will be no fusion at all. But that’s not a problem, you see, because in a commercial reactor you’ll have a pellet factory making the required one million targets per day, and they will be injected into the chamber 10 times per second, with practically no do…
But I cannot tell if this comment is being facetious or rather optimistic. Therefore, I’ll agree!