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

US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

energy.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 1001 posts

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#61

Post by panosfilianos »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #54
panosfilianos wrote: post #39

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 ~$…

> tritium is ridiculously expensive, at $30k per gram D-T fusion almost always breeds tritium in the blanket.

Would that mean that you wouldn't need titium to start with? Or that tritium deposits would replenish?

How would it affect the rough calculations above?

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#62

Post by galuano1 »

brofallon wrote: post #30

I'm still a little unclear on the benefits that fusion offers compared to things like wind and solar. I understand that we need to develop better storage technologies for the energy produced by wind and solar, but that seems so much easier than the challenges currently facing fusion. Wind and solar just seem so far ahead of fusion already - they're pretty cheap and very widely deployed on a global scale. In compariso…

Predictable and abundant supply of fuel, and hopefully greener to produce the powerplant itself.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#63

Post by vfclists »

brofallon wrote: post #30

I'm still a little unclear on the benefits that fusion offers compared to things like wind and solar. I understand that we need to develop better storage technologies for the energy produced by wind and solar, but that seems so much easier than the challenges currently facing fusion. Wind and solar just seem so far ahead of fusion already - they're pretty cheap and very widely deployed on a global scale. In compariso…

Industry does not run on solar and wind and sad to say it, current storage energy is not green.

The cleanest energy available now is nuclear fission, but there is no money in it for the energy industry. It is too plentiful and cheap if implemented properly and capitalism does not like plentiful and cheap.

France has had cheap electricity for decades and it seems it has been so cheap that they don't want it anymore.

This is all capitalist boondoggles.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#65

Post by readams »

psychoslave wrote: post #43

Is that a different approach than the Tokamak, some piece to make it works, or some other relationship? What does it mean for existing projects such as ITER? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

This works in a totally different way, by heating a tiny target fuel pellet with a laser to cause it to collapse and trigger fusion through basically heating and squeezing: more like how a bomb works. It's not easy to see a direct path from this approach to a power plant, but it might involve lining up a steady stream of fuel targets and doing this in a sort of pulsed mode.

Other approaches attempt to create a continuous plasma where fusion can occur confined in a powerful magnetic field, and heated by radio waves to get it going. So there's always fusion happening rather than in short bursts.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#66

Post by frellus »

I hate to ask this, but have to ... is there any danger of these discoveries being weaponized easily by hostile countries? i.e. does this make unconventional weapons more accessible to countries who otherwise have embargoes on technology and material to make atomic weapons?

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#67

Post by fastneutron »

twarge wrote: post #40

Remarkable. It's still nuclear energy, and the sobering part for me is that fusion neutrons are an order of magnitude more energetic than fission neutrons. Add the fact that fusion plants are an order of magnitude larger, and you get orders of magnitude more nuclear waste with order of magnitude higher activation/radioactivity. If you don't like nuclear for these reasons, you'll probably hate fusion.

Activation products are of a different nature than the fission products and minor actinides you get in fission reactors, and are not necessarily as fearsome to handle, nor is the total activity comparable at all to what you get in spent fuel.

However, those high energy neutrons do a ridiculous amount of damage to the structural materials, and if there are constant outages to swap and repair components, I don’t see an easy way of making energy economically.

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#68

Post by JumpCrisscross »

panosfilianos wrote: post #61
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tritium is ridiculously expensive, at $30k per gram D-T fusion almost always breeds tritium in the blanket.

Would that mean that you wouldn't need titium to start with? Or that tritium deposits would replenish? How would it affect the rough calculations above?

> Would that mean that you wouldn't need titium to start with?

Tritium decays in a decade. To start, you'd need the expensive stuff harvested from the heavy water of spent fuel pools. After that, you'd let your neutrons breed it in lithium (or boron, if you're fancy).

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#69

Post by ericmay »

Buttons840 wrote: post #5
mustacheemperor wrote: post #2

I don't know about everyone else, but I'm taking this particular moment just to swell with pride and excitement for this achievement by science and forget about the details of how much more needs to be done to create the first power plant. I'm remembering when I first learned about fusion energy development, how distant and unfeasible it seemed, and regardless of how long the road ahead still is it's incredible how f…

What about this: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2333346-ignition-confir... Allegedly ignition was achieved a year ago. How is this different?

A better question to ask yourself is if this isn't any different, why are the entire scientific community, the Lawrence Livermore lab, the DOE, and others so excited about it?

If these are the same thing, why didn't they make a big deal about it before? What's the material difference?

Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

#70

Post by anfilt »

trilobyte wrote: post #42
sidibe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2.05 MJ is what made it into the system from the laser. It took a lot more to power the laser.

That's what I was trying to figure out. So is it still a net-negative overall?

Yea very curious as well would need to dig a little deeper. If it's the beam energy it means we need more efficient lasers or to scale larger to overcome the energy losses from making a laser beam.

Still even if it's just the beam we are at an energy positive which is still great news because it mean the fundamentals are working.

Still other issues though, the biggest in my opinion are an effective way to produce Tritium and energy extraction.

Post reply on HN