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Fusion Power Plant Simulator

fusionenergybase.com

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Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator

#61

Post by derriz »

When people get excited about fusion as a source of energy, I’m always reminded of Henry Ford’s famous quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” although apparently he probably never said that.

Fusion is that faster horse - promising a cheaper to operate firebox which when attached to a stream engine attached to an alternator can produce electricity.

This approach to generating electricity has been superseded by new technologies - first by gas turbines which removed the steam engine and then by wind turbines which removed heat from the process and now by solar PV which has removed all the mechanics.

I just can’t see any circumstances under which steam engines are “coming back” and becoming competitive for electricity no matter how cheap the firebox fuel is.

Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator

#62

Post by leonidasrup »

Symmetry wrote: post #26
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fusion power plants can't "melt down" Eh, a core-containment failure (in any magnetically-contained system) would involve superheated hydrogen getting friendly with oxygen. That, in turn, would give neutron-impregnated barrier materials a free ride on propellant. It's not strictly a melt down. But it's in the same practical category of failure.

There's only a few grams of hydrogen in the reactor's plasma, it's reaction with oxygen wouldn't be much more exciting than just losing containment. There are engineering challenges that have to be addressed but no worse than the 6 MW research reactor I used to walk by every day to my college classes in the middle of a dense city. The proliferation risk of someone using the neutron flux to produce an atomic or dirty…

I think the proliferation risks will be in future the reason, independent of technological obstacles or costs, why US will not allow to build fusion power plants in all countries around the world.

Hybrid nuclear fusion–fission power plants have been already proposed and studied in theory.

"In general terms, the hybrid is very similar in concept to the fast breeder reactor, which uses a compact high-energy fission core in place of the hybrid's fusion core. Another similar concept is the accelerator-driven subcritical reactor, which uses a particle accelerator to provide the neutrons instead of nuclear reactions."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion–fission_hybrid

Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator

#63

Post by johnea »

Great... Decades, and probably trillions of dollars later, we have a really cool fusion simulator.

That's awesome. Maybe we can fly it around the moon and take selfies with it!

Might as well roll all the high cost pseudo-science into one big instagram package...

p.s. Of course this is in contrast to using the giant fusion reaction that we have running, literally over our heads...

Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator

#64

Post by minihat »

derriz wrote: post #61

When people get excited about fusion as a source of energy, I’m always reminded of Henry Ford’s famous quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” although apparently he probably never said that. Fusion is that faster horse - promising a cheaper to operate firebox which when attached to a stream engine attached to an alternator can produce electricity. This approach to generat…

Some fusion reactions release their energy almost entirely as fast moving charged particles.

You can slow down those particles against an electric field and harvest the energy as electricity directly. No steam turbine. No Carnot limit.

Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator

#65

Post by the8472 »

dale_glass wrote: post #16

A good addition would be the sales price per MWh, price for the power plant, and the loan interest rate. Because IMO all that is extremely critical. I fully support the pursuit of fusion as a scientific endeavor, but given that we're probably at least 30 years away from having anything approaching commercial deployment (assuming ITER is built, works, is followed promptly by DEMO, it works, and is followed promptly by…

Storing renewables for a whole season is an unsolved problem at the moment. Countries at higher latitudes might want fusion for baseload generation during winter. And later it'll help with climbing the Kardashev scale.

Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator

#66

Post by MisterTea »

ExpertAdvisor01 wrote: post #27
MisterTea wrote: post #7

No melt down? This game sucks. On a serious note: I wonder how practical and safe it would be to build fusion pants close to city centers in order to harvest the excess heat for district heating. Would be a boon in e.g. NYC which already has a large district steam system. You can do cooling too, look up "steam absorption chiller."

It already exists in many countries. They transport it through pipelines . E.g. Temelín Nuclear Power Plant, Paks Nuclear Power Plant And many more

My question is more about the safety of locating one smack in the middle of a city. There is radiation to shield but no radioactive fuel waste. HOWEVER, worn reactor parts that need to be replaced will be piping hot when measured with a Geiger counter. So is it safe to build and operate in the middle of e.g. NYC?

And further, if they are safe, what is the public's perception of fusion? Do people hear "nuclear fusion" and immediately think nuclear disaster imagery brought about by incidents like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl?

Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator

#67

Post by dale_glass »

the8472 wrote: post #65
dale_glass wrote: post #16

A good addition would be the sales price per MWh, price for the power plant, and the loan interest rate. Because IMO all that is extremely critical. I fully support the pursuit of fusion as a scientific endeavor, but given that we're probably at least 30 years away from having anything approaching commercial deployment (assuming ITER is built, works, is followed promptly by DEMO, it works, and is followed promptly by…

Storing renewables for a whole season is an unsolved problem at the moment. Countries at higher latitudes might want fusion for baseload generation during winter. And later it'll help with climbing the Kardashev scale.

But there's far easier solutions to that than fusion.

For example, HVDC. Interconnect and buy power from somebody with more sun. Or just overbuild solar by a lot. It's cheap, so chances are having too much of it still works out economically.

Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator

#68

Post by nerdsniper »

advisedwang wrote: post #13
MisterTea wrote: post #7

No melt down? This game sucks. On a serious note: I wonder how practical and safe it would be to build fusion pants close to city centers in order to harvest the excess heat for district heating. Would be a boon in e.g. NYC which already has a large district steam system. You can do cooling too, look up "steam absorption chiller."

> I wonder how practical and safe it would be to build fusion pants close to city centers in order to harvest the excess heat for district heating The cost/benefit for doing this seems pretty similar between fusion as gas power. We don't usually do this with gas, so I guess it's probably not viable for fusion.

Many cities/towns in the USA have small power plants in them (typically associated with a University, large hospital system, or central business district) which "sell" not just power, but also hot water, and steam. The steam is typically used to heat buildings. Google for "$CITY steam tunnels" or "$CITY CHP plant" to find these in your area.

San Francisco has[0][1][2][3] at least five combined heat and power plants that generate electricity and also sell steam to neighboring buildings via 72,000 feet of pipes.

I worked at a privately-owned for-profit "factory" in Santa Monica whose primary product was chilled water (their other product was warm water). They built pipelines to nearby large buildings and sold chilled water to them.

0: https://cordiaenergy.com/locations/san-francisco-3/ (2 for-profit CHP plants)

1: Skanska (for-profit)

2: San Francisco General Hospital

3: Apparently there are some "Muni" CHP plants scattered about SF as well (publicly-owned)

Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator

#69

Post by bleepblap »

leonidasrup wrote: post #62
Symmetry wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's only a few grams of hydrogen in the reactor's plasma, it's reaction with oxygen wouldn't be much more exciting than just losing containment. There are engineering challenges that have to be addressed but no worse than the 6 MW research reactor I used to walk by every day to my college classes in the middle of a dense city. The proliferation risk of someone using the neutron flux to produce an atomic or dirty…

I think the proliferation risks will be in future the reason, independent of technological obstacles or costs, why US will not allow to build fusion power plants in all countries around the world. Hybrid nuclear fusion–fission power plants have been already proposed and studied in theory. "In general terms, the hybrid is very similar in concept to the fast breeder reactor, which uses a compact high-energy fission cor…

> Hybrid nuclear fusion–fission power plants have been already proposed and studied in theory.

I have a hand-wavy hard sci-fi universe I've been rolling around my head for years and I eventually came to the conclusion that fission-fusion drives would be really handy for spacecraft, since it would be much easier to start a fission reaction in a cold/dark ship than fusion because of the power requirements. Otherwise you need some other way to generate 10s or 100s of MW to start the fusion reaction.

Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator

#70

Post by DennisP »

dale_glass wrote: post #45
mono442 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's impossible to calculate at this stage since there're no fusion power plants which actually produce net power.

True, but we've built tokamaks and we're building ITER, which so far has an estimated price of between $45 billion and $65 billion. Now of course that's a research reactor full of experiments and instrumentation that wouldn't be part of a normal power plant, but given current experience that I think we can expect we won't suddenly knock down the cost to $100M. It's going to be somewhere in the billions. And we have e…

Part of that cost is from ITER being so huge, which is because they use obsolete superconductors. CFS is doing the same thing in a reactor a tenth as big, using newer superconductors that support stronger magnetic fields.

The size and also the complicated governance have made ITER very slow to build, which also increases expense. The JET tokamak is about the size of the reactor CFS is building, and JET was built in a year for the reactor itself, plus three years before that for the building they put it in.

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