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Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

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Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#631

Post by Gud »

moloch-hai wrote: post #599
donquixote25 wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, the whole target bay is in vacuum which helps with the arcing.

Vacuum is supposed to increase arcing. People who want to prevent arcing flood the cavity with sulfur hexafluoride. Fun fact, it has 25,000 times the "greenhouse potential" of CO2. Dunno if that includes lifetime in the atmosphere, or just instantaneous opacity to IR. All the wind turbines are pumped full of it. There is an effort on to switch to something else of proprietary composition.

I don’t know about the actual turbines, but there is GIS switchgear and it’s sealed. Modern GIS don’t leak much(extremely little).

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#632

Post by dmix »

hawtkey wrote: post #556
floxy wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Their most recent article has a ton of great data and next steps: That device in the photo is great. Looks to be about 16AWG magnet wire. Guessing a 10mm ID of the coil, and about 25mm in length. To get to 26 Tesla, looks like you'd need to push about 33,000 A through that coil. Coil inductance might be about 1uH, and if the test lasts ~1us, then you'd need 33kV to push that 33kA through the coil. 30kV/inch insulati…

here's a video that shows a machine at Berkeley lab that makes a high-performance magnet wire, not sure if it's related to this project but still pretty interesting to see how complex just the wire is- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmmNRaKpBTI&t=2138s

"It looks a bit Rube Goldberg esque coming out the back"

Yes it does indeed. Amazing amount of trial and error to build such a machine.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#633

Post by donkeyd »

ak217 wrote: post #280
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'm not an expert but I've been following the field for a while. It's telling that negligible venture capital is pursuing this route to commercial fusion, and the only cheerleading for it comes from DOE lab press releases. That's because the NIF is a thermonuclear bomb simulator developed by a lab tasked with both thermonuclear bomb development and also developing a portfolio of civilian applications for its technolo…

Currently, about $3B is invested in fusion per year, while about $6000B is spent on oil subsidies. That's just to show how little we spend on fusion. Any decent increase in spending would really help speeding up the process. I think that's something we should all be promoting!

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#634

Post by pfdietz »

Retric wrote: post #175
acidburnNSA wrote: post #49

After a few more major breakthroughs we'll be where fission was in 1942 after Fermi made the first man made neutron chain reaction. After that, we can see what a practical electricity producing plant looks like, and see how much people actually care about small amounts of tritium radiation. At the moment fuel costs in fission are like 5-10% of total costs for a fission fleet. In fusion it could be lower, but that wil…

Fuel is hardly the only advantage, the major issue with fission is the enormous costs of trying to avoid problems or cleanup after them. Thus 24/7 security, redundancy on top of redundancy, walls thick enough to stop aircraft etc. Fission is still by far the most expensive power source even with massive subsides and is only even close to economically viable as base load power backed up with peaking power plants. In t…

Fusion will also have to go to enormous efforts to avoid problems -- not because of public safety, but because it's very difficult to repair anything in the reactor if it breaks. This was a lesson of Three Mile Island: a nuclear accident that doesn't kill anyone is still ruinous for a utility, since their large investment is destroyed.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#635

Post by dmix »

moloch-hai wrote: post #594
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…

There is nothing disappointing in skepticism about the importance or value of this work. 1. It is, purely, bomb research dressed up as civilian activity for funding purposes. Everyone working on it has top-secret clearance. 2. It has no consequence for any civilian project. The target that produced a couple of MJ cost $10M. (2.4 MJ is 3. Extracting useful energy would require capturing hot neutrons in a "blanket", he…

I've read some very well informed critiques on HN. The general sentiment will always be super negative absent an easy topic or a clickbait headline which over simplifies a problem to tap into a commonly held feeling.

These sorts of hard questions about scaling it up into real life have been some of the most persuasive fusion critiques.

And the bit you tapped into about the whole detachment from the gov research world from making something they have to justify with hard $$ and all that comes with it are very legitimate.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#636

Post by simne »

entropicgravity wrote: post #31
PaulHoule wrote: post #3

The efficiency of the lasers is awful though and they will have to get at least 100x that energy yield for it to be a net power source. A lot of heat winds up in the laser glass and it takes it a long time to cool between shots so you are doing very good to make a few shots a day. A real power plant is going to need more like 10 shots per second. Heavy-ion fusion has been talked about since the 1970s and it seems muc…

Unfortunately large fusion is unlikely to ever be economic because the cost of solar/battery is coming down so quickly and is already in the 1-2 cents per kilowatt hour for the solar component. And costs will continue to drop. Small scale fusion on the other hand would have a viable niche application at the poles, in the sea or underground or any other environment that is without sun or space.

You don't imagine, how large part of world, which have at least two months year, with near 90% fall of solar energy.

And they have to use traditional energy sources, or buy energy from neighbors.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#637

Post by dmix »

htag wrote: post #626
kelnos wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think fission power's failure is a political and marketing one. I don't agree that the waste disposal issues, or the safety issues, are quite the big deal people make of them. (Not saying there are no unsolved issues, just that the issues that exist are not significantly worse than those present burning fossil fuels, and are better in some dimensions. They're just different, and in some ways very emotion…

> Personally I think fission power's failure is a political and marketing one. I think it's because of the occasional catastrophic failures that spatter our short history with the technology. Fukushima made headline news around the world, leaked large amounts of caesium-137 into the ocean, caused a 20km evacuation radius, is projected to take a total of 30-40 years to clean up, and people think of it as not that bad…

Nuclear fission is probably one of the greatest victims of populist democracy. It seems the more modern "socially-democratic" a country was over the last 30-40yrs the more anti-nuclear it became. The raw output of markets or the tough hand of socialist dictatorship was the biggest positive driving force in the early history of fission energy.

But ultimately it's such an expensive and society-tier level of investment that it's at the whims and pressures more than almost any other technology that has benefited society in resent history. So likewise it's also most at risk of the downside of populist politics (short term thinking, highly reactive to noisy local issues, driven by emotional outrage, etc).

I wonder if it's prospects are even worse off now that's to social media.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#638

Post by hinkley »

wingworks wrote: post #540
SantalBlush wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Very disappointed by the discourse in this HN thread. The same old quips over and over. We see these comments on every science thread because almost all of these people lack the requisite expertise to weigh in on the actual details, so instead they make a high-level criticism to give the appearance of having some kind of knowledge on the subject. Moreover, they think that crapping on things equates to being a critic…

They're probably going by past experience in other tech products, which get development news but then you never heard about it again, or, if your lucky it hits consumer markets like 10 years later. I have no experience in fusion, so can't comment on that either way.

I have thirty years of experience with people telling me we’re really close on fusion. Next year or the one after will mark my 30th anniversary of having heard the phrase, “fusion is 30 years away and always will be.”

If the people working on it today want to make beef with someone, they should complain to the people who have been lying for long enough that a joke about it is at least three decades old. If the real problem is that the only way we’ve gotten funding for this is to keep misleading politicians on how long the remaining road is, that’s fine, but once you’re known for lying - intergenerationally - how on earth do you expect the general public to take anything you say seriously?

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#639

Post by fundatus »

robocat wrote: post #553
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…

In the US, the average capacity factor for wind turbines is about 33%, so your nameplate 34,500 MW capacity is immediately ~11.5 GW actual. Wind makes sense, but deceptive numbers don’t help your argument.

that is exactly what i am talking about in my second point?! you‘re at 11.5 GW considering the capacity factor, divide that by 3 (first point) and you’re still above whatever you’ll produce with Hinkley Point C!

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#640

Post by gertlex »

mjfl wrote: post #579
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…

> Many fusion designs are 10 magnitudes away or more. JET Tokamak was within a factor of 2 and ITER will overshoot by a factor of 10.

I think you and the parent poster may be talking about different "goals".

My lazy quick skim of the main article here is that NIF has achieved a Q value of 1.2 presently.

ITER is aiming for a Q of 10 [0]; i.e. Q=10 means fusion outputting 10x the input energy, which is (by some considered) roughly enough to break-even in energy production [1], i.e. to recapture 10% of that energy (as heat or as electricity, not sure...)

So parent poster saying NIF is an order of magnitude away means Q=1.2 -> ~Q=10

And ITER seeking Q=10, means that's the goal that NIF is an order of magnitude away from, according to the parent poster.

[0] Q=10 for Iter: https://www.iter.org/sci/Goals#:~:text=ITER%20is%20designed%....

[1] Q=10 is a rough minimum for energy production (quick and dirty source from google) https://www.powermag.com/fusion-energy-is-coming-and-maybe-s....

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