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Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

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Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#651

Post by entropicgravity »

simne wrote: post #636
entropicgravity wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I only mentioned solar/battery for brevity but clearly wind/battery is already substantial in many parts of the world. In addition, HVDC transmissions line costs are also dropping year by year and these allow solar/wind generated electricity to be inexpensively shifted across long distances.

For example, such a transmission line is currently being built to send solar energy from Northern Australia to Singapore across about 3000km of ocean. Another project is generating wind energy near Iceland and sending it to the UK a distance of 800km.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#652

Post by StreamBright »

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…

Do you realize that this is 50% of the problem? The another 50% is how to "compress" fusion?

https://coldfusionnow.org/power-equivalent-to-the-sun-we-alr...

This is one aspect of the problem. THe another aspect is that we should create decentralized technology that everybody can use at home. It would make our world a much better place, much more resistant to many things (including terrorism). I think the small amount of virtually infinite energy is a much better option.

https://ndb.technology/

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#653

Post by [deleted] »

pfdietz wrote: post #628
moloch-hai wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to see a demonstration that the synthesis method would exceed consumption. It should be possible with current tech, if at all.

Well, they can operate on just DD, so they can start from no 3He and make 3He. This video of a presentation by Helion's Kirtley at Princeton has a slide where the reactivity vs. energy loss is shown for a DD system at beta=1. That system will make 3He directly, and also make tritium by two modes (directly from DD, and by capture of neutrons on 6Li in a blanket.) The net result would be production of 1.5 3He nuclei pe…

[deleted]

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#654

Post by quickthrower2 »

zbobet2012 wrote: post #265
ghostly_s wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'd still be getting only ~1/4 of power input with a 20% efficiency laser.

Yes, but the overall we get "more power out of the building then we put in" isn't the goal. They are trying to drive the Q factor of the reaction itself up. If they get that to > 5x what the laser strike hits (a very real probability) it's likely trying to make a building that has a net positive Q makes sense. That building would use modern lasers, modern supercapactiors, etc. to significantly change the "other" part…

This is like making a program work on your laptop, but realizing that scaling up to production with 1000 laptops would be too costly, so you use actual servers. But you are in no rush to code directly on a server machine.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#655

Post by sph »

dmix wrote: post #637
htag wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Nuclear fission is probably one of the greatest victims of populist democracy.

Oh yes indeed. Nuclear energy is not legal in Italy, so I did some research:

We had nuclear reactors in the 80s, until we held a referendum on nuclear energy, 3 months after Chernobyl. The result: overwhelmingly against, so we dismantled our reactors. Decades later, the Government pushed for a new referendum. When did they choose to do it? 6 months after the Fukushima disaster... you can guess what did the Italian population voted for.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#656

Post by htag »

dmix wrote: post #637
htag wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

Is this true?

I always considered fission tech to be used for the following reasons, and none of them are economic. The number's I've crunched say fission isn't the economic choice, but that varies depends on how much value is placed on 'base load'.

1. Cold war era vanity tech. Nuclear weapons were used to end World War 2, and now they are just another infrastructure project for us.

2. Code shifted weapons research. Countries blame each other for this all the time in the nuclear non-proliferation era.

3. Strategic choice to avoid traditional energy imports (France, Japan).

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#657

Post by 543g43g43 »

moloch-hai wrote: post #616
543g43g43 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We won't know what the cost of solar/battery will be in a sustainable energy economy, until someone builds a solar-powered solar panel and battery factory. At the moment, productions costs are heavily (as in, entirely) subsidised by fossil fuels (mostly coal).

Cost of current production is an upper bound. As power costs fall, production costs that depend on that will fall, in lockstep. Production is not subsidized: factories pay full price for their power.

You miss my point. The reason solar is so cheap right now (along with the huge amount of government subsidies) is that the huge amount of energy required to manufacture them is currently done with very cheap coal in China.

>Cost of current production is an upper bound.

Under the current state of the energy economy, maybe. If we had to replace all manufacturing power sources with renewables - absolutely not.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#658

Post by mayama »

fanf2 wrote: post #229
Someone wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electricity in, heat out, I think. Getting that heat back to electricity will cost some, I expect more than that 0.4

The efficiency of a thermal power plant is around 40%, depending on the temperature of the steam it can produce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_power_station#Thermal_...

Note that energy in the case of ICF is produced instantaneously. There is no approach to capture this energy in production at this moment. Capturing that enery is still ongoing research topic.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#659

Post by 543g43g43 »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #627
543g43g43 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We won't know what the cost of solar/battery will be in a sustainable energy economy, until someone builds a solar-powered solar panel and battery factory. At the moment, productions costs are heavily (as in, entirely) subsidised by fossil fuels (mostly coal).

So the energy that is cheaper than coal and driving operating coal plants out of business will make the cost of producing it go up when the share increases? These mental gymnastics routines are olympic level.

The reason we can ignore the huge manufacturing energy inputs required to make solar panels, is because it's powered by cheap domestic coal in China.

>driving operating coal plants out of business

Any specific ones? The only coal plants I've seen get shut down are because of environmental reasons (or age). Some countries, like Germany and China, are re-opening or building new coal plants.

Talking of mental gymnastics - fundamentally, the energy economy boils down to EROI (energy returned on energy invested). It's just wishful thinking that we can replace energy sources that are basically free (coal, oil, gas), with those that have energy payback periods in the mid-double digits of their expected lifespan (solar).

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#660

Post by winReInstall »

kelnos wrote: post #311
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…

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…

I think fissions failure is a inability to plan for complete failure scenarios, were society folds in on itself, suppliers are no longer available or power plants are actually fought over. So the inability is not to get the tech going, but to plan for how it can it be usefull in a unravelling world.

Already economic downturns corelate with fission problems, as plants are not properly maintained. We have one blowing up every thirty years atm. Our reach exceeds our grasp, and there is no shame in admitting to that.

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