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Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

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Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#661

Post by Schroedingersat »

zaphar wrote: post #589
Schroedingersat wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuke is a word that applies to a reactor, a bomb, and someone who works on a reactor equally. Stop with the pearl clutching. https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/ThreeYrsEnergyAva... Cheap reactors are unreliable reactors. > What do you think service costs are for offshore/onshore wind and hinkley point? having maintenance and an industry is actually a good thing for the economy. Stop with the broken window fal…

Colloquially speaking, which your conversation here is, nuke has always meant bombs not reactors. He's not pearl clutching, he's reacting to what sounds like unnecessarily negative terminology.

It unambiguously means nuclear reactor in context and is widely used. The only people who even pretend it doesn't are the ones simultaneously making disingenuous arguments about why renewables are terrible and we immediately need to drop them and wait 50 years for nuclear to save the day.

The mock outrage is tiresome and transparent.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#662

Post by _0w8t »

Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #295
Retric wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

this is simply not true. according to IEA https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el... LCOE of nuclear is cheaper than almost all other possibilities we have. 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. your correct that nuclear has had some very expensive accidents, but the chance of a mo…

Any claims about 100 years of trouble-free operations of a nuclear reactor is a wishfull thinking at best.

For example, in France nuclear power reactors were stopped because unexpected cracks appeared in pipes after just 25 years of operations requiring expensive maintenance, https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/France-Cl... That put reactors off-line for over a year.

Then Sweeden closed one of its reactors because it bacame unprofitable due to raising maintainance costs, https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-sweden-europe...

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#663

Post by jkelleyrtp »

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…

1. The same research that brought us the atomic bomb brought us so much more. Who cares about the motivation of the research? This is such a bad take considering the history of technology evolving out of military development.

2. Again, all technology is expensive in the beginning. Who cares? The important thing here is to climb magnitude by magnitude. NIF climbed many magnitudes in recent history, making it notable.

3. As you mentioned, Helion and direct energy capture. D+He3 + DEC might be not feasible with a tokamak, but the scaling laws of fusion (size, current, B field) are in favor of experiments that get close.

4. See 3

5. See 3

6. See 3

7: See 3

I think you have a very negative take on what is an amazing breakthrough accomplishment. Even if the NIF doesn't end up converting their research into a commercial powerplant, they have at least demonstrated experimental viability of inertial confinement fusion. It's only a matter of time before the next generation shows viability of D+He3 fusion and then we'll have even more options.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#664

Post by deng »

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…

> Very disappointed by the discourse in this HN thread. The same old quips over and over.

To be fair, that's not entirely the fault of HN. It's hard to get excited about fusion research when I almost always feel mislead, because it is almost never explicitly stated that we are talking about Q-plasma here. I don't expect much from science journalism, but I feel that the fusion scientists have no problem silently playing along this misconception, which they are perfectly aware of.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#665

Post by preisschild »

sushisource wrote: post #521
fundatus wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, and fusion reactors will probably be even more expensive (especially the first ones). Looking at the current prices of renewables, I don't see a market for fusion reactors at all to be honest. After all we already have a giant fusion reactor just 12 light-minutes away from us! We just have to harvest that energy. The direction were already going (mostly market-driven nowadays actually!) is generation from renewa…

This minimizes the main problem with really going full renewables, storage. Fusion is 24/7 output at the same level. Solar and wind are not, which means batteries, and all the problems associated with that. Fusion could obviate the need for grid-wide storage systems which would be a huge advantage.

Unfortunately 100% renewable advocates just throw LCOE numbers around even though LCOE doesn't account for storage at all.

Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity (LFSCOE) does include storage and suddenly nuclear fission gets a lot more competitive:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4028640

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#666

Post by voqv »

moloch-hai wrote: post #607
sushisource wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This minimizes the main problem with really going full renewables, storage. Fusion is 24/7 output at the same level. Solar and wind are not, which means batteries, and all the problems associated with that. Fusion could obviate the need for grid-wide storage systems which would be a huge advantage.

Not if fusion would cost orders of magnitude more than storage. "All the problems associated with" what? Modern batteries don't burst into flame. Anyway the overwhelming bulk of storage is not and will not be chemical batteries.

> "All the problems associated with" what?

Economic challenges of quickly building grid-scale battery storage , battery production for the entire globe, NIMBY's etc.

> Modern batteries don't burst into flame

they literally do

> the overwhelming bulk of storage is not batteries

Well overwhelming bulk is a high bar and storage is geography dependent. Germany f.e. can't build as much pumped storage as Australia and Australia built a large amount of battery storage vs PSH.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#667

Post by rnhmjoj »

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…

> 1. It is, purely, bomb research dressed up as civilian activity for funding purposes. Everyone working on it has top-secret clearance.

Mostly Agreed: there may be applications such experimental astrophysics, but that's certainly not the main motivation.

> 2. It has no consequence for any civilian project. The target that produced a couple of MJ cost $10M. (2.4 MJ is The cost of just about anything new regarding fusion experiments is not very meaningful: likely it had to be invented, designed and manufactured just for them. Of course it's crazy expensive, but it doesn't mean prices won't go down after an industry around fusion has been established. Just look at the price of a c-Si solar cell in the 70s.

> 5. No research has gone into identifying a viable material, in decades, despite that none is known. After a short time the reactor parts would all become weak and (also) fiercely radioactive.

I don't know about inertial confinement, but in magnetic fusion that is completely false. Materials with low activation, radiation damage resistance and good plasma properties have been continuously researched for the last 30 years: the current candidate for ITER is EUROFER97 for which you can find almost 800 publications. [1]

> 5. Repairs would need robots not yet designed.

Also false. Not only there are several remote handling designs for DEMO power plants, but they have also existed for a long time. For example, JET had been operated remotely since 1997, during the DT1 campaign. [2]

> 6. Civil fusion would require a large amount of tritium, which no one knows how to make economically.

Well, this is dishonest. Of course no one knows how to breed tritium economically: we don't know what the economy will look like in 40-50 years, but we surely know how to do it.

Fusion power plants are designed for self-sufficiency, producing more tritium that they consume by a factor of at least 1.05 (called tritium breeding ratio). Very briefly, this involves a breeding blanket that converts lithium to tritium and a complex chemical plant to extracts newly produced tritium from the blanket and also recovers it from the unburnt plasma fraction. See [3] for an overview of various design that will be tested in ITER.

For as long as there are a few CANDU reactors around, the current tritium supply will be enough to bootstrap future fusion plants without expensive ad-hoc production. [4]

[1]: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/nuclear-materials-and-ener...

[2]: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=hg6MnjG7m6U

[3]: https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.fusengdes.2011.11.005

[4]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fusengdes.2013.05.043

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#668

Post by mavhc »

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.

They're not pumped full of it though, are they.

"Data from Vattenfall suggests leakage emissions from Europe’s 100,000 wind turbines were about 900kg of SF6 over the last six years. This is equivalent to 3,525 tonnes of CO2 a year. This includes the release of gases during the reclamation and recycling process. At end-of-life the turbine switchgears are collected and the sulphur hexafluoride gas is reclaimed and reused in new equipment.

By comparison wind energy avoids the emission of 255 million tonnes of CO2 in Europe a year by generating 336TWh of electricity displacing fossil fuels. The SF6 leakage therefore represents around 0.001% of the emissions avoided thanks to wind energy every year."

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#669

Post by varjag »

ajhurliman wrote: post #623
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…

As comical as it sounds, The Simpsons and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles devastated the image of nuclear energy.

They both first aired in 1987, the year after Chernobyl. What would you expect?

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#670

Post by mavhc »

epivosism wrote: post #550
crote wrote: post #514

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'…

I accept this as one point; I do question whether the opposite side of the benefit calculation was made - i.e. did we have a public debate where we correctly looked at the tradeoffs of increased fossil fuel carbon pollution, economic impacts from lack of energy and failures to advance, balanced out with honest cost estimates of disaster profiles? It doesn't seem like it. It seems the debates were fairly one-sided; th…

Same with wind, "you must pay a fine if you kill a bald eagle", but if you slowly kill all of them with pollution, that's free.

"The fly ash emitted from burning coal for electricity by a power plant carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy."

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