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Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

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Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#691

Post by moloch-hai »

543g43g43 wrote: post #657
moloch-hai wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Power from renewables costs less than from coal.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#692

Post by savingsPossible »

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.

Sorry, this is just FUD.

Provide links? Also, 25000 times might be ok, if the amount of gas released in the atmosphere is 1/10^6, say, of the amount of co2

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#693

Post by boredhedgehog »

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…

> I think it's because of the occasional catastrophic failures that spatter our short history with the technology.

Airliners have the same problem, yet their spin doctors are much more successful. Everybody keeps believing they're the safest form of travel.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#695

Post by hutzlibu »

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…

"and made it actually realistic for inertial confinement to be a feasible tech for a power producing plant."

Before this is not solved:

"it's not actually generating power"

I simply would not talk about a real power plant yet, because a real power plant has economic constraints. As long as the current approach is not even generating energy, all the scepticism is warranted, if we are talking about something that is supposed to solve energy generation and climate change. This is why people are upset with it - we need not promises of unsolved tech, but solutions now. So fusion remains exciting and cool tech and I love to read about its recent progress, but please without illusions. Even if they could generate power tommorow - it would still be a very long, unknown way, till it actually helps us.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#697

Post by crest »

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…

Even a 100x fusion gain wouldn't make the NIF net power producer, because last time I checked the lasers produce ~99% heat and <1% coherent light. The relevant metric is the ratio of energy input into the facility vs its output.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#699

Post by Schroedingersat »

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.

There's well under a hundred million people that aren't within easy transmission distance of somewhere with at least 10% capacity factor for a bifacial system in mid winter and don't already have more than enough hydro to go wind/hydro.

If 1% of the world needs to get 30% of their energy from gas while we figure out the hydrogen thing, it's not really a problem.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#700

Post by huijzer »

winReInstall wrote: post #660
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…

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 u…

> 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.

Are you referring to the need for electricity now at the Ukraine plants? Newer technologies such as NuScale require no external electricity for their cooling. The reaction only occurs if there is water and when all the water evaporates then the reaction stops.

> 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.

Gas turbines in aviation also blew up way more often in the past than they do now. Who says the blowing up of plants is a constant? There have been many improvements in safety. Also, apart from the Three Mile Island accident, there haven't been major nuclear problems in the US in the last 50 or so years. Furthermore, the thing that lead to the Chernobyl disaster is not possible, by law, in modern reactors. Furthermore, newer reactors require an extra casing of concrete which would also have contained the Chernobyl disaster. You can even fly an airplane in those newer housing buildings and nothing would happen (with the building at least).

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