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MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

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Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#71

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

sbierwagen wrote: post #57
zetalyrae wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered: why exactly is ITER so expensive, and slow? Is the engineering required at such a standard that it should takes decades of planning and construction and tens of billions of dollars? The timeline is so dilated (started in 1988, first plasma planned for 2025!) it feels like the kind of project that's expected to be cancelled from the start. It just doesn't strike me as obvious that reducing the ma…

Here's a render of the completed reactor: https://www.iter.org/doc/all/content/com/gallery/media/7%20-... Note human for size. It's all completely bespoke scientific equipment hand made for this project only. The cryostat will be the largest stainless steel vacuum vessel ever made-- all welded by hand. After welding, a substantial number of in-vessel components have to be installed by threading them through access po…

That will become a level in an FPS game for sure.

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#73

Post by yboris »

dfdx wrote: post #34

Plenty of skepticism in these comments. I've been following CFS for a while and can present a point of view for why this time might be different. Fusion energy was actually making rapid progress in the latter half of the twentieth century, going from almost no power output in the fifties and sixties to a power output equal to 67% of input power with the JET reactor in 1997. By the eighties there was plenty of experim…

A march 2019 talk by Dr. Dennis Whyte of MIT working on SPARC https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY6U4wB-oYM

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#74

Post by MisterBastahrd »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #6
dfdz wrote: post #2

The thumbnail of the youtube video made me laugh Smaller. Smarter. Sooner. 2018 Currently 2021 where is my fusion energy? But this time must be different, after this advance we are only a few years away from fusion energy?

The running joke has always been that “Fusion is 20 years away,” and has been, for the last 50 years. I really want this to work. I am a bit concerned, with how “the old guard” will react, once we have successful, productive, fusion. I foresee an astroturf NIMBY campaign against construction of fusion plants.

Fusion is the Linux Desktop of energy projects.

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#75

Post by UnFleshedOne »

danans wrote: post #55
rnhmjoj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But are they surmountable AND cheaper than existing nuclear or other energy sources? DT fusion solves the two biggest arguments that are always raised by nuclear energy opponents: storage of nuclear waste (it doesn't produce high-level waste) and safety (it's not perfect but it can't explode). I wouldn't call it a "meh", even if it comes off as much more expensive than fission.

> I wouldn't call it a "meh", even if it comes off as much more expensive than fission. It's not competing with fission, though. It's competing with renewables + storage + load shifting + efficiency. Compared to those, it might indeed be "meh".

In the grid this would take role of coal or gas plants for base load, no?

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#77

Post by MauranKilom »

drdeca wrote: post #53
MauranKilom wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please consult this graphic from 1976 if you are actually interested in the answer. https://i.imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png

Could you clarify how to read this chart? The y axis is, funding given different plans? Or.. I got the impression that this is meant to depict a relationship between when practical fusion would be developed and how much funding it receives, but I don’t see how to get that from the chart. Also, not sure why imgur has that image marked as adult content.

These are projections made in 1976. They can be read as different project plans made at that time for different amounts of funding. For example, "if we follow the blue plan, it would require 9 billion (2012) US dollars of funding in 1982 (etc.) and we would achieve fusion by 1990."

The 1976 projection was that, assuming funding was kept at the level of 1976 (~1 billion a year), fusion would not be achieved in the foreseeable future. It further shows that actual funding has been below that level.

In short: Yes, getting fusion off the ground sooner would have required more money. Not "always more", but more than "we project no success" levels.

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#78

Post by Gravityloss »

dfdx wrote: post #54
zetalyrae wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered: why exactly is ITER so expensive, and slow? Is the engineering required at such a standard that it should takes decades of planning and construction and tens of billions of dollars? The timeline is so dilated (started in 1988, first plasma planned for 2025!) it feels like the kind of project that's expected to be cancelled from the start. It just doesn't strike me as obvious that reducing the ma…

Anecdotally, ITER was the largest of few options for a fusion researcher to run their experiment in a new tokamak. Everybody wanted to put their work into it, and as more features were added, the more funding it sucked up, leaving less money for other experiments, leading to more people wanting to put their experiment into ITER. Here's a presentation [0] that goes over why SPARC, being so much smaller and simpler tha…

For NASA science probes, this cost increase and risk averseness spiraling is called when missions become "Battlestar Galactica".

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#79

Post by maccam94 »

azalemeth wrote: post #13
shmageggy wrote: post #7

These university press releases are always very positively framed. This one makes the new magnet seem incredibly promising and fusion seem like almost an inevitability now, but decades of failure have us conditioned for skepticism. What's the catch this time?

Agreed. Whilst it may well be the largest, highest-field "only" high Tc superconductor design in the world, it's definitely not the highest-field high Tc superconducting magnet -- I believe that honour belongs to another bit of MIT with a 1.3 GHz NMR machine [1] (but I do remember something about Bruker collaborating with the US's National Magnet Lab and building a 30T machine -- I can't easily find a link). I really…

The magnet with the strongest magnetic field isn't necessarily the best engineering solution for a fusion reactor. In particular, these magnets need to be cooled (plumbing can be bulky and coolant can be difficult to work with) and allow for easy servicing of the reactor components (particularly the vacuum vessel which will need replacing every ~10 years due to neutron embrittlement). This magnet design is noteworthy because of several factors: high-temperature superconductivity means they're cheaper and easier to cool, the high field strength allows for a smaller scale reactor, and the physical construction of the magnets makes them cheap to build and allows for easy disassembly during maintenance periods.

Re: MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

#80

Post by UnFleshedOne »

phscguy wrote: post #32
jcfrei wrote: post #20

Lots of negative comments in this thread. I've been following CFS for a few years now and I honestly believe this is an historic event - probably the beginning of the "fusion age".

Yeah, any positive news on fusion progress and there always seems to be the same set of comments appear that are overwhelmingly critical of fusion development. Fusion is not well funded and imo has been let down by mismanagement of ITER, and despite this keeps making progress. I feel that fusion is one of humanity's best shots at actively reversing climate change, and it is disheartening to see such widespread pessim…

There is a species of environmentalism that would consider successful fusion or similar high tech mega scale energy source actually detrimental because you can't build one in your hippy community using old tractor parts and alternative ways of knowing.

Environmentally clean energy source is not enough, it needs to be ideologically pure as well.

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