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Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

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Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#781

Post by winReInstall »

panick21_ wrote: post #775
winReInstall wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has been a major back-logging in nuclear equipments investments, so big in fact, that some countries who should by right be netto exporters of energy (france) became importers. Its a valid technology in a theoretical world, that does all the upkeep measures, does actual credible threat analysis. I have yet to see such a world.

Its simply about economics of scale. If you built nuclear at scale, then these problems solve themselves. Just as France solved them in 15 years in the 70/80s. Just as these problems were solved for solar/wind by economics of scale. Solar/wind was not economical, it was basically forced into being economical by creating economics of scale.

France currently has a problem at scale maintaining them?

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#782

Post by serverholic »

e1g wrote: post #733
serverholic wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm getting really sick of the "always 20 years away haha" jab. Look, it's really simple: 1. This is a very hard and expensive problem. 2. Progress IS being made. It's not clever or cute to diminish progress on this problem.

I wasn't diminishing the achievement but clarifying its place in the context of how far we are from commercialization. The director of LLNL who announced the breakthrough discovery said she expects we are 3-4 decades away from commercializing it.

Then you could have just said that instead of adding the “as always”.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#783

Post by panick21_ »

fundatus wrote: post #459
Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

What if Britain would have simply built 20 Hinkley Point C starting a new one every year at first and then after a couple years multiple every year.

The same people moving form project to project, on-boarding new people. Just as France did in 1980s.

This would result in very cheap competently green grid for the next 100 years.

Wind turbines have to be replaced 3x in that time and you don't have to deal with intermittency at all.

Just as with everything else, without economics of scale it doesn't work.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#784

Post by panick21_ »

Izikiel43 wrote: post #55
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…

Since you seem to be an expert in that field, what is your perspective on fission for the short term? Are smrs really viable ?

What your definition of SMR?

Because some countries consider even 500MW reactors SMR if they are GenIV.

SMR has become kind of widely used for lots of different things.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#785

Post by dmfdmf »

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…

> 3. Extracting useful energy would require capturing hot neutrons in a "blanket", heating it up, and running fluid through it to boil water to drive a steam turbine. The minimum practical size for such a "blanket" exceeds that of a large fission plant. To collect enough neutrons to be useful requires a huge volume of plasma, as even compressed plasma is very diffuse vs. fissiles.

I worked as a control systems engineer in the nuclear power industry for 8 years back in the '90s. I worked on Lungmen in Taiwan, ABWRs (Kashiwazaki 6/7) and even Fukushima (power uprates) in Japan and Grand Gulf and Pilgrim in the USA.

Fusion is billed as a "clean" alternative to fission reactors but I think this is (another) false hope of the technology. I still recall my nuke prof telling me that fusion (if it ever works) is going to be an even bigger waste problem than fission reactors. The 15 MEV neutrons are going to neutron-activate tons of shielding or heat extracting blankets which would be a huge disposal problem. He also thought that neutron embrittlement of plant structures was going to be a serious problem and is already a problem in fission plant cores that use thermal neutrons. Carting that waste away at EOL will kill the economics.

We should start building fission plants now which are safe and clean enough and can provide power until something better comes along.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#786

Post by panick21_ »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #67
Izikiel43 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you seem to be an expert in that field, what is your perspective on fission for the short term? Are smrs really viable ?

I'm not super excited about current SMR projects either, sadly. The economies of scale that they explicitly turn away from are very real. The economies of mass production that they rely on can't be achieved unless a lot of people are willing to buy the first N for high cost. But who will buy after the first few boondoggle a bit? I am excited about standardized large light-water reactors at the moment, like the US/Jap…

I would say Canada is the furthest along (in the West) for true GenIV reactors.

They are taking an active approach:

https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li...

Reactors like ISMR from Terrestrial Energy and SSR from Moltex that will operate at 500MW (rather then true 'small' reactors) are for more reasonable for scale.

They look like 'small' reactors but they pack quite a punch in comparison to PWR designs.

Any nation that just seriously commits to a single reactor design like this and plans to build 50 of them will do really well.

But I agree the same could be done with APR-1400 or AP1000.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#787

Post by panick21_ »

SuperFine wrote: post #52
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…

>After that, we can see what a practical electricity producing plant looks like I guess we still don't have anything better than boiling water, right?

As some-point maybe aneutornic fusion will be a thing. That will be more like solar panels.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#788

Post by MaxBarraclough »

moloch-hai wrote: post #717
voqv wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 Aust…

Germany has an overabundance of hills. Most places do. But pumped storage is just one of many options Modern batteries do not burn. Teslas do.

It's a problem with lithium batteries in general, not just Tesla.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/recycling-firm-fined...

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#790

Post by TaylorAlexander »

pfdietz wrote: post #728
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally my money is on SPARC as a demo plant and its planned successor ARC as a commercial power plant prototype. Unlike ITER these systems use high field strength superconducting magnets, which directly translates to a much smaller machine for the same energy gain. Because of the smaller machine size, it can be built much faster than ITER. The company building SPARC plans to achieve first fusion around the same t…

ARC's volumetric power density is just 40x worse than a PWR's reactor vessel, vs. 400x worse for ITER. Neither appears to be on a route to an economical power plant.

I’m not sure I follow, but you’re saying the power plants are very large relative to their power output, and this size correlates to cost, thus making them so expensive that they are not economical?

You’re probably right, but I guess what I’m saying is that we’ve never had a fusion power plant that produces net energy gain at any cost. I believe SPARC is on the path to doing so. It will still take a long time to make fusion actually affordable. For what it’s worth I am a huge advocate of wind and solar power. But fusion is neat and I’m excited for us to get to a point where we actually have sustained Q total greater than 1.

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