81–90 of 167 posts
Tell that to the Sun. We already have a fusion reactor sufficient to meet all of humanity's energy needs, it's a gravitationally contained fusion reactor with a projected lifetime of at least one billion years, so why not just rely on that? Seems to have done wonders for the biosphere for the last one billion years, hasn't it?
My key takeaways: * In a perfect world, there would be a more ambitious program developing the breeding technology in parallel to ITER, Willms says, so that by the time ITER has perfected the fusion reactor there’s still a fuel source to run it * Like many of the most prominent experimental nuclear fusion reactors, ITER relies on a steady supply of both deuterium and tritium for its experiments * When it’s finally fu…
Last week Elon explained that the problem of fusion is that it will be more expensive than solar and wind.
The answer depends on the reactor design, which Elon doesn't know. There are a lot of possibilities, and if the first ones are too expensive, later ones might not be.
"Precious tritium is what makes this project go. There's only 25 pounds of it on the whole planet."
> There's only 25 pounds of it on the whole planet. "Because we haven't needed more until now, and it's mostly man-made." There wasn't any plutonium on Earth, either, until we decided we needed some.
Because the longest-lived isotope of plutonium has a half-life close to 100 million years, so some 45 halvings have happened since the Earth formation, almost all primordial plutonium has decayed by now.
A few atoms of the primordial plutonium are still around us, though they are much too few to be easily detectable (there have been claims that some very sensitive experiments have detected them).
I thought the end game was aneutronic fusion using lithium and deuterium anyway creating only charged particles instead of high energy neutrons that are dangerous and damaging to the reactor. If nuclear fusion ever wants to be commercially viable, it must not depend on tritium.
There are also at least four companies working on proton-boron fusion, though all but one are very small. (TAE is the exception.)
> “It would be an absurdity to use dirty fission reactors to fuel ‘clean’ fusion reactors,” This seems like a non-sequitur. If we need to keep around (or even build) a few heavy-water fission plants to enable the fusion industry, what's the problem? The simple phrasing of fission as "dirty" really shows the quotee's biases. You could easily envision a stable energy mix with a few percent of fission, the rest fusion a…
And I think their failure to really understand fusion power either. The sort of fusion reactors we build first will produce tons of neutron radiation, which over time will turn the whole reactor itself into radioactive nuclear waste.
> “It would be an absurdity to use dirty fission reactors to fuel ‘clean’ fusion reactors,” This seems like a non-sequitur. If we need to keep around (or even build) a few heavy-water fission plants to enable the fusion industry, what's the problem? The simple phrasing of fission as "dirty" really shows the quotee's biases. You could easily envision a stable energy mix with a few percent of fission, the rest fusion a…
There's a lot of bad thinking in that one sentence. All or nothing. We must have completely clean power or it has no value. Not using comparison. How does it compare to other sources of energy, (including solar which is built in facilities using coal power).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a lot of bad thinking in that one sentence. All or nothing. We must have completely clean power or it has no value. Not using comparison. How does it compare to other sources of energy, (including solar which is built in facilities using coal power).
At some point, we will have enough solar/hydro/wind etc that they won't be built using coal power... Right now it's a necessary yes, in the future no. In a way, that last (...) is also a very black and white way of viewing things.
In what way is it black and white view of things?
Solar energy production is not 100% clean. It never will be regardless if coal is used or not. That doesn't mean it's bad. The goal isn't purely clean energy. The goal is improved sources of energy.
Hopefully coal isn't used in the future. But things don't appear to be on track.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/china-briefing-17-march-2022-bei...
Unfortunately, because black and white thinking and evaluating energy sources without comparing them has resulted in a shortage of natural gas (thanks to fossil fuel divestment and ESG) and energy producers falling back to coal. The worst possible source of energy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article covers that. > Tritium breeding was originally going to be tested as part of ITER, but as costs ballooned from an initial $6 billion to more than $25 billion it was quietly dropped. Willms’ job at ITER is to manage smaller-scale tests. Instead of a full blanket of lithium surrounding the fusion reaction, ITER will use suitcase-sized samples of differently presented lithium inserted into “ports” around the…
$25 billion... thinking about how much money we've dedicated for active warfare in the last 2 months alone... clearly we have our priorities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reaction is supposed to be self-sustaining. The reactor walls are supposed to emit more than enough tritium to satisfy your needs. Whatever you bring from outside is just to bootstrap it once you turn it on. (I imagine they are not collecting the tritium between runs, but it's something you are expected to do.)
Wait, so then at _whatever_ cost, the cost of producing Tritium is sorta moot, right? Whether it's building reactors or investing a tonne of energy, the cost of creating the amount of tritium needed is met with theoretically infinite profits?
There is another, unrelated issue that if we decide to scale (H + D) fusion power, for decades we will need more tritium than they can generate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oops missed that. ITER is not necessarily the best approach to fusion, although it's the best funded. In any case if we can't breed tritium than we either need to shoot for higher energy D-D fusion or some other reaction or fusion will never be cost-competitive.
Is there any other approach to fusion than ITER? I mean fusion capable of practical power generation. D-T fusion is the easiest, and yet super hard. Tokamaks are the only design that we know how to build in order to meet the goal, with maybe stellerators in second position. Inertial fusion work for scientific and military experiments, but are far from being a usable power source. Things like fusors and its derivative…
There are also various alternative designs, like Zap Energy's z-pinch, General Fusion's magnetized target fusion, and Helion's field-reversed configuration. Helion is attempting hybrid D-D/D-He3 fusion, the other two are D-T.