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Progress toward fusion energy gain as measured against the Lawson criteria

fusionenergybase.com

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Re: Progress toward fusion energy gain as measured against the Lawson criteria

#81

Post by UltraSane »

worik wrote: post #79
actinium226 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, what makes you oppose new fission plants? Do you think existing ones should be closed before their scheduled end-of-life?

I will bite. There are any problems with fission that are all related to the extraordinary danger of handling the fuel, byproducts, and the sites themselves. The cost of them is huge, some people are hoping that modularity will help with construction, but it is still astonishingly expensive. The problems of handling the fuel has been solved, in theory and practise. Except when commerce is involved. When the money peo…

I am so tired of this lie being repeated endlessly. We have a perfectly safe way to handle nuclear "waste":

reprocess the dirty fuel and bury the actual waste deep underground like Finland is doing at the Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

And there is still very much a need for zero-carbon DISPATCHABLE electricity of witch nuclear is the ONLY choice. You simply cannot have 100% of your electricity from only solar and wind because it is far too variable and we simply don't have the technology to store electricity cheaply enough.

Your attitude towards nuclear energy is as irrational as the average antivaxer towards vaccines.

Re: Progress toward fusion energy gain as measured against the Lawson criteria

#83

Post by whatshisface »

robocat wrote: post #39
pfdietz wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ITER doesn't use high temperature superconductors. It uses niobium-tin and niobium-titanium low temperature superconductors in its magnets. ITER has been criticized since early days as a dead end, for example because of its enormous size relative to the power produced. A commercial follow-on would not be much better by that power density metric, certainly far worse than a fission reactor. There is basically no chance…

> phony baloney jobs I looked hopefully at the HR report https://www.iter.org/sites/default/files/media/2024-11/rh-20... to see if there was some sort of job categorisation - scientist, engineer, management. Disappointingly scant. PhD heavy. Perhaps the budget would be more insightful. "Execution not ideas" is a common refrain for startups. I wonder how much of the real engineering for ITER is occurring in subcontrac…

I wonder why a physics research facility would be PhD-heavy. ;-)

Re: Progress toward fusion energy gain as measured against the Lawson criteria

#84

Post by Alex_001 »

DennisP wrote: post #16
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #15

I heard that NIF was never intended to be a power plant, not even a prototype of one. It's primarily a nuclear weapon research program. For a power plant you would need much more efficient lasers, you would need a much larger gain in the capsules, you would need lasers that can do many shots per second, some automated reloading system for the capsules, and you would need a heat to electricity conversion system around…

It's an experimental facility. Yes, a power plant would need much more efficient lasers, but NIF's lasers date back to the 1990s, equivalent modern lasers are about 40X more efficient, and for an experiment it's easy enough to do a multiplication to see what the net result would have been with modern lasers. Modern lasers can also repeat shots much more quickly. Power gain on the capsules appears to scale faster than…

[dead]

Re: Progress toward fusion energy gain as measured against the Lawson criteria

#85

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

cyberax wrote: post #67
pfdietz wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ITER doesn't use high temperature superconductors. It uses niobium-tin and niobium-titanium low temperature superconductors in its magnets. ITER has been criticized since early days as a dead end, for example because of its enormous size relative to the power produced. A commercial follow-on would not be much better by that power density metric, certainly far worse than a fission reactor. There is basically no chance…

> ITER doesn't use high temperature superconductors. It does, for high-current buses that interface with regular resistive power distribution. They are also planned for some auxiliary components (like the neutral beam injectors). > ITER has been criticized since early days as a dead end, for example because of its enormous size relative to the power produced. ITER is NOT designed for power generation. It's essentiall…

is a conservative approach useful if it is taking 30 years to build?

Re: Progress toward fusion energy gain as measured against the Lawson criteria

#86

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

UltraSane wrote: post #81
worik wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will bite. There are any problems with fission that are all related to the extraordinary danger of handling the fuel, byproducts, and the sites themselves. The cost of them is huge, some people are hoping that modularity will help with construction, but it is still astonishingly expensive. The problems of handling the fuel has been solved, in theory and practise. Except when commerce is involved. When the money peo…

I am so tired of this lie being repeated endlessly. We have a perfectly safe way to handle nuclear "waste": reprocess the dirty fuel and bury the actual waste deep underground like Finland is doing at the Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo... And there is still very much a need for zero-carbon DISPATCHABLE electricity of witch nuclear is the ONLY choice.…

hydro is also a 0 carbon dispatchable choice (which is much cheaper)

Re: Progress toward fusion energy gain as measured against the Lawson criteria

#87

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

arghandugh wrote: post #20
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the alternative option is a coal power plant, sign me up!

You will not live long enough to see commercial fusion power, and your children will not live long enough to see a complete end to thermal coal.

coal is already very much on the way out. natural gas is much cheaper, and also greener.

Re: Progress toward fusion energy gain as measured against the Lawson criteria

#88

Post by markvdb »

pfdietz wrote: post #59
greenavocado wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of radioactive scrap produced by hypothetical decommissioned radioactive fusion containment vessels is laughably trivial compared to fission waste streams. Even accounting for the most pessimistic irradiation models of first-wall materials, the total radioactive burden remains orders of magnitude below legacy technologies. The half-lives of such activated components like predominantly steel alloys and cera…

The long term activity of the waste is certainly lower, but the volume of the waste is likely much higher. And much of the cost is driven by volume, not activity.

As a species, we're spectacularly bad at negative externalities.

We are also very bad at anything very long term. We've hardly pulled off any physical project to last more than one generation recently. We barely invest in any.

The winning energy tech of the future better have as little negative externalities as possible, especially long term ones.

Re: Progress toward fusion energy gain as measured against the Lawson criteria

#90

Post by jabl »

cyberax wrote: post #6
actinium226 wrote: post #2

Why is the last plot basically empty between 2000 and 2020? I understand that NIF was probably being built during that time, but were there no significant tokamak experiments in that time?

The ITER is in development hell. Mind you, it's not useless! It produced a TON of very useful fusion research: neutral beam injectors, divertors, construction techniques for complex vacuum chambers, etc. At this point, I don't think it's going to be complete by the time its competitors arrive. One spinoff of this is high-temperature superconductor research that is now close to producing actually usable high-TC flexib…

> actually usable high-TC flexible tapes. This might make it possible to have cheaper MRI and NMR machines, and probably a lot of other innovations.

I'm sure there'll be plenty of fascinating applications of high-Tc tape, however I'm not sure MRI/NMR machines will be one of those. There would still be a lot of thermal noise due to the high temperature. Which is why MRI/NMR machines tend to use liquid helium cooling, not because superconductors capable of operating at higher temperatures don't exist.

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