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Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

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Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#801

Post by TaylorAlexander »

pfdietz wrote: post #794
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, that's right. View it this way: a fission power plant and a DT fusion power plant are pretty much the same, except for the reactor. The fusion reactor is many times the size (and mass) of the fission reactor, made of much more sophisticated materials, with a much more complex design, operating at higher stresses (loads on supports of the magnets, thermal power/area at the wall, neutron flux). So how is it that i…

Ah, yeah that is totally valid. My thinking is not exactly that fusion power will be cheaper than fission any time soon, but that the technology has the potential to deliver safer power, and as important as wind and solar are to our transition over the next few decades, I believe that fusion has the potential to deliver much higher levels of power than wind and solar, allowing for new uses for electricity previously considered impractical. I wonder what kind of new manufacturing processes we can come up with if we have enough power to deliver huge amounts of process heat, for example.

I agree with you that in a practical sense fusion power will not be economical in the next 50 years, but then solar power was not economical for most of my life either. I am excited for the technology to get to the point where at the very least it is producing power, as this will stimulate more investment in lowering the costs, and has been such a dream for longer than I have been alive.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#802

Post by moloch-hai »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #788
moloch-hai wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Lithium-ion batteries burn. But the topic was "modern batteries", which at the instant moment means LiFeP batteries, not "previous-generation batteries".

Lithium is anyway not favored for use in utility-scale storage, where its light weight offers no compelling value. Up-and-coming chemistries include iron-air (no explosions), calcium-antimony (no explosions), and bromine-zinc (no explosions). Hundreds of other chemistries are available.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#803

Post by pfdietz »

simne wrote: post #799
pfdietz wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ITER will only operate for a few weeks total at full power. It's not intended for materials development. For that, a Fusion Nuclear Science Facility (FNSF) would be needed.

You don't understand. ITER will RESEARCH, how existing materials withstand in real fusion reactor, and gather parameters of real fusion reactor, so other science facilities will have benchmarks.

ITER is fundamentally unable to replicate the conditions that materials will be subjected to in an actual commercial fusion reactor. It cannot achieve the same cumulative neutrons dose that a real reactor can experience. It will not be able to answer the questions that need to be answered to prove out the materials for first walls or blankets, and it will not be able to establish reliability metrics for these structures.

For this reason, there has long been a call for a FNSF. This facility is likely to be needed to establish designs for components that would go into the putative successor to ITER (DEMO).

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#804

Post by _ea1k »

foota wrote: post #355
_ea1k wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I pulled the estimate for really efficient heat pumps. To convert to all electric heat like that estimate, we'd have to replace a lot of gas heat with electric. Might as well go for the most efficient thing. Compared to the nearly $200B in infra investment that I was estimating, that looks easy, lol.

I realize this isn't relevant for a discussion about future investment, but the current "value" of the whole energy infrastructure for a state is probably in the hundreds of billions of dollars, right? It's been built out over decades, of course, so the actual costs per year are much lower.

That's definitely possible. Going based upon the output of something like Catawba, that looks like ~3 nuclear plants. I bet that could be done for less than 100B, though I'd just be guessing. I also don't know anything about operations costs for that.

Also, I estimated solar at $1.5/watt. That's probably at least 50% too high.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#805

Post by pfdietz »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #801
pfdietz wrote: post #794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's right. View it this way: a fission power plant and a DT fusion power plant are pretty much the same, except for the reactor. The fusion reactor is many times the size (and mass) of the fission reactor, made of much more sophisticated materials, with a much more complex design, operating at higher stresses (loads on supports of the magnets, thermal power/area at the wall, neutron flux). So how is it that i…

Ah, yeah that is totally valid. My thinking is not exactly that fusion power will be cheaper than fission any time soon, but that the technology has the potential to deliver safer power, and as important as wind and solar are to our transition over the next few decades, I believe that fusion has the potential to deliver much higher levels of power than wind and solar, allowing for new uses for electricity previously…

Solar and wind potential is enormous. The current world average primary energy demand is 18 TW, but the Earth is constantly being struck by 100,000 TW of sunlight. In no sense is a shortage of sun and wind an argument for fusion.

As for safety, the problem with fission isn't safety, it's cost. Trading off economics to obtain better safety is solving the wrong problem.

If fusion is not to be economical for 50 years, it will be competing against renewables (and storage) that have gone fully down their experience curves. In a world fully powered by PV, on the demonstrated historical experience curve, the LCOE from PV could be below $0.01/kWh (in today's dollars). Fusion will have a very difficult time competing against that.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#806

Post by zbobet2012 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #620
zbobet2012 wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion#As... That's utterly incorrect: "Fast ignition and similar approaches changed the situation. In this approach gains of 100 are predicted in the first experimental device, HiPER. Given a gain of about 100 and a laser efficiency of about 1%, HiPER produces about the same amount of fusion energy as electrical energy was needed to create it (and thus will require…

This is irrelevant - each shot also requires a highly precision engineered piece of metal called a hohlraum to be destroyed. With current technology, running an ICF plant would cost literally hundreds of millions of dollars per hour in hohlraums, since a single one costs millions, and you need to shoot several times per minute to produce energy. That's why ICF is not even close to being a plausible electricity genera…

hohlraums are not expensive because of base materials, but because today we generally produce them as one offs and the process is incredibly man hour intensive. The DOE "roundtable" on the announcement today addressed this.

For an actual look at the challenge of ICF i'd say look here: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/TE_1704_web.p...

and also consider that it might be used in combination with MCF for example: https://medium.com/fusion-energy-league/the-fundamental-para...

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#807

Post by wolverine876 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #323
rcarr wrote: post #313

Genuine question: I seem to recall there being some very similar news about how 'ignition' had been achieved not too long ago. Am I imagining things or is this a genuine new development?

The story here isn't ignition. It's that they got out more energy than they put in, which is of course necessary to use fusion as an energy source. We'e been able to produce fusion for awhile, but net positive energy hasn't happened before.

To correct myself: 'ignition' is getting more energy output then input (if I understan correctly), and that is a first. Sorry for the confusion.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#808

Post by moloch-hai »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #745
moloch-hai wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Amazing breakthroughs" have notable consequences. This thing has no prospect of any consequences. It is just one number inching past a second number, the second one of dubious provenance. You may call it a "milestone" if you like, even though it is a milestone on the way to nowhere. The only reason fusion gets any attention is because megaton bombs worked, and already demonstrated Q>1. People are building out solar…

> "Amazing breakthroughs" have notable consequences. This thing has no prospect of any consequences. The consequences of a breakthrough are often not noted at the time. It is only when the consequences have happened that we recognize them and grasp the change which has been catalyzed by the discovery. Who, other than Mathematicians, cared about Number Theory when it was discovered? I don't know enough about plasma ph…

If there are ever any notable consequences of any value, we can whoop about it then. There are dozens of advances of equal magnitude, in as many fields, every day, without attracting a glance.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#809

Post by moloch-hai »

dmfdmf wrote: post #785
moloch-hai wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 engine…

Something better has already come along. Solar and wind produce power more cheaply than the world has ever seen.

Fission is distinguished by being the most expensive power in current heavy use. All the nukes will be mothballed, soon enough, unable find takers at a price that would pay for continued operation.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#810

Post by moloch-hai »

weregiraffe wrote: post #760
moloch-hai wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

7. It doesn't matter, even if renewables were free. They is no way to store energy from intermittent sources that will allow to power human civilization. You are going to end up like Germany, replacing nuclear power with coal and gas.

You can pretend there is no storage while the world goes ahead building and using it, at utility scale, paying no attention to you insisting they cannot
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