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Fusion Power Plant Simulator

fusionenergybase.com

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Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator

#91

Post by willis936 »

dale_glass wrote: post #67
the8472 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storing renewables for a whole season is an unsolved problem at the moment. Countries at higher latitudes might want fusion for baseload generation during winter. And later it'll help with climbing the Kardashev scale.

But there's far easier solutions to that than fusion. For example, HVDC. Interconnect and buy power from somebody with more sun. Or just overbuild solar by a lot. It's cheap, so chances are having too much of it still works out economically.

Let's be fair here, we're trading one megaproject for another.

Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator

#92

Post by willis936 »

aaroninsf wrote: post #44
nerdsniper wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite video that walks through fusion energy design/sizing/cost equations is also a lecture by Dennis Whyte: https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4?si=U8xaAAvjdnt6yqr8 It’s a really engaging lecture - I’m normally pretty put off by 100-minute lectures on YouTube but this one was both very easy to follow and perfectly scoped. Can highly recommend it - the learnings from it are timeless fundamentals that really make fusion…

The wildcard for our civilization that I pay a lot of attention to: will AI help us get through blockers like this? I'm out of the prediction business but my guess is: absolutely, but iff we don't collapse in some way first. Wild to be alive as the centuries-long horse race of industrialization between doom, or the stars, approaches its finish line.

How would AI help achieve commercial fusion? You first need to identify the blockers. These almost all entirely boil down to "how do we precision machine large pieces of hard metal?", "how do we assemble facilities with untold process channels?", "how do we capture neutrons without making a prohibitively massive machine?", and "how do we make metal that doesn't melt?".

Now, AI might have a chance at supercharging material research and making miracle materials that help address the blanket and first wall challenges, but honestly those are roadblocks we're not even running into yet. AI can not and will not fix issues related to organizing labor and supply chains and suddenly make megaprojects have a 100% success rate for on-time and on-budget. It's just not going to happen.

So are these problems intractable? Of course not. It's just not what the chatbot is well suited for. Anyone saying otherwise is selling something.

Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator

#93

Post by DennisP »

hunterpayne wrote: post #85
DennisP wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging by the comments I see most places, the general public's perception of fusion is "magical scifi tech that will never happen."

That's because it almost certainly is. Don't hate on the messengers.

My point is, that's a pretty positive view of fusion. They think it's too good to be true, but if it actually happens then I doubt many people will suddenly switch into thinking it's a dirty old explodey thing like fission's public image.

Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator

#94

Post by DennisP »

jiggawatts wrote: post #87
DennisP wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wildly overstates how far off we are. To take the most conservative example, tokamaks have very well-known scaling laws and based on those, CFS is generally expected to exceed breakeven with SPARC and get to practical power levels with ARC, over the next several years.

> over the next several years. More like decades. The earliest time any planned fusion reactor will make net electrical output -- but not yet an economically useful amount -- is the mid 2030s, a decade from now. Commercially relevant amounts of electrical generation is uncertain, but most plans start around 2045 and then would take decades to replace fossil fuel plants at scale.

There's a big difference between "it will be decades before we've replaced fossil plants at scale" and "we won't have net power until we invent magical new technologies that we have no clue about today."

Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator

#95

Post by Gud »

tovej wrote: post #50
Gud wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ITER is not our best bet for commercial fusion. ITER was a peace project between the USA and the Soviet Union. https://www.cfs.energy

ITER is definitely the best bet for a workable fusion concept. There are some unsolved issues left, but its nothing compared to the sci-fi solutions most US startups would require.

Did you click the link? Nothing “sci-fi” about commonwealth fusion systems..

Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator

#96

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

sam wrote: post #11
NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #10

For whatever reason the game doesn't load until I switch to the dark mode If I enable advanced mode, the "exiting" in Heating Power (exiting) gets overlapped with corresponding numbers Display menu doesn't allow switching to Energy mode

Thanks - what browser?

technically LibreWolf, but it should be just latest Firefox with some privacy options preselected (like blocking your requests to cloudflare insights)

other that said cloudflare, I see no other errors/warnings in f12

the "load only on lighting theme switch" has fixed itself, the other 2 problems are still there for me

Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator

#97

Post by leonidasrup »

minihat wrote: post #64
derriz wrote: post #61

When people get excited about fusion as a source of energy, I’m always reminded of Henry Ford’s famous quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” although apparently he probably never said that. Fusion is that faster horse - promising a cheaper to operate firebox which when attached to a stream engine attached to an alternator can produce electricity. This approach to generat…

Some fusion reactions release their energy almost entirely as fast moving charged particles. You can slow down those particles against an electric field and harvest the energy as electricity directly. No steam turbine. No Carnot limit.

There are many kinds of nuclear fusion reactions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Important_react...

The lowest-threshold nuclear fusion reactions (deuterium–tritium (D–T) fusion, used by ITER, Commonwealth Fusion Systems) release up to 80% of their energy in the form of neutrons. These designs have to convert energy of the neutrons to electricity, indirectly using heat.

Since it is simpler to convert the energy of charged particles into electrical power than it is to convert energy from uncharged particles, an aneutronic reaction would be attractive for power systems. However, the conditions required to harness aneutronic fusion are much more extreme than those required for deuterium–tritium (D–T) fusion.

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

Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator

#98

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #79
dale_glass wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there's far easier solutions to that than fusion. For example, HVDC. Interconnect and buy power from somebody with more sun. Or just overbuild solar by a lot. It's cheap, so chances are having too much of it still works out economically.

> For example, HVDC. Interconnect and buy power from somebody with more sun. Who is Japan interconnecting with, or any other country that doesn't trust its neighbors? What is Canada supposed to do when it's ~6000 km from the equator and might not want to rely on the US for electricity regardless? > Or just overbuild solar by a lot. It's cheap, so chances are having too much of it still works out economically. Solar i…

> Who is Japan interconnecting with, or any other country that doesn't trust its neighbors? What is Canada supposed to do when it's ~6000 km from the equator and might not want to rely on the US for electricity regardless?

With space. By space-based solar power instead of HVDC.

Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator

#99

Post by dheera »

advisedwang wrote: post #13
MisterTea wrote: post #7

No melt down? This game sucks. On a serious note: I wonder how practical and safe it would be to build fusion pants close to city centers in order to harvest the excess heat for district heating. Would be a boon in e.g. NYC which already has a large district steam system. You can do cooling too, look up "steam absorption chiller."

> I wonder how practical and safe it would be to build fusion pants close to city centers in order to harvest the excess heat for district heating The cost/benefit for doing this seems pretty similar between fusion as gas power. We don't usually do this with gas, so I guess it's probably not viable for fusion.

> The cost/benefit for doing this seems pretty similar between fusion as gas power.

The real problem is stupid capitalism reprices everything good to the price of the non-good thing. Solar was supposed to be almost-free clean electricity, but the price of panels has been repriced to make them the same as dirty electricity.

Re: Fusion Power Plant Simulator

#100

Post by leonidasrup »

bleepblap wrote: post #69
leonidasrup wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the proliferation risks will be in future the reason, independent of technological obstacles or costs, why US will not allow to build fusion power plants in all countries around the world. Hybrid nuclear fusion–fission power plants have been already proposed and studied in theory. "In general terms, the hybrid is very similar in concept to the fast breeder reactor, which uses a compact high-energy fission cor…

> Hybrid nuclear fusion–fission power plants have been already proposed and studied in theory. I have a hand-wavy hard sci-fi universe I've been rolling around my head for years and I eventually came to the conclusion that fission-fusion drives would be really handy for spacecraft, since it would be much easier to start a fission reaction in a cold/dark ship than fusion because of the power requirements. Otherwise yo…

Using the energy of fission for spacecraft propulsion has been studied and some prototypes have been already constructed. Most of these nuclear engines should be used only outside of Earths atmosphere.

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

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

Most interesting and promising are direct nuclear propulsions, like fission-fragment rockets.

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

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