Fusion Energy: the 35-Country Clean-Energy Effort to "Bottle the Sun' (cnn.com) 218
This week CNN published an article chronicling how 35 countries "have come together to try and master nuclear fusion, a process that occurs naturally in the sun — and all stars — but is painfully difficult to replicate on Earth.
"Fusion promises a virtually limitless form of energy that, unlike fossil fuels, emits zero greenhouse gases and, unlike the nuclear fission power used today, produces no long-life radioactive waste. Mastering it could literally save humanity from climate change, a crisis of our own making." If it is mastered, fusion energy will undoubtedly power much of the world. Just 1 gram of fuel as input can create the equivalent of eight tons of oil in fusion power. That's an astonishing yield of 8 million to 1. Atomic experts rarely like to estimate when fusion energy may be widely available, often joking that, no matter when you ask, it's always 30 years away. But for the first time in history, that may actually be true....
The main challenge is sustaining it. The tokamak in the UK — called the Joint European Torus, or JET — held fusion energy for five seconds, but that's simply the longest that machine will go for. Its magnets were made of copper and were built in the 1970s. Any more than five seconds under such heat would cause them to melt. ITER uses newer magnets that can last much longer, and the project aims to produce a 10-fold return on energy, generating 500 megawatts from an input of 50 megawatts.... The dimensions are mind-blowing. The tokamak will ultimately weigh 23,000 tons. That's the combined weight of three Eiffel towers. It will comprise a million components, further differing into no fewer than 10 million smaller parts.
This powerful behemoth will be surrounded by some of the largest magnets ever created. Their staggering size — some of them have diameters of up to 24 meters — means they are are too large to transport and must be assembled on site in a giant hall.... Even the digital design of this enormous machine sits across 3D computer files that take up more than two terabytes of drive space. That's the same amount of space you could save more than 160 million one-page Word documents on. Behind hundreds of workers putting the ITER project together are around 4,500 companies with 15,000 employees from all over the globe... Now commercial businesses are preparing to generate and sell fusion energy, so optimistic they are that this energy of the future could come online by mid-century.
But as ever with nuclear fusion, as one challenge is overcome another seems to crop up. The limited stocks and price of tritium is one, so ITER is trying to produce its own. On that front, the outlook isn't bad. The blanket within the tokamak will be coated with lithium, and as escaped plasma neutrons reach it, they will react with the lithium to create more tritium fuel... First plasma is now expected in 2025, and the first deuterium-tritium experiments are hoped to take place in 2035, though even those are now under review — delayed, in part, by the pandemic and persistent supply chain issues.
"This article has some nice photography," writes Slashdot reader technology_dude. "It really makes it hit home on the incredible amount of design and planning work that is required."
The article notes that when Stephen Hawking was asked which scientific discovery he'd like to see in his lifetime, Hawking answered, "I would like nuclear fusion to become a practical power source."
"Fusion promises a virtually limitless form of energy that, unlike fossil fuels, emits zero greenhouse gases and, unlike the nuclear fission power used today, produces no long-life radioactive waste. Mastering it could literally save humanity from climate change, a crisis of our own making." If it is mastered, fusion energy will undoubtedly power much of the world. Just 1 gram of fuel as input can create the equivalent of eight tons of oil in fusion power. That's an astonishing yield of 8 million to 1. Atomic experts rarely like to estimate when fusion energy may be widely available, often joking that, no matter when you ask, it's always 30 years away. But for the first time in history, that may actually be true....
The main challenge is sustaining it. The tokamak in the UK — called the Joint European Torus, or JET — held fusion energy for five seconds, but that's simply the longest that machine will go for. Its magnets were made of copper and were built in the 1970s. Any more than five seconds under such heat would cause them to melt. ITER uses newer magnets that can last much longer, and the project aims to produce a 10-fold return on energy, generating 500 megawatts from an input of 50 megawatts.... The dimensions are mind-blowing. The tokamak will ultimately weigh 23,000 tons. That's the combined weight of three Eiffel towers. It will comprise a million components, further differing into no fewer than 10 million smaller parts.
This powerful behemoth will be surrounded by some of the largest magnets ever created. Their staggering size — some of them have diameters of up to 24 meters — means they are are too large to transport and must be assembled on site in a giant hall.... Even the digital design of this enormous machine sits across 3D computer files that take up more than two terabytes of drive space. That's the same amount of space you could save more than 160 million one-page Word documents on. Behind hundreds of workers putting the ITER project together are around 4,500 companies with 15,000 employees from all over the globe... Now commercial businesses are preparing to generate and sell fusion energy, so optimistic they are that this energy of the future could come online by mid-century.
But as ever with nuclear fusion, as one challenge is overcome another seems to crop up. The limited stocks and price of tritium is one, so ITER is trying to produce its own. On that front, the outlook isn't bad. The blanket within the tokamak will be coated with lithium, and as escaped plasma neutrons reach it, they will react with the lithium to create more tritium fuel... First plasma is now expected in 2025, and the first deuterium-tritium experiments are hoped to take place in 2035, though even those are now under review — delayed, in part, by the pandemic and persistent supply chain issues.
"This article has some nice photography," writes Slashdot reader technology_dude. "It really makes it hit home on the incredible amount of design and planning work that is required."
The article notes that when Stephen Hawking was asked which scientific discovery he'd like to see in his lifetime, Hawking answered, "I would like nuclear fusion to become a practical power source."
That's about (Score:4, Funny)
4,500 companies with 15,000 employees
That's 9 times the number of companies in the S&P500, and the employees would fill about the twenty lower rows in a big stadium!
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Re: That's about (Score:4, Interesting)
I would bet that 4000 of the companies are single person contractors running LLCs to protect themselves.
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More importantly, how many giraffes are in an Eiffel Tower?
Re:That's about (Score:5, Funny)
how many giraffes are in an Eiffel Tower?
About 5 Olympic swimming pools
That's cute (Score:3, Insightful)
How long have they been at it? What progress?
Apparently it was all the hot fusion guys who couldn't stop shouting loudly how they couldn't reproduce the cold fusion guys' results. And somehow they pretty much utterly failed to make all that hot fusion money into fusion, nevermind all that lovely energy they keep promising us with their fusion.
So far the most direct way to use fusion energy is to use solar panels. Those do seem to get better in a hurry. Curious, no?
Re:That's cute (Score:5, Insightful)
And somehow they pretty much utterly failed to make all that hot fusion money into fusion,
This is nonsense, there are multiple very real ways to make fusion [wikipedia.org]. We know how to do "hot fusion" as you call it.
The goal now is to make break-even controlled fusion, and then make it cheap.
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The goal now is to make break-even controlled fusion, and then make it cheap.
Not quite. The heat from a fusion reaction is over 1,000,000 C. To extract energy from heat that high is an unsolved problem (hell, nobody is even working on it). In other power plants we extract energy from heat in the 200-300C range and at 45% efficiency. We can do it up to 3000C (I think, I know we can do up to 1000C). Past that, it is anyone's guess how efficiently we can extract energy. So it isn't Q > 1 we need to reach, it is Q > 1 / .45 or whatever efficiency we can extract energy from 1
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"To extract energy from heat that high is an unsolved problem"
They aren't needing to figure out how to tap a million-degree plasma. The harvestable energy, according to what I have read, is in the form of neutrons that escape from the plasma or imploding fuel pellet or whatever is fusing. The neutrons strike something in the enclosure that ideally will get hot and be able to carry the heat away. There appear to be some possible solutions to that, and the problem is not being ignored.
"It won't happen in any
Re:That's cute (Score:4, Informative)
That is hindsight. At the time it wasn't nonsense at all and they branded crackpot anyone who tried to work on cold fusion regardless of their own credentials. Destroyed their careers and pulled the rug out from their funding.
Nonsense. It went down thusly:
Pons and Fleischman, two electrochemists, had an interesting idea for an experiment, but they were not knowledgeable about the type of physics experiment they were attempting to do and thus set one up could not give them the data they were seeking.
Said experiment produced entirely spurious results of positive energy output, and, making no attempt to get outside review of their work, or seeking direct evidence of the claimed fusion (neutron emission, tritium production), they publicized it as a world shaking discovery (the university press office helped here).
For the space of no more than a year attempts to replicate this result were entirely credible, and was attempted by hundreds of labs around the world. This was basically everyone with the materials and facilities to attempt it, since being the first person to confirm a world-shaking result gets significant credit also.
No one could replicate it, and serious experimental physicists immediately spotted fatal flaws in how the original experiment was done.
P&F had the opportunity at that point to acknowedge their error and retract their results. They did not do that and so made the deliberate decision to abandon their careers as scientists and become professional crack-pots.
There is still to this day serious accepted science going in low energy nuclear reactions (LENR) that are finding evidence of very slight nuclear reactions under cold conditions. This work is not branded crackpot and is published in journals.
But people claiming "lots of power" from cold fusion for the last 23 years are incompetents or liars which is a good operational definition of "crackpot".
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Unlike the cold fusion guys, the hot fusion guys are making progress though. As in, there have shown that Tokamak energy output appears to scale favorably such that a large plant, if built, would work.
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This isn't a matter of science. The science is quite simple: "Get the protons close to each other." It's a matter of engineering and economics. Fusion is rather simple to do. You can build a Farnsworth fusor [wikipedia.org] in a garage if you're reasonably skilled technically. Polywells [wikipedia.org] can be built by most physics grad students. Fusion warheads [wikipedia.org] have existed since the 50s. The trick is building a fusion reactor that generates more energy than it consumes and can harvest that surplus energy with an efficiency high enough to
It'll get there technically, but not economically. (Score:4, Interesting)
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The limiting resource for PV is real estate. Have you checked on the price of that lately?
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The limiting resource for PV is real estate. Have you checked on the price of that lately?
And it's only available for about 12 hours/day, when it's sunny. A centralized fusion plant can run 24/7 rain or shine.
Re: It'll get there technically, but not economica (Score:4, Insightful)
Thatâ(TM)s a solved problem. Even with todayâ(TM)s battery technology, time shifting solar production to demand is cheeper than competing methods of production. The cost of these storage systems (along with the solar arrays too) is rapidly dropping too.
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That's a solved problem. Even with today's battery technology, time shifting solar production to demand is cheeper than competing methods of production.
Sure, but generating and storing some of that power 12 h/day isn't the same as generating power 24 h/day.
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Sure, but generating and storing some of that power 12 h/day isn't the same as generating power 24 h/day.
With competent transmission, we won’t run out of area to put panels even if we have to use 2x as many panels and storage kWh to get from 12hr average load coverage to 24 hr. Given how solar panel prices keep dropping while efficiency slowly rises, and grid battery storage getting cheaper, it’s not going to take that much longer.
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Also, a citation needed on that "shifting so
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The panels last at least 25 years and yeah, they aren't completely clean but far cleaner than fossil. The useful lifetime of the existing battery tech is probably less, but a lot of progress is being made there.
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If we pretend it is viable. Fusion would be a better answer, especially combined with hydr
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Fusion might be great but we don't have fusion. Hydrogen is merely a storage medium for energy, not a source.
Solar PV generally lasts a minimum of 25 years, and maybe considerably longer if reduced output is acceptable. But in 25 years we will have much better panels and they will be way cheaper, probably everything will be replaced. As for batteries, even some existing battery tech such as zinc-air, iron oxide, and gravity batteries may well last 20+ years. Even lithium batteries can be swapped out and rec
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Interesting. But the article does say;
"Present U.S. lithium resources appear sufficient, however, and it is expected that the costs of increasing lithium production would be within acceptable costs for fusion power plants."
And;
"The quantity of lithium actually consumed in nuclear reactions or blanket replacement will be a small part of the natural lithium required by fusion power plant concepts that use liquid lithium metal as a moderator, fertile material, and primary coolant"
So most of the lithium would n
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The longest lived radioactive lithium isotope has a half-life of 0.838 seconds. Lithium does not get radioactive through activation. It will contain tritium hydride since breeding tritium is the reason for the blanket. But it will just get reused in new fusion power blankets as long as they plants exist.
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Meanwhile, please tell us how much concrete a fusion reactor will use? (For our convenience, please express in Cubic Mile units).
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You don't need prime real estate. Maybe not viable in Singapore or Monaco, but most other countries have more than enough space for solar. Exxon owns 15 million acre of land in US alone. You can produce more solar electricity from this land than electricity from all of oil/gas produced by Exxon.
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OMG! I forgot that the sun doesn't shine at night.
You guys have found the fatal flaw in my plan...
What could possibly be done? Ever heard of a battery?
Australia has several very large ones which have saved them millions.
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Ever heard of a battery?
Sure, but generating power and saving some of it 12 h/day isn't the same as generating power 24 h/day like a fusion plant could (and maybe even saving some of that). Also, while an outlier case, solar w/batteries doesn't really work in the extreme northern/southern latitudes where there may be several months of near/complete darkness...
Re: It'll get there technically, but not economica (Score:3)
One problem with nuclear is that it can't follow the load which is much lower at night. Solar, wind and batteries are an ideal mix for 24/7 power.
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One problem with nuclear is that it can't follow the load which is much lower at night.
For fission power plants sure (they're most efficient at full capacity), but will that also be true for fusion plants? Perhaps, but for different reasons. Then again, either fission or fusion could be used to charge batteries (or other storage methods) for periods of greater demand -- like using a nuclear power plant with pumped hydro storage -- there's one here in Virginia: Bath County Pumped Storage Station [wikipedia.org].
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If you are using a nuclear heat source it to heat a lot of water with large thermal mass and run a steam turbine just like a coal plant does, then I can't see how it would be any easier to modulate power output than it is for a coal plant. After all, you can put out the fire in a coal plant quickly enough - just cut off the air supply or fuel or flood it with nitrogen, just like you can stop a fusion reaction quickly by cutting off the fuel.
Gas turbine output can be moderated more easily because the gas is
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A centralized fusion plant can run 24/7 rain or shine.
You know this comes in all the time... and its not really that true. As you shift more and more generation to nuclear, you quickly start approaching the ceiling on how much left over heat you can dump into that local environment. The locations with massive amounts of water needed to take the heat away are more limited in their availability than for many other power sources.
You don't need much temperature increase to cut down on oxygen for aquatic life. Not much to cause toxic algae blooms.
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Re: It'll get there technically, but not economica (Score:2)
Nuclear is probably 40% efficient at best. I would be surprised if any production plant in the US passes 35%. Even with all you say, you may get to 50%. You will always have massive amounts of heat dumped out in a relatively small area.
You need to maintain a temperature difference to get any work out of it. The work itself only removes 1/3 of the heat and then the diff is closed by 2/3. Rinse, repeat, not only is the diff down, but it's 1/4 the work now and dropping.
If you don't cool the tail side, you
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Nuke plants boil water to produce electricity, and a considerable amount of the energy is lost as waste heat. That heat can be evaporated away in which case you use a huge amount of water. Or it can be dumped into the sea or a river, which does heat the local environment.
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And it's only available for about 12 hours/day, when it's sunny.
That's also a solved problem from a technological standpoint. We have these things called "batteries".
Sure, but generating and storing some of that power 12 h/day isn't the same as generating power 24 h/day ...
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Yes people keep saying that, and I've heard it repeated here a few times already. But it's simply not true. Yes we have batteries, good ones even, and there are a few instances of large-scale installation (Tesla batteries for instance) to help store power and balance the grid, but we certainly don't have enough batteries to store energy for the entire world, or even at a large, national scale. Batteries are very costly and have a heavy environmental footprint in their manufacture. They are honestly quite
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The limiting resource for PV is real estate.
There's a lot of roofs without PV systems on them. At the end of the day, all that matters is the cost per watt. Fusion may never be an economical source of energy, at least not the kind of fusion that takes place here on Earth. If it's cheaper to point some PVs at the big fusion reactor in the sky, that's what will be done.
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Its funny how many people focus on Fusion and all its marketing utopia of the future. Just do what France does with their nuclear fuel and the US is pretty much set for 3-4 generations. But that's not considered viable (political, economic, etc reasons). However, dismissing alternatives for a pipe dream is OK.
Please, by all means, continue to fund Fusion... but we can do other things in the meantime too rather than keep shoveling coal.
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Have you checked the price of land out in the middle of nowhere?
Literally dirt cheap.
Also, most urban/suburban PV is installed on rooftops... free land.
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The limiting resource for PV is real estate. Have you checked on the price of that lately?
That's not even close to being an issue. Out my window in a major metropolitan area are a bunch of 1-story houses with 2-car garages and big lawns, owned by middle-class people. Since nobody around here is named Vanderbilt, and this is neither a rural area nor a giant state, it's pretty obvious that land is not expensive in general.
But the kind of land used for power infrastructure is dirt-cheap even compared to that, and solar loves desert wastelands.
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Out my window in a major metropolitan area are a bunch of 1-story houses
And that's fine for serving residential loads. But not commercial or industrial needed to support your lifestyle. And residential demand is a small part of overall electrical load. You might think that your PV system takes a big chunk out of your electric bill. But if you figure your grocery store, department store, office building and data center's demand, your rooftop plus theirs don't come close to providing enough area.
and solar loves desert wasteland
So do endangered rats. Don't forget the external costs of all that "free" land.
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So do endangered rats. Don't forget the external costs of all that "free" land.
The external costs are definitely trivial compared to those of any other energy technology. Also, I don't think desert rats object to having more shade, more water condensing in the
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Solar PV and wind will take over majority of the electricity market (at least 80%) in next few decades. There are many utility scale energy storage and long distance transmission lines are being developed which will be able to deliver cheap solar energy to 90% of the population 90% of the time by 2050. Remaining 20% can use hydro, bio-fuel or synthetic fuel produced using chemical reactions from solar/wind electricity.
Fusion was always under development and it will be still born when delivered.
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The issue with fusion is that what sounds like an advantage is actually crippling: If t
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Even a tokamak based fusion plant design can be cheaper than a solar plant depending on the energy output. Saying nothing about the fact that once the tokamak proves practical investment in developing other cheaper and more compact designs like Dense Plasma Focus, MagLIF, and Polywell will get the investment needed to be developed.
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Not Practical for Vehicles (Score:2)
Aircraft carriers, submarines, and spacecraft would definitely benefit.
Not unless we can make a much, much smaller and less complex fusion reactor. As the article says the tokamak itself is 23,000 tons without the necessary neutron shielding you would need for any human-occupied vessel which would likely and thousands of tons more. It also has over a million components.
For comparison, the ISS is ~440 tons and took multiple launches to build. You would need to reduce the mass by at least 2-3 orders of magnitude for it to be practical for spacecraft - probably 3 by the time
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The era of solar getting progressively cheaper is already over Solar panels are already getting more expensive
Not the case. Demand is just saturating currently available supply, same as the entire semiconductor industry, and inevitably causes manufacturers to increase capacity until prices stabilize at an ultimately lower level and higher volume. It will take a while to do that because the entire global economy is involved in the semiconductor demand spike, but it's not an opinion that the stable price of PV technology will continue downward: It's how economies work.
Long-term commodity prices can go up or down
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why are you totally ignoring the effects of inflation on all aspects of solar panel creation?
The semiconductor crunch isn't inflation, it's simple microeconomic supply and demand. Suppliers are making money hand-over-fist from the demand spike, which is driving investment into increasing capacity. Since metals and electronics manufacturing are both capital-intensive, that kind of capacity increase takes years to be reflected in prices, but once it enters the stream the stable prices that result are lower than before the demand spike.
I'll grant you this: China is using market share in a monopol
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Solar panels face a far more fundamental challenge, because they require vastly more materials than semiconductors.
They use a lot of different materials, but require? As far as I know, only semiconductors are physically necessary. And even then, it's an advantage to have a broad input base, because it increases the options in the tradespace. Technologies strive for that. It makes them more flexible against temporary economic conditions.
They are already at scale.
They're not even close to scale. You'll know it's at scale when the absence of solar panels is cited in ads for nature parks. I think what we have here is a failure of imagination:
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Sun doesn't actually shine enough in most places where there are people on this planet for solar to even recoup its carbon debt.
Exactly zero of that carbon debt is inherent to the technology. You are citing the failure of the entire economy to already be carbon neutral as a reason to not adopt renewable energy, and that's ridiculous.
You put it into a coal furnace
Also not fundamental to the technology, and obviously the first step to sustainably generating high temperatures is to have a sustainable energy system! You're talking a lot of chicken-and-egg bullshit.
PVs installed in Germany won't recoup their carbon debt and they sure as heck won't power the nation.
It already generates over 8% of their electricity. And as for carbon debt, you've now moved the goal
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On over 150% peak consumption worth of INSTALLED CAPACITY.
I didn't say anything about installed capacity, which BTW Germany also leads the world in per capita. I said over 8% of their electricity was generated by solar, and failed to mention that figure was from years ago.
Wait, so you think the mass move to solar and wind is not because it reduces emissions?
Now you admit that it reduces emissions? Because just before that you were claiming the opposite, that it has a net carbon debt because anything at all in the entire economy that goes into it generates carbon emissions.
You cannot create modern PVs without high purity polysilicon.
I don't know if that's true, but I know that nothing about a high-temperatur
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You mean the gas that Germany relied on to carry the no wind, no sun moments after they went for Energiewende?
Could more money speed things up? (Score:2, Troll)
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True. The 'climate' scam will only allow certain permitted solutions. By complete coincidence they're the ones that will make money for certain people.
Yes, like Al "Carbon Credits" Gore LOL.
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True. The 'climate' scam will only allow certain permitted solutions. By complete coincidence they're the ones that will make money for certain people.
You forgot the part about how those solutions will never work. Also the part about blaming others for having the temerity to have to eat, get to work and other basics of modern life. The truth is that global warming is real. The fraud is that wind, solar and fusion will have anything to do with solving it. If you disagree, consider that the richest man on the planet sells solar panels and EVs and that's how he made his money. If you are still anti-nuclear, you are the problem.
Real soon now (Score:2)
Fusion (other than in bombs) has been Real Soon Now for decades. For a long time they were zapping deuterium ice pellets with lasers. Now they're back to playing with tokamaks. There seems to be a fundamental issue in the way or they would have made it work by now.
...laura
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Lots of things were considered real soon now and then seemed like they would take forever .. see flying machines, even video phones. Home "videotelephones" were promised for well over 120 years until the late 1990s when it started being somewhat practical. Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
In the 1980s it was a joke that video phones were right around the corner. Same thing with smartwatches. A comic called "Dick Tracy" popularized the idea of a phone-watch in the 1930s and all kinds of gimmick ve
Re:Real soon now (Score:5, Informative)
Fusion (other than in bombs) has been Real Soon Now for decades.
No, it's been making slow progress for decades. Slow progress because it is under-funded.
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Fusion (other than in bombs) has been Real Soon Now for decades.
No, it's been making slow progress for decades. Slow progress because it is under-funded.
Indeed. Working fusion would mean some people got a lot less rich selling fossile fuels. Fusion has indeed made steady (slow) progress ans has not hit any wall so far. But with the extreme greed that the fossile industry has, fusion will, at best, be at the end of the measures to fight climate change.
Re:Real soon now (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it's a matter of perspective. It's not that progress is slow, in fact progress has actually been fast. The problem is the problem itself is extraordinarily difficult, and for that reason we're not really *strictly* funding limited. For example we likely wouldn't get ten years progress in two years by spending 5x as much.
I think on D-T fusion at least, we may be in a better position to really accelerate progress with funding after ITER starts returning some results. At present there is so much we simply don't know -- e.g. how generate enough electrical power with the plant to run itself. With a large working reactor we can eliminate a lot of ideas that sound promising but would ultimately be dead ends.
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No, it's been making slow progress for decades. Slow progress because it is under-funded.
20 years ago (in my early 30's), I was wandering the streets of Amsterdam one night looking for a cool local pub to hang out just outside of the tourist centre area. I stumbled on pub that seemed to have lots of people hanging out in and lingering outside.I made my way in and the only place I could find to grab a seat, which was on a step of some unused stairs leading up. I was pretty close to a group of men in their
Re:Real soon now (Score:5, Interesting)
As I seem to have to post in every thread on every discussion forum whenever this topic comes up:
THIS GRAPH DOES NOT SAY WHAT YOU THINK IT DOES.
This graph is based on ERDA numbers from 1976. At the time, they were funding the development of the PLT at Princeton, the first medium-scale tokamak with aux heating. There was widespread agreement that if PLT could heat, the next reactor after it would break even, and the one after that would be a commercial prototype.
So now look at the graph. Do you see how most of the lines have three peaks? Those are each of those machines being built. Take the green one, for instance. You see TFTR being built through the late 1970s and entering use in the early 80s. Then, based on what was learned there, you build the breakeven machine during the late 1980s. Finally, with those experiments done, you build your prototype power plant during the early/mid 1990s. The other curves simple compress this or stretch it out to limit the size of the peaks. The blue line simply builds two machines at once, thus two huge peaks instead of three smaller ones.
Problem: the designs didn't actually work. As they pushed towards higher density, the plasma once again went unstable. The entire system was just wrong. You could throw all the money you want at it, it wouldn't suddenly make it work. And that's why, when TFTR clearly wasn't going to work, the black line occurred. Instead of just throwing money at huge machines and praying, it was back to basics while they figured out the physics.
It's like someone told you that their 10 foot ladder was too short, but it only cost $20, so if you give them $1,000,000 we can build a ladder to the moon and forget all that rocket stuff. If the physics don't work, then no amount of money will solve that.
Here we are 40 years later and people still drag this graph out to tell us precisely the opposite of what actually happened.
I don't think (Score:2)
ITER will be the first to achieve fusion. To much of a big business attitude, cost overruns, ect.
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ITER will not be the first to achieve fusion because fusion has already been achieved. The first controlled release of fusion power in 1991. Uncontrolled fusion was earlier.
Seriously, you people need to open a wikipedia page before posting, you are making yourselves look ignorant by posting ignorant things.
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When I said "first to achieve fusion" I meant first to achieve commercial fusion, or first to achieve breakeven in a tokomak, but I was on my phone and I am lazy. I thought most readers would be able to "get the drift", but there are always those who like to be condescending, so keep up the good (condescending) work
That's not all. (Score:5, Interesting)
People always talk like sustaining a fusion reaction is the all they need to do to make this a practical energy source. But if these reactors cost billions of dollars just to make 1/2 a gigawatt of thermal power, that is not practical. If they need to be completely overhauled every year, that is not practical. So, in reality, sustaining a reaction is only the first step to making something like this work. After you have that working, there is still a ton of development that needs to happen before this could become a practical power source.
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Indeed. The thing is that most people are stupid and both have no clue what they are talking about and have no clue that they have no clue. Hence statements about how easy all these things are here on /.
If you need Tritium, you are fucked (Score:2)
In any sane design, Tritium is used for research and to ramp things up to Deuterium as fuel, nothing else.
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Tritium easy to make, hard to handle (Score:2)
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Indeed. That is pretty much also what the scientists say.
Neutrons (Score:2)
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This is the entire point of z-pinch fusion. The neutron strike carries the thermal energy required to boil water. By pinching the fusion plasma you are using inertia to confine the area that is struck. There's still the chance of secondary collisions which would change the angular trajectory of the neutron. So yes, there would still at some point be a need to replace parts, but would be greatly reduced as, at least in theory, the majority of neutrons are directed at the thermal transfer medium.
Itâ(TM)s just 10 years away (Score:2)
Just like it always has been for the last 60 odd years
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Neutron flux is a fusion killjoy... (Score:2)
High-energy neutrons released in nuclear reactor cause the reactor material to become weak and brittle over time. In a fission reactor, after about 40 years of operation the reactor has been weakened enough that it may require replacement.
The neutron flux per unit area/time in a D-T fusion reactor is ~100x that of fission. The entire reactor vessel could possibly require replacement every half year or so unless a workaround for this is found. Even if planned/engineered for such as by a replaceable sacrifici
SMRs now, fusion when it happens (Score:3)
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Deploying something now is difficult when that something doesn't exist. There's currently one running prototype SMR in the world and it's a reactor designed for Soviet nuclear icebreakers. Rolls-Royce is developing SMRs in the UK and their timeline for making significant amounts of power seems to be 2050 (from their website). For the near future, SMRs are going to be tech demos just like fusion plants. It's going to be hard for them to ever compete with renewables on cost.
ITER Russia cooperation in doubt with sanctions.. (Score:2)
Russia is a founding member of ITER and a major contributor to the gyrotrons and other components. Apart from being so inextricably linked with the construction of ITER, sanctioning Russia will be difficult, given other members including China and India have not condemned the invasion of Ukraine.
ITER is now in the process of rethinking timelines and budgets. https://sciencebusiness.net/ru... [sciencebusiness.net]
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the sooner fusion is working, the sooner Russian oil and gas is sidelined forever.
Bottling the Sun is easy. (Score:2)
If they wanted to simply "bottle the sun" that would be relatively easy. The energy production of the Sun is actually rather low, not much more than your typical compost heap on a cubic meter by cubic meter basis. The difference is that the Sun is really, really, really big, and in a near perfect vacuum bottle.
To actually get useful energy production out of a fusion reaction, the energy density of the fusion reaction needs to be multiple orders of magnitude higher than in the sun, which means significantly
Why bottle the sun when you can use the sun itself (Score:2)
Fusion energy has never worked, and has never even proven feasible to actually provide usable energy. Why wouldn't we use better proven technologies like solar mirrors in orbit, which requires scaling up rather than new physics?
Fusion promises a virtually limitless form of ener (Score:3)
It does not. Although deuterium is indeed available in large quantity, fusion also (realistically) requires lithium to breed tritium. The world's supply of lithium is enough to produce the same as the total amount of energy in fission fuel if we use fast breeders.
Fast breeders have been operational since the 1950s and are basically unused. If the goal is to produce this "virtually limitless" power, we could do so immediately using them.
In contrast, the first attempt at a fusion reactor was made in 1938, and today in 2022 we still don't have a single working model.
And yes, that's the same lithium that will have a dramatically greater impact on CO2 if we use it for batteries in cars rather than some ubertech that can be replaced by dozens of other CO2-free concepts, you know, like wind.
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It takes a LOT of power to get weapon grade nuclear material.
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If you go the uranium route. The plutonium route is easier but the engineering of the weapon is more challenging.
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Smallest traditional H-bomb would produce energy at least 10^16 J. How do you store such large amount of energy for extended period to convert into electricity slowly. This is just one simple question (you will have solve many more problems). If you can find a storage solution at this level, then you can use solar for winter months and you won't need fusion.
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Because you need fissile material to get the fusion reaction started, that makes nuclear fallout
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"I'm not an atomic scientist". That's putting it mildly. After it goes boom, where do expect the continuous flow of energy to come from? Oh, I see, you want to continuously detonate them. Tell you what, go off and figure out the power output and size the containment building properly, and get right back to us. We'll wait.
Already being Worked On (Score:2)
Why not build the smallest thermonuclear bomb you can?
That approach is already being worked on at the US's National Ignition Facility [wikipedia.org]. Rather than provide the heat required from a small fission device though they use an insanely powerful laser focused on a pellet of frozen hydrogen. The resulting heating of the outer layer causes the core to implode and undergo fusion.
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No, those are still just experiments. Commercially useful fusion is 20 to 30 years away, as it has been for the last 50 years.
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I've been hearing that "practical fusion is only 10-15 years away" for the past five decades - hence my attempted joke.