[HN Gopher] Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as 'ignition'...
___________________________________________________________________
Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as 'ignition' triggered in a
lab
Author : elorant
Score : 447 points
Date : 2021-10-12 14:25 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.imperial.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.imperial.ac.uk)
| ph4 wrote:
| So is the goal just to fuel our current patterns of consumption
| and development with fusion, or nuclear, or whatever?
| f00zz wrote:
| A lot of stuff becomes feasible with free unlimited energy. For
| instance, carbon air capture (could even become a protein
| source) and green hydrogen (for applications like production of
| iron via direct reduction, so we can finally get rid of blast
| furnaces).
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Why do you think fusion would provide free unlimited energy?
| With any design even slightly visible on the horizon right
| now, a single plant will cost billions of dollars and barely
| produce a few MW of energy. This is much worse than any
| equivalent investment in solar power, which similarly
| requires 0 fuel.
| abraae wrote:
| I can't help feeling we'll find new ways to soak up that
| energy.
|
| Ad tech will start segmenting right down to the individual
| customer, burning thousands of watts to work out how to
| entice then to spend $20.
|
| Perhaps raw heat, rather than the indirect heat effects of
| global warming will be our next challenge.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Our current Bitcoin mining facilities will seem like
| child's play.
| _jal wrote:
| If cheap commercial fusion became a reality, no.
|
| We would use far more energy.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Would more cheap (in all ways) energy be a bad thing? I don't
| think so, people pay money for that sort of thing.
| hinkley wrote:
| Heat pollution. Green house gasses are not the only way to
| cook ourselves.
|
| Though there are some people working on beaming heat into
| space, I suspect they haven't fully accounted for heat
| absorption by atmospheric dust.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It'd be interesting to ponder whether such a "heat ray"
| would work, in terms of thermodynamics. Some kind of heat
| pump, the hot side of which is hot enough to radiate into
| space? I can't imagine that having a net cooling effect
| when considering the Carnot efficiency of a refrigeration
| cycle. Maybe a giant ice machine in space? (Then again, any
| ice would probably create more heating than cooling as it
| enters our gravity well or deorbits). Anyone have any
| ideas?
| zardo wrote:
| The cold side is what your heat ray hits, the idea is
| that would be the CMWB.
| hinkley wrote:
| I'm... cautious but optimistic. They have actual
| installations so it must not be complete bullshit.
|
| Absorption and emission bands matter. They are in fact
| made of exotic materials (rare earths IIRC) so it's at
| least plausible.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| Hm, interesting. I was initially unconvinced that this
| could be a problem, but some back-of-the-envelope math says
| it's at least conceivable:
|
| The sun deposits _enormous_ amounts of energy onto earth
| every single day: Around 340 W /m2 (averaged over the whole
| earth), or a total of 43 x 10^15 Watts. Essentially all of
| it is radiated back into space (mostly as infrared). We
| have a temperature equilibrium because energy intake is
| largely constant (surface/cloud albedo notwithstanding)
| while radiation back into space grows with fourth power of
| (surface/atmospheric) temperature.
|
| Current global energy consumption is on the order of 2 x
| 10^12 Watts, over four orders of magnitude lower. If we
| somehow increase energy production by ~two orders of
| magnitude, to the point of ourselves emitting 1% of the
| solar energy intake on top, the surface temperature would
| need to rise by about 0.75 degC to maintain equilibrium. An
| order of magnitude more (i.e. three orders of magnitude
| above current consumption, roughly 10% of solar intake)
| would correspond to a 7.2 degC rise.
|
| (Point of reference: Global power consumption has barely
| doubled in the past 40 years. No telling what "free" energy
| would cause though.)
|
| Presumably we'd have geo-engineered a solution by that
| point, but it's surprisingly not too early to start
| thinking about the problem!
| hinkley wrote:
| That's assuming the anthropomorphic heat is spread evenly
| over the earth, rather than concentrated and creating a
| heat island effect.
|
| You probably can drop an order and a half of magnitude
| off of that number just based on concentration. And if
| you don't think 'free' fusion will cause us to use
| several times more power than we currently use, then I
| don't know what to tell you.
| [deleted]
| woah wrote:
| I'm guessing any possible energy generated by manmade
| fusion plants would be miniscule compared to that hitting
| the earth from the sun every day.
| hinkley wrote:
| That's not how homeostasis works.
| groby_b wrote:
| Assuming anything else would happen is ignoring human nature.
|
| The only way to get significant reduction of consumption is via
| catastrophe. There's a good chance that'll happen, but there's
| no feasible different way that I can see. Take away large
| levels of comfort from large amounts of people, and you will
| inevitably see bloodshed. (Yes, I know that unsustainable
| consumption will also lead to catastrophe. Welcome to the 21st
| century, where the path forward is narrow and uncertain, while
| the stakes are higher than ever)
| dfdz wrote:
| This more carefully worded Nature article [1] explains that the
| experiment did not meet the technical definition of ignition.
| That is why they wrote 'ignition' in quotes in the article title.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02338-4
| mbgerring wrote:
| Pretty interesting how this huge rash of articles about the same
| 2 or 3 fusion experiments have appeared just as the Federal
| government is considering where to spend resources in energy
| infrastructure for the next ten years. Who's the publicist?
| p1mrx wrote:
| I don't think it's a huge rash of articles; it's the same old
| news from August resurfacing every couple weeks.
| greenail wrote:
| Sweet, nucluear fusion now must only be 20 years away!
| akimball wrote:
| Let's see, JET 1998 Q total ca. 0.01, NIF 2021 Q total ca.
| 0.001 -- seems like fusion is getting further away, rather than
| closer.
| Iv wrote:
| 20 years ago we were joking about it being 40 year away. So
| yes, it is timely progress.
|
| I am still bitter that we don't invest more on this research
| which has the potential to solve the climate crisis
| "unexpectedly".
| nnamtr wrote:
| I'm somehow afraid of a world in which huge amounts of energy
| can be wasted without having a bad conscience. Probably it
| would lead to some new problems.
| bduerst wrote:
| Not sure if poe's law but that's basically the way things
| are today.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| ICF really doesn't have this potential, definitely not in the
| way it is practiced here. Each shot at NIF costs a few
| million dollars in material costs alone, because of the
| precisely machined parts that are required to achieve
| inertial confinement of the plasma long enough to make it
| start fusion, which get destroyed in the process.
| iammisc wrote:
| > I am still bitter that we don't invest more on this
| research which has the potential to solve the climate crisis
| "unexpectedly".
|
| Unfortunately, solving the climate crisis would put many a
| pundit out of a job.
| junon wrote:
| Something tells me the alternative is going to do much more
| than putting people out of jobs.
| iammisc wrote:
| I agree, but the bureaucrats in charge are more
| responsive to their own immediate needs than to the long-
| term outcomes. That is to say, it is in their best
| interests to prevent an exciting new technology to come
| out and eradicate the problem as then they would no
| longer have their jobs.
| joncrane wrote:
| Sorry, it's actually now 29.5 years away.
|
| Also this article isn't even about a tokamak so...
| rfrey wrote:
| Meta-question about fusion energy -something I don't understand
| about the movement. I spent a few years as CTO of a company
| providing heat-to-electricity plants. We financed and built them
| off high-heat plants like natural gas turbines. The "fuel" was
| heat going up the stack - so it was essentially free. We still
| couldn't compete with conventional electricity plants, even with
| a $30/tonne price on carbon in Canada.
|
| Geothermal energy is the same: sustainable, long-life electricity
| with no "fuel" costs, but it costs 2-3x as much to build a
| geothermal plant (in most areas, depends on geology) as e.g. a
| natural gas turbine powered plant, so the overall cost of
| electricity is much higher and you can't get financing.
|
| How is fusion different? The fuel will be free and unlimited, but
| the "levelized cost of electricity", dominated by the capital
| cost of the plant, will still be much higher than other sources
| of electricity. I don't think there's a world -- even one where
| the onerous regulations go away and a market price on carbon is
| available -- where the LCOE of fusion power is less than that
| from natural gas, or even close.
| raywu wrote:
| Your question is great and barring other incentives (comments
| in response to this), I'm also interested in how commercial
| viability impedes adoption.
|
| In your opinion, what could be done to make the energy
| generated by fusion competitive? Can we add storage to the mix
| and therefore compete on a longer time horizon? I know storage
| itself is expensive.
|
| Is it to say that fusion won't get adoption from market forces
| alone, until the cost of construction lowers?
| cletus wrote:
| > How is fusion different?
|
| It's not but people don't seem to realize this or maybe just
| don't want to think about it. Spending $100B to produce 1GW of
| power (made up numbers) is not an economical source of power.
| So hydrogen being free (deuterium and tritium are essentially
| free; Helium isotopes are more complicated) is irrelevant until
| the capital cost of the plane is much, much lower.
|
| And even then you still have to deal with these significant
| issues:
|
| - Neutron embrittlement of the container;
|
| - Energy loss from the chamber from neutrons; and
|
| - Containment. The plasma is essentially an extremely high
| temperature turbulent fluid. Because of the turbulence and the
| super-high temperatures containment is likely to remain a
| significant issue.
|
| I hope fusion becomes commercially viable and economical but
| I'm just not convinced (yet) that that will ever be the case.
| It certainly won't be ITER even with tens of billions spent on
| it.
|
| People get caught up on the fact that stars do fusion without
| considering what's different. To summarize:
|
| - Energy loss from neutrons is essentially a non-issue because
| of gravity and just the size of stars. To put this in context,
| it's estimated that photons created at the Sun's core take
| ~30,000 years to escape;
|
| - Stars are relatively inefficient with their fuel. IIRC the
| Sun converts ~4.5M tons of matter into energy every second. It
| sounds like a lot but that's a tiny fraction of the Sun's mass
| (~10^30 kg). That's because hydrogen atoms are so unlikely to
| fuse and they go through several intermediate states before
| that happens. Fusion in the lab already produces many more
| fusion reactions per unit mass than stars do.
|
| I firmly believe that space-based solar power collection is our
| most likely future.
|
| EDIT: corrected "photons"
| bigfudge wrote:
| > photos created at the Sun's core take ~30,000 years to
| escape
|
| I'm guessing you meant photons but this still seems amazing.
| Is there somewhere I can find out more about that?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| It's not really "the same" photon though.
| [deleted]
| jhgb wrote:
| It's like a random walk, basically. Now realize that the
| photon has something like 700000 kilometers to go and a
| mean free path in the core in the range of one millimeter
| or so and it's kind of obvious that this will necessarily
| take some time.
| cletus wrote:
| So this is based on mathematical modeling. Here's one
| reference I found [1] that estimates 5,000 years. I know
| I've heard 30,000 too, which is really within the same
| order of magnitude.
|
| [1]: https://sciencing.com/fun-sun-moon-stars-8459789.html
| jhgb wrote:
| When I was younger (like three decades ago), the number I
| was taught was something like two _million_ years (if I
| remember it correctly; I might still be able to find that
| book if I 'm lucky).
| truculent wrote:
| To add to the confusion, I vaguely recall a number of
| around 125,000 years. I think it was either from "A Brief
| History of Time" or Jeff Forshaw's "Why Does E=mc2?".
| zpeti wrote:
| $100bn to get to a working fusion reactor doesn't mean the
| second one will cost EUR100bn as well...
| drran wrote:
| Yep, but if you want to have cheap energy, then it better
| to start with something cheaper, like LENR, which is still
| pain to reproduce, but give it $100bn and 20 years and then
| compare with ITER.
| pfdietz wrote:
| As long as we're in fantasyland I suggest perpetual
| motion machines, or perhaps unicorn power.
|
| It's hard to make up for LENR's lack of existence with
| clever engineering. But even if LENR existed, how do you
| think it would get around the problem described? LENR
| would make heat, low grade heat.
| cletus wrote:
| Oh for sure. To be clear, I meant the amortized cost, not
| the initial cost of, say, ITER. I could've stated that
| better.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Either way we (humanity) have to research these things or
| we are guaranteeing that we will reach an energy and
| materials plateau and eventual decline as a species.
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| Here's an article about why fusion is a bad idea [1] and its
| from the bulletin of atomic scientists so they should know.
| I'd love to hear it refuted but doesn't seem to have
| happened.
|
| [1] https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-
| the...
| marktangotango wrote:
| > I firmly believe that space-based solar power collection is
| our most likely future.
|
| Isn't this the same capital expenditure analysis your post
| starts with though? How many billions does it cost to get the
| solar panels to orbit in sufficient quantity? And ground
| stations to receive the energy beams (microwave presumably).
| This is where Musk/Spacex push for cheap kg to orbit really
| matter. Even in the 70's they worked out that mining the moon
| for raw materials to build space based solar was much more
| economical.
| cletus wrote:
| So during the Space Shuttle (and earlier) era I believe the
| cost of getting payloads to LEO was $20-50k/kg. Currently
| with Falcon 9 it's gone down to ~$1000/kg. I imagine this
| will continue to get cheaper with further reuse and
| Starship.
|
| But we really need to get down to <$10/kg. Thing is, that's
| entirely achievable. I believe the ultimate future here
| will be orbital rings [1]. Space elevators get a lot more
| attention and they really shouldn't because they're a lot
| less achievable and they require materials we haven't
| invented yet (to resist the centrifugal force).
|
| Imagine being able to take a cable car into orbit. That's
| what orbital rings promise and you need little more than
| copper wire and stainless steel.
|
| Not only would this bootstrap colonization of space but you
| can simply attach collectors to the ring itself and run the
| power down a cable to the ground so you don't even need to
| suffer the power loss from wireless transmission (which,
| for the record, is a practical method still).
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E
| red_trumpet wrote:
| > even one where the onerous regulations go away and a market
| price on carbon is available
|
| What do you mean by a "market price of carbon"? From context I
| would guess that the "market price" would be higher than the
| current price, but the history has told us otherwise - that is
| why we have regulations on carbon emissions.
| sandGorgon wrote:
| true this. In fact - im wondering why molten salt reactors
| which the US innovated almost 60 years back where not pursued.
| Thorium is plentiful and cheap - and Terrapower seems to have
| already productized cheap miniaturized MSRs.
| drumhead wrote:
| High up front costs, for Nuclear fusion/fission, geothermal and
| solar but cheap fuel, you can run then all day long and sell
| the power you generate at any price to cover the fixed costs
| and pay off the capital costs and of course you're not
| generating carbon. With carbon burning generation, the cost of
| the fuel is volatile, sometimes its cheap sometimes it not, so
| you have to be clever in buying the fuel and not get stuck just
| buying spot and going bankrupt because its suddenly spiked in
| price.
| thehappypm wrote:
| In addition to being a large project to set up geothermal, they
| don't generally produce a lot of power. The largest deployment
| in the world is in California (The Geysers) and spans ~20
| separate units, and each unit on average produces around 100
| MW. A gas plant produces around 500 MW, and a nuclear plant
| about 1 GW.
| Mizza wrote:
| It's political. Taxes on carbon pollution are inevitable, but
| for the time being there is still political blockage because of
| the power of the cartels.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Politically the problem is that voters want action on climate
| change but aren't willing to pay any visible cost associated
| with that action. If you put a tax on carbon that raises the
| price of something by $100 then that's a political no-go. But
| if you create a cap and trade system that raises the price by
| $150 that might be politically viable. Not ideal, but one has
| to compromise with political realities.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The answer to this is for the tax to pay out to everyone as
| a dividend. Then voters would be in favor because some of
| the tax is paid by corporations but all of the money goes
| to individuals, so most people get back more than they pay.
|
| On top of that, the tax would (if enacted by most
| countries) crush demand for fossil fuels. So then fossil
| fuel prices go down by, for example, half the amount of the
| tax, meaning that half the tax get paid by Exxon et al. But
| all tax money still gets paid out to individuals.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| I wish it were just cartels that oppose a carbon price. The
| fact is it will make certain industries shrink, and almost no
| country in the world (certainly not the US) does much to take
| care of displaced workers, and the workers know it. Meanwhile
| the people who will have jobs in the new industries that
| spring up don't know it yet, so they don't fight for it.
| mraison wrote:
| It's hard to compare a fusion plant and a geothermal plant if
| we don't know how much energy a single fusion plant could
| produce. Are there any estimates on that?
| dibujante wrote:
| Bingo.
| Fordec wrote:
| > We still couldn't compete with conventional electricity
| plants, even with a $30/tonne price on carbon in Canada.
|
| Was this Canada specific? A country with both very abundant
| native oil & gas and abundant hydro energy with nuclear power
| plants in place to boot.
|
| Not every country in the world has such abundant energy sources
| on tap.
| rfrey wrote:
| We tried to build in Europe and America as well; the
| economics are just hard. In the US there was very little
| market for carbon, which is why I said "even in Canada" since
| there is a regulated price for carbon here.
|
| The plants were mostly in Alberta, where NG is cheap but
| there is no hydro.
| porphyra wrote:
| Generating energy from the difference between extremely hot and
| slightly hot is cheap and efficient using turbines.
|
| Going from slightly hot to cold, as in the case of geothermal
| and capturing residual heat in the stack of a natural gas
| plant, is thermodynamically inefficient and quite expensive.
|
| Since fusion energy is extremely hot, it is efficient. Other
| sources of "extremely hot" include: combustion (typically from
| fossil fuels) and solar thermal.
| asdff wrote:
| That just tells me that we haven't priced the externalities of
| carbon based energy appropriately, if the green solution is
| still more costly. Increase the carbon tax and things will
| pencil out fast.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Natural gas costs don't include the external costs like climate
| change, so it looks better than it is. We have to stop using
| fossil fuel soon to prevent really catastrophic changes, so
| then other sources are needed.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| Exactly. The costs are much more than economic. It's the
| Tragedy of the Commons
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
| pfdietz wrote:
| DT fusion is not different, and is unlikely to be competitive.
| This was understood decades ago.
|
| http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trou...
| zurfer wrote:
| The question is not _if_ it will be cheaper, but _when_. Gas is
| a limited resource. We will eventually run out of it, the
| closer we get to that point the more expensive gas will become.
| But that point - without political intervention - can be many
| decades away.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Supply doesn't create it's own demand.
|
| This is plain social failing you're describing. You ask whether
| it _will_ happen to fusion, I would argue it has already been
| happening to both for quite some time.
|
| Just as starter motors are needed to stat ICEs, so new sorts of
| power generation start as unprofitable, and end as essential.
| humaniania wrote:
| Natural gas is only inexpensive because of fracking.
|
| With fracking in the USA at least the people involved can set
| up an LLC that dissolves after the well runs out. They are not
| required to disclose the contents of the fracking wastewater
| fluid. It gets pumped back down underground where it could
| dissipate into the rest of the water system. These people claim
| that it's safe for decades when our computer models can't
| predict the weather accurately next week.
|
| In California now they're using fracking wastewater on crops
| because of the water shortages. Without disclosing what's in
| it. And not testing for if that stuff ends up in the food.
| These people are using loopholes to take the profits now and
| leave society with the bills for cleanup and the health
| consequences. That isn't sustainable or IMO fair or just. If
| the real cost of fossil fuels was clear up front they would not
| make sense.
|
| https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-drought-oil-w...
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _These people claim that it 's safe for decades when our
| computer models can't predict the weather accurately next
| week._
|
| The models may or may not be accurate but they have nothing
| to do with predicting the weather. There isn't any weather
| underground... It's all slow diffusion and buoyancy.
|
| A better starting place might be asking where the model
| inputs come from.
| phillc73 wrote:
| https://www.wunderground.com/
| mcguire wrote:
| Doesn't "diffusion and buoyancy" technically describe the
| weather, too?
| whatshisface wrote:
| Diffusion and buoyancy are indeed both things about the
| weather, but the nonlinearity of the navier-stokes
| equation stems from the ability of convection to
| transport momentum. Fluids moving through rocks can't go
| fast enough for that to happen.
| 5faulker wrote:
| This is definitely more of a do-it-while-you-can model.
| Mewit wrote:
| I don't think it is accurate to say it "dissipates into the
| rest of the water system". Typically the hydrocarbon
| formations being fracked are thousands of feet below the
| water table, separated by thousands of feet of impermeable
| shale. It's the same, or more so, for disposal zones where
| the frack fluid that flows back is injected. For the fluid to
| mix with a potable aquifer, it would have to leak within a
| wellbore. That's possible, for sure, but it's pretty rare,
| can be detected through proper monitoring, and can be more or
| less eliminated as a risk when the well is ultimately
| abandoned by pumping cement down the well. You don't really
| need a computer model to tell you what's going to happen: the
| formations have been separate for millions of years, and
| they're probably going to continue to be separate for
| millions more.
|
| I hadn't heard about them using the water for crops, that is
| a little more alarming to me. I suspect it's not being done
| quite as cavalierly as you're suggesting - they are clearly
| treating and testing it, as discussed in the article.
|
| In my (maybe biased) opinion, all of this should be weighed
| against the alternatives. Gas is much cleaner than coal,
| after all. In Europe, they made the decision to ban fracking,
| and also eliminate nuclear energy (in some countries at
| least). Some of the gap can be filled increasingly with
| renewables, but as recent history has shown, not all of it.
| Most of the gap is filled with Russian gas, which has its own
| issues. And overall it makes the energy supply less robust,
| which allowed their current energy crisis to happen, when the
| wind doesn't blow enough and the Russian supply has hiccups.
|
| I don't think it's fair to paint this as oil and gas
| companies reaping all the benefits while everyone else pays
| the price: everyone benefits from lower energy prices,
| directly or indirectly. In my opinion, consumers bear some of
| the responsibility for environmental issues, as well as the
| producers.
| humaniania wrote:
| Also maybe read the entire article on using fracking
| wastewater on crops:
|
| Until now, government authorities have only required
| limited testing of recycled irrigation water, checking for
| naturally occurring toxins such as salts and arsenic, using
| decades-old monitoring standards. They haven't screened for
| the range of chemicals used in modern oil production.
|
| No one knows whether nuts, citrus or other crops grown with
| the recycled oil field water have been contaminated.
| Farmers may test crops for pests or disease, but they don't
| check for water-borne chemicals. Instead, they rely on
| oversight by state and local water authorities. But experts
| say that testing of both the water and the produce should
| be expanded.
| Mewit wrote:
| I don't know anything about this, but contamination seems
| plausible, as you say, and it would probably make sense
| for California to update its regulations to make sure the
| crops grown with this water are safe for consumption.
|
| I think this is a pretty unusual situation. As far as I
| know, most spent frack fluid is reused in oilfield
| operations or disposed of in deep disposal wells.
| nightski wrote:
| This is surprising to me because in North Dakota there
| have been plenty of brine spills (from storage tanks) and
| it seems to _destroy_ the farmland. It 's nearly
| impossible to clean up and it always makes its way into
| major waterways.
|
| I can't believe a farmer would intentionally use this to
| water their crops, it wouldn't make any business sense.
| andrepd wrote:
| > In Europe, they made the decision to ban fracking, and
| also eliminate nuclear energy
|
| Well the difference being fracking for natural gas is an
| environmental disaster that will leave untold problems for
| the future to clean up, and nuclear energy is one of the
| cleanest forms of energy we have.
| humaniania wrote:
| "impermeable" until there's an earthquake caused by
| fracking and things shift deep underground where nobody can
| monitor or track what is happening? Seems exceptionally
| short sighted to me.
|
| https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/does-fracking-cause-earthquakes
| Mewit wrote:
| I think it's best to look at the options through a risk
| matrix. Is it possible that an earthquake is generated by
| fracking that is big enough to geologically connect a
| hydrocarbon formation with a surface aquifer thousands of
| feet above it? I suppose, but I think it is very
| unlikely. I don't think there are any cases of that on
| record, and wells have been fracked in the US for many
| decades (although not as frequently as recently). What is
| the consequence of that happening? A community (likely a
| rural community) loses potable drinking water. I would
| say that is a low probability of a medium impact event.
|
| The calculation is going to change if there is a higher
| probability of drinking water contamination for whatever
| reason, or if more people live in the area and would be
| impacted by an event, just as the risk matrix is
| different building a nuclear power plant in France
| compared to building one on the Japanese coastline. Of
| course every jurisdiction makes its own decisions, as is
| their right, but the consequence of always taking the
| least risky option can leave a country in a tough
| situation when those options don't cover their energy
| needs, like in Germany (and elsewhere in Europe) right
| now.
| pasabagi wrote:
| Absent from your analysis is the risk presented by global
| warming. Obviously, transitioning the energy sources for
| an entire group of nations is risky and absolutely the
| kind of thing you expect to be a bumpy ride. On the other
| hand, uncontrolled global warming is far more risky - at
| worst, the energy shortages present a limited economic
| challenge. Global warming presents an existential
| challenge at worst, and an unbounded, extreme economic
| challenge at best.
|
| The issue a lot of people have with fracking is not just
| the local environmental damage, but also the deeper issue
| of whether it's worth pouring investment into an obsolete
| industry that is going to produce inputs for other
| obsolete industries, all of which are environmentally
| damaging on any scale, just so you can gain a bit of
| energy security in the here and now. It's not just
| kicking the can down the road on your future energy
| security - it's also pushing us towards an extremely
| chaotic and difficult future for everybody.
| ac29 wrote:
| > In California now they're using fracking wastewater on
| crops
|
| That's not what your linked article says. The article says
| _treated_ wastewater is being used. That being said, it
| appears to be in dispute if the water is treated enough, with
| the water district claiming that it is and an environmental
| group claiming its not.
| drdeca wrote:
| Are you claiming that it is chaotic in the way that weather
| is? Or, if not, why would such a comparison make sense?
|
| Like, why does it make more sense than "the people at the LHC
| claim they understand well enough to be confident that the
| LHC wont produce a black hole that swallows the earth, but
| how can we trust that when computer models can't predict the
| weather next week?" ? What does one have to do with the
| other?
|
| It is not at all clear to me that the inability to predict
| the weather is at all a good reason to significantly doubt
| the accuracy of their models of the impact of the wastewater
| fluid. There may be other good reasons to doubt it! I'm not
| claiming their models are good, I know very little about it.
| But, without a further explanation as to why the two are
| comparable in this way, I don't see the "but we can't
| precisely predict the weather for next week" argument as
| having any non-negligible weight.
| xondono wrote:
| What a great way to _not_ answer what OP is asking.
|
| If you don't like fracking, that's alright, but sustaining
| ourselves without it it's not really an option. Right now our
| options are:
|
| 1) Use coal, accept the consequences of the increased climate
| change.
|
| 2) Keep using gas, reduce the future costs of climate change,
| deal later with the speculative consequences you mention.
|
| 3) Switch to renewables and drastically increase energy
| costs, which will trap millions of people into poverty, and
| put millions more in risk.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Of course, the consequences of climate change are billions
| cast into abject poverty, wars over resources and land, and
| so on. Moreover, if we do away with carbon subsidies (i.e.,
| implement carbon pricing and border adjustments), then yes
| the cost of fossil fuel energy goes up, the consequence is
| the society adapts to using power more efficiently. We make
| less disposable shit, our industrial processes improve to
| keep costs down, etc. Further still, nuclear _fission_ is
| still a perfectly good option, and we have reactor designs
| that are dramatically smaller, safer, and cheaper than
| previous generations (with projections for the levelized
| cost of energy comparing favorably with that of fossil
| fuels today).
| ransom1538 wrote:
| "Of course, the consequences of climate change are
| billions cast into abject poverty"
|
| The only way to end climate change is to have a serious
| debate about population control. But no one wants
| difficult debates (at least people that matter). Nuclear
| fission once pulled off will make things much much worse.
| I foresee a population explosion into areas once
| uninhabitable.
| diordiderot wrote:
| Pretty sure you could just price in carbon. Poverty is
| more like not driving an f150 2 hours to your job at
| office, not max eating 6 steaks a week, taking shorter
| showers, and turning your AC in south Texas in August
| from 62 to 78
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| You can either cull billions of people or transition to
| clean energy, and yeah, people are rightly fixated on the
| latter.
|
| > Nuclear fission once pulled off will make things much
| much worse.
|
| What a foolish thing to say.
| devdas wrote:
| An actual debate on population control would be looking
| at reducing the number of children in the developed world
| even more, and discouraging suburban housing.
| xondono wrote:
| > Of course, the consequences of climate change are
| billions cast into abject poverty
|
| That may be true, but I was referring to the effects of
| switching to renewables _too early_. Since given our
| technology, the cost per MW is higher from renewables,
| switching to renewables (as a society) has massive costs.
| If we rise the price of the MW a 10%, that 's a +10% on
| every MW from now _until we find something better_. That
| could be a long time, which means the impact of these
| costs could be gigantic. As I 've commented elsewhere in
| this article, a 0.75% reduction on GDP over 100 years is
| equivalent to losing more than the entire (current)
| annual GDP, that's not nothing! Growth is how we've
| managed to move millions out of poverty, we should think
| it through before sacrificing growth.
| humaniania wrote:
| Energy subsidies for vulnerable people are an option that
| negates your only argument against the most sane option of
| switching to renewable and nuclear ASAP, at least in
| extremely wealthy countries like the USA.
| xondono wrote:
| My argument doesn't care who's pocket is funding the
| renewables.
|
| As a society, every extra dollar spent on pricier energy
| is an extra dollar that can't go to social programs, or
| to new start up, or anywhere.
| outworlder wrote:
| > As a society, every extra dollar spent on pricier
| energy is an extra dollar that can't go to social
| programs, or to new start up, or anywhere.
|
| If you are arguing to stop subsidies for fossil fuels,
| sure! Let's do it.
|
| Without any subsidies and with externalities accounted
| for, fossil fuels would be even more expensive than
| renewables.
| xondono wrote:
| > If you are arguing to stop subsidies for fossil fuels,
| sure! Let's do it.
|
| I'll be all in on that. That's not my point at all.
|
| > Without any subsidies and with externalities accounted
| for, fossil fuels would be even more expensive than
| renewables.
|
| Wow, slow down there.
|
| First, subsidies are a confounding factor. I don't care
| who signs the check, we're all paying for it in one way
| or another. Let's just assume we join all of the worlds
| wealth into a big pot somehow, and can magically
| distribute it as we desire.
|
| Externalities are important though, because we will pay
| them anyway, so that one counts.
|
| LCOE for solar and wind is lower, but we can't build a
| whole network with wind and solar because they're
| unreliable. The "popular" (hyped) solution is storage,
| but storage is _so_ expensive that the LCOE for Solar
| /Wind + Storage blows us through the roof again!
|
| I'd love to have some real solution, a renewable and
| reliable source with LCOE similar to natural gas, but
| until we have one we need to accept the fact that natural
| gas is in our mixture of energy sources is _a good
| thing_.
| 8note wrote:
| Every extra dollar saved on cheaper energy _actually_
| goes to lining some billionaire 's pockets in some
| untaxed hole. And then eventually the people who would
| benefit from said social program will instead have to pay
| back a climate debt in the future.
| xondono wrote:
| If we are going to just made up magic pockets where
| infinite money lies, then we can justify whatever we
| please.
|
| The point of my comment is that it doesn't matter where
| the money is. Even if you were to pay it through massive
| taxes to the rich (assume no loopholes, no funny
| accounting tricks possible), the ones picking up the tab
| are the poor people of the future, because even if all
| millionaires are evil movie villains, taking their money
| _will hurt growth_ , and growth compounds. Reducing
| growth now can be a catastrophe when compounded over 100,
| 200, 500 years.
| mindslight wrote:
| This growth fallacy is the main thing driving so much
| environmental destruction in the first place. Most effort
| is being wasted on churn rather than creating
| advancement, and this is increasing as time goes on (fake
| jobs). Until we reprioritize the economy to make
| efficiency gains translate into leisure gains, talking
| about "growth" is just cover for business as usual.
| nomel wrote:
| Many would claim that every extra dollar spent on
| renewables is reducing the environmental debt that we've
| accumulated, that we have to will pay for, with very real
| dollars, since we've subsidize our energy cost with
| future remediation costs.
|
| I think there's some in-between here.
| xondono wrote:
| You can explain or justify the costs however you like.
| That's not the issue. I'm not making any claims as to the
| suitability of spending more or less into renewables,
| just pointing the obvious but often forgotten
| consequence, that every dollar spent here is a dollar you
| can't spend in another place.
|
| Swapping to renewables at once would have an impact that
| can very easily overshadow any remediation costs. Even
| tiny cost increases _now_ will produce vast difference
| 100 years forward due to compounding.
|
| Just as a thought experiment, if the costs of switching
| to renewable energy are >0.72% of GDP, and the remedial
| costs are around 18T$ (in today's money) in 100 years,
| you're still better off _not switching_ to renewables.
| lazide wrote:
| What do you think the odds of this occurring are?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| > Switch to renewables and drastically increase energy
| costs, which will trap millions of people into poverty, and
| put millions more in risk
|
| This feels like a bad faith take out of the gate (whether
| or not it's intended)... are there no mechanisms for
| subsidies to abate these issues? are renewables more likely
| to increase wealth gaps than other fuels?
| lazide wrote:
| Renewables as currently implemented have significant
| effective capacity issues - wind not blowing, or sun not
| shining, or whatever - and overbuilding them still won't
| solve that.
|
| Storage is currently very expensive, and this is not
| likely to meaningfully (as in decrease by an order of
| magnitude or more in cost) change anytime soon.
|
| That means that you need to buy and maintain more
| equipment for the same kwh at the plug than you would
| with a typical power plant. Fossil Fuels are incredibly
| energy dense and really cheap to extract, even with the
| nutty new technologies required in many places.
| xondono wrote:
| It's just simple arithmetic, however you want to
| subsidize or socialize the cost, the fact is that
| renewables have higher cost per MW.
|
| Every dollar spent on higher energy costs is a dollar not
| spent in other things. This will impact growth.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Sure, but aren't fossil fuels also subsidized? Haven't
| the costs been reduced due to the economies of scale and
| time? Are the environmental downsides _not_ considered
| part of the cost?
|
| I get it, renewables are still more expensive, but are
| they really doomed to trap more people in poverty?
|
| Couldn't one argue that the unbalanced economic systems
| are the primary thing that traps people in poverty and
| the cost of energy is simply a minor factor? There are
| certainly countries with low energy costs and high
| poverty rates.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Fossil fuels are _heavily_ subsidized. Most places in the
| world allow the fossil fuel industry to write-off their
| pollution costs, and many other places go further even
| than that.
|
| Moreover, it's disingenuous of the OP to suggest that
| renewables lead to "millions trapped in poverty" while
| fossil fuels merely result in "climate change" (as though
| climate change doesn't imply _billions_ trapped in
| poverty).
| xondono wrote:
| > Sure, but aren't fossil fuels also subsidized?
|
| Yes, that has to do nothing with my point.
|
| > Haven't the costs been reduced due to the economies of
| scale and time?
|
| That's a sunken cost fallacy. What we have already spent
| doesn't matter. What matters is what we choose _today_ ,
| and what consequences does it bring.
|
| > Are the environmental downsides not considered part of
| the cost?
|
| Off course, that's the main issue. Environmental costs
| are gigantic, but they are also _far_ into the future.
|
| > renewables are still more expensive, but are they
| really doomed to trap more people in poverty?
|
| Anything that hampers growth will have massive
| consequences on the long run. Higher energy prices will
| heavily reduce growth, even if we assume that there's
| margin for efficiency to be gained from economies of
| scale and technology improvements.
|
| > Couldn't one argue that the unbalanced economic systems
| are the primary thing that traps people in poverty and
| the cost of energy is simply a minor factor?
|
| You could argue the first one if you'd like, I won't
| because it would be getting off topic. As for the second,
| the cost of energy is a massive factor into the economy,
| because energy underpins anything we do. The only real
| solution we've found to poverty is _growth_. The worlds
| wealth follows an exponential, tampering with the base
| has serious implications when you are looking at climatic
| timescales.
|
| > There are certainly countries with low energy costs and
| high poverty rates.
|
| Let me try to explain in another way. We are at a
| crossroads. Whatever our past is, our current situation,
| it's no matter now, that's behind us. We can choose path
| A, or path B.
|
| Path A (continue to use natural gas) keeps us going. We
| know that at some point we'll have to deal with the
| consequences of climate change, but we can modulate our
| use, and take our time. We are making the future costs
| higher, there's no doubt about that, but we might be
| better equipped to switch to renewables in 40 years.
| There's no reason to rush the switch.
|
| Path B (completely switching to renewables _now_ ). This
| will limit our growth for sure. It will also require us
| to sort out _now_ how best to handle the transition,
| because rising prices with our current system will leave
| a lot of people without heating in the winter, or unable
| to use appliances like dishwashers (I 'm in Spain, our
| energy cost has been rising constantly, we are seeing
| this happening). We will need to change a lot in very
| short time. Our future climate costs will be lower.
|
| In some sense, by choosing path A, we are betting that we
| will find better solutions at some point in the future.
| If we choose path B but if some new amazing renewable
| technology appears in say, 75 years, we've made a huge
| mistake.
| akimball wrote:
| Only because profits are privatized while costs and tail
| risks are largely socialized, for the fossil fuel
| industry. If they paid their environmental impact costs,
| no driller or coal miner could operate profitably.
| Qwertious wrote:
| >It's just simple arithmetic, however you want to
| subsidize or socialize the cost, the fact is that
| renewables have higher cost per MW.
|
| All the more reason for a carbon price. If the cost from
| renewables is _genuinely_ more expensive than climate
| destabilization, then make the price explicit and the
| market will sort the practical from the pointless.
|
| If there's one thing markets are good at, it's choosing
| the cheaper option. But they need a price signal to work
| on in the first place.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Option 4, use a mixture of modern nuclear and renewables.
| Power prices go up slightly, environmental footprint goes
| down a lot.
| xondono wrote:
| I'd love for the world to see that Option 4 would be
| great (I'd chose that one too!), but it's not a
| politically viable option. I was limiting the options to
| the "realistic" ones, given our current constraints.
| solarhoma wrote:
| There is a lot wrong with your post.
|
| >They are not required to disclose the contents of the
| fracking wastewater fluid.
|
| Majority of water used in hydro fracking is slick water. This
| is normal water with friction reducers added to it. Typically
| 1%. Though can change based on the design of the frack. These
| are maybe not disclosed to the public since they typically
| are proprietary formulas that each vendor creates on their
| own. Each wanting to protect their IP from other vendors
| supplying the friction reducers.
|
| >It gets pumped back down underground where it dissipates
| into the rest of the water system.
|
| This is the most inaccurate and hyperbolic part of your
| response. It is markedly false. The slick water is typically
| reused after the well back flows. They store the water onsite
| for the remaining wells. Or transport to another pad for
| continued hydro fracking use. Any water that is produced
| during well production is pumped into non-human use
| reservoirs. These disposal wells are called SWD's, saltwater
| disposals. The depths of the wells vary, in our field it was
| 7500'. Whereas freshwater wells for human and cattle use were
| 300'. Regulatory bodies strictly manage the creation of SWD's
| with significant research and paperwork to show the reservoir
| you are disposing into is not or has ever been used for human
| consumption. The water at this reservoir will not magically
| make its way into the freshwater reservoir.
|
| >These people claim that it's safe for decades when our
| computer models can't predict the weather accurately next
| week.
|
| This seems more emotionally driven than anything. Who are
| 'these people'. How does this correlate to weather? I have
| worked with hundreds of wells that are +80 years old still in
| good standing. If the well integrity is in question a cement
| bond log is run, along with other logs. If it is found there
| are any discrepancies they are fixed. Or the well plugged and
| abandoned, is filled with cement and the wellhead removed.
|
| I have not heard of fracking water ever being used for crops.
| Apologies for any spelling or grammar errors as I am on my
| phone writing this message.
| malchow wrote:
| He's also wrong about there being a water *shortage* in
| California. There is water *diversion*, designed by
| environmentalists to save animals, that strips farmers of
| water.
| nomel wrote:
| One could claim that the water diverted to those pesky
| natural habitats would be inconsequential if there were
| enough for both.
| toqy wrote:
| It seems to me that if you have a new dilemma of choosing
| to starve A or B of water, that you indeed have a
| shortage.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| We already reduced the flow of the rivers to a trickle by
| diverting most of the water for the farmers. Refusing to
| divert the last trickle and make the river bone dry is
| not the cause of the problem.
| javajosh wrote:
| Yes, what good is a biosphere when we have strip malls to
| build in the short term, and the Shangrila of Mars to
| look forward to colonizing in the long term?
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| As someone who worked around fracking wells as a roughneck,
| I see a lot wrong with your post.
|
| >Majority of water used in hydro fracking is slick water.
| This is normal water with friction reducers added to it.
| Typically 1%. This is like saying "dihidrogen monoxide is
| the largest component of acid rain". Technically true, but
| the toxin is toxic enough even at low concentrations. You
| wouldn't enjoy having it in your eyes no matter how much of
| it is water that day. This is frankly a strange argument
| for someone who's worked with the stuff to make, it's not
| quite H2S but nobody I worked with took the toxicity
| lightly.
|
| >The slick water is typically reused after the well back
| flows. That is what's told to the people in the office but
| it's not reliable. A volume of fluid is pumped down the
| well, the same volume is pumped back up. So long as there's
| no water at all downhole, you would recover only fracking
| fluid. Typically if people are worried about fracking,
| there is water downhole and no way of preventing mixing.
|
| >If it is found there are any discrepancies they are fixed.
| The payment structure incentivises the field crews to
| under-report those kinds of errors. Some crews are diligent
| and take the reputational hit of reporting a fracking
| blowout, others simply kick some dirt over it. From my
| experience it's about 50-50. And in the latter case it
| certainly does often land on an unfortunate farmer's field.
| yunohn wrote:
| >> They are not required to disclose the contents of the
| fracking wastewater fluid.
|
| > not disclosed to the public since they typically are
| proprietary formulas that each vendor creates on their own.
|
| So, you're agreeing with the poster then? Fracking
| wastewater is opaque and undisclosed to public.
|
| > If the well integrity
|
| My understanding was that the poster was talking about the
| fracking procedure and resulting wastewater, throughout
| their post. Nobody was questioning the integrity of
| concrete.
| specialp wrote:
| >>They are not required to disclose the contents of the
| fracking wastewater fluid.
|
| >Majority of water used in hydro fracking is slick water.
| This is normal water with friction reducers added to it.
| Typically 1%. Though can change based on the design of the
| frack. These are maybe not disclosed to the public since
| they typically are proprietary formulas that each vendor
| creates on their own. Each wanting to protect their IP from
| other vendors supplying the friction reducers.
|
| How does this make the claim that they are not required to
| disclose the contents of the waste water false? Are
| friction reducers mostly similar and non toxic? It is
| irrelevant that it is 99% water as most industrial waste is
| mostly water. If I pumped out water that was 99% water and
| 1% mercury it would be incredibly toxic. The issue is
| certain chemicals end up lingering in water and bio
| accumulating for a very long time.
| javajosh wrote:
| Yes, I was thinking the same thing. 1% is actually an
| enormous amount since toxins are measured in ppm. Imagine
| being asked, for every 100 cups of water you drink, to
| drink a cup of mystery fluid. Actually, it's worse
| because any (non volatile) additive will tend to
| concentrate over time in food (and then concentrate
| further in animals if the food used for feed), and in
| addition any chemical is bound to change over time in
| contact with sunlight and ordinary plant/animal
| biochemistry.
|
| I've never heard of this use of fracking water in CA, and
| if it's real it sounds to me like frackers IP be damned,
| we need to know what's in the damn water!
| hanselot wrote:
| Imagine if for every 9 vaccines you took you were told to
| take a mystery experimental gene therapy...
| chmsky00 wrote:
| Perhaps the cost to be concerned with is not fiat currency but
| more literal.
|
| The up front costs could wipe out the routine costs and maybe
| we could also dispose of the " make money selling blades not
| handles" monopoly fossil fuel monopolies rely on for political
| relevance.
|
| Infinitely big little numbers let economists iterate forever in
| whatever direction they want. Physical reality has constraints
| their academic models omit.
|
| We need to redefine the perimeter not iterate within the area
| of a well known boundary. Who cares how much it costs
| aristocrats in profits if the result ends up what is believed
| possible? I don't have to believe any given solution or CEO is
| owed a market.
| lazide wrote:
| There are a couple potential answers to your question.
|
| 1) 'make it up in volume' - part of the reason for the
| relatively high capital cost of the technologies you are
| describing, is they don't scale well from a one-off design or
| manufacture vs amount of energy produced perspective.
| Geothermal plants require significant amounts of 'actually
| sticking a very long pipe into unstable ground' which can't be
| effectively economy-of-scaled away to be cheaper. There are
| also only a relatively small number of locations with the right
| factors to make it worthwhile. Presumably the waste heat
| systems you are referring to require custom fitting to the
| plant in some way, and there are also not a huge number of
| places with sufficient waste heat to make it worthwhile. Both
| of these techs are in the sub-gigawatt (often sub-hundred
| megawatt) range. That adds a lot of friction, thinking, and
| site/location specific ness for a relatively small amount of
| power. IN THEORY fusion can produce massive (giggawatt) power
| anywhere, and there is no reason you couldn't make one for
| every neighborhood if you wanted. Please be aware that
| practically speaking this seems to be a fantasy.
|
| 2) most people don't/can't understand the physics, so it is
| really easy to project impossible benefits onto it that will
| never play out in real life, and sound plausible while doing
| so. This makes it easier to sell to politicians in particular.
|
| 3) IN THEORY because of these factors, whoever comes up with
| fusion first is going to take over the world (either
| commercially or politically), so there is a lot of pressure to
| not be #2 there. This outweighs things like pesky market
| dynamics and concrete profit margins.
|
| 4) also, since no one has a prototype or design for a reactor
| that could plausibly actually be a viable commercial reactor,
| no one has the ability to sit down and figure out if the math
| works or not. This is all still research reactor space.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| Very likely, each fusion plant (if they ever exist) would
| require, ironically, a fission plant next door to provide the
| power required for the magnets.
|
| The magnets, and wiring won't be cheap. The power delivery and
| control won't be cheap. I'm not sure how this would be
| amortized into the cost of the power, without making it 2-3x
| (or more) more expensive than alternatives.
|
| We can build, and we need, nuclear plants now, to be able to
| generate cheap/plentiful electric power. And if we don't we're
| basically going to have to push the brakes on EV deployment. Or
| light up more NG/Oil plants to provide the power for those.
| thehappypm wrote:
| This approach doesn't use magnets.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| NIF doesn't use magnets. Pure inertial confinement. You're
| thinking of Tokamaks. Those use superconducting magnets.
|
| Superconducting magnets like ITER uses don't require energy
| to continue running as they, of course, are superconducting.
| They "only" have to dump heat put into them by the reaction
| radiation. The SPARC reactor by MIT is similar but much
| smaller by using Cuprate superconductors (high temperature
| superconductors, but here operated at much lower temperatures
| to increase the critical field) that allow much higher field
| strengths. They often have non-superconducting joints which
| cause a (sort of) small amount of additional heat that needs
| to be dumped, but it is possible to make such joints
| superconducting as well. Anyway, all such designs for
| commercial scale power from Tokamaks use fusion generated
| electricity to power the magnet cooling, and those
| electricity requirements are less than the electricity
| produced.
| epistasis wrote:
| > We can build, and we need, nuclear plants now, to be able
| to generate cheap/plentiful electric power. And if we don't
| we're basically going to have to push the brakes on EV
| deployment. Or light up more NG/Oil plants to provide the
| power for those.
|
| The real power generation tech here will be wind and solar,
| not nuclear. We can build lots and lots and lots of it,
| easily and cheaply. And using it to charge vehicle batteries
| doesn't even require intermediate storage.
|
| Even construction powerhouses like China are deploying more
| than an order of magnitude more renewables than nuclear,
| because renewables will be the backbone of any future grid.
| Nuclear isn't getting any cheaper, yet wind solar and
| batteries are on exponentially decreasing cost curves.
|
| People on HN are far better able to understand exponential
| technology advancement than people in the energy industries.
| And hopefully we can all see how renewables plus batteries is
| going to make nuclear obsolete.
| Animats wrote:
| Doing something with low-grade heat is hard and often futile. E
| = (Th-Tc)/Th. Look at a gas turbine. There's a succession of
| turbine wheels, getting larger towards the end. Each is running
| off the exhaust of the previous wheel, at a lower pressure. If
| you added another, larger, turbine wheel at the end, you'd get
| a little more energy out, at higher machine cost. The turbine
| ends where adding another wheel is not cost-effective.
|
| Starting from the exhaust at that point means you're competing
| with turbine manufacturers who decided they'd reached the
| economic limit. That's fighting the Second Law of
| Thermodynamics.
|
| The hot end temperature for fusion systems is quite high. Tens
| of millions of degrees at the plasma. Fusion has lots of
| problems, but thermodynamic efficiency is not one of them.
|
| The dream is that somehow that high temperature plasma from the
| fusion reaction is run through a hollow coil to generate power
| by magnetohydrodynamics. No turbine required.
|
| Somehow. Maybe someday. No clue how to do this yet.
| rfrey wrote:
| Exhaust from a gas turbine for a pipeline compression station
| is around 600C at about 95kg/second. That flow contains about
| 100MW of heat energy, which can be captured with Organic
| Rankine Cycle (like steam cycle, but using organic fluids
| like cyclopentane as a working fluid to better match the
| thermodynamics) about 20% of that can be converted to
| electricity. This is off-the-shelf tech.
|
| The problem isn't the technology, it is the economics.
| lazide wrote:
| The parent was pointing out that the economics are also a
| fundamental limit of the technology/physics.
|
| If you can do a lot of work with expensive machines to get
| 20MW from that plant, but you can also do less work and
| spend less money getting an extra 20MW by burning some
| cheap primary fuel (with higher quality heat/aka a bigger
| delta), then they're just going to burn more primary fuel.
| It's a bit silly to do it any other way (barring
| legislation or market pressures or whatever) if you care
| about the amount of energy you are getting for the money
| you are paying.
|
| And that is a fundamental issue, as reclaiming energy from
| secondary heat is always going to be less 'nice' than from
| the primary fuel.
|
| If you can do it easily enough that it doesn't add a lot of
| extra cost, then chances are the primary turbine/power
| system could be built efficiently enough to not throw that
| waste heat out the back in the first place. They do so
| because the math doesn't check out generally.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _> > gas turbine for a pipeline compression station_
|
| _> primary turbine /power system could be built
| efficiently enough to not throw that waste heat out the
| back in the first place_
|
| It sounds like this might be a situation where maybe an
| older turbine already exists for generating mechanical
| power (pumping), and the add-on kit is supposed to
| capture more energy without having to replace the
| existing systems?
| lazide wrote:
| But it doesn't pay for itself is the problem - and I'm
| pointing out that the prior poster was pointing to a
| fundamental reason why that is not likely to change if
| the input fuel is cheap.
|
| If the input is expensive, then the economics change and
| it's more worthwhile to pay more in equipment to get more
| out of the input.
|
| I bet someone has a really detailed set of calculations
| that would tell you exactly when that line is crossed.
| But I doubt they are hanging out here.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| In that context think of this this way, if cost of
| converting methane into heat is 1 currency unit per joule
| of heat produced, fusion is hundred times as expensive but
| produces a million times more heat so the cost per joule is
| one ten thousandth of the cost from methane.
| 08-15 wrote:
| How come? Conventional electricity plants also convert heat to
| electricity. That doesn't sound fundamentally different from
| your business.
|
| Was your input temperature too low? That would explain it. At
| low temperature differential, you have lower efficiency and
| need much bigger machinery for the same output.
|
| That said, fusion has a chance to be competitive, because the
| temperature will be higher. (Obviously, the thermodynamic limit
| is in the billions of Kelvin, but a practical power conversion
| system will operate in the range of 500-1000 Celsius.) But for
| the foreseeable future, it won't be competitive.
| rfrey wrote:
| Our heat sources were typically in the 500-600C range, with
| plant exhaust flows containing about 80-150MW of energy.
| Current tech can convert that with about 20% efficiency.
|
| Not at all like conventional electricity plants, the heat is
| already being created in industrial processes and is a waste
| product.
|
| We're familiar with delta-T and thermodynamics. Current off
| the shelf technology can easily hit half of the Carnot limit
| at most delta-Ts. That's not the point, the point is the
| "fuel" was free, and the price was "close" to existing
| sources as these things go (about 2x the price of natural
| gas) and even with a carbon market and climate mandates, it's
| impossible to get investment.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| If you go to an existing power market, there is generally
| already enough supply for the existing demand. And all of
| that supply is a sunk cost. The plants are already built.
| They're not going to get shut down unless the price falls
| below solely the operating cost.
|
| Building more capacity can cause the price to decline. In
| some cases by quite a lot. So nobody is going to want to
| finance it unless they see that either demand is about to
| increase or supply is about to decrease.
|
| Which is potentially true in the future. Electric cars will
| need more generation capacity. A carbon tax that causes
| existing fossil plants to shut would reduce existing
| supply.
|
| But it's also potentially not true. Maybe the demand for
| electric cars will be satisfied by an increase in rooftop
| solar and not an increase in utility-scale generation
| plants. We don't know when, or if, a carbon tax will happen
| in a given market.
|
| You guys also had a specific problem. If you're getting
| waste heat from natural gas plants, and then carbon prices
| increase to the point that people stop burning natural gas
| and switch to alternatives, you're not the ones absorbing
| that demand, you're the ones getting shut down.
|
| So you're in a different market position than would be the
| case for fusion after the introduction of a carbon tax.
| 08-15 wrote:
| Wait, what? Coal plants operate with an upper temperature
| of under 600C, and they approach 40% efficiency. Why do you
| say it's only 20%?
|
| Either way, it sounds as if a coal plant without the
| furnace wouldn't be able to compete with "conventional
| electricity". What is "conventional electricity" then? Open
| cycle gas turbines? Are they that much cheaper, even
| including fuel cost?
| ivix wrote:
| The cost of a fusion plant will be a small fraction of the cost
| of a fission plant, where the extreme safety requirements makes
| it expensive. People are now testing fusion in small regular
| industrial facilities.
| pontifier wrote:
| As someone trying to build a fusion reactor of my own design, I
| worry about this myself. I just have to believe that advancing
| the state of the art is a good thing, not a bad thing, and that
| my efforts will pay off.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I could cite you things like this:
| (https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6276900) but they will likely be
| buzzword soup.
|
| The simplest explanation is that the fusion reactor's energy
| output is the _primary_ heat source for a heat engine like a
| steam turbine.
|
| It sounded from your description that your company was
| targeting so called "waste" heat, which is a lower grade of
| heat (smaller delta between ambient so a smaller temperature
| differential to work with). There are limits to the efficiency
| of being able to convert heat into some other form of energy
| (kinetic, chemical, electric, Etc.) because that is how the
| universe works sadly.
|
| That said, when you have a very large heat differential, as you
| do from fusion or fission reactions, converting even a small
| percentage of that can be a net win in terms of production.
|
| So fusion is different in that it can take a small amount of
| widely available "fuel" and release a large amount of energy by
| "burning" it (in actuality fusing it into a new element, but
| the effect is that the original fuel is no longer available for
| use) and then using that heat to run heat engines that are
| producing electricity. The waste products are the fused result
| and heat in the form of highly energetic alpha particles.
| rfrey wrote:
| Sure, I understand delta-T, and Carnot haunts my nightmares.
|
| My question about fusion isn't about thermodynamic
| efficiency, but about economics. Our waste heat solutions
| produced electricity at about 2x the LCOE of a natural gas
| turbine. Since it was carbon-free electricity, by selling the
| carbon credits we could get close to the ROI of a natural gas
| plant. A NG plant might have a 20 year IRR of 14-16% - we
| could get to 11 or 12. But that was enough to kill the
| project.
|
| And we have other technologies that produce carbon free
| electricity at a price _close_ but not quite at NG turbines -
| renewables + storage, for example, or geothermal. But those
| aren 't considered economic to build right now, despite being
| here and ready and understood.
|
| I might be wrong, but I can't imagine a nuclear fusion plant
| getting within spitting distance of a NG plant for capital
| cost. And if it's even twice as much money -- which seems
| wildly optimistic -- maybe nobody will build them. Or maybe
| they will, because there are other factors at play besides
| carbon free electricity and cost! That's what I'm asking -
| what are those other factors?
| Jensson wrote:
| Coal plants runs on heat as coal isn't explosive enough to
| run turbines directly. If they are affordable then so is
| fusion heat. So the question is if we can generate fusion
| heat at low enough cost.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| They are not affordable. That's why they are being
| replaced by gas plants and renewables all over the place.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Skin in the game [1]. OP has actually done it ("CTO of a
| company providing heat-to-electricity plants").
|
| Have you? Or you just read about it?
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Skin-Game-Hidden-Asymmetries-
| Daily-eb...?
| hellohntoday wrote:
| OP doesn't bring up the different temperature and pressure
| differential of heat sources. That's a huge red flag. For
| all we know the CTO role at that company was entirely
| focused on keeping the staff laptops running and is largely
| disconnected from the fundamentals of heat to electricity
| generation. Why the hell would she (or he) ask here when
| (s)he has current or former colleagues in the industry to
| ask.
|
| My BS detector went off immediately.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I get that, 100% props for the experience. And I totally
| respect it. The GP question was "what makes fusion
| different", and the only thing that is different really is
| the economics of how much it costs vs how much energy you
| get out.
|
| Energy out is, by definition, the amount of heat
| differential you can generate. Cost is, again by
| definition, the total operating cost of the heat source.
|
| So this is where the author and I see things differently,
| the author wrote: _... the "levelized cost of electricity",
| dominated by the capital cost of the plant, will still be
| much higher than other sources of electricity._
|
| I agree with that statement, the difference with fusion is
| that the amount of energy produced after accounting for the
| capital cost of the plant will be a _million_ times
| greater. And as I related in a later comment if you compare
| things on a dollars /BTU level the fusion plant will
| produce extremely cheap BTUs. Much cheaper than even the
| cheapest natural gas plant.
|
| The key here is that the cost to build such a plant is much
| higher (and it is), but the energy produced by that plant
| is _way_ higher. That is the ratio that makes fusion
| different.
| rfrey wrote:
| But the LCOE is a normalized (usually to $/kwh) price
| that accounts for the amount of energy produced for a
| given capex, plus the operating costs, plus the cost of
| capital, plus the lifetime of the plant. It tries to bake
| that all in.
|
| Your position is that LCOE _will_ be much lower, because
| (as I understand you) the plant cost will scale much
| better than, say, 100MW natural gas plants. I totally
| accept that my assertion about LCOE might be wrong
| because it only costs 2x as much money to build a fusion
| plant that 's 100x bigger.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| The future of whether or not fusion becomes the next big
| thing will be watching the LCOE for fusion plants vs
| everything else.
|
| It is interesting to compare fusion plants to fission
| plants in this regard. Fusion fuel extraction is _much_
| cheaper, fusion waste byproducts are _minimal_ , plant
| failure risk and mitigation is _much much_ cheaper (no
| fallout, no long live nucleotides etc), and the energy
| cycle produces 10 - 20x as much energy as fission.
|
| Edit: And when things get going you can get around Carnot
| Efficiency by converting the high speed particles
| directly[1]. This experiment was built at LLNL as well
| and shown to actually give > 50% conversion efficiency.
|
| [1] http://www.ralphmoir.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2012/10/venBlnd....
| tuatoru wrote:
| Fusion plants cannot be 100x bigger.
|
| The grid doesn't cope well with current 2GWe plants going
| offline suddenly. It would not cope _at all_ with a
| 200GWe plant doing that.
|
| Besides the waste heat dissipation issues...
| grkvlt wrote:
| are you suggesting that fusion plants will be petawatt
| sized? because that's really not the case. i think the
| lcoe of fusion is predicted to be around the same as
| natural gas, with the DEMO reactor costing twice as much.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| I don't think nuclear power - fission or fusion - can ever be
| profitable on a capital return basis. They're the best bang for
| your buck if the cost of capital is zero and among the worst if
| it's greater than zero.
|
| Nuclear physicists and engineers are smart enough that I think
| they could understand this problem if they spent a weekend
| grappling with it, but they're so specialised in their very
| difficult discipline that they never spend that one weekend.
| asdfge4drg wrote:
| for someone who worked in this area, you have an unbelievably
| short term view.
|
| humanity either has fusion reactors or it doesn't. imagine what
| we can do with them, the spacecraft we can build, submarine
| cities, one in every home. Mars, Europa. It's not where we'll
| be 10 years after we do it, but 100 years, 500 years. To get
| there, we've got to step forward now.
| stormbrew wrote:
| > We still couldn't compete with conventional electricity
| plants, even with a $30/tonne price on carbon in Canada.
|
| Worth noting that the current plan is for the minumum carbon
| tax in canada to increase by $15/tonne/yr until 2035, so the
| question might be more when will it reach a break even point?
| Seems like you'd want to be positioned for that.
| rfrey wrote:
| That was our company thesis, that carbon was systematically
| underpriced and we wanted to amass a portfolio of carbon
| credits before that was corrected. But you still need to
| provide project investors with a competitive ROI if you want
| to build the thing.
| wussboy wrote:
| That kind of forward thinking is unfortunately rare.
| stkdump wrote:
| You increase carbon taxes, outlaw fossil fuels and subsidize
| alternatives. This kind of innovation doesn't work without
| government intervention.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| Fusion is different in that the math scales well with the size
| of the fusion plant you create (and also the power of the
| magnets you have access to). If it's technologically feasible
| to create a large enough fusion plant, it starts to be able to
| create ludicrous quantities of electricity compared to things
| like geothermal that have much harder limits.
|
| Of course, "technologically feasible" is doing a lot of heavy
| lifting, but it is in the realm of theoretical possibility for
| a large scale fusion plant to be cost effective.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| The unpopular truth is that fossil fuels are far too cheap. If
| the negative externalities were priced in, they would be at
| least twice as expensive, perhaps as much as ten times.
| xondono wrote:
| > If the negative externalities were priced in they would be
| at least twice as expensive
|
| Quotation needed
| piva00 wrote:
| Here's a source for a recent meta-analysis of hidden costs
| of fossil fuels [1].
|
| Findings on the abstract already corroborate the parent
| comment.
|
| [1] "The hidden costs of energy and mobility: A global
| meta-analysis and research synthesis of electricity and
| transport externalities" - https://www.sciencedirect.com/sc
| ience/article/pii/S221462962...
| xondono wrote:
| The problem with this type of study is that it can by
| definition only cover the known externalities, but most
| of the price of externalities is far into the future.
| This means that the real margin of error is huge (and
| unknowable at this time).
| akimball wrote:
| Also it misprices tail risk, marking it to zero
| pdoege wrote:
| For coal in the USA the stated cost for MWh in 2010 was
| $41. The external cost was $58.
|
| This does not include for implicit and explicit subsidies.
| Including those would make the external costs higher.
|
| The numbers change by country, time, energy source, and
| etc. so asking for a quotation is a bit of a fishing
| expedition. See Tables 1 and 2 at:
| https://www.climateadvisers.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2014/01/2...
|
| If you have the spare time to read 507 pages of support,
| please see: https://www.nap.edu/download/12794
| pipodeclown wrote:
| Fusion is not going to be commercially viable anytime soon but
| that's not the point. Whether how and to what we transition is
| a political choice, if fossil fuels are too cheap for renewable
| to compete, you tax carbon fuels more. Renewables mostly
| everybody is ok with however have the problem that don't
| produce power consistently and on demand, that's where nuclear
| power comes in to fill that gap and hopefully in the future
| fusion. If we dislike the nuclear waste problem enough, we'll
| have to pay up to make fusion a financially viable alternative.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Another way of asking this question is how long will the
| capital investment last? And what are the upkeep costs?
|
| Once we better understand this, governments would have the
| decision making expertise and an understanding of timescales
| involved to see if it is a worthwhile investment.
| orangepurple wrote:
| You can't put a price on energy independence in a free market
| economy. Energy independence is a military objective and a
| matter of national security. The costs are difficult to put in
| perspective.
| xondono wrote:
| Of course you can. The price of energy independence is the
| lowest total cost that can keep up with energy demand.
|
| The question is if fusion is really the cheapest way to do
| it, say vs alternatives.
| nomel wrote:
| > lowest total cost that can keep up with energy demand
|
| It's not trivial since it's difficult to predict if that
| external supplier will eventually decide to twist you arm
| to maintain their energy stream.
| 8note wrote:
| Isn't it an insurance cost, for repaying when the energy
| shuts off?
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Oil companies are subsidized to the tune of Billions of
| dollars an hour. Subsidizing fusion energy would merely be
| redirecting that money to the greater payoff.
| 420official wrote:
| This is not true.. 1 billion an hour is 8.76 trillion a
| year yet you say "billions" an hour which would make it at
| least 17.52 trillion a year which is basically the entire
| GDP of the us.
|
| Certainly oil companies are subsidized but not "to the tune
| of" the entire US GDP.
| pstrateman wrote:
| The hyperbole isn't needed.
|
| Billions of dollars an hour is 17 Trillion dollars a year.
|
| They're not being subsidized by that much
| akimball wrote:
| Count the socialized cost of environmental remediation
| please. It will run into the quadrillion zone
| mchusma wrote:
| Id answer this in 2 ways:
|
| First.
|
| Let's say we have a trillion people in space stations/multiple
| planets. Fusion is a energy source that can plausibly power
| them.
|
| Second.
|
| fission works close to other sources, but is so hampered by
| regulation that it hasn't gotten to be affordable. This may be
| fixed in the future. micro-reactors solve the biggest economy
| of scale issues and a renewed bipartisan interest in nuclear
| could help it be politically viable. If fission works in
| theory, fusion definitely works in theory (as the energy output
| is much higher).
| 542458 wrote:
| I've wondered this as well.
|
| There is an argument that we're dramatically underestimating
| the global warming impact of natural gas by
| underestimating/ignoring the impact of leakage.
| onion2k wrote:
| Simple solution - nationalize energy production.
| thow-58d4e8b wrote:
| Proposing nationalization is akin to blasphemy nowadays - way
| outside of Overton window. But I haven't really heard any
| good arguments or benefits of electricity production and
| distribution being private.
|
| On the other hand, there are a lot of good arguments in favor
| of state ownership - matter of national security, need for
| redundancy instead of efficiency, it's a commodity and a
| basic necessity, low margins, large scale leads to financing
| issues for corporations, chicken-egg problems that state is
| better at dealing with, the domain is primarily about
| engineering challenges with branding and management having
| very limited impact, simple supply chains, cost-cutting may
| lead to disastrous consequences, etc...
| vilhelm_s wrote:
| Natural gas plants are cheap but they cause global warming, so
| soon we will not be able to use them. For example, the U.S.
| target is to have zero carbon emissions from electricity
| generation by 2035, and zero carbon emissions at all by 2050.
| brightball wrote:
| Their carbon emissions are still dramatically lower than
| those of coal and oil. There are bigger fish to fry than NG.
|
| NG is likely going to be a critical transitional fuel for the
| planet to depend on while we get to more abundant renewable
| options, grid batteries and nuclear/fusion/thorium.
| beambot wrote:
| What time horizon are NG plants capitalized over? Soon
| enough, that will be a significant factor in the economic
| equation...
| megaman821 wrote:
| Also NG plants have the potential to burn various levels
| of hydrogen mixed in with the natural gas. It could be a
| nice compliment to areas that over-provision solar and
| wind and make hydrogen with the excess energy.
| rfrey wrote:
| Typically 15 years.
| adrianN wrote:
| With NG you also have to take into account leakage from
| extraction and transport. Methane is a pretty strong GHG.
| I've heard that if you take that into account NG is not
| that much better than coal.
| brightball wrote:
| That makes sense but it seems like a problem that could
| be addressed if it was focused on.
| blake1 wrote:
| Not really. The equipment to seal wells and pipelines
| against leaks would cost billions.
|
| We need more generation, but solar is already cheaper
| than new natural gas built on the leaky network. It makes
| more economic sense to just overbuild your solar at these
| prices.
|
| [1] $250mn for a single state:
| https://apnews.com/article/business-environment-and-
| nature-c...
| londons_explore wrote:
| The existence of natural gas keeps electricity prices low,
| which disincentives research into other power generation
| methods.
|
| In a capitalist world, "lets do this until that is ready"
| plans usually just end up delaying 'that'.
|
| A massive tax on carbon would mean we can all _pay_ for
| 'this', until 'that' has been developed and we can enjoy
| low prices again.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| 500 gCO2eq/kWh.
|
| Fuck natural gas. Just because coal and oil are terrible
| doesn't mean that it is a good option too.
|
| Build hydro, build nuclear, build wind and solar if you
| have money to waste. But natural gas is not a good stopgap
| measure while we get to fusion.
| brightball wrote:
| It's still less than half what's produced by coal or oil.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11
|
| There are a limited number of locations where hydro is
| viable and most of them have been tapped (last I read
| about it at least),
|
| I'm 100% with you on nuclear.
|
| Regardless of cost, we need base load capabilities when
| the wind isn't blowing and the sun is down. Grid storage
| hasn't been well proven yet. People are actively fighting
| nuclear and the costs as well as timeliness are crazy. If
| there's one thing in this country worth wasting money on,
| it's nuclear.
|
| If we can't get base load generation from nuclear due to
| all of the financial risks, NG is about all that's left
| to carry the load as an improvement over coal and oil.
|
| I'd much rather have zero emission nuclear, but NG is the
| stop gap that we are left with until we start committing
| to nuclear (or we have a better round-the-clock option).
| coryrc wrote:
| > we need base load capabilities when the wind isn't
| blowing and the sun is down
|
| That's not a proper use of the concept "base load".
|
| We used to have plants which are only cost-effective when
| run 24/7, but are cheaper than other kinds. The concept
| of "base load" is to build those kinds of plants to meet
| roughly the lowest daily usage so as to minimize costs.
|
| It isn't a substitute for "capacity needed when
| renewables aren't generating".
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Leaks and emissions specific to NG aside, NG is primarily a
| byproduct of the oil extraction industry. It lives in a
| symbiotic relationship with it. To truly get off oil we
| need to get off gas as well. There's a reason why oil patch
| boosters and lobbyists and climate change deniers in places
| like Alberta are also pushing natural gas; the fortunes of
| oil and gas are tied together. This is a lobby and sector
| we need to deprecate not support.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| In the US, natural gas produces more emissions now than
| coal, if you include heating. NG is now the big fish to
| fry.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Study this:
|
| https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
|
| Ignoring storage: it makes no sense now to build anything but
| wind and solar. Only the marginal cost of gas is cheaper
| (meaning existing plants, not new ones).
|
| Including storage: conventional is still cheaper, but not by
| much (within a factor of 2): $81 for PV+storage vs. $44 for gas
| combined cycle.
|
| We should put more resources into storage now, fusion can wait.
| adrianN wrote:
| PV+storage is how many hours of storage? Storing enough power
| to last a night is just getting close to commercially viable
| afaik, but storing enough power to last a winter is still
| quite expensive.
| myself248 wrote:
| The best storage is no storage at all, it is demand-
| response.
|
| Things like responsive appliances and EV chargers that can
| schedule their load rather than insisting that limitless
| power be available instantaneously. I don't care when the
| dishwasher runs as long as the dishes are clean by
| tomorrow, you know?
|
| Of course right now, putting the word "smart" on an
| appliance doesn't imply any of that, and the way it ends up
| implemented will probably be terrible and a half. But
| theoretically, demand-response could dramatically reduce
| the need for storage. I think it truly has a large role to
| play, but the folks releasing insecure internet-of-shit
| devices have a lot to answer for first.
| meltedcapacitor wrote:
| Yes, but bulk of the demand is heat and industry, so
| you're quickly back to having to build a lot of "storage"
| in the form of buildings with high thermal inertia and
| spare capacity for production, so that you can keep the
| high energy plants idle at inconvenient times. Hard to
| say if that is more efficient than building actual energy
| storage.
|
| Every little helps I guess, but getting people not to
| shower on cloudy days is not gonna move the needle
| materially.
| learc83 wrote:
| You could just implement enough surge pricing that
| people/companies work around peak times on their own and
| build their own storage.
| Qwertious wrote:
| Heat is fairly trivially stored for _months_ on a mass
| scale, check out Polar-night Energy 's system -
| basically, you heat up (usually with just resistive
| heating) a bunch of sand in a 40metre-wide insulated
| cylinder, and when you want to use that heat you use fans
| to blow air through ducts that are surrounded by the
| sand.
|
| The amazing thing is that every single part of the tech
| is old and boring - resistive heating is literally as old
| as electricity, electric fans and ducting are trivial,
| heating sand is basically impossible to screw up, etc
| etc.
| pstrateman wrote:
| There really aren't many things that can be off for
| significant periods of time without making them useless.
|
| Indeed I can't think of any that can be off for more than
| a day.
|
| Can you?
| mikewave wrote:
| There are companies that will drive your "smart"
| thermostat and purport to save you money by strategically
| controlling it, but in the end if you want to save money
| on your house's climate control, you're going to end up
| being warmer/colder than you would like.
| myself248 wrote:
| Most EVs have enough battery to cover more than a week of
| daily commute. If you could charge for significantly
| cheaper and greener than you do right now, by simply
| telling it to only charge when the panels on the roof are
| producing a surplus, isn't that sort of a no-brainer?
|
| Maybe you'd go back to grid mode when anticipating a
| weekend trip, or when the charge hits some sort of level
| of concern. And I expect polar places with cloudy winters
| would probably run a fair bit of conventional generation
| like we do now, in the winter. But during the sunny
| season, shut it down!
| adrianN wrote:
| I agree, but I think you can't demand-response away all
| of winter. People still want to drive their EVs and heat
| their homes and industrial processes can't be time
| shifted for weeks or even months.
|
| You'll need some storage. Right now that would probably
| be Hydrogen or Methane, and making those is pretty
| expensive. Perhaps something better will come along, or
| it gets cheaper with scale, but at the current CO2 price
| it's not competitive with fossil fuels.
| mikewave wrote:
| > I don't care when the dishwasher runs as long as the
| dishes are clean by tomorrow, you know?
|
| You can already accomplish 95% of this now with any
| dishwasher made within the last 20 years that has a delay
| timer on it. Just load it up and tell it to run in 6
| hours and then go to bed.
|
| I don't want some 3rd party company driving a huge team
| of middlemen sucking up a gigantic pile of data in order
| to determine when it might be strategically useful for my
| dishwasher to be on. I don't want my dishwasher on the
| internet. I barely want it to have any electronics at
| all, because I want the damn thing to last for 20 years,
| not the scant 5 years people seem to be getting out of
| major appliances these days. You wanna talk carbon
| footprint and recycling, making things reliable would
| probably save us a million times more energy than would
| using the internet-of-things to run this stuff at night
| time.
|
| I _might_ be willing to accept a compromise where my
| smart power meter uses an open protocol to inform devices
| in my house of the current energy cost for Time-of-Use
| billing and then the appliance decides when to start
| based on a threshold I set, but even that's more
| implementation than is really necessary here.
|
| Also, there are only a few appliances that can really
| make use of that kind of thing. As a parent, I need to
| run laundry all the time, non-stop, because children are
| filthy monsters. I can't factor energy costs into that,
| because laundry takes a long time to run and many loads
| need to be run. It's only a small number of people who
| can stick their one weekly load into the dryer and tell
| it to wait for night - and again, a timer would do 90%+
| of the work spreading the load around, you don't need a
| gigantic network of flimsy compute doing the work here.
| myself248 wrote:
| I think we agree more than we disagree. An overnight
| timer is ideal right now while most base-load comes from
| coal and nuclear, and power is cheapest at night.
|
| But as we move past combustion (I'm in Michigan and the
| amount of coal we burn for power is absolutely shameful)
| and into more solar, it's less predictable. I can't set a
| timer that knows when the sky will be cloudy.
|
| This is why I'm so excited to see EVSEs that take data
| from PV inverters and have a "PV surplus only" mode,
| where the car is charged only when the sun shines,
| without ever importing grid power. Modulating 30kW of
| load is just as good as 30kW of storage, but costs
| nothing but a few lines of code.
|
| And yeah, networks and middlemen can suck it. Keeping it
| local is always better.
| giaour wrote:
| Nitpicky, but shouldn't this pattern be called "supply-
| response" (as in, appliances programmed to respond to a
| supply glut) "Demand-response" sounds like it should be
| used for power sources that only spin up when demand
| exceeds the production rate.
| myself248 wrote:
| It strikes me as weird too. They're calling it "demand
| which responds", but it's phrased funny.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| "We should put more resources into breeding faster horses
| now, internal combustion can wait." - someone in late 19
| century.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Well, if we'd have gone down that road, plus strong
| environmental awareness, maybe the Earth wouldn't be
| warming up so badly right now, and the oceans wouldn't have
| islands of plastic (= oil) waste. Now, sure, we wouldn't
| have enjoyed some of the benefits of car technology, but -
| public transport (esp. trains) makes up for a lot of that.
| OTOH, public transport pollutes too.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Had we gone down this road, we'd have a thick layer of
| manure covering everything. Living creatures are a source
| of CO2 too, and a big one. Look up for a share of
| greenhouse gases coming form agriculture. Had we used
| faster horses, that volume of emissions would be
| effectively doubled or tripled.
| Qwertious wrote:
| >Living creatures are a source of CO2 too, and a big one.
| Look up for a share of greenhouse gases coming form
| agriculture.
|
| CO2 emitted by horses comes from the food they eat, which
| is absorbed from the atmosphere in the first place by the
| plant when it grows.
|
| And a ton of the greenhouse gases from agriculture come
| from using oil, a major component of that being from
| tractors and crop dusters (which wouldn't exist in a
| horse-only world).
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| No, not really. [1]
|
| [1]: https://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global-
| warming-m...
| after_care wrote:
| I'd much rather take an ICE train than a steam engine
| train...
| m4rtink wrote:
| Forget ICE, kets build a ICF powered train! :D
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Hah, well what was the rate of progress on breeding faster
| horses vs. internal combustion in the late 19th century? I
| don't imagine that the progress rate was very high for
| horses..
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I'm not so sure about internal combustion, but I think it
| took steam engines 100 years to start outperforming
| horses.
|
| I think that that's a better technology comparison
| because internal combustion was able to leverage the
| theoretical insights originally derived for steam.
| There's no shoulders-of-giants effect going on for
| nuclear fusion, as there wasn't for steam.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Well, it kind of depends on what you define as teh first
| steam engines. Are you including like novelty stuff used
| for entertainment like magic shows and fountains? Or are
| we starting with the first steam engine used to do real
| mechanical work? The Newcomen engine came out in around
| 1712, but it's initial purpose as a water pump for mines
| wasn't really in direct competition to horse powered
| pumps. While they could be used to generate power for
| factories, that was an uncommon use case because they
| gradually lost power output over time.
|
| The Watt design is when we finally saw steam engines
| replace animal power in the late 1770s. So not quite 100
| years.
|
| But yes, ICE development benefited from all the problems
| solved by steam power generation. I believe the ability
| to machine pistons to an accuracy of 0.1" wasn't
| developed until around 1750. Prior to that, people just
| hammered iron roundish and called it a day. Good enough
| for large steam engines, but not too valuable with an
| ICE.
| after_care wrote:
| I want to live in a world where we work on projects that
| will benefit us both 5 and 50 years in the future.
| [deleted]
| dragontamer wrote:
| The benefits of a car were immediately obvious as soon as
| supply lines were considered. Feed for horses was something
| like 30% of all deliveries in a horse-based supply chain.
|
| Railroads run off of coal, but steam-engines were huge. ICE
| engines were miniature engines that also ran off of a fuel
| source (eventually settling upon oil, but many different
| fuel sources were considered in those early days, including
| electricity).
|
| ---------
|
| Such benefits are not immediately obvious with solar/wind.
| In particular, USA doubles its electricity usage each day,
| and then it shrinks down to 50% by nightfall (which does
| NOT time with the sun, its slightly offset: the 5pm sun
| loses most of its solar-power but homes are still hot and
| using a ton of electricity for A/C)
|
| As a baseload plant, solar/wind, even with storage, is a
| bit unreliable. That's fine, they're a cheap source of
| energy but you need to consider things like hurricanes:
| winds too fast so you need to shut off the wind plants
| (otherwise they'd spin too fast and damage themselves), and
| the cloud cover so thick you lose most of your solar power.
|
| Since there's no storage mechanism that lasts for days (ex:
| hypothetical hurricane), you end up needing to build a
| 200MW gas turbine ("just in case"), +200MW of clean energy.
|
| Note: this is fine. This is probably the best path forward
| for now. But nuclear is reliable and doesn't need this
| "natural gas assist". Even if a hurricane sweeps over an
| area, the nuclear power plants will keep working.
|
| EDIT: The issues come up if someone builds 200MW of solar
| panels / wind but fails to build any "just in case" energy
| sources. Which is happening. Their grids will fail when
| solar/wind inevitably cuts off.
| thow-58d4e8b wrote:
| > ICE engines were miniature engines that also ran off of
| a fuel source (eventually settling upon oil, but many
| different fuel sources were considered
|
| Fun fact - Rudolf Diesel's first engines were running on
| cooking oil. In fact, many diesel engines can operate on
| vegetable oils without modifications (not long term
| though). That sounds odd, but from the perspective of
| "burn hydrocarbons to generate heat", petrol, diesel,
| oil, body fat, coal or kerosene are all very similar to
| each other.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| No, horse breeders argued the supply lines favored horses
| as horses could be fed by unlimited biofuels instead of
| limited fossil fuels. Of course, there was a difference
| in scale, but it's just false to claim there weren't
| major naysayers about automobiles from the horse
| industry.
| mywittyname wrote:
| People thought fossil fuels were a finite resource back
| then?
|
| I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if _someone_ thought
| that, but given the frequency with which oil was being
| discovered, it seems reasonable that people would have
| assumed it to be effectively unlimited.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Even in the late 1800s when cars were just starting to be
| used, the ultimate scarcity of fossil fuels (including
| coal) was explored by Jules Verne who suggested hydrogen
| as a successor fuel in _The Mysterious Island_. And local
| scarcity of fossil fuels was acknowledged since everyone
| knew that oil wells started reducing output after a few
| years.
|
| Nikola Tesla spoke glowingly about how we don't need
| coal, oil, or gas if we just harness the energy around us
| (what he meant here was quackery, unfortunately, but wind
| and solar accomplish very much the same thing). People
| understood from the beginning that coal, oil, and gas are
| finite.
| dragontamer wrote:
| IIRC, people did think we were going to run out of coal
| back then. A minority, but yes, I do recall some quotes
| from the 1800s about the exponential growth of coal usage
| and that people were using too much coal.
|
| But by the time ICE engines were getting invented, it was
| a done debate IIRC. Horses used to pull trains after all,
| the steam engine replaced horses in train-usage decades
| earlier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagonway, for the
| animal-based predecessor to trains)
| mcguire wrote:
| " _But nuclear is reliable and doesn 't need this
| "natural gas assist". Even if a hurricane sweeps over an
| area, the nuclear power plants will keep working._"
|
| Actually, they don't.
|
| " _As a precaution measure, the reactor shall be shut
| down at least two hours before the hurricane's strong
| winds arrive at the location. Generally this happens when
| the speed reaches between 70 and 75 mph (between 113 and
| 121 km /h)._" (https://www.foronuclear.org/en/nuclear-
| power/questions-and-a...)
|
| Also, they need electrical power to keep the reactor cool
| ---typically the power grid and co-located diesel
| generators, not necessarily the best redundant backup
| system.
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| It's only the older designs that need active cooling.
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/27/136920/the-
| new-s...
| Aeolun wrote:
| Given how long it took Fukushima to cool down, does this
| actually do anything appreciable in the two hours before
| arrival?
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I wonder if it's possible to create air conditioning that
| generates electricity. It seems like you're removing
| energy from the air.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Do you mean a heat engine?
|
| Because the "opposite" of air conditioning is just a heat
| engine (taking "hot" and "cold" source, and using the
| difference to generate locomotion). In fact, all engines
| are glorified heat engines: be it a steam turbine, ICE,
| geothermal, or whatever
|
| When air gets hot, it expands. When air gets cold, it
| contracts. So heat up air through some mechanism (hot
| side) to push a piston up. To pull the piston down,
| either use momentum or the cold-source (cold air
| contracts, pulling the stuff down).
|
| The sterling engine is the best general purpose
| demonstration of this, and you can buy such engines for
| $20 to $100 or so.
|
| ICE engines use gasoline as the hot source. Steam engines
| use steam (water at 100C) to transfer the heat from the
| hot source to the needed locations (heat can be from
| nuclear, coal, or other sources)
|
| ----------
|
| Air conditioning is just this process in reverse. Expand
| the air forcibly by applying force to the piston. This
| cools down the air. "Gather" the coldness through some
| mechanism, which heats up your air inside the A/C unit
| while cooling whatever is on your "cold plate".
|
| Push the hot air and compress it down. This heats up the
| air even further: "transfer" the hotness through some
| mechanism (aka: heat something else up, like the air
| outside the house). This cools down the air inside your
| A/C unit.
|
| Now find a fluid that's more efficient at this process
| than oxygen. Then realize that fluid is terrible for the
| Ozone layer and write a regulation for a newer, crappier
| fluid that's less damaging to the Earth, and you have
| modern A/C units.
|
| > It seems like you're removing energy from the air.
|
| You're just transferring the hotness somewhere else. Go
| feel the air that your refrigerator outputs: its far
| hotter than the air inside. If you measure the energy,
| its the energy that was "stolen" from inside the
| refrigerator + the energy "spent" on the heat pump (that
| compression / decompression cycle takes work, and work
| generates heat)
|
| We can transfer heat around, but it costs energy.
| Alternatively, a difference in heat can be used to gather
| energy, but it will "Average" the temperatures and
| eventually the hot-source and cold-source will be the
| same temperature.
|
| We can use fuels to make the hot-source stay really,
| really hot for long periods of time (as long as we have a
| source of fuel), and that's basically the design of steam
| engines / heat engines.
| nomel wrote:
| Think of it like water flowing down a hill. The heat is
| in your room because it flowed down to a cooler space
| with less energy, just like the water flowed down to a
| space with less potential energy. Moving that heat back
| to a higher energy area, back outside, is the same as
| pumping the water back up a hill. It always takes more
| than one unit of energy to move one unit of energy back
| "up". You can only capture energy if it's moving "down".
|
| You might enjoy a physics course, especially if you enjoy
| calculus, although an entry level course won't require
| it.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Your analogy falls flat because we're still decades away
| from a functional fusion power plant.
|
| "Why breed faster horses now when maybe my grandchildren
| will get to zoom around in cars?"
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| The 1000 miles road starts with a first step, and it's
| not like we can't pursue several approaches at once.
| People like grandparent poster suggest us drop everything
| and concentrate on the idea _he_ likes best. That is a
| very bad and harmful idea.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| We aren't. MIT's SPARC Tokamak design could be ready for
| commercialization by a decade. Less time than completing
| a high speed rail project in the US.
| Qwertious wrote:
| In many areas nowadays, solar is the cheapest source of
| energy bar none.
|
| Now, suppose you live in one of those areas. Two
| questions:
|
| 1) What year was solar first ready for commercialization?
| 2) Would you _ever_ consider that year 's solar tech
| outside of extremely niche applications?
| mywittyname wrote:
| Call me with the second and third commercial reactors are
| _completed_. That 's when we'll have an idea of the real
| world viability, including how to scale and deal with
| production concerns.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| So we shouldn't be investing in developing nuclear fusion
| power until after it's proven and commercialized? How
| does that work?
| mywittyname wrote:
| No, I'm saying don't sit around talking about how this
| will be ready for commercial deployment in less than ten
| years until after it has been demonstrated to actually
| work in a production environment.
|
| The first commercial production system will be an alpha
| build. The second and thirds are betas. It's only after
| those are completed that there's enough information to
| make commercial plans.
|
| As of now, this system the GP is talking about _hasn 't
| even been built yet_ and won't be operational until at
| least 2025. And even when it is built, it is just a lab
| experiment designed to run in 10 second bursts. There are
| numerous more steps _after_ this design phase before we
| get to commercial application.
|
| Ten years is a pipe-dream for commercial application.
|
| I'm excited to see progress in this field. But we are
| doing it a huge disservice by spreading misinformation
| about it. There are still a lot of problems to be solved
| before these are ready for prime time. And these problems
| will require a lot more funding to solve. If people sit
| around and talk about how this will be _ready to go in 10
| years_ , then who is going to want to fund it into year
| 11?
|
| Scientific funding is directed largely by politicians.
| And there are many, many political opponents to science
| in our current Congress. Giving them ammo in the form of
| empty promises doesn't do advocates for fusion energy any
| good.
|
| The honest answer is, we still don't know if tokamak will
| ever make for a viable commercial power plant. Best can
| be said is that it has been demonstrated to produce net
| positive energy for short periods of time, and that there
| is confidence that improvements can be made. That's it.
| The viability of commercial application has yet to be
| demonstrated and _may never happen_.
| mcguire wrote:
| The word "could" is doing a lot of work, there.
|
| And how many times have we heard the phrase "a decade" in
| this field?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Kind of a lazy comment. There has been substantial
| progress with the latest development from NIF as well as
| SPARC demonstrating a magnet section that would enable
| ITER at a much smaller scale using fundamentally superior
| superconducting technology With NIF's latest result,
| we're no longer just generating smoke from rubbing sticks
| together, now we got a flame.
|
| That's a substantial, qualitative change in the state of
| the art of fusion technology. Now we need to do it dozens
| of times per second and make steam from it, while using
| efficient lasers and breeding tritium from the lithium
| jacket.
|
| Works kind of like the EUV light sources TSMC uses to
| make the highest end computer chips, except a fuel pellet
| instead of a drop of tin. Like so: https://en.wikipedia.o
| rg/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy
| thomasahle wrote:
| This is a great resource!
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Why should we wait for fusion? We can and should do both, and
| fusion also benefits from storage. Fusion and fission help
| northern countries in particular as they actually produce
| MORE energy during the dark, cold months.
| [deleted]
| 8note wrote:
| Where does that leave turning existing coal plants into gas
| plants?
| eldaisfish wrote:
| Lazard do not factor in the cost of accommodating the
| vagaries of wind and solar into these figures.
|
| As just one example - when the wind turbines aren't running,
| your lights are still on. That power comes from somewhere and
| that somewhere has a cost to keep it available.
|
| That cost is passed on to electricity consumers but not the
| source of the problem - wind and solar generators.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Yeah, a better option is to use capital costs and input
| them into https://model.energy
| ttul wrote:
| August 2021
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| elorant is posting from oort cloud, be easy on him.
| ttul wrote:
| Oh good. I wasn't aware they had relocated quite that far
| oort.
| tantony wrote:
| Is this "plasma breakeven" or overall break-even?
| lisper wrote:
| Neither. From TFA:
|
| "While the latest experiment still required more energy in than
| it got out, it is the first suspected to reach the crucial
| stage of 'ignition', which allowed considerably more energy to
| be produced than ever before, and paves the way for 'break
| even', where the energy in is matched by the energy out."
|
| Here [1] is an excellent video by Sabine Hossenfelder about why
| you should not get too excited about this result.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
| mlindner wrote:
| It's neither, agreed.
|
| However, Sabine misconstrues things in the opposite direction
| and lies through omission to the audience. For example
| including startup energy and not ammortizing it over runtime,
| or not assuming that the energy consumption of the
| experiments is part of the required energy consumption of the
| fusion reactor, or trying to construe that once you have a
| fusion power reaction that is burning it is still especially
| difficult to further create a functioning power reactor out
| of it.
|
| The true hard part of fusion is the burning plasma aspect.
| Once you have a burning plasma, it's a heat source like any
| other (with a few side-effects like neutron output) and
| everything we know from fission power reactors (but with a
| much lower radiation) and fossil fuel generators applies.
| dcow wrote:
| Where are you getting this impression? Her video pretty
| clearly focuses on the confusion between the Qs. Where does
| she get the napkin math wrong? She uses a published figure
| for total energy required during the operation of ITER when
| it's up and running not a one time startup cost figure. Id
| she misrepresented that number, what would be a more honest
| total power consumption figure? As far as construing the
| output, she uses existing loss ratio for heat to electrical
| energy conversion which really does not seem to work to
| construe the problem as "especially difficult", it's
| "normally difficult" is how I interpreted. Are there
| impending advancements in energy conversion that makes 50%
| too liberal?
| mlindner wrote:
| Her video multiple times tries to make fake total Q
| values by looking at the energy consumption of JET and
| ITER and then trying to say that is Q_total, which is
| wrong.
|
| She doesn't even show her calculations on how she
| calculates some of her Q_total examples.
| jacquesm wrote:
| From TFA:
|
| "The pace of improvement in energy output has been rapid,
| suggesting we may soon reach more energy milestones, such as
| exceeding the energy input from the lasers used to kick-start
| the process."
| birdman3131 wrote:
| These people grew up on Wow and are familiar with Soon(tm).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Cerium wrote:
| I think it is neither. Most nuclear fusion news is focused on
| magnetic confinement. This article is about reaching ignition
| on an inertial confinement system.
| mlindner wrote:
| Neither, it's inertial confinement fusion, which isn't really
| seen as a way to a successful commercial reactor (at least not
| that I've heard of) and is more a tool to study the physics of
| D-T fusion reaction in a controlled way that's not inside a
| nuclear bomb. It's a tool for experiments.
| leephillips wrote:
| You may be surprised to know that there are loads of people
| working in ICF who think they're working on a plan to supply
| the world with energy, and have detailed and elaborate
| designs for commercial ICF reactors, including pellet
| factories, tritium extraction, and everything. With
| calculations of the final cost per delivered kW-hour. It's
| all a fantasy, but it's a real research activity, funded by
| the US DOE (mainly through the NNSA).
| gene-h wrote:
| What's important here is that they may have achieved ignition,
| that is making the fusion reaction self sustaining[0]. Once it
| becomes self sustaining one should be able to add more fuel to
| the pellet to get more energy out for the same input energy.
|
| It's worth noting that NIF was not intended to generate power
| and is not representative of a potential power plant. The
| lasers on NIF are old and were chosen to have a lower
| efficiency for cost reasons. In addition, while NIF could
| generate much more energy, NIF isn't necessarily going to
| pursue this because the higher output energy may render the
| machine inoperable for too long.
|
| Dealing with a high rate of explosions is one thing this class
| of fusion will need to solve before being able to generate
| power.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Don't you still need to spend energy on confinement? You
| don't need to "reignite" the plasma but w/e confinement
| solution you chosen still has a cost and a non marginal one
| when it comes to magnetic confinement.
| gene-h wrote:
| this uses inertial confinement rather than magnetic
| confinement.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| You still need big ass lasers or particle accelerators
| for ICF too, these tend to be quite energy intensive too.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Yes, with ICF you do need to constantly reignite the
| plasma.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > Once it becomes self sustaining one should be able to add
| more fuel to the pellet to get more energy out for the same
| input energy.
|
| That's not how ICF works. Plasma, being a gas-like state,
| will always expand to fill whatever volume is presented. With
| ignition, the rate of expansion is essentially lower than the
| rate of fusion, allowing you to fuse all of the fuel before
| the plasma dissipates and cools down.
|
| In ICF as studied at NIF, you start with an extremely
| precisely machined piece of metal called a hohlraum, you put
| a solid pellet of fuel inside at an extremely precise
| location, then fire a laser with extremely precise alignment
| to heat the hohlraum until it generates X-Rays that heat the
| pellet just right so that its outer layer explodes, creating
| an equal implosion, generating two shockwaves inside the
| pellet; if the two shockwaves meet just right, at the center
| of their meeting place you get a fusion reaction, and you
| hope that that fusion reaction has enough time to heat up and
| cause more fusion reactions before the initial implosion
| loses speed and expansion happens.
|
| That initial shock is the only thing containing the plasma -
| once it has lost its velocity, the plasma dissipates and
| cools down. If ignition was reached, the gas that cools down
| and dissipates should be 100% He, instead of a mix of He, D
| and T. However, there is no way to stop this dissipation, it
| is a fundamental part of ICF.
|
| The only way to keep an ICF reactor going is to shoot one
| laser burst at one pellet, capture the energy of the fusion,
| and use that to power the next laser burst fired at the next
| pellet.
|
| Of course, after each burst of laser heating the hohlraum so
| much that it radiates the heat as X rays, and then briefly
| containing a 1-10M kelvin burst of hot plasma, plus a neutron
| bombardment, the hohlraum is destroyed. Since machining the
| hohlraum to the precise shape required to achieve the
| shockwaves discussed above is never going to be a cheap
| process, it is impossible to imagine ICF would ever be even a
| tiny bit close to economical, even if it could in principle
| output more energy than it requires as input.
|
| As such, ICF is strictly a scientific pursuit, mostly
| interesting for nuclear weapons research.
| gene-h wrote:
| This report found that ICF could reach LCOE as low as
| $25/MWh "with optimistic but not obviously unrealistic
| inputs."[0] This does require hohlraums cost about $2 each
| and are fired every 20 seconds. With mass production and
| process optimization it may not be ridiculous to reduce
| hohlaum cost to this amount. However, the yield is about 5
| gigajoules which is equivalent to about 1 ton of TNT.
|
| Making equipment that can handle 1 ton of TNT exploding
| every 20 seconds is an interesting engineering challenge.
|
| [0]https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2020
| .005...
| tsimionescu wrote:
| "Optimistic but not obviously unrealistic inputs" include
| reducing the cost of hohlraums from the million dollar
| range to 10$ (not even sure if that accounts for the
| price of the gold itself), a reactor capable of resisting
| 50 million pulses before needing replacement, and a few
| others.
|
| It also considers the price of a fusion power plant to be
| less than that of a fission power plant, based entirely
| on the observation that it would have less stringent
| safety requirements.
|
| Overall this article may be right in principle if taken
| to refer to an arbitrarily far away future (hundreds of
| years away at least, if ITER and DEMO are to be taken as
| realistic examples of the pace of improvement of fusion
| power in general, even if they are MCF instead of ICF).
| hangonhn wrote:
| What is the goal of NIF? I've read repeatedly that fusion
| power isn't their end goal but rather to study inertial
| confinement. That's fine but why study inertial confinement
| if not to generate power? I've always been very confused
| about their goal. I'm a total layman when it comes to this
| stuff so there's some nuance I'm not understanding.
| Appreciate any clarification anyone can give.
| capekwasright wrote:
| In terms of the NIF's broader goal, as opposed to the
| specific goals for their ICF work, the NIF is meant to keep
| nuclear physicists fresh on research relevant to nuclear
| weapons design in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War
| and Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facilit
| y#NIF...
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| > What is the goal of NIF?
|
| Nuclear weapons, more specifically stockpile stewardship
| (what happens as weapons age) and verification of weapons
| codes/simulation software (can we make new weapons without
| full-scale testing).
|
| Everything else is gravy. There's a reason it's at one of
| the weapons labs (vs. the unclassified work done at most
| other national laboratories).
| nebopolis wrote:
| The thing you are missing is that in addition to fusion
| power research (which is valuable and NIF has made major
| contributions to) there is also fusion weapons research.
| Inertal confinement is (kinda) close to the conditions
| inside a fusion bomb, and NIF also has a mandate to
| research those conditions. For that kind of research, a
| single pulse of fusion ignition is exactly the kind of data
| they need. Since we have a nuclear weapon test ban, and
| computer simulations need some kind of ground truth to be
| calibrated against, achieving fusion ignition in a lab is
| valuable to NIF for that reason alone.
| jjk166 wrote:
| The NIF is a facility for conducting experiments. The goal
| for the field is fusion power, and these experiments may
| wind up contributing toward it, but it will never be
| anything more than a stepping stone. The primary purpose of
| the NIF is validating computer models for simulating
| nuclear reactions. These models are used both for the
| design of nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors. They also
| develop technologies to support their activities, such as
| new sensors and laser control methods. Compare this program
| to say a mars rover where we don't expect the rover itself
| to do anything of great practical utility, but the lessons
| learned along the way have many potential applications both
| directly for future missions, and indirectly for spinoff
| technologies.
| akeck wrote:
| Probably just "plasma breakeven" Sabine talks about the issue.
|
| [1] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-close-is-
| nucle...
| mlindner wrote:
| Sabine actually is completely misleading and misconstrues a
| bunch of facts.
|
| None of these plants are even attempting to have real energy
| breakeven and spend a ton of energy supplying experiments and
| unrelated support equipment. They don't even have a method of
| capturing energy as that's not the point as it would make it
| harder to test the physics. Additionally these plants have
| high amounts of "startup energy consumption" that is also
| factored in to the energy usage but would be amortized out
| over a long run. Trying to use the absolute power consumption
| of the experiment as if that's where the state of the art is
| at for true energy break even is completely wrong.
|
| Plasma breakeven is all anyone is really working on. Once you
| have plasma breakeven you have a self-sustaining heater
| basically, which then can be used to create energy. The point
| of an "ignited plasma" is that it's self-sustaining and just
| pumps out heat, even if most of the energy is used to keep
| the reaction going.
| ckuehne wrote:
| I think your statement "Once you have plasma breakeven you
| have a self-sustaining heater basically" is false.
| According to Wikipedia [1] - if I interpret it correctly -
| the fusion energy gain factor from plasma must be 5 (!) to
| have a self-sustaining heater:
|
| "Most fusion reactions release at least some of their
| energy in a form that cannot be captured within the plasma,
| so a system at Q = 1 will cool without external heating.
| With typical fuels, self-heating in fusion reactors is not
| expected to match the external sources until at least Q =
| 5"
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor
| willis936 wrote:
| Fusion begets fusion. ITER plans to have high-intensity,
| relatively short Q=10 shots. If the plasma heats itself
| then it doesn't need much heating. This sudden focus on Q
| is clearly the result of one vocal non-expert not
| understanding the field and everyone listening to them
| like they have something valuable to teach.
| mlindner wrote:
| I oversimplified in that statement, you need more than a
| factor of 1 because of heat losses to the environment
| yes. However 5 is not much different than 1. We've gone
| from 0.0001 only a few years ago to close to 1 now.
|
| And btw, you really want more than 5, 10 or 20 ideally,
| but again, that's not too hard as compared to how far
| we've come and new reactors will be beyond that soon.
| tootie wrote:
| I think her meaning is pretty clear and correct. As much as
| plasma breakeven may be the entire goal of ITER it's
| absolutely setting them up for a badly missed public
| expectation. The day they declare net positive output, the
| world will ask when we can start building infrastructure
| and the answer will be "30 more years" and then they'll get
| their funding yanked forever.
| willis936 wrote:
| >As much as plasma breakeven may be the entire goal of
| ITER
|
| Who gave you that impression? They were lying. The goal
| of ITER has always been to study burning plasmas and
| experiment with solutions to problems that a reactor-
| grade MCF machine faces.
| mlindner wrote:
| ITER isn't even possible to create an economic nuclear
| reactor out of because it's too big. The sheer size of a
| ITER-sized reactor doesn't get us to economical reactors.
| ITER is a science experiment, not a commercial reactor
| design. High-field strength high temperature
| superconductor based allows much smaller sizes than ITER,
| but ITER was designed with the technology that was
| available in the late 1990s.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > Plasma breakeven is all anyone is really working on. Once
| you have plasma breakeven you have a self-sustaining heater
| basically, which then can be used to create energy. The
| point of an "ignited plasma" is that it's self-sustaining
| and just pumps out heat, even if most of the energy is used
| to keep the reaction going.
|
| This is dead wrong. First of all, the experiment described
| here is ICF, in which you have to constantly re-heat new
| pellets of fuel. Even for MCF, you have to spend inordinate
| amounts of energy just containing the million kelvins
| plasma with few kelvin superconducting magnets, and to
| constantly deliver new D+T into the plasma.
|
| If containment fails at any time for any amount of time,
| your reactor is instantly obliterated.
|
| Not to mention, your source of heat only heats up by about
| half of the energy - the other half is radiated away as
| hard to capture neutrons, which are almost entirely a waste
| product.
|
| I have no idea why you think that ignited plasma is enough
| to maintain an energy-producing reactor.
|
| Edit: million kelvins should have been billion kelvins...
| jhgb wrote:
| > the other half is radiated away as hard to capture
| neutrons, which are almost entirely a waste product
|
| I thought the neutrons were supposed to take away the
| heat, to be absorbed in layers of water?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Reading more about this, it seems that one of the ideas
| is indeed to capture the neutrons in a liquid lithium
| blanket, that would then produce both heat and tritium,
| and using that heat, that is outside the magnetic
| confinement, to connect to a turbine.
|
| Unfortunately, I believe that the area of actually
| capturing the energy of the fusion reaction is almost
| entirely unstudied yet in practice.
| tediousdemise wrote:
| What are the odds of runaway fusion occurring? Is there any
| consideration that a violent reaction could engulf the planet and
| end life as we know it?
| regularfry wrote:
| Zero.
| tediousdemise wrote:
| Is this because the chain reaction is limited by the fuel
| source?
| regularfry wrote:
| The fusion reaction needs containment, the right fuel, and
| massive amounts of energy in _just_ the right place. It 's
| phenomenally difficult to marshal the containment necessary
| to make the energy from a fusion reaction go into more
| fusion and not, say, warming up the test chamber a
| fraction. Yes, the fact that there's not much fuel is
| important, but not as important as the finickiness of
| making the plasma do what you want in the first place.
|
| One of the major problems (arguably _the_ problem) with
| tokamak or similar fusion reactors is that if the plasma
| ever touches the edge of the vessel, it immediately cools
| down and stops being plasma. It can 't fuse with itself any
| more, much less trigger anything else to start. Heavier
| atoms need more energy to fuse, that's why you see
| hydrogen, helium, lithium bandied about in these
| discussions. The amount of energy needed to fuse the atoms
| in the walls of a fusion reactor is _literally_ supernova-
| scale. We 're not talking "there's an engineering tolerance
| built in for safety", rather "as a civilisation it's not
| immediately conceivable how we might generate amounts of
| energy that large".
|
| Given that the majority of the earth is made out of
| elements that are inconveniently heavy, runaway fusion is
| absolutely, definitely, totally, completely not a problem.
| DreamFlasher wrote:
| Old?
| OJFord wrote:
| Previously passim:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
|
| (Edit: along with other, I now realise different, news from MIT.)
|
| (Including my submission of this same link, not discussed:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28219462, but the others are
| the same news.)
|
| Discussed mostly in:
| ~~https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28462151 and:~~(edit, per
| above) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28219337
| ortusdux wrote:
| SPARC [?] NIF
| OJFord wrote:
| Ok, I hadn't realised the MIT one I said 'mostly discussed
| in' was different, but the others are this.
| mastrsushi wrote:
| Test
| pmdulaney wrote:
| Three cheers to the special relationship -- specifically as it
| extends to nuclear fusion!
| ohcomments wrote:
| Next step.... Implement this in a spaceship and GTFO'a here...
| not2b wrote:
| We're still a very long way off. Sabine Hossenfelder has a good
| explanation of what's wrong with most reporting on progress
| toward fusion:
|
| http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-close-is-nuclea...
|
| edit: not sure why this was downvoted, it's directly relevant and
| the video and transcript discuss this experiment. It quotes
| Arthur Turrell: "This phenomenal breakthrough brings us
| tantalisingly close to a demonstration of 'net energy gain' from
| fusion reactions - just when the planet needs it." But this comes
| close to getting Qplasma to be 1, which is about a factor of
| 50-70 lower than getting Q to be 1 (total power into the reactor
| vs usable power out of the reactor).
| kragen wrote:
| Does this mean you can now build a hydrogen bomb without uranium
| or plutonium?
|
| If not, why not?
| 00N8 wrote:
| No, the ignition here is small - on the order of a stick of
| dynamite. There's no reasonable way to scale it up to the size
| of a hydrogen bomb. Even if the lasers could just be scaled up
| larger & still work, which they can't b/c the lasers would make
| too dense of plasma & block their own beams, the number you'd
| need & the geometry of trying to use it on a full scale bomb
| would be totally impractical even for a single test. Also, a
| city sized laser ignition source w/ a bomb at the middle
| wouldn't be a useful weapon even if it were possible
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Because to achieve 1MW of energy from fusion, you put 200MW of
| power into the lasers. And, you have to fire these lasers with
| unfathomable precision at a tiny piece of gold, in order to
| heat up an even tinier pellet of hydrogen, which then heats up
| enormously for a few milliseconds before fizzing out.
|
| ICF is a good way of studying what happens inside a hydrogen
| bomb, but it is in no way imaginable how you could use it as a
| weapon in itself. At this point, you'd be much, much better off
| just firing the lasers at your target (though even that
| wouldn't achieve much, unless you target is kind enough to step
| in front of a highly sensitive, gigantic laser).
|
| Edit: corrected a typo graciously pointed out by GP.
| kragen wrote:
| What stops you from using the "even tinier piece pellet of
| hydrogen"[sic] from initiating fusion in a slightly less tiny
| pellet of hydrogen that it's sitting on top of, which
| initiates fusion in a slightly less tiny pellet of hydrogen,
| and so on? Aside from concern for your own survival, of
| course.
|
| Maybe if you can't fathom the precision required to irradiate
| the NIF hohlraum sufficiently isotropically to achieve
| ignition in the first place, you shouldn't be trying to
| answer this question.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > What stops you from using the "even tinier piece pellet
| of hydrogen"[sic] from initiating fusion in a slightly less
| tiny pellet of hydrogen that it's sitting on top of, which
| initiates fusion in a slightly less tiny pellet of
| hydrogen, and so on? Aside from concern for your own
| survival, of course.
|
| The same thing that stops you from igniting the initial
| pellet with the hohlraum - you don't have anything creating
| the kind of confinement necessary to keep the plasma
| together.
|
| The only thing allowing the plasma to get hot enough for
| fusion is the initial velocity of the inward-spreading
| shockwave from the initial explosion of the outer shell of
| the pellet. As the velocity of this shockwave inevitably
| decreases, confinement is inevitably lost and the plasma
| dissipates and cools down.
|
| Probably in principle you could use the energy of the first
| pellet's plasma to cause similar shockwaves in a second,
| larger pellet and so on, but that requires an entirely
| different geometry, its not just a matter of putting the
| second pellet close to the first one.
| gus_massa wrote:
| The other two answers are probably better, but in case it's
| useful take a look at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design#Two-
| stag...
|
| Between the primary fission bomb and the secondary fusion
| bomb there is a huge shield, so the shockwave of the first
| one hit's the second one at the same time everywhere,
| instead of hitting the top.
|
| My guess is that to put a ternary fusion bomb you will need
| another even bigger shield, but IANANBS.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Nuclear fusion requires both compression and heating of the
| fuel. In nuclear weapons, this is accomplished with a
| combination of radiation pressure and a fissile sparkplug,
| respectively. In inertial confinement fusion, there are two
| distinct laser pulses with different characteristics. A
| fusion pellet detonating would release radiation that could
| compress another pellet, but there would be no method of
| heating that pellet at the appropriate moment.
|
| There may be an engineering method to overcome this, but it
| would be way beyond the difficulty of getting that first
| pellet to ignite, which already is a bleeding edge
| technological development.
| kragen wrote:
| Thank you very much!
| coolspot wrote:
| Man-made nuclear fusion is not self-sustaining, requires
| massive infrastructure to ignite very little of material.
|
| Nuclear fission of unstable isotopes is self-sustaining chain
| reaction that converts a lot of matter into energy without much
| of hardware - just put some sub-critical mass of Plutonium into
| a sphere lined with conventional explosives.
|
| See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_fusion_weapon
| kragen wrote:
| Well, of course that's always been true in the past, but
| isn't "ignition" precisely the point at which it becomes
| self-sustaining? Isn't that the distinction between
| "ignition" and not "ignition"? I mean, you're not the right
| person to ask (you apparently think plutonium is a brand
| name), but maybe somebody reading this understands the
| issues.
|
| You don't even need explosives to get a self-sustaining
| nuclear fission chain reaction if you don't want a bomb;
| Harry Daghlian did it accidentally, Fermi did it underneath
| Stagg Field in Chicago in 01942, we do it routinely to
| generate electricity, and 16 fossil natural nuclear fission
| reactors have been discovered in Oklo. The explosives are
| only there to keep a rapid chain reaction from driving the
| pieces apart before you get enough yield for a weapon.
|
| It's true that the NIF would not make a very useful bomb,
| being difficult to deliver to enemy territory even by ship,
| and probably inflicting more damage on the funding agency
| than the destroyed enemy city. But a significant part of that
| is non-recurring engineering costs, and it's probably
| possible to miniaturize it to a significant degree.
|
| I read Freeman Dyson's autobiography recently, and he claims
| (contrary to the report of continuing DOE research in the
| Wikipedia article) one of the things they stopped working on
| in the 01960s due to the arms treaties was specifically
| hydrogen bombs that didn't require fission igniters.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Ignition in the case of ICF means that, for the brief time
| while the shockwave from the initial laser burst is still
| keeping the plasma together, you get to fuse all of the D+T
| in your pellet. Once the initial velocity is lost, the
| high-temperature He dissipates away.
|
| Not ahcieving ignition means that the plasma cools too
| rapidly and the fusion reaction stops even before the brief
| microseconds of inertial confinement are lost.
|
| Perhaps if you could deliver enough energy to a large
| enough pellet, you could use this to build a bomb, but
| today it is far too small for that, and the reaction
| wouldn't work with a larger fuel pellet (the geometry that
| allows the extreme pressures needed for fusion would not be
| easily achieved with a larger pellet, since even the wave-
| length of the laser is relevant at this level).
| kragen wrote:
| Not all of it, no; your understanding of "ignition" is
| incorrect. cf.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28842919
| thehappypm wrote:
| I'm struggling to understand what exactly happens. The deuterium
| and tritium mixture is hydrogen -- so it is a gas? So is it in
| some sort of gas-containing container, that also lets laser light
| through -- probably some kind of glass container? What kind of
| glass container can survive having this much energy pumped
| through it, and such a hot gas inside it?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition
| Robotbeat wrote:
| It's actually frozen deuterium tritium. Inside a small pellet
| blasted by X-rays which compress the pellet until it's hot and
| dense enough for the fusion energy produced to continue burning
| and heating the deuterium/tritium until much more energy is
| produced than the energy of the X-rays.
|
| It all happens in an instant. The pellet's structure doesn't
| survive. But it happens fast enough that just the inertia of
| the pellet (turning to a gas and then a plasma) keeps things
| confined for long to fuse a significant amount of the
| deuterium/tritium.
| xixixao wrote:
| > Fusion ignition is the point at which a nuclear fusion reaction
| becomes self-sustaining. This occurs when the energy being given
| off by the fusion reactions heats the fuel mass more rapidly than
| various loss mechanisms cool it.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition
| gremIin wrote:
| How is this any different than the term 'breakeven' [0]?
|
| > Breakeven describes the moment when plasmas in a fusion
| device release at least as much energy as is required to heat
| them
|
| [0] https://www.iter.org/sci/BeyondITER
|
| Is this just a case of multiple terms for the same phenomenon,
| and do plasma physicists have a preference?
| detaro wrote:
| The wikipedia article linked answers that.
| [deleted]
| falcrist wrote:
| That question is answered in the wikipedia link above.
|
| > Ignition should not be confused with breakeven, a similar
| concept that compares the total energy being given off to the
| energy being used to heat the fuel. The key difference is
| that breakeven ignores losses to the surroundings, which do
| not contribute to heating the fuel, and thus are not able to
| make the reaction self-sustaining. Breakeven is an important
| goal in the fusion energy field, but ignition is required for
| a practical energy producing design.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It should be noted that 'self sustaining' only means that the
| entire pellet undergoes fusion. The process still stops after a
| few instants of time, requiring a new pellet of fuel, a new
| laser burst (consuming at least twenty times the power that
| gets deposited in the plasma), and worst of all, a new
| monumentally expensive hohlraum, machined to nanometer
| precision.
| leephillips wrote:
| Good points, but you mean energy, and it's several hundred
| times.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Yes, should have said energy. As for hundreds vs twenty, my
| understanding was that newer lasers than what NIF is using
| should be in the twenty times range, but you're right that
| at NIF they use hundreds of times more energy than they can
| deliver to the plasma.
| AutumnCurtain wrote:
| >Early reports estimated that 250 kilo-joules of energy was
| deposited on the target (roughly 2/3 of the energy from the
| beams), which resulted in a 1.3 Megajoule output from the
| fusing plasma.
|
| Incredible progress over where they were just a couple years
| ago.
| xxpor wrote:
| For reference: 1 MJ = 0.277778 kWh.
|
| Not trying to knock the progress made or anything like that,
| I just needed the conversion to a more familiar unit in order
| to appreciate what sort of scale they're talking about.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Yeah, the idea is to do like dozens of these explosions per
| second, like in an internal combustion piston engine. There
| was a conceptual design for a fusion power plant based off
| of laser inertial fusion like NIF called LIFE.
|
| Works kind of like the EUV light sources TSMC uses to make
| the highest end computer chips, except a fuel pellet
| instead of a drop of tin. Like so:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy
| ruste wrote:
| When thinking of this amount of energy in kWh it seems
| small, but if this is deposited by lasers in a small
| fraction of a second it seems like a huge amount of power
| delivery.
| xxpor wrote:
| Yeah, the time scale and volume of where it's happening
| matters a lot.
|
| It's like in fission when you read about reactions giving
| net energy of X MeV. If you convert that to even Wh, let
| alone kWh, it's an incredibly small number. But when you
| start multiplying by the number of atoms in a fuel
| source, it starts adding up VERY quickly.
| [deleted]
| connicpu wrote:
| Though, when 1 MJ is generated in a fraction of a second,
| that does mean its instantaneous output was in the MW+
| range
| regularfry wrote:
| Unfortunate, though, that NIF can't do continuous
| generation by design. It's good for learning from and
| validating stuff instantaneously, but it's almost
| certainly an architectural dead-end otherwise.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Hard not to see it as a laser weapons program wearing
| power-plant clothes.
| Jensson wrote:
| Also 1 MJ = 250 calories. So like a pizza slice.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| calories or kilocalories?
| stevespang wrote:
| rehashing old news that no 3rd party independent facility can
| verify since NIF is the only site in the world with such a device
| . . . .
| vfclists wrote:
| Funny how this story gets posted after soon after Dr Sabine
| Hossenfelder's debunking and deflate the fusion power hype -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
|
| with a genuine Hans Gruber accent :)
| seoaeu wrote:
| Do you have any context on who Dr. Hossenfelder is or why their
| "debunking" is meaningful?
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| She's a German physicist who has made a name for herself, I
| think, arguing that mathematical beauty should not be a
| factor when constructing solutions to problems in theoretical
| physics.
|
| I think construing her video as a "debunking" does it a
| disservice, for what it's worth. It's a call for journalists
| and laypeople to be cautious when interpreting lab results.
| She doesn't "dunk on" fusion power or say that it's not worth
| investigating.
| Krasnol wrote:
| It's even funnier how fast you got downvoted.
|
| The nuclear band wagon is strong here.
| vfclists wrote:
| I noticed
| jjk166 wrote:
| It's almost like this is the event that prompted her to make
| her video.
| ashton314 wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken, part of _Star Trek: Into Darkness_ was
| filmed at a fusion research center. They used it as the backdrop
| for engineering /warp core. Just slap on a few starfleet decals
| and you're good to go!
| [deleted]
| bob229 wrote:
| i guess it's just 20 years away then hahaha
| Animats wrote:
| Oh, this is just laser fusion. One pulse of power. That's not a
| power source, even potentially. It's a lab-sized H-bomb
| experiment. This isn't one of the magnetic containment systems
| achieving ignition and sustaining the reaction. Now that would be
| an achievement.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Internal combustion piston engines also do intermittent
| combustion. If you were to make a power plant based off of
| this, you would need dozens of these per second (and much more
| efficient lasers and a tritium breeding liquid lithium metal
| jacket and... a lot of other stuff).
| wolf550e wrote:
| @dang This was reported and discussed 12 days ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28704298
|
| The important thing to know is that the NIF is about nuclear
| weapons design (verification of modeling software used for
| nuclear weapons design), not about developing fusion power
| plants.
| snek_case wrote:
| Kind of crazy that we're still spending money on this. Do we
| really need better H-bombs?
| chemeng wrote:
| The US military probably thinks so, but I believe a major
| goal of NIF is the ability to model whether the ones the US
| already built will still work without setting one off.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Note that @dang doesn't actually notify dang, unless he happens
| to open this article and see it out of the corner of his eye or
| something. If you want to report a frontpage dupe, emailing the
| mods using the footer Contact link is an efficient method (or
| you can just flag it as I did, which has relatively the same
| effect if enough people do).
| amarant wrote:
| I thought ignition had been achieved a long time ago. Is the
| article saying this is the first time for this particular lab to
| achieve ignition, or have I confused my fusion hype-terminology?
| I genuinely can't tell, as the article is written in Hype rather
| than English...
| leephillips wrote:
| The Univ. of CA lab that operates NIF has an entire public
| relations department, paid for by US taxpayers, whose purpose
| is to generate this hype in order to influence Congress (they
| are the ultimate audience for all of this) to keep spending
| more US taxpayer money on NIF. NIF's real purpose is stockpile
| stewardship, so the funding is not really in jeopardy; but they
| always want more.
| wffurr wrote:
| First time for an internal confinement system using lasers
| instead of a tokamak using magnetic confinement.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Inertial confinement.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion
| Parnee wrote:
| Fusion berries powering cell phones for weeks. I'll take two.
| option wrote:
| fusion sound fantastic in principle. But in the meantime we can
| and should addressed most of our energy needs with fission.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| Not sure why this is downvoted. Fission works, and it works
| well. The waste problem is massively overstated and also, aside
| from NIMBY politics, solved.
| cronix wrote:
| There are also things like tidal waves, earthquakes and other
| unforeseen things that do pop up from time to time and cause
| big issues. We can say it's rare, statistically very
| unlikely, etc., but no one wants to be a Fukushima and that
| image is still pretty fresh and hard to combat logically.
|
| That said, one thing that I think would really help is to
| have smaller reactors, more of them, and using a standardized
| and approved design. I remember hearing an interview with an
| Oregon State University professor some 15+ years ago who was
| working on a project that did just that. IIRC, he said one
| major contributing factor to the cost of building a reactor,
| besides waste, is that basically each one is designed and
| engineered from scratch. He envisioned more of an assembly
| line. Universal design, universal parts, etc. I believe they
| went on to form a company called NuScale and a quick DDG
| search led to this:
|
| > "Portland company's innovative nuclear reactor OK'd by feds
| (September 26 2020)" ... The modules -- each capable of
| producing 60 megawatts of energy, which is enough to power
| 45,000 homes -- also allow a plant to scale up as needed,
| with a maximum capacity of 12 modules for a total of 720
| megawatts.
|
| https://pamplinmedia.com/pt/9-news/482166-388954-portland-
| co...
| tehbeard wrote:
| I don't know what has happened more, nuclear fusion
| "breakthroughs", or Voyager "leaving the solar system"...
| hinkley wrote:
| Fusion breakthroughs for sure, but I hear you about Voyager.
| boringg wrote:
| Agree. I will add in the mix new Energy Storage breakthroughs.
| The cynic in me suspects its a research money grab or a
| validation on money spent with no real forward trajectory.
|
| At least the voyager is clearly plodding along towards the Oort
| Cloud and eventually out of the solar system. Sadly I will be
| long dead and hopefully these comments will still live on (300
| year estimate for Oort Cloud at its current speed of 1M miles a
| day).
| carabiner wrote:
| New dental treatment will eliminate cavities.
| cyberpsybin wrote:
| because nuclear fusion is an endgame; it going to take
| centuries
| _justinfunk wrote:
| Or "water discovered on Mars"
| [deleted]
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