[HN Gopher] Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
___________________________________________________________________
Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
Author : playpause
Score : 748 points
Date : 2022-02-09 12:02 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.co.uk)
| willis936 wrote:
| It's great to have a nuclear magnetic confinement device anywhere
| on the planet again. It looks like things are running well:
| profiles of NBI, and density are all under control.
| TrevorJ wrote:
| Can someone explain something about fusion for me? To make a
| fusion reactor that's useful you have to solve two problems:
| First you have to build a working fusion reactor. Second, you
| have to capture that energy to do useful work.
|
| Given that, wouldn't it make more sense to focus on technology to
| capture energy from the giant, already working fusion reactor in
| the sky?
| space_fountain wrote:
| A fusion reactor could have much more concentrated energy. The
| sun is great, but it's putting out energy in all directions and
| we're a long way away
| alexchamberlain wrote:
| The giant fusion reactor in the sky dissipates most of its
| energy before it gets to Earth, and more of it in the
| atmosphere. A new star born in a reactor can be fully
| contained, so most of its energy can be captured for its
| intended use case.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| Solar panels are all well and good, but you couldn't use them
| inside of a fusion reactor. For one thing they wouldn't be able
| to withstand the temperature and neutron flux. Most fusion
| reactor designs capture energy by heating water, same as a
| fission reactor.
| 300bps wrote:
| We generate electricity with fusion the same way we do with
| many other technologies.
|
| We heat up water until it turns to steam which moves a turbine
| to spin some magnets to generate electricity.
|
| Fusion's advantage over solar is it can theoretically generate
| unlimited energy in a relatively small footprint. It also
| doesn't go out 8-12 hours per day.
|
| But I think the reality is that we need to pursue many options
| for clean energy.
| zulban wrote:
| In addition to what others have said, the sun isn't always in
| the sky.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| I'd like to see a side-by-side... The sun _is_ always in the
| sky, just not where power is needed. If you look at the
| global investment into fusion, I wonder by what order of
| magnitude that compares to scrapping that work and building
| HVDC lines East-West to major population centers and North-
| South to places with super-high availability wind resources.
| We could basically build those "tomorrow" as compared to
| spending billions/year in research and then tens of
| billions/year in actual construction cost when we figure out
| the technology. Not a 'fair' comparison by any stretch but I
| think it'd be interesting.
| spdegabrielle wrote:
| The economics don't make sense. Everyone has access to the sun.
| Even in poor countries.
| noah_buddy wrote:
| What an incredibly cynical take. Perhaps if abundant and easy
| to harvest free energy existed in the sky, we would have
| abundant cheap ways to capture it? The issues are more
| profound than rich people want to keep the poor people down.
| lkbm wrote:
| Thirty years ago it would have been true to say "Solar is
| decades away from being viable as our primary energy source,
| whereas fission has been ready and able for decades."
|
| I really wish we'd gone with Nixon's 1970s proposal to make our
| entire grid carbon-neutral using fission, but given how the
| politics of that worked out, I'm also incredibly grateful that
| people kept working on photovoltaic technology anyway.
|
| We're building out solar pretty rapidly, and the technology has
| been advancing at an incredible rate, but we can work on
| multiple solutions simultaneously, and solar is a clear case
| study in why working on not-yet-viable technology is incredibly
| worthwhile pursuit.
| pkaye wrote:
| What do people think of this critique of nuclear fusion power?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
| anonporridge wrote:
| Generally good.
|
| My take is that the crux of her argument is that fusion is
| unlikely to be the great solution of all our energy problems
| any time soon, so we should not let that false hope direct our
| funding decisions in the race to a sustainable energy future.
|
| It would be an insanely good outcome if fusion becomes viable
| and massively scaled by the end of the century, and frankly,
| that's not soon enough for our climate and peak oil problems.
| rini17 wrote:
| Spot on. I also saw another good metaphor: it's like building
| jet engine in the 1800s right after discovering Bernoulli's
| equation.
|
| However, since it has such mighty political backing as a solemn
| hope to tackle climate change, politics will always win.
| willis936 wrote:
| Awful. More here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30090315
| yurishimo wrote:
| The couple of videos I watched above your comment seem to take
| this into account. I think that's why the aim is for a Q > 10
| rather than just being content with Q > 1.
| gw67 wrote:
| It's incredible how much innovation it's coming from EU recently
| instead of US.
| Bayart wrote:
| We're always pretty good on fundamental science. It's the
| commercialization front that's letting us down.
| [deleted]
| timomax2 wrote:
| These are international projects.
| martopix wrote:
| I love how one of the articles on the HN frontpage says "Oxford",
| the other says "European researchers"
| mort96 wrote:
| But people living in Oxford are European? If one article says
| "North American researchers" and another article says
| "Researchers from California", would that be strange to you as
| well? Or if one article said "African researchers" and another
| said "Researchers from Rwanda"?
| tankenmate wrote:
| EUROfusion is a consortium of national fusion research
| institutes located in the European Union, Switzerland and
| Ukraine. It was established in 2014 to succeed the European
| Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA) as the umbrella
| organisation of Europe's fusion research laboratories. The
| consortium is currently funded by the Euratom Horizon 2020
| programme. [0]
|
| -- Wikipedia
|
| So the reason it is called European is that it was conceived by
| the EU and it's partners and it primarily funded by the EU's
| Horizon 2020 funding programme.
|
| [0]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20170830004728/http://horizon202...
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I think the point that your parent commenter was making is
| that Oxford is in the UK and the UK is no longer a member of
| the EU or Euratom, although it has various agreements with
| both.
| skrebbel wrote:
| The UK didn't float away or anything. It's still in Europe.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Geographically, yes. Politically, much less so -
| unfortunately.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Consensus among geologists is that substantial portions
| of that island did in fact drift away from what we know
| as France.
| thothamon wrote:
| Plate tectonics has everything moving, so although I am
| an amateur, it seems the fact that the British Isles are
| moving away from Europe doesn't prove much.
| Toine wrote:
| You mean the rosbifs actually live on our land ? JEANNE,
| AU SECOURS !
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| Well, any EU country can opt out of the EU, but they cannot
| leave Europe - unless you redefine basic geographical
| concepts.
| derriz wrote:
| I'm not sure it's Brexit related - but I've noticed more
| and more that when the UK media uses the expressions Europe
| or European, they are referring to the European continent
| as if the UK was not part of it. I've even heard it used in
| this capacity in a work presentation which caused confusion
| in the multi-national audience - "in Asia it's X, in Europe
| it's Y, in the UK it's Z...". I consume quite a bit of UK
| media so I knew what they meant but others pulled them up
| on it and the presenter seemed initially perplexed that
| anyone would think that "Europe" included the UK.
| arlort wrote:
| You might've noticed more and more but it's always been
| the case
|
| It's probably related to brexit in that this outlook is
| very likely at least part of why Brexit happened (or
| rather why the UK was never a particularly good fit for
| the EU)
| dharma1 wrote:
| Has been like this for a long time before brexit and was
| surprising to me too when I moved to the UK nearly 20
| years ago. "Europe" in colloquial use in the UK usually
| refers to mainland Europe, not the British isles (or even
| Ireland)
| robotresearcher wrote:
| I can say 'in California X and in the US Y' without
| implying California is not in the US.
| n4r9 wrote:
| I think OP was commenting more on the emphasis, i.e. one of
| the titles highlighting the name "Oxford" just because it's
| famous. The UK is still in Europe and will likely be for
| decades to come.
| timthorn wrote:
| JET is based near Oxford, and in an article from the BBC
| provides useful geographic context for the UK audience. I
| don't think it is mentioned because Oxford is "famous".
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I'm wondering about what you know that we don't? Is there
| a project to move the UK physically out of Europe?
|
| Or will this fusion go out of control and demolish the UK
| in a nuclear fireball?
| n4r9 wrote:
| It was tongue-in-cheek, but born from my own paranoia and
| despair. The last few years have made even the concept of
| "Europe" feel kind of shaky.
| [deleted]
| can16358p wrote:
| Just to be sure: what we are seeing in the video is plasma from
| the fusion of hydrogen atoms, right?
|
| (And if I'm terribly wrong please don't flame, not a nuclear
| physics expert here)
| regularfry wrote:
| Yes, two different isotopes. JET uses deuterium-tritium fuel.
| pulse7 wrote:
| 59 megajoules (MJ) = 16.4 kWh. For comparison: Tesla Model 3
| (Standard Range) has 60 kWh battery. So they made about 1/4 of
| the full Tesla Model 3 battery.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Ok, sure -- but it's nuclear fusion. Gotta start somewhere,
| right?
| j245 wrote:
| > So they made about 1/4 of the full Tesla Model 3 battery.
|
| Focusing on absolute numbers is pretty irrelevant, wouldn't you
| say ?
|
| We know once we get a working prototype it can be scaled up
| relatively easily.
|
| Strange to see a storage mechanism (battery) compared to a
| generation mechanism (fusion plant)
| pulse7 wrote:
| So comparison is about the "amount of energy", not about
| mechanisms...
| j245 wrote:
| My point is the comparison is meaningless.
|
| If they get this to work, they will just build something
| with 100x or 1000x the output.
|
| The number isn't really important here, some indication of
| how the development of the technology is coming along is
| what we care about. Compare this energy to the last best
| output.
|
| If this works and we productionize it, we will suddenly go
| from 1/4 Tesla battery to 10,000 Tesla batteries.
| [deleted]
| davidrusu wrote:
| A shot of the pulse from within the reactor:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMuOaTqdp4c
| darnfish wrote:
| What would happen if you stood in that
| JulianChastain wrote:
| You would die
| Stevvo wrote:
| You contacting the plasma would cause it to collapse, but you
| would already by cooked. It's a chicken and egg question,
| because a plasma is never going to get started with a person
| inside; it needs a near perfect vacuum.
| nomel wrote:
| Isn't the stream supposed to be in the middle, away from the
| melty bits?
| willis936 wrote:
| Yes, but the really hot part is not emitting visible light.
| ;)
|
| If you're curious about why the bottom glows: ExB drift
| pushes electrons to the bottom. I'm sure that doesn't make
| sense, but unfortunately there isn't really a shortcut to
| understanding here. Some books are pretty accessible though
| (I'm a fan of _The Future of Fusion Energy_ ).
|
| https://ebrary.net/174598/mathematics/drift_motion_energetic.
| ..
|
| And, of course, there is always the freely available IAEA
| textbook:
|
| https://www.iaea.org/publications/8879/fusion-physics
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| You can tell when someone didn't read the article, because the
| video is at the very top of it :)
| ummonk wrote:
| I read through the whole article and didn't realize the video
| was there until I read this comment chain. I had just glanced
| past the video assuming it was an ad.
| soperj wrote:
| throwawayninja wrote:
| Honestly I find Bill Gates a pretty OK dude, all things
| considered. If you live life without making any
| mistakes/enemies that means you really didn't live at all.
| pm90 wrote:
| Nobody is saying that you need to be a perfect moral paragon.
| But having a documented close relationship with the most
| famous and powerful pedophile isn't something you can gloss
| over. His departure from the MS over inappropriate conduct
| seems to paint a pattern: this is a powerful guy who abused
| his power over women repeatedly and it's worth calling that
| out.
|
| (Please no whataboutism; yes there are probably worst
| billionaires than him; yes all of them should be held to
| account for their actions).
| soperj wrote:
| Anyone who visited Jeffery Epstein's island and has also been
| removed from the board of directors of the company they
| started for inappropriate relationship isn't an OK dude.
|
| There's also the whole bit with Paul Allen where they tried
| to take all of his shares when he had cancer.
| spockz wrote:
| I read Paul Allen's biography. There it seemed Gates could
| be (quite) a bit of a jerk. However, this thing about
| shares isn't mentioned.
|
| And was Gates removed from the board of Microsoft? Where
| did you get that information?
| soperj wrote:
| Seriously?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/30/micros
| oft...
|
| He "left" the board, which is the equivalent of "You
| can't fire me, I quit". He was removed.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/17/bill-
| gates-m...
| dboreham wrote:
| Quick note that simply associating with Epstein _may_ not
| imply badness of the kind you suggest. There's some
| suspicion that Epstein was some sort of intelligence
| operative and therefore may have engaged in all kinds of
| measures to attempt to befriend, influence and compromise
| powerful individuals. If that's the case, he would have
| used the approach we hear about vs underage girls etc if he
| thought that would be successful, but other approaches if
| that didn't seem likely to work. So it may be possible that
| an individual had contact with Epstein in a way totally
| unrelated to human trafficking. e.g. he said "come on my
| plane and you can meet <very interesting person>" or "come
| to my island and I'll invest in your company". Basically,
| he was a person focused on compromising and influencing
| people, using a wide gamut of techniques, not simply a
| person focused on being an abuser/trafficker.
| butterfi wrote:
| Bill Gates is my poster child for "Do the ends justify the
| means?" I know people who were absolutely robbed by MCSFT and
| their business practices in the 90's. I'm glad he's using his
| wealth for good, but that doesn't change how he got the
| money.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's kind of like Pilot washing his hands though, yeah? Who
| do you have to ask to find out how much of your money must
| be given away before you're atoned? Does he also have to
| say a bunch of hail mary's and our father's? Wouldn't it be
| better to set aside a huge chunk of money to have people
| re-write history on your behalf after you're gone?
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| I guess it is not a big deal at the end of the day, but it is
| quite shocking to me on a certain level that this is being
| said here. But I guess it is just another reminder that HN is
| much more about the _business_ of computers and software, and
| not so much about computers and software themselves, even if
| that can be a very blurry distinction most of the time. But
| here... the distinction /priority is quite clear!
| rlt wrote:
| You're going to have to be more specific.
| soperj wrote:
| I mean, start with why his wife is divorcing him (Jeffery
| Epstein) and why he's no longer on the board at
| Microsoft(inappropriate relationships with staffers), then go
| into how he's screwed up public schooling in the US, then
| Microsoft under him. That's the easy stuff that you can see
| publicly.
| Decker87 wrote:
| He's pretty into the future of clean energy. If one looks at it
| just from that perspective and not a moralistic one, I think it
| means something for him to invest.
| jl6 wrote:
| Turns out people can do both bad and good things and are hard
| to reduce to a single number on a linear scale from bad to
| good.
| ambrozk wrote:
| Why? He dedicates huge amounts of money to worldwide public
| health, and is giving away the vast majority of his fortune
| over the course of his life. Why shouldn't I hold such a person
| in high regard?
| soperj wrote:
| From other comment > I mean, start with why his wife is
| divorcing him (Jeffery Epstein) and why he's no longer on the
| board at Microsoft(inappropriate relationships with
| staffers), then go into how he's screwed up public schooling
| in the US, then Microsoft under him. That's the easy stuff
| that you can see publicly.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Whats with public schooling? I havent found anything that
| looks relevant
| soperj wrote:
| They're responsible for common core, which basically
| makes teachers teach to the test to keep their jobs.
| rndmize wrote:
| Pretty sure that was a part of No Child Left Behind,
| years before Common Core. I'm also not sure how
| development of a set of tests and standards would be
| related to teacher employment - I would have expected
| that to be up to the states and how they implement them.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Worth mentioning though is that they didn't invent Common
| Core Standards; they support it. Common Core was also
| preceded by No Child Left Behind, which shifted emphasis
| in education in a similar war.
|
| All that is to say that the issue didn't originate with
| the Gates Foundation. It goes much deeper and is arguably
| a broad societal issue. No one agrees on how teaching
| should be done, there's insufficient coordination, people
| doing the work lack resources and incentive, and kids
| suffer a lot as a result.
| wowokay wrote:
| True, we should discount all his contributions and hold him
| a accountable for his past actions right? Man I'm glad the
| rest of us never make mistakes and have all contributed so
| much more then him..
| soperj wrote:
| I'm sorry, but if the Queen can disavow her own kid for
| his affiliation with Jeffery Epstein, and Bill's wife can
| do the same, we can disavow Bill Gates. Just because he
| has money doesn't mean a damn thing w/r to whether we
| have to hold him to any regard. He's proven over decades
| to not be a good person. There's a reason Paul Allen
| ended his relationship with Bill Gates.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I didn't know about Paul Allen, but after searching it
| seems the top result is about how they managed to regain
| some friendship: https://www.geekwire.com/2019/bill-
| gates-patched-things-paul...
|
| I know very little about Gates but can only find
| information indicating Epstein wanted to do business with
| him under the guise of it being a great benefit to
| charity, which in the end turned out to be a ruse of some
| sort. Perhaps it's untrue, but I don't see damning
| evidence. There are photos, but surely there are hundreds
| or thousands of photos of Epstein with people. Is there
| something that you know that I'm not finding?
| soperj wrote:
| When Paul Allen found out his cancer was terminal, Bill
| phoned him a number of times and Paul refused to take
| those calls. So much for friendship.
|
| Do you actually believe Melinda Gates divorced him
| because he wanted to do business with Jeffrey Epstein in
| a philanthropic fashion?
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I don't believe much about situations I know only what
| media has enabled me to know.
|
| If I were to assume anything, I'd first guess that a
| healthy marriage could endure a questionable
| relationship. If it did in fact end over that, it could
| have been due to underlying issues rather than something
| more scandalous.
|
| I'd also guess that Epstein also did legitimate business,
| and with many people we don't point fingers at.
|
| Given that with the limited information available, I
| can't draw a conclusion.
| bostonsre wrote:
| So are you suggesting he be completely shunned from
| society? Why not let him try to atone for his sins and
| try to do good in the world by giving away a large
| portion of his wealth to noble causes?
| soperj wrote:
| I'm suggesting not to hold him or his money in high
| regard. He's not worth mentioning.
| bostonsre wrote:
| Aren't the causes that he is championing worth mentioning
| tho? Why is there a need to purge him from current public
| discourse when he did something bad in the past? I don't
| think we should disprove of bad people doing good things.
| Just because he did something bad doesn't mean he can no
| longer make commendable contributions to society.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| The difference between Prince Andrew and Bill Gates is
| that Andrew has been (credibly) accused of sexual abuse,
| whereas Gates was - as far as we know - just friends with
| Epstein. Maybe there's something more, but there's no
| evidence of it - it's not even clear how close they were,
| exactly.
|
| I mean, Prince Charles and Jimmy Savile had a friendship
| of sorts; the queen didn't disavow Charles because that's
| all it was. The problem with Andrew wasn't really his
| relationship with Epstein *as such*, but the things
| Andrew did.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Wow, it's like you're suggesting statutes of limitation
| on bad reputation? That's like depending on a populace
| have the memory of a goldfish for that to work. Oh, wait.
| Damnn, you're genius /s
| [deleted]
| renewiltord wrote:
| I don't give a fuck about all that. He can have consensual
| relationships with whomever he likes.
|
| If I complete my life with as big a positive impact and the
| worst thing that happens is I have a divorce and sleep
| consensually with a few women who reported to me I will
| count it as a huge win.
| ambrozk wrote:
| The guy's work has directly prevented the deaths of
| enormous numbers of poor people worldwide. That trumps
| everything else in my book.
|
| Also, don't fall for his wife's PR team. You have no idea
| why she's divorcing him. Claiming that the issue was
| Epstein is what any smart legal / publicity team would do
| in this circumstance.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >The guy's work has directly...
|
| The guy's money has funded people who work to do these
| things.
| soperj wrote:
| It's not all his money here. A major chunk of it is
| Warren Buffet's.
| whatshisface wrote:
| That, and there is no way to know that the people who he
| stole it from through anti-competitive practices wouldn't
| have funded even better things with it.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _Claiming that the issue was Epstein is what any smart
| legal / publicity team would do in this circumstance._
|
| If a PR team was going to pick a fake reason to hide a
| blase real reason, why would they pick the biggest
| scandal possible? I thought rich people tried to keep
| their personal lives _out_ of the news. Saying that they
| had drifted apart naturally while the real reason was
| Epstein is something like what a PR counsel would do,
| that I could believe, but you 're suggesting that they're
| making that trade in reverse.
|
| Another point to bear in mind is that the legal team does
| not care what the public thinks because the public
| doesn't decide anything in court. Lawyers usually tell
| you to keep quiet about your case, to reduce the risk of
| saying anything in public that the other side can bring
| up in court to use against you. That's another thing that
| usually works backwards from how you're suggesting it is
| in this situation.
| oneplane wrote:
| > If a PR team was going to
|
| I think you need a PR team if you're going to start
| writing replies like this...
| [deleted]
| ambrozk wrote:
| Melinda Gates is trying to get the best possible
| settlement from her divorce. The Epstein issue is obvious
| leverage. Melinda loses nothing by Bill being embarassed
| in public, and she gains a lot at the negotiating table.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I haven't watched enough mobster movies to be sure, but I
| think you might have the order of operations inverted on
| the blackmailing process. The Don doesn't release the
| photos then start blackmailing, he shows _you_ the
| photographs, then blackmails you, _then_ maybe releases
| them if he has a reputation to keep and you didn 't pay.
| ambrozk wrote:
| Some of the information is public. Who knows how much
| there is behind it?
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Even ignoring that, his fortune came from anti-competitive
| business practices in the 80s and 90s, without which,
| personal computing would have been in a much better place
| today.
| holoduke wrote:
| Explain better? So easy said. It sounds a bit silly when
| you say that.
| MathCodeLove wrote:
| Without which, you _think_ personal computing would be in
| a much better place today. You have no way to verify that
| belief one way or another.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Technically correct, which, as we all know, is the best
| kind of correct.
| [deleted]
| oneplane wrote:
| Just because he as a prick doesn't mean the investment into
| fusion energy is therefore prick-ish...
| soperj wrote:
| It doesn't, also doesn't mean that I can't call him a
| prick whenever he's mentioned in a light that's slightly
| glowing.
| worik wrote:
| > Why? He dedicates huge amounts of money to worldwide public
| health, and is giving away the vast majority of his fortune
| over the course of his life. Why shouldn't I hold such a
| person in high regard?
|
| We are talking about Bill Gates who because he was better at
| red in tooth and claw business than technology he held
| computing back by at least a decade.
|
| In 1995 I was using stable 32-bit personal computer software
| complete with all the tooling I needed, the very best. My
| friends were bogged down in expensive, unreliable, insecure,
| and privacy violating crap DoS with a shell (Windows 95).
|
| They were not fools, but they had been fooled. It was for
| business reasons that this happened. It was driven by Bill
| Gates (and the business incompetence of the technically
| competent of the time)
|
| If he lives another fifty years giving away every cent to
| good causes - good on him. I will not forget what he did to
| my industry.
| ambrozk wrote:
| Okay. Hold your grudge from the 90s. No one can stop you.
| It's pretty weird not to care about his enormous efforts in
| philanthropy, though.
| soperj wrote:
| How much of it is even his money and not Warren Buffett's
| money?
| danny_taco wrote:
| Despite his flaws as a human being and damage done by Microsoft
| in the 90's, overall his contributions to humanity greatly
| exceed his shortcomings. What are your contributions to
| humankind? Have you done anything to make the world a better
| place?
|
| The answer is, probably not, or at least not as much as Bill.
| So be wary of passing judgement to others so easily lest you be
| judged yourself.
| soperj wrote:
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic
| tangents._ "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30272413.
|
| (No, we're not trying to defend lizard people, great resets,
| population control, 5G, or whatever else comes up in this
| context. We're just trying to have an internet forum that
| doesn't suck. Repeating the same flamewar topics over and over
| again sucks, and this one is especially completely off topic in
| this thread.)
| soperj wrote:
| Saying Bill Gates isn't a good person is flamebait?
|
| Sorry then, it wasn't my intention.
| dang wrote:
| Sure. It's just a classic flamewar topic, and completely a
| generic tangent (unless the story had been about BG).
|
| I totally get that it wasn't your intention!
| 317070 wrote:
| Edit: it's finished
|
| --The live announcement is going on now:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H99hvPlC4is (from 12:00 until
| 13:00 GMT)--
| cranberryturkey wrote:
| They always say this...its like when NASA says "Possible alien
| life found on Mars" and it turns out to be just a new kind of
| dust particle.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| It's more like when USA Today says "NASA possibly found alien
| life on Mars." The path from the workers' "Compound A-9512 is
| present in thygmolonogical quantities in martian topsoil" to
| the PR office's "We found really exciting organic compounds on
| mars" to mainstream news's "Possible alien life found on mars"
| is so predictable and happens the same way every single time.
| It's depressing.
| [deleted]
| aquamarine1 wrote:
| It's not, until it is...
| chaps wrote:
| Can you give an example where NASA has actually said they found
| possible life?
| [deleted]
| jstummbillig wrote:
| And then there's all those times where it was not in fact
| nothing but major scientific progress.
| broahmed wrote:
| In my experience, it's not the scientists (NASA or JET in this
| case) that utter such statements but journalists. NASA
| scientists will say something like "we've encountered something
| new, but we're not jumping to conclusions until we've
| investigated fully" and then you'll see some
| bloggers/journalists putting out clickbait titles like
| "Possible alien life discovered on Mars!"
|
| In this case, the celebration seems well-reasoned. From the
| article:
|
| "It's a landmark because they demonstrated stability of the
| plasma over five seconds. That doesn't sound very long, but on
| a nuclear timescale, it's a very, very long time indeed. And
| it's very easy then to go from five seconds to five minutes, or
| five hours, or even longer."
| mbgerring wrote:
| It would benefit the discourse on this subject a great deal if
| these stories were subject to having their headlines edited, or
| if there were a sticky comment summarizing the actual substance
| of the "breakthrough."
|
| A great deal of VC money is going into nuclear fusion at the
| moment, and there is obvious interest in creating the impression
| that economically viable fusion reactors are just around the
| corner. It would be prudent to guard against the efforts of
| publicists and PR professionals by providing context.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| I don't understand a lot about these fusion plans, so this might
| be a dumb question, but if it were to be used at scale, aside
| from the energy stuff, would it be a viable source of substantial
| quantities of helium?
| Filligree wrote:
| Not in significant quantities.
|
| It also produces huge amounts of activating radiation. The
| reactor walls will be highly radioactive, as will everything
| from the fuel supply to the helium itself. In principle you can
| split that off, but I wouldn't want to try. Fission reactors
| are a lot more tractable.
| xutopia wrote:
| Had to look up what JET stood for: Joint European Torus.
| 1024core wrote:
| _It 's not a massive energy output - only enough to boil about 60
| kettles' worth of water._ ...
|
| The British and their penchant for tea...
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Did the British go with 240V because it makes tea faster? I
| don't know the history... but I want to believe.
| dboreham wrote:
| Nice idea, but I believe it was due to lack of lawyers.
| jedberg wrote:
| I think you mean 230V, but it was picked because it's more
| efficient and cheaper (you can use smaller wires for the same
| output).
| dghughes wrote:
| But the size of those wall plugs tho...
| anyfoo wrote:
| Other European countries use ~230V as well and have
| smaller plugs than the UK.
|
| The UK has fuses in their plugs, which if I recall
| correctly had something to do with copper shortage during
| the war constraining the electrical cabling for houses,
| but I don't want to accidentally put wrong information
| out, so better look it up yourself.
| jedberg wrote:
| They are mostly that size for safety. You can't
| electrocute yourself nearly as easily in the UK.
| GordonS wrote:
| IMO they are not meaningfully larger than US plugs (I'm
| British, but have travelled to the US several times, as
| well as many other countries), but they are safer.
| anyfoo wrote:
| They're definitely larger, but as I said in a sibling
| comment they're not directly a result of the higher
| voltage specifically.
|
| German Schuko is also 230V and even safer (in countries
| that use it), yet still significantly smaller than
| British plugs.
| jedberg wrote:
| They're definitely much bigger. Look at a British power
| strip vs an American one. The same length but twice as
| many plugs on the American one.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I think it used to be 240V-ish (back then, IIRC they
| allowed larger fluctuations) but we slipped to 230V for
| compatibility with EU?
|
| This corroborates that enough that I'm not checking their
| sources: https://www2.theiet.org/forums/forum/messageview.c
| fm?catid=2... moved from 240+-6% to 230 +10%/-6%.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Well, yeah, but 300V allows smaller wires still, and 1000V
| even smaller, and so on. Hell, you could just wire
| distribution voltage straight to the socket, make the wires
| tiny, and eliminate the need for a zillion transformers! Of
| course, we don't do that for safety reasons, so the choice
| of socket voltage represents a compromise between safety
| and efficiency/power. The US and Britain made different
| tradeoffs, which probably means the constraints were
| slightly different. I could see "brews tea faster" as a
| significant factor in a country that once spent 10% of its
| GDP on tea. That would be a fun fact, if true. But maybe it
| isn't, and the whole thing is dumb luck and poor
| coordination around transformer tapping. Shrug.
| xdennis wrote:
| The UK used to be 240V and many countries in Europe were
| 220V. The compromise was for everybody to use 230V
|
| But what I've heard is that the voltages staid the same,
| but 240V is still within spec of 230V with tolerances.
| belter wrote:
| They went with it because their Rock music sounds better:
|
| "110v vs 220v amp tone" https://www.thegearpage.net/board/ind
| ex.php?threads/110v-vs-...
| dylan604 wrote:
| Tell someone how many watts/kWh/etc, and they'll maybe have an
| inclination of what that means to them. Tell them something in
| a way they can relate by referencing something they do multiple
| times in a day, then they can understand.
|
| Doesn't seem like a mystery on why the reference was used.
| druadh wrote:
| It was a joke
| dylan604 wrote:
| Don't quit your day job
| [deleted]
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post flamebait to HN or take HN threads into
| ideological flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it
| destroys what it is for.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| I absolutely feel I did no such thing. It's not ideological
| to observe what I observed in my initial post. It's clearly
| factual and clearly relevant to the topic as it is actually
| raised in the original article.
|
| I am working on the assumption that you are admin and
| therefore enforce rules.
|
| If this counts as something you wish to flag and remove then
| I'd like you to remove me. So could you drop me an email
| about deleting or otherwise permanently disabling my account,
| please?
| mns06 wrote:
| I found it a valid and unambiguous comment. Brexit has been a
| disaster for UK science. If the BBC found it relevant enough to
| be included in the article, surely it merits a discussion here
| without being downvoted.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| FWIW I am wholly willing to concede, in retrospect, that all
| the downvotes were because of the way I formulated my
| comment.
|
| _(Not least because I snarked about Marco Arment yesterday.
| ;-)_
| swayvil wrote:
| Not just downvoted, erased.
|
| It makes you think.
| spuz wrote:
| This could be read as an either pro or anti-brexit comment but
| the fact that it is ambiguous makes it kind of pointless.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| I was also confused about the ambiguity
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| If you can read that as a pro-Brexit comment, then the Brexit
| project succeeded beyond its instigators' wildest dreams.
|
| It's not ambiguous at all. Everything in the UK going on
| right now -- everything -- has a _" some of this is unclear
| or worse because Brexit has destroyed agreements or because
| proposed, nearly impossible agreements have not been struck"_
| subplot.
|
| Brexit has set fire to every kind of international
| complication.
|
| And so here we are with a sucessful fusion lab in the UK,
| doing the hard work, that is a precursor to a European
| project that it is really not at all clear we will be able to
| participate in or benefit from, because crucial parts of the
| Brexit neo-establishment want the benefits of the agreements
| without acceding to the legal underpinnings of the
| agreements.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| You do realise that countries can work together without
| being part of the same trading block?
|
| ... If I understand your nonsensical ramblings correctly.
| DrBazza wrote:
| And 2 seconds of googling:
|
| "The UK will remain part of Iter"
|
| https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/3551
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Your googling would also show that the article dates from
| more than a year ago.
|
| A lot changed.
|
| Basically, fundamental disagreements with Europe over
| predicate treaties mean that the thing we committed to do
| (remain part of ITER) is under threat, because other
| things we committed to do (uphold transition agreements
| regarding Northern Ireland) are in default.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/feb/08/uk-and-
| euro...
|
| In this case, the EU is saying, sorry, you possibly can't
| stay a member of our science club because you promised
| you'd do certain things that underpin an _internationally
| agreed peace process_ and you are undoing them.
|
| It's a completely legitimate political bargaining point
| that would not be an issue at all without Brexit.
|
| The intent to remain members of ITER and Horizon 2020 is
| genuinely at risk.
|
| All of this underpins my point: everything is more
| complex because of Brexit -- even staying in things we've
| said we really really want to stay in.
| DrBazza wrote:
| > Your googling would also show that the article dates
| from more than a year ago. > A lot changed.
|
| What changed? The UK participate in ITER still, via F4E.
| ITER is not just the EU, it's funded by China, the
| European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the
| United States.
|
| Frankly, I don't see what Brexit has to do with HN. There
| are better places to "discuss" Brexit, and politics, than
| on HackerNews.
| dang wrote:
| Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please make
| your substantive points without swipes and name-calling.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| > ... If I understand your nonsensical ramblings
| correctly.
|
| If you think they are nonsensical, you do not understand
| what I am saying.
|
| Yes, countries can "work together without being part of
| the same trading bloc" but trade is not the limit of what
| Brexit changed.
|
| Brexit removes us from the international legal agreements
| that underpinned that trade. It also removed us from the
| free movement clause, which is crucial to a lot of
| science-industry collaborations (the free movement
| principle was essentially invented to allow professional
| collaboration in the energy industry).
|
| Finally it also removed us from the legal frameworks that
| underpin several European science funding agreements.
|
| Every agreement has to be rewritten, at cost to the
| process. And every time it is rewritten, the net result
| for Britain is substantially worse than if we'd not done
| it. Because you cannot hope to get full membership of any
| club without agreeing to all the rules.
|
| From the article:
|
| _> The UK is a participant, too. Its full involvement in
| ITER, however, will require first for Britain to
| "associate" to certain EU science programmes, something
| that so far has been held up by disagreements over post-
| Brexit trading arrangements, particularly in relation to
| Northern Ireland._
|
| Here is just one example of that:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/feb/08/uk-and-
| euro...
|
| From that article:
|
| _> The EU agreed to associate membership for the UK as
| part of the wider Brexit trade deal struck on Christmas
| Eve 2020 but it has still not ratified the deal or a
| similar one with Switzerland, held up by a dispute over a
| draft treaty binding the country to the bloc._
|
| We didn't need to do any of this, there have been no
| benefits from any of this, and there are no meaningful
| projected benefits for any of this in our lifetimes.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| > If you think they are nonsensical, you do not
| understand what I am saying.
|
| And I thankyou for clarification :)
|
| > but trade is not the limit of what Brexit changed.
|
| Here in lies the problem that many Brexitiers had with
| the EU - it wasn't just a trading bloc, the "club" had a
| lot of baggage that few people understood - and when
| people don't understand something, they fear/misstrust
| it. The message around leaving was focused on GDP and
| whether we would have roaming chargers or not... and this
| message fell flat with a lot of voters.
|
| I blame the remain side with arrogance and a complete
| lack of understanding how to deliver a good message.
|
| I voted remain BTW, but feel we had a fair vote and it is
| what it is.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| I think there are some specific failings with the remain
| argument -- people failed to make the case that is surely
| now obvious that you can't just unpick this without major
| fallout. Though they definitely did try.
|
| The problem is they also came up against vile, populist
| hate about Syrian immigrants, Romanian neighbours, people
| not speaking english on buses, fake news about pillow
| regulations; it went on and on. And a lot of that stuff
| really was funded by deeply shady money.
|
| Brexit was the first real demonstration of how good faith
| cannot possibly counter weaponised, well-backed bad
| faith, IMO.
|
| It is what it is, I agree, and alas it is wholly
| irreversible. But at least within five years we won't
| have to worry about how _Great Britain and Northern
| Ireland_ repositions itself within Europe, because the
| consequences of the vote will be the end of _that_ too.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| > The problem is they also came up against vile, populist
| hate about Syrian immigrants, Romanian neighbours, people
| not speaking english on buses, fake news about pillow
| regulations;
|
| Except there is some truth/validity in all of these -
| they are proxies. The pillow/banana stuff was about over-
| regulation by the EU. People not speaking the native
| language on buses is an indication of a a loss of British
| culture (people will be generally protective of their own
| culture). Romanian neighbours is about a fear of losing
| one's low-paying job to an immigrant.
|
| These are all valid worries of many people in the UK.
|
| Calling them "vile", "populist" is what I'm talking about
| with regard to remain arrogance. Ignore voter's fears at
| your peril.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| The pillow stuff was fraudulent, sorry. You can't hold up
| a bed pillow and say all these regulations cover pillows
| when almost all of the uses of the word "pillow" were
| from engineering safety regulations (pillow blocks etc.)
|
| The Syrian immigration thing was based on a lie (and
| about specific fearmongering concerning Turkey's supposed
| accession to the EU -- a process that has entirely
| stalled and is even in reverse because Turkey cannot join
| the EU until it satisfies the EU's demands). It was
| backed up by one of the most despicable political
| leaflets in British history:
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-
| referendum...
|
| (I received this pamphlet and it remains the only thing I
| have ever ceremonially burned while cursing people)
|
| They were vile, populist-oriented slurs. It was awful,
| disgusting politics.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| > The pillow stuff was fraudulent, sorry.
|
| That's why I said they were proxies - please read what I
| wrote again.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| It wasn't a proxy; it was a deception.
| A_non_e-moose wrote:
| It's not a binary thing. It's not either they work
| together or they don't.
|
| Under a common block, trading or otherwise, things are
| just easier and much closer together.
|
| Consider only visas, travel and employment, the
| complications of these brought by Brexit already
| distanced any existing and future collaborations by some
| measure.
|
| There is still collaboration of course, and there will
| be, but it's not what it was before.
|
| And this negative trend of distance in collaboration is
| more worrying in an increasingly threatening environment
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| Yes, countries work together by making agreements. UK
| decided to burn perhaps the largest and most fruitful
| agreements ever made between European countries. What's
| nonsensical is claiming one can work together after doing
| the exact opposite of that.
| A_non_e-moose wrote:
| It's not a binary thing. It's not either they work
| together or they don't.
|
| Under a common block, trading or otherwise, things are
| just easier and much closer together.
|
| Consider only visas, travel and employment, the
| complications of these brought by Brexit, already
| distanced any existing and future collaborations by some
| measure.
|
| There is still collaboration of course, and there will
| be, but it's not what it was before.
|
| And this negative trend of distance in collaboration is
| more worrying in an increasingly threatening environment.
| spuz wrote:
| Thank you for clarifying. The confusion is because your
| comment could easily be interpreted as a criticism of lazy
| reporting (everything negative that occurs must be because
| of brexit) rather than actual criticism due to a real issue
| beyond how it is reported.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Ah!!
|
| I actually rewrote it to the form it is now, about 15
| seconds after posting it, to try to remove any suggestion
| it's about the report; it's possible I suppose that some
| people reacted to it before I did.
|
| I went from "paragraph" (as in, in an article) to
| "parenthetical" in the colloquial sense. Like, literally
| every process or discussion about anything going on in
| the country has to have this sidebar about how much worse
| it is because of all the changes.
|
| I don't really read it as confusing because I had the
| "thanks, disaster capitalists" bit, which should be
| unambiguous, but I haven't had my coffee, so I will note
| and upvote your point and think about it next time I
| write stuff :-)
| spuz wrote:
| Honestly, I didn't and still don't really understand the
| phrase "disaster capitalists" which probably aided the
| confusion. What is it supposed to mean? Someone who
| promotes capitalism to the point of disaster? Someone who
| trades with disaster as their currency?
|
| It also doesn't help that you start with "Further
| evidence that...". You can't assume any of your readers
| are already on board with your conclusions. In my
| experience, the kind of people who make these kind of
| comments tend to be closed to debate and commenting in
| bad faith. For example "further evidence of political-
| correctness gone mad" is a classic one.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| "Disaster capitalism" is a well-established, pretty well
| known rhetorical term coined by Naomi Klein, a good 15
| years ago now. (The book it came from is called _The
| Shock Doctrine_ )
|
| It refers to a kind of capitalism (and capitalist policy-
| making) that is poised ready to financially exploit the
| negatives of any economic shock precisely because the
| people involved have proximity to the very power
| structures that are unleashing that economic shock.
|
| It was a prediction that came true.
|
| The Brexit-leaning establishment has made a lot of money
| out of economic predictions and money movements triggered
| by Brexit, and the overlap between politicians and hedge
| funds/investment funds/large non-EU exporters etc. was so
| close as to suggest the possibility that the legislation
| has designs for them.
|
| "Further evidence that" is just dry humour from a Brit.
| We are in absolutely deep, deep **** in this country for
| the next two years; everything is going to be bad because
| the Brexit transition has unilaterally, not bilaterally,
| failed.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| I find it amazing that the will to politicize everything can't
| really stop at nothing.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| (The will to politicise is precisely what got us Brexit.)
| rmbyrro wrote:
| The opposing side of the one you seem to be identified with
| would probably say the same thing, but related to joining
| the EU in the first place.
|
| If I may perhaps suggest, perhaps, just maybe, it could be
| worthwhile for you to stop seeing politics in everything
| and focus on something other than politics, like these
| scientists are doing?
|
| They don't care about EU, Brexit, who the hell is the
| British PM. Whatever. They just want to build a smart,
| sustainable and cheap way for humanity to harness energy
| from our universe. That's super cool. Imagine if they
| remained in their homes tweeting about Brexit all day long?
| We'd be burning fossil fuels forever until we kill
| ourselves out of smoke...
|
| I don't know, just maybe it would be interesting, who
| knows...
| Aeolun wrote:
| Two times as much energy as 1997. That's... dissapointing?
| azinman2 wrote:
| It's not a linear process. It's about solving specific problems
| before you scale up exponentially.
| [deleted]
| civilized wrote:
| This article seems very gung-ho on ITER, but over the past few
| months, I've seen other articles and HN comments suggesting that
| ITER is already hopelessly obsolete, locked into a design that's
| likely to be far from optimal, and new startups taking fresh
| approaches are much more relevant to the future of fusion.
|
| I wonder who's right?
| BenoitP wrote:
| Here is the paper detailing the preparations, which were about
| mimicking an ITER-like wall:
|
| https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-4326/ab2276/...
| skywal_l wrote:
| So I read that this is good news for ITER.
|
| Sorry for the noob question but there is something I do not
| understand. I thought ITER design was more or less decided now
| as they are building it. Should I understand that they started
| building ITER without really knowing where they were going to
| go and are using JET experiment as a way know how to build
| ITER?
| IneffablePigeon wrote:
| ITER was planned in part through early results from JET in
| the 90s - but they more recently replaced the inner wall of
| JET to match what ITER will use, which was a good choice
| according to models but this gives empirical confirmation
| that it's possible to sustain the plasma using the new wall
| material.
|
| All new fusion plants are a risk, that's why they're
| experimental. I suspect they were reasonably confident they
| could make ITER work and that's why they started building,
| but this will give them confirmation that the material choice
| was a good one and will also show them in advance some of the
| operational obstacles and possible solutions.
|
| In other words, they knew "where they were going to go" but
| this gives them more confidence they were correct in deciding
| the direction, and will speed up their learning curve setting
| up the machine once built. Even if it is built and something
| fundamentally doesn't work about the concept, that will still
| be useful scientific knowledge, even if it is disappointing.
| Aperocky wrote:
| > This is more than double [the energy] what was achieved in
| similar tests back in 1997.
|
| I was excited for a little bit there.
| tomxor wrote:
| I wonder, in the future when everyone's attention has been
| burned by turning up the volume on all headings to 11... will
| everyone ignore and miss a truly "major" breakthrough.
| willis936 wrote:
| Using the same machine. That's a pretty impressive jump.
| [deleted]
| q1w2 wrote:
| Yep - we're still nowhere near break-even.
| DennisP wrote:
| We're not _that_ far off. JET previously achieved Q=0.67, ie.
| two-thirds as much energy output as input. (The new result
| has higher output but lower Q.)
|
| For a practical reactor we need Q around 30, which might seem
| far away but tokamak output scales with the square of reactor
| volume and the fourth power of magnetic field strength.
| Double the field, 16X the output, and we can generate much
| more powerful magnetic fields with modern superconductors
| than we can with JET's copper coils.
| andruby wrote:
| Any source on that Q=30 requirement for practical reactors?
|
| I'd assume that anything >1 is theoretically "profitable"
| and something like 2~5 might already be economically
| viable.
| skykooler wrote:
| Q=1 just means that the plasma is putting out more energy
| then is put in. However, that doesn't mean you can
| recover all of that energy; you can't run a heat engine
| at millions of degrees, so energy generation has to be
| fairly indirect, which means you need about Q=30 to
| handle all the various conversion inefficiencies and
| still come out net positive enough to be practical.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| So they just need to build the same thing, but make it
| gigantic in size?
|
| Why is it not yet done?
| willis936 wrote:
| It is very expensive to do.
|
| HTS was known but not practical when ITER was planned,
| but it's almost done. ITER is almost large enough to be
| an LTS-based power plant.
|
| ITER will still produce a lot of useful science, but
| there is a now a potential class of mid-scale HTS
| machines that would help develop plasma models.
|
| These iterations seem frustrating and time consuming, but
| their results are lowering the cost of a hypothetical
| power plant until one day maybe society will decide
| they're worth making for power generation.
| [deleted]
| yholio wrote:
| Yup, a major breakthrough in this glacial field is doubling the
| energy output in 25 yeas.
|
| So by the time captain Picard is born, we might have a very
| expensive and massive fusion reactor that will generate the
| same kind of energy we can generate today with very expensive
| and massive fission reactors.
|
| Really now, this is pure garbage and does not solve the major
| problems in the field nor do most of the myriad startups trying
| to cash in on speculative seed funds.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "with very expensive and massive fission reactors"
|
| The laws if physics don't owe us a free lunch. Light, safe
| and cheap powersource does not exist
|
| Fossil fuels aren't a power source, they wre a power store -
| that power was collected and millions of years ago.
|
| Also 100% productivity on 25 years is quite good - what did
| combustion engines improve in that time, 5%?
| onychomys wrote:
| The 1997 F-150 made 220bhp and got 18mpg [0], while the
| 2022 F-150 makes 400bhp and 19mpg [1], so fusion is doing
| way better than that!
|
| (...i think i chose comparable trim levels to do that
| comparison, there are a stunning number of choices there!)
|
| [0] https://www.cars.com/research/ford-
| f_150-1997/specs/103719/ [1]
| https://www.edmunds.com/ford/f-150/2022/features-specs/
| brandall10 wrote:
| Mileage figures have little to do w/ max power. That
| mileage figure is roughly using the same actual power,
| which is a relative sip of fuel.
|
| The main difference would be in testing EPA methodology
| which which would be a bit more stringent/realistic to
| world use. On top of that, there likely is more rolling
| resistance at lower speed due to larger tires and heavier
| weight, offset somewhat by lower C/D at speed.
|
| Basically it's hard to extrapolate ICE efficiency
| gains... they're there are sure, but probably in the
| single or low double digits.
| nomel wrote:
| The real question would be, what's the fuel consumption
| for a given, sustained, bhp, for both? The mpg numbers
| are often pretty unrealistic. [-1]
|
| [-1] https://www.edmunds.com/fuel-economy/heres-why-real-
| world-mp...
| winrid wrote:
| The newer F150 also weighs more. Also, if it didn't have
| to make twice the power, it would probably get 40mpg
| today.
|
| ICE engines have advanced a lot in 20 years, especially
| in terms of cost per HP/MPG.
| hedora wrote:
| I don't understand why they can't just build a basic
| pickup truck any more.
|
| We had an old pre-fuel injected pickup. It had a bigger
| bed than the current truck, and seated six instead of
| five. It got 33% more miles to the gallon. The new one's
| transmission likes to overheat, even when not towing.
|
| Seriously, wtf?
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we put the massive
| amounts of money we have put into nuclear fusion and fission
| into bone simple solar panel purchases. I wonder if anyone
| has done the math.
|
| There's a fully functioning fusion reactor 91 million miles
| from us that sends a lot of energy our way.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| The levelized cost of large scale solar power is about 7
| cents per kilowatt-hour.
|
| ITER alone will cost $21B minimum and won't make power.
| DEMO will conservatively cost about the same, but let's be
| generous and round up the total "fusion research cost" to
| just $30B.
|
| That would buy about 1.5e18 joules, or around the same
| amount of energy as the electrical generation of the United
| States... for a month.
|
| So, a drop in the bucket compared to what we use
| globally...
|
| Even if you use much bigger numbers for fusion research and
| assume further solar power cost improvements, fusion might
| still be worth it.
|
| However, it'll only be worthwhile if the total cost the
| production fusion plants is not too high. If they end up
| costing $10B each then the whole thing will be a dead end
| economically.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I mean, if you don't invest in the speculative, how do you
| expect things to advance? Failure at any particular venture
| isn't a bad outcome.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| Fusion research is the ,,building a cathedral" of our times.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| As the article itself states: _In the words of my colleague Jon
| Amos: "Fusion is not a solution to get us to 2050 net zero. This
| is a solution to power society in the second half of this
| century."_
| civilized wrote:
| 2050 is coming sooner than any of us can imagine. I'm glad
| there are people looking out on that horizon!
| emteycz wrote:
| Yeah!
|
| But we need to go nuclear [fission] in the mean time... I
| can't imagine any other way that wouldn't devastate the
| environment excessively at the same time (e.g. river dams are
| bad IMHO).
| galvin wrote:
| Flamanville 3 in France was started in 2007 and is due to
| be launched in 2022. It's the first of its generation (in
| France at least) so the delays and cost overruns are not
| unexpected. Even so, if more are to be built they will not
| come into service until the mid 2030's at the earliest. I
| don't think we can wait that long.
| emteycz wrote:
| Well yeah, I think we should industrialize it, make
| nuclear fission reactors serial. I don't think what we're
| doing is sufficient either.
| mcv wrote:
| Even that is optimistic; they don't expect any net production
| of energy before 2055, and I doubt there's any guarantee that
| that will work, because if there was, they'd be trying that
| right now.
| belter wrote:
| This was a test to validate what will happen with ITER. ITER
| will really only start, by their own planning, that has been
| consistently delayed, only in 2035.
|
| They will start in 2025, then will stop for a few years then
| will really only start in 2035. ITER is a scientific
| experiment not the first commercial prototype.
|
| Assuming it succeeds you are looking at a procurement and
| construction process of 20 years for the first commercial
| prototype by 2060!
|
| At best, you will start constructing commercial power in 2060
| and making in impact in 2080. If its even commercially
| feasible and not an incredibly expensive toy.
|
| Fantastic achievements from the SPARC (MIT) project are not
| likely to impact this. Conclusion: Forget about Fusion as a
| solution to help with the current climate change emergency.
| The planet will be here, but Gaia will clean us up as
| parasitic extras, if we don't do something in the next 5 to
| 10 years.
|
| And no, you wont be allowed in the Belt.
| louwrentius wrote:
| Sorry for being like this but what I like most about that
| remark is the joyful optimism that there will be a society to
| power in the first place, and secondly one that can (still)
| build and operate such technology.
|
| Edit: maybe I'm needlessly pessimistic but I feel societies are
| much more fragile than they seem. We had it unreasonably good
| in 'the west' for the last 77 years but that time span is so
| short in the grander scheme of things, it gives a false sense
| of security.
|
| In some part, due to societal changes, schisms, injustices, the
| increasing distrust that eats at the foundation of society,
|
| At some point, there may be nothing worth left to power with
| nuclear fusion.
|
| Although I start to wonder if we should keep powering a lot of
| things in today's world. There is so much needless unnecessary
| madness going on.
| willis936 wrote:
| Why bet against society existing in 30 years? If you're right
| then you make money and if you're wrong then money is
| worthless.
|
| Replace money with "technology that sustains society".
| dylan604 wrote:
| Huh? It's only like 30 years off. They didn't say 2150 or
| something else further into the future. How bad do you think
| things are currently that 28 years from now, society will be
| totally shattered?
| benlumen wrote:
| You don't give it 28 years? In the early 2000s I was in the
| "fast crash" camp, too. Not anymore.
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| Are there any studies on what the world might look like in 50
| years, based on a reasonable, realistic projection of climate
| change, human change in behaviour etc etc?
|
| Just to be clear, I 100% believe in climate change, and do
| what I think is a fair amount to help (cycle as much as I
| can, don't take long haul flights, take train instead of
| short haul flights, drive EV, insulate house, don't eat much
| meat, Solar PV panels).
|
| BUT!
|
| I feel like humanity and the earth are way more fault-
| tolerant than the parent comment gives them credit for. I
| don't think we are going to see the total collapse of
| civilisation - far from it. But I would welcome any links on
| people/studies/groups who have theorised what might happen in
| a medium-case scenario?
| unilynx wrote:
| Don't worry, Earth is pretty fault tolerant. It will still
| be here long after we're gone
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Exactly this! I believe global warming can become an
| inconvenience but nothing totally off the scale compared to
| the problems we face today (and especially have faced in
| the past). If there is even a 1% chance of a nuclear war
| that would be much more devastating (even in expected
| value) than climate change. I actually have grown to fear
| the opposite: We come up with an efficient cycle to capture
| carbon (like the one to create starch that was all over the
| news some time ago) and suddenly it becomes a race to the
| bottom where we need international treaties so people are
| not sucking all the carbon from the atmosphere. I have no
| clue about chemistry whatsoever so I can hardly tell if
| this is plausible but if it is, it appears far more
| dangerous to me than a couple degrees in global warming.
| Simplicitas wrote:
| Ok .. let's pack it in, and kiss our tails goodbye then ..
| lol
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| It seems highly improbable we won't have society in 2050.
| We're currently in 2022, we've existed alongside nuclear
| weaponry for 75 years, I doubt the next 28 will see
| annihilation but I do dread the small chance (maybe 5-10%)?
|
| So other than nuclear apocalypse, I fail to see what could
| remove society by 2050? Climate Change's worst effects will
| not be seen by 2050, they'll be very bad but they won't
| destroy society in all places, just hamper its economy and
| lower societal living standards.
| Axien wrote:
| I noticed the waste output is helium. Does this fix the worldwide
| helium scarcity issue?
| gus_massa wrote:
| Let's make some back of the envelope calculation:
|
| * World electricity production: 25000TWh/year
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation
|
| * Energy per Helium atom: 17.6MeV
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterium%E2%80%93tritium_fusi...
|
| So per year (with a 100% efficiency [1]) you would produce as a
| side effect 25000TWh/17.6MeV ~= 3E31 Helium atoms.
|
| The Avogadro constant is 6,022E23 and that produces 22.4 liters
| of gas, so you get 1.2E9 liters, that is 1.2E6 cubic meters.
| Let's round that to 1 million cubic meters per year.
|
| The worldwide production of Helium is 140 million cubic meter
| per year https://www.statista.com/statistics/925214/helium-
| production...
|
| [1] A 100% efficiency is too optimistic. The second law and the
| nasty details of the real world reduce the efficiency a lot.
| Let me guess 50% from
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_conversion_efficiency#E...
| But this is good! If you waste half of the produced energy, you
| need the double of fusion plants, and that means the double of
| Helium balloons.
| willis936 wrote:
| This calculation was done on an HN thread a few years ago. I
| have not reviewed it recently.
|
| If all power generated right now was from D+T fusion, it
| would generate about 8.2% of the current helium consumption.
| We consume 153,596 TWh of thermal energy per year [1]. Each
| D+T reaction releases 17.59 MeV [2]. Multiply by the atomic
| mass of He4 and divide by Avogadro's number to get the mass
| of He4 produced per energy produced. Divide by the density of
| He4 at STP to get volume of He4 produced per second [3].
| Divide by the consumption of He4 to get the ratio of He4
| produced to He4 consumed [4].
|
| (153596 TWh / year) / (17.59 MeV) / (avogadro's number 1/mol)
| * (4.002602 g/mol) / (0.1786 g / liter) / (88 million m^3 /
| year)
|
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(153596+TWh+%2F+year)+.
| ..
|
| 1. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-and-changing-
| en...
|
| 2. http://hyperphysics.phy-
| astr.gsu.edu/hbase/NucEne/fusion.htm...
|
| 3. https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/gas-density-d_158.html
|
| 4.
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11053-017-9359-y
| _joel wrote:
| I thought they'd found masses of deposits recently?
| rnhmjoj wrote:
| No, fusion power plants will likely need helium to run: it's
| necessary to cool the magnetic coils. Unless there will be a
| breakthrough in room-temperature superconductivity, helium will
| still be needed and consumed (through leakages) at a faster
| rate than the fusion reactions can provide.
|
| source: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fusengdes.2013.01.059
| willis936 wrote:
| Even with hypothetical very high temperature superconductors
| we still want to run cryogenics to push the critical current
| higher. At some point mechanical stress would be the limiting
| factor but there is no path towards discovering such a
| miracle material. If one were to be discovered it would
| revolutionize our world.
|
| For the foreseeable, we use HTS materials, that _can_
| superconduct at LN2 temperatures, with helium.
| MertsA wrote:
| No, there's very little helium produced for the same reason
| that fusion generates massive amounts of energy from very tiny
| amounts of fuel. In fact there'd be more helium produced in the
| nuclear reactor generating the tritium than there would be in
| the fusion reactor burning it. Eventually commercial nuclear
| fusion reactors will generate their own tritium from a lithium
| blanket but for now that's all from fission reactors.
| vaylian wrote:
| No idea. But it would be absolutely awesome if we had another
| age of airships.
| danparsonson wrote:
| One thing's for sure - the scientists working there will all
| have really squeaky voices
| smm11 wrote:
| Hit men are on their way.
| spuz wrote:
| > The experiments produced 59 megajoules of energy over five
| seconds (11 megawatts of power).
|
| > This is more than double what was achieved in similar tests
| back in 1997.
|
| > It's not a massive energy output - only enough to boil about 60
| kettles' worth of water. But the significance is that it
| validates design choices that have been made for an even bigger
| fusion reactor now being constructed in France.
|
| I thought this was interesting as 59 megajoules of energy or 11
| megawatts of power seems more than you would need to boil 60
| kettles' of water. In fact, it takes 4,184 joules to raise the
| temperature of 1kg of water by 1 degree. Or 313800 joules to
| raise 1kg of water by 75 degrees. That means JET could have
| boiled about 188 kg of water.
| ginko wrote:
| >In fact, it takes 4,184 joules to raise the temperature of 1kg
| of water by 1 degree. Or 313800 joules to raise 1kg of water by
| 75 degrees. That means JET could have boiled about 188 kg of
| water.
|
| This is missing the heat of vaporization[1] needed to actually
| boil the water though, i.e. to turn 100C liquid water to 100C
| steam. That's another 2250kJ/kg on top of the 313.8kJ/kg you've
| mentioned.
|
| It's why steam is such a great carrier of energy for industrial
| applications.
|
| I guess you could argue that you wouldn't evaporate all water
| in the kettle, but then you do want a rolling boil. It's
| probably a bit up for discussion at which point you'd stop
| heating the kettle.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_vaporization
| [deleted]
| mannykannot wrote:
| > I guess you could argue that you wouldn't evaporate all
| water in the kettle...
|
| One does not have to argue for that interpretation - raising
| the temperature to boiling point, not boiling it dry, is
| indisputably the accepted and intended meaning of the phrase
| wherever English is spoken... though it would fit with a
| certain stereotype of scientists if a bunch of plasma
| physicists did not know how to make a pot of tea!
| GavinMcG wrote:
| It's entirely disputable _as evidenced by this
| conversation._
|
| It's also an incredible waste of time to argue over
| definitions. They're always disputable because they always
| arise in response to two people using a word differently.
| Maybe they're wrong and you're right, or maybe others also
| use the word that way--it doesn't matter. Humility and
| aiming at _mutual understanding_ is far more worthwhile.
| mannykannot wrote:
| This issue is indeed trivial, but I don't know how, in
| general, we are going to achieve mutual understanding
| without establishing an agreed-upon semantics.
| AitchEmArsey wrote:
| Start by assuming a spherical teapot in a vacuum...
| causi wrote:
| _indisputably the accepted and intended meaning of the
| phrase wherever English is spoken_
|
| Not exactly. In American English "bring a pot to a boil" is
| much more common. When I read "enough energy to boil 60
| kettles of water" I thought "vaporize".
| chucksmash wrote:
| > Not exactly. In American English "bring a pot to a
| boil" is much more common. When I read "enough energy to
| boil 60 kettles of water" I thought "vaporize".
|
| Disagree that this is a) a much more common phrasing or
| b) that your interpretation would be the common one. I've
| yet to run into a situation where somebody asked me to
| "boil some water" and intended for me to vaporize all the
| water in some vessel.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Point taken - I can't dispute the fact that you read it
| this way!
| gandalfian wrote:
| Well my kettle is 3kw and takes about 2 minutes to boil so
| about 200 of my kettles... BUT they don't say how big the
| kettle is or how much water it contains so it could be 60 BBC
| kettles. I bet they drink a lot of tea...
| Nitrolo wrote:
| That calculation is correct if you assume that by "boil water"
| they mean to bring the water to 100degC (which is what you'd
| use a kettle for usually).
|
| However to go from liquid water to water vapor you need to add
| even more energy [0]. The enthalpy of vaporization for water is
| 2257 kJ/kg, it takes much more energy to boil water at 100degC
| than it takes to get there from room temperature.
|
| Warming by 75 degrees + boiling = 2570 kJ/kg -> enough to boil
| 23 liters of water
|
| I'm guessing in reality the energy needed to operate the
| kettles would lie somewhere in between, as a small part of the
| water will be boiled and most of it kept around 100degC. For 2L
| kettles the value seems in the right ballpark.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_vaporization
| WithinReason wrote:
| 3L kettles I guess
| yaniqt wrote:
| Is it possible they subtracted the energy required to
| facilitate the reaction in the first place? So net energy was
| enough to boil 60 kettles worth of water?
| NextHendrix wrote:
| "At Jet, two 500 megawatt flywheels are used to run the
| experiments."
|
| So net power is -989MW, assuming both flywheels are at full
| pelt the whole time and no power is required before fusion is
| acheived.
| willis936 wrote:
| Those are used for the confinement coils. Incredibly, JET
| uses copper coils. You can't run those all day, so the
| flywheels are used. The last machine I worked at worked the
| same way. 16 train motors with 1 ton flywheels spinning at
| 1600 RPM to be an 11 MW power supply for 1 second every few
| minutes.
|
| Plasma heating in JET is done via NBI+ICRH and is about 59
| MW.
| azalemeth wrote:
| I've seen those copper busbars -- they drill holes for
| water throughout them. The whole design of high-B field
| environments is fascinating; you end up with things like
| Bitte designs with split rings and a whole lot of
| engineering to stop the copper vapourising. Highly
| recommended if you're ever in the area - they do two
| sorts of tours (or did, prior to covid), the "general
| public" tour and the "scientist" tour. I went on the
| latter. The sight of two giant robotic arms playing Jenga
| to train their operators is not one to forget.
| willis936 wrote:
| I should visit JET sometime. Of all the systems on the
| machine I worked on (https://hsx.wisc.edu/), the coil
| current feeds were the most difficult. Trying to cram
| that much current through a small piece of copper with a
| discontinuity takes years of effort.
| varjag wrote:
| That would be a fusion breakthrough worth mentioning on its
| own.
| samwillis wrote:
| > That means JET could have boiled about 188 kg of water.
|
| > only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water
|
| Exactly, no one has 3l kettles, but it's the right ballpark.
| You could also run about 9k kettles for that 5 seconds but not
| boil them, and if you tried to run 60 kettles consuming all
| that power for 5 seconds you would have quite the fire...
| bencollier49 wrote:
| > no one has 3l kettles
|
| I have! Duckduckgo it.
| samwillis wrote:
| Yep, just checked mine and its 3l, oops.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| Of course this is great news, however, it is worth taking into
| account it took them 25 years just to double the energy output.
| They are also nowhere near long sustained operation of such
| reactors. It really requires an order of magnitude increase
| before nuclear fusion becomes a realistic prospect in two
| decades.
|
| I understand this just to validate design choices and it is a
| good step forward. However, it doesn't make nuclear fusion a
| reality in two decades unless further records are set using
| this design
| willis936 wrote:
| JET ran its moonshot campaign 25 years ago. Moonshot as in
| "we don't care if the machine runs again", for whatever
| reason. It hasn't been funded for nuclear operations since
| then. It's not that it took 25 years to make progress. It
| took 25 years to find funding.
| kristaps wrote:
| From the article I gathered that this run was mostly about
| validating some design choices for ITER, not about pushing
| output limits.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| Yes in that sense it is a great achievement, however, it
| only put us a tiny baby step closer to fusion power.
| jopsen wrote:
| When discussing nuclear power plants we can all debate aspects
| of the bikeshed.
|
| When discussing fusion power, we can all debate how many
| kettles we can boil.
|
| Kind of funny :)
| [deleted]
| ourmandave wrote:
| _But the significance is that it validates design choices that
| have been made for an even bigger fusion reactor now being
| constructed in France._
|
| They already started construction on a larger one? What if it
| had invalidated design choices?
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| > What if it had invalidated design choices?
|
| The government money was already allocated and even the
| government can't unring that bell!
| remus wrote:
| Presumably they feel like the major design choices at ITER
| have already been validated and this experiment validates
| some more minor design choices.
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| So are they still using a steam engine to generate the
| electricity? Will the design of the steam engine working with
| this reactor be revolutionary?
| elihu wrote:
| Probably not. Steam turbines are a pretty mature technology,
| though I suppose you'd want to use the most efficient kind of
| turbine available if energy output isn't overwhelmingly bigger
| than energy input.
|
| edit: since JET is used for research rather than practical
| power generation, they might not have a steam turbine at all. I
| was thinking more of the scenario where they're past the
| research phase and actually doing power generation.
| baryphonic wrote:
| > The fusion announcement is great news but sadly it won't help
| in our battle to lessen the effects of climate change.
|
| > There's huge uncertainty about when fusion power will be ready
| for commercialisation. One estimate suggests maybe 20 years. Then
| fusion would need to scale up, which would mean a delay of
| perhaps another few decades.
|
| > And here's the problem: the need for carbon-free energy is
| urgent - and the government has pledged that all electricity in
| the UK must be zero emissions by 2035. That means nuclear,
| renewables and energy storage.
|
| > In the words of my colleague Jon Amos: "Fusion is not a
| solution to get us to 2050 net zero. This is a solution to power
| society in the second half of this century."
|
| Between promising results like this, the Wendelstein-7X (which
| sadly seems to have been delayed by COVID), and then the
| exceptionally exciting CFS in Massachusetts, I have a sense that
| we're making real progress toward fusion for the first time in a
| few decades. Doom and gloom won't do anything to increase
| investment in fusion that is beginning to look like a reasonable
| bet.
| adg001 wrote:
| The title is unfair in suggesting this is a result coming from
| Oxford institutions alone. As correctly put in the EUROfusion
| official press release, the EUROfusion consortium comprises
| "4,800 experts, students and staff from across Europe, co-funded
| by the European Commission".
|
| Edited to add the link (now on HN front page): https://www.euro-
| fusion.org/news/2022/european-researchers-a...
| j245 wrote:
| Oxford is also a geographical location. So it could be
| interpreted as, Research lab in town of Oxford.
| rahen wrote:
| Yes, additionally JET stands for Joint European Torus, it's not
| British.
|
| The title is as misleading as calling ITER French because it's
| located in France.
| dang wrote:
| We've edited the title to match the article now. Not sure if
| the submitted title ("Oxford's JET lab smashes nuclear fusion
| energy output record") was the BBC's and they've corrected it,
| or was editorializing by the submitter (which isn't allowed on
| HN - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
| fusionbro wrote:
| This has been by far the most informative source on Fusion I've
| seen and gives a clear picture on how to evaluate claims like
| this.
|
| MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy (IAP 2017) - Zach Hartwig
|
| https://youtu.be/L0KuAx1COEk
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| I believe this is the original/primary source for this news. Can
| someone confirm?
| mklarmann wrote:
| According to Wikipedia (German) the Wendelstein 7-X already did
| 150 mega joules of "sustained fusion" [1]. So how is this record
| breaking?
|
| [1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X
| danbruc wrote:
| Wendelstein 7-X is for plasma science, it is not intended to
| fuse anything.
| freeflight wrote:
| _> though this experimental reactor will not produce
| electricity, it is used to evaluate the main components of a
| future fusion power plant_
| danbruc wrote:
| And you can evaluate fusion reactor components without
| fusing anything. Or are you disagreeing because I
| summarized it with the term plasma science? In that case, I
| was not really happy with the term either but could not
| come up with anything better. My point however is that
| Wendelstein 7-X is not intended to fuse anything, not to
| precisely describe the nature and goals of the experiments.
|
| Google translation of the beginning of the
| Strahlenschutzaspekte (radiation protection concerns)
| section from the German Wikipedia article [1]. There will
| only be a tiny bit of accidental fusion.
|
| _Wendelstein 7-X only examines plasmas made of hydrogen
| (H) or deuterium (D), so it does not use a mixture of
| deuterium and tritium, as is necessary for later fusion
| reactors. The omission of this reduces the release of
| neutrons and enables access to the facility and the
| surrounding instruments immediately after the end of each
| experiment. This facilitates modifications for subsequent
| experiments. During operation, however, access to the torus
| hall is generally not possible for safety reasons (danger
| of voltage flashovers, stored energy in the magnetic
| fields).
|
| Hydrogen is provided as the working gas for normal
| operation. In addition, experiments with deuterium are to
| be carried out in order to extrapolate the properties of a
| plasma mixture of deuterium and tritium. Fusion reactions
| between deuterium nuclei, in which neutrons are released,
| can occur to a small extent. To shield them, the torus hall
| is surrounded by a 1.8 m thick wall made of borated
| concrete._
|
| [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X#Strahlens
| chutz...
| willis936 wrote:
| That's the energy into the plasma. W7-X plasma did not produce
| any energy because it was not using nuclear fuel. Don't
| despair! W7-X is an incredible machine and Germany and IPP
| should be proud of their achievement. The ECRH system is awe-
| inspiring and the sheer length and power of the pulses is
| unmatched by any MCF machine on the planet.
|
| Until recently no MCF device on Earth was nuclear. Today's
| headline is the return of JET's nuclear operations.
|
| There are dozens of MCF machines operating right now and only
| one is nuclear. That means Q as a metric is only useful for one
| machine. Something to think about when people toss around
| Q-related rhetoric around here.
| ck2 wrote:
| I've always wondered, can fusion be weaponized like fission?
|
| Because if so, that's the first thing governments are going to do
| with it, not free/cheap power for the masses.
| xondono wrote:
| Nuclear fusion bombs are old tech, fission research is about
| getting fusion without requiring detonating a fission bomb
| first.
|
| Even if that wasn't the case, why would they? Once you can kill
| the whole planet, there's no extra points for killing it
| _multiple times over_.
| [deleted]
| rland wrote:
| It has been. "Hydrogen" bombs are fusion bombs, they were
| invented in the 50s.
| formvoltron wrote:
| OK so with fusion everybody loves it because the fuel would be
| clean and nearly endless.
|
| Isn't that what solar power offers?
|
| Nobody wants to deploy solar due to high upfront cost. However,
| wouldn't the startup on a fusion reactor be much greater?
| legutierr wrote:
| A fusion reactor can conceivably provide a continuous,
| uninterrupted stream of energy, and from any location, while
| solar (and wind) energy can only be harvested intermittently,
| from certain specific locations.
|
| The main issues with renewable energy sources today are
| electricity storage and transmission. If it weren't for these
| limitations, wind and solar would already be superior to other
| means of energy production.
|
| Most likely problems with storage and transmission will be
| solved first, before fusion energy is proven to be commercially
| viable. However, there is no guarantee that they will be--
| especially in the case of transmission, which is primarily a
| political problem.
| knapcio wrote:
| I remember that early this autumn Sweden had to borrow energy
| from other countries because it relied too much on renewables
| which turned out to be unstable.
| Archelaos wrote:
| The electricity import and export of individual countries
| fluctuates constantly. A nice map with live data can be found
| here: https://app.electricitymap.org/map (in German).
|
| Dealing with the instability of solar and wind energy is very
| complex and requires numerous measures, such as better
| integration of wide-area electricity grids, more electricity
| storage, more generation reserves, etc.
|
| But even nuclear power generation is dependent on the
| weather. During heat waves, nuclear power plants located on
| rivers in Germany and France repeatedly had to shut down
| because there was not enough cooling water available or the
| water in the rivers would otherwise have become too warm.[1]
| During cold spells, nuclear power plants had sometimes to be
| shut down because the supply of cooling water was no longer
| guaranteed due to ice.[2]
|
| [1] For example: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-
| electricity-heatwa...
|
| [2] For example: https://fortune.com/2019/01/31/ice-shutdown-
| new-jersey-nucle...
| [deleted]
| FredPret wrote:
| Solar is using the fusion generator in the sky, which is out of
| view half the time and obscured by clouds some other times.
|
| Fusion is having our own little portable sun that can be
| utilized more efficiently.
| tithonus wrote:
| The basic problem is energy storage. If your not talking
| gigawatt-days then it's not feasible and most storage currently
| is megawatt-hours... i.e. because you need to store energy made
| during the day to use at night, to make solar power realistic
| you need a way to store huge amounts energy. BTW: The England
| power grid is about 30 GW. So 1 GW-day is just shy of an hour
| of demand.
| babypuncher wrote:
| A fusion reactor works at night, and could produce considerably
| more energy per square foot of land area than photovoltaics.
| ajuc wrote:
| The problem with solar is unpredictability and A LOT of
| batteries needed to bridge the mismatch between production
| peaking at noon and consumption peaking at late evening.
|
| Both of these are solved with fusion power.
|
| Energy market operates on the assumption that whoever
| unbalances the network has to pay for balancing it. Providing
| too much and too little energy is both bad - you have to pay
| someone else to use more/less or to produce less/more to
| balance the mess you made. There are specialized powerplants
| for this, they are "on standby" and jump in when needed - and
| they charge much more than the normal powerplants. When there's
| a big shortage they can charge absurd prices for energy. And if
| you caused the shortage by mispredicting weather - you have to
| pay for it.
|
| This makes the energy provided by solar panels much less
| valuable than the energy provided by a predictable,
| controllable source. Often by 1:10 factor.
| st3ve445678 wrote:
| But if we as a society decided to put a large investment into
| solar and had that augmenting the grid, you should be able to
| dramatically reduce the amount of fossil fuels used to
| produce our daily energy, thus slowing climate change.
| Imagine if we could cut fossil fuel energy by 40-50% and rely
| more heavily on solar/wind. Fusion may not be available for
| another 40 years and who knows what the environment situation
| will be then so we should probably be looking to leverage any
| clean sources that are available right now.
| Joeri wrote:
| But nuclear power is also not predictable, as plants
| regularly experience unexpected downtime. No power source is
| fully predictable, which is why you need controllable power
| sources to make up the difference.
|
| I would say solar's problem is controllability. You can only
| turn it up to the limit of the amount of sun received, which
| is none at night, and sometimes very little in the day.
|
| It remains to be seen how controllable fusion power will be.
| Will it be for base load only, or will it also be useful to
| flexibly dial up and down for variable load? Much of current
| nuclear power is base load only. Clean base load power is
| still super useful, but it is not a complete solution.
| ajuc wrote:
| Yes, unexpected stuff happen to baseload powerplants too.
| Once every year on average maybe? Probably less. If that
| happens you may need to pay for balancing once a year.
|
| Meanwhile solar is unexpected on the scale of minutes to
| hours, every day. It's not the same.
| chess_buster wrote:
| No its not. https://www.energymeteo.com/products/power_fo
| recasts/wind-so...
| [deleted]
| fvold wrote:
| The thing is, a commercial-scale fusion reactor could produce
| the same energy as a truly vast solar array, and also produces
| power at night, does not need to be exposed to wind and rain to
| operate and can be scaled directly instead of with costly
| battery arrays.
|
| Solar has the upside of actually producing a power surplus
| already, though.
| ComradePhil wrote:
| No. Fusion is completely different from solar. It can provide
| steady energy without going down for years. Solar goes down
| multiple times a day.
| dymk wrote:
| Name a single fusion plant that has been running
| uninterrupted for years.
|
| Meanwhile Australia has retooled for 10% Solar and batteries
| in a matter of years, that number is rapidly increasing, and
| is turning off their coal plants.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Name a single fusion plant that has been running
| uninterrupted for years.
|
| Minutes, even. Perhaps you meant fission?
| dymk wrote:
| No, I mean fusion. The parent comment claims "[Fusion
| can] provide steady energy without going down for years".
| I want a single example of this.
|
| Meanwhile, we have massive grids of solar and battery
| being installed _today_, and existing installations
| replacing coal plants.
|
| I'm tired of people talking about fusion (or even
| nuclear, as it's so mired in public FUD) as if it's some
| panacea. We have a solution right now: Solar and
| batteries. It works in places with cloudcover. It works
| in cold and hot climates. It works at night. It's getting
| cheaper every year.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| We haven't invented commercial fusion power, so none; but
| theoretically that is how they would function.
|
| Solar and batteries are nice but they're not yet cost
| effective. They're getting better. But you can't just
| handwave away real problems from your armchair viewpoint
| and assume thats all fine.
| dymk wrote:
| > They're getting better.
|
| Solar is getting so much cheaper, at such a fast pace,
| that I really don't understand how one can disagree that
| it's the future of our energy grids. Installing solar is
| a no-brainer in some parts of the world now, and in the
| very near future (extrapolating from the last 10 years),
| it'll be every part of the world soon.
|
| What problems am I hand waving away?
|
| https://www.statista.com/chart/26085/price-per-megawatt-
| hour...
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Solar is, without a doubt, a major part of future energy
| grids.
|
| But this chart is the levelized cost of energy. Its not
| the price at which you can get it. Energy demands are
| higher in winter. They are non trivial at night. The cost
| of energy might be low, but the price at which you can
| get it may be very high if not enough is available.
| 1_player wrote:
| I don't get why you and many other commenters are so
| against the idea of fusion. Solar is decent, not perfect
| by any stretch, so we should just give up trying to solve
| the energy technology for the next 200 years? It's not
| even like it's one or the other. No one is abandoning
| solar to work on fusion. But fusion, if it works, is
| orders of magnitudes more efficient than solar is. It
| opens avenues that are considered impossible and science
| fiction today.
|
| It's like being back in the 1700s and arguing that
| research into petrol is a waste of time. I absolutely do
| not understand this mindset.
| dymk wrote:
| I'm not against fusion, there just is simply no viable
| fusion power that can be built today. It's not going to
| get here fast enough. We need to adopt renewables
| yesterday. There is no time to be wasted pretending that
| fusion provides any value aside from starry eyed
| theoretical aspiration.
|
| We will not be here in 200 years to enjoy fusion if we
| don't adopt solar and battery _right now_.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > We haven't invented commercial fusion power
|
| We don't have working fusion power, at all.
|
| > Solar and batteries are nice but they're not yet cost
| effective
|
| "Cost effective" is a judgement call, not physics. If I
| told you that the cost of coal-generated electricity was
| that your great-grandchildren would live in an
| impoverished and difficult world, you might not view that
| a particular cost-effective either, yet somehow that's
| the "standard" against which things are judged.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > We don't have working fusion power, at all.
|
| Sure we do. Look no further than this article. We can
| make it, but its not commercially viable.
|
| > "Cost effective" is a judgement call, not physics. If I
| told you that the cost of coal-generated electricity was
| that your great-grandchildren would live in an
| impoverished and difficult world, you might not view that
| a particular cost-effective either, yet somehow that's
| the "standard" against which things are judged.
|
| Ah yes, think of the children.
|
| Yes, coal is problematic, but the reality is that energy
| is expensive and we need a lot of it. If we tried to go
| full solar right now it would cost trillions of dollars,
| and the grid would still fail in the winter when heating
| is most important, and the economy would enter a massive
| depression as the cost of doing things gets both more
| expensive on average and extremely volatile.
|
| You say this is a judgement call, not physics, but then
| go on to just broadly make assumptions about all of the
| relevant facts. You're not the one being logical and fact
| based. You're the one observing, yes, we have a climate
| crisis, and thus assuming that a radical solution for
| which you have no particular understanding of the
| economic or infrastructure implications is the right one
| because it's at least different from what we have now.
|
| Renewables are good. They are getting cheaper. They're
| growing in capacity. And yet, I guarantee you, we cannot
| go full solar now. And I also guarantee that you do not
| have nearly sufficient of a view of the system dynamics
| to be making statements as bold as you are. This is hard.
| It's not just evil greedy coal mine operators ruining
| everything.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Sure we do. Look no further than this article. We can
| make it, but its not commercially viable.
|
| Q total is way below 1 (translation: it took far more
| energy to make the energy that was produced, than was
| produced). We do not have working fusion power, if
| "working fusion power" means "you get more out than you
| put in".
|
| As for the rest of this, I have no idea who you think
| you're replying to. Just one follow up, neverthless:
|
| > And yet, I guarantee you, we cannot go full solar now.
|
| The USA spent more than US$300M _per day_ on the war in
| Afghanistan, for 20 years. I guarantee you that if "we
| wanted to go full solar" now, we could. US$2T buys you a
| lot of anything, including even today's vaguely clunky
| battery tech.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > Q total is way below 1 (translation: it took far more
| energy to make the energy that was produced, than was
| produced). We do not have working fusion power, if
| "working fusion power" means "you get more out than you
| put in".
|
| That's not what it means. Working means it works. Can you
| produce fusion power? Yes. Can you do so in a
| commercially viable way? No. Q is obviously a part of
| this. Uninteresting semantics.
|
| > The USA spent more than US$300M per day on the war in
| Afghanistan, for 20 years. I guarantee you that if "we
| wanted to go full solar" now, we could. US$2T buys you a
| lot of anything, including even today's vaguely clunky
| battery tech.
|
| And I'm telling you, no, we could not, because that's not
| how the world works. From many perspectives, including
| economics of how to actually acquire all these solar
| assets many of which are already being consumed as fast
| as produced and dependent on limited metals supply
| chains; land availability with reasonable transmission
| setups; grid capacity to absorb these new generation
| facilities on the transmission lines; power availability
| during non peak times; and the preposterous externalities
| of trying to rapidly undermine the global energy market.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Can you produce fusion power? Yes
|
| If it takes more than 1W of input power to produce 1W of
| power from fusion, then I'd say the answer is no. The
| distinction is not "commercially viable", it's "net
| energy production". We're not there yet (and are actually
| quite a lot way from it).
|
| > And I'm telling you,
|
| ... that US$2T is a lot of money, and that's just what we
| spent on 1 war. Yes, there would be complications and
| side effects and what have you. Money, in our system,
| combined with the other abilities of the federal
| government, can do a lot.
| ComradePhil wrote:
| It _can_ do that if they manage to make it work as planned
|
| Solar, even under ideal conditions, needs backup and much
| more manpower and management to make it work... and even
| then, it is not reliable.
|
| So, solar is not a replacement for fusion, or nuclear or
| coal for that matter. It is great for supplementation
| though.
| kimbernator wrote:
| the sun
| dymk wrote:
| This is a great example, we should try to make use of all
| that sun (is there another word for that?) energy!
| kimbernator wrote:
| Obviously, it is a bit silly to point to the sun and say
| it's a successful fusion reactor in a discussion meant to
| refute solar's usefulness. Despite that, it is an example
| of the principles of fusion working quite reliably, and
| it should stand to reason that having smaller sun-like
| power sources would be preferable to relying on a single
| fusion reactor that's only available half of the time.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Solar panel manufacturing and disposal is far from clean
| though.
| elric wrote:
| And you think this is going to be any different for fusion
| plants?
| gtirloni wrote:
| You seem to think it's not going to be any different (or
| maybe even worse). Could you elaborate?
| okuntilnow wrote:
| Solar takes up quite a lot of space, but most importantly only
| works for a portion of a 24 hour cycle.
| vcdimension wrote:
| The Chinese & Japanese governments are investing in space
| based solar which solves the nighttime problem:
| https://wonderfulengineering.com/china-is-aiming-to-
| build-a-... https://nextrendsasia.org/japan-pioneer-of-
| transferring-sola...
|
| But we really need more energy storage, and there are plenty
| of good ideas in this area too: better batteries, gravity
| bases systems, crowd sourced storage, etc.
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| Ideas are great however even a small country like the
| Netherlands is looking at a trillion EUR bill to switch to
| 100% renewable by 2050.
| thothamon wrote:
| I don't know much about the physics, but it seems like
| you'd want square miles of solar panels, even in space, and
| then there's the problem of getting that energy back to
| earth. On the other hand, in space you'd get a lot of light
| frequencies that are rarer on Earth. It's not clear to me
| if those could be harnessed somehow. Regardless, it's a
| creative idea.
| cnasc wrote:
| Imagine you live in a smallish, not-so-sunny country like the
| UK. How much of your land area do you have to cover with solar
| panels in order to completely rid the nation of fossil fuels?
| ajuc wrote:
| Fun fact - solar energy production over a year only differs
| by a factor of 4 between worst and best reasonably inhabited
| places.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Another fun fact. When I installed my PV array, I got the
| alignment of one of them wrong by 1 degree (from due
| south). I looked up how much power I lost from this mistake
| ... not much, about 1%. Then I used the same tool to check
| what would have happened if I had installed them facing due
| north. To my surprise: only 15% less power!
| spuz wrote:
| Apparently, about 12% of the land or 29,690 sq km in order to
| meet current energy demands (electricity, petrol, oil and
| gas). Apparently, only 6% of the country is currently built
| on which suggests that for any country of a similar latitude,
| you can estimate a land total of double that currently used
| per person. This does not take into account energy storage
| and assumes no energy is generated at night.
|
| https://www.finder.com/uk/solar-power-potential
| rlt wrote:
| Of course that 6% only counts land usage by _humans_. How
| many (additional) non-human habitats would you have to
| decimate to cover 12% of the land with (ugly) solar panels?
|
| Maybe thats acceptable in some deserts, but pretty terrible
| in other places. 1 step forward, 1 step back.
|
| Plus that figure is for our _current_ energy usage, which
| is only going to increase over time.
| [deleted]
| kimbernator wrote:
| Solar comes with a lot of challenges for large-scale usage as a
| replacement for coal, nuclear, etc. Really, the only thing
| better about solar at the moment is that it is available.
|
| First off, the daylight cycle is an obvious concern and there
| still isn't a great way to store solar energy during the day
| for use by cities (or generally large consumers) at night. Not
| to say it's not possible, but people are largely still trying
| to figure out what the right solution for that is.
|
| Second, the startup requires a significant amount of land in
| advantageous locations for sunlight. There's a lot of the
| planet that just won't see the same advantages as others, and
| transporting energy long distances to them is another unsolved
| problem.
|
| Lastly, and this is more for fun, but solar won't be as useful
| when we as a species aren't exclusively on earth anymore.
| Fusion would be a pretty nice step forward for things like
| space travel.
|
| Both have a really high startup, but achieving fusion would
| mean 24/7 clean energy that works regardless of environment.
| gtsop wrote:
| > First off, the daylight cycle is an obvious concern and
| there still isn't a great way to store solar energy during
| the day for use by cities (or generally large consumers) at
| night. Not to say it's not possible, but people are largely
| still trying to figure out what the right solution for that
| is.
|
| Not a concern at all. Google renewable energy storage. It is
| there but there is profit merit, so it is not welcome
| kimbernator wrote:
| Could you just be more specific about the storage method
| you're hoping I'll find on google? I know that there are a
| number of "viable" options for massive population centers
| in theory (or even in limited use today), but to call it a
| solved problem is, to my knowledge, incorrect
| belorn wrote:
| An other large drawback with solar is the required latitude.
| The further north it gets the fewer hours of sun light, and
| the energy you get is lower from the lower angle of attack.
| At the same time the energy needed for heating goes up during
| winter.
|
| Solar makes great sense for places where energy consumption
| is higher during the summer than during winter.
| fragmede wrote:
| Pedantically, both are fusion, one's just 1 AU away.
| fvold wrote:
| For the past 50 years, commercial fusion power has been only a
| decade away. Now it's only a decade away _for sure_!
| reacharavindh wrote:
| As an uneducated observer to nuclear physics, I could not tell
| the significance of this achievement. Did we finally learn how to
| extract more energy from a fusion rector than we supplied to
| operate it? Could anyone more in the know here explain in simpler
| and more practical terms please?
| arlort wrote:
| > Results fully in line with predictions, strengthening the
| case for ITER
|
| This is the main take away for me, JET is not a standalone
| project, it's part of the whole ITER project which is supposed
| to go like this:
|
| + JET as a scaled down model provides testing and data for +
| ITER which I believe is a full scale model and is supposed to
| generate net gain (heat in vs heat out, not net electricity)
| and provide information to + DEMO which is supposed to produce
| net electricity (though not at market rate costs)
|
| So the fact that it worked as predicted is a good sign (or at
| least as good as we can get) that ITER will work which will be
| a good sign for DEMO etc
|
| Also not an expert though
| regularfry wrote:
| The energy generated is a _small_ red herring here.
|
| For a long time one of the hardest problems in fusion reactor
| design is what the hell you make it out of. The big win here is
| that they replaced the walls of the reactor with a new alloy,
| and it worked according to what theory predicted, which gives
| them the green light for using that material in ITER.
|
| To simplify a little (ok, a lot) there are two big materials
| problems inside the reactor. The first is the walls: you need
| something that's going to survive the temperatures, not disturb
| the reaction, and not get too radioactive in the process. They
| previously used carbon, which isn't great: it gets radioactive
| because it absorbs tritium, which is in the fuel. This
| experiment used a beryllium alloy, which doesn't absorb nearly
| as much, and worked, validating the material choice for ITER.
|
| The second problem is to do with the exhaust. You need to get
| hot plasma out of the chamber without disturbing the ongoing
| reaction, and with a tokamak that means ridiculously energetic
| particles hitting a solid divertor. Again, the problem here is
| what materials you might come up with that stand a chance of
| surviving useful operational periods. ITER is currently planned
| to use beryllium walls and a tungsten divertor, but I don't
| know what JET's divertor is made of at the moment to know
| whether this experiment will have informed whether tungsten is
| a good enough choice.
|
| What all this means is that there's one less thing on the "ITER
| might fail because of..." list.
| lisper wrote:
| > Did we finally learn how to extract more energy from a fusion
| rector than we supplied to operate it?
|
| No.
|
| > Could anyone more in the know here explain in simpler and
| more practical terms please?
|
| It's impossible to tell because the story is incoherent. The
| central claim is that they "release[d] a record 59 megajoules
| of sustained fusion energy" but this makes no sense. One can
| talk about sustained _power_ (over a period of time) but
| "sustained _energy_ " is a category error because energy is
| just power integrated over time. You can get 59 megajoules out
| of your wall socket if you wait long enough.
|
| They apparently did _something_ that had never been done
| before, but there 's no way to tell exactly what that was from
| what is written in this story.
|
| (This kind of obfuscation is not unusual in fusion research. A
| cynic might argue that this is because if they were clear about
| the actual state of things their funding would cease.)
| Rygian wrote:
| > You can get 59 megajoules out of your wall socket if you
| wait long enough.
|
| Assuming a French wall socket, 240 V at 13 amps, and a pure
| resistive load, that will take $ units
| Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on
| 2020-11-15 3677 units, 109 prefixes, 114 nonlinear
| units You have: 59 MJ You want: (240 V *
| 13 A) * s * 18910.256 /
| 5.2881356e-05 You have: 18910.256 s You want: hms
| 5 hr + 15 min + 10.256 sec
|
| which helps put the figure in perspective.
| SamBam wrote:
| I don't believe that this is entirely mis-stated.
|
| We already know that fusion power plants are going to operate
| by igniting plasma in short bursts -- a few seconds, maybe
| 10s at most -- and generating a huge amount of power during
| that single burst. You then ignite it again and again.
|
| The question is how much total energy you can extract from
| each of those bursts. By that metric, the total energy _is_
| what 's important, not the power. Producing 10 quadrillion
| watts of power isn't that useful if it's only for 100
| trillionths of a second. (Both numbers pulled from an actual
| recent result last August. [1])
|
| "59 megajoules of sustained fusion energy" means a single
| burst produced that much. That's significantly more than the
| paltry 1.3MJ from that other result I just linked to.
|
| Yes, of course you could get that much from a wall socket
| over the course of hours, but we know we haven't been able to
| sustain a fusion reaction for a few seconds, so that's the
| timeframe we're talking about for a single burst.
|
| 1. https://www.livescience.com/fusion-experiment-record-
| breakin...
|
| EDIT: And, at the bottom of the article it says that the
| reaction ran at 11MW, so plugging that in it sounds like,
| indeed, it ran for 5 seconds.
| robbomacrae wrote:
| Your description made me wonder if it would be possible to
| make an ICE to extract the power. I then found a paper
| called Fusion Internal Combustion Engine from 2010 [0].
| Does anyone know if there was any merit to this idea and if
| anything else has come of it since?
|
| 0: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/215544178_Fusio
| n_In...
| lisper wrote:
| A few elementary calculations reveal how feasible this
| might be. A typical ICE produces a few hundred horsepower
| using 4-8 cylinders rotating at a few thousand RPM. 1 HP
| = 745 watts. Figure out how much energy is released per
| cylinder on each cycle, and compare that to the energy
| released in a typical fusion ignition. Also note the
| cycle time of an ICE rotating at a few thousand RPMs, and
| compare that to the cycle time of a current state-of-the-
| art fusion reactor. (Hint: the former is measured in
| milliseconds, the latter currently in months if not
| years.)
| robbomacrae wrote:
| I'm a layman and so its possible I am missing some
| limiting factors but I do feel as though this rebuttal
| does not take into account the possible ranges of values
| that can be configured when tweaking things like scale
| and operating speed. For example the Wartsila-Sulzer
| RTA96-C operates at 15-102 RPM generating 100,000 HP (or
| 74.5 megawatts for your comparison) [0].
|
| Nor does it take into account the difference between a
| prototype investigation being constantly modified for
| experimentation and analysis and a production system
| built to purpose.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%A4rtsil%C3%A4-Sulze
| r_RTA9...
| lisper wrote:
| Yes, I probably should have used numbers from a large
| diesel rather than an automobile engine. Wow, the
| Wartsila-Sulzer RTA96-C operates at speeds as low as 15
| RPM! That is just mind-boggling. I found this video:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXHvY-zY9hA
|
| Still, I think you will find that even this doesn't help
| all that much. A cycle time measured in seconds rather
| than milliseconds is still orders of magnitude away from
| what can presently be achieved.
|
| > the difference between a prototype investigation being
| constantly modified for experimentation and analysis and
| a production system built to purpose.
|
| AFAICT, no one has ever built an ICE that is within even
| an order of magnitude of realistic operating parameters
| of a fusion ICE. It's a whole 'nuther level of
| engineering challenge beyond just getting the fusion
| itself to work. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'll
| give you long odds against seeing it happen in any of our
| lifetimes.
| lisper wrote:
| > "59 megajoules of sustained fusion energy" means a single
| burst produced that much.
|
| In what sense is that "sustained"? A typical power plant
| produces that much energy in less than a second on a
| continuous (i.e. sustained) basis. Producing 59 megajoules
| _once_ is basically a joke. It is analogous to detonating a
| pipe bomb (at a cost of several billion dollars) and
| claiming that as significant progress towards an internal
| combustion engine.
| rat9988 wrote:
| > A typical power plant
|
| Fusion power plant aren't typical though
| lisper wrote:
| Yes, that is exactly the problem. If they are ever going
| to be commercially viable they need to _become_ typical.
| 59MJ per cycle isn 't going to do you a lot of good if a
| cycle time is measured in months as is currently the
| case. You have to get that cycle time down to fractions
| of a second at this energy level before you even have a
| chance at commercial viability. 59 MJ is a _tiny_ amount
| of energy by the standards of commercial power
| generation.
| exitheone wrote:
| I hope you realize that these are research reactors that
| are not designed to give you a low interval between
| cycles or produce power. They are meant so clarify some
| of the open research questions for the likes of ITER/DEMO
| that will integrate these findings into things that are
| actually designed to produce a lot more power quicker.
| lisper wrote:
| Yes, of course I realize that. I hope you realize that
| even if they get these research reactors to work (which
| is far from given) that there will still be a shit ton of
| work to be done before this technology can be used to
| produce commercially viable power.
| [deleted]
| grogenaut wrote:
| internal combustion engines do this and are basically
| sustained. integrate over cylinders and time. Aka diesel
| or gas generators.
| lisper wrote:
| See this comment for my reply:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30274449
| arlort wrote:
| They expand under the article (not the clearest visual design
| though, I thought it was an ad or some "related" section)
|
| The record is for energy generated. They generated the most
| energy, however they did not generate the most power (unlike
| the previous record which generated both the most energy and
| most power) because they were focusing on sustained
| generation
|
| The sentence "59 megajoules of sustained fusion-energy",
| where fusion is the source of the energy, doesn't make sense
|
| I think they meant it as "59 megajoules of sustained-fusion
| energy" where sustained fusion is the focus of the experiment
| (not sure I managed to get through what I meant and it's
| worded awfully on the website)
|
| I hope / expect the actual paper/technical reports which will
| come out will be worded more clearly
| mattalex wrote:
| > Did we finally learn how to extract more energy from a fusion
| rector than we supplied to operate it?
|
| No. The issue is that most people only report the gain over the
| plasma (i.e. how much energy was put into generating the
| plasma) rather than the full amount of energy put into the
| process (i.e. superconductors, magnets, generating the
| deuterium/tritium, maintaining the sun-like heat, etc). If you
| add this to the computation, you end up having to have a
| "fusion-gain" of around 50x to break even. The reason people
| report the plasma efficiency instead of the actual operating
| efficiency is to get funding and hype.
|
| Don't get me wrong, this result is still impressive, but it's
| still orders of magnitude off of the required efficiency.
| Yajirobe wrote:
| 50x is not orders of magnitude off. It's one order of
| magnitude
| ppaattrriicckk wrote:
| In extension to this news and the press conference, one thing I
| am super excited about, is the private SPARC project and the MIT-
| spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). If you don't know
| about it already, I would highly recommend checking it out (e.g.
| by searching YouTube for "MIT Sparc Fusion Reactor" for some
| fairly accessible videos on the theory behind why they should
| achieve fusion way faster than the current roadmap with ITER and
| DEMO).
|
| In the press conference just ended, they repeated how exactly the
| JET reactor worked as predicted by theory. In my layman's
| understanding, for the exact same reason (seemingly very sound
| theoretical groundwork), the SPARC reactor should exceed
| breakeven within the next few years.
|
| From Wiki on CFS:
|
| * Back in September 2021, they built the strongest high-room-
| temperature superconducting magnet (20 Tesla) suitable for a
| fusion reactor
|
| * Theory dictates that with stronger magnets, the reactor can be
| scaled down (with the square/cube, can't remember exactly), and
| thus cost and time to develop
|
| * Back in November 2021, they raised $1.8 billion from the likes
| of Bill Gates
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Fusion_Systems
|
| Boy, do I think it would be crazy cool if they succeed, even
| taking twice as long as they've planned! :)
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| There are certainly some exciting projects happening in the
| fusion world coming up. It seems likely we will start seeing
| much higher energy outputs, I think for SPARC they are
| predicting >10x the energy produced as what it will consume (Q
| > 10).
|
| My biggest question is with the crazy temperatures involved
| will we ever see one of these things able to run for hours at a
| time? With SPARC they are shooting for 10 second bursts, so
| that would double this breakthrough for the JET reactor. Even
| with the magnetic containment there are components in there
| exposed to millions of degrees Celsius right? That leaves us
| with some significant material science problems to solve.
| DennisP wrote:
| Temperature is high but total heat isn't remarkable. The
| atoms are moving very fast but there aren't many of them.
| moogly wrote:
| > Theory dictates that with stronger magnets, the reactor can
| be scaled down (with the square/cube, can't remember exactly),
| and thus cost and time to develop
|
| OTOH, in a tokamak, the plasma volume (and potential energy
| output) scales quadratically with the torus' aspect ratio
| (ratio of major to minus radius), so I'm not sure that tokamak-
| based fusion really is particularly suitable to
| miniaturization.
| ppaattrriicckk wrote:
| I had no idea, thanks for sharing.
|
| Again, I'm very much a layman to this subject, but how does
| miniaturization necessarily affect that particular aspect
| ratio? Since it's literally a ratio of two dimensions of the
| torus, shouldn't this be invariant to the overall size?
| (Assuming all things being equal, which I have no idea
| whether holds.)
| gloriana wrote:
| However, you as you scale down, all the radiation damage
| effects per unit volume or unit surface area increase rapidly
| causing higher material activation and maintenance cost.
| Turbots wrote:
| DennisP wrote:
| Tokamak output scales with the square of reactor volume but
| the fourth power of magnetic field strength, so with
| sufficiently powerful magnets, scaling down the size can be
| an option.
| kuprel wrote:
| Wouldn't the aspect ratio remain constant as you scale down?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Unless you forget to hold the shift key as you drag.
| mrandish wrote:
| You win HN for today...
| IceDane wrote:
| This guy clearly does nuclear fusion.
| beambot wrote:
| This technical deep-dive by Dr. Dennis Whyte goes into the
| scaling considerations:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY6U4wB-oYM
|
| TLDR: Tokamak economics scale in size with 1/B^5 -- so
| doubling the magnet field strength reduces the physical size
| substantially. This factor dominates other scaling parameters
| by a substantial margin, and is entirely enabled by high-
| temperature superconductors. A host of other key fusion
| parameters also scale beneficially with B^x (for some value
| of x) -- most of which are discussed in first half the video.
| XorNot wrote:
| Miniaturization has never been realistic with tritium fusion
| anyway due to neutron production - you need several metres of
| material to stop them, otherwise your reactor is just kicking
| off radioactive oxygen into the atmosphere.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I'd love to work at CFS. Cambridge, MA is right down the road
| from me and there is no greater cause right now than fusion
| energy in my opinion.
| willis936 wrote:
| I remember being nervous about CFS not being able to raise its
| 100 MUSD target a few years ago. I'm very excited for their
| results.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| I think at this point it's very likely that CFS will succeed.
| But economics could be a problem, which is why I'm more excited
| about Helion or ZAP.
| px43 wrote:
| The insane thing that people should realize about the 20T CFS
| test back in September was that it was them completing the
| first of 18 coils, and it performed incredibly well.
|
| The secret sauce is better high temperature superconductors,
| and the ridiculous magnets you can build with them. They're
| pretty much putting these coils together as quickly as they can
| accumulate the HTSC wiring, and once they have all 18, they
| basically just need to put them all in a ring and light it up,
| and in theory they'll be generating over 10x the amount of
| power that they're putting into it.
|
| This is the kind of tangible progress that gets me really
| excited. I wish there was a tracker on the CFS site to see how
| many coils they've completed so far, similar to tracking the
| progress of the JWST. Last I checked they were estimating
| completion around 2025, and at this pace that actually seems
| reasonable.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > in theory they'll be generating over 10x the amount of
| power that they're putting into it
|
| Does this mean 9/10ths of the power can be sold and the other
| 1/10th can be re-used to power the reactor endlessly?
|
| How much power does this produce compared to a nuclear
| reactor?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Does this mean 9 /10ths of the power can be sold and the
| other 1/10th can be re-used to power the reactor
| endlessly?_
|
| In theory, yes, but in practice it doesn't. But it _does_
| mean that they 'll've proven the concept sound, and we can
| start making real fusion reactors.
| elihu wrote:
| ReBCO tape is the specific high-temperature superconducting
| material they're using.
|
| Another important material is FLiBe, which is a liquid that I
| think absorbs the energy from the fusion reactor. I don't
| really understand the properties that make it particularly
| well suited to the task, but I gather it's important.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_barium_copper_oxide
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLiBe
| javajosh wrote:
| According to the article, FLiBe has the same heat capacity
| of water, but a boiling point over 14x higher (1430 degC
| according to the article). Melting point is 359 degC, 3.5x
| higher. I will speculate that its basically used as a water
| coolant with the phase shifts shifted up and out. I bet the
| heat exchangers are exotic, too, having to operate at such
| high temps! In fact I'd expect to see a pretty
| sophisticated cascade of exchangers.
| rnhmjoj wrote:
| > they basically just need to put them all in a ring and
| light it up
|
| Well, if that's not under understatement... There are surely
| many more challenges in the high-field line of research,
| probably more than we know of, since they're kind of
| pioneering this field. Large size tokamaks, depsite their
| huge costs, have some considerable benefits like longer
| timescales for MHD instabilities and smaller stresses (both
| thermal and mechanical).
| vcdimension wrote:
| They're still a very long way from getting a net gain in energy:
| https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY
| prohobo wrote:
| Sadge. But I think this is the best bet for sustainable and
| clean energy, so why not put all the enthusiasm we can into it?
|
| A breakthrough is a breakthrough, and that's good news.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| > bet for sustainable and clean energy
|
| The best bet for sustainable and clean energy is to stop
| using fossil fuels and figure out how to deal with the
| economic consequences.
|
| I feel this optimism around this far off solutions for
| decades has been just a detrimental to climate action as out
| right climate denialism.
|
| Growing up in the 90s I was always told "everything will be
| fine, since we'll figure it all out with technology". It
| wasn't until decades later, when I kept hearing this
| promising but seeing CO2 emissions rise that I looked into
| the details and realized how incredibly in danger our society
| is, as well as how nearly impossible to solve this problem is
| at this point.
|
| The reason we shouldn't put our enthusiasm into it is because
| it's a distraction from the fact that we may already be past
| essential limits in our climate system and if we want any
| chance of survival as a civilization and potentially species
| we need drastic action now.
| malka wrote:
| > the economic consequences.
|
| you mean the death of billions of people ?
| worik wrote:
| No
| time_to_smile wrote:
| Describe to me the scenario where billions don't die?
|
| I think you're pointing to the very likely reality which
| is that there is no way out. More often than not I agree
| with you. It's just a shame that, as a society, we've
| chosen not to even publicly allow conversations about
| what's really happening and the choices we have to make.
| malka wrote:
| > Describe to me the scenario where billions don't die?
|
| There is not one.
|
| I was merely pointing what I think is an euphemism.
|
| > we've chosen not to even publicly allow conversations
| about what's really happening and the choices we have to
| make.
|
| Because we are ashamed. We all know that the price of our
| current comfort is blood. Now and in the future. And our
| human nature seem to be unable to abandon comfort once we
| have it.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Going in the wrong direction with development that can never
| work as intended is always a waste no matter how good the
| goal. Incorrectly reporting this modest incremental change is
| the kind of thing that allows doomed projects like this to
| consume vast resources of money, material and skilled labor
| that could be used to explore other alternatives.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| What? We have the best bet for sustainable and clean energy.
|
| Wind and Solar. They soon will beat natural gas for cheapest
| unsubsidized LCOE, and considering all fossil fuels are
| shadow-subsidized, that's huge.
|
| Fusion needs to prove is can be cheaper than old-crappy-
| pressurized solid rod fission first, which is right now
| getting killed by alternative energy.
|
| I was a big LFTR stan for a while. But wind/solar has won.
| Keep investing in fusion and fission, but they are subsidy
| and research projects right now only.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Wind + Solar are near useless without storage, and we do
| not have anything close to the storage necessary.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Storage likely will be a non-issue once sodium ion
| batteries scale up, even cheaper and safer than LFP. A
| couple more years of scale efficiencies and alt+storage
| will be cheaper without subsidies. Consumer solar+storage
| will be cheaper than nat gas in a couple years with any
| rational subsidy.
|
| Land issues? Seriously?
|
| The land issue for solar is a non-issue, it's like fake
| hand-wringing by the oil astroturfers over birds and
| windmills when skyscrapers kill 100xs more birds. There's
| this type of land called desert. Also, there is this
| thing called roofs where modern solar panels only need a
| small part of the roof to do a suburban house or
| apartment building including recharging your EV.
|
| The land issue for wind is even less on an issue:
|
| As for wind, I don't know if you've seen windmills on
| farms but... yeah, the pole doesn't take up much space.
| Then there is offshore wind. Windmills can integrate with
| existing use land (why not nature preserves?), you don't
| need to dedicate acreage to windmill farms.
|
| Meanwhile, fusion reactors have a wee bit of problems
| with neutrons flying everywhere and turning the reactor
| vessels slightly radioactive from neutron capture. Maybe
| they'll fix that with good absorption spectrum elements,
| but let's not pretend fusion is 100% clean.
|
| https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-
| the...
|
| But again, the promise is there for fusion and LFTR/"new"
| fission. Keep the research, maybe the economics will turn
| around. Industry sure would need it to fully decarbonize,
| or, heck, space colonies. Or flying cars! Or any of the
| other sci-fi stuff we have given up on.
|
| Right now we have an existential threat from GW, and an
| actual industrialized / productized and economic path is
| right there: wind and solar. That's what we need money
| printing for.
| dahfizz wrote:
| > Storage likely will be a non-issue once sodium ion
| batteries scale up, even cheaper and safer than LFP.
|
| Sure, once storage is solved it will be a non-issue. But
| it is not currently solved, and you will forgive my
| skepticism.
|
| I also never brought up land issues; I agree that it's
| not a real problem.
|
| TL;DR we need to be realistic about the capabilities of
| solar + wind. You argue that storage will solve itself.
| Your sibling argues that we don't need storage at all.
|
| The reality is that storage is a huge issue right now.
| It's the #1 technical issue stopping us from shutting
| down coal and natural gas plants.
| 1_player wrote:
| You can't say fusion is impractical while saying solar
| and wind is better by hand waving all the current
| concerns and technological walls we still haven't solved.
| Plans on an whiteboard do not count, sorry.
|
| Storage isn't solved, land space isn't solved, efficiency
| isn't solved, just like fusion isn't a solved problem.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Not nessesarily, alternative approach is to overbuild
| them 10x so thay we always generate more wnergy than we
| need and have continent spanning super-grid because it's
| always windy and sunny somewhere.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Today Boston has a sunrise at 11:47 am utc and Los
| Angeles has a sunset 1:30am utc. That is 10+ hours where
| the USA gets zero sunlight. Inconveniently, we also hit
| peak energy usage during those 10 dark hours.
|
| So if you want to ignore the storage problem, you need to
| rely on wind only. And if you have to dramatically over
| provision production to be able to meet demand, the cost
| benefits disappear.
|
| Storage is a must for renewables to really take off.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Wind and solar are great but they use up a lot of space and
| ideally we'd have more electric power than can be provided
| with just those two.
| epistasis wrote:
| In what sense do you think this is good for sustainable
| energy? Do you think it will cost less, or have less
| environmental impact than, say, newer deep well geothermal?
| I'm not so optimistic that costs could ever be competitive
| with geothermal.
| tinco wrote:
| Doesn't deep geothermal generally require fracking? At
| least the geothermal plants that I've seen being
| implemented right now do. Is there any fancy new tech
| breaking through there currently?
|
| I think both fusion and geothermal are very exciting, crazy
| thing is although geothermal sounds simpler, I have no idea
| what's holding it back technology-wise, yet I have a pretty
| good understanding of the state of fusion research right
| now.
|
| Why couldn't we get geothermal without fracking? Is it so
| hard to establish a more controlled heat exchange channel
| down there? Harder than developing nuclear fusion?
| ianai wrote:
| Geothermal is very location sensitive and requires huge
| outlays upfront. Maybe it'd be a clearer choice if energy
| storage were better solved. It also requires political
| support to cross NIMBYism.
| Arrath wrote:
| Aren't we at the point where most large scale
| infrastructure projects require huge outlays? Unless
| geothermal is an order of magnitude more expensive per MW
| or GWH than say nuclear, is it a point against it?
| ianai wrote:
| I think people both aren't making the logical connection
| for why they need more power for their current way of
| life. Also, the NIMBYism against geothermal may be even
| stronger than that against nuclear because of the
| governments involved.
|
| Consider how much commerce is done in the US via truck.
| Those trucks average 6 miles per gallon diesel. That
| represents a huge amount of energy. But it currently
| relies on fossil fuels so people don't think of it as
| being potentially served by renewable energy sources.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| The idea is that it would cost less and make energy so
| cheap and abundant that it would completely change society.
| Fusion would allow you to get 30x energy out vs energy in
| and has 10,000x the energy density of coal. If you want to
| explore space, it's a good option.
| epistasis wrote:
| I guess, why is it thought that it could be cheaper than
| geothermal, for example? Geothermal doesn't have fuel at
| all. I don't see how fusion produces energy cheap enough
| for it to be super abundant. And maybe that's just a
| failure of my imagination, but there seem to be massive
| gaps in others' reasoning that nobody has been able to
| fill me in on.
|
| Space travel is an entirely separate type of energy use,
| and I could see it being the only option for lots of
| applications. But that would be much further away, and
| the significant hurdles there can also be solved by other
| future tech advances like direct conversion for fusion to
| electricity.
| andruby wrote:
| Even without fuel, geothermal still has constraints.
| Where can we build it? What are the build costs and costs
| to run (maintenance, staffing, etc)?
|
| I doubt we can scale geothermal indefinitely. Fusion
| might suffer from similar constraints, but afaik, doesn't
| need "much" space or specific geographic structures.
| epistasis wrote:
| FWIW, drilling tech is advancing at an incredible rate,
| making geothermal possible in all sorts of new places all
| the time.
|
| But my primary concern with fusion is cost. I don't see
| the path to being cheaper than geothermal, nor fission,
| and new fission is already some of our most expensive
| energy. The goal may be eventual space travel, which
| seems like a more plausible goal to talk about than
| sustainable energy.
| thehappypm wrote:
| There's nothing fundamentally expensive about a Tokamak.
| We're in the phase of fusion of "computers have 1 Kb of
| memory and take up a whole basement."
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| What does 'fundamentally expensive' mean?
|
| If it does not incluse precision engineering to build
| largest vacuum vessel, supercomputers, superconductors,
| generation and containment of hottest substance on the
| planet, and largest magnetic fields we can produce. If
| that's not 'fundamentally expensive', then what is?
|
| Especially when your interlocutor is asking for
| geothermal, a.k.a. a hole in the ground?
| tinco wrote:
| You mean fundamentally expensive like building billions
| of nano meter scale devices, aligning and wiring 24
| million of them to be individually addressable on a 6
| inch plane? Oh and we build those by the thousands on
| factory lines.
|
| That's a whole lot more of precision engineering than is
| needed to build a nuclear fusion reactor, and you can buy
| it on the order of a hundred bucks.
|
| And it's not just a hole in the ground, last time I
| checked the thermal conductivity of rocks isn't exactly
| stellar.
| epistasis wrote:
| I think this is a great example of why fusion will
| probably not drop in price.
|
| With semiconductors, prices fall continuously because
| there is continuous iteration, and starting from the very
| very first lithographic circuits there was a market.
| There's an entire industry, competitors, and it's a
| factory system.
|
| Fusion is not like that, it will be like building
| monuments, there's not thousands or millions of the same
| thing getting churned out, it will be all specialized
| construction for each piece.
|
| You may say that a chip did specialized in that each of
| the transistors re wired together in very specific ways,
| but the semiconductor industry is a factory factory in
| some sense, you build a set of masks and that's your
| factory for your chip.
|
| Let's say you design a fusion reactor, and then 12 months
| later you see how to shave off 1% of the costs somewhere.
| That iterative gain is lost, because the fusion reactors
| will be built very rarely, and building each one in a new
| custom way poses lots more risk than doing the same
| design for 10 years. They are just too big and expensive
| to show the same sort of mass manufacturing gains that
| can be seen with technologies that have learning curves.
|
| I could be wrong, and I certainly hope I am, but I would
| bet a hell of a lot more money on a new battery chemistry
| than I would on fusion as being a terrestrial power
| device.
| tinco wrote:
| I think you're underestimating how small fusion reactors
| are. We're going to be needing not just fusion reactors
| per city, but per city block. If we manage to get them to
| break-even, they're going to be super plentiful.
|
| At least, that's what the promise is, we'll have to see
| of course.
| epistasis wrote:
| I've never heard anyone suggest that fusion could scale
| to be really tiny like that. Do you have any pointers on
| where I could look to learn about something like that?
| Because every existing thermal electricity generator
| scales to be really big for the efficiency gains, and
| fusion is a thermal electricity generator as planned so
| far. Tiny steam turbines in each block does not sound
| cost effective, even if the heat is free.
| tinco wrote:
| I'm basing this basically on the size of the experimental
| reactors currently being developed like sparc and the
| ST40. No doubt building larger plants is going to be more
| efficient, but if the fusion reactors themselves are
| going to be that small a single plant will probably have
| multiple ones.
|
| I think fission reactors and ITER have shown the downside
| of building really large one off reactors, I don't think
| they're gonna make that mistake again.
| thehappypm wrote:
| There's no piece of the Tomamak individually that can't
| be miniaturized or benefit from economies of scale. It
| doesn't require exotic fuel like nuclear fission reactors
| do. It doesn't need gigantic quantities of space and
| material like wind and solar. It doesn't have high up
| front engineering costs like geothermal. One day a
| tokamak might be an off the shelf industrial purchase,
| maybe akin to an MRI machine.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| I'm not quite sure why but I have this flashback-like feeling
| from blockchain with this Q_total < Q_plasma confusion.
| willis936 wrote:
| Pardon the analogy, but bringing up Q_engineering in this
| context is like someone shopping for a car running into
| Ford's engine design department and complaining that the
| engineers are not using the car's fuel economy to increase
| the engine's performance.
|
| How much power the subsystems takes has no influence on the
| plasma's performance. How much power goes into the plasma
| (and what type of power and where and when, etc.) do
| influence the plasma's performance.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| We (now) know but most people don't, when somebody says
| it'll "produce X amount of power than you put in" any
| normal human being would think "it's done" but then they'll
| wonder for next X decades why there are no power plants
| yet? Because nobody told them that you need more power than
| it produces at the end and positive net was just for final
| reaction and without heat to electricity conversion.
| willis936 wrote:
| You should watch the hour long press release and see just
| how clearly they explain what has been done.
| ninkendo wrote:
| What's nice is that even for Q_plasma this only gets
| 0.33. So it's a net loss no matter how you measure it.
| willis936 wrote:
| I'm confused. What do you think the goal of the campaign
| was?
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Clearly the end goal is to beat the First Law of
| Thermodynamics and its pesky "conservation of energy." We
| already know how to print money, now it's time to print
| energy! /s
| ninkendo wrote:
| It's tough to say because the campaign is a signpost on
| the way to an eventual end goal. But the end goal is easy
| to describe: "a working fusion power plant."
|
| The end goal is so far away at this point, not a single
| player in this space is even trying to do it, even on
| their farthest-out roadmaps...
| willis936 wrote:
| No, the campaign's goals were to push higher plasma
| energy out of a JET pulse. This required upgrades to many
| subsystems and to dust off everything necessary for
| nuclear operations.
|
| They did this in support of ITER, but there are also
| likely other political motivations. There has been no
| nuclear MCF operation on Earth in decades and now the UK
| has invested in resuming theirs rather than mothballing
| it.
|
| You can't make claims about the motivations of the
| campaign (such as it being a signpost?) if you don't know
| what was even done.
|
| And again, you shouldn't talk about the roadmaps if you
| haven't looked at them. Look at PPPL FIRE and power plant
| studies.
| dnautics wrote:
| When you are comparing across different fusion techniques,
| which we implicitly are in our brains (because we are not
| sophisticated plasma physicists and not every strategy
| right now is magnetic confinement), Q_engineering is
| important to think about: different strategies will have
| different capabilities of harvesting the energy and turning
| it into power, and maybe some of the strategies (laser
| inertial confinement cough cough) are super-unlikely to
| _ever_ have reasonable and efficient capture strategies. It
| would be nice to have an "estimated Q_engineering" come
| out of these experiments, even if they are wildly
| overinflated and crap estimates (as long as the assumptions
| that go into that are recorded). For that matter, it's not
| entirely clear to me how one harvests energy from
| magnetically confined fusion plasmas. Can someone give me a
| soundbyte on that?
| willis936 wrote:
| You're asking for a simplification when there is no way
| to do it without lying. The fact is you do need to know
| more than a layman to appreciate how impractical ICF
| really is or how useless looking at Q is in nearly every
| context that matters. No MCF machine has even attempted
| to get a higher Q in the past 25 years. Look at lawson
| criterion and scaling laws for progress.
| SamBam wrote:
| But at the end of the day, if this is to be useful, we need
| the plant to produce more than it uses, right?
| willis936 wrote:
| Then read the power plant studies published every few
| years by numerous institutions.
|
| There are no showstoppers.
|
| Here is a good (stellarator-focused) resource made by
| PPPL:
|
| http://firefusionpower.org/
| jimworm wrote:
| For those wondering, the Q for this particular result was 0.33.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H99hvPlC4is&t=48m
| beefman wrote:
| He says this is also a world record, but JET got 0.67 in 1997
| (according to Wikipedia). The missing asterisk may be that
| this Q was the average for the whole shot, whereas the 1997
| result may have been measured over a short time. Just my
| speculation, based on slide 21 here:
| https://fire.pppl.gov/iea_bp_w60_stork.pdf
|
| Edit: Confirmed by this comment https://www.reddit.com/r/fusi
| on/comments/soc5xo/oxfords_jet_...
| tclancy wrote:
| We can make it up in volume.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Haven't we already had fusion experiments with net positive
| energy?
| beefman wrote:
| No, unless you count thermonuclear explosives. This
| experiment didn't demonstrate it either. The fusion only
| yielded 1/3 the energy used to heat the plasma.[1] That
| doesn't include the energy needed to run the rest of the
| machine (magnetic containment etc) and it doesn't include any
| losses converting the fusion energy to electricity (which was
| not attempted).
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00391-1
| [deleted]
| willis936 wrote:
| This wasn't a high-Q campaign.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I think this explanation is more comprehensive:
| https://youtu.be/JurplDfPi3U
| cletus wrote:
| Does deuterium-tritium ("D-T") fusion really have a future?
|
| Net energy output is one thing but neutrons are the big problem.
| The two issues are energy loss and destruction of the container
| (aka neutron embrittlement). I see ITER plans to handle this with
| basically a large, thick absorption layer (steel and water). CFS
| OTOH is looking at molten salt solutions.
|
| But these solutions seem to be aimed at the embrittlement issue
| and not really the energy loss issue.
| limaoscarjuliet wrote:
| According to Sabine Hossenfelder, published numbers are
| frequently mis-stated on purpose. When you look at frequently
| reported Q Plasma (or plasma efficiency) we are not that far from
| it being > 1. However, we should look at Q Total (total
| efficiency), which is still way below < 1, even in the best
| plans.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
|
| For years, I was hoping fusion is close. After watching Sabine's
| video, I'm not so optimistic anymore.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Nothing concrete to add, just the anecdote that the plasma
| physics class I took in grad school hands down had some of the
| sketchiest looking physicist math I think I have ever seen.
| Felt like a SWAT team from the mathematics department might
| burst through the door at any time.
| siver_john wrote:
| Just imagining the mathematics SWAT team coming through the
| door and swatting the marker out of one of my physics profs'
| hands when they went from ydy/dx=x -> ydy=xdx as if they were
| simply re-arranging a fraction, made me chuckle.
| GoodJokes wrote:
| mmazing wrote:
| Like an ECON 101 course?
|
| I felt like the Calculus SWAT Team was going to burst through
| the doors in that class, ha.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| This was no regular spherical cow, I tell you it was
| assumed to be time-independent while at the same time
| having an oscillatory frequency.
| Retric wrote:
| She makes several significant mistakes in that video. One
| example is the energy used to heat the plasma is now heat in
| the plasma identical to the heat generated by fusion. This
| means you can recover a percentage of that with a steam
| turbine.
|
| Second a great deal of ITER's energy usage is as a science
| experiment not a fusion reactor. Most of their monitoring
| equipment for example is irrelevant to an operating power
| plant. Thus Qplasma is giving relevant information where Qtotal
| is largely meaningless at this stage.
| ggrrhh_ta wrote:
| But her point stands even if there were mistakes: the press
| and many scientists, even if unwillingly, have failed to
| communicate the real state of fusion as an energy source. And
| I can believe that maybe some representatives did not fully
| understand the difference between Qtotal and Qplasma and the
| amount of time a reaction can be sustained (all three things
| that they would understand if they were explained clearly).
| willis936 wrote:
| Some context please. Where did they make this failure in
| the hour long press release?
| ggrrhh_ta wrote:
| The parent comment was talking about a video outside of
| the context of this entry in HN. My reply was in the
| context of parent comment referring to that video, the
| video in question provides excerpts of example of that
| failure of communication.
| oakwhiz wrote:
| Why would any experimenters optimize for Q total if Q plasma is
| a prerequisite to get anywhere?
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| The concern is that experimenters are wasting time on
| experiments with promising looking Q plasma but with orders
| of magnitude smaller Q total (eg pulsed laser systems)
|
| It's important not to forget the big picture. Otherwise you
| end up optimizing one piece of the system, and causing
| another piece of the system to work less well in a way the
| degrees overall system performance.
| ggrrhh_ta wrote:
| Well, because it makes no sense to try to increase Q plasma;
| to what end? As pointed by others, you can increase Q plasma
| at the expense of Q total, thus precisely optimizing for the
| wrong objective (fusion can be produced and studied without
| looking at Q plasma or Q total; although reporting Q plasma
| along with the time that the reaction was sustained is
| helpful). I give you an analogy: let's make the most power-
| efficient floating point unit; but let's focus on Q_float,
| instead of Q_total; at the end we would end with a simple
| very wide adder; if we want to multiply two numbers, the
| system will convert them to their logarithms, add them, and
| then use exponentiation. Yes, the floating point unit
| consumed very little power Q_float was great. Well, I guess
| you get the point.
| phkahler wrote:
| The problem is press/marketing. When you read about this
| stuff 1.0 is claimed to be break-even, the threshold where
| fusion start to become practical. So in one piece of writing
| they will talk about this important number and (deliberately)
| conflate it with fusion being practical. Yes, getting Q
| plasma above 1 is necessary, but it's about an order of
| magnitude too low in reality. Sure everyone in the field know
| that. Her criticism is thats not how its presented to the
| outside world.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Sabine is overly critical IMO. The distinction she is making is
| known to anyone who has spent a little bit of time thinking
| about fusion (hopefully that includes the grant writers) and
| projects like ITER are explicitly aiming for Q=10, not just
| "breakeven"
| kalium-xyz wrote:
| ITER is a bit too optimistic IMHO. For example I've always
| found the "UNLIMITED ENERGY" on their website a bit funny
| https://www.iter.org/
| numbsafari wrote:
| Which Q? Qtotal or Qplasma?
| marcyb5st wrote:
| Qplasma. Supposedly, with Qplasma > 20 Qtotal should also
| be > 1 with current magnet tech.
| jfengel wrote:
| That's kind of her thing. She is usually right, but also
| overly pessimistic in a way opposite from the popular press
| over-optimism.
|
| I get frustrated because it paints science in an undeserved
| negative light. It is at least truthful, in a way that most
| anti science writing is not. Mostly I find it unhelpful in
| that it points out problems without either explaining why
| they were reasonable or giving a real alternative.
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| Popular 'i f#@cking love science's type science deserves to
| be painted in a negative light.
|
| IFLS pushers are motivated by money, clicks, and clout and
| to a large extent misinform the public.
| jfengel wrote:
| Agreed. But there is blowback on the actual scientists
| doing the real work.
|
| I suppose you could say that they also get benefits from
| appealing to the IFLS crowd, so live and die by the same
| sword. I believe IFLS does more harm than good, but it's
| hard to be sure.
| willis936 wrote:
| Indeed. Her arguments made in the aforementioned video are
| slanted. There are many lies by omission that paint an
| inaccurate worldview for laypeople.
|
| It's incredible that the term "Lawson criterion" wasn't
| mentioned once.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Sabine is not as "right" as many of her pop-sci fans seem
| to want. Most of her opinions about the direction of
| theoretical physics are not really falsifiable or "right."
| jfengel wrote:
| That's correct. That's sort of the point. Fundamental
| research is in kind of a slump right now, and it's hard
| to judge where (or whether) it should continue.
|
| I don't think much of her "just do something different,
| don't ask me what" approach.
| baxtr wrote:
| Bootvis wrote:
| I don't see much criticism about that video in the linked
| submission.
| rtsil wrote:
| I don't see any criticism of her video in the link you
| provided.
| tra3 wrote:
| Can someone ELI5 for people that don't follow fusion tech
| closely? In particular does this mean we're going to have fusion
| soon?
| humanistbot wrote:
| We have controlled fusion in labs, but it takes more energy to
| start up than what you get out of it. The longer you can
| sustain the fusion reaction, the more you can get out of it.
| They did it for 5 seconds, which is longer than anyone else,
| but still a net negative.
|
| Predictions about the future of fusion are notoriously
| difficult to make.
| openknot wrote:
| To respond to the second question, though I haven't followed
| fusion tech closely, from the environmental analyst featured in
| the article:
|
| "The fusion announcement is great news but sadly it won't help
| in our battle to lessen the effects of climate change.
|
| "There's huge uncertainty about when fusion power will be ready
| for commercialisation. One estimate suggests maybe 20 years.
| Then fusion would need to scale up, which would mean a delay of
| perhaps another few decades.
|
| "And here's the problem: the need for carbon-free energy is
| urgent - and the government has pledged that all electricity in
| the UK must be zero emissions by 2035. That means nuclear,
| renewables and energy storage.
|
| "In the words of my colleague Jon Amos: "Fusion is not a
| solution to get us to 2050 net zero. This is a solution to
| power society in the second half of this century.""
| 323 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I've seen "fusion breakthrough" articles every
| year on HN for at least 10 years now. So I'm waiting for a real
| plant.
| tommywiseausmom wrote:
| This is the ONLY way we'll get out of our current situation.
| Unfortunately I think it might be a decade too late as we're
| still about 10 years from viability.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| > It's not a massive energy output - only enough to boil about 60
| kettles' worth of water.
|
| This made me laugh. How much more British can you get?
| johnthesecure wrote:
| That's enough energy to boil those kettles dry, if my
| calculations are correct. To bring them to the boil, 59MJ would
| run about 600 kettles.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Maybe they meant from a frozen solid state?
| advisedwang wrote:
| Water has a specific heat capacity of 4184J/kg/C. Lets say to
| get to the boil you need to go from 20C to 100C and that a
| kettle holds 1.75L.
|
| 59MJ / (80C * 4184J/kg/C) = 176kg ~= 176L ~= 100 kettles.
|
| Water has a latent heat of vaporization of 2260 kJ/kg. So to
| boil it dry:
|
| 59MJ / (80C * 4184J/kg/C + 2260 kJ/kg) = 22kg ~= 22L ~= 12
| kettles.
|
| I have no idea what the journalist calculated.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Did you factor in the inefficiencies of the power
| distribution grid and the heating element of the kettle?
| I'd say the journalists are just repeating what they've
| been told by the scientists, and the scientists factored
| inefficiency in on a calculation similar to your first.
| 34679 wrote:
| There may exist inefficiencies in the transfer of heat
| from the element to the water, but there is no such thing
| as an inefficient heating element. All of the power it
| uses will be converted to heat. Take a light bulb for
| example. When used to light a space, the inefficient part
| would be the energy that is lost to heat. The rest is
| converted to light, but as soon as that light hits an
| object, it's converted to heat. So even a light bulb is a
| perfectly efficient heating element.
|
| With this in mind, you aren't saving any money on your
| electric bill by turning off lights when your furnace is
| on.
| Retric wrote:
| The internal heating element isn't strictly speaking 100%
| efficient on AC as it's producing a changing electric
| field etc. It's just generally ignorable in practical
| terms.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| The kettle is also losing a lot of heat to the air in the
| room.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Presumably heat dispersing into the air rather than into
| the water would be an example of an inefficient heating
| element.
| advisedwang wrote:
| Nope, I didn't factor in anything like that. Also
| kettle's don't actually heat every ml to 100C so there's
| some fudge in the other direction. I mostly was just
| getting nerdsniped.
| fartcannon wrote:
| Thermodynamics is very good at sniping nerds. The first
| law is basically a universe builder. The second law is
| maybe a universe destroyer? :)
| zucker42 wrote:
| I suppose it's possible that the "standard" kettle size is
| ~3L. They don't seem too uncommon on Amazon.
| Axien wrote:
| Are you referring to a morning kettle of tea or an afternoon
| kettle of tea?
| satronaut wrote:
| an african or european kettle?
| fourseventy wrote:
| Maybe two kettles could boil the water together?
| soheil wrote:
| You'd probably be surprised to learn that the UK is not at the
| top of the list of countries with the highest tea consumption.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tea_consu...
| bityard wrote:
| Ireland is #2? As a culturally ignorant American, that _does_
| surprise me.
| jackfruitpeel wrote:
| We are absolute fiends for tea.
| andrew_ wrote:
| Just learned new slang for "whiskey". Thank you.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| The box of Barry's in my drawer (I'm in America) agrees
| with you
| jspash wrote:
| Ah go on, go on, go on.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Not even remotely surprised. I'm decently surprised they made
| it to number 4; I thought some southeast asian countries
| might have a higher per-capita tea consumption. Come to think
| of it, I think the list is probably highly skewed towards
| countries that import their tea and countries with local tea
| production will be a lot harder to pin down more accurately.
| Many countries missing from the list as well!
|
| There are other "oddities" that make me suspicious. e.g.
| Saudi Arabia and UAE have extremely similar native population
| (bedouin Arab origins) and neither culturally drink black
| tea, but KSA ranks much higher than UAE. My immediate guess
| is the massive (underpaid) southeast asian labor force in
| KSA1, which I know firsthand consume tea ceaselessly - but
| India supposedly has a lower per-capita consumption rate than
| the UAE. In fact, I'm sure both KSA and UAE are up there
| because of their foreign laborers, lending credence to my
| suspicion that countries with local tea production (such as
| India) are massively under-represented in that list.
|
| 1: KSA does admittedly have a higher percentage of Levantine
| and North African permanent residents.
| tsol wrote:
| It's strange to me how low India is on the list. As an Indian
| all the Indians I know drink huge amounts of tea. Might just
| be an economics thing-- they can't afford to buy as much tea
| as they'd like to. That or it's something to do with the way
| the stats are collected
| netflixandkill wrote:
| Yes but how many football fields can that throw a beer can?!
| madaxe_again wrote:
| African or European beer cans?
| johnzim wrote:
| It's also quite a helpful metric.
|
| Most British people are aware that the national grid used to
| spend a lot of time making sure they had the power available to
| draw during the commercial breaks of mass-media TV events
| (series finales, half time in a cup match etc) purely for the
| nation boiling water with electric kettles en masse.
|
| Great intersection of hard science (energy necessary to boil
| water + extremely efficient energy transfer) and everyperson
| knowledge. Good journalism!
| nr2x wrote:
| Yes, and some places world cup viewership can take down the
| grid!
| seanw444 wrote:
| Wasn't there a relevant Tom Scott video on the subject?
| moreati wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jx_bJgIFhI about pumped
| hydro at Dinorwig Power Station
| tomp wrote:
| Makes you wonder if the US idea of using just 110 volts isn't
| better... not from an individual viewpoint (slower to boil
| water) but from the grid perspective.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Power is power. To the extent 110V is slower to boil water,
| it's a reflection of either inadequate power delivery
| capacity due to the higher currents required, or wasted
| heat in places other than the kettle. Either way, heat gets
| lost over time.
|
| You're almost always better off with higher voltage and
| less current, when given a choice. An obvious exception
| being when you get shocked. :-P Or when corona losses come
| into the picture.
| tigershark wrote:
| No, it's absolutely not. They consume _a lot_ of power on
| average as far as I remember. They have just more
| transmissions loss at a lower voltage and I guess that it
| would be a pain to use a normal induction cooktop with
| 9-10KW at 110V.
| simfree wrote:
| 110v does nearly halve your peak power draw... But the
| transformers have a bit of added complexity and in homes
| and businesses you need thicker wire to move the same
| amount of power.
| bityard wrote:
| The US grid (the last-mile bits anyway) isn't 110 volts,
| it's 220. It's just our houses that are wired for (mostly)
| 110 V.
|
| Edit: I would love to see some sort of hybrid 110/220 V
| residential wiring/plug standard take hold in the US. It
| would require more expensive cable in the walls (since you
| need one additional conductor) and plugs, but it's totally
| doable. Most electrical products and appliances made these
| days are easily converted between 110/220, or run just fine
| on either.
| toast0 wrote:
| There is NEMA 14, which has hot,hot,neutral,ground, but I
| don't think anything lower than 20amps is available, and
| that's a locking one, 30 amps is available without locks,
| but 30 amps at 220v is a lot of power for household
| outlets. You'd need larger wire in the walls, not just
| more of them.
|
| Any sort of outlet upgrade would need a really good plan
| for how to make it viable, because even if 100% of new
| construction used the new outlet, it would be decades
| before you could sell devices that relied on it.
| hedora wrote:
| You could include a second cable with the teapot, and
| wire it to work with 110 or 220 depending on which cable
| is used. This is already reasonably common. I have plenty
| of useless European cables laying around to prove it.
| btbuilder wrote:
| I have a 20A 220 circuit for an electric kettle with
| multiple 6-15Rs. It has a 20A gfci breaker.
| hedora wrote:
| You could just run US-style appliance circuits to your
| kitchen, etc. Those are sometimes three conductor and
| other times four conductor.
|
| However, I doubt it'd pass inspection if they were easily
| accessible from the counter-top.
|
| If you're going to flout building codes anyway, it'd
| probably be easier/more practical to just run circuits
| with foreign outlets instead. Also, it might be easier to
| find appropriate GFCI breakers.
| btbuilder wrote:
| Use 6-15R or 6-20R. I think it would pass inspection
| because most safety requirements around gfci and afci
| don't apply to 240V circuits
| coryrc wrote:
| They do now, but only when accessible by a person. Even
| car charging station outlets do (even though every car
| charging station has gfci built in...)
| pkulak wrote:
| I kinda like that all but a couple outlets in my house
| can't kill me.
|
| Also, I boil my water on an induction stove plugged into
| 50 amps at 220 volts. I'm not waiting around, to put it
| mildly.
| jjeaff wrote:
| 110v can easily kill you. It's a little harder to get a
| good solid connection through your body and into the
| ground than 220v. But it certainly can and does happen.
| 0n34n7 wrote:
| Amps kill, not volts. Hence high voltage low amp Tesla
| coil spark shows.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| High voltage from a Tesla coil not only has low average
| current, but is subject to the skin effect. So while it
| can still cause a painful shock to your superficial
| sensory nerves, not much of that energy ends up in
| contact with the motor nerves.
|
| TL,DR: you probably don't want to be shocked by a big
| Tesla coil, even though it won't kill you.
| IntrepidWorm wrote:
| Thats not quite accurate- it is true that high amp
| current is deadly in many scenarios, but it takes both
| amps and volts to kill. High amp, high voltage current is
| a killer for sure, but high current at sufficiently tiny
| voltages is not necessarily deadly. Similarly, high
| voltage at low currents is usually not deadly (but can be
| very painful).
| baq wrote:
| 30A at 400V is how we roll in the EU.
| orra wrote:
| Wow. A typical induction hob in the UK is 32A at 230V.
| 230V is of course the nominal voltage of a single phase,
| although in practice in the UK the voltage is closer to
| 240V.
|
| That's only 7.35kW of power. Do you have significantly
| more powerful cookers?
| kuschku wrote:
| 400V is only used for stoves or instant water heaters,
| but e.g. our stove uses 11kW actually.
|
| If you don't have these amounts of energy available, the
| temperature your instant water heater can reach or the
| speed with which you can cook obviously suffers (which I
| suspect is one of the reasons why americans prefer gas
| stoves so much).
| AnssiH wrote:
| > The US grid (the last-mile bits anyway) isn't 110
| volts, it's 220. It's just our houses that are wired for
| (mostly) 110 V.
|
| Similarly, in most of continental Europe phase-to-phase
| is 400V but most outlets are 230V. E.g. in my apartment
| only the stove has a 400V three-phase (4-wire)
| connection.
| m463 wrote:
| was it British Teapot Units all along?
| axg11 wrote:
| What is stopping one of the major western governments from
| printing $50B of their own currency and investing it all in an
| intensive fusion programme?
|
| There doesn't seem to be much to lose (these economies are
| already unreasonably inflated) but so much to gain from viable
| fusion.
| jcfrei wrote:
| In the current economy the funding of these types of projects
| is usually not the bottleneck. It's finding the people and
| achieving the actual scientific / engineering breakthroughs.
| The marginal return on more money is pretty insignificant for
| that. If you just threw a ton of money at it much of it would
| probably be splurged or straight away misappropriated. Then
| you'll get a whole lot of terrible press, undermining other
| scientific funding and putting the politicians reelection at
| risk.
| mchusma wrote:
| I don't believe that is true. This famous chart shows funding
| levels versus requested since the 1970s:
|
| https://images.app.goo.gl/58YdLFt7R9uY8dyR6
|
| The much maligned prediction that fusion is 30 years away was
| always anticipating stronger financial support.
| pomian wrote:
| Thanks for that chart. Maybe famous, but first time I've
| seen it. It's a bit pathetic. And explains a lot about
| progress.
| Joeri wrote:
| As others have pointed out, ITER has this kind of funding, and
| it is not the only nuclear fusion research program. It is
| unclear whether more money will accelerate.
|
| As for green R&D in general, the EU is massively investing in
| hydrogen research, as something that can be made with excess
| variable solar and wind power, and be used as a green
| alternative to natural gas in many situations.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/mariannelehnis/2021/12/31/the-e...
| johlindenbaum wrote:
| ITER is doing that, no? Large scale test of fusion energy
| output.
| mavhc wrote:
| Problem with ITER is it's not 1 country, it's lots, and they
| all want their piece of the pie instead of doing it
| efficiently
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Does one country have all the smart people needed to go it
| alone?
|
| (This is not a further joke about Brexit I pinky promise)
| kamarg wrote:
| If you're willing to print enough cash to pay for the
| smart people to come to you, you can probably import
| them. It seems to be more the exception than the rule
| that people dislike a country so much that no amount of
| money could get them to go there to do research on the
| topic they're interested in.
| nicoburns wrote:
| A $50b program from 1 country would likely have the same
| problem (as indeed would a large private program).
| Injecting a large amount of capital all at once into a
| project just isn't efficient.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Injecting a large amount of capital all at once into a
| project just isn't efficient.
|
| SpaceX would beg to disagree here. The reason why they
| are so cheap, agile and sustainable (=reusable rockets)
| is precisely because SpaceX got a load of money without
| the "pork" requirements that were commonplace with ULA &
| friends. That enabled SpaceX to embrace vertical, on-site
| integration and go for what was technically the best
| option instead of what was required by some buffoons in
| Congress.
|
| Although a point may be made that a "hand out cash"
| program needs a competent, strong and undisputed leader
| at the top. There's a lot of issues with Elon Musk, but
| it is undeniable that he is a very effective and
| inspiring leader.
| biorach wrote:
| ITER vs SpaceX is a really poor comparison.
|
| ITER is a high risk foray into still-experimental
| technology with no hope of direct return on investment
| (it can not function as a commercial power plant). It had
| to be built at this scale because they had reached the
| limits of smaller-scale prototypes (tho I think there was
| not unanimity about this). Pooling resources makes sense
| here.
|
| SpaceX is a more efficient take on technologies and
| processes that have been battle tested over many decades.
| This gives them a clear path to profitability, with some
| risk, but low enough to get investors on board, which
| ITER would have no hope of doing. Granted they are
| innovating, but incrementally, not from scratch. Very
| different.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Pooling resources makes sense here.
|
| Yes, but still - instead of all the components needed
| being manufactured on or near site, they are shipped from
| across the world... so parts end up damaged [1], not made
| according to spec or the spec having errors introduced
| somewhere among dozens of companies and institutions.
| With sometimes weeks or months of shipping round-trip
| times, that is causing _a fucking lot_ of delays. Not to
| mention that shipping all the stuff around _itself_ is
| also causing issues given the current COVID-caused
| shipping delays.
|
| The problem is that ITER, ULA, EADS, Airbus, the ISS and
| a bunch of other international cooperative projects _all_
| are considered by politicians primarily as a way to
| distribute pork, secondarily as a way to show off on the
| international stage and only then as a way to actually
| advance scientific knowledge.
|
| [1]:
| https://news.newenergytimes.net/2021/09/26/component-
| issues-...
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Airbus is an inefficient port project? They build almosy
| half the world's aircraft.
|
| Boeing has 1 boss and what are they better at, defrauding
| regulators to sell dangerous aircraft? And all other
| private manufacturers combined are a rounding error?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| It helps that SpaceX is just iterating on 1960s
| technology.
| nicoburns wrote:
| SpaceX didn't get anything near $50B in investment
| though. And certainly not committed all at once.
| gameshot911 wrote:
| SpaceX is so much more than just the capital. It's the
| capital _plus_ the unwavering vision of the leadership.
| The latter is much harder to find.
| mavhc wrote:
| If so then it's impossible to advance, which would be
| annoying.
|
| What's needed is people who know the subject matter and
| are experts at running large companies.
|
| SpaceX turned rockets into a production line,
| experimented, blew a load up, and then fixed the problems
| with landing. But that's productising last year's thing,
| not inventing a new possibly impossible thing.
| Interesting to see how Starship goes.
|
| Need a leader to stay: you do x, you do y, not a
| committee where every country gets to make one of the 12
| magnets because they're a primary school and everything
| has to be "fair"
| axg11 wrote:
| Questions about how effective this would be aside. What
| is there to really lose? If we inflate the economy via
| current means or inflate the economy via employing
| scientists and engineers ineffectively, it's inflation
| nonetheless.
| candiodari wrote:
| Well, they do:
|
| https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.2018041...
|
| The latest ITER budget update puts the cost at $65 billion
| dollar.
|
| And, yes, there's 1 million, 10 million, 100 million and so on
| grants for smaller scale efforts too, JET being one example.
| NGRhodes wrote:
| How much energy was required to start the fusion ?
| danpalmer wrote:
| Probably a lot, and while that's generally a useful question to
| ask about fusion research, in this case the point is not to
| create a sustainable fusion process but to validate specific
| pieces of technology, so it doesn't really matter here.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Sidenotes from the Blockchain Twitter-sphere, Fusion = Proof of
| Work that Doesn't Destroy the Planet.
| pizlonator wrote:
| This is a red flag:
|
| "These experiments we've just completed had to work,"
|
| Situations like this create a pressure cooker of bias. Maybe they
| got the result they wanted by force of will not because of the
| underlying science or engineering.
| willis936 wrote:
| The stakes are high, but failure is always an option. I've seen
| machines take years to get density under control. What the JET
| team has achieved is exceptional.
| advisedwang wrote:
| I mean... they achieved the milestone. That seems like an
| objective fact that isn't really subject to bias.
|
| It sounds like what you are talking about is "motivation" not
| "bias".
| softwarebeware wrote:
| Darn, I found the article quite underwhelming. It may be a major
| breakthrough relative to past accomplishments in the field but
| it's far from commercial viability.
| nr2x wrote:
| Yes, but every step forward on this path is thrilling. If we
| crack carbon capture at scale, and unleash fusion, it would
| change the game for the survival of our species.
| immmmmm wrote:
| To change the game for the survival of our species (if
| protecting a species that destroyed 75% of ecosystems as of
| today is really sth wanted anyway) we might want to protect
| the other species as well since we rely on them almost
| entirely for anything relevant to survival. Also I am not
| sure having ten times more energy would do any good.
|
| IPBES reports as well as the literature in relevant
| conservation journals are recommended readings.
| mdavis6890 wrote:
| Negative. If we want to "change the game for the survival of
| our species" that would be fission, a super-mature and proven
| technology that is already widely deployed.
|
| As far as "carbon sequestration" - that is just a tree. No
| R&D required.
| scovetta wrote:
| This is super cool, but I didn't see how much energy was put into
| the system in order to generate the output 57 MW, and whether the
| output energy was all usable (e.g. could the team have actually
| boiled 60 kettles of water?). It'd also be useful to know how
| whatever energy is needed to run the machine would be expected to
| scale as the output is increased.
|
| Don't get me wrong, fusion (IANANP) seems to be the best approach
| for long-term energy, and I'm strongly in favor of lots of
| research and experimentation in this area, and this seems like
| incremental progress. Kudos to the team!
| pnt12 wrote:
| >I didn't see how much energy was put into the system in order
| to generate the output 57 MW
|
| It's in the article: 500 MW. Scientists hope further
| experiments move into breaking even and later having net gains.
| tuyiown wrote:
| Sabine Hossenfelder did a sobering wrap-up about fusion power
| press announcements a few months ago
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
| Gadiguibou wrote:
| I really appreciate the note of the environmental analyst which
| helps readers who don't have deep knowledge of the field
| understand the meaning of this breakthrough in context. I wish
| more news agencies adopted the same practice.
| openknot wrote:
| The Financial Times, though pricey as a financial newspaper, is
| a good source for this. It regularly publishes in-depth
| articles with a wide range of interviews with experts for
| readers to learn the context of current issues (via their "News
| in-depth" series, and also their series called "The Big Read").
| Gadiguibou wrote:
| Thanks for the tip!
| thehappypm wrote:
| Crazy idea for viable fusion: make tiny nuclear bombs, drop them
| underground, then use geothermal plants to extract the energy.
| There, just beat your world record.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| The timing is impeccable (making me suspicious), I was just at a
| UKAEA public meeting yesterday -- they're choosing a site for a
| new fusion project, a small "demo" reactor.
|
| https://step.ukaea.uk/
|
| You couldn't have better timing to encourage the public that this
| is a positive thing for us to develop.
|
| FWIW I'm a big fan of JET, Wendelstein, and fusion research in
| general. And, I think this STEP project is very positive.
| Reventlov wrote:
| Web Archive Snapshot:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20220209131058/https://www.euro-f...
| [deleted]
| dfdz wrote:
| > This is more than double what was achieved in similar tests
| back in 1997.
|
| The experiment produced
|
| > 11 megawatts of power
|
| and at Jet
|
| > two 500 megawatt flywheels are used to run the experiments
|
| log_2(2*500/11)*(2022-1997) + 2022 = 2185
|
| At this rate we will have fusion by 2185 I guess?
| dghughes wrote:
| Or it could be like Zeno's Dichotomy Paradox.
| Neil44 wrote:
| That's a co-insidence, 2185 is also the year of Linux on the
| desktop.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Even if it takes 200 years it is likely still worthwhile.
| Unfortunately we, as a culture, have a problem seeing and
| planning across generations. https://longnow.org/
| amelius wrote:
| > we, as a culture, have a problem seeing and planning across
| generations
|
| From a political perspective, there is little incentive to
| plan further ahead than the current administration.
| can16358p wrote:
| Yup, that's exactly the problem. We need to find an
| incentive for the ones in power to invest in things that
| would be good for the future.
|
| Maybe I'm going too far but in the future cryonics and
| being frozen and be brought back when the promise of these
| investments be resolved in the future might create some
| incentives.
|
| Even though this seems super-scifi for now, it probably
| won't be in about 100 years.
| frabcus wrote:
| Yes! As a concrete example, people spent all of the C19
| trying to fly, learning lots about aerodynamics along the way
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation#19th_centu
| ...). This culminated in the Wright Brothers making the final
| improvements that made it work. A century or two to get
| fusion would be quite efficient.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| We're currently on course for having trouble _existing_
| across generations. The path we 're on now I don't think
| meeting fusion goals will be big concern if there's anyone
| around to even be concerned.
| andruby wrote:
| True, but if we can crack fusion energy, we can stop
| burning fossil fuels and we might even have ample energy to
| extract CO2 from the atmosphere.
| orangepurple wrote:
| We already have the capability to economically capture
| atmospheric carbon with existing nuclear power generation
| systems
| antisthenes wrote:
| <poignant joke about being able to capture atmospheric
| carbon since the dawn of time>
| Filligree wrote:
| Fusion produces a lot more radiation than fission, AIUI.
|
| What makes you think it will be any more politically
| viable to scale out than fission reactors?
| Lev1a wrote:
| > What makes you think it will be any more politically
| viable to scale out than fission reactors?
|
| IIRC a major difference would be the danger potential in
| case of a "meltdown", since a fusion reactor wouldn't
| have kilograms or even tons of uranium etc. laying around
| to form another elephant's foot but "just" the irradiated
| reactor vessel which AIUI is both not as dangerous or as
| long-lived as fission fuel, a fission reactor itself and
| fission waste products.
|
| Also IIRC the actual "meltdown" of a fusion reactor would
| involve the reaction environment (extremely high
| temperatures and pressures) breaking down at which point
| the reaction stops almost immediately no longer producing
| any _additional_ radiation or waste products, leaving
| only the already irradiated reactor vessel to deal with
| since the comparatively tiny volume of reactant(s)
| (probably one or more different Hydrogen isotopes) and
| reaction product(s) (probably Helium) will escape quickly
| and with pretty much no harm done.
| Filligree wrote:
| That is a sane, logical argument.
|
| I'm just worried. If sane, logical arguments worked, then
| there'd be a lot more fission reactors in the world and a
| lot fewer coal plants.
| hedora wrote:
| Yeah; meltdown-proof clean fission reactors have been a
| solved problem for what, fifty years now?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| There is no nuclear waste, what radiation are you
| measuring to come to this conclusion? neutrons that
| dissapear the moment the reactor switches off?
| Filligree wrote:
| Activation of the reactor walls. The neutrons don't
| disappear; they're absorbed, and some fraction of the
| atoms that absorb them become radioactive themselves.
| I've seen lifetime estimates ranging from five to ten
| years for the walls, after which they'll be high-level
| waste.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Isn't the breeding blanket suppose to prevent that?
| willis936 wrote:
| The breeding blanket does slow the neutrons, but there
| needs to be a first wall material that does not ablate
| into the plasma. You need very little of non-hydrogen
| material in the vacuum to cause a density collapse. If
| you made the wall out of liquid lithium then there would
| be a _lot_ of lithium in the plasma.
|
| Tungsten is a good choice for a first wall material
| because of its uniquely high melting point, low rate of
| embrittlement in high neutron flux, and short-lived
| radioisotopes.
| Vadoff wrote:
| Would it? We could have hundreds of runaway-meltdown proof
| nuclear fission reactors now if we wanted.
| m_fayer wrote:
| I'm happy to hear someone make this point. Rather than
| sneering "vaporware" when decades fail to crack a problem, I
| would prefer us to keep in mind that if we never try multi-
| generational projects, we will never taste the fruit of
| multi-generational projects, and those are some sweet fruit
| indeed.
| danenania wrote:
| It's also good to have a number of these things in the
| oven, because it's hard to predict when a sudden
| discontinuous leap might make practical in the short term
| something that previously seemed like a multi-generational
| project.
|
| I presume almost no one in 1920 could have imagined that
| anything approaching the output of _fission_ energy would
| become common in their lifetime.
| soperj wrote:
| that's perfect analogy, since most fruit & nuts are multi-
| generational projects.
| treis wrote:
| It runs into the spaceship problem where later iterations
| of a spaceship reach the destination first because new
| technology allows them to fly faster. At some point (maybe)
| materials and other technology will develop enough so that
| fusion becomes feasible on a decades or so timeline. Or
| solar & battery technology will develop to the point where
| fusion isn't really needed.
| guhidalg wrote:
| It's an interesting sci-fi thought, but why wouldn't the
| second spaceship just catch up with the first one and
| pick up the passengers to avoid their unnecessary travel
| time?
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| Why pick up the passengers only? Plan ahead and build it
| to pick up the entire ship, including not just the
| passengers but all the materials and supplies they had
| packed as well.
| taftster wrote:
| Incompatible docking apparatus, not backwards compatible.
| Engineers invented these doors, after all.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| So? If you know there's another spaceship that you're
| going to pass and you need to pick people up, you make
| your docking apparatus backwards compatible.
|
| This isn't rocket science :-)
| tsol wrote:
| Yes but this spaceship was made by Apple. It's a feature.
| antod wrote:
| Because you'd have to leave the 2nd one nearly empty to
| fit the extra passengers in?
|
| Might be a good idea if nobody wants to go on the 2nd
| ship though.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| How does it make any sense for science? If noone builds
| version 1, there will be no version 2.
|
| You can't skip inventing ironworks because eventually
| titanium will be invented.
| rytill wrote:
| But if the first spaceship was never developed, would the
| second spaceship have been?
| treis wrote:
| Sure because you develop technology while working on
| achievable goals. As an example, what could someone in
| 1920 do to help develop fusion power? Pretty much nothing
| that would be practically useful today. But they had
| stuff they could achieve which laid the groundwork to
| what we're doing today.
| netcraft wrote:
| I was just talking about this the other day, its formal
| name is called the Wait Calculation https://en.wikipedia.
| org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calcu...
| kiba wrote:
| I am not sure if we have a project that spans multiple
| generations?
|
| It would be easier to do a project that provide some kind
| of immediate benefit while having long term
| multigenerational long term effect.
|
| Science is kinda that way. We get immediate knowledge with
| long term unknown payoff.
| fragmede wrote:
| Many churches built before the industrial age took
| multiple generations to build.
| sdunwoody wrote:
| Not a scientific achievement, but doesn't the Sagrada
| Familia count?
|
| "On 19 March 1882, construction of the Sagrada Familia
| began ... It was anticipated that the building would be
| completed by 2026, the centenary of Gaudi's death, but
| this has now been delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic."
|
| Continuing construction (admittedly not continuosly) for
| roughly 150 years is pretty impressive in my opinion.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| The Netherlands would like a word. Holding back the sea
| was a monumental project that will definitely last
| generations to come. Maybe not as exiting as high temp
| superconductors and fusion but still a nationwide unique
| product.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| It may last for generations to come, but did the original
| development take generations?
| kuschku wrote:
| Old-school land reclamation worked by putting woven
| fences in the water where waves would deposit sand over
| decades and centuries, slowly growing the land bit by
| bit. Those versions were already multi-generational
| projects.
|
| (I'm citing the techniques used in the north frisian
| wadden sea, I'm unsure if the same techniques were used
| in west frisia as well)
| pmontra wrote:
| Decommissioning a fission power plant and storing nuclear
| waste in a safe way? That's probably a multi civilization
| project. The easy part first.
| cft wrote:
| Also in the era of family businesses, businesses were
| much more sustainable, sometimes competitive over
| hundreds of years. The useful lifespan of a modern public
| company is much smaller.
| DrBazza wrote:
| It's 30 years time. It's always 30 years time.
|
| https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/why-nuclear-fusi...
| ambrozk wrote:
| This is a very dumb meme that people use to avoid learning
| anything about the actual hurdles that are currently being
| faced by fusion researchers. At some point, fusion will be
| much less than 30 years away, and at that point, I guarantee
| you that lazy people will still be repeating this joke,
| because it is literaly the only thing they know about the
| subject.
| DrBazza wrote:
| If only I didn't do my phd in a department with plasma guys
| 30 years ago back in the 90s eh?
| khafra wrote:
| "Fusion is always 30 years away" is a heuristic that almost
| always works.
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-
| almost...
| Wiseacre wrote:
| We haven't even been splitting atoms for a full century
| yet. Give science some goddamn time to work.
| andrepd wrote:
| Not to mention we haven't invested a fiftieth of what we
| should have into fusion research.
| sroussey wrote:
| More money goes to subsidizing almonds.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| 20 century progress was so crazy that people got all the
| kinds of unrealistic expectations.
| kaibee wrote:
| Not reading the article in the link you're replying to is
| a heuristic that almost always works ;)
| orangepurple wrote:
| This is an excellent read, thanks for sharing
| NoGravitas wrote:
| "Assuming anything Scott Alexander Siskin says is wrong"
| is also a heuristic that almost always works.
| soperj wrote:
| It was 30 years away at current levels of funding. Funding
| dipped considerably. This is as dumb as when they ask you for
| an estimate at work, then change the scope of the project and
| then retort with "well it was your estimate".
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I think it used to be in 20 years time.
|
| https://bigthink.com/videos/fusion-really-is-20-years-
| away-2...
| giantrobot wrote:
| Inflation.
| willis936 wrote:
| This is a disingenuous argument. JET was not designed as a
| power plant. Those flywheels are used exclusively to
| transiently power the copper confinement coils. Since
| superconduction was discovered, no reactor study has had non-
| superconducting confinement coils because they are (very
| obviously) impractical.
| SantalBlush wrote:
| Remember, the easiest way for uninformed people to appear
| scientific is to lob high-level criticisms about the topic.
| In this case, it's "But it only doubled the output!" or
| something similar.
|
| We see this pattern on every single piece of science news
| that comes across the front page of HN.
| dfdz wrote:
| The only purpose of my comment was to provide context for the
| numbers in the article via a thought experiment involving
| doubling.
|
| Since the calculation involves taking log_2, even if the
| estimate for the "used power" is off by a factor of 4 the
| result will only change by 50 years.
|
| Can you make your qualitative comment quantitative and update
| the numbers in my doubling thought experiment?
|
| I would be curious about what you think is more realistic.
| willis936 wrote:
| A quantitative approach is no virtue here, just a more
| convincing way to lie.
|
| ITER will use roughly the same amount of power as JET,
| produce 10x the power 40 years later. Even using poor
| metrics such as Q you have enough data points to p-hack
| whatever incorrect timeframe model you want.
|
| ITER isn't even using HTS coils.
|
| If you really want a quantitative projection of MCF
| performance over time, here you go. Don't lie with numbers
| if you don't know what you're talking about.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fustion_triple-
| product_di...
| IceHegel wrote:
| Not to be an asshole, but I think the fusion crowd could go for
| more of an under promise, over deliver mentality.
| dangom wrote:
| No one will get funded with that mentality in such a high-risk
| high-reward area like fusion. But indeed after so many
| headlines I agree with you that no one gets excited about these
| news anymore.
| einpoklum wrote:
| My very limited exposure to the EU research funding world
| suggests that it is customary (at least in applied CS) to
| massively overstate the potential benefits and scope of your
| project, and it is understood/accepted that you will
| backtrack when reporting progress (or even already in the
| detailed description of what work will be done). Unfortunate,
| but it probably means that your comment is valid.
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| I'm not really sure about that. The promise of fusion power
| is so great that it would be idiotic not to throw money at
| it. The US was spending a billion a week in the Afghanistan
| war.
| dymk wrote:
| You just gave a great example of the irrationality of how
| things are funded. Idiotic things get cash thrown at them,
| National healthcare rests on the sidelines.
| bumby wrote:
| I think it matters on perspective. That funding might be
| considered rational if you were a congressperson who have
| a vested interest in certain lobbies. Not saying it's
| necessary moral or optimizing for the right thing for
| society as a whole, but it may be rational.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Just wait... it's kind of a tired trope, but I still
| think there will yet be a "War on Climate Change."
|
| /s
| nosianu wrote:
| Yeah, but that helped out a lot of US companies that have
| significant lobbying backing and districts where those
| companies are located. Similar to how some NASA things get
| funded.
|
| The outcome itself is not nearly enough, if it even matters
| (see Afghanistan, it' _s not like the outcome was a
| surprise): What needs to happen is that the_ money river*
| needs to flow through areas that have influential
| congress(wo)men and senators who benefit both financially
| (campaign contributions) and politically (good headlines,
| get something they can use in deals, etc.).
|
| This is for anything where the outcomes are far away and/or
| uncertain. In those cases the money flow itself becomes the
| actual target. It is something concrete, with impact right
| away, compared to those types of goals.
|
| A politician will probably support military spending in
| case the homeland is actually really threatened, but when
| it's not it's all about the benefits not of the military
| equipment for the troops, which are questionable (even when
| it works, do they actually need it?), but the benefits of
| the spending itself, pretty much disregarding the final
| products.
|
| Example Afghanistan, which at first glance seems to fit my
| claim less than military spending for hardware:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/11/us-
| afg...
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-won-in-afghanistan-
| private-... (paywall)
|
| > _One-third to half of that sum went to contractors, with
| five defense companies-- Lockheed Martin Corp. , Boeing Co.
| , General Dynamics Corp. , Raytheon Technologies Corp. and
| Northrop Grumman Corp. --taking the lion's share, $2.1
| trillion, for weapons, supplies and other services_
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Well, it's not like the US would pay someone else to
| develop NASA's missions, would they? Part of the point of
| NASA is to keep aerospace expertise thriving, (I'd argue
| one of the primary goals, in fact), by answering really
| challenging science questions. You're right in letter,
| but off in spirit by comparing it to war profiteering.
|
| Just imagine where we'd be if the US had a similar "Focus
| here" initiative for semiconductors since the 1960s.
| nosianu wrote:
| I would like to emphasize, since I did not already do so,
| that I make no value judgment. It is the public that does
| not want the US government to do "socialism", but there
| seems to be a real need for it so politicians do it
| through the back door. How well that works is another
| matter. It's not wrong for politicians to pay attention
| to try to keep jobs, or to keep certain industries alive
| for which there only is infrequent real need, which the
| short-term business management outlook would leave
| rotting.
|
| I think independent of how well it works, or how
| terrible, to me it's an example of the "life finds a way"
| meme. Some great need exists, but also some great
| constraints, and a large amount of irrationality, so the
| outcome is what it is.
|
| .
|
| > _Just imagine where we 'd be if the US had a similar
| "Focus here" initiative for semiconductors since the
| 1960s._
|
| You may want to buckle up and watch the excellent talk
| https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo
|
| > _Today, Silicon Valley is known around the world as a
| fount of technology innovation and development fueled by
| private venture capital and peopled by fabled
| entrepreneurs. But it wasn 't always so. Unbeknownst to
| even seasoned inhabitants, today's Silicon Valley had its
| start in government secrecy and wartime urgency._
|
| > _In this lecture, renowned serial entrepreneur Steve
| Blank presents how the roots of Silicon Valley sprang not
| from the later development of the silicon semiconductor
| but instead from the earlier technology duel over the
| skies of Germany and secret efforts around (and over) the
| Soviet Union. World War II, the Cold War and one Stanford
| professor set the stage for the creation and explosive
| growth of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. The world
| was forever changed when the Defense Department, CIA and
| the National Security Agency acted like today 's venture
| capitalists funding this first wave of entrepreneurship._
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| I don't think there is room to under promise with fusion power,
| it will either work or it will not.
| curiousgal wrote:
| Battery and teeth enemal people too!
| Mvandenbergh wrote:
| Sure, that's an approach that has led to the success of Silicon
| Valley and the employment of most of the people on HN (as well
| as the fortunes of Y combinator).
| artur_makly wrote:
| a comment from a friend of mine " I worked at JET for 2 years,
| That device is from 1979, it's a fucking joke and the $ millions
| being pumped into it every year would be more useful as paper
| fuel for a steam engine... the SPARC thing (private, but also in
| Oxford and in the same compound as JET)is much more promising"
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