[HN Gopher] Tokamak Energy sets a temperature record among comme...
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Tokamak Energy sets a temperature record among commercial fusion
companies
Author : geox
Score : 180 points
Date : 2022-03-13 20:01 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tokamakenergy.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tokamakenergy.co.uk)
| richardfey wrote:
| It feels like this is what Elon Musk should have invested into.
| topspin wrote:
| Commonwealth Fusion (the MIT spinoff with new high temperature
| superconducting magnets) has raised about $2 billion in venture
| capital since 2021.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| Does "commercial fusion" means suistained fusion?
| aaomidi wrote:
| Probably net positive energy generation.
| dejv wrote:
| They do have great Youtube channel:
| https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCuSlFJbBUIj1zfJLRnGXSow
|
| Unfortunately it is not as active as it once was, but their old
| videos are very interesting.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| For those who know more, how meaningful is this achievement"
|
| "We are proud to have achieved this breakthrough which puts us
| one step closer to providing the world with a new, secure and
| carbon-free energy source."
|
| Seems like every fusion energy announcement, always one step
| closer but never quite arrived.
| tempfs wrote:
| It is almost like these 'another winning step towards fusion'
| announcements arrive on a schedule meant to make sure that the
| funding isn't pulled.
| qiskit wrote:
| If it was anywhere close to being commercially feasible, you'd
| first see it in oil/gas futures. Money will know long before
| you or I or any news outlets will know.
| onethought wrote:
| I'm not sure that is true. GM isn't a penny stock when it
| should be, and Neo or Xpeng should be bigger, and they are
| not.
|
| Sometimes money wants to deny the future that is coming.
| liketochill wrote:
| Clearly the market disagrees with you. I've never heard of
| neo or xpeng and GM has a long history of manufacturing
| vehicles to North American safety standards. Whatever neo
| or xpeng do is GM incapable of hiring some engineers (they
| might already have some) to copy it and then build it in
| their existing factories?
| zizee wrote:
| This doesn't sound right to me. How many years out do oil/gas
| futures project? Even if someone from the future arrived
| today with blueprints of a perfect fusion power plant design,
| it would take many years to build up enough fusion power
| plants to make a dent in the world's oil/gas consumption.
| You'd not only need to switch over power plants, but replace
| every car, truck, house, ship, smelter, xxxx to use
| electricity.
| lazide wrote:
| The poster is saying the stakes in oil/gas are high enough
| that someone IS already paying millions of dollars to have
| dedicated staff follow projects and give people a heads up
| if anyone seems actually close (or it seems remotely
| feasible) - and you'd see it reflected in various market
| moves, either by hedge funds or by the companies themselves
| in how they invest on projects.
|
| Which is probably true.
|
| I've heard from friends of some of the typical shenanigans
| played among state actors involving oil and gas, and that
| would be the least underhanded thing going on.
| tootie wrote:
| The context here is that this is a private company who have hit
| an important milestone. They have managed to raise capital,
| hire people and build a plausible foundation for a viable
| reactor without billions in government subsidies and done it in
| a little over ten years. They are claiming grid-connected
| reactors will be online by 2030.
| elil17 wrote:
| I mean that is how steps work, no?
|
| This is how R&D projects work. It's extremely difficult to
| estimate timelines. Someone might have said the same thing of,
| for instance, image recognition - we kept getting "one step
| closer" for years and years. You could look at Fei-Fei Li
| making ImageNet in 2006 and go, "she didn't really solve
| anything - they keep saying we're one step closer to image
| recognition but this is just some new dataset." Of course that
| actually was a very significant step, it was crucial groundwork
| for AlexNet.
|
| There is absolutely no way to know whether getting to 100M in a
| spherical tokamak is really significant. Maybe this design is a
| dead end that will never see actual use. Maybe you will have a
| tiny one in your tea kettle by 2050.
|
| What's clear, though is that the pace of fusion research is
| really much faster than it was. That should be exciting to
| everyone except oil barons.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| Great :-) Only 20 more years.
|
| Sorry, Could not resist
| olliej wrote:
| Next year is the year of viable fusion power!
| AitchEmArsey wrote:
| Which will arrive first - the year of viable fusion, or the
| year of Linux on the desktop?
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| To be honest, the year of fusion on the desktop sounds pretty
| dope.
|
| Though you could argue that was 1992[1] and KDE has has
| Plasma sewn up for a long time too.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)
| thruhiker wrote:
| This is so hot it's cool.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Does temperature have a theoretical upper limit ?
| russdill wrote:
| You'd eventually have so much energy that the mass energy
| relation would give you a black hole.
| jleahy wrote:
| No, it does not. In a closed system if you add enough energy
| the temperature will eventually become negative (after 'passing
| through' +inf).
|
| As you reach a state where almost all particles are in their
| maximum energy states (this is assuming there is one) you will
| slowly approach negative zero (which again you can never quite
| attain).
|
| Statistical mechanics can be confusing at first.
| civilized wrote:
| So what happens if I stick my hand in a negative temperature
| state of matter?
| jleahy wrote:
| You'd be fine, because any kind of matter that you could
| stick your head into is incapable of reaching negative
| temperatures.
| nimish wrote:
| Sure you can, gas lasers exist. Stick your hand into the
| gain medium and have fun getting fried!
| crdrost wrote:
| I am not sure about your first statement...
|
| In particular even with a quantum non-interacting gas with
| particle-in-a-box modes, the Hamiltonian is not bounded from
| above and there is no reason to expect a negative
| temperature, no?
|
| There exist systems, like spin systems, where energy is
| bounded from above and so entropy decreases as you add
| energy, which is the definition of negative temperature...
| But I find it dubious that _every_ system is such, unless I
| am missing something nonintuitive about say relativistic
| effects or so
| jleahy wrote:
| No you're quite right, that's why I said "...maximum energy
| states (this is assuming there is one)". Of course with no
| upper bound on energy this isn't possible, that's the
| definition straight up, just like you say.
| kibwen wrote:
| Wikipedia article on the concept of negative temperature:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| The critical bit for me:
|
| > This is only possible if the number of high energy states
| is limited. For a system of ordinary (quantum or classical)
| particles such as atoms or dust, the number of high energy
| states is unlimited (particle momenta can in principle be
| increased indefinitely). Some systems, however [...], have
| a maximum amount of energy that they can hold, and as they
| approach that maximum energy their entropy actually begins
| to decrease.
|
| In my (limited) understanding, it's somewhat like the
| phenomenon that a communication channel bit error rate over
| 0.5 actually results in _less_ information loss (imagine a
| BER of 1: that 's just a NOT gate).
|
| If your energy states are limited, adding energy actual
| brings you _closer_ to an ordered state (that of everything
| being in the highest state).
|
| But, this is not a situation you get by simply heating
| something up with a blowtorch, no matter how hot it is.
| 19870213 wrote:
| Not a physicist, if temperature of particles is movement (I
| think chemical bonds will break long before the following
| limit), then the upper limit is just below the speed of light.
| To make it even hotter would require infinite amount of energy.
| Now what that temperature is in kelvin, I don't know.
| parineum wrote:
| Enough energy in one place will create a black hole.
| wiml wrote:
| Temperature is more about the kinetic (and other) energy of
| the particles than the velocity -- you can keep adding energy
| indefinitely, or at least until you hit some kind of planck-
| scale weirdness point, even though the velocity is only
| asymptotically approaching c.
| jupp0r wrote:
| Yes, 1.42 x 10^32 K but it's not as straightforward as naming a
| single limit [1].
|
| [1] https://www.popsci.com/article/science/ask-anything-whats-
| ho...
| Keyframe wrote:
| That question has an answer in another question.. does energy
| have a theoretical upper limit? Lowest temperature is absolute
| zero, no movement.
| elil17 wrote:
| Yes it does - the plank temperature, where the wavelength of
| light emitted is the plank length. Current theories predict
| that this would be the maximum possible temperature. Of
| course, this is so hot as to be totally irrelevant to
| anything practical.
| olliej wrote:
| I mean the obvious upper limit is the particles moving at C,
| but I suspect quantum physics means that the limit is
| actually below that (my uneducated low level undergrad
| physics courses make me assume some relationship to the plank
| constant)
| foob wrote:
| Not in classical thermodynamics, but temperatures above the
| Planck temperature aren't understood with current quantum
| models. It would probably require a theory of quantum gravity
| to shed further light on this.
| usrusr wrote:
| Children's TV level astrophysics (it's not astrophysics, but
| that's the context where stuff like that is presented?)
| suggests that if Brownian motion approached 1c, mass would grow
| towards the infinite. So you could always add even more energy?
|
| (sorry, can't provide anything beyond that level)
| gus_massa wrote:
| The mean velocity in a gas is
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_velocity
|
| v ~= Sqrt( k_B * T / m) ~= constant * Sqrt(T)
|
| (There is another constant in the formula that depends on
| what definition of mean you use, but it's safe to ignore it
| for this discussion.)
|
| So if T is big enough, the result of this formula is faster
| than light.
|
| But this formula is useful only for a not relativistic gas.
| Once the temperature is so big that relativistic effects are
| important, you must use another formula. (The other formula
| is more difficult to calculate, but when the temperature is
| low the result is almost identical to the formula I wrote.)
|
| Temperature has no theoretical upper limit, but if it's high
| enough weird things can happen as described in a sibling
| comment. More details in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck
| _units#Planck_temperatur...
| javcasas wrote:
| More children's TV level of astrophysics: so you keep adding
| energy to your particles, they approach 1c, they gain and
| gain mass... until they collapse into nanoscopic black holes
| and immediately evaporate into hawkins radiation, right?
|
| I mean that's the general upper limit on stuff in the
| universe: it eventually collapses into a black hole.
| ynfnehf wrote:
| For each specific fusion reaction there is an optimal
| temperature (for maximum reactivity). Usually around a billion
| kelvin or so, plus or minus a few orders of magnitude.
| grahamlee wrote:
| interestingly, no. Temperature can become infinitely high, and
| you can still add heat, at which point it becomes infinitely
| low. You can carry on adding heat, and the temperature will get
| back to absolute 0.
| https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/36885/how-is-n...
| q-big wrote:
| > Temperature can become infinitely high, and you can still
| add heat, at which point it becomes infinitely low. You can
| carry on adding heat, and the temperature will get back to
| absolute 0.
|
| Perhaps the correct measure is not temperature, but inverse
| temperature (i.e. 1/T)?
| whatshisface wrote:
| You can't heat something to negative temperature, although
| negative temperature things will transfer energy to positive
| temperature things. Negative temperature can be achieved
| through lining up many small magnets against a larger
| magnetic field. Disordering the magnets will reduce the
| potential energy, running opposite to the usual trend where
| increasing disorder involves the occupation of higher-energy
| states.
| olliej wrote:
| How does it become infinitely high? Temperature is a measure
| of average particle speed, and that's limited to the speed of
| light
|
| (I'm not a physicist so I'm willing to be corrected, but this
| doesn't jibe with my low level compulsory physics courses
| from uni :) )
| crdrost wrote:
| Temperature has to do with how the entropy changes with the
| addition of energy. It helps to use the "coldness" or
| "thermodynamic beta" scale, b = DS/DE is the coldness of a
| system, the thermodynamic temperature is defined as 1/(k b)
| where k is a conversion factor, the Boltzmann constant, to
| convert between units of energy and kelvins.
|
| For most normal systems, entropy increases with an addition
| of energy, and they have a positive coldness. Confusingly,
| the _lower_ the entropy change, the _less cold_ or _hotter_
| we would regard it: if you bring two systems into contact,
| they share energy to maximize their total entropy, so
| something which has low coldness = low entropy change will
| donate a lot of energy to something with a higher coldness
| = higher entropy change, the smaller negative will be
| balanced out by a larger positive.
|
| You can extrapolate this to an infinite temperature, this
| would be an object with b = 0 or zero coldness, it can take
| or lose energy without changing its entropy at all. An
| example is an assembly of electron spins in a magnetic
| field, when 50% of them are aligned with and 50% are
| aligned against the magnetic field: this is the most
| entropic that the spin system could possibly be, so there
| is no way to increase it and to first order changes in
| energy do not decrease it. It has zero coldness or infinite
| temperature.
|
| Add a little bit of energy and it is in the state where it
| actively wants to lose energy, putting more energy into the
| system requires aligning more of the spins along the
| magnetic field. This is a negative coldness, which is also
| regarded as a negative temperature by this T =1/(k b)
| formula.
| mateo1 wrote:
| Interesting development, wrong title.
| api wrote:
| > While several government laboratories have reported plasma
| temperatures above 100M degrees in conventional tokamaks, this
| milestone has been achieved in just five years, for a cost of
| less than PS50m ($70m), in a much more compact fusion device.
|
| Governments should only fund things. They should not actually run
| them.
| elil17 wrote:
| This private company was only able to move so quickly and
| cheaply _because_ government labs had already shown how to do
| it. If anything, this case is evidence against your view.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| Privately run, revenue optimizing police isn't something that
| sounds like a positive.
| noobermin wrote:
| To be honest a lot of the fusion news recently has made me
| skeptical (namely, for CFS guys who kinda smell a little sus to
| me if I'm being 100% honest), but this on the other hand is
| fantastic, actual results (although they should publish a paper
| on it, just my bias as a scientist), meeting good plasma temps
| with just $70M! Not a gigabuck not even 100 megabucks, that to me
| is a good sign for actual commercial fusion. Bravo to Tokamak
| Energy.
| willis936 wrote:
| What's sus about CFS? No one else is making 20 T confinement
| field coils. SPARC's campus is already up and the machine is
| being built. ARC is expected to have ground broken this year.
| Mizza wrote:
| What about CFS is fishy to you? Those are the guys I'd put my
| money on, but I'm curious why you'd think otherwise.
| Retric wrote:
| For me it's the "seemingly" crazy unrealistic deadlines,
| which are achievable if they don't actually try and hit net
| energy gain.
|
| Use 20MW of energy to add 10MW into plasma, get 20MW of
| fusion, convert 30MW of heat into 10MW of electricity and
| they have reached their stated goal without actually
| achieving anything useful. And that's assuming steady state
| operation rather than a fraction of a second pulse that
| briefly reaches their goals.
|
| It's exactly the same thing as a startup selling dollars for
| pennies and saying yea we're going to make it up in volume.
| nimish wrote:
| I don't think they'll have SPARC by 2025 but the physics
| work out. It's basically a bog-standard tokamak with
| superconducting magnets but with much more current capacity
| and therefore magnetic field strength from newer HTS. It's
| the fabrication of the magnets at scale that's totally new
| engineering and manufacturing; as we saw with Tesla that's
| quite hard. Plus the supply chains of HTS tapes aren't
| exactly mature.
|
| I think both Tokamak and CFS have roughly the same strategy
| of using bigger magnetic fields. Given the scalings here ht
| tps://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2017.043.
| .. + JET working well it's a lot less risk than whatever
| most others are doing. Make a JET sized tokamak but have 5x
| the magnetic field strength gives a 625x gain in power,
| ideally.
| DennisP wrote:
| ARC will be about the size of JET, and JET was built in
| four years, with most of that being just for the buildings.
| The test reactor, SPARC, will be about half that size.
|
| Tokamak scaling is very well established. The output scales
| with the square of plasma volume, and the fourth power of
| magnetic field strength. Stronger magnetic fields also make
| the plasma more stable. JET already demonstrated a five-
| second plasma, which they only had to shut down because
| they have copper coils that would melt if operated longer
| than that.
|
| Because of all this, many independent fusion researchers
| think SPARC will succeed in getting 10X gain in 2025. After
| that, the larger ARC should easily reach commercial levels.
|
| Of all the commercial fusion companies, CFS is the most
| conservative one. Tokamak Energy is a close second, with a
| very similar approach. The other fusion startups are
| attempting approaches that have more physics risk, though
| many of them would have fewer engineering and economic
| difficulties if the physics does work out.
| Retric wrote:
| Simply scaling SPAR or ITER doesn't result in commercial
| operation.
|
| First you need fuel, global Tritium supplies are tiny and
| DD fusion is much harder.
|
| Next stability is an open question, no Tokamak has ever
| operated near maximum capacity for even 1 hour.
|
| Add to that serious material science questions, etc etc
| and even Q>100 alone just doesn't actually mean much.
|
| Now let's just assume all of that is solved, you still
| need to actually ensure your design is economically
| viable. Simply producing energy from fusion alone isn't
| enough which means you need to cheaply solve not only all
| the above but do so cheaply.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| And to think, some people would rather spend $700 million on a
| boat[1].
|
| If you wanted a legacy, you could hardly do better than being
| the Zefram Cochrane of energy. You don't even have to stop
| being an asshole!
|
| [1] The Scheherazade for a current example of interest, but
| there are thousands more examples.
| acchow wrote:
| > And to think, some people would rather spend $700 million
| on a boat[1].
|
| This is the weirdest thing to me. How do billionaires think a
| big boat is cooler than building nuclear fusion? If I was a
| billionaire, I'd build space ships and underground tunnels
| and nuclear micro reactors
| cplusplusfellow wrote:
| A lot of billionaires have organized businesses but never
| tinkered with anything constructive in their lives. They
| don't even own a black and decker power tool.
| contradictioned wrote:
| It is enough to own black and decker... Scnr
| api wrote:
| The big boat is about status, which means attracting mates
| and increasing the odds of breeding before a lion eats you.
| Our brain stems don't know what geological epoch we are in.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| That a big useless boat is a vastly bigger panty-dropper
| then a working fusion reactor says everything about our
| species, doesn't it?
| VectorLock wrote:
| Girls in bikinis don't want to sun themselves on a fusion
| reactor.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| To be fair, you do get a better tan with a fission
| reactor.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Right? Big boats aren't even that big a brag, someone will
| always have a bigger one, and if yours _is_ longest for
| now, then theirs has _three_ helipads, and next year some
| tryhard will build a longer one anyway.
|
| Being first to fusion would mean your name would be above
| even Einstein in history.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| The fusion reactor just uses a very inefficient process to
| turn energy into less energy. At least the big boat goes
| places.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Large yachts are functional. They're mobile own territory
| for people operating on the level of nation states.
|
| Booking out a hotel for hundreds of aides, attaches and
| visitors is very difficult outside the largest cities.
| Securing it can be impossible. Particularly on short
| notice. A yacht solves those problems.
|
| (I'd still pick the reactor.)
| izzygonzalez wrote:
| I never thought of it from this perspective. A yacht
| could serve as a research vessel with slight added
| protection against political turmoil. One of the problems
| with setting up organizations inside of a nation-state
| are the economic and political risks. Without the
| necessary dive into the ethics of the proposition, it
| might serve as the Noah's ark for vital research and the
| associated minds.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Now there's a spec-fic book I'd read:
|
| > Physicists trapped in indentured servitude aboard Elon
| Musk's converted droneship research station "Just Fucking
| Get It Done" as it sails the post-apocalytic seas.
|
| > Just when they thought it couldn't get any worse, they
| dock at Peter Thiel's island bio-research facility and
| they have to take matters into their own nitrile-gloved
| hands before it's too late...
| credit_guy wrote:
| Many megayachts are chartered when not in use by their
| owner. So in the end they are investments that produce a
| return [1]
|
| " It's worth acknowledging that while owners will
| ultimately spend a huge amount for the privilege of having
| their very own superyacht, they're able to recoup some of
| these costs by chartering them out. Connor estimates that
| around 12 weeks of charter represents the annual operating
| cost of most yachts, which means owners can break even if
| they hire their boats out for the same length of time they
| use them during the year."
|
| [1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/amp/hidden-costs-of-owning-
| a-supe...
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| You might break even on running costs, but when do you
| break even on the outlay?
|
| I guess you get some back if you sell it, and you
| probably never actually laid out for it as such rather
| then though some mad financial chicanery because simply
| paying for stuff is decidedly plebian.
| ed wrote:
| Note: they did not achieve "commercial fusion" (Q-total > 1),
| they set a temperature record among commercial fusion companies.
| (Still cool though!)
| ReptileMan wrote:
| The opposite of cool. Literally
| dang wrote:
| OK, we've put that phrase in the title above. Thanks!
| deutschew wrote:
| damn...got all excited
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