[HN Gopher] Will We Ever Get Fusion Power?
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Will We Ever Get Fusion Power?
Author : pseudocoup
Score : 34 points
Date : 2024-06-26 12:06 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.construction-physics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.construction-physics.com)
| pixiemaster wrote:
| there is some fundamental thing that attracts humans to big
| things.
|
| technical challenges aside, fusion power as a research + building
| + disvtributil project is so expensive - for the same amount of
| money we could already build a decentralized solution out of
| over-abundant solar cells, but it seems looking for the one big
| thing is still more interesting.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| It's just 50 years away.
| marssaxman wrote:
| ...or 500 seconds away, depending on your point of view!
| more_corn wrote:
| There's a fusion reaction in the sky. All you have to do is
| harvest it. If you want to bring a fusion reaction home you have
| to deal with pesky things like INSANE AMOUNTS OF HEAT. Luckily
| the sky furnace is safely surrounded by 93M miles of insulting
| vacuum rendering the radiation harmless and even pleasant. We
| have a handy-dandy magnetic shield to handle surges, and
| atmospheric buffer for anything that sneaks through (now with
| protective ozone!) It's really an ingenious design. I can't think
| of any way to improve upon it.
| fragmede wrote:
| Harvesting energy from this "sky fusion reactor" (if it really
| exists) has this small pesky problem of being unavailable if
| you can't see the fusion reactor, in a daily phenomena known to
| scientific experts as "night", as well as this other
| intermittent problem dubbed "clouds" by scientific experts in
| weather and weather-related fields, so I can think of at least
| two places to improve upon sky-fusion-energy-harvesting
| technology. An at-home fusion reactor would not have problems
| there.
| hyperhello wrote:
| Do you really not know of the progress that's been made in
| the thirty years since you've been telling that joke?
| nullhole wrote:
| One of my old favouries:
|
| "Rotation Of Earth Plunges Entire North American Continent
| Into Darkness"
|
| https://www.theonion.com/rotation-of-earth-plunges-entire-
| no...
| katbyte wrote:
| Insane amounts of heat is exactly what you want from your power
| plant..
| choilive wrote:
| Being pedantic, but most heat is considered "waste" heat -
| aka it is high entropy energy, which is much harder to
| convert into the more useful forms of energy (mechanical,
| electrical, etc.)
| encoderer wrote:
| SimCity predicted 2050
| orson2077 wrote:
| Fusion is always 50 years away for a reason:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/5gi9yh/fusion_i...
|
| IIRC, the sum total of all fusion research throughout all of
| history is USD$100-200B. It's obvious
| governments/industry/humanity doesn't really want it, or they'd
| go fund it.
| travisb wrote:
| The lack of funding angle isn't really convincing.
|
| Modern designs depend on material science and computing
| abilities which could never have been made in the 70's no
| matter how much money was thrown at it.
| orson2077 wrote:
| Fusion-relevant materials research could have absolutely
| advanced with funding back in the 70s. Lithium compatible
| structural material and 14MeV neutron source experiments
| immediately come to mind, not to mention tritium permeation
| and extraction. There was tonnes to learn, and they chose not
| to fund it.
| choilive wrote:
| We already have a zero maintenance fusion power plant that will
| last billions of years and that outputs millions of times more
| energy per second than humanity uses in a year.
|
| We already have technology that can take the electromagnetic
| waves this fusion power plant produces and _directly_ convert it
| into electricity without needing pesky intermediaries like
| boiling water to turn a turbine.
|
| This technology is relatively cheap to produce, extraordinarily
| safe, can last for decades with minor maintenance, can scale
| almost indefinitely, and there are many practical improvements we
| can make to it that are going to applied commercially in years
| and not decades.
|
| I don't doubt that trying to achieve commercially viable fusion
| is a worthy engineering and science challenge and that we will
| learn and develop many useful technologies along the the way -
| but fusion is probably the hardest engineering challenge humanity
| has ever attempted and after many decades of R&D there is still
| no clear path to commercial viability.
|
| Solar panels today work, and they work well, and we can
| practically throw endless amounts of money building them and it
| will work. Today. And we needed solutions that work today, not 50
| years from now... maybe.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| > Solar panels today work
|
| But not tonight
| choilive wrote:
| Luckily about 50% of the Earth is lit up by the sun at any
| moment and energy storage capabilities are advancing much
| faster than fusion's capabilities are.
|
| Distribution and storage are way more tractable problems than
| fusion.
|
| If you want to be really ambitious you can go to space and
| have 100% capacity :).
| okanat wrote:
| Unless you colonize it, you cannot utilize 50% of the
| Earth's energy. If it proven anything, what the war in
| Ukraine showed us is how terrible of an idea to outsource
| energy, especially to nations who don't share interests
| with us.
| RAM-bunctious wrote:
| I think it's clear that solar panels, while working today,
| clearly haven't been able to solve today's problems, or else
| this discussion wouldn't be happening. But we should keep
| investing in them, one way or another.
|
| Similarly, we should keep investing in the prospect of
| commercially viable fusion reactors. The harnessing of fusion
| reactors would be instantly revolutionary as opposed to the
| incremental progress solar promises. Therein lies the
| difference. Once is not necessarily better than the other.
|
| And it's not a zero-sum game.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Solar panels clearly don't work wel enough to be able to solve
| our energy demands. A very significant portion of the day they
| don't work at all.
| burnished wrote:
| We call that the 'night' and our battery tech is improving
| enormously. Personally I hope solar becomes so cheap that
| mechanical batteries become popular - pumped resevoirs,
| inexplicable wood flywheel
| JohnFen wrote:
| "Ever" is a very long time.
|
| Will we get fusion power in the next few decades? I wouldn't bet
| on it, but I also wouldn't bet against it.
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