Breaking News: Fusion Energy

[CousinsCowgirl84]

8 hours ago, LD0506 said:

You do realize this means a fusion reactor produces heat to boil water to make steam to turn turbines yadda yadda yadda........it's a better fire, but hardly some holy grail. You still have massive infrastructure and delivery networks and a host of other issues that we have already, along with the centralized control and monetization of the network as opposed to diffuse solar + better batteries that might allow you to go offgrid altogether.

 

Not to throw cold water on this, it's a great step but still just a step. 

It depends on how small you can make the reactor. With nuclear fission reactors, the generate radioactive waste so although you can make them relatively small, it isn’t viable to make smaller one due to the waste issue. You don’t have that problem so if you could make one the size of a room it smaller, every home could have one, or at least every high rise building.

Edited December 13, 2022 by CousinsCowgirl84

[Dont Taze Me Bro]

4 hours ago, PokerPacker said:

Wait 'til you see what you get when they have kids.  The whole wit bred.

 

They turn out like Trade the Beal?

[Destino]

31 minutes ago, The Sisko said:

Meh.🥱🥱🥱 Call me when they build a Dyson sphere. That, I can get excited for.

That’s much too big.  Let’s aim for a ring wold first.

[Destino]

24 minutes ago, CousinsCowgirl84 said:

It depends on how small you can make the reactor. With nuclear fission reactors, the generate radioactive waste so although you can make them relatively small, it isn’t viable to make smaller one due to the waste issue. You don’t have that problem so if you could make one the size of a room it smaller, every home could have one, or at least every high rise building.

Fusion reactors could theoretically by used as propulsion if they could be made small and stable enough.  This would greatly reduce the amount of fuel needed for space travel within our solar system, increasing the payload capacity.  Advances in fusion tech could be significant in more ways than just energy production.  

[tshile]

It’ll be like living in a video game 

 

running around in armored suits collecting fusion cells to power them 

 

shoot lasers with forearm attachments 

 

 

[CousinsCowgirl84]

Yea, because you’ll already need super powerful lasers for the reactor; dual purpose lasers. Looks like they’ll be green lasers.

[Destino]

2 hours ago, tshile said:

It’ll be like living in a video game 

 

running around in armored suits collecting fusion cells to power them 

 

shoot lasers with forearm attachments 

Fusion is steam, so more steam punk than Fallout.  The fusion cell would bring all your steam powered devices to life.  And we’ll all dress like this..

 

 

 

[PokerPacker]

33 minutes ago, Destino said:

Fusion is steam, so more steam punk than Fallout.  The fusion cell would bring all your steam powdered devices to life.  And we’ll all dress like this..

 

 

 

Might I suggest a tall top-hat that actually contains a fusion reactor inside?  Stylish and functional.

[Llevron]

3 minutes ago, PokerPacker said:

Might I suggest a tall top-hat that actually contains a fusion reactor inside?  Stylish and functional.

Old school divers suit with a drill attached to your arm. And a weird little girl with a stabby thing. 

[Jabbyrwock]

2 minutes ago, Llevron said:

 And a weird little girl with a stabby thing. 

 

[PokerPacker]

23 minutes ago, Llevron said:

Old school divers suit with a drill attached to your arm. And a weird little girl with a stabby thing. 

Mr Bubbles approves of your design.

[Corcaigh]

22 hours ago, Renegade7 said:

Paging @Corcaighto help guncheck this.

 

Debbie Downer checking in. I haven’t seen the details but from the general articles would suspect that this is not much to get excited about. 

 

Inertially confined fusion has been investigated since the 1950s … so it’s not new. It’s very different from the major tokamak experiments which create a fairly large plasma at a few hundred millions degrees and try to contain it using huge magnetic fields (i.e. magnetic confinement).

 

ICF involves hitting a small Deuterium/Tritium pellet with massive lasers so that the pellet implodes and creates fusion reactions before it explodes outwards. Sort of like tiny fusion bombs. We know how to do that. And some of the ICF research has been classified because of the overlap with elements of weapon design. 😁 The NIF is the latest of these experiments using inertial confinement and cost over $1B. This announcement appears to be saying that the energy from fusion reactions is now greater than the energy need to smash the pellet with lasers. But Tokamaks are already at that stage generating slightly more energy. 
 

The $64Billion question(s) are:

1. Can you scale this approach to anything approaching steady state power generation?
2. Can you generate enough excess energy to pay for a reactor that will cost billions to construct?
3. Can you usefully extract the energy in a way to make electricity? Most of the energy in a Deuterium-Tritium fusion reaction is in the form of high energy neutrons. How do you capture that energy efficiently in a sustainable way, converting it into heat that can drive a steam turbine. 
4. Can you keep the reactor operating and maintain it given the high energy radiation that will bombard the whole configuration, i.e. those neutrons will do damage
5. And if you can answer all these well enough, can you source enough fuel and construct enough pellets in an economic manner? There is some hope (although the engineering is nowhere near understood) that Tokamaks can breed Tritium which is the critical fuel component. I don’t know if ICF has any method for this. Without an abundant source of Tritium we would have to turn to fusion reactions using other elements/isotopes that are much, much harder.

 

 

 

Edited December 13, 2022 by Corcaigh

[Destino]

1 hour ago, Llevron said:

Old school divers suit with a drill attached to your arm. And a weird little girl with a stabby thing. 

Little sisters were creepy as hell.  Got to stay on land and avoid the underwater libertarians.

 

 

[LD0506]

9 hours ago, CousinsCowgirl84 said:

It depends on how small you can make the reactor. With nuclear fission reactors, the generate radioactive waste so although you can make them relatively small, it isn’t viable to make smaller one due to the waste issue. You don’t have that problem so if you could make one the size of a room it smaller, every home could have one, or at least every high rise building.

 

 

Ah yes, wantum physics

 

Step 1: I imagine something

Step 2: urgleburglemagichappensallthehardpartsdisappear

Step 3: Problem solved!

[ixcuincle]

Great news. I saw on TV yesterday that they had done this in California, however it'll be about 30 years until fusion plants can generate electricity.

[CousinsCowgirl84]

52 minutes ago, LD0506 said:

 

 

Ah yes, wantum physics

 

Step 1: I imagine something

Step 2: urgleburglemagichappensallthehardpartsdisappear

Step 3: Problem solved!

That is how a lot of technology works. 
 

https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.html

 

Already working on it.

[Corcaigh]

1 hour ago, CousinsCowgirl84 said:

That is how a lot of technology works. 
 

https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.html

 

Already working on it.

I can share review papers of compact toroid/high beta experiments from the 70s if you want. 🤓

And there was quite a focus in multiple international labs in the 80s before they pulled the plug. They are interesting for studying high temperature plasmas and their stability when you don’t try to contain it with extremely strong magnetic fields

But the reason the tokamak is the current chosen path for a fusion reactor based on magnetic confinement is because the compact approaches can’t get close to the plasma confinement times. 

[CousinsCowgirl84]

25 minutes ago, Corcaigh said:

I can share review papers of compact toroid/high beta experiments from the 70s if you want. 🤓

And there was quite a focus in multiple international labs in the 80s before they pulled the plug. They are interesting for studying high temperature plasmas and their stability when you don’t try to contain it with extremely strong magnetic fields

But the reason the tokamak is the current chosen path for a fusion reactor based on magnetic confinement is because the compact approaches can’t get close to the plasma confinement times. 

I’m not debating the way things are now. The first computer was the size of of a entire floor of a building.

 

Not related to above, just a general question, but it seems like they are using the magnetic field to contain the plasma to thermally isolate it so they can get the molecules moving fast enough to cause them to collide at high enough speed to cause fusion?

Edited December 13, 2022 by CousinsCowgirl84

[FootballZombie]

 

 

This is cool and I got excited when I read about it.

Fusion always felt so far away, but now... That is a nice feeling.

 

[Corcaigh]

14 minutes ago, CousinsCowgirl84 said:

I’m not debating the way things are now. The first computer was the size of of a entire floor of a building.

 

My point is that LM web page is high on sales content to claim they are doing something new when the concept is >50 years old and proven problematic. If they had any nuggets on the page on how new tech might help it would be more interesting. But simply saying smaller allows faster iteration doesn't get much. The original experiments were much smaller that JET or ITER too, but got larger because that was the only was they could conceive improving confinement times. 

[mcsluggo]

12 hours ago, CousinsCowgirl84 said:

Yea, because you’ll already need super powerful lasers for the reactor; dual purpose lasers. Looks like they’ll be green lasers.

 

i am fairly certain they will be red.... 

 

 

 

[Corcaigh]

23 hours ago, bearrock said:

Wow.  Isn't fusion the holy grail of clean energy?  

 

That's what the pitch story is when talking to elementary school kids and politicians. Unfortunately, the easiest fusion reaction to achieve (Deuterium-Tritium) releases energy in the form of high energy neutrons. So while fusion avoids the nuclear waste disposal problem of fission, instead the whole fusion reactor becomes highly radioactive from the high energy neutron flux and needs to be swapped out.

 

If we could make fusion work with D-D then the clean energy story is much more credible. But D-T, not so much.

21 hours ago, Jabbyrwock said:

I've always thought that fusion was a beautiful example of the cultural differences between Europeans and Americans, and the bleed over of those differences into engineering designs and approaches.  The Europeans have favored the Tokamak fusion reactor design, which confines the plasma with magnetic fields within an elegant torus and gently (at least as gently as you can at these temperatures) coaxes the plasma to fusion with external currents.  The American ICF approach, however, is basically "HIT IT WITH BIG FRIGGIN LASERS!!!!!!".

 

I love being American.

 

Never mind those Euro-libs, Tokamak is Soviet in origin.

 

But as someone else commented, USA has long done magnetic confinement too at home and overseas, and I think is covering about 20% of the cost of ITER.

[Forehead]

Well, whatever advancements they make, I'm pretty sure Manchin will vote against it.

[LD0506]

A significant part of this advance is the work done on better magnets and more finely controlled magnetic fields. This can only happen with successes in a variety of other lines of research to enable controlled, sustained fusion reactions.

 

But I love it, I am enamored with tech and research and we are living in a golden age. Just imagine what might happen without the drag from nationalistic selfish impulses that keep us fractured into warring camps. If we could focus our energies problems like this would be solved. 

[Corcaigh]

17 hours ago, Destino said:

Does anyone know if a goal exists for sustained operation in order to actually operate as a power plant and produce electricity?  If there is, I haven’t seen it.
 

 

I don't think anyone knows yet how it would work in practice. ITER's current schedule is to start burning Deuterium-Tritium in 2035 and have at least a decade of experiments to understand what it looks like for increasingly longer burns to understand the heat and radiation flux in reactor-like conditions. I didn't see it listed in the goals below but elsewhere I have seen up to 400-600 second plasma burns on ITER, and up to 500MW of plasma energy produced.

 

https://www.iter.org/sci/Goals

 

Ideally you would want a power plant to operate continuously if you are generating heat to drive steam turbines. And 500MW of energy from the plasma is likely to produce at best less than 200MW of electrical power. So the plasma conditions would still be some steps short of an interesting commercial reactor.

 

The Chinese are apparently planning a reactor with would have a 2GW plasma energy which would equate to a theoretical 700MW electrical energy production. Details are sketchy. 🙂

 

None of these approaches, if they work, would deliver energy to the grid before 2050. The commercial projects we are reading about recently are taking a big bet and hoping for unspecified physics and engineering breakthroughs in order to come up with a viable design that doesn't cost >$25B like ITER.

24 minutes ago, Forehead said:

Well, whatever advancements they make, I'm pretty sure Manchin will vote against it.

 

The "good news" is that he will be in the grave 20 years before it competes with coal.