This is fantastic news!
Based on this information, I conclude that nuclear fusion is probably only about 20 years away.
Based on this information, I conclude that nuclear fusion is probably only about 20 years away.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fus...
It's just disrespectful to all the brilliant physicists and engineers who work on the topic to belittle their efforts like that.
That's a surprisingly small number for the impact nuclear fusion could make. I wonder why we haven't seen any billionaires taking up the challenge, even though this might be more impactful than space tourism or people on mars.
Note that SpaceX is set up as a business, not a charity; Musk may talk a lot about Mars but that's not really where the money goes.
By contrast, fusion will only be a scientific research project for many years and many billions.
It's like Manhattan project, you can do it if you want it bad enough.
The basic problem is that heat transfer limits guarantee that fusion reactors will be big and expensive (meaning: power density an order of magnitude worse than a fission reactor core, and probably worse than that.)
The core of a PWR fission reactor that one can build today has a power density of 100 MW per cubic meter. The power density of ITER (dividing the gross fusion power by the volume inside the cryostat) is 0.05 MW per cubice meter, 2000x worse. Other fusion designs aren't quite as ludicrous, but will still be much worse than fission.
The problem is that heat in the PWR has to get out of fuel rods that are 1 cm in diameter. The heat in a fusion reactor has to get out of a plasma vessel that is meters in diameter. The ratio of surface area/volume is orders of magnitude higher for the fission reactor.
the other rapid development scenario would be some sort of fusion arms race between asia (ch/kr/jp) and the rest of developed world.
I understand that there is a level of experimentation and R&D that is guaranteed not to generate viable results but at some point you need to trim the fat, get everyone moving in one direction etc. This grand project has been going on for over 50 years at this point, It seems like we should at least have one design that everyone should be focusing on. If they had real, defined commercial goals (even if they miss the goals) it might be easier to secure funding because your average politician would see the benefit to them.
I'm not a nuclear engineer so take that all with a grain of salt.
As they say - if we knew what we were doing it wouldn't be research.
If you spare half an hour to Google, you can find out what we want collectively;
1) Find global spending on fusion research and note it down.
2) Pick some other stuff to compare it to. Like global annual military budget. Annual profits of the largest companies and what they sell to make it. Or how much do we spend on 'entertainment'. Or popularity of Kardashians(given even I know that f#cking name...) or whatever.
You'll be quick to realize that the fusion is sitting in the corner, waiting for us to "want to have it".
It makes me feel depressed to see on every fusion article in 2018, there is a paragraph allocated to explain how fusion is different from fission and how it is not... basically not a bomb.
The topic feels home in HN, but I do not know if you ever brought up fusion in a talk with family or even among your young friend circle. I certainly have engaged in that experiment myself. People do not even know what the heck is fusion, let alone lobbying to fund it with tax money. In this state, I say, the advancement on fusion is rather stellar, I congratulate wholeheartedly anyone putting sweat and money in it to bring things to this level.
Rather, funding for fusion is low because fusion is marginal.
The money would be there if the technology warranted it. But examined closely, fusion doesn't appear promising, so people close their checkbooks.
Down from the '25 years away' it has been for the last 50. I'm not being facetious, I actually think that's huge win and we should all be happy.
Edit: Addendum: I vividly remember images with visualization results for numerical simulations on the reactor vessel shape for Wendelstein 7-X. That was back in 1992 or so. This just shows how long this experiment was in the making.
On which reference frame?