Small Lab Makes Big Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion Tech
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Will fusion be achieved iteratively? Or will it need key new insights we have not yet discovered?
Fusion funding is measured in tens of millions and does not have 350.000 people working on it.
ITER is an international, purely scientific, peaceful project that is already going on for many more years than the original Manhattan project. Also fusion doesn't just happen by itself, when you "put the right elements close together". The problem that ITER tries to solve, even considering the advances over last 80 years, is quite a bit harder than nuclear fission in my opinion. Both are very hard, don't get me wrong, but fusion is considered the harder problem of those two.
It is good to ask, whether something is effective, efficient or at least has meaning. But with such endeavours, you can only really judge afterwards because it has never been done before. So the whole ITER project, with machinery that redefines the meaning of custom, costs about 4x as much, as the Berlin-Brandenburg Airport or 4x times as much as the current Lufthansa bailout. I wouldn't consider both to be very efficient spending of public money, but I am no expert. ITER is financed by most of the developed countries in some capacity, the compared projects are only financed by Germany.
1. That implies that the total cost of past fission projects was a very small fraction of ITER's cost.
2. I find it difficult to believe that an eleven-digit hindsight estimate excludes military costs, let alone that the beancounters couldn't/wouldn't estimate "much of the cost".
The real question is whether fusion will ever be economically competitive with renewables+storage.
(1) There could always be unknown-unknowns related to stability or confinement with a self-heating plasma. ITER is still a science experiment.
(2) The disruption problem hasn't be solved. There's an attitude of "it'll get solved because we need it to get solved."
You hit the nail on the head with the economics issue, though.
The costs of ITER have grown to be more than 4x as much as what was planned (and it is still in early stages so that's probably not the end of the story). I would not call that "solid".
Could you elaborate on what storage you have in mind? The only effective way we have to store large amounts of electricity right now is [pumped-storage hydroelectricity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...), which is interesting but also very sensitive to the geography.
[1] https://www.kit.edu/kit/english/pi_2018_009_power-to-gas-wit...
I think 2019 (or was it 2018?)was the first year with more renewable installed than coal plants, if you look at max charge. Good news at least.
I wonder if this could be used to lower the temperature needed for fusion?
These devices existed for a long time and have been used as X rays or neutron sources but not for fusion power. LPP have explained the exact machanism at the basis of the DPF fusion and have optimised the radiation losses and electron heating to reach higher temperatures but from this to claiming viable fusion power is quite a stretch.
The board of advisors doesn't have a single physicist on it -- makes me suspicious as well.
https://lppfusion.com/investing-in-lppfusion/our-plan-to-net...
Then there's this bit: "switching to pB11 fuel will give us a 100-fold increase in yield" -- compared to deuterium. That's straight-up backwards. pB11 power density is actually more like 100 times less. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion
Yes, he's published papers about his experiments, but there's nothing in them about how he's going to get to net energy output -- so that part is not peer reviewed.