Three papers highlight results of record yield nuclear fusion shot
llnl.gov
llnl.gov
> The record shot was a major scientific advance in fusion research, which establishes that fusion ignition in the lab is possible at NIF,” said Omar Hurricane, chief scientist for LLNL’s inertial confinement fusion program. “Achieving the conditions needed for ignition has been a long-standing goal for all inertial confinement fusion research and opens access to a new experimental regime where alpha-particle self-heating outstrips all the cooling mechanisms in the fusion plasma."
Moller at least had a brief prototype that hovered.
There are probably real scientists, engineers, and approaches, but it's probably about fleecing dumb investors at a fundamental level.
(He used to be one of those guys inside an ICBM silo during the Cold war)
More on recent fusion developments: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-f...
I am no scientist, so it is hard for me to know if team optimistic or team pessimistic is right. But even if it is the latter, I think we should put more money and research on it!
FYI she's largely been debunked as a fear monger. She swings the pendulum too far in the other direction when reality is somewhere in between.
Unless maybe if somebody figures out aneutronic fusion but we are nowhere close yet.
> 1978: This report reviews aspects of the military applications of the inertial confinement fusion (ICF) program at Sandia Laboratories
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6412035
> Today, research on inertial confinement fusion—the other leading approach—remains largely under the control of US national weapons labs. The military focus has had profound impacts on the development of inertial fusion energy.
https://thebulletin.org/2013/07/nuclear-weapons-the-death-of...
I understand that is not the marching orders of the US government but it could be, and it could also be a choice made by individuals on the ground.
In WW2, even before dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US committed to a large bombing campaign that completely destroyed the country. The damage was so vast and total that the Japanese government did not even register Hiroshima to be unusual! Around that time other cities were also being razed to the ground, it just took more bombs to do so. During that war, in Europe and in Japan there were large bombing campaigns that indiscriminately killed many civilians. I find it hard to justify this (no, "they were doing the same" does not actually feel like a legitimate reason, especially when the narrative nowadays is that it was a battle between good and evil)
Low-yield tactical nukes seem to be playing with the idea of being able to have this option to massacre people more easily and play around with the idea of using nukes with no consequence. Higher-yield nukes seem to serve the purpose of more effectively wiping chunks of a city from a map. What magical weapon are we looking for that will make the world safer, and that accomplishes strategic objectives that are not already covered by both the existing nuclear arsenal and the conventional weapons of the US? Remember, normal bombs actually do things too!
Meanwhile, actual, legitimate No First Use policies would be much more effective at making the world a safer place. Stronger treaties to reduce nuclear arsenals, giving militaries less space to just push other countries around.
What would you have done instead to reduce their civilian casualties, under the constraints that the Allies still win the war and that Allied casualties don't increase?
Unconditional surrender in Japan lead to the US occupational government for 9 years (along with over 20 years occupation of Okinawa, which had to be pried out of the hands of the US military, who wanted to indefinitely keep it as a colony).
Now, I'm not going to cry over Nazis or the Japanese military not being able to get a conditional surrender. But Japan is especially stark: except for a handful of high profile executions, not only did most decision makers not face punishment, many of them ended up back in the government and as heads of state. All of this more or less at the behest of the US.
What is my point? The US chose to reach for an unconditional surrender, for some pretty realpolitik objectives, prolonging the suffering of the civilians on the ground. There is decent documentation that part of this is so that the US could determine surrender conditions rather than the USSR. There is an alternate universe of a negotiated surrender that shortened the Pacific front.
What does that universe look like? I do not know. It probably would not have lead to the US having military bases all over the country. But conditional surrenders are the norm in wars. Air campaigns allow for militaries to just decide "no, we will just continue to attack forever, as we suffer few casualties anyway".
Given that they let the emperor continue, they might as well have just allowed surrender with the promise the emperor would remain. But of course that choice was not made at that point.
An what I think people need to consider is that all of WW2 basically happened because the allies did not force unconditional surrender on Germany in WW1. A mistake that many wanted to avoid. Of course famously Wilson debated this question with Henry Cabot Lodge and that disagreement is a huge part in the US rejecting Versailles. Wilson justified himself by basically formulating the two Germans theory, ie there is the evil militaristic Prussian Germany and the good German people. Henry Cabot Lodge didn't buy that.
Sean McMeekin in his new book makes the point that FDR announced the unconditional surrender doctrine basically to placate Stalin and did it basically without fully coordinating that with the British. Attempting to offer the German military some sort of deal that would have made them remove the Nazis prevent Eastern Europe falling to Communism would have been a better policy. That is of course very controversial.
And if I have learned one thing, its that unconditional surrender is always a incredibly hot issue with people passionately arguing both sides.
You need to read more non-revisionist history books.
> In the three weeks prior to Hiroshima, 26 cities were attacked by the U.S. Army Air Force. Of these, eight — or almost a third — were as completely or more completely destroyed than Hiroshima (in terms of the percentage of the city destroyed). The fact that Japan had 68 cities destroyed in the summer of 1945 poses a serious challenge for people who want to make the bombing of Hiroshima the cause of Japan’s surrender. The question is: If they surrendered because a city was destroyed, why didn’t they surrender when those other 66 cities were destroyed?
> On August 2, you would have arrived at the office to reports that four more cities have been attacked. And the reports would have included the information that Toyama (roughly the size of Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1945), had been 99.5 percent destroyed. Virtually the entire city had been leveled. Four days later and four more cities have been attacked. On August 6, only one city, Hiroshima, was attacked but reports say that the damage was great and a new type bomb was used. How much would this one new attack have stood out against the background of city destruction that had been going on for weeks?
Of course the perspective of people who actually were on the ground is totally different. But if we are talking about strategic objectives, then how the leadership sees thing is in fact relevant!
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160221160530/https://foreignpo...
You might say that China has a secret huge arsenal. The US might have comparable things! And even among the assumed amount of 350 warheads, a lot of damage can be done. The US can do a lot of this as well! There is a nuclear triad on both sides.
Perhaps the No First Use policy is a lie. It is not a law of physics. But it is something. It is a posture that makes it harder for a nation to navigate in some liminal space that makes defensive and offensive posturing look exactly the same.
But the main point of course is that the current state of affairs is already amazingly powerful. What more do people want from their nukes? In what universe is 1500 deployed warheads (out of a stockpile of 5000) not enough to accomplish any sort of strategic objective? There have been many conflicts where 0 has been enough
I think that it is possible to maintain an existing set of weapons without trying to continue pushing the envelope towards even more destructive weapons, and that 5000 is a lot/enough.
If anything I'd image modern research is more interested in things like precision, collateral damage reduction, etc.
China's warheads are also generally higher yield - they're intended for counter-city ops, not counter-force.
The idea with the currently deployed warheads is that even after losses to a hostile first strike, they can still respond and cause unacceptable losses in the enemy. How many nukes does it take to cause 10% fatalities in the USSR? How many in China? And what percentage of those nukes are destroyed before launch, and how many make it though enemy defences to detonate where they should?
And of course, nukes decay.
China's "policies" last as long as their dictator cares to keep them. At the first sign of change that policy will disappear as well.
Also it's a clear lie as in a fictional world where China mainland was invaded and China was losing the war, it's rather absurd to think they would just sit on their nuclear weapons and not use them.
The US also wouldn't use them in a first strike, but drawdowns have to happen on both sides.
> You might say that China has a secret huge arsenal. The US might have comparable things!
The US cannot. That's the entire point of international inspections. China would have to allow US inspections of their arsenal like is done to the US.
I think you’d need some pretty well-qualified people to crunch the numbers before just, winging it with something different. Given the stakes and all.
You seem to have it backwards. The only reason we are alive is because the designed system that was built failed following a computer error. The point was to respond.
Societies and the world do not run on personal choices. Sometimes personal choices matter and can have reverberations throughout society, but assuming society can function on an accumulation of personal choices is a child's way of viewing the world. If you want to change something you find disagreeable, influence policy makers or somehow figure out how to change the academic landscape in America (which probably means you again need to influence policy makers). Otherwise, you'll keep finding more scientists making the "personal choice" to develop weapons for uncle sam.
You are of course correct that the best thing is to institutionally change things. But the institutional changes are usually pushed for due to actual public pressure.
No, it doesn't. But the time you convince someone (if you do), there are 5 more people that you now have to convince who weren't on the scene before.
The purpose is probably personnel related: employees on this do not need a security clearance, so cost less.
Part of the purpose is definitely personnel related though. Part of the US nuclear deterrence is the projection of having a large, highly skilled nuclear weapon related workforce.
Wrt. inertial confinement fusion productization I think the delay is intentional (just look at Sandia z-machine results from 20+ years ago and all the ways of tempering and redirecting progress since then there) as such schemes allow for fusion weapons without fission primary which will completely break the non-proliferation regime.
Link to credible reports where the US said they would respond with nukes? AFAIK, this never happened and I paid close attention
Merely publishing a paper on a certain subtopic in the fusion space can easily be interpreted as an implied threat or threat response.
Of course the US does have a stated doctrine of using nukes only in response to nukes used against it or its allies. It is enormously doubtful that the US would trigger an end-of-days scenario in response to Russia using tactical/low-yield nukes against a non-US-ally like Ukraine, but the uncertainty is for sure purposefully cultivated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)
Do you have any reference for this?
I'm familiar with US Nuclear bunker buster bombs. But I've never seen any writing that makes the claim the US deterrence policy is targeting Putin.
Indeed [1] makes the claim that the US in incapable of successfully attacking Russian command and control bunkers and seems from a reasonably credible writer.
[1] https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2020/12/01/putins_...
I have read of spiking conventional fission warheads with a core of fusible material to boost yield, but maximizing yield does not seem to be the goal of these devices.
You're partially correct on accident. It _is_ single use, but not in the way you think. The NIF facility was built for the express purpose of nuclear weapon design, and any fusion science that comes out of it should be considered a happy accident. I can assure you that very nearly 100% of the people working at the NIF have Q level or higher clearance. The costs are absolutely astronomical.
I didn’t even know fusion had a weapons research program
The "hydrogen" in "hydrogen bomb" relates to fusion. In a nutshell, these types of devices use a fission bomb to create the environment (pressure/temperature) that causes lighter atoms to undergo fusion, which significantly boosts the explosive yield compared to a pure fission bomb.
I'd like us to focus on practical power generation. It will be the most defining aspect of future of US and largely the world. Everything is tied to energy and if we can make energy cheap enough so that its not worth metering; we'd secure the future from literally any calamity (including CC). Even the shittiest efficiency of carbon capture can be put to use when energy is cheap. 4% efficiency? Cool. Entropy increase from residual heat loss wouldn't make meaningful dent on the world's temperature. It is the carbon that is the problem (greenhouse effect).
We have an almost unlimited source of energy from nuclear + solar. There are always going to be people and ideologies that oppose technological progress and prevent humanity from propelling forward. I belong to the camp where I'd want us to become a Kardeshev Type 1 civilization. Fusion would be a direct contributing factor for it.
What is CC here? Cosmic collapse? Credit cards?
Edit: Ah, of course. Thanks.
China saw it that way, in the time of Han Chin, the first Chinese emperor. Wealth comes fundamentally from agriculture because then you can make more servants slash slaves for the emperor, that's literally what he called them, then instead of emperor you have an Emperor, Emperor of China. That's what the original historical sources say! More food more people more servitude more wealth for the man at the top of society.
So credit cards are that. Uniformly crazy interest rates, and shitty scams to jack up the rates just barely before getting taken to court. Or a French Revolution, which they know about and fear. Know the harm they do, the houses they take, the homeless they make, the people they imprison indirectly, the children they starve, they know. What's it's name, FICO score, patio11 talked about them, they are 100% certain you--anybody who reads this--is strictly inferior to them. He says if you talk back to their claim you are an inferior debtor who deserves a low credit score they react like it's a shoe factory dealing with a talking shoe. An object. A servant slash slave.
Owes them money just because. Or because that debt was inherited. They actually have all the machine learning models and all the statistics you could possibly ask for (generally they claim this is fraud detection, but it's price discrimination too) to determine exactly how much--to the thousandth of a percentage--they can fuck with people with their usury--their theft--before people go bananas. Usury means you gotta pay back the debt or be homeless. Tolerate crimes in your gainst with no recourse. Any crime. No recourse. In my case murder. No recourse. Cops won't show up for you.
Debt grows surprisingly fast. Just as surprisingly fast as the equity in the home grows surprisingly slow. People always feel cheated by their mortgage because they did get cheated by unforgivably incorrect math. What does that mean? Ignoring all the intermediate steps, more kids to inherit the debt.
And technically--and I can justify this mathematically and in a court of law--even simultaneously--compound interest is contradictory to the laws of physics. It would not work out mathematically even if they did do the math correctly, which they do not. It could work in an infinitely-dimensional universe. If they did it correctly. But not in a 3-dimensional universe. You can have, at absolute most, cubic growth. Otherwise you end up with shitty debt. Unforgivably incorrect math declaring you are a servant slash slave. A letter demanding you make a choice: servitude or tolerating crime against you.
Shitty debt.
Credit card debt.
9 billion humans.
Climate change.
Then what they should invest in is fission. Fuel for fission is much cheaper and CapEx is much less. And we have all the basic tech needed to make it happen. Its the missing will more then anything else.
This is still an important step forward, and shouldn't be dismissed frivously.
Fair or not isn't that the very definition of science? To reproduce a result. No matter who tries.
They've proven they can do something impressive, that's a huge leap. Understanding the underpinnings better so you can do it reliably: that's a matter of research effort and engineering. But they've already done the hard part, let them do their work.
If what they claim can't be reproduced, then what's the basis for asserting anything was proven?
It’s an early signal indicating that we may have line of sight to someone demonstrating working fusion within the next 5 years. Is that not impressive?
It seems more likely that scientists used the weapons angle to dip into that massive flow of military money for their energy program.
You can argue all you want. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a government-owned, contractor-operated facility managed through a contract between the LLNS Board of Governors and the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The NNSA in turn works to ensure that the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons is safe and secure.
The funding source being mandated solely for nuclear weapons goes against your claim it's not primarily for weapons.
Note that in the US nuclear weapons are controlled by the DOE, and not the DOD.
But, ICF is simply not a viable way to produce fusion power, it is far far far too expensive to operate such a device. So, we can only conclude that they are either deluding themselves, or they are in fact doing fusion weapons research (or, at best, simply fundamental theoretical research into how fusion works) - since the same kinds of conditions or forces are what happens inside a fusion bomb.
It's arguable how much of the NIL is still validating models useful for simulating nuclear weapons vs fundamental research vs energy research. And it’s likely the relative importance of each factor has changed over the programs lifetime.
All possible other explanations that they have thought of.
If reproducibility demanded getting the exact same numbers, a lot of good results would be thrown out for no good reason.
Difficult tasks are difficult. Difficult tasks take time.
A credible indicator that they have achieved something significant is the widespread acclaim they have received from the global physics and fusion communities.
Repeatability isn’t the only tool in science and nobody is claiming reproducibility isn’t a goal.
If five years from now nobody can reproduce the results, people will take notice. But the evidence is they did what they think they did.
> A credible indicator that they have achieved something significant is the widespread acclaim they have received from the global physics and fusion communities.
How do those people know the result wasn't spurious, if it can't be reproduced? This comment and the one above are questions, do you have an answer?
Seriously some large % of "breakthrough" results are just errors in methodology/measurement. It's why no one serious gives a damn about results until they're replicated(or at least they shouldn't). And that's before you get into outright fraud where they just claim they measured something.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you claim you've gotten that kind of fusion reaction, and can't reproduce it, then it casts doubt on if you ever really got that reaction at all.
To be clear I'm not supporting/rejecting either F&P or this article's writers at all as I'm not knowledgable in the field, merely pointing out that the need for reproducibility was reinforced by their reported results and the inability of others to duplicate it. It's a good lesson - nothing is proven until it is repeated.
The problem is that the fuel mass that undergoes fusion has a lot of mechanisms for energy loss, which mean that you need to continously apply a lot of energy into the system to keep it going.
"Ignition" refers to achieving conditions where the energy output of fusion matches the energy loss from the hot spot. In this situation, it is no longer necessary to feed in energy to keep the reaction going, so long as there is sufficient fuel.
Before you get cosmic energy out of nuclear fusion fuel (usually isotopes of hydrogen), you have to put a bunch of energy into the fuel to get it into fusion conditions. Namely, you have to heat it up and compress it so the nuclei get close enough to fuse (after which they'll release energy).
There are a few milestones along the way to commercial fusion energy:
* Get more energy out of a fusion fuel than you put into it
* Get more energy out of fusion fuel that it took you to make the energy you put into it
* Build a way to capture the net gain energy and convert it into electricity
* Demonstrate the integrated power plant as a prototype system
* Build and operate the first commercial power plant
* Assuming good economic and technical performance, start building a fleet
* Deal with fleet scaling issues
* Profit!
This is a celebration of the first bullet.
What does that mean if the cost of energy is 0 ? (e.g renewables)
As with fission, most of the operating costs would have nothing to do with buying fuel. Solar and wind power suffer none of these costs, so fusion, like fission, would be wholly unable to produce power at a price anyone would pay without being forced to.
The fission plants still operating will find themselves increasingly unable to produce power at a price anyone will pay, so will be mothballed long short of their design life.
And, who do you imagine you are fooling?
Regarding Diablo Canyon nuclear plant: “The plant produces electricity for about 6 cents per kWh, less than the average cost of 10.1 cents per kWh that PG&E paid for electricity from other suppliers in 2014.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant#:~....
And if there were, this would not contribute to its development.
Fuel for such a plant (tritium) is practically non-existent. What of it that exists is synthesized at great expense.
Well, only insofar as we have all the required elements on earth. You still have to go threw a considerably complex and expensive process to make that fuel.
You need to mine lithium and then expose it to plasma to breed tritium.
> A fusion core is naturally fail safe since energy and fuel need to be constantly applied
With a breeder reactor that can be consciously refueled you can also keep its access reactivity very low. And even better, if its fuel is a molten salt the dangerous elements are chemically bound in the fuel. So even if an explosion (terrorist planting C4) would happen in the power plant, and fuel would get spread but the dangerous elements would remain in the molten salt. The dangerous elements are never gaseous and thus never leave the safety boundary of the plant.
A fission reactor in comparsion when hit by C4 can actually release gaseous radioactive material. Just not very much.
So I am not saying fusion reactors are unsafe, but rather then fission reactors can be incredibly as safe.
For myself I would much rather sleep next to a molten salt breeder reactor rather then fusion reactor.
It keeps hot-neutron physicists, who you must recruit from among for weapons work, busy.
It provides continual practical challenges to plasma fluid dynamics physicists, who otherwise have great difficulty funding experiments.
It provides cash flow to the (chiefly) military contractors who build the test apparatus.
In this particular case, it lets you conduct tests for thermonuclear weapons concepts paid for out of a different budget.
Any expectation of ever getting useful energy out would be the worst reason, because there will never be one solitary erg of that.
Fusion rocket information:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_rocket
https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/3303
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/realdesignsfusi...
A supplement to a fusion power plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Specific_Impulse_Magn...
http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-dri...
The only fuels that could achieve better energy density than fusion fuel would be antimatter, or maybe some fanciful sci-fi thing we may discover down the line, such as quark fusion ( https://www.sciencealert.com/new-quark-fusion-releases-signi... ) or subatomic compression ( a concept from fiction that involves packing an immense amount of solid electrons together so tightly that the electrostatic repulsion functions as a compressed spring (perhaps using mutual gravitation almost but not quite strong enough to be a black hole as a way of preventing disastrous spontaneous decompression) ).
Therefore, providing energy, no matter the source, always has a cost.
While renewables are making increasingly cheap generators, the overall systems involved in delivering reliable energy from them are increasingly expensive at increasing scale. Check energy costs to customers e.g. in Germany.
Mining, energy storage, transmission, demand control, recycling, maintenance, land rights, etc. for any energy source at world scale will continue to cost well >$0. For nuclear fission, fuel cost is only 5% of the total cost. For renewables, fuel cost is 0%, but that doesn't mean there aren't costs.
Please better check France for the often touted right way of going nucelar, with half of their overaged reactors taken off the grid due to failing safety regulations (which are not too hard but have been dangerously softened over ye years..), cracks and corrosion problems, and their unfolding catastrophe in regard to nonavailable cooling fluid, which is a problem that will only become much bigger in the future years.
Also don't distract and mix energy with energy, if something we have a heating and fuel problem, not electeicity. Secondly our gas reservoirs are already 75% filled again ahead of plan surprise surprise.. seems the lasts months panic had a little bit too much agenda involved.
If you ask me energy prices here are still much too low for what is upcoming and humanity should really focus on... this will make current debates so absurd and laughable, not getting it.
Why not look at some other examples who fully went renewables and doing it succesfully? Stop looking at a wanted or at least easily prevented politic, lobbyism and incompetence failure, that now leads to prices that are still much too cheap for what our wastage of resources should actually cost, lol.
But if you do 100% wind and solar, then you have to start spending money on things other than generators. The fraction of cost that is wind/solar generators vs. e.g. energy storage systems, transmission, recycling, etc. shifts from 1 to ~0 at scale.
This is handwaving away the most difficult part of of a 100% renewable grid.
This is a colossal amount of storage, far outside the bounds of existing storage methods. Hence why plans for a renewable grid assume untested mechanisms like power to gas or compressed air will just scale to near-infinity.
Most existing storage, taking advantage of existing hydro-power dams, uses excess energy to force water up to the reservoir, which energy is later extracted by letting it flow out through a turbine. New pumped-hydro systems built just for storage will be radically cheaper than existing dams, and be practical in hundreds of times as many places: you just need a hilltop no one is using, and water to pump up to it. The reservoir may be much cheaper than a hydro power dam because it does not need to contain high pressure; an earthen dike suffices.
There are numerous other, equally simple methods, for places without enough hills or water. Synthetic fuels like hydrogen and ammonia are an attractive choice because tankage is cheap, and they are transportable and have myriad industrial uses, so after your tankage is full you can sell all further production.
Of course one only builds storage after there is excess energy to put in it. We will need a lot of it, in time, but it is all just construction and mechanics: ordinary civil engineering.
(If you have to lie about the practicality of storage in order to promote nukes, what does that really tell us about your nukes?)
You're right that hydroelectric offers lots of storage potential. But it's geographically limited. Great for countries like Norway that have lots of it. But countries that don't can't just summon dam-able mountain valleys.
You need more than just a hilltop to build pumped hydro. You need a hilltop, with access to a water source. It also needs to be close to a transportation network otherwise construction costs will be prohibitively expensive. Pumped hydro plants do indeed cost a lot: the biggest one in the US in Bath County cost $4 billion dollars for a capacity of 24 GWh.
Furthermore, it will get more expensive as it scales up: as the most accessible sites are developed, subsequent facilities have to be built in more and more suboptimal sites.
> The reservoir may be much cheaper than a hydro power dam because it does not need to contain high pressure; an earthen dike suffices
This makes absolutely no sense. I needs high pressure to generate electricity. Low pressure would mean there's hardly any potential energy to tap. If you're suggesting we have a tunnel leading out from under the reservoir, then those have to be built in exactly the right geography where there's an alpine lake with a height difference.
> There are numerous other, equally simple methods, for places without enough hills or water.
Yet, despite these methods purported simplicity you didn't actually specify them (Edit: you added a couple in an edit after I typed my reply). Because then you'd have to defend their viability.
Since you edited in hydrogen and ammonia:
* Power to hydrogen: electrolysis of water remains expensive, hence why most hydrogen is built with steam reformation. It's not just the electricity costs, but also maintaining the electrodes that perform the hydrolysis.
* Power to Ammonia: this needs a source of hydrogen, so it shares all of the above's issues. Ammonia is really just a storage mechanism for hydrogen, actually producing usable energy from ammonia is done by releasing the hydrogen from the ammonia and then running it through a fuel cell.
You're the one being overly optimistic about the practicality of storage. We've had excess production during peak renewable generation for close to a decade now. The excuse that we won't build storage until there's an excess of electricity isn't valid. Places like Hawaii and California already are saturating the energy market, but the storage is systems you propose aren't being built because they aren't feasible.
Intermittent sources are fine to chip away at fossil fuel use, or in places with widespread hydroelectric power. But we can't kid ourselves into thinking that storage will make it feasible every. Grid scale energy storage should be approached like fusion: maybe it'll be invented and change the energy landscape. But it's foolish to treat that possibility as a given.
Pumped hydro storage does not, as I already pointed out, require river valleys. It does not, in fact, need those other things. You make clear that you know nothing about, even, pumped storage. (Maybe look up the word "penstock"?) Why would anyone trust you about others?
People often badly overspend on civil projects, but that does not give you honest numbers -- if indeed what you want is honest numbers. You make very clear that you do not want honest numbers.
Pretending that fuel synthesis depends on access to scarce raw materials (hydrogen, nitrogen? Really?) will not fool anyone. Neither will anyone be fooled by your insistence that its energy must be extracted via fuel cells.
I'm not a civil engineer, nor any kind of expert in grid-scale energy storage, so I can only note that in my amateur readings I've seen many different people (alleged experts) say the same things that Manuel_D is saying. That doesn't mean it's true, that's not my point. My point is that if you know something that all these other commentators don't, I and others would greatly appreciate it if you would explain that. But you'd need to actually explain it, not just accuse others of bad faith.
All do acknowledge that building out storage will be a project of a scale similar to that of building out renewables. Only the most dishonest would insist that the relatively small amount of storage already built demonstrates anything other than that capital is overwhelmingly better used, today, to build out new generating capacity. It would be obviously stupid to spend on building storage you have not generating capacity to charge up.
What pumped hydro(+other storage)+renewables is cheaper than is nuclear. You will notice Vietnam isn't building nukes either.
I'm well aware of what a penstock is. This [1] graphic shows how a penstock functions in pumped hydro storage. You see that "upper reservoir"? That's an alpine lake that forms the body of water that flows down through the penstock and drives the electric turbine.
You have to have the right geography to form that upper reservoir. If you tried to build a pumped hydro storage in Nebraska, you'd have to move massive amounts of earth to build that upper reservoir - essentially building an artificial alpine lake. This is prohibitively expensive to do, which is why hydroelectric storage is geographically limited.
> Pretending that fuel synthesis depends on access to scarce raw materials (hydrogen, nitrogen? Really?)
Hydrogen is almost entirely produced through steam reformation, which emits carbon dioxide. Effective hydrogen electrolysis needs expensive materials like titanium electrodes.
1. https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_artic...
The graphic does not, in fact, portray an "alpine lake". It says, exactly, "Upper Reservoir". Did you hope people would not click through and see?
The place where water in the system is at high pressure is not in the upper reservoir, but only lower down, inside the penstock. Which you now claim you already knew, after lying about it.
> You see that "upper reservoir"? That's an alpine lake that forms the body of water that flows down through the penstock and drives the electric turbine.
The pressure is at the bottom of the penstock at the turbine. I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that I wrote otherwise.
If the upper reservoir isn't raised - as in, an alpine lake - the there's no pressure in the penstock. Look at any picture of a hydroelectric storage facility:
https://i0.wp.com/esbarchives.ie/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/...
https://www.ecogeneration.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/...
https://i1.wp.com/www.cleanfuture.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2...
If the upper reservoir isn't raised well above the river or lower reservoir, then there's no pressure to drive the turbines. If you didn't build the upper reservoir up high on a mountain forming an alpine lake, and instead built it on flat ground you'd just have a big useless pond. This is why geography is crucial for pumped hydroelectricity storage.
Pumped hydro requires an elevated reservoir ("news at 11!"). It does not, in fact, require an alpine lake. Nor does the upper reservoir need concrete construction, as the pressure on its dike, if in fact one is needed at all, is limited to the depth of the water in it.
You knew all of the above, but chose to lie about it.
6000 cycles
this is 2.3 cents per kwh for storage.
Where is the handwaving?
For this reason, the costs of recent battery storage has risen considerably. Recent storage projects ended up paying $567/Kwh : https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-co...
This is the scaling problem: if you try to deploy batteries at scales relevant to the energy grid you outstrip the supply of inputs. In order to keep up with demand, extraction industries have to tap more and more inaccessible reserves thus driving up costs. Remember, global electricity usage is 60 TWh per day. And that's just electricity, total energy use is about twice that at 120 TWh per day. Even just 12 hours of storage is hundreds of times the annual battery output - most of which isn't going to grid storage but rather electric vehicles.
That's a pretty hilarious claim given the absurd amount of global investment in the last 30 years.
And lets be real here, nuclear has actually been blocked far more then renewables. In 1982 a green activists literally shot a french nuclear reactor with RPGs. Activists have surrounded nuclear plant and prevented them from being built, only for the state to build a coal plant in the same location. Research projects were canceled as soon as they hit slight issues because politicians did not want to stick their neck out.
Compare this with renewables despite 20 decades of green transition and huge cost in Germany the results are not that great. France in 2 decades basically turned its whole gird green, Germany in comparison is not very close and still operates waste coal plants.
Even project that were actually very successful and did show path for the future had to be killed of as was the case in France:
> A 1998 "Inquiry commission on Superphenix and fast neutrons reactor sector" [3] reported that "decision to close Superphénix was included in Jospin's program ... in the agreement between Socialist Party and Green Party". Also the same report says "despite many difficulties, the technical results are meaningful". In the explanation of vote at the end of the report, commission members says "give up on Superphenix has been a big error" and "Superphenix has to die because is a symbol".
France could have build multiple more of these, but of course instead of that they are building the same old PWRs.
And generally the transition to nuclear would have happened in the US for example if coal had not been cheaper. Just as the transition to renewables had not happened without the state pushing the technology. The difference is just that now states are willing to accept higher prices and higher spending to push the preferred technology and in the 70/80s that was a total non-starter.
> Please better check France for the often touted right way of going nucelar
You mean the country that had a essentially green grid for the last 40 years? Are you aware of the fact that CO2 not produced earlier is far better for the environment then CO2 not produced now?
Because the reality is France has done the whole world a major favor by running a large industrial economy with nuclear. The real failure in France is that they didn't double down on next generation nuclear and instead simply gave up and essentially stopped adding new capacity and instead relying on gas and German coal.
Had Germany gone with nuclear the way France did both Germany and the world we would be in a much better position now. The health effects of coal in Germany alone are staggering. And that doesn't just go for Germany, German coal ash is distributed overall all of Europe, including low countries, France and Switzerland.
So to say 'look France has a few issues with nuclear now what a failure of a strategy' is ridiculous when the country next to it burns huge amount of coal and gas.
The reality is, had the world moved to nuclear we wouldn't nearly have the problem we have now. The grid would be much greener both in terms of CO2 and other emissions. Based on that you also have a great strategy to push out carbon from home heating and replacing it with electric. The same goes for home cocking with gas.
Even for Deep Decarbonization of industry and transport nuclear provides solution. High temperature nuclear heat can be used to make hydrogen or provide heat for all kinds of other chemical process that currently use gas.
We could have even done things like moving to nuclear power synthetic fuel production and added increasingly more methanol into gas (this technology was available in the form of Flex-Fuel Vehicles and has been used in the US and Brazil for example). That would have been a way to reduce carbon emission in transportation before electric cars became possible (thanks to Li-Ion). These are all things that nuclear visionaries like Alvin Weinberg advocated and that would have been possible had we pushed forward nuclear technology.
Now non of it is to say that renewable now are bad, and since we have done the investment renewable are cheap and often make more sense then nuclear (given nuclear progress has been very limited). However to claim that the nuclear strategy was the wrong one is absurd given both the CO2 output and the general emissions produced by country that didn't have a strong nuclear strategy. The world made a huge mistake by not embracing nuclear.
During those times, in some parts of Europe for example, renewable energy really is practically free. This is a problem for nuclear and fossil plants which lose money during those times. The renewable operators don't make much either but at least they don't have very high input costs.
Isn’t it more fair to say that during those times they are resting their costs at a higher rate than with their typical output?
Not merely "practically free", but actually negative price. i.e. they pay you to use electricity, because they need to get rid of it.
https://www.energycouncil.com.au/analysis/increases-in-negat...
That doesn't cost $0. It probably costs billions of dollars.
Anyway, the cost of energy with solar / wind is obviously not 0. You have to produce the panels / windmills, perform maintenance, for solar you need to clean, etc. Additionally, the energy isn’t available always so you need energy reserves like batteries, pumped water, etc to store it for use which increases the cost further. Finally, there are energy demands that solar / windmills can’t meet where you need *really* hot temperatures.
That’s why fission repeatedly is shown as the only solution to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Fusion is great but we should be building insane amounts of nuclear reactors right now to meaningfully decarbonize our energy generation.
* EDIT: Here’s a talk [1] by Michel Laverne CSO of General Fusion. He starts talking at the ~6 minute mark and explains why renewables will never see more than 10-20% market penetration.
The term "renewable" is such a poor word for 'long-term sustainable'. I wish we had something that didn't make everyone think we were violating the laws of energy conservation.
You know what was renewable, using whale oil. That's very renewable in fact, but somehow most people are against running the global economy on whale oil.
Fission is incredibly sustainable in the long term. In fact, even if we mined all the easily expressible thorium volcanic activity actually continuously brings up more.
...and yet market penetration of wind and solar in the UK was 26.4% in July[0] and still climbing as we build more offshore wind. Plus 1.3% hydro (and 5.9% biomass if you count that as renewable).
[0]: https://www.nationalgrideso.com/electricity-explained/electr...
There’s simply not enough battery capacity and physical land in the world for solar power plants and wind turbines to provide all the energy. Everyone always does the solar calculations ignoring the fact that energy has to be produced semi locally to where it’s used (long distance transmission is expensive and lossy). Additionally the calculations for energy capacity of renewables ignores the fact that energy that the capacity can’t be shifted to match load (without batteries).
Seriously. This is why the fossil fuel industry loves solar and wind. They’re not a serious enough threat to their business.
> We expect renewable sources will provide 22% of U.S. generation in 2022 and 24% in 2023, up from 20% in 2021.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php
> Everyone always does the solar calculations ignoring the fact that energy has to be produced semi locally to where it’s used (long distance transmission is expensive and lossy).
This is untrue. They are building a solar farm in Australia to export electricity to Singapore 3,100 miles (5,000 km) away.
https://newatlas.com/energy/sun-cable-australia-singapore-so...
In China they already have multiple operating transmission lines over 2000km.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...
What on earth does this mean?
Most (all?) industrial processes using electrical furnaces which work fine with renewables.
This result does not bring us any nearer to civil energy production via fusion.
It clearly does not. I can understand the researchers feeling unable to tell the press, "Look, this is just basic research. Like the JWST." It might lead to a massive reaction that "well, then you have to just get in line for those basic research dollars, instead of being a top-priority thing we throw money at."
All those research dollars they'd be giving up!
However, ITER is a global effort, so it isn't just the US budgets we have to consider, right?
That would be what they might call an "expensive setback".
On other hand amounts used are relatively minor so it isn't massively bad issue.
They need a great deal of 6Li/7Li in the path of the neutrons to breed fuel. How they would extract small PPB concentration of volatiles is unclear.
A lithium hydride breach would be no picnic, either.
> Sounds a bit like a nuclear reactor.
They are nuclear reactors. Nuclear fusion reactors, rather than nuclear fission reactors.
In Spiderman 2 Doc Oct is blowing stuff up with fusion.
Those are the two that pop into my head.
The failure mode for a regular (fission) reactor can be twofold. The better scenario is that by some kind of mechanical failure the radioactive materials escape the confinement, and instead of putting their energy into the electricity generation mechanisms, just start shooting it around, irradiating things, thus breaking them (including living organism's cells and DNA) and causing them to become secondary sources of radiation. The worse scenario is that that before that, radioactive materials become too close together, starting self-sustaining chain reaction, which outputs immense amounts of energy (essentially, like a nuclear bomb), inevitably leading to destruction of whatever container it is in (no container can survive it for long, too much energy) and spreading around, by which time we're back to the scenario above (since once the materials have spread around, the chain reaction would stop) only with much more material which is much more energetic and thus will spread around wider and do more mess.
The failure mode of fusion reactor, if it happens, would be different, since it does not contain fissile material. Instead, it contains some light elements (usually the mix of deuterium and tritium, both of which are just hydrogen with some extra neutrons) which are heated and compressed a lot to start forming helium. If something breaks, the elements would not have anything to contain them (since, unlike what happens in the Sun, they don't have nearly enough gravity in themselves to be able to counter the thermal forces taking them apart) so what you'd get is a lot of very hot gases (mostly hydrogen) flying around. It's no fun, especially given hydrogen likes to explosively combine with oxygen in the air under the right conditions, but there would be no radiation involved, and it won't be able to "fuse" with anything else because it won't have enough energy to initiate the fusion process (that why we needed to compress and heat it up in the first place). So if everything goes very wrong - which is not very likely, but we're assuming the absolutely worst case scenario - we will have an explosion but noting like fission reactor. The containment is absolutely necessary - at least in current fission reactors - to achieve more energy out than in - and if it fails, the energy output will stop. This is one of the reasons fusion reactors are supposed to be safer.
There still could be some radioactive contamination involved due to fusion causing neutrons to fly around, hit the surrounding materials and turn them radioactive, and these could be spread around by the explosion, but less than in the fission case.
Now you may ask how hydrogen bombs are so destructive then? The big difference they use a regular nuke to ignite the reaction. Unless somebody builds a fusion reactor inside an exploding nuke, that's not the scenario we'll be dealing with in the fusion reactor case.
Fusion reactors and conventional nuclear (fission) reactors are very different. Only poorly designed fission reactors can meltdown and release large amounts of highly radioactive material into the environment. And no nuclear power reactor of any kind can explode into a giant fireball like a nuclear bomb; that only happens on TV shows.
a) ruled out by the laws of physics, or
b) possible.
Commercial ICF is in the latter category as far as I can tell.
In other words, maybe?
AFAIK energy generation with ICF is much closer to the latter than the former.
- Will Capx be lower compared to a advanced fission plant. Almost certainty not.
- Will Fusion plan be significantly cheaper to fuel. Almost certainty not, uranium and thorium are available in waste quantities.
- Will it solve proliferation concerns? No, if you have a control of a fission reactors you have the potential to do all sorts of things.
- Will it solve the nuclear waste issue. Maybe slightly but advanced fission can produce waste that need to be stored for around 300 years and that is not actually that difficult.
And that is of course if you assume that the 100s of billions in investment required will not have be be paid back in any way. That is partly fair because fission didn't have to do that either, but there the investment is shared with nuclear weapons (for better or worse).
So I would say its closer to the second suggestion. I don't see a theoretical path of how a fusion reactor can be built cheaper then a comparable fission reactor.
But I'm not a expert on fission, I have heard of some fission that could be built very small but all actual real designs for suggestion of commercial fission I have seen do not fall into that category.
b) is two things
b1) possible and worth the cost
b2) merely possible
x) require preexisting conditions not present in the Universe, or
Also: "Here at SpaceX we specialize in turning the impossible into just late".
I don’t know why their plan is to just vent helium given the shortage although I imagine that’s a second order problem they can solve later.
Maybe the Belters will mine lithium from asteroids and send them back to earth in exchange for air and water...
At one point back in the 1960s some physicists were trying to make a neutron detector using lithium, and it wouldn't work. They eventually discovered the lithium they had purchased from a chemical supply company was nearly pure 7Li. It had been sold back into the chemical market from the waste stream of the government's lithium enrichment facility.
And then compare to that the very complex and expensive process of process of breeding tritium.
How does that make any sense?
Sure, fusion is about 3 order of magnitude denser, but fission is already incredibly dense. The increase density doesn't really benefit you in any practical way unless maybe if you are trying to do interstellar flight or something.
Still a very long way to go before becoming similar to a fossil burning power plant. They got equivalent of 1 megawatt for a single second. A typical coal plant is hundreds of megawatts continuously.
Its successor, ITER is supposed to produce more energy than used in creating the fusion process. It is still under construction in France.
I vaguely recall reading a long time back that managing the emanating free neutrons was also a challenge. Has that been solved?
Would you mind answering a layman's question on where the energy comes from in fusion: my understanding is that the problem here is that energy has to be put in to overcome electromagnetic repulsion between atom nuclei so that the strong force can take over and combine them into a new nuclei, releasing energy at that time.
Is this interpretation correct-ish?
That looks like some steady progress. How long should it take to consistently yield one more order of magnitude? Are they expecting to hit a plateau at some point?
people throw it around like "you need q=1.35 to be economical" but that's kind of nonsense
You can't even evaluate if a good choice for location 1 is still a good choice for a different location without knowing what the other location is
There is no easy number for a casual to try to make these decisions with
I guess within the next 3 years we will have more results
Capitalism will make sure the tech is locked down behind patents ;)
Capitalism is why we still burn coal and use gas
Capitalism is why china is already ahead
I can continue with many more examples :)
They all waiting in line to get government funding
Capitalism is why there is no chip fab in the US
Intel is waiting in line for government funding
Yes, adopting capitalism is why China got so far so fast.
> Capitalism is why there is no chip fab in the US
https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-breaks-ground-20-bl...
It is communism/socialism, government funded effort, government funded universities/R&D
Just like this US's record
Yes, but not in the ironic meaning you probably meant it in. China is more capitalist than the United States or Europe at this point in time. It's why they managed to catapult themselves so quickly ahead.
> Capitalism is why there is no chip fab in the US
Umm what? My friend works at one. There's dozens of them in the US.
Also the reason why chip fabs took off in certain other countries is because of state sponsorship by feeding their development off of the tax base. i.e. corporate welfare.
We are starting to see similar projects in the renewables space, most notably Energy Vault (NRGV). Their stuff does not work, and cannot work, but it does not matter because the customer is the investors, not the utilities, and what the investors buy is pipe dreams.
I think with fusion investors would be thinking about generational ROI (20-40 years) instead of 5-10 years.
What I don’t understand is why there isn’t a similar push to really shake things up with fission. Our current power mix will take a century or so to replace. Fission should be a MUCH faster path.
> it requires the U.S. Department of the Interior to lease 2 million acres in federal lands onshore and 60 million acres offshore each year for oil and gas development (or whatever acreage the industry requests, whichever is smaller). These quotas must be met to allow federal leasing for onshore and offshore renewables development, respectively.
> In an online statement, a senior scientist at 350.org called the bill a “sham” and said that it “contained so many giveaways to the fossil fuel industry” that it “turns all of the gains in addressing the climate crisis into a moot point.”
Nuclear power plants with today’s technology are already safe. Small modular designs are nice but it’s not an either or. We should be building reactors with the best technology available at the time, not waiting for a hypothetical future. In fact, building with today’s technology helps because a) provides clarity that allows for greater private investment b) Wright’s law tells us it’ll have compound benefits where nuclear technology gets cheaper and safer.
Look at China. They’ve already build 47 power plants with another 11 approved [2]. They know what kind of problem oil is and they’re making significant effort to fix it while the rest of the world is sitting on their hands. It plans to build another 150 reactors, 30 of which are outside of China [3]. They’re spending 440B (almost 0.5T) in building out nuclear fission [4].
Fission has a realistic path to displacing all fossil fuels. We should have been doing this for the past 60 years - it would have been even cheaper in the past. Even with all the accidents, nuclear technology has fewer deaths per KWh produced than almost any other technology [5] (on par with solar and wind).
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/planetpolicy/2022/08/04/the-c...
[2] https://cnpp.iaea.org/countryprofiles/China/China.htm
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
When they wrote the regulation it was written when PWRs were the only commercial type of reactor, so regulations were hard coded to regulate those reactors.
And the DoE would not, at least not for free, even attempt to regulate anybody else. So if you wanted to get a license, you would literally have to pay the DoE to develop a licensing process first.
Even if you had the huge financial power to do this, it would likely be a decade+ before the DoE would even tell you what exactly the requirements are that your design has to pass.
Other regulator such as the one in Canada or Britain don't suffer from that technology dependency. But even without that, the regulator still needs to be motivated to regulate non standard reactor. In Britain this is not the case and that's why Moltex Energy for example, relocated from Britain to Canada.
In Canada, after CANDU was sold commercially, the Canadian regulator was very motivated to actually look into GenIV reactors and SMRs. Thus that is where all advanced reactor development takes place.
This is mostly not a fossil fuel conspiracy, but rather an over reaction based on uniformed politicians and uninformed public.
Read the article you cited at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/planetpolicy/2022/08/04/the-c...
It's a really good article that points out that this additional land will only be leased if the companies request it, and that will be driven by consumer demand. To quote:
> Analysis from Energy Innovation shows that for every one ton of expected emissions from the bill’s fossil fuel provisions, the bill will result in 24 tons of emissions reductions.
...
> The fossil fuel demand-reducing portions of the bill work at cross purposes with the fossil fuel leasing provisions. It’s an odd way to write legislation, but if that’s what it takes to pass the most important climate bill ever, so be it. As I’ve written before, ending U.S. oil and gas production is not the way to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The world has plenty of oil and gas (even though it doesn’t feel that way right now) and the United States will import whatever it doesn’t produce, perhaps from countries with lower environmental standards and higher greenhouse gas emissions profiles than our own. Fighting fossil fuel demand is the way to lower emissions, and this bill does just that.
The problem is that there are very few places in the West where there is anything like a market.
In the US, any progress is basically blocked because the only type of reactor that can get a license is a PWR. Anything else is essentially impossible because of incredibly dumb and regressive technology depended licensing schemes. Thankfully even the DoE has realized this and his slowly changing course. However we are talking decades.
NuScale is building a small PWR, that is why they were able to do it in the US.
That is why, most Western advanced fission companies go to Canada. Canada has a good internationally reorganized regulator and a regulatory framework that is sensible.
See their process here, and a list of companies going threw the process:
https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li...
As you can see Terrestrial Energy Inc. has passed into Phase 2 in 2018 and is thus the furthest along company in terms of bringing a GenIV plant into commercial operation.
What we need to realize is that these companies operate with comparatively little money and thus are operating pretty slowly. If a government would to really push these projects, they could be much faster.
That said, France of course had GenIV plant operating and producing as far back as 1986 but sadly the project was killed by short sited politics.
There is also an interesting US company called Kairos Power. They are attempting to go threw licensing in the US but they have a very complex plan to 'hack' the traditional path of licensing.
My personal favorite design is by Moltex Energy as it is a molten salt reactor that is burning nuclear 'waste'.
Does this mean they are producing energy? 10,000 kilo watt hours is not to be sniffed at
170kJ is 1/20th of a kilowatt hour - on the order of 1 cents worth of electricity. 700kJ would be 1/5th of a kWh
That's approximately as much energy as you'd get from burning one fast food hamburger.