Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
ft.com
ft.com
US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33971377
I think it's very clear, given the past year that NIF has had, that they are very rapidly approaching a point where we have the tech to "solve" inertial fusion.
https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/papers-presentations
Getting fusion right is done a magnitude at a time. Right now NIF is within 1 magnitude if they built it with modern laser tech. Many fusion designs are 10 magnitudes away or more.
Their most recent article has a ton of great data and next steps:
https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/magnetized-targets-boost-nif-im...
This includes
- Cryo-cooling the main target
- New alloys
- Magnetic compression of targets
The recent advancement that helped reach ignition (in the last article) boosted performance 40%.
The advancement between then and now: nearly 60%.
Within the past 6 months, NIF has nearly doubled energy output of the reaction.
Plus, if you know anything about fusion research, you'd know that energy outputs tend to scale non-linearly with energy input and size. This tends to be on the order of the power 3 or 4. Hence the existence of ITER.
NIF has uncovered some new science, closed the magnitude gap, and made it actually realistic for inertial confinement to be a feasible tech for a power producing plant.
That device in the photo is great. Looks to be about 16AWG magnet wire. Guessing a 10mm ID of the coil, and about 25mm in length. To get to 26 Tesla, looks like you'd need to push about 33,000 A through that coil. Coil inductance might be about 1uH, and if the test lasts ~1us, then you'd need 33kV to push that 33kA through the coil. 30kV/inch insulation resistance, might not get arcing between the wires in air. Probably running the thing in vacuum? Looks like things check out.
https://www.eeweb.com/tools/magnetic-field-calculator/
>NIF has uncovered some new science
What is the new science? Seems like they are working on making the fuel pellets closer to perfect, which makes sense if you are trying to use the implosion shock wave inside the fuel to be the source of heat and pressure needed for further fusion. I'm imagining that the laser initiates the surface fusion, and then you want that fusion to propagate inward, and need thing perfect, so the fuel doesn't go squirting out the sides (so to speak) stopping the chain reaction.
People who want to prevent arcing flood the cavity with sulfur hexafluoride. Fun fact, it has 25,000 times the "greenhouse potential" of CO2. Dunno if that includes lifetime in the atmosphere, or just instantaneous opacity to IR. All the wind turbines are pumped full of it. There is an effort on to switch to something else of proprietary composition.
It's probably not feasible to pump to such low pressures in wind turbines, so they probably don't even try. But for NIF, it's common.
individual wind turbines are not generating at more than 13.8kV so I would be surprised if they had any sf6 in them.
"Data from Vattenfall suggests leakage emissions from Europe’s 100,000 wind turbines were about 900kg of SF6 over the last six years. This is equivalent to 3,525 tonnes of CO2 a year. This includes the release of gases during the reclamation and recycling process. At end-of-life the turbine switchgears are collected and the sulphur hexafluoride gas is reclaimed and reused in new equipment.
By comparison wind energy avoids the emission of 255 million tonnes of CO2 in Europe a year by generating 336TWh of electricity displacing fossil fuels. The SF6 leakage therefore represents around 0.001% of the emissions avoided thanks to wind energy every year."
Provide links? Also, 25000 times might be ok, if the amount of gas released in the atmosphere is 1/10^6, say, of the amount of co2
https://www.llnl.gov/news/three-peer-reviewed-papers-highlig...
In particular, the original article talks about magnetic compression hypothesis being a byproduct of white dwarf simulation. With this new regime, they were able to apply the same ideas to fusion, resulting in the breakthrough.
With ignition being a regular thing in laser fusion going forward, I suspect many groups will have some slightly varied approach or some technique improvements.
If you're into fusion and lasers, there's a lot of areas that are still ripe for magnitude leaps.
- Laser power, timing, materials, and cost
- Metallurgy of the target canister
- Construction of the target and perfecting it as you mentioned
- Absorption of energy
I believe the NIF will focus on #2 and #3 as of course they focus more on making the "boom bigger" rather than making it cost effective of useful. IMO another group (startup or otherwise) will step in as an actual project in this space.
One area to innovate here is to use a different fuel mixture that doesn't produce neutrons. We wouldn't need liquid lithium/lead, breeding, or any of the complexities people very commonly complain about.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion
It's entirely within the realm of possibility that the technique to achieve ignition will open the door for 5:1 or 10:1 q with neutron-free fuels.
Even a total Q of 2:1 or 3:1 is a huge win, and that's within a magnitude of the modern tech.
--
Something I want to mention here too - the easiest aneutronic fuel mixture available is H2 + He3. It hasn't been explored too much since He3 is hard to come by on earth (though you can mine it from the moon!).
But, Helion has patented a way to generate He3 from H2 fusions. We don't need to mine He3 to achieve neutron-free fuels, just need to transmute it from seawater.
That is the coolest thing I'll read all month.
The patent was based on research analyzing the propagation of wavefronts on neutron stars[1]. I forget the term(s), but the critical aspect related to features which travel along the wavefront faster than light. This feature couldn't actually be used to communicate faster than light, obviously, however the patent claimed to be able to use it to defeat active radar jamming--more specifically, radar deception. Because this controllable wavefront feature (modulation? polarization?) could be FTL, and the waves themselves light-speed, it was thus intrinsically impossible to fake a correct return signature.
From a lay geek's perspective, I told my friend that AFAICT this aspect of the invention seemed not obviously flawed: it was FTL only in the sense that you could swing a flashlight across the moon and the apparent motion of the reflected beam could be faster than light. Normally such a phenomenon is merely a curiosity, but apparently the inventors had put it to some practical use, at least in theory.
[1] IIRC, either physical or magnetic waves generated by starquakes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_velocity
You can see the effect shown in the first animation of this article if you keep track of the wave peaks in the wake of a boat. They start at the back of the group of waves, move through it, and fade away as they reach the front.
Yes it does indeed. Amazing amount of trial and error to build such a machine.
We see these comments on every science thread because almost all of these people lack the requisite expertise to weigh in on the actual details, so instead they make a high-level criticism to give the appearance of having some kind of knowledge on the subject. Moreover, they think that crapping on things equates to being a critical thinker, and have convinced one another that this is so.
I have no experience in fusion, so can't comment on that either way.
If the people working on it today want to make beef with someone, they should complain to the people who have been lying for long enough that a joke about it is at least three decades old. If the real problem is that the only way we’ve gotten funding for this is to keep misleading politicians on how long the remaining road is, that’s fine, but once you’re known for lying - intergenerationally - how on earth do you expect the general public to take anything you say seriously?
You mean, starting from the journalists writing the articles?
JET Tokamak was within a factor of 2 and ITER will overshoot by a factor of 10.
My lazy quick skim of the main article here is that NIF has achieved a Q value of 1.2 presently.
ITER is aiming for a Q of 10 [0]; i.e. Q=10 means fusion outputting 10x the input energy, which is (by some considered) roughly enough to break-even in energy production [1], i.e. to recapture 10% of that energy (as heat or as electricity, not sure...)
So parent poster saying NIF is an order of magnitude away means Q=1.2 -> ~Q=10
And ITER seeking Q=10, means that's the goal that NIF is an order of magnitude away from, according to the parent poster.
[0] Q=10 for Iter: https://www.iter.org/sci/Goals#:~:text=ITER%20is%20designed%....
[1] Q=10 is a rough minimum for energy production (quick and dirty source from google) https://www.powermag.com/fusion-energy-is-coming-and-maybe-s....
1. It is, purely, bomb research dressed up as civilian activity for funding purposes. Everyone working on it has top-secret clearance.
2. It has no consequence for any civilian project. The target that produced a couple of MJ cost $10M. (2.4 MJ is <0.7 kWh.) A real plant would need to feed them in at a high rate. Q is not the important measure. Dollars out / dollars in is the right measure, and everyone is still at exactly zero, with no plausible prospect of ever exceeding 1.
3. Extracting useful energy would require capturing hot neutrons in a "blanket", heating it up, and running fluid through it to boil water to drive a steam turbine. The minimum practical size for such a "blanket" exceeds that of a large fission plant. To collect enough neutrons to be useful requires a huge volume of plasma, as even compressed plasma is very diffuse vs. fissiles.
4. Compressing the plasma with superconducting magnets could increase density, but then the neutron flux through the smaller surface area of the chamber wall would destroy it that much more quickly.
5. The hot neutron flux would also quickly weaken the structural parts required to contain the enormous forces exerted by the electromagnetic coils. Superconducting coils would impose even larger stresses. No research has gone into identifying a viable material, in decades, despite that none is known. After a short time the reactor parts would all become weak and (also) fiercely radioactive. Repairs would need robots not yet designed.
6. Civil fusion would require a large amount of tritium, which no one knows how to make economically.
7. Steam turbines cost a lot to operate, regardless of heat source. No other generation method relying on such steam turbines -- coal, fission, geo -- is today competitive vs. renewables. As the cost of renewables continues on down, they get less competitive by the day.
Fusion is intrinsically interesting, just not for power generation.
One company, Helion, is trying to make a fusion device that does not emit many hot neutrons. However, achieving conditions for this process, D-3He, is even harder than for D-T fusion. They hope to breed their own tritium, which would eventually decay to the 3He they actually need, but it is not clear how they will produce enough. (Fun fact, 3He loves to turn back into tritium.)
If they cannot, but they do get it working, it might end up usable for outer solar system exploration, which is difficult to power.
This "milestone" provides exactly zero meaningful information for the magnetic confinement fusion that is the only avenue being pursued for civil power.
Fusion offers no prospect of "unlimited free energy". It offers instead very expensive energy, or possibly none at all. We already have access to unlimited free energy, and need only build out the solar, wind, and maybe tidal systems to collect some as it goes by.
along with 1.3 million others [0]. just sayin'
[0] https://news.clearancejobs.com/2022/08/16/how-many-people-ha...
But that they don't hire anybody without still tells us something.
These sorts of hard questions about scaling it up into real life have been some of the most persuasive fusion critiques.
And the bit you tapped into about the whole detachment from the gov research world from making something they have to justify with hard $$ and all that comes with it are very legitimate.
2. Again, all technology is expensive in the beginning. Who cares? The important thing here is to climb magnitude by magnitude. NIF climbed many magnitudes in recent history, making it notable.
3. As you mentioned, Helion and direct energy capture. D+He3 + DEC might be not feasible with a tokamak, but the scaling laws of fusion (size, current, B field) are in favor of experiments that get close.
4. See 3
5. See 3
6. See 3
7: See 3
I think you have a very negative take on what is an amazing breakthrough accomplishment. Even if the NIF doesn't end up converting their research into a commercial powerplant, they have at least demonstrated experimental viability of inertial confinement fusion. It's only a matter of time before the next generation shows viability of D+He3 fusion and then we'll have even more options.
You may call it a "milestone" if you like, even though it is a milestone on the way to nowhere. The only reason fusion gets any attention is because megaton bombs worked, and already demonstrated Q>1.
People are building out solar and wind power systems that stand some chance of fending off climate catastrophe, each day pushing fusion, like fission, farther from any prospect of competitiveness.
The consequences of a breakthrough are often not noted at the time. It is only when the consequences have happened that we recognize them and grasp the change which has been catalyzed by the discovery. Who, other than Mathematicians, cared about Number Theory when it was discovered?
I don't know enough about plasma physics to characterize this one way or the other, but I think looking for notable consequences is very slippy ground to stand on when dismissing a result.
Mostly Agreed: there may be applications such experimental astrophysics, but that's certainly not the main motivation.
> 2. It has no consequence for any civilian project. The target that produced a couple of MJ cost $10M. (2.4 MJ is <0.7 kWh.) A real plant would need to feed them in at a high rate. Q is not the important measure. Dollars out / dollars in is the right measure, and everyone is still at exactly zero, with no plausible prospect of ever exceeding 1.
The cost of just about anything new regarding fusion experiments is not very meaningful: likely it had to be invented, designed and manufactured just for them. Of course it's crazy expensive, but it doesn't mean prices won't go down after an industry around fusion has been established. Just look at the price of a c-Si solar cell in the 70s.
> 5. No research has gone into identifying a viable material, in decades, despite that none is known. After a short time the reactor parts would all become weak and (also) fiercely radioactive.
I don't know about inertial confinement, but in magnetic fusion that is completely false. Materials with low activation, radiation damage resistance and good plasma properties have been continuously researched for the last 30 years: the current candidate for ITER is EUROFER97 for which you can find almost 800 publications. [1]
> 5. Repairs would need robots not yet designed.
Also false. Not only there are several remote handling designs for DEMO power plants, but they have also existed for a long time. For example, JET had been operated remotely since 1997, during the DT1 campaign. [2]
> 6. Civil fusion would require a large amount of tritium, which no one knows how to make economically.
Well, this is dishonest. Of course no one knows how to breed tritium economically: we don't know what the economy will look like in 40-50 years, but we surely know how to do it.
Fusion power plants are designed for self-sufficiency, producing more tritium that they consume by a factor of at least 1.05 (called tritium breeding ratio). Very briefly, this involves a breeding blanket that converts lithium to tritium and a complex chemical plant to extracts newly produced tritium from the blanket and also recovers it from the unburnt plasma fraction. See [3] for an overview of various design that will be tested in ITER.
For as long as there are a few CANDU reactors around, the current tritium supply will be enough to bootstrap future fusion plants without expensive ad-hoc production. [4]
[1]: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/nuclear-materials-and-ener...
[2]: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=hg6MnjG7m6U
2. Robots for fuel handling in a JET reactor are as far from robots for fusion plant repair as a Sopwith Camel is from Artemis. All they share is the word "robot".
3. Nobody can suggest any way to separate, every day, a few grams of tritium at PPB concentration from a thousand tons of molten FLiBe and lead.
I worked as a control systems engineer in the nuclear power industry for 8 years back in the '90s. I worked on Lungmen in Taiwan, ABWRs (Kashiwazaki 6/7) and even Fukushima (power uprates) in Japan and Grand Gulf and Pilgrim in the USA.
Fusion is billed as a "clean" alternative to fission reactors but I think this is (another) false hope of the technology. I still recall my nuke prof telling me that fusion (if it ever works) is going to be an even bigger waste problem than fission reactors. The 15 MEV neutrons are going to neutron-activate tons of shielding or heat extracting blankets which would be a huge disposal problem. He also thought that neutron embrittlement of plant structures was going to be a serious problem and is already a problem in fission plant cores that use thermal neutrons. Carting that waste away at EOL will kill the economics.
We should start building fission plants now which are safe and clean enough and can provide power until something better comes along.
Fission is distinguished by being the most expensive power in current heavy use. All the nukes will be mothballed, soon enough, unable find takers at a price that would pay for continued operation.
https://coldfusionnow.org/power-equivalent-to-the-sun-we-alr...
This is one aspect of the problem. THe another aspect is that we should create decentralized technology that everybody can use at home. It would make our world a much better place, much more resistant to many things (including terrorism). I think the small amount of virtually infinite energy is a much better option.
To be fair, that's not entirely the fault of HN. It's hard to get excited about fusion research when I almost always feel mislead, because it is almost never explicitly stated that we are talking about Q-plasma here. I don't expect much from science journalism, but I feel that the fusion scientists have no problem silently playing along this misconception, which they are perfectly aware of.
That is the way to keep the money flowing.
See
"How close is nuclear fusion power?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
and (different area but about how high investment physics works, "just around the corner")
The article is old news before it was written. The article mentions the previous 'success' (yield was higher than previous experiments), and that was over a year ago now. They haven't been able to reproduce the previous experiment even knowing as precisely as they can what they perceive to be the preconditions necessary for an effective reaction. It also seems that this article was written about a single experiment. They will not be able to intentionally repeat the experiment. The manner in which they're exploring the pareto front is like groping in the dark to find a light switch that has an unknown texture and conformation. It's a classic monte-carlo simulation but they have one iteration every several weeks or months, and they cannot even possibly identify all the controlling parameters, nor do they have the necessary throughput or bandwidth to succeed in their pursuit without windfall.
The low hanging fruit providing the basic harmonics of the solution were discovered well before I was even introduced to this technology (in the 70's and 80's. Coincidentally around the moment of the genesis of many of our modern treaties on weapons testing).
You are overly optimistic, a 40-60% increase in nearly nothing is still nearly nothing. The PR campaign around this event is I think more significant in its political convenience, and in white washing the purpose of the facility. There are significant discoveries that still need to be made to even make the reactions consistent, and they will not come conveniently or quickly. Once the reactions are better understood and the mechanisms can be manipulated with intent the distance between the science and a practical industry / commercial product will require even more hurdles that stretch the imagination to be overcome. For instance I cannot conceive of a practical mechanism for actually utilizing any fraction of the massive amount of energy released in a fraction of a second in a chaotic murder of wavelengths and particles. The most practical way we've yet discovered for converting neutrons to electricity is through boiling water. Grossly inefficient in other contexts, I'm not sure that has even marginal utility in this scope.
I for one am 100% sure I barely know what I'm talking about. My disclaimer is that I'm not a physics guy, and high energy density physics was only a hobby of mine at one brief point in my life. Through perspicacity and access to papers and people, this is my honest mental model of the whole thing. You're welcome to your perspective, but although you seem well informed you sound very inexperienced.
Before this is not solved:
"it's not actually generating power"
I simply would not talk about a real power plant yet, because a real power plant has economic constraints. As long as the current approach is not even generating energy, all the scepticism is warranted, if we are talking about something that is supposed to solve energy generation and climate change. This is why people are upset with it - we need not promises of unsolved tech, but solutions now. So fusion remains exciting and cool tech and I love to read about its recent progress, but please without illusions. Even if they could generate power tommorow - it would still be a very long, unknown way, till it actually helps us.
That means the reaction would only need a gain of 4, rather than 100, to generate net power.
> Very disappointed by the discourse in this HN thread. The same old quips over and over. "NIF is just a nuclear stewardship program", "it's not actually generating power", "fusion still 30 years away".
Basically, I came to the comments to hear from the skeptics. Of course, most of the skeptics fall victim to a mental trap.
I think there is one key difference between "what I was looking to read from skeptics" and "what most skeptics used as arguments". The information I was seeking: to understand the difference between what the "breakthrough" was being reported as and what the breakthrough actually was. The information I received was: "this is impossible for (reasons)"
An equally important thing I was seeking was to understand was how this work might affect other industries (before it results in "fusion power").
The thing I'm least interested in is hearing "why it will never happen." I think most of us know many of the reasons this is a "Marsshot" problem[1]. I think most of us get annoyed when the media presents news in a manner that provides the general public with extremely unrealistic expectations and are sensitive to the dangers of that, but we get frustrated by those kinds of comments because, likely, none of us need to be told that! :)
It's impossible to make a useful argument to a skeptic that "this technology will exist in (insert timeframe)." The point at which (timeframe) is a trustworthy estimate usually coincides with the technology maturing to the point that the skeptics fall off (or turn out to be right if "timeframe" is never). And there's a long way to go (I think I saw a list of 10 or so "extremely hard problems") but this certainly appears to be something that is chipping away at one of the "impossible problems." Over-simplifying as this is, the rate at which technology advances is not linear; it accelerates. The next problem may not be as difficult or knowledge we attain from solving this one may be able to be used to solve related problems[2].
[0] There were several others on the topic and being ft.com, I assumed it would require a subscription that I do not have.
[1] Maybe far more difficult, but I never liked "moonshot" when describing something that hasn't been done, yet.
[2] Again, not a physicist, but reading through various "fusion is doomed" lists, many of the problems center around "the word 'hot' is a woefully inadequate description".
In order to make inertial confinement work, this process needs to occur multiple times per second
All the fancy stuff with the hohlraum, magnetic compression, target cryo cooling must be accomplished accurately and repeatedly, BUT ALSO shot out of an "injector" to fall precisely into alignment with the lasers, in vacuum within a plasma field...
When you write it all out! Yikes!
Then! This has not included any capture of energy, so that part must be implemented as well, which would effectively mean placing all of NIF target chamber inside a thermal heat exchanger.
So, no, inertial confinement is probably the furthest from ever being a suitable arrangement from a power production standpoint.
Physicists have an uncanny ability to ignore engineering.
As a proponent of fusion and fusion research, it's important to keep the focus on what is valuable about the work being done and not mislead the general public about flights of fancy.
If you want to understand radiative pressure and plasma characteristics, this is the place to be, for sure
It does sound like magic, but doesn't EUV involve some process similar to this? Something about shooting drops of tin with a laser? That sounds like magic to me too but is apparently a thing. Obviously two totally different things, but the level of magic to me is the same.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ge2RcvDlgw
Probably the hardest part is making sure the droplet is cost effective enough that we care.
Again, to op's point, this is an incredibly shallow analysis. The question I would be pushing towards is:
What are the hardest remaining engineering problems? How likely are we to overcome them? At the end of that process will it be a cost competitive outcome?
The laser does not hit the target, it hits the interior of the hohlraum. Generating x-rays, this creates radiation pressure on the cryogenically cooled target, which is inadequate for fusion without also pulsing a high magnetic field to confine the plasma (this is now inertial/magnetic confinement fusion).
The energy output is not sustained for any duration, but rather is nearly instantaneous. The plasma and debris must be cleared of the beam path for the next laser pulse and target injection.
These are the hardest remaining engineering problems if you discount the fact that energy must then be absorbed and put to use with constant material degradation of the target chamber and the necessary high output production of tritium filled beryllium capsules.
We are unlikely to overcome these challenges for substantially longer than the time period required to generate a functioning EUV machine.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/First-Light-team...
Fusion has the strong advantage (and disadvantage) that it is a powerful neutron source. Even a very low performance reactor can be useful as a neutron source
https://ats-fns.fi/images/files/2019/syp2019/presentations/T...
Fusion might be useful for making isotopes long before it is competitive as an energy source. In the 1980s I know scientists were looking to hybrid systems that convert ²³²Th to ²³³U and ²³⁸U to ²³⁹Pu as fusion reactors produce so many high energy neutrons that they could be better than fast breeders for manufacturing fuel for thermal fission reactors. In fact, it is very possible a fusion reactor could be used to make fuel for nuclear weapons.
At the moment fuel costs in fission are like 5-10% of total costs for a fission fleet. In fusion it could be lower, but that will not be any means mean the overall system will be cheaper.
We'll have to see the cost tradeoffs: fusion makes much less radioactive material per kWh than fission (but it still makes some) vs. simplicity. Fission is relatively trivial: just put special rocks in a grid and pump water over them as they pour out their star energy.
Progress is good and exciting, but I don't see any reason to think this will have major implications for energy systems anytime soon. Would be happy to be wrong though.
Disclaimer: I switched from studying fusion energy to advanced fission 16 years ago.
I guess we still don't have anything better than boiling water, right?
There are other ideas too, but it's hard to beat a Rankine cycle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy
https://web.archive.org/web/20150404075829/https://hifweb.lb...
We do have radio-photo-voltaic devices, but they're so inefficient it's laughable. And we have RTG generators, which are only practical in limited situations, and again have a very low efficiency.
So hot water it is!!
If we use a reaction that primarily produces beta radiation or other high energy charged particle, sending it through a coil of wire would induce a voltage that we could extract as electric energy.
For that matter, appropriately located coils could be used to extract thermal energy from the plasma directly. The trick there is that we can't get much with the current tokamak and stellarator designs -- the thermal energy is too disordered to use a large coil and the plasma flow is not sufficiently confined to use small coils. There are almost certainly better configurations, but the electrohydrodynamics simulations are tricky. If we keep at it I'm sure we can find a stable configuration with fewer degrees of freedom.
I am excited about standardized large light-water reactors at the moment, like the US/Japanese ABWR or Korean's APR-1400 designs. I wish there was more hype around them rather than SMRs and advanced reactors.
My favorite idea in nuclear to rapidly deeply decarbonize is to use a shipyard to mass-product large floating reactors. This gives you economies of scale and economies of mass production. Amazingly, this was seriously attempted in the 1970 and 80s in Jacksonville, Fl on Blount Island, where Offshore Power Systems installed the world's largest gantry crane and got an honest-to-goodness manufacturing license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build 8 of these. [1]
Sadly, my concern above with SMRs happened to OPS and they couldn't break through. Such a good idea though.
They are taking an active approach:
https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li...
Reactors like ISMR from Terrestrial Energy and SSR from Moltex that will operate at 500MW (rather then true 'small' reactors) are for more reasonable for scale.
They look like 'small' reactors but they pack quite a punch in comparison to PWR designs.
Any nation that just seriously commits to a single reactor design like this and plans to build 50 of them will do really well.
But I agree the same could be done with APR-1400 or AP1000.
Because some countries consider even 500MW reactors SMR if they are GenIV.
SMR has become kind of widely used for lots of different things.
I might be in the opposite camp as you but this is very much a "where were you when—" moment for me. I'm sure someone will pop in to disappoint me but I think the point is it's no longer a hypothetical exercise.
Of laser energy into a tiny control volume that doesn't consider how much energy went into the laser systems. If you draw the control volume around the building and see that the lasers require vastly more energy than what came out, I think you'll be less excited, right?
We've been getting lots of energy out of fusion since the early 1950s with thermonuclear bombs. We know we can get energy out of a control volume. But is it a practical energy source is still the question imho.
Edit: I was wrong, fusion is always 30 years away: https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/why-nuclear-fusi...
Someone has to keep the bloviated PR campaigns checked with reality. Otherwise, some crazy fools might actually start believing that fusion is real and gets duped out of their money. If you can't stand a bit of real criticism, then maybe you should sell your scam somewhere else. Otherwise, take it on the chin, retool your message, and come at it honestly.
Maybe it's not the result you think it should be ("with all they hype over decades, we should have fusion power by now"), but... too bad. It is what it is, and this particular announcement is indeed impressive.
Personally, I just don't see fusion being a viable solution for anything in any of our lifetimes. I will gladly admit how wrong I was if/when someone solves it. I just have a much stronger doubt in sci-fi vs reality, and don't get swooned by the hype machines surrounding fusion.
What is tiring to me is calling the skeptics tiring. But to each their own
And it's unreasonable and annoying to expect everyone to say "This is amazing, but..." rather than just "This is amazing". Yes, we know, fusion power isn't ready, and we have no idea when (or if) it will be.
I haven't been "holding my breath". I've been watching from afar, checking in occasionally (like when this sort of news comes out), and I genuinely think this particular breakthrough is exciting. I don't need the tiresome -- yes, incredibly, frustratingly tiresome -- legion of naysayers coming in and stating the obvious every single time.
Is it that in a specific volume they got X EM energy coming in from the laser and Y thermal energy coming out, with Y>X BUT the electricity consumption of the lasers is Z>Y>X?
If so that's sort of misleading, like the plethora of claims from ITER. I hoped this was different.
Tabletop rigs can be as efficient as 50%, however high power such as we see here tends to come with drastically reduced efficiency.
Still, this is an important step in the development of fusion energy reactors.
But personally, I don't know whether that's actually important. Power plants usually consume a nontrivial fraction of their own produced power to power themselves, and in fact consume more than 100% of produced power when starting from a full stop — meaning that in initial few-shot conditions, even when feeding back their own produced power into themselves, they still need (huge amounts of) external power input to get going, like a car engine needing a battery + starter motor. Only a rare few kinds of power plant can be used to "black start" a power grid. Most types of generator need to overcome initial higher resistances, e.g. inertia (and thereby back-EMF resistance at the transformer) in getting heavy turbines spinning from a stop.
It wouldn't be at all strange if a practical fusion power plant turned out to be energy-negative over a few-shot run (i.e. required "bootstrapping"), but then became energy positive over a theoretical 24/7 run at whatever its optimal duty cycle is. And a single-shot run becoming net-positive would be a good point to start to consider those more practical calculations, since they'd have been useless to consider until then—a power plant can't possibly be net-positive over any kind of runtime + duty cycle, if its core reaction can't be net-energy-positive when considered in isolation.
Which is, to me, why it probably does make sense for ITER to be excited. They've reached the point where they can stop using a lab-bench model of power efficiency, and start trying to come up with another, more full-scale model of power efficiency to replace it with.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility
> The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers, the people with knowledge of the results said, adding that the data was still being analysed.
They probably upgraded the rig since the Wikipedia article was written, so most likely the 2.1 MJ refers to the UV light numbers.
Add to that the fact that improvements in laser efficiency is a hot research area (as lasers are used commercially in a lot of places, and cost-cutting is always a concern), and this is starting to feel a little more attainable.
Even if the lasers are 1% efficient does it matter if 100 GJ of electrical power results in 100 TJ of fusion heat? I'm not saying this is at all how it scales, but it is the logic behind pursuing an ICF power plant. The fuel gets ignited and heats itself.
Also, for fun, 100 TJ is 24 kT TNT equivalent: slightly more than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Trying to capture this energy released instantaneously would be a fun engineering challenge.
Happy to be proven wrong and told that it is more of a breakthrough than I think it is..
So there is at the moment no working design for a generator as a plant that produces more electricity than it takes in.
It's always the same…
There are always these articles: net energy gain finally! and then: no not really.
It being hard and it requiring continual progress does not mean that progress does not occur.
Fusion is a much safer alternative both in incidents and fallout
I definitely wouldn't want to make any broad sweeping statements about something that hasn't been built yet.
In a case of an accident I would also imagine an explosion from a Fusion Reactor, but the fallout of it would not even close as dramatic as a Fission Reactor leak or explosion
In theory much of that is excessive but there is a long history of very expensive mistakes with massive cleanup efforts. The US talks about three mile island as the largest nuclear accident ignoring the Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One that killed 3 people. All that complexity and expense comes from trying to avoid real mistakes that actually happened.
https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el...
LCOE of nuclear is cheaper than almost all other possibilities we have. sure nuclear is very expensive up front, but a nuclear powerplant can run for 100 years while wind and solar had to be completely replaced every 25 years.
your correct that nuclear has had some very expensive accidents, but the chance of a modern gen3+ plant that we'd build today causing any accidents like that in a western country is so very close to 0 that it's not even worth discussing.
The rate and cost of failures directly relate to insurance costs. A 1 in 100,000 chance per year to cause a 500 billion dollar accident represents a ~5 million per year insurance cost to offset that risk before considering the risk premium associated with insurance. And that’s on top of the normal risks for large complexes that have little to do with nuclear just high voltage equipment etc. Unsubsidized insurance costs are something like 0.2c/kWh which is quite significant for these projects.
In the end you see a lot of people talking nonsense around nuclear costs using wildly optimistic numbers, but there hasn’t been a power plant built and operated in the last 20 years that come even close to these numbers. Let alone when you start to compare predictions for decommissioning costs with actual decommissioning costs.
If we are being honest, that also has a lot to do with why nuclear is so expensive.
Poland just decided to build our nuclear to the tune of 40bn eur and their first contract is with westinghouse and their ap1000 reactor but also signed a letter of intent with KHNP to also built out further. I'm sure they cost Westinghouse for strategic reasons though and not because of price.
heck.. even Finland with their massively delayed and over budget Olkiluoto 3 also plans to built out even more nuclear. it's almost like some countries are now realizing that putting your faith in the weather gods for supply safety is not a good idea and that solar and wind are simply not viable for baseload or the grid in general.
i still think wind and solar has a place for creating synthetic fuels, but let's stop pretending it's been comparable to nuclear for the grid.
edit:
also.. are your saying IEA has wrong data? and if so, would you mind bringing since sources into your argument about people being way too optimistic
Must be a conspiracy theorist.
Globally 16% of electricity is produced by traditional hydro annually that can cover the majority of the projected need for storage in a pure wind/solar grid.
Also, by the time we need significant batteries the costs will have fallen even further. If you want to eventually cover 10% of the grids daily demand from batteries using projected costs from 2030 to 2040+ it doesn’t look unreasonable.
Renewables with straight gas backup and no other storage are already lower carbon than any other option, and batteries and off river PHES have only just started getting cheap.
The breakthroughs we need to cover the final gap have already been made if you're paying any attention at all.
Stop concern trolling
Storage does not need any "breakthroughs". It will be built out when there is renewable generating capacity to charge it from. In the meantime, NG plants fill shortfalls.
It is also perfectly capable of meeting dispatchable loads like heating, chemical production, and EV charging, and adding them to the grid will bring the ability to meet electricity even higher. Considering the storage and dispatchable low carbon energy that already exists, the remaining part would produce less carbon than would be released by expanding Uranium mining.
There is not enough uranium to meet 50% of world electricity demand using current technology for long enough to wear out a single generation of wind turbines or solar panels.
Your imaginary all nuclear future is both impossoble and worse than the trajectory we are currently on.
United Arab Emirates has had massive issues. Unit 1 began construction in 2012 and was “completed” in 2018, but didn’t enter commercial operation until 2021 due to literally hundreds of issues. “In December 2018, it was reported that voids were found in the concrete containment buildings for units 2 & 3. Grease was found to have leaked through the unit 3 containment, which may have been due to a crack in the concrete.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant
South Korea also ran into multiple delays, “Shin Kori-3 was initially scheduled to commence operation by the end of 2013, but the schedules for both Units 3 & 4 were delayed by approximately one year to replace safety-related control cabling, which had failed some tests.”
Poland isn’t a failure at this point, but they don’t have a power plant yet and their cost projections before delays aren’t very rosy.
Objectivity it’s reasonable to blame bad management for issues within a single project or even country, but when several different projects in different countries run into issues that suggest more fundamental problems.
If Britain decided to build 10 APR-1400 in the next 10 years with each one they would improve.
France built like 50 reactors in 15 years with 60s technology. Yes they had issue early on but after a while they were completing reactors within 4-5 years and very few issues.
The reality is from 2000 to 2020 every country in Europe could have 100% green energy if they had just started building multiple reactors every year.
Germany could have easily have a green grid by now. A nation like Germany could very much have gone and do that, just as France did in 1980s.
European nuclear initiatives are mostly about strategic concerns to get out of Russian gas. Economically, even the cheapest nuclear power on Earth can't compete with gas, if it is pipelined. (It can compete if it is liquified.) Or you need to penalize gas to unreasonable degrees for carbon emission.
Meanwhile the largest known deposits of Uranium can be found in Australia and Canada, making them much safer sources for western countries.
If EU countries allow fracking domestically, this will change, of course. Though the same "green" movement that opposes nuclear is likly to try to block this. Maybe we should look at how much funding these people get from Russia?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/19/russia-s...
https://www.newsweek.com/putin-funding-green-groups-discredi...
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/german-green-group-brande...
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/putins-green-fifth-co...
Just to pick a few random google results.
As far as I can tell, it's in Russia's interest to encourage any energy source that synergizes with NG (ie wind and solar) and to work against energy sources that are full alternatives (nuclear, coal and large scale storage), while at the same time ignore the downsides of NG.
It would make sense to fund groups aligned with these interests, even those that are generally negative to Russia politically. Such funding would not need to be done directly, but could be done through subsidiaries.
Yes, and that one is society. It what we do with any risk that is so great that if any company would have to carry it then the company would fold and society would still have to carry it.
Hydro power is one prime example. If a dam would break the damage downstream would be too high for any power company to pay. Individuals living downstream might have insurance, but no insurance company can handle the cost of a major flood. The only entity able to do so would be the government.
An other example is forest fires caused by poor maintenance of power lines. Such things happens from time to time and it not the power company or their insurance that will cover if half a country is up in literal flames and a few towns are lost. There might be a bit of bad press, a few millions/billions in damages, but the true cost won't land anywhere near the power company.
Fully eliminate the risk of floods and fire from the power grid would be very difficult, and putting the power company on the hook for the full cost would be impractical and counter productive. Society need electricity. The best they can do is impose regulations, and in exchange society will pick up some of the risk.
Those companies can and should be held responsible for the damages they cause. You can't just privatize all the profits and leave all the losses to the government! If you want to do something so dangerous nobody is willing or even able to insure you, you should not be allowed to do it.
[0]: https://damsafety.org/sites/default/files/files/Legal%20Liab...
For power generation, humans just need electricity. This requires large networks of high voltage lines crisscrossing the country. Those lines will start wildfires at some rate X. A utility cannot survive being liable for all damages by that wildfire.
So what you do - is everyone buys insurance and the government sets "best practice" regulations designed to reduce X to a number considered reasonable. Investigations that result in litigation are usually what happens when the company has clearly violated best practice.
The problem with all things nuclear is that our vision of acceptable number and severity of nuclear incidents is that it needs to be negative.
When a company files for bankruptcy the result is a legal process where the company seeks relief from debt. PG&E caused California second biggest wild fire named "Camp Fire" which destroyed 1,329 structures, and burned 963,309 acres, with an estimated cost of $16bn. The next year they caused a second wild fire, and yes they did get sued for that. They are estimated to have caused over 40 wild fires.
In the bankruptcy filing that got accepted by the judge they might be paying $13.5 billion for all of the wildfires, with half of that being paid as "stocks" in the company (for how much that is worth). All the remaining costs of the wildfires will be carried by the victims. Since September 30 this year the total amount PG&E has actually paid is $5.08 billions.
If one of Californias nulcear power plant would explode tomorrow with the effect of 40 wild fires then the result would be identical to PG&E. They would be sued, they would file for bankruptcy, and then a portion of the true costs will be paid out. That is reality regardless of what you thought it was.
[0]: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article165448747.html
As a California government agency it’s self insured by the state government, which is a very different situation than a private company building a power plant exclusively to generate power.
As to bankruptcy, insurance is normally required. Wildfires are an odd case because unlike nuclear the people who suffer damage are partially responsible for failing to mitigate risks as eventually fires will happen.
Who is the primary owners in a power company matter very little. In many countries, especially in EU, the government tend to be the majority owners in power companies operating nuclear power plants. It doesn't change the risk factors.
Also I would never blame victims of flooding or wildfires. People who choose to live downstream of a hydro power dam, or chooses to live in areas with high risk of wild fires, has just as much power as people who choose to live next to a nuclear power station. If operators of dangerous and critical infrastructure do a bad job then the blame tree start with the owners and trickles down to each leaf.
People have been making dams for quite literally thousands of years before we discovered AC electricity. They are useful structures to ensure water security and reduce damage and deaths from regular flooding. So yes the Marib Dam for example produces electricity and it’s failure would pose a risk, but it’s on the same location people a dam failed all the way back in 575 and there is evidence of earlier dams in that location going back to 1750 BC.
Hinkley Point C is currently expected to cost around $31 billion once finished for a measly 3,000 MW.
For that money you could build ~2,300 15MW onshore wind turbines - which would add up to roughly 34,500 MW capacity. So even under the assumptions that
- you have to replace the wind turbines 3x to reach 100 years life span and
- you always have to build more renewables since they don't run at 100% their capacity throughout their lifespan
wind make more sense economically nowadays.
Offshore wind pays into the public purse now via the leases and still costs about half what subsidised nuclear does. It's still a very young industry.
Offshore has a rather fast construction time, it turns out. For example, the United Kingdom's Hornsea Wind Farm Project 2 was given planning permission in 2016, and it reached its full capacity of 1.4GW less than six years later. Project 1 at the same wind farm reached 1.2GW in less than five years.
And when it comes to cost, Hornsea Project 3 is to start construction next year - with commercial operation scheduled in 2025 - at $12bn for 2.4GW. Not bad when you compare it to Finland's Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant unit 3 costing an estimated $11bn for 1.6GW - which took 22 years from first license application to design output power.
That is insane. They're building a FOAK project for less than NOAK nuclear reactors like Hinkley C in less time and it will be generating at higher capacity from day one than new nukes manage for their first decade or so of operation. Nice pro wind factoid.
More power, sooner, with low enough O&M that you could build another one with the money you saved just during the time it would take for another EPR to be built and come to full power? Sign me up.
it's cute that you are mentioning onshore wind but that will just never happen, takes up way too much space and most places have a capacity factor of below 20% making your 34500 Mw 6900Mw as well as giving you erratic output. so for wind to work you either need fossil fuels, power 2x or some new magical battery that will make the cost of such a solution insane because you'd have to completely overhaul your infrastructure.
offshore wind is more realistic, but costs way more than nuclear.
wind makes sense of you want to built something fast, but it won't bring down your carbon footprint. og at least it haven't in Germany or Denmark. the only reduction we've seen is because we burn trash and biomass which fair some messed up reason is considered green and renewable.
Then also look at the $20 billion dollar 'service' contract for the Saudi one that doesn't include any labour or running costs. It suddenly costs about the same as Hinkley C even before overruns.
Once you look at the total in rather than comparing overnight costs to renewable all in costs, they're the same $8-10 per net watt as nuclear always is anywhere except china - and China's renewables are cheaper by close to the same ratio.
The penetration rates at a given cost favour renewables right up until your peaker gas plants are causing less emissions than the Uranium mine.
could you please provide some evidence that the capacity factor and supply safety is remotely comparable between APR1400 and offshore wind?
What do you think service costs are for offshore/onshore wind and hinkley point? having maintenance and an industry is actually a good thing for the economy.
where do you get your numbers? you sure make many claims without a shred of evidence. and are you seriously suggesting that we continue using natural gas?
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/ThreeYrsEnergyAva...
Cheap reactors are unreliable reactors.
> What do you think service costs are for offshore/onshore wind and hinkley point? having maintenance and an industry is actually a good thing for the economy.
Stop with the broken window fallacy. If subsidizing jobs is important, open a battery or PV plant with the tax money instead.
> and are you seriously suggesting that we continue using natural gas?
Using gas 2-20% of the time with a mean of around 8% produces fewer emissions than opening new uranium mines and only needs to happen whilst the storage industry matures. Your plan entails burning more gas whilst the reactors, mines, and enrichment are built out over decades, then it also entails burning more gas at the end for outages unless you overprovision and build seasonal storage and long distance transmission.
The mock outrage is tiresome and transparent.
As do I, I personally have never heard someone refer to a nuclear fission power plant as a nuke, but I guess I don't hang around with the same people as you...
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/nuke
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nuke
Your mock ignorance is tiresome and transparent
Everyone in the area simply calls it "the nuke plant".
It is a directional landmark : "yeah, so once you get to the nuke plant turn left...."
"Once you see the nuke plant you know you are getting close"..
Its full name is a mouth full : Pickering Nuclear Generating Station.
Citing wikipedia sometimes backfires.
No one is even slightly confused by the usage.
The same people moving form project to project, on-boarding new people. Just as France did in 1980s.
This would result in very cheap competently green grid for the next 100 years.
Wind turbines have to be replaced 3x in that time and you don't have to deal with intermittency at all.
Just as with everything else, without economics of scale it doesn't work.
You certainty don't have anything close to the intermittency of wind and solar. And this is clearly evident in the production graphs.
In most regions you can get a lower forced downtime rate for a lower cost with renewables, and then you also get the curtailed energy to feed dispatchable loads. You need the electrolysers anyway for chemical feed, and you need storage to meet variable loads so it's just a matter of which can be deployed faster.
Additionally you get a very long forced downtime when you burn through your Uranium reserves in under a decade by trying to provide current final energy.
Currently a lot of reactors are hitting the 30-40 year mark, and they are running into significant issues with the aging equipment. We are seeing an increasing number of minor incidents, often caused due to manufacturing defects finally rearing its head, or just plain fatigue.
Meanwhile, solar has a 25-year economic lifespan. At that point you can make more money by replacing them with more efficient panels. However, manufacturers have already started offering 40-year warranties for consumer panels, at which point they have a guaranteed 88% power output. Wind indeed has a lifespan of 25 years, which seems pretty average when compared to literally any other power plant with moving parts.
When it comes to accidents, they are indeed extremely unlikely. However, the figure to look at is the potential damages multiplied by the likelyhood of the accident. When we look at those two together, they are definitely worth discussing.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/iaea-data-animation-nuc...
solar is fine for those who can afford it, but workout subsidies and the ability to sell electricity back to the grid it's a crazy long term investment in many places of the world especially northern Europe where I'm from (for hopefully obvious reasons). so different milage may apply elsewhere. i guess we'll have to see if those 40 years are for real and if the companies offering it are even around in 20 years.
wind needs constant maintenance to have a 20 year lifespan, but beyond the 25 years you'd have to replace the whole thing. so while a nuclear powerplant also requires constant maintenance you don't have to treat down the whole plant after 40 years. even the German ones that are closing now could easily have their lifetime extended https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/could-germany-keep-i...
>When it comes to accidents, they are indeed extremely unlikely. However, the figure to look at is the potential damages multiplied by the likelyhood of the accident. When we look at those two together, they are definitely worth discussing.
i guess what I'm trying to say is that we as a civilization engage in activities that are way more risky and dangerous than the miniscule risk of a serious accident in a modern gen 3+ nuclear power plant. of course we should have strict regulation here, but it's just not that dangerous or risky
Let it run? You mean, presumably, the huge amount of testing and preventative and planned maintenance that is scheduled in as part of a reactors expected lifetime, plus anything new discovered along the way. That doesn't come for free.
> In theory maintain a nuclear power plant to last for 100s of years
Sure, given enough effort you can fix anything. But extending a fission plant's lifetime can require massive overhauls, replacing reactor components, replacing materials that have experienced radiation embrittling and activation, etc. Keeping a plant running indefinitely is so complicated and expensive that we haven't managed it so far.
Extension is something we should absolutely consider but it's not a magic fix all. Sometimes it's not worth it to keep an old thing running.
The ~fifty year lifespan is in part based on physical corrosion of pipes running through concrete there really isn’t a way to economically replace them all that costs less than simply building a new power plant. But even here not everything fails on the same day so there is some wiggle room.
A warrantee of that length is only valuable if the manufacturer is a stable business with multiple income streams (say GE) or the warrantee is backed by stable insurance (say Lloyds). Liabilities are supposed to be on the balance sheet, so they are not free to mint.
If there were a long term issue where consumers needed to claim on the warrantee, I would guess most manufacturers would just get liquidated, but the executives and owners will have already cashed out. The same business model gets used for lots of other businesses with long term warrantees - limited liability is very handy.
But that's precisely why nuclear power plants are so expensive to construct. If the generation technology was inherently less risky, it stands to reason the facilities would be cheaper to build
For example, in France nuclear power reactors were stopped because unexpected cracks appeared in pipes after just 25 years of operations requiring expensive maintenance, https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/France-Cl... That put reactors off-line for over a year.
Then Sweeden closed one of its reactors because it bacame unprofitable due to raising maintainance costs, https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-sweden-europe...
Seems like power generation still counts on externalities being external.
>. Fission is still by far the most expensive power source even with massive subsides and is only even close to economically viable as base load power backed up with peaking power plants.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/748580/electricity-cost-...
Seems Solar is the most expensive, and by a large margin?
It looks like nuclear is cheaper vs almost all "renewables"?
There is a nuclear power plant ~10KM from me that set world records:
- On October 7, 1994, Pickering Unit 7 set the world record for continuous runtime at 894 days, a record that stood for 22 years.
Can you provide the number of days that "WIND" or "Solar" have provided continuous power for?
That complexity and expense is because you are building machines which can run for 894 days NON-STOP. (CANDU plants can be refuelled while operating)
Diesel locomotives are expensive, a lot of this is attributed to the engine designed to run at high-output for an extended amount of time.
A fusion reactor will also require wall thick enough to stop aircraft. Security will likey be the same to. And there is no fundamental reason why fusion should require any less for any of these.
In fact the actual cost of nuclear is CAPX and comes from the large civil engineering project with high specification, the steam turbine and water towers.
There are lots of fission based reactor designs that have non of these things. So nothing you describe has really much to do with 'fission' itself. Fission plants can also be made so that airborn radiation is practically impossible.
We simply stopped fundamentally advancing fission reactors in the early 70s and instead of solving problems fundamentally, we added lots of regulation.
I think it might be fine that fusion power may be more expensive in some ways than fission, as long as its reputation is kept clean (figuratively and literally). Market fusion power as the savior of humanity, and get enough people to believe it, and it'll be fine.
After all we already have a giant fusion reactor just 12 light-minutes away from us! We just have to harvest that energy. The direction were already going (mostly market-driven nowadays actually!) is generation from renewable sources, flexible grids and storage systems to balance everything out.
Fusion could obviate the need for grid-wide storage systems which would be a huge advantage.
"All the problems associated with" what? Modern batteries don't burst into flame. Anyway the overwhelming bulk of storage is not and will not be chemical batteries.
Economic challenges of quickly building grid-scale battery storage , battery production for the entire globe, NIMBY's etc.
> Modern batteries don't burst into flame
they literally do
> the overwhelming bulk of storage is not batteries
Well overwhelming bulk is a high bar and storage is geography dependent. Germany f.e. can't build as much pumped storage as Australia and Australia built a large amount of battery storage vs PSH.
Modern batteries do not burn. Teslas do.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/recycling-firm-fined...
Lithium is anyway not favored for use in utility-scale storage, where its light weight offers no compelling value. Up-and-coming chemistries include iron-air (no explosions), calcium-antimony (no explosions), and bromine-zinc (no explosions). Hundreds of other chemistries are available.
That's not sufficient for pumped storage at scale, but Germany is mostly focusing on hydrogen for now.
Fissions reactors that don't have incredibly strict and expensive regulation are already pretty unreliable, and they're operating within the bounds of known materials rather than an order of magnitude outside of them.
Even the mythical 100% uptime nuclear reactor still needs just as much storage for abritrage because it is so much more expensive.
Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity (LFSCOE) does include storage and suddenly nuclear fission gets a lot more competitive:
When you are building a power plant which has the capability of making a significant portion of your country permanently incompatible with human life, you generally want to be really sure you aren't going to have an oopsie.
I think Chernobyl was the only really big nuclear plant disaster right? And even then, what we've really learned in the long term is that human habitation is more dangerous to wildlife than nuclear radiation (the area around the plant is now a thriving wildlife preserve).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
"The fly ash emitted from burning coal for electricity by a power plant carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy."
A nuclear reactor that had the same radiation as a coal plant would not be legal? How does this make any sense at all?
The Safety standards were actually put at to high a level to early, specially given how instantly save nuclear was.
Consider this, how safe were coal plants? Would nuclear instead of coal have saved 100000s of lives since then? Yes of course nuclear would have, even if you had an accident once in a while.
The problem is that there was 0 tolerance for nuclear accident, because of populist nonsense, but if coal plant and supply chain killed 5 people here 10 people and 1000s of people get sick, nobody cares.
So the reality is, that nuclear went uneconomical because nuclear and existing power production (mostly coal, later gas) were no treated the same in terms of their safety requirements.
> When you are building a power plant which has the capability of making a significant portion of your country permanently incompatible with human life
That's not actually what happens. 3 Mile Island or Fukushima didn't even remotely come close to what you describe. And even for Chernobyl this is questionable statement. And Chernobyl was a type of reactor not built in the West, so in the West something that bad simply can't happen with PWRs.
At the contrary in renewables the learning cycle is in months so costs fall exponentially.
That's the real reason of high costs in fission, not red tape or public sentiment.
I think it's because of the occasional catastrophic failures that spatter our short history with the technology. Fukushima made headline news around the world, leaked large amounts of caesium-137 into the ocean, caused a 20km evacuation radius, is projected to take a total of 30-40 years to clean up, and people think of it as not that bad of a nuclear incident.
In comparison burning fossil fuels is a classic tragedy of the commons problem. Way less sensational. You can do math and say nuclear has a safer track record than coal/oil. You can point to design, engineering or management faults with historical failures. It doesn't change the fact that nuclear had a very fair chance at being the future and shown itself to not be trustworthy. If humanity was a little more perfect maybe we could have pulled it off
But ultimately it's such an expensive and society-tier level of investment that it's at the whims and pressures more than almost any other technology that has benefited society in resent history. So likewise it's also most at risk of the downside of populist politics (short term thinking, highly reactive to noisy local issues, driven by emotional outrage, etc).
I wonder if it's prospects are even worse off now that's to social media.
Oh yes indeed. Nuclear energy is not legal in Italy, so I did some research:
We had nuclear reactors in the 80s, until we held a referendum on nuclear energy, 3 months after Chernobyl. The result: overwhelmingly against, so we dismantled our reactors. Decades later, the Government pushed for a new referendum. When did they choose to do it? 6 months after the Fukushima disaster... you can guess what did the Italian population voted for.
Is this true?
I always considered fission tech to be used for the following reasons, and none of them are economic. The number's I've crunched say fission isn't the economic choice, but that varies depends on how much value is placed on 'base load'.
1. Cold war era vanity tech. Nuclear weapons were used to end World War 2, and now they are just another infrastructure project for us.
2. Code shifted weapons research. Countries blame each other for this all the time in the nuclear non-proliferation era.
3. Strategic choice to avoid traditional energy imports (France, Japan).
After 1990 specially 2000 lots of governments around the world started to massively subsidize solar and wind. While often at the same time having policies punishing nuclear in various ways.
The uneconomical solar and wind became economic because of massive government orders and investment. Even the US often simply set targets for solar and wind that utility providers had to reach. Even nuclear nations like France did so.
So why did wind and solar turn economical, massive investment around the world in making it so. Had Germany, France and the rest of the EU simply gone all in on even a Gen3+ reactor design, and had order 200 of them since 1990, it would also be very economical. History of nuclear shows that if you build the same plant in large numbers, they can be built and finished far faster and cheaper.
And that is even before we consider the huge reduction in capital cost if you go from a PWR design to a GenIV design. Just in terms of the scale of the project, there is a huge difference. Sadly by the time that technology was getting ready for serious commercialization, nuclear was basically seen as legacy and almost all government stopped most research and stop investing in it.
Imagine if nuclear in the 80s had the support wind/solar did in the last decade. If every utility in the US simply sad 'you need X% nuclear by Y date'. And in Europe at the same time as France was building its reactors, Germany, Nordics, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Britain had also built reactors at the same time.
During the Kyoto protocol talks, France already had a mostly green grid because of nuclear. But somehow essentially nobody copied this success story because it simply wasn't politically viable in most places. It took decade plus after Kyoto before wind/solar were commercially viable but really only if you don't consider intermittency a problem and the market doesn't give you a penalty for it (it usually didn't because before wind/solar that just wasn't an issue). Yet despite solar and wind not being economical, massive investment in it happened and eventually it was made economical thanks to economics of scale.
I would claim if all the investment that was made in wind/solar since 1992 had been made in nuclear, we would produce more green energy now and the cost curve would be driven even lower, and baseload power would be solved as intermittency is simply not a thing. We would not need to redesign grids because nuclear plants would map nicely onto the current grid, if you just replace coal with nuclear.
So, its all about economics of scale, that makes it energy production cheap. Putting up huge wind mills is cheap because there are lots of trained people to do it, the factories can produce large volumes. The largest wind mills now are by themselves large then a whole GenIV plant would be. And produce like 95% less energy and not even consistently.
> I always considered fission tech to be used for the following reasons, and none of them are economic.
You missed that it is green and no CO2. That was not a reason anybody cared about before 2000 but since then it was part of the rational in some countries.
I would like to hear why you think fission can't be economic in principle. Maybe you can make the argument that Gen3 reactors can't be economical but based on first principles, fission itself can be economical if you had economics of scale seems a stretch.
Airliners have the same problem, yet their spin doctors are much more successful. Everybody keeps believing they're the safest form of travel.
Yes, something like 150k people were evacuated because of worries about radiation. What you don't mention is that the total number of people evacuated was 470k. Most of the people who had to leave their homes had to leave not because of anything nuclear but because the enormous tsunami destroyed their homes.
So the Fukushima story is: massive natural disaster that caused enormous destruction and tens of thousands of deaths; a nuclear power plant was in a badly affected area; the damage was expensive to deal with but the total number of resulting deaths was, er, maybe about 1.
1. People tried to ring alarm bells about the building codes (and the reactor specifically) not being able to handle earthquakes of a size Fukushima was likely to experience. They were on deaf ears.
2. Japanese government admitted guilt for poor oversight and regulation.
3. Three executives were put on trail for negligence. There were found not guilty, but that's not the same as innocent.
If the question were, say, "how much should we trust the Japanese government?" then Fukushima is not very encouraging. But if it's "how worried should we be about nuclear power?" it seems pretty encouraging to me. Lots of errors and negligence, huge natural disaster, and even so scarcely any lives lost and most of the harm done would have been the same without the nuclear power plant.
> caused a 20km
Questionable if that is actually necessary or just over-reaction.
Already economic downturns corelate with fission problems, as plants are not properly maintained. We have one blowing up every thirty years atm. Our reach exceeds our grasp, and there is no shame in admitting to that.
Are you referring to the need for electricity now at the Ukraine plants? Newer technologies such as NuScale require no external electricity for their cooling. The reaction only occurs if there is water and when all the water evaporates then the reaction stops.
> Already economic downturns corelate with fission problems, as plants are not properly maintained. We have one blowing up every thirty years atm. Our reach exceeds our grasp, and there is no shame in admitting to that.
Gas turbines in aviation also blew up way more often in the past than they do now. Who says the blowing up of plants is a constant? There have been many improvements in safety. Also, apart from the Three Mile Island accident, there haven't been major nuclear problems in the US in the last 50 or so years. Furthermore, the thing that lead to the Chernobyl disaster is not possible, by law, in modern reactors. Furthermore, newer reactors require an extra casing of concrete which would also have contained the Chernobyl disaster. You can even fly an airplane in those newer housing buildings and nothing would happen (with the building at least).
I have yet to see such a world.
If you built nuclear at scale, then these problems solve themselves. Just as France solved them in 15 years in the 70/80s.
Just as these problems were solved for solar/wind by economics of scale.
Solar/wind was not economical, it was basically forced into being economical by creating economics of scale.
That said, well, they stopped building new reactors, most of their reactors were built in 15 years in the 70/80s. Since then they have not done as much as they should have and all those reactors are starting to need more maintenance now.
Because they have not built much new things, they don't have as many people with knowledge as they used to.
But they are managing most of these issues pretty well overall.
I would say France did pretty well having 40 years of green energy.
Probably the fact that it's literally the same thing that killed 140 thousands people in an instant and imposed the spectre of a nuclear winter upon us all, had its importance.
I'm pretty sure I saw that in a 'goop' sales pitch.
Yeah and with a breeder fission reactor we could reduce this to below 1% probably. With a thorium breeder the fuel cost might be essentially 0%. In the vision of Alvin Weinberg you literally just drop some thorium into the fuel salt every once in a while.
But the real issue for nuclear energy is currently capital cost and time not fuel cost. And capital cost can go down massively with GenIV reactors as well.
So I don't see how fusion will be cheaper.
> In fusion it could be lower
But eventually you have to start breeding tritium, so wouldn't that make it more expensive.
> Disclaimer: I switched from studying fusion energy to advanced fission 16 years ago.
Awesome, we desperately need GenIV reactors (even if I dislike that term).
If you are programmer, think of it like your program compiled successfully for the first time. It means that all of the bits between you designing the program, the program being compiled, and the operating system recognizing it as a program, all did what they were supposed to. Of course your program probably doesn't do what you want it to yet, but you have validated a huge chunk of the "pipeline" between what you are trying to do, and doing it with the equipment you have. That is what this is, "hello world" for Fusion Physicists.
And the reason they are so pumped is that they have literally been told for DECADES that why they proposed to do "wasn't possible" (and by that I mean creating actual fusion through inertial confinement.)
Steps 2 - n look a LOT more like engineering steps than "can this even work" steps, okay?
Scaling up Qplasma from 1 to ~1000, and scaling up operating time from a microsecond to a megasecond are just two of them.
I have a feeling there is still some science to do.
Heavy-ion fusion has been talked about since the 1970s and it seems much more practical than lasers for energy production because the efficiency of particle accelerators is pretty good (maybe 30% or more) but it takes a very big machine, the size of a full powerplant, to do do meaningful development. Something like that seems to need about 100 beamlines because otherwise space charge effects prevent you from getting the needed luminosity. Given that you are going to need to protect the wall of the reactor and the beamlines from the blasts and also have a lot of liquid lithium flowing around to absorb neutrons and breed tritium it is hard for me to picture the beam quality being good enough.
There hasn't been much work on it since then. If I had $48 billion to spend I'd think a heavy ion fusion lab would be better than some other things I could buy.
I don't hold out much hope for a practical, economical reactor from inertial confinement, but it's certainly exciting to see them achieve ignition & scientific breakeven, even if it's 10 years behind schedule. The one nice thing about ICF is that the energy gain shoots up dramatically once you cross the ignition threshold. That means they're arguably closer than tokamaks, even though both concepts need ~100x the demonstrated gain to get from where they are now to a workable reactor. (Ie, tokamaks have hit Q~0.3, need to get Q~30, vs ICF that has hit Q~1, needs Q~100).
But NIF was never, and is not, designed to be a generating reactor, or even a prototype of a testbed. It's a weapons physics facility that happens to do some energy generating research sometimes.
That aside, hitting Q=1 (and be able to use the device again) in any way at all using any equipment is a major milestone that proves humans can get there. From that point, in theory, it's just engineering.
Small scale fusion on the other hand would have a viable niche application at the poles, in the sea or underground or any other environment that is without sun or space.
Production is not subsidized: factories pay full price for their power.
>Cost of current production is an upper bound.
Under the current state of the energy economy, maybe. If we had to replace all manufacturing power sources with renewables - absolutely not.
That's not very interesting though - what is interesting, which has been my topic of conversation this entire time, is what the energy economy would look like if it were not still fundamentally rooted in fossil fuels.
Given that coal and other fossil fuels are basically free energy - it does not take much at all to get energy from it (ie, set it on fire), it is not physically possible for PV generation to beat that. Therefore, it follows that renewable power will be more expensive than fossil fuel power. I don't see why this is so hard to acknowledge - we are living in a time of unreasonably cheap power, fuelled by several million years worth of stored solar energy. It can't last.
Solar and wind, un-subsidized, are the cheapest power the world has ever seen, and their cost is still falling at exponential rate.
And? Most of our power usage is not supplied through electricity. Solar panels are never going to heat my house.
Plus storage is a thing. Using a heat pump to dry NaOH or melt Sodium Acetate, or heat a large pond can store low grade heat economically for months. Ammonia, or methanol can do so indefinitely.
Then there's transmission. HVDC can transport energy 10GW pernline for thousands of km at costs comparable to local generation.
I'd be very surprised if you could avoid using a solar panel to heat your home in 40 years even if you go out of your way to do so.
https://globalsolaratlas.info/detail?c=-5.462873,137.384064,...
Bifacial isn't in this model, but it boosts the snowy region by about 20% and the tropical one by about 5%
And what will the stuff available to burn be made from when there are plants producing ethylene or methanol or ammonia in chile or saudi arabia or mongolia for less than what gas costs to dig up?
These mental gymnastics routines are olympic level.
>driving operating coal plants out of business
Any specific ones? The only coal plants I've seen get shut down are because of environmental reasons (or age). Some countries, like Germany and China, are re-opening or building new coal plants.
Talking of mental gymnastics - fundamentally, the energy economy boils down to EROI (energy returned on energy invested). It's just wishful thinking that we can replace energy sources that are basically free (coal, oil, gas), with those that have energy payback periods in the mid-double digits of their expected lifespan (solar).
If you're really worried about it, buy a panel from europe, the polysilicon (90% of the energy) comes from hydro, wind, and nuclear powered countries.
Even if all the money for a solar module went to coal generation at chinese or indian prices and nothing else it would pay back that power in under two years.
If the only activity involved in making PV was to spend the entire system cost on lignite and burn it directly at the mine front, it would *still* produce more energy in its lifetime than putting the coal in a coal plant.
It's absolutely laughable that you think you can keep spouting this ridiculous lie.
Where do you get your numbers from?
>it would pay back that power in under two years.
That's exactly the problem. This is a significant portion of the lifetime output of the panels.
>it would still produce more energy in its lifetime than putting the coal in a coal plant.
I'm not arguing that solar panels are a net negative, as you seem to be implying. I'm arguing that the energy economics of a world fuelled entirely by solar (and other renewable technologies - solar is about the worst for EROI) would look very different to what we have now.
You're the one making the insane claims. You back them up.
I certainly haven't made any claims as specific as this without any backup!
Prove new solar in a median location is lower EROI than the median for new gas using up to date info on the whole process and solar cells you would buy for a project started now such as 155 micron wafer mono PERC.
Nope, I said that it's lower than other sources of power, and thus an energy economy based on solar will look very different than what we currently have.
Given that electricity represents a relatively small percentage of our power usage, in the majority of cases (materials manufacture, industry, heating, etc), the EROI of renewables will be worse than fossil fuels.
Then add heat pumps and PV+Heliostat or PV+CSP derived hydrogen compounds to your equation and realise that adding heat and chemical stocks shipped from distant places to the equation makes it favour renewables even more as you can turn 120MJ of electricity and 40MJ of direct sunlight at Chile's 35% capacity factor into 120MJ of hydrogen or 100MJ of Ammonia you don't have to refine. With the heat pump you'd get more low grade heat even if you burnt the fossil fuel for electricity.
Wind + PV is a pure upgrade from an EROI perspective, and electrolysers and CSP are following very close behind.
And they have to use traditional energy sources, or buy energy from neighbors.
For example, such a transmission line is currently being built to send solar energy from Northern Australia to Singapore across about 3000km of ocean. Another project is generating wind energy near Iceland and sending it to the UK a distance of 800km.
Unfortunately, most of territories I mention, also have low population density, about 1/10 of western Europe, and have low middle income, so it is not right to directly compare them with western Europe or Singapore, in possibilities to achieve same infrastructure power.
If 1% of the world needs to get 30% of their energy from gas while we figure out the hydrogen thing, it's not really a problem.
On the extreme end, there's the energy cost of building the machine and engineering its components. For the vast majority of these, we can probably all agree that were a fusion power plant to be built, the net gain would fully eclipse these initial inputs fairly quickly. This may sound silly, but remember that the economic context where fusion so often sits is one that centers on renewable energy and sustainability. These costs do have to be accounted for.
On the other end, there's the energy cost consumables. For example, the deuterium and tritium fuel input into the device, which need to be purified (deuterium from water, possibly tritium from the atmosphere) or otherwise isolated (from what I understand, tritium is a byproduct from fission reactors and they serve as its primary source in scientific applications). It may well be that the energy cost of acquiring these consumables is fractions to fractions of a fraction of the energy cost of running the device, effectively constituting a rounding error. But I think when we're talking about net gain, a clear definition and accounting of the input energy required to run the experiment would be useful to communicate to the public.
I hope we see disclosure of these details with all the expected caveats when the peer-reviewed article goes to print and journalists have another feeding frenzy.
These over-unity reports are meaningless, because every damn one of them only measures Q-plasma, not Q-total.
What is the justification for keeping it classified?
The capability of the NIF to get positive energy from the energy that they impart on the Hohlraum itself is neat, but I constantly discount any milestones that Livermore/NIF report, because the inertial confinement approach has such higher barriers to commercialization than tokamak style approaches, that I just consign it to "boondoggle" in my head.
Yeah, the lasers could be 20x more efficient, and yeah, they probably could figure out how to pump 10s of targets into the chamber per second, but the energy extraction is just completely missing from the considerations. The engineering challenges are a whole 'nother level for NIF, a big barrier to usability.
So manufacturing fusion reactors would use a lot of lithium, which is already in short supply. That would be an interesting complication with the demand of lithium for electric vehicle batteries. Maybe the Li supply situation will be eased by then.
https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/new-scientific-papers-pred...
You’re probably right, but I guess what I’m saying is that we’ve never had a fusion power plant that produces net energy gain at any cost. I believe SPARC is on the path to doing so. It will still take a long time to make fusion actually affordable. For what it’s worth I am a huge advocate of wind and solar power. But fusion is neat and I’m excited for us to get to a point where we actually have sustained Q total greater than 1.
I agree with you that in a practical sense fusion power will not be economical in the next 50 years, but then solar power was not economical for most of my life either. I am excited for the technology to get to the point where at the very least it is producing power, as this will stimulate more investment in lowering the costs, and has been such a dream for longer than I have been alive.
As for safety, the problem with fission isn't safety, it's cost. Trading off economics to obtain better safety is solving the wrong problem.
If fusion is not to be economical for 50 years, it will be competing against renewables (and storage) that have gone fully down their experience curves. In a world fully powered by PV, on the demonstrated historical experience curve, the LCOE from PV could be below $0.01/kWh (in today's dollars). Fusion will have a very difficult time competing against that.
But I cannot tell if this comment is being facetious or rather optimistic. Therefore, I’ll agree!
The exciting thing is that they've shown a fusion reaction in lab conditions which produces more energy than it takes to start it. Yes, the gain is small. It's nearly irrelevant to the amount of energy used to run the reactor, yes.
But it clearly shows that what we're trying to do is possible, and we've identified one mechanism that can initiate these reactions.
It's exciting. This is a great result that shows the science is progressing and beginning to finally show results.
The main idea behind my reactor is to contain NIF like explosions in magnetic fields. I've been trying to get a test reactor built for a long time, and my plans have been hampered by a theft earlier this year.
A huge difference between the current NIF device and my proposed device is the speed of implosions and the strength of the field. While the NIF device must be re-built before every implosion, my device creates an environment where the implosions form as part of a harmonic oscillation. The ions are allowed to travel their entire individual cyclotron trajectories before they return to the implosion site... my target frequency was 2.4GHz, which is a useful frequency for direct conversion and COTS components.
I had one of the main videos on the site set to private for a few years until someone told me they couldn't see it. I had only tested on my own devices which were all logged in to my Google account so I never saw the problem.
I felt so stupid, but very thankful for the feedback. How many people went to the site and immediately dismissed it because such a central piece was missing? Probably a lot. I'm sure there are scientists who will never take a second look at the idea because of stupid errors like that. So truly, I value the feedback.
However, I see no reason what so ever why fusion would ever be cheaper then a GenIV fission reactor. I guess the advantage fusion has is that states actually invest serious money in fusion while fission is struggling to get funding.
The reason why I think fission will remain cheaper.
- Capital cost is less. A GenIV fission reactor is pretty low tech overall, in a non water based reactor the containment is mostly just a steel tub. Everything around the reactor, the heat loops, the turbine and so on will be mostly the same.
- Fuel cost. Fuel cost is already a small part of reactor cost, if we switch to a breeder the fuel cost is basically nothing. For Fusion, in the long term this is an issue and you likely have to breed new tritium.
- Operation cost. Seems to me that self regulating GenIV reactor should be easier to operate overall and there is much less complex technology involved that could break.
- Safty. A GenIV reactor that is passivly safe is already incredibly safe. Specially with a molten salt reactor, the radioactive chemical that get blown into the air, will just remain in the fuel salt and will remain in the reactor safety zone. A fusion reactor does actually contain radioactive material that could be dispersed into the air. A fusion reactor might still be safer, but the difference doesn't seem that big.
So really I don't get it, why would fusion ever be cheaper then fission?
That said, I'm not against research of fusion. I just wish more money was spent on actually getting GenIV fission reactors into real world uses. That would actually be a more viable solution to energy problems on the plant.
We can't just stop using energy. We can't buy our way forward with "carbon offset" fees. And, most importantly, we can't just redirect all of our environmental conservation efforts to eliminating energy use. Remember when we were going to save the rainforests? Don't forget why we called these "green" initiatives in the first place.
That's not at all what GP said IMO
If we could pick a World 3 track to be on, which one would it be? Now, what can we do to try to push ourselves onto that track? That's what gets me up in the morning.
Meanwhile the VC money is quietly piling into tokamak and stellarator magnetic confinement designs, driven by high expectations from real breakthroughs in ReBCO tape manufacturing technology. These superconducting tapes can be manufactured like semiconductors and can develop magnetic fields that were previously impossible, which is a key manufacturability enabler in a design whose path to commercialization is far better de-risked overall. There are still concerns with the durability of equipment needed to capture the neutrons in these designs too, but ReBCO tapes were the real prior changer.
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.2021102...
This is last unknown in this equation. All others are already known, from achievements of last few years.
Materials research is one of primary targets of ITER.
If good enough materials will not being found fast enough, will need to use clear reactions like boron-carbon fusion, in which need magnitude higher temperature, so practical device will be few times larger (because x-ray losses, proportional to surface square of plasma configuration).
For this reason, there has long been a call for a FNSF. This facility is likely to be needed to establish designs for components that would go into the putative successor to ITER (DEMO).
Are You joking? Or You just don't know physics?
What REALLY differ ITER (DEMO) from real commercial reactor?
ITER fails in at least two ways. First, the intensity of neutron radiation at the first wall is far too low for a viable commercial reactor. It cannot simulate the heat load a commercially viable breeding module would encounter. Second, ITER cannot operate for more than a few weeks, so it cannot simulate the integrated radiation load a commercial first wall would have to be able to withstand. It also cannot operate with enough blanket modules, for long enough, to move the designs down experience curves for reliability growth to occur so they are sufficiently robust for a commercial reactor (this is a huge looming problem, as they will be very difficult to repair.)
Abdou at UCLA has been beating the drum for a FNSF to actually address these issues. He's been beating this drum for DECADES.
Source? Proofs? Sorry, for me this looking as just Your opinion.
> Second, ITER cannot operate for more than a few weeks
This is just not important at all now. That what I mean, said You don't understand physics.
- NOWHERE at Earth possible to recreate exact radiation environment of Jupiter orbit for YEARS, need to test radiation capable computer environment for space probes.
What really doing? After first probes measured parameters of environment, at Earth built test benches, consisting of few throttle-able sources, so they give approximate spectrum, very like near Jupiter, but could do year dose in few hours and could easy be switched off, to make manipulations with tested samples.
So now, I even know guys, who touched exposed chips and running real world software on them, and real computers in Jupiter/Mars missions, working much longer than need for mission (BTW, first samples tested at Earth, where not reliable).
My TLDR (from a layman):
* The output is greater than the energy *in the lasers*, but the lasers deliver 1% of the energy required to power them. Need 100x improvement to break even.
* Converting the generated energy into electricity would cut the output in half. We need a further 2x improvement here, so it's ~200x to break even end-to-end.
* The scientific equipment requires immense & expensive maintenance.
* Plus the $3B facility around the equipment, that theoretically could deliver just 2.5 MW.
Continual refinement may finally get us where we need to be, but it's going to take a long time.
This video of a presentation by Helion's Kirtley at Princeton has a slide where the reactivity vs. energy loss is shown for a DD system at beta=1. That system will make 3He directly, and also make tritium by two modes (directly from DD, and by capture of neutrons on 6Li in a blanket.) The net result would be production of 1.5 3He nuclei per DD fusion, on average. It takes a while for some of those 3He to be produced though, as the tritium has to decay (halflife of 12 years.)
https://mediacentral.princeton.edu/media/JPP08December2022_D...
Maybe this could also open up more avenues for money.
Yes it's good progress, but an order of magnitude is not nothing. Squeezing another order of magnitude efficiency out of the lasers will be very difficult. It took 30 years or so to go from 1% efficiency to 20%, and law of diminishing returns applies.
Edit: to clarify, lasers will have some maximum efficiency that is less than 100% and approaching that maximum is subject to diminishing returns.
I wouldn't bet on no breakthroughs happening in laser efficiency, but more efficient lasers doesn't look like it will be enough to get to net energy given other inefficiencies in the system.
But that’s not what we’re talking about. This is a physical process which is known to be exothermic for the energy ranges we care about.
As another example, raising the temperature of a flammable material 1 degree from room temperature will probably not light. Ditto with 2 degrees. But eventually, if you raise the temperature high enough, you’ll get more energy out than you put in. That’s the type of process we’re talking about now.
It has nothing to do with energy generation though, and never has.
That's utterly incorrect:
"Fast ignition and similar approaches changed the situation. In this approach gains of 100 are predicted in the first experimental device, HiPER. Given a gain of about 100 and a laser efficiency of about 1%, HiPER produces about the same amount of fusion energy as electrical energy was needed to create it (and thus will require more gain to produce electricity after considering losses). It also appears that an order of magnitude improvement in laser efficiency may be possible through the use of newer designs that replace flash lamps with laser diodes that are tuned to produce most of their energy in a frequency range that is strongly absorbed. Initial experimental devices offer efficiencies of about 10%, and it is suggested that 20% is possible."
With current technology, running an ICF plant would cost literally hundreds of millions of dollars per hour in hohlraums, since a single one costs millions, and you need to shoot several times per minute to produce energy.
That's why ICF is not even close to being a plausible electricity generation technology, so it is only being researched by nuclear weapons research labs like LLNL.
For an actual look at the challenge of ICF i'd say look here: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/TE_1704_web.p...
and also consider that it might be used in combination with MCF for example: https://medium.com/fusion-energy-league/the-fundamental-para...
The reports you quote actually mention the target costs very clearly. The IAEA one talks about needing 500,000 targets per day, and sets a target of 0.30$ per target. At the time it was written, it says that a target costs 1000$, which is probably before NIF found put just how much more stringent the requirements for the shape of the target were (since the numbers I saw last time NIF achieved ignition were closer to hundreds of thousands of dollars per target, though maybe I am misrembering).
It's also worth noting that that report was expecting NIF to achieve the current milestone within 3-6 years, and it actually took 13. So I feel their numbers can well be considered optimistic.
HiPER is also dead, I think.
> So we might be as close as 10-20 years away, as always!
I don't really get the cynicism here. This is a huge milestone that's been passed. Maybe with this, we actually will be 10-20 years away. Or maybe it's more like 30-40, who knows. But this experiment shows that net-positive energy is actually possible to do with our current understanding and technology; before this, I believe much of the skepticism was based on a belief that it may not actually be possible to get more energy out than put in, at least not without technology that's significantly out of reach.
https://www.livescience.com/43318-fusion-energy-reaches-mile...
This time, they're comparing to the total energy in the laser beams.
They're ignoring the inefficiency of the laser devices, but that kinda makes sense because they're using really old, inefficient lasers and much better ones are available now.
How do you know? Nothing has been published yet; it’s science through press release. In the past, published papers from NIF have been a real wake-up call after absorbing the misleading hype (the papers are most honest than the folks taking to the reporters).
> The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers
I guess we'll see how things develop. But from a quick google, 2.1 megajoules is about what the lasers deliver, unless they've significantly increased their power recently.
This was never expected to be a power plant technology. It's a research tool, for studying fusion.
"Technical breakeven" is when the plant generates enough energy to run itself. This is at least 100x below that.
"Commercial breakeven" is when it makes money.
How's that Lockheed-Martin fusion thing coming along?[1]
[1] https://lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.htm...
Look, it's really simple:
1. This is a very hard and expensive problem.
2. Progress IS being made.
It's not clever or cute to diminish progress on this problem.
I'm not complaining. If we do crack the code on Nuclear Fusion, if I was the government, my next step would be to figure out how to build so many reactors that electricity costs go to basically zero. If you can charge your electric car for pennies, even the most diehard gas-car fans won't be able to resist. Offering a better product attracts far more users than, say, trying to shame people for CO2 usage (more flies with honey instead of vinegar).
They just won't have a choice; if we can provide a real alternative, we can just forbid gas car altogether. Just like we banned CFC to save the ozone when better alternatives were developed.
The main issue is that our electricity grids and production facilities aren't ready yet to sustain a mass shift to electric, so we need to ease in the transition. But the moment they are, there is no reason to delay any further.
People who "really want to" will keep old ones working and most people will slowly start using the new ones.
After all you can still get a horse-drawn carriage if you want to, and you can drive a Model T, but few people bother.
Banning gas cars outright, I think, would be a political miscalculation. There is broad mistrust of anything the government does right now in the US (not wholly undeserved), and it is likely to continue getting stronger, so not tainting it with a political ban would be a better solution in my view. Otherwise you risk polarization and failure, because not everyone buys climate change, or banning something because X is determined to be better now. It also would breed widespread resentment from people who aren't ready to switch (because, let me tell you, outside of cities, "reduces climate change" is something nobody cares about as a selling point). Just let electric vehicles naturally become better at everything and let gas cars slowly die naturally. The "invisible hand" will take care of the rest - just like it did with the horse and buggy.
emphasis, etc
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.2021102...
Same article mentions that some petawatt lasers can fire more than once per second now.
Some reactor designs let you harvest electricity directly from charged ions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion
The real question in the experiments here at NIF was about whether inertial confinement fusion would work. This is very promising progress.
Also NIF spends a good portion of its time on weapons research, not fusion power so it's only been a recent focus.
Taking those costs into account, being able to use this method to generate power seems really non-optimal.
> But, as with all science, it's good to be cautious and not overhype results yet to be fully analyzed. We have been here before, after all. In 2013, reports swirled the NIF had achieved this exact feat. It wasn't the case.
https://www.cnet.com/science/climate/a-fusion-energy-breakth...
AFAICT, the only thing that's been publicly confirmed is that announcement will be made tomorrow.
It took 63 years of progress in flight technology. Not counting earlier experiments and R&D time.
First fusion experiment was 1933 Fusion seems a lot more complex to a layman (me) than spaceflight.
Excited for what's to come
The common thread is that they tend to aim directly for an electrical output rather than simply generating energy, and don't necessarily plan to have a self-sustaining reaction.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor#Engi...]
https://www.youtube.com/c/EnergyGov/live
300MJ in at the wall, 2MJ produced at lasers (using 1980's laser tech), 3MJ out from reaction
From a quick skimming it seems only one of the experts quoted here even mentions that (Tony Roulstone).
(Update: i wrote this comment in response to another story and the comment got moved here, so it lost a bit of context https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33958678&ref=upstract.c... - the press release indeed does mention this caveat, but many news stories missed it)
I'm curious - given that this is the first time we have ever done this (even with the constrained definition as discussed in this article), how there can be a '"usual caveat" about all of the "got more energy out than we put in" stories'?
AFAICT, this is the first such "story" to have ever happened artificially in history.
With no disrespect to the researchers in this experiment, it's not like we're surprised that fusion works or that a pellet can generate more power than is put in.
Yes, it's true that in this case we didn't actually "get more energy out than we put in" when considering the full closed system, but the point of this research was to see if they could get more energy out of the reaction itself than was put into it by the lasers themselves. Presumably the next step is to see how far they can push this, still without bothering to think about the energy needed to power the lasers themselves, because, again, that is not the purpose of this research. There are other people working on making lasers more efficient, and the overall project will benefit from that research (and so will the NIF, if they decide it's worthwhile to upgrade their 90s-era lasers to something modern).
I think a lot of people here are having knee-jerk reactions and didn't read the article where they very clearly explain the caveat and what the researchers actually did.
Because of the physics of fusion (or ICF) returns on power are non linear. It's very much possible research here results in a path to a "net gain facility".
It's quite easy to see that replacing the lasers, the capacitors, etc. with more modern technology would have an immediate effect. But it doesn't matter until doing the reaction at all makes sense. That's what they are focusing on.
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.2021102...
That building would use modern lasers, modern supercapactiors, etc. to significantly change the "other" parts of the equation.
“The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory experiment shows that scientists can get more energy out than put in by the laser itself. This is great progress indeed, but still more is needed: first we need to get much more out that is put in so to account for losses in generating the laser light etc (although the technology for creating efficient lasers has also leapt forward in recent years). Secondly, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory could in principle produce this sort of result about once a day – a fusion power plant would need to do it ten times per second. However, the important takeaway point is that the basic science is now clearly well understood, and this should spur further investment. It is encouraging to see that the private sector is starting to wake up to the possibilities, although still long term, of these important emerging technologies.”
While this spins it in an optimistic way, the challenges to make this work are significant. The laser is quite inefficient, so the gain must be much much larger before you have net energy gain. To scale it up to implode a capsule tens of times a second rather than a few times a day, is in the order of 100.000 times more frequent than today.Thus this is a long way from commercial production.
The goal of the research being done at NIF is to understand inertial confinement fusion. "Solving" these other problems isn't as important, other folks are solving these all day long for commercial industries already.
Q-total is still below 1, but some of that can be improved through already-known laser efficiency advancements, and also by pushing Q-plasma higher.
I think pushing Q-plasma above 1 is the big gate though, isn't it? I mean, partly psychologically. Showing that it's actually technically possible.
For example, for fission, my 12 year old understanding is: Stack uranium plates until the reaction is self-sustaining, boil water to spin turbine, if reaction gets too fast, cover it with lead / cool it with water. Circulated water is slightly radioactive. Main costs are keeping reaction container / need power to circulate water cooling, disposing of spent fuel is a problem. Power output is 100s or 1000s times more effective than coal / oil once running. In addition to meltdown risk, public opinion is concerned about radioactive cooling water near their community.
What's the same tldr for fusion? (and feel free to correct my tldr)
This is the first time that the laser’s photon energy was exceeded by the energy produced by fusion. But this machine isn’t optimized as a power plant, just to demonstrate fusion (mostly to improve modeling of H-bombs, actually). The shots take hours to do, the tiny bombs are currently expensive to make, the chamber for the tiny bombs isn’t designed to capture heat, breed fuel, or even withstand damage from higher yield fusion. Another machine would be needed to demonstrate like 10-100 tiny bombs per second, and the efficiency (and repetition rate) of the lasers would need to be higher and the energy gain also needs to be much higher (but if they got “ignition” where the fusion heat helps sustain the reaction, this may be doable). And need to find a way to make these tiny bombs cheaper.
I need to explain what Q is in the context of fusion. Basically, you heat the plasma with some energy (Energy In), and the fusion reactions produces some energy (Energy out). Q is basically the ratio (Energy out)/(Energy In). When Q is bigger than 1, we call it break-even. However, (Energy In) is not the actual cost of energy you need to run the whole facility, it is only the Energy that reaches the plasma. The same goes for (Energy out): this energy cannot be captured 100% efficiently. Some of it will heat the plasma itself, some of it will escape but the conversion back to electricity is not 100% efficient.
So in a sense, Q > 1, aka break-even, does not mean commercial fusion, it is only a kind of a psychological barrier to achieve (so this is what the NIF announced; still a major breakthrough). We need at least to achieve (Total Electrical Energy out)/(Total Electrical Energy In) > 1 to achieve commercial fusion. But physicists consider the rest as engineering problems, not physics problems. And great news, there is no theoretical limit on how big Q can be: for example, the sun has a Q of infinity, as there is no required energy input. Current estimates put Q at least 30-40 to achieve commercial fusion (again: there is no physical limit to achieve that, only engineering difficulties).
Main costs are: difficult to define, because we haven't commercialized a reactor yet. I would say, for now, everything around it is expensive (magnets, the blanket, the fuel (tritium)). However, once we have sufficiently understood the optimal parameters on how to produce net gain energy, there is no reason why the design of the reactor can't then be simplified to be mass-produced.
Note: the technology used by the NIF is very different from what I described for a realistic fusion device: what I described is called magnetic confinement, and what the NIF did is called inertial confinement.
I think we're still probably 20 years away from commercialization of this, but I still think this is a very big deal.
Can't you use energy produced from existing solar panels to create more of them?
Fun fact that Wolfram alpha just informed me of: a phone uses between 10 and 20 MJ a year: multiple kilos of TNT. 4000mAh * 3.7V * 365: yep, it's about right.
Also, interesting fun fact indeed.
Generating 59 MJ (11MW) in five seconds was impressive too although I didn't see what the amount of energy that was input.
I'm also curious how are they going to heat water for the steam generators? Water can't be heated to 150 million degrees C something has to moderate it down to X degrees. That seems to be incredibly wasteful.
Each will be converted to heat in walls and in shielding blanket, which cooled by water.
NIF uses DT, not D3He, btw.
Yes, I made mistake. Thank You.
But this is not making much difference from neutrons from D+T reaction, particles are not too convenient to got energy from their moving.
Much better pure Boron+Carbon reaction, from which energy will go just as photons, for example could be used to feed laser/maser and then convert to electricity by photovoltaic or high frequency power diodes.
Which means normal nuclear reactors will be needed to make it and minimising any economic viability of the dependent fusion rector for a long long time.
I'm not by any means well informed on the matter, but isn't the lunar surface covered in tritium deposits?
It might make sense to mine the moon sooner than later. Once we have the necessary equipment and resources there, the delta-v for getting the mined product to Earth isn't nearly as substantial.
Building lunar mining tech is likely to unlock all sorts of advances for the human race.
If you turned that heat energy into electricity (our ultimate goal here) you'd have:
(2.5 megajoules produced * 50% loss in conversion to electricity) - 2.1 megajoules input = negative 0.85 megajoules generated
This is still cool of course, but we're still way off from making this anywhere near feasible.
They could easily buy a newer, more efficient laser for example. That would increase the overall efficiency, but would ultimately be a waste of money. It wouldn't change the science at all, and the point is the science.
I don't think they used that for this recent event, so if it works out that's potentially a significant improvement.
- Breakthrough: a sudden, dramatic, and important discovery or development
- Milestone: a significant point in development
This is clearly neither 'sudden' nor 'dramatic' and should NOT be celebrated or acknowledged as a 'breakthrough'. This level of journalistic malpractice is worth noting, and I have contacted the author on Twitter to voice my disapproval.
Which definition of breakeven are they using this time? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JurplDfPi3U&t
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
So they probably are talking again about Q_plasma, not Q_total .
Solar panels are cheap and batteries are easier to build and there are lots of ways of making them.
Nuclear is still possibly a great fit for niche locales where renewables aren’t feasible at all. Not a nuclear hater by any means (we need every innovation we can get), just show your math.
Most of those people living in Russia, Norway, and Sweden with easy access to an abundance of hydro, to the level that energy flows north to south in the Scandinavian countries.
> just show your math.
I admit I can't. It's mostly gut-feeling from various science news sources I keep up with (e.g. Ars Technica; Skeptic's Guide to the Universe).
Solar, Wind, HVDC transmission lines, short-term battery storage get us most of the way there, and is all on the process of being built out now. Medium term storage is still up in the air (flow batteries? compressed air?). Long term storage looks like hydrogen or natural gas with carbon capture. All these things seem more achievable than fusion in the next few decades.
I live in a cold state. The idea of relying on out-of-state power, regulated and controlled by people with zero accountability to you, for life-and-death energy is a tough sell.
Last I checked, we mine our own coal, pump our own oil and put up our own wind farms [1]. Minnesota, for what it’s worth, runs on renewables, coal and nukes [2]. The fifth of natural gas it does use comes from Canada, the Dakotas and Iowa.
These cold-state energy security concerns are a big part of the political puzzle that gets missed in the national discourse.
[1] https://www.wsgs.wyo.gov/products/wsgs-2012-electricalgenera...
If most states stopped importing energy they would have to go back to wood and coal-fired stoves. That would be a huge quality of life reduction in terms of convenience and home air quality.
Resistive heating.
> most states stopped importing energy they would have to go back to wood and coal-fired stoves
Most states don’t have high-baseload, low-latency life-or-death energy requirements. Those that do have the options I outlined above.
High level, the energy transition isn't simply a fossil->renewables story, but also a centralization->highly decentralized story.
EDIT: It seems not too badly [1].
[1] https://empoweringmichigan.com/how-do-wind-turbines-work-in-...
From the context, I think your link is relevant to the GP's question.
However, if you search for "geothermal Minnesota", you'll get hits primarily related to ground-loop heat pumps.
Note that in the Minneapolis area, the ground will freeze down about 3 feet in winter, so you need to bury your ground loop deeper than that. The frost line is even deeper up in the Duluth area. (Also, you need to use an air compressor to purge the vast majority of water out of any in-ground sprinkler systems before the ground freezes.)
However, I also remember a news story about some used wind turbines relocated from California that had trouble due to inadequate heaters to keep the lubricant from getting too viscous.
https://www.energystar.gov/campaign/seal_insulate/identify_p...
I don't really see a hot/cold stratification in this chart-
https://www.statista.com/chart/12098/the-us-states-with-the-...
And even then, the difference in costs seems quite small. Alaska is $332 and Georgia is $310.
I think it's highly likely we'll be burning a lot of algae fuel in the coming decades in situations where the energy density of carbon fuels is necessary.
The goal is to reduce emissions so it would be great even if we can just stop burning coal in the summer.
It's one of those issues the overwhelming majority of people are on the same page about what we should do but at the ends you have "my livelihood depends on coal" on one end and "my life is insulated against the downsides of full-renewables so I'm privileged enough to have out of touch opinions" on the other and that's who shows up in comment sections.
Its the same as what we see with EVs, tbh. Oh noes, what if you get caught in a snowstorm!? Imagine if 80% of the cars were EVs and they got stuck and there were... no chargers! Picture yourself freezing to death because of "those people".
Real world performance and goals are not correlated well with media hyperbole.
https://energytransition.umn.edu/modernizing-minnesotas-grid...
I don’t think storage will be feasible in places like Minnesota. The following makes far more economic sense:
- Double solar / wind production by buying 2x more panels vs. “normal” states.
- Go all electric (heat pump / induction) for appliances and vehicles.
- Buy 8-24h worth of house batteries.
- Use a fossil fuel generator to top off batteries during outages (this more than doubles the generator’s end to end efficiency)
- Sell excess electricity to the grid, where it is used for subsidized carbon capture.
This should be completely resilient against storms and power outages, and extremely carbon negative. It would cost about 2x as much as best case renewables.
500,000 kilowatt of panels would produce ~33 gwh in the worst month (January). So, we'd need 151 times that many to have a good chance of doing this with purely solar. That'd mean 75,500,000 kw of solar panels. Assuming that we could install these for $1.50/w, that'd cost 113,250,000,000 and there's still a chance that we'd freeze people to death.
To mitigate that risk, we'd want to add ~500 gwh of batteries (just guessing as to needed capacity here). At a price of ~150/kwh, we'd be looking at ~75,000,000,000 in energy storage prices.
Feel free to check my math, as I did that pretty quickly. The figures are absurdly high due to scaling for the worst case type scenarios. Summer months would correlate with lower demand and more than double the supply.
Sensibly speaking, noone would try to do this. Its like building an offgrid home. You can get 90% of the way there and add a generator, or you can spend 10x more be truly offgrid. Almost everyone chooses the former. Maybe even 80%. Solar is great and very cost effective, but the returns diminish the deeper one goes.
E: Ah, it occurs to me that you're using electric heat pumps, which are probably much more efficient than my NG boiler.
Compared to the nearly $200B in infra investment that I was estimating, that looks easy, lol.
Also, I estimated solar at $1.5/watt. That's probably at least 50% too high.
Selecting the state of Minnesota, 2011 weather data, and 2030 cost assumptions, this would be about 70 Euro/MWh. The cost optimized solution would involve 222 hours of hydrogen storage, 5 hours of battery storage, 4.2x peak power of solar and 2.4x peak power of wind.
Removing 20% of emissions will make a huge difference.
ETA on this should be around 2030?
What I don’t get is since solar is cheaper, why are we building so many coal power plants?
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2317274-china-is-buildi...
Coal handles baseline load. We should be using nuclear for baseline instead.
I'll believe it when the batteries are actually installed and the bill is paid.
Also, the solar farm is planned for 800-MWh of storage. In 2021, LA used over 65 TWh of electricity[1]. That's over 7 GWh, per hour. So this storage would run the city for a few minutes. Not exactly a replacement for base load generation.
We need a major breakthrough in storage tech to make grid-scale storage a reality. Li-ion batteries are never going to cut it. Who knows whether grid scale storage will come along faster than fusion.
This is false. This has only ever been shown to be true in extremely narrow edge cases where the batteries only needed to last overnight in extremely sunny locations.
For solar+batteries to be cheaper they need to be large enough to power through weeks/months of cloudy/snowy/leafy/rainy weather in places that are at least near higher latitude locations.
Mechanical, lithium based, flow, heat, compressed air, pumped hydro are all types of batteries that are able to store quite large amounts of power today or in the near future. Certainly cheaper than fusion has any hope to be within 20 years.
Form Energy is working on iron air batteries as a new class of multi-day energy storage, launching its first test installation in 2023
The US passed a tax credit for energy storage, to encourage building more pumped storage capacity
Congress is working on transmission line permitting reform
There are some good reasons to be optimistic in the near term
Right now they are, but they often rely on materials from politically unstable regions (particularly Africa), or potential political rivals (China). Also, many solar panels require polysilicon from China, which is almost certainly produced with forced labor.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/dark-spot-solar-energy-industr...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/12/clean-energy-china-xinj...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/29/evidence...
And it's not just a China problem.
"On batteries, there were major issues with the mining of between 15% and 30% of the world’s cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Amnesty International found that children, some as young as seven, were working in artisanal cobalt mines, often for less than $2 a day. Mining conditions were reportedly hazardous, and workers often did not have adequate protective equipment and were exposed to toxic dust that contributed to hard metal lung disease."
The US is trying to crack down but Europe is lagging behind on it. However, if the report's claim (which I see no reason to doubt) that China has 82% of the global polysilicon market is true, with most of their polysilicon production being in the Xinjiang region, calling solar panels (or batteries) "cheap" is fairly distasteful considering their sources.
And if you want to store multiple days for a northerly nation with very cold winters, frequent high pressure anticyclones (so, no wind) that can last about a week, and you want to switch everyone to zero carbon heating, then the technology doubly doesn't exist.
And the only retort to the above will be mumbling "yeah, but exponential improvement in batteries plus didn't someone say something about hydrogen?" which is essentially, wishful thinking. When you can build a zero carbon grid out of nuclear fission plants - and we've known how to do so since the 60s.
Close to me is the oldest one, built in 1972 and still operational today: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraftwerk_Huntorf
But it is almost certainly closer to existence than fusion.
We're not close, and it's basically completely unfeasible. Fusion will be closer in 100 years than such a project.
Consider pumped thermal energy storage. Use a thermal cycle to generate hot and cold (say, by compressing a gas, probably argon, extracting the heat, then reexpanding, and then storing the resulting "cold"), then reversing that cycle to generate power.
This scales embarrassingly well. It can be made entirely from cheap materials available in essentially infinite supply. No component operates at a temperature above the creep limit of ordinary steel. Round trip efficiency could reasonably be 75%. This requires no technological breakthroughs -- it's 19th century technology.
For all the crocodile tears about children mining cobalt, it's easy to forget how other industries can be just as bad or much worse. Of course, critics of batteries are laser focused on only and exclusively criticizing how bad things are when it comes to batteries and literally nothing else whatsoever.
I mean, do you want to talk about oil? Or coal? Or copper? Or uranium? Nasty industries, each of them. Especially oil. Lots of environmental destruction, poor working conditions, the occasional bit of genocide or sponsored corruption, wars, etc. Mining and oil/gas industry just are a nasty. Especially when everybody just accepts it as normal and looks the other way.
It could still be a useful technology, especially in space. I could see a moon or mars base powered by fusion.
Also of course we might want to consider the carbon emissions of gas plants.
The viability of fusion has been centered for a long time around getting more power out than you put in and once that marker is met it's viewed as the last giant hurdle in the way. There's still plenty more R&D that needs to be done before it can easily / readily scale though.
It's where nuclear was in the 60s basically. Even if it only ever gets to be comparable to nuclear in terms of costing but with none of the hazardous byproduct, it will come out ahead. When you consider the environmental factors involved in battery production it is pretty clear that fusion at least has the potential to be the cleanest sources of energy. Whether it ultimately gets there is another question.
Plants built in the 70s are still operating. It is nowhere near a decade away.
I do think it'll be a decade or so to go from net gain -> commercial fusion reactors coming online.
Most skepticism is ratified by subsequent events.
DT fusion doesn't appear to have much to recommend it, since it still requires a thermal cycle like fission or coal, and that keeps its cost high. From an engineering point of view it involves large monolithic plants with very complex and stressed equipment. This seems the opposite of good engineering.
We're constantly being told to take the long term view. Are we only to do that when it's favorable to the technological optimist's case or budget?
If you have to build a steam turbine to convert the energy from your fusion reactor into electricity, it's never going to compete with solar and wind power in most of the world.
Doesn't mean that there won't be applications (if you can make all those lasers compact enough, submarines, ships, and ultimately spacecraft come to mind), but grid electricity is doubtful.
1 fusion plant has less NIMBYs to deal with than wind-on-land, for example.
But yes, could be that still it's too expensive by the time it becomes available. By then I hope we can make a fusion plant so small it fits on a space ship and power an Epstein drive :-)
The other thing is that if LLNL is still using their own definition of Q, it's not necessarily the case that they've demonstrated net-energy breakeven; they like to compare direct energy delivery to energy release, so when calculating Q they basically pretend there aren't any energy losses from actually running the huge laser facility itself. As a result, LLNL assumes that laser technology will improve to the point that real-life Q can catch up with their "scientific Q" metric. (IIRC I think "Project LIFE" was supposed to develop some of those technologies, but it never worked out, possibly since NIF is so far behind their promised schedule.)
Cost effectiveness is also a myth perpetrated by the death of nuclear executed through bureaucracy.
The nuclear, however, is currently the true energy source to use, technologically much simpler (than fusion) to execute with decades of experience making it the safest out there. It is the zero-carbon environmentally friendly energy source.
Maybe fusion will stay a small part of the energy mix for decades even after the first commercial plants are built but be part of what eventually enables us to use orders of magnitude more energy than we do now…
It's always the same…
New things are hard. Nothing truly worthwhile is easy.
Am I talking to a ChatGPT instance or what is happening here. Let's find out :D
\\\vig-128 ?{/subject unlink;;;
But Fusion is not just another way to power your lightbulbs, fusion is a completely new type of energy.
With fusion we can in principle reach 10% of the speed of light which would be revolutionary for space travel.
But even wilder, because it's technically a sun we would over time be able to create basic materials like, Gold, Neon, Sodium, Magnesium, Silicon, Nickel, Copper, Zinc, Gallium, Germanium.
It would also mean abundant energy to create synthetic materials that could even replace use of fossil fuels in our materials.
Long to short, Gates assured me (paraphrasing), "We're close. It's doable. All we need is more funding."
I hope he's right.
p.s. I know PPPL might not be directly involved in this announcement. I was sharing context on the topic.
NIF on the other hand is already a miracle of materials science. An absolute triumph. But you can't enumerate the list of unsolved problems that, if eventually solved, lead to inertial confinement fusion as a civilian energy source. On the other side you can make that list for magnetic confinement. There is a clear path from magnetic confinement research to commercialization, with a known set of major problems.
They correctly dismissed it as a curiosity because it was far too inefficient to do anything useful with the amounts of fuel they would have had available. They couldn't have made a more efficient one because they didn't have any idea how to construct reasonably uniform pressure-bearing cylinders.
Real innovation didn't happen until much later on, at British coal mines because 1. there was lots of fuel because it's already at a coal mine, 2. there was a useful task for the work in pumping water out of the mine, and 3. materials technology had advanced enough to make it possible to construct an engine that did a useful amount of work from a manageable amount of fuel.
This is not some bizarre idea - Lawrence Livermore is officially a part of the DoE's research into maintaining and improving thermonuclear weapons. That there are some vaguely imaginable applications in energy generation is at the very best a bonus.
Remember that each shot of the lasers also destroys 10 million dollars or so of the highly precision engineered "housing" for the fuel pellet (called a hohlraum).
The lasers don't directly hit the pellet - they hit the metal walls of this hohlraum, causing it to grow so hot that it emits x-rays, and its shape is perfectly aligned so that those pellets hit the two sides of the pellet at exactly the same time, causing two "ripples" to compress it so much that they force the atoms to fuse in the middle and produce a chain reaction that has to consume the entire amount of fuel before the force of the implosion dissipates, at which time all of the matter violently explodes. The brunt of that explosion (and the neutron bombardment from the fusion process) is taken up by the hohlraum, which is ireedemably destroyed and can only be, at best, melted down as raw material for the next hohlraum.
Edit: tldr, this is exactly as useful for energy generation as an internal combustion engine whose pistons are destroyed every time the fuel ignites.
It is possible though that they could also use this for some fundamental research into how fusion works as a process.
It's a marginal change.
To a system that doesn't fulfil the requirements of the rest of the article (requires tritium and the world's most powerful laser).
And it might not have even actually happened, the measurements are still being assessed.
People are so desperate for an easy, technical answer. But that doesn't mean the is one.
Please reserve commenting for the experts who are specifically familiar with NIF.
Oh no now I shouldn't have commented /error
This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.
It is very interesting, but in the same way that advances in particle physics are interesting.
> SCOOP: Net energy gain in a fusion reaction has been a holy grail in science for decades. Now I’m told US scientists have done it. A massive breakthrough with revolutionary potential for clean power. US Energy Secretary to hold a press conference Tuesday: https://www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fab-66ef-4e33-adec-cfc345589...
Instead of particle physics, perhaps a better comparison would be to quantum computing "breakthroughs" that come out from time to time. Within the field I'm sure there are breakthroughs that inch us closer to something useful (useful in the way it is described in these articles, solving currently unsolvable problems, etc.), sure, but we are so far away from something useful that these inches are ultimately quite underwhelming to the general public (people like me).
By all means, I will occasionally read and enjoy great science reporting on these topics, but I have been conditioned to massively downplay the general significance of such news, and I think it's quite well justified, and not mere cynicism (cast as a negative).
Everyone formed their opinion about eg. Blockchain a long time ago.
But they do admit that eg. Gpt-3 is pretty advanced, but has it's own flaws.
I think the criticism comes mostly from people with just a little knowledge, trying to sound and feel like they know more. Just a few talking points or principles enable you to criticize, but not seriously analyze (much less create).
All the new stuff, however, has marketing and looks shiny.
In fusion research, pessimism is realism. Especially in laser powered fusion.
This experiment is producing 2.5 MJ of output for 500 MJ of input.
Roughly once a day.
After decades of basic research.
It's a scientific breakthrough in the sense that the rocks are now being banged together hard enough to make sparks. And a little more is known about rock banging than was known ten years ago.
But it's clearly not going to be producing power on a commercial scale any time soon.
Instead, I'd like to suggest, in addition to having with cumulative exposure developed a severe hype allergy, a lot of us are burnt with respect to that so-called progress. There's been a fair bit of outright corrupted delivery on the promise of new technology, not least IT, and many people here are savvy enough to see the costs of wrongheaded changes.
'Move fast or not, we don't care much, but back off breaking things we liked and leaving the rest of us picking up the shards.'
Cars, TVs, phones, take your pick.
When demonstrable, measure progress is achieved, visitors of this site get very excited and positive, from things like the Rust language all the way to solar power and reusable rockets.
A breakthrough is a qualitative change, not (merely) quantitative. 95% to 96% of reaction energy output is a nice but quantitative advance. 99% to 101% is a qualitative breakthrough: suddenly, it's a surplus, actual generation.
We are still far away from the latter, alas.
I think it’s just the Zeitgeist. Social media has trained us that a certain reasoning style is rewarded, quick takes that don’t dig into the first principles and instead serve as shibboleths that you’re not one of THOSE types of unintellectual pseudo tech bros who bought NFTs or whatever.
[0] The saying is true IME: First they laugh at it (ridicule it), then they say it's not in the Bible (conflicts with the norm), then they say they believed it all along.
If you read "breakthrough", you can be almost sure that it's an exaggeration from the press or the marketing team of the university (and in some rare cases, from the research team).
I'm excited for both for reference.
No it's not.
"No it isn't!"
My very uninformed opinion (nuclear physicist by training, but not specialized in fusion, lasers, or plasma physics) is that we’re still 20 years (haha) away from fusion energy making its way into the power grid. And that is assuming this result (or other things, like the relative instability of global energy markets lately) causes an increase in funding for the field so that they can solve all the pesky engineering issues related to efficiency, reactor lifespan, reliability, cycling speed, etc.
It wouldn't happen overnight, but I can think of few things that would kickstart the electrification of everything better than functional fusion power plants.
But building out solar, wind, and storage will very predictably achieve energy independence, for radically less expense. No breakthroughs needed, but gratefully applied where found.
Can fusion power generation be made to work cheaply? Each day the question becomes less relevant.
What could be done about that aside from expecting people to just... be better? I think the shape of these forums induces those kinds of comments, even if the community and moderators make a real effort to uphold higher standards. And I think if I encountered the same people in a different kind of forum then I might have a higher quality conversation. Heck, my own comments would probably be a lot more constructive!
Real world example of what I'm thinking: I have a neighbor over one fence who has very different political views to mine. We have perfectly civil conversations in which we're both actually really engaged and trying to understand each others' perspectives and experiences, and not just keeping the peace by avoiding difficult topics. It feels like effort we put into the conversation is rewarded.
I can't shake the idea that there might be "one weird trick" (okay, maybe a handful used together) that could make it more rewarding to put more effort into online conversations on forums like Hacker News or Reddit. One I've wanted to try for a while is to recreate something along the lines of Slashdot's moderation system, but with room for a meta-conversation to take place in "moderation space" (in which all community members could participate) and for there to be opportunities for people to refine their comments in response to feedback — and for doing so to be the norm.
Maybe it's not that simple. That's okay, too. But I've seen different moderation strategies around the web produce very different results, so it seems to me that there should be plenty of room for experimentation, and a lot to learn from doing so.
Online discussions "between two people" merely mimic a conversation so the audience (of potentially thousands+ of people) can learn and be swayed.
Online conversations are inherently broadcast so the stakes are too high to acquiesce or make concessions for whomever's willing to actually take the bait and engage on "important" topics.
You get more content out of a discussion with your neighbor in 30s than that. Those comments are genuinely worthless, they don't talk about things like:
1) What are the parts of an inertial confinement fusion based system which are difficult and which are missing today and would need serious investment
2) What is the likelyhood that the power output observed here could double, or more with other scale factors?
3) What's the net system costs once a plant is made. Is the fuel cheap or expensive?
Etc. It's fine to be contrarian, but most of the contrariness on this most internet forums is of the most basic, shallow kind that is defeated in a moment by any serious thinking.
The short answer to being better? Posts with more in depth content. I seriously think HN should consider banning pithy one or two sentence posts "they still would only get 1/4 the power" you find all over the place.
The problem is that fusion "breakthroughs" have been hyped by the press for many decades now. After a few such articles gets people excited and then reality crushes the hype, people learn to dismiss every new story as yet another inconsequential thing blown out of proportion.
I'm commenting about the coverage of fusion in general, not about this particular thing. If it is actually a big deal, great!
No one has any idea how that would ever be viable; other fusion alternatives at least have a way to accomplish thermal transfer from the reactor. Then you somehow have to figure out how to build a financially viable power plant. Oh, by the way, the lasers need to fire 1000x more for that. No one has any idea how that would work either.
There is a reason no one but a national lab interested in fusion reactions with massive financial resources has done this before; its interesting but doesn't produce any kind of viable power source.
Edit: The INF was proposed and designed as means to ensure the viabilty of the nuclear stockpile. It and the French equivalent were never understood as somehow prototyping a fusion power plant for the reasons laid out above. The press reporting here is just not accurate.
Hackernews is not infested with reflexive contrarians.
Hackernews has healthy amounts of skepticism and doubt. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Bringing FTX into a discussion of nuclear fusion to justify skepticism is parody-worthy.
FTX is simply the latest in a series of media empowered EXTREMELY high profile scams. You can easily put a thousand other different high profile companies or claims in there.
The scientists are like 10% to blame here.
hey, at least all of them are highly educated and extremely correct about things. read about it on their blogs. (sarcasm enabled for this reply)
I think that's true. But I also think there is a lot in the way of breathless PR around science topics both from university press offices and lower-end science news outlets. Especially around fusion, which has been 20 years away for a lifetime. So I get why people are going to be particularly skeptical.
From the article!!!
Showing a room full of problem solvers an unfinished problem that lacks critical supporting evidence will no doubt elicit a general response in the skeptical-to-cynical range.
I would respectfully argue that is is a health and normal response given the audience, and should be an expected bias on HN.
This is a “show me the evidence don’t tell me about the possibilities” crowd.
I for one and deeply excited if the data proves out, but my bias is “wait and see.” This could be a massive leap towards proof it will work.
I don't know. Looking closely at the article reveals that the researchers achieved 1.2x energy gain from the lasers, which are about 1% efficient. Given the SOTA for such lasers is closer to 20% efficiency, this means that they achieved about 60% of break-even. But that's energy, no electricity. Even with the best current methods, about 60% efficiency is the best we can hope for in terms of getting actual electricity from this. So in practical terms they achieved 30% of break-even.
Is that good progress? I'd say so, for sure. Is this a breakthrough? I don't know, especially since the article itself says the data is still being analysed and the actual results aren't published yet. 95% of the article is just fluff about the potential and quoting 3rd parties who celebrate a result that hasn't even been officially confirmed yet.
So, no I don't think it's cynicism, I don't think it's contrarianism, and I do think it's VERY healthy to approach sensationalist headlines with a level-headed and down to Earth attitude instead.
Now regarding efficiency of laser itself, sure they are inefficient but from just nuclear fusion pov net energy gain is a significant milestone in itself. lasers can get incrementally more efficient, at least there was not incentive to make them super efficient so far & there are no known fundamental problems with making them efficient.
It’s silly to blame a facility not designed for power production for using inefficient lasers.
This is an important and necessary step to getting resources to go further. Imagine how dumb it would’ve been to build a fusion power plant before we could even do 1.2x energy gain. A complete waste of resources.
There's no industrial processes that make use of plasma in the 10s of megakelvins. It's also not moving the goal post at all, since generating electricity is the literal goal of nuclear fusion. If it's just heat you're after, we've solved that problem over 70 years ago. There's hundreds if not thousands of thermonuclear fusion devices readily available literally at the push of a button. But for some odd reason we try hard not to use them and focus on electricity instead...
Sadly, however, the article doesn't seem interested in answering that question and providing the necessary context. Instead it quotes authors of books, who seem ecstatic about the possibilities.
You'd be correct in calling me a cynic when I say that I've heard the "too cheap to meter"-slogan from back in the 50s when nuclear fission was the future.
But I try hard not to be that guy and genuinely want the same question answered - is this an actual breakthrough and a significant milestone in the big picture? Up to this point it's been hit-and-miss and many so called "breakthroughs" turned out to be small steps in the right direction, but not exactly quantum leaps.
Secondly, your attempt at being pithy about nuclear bombs is a complete loss. We previously only knew how to achieve an inertial confinement based fusion reaction with a positive Q factor by first setting off a fission bomb, and this was only done for the neutron generation to increase the amount of fissionable material exploded (which is why they are called fission-fusion-fission bombs).
We can now generate fusion energy in a way that is obviously confine-able. That's a major step, and it's not THAT hard to imagine many mechanisms of turning a hot droplet into energy. For example the hohlraum itself in an indirect system will obviously be heated by the reaction and could be used to generate steam. Engineering that makes no sense though if you can't get a high Q factor out of the ignition itself, hence the focus.
This four sentence post is a perfect example of OP's point. No insight, no though process, just a pithy negative reply.
Only an order of magnitude off, but yeah, physicists and spherical cows and all that.
> Secondly, your attempt at being pithy about nuclear bombs is a complete loss.
A little sense of humour is lost on so many bitter souls these days, it's kind of sad. Lighten up, mate!
> Engineering that makes no sense though if you can't get a high Q factor out of the ignition itself, hence the focus.
You do realise that the fusion reaction we're talking about lasted for less than a trillionth of a second in a miniscule area, while other practical designs are aiming for continuous operation in the half hour range to examine practical engineering challenges of particular reactor configurations?
A high Q-factor may be completely useless if the underlying concept doesn't work for actual power generation and one might be easier to achieve than the other (i.e. getting a continuously working reactor first and tweaking it to improve Qp). The question therefore becomes, what's the actual value of the result. The article doesn't even touch on that, while even some C-grade online publications provided context like that.
Didn't we get to that milestone when they detonated a fusion-based bomb back in 1952?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike
Anyway, I'm not sure it's a significant milestone. It's just a number along a scale. If you were to tell me they've achieved a _sustained_ reaction which yields more energy than goes into it, for a period of, say, a day or so - then you could claim a significant milestone has been reached.
And even with that, some people argue that given how there's basically no sustainable source of tritium for large-scale electricity generation, the whole exercise is pointless unless the process uses other combinations of elements.
My experience on HN is there is a bias for critical thinking. If it's traditional nuclear power or climate change, the bias is for it. If it's new battery tech or fusion power the bias is against.
Does it only feel "very healthy" to be critical because you are being critical of the idea?
I have been called "contrarian" to my face. I understand the deep seated need to be "absolutely certain", but maybe there _is_ something going here other than that?
Who's critical of the idea? I literally said it's good progress. What 's not good, however, is exaggeration, sensationalism that puts potential views and hype before substance, and raising expectations for something that's still essentially just basic research.
This has nothing to do with bias of any kind. It's just poor journalism, bad form, and misrepresentation of genuinely great work. I simply expect better from a publication like FT. If that's the level of reporting we get from what I thought to be a somewhat reputable source, why even bother taking any publication serious anymore? It's not criticising the researchers or downplaying their work.
It's a critique of the media preventing the public from actually getting a realistic picture. I'd like to be educated and kept up-to-date, not mislead and hyped up.
I will try to be really positive here. The researchers managed to achieve ignition on an area less than the width of a human hair for 100 trillionths of a second.
The resulting fusion may have gotten scientific break-even (again - no officially published results yet). This is great progress in terms of basic research, for sure.
On the other hand, we have experiments like Wendelstein 7-X, an experimental reactor that already can hold a stable plasma for seconds and is planned to go up 30 minutes of continuous operation early next year (construction is already finished).
The researchers state that they want to test, whether continuous operation is possible, how the plasma can be handled, how the materials and magnetic fields can be optimised and whether their approach is practical.
So on the one hand we have a theoretical result that may or may not be a scientific break even and is hailed as a major breakthrough that will open the door for commercial fusion reactors and lasts for trillionths of a second within a miniscule aera. No continuous plasma, no work on practical reactor design, just good old fashioned basic research at its best.
On the other hand we have working, practical fusion reactor experiments that are already able to hold a stable plasma for seconds and are tackling the engineering challenges of actually producing electricity. Some are designed for engineering break-even and Qp > 1 (e.g. ITER) and not ready yet, while others "simply" examine the practicality of a particular design (e.g. Wendelstein 7-X) and actually worked and continue to improve by orders of magnitude (in terms of operation time), pushing continuous operation time up to 30 minutes.
Now that I gave some context, how much of a breakthrough are we talking about? I don't know. All these experiments are important, of course and are required for the end goal of achieving economically viable stable power generation using nuclear fusion. I'd just like to wait for an official publication and a proper subsumption by other experts in the field.
Maybe we are just arguing about semantics and what constitutes a breakthrough but in my mind, the hardest challenge of fusion has been getting scientific gain over 1. There are still OTHER hard problem like continuous operation, capturing energy, but ultimately, getting scientific gain over 1 is/was the most challenging. You can say it isn't but the fact is, none of the MCF concepts have achieved a scientific gain over ~.64 and have not improved since the 1990s (JET). Look, if the 7-X or ITER or JET achieves a similar scientific gain, they will get similarly applauded.
I'm not saying that fusion will become a economically viable power source now. It is just that NIF de-risked the hardest challenge of fusion from a pure physics standpoint: more energy out than in.
It's a bad criterion for judging something noteworthy.
15 years after whatever this breakthrough is will anything have changed outside of the lab? That remains to be seen, but I'll believe it when we see the data.
The newspapers didn't cover it until random people started asking why the feats they'd seen with their own eyes weren't being written about.
https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Aviations_Attic...
It's a bit like with Elon Musk (re-)inventing the electric car. Those popular names that went down in history are usually not the original inventors. These people were first of all successful entrepreneurs that understood business and ultimately won the patent war. But in the early 20th century, the idea of flight was already firmly established, why would any "respected scientist" have doubted what could already be observed in action around the Western world?
A few years back I read David McCullough's biography of the Wright Brothers which told the same story: https://www.amazon.com/Wright-Brothers-David-McCullough/dp/1...
This site cites a couple of the pre-Wright naysayers: https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-imp...
It certainly sounds like just another Monday to me.
These may seem like tiny steps forward, but once the genie is out of the bottle it's going to be nuts.
Also this laser tech is ancient, once there's a major economic driver behind it I expect they'll rapidly advance.
Who else in their minds eye see smoke and sparks in the experimental facility and control room, and scientists and engineer wooping with joy ;)
The initial flood of comments is always like that, because they are low-effort dismissals. The first 5 comments on every story could probably be auto-flagged.
The better stuff usually rises to the top eventually.
If you don’t push and help the many small steps that come before the big leap, many big leaps will never become feasible.
Overall, I'm glad there are still points of excitement and we haven't come to a halt.
(1) We are used to the same "news" story being cycled again and again. I think a year ago we heard about a previous breakthrough in ignition. When I hear a story like this my first instinct is that the old story has been recycled and I'm not sure that there is any actual news.
A few months back it was announced that scientists had discovered a black hole that was nearest to the earth and it still gets posted to HN which makes me wonder if they discovered a closer one.
(2) For a while there have been two parallel tracks, one of very slow development efforts at LLNL and IETF which might yield a power source in 50 years and another about firms from Lockheed Martin to scrappy startups who are promising to build a "Mr Fusion" tomorrow. There are still memories of the Pons & Fleischman affair from the 1980s and a strange subculture of LENR activists who claim they will sell you a fusion power source today. One could easily assume "fusion is the new blockchain" in this climate
(3) Fusion research has proceeded with no direct line to a practical power source for a long time, the sharpest critique you hear is "the point of the NIF is to do subthreshold tests of nuclear weapons, not develop a power source"
(4) Fusion is really hard. They might have to get the energy output up 100 times and increase the shot rate 500,000 times to build a real power source, even if 1-3 aren't enough to make you dismiss the whole thing. People will point out that ignition is a big threshold and it might not be so hard to increase the energy output from here out, but we have a long ways to go.
Hacker News is a good source for interesting posts and idea. The comments are mostly worthwhile for watching how a social machine produces very weird stuff. It is not the people who are contrarians, it a function of the machine.
Zeynep Tufekci talked about how twitter affords outrage and the Arab Spring, but did not afford a way to do anything constructive with that outrage. (Twitter and Tear Gas, available as a pdf). HN commenting system affords .... what you see here.
I think the best way to increase the quality of discussion for research results is to avoid posting misleading and hype driven coverage, so the discussion can then focus on the actual research results and their implications, rather than on the poor coverage.
Don't get me wrong I respect all the effort it takes to do something truly new, inventing technologies that previously didn't exist with the height of what we can produce today, and every step forward is a triumph. But is tomorrow's announcement going to lead to a step-change in anyone's life before my infant daughter goes to college? I doubt it, and I have work to do. I'm happy to be proven wrong though!
When I read what USDOE announces, I hope to be less skeptical.
The basis of my skepticism rests on having written a term paper titled ’Nuclear Fusion, Infinite Energy for the Future’ in 1982, and after the semester sharing my ‘it’s only 20 years away’ enthusiasm with my father -a PhD scientist working for the DoD. Hence it’s forty years since I first heard ‘fusion is always 20 years away.’
Of course I don’t know any LLNL scientists but don’t question their or your sincerity or motivation.
The difference between those and the incentives of financially oriented news reporting, doesn’t make me less skeptical. Their mandate is to present potentially market moving ideas before the market can move.
And because I lived through Pons-Fleischman. Which is to say I have forty years of experience with reports…I mean I see excitement for Tokamaks and I wrote about them in 1982.
We are not 'reflexive contrarians' for going "I don't believe it until a lot of separate research groups show the same results". The whole point of the scientific method is to not believe somebody just because you personally know them or they are "respected". Their work has to be replicated for Science to take it seriously.
1. Energy output != power generation. At the end of every fusion reactor is boiling water to turn a turbine to generate electricity. There's a limit on efficiency and we still aren't there yet;
2. Much like all of nuclear power (fission included) we brush over capital costs and focus on operating costs because that tells a much better story.
3. We still have energy loss from neutron loss;
4. We still have container damage to content with due to neutron embrittlement.
Even the article claims (and this is optimistic) that commercial fusion power generation is "decades away".
Much like FTL travel, we get suckered into unwarranted optimism because we want it to be tru, particularly with the fuel abundance and (no) waste issues. We also fall into th enaive trap of thinking if stars can do it, it must work. But what contains stellar nuclear fusion is gravity.
I'd argue there's still way too much optimism. Pointing out these issues doesn't make you a contrarian. It makes you a realist.
I can't imagine what it is like to be in their heads. Even for things I am skeptical about, I still want them to be true if they are truly transformative. My worst case scenario is being cautious, but never, ever, negative.
The first one I see is along the lines of "This was only net energy gain in the plasma and not overall so it shouldn't be called a breakthrough". The net energy gain in the plasma is still a huge step and rightfully called a breakthrough.
The second one is along the lines of "These are just intial results and the article says the data is still under review". This one I totally get. Replication of scientific results and accounting for all sources of errors is real big deal. The NIF had an experiment last year where they we able to achieve an ignition reaction but were unable to replicate it.
When it was all on the upside, inflating the bubble, there was a fair amount of hero worship here for Zuck and others. People were talking about self driving cars being leased by the minute and changing the world, all with a straight face. Google paid an engineer over $110million because he was going to lead the effort to build a fully autonomous self driving car... As an industry, we've sort of failed on that one. AI/ML was going to lead to mass layoffs of people as we "automated" everything, there were companies just pouring money in to anything related to it to avoid being left behind. I think I heard at a conference over the summer that 90+% of all ML/AI project fail to make it to production; that's brutal, like half I could see but 9 of 10?!? Even if you're getting paid tons of money to do that stuff, wouldn't you want to actually achieve some success? Social media has sort of failed us too, the real media got involved and sort of took it away and then the Russians and Chinese have been using it to tamper with our elections and our ability to practice democracy. The internet is "decentralized" but just try to do that without Google or Facebook or Amazon or other... Since everyone seems to be convinced a recession is going to happen, it's going to take one to sort of get things righted and start the next bubble cycle. Or maybe how the gig-economy was going to change it all. Or everyone was going to learn to cook gourmet meals from blue apron and all the carbon used to move boxes of ingredients around was never going to be a big deal...
It's always based in hype. Every handful of years the geeks and nerds think they're going to take over the world again, maybe we'll do it next time.
In the mean time, any and every break through with fusion is awesome. I'm a geek/nerd so don't believe my hype, but when we crack the fusion nut, we will change the world.
I think scientists are humans after all and they (much like people who rejected bitcoin when it was at $3 and now have to justify their pre-held beliefs) have to justify why they didnt think it was possible or "real" even in the face of multiple fusion breakthroughs.
But yeah, certainly seems like this time is different. Really hope we start seeing more breakthroughs after this as it’s great news.
Just because they're excited doesn't mean it's a big deal, nor any guarantee that it works or ends up being practical.
I've heard 'exciting' news about fusion many, many times over my entire life and essentially all of them have come to nought. Or after the excitement settles down over said development we still find that fusion ends up being that magic number of 40 years into the future.
I've even worked in the nuclear game but I don't expect to see my home powered by fusion energy in my lifetime, unfortunately.
People laugh at Russian TV, but to a lesser extent all western governments do the same kind of thing.
The LLNL has one job: research nuclear physics for maintaining the bomb stockpile without actually blowing any up in life fire tests.
Anything else they say is just there to make the public feel good about the billions being spent on weapons research.
There is zero — repeat — ZERO chance that the fusion approach used by LLNL will ever be used in any sort of energy production.
That’s not what their setup is for.
no it's not
( /s but also many of us have seen enough 'fusion breakthrough' and 'battery tech breakthrough' and 'medical breakthrough' and 'AI breakthrough' announcements that it's difficult to give anything much credence without at least a production prototype showing real world performance.)
"Although many scientists believe fusion power stations are still decades away, the technology’s potential is hard to ignore. Fusion reactions emit no carbon, produce no long-lived radioactive waste and a small cup of the hydrogen fuel could theoretically power a house for hundreds of years."
Not sure if you were expecting things to progress faster. But it it "only" takes 20 years. That would be insanely fast and world changing.
https://www.engineering.com/story/why-is-fusion-power-is-alw...
The potential is hard to ignore, but that doesn't mean the potential will ever be achieved. This (like crypto currency) is the realm of vapourware I am afraid. Always just around the corner. :(
Have you never heard of ITER? Its set to power on in 2025.
Its the same as crypto or emissions reductions.
That's pretty much the definition of vaporware, but maybe it will actually go the route of Duke Nukem :)
It's important to note that while this is technically true, it's mostly irrelevant. Sure, there's no material that will remain radioactive for the next 10k years, but instead you get much more highly radioactive material that will emit high doses for a "short" hundred years or so.
>It’s unnecessary greenwashing hyperbole
OP's question provides evidence that not all people understand the carbon benefits of this technology.
Fusion plants have exorbitant feedstock price volatility and are only marginally smaller than a fission planet, despite square footage not being the scope of the worlds' energy problems today.
A leap forward or two might be worth celebrating along the way, sure, but we're at least 3 orders of magnitude away from actually generating net power here.
What will Fusion give us that Fission can't already? Is it safer perhaps?
Certainly, fusion does have the big advantage that it makes far fewer Curies of radioactive material per kWh as it operates. That has been the main driver of nuclear fission safety and waste issues.
On the other hand, there are good arguments suggesting that conventional fission has been reasonably good at containing and controlling the radiation, such that it's among the safest and cleanest forms of energy known already. But the PR issue is a hard one, and people don't think like actuaries.
That being said, fission is already pretty darn safe. But the public perception of it is not good.
> Surely Fission provides us with unlimited carbon free energy (given enough fissionable material).
The crux of the problem is, there is a limited supply of fissionable material. If we manage to survive as a species, our energy demand will continue to grow, and one day we would meet a hard cap, limiting what humanity as a species, is able to do.
As a very very rough estimate, if we burnt through all the fissionable material that we have available on earth, it would be about enough energy to launch the mass of Mt. Everest into orbit. Long term (as in, many generations from now) we will need more energy than that.
Realistically, today, it's only better because of decades of lobbying and propaganda for fear mongering around fission. There is no reason why nuclear energy couldn't be the vast majority producer of all electricity in the world while massively lowering environmental damage and loss of human life.
Long term, fusion might be better because it can produce a lot more energy and be safer. I feel like the safety improvement is negligible however compared to modern fission reactors that are properly maintained and governed.
Since you brought up lobbying, it's fascinating to me how many nuclear power fans the industry has created who are not informed by data and facts but are utterly convinced that nuclear power is the solution to all our energy issues.
> attackers can even create more destruction and chaos by initiating a meltdown
This is not a feasible thing to do with modern reactor designs, and the same danger is present for infrastructure like dams or even just a big building.
> not informed by data and facts
Said by the person who's repeating misinformation
The cost btw is even higher than most people think considering that energy companies aren't paying for most of it but tax payers do. Some not even born yet. But even without factoring in those future costs, as you suggested we do, nuclear power in its current form is among the most expensive forms of power production. Again, look at the data, not energy company propaganda:
Because we simply cannot live in a world where we are independent from the current power structure. They won't allow it.
Hopefully I'm wrong, I'd love to see progress in energy production that is actually sustainable.
They'd just make people afraid: Focus on how it's nuclear, how it's dangerous, and get the people to want it banned. A few laws in some key jurisdictions and it's over, and the scientists can rant as much as they want, it'll never be a problem again.
Of course, all of that partakes of the comforting illusion there even is a Them in the world.