Largest tokamak fusion reactor powers up
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In my previous life I was a game developer. For one of my games I needed a physics engine. And one of the candidates was <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak_(software)>.
And ever since then, whenever I read or hear the word "tokamak", my first thought hasn't been fusion, but 3d games :)
But the only numbers that matter are zero, one, and more than one.
The computer science department of the Moscow State University [1] was created in 1970 as a joint effort between Physics and Math departments to address computational needs of Tokamak models. Hence the official name - the department of computational mathematics and cybernetics.
The joke goes that they were hoping to "solve the Tokamak" in a couple of years and then move on to other fields of computer science - a dream that is still very much alive.
Some SDEs do take interest in these topics independently, though.
The same things they ask on FAANG interviews, coincidentally.
MIPT - https://mipt.ru/english/edu/master/
There’s everything, including traditional CS topics (compilers etc), AI and quantum informatics.
That's hilarious. That sort of computation has to be completely trivial with modern computers. It's so crazy to think that plotting a ballistic trajectory ever took more than a few milliseconds, much less hours
I'm not surprised it was hard to compute to the accuracies desired.
I'm not saying the computation isn't complicated, I'm marveling at the fact that my watch can run that computation in microseconds
The next milestone years later would be "predict the weather 24 hours from now in fewer than 24 hours"
A lot of the government's interest in advancing computers was the military advantage of being able to predict the weather. Maybe if it was thoroughly understood, they could even control it! Alas.
All covered in the book "Turings Cathedral"
I wonder how anyone goes about planning such an enormous effort.
https://www.ipp.mpg.de/1727365/zeitraffer_w7x
This is the assembly of Wendelstein 7-X, also over the span of a decade. It is a stellarator-type test reactor in Germany. Stellarators offer the advantage of possibly continous operations while tokamaks need to be pulsed but that necessitates a lot of contorted coils.
(Also in case of bitrot from the original article dying)
- Up an Atom : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5RxUW7VC-A
- Practical Engineering : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD3dMzv1vIQ
And for the french speaker an older take from Monsieur Bidouille : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36WpRwY2DYw
And there appear to be a dedicated YT channel : https://www.youtube.com/@iterorganization/videos
This one always cracks me up. When I studied Physics in the early 2000s the joke was “fusion power has been 50 years away for the last 50 years”.
If it’s 25 years away now that is finally progress, even if everyone forgot the previous predictions. Although perhaps assume a 2:1 estimate:progress ratio based on the evidence?
It will happen sooner than expected.
It doesn't crack me up.
Our funding for fusion has always been below the "fusion never" line on the graph. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FWQaKc8XEAAAVmZ.jpg:large
If only we had as much funding for fusion as we do for Skinner boxes ...
But the Lawson criterion progress is there: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cb/Fu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak#1980s:_great_hope,_gre...
Mate. It doesn't matter how we can blame others' estimation. It only matters that we do blame others' estimation.
Besides, in this case, it's the hardware guy's fault. He's <waves hands> over there somewhere.
If I can divert from the joke; software development is like any development work which includes that such as fusion tech; is either progressing because the current task is running over tracks already laid and relatively easy to progress over or progress requires new track to be laid to proceed further on to completion. The difficulty of task is irrelevant to the process of development just the scales of everything, cost|time|reward might be larger or smaller.
Just because fusion is novel or difficult is irrelevant. It's a project with tasks todo. Those tasks may be mundane: akin to running over existing track or to proceed further: new track must be laid.
Laying new tracks includes over many problems with unknown dimension. The problems needing overcoming might be like voids, uneven terrain, unknown stability, on, under or around water.
All this takes time, which is arguably the most expensive resource as without any time invested towards a project task, none of any other material resources get manipulated into solutions.
So a project is always speeding along the tracks to the end of the line with a goal of laying more new track from the constantly shifting current position until the track is at the point of success/completion.
A project might find it necessary to backtrack due to an seemingly insurmountable / not worth it to continue this direction situation. It also can make progress in parallel. It's always laying new sections - some might be used for the final, some might be only used as scaffolding, some might be deemed a failed branch of track and not used in the final.
It's all just project management. Time and resources cost, how to use them. Accept when it didn't work as expected, the most important thing is to keep your failures small. Small failures typically take small efforts to correct, larger failures unacknowledged for longer typically take far longer to fix.
A good PM will have a way to keep pulse of the project without bothering the track layers constantly. The track layers might say, yup, usually it takes 10 min for the machine to put a new section down, you can't/shouldn't get disappointed when the machine may breakdown unexpectedly and doesn't lay the next track in 10min. As PM, it's your task to get that machine operational asap. You don't get to get upset the track layers cannot continue in that case - but many do. Many PMs also lay track where they think a customer wants the track to go but are in fact oblivious because they don't keep the stakeholder|customer updated with progress. Frequent communication is better. Not too much, perhaps, but certainly not too little so issues and ramifications are stacking up with stakeholders unaware.
Another analogy: Development, R&D, is all sprinting straight into the next wall. Over and over again.
Some walls are easier to proceed past. Some walls are planned and expected for, others are not. Again, the size and composition is irrelevant: it's just another wall. A decision is required on the implementation method. Do we go through, over, under, or can somehow just go around it - not taking that wall on altogether. So spec. the how, get the team onto perhaps researching the situation first, get to implementing.
Just because a wall comes up isn't necessarily a "fault" of anyone, the sprinter or management. It's fact of life and process. Accept it. Handle it.
Blaming doesn't actually cause progress to be made - all it does is assign blame, justly or unjustly. Accident investigations might not even assign blame, they seek to understand the situation to learn from it so the industry can learn and not make repeat mistakes. Even in the case of say a pilot suicide, there's more to learn than: that pilot killed everybody on purpose. I'd hope in that case, a framework and processes would be mandated to prevent that happening easily again.
That's all where management should be concerned. In my opinion.
JET was shut down at the end of October.
BTW, what is the status of ITER?
For that, there's the upcoming DEMO reactor, which will demonstrate (hence the name) electricity generation no earlier than 2048, a quarter of a century from today.
In 2050, half way through the century, according to the EU plans for fusion power, there will be one (1) fusion power plant on the continent that can make any amount of electricity, for a net cost of $100 billion.
That $100 billion could have purchased 100 GW of installed utility-scale solar at 2022 prices[1], which continue to drop. By 2050, that amount of money could have likely purchased 200 GW plus batteries, covering about 50% of the European Union electricity demand.
Instead the EU will have a single ~1 GW of fusion power plant, with each additional gigawatt costing ten-plus billion, vastly more expensive than renewable energy sources by that decade.
[1] https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-in...
edit: Also, your 100b estimate is even higher than the - disputed - worst case assumptions of the DOE, which is somewhere between 45 to 65b. Also: http://www.iter.org/faq#Do_we_really_know_how_much_ITER_will...
That's a question that can safely be ignored though, Germany alone has installed rooftop solar on a small percentage of homes and is already at 70GW. Space is not a problem for solar, you can install it everywhere. It's so cheap now that it's viable even in sub-optimal locations.
>though there's hope that storage will be somewhat solved in 2050 using ... research!
It is solved already, all that remains to do is to build it. Germany has enough gas storage to last a year, and we know how to generate gas from electricity. It's being done in several places already.
I think the major hold-up is political. Moving energy production from the current government-controlled central power plants to small-scale operations close to the consumer is too disruptive for lots of reasons. But I have hope that eventually we'll get there, it just takes time.
That said, spending billions on things that won't solve any problems for the nest 50 years and using that as a reason to not actually do the thing that will work is inexcusable. At least do both.
If storage is solved, then I think we would've heard about it.
> That said, spending billions on things that won't solve any problems for the nest 50 years and using that as a reason to not actually do the thing that will work is inexcusable. At least do both.
Who is using this as a reason to not do the other thing?
Here's one of many many ways how the storage problem has been solved: https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/products-servi...
>Who is using this as a reason to not do the other thing?
It's not stated directly of course but if you look at the money there is a discrepancy. The largest battery storage facility in Europe cost about 90 million euros, while the EU has granted over 5000 million to the ITER Tokamak project.
So, clearly one thing is being done at a much larger scale than the other thing, deliberately or not.
No, the major hold-up is that saner heads prevail.
I’m pretty green myself, but the vehement hatred most other green people display towards nuclear (whether it is fission or fusion) is mind-boggling.
We will not have the grid storage to do baseload via renewable+batteries. There is not enough production capacity now, and production will not keep up with demand by a long shot.
We need nuclear. Just fucking stop pushing us down a pit where we say in 25 years “well, shit, I guess we did need to start building nuclear 25 years ago. Fire up the coal plants!”.
The hatred is understandable when you read stuff like this: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/05/sellafield-...
One example of many many many. It really seems like replacing one problem with another.
That being said, my main problems with nuclear are 1) we solve the current acute problem much faster with solar+storage than with nuclear and 2) nuclear power drains much of same money that could be spent on solar+storage and 3) nuclear guarantees large expenses for future generations for the foreseeable future.
>We will not have the grid storage to do baseload via renewable+batteries.
Sure we will if we build it - there are no technical hurdles whatsoever to build all the storage we need, both batteries and gas are viable, and we also have pumped storage and other mechanisms. Moreover, since we have at least 10x the workforce with the required skillset to build storage than we have workers who can make nuclear plants, we can mobilize many more at once.
Seriously - if you want to reduce emissions right now, you need to subsidize storage. Green hydrogen, pumped storage, batteries, everything.
If we do this, not only will it start making a difference immediately, but 5 years from now we will have reduced emissions by the same amount as a bunch of nuclear power plants. Effects will be noticeable from year 1.
Meanwhile not a single nuclear power plant will be built in 5 years.
Building enough grid storage is a pie in the sky. Don’t fall for it- enough people do and we are all screwed.
It is by now technically cheaper for a steel mill to make it's own energy than to buy energy, even if they buy it from a nuclear plant that has already been built, and they can do it in 1-2 years. Once they have done it, they no longer use centrally produced energy, leaving more for the rest of us. Multiply this with thousands of large energy consuming companies everywhere and you have made real progress very fast.
Battery production capacity has grown exponentially and will continue to get cheaper thanks to the electric car transition. Cars get recycled and the batteries can be repurposed to storage, and in a few years when electric cars are the standard, the sales will plummet from the peak leaving enormous capacity available for grid storage. The latest battery chemistries in use in cars today use the most abundant elements on earth.
So, there are no logistical limits, no technological limits, no limited resources to prevent this from happening today, the limits are instead things like battery storage being taxed both when it stores energy and when it delivers energy, private producers being taxed on their own production and so on.
Such regulations are put in place to prevent the loss of control over a major part of the economy, and is IMO the main obstacle to solving the problem.
Talking about making nuclear plants is a nice way for politicians to keep control of the electricity money fountain, but nuclear power is IMO a very poor solution to the problem of fossil fuels since it will always be very expensive, slow to deploy, and a very bad problem all by itself.
Let's hope we don't need too much cobalt too?
We will save copper since electricity can be produced close to where it's being consumed, eliminating millions of miles of powerlines from central powerplants to everywhere else.
We need no lithium or copper at all in order to create hydrogen, ammonia or methane, and no lithium for iron-air batteries which are more suited for grid storage than lithium-ion.
We probably won't need any cobalt at all for grid storage, it is even being eliminated in electric cars already.
Yes, that would require a cable. But it isn't rational to be in a situation where we believe we can build a fusion reactor, but some relatively simple civil engineering is apparently beyond us.
The downside being you still don't have energy independence, if that is a goal.
Yes, and that has bitten us in the ass big time.
See what's happening now with the Middle East. Don't want to repeat that dependency. I'm referring to the UAE basically using the climate conference as a sales conference for fossil.
We should absolutely be doing both.
Maybe they'll be in time to provide energy to slurp carbon out of the atmosphere. Or power huge spacecraft etc etc.
So we need to do something to meet the futures energy demands, but we also need to do something today. The smart thing is to invest in what we can do today, solar, wind and batteries, and invest what we can do in the near future, better fission reactors is one possibility, and invest in the long term, that could be fusion. It would be foolish to only invest in one of them.
And that does not even take predictable peaks into account (think the pause of a national event with lots of viewers, where people make coffee/tea/snacks at the same time), which needs fossil peaker plants, or even more battery capacity.
The article also makes the point of how much time/money has been spent on fusion...well yeah, once we crack fusion it solves a lot of problems. The other major thing for humanity is solving space travel/mining so that we can rip into asteroids instead of our one planet.
This great promise seems to be the main reason why we still try to built that machine. I have the feeling that putting these resources into economically already proven clean technologies would be a better investment.
On the other hand, a lot of young researchers are working on such a project. Their education is also valuable and might justify parts of that investment.
And it's not like the current proven clean technologies do not have drawbacks.
25 years ago (the customary fusion time unit ;)) that would have been very different, but who knows, perhaps that would have created a rigid "big money" mindset in the fledgling renewable market that would have crippled it forever, compared to the mix of brute force state money and organic growth we had in the history that did happen.
And yes, unexpected side effects of large research spending can be a thing. Who knows how computing would look like today if European countries hadn't pooled to create that permanent physics festival called CERN.
There's something to be said about putting all one's eggs in one basket. While current renewables are a big leap over non-renewables, there are glaring flaws in each implementation.
Wind and solar still require massive manufacturing and transportation back-ends to scale up, and solar in particular requires weird rare-earths, the mining of which causes serious ecological issues. Nuclear fission power is fantastic, but has a huge PR and NIMBY problem (despite ironically being orders of magnitude safer than its non-renewable counterparts), and therefore has skyrocketing costs today as well.
Battery-electric vehicles and storage face the same problem, and in many cases, simply offload their emissions to a central (usually coal/oil/gas-fired) power station.
There's a lot of money to go around; the gross world product is approaching US$100 trillion and I'm fairly certain a handful of billions could be spared for the development of fusion.
In terms of physics, it's a solved problem; even in terms of engineering, the issue has been narrowed down to confining the working plasma enough and managing instabilities for long enough to produce net positive power. Funnily enough a big issue previously was having enough compute to simulate the plasma behaviour; with high-end GPUs, this is also less of a problem now.
I am cautiously optimistic—ITER is going for sheer size, whereas start-ups like SPARC are trying new superconducting magnets. I believe the late 2020s and early 2030s will be a very productive period for fusion.
If it works, if we can get fusion and it's promise, then my kids are going to live in a radically different world, and a much better one.
Gone are many of the resource wars, gone are the fears of fission based power, whether it be the waste or refinement, gone are the limitations of the electrical grid due to weather (mostly).
Finally, we'll have electricity too cheap to measure. Finally, they won't have to care about the price of a barrel of oil and how that affects their governments. Finally, they'll have the energy to actually do something about climate change without adding to the problem.
But all these thoughts are going to seem like 'faster horses' to them. Their ideas in a world of nearly free and clean energy are going to make mine seem so very antiquated.
I'm hoping that they are going to live most of their lives in a world just so much better than mine. And I really do think that fusion is one step in that direction.
Something about that makes me just smile.
Also don't worry, you wouldn't miss it - the very moment we have net positive fusion at industrial scale, it will be the news of the century.
So far the NIF in California is the only reactor I'm aware of that has achieved ignition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition#2021_and_2022_...
But AFAIK there are no Tokamak reactors planned that will be able to run continuously and produce useful power. These are all experimental reactors that will be self-sustaining for only a few seconds here and there.
But are there at least theoretical concepts, on how one could build a tokamak reactor that can run continiously? In other words, is the main disadvantage of the Tokamak solved in any way?
If not, why is the Stellerator design not getting more attention?
DEMO, but don't expect to see it any time soon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant#Time...
I dont know the number, so I'll guess you'd need to get to 150% or higher to rival even a small conventional power plant.
People are threatened, brainwashed and provided with semblance of comfortable life in equal measures. Like that boiled frog, little by little they lost all their basic fundamental rights and freedoms to the point where a large part of the populace doesn't even question what's happening and those who do can't do anything about it. It is a profoundly disheartening to see what happened to the country and how very few cared.
Nicely summarized.
And what should we do now anyway? It's not like any western countries making it easy for immigrants from Russia to acquire working visas and residency permits. A lot more of taxpayers would flee from Russia if US or EU would help them, but they dont care about it.
PS: I pesonally left Russia on February 25th 2022 and haven't been there since, paid 0 taxes there, etc. But it's not like everyone had this option.
It's just that in Russia, the oil money tends to flow to some citizens more than others.
The ex-Soviet Baltic EU states are largely doing okay. Ukraine's making surprisingly rapid progress on its EU accession checklist. Elsewhere, other good models would be Spain, Portugal, Taiwan (none really had any serious history of democracy before the late 20th century). It is absolutely possible for a country which has basically always been totalitarian to become a functioning democracy, though it tends to go faster with outside help.
The EU accession model (essentially "we'll give you stuff if you reduce the corruption to a dull roar") seems to be pretty effective, though it's not foolproof (in particular, there's not _that_ much stopping a member state turning around and going "haha, only joking" once it's in; see Hungary).
I think people have forgetten just how corrupt Ukraine is. It has regularly been ranked the most corrupt nation in Europe (yes, worse than Russia and Hungary!).
Perhaps the war has suppressed it somewhat due to increased patriotism, increased scrutiny, etc, but corruption is so ingrained the culture that it's very difficult to imagine it disappearing just because they want to join the EU.
The EU really needs a strong mechanism to kick member states out when this happens.
Separately, in the 1960s scientists developed the plasma focus device [2], which, instead of trying to suppress plasma instabilities, sought to exploit them to compress energy. This approach, though less mainstream, could offer alternative methods for achieving fusion.
Finally, research into deuterium-tritium (DT) fuel has dominated, but DT has drawbacks, like neutron production and associated radioactive waste. Since the 60s, there's been knowledge of aneutronic fusion reactions [3] (like hydrogen-boron or pB11) that produce no or few neutrons. These require higher temperatures but offer advantages for cleaner energy. However, research in this area has been minimal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_plasma_focus [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion
https://wippl.wisc.edu/wisconsin-hts-axisymmetric-mirror/
https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2020-09/Day1_1...
There's been advancements that promise to nix various instabilies and loss modes that had stymied previous work.
https://plasma.physics.swarthmore.edu/brownpapers/WHAMmirror...
Umm, will this show up in time to save the world by removing unfossiling our energy needs?