Company says nuclear fusion could power the grid – and soon | Hacker News Reader

Company says nuclear fusion could power the grid – and soon

cnn.com

3 pointsmpweiher5 comments

The detail that always gets glossed over with fusion is the "sustaining it" part. Getting net energy for a few seconds in a lab is very different from running a power plant continuously for decades. That said, the fact that they already have buyers (Google and Eni) and are applying to connect to the grid makes this feel more real than the usual fusion announcements.

Yep, fusion is just 30 years away from being commercially viable. Like it was 30 years ago.

What are you complaining about? The math has always been decades or sometimes centuries away from implementation.

This isn’t like fixing the plumbing. Each increment is so expensive due to the infrastructure investments, I think this is one of those things we can cross our fingers and hope for “some day” to eventually come.

Next year for first Plasma in the SPARC reactor, which is supposed to yield net positive fusion energy.

Early 2030s for the commercial reactor feeding fusion-powered electricity into the grid. For which they (a) have an electricity purchase contract with Google[1] and (b) just applied for a grid connection[2].

Which of 2027 and "early 2030s" is "30 years away, in your humble opinion?

That joke is really, really past its sell-by-date. Something like 30 years past...

[1] https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/su...

[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/commonwealth-fusion-fil...

There many technical changes which will have to be overcome for fusion to:

1. Produce long term stable plasma. SPARC should demonstrate this.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems are confident that with the magnet properties of SPARC and the conservative parameters of the SPARC plasma they can demonstrate this.

2. Produce the prototype of a fusion power plant, the ARC reactor.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems has to scale up the SPARC reactor. They have to not only design, but also build and test, reactor vessel which would allow useful heat recovery and tritium breeding. Tritium is hydrogen, very small molecule that has tendency do leak through smallest cracks. It can also cause hydrogen embrittlement.

3. Produce energy from fusion on commercial scale and at competitive prices.

Reactor vessel is exposed to very strong magnetic field and as result large forces. The neutrons produced from D-T plasma have energy about 13 MeV and they cause faster material degradation than in fission power plants. It's possible that frequent replacements of the reactor vessel will be needed. The reactor vessel is neutron activated low-level radioactive waste, which has to be properly disposed of. The beryllium used in some designs is quite rare (world's annual production of beryllium is 220 tons). All this issues affect the economy of fusion power plant.

I confident that all this non-trivial material and engineering changes will be solved and commercial fusion power plants will exist in 50-100 years.

For quick introduction I recommend watching: "International Colloquia #26: Fusion Reactor First Wall Cooling"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHJyoqDO0zw

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