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Nuclear fusion on brink of being realised, say MIT scientists
- mariuolo 9y agoI'm no expert, but 15 years seem like an awfully small timeframe to produce a commercial reactor with a still unproven technology.
- sgt101 9y agoThe argument is that they can make it small - room sized, with the new magnates. This reduces the every one of the subsidiary technical challenges to doable, basically you don't need big machines to dig big holes, you don't need 30000m^3 of concrete here, there and everywhere, you don't need a supply chain that involves 20000 people in 40 countries... so the co-ordination costs go away as well. It's pretty like the idea with data analytics or software ; if you can do an iteration / update by yourself in 10 minutes you will be able to solve the problem (for reasonable problems) in a few weeks for sure. If you need to spend a month assembling the data and compiling the code before you can commit a change you are simply not going to ever be able to make progress.
- vidanay 9y agoI think the "for reasonable problems" is the question for fusion.
- sgt101 9y agoI have no idea of the value of my impression of the work - I saw the MIT PI present on this a year ago and have read up since, but well - that's it. However, I think that they think that the main challenges are solved as per ITER and that they are on a mission to resolve the engineering; and this is the way to do that. They don't think that there is anything left which is a show stopper apart from the need to trouser $50m++ to build the proof of concept.
- boomboomsubban 9y agoIt took sixteen years from our realization that fission based power was possible to the first plant running. Seems possible.
- lucozade 9y agoThe trick is not to be too precise about when you start counting from
- tim333 9y agoI figure they could probably build a reactor that produces power - the MIT design looks like it would work if built. Making it profitable without government subsidy is a whole different thing though which I doubt will happen in 15 years. There are a lot of problems to deal with eg see "Fusion reactors: Not what they’re cracked up to be" https://thebulletin.org/fusion-reactors-not-what-they%E2%80%99re-cracked-be10699 https://thebulletin.org/fusion-reactors-not-what-they%E2%80%... There's also a Reddit discussion of that saying the problems aren't quite so bad https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/67rqqg/fusion_reactors_not_what_theyre_cracked_up_to_be/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/67rqqg/fusion_react... If I were a politician I'd vote for subsidising the thing by say buying the electricity at 30c/kWh to advance human understanding, so I think it could be built. I think MIT estimated $5bn + to build a 200MW generator which is not a huge amount in government terms.
- anotheryou 9y agoisn't it meaned to always be 50 years away? The 10s runtime is surprisingly close to a continuum runtime btw.
- scottlocklin 9y agoFusion always 15 years from being realized. Always will be.
- ShorsHammer 9y agoIt's the golden timeframe for world-shattering technology. At least money is being raised and people are trying, it's easy to be a cynic about something that's been promised as around the corner for the last 50 years. Fusion with net positive output would change everything for the world. Really hope they get over the line.
- sien 9y agoSadly, that joke is at least 30 years old too. There are lots of companies in the game now. Tri Alpha Energy, General Fusion, Lockheed Martin and there are quite a few more. There is the Wendelstein 7X stellarator and ITER. The increase in fusion magnetic energy has actually been faster than Moore's law. See this video at 18:30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4&t=3990s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4&t=3990s The massive improvements in superconductive magnets are really making a huge impact. Check out ARC and SPARC from MIT. Humanity is going to get usable energy generated from fusion.
- PhantomGremlin 9y agoSadly, that joke is at least 30 years old too. When I was in high school, 45 years ago, I visited prospective colleges. Some grad students were discussing the fusion work they were doing, in a big building, with lots of shiny hardware. They probably told me that practical fusion was 15 years away. Humanity is going to get usable energy generated from fusion. Yeah I heard that in high school. I'm now retired and am still hearing it. Still, stranger things have happened. The Chicago Cubs won the World Series a few years ago!
- cycrutchfield 9y agoPast performance is not indicative of future results.
- zaarn 9y agoI hope we crack the concept of fusion soon, it would solve a lot of our problems (atleast most of the energy related ones, ie safety, pollution, availability of fuel)
- ben_w 9y agoArticle talks about YBCO as if it was new, but it’s almost as old as I am. If it was the only thing holding back fusion, the reactors would’ve had software updates for the Millennium Bug. Perhaps this time I won’t fall for the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect…
- rbjorklin 9y agoThe way I’m reading the article they’re talking about a new superconductor where YBCO is one of the materials used. English isn’t my first language though so I could be off base here.
- sgt101 9y agoThey've found a way to wind it into tapes which make fabricating magnates relatively easy - they have demonstrated world record magnetic capability with these. Fusion is one of the applications but the thing I liked about the research is that there are intermediate technology goals that they are aiming to hit which should fund everything - notably compact medical scanners.
- fabian2k 9y agoYBCO is not new, but the production of it in the amounts and quality necessary for large superconducting magnets is still difficult. You need to produce long stretches of the material to create large magnets efficiently, and that isn't trivial. The old superconductors typically used in this kind of magnets have been pushed to the limit already in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, ~23 Tesla is the strongest existing commercial one and this seems to be a limit for that technology. The first NMR magnets that use YBCO are expected in the next years as far as I remember, I don't think any exist yet.
- ben_w 9y agoNow that is interesting. I had thought YBCO was easy to fabricate given I saw some amateur do it on YouTube, but I do accept they had quality control issues — important on large scale production.
- hguhghuff 9y agoI first heard about fusion maybe 30 years ago. At the time I was told that the cliche of fusion energy is that it's always just around the corner. And this article seems to say, well it's.......
- danmaz74 9y agoThis prediction will always be wrong... until it won't. By the way, "on the brink of" in the title is pretty stupid.
- ZenoArrow 9y agoEver wonder why that is? I'd suggest the optimistic estimates are both for scientists and investors. Optimism is used as a fuel to keep scientists going when the future is uncertain, and any breakthrough, however small, is a chance to recharge that fuel. On the other side, (in our society) scientific research requires funding. It's easier to acquire funding if you suggest the research may take 20 years rather than suggesting it'll take 100 years. This also encourages scientists to be optimistic in their predictions, as if they aren't optimistic they risk losing their funding, which greatly reduces the chance of rapid progress. For those reasons, I'd suggest these long estimates (as a definition of 'long', let's say in this case anything over 5 years) are just tools that help to get the work done, rather than being something with a high probability of being true.
- annabellish 9y agoWell, we're mostly software developers - I'm sure we all understand being an hour away from completing a project for the past several days of development. Scale that up, and...
- ZenoArrow 9y agoSure, but there's a difference between setting short term targets and long term targets. Setting short term targets is only realistic when you're doing something that either has been done before or where it's a variation on something that has been done before. Perhaps you underestimate the time it takes to do something by being unaware of the underlying complexity of a task (or by telling people what they want to hear, if they can't handle pessimistic estimates), but they still have a reasonable chance of being completed on time. Long term targets work differently. If you want the time taken to be as short as possible, and you still give an estimate within a window of time which you have little to no hope to predict, you're basically saying "I don't know". To put it another way, I could have a reasonable guess at what I'd be doing one week from now. On the other hand, I don't really know what I'll be doing 20 years from now. Any estimates I put within a range that is outside my ability to predict would basically boil down to me implying I haven't got a clue. With that said, I'd still put a timescale on an baseless estimate if it served a purpose. It's the purpose behind pulling the number out of thin air which is the point I was trying to highlight.
- oldcynic 9y agoFirst time I heard that fusion was 15 years away was around 35 years ago, in an already old book belonging to my eldest brother. They were talking about ZETA (late 50s). Wake me when the first power station is being built.
- tomw2005 9y agoTo quote my Physics of Electrical Power Generation lecturer from a few years ago: "Fusion is 15 years away, I think it will always be 15 years away."
- ScipioAfricanus 9y agoIt's a good quote, but you should know you're really quoting the zeigeist there, as was your professor.
- rikkus 9y agoIf we were to work with an assumption that fusion happens soon (<20 years) and power is now cheap, what would we now be able to achieve that was previously prohibitively difficult / expensive?
- throwawayqdhd 9y agoIf energy is basically free, how will it impact crypto prices?
- cycrutchfield 9y agoVariable costs are eliminated so the amortized fixed cost of hardware is the only ingredient for price. Basically the price (demand) for hardware goes up and should equilibriate when it reaches the previous cost of energy.
- alex_hitchins 9y agoWill the concept of money still mater as much if at all if all energy is free?
- aoeusnth1 9y agoLet me rephrase - “will anything be scarce if electrity is free?” The answer to that is obvious: yes. So why wouldn’t we need money?
- alex_hitchins 9y agoAgreed, hence "as much". My thoughts were that the main cost of 'stuff' is the energy used in mining or preparing it. If you have free (cheaper) electricity, you don't need oil, metal production has it's biggest cost removed, etc.
- incompatible 9y agoI believe the proof-of-work calculations automatically become more difficult as more computing power is dedicated to solving them. The net result is that the amount of energy consumed will probably increase inversely proportionally to any reduction in power prices.
- Maakuth 9y agoFor comparison, Olkiluoto 3 fission plant has been under construction for 13 years already. It's currently estimated to enter energy production a bit over one year from now.
- Spellchamp 9y agoAre you comparing the turnaround time for construction of a fission plant vs a fusion plant? (If this article's idea of 15 years is to be believed)
- andygates 9y agoThe delays there have been the usual big project problems - big builds, corporate drama, quality control. none of those apply to the MIT plan (they did apply to ITER, which was one of the arguments against it, but at the time it was the best option because the small strong magnets didn't exist).
- throwawayqdhd 9y agoWhat will be realized first: affordable graphene production, nuclear fusion, or general artificial intelligence?
- alex_hitchins 9y agoI'll go one step further - humans might sort their species out and stop with all the pointless tribalism and unite for the common good.
- solnyshok 9y agoOr, human might sorth their species out and away from the list of Earth species, effectively rendering question of nuclear fusion, graphene production, AI, and social constructs irrelevant.
- saiya-jin 9y agothat is so naive it's almost cute. more likely old tribes will die and new ones will be born (wealth, access to advanced AI, supreme medical care, prolonging life, enhancing body and mind etc.)
- hutzlibu 9y ago"stop with all the pointless tribalism " I'll challenge that, because I think tribalism (living in small groups) is the way more akin to our genes. And much from the rising mental problems of humans today comes from living on your own in a big anonymous pool of strangers. But those small groups could then indeed work (more) together for the common good.
- incompatible 9y agoI'm not sure if the Earth is large enough to distribute 8 billion humans into sufficiently separated small groups, and such a scheme isn't even on the political horizon.
- hutzlibu 9y ago
- alex_duf 9y agoI'm sure it would be useful to have that technology around and I'm quite excited by the prospect of it, especially as the volume seems to be drastically reduced compared to ITER. But I'm wondering how relevant fusion is to reverse climate change. It seems like renewables and storage are already fitting the bill, at a much lower cost. Edit: happy to hear any arguments
- DennisP 9y agoRenewables are cheap when backed up by natural gas plants, but wouldn't be especially cheap if you built enough storage to run civilization on them. I certainly think we should build renewables as fast as we can, because they're available now and a long way from the market share that requires a lot of expensive storage. But down the road, it's entirely possible that advanced nuclear power sources, whether fusion or advanced fission like MSRs, will be more economical than building enormous amounts of battery storage. (We do have cheap hydro storage but that's geographically limited.)
- clon 9y agohttps://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQV2HASTArytCtxnJ5ML9iSeroJBGzgxNSPBB_CcVO56Ex0Lch14bXbJJE7 https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQV2HAS... I enjoy the joke about the perpetually shifting fusion acquisition time frame, but it would be fair to add that in terms of actual funding, we have been under the "fusion never" level. I feel like the context for the saying has always been that the proper financing assumption holds.
- clon 9y agoThat said, the material sciences advances required, especially high temperature superconducting magnets, simply were not there in the 70s. So a moonshot project to achieve it may have been a failure at massive costs, discouraging humanity from fusion research for a long time.
- j1mb0 9y agoI can’t wait for the first fusion accident. I hope it obliterates the entire left coast.
- pfdietz 9y agoAccording to the 2014 arxiv.org paper on the ARC reactor https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.3540.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.3540.pdf the concept (which would produce 190MW(e)) uses 90 tonnes of beryllium. According to the USGS, the current total world annual production of Be is 220 tonnes, and total global resource is estimated at 100,000 tonnes. The world uses ~20 TW of primary energy, so roughly 100,000 ARC reactors would be needed to supply the world, using about 100x as much Be as the estimated amount available for mining. Unless Be supplies can be drastically increased, this concept is at best a niche player.