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Always happy to see people doing new and interesting stuff with fusion. I got into nuclear technology because of ITER back in the early 2000s. Worked on it cont
by acidburnNSA 7y ago
Always happy to see people doing new and interesting stuff with fusion. I got into nuclear technology because of ITER back in the early 2000s. Worked on it continuously (mostly in advanced fission) ever since.
> "The timeline question is a tricky one," he says. "I don't want to be a laughing stock by promising we can deliver something in 10 years, and then not getting there. First step is setting up camp as a company and getting started. First milestone is demonstrating the reactions, which should be easy. Second milestone is getting enough reactions to demonstrate an energy gain by counting the amount of helium that comes out of a fuel pellet when we have those two lasers working together. That'll give us all the science we need to engineer a reactor. So the third milestone is bringing that all together and demonstrating a reactor concept that works."
The fourth step is to deliver the reactor concept as promising machine. The fifth step is to attach it to power generating equipment and demonstrate the power plant. The sixth step is to scale up a supply chain capable of delivering multiple units that compete with other sources of commodity electricity (or other energy products). The seventh step is to scale to large scale without being unduly burdened by either supply chain (raw material, skilled labor) or regulatory impact/public concern that inevitably scales with any large fleet of any new tech.
Fission made it to step 7 and then faltered and is now teetering depending on where you look. It never scaled past 5% of total world primary energy.
The promise of fusion is to deliver nuclear energy with less public concern than fission because it makes less radiologically hazardous material. The challenge is to go through the physical, engineering, and commercial viability phases as a power plant.
- anonuser123456 7y ago>I got into nuclear technology because of ITER back in the early 2000s. Worked on it continuously (mostly in advanced fission) ever since. What is your opinion on SPARC and tokamak energy?
- acidburnNSA 7y agoHigh temperature superconductors are absolutely an interesting pathway to make magnetic confinement fusion significantly easier than the big tokamaks like ITER. I have friends working at Commonwealth Fusion who are good people and I wish them much success. That said there are still a lot of phases to go through, from physical viability at stage 1 to scaled commercial fleet at stage 7, and that pathway is impossible to predict without getting on the ground and going through the stages. I certainly think it's worth running through the stages.
- njarboe 7y agoI really hope that fusion power can become a major power source in the future and humanity really needs it to expand off planet, but like you said above, nuclear fission power got to stage 7 and then stalled. I think the nuclear fusion community should drop the word nuclear completely from their vocabulary or they are likely to end up with the same fate, if they ever get to stage 7.
- smolder 7y agoIf we can figure out fusion as a power source, maybe we can also figure out how to improve the quality of people's information exposure too, leading to a smarter population. Currently we try to hide the best information behind paywalls or in private knowledgebases, we neglect schools or profiteer through them (US in particular), and we inundate people with stupefying advertisements and misinformation.
- njarboe 7y agoAlthough both things are very difficult, the knowledge needed to create a commercial fusion reactor is very different to educating a whole populous not to be so afraid of radiation (which is natural and found everywhere all the time).
- freeopinion 7y agoHow about "Smart Plant"©™?
- petre 7y agoFusion will do just fine.
- ncmncm 7y agoThere is no actual expectation of ever getting useful power generation from magnetic confinement fusion (ITER, Tokamak): it has always been, instead, a jobs program for high-neutron flux physicists, to maintain a population to draw on for weapons work. p-boron fusion is interesting as a possibly practical energy source. The hurdles are a matter of engineering and finance, not fundamental design flaws. But it's useless as a jobs program for weapon experts, so must rely on commercial investment.
- anonuser123456 7y agoSPARC is not ITER. It's seems bizarre to ignore the impact HTS tape would have on the plausible operation of MCF.
- pfdietz 7y agoARC's power density is only 40 times worse than a PWR, rather than 400 times worse like ITER.
- philipkglass 7y agoI think that you have that backwards. It's the laser driven inertial confinement fusion approach that is useful for weapons insights. The very low density and slow kinetics of fusion in a tokamak are much less like weapon fusion reactions. Lawrence Livermore -- a nuclear weapons lab -- has studied inertial confinement fusion for decades. They don't have a tokamak. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility
- ncmncm 7y agoIt's all about the neutrons.
- dfsegoat 7y agoFWIW as an aside: I always scan comments on nuke-related HN posts to find yours first. Super informative and easy to digest. Thanks again.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoHappy to hear it! I love the discussions that happen here so it's my pleasure.
- ccleve 7y agoA number of these steps become easier if the reactor is physically small. A plant that fits in a shipping container has a way easier path to commercial viability. Small plants require less capital. They're easier to manufacture. They can iterate faster. They have less environmental impact, and therefore fewer regulatory hurdles. They require less labor to build and a smaller supply chain. I expect that the engineering is harder, because scale can bring efficiencies. But still, I think the winner is going to be a small device, not a behemoth, if only because a small device can come online years earlier.
- throwaway894345 7y agoI expect that you lose efficiencies with respect to security. I.e., it's not easy to secure one large nuclear reactor (fission or fusion), but it's a lot easier than securing dozens of small reactors.
- Someone 7y agoIf that’s a problem, you can locate hundreds of small reactors together.
- kbenson 7y agoThere might also be less security needed if you have dozens of smaller reactors. You have to secure the one because losing it affects so much. If losing a couple is not as big a problem, you an rely more on the redundancy of the system than on the redundancy of the component. This depends on the threat model to some degree, but there's security in knowing that it's vastly harder for a threat to affect multiple targets at once, no matter the threat.
- jacobedawson 7y agoIsn't this just the same scenario as we currently have, just with different underlying technology? Do coal-powered plants have additional security outside of a few private guards?
- caymanjim 7y ago
- Accujack 7y agoLove the user name. I always thought that movie was amusing, and so is the NSA :)
- acidburnNSA 7y agoHa thanks. I kind of made it before I knew Hacker News was more or less a serious place. And snowden was in the news at the time.
- naiveprogrammer 7y agoI don't know whether this is a legit breakthrouhg. But technological progress is often a sigmoid (S-shaped) growth curve, it may take a while to get past certain steps but once you are through, money flows and more people devote time to that technology which accelerates the process. It is not hard to imagine, say, 20 years from now, we have power plants running on fusion given the interest we have in solving the climate crisis.
- sf_rob 7y agoTangent, but assuming fusion energy generation will be a reality in the next 30 years, what do you believe the price/KWH will be? I am not knowledgeable enough to parse the estimates I've seen and want to believe in the post-energy-scarcity future.
- malux85 7y agoI doubt we are even anywhere near close to being able to calculate that because there’s still too many unknowns with regards to materials required to build, their rate of depreciation, and other things we discover in the scaling/commercialisation phases, and also exactly how much net energy will be produced!
- joshvm 7y agoPrice per kwh is not solely about generation efficiency, it's also about distribution and infrastructure. There will always be a cost associated with that which will rise with inflation. Even if we went totally renewable and all your electricity was "free" then you'd still have to account for on demand storage and infrastructure costs. The main benefit of nuclear is its relatively low carbon footprint and in theory less risk of spiking fuel costs because we run out of raw materials. That's the dream of fusion anyway. Nuclear power infra is not cheap and even fusion will have security and decommissioning costs. Forget cost as the main factor, grid power will never be free. That's a fantasy - even publicly owned utilities will/are funded by taxation. You're paying for price and power stability. Domestic fusion means you don't need to rely on foreign resources (eg Russia cutting off the gas). Putting renewable generators in your home has a high capital cost, but people forget that you're also cushioning yourself against grid outages. It's insurance more than anything else.
- DennisP 7y agoD-T fusion would have security and decommissioning costs, but neither would be an issue for aneutronic fusion.
- freeopinion 7y agoWhat's the fun of tech forecasting if you don't over-promise? A fusion reactor the size of a shipping container? Plop one down between my neighbor's house and my house. Right where our backup generators now sit. It's about the same footprint. No more distribution costs. Well, except for Amazon's fees to drop off the uranium now and then. :)
- wtracy 7y ago> The fifth step is to attach it to power generating equipment The part that jumped out at me as strange is that they claim their process generates electricity "directly" without having to drive a turbine. Supposedly they produce helium cations, and that can drive a circuit. Can anybody comment on whether that makes sense?
- frankus 7y agoHuge if true. Most fission plants throw away about two-thirds of their energy output as waste heat (according to: https://www.answers.com/Q/How_much_of_the_heat_generated_in_a_nuclear_power_plant_is_waste_heat https://www.answers.com/Q/How_much_of_the_heat_generated_in_...), and their cooling towers are so much bigger than the reactor itself that they've become a symbol of the plants as a whole.
- graycat 7y agoSorry to get away from some really nice physics and suggestion of some really good news for some of relevant reality: The cooling towers? The photographs in the news commonly show huge clouds of water vapor escaping from the tops of the towers with a picture caption about "nuclear" power or some such. So, the suggestion is that nuke plants generate huge clouds of dangerous radioactive byproducts. Such news content is easy: (1) Suggest that the cooling towers are the nuclear reactors and (2) don't mention that what is coming out is just water vapor, from water recently in some river or lake. Now the news people have their audience by their eyeballs for ad revenue and/or politics as in https://www.peakprosperity.com/2019-year-in-review-part-1/#climate https://www.peakprosperity.com/2019-year-in-review-part-1/#c... “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” ~ H.L. Mencken
- philipkglass 7y agoNuclear plant operators show the steaming cooling towers on their own web sites: https://www.exeloncorp.com/locations/power-plants/limerick-generating-station https://www.exeloncorp.com/locations/power-plants/limerick-g... The same imagery shows up on the covers of nuclear textbooks: https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Engineering-Handbook-Mechanical-Aerospace/dp/1482215926 https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Engineering-Handbook-Mechanic... If anything, laypeople think that radiation is scary because it's invisible, tasteless, and odorless.
- ChuckMcM 7y agoSpot on analysis. There is one loophole which is Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). If you energy production solution can achieve a lower TCO in an existing market segment, steps six and seven (production and supply chain) take care of themselves. The poster child for this was 'on premise PV generation.' Once a nuclear technology demonstrates a lower TCO for baseline power generation, its game on.
- tinco 7y agoOff-topic question: is there some software part in nuclear energy systems that is restricting plants or research? I'd like to contribute to the industry as a non-physicist, but it's hard for me to imagine what kind of software might be missing or is being sold by too expensive specialist companies. I imagine most software is tied to the specific devices they run on, but perhaps there's coupling or analytical software that could be better geared towards the problem domain. Is there any fundamental issue that is waiting for a good software solution?
- jxy 7y agoAll kinds of simulations. For example: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1094342017712059 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10943420177120...
- ttul 7y agoI'm not an expert at all, but I follow news about fusion energy with keen interest. Getting to conditions where fusion reactions can take place requires modeling the physics with supercomputers. I think the physicists have a handle on the software required to do that modeling; they also have access to the computers. I think if you have a software background and want to contribute, you should consider applying for a job with one of the projects themselves. General Atomics lists 135 software jobs (https://www.ga-careers.com/search-jobs/software/499/1 https://www.ga-careers.com/search-jobs/software/499/1) for instance.
- LaMarseillaise 7y agoI think it must be mentioned that in addition to fission and fusion (ITER) work, General Atomics is the creator of the MQ-9 Reaper, which is commonly used for drone strikes. A software job at this company may involve work on these aircraft.
- eloff 7y agoAnd that's bad because drones are evil? I'm sure I don't agree with a blanket statement to that effect. They're a tool of warfare and I don't see how they're particularly worse than other ways of killing your enemies. I can think of a few ways they're better.
- 1024core 7y agoApparently Step 5 is not needed? > The alpha particles generated by the reaction would create an electrical flow that can be channeled almost directly into an existing power grid with no need for a heat exchanger or steam turbine generator."
- sandworm101 7y agoIt isn't that simple. This thing will be DC, and at some random voltage. They will need huge bits of kit to convert the output into some sort of usable power. It is electricity yes, but not clean useful power.
- throwaway010718 7y ago> because it makes less radiologically hazardous material Why is there any radioactive material produced by a fusion reactor ?
- analog31 7y agoYou don't get to precisely choose which isotopes are produced by the reaction. Even among the light elements, there are radioactive isotopes, such as tritium. And it doesn't take much of it, to render the entire mixture hazardous unless refined in some fashion. One hope is that the refinement process can return the radioactive stuff to the cooking pot, so that the ultimate waste products are safe.
- deadundead 7y agoConsidering the DT reaction D + T = a + n. Neutrons produced in this reaction, being chargeless, cannot be contained within the electromagnetic field, thus leaving plasma and reacting with the surrounding material (e.g. tokamak chamber walls) and producing radioactive elements. This leads to activation and radioactive degradation of the reactor itself.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]