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Are at an inflection point for fusion power? With interest and funding for it finally gaining steam? I’ve noticed several announcements about independent effort

• lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  >>> b) my view is skewed by HN. Making us anti-fake news?? :-) However I also have the same impression, and HN is one of my leading indicators so it could well be coalescing.
  • ashtonkem 6y ago
    Why would HN be the indicator? I’m sure we all personally enjoy the ego boost of participating in such a “smart” forum, but let’s not get too ahead of ourselves here; the primary speciality that HN caters to are software engineers and startup people (usually both). There’s no particular reason to believe that HN would be a reliable indicator for such heady topics as fusion power other than “a bunch of curious nerds comment there”.
    • lifeisstillgood 6y ago
      “a bunch of curious nerds comment there” beats well over 80% of new sources. Of course the Fusion Power discussion board that still uses PHP4 powered text boxes will be way better. Of course we must be aware of our "me,me,me" tendencies, its a good warning.
      • ashtonkem 6y ago
        “Beating 80% of other news sources” is completely orthogonal to being right. HN could indeed beat out 80% of the alternatives and still be brutally wrong. And that’s long before we discuss the tendency of specialists to over-extend into other fields with predictably bad results.
• raziel2701 6y ago
  I can only speak about NIF but they're under stress right now as their funding agency, the NNSA, is reviewing the progress of NIF as questions about its efficacy at achieving fusion become stronger after several failed campaigns. NIF needs to put up a pretty face so the press releases might be part of a combined effort to spin a positive picture of their progress, plus it serves as a recruitment tool since the lab is going through its largest demographic shift: the boomers are retiring. Additionally, with the new administration it's expected that nuclear may not be viewed favorably as wind and solar continue dropping in price. So there's a lot of threats going on and all these press pieces may be attempts at buttering up the people in power and also the general population to get them excited about fusion and hopefully etch bits off of the general fear regarding nuclear power. Personally, NIF is stuck, it's not gonna work under its current design, and convincing Congress to fork out some 60 billion dollars for a modest increase in laser energy when we probably need 10x laser energy does not seem like a good idea. Especially when the food lines are getting longer and we're approaching an insolvency event. It's hard to justify.
  • yread 6y ago
    I always thought NIF is just a facade for weapons research, that there is no way to make it energy positive
    • willis936 6y ago
      It is. Their fusion power research program is essentially retired and it operates as a nuclear stockpile steward research facility.
      • pfdietz 6y ago
        It was end of LIFEd?
    • raziel2701 6y ago
      It's like 80% stockpile stewardship and 20% fusion research. The ratio has changed over time, and the big question is if the research will be driven down to zero. There's still a lot of basic research done with that 20% covering laser-matter interaction, materials science, plasma physics, x-ray tomography, computational simulations etc.
• ncmncm 6y ago
  Yes, yes we are at an inflection point. But maybe not the kind you are thinking of. There will never be a commercial tokamak power plant. There has never, at any time, been any reasonable expectation of getting practical, commercial power from magnetic-confinement hot-neutron fusion. Renewables, with practical energy storage, will always be much, much cheaper than fusion could ever have been, even if it could be made into a workable idea. Any practical fusion plant would have to absolutely huge -- an order of magnitude bigger than the biggest fission plant. Then, it would destroy its most expensive parts with neutron flux in short order. To continue using it, it would have be be rebuilt, frequently, and at even more ruinous expense, using robots. "Break-even" is nowhere near enough to get practical power out, because the energy extraction process must be so inefficient, with two stages of heat exchange before you get a working fluid you can run through your turbine. Tokamak fusion research is, first, foremost, and always, a jobs program to maintain a population of high-neutron-flux physicists as a population to draw upon for weapons work. Actual useful power has never been the point, or any sort of practical goal. Thus, the burgeoning hype is meant to counter the dawning realization that the whole program always was, still is, and can only ever be a shuck. They need enough billions poured into the project to make it politically self-sustaining, where no amount of failure can ever threaten its funding, because so much has already been sunk that it would be too embarrassing to admit failure. As it is, to ever actually break even, all the fusion plants that could be built would have to operate for decades just to pay back all the money that has already been sunk, without any commercial construction, before even starting to pay back any of the actual (huge) construction costs. But the only way to keep them operating would be via enormous public subsidies, because they could never compete on a level field with solar and wind. So, the longer they were operated, the deeper in the hole they would get.
  • willis936 6y ago
    >”Break-even" is nowhere near enough to get practical power out, because the energy extraction process must be so inefficient, with two stages of heat exchange before you get a working fluid you can run through your turbine. Correction: break-even is most of the way to a working plant. A “burning fusion plasma” is one that self heats. The plant requires very little power when the plasma is supplying most of its own heating. Keep the confining coils cool, keep the control systems (correction coils and heaters) running, and watch as the heat comes in. Q = 1 is the balance point. The distance (in terms of lawson criterion) between Q = 0.5 and 1 is much larger than Q = 1 and infinity, Also, two stages of heat exchange are not needed and not a killer for power generation regardless. A liquid lithium wall blanket operates as tritium breeder and coolant. Run the lithium through a heat exchanger to boil water. Watch as the turbine spins. Very similar to PWRs.
• lambdatronics 6y ago
  Not yet, in my opinion. Things will really change once some group achieves 'scientific breakeven' (gain > 1) or better yet 'engineering breakeven' (gain > 10). ITER targets gain ~5-20 sometime after 2035, and SPARC targets gain ~ 2-10 sometime after 2025. So there's a possible inflection point on the horizon, which explains all the press.