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Fusion News Ignites Optimism
- Tepix 5y agoI get the impression that the rate of progress is increasing in fusion energy research. Finally! Or is it just various fusion startups making PR waves to get more investments?
- adnmcq999 5y agoNIF is a national lab. Haven’t read this article yet but they made somewhat unexpected progress. NIF is inertial confinement fusion. Magnetic confinement fusion startups have been making waves because of a new type of magnet which doesn’t need to be supercooled and can create the same amount of magnetic pressure w a smaller device (I think). In addition to that, there are the same old and not-so-old publicly funded experiments which have been making good progress of their own. ITER is still being built, but a lot of these publicly funded experiments are tied to ITER.
- pfdietz 5y agoFusion is reaching (or arguably has passed) its sell by date as alternatives crash in cost. So it's raise money now or never.
- dabeeeenster 5y agoCan someone ELI5 to me how this design would be industrialised? How do you repeat this process day in day out? Whenever there are articles written about inertial confinement, they always describe the current process (which I understand at a layperson level) but never how this design could be implemented in a repeatable manner?
- BrianOnHN 5y agoMore energy output than input such that output powers the input and so is a firehose of free money until energy no longer has monetary value. The initial investment may be scary, but I think this is discounted per people's experience with Moore's law (whether right or wrong).
- dabeeeenster 5y agoI understand the first cycle of the process - my question is how do you repeat the cycle?
- BrianOnHN 5y agoI'm trying to ELI5 here, so, "keep dropping heavy-water pellets and pulsing laser beams."
- dabeeeenster 5y agoThat doesnt sound simple to me. But maybe it is?
- motoboi 5y agoA single pellet contains a lot of atoms. The current process is able to fuse some of those but soon the plasma cools down. The goal is to start fusion by compressing the pellet using lasers and then use magnets to keep the plasma (charged, very hot gas/thing) confined to a small volume and hot enough so fusion becomes a chain reaction until all atoms of the pellet becomes a heavier element, when fusion stops (because a much higher temperature and pressure is required to fuse those). This will generate a lot of energy which you car harness capturing the heat (by stoping the neutrons it emits or other method). Use that heat to vaporize water to very high temperatures and use the high pressure to squeeze it through a pipe and then to push a generator. So, this is a pulse thing. Pellet, laser, fusion, discard. Repeat.
- tsimionescu 5y agoIn this case, is the pellet the highly precise gold holhraum described in the article? If that is the case, then isn't this whole thing obviously doomed to failure, given that the entire advancement described consisted of even more sophisticated methods of producing that holhraum?
- danpalmer 5y agoWhile I'm excited for this, I'm also cynical about the public reaction to fusion power as it gets closer to success and eventual general availability. These past 2 years have highlighted to many how a combination of poor critical thinking and politicisation of so many aspects of our lives can lead to literal catastrophes. Will the public see Fusion as the wonderful advancement for humanity that it will likely be, or will they see it as another dangerous nuclear thing? Will they see it as taking jobs from hard-working coal/oil workers? Will it be spun as the green energy sector not making their minds up and flip flopping between solar/wind/fusion/etc? Will there be stories about how we could accidentally create a black hole and destroy the world? Hopefully I'm just being cynical, but I am worried about how the general public will perceive it, and/or how it will be sold by politicians and the less reputable parts of the media.
- xupybd 5y agoI don't think it will as it should be radically cheaper. It should come with an economic improvement.
- danpalmer 5y agoIt might be in the long term, but the same can essentially be said for nuclear (fission) power – the materials cost is low (compared to fossil fuels), but due to the extremely high capex needed to build a plant it's considered expensive. I think the first ~50 years of fusion projects are likely to be very expensive and I'd expect that reputation to stick.
- XorNot 5y agoDepends on the return. Solar was too expensive until it was a better investment then a coal plant.
- tsimionescu 5y agoGiven the current trends, it seems very unlikely that fusion will be even close to competitive with solar or wind by the time it arrives (which is still probably more than 20 years away as a commercial endeavor). Fusion, in any of its forms, requires some of the highest technology ever produced by mankind. It then exposes these ultra-high-tech wonders to extreme temperatures, and extreme temperature differences, and large amounts of extreme radiation (neutron bombardment), plus corrosion from the extremely fine hydrogen gas. Initial fusion power plants will operate at a very small energy efficiency, and they will need constant maintenance via high-tech robots capable of withstanding the radioactive environment that the neutron bombardment will create all around the reactor. Most pieces of the reactor will probably not last for more than a few months or at best years, due to all of the pressures described before. Not to mention, the potential for catastrophic failure, though much less than with fission, is still enough to completely destroy the reactor and a good chunk of the plant, if the plasma containment fails. While of course incomparably safer than a fission reactor meltdown, it would still be a massive economic issue. So commercial fusion, when it does finally arrive (or if), will be extremely expensive, with its only plausible use case as a somewhat reliable base load. Cheap fusion, if it is even possible, is much further away into the future than that - I would confidently bet that cheap fusion will not exist this century, even if ITER or others reach all of their milestones as planned.
- aristophenes 5y agoI don’t understand the appeal of this type of fusion (as opposed to the plasma reactor approach). We’ve known how to get positive energy out of fusion fuel since thermonuclear weapons in 1952. The really hard part would seem to be capturing that energy efficiently. This experiment is stuck at the ignition phase. When that’s positive energy they won’t be done, they’ll be able to start working on the practical problems of sustaining it. What am I missing.
- the-dude 5y agoThat fusion is not fission?
- aristophenes 5y agoThermonuclear weapons use fission to ignite fusion, and is how modern nuclear weapons work. Developed in the early 1950’s.
- user-the-name 5y agoI don't know, what are you missing? You have fairly accurately listed the facts to the situation as it stands. This is where we are at, that is what we are aiming for.
- motoboi 5y agoI suppose you could look at it as a spaceship. We have know for centuries that all you need to go high is a big fire pointing down, but soon realized that the hard part was maintaining the fire long enough to reach orbit or other planets. And even when that would become possible, the problem of how to land in the destination, build shelters and grow food remains. So, why we insist on this irrational pursuit? First because we can. Second because the the search needed to achieve that generates far more societal benefit than just the space goals. And third because society can pursuit many goals at once. We have several people, just let them explore. So, fusion is hard, but very probably not impossible. The pursuit of it will advance science and technology. If successful, can trigger societal changes we can only imagine today (serious carbon capture becomes possible. Smelting of very energy intensive alloys becomes cheaper and possible). And if the ultimate goal of a miniaturized reactor becomes possible, our spaceships can fly basically anywhere.
- danjac 5y agoGreat! Does that mean fusion is going to be here in just 10 years in the future as opposed to the 20 years in the future it's been for the last 50 years?
- Ottolay 5y agoWho knows. The problem is not getting fusion, but getting fusion to economically produce power. Hopefully one of the startups figure out some way to make it work. I have a hard time seeing the NIF approach becoming economical. It's more of a science experiment.
- tsimionescu 5y agoAnd very likely a weapons experiment, as has been said by others. This kind of indirect ICF is the closest model of what happens in a thermonuclear weapon.
- Shadonototra 5y agoNow that china is advancing with its mini artificial Sun, you can be sure the west will do whatever it takes to "catch up"
- willis936 5y agoI like being optimistic, but there is nothing to be optimistic about when it comes to producing electrical power from laser ICF. It's a weapons program. Also, I spent a few years as an engineer at a stellarator. This video[0] recently came out and I find it's the best crash course on the nuances of reactor design that I've seen. It really nails the thoughts and feelings of fusion researchers. It was especially refreshing to hear in public that ECRH is the only viable heating method for a reactor. If you watch this you might think I'm pessimistic about fusion, but I'm not. Fusion has been sold as this secret Ace up our sleeve that will come in and decarbonize our grid in a matter of decades. It isn't that. That's what's been sold because it's difficult to justify the field when the timelines don't decarbonize the grid in 50 years. The important thing to know is that the world doesn't end in 50 years. Energy demands are ever increasing and the supply is ever diminishing. Fusion science is expensive and time consuming. Humans will have to do the work if they want to stay on the current track beyond the next 100 years. It might seem like a subtle point and a doomed one to make considering how shortsighted we as a society have demonstrated to be. 0. https://youtu.be/JurplDfPi3U https://youtu.be/JurplDfPi3U
- PedroBatista 5y agoUntil now Nuclear Fusion has produced optimism, careers and portfolio valuations but no energy. The theory is there, but the implementation is not and worse than that, there is no "it will get cheaper with industrialization" in sigh, because we are not even at that stage and there is no indication there is a realistic path to achieve the efficiency needed to be economically viable ( ever! ). The best positioned to deliver something tangible seems to be ITER, many of the rest seems to be more of a pump & dump scheme than anything else.
- pfdietz 5y agoITER may deliver something tangible, but also something that is not on any realistic path to being competitive. It's far too large for the power it (or DEMO) would produce. It's also possible ITER will just deliver a negative outcome, if they can't figure out how to control disruptions sufficiently. A reactor that violently breaks itself is not something anyone would want to buy.
- choeger 5y agoCould someone enlighten me how laser fusion of prefabricated pellets (at least that's how I understand the idea in the article) can generate electricity? In a Tokamak or Stellarator, we collect heat on the outside, AFAIK and generate electricity in the good, old, "make something spin quickly" manner. But in a laser-ignition device, we need to shoot a pellet into some kind of chamber, so that chamber better be relatively cool or our pellet melts or deforms before it can be hit by the lasers, right? So how does one tackle that problem?
- ganzuul 5y agoMagnetohydrodynamics converting ion current into electrical current is often floated but seldom explained in detail.