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After years of doubts, hopes grow that nuclear fusion is near
- tromp 5y ago12ft.io works as advertized: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=http://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/12/22/science/after-years-doubts-hopes-grow-that-nuclear-fusion-is-finally-real-could-help-address-climate-change https://12ft.io/proxy?q=http://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/12/2...
- leephillips 5y ago“These advancements aren’t incremental; they are quantum leap improvements.” I hope that physicist Dennis Whyte was being misquoted here. We need to rapidly ramp down the use of fossil fuels and replace them with technology that works today, such as photovoltaics and nuclear fission (in the interim). Aspirational projects that might possibly have a working proof-of-concept in a decade or five are not part of the solution to the climate crisis.
- Jiro 5y ago>I hope that physicist Dennis Whyte was being misquoted here. Why? Because quantum leaps are small? The metaphor is not comparing it to the size of the quantum leap; the metaphor is that quantum leaps are discontinuous.
- leephillips 5y agoI thought he also believed that the advances were of significant size, but maybe I’m wrong and he did, in fact, mean to admit that this recent, discontinuous progress was minute.
- robertlagrant 5y agoPresumably all progress, far above the quantum level, is discontinuous anyway. The main usage seems to just be "big".
- kiba 5y agoIf we are serious about ramping down the use of fossil fuels, we should start with the eliminations of vehicles that we don't need, such as cars. In order to eliminate cars, however, it will require a drastic readjustment of our urban planning policies. Land use policies are what made cars viable and public transport unviable.
- hungryforcodes 5y agoThis will NEVER happen. People rarely listen to urban planners, no one is going to tear up their cities and reorganize them around some untested ideological idea, and finally no one is going to give up their cars -- like it or not-- they are annoying. It's much easier to just make them all electric and decarbonize grid production.
- soperj 5y ago>no one is going to tear up their cities and reorganize them around some untested ideological idea that's exactly what they did for cars in the first place.
- mlindner 5y agoCars replaced horse-drawn carriages which already filled cities. Poo covered the streets of New York City. Modern US cities were designed around the horse-drawn carriage, not the car.
- hungryforcodes 5y agoRight, but those were the motor companies behind that. IE: Concrete, spendable money. Urban planners get very little cred unfortunately. If they were smart -- the urban planners -- they would get all computational and build highly accurate models of the cities they work for that people could just go online and check out. Then planners could create new versions of the real city, testing different ideas and sharing them interactively with the public. Most planners these days seem to just say "mass transit GOOD!" and "cars BAD!", without really any substance behind it. This often doesn't really convince the public of much.
- andi999 5y agoOr just depopulate regions in the world which require heating to survive.
- echelon 5y agoAll of Canada and every state north of Kentucky?
- syspec 5y agoWhat about places that require massive amount of cooling in the summer
- andi999 5y agoHmmm.. Maybe migratory bird approach?
- elzbardico 5y agoNow this is something that our current fusion technology could help with
- mlindner 5y agoHe is correct however. There's no possibility of replacing all power with renewables energy within 10 years, so having a 5 year time scale for a working prototype is completely reasonable. We're not even going to have all cars converted to electric vehicles within 20 years even in countries with the most strict rules, let alone all power generation and fossil fuel use for other applications. (Even if fossil fuel sales were forbidden tomorrow, it would still take 20 years for the existing vehicles to be taken out of the used market.)
- willis936 5y agoClimate predictions end in 2070, but the world does not. "We're fucked" isn't a reason to throw our hands up and not try. Fusion is "too late" the same way every other decarbonization tool is too late. It doesn't matter. Do it anyway. In 200 years the people who threw up their hands will be seen as short-sighted.
- ncmncm 5y agoPeople who wasted fortunes on dead ends will be seen in a rather worse light. We already know what we need to stave off climate catastrophe: solar and wind, with storage and hydrogen synthesis, might be enough. Each cent pissed away on useless frivolity incrementally reduces our chance of success.
- sandworm101 5y ago>> known as ITER, which the United States and other countries are building in southern France to generate 10 times more power than it took to generate the fusion reaction. ITER is a physics experiment, not dissimilar to the LHC. It is not going to generate "power" but energy. The goal is to provide a steady fusion reaction from which to then develop potential technologies to turn that energy into usable electricity. ITER is not a powerplant. It is a scientific reactor. https://www.iter.org/proj/inafewlines https://www.iter.org/proj/inafewlines >> ITER will be the first fusion device to produce net energy. ITER will be the first fusion device to maintain fusion for long periods of time. And ITER will be the first fusion device to test the integrated technologies, materials, and physics regimes necessary for the commercial production of fusion-based electricity.
- maccam94 5y agoThis article is not about ITER, it is discussing a new reactor being built by an MIT spin-off company called Commonwealth Fusion Systems. They plan to build a demo reactor by 2025, and a full scale power plant by 2030.
- lisper 5y agoI'll give long odds against.
- ByteJockey 5y agoSometimes the solution is to get a bunch of people who don't know it's impossible in a room and give them a deadline. I'm not going to hold my breath, but it would be cool if it works here.
- lisper 5y agoThis is a bet I would be absolutely thrilled to lose. But I'm pretty sure I won't.
- ncmncm 5y ago
- anonuser123456 5y agoGetting fusion to happen is the easy part. Building a reactor that is economical is not so easy. Fast neutrons, tritium management, corrosive molten salts, beryllium supply constraints…whole lotta material science problems you gotta work out at scale and on budget.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoWHich reminds me of LFTR: http://transcriptvids.com/v/AHs2Ugxo7-8.html http://transcriptvids.com/v/AHs2Ugxo7-8.html Molten salts, vessel degradation, etc all need to be dealt with there, but with a far clearer path for positive energy production.
- Animats 5y agoIt's forward progress, but nowhere near being useful. By "more energy out than they put in", they mean passing "theoretical breakeven", generating more energy as heat than they put in as electricity. Not converting that energy back to electricity and making the thing self-powered. Brief periods of theoretical breakeven have been achieved before. Ahead lies "sustained theoretical breakeven" - the thing can be kept running for a while. So far, other tokomak experiments have achieved 70 seconds of plasma containment (Korea) and 120 seconds (China). That's below ignition temperature, though. Then "self-sustaining breakeven" - the thing can power itself. Then, someday, "economic break-even" - it can pay for itself. Then, maybe, useful power generation. There's the problem of getting the energy out in some useful form. This begins with the "first wall" problem of finding something that can survive the conditions just outside the magnetic field. Those conditions include huge numbers of neutrons, which tend to split atoms in the first wall material and cause unwanted transmutation. This causes radiation embrittlement, which is not good for materials. It's going to be a long haul.
- danuker 5y ago> and cause unwanted transmutation This is a syntagm I did not expect reading on Hacker News in a comment about technology, but about a roleplaying game.
- david_draco 5y agoSabine Hossenfelder essentially called the nuclear fusion PR a fraud, because they do not report true (full-system) efficiencies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
- mlindner 5y agoShe also overstated things and made things out to be worse than they actually are. Getting to fusion plasma power breakeven IS the hardest part. And it's always been so far away, setting and talking about realistic goals is better than trying to immediately jump to the far end goal. This is the difference between ITER and projects like SPARC though, they both plan to get fusion plasma power breakeven, but ITER's design has zero hope of ever being economical.
- cletus 5y agoThe article doesn't really go into detail about this (it's mentioned in the video) but the key breakthrough they're referring to is increasing the magnetic field strength from HTS (high-temperature superconducting) magnets to 20 Tesla [1]. It's hard not to come away from reading any of this without thinking what a huge boondoggle ITER was and is and there was plenty of reason to think that before now. A lot of talk here is given to net energy production. That is a key milestone but it's not by itself sufficient for commercial fusion power production. Example: imagine a plant costs $10B and products 100MW of net power. It has a lifespan of 30 years and requires $500m/year in maintenance and staffing. That capital cost and operating costs need to be amortized over the lifespan of the plant so even though it's 100MW of net power production, those numbers simply aren't commercially viable. I applaud these efforts but I remain skeptical on when (if ever) we'll have commercial fusion power production, for several reasons: 1. The issues of turbulence with a super-heated plasma; 2. Power loss through neutrons; and 3. Damage caused by neutron embrittlement of the reactor itself. Personally I think solar is still the frontrunner for the first renewable mass-scale power production method that will be cheaper than fossil fuels and thus replace fossil fuel plants for economic reasons. I'm glad there are a bunch of commercial enterprises focused on this. I hope at least some of them explore some of the alternative forms of fusion (ie other than hydrogen). For example: proton-Born fusion [2]. Aneutronic fusion would have huge advantages. [1]: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a37924936/worlds-strongest-magnetic-field/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a37924936/wo... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion#Boron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion#Boron
- sandworm101 5y agoAnd look at how much liquid helium is required for the cooling plant. There isn't enough on the planet to build many reactors like this. https://www.iter.org/construction/cryoplant https://www.iter.org/construction/cryoplant >> In order to deliver the cooling fluids to the machine, a large cooling plant has been built at ITER that ranks as the most powerful single-platform cryoplant in the world.
- luckylion 5y ago
- ur-whale 5y agohttps://archive.ph/FbH0D https://archive.ph/FbH0D
- tekno45 5y agoDoes anyone know of non energy generation related things we've learned doing this? Seems like space research in the same way that just trying will yield dividends.
- _robbywashere 5y agoIs nuclear fusion this centuries perpetual motion machine?
- maccam94 5y agoThere's not much new info here since the last time the project was discussed. The first two comments here link to informative videos about how the reactor works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629828#24634733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629828#24634733 News since then: CFS has now raised $1.8B They have demonstrated a full-size magnet with a field strength of 20 Tesla They have started construction on the new SPARC reactor facility.
- ambrozk 5y agoIf you're wondering what PR buys you, it's a constant stream of articles like this one. There's no new information to report, but Commonwealth Fusion Systems is in the news again!
- fnord77 5y agothis article appears to be a marketing piece for Commonwealth Fusion Systems. No mention of NIF, which actually has achieved ignition.
- dflock 5y agoNIF is a weapons research program, with no intended or possible path to power generation.
- 8bitsrule 5y ago25 years, at the most.
- cromulent 5y agoAnother recent article on the topic from the New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/11/can-nuclear-fusion-put-the-brakes-on-climate-change https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/11/can-nuclear-fu...
- selfhifive 5y agoThe personal Quantum computers of energy tech.
- lisper 5y agoHope has been plentiful for decades now. It is actual progress that has been in short supply.
- helloworld11 5y agoIt's worth noting that nuclear fission was a theoretical, barely experimental thing for decades since 1911 and 1917, until 1942 when the first successful reaction was produced.. From there you know he rest. Fusion is more difficult, so it's to be expected that more of ramp-up time is warranted. We at least know that the basic concept works. It's visible every day, worldwide.
- hutzlibu 5y ago"We at least know that the basic concept works. It's visible every day, worldwide." The basic concept is a very hot, very big star. We cannot really rebuild that. We can make bombs with the principle since a while - but we are still far from controlling that energy.
- pontifier 5y agoI've got my own novel fusion reactor design that really needs to be tested. What do you do when you have an idea that could change the world? I wish I could drop it, but I can't. It haunts me with it's elegance and simplicity, and has defied all of my attempts to find flaws in the theory. I'm trying to move forward on my own. I'm not comfortable selling a promise. I have no guarantee that my device will work, but I have no reason to believe that it won't. It's great that all this money is being thrown at fusion recently, but that's almost the easy part.
- imtringued 5y agoWell, how about you do a PhD and publish a paper?
- pontifier 5y agoMaybe I will if that's what it takes. Our society has serious problems when it allows a single person to be a bottleneck on something like this. A better society might allocate some existing resources to evaluate new ideas in parallel in case these ideas are actually, truly valuable.
- danaris 5y agoMy gut feeling is that if you don't already know anyone you could talk to about this—which is the likely result of being an expert in the field, studying at a high level and interacting with other such experts—your design probably isn't going to work better than what's already out there, and even if it did, you wouldn't have the credibility with the field to get them to listen to you without years of work building relationships and trust. I'm not going to try to claim that it's impossible to self-train in nuclear physics to the degree necessary to come up with a novel fusion reactor design that's a) viable, and b) genuinely novel, but it's going to be so vastly less likely than the various alternatives that, as the sibling commenter notes, even if you've already got 100% of the knowledge and understanding required to do this and you're 100% right, your best bet is almost certainly to get into a PhD program in this field, and publish this as your dissertation.
- more_corn 5y agoFusion is ten years away and it will be for at least the next hundred years.
- foxyv 5y agoNuclear fusion isn't near until they actually start generating electric power. If they can generate power, even if it costs $1,000+ per watt, then I'll be like "Sure, maybe in a couple decades we'll see it in military or specialist applications where cost isn't a factor." But if you can't even generate a single watt of power with a couple hundred billion dollars, it is nowhere close.