34 ms·
Korean nuclear fusion reactor achieves 100M°C for 30 seconds
- rkagerer 4y agoThe Wikipedia article on Tokamaks is refreshingly approachable: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak
- redwood 4y agoS. Korea's technology sophistication is so inspiring
- gajus 4y agoWhat is the significance of this?
- groby_b 4y agoSecond sentence from The Fine Article: "While the duration and temperature alone aren’t records, the simultaneous achievement of heat and stability brings us a step closer to a viable fusion reactor – as long as the technique used can be scaled up."
- terrorOf 4y agoAFAIK, China has record for temperature and duration however it is known as China heated up electron rather than heating up ion which is more proper.
- tinco 4y agoI hadn't realized that was a different kind of record (150M degrees for over 1000 seconds). I suppose the ions have more mass than the electrons so that temperature is harder to maintain, but I have no idea about the physics of having them not heat up at the same rate. BTW I had to vouch for your comment to reply because you have a history of making short and sometimes brusque comments and HN has punished you for it. If you would make slightly longer comments in the future more people will engage with you and it will be more fun for you.
- zxcvbn4038 4y agoWhat? No reactor in every home? Those house of the future films lied to me in every way.
- stevage 4y agoThat's what solar plus battery is for.
- uwuemu 4y agoGood luck trying to "scale up" (at least in the near future). Tokamaks are only getting to be "scaled up" now, after pretty much decades, and basically only thanks to ITER (factor of ten plasma volume compared to the second largest tokamak). And ITER is a megaproject comparable (both in budget and time) with the SLS program. Maybe even more expensive (depending on if you believe the official number, 22bn EUR, or the unofficial estimate, 40bn EUR) and DEFINITELY more complex with far more cutting edge science (plasma physics, material science...), technology, and engineering required. If ITER succeeds (proves that fusion in a magnetic confinement device can be used to produce net electricity and it's "just" a matter of scaling things up that is holding fusion back), then sure, investors are going to line up, even for alternative designs. Fusion will be all the rage. But until then, I doubt anyone is scaling anything fusion-related up. Well and if ITER fails, then we are all fucked, and we can turn the fusion "are we there yet" clock back 50 years.
- samhain 4y agoHave you taken a look at MITs SPARC reactor? I’m always skeptical of comments that only reference ITER, since it’s very old news at this point, and there have been a plethora of innovation beyond ITER in just the last few years. The REBCO tape, and being able to get 10x magnetic field strength compared to ITER in a 3x smaller diameter seems like fairly significant progress to me.
- idontpost 4y ago> I’m always skeptical of comments that only reference ITER, since it’s very old news at this point, and there have been a plethora of innovation beyond ITER in just the last few years. Seeing as ITER doesn't even exist yet, I fail to understand how it can be old news or how we can innovate beyond it.
- klabb3 4y agoIsn't total cost per reactor more constraining than cost per Wh for these mega projects? Say you spend $10B on a reactor that produces essentially free energy. You're still limited by plant lifetime, maintenance and crucially transportation of that energy – just breaking even would be a challenge in many locations. Thus, we have to have many plants distributed, similar to today's fission, at somewhere in the 500MW range per reactor (give or take an OOM). In short, we have diminishing returns for giant reactors, and instead need to have plants that can be mass produced, fast.
- npunt 4y agoIt's just the new hotness
- random314 4y agoAlright, take the upvote!
- mikeInAlaska 4y ago"An error occurred during a connection to www.shiningscience.com" Was it hosted at the facility?
- Rackedup 4y ago"as long as the technique used can be scaled up."
- teaearlgraycold 4y agoOOF
- j15e 4y agoAs a newbie in nuclear fusion, this explanation is the most interesting part: > Lee Margetts at the University of Manchester, UK, says that the physics of fusion reactors is becoming well understood, but that there are technical hurdles to overcome before a working power plant can be built. Part of that will be developing methods to withdraw heat from the reactor and use it to generate electrical current. > “It’s not physics, it’s engineering,” he says. “If you just think about this from the point of view of a gas-fired or a coal-fired power station, if you didn’t have anything to take the heat away, then the people operating it would say ‘we have to switch it off because it gets too hot and it will melt the power station’, and that’s exactly the situation here.”
- bumblebritches5 4y ago
- baby 4y agoSimilar to how energy is extracted from fission reactors currently: the heat is used to boil water which makes large turbines spin and produce energy. It's dumb engineering. (I don't mean that in a bad way.)
- z3rgl1ng 4y ago
- bryanlarsen 4y agoIt's also very expensive engineering. That's how a coal plant works, and the last coal plant that the US built cost $2B for a 600MW plant. Given how much cheaper solar & wind are, fusion will be dead in the water if it doesn't come up with a cheaper way of extracting energy from the reaction.
- nemo44x 4y agoSolar and wind are not serious solutions to the energy needs of the planet today or in the future. As billions more people become part of a global middle class our energy requirements will expand dramatically from today.
- johndhi 4y agoWhat % chance do we feel that we will have fusion power within the next 50 years?
- weberer 4y agoConstruction of the DEMO plant is currently set to begin in 2040. It is made to follow ITER, so any delay in ITER will propagate to DEMO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant#Timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant#Time... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
- DennisP 4y agoYes but ITER is the world's slowest fusion project. Now we can build much smaller reactors, much more quickly, with the same output because we have better superconductors. Several startups are tackling it, and a lot of fusion scientists think CFS will beat ITER to net power by a decade.
- myrmidon 4y agoIt sure might be faster to experiment with new tech if your reactor is toy-sized, but building the whole thing at a scale that's somewhat realistic for economically generating power seems an un-avoidable step to me. ITER is doing that NOW and NONE of headline-generating startups have even started... So it seems to me that ITER is both contributing more engineering insights and closer towards a full-fledged fusion power-plant, and unlikely to be overtaken in these regards anytime soon, if ever.
- DennisP 4y agoTokamak output scales with the square of plasma volume, but the fourth power of magnetic field strength. Double the field, 16X the output. We have superconductors now that can support much stronger magnetic fields than ITER uses. That lets us build smaller tokamaks with the same output as ITER. Several startups are using them, led by MIT spinoff CFS. Their SPARC reactor should have output similar to ITER's, in a reactor half the size of JET, which was built in a year. They expect to attempt net power in 2025 and a lot of researchers think they'll succeed. Assuming that works, as similar reactor the size of JET gets them to commercial output levels.
- scifibestfi 4y agoLet's say they manage to scale this up. What effect would it have on humanity? Climate change is solved. What else?
- myrmidon 4y agoNone. We already have proven basically unlimited electric energy in the form of PV panels (and batteries if you need it stored). So far, that tech has not solved climate change at all, because actually building enough of these things is something that people need to be willing to pay for.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MichaelCollins 4y agoLittle effect I think. Fusion power can do little that fission power can't do already, which is provide "free" power after you look past the cost to build and maintain the plant. The best advantage of fusion power is the public perception is presently better.
- ithkuil 4y agoIs the safety profile any better? Or is it just public perception?
- ok_dad 4y agoThe lack of major radioactive waste is a plus, only the pipes and stuff inside the core of the reactor will have radioactive elements due to neutron activation. The only waste from it otherwise is helium (and tritium, which is re-used in the reaction later).
- rosywoozlechan 4y agoisn't helium valuable? seems like a good "waste" to produce
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- boringg 4y agoFull steam ahead!
- enviclash 4y agoAre there game-changing implications for this result?
- tinco 4y agoNope, it's just the expected gradual progression to the game-changing result that fusion eventually is going to be.
- ncmncm 4y agoNo. Progress toward cancellation, as its gross impossibility fades into gross impracticality and grossly extreme cost. You can safely ignore all future fusion announcements.
- ajdegol 4y agoIt's not like it's theoretical, it powers the sun; it's responsible for all atoms in the universe. It's essential for the long term survival of the species. "Grossly extreme cost"? Shell made more money than ITER costs in the Q2 of 2022 https://www.shell.com/investors/results-and-reporting/quarterly-results/2022/q2-2022/_jcr_content/par/toptasks_1119141760_.stream/1658963233980/ea8d3faec80bcc2622226933fa722b4955a5e83a/q2-2022-quarterly-press-release.pdf https://www.shell.com/investors/results-and-reporting/quarte...
- ncmncm 4y agoHint 1: nobody is working on fusion as it happens in the sun. Hint 2: the sun already works. Solar panels already work, and are cheap and getting cheaper. Hint 3: ITER is not a power plant. It is not even planned to ever produce so much as one kWh of electrical energy. It will burn GWh, if ever finished. Hint 4: a working fusion power plant would necessarily cost many times as much to operate as a fission plant of the same capacity.
- ajdegol 4y agoHint 1: Nobody working on something isn't solved by not spending money on it. Hint 2: We should invest heavily in solar; they aren't exclusive. I am a massive, massive fan of solar, and tidal, and hydro, and wind. Hint 3: ITER was never intended to be a power plant. This is a hacker forum, one assumes you know about iteration. Hint 4: That's an untested assertion which I would dispute, and the cost will come down with more research and experience. Also, I'm taking exception with you regarding the cost. This is pittance for humanity to spend.
- lake_vincent 4y ago"While the duration and temperature alone aren’t records, the simultaneous achievement of heat and stability brings us a step closer to a viable fusion reactor – as long as the technique used can be scaled up." Half of the engineers on HN right now: [...as long as the technique used can be scaled up...](PTSD_Chihuahua.jpg)
- rjzzleep 4y agoIt's interesting to see that South Korea has such strong nuclear research facilities. Taiwan lost a lot of nuclear researchers in the past decades. Some of it due to US lobby work and some of it due to stupid governmental policies in the recent past. Japan which is also quite strong in nuclear seems to be trying to sell part of their nuclear industry, a move which turned out disastrously for the french.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago> a move which turned out disastrously for the french. Any more to add? IIUC, France has one of the highest percentages of nuclear energy of any country in the world. Is this supposed to be bad?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rjzzleep 4y agoMore than half of their reactors are currently out of commission. And Macron was one of the people responsible for signing off on the deal that sold off their turbine development to GE due to pressure of the DOJ. They were talking about buying "it" back. Although I don't know what the scope or timeline of the buyback is. I also remember that contrary to previous promises GE started dismantling one of those factories.
- gerdesj 4y agoWhen I was at school in Abingdon, Oxfordshire (UK) around 1988 my physics class (A level aged 17) was somewhat enlivened by a visit by a bunch of clever chaps from JET at the Culham labs from up the road. This was the first time I heard the "nuclear fusion is 25 years away" joke and it was told as such. We were also shown a graph of how many orders of magnitude away from ignition (for want of the correct word) by date. It had an initial steep decline but then turned right quite sharply and had annoying looking tendency to avoid the magic value. Now, once you have ignition, you have to sustain it and extract power from it. That's quite tricky too!
- cygx 4y agoWe were also shown a graph of how many orders of magnitude away from ignition (for want of the correct word) by date See p.4-5 of [1] for more recent plots. It includes earlier runs of both KSTAR (the experiment under discussion) and EAST (the Chinese one mentioned in another comment), but not their most recent ones. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10954 https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10954
- zamadatix 4y agoFor those wanting a quick in browser glance: https://i.imgur.com/z7MRk5X.png https://i.imgur.com/z7MRk5X.png
- gerdesj 4y agoThat looks like a canonical "how we are doing" for the trade. You may find it surprising that us civilians find that chart a bit tricky to understand. The graph I was shown was more of a "lies to children" job (a Sir Terry Pratchett term for simplification of a concept to enable teaching to happen). It looked more like a somewhat lumpy y=a/log(bt) where a and b are not 1. I'm just a simple IT bod what studied a fair bit of engineering and a smattering of science back in the day. That graph looks like it forgot to put it's bloody knickers on. The one in the paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.10954.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.10954.pdf is a bit closer to what I remember. I do feel that we can relax the 25 year rule a bit these days. I think we can quite confidently allow 20 years and I'm quite cautiously going to suggest 15 instead.
- Kukumber 4y agoChina managed to reach 120 millions °C for 1000 seconds last year already https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-12-31/China-s-artificial-sun-smashes-1000-second-fusion-world-record-16rlFJZzHqM/index.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-12-31/China-s-artificial-sun...
- motokamaks 4y agoThey managed to do it all separately in separate experiments. This is the first time both stability & temperature were achieved simultaneously.
- Kukumber 4y agoOh you are right, important detail indeed
- djyaz1200 4y agoWhat if the stars in the galaxy are the remnants of civilizations fusion reactor gone wrong ;p
- Aaronstotle 4y agoWhat if stars are sentient beings?
- kushan2020 4y agoWhat if stars also experience global warming ?
- rr888 4y agoThere was a positive fusion article in the WP a few weeks back. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/26/nuclear-fusion-technology-climate-change/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/26/nuclear.... Looks like things are finally happening.
- ncmncm 4y ago
- junon 4y agoYou keep parroting this in this thread without much substance behind anything you say. Care to elaborate?
- ncmncm 4y agoEvery scenario for fusion power requires extremely expensive processes to extract heat, and then using it to drive steam turbines. But operating steam turbines, all by itself, costs more than renewables. These extremely expensive processes would cost way more than is needed for fission. But fission is already not competitive. (See above.) So there is no future for fusion driving heat engines. There just might possibly be a future in aneutronic fusion, fusing deuterium with 3He and extracting the energy directly electromagnetically. But all these announcements are not about that.
- DubiousPusher 4y agoWas this a successful ignition?
- elihu 4y ago> “This team is finding that the density confinement is actually a bit lower than traditional operating modes, which is not necessarily a bad thing, because it’s compensated for by higher temperatures in the core,” he says. “It’s definitely exciting, but there’s a big uncertainty about how well our understanding of the physics scales to larger devices. So something like ITER is going to be much bigger than KSTAR”. This made me wonder when ITER was going to actually be up and running. From wikipedia: > "The reactor was expected to take 10 years to build and ITER had planned to test its first plasma in 2020 and achieve full fusion by 2023, however the schedule is now to test first plasma in 2025 and full fusion in 2035." So, it sounds like it'll start doing something within a few years, but it'll probably be a long time before it produces significant scientific results. By the time ITER is running, maybe some other group will beat them to it (like the MIT ARC or SPARC reactors, which use more recent, better superconductors and don't need to be anywhere near as big). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
- yreg 4y agoSeems (like other contributors) Russia is manufacturing parts for it. Hope the current events won't delay the project.
- Filligree 4y agoOne of the main reasons it's so delayed, is that everyone gets to make some of the parts. Which then have to be put together on-site, despite inevitable mismatches. Reducing the number of countries involved will probably just speed it up.
- ncmncm 4y agoNot noticeably. The longer it takes, the longer the money flows. The moment its real prospects become clear to everybody, the money stops.
- ncmncm 4y agoITER if ever finished will have exactly zero apparatus to extract useful power. They are not even talking about starting on a power plant before 2050, or finishing before 2070. It will of course all be dropped long before then, one way or another. Either we build out renewables fast enough, or civilization collapses before we get there. Either way, no fusion power.
- tonymet 4y agoa question for nuclear experts : what does the unstable fusion state look like ? is there a catastrophic risk and now severe is it ?
- sounds 4y agoPretty much overheating something, leading to a relatively boring shutdown and a long, potentially costly repair.
- TedShiller 4y agoWhile impressive, that is the easy part. Anyone can heat something up given enough energy put into the system. The hard part is producing energy on a net basis.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kushan2020 4y agoDoes anyone know how do scientists measure such high temperatures? I doubt a regular thermometer will scale at such levels.
- femto 4y agoMeasuring the temperature is the same as measuring the average energy of particles in the plasma, which is the same as measuring the average speed of the particles. Basically you do that by measuring radiation, doing it in several different ways, so you can test the accuracy of your measurement. This article gives an overview: https://www.scienceinschool.org/article/2013/fusion-4/ https://www.scienceinschool.org/article/2013/fusion-4/ Incidentally, the plasma is of such low density (ie. few particles) that it has little stored heat energy. As soon as the plasma touches anything it cools down and fusion stops. You're unlikely to get a mushroom cloud out of today's fusion reactors, as there is just not enough stored energy in them. (Might that change if they are scaled to the point where large amounts of energy can be extracted, a bit like the bang out of a large charged capacitor?)
- pontifier 4y agoFusion? I've got a new and different design that needs testing. If anyone is interested there is more information at http://www.DDproFusion.com http://www.DDproFusion.com
- fibonacc 4y agoIf they can pull this for 30 seconds in 2022, they can do 30 minutes by 2025, 30 hours in by 2027 and then 30 weeks by 2030 being very optimistic here. Right now things are bad in this world and will get worse but the future is filled with abundance and new levels of comforts not seen in human history.
- aeternum 4y agoIt does seem like the cost vs. reward of fusion tech is ridiculous at this point. I'm all for new tech but we should at least try to project the cost to build a working fusion power plant. Fusion not only has to work, it has to be at least somewhat cost-competitive with other forms of energy generation.
- fibonacc 4y agotrue as elon musk says it won't be economically viable for quite some time but fusion is the right step, what I'd be interested is if they can miniaturized to fit on rocket payloads.
- notamy 4y ago> Fusion not only has to work, it has to be at least somewhat cost-competitive with other forms of energy generation. Perhaps silly, but I wonder how this comparison would shape up if we were capable of calculating reasonably-accurate long-term figures about effects of pollution, mining for resources, construction costs, etc. in the process of producing each form of energy. I'm really curious what that'd look like.
- alliao 4y agoHope I get to see it before I die... unlimited energy to combat climate change would be pretty damn epic.
- ncmncm 4y agoFusion will not provide unlimited energy. And not even affordable energy. There is nothing to see here but physicists having fun with other people's money.
- protoman3000 4y agoCorrect me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t a huge amount of released energy in this scale eventually heat up the planet? I mean, doesn’t the atmosphere in our big greenhouse always retains a non-zero amount of energy, no matter the CO2 etc. in the air? If that is true, then so far the net energy out flux was positive, but now we see with rising greenhouse concentrations that it’s turning. If we then raise the stock of energy inside the greenhouse, it overheats, no?
- ncmncm 4y agoNo, it wouldn't. The sun dumps untold petawatts of heat on us 24/7. We will never produce anything as much as the difference from one week to the next. In any case this stuff will never produce so much as one solitary kWh of commercial power, so the question is wholly academic. Fusion heat would cost much, much more to extract in usable form than fission, and fission is already not competitive. The dream of unlimited power without spending on fuel -- capex but no opex -- is already here, and we call it renewables + storage. We just need to build it out fast enough that civilization doesn't collapse first. Fusion is a pernicious distraction, in present circumstance.
- concordDance 4y ago> The dream of unlimited power without spending on fuel -- capex but no opex -- is already here, and we call it renewables + storage. This is inaccurate, both production and storage have service lives (in years, cycles or both) so need to be continually replaced. This is opex in practice
- ncmncm 4y agoYet, already less than opex for steam turbines. And still falling.
- bluepnume 4y agoSure, but we can divert some of that energy to power wind turbines, which ought to cool things down a bit.
- eek2121 4y ago20 more years folks! Move along...
- keepquestioning 4y agoCompare this to other tech news today.. a marginal iPhone upgrade. Our priorities are wrong.
- ncmncm 4y agoYet, the iphone is the more significant event.
- BryLuc 4y ago
- taylorbuley 4y ago> Malware and Phishing > This site is blocked because it is a known security threat. Please contact your network administrator to gain access. Higher quality source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2336385-korean-nuclear-fusion-reactor-achieves-100-millionc-for-30-seconds/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2336385-korean-nuclear-...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jacknews 4y agoI completely support fusion efforts from a science point of view, but let's be honest, an economic reactor for electricity generation is still decades away, it may not even be feasible, and it certainly won't be as 'clean' as is being sold, using D-T fusion. We should switch a good chunk of fussion funding towards 'clean' fission; travelling wave reactors, molten salt, small modular reactors, thorium, etc, etc. Some of these have a chance at being commercially viable and making a real impact this decade, not half a century or more hence.
- DennisP 4y agoWe have dozens of fusion startups, and dozens of fission startups working on everything you suggested. The fusion startups build test reactors. The fission startups do paper reactors and license applications, and in the US at least, if it's not a water-cooled solid uranium reactor, they probably won't get any further. Fix the NRC, and we might get somewhere with fission.
- jacknews 4y agoI agree, but further, government should be helping with this early stage research, and putting more of it towards fission, not leaving it to startups.
- bborud 4y agoYou can iterate the argument one step further and say that affordable nuclear is too far into the future, and that we should instead focus on more immediately realizable options such as wind, solar, geothermal etc. This is where much of the energy debate in Europe is at now. It is exactly the same argument being used against fission. Pick any technology that has come to fruition in the last decade. Video streaming as a substitute for cable and terrestrial TV. Mass adoption of Smart Phones. EVs becoming a viable option for broad populations of car owners. A space startup that came from nowhere and rapidly out-competed the incumbents. All of them. Remember the Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon shitting on private space companies on C-SPAN not that many years ago? Look at the time span between people dismissing these technologies as off in the distant future and when they arrived. People have a tendency to assume that tomorrow will be the same as today. Affordable nuclear is still some years away. I think the events in Europe actually shortened that distance into the future by a significant amount just in the last 6 months. But fission power is still "too slow". Fusion is even more years away into the future. If/When it comes to fruition people are going to be surprised, and none more so than the experts. Because the experts are almost always wrong for a good while after disruptive breakthroughs have already happened. It means we have to think ahead and make sufficient bets on technologies that exist at all time scales. And the more potential they have for delivering stable base load, the higher the payoff. Yes we have to invest in both fission and fusion. And we have to invest a lot more than we already do.
- jmyeet 4y agoI'd love for commercial fusion power generation to be a reality but I'm skeptical that, at a minimum, hydrogen fusion will ever be practical. The reasons have remained a problem for considerable period of time: 1. Containing a hydrogen plasma involves containing a superheated turbulent fluid. This is inherently unstable that will be sensitive to very minor defects; 2. A superheated plasma produces a lot of high velocity particles. Those not contained by magnetic containment tend to destroy the container (ie "neutron embrittlement"); and 3. Possibly the biggest problem of all: neutrons represent energy loss by the system and there's no currently viable way of solving this problem. To solve (2) and (3) various groups research so-called "aneutronic" fusion. I put that in quotes because it's just a lot less neutrons generally, not no neutrons. Helium-3 fusion is one possibility but He-3 is exceedingly rare. The best source may be from the solar wind being collected on the Moon's surface. As you can imagine that presents it's own set of challenges to mine, contain and return. Hydrogen fusion uses heavier isotopes of hydrogen (ie deuterium with 1 neutron and/or tritium with 2). Why? Because we currently need these neutrons to feed the fusion reaction. And after all this we extract heat to boil water to turn a turbine. This too adds to cost and complexity. Personally I think the future of humanity's energy production is space-based solar power collectors.
- DennisP 4y agoIf it's aneutronic fusion, you don't need a turbine. You have fast-moving charged particles, and can probably figure out a way to do direct conversion. Helion has already demonstrated it in their latest reactor. They use a hybrid D-D/D-He3 reaction. The He3 is the waste product of the D-D reactions. They say the combination will release only 6% of its energy as neutron radiation, which is why they can skip the turbine. (I'm also a fan of space solar though.)
- kumarski 4y agoFusion is pointless. Fusion reactors make nuclear power plants marginally smaller. Dispatch and transmission costs are still a thing.
- ncmncm 4y agoFusion reactors would have to be enormously bigger than fission plants. And cost correspondingly more both to build and to operate.
- kumarski 4y agoThere's no net benefit to fusion. Dispatch and transmission are a thing even if all the software developer/ECE/Physicist folks downvote my comments.
- ajdegol 4y ago"There's no net benefit to fusion." There's no net benefit to abundant energy... yes, I can't think of any.
- pfdietz 4y agoNot if it's as expensive as it's likely to be from fusion, no.
- ajdegol 4y agoYou don't get them cheaper by never building them; the energy density of fusion is far higher than fission and doesn't have any danger of runaway chain reactions.
- pfdietz 4y agoNeither of those is a significant advantage. Also, I'm not a fan of tinkerbell engineering, where anything is possible if we just believe hard enough.
- la64710 4y agoThis is why California is so freaking hot this week !! Crazy
- DennisP 4y agoI think you're joking, but I'll still point out that it's not actually much heat. The atoms of fusion fuel move very fast, but there aren't many of them.
- holografix 4y agoWrap fusion reactor in huge domes of highest efficiency possible modified photo voltaic curved panels aimed at capturing decaying neutrons producing photons.
- caseyavila 4y agoI don't know everything about nuclear fusion so I have to ask: Is it actually renewable? In other words, are the byproducts able to form back into the "fuel" at a reasonable rate with the energy input of the Sun? I know that a selling point of fusion is that there is such an abundance of fuel that this doesn't matter. But if we treat finite energy sources as infinite, exponential growth in our energy budget means that we will undoubtedly run out of energy, as is being done with forests and such. After all, I have a feeling people at the dawn of the industrial revolution thought the amount of coal available in the world would serve their needs "practically forever," until energy consumption scaled up by thousands of times.
- hoseja 4y agoBy the point we've fused significant portion of Earths hydrogen, it will really not be a problem to hop over to Jupiter for some more. The scales are insane. Energy input of the Sun ALSO isn't renewable if you think like this.
- marcyb5st 4y agoSo, the fusion we are talking about here is deuterium - tritium fusion as it should be the easiest to achieve. Deuterium is not a problem. A rough estimate says that there's enough of the stuff to cover 100% of the world needs for thousands of years. And it's easy to breed: surround the reactor with water so the hydrogen there can capture the stray neutrons. Tritium, on the other hand, is a problem. It is radioactive with a half life of ~12 years and so the little we have needs to be produced since we can't really accumulate it. Currently it is produced by conventional nuclear reactors. Additionally, breeding tritium is harder than deuterium and requires a blanket around the reactor that uses other materials to multiply the number of stray neutrons. For each atom of Tritium that is fused we could get somewhere between 1.1 to 1.7 with a theoretical maximum of 2 Tritium atoms so, finally answering your question, it is renewable. It's just hard, but a piece of cake compared to actually maintaining a stable fusion.
- ncmncm 4y agoRight: intractable, but much smaller than other problems.
- rkagerer 4y agoFor reference, the core of the Sun is around 15M°C (cooling to ~5500°C at its surface). Oh, and about 160M times bigger in diameter.
- empiricus 4y agoWhat if instead of this huge engineering efforts (with no end in sight) you can just put two rocks together and get heat/energy? That is called fission btw.
- moomoo11 4y ago100M Celsius? Does this contribute to the planetary heating? Sorry if dumb question but that is so hot. How is the heat controlled? Is there any resource that explains this thermal part?
- bheadmaster 4y agoPlanetary heating depends on the amount of energy released. 100M Celsius refers to the temperature, not energy. On a small enough space, you could achieve 100M with very little energy.
- Aicy 4y agoPlanetary heating is caused by trapping more of the suns energy than in the past. The sun is immensely powerful, and any heat generating activity done by humans is negligible compared to the sun. Except for activities which increase the suns effects, such as creating greenhouse gasses.
- sai_c 4y agoCould someone please enlighten a physics noob? As i understand it, nuclear fusion could (as soon as really achieved, i.e. there exist commercial plants) provide more energy than we are currently producing by all other methods. And if we can produce it, I have no doubt we would use more and more energy. Which would mean that all this energy must end up somewhere somehow. What I would like to know is, don' we then (just in another form) contribute to the heating of the planet again? Are there any studies/theories about that? What would the impact of the ever increasing energy release/production be?
- TaylorAlexander 4y agoIt’s a good question. I recall someone saying that the amount of direct heat produced by energy generation is very small compared to the heat captured from the sun by the greenhouse effect. Also I don’t think it’s true that commercial fusion power plants would in the near term produce extraordinarily high energy levels compared to a large hydroelectric or fission nuclear power plant. The thing that’s great about fusion is that it requires very little fuel and doesn’t produce nuclear waste.
- sai_c 4y agoI hope i did not understand you wrong, but what I meant was the following. We create electric energy from source X. The electric energy is mutated to heat, or mechanical energy or what not (computers produce heat, electric cars mutate it into kinetic energy and so on). Energy is never destroyed, it just changes its form. So if we produce/consume more energy than now (yes that's just theoretical) would that contribute to climate change in a significant manner?
- DennisP 4y agoEventually, yes. Right now waste heat is a tiny fraction of excess greenhouse heating, but if we kept multiplying our energy usage by a couple percent per year, we'd boil the oceans in four centuries. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... If we invent fusion, I think we could grow exponentially for quite a while, but it'll mostly happen in space. Controlled fusion makes a really great rocket.
- mrtri 4y ago
- greyhair 4y agoWeb link is flagged by Avast has containing a malware payload.
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- dikaio 4y agoFor some reason this website gets flagged as a fishing site with an Orbit router.