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Many scientists see fusion as the future of energy

167 points by hhs 4y ago

dj_gitmo 4y ago
In the third image you can see it's built with Python. See "The tokamak hall at Culham"
metadat 4y ago
Did this page hijack anyone else's back button? Weird.
- once_inc 4y ago
  Not for me, no.
FernandoTN 4y ago
“Nuclear fusion is 30 years away; and always will be." I wonder how this phrase manages to hold after 50 years since its inception. We could compare it to the state of general AI, but at least in the machine learning field, progress is being made without knowing the feasibility or path to reaching general in AI. In fusion it appears that the theory has already been set and maintaining the chain reaction going for long enough is the limitation (progress being made here), would it be the same case that the final steps are still missing without a clear path, or would the current progress be enough to eventually reach it?
- jl6 4y ago
  AI research has made slow scientific progress but great engineering progress. Fusion has made great scientific progress but still has a lot of engineering left to do.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > has made great scientific progress but still has a lot of engineering left to do It’s made serious engineering progress too.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Engineering work halted 30+ years ago. There has been no recent work on structural materials that could withstand the neutron bombardment, and no work on extracting bred tritium at parts per billion concentration from thousands of tons of "blanket" material needed for the next day's operation. There is no possibility of any present scheme operating at even 10x the cost of fission. Fission is not today competitive, and falls further behind each day.
      - fallingknife 4y ago
        You can get around the tritium problem with boron-proton fusion. Also gets around the inefficiency of converting to heat / turbines. Obviously not any closer to production (and probably further) than tritium fusion, though. https://hb11.energy/how-it-works/ https://hb11.energy/how-it-works/
        ncmncm 4y ago
        There is no reason to expect that p-11B fusion is possible. It might be, in a hundred years, if our present understanding is wrong, and somebody figures out how to reflect gamma rays.
        fallingknife 4y ago
        It's been done by firing lasers at a HB pellet, so I assume you mean not possible to be done commercially? And why would you have to reflect gamma rays?
        ncmncm 4y ago
        Obviously you can fuse about anything by accelerating nuclei at each other fast enough. If it takes more energy to do it than you can get back, it is of purely academic interest. Firing lasers comes up many orders of magnitude short. Another alternative is magnetic confinement, but radiative loss goes up with the 4th power of temperature, so would be 10000 times as much as for a D-T plasma, IIUC.
- Trouble_007 4y ago
  Timeline of Nuclear Fusion : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_nuclear_fusion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_nuclear_fusion
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  This chart rests upon faulty assumptions about the efficacy of tokamaks, but it does demonstrate how little interest the U.S. federal government has had towards research of fusion. http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusion-researchers-answer-your-questions https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fus...
breck 4y ago
Can someone explain to me the 2nd order effects if we made energy 10x cheaper? Do we ever have to worry about waste heat? I'm not an EE or physicist (maybe in retirement).
- llsf 4y ago
  I am also interested by this question. Energy => machine/labor => GDP So, my first naive take would be that we could extract/build/ship more for less, and then potentially keeps the "growing" economy humming. Maybe due to my past education/experience, I still feel uncomfortable about more waste (if energy is cheap, why not like in Quatar build stadiums with AC ? keep AC stores doors open in summer, and in winter when the heat is on, etc.) I have a sense that increasing energy waste will come to 2nd order cost on other resources (water, minerals, etc.). Thoughts ?
- pstrateman 4y ago
  At least for a while fusion isn't about being cheaper. It's about being abundant.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Neither one.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    There is no world where fusion would be more abundant without being cheaper. Sure, it's nice that you only need water to get half the fuel of a fusion power plant, but even for fission, uranium is a fraction of the cost. The reason fission isn't already providing us with abundant power is the huge cost of the extremely advanced fission reactors - which look like lego blocks compared to a fusion reactor. And 1 fusion reactor will generate nowhere near the power of the largest fission reactors we already have, in any design considered realistic today. Not to mention, the extraordinarily expensive fusion reactor you build will become too brittle to hold itself up in the span of 10 years at best, because of the neutron bombardment - turning your massive investment mostly into highly radioactive waste that you'll need expensive robots to disassemble and replace.
GOONIMMUNE 4y ago
I love to follow this field because the engineers working on tokamaks/stellarators/other fusion devices are dealing with some truly extreme technical challenges. However, creating devices that economically overcome those challenges at scale seems unlikely when solar panels and batteries are aggressively decreasing in cost. How will these compete if scientists figure out the longevity problem for perovskite solar? Just my opinion as a layman. I still think the research is worthwhile because of possible future applications (space?)
- wefarrell 4y ago
  There's only so much surface area on the earth that we can cover with solar panels and global energy consumption is exponential. Abundant energy will enable more possibilities such as removing CO2 from the atmosphere, desalinating water and pumping it into arid regions, and opening up space tourism for the majority of the worlds' population.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    False. There is exactly zero need to devote any land surface at all exclusively to the solar panels that will provide for all our needs. Solar coexists nicely with numerous other uses. Similarly, for wind turbines. Storage may consume some area, but nowhere near what existing fossil fuel extraction activities do. There will be no fusion.
    - mmazing 4y ago
      > There will be no fusion. Scream it into the ether with veins popping out of your head all you want, it doesn't make you correct. Additionally, there's literally no reason to not pursue both avenues.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        Nobody is screaming. Even presuming usable structural materials can be discovered (not worked on in 3 decades) and tritium at PPB concentration can be extracted from thousands of tons of blanket material every day (never worked on at all), a working plant would cost more than an order of magnitude more on every axis than fission. But fission is already not competitive. Fission falls farther behind better methods each day. So, no one will build a fusion power plant, and there will be no fusion power. "Pursuing avenues" with no possibility of desirable results is wasted effort and wasted money. We have valid reasons to avoid waste.
rapsey 4y ago
We are much more likely to solve the large scale battery problem than the fusion problem in some reasonable timeframe within our lifetimes. Once we solve the battery problem solar and wind become enough to power humanity.
- once_inc 4y ago
  Honest question: doesn't the production of battery and photovoltaic cells require quite an investment of rare elements and significant carbon emission?
  - rapsey 4y ago
    They last 20 years though. The investment pays off over a long period.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - ngvrnd 4y ago
      not just a cost question but a resource availability/energetic cost of resource extraction question. If it takes more and more fossil fuel use to extract the increasingly rare components of the renewables, then renewables may not be able to save us. I don't know if it is true, but it is a legitimate question which is worth knowing the answer to...
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        There are no "increasingly rare components". So, no, it is not any sort of legitimate question. It is, rather, concern trolling.
        _uhtu 4y ago
        My guess is he's talking about Lithium and if so that's not concern trolling, Lithium mining is very expensive and if we want to go full renewable we'll need some major storage capacity. There's obviously ways around that, hydro storage being the most obvious, but it is something to think about.
vlovich123 4y ago
Commercial profitable nuclear fusion is a maybe by the end of the century. We really need to get nuclear fission capacity built out ASAP if we're serious about global warming and the overall health of the planet. Renewables just won't get us there. Moreover, we need to overbuild the amount of clean energy produced to the point where we can waste it on energy inefficient processes for carbon recapture that we know work. Fusion is important in terms of helping this to continue to scale / make it even more economical / reduce nuclear waste and weapons concerns. Ultimately though, it's an iterative step over fission for the problems the most urgent ecological problems the world is facing. EDIT: Did some back of the envelope math. Nuclear energy is worst case ~ $200 USD / MWh. At 2,400 kWh/tCO2 for direct air capture, that's $14 trillion USD or ~16% of the world's GDP that would instantly get us to net 0 yearly emissions. We'd need to invest more than that to start reducing carbon levels. This wouldn't recover things since damage is already done in many places (e.g. coral reef deaths) but it would arrest the worsening of issues. Additionally, this has knock on effects that improves the economy overall (weaker storms = less money recovering from disasters).
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  Do you have any concept of how far away the end of the century is? That's 80 years. Think back to 1942. It's ridiculously arrogant to make predictions like this.
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    The most optimistic estimates by the commercial companies working in this space is the first commercial reactors coming online around ~2050. It takes time to build these reactors and integrate them into the existing power systems. I may have misstated my position which is that I don't think fusion will make up any meaningful part of power by the end of the century. The reason is a) requires fundamental engineering and materials breakthroughs b) funding for it is a pitiful amount compared to what it probably needs c) it's competing with other cheaper energy sources d) we don't have any net positive energy reactors yet. The basis of that prediction is just looking at how long it took fission to take off and there it was being driven by military needs (submarines) and not civilian.
fguerraz 4y ago
The real question is no if it's the energy of the future. The real question is it going to be in time to save us? Even if we knew exactly how to make fusion reactor today, how long would it take for it to effectively replace all the fossil fuel energy? Too long is the answer.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > The real question is it going to be in time to save us? From what? Global warming? No, it won't. If somebody creates commercially viable fusion today, it will still take some 3 to 5 decades until it is common enough to impact our energy generation. And if it is based on breeding Tritium, those 3 to 5 decades are dictated by physics. (But just the ramp-up on constructing those power plants is enough of an issue, no fundamental physics needed.)
cl42 4y ago
I personally believe that nuclear fusion is a necessity for long-term survival of humanity -- I'm talking centuries out. I am not a physicist (humble startup dude / engineer / sales guy). Is there anything someone like me can do to contribute to this space?
- ncmncm 4y ago
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    As amusing as it is to see an inverted shtick of the Fusion Energy Foundation that matches the same tenor as that organization, most proponents of solar and wind probably don't see R&D into other methods of power generation as a zero-sum game that detracts from their own favored approach. Not to mention, research into fusion, and indeed any type of nuclear power, is likely overwhelmingly dwarfed by all of the efforts spent into greenhouse gas-generating fossil fuels. Given that, the aforementioned tenor is rather quixotic and misplaced.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Money is fungible. A billion dollars spent chasing fusion is exactly a billion not spent displacing CO2 production.
      - Apocryphon 4y ago
        Money is not fungible when it’s never in the hands of a person or organization who is going to make the binary decision of investing in fusion vs. investing in renewables. You are creating a false dilemma that does not actually exist in real life. Furthermore, if you really cared about advancing the cause of solar and wind, you would take that tenor and energy towards attacking fossil fuels, rather than a completely marginal segment of the power generation pie.
        4y ago
johnnymorgan 4y ago
What I want to know is why nobody talks about this.. https://brillouinenergy.com/news https://brillouinenergy.com/news > Researchers at SRI International have issued a Technical Progress Report covering their review and independent validation of Brillouin Energy’s on-going testing and scaling efforts of its most advanced Isoperibolic (“IPB”) Hydrogen Hot Tube™ (HHT™) component prototypes, which generate controlled Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (“LENR”). I've been keeping an eye on it since 89 and this seemed significant.
- philipkglass 4y ago
  It's probably because they appear to be cranks who keep promising results right around the corner and never deliver. Here's a story from 10 years ago about how Brillouin's technology can generate electricity for 1 cent per kilowatt hour, linked from their official blog at the time [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130515012248/http://pesn.com/2012/04/19/9602078_Brillouin--Understanding_How_LENR_Works_Will_Enable_Us_to_Be_First/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130515012248/http://pesn.com/2... If they had an empirically working device, by now they could just be using it generate heat and/or power and leave it up to better-funded institutes to figure out the mechanism after the fact. Since they're not selling the devices and they're not selling power, and they've been "iterating" for years, I don't think that they actually have anything. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130421190244/http://brillouinenergy.blogspot.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130421190244/http://brillouine...
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Making empty promises about fusion tech is a good way to collect investors' money with no risk of fraud indictments, and no need ever to pay any back. Work done under government grants is similar.
  - johnnymorgan 4y ago
    Tbh it was only the SRI confirmation that caught my eye. I've mostly written this off but was curious what the relevance of it was as it did seem to be verified by an independent body. The question of if the tech can actually be used for power generation..no idea but never seemed likely.
packetlost 4y ago
The amount of anti nuclear from a few accounts in this thread is weird and reeks of weird concern trolling.
- notacoward 4y ago
  It's mostly from one person, who somehow gets away with (up to) dozens of low-effort comments on every single story about nuclear power. I happen to agree with their basic premise, but still find it highly suspect that such spammy behavior continues to be allowed.
  - packetlost 4y ago
    They seem like a concern troll-for-hire type of thing tbh. I find it concerning that they're allowed to continue to be here too
- tuatoru 4y ago
  In my own case I'm just trying to get people to let go of the idea that nuclear (fission or fusion) is viable for electricity generation. Please read the paper by Way, Ives, Mealy and Farmer[1], look at the trends, and draw your own conclusions. Edit: as I said in another comment: It's 1972, the microprocessor has been invented, and these guys are saying "what the world needs is much bigger mainframes. Much, much bigger." 1. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Looks like there's a discussion thread here. https://www.reddit.com/r/RenewableEnergy/comments/xeydwp/empirically_grounded_technology_forecasts_and_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RenewableEnergy/comments/xeydwp/emp...
    - tuatoru 4y ago
      Thanks for that. The main criticism is that "it looks like a curve fit". Indeed it does; the paper talks at length about this very thing. (Mostly in the 400 page supplementary paper S1.) But the thing is, the curves (Moore's and Wright's) apply to a lot of technologies undergoing rapid expansion. That's actually the science contribution of the paper: setting out a better way to make policy-relevant forecasts, and hopefully ending the abysmal track record of forecasts that is documented in the paper. (I can see ways to get at least 67% cost reductions in both wind and PV from where we are now, and I'm just an interested layman. So in at least the near term we will likely keep following the curves. Yes, actual work has to be done, but there's no voodoo. Just like with microprocessors.)
tuatoru 4y ago
It's 1972, the microprocessor has been invented, and these guys are saying "what the world needs is much bigger mainframes. Much, much bigger." You owe it to yourself to read the paper by Way, Ives, Mealy and Farmer in Joule, "Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition". Or at least look at the pictures. 1. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X
vladkovalev 4y ago
Helion energy?
- ncmncm 4y ago
  This is the only fusion project that could conceivably have a future.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    It really isn't. First they're openly lying about how they get energy out. Only a tiny fraction will come out via their EM coupling, the rest has to be recycled via a heat engine at massive loss even to keep it running. They tell you this indirectly in their press releases but then go on to say that the EM coupling solves the problem. Then there is only enough potential He3 prpduction worldwide to provide 10% of primary energy for about a minute per year. The overwhelming majority of this of this is a gas mining byproduct. Lunar mining might be possible, but the sheer volume of equipment needed means it's just really complicated and inefficient methane or oil power. p + B fusion might not be pure scifi, but noone has demonstrated any compelling evidence. If any of the options have a real application my money is on the general fusion concept purely because it separates the stuff that has to stay the same shape from the stuff that can melt anything by a blanket of liquid metal. I can't think of what that application might be (maybe surface area limited applications like boats? Seems like it's a massive proliferation risk distributing easy neutron sources though).
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      They would produce their own 3He via DD. Explain how you know they are lying about energy recycling?
      - Schroedingersat 4y ago
        > They would produce their own 3He via DD. So solve the problem of fusion producing neutrons which wreck everything by producing neutrons which wreck everything? > Explain how you know they are lying about energy recycling? They brag directly in their promotional videos about recovering the 'remaining' thermal energy in their plasma via a heat exchanger back into their magnets. The second you run your energy through a heat engine twice, you've lost. The entire concept can never be commercialized. That's even if you haven't built a multi billion dollar boondoggle that will fall apart in ten years due to neutron embrittlement.
jmyeet 4y ago
Current proposals for nuclear fusion, most notably hydrogen fusion variants (ie deuterium-tritium in particular), increasingly seem like a pipe dream to me. Fusion seems attractive because stars do it but stars also have gravity on their side. We hafve to build lmeter thick concrete walls to protect against errant neutrons (as mentioned in the article) but that doesn't solve the real problem: escaping neutrons are energy lost. You also can't ignore the fact that those neutrons also destroy the precise equipement designed to contain the reaction. Add to this, you need to perfectly contain an ultra-high temperature plasma and you run into fairly fundamental issues with fluid dynamics (ie turbulence). I'm disappointed but not the least bit surprised that the pro-fission HN crowd tries to hijack this thread into a fission energy argument. Is it possible to discuss nuclear fusion without bringing the quite unrelated fission issue into it?
- ncmncm 4y ago
  There is also the problem of extracting grams of tritium every day from a thousand tons of lithium "blanket" so you will have fuel to operate from tomorrow. But the biggest problem is no one will pay more than 10 cents for what costs you dollars to produce. The fission people hold out hope that people can be forced to pay 50 cents for what they can get for 10 elsewhere.
whycombinetor 4y ago
Are we talking like Nutty Professor levels of big? Should we be concerned about how big the scientists are getting?
- JetAlone 4y ago
  The scientists are becoming enormous. Even inflation fetishists are beginning to voice concern.
jacknews 4y ago
"Star machines", "This form of energy ... will be abundant, efficient, carbon-free, safe", and "solve all of humanity’s energy problems in one fell swoop – amongst many other things. " Humbug. Even if/when it is possible to build a power plant (many decades IMHO) it will be massively costly, the waste from D-T fusion is far more of an issue than is being discussed, the efficiency will be terrible, barely enough to make the thing workable, etc. "Tritium… can be made from another element that is extremely plentiful: lithium." So we're going to burn all the lithium, instead of building batteries with it?
- tuatoru 4y ago
  Doesn't really matter, as we can also build batteries with sodium, calcium, aluminum, iron, zinc, and with carbon polymers. And probably more.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  There is plenty of lithium, but we won't be burning any except in H-bombs. We may hope not there, either. If we don't fend off climate disaster, there will be plenty of that soon enough.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > So we're going to burn all the lithium, instead of building batteries with it? There are lots of reasons DT fusion is stupid, but this isn't one of them. If you made a 1kg lithium battery and filled it with DT fusion from one kg of fuel then you'd have to wear the battery out after filling it thousands of times and recycle it 10s of thousands of times. If you lost 100mg each time you recycled your 1kg battery, you'd run out of battery long before the fuel ran out. The massive resource consumption of fusion comes from burying the 10000t reactor with 100s of tonnes of materials much more exotic than lithium for 100 years after running 100kg of fuel through it
paxys 4y ago
Been hearing a lot of fusion hype lately. Guess it's that time of the decade again..
- ncmncm 4y ago
  The pigeons need to be gulled again.
fuddle 4y ago
There is an old joke that physicists like to wheel out every now and then. It goes like this: fusion power is just 20 years away and it always will be.
rapjr9 4y ago
There are some potential down sides to fusion power. One is that it may make huge energy releases possible. Think releases of heat that physically warm the planet (instead of messing with the atmosphere and causing heating indirectly). Another is that it may enable some machines to run for a very long time, particularly if it becomes well understand enough to make small fusion reactors. Like a robot that remains powered for years, or a tank that runs for years, or a plane that can fly for years (and aircraft carriers, and chemical plants, etc.) Right now it would be very difficult to make a machine that could slowly destroy the world, perhaps by mining and releasing poisons or turning the air into ozone. A fusion powered machine could toil away for a decade with no need for fuel. These are not near term risks, but they are risks none-the-less.
- germinalphrase 4y ago
  Are these your personal speculations or do they have a reference?
  - rapjr9 4y ago
    Personal speculations, but it seems obvious that the raw amount of energy available to civilization would increase dramatically in the long run. What are the consequences of that? They are not necessarily all good.
- moralestapia 4y ago
  LOL, sorry but this is bull. The Sun is hitting the Earth continuously with about 173,000 TW of power [1]. Even with the most optimistic sci-fi scenario with 24/7 nuclear power for everybody on Earth, it would be barely noticeable. 1: https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026 https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026
  - rapjr9 4y ago
    Sure, but how much heat would it take to tip an ecosystem into collapse? Someone could build a fusion plant that just creates CO2 for a decade out of seaweed or something. What I'm saying is that the scale of power available to us would be changed, and there will be consequences to that. Some good, but not many people seem to be thinking about the potential bad consequences. Maybe we could melt glaciers to get drinking water, would that be a good thing?
ck2 4y ago
Won't live long enough to see the answer to this but really curious if very cheap power leads to (much) lower cost of living for the masses or rather is used by nations to power their war-machines and make war cheaper/more frequent.
pabs3 4y ago
What are the inputs and outputs of most potential fusion energy projects?
pjdemers 4y ago
Fusion is the energy source of the future, and it always will be.
hunter-gatherer 4y ago
Why did we have to polarize nuclear and renewables??? Why can't we just aggressively build out and develop both and leave it at that? There is money and resources enough to accomplish both, but as a society we just choose to allocate our time and efforts on stupid bullshit. If people are serious about fighting climate change (which I don't think very many peole are) then we need to Manhatten project the solution. A 'war' needs to be declared and some drastic lifestyle changes need to be made by most of the world population. Everyone talks about nuclear and renewables as if it can only be one or the other. I don't ubderstand this sentiment on HackerNews.
- threatripper 4y ago
  I think that HN is strong in software development areas but those people usually don't have a solid understanding of engineering topics. Using slightly different assumptions, data and mental models you can come to totally different conclusions. Then these energy topics have been heavily polarized by different interest groups for many decades and sophisticated falsehoods are being promoted. I think it is much easier to start with a conclusion and then to build an argument by selecting data than to go the other way of trying to understand all the different alternatives and their impacts. None of the energy sources is ideal in all the ways you can look at it, none of them is a clear winner over all the others (even though it may seem so if you have a simplified understanding). We need to cut through the BS and invest in at least one of the viable solutions. I even think that we can invest enough in all of the viable solutions and then some. The money we are spending on nuclear fusion is still peanuts compared to the whole picture. The "Manhattan project" style approach will happen once our platform is really burning but that may be many years into the future. I'm hopeful that solar and wind out-compete fossil fuel economically and gain enough traction that way.
- LatteLazy 4y ago
  There isn't enough money to replace the current system with fission, it's simply too expensive.
- lm28469 4y ago
  Ask that to ecologists, pro nuclear people don't care if renewable are used in combination with nuclear, but pro renewable are very adamant about the fact nuclear is bad and shouldn't be used at all Take germany, they prefer to guzzle on russian gas or choke on coal fumes rather than admit they fucked up. They've been lobbying against nuclear for years and now they blame france for their electricity issues: https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-set-to-extend-nuclear-power-due-to-much-worse-energy-situation-in-france/ https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-set-to-extend-nuclea...
picsao 4y ago

167 points by hhs 4y ago

dj_gitmo 4y ago

In the third image you can see it's built with Python. See "The tokamak hall at Culham"

metadat 4y ago

Did this page hijack anyone else's back button? Weird.

once_inc 4y ago
Not for me, no.

FernandoTN 4y ago

“Nuclear fusion is 30 years away; and always will be." I wonder how this phrase manages to hold after 50 years since its inception. We could compare it to the state of general AI, but at least in the machine learning field, progress is being made without knowing the feasibility or path to reaching general in AI. In fusion it appears that the theory has already been set and maintaining the chain reaction going for long enough is the limitation (progress being made here), would it be the same case that the final steps are still missing without a clear path, or would the current progress be enough to eventually reach it?

jl6 4y ago
AI research has made slow scientific progress but great engineering progress. Fusion has made great scientific progress but still has a lot of engineering left to do.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > has made great scientific progress but still has a lot of engineering left to do It’s made serious engineering progress too.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Engineering work halted 30+ years ago. There has been no recent work on structural materials that could withstand the neutron bombardment, and no work on extracting bred tritium at parts per billion concentration from thousands of tons of "blanket" material needed for the next day's operation. There is no possibility of any present scheme operating at even 10x the cost of fission. Fission is not today competitive, and falls further behind each day.
    - fallingknife 4y ago
      You can get around the tritium problem with boron-proton fusion. Also gets around the inefficiency of converting to heat / turbines. Obviously not any closer to production (and probably further) than tritium fusion, though. https://hb11.energy/how-it-works/ https://hb11.energy/how-it-works/
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        There is no reason to expect that p-11B fusion is possible. It might be, in a hundred years, if our present understanding is wrong, and somebody figures out how to reflect gamma rays.
        fallingknife 4y ago
        It's been done by firing lasers at a HB pellet, so I assume you mean not possible to be done commercially? And why would you have to reflect gamma rays?
        ncmncm 4y ago
        Obviously you can fuse about anything by accelerating nuclei at each other fast enough. If it takes more energy to do it than you can get back, it is of purely academic interest. Firing lasers comes up many orders of magnitude short. Another alternative is magnetic confinement, but radiative loss goes up with the 4th power of temperature, so would be 10000 times as much as for a D-T plasma, IIUC.
Trouble_007 4y ago
Timeline of Nuclear Fusion : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_nuclear_fusion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_nuclear_fusion
Apocryphon 4y ago
This chart rests upon faulty assumptions about the efficacy of tokamaks, but it does demonstrate how little interest the U.S. federal government has had towards research of fusion. http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusion-researchers-answer-your-questions https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fus...

breck 4y ago

Can someone explain to me the 2nd order effects if we made energy 10x cheaper? Do we ever have to worry about waste heat? I'm not an EE or physicist (maybe in retirement).

llsf 4y ago
I am also interested by this question. Energy => machine/labor => GDP So, my first naive take would be that we could extract/build/ship more for less, and then potentially keeps the "growing" economy humming. Maybe due to my past education/experience, I still feel uncomfortable about more waste (if energy is cheap, why not like in Quatar build stadiums with AC ? keep AC stores doors open in summer, and in winter when the heat is on, etc.) I have a sense that increasing energy waste will come to 2nd order cost on other resources (water, minerals, etc.). Thoughts ?
pstrateman 4y ago
At least for a while fusion isn't about being cheaper. It's about being abundant.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Neither one.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  There is no world where fusion would be more abundant without being cheaper. Sure, it's nice that you only need water to get half the fuel of a fusion power plant, but even for fission, uranium is a fraction of the cost. The reason fission isn't already providing us with abundant power is the huge cost of the extremely advanced fission reactors - which look like lego blocks compared to a fusion reactor. And 1 fusion reactor will generate nowhere near the power of the largest fission reactors we already have, in any design considered realistic today. Not to mention, the extraordinarily expensive fusion reactor you build will become too brittle to hold itself up in the span of 10 years at best, because of the neutron bombardment - turning your massive investment mostly into highly radioactive waste that you'll need expensive robots to disassemble and replace.

GOONIMMUNE 4y ago

I love to follow this field because the engineers working on tokamaks/stellarators/other fusion devices are dealing with some truly extreme technical challenges. However, creating devices that economically overcome those challenges at scale seems unlikely when solar panels and batteries are aggressively decreasing in cost. How will these compete if scientists figure out the longevity problem for perovskite solar? Just my opinion as a layman. I still think the research is worthwhile because of possible future applications (space?)

wefarrell 4y ago
There's only so much surface area on the earth that we can cover with solar panels and global energy consumption is exponential. Abundant energy will enable more possibilities such as removing CO2 from the atmosphere, desalinating water and pumping it into arid regions, and opening up space tourism for the majority of the worlds' population.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  False. There is exactly zero need to devote any land surface at all exclusively to the solar panels that will provide for all our needs. Solar coexists nicely with numerous other uses. Similarly, for wind turbines. Storage may consume some area, but nowhere near what existing fossil fuel extraction activities do. There will be no fusion.
  - mmazing 4y ago
    > There will be no fusion. Scream it into the ether with veins popping out of your head all you want, it doesn't make you correct. Additionally, there's literally no reason to not pursue both avenues.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Nobody is screaming. Even presuming usable structural materials can be discovered (not worked on in 3 decades) and tritium at PPB concentration can be extracted from thousands of tons of blanket material every day (never worked on at all), a working plant would cost more than an order of magnitude more on every axis than fission. But fission is already not competitive. Fission falls farther behind better methods each day. So, no one will build a fusion power plant, and there will be no fusion power. "Pursuing avenues" with no possibility of desirable results is wasted effort and wasted money. We have valid reasons to avoid waste.

rapsey 4y ago

We are much more likely to solve the large scale battery problem than the fusion problem in some reasonable timeframe within our lifetimes. Once we solve the battery problem solar and wind become enough to power humanity.

once_inc 4y ago
Honest question: doesn't the production of battery and photovoltaic cells require quite an investment of rare elements and significant carbon emission?
- rapsey 4y ago
  They last 20 years though. The investment pays off over a long period.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ngvrnd 4y ago
    not just a cost question but a resource availability/energetic cost of resource extraction question. If it takes more and more fossil fuel use to extract the increasingly rare components of the renewables, then renewables may not be able to save us. I don't know if it is true, but it is a legitimate question which is worth knowing the answer to...
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      There are no "increasingly rare components". So, no, it is not any sort of legitimate question. It is, rather, concern trolling.
      - _uhtu 4y ago
        My guess is he's talking about Lithium and if so that's not concern trolling, Lithium mining is very expensive and if we want to go full renewable we'll need some major storage capacity. There's obviously ways around that, hydro storage being the most obvious, but it is something to think about.

vlovich123 4y ago

Commercial profitable nuclear fusion is a maybe by the end of the century. We really need to get nuclear fission capacity built out ASAP if we're serious about global warming and the overall health of the planet. Renewables just won't get us there. Moreover, we need to overbuild the amount of clean energy produced to the point where we can waste it on energy inefficient processes for carbon recapture that we know work. Fusion is important in terms of helping this to continue to scale / make it even more economical / reduce nuclear waste and weapons concerns. Ultimately though, it's an iterative step over fission for the problems the most urgent ecological problems the world is facing. EDIT: Did some back of the envelope math. Nuclear energy is worst case ~ $200 USD / MWh. At 2,400 kWh/tCO2 for direct air capture, that's $14 trillion USD or ~16% of the world's GDP that would instantly get us to net 0 yearly emissions. We'd need to invest more than that to start reducing carbon levels. This wouldn't recover things since damage is already done in many places (e.g. coral reef deaths) but it would arrest the worsening of issues. Additionally, this has knock on effects that improves the economy overall (weaker storms = less money recovering from disasters).

bpodgursky 4y ago
Do you have any concept of how far away the end of the century is? That's 80 years. Think back to 1942. It's ridiculously arrogant to make predictions like this.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  The most optimistic estimates by the commercial companies working in this space is the first commercial reactors coming online around ~2050. It takes time to build these reactors and integrate them into the existing power systems. I may have misstated my position which is that I don't think fusion will make up any meaningful part of power by the end of the century. The reason is a) requires fundamental engineering and materials breakthroughs b) funding for it is a pitiful amount compared to what it probably needs c) it's competing with other cheaper energy sources d) we don't have any net positive energy reactors yet. The basis of that prediction is just looking at how long it took fission to take off and there it was being driven by military needs (submarines) and not civilian.

fguerraz 4y ago

The real question is no if it's the energy of the future. The real question is it going to be in time to save us? Even if we knew exactly how to make fusion reactor today, how long would it take for it to effectively replace all the fossil fuel energy? Too long is the answer.

marcosdumay 4y ago
> The real question is it going to be in time to save us? From what? Global warming? No, it won't. If somebody creates commercially viable fusion today, it will still take some 3 to 5 decades until it is common enough to impact our energy generation. And if it is based on breeding Tritium, those 3 to 5 decades are dictated by physics. (But just the ramp-up on constructing those power plants is enough of an issue, no fundamental physics needed.)

cl42 4y ago

I personally believe that nuclear fusion is a necessity for long-term survival of humanity -- I'm talking centuries out. I am not a physicist (humble startup dude / engineer / sales guy). Is there anything someone like me can do to contribute to this space?

ncmncm 4y ago
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  As amusing as it is to see an inverted shtick of the Fusion Energy Foundation that matches the same tenor as that organization, most proponents of solar and wind probably don't see R&D into other methods of power generation as a zero-sum game that detracts from their own favored approach. Not to mention, research into fusion, and indeed any type of nuclear power, is likely overwhelmingly dwarfed by all of the efforts spent into greenhouse gas-generating fossil fuels. Given that, the aforementioned tenor is rather quixotic and misplaced.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Money is fungible. A billion dollars spent chasing fusion is exactly a billion not spent displacing CO2 production.
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      Money is not fungible when it’s never in the hands of a person or organization who is going to make the binary decision of investing in fusion vs. investing in renewables. You are creating a false dilemma that does not actually exist in real life. Furthermore, if you really cared about advancing the cause of solar and wind, you would take that tenor and energy towards attacking fossil fuels, rather than a completely marginal segment of the power generation pie.
      - 4y ago

johnnymorgan 4y ago

What I want to know is why nobody talks about this.. https://brillouinenergy.com/news https://brillouinenergy.com/news > Researchers at SRI International have issued a Technical Progress Report covering their review and independent validation of Brillouin Energy’s on-going testing and scaling efforts of its most advanced Isoperibolic (“IPB”) Hydrogen Hot Tube™ (HHT™) component prototypes, which generate controlled Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (“LENR”). I've been keeping an eye on it since 89 and this seemed significant.

philipkglass 4y ago
It's probably because they appear to be cranks who keep promising results right around the corner and never deliver. Here's a story from 10 years ago about how Brillouin's technology can generate electricity for 1 cent per kilowatt hour, linked from their official blog at the time [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130515012248/http://pesn.com/2012/04/19/9602078_Brillouin--Understanding_How_LENR_Works_Will_Enable_Us_to_Be_First/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130515012248/http://pesn.com/2... If they had an empirically working device, by now they could just be using it generate heat and/or power and leave it up to better-funded institutes to figure out the mechanism after the fact. Since they're not selling the devices and they're not selling power, and they've been "iterating" for years, I don't think that they actually have anything. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130421190244/http://brillouinenergy.blogspot.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130421190244/http://brillouine...
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Making empty promises about fusion tech is a good way to collect investors' money with no risk of fraud indictments, and no need ever to pay any back. Work done under government grants is similar.
- johnnymorgan 4y ago
  Tbh it was only the SRI confirmation that caught my eye. I've mostly written this off but was curious what the relevance of it was as it did seem to be verified by an independent body. The question of if the tech can actually be used for power generation..no idea but never seemed likely.

packetlost 4y ago

The amount of anti nuclear from a few accounts in this thread is weird and reeks of weird concern trolling.

notacoward 4y ago
It's mostly from one person, who somehow gets away with (up to) dozens of low-effort comments on every single story about nuclear power. I happen to agree with their basic premise, but still find it highly suspect that such spammy behavior continues to be allowed.
- packetlost 4y ago
  They seem like a concern troll-for-hire type of thing tbh. I find it concerning that they're allowed to continue to be here too
tuatoru 4y ago
In my own case I'm just trying to get people to let go of the idea that nuclear (fission or fusion) is viable for electricity generation. Please read the paper by Way, Ives, Mealy and Farmer[1], look at the trends, and draw your own conclusions. Edit: as I said in another comment: It's 1972, the microprocessor has been invented, and these guys are saying "what the world needs is much bigger mainframes. Much, much bigger." 1. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Looks like there's a discussion thread here. https://www.reddit.com/r/RenewableEnergy/comments/xeydwp/empirically_grounded_technology_forecasts_and_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RenewableEnergy/comments/xeydwp/emp...
  - tuatoru 4y ago
    Thanks for that. The main criticism is that "it looks like a curve fit". Indeed it does; the paper talks at length about this very thing. (Mostly in the 400 page supplementary paper S1.) But the thing is, the curves (Moore's and Wright's) apply to a lot of technologies undergoing rapid expansion. That's actually the science contribution of the paper: setting out a better way to make policy-relevant forecasts, and hopefully ending the abysmal track record of forecasts that is documented in the paper. (I can see ways to get at least 67% cost reductions in both wind and PV from where we are now, and I'm just an interested layman. So in at least the near term we will likely keep following the curves. Yes, actual work has to be done, but there's no voodoo. Just like with microprocessors.)

tuatoru 4y ago

It's 1972, the microprocessor has been invented, and these guys are saying "what the world needs is much bigger mainframes. Much, much bigger." You owe it to yourself to read the paper by Way, Ives, Mealy and Farmer in Joule, "Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition". Or at least look at the pictures. 1. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X

vladkovalev 4y ago

Helion energy?

ncmncm 4y ago
This is the only fusion project that could conceivably have a future.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  It really isn't. First they're openly lying about how they get energy out. Only a tiny fraction will come out via their EM coupling, the rest has to be recycled via a heat engine at massive loss even to keep it running. They tell you this indirectly in their press releases but then go on to say that the EM coupling solves the problem. Then there is only enough potential He3 prpduction worldwide to provide 10% of primary energy for about a minute per year. The overwhelming majority of this of this is a gas mining byproduct. Lunar mining might be possible, but the sheer volume of equipment needed means it's just really complicated and inefficient methane or oil power. p + B fusion might not be pure scifi, but noone has demonstrated any compelling evidence. If any of the options have a real application my money is on the general fusion concept purely because it separates the stuff that has to stay the same shape from the stuff that can melt anything by a blanket of liquid metal. I can't think of what that application might be (maybe surface area limited applications like boats? Seems like it's a massive proliferation risk distributing easy neutron sources though).
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    They would produce their own 3He via DD. Explain how you know they are lying about energy recycling?
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      > They would produce their own 3He via DD. So solve the problem of fusion producing neutrons which wreck everything by producing neutrons which wreck everything? > Explain how you know they are lying about energy recycling? They brag directly in their promotional videos about recovering the 'remaining' thermal energy in their plasma via a heat exchanger back into their magnets. The second you run your energy through a heat engine twice, you've lost. The entire concept can never be commercialized. That's even if you haven't built a multi billion dollar boondoggle that will fall apart in ten years due to neutron embrittlement.

jmyeet 4y ago

Current proposals for nuclear fusion, most notably hydrogen fusion variants (ie deuterium-tritium in particular), increasingly seem like a pipe dream to me. Fusion seems attractive because stars do it but stars also have gravity on their side. We hafve to build lmeter thick concrete walls to protect against errant neutrons (as mentioned in the article) but that doesn't solve the real problem: escaping neutrons are energy lost. You also can't ignore the fact that those neutrons also destroy the precise equipement designed to contain the reaction. Add to this, you need to perfectly contain an ultra-high temperature plasma and you run into fairly fundamental issues with fluid dynamics (ie turbulence). I'm disappointed but not the least bit surprised that the pro-fission HN crowd tries to hijack this thread into a fission energy argument. Is it possible to discuss nuclear fusion without bringing the quite unrelated fission issue into it?

ncmncm 4y ago
There is also the problem of extracting grams of tritium every day from a thousand tons of lithium "blanket" so you will have fuel to operate from tomorrow. But the biggest problem is no one will pay more than 10 cents for what costs you dollars to produce. The fission people hold out hope that people can be forced to pay 50 cents for what they can get for 10 elsewhere.

whycombinetor 4y ago

Are we talking like Nutty Professor levels of big? Should we be concerned about how big the scientists are getting?

JetAlone 4y ago
The scientists are becoming enormous. Even inflation fetishists are beginning to voice concern.

jacknews 4y ago

"Star machines", "This form of energy ... will be abundant, efficient, carbon-free, safe", and "solve all of humanity’s energy problems in one fell swoop – amongst many other things. " Humbug. Even if/when it is possible to build a power plant (many decades IMHO) it will be massively costly, the waste from D-T fusion is far more of an issue than is being discussed, the efficiency will be terrible, barely enough to make the thing workable, etc. "Tritium… can be made from another element that is extremely plentiful: lithium." So we're going to burn all the lithium, instead of building batteries with it?

tuatoru 4y ago
Doesn't really matter, as we can also build batteries with sodium, calcium, aluminum, iron, zinc, and with carbon polymers. And probably more.
ncmncm 4y ago
There is plenty of lithium, but we won't be burning any except in H-bombs. We may hope not there, either. If we don't fend off climate disaster, there will be plenty of that soon enough.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
> So we're going to burn all the lithium, instead of building batteries with it? There are lots of reasons DT fusion is stupid, but this isn't one of them. If you made a 1kg lithium battery and filled it with DT fusion from one kg of fuel then you'd have to wear the battery out after filling it thousands of times and recycle it 10s of thousands of times. If you lost 100mg each time you recycled your 1kg battery, you'd run out of battery long before the fuel ran out. The massive resource consumption of fusion comes from burying the 10000t reactor with 100s of tonnes of materials much more exotic than lithium for 100 years after running 100kg of fuel through it

paxys 4y ago

Been hearing a lot of fusion hype lately. Guess it's that time of the decade again..

ncmncm 4y ago
The pigeons need to be gulled again.

fuddle 4y ago

There is an old joke that physicists like to wheel out every now and then. It goes like this: fusion power is just 20 years away and it always will be.

rapjr9 4y ago

There are some potential down sides to fusion power. One is that it may make huge energy releases possible. Think releases of heat that physically warm the planet (instead of messing with the atmosphere and causing heating indirectly). Another is that it may enable some machines to run for a very long time, particularly if it becomes well understand enough to make small fusion reactors. Like a robot that remains powered for years, or a tank that runs for years, or a plane that can fly for years (and aircraft carriers, and chemical plants, etc.) Right now it would be very difficult to make a machine that could slowly destroy the world, perhaps by mining and releasing poisons or turning the air into ozone. A fusion powered machine could toil away for a decade with no need for fuel. These are not near term risks, but they are risks none-the-less.

germinalphrase 4y ago
Are these your personal speculations or do they have a reference?
- rapjr9 4y ago
  Personal speculations, but it seems obvious that the raw amount of energy available to civilization would increase dramatically in the long run. What are the consequences of that? They are not necessarily all good.
moralestapia 4y ago
LOL, sorry but this is bull. The Sun is hitting the Earth continuously with about 173,000 TW of power [1]. Even with the most optimistic sci-fi scenario with 24/7 nuclear power for everybody on Earth, it would be barely noticeable. 1: https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026 https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026
- rapjr9 4y ago
  Sure, but how much heat would it take to tip an ecosystem into collapse? Someone could build a fusion plant that just creates CO2 for a decade out of seaweed or something. What I'm saying is that the scale of power available to us would be changed, and there will be consequences to that. Some good, but not many people seem to be thinking about the potential bad consequences. Maybe we could melt glaciers to get drinking water, would that be a good thing?

ck2 4y ago

Won't live long enough to see the answer to this but really curious if very cheap power leads to (much) lower cost of living for the masses or rather is used by nations to power their war-machines and make war cheaper/more frequent.

pabs3 4y ago

What are the inputs and outputs of most potential fusion energy projects?

pjdemers 4y ago

Fusion is the energy source of the future, and it always will be.

hunter-gatherer 4y ago

Why did we have to polarize nuclear and renewables??? Why can't we just aggressively build out and develop both and leave it at that? There is money and resources enough to accomplish both, but as a society we just choose to allocate our time and efforts on stupid bullshit. If people are serious about fighting climate change (which I don't think very many peole are) then we need to Manhatten project the solution. A 'war' needs to be declared and some drastic lifestyle changes need to be made by most of the world population. Everyone talks about nuclear and renewables as if it can only be one or the other. I don't ubderstand this sentiment on HackerNews.

threatripper 4y ago
I think that HN is strong in software development areas but those people usually don't have a solid understanding of engineering topics. Using slightly different assumptions, data and mental models you can come to totally different conclusions. Then these energy topics have been heavily polarized by different interest groups for many decades and sophisticated falsehoods are being promoted. I think it is much easier to start with a conclusion and then to build an argument by selecting data than to go the other way of trying to understand all the different alternatives and their impacts. None of the energy sources is ideal in all the ways you can look at it, none of them is a clear winner over all the others (even though it may seem so if you have a simplified understanding). We need to cut through the BS and invest in at least one of the viable solutions. I even think that we can invest enough in all of the viable solutions and then some. The money we are spending on nuclear fusion is still peanuts compared to the whole picture. The "Manhattan project" style approach will happen once our platform is really burning but that may be many years into the future. I'm hopeful that solar and wind out-compete fossil fuel economically and gain enough traction that way.
LatteLazy 4y ago
There isn't enough money to replace the current system with fission, it's simply too expensive.
lm28469 4y ago
Ask that to ecologists, pro nuclear people don't care if renewable are used in combination with nuclear, but pro renewable are very adamant about the fact nuclear is bad and shouldn't be used at all Take germany, they prefer to guzzle on russian gas or choke on coal fumes rather than admit they fucked up. They've been lobbying against nuclear for years and now they blame france for their electricity issues: https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-set-to-extend-nuclear-power-due-to-much-worse-energy-situation-in-france/ https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-set-to-extend-nuclea...

picsao 4y ago