19 ms·

Largest tokamak fusion reactor powers up

162 points by clouddrover 3y ago

fgoesbrrr 3y ago
I thought ITER was the biggest tokamak. BTW, what is the status of ITER?
- clouddrover 3y ago
  Still building it. Start is scheduled for late 2025: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Timeline_and_status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Timeline_and_status https://www.iter.org/proj/itermilestones https://www.iter.org/proj/itermilestones
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    I love how they won't even start putting the actual fuel (deuterium-tritium) into it for another decade, and then it's still just a research reactor, so it has no hope of producing a useful amount of recoverable electricity. For that, there's the upcoming DEMO reactor, which will demonstrate (hence the name) electricity generation no earlier than 2048, a quarter of a century from today. In 2050, half way through the century, according to the EU plans for fusion power, there will be one (1) fusion power plant on the continent that can make any amount of electricity, for a net cost of $100 billion. That $100 billion could have purchased 100 GW of installed utility-scale solar at 2022 prices[1], which continue to drop. By 2050, that amount of money could have likely purchased 200 GW plus batteries, covering about 50% of the European Union electricity demand. Instead the EU will have a single ~1 GW of fusion power plant, with each additional gigawatt costing ten-plus billion, vastly more expensive than renewable energy sources by that decade. [1] https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-installed-system-cost.html https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-in...
    - sgift 3y ago
      Yes, research costs money at first in the hope of getting results later. Comparing it to buying something is only useful if you think what the research does can also be achieved by that. Since you ignore the question of whether Europe even has space for 100 or 200GW of solar power, that this power is only intermediately available (though there's hope that storage will be somewhat solved in 2050 using ... research!) and so on. We could get Fusion faster. That would cost more money. Governments are not willing to invest that, so we stay the course with the slow path. edit: Also, your 100b estimate is even higher than the - disputed - worst case assumptions of the DOE, which is somewhere between 45 to 65b. Also: http://www.iter.org/faq#Do_we_really_know_how_much_ITER_will_cost http://www.iter.org/faq#Do_we_really_know_how_much_ITER_will...
      - Kon5ole 3y ago
        >Since you ignore the question of whether Europe even has space for 100 or 200GW of solar power That's a question that can safely be ignored though, Germany alone has installed rooftop solar on a small percentage of homes and is already at 70GW. Space is not a problem for solar, you can install it everywhere. It's so cheap now that it's viable even in sub-optimal locations. >though there's hope that storage will be somewhat solved in 2050 using ... research! It is solved already, all that remains to do is to build it. Germany has enough gas storage to last a year, and we know how to generate gas from electricity. It's being done in several places already. I think the major hold-up is political. Moving energy production from the current government-controlled central power plants to small-scale operations close to the consumer is too disruptive for lots of reasons. But I have hope that eventually we'll get there, it just takes time. That said, spending billions on things that won't solve any problems for the nest 50 years and using that as a reason to not actually do the thing that will work is inexcusable. At least do both.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        > It is solved already, all that remains to do is to build it. Germany has enough gas storage to last a year, and we know how to generate gas from electricity. It's being done in several places already. If storage is solved, then I think we would've heard about it. > That said, spending billions on things that won't solve any problems for the nest 50 years and using that as a reason to not actually do the thing that will work is inexcusable. At least do both. Who is using this as a reason to not do the other thing?
    - rapnie 3y ago
      Well, if all this R&D investment gives us clean energy for the next centuries at affordable cost, it is an improvement right? And we don't have to cover our land and waters with solar farms that have their own externalities (limited lifetime, waste, harmful materials, etc).
      - raffraffraff 3y ago
        The problem is surviving long enough to make a fusion breakthrough. Fusion may actually be an impossible engineering problen. Fission is cheap and easy by comparison.
    - jl6 3y ago
      Many EU countries aren’t blessed with the square mileage and hours of sunlight required for giga-scale solar. A dense, continuous power source would be very welcome, even at a higher cost.
      - gnfargbl 3y ago
        Then why aren't those EU countries negotiating agreements with other less-well-off countries that are so blessed? Yes, that would require a cable. But it isn't rational to be in a situation where we believe we can build a fusion reactor, but some relatively simple civil engineering is apparently beyond us.
        ragebol 3y ago
        Though not the EU anymore, but something like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Power_Project?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe... The downside being you still don't have energy independence, if that is a goal.
        offices 3y ago
        It should be a goal. It's less than 2 years since a former EU ally used our dependence on them for energy as a bargaining tool.
        gnfargbl 3y ago
        We haven't had energy independence in Europe for decades. That risk is managed by hedging, and there's no reason we couldn't do the same with long-distance solar interconnects.
        adwn 3y ago
        > We haven't had energy independence in Europe for decades. Yes, and that has bitten us in the ass big time.
        wkat4242 3y ago
    - AndrewDucker 3y ago
      It is worth doing multiple things, some short term, some long term. If you only ever invest in the solution which pays back right now, then you never get the next step. We should absolutely be doing both.
    - ragebol 3y ago
      Our energy needs are ever increasing. If we ever want to get to what is currently science fiction, we'll need fusion energy, otherwise we'll eventually blanket the Earth in solar panels. Maybe they'll be in time to provide energy to slurp carbon out of the atmosphere. Or power huge spacecraft etc etc.
      - shermantanktop 3y ago
        Various estimates put the US’s entire energy supply as requiring enough solar panels to fill a square between 100 and 150 miles on a side. If efficiency goes up (which has upper bounds) and panels are integrated into buildings, solar being that virtually limitless supply doesn’t seem far-fetched.
    - mythhabit 3y ago
      A fusion reactor is the long term game. Sure we could use that money to add more capacity to the grid, but what we need is to take fossil fuels offline and 200 GW would barely make a dent in the production from coal if the consumption continues to increase. In 2022 it was estimated that coal produced 44000 TWh and that number increase at an alarming rate every year. So we need to do something to meet the futures energy demands, but we also need to do something today. The smart thing is to invest in what we can do today, solar, wind and batteries, and invest what we can do in the near future, better fission reactors is one possibility, and invest in the long term, that could be fusion. It would be foolish to only invest in one of them.
      - jiggawatts 3y ago
        Long term? You say that like the Sun will go out and we’ll need artificial power to survive.
        mythhabit 3y ago
        If we rely on solar, we need a massive overcapacity. In large parts of the world the output of a solar panel is 50% in the winter compared to the summer, and in addition, we use significantly more power during the winter. And that will be even further exaggerated if fossils do not heat water for district heating in addition to the power produced - but perhaps that is offset by AC usage in the summer. Either way, we would need a significant overcapacity to meet demand, not to mention huge investments in battery infrastructure. And that does not even take predictable peaks into account (think the pause of a national event with lots of viewers, where people make coffee/tea/snacks at the same time), which needs fossil peaker plants, or even more battery capacity.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      2048 is twentyfive years from now.
    - specialist 3y ago
      Fusion is a terrific way to build and retain a knowledge skill stack indefinitely. IMHO, fusion is preferable to nukes (weapons) for that purpose.
    - nosrepa 3y ago
      ITER has no hope of producing any electricity because there are no turbines on site.
- sgift 3y ago
  It will be, when it starts. For now this is. It's testing things also needed later for ITER and DEMO.
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    If DEMO is ever built. My sincerest hope is that Commonwealth Fusion Systems does so well with SPARC and ARC that DEMO never needs to be built. DEMO would be so incredibly expensive to build that it would never produce economical energy.
    - sgift 3y ago
      I hope for the same. But it's nice to know there's a backup in case none of the more "moonshoot" projects pan out.
- CaptainSamJohn 3y ago
  Also wondering if they resolved the main issue which is plasma disruptions in Tokamaks ? Because, you may build bigger and bigger Tokamaks but if the main issue is still there it won't change the result.
  - bmitc 3y ago
    Commonwealth Fusion Systems holds the thesis that you need stronger magnets so that you make the reactor smaller.
fanf2 3y ago
JT-60 is a similar size and age to JET in England. JT-60 has been rebuilt over the last few years to use superconducting magnets. JET was shut down at the end of October.
throwaway_65123 3y ago
Fun fact - The computer science department of the Moscow State University [1] was created in 1970 as a joint effort between Physics and Math departments to address computational needs of Tokamak models. Hence the official name - the department of computational mathematics and cybernetics. The joke goes that they were hoping to "solve the Tokamak" in a couple of years and then move on to other fields of computer science - a dream that is still very much alive. [1] https://cs.msu.ru/en https://cs.msu.ru/en
- mustafa_pasi 3y ago
  Interesting. Computational mathematics has really very little to do with traditional CS topics.
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    Traditional CS is not in vogue at ex-USSR universities. Poring over type systems and pure functions just never caught up over here, compared to good old Knuth-worth "close to metal" CS. Some SDEs do take interest in these topics independently, though.
    - DeathArrow 3y ago
      What do they study in ex-USSR universities?
      - thriftwy 3y ago
        Data structures, low-level workings of CPU and other hardware, computational compexities, binary algebra, combinatorics and discrete maths. Throw in some logic circuits design. The same things they ask on FAANG interviews, coincidentally.
        flopriore 3y ago
        It seems very similar to what we study in "Computer Science and Engineering" in Italy, which is a different degree from "Computer Science". The former is considered engineering, the latter isn't (pretty strange tbh, but that's how it works)
ssijak 3y ago
will this produce net positive energy?
- rollcat 3y ago
  Not yet, it's still very much an R&D project in an R&D field. Also don't worry, you wouldn't miss it - the very moment we have net positive fusion at industrial scale, it will be the news of the century.
- gary_0 3y ago
  That's the goal of the project, and they're already close: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JT-60 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JT-60 So far the NIF in California is the only reactor I'm aware of that has achieved ignition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition#2021_and_2022_ignition_reports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition#2021_and_2022_... But AFAIK there are no Tokamak reactors planned that will be able to run continuously and produce useful power. These are all experimental reactors that will be self-sustaining for only a few seconds here and there.
  - fanf2 3y ago
    NIF is not a Tokamak, it does inertial laser confinement fusion. (No magnets, not a torus.)
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    "But AFAIK there are no "Tokamak reactors planned that will be able to run continuously and produce useful power. These are all experimental reactors that will be self-sustaining for only a few seconds here and there. " But are there at least theoretical concepts, on how one could build a tokamak reactor that can run continiously? In other words, is the main disadvantage of the Tokamak solved in any way? If not, why is the Stellerator design not getting more attention?
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    > But AFAIK there are no Tokamak reactors planned that will be able to run continuously and produce useful power DEMO, but don't expect to see it any time soon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant#Timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant#Time...
aitchnyu 3y ago
> a little patience might be in order Umm, will this show up in time to save the world by removing unfossiling our energy needs?
- luplex 3y ago
  Nope, definitely not by 2030
- jksk61 3y ago
  of course not, none is considering fusion as a reliable workable solution for the 2050 net zero goals. I mean they don't even consider opting out gas and oil until 2040s or even later lol
- kaliqt 3y ago
  Save the world? Yes. Because it's not going to end anytime soon due to fossil fuels.
- bobim 3y ago
  The "world" is a very different thing than what you mean: "our current, energy guzzling, way of life"
hschne 3y ago
If anyone was wondering, like me, why it took over ten years to assemble this thing: The video at the end gives you a good idea. I wonder how anyone goes about planning such an enormous effort.
- _Microft 3y ago
  Time lapse of the assembly of Wendelstein 7-X: https://www.ipp.mpg.de/1727365/zeitraffer_w7x https://www.ipp.mpg.de/1727365/zeitraffer_w7x This is the assembly of Wendelstein 7-X, also over the span of a decade. It is a stellarator-type test reactor in Germany. Stellarators offer the advantage of possibly continous operations while tokamaks need to be pulsed but that necessitates a lot of contorted coils.
- freeqaz 3y ago
  Direct link for anybody interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eno5410tO0g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eno5410tO0g (Also in case of bitrot from the original article dying)
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    Thanks, it looks like a very big project.
- Timshel 3y ago
  If you want more details on tokamak construction there is recent videos done on Iter by : - Up an Atom : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5RxUW7VC-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5RxUW7VC-A - Practical Engineering : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD3dMzv1vIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD3dMzv1vIQ And for the french speaker an older take from Monsieur Bidouille : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36WpRwY2DYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36WpRwY2DYw And there appear to be a dedicated YT channel : https://www.youtube.com/@iterorganization/videos https://www.youtube.com/@iterorganization/videos
methou 3y ago
Hopefully we could see a price drop in utility prices in Japan. Eventually EVs should be affordable.
- sgift 3y ago
  It's a research project. It won't produce energy. So no, you won't, sorry.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hasoleju 3y ago
> However, since successful fusion power would provide humanity with unlimited clean power forever, a little patience might be in order. This great promise seems to be the main reason why we still try to built that machine. I have the feeling that putting these resources into economically already proven clean technologies would be a better investment. On the other hand, a lot of young researchers are working on such a project. Their education is also valuable and might justify parts of that investment.
- Timshel 3y ago
  The cost appear exorbitant but in the end it's not much compared to what it will cost to replace fossil fuels. And it's not like the current proven clean technologies do not have drawbacks.
- delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
  > I have the feeling that putting these resources into economically already proven clean technologies would be a better investment. There's something to be said about putting all one's eggs in one basket. While current renewables are a big leap over non-renewables, there are glaring flaws in each implementation. Wind and solar still require massive manufacturing and transportation back-ends to scale up, and solar in particular requires weird rare-earths, the mining of which causes serious ecological issues. Nuclear fission power is fantastic, but has a huge PR and NIMBY problem (despite ironically being orders of magnitude safer than its non-renewable counterparts), and therefore has skyrocketing costs today as well. Battery-electric vehicles and storage face the same problem, and in many cases, simply offload their emissions to a central (usually coal/oil/gas-fired) power station. There's a lot of money to go around; the gross world product is approaching US$100 trillion and I'm fairly certain a handful of billions could be spared for the development of fusion. In terms of physics, it's a solved problem; even in terms of engineering, the issue has been narrowed down to confining the working plasma enough and managing instabilities for long enough to produce net positive power. Funnily enough a big issue previously was having enough compute to simulate the plasma behaviour; with high-end GPUs, this is also less of a problem now. I am cautiously optimistic—ITER is going for sheer size, whereas start-ups like SPARC are trying new superconducting magnets. I believe the late 2020s and early 2030s will be a very productive period for fusion.
stefantalpalaru 3y ago
[dead]
reacharavindh 3y ago
Imagine, if Russia had gone the "Norway model" and used all the oil money to good use.... A soverign fund that improves teh lives of the citizens of the country, and invests in research that benefits the greater good, or even nationalistically, serving national interests in technical prowess. Instead they have oligarchs and war. We humans can't have nice things.
- bvoq 3y ago
  I actually think the Russian people are too nice and tolerant. Too many Russians choose to ignore what's happening, they are too nice to their leaders.
  - throwaway_65123 3y ago
    It's not because they are nice and tolerant. People are threatened, brainwashed and provided with semblance of comfortable life in equal measures. Like that boiled frog, little by little they lost all their basic fundamental rights and freedoms to the point where a large part of the populace doesn't even question what's happening and those who do can't do anything about it. It is a profoundly disheartening to see what happened to the country and how very few cared.
    - argiopetech 3y ago
      This could be referring to any one of a number of nations, I'm afraid. Nicely summarized.
      - smackeyacky 3y ago
        Wait. Is Norway a distopian nightmare like Russia? Did that happen yesterday and I like missed it or something?
    - stjohnswarts 3y ago
      Yeah I think a lot of people in the West don't understand that 80% of the Russian people support what Putin is doing in Ukraine and to his own people.
TomaszZielinski 3y ago
This is unrelated to fusion, but it's HN so I'm hoping such trivia fits here :) In my previous life I was a game developer. For one of my games I needed a physics engine. And one of the candidates was <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak_(software)>. And ever since then, whenever I read or hear the word "tokamak", my first thought hasn't been fusion, but 3d games :)
- elliottkember 3y ago
  Naming things AND cache invalidation, in one comment. You’re only off by one.
  - shermantanktop 3y ago
    Which puts you at three, I think. But the only numbers that matter are zero, one, and more than one.
    - volemo 3y ago
      Zero, one, and carry, you mean?
WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
There can't be such massive projects without public funding, the private sector yet again fails humankind, thanks to everyone who, through their government, continue to fund these massive scientific projects
fennecfoxy 3y ago
I think I'm still more interested in what CFS are doing with their SPARC reactor. It seems like they're just trying to brute force fusion with stronger magnets. The article also makes the point of how much time/money has been spent on fusion...well yeah, once we crack fusion it solves a lot of problems. The other major thing for humanity is solving space travel/mining so that we can rip into asteroids instead of our one planet.
jd116 3y ago
While Tokamaks have gathered a lot of attention, one alternative approach is the stellarator [1]. It attempts to solve plasma drift problems with a twisted torus design, potentially allowing continuous operation. Although overshadowed by Tokamak research, advancements in stellarators could provide valuable insights into plasma stability and containment. Separately, in the 1960s scientists developed the plasma focus device [2], which, instead of trying to suppress plasma instabilities, sought to exploit them to compress energy. This approach, though less mainstream, could offer alternative methods for achieving fusion. Finally, research into deuterium-tritium (DT) fuel has dominated, but DT has drawbacks, like neutron production and associated radioactive waste. Since the 60s, there's been knowledge of aneutronic fusion reactions [3] (like hydrogen-boron or pB11) that produce no or few neutrons. These require higher temperatures but offer advantages for cleaner energy. However, research in this area has been minimal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_plasma_focus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_plasma_focus [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion
- Zardoz84 3y ago
  what happened to magnetic mirrors designs?
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    There's an interesting design called WHAM being pursued. https://wippl.wisc.edu/wisconsin-hts-axisymmetric-mirror/ https://wippl.wisc.edu/wisconsin-hts-axisymmetric-mirror/ https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2020-09/Day1_1405_UWM_Forest.pdf https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2020-09/Day1_1... There's been advancements that promise to nix various instabilies and loss modes that had stymied previous work. https://plasma.physics.swarthmore.edu/brownpapers/WHAMmirror21.pdf https://plasma.physics.swarthmore.edu/brownpapers/WHAMmirror...
theptip 3y ago
> For 75 years we've been told that fusion power was only 25 years away This one always cracks me up. When I studied Physics in the early 2000s the joke was “fusion power has been 50 years away for the last 50 years”. If it’s 25 years away now that is finally progress, even if everyone forgot the previous predictions. Although perhaps assume a 2:1 estimate:progress ratio based on the evidence?
- Towaway69 3y ago
  It reminds me of the current discussions around AI and when will we'll have AGI. It will happen sooner than expected.
  - volemo 3y ago
    Your comment is a good example of the Reverse Tinkerbell effect.
- bsder 3y ago
  > This one always cracks me up. It doesn't crack me up. Our funding for fusion has always been below the "fusion never" line on the graph. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FWQaKc8XEAAAVmZ.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FWQaKc8XEAAAVmZ.jpg:large If only we had as much funding for fusion as we do for Skinner boxes ...
  - bastawhiz 3y ago
    The Chicago police department gets more annual funding than fusion (in 2012), according to that graph. Wild.
  - mcmoor 3y ago
    It seems to me that there's fewer believable research proposal than predicted
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    So, instead of buying twitter, a single man could have “bought” us fusion for all, instead he brought us X.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
I hope that future civilizations get this working, and that it requires an incredibly powerful AI to wrangle the star on earth to be safe.

162 points by clouddrover 3y ago

fgoesbrrr 3y ago

I thought ITER was the biggest tokamak. BTW, what is the status of ITER?

clouddrover 3y ago
Still building it. Start is scheduled for late 2025: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Timeline_and_status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Timeline_and_status https://www.iter.org/proj/itermilestones https://www.iter.org/proj/itermilestones
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  I love how they won't even start putting the actual fuel (deuterium-tritium) into it for another decade, and then it's still just a research reactor, so it has no hope of producing a useful amount of recoverable electricity. For that, there's the upcoming DEMO reactor, which will demonstrate (hence the name) electricity generation no earlier than 2048, a quarter of a century from today. In 2050, half way through the century, according to the EU plans for fusion power, there will be one (1) fusion power plant on the continent that can make any amount of electricity, for a net cost of $100 billion. That $100 billion could have purchased 100 GW of installed utility-scale solar at 2022 prices[1], which continue to drop. By 2050, that amount of money could have likely purchased 200 GW plus batteries, covering about 50% of the European Union electricity demand. Instead the EU will have a single ~1 GW of fusion power plant, with each additional gigawatt costing ten-plus billion, vastly more expensive than renewable energy sources by that decade. [1] https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-installed-system-cost.html https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-in...
  - sgift 3y ago
    Yes, research costs money at first in the hope of getting results later. Comparing it to buying something is only useful if you think what the research does can also be achieved by that. Since you ignore the question of whether Europe even has space for 100 or 200GW of solar power, that this power is only intermediately available (though there's hope that storage will be somewhat solved in 2050 using ... research!) and so on. We could get Fusion faster. That would cost more money. Governments are not willing to invest that, so we stay the course with the slow path. edit: Also, your 100b estimate is even higher than the - disputed - worst case assumptions of the DOE, which is somewhere between 45 to 65b. Also: http://www.iter.org/faq#Do_we_really_know_how_much_ITER_will_cost http://www.iter.org/faq#Do_we_really_know_how_much_ITER_will...
    - Kon5ole 3y ago
      >Since you ignore the question of whether Europe even has space for 100 or 200GW of solar power That's a question that can safely be ignored though, Germany alone has installed rooftop solar on a small percentage of homes and is already at 70GW. Space is not a problem for solar, you can install it everywhere. It's so cheap now that it's viable even in sub-optimal locations. >though there's hope that storage will be somewhat solved in 2050 using ... research! It is solved already, all that remains to do is to build it. Germany has enough gas storage to last a year, and we know how to generate gas from electricity. It's being done in several places already. I think the major hold-up is political. Moving energy production from the current government-controlled central power plants to small-scale operations close to the consumer is too disruptive for lots of reasons. But I have hope that eventually we'll get there, it just takes time. That said, spending billions on things that won't solve any problems for the nest 50 years and using that as a reason to not actually do the thing that will work is inexcusable. At least do both.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        > It is solved already, all that remains to do is to build it. Germany has enough gas storage to last a year, and we know how to generate gas from electricity. It's being done in several places already. If storage is solved, then I think we would've heard about it. > That said, spending billions on things that won't solve any problems for the nest 50 years and using that as a reason to not actually do the thing that will work is inexcusable. At least do both. Who is using this as a reason to not do the other thing?
  - rapnie 3y ago
    Well, if all this R&D investment gives us clean energy for the next centuries at affordable cost, it is an improvement right? And we don't have to cover our land and waters with solar farms that have their own externalities (limited lifetime, waste, harmful materials, etc).
    - raffraffraff 3y ago
      The problem is surviving long enough to make a fusion breakthrough. Fusion may actually be an impossible engineering problen. Fission is cheap and easy by comparison.
  - jl6 3y ago
    Many EU countries aren’t blessed with the square mileage and hours of sunlight required for giga-scale solar. A dense, continuous power source would be very welcome, even at a higher cost.
    - gnfargbl 3y ago
      Then why aren't those EU countries negotiating agreements with other less-well-off countries that are so blessed? Yes, that would require a cable. But it isn't rational to be in a situation where we believe we can build a fusion reactor, but some relatively simple civil engineering is apparently beyond us.
      - ragebol 3y ago
        Though not the EU anymore, but something like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Power_Project?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe... The downside being you still don't have energy independence, if that is a goal.
        offices 3y ago
        It should be a goal. It's less than 2 years since a former EU ally used our dependence on them for energy as a bargaining tool.
        gnfargbl 3y ago
        We haven't had energy independence in Europe for decades. That risk is managed by hedging, and there's no reason we couldn't do the same with long-distance solar interconnects.
        adwn 3y ago
        > We haven't had energy independence in Europe for decades. Yes, and that has bitten us in the ass big time.
      - wkat4242 3y ago
  - AndrewDucker 3y ago
    It is worth doing multiple things, some short term, some long term. If you only ever invest in the solution which pays back right now, then you never get the next step. We should absolutely be doing both.
  - ragebol 3y ago
    Our energy needs are ever increasing. If we ever want to get to what is currently science fiction, we'll need fusion energy, otherwise we'll eventually blanket the Earth in solar panels. Maybe they'll be in time to provide energy to slurp carbon out of the atmosphere. Or power huge spacecraft etc etc.
    - shermantanktop 3y ago
      Various estimates put the US’s entire energy supply as requiring enough solar panels to fill a square between 100 and 150 miles on a side. If efficiency goes up (which has upper bounds) and panels are integrated into buildings, solar being that virtually limitless supply doesn’t seem far-fetched.
  - mythhabit 3y ago
    A fusion reactor is the long term game. Sure we could use that money to add more capacity to the grid, but what we need is to take fossil fuels offline and 200 GW would barely make a dent in the production from coal if the consumption continues to increase. In 2022 it was estimated that coal produced 44000 TWh and that number increase at an alarming rate every year. So we need to do something to meet the futures energy demands, but we also need to do something today. The smart thing is to invest in what we can do today, solar, wind and batteries, and invest what we can do in the near future, better fission reactors is one possibility, and invest in the long term, that could be fusion. It would be foolish to only invest in one of them.
    - jiggawatts 3y ago
      Long term? You say that like the Sun will go out and we’ll need artificial power to survive.
      - mythhabit 3y ago
        If we rely on solar, we need a massive overcapacity. In large parts of the world the output of a solar panel is 50% in the winter compared to the summer, and in addition, we use significantly more power during the winter. And that will be even further exaggerated if fossils do not heat water for district heating in addition to the power produced - but perhaps that is offset by AC usage in the summer. Either way, we would need a significant overcapacity to meet demand, not to mention huge investments in battery infrastructure. And that does not even take predictable peaks into account (think the pause of a national event with lots of viewers, where people make coffee/tea/snacks at the same time), which needs fossil peaker plants, or even more battery capacity.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    2048 is twentyfive years from now.
  - specialist 3y ago
    Fusion is a terrific way to build and retain a knowledge skill stack indefinitely. IMHO, fusion is preferable to nukes (weapons) for that purpose.
  - nosrepa 3y ago
    ITER has no hope of producing any electricity because there are no turbines on site.
sgift 3y ago
It will be, when it starts. For now this is. It's testing things also needed later for ITER and DEMO.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  If DEMO is ever built. My sincerest hope is that Commonwealth Fusion Systems does so well with SPARC and ARC that DEMO never needs to be built. DEMO would be so incredibly expensive to build that it would never produce economical energy.
  - sgift 3y ago
    I hope for the same. But it's nice to know there's a backup in case none of the more "moonshoot" projects pan out.
CaptainSamJohn 3y ago
Also wondering if they resolved the main issue which is plasma disruptions in Tokamaks ? Because, you may build bigger and bigger Tokamaks but if the main issue is still there it won't change the result.
- bmitc 3y ago
  Commonwealth Fusion Systems holds the thesis that you need stronger magnets so that you make the reactor smaller.

fanf2 3y ago

JT-60 is a similar size and age to JET in England. JT-60 has been rebuilt over the last few years to use superconducting magnets. JET was shut down at the end of October.

throwaway_65123 3y ago

Fun fact - The computer science department of the Moscow State University [1] was created in 1970 as a joint effort between Physics and Math departments to address computational needs of Tokamak models. Hence the official name - the department of computational mathematics and cybernetics. The joke goes that they were hoping to "solve the Tokamak" in a couple of years and then move on to other fields of computer science - a dream that is still very much alive. [1] https://cs.msu.ru/en https://cs.msu.ru/en

mustafa_pasi 3y ago
Interesting. Computational mathematics has really very little to do with traditional CS topics.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  Traditional CS is not in vogue at ex-USSR universities. Poring over type systems and pure functions just never caught up over here, compared to good old Knuth-worth "close to metal" CS. Some SDEs do take interest in these topics independently, though.
  - DeathArrow 3y ago
    What do they study in ex-USSR universities?
    - thriftwy 3y ago
      Data structures, low-level workings of CPU and other hardware, computational compexities, binary algebra, combinatorics and discrete maths. Throw in some logic circuits design. The same things they ask on FAANG interviews, coincidentally.
      - flopriore 3y ago
        It seems very similar to what we study in "Computer Science and Engineering" in Italy, which is a different degree from "Computer Science". The former is considered engineering, the latter isn't (pretty strange tbh, but that's how it works)

ssijak 3y ago

will this produce net positive energy?

rollcat 3y ago
Not yet, it's still very much an R&D project in an R&D field. Also don't worry, you wouldn't miss it - the very moment we have net positive fusion at industrial scale, it will be the news of the century.
gary_0 3y ago
That's the goal of the project, and they're already close: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JT-60 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JT-60 So far the NIF in California is the only reactor I'm aware of that has achieved ignition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition#2021_and_2022_ignition_reports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition#2021_and_2022_... But AFAIK there are no Tokamak reactors planned that will be able to run continuously and produce useful power. These are all experimental reactors that will be self-sustaining for only a few seconds here and there.
- fanf2 3y ago
  NIF is not a Tokamak, it does inertial laser confinement fusion. (No magnets, not a torus.)
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  "But AFAIK there are no "Tokamak reactors planned that will be able to run continuously and produce useful power. These are all experimental reactors that will be self-sustaining for only a few seconds here and there. " But are there at least theoretical concepts, on how one could build a tokamak reactor that can run continiously? In other words, is the main disadvantage of the Tokamak solved in any way? If not, why is the Stellerator design not getting more attention?
- rsynnott 3y ago
  > But AFAIK there are no Tokamak reactors planned that will be able to run continuously and produce useful power DEMO, but don't expect to see it any time soon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant#Timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant#Time...

aitchnyu 3y ago

> a little patience might be in order Umm, will this show up in time to save the world by removing unfossiling our energy needs?

luplex 3y ago
Nope, definitely not by 2030
jksk61 3y ago
of course not, none is considering fusion as a reliable workable solution for the 2050 net zero goals. I mean they don't even consider opting out gas and oil until 2040s or even later lol
kaliqt 3y ago
Save the world? Yes. Because it's not going to end anytime soon due to fossil fuels.
bobim 3y ago
The "world" is a very different thing than what you mean: "our current, energy guzzling, way of life"

hschne 3y ago

If anyone was wondering, like me, why it took over ten years to assemble this thing: The video at the end gives you a good idea. I wonder how anyone goes about planning such an enormous effort.

_Microft 3y ago
Time lapse of the assembly of Wendelstein 7-X: https://www.ipp.mpg.de/1727365/zeitraffer_w7x https://www.ipp.mpg.de/1727365/zeitraffer_w7x This is the assembly of Wendelstein 7-X, also over the span of a decade. It is a stellarator-type test reactor in Germany. Stellarators offer the advantage of possibly continous operations while tokamaks need to be pulsed but that necessitates a lot of contorted coils.
freeqaz 3y ago
Direct link for anybody interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eno5410tO0g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eno5410tO0g (Also in case of bitrot from the original article dying)
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  Thanks, it looks like a very big project.
Timshel 3y ago
If you want more details on tokamak construction there is recent videos done on Iter by : - Up an Atom : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5RxUW7VC-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5RxUW7VC-A - Practical Engineering : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD3dMzv1vIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD3dMzv1vIQ And for the french speaker an older take from Monsieur Bidouille : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36WpRwY2DYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36WpRwY2DYw And there appear to be a dedicated YT channel : https://www.youtube.com/@iterorganization/videos https://www.youtube.com/@iterorganization/videos

methou 3y ago

Hopefully we could see a price drop in utility prices in Japan. Eventually EVs should be affordable.

sgift 3y ago
It's a research project. It won't produce energy. So no, you won't, sorry.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hasoleju 3y ago

> However, since successful fusion power would provide humanity with unlimited clean power forever, a little patience might be in order. This great promise seems to be the main reason why we still try to built that machine. I have the feeling that putting these resources into economically already proven clean technologies would be a better investment. On the other hand, a lot of young researchers are working on such a project. Their education is also valuable and might justify parts of that investment.

Timshel 3y ago
The cost appear exorbitant but in the end it's not much compared to what it will cost to replace fossil fuels. And it's not like the current proven clean technologies do not have drawbacks.
delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
> I have the feeling that putting these resources into economically already proven clean technologies would be a better investment. There's something to be said about putting all one's eggs in one basket. While current renewables are a big leap over non-renewables, there are glaring flaws in each implementation. Wind and solar still require massive manufacturing and transportation back-ends to scale up, and solar in particular requires weird rare-earths, the mining of which causes serious ecological issues. Nuclear fission power is fantastic, but has a huge PR and NIMBY problem (despite ironically being orders of magnitude safer than its non-renewable counterparts), and therefore has skyrocketing costs today as well. Battery-electric vehicles and storage face the same problem, and in many cases, simply offload their emissions to a central (usually coal/oil/gas-fired) power station. There's a lot of money to go around; the gross world product is approaching US$100 trillion and I'm fairly certain a handful of billions could be spared for the development of fusion. In terms of physics, it's a solved problem; even in terms of engineering, the issue has been narrowed down to confining the working plasma enough and managing instabilities for long enough to produce net positive power. Funnily enough a big issue previously was having enough compute to simulate the plasma behaviour; with high-end GPUs, this is also less of a problem now. I am cautiously optimistic—ITER is going for sheer size, whereas start-ups like SPARC are trying new superconducting magnets. I believe the late 2020s and early 2030s will be a very productive period for fusion.

stefantalpalaru 3y ago

[dead]

reacharavindh 3y ago

Imagine, if Russia had gone the "Norway model" and used all the oil money to good use.... A soverign fund that improves teh lives of the citizens of the country, and invests in research that benefits the greater good, or even nationalistically, serving national interests in technical prowess. Instead they have oligarchs and war. We humans can't have nice things.

bvoq 3y ago
I actually think the Russian people are too nice and tolerant. Too many Russians choose to ignore what's happening, they are too nice to their leaders.
- throwaway_65123 3y ago
  It's not because they are nice and tolerant. People are threatened, brainwashed and provided with semblance of comfortable life in equal measures. Like that boiled frog, little by little they lost all their basic fundamental rights and freedoms to the point where a large part of the populace doesn't even question what's happening and those who do can't do anything about it. It is a profoundly disheartening to see what happened to the country and how very few cared.
  - argiopetech 3y ago
    This could be referring to any one of a number of nations, I'm afraid. Nicely summarized.
    - smackeyacky 3y ago
      Wait. Is Norway a distopian nightmare like Russia? Did that happen yesterday and I like missed it or something?
  - stjohnswarts 3y ago
    Yeah I think a lot of people in the West don't understand that 80% of the Russian people support what Putin is doing in Ukraine and to his own people.

TomaszZielinski 3y ago

This is unrelated to fusion, but it's HN so I'm hoping such trivia fits here :) In my previous life I was a game developer. For one of my games I needed a physics engine. And one of the candidates was <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak_(software)>. And ever since then, whenever I read or hear the word "tokamak", my first thought hasn't been fusion, but 3d games :)

elliottkember 3y ago
Naming things AND cache invalidation, in one comment. You’re only off by one.
- shermantanktop 3y ago
  Which puts you at three, I think. But the only numbers that matter are zero, one, and more than one.
  - volemo 3y ago
    Zero, one, and carry, you mean?

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

There can't be such massive projects without public funding, the private sector yet again fails humankind, thanks to everyone who, through their government, continue to fund these massive scientific projects

fennecfoxy 3y ago

I think I'm still more interested in what CFS are doing with their SPARC reactor. It seems like they're just trying to brute force fusion with stronger magnets. The article also makes the point of how much time/money has been spent on fusion...well yeah, once we crack fusion it solves a lot of problems. The other major thing for humanity is solving space travel/mining so that we can rip into asteroids instead of our one planet.

jd116 3y ago

While Tokamaks have gathered a lot of attention, one alternative approach is the stellarator [1]. It attempts to solve plasma drift problems with a twisted torus design, potentially allowing continuous operation. Although overshadowed by Tokamak research, advancements in stellarators could provide valuable insights into plasma stability and containment. Separately, in the 1960s scientists developed the plasma focus device [2], which, instead of trying to suppress plasma instabilities, sought to exploit them to compress energy. This approach, though less mainstream, could offer alternative methods for achieving fusion. Finally, research into deuterium-tritium (DT) fuel has dominated, but DT has drawbacks, like neutron production and associated radioactive waste. Since the 60s, there's been knowledge of aneutronic fusion reactions [3] (like hydrogen-boron or pB11) that produce no or few neutrons. These require higher temperatures but offer advantages for cleaner energy. However, research in this area has been minimal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_plasma_focus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_plasma_focus [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion

Zardoz84 3y ago
what happened to magnetic mirrors designs?
- pfdietz 3y ago
  There's an interesting design called WHAM being pursued. https://wippl.wisc.edu/wisconsin-hts-axisymmetric-mirror/ https://wippl.wisc.edu/wisconsin-hts-axisymmetric-mirror/ https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2020-09/Day1_1405_UWM_Forest.pdf https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2020-09/Day1_1... There's been advancements that promise to nix various instabilies and loss modes that had stymied previous work. https://plasma.physics.swarthmore.edu/brownpapers/WHAMmirror21.pdf https://plasma.physics.swarthmore.edu/brownpapers/WHAMmirror...

theptip 3y ago

> For 75 years we've been told that fusion power was only 25 years away This one always cracks me up. When I studied Physics in the early 2000s the joke was “fusion power has been 50 years away for the last 50 years”. If it’s 25 years away now that is finally progress, even if everyone forgot the previous predictions. Although perhaps assume a 2:1 estimate:progress ratio based on the evidence?

Towaway69 3y ago
It reminds me of the current discussions around AI and when will we'll have AGI. It will happen sooner than expected.
- volemo 3y ago
  Your comment is a good example of the Reverse Tinkerbell effect.
bsder 3y ago
> This one always cracks me up. It doesn't crack me up. Our funding for fusion has always been below the "fusion never" line on the graph. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FWQaKc8XEAAAVmZ.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FWQaKc8XEAAAVmZ.jpg:large If only we had as much funding for fusion as we do for Skinner boxes ...
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  The Chicago police department gets more annual funding than fusion (in 2012), according to that graph. Wild.
- mcmoor 3y ago
  It seems to me that there's fewer believable research proposal than predicted
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  So, instead of buying twitter, a single man could have “bought” us fusion for all, instead he brought us X.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

I hope that future civilizations get this working, and that it requires an incredibly powerful AI to wrangle the star on earth to be safe.