9 ms·

Inside the Dynomak: A Fusion Technology Cheaper Than Coal

104 points by ohaal 12y ago

ThePhysicist 12y ago
The important word in the article is "experiment": As of now, most of the cost estimates and even the viability of this new type of fusion reactor are based on calculations only. It's of course great that new types of reactors get researched, it's just a pity that the press always seems to overreact and sell these experiments as production-ready systems to the world. This is probably the main cause for the public skepticism towards fusion energy: Too often early prototypes have been sold as working reactors. BTW, there have been numerous proposed improvements over the Tokamak reactor type over the years, such as the "Stellarator" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator), most of them have proven too complex to be of practical use though.
- ommunist 12y ago
  Yeah, mankind will feed from simple Soviet designs that just works for decades. Tokamak is a just a fascinating example. Think lasers for example -- the USSR tech of the 60-es ;-)
  - DonHopkins 12y ago
    All that fascinating technology, yet they're still afraid of gay people.
    - 1971genocide 12y ago
      what ? Gay marriage is still not legalized in most of the united states. and gay in russia means paedophiles included, its something putin has conjured up. Saying Russians are scared of gays is like saying americans are all fat and lazy.
      - DonHopkins 12y ago
        You facts are wrong, and even if you were right, your argument doesn't hold any water.
    - ommunist 12y ago
      They are not afraid, and never was. In the USSR gays were criminalized and put to jail. There was no same punishment for lesbians, surprisingly. However, we are talking about TOKAMAKs and LASERs here.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  I ran across the Stellarator concept a few weeks back. Just on the basis of the name alone, it's awesome. Not that that makes me think it's any more likely to work....
stormbrew 12y ago
From an outsider's perspective, it kind of seems like fusion research is picking up recently, especially in terms of the diversity of approaches by relatively credible teams. Before it seemed like the credible effort was the tokamak and everything else was the domain of crackpots. If so, this seems like a good thing to me, even if most of these approaches might be doomed to failure. Should have been happening years ago. I'm curious if that's just some kind of perception filter thing, though, or if not what's causing it.
- phreeza 12y ago
  Putting on my tinfoil hat for a moment here, something I picked up on a similar fusion story here on HN a while ago: there have recently been a lot of news stories that may be interpreted as being aimed at bringing down the oil price. Not sure if I buy it, but if it is the case, it seems to be working.
  - XorNot 12y ago
    Fusion energy doesn't replace oil. It doesn't substantially reduce dependence on it - oil fired power plants are uncommon compared to the quantity of coal ones, and we have a lot of coal to go through (well, not so much I guess - Australia has 400 years worth, but that's what, 5-6 generations + blasting our country into an uninhabitable wasteland?) Fusion energy replaces coal powerplants, and probably fuel bunkers on container ships/air craft carriers. No concept is small enough or dense enough to replace oil, although cheap fusion energy would make all sorts of crazy synthetic hydrocarbon schemes viable.
    - phreeza 12y ago
      Yea I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense either, but then again the oil price isn't completely determined by rational arguments... FWIW, here is the original comment I was referring to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8459658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8459658
    - ChuckMcM 12y ago
      Actually it can replace oil. Making long chain hydrocarbons through a process like the Fischer-Tropsch one is fairly straight forward if you have the energy. You would still have a refinery but sitting on the ocean with your fusion power plant your refinery would never need to have an oil tanker offload, instead your fusion plant would be supplying the energy to pull CO2 out of the air, hydrogen and oxygen out of the water and converting them into what the base for what ever the refinery needed.
Mithaldu 12y ago
Do i understand this right that with the HIT-SI3 they have already built a working dynomak that can generate a surplus of energy, albeit at a small scale, and the challenge is to make a bigger one that still works?
- m12k 12y ago
  Good question - as far as I can tell, the article doesn't say so explicitly, so I assume it's not generating a surplus, since if it did, that would have been the headline. There is however the possibility that the two interesting numbers, required power input and power output, do not grow with the size of the reactor/amount of plasma in the same way, e.g. one function might be quadratic, the other cubic. So it is possible that the current prototype does not generate a surplus, but it might indicate enough about those two functions to indicate that a "slightly" larger version would (assuming no unforeseen technical or physical issues arise). It sounds like it's too early to say though.
- the8472 12y ago
  Looking at the linked abstract[1] of a paper about their experimental device it seems like they're running their prototype with a helium plasma, which can't produce energy (He-4 fusion processes require a lot more activation energy than various hydrogen processes). So they're mostly testing the plasma physics and rely on projections for the energy yield if actual fusion were to happen. [1] http://absimage.aps.org/image/DPP14/MWS_DPP14-2014-000198.pdf http://absimage.aps.org/image/DPP14/MWS_DPP14-2014-000198.pd...
omellet 12y ago
The article lists several other fusion approaches that are also in development. Does anyone have a real sense of the likelihood of any of these actually working? I'm optimistic, but also naïve about the engineering challenges.
- the8472 12y ago
  If there were consensus on which technology is going to work and which one isn't we wouldn't need the parallel research. They all work if we're assuming spherical, frictionless cows in a vacuum.
- arethuza 12y ago
  There are a lot of fascinating engineering issues with projects like ITER - which are starting to scale up towards a commercial scale fusion plant. For example the ITER cryostat is apparently the largest high-vacuum chamber ever built: http://www.iter.org/newsline/294/1792 http://www.iter.org/newsline/294/1792
  - apaprocki 12y ago
    The sad part is that the Tokamaks were being defunded in order to fund ITER, which wasn't even built yet. I'm not sure what wound up happening. I visited the one at MIT and got to see it fire live from inside the control room, but the postdocs were all sad that we were canning working primary research for what seemed like a complicated construction boondoggle. I hope they found another way to fund the research!
    - Ygg2 12y ago
      That has little to do with ITER. They could fund tokamaks by diverting some cash from other budgets.
    - ZenoArrow 12y ago
      I don't understand what you mean by "The sad part is that the Tokamaks were being defunded in order to fund ITER". ITER is a tokamak, the world's largest (if/when it's completed), so funding for tokamaks is not a problem.
seren 12y ago
Like the Lockheed announcement, the goal seems to raise more funds to create more advanced prototype, so obviously the perspective sounds optimistic.
illumen 12y ago
"The primary argument against fusion power has been that despite decades of work, it still doesn’t exist" I'd bet on thermal solar, that is proven to work. Also smart energy management with wind and solar are all proven to work. Electric cars have big batteries which are proven to work as energy storage.
- blisterpeanuts 12y ago
  I know, there are several viable alternatives that would cost much less than the equivalent in fusion. Simply putting solar on most rooftops at about $20K per install would probably create a huge surplus in existing electric generation. That said, I favor the continued R&D and I hope one of these approaches pans out. Research is rarely wasted.
  - XorNot 12y ago
    There's a constant need for baseload generation. Fusion can provide baseload.
    - illumen 12y ago
      No it can't. Fusion power plants don't exist at all. Thermal solar can provide base load today. So can distributed wind power, or wind power storing in batteries.
      - Turing_Machine 12y ago
        "Thermal solar can provide base load today" Sorry, no. That's simply not correct. The biggest solar installation in existence is a 392 Mw plant in the Mojave Desert that cost about $5.00/watt capacity (which works out to $10.00/watt considering that it doesn't work at night). That's about twice as much per watt as coal. It produces electricity at a wholesale cost of about 14 cents per kilowatt hour. The average retail cost of electricity in the United States is about 13 cents. It's an interesting experiment, but no, it doesn't make economic sense. That's for a measly 392 Mw plant. A large coal plant cranks out 5 Gw, and a large hydro plant can be up to 20 Gw. We don't have that many Mojave Deserts, dude. Not to mention what the environmentalists are going to say if we start covering any substantial fraction of the Mojave Desert with solar plants (this one alone covers 3,000 acres of land). Wind, with or without batteries, involves similar costs, unreliability, and land use problems, and batteries in general are one of the most environmentally nasty technologies we have.
dghf 12y ago
> The primary argument against fusion power has been that despite decades of work, it still doesn’t exist. I thought it did exist but wasn't efficient (i.e., energy in > energy out)?
- Elrac 12y ago
  You're correct. Fusion is routinely achieved already, but without approaching a positive energy balance. When people talk about "doing" fusion, it's usually implied to mean "in a commercially viable way."
  - frtab 12y ago
    A positive energy balance was achieved in 2013. http://www.nature.com/news/laser-fusion-experiment-extracts-net-energy-from-fuel-1.14710 http://www.nature.com/news/laser-fusion-experiment-extracts-... For only a hundredth of a second, and not even remotely economically viable yet. But it's a step in the right direction.
    - Elrac 12y ago
      I stand corrected, thanks! I guess I'd need to add "sustained" to my shopping list of implied necessary criteria.
      - db48x 12y ago
        Add in 'with a practical mass budget' as well. Right now the best known way to produce power from fusion is to build a star, and put solar panels around it.
    - DennisP 12y ago
      It's an inherently pulsed design, so the duration of energy production isn't a problem. It would be the same short duration in a production power plant. Many other designs are also pulsed. What is a problem is that they simply measured the energy output of a small portion of fuel to the energy absorbed by that fuel. If you take into account things like the large energy losses in powering the lasers, they're actually pretty far from breakeven. By contrast, the JET tokamak in the UK is expected by many to achieve real overall breakeven by 2020.
jacknews 12y ago
There seems to be a flurry of "fusion/energy breakthrough" press items recently. On the one hand it's extremely exciting, but on the other, I wonder if there's a more sinister motive behind all the press. Cui Bono?
Elrac 12y ago
I'm a bit skeptical about the claim "it doesn't produce dangerous, long-term toxic waste." I'm no expert but I've read that fusion reactors will be producing massive amounts of neutron radiation (like the neutron bomb, AKA the "real estate bomb," heh!) which ends up absorbed by the cladding of the reactor chamber and converts it to partly radioactive isotopes. A consequence is that the reaction chamber walls lose their physical integrity, i.e. become brittle, so leaving them in place is not an option. Thus, when operating a fusion reactor, you're constantly forced to replace crunchy, fusion-baked, radioactive reactor wall debris with newly built wall plates. I admit to having no idea about which isotopes would be produced and what their half-life would be. If anyone can shed some light or correct me, I'd be indebted.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  "I'm no expert but I've read", is probably one of the most dangerous phrases in the entire English language. That said, I'm no expert but I've read that the half life of the stuff it irradiates is pretty short, so you only need to store it for a hundred years or so rather than 10,000. So no ray-cats are needed. http://emperorx.bandcamp.com/album/10000-year-earworm-to-discourage-settlement-near-nuclear-waste-repositories http://emperorx.bandcamp.com/album/10000-year-earworm-to-dis...
  - Elrac 12y ago
    I hoped to limit the impact of my speculation by being humble about my state of knowledge. Anyway, more information is good, and that's one less thing for me to lose sleep over. Thanks!
    - the8472 12y ago
      >I hoped to limit the impact of my speculation by being humble You could have requested information instead. Otherwise people may feel compelled[1] to "fix" your half-baked knowledge by argumenting ferociously instead of just presenting knowledge. [1] http://xkcd.com/386/ http://xkcd.com/386/
lotsofmangos 12y ago
So, from what I understand, they are blowing a charged smoke-ring of plasma and then coupling it inductively as one half of a motor, so they can keep it sustained, and the more electric you feed in, the hotter and tighter and faster it goes. I want one.
blaze33 12y ago
One reason that allowed us to quickly develop fission power is that the physics is mostly linear meaning building a 1GW plant wasn't so much more difficult once you mastered the small experimental reactors. Now I worked on nuclear plants and not on fusion research but I heard that the main issue with fusion power is the non-linearity that comes along when scaling up small experiments. Things like not being really able to predict plasma behavior at industrial scale even if it works fine in the lab. Could anyone with a better understanding of the physics expand on this ?
- pavlov 12y ago
  I'm definitely not an expert, but building new fission plants to modern standards seems to be substantially more difficult than previously thought. The only new fission plant being built in Western Europe, Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, was supposed to go online in 2010 but is still unfinished: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#U... Estimates suggest it may not be done until 2020, and the budget has overrun to about $10.6 billion USD versus the original cost estimate of about $3.75B USD. (This reactor is now more expensive than the Large Hadron Collider!) When a fission plant costs $10B+ today, I wonder how much the first working fusion plant will cost -- if we ever get that far.
  - b4stien 12y ago
    You forgot Flamanville 3 in France: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanville_3_.28EDF.27s_first_plant.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvil.... Same problems though (huge delay, budget increase, ...)
    - bazzargh 12y ago
      And Hinkley C in Somerset, UK http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/20/hinkley-point-c-nuclear-plant-boss-nigel-cann http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/20/hinkley-poin... (again, delays etc - currently only earthworks are going on)
  - 12y ago
carapace 12y ago
Dr. Bussard gave a very interesting talk on his design for "inertial electrostatic confinement" fusion reactor: http://youtu.be/rk6z1vP4Eo8 http://youtu.be/rk6z1vP4Eo8
- kristianp 12y ago
  See http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php for info on his design, and other fusion news. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

104 points by ohaal 12y ago

The important word in the article is "experiment": As of now, most of the cost estimates and even the viability of this new type of fusion reactor are based on calculations only. It's of course great that new types of reactors get researched, it's just a pity that the press always seems to overreact and sell these experiments as production-ready systems to the world. This is probably the main cause for the public skepticism towards fusion energy: Too often early prototypes have been sold as working reactors. BTW, there have been numerous proposed improvements over the Tokamak reactor type over the years, such as the "Stellarator" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator), most of them have proven too complex to be of practical use though.

ommunist 12y ago
Yeah, mankind will feed from simple Soviet designs that just works for decades. Tokamak is a just a fascinating example. Think lasers for example -- the USSR tech of the 60-es ;-)
- DonHopkins 12y ago
  All that fascinating technology, yet they're still afraid of gay people.
  - 1971genocide 12y ago
    what ? Gay marriage is still not legalized in most of the united states. and gay in russia means paedophiles included, its something putin has conjured up. Saying Russians are scared of gays is like saying americans are all fat and lazy.
    - DonHopkins 12y ago
      You facts are wrong, and even if you were right, your argument doesn't hold any water.
  - ommunist 12y ago
    They are not afraid, and never was. In the USSR gays were criminalized and put to jail. There was no same punishment for lesbians, surprisingly. However, we are talking about TOKAMAKs and LASERs here.
dredmorbius 12y ago
I ran across the Stellarator concept a few weeks back. Just on the basis of the name alone, it's awesome. Not that that makes me think it's any more likely to work....

stormbrew 12y ago

From an outsider's perspective, it kind of seems like fusion research is picking up recently, especially in terms of the diversity of approaches by relatively credible teams. Before it seemed like the credible effort was the tokamak and everything else was the domain of crackpots. If so, this seems like a good thing to me, even if most of these approaches might be doomed to failure. Should have been happening years ago. I'm curious if that's just some kind of perception filter thing, though, or if not what's causing it.

phreeza 12y ago
Putting on my tinfoil hat for a moment here, something I picked up on a similar fusion story here on HN a while ago: there have recently been a lot of news stories that may be interpreted as being aimed at bringing down the oil price. Not sure if I buy it, but if it is the case, it seems to be working.
- XorNot 12y ago
  Fusion energy doesn't replace oil. It doesn't substantially reduce dependence on it - oil fired power plants are uncommon compared to the quantity of coal ones, and we have a lot of coal to go through (well, not so much I guess - Australia has 400 years worth, but that's what, 5-6 generations + blasting our country into an uninhabitable wasteland?) Fusion energy replaces coal powerplants, and probably fuel bunkers on container ships/air craft carriers. No concept is small enough or dense enough to replace oil, although cheap fusion energy would make all sorts of crazy synthetic hydrocarbon schemes viable.
  - phreeza 12y ago
    Yea I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense either, but then again the oil price isn't completely determined by rational arguments... FWIW, here is the original comment I was referring to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8459658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8459658
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    Actually it can replace oil. Making long chain hydrocarbons through a process like the Fischer-Tropsch one is fairly straight forward if you have the energy. You would still have a refinery but sitting on the ocean with your fusion power plant your refinery would never need to have an oil tanker offload, instead your fusion plant would be supplying the energy to pull CO2 out of the air, hydrogen and oxygen out of the water and converting them into what the base for what ever the refinery needed.

Mithaldu 12y ago

Do i understand this right that with the HIT-SI3 they have already built a working dynomak that can generate a surplus of energy, albeit at a small scale, and the challenge is to make a bigger one that still works?

m12k 12y ago
Good question - as far as I can tell, the article doesn't say so explicitly, so I assume it's not generating a surplus, since if it did, that would have been the headline. There is however the possibility that the two interesting numbers, required power input and power output, do not grow with the size of the reactor/amount of plasma in the same way, e.g. one function might be quadratic, the other cubic. So it is possible that the current prototype does not generate a surplus, but it might indicate enough about those two functions to indicate that a "slightly" larger version would (assuming no unforeseen technical or physical issues arise). It sounds like it's too early to say though.
the8472 12y ago
Looking at the linked abstract[1] of a paper about their experimental device it seems like they're running their prototype with a helium plasma, which can't produce energy (He-4 fusion processes require a lot more activation energy than various hydrogen processes). So they're mostly testing the plasma physics and rely on projections for the energy yield if actual fusion were to happen. [1] http://absimage.aps.org/image/DPP14/MWS_DPP14-2014-000198.pdf http://absimage.aps.org/image/DPP14/MWS_DPP14-2014-000198.pd...

omellet 12y ago

The article lists several other fusion approaches that are also in development. Does anyone have a real sense of the likelihood of any of these actually working? I'm optimistic, but also naïve about the engineering challenges.

the8472 12y ago
If there were consensus on which technology is going to work and which one isn't we wouldn't need the parallel research. They all work if we're assuming spherical, frictionless cows in a vacuum.
arethuza 12y ago
There are a lot of fascinating engineering issues with projects like ITER - which are starting to scale up towards a commercial scale fusion plant. For example the ITER cryostat is apparently the largest high-vacuum chamber ever built: http://www.iter.org/newsline/294/1792 http://www.iter.org/newsline/294/1792
- apaprocki 12y ago
  The sad part is that the Tokamaks were being defunded in order to fund ITER, which wasn't even built yet. I'm not sure what wound up happening. I visited the one at MIT and got to see it fire live from inside the control room, but the postdocs were all sad that we were canning working primary research for what seemed like a complicated construction boondoggle. I hope they found another way to fund the research!
  - Ygg2 12y ago
    That has little to do with ITER. They could fund tokamaks by diverting some cash from other budgets.
  - ZenoArrow 12y ago
    I don't understand what you mean by "The sad part is that the Tokamaks were being defunded in order to fund ITER". ITER is a tokamak, the world's largest (if/when it's completed), so funding for tokamaks is not a problem.

seren 12y ago

Like the Lockheed announcement, the goal seems to raise more funds to create more advanced prototype, so obviously the perspective sounds optimistic.

illumen 12y ago

"The primary argument against fusion power has been that despite decades of work, it still doesn’t exist" I'd bet on thermal solar, that is proven to work. Also smart energy management with wind and solar are all proven to work. Electric cars have big batteries which are proven to work as energy storage.

blisterpeanuts 12y ago
I know, there are several viable alternatives that would cost much less than the equivalent in fusion. Simply putting solar on most rooftops at about $20K per install would probably create a huge surplus in existing electric generation. That said, I favor the continued R&D and I hope one of these approaches pans out. Research is rarely wasted.
- XorNot 12y ago
  There's a constant need for baseload generation. Fusion can provide baseload.
  - illumen 12y ago
    No it can't. Fusion power plants don't exist at all. Thermal solar can provide base load today. So can distributed wind power, or wind power storing in batteries.
    - Turing_Machine 12y ago
      "Thermal solar can provide base load today" Sorry, no. That's simply not correct. The biggest solar installation in existence is a 392 Mw plant in the Mojave Desert that cost about $5.00/watt capacity (which works out to $10.00/watt considering that it doesn't work at night). That's about twice as much per watt as coal. It produces electricity at a wholesale cost of about 14 cents per kilowatt hour. The average retail cost of electricity in the United States is about 13 cents. It's an interesting experiment, but no, it doesn't make economic sense. That's for a measly 392 Mw plant. A large coal plant cranks out 5 Gw, and a large hydro plant can be up to 20 Gw. We don't have that many Mojave Deserts, dude. Not to mention what the environmentalists are going to say if we start covering any substantial fraction of the Mojave Desert with solar plants (this one alone covers 3,000 acres of land). Wind, with or without batteries, involves similar costs, unreliability, and land use problems, and batteries in general are one of the most environmentally nasty technologies we have.

dghf 12y ago

> The primary argument against fusion power has been that despite decades of work, it still doesn’t exist. I thought it did exist but wasn't efficient (i.e., energy in > energy out)?

Elrac 12y ago
You're correct. Fusion is routinely achieved already, but without approaching a positive energy balance. When people talk about "doing" fusion, it's usually implied to mean "in a commercially viable way."
- frtab 12y ago
  A positive energy balance was achieved in 2013. http://www.nature.com/news/laser-fusion-experiment-extracts-net-energy-from-fuel-1.14710 http://www.nature.com/news/laser-fusion-experiment-extracts-... For only a hundredth of a second, and not even remotely economically viable yet. But it's a step in the right direction.
  - Elrac 12y ago
    I stand corrected, thanks! I guess I'd need to add "sustained" to my shopping list of implied necessary criteria.
    - db48x 12y ago
      Add in 'with a practical mass budget' as well. Right now the best known way to produce power from fusion is to build a star, and put solar panels around it.
  - DennisP 12y ago
    It's an inherently pulsed design, so the duration of energy production isn't a problem. It would be the same short duration in a production power plant. Many other designs are also pulsed. What is a problem is that they simply measured the energy output of a small portion of fuel to the energy absorbed by that fuel. If you take into account things like the large energy losses in powering the lasers, they're actually pretty far from breakeven. By contrast, the JET tokamak in the UK is expected by many to achieve real overall breakeven by 2020.

jacknews 12y ago

There seems to be a flurry of "fusion/energy breakthrough" press items recently. On the one hand it's extremely exciting, but on the other, I wonder if there's a more sinister motive behind all the press. Cui Bono?

Elrac 12y ago

I'm a bit skeptical about the claim "it doesn't produce dangerous, long-term toxic waste." I'm no expert but I've read that fusion reactors will be producing massive amounts of neutron radiation (like the neutron bomb, AKA the "real estate bomb," heh!) which ends up absorbed by the cladding of the reactor chamber and converts it to partly radioactive isotopes. A consequence is that the reaction chamber walls lose their physical integrity, i.e. become brittle, so leaving them in place is not an option. Thus, when operating a fusion reactor, you're constantly forced to replace crunchy, fusion-baked, radioactive reactor wall debris with newly built wall plates. I admit to having no idea about which isotopes would be produced and what their half-life would be. If anyone can shed some light or correct me, I'd be indebted.

lotsofmangos 12y ago
"I'm no expert but I've read", is probably one of the most dangerous phrases in the entire English language. That said, I'm no expert but I've read that the half life of the stuff it irradiates is pretty short, so you only need to store it for a hundred years or so rather than 10,000. So no ray-cats are needed. http://emperorx.bandcamp.com/album/10000-year-earworm-to-discourage-settlement-near-nuclear-waste-repositories http://emperorx.bandcamp.com/album/10000-year-earworm-to-dis...
- Elrac 12y ago
  I hoped to limit the impact of my speculation by being humble about my state of knowledge. Anyway, more information is good, and that's one less thing for me to lose sleep over. Thanks!
  - the8472 12y ago
    >I hoped to limit the impact of my speculation by being humble You could have requested information instead. Otherwise people may feel compelled[1] to "fix" your half-baked knowledge by argumenting ferociously instead of just presenting knowledge. [1] http://xkcd.com/386/ http://xkcd.com/386/

lotsofmangos 12y ago

So, from what I understand, they are blowing a charged smoke-ring of plasma and then coupling it inductively as one half of a motor, so they can keep it sustained, and the more electric you feed in, the hotter and tighter and faster it goes. I want one.

blaze33 12y ago

One reason that allowed us to quickly develop fission power is that the physics is mostly linear meaning building a 1GW plant wasn't so much more difficult once you mastered the small experimental reactors. Now I worked on nuclear plants and not on fusion research but I heard that the main issue with fusion power is the non-linearity that comes along when scaling up small experiments. Things like not being really able to predict plasma behavior at industrial scale even if it works fine in the lab. Could anyone with a better understanding of the physics expand on this ?

pavlov 12y ago
I'm definitely not an expert, but building new fission plants to modern standards seems to be substantially more difficult than previously thought. The only new fission plant being built in Western Europe, Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, was supposed to go online in 2010 but is still unfinished: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#U... Estimates suggest it may not be done until 2020, and the budget has overrun to about $10.6 billion USD versus the original cost estimate of about $3.75B USD. (This reactor is now more expensive than the Large Hadron Collider!) When a fission plant costs $10B+ today, I wonder how much the first working fusion plant will cost -- if we ever get that far.
- b4stien 12y ago
  You forgot Flamanville 3 in France: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanville_3_.28EDF.27s_first_plant.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvil.... Same problems though (huge delay, budget increase, ...)
  - bazzargh 12y ago
    And Hinkley C in Somerset, UK http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/20/hinkley-point-c-nuclear-plant-boss-nigel-cann http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/20/hinkley-poin... (again, delays etc - currently only earthworks are going on)
- 12y ago

carapace 12y ago

Dr. Bussard gave a very interesting talk on his design for "inertial electrostatic confinement" fusion reactor: http://youtu.be/rk6z1vP4Eo8 http://youtu.be/rk6z1vP4Eo8

kristianp 12y ago
See http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php for info on his design, and other fusion news. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell