If you can read that as a pro-Brexit comment, then the Brexit project succeeded beyond its instigators' wildest dreams.
It's not ambiguous at all. Everything in the UK going on right now -- everything -- has a "some of this is unclear or worse because Brexit has destroyed agreements or because proposed, nearly impossible agreements have not been struck" subplot.
Brexit has set fire to every kind of international complication.
And so here we are with a sucessful fusion lab in the UK, doing the hard work, that is a precursor to a European project that it is really not at all clear we will be able to participate in or benefit from, because crucial parts of the Brexit neo-establishment want the benefits of the agreements without acceding to the legal underpinnings of the agreements.
> ... If I understand your nonsensical ramblings correctly.
If you think they are nonsensical, you do not understand what I am saying.
Yes, countries can "work together without being part of the same trading bloc" but trade is not the limit of what Brexit changed.
Brexit removes us from the international legal agreements that underpinned that trade. It also removed us from the free movement clause, which is crucial to a lot of science-industry collaborations (the free movement principle was essentially invented to allow professional collaboration in the energy industry).
Finally it also removed us from the legal frameworks that underpin several European science funding agreements.
Every agreement has to be rewritten, at cost to the process. And every time it is rewritten, the net result for Britain is substantially worse than if we'd not done it. Because you cannot hope to get full membership of any club without agreeing to all the rules.
From the article:
> The UK is a participant, too. Its full involvement in ITER, however, will require first for Britain to "associate" to certain EU science programmes, something that so far has been held up by disagreements over post-Brexit trading arrangements, particularly in relation to Northern Ireland.
> The EU agreed to associate membership for the UK as part of the wider Brexit trade deal struck on Christmas Eve 2020 but it has still not ratified the deal or a similar one with Switzerland, held up by a dispute over a draft treaty binding the country to the bloc.
We didn't need to do any of this, there have been no benefits from any of this, and there are no meaningful projected benefits for any of this in our lifetimes.
> If you think they are nonsensical, you do not understand what I am saying.
And I thankyou for clarification :)
> but trade is not the limit of what Brexit changed.
Here in lies the problem that many Brexitiers had with the EU - it wasn't just a trading bloc, the "club" had a lot of baggage that few people understood - and when people don't understand something, they fear/misstrust it. The message around leaving was focused on GDP and whether we would have roaming chargers or not... and this message fell flat with a lot of voters.
I blame the remain side with arrogance and a complete lack of understanding how to deliver a good message.
I voted remain BTW, but feel we had a fair vote and it is what it is.
I think there are some specific failings with the remain argument -- people failed to make the case that is surely now obvious that you can't just unpick this without major fallout. Though they definitely did try.
The problem is they also came up against vile, populist hate about Syrian immigrants, Romanian neighbours, people not speaking english on buses, fake news about pillow regulations; it went on and on. And a lot of that stuff really was funded by deeply shady money.
Brexit was the first real demonstration of how good faith cannot possibly counter weaponised, well-backed bad faith, IMO.
It is what it is, I agree, and alas it is wholly irreversible. But at least within five years we won't have to worry about how Great Britain and Northern Ireland repositions itself within Europe, because the consequences of the vote will be the end of that too.
> The problem is they also came up against vile, populist hate about Syrian immigrants, Romanian neighbours, people not speaking english on buses, fake news about pillow regulations;
Except there is some truth/validity in all of these - they are proxies. The pillow/banana stuff was about over-regulation by the EU. People not speaking the native language on buses is an indication of a a loss of British culture (people will be generally protective of their own culture). Romanian neighbours is about a fear of losing one's low-paying job to an immigrant.
These are all valid worries of many people in the UK.
Calling them "vile", "populist" is what I'm talking about with regard to remain arrogance. Ignore voter's fears at your peril.
The pillow stuff was fraudulent, sorry. You can't hold up a bed pillow and say all these regulations cover pillows when almost all of the uses of the word "pillow" were from engineering safety regulations (pillow blocks etc.)
The Syrian immigration thing was based on a lie (and about specific fearmongering concerning Turkey's supposed accession to the EU -- a process that has entirely stalled and is even in reverse because Turkey cannot join the EU until it satisfies the EU's demands). It was backed up by one of the most despicable political leaflets in British history:
It's not a binary thing. It's not either they work together or they don't.
Under a common block, trading or otherwise, things are just easier and much closer together.
Consider only visas, travel and employment, the complications of these brought by Brexit already distanced any existing and future collaborations by some measure.
There is still collaboration of course, and there will be, but it's not what it was before.
And this negative trend of distance in collaboration is more worrying in an increasingly threatening environment
Yes, countries work together by making agreements. UK decided to burn perhaps the largest and most fruitful agreements ever made between European countries. What's nonsensical is claiming one can work together after doing the exact opposite of that.
It's not a binary thing. It's not either they work together or they don't.
Under a common block, trading or otherwise, things are just easier and much closer together.
Consider only visas, travel and employment, the complications of these brought by Brexit, already distanced any existing and future collaborations by some measure.
There is still collaboration of course, and there will be, but it's not what it was before.
And this negative trend of distance in collaboration is more worrying in an increasingly threatening environment.
Your googling would also show that the article dates from more than a year ago.
A lot changed.
Basically, fundamental disagreements with Europe over predicate treaties mean that the thing we committed to do (remain part of ITER) is under threat, because other things we committed to do (uphold transition agreements regarding Northern Ireland) are in default.
In this case, the EU is saying, sorry, you possibly can't stay a member of our science club because you promised you'd do certain things that underpin an internationally agreed peace process and you are undoing them.
It's a completely legitimate political bargaining point that would not be an issue at all without Brexit.
The intent to remain members of ITER and Horizon 2020 is genuinely at risk.
All of this underpins my point: everything is more complex because of Brexit -- even staying in things we've said we really really want to stay in.
> Your googling would also show that the article dates from more than a year ago.
> A lot changed.
What changed? The UK participate in ITER still, via F4E. ITER is not just the EU, it's funded by China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States.
Frankly, I don't see what Brexit has to do with HN. There are better places to "discuss" Brexit, and politics, than on HackerNews.
Thank you for clarifying. The confusion is because your comment could easily be interpreted as a criticism of lazy reporting (everything negative that occurs must be because of brexit) rather than actual criticism due to a real issue beyond how it is reported.
I actually rewrote it to the form it is now, about 15 seconds after posting it, to try to remove any suggestion it's about the report; it's possible I suppose that some people reacted to it before I did.
I went from "paragraph" (as in, in an article) to "parenthetical" in the colloquial sense. Like, literally every process or discussion about anything going on in the country has to have this sidebar about how much worse it is because of all the changes.
I don't really read it as confusing because I had the "thanks, disaster capitalists" bit, which should be unambiguous, but I haven't had my coffee, so I will note and upvote your point and think about it next time I write stuff :-)
Honestly, I didn't and still don't really understand the phrase "disaster capitalists" which probably aided the confusion. What is it supposed to mean? Someone who promotes capitalism to the point of disaster? Someone who trades with disaster as their currency?
It also doesn't help that you start with "Further evidence that...". You can't assume any of your readers are already on board with your conclusions. In my experience, the kind of people who make these kind of comments tend to be closed to debate and commenting in bad faith. For example "further evidence of political-correctness gone mad" is a classic one.
"Disaster capitalism" is a well-established, pretty well known rhetorical term coined by Naomi Klein, a good 15 years ago now. (The book it came from is called The Shock Doctrine)
It refers to a kind of capitalism (and capitalist policy-making) that is poised ready to financially exploit the negatives of any economic shock precisely because the people involved have proximity to the very power structures that are unleashing that economic shock.
It was a prediction that came true.
The Brexit-leaning establishment has made a lot of money out of economic predictions and money movements triggered by Brexit, and the overlap between politicians and hedge funds/investment funds/large non-EU exporters etc. was so close as to suggest the possibility that the legislation has designs for them.
"Further evidence that" is just dry humour from a Brit. We are in absolutely deep, deep **** in this country for the next two years; everything is going to be bad because the Brexit transition has unilaterally, not bilaterally, failed.
The opposing side of the one you seem to be identified with would probably say the same thing, but related to joining the EU in the first place.
If I may perhaps suggest, perhaps, just maybe, it could be worthwhile for you to stop seeing politics in everything and focus on something other than politics, like these scientists are doing?
They don't care about EU, Brexit, who the hell is the British PM. Whatever. They just want to build a smart, sustainable and cheap way for humanity to harness energy from our universe. That's super cool. Imagine if they remained in their homes tweeting about Brexit all day long? We'd be burning fossil fuels forever until we kill ourselves out of smoke...
I don't know, just maybe it would be interesting, who knows...
I found it a valid and unambiguous comment. Brexit has been a disaster for UK science.
If the BBC found it relevant enough to be included in the article, surely it merits a discussion here without being downvoted.
I absolutely feel I did no such thing. It's not ideological to observe what I observed in my initial post. It's clearly factual and clearly relevant to the topic as it is actually raised in the original article.
I am working on the assumption that you are admin and therefore enforce rules.
If this counts as something you wish to flag and remove then I'd like you to remove me. So could you drop me an email about deleting or otherwise permanently disabling my account, please?
Sorry for the noob question but there is something I do not understand. I thought ITER design was more or less decided now as they are building it. Should I understand that they started building ITER without really knowing where they were going to go and are using JET experiment as a way know how to build ITER?
ITER was planned in part through early results from JET in the 90s - but they more recently replaced the inner wall of JET to match what ITER will use, which was a good choice according to models but this gives empirical confirmation that it's possible to sustain the plasma using the new wall material.
All new fusion plants are a risk, that's why they're experimental. I suspect they were reasonably confident they could make ITER work and that's why they started building, but this will give them confirmation that the material choice was a good one and will also show them in advance some of the operational obstacles and possible solutions.
In other words, they knew "where they were going to go" but this gives them more confidence they were correct in deciding the direction, and will speed up their learning curve setting up the machine once built. Even if it is built and something fundamentally doesn't work about the concept, that will still be useful scientific knowledge, even if it is disappointing.
> The experiments produced 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds (11 megawatts of power).
> This is more than double what was achieved in similar tests back in 1997.
> It's not a massive energy output - only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water. But the significance is that it validates design choices that have been made for an even bigger fusion reactor now being constructed in France.
I thought this was interesting as 59 megajoules of energy or 11 megawatts of power seems more than you would need to boil 60 kettles' of water. In fact, it takes 4,184 joules to raise the temperature of 1kg of water by 1 degree. Or 313800 joules to raise 1kg of water by 75 degrees. That means JET could have boiled about 188 kg of water.
Is it possible they subtracted the energy required to facilitate the reaction in the first place? So net energy was enough to boil 60 kettles worth of water?
Those are used for the confinement coils. Incredibly, JET uses copper coils. You can't run those all day, so the flywheels are used. The last machine I worked at worked the same way. 16 train motors with 1 ton flywheels spinning at 1600 RPM to be an 11 MW power supply for 1 second every few minutes.
Plasma heating in JET is done via NBI+ICRH and is about 59 MW.
I've seen those copper busbars -- they drill holes for water throughout them. The whole design of high-B field environments is fascinating; you end up with things like Bitte designs with split rings and a whole lot of engineering to stop the copper vapourising. Highly recommended if you're ever in the area – they do two sorts of tours (or did, prior to covid), the "general public" tour and the "scientist" tour. I went on the latter. The sight of two giant robotic arms playing Jenga to train their operators is not one to forget.
I should visit JET sometime. Of all the systems on the machine I worked on (https://hsx.wisc.edu/), the coil current feeds were the most difficult. Trying to cram that much current through a small piece of copper with a discontinuity takes years of effort.
> That means JET could have boiled about 188 kg of water.
> only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water
Exactly, no one has 3l kettles, but it's the right ballpark. You could also run about 9k kettles for that 5 seconds but not boil them, and if you tried to run 60 kettles consuming all that power for 5 seconds you would have quite the fire...
>In fact, it takes 4,184 joules to raise the temperature of 1kg of water by 1 degree. Or 313800 joules to raise 1kg of water by 75 degrees. That means JET could have boiled about 188 kg of water.
This is missing the heat of vaporization[1] needed to actually boil the water though, i.e. to turn 100C liquid water to 100C steam. That's another 2250kJ/kg on top of the 313.8kJ/kg you've mentioned.
It's why steam is such a great carrier of energy for industrial applications.
I guess you could argue that you wouldn't evaporate all water in the kettle, but then you do want a rolling boil. It's probably a bit up for discussion at which point you'd stop heating the kettle.
> I guess you could argue that you wouldn't evaporate all water in the kettle...
One does not have to argue for that interpretation - raising the temperature to boiling point, not boiling it dry, is indisputably the accepted and intended meaning of the phrase wherever English is spoken... though it would fit with a certain stereotype of scientists if a bunch of plasma physicists did not know how to make a pot of tea!
indisputably the accepted and intended meaning of the phrase wherever English is spoken
Not exactly. In American English "bring a pot to a boil" is much more common. When I read "enough energy to boil 60 kettles of water" I thought "vaporize".
> Not exactly. In American English "bring a pot to a boil" is much more common. When I read "enough energy to boil 60 kettles of water" I thought "vaporize".
Disagree that this is a) a much more common phrasing or b) that your interpretation would be the common one. I've yet to run into a situation where somebody asked me to "boil some water" and intended for me to vaporize all the water in some vessel.
It's entirely disputable as evidenced by this conversation.
It's also an incredible waste of time to argue over definitions. They're always disputable because they always arise in response to two people using a word differently. Maybe they're wrong and you're right, or maybe others also use the word that way—it doesn't matter. Humility and aiming at mutual understanding is far more worthwhile.
This issue is indeed trivial, but I don't know how, in general, we are going to achieve mutual understanding without establishing an agreed-upon semantics.
It's not possible to fix a particular semantics outside a particular time and context, and certainly not possible to do so in general.
Here, as soon as someone recognizes that the amount of energy cited is way higher or lower than would be implied by their own definition, they should 1) identify the difference ("Boil here means 'boil n kettles dry' rather than 'bring n kettles to boil'") and 2) in most cases, avoid the wasted debate by adopting the other person's language if further conversation using the concept is needed.
Indeed - so it is clear what one should do here, which is to begin by assuming the author is adopting a well-established meaning within the relevant context. For this, we have a couple of clues: one is British English usage, given that this is a press release from a British laboratory, and the other is that there is a meaning in which the calculation works out correctly.
In the light of this, what is your objection to my comment? As far as I can tell, it is in conformance with your numbered principles.
Saying "X is indisputably the accepted and intended meaning of the phrase wherever English is spoken" is not in conformance with those principles at all.
There appears to be a certain irony in how, in your rather sanctimonious posts here, you seem to have generally failed to act in accordance with the very principles that you accuse me of violating.
That calculation is correct if you assume that by "boil water" they mean to bring the water to 100°C (which is what you'd use a kettle for usually).
However to go from liquid water to water vapor you need to add even more energy [0]. The enthalpy of vaporization for water is 2257 kJ/kg, it takes much more energy to boil water at 100°C than it takes to get there from room temperature.
Warming by 75 degrees + boiling = 2570 kJ/kg -> enough to boil 23 liters of water
I'm guessing in reality the energy needed to operate the kettles would lie somewhere in between, as a small part of the water will be boiled and most of it kept around 100°C. For 2L kettles the value seems in the right ballpark.
Of course this is great news, however, it is worth taking into account it took them 25 years just to double the energy output. They are also nowhere near long sustained operation of such reactors. It really requires an order of magnitude increase before nuclear fusion becomes a realistic prospect in two decades.
I understand this just to validate design choices and it is a good step forward. However, it doesn't make nuclear fusion a reality in two decades unless further records are set using this design
JET ran its moonshot campaign 25 years ago. Moonshot as in "we don't care if the machine runs again", for whatever reason. It hasn't been funded for nuclear operations since then. It's not that it took 25 years to make progress. It took 25 years to find funding.
Well my kettle is 3kw and takes about 2 minutes to boil so about 200 of my kettles... BUT they don't say how big the kettle is or how much water it contains so it could be 60 BBC kettles. I bet they drink a lot of tea...
It's great to have a nuclear magnetic confinement device anywhere on the planet again. It looks like things are running well: profiles of NBI, and density are all under control.
In what sense do you think this is good for sustainable energy? Do you think it will cost less, or have less environmental impact than, say, newer deep well geothermal? I'm not so optimistic that costs could ever be competitive with geothermal.
Doesn't deep geothermal generally require fracking? At least the geothermal plants that I've seen being implemented right now do. Is there any fancy new tech breaking through there currently?
I think both fusion and geothermal are very exciting, crazy thing is although geothermal sounds simpler, I have no idea what's holding it back technology-wise, yet I have a pretty good understanding of the state of fusion research right now.
Why couldn't we get geothermal without fracking? Is it so hard to establish a more controlled heat exchange channel down there? Harder than developing nuclear fusion?
Geothermal is very location sensitive and requires huge outlays upfront. Maybe it’d be a clearer choice if energy storage were better solved. It also requires political support to cross NIMBYism.
Aren't we at the point where most large scale infrastructure projects require huge outlays? Unless geothermal is an order of magnitude more expensive per MW or GWH than say nuclear, is it a point against it?
I think people both aren’t making the logical connection for why they need more power for their current way of life. Also, the NIMBYism against geothermal may be even stronger than that against nuclear because of the governments involved.
Consider how much commerce is done in the US via truck. Those trucks average 6 miles per gallon diesel. That represents a huge amount of energy. But it currently relies on fossil fuels so people don’t think of it as being potentially served by renewable energy sources.
The idea is that it would cost less and make energy so cheap and abundant that it would completely change society. Fusion would allow you to get 30x energy out vs energy in and has 10,000x the energy density of coal. If you want to explore space, it’s a good option.
I guess, why is it thought that it could be cheaper than geothermal, for example? Geothermal doesn't have fuel at all. I don't see how fusion produces energy cheap enough for it to be super abundant. And maybe that's just a failure of my imagination, but there seem to be massive gaps in others' reasoning that nobody has been able to fill me in on.
Space travel is an entirely separate type of energy use, and I could see it being the only option for lots of applications. But that would be much further away, and the significant hurdles there can also be solved by other future tech advances like direct conversion for fusion to electricity.
Even without fuel, geothermal still has constraints. Where can we build it? What are the build costs and costs to run (maintenance, staffing, etc)?
I doubt we can scale geothermal indefinitely. Fusion might suffer from similar constraints, but afaik, doesn't need "much" space or specific geographic structures.
FWIW, drilling tech is advancing at an incredible rate, making geothermal possible in all sorts of new places all the time.
But my primary concern with fusion is cost. I don't see the path to being cheaper than geothermal, nor fission, and new fission is already some of our most expensive energy. The goal may be eventual space travel, which seems like a more plausible goal to talk about than sustainable energy.
If it does not incluse precision engineering to build largest vacuum vessel, supercomputers, superconductors, generation and containment of hottest substance on the planet, and largest magnetic fields we can produce. If that's not 'fundamentally expensive', then what is?
Especially when your interlocutor is asking for geothermal, a.k.a. a hole in the ground?
There’s no piece of the Tomamak individually that can’t be miniaturized or benefit from economies of scale. It doesn’t require exotic fuel like nuclear fission reactors do. It doesn’t need gigantic quantities of space and material like wind and solar. It doesn’t have high up front engineering costs like geothermal. One day a tokamak might be an off the shelf industrial purchase, maybe akin to an MRI machine.
"It doesn’t have high up front engineering costs like geothermal."
You are commenting on an article about how scientists had to build a reactor out of berillium and tungsten.
Have you ever touched those materials? Is there any berillium in your car, or your washing machine? If you go around your neighbourhood looking for someone who can weld or work tungsten, will you find anyone? Can you buy a tool on amazon that will cut tungsten?
The number of facilities that can produce precision-enginered thousand-ton vacuum vessel with exotic materials, are counted with fingers on one hand.
> Tritium is very exotic, and fuel cost is a small and irrelevant cost to fission powerplant
This is downright delusional, solar is the only technology that you can go and buy off the shelf and it is much cheaper than an MRI machine, any joe with basic electrical education can put together a solar power system and poor people in developing nations do it. Anyone who thinks that fusion will be easier than slapping solar panels together is smoking some serious dope
You’re missing the point a little bit. No one is arguing that solar is going to be more expensive than fusion. The point is that fusion is about as far fetched as a lot of technology seem at first. Like microprocessors (billions of transistors?) or medical imaging (put a human into a giant magnetic field to see inside them) or internal combustion engines.
You mean fundamentally expensive like building billions of nano meter scale devices, aligning and wiring 24 million of them to be individually addressable on a 6 inch plane? Oh and we build those by the thousands on factory lines.
That's a whole lot more of precision engineering than is needed to build a nuclear fusion reactor, and you can buy it on the order of a hundred bucks.
And it's not just a hole in the ground, last time I checked the thermal conductivity of rocks isn't exactly stellar.
I think this is a great example of why fusion will probably not drop in price.
With semiconductors, prices fall continuously because there is continuous iteration, and starting from the very very first lithographic circuits there was a market. There's an entire industry, competitors, and it's a factory system.
Fusion is not like that, it will be like building monuments, there's not thousands or millions of the same thing getting churned out, it will be all specialized construction for each piece.
You may say that a chip did specialized in that each of the transistors re wired together in very specific ways, but the semiconductor industry is a factory factory in some sense, you build a set of masks and that's your factory for your chip.
Let's say you design a fusion reactor, and then 12 months later you see how to shave off 1% of the costs somewhere. That iterative gain is lost, because the fusion reactors will be built very rarely, and building each one in a new custom way poses lots more risk than doing the same design for 10 years. They are just too big and expensive to show the same sort of mass manufacturing gains that can be seen with technologies that have learning curves.
I could be wrong, and I certainly hope I am, but I would bet a hell of a lot more money on a new battery chemistry than I would on fusion as being a terrestrial power device.
I think you're underestimating how small fusion reactors are. We're going to be needing not just fusion reactors per city, but per city block. If we manage to get them to break-even, they're going to be super plentiful.
At least, that's what the promise is, we'll have to see of course.
I've never heard anyone suggest that fusion could scale to be really tiny like that. Do you have any pointers on where I could look to learn about something like that? Because every existing thermal electricity generator scales to be really big for the efficiency gains, and fusion is a thermal electricity generator as planned so far. Tiny steam turbines in each block does not sound cost effective, even if the heat is free.
I'm basing this basically on the size of the experimental reactors currently being developed like sparc and the ST40. No doubt building larger plants is going to be more efficient, but if the fusion reactors themselves are going to be that small a single plant will probably have multiple ones.
I think fission reactors and ITER have shown the downside of building really large one off reactors, I don't think they're gonna make that mistake again.
What? We have the best bet for sustainable and clean energy.
Wind and Solar. They soon will beat natural gas for cheapest unsubsidized LCOE, and considering all fossil fuels are shadow-subsidized, that's huge.
Fusion needs to prove is can be cheaper than old-crappy-pressurized solid rod fission first, which is right now getting killed by alternative energy.
I was a big LFTR stan for a while. But wind/solar has won. Keep investing in fusion and fission, but they are subsidy and research projects right now only.
Not nessesarily, alternative approach is to overbuild them 10x so thay we always generate more wnergy than we need and have continent spanning super-grid because it's always windy and sunny somewhere.
Today Boston has a sunrise at 11:47 am utc and Los Angeles has a sunset 1:30am utc. That is 10+ hours where the USA gets zero sunlight. Inconveniently, we also hit peak energy usage during those 10 dark hours.
So if you want to ignore the storage problem, you need to rely on wind only. And if you have to dramatically over provision production to be able to meet demand, the cost benefits disappear.
Storage is a must for renewables to really take off.
But I am not claiming there is any cost benefit at all - alI am claiming it's doable, and we will have zero or negative electricity price on windy days, that coupd be put to good use for electrolysis, hydrogen production, etc.
Storage likely will be a non-issue once sodium ion batteries scale up, even cheaper and safer than LFP. A couple more years of scale efficiencies and alt+storage will be cheaper without subsidies. Consumer solar+storage will be cheaper than nat gas in a couple years with any rational subsidy.
Land issues? Seriously?
The land issue for solar is a non-issue, it's like fake hand-wringing by the oil astroturfers over birds and windmills when skyscrapers kill 100xs more birds. There's this type of land called desert. Also, there is this thing called roofs where modern solar panels only need a small part of the roof to do a suburban house or apartment building including recharging your EV.
The land issue for wind is even less on an issue:
As for wind, I don't know if you've seen windmills on farms but... yeah, the pole doesn't take up much space. Then there is offshore wind. Windmills can integrate with existing use land (why not nature preserves?), you don't need to dedicate acreage to windmill farms.
Meanwhile, fusion reactors have a wee bit of problems with neutrons flying everywhere and turning the reactor vessels slightly radioactive from neutron capture. Maybe they'll fix that with good absorption spectrum elements, but let's not pretend fusion is 100% clean.
But again, the promise is there for fusion and LFTR/"new" fission. Keep the research, maybe the economics will turn around. Industry sure would need it to fully decarbonize, or, heck, space colonies. Or flying cars! Or any of the other sci-fi stuff we have given up on.
Right now we have an existential threat from GW, and an actual industrialized / productized and economic path is right there: wind and solar. That's what we need money printing for.
> Storage likely will be a non-issue once sodium ion batteries scale up, even cheaper and safer than LFP.
Sure, once storage is solved it will be a non-issue. But it is not currently solved, and you will forgive my skepticism.
I also never brought up land issues; I agree that it's not a real problem.
TL;DR we need to be realistic about the capabilities of solar + wind. You argue that storage will solve itself. Your sibling argues that we don't need storage at all.
The reality is that storage is a huge issue right now. It's the #1 technical issue stopping us from shutting down coal and natural gas plants.
You can't say fusion is impractical while saying solar and wind is better by hand waving all the current concerns and technological walls we still haven't solved. Plans on an whiteboard do not count, sorry.
Storage isn't solved, land space isn't solved, efficiency isn't solved, just like fusion isn't a solved problem.
The land requirement for solar should not be so casually dismissed.
To power the US energy needs, you need an area about the size of New Jersey. Also roughly equivalent to the area taken up by roads. The interstate highway system alone has been cited as the largest public works project in history, and that's "just" asphalt.
The LCOE of solar and wind is cheaper than all fossil fuel plants and nuclear plants. Existing generation will peak load.
Look, any new nuclear or fusion project won't turn on for a decade. Given that even with inflation wind/solar STILL dropped in LCOE cost last year, and still likely has technological and economies of scale, you REALLY think a 10 year out fusion or nuclear project will launch at a price competitive with what even solar/wind + storage will be?
Solar/wind likely will be half the inflation adjusted cost it currently is now even with storage in 10 years.
LFP batteries are coming on the market now for storage that are half what lithium ion cost. Sodium will be release by CATL later this year or next. I'm not handwaving anything.
There is a LOT of roof real estate. A fair amount more than the interstate system. The costs are already pushing wind/solar to deploy as fast as it can be made, it basically is a production scaling problem.
New Jersey is not a large state, given we have west texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and lots of other desert. Which we don't need, because of rooftops and wind.
The best bet for sustainable and clean energy is to stop using fossil fuels and figure out how to deal with the economic consequences.
I feel this optimism around this far off solutions for decades has been just a detrimental to climate action as out right climate denialism.
Growing up in the 90s I was always told "everything will be fine, since we'll figure it all out with technology". It wasn't until decades later, when I kept hearing this promising but seeing CO2 emissions rise that I looked into the details and realized how incredibly in danger our society is, as well as how nearly impossible to solve this problem is at this point.
The reason we shouldn't put our enthusiasm into it is because it's a distraction from the fact that we may already be past essential limits in our climate system and if we want any chance of survival as a civilization and potentially species we need drastic action now.
Describe to me the scenario where billions don't die?
I think you're pointing to the very likely reality which is that there is no way out. More often than not I agree with you. It's just a shame that, as a society, we've chosen not to even publicly allow conversations about what's really happening and the choices we have to make.
> Describe to me the scenario where billions don't die?
There is not one.
I was merely pointing what I think is an euphemism.
> we've chosen not to even publicly allow conversations about what's really happening and the choices we have to make.
Because we are ashamed. We all know that the price of our current comfort is blood. Now and in the future. And our human nature seem to be unable to abandon comfort once we have it.
Going in the wrong direction with development that can never work as intended is always a waste no matter how good the goal. Incorrectly reporting this modest incremental change is the kind of thing that allows doomed projects like this to consume vast resources of money, material and skilled labor that could be used to explore other alternatives.
Pardon the analogy, but bringing up Q_engineering in this context is like someone shopping for a car running into Ford's engine design department and complaining that the engineers are not using the car's fuel economy to increase the engine's performance.
How much power the subsystems takes has no influence on the plasma's performance. How much power goes into the plasma (and what type of power and where and when, etc.) do influence the plasma's performance.
We (now) know but most people don't, when somebody says it'll "produce X amount of power than you put in" any normal human being would think "it's done" but then they'll wonder for next X decades why there are no power plants yet? Because nobody told them that you need more power than it produces at the end and positive net was just for final reaction and without heat to electricity conversion.
Clearly the end goal is to beat the First Law of Thermodynamics and its pesky "conservation of energy." We already know how to print money, now it's time to print energy! /s
It's tough to say because the campaign is a signpost on the way to an eventual end goal. But the end goal is easy to describe: "a working fusion power plant."
The end goal is so far away at this point, not a single player in this space is even trying to do it, even on their farthest-out roadmaps...
No, the campaign's goals were to push higher plasma energy out of a JET pulse. This required upgrades to many subsystems and to dust off everything necessary for nuclear operations.
They did this in support of ITER, but there are also likely other political motivations. There has been no nuclear MCF operation on Earth in decades and now the UK has invested in resuming theirs rather than mothballing it.
You can't make claims about the motivations of the campaign (such as it being a signpost?) if you don't know what was even done.
And again, you shouldn't talk about the roadmaps if you haven't looked at them. Look at PPPL FIRE and power plant studies.
When you are comparing across different fusion techniques, which we implicitly are in our brains (because we are not sophisticated plasma physicists and not every strategy right now is magnetic confinement), Q_engineering is important to think about: different strategies will have different capabilities of harvesting the energy and turning it into power, and maybe some of the strategies (laser inertial confinement cough cough) are super-unlikely to ever have reasonable and efficient capture strategies. It would be nice to have an "estimated Q_engineering" come out of these experiments, even if they are wildly overinflated and crap estimates (as long as the assumptions that go into that are recorded). For that matter, it's not entirely clear to me how one harvests energy from magnetically confined fusion plasmas. Can someone give me a soundbyte on that?
You're asking for a simplification when there is no way to do it without lying. The fact is you do need to know more than a layman to appreciate how impractical ICF really is or how useless looking at Q is in nearly every context that matters. No MCF machine has even attempted to get a higher Q in the past 25 years. Look at lawson criterion and scaling laws for progress.
He says this is also a world record, but JET got 0.67 in 1997 (according to Wikipedia). The missing asterisk may be that this Q was the average for the whole shot, whereas the 1997 result may have been measured over a short time. Just my speculation, based on slide 21 here: https://fire.pppl.gov/iea_bp_w60_stork.pdf
No, unless you count thermonuclear explosives. This experiment didn't demonstrate it either. The fusion only yielded 1/3 the energy used to heat the plasma.[1] That doesn't include the energy needed to run the rest of the machine (magnetic containment etc) and it doesn't include any losses converting the fusion energy to electricity (which was not attempted).
A $50b program from 1 country would likely have the same problem (as indeed would a large private program). Injecting a large amount of capital all at once into a project just isn't efficient.
> Injecting a large amount of capital all at once into a project just isn't efficient.
SpaceX would beg to disagree here. The reason why they are so cheap, agile and sustainable (=reusable rockets) is precisely because SpaceX got a load of money without the "pork" requirements that were commonplace with ULA & friends. That enabled SpaceX to embrace vertical, on-site integration and go for what was technically the best option instead of what was required by some buffoons in Congress.
Although a point may be made that a "hand out cash" program needs a competent, strong and undisputed leader at the top. There's a lot of issues with Elon Musk, but it is undeniable that he is a very effective and inspiring leader.
ITER is a high risk foray into still-experimental technology with no hope of direct return on investment (it can not function as a commercial power plant). It had to be built at this scale because they had reached the limits of smaller-scale prototypes (tho I think there was not unanimity about this). Pooling resources makes sense here.
SpaceX is a more efficient take on technologies and processes that have been battle tested over many decades. This gives them a clear path to profitability, with some risk, but low enough to get investors on board, which ITER would have no hope of doing. Granted they are innovating, but incrementally, not from scratch. Very different.
Yes, but still - instead of all the components needed being manufactured on or near site, they are shipped from across the world... so parts end up damaged [1], not made according to spec or the spec having errors introduced somewhere among dozens of companies and institutions. With sometimes weeks or months of shipping round-trip times, that is causing a fucking lot of delays. Not to mention that shipping all the stuff around itself is also causing issues given the current COVID-caused shipping delays.
The problem is that ITER, ULA, EADS, Airbus, the ISS and a bunch of other international cooperative projects all are considered by politicians primarily as a way to distribute pork, secondarily as a way to show off on the international stage and only then as a way to actually advance scientific knowledge.
Airbus is an inefficient port project? They build almosy half the world's aircraft.
Boeing has 1 boss and what are they better at, defrauding regulators to sell dangerous aircraft? And all other private manufacturers combined are a rounding error?
Questions about how effective this would be aside. What is there to really lose? If we inflate the economy via current means or inflate the economy via employing scientists and engineers ineffectively, it’s inflation nonetheless.
If so then it's impossible to advance, which would be annoying.
What's needed is people who know the subject matter and are experts at running large companies.
SpaceX turned rockets into a production line, experimented, blew a load up, and then fixed the problems with landing. But that's productising last year's thing, not inventing a new possibly impossible thing. Interesting to see how Starship goes.
Need a leader to stay: you do x, you do y, not a committee where every country gets to make one of the 12 magnets because they're a primary school and everything has to be "fair"
If you're willing to print enough cash to pay for the smart people to come to you, you can probably import them. It seems to be more the exception than the rule that people dislike a country so much that no amount of money could get them to go there to do research on the topic they're interested in.
In the current economy the funding of these types of projects is usually not the bottleneck. It's finding the people and achieving the actual scientific / engineering breakthroughs. The marginal return on more money is pretty insignificant for that. If you just threw a ton of money at it much of it would probably be splurged or straight away misappropriated. Then you'll get a whole lot of terrible press, undermining other scientific funding and putting the politicians reelection at risk.
As others have pointed out, ITER has this kind of funding, and it is not the only nuclear fusion research program. It is unclear whether more money will accelerate.
As for green R&D in general, the EU is massively investing in hydrogen research, as something that can be made with excess variable solar and wind power, and be used as a green alternative to natural gas in many situations.
Probably a lot, and while that's generally a useful question to ask about fusion research, in this case the point is not to create a sustainable fusion process but to validate specific pieces of technology, so it doesn't really matter here.
In extension to this news and the press conference, one thing I am super excited about, is the private SPARC project and the MIT-spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). If you don't know about it already, I would highly recommend checking it out (e.g. by searching YouTube for "MIT Sparc Fusion Reactor" for some fairly accessible videos on the theory behind why they should achieve fusion way faster than the current roadmap with ITER and DEMO).
In the press conference just ended, they repeated how exactly the JET reactor worked as predicted by theory. In my layman's understanding, for the exact same reason (seemingly very sound theoretical groundwork), the SPARC reactor should exceed breakeven within the next few years.
From Wiki on CFS:
* Back in September 2021, they built the strongest high-room-temperature superconducting magnet (20 Tesla) suitable for a fusion reactor
* Theory dictates that with stronger magnets, the reactor can be scaled down (with the square/cube, can't remember exactly), and thus cost and time to develop
* Back in November 2021, they raised $1.8 billion from the likes of Bill Gates
> Theory dictates that with stronger magnets, the reactor can be scaled down (with the square/cube, can't remember exactly), and thus cost and time to develop
OTOH, in a tokamak, the plasma volume (and potential energy output) scales quadratically with the torus' aspect ratio (ratio of major to minus radius), so I'm not sure that tokamak-based fusion really is particularly suitable to miniaturization.
Again, I'm very much a layman to this subject, but how does miniaturization necessarily affect that particular aspect ratio? Since it's literally a ratio of two dimensions of the torus, shouldn't this be invariant to the overall size?
(Assuming all things being equal, which I have no idea whether holds.)
Tokamak output scales with the square of reactor volume but the fourth power of magnetic field strength, so with sufficiently powerful magnets, scaling down the size can be an option.
TLDR: Tokamak economics scale in size with 1/B^5 -- so doubling the magnet field strength reduces the physical size substantially. This factor dominates other scaling parameters by a substantial margin, and is entirely enabled by high-temperature superconductors. A host of other key fusion parameters also scale beneficially with B^x (for some value of x) -- most of which are discussed in first half the video.
However, you as you scale down, all the radiation damage effects per unit volume or unit surface area increase rapidly causing higher material activation and maintenance cost.
Miniaturization has never been realistic with tritium fusion anyway due to neutron production - you need several metres of material to stop them, otherwise your reactor is just kicking off radioactive oxygen into the atmosphere.
The insane thing that people should realize about the 20T CFS test back in September was that it was them completing the first of 18 coils, and it performed incredibly well.
The secret sauce is better high temperature superconductors, and the ridiculous magnets you can build with them. They're pretty much putting these coils together as quickly as they can accumulate the HTSC wiring, and once they have all 18, they basically just need to put them all in a ring and light it up, and in theory they'll be generating over 10x the amount of power that they're putting into it.
This is the kind of tangible progress that gets me really excited. I wish there was a tracker on the CFS site to see how many coils they've completed so far, similar to tracking the progress of the JWST. Last I checked they were estimating completion around 2025, and at this pace that actually seems reasonable.
ReBCO tape is the specific high-temperature superconducting material they're using.
Another important material is FLiBe, which is a liquid that I think absorbs the energy from the fusion reactor. I don't really understand the properties that make it particularly well suited to the task, but I gather it's important.
According to the article, FLiBe has the same heat capacity of water, but a boiling point over 14x higher (1430 °C according to the article). Melting point is 359 °C, 3.5x higher. I will speculate that its basically used as a water coolant with the phase shifts shifted up and out. I bet the heat exchangers are exotic, too, having to operate at such high temps! In fact I'd expect to see a pretty sophisticated cascade of exchangers.
Higher temperatures in the coolant loop are normally desirable for efficiency. In a heat engine, the hotter the hot side, and cooler the cold side, the more energy you can extract after all.
I don't really see why it's important for a fusion reactor though, where efficiency isn't really a concern at this point.
Well, the energy output of the reactor is limited by the amount of energy you can get out, which is limited by how much coolant you can move through it and how much energy the coolant can absorb without boiling/exploding. The MIT SPARC/ARC reactor designs are physically rather small, so it's possible that heat exchange could be the limiting factor in power output of an individual reactor.
That video's a bit confusing because it purely talks about watts and not everything is continuous.
Anyway, the important part: In addition to the output being thermal, with losses from conversion, only the energy going into the plasma is being counted. So measuring the entire system, this reactor might still be a little short of break-even.
So they arent counting magnets/magnetism as a source of energy like a battery then? However I'm sure these newer stronger possibly more directional/controllable batteries will have an effect in electric motors in the future.
I think the newer higher temperature super conductors helps, but then I wonder if the cooling facilities of the older generation of super conductors might have been a potential future safety feature on earth but not in space.
> they basically just need to put them all in a ring and light it up
Well, if that's not under understatement... There are surely many more challenges in the high-field line of research, probably more than we know of, since they're kind of pioneering this field. Large size tokamaks, depsite their huge costs, have some considerable benefits like longer timescales for MHD instabilities and smaller stresses (both thermal and mechanical).
There was alot of debate about spending so much money on the large hydron collider when there was other social programs the money could be spent on instead of probing the fundamental nature of the universe.
LHC actually paved the way for commercial production of novel superconductors and magnets, leading in some way to helping fusion become a reality. In my opinion, Fusion and solving death should be my generations guiding star. (i'm 26)
There are certainly some exciting projects happening in the fusion world coming up. It seems likely we will start seeing much higher energy outputs, I think for SPARC they are predicting >10x the energy produced as what it will consume (Q > 10).
My biggest question is with the crazy temperatures involved will we ever see one of these things able to run for hours at a time? With SPARC they are shooting for 10 second bursts, so that would double this breakthrough for the JET reactor. Even with the magnetic containment there are components in there exposed to millions of degrees Celsius right? That leaves us with some significant material science problems to solve.
Why though, we already have Nuclear energy, we could easily build enough that it could power the world's energy needs. The issue is storage, until we have a revolutionary storage solution very little will change with fossil fuel usage.
However! fusion plants are much larger than fission cores, and the neutrons are an order of magnitude more energetic, so you wind up with both way more mass and way higher activation.
At this point, I think fusion has the best chance
of saving us from ourselves wrt to climate change, so long as the unforeseen consequences aren’t too bad.
It doesn't seem like it's quick enough. We're, at minimum, decades away from it even being built out commonly, and to _really_ save ourselves we should have already replaced a substantial portion of the world's energy generation decades ago.
Yes, this is part of what would need to happen: using a super abundance of essentially carbon-free energy to do geo-engineering on a massive scale (including artificial carbon sequestration).
It might in the future turn out to be more efficient with a "few" reactors than, say, lots of batteries and wind turbines and solar panels, from a resource perspective. But I think not even that will come true, if we optimize stuff enough, which we will have a long time to do before fusion is here.
Fusion would "solve" the climate change issue, but do nothing in regard to all other crises affecting our environment right now (biodiversity collapse, various sources of chemical and particulate pollution, fertilizer runoff...).
On the contrary, unlimited energy would exacerbate the man-made crises we are having today by further pushing the potential impact of man on its environment.
> Theory dictates that with stronger magnets, the reactor can be scaled down (with the square/cube, can't remember exactly), and thus cost and time to develop
Here's the quick summary:
B: magnetic field strength
R: length scale
Fusion rate ∝ (plasma pressure)^2 ∝ B^4
Energy gain (Q) ∝ R^1.3 B^3
Power density ∝ R B^4
Cost ∝ R^3
So, say for example you're targeting a fixed Q. Doubling the magnetic field strength results in R1 = R0 / 2^(3/1.3) = 0.2 R0. And 0.2 R0 translates to 1/(0.2)^3 = 0.008 = 0.8% the cost.
The scaling is absolutely insane, and a stronger magnetic field has other advantages (such as making plasma instability far less of a concern), though structural loads can be an issue (that, at least is a relatively straightforward engineering problem).
If you take 12T for ITER and 20T for SPARC, that's not actually 2x, it's 1.67, which translates to 30% the size and 3% the cost (and time). It should also be noted that this is just rough, order-of magnitude estimation, but it should be broadly accurate.
> It's even more subtle than that, in fact this is really one of the things we've studies at MIT, is that there's other things that come in terms of benefits, particularly when you make the magnetic field very high, it basically starts to tame, just all of the whole suite of plasma instabilities that exist.
There's no such thing as a room temperature super-conducting magnet. You are talking about "high temperature" magnets, which are YBCO tape magnets. High temperature, in this case, means about -290 degrees F.
The next breakthrough that will come will be YBCO powder-in-tube wires, that will allow much stronger fields than currently. They'll be here within a decade, probably much less, as working prototypes exist now.
I think they were referring to the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, at around -196°C, not being cooled by nitrogen being what makes them "high temperature".
Private companies have a big incentive to share the good news and hide the bad news.
What are the chances these guys have a pile of problems they can't solve with their approach, but rather than trying to approach it from another direction like an engineer would, instead they continue development because collecting more investor cash while the investors are unaware of the showstoppers is good employment.
This is a very dumb meme that people use to avoid learning anything about the actual hurdles that are currently being faced by fusion researchers. At some point, fusion will be much less than 30 years away, and at that point, I guarantee you that lazy people will still be repeating this joke, because it is literaly the only thing they know about the subject.
It was 30 years away at current levels of funding. Funding dipped considerably. This is as dumb as when they ask you for an estimate at work, then change the scope of the project and then retort with "well it was your estimate".
Even if it takes 200 years it is likely still worthwhile. Unfortunately we, as a culture, have a problem seeing and planning across generations.
https://longnow.org/
I'm happy to hear someone make this point. Rather than sneering "vaporware" when decades fail to crack a problem, I would prefer us to keep in mind that if we never try multi-generational projects, we will never taste the fruit of multi-generational projects, and those are some sweet fruit indeed.
The Netherlands would like a word. Holding back the sea was a monumental project that will definitely last generations to come. Maybe not as exiting as high temp superconductors and fusion but still a nationwide unique product.
Old-school land reclamation worked by putting woven fences in the water where waves would deposit sand over decades and centuries, slowly growing the land bit by bit. Those versions were already multi-generational projects.
(I'm citing the techniques used in the north frisian wadden sea, I'm unsure if the same techniques were used in west frisia as well)
Oh, that's very interesting. So I'm guessing that technique was used to make areas that were put of the water during low tide, and then eventually dikes were added to make them dry land?
Exactly. But this technique only allows you to get land that's exactly at sea level, so dikes are absolutely necessary.
This also means you need drainage systems to remove the water from already reclaimed land, as it's still exactly at sea level and will be relatively wet marshland otherwise.
Thats why the netherlands built those old school windmills. thats how land was reclaimed below sea level. They no longer serve the same function but are used instead for small shops and for tourists.
Not a scientific achievement, but doesn't the Sagrada Família count?
"On 19 March 1882, construction of the Sagrada Família began ... It was anticipated that the building would be completed by 2026, the centenary of Gaudí's death, but this has now been delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic."
Continuing construction (admittedly not continuosly) for roughly 150 years is pretty impressive in my opinion.
Also in the era of family businesses, businesses were much more sustainable, sometimes competitive over hundreds of years. The useful lifespan of a modern public company is much smaller.
It runs into the spaceship problem where later iterations of a spaceship reach the destination first because new technology allows them to fly faster. At some point (maybe) materials and other technology will develop enough so that fusion becomes feasible on a decades or so timeline. Or solar & battery technology will develop to the point where fusion isn't really needed.
Sure because you develop technology while working on achievable goals. As an example, what could someone in 1920 do to help develop fusion power? Pretty much nothing that would be practically useful today. But they had stuff they could achieve which laid the groundwork to what we're doing today.
But then you run into things that you only discover while trying to do something practical. Like the space shuttle having to land--NASA developed grooved runways specifically for this purpose and now they're on our highways. https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/Groove....
There are technologies, materials, and methods we've developed, tested, and perfected because of some specific need. I mean, how much of the internet do we have today as a result of CERN having to store and share vast amounts of data and information?
Sure, you can say /eventually/ we would've come up with alternatives. But a lot of the internet and technology in the 90s came as a direct result of CERN doing practical things. How would we know we'd need solid state drives today if we didn't develop a need for hard drives? The same can be said of NASA, the space shuttle, the Hubble telescope, etc.
Going back to CERN, maybe it would've been better to wait for the Superconducting Super Collider because it was going to be more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider. But so far only one of these particle accelerators has detected the Higgs boson.
It's an interesting sci-fi thought, but why wouldn't the second spaceship just catch up with the first one and pick up the passengers to avoid their unnecessary travel time?
So? If you know there's another spaceship that you're going to pass and you need to pick people up, you make your docking apparatus backwards compatible.
Why pick up the passengers only? Plan ahead and build it to pick up the entire ship, including not just the passengers but all the materials and supplies they had packed as well.
It's also good to have a number of these things in the oven, because it's hard to predict when a sudden discontinuous leap might make practical in the short term something that previously seemed like a multi-generational project.
I presume almost no one in 1920 could have imagined that anything approaching the output of fission energy would become common in their lifetime.
We're currently on course for having trouble existing across generations. The path we're on now I don't think meeting fusion goals will be big concern if there's anyone around to even be concerned.
Activation of the reactor walls. The neutrons don't disappear; they're absorbed, and some fraction of the atoms that absorb them become radioactive themselves. I've seen lifetime estimates ranging from five to ten years for the walls, after which they'll be high-level waste.
The breeding blanket does slow the neutrons, but there needs to be a first wall material that does not ablate into the plasma. You need very little of non-hydrogen material in the vacuum to cause a density collapse. If you made the wall out of liquid lithium then there would be a lot of lithium in the plasma.
Tungsten is a good choice for a first wall material because of its uniquely high melting point, low rate of embrittlement in high neutron flux, and short-lived radioisotopes.
> What makes you think it will be any more politically viable to scale out than fission reactors?
IIRC a major difference would be the danger potential in case of a "meltdown", since a fusion reactor wouldn't have kilograms or even tons of uranium etc. laying around to form another elephant's foot but "just" the irradiated reactor vessel which AIUI is both not as dangerous or as long-lived as fission fuel, a fission reactor itself and fission waste products.
Also IIRC the actual "meltdown" of a fusion reactor would involve the reaction environment (extremely high temperatures and pressures) breaking down at which point the reaction stops almost immediately no longer producing any additional radiation or waste products, leaving only the already irradiated reactor vessel to deal with since the comparatively tiny volume of reactant(s) (probably one or more different Hydrogen isotopes) and reaction product(s) (probably Helium) will escape quickly and with pretty much no harm done.
Yup, that's exactly the problem. We need to find an incentive for the ones in power to invest in things that would be good for the future.
Maybe I'm going too far but in the future cryonics and being frozen and be brought back when the promise of these investments be resolved in the future might create some incentives.
Even though this seems super-scifi for now, it probably won't be in about 100 years.
Yes! As a concrete example, people spent all of the C19 trying to fly, learning lots about aerodynamics along the way (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation#19th_centu...). This culminated in the Wright Brothers making the final improvements that made it work. A century or two to get fusion would be quite efficient.
This is a disingenuous argument. JET was not designed as a power plant. Those flywheels are used exclusively to transiently power the copper confinement coils. Since superconduction was discovered, no reactor study has had non-superconducting confinement coils because they are (very obviously) impractical.
Remember, the easiest way for uninformed people to appear scientific is to lob high-level criticisms about the topic. In this case, it's "But it only doubled the output!" or something similar.
We see this pattern on every single piece of science news that comes across the front page of HN.
The only purpose of my comment was to provide context for the numbers in the article via a thought experiment involving doubling.
Since the calculation involves taking log_2, even if the estimate for the "used power" is off by a factor of 4 the result will only change by 50 years.
Can you make your qualitative comment quantitative and update the numbers in my doubling thought experiment?
I would be curious about what you think is more realistic.
A quantitative approach is no virtue here, just a more convincing way to lie.
ITER will use roughly the same amount of power as JET, produce 10x the power 40 years later. Even using poor metrics such as Q you have enough data points to p-hack whatever incorrect timeframe model you want.
ITER isn't even using HTS coils.
If you really want a quantitative projection of MCF performance over time, here you go. Don't lie with numbers if you don't know what you're talking about.
EUROfusion is a consortium of national fusion research institutes located in the European Union, Switzerland and Ukraine. It was established in 2014 to succeed the European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA) as the umbrella organisation of Europe's fusion research laboratories. The consortium is currently funded by the Euratom Horizon 2020 programme. [0]
-- Wikipedia
So the reason it is called European is that it was conceived by the EU and it's partners and it primarily funded by the EU's Horizon 2020 funding programme.
I think the point that your parent commenter was making is that Oxford is in the UK and the UK is no longer a member of the EU or Euratom, although it has various agreements with both.
I think OP was commenting more on the emphasis, i.e. one of the titles highlighting the name "Oxford" just because it's famous. The UK is still in Europe and will likely be for decades to come.
JET is based near Oxford, and in an article from the BBC provides useful geographic context for the UK audience. I don't think it is mentioned because Oxford is "famous".
Plate tectonics has everything moving, so although I am an amateur, it seems the fact that the British Isles are moving away from Europe doesn't prove much.
I'm not sure it's Brexit related - but I've noticed more and more that when the UK media uses the expressions Europe or European, they are referring to the European continent as if the UK was not part of it. I've even heard it used in this capacity in a work presentation which caused confusion in the multi-national audience - "in Asia it's X, in Europe it's Y, in the UK it's Z...". I consume quite a bit of UK media so I knew what they meant but others pulled them up on it and the presenter seemed initially perplexed that anyone would think that "Europe" included the UK.
Has been like this for a long time before brexit and was surprising to me too when I moved to the UK nearly 20 years ago. “Europe” in colloquial use in the UK usually refers to mainland Europe, not the British isles (or even Ireland)
You might've noticed more and more but it's always been the case
It's probably related to brexit in that this outlook is very likely at least part of why Brexit happened (or rather why the UK was never a particularly good fit for the EU)
But people living in Oxford are European? If one article says "North American researchers" and another article says "Researchers from California", would that be strange to you as well? Or if one article said "African researchers" and another said "Researchers from Rwanda"?
The title is unfair in suggesting this is a result coming from Oxford institutions alone. As correctly put in the EUROfusion official press release, the EUROfusion consortium comprises "4,800 experts, students and staff from across Europe, co-funded by the European Commission".
We've edited the title to match the article now. Not sure if the submitted title ("Oxford's JET lab smashes nuclear fusion energy output record") was the BBC's and they've corrected it, or was editorializing by the submitter (which isn't allowed on HN - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
The thing is, a commercial-scale fusion reactor could produce the same energy as a truly vast solar array, and also produces power at night, does not need to be exposed to wind and rain to operate and can be scaled directly instead of with costly battery arrays.
Solar has the upside of actually producing a power surplus already, though.
What disposal? Less than 1% of the solar plants have been ever decommissioned. It's hard to set up recycling plants if you have nothing to recycle yet.
The point is that it's hard to expect industrial processes for recycling solar panels now, since there is no market for them yet, and won't really be any for the next decade.
Also, the lifespan is 25-30 years, but after that time the panels will still maintain 50-80% efficiency - so they can be reused for different purposes (or shipped to Africa, where there is a plenty of cheap space, sunlight, and they will work well).
You can easily throw solar panels in a land fill. It isn't a big problem. Slag heaps from coal is already a much larger problem than a solar panel landfill would ever be. A single coal mine has a bigger slag problem than all the worlds solar panels combined.
Yes, we should take the problem serious, but it is also grossly overrated. It is certainly not a reason to avoid solar panels.
But we really need more energy storage, and there are plenty of good ideas in this area too: better batteries, gravity bases systems, crowd sourced storage, etc.
I don't know much about the physics, but it seems like you'd want square miles of solar panels, even in space, and then there's the problem of getting that energy back to earth. On the other hand, in space you'd get a lot of light frequencies that are rarer on Earth. It's not clear to me if those could be harnessed somehow. Regardless, it's a creative idea.
Imagine you live in a smallish, not-so-sunny country like the UK. How much of your land area do you have to cover with solar panels in order to completely rid the nation of fossil fuels?
Apparently, about 12% of the land or 29,690 sq km in order to meet current energy demands (electricity, petrol, oil and gas). Apparently, only 6% of the country is currently built on which suggests that for any country of a similar latitude, you can estimate a land total of double that currently used per person. This does not take into account energy storage and assumes no energy is generated at night.
Of course that 6% only counts land usage by humans. How many (additional) non-human habitats would you have to decimate to cover 12% of the land with (ugly) solar panels?
Maybe thats acceptable in some deserts, but pretty terrible in other places. 1 step forward, 1 step back.
Plus that figure is for our current energy usage, which is only going to increase over time.
1 sq km = 100 hectares = 100 GWh of energy produced per year in northern Europe.
29000 sq km = 2900 TWh
Which is 10x the current electricity use of UK.
I think they may be overestimating the numbers by taking the petrol, oil and gas verbatim - whereas they should consider that electric cars have way higher efficiency, and electric heating can be done also way more efficiently than gas heating (because heat pumps).
This guy electrodacus.com swears that panels are so cheap now that it really only makes sense to heat with PV directly. He stores extra into an array of concrete slabs which then radiate out over the night. He built a special type of MPPT to orchestrate this flow of energy from PV into thermal mass. He lives in deep freeze Canada.
Interesting. In Poland, where I live, I researched this recently, for my mother's house - and it won't work. The heat is needed from October until April, and most of that time solar panels generate close to zero electricity.
In the end, my mother will have a significant surplus of power during summer (even with storage), and will still need to heat up house in winter using gas, or grid electricity (coal :/).
I read about some Nordic researchers developing long-term heat storage, which would be way better.
Another fun fact. When I installed my PV array, I got the alignment of one of them wrong by 1 degree (from due south). I looked up how much power I lost from this mistake ... not much, about 1%. Then I used the same tool to check what would have happened if I had installed them facing due north. To my surprise: only 15% less power!
Is it? Oil/coal/gas reserves differ by factors of millions.
You only get 3 times less power/area of solar in Scotland than in California. That's pretty surprising (part of it is higher efficiency of photovoltaic cells in lower temperatures) and pretty great for our future.
For example it means once we switch from fossil fuels pumped out of the ground to fossil fuels generated with surplus renewable energy (and it's not that far - it will probably be profitable in most of the world in next decade) - there will be much less incentives for fossil fuel dictatorships.
They show that you need roughly 25 m2 to cover energy use of a family. That easily fits on most roofs. A regular apartment is at least 80 m2, so you only use a fraction of the roof space. That means regular roof could in principle cover a 3 story apartment building with all the needed power.
Of course industry and business also use power. But if every house had 50 m2 solar panels on the roof on average you would cover that as well.
Thus roofs are in principle more than enough for most countries. Sure this will not always work, but it actually works quite well to combine solar power and agriculture: Agrovoltics. It can actually improve yields and give extra income to farmer which can sell electricity.
These kinds of things is not taken into consideration when comparing land usage of nuclear power and solar power. Solar power can be mixed with residential areas and farms. Nuclear power can't. You are not going to place a fusion power plant on people's roofs.
Solar comes with a lot of challenges for large-scale usage as a replacement for coal, nuclear, etc. Really, the only thing better about solar at the moment is that it is available.
First off, the daylight cycle is an obvious concern and there still isn't a great way to store solar energy during the day for use by cities (or generally large consumers) at night. Not to say it's not possible, but people are largely still trying to figure out what the right solution for that is.
Second, the startup requires a significant amount of land in advantageous locations for sunlight. There's a lot of the planet that just won't see the same advantages as others, and transporting energy long distances to them is another unsolved problem.
Lastly, and this is more for fun, but solar won't be as useful when we as a species aren't exclusively on earth anymore. Fusion would be a pretty nice step forward for things like space travel.
Both have a really high startup, but achieving fusion would mean 24/7 clean energy that works regardless of environment.
An other large drawback with solar is the required latitude. The further north it gets the fewer hours of sun light, and the energy you get is lower from the lower angle of attack. At the same time the energy needed for heating goes up during winter.
Solar makes great sense for places where energy consumption is higher during the summer than during winter.
I know a guy who lives in Canada pretty far north of the US border. He heats entirely with PV solar. He claims it's also way less expensive than other fossil fuel heat. Basically PV solar cost has plummeted to the point that it is conceivable this sort of thing is possible. No need for a battery here as he pumps his electrons directly into concrete slabs which then radiate heat at night.
> First off, the daylight cycle is an obvious concern and there still isn't a great way to store solar energy during the day for use by cities (or generally large consumers) at night. Not to say it's not possible, but people are largely still trying to figure out what the right solution for that is.
Not a concern at all. Google renewable energy storage. It is there but there is profit merit, so it is not welcome
Could you just be more specific about the storage method you're hoping I'll find on google? I know that there are a number of "viable" options for massive population centers in theory (or even in limited use today), but to call it a solved problem is, to my knowledge, incorrect
Storing solar power for the night isn't hard. It has been possible to do so for decades with concentrated solar power (CSP). You heath up salt directly with the sun. The hot salt can then drive steam turbines at night.
CSP has been dying for years however because Photovoltaics are cheaper. However, this is largely due to regulation. Solutions are picked based on price per kWh. CSP cannot compete on that with Solar cells. However today government have started modifying regulation so that a premium price is paid to those which can deliver power at night.
CSP projects then become competitive since unlike solar cells they can deliver power at night. In the past CSP projects delivered power the whole day. Now they are increasingly only delivering power at night, thus getting the premium price.
This goes to show that to get desired development in renewable energy it is crucial to get regulation right. Until now, regulation has not properly rewarded projects which can deliver power on demand.
However once that is in place, thermal and cryogenic storage of power will become competitive and be built.
A fusion reactor can conceivably provide a continuous, uninterrupted stream of energy, and from any location, while solar (and wind) energy can only be harvested intermittently, from certain specific locations.
The main issues with renewable energy sources today are electricity storage and transmission. If it weren't for these limitations, wind and solar would already be superior to other means of energy production.
Most likely problems with storage and transmission will be solved first, before fusion energy is proven to be commercially viable. However, there is no guarantee that they will be—especially in the case of transmission, which is primarily a political problem.
I remember that early this autumn Sweden had to borrow energy from other countries because it relied too much on renewables which turned out to be unstable.
The electricity import and export of individual countries fluctuates constantly. A nice map with live data can be found here: https://app.electricitymap.org/map (in German).
Dealing with the instability of solar and wind energy is very complex and requires numerous measures, such as better integration of wide-area electricity grids, more electricity storage, more generation reserves, etc.
But even nuclear power generation is dependent on the weather. During heat waves, nuclear power plants located on rivers in Germany and France repeatedly had to shut down because there was not enough cooling water available or the water in the rivers would otherwise have become too warm.[1] During cold spells, nuclear power plants had sometimes to be shut down because the supply of cooling water was no longer guaranteed due to ice.[2]
The basic problem is energy storage. If your not talking gigawatt-days then it's not feasible and most storage currently is megawatt-hours... i.e. because you need to store energy made during the day to use at night, to make solar power realistic you need a way to store huge amounts energy.
BTW: The England power grid is about 30 GW. So 1 GW-day is just shy of an hour of demand.
The problem with solar is unpredictability and A LOT of batteries needed to bridge the mismatch between production peaking at noon and consumption peaking at late evening.
Both of these are solved with fusion power.
Energy market operates on the assumption that whoever unbalances the network has to pay for balancing it. Providing too much and too little energy is both bad - you have to pay someone else to use more/less or to produce less/more to balance the mess you made. There are specialized powerplants for this, they are "on standby" and jump in when needed - and they charge much more than the normal powerplants. When there's a big shortage they can charge absurd prices for energy. And if you caused the shortage by mispredicting weather - you have to pay for it.
This makes the energy provided by solar panels much less valuable than the energy provided by a predictable, controllable source. Often by 1:10 factor.
But nuclear power is also not predictable, as plants regularly experience unexpected downtime. No power source is fully predictable, which is why you need controllable power sources to make up the difference.
I would say solar’s problem is controllability. You can only turn it up to the limit of the amount of sun received, which is none at night, and sometimes very little in the day.
It remains to be seen how controllable fusion power will be. Will it be for base load only, or will it also be useful to flexibly dial up and down for variable load? Much of current nuclear power is base load only. Clean base load power is still super useful, but it is not a complete solution.
Yes, unexpected stuff happen to baseload powerplants too. Once every year on average maybe? Probably less. If that happens you may need to pay for balancing once a year.
Meanwhile solar is unexpected on the scale of minutes to hours, every day. It's not the same.
But if we as a society decided to put a large investment into solar and had that augmenting the grid, you should be able to dramatically reduce the amount of fossil fuels used to produce our daily energy, thus slowing climate change. Imagine if we could cut fossil fuel energy by 40-50% and rely more heavily on solar/wind. Fusion may not be available for another 40 years and who knows what the environment situation will be then so we should probably be looking to leverage any clean sources that are available right now.
You don't need batteries for this. You could build concentrated solar power (CSP), instead. These have trailed PV development for years because they have not been paid a premium for being able to deliver power on demand. Thus PV has outcompeted them. But with better regulation giving them a premium for delivering power at night they are getting a comeback.
Also thermal storage and cryogenic storage can easily provide enough capacity. The problem is that they are not as efficient as batteries. If you buy electricity but only get 50% of that electricity back after storage, then you need to sell at 200% the price you paid.
Electricity prices don't swing enough today to make the feasible. But if far more wind and solar was built, then you would get much cheaper power at peak, which storage providers could buy and sell with a profit.
Name a single fusion plant that has been running uninterrupted for years.
Meanwhile Australia has retooled for 10% Solar and batteries in a matter of years, that number is rapidly increasing, and is turning off their coal plants.
No, I mean fusion. The parent comment claims "[Fusion can] provide steady energy without going down for years". I want a single example of this.
Meanwhile, we have massive grids of solar and battery being installed _today_, and existing installations replacing coal plants.
I'm tired of people talking about fusion (or even nuclear, as it's so mired in public FUD) as if it's some panacea. We have a solution right now: Solar and batteries. It works in places with cloudcover. It works in cold and hot climates. It works at night. It's getting cheaper every year.
We haven't invented commercial fusion power, so none; but theoretically that is how they would function.
Solar and batteries are nice but they're not yet cost effective. They're getting better. But you can't just handwave away real problems from your armchair viewpoint and assume thats all fine.
> Solar and batteries are nice but they're not yet cost effective
"Cost effective" is a judgement call, not physics. If I told you that the cost of coal-generated electricity was that your great-grandchildren would live in an impoverished and difficult world, you might not view that a particular cost-effective either, yet somehow that's the "standard" against which things are judged.
Sure we do. Look no further than this article. We can make it, but its not commercially viable.
> "Cost effective" is a judgement call, not physics. If I told you that the cost of coal-generated electricity was that your great-grandchildren would live in an impoverished and difficult world, you might not view that a particular cost-effective either, yet somehow that's the "standard" against which things are judged.
Ah yes, think of the children.
Yes, coal is problematic, but the reality is that energy is expensive and we need a lot of it. If we tried to go full solar right now it would cost trillions of dollars, and the grid would still fail in the winter when heating is most important, and the economy would enter a massive depression as the cost of doing things gets both more expensive on average and extremely volatile.
You say this is a judgement call, not physics, but then go on to just broadly make assumptions about all of the relevant facts. You're not the one being logical and fact based. You're the one observing, yes, we have a climate crisis, and thus assuming that a radical solution for which you have no particular understanding of the economic or infrastructure implications is the right one because it's at least different from what we have now.
Renewables are good. They are getting cheaper. They're growing in capacity. And yet, I guarantee you, we cannot go full solar now. And I also guarantee that you do not have nearly sufficient of a view of the system dynamics to be making statements as bold as you are. This is hard. It's not just evil greedy coal mine operators ruining everything.
> Sure we do. Look no further than this article. We can make it, but its not commercially viable.
Q total is way below 1 (translation: it took far more energy to make the energy that was produced, than was produced). We do not have working fusion power, if "working fusion power" means "you get more out than you put in".
As for the rest of this, I have no idea who you think you're replying to. Just one follow up, neverthless:
> And yet, I guarantee you, we cannot go full solar now.
The USA spent more than US$300M per day on the war in Afghanistan, for 20 years. I guarantee you that if "we wanted to go full solar" now, we could. US$2T buys you a lot of anything, including even today's vaguely clunky battery tech.
> Q total is way below 1 (translation: it took far more energy to make the energy that was produced, than was produced). We do not have working fusion power, if "working fusion power" means "you get more out than you put in".
That's not what it means. Working means it works. Can you produce fusion power? Yes. Can you do so in a commercially viable way? No. Q is obviously a part of this. Uninteresting semantics.
> The USA spent more than US$300M per day on the war in Afghanistan, for 20 years. I guarantee you that if "we wanted to go full solar" now, we could. US$2T buys you a lot of anything, including even today's vaguely clunky battery tech.
And I'm telling you, no, we could not, because that's not how the world works. From many perspectives, including economics of how to actually acquire all these solar assets many of which are already being consumed as fast as produced and dependent on limited metals supply chains; land availability with reasonable transmission setups; grid capacity to absorb these new generation facilities on the transmission lines; power availability during non peak times; and the preposterous externalities of trying to rapidly undermine the global energy market.
If it takes more than 1W of input power to produce 1W of power from fusion, then I'd say the answer is no. The distinction is not "commercially viable", it's "net energy production". We're not there yet (and are actually quite a lot way from it).
> And I'm telling you,
... that US$2T is a lot of money, and that's just what we spent on 1 war. Yes, there would be complications and side effects and what have you. Money, in our system, combined with the other abilities of the federal government, can do a lot.
Solar is getting so much cheaper, at such a fast pace, that I really don't understand how one can disagree that it's the future of our energy grids. Installing solar is a no-brainer in some parts of the world now, and in the very near future (extrapolating from the last 10 years), it'll be every part of the world soon.
Solar is, without a doubt, a major part of future energy grids.
But this chart is the levelized cost of energy. Its not the price at which you can get it. Energy demands are higher in winter. They are non trivial at night. The cost of energy might be low, but the price at which you can get it may be very high if not enough is available.
to be fair, you need more than the EV. Using your EV battery as a power source to feed into your main house/home wiring is not crazy complicated, but it's not just a plugin.
Average home uses 30kWh per day. And that's average. Winter is higher, and would be much much higher if we were trying to use electricity to heat homes instead natural gas. Where do you live? CA? You have a lot more sun and land than other areas. Building the generation capacity in your area might not help areas that actually need the power to the north and east. And what if you need your car to have full power? What if you're not a low needs residential unit but a hospital? Or a factory? What if you have a couple low sun days in a row? What if your city just does not have enough power in reserves and its very cold or very hot?
Battery tech and solar is great, but its not the perfect solution.
I don't get why you and many other commenters are so against the idea of fusion. Solar is decent, not perfect by any stretch, so we should just give up trying to solve the energy technology for the next 200 years? It's not even like it's one or the other. No one is abandoning solar to work on fusion. But fusion, if it works, is orders of magnitudes more efficient than solar is. It opens avenues that are considered impossible and science fiction today.
It's like being back in the 1700s and arguing that research into petrol is a waste of time. I absolutely do not understand this mindset.
I'm not against fusion, there just is simply no viable fusion power that can be built today. It's not going to get here fast enough. We need to adopt renewables yesterday. There is no time to be wasted pretending that fusion provides any value aside from starry eyed theoretical aspiration.
We will not be here in 200 years to enjoy fusion if we don't adopt solar and battery _right now_.
> We will not be here in 200 years to enjoy fusion if we don't adopt solar and battery _right now_.
Technically, none of us will be here in 200 years.
I very much doubt if climate change will lead to an end to the human species, so I think a better way talk about this stuff is to frame it in terms of our descendants living in an impoverished, less beautiful, more strife-filled world.
But yes, FFS, action yesterday or last week, and make it trillions of dollars worth of action, like an actual war, but for infinitely better reasons.
I hear a lot of stuff like this and it just doesn't jive with my childhood experience. I have a suspicion that bullshit was, on some specific channels like pop sci, much easier to pass in the pre-internet days. Or at least the signal : noise ratio has gotten much better with a voice of reason saying "no" whenever these things pop up.
It's always been clearly communicated to me that fusion is extremely hard and we're not that close to getting it working.
Obviously, it is a bit silly to point to the sun and say it's a successful fusion reactor in a discussion meant to refute solar's usefulness. Despite that, it is an example of the principles of fusion working quite reliably, and it should stand to reason that having smaller sun-like power sources would be preferable to relying on a single fusion reactor that's only available half of the time.
They are high maintainence and very expensive, but the thermal storage is very promising, in that it doesn't have the worst downside of solar. China has been experimenting with them, so I'm hopeful that they will come up with a cheap way to do that.
Fusion power could give you power when you need it unlike solar power which would need storage. Of course Fusion power is so complex and expensive that it is likely far cheaper to simply build solar panels and add storage.
While Fusion obviously has merits I think it is overhyped as a solution. Molten Salt Reactors are a much more sensible solution if nuclear power is the desired solution. Why? Because they actually generate LESS nuclear waste than Fusion power plants.
The big selling point of Fusion reactors is that they don't generate any nuclear waste. Except they kind of do. Molten Salt Reactors (MSR) in contrast actually "eat up" nuclear waste. You can power them on nuclear waste and get less waste out. Thus an MSR has negative radioactive waste production. Fusion has positive waste production.
Unlike Fusion reactors we have already proven that we can build MSR reactors. It doesn't mean I think we should give up Fusion research. I just think that if we want to get cheap, clean and reliable power today, then solar, wind and MSRs are probably the most sensible options, not fusion.
As an uneducated observer to nuclear physics, I could not tell the significance of this achievement. Did we finally learn how to extract more energy from a fusion rector than we supplied to operate it? Could anyone more in the know here explain in simpler and more practical terms please?
> Did we finally learn how to extract more energy from a fusion rector than we supplied to operate it?
No.
> Could anyone more in the know here explain in simpler and more practical terms please?
It's impossible to tell because the story is incoherent. The central claim is that they "release[d] a record 59 megajoules of sustained fusion energy" but this makes no sense. One can talk about sustained power (over a period of time) but "sustained energy" is a category error because energy is just power integrated over time. You can get 59 megajoules out of your wall socket if you wait long enough.
They apparently did something that had never been done before, but there's no way to tell exactly what that was from what is written in this story.
(This kind of obfuscation is not unusual in fusion research. A cynic might argue that this is because if they were clear about the actual state of things their funding would cease.)
We already know that fusion power plants are going to operate by igniting plasma in short bursts -- a few seconds, maybe 10s at most -- and generating a huge amount of power during that single burst. You then ignite it again and again.
The question is how much total energy you can extract from each of those bursts. By that metric, the total energy is what's important, not the power. Producing 10 quadrillion watts of power isn't that useful if it's only for 100 trillionths of a second. (Both numbers pulled from an actual recent result last August. [1])
"59 megajoules of sustained fusion energy" means a single burst produced that much. That's significantly more than the paltry 1.3MJ from that other result I just linked to.
Yes, of course you could get that much from a wall socket over the course of hours, but we know we haven't been able to sustain a fusion reaction for a few seconds, so that's the timeframe we're talking about for a single burst.
Your description made me wonder if it would be possible to make an ICE to extract the power. I then found a paper called Fusion Internal Combustion Engine from 2010 [0]. Does anyone know if there was any merit to this idea and if anything else has come of it since?
A few elementary calculations reveal how feasible this might be. A typical ICE produces a few hundred horsepower using 4-8 cylinders rotating at a few thousand RPM. 1 HP = 745 watts. Figure out how much energy is released per cylinder on each cycle, and compare that to the energy released in a typical fusion ignition. Also note the cycle time of an ICE rotating at a few thousand RPMs, and compare that to the cycle time of a current state-of-the-art fusion reactor. (Hint: the former is measured in milliseconds, the latter currently in months if not years.)
I'm a layman and so its possible I am missing some limiting factors but I do feel as though this rebuttal does not take into account the possible ranges of values that can be configured when tweaking things like scale and operating speed. For example the Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C operates at 15-102 RPM generating 100,000 HP (or 74.5 megawatts for your comparison) [0].
Nor does it take into account the difference between a prototype investigation being constantly modified for experimentation and analysis and a production system built to purpose.
Yes, I probably should have used numbers from a large diesel rather than an automobile engine. Wow, the Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C operates at speeds as low as 15 RPM! That is just mind-boggling. I found this video:
Still, I think you will find that even this doesn't help all that much. A cycle time measured in seconds rather than milliseconds is still orders of magnitude away from what can presently be achieved.
> the difference between a prototype investigation being constantly modified for experimentation and analysis and a production system built to purpose.
AFAICT, no one has ever built an ICE that is within even an order of magnitude of realistic operating parameters of a fusion ICE. It's a whole 'nuther level of engineering challenge beyond just getting the fusion itself to work. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'll give you long odds against seeing it happen in any of our lifetimes.
> "59 megajoules of sustained fusion energy" means a single burst produced that much.
In what sense is that "sustained"? A typical power plant produces that much energy in less than a second on a continuous (i.e. sustained) basis. Producing 59 megajoules once is basically a joke. It is analogous to detonating a pipe bomb (at a cost of several billion dollars) and claiming that as significant progress towards an internal combustion engine.
Yes, that is exactly the problem. If they are ever going to be commercially viable they need to become typical. 59MJ per cycle isn't going to do you a lot of good if a cycle time is measured in months as is currently the case. You have to get that cycle time down to fractions of a second at this energy level before you even have a chance at commercial viability. 59 MJ is a tiny amount of energy by the standards of commercial power generation.
I hope you realize that these are research reactors that are not designed to give you a low interval between cycles or produce power. They are meant so clarify some of the open research questions for the likes of ITER/DEMO that will integrate these findings into things that are actually designed to produce a lot more power quicker.
Yes, of course I realize that. I hope you realize that even if they get these research reactors to work (which is far from given) that there will still be a shit ton of work to be done before this technology can be used to produce commercially viable power.
They expand under the article (not the clearest visual design though, I thought it was an ad or some "related" section)
The record is for energy generated. They generated the most energy, however they did not generate the most power (unlike the previous record which generated both the most energy and most power) because they were focusing on sustained generation
The sentence "59 megajoules of sustained fusion-energy", where fusion is the source of the energy, doesn't make sense
I think they meant it as "59 megajoules of sustained-fusion energy" where sustained fusion is the focus of the experiment (not sure I managed to get through what I meant and it's worded awfully on the website)
I hope / expect the actual paper/technical reports which will come out will be worded more clearly
> You can get 59 megajoules out of your wall socket if you wait long enough.
Assuming a French wall socket, 240 V at 13 amps, and a pure resistive load, that will take
$ units
Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2020-11-15
3677 units, 109 prefixes, 114 nonlinear units
You have: 59 MJ
You want: (240 V * 13 A) * s
* 18910.256
/ 5.2881356e-05
You have: 18910.256 s
You want: hms
5 hr + 15 min + 10.256 sec
> Did we finally learn how to extract more energy from a fusion rector than we supplied to operate it?
No. The issue is that most people only report the gain over the plasma (i.e. how much energy was put into generating the plasma) rather than the full amount of energy put into the process (i.e. superconductors, magnets, generating the deuterium/tritium, maintaining the sun-like heat, etc).
If you add this to the computation, you end up having to have a "fusion-gain" of around 50x to break even. The reason people report the plasma efficiency instead of the actual operating efficiency is to get funding and hype.
Don't get me wrong, this result is still impressive, but it's still orders of magnitude off of the required efficiency.
> Results fully in line with predictions, strengthening the case for ITER
This is the main take away for me, JET is not a standalone project, it's part of the whole ITER project which is supposed to go like this:
+ JET as a scaled down model provides testing and data for
+ ITER which I believe is a full scale model and is supposed to generate net gain (heat in vs heat out,
not net electricity) and provide information to
+ DEMO which is supposed to produce net electricity (though not at market rate costs)
So the fact that it worked as predicted is a good sign (or at least as good as we can get) that ITER will work which will be a good sign for DEMO etc
For a long time one of the hardest problems in fusion reactor design is what the hell you make it out of. The big win here is that they replaced the walls of the reactor with a new alloy, and it worked according to what theory predicted, which gives them the green light for using that material in ITER.
To simplify a little (ok, a lot) there are two big materials problems inside the reactor. The first is the walls: you need something that's going to survive the temperatures, not disturb the reaction, and not get too radioactive in the process. They previously used carbon, which isn't great: it gets radioactive because it absorbs tritium, which is in the fuel. This experiment used a beryllium alloy, which doesn't absorb nearly as much, and worked, validating the material choice for ITER.
The second problem is to do with the exhaust. You need to get hot plasma out of the chamber without disturbing the ongoing reaction, and with a tokamak that means ridiculously energetic particles hitting a solid divertor. Again, the problem here is what materials you might come up with that stand a chance of surviving useful operational periods. ITER is currently planned to use beryllium walls and a tungsten divertor, but I don't know what JET's divertor is made of at the moment to know whether this experiment will have informed whether tungsten is a good enough choice.
What all this means is that there's one less thing on the "ITER might fail because of..." list.
According to Sabine Hossenfelder, published numbers are frequently mis-stated on purpose. When you look at frequently reported Q Plasma (or plasma efficiency) we are not that far from it being > 1. However, we should look at Q Total (total efficiency), which is still way below < 1, even in the best plans.
She makes several significant mistakes in that video. One example is the energy used to heat the plasma is now heat in the plasma identical to the heat generated by fusion. This means you can recover a percentage of that with a steam turbine.
Second a great deal of ITER’s energy usage is as a science experiment not a fusion reactor. Most of their monitoring equipment for example is irrelevant to an operating power plant. Thus Qplasma is giving relevant information where Qtotal is largely meaningless at this stage.
But her point stands even if there were mistakes: the press and many scientists, even if unwillingly, have failed to communicate the real state of fusion as an energy source. And I can believe that maybe some representatives did not fully understand the difference between Qtotal and Qplasma and the amount of time a reaction can be sustained (all three things that they would understand if they were explained clearly).
The parent comment was talking about a video outside of the context of this entry in HN. My reply was in the context of parent comment referring to that video, the video in question provides excerpts of example of that failure of communication.
The problem is press/marketing. When you read about this stuff 1.0 is claimed to be break-even, the threshold where fusion start to become practical. So in one piece of writing they will talk about this important number and (deliberately) conflate it with fusion being practical. Yes, getting Q plasma above 1 is necessary, but it's about an order of magnitude too low in reality. Sure everyone in the field know that. Her criticism is thats not how its presented to the outside world.
The concern is that experimenters are wasting time on experiments with promising looking Q plasma but with orders of magnitude smaller Q total (eg pulsed laser systems)
It’s important not to forget the big picture. Otherwise you end up optimizing one piece of the system, and causing another piece of the system to work less well in a way the degrees overall system performance.
Well, because it makes no sense to try to increase Q plasma; to what end? As pointed by others, you can increase Q plasma at the expense of Q total, thus precisely optimizing for the wrong objective (fusion can be produced and studied without looking at Q plasma or Q total; although reporting Q plasma along with the time that the reaction was sustained is helpful). I give you an analogy: let's make the most power-efficient floating point unit; but let's focus on Q_float, instead of Q_total; at the end we would end with a simple very wide adder; if we want to multiply two numbers, the system will convert them to their logarithms, add them, and then use exponentiation. Yes, the floating point unit consumed very little power Q_float was great. Well, I guess you get the point.
Sabine is overly critical IMO. The distinction she is making is known to anyone who has spent a little bit of time thinking about fusion (hopefully that includes the grant writers) and projects like ITER are explicitly aiming for Q=10, not just "breakeven"
That's kind of her thing. She is usually right, but also overly pessimistic in a way opposite from the popular press over-optimism.
I get frustrated because it paints science in an undeserved negative light. It is at least truthful, in a way that most anti science writing is not. Mostly I find it unhelpful in that it points out problems without either explaining why they were reasonable or giving a real alternative.
Agreed. But there is blowback on the actual scientists doing the real work.
I suppose you could say that they also get benefits from appealing to the IFLS crowd, so live and die by the same sword. I believe IFLS does more harm than good, but it's hard to be sure.
Sabine is not as "right" as many of her pop-sci fans seem to want. Most of her opinions about the direction of theoretical physics are not really falsifiable or "right."
That's correct. That's sort of the point. Fundamental research is in kind of a slump right now, and it's hard to judge where (or whether) it should continue.
I don't think much of her "just do something different, don't ask me what" approach.
Nothing concrete to add, just the anecdote that the plasma physics class I took in grad school hands down had some of the sketchiest looking physicist math I think I have ever seen. Felt like a SWAT team from the mathematics department might burst through the door at any time.
Just imagining the mathematics SWAT team coming through the door and swatting the marker out of one of my physics profs' hands when they went from ydy/dx=x -> ydy=xdx as if they were simply re-arranging a fraction, made me chuckle.
No one will get funded with that mentality in such a high-risk high-reward area like fusion. But indeed after so many headlines I agree with you that no one gets excited about these news anymore.
I'm not really sure about that. The promise of fusion power is so great that it would be idiotic not to throw money at it.
The US was spending a billion a week in the Afghanistan war.
You just gave a great example of the irrationality of how things are funded. Idiotic things get cash thrown at them, National healthcare rests on the sidelines.
I think it matters on perspective. That funding might be considered rational if you were a congressperson who have a vested interest in certain lobbies. Not saying it's necessary moral or optimizing for the right thing for society as a whole, but it may be rational.
Yeah, but that helped out a lot of US companies that have significant lobbying backing and districts where those companies are located. Similar to how some NASA things get funded.
The outcome itself is not nearly enough, if it even matters (see Afghanistan, it's not like the outcome was a surprise): What needs to happen is that the money river* needs to flow through areas that have influential congress(wo)men and senators who benefit both financially (campaign contributions) and politically (good headlines, get something they can use in deals, etc.).
This is for anything where the outcomes are far away and/or uncertain. In those cases the money flow itself becomes the actual target. It is something concrete, with impact right away, compared to those types of goals.
A politician will probably support military spending in case the homeland is actually really threatened, but when it's not it's all about the benefits not of the military equipment for the troops, which are questionable (even when it works, do they actually need it?), but the benefits of the spending itself, pretty much disregarding the final products.
Example Afghanistan, which at first glance seems to fit my claim less than military spending for hardware:
> One-third to half of that sum went to contractors, with five defense companies— Lockheed Martin Corp. , Boeing Co. , General Dynamics Corp. , Raytheon Technologies Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp. —taking the lion’s share, $2.1 trillion, for weapons, supplies and other services
Well, it's not like the US would pay someone else to develop NASA's missions, would they? Part of the point of NASA is to keep aerospace expertise thriving, (I'd argue one of the primary goals, in fact), by answering really challenging science questions. You're right in letter, but off in spirit by comparing it to war profiteering.
Just imagine where we'd be if the US had a similar "Focus here" initiative for semiconductors since the 1960s.
I would like to emphasize, since I did not already do so, that I make no value judgment. It is the public that does not want the US government to do "socialism", but there seems to be a real need for it so politicians do it through the back door. How well that works is another matter. It's not wrong for politicians to pay attention to try to keep jobs, or to keep certain industries alive for which there only is infrequent real need, which the short-term business management outlook would leave rotting.
I think independent of how well it works, or how terrible, to me it's an example of the "life finds a way" meme. Some great need exists, but also some great constraints, and a large amount of irrationality, so the outcome is what it is.
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> Just imagine where we'd be if the US had a similar "Focus here" initiative for semiconductors since the 1960s.
> Today, Silicon Valley is known around the world as a fount of technology innovation and development fueled by private venture capital and peopled by fabled entrepreneurs. But it wasn't always so. Unbeknownst to even seasoned inhabitants, today's Silicon Valley had its start in government secrecy and wartime urgency.
> In this lecture, renowned serial entrepreneur Steve Blank presents how the roots of Silicon Valley sprang not from the later development of the silicon semiconductor but instead from the earlier technology duel over the skies of Germany and secret efforts around (and over) the Soviet Union. World War II, the Cold War and one Stanford professor set the stage for the creation and explosive growth of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. The world was forever changed when the Defense Department, CIA and the National Security Agency acted like today's venture capitalists funding this first wave of entrepreneurship.
My very limited exposure to the EU research funding world suggests that it is customary (at least in applied CS) to massively overstate the potential benefits and scope of your project, and it is understood/accepted that you will backtrack when reporting progress (or even already in the detailed description of what work will be done). Unfortunate, but it probably means that your comment is valid.
Sure, that's an approach that has led to the success of Silicon Valley and the employment of most of the people on HN (as well as the fortunes of Y combinator).
a comment from a friend of mine
“ I worked at JET for 2 years, That device is from 1979, it's a fucking joke and the $ millions being pumped into it every year would be more useful as paper fuel for a steam engine... the SPARC thing (private, but also in Oxford and in the same compound as JET)is much more promising”
826 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 326 ms ] thread--The live announcement is going on now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H99hvPlC4is (from 12:00 until 13:00 GMT)--
It's not ambiguous at all. Everything in the UK going on right now -- everything -- has a "some of this is unclear or worse because Brexit has destroyed agreements or because proposed, nearly impossible agreements have not been struck" subplot.
Brexit has set fire to every kind of international complication.
And so here we are with a sucessful fusion lab in the UK, doing the hard work, that is a precursor to a European project that it is really not at all clear we will be able to participate in or benefit from, because crucial parts of the Brexit neo-establishment want the benefits of the agreements without acceding to the legal underpinnings of the agreements.
... If I understand your nonsensical ramblings correctly.
If you think they are nonsensical, you do not understand what I am saying.
Yes, countries can "work together without being part of the same trading bloc" but trade is not the limit of what Brexit changed.
Brexit removes us from the international legal agreements that underpinned that trade. It also removed us from the free movement clause, which is crucial to a lot of science-industry collaborations (the free movement principle was essentially invented to allow professional collaboration in the energy industry).
Finally it also removed us from the legal frameworks that underpin several European science funding agreements.
Every agreement has to be rewritten, at cost to the process. And every time it is rewritten, the net result for Britain is substantially worse than if we'd not done it. Because you cannot hope to get full membership of any club without agreeing to all the rules.
From the article:
> The UK is a participant, too. Its full involvement in ITER, however, will require first for Britain to "associate" to certain EU science programmes, something that so far has been held up by disagreements over post-Brexit trading arrangements, particularly in relation to Northern Ireland.
Here is just one example of that:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/feb/08/uk-and-euro...
From that article:
> The EU agreed to associate membership for the UK as part of the wider Brexit trade deal struck on Christmas Eve 2020 but it has still not ratified the deal or a similar one with Switzerland, held up by a dispute over a draft treaty binding the country to the bloc.
We didn't need to do any of this, there have been no benefits from any of this, and there are no meaningful projected benefits for any of this in our lifetimes.
And I thankyou for clarification :)
> but trade is not the limit of what Brexit changed.
Here in lies the problem that many Brexitiers had with the EU - it wasn't just a trading bloc, the "club" had a lot of baggage that few people understood - and when people don't understand something, they fear/misstrust it. The message around leaving was focused on GDP and whether we would have roaming chargers or not... and this message fell flat with a lot of voters.
I blame the remain side with arrogance and a complete lack of understanding how to deliver a good message.
I voted remain BTW, but feel we had a fair vote and it is what it is.
The problem is they also came up against vile, populist hate about Syrian immigrants, Romanian neighbours, people not speaking english on buses, fake news about pillow regulations; it went on and on. And a lot of that stuff really was funded by deeply shady money.
Brexit was the first real demonstration of how good faith cannot possibly counter weaponised, well-backed bad faith, IMO.
It is what it is, I agree, and alas it is wholly irreversible. But at least within five years we won't have to worry about how Great Britain and Northern Ireland repositions itself within Europe, because the consequences of the vote will be the end of that too.
Except there is some truth/validity in all of these - they are proxies. The pillow/banana stuff was about over-regulation by the EU. People not speaking the native language on buses is an indication of a a loss of British culture (people will be generally protective of their own culture). Romanian neighbours is about a fear of losing one's low-paying job to an immigrant.
These are all valid worries of many people in the UK.
Calling them "vile", "populist" is what I'm talking about with regard to remain arrogance. Ignore voter's fears at your peril.
The Syrian immigration thing was based on a lie (and about specific fearmongering concerning Turkey's supposed accession to the EU -- a process that has entirely stalled and is even in reverse because Turkey cannot join the EU until it satisfies the EU's demands). It was backed up by one of the most despicable political leaflets in British history:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-referendum...
(I received this pamphlet and it remains the only thing I have ever ceremonially burned while cursing people)
They were vile, populist-oriented slurs. It was awful, disgusting politics.
That's why I said they were proxies - please read what I wrote again.
Under a common block, trading or otherwise, things are just easier and much closer together.
Consider only visas, travel and employment, the complications of these brought by Brexit already distanced any existing and future collaborations by some measure.
There is still collaboration of course, and there will be, but it's not what it was before.
And this negative trend of distance in collaboration is more worrying in an increasingly threatening environment
Under a common block, trading or otherwise, things are just easier and much closer together.
Consider only visas, travel and employment, the complications of these brought by Brexit, already distanced any existing and future collaborations by some measure.
There is still collaboration of course, and there will be, but it's not what it was before.
And this negative trend of distance in collaboration is more worrying in an increasingly threatening environment.
"The UK will remain part of Iter"
https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/3551
A lot changed.
Basically, fundamental disagreements with Europe over predicate treaties mean that the thing we committed to do (remain part of ITER) is under threat, because other things we committed to do (uphold transition agreements regarding Northern Ireland) are in default.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/feb/08/uk-and-euro...
In this case, the EU is saying, sorry, you possibly can't stay a member of our science club because you promised you'd do certain things that underpin an internationally agreed peace process and you are undoing them.
It's a completely legitimate political bargaining point that would not be an issue at all without Brexit.
The intent to remain members of ITER and Horizon 2020 is genuinely at risk.
All of this underpins my point: everything is more complex because of Brexit -- even staying in things we've said we really really want to stay in.
What changed? The UK participate in ITER still, via F4E. ITER is not just the EU, it's funded by China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States.
Frankly, I don't see what Brexit has to do with HN. There are better places to "discuss" Brexit, and politics, than on HackerNews.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I actually rewrote it to the form it is now, about 15 seconds after posting it, to try to remove any suggestion it's about the report; it's possible I suppose that some people reacted to it before I did.
I went from "paragraph" (as in, in an article) to "parenthetical" in the colloquial sense. Like, literally every process or discussion about anything going on in the country has to have this sidebar about how much worse it is because of all the changes.
I don't really read it as confusing because I had the "thanks, disaster capitalists" bit, which should be unambiguous, but I haven't had my coffee, so I will note and upvote your point and think about it next time I write stuff :-)
It also doesn't help that you start with "Further evidence that...". You can't assume any of your readers are already on board with your conclusions. In my experience, the kind of people who make these kind of comments tend to be closed to debate and commenting in bad faith. For example "further evidence of political-correctness gone mad" is a classic one.
It refers to a kind of capitalism (and capitalist policy-making) that is poised ready to financially exploit the negatives of any economic shock precisely because the people involved have proximity to the very power structures that are unleashing that economic shock.
It was a prediction that came true.
The Brexit-leaning establishment has made a lot of money out of economic predictions and money movements triggered by Brexit, and the overlap between politicians and hedge funds/investment funds/large non-EU exporters etc. was so close as to suggest the possibility that the legislation has designs for them.
"Further evidence that" is just dry humour from a Brit. We are in absolutely deep, deep **** in this country for the next two years; everything is going to be bad because the Brexit transition has unilaterally, not bilaterally, failed.
If I may perhaps suggest, perhaps, just maybe, it could be worthwhile for you to stop seeing politics in everything and focus on something other than politics, like these scientists are doing?
They don't care about EU, Brexit, who the hell is the British PM. Whatever. They just want to build a smart, sustainable and cheap way for humanity to harness energy from our universe. That's super cool. Imagine if they remained in their homes tweeting about Brexit all day long? We'd be burning fossil fuels forever until we kill ourselves out of smoke...
I don't know, just maybe it would be interesting, who knows...
(Not least because I snarked about Marco Arment yesterday. ;-)
It makes you think.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I am working on the assumption that you are admin and therefore enforce rules.
If this counts as something you wish to flag and remove then I'd like you to remove me. So could you drop me an email about deleting or otherwise permanently disabling my account, please?
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-4326/ab2276/...
Sorry for the noob question but there is something I do not understand. I thought ITER design was more or less decided now as they are building it. Should I understand that they started building ITER without really knowing where they were going to go and are using JET experiment as a way know how to build ITER?
All new fusion plants are a risk, that's why they're experimental. I suspect they were reasonably confident they could make ITER work and that's why they started building, but this will give them confirmation that the material choice was a good one and will also show them in advance some of the operational obstacles and possible solutions.
In other words, they knew "where they were going to go" but this gives them more confidence they were correct in deciding the direction, and will speed up their learning curve setting up the machine once built. Even if it is built and something fundamentally doesn't work about the concept, that will still be useful scientific knowledge, even if it is disappointing.
> This is more than double what was achieved in similar tests back in 1997.
> It's not a massive energy output - only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water. But the significance is that it validates design choices that have been made for an even bigger fusion reactor now being constructed in France.
I thought this was interesting as 59 megajoules of energy or 11 megawatts of power seems more than you would need to boil 60 kettles' of water. In fact, it takes 4,184 joules to raise the temperature of 1kg of water by 1 degree. Or 313800 joules to raise 1kg of water by 75 degrees. That means JET could have boiled about 188 kg of water.
So net power is -989MW, assuming both flywheels are at full pelt the whole time and no power is required before fusion is acheived.
Plasma heating in JET is done via NBI+ICRH and is about 59 MW.
> only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water
Exactly, no one has 3l kettles, but it's the right ballpark. You could also run about 9k kettles for that 5 seconds but not boil them, and if you tried to run 60 kettles consuming all that power for 5 seconds you would have quite the fire...
I have! Duckduckgo it.
They already started construction on a larger one? What if it had invalidated design choices?
The government money was already allocated and even the government can't unring that bell!
This is missing the heat of vaporization[1] needed to actually boil the water though, i.e. to turn 100C liquid water to 100C steam. That's another 2250kJ/kg on top of the 313.8kJ/kg you've mentioned.
It's why steam is such a great carrier of energy for industrial applications.
I guess you could argue that you wouldn't evaporate all water in the kettle, but then you do want a rolling boil. It's probably a bit up for discussion at which point you'd stop heating the kettle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_vaporization
One does not have to argue for that interpretation - raising the temperature to boiling point, not boiling it dry, is indisputably the accepted and intended meaning of the phrase wherever English is spoken... though it would fit with a certain stereotype of scientists if a bunch of plasma physicists did not know how to make a pot of tea!
Not exactly. In American English "bring a pot to a boil" is much more common. When I read "enough energy to boil 60 kettles of water" I thought "vaporize".
Disagree that this is a) a much more common phrasing or b) that your interpretation would be the common one. I've yet to run into a situation where somebody asked me to "boil some water" and intended for me to vaporize all the water in some vessel.
It's also an incredible waste of time to argue over definitions. They're always disputable because they always arise in response to two people using a word differently. Maybe they're wrong and you're right, or maybe others also use the word that way—it doesn't matter. Humility and aiming at mutual understanding is far more worthwhile.
Here, as soon as someone recognizes that the amount of energy cited is way higher or lower than would be implied by their own definition, they should 1) identify the difference ("Boil here means 'boil n kettles dry' rather than 'bring n kettles to boil'") and 2) in most cases, avoid the wasted debate by adopting the other person's language if further conversation using the concept is needed.
In the light of this, what is your objection to my comment? As far as I can tell, it is in conformance with your numbered principles.
However to go from liquid water to water vapor you need to add even more energy [0]. The enthalpy of vaporization for water is 2257 kJ/kg, it takes much more energy to boil water at 100°C than it takes to get there from room temperature.
Warming by 75 degrees + boiling = 2570 kJ/kg -> enough to boil 23 liters of water
I'm guessing in reality the energy needed to operate the kettles would lie somewhere in between, as a small part of the water will be boiled and most of it kept around 100°C. For 2L kettles the value seems in the right ballpark.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_vaporization
I understand this just to validate design choices and it is a good step forward. However, it doesn't make nuclear fusion a reality in two decades unless further records are set using this design
When discussing fusion power, we can all debate how many kettles we can boil.
Kind of funny :)
A breakthrough is a breakthrough, and that's good news.
I think both fusion and geothermal are very exciting, crazy thing is although geothermal sounds simpler, I have no idea what's holding it back technology-wise, yet I have a pretty good understanding of the state of fusion research right now.
Why couldn't we get geothermal without fracking? Is it so hard to establish a more controlled heat exchange channel down there? Harder than developing nuclear fusion?
Consider how much commerce is done in the US via truck. Those trucks average 6 miles per gallon diesel. That represents a huge amount of energy. But it currently relies on fossil fuels so people don’t think of it as being potentially served by renewable energy sources.
Space travel is an entirely separate type of energy use, and I could see it being the only option for lots of applications. But that would be much further away, and the significant hurdles there can also be solved by other future tech advances like direct conversion for fusion to electricity.
I doubt we can scale geothermal indefinitely. Fusion might suffer from similar constraints, but afaik, doesn't need "much" space or specific geographic structures.
But my primary concern with fusion is cost. I don't see the path to being cheaper than geothermal, nor fission, and new fission is already some of our most expensive energy. The goal may be eventual space travel, which seems like a more plausible goal to talk about than sustainable energy.
If it does not incluse precision engineering to build largest vacuum vessel, supercomputers, superconductors, generation and containment of hottest substance on the planet, and largest magnetic fields we can produce. If that's not 'fundamentally expensive', then what is?
Especially when your interlocutor is asking for geothermal, a.k.a. a hole in the ground?
You are commenting on an article about how scientists had to build a reactor out of berillium and tungsten.
Have you ever touched those materials? Is there any berillium in your car, or your washing machine? If you go around your neighbourhood looking for someone who can weld or work tungsten, will you find anyone? Can you buy a tool on amazon that will cut tungsten?
The number of facilities that can produce precision-enginered thousand-ton vacuum vessel with exotic materials, are counted with fingers on one hand.
> Tritium is very exotic, and fuel cost is a small and irrelevant cost to fission powerplant
This is downright delusional, solar is the only technology that you can go and buy off the shelf and it is much cheaper than an MRI machine, any joe with basic electrical education can put together a solar power system and poor people in developing nations do it. Anyone who thinks that fusion will be easier than slapping solar panels together is smoking some serious dope
That's a whole lot more of precision engineering than is needed to build a nuclear fusion reactor, and you can buy it on the order of a hundred bucks.
And it's not just a hole in the ground, last time I checked the thermal conductivity of rocks isn't exactly stellar.
With semiconductors, prices fall continuously because there is continuous iteration, and starting from the very very first lithographic circuits there was a market. There's an entire industry, competitors, and it's a factory system.
Fusion is not like that, it will be like building monuments, there's not thousands or millions of the same thing getting churned out, it will be all specialized construction for each piece.
You may say that a chip did specialized in that each of the transistors re wired together in very specific ways, but the semiconductor industry is a factory factory in some sense, you build a set of masks and that's your factory for your chip.
Let's say you design a fusion reactor, and then 12 months later you see how to shave off 1% of the costs somewhere. That iterative gain is lost, because the fusion reactors will be built very rarely, and building each one in a new custom way poses lots more risk than doing the same design for 10 years. They are just too big and expensive to show the same sort of mass manufacturing gains that can be seen with technologies that have learning curves.
I could be wrong, and I certainly hope I am, but I would bet a hell of a lot more money on a new battery chemistry than I would on fusion as being a terrestrial power device.
At least, that's what the promise is, we'll have to see of course.
I think fission reactors and ITER have shown the downside of building really large one off reactors, I don't think they're gonna make that mistake again.
Wind and Solar. They soon will beat natural gas for cheapest unsubsidized LCOE, and considering all fossil fuels are shadow-subsidized, that's huge.
Fusion needs to prove is can be cheaper than old-crappy-pressurized solid rod fission first, which is right now getting killed by alternative energy.
I was a big LFTR stan for a while. But wind/solar has won. Keep investing in fusion and fission, but they are subsidy and research projects right now only.
So if you want to ignore the storage problem, you need to rely on wind only. And if you have to dramatically over provision production to be able to meet demand, the cost benefits disappear.
Storage is a must for renewables to really take off.
"Not cost-effective to be the majority of power production while CO2 pollution is free." is very different from "near useless".
But I am not claiming there is any cost benefit at all - alI am claiming it's doable, and we will have zero or negative electricity price on windy days, that coupd be put to good use for electrolysis, hydrogen production, etc.
Land issues? Seriously?
The land issue for solar is a non-issue, it's like fake hand-wringing by the oil astroturfers over birds and windmills when skyscrapers kill 100xs more birds. There's this type of land called desert. Also, there is this thing called roofs where modern solar panels only need a small part of the roof to do a suburban house or apartment building including recharging your EV.
The land issue for wind is even less on an issue:
As for wind, I don't know if you've seen windmills on farms but... yeah, the pole doesn't take up much space. Then there is offshore wind. Windmills can integrate with existing use land (why not nature preserves?), you don't need to dedicate acreage to windmill farms.
Meanwhile, fusion reactors have a wee bit of problems with neutrons flying everywhere and turning the reactor vessels slightly radioactive from neutron capture. Maybe they'll fix that with good absorption spectrum elements, but let's not pretend fusion is 100% clean.
https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-the...
But again, the promise is there for fusion and LFTR/"new" fission. Keep the research, maybe the economics will turn around. Industry sure would need it to fully decarbonize, or, heck, space colonies. Or flying cars! Or any of the other sci-fi stuff we have given up on.
Right now we have an existential threat from GW, and an actual industrialized / productized and economic path is right there: wind and solar. That's what we need money printing for.
Sure, once storage is solved it will be a non-issue. But it is not currently solved, and you will forgive my skepticism.
I also never brought up land issues; I agree that it's not a real problem.
TL;DR we need to be realistic about the capabilities of solar + wind. You argue that storage will solve itself. Your sibling argues that we don't need storage at all.
The reality is that storage is a huge issue right now. It's the #1 technical issue stopping us from shutting down coal and natural gas plants.
Storage isn't solved, land space isn't solved, efficiency isn't solved, just like fusion isn't a solved problem.
To power the US energy needs, you need an area about the size of New Jersey. Also roughly equivalent to the area taken up by roads. The interstate highway system alone has been cited as the largest public works project in history, and that's "just" asphalt.
Look, any new nuclear or fusion project won't turn on for a decade. Given that even with inflation wind/solar STILL dropped in LCOE cost last year, and still likely has technological and economies of scale, you REALLY think a 10 year out fusion or nuclear project will launch at a price competitive with what even solar/wind + storage will be?
Solar/wind likely will be half the inflation adjusted cost it currently is now even with storage in 10 years.
LFP batteries are coming on the market now for storage that are half what lithium ion cost. Sodium will be release by CATL later this year or next. I'm not handwaving anything.
There is a LOT of roof real estate. A fair amount more than the interstate system. The costs are already pushing wind/solar to deploy as fast as it can be made, it basically is a production scaling problem.
New Jersey is not a large state, given we have west texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and lots of other desert. Which we don't need, because of rooftops and wind.
The best bet for sustainable and clean energy is to stop using fossil fuels and figure out how to deal with the economic consequences.
I feel this optimism around this far off solutions for decades has been just a detrimental to climate action as out right climate denialism.
Growing up in the 90s I was always told "everything will be fine, since we'll figure it all out with technology". It wasn't until decades later, when I kept hearing this promising but seeing CO2 emissions rise that I looked into the details and realized how incredibly in danger our society is, as well as how nearly impossible to solve this problem is at this point.
The reason we shouldn't put our enthusiasm into it is because it's a distraction from the fact that we may already be past essential limits in our climate system and if we want any chance of survival as a civilization and potentially species we need drastic action now.
you mean the death of billions of people ?
I think you're pointing to the very likely reality which is that there is no way out. More often than not I agree with you. It's just a shame that, as a society, we've chosen not to even publicly allow conversations about what's really happening and the choices we have to make.
There is not one.
I was merely pointing what I think is an euphemism.
> we've chosen not to even publicly allow conversations about what's really happening and the choices we have to make.
Because we are ashamed. We all know that the price of our current comfort is blood. Now and in the future. And our human nature seem to be unable to abandon comfort once we have it.
How much power the subsystems takes has no influence on the plasma's performance. How much power goes into the plasma (and what type of power and where and when, etc.) do influence the plasma's performance.
There are no showstoppers.
Here is a good (stellarator-focused) resource made by PPPL:
http://firefusionpower.org/
The end goal is so far away at this point, not a single player in this space is even trying to do it, even on their farthest-out roadmaps...
They did this in support of ITER, but there are also likely other political motivations. There has been no nuclear MCF operation on Earth in decades and now the UK has invested in resuming theirs rather than mothballing it.
You can't make claims about the motivations of the campaign (such as it being a signpost?) if you don't know what was even done.
And again, you shouldn't talk about the roadmaps if you haven't looked at them. Look at PPPL FIRE and power plant studies.
Edit: Confirmed by this comment https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/soc5xo/oxfords_jet_...
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00391-1
There doesn’t seem to be much to lose (these economies are already unreasonably inflated) but so much to gain from viable fusion.
SpaceX would beg to disagree here. The reason why they are so cheap, agile and sustainable (=reusable rockets) is precisely because SpaceX got a load of money without the "pork" requirements that were commonplace with ULA & friends. That enabled SpaceX to embrace vertical, on-site integration and go for what was technically the best option instead of what was required by some buffoons in Congress.
Although a point may be made that a "hand out cash" program needs a competent, strong and undisputed leader at the top. There's a lot of issues with Elon Musk, but it is undeniable that he is a very effective and inspiring leader.
ITER is a high risk foray into still-experimental technology with no hope of direct return on investment (it can not function as a commercial power plant). It had to be built at this scale because they had reached the limits of smaller-scale prototypes (tho I think there was not unanimity about this). Pooling resources makes sense here.
SpaceX is a more efficient take on technologies and processes that have been battle tested over many decades. This gives them a clear path to profitability, with some risk, but low enough to get investors on board, which ITER would have no hope of doing. Granted they are innovating, but incrementally, not from scratch. Very different.
Yes, but still - instead of all the components needed being manufactured on or near site, they are shipped from across the world... so parts end up damaged [1], not made according to spec or the spec having errors introduced somewhere among dozens of companies and institutions. With sometimes weeks or months of shipping round-trip times, that is causing a fucking lot of delays. Not to mention that shipping all the stuff around itself is also causing issues given the current COVID-caused shipping delays.
The problem is that ITER, ULA, EADS, Airbus, the ISS and a bunch of other international cooperative projects all are considered by politicians primarily as a way to distribute pork, secondarily as a way to show off on the international stage and only then as a way to actually advance scientific knowledge.
[1]: https://news.newenergytimes.net/2021/09/26/component-issues-...
Boeing has 1 boss and what are they better at, defrauding regulators to sell dangerous aircraft? And all other private manufacturers combined are a rounding error?
What's needed is people who know the subject matter and are experts at running large companies.
SpaceX turned rockets into a production line, experimented, blew a load up, and then fixed the problems with landing. But that's productising last year's thing, not inventing a new possibly impossible thing. Interesting to see how Starship goes.
Need a leader to stay: you do x, you do y, not a committee where every country gets to make one of the 12 magnets because they're a primary school and everything has to be "fair"
(This is not a further joke about Brexit I pinky promise)
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.2018041...
The latest ITER budget update puts the cost at $65 billion dollar.
And, yes, there's 1 million, 10 million, 100 million and so on grants for smaller scale efforts too, JET being one example.
https://images.app.goo.gl/58YdLFt7R9uY8dyR6
The much maligned prediction that fusion is 30 years away was always anticipating stronger financial support.
As for green R&D in general, the EU is massively investing in hydrogen research, as something that can be made with excess variable solar and wind power, and be used as a green alternative to natural gas in many situations.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mariannelehnis/2021/12/31/the-e...
In the press conference just ended, they repeated how exactly the JET reactor worked as predicted by theory. In my layman's understanding, for the exact same reason (seemingly very sound theoretical groundwork), the SPARC reactor should exceed breakeven within the next few years.
From Wiki on CFS:
* Back in September 2021, they built the strongest high-room-temperature superconducting magnet (20 Tesla) suitable for a fusion reactor
* Theory dictates that with stronger magnets, the reactor can be scaled down (with the square/cube, can't remember exactly), and thus cost and time to develop
* Back in November 2021, they raised $1.8 billion from the likes of Bill Gates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Fusion_Systems
Boy, do I think it would be crazy cool if they succeed, even taking twice as long as they've planned! :)
OTOH, in a tokamak, the plasma volume (and potential energy output) scales quadratically with the torus' aspect ratio (ratio of major to minus radius), so I'm not sure that tokamak-based fusion really is particularly suitable to miniaturization.
Again, I'm very much a layman to this subject, but how does miniaturization necessarily affect that particular aspect ratio? Since it's literally a ratio of two dimensions of the torus, shouldn't this be invariant to the overall size? (Assuming all things being equal, which I have no idea whether holds.)
TLDR: Tokamak economics scale in size with 1/B^5 -- so doubling the magnet field strength reduces the physical size substantially. This factor dominates other scaling parameters by a substantial margin, and is entirely enabled by high-temperature superconductors. A host of other key fusion parameters also scale beneficially with B^x (for some value of x) -- most of which are discussed in first half the video.
The secret sauce is better high temperature superconductors, and the ridiculous magnets you can build with them. They're pretty much putting these coils together as quickly as they can accumulate the HTSC wiring, and once they have all 18, they basically just need to put them all in a ring and light it up, and in theory they'll be generating over 10x the amount of power that they're putting into it.
This is the kind of tangible progress that gets me really excited. I wish there was a tracker on the CFS site to see how many coils they've completed so far, similar to tracking the progress of the JWST. Last I checked they were estimating completion around 2025, and at this pace that actually seems reasonable.
Another important material is FLiBe, which is a liquid that I think absorbs the energy from the fusion reactor. I don't really understand the properties that make it particularly well suited to the task, but I gather it's important.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_barium_copper_oxide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLiBe
I don't really see why it's important for a fusion reactor though, where efficiency isn't really a concern at this point.
We've known how to produce fusion reactions for a long time, the difficult part is to generate net energy.
Accordingly, the ratio of 1430°C to 100°C is roughly 1703/373=4.6.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/breeding-bl...
n + ⁷Li → T + ⁴He + n′
n′ + ⁶Li → T + ⁴He
(and ⁴He + n → D + T)
It didn't help that I was scanning the equations for ²H and ³H, not D or T.
Does this mean 9/10ths of the power can be sold and the other 1/10th can be re-used to power the reactor endlessly?
How much power does this produce compared to a nuclear reactor?
In theory, yes, but in practice it doesn't. But it does mean that they'll've proven the concept sound, and we can start making real fusion reactors.
No: https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY
Anyway, the important part: In addition to the output being thermal, with losses from conversion, only the energy going into the plasma is being counted. So measuring the entire system, this reactor might still be a little short of break-even.
I think the newer higher temperature super conductors helps, but then I wonder if the cooling facilities of the older generation of super conductors might have been a potential future safety feature on earth but not in space.
Well, if that's not under understatement... There are surely many more challenges in the high-field line of research, probably more than we know of, since they're kind of pioneering this field. Large size tokamaks, depsite their huge costs, have some considerable benefits like longer timescales for MHD instabilities and smaller stresses (both thermal and mechanical).
There was alot of debate about spending so much money on the large hydron collider when there was other social programs the money could be spent on instead of probing the fundamental nature of the universe.
LHC actually paved the way for commercial production of novel superconductors and magnets, leading in some way to helping fusion become a reality. In my opinion, Fusion and solving death should be my generations guiding star. (i'm 26)
My biggest question is with the crazy temperatures involved will we ever see one of these things able to run for hours at a time? With SPARC they are shooting for 10 second bursts, so that would double this breakthrough for the JET reactor. Even with the magnetic containment there are components in there exposed to millions of degrees Celsius right? That leaves us with some significant material science problems to solve.
You don't know that until the failure is complete, though, and "it may fail" is a terrible reason to not try the best shots we have.
I'm very onboard for any potential fusion power generation, I just don't think it has any hope of saving us from global warming.
I guess there are some irreversible effects once warming reaches a certain threshold however.
On the contrary, unlimited energy would exacerbate the man-made crises we are having today by further pushing the potential impact of man on its environment.
Here's the quick summary:
B: magnetic field strength
R: length scale
Fusion rate ∝ (plasma pressure)^2 ∝ B^4
Energy gain (Q) ∝ R^1.3 B^3
Power density ∝ R B^4
Cost ∝ R^3
So, say for example you're targeting a fixed Q. Doubling the magnetic field strength results in R1 = R0 / 2^(3/1.3) = 0.2 R0. And 0.2 R0 translates to 1/(0.2)^3 = 0.008 = 0.8% the cost.
The scaling is absolutely insane, and a stronger magnetic field has other advantages (such as making plasma instability far less of a concern), though structural loads can be an issue (that, at least is a relatively straightforward engineering problem).
If you take 12T for ITER and 20T for SPARC, that's not actually 2x, it's 1.67, which translates to 30% the size and 3% the cost (and time). It should also be noted that this is just rough, order-of magnitude estimation, but it should be broadly accurate.
For a more detailed explanation: https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4
Here's the section in Professor Whyte's talk: https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4?t=2215
> It's even more subtle than that, in fact this is really one of the things we've studies at MIT, is that there's other things that come in terms of benefits, particularly when you make the magnetic field very high, it basically starts to tame, just all of the whole suite of plasma instabilities that exist.
<joke> I guess windows will be resetting the house energy provider on each update soon
</Joke>
The next breakthrough that will come will be YBCO powder-in-tube wires, that will allow much stronger fields than currently. They'll be here within a decade, probably much less, as working prototypes exist now.
It's easy to produce, handling is well understood and cheap.
-273.15°C == −459.67°F
I'm not sure what "high room temperature" would even entail :)
What are the chances these guys have a pile of problems they can't solve with their approach, but rather than trying to approach it from another direction like an engineer would, instead they continue development because collecting more investor cash while the investors are unaware of the showstoppers is good employment.
The experiment produced
> 11 megawatts of power
and at Jet
> two 500 megawatt flywheels are used to run the experiments
log_2(2*500/11)*(2022-1997) + 2022 = 2185
At this rate we will have fusion by 2185 I guess?
https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/why-nuclear-fusi...
https://bigthink.com/videos/fusion-really-is-20-years-away-2...
It would be easier to do a project that provide some kind of immediate benefit while having long term multigenerational long term effect.
Science is kinda that way. We get immediate knowledge with long term unknown payoff.
(I'm citing the techniques used in the north frisian wadden sea, I'm unsure if the same techniques were used in west frisia as well)
This also means you need drainage systems to remove the water from already reclaimed land, as it's still exactly at sea level and will be relatively wet marshland otherwise.
And it might not even take an all out nuclear war, social media may turn out to have been even more destructive than nukes.
"On 19 March 1882, construction of the Sagrada Família began ... It was anticipated that the building would be completed by 2026, the centenary of Gaudí's death, but this has now been delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic."
Continuing construction (admittedly not continuosly) for roughly 150 years is pretty impressive in my opinion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia
There are technologies, materials, and methods we've developed, tested, and perfected because of some specific need. I mean, how much of the internet do we have today as a result of CERN having to store and share vast amounts of data and information?
Sure, you can say /eventually/ we would've come up with alternatives. But a lot of the internet and technology in the 90s came as a direct result of CERN doing practical things. How would we know we'd need solid state drives today if we didn't develop a need for hard drives? The same can be said of NASA, the space shuttle, the Hubble telescope, etc.
Going back to CERN, maybe it would've been better to wait for the Superconducting Super Collider because it was going to be more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider. But so far only one of these particle accelerators has detected the Higgs boson.
You can't skip inventing ironworks because eventually titanium will be invented.
This isn't rocket science :-)
Might be a good idea if nobody wants to go on the 2nd ship though.
I presume almost no one in 1920 could have imagined that anything approaching the output of fission energy would become common in their lifetime.
What makes you think it will be any more politically viable to scale out than fission reactors?
Tungsten is a good choice for a first wall material because of its uniquely high melting point, low rate of embrittlement in high neutron flux, and short-lived radioisotopes.
IIRC a major difference would be the danger potential in case of a "meltdown", since a fusion reactor wouldn't have kilograms or even tons of uranium etc. laying around to form another elephant's foot but "just" the irradiated reactor vessel which AIUI is both not as dangerous or as long-lived as fission fuel, a fission reactor itself and fission waste products.
Also IIRC the actual "meltdown" of a fusion reactor would involve the reaction environment (extremely high temperatures and pressures) breaking down at which point the reaction stops almost immediately no longer producing any additional radiation or waste products, leaving only the already irradiated reactor vessel to deal with since the comparatively tiny volume of reactant(s) (probably one or more different Hydrogen isotopes) and reaction product(s) (probably Helium) will escape quickly and with pretty much no harm done.
I'm just worried. If sane, logical arguments worked, then there'd be a lot more fission reactors in the world and a lot fewer coal plants.
From a political perspective, there is little incentive to plan further ahead than the current administration.
Maybe I'm going too far but in the future cryonics and being frozen and be brought back when the promise of these investments be resolved in the future might create some incentives.
Even though this seems super-scifi for now, it probably won't be in about 100 years.
We see this pattern on every single piece of science news that comes across the front page of HN.
Since the calculation involves taking log_2, even if the estimate for the "used power" is off by a factor of 4 the result will only change by 50 years.
Can you make your qualitative comment quantitative and update the numbers in my doubling thought experiment?
I would be curious about what you think is more realistic.
ITER will use roughly the same amount of power as JET, produce 10x the power 40 years later. Even using poor metrics such as Q you have enough data points to p-hack whatever incorrect timeframe model you want.
ITER isn't even using HTS coils.
If you really want a quantitative projection of MCF performance over time, here you go. Don't lie with numbers if you don't know what you're talking about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fustion_triple-product_di...
-- Wikipedia
So the reason it is called European is that it was conceived by the EU and it's partners and it primarily funded by the EU's Horizon 2020 funding programme.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20170830004728/http://horizon202...
Or will this fusion go out of control and demolish the UK in a nuclear fireball?
It's probably related to brexit in that this outlook is very likely at least part of why Brexit happened (or rather why the UK was never a particularly good fit for the EU)
Edited to add the link (now on HN front page): https://www.euro-fusion.org/news/2022/european-researchers-a...
The title is as misleading as calling ITER French because it's located in France.
Isn't that what solar power offers?
Nobody wants to deploy solar due to high upfront cost. However, wouldn't the startup on a fusion reactor be much greater?
Solar has the upside of actually producing a power surplus already, though.
Also, the lifespan is 25-30 years, but after that time the panels will still maintain 50-80% efficiency - so they can be reused for different purposes (or shipped to Africa, where there is a plenty of cheap space, sunlight, and they will work well).
Yes, we should take the problem serious, but it is also grossly overrated. It is certainly not a reason to avoid solar panels.
https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/recycling-solar-panel-wa...
But we really need more energy storage, and there are plenty of good ideas in this area too: better batteries, gravity bases systems, crowd sourced storage, etc.
https://www.finder.com/uk/solar-power-potential
Maybe thats acceptable in some deserts, but pretty terrible in other places. 1 step forward, 1 step back.
Plus that figure is for our current energy usage, which is only going to increase over time.
Production is very near the usage sites (for BEVs, very near). It keeps the cars cooler in summer. And you can't make the parking lots any uglier.
(I am aware there aren't enough parking lots, but this deals with a fraction of the needed space.)
29000 sq km = 2900 TWh
Which is 10x the current electricity use of UK.
I think they may be overestimating the numbers by taking the petrol, oil and gas verbatim - whereas they should consider that electric cars have way higher efficiency, and electric heating can be done also way more efficiently than gas heating (because heat pumps).
In the end, my mother will have a significant surplus of power during summer (even with storage), and will still need to heat up house in winter using gas, or grid electricity (coal :/).
I read about some Nordic researchers developing long-term heat storage, which would be way better.
how is a factor of 4 "only". It's absurdly high.
You only get 3 times less power/area of solar in Scotland than in California. That's pretty surprising (part of it is higher efficiency of photovoltaic cells in lower temperatures) and pretty great for our future.
For example it means once we switch from fossil fuels pumped out of the ground to fossil fuels generated with surplus renewable energy (and it's not that far - it will probably be profitable in most of the world in next decade) - there will be much less incentives for fossil fuel dictatorships.
https://nextjournal.com/erik-engheim/renewable-energy-calcul...
They show that you need roughly 25 m2 to cover energy use of a family. That easily fits on most roofs. A regular apartment is at least 80 m2, so you only use a fraction of the roof space. That means regular roof could in principle cover a 3 story apartment building with all the needed power.
Of course industry and business also use power. But if every house had 50 m2 solar panels on the roof on average you would cover that as well.
Thus roofs are in principle more than enough for most countries. Sure this will not always work, but it actually works quite well to combine solar power and agriculture: Agrovoltics. It can actually improve yields and give extra income to farmer which can sell electricity.
These kinds of things is not taken into consideration when comparing land usage of nuclear power and solar power. Solar power can be mixed with residential areas and farms. Nuclear power can't. You are not going to place a fusion power plant on people's roofs.
First off, the daylight cycle is an obvious concern and there still isn't a great way to store solar energy during the day for use by cities (or generally large consumers) at night. Not to say it's not possible, but people are largely still trying to figure out what the right solution for that is.
Second, the startup requires a significant amount of land in advantageous locations for sunlight. There's a lot of the planet that just won't see the same advantages as others, and transporting energy long distances to them is another unsolved problem.
Lastly, and this is more for fun, but solar won't be as useful when we as a species aren't exclusively on earth anymore. Fusion would be a pretty nice step forward for things like space travel.
Both have a really high startup, but achieving fusion would mean 24/7 clean energy that works regardless of environment.
Solar makes great sense for places where energy consumption is higher during the summer than during winter.
Not a concern at all. Google renewable energy storage. It is there but there is profit merit, so it is not welcome
CSP has been dying for years however because Photovoltaics are cheaper. However, this is largely due to regulation. Solutions are picked based on price per kWh. CSP cannot compete on that with Solar cells. However today government have started modifying regulation so that a premium price is paid to those which can deliver power at night.
CSP projects then become competitive since unlike solar cells they can deliver power at night. In the past CSP projects delivered power the whole day. Now they are increasingly only delivering power at night, thus getting the premium price.
This goes to show that to get desired development in renewable energy it is crucial to get regulation right. Until now, regulation has not properly rewarded projects which can deliver power on demand.
However once that is in place, thermal and cryogenic storage of power will become competitive and be built.
The main issues with renewable energy sources today are electricity storage and transmission. If it weren't for these limitations, wind and solar would already be superior to other means of energy production.
Most likely problems with storage and transmission will be solved first, before fusion energy is proven to be commercially viable. However, there is no guarantee that they will be—especially in the case of transmission, which is primarily a political problem.
Dealing with the instability of solar and wind energy is very complex and requires numerous measures, such as better integration of wide-area electricity grids, more electricity storage, more generation reserves, etc.
But even nuclear power generation is dependent on the weather. During heat waves, nuclear power plants located on rivers in Germany and France repeatedly had to shut down because there was not enough cooling water available or the water in the rivers would otherwise have become too warm.[1] During cold spells, nuclear power plants had sometimes to be shut down because the supply of cooling water was no longer guaranteed due to ice.[2]
[1] For example: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa...
[2] For example: https://fortune.com/2019/01/31/ice-shutdown-new-jersey-nucle...
Both of these are solved with fusion power.
Energy market operates on the assumption that whoever unbalances the network has to pay for balancing it. Providing too much and too little energy is both bad - you have to pay someone else to use more/less or to produce less/more to balance the mess you made. There are specialized powerplants for this, they are "on standby" and jump in when needed - and they charge much more than the normal powerplants. When there's a big shortage they can charge absurd prices for energy. And if you caused the shortage by mispredicting weather - you have to pay for it.
This makes the energy provided by solar panels much less valuable than the energy provided by a predictable, controllable source. Often by 1:10 factor.
I would say solar’s problem is controllability. You can only turn it up to the limit of the amount of sun received, which is none at night, and sometimes very little in the day.
It remains to be seen how controllable fusion power will be. Will it be for base load only, or will it also be useful to flexibly dial up and down for variable load? Much of current nuclear power is base load only. Clean base load power is still super useful, but it is not a complete solution.
Meanwhile solar is unexpected on the scale of minutes to hours, every day. It's not the same.
Also thermal storage and cryogenic storage can easily provide enough capacity. The problem is that they are not as efficient as batteries. If you buy electricity but only get 50% of that electricity back after storage, then you need to sell at 200% the price you paid.
Electricity prices don't swing enough today to make the feasible. But if far more wind and solar was built, then you would get much cheaper power at peak, which storage providers could buy and sell with a profit.
Meanwhile Australia has retooled for 10% Solar and batteries in a matter of years, that number is rapidly increasing, and is turning off their coal plants.
Minutes, even. Perhaps you meant fission?
Meanwhile, we have massive grids of solar and battery being installed _today_, and existing installations replacing coal plants.
I'm tired of people talking about fusion (or even nuclear, as it's so mired in public FUD) as if it's some panacea. We have a solution right now: Solar and batteries. It works in places with cloudcover. It works in cold and hot climates. It works at night. It's getting cheaper every year.
Solar and batteries are nice but they're not yet cost effective. They're getting better. But you can't just handwave away real problems from your armchair viewpoint and assume thats all fine.
We don't have working fusion power, at all.
> Solar and batteries are nice but they're not yet cost effective
"Cost effective" is a judgement call, not physics. If I told you that the cost of coal-generated electricity was that your great-grandchildren would live in an impoverished and difficult world, you might not view that a particular cost-effective either, yet somehow that's the "standard" against which things are judged.
Sure we do. Look no further than this article. We can make it, but its not commercially viable.
> "Cost effective" is a judgement call, not physics. If I told you that the cost of coal-generated electricity was that your great-grandchildren would live in an impoverished and difficult world, you might not view that a particular cost-effective either, yet somehow that's the "standard" against which things are judged.
Ah yes, think of the children.
Yes, coal is problematic, but the reality is that energy is expensive and we need a lot of it. If we tried to go full solar right now it would cost trillions of dollars, and the grid would still fail in the winter when heating is most important, and the economy would enter a massive depression as the cost of doing things gets both more expensive on average and extremely volatile.
You say this is a judgement call, not physics, but then go on to just broadly make assumptions about all of the relevant facts. You're not the one being logical and fact based. You're the one observing, yes, we have a climate crisis, and thus assuming that a radical solution for which you have no particular understanding of the economic or infrastructure implications is the right one because it's at least different from what we have now.
Renewables are good. They are getting cheaper. They're growing in capacity. And yet, I guarantee you, we cannot go full solar now. And I also guarantee that you do not have nearly sufficient of a view of the system dynamics to be making statements as bold as you are. This is hard. It's not just evil greedy coal mine operators ruining everything.
Q total is way below 1 (translation: it took far more energy to make the energy that was produced, than was produced). We do not have working fusion power, if "working fusion power" means "you get more out than you put in".
As for the rest of this, I have no idea who you think you're replying to. Just one follow up, neverthless:
> And yet, I guarantee you, we cannot go full solar now.
The USA spent more than US$300M per day on the war in Afghanistan, for 20 years. I guarantee you that if "we wanted to go full solar" now, we could. US$2T buys you a lot of anything, including even today's vaguely clunky battery tech.
That's not what it means. Working means it works. Can you produce fusion power? Yes. Can you do so in a commercially viable way? No. Q is obviously a part of this. Uninteresting semantics.
> The USA spent more than US$300M per day on the war in Afghanistan, for 20 years. I guarantee you that if "we wanted to go full solar" now, we could. US$2T buys you a lot of anything, including even today's vaguely clunky battery tech.
And I'm telling you, no, we could not, because that's not how the world works. From many perspectives, including economics of how to actually acquire all these solar assets many of which are already being consumed as fast as produced and dependent on limited metals supply chains; land availability with reasonable transmission setups; grid capacity to absorb these new generation facilities on the transmission lines; power availability during non peak times; and the preposterous externalities of trying to rapidly undermine the global energy market.
If it takes more than 1W of input power to produce 1W of power from fusion, then I'd say the answer is no. The distinction is not "commercially viable", it's "net energy production". We're not there yet (and are actually quite a lot way from it).
> And I'm telling you,
... that US$2T is a lot of money, and that's just what we spent on 1 war. Yes, there would be complications and side effects and what have you. Money, in our system, combined with the other abilities of the federal government, can do a lot.
Solar is getting so much cheaper, at such a fast pace, that I really don't understand how one can disagree that it's the future of our energy grids. Installing solar is a no-brainer in some parts of the world now, and in the very near future (extrapolating from the last 10 years), it'll be every part of the world soon.
What problems am I hand waving away?
https://www.statista.com/chart/26085/price-per-megawatt-hour...
But this chart is the levelized cost of energy. Its not the price at which you can get it. Energy demands are higher in winter. They are non trivial at night. The cost of energy might be low, but the price at which you can get it may be very high if not enough is available.
I use 6kWh / day. (not sure how! but that's what the power company says)
A decent EV battery holds 20 kWh or more.
Boom. There is my night time storage buffer.
Battery tech and solar is great, but its not the perfect solution.
It's like being back in the 1700s and arguing that research into petrol is a waste of time. I absolutely do not understand this mindset.
We will not be here in 200 years to enjoy fusion if we don't adopt solar and battery _right now_.
Technically, none of us will be here in 200 years.
I very much doubt if climate change will lead to an end to the human species, so I think a better way talk about this stuff is to frame it in terms of our descendants living in an impoverished, less beautiful, more strife-filled world.
But yes, FFS, action yesterday or last week, and make it trillions of dollars worth of action, like an actual war, but for infinitely better reasons.
When I was 16 I remember reading a Scientific American article that was describing how nuclear fusion was around the corner. Within the next 2 years!
It's always been clearly communicated to me that fusion is extremely hard and we're not that close to getting it working.
Solar, even under ideal conditions, needs backup and much more manpower and management to make it work... and even then, it is not reliable.
So, solar is not a replacement for fusion, or nuclear or coal for that matter. It is great for supplementation though.
Fusion is having our own little portable sun that can be utilized more efficiently.
While Fusion obviously has merits I think it is overhyped as a solution. Molten Salt Reactors are a much more sensible solution if nuclear power is the desired solution. Why? Because they actually generate LESS nuclear waste than Fusion power plants.
The big selling point of Fusion reactors is that they don't generate any nuclear waste. Except they kind of do. Molten Salt Reactors (MSR) in contrast actually "eat up" nuclear waste. You can power them on nuclear waste and get less waste out. Thus an MSR has negative radioactive waste production. Fusion has positive waste production.
Unlike Fusion reactors we have already proven that we can build MSR reactors. It doesn't mean I think we should give up Fusion research. I just think that if we want to get cheap, clean and reliable power today, then solar, wind and MSRs are probably the most sensible options, not fusion.
https://erik-engheim.medium.com/yes-clean-nuclear-power-exis...
No.
> Could anyone more in the know here explain in simpler and more practical terms please?
It's impossible to tell because the story is incoherent. The central claim is that they "release[d] a record 59 megajoules of sustained fusion energy" but this makes no sense. One can talk about sustained power (over a period of time) but "sustained energy" is a category error because energy is just power integrated over time. You can get 59 megajoules out of your wall socket if you wait long enough.
They apparently did something that had never been done before, but there's no way to tell exactly what that was from what is written in this story.
(This kind of obfuscation is not unusual in fusion research. A cynic might argue that this is because if they were clear about the actual state of things their funding would cease.)
We already know that fusion power plants are going to operate by igniting plasma in short bursts -- a few seconds, maybe 10s at most -- and generating a huge amount of power during that single burst. You then ignite it again and again.
The question is how much total energy you can extract from each of those bursts. By that metric, the total energy is what's important, not the power. Producing 10 quadrillion watts of power isn't that useful if it's only for 100 trillionths of a second. (Both numbers pulled from an actual recent result last August. [1])
"59 megajoules of sustained fusion energy" means a single burst produced that much. That's significantly more than the paltry 1.3MJ from that other result I just linked to.
Yes, of course you could get that much from a wall socket over the course of hours, but we know we haven't been able to sustain a fusion reaction for a few seconds, so that's the timeframe we're talking about for a single burst.
1. https://www.livescience.com/fusion-experiment-record-breakin...
EDIT: And, at the bottom of the article it says that the reaction ran at 11MW, so plugging that in it sounds like, indeed, it ran for 5 seconds.
0: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/215544178_Fusion_In...
Nor does it take into account the difference between a prototype investigation being constantly modified for experimentation and analysis and a production system built to purpose.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%A4rtsil%C3%A4-Sulzer_RTA9...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXHvY-zY9hA
Still, I think you will find that even this doesn't help all that much. A cycle time measured in seconds rather than milliseconds is still orders of magnitude away from what can presently be achieved.
> the difference between a prototype investigation being constantly modified for experimentation and analysis and a production system built to purpose.
AFAICT, no one has ever built an ICE that is within even an order of magnitude of realistic operating parameters of a fusion ICE. It's a whole 'nuther level of engineering challenge beyond just getting the fusion itself to work. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'll give you long odds against seeing it happen in any of our lifetimes.
In what sense is that "sustained"? A typical power plant produces that much energy in less than a second on a continuous (i.e. sustained) basis. Producing 59 megajoules once is basically a joke. It is analogous to detonating a pipe bomb (at a cost of several billion dollars) and claiming that as significant progress towards an internal combustion engine.
Fusion power plant aren't typical though
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30274449
The record is for energy generated. They generated the most energy, however they did not generate the most power (unlike the previous record which generated both the most energy and most power) because they were focusing on sustained generation
The sentence "59 megajoules of sustained fusion-energy", where fusion is the source of the energy, doesn't make sense
I think they meant it as "59 megajoules of sustained-fusion energy" where sustained fusion is the focus of the experiment (not sure I managed to get through what I meant and it's worded awfully on the website)
I hope / expect the actual paper/technical reports which will come out will be worded more clearly
Assuming a French wall socket, 240 V at 13 amps, and a pure resistive load, that will take
which helps put the figure in perspective.No. The issue is that most people only report the gain over the plasma (i.e. how much energy was put into generating the plasma) rather than the full amount of energy put into the process (i.e. superconductors, magnets, generating the deuterium/tritium, maintaining the sun-like heat, etc). If you add this to the computation, you end up having to have a "fusion-gain" of around 50x to break even. The reason people report the plasma efficiency instead of the actual operating efficiency is to get funding and hype.
Don't get me wrong, this result is still impressive, but it's still orders of magnitude off of the required efficiency.
This is the main take away for me, JET is not a standalone project, it's part of the whole ITER project which is supposed to go like this:
+ JET as a scaled down model provides testing and data for + ITER which I believe is a full scale model and is supposed to generate net gain (heat in vs heat out, not net electricity) and provide information to + DEMO which is supposed to produce net electricity (though not at market rate costs)
So the fact that it worked as predicted is a good sign (or at least as good as we can get) that ITER will work which will be a good sign for DEMO etc
Also not an expert though
For a long time one of the hardest problems in fusion reactor design is what the hell you make it out of. The big win here is that they replaced the walls of the reactor with a new alloy, and it worked according to what theory predicted, which gives them the green light for using that material in ITER.
To simplify a little (ok, a lot) there are two big materials problems inside the reactor. The first is the walls: you need something that's going to survive the temperatures, not disturb the reaction, and not get too radioactive in the process. They previously used carbon, which isn't great: it gets radioactive because it absorbs tritium, which is in the fuel. This experiment used a beryllium alloy, which doesn't absorb nearly as much, and worked, validating the material choice for ITER.
The second problem is to do with the exhaust. You need to get hot plasma out of the chamber without disturbing the ongoing reaction, and with a tokamak that means ridiculously energetic particles hitting a solid divertor. Again, the problem here is what materials you might come up with that stand a chance of surviving useful operational periods. ITER is currently planned to use beryllium walls and a tungsten divertor, but I don't know what JET's divertor is made of at the moment to know whether this experiment will have informed whether tungsten is a good enough choice.
What all this means is that there's one less thing on the "ITER might fail because of..." list.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
For years, I was hoping fusion is close. After watching Sabine's video, I'm not so optimistic anymore.
Second a great deal of ITER’s energy usage is as a science experiment not a fusion reactor. Most of their monitoring equipment for example is irrelevant to an operating power plant. Thus Qplasma is giving relevant information where Qtotal is largely meaningless at this stage.
It’s important not to forget the big picture. Otherwise you end up optimizing one piece of the system, and causing another piece of the system to work less well in a way the degrees overall system performance.
I get frustrated because it paints science in an undeserved negative light. It is at least truthful, in a way that most anti science writing is not. Mostly I find it unhelpful in that it points out problems without either explaining why they were reasonable or giving a real alternative.
IFLS pushers are motivated by money, clicks, and clout and to a large extent misinform the public.
I suppose you could say that they also get benefits from appealing to the IFLS crowd, so live and die by the same sword. I believe IFLS does more harm than good, but it's hard to be sure.
It's incredible that the term "Lawson criterion" wasn't mentioned once.
I don't think much of her "just do something different, don't ask me what" approach.
I felt like the Calculus SWAT Team was going to burst through the doors in that class, ha.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
/s
The outcome itself is not nearly enough, if it even matters (see Afghanistan, it's not like the outcome was a surprise): What needs to happen is that the money river* needs to flow through areas that have influential congress(wo)men and senators who benefit both financially (campaign contributions) and politically (good headlines, get something they can use in deals, etc.).
This is for anything where the outcomes are far away and/or uncertain. In those cases the money flow itself becomes the actual target. It is something concrete, with impact right away, compared to those types of goals.
A politician will probably support military spending in case the homeland is actually really threatened, but when it's not it's all about the benefits not of the military equipment for the troops, which are questionable (even when it works, do they actually need it?), but the benefits of the spending itself, pretty much disregarding the final products.
Example Afghanistan, which at first glance seems to fit my claim less than military spending for hardware:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/11/us-afg...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-won-in-afghanistan-private-... (paywall)
> One-third to half of that sum went to contractors, with five defense companies— Lockheed Martin Corp. , Boeing Co. , General Dynamics Corp. , Raytheon Technologies Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp. —taking the lion’s share, $2.1 trillion, for weapons, supplies and other services
Just imagine where we'd be if the US had a similar "Focus here" initiative for semiconductors since the 1960s.
I think independent of how well it works, or how terrible, to me it's an example of the "life finds a way" meme. Some great need exists, but also some great constraints, and a large amount of irrationality, so the outcome is what it is.
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> Just imagine where we'd be if the US had a similar "Focus here" initiative for semiconductors since the 1960s.
You may want to buckle up and watch the excellent talk https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo
> Today, Silicon Valley is known around the world as a fount of technology innovation and development fueled by private venture capital and peopled by fabled entrepreneurs. But it wasn't always so. Unbeknownst to even seasoned inhabitants, today's Silicon Valley had its start in government secrecy and wartime urgency.
> In this lecture, renowned serial entrepreneur Steve Blank presents how the roots of Silicon Valley sprang not from the later development of the silicon semiconductor but instead from the earlier technology duel over the skies of Germany and secret efforts around (and over) the Soviet Union. World War II, the Cold War and one Stanford professor set the stage for the creation and explosive growth of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. The world was forever changed when the Defense Department, CIA and the National Security Agency acted like today's venture capitalists funding this first wave of entrepreneurship.