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TAE Technologies Claims Landmark In Fusion Energy, Sees Commercialization By 2030 (techcrunch.com) 118

Posted by BeauHD from the one-step-closer-to-infinite-energy dept.
TAE Technologies, a 20-year-old fusion energy technology developer, is claiming to have hit a milestone in the development of a new technology for generation power from nuclear fusion. The company said its reactors could be operating at commercial scale by the end of the decade, thanks to its newfound ability to produce stable plasma at temperatures over 50 million degrees (nearly twice as hot as the sun). TechCrunch reports: For TAE Technologies, the achievement serves as a validation of the life's work of Norman Rostoker, one of the company's co-founders who had devoted his life to fusion energy research and died before he could see the company he helped create reach its latest milestone. "This is an incredibly rewarding milestone and an apt tribute to the vision of my late mentor, Norman Rostoker," said TAE's current chief executive officer, Michl Binderbauer, in a statement announcing the company's achievement. "Norman and I wrote a paper in the 1990s theorizing that a certain plasma dominated by highly energetic particles should become increasingly better confined and stable as temperatures increase. We have now been able to demonstrate this plasma behavior with overwhelming evidence. It is a powerful validation of our work over the last three decades, and a very critical milestone for TAE that proves the laws of physics are on our side."

Rostoker's legacy lives on inside TAE through the company's technology platform, called, appropriately, "Norman." In the last 18 months that technology has demonstrated consistent performance, reaching over 50 million degrees in several hundred test cycles. Six years ago, the company had proved that its reactor design could sustain plasma indefinitely -- meaning that once the switch is flipped on a reaction, that fusion reaction can continue indefinitely. Now, the company said, it has achieved the necessary temperatures to make its reactors commercially viable. It's with these milestones behind it that TAE was able to raise an additional $280 million in financing, bringing its total up to $880 million and making it one of the best financed private nuclear fusion endeavors in the world.
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TAE Technologies Claims Landmark In Fusion Energy, Sees Commercialization By 2030 More

TAE Technologies Claims Landmark In Fusion Energy, Sees Commercialization By 2030

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  • So, they are able to get a core to temperature and keep it running? Now they just need to keep everything around it from melting/fusing for the 50 year lifespan of a power plant, and we will have limitless energy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cyberax ( 705495 )
      There is no "core" in a fusion reactor. The fuel is an extremely tenuous plasma, less than a milligram for the whole reactor. It's extremely hot but it doesn't actually touch the reactor walls.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        However it's also radioactively hot, and that *does* touch the reactor walls. It'd be interesting to know how they plan to deal with that. One of the common ideas is to use lots of lithium in the walls so they generate hydrogen to feed the reactor, but I've never tried to follow that up. I don't even know whether what is generated is deuterium (or possibly tritium).

        • Re:only 50 years off (Score:4, Funny)

          by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Saturday April 10, 2021 @12:27AM (#61257544)

          "Fuck it, we're doing fiveterium."

        • Re:only 50 years off (Score:5, Informative)

          by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Saturday April 10, 2021 @08:41AM (#61258132)

          According to TFA, the reactor uses boron+H, not DT.

          B11 + H => 3 He + 18 MeV

          No neutrons are produced.

          There are reasons to be extremely skeptical about their claims. Boron fusion requires much higher temperatures than DT fusion. The difficulty of containing the plasma goes up as the square of the temperature.

          Even DT fusion requires 100M Kelvin. But TAE is half that, right? Well, no. Read the summary carefully with your BS detector turned on. Do you notice that they say 50M "degrees" not "Kelvin"? Then they say it is nearly twice the temperature of the sun. That is only true if the "degrees" are Fahrenheit. So they have actually only achieved about 30M K.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by HiThere ( 15173 )

            Thanks. I'd forgotten that they were the Boron Fusion people.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jcdick1 ( 254644 )

            The difficulty of containing the plasma goes up as the square of the temperature.

            But isn't their whole thing that ""... a certain plasma dominated by highly energetic particles should become increasingly better confined and stable as temperatures increase"?

            • But isn't their whole thing that ""... a certain plasma dominated by highly energetic particles should become increasingly better confined and stable as temperatures increase"?

              Yeah, right. If you believe that, I got some oceanfront property under the Brooklyn Bridge to sell you. PM me for wiring instructions.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Cyberax ( 705495 )
                They actually demonstrated that their scaling law holds with the increasing machine sizes. The next upgrade will achieve temperatures and confinement properties that are good enough for energy-positive D-T fusion. This would be an milestone of its own that can be commercialized, but they'll try to do one more scale up and try to burn B11-p plasma.
          • The actual press release [tae.com] says Celcius. Also says that their current goal is development of a demonstration facility that will operate well in excess of 100 million degrees Celsius, which gives them a technology they can sell, in order to raise more capital to develop further towards the temperatures required for p-B11.

            • They say they've got temperature and time, but what's the density? That's necessary in order to achieve break even, right? I don't see anything about that in the press release.

    • And on top of that, generate a fusion reaction which produces much more energy than it requires to generate the reaction. Or else be like the USA, and require corn ethanol in gasoline, purportedly to reduce greenhouse gases, except that it consumes more fossil fuels to fertilize and harvest the corn. Yay "green" politicians.

  • Call me when they reach breakeven. My guess is ITER or a Laser-Maglif system (either in the US or in China) will get there first.

    • Re:Breakeven (Score:5, Funny)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @10:09PM (#61257334) Journal

      Call me when they reach breakeven.

      I'll deliver the news in my flying car.

    • ITER might technically be able to get Q > 1 in the 2030s (schedule keeps slipping, but deuterium tritium operation is now around mid 2030s I believe), but it is not designed to put energy on the grid. It's a science experiment and frankly it doesn't translate well to a commercial reactor; they have taken the "volume scaling" approach that leads to a temperamental reactor ten times the size of a fission reactor of comparable output. It's simply not economical.

      Same thing with laser fusion - Q might be >

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        To get to commercial fusion requires new ways of thinking.

        How new?

        Personally TAE seems too ambitious to me, but good for them trying.

        Oh, %@?, not THAT new! /s

        Jeez, parent, you get what you asked for a sentence later and aren't satisfied. ;)

      • ITER might technically be able to get Q > 1 in the 2030s (schedule keeps slipping, but deuterium tritium operation is now around mid 2030s I believe), but it is not designed to put energy on the grid. It's a science experiment and frankly it doesn't translate well to a commercial reactor; they have taken the "volume scaling" approach that leads to a temperamental reactor ten times the size of a fission reactor of comparable output. It's simply not economical.

        You are right about size and not being economical for commercial use - it won't be. But tokamaks are the only technology that can so far make a strong technical case that they can reach the point of producing commercial scale power at any cost.

        Calling ITER a "science experiment" is wildly inaccurate. All tokamaks up to the present day have been science experiments. But a new generation are starting operation now that are really engineering testbeds - they are designed not to push plasma parameters further

        • I'm all in favor of science experiments, didn't intend to apply the label as a slander. The point remains (and sounds like you agree) that it isn't designed to tap energy (no lithium / FLiBe etc) and even if so the total cost is probably > 10x what makes sense commercially. I do agree with you tokamaks have potential which is why I singled out CFS as being the most likely commercial success in my opinion.

    • Call me when they have a reactor design which can sustain operation for years while actually running a fusion reaction.

      Fusion is a nasty beast - it produces fast neutrons (with sufficient energy to split U238 and other normally non-fissile material). The reactor shielding you need for fusion needs to be orders of magnitude thicker than for fission and it will get contaminated over time. Once it gets contaminated, the shielding and the reactor infrastructure will lose its mechanical, magnetic, eletcric, et

      • There's a post up near the top that says this is using (or will use) Boron + Tritium, which--according to the post--does not produce a neutron flux. IANANP, but if they're correct, then maybe the shielding and radioactive waste problems are not so bad.

    • The Wendelstein Stellarator [wikipedia.org] looks promising as well. They've done test runs to confirm that the reactor is behaving as expected, and are currently adding components for the next phase: working towards 30 minute high energy runs.

    • Commonwealth Fusion Systems is getting a lot of investment, and allegedly they've jumped ahead of Lockheed. CFS claims they'll have a working proof-of-concept by 2025 and commercial reactors by the early 2030s.

  • For one, this is not "traditional" fusion. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SigIO ( 139237 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @09:57PM (#61257310)

    The energy released from this reaction is when the unstable boron-11 + proton nucleus splits into 3 alpha particles. They can capture the positively charged alphas and generate electricity directly. No neutrons to deal with, either. In theory anyways.

    The downside is it takes far higher temperatures to puncture the boron nucleus' Column barrier than lighter nuclei. Plasma confinement has got to be crazy to manage at those energies.

    All that said, I've watched this company for over a decade now, and I'm highly skeptical of their claims and likelihood of commercial success. However, it does seem to be a fantastic vehicle for attracting venture capital.

    • Sorry..."Columb barrier". Stupid autocorrect.

    • The way I read the article is that they are using deuterium tritium fuel which produce shitloads of neutrons which is in essence high energy ionizing radiation which isn't good for transferring energy and is dangerous besides. I am pretty sure they said the next step is to get a proton Boron reaction to work, which is better for transferring energy. From something I read somewhere I think this also might be better for producing energy because it doesn't produce neutrons and might allow direct electricity pr

    • No neutrons to deal with, either. In theory anyways.

      Actually, some neutrons because of reaction variants that are difficult or impossible to suppress. So in theory, less alpha radiation but not zero.

      The downside is it takes far higher temperatures to puncture the boron nucleus' Column barrier than lighter nuclei.

      Which brings us to the typo in the article where they wrote 1 million degrees when they really meant 1 billion degress, or 2 billion, or about 50 times hotter than the center of the Sun.

      Plasma confinement has got to be crazy to manage at those energies.

      Don't confine your imagination, just let it go! After all a bunch of tech billionaires and movie stars say they did.

      it does seem to be a fantastic vehicle for attracting venture capital.

      Yessirree. What I'm not seeing here is a whole pile of credibl

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Myrdos ( 5031049 )

      Damn I hope it works though. Not for the power, that's just a bonus, but because it will make ITER obsolete before it even starts. Can you imagine? Billions and billions of dollars and decades of work, and some little company comes along and solves the whole problem for a fraction the cost.

      Also, SpaceX needs to get their reusable Starship running the day before the inaugural launch of the SLS. Mmmmm.

  • Not close, where are they a Lawson criteria (Score:5, Informative)

    by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @10:01PM (#61257318)
    If you read carefully though, what the claim is 50M degree plasma temperatures, no mention of density. If you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] The Princeton torus reached 60M degrees in 1978 and 75M degrees around 1980 Of course H-B fusion (which is what the press release describes) requires a lot higher temperature, something like 10X D-T, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] So 600M – 1.2B is the right range, 50M isn’t nearly enough What matters is Lawson criteria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Pressure * time at that temperature. They don’t give that. They say a “positive relationshipbetweenplasma confinement and reactor temperature, meaningthatthe company’s compact linear configurationimprovesplasma confinement as temperatures rise”. Which is nice words, but no data at all, or what regime they are in. No info on pressure at all. Note that their next machine will “that will operate well in excess of 100 million degrees Celsius to simulate net energy production from the conventional Deuterium-Tritium (D-T) fuel cycle” *simulate* - that machine is not intended to be net producing power. They give no idea of their target Q. If I go to their article at https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com] I don’t see any temperature above 1 KeV listed (ion + electron, a somewhat weird measuremn) that is only 12M degrees. (just a quick read, maybe I’m missing something) Their density is around 1e19 Lawson is about 5e20 density * seconds at 50M degrees. But they are only 10M degrees, so their pressure is 5X lower. In terms of pressure they are 250 X lower than breakeven for a 1 second run. But its worse than that, their containment time demonstrated is only milliseconds. So, the existing machine misses Lawson by a factor of about a million which puts them in the same ballpark as Farnsworth fusors There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the field reversed configuration. What is missing here is any data to suggest that it scales better than a Tokomak to get to a production machine. They say they have raised 880M$ but even their next generation machine doesn’t reach break-even for D-T. I see no indication that a break even machine will cost less than ITER. If you look at the papers on their site https://tae.com/research-libra... [tae.com] their magnetic fields are sub kilo-gauss. The ITER field is ~50KG. But ITER has a density around 1e20, at 8KeV (8X the temperature) so about 80X the pressure with 50X the field. It all holds together – the Tri Alpha Energy system gets similar performance per field strength – exactly as expected. It might be 2X better or 2X (or much more) worse, but nothing really exciting going on here.
    • Sorry, copy / paste turned into wall of text, cant edit
      • thanks for the posting. Dont have to apologize. You did more than most slashdotters...

      • This sometimes happens with text extraction from PDFs. There are no space characters in PDFs, rather (IIUC) the non-space characters are simply positioned on the page. I'm not sure why sometimes you got space chars between some words but not others.

        Huh, I thought I got a PDF the first time I followed the link. Now I get a regular web page. So maybe I'm talking out of my hat. Time to go to sleep.

    • What is your take on scaling up stellarators as a competition for the ITER? Your take was very informative.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      • I think its a detailed technical question. In plasma fusion machines, magnetic field pressure maintains the plasma pressure. Different designs allow different ratios of plasma pressure to magnetic field strength before there are instabilities, but the difference isn't huge. Plasmas mostly lose energy by synchrotron radiation, but they are mostly opaque to that radiation - so the net effect is similar to the surface radiating. So the bigger the plasma, the less energy loss per volume. So the overall

        • This is twice now.

          Friendly advice (truly..), please try and use the "new paragraph" key on the keyboard. (It's there -- hit it twice.) Consider back to high-school. An opening sentence, content-sentences, a summary sentence, and that is your paragraph. 5-7 sentences, _if_ you include the intro and outro -- else 2-3 sentences without.

          Alternatively, you can use the listicle form. Every sentence is a new paragraph. I hate that, but I probably hate a run-on paragraph more. I'll read two or three listicle items.

          • Just a spaz - copy / paste and accidentally posted before fixing the paragraph. Didn't want to post an identical thing with the same info. No way to edit on slashdot (which is probably good, but annoying in this case).

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by jabuzz ( 182671 )

          As I understand it there has always been a known better configuration than a the ITER configuration of a toroidal tokomak, is a spherical one. Traditionally they where impractical because of the magnets. However advances in high temperature superconducting tapes are eating if not eaten away at that. However ITER is a very conservative design, aka no unnecessary risks have been taken and a spherical configuration with HTS tapes would be a risk.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cyberax ( 705495 )
      I'm an investor in TAE, so I get somewhat more detailed reports. They are doing development on two fronts: "long enough" and "hot enough". They demonstrated the "long enough" approach with their previous machines, the current machine is designed to be the "hot enough" demonstrator.

      It seems that they have validated the scaling laws for their approach and the next step is to actually do the scaling. Their next machine (to be finished around 2023) would be energy-positive if fueled with D-T, which is not the
      • The information may be proprietary, which is fine, but have they demonstrated to you that this really scales to break-even better than a tokomak? They need the same temperature and same pressure * time product (Lawson criteria). Caution: look at pressure * time, not density * time because a low temperatures (like 10M kelvin) its easier to get the density. The original TAE concept sounded very attactive: the collided toruses of plasma. I remember when that was announced and it sounded brilliant. That mea

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Cyberax ( 705495 )
          Yes, they scale about better than a tokamak. Essentially, tokamaks are limited by the size of the central pillar, and the FRC allows to eliminate it. FRC additionally allows for a much simpler construction, because you don't need a hugely complicated toroidal reactor surface.

          TAE tried non-thermal plasmas in the beginning (that's what Polywell also tried to do) but it turned out that plasma thermalises too quickly, so this had been abandoned in early 2000-s. The current idea is to have a classic thermal pl
          • How much better scaling? Getting rid of the center of the toroid is great but do they do better on total magnetic field energy vs plasma mass? One concern though is that reversed field config relies on current flowing in the plasma. I think in a tokomak the fields are all generated by magnets, so if SC magnets are used they can maintain the field for long periods of time (30 seconds is the target for ITER I think). I don't know how long the reversed field current can be maintained in the plasma, but if

            • How much better scaling? Getting rid of the center of the toroid is great but do they do better on total magnetic field energy vs plasma mass? One concern though is that reversed field config relies on current flowing in the plasma. I think in a tokomak the fields are all generated by magnets, so if SC magnets are used they can maintain the field for long periods of time (30 seconds is the target for ITER I think).

              To answer a few questions, In tokamaks the Plasma current is generated by ohmic induction, boot strap current, and neutral beam injection. The FRC uses the same thing their central stack is just at end of the machine. Recent work has looked at Ion Cyclotron Resonance heating as a method to drive steady state current since ohmic induction cannot be sustained indefinitely. Stellarators are the ones where the fields are entirely steady state and require zero Plasma current. ITER plasmas will last for 30 minute

              • Thank you, good info. TIA has claimed a few milliseconds of plasma in one of their papers, but that doesn't change your point significantly. They are using neutral beam injection as well. Does that generate a net current somehow due to the different electron and ion masses (and momentum)? Is that a way for a FRC to have a continuous current, by injecting neural atoms tangentially? That might eliminate my concern about maintaining an induced current. Is the plasma current in a Tokomak required for conta

                • They are using neutral beam injection as well. Does that generate a net current somehow due to the different electron and ion masses (and momentum)? Is that a way for a FRC to have a continuous current, by injecting neural atoms tangentially?

                  Neutral beams work by first charged ion then using an electric field to accelerate them up to the desired energy. The accelerated particles are then sent though a neutralizer add back the electron to make them neutral charge again. Since they have no charge they aren’t confined to the magnet and can travel into the core. The neutral beams then charge exchange with slower particles so the net effect is positively charged ions with momentum. Then you just point the beams tangentially to drive a current.

                • Plasma current is also one of the problems from a engineering perspective on producing power plants. Jeff Freidberg wrote a great easy to understand paper on this [scitation.org] Preprint here [mit.edu]. He’s a character. He reminds me of a Carnival Barker in the APS poster sessions.
                  • Thank yo for posting the paper. That looks like a very good mix of physics and engineering, it will take some time to read. I hope anyone investing in fusion machines at least reads at this level.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Cyberax ( 705495 )

                By contrast, the plasmas in the FRC last 0.1 ms at best.

                TAE achieved 100ms confinement and they apparently validated the scaling law, so that larger machines would be able to achieve many seconds of confinement. This in theory would be enough for a pulsed mode.

    • Tokamak technology is close to scientific break-even, and given the well proven scaling for these systems ITER will operate at engineering break-even. Another factor 10 after that will make it possible to produce (unaffordable) commercial power. So these people are six orders of magnitude behind tokamaks that are already operating.

      Still, much better than ICF, as the most advanced and expensive ICF system in the world, the National "Ignition" Facility is about 20 orders of magnitude short of commercial power

      • I pretty much agree. I think plasma fusion is well understood and we know how to build an uneconomical machine. I haven't completely given up on ICF. Laser technology has advanced tremendously since NIF, and for enough $$ you can make pretty efficient lasers (diode pumped Yb:YAG rather than glass) but even today the cost would be astronomical. Ion beam fusion - been talked about for decades. Ion beams can be very efficient - but the accelerator facility is ginormous. There is the Sandia pulse disch
    • Itâ(TM)s rare that I read a comment this detailed, congratulations, Slashdot should have more of these. Although I admit I donâ(TM)t have the base knowledge to understand some of the details and validate what you wrote, you were able to still convey your reasoning, kudos!

  • https://generalfusion.com/tech... [generalfusion.com]

    But I have no idea how credible this is, it just appeals to my sense that something mechanical has a better chance of working, yet there is the same plasma instability problem in the center of this device.

    • How do they solve the rayleigh taylor instability? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] that is the bugaboo of implosion machines. (and why NIF couldn't get to breakeven).

      • If I was in charge (haha), I'd say "more power", lots of power... H-bombs work...

        • In fusion bigger certainly is better. Once you get to stellar mass, pretty much anything will fuse.. Sadly I think lily-livered environmentalists might object to detonating millions of H bombs to generate power. Too bad, because nuclear winter would help reverse global warming.

          • Sadly I think lily-livered environmentalists might object to detonating millions of H bombs to generate power.

            I ironically that was one of the first proposals for fusion energy. Detonate H-Bombs underground then use geo thermal to extract the energy.

            • Its not deeply crazy. I think the problem is avoiding radioactive leakage, and of course fusion bombs have fission triggers so there is going to be a lot of ugly waste products building up in that cavern. Bombs are also quite intricate and probably very expensive to manufacture

          • They wouldn't mind if we detonated the bombs in space, at a safe distance. We could use various devices to collect the resulting radiant energy. We could plan things so that it maintained a stable distance to the Earth. It would be very green.

            I cal this plan "project Sol", and if you give me $1 billion, I promise to show a working prototype in 10 years.

        • If I was in charge (haha), I'd say "more power", lots of power... H-bombs work...

          They do, which is why there were two classified test programs called Centurion and Halite that experimented with scaling down nuclear explosions, using underground nuclear tests as the driving energy to see how low they could go with ICF.

          The plasma parameters achieved, and the scaling law they thought they established, are still classified, but were used to pitch the National Ignition Facility. This system was expected to be three times above the lowest level of break-even, but it fell an order of magnitude

          • Sort of like how the reaction rate of muon catalyzed fusion turned out to be an order of magnitude below what was needed to make that technology possible.

            Nature doesn't always help us do what we would like to be able to do.

            I'll see you in my flying hover car.

            Maybe they just need larger magnets? [sciencemag.org]

            • I was supposing at one point that it would be cool to see if you could focus naturally occurring muons using quadrupole magnets (simple permanent) so that a large area array could pull in lots of muons and focus them in on a small area. The goal being to keep it as simple as possible but one complication would be you probably would need to do this in a vacuum chamber.

      • The rayleigh taylor instability only becomes important as time progresses. In General Fusion, the entire shockwave pulse is about a millisecond long. They just do them sequentially one after another.

        • Raleigh taylor killed NIF (that is why they had to go to a Holoraum) and their compression time is less than a nanosecond. RT happens on an amazing range of scales, from coffee creamer in a coffee cup to supernovas.

  • https://www.physics.uci.edu/si... [uci.edu]

    They fuse a proton with B11 to make 3 He4's, some xrays for energy, and no extra neutron to contain. Seems they need to solve remaining problems like He4 buildup?

    TFA: "The company isn’t generating energy yet, and won’t for the foreseeable future," and, paradoxically, "Sees commercialization by 2030"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cyberax ( 705495 )

      Seems they need to solve remaining problems like He4 buildup?

      They are planning to use He4 nuclei to generate electricity directly by passing them through a reverse particle accelerator ("decelerator?"). There's no "buildup" to speak of, as the plasma in the core will be extremely tenuous in any case. In practice, the reactors are likely to work in cycles of a few days with maintenance in between.

      • With all the solar panels around, even cycles of half a day (i.e. a night) might be a worthy source of energy. However, "normal" nuclear power plants usually work 6 months or more without maintenance...
        But I'm relatively certain not even "free" energy would be worth it with maintenance every week...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Cyberax ( 705495 )
          Periodical maintenance is fine, you can just build two fusion reactors and cycle between them. They are about two orders of magnitude less capital-intensive than a fission core.

  • Is that Celcius or Fahrenheit degrees...

    It makes a big difference when you are talking about millions...

  • Fusion physicists measure temperature in eV. 50000000k is ~4keV. By contrast, The ITER pedestal, that’s only just the edge, will have a temperature of 4keV. The core of ITER will have a temperature of 25keV [doi.org]. And it will do that for 30minutes. Now remember DT Fusion requires the lowest energy to overcome the column barrier. TAE’s device only operates for 0.1ms. On top of that, the reaction they are targeting will require an order of magnitude higher temperature than the ITER core that is already [stackexchange.com]

  • "Cold Fusion" could apply to any fusion under one million degrees.

    "Officially" (internet officially), Wikipedia says that "Cold fusion" is at or near room temperature. (Tokamak: 150 million degrees C.) Seriously, though -- consider fusion developments. They all have one million to tens-of-millions of degree plasma, confined with magnetics and/or gravity (unavailable on Earth). Practically, it would be incredible to see practical fusion at less than a million degrees. ne?

    Sorry, maybe this is more a "high tho

  • 'Hitting a milestone' ? (Score:3)

    by Richard Kirk ( 535523 ) on Saturday April 10, 2021 @06:59AM (#61257952)
    Passing a milestone is a success. Hitting one not so much. I wish them success, but I suspect the text is accurate as it is.
  • Very surprised. I thought the field has gone "cold".

  • But we already got one. A much *much* better one. You might have noticed it... in the sky!!

    If we're going to travel to the outer planets or other star systems, we'll call you.

  • Still 10 years away? (Score:3)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Saturday April 10, 2021 @09:44AM (#61258246)
    So we're still 10 years away from having fusion power? Thanks for the update.

    • No this is new. We've been 20 years away for 60 years. Now we're only 10 years away. The question is... "How many decades will it be until we're only 5 years away?"

      BTW, there was news out of MIT about 3 or 4 years ago that said we were maybe only 5 to 10 years away. Isn't this fun?

      Meanwhile, the cost of the first viable fusion power plant we could probably cover every house in the US with solar panels with a backup battery. But... fusion! It's soooo coool! And it only produces low level radioactive w

  • Years ago my dad went on a stock exchange kick. He thought he would invest in the "next big thing" and hit it rich. When he would take about the latest "promising news" from a company it slowly started to occur to me that it was a sham intended to lure penny stock investors. My dad ended up losing about $30,000 in the long run, because inevitably all of the "amazing break throughs" didn't pan out. I highly doubt TAE has found anything other than a break through in robbing middle aged men having a mid life c

  • Fusion power is just ten years away - and has been ten years away for the last forty years.

  • Set an alarm clock for 2030, and we'll see if anyone even remembers that this company existed.

  • More and more we are going to see videos like this one...
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    It's videos like this pointing out the very real math on nuclear fission power that will get people supporting it in the future. These videos point out what has been known for decades but a great many politicians, lobbyists, and ignorant dreamers have been able to hide for far too long. Because of how we communicate today it's going to be impossible to keep nuclear fission from being the dominate form of energy in th

    • Get Nuclear two magnituden cheaper than solar and we'll talk.

      Until then, the future is solar, wind and batteries. Which is a shame, fission has a lot of great complementary properties to solar and wind.

      In a world where form power is the cheapest power source, base power will find itself increasingly stranded.

      Of course, nothing spurs innovation like necessity, so I'm not completely ruling out fission. Just fission as it exists today.

      • Until then, the future is solar, wind and batteries.

        I've been reading claims like that for a very long time, longer than I care to admit. How much longer do I have to wait?

        • It's all a matter of following the money trail.

          Building a new Nuclear plant today would give an LCOE of around $155 per Megawatt hour... IF it runs at 85% capacity. If Tony Seba et al are correct in their latest report, The Great Stranding, Nuclear costs closer to $270 today, and will cost around $2000 in 2030.

          Meanwhile LCOE of Solar is now $49 and LCOE of Wind is $41, and this is projected to gradually sink to around $10-$15 at 2030. So, yes, I do not believe the best-case Nuclear plants of today can reali

          • Building a new Nuclear plant today would give an LCOE of around $155 per Megawatt hour... IF it runs at 85% capacity. If Tony Seba et al are correct in their latest report, The Great Stranding, Nuclear costs closer to $270 today, and will cost around $2000 in 2030.

            I can also pull numbers out of my ass, put them in a paper, then add "et. al." after my name so I don't have to admit the other contributors have been my cats.

            Why in the hell would nuclear power go from $270 today to $2000 in ten years? Do they expect the price of concrete to go up in that time? If so then why would solar and wind, which require far more concrete for the same generating capacity over nuclear fission, not also see a tenfold increase in costs? That's a bullshit number and can only be expla

            • > I can also pull numbers out of my ass, put them in a paper, then add "et. al." after my name so I don't have to admit the other contributors have been my cats.

              Well I don't know how many cats these guys have, but they've been tracking unsubsidized prices for 13 years now:

              https://www.lazard.com/media/451086/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-130-vf.pdf

              On page 2 you will see that LCOE for new nuclear is around 15 cents, and new wind and solar is 3.5. These are based on in-market pricing.

              Even the EIA

  • Fusion is one of those pie in the sky things that's perpetually "10 years away".

  • I realize this is a three-day-old necrothread, but...

    TAE has been promising "10 years" for 23 years now. Seriously, they first claimed they would have a commercial reactor within ten years *in 1997*. Every year since then they say the exact same thing in spite of the machine not delivering a single deliverable. p-B11, the "tri-alpha" of their original name "Tri-Alpha Energy" requires 300 eV, and even their pivot to D-T needs at least 100 eV and they can't even do that.

    But forget that, we already know the ma

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