Will MIT Scientists' Powerful Magnet Lead Us to Nuclear Fusion Energy? (nytimes.com) 164
"A start-up founded by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says it is nearing a technological milestone that could take the world a step closer to fusion energy, which has eluded scientists for decades," reports the New York Times:
Researchers at M.I.T.'s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and engineers at the company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, have begun testing an extremely powerful magnet that is needed to generate immense heat that can then be converted to electricity. It would open the gates toward what they believe could eventually be a fusion reactor... Though a fusion energy breakthrough remains elusive, it is still held out as one of the possible high-technology paths to ending reliance on fossil fuels. And some researchers believe that fusion research could finally take a leap forward this decade. More than two dozen private ventures in the United States, Europe, China and Australia and government-funded consortia are now investing heavily in efforts to build commercial fusion reactors. Total investment by people such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos is edging toward $2 billion. The federal government is also spending about $600 million each year on fusion research, and there is a proposed amendment to add $1 billion to the Biden administration's infrastructure bill, said Andrew Holland, chief executive of the Fusion Industry Association...
Commonwealth's new magnet, which will be one of the world's most powerful, will be a crucial component in a compact nuclear fusion reactor known as a Tokamak, a design that uses magnetic forces to compress plasma until it is hotter than the sun... Commonwealth Fusion executives claim that the magnet is a significant technology breakthrough that will make Tokamak designs commercially viable for the first time. They say they are not yet ready to test their reactor prototype, but the researchers are finishing the magnet and hope it will be workable by 2025...
Commonwealth, which has raised more than $250 million so far and employs 150 people, received a significant boost last year when physicists at M.I.T.'s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and the company published seven peer-reviewed papers in the Journal of Plasma Physics explaining that the reactor will work as planned. What remains to be proved is that the Commonwealth prototype reactor can produce more energy than it consumes, an ability that physicists define as Q greater than 1. The company is hoping that its prototype, when complete, will produce 10 times the energy it consumes.
Commonwealth's chief executive (also a plasma physicist) explains to the Times how fusion energy is different than other sources: because it really doesn't require any resources. "You add up all the costs, the cost of normal stuff like concrete and steel, and it will make as much power as a gas plant, but without having to pay for the gas."
Commonwealth's new magnet, which will be one of the world's most powerful, will be a crucial component in a compact nuclear fusion reactor known as a Tokamak, a design that uses magnetic forces to compress plasma until it is hotter than the sun... Commonwealth Fusion executives claim that the magnet is a significant technology breakthrough that will make Tokamak designs commercially viable for the first time. They say they are not yet ready to test their reactor prototype, but the researchers are finishing the magnet and hope it will be workable by 2025...
Commonwealth, which has raised more than $250 million so far and employs 150 people, received a significant boost last year when physicists at M.I.T.'s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and the company published seven peer-reviewed papers in the Journal of Plasma Physics explaining that the reactor will work as planned. What remains to be proved is that the Commonwealth prototype reactor can produce more energy than it consumes, an ability that physicists define as Q greater than 1. The company is hoping that its prototype, when complete, will produce 10 times the energy it consumes.
Commonwealth's chief executive (also a plasma physicist) explains to the Times how fusion energy is different than other sources: because it really doesn't require any resources. "You add up all the costs, the cost of normal stuff like concrete and steel, and it will make as much power as a gas plant, but without having to pay for the gas."
In before (Score:5, Interesting)
In before the pessimistic fools that will state fusion has been 5, 10, 25, or 50 years away constantly.
You know airplanes and even rockets were like that too at one point. How much ridicule did Robert Goddard have to face over rocketry?
Fusion budgets were cut drastically in the 1970s and never recovered. If Reagan had built ITER back in 1984 we would have fusion energy already. Fact is fusion is a certain investment away, not a time function. Anyway, the ITER structure will finally be built by 2025 assuming you pessimist fools don't succeed in killing it again.
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Fusion power is at least one breakthrough away. These guys think that they've made a breakthrough in magnets, and that this is the last breakthrough needed.
Best of luck to them. It would be awesome if they were right. But I'm going to remain skeptical until someone starts building a commercial plant in my region.
The problem with breakthroughs is that they are difficult to predict in advance. Despite your theory, it isn't just a matter of setting fire to sufficiently large piles of cash. That should hav
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Re:In before (Score:5, Informative)
In my incredibly limited understanding, there are at least three interesting challenges to solve:-
1. Getting fuel in - what we’re developing at the moment is the means to achieve plasma, a necessary pre-cursor step to the actual fusion of nuclei to form heavier elements. But that material being turned in to plasma has to come from somewhere. During experimental runs, we can simply fill the interior of the toroidal with the cold form of the gas we want to experiment on and then heat it up by switching on the fields. In a production reactor, we’re going to need to figure out a way of recycling the chamber or getting raw fuel in there without breaking the magnetic field. Fiddly.
2. Getting the waste [spent] fuel out - obviously we can’t simply keep on adding more fuel, so there’s the challenge of getting spent fuel out. Maybe we can just run the chamber for a fixed period of time and then let it cool off and reset it. But there’s a world of difference from being able to achieve this once and being able to do this reliably. In automotive terms, we’re still trying to get a spark plug to fire once, in one cylinder, all the while dreaming of a running IndyCar engine
3. Converting this to electricity - which is why we’re doing this. Conventional thinking seems to suggest that we’ll clad the chamber with some form of jacketing and then run a coolant/thermal transfer fluid through the jacket, to take the heat out as steam. But think about all the other tech needing to be in and around the toroid - fuel injectors, waste valves, super-cooled magnets
But to answer one of the first questions in this thread - how can we be confident we’re getting closer since fusion power has been ‘a couple of decades’ away for the last 50-60 years my answer would be to look at the impact of Artificial Intelligence on, say, aircraft design. AI is producing designs that are lighter and stronger than we have managed, doing so in a way that we could not have even conceived, let alone achieved, thanks in large part to work rate. Finesse this with the application of quantum computing where it makes sense to do so [i.e. attempting multiple permutations to problems simultaneously] and what has changed is that, in other fields, we have built the capability to brute-force some of the biggest design problems in the field.
Couple that with what we’re achieving with metal 3D printing [lighter, stronger] and what we’re collectively witnessing is not just innovation in the actual challenge of creating and maintaining fusion, but of all the myriad fields supporting that which we’ll also need to ‘get right’ in order to turn the first experimental model in to a commercial reality.
To be honest my biggest concern is not whether we will get there, but who gets there first. I see the first viable commercial solution being snagged by a nation state to wield for international power purposes. Not helpful for a planet that desperately needs a good source of clean power right now.
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An excellent presentation of current fusion efforts is given in this site:
https://scitechdaily.com/tag/f... [scitechdaily.com]
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Sadly, the world doesn't work in the way you describe.
If innovations that would be more efficient than the current options got the funding they deserve, the world would already look very different. Like a big tree stealing most of the water and sun from surrounding sprouts, the dominant systems in society will strangle funding from its competitors. The least we can do is to help the sprouts that won't pollute the atmosphere as much by providing more funding.
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Agree, it's great news, as steady progress has been made, especially recently. Compact (spherical) tokamaks seems very promising and the reward for mastering this technology will be immense. There's also steady progress with stellarator (W7-X) and laser based fusion. Additionally some private companies claim being on a verge of mastering reverse field fusion, though this is still a controversial technology (as I have not heard of anybody actually achieving fusion with this approach) I wish them well.
Let's n
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There's also steady progress with stellarator (W7-X) and laser based fusion.
New progress on stellerators, true, thanks to modern computational power that can analyze more complex designs.
But the opposite of progress is happening (actually has happened) with laser fusion. The National Ignition Facility has demonstrated that laser fusion is infeasible. It underperformed projections by an order of magnitude and has demonstrated the energy input required for inertial confinement fusion is too high to make a practical fusion system. NIF is the last laser fusion facility that will be bui
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But the opposite of progress is happening (actually has happened) with laser fusion. The National Ignition Facility has demonstrated that laser fusion is infeasible. It underperformed projections by an order of magnitude and has demonstrated the energy input required for inertial confinement fusion is too high to make a practical fusion system.
They never started nor cared about doing fusion research in the first place.
NIF is the last laser fusion facility that will be built and they have given up on doing energy research with it.
Tell that to the Europeans. The LMJ in France is basically a clone of NIF except they don't pretend that its for fusion research.
Re: In before (Score:3)
Other couldnâ(TM)t have been built in the 80s. Even m modern computers struggle to keep up with the fluid dynamics solutions needed to keep the plasma contained.
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Scientists and engineers need a certain time to come up with answers to some of the teething problems, such as instability of the plasma, the extraction of the energy and the wear of the walls.
I believe we'll eventually bask in the energy generated by fusion reactors, but it may still take quite a while. The goals set out by ITER are not guaranteed to be met and even DEMO may take decades to complete.
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Not clear. There seem to have been lots of technological blocks that need to be crossed before controlled fusion becomes practical. Remember, we need to do it a lot faster than the sun does to get any value out of it.
That said, I can hope that this latest magnet is the final necessary piece. But it couldn't have been built 20 years ago, even with adequate funding.
P.S.: With proper funding Goddard could probably have built a V2, but he couldn't have built a Saturn or a Space Shuttle, much less the more m
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Your argument seems to be this: "Airplanes and rockets were ridiculed and yet became successful, therefore any idea which is ridiculed will eventually be successful." This seems fallacious. One difference between the two cases is that, starting around the year 1900, airplanes and rockets progressed pretty steadily. Those really were just engineering problems, though they did require and produce progress in other fields, like metallurgy, refining fossil fuels, and of course aerodynamics.
One thing which is
Re: In before (Score:2)
Exemplary comeback (Score:2)
I take it you are expressing sarcasm?
I find that style of "fisking" point-by-point response . . . tedious.
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How much ridicule did Robert Goddard have to face over rocketry?
Could you point to a source documenting that he faced any ridicule at all over it?
In the 1920s, Robert Goddard was mercilessly ridiculed by the NY Times, among others. The newspapers pointed out that space travel was a fantasy because rockets had nothing to push against in a vacuum.
The NY Times published a retraction [wikipedia.org] on July 17th, 1969, apologizing to Dr. Goddard. This was one day after Apollo 11 was launched to the moon.
But there was one place where Dr. Goddard's research was taken very seriously: Nazi Germany.
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1920s to 1957 is much less than 60 years, though,
V2 rockets were falling on London in 1944.
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People were ridiculing him long before the NY Times article. How did you arrive at 60 years as being the amount of time something should be attempted for until it should be given up on and its scientists ridiculed by jerks like you? I mean, humans were trying to fly for at least a few hundred years. Should we have given up on trying to fly when Ibn Firnas fell from the tower in Cordoba in 800 AD? If you were making policy, admit that the Wright brothers would have been publicly shamed when their first few a
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How much ridicule did Robert Goddard have to face over rocketry?
Could you point to a source documenting that he faced any ridicule at all over it?
In the 1920s, Robert Goddard was mercilessly ridiculed by the NY Times, among others.
The NY Times editorial is, of course, famous. It is the "among others" that I would question. What others?
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You don't have google, is that it? Or, you don't know how to use it. Tell us, is this link false, wherein a professor says that it is "impossible" to ? https://ade3.medium.com/the-mo... [medium.com]
How many of these links do I have to keep pasting? You don't bother to read them and then lie about how only the NY Times article criticized him. You are fucking lying asshole and the link I pasted above proves it. If nobody was skeptical of his research and the press hadn't been calling him names like "moon professor", why d
Re:In before (Score:4)
It's always the burden of the person making claims to present evidence, not the audience. Also a random Reddit post wouldn't qualify as a reputable reference on Wikipedia, let alone anything that carries scientific weight.
The fact is, nobody knows if fusion is achievable, so anyone can claim "not enough funding," without worrying about being proved wrong. To use your own example, it wasn't monumental effort or that led to the Wright Brothers achieving powered flight; it was an insight that the shape of a bird's wing generates lift. No amount of effort or funding would have made flight possible if everyone was barking up the wrong tree. That's why funding starts small, because nobody has a priori knowledge of which trees will bear fruit, only trees that cannot possibly bear fruit. "Sufficient investment," is necessary of course (by definition), but it's no guarantee of any desired outcome.
Re:In before (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact is, nobody knows if fusion is achievable
Fusion is achievable. We know how to do it.
The question is how to make it cost effective. That is an engineering problem, not a fundamental problem.
Re:In before (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact is, nobody knows if fusion is achievable,
Actually: we all know, that it is. Ooops, you excluded of course.
Because we had dozens of successful fusion experiments already.
Problem is, figuring:
a) how to make a long lasting reaction (shape of magnetic field? etc. p.p.)
b) how to extract energy from the reaction
c) how to make it net positive (we are actually close to that one - but it might collide with a) and b) )
The other problems are size: atm we can only build huge reactors. Probably to tacke the problems mentioned above, we might need even bigger ones.
There are plenty of minor issues too:
- getting fuel
- having operators - atm they are basically run by a bunch of PhD weirdoes - perhaps a good thing, but might in the long run pump up the costs significantly
- decommissioning - against popular believe, the reactor will have a relatively short life span and will consist out of highly radioactive steel and concrete waste when decommissioned, due to the neutron bombardment
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I don't think that logic works, if there has been a sustained high level of funding for wing research it's likely that someone would have made the same discovery but earlier.
Much like the Apollo programme, it would have taken much longer if it hadn't been funded so well.
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> It's always the burden of the person making claims to present evidence, not the audience.
You must understand that social media and scientific papers are not the same thing and they have different dynamics.
Think of this place like a dinner conversation. Nobody speaks while citing references but if there's a disagreement the websearch comes out.
Rigorous science is an adversarial system while polite conversation is cooperative. Mistaking the two will lead to social ostracism.
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I am not here to convince idiots who cannot Google. What value is there in it?
About as much value as listening to people who post links that they have not, themselves, read.
Re: In before (Score:2)
So you dispute that people laughed at Goddard when his tests were failing? You cannot be bothered to Google it yourself, but here to throw rocks? Why should I bother to try to educate you when you are disingenuous. I posted links proving that people were like you tried to stop Goddard and others rocket research. I also posted links that showed the fusion budgets being cut drastically in the 1970s. What have you to counter those references? Nothing.
Irrelevant links [Re: In before] (Score:2)
So you dispute that people laughed at Goddard
Indeed one person (not "people": one person, the guy who wrote the NYT editorial) did mock Goddard.
when his tests were failing? You cannot be bothered to Google it yourself, but here to throw rocks? Why should I bother to try to educate you when you are disingenuous. I posted links proving that people were like you tried to stop Goddard and others rocket research.
You did nothing of the sort.
I also posted links that showed the fusion budgets being cut drastically in the 1970s.
In what way does that support your assertion that if Reagan had funded ITER, we would have fusion today? (And... are you aware the Reagan wasn't even president in the 1970s?)
And... By "links" you mean "one link". And, wait-- that one link [iter.org] doesn't "show the fusion budgets being cut drastically in the 1970s" -- it showed the opposite, it was about an agreement signed that initiated
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Indeed one person (not "people": one person, the guy who wrote the NYT editorial) did mock Goddard.
Not sure which link you supposedly looked at, but at least a couple stated that Goddard received ridicule from others, including fellow professors. Why can't you be bothered to research this instead of trying to derail fusion research? I mean seriously, fucking use Google and then tell me that the NYT editor is the only person who ridiculed him.
when his tests were failing? You cannot be bothered to Google it yourself, but here to throw rocks? Why should I bother to try to educate you when you are disingenuous. I posted links proving that people were like you tried to stop Goddard and others rocket research.
You did nothing of the sort.
The articles I posted clearly stated that folks like Oberth, Goddard, and Tsiolkovsky and others in aerospace all faced ridicule from peo
5 seconds of google... isn't enough [Re:In before] (Score:2)
Could you point to a source documenting that airplanes or rockets were continuously described as "20 years away" for over 60 years?
(a bunch of random links about history of astronautics)
Not one of these links document that "airplanes or rockets were continuously described as "20 years away" for over 60 years".
If Reagan had built ITER back in 1984 we would have fusion energy already.
Please present evidence to support that claim.
https://www.iter.org/newsline/... [iter.org]
Link does not support the assertion that if Reagan had built ITER in 1984 we would have fusion energy already.
You stupid fuck, you don't have google or something? Not sure why I would waste my time when nothing I said can't be found by a 5 second google.
Nothing you found in your "5 second google" supported the assertions you made.
Next time, consider actually reading the pages you link to learn what they say.
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Thank you for this beautiful illustration of why the level of discourse on slashdot is so high. You start by assuming that research should be entirely the job of readers, not posters. Someone can make whatever claims they want without presenting any evidence to support them and that's just fine. Then you follow with a bunch of links to high quality, authoritative sources (like a reddit thread) and irrelevancies. For example, to prove the claim, "If Reagan had built ITER back in 1984 we would have fusion
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Literally one reddit thread.. how about this one? http://large.stanford.edu/cour... [stanford.edu]
I posted enough references to establish my point, that just because something is delayed doesn't mean it's impossible. Just because there are skeptics doesn't mean the skepticism is true. Your post had zero references btw. I didn't know slashdot was a journal and we need publication quality references. I gave enough that someone interested in the truth can have a starting point from which to verify the important thing:
1. That
Re: In before (Score:2)
I support his claim that the poster he replied to was, indeed, a stupid fuck.
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We had many chances down this road. It wasn't just Reagan. Clinton killed the SSC project to ensure oil-guzzling SUVs were the mainstay.
Huh? That makes no sense. The SSC has nothing to do with oil, nor with fuel efficiency standards.
The Scientific American article is good: https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
Another point (Score:5, Interesting)
Fusion energy was only proper theorized in the 1940s, so what if it takes 100 years to build a facility? For fucks sake, nobody even knew that the Sun was producing energy by fusion until the 1930s. The progress has been slow (but steady) only due to lack of funding to build the required facility. The tokamak models have been working as theorized ever since Edge localised modes were discovered and steady progress has been made on facilities such as JET. We are supposed to give up in 80 years, because of a few setbacks? What if Von Braun or SpaceX gave up after the first 3 or 4 rocket failures? Fuck off.
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> The progress has been slow (but steady) only due to lack of funding to build the required facility.
No, it's been slow due to astonishing needs of pressure and temperature to make the fuel dense enough to fuse. An entire star does it effectively, though not efficiently.
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An entire star does it effectively, though not efficiently.
Stars do proton-proton fusion [wikipedia.org], not D-T fusion.
P-P and D-T aren't really comparable. D-T fusion is way easier.
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That is a valid point, and one I did not make clear. Stars generate fusion energy effectively. I should have been more clear.
_That_ energy is a very potent and eocnomical fuel source, especially if we can expand to using space based solar mirrors to collect, transform, and focus the energy for safe retransmission to Earth. The solar mirror concept, unlike the the fusion plant designs, is a mere engineering task, one requiring experiementation and development but within the grasp of existing technologies.
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An entire star does it effectively, though not efficiently.
It's probably good that it's not more efficient.
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It's good for those of us who want to live on Earth, anyway. If the sun were more efficient, life might have to have been on Mercury instead.
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Wait... if it were more efficient then wouldn't Sol burn much brighter?
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That's one interpretation, but I'm looking at it from the viewpoint that if it were more efficient then it would waste less energy on outward radiation.
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That would mean the amount of energy needed to cause fusion would be increased. I'm not sure how you consider that more efficient fusion.
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It seems to me like efficiency doesn't involve throwing so much energy away. If you consider the sun as a power source for the planets then only a minuscule portion of the output is going where it's supposed to, and the system efficiency is piss-poor.
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An entire star does it effectively, though not efficiently.
Yes, the Sun has an energy density of 276 watts per cubic metre, which is frequently and amusingly compared to a compost heap.
To match an ordinary 1GWe grid power station, you'd need a one cubic kilometre reactor, at that power density. Clearly, fusion reactors are not attempting to mimic conditions in the sun.
Fusion is hard, but even if it is never an economical way to produce electricity for the grid, it may become the standard power source for air travel, space travel, and ships at sea.
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What _possible_ use is there for fusion unless miracles of shrinking the necessary power plant occur? The fusion reactor designs are _massive_, and radio-active. It's difficult to even imagine a plant denser and more potent than, say the fission plants used for nuclear ships. Even if a fusion plant achieves "break-even", the size, expensive, and complexity are not likely to ever be useful for ships or aircraft.
Spacecraft already have access to an effective fusion power plant: the Sun. Solar collectors are k
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How about a thermonuclear bomb aka hydrogen bomb? What's the energy per cubic meter released from that? Still want to hold on to your position that high density release of energy from fusion is impossible?
Re: Another point (Score:2)
Powerful magets are great but not fusion. (Score:3)
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More powerful magnets will make it possible to build smaller practical fusion machine, but by themselves they are not a solution.
In this case, no they are not. However, if the magnet was strong enough then it could cause fusion on it's own. It would need to produce an uncanny number of Teslas but it would do it. Not a machine you want to be near, lest all the iron atoms be ripped from your body.
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If I've learned anything about the universe, it's that crazy and improbable things do happen in the universe through emergent patterns. The universe is just like the Game of Life in that a simple set of rules leads to strange self-organizing systems as well as chaotic byproducts. So, if it requires a massive asteroid mostly composed of hydrogen traveling at a fraction of C running into a magnetar of unimaginable strength then it's probably happened.
Pffffffft (Score:2)
Total investment by people such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos is edging toward $2 billion. The federal government is also spending about $600 million each year on fusion research, and there is a proposed amendment to add $1 billion This is pissing into the wind. More money was spent by the Navy on a goddamn rail gun. Socmed spends more money drilling into your brain and harvesting data. Fossil fuel companies receive this much in diesel fuel subsidies alone. Get serious or go home. The Chinese are advancing
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More money was spent by the Navy on a goddamn rail gun. Fossil fuel companies receive this much in diesel fuel subsidies alone. Get serious or go home. The Chinese are advancing 10-15 years to our one.
As another reference point: Uber has received over $25 billion in funding so far.
The amount humanity is spending on energy research is truly pathetic when you consider it's the future of the planet that's at stake.
another paywall site link ! (Score:3)
Not sure why EditorDavid and Slashdot have this irrepressible urge to link to NYT and other paywall sites. Few of us have paid accounts at all these sites. I suggest you see if your browser can use the add-on: Bypass Paywalls by Adam to give you access to these unfriendly sites. Meanwhile, send a rude reminder to Slashdot that their negligence is not appreciated.
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Re: another paywall site link ! (Score:2)
Do you cry when someone posts about an offline Popular Mechanics article too? *gasp* How dare they charge for magazines. The summary was charitably long on this submission, so stop whining about it.
The NYT interviewed the company's founders and sent a photographer too, why should everyone else pretend that content doesn't exist because the link offends you? SORRY you're out of free NYT views this month, how much more detail do you REALLY need to comment about fusion power on Slashdot, ffs.
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Do you cry when someone posts about an offline Popular Mechanics article too?
We would definitely laugh and point out they were morons. And you would cry loudly, wailing, "I'm not crying, you're crying!"
But I don't think anybody is stupid enough to post about that.
People pay for content? (Score:2)
There are plenty of ways to work around paywalls and I make good use of them.
While Dicedot editors are lazy slobs who post content with little review (note the many dupes) and still get paid so they've no incentive to change, paywalls are only a problem for those who care. I don't pay for software let alone news content. The rich don't care about me nor I about them or their rules other than those I can be punished for breaking.
Meh. (Score:2)
The liquid metal technologies are going to win this race. Either General Fusion or the other company that is using a different isotope as fuel.
Tokomaks have issues with ablative shielding and neutron irradiation of the containment vessel.
Re: Meh. (Score:2)
If you watch the guys talk, youâ(TM)ll see that this superconducting magnet design solves the irradiated blanket problem you are alluding to. This rather makes tokamaks look viable.
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You are correct. There is no prospect, even within the projections of proponents, that fusion will produce electricity at a practical cost. The cost projections for DEMO (the ITER follow on) is 10 times current wholesale electricity prices.
I still support fusion energy research however since the investment is not holding back other technologies (what might be called the fallacy of "movable money", if X was not funded then money would be available for Y - where the fallacist gets to plug anything they like i
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Well, I'm certain the cost projections for the follow-on are optimistic, but the follow-on to the follow-on might well have reasonable prices. And the next generation of designs after that might be a lot better.
Of course there are a lot of "might"s in that paragraph. That's the nature of development. I *really* hope we get controlled fusion working to allow it to power space colonies far from the sun. Possibly out beyond Pluto. As an intermediate step.
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I have no objection to research but I think money would be better spent on 10+ smaller projects than the one big project. All the big project does is show us that it's financially unfeasible to do fusion on a large scale. But in the long run it's not about money, it's about resources and which form of non-fossil fuel energy is more sustainable in the long term.
Skepticism (Score:3)
$600 Million from the US government is basically just coins found under the sofa. No one's taking it seriously.
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$600 Million from the US government is basically just coins found under the sofa. No one's taking it seriously.
Lots of people are taking this seriously. The U.S. is on the hook for only 13% of the cost for ITER which is international. The total investment in building ITER is something like 30 billion dollars.
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Over how many years?
It's coins found in the sofa.
Who cares if it is "international?" We're not their babysitter. Who cares how much was spent? Those are sunk costs, not a future obligation.
Byproducts (Score:2)
Even if they get Tokamak running, it's still a neutron source, producing toxins and potentially fissionable products.
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Even if they get Tokamak running, it's still a neutron source, producing toxins and potentially fissionable products.
The high neutron flux can make surrounding materials radioactive, but I don't think that is nearly as bad as the mess of long-lived decay products from nuclear fission. I don't think neutron absorption in a fusion reactor will produce fissionable products, e.g. uranium or plutonium. In stellar evolution, heavy nuclei like those only get produced under the most extreme conditions, such as supernovas. Ordinary slow fusion in a stable star will not do it. I think it is possible to use materials in a fusion rea
No (Score:2)
This is not about a single component.
the bit I don't get (Score:5, Insightful)
All this excitement and fuss about nuclear fusion as a power source.
We already have nuclear fission as a power source. It's proven, it works, it's been deployed for decades. Yet we continually refuse to use it to replace fossil fuel energy sources.
So why bother with nuclear fusion? It'll be resisted and declared too expensive and ignored anyway.
Re:the bit I don't get (Score:5, Informative)
So why bother with nuclear fusion?
It does not produce a waste stream. IIRC products from the reactor are stable and radioactivity is present mainly when the reactor is in operation, when it is not the reactor has very low levels of radioactivity.
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And don't forget, the failure mode is not a meltdown just a quenching of the plasma!
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Spilling molten, tritium embedded lithium is quite dangerous. Purified deuterium and lithium for the reactor itself float up when pure, they _do_ burn, they _will_ oxidize to form heavy water, and they _will_ get into the water supply. Look into the tritium poisonong of water around municipal disposal sites due to old "Exit" signs.
We finally have the answer (Score:2)
If someone asks the stupid "Magnets, how do they fucking work?" meme, just reply "Ask the Massachusetts Institute of Technology".
Sure of it now (Score:2)
You forgot "only 40 years away!", a staple since the 1970s.
Re: (Score:2)
Offtopic but (Score:2)
I always laugh sardonically when I get to this par (Score:2)
"Researchers ... have begun testing an extremely powerful magnet .... the researchers are finishing the magnet and hope it will be workable by 2025"
In other words, the researchers are announcing a product that doesn't actually exist yet, but they hope it will be working in four years. IF the magnet works as well as they hope, it MIGHT form one piece of a way to use nuclear fusion to produce power, IF all the other problems can be worked out. (To borrow from Robert Heinlein: "If we had some bacon, we could
No details? (Score:2)
Re:No fuel (Score:4, Informative)
Tritium can be created in the fusion reactor itself by using blankets that contain lithium. When a neutron hits lithium it becomes helium and tritium. Calculations of the tritium breeding ratio using known blanket designs show you can produce more than enough tritium for the reactor to be self-sustaining without requiring an outside tritium source.
Re: (Score:2)
Tritium can be created in the fusion reactor itself by using blankets that contain lithium. When a neutron hits lithium it becomes helium and tritium. Calculations of the tritium breeding ratio using known blanket designs show you can produce more than enough tritium for the reactor to be self-sustaining without requiring an outside tritium source.
This is true, and essential for having a self-sustaining fusion energy system, but you still need to have start-up tritium for the needed inventory - an the most practical source of that is fission reactors. The breeding ratio of fusion plants should be enough to maintain that inventory, but it would likely be impossible (given that tritium decays) to build up inventory for a second plant start-up.
Re: (Score:2)
Tritium can be created in the fusion reactor itself by using blankets that contain lithium. When a neutron hits lithium it becomes helium and tritium. Calculations of the tritium breeding ratio using known blanket designs show you can produce more than enough tritium for the reactor to be self-sustaining without requiring an outside tritium source.
I'm curious, how does that work? The D-T reaction produces one neutron. Breeding tritium from 6Li requires one neutron to make one tritium. In order to just break even, you'd need every single fusion neutron to be captured by a lithium.
And if you're proposing that you could breed tritium from 7Li, the cross section is so small it's not going to be useful.
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There is also a limited amount of helium on the planet, mostly a thorium and uranium decay by-product. A fusion factory for production in useful quantities of that can be profitable in itself.
This is not just party balloons and the Goodyear blimp. If the lithium blanket can generate helium-4 then a lot of useful science projects would pay top dollar for it. They already do for unstable natural deposits that literally go sky high on the regular. [acs.org]
This won't apply to designs that don't use tritium catal
Re: No fuel (Score:3)
Got any proof that it is unworkable? Tritium production from Lithium is a well-proven reaction. It is well known from experiments that lithium converts to helium and tritium upon receiving a neutron. I dunno man, I have to teach you basic physics? How can you declare the concept unworkable? What credible studies have shown the principle unworkable? Of course there has not been a reason to waste money on a large scale fusion reactor breeding blanket, but the concept itself is proven and far from unworkable.
Re: (Score:2)
> What credible studies have shown the principle unworkable
All of them. _No_ lithium blanketed reactor has had more microsamples of tritium harvested. Actually harvesting it has never been successfully accomplished.
Those Google hits are not designs. The X-Mol paper you cite is a simulation, and an extraordinarily optimistic one. The scirp publication is an estimate of lithium produced, not a measurement. Estimates and simulations are not data, and neither include the designs needed to actually harvest th
Re: (Score:2)
No. Those papers, and others I can't be bothered to link, are based on experimental data. You are claiming that the conversion of Lithium to Tritium is theoretical and that all the papers about experiments proving it are false? Here is a paper from as far back as 1938, showing it: https://journals.aps.org/pr/ab... [aps.org] I guess if you deny all the others, you would think that one is false too. I still pasted the link not for you, but for the others you might be hoping to mislead. Here is a quote from that paper:
Re: No fuel (Score:2)
The reactor design in question here uses lithium to absorb neutrons, and in doing so produces more tritium than the reactor consumes. The two fields you need are deuterium and lithium. You need a little tritium to get started, but youâ(TM)re good after that.
Re: (Score:3)
Wrong. Deuterium-Tritium fusion is a stepping stone in the plasma research needed to get to other types of fusion.
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The only reliable source of tritium on Earth is nuclear fission.
As far as I know, tritium is usually produced by neutron bombardment of lithium 6. The fusion fuel is in the form of lithium deuteride, which has the advantage of being a solid. When lithium 6 absorbs a neutron, the result is one helium nucleus (alpha particle) and one tritium nucleus. The tritium then fuses with the deuterium to form one helium nucleus, and one neutron. I think natural lithium has to be refined to remove lithium 7, which does not produce the right reaction to neutrons.
Nuclear fission comes
Re: (Score:2)
> As far as I know, tritium is usually produced by neutron bombardment of lithium 6. T
Only in theoretical designs, none of which have ever been successfully harvested for tritium except in the most miniscule quantities to measuer the amount of tritium produced.. See the EPA report on tritium:
https://www.epa.gov/radiation/... [epa.gov]
Tritium can be difficult to harvest. It's quite high radioactive not only makes it dangerous, but can weaken or chemically alter containing vessels, and i
In short, no (Score:3)
This doesn't have any direct application to commonly used motors and such.
A motor would benefit from a stronger magnetic field coming from:
A) a permanent magnet
B) that works at high temperature
C) is the same size as the magnet it replaces
D) is the same cost
None of those four points applies to fusion reactors, or to this magnet design. For a fusion reactor, it's all about total power, just brute force magnetic field strength. It's not a permanent magnet - doesn't need to be. 10 kelvin is a doable temperature
Re: What about motors? burying the lead? (Score:2)
You still need to get this âoehigh temperatureâ superconductor down to 92 Kelvin. You need to get an enormous amount of energy out to make that worthwhile. Ofc, fission generators may well be one of those cases. I can imagine MRI scanners are another.
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Wouldn't a stronger magnet lead to stronger/lighter/more-efficient motors? Isn't the vast majority of civilization fueled by magnetism? Isn't that what fuels our generators and motors?
Advances in HTS can applied to increase resolution of MRIs, improve transmission lines and accelerators. I'm not so sure about efficiency they are all composite things that trade pure superconductivity for handling higher currents.
1. I don't believe we're close to it...2. Even if they could do it, I am skeptical they could do it profitably....3. Even if they could, I am not sure I care. It seems expensive and dangerous, I am not sure when it would tangibly make my life better. Its seems far off.
Personally I think it we'll have a much better idea when ITER starts burning plasma. Fusion reactors are mostly harmless. Total mass of the plasma is insanely miniscule, no possibility of runaway reaction and activated material are relatively short lived, way less and much easi
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Cold fusion? Not likely. Hot fusion? 2030.
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Cold fusion *is* practical...on extremely small scales. It doesn't look like a reasonable source of energy. (Please prove me wrong, but the evidence I've seen so far gives me fairly high certainty I'm correct with all current approaches.)
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In the '90's the intelligence agencies made up the story of the fictional material called "Red Mercury" which was supposed to enable easy construction of a nuclear device. Most likely to divert attention from all the nuclear materials laying around for grabs at nuclear labs in former Soviet republics.
Re: (Score:2)
Mind you that cold-fusion (if it exists) isn't necessarily a good thing. It could enable terrorist groups to construct primitive nuclear weapons inexpensively with hardly any hazardous materials.
Probably not. Current thinking on "cold fusion" (if it exists at all) is that it is an effect of lattice confinement, so it needs the crystalline lattice to make the fusion happen. Heat it up, the lattice gets progressively disordered and eventually vanishes, and the fusion goes away. In nuclear bombs, on the other hand, the fission (and fusion) reaction goes on regardless of the state of the atoms, since only the nuclei matter.
Those you must defend control you. (Score:2)
War isn't really "expensive" since it's a tech jobs program with tiny casualties among well paid volunteers (I was one, it's perfectly human to kill for the tribe) but it's a poor investment compared to energy independence.
The strategic value of reduced dependence on members of a viciously patriarchal, anti-personal freedom and violently homophobic enemy culture is immense for those you must defend control you. None of our clients in the Middle East are better than their opponents and they should be left t