New Era Begins: Construction Starts on 47-Acre Fusion Reactor Funded by Google and Bill Gates (msn.com) 215
Heating plasma fuel to over 100 million degrees Celsius to create inexpensive and unlimited zero-emissions electricity "has been compared to everything from a holy grail to fool's gold..." writes the Boston Globe, "or an expensive delusion diverting scarce money and brainpower from the urgent needs of rapidly addressing climate change."
[N]ow, after breakthroughs this year at MIT and elsewhere, scientists — and a growing number of deep-pocketed investors — insist that fusion is for real and could start sending power to electricity grids in about a decade.
To prove that, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, an MIT spinoff in Cambridge, is using a whopping $1.8 billion it raised in recent months from investors such as Bill Gates, Google, and a host of private equity firms to build a prototype of a specially designed fusion reactor on a former Superfund site in Devens. A host of excavators, backhoes, and other heavy machinery are clearing land there and laying concrete foundations on 47 acres of newly acquired land. "It may sound like science fiction, but the science of fusion is real, and the recent scientific advancements are game-changing," said Dennis Whyte, director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center and cofounder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems. "These advancements aren't incremental; they are quantum leap improvements. . . . We're in a new era of actually delivering real energy systems...."
There are now at least 35 companies trying to prove that fusion can be a practical power source, most of them established in the past decade, according to the three-year-old Fusion Industry Association. The promise of fusion was buoyed with significant developments this year. In May, scientists in China used their own specially designed tokamak to sustain a fusion reaction of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds, the longest on record. In September, Whyte's team at MIT and his colleagues at Commonwealth Fusion Systems demonstrated that, while using relatively low-cost materials that don't require a large amount of space, they could create the most powerful magnetic field of its kind on Earth, a critical component of the prototype reactor they're building in Devens.
"We have come a long way," said Bob Mumgaard, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, who compared their advance to similar breakthroughs that made flight possible. "We're a pretty conservative science bunch, but we're pretty confident." With some $2 billion raised in recent years — more than any of the other fusion startups — his company is racing to prove that their prototype, called SPARC, will produce more energy than it consumes in 2025. If they succeed, the company plans to start building their first power plant several years afterward. Ultimately, he said, their goal is to help build 10,000 200-megawatt fusion power plants around the world, enough to replace nearly all fossil fuels. "This is a solution that can scale to the size of the problem that decarbonization requires," he said.
Phil Warburg, a senior fellow at Boston University's Institute for Sustainable Energy, disagrees. "Fusion has been an elusive fantasy for a half-century or more," he tells the Boston Globe. "Along with the technical hurdles, the environmental downsides have not been seriously examined, and the economics are anything but proven... The current wave of excitement about fusion comes at a time when we've barely begun to tap the transformative potential of solar, wind, storage, and energy efficiency — all known to be technically viable, economically competitive, and scalable today. The environmental advocacy community needs to focus on vastly expanding those clean-energy applications, leaving fusion to the scientists until they've got something much more credible to show for their efforts."
But Elizabeth Turnbull Henry, president of the Environmental League of Massachusetts rejected the argument that fusion research detracts from investments in renewables as a "false choice.... We're at a very different moment now, and it's good to have a lot of different horses in the race."
The also article notes that officials at America's Nuclear Regulatory Commission told them federal officials are already holding meetings to discuss how they'd regulate fusion reactors.
To prove that, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, an MIT spinoff in Cambridge, is using a whopping $1.8 billion it raised in recent months from investors such as Bill Gates, Google, and a host of private equity firms to build a prototype of a specially designed fusion reactor on a former Superfund site in Devens. A host of excavators, backhoes, and other heavy machinery are clearing land there and laying concrete foundations on 47 acres of newly acquired land. "It may sound like science fiction, but the science of fusion is real, and the recent scientific advancements are game-changing," said Dennis Whyte, director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center and cofounder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems. "These advancements aren't incremental; they are quantum leap improvements. . . . We're in a new era of actually delivering real energy systems...."
There are now at least 35 companies trying to prove that fusion can be a practical power source, most of them established in the past decade, according to the three-year-old Fusion Industry Association. The promise of fusion was buoyed with significant developments this year. In May, scientists in China used their own specially designed tokamak to sustain a fusion reaction of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds, the longest on record. In September, Whyte's team at MIT and his colleagues at Commonwealth Fusion Systems demonstrated that, while using relatively low-cost materials that don't require a large amount of space, they could create the most powerful magnetic field of its kind on Earth, a critical component of the prototype reactor they're building in Devens.
"We have come a long way," said Bob Mumgaard, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, who compared their advance to similar breakthroughs that made flight possible. "We're a pretty conservative science bunch, but we're pretty confident." With some $2 billion raised in recent years — more than any of the other fusion startups — his company is racing to prove that their prototype, called SPARC, will produce more energy than it consumes in 2025. If they succeed, the company plans to start building their first power plant several years afterward. Ultimately, he said, their goal is to help build 10,000 200-megawatt fusion power plants around the world, enough to replace nearly all fossil fuels. "This is a solution that can scale to the size of the problem that decarbonization requires," he said.
Phil Warburg, a senior fellow at Boston University's Institute for Sustainable Energy, disagrees. "Fusion has been an elusive fantasy for a half-century or more," he tells the Boston Globe. "Along with the technical hurdles, the environmental downsides have not been seriously examined, and the economics are anything but proven... The current wave of excitement about fusion comes at a time when we've barely begun to tap the transformative potential of solar, wind, storage, and energy efficiency — all known to be technically viable, economically competitive, and scalable today. The environmental advocacy community needs to focus on vastly expanding those clean-energy applications, leaving fusion to the scientists until they've got something much more credible to show for their efforts."
But Elizabeth Turnbull Henry, president of the Environmental League of Massachusetts rejected the argument that fusion research detracts from investments in renewables as a "false choice.... We're at a very different moment now, and it's good to have a lot of different horses in the race."
The also article notes that officials at America's Nuclear Regulatory Commission told them federal officials are already holding meetings to discuss how they'd regulate fusion reactors.
after breakthroughs at MIT and elsewhere... (Score:5, Interesting)
If there's one thing I've realized (and not just this story), MIT have an excellent press office.
Re:after breakthroughs at MIT and elsewhere... (Score:5, Interesting)
Commonwealth may have started at MIT, but it's a spinoff. And honestly, it's the first time economical fusion power has actually felt tangible. It's bog-standard tokamak fusion, which pretty much everyone accepts can work, but with HTS tape windings (which have been maturing over the past decade). HTS tapes are game changer for magnetic confinement fusion - dramatically decreased torus size (due to much higher field intensities); allowing for easier core maintenance (can "fold open" the core to replace the lining); and ease the cooling requirements (Commonwealth plans to use to LH2, liquid neon, or pressurized gaseous helium rather than (extremely expensive) liquid helium).
I can't wait to see this project really get rolling.
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Smaller size also means less shielding for all the critical components. What's the lifetime of the magnets and structural components at 24h operations?
Re:after breakthroughs at MIT and elsewhere... (Score:5, Informative)
Big Oil doesn't want fusion to exist, for example.
I doubt "big oil" cares what happens to fusion power. They may in fact find fusion power working to their benefit.
Petroleum companies sell fuel for transportation, but also big markets are lubricants, plastics, and fertilizers. If fusion power proves cheap enough then "big oil" will use fusion power to make plastics, lubricants, and fertilizer instead of petroleum. They may even use fusion power to make transportation fuels.
"Big oil" gets a lot of bad PR for the CO2 produced from burning their product. There is a market for carbon neutral fuels and "big oil" is well placed to take advantage of it. A big problem in making carbon neutral fuels is a zero carbon energy source that is cheap enough to power the systems that can make the carbon neutral fuels. There's a premium people are willing to pay for carbon neutral fuel but it's not that high above petroleum fuels.
Fusion power could serve "big oil" well in maintaining a fuel market. If electric vehicles are eating some of the market from "big oil" then carbon neutral fuels would reduce those market losses, and "big oil" has an existing infrastructure for the production and distribution of carbon neutral fuels. I believe that they'd love to see fusion power work.
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And many "big oil" companies are pivoting to be "energy" companies.
Which includes renewables, etc.
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Even if high uptime energy positive fusion becomes possible that doesn't mean it will be cheap. There are lots of foreseeable hurdles limiting reduction in operating costs.
Re: after breakthroughs at MIT and elsewhere... (Score:3)
Re: after breakthroughs at MIT and elsewhere... (Score:2)
I'll be singing, "Another One Bites The Dust"
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If there's a containment failure I'll be singing "The Future's So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)" by Timbuk 3...
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If there's a containment failure ...
There is no "containment" to fail.
Fusion reactors are nothing like fission reactors.
With a fission reactor, many things can go wrong, and some of those things can result in meltdowns and radiation leaks.
With a fission reactor, many things can go wrong, and all of those things cause an immediate shutdown of the reactor.
Keeping a fusion reactor going is like keeping a match lit while standing in a category five hurricane.
Re: after breakthroughs at MIT and elsewhere... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Sorry, fission.
Re: after breakthroughs at MIT and elsewhere... (Score:2)
Hahaha, I forgot about that day they introduced windows 95. Never gets old. https://youtu.be/lLPAUHdyjRI [youtu.be]
I want to understand why this is being built? (Score:2)
Re:I want to understand why this is being built? (Score:4, Informative)
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Yes they are hoping to achieve breakeven:
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Definitely erroneous (Score:3, Insightful)
"enough to replace nearly all fossil fuels"
Until the entire vehicle fleet is electrified and most houses are retrofitted to not heat with gas, there will still be a lot of fossil fuel use.
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Re:Definitely erroneous (Score:4, Informative)
Fusion reactors can't be weaponized. and other than the reactor housing itself becoming mildly radioactive by neutron bombardment over the life of the reactor fusion is very clean.
Unlike a fission reactor a fusion reactor takes a lot of effort to just keep a fusion reaction going. If it loses to much heat or containment the whole thing stops working. They are literally "walk away safe" And contrary to what some movies and books would have everyone believe a fusion reactor can not be forced to "go critical" and explode. Current "Hydrogen bombs" actually use a fission bomb to initiate the the explosion.
And even if the fusion reactors can't be made small enough for a ship then there is just the really easy way to make shipping carbon neutral by just replace the current fossil fuels with renewable synthetics. Wouldn't even need to retire any current ships.
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Unlike a fission reactor a fusion reactor takes a lot of effort to just keep a fusion reaction going.
That would mitigate against use on ships.
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Fusion reactors can't be weaponized.
Bullshit. Fusion reactors produce neutrons, and those neutrons can be used to turn natural uranium into plutonium. Fusion reactors that can be made small enough would be used to power warships like fission reactors are now. Fusion reactors that can run on heavy isotopes of hydrogen means that nations would not be reliant on petroleum or uranium for energy. There's a lot of heavy hydrogen occurring naturally in the water on Earth, and the process to extract it was developed 100 years ago. If a nation ca
Re: Definitely erroneous (Score:2)
You can produce neutrons with a cycltron and turn U-238 into Pu-239 if you want
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Re:Definitely erroneous (Score:5, Interesting)
your overlooking that gasoline, diesel, and methane can be produced synthetically if enough heat and electrical energy is available to power the process.
With the infrastructure already in place once the energy-of-production issue is resolved the switch over to 100% carbon neutral synthetics would be easy.
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Also, if electricity is cheap enough, we can remove CO2 from the atmosphere, liquify it, and sequester it in depleted gas wells.
Collecting and sequestering CO2 is easy. It just isn't cost-effective. Energy prices below one cent/kwh will change that.
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Collecting and sequestering CO2 is easy.
It's possible but certainly not easy. Even at 1c/kWh, it's a big bill someone has to pay.
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Even at 1c/kWh, it's a big bill someone has to pay.
The energy cost is about 0.2 kwh / kg of CO2.
To remove humanity's current annual production of 45 Gigatonnes would require 9 trillion kwh = $90B/year @ 1 cent/kwh.
That is 12% of America's military budget.
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Even at 1c/kWh, it's a big bill someone has to pay.
The energy cost is about 0.2 kwh / kg of CO2.
Citation? Is this something that can scale, or just a small-scale demonstrator? I would like to believe it is so cheap, but I am sceptical. The issue isn't so much annual production as historical, though. You'd still need to reduce carbon output from current so you are reducing CO2 in the atmosphere, or have even more than that 12% devoted to it. IPCC has scenarios that include active net sequestration IIRC.
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The OP is correct. There is no need at this point to engage in widespread artificial sequestering. What is really needed is for us to stop overloading the natural carbon cycles with the crap we produce. If we do that the environment will clean itself far faster and better than we can.
Big plans (Score:3)
Put "breakeven" in scare quotes (Score:4, Interesting)
When people talk about "breakeven" they're nearly always counting neutrons in the reactor's "output" even though neutrons currently are worse than useless -- neutrons currently can't be turned into electricity and they're ionizing radiation that transforms a reactor's components into radioactive waste.
There's two and only two ways around that. Either (1) you use a fuel that generates its output energy as something other than neutrons ("aneutronic fusion"), or (2) you find a way to turn neutrons into electricity (which is one of the major research goals of ITER). As far as I've heard nobody's attempting any practical demonstrations of aneutronic fusion reactions because they're far, far harder to achieve than deuterium-tritium scare-quotes "breakeven". Assuming these guys aren't even attempting aneutronic fusion, the only remaining possibility is that they've got some scheme to turn neutrons in to electricity.
Billionaires funding a "demonstration" fusion project is either very interesting or not interesting at all. Either they know something about harnessing neutrons we don't, or billionaires can be just as gullible as the general public.
What I think may be happening is that this is actually an *experiment* that's being hyped as a *demonstration*. I think they've got some scheme to turn neutrons into electricity (and probably tritium fuel too) and they're trying to show it works. A "demonstration" would be a project to take something you know works and show it would be economical to scale to practical levels. There's certainly a whiff of hype around this. Even if you had a technology that is shown to work by 2025, the idea that you'd be able to get a plant built "several years later" is only remotely possible if you're very loose with the word "several".
Whooping 1.8 billion? (Score:5, Insightful)
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There's also the half a billion dollars per year Americans alone spend on halloween costumes. For their pets.
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Re:Whooping 1.8 billion? (Score:4)
The Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant cost PG&E more than $8 billion to build in the 1980s.
Part of that $8 billion price tag was excessive regulations and shutdown of research in the late '60 and early '70s. This causes each reactor to be custom designed and parts sourced, meaning expensive. This, of course, was caused by a bunch of boomer hippies that where protesting something they didn't understand.
If the hippies had been ignored and research allowed to continue by the time Diablo Canyon was built there probably would have been a standard micro reactor design. With this the Diablo Canyon rector might have cost a quarter of what it did and been a hundred times safer and many times more productive.
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While I'm not really sold on Thorum reactors. I have a feeling if it was feasible someone would have done it by now.
With that being said people, especially anti-nuke kooks, need to look at the new reactor designs. Melt down proof designs. Waterless systems using molten salt. An most importantly, a micro, scalable reactor that will fit on the back of a flatbed truck. This last one can be mass produced and shipped anywhere power is needed and can be scaled up by simply adding more modules
Some of t
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Nuclear waste is not as big a deal as people think it is. Most nuclear waste can be reprocessed to extract the unspent fuel. I think 90% of the wastes consist of this unspent fuel. The rest can be buried in subduction zones out at sea.
At least it could in theory. This was part of the research that operation ignorant hippie derailed in the '60s and '70s. The anti-nuke craze did so much damage to our society and civilization.
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I'm not so sure that burying at sea is a great idea. I think the original notion of burying in geologically stable Nevada salt caverns was much better. Bury at sea and what's to keep it from leaking into the ocean?
You are not burying it at sea, but under the sea. Poor choice of words on my part.
The idea is to bury nuclear waste under the sea bed by drilling through the sea floor and into the bedrock under the sediment layer. Drill about a mile into the bedrock then back fill the hole with the waste and concrete. Then you let the natural ocean sediment coverup the rest of the hole. Another part of the plan is the location, subduction zones. This is a place where one plate is being pushed under another. In th
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There have been enough major accidents - Fukushima, Three MIle Island, Chernobyl - to warrant some of that fear.
With the three accidents that you mentioned, only one of them was due to poor reactor design. Chernobyl. What happened at Chernobyl can not happen at a modern reactor, even one that was designed 4 decades ago.
Fukushima was not caused by a poor reactor design. It was caused by poor infrastructure and human error. The company that operated Fukushima cut corners on the safety systems.
Three Mile Island is the most over blown "accident" in history. There was a issue, but the safety systems worked exac
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The hippies where right to be concerned. Two cities just twenty years early disappeared under mushroom clouds. There where now enough nuclear weapons on the planet to render it lifeless. What is not to be concerned about?
What they where wrong about was to not just protest nuclear weapons but everything with the word nuclear in the name. Did you know the fools protested "nuclear medicine?" Something that really has nothing to do with nuclear power or weapons. That his how ignorant they are abou
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I think ByteDance is valued at 400 billion, they didn't get 400 billion of investment.
According to this :
https://www.crunchbase.com/org... [crunchbase.com]
They have raised just below US 10 billion dollars. Not saying it's a small amount, just pointing out that valuation is not equal to amount raised.
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Uncertainty messes up the projections.
Studies so far do project a reduction in crop land, though.
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Don't forget the lack of soil. Farming on the Canadian shield's bedrock or in some swamps should be fun, especially with varieties of crops that aren't used to the daylight lengths.
Re:Whooping 1.8 billion? (Score:4, Informative)
That prediction surprises me. There are great swaths of land in Canada and Russia that aren't farmable because their growing seasons are either non-existent or too short. It would be prime farming land if the growing seasons were more favorable.
You are surprised because you never investigated the subject in the slightest. Compared to the amount of farmland south of 50 degrees north and south, the amount of land north of that in Canada and Russia is actually small. Farmland in lower latitudes with its longer growing seasons (even year-round) is also much more productive per hectare. Changes that hurt lower latitude production due to rainfall and excessive heat cannot possibly be compensated for by gains in the smaller lands of the far north were agriculture goes from being impractical to... marginal, or marginal to... fair.
And great swaths of Russia that have too short a growing season are also technically deserts due their low precipitation, looking "lush" only because of a near mono-culture of xerophilic conifers that dominate low moisture cold niches. Warming will bring forth overt desertification or conversion to dry scrub land in much of Siberia not lush farming.
Re:Whooping 1.8 billion? (Score:4, Insightful)
Compared to the amount of farmland south of 50 degrees north and south, the amount of land north of that in Canada and Russia is actually small.
A big reason for this misunderstanding is the Mercator projection [wikipedia.org] that exaggerates the apparent size of northern areas.
Many people are also unfamiliar with the geology of the Canadian Shield [wikipedia.org] and Siberian Traps [wikipedia.org] that make large swathes of Canada and Russia unsuitable for agriculture.
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It would be prime farming land if the growing seasons were more favorable.
a) temperature changes do not change _seasons_
b) land that is permafrost right now will be swamps when they melt: not farmland
You might find some edge cases where you can farm, good luck searching them.
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Re:Whooping 1.8 billion? (Score:4, Insightful)
The following is meant as an honest question, not an insult: have you considered that maybe you're the one not thinking clearly? You think one thing, many other people think differently. Nearly all the people who study the subject professionally are on the side disagreeing with you. You can assume all those people who spend their lives studying it are somehow confused and "don't think clearly," but is that really the most likely possibility? Are you willing to consider the possibility you might be wrong?
Re:Whooping 1.8 billion? (Score:4, Informative)
I've thought about it quite a bit. All the arguments for climate change panic makes the assumption that the pre-industrial climate cannot be improved upon
They don't. They make the assumption that current infrastructure is arranged for current conditions, which is simply a fact.
When I see the headlines go from "Global Cooling" 50 years ago, to "Global Warming" 30 or so years ago, to "Climate Change" ten years ago
Ah, those old canards. Global cooling was a headline but not backed by science. Climate change was the original term prevalent in the 1950s, global warming one used alongside it, starting in the 1960s and to this day.
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There's no such thing as a "best climate". 70 million years ago, the earth was a lot hotter than today. It was a terrible climate for humans, but a great climate for dinosaurs. Everything alive at the time was adapted to that climate. Likewise, every plant and animal on earth today, humans included, is adapted to the pre-industrial climate we're quickly leaving behind. Given enough time, they can adapt to the new climate, but that takes thousands of years. We're changing it much faster than they can a
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Show me the proof that the climate of 400 years ago is the best possible climate for civilization.
The only demonstration required is whether the one 100 years in the future is optimal, not that of the past.
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You really should read up what happens when you increase CO2 to plants, the comparison to sugar is pretty close, plants put on weight without any increase in nutrition and actually get more unhealthy.
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You really should read up what happens when you increase CO2 to plants, the comparison to sugar is pretty close, plants put on weight without any increase in nutrition and actually get more unhealthy.
When you have people starving for calories the lack of some vitamins and minerals in their vegetables is hardly a concern. Besides, we know how to supplement these vitamins and minerals artificially. If we can improve the production of wheat then we can send that off to make vitamin fortified bread. There's been claims that fortified Wonder bread was a major contributor to the increase in the world's IQ after World War Two. Fortified bread was a thing before World War Two but didn't get to be so cheap a
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Why would anyone want to proof to you a random knee yerk question?
I have no idea bout the climate 400 years ago: so why do you ask about it?
Did you typo and meant 40 years ago?
Two questions when I hear about fusion (Score:5, Interesting)
Thanks to Sabine Hossenfelder [youtube.com], I now have two questions when I hear about fusion projects:
1) What's the Q_plasma
2) What's the Q_total
Thanks to Elizabeth Holmes and her stellar board of directors at Theranos [businessinsider.com], I have learned that very insightful and smart people can be totally fooled. So while a list of luminary funders is a positive point, the promised reward of fusion is so huge that many can will themselves to believe when perhaps they shouldn't.
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Thanks to Elizabeth Holmes and her stellar board of directors at Theranos [businessinsider.com], I have learned that very insightful and smart people can be totally fooled.
I do not think that is the case. I rather think people can successfully appear to be insightful and smart, when they are really not. Gates is a prime example of that. All he can do is sell crap as if it was a good product. You know, basically a scaled-up used-car salesman.
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Q plasma 1.
THAT bad?
Well, that's someone's pension plan down the drain.
The round was led by Tiger Global Management with participation by new investors, including (in alphabetical order) Bill Gates; Coatue; DFJ Growth; Emerson Collective; Footprint Coalition; Google; JIMCO Technology Fund, part of JIMCO, the Jameel Familyâ(TM)s global investment arm; John Doerr; JS Capital; Marc Benioff's TIME Ventures; Senator Investment Group; a major university endowment; and a pension plan; as well as current investors, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures; The Engine; Eni; Equinor Ventures; Fine Structure Ventures; Future Ventures; Hostplus; Khosla Ventures; Lowercarbon; Moore Strategic Ventures; Safar Partners; Schooner Capital; Soros Fund Management LLC; Starlight Ventures; Temasek; and others committed to the commercialization of fusion energy to mitigate climate change.
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Not for the people whose pensions are being gambled with.
Nor for stopping or reversing the climate change.
Nor for anyone expecting a milliwatt of usable power to come out of it.
Also, they are nowhere near breaking even. Even by their own numbers. [slashdot.org]
And considering how much energy they are spending on obfuscation of scientific terms, [youtu.be] I doubt that those numbers are anywhere NEAR realistic.
But, you know... other people's money... jerking off a horse for a bit longer... [umich.edu] destroying faith in science and killing off
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ITER is planned to reach 10.
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Converting heat to electricity is a solved problem.
With what efficiency? [wikipedia.org] Apply that to that "10".
Also, might wanna check the ACTUAL input and not the BS "50 MW absorbed" they are peddling.
I.e. Even Q-plasma is not even close to 1, not 10, let alone Q-total.
ITER's thermonuclear fusion reactor will use over 300MW of electrical power to cause the plasma to absorb 50 MW of thermal power, creating 500 MW of heat from fusion for periods of 400 to 600 seconds.[10] ... Beyond just heating the plasma, the total electricity consumed by the reactor and facilities will range from 110 MW up to 620 MW peak for 30-second periods during plasma operation.[13]
They are just burning money and energy.
Even according to those numbers, ignoring total energy needed for operation AND accepting theoretically perfect levels of heat-to-electricity conversion (where those pesky laws of thermodynamics raise their ugly head) - actual break even point would be a generation o
So we're down to "a" decade (Score:5, Funny)
That's real progress!
What new era? (Score:2)
I will believe ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Despite all the frequent hype fusion energy has been "15-20 years away" for the last 60+ year.
We'll probably have a break through in LENR [ieee.org] energy long before conventional fusion even gets close.
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No. It never has been only 15-20 years away. No real expert ever claimed that. That was politicians and journalists. Actual stance by experts at this time and before is "we do not know".
Re:I will believe ... (Score:5, Funny)
You're probably reading the wrong site. This one is (occasionally) abut scientific and engineering news. You seem to want more consumer products. Walmart.com maybe?
One of the few fusion startups that isn't crazy (Score:2)
I've criticized a number of "voodoo fusion" startups. (A term coined by D. Jassby, see https://vixra.org/pdf/1812.038... [vixra.org] ) but this actually has potential. It will all come down to cost of course, but the reduced scaling relative to ITER is promising.
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A decade? No chance. (Score:2)
Lets say 30 to 80 years and we get somewhere.
Well cool. (Score:2)
Practical fusion has been forty years away since the 1950s. I guess we should consider it a significant improvement that it's now only ten years away.
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Well then (Score:3)
Phil Warburg, a senior fellow at Boston University's Institute for Sustainable Energy, disagrees. "Fusion has been an elusive fantasy for a half-century or more," he tells the Boston Globe. "Along with the technical hurdles, the environmental downsides have not been seriously examined, and the economics are anything but proven... The current wave of excitement about fusion comes at a time when we've barely begun to tap the transformative potential of solar, wind, storage, and energy efficiency — all known to be technically viable, economically competitive, and scalable today. The environmental advocacy community needs to focus on vastly expanding those clean-energy applications, leaving fusion to the scientists until they've got something much more credible to show for their efforts."
Translation:
"You have offended the gods! Heretic!"
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Except if you actually look at each one of his claims, he's right on every single point. Deuterium-tritium fusion reactions consume massive amounts of electricity and generate energy as neutrons which are only convertible to back to electricity in the crude and highly inefficient ways. Even if you could generate more electricity than you consume, you need to generate a *large* surplus for a project to be useful, and that likely means a huge scale plant which will be expensive to build and operate.
I had to smile (Score:2)
When I read that fusion is only a decade away. We’ve been hearing similar statements for many decades - ever since I was a kid. So wake me when the commercial power plant is about to launch.
Fuck off alread got one (Score:2)
It's called the fucking sun you fucking idiots and power is transmitted by electromagnetic radiation.
They might make a power station which can even power the whole world but how do they transmit the power to customers ?
The other problem (Score:2)
The reactors that have been built so far have been incredibly expensive, and require a lot of maintenance. After they establish that they can produce net energy, they still have to prove that they can offer a good value compared to wind and solar.
Fusion Always Works With Next Reactor (Score:2)
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Jet, no, ITTR, Guess not. Wait, this one will work. Or the money could be spent on something real, like solar cells, a tidal pool, a wind farm.
Or nuclear fission.
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Plutonium for everyone (Score:2)
They might become useful plutonium breeders for third world countries, but they will be far too expensive for everything else.
Quantum leaps doesn't means what you think... (Score:2)
Quantum Leap is the smallest possible Leap.
"These advancements aren't incremental; they are quantum leap improvements..."
Amazing how people that works on quantum physics stills misuse this phrase.
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How would you know whether or not it's economically competitive, until you have done the math, built the equipment, ran the experiment(s), compared results with previous expectations, and re-calibrate against current knowledge / cost / technology options? Both technology and market prices are changing over time, you know.
"price is sky-high because it's complex" says nothing. Put some numbers on it, attack part(s) of the problem, use results to improve solutions, repeat until (economically) feas
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Energy conversion (Score:2)
In many parts of the world, even ones with low-cost coal in places where you can build a power plant next to the mine, new-build coal can't compete with renewable energy. Heck, existing coal plants are closing because they can't compete with renewables. A fusion power plant is a coal power plant with a very complex and expensive heat source replacing the coal burner.
As such, it's extremely difficult to see how fusion could possibly b
Re: Economically a no-go (Score:5, Insightful)
Solar with storage is now nearly competitive with the cost of building a new coal plant, even ignoring the cost of fuel. And it's getting cheaper every year.
No, not even close. Storage is insanely expensive and doesn't scale. And solar isn't cheap for the power provided. It is cheap watt for watt when measured by capacity which is what is always shown in the media and on greenwashing sites. When measured per watt delivered to the user, its much more expensive than nuclear or hydrocarbon sources. Also, quite a bit of natural gas has to be burned to handle the variability of solar. That's why you talk about storage. But storage doesn't scale (there isn't even close to enough Li to make the batteries you would need) and so you have to use other means of storage which are insanely inefficient (think doubling or tripling the amount you have to generate). Or to put it another way, if what you said was true, energy utilities would pay you to install solar panels. Instead, they fight you tooth and nail to keep your unreliable solar power to yourself. What does that tell you? Do you seriously think they would rather run those coal plants? No, but they need to keep the lights on, and they have professional engineers who do the calculations and know that what you propose doesn't work. It has been tried. It failed every time. Learn about the Ivanpah plant in Southern California for starters.
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The thing you are missing here is that cooling a steam-turbine is not much of a problem compared to what burning fossile fuels to create the steam does.
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Heat and temperature are not the same thing.
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Burning fossil fuels also produces heat, and CO2 emissions which capture heat from the sun long after the fossil-burning heat has dissipated. Like, until centuries after. The extra heat captured over time by CO2 in the atmosphere is way, way more than the initial heat you got from burning coal / oil / gas / whatever. Kind of like you burn 1 kg. of coal, and then (over time), the heat of burning 1 kg. of coal is captured again, and again, and again, many times over, even if that 1 kg. of coal was only burne
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The "heat" leaves the planet constantly as radiated energy. The radiated energy that heats the planet is all, but an infinitesimal amount, arriving constantly from the Sun.
The Earth radiates heat. Look up black body radiation.
The atmosphere reduces the rate at which heat leaves the planet (amongst a few other things). It is a complex picture, but a number of the elements that make up the atmosphere have different effects on the rate of heat dispersion. Water vapour has the greatest effect but it is not
Re: Well, it beats sending... (Score:2)
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