Government Scientists 'Approaching What is Required for Fusion' in Breakthrough Energy Research (vice.com) 135
Scientists hoping to harness nuclear fusion -- the same energy source that powers the Sun and other stars -- have confirmed that magnetic fields can enhance the energy output of their experiments, reports a new study. The results suggest that magnets may play a key role in the development of this futuristic form of power, which could theoretically provide a virtually limitless supply of clean energy. Motherboard reports: Fusion power is generated by the immense energy released as atoms in extreme environments merge together to create new configurations. The Sun, and all the stars in the night sky, are fueled by this explosive process, which occurs in their cores at incredibly high temperatures and pressures. Scientists have spent roughly a century unraveling the mechanics of nuclear fusion in nature, and trying to artificially replicate this starry mojo in laboratories.
Now, a team at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), which is a fusion experiment based at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has reported that the magnetic fields can boost the temperature of the fusion "hot spot" in experiments by 40 percent and more than triple its energy output, which is "approaching what is required for fusion ignition" according to a study published this month in Physical Review Letters.
"The magnetic field comes in and acts kind of like an insulator," said John Moody, a senior scientist at the NIF who led the study, in a call with Motherboard. "You have what we call the hot spot. It's millions of degrees, and around it is just room temperature. All that heat wants to flow out because heat always goes from the hot to the cold and the magnetic field prevents that from happening." "When we go in and we put the magnetic field on this hotspot, and we insulate it, now that heat stays in there, and so we're able to get the hot spot to a higher temperature," he continued. "You get more [fusion] reactions as you go up in temperature, and that's why we see this improvement in the reactivity."
The hot spots in the NIF's fusion experiments are created by shooting nearly 200 lasers at a tiny pellet of fuel made of heavier isotopes (or versions) of hydrogen, such as deuterium and tritium. These laser blasts generate X-rays that make the small capsule implode, producing the kinds of extreme pressures and temperatures that are necessary for the isotopes to fuse together and release their enormous stores of energy. NIF has already brought their experiments to the brink of ignition, which is the point at which fusion reactions become self-sustaining in plasmas. The energy yields created by these experiments are completely outweighed by the energy that it takes to make these self-sustaining reactions in the plasmas in the first place. Still, achieving ignition is an important step toward creating a possible "breakeven" system that produces more energy output than input. Moody and his colleagues developed their magnetized experiment at NIF by wrapping a coil around a version of the pellet made with specialized metals.
"The magnetic field comes in and acts kind of like an insulator," said John Moody, a senior scientist at the NIF who led the study, in a call with Motherboard. "You have what we call the hot spot. It's millions of degrees, and around it is just room temperature. All that heat wants to flow out because heat always goes from the hot to the cold and the magnetic field prevents that from happening." "When we go in and we put the magnetic field on this hotspot, and we insulate it, now that heat stays in there, and so we're able to get the hot spot to a higher temperature," he continued. "You get more [fusion] reactions as you go up in temperature, and that's why we see this improvement in the reactivity."
The hot spots in the NIF's fusion experiments are created by shooting nearly 200 lasers at a tiny pellet of fuel made of heavier isotopes (or versions) of hydrogen, such as deuterium and tritium. These laser blasts generate X-rays that make the small capsule implode, producing the kinds of extreme pressures and temperatures that are necessary for the isotopes to fuse together and release their enormous stores of energy. NIF has already brought their experiments to the brink of ignition, which is the point at which fusion reactions become self-sustaining in plasmas. The energy yields created by these experiments are completely outweighed by the energy that it takes to make these self-sustaining reactions in the plasmas in the first place. Still, achieving ignition is an important step toward creating a possible "breakeven" system that produces more energy output than input. Moody and his colleagues developed their magnetized experiment at NIF by wrapping a coil around a version of the pellet made with specialized metals.
Late to the party? (Score:2)
Commonwealth Fusion, Lockheed Martin, General Fusion, and others seem to already be on this track. It's nice to see some scientists presumably working in the public interest confirming the validity of their efforts.
Re:Late to the party? (Score:5, Informative)
Um, no.
NIF uses an entirely different method to heat and compress the fuel: rather than magnetic confinement, it is inertial confinement. The magnetic field helps to keep the heat in the reaction volume, not to compress the plasma, as all those you cited do.
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I'll concede that point. I was speaking of fusion in general, though. There have been many who have been quick to dismiss the viability of fusion as a power source, despite the many well-funded efforts claiming to have breakthroughs ready for commercialization by 2030 or so.
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I'll concede that point. I was speaking of fusion in general, though. There have been many who have been quick to dismiss the viability of fusion as a power source, despite the many well-funded efforts claiming to have breakthroughs ready for commercialization by 2030 or so.
Claims are not absolutes. I still see no mention of parasitic power mitigation.
I suppose if this gives people some sort of hope for the promise of clean, virtually unlimited power, well, that's a good thing. For myself, the questions I have probably should be suppressed - I must be wrong.
Re:Late to the party? (Score:5, Informative)
> Commonwealth Fusion
Is real. It is, after all, simply a tokamak that has been scaled down due to the use of more modern magnet systems than those in ITER. The physics of the plasma itself is well understood and constantly supported by ample experimental evidence from machines like JET and JT-60.
> Lockheed Martin
Is not real. It was always baloney and everyone in the field was saying that. The only information they released was a YouTube video with actors playing scientists.
They shut down the project before COVID and everyone is gone.
> General Fusion
They say they are simply updating an old concept known as LINUS, which is now workable because modern electronics and computers can solve the killer problem they had in the 1970s. I talked to some of the original LINUS team members and they said the "killer problem" was solved and they stopped working on it because better approaches came alone (specifically, FRCs).
GF has been around for almost 20 years now, and during that time they haven't generated a single neutron using their proposed concept. In spite of this, they are proceeding to build a large-scale machine with, literally, no experimental evidence whatsoever to back up their claims it will work.
> and others
Many other companies with designs that make no sense whatsoever, contradict things the field has known for decades, and yet tell us "fusion any day now". Meanwhile, people building fusors in their garages for fun are producing fusion at 1000x the rate any of these machines has managed.
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Is there any method of self-sustained reaction that appears feasible, as opposed to pulsed power?
(I realize pulsed power might 'self-sustained' in the sense of beating the break-even point, just as we use internal combustion engines that consume some energy to generate electricity to fire a spark plug instead of just letting a fire burn continuously to boil steam...)
Re: Late to the party? (Score:2)
Yeah, the Sun.
Magnetic confinement costs energy. Gravitational confinement, or critical mass for fusion if you will, costs nothing. It does require, however, incredible mass.
There may be some overlap in the middle, but we have not found a way to work it out.
Maybe instead of a torus or torus like arrangement can make a magnetic knot. That would tie things up nicely, eh?
Re: Late to the party? (Score:2)
with actors playing scientists You better pick olâ(TM) Doc Brown (the venerable Christopher Lloyd who packed Mr Fusion instead of his battle-tested flux capacitor. The others might pick Jeff Goldblum lately of Jurassic Park lore. Now thatâ(TM)s an actor.
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Got any extra info on Lockheed Martin's fusion efforts? Last I heard were stories like this one:
https://www.thedrive.com/the-w... [thedrive.com]
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He thinks Back to the Future is a documentary about a doctor who invented a fusion device to power cars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] "Fusors have also become very popular for hobbyists and amateurs. A growing number of amateurs have performed nuclear fusion using simple fusor machines"
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He thinks Back to the Future is a documentary about a doctor who invented a fusion device to power cars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] "Fusors have also become very popular for hobbyists and amateurs. A growing number of amateurs have performed nuclear fusion using simple fusor machines"
They should be congratulated for reinventing the vacuum tube.
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https://makezine.com/projects/... [makezine.com]
There you go. Step by step instructions.
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Meanwhile, people building fusors in their garages for fun are producing fusion at 1000x the rate any of these machines has managed.
Can you elaborate?
He is not talking about the subjects of his earlier paragraphs, just about the "Many other companies with designs that make no sense whatsoever...". In other words the kooks and the scammers who aren't capable of even building a fusor themselves, but want to claim to the world that they've solved fusion.
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Yeah, you might want to look up when NIF was started and when those others were founded or started getting interested in fusion.
Also, completely different methods.
Can I return my thin film solar cells? (Score:3)
We were so close with the general adoption of thin film solar cells on a roll for $1 per meter.
Except real products never saw the light of day.
Re:Can I return my thin film solar cells? (Score:5, Interesting)
We were so close with the general adoption of thin film solar cells on a roll for $1 per meter.
No, we were not. We can't have them because the plastic outer layer develops microcracks, then moisture gets in and spoils the metal layers. Flexible solar is always junk.
Whee facts are overrated (Score:2)
I see some MAGAts I offended in another thread have come here to abuse moderation. They cry and cry about the cancel culture they invented and continue to perpetrate.
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I see some MAGAts I offended in another thread have come here to abuse moderation. They cry and cry about the cancel culture they invented and continue to perpetrate.
As they say about the MAGAs - Every accusation is a confession.
As Ol Olsoc notes - sending MAGAs into a white hot rage is a job well done.
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you seem to have a real problem with assuming anyone who disagrees with you is a "MAGAt"...
I know who I pissed off, and when. I'm not new.
no one even moderated your post, guy.
You don't seem to know how moderation and comments work on this board, buddy.
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Flexible solar is always junk.
Except for certain applications where moisture doesn't exist, such as satellites and spacecraft. Therefore "always" is axiomatically incorrect.
Plenty of Time Yet (Score:2)
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You bring up a point that has always caused me to scratch my head. Just what system would be used to extract the energy? At those temps, I can't believe a water-based system could remove the energy. What other options are there?
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Gotcha. Thanks.
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Water is actually the easy answer, though you can use other coolants (salts, metals) if the reactor can handle the temperatures.
The coolant never comes anywhere close to the plasma - it would extinguish it instantly if it did. Instead the high-energy/temperature fusion products escape magnetic confinement and collide with the radiation shielding in the walls - walls that are then kept cool with water or other coolant that is used to drive a heat engine.
The temperature (=speed) of the fusion products doesn'
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Pretty much the same thing you use on a fission reactor, which is not that different from what the Victorians used on their steam engines.
You don't want to take heat from the plasma, you want it to stay has hot as possible. You have to cool the reactor walls because heat will leak, but the main source of energy is cooling the neutrons that come flying out. Just like it is in a fission reactor.
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There doesn't seem to be any mention of breakeven except in the editorializing - the goal they're on the brink of achieving is ignition - a.k.a. a sustained fusion reaction. Breakeven comes at some point beyond that, but is largely a bookkeeping goal (though admittedly still very important for real-world energy production). Ignition is where the physics gets complicated - I only recall one group achieving it so far, and they found that the plasma behavior rapidly departed from the theoretical predictions,
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Breakeven comes at some point beyond that, but is largely a bookkeeping goal
Our team of top tier accountants are on the job, and will have that thing producing endless energy! 8^)
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There is still plenty of time for solar. Breakeven in this context is simply having the plasma generate the same amount of energy that went into creating it - it does not include extracting that energy.
This is on fleek. It not only has to have the power extracted - meaning that what they are now calling break-even or Qout, it has to have hella lot more power out.
This is truEven if NIF, ITER etc achieve breakeven they will need to go a lot further because no extraction system will be 100% efficient and nobody will build a power plant that can only power itself. They will also need to test and develop the extraction systems. So don't worry - we are still decades away from the first working fusion reactor.
We must acknowledge that the amount of power needed to power just itself , or Qtotal, is huge. Neutron impingement will create some intensely radioactive materials (clean and safe, amirite?) and remember - these nearly unlimited power sources will be running 24/7/365 without failure.
Anyhow, I don't want to pee in people's wheaties. Nuclear Fusi
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Even if the "wormhole" were transmitting mass-energy rather than information, harnessing fusion energy from the sun would still be largely useless - your body generates considerably more heat per cubic meter than the core of the sun.
One of the challenges of fusion energy generation is that we're attempting to create a sustainable reaction at energy densities far in excess of anything that occurs naturally, outside of supernova at least. For all the massive temperature and pressure of the sun's core, it doe
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I don't believe heat collection from the sun would be limited to the heat energy generated by the fusion reaction in the volume of the point of collection. Extracting energy at that point would create a differential and heat from the rest of the reaction would transfer to equalize that differential.
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Even if the "wormhole" were transmitting mass-energy rather than information, harnessing fusion energy from the sun would still be largely useless - your body generates considerably more heat per cubic meter than the core of the sun.
Whoosh.
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Oh and batteries with insane capacities are coming any day now along with insane amounts of disk space, memory, network speed, etc.
Those are here.
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Exactly. 20 sounds reasonable. As people have been saying for, what, the last 40 years? So it must be true with that much agreement.
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along with insane amounts of disk space, memory, network speed, etc. Just you wait.
You mean like how we went from megabyte-scale disks and memory to terabyte-scale disks and memory in 10 years?
Or how we went from megabit-scale networking being cheap and accessible to everyone to 10gbit-scale networking being cheap and accessible to everyone in the same amount of time?
Don't you think that you probably shouldn't have included what is obviously stupid and wrong in your post?
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"You mean like how we went from megabyte-scale disks and memory to terabyte-scale disks and memory in 10 years?"
If you mean at consumer level we had gigabyte scale disks in the 90's and we've been stuck at low TB scale for 10yrs. We still don't have TB scale memory.
https://www.techexplorist.com/highest-level-storage-technology-developed-far/34761/ - 20 years away, FRAM a promised memory tech over decades. One of many.
"Or how we went from megabit-scale networking being cheap and accessible to everyone to 10g
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Or how we went from megabit-scale networking being cheap and accessible to everyone to 10gbit-scale networking being cheap and accessible to everyone in the same amount of time?
I think you are mixing up: inside of the USA with outside of the USA.
My unlimited Gbytes per second and per month, Fibre in Thailand costs me 630TBH per month, up to you to look up what that is in USD. Germany is more expensive, though, and fibre is not every where available.
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> We were so close with the general adoption of thin film solar cells on a roll for $1 per meter.
Assume, for instance, a 15% efficient module (which is good for thin-film in production) and a 1 m square. That would produce about 150 W. At current prices using poly-Si at utility scale buys, ~10MW, you would pay 20 cents a watt, so maybe $30 per meter.
Thin film is not 1/30 the cost of conventional panels. I'm not sure who sold you on this claim, but it's completely bogus.
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So: Mag fields with Inertial Confinement fusion? (Score:3)
Re:So: Mag fields with Inertial Confinement fusion (Score:5, Interesting)
>I am not an expert, but the authors of the summary seem not to be aware of methods of fusion other than Inertial Confinement, that already rely on magnetic fields ?
That's why Inertial Confinement fusion is bomb research hidden behind a very, very thin pretense of civilian application. It's a way to get around the nuclear weapon testing bans, it's presented as a promising alternative to magnetic or electrostatic confinement, it gets plenty of money and cool buildings with lasers, despite being the least likely to ever be viable for actual energy production (at least the kind you turn into electricity. If you are more interested in the kind which flattens cities, yeah, it's spot on).
Repeat after me: inertial confinement fusion research is nuclear weapon research. Always has been.
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What's the point? Who thinks what the world needs is a bigger nuclear weapon? Why not focus on better MIRV or something like that?
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The point of the research is to make the bombs smaller, not bigger.
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Makes sense, thanks.
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Hey... it sounds cool, anyway. It's like they're literally trying to invent the "warp core containment field" that the Star Trek engineers were always babbling about on that series.
Re:So: Mag fields with Inertial Confinement fusion (Score:4, Interesting)
Moreover, this approach has been actively experimented on at least since the 1970s. It's known as magneto-inertial fusion, or MIF (or MagLIF), and comes in a wide variety of forms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-inertial_fusion
MIF has never worked. At one end of the spectrum, you have devices that attempt to use super-powerful can crusher magnets to compress a warm plasma (typically pre-heated with a laser) to moderate densities. Rayleigh-Taylor murders them - which is what you expect if you have a heavy metal pressing on a light gas (seriously, how did anyone think that would work?). The experiment described here is at the other end of the spectrum, using a small magnetic field to help confine the plasma while its being crushed to extremely high density by the laser.
All of these approaches are useless for power generation. The cost of the pusher is more than that value of the energy they produce. This has been known since the start of ICF research and even has it's own name, "the kopeck problem". In 50 years of effort, the problem has only grown worse. The targets in NIF cost millions of dollars yet, assuming it worked as initially suspected, would produce about 5 cents worth of electricity. Even in mass production, and NOT including the magnet described in this article, it is predicted the lowest possible cost for the targets would be around 50 cents. So you are literally better off burning money.
Full self drivng or fusion power first? (Score:2)
I don't know anything about fusion (Score:2, Insightful)
And if it does expand uncontrollably, it will be a quick and painless death for the rest of us, yes?
It would really suck if the only intelligent life in the Universe ends up destroying itself while trying to save on energy costs.
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I don't know anything about fusion. I just would like to ask when these guys do succeed, what are the chances that this fusion is controlled and would not expand rapidly to everything else on the planet? And if it does expand uncontrollably, it will be a quick and painless death for the rest of us, yes? It would really suck if the only intelligent life in the Universe ends up destroying itself while trying to save on energy costs.
Ummmm... 100%? We've already ran (uncontrolled) fusion straight in the atmosphere, by means of thermonuclear bomb testing.
Why fusion power plants aren't a planetary threat (Score:5, Informative)
Hello,
To expand on the other answer given in this thread:
All the types of fusion plants that are being researched require very special and difficult conditions to produce net energy.
The magnetic confinement fusion plants need very hot plasmas (millions to hundreds of millions of degrees), and if they escaped into the atmosphere not only would there be no deuterium and tritium for them to continue to burn as fuel, they'd instantly cool off and shut down--on a time scale of nanoseconds to microseconds.
The inertial confinement fusion systems don't even burn continuously. You have to supply a huge amount of input energy to get a small amount of fuel to burn, and when that fuel is burnt, energy production stops. So they naturally shut themselves down without continuous input of energy and fuel. Think of a gasoline engine with spark plugs and fuel injection. Take away either the fuel injection or the spark plugs, and the car doesn't go.
So as the other poster said, there is absolutely *no* chance of a fusion plant setting off a chain reaction that burns up the planet, and he's correct that nuclear fusion bomb testing that was done in the atmosphere also demonstrates this as a non-risk.
--PeterM
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followed by the noise of very expensive gases billowing into the atmosphere
It is the opposite around. The atmosphere will billow inot the reaction chamber, as there is a vacuum.
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I don't know anything about fusion. I just would like to ask when these guys do succeed, what are the chances that this fusion is controlled and would not expand rapidly to everything else on the planet?
The principles of fusion require the focus confinement of a massive amount of energy. That's the one thing holdings us back from actually harnessing it, the ability to confine so much energy in a small volume. When energy confinement stops and it expands it disperses and the energy drops, so does the fusion reaction. This is also how it works in the sun, the massive gravity of the sun and the density at its core causes the fusion.
So at the very worst we'd end up with nothing more than a hydrogen bomb going
Cryptic Phrasing (Score:2)
The summary eventually spells out the details, but the opening paragraph sounds like some mystical pseudosc
In other news... (Score:2)
No materials whatsoever can contain fusion reaction heat.
Neutron bombardment eventually makes any containment material so brittle that it fails.
It's a materials science problem. And we're not even close to the answer here.
So, we're only 30 years away (giggle)!
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You better tell the operators of all those fission reactors we built.
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You better tell the operators of all those fission reactors we built.
Right - Fusion reactors have been operating 24/7/365 for decades now. And they use those special neutrons that do not affect anything at all - no embrittlement, and they don't leave anything radioactive. 8^/
But seriously, I do know one of the ways they want to mitigate the neutron problem is encase the entire fusion capsule in about a meter of liquid Lithium.
That should be interesting. Li isn't as ill mannered as it's brothers Sodium, and metallic Potassium, but it's like the incredible Hulk - get it
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Tell them what? Conditions inside a fission reactor are not a benign environment, but nothing compared to the fusion environment. We had that figured out long ago, less than 10 years after the first use of nuc's. In 1951 Argonne first produced electrical power from a fission reactor. The Nautilus submarine launched and the Obninsk nuclear power plant put power on the grid in 1954. But back to my point.
Remember, one of fusion power's promises is that it is clean. That's the point. Clean it is not. Protium
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The requirement for any fissionable substance is that it produce multiple neutrons per reaction. They're higher energy than fusion neutrons too. In general, you want to slow them down (thermalize them) so they're more efficient at producing more reactions.
Development of fission reactors required developing special alloys and other materials to handle the neutron flux, specifications for when they need to be replaced, and development of neutron shielding and thermalization systems. OP claimed we don't have t
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The requirement for any fissionable substance is that it produce multiple neutrons per reaction. They're higher energy than fusion neutrons too. In general, you want to slow them down (thermalize them) so they're more efficient at producing more reactions.
Development of fission reactors required developing special alloys and other materials to handle the neutron flux, specifications for when they need to be replaced, and development of neutron shielding and thermalization systems. OP claimed we don't have the materials to build a fusion reactor. This isn't true. People also love to say you can't extract energy from very hot things. This is ridiculous on all fronts.
As for "cleanliness," neuronic fusion does activate structural materials, the same way fission does, but this is low level waste. Unless you're an environmentalist who wants to make the amount of waste sound really impressive, it's the high level stuff that's a problem, and fusion doesn't produce that.
It's odd, fusion is hard enough, there really isn't a reason to make up problems, but people love to do it.
Of course we have the materials - I came in late enough on the conversation I hadn't even read that.
If you want to know my main issue is, aside from the blue sky claims? The lies.
Here is an article from a educational institution that should surely know better https://sites.aub.edu.lb/outlo... [aub.edu.lb] They say it is clean and unlimited. No mincing words. Specifically clean and unlimited.
As opposed to this https://www.osti.gov/biblio/64... [osti.gov] It is old, but no where does it mention clean and unlimited. It does
It can work, but can it be economical? (Score:2)
For fusion to be economical, it not only has to generate more energy than you put in, you have to be able to have a lower price per kWh produced than alternative sources of energy--that serve the same purpose (i.e., base load, peaking, whatever).
Most fusion options these days, in particular ITER, need a steam-conversion step to convert heat into electricity. Coal and conventional nuclear also need a steam-conversion step to generate electricity from heat.
The argument I read is that any form of energy that
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"For fusion to be economical, it not only has to generate more energy than you put in, you have to be able to have a lower price per kWh produced than alternative sources of energy--that serve the same purpose (i.e., base load, peaking, whatever)."
In comparing it with burning fossil fuels, fusion just has to be cheaper than (fossil fuel + the cost of capturing and sequestering the CO2)
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Rossdee,
I'm OK with including the cost of the damage caused by emitting CO2 and holding that as part of the cost of fossil fuel energy for doing this comparison--provided the hidden costs of fusion power are also included in the cost of fusion....
We should have been doing that anyway as soon as it became clear that CO2 was causing damage, but our political processes apparently cannot be made to figure entire lifecycle costs correctly, either for fossil fuels, coal mining, solar cell manufactu
Where's the research to stop NIMBYism? (Score:2)
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Nuclear fission has problems like spent fuel management and reaction containment (China syndrome, Chernobyl etc), fusion does not. You are right that it has the N-word, but when people see the lack of disadvantages they might look past that.
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Nuclear fission has problems like spent fuel management and reaction containment (China syndrome, Chernobyl etc), fusion does not. You are right that it has the N-word, but when people see the lack of disadvantages they might look past that.
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You are right that it has the N-word, but when people see the lack of disadvantages they might look past that.
You're assuming people buy into rational arguments particularly when they go against their pre-conceived notions, no matter however misguided. If that were the case, we'd also have a rational political discourse in every country and the histrionic nonsense we see today. But we don't.
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You know what else has the dreaded word nuclear attached to it? Everything. You are a nuclear being, built from atomic matter, with a cluster of nuclear particles at the heart of every one of them. And so is everything else we've ever directly detected in the universe. (Dark matter is presumably something else, but so far we've failed to make any direct detection to confirm it exists at all)
> It's cleaner than fission
That... depends on how you count it.
Fusion doesn't generate any long-lived radioacti
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Yeppers. Burnin g coal releases far more radioactives than fission in normal operation. Hell, over its lifetime, a GW coal plant will release more radioactives than a fission plant even if you assume that something like Chernobyl is "normal" for fission plants.
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Fusion isn't exactly radiation free like everyone claims.
Yes, this is a point that fusion advocates tend to gloss over.
The fusion reaction currently being worked on for future power plants is DT, which produces neutrons in abundance. Exposure to the neutrons will then turn pretty much anything else radioactive.
No, fusion is not radiation free.
Awesome! We're now only 30-40 yr away from Fusion (Score:2, Redundant)
Awesome news... I guess we're now only 30-40 years away from Fusion to become viable :p
Same projected time line as flying cars. (Score:4, Funny)
You know, this is how it'll happen. (Score:2)
It'll go from "15 years away" to practically here overnight. We're living at the confluence of critical mass. All the needed enterprises are experiencing seismic advances. I'm not glued to every incremental advance... I'm waiting for the disruption. And it will be here soon - I really believe that.
A decade here, a decade there... (Score:3)
So...fusion, which has been eternally just 40 years away since the 1970s, is now only 30 years away?
"Approaching" is a loaded term here (Score:2)
Magnets and Lasers and Stuff (Score:2)
Hell, they should have just asked my 6 year old son.
--Hey kiddo, how can we get fusion power to work?
++ I dunno, lasers and magnets?
Unlimited Cheap Energy (Score:2)
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You think that earth is warming now? Just wait...
Arthur Clark noted in his Space Oddysey books that with unlimited energy, we will indeed have a heat crisis. He used Zero Point Energy as the source, but the same problem happens with "Virtually Unlimited Fusion Power"
No need for efficient devices with unlimited power availability, so there will be much waste heat.
They aren't approaching anything (Score:2)
Magnets; how do they work? (Score:2)
neodumbium
Specialized metals? (Score:2)
I assume they will be utterly destroyed by the resulting fusion process. Are these metals going to available in the needed quantities? Or are we going to have to, say, perfect asteroid mining just to be able to manufacture the reactor fuel?
Approaching (Score:2)
Zeno's paradox. Always 20 years, real soon.
Re:stop the star meme (Score:5, Informative)
Thing is though it's not "nothing to do with". It's still fusion, and it's still fusion involving deuterium. It's not like deuterium fusion is absent in the sun. It's not identical, and as far as fusion systems go it's quite different. But compared to the world of everything else, it's pretty similar.
What would you have reporters say to anyone who's not a physicist? This is absolutely nothing like anything else ever. That's less accurate than the analogy.
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> stars use different fuels and different processes under radically different conditions
That's literally exactly what the post you're replying to very clearly states.
> educate yourself
Indeed.
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The sun uses the proton-proton chain reaction which uses pure hydrogen as raw fuel, yes. However, that pure hydrogen actually gets formed into Deuterium in the first stage of the chain reaction. So deuterium fusion is actually part of it. The GP is not actually wrong.
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What the GP said is " It's not like deuterium fusion is absent in the sun. It's not identical, and as far as fusion systems go it's quite different. ." That's not wrong. The statement that "man-made fusion experiments and thermonuclear weapons have nothing to do with the processes or nuclear fuels that stars use." is closer to wrong. They're not exactly the same, but they hardly have nothing to do with each other. Sorry, but on a pedantic nitpicking scale, your statement seems to be less correct than servi
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man-made fusion experiments and thermonuclear weapons have nothing to do with the processes or nuclear fuels that stars use
Huh? Care to clarify? Yes, fusion in a small space (as opposed on the scale of a star) is a different beast. A star emits energy equivalent to a compost pile (on a per-volume basis); fusion of atoms is comparatively rare. We need a much higher energy density for local energy production.
However, the fundamental concept and fuel are the same: Take two hydrogen atoms and smash them together hard enough to fuse the nuclei, thus creating one helium atom. What different is how (and how often) you get the atoms t
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Lets ask the simple quest: what has our star been burning for 5 billion years, and what will it continue to burn for the next 5 billion years?
The sun's fuel source is from a Galactic Taco Bell that got out of hand.
Fusion is the Process (Score:4, Insightful)
man-made fusion experiments and thermonuclear weapons have nothing to do with the processes or nuclear fuels that stars use
What the heck are you talking about? They are the same fundamental process of fusing nuclei together to release energy. The sun may get most of its energy from hydrogen fusion and some from the CNO cycle as opposed to deuterium or tritium fusion but it's still fundamentally the same nuclear fusion process just with different initial nuclei.
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The sun gets very little energy from the actual fusion of H1 + H1. That's actually the rate limiting step. So when someone says "the sun generates less energy than a compost pile, by volume" the reason for that is that the sun has to make its own deuterium, and that happens really slowly. The average solar hydrogen can expect to wait billions of years to fuse.
The next step is deuterium-hydrogen fusion. That happens really fast (average ~ 1 s per deuterium) and generates about four times as much energy. Most
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You missed one:
1958: (ZETA in UK fails) this is probably never going to work. Give us more money to prove that.
1968/9: (T-3 results are published) you see, we told you this was going to work! just a few more years...
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It's not perpetual motion you dummy. It uses fuel. Isotopes of hydrogen specifically.
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They already figured out perpetual motion with petrol engines. You put in a little spark and loads of energy comes out.
And wait until you learn about heat pumps! Put in 1kW of electricity, get 8kW of heat out of the hot radiator!!
All of physics is wrong! Einstein is dead! So is Newton! Or...
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We get it entitled asshole - now get busy actually FUNDING them - they still haven't received the total funding that was anticipated when those first 20-year predictions were made.
It's like you bid to build an apartment building in 20 months at a cost of $X paid in monthly installments, and then every month they dramatically cut the amount of funding so that 60 months later you've still only received a fraction of the originally agreed upon amount, but everyone's yelling at you to finish the apartment build
Re: Grant time again, eh? (Score:2)