'World's First' Grid-Scale Nuclear Fusion Power Plant Announced In the US (cnn.com) 134
Longtime Slashdot reader timeOday shares a report from CNN: If all goes to plan, Virginia will be the site of the world's first grid-scale nuclear fusion power plant, able to harness this futuristic clean power and generate electricity from it by the early 2030s, according to an announcement Tuesday by the startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems. CFS, one of the largest and most-hyped nuclear fusion companies, will make a multibillion-dollar investment into building the facility near Richmond. When operational, the plant will be able to plug into the grid and produce 400 megawatts, enough to power around 150,000 homes, said its CEO Bob Mumgaard.
"This will mark the first time fusion power will be made available in the world at grid scale," Mumgaard said. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin welcomed the announcement, calling it "an historic moment for Virginia and the world at large." The plant would represent a new stage in the quest to commercialize nuclear fusion, the process which powers the stars. But the path toward it is unlikely to be smooth, not least because the technology has not yet been proved viable.
"This will mark the first time fusion power will be made available in the world at grid scale," Mumgaard said. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin welcomed the announcement, calling it "an historic moment for Virginia and the world at large." The plant would represent a new stage in the quest to commercialize nuclear fusion, the process which powers the stars. But the path toward it is unlikely to be smooth, not least because the technology has not yet been proved viable.
Vaperware (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vaperware (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Vaperware (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.fusionindustryasso... [fusionindu...iation.org]
Re:Vaperware (Score:4, Informative)
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That said, we can't let up on wind and solar in favor of fusion until and unless it works and is economical. It's really hard to imagine any form of nuclear being more economical than wind and solar when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining in Nevada
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As you say, solar and wind are never going
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Honestly Fusion is not a solved problem yet so why they are putting money into it is clearly just to line their pockets with stupid investor's money.
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Not my claim. It was a different Slashdotter. However, I don't think we're directly disagreeing. You are saying "this is so good value it has to be fraud" and I'm saying that "this sounds surprisingly cheap to me". Related but different points which can both be true.
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True, I think we may be in 'violent agreement'
Discovering that phrase was enlightening for me and has occasionally been transformational in discussions where it applies.
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In days past on occasion at work I would come upon coworkers have a loud argument and me, not emotionally involved, would discern that they actually agreed, so I would call a time out and ask each to summarize their thoughts, then, in that calmer moment, they would agree that they'd not been in disagreement to begin with!
the concept of violent agreement has been transformational for me as well
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What a strange statement. This is the exact point raising capital - enabling investment in risky ventures that might bring a profit. This is precisely what shared ownership of corporations was originally invented to accomplish.
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Re:Vaperware (Score:4, Funny)
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> Private investment in fusion totally dwarfs government funding these days
No.
ITER is around 22 billion officially, and about 35 real.
Even if we forget all the other countries in the world, the US budget is around $750 million a year, compared to the $2 billion ever.
NIF alone cost more than the entire private fusion cash pool.
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Re: Vaperware (Score:2)
NIF alone cost more than the entire private fusion cash pool.
The NIF exists to do nuclear weapons research.
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I’ll believe it when I see it. Some people are definitely going to get rich of the taxpayer trough though.
Why should they? Plenty of elections will take place between now and when they claim this bullshit might
Bubble Investor Trap (Score:5, Interesting)
IIt's a trap.
a Bubble Investor Trap.
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You can tell without even reading the article. Is this "first ever fission power plant" coming from one of the large experienced nuclear power companies? No, well surely it's coming from one of the defense contractors that have been investing in fission for decades? No, well maybe it's a spin-off from a university that has been partnered with governments to study fission?
No, it's a startup venture. Your better off investing in meme coins from social media stars.
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Vaperware ? Are vapes hallucinogenic now?
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Vaporware, designed by vapers.
Until it's built and working I won't believe it. Isn't fusion still not a thing?
Build it. Test it. Run it. Prove it.
If true, the world really needs this.
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Indeed. The tech is not ready at all. Not even the Pysics is realy done. Somebody is running an elaborate scam here.
Plasmaware (Score:5, Funny)
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Fantastic... it's great too see that useful nuclear fusion reactors are now just a decade away -- as they have been ever since the 1970s.
Oh the joy!
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Iâ(TM)ll believe it when I see it. Some people are definitely going to get rich of the taxpayer trough though.
Considering I have never heard a single scientist claim that fusion power was better than break-even, WTF even are they building and why is spending more power than it produces a desirable outcome?
the science (Score:5, Funny)
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The science is more or less settled. It's the engineering - turning theory and math into a real, working machine - that's been the big problem.
Fusion is one of those things where there's no benefit to doing small-scale tests, since it's stupidly expensive and does not scale down well. If you're gonna do it, might as well go all out and build it full scale.
Will this reactor ever be successful? I'd wager not, but I'd be happy to be wrong. Until then I'm not going to waste much time thinking about it.
=Smidge=
Re:the science (Score:4, Interesting)
> The science is more or less settled
No it's not. In addition to the fact that no reactor has actually operated at power-production settings and may be subject to new instabilities, something that has happened 100% of the time we ramped in the past, there are also whole branches of secondary issues we have not even begun to explore.
For instance, CFS's design runs on D-T. T is not available in nature (there's about 12 kg on the entire planet) and has to be "bred" in the reactor. No actual experiments on how to do this have ever been carried out. There's *lots* of physics there.
In the particular case of CFS, the design hinges on a demountable magnet concept. This has never been tried. Lots of physics here too.
> It's the engineering
There's lots of this too.
> and does not scale down well
Yeah, this is completely the opposite of reality.
Fusion scales downward extremely well. Unlike fission, there is no analog of a critical mass. This means you can build a fusor in your den, and any number of people have done that.
The actual problem is that it does not scale **up**. The entire history of fusion follows this pattern:
1) come up with a new confinement arrangement
2) build a small machine to test it
3) small machine works, build larger machine
4) larger machine demonstrates instabilities
5) figure out the source of instabilities, build larger machine that fixes them
6) larger machine demonstrates instabilities
7) goto 5
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Besides the things that just aren't true, your objections pretty much boil down to tokamaks not being tested at a sufficiently large scale to generate net energy. That is true. The way you fix that is to build a machine at sufficiently large scale to generate net energy.
Once you've done that and worked out the bugs, why not hook it up to the grid?
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Sure. In 50...200 years.
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Talk about delulu. The Science is not settled at all. All that is settled is that there are likely no show stoppers in the Science.
Re: the science (Score:2)
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Nope. The science here is > 90% applied. Completely different in almost all aspects. Most of the relevant questions _cannot_ be solved with what the standard model gives you for very practical reasons, like us having a few 10's of orders of magnitude to little computing power to do the simulations that would need.
Incidentally, the standard model is incomplete and known to be wrong. With the extreme conditions we are talking here, this may well matter.
You really need to look up how Science works. Your sta
Still a Science Problem (Score:3)
The science is more or less settled. It's the engineering
Not really, it is still the science. While the basic physics of nuclear fusion are well understood the problem is the plasma physics. Either you have to come up with a system of magnetic and electric fields to contain a plasma while also allowing for fuel injection and energy exctraction or you need to figure out the physics to make a one-shot device work, examples of which are powerful laser systems focussed on frozen hydrogen pellets, like the US's National Ignition Facility, or more exotic things like
Re:Still a Science Problem (Score:4)
> Either you have to come up with a system of magnetic and electric fields to contain a plasma while also allowing for fuel injection and energy exctraction or you need to figure out the physics to make a one-shot device work
These are engineering problems.
The science is in what to do; The science says you need a plasma with this much energy of such and such composition and density and you need to do this and that to get the desired result. Science gives us the needed insights into the fundamental physical principles.
HOW to accomplish that is engineering. Science says you need a plasma, and it's an engineering task to build a device to hold that plasma. Science says you need to add these ingredients in these amounts, and it's an engineering task to figure out how to do that reliably. Science says the energy comes out of the reaction as light and heat and radiation, and it's an engineering task to figure out how to capture and convert that into a useful form. Physicists don't design and build machines, engineers do. Sometimes a physicist may wear an engineer's hat out of necessity, but their actual job is only defining the requirements the machine needs to meet, not building it.
> it is still very much a science problem figuring out how the plasma is likely to respond to particular conditions and trying to make those conditions match what is needed to extract useful fusion power
That's not science, that's engineering. It's problem solving. The problem is how do you keep a plasma - a gaseous substance at millions of degrees - safely contained for a prolonged period while also feeding material into it and also extracting material and energy from it.
Let me try explaining it this way;
The scientific method is, broadly: Question > Hypothesis > Experiment > Observation. Repeat until your hypothesis is refined to the point that it can reliably predict the outcome of an experiment given some starting conditions. You can then typically use this knowledge to work backwards, starting with a desired outcome and figuring out what conditions you need to get that outcome.
The engineering method is, equally broadly: Define the problem and constraints > Develop and build a solution > Evaluate the solution. Repeat until your solution meets all the criteria of the original problem. There is no working backwards though; you cannot start with a desired solution and figure out what kind of problem you need to make it viable because that makes no fucking sense... and that's the Marketing Department's job anyway.
Science defines the problem, in the form of the needed conditions that theory predicts will result in the desired outcome, and engineering solves the problem by developing a strategy to meet those requirements and iterating until it works. We have all the needed science to define what is required to achieve nuclear fusion, now we need to solve the problem of meeting all those requirements. Engineering doesn't even NEED science, strictly speaking, because it's entirely possible to just do shit until something works. Not a particularly elegant way to go about things but it usually gets results and such methods have served mankind's needs since we were literally banging rocks together to make crude tools.
=Smidge=
Re:the science (Score:5, Informative)
That's fission, this is Tokamak fusion, which has stymied ITER for years. What CFS claims is that they have massively improved the magnets and shrunk the reactor. What I want to see is a sustained Tokamak fusion reaction that lasts a long time and provides a net energy gain, which hasn't happened in any Tokamak generator - NIF (laser based) had a very short positive gain, EAST ran for ~20 minutes and had a net energy loss. Stellarators have had more promising results than Tokamaks, to be honest. The Lockheed Skunkworks CFR has infuriatingly little details.
Not that fission is bad - fast fission reactors are basically as clean as fusion reactors, but require onsite reprocessing, which is considered a dangerous proliferation risk. Since fast fission breeds either thorium or "nuclear waste" uranium to fissile uranium or plutonium, these are burned during the reaction, as are long lived actinides. What is left is a highly radioactive 100 year problem, but guess what, fusion has that as well, producing tritium and deuterium. Still, 100 years to background radiation is a far cry from the millions of years for nuclear waste from conventional reactors.
Re:the science (Score:4, Informative)
NIF (laser based) had a very short positive gain
And even that is a very loose definition of the word "positive" which requires pretending the output of the lasers is the actual amount of energy being put into the system rather than a shockingly small percentage of it (something like 0.5-1%).
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The science is out there (Score:5, Insightful)
they really should nail down the science on this first. but then again, i heard putin cured cancer.
You do realize MIT made a breakthrough in fusion a year or two ago, had a long video on YouTube explaining exactly what they found, and all that information is available for your perusal, right? And there was an article here on slashdot, right?
Fusion return is proportional to the fourth power of the containment field. By using modern superconducting magnets and some innovative design, they are able to achieve a much stronger confinement. This results in a longer, higher pressure burn (various, depending on which parameters you want to emphasize) that's more stable.
Why people have to be snippy and insulting instead of just asking "what's the science behind this" is beyond me.
Maybe it's an echo from the recent election, I don't know.
Lots of informed people would just tell you what you want to know.
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And there was an article here on slashdot, right?
I think this is the most recent Slashdot article on the MIT breakthrough. https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
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(I'm about as pro-nuclear, including fusion, as they get)
They've made compact superconducting magnets that theoretically produce enough confinement to sustain a large gain in power. They will probably break every record yet for fusion power gain, short of a hydrogen bomb. I'm very much looking forward to startup.
However, there are a large number of unsolved problems before they have a commercial grade power reactor, as per the headline claims. So yes, this latest bit of hype is best treated with skep
Re: The science is out there (Score:2)
Theyâ(TM)re not chasing funding - they already have $2bn in funding, which is more than enough. SPARC (the experimental reactor that will nail down the last bits of science) is well on the way to being built. They need to break ground on ARC to make sure it follows in a reasonably timely manner.
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Theyâ(TM)re not chasing funding
Yes, they are. They got funded for the SPARC build. Now they're pitching ARC: a much more expensive proposition. $2 billion is seed money for something like this. It won't come close to building ARC.
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For $2billion, you can dig the foundation, and hire guards that prevent kids to play in the sand used for mixing concrete.
For you even specific numbers are meaningless pliable hyperbole.
You don't even pretend to be sciencerific anymore.
Re: The science is out there (Score:2)
ITER really has nothing to do with most of the fusion designs coming out of these smaller labs. Unfortunately ITER took so long it looks like it got leapfrogged entirely by advancements in materials science. The test reactors that have been being made over the last five years or so were able to be built in spaces roughly the size of an auditorium, with far less effort than ITER has taken.
The thing that boosts my optimizm that some of these projects will work is some fairly senior fusion researchers pretty m
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> They're chasing funding, and they're making some pretty fantastic claims to secure it.
That's because a lot of other companies are doing the same thing, and getting funded.
For instance, TAE has been telling everyone they would have breakeven in three years and positive output in five. They have been saying this since 1998.
General Fusion has been saying something similar since they formed in 2003.
Helion claims their machine will run on He3 and be energy positive from the start. They formed in 2013.
Zap h
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They don't claim "commercial grade." Rather, "grid-scale", "will be able to plug into the grid" etc.
I.e. a reactor that produces net energy and in a quantity that is reasonable to consider an actual powerplant.
Blame the boomers (Score:2)
Why people have to be snippy and insulting instead of just asking "what's the science behind this" is beyond me.
Its boomers. They remember the cold fusion breakthrough.
Re:Blame the boomers (Score:5, Funny)
We'd have practical cold fusion by now, if Adobe hadn't bought it out in 2005 and left it to wither away.
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“Old man withers?”
“And I woulda gotten away with it too! If it weren’t for these meddling kids!”
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Re:The science is out there (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize MIT made a breakthrough in fusion a year or two ago
Why people have to be snippy and insulting instead of just asking "what's the science behind this" is beyond me.
The breakthrough was in 2021, if I am not mistaken. And people are "snippy", because no one - including MIT - has ever had fusion generate enough power to even run the fusion generator itself. They have, occasionally, produce more power than went directly into the reaction, but power all of the equipment around it? Not even close.
I'd love to see fusion power succeed. However, it has always been "just a few years away", and it continues to be "just a few years away". Even once they get the magnetic fields strong enough, there are a whole host of practical engineering problems to solve, before a fusion plant will be able to run continuously.
Meanwhile, if you want "carbon free energy", any of a number of new fission designs would work just fine, and we have easily accessible fuel for literally thousands of years.
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You do realize MIT made a breakthrough in fusion a year or two ago
I've lost count of the number of breakthroughs we've had in fusion over the past 50 years. I highly recommend applying a bit more skepticism to your life. Not just that the MIT breakthrough would lead to commercially viable projects in under 2 years (which would be a breakthrough in and of itself), but that a fusion plant could go from concept to operation in under 6 years a feat that traditional coal or gas plants are barely capable of (which would be a breakthrough in and of itself).
There's too many break
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You do realize MIT made a breakthrough in fusion a year or two ago, had a long video on YouTube explaining exactly what they found, and all that information is available for your perusal, right? And there was an article here on slashdot, right?
Do you have links? And, the most important, has anyone anywhere ever claimed that could could get more power out than put in over a sustained period? That seems to me like it would be world-shattering level of news, and yet I haven't heard anything more than very short periods of measurements returning anything above the power input.
Promises of the future (Score:5, Insightful)
Now we have entrepreneurs promising fusion by 2030. I like fusion, I hope it happens, but somehow I have doubts.
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https://observer.com/2024/09/b... [observer.com]
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In fairness, Gates can afford to invest widely. And why not. It's not like he's gonna live forever.
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Well technically aside from Tesla the companies which promised self driving cars have delivered. Sure GM just pulled the plug on their projects but they did have Cruise Robotaxis operating. Google also puts out over 1 million unsupervised self driving miles PER WEEK.
The cars are here, you just don't get to buy one, and the only person promising you that you would be able to buy one was the habitual liar Elon Musk.
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Disclaimer (Score:5, Funny)
This will mark the first time fusion power will be made available in the world at grid scale*
* once we get it working
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That itty-bitty asterisk is carrying a lot of weight.
I wonder if any betting sites have set up a pool for this project?
FYI, it would be wonderful if true. I just do not believe it, being of the generation that knew "fusion is only 30 years away and always will be".
Re:Disclaimer (Score:5, Funny)
That itty-bitty asterisk is carrying a lot of weight.
Yes. One wonders if it has an event horizon.
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This will mark the first time fusion power will be made available in the world at grid scale*
* once we get it working
The should run the whole thing with Node.js (Reactor) and employ MongoDB. It's web scale!
Old news (Score:2)
Commonwealth Fusion has had this plan in their press releases for several years now.
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https://blog.cfs.energy/cfs-wi... [blog.cfs.energy]
I own the first FTL ship spaceport (Score:2)
Who writes this nonsense?
Who believes it enough to post it here?
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I own the first FTL ship spaceport
I hope you installed appropriately sized apollo retroreflectors, otherwise it's not up to code and will be shut down.
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There are a lot of bright eyed morons that believe this crap. Even here, just look at the comments.
Politics (Score:2)
"Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin welcomed the announcement,"
Aren't Governors in VA term limited? So he won't have to explain why it didn't happen while he was in charge..
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"Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin welcomed the announcement,"
Aren't Governors in VA term limited? So he won't have to explain why it didn't happen while he was in charge..
One four year term.
But he will be running for President next.
Sounds like somebody... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like somebody needs some good press before their next round of funding.
only 5 years away... (Score:2)
Not to be outdone (Score:2)
why does the picture show a Chinese tokamak? (Score:4, Interesting)
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/19... [cnn.com]
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Ah interesting: The US led on nuclear fusion for decades. Now China is in position to win the race
Context is important: The US had many of dead-ends that have been abandoned - Fusor [wikipedia.org] (electrostatic confinement)) designs (still very useful, but not as a power source) lead the way for quite a while. Fusors are easily built by hobbyists, even. There was some hope that the Polywell would bring electrostatic to net energy production, but it seems that hope is gone.
The Soviet tokamak (magnetic confinement) seemed (and continues to be) more promising in the late 60's, and with that, most of the world started mo
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Yeah, no Tokamak has ever made breakeven power as of yet.
The US led in fission technology, too, until the government killed it because the politicians ruling were dumb f***s. Sorry Bill Clinton and John Kerry, the Integral Fast Reactor actually didn't have 90% of the issues you used to kill it. Proliferation risk, probably yes. Waste, no. Can be buried and nobody ever have to check on it, yup (passively safe). I'm not even a fan of IFR's technology (based on light water reactor), but like every negative ch
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> There was some hope that the Polywell would bring electrostatic to net energy production
There really wasn't, at least among actual researchers. After Rider's thesis it was clear it would not work.
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11412
That did not stop the internet experts, who immediately concocted a conspiracy between the ONR and MIT that was dedicated to taking down the Polywell.
And then along came those reports from Australia, where research on the concept had continued. They demonstrated that t
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They are just whining that someone else beat them to it, in preparation for demanding a ban on importing Chinese fusion technology.
These things are not copies, they are based on open research, engineering done in China, and the logical next steps. It's just sour grapes.
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Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless a major breakthrough was made in the last few hours, sustained artificial over-unity fusion is not a thing yet. Even if you ignore losses outside the actual fusion reaction itself.
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Indeed. But many people cannot fact-check for shit.
I am announcing first transporter technology demo (Score:3)
Also sometime in the 2030's. Still working out the kinks that cause the evil version of yourself to beam in a second later.
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Where are they getting the fuel? (Score:2)
I read once that a grid scale D-T fusion plant would burn through the world's supply of tritium in a matter of days to weeks. Yes, it's a by-product of CANDU reactors, but they only produce so much per year, and this reactor is going to be competing for the supply with other industrial and scientific consumers, so the price will skyrocket if they try to buy up the entire world's supply. Are they going to be setup to breed tritium once they are up and running? I'm sure they must have a plan if they are co
Re:Where are they getting the fuel? (Score:5, Informative)
That's why most fusion plants would involve a lithium lining in order to generate more tritium.
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I read once that a grid scale D-T fusion plant would burn through the world's supply of tritium in a matter of days to weeks.That's why most fusion plants would involve a lithium lining in order to generate more tritium.
The "stripping reaction" D + D -> T + P is nuclear-scale exothermic, too. (0.9389 MeV vs. about 17 MeV for D + T -> He + N) So some approaches involve two reactors, one to make a little energy and some tritium to feed the other - or alternatively do both in one reactor in multiple st
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> That's why most fusion plants would involve a lithium lining in order to generate more tritium.
"Involve" as in "it would be really cool to do this and we TOTALLY want to, but no one has actually tried this and we don't really have a good idea how to build it."
This is not a trivial issue or "just engineering". The T is burning itself out in-situ, and the amount that is created is so small that you have to get every bit of it you can. So we can't just leave whatever-it-is-that-makes-the-blanket in place,
Stories like this are why MSM fails (Score:5, Insightful)
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The problem is the same people are also entirely unable to see when they're being lied to / bullshitted in a different area. As a species, we just aren't skeptical enough in general, and we love when bullshit fits our desired narrative.
What has changed (Score:2)
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They will not. Too much enginerring and applied science is unsolved. And remember, this needs to be not massively uneconomic in addition. In comparison, the X7, impressive as it is, is a simple device.
conductive medium (Score:2)
What will be the conductive medium for this plant? Water? Steam? Liquid sodium? Liquid salt? So far, it seems that the answer is hot air.
How big will the explosion be.... (Score:2)
Everyone needs to watch this Documentary (Score:2)
Until there are published, repeatable fusion methods that have more than a trivial amount of net energy gain, it's the same con over and over again, and the actual scientists trying to make it happen are given the bad press, even though it's the business interests made the con.
Re:consider the source (Score:4, Funny)
Trump says I read it on the Internet, it must be real‘
But Melania‘s tits are all over the internet and they are surely not real.