The USA is set to announce a “major scientific breakthrough” after reports scientists have achieved a major milestone in nuclear fusion research.
I know a guy who worked in a similar facility near the east coast. Years before he got there, Shell had pulled the plug and shelved a project that was on the tipping point of net positive energy.
That was over 20 years ago.
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Fusion is always just around the corner.
For the sake of the planet, I hope they have actually turned it.
Guy
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Looks interesting, but even if they achieved a net energy output, ICF technology doesn’t look like something you could easily scale up into a commercial reactor. Let’s see what they announce.
This has already been announced. They had a “net energy gain” for a few seconds. The road to commercializing is long indeed.
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Very expensive research too. And not just the theoretical stuff. The engineering required to keep a super hot plasma running just centimeters away from the superconducting magnets needed to contain it, which must run at 4 kelvin, is mind boggling.
Look at iter.org/newsline/-/3818 for an analysis of some of these issues, including weld cracks
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I should point out that the announcement Tuesday December 13 2022 by scientists at the National Ignition Facility in Lawrence Livermore Labs concerned gain >1 in a laser target approach to fusion, not the tokomak plasma confinement approach used at ITER and other smaller fusion projects. quite a different idea, and the tokomak (various shapes and scales are underway now) may well turn out to be more feasible for large-scale energy generation than a laser driven pulsed system. which was originally developed for simulating and testing nuclear fusion weapons systems…
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Somebody’s been reading Science Daily.
and also Symmetry Magazine, Fermilab and ITER publications, nature news digests, IEEE communications, etc.
kinda my job.
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Always good to hear from a subject matter expert.
Thank you for your service.
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Yeah, i would have thought the pulsed systems are a nonstarter for a commercial proposition.
When I was about 17 I wondered why it wasn’t possible to initiate fusion in colliding ion beams. It turns out that it is, and it has some commercial application. I still think there’s some mileage in that approach for power generation, although I suspect a practical layout would end up looking similar to tokomak-type confinement.
far from an expert. more of an interested bystander. but i can bluff my way through when needed.
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theoretically possible to generate fusion by shooting two bullets at each other. the engineering side of solving that practically is another issue (materials, velocities, cleaning up the mess, etc…)
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The thing about ions (unlike bullets) is that you can manipulate them fairly easily with electric and magnetic fields. I can recall doing some fagpacket calculations with textbook fusion cross-section numbers and the required beam density, particle energy, etc didn’t turn out to be outlandish. Of course I was 17, so I probably got the calculations wrong. If you google it, though, this is an ongoing area of research (although mostly for neutron source applications, as far as I can tell). So I don’t think I was completely barking up the wrong tree.
The upside of particle-beam fusion is that everything is moving in the correct direction, as it were. In a plasma, stuff is just moving randomly, and the probability of fusion is correspondingly lower.
Issues of “cleaning up the mess” don’t strike me as intractable, although I suppose one big issue with any power-generation technology using fusion is “what do you do with the neutrons”? That gets harder, or easier, depending on the physical form of whatever-it-is that you need to achieve net-positive-power fusion.
In case it’s not clear, I’m just spitballing here. I’m not a nuclear physicist.
This is huge but may be another dead end. The big hurdles I assume are how to extract the energy and to reduce the cost of and/or improve the lasers.
The energy can always be extracted by using the whole chamber as the heat source for a steam turbine but that would be inefficient. My informed guess is that they would need to isolate it in another chamber first, which doesn’t sound easy.
The lasers suck ass right now too. Hella expensive and hella inefficient. If I was ASML I would pour all that income into this and suck up all of the government funding along the way. Open up a new revenue stream.
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Technical hurdles are just one part of the puzzle, and will not likely be sufficient. Social organisation issues also need to be addressed around access, usage and policy in downstream sectors.
We have mature commercial fission energy tech, and new reactor designs that are much safer than even PWR (which is pretty safe because it’s water moderated, no water = no reaction). Fusion is still a pipe dream.
There are no commercial way to extract electricity from fusion, because all the energy is in the form of radiation that is inefficient to turn into electricity (we can, but it’s very inefficient).
We should be getting over our fears of nuclear energy and build more fission plants using safer technology that is commercially viable NOW, unlike fusion that is always 50 years away.
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Fusion is like the new crypto. How can I buy in?
I still think this is the most likely fusion technology to be commercialized first.
No turbines, no steam, no tritium, just fusion, electromagnets, and electricity,
It is too soon to talk about any new fusion “breakthrough”.
“Fusion reactors: Not what they’re cracked up to be”
By Daniel Jassby | April 19, 2017
“The harsh realities of fusion belie the claims of its proponents of “unlimited, clean, safe and cheap energy.” Terrestrial fusion energy is not the ideal energy source extolled by its boosters, but to the contrary: It’s something to be shunned.”"
“ITER is a showcase … for the drawbacks of fusion energy”
By Daniel Jassby | February 14, 2018
“…When confronted by this reality, even the most starry-eyed energy planners may abandon fusion. Rather than heralding the dawn of a new energy era, it’s likely instead that ITER will perform a role analogous to that of the fission fast breeder reactor, whose blatant drawbacks mortally wounded another professed source of “limitless energy” and enabled the continued dominance of light-water reactors in the nuclear arena.”"
Best regards,
Chan Rasjid,
Singapore.
“Einstein’s E=mc2 Invalid”
“Nuclear Physics Wrong”