[HN Gopher] Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as 'ignition'... ___________________________________________________________________ Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as 'ignition' triggered in a lab Author : elorant Score : 447 points Date : 2021-10-12 14:25 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.imperial.ac.uk) (TXT) w3m dump (www.imperial.ac.uk) | ph4 wrote: | So is the goal just to fuel our current patterns of consumption | and development with fusion, or nuclear, or whatever? | f00zz wrote: | A lot of stuff becomes feasible with free unlimited energy. For | instance, carbon air capture (could even become a protein | source) and green hydrogen (for applications like production of | iron via direct reduction, so we can finally get rid of blast | furnaces). | tsimionescu wrote: | Why do you think fusion would provide free unlimited energy? | With any design even slightly visible on the horizon right | now, a single plant will cost billions of dollars and barely | produce a few MW of energy. This is much worse than any | equivalent investment in solar power, which similarly | requires 0 fuel. | abraae wrote: | I can't help feeling we'll find new ways to soak up that | energy. | | Ad tech will start segmenting right down to the individual | customer, burning thousands of watts to work out how to | entice then to spend $20. | | Perhaps raw heat, rather than the indirect heat effects of | global warming will be our next challenge. | kwertyoowiyop wrote: | Our current Bitcoin mining facilities will seem like | child's play. | _jal wrote: | If cheap commercial fusion became a reality, no. | | We would use far more energy. | HPsquared wrote: | Would more cheap (in all ways) energy be a bad thing? I don't | think so, people pay money for that sort of thing. | hinkley wrote: | Heat pollution. Green house gasses are not the only way to | cook ourselves. | | Though there are some people working on beaming heat into | space, I suspect they haven't fully accounted for heat | absorption by atmospheric dust. | HPsquared wrote: | It'd be interesting to ponder whether such a "heat ray" | would work, in terms of thermodynamics. Some kind of heat | pump, the hot side of which is hot enough to radiate into | space? I can't imagine that having a net cooling effect | when considering the Carnot efficiency of a refrigeration | cycle. Maybe a giant ice machine in space? (Then again, any | ice would probably create more heating than cooling as it | enters our gravity well or deorbits). Anyone have any | ideas? | zardo wrote: | The cold side is what your heat ray hits, the idea is | that would be the CMWB. | hinkley wrote: | I'm... cautious but optimistic. They have actual | installations so it must not be complete bullshit. | | Absorption and emission bands matter. They are in fact | made of exotic materials (rare earths IIRC) so it's at | least plausible. | MauranKilom wrote: | Hm, interesting. I was initially unconvinced that this | could be a problem, but some back-of-the-envelope math says | it's at least conceivable: | | The sun deposits _enormous_ amounts of energy onto earth | every single day: Around 340 W /m2 (averaged over the whole | earth), or a total of 43 x 10^15 Watts. Essentially all of | it is radiated back into space (mostly as infrared). We | have a temperature equilibrium because energy intake is | largely constant (surface/cloud albedo notwithstanding) | while radiation back into space grows with fourth power of | (surface/atmospheric) temperature. | | Current global energy consumption is on the order of 2 x | 10^12 Watts, over four orders of magnitude lower. If we | somehow increase energy production by ~two orders of | magnitude, to the point of ourselves emitting 1% of the | solar energy intake on top, the surface temperature would | need to rise by about 0.75 degC to maintain equilibrium. An | order of magnitude more (i.e. three orders of magnitude | above current consumption, roughly 10% of solar intake) | would correspond to a 7.2 degC rise. | | (Point of reference: Global power consumption has barely | doubled in the past 40 years. No telling what "free" energy | would cause though.) | | Presumably we'd have geo-engineered a solution by that | point, but it's surprisingly not too early to start | thinking about the problem! | hinkley wrote: | That's assuming the anthropomorphic heat is spread evenly | over the earth, rather than concentrated and creating a | heat island effect. | | You probably can drop an order and a half of magnitude | off of that number just based on concentration. And if | you don't think 'free' fusion will cause us to use | several times more power than we currently use, then I | don't know what to tell you. | [deleted] | woah wrote: | I'm guessing any possible energy generated by manmade | fusion plants would be miniscule compared to that hitting | the earth from the sun every day. | hinkley wrote: | That's not how homeostasis works. | groby_b wrote: | Assuming anything else would happen is ignoring human nature. | | The only way to get significant reduction of consumption is via | catastrophe. There's a good chance that'll happen, but there's | no feasible different way that I can see. Take away large | levels of comfort from large amounts of people, and you will | inevitably see bloodshed. (Yes, I know that unsustainable | consumption will also lead to catastrophe. Welcome to the 21st | century, where the path forward is narrow and uncertain, while | the stakes are higher than ever) | dfdz wrote: | This more carefully worded Nature article [1] explains that the | experiment did not meet the technical definition of ignition. | That is why they wrote 'ignition' in quotes in the article title. | | [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02338-4 | mbgerring wrote: | Pretty interesting how this huge rash of articles about the same | 2 or 3 fusion experiments have appeared just as the Federal | government is considering where to spend resources in energy | infrastructure for the next ten years. Who's the publicist? | p1mrx wrote: | I don't think it's a huge rash of articles; it's the same old | news from August resurfacing every couple weeks. | greenail wrote: | Sweet, nucluear fusion now must only be 20 years away! | akimball wrote: | Let's see, JET 1998 Q total ca. 0.01, NIF 2021 Q total ca. | 0.001 -- seems like fusion is getting further away, rather than | closer. | Iv wrote: | 20 years ago we were joking about it being 40 year away. So | yes, it is timely progress. | | I am still bitter that we don't invest more on this research | which has the potential to solve the climate crisis | "unexpectedly". | nnamtr wrote: | I'm somehow afraid of a world in which huge amounts of energy | can be wasted without having a bad conscience. Probably it | would lead to some new problems. | bduerst wrote: | Not sure if poe's law but that's basically the way things | are today. | tsimionescu wrote: | ICF really doesn't have this potential, definitely not in the | way it is practiced here. Each shot at NIF costs a few | million dollars in material costs alone, because of the | precisely machined parts that are required to achieve | inertial confinement of the plasma long enough to make it | start fusion, which get destroyed in the process. | iammisc wrote: | > I am still bitter that we don't invest more on this | research which has the potential to solve the climate crisis | "unexpectedly". | | Unfortunately, solving the climate crisis would put many a | pundit out of a job. | junon wrote: | Something tells me the alternative is going to do much more | than putting people out of jobs. | iammisc wrote: | I agree, but the bureaucrats in charge are more | responsive to their own immediate needs than to the long- | term outcomes. That is to say, it is in their best | interests to prevent an exciting new technology to come | out and eradicate the problem as then they would no | longer have their jobs. | joncrane wrote: | Sorry, it's actually now 29.5 years away. | | Also this article isn't even about a tokamak so... | rfrey wrote: | Meta-question about fusion energy -something I don't understand | about the movement. I spent a few years as CTO of a company | providing heat-to-electricity plants. We financed and built them | off high-heat plants like natural gas turbines. The "fuel" was | heat going up the stack - so it was essentially free. We still | couldn't compete with conventional electricity plants, even with | a $30/tonne price on carbon in Canada. | | Geothermal energy is the same: sustainable, long-life electricity | with no "fuel" costs, but it costs 2-3x as much to build a | geothermal plant (in most areas, depends on geology) as e.g. a | natural gas turbine powered plant, so the overall cost of | electricity is much higher and you can't get financing. | | How is fusion different? The fuel will be free and unlimited, but | the "levelized cost of electricity", dominated by the capital | cost of the plant, will still be much higher than other sources | of electricity. I don't think there's a world -- even one where | the onerous regulations go away and a market price on carbon is | available -- where the LCOE of fusion power is less than that | from natural gas, or even close. | raywu wrote: | Your question is great and barring other incentives (comments | in response to this), I'm also interested in how commercial | viability impedes adoption. | | In your opinion, what could be done to make the energy | generated by fusion competitive? Can we add storage to the mix | and therefore compete on a longer time horizon? I know storage | itself is expensive. | | Is it to say that fusion won't get adoption from market forces | alone, until the cost of construction lowers? | cletus wrote: | > How is fusion different? | | It's not but people don't seem to realize this or maybe just | don't want to think about it. Spending $100B to produce 1GW of | power (made up numbers) is not an economical source of power. | So hydrogen being free (deuterium and tritium are essentially | free; Helium isotopes are more complicated) is irrelevant until | the capital cost of the plane is much, much lower. | | And even then you still have to deal with these significant | issues: | | - Neutron embrittlement of the container; | | - Energy loss from the chamber from neutrons; and | | - Containment. The plasma is essentially an extremely high | temperature turbulent fluid. Because of the turbulence and the | super-high temperatures containment is likely to remain a | significant issue. | | I hope fusion becomes commercially viable and economical but | I'm just not convinced (yet) that that will ever be the case. | It certainly won't be ITER even with tens of billions spent on | it. | | People get caught up on the fact that stars do fusion without | considering what's different. To summarize: | | - Energy loss from neutrons is essentially a non-issue because | of gravity and just the size of stars. To put this in context, | it's estimated that photons created at the Sun's core take | ~30,000 years to escape; | | - Stars are relatively inefficient with their fuel. IIRC the | Sun converts ~4.5M tons of matter into energy every second. It | sounds like a lot but that's a tiny fraction of the Sun's mass | (~10^30 kg). That's because hydrogen atoms are so unlikely to | fuse and they go through several intermediate states before | that happens. Fusion in the lab already produces many more | fusion reactions per unit mass than stars do. | | I firmly believe that space-based solar power collection is our | most likely future. | | EDIT: corrected "photons" | bigfudge wrote: | > photos created at the Sun's core take ~30,000 years to | escape | | I'm guessing you meant photons but this still seems amazing. | Is there somewhere I can find out more about that? | whimsicalism wrote: | It's not really "the same" photon though. | [deleted] | jhgb wrote: | It's like a random walk, basically. Now realize that the | photon has something like 700000 kilometers to go and a | mean free path in the core in the range of one millimeter | or so and it's kind of obvious that this will necessarily | take some time. | cletus wrote: | So this is based on mathematical modeling. Here's one | reference I found [1] that estimates 5,000 years. I know | I've heard 30,000 too, which is really within the same | order of magnitude. | | [1]: https://sciencing.com/fun-sun-moon-stars-8459789.html | jhgb wrote: | When I was younger (like three decades ago), the number I | was taught was something like two _million_ years (if I | remember it correctly; I might still be able to find that | book if I 'm lucky). | truculent wrote: | To add to the confusion, I vaguely recall a number of | around 125,000 years. I think it was either from "A Brief | History of Time" or Jeff Forshaw's "Why Does E=mc2?". | zpeti wrote: | $100bn to get to a working fusion reactor doesn't mean the | second one will cost EUR100bn as well... | drran wrote: | Yep, but if you want to have cheap energy, then it better | to start with something cheaper, like LENR, which is still | pain to reproduce, but give it $100bn and 20 years and then | compare with ITER. | pfdietz wrote: | As long as we're in fantasyland I suggest perpetual | motion machines, or perhaps unicorn power. | | It's hard to make up for LENR's lack of existence with | clever engineering. But even if LENR existed, how do you | think it would get around the problem described? LENR | would make heat, low grade heat. | cletus wrote: | Oh for sure. To be clear, I meant the amortized cost, not | the initial cost of, say, ITER. I could've stated that | better. | nitrogen wrote: | Either way we (humanity) have to research these things or | we are guaranteeing that we will reach an energy and | materials plateau and eventual decline as a species. | chadcmulligan wrote: | Here's an article about why fusion is a bad idea [1] and its | from the bulletin of atomic scientists so they should know. | I'd love to hear it refuted but doesn't seem to have | happened. | | [1] https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what- | the... | marktangotango wrote: | > I firmly believe that space-based solar power collection is | our most likely future. | | Isn't this the same capital expenditure analysis your post | starts with though? How many billions does it cost to get the | solar panels to orbit in sufficient quantity? And ground | stations to receive the energy beams (microwave presumably). | This is where Musk/Spacex push for cheap kg to orbit really | matter. Even in the 70's they worked out that mining the moon | for raw materials to build space based solar was much more | economical. | cletus wrote: | So during the Space Shuttle (and earlier) era I believe the | cost of getting payloads to LEO was $20-50k/kg. Currently | with Falcon 9 it's gone down to ~$1000/kg. I imagine this | will continue to get cheaper with further reuse and | Starship. | | But we really need to get down to <$10/kg. Thing is, that's | entirely achievable. I believe the ultimate future here | will be orbital rings [1]. Space elevators get a lot more | attention and they really shouldn't because they're a lot | less achievable and they require materials we haven't | invented yet (to resist the centrifugal force). | | Imagine being able to take a cable car into orbit. That's | what orbital rings promise and you need little more than | copper wire and stainless steel. | | Not only would this bootstrap colonization of space but you | can simply attach collectors to the ring itself and run the | power down a cable to the ground so you don't even need to | suffer the power loss from wireless transmission (which, | for the record, is a practical method still). | | [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E | red_trumpet wrote: | > even one where the onerous regulations go away and a market | price on carbon is available | | What do you mean by a "market price of carbon"? From context I | would guess that the "market price" would be higher than the | current price, but the history has told us otherwise - that is | why we have regulations on carbon emissions. | sandGorgon wrote: | true this. In fact - im wondering why molten salt reactors | which the US innovated almost 60 years back where not pursued. | Thorium is plentiful and cheap - and Terrapower seems to have | already productized cheap miniaturized MSRs. | drumhead wrote: | High up front costs, for Nuclear fusion/fission, geothermal and | solar but cheap fuel, you can run then all day long and sell | the power you generate at any price to cover the fixed costs | and pay off the capital costs and of course you're not | generating carbon. With carbon burning generation, the cost of | the fuel is volatile, sometimes its cheap sometimes it not, so | you have to be clever in buying the fuel and not get stuck just | buying spot and going bankrupt because its suddenly spiked in | price. | thehappypm wrote: | In addition to being a large project to set up geothermal, they | don't generally produce a lot of power. The largest deployment | in the world is in California (The Geysers) and spans ~20 | separate units, and each unit on average produces around 100 | MW. A gas plant produces around 500 MW, and a nuclear plant | about 1 GW. | Mizza wrote: | It's political. Taxes on carbon pollution are inevitable, but | for the time being there is still political blockage because of | the power of the cartels. | Symmetry wrote: | Politically the problem is that voters want action on climate | change but aren't willing to pay any visible cost associated | with that action. If you put a tax on carbon that raises the | price of something by $100 then that's a political no-go. But | if you create a cap and trade system that raises the price by | $150 that might be politically viable. Not ideal, but one has | to compromise with political realities. | AnthonyMouse wrote: | The answer to this is for the tax to pay out to everyone as | a dividend. Then voters would be in favor because some of | the tax is paid by corporations but all of the money goes | to individuals, so most people get back more than they pay. | | On top of that, the tax would (if enacted by most | countries) crush demand for fossil fuels. So then fossil | fuel prices go down by, for example, half the amount of the | tax, meaning that half the tax get paid by Exxon et al. But | all tax money still gets paid out to individuals. | Jeff_Brown wrote: | I wish it were just cartels that oppose a carbon price. The | fact is it will make certain industries shrink, and almost no | country in the world (certainly not the US) does much to take | care of displaced workers, and the workers know it. Meanwhile | the people who will have jobs in the new industries that | spring up don't know it yet, so they don't fight for it. | mraison wrote: | It's hard to compare a fusion plant and a geothermal plant if | we don't know how much energy a single fusion plant could | produce. Are there any estimates on that? | dibujante wrote: | Bingo. | Fordec wrote: | > We still couldn't compete with conventional electricity | plants, even with a $30/tonne price on carbon in Canada. | | Was this Canada specific? A country with both very abundant | native oil & gas and abundant hydro energy with nuclear power | plants in place to boot. | | Not every country in the world has such abundant energy sources | on tap. | rfrey wrote: | We tried to build in Europe and America as well; the | economics are just hard. In the US there was very little | market for carbon, which is why I said "even in Canada" since | there is a regulated price for carbon here. | | The plants were mostly in Alberta, where NG is cheap but | there is no hydro. | porphyra wrote: | Generating energy from the difference between extremely hot and | slightly hot is cheap and efficient using turbines. | | Going from slightly hot to cold, as in the case of geothermal | and capturing residual heat in the stack of a natural gas | plant, is thermodynamically inefficient and quite expensive. | | Since fusion energy is extremely hot, it is efficient. Other | sources of "extremely hot" include: combustion (typically from | fossil fuels) and solar thermal. | asdff wrote: | That just tells me that we haven't priced the externalities of | carbon based energy appropriately, if the green solution is | still more costly. Increase the carbon tax and things will | pencil out fast. | Scarblac wrote: | Natural gas costs don't include the external costs like climate | change, so it looks better than it is. We have to stop using | fossil fuel soon to prevent really catastrophic changes, so | then other sources are needed. | jack_riminton wrote: | Exactly. The costs are much more than economic. It's the | Tragedy of the Commons | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons | pfdietz wrote: | DT fusion is not different, and is unlikely to be competitive. | This was understood decades ago. | | http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trou... | zurfer wrote: | The question is not _if_ it will be cheaper, but _when_. Gas is | a limited resource. We will eventually run out of it, the | closer we get to that point the more expensive gas will become. | But that point - without political intervention - can be many | decades away. | Ericson2314 wrote: | Supply doesn't create it's own demand. | | This is plain social failing you're describing. You ask whether | it _will_ happen to fusion, I would argue it has already been | happening to both for quite some time. | | Just as starter motors are needed to stat ICEs, so new sorts of | power generation start as unprofitable, and end as essential. | humaniania wrote: | Natural gas is only inexpensive because of fracking. | | With fracking in the USA at least the people involved can set | up an LLC that dissolves after the well runs out. They are not | required to disclose the contents of the fracking wastewater | fluid. It gets pumped back down underground where it could | dissipate into the rest of the water system. These people claim | that it's safe for decades when our computer models can't | predict the weather accurately next week. | | In California now they're using fracking wastewater on crops | because of the water shortages. Without disclosing what's in | it. And not testing for if that stuff ends up in the food. | These people are using loopholes to take the profits now and | leave society with the bills for cleanup and the health | consequences. That isn't sustainable or IMO fair or just. If | the real cost of fossil fuels was clear up front they would not | make sense. | | https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-drought-oil-w... | whatshisface wrote: | > _These people claim that it 's safe for decades when our | computer models can't predict the weather accurately next | week._ | | The models may or may not be accurate but they have nothing | to do with predicting the weather. There isn't any weather | underground... It's all slow diffusion and buoyancy. | | A better starting place might be asking where the model | inputs come from. | phillc73 wrote: | https://www.wunderground.com/ | mcguire wrote: | Doesn't "diffusion and buoyancy" technically describe the | weather, too? | whatshisface wrote: | Diffusion and buoyancy are indeed both things about the | weather, but the nonlinearity of the navier-stokes | equation stems from the ability of convection to | transport momentum. Fluids moving through rocks can't go | fast enough for that to happen. | 5faulker wrote: | This is definitely more of a do-it-while-you-can model. | Mewit wrote: | I don't think it is accurate to say it "dissipates into the | rest of the water system". Typically the hydrocarbon | formations being fracked are thousands of feet below the | water table, separated by thousands of feet of impermeable | shale. It's the same, or more so, for disposal zones where | the frack fluid that flows back is injected. For the fluid to | mix with a potable aquifer, it would have to leak within a | wellbore. That's possible, for sure, but it's pretty rare, | can be detected through proper monitoring, and can be more or | less eliminated as a risk when the well is ultimately | abandoned by pumping cement down the well. You don't really | need a computer model to tell you what's going to happen: the | formations have been separate for millions of years, and | they're probably going to continue to be separate for | millions more. | | I hadn't heard about them using the water for crops, that is | a little more alarming to me. I suspect it's not being done | quite as cavalierly as you're suggesting - they are clearly | treating and testing it, as discussed in the article. | | In my (maybe biased) opinion, all of this should be weighed | against the alternatives. Gas is much cleaner than coal, | after all. In Europe, they made the decision to ban fracking, | and also eliminate nuclear energy (in some countries at | least). Some of the gap can be filled increasingly with | renewables, but as recent history has shown, not all of it. | Most of the gap is filled with Russian gas, which has its own | issues. And overall it makes the energy supply less robust, | which allowed their current energy crisis to happen, when the | wind doesn't blow enough and the Russian supply has hiccups. | | I don't think it's fair to paint this as oil and gas | companies reaping all the benefits while everyone else pays | the price: everyone benefits from lower energy prices, | directly or indirectly. In my opinion, consumers bear some of | the responsibility for environmental issues, as well as the | producers. | humaniania wrote: | Also maybe read the entire article on using fracking | wastewater on crops: | | Until now, government authorities have only required | limited testing of recycled irrigation water, checking for | naturally occurring toxins such as salts and arsenic, using | decades-old monitoring standards. They haven't screened for | the range of chemicals used in modern oil production. | | No one knows whether nuts, citrus or other crops grown with | the recycled oil field water have been contaminated. | Farmers may test crops for pests or disease, but they don't | check for water-borne chemicals. Instead, they rely on | oversight by state and local water authorities. But experts | say that testing of both the water and the produce should | be expanded. | Mewit wrote: | I don't know anything about this, but contamination seems | plausible, as you say, and it would probably make sense | for California to update its regulations to make sure the | crops grown with this water are safe for consumption. | | I think this is a pretty unusual situation. As far as I | know, most spent frack fluid is reused in oilfield | operations or disposed of in deep disposal wells. | nightski wrote: | This is surprising to me because in North Dakota there | have been plenty of brine spills (from storage tanks) and | it seems to _destroy_ the farmland. It 's nearly | impossible to clean up and it always makes its way into | major waterways. | | I can't believe a farmer would intentionally use this to | water their crops, it wouldn't make any business sense. | andrepd wrote: | > In Europe, they made the decision to ban fracking, and | also eliminate nuclear energy | | Well the difference being fracking for natural gas is an | environmental disaster that will leave untold problems for | the future to clean up, and nuclear energy is one of the | cleanest forms of energy we have. | humaniania wrote: | "impermeable" until there's an earthquake caused by | fracking and things shift deep underground where nobody can | monitor or track what is happening? Seems exceptionally | short sighted to me. | | https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/does-fracking-cause-earthquakes | Mewit wrote: | I think it's best to look at the options through a risk | matrix. Is it possible that an earthquake is generated by | fracking that is big enough to geologically connect a | hydrocarbon formation with a surface aquifer thousands of | feet above it? I suppose, but I think it is very | unlikely. I don't think there are any cases of that on | record, and wells have been fracked in the US for many | decades (although not as frequently as recently). What is | the consequence of that happening? A community (likely a | rural community) loses potable drinking water. I would | say that is a low probability of a medium impact event. | | The calculation is going to change if there is a higher | probability of drinking water contamination for whatever | reason, or if more people live in the area and would be | impacted by an event, just as the risk matrix is | different building a nuclear power plant in France | compared to building one on the Japanese coastline. Of | course every jurisdiction makes its own decisions, as is | their right, but the consequence of always taking the | least risky option can leave a country in a tough | situation when those options don't cover their energy | needs, like in Germany (and elsewhere in Europe) right | now. | pasabagi wrote: | Absent from your analysis is the risk presented by global | warming. Obviously, transitioning the energy sources for | an entire group of nations is risky and absolutely the | kind of thing you expect to be a bumpy ride. On the other | hand, uncontrolled global warming is far more risky - at | worst, the energy shortages present a limited economic | challenge. Global warming presents an existential | challenge at worst, and an unbounded, extreme economic | challenge at best. | | The issue a lot of people have with fracking is not just | the local environmental damage, but also the deeper issue | of whether it's worth pouring investment into an obsolete | industry that is going to produce inputs for other | obsolete industries, all of which are environmentally | damaging on any scale, just so you can gain a bit of | energy security in the here and now. It's not just | kicking the can down the road on your future energy | security - it's also pushing us towards an extremely | chaotic and difficult future for everybody. | ac29 wrote: | > In California now they're using fracking wastewater on | crops | | That's not what your linked article says. The article says | _treated_ wastewater is being used. That being said, it | appears to be in dispute if the water is treated enough, with | the water district claiming that it is and an environmental | group claiming its not. | drdeca wrote: | Are you claiming that it is chaotic in the way that weather | is? Or, if not, why would such a comparison make sense? | | Like, why does it make more sense than "the people at the LHC | claim they understand well enough to be confident that the | LHC wont produce a black hole that swallows the earth, but | how can we trust that when computer models can't predict the | weather next week?" ? What does one have to do with the | other? | | It is not at all clear to me that the inability to predict | the weather is at all a good reason to significantly doubt | the accuracy of their models of the impact of the wastewater | fluid. There may be other good reasons to doubt it! I'm not | claiming their models are good, I know very little about it. | But, without a further explanation as to why the two are | comparable in this way, I don't see the "but we can't | precisely predict the weather for next week" argument as | having any non-negligible weight. | xondono wrote: | What a great way to _not_ answer what OP is asking. | | If you don't like fracking, that's alright, but sustaining | ourselves without it it's not really an option. Right now our | options are: | | 1) Use coal, accept the consequences of the increased climate | change. | | 2) Keep using gas, reduce the future costs of climate change, | deal later with the speculative consequences you mention. | | 3) Switch to renewables and drastically increase energy | costs, which will trap millions of people into poverty, and | put millions more in risk. | throwaway894345 wrote: | Of course, the consequences of climate change are billions | cast into abject poverty, wars over resources and land, and | so on. Moreover, if we do away with carbon subsidies (i.e., | implement carbon pricing and border adjustments), then yes | the cost of fossil fuel energy goes up, the consequence is | the society adapts to using power more efficiently. We make | less disposable shit, our industrial processes improve to | keep costs down, etc. Further still, nuclear _fission_ is | still a perfectly good option, and we have reactor designs | that are dramatically smaller, safer, and cheaper than | previous generations (with projections for the levelized | cost of energy comparing favorably with that of fossil | fuels today). | ransom1538 wrote: | "Of course, the consequences of climate change are | billions cast into abject poverty" | | The only way to end climate change is to have a serious | debate about population control. But no one wants | difficult debates (at least people that matter). Nuclear | fission once pulled off will make things much much worse. | I foresee a population explosion into areas once | uninhabitable. | diordiderot wrote: | Pretty sure you could just price in carbon. Poverty is | more like not driving an f150 2 hours to your job at | office, not max eating 6 steaks a week, taking shorter | showers, and turning your AC in south Texas in August | from 62 to 78 | throwaway894345 wrote: | You can either cull billions of people or transition to | clean energy, and yeah, people are rightly fixated on the | latter. | | > Nuclear fission once pulled off will make things much | much worse. | | What a foolish thing to say. | devdas wrote: | An actual debate on population control would be looking | at reducing the number of children in the developed world | even more, and discouraging suburban housing. | xondono wrote: | > Of course, the consequences of climate change are | billions cast into abject poverty | | That may be true, but I was referring to the effects of | switching to renewables _too early_. Since given our | technology, the cost per MW is higher from renewables, | switching to renewables (as a society) has massive costs. | If we rise the price of the MW a 10%, that 's a +10% on | every MW from now _until we find something better_. That | could be a long time, which means the impact of these | costs could be gigantic. As I 've commented elsewhere in | this article, a 0.75% reduction on GDP over 100 years is | equivalent to losing more than the entire (current) | annual GDP, that's not nothing! Growth is how we've | managed to move millions out of poverty, we should think | it through before sacrificing growth. | humaniania wrote: | Energy subsidies for vulnerable people are an option that | negates your only argument against the most sane option of | switching to renewable and nuclear ASAP, at least in | extremely wealthy countries like the USA. | xondono wrote: | My argument doesn't care who's pocket is funding the | renewables. | | As a society, every extra dollar spent on pricier energy | is an extra dollar that can't go to social programs, or | to new start up, or anywhere. | outworlder wrote: | > As a society, every extra dollar spent on pricier | energy is an extra dollar that can't go to social | programs, or to new start up, or anywhere. | | If you are arguing to stop subsidies for fossil fuels, | sure! Let's do it. | | Without any subsidies and with externalities accounted | for, fossil fuels would be even more expensive than | renewables. | xondono wrote: | > If you are arguing to stop subsidies for fossil fuels, | sure! Let's do it. | | I'll be all in on that. That's not my point at all. | | > Without any subsidies and with externalities accounted | for, fossil fuels would be even more expensive than | renewables. | | Wow, slow down there. | | First, subsidies are a confounding factor. I don't care | who signs the check, we're all paying for it in one way | or another. Let's just assume we join all of the worlds | wealth into a big pot somehow, and can magically | distribute it as we desire. | | Externalities are important though, because we will pay | them anyway, so that one counts. | | LCOE for solar and wind is lower, but we can't build a | whole network with wind and solar because they're | unreliable. The "popular" (hyped) solution is storage, | but storage is _so_ expensive that the LCOE for Solar | /Wind + Storage blows us through the roof again! | | I'd love to have some real solution, a renewable and | reliable source with LCOE similar to natural gas, but | until we have one we need to accept the fact that natural | gas is in our mixture of energy sources is _a good | thing_. | 8note wrote: | Every extra dollar saved on cheaper energy _actually_ | goes to lining some billionaire 's pockets in some | untaxed hole. And then eventually the people who would | benefit from said social program will instead have to pay | back a climate debt in the future. | xondono wrote: | If we are going to just made up magic pockets where | infinite money lies, then we can justify whatever we | please. | | The point of my comment is that it doesn't matter where | the money is. Even if you were to pay it through massive | taxes to the rich (assume no loopholes, no funny | accounting tricks possible), the ones picking up the tab | are the poor people of the future, because even if all | millionaires are evil movie villains, taking their money | _will hurt growth_ , and growth compounds. Reducing | growth now can be a catastrophe when compounded over 100, | 200, 500 years. | mindslight wrote: | This growth fallacy is the main thing driving so much | environmental destruction in the first place. Most effort | is being wasted on churn rather than creating | advancement, and this is increasing as time goes on (fake | jobs). Until we reprioritize the economy to make | efficiency gains translate into leisure gains, talking | about "growth" is just cover for business as usual. | nomel wrote: | Many would claim that every extra dollar spent on | renewables is reducing the environmental debt that we've | accumulated, that we have to will pay for, with very real | dollars, since we've subsidize our energy cost with | future remediation costs. | | I think there's some in-between here. | xondono wrote: | You can explain or justify the costs however you like. | That's not the issue. I'm not making any claims as to the | suitability of spending more or less into renewables, | just pointing the obvious but often forgotten | consequence, that every dollar spent here is a dollar you | can't spend in another place. | | Swapping to renewables at once would have an impact that | can very easily overshadow any remediation costs. Even | tiny cost increases _now_ will produce vast difference | 100 years forward due to compounding. | | Just as a thought experiment, if the costs of switching | to renewable energy are >0.72% of GDP, and the remedial | costs are around 18T$ (in today's money) in 100 years, | you're still better off _not switching_ to renewables. | lazide wrote: | What do you think the odds of this occurring are? | micromacrofoot wrote: | > Switch to renewables and drastically increase energy | costs, which will trap millions of people into poverty, and | put millions more in risk | | This feels like a bad faith take out of the gate (whether | or not it's intended)... are there no mechanisms for | subsidies to abate these issues? are renewables more likely | to increase wealth gaps than other fuels? | lazide wrote: | Renewables as currently implemented have significant | effective capacity issues - wind not blowing, or sun not | shining, or whatever - and overbuilding them still won't | solve that. | | Storage is currently very expensive, and this is not | likely to meaningfully (as in decrease by an order of | magnitude or more in cost) change anytime soon. | | That means that you need to buy and maintain more | equipment for the same kwh at the plug than you would | with a typical power plant. Fossil Fuels are incredibly | energy dense and really cheap to extract, even with the | nutty new technologies required in many places. | xondono wrote: | It's just simple arithmetic, however you want to | subsidize or socialize the cost, the fact is that | renewables have higher cost per MW. | | Every dollar spent on higher energy costs is a dollar not | spent in other things. This will impact growth. | micromacrofoot wrote: | Sure, but aren't fossil fuels also subsidized? Haven't | the costs been reduced due to the economies of scale and | time? Are the environmental downsides _not_ considered | part of the cost? | | I get it, renewables are still more expensive, but are | they really doomed to trap more people in poverty? | | Couldn't one argue that the unbalanced economic systems | are the primary thing that traps people in poverty and | the cost of energy is simply a minor factor? There are | certainly countries with low energy costs and high | poverty rates. | throwaway894345 wrote: | Fossil fuels are _heavily_ subsidized. Most places in the | world allow the fossil fuel industry to write-off their | pollution costs, and many other places go further even | than that. | | Moreover, it's disingenuous of the OP to suggest that | renewables lead to "millions trapped in poverty" while | fossil fuels merely result in "climate change" (as though | climate change doesn't imply _billions_ trapped in | poverty). | xondono wrote: | > Sure, but aren't fossil fuels also subsidized? | | Yes, that has to do nothing with my point. | | > Haven't the costs been reduced due to the economies of | scale and time? | | That's a sunken cost fallacy. What we have already spent | doesn't matter. What matters is what we choose _today_ , | and what consequences does it bring. | | > Are the environmental downsides not considered part of | the cost? | | Off course, that's the main issue. Environmental costs | are gigantic, but they are also _far_ into the future. | | > renewables are still more expensive, but are they | really doomed to trap more people in poverty? | | Anything that hampers growth will have massive | consequences on the long run. Higher energy prices will | heavily reduce growth, even if we assume that there's | margin for efficiency to be gained from economies of | scale and technology improvements. | | > Couldn't one argue that the unbalanced economic systems | are the primary thing that traps people in poverty and | the cost of energy is simply a minor factor? | | You could argue the first one if you'd like, I won't | because it would be getting off topic. As for the second, | the cost of energy is a massive factor into the economy, | because energy underpins anything we do. The only real | solution we've found to poverty is _growth_. The worlds | wealth follows an exponential, tampering with the base | has serious implications when you are looking at climatic | timescales. | | > There are certainly countries with low energy costs and | high poverty rates. | | Let me try to explain in another way. We are at a | crossroads. Whatever our past is, our current situation, | it's no matter now, that's behind us. We can choose path | A, or path B. | | Path A (continue to use natural gas) keeps us going. We | know that at some point we'll have to deal with the | consequences of climate change, but we can modulate our | use, and take our time. We are making the future costs | higher, there's no doubt about that, but we might be | better equipped to switch to renewables in 40 years. | There's no reason to rush the switch. | | Path B (completely switching to renewables _now_ ). This | will limit our growth for sure. It will also require us | to sort out _now_ how best to handle the transition, | because rising prices with our current system will leave | a lot of people without heating in the winter, or unable | to use appliances like dishwashers (I 'm in Spain, our | energy cost has been rising constantly, we are seeing | this happening). We will need to change a lot in very | short time. Our future climate costs will be lower. | | In some sense, by choosing path A, we are betting that we | will find better solutions at some point in the future. | If we choose path B but if some new amazing renewable | technology appears in say, 75 years, we've made a huge | mistake. | akimball wrote: | Only because profits are privatized while costs and tail | risks are largely socialized, for the fossil fuel | industry. If they paid their environmental impact costs, | no driller or coal miner could operate profitably. | Qwertious wrote: | >It's just simple arithmetic, however you want to | subsidize or socialize the cost, the fact is that | renewables have higher cost per MW. | | All the more reason for a carbon price. If the cost from | renewables is _genuinely_ more expensive than climate | destabilization, then make the price explicit and the | market will sort the practical from the pointless. | | If there's one thing markets are good at, it's choosing | the cheaper option. But they need a price signal to work | on in the first place. | CuriouslyC wrote: | Option 4, use a mixture of modern nuclear and renewables. | Power prices go up slightly, environmental footprint goes | down a lot. | xondono wrote: | I'd love for the world to see that Option 4 would be | great (I'd chose that one too!), but it's not a | politically viable option. I was limiting the options to | the "realistic" ones, given our current constraints. | solarhoma wrote: | There is a lot wrong with your post. | | >They are not required to disclose the contents of the | fracking wastewater fluid. | | Majority of water used in hydro fracking is slick water. This | is normal water with friction reducers added to it. Typically | 1%. Though can change based on the design of the frack. These | are maybe not disclosed to the public since they typically | are proprietary formulas that each vendor creates on their | own. Each wanting to protect their IP from other vendors | supplying the friction reducers. | | >It gets pumped back down underground where it dissipates | into the rest of the water system. | | This is the most inaccurate and hyperbolic part of your | response. It is markedly false. The slick water is typically | reused after the well back flows. They store the water onsite | for the remaining wells. Or transport to another pad for | continued hydro fracking use. Any water that is produced | during well production is pumped into non-human use | reservoirs. These disposal wells are called SWD's, saltwater | disposals. The depths of the wells vary, in our field it was | 7500'. Whereas freshwater wells for human and cattle use were | 300'. Regulatory bodies strictly manage the creation of SWD's | with significant research and paperwork to show the reservoir | you are disposing into is not or has ever been used for human | consumption. The water at this reservoir will not magically | make its way into the freshwater reservoir. | | >These people claim that it's safe for decades when our | computer models can't predict the weather accurately next | week. | | This seems more emotionally driven than anything. Who are | 'these people'. How does this correlate to weather? I have | worked with hundreds of wells that are +80 years old still in | good standing. If the well integrity is in question a cement | bond log is run, along with other logs. If it is found there | are any discrepancies they are fixed. Or the well plugged and | abandoned, is filled with cement and the wellhead removed. | | I have not heard of fracking water ever being used for crops. | Apologies for any spelling or grammar errors as I am on my | phone writing this message. | malchow wrote: | He's also wrong about there being a water *shortage* in | California. There is water *diversion*, designed by | environmentalists to save animals, that strips farmers of | water. | nomel wrote: | One could claim that the water diverted to those pesky | natural habitats would be inconsequential if there were | enough for both. | toqy wrote: | It seems to me that if you have a new dilemma of choosing | to starve A or B of water, that you indeed have a | shortage. | fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: | We already reduced the flow of the rivers to a trickle by | diverting most of the water for the farmers. Refusing to | divert the last trickle and make the river bone dry is | not the cause of the problem. | javajosh wrote: | Yes, what good is a biosphere when we have strip malls to | build in the short term, and the Shangrila of Mars to | look forward to colonizing in the long term? | SuoDuanDao wrote: | As someone who worked around fracking wells as a roughneck, | I see a lot wrong with your post. | | >Majority of water used in hydro fracking is slick water. | This is normal water with friction reducers added to it. | Typically 1%. This is like saying "dihidrogen monoxide is | the largest component of acid rain". Technically true, but | the toxin is toxic enough even at low concentrations. You | wouldn't enjoy having it in your eyes no matter how much of | it is water that day. This is frankly a strange argument | for someone who's worked with the stuff to make, it's not | quite H2S but nobody I worked with took the toxicity | lightly. | | >The slick water is typically reused after the well back | flows. That is what's told to the people in the office but | it's not reliable. A volume of fluid is pumped down the | well, the same volume is pumped back up. So long as there's | no water at all downhole, you would recover only fracking | fluid. Typically if people are worried about fracking, | there is water downhole and no way of preventing mixing. | | >If it is found there are any discrepancies they are fixed. | The payment structure incentivises the field crews to | under-report those kinds of errors. Some crews are diligent | and take the reputational hit of reporting a fracking | blowout, others simply kick some dirt over it. From my | experience it's about 50-50. And in the latter case it | certainly does often land on an unfortunate farmer's field. | yunohn wrote: | >> They are not required to disclose the contents of the | fracking wastewater fluid. | | > not disclosed to the public since they typically are | proprietary formulas that each vendor creates on their own. | | So, you're agreeing with the poster then? Fracking | wastewater is opaque and undisclosed to public. | | > If the well integrity | | My understanding was that the poster was talking about the | fracking procedure and resulting wastewater, throughout | their post. Nobody was questioning the integrity of | concrete. | specialp wrote: | >>They are not required to disclose the contents of the | fracking wastewater fluid. | | >Majority of water used in hydro fracking is slick water. | This is normal water with friction reducers added to it. | Typically 1%. Though can change based on the design of the | frack. These are maybe not disclosed to the public since | they typically are proprietary formulas that each vendor | creates on their own. Each wanting to protect their IP from | other vendors supplying the friction reducers. | | How does this make the claim that they are not required to | disclose the contents of the waste water false? Are | friction reducers mostly similar and non toxic? It is | irrelevant that it is 99% water as most industrial waste is | mostly water. If I pumped out water that was 99% water and | 1% mercury it would be incredibly toxic. The issue is | certain chemicals end up lingering in water and bio | accumulating for a very long time. | javajosh wrote: | Yes, I was thinking the same thing. 1% is actually an | enormous amount since toxins are measured in ppm. Imagine | being asked, for every 100 cups of water you drink, to | drink a cup of mystery fluid. Actually, it's worse | because any (non volatile) additive will tend to | concentrate over time in food (and then concentrate | further in animals if the food used for feed), and in | addition any chemical is bound to change over time in | contact with sunlight and ordinary plant/animal | biochemistry. | | I've never heard of this use of fracking water in CA, and | if it's real it sounds to me like frackers IP be damned, | we need to know what's in the damn water! | hanselot wrote: | Imagine if for every 9 vaccines you took you were told to | take a mystery experimental gene therapy... | chmsky00 wrote: | Perhaps the cost to be concerned with is not fiat currency but | more literal. | | The up front costs could wipe out the routine costs and maybe | we could also dispose of the " make money selling blades not | handles" monopoly fossil fuel monopolies rely on for political | relevance. | | Infinitely big little numbers let economists iterate forever in | whatever direction they want. Physical reality has constraints | their academic models omit. | | We need to redefine the perimeter not iterate within the area | of a well known boundary. Who cares how much it costs | aristocrats in profits if the result ends up what is believed | possible? I don't have to believe any given solution or CEO is | owed a market. | lazide wrote: | There are a couple potential answers to your question. | | 1) 'make it up in volume' - part of the reason for the | relatively high capital cost of the technologies you are | describing, is they don't scale well from a one-off design or | manufacture vs amount of energy produced perspective. | Geothermal plants require significant amounts of 'actually | sticking a very long pipe into unstable ground' which can't be | effectively economy-of-scaled away to be cheaper. There are | also only a relatively small number of locations with the right | factors to make it worthwhile. Presumably the waste heat | systems you are referring to require custom fitting to the | plant in some way, and there are also not a huge number of | places with sufficient waste heat to make it worthwhile. Both | of these techs are in the sub-gigawatt (often sub-hundred | megawatt) range. That adds a lot of friction, thinking, and | site/location specific ness for a relatively small amount of | power. IN THEORY fusion can produce massive (giggawatt) power | anywhere, and there is no reason you couldn't make one for | every neighborhood if you wanted. Please be aware that | practically speaking this seems to be a fantasy. | | 2) most people don't/can't understand the physics, so it is | really easy to project impossible benefits onto it that will | never play out in real life, and sound plausible while doing | so. This makes it easier to sell to politicians in particular. | | 3) IN THEORY because of these factors, whoever comes up with | fusion first is going to take over the world (either | commercially or politically), so there is a lot of pressure to | not be #2 there. This outweighs things like pesky market | dynamics and concrete profit margins. | | 4) also, since no one has a prototype or design for a reactor | that could plausibly actually be a viable commercial reactor, | no one has the ability to sit down and figure out if the math | works or not. This is all still research reactor space. | hpcjoe wrote: | Very likely, each fusion plant (if they ever exist) would | require, ironically, a fission plant next door to provide the | power required for the magnets. | | The magnets, and wiring won't be cheap. The power delivery and | control won't be cheap. I'm not sure how this would be | amortized into the cost of the power, without making it 2-3x | (or more) more expensive than alternatives. | | We can build, and we need, nuclear plants now, to be able to | generate cheap/plentiful electric power. And if we don't we're | basically going to have to push the brakes on EV deployment. Or | light up more NG/Oil plants to provide the power for those. | thehappypm wrote: | This approach doesn't use magnets. | Robotbeat wrote: | NIF doesn't use magnets. Pure inertial confinement. You're | thinking of Tokamaks. Those use superconducting magnets. | | Superconducting magnets like ITER uses don't require energy | to continue running as they, of course, are superconducting. | They "only" have to dump heat put into them by the reaction | radiation. The SPARC reactor by MIT is similar but much | smaller by using Cuprate superconductors (high temperature | superconductors, but here operated at much lower temperatures | to increase the critical field) that allow much higher field | strengths. They often have non-superconducting joints which | cause a (sort of) small amount of additional heat that needs | to be dumped, but it is possible to make such joints | superconducting as well. Anyway, all such designs for | commercial scale power from Tokamaks use fusion generated | electricity to power the magnet cooling, and those | electricity requirements are less than the electricity | produced. | epistasis wrote: | > We can build, and we need, nuclear plants now, to be able | to generate cheap/plentiful electric power. And if we don't | we're basically going to have to push the brakes on EV | deployment. Or light up more NG/Oil plants to provide the | power for those. | | The real power generation tech here will be wind and solar, | not nuclear. We can build lots and lots and lots of it, | easily and cheaply. And using it to charge vehicle batteries | doesn't even require intermediate storage. | | Even construction powerhouses like China are deploying more | than an order of magnitude more renewables than nuclear, | because renewables will be the backbone of any future grid. | Nuclear isn't getting any cheaper, yet wind solar and | batteries are on exponentially decreasing cost curves. | | People on HN are far better able to understand exponential | technology advancement than people in the energy industries. | And hopefully we can all see how renewables plus batteries is | going to make nuclear obsolete. | Animats wrote: | Doing something with low-grade heat is hard and often futile. E | = (Th-Tc)/Th. Look at a gas turbine. There's a succession of | turbine wheels, getting larger towards the end. Each is running | off the exhaust of the previous wheel, at a lower pressure. If | you added another, larger, turbine wheel at the end, you'd get | a little more energy out, at higher machine cost. The turbine | ends where adding another wheel is not cost-effective. | | Starting from the exhaust at that point means you're competing | with turbine manufacturers who decided they'd reached the | economic limit. That's fighting the Second Law of | Thermodynamics. | | The hot end temperature for fusion systems is quite high. Tens | of millions of degrees at the plasma. Fusion has lots of | problems, but thermodynamic efficiency is not one of them. | | The dream is that somehow that high temperature plasma from the | fusion reaction is run through a hollow coil to generate power | by magnetohydrodynamics. No turbine required. | | Somehow. Maybe someday. No clue how to do this yet. | rfrey wrote: | Exhaust from a gas turbine for a pipeline compression station | is around 600C at about 95kg/second. That flow contains about | 100MW of heat energy, which can be captured with Organic | Rankine Cycle (like steam cycle, but using organic fluids | like cyclopentane as a working fluid to better match the | thermodynamics) about 20% of that can be converted to | electricity. This is off-the-shelf tech. | | The problem isn't the technology, it is the economics. | lazide wrote: | The parent was pointing out that the economics are also a | fundamental limit of the technology/physics. | | If you can do a lot of work with expensive machines to get | 20MW from that plant, but you can also do less work and | spend less money getting an extra 20MW by burning some | cheap primary fuel (with higher quality heat/aka a bigger | delta), then they're just going to burn more primary fuel. | It's a bit silly to do it any other way (barring | legislation or market pressures or whatever) if you care | about the amount of energy you are getting for the money | you are paying. | | And that is a fundamental issue, as reclaiming energy from | secondary heat is always going to be less 'nice' than from | the primary fuel. | | If you can do it easily enough that it doesn't add a lot of | extra cost, then chances are the primary turbine/power | system could be built efficiently enough to not throw that | waste heat out the back in the first place. They do so | because the math doesn't check out generally. | nitrogen wrote: | _> > gas turbine for a pipeline compression station_ | | _> primary turbine /power system could be built | efficiently enough to not throw that waste heat out the | back in the first place_ | | It sounds like this might be a situation where maybe an | older turbine already exists for generating mechanical | power (pumping), and the add-on kit is supposed to | capture more energy without having to replace the | existing systems? | lazide wrote: | But it doesn't pay for itself is the problem - and I'm | pointing out that the prior poster was pointing to a | fundamental reason why that is not likely to change if | the input fuel is cheap. | | If the input is expensive, then the economics change and | it's more worthwhile to pay more in equipment to get more | out of the input. | | I bet someone has a really detailed set of calculations | that would tell you exactly when that line is crossed. | But I doubt they are hanging out here. | ChuckMcM wrote: | In that context think of this this way, if cost of | converting methane into heat is 1 currency unit per joule | of heat produced, fusion is hundred times as expensive but | produces a million times more heat so the cost per joule is | one ten thousandth of the cost from methane. | 08-15 wrote: | How come? Conventional electricity plants also convert heat to | electricity. That doesn't sound fundamentally different from | your business. | | Was your input temperature too low? That would explain it. At | low temperature differential, you have lower efficiency and | need much bigger machinery for the same output. | | That said, fusion has a chance to be competitive, because the | temperature will be higher. (Obviously, the thermodynamic limit | is in the billions of Kelvin, but a practical power conversion | system will operate in the range of 500-1000 Celsius.) But for | the foreseeable future, it won't be competitive. | rfrey wrote: | Our heat sources were typically in the 500-600C range, with | plant exhaust flows containing about 80-150MW of energy. | Current tech can convert that with about 20% efficiency. | | Not at all like conventional electricity plants, the heat is | already being created in industrial processes and is a waste | product. | | We're familiar with delta-T and thermodynamics. Current off | the shelf technology can easily hit half of the Carnot limit | at most delta-Ts. That's not the point, the point is the | "fuel" was free, and the price was "close" to existing | sources as these things go (about 2x the price of natural | gas) and even with a carbon market and climate mandates, it's | impossible to get investment. | AnthonyMouse wrote: | If you go to an existing power market, there is generally | already enough supply for the existing demand. And all of | that supply is a sunk cost. The plants are already built. | They're not going to get shut down unless the price falls | below solely the operating cost. | | Building more capacity can cause the price to decline. In | some cases by quite a lot. So nobody is going to want to | finance it unless they see that either demand is about to | increase or supply is about to decrease. | | Which is potentially true in the future. Electric cars will | need more generation capacity. A carbon tax that causes | existing fossil plants to shut would reduce existing | supply. | | But it's also potentially not true. Maybe the demand for | electric cars will be satisfied by an increase in rooftop | solar and not an increase in utility-scale generation | plants. We don't know when, or if, a carbon tax will happen | in a given market. | | You guys also had a specific problem. If you're getting | waste heat from natural gas plants, and then carbon prices | increase to the point that people stop burning natural gas | and switch to alternatives, you're not the ones absorbing | that demand, you're the ones getting shut down. | | So you're in a different market position than would be the | case for fusion after the introduction of a carbon tax. | 08-15 wrote: | Wait, what? Coal plants operate with an upper temperature | of under 600C, and they approach 40% efficiency. Why do you | say it's only 20%? | | Either way, it sounds as if a coal plant without the | furnace wouldn't be able to compete with "conventional | electricity". What is "conventional electricity" then? Open | cycle gas turbines? Are they that much cheaper, even | including fuel cost? | ivix wrote: | The cost of a fusion plant will be a small fraction of the cost | of a fission plant, where the extreme safety requirements makes | it expensive. People are now testing fusion in small regular | industrial facilities. | pontifier wrote: | As someone trying to build a fusion reactor of my own design, I | worry about this myself. I just have to believe that advancing | the state of the art is a good thing, not a bad thing, and that | my efforts will pay off. | ChuckMcM wrote: | I could cite you things like this: | (https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6276900) but they will likely be | buzzword soup. | | The simplest explanation is that the fusion reactor's energy | output is the _primary_ heat source for a heat engine like a | steam turbine. | | It sounded from your description that your company was | targeting so called "waste" heat, which is a lower grade of | heat (smaller delta between ambient so a smaller temperature | differential to work with). There are limits to the efficiency | of being able to convert heat into some other form of energy | (kinetic, chemical, electric, Etc.) because that is how the | universe works sadly. | | That said, when you have a very large heat differential, as you | do from fusion or fission reactions, converting even a small | percentage of that can be a net win in terms of production. | | So fusion is different in that it can take a small amount of | widely available "fuel" and release a large amount of energy by | "burning" it (in actuality fusing it into a new element, but | the effect is that the original fuel is no longer available for | use) and then using that heat to run heat engines that are | producing electricity. The waste products are the fused result | and heat in the form of highly energetic alpha particles. | rfrey wrote: | Sure, I understand delta-T, and Carnot haunts my nightmares. | | My question about fusion isn't about thermodynamic | efficiency, but about economics. Our waste heat solutions | produced electricity at about 2x the LCOE of a natural gas | turbine. Since it was carbon-free electricity, by selling the | carbon credits we could get close to the ROI of a natural gas | plant. A NG plant might have a 20 year IRR of 14-16% - we | could get to 11 or 12. But that was enough to kill the | project. | | And we have other technologies that produce carbon free | electricity at a price _close_ but not quite at NG turbines - | renewables + storage, for example, or geothermal. But those | aren 't considered economic to build right now, despite being | here and ready and understood. | | I might be wrong, but I can't imagine a nuclear fusion plant | getting within spitting distance of a NG plant for capital | cost. And if it's even twice as much money -- which seems | wildly optimistic -- maybe nobody will build them. Or maybe | they will, because there are other factors at play besides | carbon free electricity and cost! That's what I'm asking - | what are those other factors? | Jensson wrote: | Coal plants runs on heat as coal isn't explosive enough to | run turbines directly. If they are affordable then so is | fusion heat. So the question is if we can generate fusion | heat at low enough cost. | Gwypaas wrote: | They are not affordable. That's why they are being | replaced by gas plants and renewables all over the place. | AlbertCory wrote: | Skin in the game [1]. OP has actually done it ("CTO of a | company providing heat-to-electricity plants"). | | Have you? Or you just read about it? | | [1] https://www.amazon.com/Skin-Game-Hidden-Asymmetries- | Daily-eb...? | hellohntoday wrote: | OP doesn't bring up the different temperature and pressure | differential of heat sources. That's a huge red flag. For | all we know the CTO role at that company was entirely | focused on keeping the staff laptops running and is largely | disconnected from the fundamentals of heat to electricity | generation. Why the hell would she (or he) ask here when | (s)he has current or former colleagues in the industry to | ask. | | My BS detector went off immediately. | ChuckMcM wrote: | I get that, 100% props for the experience. And I totally | respect it. The GP question was "what makes fusion | different", and the only thing that is different really is | the economics of how much it costs vs how much energy you | get out. | | Energy out is, by definition, the amount of heat | differential you can generate. Cost is, again by | definition, the total operating cost of the heat source. | | So this is where the author and I see things differently, | the author wrote: _... the "levelized cost of electricity", | dominated by the capital cost of the plant, will still be | much higher than other sources of electricity._ | | I agree with that statement, the difference with fusion is | that the amount of energy produced after accounting for the | capital cost of the plant will be a _million_ times | greater. And as I related in a later comment if you compare | things on a dollars /BTU level the fusion plant will | produce extremely cheap BTUs. Much cheaper than even the | cheapest natural gas plant. | | The key here is that the cost to build such a plant is much | higher (and it is), but the energy produced by that plant | is _way_ higher. That is the ratio that makes fusion | different. | rfrey wrote: | But the LCOE is a normalized (usually to $/kwh) price | that accounts for the amount of energy produced for a | given capex, plus the operating costs, plus the cost of | capital, plus the lifetime of the plant. It tries to bake | that all in. | | Your position is that LCOE _will_ be much lower, because | (as I understand you) the plant cost will scale much | better than, say, 100MW natural gas plants. I totally | accept that my assertion about LCOE might be wrong | because it only costs 2x as much money to build a fusion | plant that 's 100x bigger. | ChuckMcM wrote: | Exactly. | | The future of whether or not fusion becomes the next big | thing will be watching the LCOE for fusion plants vs | everything else. | | It is interesting to compare fusion plants to fission | plants in this regard. Fusion fuel extraction is _much_ | cheaper, fusion waste byproducts are _minimal_ , plant | failure risk and mitigation is _much much_ cheaper (no | fallout, no long live nucleotides etc), and the energy | cycle produces 10 - 20x as much energy as fission. | | Edit: And when things get going you can get around Carnot | Efficiency by converting the high speed particles | directly[1]. This experiment was built at LLNL as well | and shown to actually give > 50% conversion efficiency. | | [1] http://www.ralphmoir.com/wp- | content/uploads/2012/10/venBlnd.... | tuatoru wrote: | Fusion plants cannot be 100x bigger. | | The grid doesn't cope well with current 2GWe plants going | offline suddenly. It would not cope _at all_ with a | 200GWe plant doing that. | | Besides the waste heat dissipation issues... | grkvlt wrote: | are you suggesting that fusion plants will be petawatt | sized? because that's really not the case. i think the | lcoe of fusion is predicted to be around the same as | natural gas, with the DEMO reactor costing twice as much. | SuoDuanDao wrote: | I don't think nuclear power - fission or fusion - can ever be | profitable on a capital return basis. They're the best bang for | your buck if the cost of capital is zero and among the worst if | it's greater than zero. | | Nuclear physicists and engineers are smart enough that I think | they could understand this problem if they spent a weekend | grappling with it, but they're so specialised in their very | difficult discipline that they never spend that one weekend. | asdfge4drg wrote: | for someone who worked in this area, you have an unbelievably | short term view. | | humanity either has fusion reactors or it doesn't. imagine what | we can do with them, the spacecraft we can build, submarine | cities, one in every home. Mars, Europa. It's not where we'll | be 10 years after we do it, but 100 years, 500 years. To get | there, we've got to step forward now. | stormbrew wrote: | > We still couldn't compete with conventional electricity | plants, even with a $30/tonne price on carbon in Canada. | | Worth noting that the current plan is for the minumum carbon | tax in canada to increase by $15/tonne/yr until 2035, so the | question might be more when will it reach a break even point? | Seems like you'd want to be positioned for that. | rfrey wrote: | That was our company thesis, that carbon was systematically | underpriced and we wanted to amass a portfolio of carbon | credits before that was corrected. But you still need to | provide project investors with a competitive ROI if you want | to build the thing. | wussboy wrote: | That kind of forward thinking is unfortunately rare. | stkdump wrote: | You increase carbon taxes, outlaw fossil fuels and subsidize | alternatives. This kind of innovation doesn't work without | government intervention. | NineStarPoint wrote: | Fusion is different in that the math scales well with the size | of the fusion plant you create (and also the power of the | magnets you have access to). If it's technologically feasible | to create a large enough fusion plant, it starts to be able to | create ludicrous quantities of electricity compared to things | like geothermal that have much harder limits. | | Of course, "technologically feasible" is doing a lot of heavy | lifting, but it is in the realm of theoretical possibility for | a large scale fusion plant to be cost effective. | thescriptkiddie wrote: | The unpopular truth is that fossil fuels are far too cheap. If | the negative externalities were priced in, they would be at | least twice as expensive, perhaps as much as ten times. | xondono wrote: | > If the negative externalities were priced in they would be | at least twice as expensive | | Quotation needed | piva00 wrote: | Here's a source for a recent meta-analysis of hidden costs | of fossil fuels [1]. | | Findings on the abstract already corroborate the parent | comment. | | [1] "The hidden costs of energy and mobility: A global | meta-analysis and research synthesis of electricity and | transport externalities" - https://www.sciencedirect.com/sc | ience/article/pii/S221462962... | xondono wrote: | The problem with this type of study is that it can by | definition only cover the known externalities, but most | of the price of externalities is far into the future. | This means that the real margin of error is huge (and | unknowable at this time). | akimball wrote: | Also it misprices tail risk, marking it to zero | pdoege wrote: | For coal in the USA the stated cost for MWh in 2010 was | $41. The external cost was $58. | | This does not include for implicit and explicit subsidies. | Including those would make the external costs higher. | | The numbers change by country, time, energy source, and | etc. so asking for a quotation is a bit of a fishing | expedition. See Tables 1 and 2 at: | https://www.climateadvisers.com/wp- | content/uploads/2014/01/2... | | If you have the spare time to read 507 pages of support, | please see: https://www.nap.edu/download/12794 | pipodeclown wrote: | Fusion is not going to be commercially viable anytime soon but | that's not the point. Whether how and to what we transition is | a political choice, if fossil fuels are too cheap for renewable | to compete, you tax carbon fuels more. Renewables mostly | everybody is ok with however have the problem that don't | produce power consistently and on demand, that's where nuclear | power comes in to fill that gap and hopefully in the future | fusion. If we dislike the nuclear waste problem enough, we'll | have to pay up to make fusion a financially viable alternative. | mensetmanusman wrote: | Another way of asking this question is how long will the | capital investment last? And what are the upkeep costs? | | Once we better understand this, governments would have the | decision making expertise and an understanding of timescales | involved to see if it is a worthwhile investment. | orangepurple wrote: | You can't put a price on energy independence in a free market | economy. Energy independence is a military objective and a | matter of national security. The costs are difficult to put in | perspective. | xondono wrote: | Of course you can. The price of energy independence is the | lowest total cost that can keep up with energy demand. | | The question is if fusion is really the cheapest way to do | it, say vs alternatives. | nomel wrote: | > lowest total cost that can keep up with energy demand | | It's not trivial since it's difficult to predict if that | external supplier will eventually decide to twist you arm | to maintain their energy stream. | 8note wrote: | Isn't it an insurance cost, for repaying when the energy | shuts off? | BizarroLand wrote: | Oil companies are subsidized to the tune of Billions of | dollars an hour. Subsidizing fusion energy would merely be | redirecting that money to the greater payoff. | 420official wrote: | This is not true.. 1 billion an hour is 8.76 trillion a | year yet you say "billions" an hour which would make it at | least 17.52 trillion a year which is basically the entire | GDP of the us. | | Certainly oil companies are subsidized but not "to the tune | of" the entire US GDP. | pstrateman wrote: | The hyperbole isn't needed. | | Billions of dollars an hour is 17 Trillion dollars a year. | | They're not being subsidized by that much | akimball wrote: | Count the socialized cost of environmental remediation | please. It will run into the quadrillion zone | mchusma wrote: | Id answer this in 2 ways: | | First. | | Let's say we have a trillion people in space stations/multiple | planets. Fusion is a energy source that can plausibly power | them. | | Second. | | fission works close to other sources, but is so hampered by | regulation that it hasn't gotten to be affordable. This may be | fixed in the future. micro-reactors solve the biggest economy | of scale issues and a renewed bipartisan interest in nuclear | could help it be politically viable. If fission works in | theory, fusion definitely works in theory (as the energy output | is much higher). | 542458 wrote: | I've wondered this as well. | | There is an argument that we're dramatically underestimating | the global warming impact of natural gas by | underestimating/ignoring the impact of leakage. | onion2k wrote: | Simple solution - nationalize energy production. | thow-58d4e8b wrote: | Proposing nationalization is akin to blasphemy nowadays - way | outside of Overton window. But I haven't really heard any | good arguments or benefits of electricity production and | distribution being private. | | On the other hand, there are a lot of good arguments in favor | of state ownership - matter of national security, need for | redundancy instead of efficiency, it's a commodity and a | basic necessity, low margins, large scale leads to financing | issues for corporations, chicken-egg problems that state is | better at dealing with, the domain is primarily about | engineering challenges with branding and management having | very limited impact, simple supply chains, cost-cutting may | lead to disastrous consequences, etc... | vilhelm_s wrote: | Natural gas plants are cheap but they cause global warming, so | soon we will not be able to use them. For example, the U.S. | target is to have zero carbon emissions from electricity | generation by 2035, and zero carbon emissions at all by 2050. | brightball wrote: | Their carbon emissions are still dramatically lower than | those of coal and oil. There are bigger fish to fry than NG. | | NG is likely going to be a critical transitional fuel for the | planet to depend on while we get to more abundant renewable | options, grid batteries and nuclear/fusion/thorium. | beambot wrote: | What time horizon are NG plants capitalized over? Soon | enough, that will be a significant factor in the economic | equation... | megaman821 wrote: | Also NG plants have the potential to burn various levels | of hydrogen mixed in with the natural gas. It could be a | nice compliment to areas that over-provision solar and | wind and make hydrogen with the excess energy. | rfrey wrote: | Typically 15 years. | adrianN wrote: | With NG you also have to take into account leakage from | extraction and transport. Methane is a pretty strong GHG. | I've heard that if you take that into account NG is not | that much better than coal. | brightball wrote: | That makes sense but it seems like a problem that could | be addressed if it was focused on. | blake1 wrote: | Not really. The equipment to seal wells and pipelines | against leaks would cost billions. | | We need more generation, but solar is already cheaper | than new natural gas built on the leaky network. It makes | more economic sense to just overbuild your solar at these | prices. | | [1] $250mn for a single state: | https://apnews.com/article/business-environment-and- | nature-c... | londons_explore wrote: | The existence of natural gas keeps electricity prices low, | which disincentives research into other power generation | methods. | | In a capitalist world, "lets do this until that is ready" | plans usually just end up delaying 'that'. | | A massive tax on carbon would mean we can all _pay_ for | 'this', until 'that' has been developed and we can enjoy | low prices again. | ohgodplsno wrote: | 500 gCO2eq/kWh. | | Fuck natural gas. Just because coal and oil are terrible | doesn't mean that it is a good option too. | | Build hydro, build nuclear, build wind and solar if you | have money to waste. But natural gas is not a good stopgap | measure while we get to fusion. | brightball wrote: | It's still less than half what's produced by coal or oil. | | https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 | | There are a limited number of locations where hydro is | viable and most of them have been tapped (last I read | about it at least), | | I'm 100% with you on nuclear. | | Regardless of cost, we need base load capabilities when | the wind isn't blowing and the sun is down. Grid storage | hasn't been well proven yet. People are actively fighting | nuclear and the costs as well as timeliness are crazy. If | there's one thing in this country worth wasting money on, | it's nuclear. | | If we can't get base load generation from nuclear due to | all of the financial risks, NG is about all that's left | to carry the load as an improvement over coal and oil. | | I'd much rather have zero emission nuclear, but NG is the | stop gap that we are left with until we start committing | to nuclear (or we have a better round-the-clock option). | coryrc wrote: | > we need base load capabilities when the wind isn't | blowing and the sun is down | | That's not a proper use of the concept "base load". | | We used to have plants which are only cost-effective when | run 24/7, but are cheaper than other kinds. The concept | of "base load" is to build those kinds of plants to meet | roughly the lowest daily usage so as to minimize costs. | | It isn't a substitute for "capacity needed when | renewables aren't generating". | cmrdporcupine wrote: | Leaks and emissions specific to NG aside, NG is primarily a | byproduct of the oil extraction industry. It lives in a | symbiotic relationship with it. To truly get off oil we | need to get off gas as well. There's a reason why oil patch | boosters and lobbyists and climate change deniers in places | like Alberta are also pushing natural gas; the fortunes of | oil and gas are tied together. This is a lobby and sector | we need to deprecate not support. | Robotbeat wrote: | In the US, natural gas produces more emissions now than | coal, if you include heating. NG is now the big fish to | fry. | jhallenworld wrote: | Study this: | | https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... | | Ignoring storage: it makes no sense now to build anything but | wind and solar. Only the marginal cost of gas is cheaper | (meaning existing plants, not new ones). | | Including storage: conventional is still cheaper, but not by | much (within a factor of 2): $81 for PV+storage vs. $44 for gas | combined cycle. | | We should put more resources into storage now, fusion can wait. | adrianN wrote: | PV+storage is how many hours of storage? Storing enough power | to last a night is just getting close to commercially viable | afaik, but storing enough power to last a winter is still | quite expensive. | myself248 wrote: | The best storage is no storage at all, it is demand- | response. | | Things like responsive appliances and EV chargers that can | schedule their load rather than insisting that limitless | power be available instantaneously. I don't care when the | dishwasher runs as long as the dishes are clean by | tomorrow, you know? | | Of course right now, putting the word "smart" on an | appliance doesn't imply any of that, and the way it ends up | implemented will probably be terrible and a half. But | theoretically, demand-response could dramatically reduce | the need for storage. I think it truly has a large role to | play, but the folks releasing insecure internet-of-shit | devices have a lot to answer for first. | meltedcapacitor wrote: | Yes, but bulk of the demand is heat and industry, so | you're quickly back to having to build a lot of "storage" | in the form of buildings with high thermal inertia and | spare capacity for production, so that you can keep the | high energy plants idle at inconvenient times. Hard to | say if that is more efficient than building actual energy | storage. | | Every little helps I guess, but getting people not to | shower on cloudy days is not gonna move the needle | materially. | learc83 wrote: | You could just implement enough surge pricing that | people/companies work around peak times on their own and | build their own storage. | Qwertious wrote: | Heat is fairly trivially stored for _months_ on a mass | scale, check out Polar-night Energy 's system - | basically, you heat up (usually with just resistive | heating) a bunch of sand in a 40metre-wide insulated | cylinder, and when you want to use that heat you use fans | to blow air through ducts that are surrounded by the | sand. | | The amazing thing is that every single part of the tech | is old and boring - resistive heating is literally as old | as electricity, electric fans and ducting are trivial, | heating sand is basically impossible to screw up, etc | etc. | pstrateman wrote: | There really aren't many things that can be off for | significant periods of time without making them useless. | | Indeed I can't think of any that can be off for more than | a day. | | Can you? | mikewave wrote: | There are companies that will drive your "smart" | thermostat and purport to save you money by strategically | controlling it, but in the end if you want to save money | on your house's climate control, you're going to end up | being warmer/colder than you would like. | myself248 wrote: | Most EVs have enough battery to cover more than a week of | daily commute. If you could charge for significantly | cheaper and greener than you do right now, by simply | telling it to only charge when the panels on the roof are | producing a surplus, isn't that sort of a no-brainer? | | Maybe you'd go back to grid mode when anticipating a | weekend trip, or when the charge hits some sort of level | of concern. And I expect polar places with cloudy winters | would probably run a fair bit of conventional generation | like we do now, in the winter. But during the sunny | season, shut it down! | adrianN wrote: | I agree, but I think you can't demand-response away all | of winter. People still want to drive their EVs and heat | their homes and industrial processes can't be time | shifted for weeks or even months. | | You'll need some storage. Right now that would probably | be Hydrogen or Methane, and making those is pretty | expensive. Perhaps something better will come along, or | it gets cheaper with scale, but at the current CO2 price | it's not competitive with fossil fuels. | mikewave wrote: | > I don't care when the dishwasher runs as long as the | dishes are clean by tomorrow, you know? | | You can already accomplish 95% of this now with any | dishwasher made within the last 20 years that has a delay | timer on it. Just load it up and tell it to run in 6 | hours and then go to bed. | | I don't want some 3rd party company driving a huge team | of middlemen sucking up a gigantic pile of data in order | to determine when it might be strategically useful for my | dishwasher to be on. I don't want my dishwasher on the | internet. I barely want it to have any electronics at | all, because I want the damn thing to last for 20 years, | not the scant 5 years people seem to be getting out of | major appliances these days. You wanna talk carbon | footprint and recycling, making things reliable would | probably save us a million times more energy than would | using the internet-of-things to run this stuff at night | time. | | I _might_ be willing to accept a compromise where my | smart power meter uses an open protocol to inform devices | in my house of the current energy cost for Time-of-Use | billing and then the appliance decides when to start | based on a threshold I set, but even that's more | implementation than is really necessary here. | | Also, there are only a few appliances that can really | make use of that kind of thing. As a parent, I need to | run laundry all the time, non-stop, because children are | filthy monsters. I can't factor energy costs into that, | because laundry takes a long time to run and many loads | need to be run. It's only a small number of people who | can stick their one weekly load into the dryer and tell | it to wait for night - and again, a timer would do 90%+ | of the work spreading the load around, you don't need a | gigantic network of flimsy compute doing the work here. | myself248 wrote: | I think we agree more than we disagree. An overnight | timer is ideal right now while most base-load comes from | coal and nuclear, and power is cheapest at night. | | But as we move past combustion (I'm in Michigan and the | amount of coal we burn for power is absolutely shameful) | and into more solar, it's less predictable. I can't set a | timer that knows when the sky will be cloudy. | | This is why I'm so excited to see EVSEs that take data | from PV inverters and have a "PV surplus only" mode, | where the car is charged only when the sun shines, | without ever importing grid power. Modulating 30kW of | load is just as good as 30kW of storage, but costs | nothing but a few lines of code. | | And yeah, networks and middlemen can suck it. Keeping it | local is always better. | giaour wrote: | Nitpicky, but shouldn't this pattern be called "supply- | response" (as in, appliances programmed to respond to a | supply glut) "Demand-response" sounds like it should be | used for power sources that only spin up when demand | exceeds the production rate. | myself248 wrote: | It strikes me as weird too. They're calling it "demand | which responds", but it's phrased funny. | Andrew_nenakhov wrote: | "We should put more resources into breeding faster horses | now, internal combustion can wait." - someone in late 19 | century. | einpoklum wrote: | Well, if we'd have gone down that road, plus strong | environmental awareness, maybe the Earth wouldn't be | warming up so badly right now, and the oceans wouldn't have | islands of plastic (= oil) waste. Now, sure, we wouldn't | have enjoyed some of the benefits of car technology, but - | public transport (esp. trains) makes up for a lot of that. | OTOH, public transport pollutes too. | Andrew_nenakhov wrote: | Had we gone down this road, we'd have a thick layer of | manure covering everything. Living creatures are a source | of CO2 too, and a big one. Look up for a share of | greenhouse gases coming form agriculture. Had we used | faster horses, that volume of emissions would be | effectively doubled or tripled. | Qwertious wrote: | >Living creatures are a source of CO2 too, and a big one. | Look up for a share of greenhouse gases coming form | agriculture. | | CO2 emitted by horses comes from the food they eat, which | is absorbed from the atmosphere in the first place by the | plant when it grows. | | And a ton of the greenhouse gases from agriculture come | from using oil, a major component of that being from | tractors and crop dusters (which wouldn't exist in a | horse-only world). | Andrew_nenakhov wrote: | No, not really. [1] | | [1]: https://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global- | warming-m... | after_care wrote: | I'd much rather take an ICE train than a steam engine | train... | m4rtink wrote: | Forget ICE, kets build a ICF powered train! :D | jhallenworld wrote: | Hah, well what was the rate of progress on breeding faster | horses vs. internal combustion in the late 19th century? I | don't imagine that the progress rate was very high for | horses.. | __MatrixMan__ wrote: | I'm not so sure about internal combustion, but I think it | took steam engines 100 years to start outperforming | horses. | | I think that that's a better technology comparison | because internal combustion was able to leverage the | theoretical insights originally derived for steam. | There's no shoulders-of-giants effect going on for | nuclear fusion, as there wasn't for steam. | mywittyname wrote: | Well, it kind of depends on what you define as teh first | steam engines. Are you including like novelty stuff used | for entertainment like magic shows and fountains? Or are | we starting with the first steam engine used to do real | mechanical work? The Newcomen engine came out in around | 1712, but it's initial purpose as a water pump for mines | wasn't really in direct competition to horse powered | pumps. While they could be used to generate power for | factories, that was an uncommon use case because they | gradually lost power output over time. | | The Watt design is when we finally saw steam engines | replace animal power in the late 1770s. So not quite 100 | years. | | But yes, ICE development benefited from all the problems | solved by steam power generation. I believe the ability | to machine pistons to an accuracy of 0.1" wasn't | developed until around 1750. Prior to that, people just | hammered iron roundish and called it a day. Good enough | for large steam engines, but not too valuable with an | ICE. | after_care wrote: | I want to live in a world where we work on projects that | will benefit us both 5 and 50 years in the future. | [deleted] | dragontamer wrote: | The benefits of a car were immediately obvious as soon as | supply lines were considered. Feed for horses was something | like 30% of all deliveries in a horse-based supply chain. | | Railroads run off of coal, but steam-engines were huge. ICE | engines were miniature engines that also ran off of a fuel | source (eventually settling upon oil, but many different | fuel sources were considered in those early days, including | electricity). | | --------- | | Such benefits are not immediately obvious with solar/wind. | In particular, USA doubles its electricity usage each day, | and then it shrinks down to 50% by nightfall (which does | NOT time with the sun, its slightly offset: the 5pm sun | loses most of its solar-power but homes are still hot and | using a ton of electricity for A/C) | | As a baseload plant, solar/wind, even with storage, is a | bit unreliable. That's fine, they're a cheap source of | energy but you need to consider things like hurricanes: | winds too fast so you need to shut off the wind plants | (otherwise they'd spin too fast and damage themselves), and | the cloud cover so thick you lose most of your solar power. | | Since there's no storage mechanism that lasts for days (ex: | hypothetical hurricane), you end up needing to build a | 200MW gas turbine ("just in case"), +200MW of clean energy. | | Note: this is fine. This is probably the best path forward | for now. But nuclear is reliable and doesn't need this | "natural gas assist". Even if a hurricane sweeps over an | area, the nuclear power plants will keep working. | | EDIT: The issues come up if someone builds 200MW of solar | panels / wind but fails to build any "just in case" energy | sources. Which is happening. Their grids will fail when | solar/wind inevitably cuts off. | thow-58d4e8b wrote: | > ICE engines were miniature engines that also ran off of | a fuel source (eventually settling upon oil, but many | different fuel sources were considered | | Fun fact - Rudolf Diesel's first engines were running on | cooking oil. In fact, many diesel engines can operate on | vegetable oils without modifications (not long term | though). That sounds odd, but from the perspective of | "burn hydrocarbons to generate heat", petrol, diesel, | oil, body fat, coal or kerosene are all very similar to | each other. | Robotbeat wrote: | No, horse breeders argued the supply lines favored horses | as horses could be fed by unlimited biofuels instead of | limited fossil fuels. Of course, there was a difference | in scale, but it's just false to claim there weren't | major naysayers about automobiles from the horse | industry. | mywittyname wrote: | People thought fossil fuels were a finite resource back | then? | | I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if _someone_ thought | that, but given the frequency with which oil was being | discovered, it seems reasonable that people would have | assumed it to be effectively unlimited. | Robotbeat wrote: | Even in the late 1800s when cars were just starting to be | used, the ultimate scarcity of fossil fuels (including | coal) was explored by Jules Verne who suggested hydrogen | as a successor fuel in _The Mysterious Island_. And local | scarcity of fossil fuels was acknowledged since everyone | knew that oil wells started reducing output after a few | years. | | Nikola Tesla spoke glowingly about how we don't need | coal, oil, or gas if we just harness the energy around us | (what he meant here was quackery, unfortunately, but wind | and solar accomplish very much the same thing). People | understood from the beginning that coal, oil, and gas are | finite. | dragontamer wrote: | IIRC, people did think we were going to run out of coal | back then. A minority, but yes, I do recall some quotes | from the 1800s about the exponential growth of coal usage | and that people were using too much coal. | | But by the time ICE engines were getting invented, it was | a done debate IIRC. Horses used to pull trains after all, | the steam engine replaced horses in train-usage decades | earlier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagonway, for the | animal-based predecessor to trains) | mcguire wrote: | " _But nuclear is reliable and doesn 't need this | "natural gas assist". Even if a hurricane sweeps over an | area, the nuclear power plants will keep working._" | | Actually, they don't. | | " _As a precaution measure, the reactor shall be shut | down at least two hours before the hurricane's strong | winds arrive at the location. Generally this happens when | the speed reaches between 70 and 75 mph (between 113 and | 121 km /h)._" (https://www.foronuclear.org/en/nuclear- | power/questions-and-a...) | | Also, they need electrical power to keep the reactor cool | ---typically the power grid and co-located diesel | generators, not necessarily the best redundant backup | system. | mechanical_bear wrote: | It's only the older designs that need active cooling. | | https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/27/136920/the- | new-s... | Aeolun wrote: | Given how long it took Fukushima to cool down, does this | actually do anything appreciable in the two hours before | arrival? | andy_ppp wrote: | I wonder if it's possible to create air conditioning that | generates electricity. It seems like you're removing | energy from the air. | dragontamer wrote: | Do you mean a heat engine? | | Because the "opposite" of air conditioning is just a heat | engine (taking "hot" and "cold" source, and using the | difference to generate locomotion). In fact, all engines | are glorified heat engines: be it a steam turbine, ICE, | geothermal, or whatever | | When air gets hot, it expands. When air gets cold, it | contracts. So heat up air through some mechanism (hot | side) to push a piston up. To pull the piston down, | either use momentum or the cold-source (cold air | contracts, pulling the stuff down). | | The sterling engine is the best general purpose | demonstration of this, and you can buy such engines for | $20 to $100 or so. | | ICE engines use gasoline as the hot source. Steam engines | use steam (water at 100C) to transfer the heat from the | hot source to the needed locations (heat can be from | nuclear, coal, or other sources) | | ---------- | | Air conditioning is just this process in reverse. Expand | the air forcibly by applying force to the piston. This | cools down the air. "Gather" the coldness through some | mechanism, which heats up your air inside the A/C unit | while cooling whatever is on your "cold plate". | | Push the hot air and compress it down. This heats up the | air even further: "transfer" the hotness through some | mechanism (aka: heat something else up, like the air | outside the house). This cools down the air inside your | A/C unit. | | Now find a fluid that's more efficient at this process | than oxygen. Then realize that fluid is terrible for the | Ozone layer and write a regulation for a newer, crappier | fluid that's less damaging to the Earth, and you have | modern A/C units. | | > It seems like you're removing energy from the air. | | You're just transferring the hotness somewhere else. Go | feel the air that your refrigerator outputs: its far | hotter than the air inside. If you measure the energy, | its the energy that was "stolen" from inside the | refrigerator + the energy "spent" on the heat pump (that | compression / decompression cycle takes work, and work | generates heat) | | We can transfer heat around, but it costs energy. | Alternatively, a difference in heat can be used to gather | energy, but it will "Average" the temperatures and | eventually the hot-source and cold-source will be the | same temperature. | | We can use fuels to make the hot-source stay really, | really hot for long periods of time (as long as we have a | source of fuel), and that's basically the design of steam | engines / heat engines. | nomel wrote: | Think of it like water flowing down a hill. The heat is | in your room because it flowed down to a cooler space | with less energy, just like the water flowed down to a | space with less potential energy. Moving that heat back | to a higher energy area, back outside, is the same as | pumping the water back up a hill. It always takes more | than one unit of energy to move one unit of energy back | "up". You can only capture energy if it's moving "down". | | You might enjoy a physics course, especially if you enjoy | calculus, although an entry level course won't require | it. | scoopertrooper wrote: | Your analogy falls flat because we're still decades away | from a functional fusion power plant. | | "Why breed faster horses now when maybe my grandchildren | will get to zoom around in cars?" | Andrew_nenakhov wrote: | The 1000 miles road starts with a first step, and it's | not like we can't pursue several approaches at once. | People like grandparent poster suggest us drop everything | and concentrate on the idea _he_ likes best. That is a | very bad and harmful idea. | Robotbeat wrote: | We aren't. MIT's SPARC Tokamak design could be ready for | commercialization by a decade. Less time than completing | a high speed rail project in the US. | Qwertious wrote: | In many areas nowadays, solar is the cheapest source of | energy bar none. | | Now, suppose you live in one of those areas. Two | questions: | | 1) What year was solar first ready for commercialization? | 2) Would you _ever_ consider that year 's solar tech | outside of extremely niche applications? | mywittyname wrote: | Call me with the second and third commercial reactors are | _completed_. That 's when we'll have an idea of the real | world viability, including how to scale and deal with | production concerns. | Robotbeat wrote: | So we shouldn't be investing in developing nuclear fusion | power until after it's proven and commercialized? How | does that work? | mywittyname wrote: | No, I'm saying don't sit around talking about how this | will be ready for commercial deployment in less than ten | years until after it has been demonstrated to actually | work in a production environment. | | The first commercial production system will be an alpha | build. The second and thirds are betas. It's only after | those are completed that there's enough information to | make commercial plans. | | As of now, this system the GP is talking about _hasn 't | even been built yet_ and won't be operational until at | least 2025. And even when it is built, it is just a lab | experiment designed to run in 10 second bursts. There are | numerous more steps _after_ this design phase before we | get to commercial application. | | Ten years is a pipe-dream for commercial application. | | I'm excited to see progress in this field. But we are | doing it a huge disservice by spreading misinformation | about it. There are still a lot of problems to be solved | before these are ready for prime time. And these problems | will require a lot more funding to solve. If people sit | around and talk about how this will be _ready to go in 10 | years_ , then who is going to want to fund it into year | 11? | | Scientific funding is directed largely by politicians. | And there are many, many political opponents to science | in our current Congress. Giving them ammo in the form of | empty promises doesn't do advocates for fusion energy any | good. | | The honest answer is, we still don't know if tokamak will | ever make for a viable commercial power plant. Best can | be said is that it has been demonstrated to produce net | positive energy for short periods of time, and that there | is confidence that improvements can be made. That's it. | The viability of commercial application has yet to be | demonstrated and _may never happen_. | mcguire wrote: | The word "could" is doing a lot of work, there. | | And how many times have we heard the phrase "a decade" in | this field? | Robotbeat wrote: | Kind of a lazy comment. There has been substantial | progress with the latest development from NIF as well as | SPARC demonstrating a magnet section that would enable | ITER at a much smaller scale using fundamentally superior | superconducting technology With NIF's latest result, | we're no longer just generating smoke from rubbing sticks | together, now we got a flame. | | That's a substantial, qualitative change in the state of | the art of fusion technology. Now we need to do it dozens | of times per second and make steam from it, while using | efficient lasers and breeding tritium from the lithium | jacket. | | Works kind of like the EUV light sources TSMC uses to | make the highest end computer chips, except a fuel pellet | instead of a drop of tin. Like so: https://en.wikipedia.o | rg/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy | thomasahle wrote: | This is a great resource! | Robotbeat wrote: | Why should we wait for fusion? We can and should do both, and | fusion also benefits from storage. Fusion and fission help | northern countries in particular as they actually produce | MORE energy during the dark, cold months. | [deleted] | 8note wrote: | Where does that leave turning existing coal plants into gas | plants? | eldaisfish wrote: | Lazard do not factor in the cost of accommodating the | vagaries of wind and solar into these figures. | | As just one example - when the wind turbines aren't running, | your lights are still on. That power comes from somewhere and | that somewhere has a cost to keep it available. | | That cost is passed on to electricity consumers but not the | source of the problem - wind and solar generators. | Robotbeat wrote: | Yeah, a better option is to use capital costs and input | them into https://model.energy | ttul wrote: | August 2021 | aero-glide2 wrote: | elorant is posting from oort cloud, be easy on him. | ttul wrote: | Oh good. I wasn't aware they had relocated quite that far | oort. | tantony wrote: | Is this "plasma breakeven" or overall break-even? | lisper wrote: | Neither. From TFA: | | "While the latest experiment still required more energy in than | it got out, it is the first suspected to reach the crucial | stage of 'ignition', which allowed considerably more energy to | be produced than ever before, and paves the way for 'break | even', where the energy in is matched by the energy out." | | Here [1] is an excellent video by Sabine Hossenfelder about why | you should not get too excited about this result. | | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY | mlindner wrote: | It's neither, agreed. | | However, Sabine misconstrues things in the opposite direction | and lies through omission to the audience. For example | including startup energy and not ammortizing it over runtime, | or not assuming that the energy consumption of the | experiments is part of the required energy consumption of the | fusion reactor, or trying to construe that once you have a | fusion power reaction that is burning it is still especially | difficult to further create a functioning power reactor out | of it. | | The true hard part of fusion is the burning plasma aspect. | Once you have a burning plasma, it's a heat source like any | other (with a few side-effects like neutron output) and | everything we know from fission power reactors (but with a | much lower radiation) and fossil fuel generators applies. | dcow wrote: | Where are you getting this impression? Her video pretty | clearly focuses on the confusion between the Qs. Where does | she get the napkin math wrong? She uses a published figure | for total energy required during the operation of ITER when | it's up and running not a one time startup cost figure. Id | she misrepresented that number, what would be a more honest | total power consumption figure? As far as construing the | output, she uses existing loss ratio for heat to electrical | energy conversion which really does not seem to work to | construe the problem as "especially difficult", it's | "normally difficult" is how I interpreted. Are there | impending advancements in energy conversion that makes 50% | too liberal? | mlindner wrote: | Her video multiple times tries to make fake total Q | values by looking at the energy consumption of JET and | ITER and then trying to say that is Q_total, which is | wrong. | | She doesn't even show her calculations on how she | calculates some of her Q_total examples. | jacquesm wrote: | From TFA: | | "The pace of improvement in energy output has been rapid, | suggesting we may soon reach more energy milestones, such as | exceeding the energy input from the lasers used to kick-start | the process." | birdman3131 wrote: | These people grew up on Wow and are familiar with Soon(tm). | [deleted] | [deleted] | Cerium wrote: | I think it is neither. Most nuclear fusion news is focused on | magnetic confinement. This article is about reaching ignition | on an inertial confinement system. | mlindner wrote: | Neither, it's inertial confinement fusion, which isn't really | seen as a way to a successful commercial reactor (at least not | that I've heard of) and is more a tool to study the physics of | D-T fusion reaction in a controlled way that's not inside a | nuclear bomb. It's a tool for experiments. | leephillips wrote: | You may be surprised to know that there are loads of people | working in ICF who think they're working on a plan to supply | the world with energy, and have detailed and elaborate | designs for commercial ICF reactors, including pellet | factories, tritium extraction, and everything. With | calculations of the final cost per delivered kW-hour. It's | all a fantasy, but it's a real research activity, funded by | the US DOE (mainly through the NNSA). | gene-h wrote: | What's important here is that they may have achieved ignition, | that is making the fusion reaction self sustaining[0]. Once it | becomes self sustaining one should be able to add more fuel to | the pellet to get more energy out for the same input energy. | | It's worth noting that NIF was not intended to generate power | and is not representative of a potential power plant. The | lasers on NIF are old and were chosen to have a lower | efficiency for cost reasons. In addition, while NIF could | generate much more energy, NIF isn't necessarily going to | pursue this because the higher output energy may render the | machine inoperable for too long. | | Dealing with a high rate of explosions is one thing this class | of fusion will need to solve before being able to generate | power. | | [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition | dogma1138 wrote: | Don't you still need to spend energy on confinement? You | don't need to "reignite" the plasma but w/e confinement | solution you chosen still has a cost and a non marginal one | when it comes to magnetic confinement. | gene-h wrote: | this uses inertial confinement rather than magnetic | confinement. | dogma1138 wrote: | You still need big ass lasers or particle accelerators | for ICF too, these tend to be quite energy intensive too. | tsimionescu wrote: | Yes, with ICF you do need to constantly reignite the | plasma. | tsimionescu wrote: | > Once it becomes self sustaining one should be able to add | more fuel to the pellet to get more energy out for the same | input energy. | | That's not how ICF works. Plasma, being a gas-like state, | will always expand to fill whatever volume is presented. With | ignition, the rate of expansion is essentially lower than the | rate of fusion, allowing you to fuse all of the fuel before | the plasma dissipates and cools down. | | In ICF as studied at NIF, you start with an extremely | precisely machined piece of metal called a hohlraum, you put | a solid pellet of fuel inside at an extremely precise | location, then fire a laser with extremely precise alignment | to heat the hohlraum until it generates X-Rays that heat the | pellet just right so that its outer layer explodes, creating | an equal implosion, generating two shockwaves inside the | pellet; if the two shockwaves meet just right, at the center | of their meeting place you get a fusion reaction, and you | hope that that fusion reaction has enough time to heat up and | cause more fusion reactions before the initial implosion | loses speed and expansion happens. | | That initial shock is the only thing containing the plasma - | once it has lost its velocity, the plasma dissipates and | cools down. If ignition was reached, the gas that cools down | and dissipates should be 100% He, instead of a mix of He, D | and T. However, there is no way to stop this dissipation, it | is a fundamental part of ICF. | | The only way to keep an ICF reactor going is to shoot one | laser burst at one pellet, capture the energy of the fusion, | and use that to power the next laser burst fired at the next | pellet. | | Of course, after each burst of laser heating the hohlraum so | much that it radiates the heat as X rays, and then briefly | containing a 1-10M kelvin burst of hot plasma, plus a neutron | bombardment, the hohlraum is destroyed. Since machining the | hohlraum to the precise shape required to achieve the | shockwaves discussed above is never going to be a cheap | process, it is impossible to imagine ICF would ever be even a | tiny bit close to economical, even if it could in principle | output more energy than it requires as input. | | As such, ICF is strictly a scientific pursuit, mostly | interesting for nuclear weapons research. | gene-h wrote: | This report found that ICF could reach LCOE as low as | $25/MWh "with optimistic but not obviously unrealistic | inputs."[0] This does require hohlraums cost about $2 each | and are fired every 20 seconds. With mass production and | process optimization it may not be ridiculous to reduce | hohlaum cost to this amount. However, the yield is about 5 | gigajoules which is equivalent to about 1 ton of TNT. | | Making equipment that can handle 1 ton of TNT exploding | every 20 seconds is an interesting engineering challenge. | | [0]https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2020 | .005... | tsimionescu wrote: | "Optimistic but not obviously unrealistic inputs" include | reducing the cost of hohlraums from the million dollar | range to 10$ (not even sure if that accounts for the | price of the gold itself), a reactor capable of resisting | 50 million pulses before needing replacement, and a few | others. | | It also considers the price of a fusion power plant to be | less than that of a fission power plant, based entirely | on the observation that it would have less stringent | safety requirements. | | Overall this article may be right in principle if taken | to refer to an arbitrarily far away future (hundreds of | years away at least, if ITER and DEMO are to be taken as | realistic examples of the pace of improvement of fusion | power in general, even if they are MCF instead of ICF). | hangonhn wrote: | What is the goal of NIF? I've read repeatedly that fusion | power isn't their end goal but rather to study inertial | confinement. That's fine but why study inertial confinement | if not to generate power? I've always been very confused | about their goal. I'm a total layman when it comes to this | stuff so there's some nuance I'm not understanding. | Appreciate any clarification anyone can give. | capekwasright wrote: | In terms of the NIF's broader goal, as opposed to the | specific goals for their ICF work, the NIF is meant to keep | nuclear physicists fresh on research relevant to nuclear | weapons design in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War | and Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. [1] | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facilit | y#NIF... | aerostable_slug wrote: | > What is the goal of NIF? | | Nuclear weapons, more specifically stockpile stewardship | (what happens as weapons age) and verification of weapons | codes/simulation software (can we make new weapons without | full-scale testing). | | Everything else is gravy. There's a reason it's at one of | the weapons labs (vs. the unclassified work done at most | other national laboratories). | nebopolis wrote: | The thing you are missing is that in addition to fusion | power research (which is valuable and NIF has made major | contributions to) there is also fusion weapons research. | Inertal confinement is (kinda) close to the conditions | inside a fusion bomb, and NIF also has a mandate to | research those conditions. For that kind of research, a | single pulse of fusion ignition is exactly the kind of data | they need. Since we have a nuclear weapon test ban, and | computer simulations need some kind of ground truth to be | calibrated against, achieving fusion ignition in a lab is | valuable to NIF for that reason alone. | jjk166 wrote: | The NIF is a facility for conducting experiments. The goal | for the field is fusion power, and these experiments may | wind up contributing toward it, but it will never be | anything more than a stepping stone. The primary purpose of | the NIF is validating computer models for simulating | nuclear reactions. These models are used both for the | design of nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors. They also | develop technologies to support their activities, such as | new sensors and laser control methods. Compare this program | to say a mars rover where we don't expect the rover itself | to do anything of great practical utility, but the lessons | learned along the way have many potential applications both | directly for future missions, and indirectly for spinoff | technologies. | akeck wrote: | Probably just "plasma breakeven" Sabine talks about the issue. | | [1] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-close-is- | nucle... | mlindner wrote: | Sabine actually is completely misleading and misconstrues a | bunch of facts. | | None of these plants are even attempting to have real energy | breakeven and spend a ton of energy supplying experiments and | unrelated support equipment. They don't even have a method of | capturing energy as that's not the point as it would make it | harder to test the physics. Additionally these plants have | high amounts of "startup energy consumption" that is also | factored in to the energy usage but would be amortized out | over a long run. Trying to use the absolute power consumption | of the experiment as if that's where the state of the art is | at for true energy break even is completely wrong. | | Plasma breakeven is all anyone is really working on. Once you | have plasma breakeven you have a self-sustaining heater | basically, which then can be used to create energy. The point | of an "ignited plasma" is that it's self-sustaining and just | pumps out heat, even if most of the energy is used to keep | the reaction going. | ckuehne wrote: | I think your statement "Once you have plasma breakeven you | have a self-sustaining heater basically" is false. | According to Wikipedia [1] - if I interpret it correctly - | the fusion energy gain factor from plasma must be 5 (!) to | have a self-sustaining heater: | | "Most fusion reactions release at least some of their | energy in a form that cannot be captured within the plasma, | so a system at Q = 1 will cool without external heating. | With typical fuels, self-heating in fusion reactors is not | expected to match the external sources until at least Q = | 5" | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor | willis936 wrote: | Fusion begets fusion. ITER plans to have high-intensity, | relatively short Q=10 shots. If the plasma heats itself | then it doesn't need much heating. This sudden focus on Q | is clearly the result of one vocal non-expert not | understanding the field and everyone listening to them | like they have something valuable to teach. | mlindner wrote: | I oversimplified in that statement, you need more than a | factor of 1 because of heat losses to the environment | yes. However 5 is not much different than 1. We've gone | from 0.0001 only a few years ago to close to 1 now. | | And btw, you really want more than 5, 10 or 20 ideally, | but again, that's not too hard as compared to how far | we've come and new reactors will be beyond that soon. | tootie wrote: | I think her meaning is pretty clear and correct. As much as | plasma breakeven may be the entire goal of ITER it's | absolutely setting them up for a badly missed public | expectation. The day they declare net positive output, the | world will ask when we can start building infrastructure | and the answer will be "30 more years" and then they'll get | their funding yanked forever. | willis936 wrote: | >As much as plasma breakeven may be the entire goal of | ITER | | Who gave you that impression? They were lying. The goal | of ITER has always been to study burning plasmas and | experiment with solutions to problems that a reactor- | grade MCF machine faces. | mlindner wrote: | ITER isn't even possible to create an economic nuclear | reactor out of because it's too big. The sheer size of a | ITER-sized reactor doesn't get us to economical reactors. | ITER is a science experiment, not a commercial reactor | design. High-field strength high temperature | superconductor based allows much smaller sizes than ITER, | but ITER was designed with the technology that was | available in the late 1990s. | tsimionescu wrote: | > Plasma breakeven is all anyone is really working on. Once | you have plasma breakeven you have a self-sustaining heater | basically, which then can be used to create energy. The | point of an "ignited plasma" is that it's self-sustaining | and just pumps out heat, even if most of the energy is used | to keep the reaction going. | | This is dead wrong. First of all, the experiment described | here is ICF, in which you have to constantly re-heat new | pellets of fuel. Even for MCF, you have to spend inordinate | amounts of energy just containing the million kelvins | plasma with few kelvin superconducting magnets, and to | constantly deliver new D+T into the plasma. | | If containment fails at any time for any amount of time, | your reactor is instantly obliterated. | | Not to mention, your source of heat only heats up by about | half of the energy - the other half is radiated away as | hard to capture neutrons, which are almost entirely a waste | product. | | I have no idea why you think that ignited plasma is enough | to maintain an energy-producing reactor. | | Edit: million kelvins should have been billion kelvins... | jhgb wrote: | > the other half is radiated away as hard to capture | neutrons, which are almost entirely a waste product | | I thought the neutrons were supposed to take away the | heat, to be absorbed in layers of water? | tsimionescu wrote: | Reading more about this, it seems that one of the ideas | is indeed to capture the neutrons in a liquid lithium | blanket, that would then produce both heat and tritium, | and using that heat, that is outside the magnetic | confinement, to connect to a turbine. | | Unfortunately, I believe that the area of actually | capturing the energy of the fusion reaction is almost | entirely unstudied yet in practice. | tediousdemise wrote: | What are the odds of runaway fusion occurring? Is there any | consideration that a violent reaction could engulf the planet and | end life as we know it? | regularfry wrote: | Zero. | tediousdemise wrote: | Is this because the chain reaction is limited by the fuel | source? | regularfry wrote: | The fusion reaction needs containment, the right fuel, and | massive amounts of energy in _just_ the right place. It 's | phenomenally difficult to marshal the containment necessary | to make the energy from a fusion reaction go into more | fusion and not, say, warming up the test chamber a | fraction. Yes, the fact that there's not much fuel is | important, but not as important as the finickiness of | making the plasma do what you want in the first place. | | One of the major problems (arguably _the_ problem) with | tokamak or similar fusion reactors is that if the plasma | ever touches the edge of the vessel, it immediately cools | down and stops being plasma. It can 't fuse with itself any | more, much less trigger anything else to start. Heavier | atoms need more energy to fuse, that's why you see | hydrogen, helium, lithium bandied about in these | discussions. The amount of energy needed to fuse the atoms | in the walls of a fusion reactor is _literally_ supernova- | scale. We 're not talking "there's an engineering tolerance | built in for safety", rather "as a civilisation it's not | immediately conceivable how we might generate amounts of | energy that large". | | Given that the majority of the earth is made out of | elements that are inconveniently heavy, runaway fusion is | absolutely, definitely, totally, completely not a problem. | DreamFlasher wrote: | Old? | OJFord wrote: | Previously passim: | https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... | | (Edit: along with other, I now realise different, news from MIT.) | | (Including my submission of this same link, not discussed: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28219462, but the others are | the same news.) | | Discussed mostly in: | ~~https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28462151 and:~~(edit, per | above) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28219337 | ortusdux wrote: | SPARC [?] NIF | OJFord wrote: | Ok, I hadn't realised the MIT one I said 'mostly discussed | in' was different, but the others are this. | mastrsushi wrote: | Test | pmdulaney wrote: | Three cheers to the special relationship -- specifically as it | extends to nuclear fusion! | ohcomments wrote: | Next step.... Implement this in a spaceship and GTFO'a here... | not2b wrote: | We're still a very long way off. Sabine Hossenfelder has a good | explanation of what's wrong with most reporting on progress | toward fusion: | | http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-close-is-nuclea... | | edit: not sure why this was downvoted, it's directly relevant and | the video and transcript discuss this experiment. It quotes | Arthur Turrell: "This phenomenal breakthrough brings us | tantalisingly close to a demonstration of 'net energy gain' from | fusion reactions - just when the planet needs it." But this comes | close to getting Qplasma to be 1, which is about a factor of | 50-70 lower than getting Q to be 1 (total power into the reactor | vs usable power out of the reactor). | kragen wrote: | Does this mean you can now build a hydrogen bomb without uranium | or plutonium? | | If not, why not? | 00N8 wrote: | No, the ignition here is small - on the order of a stick of | dynamite. There's no reasonable way to scale it up to the size | of a hydrogen bomb. Even if the lasers could just be scaled up | larger & still work, which they can't b/c the lasers would make | too dense of plasma & block their own beams, the number you'd | need & the geometry of trying to use it on a full scale bomb | would be totally impractical even for a single test. Also, a | city sized laser ignition source w/ a bomb at the middle | wouldn't be a useful weapon even if it were possible | tsimionescu wrote: | Because to achieve 1MW of energy from fusion, you put 200MW of | power into the lasers. And, you have to fire these lasers with | unfathomable precision at a tiny piece of gold, in order to | heat up an even tinier pellet of hydrogen, which then heats up | enormously for a few milliseconds before fizzing out. | | ICF is a good way of studying what happens inside a hydrogen | bomb, but it is in no way imaginable how you could use it as a | weapon in itself. At this point, you'd be much, much better off | just firing the lasers at your target (though even that | wouldn't achieve much, unless you target is kind enough to step | in front of a highly sensitive, gigantic laser). | | Edit: corrected a typo graciously pointed out by GP. | kragen wrote: | What stops you from using the "even tinier piece pellet of | hydrogen"[sic] from initiating fusion in a slightly less tiny | pellet of hydrogen that it's sitting on top of, which | initiates fusion in a slightly less tiny pellet of hydrogen, | and so on? Aside from concern for your own survival, of | course. | | Maybe if you can't fathom the precision required to irradiate | the NIF hohlraum sufficiently isotropically to achieve | ignition in the first place, you shouldn't be trying to | answer this question. | tsimionescu wrote: | > What stops you from using the "even tinier piece pellet | of hydrogen"[sic] from initiating fusion in a slightly less | tiny pellet of hydrogen that it's sitting on top of, which | initiates fusion in a slightly less tiny pellet of | hydrogen, and so on? Aside from concern for your own | survival, of course. | | The same thing that stops you from igniting the initial | pellet with the hohlraum - you don't have anything creating | the kind of confinement necessary to keep the plasma | together. | | The only thing allowing the plasma to get hot enough for | fusion is the initial velocity of the inward-spreading | shockwave from the initial explosion of the outer shell of | the pellet. As the velocity of this shockwave inevitably | decreases, confinement is inevitably lost and the plasma | dissipates and cools down. | | Probably in principle you could use the energy of the first | pellet's plasma to cause similar shockwaves in a second, | larger pellet and so on, but that requires an entirely | different geometry, its not just a matter of putting the | second pellet close to the first one. | gus_massa wrote: | The other two answers are probably better, but in case it's | useful take a look at | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design#Two- | stag... | | Between the primary fission bomb and the secondary fusion | bomb there is a huge shield, so the shockwave of the first | one hit's the second one at the same time everywhere, | instead of hitting the top. | | My guess is that to put a ternary fusion bomb you will need | another even bigger shield, but IANANBS. | jjk166 wrote: | Nuclear fusion requires both compression and heating of the | fuel. In nuclear weapons, this is accomplished with a | combination of radiation pressure and a fissile sparkplug, | respectively. In inertial confinement fusion, there are two | distinct laser pulses with different characteristics. A | fusion pellet detonating would release radiation that could | compress another pellet, but there would be no method of | heating that pellet at the appropriate moment. | | There may be an engineering method to overcome this, but it | would be way beyond the difficulty of getting that first | pellet to ignite, which already is a bleeding edge | technological development. | kragen wrote: | Thank you very much! | coolspot wrote: | Man-made nuclear fusion is not self-sustaining, requires | massive infrastructure to ignite very little of material. | | Nuclear fission of unstable isotopes is self-sustaining chain | reaction that converts a lot of matter into energy without much | of hardware - just put some sub-critical mass of Plutonium into | a sphere lined with conventional explosives. | | See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_fusion_weapon | kragen wrote: | Well, of course that's always been true in the past, but | isn't "ignition" precisely the point at which it becomes | self-sustaining? Isn't that the distinction between | "ignition" and not "ignition"? I mean, you're not the right | person to ask (you apparently think plutonium is a brand | name), but maybe somebody reading this understands the | issues. | | You don't even need explosives to get a self-sustaining | nuclear fission chain reaction if you don't want a bomb; | Harry Daghlian did it accidentally, Fermi did it underneath | Stagg Field in Chicago in 01942, we do it routinely to | generate electricity, and 16 fossil natural nuclear fission | reactors have been discovered in Oklo. The explosives are | only there to keep a rapid chain reaction from driving the | pieces apart before you get enough yield for a weapon. | | It's true that the NIF would not make a very useful bomb, | being difficult to deliver to enemy territory even by ship, | and probably inflicting more damage on the funding agency | than the destroyed enemy city. But a significant part of that | is non-recurring engineering costs, and it's probably | possible to miniaturize it to a significant degree. | | I read Freeman Dyson's autobiography recently, and he claims | (contrary to the report of continuing DOE research in the | Wikipedia article) one of the things they stopped working on | in the 01960s due to the arms treaties was specifically | hydrogen bombs that didn't require fission igniters. | tsimionescu wrote: | Ignition in the case of ICF means that, for the brief time | while the shockwave from the initial laser burst is still | keeping the plasma together, you get to fuse all of the D+T | in your pellet. Once the initial velocity is lost, the | high-temperature He dissipates away. | | Not ahcieving ignition means that the plasma cools too | rapidly and the fusion reaction stops even before the brief | microseconds of inertial confinement are lost. | | Perhaps if you could deliver enough energy to a large | enough pellet, you could use this to build a bomb, but | today it is far too small for that, and the reaction | wouldn't work with a larger fuel pellet (the geometry that | allows the extreme pressures needed for fusion would not be | easily achieved with a larger pellet, since even the wave- | length of the laser is relevant at this level). | kragen wrote: | Not all of it, no; your understanding of "ignition" is | incorrect. cf. | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28842919 | thehappypm wrote: | I'm struggling to understand what exactly happens. The deuterium | and tritium mixture is hydrogen -- so it is a gas? So is it in | some sort of gas-containing container, that also lets laser light | through -- probably some kind of glass container? What kind of | glass container can survive having this much energy pumped | through it, and such a hot gas inside it? | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition | Robotbeat wrote: | It's actually frozen deuterium tritium. Inside a small pellet | blasted by X-rays which compress the pellet until it's hot and | dense enough for the fusion energy produced to continue burning | and heating the deuterium/tritium until much more energy is | produced than the energy of the X-rays. | | It all happens in an instant. The pellet's structure doesn't | survive. But it happens fast enough that just the inertia of | the pellet (turning to a gas and then a plasma) keeps things | confined for long to fuse a significant amount of the | deuterium/tritium. | xixixao wrote: | > Fusion ignition is the point at which a nuclear fusion reaction | becomes self-sustaining. This occurs when the energy being given | off by the fusion reactions heats the fuel mass more rapidly than | various loss mechanisms cool it. | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition | gremIin wrote: | How is this any different than the term 'breakeven' [0]? | | > Breakeven describes the moment when plasmas in a fusion | device release at least as much energy as is required to heat | them | | [0] https://www.iter.org/sci/BeyondITER | | Is this just a case of multiple terms for the same phenomenon, | and do plasma physicists have a preference? | detaro wrote: | The wikipedia article linked answers that. | [deleted] | falcrist wrote: | That question is answered in the wikipedia link above. | | > Ignition should not be confused with breakeven, a similar | concept that compares the total energy being given off to the | energy being used to heat the fuel. The key difference is | that breakeven ignores losses to the surroundings, which do | not contribute to heating the fuel, and thus are not able to | make the reaction self-sustaining. Breakeven is an important | goal in the fusion energy field, but ignition is required for | a practical energy producing design. | tsimionescu wrote: | It should be noted that 'self sustaining' only means that the | entire pellet undergoes fusion. The process still stops after a | few instants of time, requiring a new pellet of fuel, a new | laser burst (consuming at least twenty times the power that | gets deposited in the plasma), and worst of all, a new | monumentally expensive hohlraum, machined to nanometer | precision. | leephillips wrote: | Good points, but you mean energy, and it's several hundred | times. | tsimionescu wrote: | Yes, should have said energy. As for hundreds vs twenty, my | understanding was that newer lasers than what NIF is using | should be in the twenty times range, but you're right that | at NIF they use hundreds of times more energy than they can | deliver to the plasma. | AutumnCurtain wrote: | >Early reports estimated that 250 kilo-joules of energy was | deposited on the target (roughly 2/3 of the energy from the | beams), which resulted in a 1.3 Megajoule output from the | fusing plasma. | | Incredible progress over where they were just a couple years | ago. | xxpor wrote: | For reference: 1 MJ = 0.277778 kWh. | | Not trying to knock the progress made or anything like that, | I just needed the conversion to a more familiar unit in order | to appreciate what sort of scale they're talking about. | Robotbeat wrote: | Yeah, the idea is to do like dozens of these explosions per | second, like in an internal combustion piston engine. There | was a conceptual design for a fusion power plant based off | of laser inertial fusion like NIF called LIFE. | | Works kind of like the EUV light sources TSMC uses to make | the highest end computer chips, except a fuel pellet | instead of a drop of tin. Like so: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy | ruste wrote: | When thinking of this amount of energy in kWh it seems | small, but if this is deposited by lasers in a small | fraction of a second it seems like a huge amount of power | delivery. | xxpor wrote: | Yeah, the time scale and volume of where it's happening | matters a lot. | | It's like in fission when you read about reactions giving | net energy of X MeV. If you convert that to even Wh, let | alone kWh, it's an incredibly small number. But when you | start multiplying by the number of atoms in a fuel | source, it starts adding up VERY quickly. | [deleted] | connicpu wrote: | Though, when 1 MJ is generated in a fraction of a second, | that does mean its instantaneous output was in the MW+ | range | regularfry wrote: | Unfortunate, though, that NIF can't do continuous | generation by design. It's good for learning from and | validating stuff instantaneously, but it's almost | certainly an architectural dead-end otherwise. | __MatrixMan__ wrote: | Hard not to see it as a laser weapons program wearing | power-plant clothes. | Jensson wrote: | Also 1 MJ = 250 calories. So like a pizza slice. | NullPrefix wrote: | calories or kilocalories? | stevespang wrote: | rehashing old news that no 3rd party independent facility can | verify since NIF is the only site in the world with such a device | . . . . | vfclists wrote: | Funny how this story gets posted after soon after Dr Sabine | Hossenfelder's debunking and deflate the fusion power hype - | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY | | with a genuine Hans Gruber accent :) | seoaeu wrote: | Do you have any context on who Dr. Hossenfelder is or why their | "debunking" is meaningful? | mrtranscendence wrote: | She's a German physicist who has made a name for herself, I | think, arguing that mathematical beauty should not be a | factor when constructing solutions to problems in theoretical | physics. | | I think construing her video as a "debunking" does it a | disservice, for what it's worth. It's a call for journalists | and laypeople to be cautious when interpreting lab results. | She doesn't "dunk on" fusion power or say that it's not worth | investigating. | Krasnol wrote: | It's even funnier how fast you got downvoted. | | The nuclear band wagon is strong here. | vfclists wrote: | I noticed | jjk166 wrote: | It's almost like this is the event that prompted her to make | her video. | ashton314 wrote: | If I'm not mistaken, part of _Star Trek: Into Darkness_ was | filmed at a fusion research center. They used it as the backdrop | for engineering /warp core. Just slap on a few starfleet decals | and you're good to go! | [deleted] | bob229 wrote: | i guess it's just 20 years away then hahaha | Animats wrote: | Oh, this is just laser fusion. One pulse of power. That's not a | power source, even potentially. It's a lab-sized H-bomb | experiment. This isn't one of the magnetic containment systems | achieving ignition and sustaining the reaction. Now that would be | an achievement. | Robotbeat wrote: | Internal combustion piston engines also do intermittent | combustion. If you were to make a power plant based off of | this, you would need dozens of these per second (and much more | efficient lasers and a tritium breeding liquid lithium metal | jacket and... a lot of other stuff). | wolf550e wrote: | @dang This was reported and discussed 12 days ago: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28704298 | | The important thing to know is that the NIF is about nuclear | weapons design (verification of modeling software used for | nuclear weapons design), not about developing fusion power | plants. | snek_case wrote: | Kind of crazy that we're still spending money on this. Do we | really need better H-bombs? | chemeng wrote: | The US military probably thinks so, but I believe a major | goal of NIF is the ability to model whether the ones the US | already built will still work without setting one off. | floatingatoll wrote: | Note that @dang doesn't actually notify dang, unless he happens | to open this article and see it out of the corner of his eye or | something. If you want to report a frontpage dupe, emailing the | mods using the footer Contact link is an efficient method (or | you can just flag it as I did, which has relatively the same | effect if enough people do). | amarant wrote: | I thought ignition had been achieved a long time ago. Is the | article saying this is the first time for this particular lab to | achieve ignition, or have I confused my fusion hype-terminology? | I genuinely can't tell, as the article is written in Hype rather | than English... | leephillips wrote: | The Univ. of CA lab that operates NIF has an entire public | relations department, paid for by US taxpayers, whose purpose | is to generate this hype in order to influence Congress (they | are the ultimate audience for all of this) to keep spending | more US taxpayer money on NIF. NIF's real purpose is stockpile | stewardship, so the funding is not really in jeopardy; but they | always want more. | wffurr wrote: | First time for an internal confinement system using lasers | instead of a tokamak using magnetic confinement. | jacquesm wrote: | Inertial confinement. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion | Parnee wrote: | Fusion berries powering cell phones for weeks. I'll take two. | option wrote: | fusion sound fantastic in principle. But in the meantime we can | and should addressed most of our energy needs with fission. | aerostable_slug wrote: | Not sure why this is downvoted. Fission works, and it works | well. The waste problem is massively overstated and also, aside | from NIMBY politics, solved. | cronix wrote: | There are also things like tidal waves, earthquakes and other | unforeseen things that do pop up from time to time and cause | big issues. We can say it's rare, statistically very | unlikely, etc., but no one wants to be a Fukushima and that | image is still pretty fresh and hard to combat logically. | | That said, one thing that I think would really help is to | have smaller reactors, more of them, and using a standardized | and approved design. I remember hearing an interview with an | Oregon State University professor some 15+ years ago who was | working on a project that did just that. IIRC, he said one | major contributing factor to the cost of building a reactor, | besides waste, is that basically each one is designed and | engineered from scratch. He envisioned more of an assembly | line. Universal design, universal parts, etc. I believe they | went on to form a company called NuScale and a quick DDG | search led to this: | | > "Portland company's innovative nuclear reactor OK'd by feds | (September 26 2020)" ... The modules -- each capable of | producing 60 megawatts of energy, which is enough to power | 45,000 homes -- also allow a plant to scale up as needed, | with a maximum capacity of 12 modules for a total of 720 | megawatts. | | https://pamplinmedia.com/pt/9-news/482166-388954-portland- | co... | tehbeard wrote: | I don't know what has happened more, nuclear fusion | "breakthroughs", or Voyager "leaving the solar system"... | hinkley wrote: | Fusion breakthroughs for sure, but I hear you about Voyager. | boringg wrote: | Agree. I will add in the mix new Energy Storage breakthroughs. | The cynic in me suspects its a research money grab or a | validation on money spent with no real forward trajectory. | | At least the voyager is clearly plodding along towards the Oort | Cloud and eventually out of the solar system. Sadly I will be | long dead and hopefully these comments will still live on (300 | year estimate for Oort Cloud at its current speed of 1M miles a | day). | carabiner wrote: | New dental treatment will eliminate cavities. | cyberpsybin wrote: | because nuclear fusion is an endgame; it going to take | centuries | _justinfunk wrote: | Or "water discovered on Mars" | [deleted] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-10-12 23:00 UTC)