[HN Gopher] Tokamak Energy sets a temperature record among comme... ___________________________________________________________________ Tokamak Energy sets a temperature record among commercial fusion companies Author : geox Score : 180 points Date : 2022-03-13 20:01 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.tokamakenergy.co.uk) (TXT) w3m dump (www.tokamakenergy.co.uk) | richardfey wrote: | It feels like this is what Elon Musk should have invested into. | topspin wrote: | Commonwealth Fusion (the MIT spinoff with new high temperature | superconducting magnets) has raised about $2 billion in venture | capital since 2021. | TeeMassive wrote: | Does "commercial fusion" means suistained fusion? | aaomidi wrote: | Probably net positive energy generation. | dejv wrote: | They do have great Youtube channel: | https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCuSlFJbBUIj1zfJLRnGXSow | | Unfortunately it is not as active as it once was, but their old | videos are very interesting. | throwawayboise wrote: | For those who know more, how meaningful is this achievement" | | "We are proud to have achieved this breakthrough which puts us | one step closer to providing the world with a new, secure and | carbon-free energy source." | | Seems like every fusion energy announcement, always one step | closer but never quite arrived. | tempfs wrote: | It is almost like these 'another winning step towards fusion' | announcements arrive on a schedule meant to make sure that the | funding isn't pulled. | qiskit wrote: | If it was anywhere close to being commercially feasible, you'd | first see it in oil/gas futures. Money will know long before | you or I or any news outlets will know. | onethought wrote: | I'm not sure that is true. GM isn't a penny stock when it | should be, and Neo or Xpeng should be bigger, and they are | not. | | Sometimes money wants to deny the future that is coming. | liketochill wrote: | Clearly the market disagrees with you. I've never heard of | neo or xpeng and GM has a long history of manufacturing | vehicles to North American safety standards. Whatever neo | or xpeng do is GM incapable of hiring some engineers (they | might already have some) to copy it and then build it in | their existing factories? | zizee wrote: | This doesn't sound right to me. How many years out do oil/gas | futures project? Even if someone from the future arrived | today with blueprints of a perfect fusion power plant design, | it would take many years to build up enough fusion power | plants to make a dent in the world's oil/gas consumption. | You'd not only need to switch over power plants, but replace | every car, truck, house, ship, smelter, xxxx to use | electricity. | lazide wrote: | The poster is saying the stakes in oil/gas are high enough | that someone IS already paying millions of dollars to have | dedicated staff follow projects and give people a heads up | if anyone seems actually close (or it seems remotely | feasible) - and you'd see it reflected in various market | moves, either by hedge funds or by the companies themselves | in how they invest on projects. | | Which is probably true. | | I've heard from friends of some of the typical shenanigans | played among state actors involving oil and gas, and that | would be the least underhanded thing going on. | tootie wrote: | The context here is that this is a private company who have hit | an important milestone. They have managed to raise capital, | hire people and build a plausible foundation for a viable | reactor without billions in government subsidies and done it in | a little over ten years. They are claiming grid-connected | reactors will be online by 2030. | elil17 wrote: | I mean that is how steps work, no? | | This is how R&D projects work. It's extremely difficult to | estimate timelines. Someone might have said the same thing of, | for instance, image recognition - we kept getting "one step | closer" for years and years. You could look at Fei-Fei Li | making ImageNet in 2006 and go, "she didn't really solve | anything - they keep saying we're one step closer to image | recognition but this is just some new dataset." Of course that | actually was a very significant step, it was crucial groundwork | for AlexNet. | | There is absolutely no way to know whether getting to 100M in a | spherical tokamak is really significant. Maybe this design is a | dead end that will never see actual use. Maybe you will have a | tiny one in your tea kettle by 2050. | | What's clear, though is that the pace of fusion research is | really much faster than it was. That should be exciting to | everyone except oil barons. | BonoboIO wrote: | Great :-) Only 20 more years. | | Sorry, Could not resist | olliej wrote: | Next year is the year of viable fusion power! | AitchEmArsey wrote: | Which will arrive first - the year of viable fusion, or the | year of Linux on the desktop? | adhesive_wombat wrote: | To be honest, the year of fusion on the desktop sounds pretty | dope. | | Though you could argue that was 1992[1] and KDE has has | Plasma sewn up for a long time too. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager) | thruhiker wrote: | This is so hot it's cool. | drexlspivey wrote: | Does temperature have a theoretical upper limit ? | russdill wrote: | You'd eventually have so much energy that the mass energy | relation would give you a black hole. | jleahy wrote: | No, it does not. In a closed system if you add enough energy | the temperature will eventually become negative (after 'passing | through' +inf). | | As you reach a state where almost all particles are in their | maximum energy states (this is assuming there is one) you will | slowly approach negative zero (which again you can never quite | attain). | | Statistical mechanics can be confusing at first. | civilized wrote: | So what happens if I stick my hand in a negative temperature | state of matter? | jleahy wrote: | You'd be fine, because any kind of matter that you could | stick your head into is incapable of reaching negative | temperatures. | nimish wrote: | Sure you can, gas lasers exist. Stick your hand into the | gain medium and have fun getting fried! | crdrost wrote: | I am not sure about your first statement... | | In particular even with a quantum non-interacting gas with | particle-in-a-box modes, the Hamiltonian is not bounded from | above and there is no reason to expect a negative | temperature, no? | | There exist systems, like spin systems, where energy is | bounded from above and so entropy decreases as you add | energy, which is the definition of negative temperature... | But I find it dubious that _every_ system is such, unless I | am missing something nonintuitive about say relativistic | effects or so | jleahy wrote: | No you're quite right, that's why I said "...maximum energy | states (this is assuming there is one)". Of course with no | upper bound on energy this isn't possible, that's the | definition straight up, just like you say. | kibwen wrote: | Wikipedia article on the concept of negative temperature: | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature | adhesive_wombat wrote: | The critical bit for me: | | > This is only possible if the number of high energy states | is limited. For a system of ordinary (quantum or classical) | particles such as atoms or dust, the number of high energy | states is unlimited (particle momenta can in principle be | increased indefinitely). Some systems, however [...], have | a maximum amount of energy that they can hold, and as they | approach that maximum energy their entropy actually begins | to decrease. | | In my (limited) understanding, it's somewhat like the | phenomenon that a communication channel bit error rate over | 0.5 actually results in _less_ information loss (imagine a | BER of 1: that 's just a NOT gate). | | If your energy states are limited, adding energy actual | brings you _closer_ to an ordered state (that of everything | being in the highest state). | | But, this is not a situation you get by simply heating | something up with a blowtorch, no matter how hot it is. | 19870213 wrote: | Not a physicist, if temperature of particles is movement (I | think chemical bonds will break long before the following | limit), then the upper limit is just below the speed of light. | To make it even hotter would require infinite amount of energy. | Now what that temperature is in kelvin, I don't know. | parineum wrote: | Enough energy in one place will create a black hole. | wiml wrote: | Temperature is more about the kinetic (and other) energy of | the particles than the velocity -- you can keep adding energy | indefinitely, or at least until you hit some kind of planck- | scale weirdness point, even though the velocity is only | asymptotically approaching c. | jupp0r wrote: | Yes, 1.42 x 10^32 K but it's not as straightforward as naming a | single limit [1]. | | [1] https://www.popsci.com/article/science/ask-anything-whats- | ho... | Keyframe wrote: | That question has an answer in another question.. does energy | have a theoretical upper limit? Lowest temperature is absolute | zero, no movement. | elil17 wrote: | Yes it does - the plank temperature, where the wavelength of | light emitted is the plank length. Current theories predict | that this would be the maximum possible temperature. Of | course, this is so hot as to be totally irrelevant to | anything practical. | olliej wrote: | I mean the obvious upper limit is the particles moving at C, | but I suspect quantum physics means that the limit is | actually below that (my uneducated low level undergrad | physics courses make me assume some relationship to the plank | constant) | foob wrote: | Not in classical thermodynamics, but temperatures above the | Planck temperature aren't understood with current quantum | models. It would probably require a theory of quantum gravity | to shed further light on this. | usrusr wrote: | Children's TV level astrophysics (it's not astrophysics, but | that's the context where stuff like that is presented?) | suggests that if Brownian motion approached 1c, mass would grow | towards the infinite. So you could always add even more energy? | | (sorry, can't provide anything beyond that level) | gus_massa wrote: | The mean velocity in a gas is | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_velocity | | v ~= Sqrt( k_B * T / m) ~= constant * Sqrt(T) | | (There is another constant in the formula that depends on | what definition of mean you use, but it's safe to ignore it | for this discussion.) | | So if T is big enough, the result of this formula is faster | than light. | | But this formula is useful only for a not relativistic gas. | Once the temperature is so big that relativistic effects are | important, you must use another formula. (The other formula | is more difficult to calculate, but when the temperature is | low the result is almost identical to the formula I wrote.) | | Temperature has no theoretical upper limit, but if it's high | enough weird things can happen as described in a sibling | comment. More details in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck | _units#Planck_temperatur... | javcasas wrote: | More children's TV level of astrophysics: so you keep adding | energy to your particles, they approach 1c, they gain and | gain mass... until they collapse into nanoscopic black holes | and immediately evaporate into hawkins radiation, right? | | I mean that's the general upper limit on stuff in the | universe: it eventually collapses into a black hole. | ynfnehf wrote: | For each specific fusion reaction there is an optimal | temperature (for maximum reactivity). Usually around a billion | kelvin or so, plus or minus a few orders of magnitude. | grahamlee wrote: | interestingly, no. Temperature can become infinitely high, and | you can still add heat, at which point it becomes infinitely | low. You can carry on adding heat, and the temperature will get | back to absolute 0. | https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/36885/how-is-n... | q-big wrote: | > Temperature can become infinitely high, and you can still | add heat, at which point it becomes infinitely low. You can | carry on adding heat, and the temperature will get back to | absolute 0. | | Perhaps the correct measure is not temperature, but inverse | temperature (i.e. 1/T)? | whatshisface wrote: | You can't heat something to negative temperature, although | negative temperature things will transfer energy to positive | temperature things. Negative temperature can be achieved | through lining up many small magnets against a larger | magnetic field. Disordering the magnets will reduce the | potential energy, running opposite to the usual trend where | increasing disorder involves the occupation of higher-energy | states. | olliej wrote: | How does it become infinitely high? Temperature is a measure | of average particle speed, and that's limited to the speed of | light | | (I'm not a physicist so I'm willing to be corrected, but this | doesn't jibe with my low level compulsory physics courses | from uni :) ) | crdrost wrote: | Temperature has to do with how the entropy changes with the | addition of energy. It helps to use the "coldness" or | "thermodynamic beta" scale, b = DS/DE is the coldness of a | system, the thermodynamic temperature is defined as 1/(k b) | where k is a conversion factor, the Boltzmann constant, to | convert between units of energy and kelvins. | | For most normal systems, entropy increases with an addition | of energy, and they have a positive coldness. Confusingly, | the _lower_ the entropy change, the _less cold_ or _hotter_ | we would regard it: if you bring two systems into contact, | they share energy to maximize their total entropy, so | something which has low coldness = low entropy change will | donate a lot of energy to something with a higher coldness | = higher entropy change, the smaller negative will be | balanced out by a larger positive. | | You can extrapolate this to an infinite temperature, this | would be an object with b = 0 or zero coldness, it can take | or lose energy without changing its entropy at all. An | example is an assembly of electron spins in a magnetic | field, when 50% of them are aligned with and 50% are | aligned against the magnetic field: this is the most | entropic that the spin system could possibly be, so there | is no way to increase it and to first order changes in | energy do not decrease it. It has zero coldness or infinite | temperature. | | Add a little bit of energy and it is in the state where it | actively wants to lose energy, putting more energy into the | system requires aligning more of the spins along the | magnetic field. This is a negative coldness, which is also | regarded as a negative temperature by this T =1/(k b) | formula. | mateo1 wrote: | Interesting development, wrong title. | api wrote: | > While several government laboratories have reported plasma | temperatures above 100M degrees in conventional tokamaks, this | milestone has been achieved in just five years, for a cost of | less than PS50m ($70m), in a much more compact fusion device. | | Governments should only fund things. They should not actually run | them. | elil17 wrote: | This private company was only able to move so quickly and | cheaply _because_ government labs had already shown how to do | it. If anything, this case is evidence against your view. | JaimeThompson wrote: | Privately run, revenue optimizing police isn't something that | sounds like a positive. | noobermin wrote: | To be honest a lot of the fusion news recently has made me | skeptical (namely, for CFS guys who kinda smell a little sus to | me if I'm being 100% honest), but this on the other hand is | fantastic, actual results (although they should publish a paper | on it, just my bias as a scientist), meeting good plasma temps | with just $70M! Not a gigabuck not even 100 megabucks, that to me | is a good sign for actual commercial fusion. Bravo to Tokamak | Energy. | willis936 wrote: | What's sus about CFS? No one else is making 20 T confinement | field coils. SPARC's campus is already up and the machine is | being built. ARC is expected to have ground broken this year. | Mizza wrote: | What about CFS is fishy to you? Those are the guys I'd put my | money on, but I'm curious why you'd think otherwise. | Retric wrote: | For me it's the "seemingly" crazy unrealistic deadlines, | which are achievable if they don't actually try and hit net | energy gain. | | Use 20MW of energy to add 10MW into plasma, get 20MW of | fusion, convert 30MW of heat into 10MW of electricity and | they have reached their stated goal without actually | achieving anything useful. And that's assuming steady state | operation rather than a fraction of a second pulse that | briefly reaches their goals. | | It's exactly the same thing as a startup selling dollars for | pennies and saying yea we're going to make it up in volume. | nimish wrote: | I don't think they'll have SPARC by 2025 but the physics | work out. It's basically a bog-standard tokamak with | superconducting magnets but with much more current capacity | and therefore magnetic field strength from newer HTS. It's | the fabrication of the magnets at scale that's totally new | engineering and manufacturing; as we saw with Tesla that's | quite hard. Plus the supply chains of HTS tapes aren't | exactly mature. | | I think both Tokamak and CFS have roughly the same strategy | of using bigger magnetic fields. Given the scalings here ht | tps://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2017.043. | .. + JET working well it's a lot less risk than whatever | most others are doing. Make a JET sized tokamak but have 5x | the magnetic field strength gives a 625x gain in power, | ideally. | DennisP wrote: | ARC will be about the size of JET, and JET was built in | four years, with most of that being just for the buildings. | The test reactor, SPARC, will be about half that size. | | Tokamak scaling is very well established. The output scales | with the square of plasma volume, and the fourth power of | magnetic field strength. Stronger magnetic fields also make | the plasma more stable. JET already demonstrated a five- | second plasma, which they only had to shut down because | they have copper coils that would melt if operated longer | than that. | | Because of all this, many independent fusion researchers | think SPARC will succeed in getting 10X gain in 2025. After | that, the larger ARC should easily reach commercial levels. | | Of all the commercial fusion companies, CFS is the most | conservative one. Tokamak Energy is a close second, with a | very similar approach. The other fusion startups are | attempting approaches that have more physics risk, though | many of them would have fewer engineering and economic | difficulties if the physics does work out. | Retric wrote: | Simply scaling SPAR or ITER doesn't result in commercial | operation. | | First you need fuel, global Tritium supplies are tiny and | DD fusion is much harder. | | Next stability is an open question, no Tokamak has ever | operated near maximum capacity for even 1 hour. | | Add to that serious material science questions, etc etc | and even Q>100 alone just doesn't actually mean much. | | Now let's just assume all of that is solved, you still | need to actually ensure your design is economically | viable. Simply producing energy from fusion alone isn't | enough which means you need to cheaply solve not only all | the above but do so cheaply. | adhesive_wombat wrote: | And to think, some people would rather spend $700 million on a | boat[1]. | | If you wanted a legacy, you could hardly do better than being | the Zefram Cochrane of energy. You don't even have to stop | being an asshole! | | [1] The Scheherazade for a current example of interest, but | there are thousands more examples. | acchow wrote: | > And to think, some people would rather spend $700 million | on a boat[1]. | | This is the weirdest thing to me. How do billionaires think a | big boat is cooler than building nuclear fusion? If I was a | billionaire, I'd build space ships and underground tunnels | and nuclear micro reactors | cplusplusfellow wrote: | A lot of billionaires have organized businesses but never | tinkered with anything constructive in their lives. They | don't even own a black and decker power tool. | contradictioned wrote: | It is enough to own black and decker... Scnr | api wrote: | The big boat is about status, which means attracting mates | and increasing the odds of breeding before a lion eats you. | Our brain stems don't know what geological epoch we are in. | adhesive_wombat wrote: | That a big useless boat is a vastly bigger panty-dropper | then a working fusion reactor says everything about our | species, doesn't it? | VectorLock wrote: | Girls in bikinis don't want to sun themselves on a fusion | reactor. | adhesive_wombat wrote: | To be fair, you do get a better tan with a fission | reactor. | adhesive_wombat wrote: | Right? Big boats aren't even that big a brag, someone will | always have a bigger one, and if yours _is_ longest for | now, then theirs has _three_ helipads, and next year some | tryhard will build a longer one anyway. | | Being first to fusion would mean your name would be above | even Einstein in history. | fennecfoxen wrote: | The fusion reactor just uses a very inefficient process to | turn energy into less energy. At least the big boat goes | places. | JumpCrisscross wrote: | Large yachts are functional. They're mobile own territory | for people operating on the level of nation states. | | Booking out a hotel for hundreds of aides, attaches and | visitors is very difficult outside the largest cities. | Securing it can be impossible. Particularly on short | notice. A yacht solves those problems. | | (I'd still pick the reactor.) | izzygonzalez wrote: | I never thought of it from this perspective. A yacht | could serve as a research vessel with slight added | protection against political turmoil. One of the problems | with setting up organizations inside of a nation-state | are the economic and political risks. Without the | necessary dive into the ethics of the proposition, it | might serve as the Noah's ark for vital research and the | associated minds. | adhesive_wombat wrote: | Now there's a spec-fic book I'd read: | | > Physicists trapped in indentured servitude aboard Elon | Musk's converted droneship research station "Just Fucking | Get It Done" as it sails the post-apocalytic seas. | | > Just when they thought it couldn't get any worse, they | dock at Peter Thiel's island bio-research facility and | they have to take matters into their own nitrile-gloved | hands before it's too late... | credit_guy wrote: | Many megayachts are chartered when not in use by their | owner. So in the end they are investments that produce a | return [1] | | " It's worth acknowledging that while owners will | ultimately spend a huge amount for the privilege of having | their very own superyacht, they're able to recoup some of | these costs by chartering them out. Connor estimates that | around 12 weeks of charter represents the annual operating | cost of most yachts, which means owners can break even if | they hire their boats out for the same length of time they | use them during the year." | | [1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/amp/hidden-costs-of-owning- | a-supe... | adhesive_wombat wrote: | You might break even on running costs, but when do you | break even on the outlay? | | I guess you get some back if you sell it, and you | probably never actually laid out for it as such rather | then though some mad financial chicanery because simply | paying for stuff is decidedly plebian. | ed wrote: | Note: they did not achieve "commercial fusion" (Q-total > 1), | they set a temperature record among commercial fusion companies. | (Still cool though!) | ReptileMan wrote: | The opposite of cool. Literally | dang wrote: | OK, we've put that phrase in the title above. Thanks! | deutschew wrote: | damn...got all excited ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-13 23:00 UTC)