Fusion breakthrough?

[barbos]

Saw that tritium was used for the reaction. Using tritium as a fuel would be terribly expensive. Like using tritium as a fuel.

Actually, as far as thermonuclear power concerned, the Moon can be economically mined for tritium.

 

[Bomb#20]

...What's very difficult is getting a fusion reactor to generate more power than it takes to run the thing. That's what the clowns at Lawrence Livermore claimed to have done -- the binding asterisks are they're comparing the energy generated by fusing the hydrogen in a pellet with the energy delivered to the pellet by the lasers they fired at it to make it fuse. I.e., their breakthrough is they would hypothetically have a net gain reaction if they hypothetically had used 100% efficiency lasers.

Physicists are not clowns, your politicians are clowns.

They could both be clowns. The politicians only made the stupid announcement because our physicists told them they had a net gain reaction, which means our physicists were playing word games. The progress is real, but a more truthful announcement of the progress would be "After 60 years of research, we have surmounted a psychological barrier and are now finally over 1.0% of the way to a break-even reactor." If the physicists told the politicians that, the politicians would have thought about how that would play to the public.

Saw that tritium was used for the reaction. Using tritium as a fuel would be terribly expensive. Like using tritium as a fuel.

Actually, as far as thermonuclear power concerned, the Moon can be economically mined for tritium.

How do you figure? There's next to no hydrogen on the moon, let alone tritium. As far as thermonuclear power is concerned, people who talk about moon mining usually have 3He in mind, not tritium. D-3He is a harder reaction to use than D-T, but it's a lot easier than D-D.

 

[barbos]

They could both be clowns.

Not even close. Politicians are all scam and clowns. Physicists, for the most part are just scientists, and a little bit clowns when it comes to funding. But that's the game one has to play, because general public are idiots and voting for scam.

How do you figure?

You're right, He3 is on the moon, not Tritium.
Regardless, it's an important benchmark.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Saw that tritium was used for the reaction. Using tritium as a fuel would be terribly expensive. Like using tritium as a fuel.

Remastered:

Saw that tritium was used for the reaction. Using tritium as a fuel would be terribly expensive. Almost as expensive as using printer toner as a fuel.

 

[bilby]

Saw that tritium was used for the reaction. Using tritium as a fuel would be terribly expensive. Like using tritium as a fuel.

Remastered:

Saw that tritium was used for the reaction. Using tritium as a fuel would be terribly expensive. Almost as expensive as using printer toner as a fuel.

Fuel costs are important for chemical reactions - burning stuff - because you nead a metric shitton of fuel to get any worthwhile amount of energy.

For nuclear reactions, fuel costs are utterly trivial. A nuclear reactor burns a few percent of the fuel you put in, and that tiny percentage lasts about a year of full bore operational use. Then they stick the fuel rods into storage, and replace them with brand new ones.

You can design a reactor that not only burns more of the fuel, but also creates more fuel than it burns, by turning the useless ²³⁸U component (which forms the majority of the fuel) into fissionable isotopes. But nobody has really bothered to try to commercialise this process, because the cost of fuel just isn't up there in the list of costs of running a nuclear power plant.

You can also recycle the unburned fraction of the fuel, and fabricate new assemblies from it (this was done for a few decades in Europe); But it's never really been cost effective, because new fuel is cheaper to fabricate, and the fabrication is a bigger fraction of cost for a fuel assembly than the actual fuel is.

Liquid fuelled fission reactors, using molten uranium salts (rather than solid uranium oxide pellets in expensive assemblies) have been experimented with, and would likely be far more efficient in their use of fuel, but even then the largest savings are not from fuel cost, but from the cost of managing a much smaller final volume of waste. Some designs can even run on the spent fuel from current nuclear reactors - and there's already enough such spent fuel on site at nuclear plants in the USA to fuel the entire nation's energy needs for over a century, without any new uranium needing to be mined.

A coal, gas, or oil burning power generator has fuel as its main cost - the costs of everything else put together is dwarfed by the cost of fuel.

A nuclear power plant in the USA has the construction cost repayments as its largest expense, closely followed by the cost of regulatory and compliance staff, then operational staff, then parts and maintenance expenses. Fuel costs per annum are minuscule, and most of the cost of the fuel is in enrichment and fabrication. The actual yellowcake uranium itself is as cheap as chips.

A similar thing should be true of a putative fusion plant. Even expensive fuel is going to be cheap per TWh, because you will need so little of it.

Nuclear power doesn't care much about fuel costs, because it really doesn't need much fuel. That's why it's so vastly superior to burning hydrocarbons, even before you contemplate the effects of carbon dioxide on climate.

If a single printer cartridge held enough toner to print a trillion trillion colour pages, nobody would care that it cost a few hundred bucks.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Currently, the cost would be millions per day. It is also a tad bit rare.

 

[Elixir]

Currently, the cost would be millions per day. It is also a tad bit rare.

Vs what?
The energy yield per gram (cost ~ $30k) is vast. Millions per day would provide energy for millions of people per day, assuming capture of 0.01%

Maybe I'm missing something or misplaced a decimal?
There's a physicist I follow who recommended this article. He believes fusion power will be a thing before the end of this century :

Ignition achieved! Nuclear fusion power now within reach
​

 

[bilby]

Fusion power has been technically feasible since the 1950s.

All you need to do is drill a deep hole, lob in an H-bomb, and then use geothermal power gear to extract the energy from the hot rocks. When they cool down, lob in another H-bomb.

Of course, such a power plant would break a number of nuclear weapons limitation treaties.

And would scare the living crap out of the "Greens".

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Currently, the cost would be millions per day. It is also a tad bit rare.

Vs what?

Most things available on Earth.

The energy yield per gram (cost ~ $30k) is vast. Millions per day would provide energy for millions of people per day, assuming capture of 0.01%

You do see what was wrong there? It implies hundreds of millions a day for the nation, assuming capture of 0.01% whatever that means.

Maybe I'm missing something or misplaced a decimal?
There's a physicist I follow who recommended this article. He believes fusion power will be a thing before the end of this century :

Ignition achieved! Nuclear fusion power now within reach​

I'm thinking end of the century, the cow that left the barn has been dead for several decades already. While the achievement was notable, it wasn't ignition, it was marketing. I have a lightbulb that can shine brightly without any electricity*. (* - excluding the power from the socket)

End of century is possible, maybe. But that is nearly 80 years away. Our planet is heating up today, with no real intention of the globe to slow down the CO2 pumping into the atmosphere.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

We desperately need to get fusion working to power our interstellar Ark B.

 

[Elixir]

You do see what was wrong there? It implies hundreds of millions a day for the nation, assuming capture of 0.01% whatever that means.

There is no energy source that can provide for hundreds of millions of Americans for less than hundreds of millions a day. Right now we are over a trillion/year. A million million.
(source)

End of century is possible, maybe. But that is nearly 80 years away. Our planet is heating up today, with no real intention of the globe to slow down the CO2 pumping into the atmosphere.

If humans only pursued that which could be fully realized within a lifetime, we’d probably be better off, all 1.5 billion of us.

 

[Bomb#20]

We desperately need to get fusion working to power our interstellar Ark B.

They're telephone sanitizers and management consultants. We only desperately need to tell them we got fusion working.

 

[Politesse]

Previous attempts to do a thing have failed, therefore all future attempts to do that thing will also fail.

Ah, logic.

 

[bilby]

Previous attempts to do a thing have failed, therefore all future attempts to do that thing will also fail.

Ah, logic.

It's more "Previous attempts to do a thing have failed, therefore all future attempts to do that thing will prove likely be highly difficult and expensive."

It might well be possible to achieve controlled fusion power generation. But at this stage we can be confident that it will almost certainly be neither easy nor cheap.

And given that we have existing power generation technologies that are both (relatively) easy and (relatively) cheap, it's highly unlikely that controlled fusion power, if we ever achieve it, will be any kind of panacea.

Look at the opening paragraph of the article Elixir posted above:

For decades, the “next big thing” in terms of energy has always been nuclear fusion. In terms of sheer potential for power generation, no other energy source is as clean, low-carbon, low-risk, low-waste, sustainable, and controllable as nuclear fusion. Unlike oil, coal, natural gas, or other fossil fuel sources, nuclear fusion won’t produce any greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide as waste. Unlike solar, wind, or hydroelectric power, it’s not reliant on the availability of the needed natural resource. And unlike nuclear fission, there’s no risk of a meltdown and no long-term radioactive waste produced.

The only selling points they can find that puts a putative fusion generator ahead of fission are:

"No meltdowns" - which are a rare and low hazard (but very expensive) issue in older fission reactor designs, and which benefit is completely and (compared to developing fusion) cheaply achieved by moving to molten salt reactors which don't have a core to meltdown in the first place; And

"No long term radioactive waste production", which is an unsupported claim, as we don't yet know the final design of any future fusion reactors, which might well generate long term radioactive waste by neutron bombardment of the reactors components, and a trivial benefit as we have seventy years experience of storing radioactive waste, and have demonstrated that we can do so indefinitely without significant risk to anyone or anything. The nuclear waste "problem" is a marketing fiction of the neo-luddite movement. It's not a real problem for which a solution is needed to safeguard lives and/or our environment.

So in summary, fusion is difficult to the point of possible impossibility; Is going to almost inevitably be expensive; And will offer little or no offsetting benefits above those already available from nuclear fission technologies.

It might happen; But if it does, it won't be revolutionary or fantastic.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Previous attempts to do a thing have failed, therefore all future attempts to do that thing will also fail.

Ah, logic.

I think we need to keep tossing a dime here and there for fusion. But it ain't happening soon. We are several eurekas from that point. We need carbon free energy today.

 

[Bomb#20]

Currently, the cost would be millions per day. It is also a tad bit rare.

Vs what?
The energy yield per gram (cost ~ $30k) is vast. Millions per day would provide energy for millions of people per day, assuming capture of 0.01%

Maybe I'm missing something or misplaced a decimal?

The cost of tritium isn't a significant problem. The significant problem is that tritium is a short-half-life radioisotope. That means we can't mine it anywhere. Any industry based on tritium will have to rely on manufacturing it. Three guesses as to what it takes to manufacture tritium...

Show

If you guessed "A good old fashioned dirty long-lived-radioactive-waste generating nuclear fission reactor", first prize!

Fusion is being hyped to the public as a way to eliminate the nuclear waste disposal problem. Well, not if it's fusion of tritium, it isn't. It's a bait-and-switch.

 

[steve_bank]

We desperately need fusion power to supply all the bitcoin data mining computers.

All the labor saving gadgets.

All the computers.

All the EVs.

In the 80s I heard it said software expands to fill memory.

Increase the energy supply and people will find ways to consume it.

 

[bilby]

Previous attempts to do a thing have failed, therefore all future attempts to do that thing will also fail.

Ah, logic.

I think we need to keep tossing a dime here and there for fusion. But it ain't happening soon. We are several eurekas from that point. We need carbon free energy today.

We have had it since the 1950s. We need to switch to carbon free energy starting today. Seventy years ago would have been better, twenty years ago and we would have solved the problem by now, and even yesterday would be better than today.

But today's the best option available.

 

[bilby]

Fusion is being hyped to the public as a way to eliminate the nuclear waste disposal problem.

As I outlined above, there's actually no urgent or important "problem"; We can store the stuff indefinitely in dry casks on site, which has been the "interim" solution since day one while deep repositories have been mooted and cancelled repeatedly.

Half a century of this solution has resulted in zero spills, zero environmental contamination, zero injuries and zero deaths.

Call me a cavalier risk taking adrenaline junkie, but I am prepared to accept that level of hazard as a price worth paying to stop burning coal for our electricity supply.

Particularly given the woeful safety record for coal waste.

So fusion is being hyped as the solution to a problem that's already solved, and that fusion wouldn't solve, even if it weren't already solved.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Saw that tritium was used for the reaction. Using tritium as a fuel would be terribly expensive. Like using tritium as a fuel.

You can breed tritium.

Line either a fission or fusion reactor with deuterium.