If we do the fusion in zero g then we have solved the confinement issue. The problem is creating conditions for fusion in zero g. The simplest way would probably be aggregating enough material to a single spot that gravity itself creates conditions for fusion. But then the power plant becomes too energetic for earth so it has to be at an enormous distance away to be safe. And with that of course you have the problem of transmitting the power back to earth. But I think photons could be gathered at a safe distance from this fusion, to harvest it without having to be so close.
The issue with that is how to direct the energy back to Earth, and then collect it. If you can’t direct it and it radiates in all directions then only a tiny fraction of the produced photons will reach Earth. Then you need to collect those photons in order to do useful work, otherwise they will just heat the earth. If the distance needed to remain safe is greater or less than geosynchronous orbit, you’ll need collectors all over the Earth as they won’t have constant line of sight towards the source and experience a “nighttime” of sorts. There is also the issue of atmospheric effects, such as high densities of moisture, absorbing or scattering the photons, reducing the efficiency of the collectors. So it could work, but the effective maximum capacity will always be quite limited and the overall process highly inefficient relative to the total fusion energy produced.
Actually you don't want the transmission process to be 100% efficient. If you really captured all the fusion energy transmitted (or even just the small part of it reaching Earth), all sorts of people would complain, trust me! But fortunately that fusion reactor has more than enough power to go around...
Maybe we can use the excess photons in another way? We could bio-engineer sunlight collection devices that would take in sunlight and use it to break apart CO2 and produce other useful materials. We could then spread them around the planet to use the excess photons in a productive way. We gain valuable complex molecules and break down CO2 so a win win!
There may also be a side business selling skin products to protect people who may be exposed to the radiation from this new reactor. Possibly people may even choose to vacation in areas of elevated radation, as it is likely to be warmer. Interesting...
If you only have one of them then the photons would only be available on that side of the earth at any given time and the other side wouldn't have power, but two of them would confuse the animals and disrupt everyone's circadian rhythm and then you'd have to deal with the three-body problem. Even the reactor-facing side would also have issues with the photons not getting through when it's cloudy.
The photons will also create heat and that heat can be used for useful work at any time, even when there are no photons hitting that side of the earth. For example it will evaporate water which will later condense into rivers, where you can put turbines. So it's a kind of fusion power, but less direct. Pure science fiction, of course.
It looks like ultimate goal of this is creating a self-sustaining fusion reactor approximately 1AU away from earth (for safety) and using photovoltaic arrays to absorb the energy... Ingenious!
That's what OP was implying. Energy (..and its derivative global warming ) is just infrastructure and finance problem now onwards. Balancing grid, Moving power from sunshine area to non-sunshine area, storing some power at night, handling fluctuation all are more or less solved problem. Fusion is just research subject ( ..or for may be powering colony on mars ? ).
.....
saying that, I hope our collective curiosity for fusion will take us to new inventions and space opportunities.
…is this an elaborate joke about solar power? And by extension, virtually all the energy that’s accumulated on the earth over the eons? It took me a minute :)
I did some back of the envelope calculations for this and it turns out that almost all life will eventually evolve to have reasonable protection against it. Except in Australia.
You'd have to stick it in a lagrange point 1.5M km away though since just in orbit is not true zero G.
Microwave energy transfer should work. That's what I like about the Helion fusion reactor design they don't use steam to power generators it's direct power no water or steam.
> This was a 25% improvement on the previous record time achieved with EAST, in China, a few weeks previously
I applaud this nuclear arms race. 22 minutes is really impressive for a technology that’s always been “20 years away”. I think I will do a deep dive on the technical challenges of fusion.
Not to downplay it, but it's still only half as hot as would be required of a commercial reactor. Also this reactor had no mechanisms to recover energy or neutrons to breed tritium. Still impressive and encouraging.
Right but that's what ITER is for. This type of research is to validate control systems which can be transferred to that project (i.e. prove you can do it, then prove its not machine-dependent).
I'm glad the bear case includes the "will never be economically practical" which is my core criticism of fusion, even with "high funding".
I also didn't see anything about vessel irradiation, which also never seems to be discussed. I get it probably isn't as big a problem as solid fuel rod fission in terms of waste creation, and tritium breeding may help, but it still will be kind of the same problem with LFTRs: a reactor design will fundamentally need an ongoing reconstruction/replacement strategy due to the vessel irradiation and transmutation from high energy neutrons.
Feel free to correct me if this isn't as big a problem as I think it is.
No, it's not. It's just a legit illustration of somethings state of development on fundamental levels. It simply means "we have no f**ing clue how we can do this, but future..". This is different from something we have already solved, and you just need to throw money on it to scale it to whichever level you need it.
> Cracking natural language comprehension with digital computers is an example from our field and it’s here.
That's the point, everything in research is always x0 years away, until the breakthrough happens and it's finished.
> Triple product (efficiency ) has increased faster than moors law for the last 50 years
Fusion research progress is underappreciated. But Moore's Law is for an existing industry. Prior to that, it took 10 ^ 6+ improvements in various technologies to make computing possible.
Not sure what you mean by that. There was a bunch of computing technology long before photolithography or even transistors. And mores law was coined in 1965 when individual chips had far less than 10^6 transistors while the first one was made by hand.
Moore's law is self propagating: improvements in compute beget improvements in compute by improving the computers used to design compute devices. fusion, while in an impressive bootstrapping phase, does not get that acceleration until commercial break-even.
moore's law is just the observation that chips are 2d: linear shrinks produce exponential benefit.
I can't see anything like a linear/square relation in fusion reactor design (even accepting that ML's premise of shrinks being linear in time is not a law, just something that sometimes happened, and sometimes didn't...)
Specifically they were able to maintain a tokamak plasma (presumably at fusion temperatures) for 1337 seconds, using two megawatts of heating. 1337 is not a joke; presumably the "leet" reading is coincidental.
With China spying around, you probably don't want to reveal the full potential of your technologies before you are sure that you will have permanent lead.
>> In the H-mode, a calm edge without turbulence reduces how much heat and how many charged particles the plasma loses. This leads to a sharp increase in pressure across the entire volume of the plasma, including the core where the conditions that can lead to fusion occur. The reduced energy and particle losses also minimize damage to the material surfaces surrounding the plasma.
Neutrons and photons pass through magnetic fields, so they always escape the plasma and provide heat that can be turned into steam. Keeping the plasma ions better confined doesn't impair energy recovery.
One issue I see for applying prediction markets to things like “there is a commercially successful fusion power plant before the year 2070” is the long time until resolution. Now, of course, one can hope to sell your shares in “yes” or “no” 5 years from now, but there may not be enough liquidity?
Suppose we had one prediction market M_1 for “On January 1st 2070, resolves ‘yes’ if there has been a commercially successful nuclear fusion power plant, and otherwise resolves ‘no’”, and then another market M_2 that, maybe it resolves in 5 years as ‘yes’ if the price of M_1’s ‘yes’ is greater than 30%? Or… hm, that seems problematic because people could just buy a bunch of M_1’s “yes” right before M_2 resolves? Or maybe that’s a self-correcting problem because people could… no, still seems like a problem..
Well, what if instead of a prediction market about the future value of another prediction market, it was futures contracts for the shares in a prediction market? Like, the right to buy or sell shares in “yes” or “no” at a particular price?
So like, if you’re confident that the prediction market will assign probability p or higher on a particular day 5 years from now, then if you bought futures which, on that day each of the futures could be used to sell a share in “no” at the price (1-p), then…
well, if the probability assigned to “yes” on that day is indeed p or higher, then the price of “no” would be (1-p) or lower, so one buy a share in “no” at a price less than (1-p) and then sell it at (1-p)..
Hm, issue there is one still needs to buy the “no” in order to sell it, so that doesn’t seem to really fix the “what if there is no liquidity in 5 years?” issue?
I guess one could spend 1 to create a share of “yes” and a share of “no”, and then sell the “no”, and be left with the share in “yes” which is ostensibly worth at least p, and then like, sell it a bit later when there’s more liquidity or something?
I probably don’t know what I’m talking about about this.
You should look into options - you're describing various forms of options contract.
None of them solve this problem, though:
> Now, of course, one can hope to sell your shares in “yes” or “no” 5 years from now, but there may not be enough liquidity?
In general, if there isn't liquidity in the primary market you should expect the derivative markets to be even worse. You would use options not to find extra liquidity - and binary options on illiquid markets like you describe are indeed particularly prone to market manipulation - but to express very particular views.
> another market M_2 that, maybe it resolves in 5 years as ‘yes’ if the price of M_1’s ‘yes’ is greater than 30%?
Like this one - you should buy this contract if you really do want to make a bet the price will be over 30%, and you don't care much about getting a big payday if the price is 90 or keeping most of your money if the price is 29.
The future value could be shared with the entire humanity.
For example, Bill Gates is going to die like everyone else and give most of the money away, like Warren Buffet.
They can spend a significant amount of money in life if they see nuclear fusion is possible, even if they do not recover the costs.
The only thing that is needed for this to happen is investors being confident that the money is not going to be wasted.
I personally know rich people that are betting a significant part of their wealth in fusion(millions USD) even when they know there is a risk that they will never recover the money.
Poor Bill Gates wants to give his money away, but he hasn’t gotten around to it yet. Why are we still pretending he is a philanthropist and not one of the biggest oligarchs of our time?
I don't think a long pay-off horizon is a problem for this market. It the same as for shares in companies that don't pay dividends. What creates a price for Berkshire Hathaway (BRK/A) if owning the share never gives you anything in the form of dividend? It's because in the far future, you can be confident they'll have enough money in the bank that they will pay out. Maybe not in your lifetime, but you can sell to someone, who'll sell to someone, etc. who will eventually collect a dividend. The market is so abstract that that pay-off time could be infinity years in the future and still, the share still has market value today.
How would you define "commercially successful"? The first fusion power plants will only get built with huge government subsides. Some governments like China look at this as a strategic, existential issue and will pay whatever it costs to make it work. They don't like being dependent on foreign fossil fuel supplies that the USA could easily interdict.
I’m in the USA and don’t like being dependent on foreign fuel supplies!
I think there was (maybe still possible?) a real missed opportunity to pitch green energy in a national security or America First way. I don’t think the average republican voter wants us to be as tied to OPEC the way we are.
We could still product as much—or more!—oil in Texas while reducing our care for anything in the Middle East.
Speculation with positive expected return is a good thing. So the question is, does fusion have positive expected return?
The world spends 10% of global GDP on energy, about $10 trillion per year. The world will spend something like a quadrillion dollars on energy this century, possibly more as the world gets wealthier and per capita energy use increases. A billion dollar investment is just one part in a million of that. Fusion doesn't have to be very likely to succeed to make such speculation worthwhile.
It’s not that I want to bet, but that I want a good probability estimate about whether commercially viable fusion power will be around by such and such date.
The location they have that's "well into construction" is SPARC, which is not intended to be a net power production facility. It will host their net gain demonstrator that they intend to have first plasma in next year and target a net gain demonstration in 2027.
ARC which they announced siting for and is intended to be their first grid-attached net power provider only just had the location selected so I don't believe its got much construction going on yet. The goal for that plant to be producing power is "early 2030s".
Ah, maybe not well into construction. But a friend of mine works with exotic materials and they are purchasing lots of things for ARC. Though I imagine these materials have a long lead time.
For people more aware of the fusion industry, what is it that stopped the plasma at 22 minutes (or lower times in alternate tests)? Did they just stop injecting power to maintain the heat as they achieved their benchmark?
Is this something where it's on the precipice and small tweaks bridges from 22 minutes to basically indefinitely?
Tokamaks need the central solenoid to have a current ramp, so at some point you run out of voltage. You can turn that way down, but you get less plasma performance. You're traditionally limited by heat rejection capabilities of the vacuum vessel.
These are science machines to learn about plasma and increase performance of future machines. A real reactor involves a lot of engineering to handle the heat rejection problem (and turn it into a revenue stream if you're clever). In terms of the pulsed nature: not really a problem if you keep the duty cycle high enough and maintain sufficient buffers in your coolant to keep the turbines happily turning away.
I learned recently that another limit to plasma duration is contamination. As fusion occurs and high energy particles that escape magnetic confinement blast the toroid wall, ions of metal get mixed into the plasma and degrade performance.
I've seen photos of what the inside of experimental tokamaks look like after many cycles. Metal is eroded away and deposited around the chamber in interesting patterns. Unfortunately a image search isn't surfacing the images I have in mind.
From the announcement, "1,337 seconds: that was how long WEST, a tokamak run from the CEA Cadarache site in southern France and one of the EUROfusion consortium medium size Tokamak facilities, was able to maintain a plasma for on 12 February. This was a 25% improvement on the previous record time achieved with EAST, in China, a few weeks previously."
I wonder how much of an effect this kind of truly international (not in the same 'bloc') competition will have on budgets and speed of progress. Cold war tech race, etc.
It's always a good time to be an engineer. These public comps are more recruitment and training. It's not like new discoveries are made during these events. It's partly a party for the industry.
Related: PBS Space Time just did a neat episode on plasma, focusing on what the requirements are for confinement, called "The Final Barrier to (Nearly) Infinite Energy"
The Sun consumes a mass equivalent of a mount Everest worth of hydrogen via fusion to shine for just an hour (or thereabouts, if I did my math right :)). For perspective, this amount of energy is more than enough to power the Earth's current electrical usage for over a billion years.
That's all before getting into how a containment failure doesn't imply "and then everything nearby just started a self sustaining fusion reaction". The confinement itself is a key part of what enables the conditions for the fusion to continue.
I am a plasma researcher, though not in the fusion field. Containment and stability are required on tokamaks to keep a plasma burning. Losing either of these will quench the reaction. The best way to control a plasma - magnetic fields, also causes significant instabilities, which is why fusion is so difficult.
No. It just does not make sense from physical rules. Fusion only happens in a very high vacuum, at ridiculous temperatures, with very specific fuel, in the confined space. Just the cooling effect of having oxygen atoms there(in the plasma) stops the reaction, let alone touching anything so cold(millions of times colder and denser) as the walls or the outside gas.
Seems implausible. The fusion presumably wouldn’t keep going if it breached the walls.
Also, to be bright enough that we would see it from here as a star, I imagine it would require enough material that one might as well just let gravity do the job rather that use a Tokamak?
Maybe there are efficiency gains that are large enough that it wouldn’t actually require as much material as a star? I wouldn’t guess so though.
> wonder if many of the stars in the sky are from groups that almost nailed containment and stability on their Tokamak
Different fusion systems. Stars fuse, in general, by statistically overloading the weak force. (The Sun is volumetrically about an order of magnitude less powerful than a human being. Like 200 to 1,110 W/m^3.)
In smaller volumes, e.g. on Earth, we have to break the strong force. This releases more energy, I think. But it also requires temperatures and energy densities far higher than that which stars produce.
Not sure if that strengthens or weakens your hypothesis...
Strong and weak force don't come into it in either case. Fusion requires overcoming electrostatic repulsion, that's about it. The problem is the Sun is gigantic but it's fusion process is actually very inefficient. To make it practical on Earth we need more particle interactions, and thus higher temperatures, to make it Q>1
I do enjoy sharing this kind of news with all the fusion haters online. Fusion tech is legitimately cracking away on their "perpetually X-years away" stigma. That perpetual barrier can very reasonably be viewed as a normal technology barrier now.
CEA themselves are saying fusion is not going to be ready by 2050.
Don't mistake skepticism for hate. I will be the first one to applaud a commercial fusion reactor. But fusion proponents often use it's pending development as an argument against fission - a technology we already have and desperately need to adopt now.
As a big proponent of fusion: we should be spending more money and effort on it. We should be spending more money and effort on fission too. Sustainable energy sources shouldn't be fighting for scraps.
Yes, there are significant issues. Nothing we do not anticipate solving, but still. It will take time and solving these issues in a resource-effective way so that it can actually work as a power plant will be a challenge.
> But fusion often use it's pending development as an argument against fission - a technology we already have and desperately need to adopt now.
If it helps, CEA is also doing a ton of R&D on fission (and batteries, among others). But there, the real issues are mostly political.
20 years ago I would have agreed with you. However today we have proof that wind and solar work, are cheap, and are useful. The world doesn't need fusion or fission, other technology is plenty good.
Unless you can do a science fiction thing of turning off the sun, and harvesting the hydrogen in it to power local reactors in earth orbit to provide the energy (light) we need without letting the vast majority escape our solar system unused. Otherwise that big fusion reactor in the sky provides all the energy we need.
At the risk of coming off as a nay-sayer, let's say engineering hurtles related to fusion power generation is overcome. How is the presumably high upfront capital costs going to compare with the ROI?
That is, it would seem likely that fusion power would be costly to build. It would also seem apparent that if it were to fulfil its promise then the power it generates is sold at or less than the current amount. That would then seem to imply a lengthily time to make a return on the initial investment. Or am I missing something else with this equation?
It's not only initial investment. Half of the fusion fuel is tritium, which is one of the most expensive substances on Earth (a google search finds that the price of tritium is about $30k per gram [1]). For comparison, fission reactors need enriched uranium, and that costs only about $4000 per kilogram [2]. People have the idea that fusion produces many times more energy than fission, probably because fusion bombs have a higher yield than fission bombs. This is not true. The most typical fusion reaction involves one deuterium and one tritium and yields 17.5 MeV from a total or 5 nucleons. A fission reaction involves one neutron and one atom of U-235 and yields 190 MeV from 236 nucleons. So fusion yields about 4.3 times more energy per nucleon. That's respectable, but in the popular imagination fusion yields 100 or 1000 times more energy than fission, so the fuel cost can be neglected. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Agreed. I think fusion power would be great, but the sales pitch of 'limitless free power' just isn't true. The thought experiment I use is this: Let's imagine coal is magically free in every way. How does my power bill change? The answer is "barely at all" because the cost of utility electric power is mostly in distribution. We pay around 30c/kWh while the wholesale energy price is more like 2c/kWh.
It'll still make a difference in large scale energy intensive stuff, like desalination, aluminium refining, etc. but the average punter is going to save a lot more by installing solar panels.
We'll never know until (or if it ever comes) but there's reason to believe Fusion could be >50% cheaper than Fission.
That would still be more expensive than Solar and Wind (by 100% or more) - but I am skeptical in the same time frame those sources will be able to take over baseload generation.
It's really comparing apples to oranges.
Plus, it's a very hypothetical future. Anything could happen between now and then.
There is a certain amount of "who cares about the cost" when it comes to fusion power. Nations will want to build them to lower or eliminate reliance on foreign energy, to address climate change concerns, and as a backup for renewables, and for other non-economic reasons. Many things that governments will want to fund that have nothing to do with directly "how much does the electricity cost?" or "when can we expect a return on investment?"
And the first generation will be expensive. That's how all new technology is.
There's definitely an existential question around if fusion will ever be able to beat renewables plus batteries, but who knows with our energy demands ever increasing at some point renewables may hit a breaking point in land cost.
I'm generally pro-publicly funded research. There is not any direct ROI on say the LHC, but it does fund advanced manufacturing and engineering work that might enable other more practical industrial applications. The ROI might be a century away.
> At the risk of coming off as a nay-sayer, let's say engineering hurtles related to fusion power generation is overcome. How is the presumably high upfront capital costs going to compare with the ROI?
I definitely prefer spending the money on fusion over rushing a Mars mission. Fusion is probably cheaper than Mars and will actually benefit humanity. Which is not something I can say about going to Mars (or even the moon).
A Mars mission would benefit humanity, but less directly. The past lunar missions and space program benefited humanity in many ways.
For pure return on investment, I agree with your take.
Provided of course that any future threats to humanity as a single planet civilization don’t materialize. There’s a low and uncertain tail risk ignored in our calculation.
There's just no economic case for fusion. It's useful research, but current fission does the job better, and we already have decades of proven reserves, centuries likely if we kept looking for new reserves ... and then thousands of years from sea water extraction.
There's also many paths to improved fission. Fast neutron reactors, thorium, small fast neutron reactors for industrial heat, thorium reactors, accelerator-driven subcritical reactors ... Millions of years of fuel available and new ways to use the output beyond boiling water for electricity.
Note that I'm not mentioning slow neutron SMR, they're mostly pointless and just an excuse not to build current and perfectly fine PWR/BWR/heavy water reactors.
I like the idea of the passively-safe, waste-reducing LFTR but it's still a materials science issue at this point, and there's no real solution in sight.
Fission still has this huge stigma about "nuclear=dangerous and bad" which clearly isn't true with the growing number of passively-safe designs... but nobody wants to fund development of those into proper commercial reactors.
Meanwhile, fusion is still different and futuristic enough to have support from governments and the general public.
I think the funding has had a modest stimulus, and that was always the locus of causation for "perpetually x years away." Private fusion especially (but I do think their claims are somewhat overstated).
It's insane how many people like that are out there. "Fission is bad, fusion is bad, we should only do renewables." C'mon, fission brought us where we are and fusion might be the future. I believe they both deserve further research and improvements.
It’s a common fallacy: “$thing is good, new and exciting, therefore everything else is old and rubbish”. The pattern is very easy to see if we pay attention. It’s very common in tech circles, where people tend to be easily excited about new things.
I do enjoy how mindless some of the fusion advocacy is.
Why do you think a result like this would make anyone less skeptical of fusion? Ability to run a device for this long is not the obstacle to success for nuclear fusion. This is just another vastly overhyped "breakthrough", which we seem to have every week.
I've followed fusion for probably longer than you've been alive, and there are fundamental showstoppers for the common approaches, particularly tokamaks and stellarators. Fusion may have a chance with unconventional approaches, like Helion's, but the consensus approach looks like an exercise in groupthink that won't lead anywhere.
Agreed with all of this. And, there’s an implicit criticism of science journalism here. Any article that suggests useful fusion reactors are X years away should address the massive unsolved engineering problems that have to be surmounted. But no news source is going to spend five or six extra paragraphs explaining neutron metal activation or hydrogen embrittlement.
I don't hate it, but am not fanboy either. Imagine you can have nuclear fission and uranium is already found in nature ready to go to the reactor. Even in that case, nuclear fission could not beat solar or eolic ROI.
Even if nuclear fussion had the advantage of free combustible, the costs of building and manteinance alone could make it not practical. As of today it's not enough to have positive net return, but to have a LCOE of maybe $60/MWh (and going down). Current estimates put fussion at $120/MWh.
If it can't keep up with solar and eolic rade of fallig prices, it might be only suitable to replace fission power (which is not falling), about 10% of the grid. And there have been literally billions spent in research.
> Even in that case, nuclear fission could not beat solar or eolic ROI.
Neither solar or wind are free. There are costs associated e.g. with building, shipping, maintaining, decommissioning these things (and hopefully at some point recycling, but that’s not solved). Looking at the whole picture, these costs are not that different. These technologies are complementary, they have very different characteristics.
> Current estimates put fussion at $120/MWh.
Current estimates are completely unreliable, because no industrial-scale demonstrator was built. They are a useful tool for planning and modeling, but not solid enough to build an industrial strategy on them. (And it’s “fusion”)
I've seen cost estimates around there for tokamaks. If Helion actually works, their estimate is more like $20/MWh, and it looks pretty plausible given their reactor design. They would have relatively low neutron radiation, direct electricity extraction without a turbine, factory-built reactors transportable by rail, and no particularly expensive components like superconductors or fancy lasers.
Some of the other designs also look relatively cheap. Tokamaks are just the one we understand the best, so we have the highest confidence that they'll work.
Challenges persist, notably in developing materials that can endure prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures and neutron radiation within fusion reactors. Addressing these material durability issues is essential for the realization of continuous, commercially viable fusion power.
I fail to find this info: how much energy did they get out? How much did they pump in? How long does it have to burn until there's energy in-out equilibrium?
* This expirement wasn't about energy in-out, it was about plasma control. Specifically stopping at 1337 seconds is a way of announcing "and we could have gone longer, but we liked this number"
Fusion will not be commercial ever at least not for power generation.
Fission has potential for far cheaper fuel cost and can be done with less capital cost.
We are spending a crazy amount of money researching fusion while we have only explored like 1% of the potential of fission. If only part of this money was invested in fission we could have a competition for multiple advanced fission reactors.
I don’t care about sex jokes. 42 (or 72) OTOH are cool because both are surrounded by twin primes!!! how cool is that? (semiprime coolness is significantly smaller than twin prime coolness)
Why is that the correct interpretation? It seems like another would be: "This is a ~33% improvement over a record set only three seeks ago. Innovation is rapidly accelerating to a point where plasma can be contained indefinitely."
> Nevertheless, given the infrastructure needed to produce this energy on a large scale, it is unlikely that fusion technology will make a significant contribution to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. For this, several technological sticking points need to be overcome, and the economic feasibility of this form of energy production must still be demonstrated.
It's very cool, but the article itself paints a long time line. Indefinite containment is just one part of the puzzle.
Commercially viable likely also means: cost competitive with nuclear fission. Which might well never happen, since the reactor designs for fusion are orders of magnitude more complex (and therefore more expensive).
They also need a lot of ignition energy which requires a powerful separate power source, which limits where the fusion reactor can be built.
Moreover, there is the issue of the reactor core being degraded by the heavy neutron radiation which is produced by the fusion reaction. So the chamber has to be replaced regularly. Which may also be quite expensive.
Does the commercial viability change when one considers regulatory constraints on building new fission plants? People may be more inclined to allow fusion reactors than fission reactors, since the former doesn't require uranium. (I'm sure there are dangerous failure modes for fusion, like there are for everything else, but Chernobyl continues to haunt the nuclear industry in the popular imagination.)
My understanding as well is that fusion could take care of base load, but it can't be scaled up or down based on grid demand to the same degree that fission reactors can. So fusion and renewables alone would not be capable of a carbon-free future grid.
I think this is hopelessly optimistic. From what I can tell, they have not even started building the ARC reactor. There is about zero reason to believe that all the completely unproven concepts, like the molten-salt liquid blanket (or tritium breeding in general) are gonna work without a hitch and zero delays-- thats just straight up self-delusional.
In comparison with ITER, the have the advantage of newer magnet technology (which certainly helps!), but thats the only actually proven thing, and every other aspect of ARC is basically complete vaporware.
It would be a very pleasant surprise to have them extract electrical energy from the thing in early 2030, but I'm not even holding my breath for first plasma by then. But we'll see.
No one has demonstrated stable plasma operations for any lengths of time and they are claiming to not just get Q-plasma > 1 but Q-total > 1 by 2030? This is more optimistic than Full Self Driving by 2016
Does anyone have a top 5 issues list of things that are holding up fusion progress? Like there are basic material science issues that still need work to bring costs down, so that critical materials don't cost too much? Or there is still some theoretical plasma physics that we're still working out the details on? Or magnetic confinement simulations are still too crude, and we need 100x on computing power. Or whatever.
AFAIU, no existing tokamaks can handle sustained plasma for any significant period of time because they'll burn down.
Did this destroy the facility?
What duration of sustained fusion plasma can tokamaks like EAST, WEST, and ITER withstand? What will need to change for continuous fusion energy to be net gained from a tokamak or a stellerator fusion reactor?
If this destroyed the facility that would be the headline this news article.... WEST highest is 22 minutes (it's in the title) and you could google EAST and ITER but the title tells you it is less than 22 minutes. WEST is a testing ground for ITER. The fact that you can have sustained fusion for only 22 minutes is the biggest problem since you need to boil water continuously because all power sources rely on taking cold water and making it warm constantly so that it makes a turbine move.
there is destroyed and then there is a smoking hole in the side of the planet:)
but I think it fair to say, that after 22 min running, that there is no way that it can be turned back on later kind of thing, fairly sure its a pwhew!, lookatdat!, almost lost plasma containment....
keep in mind that they are trying to replicate the conditions found inside a star with some magnets
and stuff, sure its ferociously engineered stuff
but not at all like the stuff that could exist inside a star
so all in all a rather audacious endevour, and I wish them luck with it
To rephrase the question: what is the limit to the duration of sustained inertial confinement fusion plasma in the EAST, WEST, and ITER tokamaks, and why is the limit that amount of time?
Don't those materials melt if exposed to temperatures hotter than the sun for sufficient or excessive periods of time?
For what sustained plasma duration will EAST, WEST, and ITER need to be redesigned? 1 hour, 24 hours?
> all power sources rely on taking cold water and making it warm constantly so that it makes a turbine move.
PV (photovoltaic), TPV (thermopohotovoltaic), and thin film and other solid-state thermoelectric (TE) approaches do not rely upon corrosive water turning a turbine.
Turbine blades can be made of materials that are more resistant to corrosion.
> 5% efficient; you usually get less than 5% of the thermal energy converted into electricity
(International space law prohibits putting nuclear reactors in space without specific international approval, which is considered for e.g. deep space probes like Voyager; though the sun is exempt.)
> The term "thermoelectric effect" encompasses three separately identified effects: the Seebeck effect (temperature differences cause electromotive forces), the Peltier effect (thermocouples create temperature differences), and the Thomson effect (the Seebeck coefficient varies with temperature).
There is no danger of destroying the facility. The problem is keeping the plasma going. Even with self-sustaining fusion, the plasma doesn't have that much energy, it is really hot but low density.
The duration is because plasma is heated by rising current, and that hits limit after some period of time. With self-sustaining fusion, heating shouldn't be needed after the initial pulse.
It still eludes me how we are going to be able to reproduce the same temperature and pressure as in the core of a star considering the humongous amount of mass (hence energy) required to create those conditions.
There are tantalizing ways to create fusion which don’t require these precise conditions. For example, a simple farnsworth fusor device gets fusion reactions just by causing atoms to cross paths at super high speed until they collide - they simply don’t collide often enough to release anywhere near a net energy gain.
Inertial confinement fusion, such as the National ignition facility, does generate comparable pressures and temperatures to the core of the sun within the fuel pellet for an extremely small moment during an implosion. This is done by focusing a lot of energy on small target.
Plasma confinement techniques don’t utilize high pressure to create fusion; they rely on extreme temperatures which are significantly hotter than the core of the sun, which can produce fusion events in a plasma which is only pressurized to around 1 atmosphere (they also rely on different fuel types than the sun which fuse much more readily). The key is once again focus, a large amount of energy is put into a small amount of gas. The obvious issue with this is that the extreme temperatures would destroy any physical container rapidly - but given the electromagnetic nature of plasma, it can be contained using a strong magnetic field without reaching the surface of its physical container.
While temperature may be in the stellar ballpark, pressure should be much lower. That is fine because we are not trying to do proton-proton fusion (that one is very slow even in a star) but a much easier deuterium-tritium fusion.
So, deuterium needs to be obtained from sea water through distillation and electrolysis - both energy intensive operations. And tritium comes from nuclear reactors.
I have always wondered - assuming that the confinement problem is solved, how does the cost of the fuel compare to fission (or other generation methods?
Controlled fusion does not require the conditions of the interior of a star, because the nuclear fuels involved are many orders of magnitude more reactive. All the Sun's initial deuterium (and all the lithium in the core) were burned away long ago.
well done on the french achieving yet another extraordinary feat of engineering and research while still bearing the stigma of being shit at everything for some reason
I hope this international race ends up bearing fruit in a few decades, we need it
No, none of the dozens of reactors constructed so far have gone through the trouble of building a steam system with a turbine and a generator.
Which is understandable, since this is the easy part (not very different than the setup in a fission or coal plant), and there's absolutely no reason to do so until we have seen ignition.
I'd just assume that temperature would be an important factor in the reactor.
With the millions of degrees being involved, seems a little more than "not very different" than a fission reactor. But would like to hear how this is supposed to work.
They turned it off specifically then. Just like the previous one at 1066. We used to do stuff like this in our labs as a joke. Or try and stop timers exactly on :00
As a secondary effect it kind of is; the general assumption still is that the slop-generating AI will need a lot of power to train, so there is surprisingly a lot more private investment into fusion and fission innovation in recent years.
Well, AI also has something else for it : at this point, no one is expecting any ROI soon, but they all imagine that it's going to be huuuuge, so the "expected" (as in, "wished for") ROI might as well be infinite.
As soon as AI investors start demanding dividends, then the ROI of investing in AI will be compared to the ROI of investing in electricity production "for production sake".
Even if we shut down chatgpt, people who still switch light on.
If we only keep enough fusion reactors to run LLM inferences, but no one can afford lights, well...
The need to process the large amount of data gathered by the fusion test rig drove many fields of computer science. The freaking internet was supposedly invented because the physicists at CERN needed a way to collaboratively process and interpret this data.
If we do the fusion in zero g then we have solved the confinement issue. The problem is creating conditions for fusion in zero g. The simplest way would probably be aggregating enough material to a single spot that gravity itself creates conditions for fusion. But then the power plant becomes too energetic for earth so it has to be at an enormous distance away to be safe. And with that of course you have the problem of transmitting the power back to earth. But I think photons could be gathered at a safe distance from this fusion, to harvest it without having to be so close.
The issue with that is how to direct the energy back to Earth, and then collect it. If you can’t direct it and it radiates in all directions then only a tiny fraction of the produced photons will reach Earth. Then you need to collect those photons in order to do useful work, otherwise they will just heat the earth. If the distance needed to remain safe is greater or less than geosynchronous orbit, you’ll need collectors all over the Earth as they won’t have constant line of sight towards the source and experience a “nighttime” of sorts. There is also the issue of atmospheric effects, such as high densities of moisture, absorbing or scattering the photons, reducing the efficiency of the collectors. So it could work, but the effective maximum capacity will always be quite limited and the overall process highly inefficient relative to the total fusion energy produced.
Actually you don't want the transmission process to be 100% efficient. If you really captured all the fusion energy transmitted (or even just the small part of it reaching Earth), all sorts of people would complain, trust me! But fortunately that fusion reactor has more than enough power to go around...
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How about we use solar panels to collect that energy? And then we add batteries to fix holes in supply when the panels can’t see the power source.
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> The issue with that is how to direct the energy back to Earth, and then collect it.
‘Simpler’: move earth to where the energy goes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
Maybe we can use the excess photons in another way? We could bio-engineer sunlight collection devices that would take in sunlight and use it to break apart CO2 and produce other useful materials. We could then spread them around the planet to use the excess photons in a productive way. We gain valuable complex molecules and break down CO2 so a win win!
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There may also be a side business selling skin products to protect people who may be exposed to the radiation from this new reactor. Possibly people may even choose to vacation in areas of elevated radation, as it is likely to be warmer. Interesting...
And another side business selling tanning beds.
If you only have one of them then the photons would only be available on that side of the earth at any given time and the other side wouldn't have power, but two of them would confuse the animals and disrupt everyone's circadian rhythm and then you'd have to deal with the three-body problem. Even the reactor-facing side would also have issues with the photons not getting through when it's cloudy.
The photons will also create heat and that heat can be used for useful work at any time, even when there are no photons hitting that side of the earth. For example it will evaporate water which will later condense into rivers, where you can put turbines. So it's a kind of fusion power, but less direct. Pure science fiction, of course.
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Three Body Problems are only systematically unsolvable, you can still numerically calculate and manually move them with some algorithm.
A huge fusion reactor at an enormous distance away... isn't that the sun? :-)
It looks like ultimate goal of this is creating a self-sustaining fusion reactor approximately 1AU away from earth (for safety) and using photovoltaic arrays to absorb the energy... Ingenious!
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yes, exactly, no need for any fusion reactors in space. Collect space solar energy and beam it back to earth via microwave radiation.
Space solar is an old idea and the Soviets/Russians have worked on it since the 70's; and nowadays, like most other Russian inventions the Chinese are commercializing it. https://www.ft.com/content/2d43ed21-9f9d-4e90-a18b-ad46f0a47...
That's what OP was implying. Energy (..and its derivative global warming ) is just infrastructure and finance problem now onwards. Balancing grid, Moving power from sunshine area to non-sunshine area, storing some power at night, handling fluctuation all are more or less solved problem. Fusion is just research subject ( ..or for may be powering colony on mars ? ). ..... saying that, I hope our collective curiosity for fusion will take us to new inventions and space opportunities.
> If we do the fusion in zero g then we have solved the confinement issue.
If me move the reactor close enough to the center of the earth, eventually we can get to zero g. We then also solved the confinement problem.
…is this an elaborate joke about solar power? And by extension, virtually all the energy that’s accumulated on the earth over the eons? It took me a minute :)
I thought it was obvious but apparently not. Sarcasm is only funny when not tagged with the /s.
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Try building a structure around the fusion source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
beam energy down to the earth from space? My god man, did you learn nothing from Sim City’s microwave power plants??
I did some back of the envelope calculations for this and it turns out that almost all life will eventually evolve to have reasonable protection against it. Except in Australia.
You'd have to stick it in a lagrange point 1.5M km away though since just in orbit is not true zero G.
Microwave energy transfer should work. That's what I like about the Helion fusion reactor design they don't use steam to power generators it's direct power no water or steam.
In Germany, we call this „Fernfusion“. It‘s actually working beautifully, and I‘m a happy customer.
That sounds hard to meter and charge for.
About 1 AU distance, right?
I reckon Earth would need to be around 93M miles from the fusion reactor.
Tbh it sounds like that cure is worse than the problem…
I think you just invented the solar system.
Patent troll level 10/10
We shall be as gods!
Let's do it!
> This was a 25% improvement on the previous record time achieved with EAST, in China, a few weeks previously
I applaud this nuclear arms race. 22 minutes is really impressive for a technology that’s always been “20 years away”. I think I will do a deep dive on the technical challenges of fusion.
Not to downplay it, but it's still only half as hot as would be required of a commercial reactor. Also this reactor had no mechanisms to recover energy or neutrons to breed tritium. Still impressive and encouraging.
Right but that's what ITER is for. This type of research is to validate control systems which can be transferred to that project (i.e. prove you can do it, then prove its not machine-dependent).
I'm a layman, and so can't comment too specificaly. I found this Construction Physics article interesting, which was posted here some months back: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/will-we-ever-get-fusi...
I'm glad the bear case includes the "will never be economically practical" which is my core criticism of fusion, even with "high funding".
I also didn't see anything about vessel irradiation, which also never seems to be discussed. I get it probably isn't as big a problem as solid fuel rod fission in terms of waste creation, and tritium breeding may help, but it still will be kind of the same problem with LFTRs: a reactor design will fundamentally need an ongoing reconstruction/replacement strategy due to the vessel irradiation and transmutation from high energy neutrons.
Feel free to correct me if this isn't as big a problem as I think it is.
The “20 years away” meme is stupid. There really are technologies that are possible but incredibly hard and require decades of sustained effort.
Cracking natural language comprehension with digital computers is an example from our field and it’s here.
> The “20 years away” meme is stupid.
No, it's not. It's just a legit illustration of somethings state of development on fundamental levels. It simply means "we have no f**ing clue how we can do this, but future..". This is different from something we have already solved, and you just need to throw money on it to scale it to whichever level you need it.
> Cracking natural language comprehension with digital computers is an example from our field and it’s here.
That's the point, everything in research is always x0 years away, until the breakthrough happens and it's finished.
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I would debate the fact that LLMs have "cracked natural language comprehension"...
Not that it's not impressive, but LLMs do not "comprehend", for a start.
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>Cracking natural language comprehension with digital computers is an example from our field and it’s here.
Exactly, there are experts in the field less than a decade a way who said 50+ years easily. And there we are.
good one haha, the properly scary part of the other nuclear arms race is fusion too even!
Triple product (efficiency ) has increased faster than moors law for the last 50 years.
Still people make jokes about fusion research, some things just take time.
I recommend this excellent review of the even more excellent book „The future of fusion energy“
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-future...
> Triple product (efficiency ) has increased faster than moors law for the last 50 years
Fusion research progress is underappreciated. But Moore's Law is for an existing industry. Prior to that, it took 10 ^ 6+ improvements in various technologies to make computing possible.
Not sure what you mean by that. There was a bunch of computing technology long before photolithography or even transistors. And mores law was coined in 1965 when individual chips had far less than 10^6 transistors while the first one was made by hand.
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Moore's law is self propagating: improvements in compute beget improvements in compute by improving the computers used to design compute devices. fusion, while in an impressive bootstrapping phase, does not get that acceleration until commercial break-even.
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moore's law is just the observation that chips are 2d: linear shrinks produce exponential benefit.
I can't see anything like a linear/square relation in fusion reactor design (even accepting that ML's premise of shrinks being linear in time is not a law, just something that sometimes happened, and sometimes didn't...)
Specifically they were able to maintain a tokamak plasma (presumably at fusion temperatures) for 1337 seconds, using two megawatts of heating. 1337 is not a joke; presumably the "leet" reading is coincidental.
I assumed it was their target, and indeed a semi-private joke... but you make the case for coincidental. I prefer to believe it was by design :D
With China spying around, you probably don't want to reveal the full potential of your technologies before you are sure that you will have permanent lead.
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The article says it was not fusion temperatures, and that they intend to get hotter in future tests.
I see, thanks! I missed that.
That makes it less impressive; any fluorescent-light tube can maintain a stable plasma for years, after all, without even magnetic confinement.
Good technical intro to H-mode (high-confinement mode) for fusion reactions to work:
https://www.energy.gov/science/articles/science-close-develo...
>> In the H-mode, a calm edge without turbulence reduces how much heat and how many charged particles the plasma loses. This leads to a sharp increase in pressure across the entire volume of the plasma, including the core where the conditions that can lead to fusion occur. The reduced energy and particle losses also minimize damage to the material surfaces surrounding the plasma.
Wouldn’t that make energy recovery from the plasma much more difficult?
Neutrons and photons pass through magnetic fields, so they always escape the plasma and provide heat that can be turned into steam. Keeping the plasma ions better confined doesn't impair energy recovery.
One issue I see for applying prediction markets to things like “there is a commercially successful fusion power plant before the year 2070” is the long time until resolution. Now, of course, one can hope to sell your shares in “yes” or “no” 5 years from now, but there may not be enough liquidity?
Suppose we had one prediction market M_1 for “On January 1st 2070, resolves ‘yes’ if there has been a commercially successful nuclear fusion power plant, and otherwise resolves ‘no’”, and then another market M_2 that, maybe it resolves in 5 years as ‘yes’ if the price of M_1’s ‘yes’ is greater than 30%? Or… hm, that seems problematic because people could just buy a bunch of M_1’s “yes” right before M_2 resolves? Or maybe that’s a self-correcting problem because people could… no, still seems like a problem..
Well, what if instead of a prediction market about the future value of another prediction market, it was futures contracts for the shares in a prediction market? Like, the right to buy or sell shares in “yes” or “no” at a particular price?
So like, if you’re confident that the prediction market will assign probability p or higher on a particular day 5 years from now, then if you bought futures which, on that day each of the futures could be used to sell a share in “no” at the price (1-p), then… well, if the probability assigned to “yes” on that day is indeed p or higher, then the price of “no” would be (1-p) or lower, so one buy a share in “no” at a price less than (1-p) and then sell it at (1-p)..
Hm, issue there is one still needs to buy the “no” in order to sell it, so that doesn’t seem to really fix the “what if there is no liquidity in 5 years?” issue?
I guess one could spend 1 to create a share of “yes” and a share of “no”, and then sell the “no”, and be left with the share in “yes” which is ostensibly worth at least p, and then like, sell it a bit later when there’s more liquidity or something?
I probably don’t know what I’m talking about about this.
You should look into options - you're describing various forms of options contract.
None of them solve this problem, though:
> Now, of course, one can hope to sell your shares in “yes” or “no” 5 years from now, but there may not be enough liquidity?
In general, if there isn't liquidity in the primary market you should expect the derivative markets to be even worse. You would use options not to find extra liquidity - and binary options on illiquid markets like you describe are indeed particularly prone to market manipulation - but to express very particular views.
> another market M_2 that, maybe it resolves in 5 years as ‘yes’ if the price of M_1’s ‘yes’ is greater than 30%?
Like this one - you should buy this contract if you really do want to make a bet the price will be over 30%, and you don't care much about getting a big payday if the price is 90 or keeping most of your money if the price is 29.
The future value could be shared with the entire humanity.
For example, Bill Gates is going to die like everyone else and give most of the money away, like Warren Buffet.
They can spend a significant amount of money in life if they see nuclear fusion is possible, even if they do not recover the costs.
The only thing that is needed for this to happen is investors being confident that the money is not going to be wasted.
I personally know rich people that are betting a significant part of their wealth in fusion(millions USD) even when they know there is a risk that they will never recover the money.
Poor Bill Gates wants to give his money away, but he hasn’t gotten around to it yet. Why are we still pretending he is a philanthropist and not one of the biggest oligarchs of our time?
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I don't think a long pay-off horizon is a problem for this market. It the same as for shares in companies that don't pay dividends. What creates a price for Berkshire Hathaway (BRK/A) if owning the share never gives you anything in the form of dividend? It's because in the far future, you can be confident they'll have enough money in the bank that they will pay out. Maybe not in your lifetime, but you can sell to someone, who'll sell to someone, etc. who will eventually collect a dividend. The market is so abstract that that pay-off time could be infinity years in the future and still, the share still has market value today.
How would you define "commercially successful"? The first fusion power plants will only get built with huge government subsides. Some governments like China look at this as a strategic, existential issue and will pay whatever it costs to make it work. They don't like being dependent on foreign fossil fuel supplies that the USA could easily interdict.
I’m in the USA and don’t like being dependent on foreign fuel supplies!
I think there was (maybe still possible?) a real missed opportunity to pitch green energy in a national security or America First way. I don’t think the average republican voter wants us to be as tied to OPEC the way we are.
We could still product as much—or more!—oil in Texas while reducing our care for anything in the Middle East.
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> first fusion power plants will only get built with huge government subsides
This is true of every energy system ever.
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I just meant “they generate power and sell it”, which, I realize now isn’t exactly what I said / what I said wasn’t exactly what I meant.
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At this point, just go to a casino. The last thing our world needs is more gambling and fruitless speculation.
Speculation with positive expected return is a good thing. So the question is, does fusion have positive expected return?
The world spends 10% of global GDP on energy, about $10 trillion per year. The world will spend something like a quadrillion dollars on energy this century, possibly more as the world gets wealthier and per capita energy use increases. A billion dollar investment is just one part in a million of that. Fusion doesn't have to be very likely to succeed to make such speculation worthwhile.
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It’s not that I want to bet, but that I want a good probability estimate about whether commercially viable fusion power will be around by such and such date.
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I had no idea that Commonwealth fusion was already well into their construction of a grid connected plant. Apparently it might finally be happening?
I'm not sure how this works, how are they confident enough that they can make it produce net power?
The location they have that's "well into construction" is SPARC, which is not intended to be a net power production facility. It will host their net gain demonstrator that they intend to have first plasma in next year and target a net gain demonstration in 2027.
ARC which they announced siting for and is intended to be their first grid-attached net power provider only just had the location selected so I don't believe its got much construction going on yet. The goal for that plant to be producing power is "early 2030s".
Ah, maybe not well into construction. But a friend of mine works with exotic materials and they are purchasing lots of things for ARC. Though I imagine these materials have a long lead time.
"The company plans to produce its first plasma in 2026"
They haven't even gotten to Q>1, let alone building a real power plant.
For people more aware of the fusion industry, what is it that stopped the plasma at 22 minutes (or lower times in alternate tests)? Did they just stop injecting power to maintain the heat as they achieved their benchmark?
Is this something where it's on the precipice and small tweaks bridges from 22 minutes to basically indefinitely?
Tokamaks need the central solenoid to have a current ramp, so at some point you run out of voltage. You can turn that way down, but you get less plasma performance. You're traditionally limited by heat rejection capabilities of the vacuum vessel.
These are science machines to learn about plasma and increase performance of future machines. A real reactor involves a lot of engineering to handle the heat rejection problem (and turn it into a revenue stream if you're clever). In terms of the pulsed nature: not really a problem if you keep the duty cycle high enough and maintain sufficient buffers in your coolant to keep the turbines happily turning away.
I learned recently that another limit to plasma duration is contamination. As fusion occurs and high energy particles that escape magnetic confinement blast the toroid wall, ions of metal get mixed into the plasma and degrade performance.
I've seen photos of what the inside of experimental tokamaks look like after many cycles. Metal is eroded away and deposited around the chamber in interesting patterns. Unfortunately a image search isn't surfacing the images I have in mind.
Does that mean it's impossible to have steady-state operation? (And are stellarators different here?)
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I keep track of nuclear related news.
An easier (more fun) version of this with some context is here: https://x.com/olshansky/status/1892069988707729614
> x.com
I'm not clicking that shit
You might be interested in:
Those Firefox extensions automatically redirect any link that points to Shitter.
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[flagged]
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https://twitter.com/olshansky/status/1892069988707729614
Related?
Nuclear fusion: New record set at Chinese reactor EAST https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42854306 28-jan-2025
From the announcement, "1,337 seconds: that was how long WEST, a tokamak run from the CEA Cadarache site in southern France and one of the EUROfusion consortium medium size Tokamak facilities, was able to maintain a plasma for on 12 February. This was a 25% improvement on the previous record time achieved with EAST, in China, a few weeks previously."
1,337-second burn.
Lots of leet scientists there, in all seriousness. CEA is my alma mater, though I worked on quantum computing, not fusion.
how many more seconds did they push it to hit 133t xD
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I wonder how much of an effect this kind of truly international (not in the same 'bloc') competition will have on budgets and speed of progress. Cold war tech race, etc.
It should be a good time to be an engineer.
It's always a good time to be an engineer. These public comps are more recruitment and training. It's not like new discoveries are made during these events. It's partly a party for the industry.
Still 50 years away...
our physics teacher at school (late 90s) already joked that "usable fusion power is only 30 years away, for 30 years in a row now"
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Ok this was a terse comment, but so is a downvote. Please explain why is not 50 years away from first real industrial use. I am waiting....
https://youtu.be/RbZ-XYy0k10
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Related: PBS Space Time just did a neat episode on plasma, focusing on what the requirements are for confinement, called "The Final Barrier to (Nearly) Infinite Energy"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAJN1CrJsVE
PBS Spacetime is great. Excellent, accessible explanations of advanced topics without feeling dumbed down or overhyped.
I wonder if many of the stars in the sky are from groups that almost nailed containment and stability on their Tokamak.
The Sun consumes a mass equivalent of a mount Everest worth of hydrogen via fusion to shine for just an hour (or thereabouts, if I did my math right :)). For perspective, this amount of energy is more than enough to power the Earth's current electrical usage for over a billion years.
That's all before getting into how a containment failure doesn't imply "and then everything nearby just started a self sustaining fusion reaction". The confinement itself is a key part of what enables the conditions for the fusion to continue.
I am a plasma researcher, though not in the fusion field. Containment and stability are required on tokamaks to keep a plasma burning. Losing either of these will quench the reaction. The best way to control a plasma - magnetic fields, also causes significant instabilities, which is why fusion is so difficult.
Could you elaborate on how magnetic fields cause instabilities? As a layman, it's not immediately obvious to me why that would be the case.
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No. It just does not make sense from physical rules. Fusion only happens in a very high vacuum, at ridiculous temperatures, with very specific fuel, in the confined space. Just the cooling effect of having oxygen atoms there(in the plasma) stops the reaction, let alone touching anything so cold(millions of times colder and denser) as the walls or the outside gas.
Also stops immediately if no fuel is given.
Naive question here : how do we expect to collect thermal energy from it if we can't allow it to cool even a little ?
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Seems implausible. The fusion presumably wouldn’t keep going if it breached the walls.
Also, to be bright enough that we would see it from here as a star, I imagine it would require enough material that one might as well just let gravity do the job rather that use a Tokamak?
Maybe there are efficiency gains that are large enough that it wouldn’t actually require as much material as a star? I wouldn’t guess so though.
> wonder if many of the stars in the sky are from groups that almost nailed containment and stability on their Tokamak
Different fusion systems. Stars fuse, in general, by statistically overloading the weak force. (The Sun is volumetrically about an order of magnitude less powerful than a human being. Like 200 to 1,110 W/m^3.)
In smaller volumes, e.g. on Earth, we have to break the strong force. This releases more energy, I think. But it also requires temperatures and energy densities far higher than that which stars produce.
Not sure if that strengthens or weakens your hypothesis...
Strong and weak force don't come into it in either case. Fusion requires overcoming electrostatic repulsion, that's about it. The problem is the Sun is gigantic but it's fusion process is actually very inefficient. To make it practical on Earth we need more particle interactions, and thus higher temperatures, to make it Q>1
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I do enjoy sharing this kind of news with all the fusion haters online. Fusion tech is legitimately cracking away on their "perpetually X-years away" stigma. That perpetual barrier can very reasonably be viewed as a normal technology barrier now.
CEA themselves are saying fusion is not going to be ready by 2050.
Don't mistake skepticism for hate. I will be the first one to applaud a commercial fusion reactor. But fusion proponents often use it's pending development as an argument against fission - a technology we already have and desperately need to adopt now.
As a big proponent of fusion: we should be spending more money and effort on it. We should be spending more money and effort on fission too. Sustainable energy sources shouldn't be fighting for scraps.
Yes, there are significant issues. Nothing we do not anticipate solving, but still. It will take time and solving these issues in a resource-effective way so that it can actually work as a power plant will be a challenge.
> But fusion often use it's pending development as an argument against fission - a technology we already have and desperately need to adopt now.
If it helps, CEA is also doing a ton of R&D on fission (and batteries, among others). But there, the real issues are mostly political.
Now that we've made it to 2025, 2050 doesn't feel nearly as far away to me.
20 years ago I would have agreed with you. However today we have proof that wind and solar work, are cheap, and are useful. The world doesn't need fusion or fission, other technology is plenty good.
Unless you can do a science fiction thing of turning off the sun, and harvesting the hydrogen in it to power local reactors in earth orbit to provide the energy (light) we need without letting the vast majority escape our solar system unused. Otherwise that big fusion reactor in the sky provides all the energy we need.
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At the risk of coming off as a nay-sayer, let's say engineering hurtles related to fusion power generation is overcome. How is the presumably high upfront capital costs going to compare with the ROI?
That is, it would seem likely that fusion power would be costly to build. It would also seem apparent that if it were to fulfil its promise then the power it generates is sold at or less than the current amount. That would then seem to imply a lengthily time to make a return on the initial investment. Or am I missing something else with this equation?
> return on the initial investment.
It's not only initial investment. Half of the fusion fuel is tritium, which is one of the most expensive substances on Earth (a google search finds that the price of tritium is about $30k per gram [1]). For comparison, fission reactors need enriched uranium, and that costs only about $4000 per kilogram [2]. People have the idea that fusion produces many times more energy than fission, probably because fusion bombs have a higher yield than fission bombs. This is not true. The most typical fusion reaction involves one deuterium and one tritium and yields 17.5 MeV from a total or 5 nucleons. A fission reaction involves one neutron and one atom of U-235 and yields 190 MeV from 236 nucleons. So fusion yields about 4.3 times more energy per nucleon. That's respectable, but in the popular imagination fusion yields 100 or 1000 times more energy than fission, so the fuel cost can be neglected. Nothing could be further from the truth.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=tritium+price
[2] https://www.uxc.com/p/tools/FuelCalculator.aspx
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Agreed. I think fusion power would be great, but the sales pitch of 'limitless free power' just isn't true. The thought experiment I use is this: Let's imagine coal is magically free in every way. How does my power bill change? The answer is "barely at all" because the cost of utility electric power is mostly in distribution. We pay around 30c/kWh while the wholesale energy price is more like 2c/kWh.
It'll still make a difference in large scale energy intensive stuff, like desalination, aluminium refining, etc. but the average punter is going to save a lot more by installing solar panels.
We'll never know until (or if it ever comes) but there's reason to believe Fusion could be >50% cheaper than Fission.
That would still be more expensive than Solar and Wind (by 100% or more) - but I am skeptical in the same time frame those sources will be able to take over baseload generation.
It's really comparing apples to oranges.
Plus, it's a very hypothetical future. Anything could happen between now and then.
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Even if fusion is an expensive power source, it may still be desirable in areas which aren’t well suited to wind or solar.
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There is a certain amount of "who cares about the cost" when it comes to fusion power. Nations will want to build them to lower or eliminate reliance on foreign energy, to address climate change concerns, and as a backup for renewables, and for other non-economic reasons. Many things that governments will want to fund that have nothing to do with directly "how much does the electricity cost?" or "when can we expect a return on investment?"
And the first generation will be expensive. That's how all new technology is.
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There's definitely an existential question around if fusion will ever be able to beat renewables plus batteries, but who knows with our energy demands ever increasing at some point renewables may hit a breaking point in land cost.
I'm generally pro-publicly funded research. There is not any direct ROI on say the LHC, but it does fund advanced manufacturing and engineering work that might enable other more practical industrial applications. The ROI might be a century away.
> At the risk of coming off as a nay-sayer, let's say engineering hurtles related to fusion power generation is overcome. How is the presumably high upfront capital costs going to compare with the ROI?
Does money even matter once fusion is attainable?
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I definitely prefer spending the money on fusion over rushing a Mars mission. Fusion is probably cheaper than Mars and will actually benefit humanity. Which is not something I can say about going to Mars (or even the moon).
A Mars mission would benefit humanity, but less directly. The past lunar missions and space program benefited humanity in many ways.
For pure return on investment, I agree with your take.
Provided of course that any future threats to humanity as a single planet civilization don’t materialize. There’s a low and uncertain tail risk ignored in our calculation.
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The planet Mars is a gift from God for humanity
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There's just no economic case for fusion. It's useful research, but current fission does the job better, and we already have decades of proven reserves, centuries likely if we kept looking for new reserves ... and then thousands of years from sea water extraction.
There's also many paths to improved fission. Fast neutron reactors, thorium, small fast neutron reactors for industrial heat, thorium reactors, accelerator-driven subcritical reactors ... Millions of years of fuel available and new ways to use the output beyond boiling water for electricity.
Note that I'm not mentioning slow neutron SMR, they're mostly pointless and just an excuse not to build current and perfectly fine PWR/BWR/heavy water reactors.
I like the idea of the passively-safe, waste-reducing LFTR but it's still a materials science issue at this point, and there's no real solution in sight.
Fission still has this huge stigma about "nuclear=dangerous and bad" which clearly isn't true with the growing number of passively-safe designs... but nobody wants to fund development of those into proper commercial reactors.
Meanwhile, fusion is still different and futuristic enough to have support from governments and the general public.
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Yeah but I still think it would be a great scientific achievement and should be pursued.
Fusion has better security properties than fission, so perhaps it will find some use case in the far future.
I think the funding has had a modest stimulus, and that was always the locus of causation for "perpetually x years away." Private fusion especially (but I do think their claims are somewhat overstated).
It's insane how many people like that are out there. "Fission is bad, fusion is bad, we should only do renewables." C'mon, fission brought us where we are and fusion might be the future. I believe they both deserve further research and improvements.
It’s a common fallacy: “$thing is good, new and exciting, therefore everything else is old and rubbish”. The pattern is very easy to see if we pay attention. It’s very common in tech circles, where people tend to be easily excited about new things.
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I do enjoy how mindless some of the fusion advocacy is.
Why do you think a result like this would make anyone less skeptical of fusion? Ability to run a device for this long is not the obstacle to success for nuclear fusion. This is just another vastly overhyped "breakthrough", which we seem to have every week.
I've followed fusion for probably longer than you've been alive, and there are fundamental showstoppers for the common approaches, particularly tokamaks and stellarators. Fusion may have a chance with unconventional approaches, like Helion's, but the consensus approach looks like an exercise in groupthink that won't lead anywhere.
>Why do you think a result like this would make anyone less skeptical of fusion?
Just 9 days ago: >>Ability to run a device for this long is not the obstacle to success for nuclear fusion.
What an odd take. Do you also consider the list of flight endurance records to be immaterial to aircraft evolution?
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Agreed with all of this. And, there’s an implicit criticism of science journalism here. Any article that suggests useful fusion reactors are X years away should address the massive unsolved engineering problems that have to be surmounted. But no news source is going to spend five or six extra paragraphs explaining neutron metal activation or hydrogen embrittlement.
I don't hate it, but am not fanboy either. Imagine you can have nuclear fission and uranium is already found in nature ready to go to the reactor. Even in that case, nuclear fission could not beat solar or eolic ROI.
Even if nuclear fussion had the advantage of free combustible, the costs of building and manteinance alone could make it not practical. As of today it's not enough to have positive net return, but to have a LCOE of maybe $60/MWh (and going down). Current estimates put fussion at $120/MWh.
If it can't keep up with solar and eolic rade of fallig prices, it might be only suitable to replace fission power (which is not falling), about 10% of the grid. And there have been literally billions spent in research.
> Even in that case, nuclear fission could not beat solar or eolic ROI.
Neither solar or wind are free. There are costs associated e.g. with building, shipping, maintaining, decommissioning these things (and hopefully at some point recycling, but that’s not solved). Looking at the whole picture, these costs are not that different. These technologies are complementary, they have very different characteristics.
> Current estimates put fussion at $120/MWh.
Current estimates are completely unreliable, because no industrial-scale demonstrator was built. They are a useful tool for planning and modeling, but not solid enough to build an industrial strategy on them. (And it’s “fusion”)
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> As of today it's not enough to have positive net return, but to have a LCOE of maybe $60/MWh
If you don't count externalities (see cost of firming intermitency [1]).
> (and going down).
Not the last two years according to LCOE+ 2024. the main culprit is inflation, but the curve was nearing flat anyway.
[1]: https://www.lazard.com/media/gjyffoqd/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
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Solar is cheap, but it's only a supplementary power source. If you add in energy costs it becomes much, much more expensive than fission.
The elephant in the room is natural gas which is the true competitor to fission and is still dirt cheap in the US.
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I've seen cost estimates around there for tokamaks. If Helion actually works, their estimate is more like $20/MWh, and it looks pretty plausible given their reactor design. They would have relatively low neutron radiation, direct electricity extraction without a turbine, factory-built reactors transportable by rail, and no particularly expensive components like superconductors or fancy lasers.
Some of the other designs also look relatively cheap. Tokamaks are just the one we understand the best, so we have the highest confidence that they'll work.
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Actually, this only reinforces "fusion is only 10 years away".
I blame journalists not being able to proprely report on this subject.
1337 seconds... nice
1337 seconds is a pretty meaningful result.
If you're a programmer, that is. Could mean something else in physics, right?
I can't find any significance for physics, unfortunately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1337_(disambiguation)
Challenges persist, notably in developing materials that can endure prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures and neutron radiation within fusion reactors. Addressing these material durability issues is essential for the realization of continuous, commercially viable fusion power.
nice to see the competition between the east and west as this records was broken just a few weeks back
https://physicsworld.com/a/chinas-experimental-advanced-supe...
I fail to find this info: how much energy did they get out? How much did they pump in? How long does it have to burn until there's energy in-out equilibrium?
* No energy was 'captured'.
* They pumped in "2 MW of heating power".
* This expirement wasn't about energy in-out, it was about plasma control. Specifically stopping at 1337 seconds is a way of announcing "and we could have gone longer, but we liked this number"
Fusion will not be commercial ever at least not for power generation.
Fission has potential for far cheaper fuel cost and can be done with less capital cost.
We are spending a crazy amount of money researching fusion while we have only explored like 1% of the potential of fission. If only part of this money was invested in fission we could have a competition for multiple advanced fission reactors.
“1,337 seconds.” Nice.
WEST beat EAST... what a bunch of nerds :)
WEST side is the BEST side
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Next milestone is 69 minutes. No, not 60.
First they need to achieve 42 minutes sustained
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Would be really NICE.
but 69 is lame because it merely is 3*13
I don’t care about sex jokes. 42 (or 72) OTOH are cool because both are surrounded by twin primes!!! how cool is that? (semiprime coolness is significantly smaller than twin prime coolness)
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Erm. Why?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet
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t00 l4m3 4 U
this just gets my conspiracy nutjob of a mind flying.
how about the NORTH versus SOUTH team contests? ugh
Why
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet
This is pretty cool, but it's a good reminder that commercially viable fusion electricity still remains a looooong way off.
Why is that the correct interpretation? It seems like another would be: "This is a ~33% improvement over a record set only three seeks ago. Innovation is rapidly accelerating to a point where plasma can be contained indefinitely."
> Nevertheless, given the infrastructure needed to produce this energy on a large scale, it is unlikely that fusion technology will make a significant contribution to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. For this, several technological sticking points need to be overcome, and the economic feasibility of this form of energy production must still be demonstrated.
It's very cool, but the article itself paints a long time line. Indefinite containment is just one part of the puzzle.
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And we are on the verge of AGI any week now. And Full Self Driving.
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I think if the "burns" are long enough, it will be sufficient to extract net energy...
actually...
All that depends on how much burn heat we can get from those ~30mins burns... :)
Commercially viable likely also means: cost competitive with nuclear fission. Which might well never happen, since the reactor designs for fusion are orders of magnitude more complex (and therefore more expensive).
They also need a lot of ignition energy which requires a powerful separate power source, which limits where the fusion reactor can be built.
Moreover, there is the issue of the reactor core being degraded by the heavy neutron radiation which is produced by the fusion reaction. So the chamber has to be replaced regularly. Which may also be quite expensive.
>the issue of the reactor core being degraded by the heavy neutron radiation which is produced by the fusion reaction.
There are some reactor designs that use aneutronic fusion, which eliminate this particular issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion
Does the commercial viability change when one considers regulatory constraints on building new fission plants? People may be more inclined to allow fusion reactors than fission reactors, since the former doesn't require uranium. (I'm sure there are dangerous failure modes for fusion, like there are for everything else, but Chernobyl continues to haunt the nuclear industry in the popular imagination.)
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My understanding as well is that fusion could take care of base load, but it can't be scaled up or down based on grid demand to the same degree that fission reactors can. So fusion and renewables alone would not be capable of a carbon-free future grid.
CFS is building their demo reactor that should achieve Q>1 and are already building their first commercial plant: https://blog.cfs.energy/cfs-will-build-its-first-arc-fusion-...
Barring some kind of engineering failures and delays they seem on track to have things ready in the early 2030s.
I think this is hopelessly optimistic. From what I can tell, they have not even started building the ARC reactor. There is about zero reason to believe that all the completely unproven concepts, like the molten-salt liquid blanket (or tritium breeding in general) are gonna work without a hitch and zero delays-- thats just straight up self-delusional.
In comparison with ITER, the have the advantage of newer magnet technology (which certainly helps!), but thats the only actually proven thing, and every other aspect of ARC is basically complete vaporware.
It would be a very pleasant surprise to have them extract electrical energy from the thing in early 2030, but I'm not even holding my breath for first plasma by then. But we'll see.
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No one has demonstrated stable plasma operations for any lengths of time and they are claiming to not just get Q-plasma > 1 but Q-total > 1 by 2030? This is more optimistic than Full Self Driving by 2016
You fell for the oldest trick in the fusion book.
We don't know what innovation will bring or when. The important thing is trying and the direction of travel.
No it’s pointless doing it because some guy on HN said it’s a long way off and therefore you are not allowed to be excited or enthusiastic about it.
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Does anyone have a top 5 issues list of things that are holding up fusion progress? Like there are basic material science issues that still need work to bring costs down, so that critical materials don't cost too much? Or there is still some theoretical plasma physics that we're still working out the details on? Or magnetic confinement simulations are still too crude, and we need 100x on computing power. Or whatever.
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> 1337 seconds
AFAIU, no existing tokamaks can handle sustained plasma for any significant period of time because they'll burn down.
Did this destroy the facility?
What duration of sustained fusion plasma can tokamaks like EAST, WEST, and ITER withstand? What will need to change for continuous fusion energy to be net gained from a tokamak or a stellerator fusion reactor?
If this destroyed the facility that would be the headline this news article.... WEST highest is 22 minutes (it's in the title) and you could google EAST and ITER but the title tells you it is less than 22 minutes. WEST is a testing ground for ITER. The fact that you can have sustained fusion for only 22 minutes is the biggest problem since you need to boil water continuously because all power sources rely on taking cold water and making it warm constantly so that it makes a turbine move.
there is destroyed and then there is a smoking hole in the side of the planet:) but I think it fair to say, that after 22 min running, that there is no way that it can be turned back on later kind of thing, fairly sure its a pwhew!, lookatdat!, almost lost plasma containment.... keep in mind that they are trying to replicate the conditions found inside a star with some magnets and stuff, sure its ferociously engineered stuff but not at all like the stuff that could exist inside a star so all in all a rather audacious endevour, and I wish them luck with it
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To rephrase the question: what is the limit to the duration of sustained inertial confinement fusion plasma in the EAST, WEST, and ITER tokamaks, and why is the limit that amount of time?
Don't those materials melt if exposed to temperatures hotter than the sun for sufficient or excessive periods of time?
For what sustained plasma duration will EAST, WEST, and ITER need to be redesigned? 1 hour, 24 hours?
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> all power sources rely on taking cold water and making it warm constantly so that it makes a turbine move.
PV (photovoltaic), TPV (thermopohotovoltaic), and thin film and other solid-state thermoelectric (TE) approaches do not rely upon corrosive water turning a turbine.
Turbine blades can be made of materials that are more resistant to corrosion.
On turbine efficiency:
"How the gas turbine conquered the electric power industry" https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=38314774
It looks like the GE 7HA gas/hydrogen turbine is still the most efficient turbine? https://gasturbineworld.com/ge-7ha-03-gas-turbine/ :
> Higher efficiency: 43.3% in simple cycle and up to 64% in combined cycle,
Steam turbines aren't as efficient as gas turbines FWIU.
/? which nuclear reactors do not have a steam turbine:
"How can nuclear reactors work without steam?" [in space] https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7ojhr8/how_can_... :
> 5% efficient; you usually get less than 5% of the thermal energy converted into electricity
(International space law prohibits putting nuclear reactors in space without specific international approval, which is considered for e.g. deep space probes like Voyager; though the sun is exempt.)
Rankine cycle (steam) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_cycle
Thermoelectric effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect :
> The term "thermoelectric effect" encompasses three separately identified effects: the Seebeck effect (temperature differences cause electromotive forces), the Peltier effect (thermocouples create temperature differences), and the Thomson effect (the Seebeck coefficient varies with temperature).
"Thermophotovoltaic efficiency of 40%" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04473-y
Multi-junction PV cells are not limited by the Shockley–Queisser limit, but are limited by current production methods.
Multi-junction solar cells: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-junction_solar_cell#Mult...
Which existing thermoelectric or thermopohotovoltaic approaches work with nuclear fusion levels of heat (infrared)?
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There is no danger of destroying the facility. The problem is keeping the plasma going. Even with self-sustaining fusion, the plasma doesn't have that much energy, it is really hot but low density.
The duration is because plasma is heated by rising current, and that hits limit after some period of time. With self-sustaining fusion, heating shouldn't be needed after the initial pulse.
According to the linked article this was achieved at 50 million degrees. The Chinese record was achieved at 100 million degrees.
I have also read that achieving productive fusion will require temperatures above 100 million degrees.
Most of my sources are pop-sci, so correct me if I'm wrong.
It still eludes me how we are going to be able to reproduce the same temperature and pressure as in the core of a star considering the humongous amount of mass (hence energy) required to create those conditions.
There are tantalizing ways to create fusion which don’t require these precise conditions. For example, a simple farnsworth fusor device gets fusion reactions just by causing atoms to cross paths at super high speed until they collide - they simply don’t collide often enough to release anywhere near a net energy gain.
Inertial confinement fusion, such as the National ignition facility, does generate comparable pressures and temperatures to the core of the sun within the fuel pellet for an extremely small moment during an implosion. This is done by focusing a lot of energy on small target.
Plasma confinement techniques don’t utilize high pressure to create fusion; they rely on extreme temperatures which are significantly hotter than the core of the sun, which can produce fusion events in a plasma which is only pressurized to around 1 atmosphere (they also rely on different fuel types than the sun which fuse much more readily). The key is once again focus, a large amount of energy is put into a small amount of gas. The obvious issue with this is that the extreme temperatures would destroy any physical container rapidly - but given the electromagnetic nature of plasma, it can be contained using a strong magnetic field without reaching the surface of its physical container.
While temperature may be in the stellar ballpark, pressure should be much lower. That is fine because we are not trying to do proton-proton fusion (that one is very slow even in a star) but a much easier deuterium-tritium fusion.
So, deuterium needs to be obtained from sea water through distillation and electrolysis - both energy intensive operations. And tritium comes from nuclear reactors.
I have always wondered - assuming that the confinement problem is solved, how does the cost of the fuel compare to fission (or other generation methods?
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Basically, electromagnetic force is much stronger than the sun's gravitational force. (But it's also more difficult to get it to eork just right)
Controlled fusion does not require the conditions of the interior of a star, because the nuclear fuels involved are many orders of magnitude more reactive. All the Sun's initial deuterium (and all the lithium in the core) were burned away long ago.
Consider this - you are able to overpower the force of gravity on earth. The earth is very large, but you are stronger than it's gravity.
Gravity is so much less powerful than the other forces.
well done on the french achieving yet another extraordinary feat of engineering and research while still bearing the stigma of being shit at everything for some reason
I hope this international race ends up bearing fruit in a few decades, we need it
Why hasn’t the US announced anything like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JurplDfPi3U
WEST vs EAST? Did both sides agree on the naming scheme or something?
I was wondering about that too. I think it's deliberate and friendly because they're both technology testbeds for ITER.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Advanced_Supercon...
That's impressive, but what's the real-world application?
* Fusion's potential is enormous.
* Health software, like fusion, needs breakthroughs.
* Are we ready for the data deluge?
* Can we build it fast enough?
To eat the plasma? Hope they are missing an H
You have to imagine the press release being read in a French accent.
It's pretty tasty actually though you can only taste it once :-/
If you lean your ear to the reactor you can faintly hear a "Om nom nom nom nom"
1337 seconds. How https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet
Sounds like its getting close!
Has any fusion reactor produced usable electricity, if only as a proof of concept?
No, none of the dozens of reactors constructed so far have gone through the trouble of building a steam system with a turbine and a generator.
Which is understandable, since this is the easy part (not very different than the setup in a fission or coal plant), and there's absolutely no reason to do so until we have seen ignition.
I'd just assume that temperature would be an important factor in the reactor.
With the millions of degrees being involved, seems a little more than "not very different" than a fission reactor. But would like to hear how this is supposed to work.
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>1,337 seconds: that was how long WEST, a tokamak run from the CEA Cadarache site in southern France and one of the EUROfusion consortium medium size
Is this a joke and reference to internet culture or a coincidence? Probably the latter, but i found it entertaining.
They turned it off specifically then. Just like the previous one at 1066. We used to do stuff like this in our labs as a joke. Or try and stop timers exactly on :00
I work for the IFMIF project, an ITER-adjacent project with the goal of researching new materials suitable for future fusion reactors.
Trust me, we are all massive geeks, including my colleagues from CEA. There is a non-small chance that the result is deliberate.
The last record was 1066
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hastings
Would it make any sense for the Chinese to choose such a date?
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Imagine if the world's engineering talent was focused on this rather than making AI to generate slop?
As a secondary effect it kind of is; the general assumption still is that the slop-generating AI will need a lot of power to train, so there is surprisingly a lot more private investment into fusion and fission innovation in recent years.
Well, AI also has something else for it : at this point, no one is expecting any ROI soon, but they all imagine that it's going to be huuuuge, so the "expected" (as in, "wished for") ROI might as well be infinite.
As soon as AI investors start demanding dividends, then the ROI of investing in AI will be compared to the ROI of investing in electricity production "for production sake".
Even if we shut down chatgpt, people who still switch light on.
If we only keep enough fusion reactors to run LLM inferences, but no one can afford lights, well...
What value do you think Software Engineers focused on AI would provide to Fusion Research?
Why is the entire planet incapable of walking and chewing gum at the same time?
Maybe the AI trained by the best engineers will help other people get into physics and then study nuclear fusion.
Why would comp sci majors be working on plasma? Prob want physicists working on that stuff.
Anthropic likes to hire physicists.
Also: https://www.energy.gov/science/fes/articles/ai-tackles-disru...
The need to process the large amount of data gathered by the fusion test rig drove many fields of computer science. The freaking internet was supposedly invented because the physicists at CERN needed a way to collaboratively process and interpret this data.
There's a good chance this is not an either/or question, but that AI will get us to viable fusion power much earlier. For example:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/23/doe_fusion_ai/
https://openai.com/index/strengthening-americas-ai-leadershi...
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