Comment by dkjaudyeqooe
5 days ago
We don't know what innovation will bring or when. The important thing is trying and the direction of travel.
5 days ago
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.
The thing is, after repeatedly getting excited about commercial fusion power for the past sixty years, it's tough to maintain enthusiasm.
For me I worry it's like the search for the northwest passage. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage). Explorers spent about 400 years searching for something that they knew just had to be there, but when they finally did it (1957), it really wasn't important anymore.
> The thing is, after repeatedly getting excited about commercial fusion power for the past sixty years, it's tough to maintain enthusiasm.
It’s very easy if you’re even a tiny bit interested in the scientific aspects. Since we started we’ve had several generations of superconductors, huge advances in our understanding of materials and plasma physics (a bit niche but still very cool).
ITER itself is fascinating if you’re into large-scale engineering and planning. If you are into this and not interested in ITER, I would recommend having another look.
> Explorers spent about 400 years searching for something that they knew just had to be there, but when they finally did it (1957), it really wasn't important anymore.
Yes, it’s a risk and it might well end up that way. Still, many discoveries have already been made along the way, and it is impossible to predict its success or failure without actually trying to do it.
The Northwest Passage is important now tho. The short path from most of Eurasia to North America goes through the Arctic. Ice caps are diminishing/going away. The US wants Greenland. All of these are related.
What's funny is that AI has been failing to be achieved for much longer than fusion energy yet so many here are convinced we're on the cusp of an AI apocalypse.
I have more faith in fusion power in 20 years than anyone claiming AGI is coming in the exact same timeframe.
What's pointless for anyone who cares about fusion is commenting on it from the peanut gallery (i.e., any form of social media) rather than participating in R&D in any way whatsoever. The same goes for online outrage: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10095997
This entire site is nothing more than a sales and marketing tool and otherwise exists to waste peoples' time.
> What's pointless for anyone who cares about fusion is commenting on it from the peanut gallery (i.e., any form of social media) rather than participating in R&D in any way whatsoever.
Some of us do both :)
Beautiful irony in getting ratioed for this post.
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.
I'm afraid the top 1 issue forever is that it really only works if you are a sun. No need to try and harvest or contain the energy, high energy neutrons damaging the whole thing is a non-issue, and the gravity does the rest.
We already have a fusion source and a way to harvest it from afar in solar panels.
1. We don't have a perfect understanding of plasma dynamics and how they'll react to different conditions. Predicting plasma instabilities before they mess with your reactor remains a big challenge for our computation capabilities.
2. Yeah, material science is also a big one. When you are working with the magnetic forces typical in a modern fusion reactor, your materials undergo a lot of mechanical stress. The "first wall" that has to bear the brunt of the nuclear reactions becomes radioactive. Some plasma ions invariably go off trajectory and we have a "diverter" to prevent them from hurting the reactor but that reduces the temperature.
3. Our reactors aren't efficient enough. Everyone taking about "q" value means the energy they put into creating the reaction to get the plasma to fuse. It's called q-plasma which is a misleading metric. The true breakthrough will be sustained q-total, which will be the ratio of the total energy you get out over the total energy you put in. Nobody in the industry likes to talk about it, because we are decades away from reaching this.
4. Modern designs are becoming extremely expensive. The most serious design right now is being funded not by a state of a country but by the biggest countries in the planet.
5. Someone help me here I've ran out of points
5. The fuel is notoriously difficult to contain. There will be leaks, and even small ones can spoil the reaction and tip your device into unpredictability. Also, the fuel has a tendency to infiltrate metals and embrittle them.
6. Volumetric power density sucks compared to fission reactors. This leads to #4, since for a given power output the reactor is an order of magnitude larger or even worse. Designs with some hope of evading this showstopper may be possible, but they are rare on the ground, and the tokamak doesn't appear to be one of them.
5. Working big pieces of steel and making large process plants is not cheap or easy.
If I understand correctly, the Top 1 and 2, 3, 4, 5 etc. issue is how to make that plasma do actual work. So far the designs which boast Q>1 or are close enough, all produce plasma in short burst and no one has invented a way to make that burst generate electricity somehow. And tokamak design has clearer path to generating electricity but have problems in reaching stable Q>1 at all. This is all very amateurish understanding, please correct me if I'm wrong.
Series of short bursts, which heat a neutron-absorbing fluid. That part is relatively straightforward.
Helion is an exception, since they have a different fuel which gives them a way to extract electricity directly.