Slashdot Mirror
UK Joins Laser Nuclear Fusion Project
arisvega writes with this quote from the BBC:
"The UK company AWE and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have now joined with [the National Ignition Facility in the U.S.] to help make laser fusion a viable commercial energy source. ... Part of the problem has been that the technical ability to reach 'breakeven' — the point at which more energy is produced than is consumed — has always seemed distant. Detractors of the idea have asserted that 'fusion energy is 50 years away, no matter what year you ask,' said David Willetts, the UK's science minister. 'I think that what's going on both in the UK and in the US shows that we are now making significant progress on this technology,' he said. 'It can't any longer be dismissed as something on the far distant horizon.'"
The reason its only ever 50 years away is because funding required to make it 0 years away is never accepted and projects are habitually underfunded and cut short before they reach their goals. Several scientific groups and individual scientists have said they'll bring it to us now if they get their X billion for funding. So far no government or company has had the good faith to grant the amount needed. There are prototypes from the 1950's which might have worked, but at the time cost'd some enormous amount. The deal is the science behind it is sound, but the investment sense is not for anyone with the ability to start it up. Its a little like building solar arrays in space, it will pay off, but in like 200 years.
Unlike many technologies, fusion power requires a certain technological threshold to achieve, where various different technologies (possibly in the order of hundreds) finally reach the point where they are advanced enough to achieve breakeven or beyond. We need an electromagnetic containment system, a fuel-production system, monitoring and control, ignition (probably laser), even the materials the reactor is made of need to be of a certain kind. Many of these technologies we do not have, making fusion power more than simply requiring one specific breakthrough like many other technologies do.
It's a bit like how smartphones were developed. We needed not only better touchscreens, but better batteries, smaller computers, faster wireless systems, and more compact storage. Once a certain threshold was achieved, it became possible to build the modern smartphone. Before, things like them were possible, but a certain level of many technologies was required before it could really become practical.
The additional problem with fusion is not only to achieve breakeven, but to do so competitively versus other sources of power (specifically, coal). Coal is pretty cheap in terms of raw cost (the long-term consequences are much more expensive, but the investors can safely ignore most of those.) This is why fusion has been perpetually 50 years in the future: because so many things need to come together to make it practical that one single breakthrough, even if it is massive, simply won't be enough to make it practical. It is a technology we should pursue with tremendous effort, and which should one day pay off in one form or another, but it isn't a magic bullet and won't be for some time.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
"The laser fusion idea uses pellets of fuel made of isotopes of hydrogen called deuterium and tritium. A number of lasers are fired at the pellets in order to compress the fuel to just hundredths of its starting size.
In the process, the hydrogen nuclei fuse to create helium and fast-moving subatomic particles called neutrons whose energy, in the form of heat, can be captured and used for the comparatively old-fashioned idea of driving a steam turbine."
That last line reads like the punchline of a (bad) joke. (It's also a testament to how useful water is.)
Anyway, there's huge potential revenues for solving this problem. I just hope a US company gets a share of the eventual windfall.
What makes this news worthy?
"We've done fusion at fairly high levels already. Even on Sunday night, we did the highest fusion yield that has ever been done."
"Dr Moses said that a single shot from the Nif's laser - the largest in the world - released a million billion neutrons and produced for a tiny fraction of a second more power than the world was consuming."
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
There are now multiple different approaches to fusion research. Laser fusion looks promising although we don't have a really good understanding of how to efficiently extract energy from laser fusion. Magnetic containment fusion in the form of tokamaks is also still ongoing. There is an international group working now to build ITER which will be a very large tokamak which will be in France. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER. There are other ideas out there but unfortunately many of the more interesting ones are not receiving much funding. Laser fusion confines the plasma and crushes it with brief intense laser pulses while tokamaks confine the plasma using a torus of electromagnets. However, stellarators use a different form of magnetic confinement and might end up working but they are getting almost no funding.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator
The idea that we are always 50 years from fusion seems to be unfair. We've gotten much better at handling the basics. We can now consistently get fusion to occur with a variety of methods. The primary problems are doing so efficiently enough to get more energy out than we are putting in. We've made slow but steady progress at improving efficiency through a variety of methods. The development of so-called high temperature superconductors (that is able to superconduct a bit over the temperature at which nitrogen boils) in the 1970s has helped a lot. And the engineering issues really are immense. We've also sort of been spoiled by the previous success with fission power. The United States pored a massive amount of funding and resources into fission research from the beginning of the Manhattan project until a bit after World War 2. If fusion power was treated the same way we might be able to develop it quickly also.
There's another aspect about this sort of thing that is good news. The United States is steadily eroding its scientific and exploratory capability. We've retired the shuttle with no replacement. In the 1990s we canceled the Superconducting Super Collider. As a result when the LHC came online the US lost a lot of particle physicists who went over to Europe. The US particle physics has been in a state of decline since then. Most recently, the US is closing down the Tevatron, http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/68988/title/Tevatron_to_shut_down_in_September which is the star US particle accelerator. While the energy levels of the Tevatron are less than the LHC the types and variety of collisions it does are sufficiently different such that having both of them is very much not redundant. And, the James Webb Telescope might be getting canceled, so it looks like cutting edge astronomy is another area the US is giving up on. If I had just been told that there was a Slashdot headline about laser fusion in the US I would have guessed that it would have been funding cuts for the NIR. The fact that organizations from elsewhere are actually joining suggests that the decline in US science might not be as bad as a pessimist might think. It might be reversible.
Yes. Figuring out artificial gravity would also be cake, if the cake wasn't a lie.
which is totally what she said
Pumpkin pie. It is the most sincere food. Though only if the pumpkins are harvested from a sincere pumpkin patch that is approved by the Great Pumpkin.
The enemies of Democracy are
Fusion is probably going to take huge expensive and sophisticated facilities to produce an economically viable power reactor. To some point (not completely though) I think much of this has been just government works projects. On the other hand thorium nuclear reactors could be exploited for far less money and much quicker. Thorium is a fairly abundant element that does not have many of the negative properties which a plutonium or uranium based react would have. We have to do something to beef up the electrical grid. I read an article that said if 10% of the cars in the USA switched to electric, it would collapse the capacity of the grid. Besides, most electricity here is now generated by coal. Please look into the more promising technology of the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFTR http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8 I'm not saying we should stop research on fusion, but we have to have a quickly viable alternative.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
Both Hiper and Life, a similar effort at Nif, estimate that a functioning laser power plant would need to cycle through more than 10 fuel pellets each second - a million each day.
Out of curiosity do we have any plans on how to precisely feed and align a pellet into an, I assume submerged, reaction chamber to heat water/steam?
That seems like an engineering challenge on the same order of difficult as the laser etc.
Would it be like belt fed? I assume it would need to position and clear the firing target in about 10ms.
That also seems like a recipe for a maintenance nightmare. Are there any similar machines in other industries?
I hate this attitude, which says that, "Because we don't have the holy grail yet, we haven't accomplished anything." The Q-factors on fusion reactions are many orders of magnitude better than we were getting even just a few decades ago. The amount of "unknown", while not eliminated, has been dramatically reduced, and on some paths, there's a pretty clear route to commercial viability. Inertial confinement, like NIF, in particular. Well, not exactly like NIF. The leading path for commercial viability of an inertial confinement system is HiPER, which uses a much smaller (and thus much lower capital/operating cost) compression pulse, and compensates by adding a heating pulse as well. It's calculated to get a Q-factor of about 100, which is well more than is needed for viable commercial power production. There's so much confidence that this could lead to viable commercial fusion power production that they're already starting to deal with some of the "commercialization" aspects, not just the raw physics aspects -- for example, a high repetition-rate laser system.
Musk needs a safer hobby than Twitter. Fire juggling? Cage fighting? Solo hot air balloon trips?
What tata means, then?
PO-TA-TO
Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew.
The science is sound but the engineering isn't. The kind of problems that just the materials engineers have to cope with are stupendous for tokamak style high temp large scale reactors. The neutron bombardment of the structure holding the magnets makes it hard to figure out what material could stand up to the task. There are no known materials, last I checked in on this, that can do the job. So even if they get an energy sustaining reaction, they still have a bunch of engineering issues to solve which are very hard, if they want to build a commercial reactor that doesn't dissolve into dust after 5 years of operation. Much harder than the problems we solved for fission reactors..
I had a chance to visit the ASDEX Upgrade experiment in Germany a couple of years ago. They showed a nice diagram of all the experiments done so far, plotting energy output to input versus time - constantly rising. The guy who led me around there was of the opinion that the remaining problems were mostly on the material side (of course that was his area of research). Plasma heating and confinement are pretty much ready - the problems lie in setting up the system for long term operation, and partly in heat transfer.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
I am sure there is a good reason, but why are we always fusing hydrogen? Why not heavier, easier to grab - move - focus elements? Like fusing Iron or something, it'll turn into something higher up the elements ladder. Because we can shuffle iron about with magnets quite easily, compared to hydrogen that isn't magnetic. Just some very fine iron dust into the big magnet thingy and hit it with all that pressure. Or if not Iron, something else.. Why always hydrogen?
Fusing the deteurium and tritium isotopes of hydroden is the easiest form there is. Next is deuterium-deuterium which has the advantage that of being naturally available. But, if you're having trouble getting DT fusion going, you will never get DD. Proton fusion, which is what the Sun mostly uses even harder and impractically slow. But that's why the Sun continues to shine. If it were made entirely of deterium and tritium, there would have been just one big bang and that would be it.
Other elements have been proposed. Helium3 fusion has the advantage of not producing neutrons but it is much more difficult (requires more extreme heat and pressure) than DT and there is also the problem that there is negligable He3 on Earth. Boron-proton fusion is also aneurtonic and Boron is at least available but is wishful thinking to try when we still haven't managed to produce energy from DT.
As the elements get heavier, it requires more and more extreme conditions to get the nuclei to fuse and you get less and less energy out. Iron is a dead end. Fusion takes more energy than it gives. So does fision.
"I read an article that said if 10% of the cars in the USA switched to electric, it would collapse the capacity of the grid. "
Read something else...
"Since utilities have built enough power plants to provide electricity when people are operating their air conditioners at full blast, they have excess generating capacity during off-peak hours. As a result, according to an upcoming report from the Pacific Northwestern National Laboratory (PNNL), a Department of Energy lab, there is enough excess generating capacity during the night and morning to allow more than 80 percent of today's vehicles to make the average daily commute solely using this electricity. If plug-in-hybrid or all-electric-car owners charge their vehicles at these times, the power needed for about 180 million cars could be provided simply by running these plants at full capacity."
http://www.evpowersystems.com/PHEVs%20Save%20Grid.htm [evpowersystems.com]
"A new study for the Department of Energy finds that "off-peak" electricity production and transmission capacity could fuel 84 percent of these 198 million vehicles if they were plug-in hybrid electrics. ... Researchers found, in the Midwest and East, there is sufficient off-peak generation, transmission and distribution capacity to provide for ALL of today's vehicles if they ran on batteries."
http://www.pnl.gov/news/release.asp?id=204 [pnl.gov]
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
They've had this technology at Global Dynamics for years.
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
People say that, and I understand the notion, but it really misses the point.
Fission power _always_ worked. At it's most basic level you could attach a thermocouple to radium and boom, power. Hell, just put enough enriched uranium (we had known about its fission properties) in one place and BOOM for sure. The only question was the actual engineering engineering effort to design a useful plant. Fusion is different. While it has long been possible to actually make it happen, getting it to produce a useful amount of energy has not. The science just isn't (or at least hasn't been) there. Then we need engineering on top of that... It's one thing to create 2J or heat with 1J of electricity in the lab and a whole different one it converting to electricity and refining the fuel and still have a usable energy source... basically, not possible.
So, as far as funding is concerned, the ITER, is projected to cost $25 billion. That's not really chump change for a research reactor: consider that the Shippingport reactor (first commercial fission) cost only $500 million to make, adjusted for inflation. Oh, and this one isn't expected to produce power... Their _goal_ is to produce 10x in heat what they put into making the plasma. Specifically, they aren't counting conversion to electricity, the costs of refining fuel (it's tritium/duterium) and other operation costs (coolant pumps, etc). Also, they don't yet have a design that will last long enough vs. the fusion products to be commercially viable. And the reactor core will become radioactive, too, making replacement especially fun.
That last bit is the real take away here. They have $25 billion in funding, and they don't even know what a useful version could be made out of. That isn't a $25 billion question, that's more like a $25 million question. And it's one that needs to be answered in a big way, and yet that's not their focus. Am I to believe if they got $26 billion that the extra 4% would go to solving these vital problems? Sure their big demo reactor is fun^W^Wshould be helpful, and yeah, if they had twice the budget they probably could have finished it sooner. But what's the point? It's still not a halfway viable design for reasons completely unrelated to funding.
The science is sound but the engineering isn't. The kind of problems that just the materials engineers have to cope with are stupendous for tokamak style high temp large scale reactors. The neutron bombardment of the structure holding the magnets makes it hard to figure out what material could stand up to the task. There are no known materials, last I checked in on this, that can do the job. So even if they get an energy sustaining reaction, they still have a bunch of engineering issues to solve which are very hard, if they want to build a commercial reactor that doesn't dissolve into dust after 5 years of operation. Much harder than the problems we solved for fission reactors..
Can't they just route the neutron pulse through the main deflector dish? And like, vent some drive plasma through the nacelles or something?
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.