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Fusion Reactor Concept Could Be Cheaper Than Coal
vinces99 writes Fusion energy almost sounds too good to be true – zero greenhouse gas emissions, no long-lived radioactive waste, a nearly unlimited fuel supply. Perhaps the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that the economics haven't penciled out. Fusion power designs aren't cheap enough to outperform systems that use fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas. University of Washington engineers hope to change that. They have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant, would rival costs for a new coal-fired plant with similar electrical output. The team published its reactor design and cost-analysis findings last spring and will present results Oct. 17 at the International Atomic Energy Agency's Fusion Energy Conference in St. Petersburg, Russia.
2034.
They predict that the costs will be comparable to a coal-fired plant. Even if it ends up costing more, it might be worth it because the coal-fired plant isn't being held accountable for all the externalities of coal-fired plants - the extra deaths due to pollution, etc. Hopefully this time "in 20 years" will really be true.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Make it cheaper than Fracked Natural Gas and you have something.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
From the article: ...
"The team has filed patents on the reactor concept with the UWâ(TM)s Center for Commercialization
The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy."
[Insert pithy quote here]
Alternate post title: How I regurgitated an opinion I read elsewhere on the internet with absolutely no thought.
I dunno, reading the article is sounds like this really is just a "If we figure out how to get this thing Q>1, and then we scaled it up, it'd be awesome!" It kind of skips over that pesky break-even problem, though.
Isn't that what an opinion is anyway? You hear information and opinions and make your own?
Costs are a big issue, but the problem with fusion is getting more energy than is put in... and keeping that reaction sustained indefinitely. Yes, one can get energy out, and sometimes more energy out for a brief bit with a tiny gold-plated capsule... but there is a huge jump from pulverizing a mini-nugget with a big boom to having a reactor that you can turn on, and let it power stuff on an indefinite basis. Same difference between an explosion from TNT and the small, controlled explosions pushing pistons down in an IC engine.
In the TFA, supposedly their dynomak [1] actually does a sustained reaction, but the key is how sustained. Even at a couple kilowatts, if it can just sit there and act as a steam turbine, it will power a UPS for a long time. Scaling up to megawatts is where it solves the big problems, because it can power desalination plants to keep California habitable and other things which are energy/cost prohibitive as of now.
As always, I hope this succeeds. Energy is money, and the more energy available, the more a country and a people can do.
[1]: Is it that different from a tokamak which have been in use for decades?
Concepts are practically free.
As long as you never build anything, free is always "cheaper than coal"...
"Perhaps the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that the economics haven't penciled out."
Or... maybe we don't have fusion reactors because nobody has really made one work on any scale with any real power.
Uh, at some point you're supposed to supply a dash of criticality, or your opinion won't rise in the oven, and you'll end up with shitty opinions that annoy everyone.
Stating an arbitrary opinion with no justification or construction as a post just screams "I am bad at thinking" to me.
Their new design involves using the plasma as its' own containment field, rather than a bunch of superconducting magnets around the periphery. So not only is the energy of the containment field going into the plasma itself rather than being "wasted" on the magnets and other infrastructure, but the containment field is actually part of the fuel.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The problem isn't just "expense" as the summary pretends. It's that the energy output is less than the energy inputs.
Scaling the reactor is like the old joke about "losing money on every sale, but making up for it on volume."
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
namely, nobody is building any because the cost to mitigate the source pollution is so damn high, and going higher. so this generally-clocked-out concept fusion reactor, not-to-scale, would be tied with the second-highest cost of MWH production possible.
great news, I'm ordering 15 of these, bill to my account at the East Bank of the Mississippi. let's get those in production by December 1st, this year, also.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Wait until you hear about my design for a reactor that runs on unicorn farts.
I thought the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy was that it doesn't work?
(I'd like to be positive and add "yet" to that sentence, but still.)
Couldn't they use, oh I don't know, say dilithium crystals?
Modding you down is not enough. (I'll let somebody else burn their mod points)
If I ran /., this is one of the few times I'd peek in, figure out who you were, and ban your IP for life.
Aside from not knowing how to build the reactor, it's a great idea. We should fund some research to get by the proverbial step, "and then a miracle occurs."
But see, that's a much better post.
I'd disagree, but I'd disagree for reasons that are based on what you said, rather than the fact that you gave a stupid, uniformed conclusion, with no basis alongside it.
So let's do that. Let's talk about why Q>1 isn't a gigantic deal for the tokamaks that are starting to work. They achieve confined fusion with the design, in keeping with the predictions of how the confinement is theoretically supposed to work, and the theoretical models also indicate notpositive is possible. The proponents of the designs suggest that's a mere matter of tuning, testing, and calibration to get the precision of the magnetic fields precise enough.
That's not unreasonable. That doesn't mean it will work out, just that there's no abstract or theoretical limitations known to be an impassible barrier.
You need to be cheaper than the current price leader, which happens to be Natural Gas (according to the DOE in the USA) right now. Who's going to want a fusion plant if it's more risky and more expensive than Natural Gas? Um.. Nobody....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Yep...it's pretty much
1. Step one
2. Step two
3. Make the whole Fusion thing work.
4. Cheap Energy!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Until they overcome the realities that containment fields break down so fast that the costs outweigh any benefit.
This is just details. /s
Fusion Reactor Concept Could Be Cheaper Than Coal
What does the headline mean "could be"? This concept is cheaper than a coal plant right now; it cost them almost nothing next to a real coal plant. Now constructing one ... that's a different story.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Which is just the same old "It's just an engineering problem!" trope that we've been hearing from fusion researchers for decades. As we know, those engineering problems tend to be far more difficult than physicists ever give them credit for.
tl;dr Fusion is still 30 years out... k thanks
Sure, cheap and plentiful energy is great for a consumer society that likes its electronics and cars. In the long run, however, I wonder if the arrival of convenient fusion will mark the start of issues with waste heat. When electricity is generated, much of it is immediately dissipated as heat, and later when the resulting electricity or whatever is used, this too ultimately produces heat. That planet-bound civilizations risk destruction from their waste heat has long been a theme of science-fiction -- it's a plot point in Larry Niven's Ringworld for instance, and it has only seemed fantastical so far because our ability to generate energy has been so limited. What happens when we can pursue our hunger for energy with no excessive costs or short-term environmental damage?
It's APK. Don't get him started.
We really need to shake up the economics of this and encourage private entities to invest their money.
The prize I would like to see goes like this:
First company to successfully build a fusion power plant that generates XXX MW of power, connects to the grid of a sponsor country, and profitably sells electricity at retail cost less than .YY USD per KWH and generates and delivers ZZZ GWH of useful power within a test period of 1 year wins a $10 Billion cash prize. In exchange, the winner must also assign all patents that cover the powerplant to the governing body. In exchange, the winner will earn a royalty equal to P% of the retail cost of every KWH generated using powerplants that use the patents for the following 20 years. The governing body will license the patents to any and all organizations and governments that want to license them for a similar per KWH generation license fee.
The governing body would be a consortium of individuals and/or governments. They would have nothing to lose if no one claimed the prize.
The details are, of course, in the correct values for the variables in the equation, but a competent team of scientists could analyze the numbers to ensure maximum incentive. Or we could just keep doing it via research grants and it will never happen.
That's why I mentioned information and opinions. That is exactly how an opinion is formed. You have some information, you hear opinions, you question opinions different than yours, they provide arguments which helps increase you knowledge of the topic and you adjust your opinion.
A pic of BarbaraHudson "LiVe" (lmao, 'absolutely live') alias Frank N. Furter http://images1.wikia.nocookie....
A lot of folks seem to leave out that last step :)
"Hey boss, I have a functional proof of concept for something that's supposed to theoretically work"
"Well throw it out! Everyone knows engineering can't improve on existing designs"
BarbaraHudson "LiVe" (lol, absolutely live) http://images1.wikia.nocookie....
I see three problems here. First, this is a press release, so it has all the validity of any press release, in other words nothing. Second, nothing has been built, at least nothing approaching a gigawatt, and no way to know if the design will really scale to a gigawatt. Third, they are comparing the real cost of building a coal fired plant to the imaginary cost of building this device. That said, given that an advance coal fired plant is more in the range of 3 billion, the real cost of both might be comparable, and cheaper than the $40 billion for a conventional nuclear plant.
But really, the costs and all that is really besides the point. No fusion reactor has been able to produce significantly more power than it has consumed.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
China disagrees with you. The pollution is going to continue to be a problem, but they don't care. As long as you can see more than a block, it's "good enough."
Globally, there are almost 1,000 coal generators being built, again because it's cheaper because the external costs are automatically shifted onto others. Heck, even Canada's tar sands have been labeled "not so dirty any more" because people want energy and it's easier to change a label than to actually fix a problem.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
They have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant, would rival costs for a new coal-fired plant with similar electrical output.
Ummm, how about building a working reactor first. Then we can talk about cost and scaling and other practical considerations. Until they build one that works and puts out more energy than it consumes it is pure science fiction.
Considering that it was HUGE news when a fusion reactor managed to achieve unity (as much out as was put in), I'm not holding my breath waiting for a production plant.
That said, I do believe that Fusion power is our last, best, hope for the medium term survival of humanity. You can solve a LOT of the world's problems with low-cost pollution-free electrical generation.
Of course, it still doesn't solve the distribution-network problem, or the energy-density issue for transportation, but it does solve plenty of thorny obstacles in world civilization.
An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose. (7) Very little development will be required. It will use off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.
On the other hand a practical reactor can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated.
A new analysis and report on Andrea Rossi's E-Cat reactor suggests a new type of nuclear reaction may be real. http://matslew.wordpress.com/2... A new Hydrogen-Nickel-Lithium fuel source may be in our future...
I think the real problem is how much we've fixated on only one or two fusion reactor designs for decades. Plasmas are hard to control, hence why it's taking so long to materialize real fusion power. They've pursued the Tokamak too long I think, but they keep going after it because they're already so heavily invested. Time for some fresh thinking.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Which is just the same old "It's just an engineering problem!" trope that we've been hearing from fusion researchers for decades. As we know, those engineering problems tend to be far more difficult than physicists ever give them credit for.
THIS. And its not isolated to fusion reactors.
Unfortunately the costs of resolving those problems tend to be either left out or underestimated as well.
Look: Just be happy with your prize (photo of Transtesticle "itself") http://images1.wikia.nocookie....
Let's see one built. Heck, let's see several built — by competing private concerns funded by the investors' own monies. Then we can discuss their relative merits and make fun of predictions, that it is "highly unlikely" for humans of 2035 to be able to generate five times the amount of electricity we generated in 2010.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I agree.
> Fusion power designs aren't cheap enough to outperform systems that use fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.
Well, that, and sustained fusion has not been achieved yet. That's kinda like saying "Pixie Dust will never replace coal because they cost too many Altairian Dollars per Ngogn", enthusiastically passing over the slight but persistent issue that pixies don't exist.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You mean more environmental damage do to using fossil fuels? Because we thought about the environmental impact of those fuels? *eye roll*
That's what this design is...read Potsy read....
Really? God damn. I'm going to be rich selling all the unicorn farts I've been collecting from my stable full of unicorns. How much are you willing to pay for a cubic meter of the stuff at one atmosphere of pressure?
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
We can solve that problem when we come to it. Right now, on a medium to long term basis, the goal is reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as waste heat is far secondary from the heat trapped via CO2, methane, and other gases. Waste heat can be an issue, but a society that will run into issues with it will have a lot better technology than what we have now, and could solve the problem. Right now, our civilization is in peril because of the burning of fossil fuels, and the conflict that obtaining access to them causes. Once pissing contests for oil wind up in the past, civilization can actually advance, and face challenges like having the problem of waste heat actually be an issue.
Simple: with unlimited energy, we can run every air conditioner on the planet 24/7, fixing global warming as a side effect!
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
So we can find work for more unemployed physicists and engineers...but don't expect it to really work...
If their design and the math checks out, then it is easily worth $2.7 billion to validate the design by constructing a full size reactor. Heck add another billion to the budget just in case.
Still
This subject makes me wish I had the math background, because I sure don't see it.
The energy available via fusion is exactly why you will never be able to contain it using any sort of force. It will always take more power to contain than it creates. Otherwise, you would see see self-contained fusion somewhere, under some circumstances, in nature.
You might think the Sun is an example, but it is not self contained. Gravity contains it, which you get for free simply by having mass. With or without fusion, the Sun would stay contained. Since the containment field is free, then yes, you end up getting net power out of the sun.
So I guess we could build an artificial fusion reactor that makes net power, but it would look a whole lot like the Sun, and would be exceedingly difficult to build on the surface of the Earth.
Hold it, you're disturbing the local house-psycho. Don't chase him away now, every self-respecting website has to have one!
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
First, no long-lived radioactive waste is not quite, not exactly, true for the current Deuterium Tritium fusion reactors (which ITER is, and I assume this new U Washington fusion reactor is as well). DT fusion produces neutrons and neutrons can't be controlled and thus go off and hit things (steel in the containment vessel, for example), which both weakens the steel, and makes it radioactive. So, after a while you have a junk old reactor that's radioactive. (One of the benefits of Helium-3 fusion is that it doesn't produce any neutrons, but it is a long way off without some fundamental breakthroughs.)
Second, fusion is like the Internet - the one question you always have to ask is, "will it scale?". (Will plasma instabilities kill your attempt to make a small lab experiment with some confinement into a viable large scale source of power.) Fusion has a long, long history of cool ideas that did not scale, and I do not regard a press release as proof of their having cracked that problem.
The reactor is called dynomak, but it says farther down that it's a spheromak. Basically instead of a ring it's a sphere, with a metal post in the middle. Wikipedia has a nice article about it.
It works the same way as a tokamak, except the metal post and external coils are closer to the plasma. Also instead of coils all around like a tokamak, they all meet at the post, making the inside of the "ring" smaller (i.e. the inside half of each coil is replaced by that single current-bearing post). IIRC the post is exposed to the plasma, with all the problems that entails, so it has to be replaced every once in a while. I think it doesn't require superconductivity, but I'm too lazy to check.
You're arguing against something besides what I actually said.
Heck, even Canada's tar sands have been labeled "not so dirty any more" because people want energy and it's easier to change a label than to actually fix a problem.
Of course the tar sands aren't so dirty any more, because they've been removing the tar from them. Why is it that the Greenists whine so much about Candians cleaning up one of Gaia's oil spills?
Energy is more than money. It is power--in all senses of the word.
It's possible to reduce those externalities. Near where I live is a recently-opened large-scale coal plant with carbon capture and storage. They're capturing carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, and fly ash.
http://www.saskpowerccs.com/cc...
That said, I'd love to see a commercially viable fusion plant.
Oh O.K, I'll play along: please point where I got your argument wrong.
Their plane will either disappear enroute, or they will be mysteriously killed in St. Petersburg while dining at a near by restaurant, just a few hours before they are about to speak. Then it will make the news. Two days later, everybody will be back to burning fossil fuels.
Here's the project conference poster. "Total equipment cost for the development path is less than $1 billion". Nothing on the poster, though, indicates why this should work. It's yet another torus-based design, of which there have been many. The best performance to date is from the Joint European Torus: "In 1997, JET produced a peak of 16.1MW of fusion power (65% of input power), with fusion power of over 10MW sustained for over 0.5 sec."
All torus designs run into plasma instability problems. So far, nobody has a working solution. Nobody even has a good theoretical solution. No combination of fixed magnets has yet worked. There's some modest interest in active feedback for stabilization, and some modest success has been reported. The instabilities are on the order of milliseconds, so active feedback is quite feasible.
Even ITER probably won't work. The thinking behind ITER was originally "maybe it will become more stable if we make it bigger." Now, a little "maybe the feedback control people can make it work" has been added. It's not looking good, which is why there really isn't that much enthusiasm for ITER.
And if I ran /., you'd suddenly find your karma had suddenly evaporated for replying to the world's most obvious troll (with your karma bonus enabled to boot). Frankly I wouldn't be surprised at all if you were the culprit yourself.
Dude, can you guarantee they're fresh?
And that (as I suspect you know) is just the rationale behind ITER. In a sane world, ITER would be treated as a crash program, but I guess we have to be glad it's there at all. The frustrating thing is that it's the next (post ITER) reactor that's supposed to be the actual production power generator.
There are no theoretical limitations, but there very well could be engineering limitations. We won't know that until we actually build ITER because even though engineering is a science it's mostly a practical applied science. The entire point of ITER is to see if the engineering can be worked out at a power plant scale. ITER is so expensive because they don't know how to engineer them yet. This will mean they will vastly over design it so nothing very bad happens. After running it for a while they will have a better understanding of the actual forces/energy and the upper limits of those inputs and the design can be fine tuned and costs reduced.
The fact is a tokamak of this scale just isn't understood that well (engineering, not the theory). They will be breaking all kinds of new ground in many different fields with ITER and that's expensive. But even if it doesn't work they will learn unbelievable amounts from it. I expect there will massive developments in many fields not the least of which will be material science as a results of this reactor.
We all wish you had more math too.
Until you do, just shut-up about subjects like this. You're embarrassing yourself (assuming that's possible).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
When, a few years from now, all oil fields in the middle east will be controlled by IS, we want to make the switch away from oil. This seems a solution worth investigating.
no, I don't have a sig
I know, right! Fusion has been about 50 years out for at least the last 50 years now.
Obvious or not, I felt compelled to say something. And I didn't post AC either. I figure if I can't put my name on what I want to say, it probably didn't need saying.
Is that it doesn't produce energy in the lab.
Not really, a Tokamak requires rings of superconducting electromagnets outside of the plasma reaction chamber to provide containment.
This design instead runs an electric current through the plasma itself. This is what induces the magnetic field required for containment.
My guess is that it is also self stabilizing to a degree as any variation in the plasma density would also result in counter acting change in the magnetic field density.
Regardless, without the cost and complexity of the external superconducting electromagnets it may make this a viable technology.
In Mother Russia reactor fuses you.
This subject makes me wish I had the math background, because I sure don't see it.
This comment makes me wish you had a math background too.
You are actually doing math when you make the assertion that fusion "will always take more power to contain than it creates". You're doing lots of things, including physics and probably chemistry. Unfortunately, you seem to be doing all of them based on what your imagination tells you, and as we know from 300 years of science and 3000 years of pre-science, what "just makes sense" in our imaginations has nothing much to do with what is real.
You are correct to say that containment in stars is free. You have no basis for saying that it is impossible to produce an artificial containment that uses substantially less power than is produced by the fusion processes within it. That is a mathematical assertion about the physics of fusion:
Pfusion Pcontainment
That is the math you are doing, without any attempt to make it physically plausible.
Nor is the lack of non-stellar containment in nature much of an argument. Want to know what else doesn't exist in nature? Reciprocating steam engines. Repeating rifles. Spaceships. Digital computers. Yet mysteriously we have all those things, and more. It's almost as if humans, informed by physics, are capable of making machines that instantiate processes that otherwise do not exist.
Whether fusion is one of those processes remains to be seen. It is clearly a hard problem, but the jury is still well out on its ultimate feasibility.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
That's what I was thinking, they may need to scale up the power plant to the size of a small star.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
"Right now, the UW’s concept is about one-tenth the size and power output of a final product, which is still years away."
I'm guessing ~40 years from now. That estimate has worked well for the last fifty years, no reason to change it now.
All you need to do is gather a whole bunch of hydrogen. In a few billion years, you'll have enough that it starts fusing into helium under its own mass, and bingo, you have your power source for billions of years.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Their new design involves using the plasma as its' own containment field, rather than a bunch of superconducting magnets around the periphery.
It's also completely unstable. These types of confinement devices can only sustain the plasma for micro seconds. They are no where near producing producing any fusion.
I already have a working, self-sustaining, exothermic fusion reactor. I made it pretty big, so that the necessary pressure is created by gravity alone. This design produces 400,000,000,000,000 terawatts and is completely maintenance free. It also uses a passively safe design so the reaction can't run away, at least for a few billion years. I managed the containment issues (and the truly excessive power production) by suspending the reactor in vacuum about 100 million miles from any population center. Rather than building a 100 million mile cable, I'm transmitting power wirelessly via medium-wavelength electromagnetic radiation. The reactor uses a simple blackbody emitter to generate the radiation. Unfortunately, I couldn't afford to build a good focusing system at the reactor site, so only about 1/10,000,000,000 of the power (50,000 terawatts) actually reaches my potential collector site. However, we only need 13 terawatts to serve our potential market, and really more like 4 terawatts if we can convert the energy to electricity.
Now I'm just working on a system to convert this medium-wavelength electromagnetic radiation into electricity at the collector site. A lot of the fusion reactor designs I've seen use the radiation to boil a fluid to run a turbine. But I'm thinking it would be much cooler to use semiconductors -- maybe use the electromagnetic radiation to excite electrons across a bandgap and create electricity directly? I've got working prototypes of the solid-state converters, and they're already pretty cheap -- I can produce electricity for about 15 cents per kWh. I think with a few more years' work the whole system will be cheaper than coal power (it helps that I don't have to pay for the reactor or fuel). I figure if I cover 0.05% of my collector zone (the Earth's surface) with 15% efficient converters, I can provide enough energy for everyone on the planet.
Yeah, but all that can be mitigated. Build it in Detroit or Baltimore. Nobody gives a shit what happens there anyway, and anyone with any sense steers clear just knowing what the area is like. Better yet, build it in West Virginia. They mine coal there, destroying mountain tops, polluting the water so bad you can't even use it to wash much less drink, and they die at 50 of black lung - and they love it because they can flunk out of HS at 16 and go make $50-80k/yr working in the mines.
See, that was easy, now you're back to just the technical hurdles.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
In the long run, however, I wonder if the arrival of convenient fusion will mark the start of issues with waste heat.
No. Current solar absorption (accounting for albedo) is on the order of 50PW. By comparison, current peak world wide energy production is a paltry few TW. We're several orders of magnitude away from the point where our civilization's thermal output becomes a concern.
I'd suggest starting at 50 million to start, once they meet certain milestones, then release 150 million. After that, you can define certain other milestones to release that extra billion or so.
Lack of funds can be a problem. However, a perception of excess or unlimited funds can be just as deadly to a project.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
You joke, but that is almost literally the solution to a waste heat problem: pump the heat somewhere it's not going to bother you. Offworld, ideally. Just as an air conditioner makes the air inside a volume cooler while making the air outside that volume hotter, with enough energy we could make the contents inside Earth cooler while making the contents outside Earth warmer.
The Uber engineer and philantropist Elon Musk is needed to solve this problem.
No. Current solar absorption (accounting for albedo) is on the order of 50PW. By comparison, current peak world wide energy production is a paltry few TW. We're several orders of magnitude away from the point where our civilization's thermal output becomes a concern.
Not to mention that we woudl stop putting carbon dioxide from energy production into the atmosphere (and could, if it became an issue, use some of that fusion power to freeze some of it OUT of the atmosphere and do things like turn it back into coal and bury it.)
If human industry generated CO2's contribution to the greenhouse effect IS significant, we could pull that "gift that keeps on giving captured solar heat" back out of the air and put it into the bottle - at least until we reach pre-industrial levels. (Beyond that we probably don't want to go, because of the detrimental effect of low CO2 levels on plants.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Waste heat already is quite a lot: 15 terawatt. Global warming equals something like 250 terawatt. If energy consumption keeps growing about 1.5% / year like it has for the past few decades, it will take about 80 years (T+80) for waste heat contribution to overtake the heat flux from earths interior. 40 years later (T+120) our waste heat will equal the total energy used by photosynthesis. In about two centuries from (T+200) now it will have risen to values comparable to what the greenhouse effect does today. Two more centuries later (T+400) we'll finally quality for our Kardashev Type I medal according to some and yet two centuries later (T+600) our energy consumption will surpass the total solar irradiation. In theory, because by then we'd be fried unless we have our giant space coolers in place. About two millenia (T+2500) later our power requirements will outshine the sun.
0x or or snor perron?!
This article led me to check what was up with the Navy's work on the Polywell concept, long kept under their hats. I discovered:
The navy just published their results last Sunday!
I haven't time to look into it for the next few hours, but this may be very interesting news on the "are we there yet?" front.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
always has been, always will be
or
welfare for PhDs
You're confusing magnetic and inertial confinement fusion. The tiny gold capsules are inertial confinement -- you zap the capsule with a short and very intense burst of energy, compressing it and getting fusion until it flies apart. Essentially a very very tiny H-bomb.
In magnetic confinement you hold the a much less compressed but very very hot gas in place with magnetic fields while it fuses relatively slowly. Current experimental designs tend to run in pulses of a few seconds or minutes, but engineering refinements should lead to ones that burn continuously, with more fuel being added and "ash" (helium) removed.
As you make tokamaks bigger they get more efficient, because there is less surface for the energy to leak out of, compared to the volume of plasma. ITER is designed to achieve scientific break-even -- more power out of the reaction than is used to run the magnets etc. The next stage will be a reactor that achieves actual power generation -- more electricity out the whole plant than goes in. This is harder because or turbine inefficiency etc. Because of the scaling up thing, if these do produce useful power it will be gigawatts.
What UW have is a variation of the magnetic confinement setup, generating the magnetic fields in a different way. Their calculations suggest that it will scale up cheaper and efficient than the current favourite design (a tokamak), but this remains to be demonstrated.
I think fusion will be a viable power source about the same time the Year of the Linux Desktop finally shows up.
In fact we do. If you look at the corona of the sun, little bits of plasma get trapped in magnetic fields and heated to hot that fusion happens. Since the magnetic fields are shifting, they are not contained for long, but they are. By controlling the fields, we can get longer containment.
I've been hearing this since my dad took me to the NYC World's Fair when I was 3.
That was many many many decades ago.
Riiight.
That said, any actual growth in coal use since 2000 has been almost entirely due to China, not anyone else. And that's without switching to higher efficiency co-generation coal plants that use the waste heat from the coal furnaces to generate more power. Something we KNOW works, since we've been using it commercially for a long time.
Ask yourself, why are you chasing unicorns and dragons, when cheap solar, wind, and gas are already here?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
So are you trying to claim that fusion reactors haven't achieved orders of magnitude better results in the past several decades than they were getting before?
Beautiful Blueberries
According to the comments in the article this is based off of Deuterium, Tritium (D-T) fusion (which is the easiest to do). 80% of the energy from D-T fusion is in the form of high energy neutrons. The neutron flux is 100 times more than in conventional fission reactors which causes high levels of radiation in the vessel containing the fusion ( fusion vacuum vessel too hot for one year").
Tritium is not plentiful on this planet, so one solution that may solve both the high speed neutron energy capture and the breeding of Tritium is to surround the D-T reaction with Lithium which will 1) absorb the neutron's energy, and 2) create Tritium and Helium from the Lithium. So now we have electricity storage (Lithium batteries) and electricity generation (D-T fusion) bottle-necked by the same element: Lithium
Note that Tritium is radioactive and could leak or experience containment issues.
I am not so certain this will solve anything that current generation fission reactors don't solve just as well, except marketing / branding: I think selling the people on a fusion reactor in their backyard is easier than the fission one.
Fusion: the energy source of tomorrow - and always will be!
EMC2 is looking for $30M from investors to build their next Bussard Polywell
> That said, I do believe that Fusion power is our last, best, hope for the medium term survival of humanity. You can solve a LOT of the world's problems with low-cost pollution-free electrical generation.
<fission> *cough* I'm still here.
I would be so happy if this was an ITER killer. To me the ITER project is just a massive white elephant that was designed to last entire careers of delivering nothing. All the squabbling over who builds what and where it is built just reeks of petty bureaucrats gone wild. The zillions of dollars should have gone to hoards of small scale fundamental research projects instead of one giant role of the dice.
What would make me laugh even harder would be to find out that the "leaders" of ITER were trying to squash this fusion project just so they don't get shut down.
The other thing that I would be willing to bet is that if the ITER project were shut down that physicists and engineers would pour out of the woodwork saying that they didn't previously dare criticise the project for fear of their careers being destroyed but that now they can say how much the project stunk.
...The great Tritium wars of 2064 began.
As long as you can see more than a block, it's "good enough."
Well, almost. As long as the rich can buy purified air in a can, and activated carbon respirators and cabin air filters, it's "good enough".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Erm, banning an IP means you ban random people. ... unless you infact have rented an IP fixed for yourself.
IPs change usually every few days
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Ah yes ... Perri-Air.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
"Fusion energy almost sounds too good to be true"
No it doesn't.
http://matter2energy.wordpress...
"Perhaps the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that the economics haven't penciled out."
Haven't pencilled out? Sure they have, at about TEN TIMES the price of PV. Why would I want to build a reactor here when I can just download for 1/10th the cost. You know, napster.
"They have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant"
Like every other plant that said the same thing but then ran into intractable problems when scaled up?
And I do mean *every* one.
The supplies of deuterium and tritum for powering all existing fusion reactor designs are far, far more difficult to harvest and supply in bulk than fossil fuels or solar. As best I can tell, the available supplies of those fusion fuels is limited by the production from ordinary fission reactors. Since the last large scale refiner of deuterium from other sources went out business in 1997, it's not an economically viable resource. Essentially, if we first scale up our fission power to many times its current volume, we could use the byproducts to fuel fusion reactors. Their maximum output would be only a few percent of that of the fusion reactors required to fuel them in bulk,
Unless someone works a way to fuse plain hydrogen in bulk, efficiently, there is no economic point to fusion energy research. The only source of bulk fuel for it is the solar wind. If you've got large scale fusion fuel collectors in orbit, simply collect the solar energy directly and cut out the very expensive, quite radioactive middleman of fusion fuel.
Do you think the new design is better?
Beamed-energy Propulsion
Lasers and microwaves are among the beamed-energy propulsion concepts the Advanced Space Transportation Program is pursuing. If the energy to propel a spacecraft doesn’t have to be carried on board the vehicle, significant weight reductions and performance improvements can be achieved. Beamed-energy propulsion uses a remote energy source — such as the Sun, a ground- or space-based laser or a microwave transmitter — to send power to the vehicle via a "beam" of electromagnetic radiation. Presently, beamed energy is the most promising technology to lower the cost of space transportation to tens of dollars per pound. Research into this technology is a joint effort of the Marshall Center, the Air Force Research Laboratory Propulsion Directorate at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Troy, N.Y.
Earth-to-orbit for $30 to $100 a pound? Space tourism becomes a reality. Asteroid mining is next. Permanent outposts on the moon, with low-g "fall-safe" health care for the elderly. Space-based power generation. This will open up the whole solar system.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Yeah I did that when I was 8 years old (a long time ago).
Devil is in the details. A idiot understands the potential of fusion power, but the problem is not just making it work, but work in an engineered way - so that it can be implemented by industry/commercially.
I wish whatever tard had told Bush to anounce a 10 year program to put a man on mars had instead proposed a Manhattan Project type national effort and with sufficient political capital spent to make force the effort.
Consider that wars begin over resources (like energy) and many additiaonal materials/processes become workable with CHEAP energy and even desalinization (sea-water to fresh cost is largely the energy - make alot of wasteland productive...)
Consider that 'theres no inflation' but why have costs for most things continued to go up then ??? (Obama the socialist/closet commie sabatoging americas energy industry every way possible...)
So again - show the math/plans/labwork demonstrating plausible execution of 'fusion' generated power or just go bak to Hype Moron land.
Note that for fusion reactions, "net power" isn't quite good enough; if you're driving a steam-cycle turbine or some such, you're throwing away half your energy to heat loss, so you'd better have at least 3x input power before the design can begin to make economic sense.
You're a fucking loser APK.
Loser.
Long story short, since tritium has only a half-life of 11 years and there is no natural source. These fusion reactors will need equal amounts of Tritium and Deuterium as fuel.
The good thing is that a fusion reactor can be jacketed in Lithium to create the needed Tritium. The bad news is that you can't really generate a whole lot of extra Tritium. Being really optimistic you might be able to generate about 50% more Tritium than you burn. In practice this could be as low at just a few single digit % more than you burn since we don't have any working fusion reactors.
So even if we had a perfect, ready to use fusion reactor design today that was cheap, we wouldn't have the fuel to burn in more than a very limited number of plants. One projection I saw that given the lack of Tritium and the way that it would have to be generated, that if you used Fusion plants to self generate the Tritium, we can't expect more than about 30-50GW operating power plants before 2200. This is such a big problem that people worry about having enough Tritium for research with Nuclear fusion experiments.
To make matters worse... Tritium is very difficult to contain If you have a sealed steel tube filled with it, it will leak right out of the walls of the tube. In short, it's likely to present real problems with radioactive leaks. I remember reading a paper where they suggested that if we had deployed several hundred GW of fusion reactors we might be leaking radioactivity at a rate similar to having a Fukushima happening annually. And if we don't change the laws in allowed radioactivity being released from a Nuclear plant we would never be able to build a Fusion plant. As each Fusion plant would likely leak many times more radiation(via Tritium leaks) than is currently allowed.
It sucks, Fusion is really cool but for these reasons alone likely not to be a big producer of power anytime soon.
I am pretty sure that is your sig, dude.
Which is just the same old "It's just an engineering problem!" trope that we've been hearing from fusion researchers for decades. As we know, those engineering problems tend to be far more difficult than physicists ever give them credit for.
THIS. And its not isolated to fusion reactors.
Unfortunately the costs of resolving those problems tend to be either left out or underestimated as well.
Pretty much every engineering project, ever.
For half that you can get a functional Minecraft model of a fusion reactor.
The man was an absolute genius, and luckily also just the right amount of insufferable jerk. With anybody else, the results would have been sub-optimal. Under Rickover, the US Navy transitioned all subs and aircraft carriers to nuclear power without a single nuclear "incident" - an absolutely unmarred safety record. He demanded, and got, total authority over the nuclear part of the Navy and the horrendous tests he applied to Naval officers entering his nuclear program are legendary. Many of those tests were brilliant tests of the character of the men he interviewed (something he felt every bit as important as probing their technical capabilities). Sadly, I keep expecting problems to arise in the "nuclear navy" as the years sinve his passing tick by; it's only human nature to become lax about technology as that technology goes from being percieved of as "bleeding egde" and "intolerant of complacency" to "stuff my grandfather knew"
The quotes you referenced were related to his selection of particular nuclear technologies for American nuclear-powered subs. He had the genius to select just the right amount of "good enough" and "mature enough" technology (while not holding out for some promised future perfect alternative) and then work to make THAT tech as perfect as possible, and then operate it as responsibly as humanly possible. The world would be a much better place if lots of other tech people would occasionally adopt a little Rickover (no need to go "all-in", just learn the right lessons and be advised by them)
We're several orders of magnitude away from the point where our civilization's thermal output becomes a concern.
Back in 1700's and 1800's, the same sentence could have been said by coal powered steam engine proponents. Let's get meta-smarter this time.
That's just a matter of size. Fusion power release rises as a function of plasma volume, heat losses rise as a function of plasma surface, so just make it big enough.
A year or so would be nice, but shorter periods might be useful, too.
The way these things are killed are to under budget them, then blame cost overruns as justification for canceling the project. Then everyone says they gave it a chance and it failed and no other similar projects get funding... There are many many varied interests that don't want this type of technological advancement.
I don't think you understood my question (I based it on your original post here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... ). Once more, Do you think that the new design that has less peripheral supporting equipment in its infrastructure yet doing the same job is better?
OK, but having some things work, doesn't mean that anything can be made to work. Specifically, everything you described were solutions through use of adequate materials to channel energy flow inside systems. Once we reach limits of that energy channeling ability of materials we use, like we reached with silicon semiconductors, we reach the boundaries of usefulness of that solutions.
There is no material solution to plasma containment to begin with - simply you have to keep adding energy to keep it on proper density and temperature, and if you need to scale it up, you need yet more energy. And, the worst thing is: if it (the fusion) works, it'll exert rising outward pressure on the fuel plasma, which means you have to add even more energy to keep the plasma stable and fusion sustained. Oh, and you have to keep fresh fuel pouring into reactor and removing the heavier stuff produced that is now in the way of favorable encounters by light nuclei.
And if all that somehow gets solved, we still have to think of efficient way to convert the yielded energy into useful form. Break even energy is way too little if you have to boil water, generate steam, run the turbines, turn the generators, ... on each step of the conversion we bleed energy.
It's not a new design in that respect. Spheromak's have been around for decades. They don't work.
By using the plasma as the containment field, there's less energy needed overall. And fewer components to break. And maintain. So, lowered material and labor costs in day-by-day operation as well. At least that's what we're all hoping for.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
ITER, on the other hand costs a fucking fortune in comparison. We're talking about multiple orders of magnitude in cost difference.
"Absolutely. We've seen this over and over. VLSI was a lot better than discrete components. A one-piece forged hammer is a lot better (and safer) than a hammer with a handle held in place by a wedge. Single-piece wheels are a lot better than the old split-rim wheels (no inner tube, and no danger of the ring flying off when inflating and killing someone).
By using the plasma as the containment field, there's less energy needed overall. And fewer components to break. And maintain. So, lowered material and labor costs in day-by-day operation as well. At least that's what we're all hoping for." - by BarbaraHudson (3785311) on Thursday October 09, 2014 @09:33AM (#48101973)
See subject-line: My use of hosts does far more than adblock with less moving peripheral parts room for complexity + breakdown OR exploit!
It IS is the SAME principle as what you're championing here!
(Yet I also do FAR MORE than AdBlock does, with less moving parts + overheads BY FAR, yet with less parts involved - using what you already have in using the IP stack itself as a "containment field" (much like this system you LIKE does) vs. malware, botnets, spam/phish, ads of all types, etc. - et al)
* Get it, Barb? Good... YOU FAIL!
After all - YOU have essentially said it yourself with this topic, that doing more with less IS GOOD ENGINEERING (vs. "bolting on more" overheads to do the same job a simpler already NATIVE part can)...
APK
P.S.=> Heck - Even the disassembler of the Morris Worm agrees on MY design as YOU DO TOO -> http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...
As does Mr. Krebs here (quoting Amit Yoran) also http://krebsonsecurity.com/201... AND SO DO YOU, Barb (set you up like a bowling pin, didn't I? Absolutely!)
... apk
Reminds me a lot to a polywell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
One of the first fusion projects back in the early 50's was named: "Project Sherwood". As in "It Sure Would" be wonderful if we can control nuclear fusion!
APK Hosts File Engine will block banned IPs in a second. I am impervious to your peeking because of my heavenly HOSTS.
...apk
APK
P.S.=> Ack
P.P.S.=> Thhppt!
Some spacecraft have been powered that way - a bit like a radiation source and a photovoltaic to turn the photons into electricity - but it's doesn't turn much of the energy you could potentially use into electricity so steam still wins on the ground. It's a solution for very small scales where thermal is not going to work.
Then there's peltier/seebeck of dissimilar metals and a heat gradient producing electricity in tiny amounts compared with what you could do with that temperature difference and steam.
I had a similar thought:
How much energy does it take to maintain the magnetic containment? How does this compare to the energy output that can be captured from the fusion reaction? (Uncapturable energy doesn't count; it's a waste product. And where does it go?)
If that exceeds the value of the fusion energy, is it possible to bootstrap this into something that produces net energy?
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Solar Panels already collect energy from the already functioning fusion reactor that is ~8 min away. Plus, having enough solar panels to power a country, say USA, would need the area of Arizona. Plus Plus, think of the amount of heat radiation reflected back into space from a farm the size of Arizona. It's a win win win. Of course the waste of manufacturing that many panels must be taken into account.