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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.
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"...
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?
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.)
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.
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.
Who's going to want a fusion plant if it's more risky and more expensive than Natural Gas?
Someone who doesn't like burning fossil fuels or mining natural gas.
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?
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.
Yep...it's pretty much 1. Step one 2. Step two 3. Make the whole Fusion thing work. 4. Cheap Energy!
For gods sake, this is /. You forgot: 5. Profit!!
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"
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.
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
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.
The trouble with this, is that it assigns all risk to the inventor... and a _relatively_ low value even if they succeed. What happens if someone solves fusion, but decides, that a 10B prize plus royalties is actually LESS money than just producing and licensing the technology privately... Then one corporation or nation-state has patentable control over the tech and will make 100BGv* a year.
*BGI = Bill Gates' value
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
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.
Someone who has to currently buy their natural gas from Russia, which tends to carry some conditions along with it.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
You might want to check out the stock holdings of Buffet and all the very rich enviro brigade. When the tire hits the road, they won't sacrifice their money either.
No he didn't, the Koch brothers want to keep all the profit in coal. Duh.
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.
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.
Or... maybe we don't have fusion reactors because nobody has really made one work on any scale with any real power.
That takes money.
Raising money almost always requires some promise of payback.
Since working, sustained, energy-positive fusion has never been demonstrated, there is little promise of payback.
Chicken vs. Egg. You're going to have a tough time raising sufficient funding to build a working demonstration if a working demonstration is a prerequisite for raising money.
=Smidge=
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
EMC2 is looking for $30M from investors to build their next Bussard Polywell
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.
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.
You would think they would prefer coke for eponymity.
Nullius in verba
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Read The Love-Hate World of the Narcissist. A snippet:
The discard is generally cruel and is based upon the narcissist's projection of his own inner loathing.
Oh and by the way Alex. Laughing at your own jokes? Fantasies of success.
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.
It's not a new design in that respect. Spheromak's have been around for decades. They don't work.
> Chicken vs. Egg
No design *ever* made can demonstrate that it can generate more *money* than it takes to run. This is important.
Everyone is focused on break-even. It is entirely possible that ITER will reach that, at which point everyone will claim the problem is solved.
No, the *actual* problem is that the device costs far, far more than that economic value of the energy it produces. The interest payments will cost more money than it could make selling power.
You are, literally, better off burning dollar bills for power.
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/
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.
No design *ever* made can demonstrate that it can generate more *money* than it takes to run. This is important.
I assume you mean this statement only pertaining to fusion devices, and not in general... otherwise you deserve mockery. However, even if you did intend such a narrow application of that statement, you're still likely to be wrong as nearly everyone who made bald assertions about the limits of technology have been, given enough time.
The device does not need to have an economic value exceeding the value of the energy it produces, it just needs to be more advantageous than available alternatives within its lifespan. This argument is kind of absurd in its own right - there are lots of ways to make the energy it produces more valuable, and cheaper energy will actually tend to increase consumption as more applications become economically viable.
As for your sucky blog; I'll just point out one major nit to pick... there is no hard and fast rule that says you have to use tritium as a fuel. Most of what you wrote kind of hinges on tritium being a factor, and the ITER design in particular, and things start to fall apart once you explore other options.
I also like how you picked, seemingly arbitrarily, the highest dollar value for lithium ($4,500/t) you could find even from your own citation-less source article. You also completely gloss over the fact that if using lithium as a fuel source you'd need to use Lithium-6, which may or may not need to be enriched for natural Lithium.
But all that aside, best I can figure, one tonne of metallic lithium consumed in an ideal D-T fusion reaction will yield about 78 TWh. That's more than the daily consumption of *all* energy types in the US. $4,500 per day seems cheap when you put it that way.
There are a lot of very genuine technical reasons why fusion power might never come to be. It's a real shame you dropped out of your degree in physics or you could have stuck with those and had a blog post worth reading.
=Smidge=
Are you saying that that the only motivation for social justice or environmentalism is to avoid guilt? Yes, only people with disposable income can afford to make purchases "on principle." But whatever the motivation, it is good that they are doing so.
> otherwise you deserve mockery
You deserve mockery for bothering to type that sentence. I would be worthy of mocking if I wrote back and suggested that you're too stupid to understand context, or because you're so dumb that you think there is the off chance that there was no context. But I won't; instead I will state my opinion that you posted that to try to get in a cheap shot, one that is so blatantly sophomoric that it deserves mockery.
> you're still likely to be wrong as nearly everyone who made bald assertions about the limits of technology
As it seems that you've missed the *entire point of the article*, I will point it out again:
The issue is that there is always more than one technology. And you don't use inferior tech if you have a choice.
Flown in a zeppelin recently? Why not? Because someone invented heavier-than-air flight?
Got a lot of vacuum tubes that need replacement? None? Maybe because transistors are cheaper, more reliable, smaller and more powerful?
Punch card machine OK? What, you don't use punch cards? Why not? They work fine.
And for all the other readers out there: the point of the article is that we have a long way to go from today's generation systems to fusion. There are *many* other sources of power that lie between the two price points, all of which can supply all the energy the world needs. Fusion is way down a long list, even if it ever works.
> The device does not need to have an economic value exceeding the value of the energy it produces
Putting aside the opening for mockery in this statement for the moment, it appears you again missing the entire point of the article.
There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to generate power on industrial scales. Most of those are cheaper than fusion. And because of that, we have a long stack of things to get through, long enough that its effectively infinite.
For instance, it's technically trivial to make a gas turbine run on peanut oil. Peanuts are 100% renewable and burning them releases no net CO2. Yet we don't do that, because peanuts sell for about $1/kg, which gives heating costs well above NG.
Now you might say that NG prices might go up and up, and someday that means it's possible that we might want to run on peanut oil. But the problem is that it's not just NG and peanuts, there's also soy, sunflower, corn oil, all sorts of things. And soy will always be cheaper than peanuts.
Before we get to peanut turbines you have to go through soy, and only after we get through NG. Before we get to fusion, we have to get through wind, PV, tidal, more hydro, and dozens upon dozens of other ideas.
> there are lots of ways to make the energy it produces more valuable
Not there's only one: raising prices. Unless you are going to weasel-word your definition of "value", of course.
> and cheaper energy will actually tend to increase consumption as more applications become economically viable
Building a device that produces energy for higher prices does not lead to cheaper energy.
> As for your sucky blog
BTW, thanks for your post, I got a definite uptick in readers as soon as you posted it, Mr Streisand.
How's this social justice? That's new...
If you think about it for a few, I think you will see my point. If you assume that burning fossil fuels is bad, and you, being well off, decide to pay more for energy in an effort to not do bad things, the net effect is at best neutral. You really haven't prevented the burning of fossil fuels for energy, but have only really succeeded in making it cheaper for others to burn it.
Remember that the markets for such fuels are WORLD WIDE. So if you reduce demand for these fuels in one country, you just make it cheaper for people who don't share your view (or cannot afford to do anything else). So countries like China will willingly take the advantage of cheap energy while they sell you the means of being environmentally friendly because they will become richer and more powerful. I don't think we want to be governed by China, but that's what we are headed towards when we do stupid stuff like this.
You see, unless we get EVERYBODY in the world on the same page there is no real change. Unless you can outlaw fossil fuel consumption both here, in China, in the third world and everyplace else, nothing will really change. So spending more money for your electricity, just because it is solar or wind powered, is both financially and environmentally stupid. Your money would be better spent on RESEARCH into cheaper/cleaner energy production...
So why do people choose to spend more on such garbage? I'm guessing it's because they haven't thought it though and are being shamed into it.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
But the problem is that it's not just NG and peanuts, there's also soy, sunflower, corn oil, all sorts of things. And soy will always be cheaper than peanuts.
This is demonstrably false, otherwise any power plant ever built would use the cheapest and ONLY the cheapest source of fuel. Clearly that is not the case, is it?
You said it yourself: "And you don't use inferior tech if you have a choice." The problem is you might not fully appreciate what makes a particular technology "inferior" or "superior." Hydro electric power is by far the cheapest electricity there is, so by your reasoning every power plant would be a hydro plant... except that's not really the case. The reason why has to do with the more nuanced underpinnings of what makes a particular technology superior in a given situation.
To whit:
Got a lot of vacuum tubes that need replacement? None? Maybe because transistors are cheaper, more reliable, smaller and more powerful?
Vacuum tubes are still widely used in new equipment. For some applications their performance is unrivaled by silicon devices. And I don't mean audiophile bullshit either;
http://news.sciencemag.org/phy...
While lighter-than-air vehicles have largely (but not completely) been displaced for human and cargo transport, blimps and balloons are still used routinely because they are more practical and economical for certain situations. Balloons can reach altitudes that are extremely difficult for heavier-than-air craft and can do so for a fraction of the cost.
The only example you mention that has any merit is punchcards - but paper based scan sheets for data entry is still widely used because it's practical for some situations. The ubiquitous "scan-tron" exam answer sheet is an immediately recognizable example, and voting machines still use literal punch cards as a means to store information for later input into a computer. Even some electronic voting machines use scanned ballot sheets.
That's the problem when you speak in absolutes; it's very easy to prove them wrong.
And you have utterly failed to demonstrate that fusion power would necessarily be more expensive than any particular alternative, so even if the very premise of your argument worked in the real world, you still can't apply it to fusion.
Not there's only one: raising prices. Unless you are going to weasel-word your definition of "value", of course.
No weaseling here; you increase the value of a commodity by refining it into higher-valued commodities.
Let's use peanuts as your example. Not sure where you got $1/kg - probably another number you just made up - but they actually sell for about $420/ton. But why do they sell for even that much? Because they have a use! And if we increase the number of uses and/or the value of those uses, then the price will necessarily go up because of demand, barring government intervention/market manipulation.
Electricity is just like every other commodity. If you come up with new ways to use electricity that are otherwise superior to existing technologies, then the value of electricity is increased.
Value, of course, is not to be confused with price. They are related but not the same. Higher value can command a higher price, though...
Building a device that produces energy for higher prices does not lead to cheaper energy.
You haven't demonstrated that it would be at a higher price. Such a determination is impossible until we have a working technology, and even then it would be a tentative conclusion since future innovation might bring the cost down.
You're probably going to try to make a point about the billion-dollar price tag of ITER, but you'd be wrong for doing so because it's a research project and not a commercial endeavor. Thought I'd save you the trouble.
BTW, thanks for
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?