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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.
Alternate post title: How I regurgitated an opinion I read elsewhere on the internet with absolutely no thought.
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?
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."
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This has been legal for at least 34 years. As someone who has to deal with the consequences of Bayh-Dole on a regular basis, I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it causes universities to lock up a lot of basic research as restricted IP, which holds back progress and actually makes it more difficult for the results to reach the market. Or, even worse, the inventors (or eventual IP holders) treat it as a money-making machine and are basically using using the federal funding to do product development. (As opposed to using federal funding to come up with the initial concept, then private funding to develop the product.)
On the other hand, for something that's extremely capital-intensive to develop, where commercialization requires orders of magnitude more funding than the government initially provided, no one is going to invest the money required unless they're guaranteed exclusivity. This is certainly one of those cases. The alternative is for the DOE, or the UW, to invest $2.8 billion of its own money (which, ultimately, is other people's money) developing a commercial-scale reactor - and that still doesn't really get it to "market".
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.)
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.
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?
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!!
"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"
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.