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How Close Are We, Really, To Nuclear Fusion?
StartsWithABang writes: The ultimate dream when it comes to clean, green, safe, abundant energy is nuclear fusion. The same process that powers the core of the Sun could also power everything on Earth millions of times over, if only we could figure out how to reach that breakeven point. Right now, we have three different candidates for doing so: inertial confinement, magnetic confinement, and magnetized target fusion. Recent advances have all three looking promising in various ways, making one wonder why we don't spend more resources towards achieving the holy grail of energy.
Can any of the three methods fuse practically any matter like a Mr Fusion? Or do they all take ultra-pure atom mixes or tritium or something else ridiculously hard to get?
30 years. Didn't you get the memo? It came out 40 years ago.
I would say roughly 1 AU, but it varies with the elliptical orbit of the earth.
year() +10;
1) It's not the holy grail. It's been shown that if our energy consumption continues to grow along its current trajectory, then the temperature at the surface of the earth will reach the boiling point in several hundred years. Now, presumably the growth of our energy consumption will slow down at some point. But what this thought experiment demonstrates is that any power source that generates denovo heat on the earth is part of the problem. Ultimately, the source of our power will have to be the sun.
2) Even if a fusion generator could be created, it would also have to be cheaper than current sources of energy such as solar. Good luck. This hurdle may be more difficult than creating the fusion generator in the first place.
3) However, the real answer to the question: There have been so many failed predictions about when we would have practical fusion power, that no one believes in it enough anymore to put even more money into it.
Achieving practical nuclear fusion for power generation would be a very nice step forward. But "holy grail" is rather overselling it, I suspect.
Even when practical, we're still talking very big, very expensive plants that depend on a long supply chain for all its parts, the high-purity fuel and so on. When you consider the building, running and maintenance costs, and the cost of dealing with the spent fuel (much better than for fission plants of course) the energy won't be all that cheap. Hopefully cheaper than fossil fuels at least, but I would not be surprised if a first generation of plants, at least, become more expensive than that.
And they'll be competing with rapidly dropping costs for solar and other renewables. A big, expensive plant like that will need a 40-50 year lifetime to pay for itself. If you can't show that it will likely run profitably for that time period few or no companies will be willing to take on the very major investment. We may well see a technical breakthrough for fusion, and still get no plants actually built.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
It can already be done (Teller etc), it's just scaling it down to a manageable scale that's the problem.
Take a deep breath, accept that you don't know everything and then go here and read about LENR/cold fusion which is about to change the world:
http://www.e-catworld.com/
Or just google it...
This comes up now and again here on Slashdot. Maybe we should have a wiki or something "Frequently Asked Questions" or something
Fusion is always 20 years out, and there's a reason for it. this image sums it up nicely.
Essentially, we could have fusion power in about 20 years if we had the political will to think 20 years into the future and fund it.
Since fusion research won't yield results before the next election cycle, no congresscritters will vote for it.
This graph explains very clearly how far away we are, and why it is taking so long. The reality is, with all the cheap coal (and natural gas), it's just not a priority. Besides, environmentalists hate nuclear so it's not a political winner to fund it. This story is good, too.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Of course we could spend more resources. I think half a trillion $$$ should do it. Fuck, make it a trillion. The central bank wouldn't even notice. We could even get China and Europe to kick in another trillion or so. We could have another energy supply down most likely within 10 years, be it fusion I, II, or III or some generation 4 or 5 uranium/thorium reactors. Then what??? You mean all those millions of people that died because of Petroleum Hegemony died for nothing? That would be too ridiculous to contemplate. No I don't see the USA taking the lead on this unfortunately. The "wrong" people would make all the money. On the other hand it almost seems inevitable that a medium/high tech energy supply will eventually supplant petroleum. Personally I feel the guys in power now would sooner destroy the planet than give up control.
in the present political/social climate in the west, nuclear fusion won't happen here first.
How close are we, really, to StartsWithABang growing some hair, shaving off that ridiculous beard, and getting a proper job?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I've explained this on Slashdot before: Even if such plants reach "break even", creating more available energy than they use to run, they can't possibly scale to production use because the tests that are even _slightly_ successful use tritium as a critical fuel component. And the only viable source of tritium is ordinary nuclear fission reactors: there is no scalable natural source for it.
There is _no_ fusion technology ever tested, nor realistically proposed that does not rely on tritium. And every source of tritium itself, either earth-bound fission or potentially solar sail collectors for solar tritium, is _itself_ far more efficiently used as a straight power supply by itself. Sustainable fusion is interesting as a technological accomplishment, but it's not a viable power source unless the need for tritum is eliminated.
Yep, answers to the really stubborn problems are always 20rs away, everything else is 5-10yrs away. Having said that I grew up in the 60's, today's technology and culture really is yesterday's science fiction fantasy, except for flying cars, which AFAIK....are still 20yrs away.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
about 8.3 light-minutes
I would put my money on the guys at General Fusion (http://www.generalfusion.com/) ....it seems a less tricky way to extract energy and create pulsed fusion blasts rather than the other methods. Most of the tokamak design are focused on sustaining plasma, they don't even go past how to extract high energy from it, even the ITER is highly speculative in that regard. The acoustic/mechanical system has the energy extracting part already built-in in the plasma creation stage (the molten lead is used both to propagate the pressure waves and as heat exchange medium to run a steam turbine.... If I had some spare millions I'd definitely try this one eheh:)
First of all, a proton is an hydrogen nucleus. Also, matter and anti-matter aren't the same thing at all. The fundamental particles with positive and negative charges with stable arrangements making atoms are called quarks. E.g.: a proton is made of 2 up quarks (charge +2/3) and one down quark (charge -1/3) for a total of one atomic mass and 1 elementary charge. An anti-proton is made of 2 anti-up quarks (-2/3) and one anti-down quark (1/3) for a total of one atomic mass and -1 elementary charge. Baryons are made of quarks and anti-baryons are made of anti-quarks, not the same thing, not the same thing.
No, they don't. Protons and electrons squeeze together quite a lot in white dwarfs and pulsars, both types of objects being extremely stable, so we know for a fact that it doesn't happen. Again nothing surprising taking into account that protons and electrons aren't anti-particles of one another.
Besides my own personal interest in fusion, what really excites me, is the chance to finally destroy Saudi Arabia. These worthless Bedouin brigands do and contribute nothing besides sitting on top of their Allah-given oil (which they can't extract without Western technology anyway), yet they attack, bully and undermine the world at every opportunity.
Fusion won't ever be "too cheap to meter". However, it scales limitlessly, unlike just about every other energy source out there. And this is excellent news for Western civilization, which currently faces real constraints on how much energy it can generate and consume (renewables aren't dense; fossil fuels are unsustainable and ruin the environment; fission nuclear is dirty and dangerous, etc).
When fusion power plants are finally in production and being scaled up, we will no longer be forced to tolerate these barbarians. At this point, we should cut the savages off without so much as a cent or a trinket.
Could have been worse: George Lucas.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The odds of writing sci-fi accurately are approximately 3,720 to 1.
Table-ized A.I.
We already have a huge controlled fusion reactor with (on a human time scale) an unlimited fuel supply. And on top of that, this reactor has a distribution system that reaches most of the earth with abundant supplies of usable energy. The reactor has been nicknamed "the sun" and why don't we call the distribution network "sunshine"? So rather than "re-inventing the wheel" why don't we, for a small fraction of the cost of building a dangerous earth-bound version of the sun, just use what we already have?
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Interviewer: "So fusion is 30 years away and always will be, right?"
Scientist: "That's what they say, but it's totally undeserved and misleading"
Interviewer: "OK, so how far away is it then?"
Scientist: "30 years"
give or take, depending on the time of year
Nuclear Fusion is 1AU away. Start figuring out more efficient collection methods. The bio method has proven to work, but it wastes a lot of energy in extraction of the stored energy.
if only we could figure out how to reach that breakeven point.
Just accumulate enough matter together to create a gravitational field so strong that it begins to collapse space-time and fusion will start all by itself. Until we give up the notion that we can do with magnets what gravity can do (false) and that anything on a large scale must be capable of being replicated on a small scale (also false), people and governments will continue to throw money away at "fusion".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Even if you could say with certainty that in 10-20 years the practical technology could be established, wouldn't you be looking at another 30+ years before it was actually a meaningful force in power generation, making fusion more like 50+ years out?
Say they solve the technology hurdles in 10 years. They will then need to build a test plant that operates at a scale large enough to generate meaningful power (a few megawatts). That would probably take 10 years. That plant would need to run for, what, 5 years, to demonstrate that everything works like its supposed to and you can actually make the thing work.
At that point you're out another 10-15 years to plan and build a large, utility scale plant comparable to the ones that exist now -- 1.5GW. This plant would then have to run for 5 years to demonstrate (at least to investors, regulators, politicians, etc) that it works.
So worst case, 45 years later you have a single fusion plant producing electricity at utility scale.
Assuming it all works perfectly and everyone loves it in the next 20 years you might add another 3 plants. 65 years out, you now have 4 plants producing 6 TW, a drop in the bucket.
And all of this is assuming the economics make sense relative to other trends, like residential solar, improved battery storage and so on. After all this, fusion as a source of power seems closer to a 100 years out.
"The ultimate dream when it comes to clean, green, safe, abundant energy is nuclear fusion."
Not since the 1980s when we realized any machine able to harness it would cost more than we could afford to pay for it.
"The same process that powers the core of the Sun could also power everything on Earth millions of times over"
Indeed, and if we build solar panels at the rate we are now, we'll do just that.
"Recent advances have all three looking promising in various ways"
Really? Let's see:
- magnetic confinement - after some initial tabletop experiments, a guy in south america claims to have a working fusion device, and suddenly there's millions provided for research. After some initial failures, Teller calls a meeting at the Princeton Gun Club and basically says he's highly sceptical that any of the existing devices could work because they use concave fields that will cause the plasma to squirt out. Everyone leaves the meeting and immediately convinces themselves that his concerns don't apply. 60 years later... guess what, he was right.
- inertial confinement - John Nuckols came up with a formula in the 1960s that said we would have breakeven with lasers around a couple of kJ. We build those and they didn't work, not even remotely close. In the 1980s they ran some experiments using small nuclear bombs as drivers, and those suggested it would require 100 MJ. But instead of believing the results, everyone involved waved their hands and said it didn't apply, and we should keep going with the 4 MJ machine. Well guess what, it didn't work, it's stuck at 1/10th breakeven, and a driver able to close that gap is around 100 MJ.
- magnetized target fusion - so basically the entire history of fusion goes like this: I have a device that will work. It doesn't work. I have another device that will definitely work. Repeat. MTF is the latest iteration.
That doesn't mean we need a 40 MJ laser, it probably means we need 100 MJ, w
"one wonder why we don't spend more resources towards achieving the holy grail of energy."
Because it doesn't work and it's not the holy grail of energy. And people that actually work in the energy industry are perfectly aware of that, and that's why they don't get more resources.
The equilibrium temperature on earth might become a little higher, but since radiating heat goes with T^4 (ignoring all greenhouse effects here) it probably would not be a little higher.
If you fail to write it accurately (in the sense you mean) it's not science fiction. It's fantasy.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
NOMBY!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
For anybody who's more in the know than me, what's the latest with Lockheed's supposed Skunkworks compact fusion reactor? There's so little info on it I'm inclined to think it's a pie-in-the-sky bid for government pork, but if there's been any recent updates I'd love to hear it.
This graph explains very clearly how far away we are, and why it is taking so long. The reality is, with all the cheap coal (and natural gas), it's just not a priority. Besides, environmentalists hate nuclear so it's not a political winner to fund it. This story is good, too.
That looks like a graph that says 'fusion researchers want more money.' I want more money, too.
If I go to the source report, will it tell me:
1) the technical challenges they face?
2) if they're engineering problems requiring great expenditures?
3) If they're scientific research problems with uncertain outcomes?
4) If the research for a #3 problem involves a massive #2 effort?
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
About $30 billion away. When the predictions of fusion being 20 years away were made, they were based on there being an adiquately funded research program. Since then we've spent less than what was projected as the "fusion never" scenario, which lo and behold is what we've got. Even ITER took 20 years just to figure out who was going to pay for it (first proposed in 1985)
It's there, but we have to put an absurd amount of relatively rare resources into photovoltaic cells to make *use* of that energy. Otherwise, it performs a very useful function in that it gives us this thing called heat, so we don't all freeze to death and die (and so we can have an ecosystem of animals and plants that we don't have to keep in climate-controlled environments that also won't freeze and die).
No, I'm sorry, but the primary purpose of the sun is to give us energy in the form of light for plants and heat for everything else (including plants). With current technology we can't make use of the sun well enough to meet more than a fraction of our energy demands.
Now, if we had a steadily shrinking worldwide population, we might be able to do it, since we'd have more and more surplus energy every year without even doing anything -- which means if we continue to increase production of renewables like solar and wind year over year, and population decreases, it's mathematically certain that at a point not too far in the future the two will intersect and we can shut down the last coal/diesel/natural gas/nuclear plants.
But unless you can find a way to cause the population to shrink worldwide year over year in a controlled, preferably non-violent manner, I don't see a way that renewables will ever become dominant. It's not economically feasible. We can't divert enough resources to making solar panels and wind farms to meet energy demands, even if we cut worldwide energy demands per capita by 25% immediately and cut the energy use of the most energy-intensive top 5% by 75%. Even with such unrealistic and aggressive cuts in per capita consumption, an exponentially increasing population will ultimately make the exercise pointless.
Hey now, a single photon could really be two photons and two photons could really be 4 photons and... 1.1579208923731619542357098500869e+77 photons could really be 2.3158417847463239084714197001738e+77 photons. The double slip experiment should be outlawed because if you loops the experiment back in on itself, it may destroy the Universe by spawning an infinite number of photons..
All of these designs are great... but sadly we are still lacking half of the fuel needed for any fusion roll-out. All of these designs require two different types of hydrogen isotopes as fuel deuterium and tritium. We have a practically unlimited amount of deuterium in the oceans but tritium must be manufactured by neutron capture from lithium.
And this is the problem, tritium has a half-life of 12 years. Itâ(TM)s radioactive, itâ(TM)s VERY difficult to contain. And we donâ(TM)t have enough to run power plants. Now itâ(TM)s possible to wrap the a fusion reactor with Lithium to be converted into Tritium. But the amount that can made in this manner is only slightly more than what is burned to generate the flux needed to convert Lithium.
I saw a projection assuming we had a functional 1GW fusion power plant today; and we loaded the ALL of the worlds supply of Tritium into that reactor we would have enough to Tritium run that single plant for about a year. And at the end of that year assuming a good conversion rate you would have about 125-150% of the Tritium you started with. This would prevent any large deployments of fusion plants. They concluded that even after 10 years you wouldnâ(TM)t have the Tritium for more than 10-15 1GW Power plants. Assuming that you would build additional plants once you had fuel for them.
Also, they concluded that itâ(TM)s was likely impossible for a Tritium fueled fusion plant to prevent significant leakage of Tritium. As Tritium is radioactive and easily incorporated in living tissue such a power plant would be violating current laws for Nuclear plants.
I am not saying that we shouldn't be working on fusion power. But we arenâ(TM)t going to have unlimited fusion power anytime soon...
So it's about 1 Kessel run, then...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Maybe. My thought has always been that if fusion is close enough to get ballpark figures, we can build the necessary infrastructure and much of the housing in parallel with fusion development. Because the energy distribution will impose novel demands on the grid, it's going to require a major rethink on communications protocols, over-generation procedures, action plans on what to do if lines are taken out.
With fusion, especially, it's expensive at best to learn after the fact. Much better to get all the learning done in the decade until working fusion.
With all that in place, the ramp time until fusion is fully online at a sensible price will be greatly reduced.
Parallelize, don't serialize. Only shredded wheat should be cerealized.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Bill Nye keeps repeating this and I think he's right. If we load homes with solar panels and use a giant plant that uses a heavy piston to take extra solar power and store it as fluid that pumps into the cylinder. Then at night it drains out the fluid to turn a turbine and produces power to local homes. Fusion is just another expensive power plant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There have been several recent announcements by relatively reputable companies that they will soon be building and selling a fusion generator. The details are a trade secret, so we can't reasonably evaluate them. All we can really say is "Somewhere between 5 years and 30^n years.". Perhaps it's a trade secret. They may be building a working reactor right now. Details are secret.
The skepticism above is quite reasonable, but the current crop of rumors differs significantly from prior "sort of" promises. Perhaps this time it's real. Don't hold your breath.
OTOH, it *WILL* require a special mixture of hydrogen isotopes. Different groups are making different promises, and I'm skeptical not only about each of them, but also about all of them. OTOH, I'm not denying it. Skeptical means I'm not going to stop doubting them until I see proof, it doesn't mean I believe they're lying (or even wrong).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
How many parsecs does it take for light to reach earth?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Fusion has always promised too much and delivered nothing. In the past, when there was no other alternative, fusion received lots of attention, but now it is studied more like a pure science which may or may not have any practical application. India recently accepted proposal from private party to build solar plant which will supply electricity at 7.5 cents/kWH. This is way cheaper than building any fusion plant based on current science (assuming the technology will work flawlessly).
The only place where solar won't work are high latitude places but even Germany has strong solar program. Number of people leaving beyond this latitude is very small and they can easily be served using bio-fuel/wind/hydro.
So considering alternatives today, fusion is stillborn and nuclear is on deathbed, solar is a teenager and hydro is a matured adult. Fossil fuel is a dark side to be defeated.
"Promising" barely scrapes the surface of what's involved here.
Battle Story Passchendaele 1917
And, no, I did not make those "strong points" up.
I'm imagining a member of the British upper crust sitting in his warm, fireside chair peering eagerly into Galadriel's water mirror (circa 1913) to soak up this promising tidbit about the looming war, while someone in the next room hums "onward fusion soldiers".
No, a technology does not become promising merely because a singularly large obstacle looks a little smaller today than it did yesterday.
That's just pride fuckin' with you.
The odds of writing _good_ science fiction, or science, is about 1 in 10.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Oh, and don't tell me 'battery banks!' because unless someone comes up with a way of directly storing electric power that scales up very, very cheaply, it's not really a practical solution to have bank after bank after bank of Li+ (or whatever) batteries, which in way less than 20 years will have to be junked and replaced, too.
Meet the Aquion -- batteries made of manganese oxide, carbon and salt. Everything is cheap and easily mined.
Just wait another ~15 years until key patents expire.
That the bean counters should never be in charge of making operational decisions?
Can you guarantee in writing that no bean counters will run EVERY fucking nuclear power station? Ever?!
The goal of the energy companies is to maximize profit while minimizing expenses. The delivery of energy is just their method of making money, and they're pretty cozy with it. Change requires learning new things, and that takes work. Work frightens people.
The problem is that many elites have their fortunes and power tied up with the current model. When society starts to monkey with that system, powerful people get upset because it means they might not maintain control over their fiefdoms.
Fusion technology is not being developed by the energy companies, which means if it becomes viable, it would allow for young, spirited competing agencies. That could easily result in a big market shake-up and lots of established people feeling threatened.
The power delivery/distribution systems, via the electricity grid, might be willing to adapt as it wouldn't immediately affect their relationship with money, but they're small players by comparison to fossil fuel interests.
Also, there are military and covert agencies tied up in geo-politics. The face of the world, whole national agendas, are driven by oil. I can't even begin to guess how they might react to the sea change Fusion would cause in that regard. Imagine Saudi Arabia's reaction to having its cash cow threatened. Just for starters.
In any case, I don't think it's quite as cut and dried as you suggest. People would bleed and run around and be frightened while everybody plays musical fusion chairs on the world stage.
If fusion in general is the holy grail, then aneutronic fusion would be the 2nd coming of (fill in a mythological deity of your choice). Fascinating stuff really, and the group that is working on it (in a GARAGE in Jersey I believe) have already attained as high an output energy as any of the big players in the field like ITER and LIF on a shoestring budget. Not only is it incredibly smaller/cheaper to operate than any of the other approaches so far (other than possibly the MIT sponsored methods) it's also got one HUGE benefit... little to no radiation and practically NO waste whatsoever. It's also a damn near perfect propulsion system for interplanetary travel. You can keep your Tokomak's and laser igniters.. I'll go with aneutronic fusion with a side of liquid fluoride thorium reactor's for industrial use. These 2 technologies together can and will 'save the world' from itself.
If I sound stupid, it's not me talking....
Oh, wait, that's what they promised me at Expo 63 when I was 3 years old, along with flying cars and jetpacks.
(yes, I know here at the UW we have a working fusion generator, but I'm just pointing out that research does not always mean commercially available in wide distribution)
Realistically, we might see it soon for naval ships and submarines and certain military uses like powering our drone-killing laser systems, but you probably won't see it until 2050 at the earliest anywhere you care about.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A normal human have the secrete of nuclear Health@ http://www.stepupheightincreas...
BTW, how's that 2nd-3rd world country doing with the strip-mining for them solar panels?
Still a lot better than the coal and petroleum industry to date, but why throw facts into your BS arguments.