The Bizarre Reactor Scientists Hope Will Save Fusion Research (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: In a gleaming research lab in Germany's northeastern corner, researchers are preparing to switch on a fusion device called a stellarator, the largest ever built. The €1-billion machine, known as Wendelstein 7-X looks a bit like Han Solo's Millennium Falcon, towed in for repairs after a run-in with the Imperial fleet. Stellarators have long been dark horses in fusion energy research but the Dali-esque devices have many attributes that could make them much better prospects for a commercial fusion power plant than the more popular tokamaks: Once started, stellarators naturally purr along in a steady state and they are not prone to the potentially metal-bending magnetic disruptions that plague tokamaks. Unfortunately they are devilishly hard to build.

Comments

Dat Title

[Anonymous Coward]

Nerd clickbait?

Re:Dat Title

[fisted]

Dat device tho.

Re:Dat Title

[Anonymous Coward]

The human spinal column is a fusion reactor when removed and forged into a circle?

that One Weird Trick which will make you click

[turkeydance]

no...you didn't.....c'mon man.

Re:that One Weird Trick which will make you click

[Anonymous Coward]

"Tokamak researchers HATE them!"

Escape from castle Wendelstein

[Anonymous Coward]

when this blows up

Those bizarre reactor scientists

[Anonymous Coward]

What will they do next?

Shouldn't these things ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... already be small enough to attach to our cars?

Re:Shouldn't these things ...

[benjfowler]

Nope. With these kind of magnetic confinement machines and the way they scale, the bigger the better (quite literally).

This is why we need to build a stupendously huge and expensive machine like ITER to demonstrate anything approaching economic power output for the energy required to confine and heat the plasma.

Re:Shouldn't these things ...

[viperidaenz]

Woosh.

Mr Fusion.

Re:Shouldn't these things ...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, if they could scale one up to, say, a million miles in diameter...

Re:Shouldn't these things ...

[the_other_one]

That would be an acceptable replacement for my VW Clean Diesel.

Re:Shouldn't these things ...

[CODiNE]

So you saying this thing won't go into the gaping hole in my chest to power my robotic suit?

Damn.

Re:Shouldn't these things ...

[Opportunist]

It would probably become a shining example of great fusion.

Re:Shouldn't these things ...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, ITER is as big as it is because of how far ions 'jump' in certain types of collisions. Make them much smaller and they could never generate any power at all.

Re:Shouldn't these things ...

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't really contradict with what he says.
Jumps are random, the larger your reactor, the more of them you catch in it.

Re:Shouldn't these things ...

[Anonymous Coward]

A fusion reactor on your car is sooooooo yesterday.

Re:Shouldn't these things ...

[RoccamOccam]

Exactly! Why are they messing with this, when we already know that the arc reactor works?

Re:Shouldn't these things ...

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't matter how far any given ion can move in a collision, and the radius of circulating ions is quite small in a tokamak (especially compared to designs like an FRC that is not much bigger than the circles ions move in). It just comes down to there being a maximum thermal gradient it is stable for a given magnetic field. Either you make a stronger magnetic field, but there are limits to the fields superconductors can be exposed to and remain superconducting, or you make it bigger. It is somewhat like conventional insulators, in that if you want a bigger gradient, at some point you just need a thicker insulator.

Re: Shouldn't these things ...

[Lije Baley]

No problem. You just need a bigger car.

Re:Shouldn't these things ...

[Coren22]

Why aren't all the cars powered by arc reactors? I'd build one to power my house, but I am having trouble getting it to start up, do I not have enough initial power?

Why do I...

[Anonymous Coward]

have visions of Dr. Octavius when I read this???

Q: heat

[khallow]

So how are they heating up the plasma? The discussion of the comparison with the tokamak talks a lot about the instability of the latter, but not much about how they'll replace the heating mechanism (the pulsing of the plasma, is supposedly replaced with something more steady).

Re:Q: heat

[benjfowler]

Heating (and confinement) are now basically solved problems in magnetic confinement machines. The Wikipedia article says that they'll be using bog-standing microwave heating (they don't say exactly what), and neutral-beam heating in W-7X.

Both tokamaks and stellarators have to 'twist' the magnetic field around the torus (since paths around the inside of the torus are smaller than the outside, leading to instabilities). Tokamaks achieve this by inducing a current through the plasma to induce the twist in the magnetic field using a huge solenoid or other means; stellarators use external coils.

The former are prone to catastrophic disruptions (which in extreme cases, can unleash strong forces that could, in the absolute worst case, physically break the machine); the latter are more stable, but much harder to manufacture.

Re:Q: heat

[Anonymous Coward]

" bog-standing "??? What kind of expression is that? What does it mean?

Re:Q: heat

[Anonymous Coward]

He means "bog-standard", obviously.

Re: Q: heat

[Anonymous Coward]

No, "Borg standing-microwave."

Re:Q: heat

[RuffMasterD]

I don't know, but the first result on Google is some committee dedicated to the activity. They've been doing it since the 70s.

Re:Q: heat

[tehcyder]

" bog-standing "??? What kind of expression is that? What does it mean?

It's "bog-standing microwave heating" so I assume they're locating the microwave in a bog for cooling purposes. Apparently, these fusion thingies get quite hot, even more so than household microwave ovens!

Re:Q: heat

[An ominous Cow art]

And if it melts down, falls over, and sinks into the swamp, we'll just build another, which will be the strongest reactor in all the lands.

Re:Q: heat

[Khashishi]

Microwave and radio frequency antennas are used to heat the plasma. Specific frequencies are used to resonate with the electrons and ions in the plasma. 10MW of electron cyclotron resonant heating and 4MW of ion cyclotron resonant heating.

Title is misleading

[benjfowler]

There's nothing "new" about the stellarator at all.

I'm pretty sure that Lyman Spitzer came up with the idea at Princeton before the Russians did at the Kurchatov Institute. The only reason why the tokamak is more famous, is that the physics performance (particle, energy confinement) was for the longest time, way better in tokamaks (and may well still be). Also, tokamaks are way easier to build (but harder to operate).

That said, I've read suggestions that stellarators might be able to be optimised in ways that are impossible in tokamaks, pending further breakthroughs. The machines will still cost a fortune to build though -- and cost is going to be a BIG barrier to adoption of fusion as a power source at any rate.

Re:Title is misleading

[viperidaenz]

Title doesn't mention "new", neither does summary.

The summary also correctly implies stellarators are in fact old. Stellarators have long been dark horses

Re:Title is misleading

[knightghost]

We blew $5 trillion on useless wars and $20 trillion so that wall street could get some short term bonuses. A billion dollar fusion engine isn't even a rounding error.

Re: Title is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

We?
I don't think there is a Wall Street in Germany.

Re:Title is misleading

[benjfowler]

In the minds of laypeople, yes. There are quite a few other concepts that have been worked on over the years, none of which have any kind of public profile at all.

Re:Title is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, they're not the dark horses, but the second in line after tokamaks. They've have a long history of steady research, and while not the top proposal, they are still pretty heavily researched with several concurrent programs around the world. FRCs, various pinch designs, and spheromak based proposals on the other hand have been more scattered and less steadily pursued, with programs started and stopped. Stellarators are the backup design, often championed by organizations like DoE when they are accused of putting all of their eggs in one basket when they cut the much more obscure designs.

Re: Title is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

And I don't think Germany's economic losses from useless warmongering are as low as 5 trillion 2015 dollars either.

Re: Title is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes there is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankenviertel

And if you don't think plenty of banks in Frankfurt and in Europe generally haven't received bailouts, then you obviously haven't been paying attention to what's been happening with Greece. Where do you think all the money lent to Greece has been going? To pay its creditors. Where are those creditors? Frankfurt, Paris, and London.

Also, the ECB and other European government institutions have been buying the Greek debt directly. Greece owes over 300 billion euros. Most Greek debt was held by European commercial banks. Today, European banks have sold off almost the entirety of their portfolio to the European government.

By contrast, in 2007 subprime mortgages constituted $1.2 trillion. However, only a small fraction of that was in danger of default. Whereas Greece is likely to default on much more.

How leveraged European banks were, I'm not sure. The financial crisis occurred because of the drop in value of derivative instruments, not the subprime mortgages. But when the Greece debt crisis hit, Europe took more swift action behind the scenes, perhaps preventing a rapid unwinding of leveraged positions.

Re: Title is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

The debt was swapped from private to government so the Greeks couldn't just default. It is much harder to tell that to big countries than little banks...who don't have armies!

Re: Title is misleading

[Opportunist]

Especially if you want to "generously" lend those countries money so they could pay for your weapons, as is the case with Germany and Greece.

Re:Title is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

and cost is going to be a BIG barrier to adoption of fusion as a power source at any rate.

And that's why we'll still be burning coal the next 50 years.

Re: Title is misleading

[muecksteiner]

Mind you, if you are Greece, and have the current Turkey of Mr. Erdogan as neighbour, you might also be inclined to find some way to buy arms. Lots of arms, actually.

Re: Title is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if you convert it to current values

Re: Title is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that Germany seems to be ambivalent about a default, it seems to me the intention was only to postpone the inevitable to protect the commercial banking sector.

Now that the government owns most of the debt, much of which can be quantitatively-eased away, there's little reason to continue the charade for much longer. Indeed, Greece was already forced to default (a late bond payment is still a default) this summer by ECB maneuvering. Europe is just stringing Greece along because they're worried about any large shifts effecting the currently fragile state of the EU economy.

A Greece without any liquidity is a Greece that can't import and export outside its borders. While they're not huge, that would create significant dislocation problems, effecting profits and losses across all industries in the EU. Unpredictability is risky and causes lenders to clam up. Also, a Greece that successfully devalues (inside or outside the the monetary union) would eventually increase exports and decrease imports. That's inevitable, but you want it to happen slowly industries can adjust without spooking investors.

Re:Title is misleading

[SuperDre]

Maybe you should read the original article, the machine has already been built and is ready for it's first test run with plasma, but is waiting aproval to do so.. Yes it did cost a lot of money to build, but if it works it will reduce the cost of generating energy enormously and it's 'clean'..
But even if the test works perfectly, it's still a long way off before we see it used for our daily use..

Re:Title is misleading

[swb]

Forgetting the politics, economics and global events surrounding those $25 trillion, if we *had* decided to spend $25 trillion (which is nearly 2 years of total US GDP) on fusion would we have even a small scale utility version by now?

I'm assuming that given the size of that amount of money and the actual US GDP, it would take a massive effort just to practically even spend that kind of money, let alone perform the science and engineering it might enable (such as building facilities, etc).

Re:Title is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

Furthermore, a stellarator is actually a kind of tokamak.

Re: Title is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

Greece was already forced to default (a late bond payment is still a default)

Its only a default if the rules don't allow it. If you are referring to the combining of a month's payments into one payment that was allowed.

Re:Title is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

If there was that much money available I suspect it would be very quickly spent with the biggest campaign donors

Re: Title is misleading

[tehcyder]

Mind you, if you are Greece, and have the current Turkey of Mr. Erdogan as neighbour, you might also be inclined to find some way to buy arms. Lots of arms, actually.

I might be wrong, but I think if Turkey invaded Greece that would put quite a dampener on their EU membership bid. Plus they're both in NATO, so they'd be pissing off the US as well.

And, no, North Cyprus isn't the same thing.

Re: Title is misleading

[muecksteiner]

Implying that membership of the EU is something that would matter to certain parts of the political establishment in Turkey in the long run. For some, re-establishment of the Sultanate seems to come way higher on the list of priorities.

Re:Title is misleading

[tkrotchko]

It would be difficult, if not impossible, to absorb that kind of money without starting a small nuclear war.

Re:Title is misleading

[Coren22]

You do realize that the banks repaid the bailouts right?

https://projects.propublica.or...

Also, it was "only" $600B

http://www.politifact.com/new-...

It was a temporary cash influx to keep the banks from folding. I am actually surprised it wasn't handled through FDIC insurance, but I don't know much about the banking industry.

Re:Title is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

We realize you failed massively vs. apk http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Re:Title is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, they are pretty dissimilar beyond both being roughly toroidal magnetic confinement schemes (of which there are a few other types too, and some phenomena do overlap between all of them). The magnetic fields in a toroidal configuration need some amount of twist on them. Tokamaks provide this with a current running around the ring (usually a very large current), while stellarators do this with external coils in complicated shapes. That current makes a huge different in some of the behavior of the plasma. The geometry is even pretty different because of those external twists, so that tokamaks have more symmetry, which is important to understanding instabilities and wave structures within the plasma.

Re:Title is misleading

[slew]

Maybe you should read the original article, the machine has already been built and is ready for it's first test run with plasma, but is waiting aproval to do so.. Yes it did cost a lot of money to build, but if it works it will reduce the cost of generating energy enormously and it's 'clean'..
But even if the test works perfectly, it's still a long way off before we see it used for our daily use..

AFAIK, the Wendelstein 7-X is an *experimental* reactor, it wasn't planned to be an economical power plant.. It is designed for demonstrating the features required for continuous operation (important for a power plant), but I don't think it was designed for actual continuous 24-7 operation (as I recall it is supposed to operate in short stretches of plasma containment for about a half an hour or so and then gather test data, not actually do continuous fusion and extract power)

The idea is that its design is very close to that of what you would want for an actual stellarator reactor. If it works well, someone could tweak the design and build the plant that you might want to try to do fusion tests, and then later you would build on that the one for daily use and be pretty sure it works. This is not unlike ITER (which is also an experimental tokamak that is doing something similar). Neither is designed to be a power plant, (ITER doesn't even have a way to capture the fusion energy released and convert it to electricity, and I suspect neither does the W7-X reactor).

Unlike software, you don't ship the alpha nuclear reactor and let the unsuspecting population beta test it...

Re:Title is misleading

[amicitas]

Wendelstein 7-X is "new" in the sense that it not a classical stellarator (such as those built by Spitzer) but rather an optimized design. What this essentially means is the shape of the magnetic coils was carefully chosen using a set of theoretical calculations to minimize energy loss (improve confinement) and improve stability. This will be the first large scale stellarator with an optimized design. Several smaller optimized devices have been constructed, however these have been short pulse university scale machines and could not be used to fully explore this confinement concept. Up until the computation tools to create a optimized design became available, it was generally considered that the energy loss in a stellarator would always be much greater than in a tokamak, and that therefore tokamaks were a better path towards fusion energy. Using modern optimization techniques however it is possible to design a stellarator with equivalent expected energy loss as a tokamak design but with much better stability and no need for current drive (which is very energy intensive).

Re:Title is misleading

[SuperDre]

Yes, I didn't mean that specific reactor itself would be used for production, but if this prototype works it clears the way for an actual production version in the near future, which will reduce the cost of energy in the long run.

Re:Title is misleading

[slew]

Yes, I didn't mean that specific reactor itself would be used for production, but if this prototype works it clears the way for an actual production version in the **near** future, which will reduce the cost of energy in the long run.

Fusion has always been in the **near** future...

The fact that the W7X reactor is 8 years behind schedule already^ and it's only the experimental reactor might give some pause to the enthusiasm around this technology being deployed in a time frame that might be considered the near future from today. In the long run, it **might** prove to be a promising technology to reduce the cost of energy in the long run, but many potential revolutionary technologies suffer a great infant mortality rate and I wouldn't be betting too much on any of them at this point in the game...

I'm not saying we shouldn't be trying, but everything deserves a critical analysis, and that include the dream of clean fusion energy...

^(sadly, that magnitude of delay is not bad compared to other fusion projects like ITER and NIF)

Re: Title is misleading

[Opportunist]

How does one exclude the other?

Re:What's the big deal?

[AHuxley]

The well funded sheltered workshop and bespoke cottage industry buying from multinationals as nation building funding that keeps national engineering skills over decades.
Generations of German staff learn smart stuff they can then sell to the rest of the world in the open, in bulk.
The next generation of staff can then share, talk about and build on the projects. Very different from the stop/start political funding in other nations.
Locals who can work down to millimeter precision, with cold materials, understand supercomputers in the open, public sector.
That plays great in international export publications under the brand Germany. Other nations hide that kind of skill for their military only or give up, cant fund, fail with science and engineering on the public stage. Germany gets on with building, sharing, showing ie winning.
Germany can then boast about, sell, educate, share, invite and earn from the related public projects.

Just stop.

[X0563511]

looks a bit like Han Solo's Millennium Falcon, towed in for repairs after a run-in with the Imperial fleet.

Sure, in the same way a croissant does.

Meaning, not at all.

Re:Just stop.

[Ecuador]

looks a bit like Han Solo's Millennium Falcon, towed in for repairs after a run-in with the Imperial fleet.

Sure, in the same way a croissant does.

Meaning, not at all.

OK, I'll give you that, it doesn't look like a croissant, but how about a cronut? Do you see it?

Re:Just stop.

[Robotbeat]

looks a bit like Han Solo's Millennium Falcon, towed in for repairs after a run-in with the Imperial fleet.

Sure, in the same way a croissant does.

Meaning, not at all.

Now that you mention it, it kind of does look like a croissant.

Re:Just stop.

[Anonymous Coward]

As the coming movie premiere approaches, the Star Wars speak is leaching our brains more and more.

Re:Just stop.

[camperdave]

looks a bit like Han Solo's Millennium Falcon, towed in for repairs after a run-in with the Imperial fleet.

Sure, in the same way a croissant does.

Meaning, not at all.

Indeed! In every encounter I've seen between the Millennium Falcon and Imperial ships, whether it's dodging TIE fighters in an asteroid belt, playing tag with Imperial Star Destroyers, or tackling a Death Star, it's the Imperial ships that wind up being turned into scrap metal.

Re:Just stop.

[Anonymous Coward]

It also saddens my inner geek that they have to specify its owner, instead of just calling it the Millennium Falcon...

Re:Just stop.

[Anonymous Coward]

It also saddens my inner geek that they have to specify its owner, instead of just calling it the Millennium Falcon...

They're just taking sides in the Lando/Han Solo ownership argument.

Re:Just stop.

[Coren22]

Han fairly won the Falcon in a card game. Lando just didn't think the Falcon counted as "at his ship yard".

Re:Just stop.

[Anonymous Coward]

We see you fairly lost against apk when you tried playing security guru and failed Coren22 http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Presses button and...

[SuperKendall]

Whirr Whir Whir Whir CLUNK.

"They told me they fixed it! It's not my fault!" as they furiously poke at buttons.

Wibbly Wobbly

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't say bizarre, just a bit wibbly wobbly. Throw in a bit of Timey Wimey and it should be brilliant!

Re: Wibbly Wobbly

[Anonymous Coward]

One might even say fantastic..

This tech is going nowhere

[Anonymous Coward]

They're just spinning in circles at this point.

Re:This tech is going nowhere

[benjfowler]

That's what you think.

When ITER ignites a plasma early next decade, people will be completely blindsided. Progress has actually been staggering -- the state-of-the-art in fusion triple-product has grown faster than Moore's Law for decades.

Re:This tech is going nowhere

[iggymanz]

no, people will be astounded an immense amount of money was spent for something without breakeven output. ITER is a distraction from viable fusion machine designs, waste of time, money and attention; a monument at the end of a path of successive failures.

Defund ITER

Re:This tech is going nowhere

[khallow]

When ITER ignites a plasma early next decade

Still not going to cut it. You have to substantially reduce the cost as well. That means either figuring out how to do the fancy tech cheaper, or more likely redo the whole mess with technology that is more affordable.

Progress has actually been staggering -- the state-of-the-art in fusion triple-product has grown faster than Moore's Law for decades.

Still could have been faster if we were serious about it.

Re:This tech is going nowhere

[Anonymous Coward]

If built, the only way ITER won't reach a Q of 1 is if there is some fundamental wrong in plasma physics that would revolutionize things in terms of scientific discoveries. The more boring outcome is it will quite easily exceed a Q of 1, but just turn out to not be that helpful at solving engineering problems necessarily to make fusion more economical as a commercial power source. There is also the possibility it won't get completed, due to political reasons which are greatly inflating costs (e.g. distribute the production of the same item among multiple countries, because they all demand experience, and hence no price savings from economy of scale when multiple shops have to work out how to build the exact same thing in different places... like producing the specialized klystrons in multiple countries instead of one shop).

Re:This tech is going nowhere

[backslashdot]

Yup post it anonymously, so you won't be accountable as one of the people trying to derail fusion. Fools like you used to claim space travel and airplanes were impossible because of all the failures that came before it was successful. We have ITER, MagLIF, and loads of other promising concepts left to try.

Post a proof that fusion is impossible and then maybe we'll listen. You know a proof is something other than "fusion didn't work when we cut the budget by 90%".
We know fusion is possible not only because the sun is powered by it, but also because the thermonuclear weapons work.

Re:This tech is going nowhere

[Anonymous Coward]

And it will be the most expensive source of electricity yet devised by man, but we don't have a shortage of electricity.

Technology always gets better, remember? So our windmills and solar panels got better and our appliances got better. We got better at making electricity and we need less of it.

Fusion research is a dinosaur trying to solve the problems of the past.

It's useless. And ITER isn't even meant to be a power plant, that's DEMO which is even further out and more improbable.

Re:This tech is going nowhere

[Anonymous Coward]

Burden of proof is on you. By your own logic, people had to build airplanes for example. Thing is, people were able to build the first airplane with a home-made engine and bike parts. Two people did this in a shed in the early 20th century in a handful of years.

Fusion has been researched to death by entire countries for decades and provided nothing.

The burden of proof is on YOU at this point.

PS: Please post a proof that life extension is impossible then explain to me why we're not researching that?

Re: This tech is going nowhere

[Anonymous Coward]

Solar and wind power? We are going to need a heck of a lot more electricity than what solar and wind can reasonably provide. Coal, other fossil fuels, and even fission nuclear power all will be too expensive to extract in the future, meaning that effectively we will have run out. Fusion has the potential to sustain our civilization far into the future

Re:This tech is going nowhere

[camperdave]

That's what you think.

When ITER ignites a plasma early next decade, people will be completely blindsided.

Don't worry. The US will have ground troops go in long before that happens.

Re:This tech is going nowhere

[SuperDre]

That's where you're wrong, the research done for decades provided A LOT, theory is there, it should be possible, but to put that theory in practice is where the problems arise, it cost a lot of money (which not everyone is interested in pouring into it) and knowingly that it will take some time for technology to advance to actually make it possible..

And if you believe some of the stories around, the 'two people did this in a shed' can also be put to use to various other energymaking devices, but noone actually believes those people...
Also comparing a home build airplane to a fusion reactor is not really a good example..

Re:This tech is going nowhere

[beerbear]

We got better at making electricity and we need less of it.

Maybe per person consumption of energy is declining (doubtful), but the population explosion and industrialization of current third world areas will more than make up for. Every projection of world wide energy consumption shows an increase in total energy needs, not a decrease.

Re:This tech is going nowhere

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not wrong, all you've done is provide faith. Faith is nice, but doesn't power a light bulb.

Re:This tech is going nowhere

[tehcyder]

We know fusion is possible not only because the sun is powered by it, but also because the thermonuclear weapons work.

That is one of the stupidest arguments I've ever seen on slashdot. It's about as useful as saying "we know that travel at the speed of light is possible because photons do it".

Re:This tech is going nowhere

[Maury Markowitz]

>Don't worry. The US will have ground troops go in long before that happens.

You win the internet for today.

Re:This tech is going nowhere

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the typical level of logic you get from Space Nutters. Looks like we have Fusion Nutters too now.

Re:This tech is going nowhere

[backslashdot]

I never said life extension was impossible, we *SHOULD* be researching that. However with life extension only a few people have theories that after peer review seem plausible. The people who do have valid scientific theories on it are getting the funding needed -- none of which require a huge budget. In the case of fusion, tokamak has had a solid case since the 70s that it would work if built the size of ITER .. and this theory has been open to public scrutiny for a while. ITER was originally supposed to have been built in 1985. Between 1985 and today there has been nothing widely accepted saying that ITER won't work.

Re:This tech is going nowhere

[backslashdot]

There is not even a half-way plausible theory on how to convert ourselves safely into photons. We do have plausible theories on making fusion work.

Re:This tech is going nowhere

[iggymanz]

There are plenty of unknowns, plasma physics isn't evolved enough. Edge Localized Mode issues alone could doom the thing

Re:This tech is going nowhere

[Anonymous Coward]

JET has reached equivalents to Q=0.6. ELMs won't be able to stop it from reaching a Q of 1. They may make it impractical as a commercial reactor, but won't stop it from reaching that point. And unless a whole lot goes wrong with disruption suppression systems, ELMs and other effects are likely not even going to stop ITER from reaching higher Q and achieving its more basic goals.

There is a long way to go toward a practical reactor, but it is not the baby steps we've been taking that will fail, nor will the mostly arbitrary point of breakeven be significant in terms of making things economical.

Why it's hard

[phantomfive]

Lots of curves in the construction, and

Wendelstein 7-X’s bizarrely shaped components must be put together with millimeter precision. All welding was computer controlled and monitored with laser scanners.

Re:Why it's hard

[Jeremi]

How long until we can just 3D print one of these things? :)

Re:Why it's hard

[Anonymous Coward]

Milimeter precision is pretty bad, unless they mean over the total size of the construct.

Who are they?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who are those bizarre reactor scientists who hold such hopes?

princton Ppasma Physics Lab

[basecastula]

Weird how the PPPL sent out papers on these like 15 years ago and the summery make it seem like something obscure.

Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[PeterM from Berkeley]

Could the sale of the power from a ITER-like or W7X-like power plant pay better than 10% more than the interest on the capital used to build it added to the operating cost? (Assume the market is priced according to the cost of generating electricity from ALTERNATIVES to coal.)

If not, I can't see fusion competing with energy alternatives..... No one would ever invest the money to build commercial fusion plants if you couldn't make sufficient profit on the invested capital.....

--PeterM

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[david_bonn]

For all of this, in the very best case W7X will only sustain fusion for thirty minutes (according to Wikipedia). That is an extremely long way from being practical.

Even assuming it works very well, we are an extremely long way from solving all of the problems required to build a practical working fusion reactor.

Some of the problems remaining to be solved:

• Neutron flux (part 1). Most of the energy from the deuterium-tritium reaction is in the high-energy neutron produced by the reaction. The best estimate is that the neutron flux from a 1GW fusion reactor would be one or two orders of magnitude higher than from a fission reactor. No known material can withstand that neutron flux. One other way to look at it is that in five years of operation, every atomic nucleus in whatever radiation shield you build will be hit hundreds of times over a five year period.
• Neutron flux (part 2). the deuterium-tritium reaction produces one neutron. That neutron has to (1) heat a working fluid that can be used to run a turbine, and (2) strike a lithium nucleus with enough energy to breed tritium. You need to do that with every damned neutron to have a self-sustaining system. This is made even more challenging by the fact that neutrons will be emitted isotropically from the reactor. Yes, there are materials that can act as neutron amplifiers, but no one has ever done that on a large scale and it probably won't be easy or simple.
• Lithium. You are going to need a lot of it. A 1GW reactor will probably need around 10000 tons of lithium. At $7/kg, that is seventy billion dollars worth of lithium. That is also a significant percentage of the world's annual production of lithium.
• Tritium. Once you've made the tritium from the lithium, you need to get it back into the plasma where it can do some good. I note that both tritium and lithium will easily react with each other and separating them will be tricky.
• Helium removal. Your fusion reaction will produce helium. Too much helium in the plasma will interfere with the reaction and lower the efficiency of the reactor. You need a system to get the helium out of the plasma without cooling it down. This system must operate continuously.
• Scaling. W7X has a plasma volume of around 30 cubic meters. A 1GW fusion plant would need a plasma volume on the order of 1000 cubic meters. W7X will cost around a billion dollars -- straight-up extrapolation implies a cost north of 30 billion dollars. That doesn't include all of the systems described above or a turbine to actually generate electricity. I also point out that scaling up isn't necessarily cheaper either.

I'd also note that solving each of the above problems is not going to be cheap. It is hard to imagine how a fusion plant can be made for less money than an existing fission plant, and those plants are already not competitive. Chances are it would be better and cheaper to build lots of batteries with all that lithium and a lot of wind turbines and solar panels. That would get you the same amount of energy, probably.

Sources: matter2energy, Do The Math

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[david_bonn]

I messed up, 10000 tons of lithium will cost roughly seventy million dollars. However, since you need "enriched" lithium with more Li-6 a price north of $100/kg is probably more realistic, which still puts you in the billion-dollar range on how much your lithium blanket is going to cost.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[Jeremi]

These machines aren't meant to be the Boeing 747 of fusion power. They're more like the Wright Flyer -- which was not even close to being a commercially viable flying machine, but did demonstrate that heavier-than-air flight was possible, and provided the engineers with experience that helped them engineer the next generation of aircraft.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[Anonymous Coward]

The bullet points where you give numbers make no sense. 10000 tons of lithium? Design studies for DEMO, which would have several GW of thermal output, have a blanket volume on the order of 500 m^3. Even if assuming that was all lithium, you are talking about 300-400 tons, much smaller than 10000 tons. 10000 tons would be a block of lithium about 27 m on a side, which is much larger than the whole reactor vessel design.

Scaling the costs is very difficult to do. A production reactor would be far cheaper in many ways, because you don't need as much diagnostic access. A lot of compromises have to be made to just get enough space between the magnets of many designs for diagnostics, plus the costs of diagnostics (millions of dollars each for the many of them), plus the costs to use, maintain and analyse them. This is part of why designs for DEMO are only about 15% larger than ITER, but of a much more compact design considering it is producing nearly 4-8 times as much thermal output.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[david_bonn]

You're right. That is still a heck of a lot of enriched lithium. I got my numbers from skimming my sources.

I still think there is no guarantee that scaling up will necessarily be less expensive. New engineering problems are likely to arise as you scale up. And yes, while you will not need as much instrumentation in a production reactor, there is a lot of stuff a production reactor will need (like the ability to run more than thirty minutes) that isn't included in that cost. My own guess is that it will probably be a wash.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[david_bonn]

My point is that there are a lot of daunting challenges to building a reliable commercial-scale fusion plant. They are probably all solvable. It is an open question whether you can solve all of those problems and produce a competitive source of electricity. For myself, I doubt it.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[Anonymous Coward]

10000 tons of lithium? That is 18000 cubic meters of lithium, 10-20 times the total plasma volume of something like ITER and DEMO. A fusion power plant would only have a 1-2 m thick lithium blanket around the plasma, with several large gaps.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[Anonymous Coward]

My own guess is that it will probably be a wash.

There are plenty of design studies that vary from all physics to heavy economics, and they go into far more detail thank just guesing. The first search result for something recent pulls up papers like this one that amount to construction + decades of operation costs on the order of 10-20 billion euros for DEMO, which still includes science equipment, while being bigger than ITER. That is on par with just construction cost with ITER.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[camperdave]

We knew heavier than air flight was possible LONG before the Wright brothers got involved.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[SomeoneFromBelgium]

All of these are engeneering challenges and not insurmoutable barriers. Each and everyone of them has been studied and solutions proposed (how to handle the neutron flux, what materials to use, how to remove helium and how to make an efficient blanket of Lithium to assure self sustainable fueling starting from raw deuterium and lithium.
These will all be sought out an tested on Iter and then Demo.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[Anonymous Coward]

Neutron flux: Why not abandon purism and instead make fusion reactor a controlled, not self sustained chain reaction, fission inducer in fusion/fission power plant reactor? Perhaps we don't need to go all-out fusion after all? This concept could solve the fundamental problems we have with practical use of nuclear fission: scarcity (need for enrichment process) of good fissile materials capable of sustaining chain reaction, risks of nuclear weapon proliferation when using such materials, and risks of runaway fission reaction when nuclear fission plants malfunction. We could chose a relatively stable heavy element isotope and bombard it with neutron flux to force it to split. If for any reason such as natural disaster or other emergency the reactor is shut down, neutron flux dies out and fuel can't fission on its own.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[blind biker]

Could you briefly explain why a 1 GW reactor would need 10.000 tons of Lithium?

thanks in advance

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[Trailer Trash]

I messed up, 10000 tons of lithium will cost roughly seventy million dollars. However, since you need "enriched" lithium with more Li-6 a price north of $100/kg is probably more realistic, which still puts you in the billion-dollar range on how much your lithium blanket is going to cost.

Yeah, and also "1000 cubic meters" is more accurately called "a cubic kilometer". Yeah.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're off a few orders of magnitude in cost and volume...there are a lot of unknowns in future of fusion, but this isn't cosmology. You just kind of lumped a bunch of things together without clearly indicating how some of them were just your guesses (and wrong at that), some are issues that have a list of likely solutions (tritium breeding ratios are well studied, so getting enough neutrons to react to become tritium is not expected to be a problem even if untested on large scales) to the actual serious open ended issues (like structural materials that can handle the neutron flux).

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[tehcyder]

We knew heavier than air flight was possible LONG before the Wright brothers got involved.

There's a big difference between knowing something is possible, and actually doing it.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[Maury Markowitz]

> There are plenty of design studies that vary from all physics to heavy economics

Indeed, and every single one of them that's not written by the fusion research establishment universally states with overwhelming numbers that it will not be competitive.

Go ahead and look up Euratom's numbers. They predict that fusion will be the most expensive form of power even 100 years out, after 50 years of design refinement.

People who actually work in the power industry have been saying this since the 1970s. The fusion community simply circled its wagons and ignored it.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[Maury Markowitz]

Birds did too.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[dlingman]

And we know that fusion is possible too.

Look up. Look way up... See the glowing ball of fire in the sky?

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[ericloewe]

1000m^3 = 10^-6 km^3

You're way off and I recommend you take an hour to learn how to deal with powers of units.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[Zak3056]

Yeah, and also "1000 cubic meters" is more accurately called "a cubic kilometer". Yeah.

Even more accurately, it's 1/1000000th of a cubic kilometer.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[angel'o'sphere]

A nice summary except for the turbine part.
A fusion plant is supposed to generate electricity directly via the magneto hydrodynamic effect.
Considering that the plasma is magnetic confined I wonder how difficult that would be in practice ;D

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[angel'o'sphere]

Yeah, and also "1000 cubic meters" is more accurately called "a cubic kilometer". Yeah.

No it is not. A "cubic kilometer" is 1km * 1km * 1km = 1000 * 1000 * 1000 cubic meters = 1billion cubic meters.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you're almost completely wrong. Every large scale proposed fusion concept generates power using the heat from absorbing neutrons and what spills out from the confinement volume, this is then used to run a turbine. The only people proposing some sort of direct generation are a very small subset of the fusion proposals, an even smaller subset of which are not fringe. As far as tokamaks, stellarators, many other of the MCF designs, ICF designs, etc., are all turbine based in the end.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[edxwelch]

If we could develop a solar cell with 30% efficiency that is cheap to manufacture and better storage technology we would not need fussion power at all. Those research areas seem a whole lot easier to solve than fusion energy. They just lack funds.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[camperdave]

There's a big difference between knowing something is possible, and actually doing it.

In 1848, Sir George Cayley built a glider that carried a child, years before the Wright brothers were even born.

In 1856, Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Bris made the first flight higher than his point of departure, by having his glider "L'Albatros artificiel" pulled by a horse on a beach. He reportedly achieved a height of 100 meters, over a distance of 200 meters.

In 1877, Enrico Forlanini developed an unmanned helicopter powered by a steam engine. It rose to a height of 13 meters, where it remained for some 20 seconds, after a vertical take-off in Milan.

in 1894, Sir Hiram Maxim constructed a large test rig to investigate aerodynamic lift. It's twin propellers were powered by two lightweight compound steam engines and it took three people to operate. It didn't have any flight controls so it ran on rails, with a second set of rails above the wheels to restrain it. On its third run it broke from the rail, became airborne for several hundred feet at two to three feet altitude.

On 14 August 1901, Gustave Whitehead carried out a controlled, powered flight in his Number 21 monoplane at Fairfield, Connecticut.

Wilbur and Orville Wright... Last inventors of the airplane.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying it took about half a century to go from a glider with external power before one could be built that was self-powered, before which examples existed that tested the principles and showed they fundamentally worked? Interesting analogy, considering fusion experiments have existed for a couple decades now that have shown large scale fusion reactions that depend on external power sources, and it is coming down to economy of scale and fine tuning the details so that it can produce enough power itself to run that equipment.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you PLEASE stop making up shit and pulling crap out of your ass ONCE in your life?

ALL proposed non-sci fi, non-Star Trek, practical realistic fusion reactors BOIL WATER TO SPIN A TURBINE.

Put down the FUCKING COMIC BOOKS.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[mikael]

They do, it's called a startup neutron source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The problem is that the startup neutron sources receive the neutron flux themselves, changing their composition as an isotope, thus making them unusable. On the other hand, you get inert elements that become more radioactive as they receive neutron flux. So it's a juggling act to maintain optimum radioactivity.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wilbur and Orville Wright... Last inventors of the airplane.

No, that would be Airbus.

Re:Even if ITER or W7X works, is it economical?

[Trailer Trash]

Looks like we'll need two whooshes today.

Ok great, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does this "save" fusion research? Because we built a machine with 'better prospects' of becoming commercially viable?

What does that mean in terms of fusion itself?
Does it achieve fusion?
Does it output more energy compared to what it takes to run it?

DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[PeterM from Berkeley]

Went and looked for answers to my own question:

This report from DOE
http://web.ornl.gov/~webworks/...

has figures showing that they forecast the cost of fusion power to be between 68 to 80 "mill/kWh", (apparently mills are thousandth's of a 1999 dollar) which is more expensive than any alternative they examined. Wind power they forecast to cost between 20 to 40 "mill/kWh".

If the people at DOE who wrote that report are good forecasters, then fusion is DOA. Alternatives will be less expensive.

Yes, you can make "technology advancement" arguments that the DOE forecasters are wrong, but the cost of wind and solar generators are dropping all the time, too, and storage options might get radically cheaper as well. I think investment in solar + wind + storage actually dwarfs investments in fusion, so the market seems intent on fulfilling DOE's prophesy.

Fusion may really only come into its own when we go live in the asteroid belt or the outer solar system.

--PeterM

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[Opportunist]

Price has never been a good indicator of whether an energy source is viable. Especially not current price. If you suggest things like fracking or even oil sands to someone from the 70s he'd probably look at you like you're suggesting mining iron on the moon. Far too expensive to do, for there are far cheaper sources of oil.

Just because something is cheap today doesn't mean it is going to be cheap tomorrow. Resources like coal, oil and gas are getting more and more expensive as the cheap sources run dry. Nuclear (fission) power may well jump in cost if countries decide that companies running them should be responsible for disasters and waste disposal. And wind and solar power are dependent on there being areas where putting them actually makes sense. Real estate can actually become the issue here in the future.

Whether a power source is economically viable is by no means static.

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[blindseer]

Yes, you can make "technology advancement" arguments that the DOE forecasters are wrong, but the cost of wind and solar generators are dropping all the time, too, and storage options might get radically cheaper as well. I think investment in solar + wind + storage actually dwarfs investments in fusion, so the market seems intent on fulfilling DOE's prophesy.

Wind and solar will never compete with coal and fission. Part of this is because wind and solar require viable (read that as cheap, reliable, etc) storage to provide 24/7 power. Any energy storage system that can make wind and solar reliable will also serve to make coal and fission cheaper.

A big problem with any power plant that works by steam power, which coal and fission do, is that it does not respond well to large daily swings in power demands. To rectify this there are a large number of solutions, the most popular one because it is cheap is natural gas turbines. In this case "cheap" is relative because even though natural gas turbines cost three times that of coal and fission it is still the cheapest solution we have. Right now that is the same for wind and solar, to make wind and solar "work" there must be a ready reserve of natural gas turbines.

If we develop a technology that can store energy cheaper than it takes to produce it by natural gas turbines then all we'd need to do to get cheap and reliable power is to couple that storage with coal and fission. To compete with that wind and solar would have to be a fraction of the cost of operating a coal or fission power plant. Why a fraction of the cost? Because coal and fission can operate with better than 80% up time. Wind and solar can only operate with something like 30% up time. To compete with a one GW fission power plant would require three GW capacity wind and/or solar, along with this as yet undeveloped storage technology that is cheaper than natural gas.

I believe that after all the gains we've made in wind and solar in the last few decades we're seeing diminishing returns. We're getting real close to theoretical maximum efficiencies already, there just isn't much more room for improvement. If wind and solar require some cheap storage system to be viable then they are both fool's errands. While wind, solar, and storage are all noble efforts in solving our future energy needs none of them can compete with fission. Our future is a fission powered one, nothing else we've seen so far can compare, and that includes fusion.

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[blindseer]

Disasters and waste disposal issues for fission are only a concern if we keep doing it like we've done for the last 40 years. We've seen liquid fuel fission that promises to not only be "disaster" proof but can also "eat" the radioactive waste from the reactors we've used for decades.

Liquid fuel fission reactors like liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs) can be made to be walkaway safe, where any damage would be limited to the destruction of the reactor. LFTRs have safety mechanisms that prevent the possibility of "China Syndrome" style meltdowns. This is primarily because the fuel is already melted, loss of containment means removal of the mechanisms that maintain fission. If the reactor runs too hot a normal "scram" operation involves dumping the core fuel into a drain tank that removes the fuel from the core, the tank is designed in such a way that just air cooling prevents further damage. Thermal failure of the core, as in it gets so hot that it melts, mean the fuel spills onto the floor of the reactor building, and then flows into that same drain tank. It is impossible for a LFTR failure to result in a massive release of radiation.

Once the powers that be in the federal government realize the value of LFTR we will see fission not only get cheaper but also prove that fission does not mean we have to pile up radioactive waste. That "waste" we have now exists only because of federal government policies that prevent the reprocessing of spent fuel into new fuel and valuable industrial material. LFTR could prove to be a means for making reprocessing of "spent" fuel that is both economically and politically feasible. Much of what makes up "spent" fuel from current reactors is unburnt uranium, stuff that is no more radioactive than what was dug from the ground. If we can get that uranium out and turn it into something useful then not only have we just solve 90% of the "waste" problem but we've also solved an energy problem.

There's two ways to dispose of radioactive waste. One way is to store it away until it decays, which can take hundreds of years. (Anything that takes longer than hundreds of years to decay is "radioactive" only in the theoretical sense, it's not a hazard to life.) Another way to dispose of radioactive material is in a reactor. If we do it right then that reactor can not only destroy radioactive material but we also get valuable energy from it.

Like you say, if you ask someone from the 1970s about nuclear power they'll tell you about The China Syndrome. The reason we still think of fission power like we do in the 1970s is because not much has changed in fission technology since then. Why haven't we seen anything new in fission technology since the 1970s? Likely because we have the same people in the Department of Energy that we did in 1979. Time will prove that nuclear fission is safe, cheap, reliable, and the only option we have. That time may come, sadly, only because the people that are holding the technology back have died of old age.

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[angel'o'sphere]

Wind and solar will never compete with coal and fission.
But actually they do. In Germany coal planets get decomissioned because they can no longer compete.
Part of this is because wind and solar require viable (read that as cheap, reliable, etc) storage to provide 24/7 power
That is nonsense, as no country is running 24/7 with "full power", power is a curve with a lower bottom at somewhere between 40% and 60% of your peaks during daytime.

A big problem with any power plant that works by steam power, which coal and fission do, is that it does not respond well to large daily swings in power demands. That is wrong. A coal plant adjusts to demand in a few minutes.

the most popular one because it is cheap is natural gas turbines.
That is double wrong. The most popular is pumped storage, because it is cheap and the secondary one is gas turbines because gas turbines are horrible expensive, however nearly as fast in reaction as pumped storage.

fission it is still the cheapest solution we have That is again wrong, in most countries fission power is the most expensive power.

Wind and solar can only operate with something like 30% up time.
That is wrong. Wind plants have a very high uptime, and build at suitable places a very high CF, too. Solar PV plants run with the sun. Solar thermal plants with molten salt storages run around the clock. With their peak around the daily peaks and at roughly 60% at night when demand is low.

Storage is overrated. Storage becomes usefull, when you are far above 50% renewables, approaching lets say 75%. With 50% "baseload", you had 25% surplus at night, which you could store and use at daytime (to have 75% + 25% = 100%) The point where storage becomes interestnig depends on where your baseload line in relation to your peak is. Or what you can distribute in your grid.
And ofc. you would basically only store energy from baseload plants or from renewables. Storing energy from gas turbines makes no sense as a gas turbine gos from zero to 90% load in 30 seconds and is on 100% load in roughly a minute. Storing energy from coal or fission akes no sense either (unless you refill a pumped storage ... because you will need it the other day, but for that you prefer a baseload plant at night)

Instead of sitting in the corner of your room and dreaming up "facts" about energy production,you should read a bit about it.

Basically every claim you made or idea you had in your post: is wrong

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[Anonymous Coward]

I has to compete against coal, oil, and nuclear. Renewables are more intermediate and can buffer the high demand peaks and remote locations. And I say that as someone whose house is powered by solar panels.

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[Maury Markowitz]

> Wind and solar will never compete with coal and fission. Part

Which is funny, when one considers they are being installed faster than fission was at any time in history, and people are turning off their coal plants because they can't compete.

I find it amazing the lengths that people will go to in order to avoid accepting the measurable facts that are staring them right in the face.

> even though natural gas turbines cost three times that of coal and fission

Natural gas turbines cost about 1/2 coal plant, and 1/3rd to 1/5th that of a fission plant. Look on page 11 of this:

https://www.lazard.com/media/1777/levelized_cost_of_energy_-_version_80.pdf

> To compete with a one GW fission power plant would require three GW capacity wind and/or solar

Sure, and as they already cost less than 1/3rd as much, this part is already solved. In fact, to put actual numbers to it, CF adjusted CAPEX for wind is about $4.50 compared to fission at $7.60. It's almost half as expensive even after building three times as much of it. And whereas fission costs keep going up (current average price for all western in-construction reactors is over $9) the price of wind power continues to decline at rates never before seen.

Anyone looking at a chart of LCoE over the last 25 years would be *ape shit crazy* to suggest starting a fission reactor at this point in time. At a minimum you're going to wait to see if the Gen 3+ reactors don't continually overrun their price estimates, which they have.

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[Anonymous Coward]

Wind and solar will never compete with coal and fission.
But actually they do. In Germany coal planets get decomissioned because they can no longer compete.

Germany was found to be giving state aid. Also is it really old inefficient coal plants or more modern ones that can't compete. I think its a good idea to get rid of them for various reasons but the pricing structure in Germany seems atypical at the very least and designed to make some solutions more cost effective than others. This could be argued to be a more accurate reflection of cost to society but that does involve some crystal ball gazing.

Storing energy from coal or fission akes no sense either (unless you refill a pumped storage ... because you will need it the other day, but for that you prefer a baseload plant at night)

Fission is baseload.

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[Zak3056]

Wind and solar will never compete with coal and fission.
But actually they do. In Germany coal planets get decomissioned because they can no longer compete.

The reason that coal is not competitive in Germany is because the playing field is severely tilted in favor of wind (wind power gets a premium price that is, IIRC, funded by fossil, and also has priority in the grid. If there is renewable available, the fossil plans have to spin down). That climate makes it absolutely uneconomical to run a large powerplant that is slow to respond to changes in supply and demand.

Please note that I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing (though some of my German colleagues think the situation is untenable for various reasons), but your argument above is not nearly as simple as you frame it.

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[Anonymous Coward]

Price has never been a good indicator of whether an energy source is viable. Especially not current price.

True, but the GP isn't giving the current price, rather a "forecast" of what fusion generated power *could* cost. Right now, fusion generated power costs something in the ballpark of infinity dollars per kwh. The forecast says there is potential that the price could eventually be about double what wind power costs today.

I'm guessing that forecast price is based on an estimate of the type of infrastructure, operation, and fuel costs they expect a fusion power plant would require, which are pretty easy to estimate (even though the actual technology that will be used isn't fully known or even developed at this point). Unfortunately (except for fuel, I'd guess) the price will likely be similar to power generated from new-construction fission power plants...perhaps much larger, since the mechanics of a BWR are much simpler than anything fusion researchers are trying these days.

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[CaptainLard]

Whether a power source is economically viable is by no means static.

Can't argue that but this brings up an interesting question (for me anyway). What could make wind and solar more expensive in the future? The raw material costs are basically nothing compared to fossil fuels (where they are essentially basically 100%). There is plenty of silicon just lying around on the surface. Some of it may be easier to process but I think that problem is largely solved.

I don't know what the global lithium supply looks like but I do know LiIon batteries can be recycled. The reason China has all the rare earth mines is because their government subsidized them to corner the market in the short term. Rare earths aren't really that rare.

For wind you need resins and what not but again, the material input is minuscule compared to the lifetime energy output. You mentioned real estate and places that make sense....but there are a LOT of those places where it does make sense. Often the real estate is pretty cheap (deserts, etc) and hey, the solar panels covering just a little over 1/3 of my roof provide 110% of my yearly electricity use! (yeah storage...that's being resolved faster than even I thought it would)

Given all that I know about wind and solar it seems that if anything, prices will only get cheaper.

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[Anonymous Coward]

Time will prove that nuclear fission is safe, cheap, reliable, and the only option we have. That time may come, sadly, only because the people that are holding the technology back have died of old age.

Time has already proven that. Nuclear fission is as safe as any other form of power generation including Solar, Wind and Hydro.

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[fyngyrz]

Nuclear fission is as safe as any other form of power generation including Solar, Wind and Hydro.

I can't hear you through the hysteria and panic.

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[Opportunist]

Change comes from stress. Only under duress change will occur. As long as we let the owners of nuclear plants get away with dumping their waste (figuratively, c'mon...) on the public the things you describe will not happen.

Make them liable for the cleanup and we'll get clean fission power in 5 years. Tops.

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[Khashishi]

Storage is not an insurmountable problem. We already have ways of storing energy, and we can improve them.

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[Anonymous Coward]

Fission faces irrational fears, government bans, and continual harassment and sabotage. Of the billions of dollars it takes to make a nuclear powerplant, only a fraction goes into actual material and fuel costs. The rest is insurance, and security, and environmental impact studies, and secondary fallout studies, and what if scenario studies, and but what about studies, and so on and so forth.

The lawfare waged by the anti-science environmentalist against nuclear power has been a thing of beauty - So much damage accomplished for so little effort. Osama bin laden would be proud, if he'd thought of it.

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[Anonymous Coward]

the real breakthrough we need is a solid state generator that doesn't rely on spinning magnets to produce electricity.

i guess solar panels are part of the way there.

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[Opportunist]

Why do you think pretty much any country with some sense invests heavily in wind&solar? The cost for the power "source" is zero. What's left in running costs is cost for upkeep.

That is admittedly currently insane. Along with rather high initial cost this makes wind&solar power more expensive currently. With improvement in technology and increasing cost for fossil fuels (and those costs will only go up, not down, since production will get more expensive as less accessible sources have to be exploited), power from wind&solar will become far more interesting in the future. And then, countries that have an edge in the relevant know how will be where you order those power plants.

Don't rejoice, though. This means that power will become more expensive in the future. It's likely that wind&solar don't drop too dramatically in price, but fossil fuels will have to hike up prices.

What could increase cost for wind&solar? Well, real estate prices. Don't laugh. Wind and solar power are highly dependent on location. A solar power plant only makes sense if the place receives ample sunshine, and placing wind turbines in sheltered valleys isn't going to produce a lot of energy. Once the "good" spots are taken, it might get a bit more costly to put up new plants. But I'd expect this to be rather insignificant.

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[Anonymous Coward]

LFTRs will never work.

Stop perpetuating this geek cargo cult wank.

Fule reprocessing is neither cheap nor trivial nor clean and cannot be hand waved.

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[Anonymous Coward]

Gas and renewables are the future. Coal is dying. There have been a rash of nuclear plants that are asking for bailouts or shutting down.

On the battery front there is very good news as well:

The Southwest commercial story is particularly interesting: Our original analysis did not indicate that solar-plus-battery systems would be cost effective in the Southwest for several decades. However, as illustrated above, the Tesla announcement enables cost-effective deployment of systems for commercial customers throughout the Southwest in the near term.

Bottom line: Thanks to Tesla’s announcement, in the Northeast and Southwest, an additional 60 million annual customer megawatt-hours cost-effectively can defect from the grid to solar-plus-battery systems more or less immediately, resulting in an additional $12.5 billion in annual utility revenue erosion.

Another factor to consider, which was not included in this comparison, is what might happen should solar prices drop faster than expected. Current prices and updated forecasts are coming in lower than what we modeled as well, meaning the economics could further accelerate.

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[blindseer]

That is nonsense, as no country is running 24/7 with "full power", power is a curve with a lower bottom at somewhere between 40% and 60% of your peaks during daytime.

I did not claim that a national grid requires "full power" 24/7, only that power is consumed 24/7. Solar PV peaks at noon while demand peaks at sunset. Wind is unpredictable, weather forecasts only go out for a week or so and then can only give generalities, not hour by hour wind speed. To make wind and solar work would require storage, which is right now too expensive to be worthwhile outside of a few localities. Some estimates by people that study this sort of thing have stated that wind and solar can provide no more than 30% of grid power before very "interesting" things start to happen. The last thing a utility wants is an "interesting" day.

That is double wrong. The most popular is pumped storage, because it is cheap and the secondary one is gas turbines because gas turbines are horrible expensive, however nearly as fast in reaction as pumped storage.

Pumped storage requires specific and rare geological features, natural gas can be put nearly anywhere. Pumped storage is also unpopular because of the environmental impact. So, outside of a handful of locations where the geology and environmental impact are favorable the only remaining option is natural gas.

That is again wrong, in most countries fission power is the most expensive power.

Fission is only expensive because of the popular opinion created from black swan events like Chernobyl. It's a political problem creating the cost, not a technological one. Even with all the political induced cost nuclear is cheaper that solar. The price difference between fission, coal, gas combined cycle, and some wind is so small that it can be for the most part ignored as noise. Coal and gas is only going to get harder to find and therefore become more expensive. Fission fuels are such a small portion of the operating cost that it can be ignored as noise. Fission may be the most expensive power but that only means perhaps double the price, not tenfold, give it a decade and we shall see what happens to coal prices.

That is wrong. Wind plants have a very high uptime, and build at suitable places a very high CF, too.

Assuming you are correct, that wind farms have a high up time, this up time is largely irrelevant so long as utilities cannot rely on the wind to blow in sync with demand. We'd have to have enough wind farms to produce the maximum required output in the calmest of weather, that costs money. Adding in solar doesn't help much since that also peaks at the wrong time, power consumption tends to peak near sunset. Again, people that study this have found that wind and solar above 30% of grid power will make things interesting for the grid. This is not only because of the unpredictable nature of wind and solar but also because the spinning rotors on windmills introduce harmonics on the grid that are difficult to manage. This spinning rotor problem has been studied for a very long time and with every spinning rotor added the computations required to manage the harmonics become more difficult. With a large and controlled rotor on a fission or coal plant the harmonics can be controlled, in part, by throttling the power plant. There is no throttle control on the wind.

Solar PV plants run with the sun. Solar thermal plants with molten salt storages run around the clock. With their peak around the daily peaks and at roughly 60% at night when demand is low.

Solar thermal plants are largely theoretical and reliant on a favorable climate. A solar thermal plant is useless in Alaska. Fission and coal don't care about the weather. High temperature fission is also freed from the need for large amounts of fresh water, air cooling even in the Arizona summer is sufficient.

Basically eve

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[blindseer]

Natural gas turbines cost about 1/2 coal plant, and 1/3rd to 1/5th that of a fission plant. Look on page 11 of this:

I was speaking of the cost of the power produced, not the capital expenses. Right now natural gas turbines are popping up everywhere because natural gas is cheap and because it isn't coal. Coal has it's own political problems preventing growth.

I realize that wind is being built up very quickly right now, I see the windmill parts going down the interstate every day. That can only go on for so long, at some point it will reach a peak where wind capacity overcomes the grid capability to compensate for the unreliable nature of the wind. Combining gas peaking power with wind and you get a price on par with that of fission, and you can only do that until the wind provides 30% of the grid power. We've squeezed about all we can out of wind power, we can't make big gains on efficiency like we used to any more.

Wind power will always rely on storage or peaking power. We don't have cheap storage outside of the few locations fortunate enough to have geologic features favorable for pumped water storage. If natural gas gets cheaper then we'll forget building the windmills and build more natural gas. Fission can only get cheaper by comparison either through changes in law, improvements in technology, or the rising cost of fossil fuels.

Experts on power grids have done studies and just about all agree that wind and solar can only provide 30% of grid power before bad things start to happen. Even a best case scenario doesn't allow for more than 50% or so. Where is the rest of the power going to come from? Fission. Fission is proven, it exists, and does not rely on unobtanium or favorable locations like access to favorable climate, gobs of flowing water, or geologic features. High temperature fission just needs a patch of terra firma and air, both of which are abundant.

What high temperature fission has is the capability to provide grid power on its own, it does not need peaking power plants and can be put anywhere.

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[angel'o'sphere]

Solar PV peaks at noon while demand peaks at sunset.
And the difference between those peaks is? 5%? 7%?

And no: as I said before. Everything you believe to know is wrong. The peak is not at "sunset". The peak is in the morning, and sunset is a bit lower and between those is a plateau of more or less constant consumption (not talking about typical fluctuations) very close to the peaks. Hence solar PV fits in nicely.

The rest of your post makes even less sense then your other posts.

A solar thermal plant is useless in Alaska.
Very smart, indeed.

High temperature fission is also freed from the need for large amounts of fresh water, air cooling even in the Arizona summer is sufficient.
You mix something up here ...

In the rest of the world we have droughts, calm winds, and clouds once in a while.
No you have not. You have a small area with low wind, a small area with a drought and a small area with clouds.

Even Germany is already to big to be plagued by one of them over the whole area, except for clouds perhaps. Not even thinking about several of those conditions combined, last time I was in school clouds implied rain, the antagonist of droughts.

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[angel'o'sphere]

You are mixing up a few things ;D

Grid feed in fees: yes, renewables have priority (make sense as that stops coal from being burned), and the grid operators have to pay a relatively high price for that power (16 cents IIRC per kWh).

However, even with those high prices coal plants often can not compete, as they have to compete amoung each others as well.

run a large powerplant that is slow to respond to changes in supply and demand
That is a misconception. First of all coal plants react quite fast, secondly they are reacting on the "big picture", like we have 6:00 in the morning and know the country wide power increase from 6:00 till 9:00 and adapt to that, thirdly, all other fluctuations are not covered by "load following plants" but by peak plants, pumped storage and gas turbines.

but your argument above is not nearly as simple as you frame it.
It is that simple. If you have questions, ask, and I explain ;D

Re:DOE report says fusion is likely uneconomical

[Agripa]

What could make wind and solar more expensive in the future?

The cost of the source and load balancing which is currently "free" in the sense that solar and wind and lowering the capacitor factor of base-load and peaking power plants.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

How was this word salad modded up?

Re:What's the big deal?

[backslashdot]

They havent been given the budget needed to build a breakeven facility -- basically people like you set them up to fail and then say look it failed!

the focus fusion project in California

[Anonymous Coward]

seems to have the best prospects of achieving net positive fusion far sooner and at a *fraction* of these giant static-type reactor projects (only costing millions, not billions).

Human priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

Always remember: this thing costs a billion and slugs around for years and years.

In afghanistan the cost of letting climate control running cost a billion dollar. Per month.

"Built it" my ass!

[arglebargle_xiv]

As any student of history knows, Greifswald was the location of assorted secret Nazi research projects during WWII. This thing wasn't built recently, they dug it up from the mine where it was buried in 1945 to hide it from the advancing Russians. Look at the photo of the cryostat, that's classic 1940s engineering design. The reason for the "schedule slips" mentioned in the article is because they've had problems disarming all the booby traps left to kill Russian investigators. Next thing you know a previously unknown German research institute in the Owl Mountains will invent an antigravity device, and another heretofore-unknown research group at Hillersleben will announce the creation of a death ray.

Remember, you read it first on Slashspot.

Re:"Built it" my ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, you read it first on Schlitzpunkt.

FTFY. (I think strich is more correct that schlitz, but schlitz sounds better because of the z.)

Re:"Built it" my ass!

[Zak3056]

FTFY. (I think strich is more correct that schlitz, but schlitz sounds better because of the z.)

The down side is that no self-respecting German would ever drink Schlitz.

Re:"Built it" my ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

No self-respecting mammal would drink schlitz.

Re:"Built it" my ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

German here, wtf is Schlitz, drink-wise?

Re:"Built it" my ass!

[kwbauer]

An american beer brand, the company started back in the mid-1800s in Milwaukee, WI and somehow managed not to get bought up by Miller.

Re:"Built it" my ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

American beer so bad even American's won't drink it.

Re:"Built it" my ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

German here, wtf is Schlitz, drink-wise?

Schlitz is an American adjunct lager. Once the best-selling brand in the US, it made ill-advised changes to its formula in the 1970s which relegated it to obscurity. Schlitz was acquired by Stroh circa 1981, Stroh was acquired by Pabst in 1999. Pabst recreated the classic Schlitz formula in 2008.

It's decent for a mass-produced beer.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't give them a blank check neither, so any experts know what an appropriate budget would be ?

Weird description

[91degrees]

looks a bit like Han Solo's Millennium Falcon, towed in for repairs after a run-in with the Imperial fleet.

So, it's round.

A lot of words to use to say that.

Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

while relatively small, this complex construction is only matched by the Large Hadron Collider - also built by Europeans. Europe, and of course Asia, have shown in the last decades that they are the ones driving research and development in all important scientific areas. Nothing like this has ever been built, and the scientific results from these upcoming experiments can just not be valued high enough.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing like this has ever been built, and the scientific results from these upcoming experiments can just not be valued high enough.

Japan, the US, and Europe have all had large scale stellarator programs going back decades, and W7-X is one of several current on going large scale experiments, including China moving into more varied MCF projects.

Re:What's the big deal?

[TheRaven64]

Did you use Markov chains to generate that post?

Re:What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

€1-billion isn't enough of a budget?

That's insane looking

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like an organic entity. It's so weird it's uncomfortable to behold, but very beautiful.

No need for storage

[burbilog]

Wind and solar will never compete with coal and fission. Part of this is because wind and solar require viable (read that as cheap, reliable, etc) storage to provide 24/7 power. Any energy storage system that can make wind and solar reliable will also serve to make coal and fission cheaper.

No. Actually you don't need any viable storage, only viable power distribution network across the continent. Wind cannot stop blowing everywhere on the continent, no matter what. That's how Europe managed to get 10% of its electricity out of windmills in 2014.

Re:No need for storage

[blindseer]

Getting 10% of your electricity from wind is trivial. Daily demand varies more that 10% so all you have to do is what you've been doing for the current mix of coal, gas, nuclear, and hydro. People smarter than the both of us have spent a long time looking at this and have convinced me that having more than 30% of power from wind and strange things start to happen with the grid.

We can make wind power work but it would involve massive changes to how the national power grid works, which would be very expensive. Not only would it be expensive, because putting large power cables over or under the Mississippi river is not easy, but it would create a vary fragile network. If there was a catastrophic loss of connection on one of those Mississippi crossings we'd see blackouts and brownouts nationwide.

Even if we could power the world with wind we would not want to. Making wind power work means relying on wind in California to power a Florida with calm winds. There's a lot of ways that could fail, badly.

Wind power, right now, costs three times what nuclear power costs, right now. Even a quantum leap in wind technology cannot make it cheaper than what nuclear fission could cost if only the Department of Energy would allow the building of a modern liquid fuel fission reactor. The Department of Energy has been subsidizing wind power for decades and it still cannot compete with fission power from the 1970s. I don't see a great future for wind power. Wind power will never go away, it's just too easy to get in many places, but it cannot power a first world economy.

Re:No need for storage

[burbilog]

We can make wind power work but it would involve massive changes to how the national power grid works, which would be very expensive.

Upgrading power network is waaay cheaper than building huge amount of dams (while destroying huge amount of land). Or any flywheel or other SciFi madness. Recent surge in wind capacity factor (from 32% to 37% during this year alone) happened because of power network upgrade -- the better power network, the more electricity is shared across the country as needed.

Wind power, right now, costs three times what nuclear power costs, right now.

No. Recent BNEF report shows that wind electircity became cheapest power source in England and Germany without subsidies.

Even if we could power the world with wind we would not want to. Making wind power work means relying on wind in California to power a Florida with calm winds. There's a lot of ways that could fail, badly.

Wind can't fail everywhere. It just does not happen. And distributed generation is as robust as distributed networking: more distributed power plants means more plants can fail without serious damage to the network.

The Department of Energy has been subsidizing wind power for decades and it still cannot compete with fission power from the 1970s. I don't see a great future for wind power. Wind power will never go away, it's just too easy to get in many places, but it cannot power a first world economy.

How can you be THAT sure that nobody will ever let another Chernobyl happened? I remember that time we waited for the fallout in Moscow and could not do ANYTHING because some fucking stupid people did something wrong. How can you be sure that nobody will appoint beancounters to run a nuke plant near your house? Shit happens, but if shit happens with a windmill it just falls and that's it. And if shit happens with nuke plant then whole area dies and you have to move out. My relatives had to run from Ukraine and we had to house them at that time. One fucking screwup is more than enough to stop fooling around this kind of things.

Re:No need for storage

[Maury Markowitz]

> Wind power, right now, costs three times what nuclear power costs, right now

*sigh*

Every reference from the last couple of years says the exact opposite. EVERY one.

How can you possibly believe this? What sources are you reading that say this?

Re:No need for storage

[angel'o'sphere]

People smarter than the both of us have spent a long time looking at this and have convinced me that having more than 30% of power from wind and strange things start to happen with the grid.
Unfortunately those guys are either not smart or lying. because they are wrong ;D

The grid does not care where the powr comes from.

If you stard adding renewables you obviously have to take care for their variability.

Not only would it be expensive, because putting large power cables over or under the Mississippi river is not easy, but it would create a vary fragile network.
As other nations or mulit national organizations, e.g. the EU Show: there are no real Problems with such grids. Perhaps you want to google for "largest synchronized power grid"?
Even a quantum leap ...
You do know that a "quantum leap" is the smallest thinkable leap?`It describes when one electron goes either up one energy level or down.

As mentioned in my other answer to you: you should read a bit about the topic, so you stop falling for the wiered ideas of your "smart friends".

Re:No need for storage

[khallow]

Wind cannot stop blowing everywhere on the continent, no matter what.

Except when it does. Sure, it'll be less common than for smaller regions, but there's evidence from Europe's experience that you can see significant becalming over a whole continent. Also, the local surpluses and deficits mean you either have to overbuild your grid in addition or put in enough local storage or variable generation/consumption to smooth out wind power variation.

Re:No need for storage

[Pinky's Brain]

Wind is getting close to being cheap enough simply to safe on fuel for coal plants.

Re:No need for storage

[fyngyrz]

The Chernobyl installation used a flawed reactor design and was operated with inadequately trained personnel.

That is not the face of nuclear power. No one sane is suggesting building another reactor like Chernobyl.

Also, if someone wanted to use my back yard for a fission reactor using current designs, I'd be the happiest guy in town. Guaranteed.

Re:No need for storage

[mikael]

With Chernobyl, the operational staff deliberately disabled the safety systems to see if they could manually shutdown a reactor in time before it went supernova.

Re:No need for storage

[blindseer]

How can you be THAT sure that nobody will ever let another Chernobyl happened?

Because Chernobyl happened. No one is going to ever repeat those mistakes again so long as people study their history.

Chernobyl was based on a design stolen from the USA which had known problems with runaway fission. The US engineers fixed the, then theoretical, problems before it was used in the USA but the Soviets didn't care. During construction money was running low so the concrete poured was routinely mixed down with sand with no quality checks that it still met specifications. Then the reactor was tested with safeties purposefully disabled. The people at the controls at the time were inexperienced. After all of that stacked on top of each other the damage was not near what people feared. Yes, sadly, a lot of people died. Many of the deaths were also the result of poor procedures, improper or nonexistent testing, and so forth that plagued its construction.

Not only have we learned from those mistakes we've learned more about how fission works. We will not build a reactor like that again also because we have found cheaper and safer ways to do it.

To those that claim only government regulation can prevent another Chernobyl I will say that Chernobyl was a government project from top to bottom. That's the case in a communist society like the USSR, everything wrong is the fault of the government because the government runs everything.

Look up a few things about molten salt reactors and you can see for yourself how safe fission power can be and has proven to be. A few acronyms you can look up: LFTR, WAMSR, IMSR, DMSR, ARE, MSRE, TEI, VHTR/LS-VHTR, MSW, MSFR, FLIBE, MSCR, EVOL.

Re:No need for storage

[Anonymous Coward]

Germany is roughly the size of Texas. You're talking about scaling that up to supply the whole continent, it won't work that way. Texas can supply Texas with supplemental wind energy if there is a suitable baseload supply, it cannot supply Washington state or Maine.

Re:No need for storage

[jcupitt65]

Wind power, right now, costs three times what nuclear power costs, right now.

New capacity offshore wind and nuclear cost about the same, in the UK at least. Wikipedia says:

On 27 February 2015 Vattenfall Vindkraft AS agreed to build the Horns Rev 3 offshore wind farm at a price of 10.31 Eurocent per kWh. This has been quoted as below 100 UK pounds per MWh.

In 2013 in the United Kingdom for a new-to-build nuclear power plant (Hinkley Point C: completion 2023), a feed-in tariff of 92.50 pounds/MWh (around 142 USD/MWh) plus compensation for inflation with a running time of 35 years was agreed.[41][42]

On-shore wind is 30 - 50% cheaper than offshore, of course, so that would seem to beat nuclear by quite a good margin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#United_Kingdom

Ugg, more science by press release

[Maury Markowitz]

It makes no difference if this device "works" or not, no one will use it commercially.

That's because the cost of the equipment needed to extract the energy from the system costs only a little less then an entire wind farm producing the same amount of energy. This problem effects any heat engine type source, including coal and fission, which is why no one is building these any more. Natural gas turbines, hydro, wind and PV do not have this portion of the system. These sources have always been, or recently scaled down to, prices points below the older sources.

There's really not a lot of math involved, and people have been running the numbers since the 1970s. In spite of repeated statements from the power industry that they're not interested, the fusion field keeps sending out press reports like this one about how they're going to save the world. Meanwhile wind and PV are the two fastest growing power sources in history, and by the time any of these devices work the grid will have already completed its switch.

A small number of know-nothings will now protest something about direct conversion in aneutronic systems, ignoring the fact that not one such device has come within multiple orders of magnitude of working, and we have very good reason to believe they never will.

Others will protest that wind can't do X and Y, and in this case they're absolutely right. But unfortunately they don't pay for the construction. The banks actually pay for the construction, and they're giving all the money to the wind farms regardless of X and Y.

If you want to run the numbers yourself, I wrote down some of them a couple of years ago: https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/

Re:Ugg, more science by press release

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because the cost of the equipment needed to extract the energy from the system costs only a little less then an entire wind farm producing the same amount of energy. This problem effects any heat engine type source, including coal and fission, which is why no one is building these any more.

Which is why dozens are under construction in places like China, Japan and South Africa? The only places they are not expanding coal power is where this is political pressure/costs to prevent it. It has nothing to do with wind power being cheaper than the turbines in a large coal plant.

Re:Ugg, more science by press release

[Baron_Yam]

Wind and PV are intermittent, controlled fusion (should it ever reach financially viable over-unity energy production) is on demand.

Still, I think at this point I'd rather see work go into a space-based PV system beaming power down to rectenna farms.

Re:Ugg, more science by press release

[Anonymous Coward]

These "it's worthless because of cost" arguments are ridiculous. Costs change.
In 30 years, we may be able to 3D print our superconductors and Stellerators our of some material we've never heard of. The input supply of lithium might be reduced by 3 orders of magnitude as better ways to convert it to tritium. These are all separate issues to fusion power.

So, let's say that in 50 years, someone invents being able to print superconductors and cheap tritium is available. Then without this RESEARCH, we still can't build a Stellerator, no one built a working prototype now to prove the damn thing works and ironed out the kinks. Sure, the research can be started only after the starting conditions are met (in 2075), but it took Stellarator/Tokamak researchers some 75 years to get to this point. So the question will be, when do you want almost unlimited clean power that does not really on rare radioactive materials you can make bombs from? 2075 (allowing 10 years for integration and testing)? Or 2140 (2065+75)?

Academic research is not supposed to be oriented towards the immediate bottom line. You have industry research for that.

Fisted the do nothing nobody gets smoked

[Anonymous Coward]

http://it.slashdot.org/comment...

Re:Fisted the do nothing nobody gets smoked

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be really mad, APK. Maybe go out for a walk?

Re:Fisted the do nothing nobody gets smoked

[Anonymous Coward]

Fisted's reply by ac shows his embarassment at being smoked by apk his superior on all fronts which the link proves and all fisted could do was try to forums slide bury it there. You failed then Fisted and now too. Keep giving yourself those +5 self-administered upmods thru your many alterate sockpuppet slashdot accounts. Those updmods serve to make everyone see your fail here http://it.slashdot.org/comment...

Re:Fisted the do nothing nobody gets smoked

[Coren22]

APK, you couldn't smoke a cigarette without directions, go play somewhere else.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Applehu Akbar]

I suspect Google Translate.

Save Fusion Research?

[LWATCDR]

Frankly it looks like the golden age of Fusion Research.
Lockheed's High Beta Fusion reactor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The Polywell Fusion reactor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
ITER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Seem to me that there is a lot of research in this area. If any of them work then things get really interesting.

This is Germany we're talking about

[Applehu Akbar]

If they do get this thing working, the flat-earth lobby will still find a way to stop it.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Teun]

Are you both illiterates that you need assistance in comprehending such writings?

Clickbait

[jonathan.e.bell]

Really, ./? Now our titles are clickbait instead of informative?

What could possibly go wrong?

[DarthVain]

It does seem to bare a striking resemblance to this:
http://images.static-bluray.co...
and this:
http://sayforward.com/sites/de...
and eventually this:
https://cinema1544.files.wordp...
leading to this:
https://unshavedmouse.files.wo...

Hope it works out well! :)

Solar cells on every roof

[Anonymous Coward]

The economics of fusion power get weaker every year and the fusion researchers get more and more desperate for funds...

Greebles!

[coldsalmon]

You know you're in the future when you see greebles.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Penguinisto]

How was this word salad modded up?

Because Agile

( /me ducks and runs like hell )

Re:What's the big deal?

[Penguinisto]

Okay, on a more serious (and charitable) note, maybe the guy doesn't speak/write English natively, and took a run through Google Translate? The word structure and cadence is suspiciously German in nature.

If this is indeed the case, I wish the dude would've included his original native-language text as well... some of us are actually literate in German (well, the Schweizerdeutsch dialect in my case, but standard and most other German dialects are easy enough to gut through and get the gist out of.)

Coren22 "security guru" wannabe fails security

[Anonymous Coward]

YOU say "hosts=bad" (but they add security, speed, & reliability) & bitch on admin privelege to UPDATE vs. threats:

"So, have you figured out why privilege escalation is a bad thing yet?" - by Coren22 on Tuesday September 22, 2015 @05:15PM (#50577809)

Hypocrite - You use admin priv admitting it

&

How else can I programmatically update hosts minus it in Windows?

---

"Of course it requires elevation to write to the hosts file" - by Coren22 (1625475) on Wednesday September 23, 2015 @05:35PM (#50585879)

You FINALLY later admit there's no other way!

FACT:

Even MalwareBytes AntiMalware (best one) DEMANDS you use admin privelege (you saying it's "bad" too?) it can't do its job fully otherwise, like many security tools do!

---

Aryeh Goretsky NOD32/ESET says hosts = good security-> http://it.slashdot.org/comment...

Oliver Day (Symantec) does-> http://www.securityfocus.com/c...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts hosts & recommends my APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit-> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...

---

* HOW MANY SECURITY PROS DO I NEED TO KNOCK THE CHOCOLATE OUTTA YOU?

---

Those security pros INCLUDE me: I work w/ guys from malwarebytes' hpHosts on a regular basis!

I've professionally worked for decades as a combined domain-wide network admin & software engineer since 1994 (Even showing you HOW to migrate a hosts across an enterprise-> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... )

I've also been securing computers + WRITING GUIDES using CIS Tool (who took fixes from me http://slashdot.org/comments.p... - bonus) http://www.bing.com/search?q=%...

You told me you learn from guides?

I write good ones that MILLIONS USE & was PAID FOR IT http://pcpitstop.com/news/winn...

+ WARES TO PROTECT USERS that are endorsed & hosted by security pros -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...

You did all that? No!

(& that's ONLY a SMALL part of what I could put out)

APK

P.S.=> You're all TALK -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... & a "ne'er-do-well" as far as security...apk

Re:Coren22 "security guru" wannabe fails security

[Anonymous Coward]

Coren22's embarrassed trying to hide his huge fails against apk with sockpuppet administered downmods hahahahahaha!

How can solar/wind costs escalate?

[fyngyrz]

What could make wind and solar more expensive in the future?

Taxes as arbitrary support for deeply emplaced power sources such as coal and oil are one possibility. Contractor limitations and rules are another. Grid-tie requirements are another. Materials disposal is another. Licensing is another. Zoning is another. Etc.

There is no technology that government cannot make more expensive, inconvenient, and less efficient than it needs to be.

Only MTF can possibly work

[StevenMaurer]

Magnetized Target Fusion, such as is being developed by the Canadian company General Fusion, solves all these problems.You surround a microscopic amount of tritium and deuterium in a sphere, filled with a molten bath of metal, and hit the outsides of it with computer-controlled hammers. Properly calibrated, the shockwaves concentrate in the center to briefly allow fusion conditions to occur. All the neutron energy is absorbed by the molten metal, causing absolutely no damage to the machine. So it can actually operate indefinitely.

While hundreds of billions of Euros are wasted on approaches that cannot possibly work, this little private company is plugging along, starting to scale up their first practical demonstration system.

Re:Only MTF can possibly work

[Anonymous Coward]

Total spending on fusion research to date is less than $50 billion USD, and is not even close to hundreds of billions of Euros. This includes multiple MTF government project, including predecessors to General Fusion's work (their ideas didn't come from a vacuum, but from previous projects like Linus, and numerous spheromak projects). Even then, the predictions of private research like General Fusion and Tri Alpha is that a full size plant would cost 100s of millions if not billions of dollars still (as would just about any large scale power plant). They may very well have a much more economical approach, but it is not some night and day difference that is obvious at this point, and most government research is exploring numerous different approaches at the same time.

Re:Coren22 "security guru" wannabe fails security

[Coren22]

So, I found information about an old petition when searching for more information about your hosts file engine (copyright infringement?)

We hereby petition the government of the United States of America to review our proposal for putting Alexander Peter Kowalski (i.e. APK) to death by any means available. This individual is a menace to society and has proven himself to be a drain on the productivity for the millions of IT workers worldwide that spend so much time uncontrollably laughing at APK and his antics. We estimate that this phenomena is costing businesses in the US at least 100 million dollars on an annual basis. Given that APK only has APKTools to justify existence we have no problem recommending him for immediate execution. If at all possible, we would like the execution to be slow and painful.

LOL, when you annoy people so much that they create a petition for your death, you know the trolling has succeeded. Oh and BTW, my corporate firewall has marked your tools as "Potentially Unwanted Software", isn't that great to be blocked from viewing it because it is so unwanted.

Looks fun!

[wardrich86]

That thing looks like a playground for adults.... I could see me and my friends hanging out in and around a dummy replica of one of those things.

LMAO - Jay Little of Arstechnica... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not about hosts files liar. It's when I crushed him + all arstechnica on how Exchange Servers get unfrozen by memory optimization technology (using MS' own documentation to do it PUBLICLY over @ Windows IT Pro magazine) & that's where HE LITERALLY SAID "I am an expert on Exchange" that had to RUN vs. the above, lol... & then he stalked me across several sites (to lose badly on ramdrives) & was banned THEN email harassed me (he was put on a tracking ticket by his ISP) + HAD HIS SITE @ CrystalTech REMOVED too, lmao...

APK

P.S.=> Coren22 KNOWS he lost badly here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... hence his lies + b.s. here I put away easily with truth... apk

/. users disagree outnumbering you... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject & the FACT others here on /. disagree with you & outnumber you (despite your lies I disproved easily http://slashdot.org/comments.p... ):

" Oh and BTW, my corporate firewall has marked your tools as "Potentially Unwanted Software", isn't that great to be blocked from viewing it because it is so unwanted" - by Coren22 (1625475) on Friday October 23, 2015 @12:07PM (#50788125)

See subject & these quotes:

"his hosts program is actually pretty good" - by xenotransplant (4179011) on Monday August 10, 2015 @03:34PM (#50287195)

"I like your host file system." - by Karmashock (2415832) on Wednesday September 09, 2015 @03:57PM (#50489401)

"APK is kinda right... I've given up on JS based adblocking and gone to blackholing in /etc/hosts, just like it was back in the 90s. The computational load has gotten intolerable for any ad-blocking using JS. I've tried his hosts file generating software. It works." - by bmo (77928) on Thursday October 15, 2015 @11:30AM (#50736071)

"Actually, APK is totally right on this count. Adblock Plus on Firefox mobile is a dog on older, or lower end, phones. A hostfile based adblocker makes for a much better experience in this context. Of course, your phone has to be rooted, which isn't the case with Firefox + adblock." - by chihowa (366380) on Saturday May 16, 2015 @11:40AM (#49705641)

"his hosts tool is actually useful for those cases in which one does indeed want to locally block stuff outright while consuming minimum system resources" by alexgieg (948359) on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:57AM (#50596461)

"APK isn't wrong" - by cfalcon (779563) on Sunday October 04, 2015 @05:11PM (#50657891)

---

LMAO - your "corporate firewall"? Don't you mean your single machine @ home BOY??

APK

P.S.=> Now, what's that I have you QUOTED saying about, Mr. WANNABE 'security guru' FAILURE vs. myself here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... ? ... apk

Re:What's the big deal?

[kwbauer]

At least 15% more. The necessary budget to achieve success is always at least 15% more than what has been allotted. Always. Every single budget cycle.

Watch out for NOx emissions!

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what the Nazis used for the gas chambers ? VW 2.0 TDI diesel engines.

Re:What's the big deal?

[AHuxley]

The flow of Overrated, Interesting, Flamebait was interesting to see. Very positive support was early on was removed by a flow of -1's much later.
Quoting the advanced German skill sets, Germany keeping a science project well funded and getting support for the project did not seem to of much interest to some people with mod points :)
The reminder over "stop/start political funding in other nations." part could have been an issue for some readers.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way to "give the budget needed to build a breakeven facility" in fusion is to have an unlimited budget for an unknown number of years. That's why your post is wrong. Fusion is in a long-term R&D phase and any suggestion otherwise is just fusion fanboyism.

Lots of people here on /. want fusion to be the answer to all problems energy-related, and they want that answer now. That's not where fusion research is. There's a long, long list of ambitious and very expensive fusion projects to demonstrate that.

But do carry on. I like to watch the lunatics ranting on the street corners. And it's possible to be crazy and right at the same time (though the craziness usually negates the rightness on any given issue).

Re:Coren22 "security guru" wannabe fails security

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy is clearly disturbed, best just leave him be, don't push him further. It's sad really.