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UK's Newest Tokamak Fusion Reactor Has Created Its First Plasma (futurism.com)
After being switched on for the first time last Friday, the UK's newest fusion reactor has successfully generated a molten mass of electrically-charged gas, or plasma, inside its core. Futurism reports: Called the ST40, the reactor was constructed by Tokamak Energy, one of the leading private fusion energy companies in the world. The company was founded in 2009 with the express purpose of designing and developing small fusion reactors to introduce fusion power into the grid by 2030. Now that the ST40 is running, the company will commission and install the complete set of magnetic coils needed to reach fusion temperatures. The ST40 should be creating a plasma temperature as hot as the center of the Sun -- 15 million degrees Celsius (27 million degrees Fahrenheit) -- by Autumn 2017. By 2018, the ST40 will produce plasma temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit), another record-breaker for a privately owned and funded fusion reactor. That temperature threshold is important, as it is the minimum temperature for inducing the controlled fusion reaction. Assuming the ST40 succeeds, it will prove that its novel design can produce commercially viable fusion power.
100 million degrees celsius? I hope the containment system will hold... I know the dangers of extreme heat: I burned my tongue on a microwaved chocolate milk once.
FWIW they don't plan on breaking net zero energy with this model. Their current plam is their *next* model to break even energy by 2020...
Still waiting for solar to pass its commercial viability test and I suspect wind power is a similar story. So far it only succeeds here in the UK because of government subsidies. If I pay for and install my own 5kWh solar system the returns over 20 years don't cover the cost of the initial installation, let alone a replacement inverter after 10 years or any other maintenance.
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Both already have a ROI in less than a decade and are profitable almost immediately, having zero fuel cost.
You're waiting because you refuse to stop waiting and complaining.
ALL power "only succeeds" here in the UK because of government subsidies. If you pay for or install your own coal fired power station it will never pay back. Don't even try nuke.
The U.S. isn't any better
A few numbers
http://news.energysage.com/how...
In 2017, most homeowners are paying between $2.87 and $3.85 per watt to install solar, and the average gross cost of solar panels before tax credits is $16,800. Using the U.S, average for system size at 5 kW (5000 watts), solar panel cost will range from $10,045 to $13,475 (after tax credits).
Last I looked a Dollar a watt was breakeven with net metering in place and no incentives.
Whether it produces more energy out than it takes to maintain tells you it can run.
After all that, it proves it's commercially viable.
Your abstract words seem to be assuming many premises which aren’t still there. Bear in mind that all what they (+ and all the fusion-power research since quite a few years ago) are doing is plainly working on getting a stable- and controllable-enough source of heat (= the first input of any thermodynamic cycle).
After making the aforementioned preliminary step work (if possible at all under the current technology/budget/expectations), they will have to come up with a reliable way to convert that stable source of heat into electricity. In principle, they should be relying on the typical thermal-power-plants approach which basically consists in using that heat source to boil water (which moves a turbine coupled with an electricity generator). The problem here is that the ranges of temperatures of the heat sources in conventional power plants (including nuclear-fission ones) are very similar to the target 100 degree and they don't have to deal with the "tiny" issue of hugely decreasing the temperature. So, even after being able to reach a stage where they can get plasma reliably and securely, they will still have to work a lot in order to actually generate electricity from all that heat. To not mention the small detail that power plants are expected to deliver stable loads during months, what forces any replacing alternative to deliver something equivalent.
In summary, your "commercially viable" actually means "making work something extremely complex and expensive which has never been accomplished before, under very demanding conditions and whose exact motivation isn't completely clear as far as many other much simpler alternatives can do the same".
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
A Dyson ring is a good compromise to building a Dyson sphere - uses less material, lower construction costs. Even easier is the Dyson lump. Also known as a planet.
With zero subsidy and zero feed in tariff solar in the UK will pay for itself in 5-15 years, depending on where you live and what your consumption is like. Panels typically come with a 25 year warranty, and the ROI factors in some maintenance on the inverters etc.
Solar heating works very well too.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
After all that, it proves it's commercially viable.
Well I can see McDonald's licensing it for their coffee makers if that's what you mean.
The cost is no longer the panels; it's the installation. Panels are dirt cheap in bulk.
When talking about solar prices, it's important to make a distinction between home installs and grid-scale installs. The latter in the US is now averaging around $1,50 per kW, and some installs are coming in around $1 per kW. Which is crazy-cheap, even taking into account the capacity factor.
"He's a liar whose lawyer is lying about his lying lawyer's lies."
Wind turbines reached grid parity in some areas of Europe in the mid-2000s, and in the US around the same time. Falling prices continue to drive the levelized cost down and it has been suggested that it has reached general grid parity in Europe in 2010, and will reach the same point in the US around 2016 due to an expected reduction in capital costs of about 12%.[25] Nevertheless, a significant amount of the wind power resource in North America remains above grid parity due to the long transmission distances involved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity#Wind_power
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
Science Journalists are often journalists that write about science. TV producers even more so. So they write what they understand. At least this talks a bit about the science and not just about the scientists -- human interest, journos understand that.
Eventually fusion will have a role in special applications
A magic wand would also be useful there. Unfortunately, the transition from dreaming about an ideal solution and actually creating such a solution is quite difficult or even completely/practically impossible.
In any case, if you want to go deeper into elucubrations about the possible applications of what doesn't exist (and perhaps will never do), you should bring both positive and negative issues into account. For example, even by assuming that you are able to safely generate electricity from fusion power, you should bear in mind all the problems which that alternative will always provoke. Even in an ideal scenario, it will have to be used under very specific conditions (we are talking about sun-like temperatures!!! Something extremely dangerous whose confinement will certainly imply lots of constraints on many fronts). So, forget about putting all this in a spaceship or creating a portable device which you might bring anywhere. It will require extremely-expensive, huge, non-moveable facilities under constant surveillance and located in very specific areas. A particle accelerator or the whole CERN probably represent the best present-day examples of how an eventual fusion power plant might look like.
Fission power is much more adaptable than what the fusion power would ever be: on one hand, you have some dangerous materials which only need to be adequately contained; on the other hand, you have theoretically-much-less-dangerous materials but needing crazily high temperatures, what can only be generated with very expensive and complex equipment under very specific conditions. There is a very good reason why we first tried fission power: it is orders of magnitude easier, safer, more certain, controllable and adaptable than what fusion power will ever become; it is dealing with dangerous stuff vs. dealing with a whole sun!!
The problem for basically every source of energy is that renewables are cheap and growing rapidly, and so is storage. It's very hard to compete with that.
Why do you complain about objectively better alternatives outputting better results? Why do you think that you have to invest lots of money in something when you can get the same for a fraction of that? To accomplish a dream of someone? Even though that dream might be a pure nonsense and/or extremely dangerous (another very important issue: we will not know the real problems of fusion until after having suffered them; exactly the same than happened with fission, originally also assumed to be a magic wand expected to solve everything, and with any other innovation ever)? What you want is a cheaper way to generate cleaner energy, not to make something happen no matter what. If renewables are cheaper and easier why don't you spend all the planned-in-fusion huge amounts of money on them? Why not over-optimising what certainly works or adapting your needs to what you can get rather than pursuing the magic-wand solution? Or what is even worse: why complaining about the most practical alternatives to be much more affordable than the magic-wand research and seeing that as an excuse to continue their unmotivated over-funding?
Sorry to blow your bubble but, until this moment, there is only one good reason for continuing the tremendously-expensive-and-far-from-practical research on fusion energy: supporting theoretical/dreamy/other expectations for whatever reason, where practical and objective concerns are being (not sure if consciously) plainly ignored.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Personally, I think that all energy production here in the UK should be nationalised anyway, so I don't find subsidies an issue in themselves, but regardless of your ideological view on this, it is simply absurd to pretend that nuclear power is some sort of magically efficient pure free market solution. .
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Still waiting for solar to pass its commercial viability test and I suspect wind power is a similar story.
Either you are willfully ignoring facts or you don't understand them. Solar has been economically viable in a wide variety of circumstances for quite a few years now. It's not the cheapest option everywhere (nothing is) but it's easily competitive in a great many places. Even better it's cost per unit of power generated has been dropping very rapidly with no evidence of an end in sight.
So far it only succeeds here in the UK because of government subsidies.
I could say the same thing about oil and gas in the UK. The UK subsidizes fossil fuels to the tune of billions per year directly, not to mention the indirect subsidy of not requiring coal and oil to pay the full cost of their emissions. Solar is already competitive with coal and oil in many situations and it is easily competitive if you compare the full cost of each which folks like yourself arguing against solar tend not to do.
If I pay for and install my own 5kWh solar system the returns over 20 years don't cover the cost of the initial installation, let alone a replacement inverter after 10 years or any other maintenance.
The plural of anecdote is not data. Even if we take your statement at face value (and we shouldn't), it doesn't follow that there are no solar installations anywhere (UK or elsewhere) that do not recoup their costs. It is a trivial exercise to find examples of solar installations that pay for themselves within their operational lifespan.
Whatever happened to the Princeton Perpetual Particle Plasma Power Physics Laboratory (PPPPPPL)? They've been cooking soup in their Tokamaks since the Big Bang was invented in the 60's, and in the early 80's, they were "just a few years away from commercially viable power."
Or did they get closed, due to the invention of cold fusion . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Except solar definitely does not in the wonderful cloudy parts of the world near the north sea.
You mean those locations with cloudy skies and lots of wind? So use wind power if your specific location isn't ideal for solar. Last I checked there was no lack of wind in the North Sea.
I don't get why some people keep arguing that solar isn't good in general because it doesn't work for every circumstance everywhere. Solar works fine and it's now economic in a huge number of cases. Better yet it's going to continue to get cheaper and more efficient with time. Yes if you live somewhere where it is foggy 300+ days a year solar is probably not for you. That doesn't describe most places where people live.
Are you sure it's $1/kW, not $1/W? The former would mean that it would pay for itself in about two days, the latter in a year or two. If the RoI is under a week, then I'd expect a lot more construction than exists currently.
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We shouldn't keep enabling the US to keep using its backwards measurement system, let alone the UK or Canada where it's mixtures of metric and imperial in inconsistent ways.
Just give C, no one here should need F
Actually, there are a class of small nuclear reactors referred to as 'nuclear batteries'; Here's one;
http://thefutureofthings.com/3299-hyperion-nuclear-batteries/
Actually there is such a thing as a nuclear battery.
Essentially it's a chunk of pure plutonium which generate power as the element decays.
It's useful for low power operations over a VERY extended period (like space probes).
Elsewhere, it's not so useful.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Are you sure it's $1/kW, not $1/W?
It's $/W. Interestingly, though, it's under 2 now and almost to 1, and when I started looking seriously at buying panels ten years ago it was over 4.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You said in your previous post: we started with fission because it is 'easier, safer and cheaper'.
Anyway, fission power plants are no danger. The multiple 100 million degrees plasma is basically a vacuum. The whole amount of 'hydrogen' is not much more than a thimble.
If the plasma touches the walls it is basically not melting anything but just cooling down ...
Well, I only glanced over the article, but it looks like they are pretty close to have a long running probably even net positive fusion reaction soon. I wonder how their design differs from ITER.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It's cheaper or at least competitive here in Australia to go off grid with your own solar install comparative to a new grid connection - especially if you live in rural and semi-rural areas. Utilities charge exorbitant prices to maintain the grid connection because they upgraded the networks anticipating another 40 years of coal, only to have coal fade from the scene and the new grid underutilized (costing them money, which is passed on to consumers). You'd be a moron to connect to the grid these days, unless you are in the suburbs.
Don't forget Nuclear and Fossil fuel subsidies have been going for decades and they still can't produce low enough costs without them. the new UK nuclear site is cost each UK household about £30+ per year in subsidy (£2.b per year for 30 years works out quite a lot)
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Nowhere is Europe is wind producing 50% of the annual power on the grid. Not even close. Wind power cannot exist on the grid today without conventional sources to back up its intermittency.
Denmark, 49.2% of supply in 2015 (no figures for 2016 on wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Curiously the winds are a lot stronger in the winter, so thats when they have a lot of excess power to export.
Where are you talking about? the UK has subsidised the nuclear for decades to keep the prices down, renewable subsidies are a drop in the ocean in comparison
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Power grids are linked across countries in Europe. It isn't unusual to borrow power from a neighbouring country only to return the favour later. So if the wind is still in Denmark for a while, it might not be in Germany. Germany uses massive amounts of solar btw, even though it is not a super sunny place.
And I'm not against green energy, just against stupid catch all remarks that say something is better than something else or has some specific ROI without taking into account any specifics.
We are in accord on that point.
Residential wind hasn't taken off for a simple reason, it is incredibly inefficient.
Again, whether residential wind power is useful is circumstance dependent. Sometimes it makes perfect sense as a supplement even on a home installation. I know a few local hobby farms that have smallish wind turbines which were economically sensible for their location. And who said it had to be residential? Communities can install large wind turbines and share the power. If rooftop solar doesn't work and the geography doesn't work for residential wind, then get the neighbors together for a large wind turbine. Battery systems for both home and grid scale are starting to become a real thing too.
Where my house is located (near the upper Great Lakes) wind doesn't make much sense but both grid and residential turbines make a ton of sense just 80 miles from my house and in fact are used. Conversely our local power company and a fair number of houses have solar installations which work great. Just our local geography. No one power source fits every circumstance and location.
No one here said anything like that, read through the thread again.
The claim was "Except solar definitely does not in the wonderful cloudy parts of the world near the north sea." which has nothing specifically to do with residential. Furthermore my statement was something of a more general statement aimed towards the people who invariably and unhelpfully point out that the sun doesn't shine 24/7.
Or you could unplug and sit in the dark.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
But Denmark is a net importer of electricity and they don't include that in the statistic.
> Rooftop solar is about the least cost-effective way of running solar power
It is highly competitive above about 50 kW.
> but the cost of rooftop installation is high
For a large install on a flat roof it is close to even with ground mounts. The extra work of getting it all up there and installing around various HVAC and such is offset by the mechanically simpler and lighter install systems. It only really gets expensive in relative terms in small installs on tilted roofs.
> the cost of the inverter is relatively high
The inverters we sold scaled from about 50 cents/W for the smallest 250W models to about 22 cents (Canadian) for the 1 MW models. Unlike most forms of power, PV scales VERY linearly above about 50 kW.
> I don't want to be able to get one that's 50% more efficient a year later for the same price
You won't. I installed my system in 2010 using what were then one-down-from-the-best you could by panels, 230W a panel. That same panel today is 285W. That's a great improvement, but not 50% per year.
> I started looking at roof-top solar about 10 years ago. Back then, the cheap panels were 8% efficient
In 2007 most panels were around 160 W, but in the smaller form-factor using 5" cells. The jump that occurred between then and 2010 was due almost entirely to the move to 1 x 1.6m panels using 6" cells. Average efficiency during that period improved only slightly from about 10 to 12%, I'm not sure what type of panels you were looking at but apparently not A-quality examples?
We have largely reached the top of the S-curve, and price declines from here out will be smaller in conventional technologies. The epitaxial guys might have something to say, and the perkosites, but both are relatively low chances. $1/W is where it's going to be for a while.
> They've been cooking soup in their Tokamaks since the Big Bang was invented in the 60's,
Actually, they started with stellarators in 1951.
They got a whole lot of money in the 70s and 80s to build the TFTR, which everyone was sure was going to reach break even.
It didn't.
So they got some more money to keep the ancient Alcator going, now in C-Mod form. It keeps running, zombie like, in spite of the fact that there's nothing left to learn from it. They also have some smaller-scale machines, but most of the interesting ones were cancelled.
Wouldn't 1AU be too close for the inner surface (for humans, anyway)? You'd be dealing with radiant energy reflected back from the rest of the inside as well as the radiation directly from the sun. Toasty.
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