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MIT Plans To Build Nuclear Fusion Plant By 2033
Mallory Locklear reports via Engadget: MIT announced yesterday that it and Commonwealth Fusion Systems -- an MIT spinoff -- are working on a project that aims to make harvesting energy from nuclear fusion a reality within the next 15 years. The ultimate goal is to develop a 200-megawatt power plant. MIT also announced that Italian energy firm ENI has invested $50 million towards the project, $30 million of which will be applied to research and development at MIT over the next three years. MIT and CFS plan to use newly available superconducting materials to develop large electromagnets that can produce fields four-times stronger than any being used now. The stronger magnetic fields will allow for more power to be generated resulting in, importantly, positive net energy. The method will hopefully allow for cheaper and smaller reactors. The research team aims to develop a prototype reactor within the next 10 years, followed by a 200-megawatt pilot power plant.
A functional fusion reactor that's commercially viable seems to be perpetually 15-20 years in the future.
Next......
Call it " hydrogen fusion" or people might confuse it with "nuclear" and that negative associated sentiment that goes with it
It's been "in 20 years" for 40 years so the slope is 1 year every 8 years. That means we should take 120 years for the remaining "in 15 years".
Now note that world total liquids will peak in the next decade and so will coal probably. In 15 years you won't even recognize the world economy.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
FYI, the CEO of this new company (Bob Mumgaard) and CTO (Dan Brunner) helped answer the questions asked in the Ask MIT Fusion Researchers About Fusion Power in April 2012: https://hardware.slashdot.org/... Prof. Dennis Whyte and Dr. Martin Greenwald were also on that thread and are now core members of the founding team of the new startup (although they remain employed by MIT).
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
The secret to getting away with a bullshit promise is to set the promised payoff so far in the future that you'll be long gone by the time people realize you were full of shit. See every American President for the last 50 years who's promised we'll put a man on Mars just 30 years after he leaves office.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If they can use higher magnetic fields, that increases the pressure and decreases required volume of the reactor to get to breakeven.
That said, the picture the show looks really small even with high field magnets .
We'll see. There have been a lot of claims of practical fusion in the next few years. So far non have worked, but its not fundamentally impossible.
I'm not sure fusion will ever be economical even if we get it working. Fusion has to compete against direct conversion technologies, where energy is directly converted from its original form into electricity.
Solar voltaic converts light energy directly into electricity. Wind turbines turn energy from moving air directly into electricity. Gas turbines burn natural gas directly in turbines that generate electricity.
Most fusion reactions create a lot of their energy in the form of fast neutrons, whose energy can't be converted to electricity directly, but must instead be used to heat up steam, and the hot steam then is used to turn turbines and generate electricity. This is indirect conversion, and the argument I've heard is that steam conversion plants cost more all by themselves than many direct conversion technologies do--therefore fusion reactions that generate the bulk of energy in fast neutrons will be uneconomical by comparison.
Coal plants too, incidentally--there's a reason no new coal plants are being built in the USA--they're uneconomical compared to natural gas turbine generation. And fusion plants will be extremely capital intensive.
Furthermore, plasmas in thermal equilibrium that produce energy in charged particles instead of neutrons (which would allow for direct conversion), cool off faster via Bremsstrahlung radiation than they self-heat from their own fusion reactions. So direct conversion from fusion would have to come from nonequilibrium plasmas. And nonequilibrium plasmas are really, really unstable--they tend to thermalize very, very fast.
Bottom line, I'm not optimistic about terrestrial fusion in any form being economical when it has to compete with solar, wind, and natural gas. Leave planet Earth and go past the orbit of say, Jupiter, and I could see it being a good solution way out there.
Fusion is the power source of the future, and always will be.
Joking aside, I don't really care if they actually get a net positive reactor going, we need to keep pursuing these reactors. Eventually we will get one to work, even if it's as ugly as the matchup between deep blue and Gary Kasparov.
Just like carbon capture, by the time they achieve useful power generation with fusion - if ever - there will be no need for it. Solar, wind and tidal generation with battery storage will be much cheaper and less polluting.
Economically practical fusion power plants have been 15 years away...for over 50 years now...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Seems that fusion reactor design is a big complex task that these 'AI' neural nets could crunch away on til they figure out a really complex optimum design. Think what kind of crazy stellarator design skynet could think up... Might be too hard to actually construct, but I bet it works on paper (RAM?), lol.
I would like nothing better than seeing this built, if even next door to me. But in the Boston Area ? Lots of Luck.
You cannot even build a Dog House in that area without the following:
1. Multiple studies on how it will impact the neighborhood.
2. Protesters showing up at the town meetings, and you have to defend your dog house hundreds of times.
3. Fighting with various politicians.
4. Getting all kinds of subpoenas arriving at your door step in their pretty colored envelopes.
5. At least 1 court appearance, lawyers will be happy.
6. If you are lucky you hit the jackpot. Your dog house will show up as a ballot question which at best will be ignored by the politicians, or more than likely the politicians will decide to do the exact opposite.
7. I will not even mention the cost overruns
So maybe in 200 years you will see it build :(
They should have built a stellarator or literally anything other than a tokamak.
How many tens of billions have been invested in Tokamaks thus far with very little to show for it? Other approaches consistently get shafted for serious funding due to dogma/politics and risk aversion.
Comparatively peanuts have been spent on stellarators to date and they have already demonstrated far better results than any tokamak ever has.
Any one claiming to have AI should be sued for false and deceptive advertising.
The tokamak doesn't seem to work - it certainly hasn't so far. There are many other approaches that cold do with throwing a few million or billion at. We seem to have beaten tokamaks to death without success. Yes, it's theoretically possible. But many things work in theory, just not in practice.
"Cats like plain crisps"
Was there even a single fusion plant project announced before this? Is there one which was announced and should have been active by this year (i.e., which failed to deliver)?
In the 70s it was always 40 or 50 years in the future In the 90s and 00s this dropped to about 30 years in the future
Seems like people may be shifting their goals and expectations to about 20 years in the future now.
I would not be surprised that this decrease is due to people expecting things to happen more quickly now---not because of the technological advancements occurring in this field.
Also, let's face it, the only fusion-derived electricity sold to consumers currently living will be from solar panels (the Sun is a fusion reactor after all).
Cable companies will eventually drive all intelligent life off of the planet.
In the last 50 years, it's gone from being 20 yrs away to now being only 15 years away. Assuming it's not on a log curve, we'll see practical fusion power generation in another 150 years.
Well the science disagrees. Tokamaks are so far the only fusion
devices that have come close to break-even and have produced the
densest, hottest and most long lasting fusion plasmas. The scientists
also have used Tokamaks extensively to understand plasma instabilities.
The only big problem that has slowed fusion power development
has always been the lack of serious funding. ITER is a big gamble. But
it will tell us at least whether the Tokamaks will work as power production
devices.
Present day AI is based on technology and concepts from the 1960s and 1970s. The only thing that changed which make it now more viable are: Computing power, advances in parallelism, faster algorithms and the availability of digital data. Beside that it is 50 year old tech.
Looks like MIT and the fusion gang have understood that the clock is ticking and therefore the 50 year promise does no longer work. Unfortunately, it will not help even if they where able to pull it off because by 2033, we must be half through with our climate change adaptation. 2045 we are either done or finished.
I used to work in the area (and would be happy to do so again), and to me progress in AI looks to be slower that was anticipated in optimistic projections 25 years ago, except for the application of more powerful computing infrastructure. I'd agree that it is possible that this time round, the optimistic projections of progress might come to pass, though.
I know people who work in plasma physics and fusion research, so it would be interesting to get their view of the MIT work.
We've already got a really big nuclear reactor.
It's called the sun.
It distributes power with light which we can safely convert to electricity with solar panels.
About 150M Kms is about as close as we should get to a nuclear reaction of any type.
Go well
With respect, I do not think you have any conception of the developments of the last few years. For example, Generative Adversarial Networks, and especially the Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks of the last 18 months or so, have really revolutionized the field. If you believe this just to be a tweak of the algorithms of 20, 30 or 40 years ago, you are simply wrong.
"Where there is lots of data, and clearly defined objectives, AI systems based on deep neural networks and reinforcement learning can usually at least equal human performance (often surpass it) today."
Lots of data and clearly defined objectives? Yeah, those are called computer programs.
If 1. occurs then 3. is not so scary and possibly is caused by other more violent causes which may also decrease chance of option 2. ever occurring.
MIT announced yesterday that it and Commonwealth Fusion Systems -- an MIT spinoff -- are working on a project that aims to make harvesting energy from nuclear fusion a reality within the next 15 years.
We already HAVE a nuclear fusion reactor. It has been operating for YEARS with an unmatched safety record, harming no one directly except occasionally causing problems for people over-exposed to it without proper shielding. I have spoken of this before, I think, probably right here on slashdot. In their wisdom, our ancestors chose to live a safe distance away from it, at about 98 million miles, give or take a few. which makes the only issue harvesting its output, and storing it for periods when the reactor is unavailable for periods of time, as it often is.
The beauty of this reactor is that it's so big, we can all share it and it won't ever, (from our perspective, anyway,) run out.
HOWEVER, like manna raining down from heaven, all that needs be done is collect enough of the output of this fusion reactor to go until the next time it becomes available. FORTUNATELY, its availability is pretty regular and fairly predictable; in fact, you can set your clock by it, and historically, people have and still do, even if a touch indirectly. All schemes to avoid using the power of this reactor and instead prefer some other, can mostly be attributed either to ignorance, or greed. Ignorance that a better, cheaper, and safer way already exists, and greed that by providing a more "convenient" alternative, you can get people to pay you money for the privilege of using what they could already get for free. Ugh.. people.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Fusion isn't really mysterious. You need to keep the plasma above some temperature at a sufficiently high product of pressure and lifetime. This improves as the machine gets larger.
Different field configurations (tokomak, stellerator etc) can provide different scaling of storage time relative to size. At the time ITER was designed, Tokomak looked the best. I don't know if any new information has changed that.
ITER has been slow / expensive because it is a giant multi-national collaboration, IMHO the least efficient way to do a project. I bet Apple could have built the same thing for the cost of their ridiculous new headquarters.
People are looking at a lot of more exotic ideas, like the colliding ring machine (tri-alpha) with a general goal of increasing the ion temperature (needed for fusion) relative to the electron temperature (just causes energy loss) but so far they haven't looked that promissing.
Fusion may not be mysterious, the physics is not that hard in theory, but the practice seems to elude us.
Except for big giant world destroying bombs, of course. We can do that.
"Cats like plain crisps"
I think its more expensive than it is hard. I expect most of the standard fusion devices would work if scaled up - the trick is finding one that can be made at a reasonable size (with ITER maybe not qualifying as "reasonable").
"2. Nuclear fusion will come next. It is just an engineering problem."
Funny how in the previous half-century we managed to solve every other "engineering problem", we weren't able to solve that one.
"It's just an engineering problem" == the science around it is basically understood. We don't need to discover or develop new science (as opposed to true anti-grav hover boards). But it is a ginormous project that will take decades just to build.
To take a space race metaphor : Once Sputnik is in orbit, it doesn't take a long strecht of imagination to think that humanity will also manage to put people on the Moon or built a giant international space station. But from the Sputnik point in time to the modern day's ISS, it took a ginormous amount to resources, money, time and engineering.
The 15 years time frame touted by the project is probably over-optimistic. But hey, we live in the "startup / kickstarter / etc." era. Where over promizing is an absolutely necessary first step to attract the attention of money sources.
We don't even have the Concorde anymore, how come that solved problem isn't even part of the landscape any more?
Solved problem/working solution DOES NOT mean "makes sense economically".
Concorde for most of its life was a vanity project that never manage to make sens economically and look a long-term sustainable project.
And that's even before the modern ultra-connected world removed even more of the few corner cases where Concorde might have been useful.
(Basically, Skype killed the need to have business man able to cross the world within hours - and these 3 business men where the only out of all passengers that actually had a practical use of Concord)
(Though nowadays, if it was still around, Concorde might successfully be marketed as an "exclusive" experience to a few ultra-rich 1%er with way too much money in their pockets).
In other words, all the /. who currently heavily criticize the economical sustainability of Tesla/Uber/etc.
would probably thing that those are still perfectly long-term stable plans compared to Concord.
Fusion, like space colonies, is a fantasy for weak-minded tech nerds looking for a religious experience to come from technology.
Space colonies are technically feasible and limited to engineering. But such a vast problem requiring so many resources compared to potential use now, that nobody is ever going to thow the necessary money at it. You would need dozens of government putting all their resources together for a century or two to even hope boot strapping it. (Or the US divert a few percent of your war budget :-P )
It's basically a project on the same scale as the colonization of the world by the big maritime empires, except back then the empire were having high hopes to gain riches, whereas there aren't much economic incentives to invest into space colonization now. Vague hopes of mining helium 3 on the moon do not sound a credible enough excuse to lock major part of the budget of dozens of government over the next couple of centuries.
And scientific discoveries aren't a good enough incentive. It's currently way cheaper to send probes and robot to explore instead of the costly and complex project of putting humans in person there.
Sorry, Bill. You won't see commercial fusion power, asteroid mining, or space colonies.
Well it's not clear when fusion will make sense economically - might take 40 years, might take a century - or might end up not making sense at all.
But the current big project like ITER, are currently done for the sake of science, as well as vanity project to show off engineering capabilites and try to learn useful stuff out of it.
We might manage to get something out of ITER - at least learn a lot - though it might take a lot more resource and time than initially planned.
TFA's startup ? well... I wouldn't hold my breath.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If you believe this just to be a tweak of the algorithms of 20, 30 or 40 years ago, you are simply wrong.
That's the thing about problem solving. Implemented solutions may look completely different, even if they're fundamentally the same. There's a near limitless number of ways to implement a solution, but still be the same solution. Do not conflate new implementations for new solutions.
I don't know enough on the topic, but my brother is going into AI and he has taken a similar position that all of these "new" AIs is just 60s/70s computer science used in ways that only recently becoming feasible. They could not exercise these "new" ways only because they didn't have access to enough computation power, but the theory was there.
I see this same pattern in other parts of tech. People saying "omg, something new!" when it's really just computer science from the 60s/70s and they're not thinking abstractly enough to understand. But who cares about abstract reasoning? Who needs to fundamentally understand a problem when they could just memorize all of the answers?
Between highly respecting my brother's opinions and my general observations in other parts of tech, I have to side with prefec2.
Anecdote: OMG! new tech! Have you seen async programming? Me: Yeah, co-routines and state machines from the 60s. But otherwise obvious answers to the simple problem of context switching. I think it was around the age of 10 that I read about the costs of context switching, which lead me to independently abstractly create co-routines and an event notification system to signal when a logical thread was ready again. I figured if it's expensive to context switch in the hardware, which has a lot of responsibilities like virtual memory isolation, then I'd just do context switching in user mode. 20 years later async was all the rage and it was easy to understand since I already thoroughly thought about the problem when I was a child. It wasn't until I started to read about async that I found out about co-routines and state machines. I'm always happy when I come to the same conclusions as others.
ITER is most certainly NOT dead. It's an active project that pretty much dwarfs any other scientific experiment in scale. It's designed as a burning plasma lab and it's results will benefit the MIT project.
Interestingly, The Concorde stopped flying in 2003, the very year Skype launched.
Funny, I simply used Skype as a metaphor. Didn't think about the timing.
But that had zip to do with businessmen/women's reason for not using it. Business travel has not decreased. Did you know that millennials are the most frequent business travelers?
I'm not saying that business travel is decreasing.
I'm saying that there's a very specific subtype of business travel ("This is a very important meeting, you need to go represent the company, now !!!") that require urgently transfering a business person as fast as possible on the premise.
That specific type of *urgent* business meeting has decreased, and thus a small barely significant use-case for concorde has disappear.
I'm not saying that business would save the concorde. I'm simply say that's about the single (rare) situation case where one might legitimately have an use of the ultra-sonic speed of concorde (but not making economical sense).
For everything else, it was basically a "showing off" project.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]