> Wind and nuclear are not too far apart in capital expense, wind at $70 and nuclear at $83.
I'm not sure what units you're using, you didn't post them. However, in $/Wp, wind is about $1.25 and nuclear is around $10.00. So, I disagree.
> Nuclear can load follow fairly well as it is right now.
No, it can't. The vast majority of plants in service around the world have about 25% throttling capability per 24 hours. There are a minority of designs that do much better than that, closer to 50%, which is what you want.
The French get around this by having lots of reactors on a single grid so they can throttle the freshly loaded ones. That's a good idea that everyone should do, but few others places have the political or geographical capability. We can't do it here in Ontario, for instance, so we sell off our nighttime excess for something like 0.5 c/kWh or even negative from time to time.
> The problem is that the load > following needs delays between rapid changes to avoid wear and damage to the fuel
> On Earth we're already at the point where building the supporting structures for > solar panels is more expensive than the panels themselves
Balony.
Current CAPEX on >>1MW buys for 1st tier PV products is about 40-45 cents/Wp. Mounting systems for those panels cost around 15 cents/Wp, +/- 5 cents depending on what it's mounted to.
> Most large-scale orbital solar collector designs call for massive parabolic mylar-film mirrors > focusing sunlight on comparatively tiny photovoltaics
*Some* designs do, requiring PV systems that don't exist.
There was some work on these sorts of PV when oil prices were spiking, notably by Boeing, but the price/performance of traditional systems wiped them out and they all gave up. A bigger issue is that the power/weight ratio is actually less than conventional thin-film PV due to the ceramic potting.
Even if they did exist, you couldn't build the designs these plans call for. 60% of all energy falling on the cell has to be removed somehow. Here on earth the air does that for you. In space, not so much. This is a non-trivial problem.
Yeah, that plus 1/2 of the power is lost in transmission, and the panels last somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 as long in space. So the total amount of energy delivered to the grid is actually lower than the same panel on Earth.
The idea is crazy right out of the gate. We'll take photons that are less than a second from reaching Earth though an atmosphere that is 99% transparent to them, convert them into electricity, convert that electricity to less powerful photons, beam those at the Earth, and then convert it back into electricity again? Seriously? Do the math people, it's only a few lines of multiplications.
It's always amusing to see this proposed as an advantage - there's no way they'll make a bomb out of it, because they have too much of this deadly poison being created!
That's like saying that our new insecticide production method is perfectly safe because the small amount of VX nerve agent it produces is overwhelmed by the huge amount of sarin it makes as a waste product.
> This would mean a more compact reactor that operates at ambient pressure.
The LFTR fanbois make much of this, claiming that it will reduce CAPEX and OPEX and thus improve the economics.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of existing reactors that work at ambient pressure, like CANDU, and they conclusively demonstrate that there is no economic advantage inherent to low-pressure operation.
Likewise, there are plenty of existing reactors that work at higher temperatures, like AGR, and they conclusively demonstrate that there is no economic advantage inherent to high-temperature operation.
You will note that Sorenson's presentations fail to mention either of these designs.
More BS, likely from someone trying to get funding for a LFTR in the US. Let's take this bit by bit...
> China is to spend 22 billion yuan (US$3.3 billion) trying to perfect a form of technology largely > discarded in the cold war
Discarded because a continual stream of reports all concluded that the economics of the concept were worse than existing reactor designs, that the proposed advantages didn't really exist or at least weren't as important as it was implied, and that the remaining development cost was greater than any possible economic outcomes.
And it's not just during the cold war; every so often someone comes along to revive this corpse and someone has to do another study. Here, for instance, is a recent one that was triggered by the recent LFTR "we can do anything!" boosterism:
However, these benefits are overshadowed by economic costs, as demonstrated
per our model. Although substation cost-savings are associated with the building of
a LFTR in comparison to a traditional uranium plant, the difference in cost,
given the current industry environment, remains insufficient to justify the creation
of a new LFTR.
> Researchers hope that if they can solve a number of technical problems
Well duh! If we have that magic wand, I want it to make my hair fall back in.
> The technology, in theory, can create more heat and power than existing forms of nuclear > reactors that use uranium, while producing only one thousandth of the radioactive waste.
Complete baloney.
> China has some of the world's largest reserves of the metal...
It does not, not even close. How did they even come to think this?
India, the US, Austrailia and Canada have the most thorium, *by far*. Those four have more than *everyone else combined*. China isn't even in the top ten.
> The reactors use molten salt rather than water as a coolant, allowing them to create > temperatures of over 800 degrees Celsius, nearly three times the heat produced > by a commercial nuclear plant fuelled with uranium.
You don't measure heat in C, you measure temperature in C. The British AGRs operated at 650 degrees Celsius. The person that wrote this release has zero idea what they are talking about, either historically or technically.
In case you're curious about why they mention this, it has to do with how much of the heat being generated in the reactor that you can extract for electricity. This depends on the difference in temperatures on either side of the turbine. The outlet is basically "room temperature" or something close to it, so the only practical way you can improve things is on the inlet side. Water, the typical coolant, doesn't like to go too far beyond about 250; the most common plant in the US is the GE PWR which operates at 275C for instance.
So there's been lots of talk over the years about replacing water with something else with a higher triple point. That something else is normally a gas - CO2 and helium typically - or some sort of oil. And a lot of people tried these variations, including liquid salts, and in every single case they found that the improvements in economics due to higher efficiencies were easily offset by the added complexity of operation. The AGR, the only such design to see widespread use, was an economic disaster. Everyone, and I mean everyone, gave up on these because they were simply too expensive to operate.
But of course, this is a miracle device and the Chinese are supermen, so it will all definitely work no problems this time.:rolleyes:
> "a charging system that's 10 times more powerful than one of the fastest battery-charging networks > on the road today -- Tesla's own Superchargers."
Yeah, and?
A 1.6 MW inverter is about the size of a large industrial fridge, at least the one we had in our warehouse was.
We know the charger port is basically four SuperCharger ports, which are 120 kW each, but CCS Level 2 is 350 kW using similar wires. Because it's a larger battery pack, they can divide up the cells into groups any way they want, which means they could solve the same problem by doubling the voltage.
Its funny, they've selected the easiest problem to solve and are saying it's some killer issue.
> However... a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny pittance of that energy is directed towards us at any one time
So? The question isn't the absolute number, the question is that number relative to actual usage.
According to the IEA, the Earth's total consumption is 132,000 terawatt-hours per year.
The amount of sunlight hitting the Earth is 174 petawatts, of which we can make practical use of about 1/2 (due to reflection, re-emission, and wavelength issues). There are 365 x 24 = 8760 hours in a year, so that's 174000 x 8760 / 2 = 762,120,000 TWh of solar energy per year.
So to power everything, we would need to capture 0.000173 of that energy.
> We then have relatively expensive devices utilising relatively unusual materials
Solar panels are the cheapest form of power in CAPEX terms in history:
> Well, the late Dr. Robert Bussard would have disagreed with you.
The fact that there are people in this forum who have built their own fusors is pretty good evidence that any such claim is untrue.
Bussard suggests there is a interlocking system of large labs and government funding that locks research into the maxwellian box. He ignores the fact that Rider's work in the late 1990s pretty much outlaws non-maxwellian solutions for energetic reasons.
This is typical of the non-maxwellian/aneutronic crowd, who simply ignore the fact their designs almost certainly can't work even in theory, and then blame this pseudo-conspiracy for all their problems. e.g. TriAlpha.
> ITER was made the funding and marketing priority over IFMIF
Which is precisely what that graph is as well - prioritizing an engineering prototype over the machines people actually needed.
One can't blame Hirsch - he felt there was a very real possibility that funding sources would dry up if they didn't demonstrate ignition soonish. And that's precisely how it played out in the end.
Oh god not this chart again. Anyone that posts this is demonstrating that they are unfamiliar with the history and physics of fusion. So let's explore this...
Right when the entire concept was starting in the 1940s, there was a theoretical calculation that estimated how quickly the plasma would leak out of the machines. Among the various inputs were two that were key - the plasma leaked slower out of larger machines because it had further to go, so that was linear with size, and in addition, the scattering varied with the square of the magnetic field strength so if you made the magnets even a little stronger then you're good to go.
However, there was one problem. During the war, they had actually worked with magnetically confined plasmas as part of the bomb project. The actual measured results from these experiments were WAY faster than what the classical math predicted. Most worryingly, the magnetic field only improved the times linearly. If this "Bohm diffusion" was correct, there was no hope of making a working reactor.
So when they built the first machines and ran the calculations, it appeared the classical numbers were working. If they just made it bigger they would be off to the races. So through the late 1950s and into the 60s they did that. And sure enough, the results got worse. At a 1968 meeting, Spitzer, the dean of the US program, had a chart showing that the entire stellarator series was clearly following the Bohm model.
Fusion was dead.
Funny thing though... at that same meeting the Soviets showed the results of their new tokamaks and they were 10x Bohm. The results were so good, no one believed them. They had to invite a team from the UK to use their laser scattering probe before anyone was convinced it actually worked.
And then there was a sudden rush to build tokamaks. So much of a rush that they converted the biggest stellarator into one and never looked back. Now the problem was not stability, it was heating the fuel - previous machines like the pinch series heated the fuel by either compressing it rapidly or running a current through it. The tokamak showed that there were hard limits on both, and these were too low to use for heating.
So through the 1970s you had a series of experiments all around the world on how to heat the fuel. Generally, the US was the winner. The PPPL's PLT machine was able to hold its plasma and heat it until it reached the conditions for fusion. All that was left was to increase the pressure to a useful figure, and then introduce tritium so the thing would actually burn.
And that's where this graph comes in. Notice the start point of this graph, in the mid-1970s. This is when Hirsch was putting together the Manhattan Project-level attempt to make a working commercial machine around 2000. Based on this there were going to be three machines in a rapid sequence, first the follow-on to the PLT, which became TFTR, then a prototype generator that also handled tritium production, and then the prototype commercial machine. That's the green line in the chart.
What actually happened is that they built TFTR and it didn't work. As they ramped up the dials, the machine became increasingly unstable. By around 1983 TFTR failed, MFTF never even turned on, and congress, realizing no one really knew what the hell was going on, cut the funding.
So basically the green line is based on the underlying premise that they actually understood the physics. But they didn't. And if you don't understand the physics, it doesn't matter how much money you pour into it, it still won't work. So the black line happened.
In spite of this, fusion proponents keep putting this up and blaming money for "the problem". THIS IS A PHYSICS PROBLEM, IT'S NOT A MONEY PROBLEM. And we still don't really know the solution, and a trillion dollars won't fix that.
It already has, and everyone knows it. It's not just fusion, it's fission too. If you have neutrons in the first loop, you are uneconomical. Period.
The cost of a modern fission reactor is around $10/Wp. Of that, about $6/Wp is the generation loop. Only about $1 to $1.50 is the actual reactor itself.
So in other words, the lowest possible price you can build a [fission|fusion] plant for is about $6/Wp. And that's without the reactor.
A wind turbine that produces the same amount of power costs about $1.25/Wp. Because the wind doesn't always blow, to make the same amount of energy you need three of them. So a generator using wind turbines that produce NNN power will cost you about $4.50 complete, whereas for $6 you still only have a cooling loop on your nuclear plant.
The power companies have been telling the labs they won't build these things since the beginning. The Stellarator D study in 1958 produced a machine that was 500 feet across and twisted like a pretzel. The power company liaisons working on the report told them there was absolutely no way anyone would ever build such a thing. The physicists basically said "who cares" and went back to their physics, saying that since the physics didn't work then the study was dumb anyway.
That pattern repeated itself dozens of times over the next 30 years. Every so often someone would think they were getting close to a working design, and they would do a commercial design effort. And every time, the power companies would tell them in no uncertain terms they were smoking pure hopium. GE threw in the towel in 1965 when they did their own study that said the same thing. The largest one I know of is the Bechel report from ~1975, and once again the same outcome - no way anyone would ever build one.
Everyone in the field is aware of this. It's gotten to the point that if you bring this up they either yell at you (literally, had this happen to me) or do the equivalent of "LA LA LA I CANNOT HEAR YOU!". It's astonishing to watch.
> helium -- the byproduct of fusion between hydrogen atoms -- adds to the strain placed on reactors by > bubbling out into the materials and eventually weakening them
The problem with fusion is that it generates relativistic neutrons that displace atoms in metals and cause them to become brittle. This not only weakens the materials but makes some critical materials like the superconducting magnets rapidly turn into scrap.
While the helium -alphas actually- also present problems, they are not the same thing at all. The damage rate from such events is orders of magnitude lower than the neutron damage. And the idea that letting them just bubble out will remove them from the fuel at a fast enough rate makes me LOL.
The idea that this somehow fixes anything is so utterly ridiculous that it simply puts the black hole that is modern fusion research into stark perspective.
I used CIS forums for doing tech support for our users and doing update announcements and uploads. The thing that always made CIS the go-to place for this was NavCIS. It was like Blue Wave or QWK for CIS - you clicked a button and it went and got all your email and subscribed forums, downloaded any files you selected, uploaded any you had waiting, sent replies to email and forums, and logged off. It was fantastic, I did the daily support runs in maybe 2 minutes a day online time, often less.
No, this isn't the CIM, which was more like an AOL-ish interface that kept you online. This was a power-user tool sold separately.
Color me sceptical. Excluding games, I don't think I've run 800 different programs if I go back even to my Atari days.
I've worked in large public organizations before, and I recall maybe two dozen programs being used, a third of them being Office (MS Project is still out there) and the rest since replaced by web servers.
> semiconductor company Broadcom Ltd. is returning its headquarters to the U.S. from Singapore [snip] >The company's shares declined as much as 4 percent to $248.87 after the announcement.
Slashdot Mirror
> Wind and nuclear are not too far apart in capital expense, wind at $70 and nuclear at $83.
I'm not sure what units you're using, you didn't post them. However, in $/Wp, wind is about $1.25 and nuclear is around $10.00. So, I disagree.
> Nuclear can load follow fairly well as it is right now.
No, it can't. The vast majority of plants in service around the world have about 25% throttling capability per 24 hours. There are a minority of designs that do much better than that, closer to 50%, which is what you want.
The French get around this by having lots of reactors on a single grid so they can throttle the freshly loaded ones. That's a good idea that everyone should do, but few others places have the political or geographical capability. We can't do it here in Ontario, for instance, so we sell off our nighttime excess for something like 0.5 c/kWh or even negative from time to time.
> The problem is that the load
> following needs delays between rapid changes to avoid wear and damage to the fuel
Which sounds like the definition of "can't".
> If you count in the cost of externalities, it's also among the cheapest
How can you possibly believe that? On a per-watt basis it's going to cost much more than a wind turbine, and wind turbines don't have fuel.
Here's actual costs:
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-2017/
New nuclear plants are over 11 c/kWh and that's based on a CAPEX that is about 25% below the market rate. Wind is around 5 c/kWh.
And that is the reason people are building wind and not nuclear. There is no other reason no matter what the fanbois might claim.
Electrolysis is about 65 to 70% efficient, and a fuel cell is about 50%. Thus the round-trip efficiency is around 35%.
This significantly less than a battery, where the round trip efficiency is about 70%.
So no, we won't be doing this.
http://energystorage.org/energy-storage/technologies/hydrogen-energy-storage
> but it produces 300x the power over its expected lifespan
It's more like .85 times the energy over its expected lifespan. Because...
1) panels in space lasts about 1/3rd as long as on the ground
2) you lose half the power on the way down
3) there's 5x as much sunlight in space
So, 5 x .33 x .5 = 0.825
There is, literally, no point in doing this.
> On Earth we're already at the point where building the supporting structures for
> solar panels is more expensive than the panels themselves
Balony.
Current CAPEX on >>1MW buys for 1st tier PV products is about 40-45 cents/Wp.
Mounting systems for those panels cost around 15 cents/Wp, +/- 5 cents depending on what it's mounted to.
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/68925.pdf
> Most large-scale orbital solar collector designs call for massive parabolic mylar-film mirrors
> focusing sunlight on comparatively tiny photovoltaics
*Some* designs do, requiring PV systems that don't exist.
There was some work on these sorts of PV when oil prices were spiking, notably by Boeing, but the price/performance of traditional systems wiped them out and they all gave up. A bigger issue is that the power/weight ratio is actually less than conventional thin-film PV due to the ceramic potting.
Even if they did exist, you couldn't build the designs these plans call for. 60% of all energy falling on the cell has to be removed somehow. Here on earth the air does that for you. In space, not so much. This is a non-trivial problem.
> No night, no clouds. 100% predictable
Yeah, that plus 1/2 of the power is lost in transmission, and the panels last somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 as long in space. So the total amount of energy delivered to the grid is actually lower than the same panel on Earth.
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/the-maury-equation-redux/
The idea is crazy right out of the gate. We'll take photons that are less than a second from reaching Earth though an atmosphere that is 99% transparent to them, convert them into electricity, convert that electricity to less powerful photons, beam those at the Earth, and then convert it back into electricity again? Seriously? Do the math people, it's only a few lines of multiplications.
It has been generally accepted that there was life at 3.45Gya since 2013.
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20131113/DAA1VSC01.html
> high gamma ray emission
Which, of course, is a serious weapon on its own.
It's always amusing to see this proposed as an advantage - there's no way they'll make a bomb out of it, because they have too much of this deadly poison being created!
That's like saying that our new insecticide production method is perfectly safe because the small amount of VX nerve agent it produces is overwhelmed by the huge amount of sarin it makes as a waste product.
> This would mean a more compact reactor that operates at ambient pressure.
The LFTR fanbois make much of this, claiming that it will reduce CAPEX and OPEX and thus improve the economics.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of existing reactors that work at ambient pressure, like CANDU, and they conclusively demonstrate that there is no economic advantage inherent to low-pressure operation.
Likewise, there are plenty of existing reactors that work at higher temperatures, like AGR, and they conclusively demonstrate that there is no economic advantage inherent to high-temperature operation.
You will note that Sorenson's presentations fail to mention either of these designs.
More BS, likely from someone trying to get funding for a LFTR in the US. Let's take this bit by bit...
> China is to spend 22 billion yuan (US$3.3 billion) trying to perfect a form of technology largely
> discarded in the cold war
Discarded because a continual stream of reports all concluded that the economics of the concept were worse than existing reactor designs, that the proposed advantages didn't really exist or at least weren't as important as it was implied, and that the remaining development cost was greater than any possible economic outcomes.
And it's not just during the cold war; every so often someone comes along to revive this corpse and someone has to do another study. Here, for instance, is a recent one that was triggered by the recent LFTR "we can do anything!" boosterism:
http://franke.uchicago.edu/bigproblems/BPRO29000-2014/Team10-EnergyFinalPaper.pdf
Here is the important part of their conclusions:
However, these benefits are overshadowed by economic costs, as demonstrated
per our model. Although substation cost-savings are associated with the building of
a LFTR in comparison to a traditional uranium plant, the difference in cost,
given the current industry environment, remains insufficient to justify the creation
of a new LFTR.
> Researchers hope that if they can solve a number of technical problems
Well duh! If we have that magic wand, I want it to make my hair fall back in.
> The technology, in theory, can create more heat and power than existing forms of nuclear
> reactors that use uranium, while producing only one thousandth of the radioactive waste.
Complete baloney.
> China has some of the world's largest reserves of the metal...
It does not, not even close. How did they even come to think this?
India, the US, Austrailia and Canada have the most thorium, *by far*. Those four have more than *everyone else combined*. China isn't even in the top ten.
> The reactors use molten salt rather than water as a coolant, allowing them to create
> temperatures of over 800 degrees Celsius, nearly three times the heat produced
> by a commercial nuclear plant fuelled with uranium.
You don't measure heat in C, you measure temperature in C. The British AGRs operated at 650 degrees Celsius. The person that wrote this release has zero idea what they are talking about, either historically or technically.
In case you're curious about why they mention this, it has to do with how much of the heat being generated in the reactor that you can extract for electricity. This depends on the difference in temperatures on either side of the turbine. The outlet is basically "room temperature" or something close to it, so the only practical way you can improve things is on the inlet side. Water, the typical coolant, doesn't like to go too far beyond about 250; the most common plant in the US is the GE PWR which operates at 275C for instance.
So there's been lots of talk over the years about replacing water with something else with a higher triple point. That something else is normally a gas - CO2 and helium typically - or some sort of oil. And a lot of people tried these variations, including liquid salts, and in every single case they found that the improvements in economics due to higher efficiencies were easily offset by the added complexity of operation. The AGR, the only such design to see widespread use, was an economic disaster. Everyone, and I mean everyone, gave up on these because they were simply too expensive to operate.
But of course, this is a miracle device and the Chinese are supermen, so it will all definitely work no problems this time. :rolleyes:
> "a charging system that's 10 times more powerful than one of the fastest battery-charging networks
> on the road today -- Tesla's own Superchargers."
Yeah, and?
A 1.6 MW inverter is about the size of a large industrial fridge, at least the one we had in our warehouse was.
We know the charger port is basically four SuperCharger ports, which are 120 kW each, but CCS Level 2 is 350 kW using similar wires. Because it's a larger battery pack, they can divide up the cells into groups any way they want, which means they could solve the same problem by doubling the voltage.
Its funny, they've selected the easiest problem to solve and are saying it's some killer issue.
> However... a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny pittance of that energy is directed towards us at any one time
So? The question isn't the absolute number, the question is that number relative to actual usage.
According to the IEA, the Earth's total consumption is 132,000 terawatt-hours per year.
The amount of sunlight hitting the Earth is 174 petawatts, of which we can make practical use of about 1/2 (due to reflection, re-emission, and wavelength issues). There are 365 x 24 = 8760 hours in a year, so that's 174000 x 8760 / 2 = 762,120,000 TWh of solar energy per year.
So to power everything, we would need to capture 0.000173 of that energy.
> We then have relatively expensive devices utilising relatively unusual materials
Solar panels are the cheapest form of power in CAPEX terms in history:
https://www.lazard.com/media/438038/levelized-cost-of-energy-v100.pdf
By weight, they consist almost entirely of sand, with small amounts of aluminium, copper, silver and PET.
> So just stop faffing about, and recreate its energy source here on Earth
Given that you clearly don't know the first thing about modern PV, maybe you should stop "faffing about" and actually read a book or something?
Nice. Sorry, I don't have any mod points.
> Well, the late Dr. Robert Bussard would have disagreed with you.
The fact that there are people in this forum who have built their own fusors is pretty good evidence that any such claim is untrue.
Bussard suggests there is a interlocking system of large labs and government funding that locks research into the maxwellian box. He ignores the fact that Rider's work in the late 1990s pretty much outlaws non-maxwellian solutions for energetic reasons.
This is typical of the non-maxwellian/aneutronic crowd, who simply ignore the fact their designs almost certainly can't work even in theory, and then blame this pseudo-conspiracy for all their problems. e.g. TriAlpha.
> ITER was made the funding and marketing priority over IFMIF
Which is precisely what that graph is as well - prioritizing an engineering prototype over the machines people actually needed.
One can't blame Hirsch - he felt there was a very real possibility that funding sources would dry up if they didn't demonstrate ignition soonish. And that's precisely how it played out in the end.
> When nobody knows what's going on, you require scientists to do research
Exactly, you need *scientists* to do *research*, not *enginners* to build prototypes.
I thought I made that clear. I suspect it was to everyone else.
> and impossible because physics :rolleyes:
Thank you for demonstrating you can't be bothered to read anything that's "long", as my arguments are *very* clearly based on economics, not physics.
Oh god not this chart again. Anyone that posts this is demonstrating that they are unfamiliar with the history and physics of fusion. So let's explore this...
Right when the entire concept was starting in the 1940s, there was a theoretical calculation that estimated how quickly the plasma would leak out of the machines. Among the various inputs were two that were key - the plasma leaked slower out of larger machines because it had further to go, so that was linear with size, and in addition, the scattering varied with the square of the magnetic field strength so if you made the magnets even a little stronger then you're good to go.
However, there was one problem. During the war, they had actually worked with magnetically confined plasmas as part of the bomb project. The actual measured results from these experiments were WAY faster than what the classical math predicted. Most worryingly, the magnetic field only improved the times linearly. If this "Bohm diffusion" was correct, there was no hope of making a working reactor.
So when they built the first machines and ran the calculations, it appeared the classical numbers were working. If they just made it bigger they would be off to the races. So through the late 1950s and into the 60s they did that. And sure enough, the results got worse. At a 1968 meeting, Spitzer, the dean of the US program, had a chart showing that the entire stellarator series was clearly following the Bohm model.
Fusion was dead.
Funny thing though... at that same meeting the Soviets showed the results of their new tokamaks and they were 10x Bohm. The results were so good, no one believed them. They had to invite a team from the UK to use their laser scattering probe before anyone was convinced it actually worked.
And then there was a sudden rush to build tokamaks. So much of a rush that they converted the biggest stellarator into one and never looked back. Now the problem was not stability, it was heating the fuel - previous machines like the pinch series heated the fuel by either compressing it rapidly or running a current through it. The tokamak showed that there were hard limits on both, and these were too low to use for heating.
So through the 1970s you had a series of experiments all around the world on how to heat the fuel. Generally, the US was the winner. The PPPL's PLT machine was able to hold its plasma and heat it until it reached the conditions for fusion. All that was left was to increase the pressure to a useful figure, and then introduce tritium so the thing would actually burn.
And that's where this graph comes in. Notice the start point of this graph, in the mid-1970s. This is when Hirsch was putting together the Manhattan Project-level attempt to make a working commercial machine around 2000. Based on this there were going to be three machines in a rapid sequence, first the follow-on to the PLT, which became TFTR, then a prototype generator that also handled tritium production, and then the prototype commercial machine. That's the green line in the chart.
What actually happened is that they built TFTR and it didn't work. As they ramped up the dials, the machine became increasingly unstable. By around 1983 TFTR failed, MFTF never even turned on, and congress, realizing no one really knew what the hell was going on, cut the funding.
So basically the green line is based on the underlying premise that they actually understood the physics. But they didn't. And if you don't understand the physics, it doesn't matter how much money you pour into it, it still won't work. So the black line happened.
In spite of this, fusion proponents keep putting this up and blaming money for "the problem". THIS IS A PHYSICS PROBLEM, IT'S NOT A MONEY PROBLEM. And we still don't really know the solution, and a trillion dollars won't fix that.
Is this THE Carey Sub?
Haven't seen that handle pop up in a while, how you doing?
> and insurmountably too expensive due to physics
It already has, and everyone knows it. It's not just fusion, it's fission too. If you have neutrons in the first loop, you are uneconomical. Period.
The cost of a modern fission reactor is around $10/Wp. Of that, about $6/Wp is the generation loop. Only about $1 to $1.50 is the actual reactor itself.
So in other words, the lowest possible price you can build a [fission|fusion] plant for is about $6/Wp. And that's without the reactor.
A wind turbine that produces the same amount of power costs about $1.25/Wp. Because the wind doesn't always blow, to make the same amount of energy you need three of them. So a generator using wind turbines that produce NNN power will cost you about $4.50 complete, whereas for $6 you still only have a cooling loop on your nuclear plant.
The power companies have been telling the labs they won't build these things since the beginning. The Stellarator D study in 1958 produced a machine that was 500 feet across and twisted like a pretzel. The power company liaisons working on the report told them there was absolutely no way anyone would ever build such a thing. The physicists basically said "who cares" and went back to their physics, saying that since the physics didn't work then the study was dumb anyway.
That pattern repeated itself dozens of times over the next 30 years. Every so often someone would think they were getting close to a working design, and they would do a commercial design effort. And every time, the power companies would tell them in no uncertain terms they were smoking pure hopium. GE threw in the towel in 1965 when they did their own study that said the same thing. The largest one I know of is the Bechel report from ~1975, and once again the same outcome - no way anyone would ever build one.
Everyone in the field is aware of this. It's gotten to the point that if you bring this up they either yell at you (literally, had this happen to me) or do the equivalent of "LA LA LA I CANNOT HEAR YOU!". It's astonishing to watch.
> helium -- the byproduct of fusion between hydrogen atoms -- adds to the strain placed on reactors by
> bubbling out into the materials and eventually weakening them
The problem with fusion is that it generates relativistic neutrons that displace atoms in metals and cause them to become brittle. This not only weakens the materials but makes some critical materials like the superconducting magnets rapidly turn into scrap.
While the helium -alphas actually- also present problems, they are not the same thing at all. The damage rate from such events is orders of magnitude lower than the neutron damage. And the idea that letting them just bubble out will remove them from the fuel at a fast enough rate makes me LOL.
The idea that this somehow fixes anything is so utterly ridiculous that it simply puts the black hole that is modern fusion research into stark perspective.
I used CIS forums for doing tech support for our users and doing update announcements and uploads. The thing that always made CIS the go-to place for this was NavCIS. It was like Blue Wave or QWK for CIS - you clicked a button and it went and got all your email and subscribed forums, downloaded any files you selected, uploaded any you had waiting, sent replies to email and forums, and logged off. It was fantastic, I did the daily support runs in maybe 2 minutes a day online time, often less.
No, this isn't the CIM, which was more like an AOL-ish interface that kept you online. This was a power-user tool sold separately.
> half of the 800 or so total programs needed
They have 800 programs they use?
Color me sceptical. Excluding games, I don't think I've run 800 different programs if I go back even to my Atari days.
I've worked in large public organizations before, and I recall maybe two dozen programs being used, a third of them being Office (MS Project is still out there) and the rest since replaced by web servers.
So has our understanding of hype cycles.
We're right about peak AI right now.
> semiconductor company Broadcom Ltd. is returning its headquarters to the U.S. from Singapore
[snip]
>The company's shares declined as much as 4 percent to $248.87 after the announcement.
MAGA!