The important word in the article is "experiment": As of now, most of the cost estimates and even the viability of this new type of fusion reactor are based on calculations only. It's of course great that new types of reactors get researched, it's just a pity that the press always seems to overreact and sell these experiments as production-ready systems to the world. This is probably the main cause for the public skepticism towards fusion energy: Too often early prototypes have been sold as working reactors.
BTW, there have been numerous proposed improvements over the Tokamak reactor type over the years, such as the "Stellarator" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator), most of them have proven too complex to be of practical use though.
Yeah, mankind will feed from simple Soviet designs that just works for decades. Tokamak is a just a fascinating example. Think lasers for example -- the USSR tech of the 60-es ;-)
They are not afraid, and never was. In the USSR gays were criminalized and put to jail. There was no same punishment for lesbians, surprisingly.
However, we are talking about TOKAMAKs and LASERs here.
what ? Gay marriage is still not legalized in most of the united states. and gay in russia means paedophiles included, its something putin has conjured up.
Saying Russians are scared of gays is like saying americans are all fat and lazy.
From an outsider's perspective, it kind of seems like fusion research is picking up recently, especially in terms of the diversity of approaches by relatively credible teams. Before it seemed like the credible effort was the tokamak and everything else was the domain of crackpots. If so, this seems like a good thing to me, even if most of these approaches might be doomed to failure. Should have been happening years ago.
I'm curious if that's just some kind of perception filter thing, though, or if not what's causing it.
Well, the strongest connection is probably to the recent DOE plan to spend $30 million on the more fringe fusion researchers. That certainly would provoke people doing that sort of thing to call attention to their research. What caused the DOE to spend the money in the first place I don't know.
I'm guessing it is a bit of both. There are story 'waves' as a story in a publication gets a lot of attention other publications try to out similar stories to catch some of the wave. I believe fusion in particular has a particular cycle as there seems to be a tendency to use 'in 10 years this is going to ...' and every 10 years folks come back and say, "Ok, its been ten years and ?" only to be disappointed.
That said, I read the papers on the UW design and the design seems a lot more credible than the Lockheed press release. The optimist in me believes that if you work at the problem long enough, eventually you will discover something of use. And of course once we do, well then a lot of intractable problems become tractable.
Putting on my tinfoil hat for a moment here, something I picked up on a similar fusion story here on HN a while ago: there have recently been a lot of news stories that may be interpreted as being aimed at bringing down the oil price. Not sure if I buy it, but if it is the case, it seems to be working.
Fusion energy doesn't replace oil. It doesn't substantially reduce dependence on it - oil fired power plants are uncommon compared to the quantity of coal ones, and we have a lot of coal to go through (well, not so much I guess - Australia has 400 years worth, but that's what, 5-6 generations + blasting our country into an uninhabitable wasteland?)
Fusion energy replaces coal powerplants, and probably fuel bunkers on container ships/air craft carriers. No concept is small enough or dense enough to replace oil, although cheap fusion energy would make all sorts of crazy synthetic hydrocarbon schemes viable.
Actually it can replace oil. Making long chain hydrocarbons through a process like the Fischer-Tropsch one is fairly straight forward if you have the energy. You would still have a refinery but sitting on the ocean with your fusion power plant your refinery would never need to have an oil tanker offload, instead your fusion plant would be supplying the energy to pull CO2 out of the air, hydrogen and oxygen out of the water and converting them into what the base for what ever the refinery needed.
A technology I've only recently learned of, though the concept dates back 50 years.
It was first pursued by Meyer Steinberg, a nuclear physicist working at Brookhaven National Labs. The US Navy's picked it up on the basis that they 1) have a great deal of nuclear experience and 2) consume large volumes of fossil fuel.
That is an excellent summary. One of the more interesting developments here has been the development of zeolites for CO processing that you run through a concentrated solar facility for heat. (Zeolites suck up CO2 while cold, you ferry them to the focal point of the CSP, they outgas the CO2 which is collected, and get returned to the pile below.)
Thanks. The advantage of seawater extraction is that the carbon concentrations are ~140x those of the atmosphere by volume. Oh, and for those who are curious, freshwater doesn't have the same concentrations -- this really is a seawater method, not a "water-based" method.
I'll look for information on the zeolite processes.
Of all places, the West Virginia Coal Association has a wealth of information on carbon sequestration research. I suspect it's because the industry's counting on this for its future lease on life.
We're also now at the point where there exist practical fully electric cars. They're currently too expensive for everyone to own one but that's not a physics problem and is likely to change.
One reason that allowed us to quickly develop fission power is that the physics is mostly linear meaning building a 1GW plant wasn't so much more difficult once you mastered the small experimental reactors.
Now I worked on nuclear plants and not on fusion research but I heard that the main issue with fusion power is the non-linearity that comes along when scaling up small experiments. Things like not being really able to predict plasma behavior at industrial scale even if it works fine in the lab. Could anyone with a better understanding of the physics expand on this ?
For tokamaks, there's an idea that we can take all the relevant size and plasma parameters for a bunch of different experiments, run a fit on them, and come up with a set of scaling factors that will tell us how well a reactor of size x is going to perform. The prediction is that the bigger the reactor, the better things get, which is why ITER is the biggest tokamak yet.
People call it 'wind tunnel scaling', so I presume this is an empirical method borrowed from aerodynamic modeling. Nowadays we can actually do computational fluid dynamics to some extent, but a full-on electromagnetic plasma simulation remains intractable on the macroscopic/machine scale. And we remain limited on theoretical approaches, so we are stuck with actually having to build the darn things before we know they'll work.
Estimates suggest it may not be done until 2020, and the budget has overrun to about $10.6 billion USD versus the original cost estimate of about $3.75B USD. (This reactor is now more expensive than the Large Hadron Collider!)
When a fission plant costs $10B+ today, I wonder how much the first working fusion plant will cost -- if we ever get that far.
I did some scientific computing for OL3 in 2009-10 and the issue you're referring to is a different one. Back in the 80's, there was around 5 new nuclear plants built in France, each year. It powers 75% of our electric grid and most of these plants are still going to be here till 2020-2040. Now most people who conceived and designed those plants are retired or almost retired. The new EPR plants (OL3, FA3) suffered consequently, the project management and the engineering is pretty much fucked up (personal point of view, I didn't had much insight). Also Areva consciously sold the plant for a low price in order to win the auction, they knew from day 1 that it would be delayed but probably not that much.
Now I was referring to the inherent difficulty to scale fusion up due to the underlying physics. So when the article says:
> The next steps for the dynomak are straightforward. The experimental device [...] is about one-tenth the size that a commercial dynomak fusion reactor would be. [...] the group hopes to construct HIT-SIX [...] that will be twice as large as HIT-SI3.
>At that size, things start to get interesting, says Sutherland. If imposed-dynamo current drive works well in HIT-SIX, he’ll be “much more confident going forward that our development path will be successful,” he says.
I don't know if it will be that straightforward because they're building a 1/10 prototype to build a 1/5 proto and then if all goes well they could be more confident about building a full scale plant. Does someone know how scaling up 1/10 → 1/5 → 1/1 is or isn't such a big issue ?
Also not an expert. My impression was that the high cost of fission plants can be attributed to safety features that aren't required with fusion. (And arguably aren't required -- to the extent society demands them -- with fission plants either.)
I'm a bit skeptical about the claim "it doesn't produce dangerous, long-term toxic waste." I'm no expert but I've read that fusion reactors will be producing massive amounts of neutron radiation (like the neutron bomb, AKA the "real estate bomb," heh!) which ends up absorbed by the cladding of the reactor chamber and converts it to partly radioactive isotopes.
A consequence is that the reaction chamber walls lose their physical integrity, i.e. become brittle, so leaving them in place is not an option. Thus, when operating a fusion reactor, you're constantly forced to replace crunchy, fusion-baked, radioactive reactor wall debris with newly built wall plates.
I admit to having no idea about which isotopes would be produced and what their half-life would be. If anyone can shed some light or correct me, I'd be indebted.
That's a researcher working in mainstream fusion, so that would be for deuterium-tritium fuel, which is the easiest but produces very high-energy neutrons. More advanced fuels are mostly aneutronic. Helion is attempting D-D/D-He3, which would release only 6% of its energy as neutron radiation. Tri-Alpha and LPP are attempting boron fusion, for which neutron radiation is only 1% of the released energy.
The "state of the art" looks a bit chaotic to people looking in from the outside, what with the variety of approaches being tested. But this is exactly how progress is made in science!
I'm glad to see that neutron blasting is being taken into consideration. I suppose not wasting most of your energy output as destructive radiation makes excellent sense economically, too.
With D-T the neutrons do heat a fluid, so it's not like the energy is wasted. For example, General Fusion would use them to heat a mixture of molten lead and lithium (the latter for breeding more tritium), which would heat water for a steam turbine. But aneutronic fuels put most of their energy into fast-moving charged particles, which lets you extract electric power without using a turbine.
It largely depends on the elements used for the inner reactor walls and there is ongoing research to find good candidate materials[1].
Yes, radioactive waste will be produced - unless an aneutronic fusion process can be handled - but the goal is to have low-halftime waste that is manageable and does not have to be contained for millions of years.
And fission reactors also have this problem to some degree, although their neutron radiation has very different energy profiles compared to fusion. When they are dismantled their reactor cores also have to be treated as waste. But unlike fusion plants you have to deal with the structural materials AND the actual spent fuel. So fusion plants will generally be better than fission, no matter what you end up doing.
Additionally the high energy neutrons of fusion reactors may prove useful to transmutate radioactive waste from fission plants so they might actually lead to a net reduction in radioactive waste.
The argument about the fuel not turning into nuclear waste is compelling. So we're talking about less radioactive material with a shorter half-life. Win-win!
Depends on what you mean with "less", especially since as far as I understand no one is close to a economically viable solution yet. But shorter half-life is most likely true.
Most fusion reactor designs intend the vast majority of those neutrons to be absorbed by a cladding of lithium for tritium breeding. Lithium being bombarded by neutrons does not produce dangerous long-lasting isotopes.
"I'm no expert but I've read", is probably one of the most dangerous phrases in the entire English language. That said, I'm no expert but I've read that the half life of the stuff it irradiates is pretty short, so you only need to store it for a hundred years or so rather than 10,000. So no ray-cats are needed. http://emperorx.bandcamp.com/album/10000-year-earworm-to-dis...
I hoped to limit the impact of my speculation by being humble about my state of knowledge. Anyway, more information is good, and that's one less thing for me to lose sleep over. Thanks!
As a very rough generalization this is true – in the detail you'll see neutrons are still produced. Just a significantly lower percentage (Aneutronic fusion is defined as less than 1% of total energy as neutrons). It's still enough that it needs to be moderated.
The article lists several other fusion approaches that are also in development. Does anyone have a real sense of the likelihood of any of these actually working? I'm optimistic, but also naïve about the engineering challenges.
There are a lot of fascinating engineering issues with projects like ITER - which are starting to scale up towards a commercial scale fusion plant. For example the ITER cryostat is apparently the largest high-vacuum chamber ever built:
The sad part is that the Tokamaks were being defunded in order to fund ITER, which wasn't even built yet. I'm not sure what wound up happening. I visited the one at MIT and got to see it fire live from inside the control room, but the postdocs were all sad that we were canning working primary research for what seemed like a complicated construction boondoggle. I hope they found another way to fund the research!
I don't understand what you mean by "The sad part is that the Tokamaks were being defunded in order to fund ITER". ITER is a tokamak, the world's largest (if/when it's completed), so funding for tokamaks is not a problem.
Not sure, but I am personally rooting for Lawrenceville Plasma Physics because if it works, it is the best one in terms of economics, has no radioactive by-products, and is small enough to fit into ships, trains, large planes, and spacecraft. Also they have overcome 2 out of 3 major challenges with little funding. They are working on the last one, plasma density, now.
Regardless, I would be excited no matter who did it first and I want it yesterday.
I'm the same, I'm also rooting for Lawrenceville Plasma Physics. I think partly I like their approach (dense plasma focus) because of the promising results they've had with it (despite criminally low funding) and also, on a less important but nonetheless compelling note, it seems to be the most elegant fusion approach.
Aside from the potential for aneutronic fusion (essentially zero radioactive waste), and reactors small, cheap and safe enough to put in residential neighbourhoods, it's the way that they're using the instabilities in the plasma to their advantage. Reactors like the tokamak try to control the plasma, whereas dense plasma focus reactors use the natural instability in order to compress the plasma in a way that leads to fusion. So instead of fighting against nature, you make use of what nature gives you.
If any investors are reading, you really are looking at potentially the best investment you've ever made. If I was a millionaire I'm absolutely sure I'd invest. Even if a different fusion device wins the race, you'd still have a device capable of exploring the dynamics of plasmas, as well as a useful tool to explore magnetic fields. It's almost a no brainer.
Do i understand this right that with the HIT-SI3 they have already built a working dynomak that can generate a surplus of energy, albeit at a small scale, and the challenge is to make a bigger one that still works?
Looking at the linked abstract[1] of a paper about their experimental device it seems like they're running their prototype with a helium plasma, which can't produce energy (He-4 fusion processes require a lot more activation energy than various hydrogen processes).
So they're mostly testing the plasma physics and rely on projections for the energy yield if actual fusion were to happen.
Good question - as far as I can tell, the article doesn't say so explicitly, so I assume it's not generating a surplus, since if it did, that would have been the headline. There is however the possibility that the two interesting numbers, required power input and power output, do not grow with the size of the reactor/amount of plasma in the same way, e.g. one function might be quadratic, the other cubic. So it is possible that the current prototype does not generate a surplus, but it might indicate enough about those two functions to indicate that a "slightly" larger version would (assuming no unforeseen technical or physical issues arise). It sounds like it's too early to say though.
"The primary argument against fusion power has been that despite decades of work, it still doesn’t exist"
I'd bet on thermal solar, that is proven to work. Also smart energy management with wind and solar are all proven to work. Electric cars have big batteries which are proven to work as energy storage.
It's far safer to not make bets: diversity in power generation is much better. I can't think of a reason why we wouldn't pursue each to the full. That way, a single natural disaster can't bring down the power grid; no hurricane or cloudy month or downed plant.
I know, there are several viable alternatives that would cost much less than the equivalent in fusion. Simply putting solar on most rooftops at about $20K per install would probably create a huge surplus in existing electric generation.
That said, I favor the continued R&D and I hope one of these approaches pans out. Research is rarely wasted.
Depends on the fusion. UW's approach would be cheaper than coal, Helion projects a price of 4 cents/kWh, and focus fusion would be absurdly cheap if it worked out.
This problem is already solved from a technical perspective: It is now possible to buy durable and reliable >10kWh battery packs to install in residential solar setups. The only remaining issue is volume production and cost.
We'll see what happens once Tesla's new battery plant is up and running in a few years, my money is on this being a game-changer.
The biggest solar installation in existence is a 392 Mw plant in the Mojave Desert that cost about $5.00/watt capacity (which works out to $10.00/watt considering that it doesn't work at night).
That's about twice as much per watt as coal.
It produces electricity at a wholesale cost of about 14 cents per kilowatt hour. The average retail cost of electricity in the United States is about 13 cents. It's an interesting experiment, but no, it doesn't make economic sense.
That's for a measly 392 Mw plant. A large coal plant cranks out 5 Gw, and a large hydro plant can be up to 20 Gw. We don't have that many Mojave Deserts, dude. Not to mention what the environmentalists are going to say if we start covering any substantial fraction of the Mojave Desert with solar plants (this one alone covers 3,000 acres of land).
Wind, with or without batteries, involves similar costs, unreliability, and land use problems, and batteries in general are one of the most environmentally nasty technologies we have.
So, from what I understand, they are blowing a charged smoke-ring of plasma and then coupling it inductively as one half of a motor, so they can keep it sustained, and the more electric you feed in, the hotter and tighter and faster it goes. I want one.
It's an inherently pulsed design, so the duration of energy production isn't a problem. It would be the same short duration in a production power plant. Many other designs are also pulsed.
What is a problem is that they simply measured the energy output of a small portion of fuel to the energy absorbed by that fuel. If you take into account things like the large energy losses in powering the lasers, they're actually pretty far from breakeven.
By contrast, the JET tokamak in the UK is expected by many to achieve real overall breakeven by 2020.
Add in 'with a practical mass budget' as well. Right now the best known way to produce power from fusion is to build a star, and put solar panels around it.
There seems to be a flurry of "fusion/energy breakthrough" press items recently. On the one hand it's extremely exciting, but on the other, I wonder if there's a more sinister motive behind all the press. Cui Bono?
BTW, there have been numerous proposed improvements over the Tokamak reactor type over the years, such as the "Stellarator" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator), most of them have proven too complex to be of practical use though.