A very optimistic story from Medium.
It’s long so I’m posting only a small excerpt.~ctm
Long considered a joke, or a pipe dream, fusion is suddenly making enormous leaps
Jan 3
The idea first lit up Dennis Whyte when he was in high school, in the remote reaches of Saskatchewan, Canada, in the 1980s. He wrote a term paper on how scientists were trying to harness fusion (the physical effect that fuels the stars) in wondrously efficient power plants on Earth. This is the ultimate clean-energy dream. It would provide massive amounts of clean electricity, with no greenhouse gases or air pollution. It would do it on a constant basis, unlike solar and wind. Whatever waste it created would be easily manageable, unlike today’s nuclear power plants. And fuel would be limitless. One of the main ingredients needed for fusion is abundant in water. Just one little gram of hydrogen fuel for a fusion reactor would provide as much power as 10 tons of coal.
Whyte got an A on that paper, but his physics teacher also wrote: “It’s too complicated.” That comment, Whyte says with a hearty laugh, “was sort of a harbinger of things to come.”
Indeed, over the next few decades, as Whyte mastered the finicky physics that fusion power would require and became a professor at MIT, the concept seemingly got no closer to becoming reality. It’s not that the science was shaky: It’s that reliably bottling up miniature stars, inside complex machines on Earth, demands otherworldly amounts of patience, not to mention billions and billions of dollars. Researchers, like Whyte, knew all too well the sardonic joke about their work: fusion is the energy source of the future, and it always will be.
That line took on an especially bitter edge one day in 2012, when the U.S. Department of Energy announced it would eliminate funding for MIT’s experimental fusion reactor. Whyte was angry about the suddenness of the news. “It was absolutely absurd — you can put that in your article — fucking absurd that happened with a program that was acknowledged to be excellent.” But above all, he was dismayed. Global warming was bearing down year after year, yet this idea that could save civilization was losing what little momentum it had.
Wendelstein 7-X fusion reactor in Germany, 2017. Photo: Picture Alliance/Getty
So Whyte thought about giving up. He looked for other things to focus on, “stuff that wasn’t as exciting, quite frankly,” but stuff that would be achievable. “Everyone understands delays in projects, and science hurdles you’ve got to overcome, but I saw fusion energy being used for something accelerating away from us,” he says. “You start getting pretty dejected when you realize, in your professional career, you’re never going to see this happen.”
As it turned out, Whyte never really walked away. Instead, he and his colleagues and graduate students at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center figured out a new angle. And last winter, MIT declared that Whyte’s lab had a fundamentally new approach to fusion and threw its weight behind their plan with an unusually public bet, spinning out a company to capitalize on it. An Italian oil company and private investors — including a firm funded by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos — put at least $75 million into the company, known as Commonwealth Fusion Systems [CFS]. The startup intends to demonstrate the workings of fusion power by 2025.
The recent progress is remarkable, says the founder of one startup developing fusion power. “The world has been waiting for fusion for a long time.”
Real, live, economically viable power plants could then follow in the 2030s. No joke. When I ask Whyte, who is 54, to compare his level of optimism now to any other point in his career, he says, simply: “It is at the maximum.”
But it’s not just MIT. At least 10 other startups also are trying new approaches to fusion power. All of them contend that it’s no longer a tantalizingly tricky science experiment, and is becoming a matter of engineering. If even just one of these ventures can pull it off, the energy source of the future is closer than it seems.
“It’s remarkable,” says David Kingham, executive vice chairman of Tokamak Energy, a British company whose goal is to put fusion power on the grid by 2030. “The world has been waiting for fusion for a long time.”
Imagine that I told you I was developing a special machine. If I put power into it, I could get 10 times as much out. Because of the undeniable laws of physics, I could show you on paper exactly why it should be a cost-effective source of vast amounts of electricity.
Oh, here’s the catch: My paper sketch would come true — especially the part about it being cost-effective — but only if I built the machine just right. Which might require materials that haven’t been invented yet. Until I perfected that design, my machine would use up more power than it produced. And I couldn’t get close to perfecting the design without spending years and years building expensive test machines that would reveal problems that I would try to address in subsequent versions.
If it seems crazy, well, that’s the story of fusion power.
Fusion definitely works. You see it every day. Our sun and other stars blast hydrogen atoms together with such intense force that their nuclei overcome their normal inclination to repel each other. Instead they fuse, sparking a reaction that transforms the hydrogen into helium and releases cosmic amounts of energy in the process.
We also have great paper sketches for fusion power machines. Fusion happens inside stars because of the crushing pressure created by their gravity. To generate that effect inside a fusion reactor, ionized gas — which is called plasma — must be heated and compressed by man-made forces, such as an ultra-powerful magnetic field. But whatever the method, there’s just one main goal. If you get enough plasma to stay hot enough for long enough, then you can trigger so much fusion inside it that a huge multiplier effect is unlocked. At that point, the energy that is released helps keep the plasma hot, extending the reaction. And there still is plenty of energy left over to turn into electricity.
The problem is that we’re still plugging away on predecessors to the machines that could generate that effect. Ever since the 1950s, scientists have used spherical or doughnut-shaped machines called tokamaks, including the one at MIT that lost funding a few years ago, to create fusion reactions in plasmas bottled up by magnetic fields. But no one has done it long enough — while also getting it hot enough and dense enough — to really tip the balance and get it going. Heating the plasma and squeezing it in place still takes more energy than you can harvest from it.
So, that’s the name of the game in fusion: to get past that point. ITER, a mega-billion-dollar reactor being built in France by an international consortium, is designed to do it and finally prove the concept. But ITER — which is also way behind schedule and over budget — overcomes the limitations of previous tokamaks by being enormous. It’s the size of 60 soccer fields, which probably isn’t an economical setup for power plants that the world will need by the tens of thousands.
ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) under construction. Photo: Christophe Simon/Getty
HT/Roger Knight
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Neutron embrittlement of the metals of the reactor vessel still seems like a likely show-stopper to me. Sure you can run it for awhile and prove more heat energy comes out than put in and make some net electricity from it, but then if you have junk the whole internal reactor structure in 90 days because you can’t stop neutrons from doing what high-speed neutrons do, then it’s an economic dead-end. The reactor structures themselves are so un-godly expensive to fabricate and build, you just can’t get to large scale economics needed for it to work.
What if it was built in space, with no containment vessel as such?
The magnetic compression field for the heated plasma is generated from a physical vessel of very specific shape. The vessel itself is the mechanical problem. The fusion high energy neutrons steadily will cause long-term degradation of the reactor materials; swelling, hardening, and nanometer-size material defects/failures that can lead to micrometer cracks and ultimate failure with time.
In fission reactors, very specific types of low-alloy steel, special considerations of weld locations, lots of steel thickness, and use of lots of water in the jacket between the fuel rods and vessels walls all works to attenuate and mitigate the fast neutron embrittlement problem. Fusion magnetic containment designs are limited in what they can do in this regard to attenuating the neutrons before they impact the reactor wall material.
Maybe if fusion reactor vessels can become inexpensive mass-produced commodity items, such that regular replacement is economical, then I could see it working on large scale. Such a large-scale power plant could have say 24 medium size fusion reactors with half or-so in constant reactor vessel replacement while the other half are running and making heat for electricity. The engineering and economics of such a commodity reactor design could be an interesting PhD thesis.
How much more difficult is aneutronic fusion to achieve?
O.. K… first develop the physics for such a thing. Fusion implies nuclear reactions. Nuclear reactions implies nuclear particles that must have enough energy to react with other nuclei to sustain a self-reaction. That is high energy particles. Fast neutrons folks. Gamma rays, damaging, deeply ionizing EM radiation . Bad stuff if you’re a biologic.
Let’s be clear here.
Nuclear energy is high energy stuff… like radiation, fast neutrons, highly radioactive nuclides… that’s where the energy to make steam to drive turbine of any size comes from. That is hard radiation folks. Lots of it.
We’re not talking unicorn farts here or magic pixie dust. This hard radiation stuff is seriously damaging to biologic molecules. It even damages metal containment structures over enough time without flowing water jacket shielding.
Duh.
There are plenty of fusion reactions that don’t produce many (or any) neutrons: Helium-3 is the most well-known example. The problem, as I understand it, is that those reactions are harder to start and sustain than the alternatives.
and helium-3 comes from where?
Please do the work that gets you to substantial (fusionable) quantities of He-3.
You just might learn something.
On the topic of the fuel for these reactors, the article states that:
“Just one little gram of hydrogen fuel for a fusion reactor would provide as much power as 10 tons of coal”
Implying that ordinary hydrogen is a suitable fusion reactor fuel.
I seem to recall that one needs deuterium and tritium.
That ordinary hydrogen is far too hard fuse. The one reaction that uses protium also requires boron, and this reaction is orders of magnitude harder to contain that deuterium and tritium reactions.
Is this wrong?
It should not be implied that ordinary hydrogen is fusion reactor fuel.
Just more spin and hot air.
Nowhere in this lengthy text do we learn the slightest details of this amazing break through, the “new angle” which will make this happen.
It’s just an empty puff piece , probably designed to secure more funding.
The situation does not seem to have changed from: ” fusion is the energy source of the future, and it always will be.”
“Nowhere in this lengthy text do we learn the slightest details of this amazing break through, the “new angle” which will make this happen.”
You have to click on the “Read the Full Story Here” link.
PS: Excuse me if you DID click there. (It seems to me that the full article provides lots of info on how the developer plans to make his dream work.
There’s supposed to be a lot of Helium-3 on the moon.
MarkW sez:
There’s supposed to be a lot of Helium-3 on the moon.
Bingo! And that’s why China is so interested in the far side of the moon….
/conspiracy mode
Stupid harder. Like 1000 times harder.
Lonnie, with multiple stupids trying very hard, you need to be more specific regarding who you are aiming your encouragement at.
Joel,
Do you suppose that there is the possibility to leverage some of the reactor vessel designs from the KIWI / NERVA rocket programs with respect to the fusion containment vessel construction?
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19910017902.pdf
Oak Ridge Labs has some experience (though it might be lost) with respect to the use of beryllium in manufacturing alloys ( I seem to recall papers in which they list that as a key component in their Molten Salt reactor designs/prototypes). Los Alamos Labs would likely have some good experience as well, since they did a lot of work on the KIWI / NERVA projects.
Beryllium should work. I saw it in a historical document.
Confused why you’re mentioning Kiwi/Nerva and Molten Salt Reactors. They were all fission powered, which involves slow neutrons, and so much gentler with the embrittlement (but it’s still there, of course).
I made reference to those specific reactor designs because, at least in the case of the NERVA project, they specifically made use of Beryllium metal alloys to modulate the neutron “flow”. While the velocity of neutron flow, or even the volume of neutron flow, would differ between a fission and fusion reaction; the reactor designs could be examined in light of what could be required for neutron emission modulation in a fusion reaction. Perhaps they would provide a working model (that didn’t require water) as a base to develop a containment vessel that would allow the reactor operate safely.
ORNL developed Hastelloy-N (nickel-molybdenum alloy) for molten salt reactors, but this was primarily for its resistance to salt corrosion up to 1500 C. Not likely to find a miracle alloy resistant to hard neutron bombardment. Solution is to protect vulnerable crystalline or amorphous lattice solids of the containing vessel by protecting with a fluid jacket of water or something else that is highly opaque to neutrons, but not disruptive of magnetic fields.
Here is a neat resource that discusses various materials used in construction of nuclear reactor vessels and the effects of radiation upon their atomic structures. It’s not super technical, but is quite a nice read.
https://www.nuceng.ca/candu/pdf/14%20-%20Nuclear%20Plant%20Materials%20and%20Corrosion.pdf
Could the containment problem be reduced by bringing the fuel to near absolute zero and ‘shooting’ it into a ‘combustion chamber’? In the combustion chamber, the near absolute temp fuel could be compacted more easily and then suddenly super heated to fusion.
The cooling chambers would continuously produce near absolute zero fuel, which then could be sent for ‘ignition’ in a stream, so the fusion could be a continuous process.
Or, is my near total lack of knowledge of the subject making my suggestion seem silly?
Like, say, 93 million miles away?
and then buried inside 400 megameters of hot dense plasma.
Why stop there?
We could then build some artificial habitats at a suitable distance to take advantage of the waste heat. Just make them large enough to generate a gravity strong enough to retain an atmosphere and we could settle excess population onto them. Something about 12000 km diameter should do it.
Then it would need to be sun sized- Oh! Somebody had already gone and done it, and looky here! We are orbiting around it!
Contrary to the emphasis in this exerpt, containing the plasma is now less of an issue than the materials science needed to engineer the plasma-facing inner surface of the vessel.
There have however been some recent advances in plasm-facing material science.
https://www.differ.nl/news/PFMC_17_will_be_organized_at_DIFFER
There’s almost always a pesky detail.
I’ve followed a number of promising technologies over the years. They all got past the pilot plant stage. None of them panned out. There was always something that made them uneconomical.
Don Lancaster has written a lot on the subject of inventing. He made the observation that, if a lot of people had been working on something for a long time, it wasn’t going to bear fruit any time soon. The low hanging fruit has almost certainly been picked and it is likely that some kind of breakthrough is necessary. In that light, I sure wouldn’t bet the farm on fusion.
Don’t forget, fusion is a relativistic technology. To any observer at any point in time, its implementation is always ten years away.
Iter uses beryllium (a somewhat poisonous material) for the plasma facing shield. I seem to recall the neutrons cause some of the materials used to become radioactive. So a double disposal problem:
https://www.iter.org/mach/Blanket
And beryllium, while a good neutron reflector to enhance fission criticality, is a nasty metal to do fabrication with. The nuclear weapons production industry realized this in the late 40’s and 50’s. In nuclear weapons, beryllium does its job just before and during the fission super-criticality assembly of the pit. After that it’s all vaporized and of little concern compared to the other things in the bomb that become radioactive and dangerous.
Google: berylliosis.
More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berylliosis
meh.
Be-Cu is commonly used in plastic injections molds as it makes the copper harder and has a good thermal conductivity.
Yes, there are hazards associated with manufacturing products with it, but there are methods to mitigate the risk.
Seem to recall Be-Al alloy tools were available (for applications needing very lightweight/non-spark tools) in catalogs when I was an engineer.
Beryllium is used in microwave oven magnetrons, which are refused by scrapyards and are not supposed to be dumped in landfills. Where are you supposed to get rid of the damn things?
Be is also a source for producing neutrons.
That would aid in producing neutrons for fusion.
Be was used in the initiator of early A-bombs, as a reliable neutron sourcce, rather than relying on a passing cosmic ray to start the chain reaction at the right a nanosecond.
In the article they do talk about their solution for neutron embrittlement. They intend to use a molten lithium salt as a shield using the lithium neutron reaction as a way to breed tritium.
The fusion plasma is held in a high vacuum under magnetic containment and compression. The liquid molten LiSalts are on the “outside” of the vessel. The Lithium is collecting the fast neutrons that make it through the reactor wall as well as transport the working heat of the reactor. Clearly this is needed to attenuate radiation beyond the immediate reactor and generate some useful tritium, but still does not alleviate the immediate neutron irradiation of the vessel wall itself.
The magnets of ITER are superconductor-magnets like the LHC a held at ultralow temps by supercritical helium cryogenics.
https://www.iter.org/mach/cryo
So many engineering problems to make a usable reactor to make net electricity.
Liquid Li on the hot W first wall shows promise:
Temperature dependence of liquid lithium film formation and deuterium retention on hot W samples studied by LID-QMS. Implications for future fusion reactors
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-4326/aaa8d0/pdf
MSRs are what fusion would like to be; cheap to build, compact. The Case for the Good Reactor https://spark.adobe.com/page/1nzbgqE9xtUZF/
Check out Seaborg.co. A 20’ 30-ton 250 MW thermal MSR.
At least three of the new small fusion programs use reactions that do not produce high energy neutrons. They use Boron + Proton to yield three alpha particles. The organizations are Tri-Alpha Energy (TAE)
https://tae.com/technology-overview/ And Laser Boron at the UNSW in Sydney:
https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/laser-boron-fusion-now-%E2%80%98leading-contender%E2%80%99-energy A third is LPPFusion: https://lppfusion.com/
The Boron+H fusion reaction requires 100X the temperatures (billions of degrees C) at the same confinement pressures as D+T, and D+T fusion. Thus the break-even point (Ein vs Eout) to still far, far away for Boron+H fusion. D+T break-even point is probably now achievable and somewhat beyond, which if the engineering point ITER is trying prove — more energy out than put in. Boron fusion may be low fast neutron, but many many decades away if at all.
Wrong Joel. LPPFusion has already achieved reactor temperatures around 3 Billion degrees C and held it long enough for a fusion reaction. The LPPFusion team is now working on implementing redesigns along with with various fuels culminating with the hydrogen-boron mix. The redesigns and fuels are intended to achieve required densities for net fusion. From LPP News:
“Following our initial experiments (this year) with pure deuterium, we will introduce a mixing gas, either nitrogen or neon, to start simulating the mixture of gases that we will have with our ultimate hydrogen-boron fuel…Then, in the Fall (2019) or beyond, we will start introducing our experiments with hydrogen-boron, pB11 fuel. Since this fuel burns faster and more energetically than deuterium, that will again boost our fusion yields and put us on the track to our goal of getting more energy out of the device than we put into it—net energy.”
https://lppfusion.com/plans-for-the-new-experiments/
Meni– The LPPFusion team has achieved two of three Lawson Criteria and you shrug and say “Big Deal”… It is a big deal even if you are unable to grasp the consequences and significance.
In claiming you are approaching net energy (i.e., break-even), are you including only the energy input of heating the plasma, or all lifecycle energy inputs, including those to collect and prepare the fuel, generate the containment magnetic field, super-conducting magnet cyrogenics, pumping loads, etc. ITER falsely claimed it would achieve break-even by ignoring all of these. http://news.newenergytimes.net/2017/01/12/the-selling-of-iter/
LPPFusion notes they has just received their shipment for the the proton-boron fuel they will load into their experimental reactor later this year. They HAVE already reached reactor temperatures of 3 Billion degrees C and maintained it long enough for a fusion reaction.
https://lppfusion.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/LPPF-Focus-Fusion-Report-December-24-2018.pdf
What does that mean, achieved 3 billion degrees reactor temperature?
So they bought some ultrapure boron.
And they have a device and a procedure that can create on a momentary basis the conditions for some nuclear reactions to occur.
That is not news.
They are working towards releasing .25 joules of energy?
I was just reading about a guy who built an operational fusor when he was 14 years old.
So what?
Um…they are in the planning stage of working their way up to 1.0 joules from 0.25 joules.
And someone thinks this means they got more energy than they put in?
The issue here with this particular approach, besides for ignoring all the work and energy to create the conditions for the test to be performed, is scalability.
Hint: Add a whole bunch of handwavium and eliminate all traces of hohumium, then send out a press release mentioning a carbon free future a bunch of times, and this will really be going somewhere.
As it is, the hype factor is thousands of orders of magnitude too low to even warm a cup of coffee, or get a major media mention as the salvation of mankind being just around the corner.
This is not the final state of the FF-1 reactor… you don’t seem to understand the invention and development cycle… the scaling laws are enormous and the steps that are being taken to hit those milestones are discussed in detail on the LPPFusion website… this is not 12 years and $50 B away… it’s in the final stages this year to hit the fusion mark…
Nothing however is guaranteed… that’s why they do the experiments … we should have a pretty clear idea of whether the DPF approach is viable within months.
That’s why the FF-1 reactor isn’t being hyped; but nor are blanket pronouncements that it will fail at all justified.
Among the highest ranking LPPF officers are its PR hack and investor relations flack.
https://lppfusion.com/team/
Not the sort of team which inspires confidence, unless of the con man variety.
What are you babbling about?
The roster of officers is dominated by veteran physicists, EEs and computer scientists.
Pretty crude smear job. Based on nothing …
Posa,
Apparently you didn’t even look at their own link.
The smear is all yours, as anyone clicking on the link can see.
‘you just can’t get to large scale economics needed for it to work.’
Not to mention jumping over everyone who’s going to try and ban it.
Because the conditions required to bring about proton-proton fusion, no reactor designs or experiments use this reaction. It may be the worst choice possible.
Even in the sun, most of the time that two protons do fuse, they then split back into two protons.
It is estimated that even under the conditions inside the center of the core of the sun, on average it takes a billion years for a proton to fuse to another.
LPPF is using proton-boron fusion–very different from proton-proton. The reactions go very fast, not very slow as with pure hydrogen.
Dr Evil may have one answer to readily available and clean energy that is not nuclear.
His one word hint:
https://youtu.be/yVo1S52xdpI?t=5
I wish him luck, but..
“Global warming was bearing down year after year, yet this idea that could save civilization was losing what little momentum it had.”
Unless this is just shameless pandering to rich, stupid people, I doubt that he has the smarts to pull it off.
I was about to post something similar. Mastered the physics, eh? I think not.
“shameless pandering to rich, stupid people”
Face it, that’s where a lot of money is. It’s not a reflection on his intelligence if he’s doing that.
Yes, that was my point, sort of.
“if he is doing that”
And if he is not?
I’d be willing to bet that the program that got axed in 2012 was pure ‘Grant Trough’ Science, guaranteed to never fail or push the expectations.
Sounds like even they admit that being forced off their asses was what they needed to progress.
~¿~
Hahaha. We all knew fusion would work since the end of the first Back to the Future!
DANG!!! It used to be 10 years out, and now it’s 12 YEARS OUT!
Like the end of arctic ice?
Well, it can’t be a sealed system. You have to get fusion products out and new fusionable (sp?) materials in. You need a way to transfer the heat produced by the fusion reaction out to run turbines. Then there’s the whole atomic displacement issue inside the reaction vessel itself. I hear “lots of progress has been made” but nothing of substance.
You probably also need to add nuclear fusion has also been reached countless times by a number of the reactors but none have been able to reach self sustainability point. It takes a lot of energy to contain the fusion and you can’t make enough power to ever reach breakpoint.
Your article also touches on the big reason for recent interest in that you talk about materials that don’t exist. Advances in QM have allowed for for materials in the last 10 years that were traditionally though of as impossible. We have metamaterials that can break almost every classical law you can think of and that is a game changer for fusion designs.
We just need a bigger government commitment (like WWII, the Apollo program, etc.) to create unobtainium for use as the vessel wall. /sarc off
Nature has solved the fusion problem…the Sun. And we have cheap and sustainable ways of capturing the resultant energy, Photovoltaics and Wind (as well as various methods of storage). Why do governments continue to pursue Fusion? Solar and Wind is distributed power thus increasing human freedom, Fusion (and Fission) is centralized, thus reducing human freedom, the main goal of all governments.
LOL….You were joking…riiiiight ?
I’ve actually got a fully working Fusion Reactor design I’ve been working on for a few years. Everything is already spec’ed out. I’ve just got a few materials issues to finalize.
First, I’ll need a room temperature superconductor, preferably one that can be extruded as wire.
Second, I’ll need a material with a Moe’s hardness rating of 12.4 or higher, but as ductile as copper.
Finally I’ll need someone to create artificial gravity.
From there, it’ll be easy.
~¿~
Artificial gravity is easy. That’s what you have every time you fly in an airplane.
Unless the reactor design can induce the plasma to confine itself and then pinch until fusion is achieved… which is exactly the design of Dense Plasma Focus. Much of this design already works.
See LPPFusion.com for video animation and published results.
I’ve snuck a few LENR references in lately. I think it has more likelihood of making an impact than the fusion systems currently being evaluated. If you missed them, try https://isciencefoundation.org/safire
LENR is no longer one of the “in 20 years” we’ll have power members. Real power is being generated now and throughly documented. see: http://brillouinenergy.com/ for an example of one approach, there are others.
How about instead of a website of a company, you show us the link to a video of power being produced?
Thorough documentation is not what is needed.
What is needed is proof, that is observable and tangible and can be shown to people.
A you tube video of the apparatus in operation should be very simple to make if there is such an apparatus in operation.
A little deeper in the site you would be able to see the results of testing of the reactors and the 2x gain over input power in the output. You could also see the temperatures at which the reactions take place. There are also reviewed papers available for download. Failing that, I’m sure it would appear to be another “we’re almost there” paper.
Ya I want to see a video showing electrons produced so I can count them as they go by that’s the only proof I will take. Do I need the tag?
A sarc tag?
I take it you are ridiculing the notion that something more than an assertion is required, if serious people are to believe in the reality of some magical effect that no one can demonstrate while other people are watching?
Just say “Hey, it is well documented and these guys have a plant up and running that is making power, and here is the proof (posts link which leads to a countdown clock for something which will happen in a few weeks!), so there!”
How about a bet?
I will bet you any number of thousands of dollars you want to specify that no one will show any proof whatsoever, or even evidence, of anyone making electricity from low energy nuclear reactions, cold fusion, or anything similar, at any time.
Name a date and we can discuss odds. For January 31st, the date of that countdown zero hour, the chance is zero and I call BS and I dare you and challenge you to put your money where your mouth is.
No tags needed because I mean what I am saying.
Man up, iron man…it is only money.
I went to the Brillouin web site. Not much detail, so I started going through the FAQ page. One of the more interesting FAQs linked to the “experimental results page” which, when I clicked, was not there.
I can bullshit better than *that* myself.
Andreas Rossi and his E-Cat are still hanging around, though I haven’t been keeping up with him. One update is at https://e-catworld.com/2019/01/01/lenr-in-2019/
How about this article:
https://phys.org/news/2019-01-scientists-stabilizes-fusion-plasmas.amp
Now they are reviewing papers that they wrote in 1983 to highlight the latest technology trends. So, back then they already knew that fusion would be a commercial reality by 2013. Now that we’ve been enjoying cheap abundant fusion power for lo these past 5 years…what’s that? It’s still 30 years away? I don’t get it. It’s almost as if a whole bunch of scientists have made a living on an incredibly expensive Rube Goldberg contraption for their entire careers, could that be? Surely you don’t think that there could be anything improper here? I mean actually some of the original fusion scientists from the 50’s probably had children who have died since this project started.
“the U.S. Department of Energy announced it would eliminate funding for MIT’s experimental fusion reactor… So Whyte thought about giving up. … Instead, he figured out a new angle.”
Having the right bait is always important
The important question is, if this works, will the Greens allow it to be counted as renewable energy or not. After all, we don’t count large scale hydro as renewable, at least in CA.
The Greens loved natural gas as the Energy of Future when it was projected to become increasingly scarce and expensive in the 1980 and 1990’s.
Now they attempt to block LNG export from the US as they see this virtually unlimited supply from fracking as a threat to their real agenda: making expensive energy – and thus curtailment of capitalism.
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/346604-court-rejects-greens-challenge-to-texas-natural-gas-export-project
” Joel O’Bryan
January 9, 2019 at 8:09 pm
Now they attempt to block LNG export from the US as they see this virtually unlimited supply from fracking as a threat to their real agenda: making expensive energy – and thus curtailment of capitalism.”
And thereby curtail the generation of wealth.
Thirty years out? Not a chance, maybe 130. Soon enough We’ll have 1,000’s of fission small scale modular reactor’s to carry us through until then (we just need to stop wasting money on wind/solar/bio-fuels).
Just think of what will happen to global warming with all of these thousands of little suns spread over the surface of the earth! Future Luddites will have many a field day protesting this source of energy.
Why don’t we just do molten salt thorium reactors first which we proved worked at Oak Ridge in the 60’s.
Click bait headline. Nowhere in the article explained how fusion power have overcome the input/output energy barrier .. and becoming a reality soon. Sorry state of journalism
How about the problem of then paying back for the cost of the machine at a scale that makes the initial investment approach being trivial?
Fossil fuels built an entire industrialized world economy, using the energy left over after that which was used to obtain the materials and built the power plants.
As with wind and solar, it is a long way from creating more energy than was put in, to making enough to easily make more of them using part of the profits and energy obtained, with plenty left over.
Can we build wind turbines using just wind turbine energy, and create an industrial economy on what is left over?
These guys think creating more energy than was put in, for a few nanoseconds and after years of prepping for those few nanoseconds, is a huge success.
Several years ago it was breathlessly announced via press releases that company was few short years away from marketing a compact fission reactor That it was all but a done deal.
Funny how we have not heard back from that venture.
We are now back to giant multibillion dollar contraptions that could lead to something useful within a few decades.
And ten years ago it seemed very likely that we were on the verge of a renewed building spree of next generation fission power plants. But then a earthquake caused a mishap at a very old and comically misengineered nuclear reactor complex, which had some very well identified and easily solvable but potentially catastrophic flaws in the backup systems. And that one single issue was blown out of all proportion, demagogued and fearmongered ad nauseum, and overnight blew up the plans to build more fission power plants all over the world!
Except that there are still dozens being built and even more planned
http://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx
Just notso much in the UK, US or EU.
Imagine though if instead of wind turbines and solar collectors, all of that money and effort had instead gone towards building nuclear power stations.
So after checking, I see we have 99 nuke power stations in the US that provide just under 20% of our power.
Most of these must be getting kind of old.
We have two new reactors in the US, but 34 have been permanently decommissioned, which I suppose is not news to you. 20 more are expected to close within a decade or so I think.
But 74 have had their license extended or the extension applied for.
50 is better than nothing, but really it is keeping power cheap here that is my main concern.
Having more nuclear generation means that nat gas likely stays cheaper for longer.
After TMI, over 100 US plants, many already under construction, were cancelled, and not a single new one had ground broken from 1977 until 2013. In 2017 two new reactors under construction in SC were cancelled, after 4 years of work had already been done.
Similar story in GA, but there the problem is Westinghouse went bankrupt.
Having a hard time finding out exactly how many projects were cancelled after Fukashima, but the number should have been zero given the particulars of that issue.
It’s always ten to twenty years off. There is always some pesky detail still to be worked out in practice. A really big one about 93 million miles away in space could be a goer.
We’ve been able to initiate many small ones here on earth also, without containment.
“without containment”? That “big one 93 million miles away uses gravity as a containment mechanism. It’s not “without containment”. So maybe the approach should be figuring out how to make large gravity fields with out requiring much mass.
ITER (“The Way” in Latin) is one of the most ambitious energy projects in the world today.
Fusion is the energy source of the Sun and stars. In the tremendous heat (150,000,000° Celsius) and gravity at the core of these stellar bodies, hydrogen nuclei collide, fuse into heavier helium atoms and release tremendous amounts of energy in the process.
The tokamak is an experimental machine designed to harness the energy of fusion. Inside a tokamak, the energy produced through the fusion of atoms is absorbed as heat in the walls of the vessel. Just like a conventional power plant, a fusion power plant will use this heat to produce steam and then electricity by way of turbines and generators.
In 1997, a European tokamak JET produced 16 MW of fusion power from a total input heating power of 24 MW. ITER is designed to produce a ten-fold return on energy, or 500 MW of fusion power from 50 MW of input heating power.
ITER’s First Plasma (the first time the machine will be powered on for testing) is scheduled for December 2025.
Achieving a deuterium-tritium plasma in which the reaction is sustained through internal heating is planned for 2035.
So don’t hold your breath.
fusion is the energy source of the future, and it always will be — last week My son [who did MS in Nuclear Physics in Ann Arbor, Michigan] visited India had chat on problems in electricity related issues. Then he told the same as the present story — fusion is the energy source of the future, it is going to be reality in few years time then all aspects of pollution, global warming will find a place in a dustbin.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Jeev,
I wish your son well. But if your son wants a well paying job with a future, I recommend he concentrate on fission. Fusion is for bombs and the sun. If he wants to study those… then fusion.
But… If he wants to make difference in people’s lives with affordable energy… then fission.
My son is not working in those areas.
sjreddy
Fusion output exceeds kinetic energy imput
Inertial confinement by laser implosion is competing with magnetic plasma containment. Laser implosion by inertial confinement has taken a major step forward by showing fusion energy output greater than the laser caused kinetic energy input by imploding shell around frozen deuterium or polycrystalline diamond.
See US National Ignition Facility developments this last year.
Nominally they need about another order of magnitude from energy input to fusion ignition and another for commercial operation.
Le Pape, S., Hopkins, L.B., Divol, L., Pak, A., Dewald, E.L., Bhandarkar, S., Bennedetti, L.R., Bunn, T., Biener, J., Crippen, J. and Casey, D., 2018. Fusion energy output greater than the kinetic energy of an imploding shell at the National Ignition Facility. Physical Review Letters, 120(24), p.245003.
https://dspace.mit.edu/openaccess-disseminate/1721.1/116411
Sadly, there is no conceivable method to move that laboratory energy (heat from radiation) to make steam to make electricity. It’s a science project with no obvious scalability to a sustainable net power generation. Cool physics, but of no commercial practical value.
Energy output greater than the kinetic energy input, but not of the enormous amount of energy that produced both the fuel and the laser blast in the first place. This term is almost as misleading as those climate models.
Wish it were not so but…
sounds like a lot of the same old, same old.
Yeah, uh huh, when the tocamac fires up and generates 1 megawatt, send me an email. This crap needs to be shut down. Fix nuclear and make all the reactors exactly the same, so one something happens to one, the others can all be upgraded the same.
Fusion Power… LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL
/Choking on laughter.
Efficient, Cost Effective Fusion Power is 100 years or more away and maybe always will be. Line up Green Energy for a cost comparison – it’s far ahead of Fusion Power.
Let’s get real and invest in Nuclear Energy for the next 100 years while they get Fusion Power problems worked out. Nuclear energy WORKS. There is nothing stopping us from building highly reliable nuclear power plants that are relatively safe and effective.
Realistic assessment seem to concede that 50 years, at a minimum, is more like it.
It is all a big if, and anyone who says different, IMO, is thinking wishfully and thus not credible.
Something which has never, after billions of dollars and decades of effort, managed to come even close to doing what it needs to do in order for large scale power generation, has to be called what it is: Theoretical.
At best.
I also agree with what you said about fission power.
That people and nations cannot muster the will to build nuclear reactors, and in fact are mostly being decommissioned as a matter of policy by some states and even entire large countries, is truly pathetic.
Germany and the majority of the German people, seem to be genuinely convinced that CAGW is a catastrophe which is crashing down upon us as we speak, but even this nation of supposedly highly educated and intelligent people, are dissembling nuclear power plants, burning brown coal, not reducing emissions, making power incredibly expensive rather than cheaper, and in general not behaving even somewhat rationally or logically.
50 years is too long for any known principle advance into deployed capability. At some point, 15 to 30 years from now, the first of the Artificial General Intelligence computer will appear and quickly improve itself. Within a few years of whenever that occurs, any engineering problems between NASA Technology Readiness Level 2 and 9 will fall quickly.
I am a big science fiction fan too.
I love reading these articles – I decided to go to the University of Texas in 1964 in Physics, because they were starting work on a Tokamak Reactor. I wanted to be in on the “ground floor” and looked forward to the future (about 20 years out, they were saying). Fortunately, I switched to Math after two years, and didn’t go down the Fusion drain. Hard to believe that was 54 years ago.
However, I always have best wishes for anybody still willing to try. Some of the startups seem to have high confidence, and at least they are attracting private investors now, which is much more likely to find something practical, if it can be done at all. In the meantime, let’s get Molten Salt, and other fission technologies into scale production, and bridge the gap…
Biggest source of Helium-3 is on the moon. China just landed on the moon and testing the soil. Being Left Behind-again
And what is He-3 good for? Ask yourself some very basic questions Pft.
Lunar He-3 is extremely diffuse, literally useless resource on the Moon. It’s 268,000 miles from Earth. The energy needed to mine it, concentrate it, and then bring it to Earth for a fusion reactor to make energy here far exceeds any thing it would deliver.
He-3 is a neutron absorber, great for making detectors of Pu and U natural neutron emissions at the borders to guard against terrorist nukes. Here on Earth, we have copious amounts of Deuterium in seawater that makes a far better fusion source than He-3.
It’s like someone sees some fiction crap on some SciFi movie or TV show and it magically becomes like fairy dust for Earth.
Folks, we need energy here on Earth, not on the Moon or in orbit. Here on Earth. Duh.
Joel, you sound intelligent. Now leave out the insults and sarcasm from your comments.
China landed on the moon in 2018 and tested the soil.
And that demonstrates we are being left behind…again?
Huh?
We went there, sent people there, many times. We have a car there.
We brought back huge amounts of the “soil” (it aint soil) and rocks.
And we did it…drum roll please…wait for it…nearly 40 year ago.
Then stopped going back because, well…because it costs a huge amount of money and there is nothing there but rocks.
Newsflash…we have several landers walking around testing the soil on Mars, and other countries have sent probes to comets and asteroids and tested the soil.
We have probes that have left the heliosphere, and one has landed on the moon of a as giant planet.
And taken close of pictures of the rest.
Left behind?
When they claim and start terraforming Venus, I will agree with you.
Correction…nearly 50 years ago.
MY GOD! WE’RE LOSING THE HELIUM-3 RACE TO THE CHINESE ?!?!
We must not allow a 3He gap!
There a growing number of scientists that dispute the fusion theory of the sun.
Ha ha.. you funny man.
Those are not scientists. They are séance-tists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9ance
Nucleosynthesis in the cores of stars, and the chain of events that leads to such phenomenon as planetary nebulae, supernovae (and the nucleosynthesis therein), the Hertzsprung-Russel Diagram, not to mention the detailed elucidations of the various processes that give us a very good approximation of the current observed makeup of everything from our own solar system to the observable galactic nebulae…well, all of it taken as a whole, means that any idea that would supersede it would not only have to prove all of what is currently though to be the case to be false, but also provide an equally lucid and coherent explanation for everything we have learned from our observations of the sun and of the cosmos.
Probably a higher bar than trying to prove that the age of the Earth is less than 10,000 years, or that dinosaurs and other fossil, and the Grand Canyon and such, etc, are left over evidence of Noah’s flood.
There are people who doubt that the HIV virus causes AIDS, and others that think vaccines are a scam.
alan,
Please name these “scientists” and state what they say.
Stellar fusion was a theory or hypothesis in 1920. Now it’s an observation, ie a scientific fact.
Neutron Repulsion! The sun is made of Iron!
And the world will be saved by Steam!
○¿●
I wonder what Alan imagines causes the solar wind?
“Finally, Fusion Power Is About to Become a Reality”
“The recent progress is remarkable, says the founder of one startup developing fusion power.”
Well startup companies looking for funding would say that, wouldn’t they.
I didn’t read about any fundamental breakthroughs in the article.
I will remain hopeful but not holding my breath.
It still could be possible that a working fusion power plant is a long way off -not in our lifetime.
I noticed one thing that made everything else said sound just a LITTLE disingenuous…
“Real, live, economically viable power plants could then follow in the 2030s…”
The 2030s.
That sounds like a few decades off to me.
And then there is that little word “could”.
Toss in a sprinkling of “if(s)”, and it sounds just like it has always sounded.
I mean literally JUST like it has always sounded.
As for the optimism of the people who have devoted their lives to this…well, if they were not optimistic they would not be still working on it or talking about it, would they?
Optimism is like an opinion…it is not evidence. And it says nothing about likelihood. It is more or less a state of mind, an emotion. Humans have in in abundant quantity. Most of us were optimistic that the end of the cold war meant the end of economic dead end of the soul crushing economic system called socialism. And that 20 years with no warming would put an end to the nonsense about CO2 being the thermostat of the atmosphere.
Anyway, how much confidence should we have in the opinions and optimism of a scientist, who has for an argument against diverting funds away from fusion research, this subtle hint that maybe he is somewhat less gifted with scientific insight that might be hoped:
“But above all, he was dismayed. Global warming was bearing down year after year, yet this idea that could save civilization was losing what little momentum it had.”
What exactly is “bearing down on us”? Save civilization?
Sounds like someone who may be slightly given to delusions of grandeur and narcissism.
If. Could. 2030s.
*not holding breathe*