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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The various LENR experiments are fascinating. However, if this technology is so relatively easy to do compared to hot fusion, why isn’t it being investigated more? There are one or two companies that claim to have commercial products but they don’t seem to be in widespread use.
The problem as I see it is that in academic circles today, science has become the dog that is wagged by the tail of mathematics. If no mathematical proof of a concept exists, then that concept may NOT be investigated in the lab. End of story. Which is a silly attitude, and may be denying us the chance to make new discoveries.
Most new discoveries, after all, start of with someone noticing that an effect doesn’t fit within our current model of the universe. A good example was the observation of retrograde orbiting of planets, one of the key factors in the ousting of the geocentric universe concept.
LENR would be great.
Some people seem to think it is a reality, but if so, where are the you tube videos of the people making it work?
Some people seem to think fusors or a polywell machine is the answer.
Maybe wishful thinking, maybe something there.
It is not hard to believe that if fusion power is ever a reality (if!), it will be something simple, rather than a gigantic warehouse sized, and incredibly complicated, and exquisitely finicky, rubegoldbergian dealio.
It should not go unsaid that LENR was long ago investigated with the goal of confirming the results several decades ago.
After many attempts by labs all over the world, and several concerted efforts to answer definitively whether there was any “there”, there…the efforts were dropped.
Because no one, not even the people who discovered the alleged phenomenon, could reproduce the results when people were watching, the cameras were rolling, and confirmation would constitute “proof”.
On top of all of that, there is no explanation for how it could be that fusion occurred without any release of gamma radiation or neutrons. IOW, if it actually was happening, why aren’t those people dead?
And why are there no detectable nuclear fusion byproducts?
In short, it is simply not true that LENR has been investigated.
Read through the Wikipedia article on the subject, which includes many links to sources that can be looked at one by one.
Then show where or why there is any reason not to dismiss the claims?
Is it possible something is going on there?
Sure.
But to be called science, a result has to be able to be repeatedly and reliably reproduced when an identical procedure is followed.
LENR fails that test. There has been no confirmation.
Poltergeists might be real…plenty of people claim to have seen or heard them, but unless someone offers some solid evidence, why should anyone believe it?
Just because someone made an assertion?
Your comments show that you have a down on LENR, because those tests have been repeated and there is anomolous heating experienced, at least that is according to NASA & DARPA.
It is obviously not of Nuclear quantites and it remains to be seen if it will ever be worth anything commercially.
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/sensors/PhySen/docs/IPAG12_Presentation.pdf
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/sensors/PhySen/docs/LENR_at_GRC_2011.pdf
https://nari.arc.nasa.gov/node/259
http://coldfusion3.com/blog/new-pentagon-report-on-lenr
Googling NASA & LENR shows up many articles.
By “have a down on”, I take it you mean to say you think I am predisposed to dismiss the whole thing?
I do not.
I would love to see it happen.
But after looking into it again several times in recent years, there is no convincing evidence that the few and scattered reports of anomalous heating cannot be explained by sloppy work, faulty equipment (neutron detectors that fail when they get hot), spiking or outright fraud(tritium detection), etc.
If other people follow an identical procedure and cannot replicate a result, what does that mean?
In this case, even the people getting the original result have not been able to replicate it with any reliability. After several weeks, sometimes some of the setups seem to have some period of time where heat is anomalously produced, but without the hail of neutrons (fatal dose expected with even 1 watt of power production), or gamma radiation, or other reaction products noted…just some heat.
Which could come from lots of places…like maybe hydrogen and oxygen recombining.
We are supposed to be skeptical.
A result from a benchtop apparatus that cannot be replicated by anyone who tries it is not highly credible.
Thirty years.
In thirty years, where is the beef?
A video?
Someone getting power from nowhere?
Believing something no one can demonstrate is not science.
Interesting thread and thanks to Mr. O’Bryan for the insightful commentary. I have no expertise in this field, but robust physical containment is kind of a table stakes requirement and I now grok the complexity of this challenge far better then I did before.
Still, while daunting, I remain hopeful. Yeah it may take a 100 or 500 years, but I’d bet on success and sooner rather than later. Three reasons:
1. Knowledge is growing exponentially due to an ever growing pool of educated players (and competing startups) and technological advances (computing, AI, massive data aquisition/storage/processing technology, material sciences, etc.).
2. There is a massive financial opportunity for anyone who succeeds. The fossil fuel suppliers won’t like it but capitalism works and visions of being the next Rockefeller are good inspiration.
3. Ultimately we need a clean terawatt class power technology so that our many billions can all live a lifestyles with the luxuries that abundent and inexpensive energy provides (HVAC, refrigeration, water purification and transport, industrial scale manufacturing, mass transit, communications, etc., etc., etc.). So many will be motivated to continue the pursuit.
All that said however, you are all correct that while we pursue utopia we are foolhardy to ignore nuclear fission and natural gas, which for all of their shortcomings are the most benign and affordable terawatt scale technologies we have. And as the old adage goes a bird in the hand is worth a Tokamak in the bush : )
Looks like a Stellarator is worth 2 Tokomaks.
The reason for fusion is energy flux density. This is the reason the greenie backwardness is not only daft, but genocidal. The stepwise increase in energy flux density matches the population increase. Any attempt to reverse this, as Dr. Schellnhuber well knows, is an attempt to go to 1 billion persons. Even to attempt to stay still with no advance will cause the same.
A Manhattan program (which gave us fission) for Fusion is the key to this.
I’m convinced that the future of power is molten salt nuclear reactors. And there is no ntrinsic difficulty in handling “nuclear wastes” which aren’t wastes at all – they contain enormous amount of residual thermal energy which could produce enormous quantities of desalinated sea water at very little cost. As for molten salt nuclear reactors, they can be constructed for roughly $2000 per KW, and produce power very cheaply – roughly $44 per MWhr or 4.4 cents per kWhr. The plants can be built very quickly, located anywhre, are every bit as safe as any fusion reactor would ever be and doesn’t require any unknown technolgy – the technology has been around since the dawn of nuclear power, but impractical moderators and a means of fighting its corrosive effects on the reactor core material have been the hangup. I am extremely skeptical that fusion would ever be economicaly competitive with small modular molten salt reactors.
“The future” is not a static thing- it is a moving target. One thing is sure, each technological platform means a jump in energy flux density. Look at wood to oil to coal, to fission. After fusion, antimatter beckons – that’s our horizon right now.
With each step the “waste” of the previous platform becomes a raw material – fission isotopic waste with a fusion torch will be very valuable.
True. “The future isn’t what it used to be.”
It would be great to live in a world filled with well educated people, who are, if not highly knowledgeable, are at the very least logical, rational, and intellectually honest.
People whom, if they were not actually trained in any specific fields of scientific inquiry, at the very least knew what the word “science” means.
People who know enough to see the absurdity in sentences like “D. Nyer Guy does not believe in the science”, and who do not call anyone who is not a gullible and dogmatic warmista ideologue a “climate denier”.
We do not live in that world.
The vast majority of people in the word are innumerate, scientifically illiterate, and disappointingly miseducated.
And large numbers of those who have actual science credentials are the very ones who seem most readily given to fearmongering, credulous and one sided views, stupefying levels of confirmation bias, and selective attention to information to a degree that is actually incomprehensible.
Far from pursuing utopia, we seem to be led in many countries by people who are blind and deaf to reality, and we give credence not to the logical and rational among the scientific literati, but to rent seeking frauds and miseducated cranks, and our institutions of higher education have been handed over to socialist misanthropes.
You have just described the UK parliament?!
All parliaments.
Not saying Congress is any better, but the US institutions have a chance of breaking out of this swamp. Sputnik 1 and now Sputnik 2 tend to have that effect.
Two thinks worry me, the effect of the internal radiation on the metal of the container , and the sheer need of a steady supply of a great deal of electricity to keep the magnetic field going.
Maybe sometime in the future they will overcome all of the problems, but right now we need lots of energy and we know that the old designs for old fashioned nuclear works and works well.
We now have designs that can use the fuel rods used by other reactors, to extract the last bit from the rods, but even with the older waste, so what. Australian scientist perfected “Simrock” and we have a stable crust in this country. Drill a deep hole, problem solved.
Seems no-one is doing a little fact checking here. Look up Friedwardt Winterberg – he shows the difference between NIF Laser and inertial confinement, just one of many refs :
https://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/10/prweb12229892.htm
His book on the “bomb” (where fusion works well) shows there is no “secret” out there, only a political resistance. It requires a Manhattan Program approach which Trump could invoke. It looks like a national emergency that NASA is grounded, fusion is only a M.I.C “secret”, and no US mass transit or proper health care exists. Trump can invoke the famous Clause 8, National Credit, for this, no matter what the FED says.
And China’s Cheng’e 4 is after He3 on the Moon. A thermos can of that stuff leaves all other fuels in the dust.
Make no mistake , Chang’e 4 on the Moon with He3 on its agenda is the Sputnik of the 21’st Century.
Golly?
For real?
Wait…what did you say?
Sputnik 1 only beep’d – a beep heard around the world.
It was heard around the world because it, and not only the beep, went, literally, around the world.
Chang’e 4 too, never seen except for the L2 Halo relay.
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/2018/20180615-queqiao-orbit-explainer.html
So around the world, Moon and L2 !
What we were never told (so I read – maybe it’s true) that the second satellite the Russians sent into space was a 3500 pound object the size of a car. This was a demonstration that a ballistic missile was alive and well.
Maybe someone can prove or refute the claim. A beep from space is one thing, a working Big Dumb Booster with a nuke on it is quite another. As many here will know, NASA’s hostility to the BDB made their progress slow, expensive and ultimately, is the reason Russia dominates launches today.
Crispin in Waterloo
From Wikipedia.
Sputnik 2 (Russian pronunciation: [ˈsputʲnʲɪk], Russian: Спутник-2, Satellite 2), or Prosteyshiy Sputnik 2 (PS-2, Russian: Простейший Спутник 2, Elementary Satellite 2) was the second spacecraft launched into Earth orbit, on 3 November 1957, and the first to carry a living animal, a Soviet space dog named Laika, who died a few hours after the launch.[2]
Launched by the U.S.S.R., Sputnik 2 was a 4-meter (13 foot) high cone-shaped capsule with a base diameter of 2 meters (6.6 feet) that weighed around 500 kg, though it was not designed to separate from the rocket core that brought it to orbit, bringing the total mass in orbit to 7.79 tons.[3] It contained several compartments for radio transmitters, a telemetry system, a programming unit, a regeneration and temperature-control system for the cabin, and scientific instruments. A separate sealed cabin contained the dog Laika.
Engineering and biological data were transmitted using the Tral D telemetry system, transmitting data to Earth for a 15-minute period during each orbit. Two photometers were on board for measuring solar radiation (ultraviolet and x-ray emissions) and cosmic rays. A 100 line television camera provided images of Laika.
Not a 3500 lb “satellite” but still quite large at 500 kg (1100 pounds). But, more important, was the fact that it did carry a pressurized chamber holding the dog, and the dog did survive (for a little while, then died of heat stress and possibly CO2 poisoning). The radio and batteries were near-duplicates of the original tiny Sputnik sphere + 4 radio telemeter antennas, the whole “satellite” was a cone holding the tip, the radio sphere, and the pressure vessel. But its length was long enough to carry the nuclear weapons of the day, its weight, more than 20 times what US planned satellites weighed, and it worked. The rocket was also simple, and was left attached to the cone rather than carry the weight and complex booster-separation mechanism to eject the rocket and tanks once fuel was exhausted. Again, simple – but it worked.
And that was what was needed at the time by the Soviets and their R-7 booster.
Ironically, their initial success provided the “kick in the pants” needed to get American politicians and the military-industrial complex off of the collective tailpipes to get energized and beat the Soviets. First to the moon, then technically, then economically in the mid-90’s. Complacency – then as now, beat the Americans in the long run.
Just a thought regarding fusion. We already have a very stable and reliable fusion reactor the only challenge is how do we capture the excess energy it produces and turn that energy into positive helpful endeavours on Earth.
Most of us have concluded, the best and the simplest method is to use the stores of that fusion reactor converting the thermal energy into mechanical energy via engines and turbine power plants producing electricity.
A few Luddites seem to have convinced some decision makers particularly in Western countries, this is too simple and too effective to be allowed. These fusion harvesting alternative energy types lets call them Greens, think wind turbines and solar panels are the better option for humankind (did you notice what I did there).
These low level fusion energy collectors are fine in the right places, but won’t sustain growing economies and growing populations, all needing more stuff.
I suspect the Greens will ensure Earth based fusion never gets adopted, because it is too useful if it was ever achieved.
The lowering of energy availability is what the UN is focused on not increasing it.
The Trump Admin. downgraded the EU to NGO status without even bothering to inform Brussels – the same should go for the UN.
Great irony – attemps at world gov’t treated like private firms! Hilarious.
The Chinese are currently building coal powered electricity plant hand over fist. Not only in China but all over Africa and other countries too.
Maybe they also think fusion is 50 years away and always will be.
Come to think of it, maybe they also think that the global warming catastrophe is, as always predicted, about 10 years away and always will be too.
The fact we can get in to one of these experimental fusion reactors and take pictures, putting aside the high energy neutron problem, suggests these are toys with no serious commercial application prospect in the near future.
Some tired CERN tech left his ‘petit-dejeuner’ on the ring one day not long ago. Firing up the microwave system caused a huge supercooled He degassing (explosion) delaying for many months all work.
Still, I would not call it a toy – leave no crumbs please.
I still call it a toy as that He explosion didn’t breach containment, and was able to be determined afterwards.
Chinese fusion tool EAST pushes past 100 million degrees a record, 7 times the estimated Sun core temp.
Why it cannot be done
“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.“
But,
“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”
Here is where it falls apart.
The moment a multiplier effect is unleashed the energy produced forces the plasma to expand hence the magnetic field can contain it no longer.
Article’s comparison of fusion power to air flight is laughable. Wright Bros. first flight (1903) was just 27 years after Otto’s invention of the 4-stroke engine. Stellar fusion was predicted by Bethe in 1938. Now 80 years later, fusion is still the energy of the future. The problem with magnetic confinement of plasma is chaos (one of my favorite equations)
My favorite math equations:
Golden ratio – the answer to life, the universe and everything
a/b = b/(a + b)
Euler’s identity – the beauty of constants
e^(i π) + 1 = 0
Mandelbrot set – the shape of infinity
Zn+1 = Zn^2 + C
My favorite physics equations:
Time dilation – time travel in Einstein’s relativity
t’ = t L
Where: t’ is time at moving frame, t is time at rest frame, L is Lorentz factor
Virtual particle – the magic of quantum mechanics
E t o (o + B + 3)/(o – B – 1)
Where: p is Rayleigh number = 28, o is Prandt number = 10, B is a geometric factor = 8/3
My favorite physics equations:
Virtual particle – the magic of quantum mechanics
E t < h’/2
Where: E is energy, t is time, h’ is reduced Planck constant
My favorite physics equations:
Lorenz attractor – the butterfly of chaos
p > o (o + B + 3)/(o – B – 1)
Where: p is Rayleigh number = 28, o is Prandt number = 10, B is a geometric factor = 8/3
Have a look at the Wendelstein 7x – their unique equations and construction is stunning.
Sure thermonuclear fusion works, the M.I.C regard it as their little “secret”, fake secret, not laughable at all.
What is funny is the famous meeting at LLNL where a Soviet physicist told his hosts how they got their fusion going – the US establishment classified it preventing Americans amongs themselves even mentioning it after being told by Soviets! Russiagate hystria today is its shadow.
The “elite” behind that insane circus is the reason it is delayed.
Mastery of fire by ordinary citizens has always driven looser Zeus to paroxysims of insane rage,
Last two came out wrong. Here’s correct version:
Virtual particle – the magic of quantum mechanics
E t o (o + B + 3)/(o – B – 1)
Where: p is Rayleigh number = 28, o is Prandt number = 10, B is a geometric factor = 8/3
Stellar fusion of H into He was proposed by Eddington in 1920.
He also suggested that heavier elements might be made inside stars.
Eddington anticipated the discovery of stellar fusion in 1920 but Bethe discovered the complete theory of stellar nucleosynthesis in 1938. That’s why Bethe won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his theory and Eddington did not.
Bethe’s theory of stellar nucleosynthesis wasn’t complete. He dealth only with the proton-proton chain reaction and CNO cycle, not with the production of heavier elements. That awaited Hoyle’s work.
Your comment was on predicting stellar fusion. Eddington did that, long before Bethe. And even in some detail.
Let’s say that at some point, someone will get the technology to work at a power plant scale.
First generation fusion is highly unlikely to be cost-competitive with traditional nuclear power. It’s a benefit that the fuel is unlimited and inexpensive, but that won’t be a huge economic advantage for a very long time. Perhaps by that time the technology will be ready. Or, maybe by then we’ll have 50 years of experience with plasma furnaces, which also offer unlimited fuel.
Lost in the shuffle was the quote about “It was absolutely absurd — you can put that in your article — …. absurd that happened with a program that was acknowledged to be excellent” in cutting off public funding and turned to private sector funding.
The point is that there really is no need for public funds to be used to develop an unneeded energy, experimental, speculative source. Even in pursuit of the mythical CO2 disaster that is seconds or hours or years or decades or centuries in our future. And don’t allow public funds to subsidize this. Go figure how many medical research centers you can fund for what’s been spent on, in sum, a hugely wasteful public project.
And, if one is really serious about CO2, put money behind thorium power. It’s an engineering problem, not an experiment.
The most interesting and promising NEW approaches to fusion energy are privately funded… some of it actually crowd-sourced. The biggest public funding for fusion energy is earmarked for ITER… which is a loser and according to former DoE fusion director Hirsch can never become a commercial energy generator.
New approaches (or revived old approaches) to fission and fusion should be judiciously funded… with those that show the most promising results assisted towards fast commercialization.
So the guy is going to use superconducting gaffer tape to make his magnets.
This is The Breakthrough as best I can see.
And molten salt to catch the neutrons – reasonable maybe.
And then use that to boil water.
sigh facepalm
There is temperature enough to make a Carnot Engine with near enough 100% efficiency – so they throw 65%+ of the energy away by boiling water to what, 600 degC tops?
Its just hopeless. What ARE the words?
Even before you realise they are burning water.
We’ve burned the forests and plants across 33% of the habitable area on Earth
We’re burning the dirt on another 33% presently
We’re on course to burn all the coal oil and gas.
So we turn to burning water. That’ll take care of the remaining 33% of the (presently frozen) land surface
Smacks of desperation doncha think.
Wild eyed insanity or to use the lawyer’s understatement = Unreasonable Behaviour
Maybe someone something somewhere is thinking of filing for divorce – from us.
Can you blame them.
[???? .mod]
..mod ?? ..Must be the good weed !
The chief and everlasting obstacle to economically viable power is government.
Fusion electrical generation solves no problem. Man has conventional sources to last hundreds of years.
Fusion would allow us to use hydrocarbons to make things rather than burn so many of them.
We’re making all the things we want to with hydrocarbons.
But we could keep doing so longer without burning them.
Longer than what? We will have been dead for centuries before there is any constraint, if then.
“Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run,
we are all dead.”— John Maynard Keynes
The word ‘about’ is worth another few $billion in this case.
So in 2012, sacrifices had to be made to help shuffle money to Solyndra, SoloPower, and others.
As soon as I read “global warming” I stopped reading
“Finally, Fusion Power Is About to Become a Reality”
Seriously?! No one has ever even achieved one second of greater-than-breakeven energy. (Let alone even 1 minute of net electrical production.) If a similarly silly headline was found in the mainstream press about photovoltaics or wind (e.g. “Global 100 Percent Renewables is About to Become a Reality”) it would properly be torn to shreds on WUWT.
Jupiter hasn’t achieved fusion with its 1.9X10^27 kg of mass and I doubt anyone will make a sustainable fusion reactor on Earth in my lifetime. But it sure seems like a good way to separate suckers like Bill Gates from their money.
When it comes to fusion, you have to read this scientist’s misgivings.
https://thebulletin.org/2018/02/iter-is-a-showcase-for-the-drawbacks-of-fusion-energy/
Everyone here should read this, D Mac.
A huge bucket of cold water on the hype.
These projects use materials and power in amounts that could build and power small cities, and are not designed to anything other than test concepts…zero chance of generating any power because they do not capture any power, only produce it.
And rarely has anyone actually used an tritium, because not only is more lost than burned, it will make the whole thing dangerously radioactive once tritium is burned!
And the whole world has 25 kg of tritium, total! With 0.5 produced ever year, and ITER expecting to use 1.0 kg/yr just for testing, iffen they dare use any.
Krikey!
The machine weighs 400,000 tons, and massive amounts of fossil fuels are used in every stage, right up to the 300-500 megawatts of power used to cool the magnets and such, and the additional 50 megawatts to heat the fuel!
“The website implicitly boasts of this massive energy investment, depicting every one of the ITER subsystems as the most stupendous of its kind. For example, the cryostat, or liquid-helium refrigerator, is the world’s largest stainless steel vacuum vessel, while the tokamak itself will weigh as much as three Eiffel towers. The total weight of the central ITER facility is around 400,000 tons, of which the heaviest components are 340,000 tons for the foundations and buildings of the tokamak complex, and 23,000 tons for the tokamak itself.
But boosters should be distressed rather than ecstatic, because biggest and greatest means big capital outlay and great energy investment, which must appear on the negative side of the energy accounting ledger. And this energy has been largely provided by fossil fuels, leaving an unfathomably large “carbon footprint” for site preparation and construction of all the supporting facilities, as well as the reactor itself.
At the reactor site, fossil-fuel-powered machines excavate huge volumes of earth to a depth of 20 meters and manufacture and install countless tons of concrete. Some of the world’s largest trucks (powered by fossil fuels) convey mammoth reactor components to the assembly site. Fossil fuels are burned in the extracting, transporting, and refining of the raw materials needed to make fusion reactor components and possibly in the manufacturing process itself”
“Recently, the website New Energy Times presented a well-documented account, “The ITER power amplification myth,” about how the facility’s communications department disseminated poorly worded information about the ITER power balance and misled the news media. A typical widespread statement is that “ITER will produce 500 megawatts of output power with an input power of 50 megawatts,” implying that both numbers refer to electric power.
New Energy Times makes it clear that the expected 500 megawatts of output refers to fusion power (embodied in neutrons and alphas)—which has nothing to do with electric power. The input of 50 MW referred to here is the heating power injected into the plasma to help sustain its temperature and current, and it’s only a small fraction of the overall electric input power to the reactor. The latter varies between 300 and 400 MW(e), as explained earlier. ”
Say what?
Holy moly!
And this will go on through the years of the 2040s!
“Deuterium is abundant in ordinary water, but there is no natural supply of tritium, a radioactive nuclide with a half-life of only 12.3 years. The ITER website states that the tritium fuel will be “taken from the global tritium inventory.” That inventory consists of tritium extracted from the heavy water of CANDU nuclear reactors, located mainly in Ontario, Canada, and secondarily in South Korea, with a potential future source from Romania. Today’s “global inventory” is approximately 25 kilograms, and increases by about one-half kilogram per year, notes Muyi Ni and his co-authors in their 2013 journal article, “Tritium Supply Assessment for ITER,” in Fusion Engineering and Design. The inventory is expected to peak before 2030.
While fusioneers blithely talk about fusing deuterium and tritium, they are in fact intensely afraid of using tritium for two reasons: First, it is somewhat radioactive, so there are safety concerns connected with its potential release to the environment. Second, there is unavoidable production of radioactive materials as D-T fusion neutrons bombard the reactor vessel, requiring enhanced shielding that greatly impedes access for maintenance and introducing radioactive waste disposal issues.”
It gets better:
“During the unavoidable teething stage through the early 2040’s, it’s likely that ITER’s fusion power will be only a fraction of 500 MW, and that more injected tritium will be lost by non-recovery than burned (i.e., fused with deuterium).
Analyses of D-T operation in ITER indicate that only 2 percent of the injected tritium will be burned, so that 98 percent of the injected tritium will exit the reacting plasma unscathed. While a high proportion simply flows out with the plasma exhaust, much tritium must be continually scavenged from the surfaces of the reaction vessel, beam injectors, pumping ducts, and other appendages for processing and re-use. During their several dozen traverses of the Tritium Trail of Tears around the plasma, vacuum, reprocessing and fueling systems, some tritium atoms will be permanently trapped in the vessel wall and in-vessel components, and in plasma diagnostic and heating systems.
The permeation of tritium at high temperature in many materials is not understood to this day, as R. A. Causey and his co-authors explained in “Tritium barriers and tritium diffusion in fusion reactors.” The deeper migration of some small fraction of the trapped tritium into the walls and then into liquid and gaseous coolant channels will be unpreventable. Most implanted tritium will eventually decay, but there will be inevitable releases into the environment via circulating cooling water.”
Better still:
“Designers of future tokamak reactors commonly assume that all the burned tritium will be replaced by absorbing the fusion neutrons in lithium completely surrounding the reacting plasma. But even that fantasy totally ignores the tritium that’s permanently lost in its globetrotting through reactor subsystems. As ITER will demonstrate, the aggregate of unrecovered tritium may rival the amount burned and can be replaced only by the costly purchase of tritium produced in fission reactors.
Radiation and radioactive waste from fusion. As noted earlier, ITER’s anticipated 500 MW of thermal fusion power is not electric power. But what fusion proponents are loathe to tell you is that this fusion power is not some benign solar-like radiation but consists primarily (80 percent) of streams of energetic neutrons whose only apparent function in ITER is to produce huge volumes of radioactive waste as they bombard the walls of the reactor vessel and its associated components.
Just 2 percent of the neutrons will be intercepted by test modules for investigating tritium production in lithium, but 98 percent of the neutron streams will simply smash into the reactor walls or into devices in port openings.
In fission reactors, at most 3 percent of the fission energy appears as neutrons. But ITER is akin to an electrical appliance that converts hundreds of megawatts of electric power into neutron streams. A peculiar feature of D-T fusion reactors is that the overwhelming preponderance of thermal energy is not produced in the reacting plasma, but rather inside the thick steel reactor vessel as the neutron streams smash into it and gradually dissipate their energy. In principle, this thermalized neutron energy could somehow be converted back to electricity at very low efficiency, but the ITER project has opted to avoid addressing this challenge. That is a task deferred to delusions called demonstration reactors that fusion proponents hope to deploy in the second half of the century.”
‘No one has ever even achieved one second of greater-than-breakeven energy.’
WRT energy in and out, fusion achieved greater-than-breakeven several years ago (if you don’t include the energy necessary to build the components of the reactor). However, we are nowhere near greater-than-breakeven economics.
A liquid fluoride thorium reactor is far more plausible, safer and economic than fusion and will be the main source of power in mankind’s future. If we are to have a future that is.
‘And molten salt to catch the neutrons’
A thorium reactor would be useful for that as well…(hybrid thorium/fusion)
I think those tests ran for fractions of a second.
I could be wrong.
Otherwise, yes…getting as much energy released as was put in to produce the reaction is Q=1.
Engineering breakeven has been calculated as requiring Q=5…fives times more energy released than was put in, so that enough energy can be captured and converted to heat that is then used to generate enough power to keep the machine running on it’s own…basically recirculating power.
But economic breakeven is much higher, north of Q=20, and likely higher than that.
Note to that most of the results obtain so far are extrapolated, as the machines are designed to react deuterium and tritium, but tritium s dangerous and expensive and tends to leak and get lost. So most tests have used H or D and extrapolated the resulting break evens.
The people working on these things are not even of any consensus that economic breakeven is even possible if ignition is achieved and sustained.
Obviously, the cheaper the machine and the more the power is worth, the lower the bar, and the opposite is also true…expensive machine, insanely expensive, cheap alternatives = high bar for breakeven.