Poll: Will fusion save us?

[Red Squirrel]

Imagine church choir inside a fusion reactor.

 

[Muse]

Yeah, after 25 years of fusion the atmosphere will be >20% helium.

 

[sdifox]

Again, why would I talk like Minnie Mouse when we have fusion? Fusion <> breathing Helium.

 

[Ajay]

You missed one poll option : It might happen, but only god knows how long it will take.

I was hopeful in the past. But just read the following article a few weeks ago.

OUT OF GAS A shortage of tritium fuel may leave fusion energy with an empty tank

Tritium costs $30,000 per gram and the world’s only commercial sources are the 19 Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) nuclear reactors, which each produce about 0.5 kilograms a year .

Science | AAAS

www.science.org

View attachment 64797

Hmm, curious. The La Hague Nuclear Reprocessing plant in France produces about 32 grams of Tritium annually. IIRC, ultimately nuclear fusion reactors will be using a Deuterium-Tritium target.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

Yeah, after 25 years of fusion the atmosphere will be >20% helium.

Helium is too light to stay in Earth's atmosphere for very long. It'll get blown off by solar winds.

 

[gorobei]

Again, why would I talk like Minnie Mouse when we have fusion? Fusion <> breathing Helium.

well if you had watched the video i posted...
the primary reactants are deuterium and tritium to generate helium4. fusing hydrogen gets you He2 which can breakdown back to H with little energy released. the H2+H3 =He3 path can lead to He3 + He3 = He4 or He3 + H1 =He4 paths that the sun uses. its helium all the way down.

Hmm, curious. The La Hague Nuclear Reprocessing plant in France produces about 32 grams of Tritium annually. IIRC, ultimately nuclear fusion reactors will be using a Deuterium-Tritium target.

well if you had watched the video i posted...
the lithium and berylium jacket can be used to generate tritium in tokamaks, and the Helion method will supposedly generate tritium as a byproduct.

but yes, ITER will likely use up most of the the tritium available to make one reactor.

 

[Ajay]

well if you had watched the video i posted...
the lithium and berylium jacket can be used to generate tritium in tokamaks, and the Helion method will supposedly generate tritium as a byproduct.

but yes, ITER will likely use up most of the the tritium available to make one reactor.

Yes, and Nuclear reprocessing plants cut down nuclear waste AND produce Tritium - lots more than Tokamaks can produce. So, we need more of them (well, we do anyway - save for environmentalists freaking out over something that is necessary to improve the safety of stored radioactive waste). I did watch your video. So, without additional sources of Tritium, current Fusion generators are doomed anyway. Thanks.

 

[mxnerd]

Helion Energy. (Aneutronic fusion, no neutron produced)

New method (well, new startup), new claim.

 

[Ajay]

Helion Energy. (Aneutronic fusion, no neutron produced)

New method (well, new startup), new claim.

Geez, they have to run a fusion cycle to produce Helium-3 and then another fusion cycle to produce protons that move through the plasma field and induce a current in the power producing magnets. Sounds terribly inefficient. Cool technology, but I don't see how it will ever reach comercial status.

I prefer the focus on Gen4 nuclear reactors. They are built from the ground up to have 'walk away safety' and use fuel cycles that either produce much less radioactive waste or low half life radioactive wastes. They are smaller (100-300 MW) for a faster return on investment for power companies - they also take less time to build an are much less capital intensive than PWR reactors. One can site these in a way to sequentially build out an multi-reactor plant so that the first one to go active starts producing income to fund the building of the next one. Great for the baseline power that is needed, particularly at night and even in the daytime to reduce the amount of land that needs to be allocated to wind and solar. Unfortunately, investors and the general public have a hard time getting over the overrun costs and reactor failures of the past.

 

[K1052]

Unfortunately, investors and the general public have a hard time getting over the overrun costs and reactor failures of the past.

Or um the present *glances at Vogtle*.

 

[Ajay]

Or um the present *glances at Vogtle*.

Good catch! What a bloody mess. These large PWR reactors are totally bespoke as they are not really in production anymore. Once incident involved the checking that thousands of bolts were tightened to the correct torque. They were checked, but no one documented it as was supposed to be the case. All of them needed to be rechecked and documented properly, which involve the temporary removal of some structures that now blocked access to the bolts .

 

[K1052]

Good catch! What a bloody mess. These large PWR reactors are totally bespoke as they are not really in production anymore. Once incident involved the checking that thousands of bolts were tightened to the correct torque. They were checked, but no one documented it as was supposed to be the case. All of them needed to be rechecked and documented properly, which involve the temporary removal of some structures that now blocked access to the bolts .

I do think the future is SMRs that come off an assembly line but it's going to take the US utilities a bit to get over the most recent financial horror show. Commercial deployments will probably happen abroad first.

 

[DigDog]

here we go, now i'm gonna have to write another book.

I will try to simplify.

Fusion is fucking awesome.

We are currently pretty much at zero gain now. It takes X amount of money to make X' worth of energy so basically you may as well have a coal-fired plant and you'd be more efficient.
the reason to be excited is that Fusion uses a shitton of emergent technologies to get to this point, and these are technologies where you can have a new discovery that leads to a 10x increase in efficiency like it's nothing.

At this stage, we are just *dreaming* of fusion. But, with the stats we have today, ONE new tech, one increase in shielding efficiency, one new laser focusing glass, one new pellet compression, ANY change in any of the techs we are currently using and Fusion will become huge.
Fusion is un-fuckable.
Fusion is dirt cheap.
Fusion is MASSIVELY scalable.

The only real obstacle to fusion is that with improvements, Solar is becoming an even better proposal. The GCC arab nations are *very* serious about becoming an energy seller, operating massive solar plants in the desert. They are currently struggling with "if we build this, it will generate SUCH A FUCKTON of energy, that we dont really have the means to store it or carry it, what do we do?", which is like saying "i have too much money for my wallet".

 

[Muse]

Or um the present *glances at Vogtle*.

A bit of searching brought up this:

Early in 2021, crews at Georgia Power's nuclear expansion site at Plant Vogtle were struggling to find all the leaks in a pool built to hold spent, highly radioactive fuel. They added air pressure under the floor of the water-filled pool, hoping air bubbles would pinpoint flawed welds. It didn't work.Dec 31, 2021

 

[Zeze]

Is this from the fusion breakthrough news earlier this week?

From what I read, scalable and efficient fusion powerplants are like 50 years away.

And just like anything, huge massive profits and gains from fusion will be eaten up by the big guys.

The real consumer benefits are probably after my lifetime.

 

[IronWing]

Fusion is dirt cheap.

I was singing in unison until this. I see no indication that fusion will ever be cheap.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I think the real effort should be going towards energy storage. We already have solar, wind and other renewables and those techs are relatively simple to manufacture compared to fusion or fission but the issue is they are not constant. We could fix that with storage facilities. Molten salt, flow batteries, or some other tech. Regular batteries won't cut it.

Whatever it is they do it needs to be cheap and the savings need to be passed on to the consumer. Ideally it should be so cheap that you can use it for heat too and still have a bill that's under $100/mo.

 

[DigDog]

I was singing in unison until this. I see no indication that fusion will ever be cheap.

Oh but it is. You just need to understand what "cheap" means.

 

[Muse]

ABC network news was pretty sanguine about the breakthrough last night. They had video of Energy Secretary saying that fusion could solve our carbon emissions problem while supplying all the energy grid energy we need and they had ABC specialist (probably a relative dolt), Matt Guttman (IIRC) saying hey, give it 10 years, we're online folks. I figure they should really take off the rose colored glasses.

Now, they did say something interesting I had not heard elsewhere: They said LLNL had a 50% excess energy return, i.e. the energy given off was 1.5x that needed to produce the reaction.

 

[Muse]

One of the better comments on the New York Times story on this a day before the announcement:

The US spent three trillion dollars on the War About Nothing in Iraq and three+ billion dollars to solve its energy problem. That's criminally stupid.

 

[gorobei]

real engineering's follow up vid on Helion

they are using a deuterium+He3 reaction to bypass the tritium shortage issues, with plans to have a separate reactor fuse deuterium into He3.

the next version will be a scaleup adding the power recovery section. their capacitor banks will likely be a massive part of the build as they are looking to ramp the firing cycles.

my one question is how they are dealing with the heat generated in the chamber.

 

[biostud]

No, because we are still exterminating wildlife at an alarming rate. Maybe we won’t turn Earth permanent heatwave, but nature is f*cked anyways.

 

[Muse]

60 Minutes story last night on Fusion Breakthrough, prospects, etc.:

 

[Red Squirrel]

Self sustaining fusion will probably happen a year after the year of the Linux desktop.

 

[Muse]

Self sustaining fusion will probably happen a year after the year of the Linux desktop.

It may never happen. That 60 Minutes piece makes it clear to me that the dream of fusion power for earth is by leaps and bounds the toughest engineering challenge ever faced by the human race, and that appears to be a gross understatement.