Nuclear Fusion

[7 skulls]

Read this excellent article a while back. Commerical fusion power will be a pipe dream for many decades to come.

https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusi...cked-up-to-be/

[Captain Snooze]

Originally Posted by 7 skulls

https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusi...cked-up-to-be/

Interesting conclusion:
"Terrestrial fusion energy is not the ideal energy source extolled by its boosters, but to the contrary: It’s something to be shunned."

[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by 7 skulls

Read this excellent article a while back. Commerical fusion power will be a pipe dream for many decades to come.

https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusi...cked-up-to-be/

The video I posted discussed the possibility of scaling the size down of the reactor by a significant factor making the cost and time to build a reactor much less and faster, respectively.

I’m sure some day they will figure it out.

[Irace86.2.0]

[Irace86.2.0]

This covers several emerging technologies and companies, including the last one posted. They are proposing much smaller fusion reactors than the huge tokamak reactor being developed. Seems like AI will figure this out using models far faster.

[Irace86.2.0]

Scientists achieve a breakthrough in nuclear fusion. Here’s what it means.

A U.S. lab has successfully sparked a fusion reaction that released more energy than went into it. But there’s still a long way to go toward fusion as a clean energy source.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/s...nuclear-fusion

For more than 60 years, scientists have pursued one of the toughest physics challenges ever conceived: harnessing nuclear fusion, the power source of the stars, to generate abundant clean energy here on Earth. Today, researchers announced a milestone in this effort. For the first time, a fusion reactor has produced more energy than was used to trigger the reaction.

On December 5, an array of lasers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), part of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, fired 2.05 megajoules of energy at a tiny cylinder holding a pellet of frozen deuterium and tritium, heavier forms of hydrogen. The pellet compressed and generated temperatures and pressures intense enough to cause the hydrogen inside it to fuse. In a tiny blaze lasting less than a billionth of a second, the fusing atomic nuclei released 3.15 megajoules of energy—about 50 percent more than had been used to heat the pellet.

Though the conflagration ended in an instant, its significance will endure. Fusion researchers have long sought to achieve net energy gain, which is called scientific breakeven. “Simply put, this is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century,” U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said at a Washington, D.C. media briefing.

In reaching scientific breakeven, NIF has shown that it can achieve “ignition”: a state of matter that can readily sustain a fusion reaction. Being able to study the conditions of ignition in detail will be “a game-changer for the entire field of thermonuclear fusion,” says Johan Frenje, an MIT plasma physicist whose laboratory contributed to NIF’s record-breaking run.

The achievement does not mean that fusion is now a viable power source. While NIF’s reaction produced more energy than the reactor used to heat up the atomic nuclei, it didn’t generate more than the reactor’s total energy use. According to Kim Budil, director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the lasers required 300 megajoules of energy to produce about 2 megajoules’ worth of beam energy. “I don’t want to give you the sense that we’re going to plug the NIF into the grid—that’s not how this works,” Budil added. “It’s a fundamental building block.”

Even so, after decades of trying, scientists have taken a major step toward fusion power. “It looks like science fiction, but they did it, and it’s fantastic what they’ve done,” says Ambrogio Fasoli, a fusion physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

SPARKING FUSION IGNITION

Though nuclear fusion and nuclear fission both draw energy from the atom, they operate differently. Today’s nuclear power plants rely on nuclear fission, which releases energy when large, heavy atoms such as uranium break apart due to radioactive decay. In fusion, however, small, light atoms such as hydrogen fuse into bigger ones. In the process, they release a small part of their combined mass as energy.

In laboratories, coaxing hydrogen nuclei to fuse into helium requires creating and confining a “plasma”—an electrically charged gas, where electrons are no longer bound to atomic nuclei—at temperatures several times hotter than inside the sun. Scientists learned decades ago how to unleash this process explosively inside hydrogen bombs, and today’s fusion reactors can make it happen in a controlled way for fleeting instants.

Since the late 1950s and early 1960s, fusion reactors have had the same basic goal: create as hot and dense a plasma as possible, and then confine that material for long enough that the nuclei within it reach ignition. The trouble is, plasma is unruly: It’s electrically charged, which means it both responds to magnetic fields and generates its own as it moves. To support fusion, it has to reach truly staggering temperatures. Yet it’s so diffuse, it easily cools off.

Physicist Riccardo Betti, an expert on laser-driven nuclear fusion at the University of Rochester, likens the challenge of fusion ignition to burning gasoline in an engine. A small amount of gasoline mixes with air and then ignites from a spark. The spark isn’t massive, but it doesn’t have to be: All it has to do is ignite a small fraction of the gasoline-air mixture. If that tiny fraction ignites, the energy it releases is enough to ignite the rest of the fuel.

In terms of energy released, nuclear reactions pack roughly a million times more punch than chemical reactions do—and are vastly harder to get going. Past fusion experiments may have achieved the right temperatures or the right pressures or the right plasma confinement times to reach ignition, but not all those factors at once. “Basically, the spark was generated, but it wasn’t strong enough,” Betti says.

A PELLET OF FUEL

NIF’s method of sparking the nuclear fuel starts with a peppercorn-size pellet that contains a frozen mix of deuterium and tritium, two heavier isotopes of hydrogen. This capsule is placed within a gold cylinder roughly the size of a pencil eraser that’s called a hohlraum, which is then mounted on an arm in the middle of a large, laser-studded chamber.

To trigger fusion, NIF fires 192 lasers all at once at the hohlraum, which angle into it through two holes. The beams then slam into the hohlraum’s inner surface, which causes it to spit out high-energy x-rays that rapidly heat up the outer layers of the capsule, making them burn off and fly outward. The inner part of this capsule rapidly compresses to nearly a hundred times denser than lead—which forces the deuterium and tritium inside to reach the temperatures and pressures needed for fusion.

In 1997, the National Academy of Sciences defined what “ignition” would mean for the facility, which broke ground that same year: when fusion energy released exceeds the energy of the lasers.The facility opened in 2009, and reaching this threshold ended up taking more than a decade. In August 2021, NIF reported its best-ever experimental run up to that point: 1.32 megajoules of released fusion energy for 1.92 megajoules of inputted laser energy.

The 2021 run signaled that ignition could be achieved within the NIF reactor. To finally cross the threshold, NIF researchers made a few minor tweaks, which included operating at slightly higher laser energies. “Any small changes, if you do them right, will have significant changes on the outcome,” Frenje says.

THE DREAM OF A FUSION POWER PLANT

For all of NIF’s success, commercializing this style of fusion reactor wouldn’t be easy. Betti, the University of Rochester physicist, says that such a reactor would need to generate 50 to 100 times more energy than its lasers emit to cover its own energy use and put power into the grid. It’d also have to vaporize 10 capsules a second, every second, for long periods of time. Right now, fuel capsules are extremely expensive to make, and they rely on tritium, a short-lived radioactive isotope of hydrogen that future reactors would have to make on-site.

But most of these challenges aren’t unique to NIF, and the world’s many fusion labs and companies are chipping away at them. Last year the Joint European Torus (JET), an experimental reactor in Culham, England, set a record for the most fusion energy ever released during a single experimental run. Construction on JET’s successor—a huge international experiment known as ITER—is underway in France. And private companies in the United States and United Kingdom have built next-generation superconducting magnets, which could help create smaller, more powerful kinds of reactors.

It’s hard to say when, or even if, this work will yield a new energy future. But fusion researchers see the technology as an incredible tool for humankind whenever it’s ready—whether that’s 20, 50, or 100 years from now.

“When people say fusion is very complex, it’s true, but when people say that fusion is too complex, it’s not,” Fasoli says. “We know how to do complex things … Going to the moon is not simple. Achieving this result in fusion, it’s not simple. And we’ve demonstrated we can do it.”

[humfrz]

Thanks for posting that ^

[Captain Snooze]

Originally Posted by Irace86.2.0

Scientists achieve a breakthrough in nuclear fusion. Here’s what it means.

I do not know if this applies:
"Escalation of commitment is a human behavior pattern in which an individual or group facing increasingly negative outcomes from a decision, action, or investment nevertheless continue the behavior instead of altering course. The actor maintains behaviors that are irrational, but align with previous decisions and actions.

Economists and behavioral scientists use a related term, sunk-cost fallacy, to describe the justification of increased investment of money or effort in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment ("sunk cost") despite new evidence suggesting that the future cost of continuing the behavior outweighs the expected benefit."
Wiki

[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by Captain Snooze

I do not know if this applies:
"Escalation of commitment is a human behavior pattern in which an individual or group facing increasingly negative outcomes from a decision, action, or investment nevertheless continue the behavior instead of altering course. The actor maintains behaviors that are irrational, but align with previous decisions and actions.

Economists and behavioral scientists use a related term, sunk-cost fallacy, to describe the justification of increased investment of money or effort in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment ("sunk cost") despite new evidence suggesting that the future cost of continuing the behavior outweighs the expected benefit."
Wiki

I think there are two schools of thought: we need fusion and gettin there is just a matter of money and time, and on the other side, we don't need fusion. Proponents say if we only invested more money then we will get there faster, which can be true. We are seeing massive investment in green technology, specifically batteries and energy storage solutions, and from that investment, we are seeing huge innovations that would otherwise take much longer. We saw that with the rollout of different COVID vaccines and treatments worldwide in record time--hundreds of them. Sometimes it is a fools errand that just eats money. Sometimes we just lack the technology of the times, so the ingredients of technology, ideas, material costs, etc just aren't available to spawn innovation. This is when scientists shelve ideas and then fifty years go by, and then someone has an accidental discovery or eureka moment, and we are able to revisit an idea. A good example of this might have been the invention of the lithium ion battery paving way for the EV. Proponents of EVs would argue that if GM had continued investment in the EV 1 and invested heavily then GM would have made a Bolt/Telsa-like-ranged vehicle far earlier. Same can be said if EVs from the 1910's would have received equal investment, where would we be now. It is hard to know. Maybe it would have been a wasted investment.

Scientists and engineers who continue to get funding will never stop working on this problem until they realize it is impossible to turn lead into gold. We just don't know that it is impossible, and as long as it is possible, it seems worth the investment. Like Elon Musk said, when referring to space travel, in summary, 'Society believes technology always progresses and advances, but it can regress and technology can be lost. While other technologies will advance, which could benefit rocket technology, such that if we took up the mantle in the future, we could make up time, but in general, we could also have to start over, so we need to keep investing and advancing.' There is some truth to this. We have seen lost technology throughout history, and we know it isn't easy just starting something from scratch all over again than continuing to develop something.

Opponents of fusion say it just isn't necessary. There are still waste products like fission, but just less, so it isn't perfect. It still would have huge upfront costs like fission. Fission is already safe and green enough. Alternative green energy like wind and solar is cheaper and safer, so we are just wasting money. Opponents say this is a fools errand because the feasibility and core science shows this isn't viable.

Hindsight is 20/20. We don't know until we know. US military budget is three-quarters of a trillion dollars. Global fusion investment is not even ten percent of that, so it is hard to know what could be done with enough investment.

https://www.bloomberg.com/profession...ion-valuation/

[humfrz]

Originally Posted by Captain Snooze

I do not know if this applies:
"Escalation of commitment is a human behavior pattern in which an individual or group facing increasingly negative outcomes from a decision, action, or investment nevertheless continue the behavior instead of altering course. The actor maintains behaviors that are irrational, but align with previous decisions and actions.

Economists and behavioral scientists use a related term, sunk-cost fallacy, to describe the justification of increased investment of money or effort in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment ("sunk cost") despite new evidence suggesting that the future cost of continuing the behavior outweighs the expected benefit."
Wiki

OK, OK, so, I'll stop working on this. Too bad, I was soo close.

[bcj]

They've had a valid proof of concept that actually works.
Up until now, it's been purely theoretical, and a known unknown.
Now it's scale that has to be developed.

Hmm ... paladium markets ...

[humfrz]

Originally Posted by bcj

They've had a valid proof of concept that actually works.
Up until now, it's been purely theoretical, and a known unknown.
Now it's scale that has to be developed.

Hmm ... paladium markets ...

Of course, it works - come spring, in the PNW - just look up.

[bcj]

Originally Posted by humfrz

- just look up.

Nobody here has done it in their shed before.
That's the big whoop.

[humfrz]

Originally Posted by bcj

Nobody here has done it in their shed before.
That's the big whoop.

Just look under the shed -