European Scientists Claim Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough (bbc.com) 186
European scientists say they have made a major breakthrough in their quest to develop practical nuclear fusion -- the energy process that powers the stars. tomhath writes: The UK-based JET laboratory has smashed its own world record for the amount of energy it can extract by squeezing together two forms of hydrogen. If nuclear fusion can be successfully recreated on Earth it holds out the potential of virtually unlimited supplies of low-carbon, low-radiation energy. The experiments produced 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds (11 megawatts of power). This is more than double what was achieved in similar tests back in 1997. It's not a massive energy output - only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water. But the significance is that it validates design choices that have been made for an even bigger fusion reactor now being constructed in France. "The JET experiments put us a step closer to fusion power," said Dr Joe Milnes, the head of operations at the reactor lab. "We've demonstrated that we can create a mini star inside of our machine and hold it there for five seconds and get high performance, which really takes us into a new realm."
2022 (Score:5, Funny)
Re: 2022 (Score:2)
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Re: 2022 (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the guy who wrote it fills his kettle right to the brim every time instead of just boiling enough for 1 or 2 cups of Barry's
Re: 2022 (Score:4, Funny)
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Actually, for 30 (U.S.) gallons of water, raising it from room temp to 200F in 5 seconds takes about 7MW. That doesn't account for any energy escaping to the containment or other surroundings. Your "orders of magnitude" is off by orders of magnitude.
Re: 2022 (Score:5, Informative)
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They were talking about 5 seconds, not 5 hours.
Now, if you put 11MW in *any* water kettle, it'll cook the water and evaporate it for you in 5 seconds.
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11MW - Not 11MWh
11MW over a period of 5 seconds is 55,000 kilojoules. I'm not sure what size teakettle they're using - but 55,000 kj is about enough to raise the temperature of ~165 liters of water from 20C to 100C.
Seems about right to me - that's about 2.75 liters per kettle * 60 kettles.
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Megawatts are a unit of power. Joules is a unit of energy, although people often use things like megawatt hours for power grid stuff.
Power = energy / time, or rearranged, Energy = Power * time (thus MW*h as a unit of energy).
11 MW is five to ten times the power generation capacity of the average utility wind turbine in the US. Because they only ran it for 5 seconds at that level, they produced enough energy to boil 60 kettles of water.
Of course, they put more energy into heating and containing the plasma th
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They say it's 59 megaJoules total, so that's enough to raise about 179 liters of room temperature water to just below boiling, which is what is normally meant by "boiling a kettle". The water is heated up, but only a tiny amount of it changes phase to steam and that's how you know when the water is ready. Divided by 60, that's 3 liters of water per kettle. That's about 12 and a half cups, which is about twice what you would have in a typical full kettle.
Now, if they mean completely boiling all the water in
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One of us is clearly WHOOOSHing the other
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One of us is clearly WHOOOSHing the other
Like a tea kettle?
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I'd use a pulsed laser. Big one. Kind of a waste for one shot though.
Re: 2022 (Score:5, Interesting)
They couldn't run it for longer because the copper they used in the infrastructure would melt. . .at least according to the article at the BBC I read. This was just a proof of concept experiment, not a prototype for an actual reactor. There is another machine they are building that will have enough cooling to run for longer.
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(this IS a fusion reactor - presumably a fairly energetic event could occur if things go sideways). Such an even would be only somewhat less disastrous than failure in a fission reactor.
Energetic, yes, and for the same reason, but not the way you might think and certainly not long term disastrous.
A pressurized water fission reactor which loses cooling capability and overheats starts developing hydrogen gas from the coolant water, eventually detonating it and blowing its own lid off and pieces of itself all over the landscape. Fukushima blew off the roofs of all 3 operating reactor secondary containment buildings with hydrogen-air detonations and also blew off the roof of the secondary con
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Let's say you have a tea kettle that holds 1Kg of water at 20C.
Specific heat capacity of water is about 4.186 joules/g C.
To raise the temperature by 80 degrees to 100C is 80*1000*4.186 = 334,800 Joules
For 60 kettles that is 334,800*60 = 20,092,800 MJ. They claim they made 59 MJ
So we know the scientists have very big kettles.
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> 11MW is a huge amount of power over 5 seconds
The engines on a Boeing 777 each produce 23 MW. This is not a huge amount of power.
> If they can run it indefinitely, it would power hundreds of homes.
Except for the part the press release fails to mention. In order to generate those 11 MW, the system consumed 30 MW *just to run its heaters*. The magnets and vacuum systems are all on top of this. Even in the most favourable version of the measurement, Q ~=0.33, half that of the records JET set in the 1990
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1. It was a lab experiment, and not intended to be a practical or sustainable fusion reaction.
2. They showed results that were improvements over previous experiments
3. They never claimed net-positive energy, so pointing out that they weren't net-positive isn't useful.
What's with the negativity? Are you happy with the status quo of coal plants belching pollutants into the air and aging fleets of fission reactors that are going to need replacement at some point in the next 20 years, with zero replacement con
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Sadly, no. In fact, the goal posts are not only moving but accelerating away from us. This quote from the article:
'There's huge uncertainty about when fusion power will be ready for commercialisation. One estimate suggests maybe 20 years. Then fusion would need to scale up, which would mean a delay of perhaps another few decades.'
So, it's gone from 30 to 40 years in the future?
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Re:2022 (Score:5, Informative)
> Massachusetts Commonwealth Fusion claims they'll have a commercial reactor this decade.
They will not.
It is highly possible they will have a breakeven reactor, perhaps even one that reaches engineering breakeven (google it). And among all the approaches being bandied about in the private sector, theirs and the UK's TE are the only two that have any real science behind them.
However, there are numerous additional practical issues that have to be worked out, and mostly no one's even trying:
1) we need to figure out how to convert the neutrons back into tritium to fuel the reactor. We know that we can use lithium to do this. That is literally all we know. We have no idea how to get the lithium in and out of the reactor in any practical manner, we have no idea how to extract the tritium from the lithium in an practical manner, and we have no idea if it's even possible that the end result is larger than what we burned to get those neutons.
2) we need to figure out how one will perform maintenance on these devices. They require days weeks to chill down, so we can't simply turn them off if something stops working right. And unlike a fission reactor, which is basically a big pressure cooker, a fusion reactor has ALL SORTS of stuff on the inside - heaters, scrapers, fuel systems, diagnostics and then the magnets themselves. All of this is subject to the massive heat loads and neutron flux, and all of them are susceptible to damage from these. We really have no idea how we would use one in production.
Now here's the part that will make you mad. You see, waaaay back in the 1970s the US was going to build an entire lab whose only purpose was to answer those questions. It was going to be built in Washington State because one of the senators was worried about what was going to happen to all those cushy fed jobs when Hanford shut down. Well then he lost the next election, TFTR failed, and it was never heard from again...
So here we are, FIFTY YEARS LATER, and we still haven't started to *really* explore these issues that *absolutely have to be solved* before we can build a power plant.
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The joke is that *net power production* is always 20 years away. Your quote talks about an actual commercial reactor in 20 years, and "scale up", which presumably means mass deployment, a few decades after.
Re:2022 (Score:5, Interesting)
The global total spent on fusion since 1960 is around $50 billion. Which, given that you need a high-end supercomputer to control the magnetic fields in real time AND need high-end superconducting supermagnets capable of microsecond adjustment, isn't much.
The International Monetary Fund reckons fossil fuels are subsidised to the tune of $11 million a minute. $50 billion is thus the same amount it takes coal, oil and gas to start pretty much where they are every 3 days, 3 hours and 45 minutes.
The US had withdrawn from participation in ITER during the design phase in 1998 because of concerns about the facility's predicted costs and project management. The project was significantly restructured after the US withdrawal. (https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200701/iter.cfm) This restructuring basically abandoned half the research that was to be done.
Over 80% of the US ITER Project funding to date remains in the US, which means it's pretty much useless for constructing new projects. (https://www.usiter.org/sites/default/files/2019-02/US%20ITER%20Status-final-Feb%202019_0.pdf)
And you want to know why fusion isn't here yet. I think the answer is bloody obvious. Political games (US politicians wanting the money for pork) and massive underfunding.
If the world threw in an additional $100 billion a year in fusion funding, out of those fossil fuel subsidies (basically oil execs have to cancel 1/52th of their skiing holidays), we'd have fusion inside of a decade. It won't, not because it can't and not because fossil fuel companies don't want the competition, but because it would impact votes in coal and oil regions.
Re: 2022 (Score:3)
Re: 2022 (Score:2)
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Read the article, it wasn't intended to be practical, it was intended to be a proof of concept for one part of the fusion reaction.
Re:Meh (Score:4, Interesting)
> proof of concept for one part of the fusion reaction.
Not even that; it's to demonstrate that one can still reach MW levels with tungsten walls. When they first added them the performance took a dump, which kinda scared the crap out of the ITER people considering their entire thing is made of it.
The correct headline for this result is:
"Using Tungsten Still Allows Fusion Reactors To Reach the Numbers They Reached 25 Years Ago."
Certainly cause for a large collective "phew", but this is hardly the stuff of "breakthrough"!
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a bit short compared 1.21 gigawatts that Emmett "Doc" Brown needed in Back to the Future!
That's because his power requirements were in Jigawatts, not Gigawatts, totally different scale in use there.
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Romulans did it first. (Score:2)
"We've demonstrated that we can create a mini star inside of our machine and hold it there for five seconds and get high performance, which really takes us into a new realm."
Just wait till we get to mini singularities. That will open a new era of space travel.
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It's all fun and games until an alien creature lays eggs in it and Picard starts drawing smiley faces.
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It's all fun and games until an alien species mistakes your artificial singularity for a natural gravity well and attempts to use it as a nursery for its young!
What is the total energy balance? (Score:2)
All these "breakthroughs" seem to never say how much total energy in the form of electricity used they put in the system and how much energy in the form of electricity out they got.
That is how far away they are from breakeven point?
So far even the best ones have bee really far away and the so called excess energy does not include system losses.
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Re:What is the total energy balance? (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably pretty far. Over 80% of energy in Deuterium-Tritium fusion is produced in the form of neutrons, which at present are somewhat useless. They also tend to make stuff radioactive, although you can exploit that to breed tritium from lithium.
Basically all these "breakthrough" fusion stories are meaningless, because they count as-yet-useless energy as "output" rather than "waste". The only meaningful breakthrough is is *engineering* break even -- when you generate more *electricity* than you consume. Then you will be able to run the reactor on its own output. Until that all these alleged "breakthroughs" are demonstrations of consuming more electricity.
This is one of ITER's research goals -- to find a way of generating electricity from neutrons.
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The US wouldn't support ITER construction and is keeping 80% of the ITER money it does spend on pork. And you wonder why we're having problems reaching break even.
To achieve this, you need an incredibly powerful supercomputer that can modify the magnetic field every few microseconds, you need the superconducting supermagnets capable of such control, you need the sensors, and you need a reactor of suitable size - too small or too large and the changes that break up the plasma will be too difficult to react t
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I *don't* wonder why we have trouble reaching break even. We have trouble because it's hard, and we're pursuing it is what a computer scientist would call a "greedy algorithm" - we're doing the things that produce the most apparent short term progress without any consideration of whether it's leading us to a dead end.
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Which is why we need a LOT more funding for a LOT more approaches.
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I think if we want to see actual practical fusion progress in our life time we're going to have to spend a lot more. I'd only qualify that by saying we shouldn't do that at the expense of advanced fission technologies, particularly ones that promise high fuel burnup. Reducing long lived fission products reduces a lot of the inherent environmental reasons to prefer D-T fusion over fission. I don't think there's much reason to prefer D-T over carefully chosen fission technologies on the proliferation front
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I actually mentioned that. The big problem will getting enough usable energy out of that lithium blanket to run the very electricity hungry fusion reactor. It's the obvious place to look for it. If there's an important breakthrough in fusion in the next decade or two it's going to be from doing stuff with captured neutrons, not getting the reactor to consume electricity longer. That's a little more than a stunt, but not much.
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You're assuming that the binding energy per nucleon always decreases as the atomic number increases over the entire range from 1 (hydrogen) to the heaviest known element. Your assumption is wrong.
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The key is *which* nuclei you split or fuse.
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Sorry, couldn't resist.
Re: What is the total energy balance? (Score:2)
I gotta get bigger [HUMOR] tags . . . (Score:2)
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E=MC^2 to boil water. (Score:4, Insightful)
I do find it interesting that with the exception of Solar Cells, most other forms of Electrical Energy needs to be made by spinning turbines, and that is usually with good old Steam Power. That we use advanced science to make heat, which we use water to convert it to steam which creates motion, which then creates electricity. With a lot of unutilized power conversion, with heat energy not being collected but just dissipated into the air, noise from the turbines...
Just too bad we cant find a way of making an atom with more or less electrons than it should have, in an energy effective way to make a more direct energy to electricity conversion.
Re:E=MC^2 to boil water. (Score:5, Informative)
Your concern about end-to-end efficiency is quite valid. However, just producing ions is a long way from producing electric current. Electric generators use energy to **move** conduction band electrons, not to create ions + free electrons. This is far more efficient (in general) than creating excess or paucity of electrons -- kind of what a battery does. We only use batteries to store and transport energy, not because it's an efficient way to produce electric current.
Compare with solar cells: here quantum energy (photons) do the delicate trick of pushing weakly bonded electrons into a conduction band, and then getting those electrons into a conductor before the semiconductor grabs them back. That's as close as we can get to your wish.
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Re: E=MC^2 to boil water. (Score:3)
Um most of them.
Coal, steam
Nuclear steam
Natural gas, steam
Geo thermal, steam
Molten salt, yep still steam
Wind mills no steam
Direct solar cells no steam
Hydro. No steam
Steam is easy to get to generate rotoary motion which spins turbines.
You either generate electric via a spinning turbine or directly via solar cells. How ypu spin that turbine is usually water either via steam or damn water falling.
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I suppose you could use natural gas to make steam, but that's not usually what happens. Natural gas is burned in gas turbines. Basically jet engines optimized for electricity production instead of thrust.
You can do the same with coal. You have to gasify it first, but the gas turbine is way more efficient than the steam alternative.
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> Natural gas, steam
No. Natgas turbines run directly on the natgas expanding through the turbine. They do not generate steam first, because they don't have to. They often have secondary systems that use similar cycles.
Google "rankin cycle" and "brayton cycle".
Re: E=MC^2 to boil water. (Score:2)
I did forget tidal.
Stirling engines also work but only in specialied areas you cant hook a siteling engine up to a nuclear plant for heat. (Your fan is a stirling engine too just spins air blades instead of turnine.)
Stirling engines are nice but only generate low levels of power KW vs MW
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There are MW Stirling engines. You can simply scale them up like a turbine.
And your gas example misses gas turbines, the majourity of gas power plants.
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You forgot - they beam the power to you wirelessly too.
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Actually they're heat engines, and limited by the carnot cycle.
But the hot end of the heat engine is the temperature of the solar photosphere (or the equivalent black-body temperature for other light sources) and the cold end is the material of the solar cell itself. So the carnot cycle losses are a pretty low percentage (and a small fraction of the cell's "losses" as compared to turning all the en
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You have a point. Each energy conversion loses energy. It has to, 2nd law of thermodynamics. So converting radiation into steam into rotary power into electricity is a lot of wasted energy. Another poster suggested wrapping the reactor in solar cells. Hmmm. Maybe.
If you could somehow utilize photons over a much broader range of energies, it may be possible to waste less. Alternatively, capture photons not absorbed by the water in order to waste less at that stage. It's late at night and I am not crunching n
1997 (Score:2)
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Doubling every 20 years! Fusion by the year 3750!
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Well, nobody's spending money on it. Bit difficult to do work without any spending.
Finally! (Score:3)
Only 20 years away!
Blue Whales (Score:5, Interesting)
The JET project website [ukaea.uk] introduces a new commonsense measure to joing football fields, libraries of congress, Mount Everests, various weights and dimensions of cars, and the like.
Weighing 2,800 tonnes, the same as 14 blue whales, the Joint European Torus (JET) is the largest and most powerful operating tokamak machine in the world.
I was actually looking for a link to a paper describing this work, but all I found was one to a promotional video.
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Re: Blue Whales (Score:2)
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JET is funded by Euratom, from which UK has decided to withdraw (while technically a separate entity from the EU, Euratom was intended and is in practice managed as an EU agency). A funding extension was nevertheless granted until 2024, from which point JET will have to be funded by UK.
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Yes, as UK is part of Europe. ...
And the research project is most likely a joint venture of UK (ex EU) and EU
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Britain has already said it'll kick out all the European scientists.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/sci... [bbc.co.uk]
https://brexitfactbase.com/12-... [brexitfactbase.com] -- "UK left Euratom on 31 January 2020"
https://www.theguardian.com/po... [theguardian.com] - Britain not a member of Horizon
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Megajoules (Score:2)
So, let's see 59 megajoules... It takes 2.257 MJ to boil a kg of water, about 1 liter, the size of my tea kettle, not counting raising the temp to 100C, about 0.3MJ more. So, I'm saying about 30 boiling teakettles worth, but that's the amount needed to boil the teakettle dry.
If all you're talking about is raising the temp to 100C (from 20C), about 0.3MJ/kg, then you're talking 200 teakettles.
Of course none of this matters, because it doesn't take into account all losses, and they can't sustain it for more
Literally looking for this comment (Score:2)
Was waiting for someone to do the calculations, cuz there were a lot of unanswered questions, lol.
* How big were those kettles
* Are we talking STP or Sea Level at Room temp (70F/21.1C) 14.7psi or 4.84 like on Everest for the water
* What's the material on that kettle, are we talking about superconductivity with no loss through reflection
* Is it regular water or heavy water (deuterium or tritium)
So many variables!
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Yet.
So your problem is the rate of progress? (Score:2)
Then again, we can't even master fusion technology. I guess we'd better stick to oil and coal, huh?
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Well, perhaps we should leapfrog this technology and go to the next big thing - will that be dropping stuff into an artificial singularity, or can we get away with a simple matter/antimatter reactor?
Then again, we can't even master fusion technology. I guess we'd better stick to oil and coal, huh?
That would be pretty sweet! 8^)
Its not that it wouldn't be great, but it is daunting as all gitout. Aside from the parasitic power draw, we have some very real problems, such as neutron material destruction. There are fusion processes that won't do that, but we're working on the simplest fusion process, and it's a long, long way from breaking even. One of the ways that is being considered to help mitigate neutron destruction is surrounding the fusion capsule with about a meter thickness of molten lithium
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The longest fusion reaction on record is 5 minutes.
Typical Brits (Score:5, Funny)
They'll measure with anything but the metric system.
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Oh, all right. 0.6 hectokettles.
We've got to stop this before it's too late (Score:2)
Won't somebody please think of the kettles??
The illustration shows why this won't work... (Score:3, Interesting)
Most energy from fusion is released through fast neutrons. Those neutrons shoot out of fusing nuclei at a good percentage of the speed of light. When they hit reactor walls, they embrittle them. Hence, even if you could get positive return in terms of energy out for energy in, this kind of design means constantly shutting down and rebuilding the degraded reactor.
What will work is the approach of General Fusion [generalfusion.com]. Their magnetized target fusion approach compresses plasma in bursts using swirling walls of molten metal that are collapsed using external hammers from the outside. The neutron energy from the fusion goes directly into the metal itself, which damages nothing in the machine at all. They're currently building a demonstration reactor for this approach that will be operational in 2024.
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If only you could put some liquid metal around a tokamak. Perhaps even use something that produces your fusion fuel while you're at it.
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Then don't have the neutrons hit the walls. Stopping neutrons is not exactly difficult and if you're clever about it, you can even use that to generate power.
60 tea kettles ?!? (Score:2)
Re: Moore's Law of Fusion? (Score:2)
Compared to fusion, fission is immensly trivial. Fizzion is taking a hammer and hitting things until they breal part on their own. It gets tricky moderating the self sustaining reaction but once it is going it is easy to keep going.
Fusion basically needs 100 years of study after fission to get the basics right to duplicate.
(Which oddly enough is right on schedule)
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Containing a fusion reaction and extracting energy from it isn't really a problem either. There are designs from the 70s for a practical fusion reactor that would almost certainly work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The problem is making a fusion reaction happen at a small scale so the reactor can be placed in a building and located conveniently close to a city.
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You'd have to buy the generator and fuel. Fossil fuels are subsidised at $11 million a minute, according to the International Monetary Fund. After 3 days, 3 hours and 45 minutes, you'll have spent more for that power than has been spent on ALL fusion research in the past 62 years. Alternatively, you could divert a week's worth of subsidies to fusion each and every year, and have the damn thing actually work.
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There is hope! But, as always, it's at least 30 years away.
My personal long-term hope is for "truly clean" aneutronic fusion. But that'll need fusion energies orders of magnitude above what we can do today.
For now, I'm still liking fission with tiny reactors, especially including some to "burn up" long-lived nuclear waste isotopes and make a serious dent in that problem, which we'll still need a solution for even after fusion succeeds at scale.
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It's entirely possible that the laws of physics only allow for net positive fusion reactions at stellar scales.
Well no, that's nonsense. We already know that we can do net positive fusion artificially from fusion bombs. It's a question of a sustained reaction. Technically we could create a net positive fusion reactor right now by just using a huge subterranean cavern and dropping an h-bomb into it about once a day to keep the air inside superheated and pumping water into the cavern and using the resulting steam to spin turbines. There are a lot of practical concerns for such a design but, as a thought experiment, it
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I'd heard of Birkeland's experiments, so I quickly reviewed them. He shot electrons at magnetized spheres to produce aurora. I'm at a loss as what this has to do with anything. I'm much more familiar with Alfven's work, it was covered in some of my course. Likewise, no idea what you are talking about here.
In contrast, I have never heard of the "Sapphire project", and googling it turns up nothing whatsoever.
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They're talking about "electric universe" theory, just being vague about it. It's kind of like how Scientology offers self-help and drug counselling to start with and gives you the crazy stuff a bit at a time instead of just starting off with "Evil galactic overlord Xenu crushed a rebellion and flew all the political prisoners to Earth millions of years ago then chained them to a volcano and blew up the volcano with atom bombs and their ghosts stick to humans and prevent them from using their natural godlik