Fusion Reactor Concept Could Be Cheaper Than Coal 315
vinces99 writes Fusion energy almost sounds too good to be true – zero greenhouse gas emissions, no long-lived radioactive waste, a nearly unlimited fuel supply. Perhaps the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that the economics haven't penciled out. Fusion power designs aren't cheap enough to outperform systems that use fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas. University of Washington engineers hope to change that. They have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant, would rival costs for a new coal-fired plant with similar electrical output. The team published its reactor design and cost-analysis findings last spring and will present results Oct. 17 at the International Atomic Energy Agency's Fusion Energy Conference in St. Petersburg, Russia.
"will present results Oct. 17 (Score:5, Funny)
2034.
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"Mini-suns" are not part of the plan.
I can see what he's getting at though: if power becomes too cheap, then instead of X amount of heat generated by current means, we'll have X*1,000,000 amount of heat generated by fusion. Now whether that actually affects the environment, I'm not sure.
The heat is used to create steam in most power generation schemes.
This is why I've sometimes wondered if there isn't a way to directly convert nuclear energy to electricity, instead of going through a thermal cycle where a
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Please post again after completing 6th grade earth science. Thank you.
I know this guy is posting as AC, but he doesn't deserve the -1 moderation and condescending remarks. Thermal pollution as a contributing factor to global warming is real, and in my opinion not discussed enough.
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Please post again after completing 6th grade earth science. Thank you.
I know this guy is posting as AC, but he doesn't deserve the -1 moderation and condescending remarks. Thermal pollution as a contributing factor to global warming is real, and in my opinion not discussed enough.
But when considering thermal pollution levels, you must also acknowledge that the shift to favoring thermal pollution would be more than balanced by the decrease in other types of pollution that contribute directly or indirectly to global warming. That is the ultimate point of current fusion - a lesser overall negative impact on our environment (and that means it has to be cheap, of course). Not only are we already generating direct thermal pollution, we are compounding that with our poor management of carb
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6th grade earth science reason not to worry. No math so not scary.
Solar flux is area of circle with earths radius x solar flux at earths orbit. A really really big number. (This number is used in the 'solar power' section in 5th grade, so should be familiar).
The earth is (more or less) in 'thermal equilibrium' (balance). Like a bucket under a faucet with a hole in the bottom. It gains heat in the day and radiates it at night. Until our artificial energy production becomes a non-trivial percentage of so
Costs (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm not holding my breath -- fusion power has been 20-30 years away since the 70s.
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Hmmm ... I'm going with "fusion power has been 10-15 years away since the 50s".
It's been known about [cosmosmagazine.com] since the 30s.
Re:Costs (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not holding my breath -- fusion power has been 20-30 years away since the 70s.
In fairness, fusion power works just fine if you scale it up. It's just the attempts to make it work in systems that don't weight ~2x10^29kg or more that haven't been so hot.
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I say we put on our figurative cowboy hats and literally lasso the nearest 2*10^29kg mass of mostly hydrogen we can find.
Re:Costs (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Costs (Score:5, Funny)
We'd obviously have to situate it off-world and use some sort of electromagnetic beam to send the generated energy to earth. Heck, given the amount of extra power generated, we could just send off the energy everywhere and there'd still be enough hitting the earth. We could then use devices here to convert that energy into electricity.
I oppose this idea, especially out of care for the children. I think the giant fusion reactor would have to be situated too close to schools and nature preserves and other sensitive areas and I don't think the radiation risks have been thoroughly analyzed and quantified.
Look, I'm not opposed to giant balls of hydrogen as long as you build them in suitable places. There are many examples where they have put them light-years away from Earth, where there aren't any schools or preschools, and I'm all in favor of those ones.
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This. I have seen first hand what happens to our poor children in schools which are being bombarded by ionising radiation. I have seen one poor child come home with skin bright red. Can you believe it!
NIMSS (Not In My Solar System)
Re:Costs (Score:5, Funny)
If it's off-world, we could use the radiation and some catalysts to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugars and oxygen, and ferment it under pressure and heat for a few million years until it's in an easy-to-use portable form.
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I think it lasso'd us pretty good already :)
Re:Costs (Score:5, Insightful)
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So then finish delivering the expected funding.
Progress per dollar has been roughly in line with initial predictions, the problem is that the dollars per year keep being cut so that it's forever 20 years away from reaching the original funding goal.
The $50,000 question... more energy out than in? (Score:5, Informative)
Costs are a big issue, but the problem with fusion is getting more energy than is put in... and keeping that reaction sustained indefinitely. Yes, one can get energy out, and sometimes more energy out for a brief bit with a tiny gold-plated capsule... but there is a huge jump from pulverizing a mini-nugget with a big boom to having a reactor that you can turn on, and let it power stuff on an indefinite basis. Same difference between an explosion from TNT and the small, controlled explosions pushing pistons down in an IC engine.
In the TFA, supposedly their dynomak [1] actually does a sustained reaction, but the key is how sustained. Even at a couple kilowatts, if it can just sit there and act as a steam turbine, it will power a UPS for a long time. Scaling up to megawatts is where it solves the big problems, because it can power desalination plants to keep California habitable and other things which are energy/cost prohibitive as of now.
As always, I hope this succeeds. Energy is money, and the more energy available, the more a country and a people can do.
[1]: Is it that different from a tokamak which have been in use for decades?
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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We can solve that problem when we come to it. Right now, on a medium to long term basis, the goal is reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as waste heat is far secondary from the heat trapped via CO2, methane, and other gases. Waste heat can be an issue, but a society that will run into issues with it will have a lot better technology than what we have now, and could solve the problem. Right now, our civilization is in peril because of the burning of fossil fuels, and the conflict that obtaining access to t
Re:The $50,000 question... more energy out than in (Score:5, Funny)
Simple: with unlimited energy, we can run every air conditioner on the planet 24/7, fixing global warming as a side effect!
Re:The $50,000 question... more energy out than in (Score:5, Informative)
In the long run, however, I wonder if the arrival of convenient fusion will mark the start of issues with waste heat.
No. Current solar absorption (accounting for albedo) is on the order of 50PW. By comparison, current peak world wide energy production is a paltry few TW. We're several orders of magnitude away from the point where our civilization's thermal output becomes a concern.
Oblig Adm Rickover Quote (Score:4, Informative)
An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose. (7) Very little development will be required. It will use off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.
On the other hand a practical reactor can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated.
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I think the real problem is how much we've fixated on only one or two fusion reactor designs for decades. Plasmas are hard to control, hence why it's taking so long to materialize real fusion power. They've pursued the Tokamak too long I think, but they keep going after it because they're already so heavily invested. Time for some fresh thinking.
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This subject makes me wish I had the math background, because I sure don't see it.
The energy available via fusion is exactly why you will never be able to contain it using any sort of force. It will always take more power to contain than it creates. Otherwise, you would see see self-contained fusion somewhere, under some circumstances, in nature.
You might think the Sun is an example, but it is not self contained. Gravity contains it, which you get for free simply by having mass. With or without fusion, the
Re:The $50,000 question... more energy out than in (Score:5, Insightful)
This subject makes me wish I had the math background, because I sure don't see it.
This comment makes me wish you had a math background too.
You are actually doing math when you make the assertion that fusion "will always take more power to contain than it creates". You're doing lots of things, including physics and probably chemistry. Unfortunately, you seem to be doing all of them based on what your imagination tells you, and as we know from 300 years of science and 3000 years of pre-science, what "just makes sense" in our imaginations has nothing much to do with what is real.
You are correct to say that containment in stars is free. You have no basis for saying that it is impossible to produce an artificial containment that uses substantially less power than is produced by the fusion processes within it. That is a mathematical assertion about the physics of fusion:
Pfusion Pcontainment
That is the math you are doing, without any attempt to make it physically plausible.
Nor is the lack of non-stellar containment in nature much of an argument. Want to know what else doesn't exist in nature? Reciprocating steam engines. Repeating rifles. Spaceships. Digital computers. Yet mysteriously we have all those things, and more. It's almost as if humans, informed by physics, are capable of making machines that instantiate processes that otherwise do not exist.
Whether fusion is one of those processes remains to be seen. It is clearly a hard problem, but the jury is still well out on its ultimate feasibility.
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Energy is more than money. It is power--in all senses of the word.
present-requirements coal plants are no baseline (Score:2)
namely, nobody is building any because the cost to mitigate the source pollution is so damn high, and going higher. so this generally-clocked-out concept fusion reactor, not-to-scale, would be tied with the second-highest cost of MWH production possible.
great news, I'm ordering 15 of these, bill to my account at the East Bank of the Mississippi. let's get those in production by December 1st, this year, also.
Re:present-requirements coal plants are no baselin (Score:4, Informative)
China disagrees with you [nytimes.com]. The pollution is going to continue to be a problem, but they don't care. As long as you can see more than a block, it's "good enough."
Globally, there are almost 1,000 coal generators being built, again because it's cheaper because the external costs are automatically shifted onto others. Heck, even Canada's tar sands have been labeled "not so dirty any more" because people want energy and it's easier to change a label than to actually fix a problem.
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Heck, even Canada's tar sands have been labeled "not so dirty any more" because people want energy and it's easier to change a label than to actually fix a problem.
Of course the tar sands aren't so dirty any more, because they've been removing the tar from them. Why is it that the Greenists whine so much about Candians cleaning up one of Gaia's oil spills?
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Those extra costs that you mention them be Liberal Sissy Hippy Talk.
Not that I disagree with you, however in order to get real change you need to show the savings in dollars, not in difficult to quantify values.
Deaths due to pollution vs deaths not due to pollution, hard to quantify.
When you say you save $1,000,000 a year vs. Saying a 25% mean decrease in death +/-5% margin of error.
What helped the growth of Hybrid Cars, Energy Efficient Lightings, Etc... isn't the feel good about being green, But the fact
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Modding you down is not enough. (I'll let somebody else burn their mod points)
If I ran /., this is one of the few times I'd peek in, figure out who you were, and ban your IP for life.
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Hold it, you're disturbing the local house-psycho. Don't chase him away now, every self-respecting website has to have one!
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Obvious or not, I felt compelled to say something. And I didn't post AC either. I figure if I can't put my name on what I want to say, it probably didn't need saying.
Cheaper than coal is not impressive (Score:2)
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Patents? (Score:2)
From the article: ...
"The team has filed patents on the reactor concept with the UWâ(TM)s Center for Commercialization
The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy."
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US patents only last 20 years. If they actually get an economically viable reactor up & working within 20 years (and even the bit more it takes the patent to work its way through to issuance), I'm OK with them having a patent for the rest of the 20, despite the fact they got govt help at this stage. The improved externalities are sufficient public good in my opinion.
Re:Patents? (Score:4, Insightful)
This has been legal for at least 34 years [wikipedia.org]. As someone who has to deal with the consequences of Bayh-Dole on a regular basis, I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it causes universities to lock up a lot of basic research as restricted IP, which holds back progress and actually makes it more difficult for the results to reach the market. Or, even worse, the inventors (or eventual IP holders) treat it as a money-making machine and are basically using using the federal funding to do product development. (As opposed to using federal funding to come up with the initial concept, then private funding to develop the product.)
On the other hand, for something that's extremely capital-intensive to develop, where commercialization requires orders of magnitude more funding than the government initially provided, no one is going to invest the money required unless they're guaranteed exclusivity. This is certainly one of those cases. The alternative is for the DOE, or the UW, to invest $2.8 billion of its own money (which, ultimately, is other people's money) developing a commercial-scale reactor - and that still doesn't really get it to "market".
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You realize all power utilities are already monopolies regulated as utilities, don't you? They are guaranteed exclusive access to their captive markets.
What applies to the US does not necessarily apply to the other 95% of the world's population.
Until they have a working prototype to show the patent office they should be put in the same pile with patent applications for perpetual motion machines.
That would make it impossible to patent until someone has invested the $2.8 billion estimated to build such a mach
Concepts are practically free. (Score:2)
Concepts are practically free.
As long as you never build anything, free is always "cheaper than coal"...
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No, not free. This is a scale proof of concept.
Grown ups in grown up fields discuss concept,they are talking about actual design concept. Completely different then the 'concept' that you and your buddies come up with while drinking cheap beers in you pickup.
The problem was (and remains, despite vortex-based and similar proposals), "ash removal", which is to say, getting rid of the He generated as a fusion by-product to keep it from damping the fusion reaction. It was a problem with the TFTR Ttkamak in 1982, and was a problem with the NSTX, and it's a problem with this follow-on device, the spheromak (of which this article is reporting an example, dynomak).
The problem was never containment (and this dynomak, as all spheromak's, has some really clever mechanism
Wait... (Score:5, Informative)
(I'd like to be positive and add "yet" to that sentence, but still.)
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I thought the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy was that it doesn't work?
See that big yellow thing up in the sky?
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I thought the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy was that it doesn't work?
See that big yellow thing up in the sky?
He means without having to have a reaction mass the size of a star ...
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I thought the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy was that it doesn't work?
See that big yellow thing up in the sky?
Yeah, see where it is? 96,000,000 miles away. We have fusion bombs, we know how to cause fusion. It's containing it, sustaining the "reaction", and harvesting the energy - in a net positive way - that's the problem. Right now, we have those problems mostly solved, it's just that the energy needed to contain the fusing plasma cloud exceeds the energy created by the fusing plasma cloud. So we're losing on "net positive".
Hopefully this design will fix all that. If it's true that they can build one for $2
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They moved it last night???
It was only 93,000,000 miles (149.6Gm) away as recently as yesterday....
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I'm pretty sure building a replica of that big yellow thing is more expensive than a coal-fired plant.
I have a better idea, why not use the energy of the existing one!? We could build some kind of antenna that collects the energy. In fact, we could build lots them all over the world! Sure, there are some practical issues, but I'm not sure they are harder to solve than building a working fusion reactor.
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And your idea for containing a sun and capturing it's output is what? It's the "adopting" part you seem to have ignored.
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That would be Cold Fusion.
The type of fusion where the energy goes most nearly into electricity. The problem with current fusion is the heat it creates often damages the containers of it, so it will need to be replaced all the time.
Fusion we can do that... Get it so it doesn't melt the equipment meant to collect it isn't
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The heat generated by a stable fusion reaction is so great, there isn't a material around that wouldn't melt. That's why it has to be contained magnetically to keep from coming into contact with the walls of the container.
In the early days of fusion research, when it was thought to be just around the corner, it was a popular suggestion to use fusion reactors as a means of waste disposal. Just vent the plasma onto your waste, and it'll be broken down to constituent elements.
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That would be Cold Fusion. The type of fusion where the energy goes most nearly into electricity.
That's aneutronic fusion, not cold fusion (it tends to be even hotter than neutronic fusion).
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Concept. (Score:2)
scale up an ant farm (Score:2)
I see three problems here. First, this is a press release, so it has all the validity of any press release, in other words nothing. Second, nothing has been built, at least nothing approaching a gigawatt, and no way to know if the design will really scale to a gigawatt. Third, they are comparing the real cost of building a coa
Science fiction (Score:2)
They have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant, would rival costs for a new coal-fired plant with similar electrical output.
Ummm, how about building a working reactor first. Then we can talk about cost and scaling and other practical considerations. Until they build one that works and puts out more energy than it consumes it is pure science fiction.
Color me skeptical (Score:2)
Considering that it was HUGE news when a fusion reactor managed to achieve unity (as much out as was put in), I'm not holding my breath waiting for a production plant.
That said, I do believe that Fusion power is our last, best, hope for the medium term survival of humanity. You can solve a LOT of the world's problems with low-cost pollution-free electrical generation.
Of course, it still doesn't solve the distribution-network problem, or the energy-density issue for transportation, but it does solve plenty
Cold Fusion News (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Cold Fusion News (Score:5, Informative)
Read the report..
http://www.sifferkoll.se/siffe... [sifferkoll.se]
There are open source replication attempts going on now. Time will tell.
But my hope meter has gone up again... and this appears to be a new nuclear process.
Re:Cold Fusion News (Score:4, Funny)
Did you know that the word "gullible" was created as a result of a new fusion process?
True story.
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Experimental results trump theory.
True. But rigged demos do NOT trump theory. Call me when Rossi allows third parties to completely fabricate the experimental apparatus rather than being forced to submit to using his black box.
Otherwise, Occam says this is probably just another Tilley Electric Vehicle [peswiki.com]. I predict "mechanical breakdowns" will occur any time the Rossi black boxes are forced to operate under controlled observation long enough for their concealed power supplies to become exhausted. Just like the Tilley vehicle did when it was de
Awesome vaporware (Score:2)
Let's see one built. Heck, let's see several built — by competing private concerns funded by the investors' own monies. Then we can discuss their relative merits and make fun of predictions, that it is "highly unlikely" [slashdot.org] for humans of 2035 to be able to generate five times the amount of electricity we generated in 2010.
not the only problem (Score:2)
> Fusion power designs aren't cheap enough to outperform systems that use fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.
Well, that, and sustained fusion has not been achieved yet. That's kinda like saying "Pixie Dust will never replace coal because they cost too many Altairian Dollars per Ngogn", enthusiastically passing over the slight but persistent issue that pixies don't exist.
Maybe (Score:5, Informative)
First, no long-lived radioactive waste is not quite, not exactly, true for the current Deuterium Tritium fusion reactors (which ITER is, and I assume this new U Washington fusion reactor is as well). DT fusion produces neutrons and neutrons can't be controlled and thus go off and hit things (steel in the containment vessel, for example), which both weakens the steel, and makes it radioactive. So, after a while you have a junk old reactor that's radioactive. (One of the benefits of Helium-3 fusion is that it doesn't produce any neutrons, but it is a long way off without some fundamental breakthroughs.)
Second, fusion is like the Internet - the one question you always have to ask is, "will it scale?". (Will plasma instabilities kill your attempt to make a small lab experiment with some confinement into a viable large scale source of power.) Fusion has a long, long history of cool ideas that did not scale, and I do not regard a press release as proof of their having cracked that problem.
Here's the project poster (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the project conference poster. [wordpress.com] "Total equipment cost for the development path is less than $1 billion". Nothing on the poster, though, indicates why this should work. It's yet another torus-based design, of which there have been many. The best performance to date is from the Joint European Torus: "In 1997, JET produced a peak of 16.1MW of fusion power (65% of input power), with fusion power of over 10MW sustained for over 0.5 sec."
All torus designs run into plasma instability problems. So far, nobody has a working solution. Nobody even has a good theoretical solution. No combination of fixed magnets has yet worked. There's some modest interest in active feedback for stabilization, and some modest success [nih.gov] has been reported. The instabilities are on the order of milliseconds, so active feedback is quite feasible.
Even ITER probably won't work. [jp-petit.org] The thinking behind ITER was originally "maybe it will become more stable if we make it bigger." Now, a little "maybe the feedback control people can make it work" has been added. It's not looking good, which is why there really isn't that much enthusiasm for ITER.
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Only to a topologist is a stellarator a torus. But, yes, stellarators have fewer stability problems, and after three decades of torii, they're starting to come back.
Re:Not even gonna read this. (Score:4, Funny)
Alternate post title: How I regurgitated an opinion I read elsewhere on the internet with absolutely no thought.
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Isn't that what an opinion is anyway? You hear information and opinions and make your own?
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Uh, at some point you're supposed to supply a dash of criticality, or your opinion won't rise in the oven, and you'll end up with shitty opinions that annoy everyone.
Stating an arbitrary opinion with no justification or construction as a post just screams "I am bad at thinking" to me.
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That's why I mentioned information and opinions. That is exactly how an opinion is formed. You have some information, you hear opinions, you question opinions different than yours, they provide arguments which helps increase you knowledge of the topic and you adjust your opinion.
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A lot of folks seem to leave out that last step :)
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I agree.
Fusion isn't "expensive", it's lossy (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't just "expense" as the summary pretends. It's that the energy output is less than the energy inputs.
Scaling the reactor is like the old joke about "losing money on every sale, but making up for it on volume."
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Re:Fusion isn't "expensive", it's lossy (Score:5, Funny)
It's that the energy output is less than the energy inputs.
They could fix this if they used Monster Cables.
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The problem [is] that the energy output is less than the energy inputs.
Which is just economics, easily solved. Just use a massive wind and solar farm, paid for with government subsidies, to run initiation and containment. Take your 30% energy yield, sell it on the spot market as "green energy" at an inflated price (with more subsidies). Use the paper losses to eliminate taxes on your oil refinery. What am I missing? Oh yeah; 'Step 4 - Profit?'
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Scaling the reactor is nothing at all like that joke. For one thing, simple realities of available room generally make use of superconducting magnets impractical on small reactors. Further, every reactor benefits from larger sizes simply due to square-cube scaling, with less surface area for heat loss for a given volume of fusing plasma, and the various plasma and electromagnetic field behaviors follow their own scaling laws, dependent on the design but frequently favoring larger scales. The Polywell, for e
Re:Fusion isn't "expensive", it's lossy (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you saying that science has found a way around the second law of thermodynamics?
There's always one in the energy stories...
It's not about 'creating' energy, it's about accessing the energy already stored in things. Think of it like a gold mine: Just owning the gold isn't enough. You have labor costs and other overhead. if it costs you $50 to mine $100 worth of gold, you're doing better than breaking even. If it costs you $150 to mine $100 worth of gold, you're better off leaving it where it is. At no point in the process are you creating gold.
Same idea with energy. Existing processes don't create energy, they get at existing energy. It takes a certain amount of energy to access that existing energy. Some (coal, oil, fission) are like the first gold mine, producing enough energy to make the process worth it. Fusion energy is currently like the second gold mine: you can get gold out of it, but it's going to cost you more than the gold is worth to do it.
There's probably something wrong in there (sorry, I'm rusty), but it's close enough to get the idea.
Re:Not even gonna read this. (Score:5, Informative)
But see, that's a much better post.
I'd disagree, but I'd disagree for reasons that are based on what you said, rather than the fact that you gave a stupid, uniformed conclusion, with no basis alongside it.
So let's do that. Let's talk about why Q>1 isn't a gigantic deal for the tokamaks that are starting to work. They achieve confined fusion with the design, in keeping with the predictions of how the confinement is theoretically supposed to work, and the theoretical models also indicate notpositive is possible. The proponents of the designs suggest that's a mere matter of tuning, testing, and calibration to get the precision of the magnetic fields precise enough.
That's not unreasonable. That doesn't mean it will work out, just that there's no abstract or theoretical limitations known to be an impassible barrier.
Re:Not even gonna read this. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are no theoretical limitations, but there very well could be engineering limitations. We won't know that until we actually build ITER because even though engineering is a science it's mostly a practical applied science. The entire point of ITER is to see if the engineering can be worked out at a power plant scale. ITER is so expensive because they don't know how to engineer them yet. This will mean they will vastly over design it so nothing very bad happens. After running it for a while they will have a better understanding of the actual forces/energy and the upper limits of those inputs and the design can be fine tuned and costs reduced.
The fact is a tokamak of this scale just isn't understood that well (engineering, not the theory). They will be breaking all kinds of new ground in many different fields with ITER and that's expensive. But even if it doesn't work they will learn unbelievable amounts from it. I expect there will massive developments in many fields not the least of which will be material science as a results of this reactor.
Re:Not even gonna read this. (Score:4, Funny)
"Hey boss, I have a functional proof of concept for something that's supposed to theoretically work"
"Well throw it out! Everyone knows engineering can't improve on existing designs"
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You're arguing against something besides what I actually said.
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Which is just the same old "It's just an engineering problem!" trope that we've been hearing from fusion researchers for decades. As we know, those engineering problems tend to be far more difficult than physicists ever give them credit for.
THIS. And its not isolated to fusion reactors.
Unfortunately the costs of resolving those problems tend to be either left out or underestimated as well.
Re:Miracle Occurs here. (Score:4, Funny)
Yep...it's pretty much 1. Step one 2. Step two 3. Make the whole Fusion thing work. 4. Cheap Energy!
For gods sake, this is /. You forgot: 5. Profit!!
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No he didn't, the Koch brothers want to keep all the profit in coal. Duh.
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Really? God damn. I'm going to be rich selling all the unicorn farts I've been collecting from my stable full of unicorns. How much are you willing to pay for a cubic meter of the stuff at one atmosphere of pressure?
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Until they overcome the realities that containment fields break down so fast that the costs outweigh any benefit.
This is just details. /s
Fusion Reactor Concept Could Be Cheaper Than Coal
What does the headline mean "could be"? This concept is cheaper than a coal plant right now; it cost them almost nothing next to a real coal plant. Now constructing one ... that's a different story.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
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Who's going to want a fusion plant if it's more risky and more expensive than Natural Gas?
Someone who doesn't like burning fossil fuels or mining natural gas.
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Someone who has to currently buy their natural gas from Russia, which tends to carry some conditions along with it.
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The trouble with this, is that it assigns all risk to the inventor... and a _relatively_ low value even if they succeed. What happens if someone solves fusion, but decides, that a 10B prize plus royalties is actually LESS money than just producing and licensing the technology privately... Then one corporation or nation-state has patentable control over the tech and will make 100BGv* a year.
*BGI = Bill Gates' value
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Oh, that one ... the one that causes millions of cases of skin cancer each year, among other things ... that's yours?
Wait a minute while I call my lawyers.