Laser Fusion Reactor Approaches 'Burning Plasma' Milestone (sciencemag.org) 132
A reader shares a report from Science Magazine: In October 2010, in a building the size of three U.S. football fields, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory powered up 192 laser beams, focused their energy into a pulse with the punch of a speeding truck, and fired it at a pellet of nuclear fuel the size of a peppercorn. So began a campaign by the National Ignition Facility (NIF) to achieve the goal it is named for: igniting a fusion reaction that produces more energy than the laser puts in. A decade and nearly 3000 shots later, NIF is still generating more fizz than bang, hampered by the complex, poorly understood behavior of the laser targets when they vaporize and implode. But with new target designs and laser pulse shapes, along with better tools to monitor the miniature explosions, NIF researchers believe they are close to an important intermediate milestone known as "burning plasma": a fusion burn sustained by the heat of the reaction itself rather than the input of laser energy.
Self-heating is key to burning up all the fuel and getting runaway energy gain. Once NIF reaches the threshold, simulations suggest it will have an easier path to ignition, says Mark Herrmann, who oversees Livermore's fusion program. "We're pushing as hard as we can," he says. "You can feel the acceleration in our understanding." Outsiders are impressed, too. "You kind of feel there's steady progress and less guesswork," says Steven Rose, co-director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London. "They're moving away from designs traditionally held and trying new things."
NIF may not have the luxury of time, however. The proportion of NIF shots devoted to the ignition effort has been cut from a high of nearly 60% in 2012 to less than 30% today to reserve more shots for stockpile stewardship -- experiments that simulate nuclear detonations to help verify the reliability of warheads. Presidential budget requests in recent years have repeatedly sought to slash research into inertial confinement fusion at NIF and elsewhere, only to have Congress preserve it. NIF's funder, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), is reviewing the machine's progress for the first time in 5 years. Under pressure to modernize the nuclear arsenal, the agency could decide on a further shift toward stockpile stewardship. "Will the ignition program be squeezed out?" asks Mike Dunne, who directed Livermore's fusion energy efforts from 2010 to 2014. "The jury's out."
Self-heating is key to burning up all the fuel and getting runaway energy gain. Once NIF reaches the threshold, simulations suggest it will have an easier path to ignition, says Mark Herrmann, who oversees Livermore's fusion program. "We're pushing as hard as we can," he says. "You can feel the acceleration in our understanding." Outsiders are impressed, too. "You kind of feel there's steady progress and less guesswork," says Steven Rose, co-director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London. "They're moving away from designs traditionally held and trying new things."
NIF may not have the luxury of time, however. The proportion of NIF shots devoted to the ignition effort has been cut from a high of nearly 60% in 2012 to less than 30% today to reserve more shots for stockpile stewardship -- experiments that simulate nuclear detonations to help verify the reliability of warheads. Presidential budget requests in recent years have repeatedly sought to slash research into inertial confinement fusion at NIF and elsewhere, only to have Congress preserve it. NIF's funder, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), is reviewing the machine's progress for the first time in 5 years. Under pressure to modernize the nuclear arsenal, the agency could decide on a further shift toward stockpile stewardship. "Will the ignition program be squeezed out?" asks Mike Dunne, who directed Livermore's fusion energy efforts from 2010 to 2014. "The jury's out."
in Soviet Russia (Score:2, Funny)
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in Soviet Russia burning plasma approaches YOU!
Tsar Bomba!
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The ASCII art filter only nails regular posts that happen to contain an unusual word. Somehow ASCII spam gets through.
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Need to do stuff like count 'word' frequency, using all non alpha-num characters as delimiters, assess what portion of the post is abnormally long 'words', abnormally short 'words', fixed line lengths, fuzzy matching against subsections of common junk posts, etc.
a building the size of three U.S. football fields (Score:4, Insightful)
Can someone tell me what that is in S.I. units since this story is supposed to be about y'know science
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U.S. football fields is a freedom unit I'm not really familiar with.
Can someone tell me what that is in S.I. units since this story is supposed to be about y'know science
An American football field is 100 yards (91.44 meters) by 160 feet (48.8 meters). So the area is 4462 square meters.
I am assuming the NIF was designed without considering the area of the endzones.
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It's ten stories so it actually has a lot more usable space than that. A lot of the equipment is multistory but there is still a lot of room for offices and labs.
Re:a building the size of three U.S. football fiel (Score:4, Informative)
ShanghaiBill confided:
An American football field is 100 yards (91.44 meters) by 160 feet (48.8 meters). So the area is 4462 square meters.
I am assuming the NIF was designed without considering the area of the endzones.
Actually, the end zones also count (because touchdown passes must be caught within the 10-yard by 160-foot end zone area to count, and the goal posts which an attempted field goal must pass between - and above their crossbar - to count stand at the rear of the zone), so add another 20 yards (because there are two of them) to the football field's total length.
Yes, I'm being pedantic - but I'm also technically correct. And isn't that the best kind of correct to be on /. ... ?
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Accuracy only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
And nuclear ordnance
Yes I am being snarky.
As am I.
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An American football field is 100 yards (91.44 meters) by 160 feet (48.8 meters). So the area is 4462 square meters.
I am assuming the NIF was designed without considering the area of the endzones.
The main problem with the NIF is that it was originally designed decades ago, and it was laid out with totally insufficient skybox accommodations for today's market.
The approved plan is to demolish the current NIF building, and to erect a more modern replacement in the parking lot next to the present facility.
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Are they going to get rid of the "pee troughs"? I know they are more efficient for moving male spectators through the restroom facilities, but not a lot of people are comfortable with hanging dong right next to a bunch of other guys with no partitions...
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The "trough" isn't the worst of them either... I was once at a travel stop bathroom where the urinal-equivalent was a circular fountain, maybe 5ft in diameter. So not only were you standing elbow-to-elbow with other people, but you also got a full visual with eye contact of whoever it was across from you.
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Found the MIT student!
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Can someone tell me what that is in S.I. units since this story is supposed to be about y'know science
But because it's about commercially applicable nuclear science, it won't be done in most parts of the EU either.
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I'm never sure whether people who use American football fields are referring to just the main playing area (100x50 yards) or the entire surface including regulation end zones and sidelines. If you include the *entire* surface of an American football field, the regulation specifications give you an area pretty close to 1/2 hectare: 0.53512151 ha.
If we take that as 1 "American football field", then three of those is: 1.60 ha.
Now let me suggest a more international standard: the 400 m Olympic track and field o
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Americans measure short distances in car lengths and long distances in football fields. Got it now?
Light 'em up!! (Score:2)
If we were not energy independent and actually urgently needed it we could run another operation warp speed. Ready in about 10 months.
If the USA was in dire need of energy then another "operation warp speed" would, in 10 months, have three new nuclear power reactors completed and performing their initial "shakedown" before synchronizing to the grid, two more reactors more than halfway to completion, four previously abandoned coal mines opened, a dozen new natural gas wells drilled, three companies shipping oil drilling equipment to ANWR, three mines producing reactor grade thorium, and a new uranium enrichment plant spun up and pumping ou
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in 10 months, have three new nuclear power reactors completed and performing their initial "shakedown"
I needed a good laugh.
Re:a building the size of three U.S. football fiel (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course i could google that and i would if i wanted to express myself in units of square whale fins.
I learned about acres, inches, gallons, liquid ounces and all fancy other units you got and i'm fine with that. But i do have no frikking clue how big a football field is, partly because i realize you're not talking soccer.
Now, if i was a journalist and i'd reply to my boss 'but my readers can just google that' i just my job. It's task of the journalist to provide adequate information to the reader. Which, if more info is wanted always can go google, but if not most likely appreciates a readable chunk of informative text without feeling dyscalculic.
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Re: a building the size of three U.S. football fie (Score:2)
That's just comical. "My girlfriend slapped me with a half elephant"
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It's an article published in a magazine owned by the American Association for the Advancement of Science , with intended US readership, about a US government funded program, in a facility in the US state of California.
The overwhelmingly vast majority of people in this market segment know that a football field is 100 yards long, and about half as wide as it is long. It also gives a spacial reference that is easier to relate to than giving the square footage of the building size. And, quite frankly, if you
That's wonderful! (Score:2)
It sounds like we might only be 15 years away from functional fusion energy!
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Tokamak is likely to get to breakeven long before inertial confinement.
Re:That's wonderful! (Score:4, Informative)
Re: That's wonderful! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yep. And it's only one small step from there to having the world by the balls by making them dependent on American reactors for their economies. No F35s needed.
See Asimov's "Foundation" for more info.
Re: That's wonderful! (Score:3)
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The German reactor is a unique design. :P
Germany wont stop funding ITeR, after all our PhD's need work
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Look up the funding, we'd rather spend trillions on shitty *cough f35* planes than revolutionize energy(last I checked less than $1billion a year).
Not even close. It's not trillions, it's $1.2T. And that's the cost to develop, purchase, and operate the fleet of ~2,000 aircraft for 60 years (until 2077).
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Re: That's wonderful! (Score:2)
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Which is sad, because the F35 is probably completely obsolete once you've removed it's primary justification - projecting air superiority throughout the world in order to secure access to global resources (read: energy).
Practical, commercially sustainable fusion energy will disrupt human civilization in ways we can't even imagine right now, including possibly the need for war. Sure, there will still be asshat tin pot dictators that need to be kept in check, but we can do that with existing hardware.
The go
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Practical, commercially sustainable fusion energy will disrupt human civilization in ways we can't even imagine right now, including possibly the need for war.
Oh, don't worry, I'm sure we can find other reasons for war if we look hard enough.
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I'm beginning to think I should've explicitly added the "/sarcasm" tag...
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I mean... yeah. But still this is research that HAS to be done. Because if we ever do crack this fusion nut, than SO MUCH of our troubles as a species get solved. Almost free energy in ridiculous surplus without carboning the atmosphere into a venus style hellgas, the ability to actually do energy expensive stuff both within costs and ecologically safely.
I mean we can get half way there with fission, but we all know the political hurdles in the way of that path and they can't be solved by a cleverer design.
Re:That's wonderful! (Score:4, Informative)
Almost free energy in ridiculous surplus without carboning the atmosphere into a venus style hellgas, That is a myth. The energy will never be "free". After all you need the power plants to produce it - and those are expensive. You need the people to operate it, you need the grid, you need grid balancing. In Germany the grid costs are half of the consumer end price. So even if the "real energy" would be free, the distribution and billing etc. still costs money.
Then comes the fuel, perhaps there will be cheaper ways to make fuel, who knows. Then decommissioning.
When the plant has to be dismantled it will be a radioactive pile of shit, just like a fission plant.
At the moment playing with fusion is only interesting as a fundamental research. Perhaps we manage to scale a fusion plant down, to indeed use it as an rocket engine. That would be cool. But unless there is something with those "cold fusion project", we most likely will never have a commercial electricity producing fusion reactor. Hot fusion on that scale simply will always be to expensive.
Re:That's wonderful! (Score:5, Informative)
No it's not a radioactive pile of shit just like a fission plant. The isotopes produced are of a much shorter half life to the point where a 34 year old shutdown fusion reactor is basically at near background levels.
On the other hand we will have to deal with Chernobyl for centuries to come.
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No it's not a radioactive pile of shit just like a fission plant.
Yes it is.
Read a book about it.
The isotopes produced are of a much shorter half life to the point where a 34 year old shutdown fusion reactor is basically at near background levels.
That is utter nonsense.
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I mean we can get half way there with fission, but we all know the political hurdles in the way of that path and they can't be solved by a cleverer design. But Fusion hasn't got the stank of Fukushima or Chernobyl, so its a politically safer bet for the spineless political class to roll out.
As you can see in this very thread, fusion will not solve the political problem of nuclear energy, since the flat-earth lobby will immediately come with a similar set of objections to it, so long as its fossil-fuel sponsors still have money to burn. The first fusion plants should be built on military reservations like the Nevada Test Site, where protesters have no legal power to get in the way.
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I get the sarcasm. We have been only 15 years away every year for the last 40-50 years...
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thatsthejoke.jpg
So many new units of measurement (Score:5, Insightful)
Today something called punch measured in speeding truck as units
The libraries of congress and Olympic sized swimming pools are dejected and sitting on the side lines, reminiscing the good old days when they were the choice units of measurement. Clear warning to ballet shoe toe tops and speeding trucks, you will end up in the same garbage heap. The rate at which our collective intelligence is falling, you too would be considered too technical in not too distant future.
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I am waiting for the EU to introduce "The Brussels Unit of Measurement"
But like the farad, such a unit will be inconveniently large for everyday use. People evaluating regulations will have to talk in terms of picobrussels and nanobrussels.
and another one (Score:5, Funny)
You forgot volume in peppercorns.
Re:and another one (Score:4, Insightful)
Falling Down (Score:2)
useless for energy production (Score:3)
This isn't a viable path for energy production: it's an excessively expensive device for attempting to calibrate nuclear weapons codes in the absence of live testing.
The nuclear weapons and ignition fusion should both be cut, and any research money devoted towards development of viable energy fusion research.
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This isn't a viable path for energy production: it's an excessively expensive device for attempting to calibrate nuclear weapons codes in the absence of live testing.
Arguably, NIF was actually the "save the endangered nuclear physicists" device. Without something interesting to work on, there was (and is) the belief that nuclear physicists will go into other fields of study, leaving no one around to design the next generation of physics packages (the euphemism which is used for the core of the nuclear weapon).
Private Industry? (Score:2)
Re:Private Industry? (Score:5, Insightful)
The private efforts are great but they don't seem to be doing much either .. the ones that aren't investor scams haven't produced good results in spite of being at it for years (general fusion, tri alpha energy, EMC2, lawrenceville plasma physics, etc.)
Also, the skeptics keep changing the amount of time fusion is supposedly away .. for example sometimes they say "it's always been 50 years away" other times 25, 15, 10, or 5.
Fact is fusion funding was nearly zeroed i the 1970s. If fusion had the right amount of funding we'd be there by now. Instead the trickle of money has not been enough to do much .. but there is lots of progress being made. Although the skeptics don't want to hear it .. the numbers (energy produced versus input energy) are improving steadily. If the field was stagnant the "eternally 25 years away" argument could be entertainable .. but currently there are improvements incremental or small hops .. but still progress. And nothing emerged to rule things out.
Airplanes took 100s of years to develop too .. as did any technology.
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no, if fusion had "the right amount of funding" we'd still be exactly where we are now. We have new machines impossible to make a decade ago, and they can't manage it. The boondoggle ITER won't start for 5 years and it won't make self-sustaining fusion 5 years after that since not its purpose.
We have a fusion reactor in the sky that works well, we have more than enough square miles of dessert to cover with efficient solar cells, and we have UHVDC lines to carry the power across a continent. We can spen
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We are spending money on solar .. fusion research is a miniscule percent of the energy budget. We are spending $60 billion annually on solar but only about 250 million on fusion energy research .. that is like a three hundredth of the expenditure.
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> 250 million on fusion energy research
ITER alone is about 2 billion a year USD. That should be relatively obvious given its construction timeline and $22 billion budget.
If "we" refers to the US alone, then the other number is incorrect:
> We are spending $60 billion annually on solar
The US will install about 14 GW in 2020 (in spite of COVID) and at an average cost of 80 cents that's 11 billion.
So, which one is wrong? Both?
Re:Private Industry? (Score:5, Informative)
> If fusion had the right amount of funding we'd be there by now
Ahh yes, this tired old canard gets trotted out in every one of these threads.
The number you are misquoting was published by Lindon LaRouche's Fusion Energy Foundation. FEF was shut down in 1987 for illegal fundraising activities.
Their chart, which I'm sure you can find online, shows several possible funding programs including "fusion never". The claim is that if we just spent more money we would have fusion faster.
However, when one examines the history of the chart, you will find it was made in the 1970s using funding programs outlined by what would become the Department of Energy a few years later. At that time, everyone was convinced that tokamaks were going to be working fusion power devices in the 1980s and we would have commercial prototypes by the 1990s.
The funding programs were essentially different timelines considering how to fund the three machines that would be stepping-stones on that path. The first had to validate various concepts for heating the plasma, which tokamaks of the early 1970s could not do. The next would run on both deuterium and tritium with the goal of reaching breakeven. The last would be a prototype commercial machine with all the extra bits and piece that would require.
Depending on how aggressive you wanted to be, you could overlap the construction of those designs; that would result in much higher yearly budgets for the department as a whole, but compress the time axis. Or, if you didn't need the power before 1990, you could spread out those machines so they didn't overlap, thereby reducing the yearly budgets. Those are the A, B and C programs you see in the FEF chart.
In all three, and the fusion never case as well, the first step was a heating demonstration machine. This was produced in the form of the Princeton Large Torus, which was a raging success. By 1978 it had reached 60 million degrees, well within the region needed to sustain fusion. So the next step was a breakeven reactor, which was soon being built by three different groups, JT-60 in Japan, TFTR in the US, and JET in Europe.
All three failed to reach breakeven. The closest we have is JET's 0.67 shot in 1997, over 20 years ago.
So, then, that graph was wrong all along. We did not have a straight shot to fusion power, we didn't even really know what we needed to know to make the graph in the first place. We've had two more generations of machines since then (ST's and various upgrades to those ones) and we're still only going to reach breakeven in ITER in another 15 year, which cost more than all three of the budget programs combined.
The claim is complete BS, but posters are far too lazy to look up the providence of the information they parrot, so here it is again.
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You've debunked one particular funding and tech estimate from the 1970s, but you have not disproven the suggestion that with some amount of funding in past years, fusion would have been possible by today. That's very hard to disprove because we haven't given it a number yet. It does not look like fusion technology is impossible. In fact it still seems likely, to me anyway, to be an achievable goal given our current manufacturing and computing technology. Now I'm not involved in any current efforts here, tho
Plan Ahead (Score:2)
Self-heating is key to burning up all the fuel and getting runaway energy gain.
So what's the next step once "runaway energy gain" is obtained? That doesn't sound very reassuring.
On the bright side it might solve the traffic problem on 580.
Highly secure, no cameras (Score:2)
NIF is a highly secure facility. If you do get to tour it, no cameras are allowed... except for all the cameras used to film scenes for "Star Trek: Into Darkness.
It's impressive. If you do get the chance to tour it, don't miss the opportunity.
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NIF is a highly secure facility. If you do get to tour it, no cameras are allowed... except for all the cameras used to film scenes for "Star Trek: Into Darkness.
It's impressive. If you do get the chance to tour it, don't miss the opportunity.
The same applies to the Nevada Test Site. It's not easy to get onto a tour of it, but it should be on every nerd's bucket list.
Still waiting (Score:5, Interesting)
More than 25 years ago I attended a talk about Livermore's fusion program. They had slides explaining why fusion was the only possible solution to the world's energy needs. Oil was already starting to run out, and there was no way renewables could ever scale up enough to meet more than a fraction of what we needed. Fusion was the only game in town. They had a new laser coming online soon they thought would be able to do the job.
Here we are, a quarter century later. Renewables are skyrocketing. Coal and oil are declining, not because we're running out but because they're just too expensive to compete. And we're still waiting for fusion to show up to the game.
Same here (Score:3)
At school back in the 80s we were taken on a tour of JET here in the UK and were told that fusion power was just around the corner - 10 years tops. Yeah, well here we are again. The thing about fusion power is it generates more milestones than usable watts.
Re:Still waiting (Score:5, Insightful)
Renewables are not skyrocketing. It may seem like they are, because here and there they generate a serious amount of electricity in the right seasons and at the right times of day. But when considering the total amount of energy currently used by mankind instead of just electricity, renewables hardly make a dent. The amount of space and resources needed to get renewables to replace all fossil fuel (which does not just need renewable power generation but also vast stretches of new power cables and huge amounts of storage) is so unimaginably huge that if we were to pull it off, we'd have an environmental disaster (in mining, in land usage and in albedo changes) on our hands that dwarfs anything that we've seen so far.
But we won't pull it off; we'd need to accelerate renewable development to totally unrealistic amounts. For example, for my country, which is doing quite well in the renewable department, that would mean: increase the investment in renewable development with almost 10% every year until 2050 (which is when we aim to be CO2 neutral). By then, about one fifth of our working population would work in renewable development and we'd need about 1% of the worldwide concrete production while we only have 0.18% of the worlds' population. It's just totally unrealistic.
While hopefully renewables can generate a serious share of our energy, in most places we won't make it with just renewables, especially not in the winter and especially not at higher lattitudes, were most of the worlds' energy is consumed. We need either nuclear fusion, nuclear fission or something that harvests energy in space. And since we won't have large scale fusion nor space-energy anytime soon, our only chance to stop exhausting CO2 while we still have a chance will be nuclear fission for now. But since the nuclear industry is almost dead, it will take ages to ramp that up so that won't happen either. In short: we're royally fucked and will cross many climate change thresholds before we finally get our act together.
(This is usually were people start talking about cables to solar panels in the Sahara. I'll spare you the calculation but the amount of metal needed to get that done exceeds the world production many times over...)
So unfortunately they were absolutely right: fusion is the only possible solution to the worlds' energy needs. Nuclear fission can help us out as long as we don't have fusion, but that won't last forever (and there are many obvious reasons we should not want to continue using nuclear fission endlessly).
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"(This is usually were people start talking about cables to solar panels in the Sahara. I'll spare you the calculation but the amount of metal needed to get that done exceeds the world production many times over...)"
I will let google do the heavy lifting:
"number of kilometers of cable in the UK national grid":
The National Grid system is made up of approximately 7,200 kilometres (4,470 miles) of overhead line, 1,400 kilometres (870 miles) of underground cable and around 330 substations.
"distance from london
Re:Still waiting (Score:4, Informative)
The capacity of one such cable is 2500 megajoule per second at most. Since you're talking about the UK: the UK needs 188522 megajoule per second (on average!). That's 94 of such cables. Through other countries. For the UK alone. Good luck with that...
Also note that
- most of the existing power lines were created about 50 years ago or so, when copper was almost 100 times cheaper than it is now. We use aluminium now (which has only become cheaper) but it's still much more expensive to create a power line than it was when the bulk of power lines were built.
- you'd need serious security. This is going to be one hell of a terrorist-magnet, especially for subsea cables, which is what you'd most likely end up with.
- Marocco is probably a more logical choice, it's only half as far.
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Overhead transmission cables have been aluminium with a steel core probably since day one because copper is too fricking heavy. It has *NOTHING* to do with price.
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> Renewables are not skyrocketing
Renewables capacity is growing faster than any energy source in the history of mankind. Not by a little, by a lot.
Renewables installations took off post-2008 oil shock, and *really* took off after 2013 when they reached parity in many places. Since then, wind and PV have been the #1 and #2 power sources installed every year. The rate continues to accelerate, as one can see in the last major report:
https://about.bnef.com/blog/solar-and-wind-reach-67-of-new-power-capacity-a
Re:Still waiting (Score:4, Informative)
In 2019, wind and PV accounted for 67% of the total 265 GW new capacity installed. 118 GW of PV were installed.
PV is useless. Our energy consumption peaks during cold winter nights (and boy are those big peaks, even with super well insulated homes). With winter-time PV-production numbers, we'd need about 20000 km of PV (NL is a bit over 40000 kmÂ) to support our peak energy consumption. If that peak happened during the day, that is, but it doesn't; during peaks, most of our energy is used at night.
NL's total annual electricity consumption is about 120 TWh
The problem is not with electricity, that's easy. The problem is with our total energy use, which in the Netherlands is 3100 petajoule per year or about the equivalent of 850 TWh with - during cold winter nights - peaks of well over twice the average sustained for periods of many days.
Vattenfall is currently installing 140 turbines over the next two years in Hollandse Kust Zuid.
That's 0.5% of the 20000-30000 turbines we'd need to handle peak energy usage (with wind alone, that is; obviously there will be a mix). With 140 per two years, we'd get there by the year 2160 and then the entire North Sea will be an endless wind turbine farm and CO2 in the atmosphere has doubled (the latter - CO2 - is a total guess, the former - North Sea wind turbine density - a rather well educated guess).
You see, like that...
No, I don't see it at all. You ignore other forms of energy, you ignore the unbalanced production profile of PV over the year (and to a much lesser extent wind) and you ignore the biggest problem of all, which is that it is energy consumption peaks that our energy production should be able to support, not the average over a day.
Also, you seem to believe that current growth can be sustained. It cannot. For fun, just calculate what percentage of the workforce would have to work on renawables in 2050 in order for the current growth to continue. Or calculate how many times over we should increase world concrete production. Or think of where on earth we're going to put these things given that even now any location causes a big fuss and years of litigation without exception.
I have already challenged so many people, politicians that determine current direction included, to show me just a simple summary of what our energy production is going to look like in 2050 according to their scenario's. They don't have scenario's and anything they have is completely unrealistic in terms of how fast things can ramp up. It's all a big dream that lacks any substantiation. Even if we'd start ramping up wind turbines production as fast as we can AND build nuclear power plants as fast as we can AND use ALL geothermal energy available under our country, with the way things are going now, we're still going to rely on fossil fuels for at least half of our peak energy needs by 2050. The plan, though, is to be CO2 neutral by then. I don't see it, I really don't.
And it's so very easy to debunk what I'm saying; just show a summary of what the energy mix in 2050 should look like, how it is enough for peak usage and how fast we need to ramp up production capacity to get that done. Nobody gets further than a fragmented list of examples like your post. We don't need fragments, we need to be able to support 115GW worth of electricity for at least a week to get through a cold winter spell.
Re:Still waiting (Score:4, Informative)
Our energy consumption peaks during cold winter nights (and boy are those big peaks, even with super well insulated homes).
You're basing your argument on an outlier. Most of the world's population lives in places that are much warmer than the Netherlands. 40% of the world's population lives in the tropics, where there's barely any difference between summer and winter. See this graph [els-cdn.com] which shows how population varies by latitude. Worldwide, energy use is highest in the summer.
Starting your post with a patently false claim like, "PV is useless," is kind of absurd. What you should have said is, "Solar energy, on its own, cannot supply 100% of the world's energy needs at all times and all places." That's likely true, but so what? No one says it needs to. For most of the world's population, PV is a fantastic energy source that could easily provide nearly all of their energy needs. Even in the Netherlands it's far from useless. It's still an excellent energy source during the summer, and even during the winter you can get solar energy from southern Europe. You'll want to supplement with other sources of renewable energy, but that's not a problem. You're really close to lots of excellent wind resources.
you ignore the biggest problem of all, which is that it is energy consumption peaks that our energy production should be able to support, not the average over a day.
That's what storage is for. Adding enough storage to match production to demand over a day is not difficult and not that expensive. In fact, in many places installing wind or solar plus a few hours worth of storage is already cheaper than burning fossil fuels. For longer terms (seasonal variation) it would be very expensive, but there are other ways of dealing with that (diversified energy sources, long distance transmission, and where necessary overbuilding supply).
And it's so very easy to debunk what I'm saying; just show a summary of what the energy mix in 2050 should look like, how it is enough for peak usage and how fast we need to ramp up production capacity to get that done. Nobody gets further than a fragmented list of examples like your post.
https://web.stanford.edu/group... [stanford.edu] Detailed roadmaps for 139 countries, every one of them getting to 100% renewable energy by 2050.
Re: (Score:3)
That "detailed" roadmap makes several huge mistakes or leaves gaping holes. I'll name a few:
1. It averages over all countries; that's easy because like you said, for many countries PV will work out just fine. However, for that to work, we'd need to have insanely large amounts of power lines and ridiculous amounts of storage (more on that below). Also, Southern Europe would need to give up thousands of square kilometers to produce energy for the north. They won't do that, they're not mad. Cables to power the
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> PV is useless
Which is why it is the fastest-growing energy source in history - because zero people who actually matter agree with you.
> You ignore other forms of energy
No, you did that. You said renewables can't (blah) and "PV is useless". You didn't say "PV in addition to hydro, in addition to wind, in addition to nuclear is useless", you said "PV is useless".
I'm perfectly happy with a multifaceted grid, which in my personal case includes PV from my garage roof, hydro from Quebec, nuclear from Pick
they are still right (Score:3)
Re:they are still right (Score:4, Interesting)
But it won't be solved. The most likely candidate is pumped hydro (because of efficiency and relative cost) but it requires massive amounts of space (and/or elevation differences). Most suitable locations in populated areas are already in use and new locations would come with vast methane exhaust.
In my flat country, we'd need half of the country covered in a reservoir 10 meters deep to store enough energy to get us through a SINGLE cold winter day (that's 26 times the equivalent of https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]). And that's next to the 16000km of wind turbine park we'd need (my country is 300km long...) assuming that we'd already use all locally available geothermal and hydro energy.
A more reasonable alternative would be P2G, but that's ridiculously inefficient both in production and in use and since what you store, you also must produce, that would mean we'd need about twice as many wind turbines and solar cells while we cannot even get close to building enough in time with the current capacity and growth to replace existing fossil production.
So, yes, they're absolutely right, but we cannot wait for them any longer. We need a plan B now. And the only feasible plan B at this time would be nuclear fission. Or plan C: move everybody away from the North Pole towards warmer and more sunny locations, starting today.
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Yeah by my country Scotland, has the potential for 500GWh of pumped hydro storage, which is more than enough for the whole of the UK and there are additional options in England and Wales. I am sure there are pumped hydro options on the island of Ireland too. What's the problem again?
Chasing dreams? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sometimes I wonder if practical fusion is actually possible. Everyone points to the sun as an example, but even in a reactor the size of the sun, fusion is a relatively rare event. One article I recall pointed out that the energy generation in the sun is roughly equivalent to a good compost pile. It is just a very big compost pile.
What we are trying to achieve is orders of magnitude harder. We want to generate megawatts - preferably gigawatts - in a very small space.
Re: (Score:2)
Forget the sun, what about thermonuclear weapons .. aka the hydrogen bomb? It is proof that fusion can occur on Earth .. and it's a hell of a lot more than Gigawatts. If you never heard of the hydrogen bomb google it. See what it did to the Bikini Atolls.
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H-bomb - just a slightly uncontrolled reaction, that. It's the control that's the challenge...
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The question isn't if fusion can occur on earth. You can make a working fusion reactor in your garage. The problem is making a reactor that has net energy output.
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False. A hydrogen bomb has a enormous net energy output, even when you account for the cost of purifying the plutonium or uranium for the fission bomb required to compress/heat up the hydrogen. For example, the Tsar Bomba (which was actually a scaled down design) had an energy output of 70 GWh.
My point is that it is possible to get net energy output on Earth using fusion. The only question is can we do it in the economic and controlled manner required for a reactor. Obviously we can't use a conventional H-b
Re: (Score:3)
A bomb isn't a reactor they don't count. No reactor at this stage has been able to create net energy output. They have all operated at a loss, in other words the lasers, magnetic confinement fields and everything else cost more power than we can get out of the fusion reaction.
This hurdle must be overcome before they can economically viable. I agree with you that it is possible and should happen eventually assuming we don't give up. But you are simply factually wrong stating that a net positive has been ach
Re: (Score:2)
If you never heard of the hydrogen bomb google it. See what it did to the Bikini Atolls.
Google says the bomb destroyed gravity and started a chain reaction in the water converting it all to gas letting all the ships on all of the oceans drop down to the bottom.
Skepticism (Score:3)
Read the Wikipedia article on the NIF. My skepticism began when I was re-watching TRON, and looked up where they shot the laser facility scenes in. It was the SHIVA facility, built to test ICF fusion. It was subsequently dismantled for the higher powered NOVA facility. After it failed to hit "ignition" the NIF was designed and built.
Here's the cycle. A giant, multi-billion dollar laser facility is built to hit ignition. It fails, so they build another one. It fails, so they build another one. It fails, so t
We measure shit in meters. (Score:3)
Really? This is news for nerds. You can use recognized units to indicate all those things. How large is an American football field? How heavy is the truck? How big is a peppercorn? Bullshit article from the first line.
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Approaches 'Burning Plasma' Milestone (Score:2)
Sounds like a mage training a new spell.
Only a speeding truck? (Score:2)
Funny, a speeding truck hitting a peppercorn didn't actually sound like a lot of energy.
A milestone, yes, but not what you think (Score:2)
While it is absolutely true that ignition would be a long (~80 years) sought goal, it is very important to understand *precisely* what that means in the context of NIF.
NIF's lasers are powered by an enormous capacitor bank, which outputs a pulse containing ~422 MJ of energy. In the absolute best-case scenario, limited by the mechanical design of the reaction chamber, the fusion reactions can produce ~ 35 MJ.
422 in, 35 out.
35 MJ is 9.7 kWh. If one considers converting that energy to electricity, you *might*
Can they scan users with all those LASERs? (Score:2)
So, skip all that fusion mumble jumble, and start scanning people into the Internet! Image all the things we can do! Your Internet connected door bell rings, but it's a virtual guest requesting permission to visit your private LAN. Or a programmer able to test out the changes to the programs immediately. Want to read every book ever written? Visit the Library of Congress and incorporate it into your virtual mind.
We can cure so many ailments by scanning
Feeding it new fuel (Score:2)
research on weapons or fusion? (Score:2)
Isn't NIF rather a research project on high-powered lasers for future use as weapons, or for simulating nuclear explosions?
Pretty much the rest of the world is working on tokamaks, stellarators etc. when it's about fusion energy.
Maybe NIF should have a shark pool, too.
Any day now... (Score:2)
Any day now, fusion will become a real energy source. Any day now...
NIF is a scam (Score:2)
NIF was never about viable fusion energy. It has always been about end-runs around nuclear test ban treaties. NIF only pays lip service to fusion power.
Re: This is not how I envisioned the Internet in 2 (Score:2)