https://phys.org/news/2023-12-japanese-experimental-nuclear-fusion-reactor.html
The world's biggest experimental nuclear fusion reactor in operation was inaugurated in Japan on Friday, a technology in its infancy but billed by some as the answer to humanity's future energy needs.
After what the USAians achieved with a net positive output, hopefully they can match and surpass that. Fusion is one of the few technologies that can get us to 1 on Kardashev scale.
But coal workers are a bedrock of American ideals! We can't take their jobs!
Is a /s needed? I don't know anymore. Do people really enjoy being coal miners and want their children to follow that wonderful career? I can get a yes to that question but only from people who have no idea what that entails.
The method they used is absolutely unsuited for power generation, they're doing weapons research. Two things:
I remember hearing when it was announced last that fusion was achieved, scientists were skeptical that we had finally achieved this and we wouldn't be actually putting it to use for decades to come.
But here we are. Yes it's experimental but it's working amd producing energy. I'm just surprised we're here already, even if it's only a proof of concept at this point
IAEA's estimate is that Nuclear fusion, if successfully researched and demonstrated at full capacity within 2036 at ITER (which is already lagging behind schedule) will result in commercial availability in 2050. So yes, we are still decades away from putting it to use.
The ITER was basically supposed to have been built starting in the 80s from my understanding... Until cheap fossil fuels dried up all interest in funding fusion research. When it takes 40 years to fund a single project via international collaboration, 50 years is a short timescale.
Even with renewed recent interest, fusion still has less than half the funding it did during the energy crisis. Of course the predictions from that era were optimistic given they were no longer able to do experiments like these when they expected them to proliferate.
The biggest delays for ITER were all political in deciding where it would be built and who would contribute what. Yes, there's been some technical delays since then, but compared to other projects of this scale it has actually gone fairly well.
The DEMO units to follow ITER should be able to be built by individual nations. Those should go a lot faster and hence cheaper. The whole point of structuring ITER the way they did was to give all the contributing countries experience in every critical system. That's very inefficient for this particular project, but should make follow up projects a lot more feasible.
Oh, I believe working fusion reactors are in the very near future, without a doubt. However, I also believe it can't possibly work out to be as transformative as people seem to expect. In the end, we'll be saying "congratulations, you've developed the most expensive form of energy production yet! It's nearly useless!"
And worst of all, we don't have enough beryllium in the world to produce the fusion breeding blankets needed to make more than a few fusion power plants. And even if we could make all those shiny beryllium blankets, we then have another problem... one of the side effect of using a heavy metal to absorb high energy particles and turn then into heat, is that over time the entire blanket becomes highly radioactive. Now we're back to the same problems we have with fission, but at a much higher cost.
Will fusion work? Absolutely, and it will be extremely useful for long duration space missions, or antarctic bases. But beyond edge cases, the tokamak will probably never make sense.
I'm curious to see if other solutions like helion's reactor will work, that certainly seems a lot more sustainable.
Yeah I mean at the end of the day the goal is still "make water hot to turn spinny thing with steam".
There is a helium fusion reaction that produces electrons. I'm not sure how feasible the process is for electricity generation, though.
Helion says they will generate power directly from the electromagnetic field of the amplified plasma pulses (and then more from waste heat). It may work to some degree, but their proposed tritium reaction will produce enough neutrons to sterilize a couple cubic kms and render the entire assembly too radioactive to maintain by humans.
I’m not optimistic about it as a solution to climate change nor any current day energy needs primarily because it feeds right into the techbro/capitalist lame kink that if we just had wayyyyy more power it would solve everything. Most of the problems we are experiencing today stem from having too much power, too much capability to extract resources violently from the earth, too much power from oil to the point that we built a batshit insane transportation system based around cars (even in the center of the worlds largest and densest cities) and most importantly too much power in the hands of energy and fossil fuel companies.
Fusion would solve 0% of any of those problems, and the more people fixate on it as the kind of solution we should be holding out for to save us, the more dangerous it is.
However, the science is cool, it is definitely worth investing in and studying because one day it could be huge. I just think if we discovered an energy source that provided us with limitless power today, right now, it would actually be the precise thing that would doom the human race into not fixing any of the problems that truly threaten our survival as a species nor would it save the planet from us.
There is zero evidence it wouldn’t just lead to even more extraction or destruction of the environment than is already happening. There is also little evidence that the power would actually get into the hands of the power and third world and it wouldn’t just be the US, Europe and the most powerful nations in Asia living off cheap power while keeping it from the rest of the planet.
The problem isn’t technology here.
We have not spent a hundred billion dollars on fusion energy research collectively as a planet in the past 70 years of working on it. We do spent 10x that every year for the US defense budget.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/margraf1/
That's just the US government's contributions. Harder to find totals for private investments and the historical contributions from all countries.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-energy-iter-idUKTRE6581JB20100609/
Heh, in 2010 the ITER project had already been funded with $16 billion euros, which would be $22 billion euros adjusting for inflation. Kind of funny that they were hoping to have it producing 500 megawatts of thermal energy by 2020... However, the funding for ITER itself is kind of a hot mess of debate, with differing opinions on how much has truly been spent on it thus far and how much more it will need: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Investment-in-fusion-has-reached-USD6-21-billion
I'm not sure if that's saying $6.21b USD just for 2023 for private funding efforts or if that's the cumulative thus far in general.
I'd say it's safe to say if you tally it all up--public and private investments--it's around a hundred billion or more. But yes, the US does dump an awful lot of money into the military industrial complex instead of towards more universally beneficial endeavors; though, that wasn't really what was being discussed.
Fusion is so dump. Were at least a couple decades away from brake even in the fusion reaction, but still people believe it will help solve the climate crisis.
Atm we put about 10 times nore energy into the whole system than we get out. And it generates nuclear waste because the wall materials absorb neutrons and get radioactive. And so many other unsolved problems... this technology is a nice research peoject, but none of us will ever see a commercial reactor in action, because it is so far away, if even possible.
They are, and they are good solution but they are not good all and end all solutions, both wind and solar cannot meet baseload and when you start talking about battery storage as solution, scaling it up requires more metal mining than will ever be sustainable, so pursuit of fusion, pursuit of tidal energy, pursuit of better nuclear, pursuit of better geothermal are viable exploration options as we need baseload generation substitute.
Dams are a whole another story ecologically but even leaving that aside, we are talking 200-300GW capacity currently in the world for PHES, even if you construct damns on every possible lakes, estimates are around 1000GW that world can build. World currently consumes close to 8000GW on baseload. We won't even cover 15% of baseload with PHES.
If you're trolling with your storage as magical solution keep trolling.
I'm not saying storing potential energy doesn't work, it works and even though we lose some energy in conversion it's still better than chemical batteries. No question there, my point is simple, we don't have enough infrastructure to cover the world's baseload demand by releasing stored energy. We need something that can produce baseload power 24x7. Geothermal and tidal(debatable but close enough) are the only viable renewable energy sources we have that run 24x7 and they're not enough to cover the world's energy demands. Adding PSEH doesn't cover it either. We need something more and nuclear (fission or fusion) are the only other options that don't emit CO2.
Because a technology community is usually filled with people interested in advancements in technology.
So, say, you're interested in space telescopes, come to this community to read about the latest advancements and you're hit with someone saying "pffftt, stick to ground telescopes, people!"
(I didn't downvote you, by the way.)
Max Planck plans on building an actual power plant in the 2030s. A stellerator (just like Wendelstein 7X) which, unlike Tokmaks, don't have scaling issues. They will still need to nail down tritium breeding (ITER not getting anywhere, it should have provided that data) and there's also some headaches about divertor panels which get (deliberately) hit by plasma and wear down quite a bit quicker than they would've hoped but a failure there would only get into the way of being price-competetive with other energy sources (lots of spare parts needed), not achieving net power output. Including cooling and everything, not just plasma heating.
As to it solving the climate crisis: Certainly not on its own, but possibly on the tail end of the transition. We don't only need to fix the climate issue but also switch to a circular economy and having plenty of cheap energy makes that way, way easier to achieve.
I’m as much a nuclear skeptic as anyone, but while fusion solves neither the time or budget problems of fission, it does solve the meltdown and waste problems.
The reaction used in fusion generators is:
[2]H + [3]H -> [4]He + n
Since tritium is usually produced from lithium in situ, you add:
[6]Li + n -> [3]H + [4]He.
The only radioactive thing here is tritium, and it's mostly confined to the reactor. Also, tritium isn't nearly as bad as fission waste.
So does this also mean that glow-in-the-dark watches (the non electronic type) get cheaper?
I mean, if you could extract any tritium from the reactor cavity, but it's probably going to get burned up instantly.
The reactions I showed add up to this overall reaction. Neutrons simply serve as a catalyst.
[2]H + [6]Li -> 2 [4]He
On the bright side, fusion reactors produce helium as a byproduct, which might make party balloons cheaper.
It improves the waste issue, doesn't really solve it. A dirty, little-discussed secret about fusion power.
If we had a bunch of fusion plants go live, we'd soon have tons and tons of radioactive containment wall material to bury/store somewhere. Including all the special handling requirements that you need with fuel rod waste. I think fusion plants would actually create more waste than a comparable fission plant, at least as far as tons of radioactive material.
The benefit is that waste would be lighter isotopes and degrade faster. So you have more physical material to worry about but only need to worry about it for ~100 years, not thousands.
The decommissioning plans for ITER more or less literally say "let stand there as-is for 100 years, then demolish as usual". Fisson plants, which don't use less concrete, need to be taken apart small section by small section, each single piece analysed for radiation and sorted into long- or short-term storage. Fusion plants are only marginally more of a headache safety-wise than the radiology department of a hospital and you don't generally hear people complaining about those.
So does 4 other fission power plants we can imagine. Now sure why we’re so Darwindamned fixated on fusion - I suspect it’s just the name.
Fissionable isotopes are yet another nonrenewable fuel.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe.
With reprocessing, which we already do, and new Gen IV power plants, there’s enough energy to last us thousand of years with currently known resources. And that’s before we start scooping it out of the water.
That's assuming a lot of ifs resolve our way, and without power needs increasing. It's more sustainable than coal/gas/oil for sure, but with current energy development needs it's barely long term (IIRC about 60-140 years)
Also, on centuries timescale, we will need to find more fissiles in space. And according to our current understanding of the universe, they should be quite rare, especially compared to hydrogen.
Basically, figuring out fusion power would solve our needs for the first level on the Kardashev scale, and has the potential to be portable fuel for the rest of the lifespan of the universe.
My aim is not to stop research on fusion - just making the point that we know how to do nuclear and it seems to me we are letting perfect be the enemy of good.