Everything needed to go from Q > 1 to actual electric power is nonexistant, not even being worked on, and far beyond the resources of these companies. Nobody knows how to produce the tritium needed to operate, or to extract it at ppb concentration if they did. Nobody knows how to build structural elements that will not fall apart after a few months' neutron blast. It has been decades since either was seriously looked at, with no promising ideas forthcoming.
That hasn't mattered much thus far because Q is so far off, and investors pour money in regardless.
Has anyone published research on concepts for a stellarator that uses high field magnets like the SPARC/ARC systems? Obviously the idea is that it would be smaller, but I am curious if there are any interesting specifics for such a machine. You could imagine that if W7-X and SPARC show good results in the next 5 years then a high field stellarator design would start to look pretty interesting.
Both Type One and Renaissance (mentioned in the article) are HTS stellarator startups. I'm not sure if they've published power plant studies, but they've certainly pitched them.
So for those of us who just want fusion without the physics explanations; is there any possibility a stellerator could actually give us a net Q (including -all- the power put into the process, and not just point of fusion) ? or is it just a good place to run fusion experiments?
Getting to net Q leaves you very, very far from useful fusion.
Structural material that can stand up to the neutron bombardment has not been identified; no one has worked on it in decades. No one knows how to breed enough tritium to fuel it, or how to extract it from the shielding ("blanket") fast enough to be useful, if indeed they did manage to breed some.
Current estimate is that working fusion is 40 years off and receding. People, and particularly startup companies, insisting otherwise are simply lying through their teeth. Securities fraud is poorly enforced.
Q is thus not very important, except maybe for getting more money.
So, there is nothing here to get excited about unless you are very keen on plasma fluid dynamics. Plasma fluid dynamics is probably the hardest kind of physics, so anybody who can do it deserves respect. It is a shame we can't find much for them to do besides fool with fusion and work on actually-useful ion propulsion.
Forgive my ignorance; what with all the effort made to isolate the exceedingly hot plasma from connecting with any surface, what are the plans to extract the heat in order to generate power?
By capturing neutrons (which, not being charged, escape the magnetic confinement continuously as the reaction goes on) with a moderator blanket which is then cooled with water/steam.
How to keep the blanket from quickly degrading and becoming nuclear waste seems to be an open problem (not too different from what goes on in fission reactors though)
> How to keep the blanket from quickly degrading and becoming nuclear waste seems to be an open problem
Not really. Most reactors plan to also use the neutrons to breed the tritium fuel for the reactor, so the blanket would consist of liquid metallic lithium. The only products from neutrons reacting with lithium nucleii (either 6 or 7) are He-4 and tritium.
The open problem is how to safely maintain the reactor-facing wall of the lithium blanket. It gets bombarded by a lot of neutrons, yet needs to contain the hot lithium. It helps that the lithium can be unpressurized, but it's still a problem, because molten metallic lithium is not fun to have leak into anywhere.
The plan of the ARC guys appears to be to design the reactor so that the lithium vessel is easy to remove and swap for a new one, and just use steel for the vessel. The downside of this is that it's going to result in a lot of low-activity waste -- actually probably quite a bit more than what fission plants produce. There are other approaches, including using a material that doesn't really get activated by neutrons, and which is maintained above it's annealing temperature so embrittlement caused by dislocations is repaired as it happens. The downside of this is that materials above their annealing temperatures can be kind of soft.
By the way, this type of reactor is technically a hybrid fusion-fission reactor. Because when the neutron hits a Lithium-6, what happens is a fission reaction. Lithium-6 absorbs the neutron, and then splits (in Tritium and Helium) and releases energy. We are taught that fission happens only for heavy nuclei, and this is mostly true, but Lithium-6 is an exception. The energy released in the fission of Lithium-6 is quite comparable to the energy releases in the fission of Uranium or Plutonium (4.8 MeV for the fission of one Li-6 nucleus vs about 200 MeV for Uranium-235 or Plutonium-239; that energy is nearly perfectly proportional to the atomic mass).
It looks like all the isotopes of LI are very short lived. Is the problem some of the daughters, or perhaps the Fe and C in the steel that are the problem?
Unpleasantly, molten lithium metal corrodes steel. Glass, too.
Making the blanket out of molten metal would be a problem anyway because it is conductive, and you are trying to control a magnetic field inside the reactor chamber with coils around the outside of the blanket. Varying magnetic fields would set up eddy currents in the metal that would oppose changes to the field. So you probably need a diamagnetic insulating compound of lithium. What to bind to the lithium is a tricky question, because you don't want it stealing neutrons you need to breed tritium from, and getting radioactivated besides.
Under ideal conditions, if you had pure 6Li and 7Li, a neutron it stops would end up producing more than one tritium nucleus. The problem is that you have a great deal of other stuff that will steal neutrons, including pipes.
You could make the blanket with LiD, lithium deuteride, and any neutrons the deuterium picked up would make a tritium. But lithium deuteride melts up around 700C, which is hotter than most people like to imagine operating reactors. Worse, you cannot chemically distinguish the deuterium from the tritium, when you try to extract it.
There is a separate problem of extracting any bred tritium, in parts-per-billion concentration, out of the blanket.
How to extract bred tritium at parts-per-billion concentration from hundreds or thousands of tons of "blanket" material quickly enough to cycle back into the plasma has not been studied, and might not be possible.
Furthermore, nobody knows how to get enough tritium bred in it in the first place. You need for each neutron captured to breed more than one tritium nucleus, to make up for the fraction that fails to breed any. A fusion reactor with no fuel is a remarkably expensive doorstop.
It's too bad no one's figured out a way to capture the output of a nuclear reaction and convert it directly to electricity without the intermediate heat cycle. Instead, most of the energy generated is just waste heat, and only a fraction of the energy generated is used for something useful.
“The helium nucleus carries an electric charge which will be subject to the magnetic fields of the tokamak and remain confined within the plasma, contributing to its continued heating. However, approximately 80 percent of the energy produced is carried away from the plasma by the neutron which has no electrical charge and is therefore unaffected by magnetic fields. The neutrons will be absorbed by the surrounding walls of the tokamak, where their kinetic energy will be transferred to the walls as heat.
In ITER, this heat will be captured by cooling water circulating in the vessel walls and eventually dispersed through cooling towers. In the type of fusion power plant envisaged for the second half of this century, the heat will be used to produce steam and—by way of turbines and alternators—electricity.”
That’s about ITER, but the two devices do not differ in this.
Makes me wonder if given the increasing value of water this has to change a bit (for reactors not close to shore).
I.e. instead of letting the steam escape into the air after going through a turbine using some mechanism to passively cool/condense it "somehow", reusing _all_ coolant water, only having closed loop(s) (the "inner" cooling loop is often closed anyway for various reasons transferring the heat to an outer loop before its used for anything).
There is no expectation that the steam would be released. That would be terribly wasteful, and it is not done in existing plants, whether coal or nuke-fired.
Because no known material can withstand direct contact with the plasma. Even with the air gap the walls require a cooling system, and therefore a continuous hot stream of fluid will be generated like in any other thermal power plant.
However, at the stage fusion research is, the main problem is figuring how to create a device to keep the plasma fluid stable for long periods of time. As far as I know, none of the existing prototypes aims to be a functional electricity generator.
Is this not false? The plasma is so incredibly thin that it would cool down immediately the moment it touches the walls. Afaik the heat generated here is mostly due to neutron bombardment and not because of the plasma.
The plasma had better not touch the wall, becuase then no plasma.
But the wall would be heated by the neutrons hammering it. Nobody has identified a material to make this wall out of. It has not even been worked on in decades.
From what I've understood from previous discussions (don't know much about plasma physics though): It is a multistep challenge. Step 1: Figure out how to get a self-sustaining fusion reaction. Step 2: figure out how to extract the energy in a useful, safe, non-destructive (to the reactor) way.
Doing Step 1 alone is very difficult so the've postponed Step 2 to the future. I may be wrong though.
We have some ideas, of course. The rough idea is: surround the reactor with a lithium blanket. This gets bombarded with neutrons, breeding fuel and heating the lithium, which transfers its heat to coolant to spin turbines. The devil is in all the engineering details, like: how do we make alloys to deal with neutron bombardment/hydrogen embrittlement, what's the optimal geometry to capture flux while being serviceable, etc.
Much of that work can and is researched in parallel, but there will be inevitable integration hell that has a burning fusion reactor core as a prerequisite.
For Deuterium-Tritium reactions, the easiest to achieve, 80% of the energy is contained in neutrons which pass through the first wall and must be captured in a blanket. The rest of the energy could be carried to the first wall by photons, called radiative cooling, but you can also use divertors that allow the fusion products to escape the plasma carrying away some of the heat.
I think in a stellarator you will need divertors to remove the fusion products because of the continuous operation.
Since the plasma runs hotter than the Sun, and the magnetic field cannot confine photons, my guess is that the hull will become insanely hot, and you could use it to drive a steam engine.
From the fine article: "Over the past 3 years, W7-X’s creators stripped it down and replaced all the interior walls and fittings with water-cooled versions, ..."
I am guessing that the water used to cool the interior walls will get hot in the process...
This would be for DT fusion, so most of the energy would come out as neutrons.
And it would face the same showstoppingly bad volumetric power density as tokamaks, because of limits on that energy flow through the surface of the reactor.
> And it would face the same showstoppingly bad volumetric power density as tokamaks, because of limits on that energy flow through the surface of the reactor.
I do think it is worth persevering though. The future of energy is Solar/Wind but Fusion should not be ignored. It is one of Nature's fundamental processes. Mastering fusion could turn out to be useful in ways we cannot possibly fathom at the moment right now.
I agree. If we were able to eventually miniaturise fusion reactors, they would be incredible for space flight. Back on Earth, if they could be made safe enough, maybe we could even use them to run container ships?
With all the fast neutrons emanating from a fusion reactor (and the heavy confinement that it requires) I don't think a container ship would be a safe enough environment (threat of disaster at sea, constantly jostling which might affect plasma stability etc.).
But yes, there is a potential for a lot of space applications and other things we haven't thought of yet.
Well fusion reactors are likely to cost a huge amount of money when they do become operational. No point having them sinking in a storm. Probably just safer to charge a huge battery and put it on a ship (if you don’t want to use fossil fuels). Avoids a lot of unfoseen commercial risk. Even though you could use water for shielding, the metal container and other things that hold the reactor would be highly radioactive and brittle due to continuous neutron bombardment. You wouldn’t want that to be lost at sea spewing radiation (even though the reactor itself would shutdown automatically).
> Probably just safer to charge a huge battery and put it on a ship
Large container ships burn through 16 tons of bunker oil per hour, and each journey can last up to 3 weeks - any idea what size of battery such a ship would need? I have no clue how to calculate that), but I'm guessing it would be completely impractical, even if we made huge strides in battery energy density.
There seem to be efforts towards battery powered container ships out there[1], independently of any speculated use of nuclear power to charge them. Most likely they'd be battery banks in containers that get swapped out and charged at port using the same equipment as is used to load and unload cargo I believe.
I remember reading that they would have more limited range and lower top speeds, but that this might not be as much of a problem as it seems because the current routes are built around large container + long haul but that's not necessarily required (for all shipping at least).
1 ton of oil is roughly 12 MegaWatt-hours[1], so 12 MWh in a ton × 16 tons per hour × 24 hours in a day × 21 days in three weeks = ~96000 MWh or ~0.1GWh.
Here's[2] a company offering a 1MWh battery in a standard 20ft container. EverGiven[3] carries ~20,000 standard containers. So, five EverGivens?
No need for complicated calculations here... Back of an envelope:
- The energy density of LiIon batteries (or molten salt, or liquidy nitrogen etc) is roughly 100x smaller than that of gasoline/diesel/bunker fuel in weight terms and 40x smaller in volume terms
- The efficiency of electric motors is roughly 2x that of large diesel engines
So the amount of batteries needed for the same performance is 50x larger in weight and 20x larger in volume than the oil it carries (which for a big container ship is 6,000-10,000 tons I think). Which would be impractical.
I'm hoping that some of the battery technology currently under development (such as flow batteries, or aluminium-sulphur batteries) can trade space and weight for increased total capacity. A good battery for grid storage would probably work well for a container ship.
>There are hundreds of nuclear powered ships already - submarines, Icebreakers, carriers, etc.
Aren't they all operated by militaries though? So if a conspiracy of crew members tries to steal some enriched fuel or fission products, it is legal to just shoot them or throw them in jail for decade for trying.
On board the ship itself, all the nuclear material is inside a running reactor, any would-be criminal would be dead before you could shoot them
Russian nuclear icebreakers are civilian ships, and people working at normal nuclear power stations are civilians too.
It is actually only relevant what happens in the part of the chain that handles nuclear fuel - thats the shipyard plus processing of spent fuel. But again, we do that for powerplants already.
DT fusion would be just ridiculous for space flight. Anything a DT reactor could do a fission reactor could do much better -- much smaller, much higher power density, much less complexity. And similarly for use in ships down here on Earth.
In practice, synfuels would be better than either for ships on Earth.
Isn't the main reason for us not having fission rockets the fact that we don't want to have radioactive material explode a few kms above our head aka a dirty bomb?
A DT fusion reactor would have a thrust/weight ratio much less than 1, so it could not be used in a launch vehicle. It would be purely for use up in space. So, none of this "a few kms above our heads" nonsense.
I don't understand this; if fission reactors were "better", we wouldn't be pouring so much into fusion?
Also, if it makes a difference, I didn't mean we'd be bolting a first gen tokamak to a container ship; I meant, much later down the line, if we were able to miniaturise (similar to how we have nuclear powered subs and ice breakers).
Much more money is "poured into" fission than fusion, likely by a few orders of magnitude. There's one mega project around fusion (ITER) that has a price tag of about 1-2 billion dollars a year if you average it out over the many-decade life of the project, while any given fission plant built also costs billions of dollars.
Like, whether or not fusion itself is a "meme," the idea that we spend obscene amounts of money on it is absolutely a meme with no real backing in reality.
The appeal of fusion is really more about getting out of worrying so much about meltdowns and weapon proliferation, and that there is potential for much higher overall energy output if we can figure it out.
That last bit is why, imo, we should be investing in it now even though it won't really help us reach net zero carbon "in time". If we want to reverse our carbon impact, if and when we get to net zero, we're going to need immense amounts of energy to do it.
Some people quite reasonably object to spending billions of dollars every year on a project with a vanishingly small prospect of success, and of exactly zero practical value if it ever did succeed. There will never be so much as a single kWh of commercial power from these turkeys.
We can all think of numerous projects going unfunded that would have much higher chances of success, and much greater positive impact. But we have a research institution whose only possible recommendation is to continue giving it money, indefinitely.
We see the same dynamic in Alzheimer Syndrome research, where almost all the research money goes to people still fooling with amyloids and tau tangles. The people who control publication, funding, and hiring are people who would have nothing to do if funding for amyloid work stopped. So, they continue funding amyloid work long after it was recognized as a dead end. They have bred up mice that get dementia, and literally everything they do is about the mice.
This is somewhat different from the current crewed spaceflight program in the US, where the absurdly expensive SLS rocket is mandated to be used because senators have constituents in their districts depending on income from building them, useless as they are. In this case NASA would dearly love to abandon SLS, but is required by law to try to launch them. The best they can do is delay launches. Anytime the shoot one, they have to spend $billions building another one.
> We can all think of numerous projects going unfunded that would have much higher chances of success
I can think of far more things getting funded that are either even less likely to succeed or likely to succeed and, in so doing, will cause harm and death to many people. There are so many things we're spending so much money on that do nothing but harm it's absurd to laser focus on something you consider merely pointless as a Boogeyman.
Who said it was "obscene"? You seem to be putting words in mouths.
I will say I do think money has been spent unwisely on fusion, particularly on approaches that have very little chance of success, with programmatic dysfunction that even fusion advocates have noted with anger. Chance of success does have to enter into the evaluation of whether funding is wise, or else one could argue for spending on perpetual motion machines.
I.. wasn't replying to you? And I wasn't referring to you or the person I was replying to specifically anyways, but the common sentiment whenever this comes up.
But it is absolutely a common misconception that fusion is very well funded when, given the challenges involved, it is funded quite poorly. If it was well funded, ITER might have been finished 20 years ago.
That said I think the results would have been disappointing, it doesn't really seem like material science was there yet and it's not clear more money thrown at it then would have gotten us there.
Imo I think even if you think it's a boondoggle it'd be better to fund it well (much better than we are) now and find out than drag this slow march of wasted money on old designs and ideas out forever. The ITER funding should have probably gone to something more like milestone awards and letting a bunch of paths proliferate.
You seem to think that government decisions are rational.
Fusion is a meme technology. People just have this assumption that's it's valuable, without having rationally arrived at that conclusion (which, when you examine it in detail, is very difficult to justify.) I suspect this was because it started back in the 1950s when consent was easier to manufacture and nuclear was being pushed. Fission lost that glamour with most people, but fusion somehow has retained it.
It's not only governments pouring cash in, but private equity too.
With all due respect, it seems ridiculous to me that fusion is a "meme technology" - aside from money, are all those many thousands of scientists really working on a technology they know can't work?
Some of that private investment has been sadly lacking in critical due diligence.
Look at Tri-Alpha. The people involved with that (Rostoker, Binderbauer and Monkhorst) were told 23 years ago that their colliding beam H-11B concept didn't work, for multiple reasons. Yet look at how much money they raised.
Let us just observe that securities fraud is very unevenly enforced.
None of these startup companies will ever produce a lone kWh of commercial power. But they will very diligently spend every dollar they are handed by VCs. The VC brokers know the score, but the money spent goes for equipment from quite profitable companies. It is not their money, and there seems to be plenty of it.
We already have the perfect way to create heat and the science around it has been long solved and understood. Solar and wind won't save us and fusion certainly won't. It amazes me how solar and wind dreamers all seem to like fusion but fission is just super evil.
Why won't solar and wind save us? There are many bogus reasons people give for that (IMO incorrect) opinion; I'm wondering which one you're going to come up with.
I'm not coming up with anything, but the first and glaring problem is that we can't store the energy created in any meaningful capacity. Sure we have some ideas like power2x but that doesn't really help for grid scale storage covering periods of several days where no power is created due to the weather. So imo the biggest problem is that it's just not a reliable source of energy. Here in Denmark we've spent billions on wind and we have nothing to show for it our energy is almost as dirty as when we started and the biggest reason for that is that we now use gas and biomass instead of coal. I could go on, but what it all comes down to is that we already have the perfect source of energy with nuclear fission, we can easily connect it to existing grids and it even works for district heating further decreasing our reliance on gas and fossil fuels.
No, we can, in multiple ways. Batteries of many different flavors, pumped hydro, storing as thermal energy (via resistive heaters or heat pump cycles), hydrogen (electrolyzers have crashed in price) and other e-fuels. Costs of these are declining rapidly as demand picks up and the scent of trillion dollar markets entices a wide range of enterprises and investors. Storage has not been much of a thing before because we were still burning fossil fuels and could just turn those up and down instead. But that doesn't mean storage wouldn't work.
In Denmark now e-fuels will be much cheaper than the fossil fuels (well, except maybe coal) you are now using. You're temporarily stuck in a rough spot right now, but the way out is via renewables + storage, and you'll be saving money doing it.
Thing is we didn't need to be stuck in a rough spot, if our electricity was clean we'd be excused for taking our time transforming the rest of our energy use.
You are claiming that e-fuel costs are declining rapidly, but you forget to mention that there's no meaningful market anywhere on earth meaning we don't really have any experience with it and don't know how much it'll cost and how it will work exactly(will it be hydrogen, ammonia etc.) it's simply not a solved problem and there's no infrastructure to support it. It might make sense in the future to use e-fuels together with wind but what we're trying to do here in Denmark is to use wind and solar for the grid which sucks. Electricity prices fluctuates wildly at the mercy of the weather gods. Thermal energy storage is also still experimental and hydro only works in very very specific locations where it's already utilized. If we where to build new hydro we would destroy even bigger ecosystems than we already have.
Edit: I'm not even necessarily arguing against wind and solar, I'm just off the opinion that it makes much more sense to build out nuclear to support the grid first giving everyone cheap and stable electricity as well as providing district heating where it's already built out.
I'm not sure, but there's a thing called the 'Divertor' in some designs, it's said to be for removing inpurities, but some things talk about it being used for removing heat as well:
https://www.iter.org/mach/Divertor
What's the theoretical advantage of the German stellarator over a tokemak? Seems like a complex design but I assume there must be a reason for the complexity.
The main advantage is that a Stellerator can be continuously operated while a Tokamak only works in pulsed operation.
The complex design of a Stellerator's magnectic coils essentially avoid the need for a transformer as it is being used in a Tokamak. The transformer is the reason why a Tokamak can only be operated in pulsed mode. However, there is ongoing research to achieve continuous operations e.g. by means of high-frequency waves.
I am complete layman here. Still from what I read the whole point of stellarator is to be same as tokamak except you use CAD to make it twist in the same way plasma naturally would twist, to make it easier to keep the plasma in the path you want.
There's a chapter on W7-X diagnostics in this DOI (check sci-hub). It doesn't include a comprehensive list of diagnostics or their port assignments, but it was the best I found at a glance.
W7-X has 5 periods and each period is a mirrored half period, so really it's one segment repeated 10 times. This pattern is common to symmetric stellarators.
Over tokamaks, the other main technology that scientists are exploring for fusion power, stellarators require less injected power to sustain the plasma, have greater design flexibility, and allow for simplification of some aspects of plasma control.
However, these benefits come at the cost of increased complexity, especially for the magnetic field coils.
Stellerators aren't really in a torus, they are in a weird fractally twisted torus, sort of like a many-twisted Mobius strip. You really need to see a picture to understand.
Just like COVID helped the mRNA/CRISPR technology evolve and come faster and closer to us, with the potential for many more usages in various diseases, I hope that the ongoing/coming energy crisis will help all nuclear fusion technologies tokamak/stellarator become real.
We’re still a few years away from having them in actual power plants and a few decades away from solving our energy problems for every, but I hope we get there sooner than later.
I think that 50 years is a reasonable timeframe to give fusion the possibility of delivering results. But I agree with you, it's pretty much impossible that anything will come out of fusion in the coming 10-15 years, despite the publicity we keep hearing lately.
But apart from the part that's useful for nuclear weapons research, we've barely given it any funding. The idea of "we could have useful fusion reactors in 30 years" always came with the sentence "if we get the funding to do it".
There's this [1] famous graph comparing US research spending into Fusion, compared to 1976 predictions how long it would take with different budgets. According to that, the US funded fusion below the "not enough to ever get it done" budget. With that in mind, we have come remarkably far.
That famous graph was for a crash program for tokamaks, and it was predicated on tokamak physics working much better than it turns out it does. If that program had been funded it would have been a guaranteed failure. It would probably have been a failure even if the physics had been favorable, for engineering reasons that didn't become a point of public controversy until the 1980s.
Also, I think you have causality reversed. Fusion isn't remote because of lack of funding; rather, funding was low because there weren't stakeholders pushing for it, and that was because the stakeholders didn't see any value coming from it. For example, all the reactor designs utilities had been presented with were not things they had any interest in building, they were too large, complex, and expensive.
Solving hard engineering problems is expensive. You have to put lots of money into it. Say, 30% of the funds invested by VCs in jitney cabs and collectable JPEGs.
> but I'm not convinced fusion will ever be economically feasible
Not on Earth. But put a good enough fusion reactor on a rocket, and you can reach neighboring stars in 3 or 4 decades instead of the 15 one would expect for fission. (Of course, nobody is even sure reactors can get that good, but it does look possible.)
Fission fragment rockets could actually compete with fusion here. The reaction mass is the fission fragments themselves, which could get a specific impulse of around 10^6 s. The technology to do this is within relatively easy reach, at least by interstellar rocket standards.
Designs like that quickly start using a significant fraction of available fuel on earth if you want to do more than send a single tiny probe on a flyby.
The proposed fuel is even worse as AM242 has a half life of 141 years making it hard to collect in bulk.
Economic viability only exists relative to an application.
And there is absolutely zero chance of fusion solving our current energy crisis, the odds for fission are already low enough. There is no point on speculating on that.
Minimal investment means minimal progress. ITER was basically a Regan/Gorbachev project from 1985 that’s still not built yet. It’s JET’s the current largest device was completed in 1983. Real progress has been made, but the major projects have been extremely conservative by necessity.
Early designs for ITER where for a larger device that would have actually produced electricity though not cheaply enough to be economically viable, but it got scaled way down.
And ITER's design is already wildly outmoded now that high-temp superconductors exist (which they have for quite some time). Just a multinational pork project.
ITER exists to prove that fusion plasma stability can be sustained to extract useful energy. How it does it is irrelevant since the big news is having a sufficiently large tokamak vaccum vessel with instrumentation to study.
HTSCs weren't usable when it was designed, and have only just become usable in the last 5 years or so but they are a fundamentally different material. You don't just drop them into a large, incredibly complex machine that depends on it's integrated magnetic containment system: you are functionally building a new device.
If you can ITER, then you don't get a refund on spent dollars. You get a loss. And then you get to start another 30 year project to maybe build a new vacuum vessel, which you have to do because you still haven't actually tested plasma stability.
"But but MIT skunkworks!"...yeah. It's still going along, and they haven't suddenly churned out a functioning reactor based on HTSCs because oh look, whatever the advantages they're a new material with different properties, manufacturing and handling behaviors all of which need to be developed, measured and inspected before you can use them effectively in a fusion device. If they look good then great: they can be used to make DEMO, the ITER-successor commercial powerplant prototype, cheaper and more powerful.
As was predicted in the paper that spawned this joke which presented timelines based on funding and then we funded research into fusion even less than their most pessimistic model.
Fusion is about as relevant to energy production as deep sea submarines are to commuter transport. There's no way to get heat out of one and turn it into electricity in a way that is practical enough for power generation even if the core technologies were here today rather than 30 years after we need to fix things.
We have the solution, it's removing the most egregious wastes of energy and using the sun to power the rest. It's the same solution that we've always had available, we just have to do the intelligent thing rather than the thing which gives more power to the powerful.
"Necessity is the mother of invention" Proverb of unknown origins. Earliest reference Aesop's fable.
I've been quoting the proverb for a long time. Thank you for the quote, I feel it says basically the same thing but I appreciate the different wording and that it is attributed to Plato.
> Just like COVID helped the mRNA/CRISPR technology evolve
About mRNA vaccines I agree with you, because they indeed have been a niche thing before covid, but then they were the first available vaccines while the alternatives were still being researched when the first mRNA vaccines got their emergency approval. But how has CRISPR benefitted from covid? It doesn't seem to be used anywhere in therapeutics, no?
This has been IMHO inappropriately hyped. We have an expected gas shortfall in Europe due to the mess made by one rogue actor (though Putin hasn't shut the pipes off yet, The existing price shocks are all speculative!). Petroleum production is fine. Gas production outside of Europe is fine. Existing interests in those industries have been exploiting the resulting price shocks (which are not the same thing as a crisis) to try to drive public policy decisions in their direction.
We've been here before in the 1970's when rogue actors tried to exploit their production capacity for political gain. It sucked, but we didn't get fusion out of it then either.
Frankly it's not even the first time we've had a supply shortfall. People tend to forget this, but we ran out of oil in the late 90's too! Turns out, there was lots more oil available at higher price points.
> Just like COVID helped the mRNA/CRISPR technology evolve and come faster and closer to us, with the potential for many more usages in various diseases, …
I don’t think it’s actually evolved all that much. They just deployed something that wasn’t really tested. I recall learning about theoretical mRNA vaccines back in 2014-2019 (granted they were killing the hosts and stuff). As someone who’s studied bioengineering (university, reading papers and some projects) I’d really like to see 10-15 years of usage before we consider anything with the tech.
I for one home we don’t do the same thing with fusion. There is an amazing amount of risk as technology has expanded, we have to be far more cautious.
This has to be the most opaque title I’ve ever seen on Hacker News. For anyone wondering, this is about a potential development in cold fusion reactors.
Having read a few articles previous on fusion, I'm familiar with the words tokamak and stellarator, so it was obvious to me that it was about fusion from the title.
I wonder how many other titles you would consider opaque if you didn't happen to know the terms?
Hot fusion, not cold fusion. It runs at a hundred million degrees C.
Hot fusion is a well-known process that powers the sun. Cold fusion is a supposed low-temperature process that most scientists doubt is real, and if it is real we don't understand the physics of it.
Sometimes I like to say that the 15 million kelvin core of the sun is actually a cold fusion reactor, on the grounds that fusion within it is dominated by quantum tunnelling, rather than classical kinematics, overcoming the Columb barrier.
More opaque than every nth HN title referring to some cutely-monikered code framework that presses all the wrong mental buttons in those oblivious to its nature? Surely not.
As a fan of Fobl and their work on Spoogum, i'm not sure you would call it 'arguing' more sharing the obvious downsides of the dinglepop pipeline when combined with the grumpkin anti-pattern.
Others are pointing out that this is (very) hot fusion. But I'd just say that if you know the first thing about fusion, the title is actually very simple, ie, stellarators and tokamaks are competing designs for magnetic confinement fusion. Of course, no one is born knowing anything about nuclear physics, and it's not really a casual subject of conversation, so there might be a lesson here that people could take about writing in domain specific jargon and how inaccessible it is for outsiders.
And if you know nothing about fusion, the title seems to be crafted of made up words.
But if you take one glance at the comments, it becomes clear. So I guess the title was sufficient to pique my interest, which, after all, is the purpose of a title.
