Japanese experimental nuclear fusion reactor inaugurated
Japanese experimental nuclear fusion reactor inaugurated
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.
Ok but what if coal powered space craft?
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.
-Musk, "Get your shovels ready lads, we are going to Mars!"
Too low fuel density to work id assume, and most engine designs expect a liquid fuel
USAians
The level of laziness here is inspiring lmao. I'm going to use this from now on
The method they used is absolutely unsuited for power generation, they're doing weapons research. Two things:
- Sure, more energy came out than hit the target but the amount of power wasted generating the laser light is right-out astronomical. People also gripe about other experiments not including those external (to the reaction) factors but then they're also generally magnitudes lower.
- The targets are very very hard to produce, and you only get to shoot at them once.
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.
Thanks for the explanation
Neat. But I'm not very optimistic about fusion. We've been at it for over 50 years and hundreds of billions of dollars with only very little incremental progress. I'd love to be wrong, but at this point it just seems to me like a pipe dream.
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.
Progress is always incremental, except in hindsight
Funding is almost nothing compared to other endeavors.
We’ve been working on AI for 50 years too.
I wouldn’t frame it like that.
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.
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.
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.
Society grows strong when men plant trees in which shadow they will never sit.
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.
fukoshima 2 electric bugaloo
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.
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.