Scientists, why not simply invent a working fusion plant using $50m from Uncle Sam The US Department of Energy has announced plans to award up to $50 million in funds to private businesses to develop a working fusion pilot plant (FPP) by the 2030s. Nuclear fusion is expected, or hoped or dreamed, to produce abundant amounts of energy with zero or near-zero carbon emissions during operation. According to DoE …
"Heat pollution from fusion is nothing compared with that from AGW"
Indeed. One of the very interesting things is that waste heat from human industrial processes is a negligible component of climate change. It's the heat trapping gases like carbon dioxide, methane and others that are doing massive climate damage.
It has the POTENTIAL to supply energy.
So far it has not delivered anything despite decades of substantial investment and some encouraging signs.
Then it has to provide energy economically to compete with renewables which even if honesty prevails and the cost of storage is included fusion may not achieve generally. Some uses will exist even at high prices but economics is always the key to success.
Pedant alert!
it still only equates to around 28 watt-hours of electricity – not even enough to usefully illuminate the average incandescent bulb. ®
I make that almost half an hour of useful light, but it would be more environmentaly friendly if it was a Led.
How many do you need? Still relatively easily available as the "phase out by ..." EU rules were not written correctly, allowing producers to continue to supply the EU market. Hard to find? From the biggies on the high street perhaps but otherwise available and not illegal to sell as was the intention.
You are indeed technically correct (the best type of correct).
Of course, on that basis, wind power is also fusion-based as it's the temperature differentials caused by the heating and cooling cycle from the sun that causes the pressure differentials that causes wind. As are fossil fuels, as they are stored solar (i.e. fusion) energy by way of the fossilization of plants and animals that stores the energy obtained via photosynthesis.
I've got my plans drawn up for a telescoping heat-pipe which can more efficiently bring energy from the sun to the earth.
It's not like we're going to stop orbiting it any time soon and, given the current cost of living crisis, I could do with a share of the $50 million no matter how small.
I propose that we increase the power output of the sun.
That'd be far more effective than the tiny incremental efficiency gains we're getting from solar panels, and only slightly less feasible than getting fusion up and running in less than a decade for a mere $50,000,000.
I'll be sure to take my flying car to the ribbon cutting.
While hot fusion is scientifically more likely than cold fusion, the odds of fusion energy being implemented as a reliable component of the energy grid are close to nil for both sources.
Remember that initial attempts at fusion were made to study reactions in stars. Then the press and the funders got hold of the idea of free power.
Just to put things in perspective: after a couple of decades, the total spent on ITER is about twenty billion.
The world uses ballpark 15 to 30 billion barrels of oil per year at a ballpark cost of 750 to 2400 billion.
So - even at wholesale oil prices - every few days we spend on oil what we've spent in total on ITER.
JET produced 16MW of fusion power in 1997. Not for very long, and it took 24MW to produce it, but that's a Q of 0.67 and given that record I'd have thought it worth risking a bit more than the shoestring funding that it's had since then.
Talk about getting your priorities straight...
$50million will be just about enough to try to see I can get this to work
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion
Or I may die of old age or run out of the money trying
Risks, certainly, but what we must do For Progress (TM)! When you don’t leave your estate, err… Research Complex with Residential Annex, it will clearly be due to the ground breaking science done within. And the lack of publication data is merely good OpSec. If you’re hiring, let me know: a guest house on the back 40 would be enough for me. I’m not a greedy man :)
Many, including here, conclude that cold fusion cannot exist, because hot fusion exists and because Pons and Fleischmann weren't very convincing, and had the wrong credentials anyway. But that doesn't mean that there can't be an avenue of fusion other than what stars do.
The problem with hot fusion reactors is that they've been 20-40 years away for over 40 years, and still are. Even if net-positive fusion is achieved, capturing that energy safely is an extremely non-trivial engineering problem. Among others. I rather think that most fusion research is largely a welfare program for physicists, with an off chance of eventually being productive.
The other thing is that a net-positive reaction isn't enough. The output would power a steam engine, with the usual 33% or so efficiency. Then you have to use that electricity to heat and pressurise hydrogen atoms, and there's pretty substantial efficiency losses there as well.
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It's the Royal "my". Consider:
I pay my share of US taxes, according to current tax law (and my CPA), same as everybody else ought to.
Once the Government gets their greedy mitts on it, "we, the people" STILL own it, all, by definition. Including this little 50 mil subset.
So yes, it's MINE. It also belongs to every other citizen who pays their taxes.
Beer?
My deductions as a farmer/rancher are codified into Law. I am law abiding.
Truss was elected by a vote of only paid-up members of the Tory party. To be a member you pay £25 a year to subscribe. Apparently there are no requirements for you to have any connection to the UK.
Back of a fag packet.
80,000 members' votes should be enough to decide a contest in your favour. So a cool £2m from your petty cash to subscribe your ghost members. Easily pays for itself on this week's shorting of the pound.
The healthy cynicism displayed in the comments is obviously justified, but I can't help but think that the country that figures out working fusion first (if it doesn't fritter it away) is also in an extremely strong position.
I'm sure the devil is in the detail and the 50M is earmarked for dealing with specific R&D problems. Or, it would be, if I were in charge of setting out funding for things.
The progress displayed in recent South Korean and Chinese reactor run-times is significant; one does not have to get that much further to have figured out stability.
50-years away for the last 50 years is perhaps, finally, a target that is finally getting closer.
The healthy cynicism displayed in the comments is obviously justified, but I can't help but think that the country that figures out working fusion first (if it doesn't fritter it away) is also in an extremely strong position.
What I don't understand is how we're supposed to get the power out, even if we have working fusion. So I've got this dynamically stable doughnut of fusing hydrogen which I'm carefully keeping from touching anything – now what?
80% of the heat produced is in the form of emitted neutrons. These are not confined with the plasma, for obvious reasons, so they hit the walls, get absorbed and warm them up. Extracting the resulting heat from slabs of metal is left as an exercise for the reader.
See: https://www.iter.org/sci/MakingitWork
In the case of the Deuterium-Tritium fusion reaction the products of each fusion are a helium nuclear and a neutron, along with the energy released in the process. The majority of that energy is in the kinetic energy of the lone neutron. As the neutron has no charge it has no interest in the magnetic confinement keeping the plasma in the stellar doughnut and continues on its way out of the reactor vessel.
Inside the vessel walls (Made of a large quantity of dense material) the neutron collides with atoms in the wall, transferring kinetic energy to them. At the macroscopic scale, the kinetic energy of atoms becomes heat, so for a large enough quantity of produced neutrons the vessel walls heat up. The last step is to run a coolant through the walls to remove the heat, and from there it can be used to boil water and drive a steam turbine in the same way as any thermal power station.
> Inside the vessel walls (Made of a large quantity of dense material) the neutron collides with atoms in the wall, transferring kinetic energy to them.
In the process transmuting some of them into other isotopes - most likely radioactive ones. You seriously won't want to go near that vessel for a while even after the plant has been turned off.
Seeing "clean" and "cheap" in the same sentence as fusion power makes me wince.
Quote
"about time someone thought about what happens when all those neutrons hit things..."
How do you think we're going to get the tritium for the D-T fusion plasma?
1 neutron + lithium nucleus = 1 helium nucleus+ 1 tritium nucleus
Ok it may have seemed crazy to spend so much cash over the years chasing fusion, but considering the US defence budget is 700 billion dollars and ITAR is costing 25 billion..... I suspect its a bargain... also if it works, the payback will be huge.
I love science. I will read about physics, medical, philosophy all-day, any day. More money for basic research is never a bad thing to me. Fusion may still be 50-years away but 50 million to the US government is nothing; for something as game changing and with such a high potential, I would say that needs to be 4x that amount. Oh, yeah that's right Northrup Grumman would be denied the sale of 2 fighter jets.
I once had an argument with an old boss over why basic scientific research wasn't a waste of time or money. He was a Ayn Rand-ian type who thought if it didn't make money it was useless. I tried explaining how that didn't make sense logically, it would be an even larger waste of time to dream up fanciful gadgets to sell, and then do all the basic research to implement it. Then if a product failed we would have scientists looking for jobs all the time instead of making scientific progress on their topics, a university is a stable place for them to land jobs and work on topics that might take generations to crack.
"a university is a stable place for them to land jobs and work on topics"
Unfortunately much university research nowadays seems to be aimed at producing papers to raise the profile of the researcher and university. Apparently you are often judged by your university (and others) on how many papers you are producing - not their ground-breaking content.
Bit of a troll, yes, possibly also deluded. Probably has a screw loose (Most of the good ElReg commentards do, to one degree or another). But kook? Nah. He has shown no sign of typical kook behavio(u)r, most notably I've seen no sign of paranoia, nor threats against his detractors.
Perhaps "one of ElReg's resident loons" would be more accurate.
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Nuclear fusion is impossible because electron removal is unthinkable. We are dealing with a scam.
I look up in the mornings and see evidence that nuclear fusion is entirely possible.
I also look up at night and see even more of the reactors.
(Unless you think they all run on coal?)
What we've not been able to achieve is sustainable confinement, temperature & pressure even using deuterium/tritium rather that proton/proton fusion. However, recent use of deep learning algorithms to point to the plasma control is interesting.
But we've been here before of course.
The first postulate of Quantitative theory: In this volume there is only such a number of elements. For example 100 photons, see Avogadro number and periodical table. This theory has been proved by, among others, double-slit experiments. Which means that the electron must stay in the atom and it is impossible to remove it without destroying the atom. Then it is impossible to reach the nucleus, no matter how the atom heats up. Controlled nuclear fusion is impossible and is a scam.
There is no way to publish anything in English, because I am an outlaw, thanks to my patents. In Russian by the same reason.
The difference in measures and in the used philosophies: the Internal Relations theory of Analytical Philosophy, of Hegel and Bradley, in Quantitive. So far, only the External Relations theory has been used in physics, of Russell and Moore. For instance used by Kurchatov, who was an engineer and not a scientist.
As a measures, quantity is used, of the Avogadro number; instead of distance, speed, energy, etc. In the spirit of the Set Theory: electron cannot be removed no matter what. Unless atom is destroyed and nuclear phusion cannot be done.
I'm not well-versed in the science, so go easy. I seem to recall that two of the main difficulties of sustained fusion relate to maintaining a near-vacuum and keeping the remaining raw material trapped magnetically. If that's not already completely wrong, has there been any discussion of whether any part of this could, eventually, benefit from running outside the atmosphere?
well, there's an incredibly powerful fusion reactor running outside the earth's atmosphere -- the sun -- and it demonstrates both the benefits you were hoping for, but also the problems -- how do you get the energy from the reactor where it is produced to where it is needed? If you could transmit the power safely and efficiently, you could, much easier, just collect solar power from space and transport it down (which has been discussed, but is missing both the "efficiently" and "safely" parts).
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