White House hopes $180M will solve science, tech gaps in commercial fusion power The Biden administration is still chasing its fusion energy dreams, announcing new strategies and some funding – albeit a relatively paltry amount – to iron out kinks in a future fusion pilot plant. The White House said yesterday that it was convening a meeting of leaders from the government, academia and industry to get an …
Certainly not. Oil has ben legal, heroin has not. The whole of 20th century society, bar a handful of visionaries and prophets, is to blame for not giving a shit, and instead fucking over the careers of said visionaries and prophets - and that probably incudes about half of us Reg commentards. The same cannot be said for heroin.
Dr. Collis Browne's if I remember aright. Can't recall if cocaine was in the cocktail, but it was almost worth getting sick for.
But what about my history? I made no mention of that far back. Perhaps you are oversensitive in the "read into it what I want to read into it" department.
Here - have some I nicked out of Mum's medicine cupboard all those years ago. Cheers! >Glug!<
"Tax 2% of oil companies' revenue for as many years as it takes to develop."
That 2% then gets passed through to all consumers of petroleum based products or in easier terms, damn near everybody that isn't living a hunter gatherer existence. It would more honest to raise income taxes until more people were reduced to a hunter/gatherer existence. We are already seeing that with some homeless populations.
They don't need fusion yet, they already had a fission solution which worked and they binned it.
Forty-odd years ago one of the US research labs built a liquid sodium cooled thorium reactor which was inherently stable and could not, under any circumstances, suffer a meltdown. They were getting stable power output from it, but no matter which way they tried to sabotage it, it would always shutdown gracefully and could be restarted immediately with no side effects. It was more scalable then existing reactor designs meaning you could have more generating capacity at a given site, and it was also highly efficient, using existing nuclear waste and burning between 98% to 99% of the fuel load compared to just 2% to 3% of the fuel load of a current fission reactor. The estimates were that we could transition to these reactors and use the existing stockpiles of nuclear waste created over the past seventy years to provide a fuel source for up to 25,000 years.
The US government canceled it, and ordered it dismantled and all documentation destroyed. Thankfully, a handful of the scientists involved saved a substantial chunk of the documentation as they could see how beneficial this type of power production could be.
Kirk Sorenson has done a number of videos about this on YouTube which are well worth watching. This has been a major missed opportunity and a lot of the knowledge and expertise around that technology has now been lost as the scientists involved in creating it are no longer with us.
"They don't need fusion yet, they already had a fission solution which worked and they binned it. ..."
Indeed. There were two problems:
1. The public. Voters in the main believe all the fanciful armageddon stories about nuclear power, so politicians did what they will *always* do. They pandered to the voters.
2. The public. Voters in the main like to have bigger guns than the other guy, and Molten Salt Reactors are no use for making weapons, so politicians...
Maybe we still have time to get this right, but time is definitely running out.
"Molten Salt Reactors are no use for making weapons, so politicians..."
Pu for weapons isn't a hard thing to build a reactor for. There really isn't a need to be able to harvest nuclear materials from commercial reactors to keep human kind under a viable threat of mass annihilation.
“Kirk Sorenson” - thanks for the signpost. Looking more deeply but initial assessment is he’s still “out there” but struggling and even if he stood to share in 180 million pfennigs (he doesn’t) it would be nowhere near enough to outargue his opponents.
Edit : Kirk SorensEn, but YouTube found him.
Upvot4 for mentioning fission power. It is good for many purposes [I have operated fission reactors] and exists today and is safe.
Downvote for saying we do NOT need fusion research. That is for TOMORROW and USA developing it is good for the world.
If I had MY choice, I'd stop wasting money on Ukraine and SUBSIDIZING illegal immigration and so-called "renewables", and sink $150 BILLION into SERIOUS fusion rtesearch which would demand RESULTS before getting paid!!!
Unleash a series of high dollar X pries for DOE-owned patents for fusion processes and improved efficiency and energy collection and electricity generation and we'll have this working in a DECADE!
Pussy-foot around and pay a pittance for "research without results" and you'll get what you oaid for.
"Kirk Sorenson has done a number of videos about this on YouTube which are well worth watching. "
Kirk is a friend of a friend and I can't recall if he said it in a video or in person, but the regulatory environment is the biggest impediment to new nuclear power designs. They won't consider licensing or even evaluating anything that isn't classic PWR based. No permits means no construction and no testing. Even possessing enough Thorium to power a LFTR reactor is likely a lifetime offense.
Alvin Weinberg headed up several iterations of a LFTR-type design that worked very well. The documentation hasn't been destroyed and most of it is freely available. China is basing a lot of their current dev work on those documents. The full embodiment of the entire design hasn't been built and tested, but there's been nothing so far that shows it can't be safe and economic to move forward. No guarantees, but that's why there are development programs.
Fusion is still very much pie-in-the-sky. We know fusion works from a scientific perspective, but it's still unknown if it will from an engineering perspective. The sun has a massive gravitational force keeping the reaction contained, but that's not an option on Earth. Using magnetics instead works in theory, but real life has tolerances that might not be good enough to keep the beast caged.
Everyone here knows that's the origin of that result. However, that doesn't prove "it will never lead to commercial power generation". It's certainly not close now (%1 efficiency). It might also be true that LLNL has no intention of persuing that line of research because it is not within their funding mandate.
It's almost 10 years later now, so where they at?
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