UKC

Looks like a positive development.

"U.S. scientists achieve 'turning point' in fusion energy quest"
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/12/us-science-fusion-idUSBREA1B1TN20...

In reply to Only a hill:

"I think a lot of people are jazzed."

In reply to Only a hill:

The headline is slightly misleading as they don't account for the inefficiency of the lasers used so the system is still using energy as a whole.

In reply to Only a hill:

For the last 40 years, nuclear fusion has been 'ten years away'.

I don't doubt it will become a reality one day, but probably 50 years before we see commercial stations. Will solve many of the world's problems though! But by then it might be too late.

In reply to Lusk:


Omar Hurricane. Wow.

In reply to aln:


Was it him who hit the UK tonight?

In reply to crayefish:


This is one of the quotes that people trot out that slightly annoys me.

It's based on a paper reviewing the progress of fusion from the 70s I think. It set out several different possible funding levels, and estimated the time to reach certain milestones at each funding level.

One of the predictions was for the first commercial fusion power plant opening in the 90s... if fusion funding was very high. Given the actual levels of funding, their predictions were for a much longer wait, which we are now seeing.

Also, the first comercial fusion reactor will not be some laser-driven inertial-confinement thing. It will be a tokamak, tokamaks passed that milestone at least a decade ago. NIF is not really researching fusion reactors, it's an american government lab researching fusion bombs. Any useful research coming out of it is purely incidental, but they like making press releases to take people's minds off the bombs. The leading tokamak design will probably see net power generation - including all the magnets, injectors and everything else - sometime before 2030.

In reply to crayefish:
Too optimistic - for 60 years fusion has been 50 years away.

Nothing so far has changed the fundamentals that you can't get the power to run a town/city from a plasma into the steam (or whatever) to generate electricity without destroying the vacuum and/or plasma confinement.

In reply to Only a hill: I saw the other day that some big company had bought the rights to Rossi's e-cat thingamajiggy. I've got pretty fed up with following all this, are the scientific collective still viewing Rossi as a chancer? The "independent study" he published smacks highly of BS to me http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.3913 . It all seems a little like the modern day alchemy.

In reply to Jack B:


If the first commercial fusion reactor is a tokomak, I will eat my hat. Except I probably wouldn't live to see the day a tokomak feeds power into the grid commercially as it is decades away at least by their own admission.

There are half a dozen other reactor designs, each with significant private funding behind them, and all of them seem a lot more sane than tokomaks, even the one with several tons of swirling, molten lead.

In reply to Only a hill:

How much money has been spent on Fusion to date?
I see (10 second google) getting on for £10B has gone on finding the Higgs Boson, whatever use that will ever be?
At least the search for Fusion will eventually result in something useful.

In reply to Lusk:


The difficulty in the funding situation is that nobody is 100% sure that it will lead to something useful, well as far as I can tell.

In reply to Lusk:

Nothing to get excited about. When you see a headline that says, "A lot of people are jizzed" - that's when you'll know the science boys have really cracked it.

In reply to Lusk:

Very roughly, in $US inflation adjusted for 2010:

Global - Tokomak - US$20 billion
US - Laser Fusion (this article) - US$5 billion
Global - ITER - projected future spend - US$20 billion

So "big fusion" has seen about US$45 billion which is a pathetically small amount given how success in fusion could transform our world and our economies, remove one of the root causes of war, eliminate 1,000,000 deaths from air pollution worldwide per year (UN figures on the effects of air polution from burning hydrocarbons), eliminate respiratory diseases in many times more people, and seriously transform space exploration.

To put it in context, that is ~ 0.29% of US GDP, but this $45 billion was not spend in one year but over more than a decade. So in real terms it forms perhaps 0.03% of US GDP. The Apollo moon program was funded at it's peak at 0.73% US GDP, or 24 times the level of Fusion funding. Note that the fusion figure is funded from most developed nations in the world, not just the US meaning that the US is funding fusion - in real terms - at less than 1/50th of how they funded the moon landing. A sad and short sited state of affairs replicated across the world.

It is interesting to note how Tokomaks and ICF have starved all other forms of fusion research of almost all state funding, with the alternatives (Polywell: US Navy+EMC2, molten lead: General Fusion, Field Reversed Configuration: Tri-Alpha, ???:Lockhead Martin) having received funding of between US$ 10 million and US$ 100 million. One has to wonder what would have happened if the money spent on Tokomaks had been more evenly disbursed. These folks are the ones to watch - the reactor designs are smaller and lower power, which means far less exotic materials are used, and it puts the project in the scope of small/agile "start-up mentality" companies, and not international, management by committee behemoths. Some of the reactor designs also offer a pathway to 95% efficient direct electricity generation instead of the embarrassment that is a tokomak running a steam turbine (!).

Useful things already have - for example compact, controllable neutron sources (i.e. portable fusion reactors) - http://www.nsd-fusion.com - and some emerging concepts for plasma based HVDC transformers.

In reply to Tony Naylor:


Hahaha...or "Physicist gets girlfriend"

In reply to Lusk:




Some of that 10 billion spent on the LHC to find the Higgs Boson was used to develop the technology behind Niobium-Titanium superconducting magnets. It turns out those magnets are pretty handy if you want to build a ground-breaking fusion reactor, such as ITER.

In reply to camalins:

I wasn't being entirely serious, it was the comment earlier about 50 years, may as well all give up now!
I haven't got any problem with the amount of money that is spent on these projects whatsoever. Just an envious non Physicist! Had to make do with Electrics.

In reply to Jack B:




Yes, it is a coined phrase. But it is just that. I'm not saying it has literally been '10 years away" but pointing out that fusion optimism has been hogh but delivery low. And I used a coined phrase to highlight that. I think it's rather apt personally.

Though I do agree that tokamaks are the way forward and show the most promise for sustained fusion due to the inherent fuel/waste addition/removal capability.

In reply to crayefish:

Fusion is always a reasonable time away to ensure a flow of funding needed to continue the research.
We need to be investing in real energy futures as some Highlanders are.read the following for interesting local enterprise!
http://bit.ly/1bEzr7c

In reply to Jack B:



It's based on a bit more than that. I was a Physics student in the late 70s/early 80s - a little over 30 years ago. I remember lectures then in which we were told that fusion would be a working reality in 30 years time. Similarly, when there was a load of press coverage over a particular development a few years ago, we were told that fusion would be a working reality in 30 years time. It does seem to have a perpetual 30-year horizon.

In reply to Lusk:




provided you dont dislike brian cox, watch the first 2 miuntes of this :

http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_why_we_need_the_explorers.html

In reply to Jack B:

Sorry to condense your comment down to a couple of quotes, but...



[...]



You've got to admit that that's pretty funny.

In reply to wintertree:

You better buy a tasty hat

In reply to Only a hill: It's an interesting report, also covered in The Guardian (see http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/12/nuclear-fusion-breakthrough-... ).

Two points:

The comments on The Guardian's article are interesting, not so much for the opinions about the breakthrough but because of the advocates of thorium-based nuclear fission power plants. There's a gathering lobby for this stuff.

Secondly, and more relevantly, there are still big hurdles to overcome if inertially-confined fusion power using lasers is ever going to become something useful. One of the biggest relates to the frequency with which you can fire a laser system at a pellet (there are also issues around the pellets too, covered in the article). At the moment and as I understand it, the high-power laser systems need a while to recharge after firing; for a fusion power plant to work, that time needs to be radically reduced. One shot an hour, say, ain't going to be viable. That's one of the things that the National Ignition Facility has on it's 'to do' list; there is other work on the subject in the UK (we have world-class high power lasers at the Rutherford Appleton Lab) and elsewhere.

So overall, a small step; but a positive step. I shan't hold my breath waiting for the commercially viable power plant to come on stream but it's a tiny bit closer than it used to be.

T.

In reply to andrewmcleod:

Given that current forecasts don't have the first non-commercial tokomak fusion plant (DEMO) generating sustained thermal (not electrical) output until 2033 I have an awfully long time to wait to buy that hat. At that rate we're not likely to see tokomak feeding in to the grid until > 2045.

In the mean time there are several different companies - large and small - with highly respected industrialists and scientists, (not the con men who curse the fringes of the field) - claiming to be five years away from demonstrations of their technologies. Each of these technologies is smaller and lower power than a tokomak dramatically simplifying the engineering processes involved in moving them to a commercial, grid-connected generator.

We shall see.

In reply to Pursued by a bear:

Exciting times. 25 years after Germany shut down a viable and functional Thorium fission plant that had been feeding power to their grid for two years people are gradually waking up to the fact it might one day be possible to build Thorium fission plants.


There's gathering military buildup as well, for example tensions around Ladakh due to its large reserves.

In reply to wintertree:

The magnetic fusion figures they quoted were really interesting. 16MW out for 24MW in, that's a lot closer than inertial confinement fusion. Magnetic confinement also has a lot of well proven study into power out as a function of size of reactor that suggests that ITER (the new bigger reactor being built in France) should give more out than you put in (total taking into account all inefficiencies). I believe this is the first time a magnetic confinement facility has claimed this.

Also the point above about being unable to get the energy out into steam to power a reactor, the neutrons produced in the deuterium tritium reactor are not confined by the magnetic field, so can take energy out of the plasma which they deposit into the reactor walls, which heat up and can be used to boil water. A further positive side effect of this is that if the walls are made of lithium the neutrons turn it into the tritium needed to fuel the reactor. The materials science challenges to make all of these things may be great, but we're definitely closer to magnetic confinement fusion than has ever been claimed before.

In reply to Lusk:

On the topic of non-physicists´ gadget envy:

http://www.bbspot.com/news/2008/09/squirrel-smasher.html

I am a biologist, so I know it´s true...

CB

In reply to wintertree:

ITER is a tokamak isn't it? I thought it was just a larger version of JET?

I will start to take notice when someone starts talking about extracting the energy from these things, rather than just trying to nett- generate and then letting it go. There is currently too much focus on the science and not enough on the engineering.

In reply to kestrelspl:

Are you suggesting that the whole reactor sits inside some larger water - containing vessel? How would this (presumably heavily tritiated) water/steam be contained/transported? Would it go straight to a turbine? I struggle to see how you will transfer enough heat to do that without compromising the integrity of your reactor vessel. So would you instead use an active cooling system by pumping water past the reactor at high pressure?
How big is the actual reactor for some of the non-tokamak options? A tolamak like iter or even jet is just too big for the above to be feasible. And do you need any access to the reactor through-life? Because you wouldn't get it with this sort of system.

Sorry, like most engineers i like throwing stones at ideas.

In reply to wintertree:
What design was the thorium reactor in Germany? Most of the hype is around a molten salt variant based on that used at ORNL for a set of experiments in the 60s and 70s. See eneryfromthorium.com.
The technology for this is much more 'ready' than fusion but actually buildingone and getting it past the regulator would be much more time consuming and expensive than a new PWR...and the benefits are far from universally agreed.

It would be an exciting career option if it ever did take off though.

In reply to Si dH:

So whatever it's made of the wall will get hot from the neutron flux, so you'd put pipes in contact with that wall to extract the heat to make steam, that's the plan to get heat out of it to generate power. The links here http://www.iter.org/mach/coolingwater suggest that the reactor vessel will be about 240 degrees C, and maintained at that temperature with water, so easily hot enough to generate steam.


A separate issue is generating tritium from making part of the wall from lithium and then removing the generated tritium. I don't know much about the details, but I believe the removal wouldn't have to be done when the reactor was running, you could have lithium panels which were removed during maintenance shutdowns for instance. http://www.iter.org/mach/tritiumbreeding

In reply to Si dH:

I believe ITER will 'generate' energy in the sense that the walls will need to be actively cooled to stop them melting; its just that this heat energy will then be discarded because it isn't worth collecting (extracting electricity from heat is a well-understood technology after all).

In reply to Si dH:

Yes; sorry I could have been clearer. I was estimating that $20Bn has been spent on tokomaks to date, and that $20Bn is forecast to be spent on ITER going forwards, which is based around a tokomak.


I'm not sure that is a fair statement. Much of the work associated with ITER is the materials engineering associated with designing a wall of the reactor that can 1) be very large 2) contain a vacuum or plasma and fields 3) allow thermal energy to be extracted 4) contain Lithium to breed up other isotopes 5) absorb the neutrons and 6) SURVIVE.

These things are very hard to do, in large part because of the vast scales of volume needed to make a Tokomak work at better than break even. Moving to a smaller, lower power reactor gives you a much better ratio of power generating volume to power extracting surface area, relaxing these engineering requirements massively. That's where all the other technologies (other than lasers...) start to look really interesting. Then there's the possibility of aneutric fusion where you capture the charged particles directly giving > 90% efficient power generation without needing a steam turbine...