UKC

great to finally see a positive news story, and it got me dreaming.   I know most experts predict much much longer, but is it even remotely possible that someone could really crack commercial fusion power in the next 5-10 years?     Could energy supply become close to limitless?  How would this change the world?   what would global stock markets do if I designed the perfect reactor tomorrow?  Is it possible that commercial fusion power is actually impossible on this planet, no matter how smart we get or hard we try?  

Strikes me that if fusion becomes viable ( a big if), then the bottleneck in cleaner energy becomes storage, which might finally usher in the long-anticipated hydrogen era?
I'd be curious if any of the forum users have any expertise in this realm.

I'm going to put my cynical and fairly uninformed hat on.

I read the BBC news article yesterday but it was light on details. What it did say was that the US team had achieved a net fusion energy output, ie the fusion energy output was greater than the energy input to the reaction from the lasers. However, the overall energy input to the lasers and the plant allowing them to be run was still significantly greater than the fusion energy output, so the net energy is still negative. Further, the whole thing was at very small scale.

I thought this same milestone had been reached with a toroid by JET a number of years ago. We certainly already knew that fusion fundamentally works, which is what the article seemed to imply was a breakthrough. The challenge is the engineering to make it work in practice. So what's the big breakthrough here? Is there really something significant, or are they short of funding and employing a good marketing team?

I read the same article then read the comments and my brief glimmer of positivity was also extinguished by someone saying the lab was made to do weapons research and this was an off-shoot of it and this type of fusion didn't have as good prospects as other types. 

But I'm still positive that they'll crack it one day, or something comparable, and it will solve the climate crisis eventually.

As to what it would be like... I'm re-reading the Culture novels again (for the third time...) I can only hope it would make a society like that!

Not a chance of them getting it built in the next 10 years even with well understand theory and a reactor core design. There is a huge amount of work involved in planning maintenance, civil aspects, figuring out how to regulate safe operation etc etc.

The Rolls-Royce SMR project started up back in 2016 I think and having the first plant in operation by 2029 is going to require a huge amount of work and that is a fission reactor with nearly 70 years of commercial operating history around the world.

Probably closer to 30 years before you will see the first fusion plant come online unfortunately.

Breakthrough: Getting a slew of gushing press articles without anyone (even Ars) asking what the maximum possible efficiency of the lasers is, or of the steam turbo machinery a power plant would need.  Let alone asking what one over the product of those numbers is.  Hint: it’s a lot more than the 1.2x energy gain of their momentary reaction.

Lot of non state fusion firms raising serious funding, building big machines and not feeling the need to go to the press.

Maybe we can draw a parallel with the interval between the discovery of fission and the  first commercial nuclear power station, ie around 20 years?  

Possibly, it will depend very much on how fast they can mobilise an engineering team (not a straightforward task at the moment, at least not in the UK).

The engineering challenges that still need to be solved are huge. It is a long way off unless a lot more investment is put in (worth noting that currently the investment is miniscule in the grand scheme of things).

As someone else said, the energy transfer efficiencies are key. Just because the reaction generated more total energy than it took to get started, doesn't mean you can extract all of that energy and use it. The intention is to remove heat by having a blanket that absorbs neutrons and heats up (neutrons escape as they aren't affected by the magnetic confinement). You then need to extract the heat from the blanket to drive a turbine. Needless to say, these two steps alone are pretty inefficient. Also worth noting that the neutron blanket will end up very radioactive (not as bad as the high level waste from fission plants though).

Additionally the challenges around (re)fuelling are significant. Presumably this would be a batch process, whereby you undergo fusion, dump the plasma, then repeat. I have no concept of how long they can feasibly maintain the fusion reaction without refuelling, but it may not be particularly long, in which case getting a quick turnaround is key to providing a consistent source of power.

None of  this is insurmountable, but it's a lot of work and i would be surprised if there is a commercial reactor available in the next 50 years.

The refuelling challenge you describe is not relevant to Inertial Confinement Fusion which is the technology in the news. The reaction is not sustained beyond a few microseconds.

In reply to Si dH:

With regard to the net negative energy balance. It should be noted that this is an experimental facility and so laser power efficiency is not high on their list of concerns. A next generation facility like HiPER would have lasers that were 10x as efficient.

That said, this latest announcement is a bit thin because ignition was actually achieved by the same facility back in 2014. Overall positive gain is now just* a matter of incremental improvements.

*ha

Me too!

I thought the breakthrough was they achieved a self-sustainable reaction without having to capture it using ridiculous magnets which may be controlled by AI or some other magic?

We actually know the director of the ASDEX reactor in Germany, even he doesn't expect anyone to have one running commercially in his lifetime, they are lucky if they manage one experiment per year and ITER might be finished in the next decade (so 15+ years late).

Yes, I'm just getting my head around the news that there there are (at least) two completely different ways of plausibly achieving useable fusion.  I'd assumed that the laser inertial confinement version was simply for proof of principle (of getting more energy out than you put in) but apparently not.

Having had some interactions with target manufacturing for ICF - I always thought it seemed an unlikely route for a commercial fusion. Manufacturing the targets with the precision required at the rate required for continuous operation is a huge challenge. In terms of lasers - that technology is constantly evolving, but the wear on the optics at the powers utilised is another major engineering challenge.

My brief glimmer of positivity was also dampened by the disclaimer about the net energy loss when you factored in the lasers and the plant, but I still feel a little bit buoyed by the news and subsequent articles I've read about it  and I'm usually the negative, cynical bugger.

The fact it's come from a lab involved in weapons research doesn't really bother me to be honest,  Aren't there tons of modern conveniences that we now take for granted which were actually offshoots of the military? (GPS, superglue, microwaves, digital photography)....

(obviously guns and bombs bad....)

Yeah, my partner used to work on policy stuff around fusion research, and as far as I can tell the real goal of state-funded research hasn't been to get to the point where they're designing commercially viable power plants, it's been to get it to the point where that looks close enough that the private sector starts to pile in the cash.

That was Robert Bussard's explicitly stated goal some decades ago when he started the US down the Tokamak route.  There's lots of spill-over in terms of trained and educated people, developed codes and developed equipment from the big state projects to the private sector stuff, but there's a growing disconnect in terms of what they're doing.  I find it hard to imagine ITER ending up much different to the Superconducting Superconducting Super Colider... 

Interestingly most of the young PhD students I met had a very idealistic "state good private bad" mindset and we're well beyond the objective in their belief in giant Tokamak's as the solution.  Which is really odd, as the experienced staff they worked with were abundantly clear in their views...  Now some of them are pulling in serious money instead and building all sorts of interesting reactors that if their problems can be overcome, offer a route to a much less bonkers (in terms of capital cost, size and complexity) commercial power plants than the big state stuff which is something of an unstoppable juggernaut.

Does anyone know how they ever expect to harness the power from the reaction?

It's at 100,000,000°C. Surely the traditional steam/turbine option is completely unviable.

The other one I know a bit about involves a drum of liquid metal to confine and compress the plasma:

https://generalfusion.com/fusion-technology/

One does wonder a bit if the projects aren't perhaps not as concentrated on saving the world and more on endless academic furtherment. My son did his practicum at Garching but decided it was full of boffins/nerds and took his computing skills to a bank instead, they pay better and have an extensive career ladder including worldwide secondment. It's certainly conceivable that a second Elon might be more succesful, after all the Manhatten Project was run by a general, not the scientists who only did the research.

It’s always 30 years away.

I did a project on JET when I was a 17 year old A level student. Commercial fusion was 30 years away.

I’m 47!

Yes, I think this the answer to Paul Phillips' question above.  One commentator I heard said that surrounding the laser inertial confinement vessel with liquid lithium was how they planned to conduct away the heat.

In reply:

This is fusion power breakthrough number 855 which I have seen 

The previous 854 did not keep up to the promise 

Hope this doesn't sound cynical. I am merely counting and reporting 

It may be very hot, but there’s very little of it.  The problem for the heat extracting lining is not the temperature - think of a small drop of solder landing on your hand - but all the high energy neutrons bombarding it at the same time, transmuting and physically re arranging it’s atoms.

For anything except proton/boron 11, some kind of thermal blanket (or liquid metal sheath/waterfall) transports heat to steam turbines.  

Isn’t the point of the lithium blanket to breed more fusion fuel through neutron bombardment, rather than as a PTO system. My (potentially flawed) understanding was that the diverter and heat removal process were entirely separate from the blanket. 

My point was that the process of getting a plant based on a novel bit of physics designed and built would take about 30 years from the point where you had experimental data sufficient to convince engineers and investors that you are a credible organisation to bring fusion power to market so that people will work for you and invest money.

always 30 years away too outlandish for even Musk to invest in..

If you read my post you would have understood that I believe we are more than 30 years off a commercial fusion plant as the physics isn't advanced enough yet.

I know. However, anyone who has even taken even a passing interest in fusion knows that the claim is alway “in the next 30 years”. I guess one of these days, that will actually be true.

Garching is unusually stuffed with boffins/nerds.  I have fond memories of the Hotel Konig Ludwig there, one of the most Monty Python experiences of my life checking in at 11 pm on a Sunday night.

I'm a little shaky on the specifics, but aren't these an example of things going the other way, gunpowder originally being developed for the entertainment industry? 

I read something the other day that the reaction performed would need to be done 10 times a second to make a useful level of power.

If the folks at Helion Energy (https://www.helionenergy.com/) are to be believed aneutronic fusion in their latest reactor using a deuterium-helium 3 reaction is only a couple of years away.

How This Fusion Reactor Will Make Electricity by 2024

youtube.com/watch?v=4GJtGpvE1sQ&

They seem to be well funded as well.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/05/helion-series-e/

Fireworks I guess?  Yeah, sure.  Was more talking about the modern military / weapons industry producing useful civilian offshoots (as well as guns and bombs)

Now that's interesting - capturing the energy by decelerating the linear plasma explosion through a B-field instead of capturing beta particles.  Looks really simple in their swish cut-away animation too

It does make one wonder what'll become of ITER if one of these companies raising order of $1Bn does it, let alone does it without the abject embarrassment of a steam turbine hanging off the back.  

For all my negativity of the laser ICF approach like the NIF are trying, it fits spacecraft quite well; a small fission reactor powers the lasers, and the fusion products are allowed to vent out of a (magnetic) rocket engine bell; the "breakeven" there is that you're getting more power turned in to spacecraft kinetic energy the fission reactor is producing.  

Edit: Good overview of the funding going in to non-stealth mode private work here - https://www.fusionenergybase.com/organizations/#funders

As you say It would be a great step if fusion power stations could generate electricity directly without relying on old tech. It’s a pity that nature has made aneutronic fusion so hard to do compared to even a getting a sustainable D-T reactor to work.

Fusion powered space flight looks like a good idea and NASA has funded some research into Direct Fusion Drive, no fission reactor required.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Fusion_Drive

At least a couple of companies, including a UK one, are working on it.

https://www.psatellite.com/technology/fusion/
https://pulsarfusion.com/products-development/fusion-propulsion/

It would still take about 4 years to reach Pluto and there’s the small problem of getting enough Helium-3 to burn in the reactor to solve.

Yep, millions of dollars going into some of these companies but I still think it will take many billions before we see a commercial reactor.

At least Commonwealth, Helios, TAE are over $1 Bn with some having as much again secured contingent on performance milestones.

Going to take billions more, but after 15 years of quiet, slow build the leading commercial entries are now at the point they’re getting billion dollar funding to reach their make-or-break points. Exciting times, not that you’d know if from the media which largely just regurgitates press releases from the big public projects.

I was a nuclear engineer for almost 20 years before having a career change. I remember having a conversation about fusion when I started in the nuclear industry in 1995 as there had been something in the news about it ... I quoted the article about it being 20 years away and my older, more experienced colleagues all laughed and said ever since they started in the 70s or 80s, every year it's always been 20 years away....