• Security incident: ISF was recently accessed by intruders. Please change your password, and change it anywhere else you used it. Read more

Merged How Close is power from Nuclear Fusion

Steve Novella has of course written about it because that man is a monster:

JET Fusion Experiment Sets New Record

Don’t get excited. It’s always nice to see incremental progress being made with the various fusion experiments happening around the world, but we are still a long way off from commercial fusion power, and this experiment doesn’t really bring us any close, despite the headlines. Before I get into the “maths”, here is some quick background...
Click to expand...
 


This is Paul M. Sutter. He has one of the better science communication YouTube channels out there. He is an astrophysicist with a PhD.
 
Interesting if True:

Nuclear fusion for the grid is coming much sooner than you think (opinion from The Telegraph, via Yahoo! News)

Commercial nuclear fusion has gone from science fiction to science fact in less than a decade. Even well-informed members of the West’s political class are mostly unaware of the quantum leap in superconductors, lasers, and advanced materials suddenly changing the economics of fusion power.
Click to expand...

Seems a little on the breathless side.
 
It is time to drop the old joke that fusion is 30 years away, and always will be. A poll at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s forum in London found that 65pc of insiders think fusion will generate electricity for the grid at viable cost by 2035, and 90pc by 2040.
Click to expand...
ibid.

Just like I said...

arthwollipot said:
The old joke about practical nuclear fusion is that it is 40 years away, and always will be.

What I'm saying is that it will no longer always be 40 years away. However far away it is now, let's say 40 years just for the sake of argument, in five years it will be 35 years away.

That's what I'm hearing, anyway. I don't have any particular special sources of knowledge in the field.
Click to expand...
 
From the same article:

The magnets are used to fuse hydrogen isotopes by squeezing super hot plasma inside a tokamak device. The temperature must be ten times hotter than the surface of the sun in order to replicate solar fusion because the Earth’s magnetic field is that much weaker.
Click to expand...


AI hallucination, perhaps?
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
"quantum leap " from the link. Aren't "quantum leap " really, really small? : confused :
Click to expand...

It's called "quantum" not because it's really, really small, but because state changes are in discrete steps, not continuous progressions. An electron doesn't travel over a continuous mass-energy curve to get from one shell to another. It just stops being one shell and starts being in the other. The change is quantized; quanta being defined states without intermediate transitional states.

An airplane that just stops being in New York and starts being in London would be making a quantum leap across the Atlantic. But it turns out that mostly quantum changes happen on really small scales.

Anyway, a "quantum leap", outside the context of quantum mechanics, refers to a major departure from previous understanding or capability, into a new realm of what's considered possible.
 
theprestige said:
It's called "quantum" not because it's really, really small, but because state changes are in discrete steps, not continuous progressions. An electron doesn't travel over a continuous mass-energy curve to get from one shell to another. It just stops being one shell and starts being in the other. The change is quantized; quanta being defined states without intermediate transitional states.

An airplane that just stops being in New York and starts being in London would be making a quantum leap across the Atlantic. But it turns out that mostly quantum changes happen on really small scales.

Anyway, a "quantum leap", outside the context of quantum mechanics, refers to a major departure from previous understanding or capability, into a new realm of what's considered possible.
Click to expand...

Gee. Tell me something I don't know.

But real "quantum leaps" are really, really small.

Per ChatGBT
A "quantum leap" typically refers to a sudden, significant, and often unexpected advancement or change in a particular field or situation. The term originates from quantum physics, where a quantum leap describes the instantaneous transition of an electron from one energy state to another within an atom. In broader usage, it's often used metaphorically to describe a drastic or revolutionary shift in understanding, technology, progress, or achievement.
Click to expand...
 
The "years away" is irrelevant. We're zero years away from being able to produce unlimited energy from hamsters running in wheels. But we don't do it, because the cost per kWh for the net energy produced that way is way too high. The same would be true of the net energy produced by magnetic confinement or inertial confinement fusion, even if we could produce any. Ultra-high temperature vacuum chambers, superconducting magnets, 80-terawatt laser arrays channeled through thousands of meter-size optically perfect lenses... these things are never going to be cheap enough to build, operate, or maintain, just to do what (for instance) solar panels and battery banks already do.

Sure, battery banks and other large-scale energy storage technologies are on the expensive side at present, but unlike with fusion there are plausible paths toward significant future cost reductions, from new technologies and economies of scale. Where do we anticipate reducing costs by the required orders of magnitude in some hypothetical even more advanced NIF or ITER? Apparently they need to be scaled up even more to become "economical" (that is, better than break-even energy-wise) but they're already among the largest most expensive and most complex machines ever built.
 
Last edited:
Myriad said:
The "years away" is irrelevant. We're zero years away from being able to produce unlimited energy from hamsters running in wheels. But we don't do it, because the cost per kWh for the net energy produced that way is way too high. The same would be true of the net energy produced by magnetic confinement or inertial confinement fusion, even if we could produce any. Ultra-high temperature vacuum chambers, superconducting magnets, 80-terawatt laser arrays channeled through thousands of meter-size optically perfect lenses... these things are never going to be cheap enough to build, operate, or maintain, just to do what (for instance) solar panels and battery banks already do.

Sure, battery banks and other large-scale energy storage technologies are on the expensive side at present, but unlike with fusion there are plausible paths toward significant future cost reductions, from new technologies and economies of scale. Where do we anticipate reducing costs by the required orders of magnitude in some hypothetical even more advanced NIF or ITER? Apparently they need to be scaled up even more to become "economical" (that is, better than break-even energy-wise) but they're already among the largest most expensive and most complex machines ever built.
Click to expand...

This is the ultimate problem. Even if we assume that they finally figure this out and are able to make a piece of equipment that can stably sustain a fusion reaction and figure out a mechanism that can turn the surplus energy produced by the reaction into electricity, what if it's just plain too expensive in the end?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page

ISF - Join now!

Every member here is approved by hand. No bots, no spam, just people who care about evidence and honest debate.

Membership is free!

Create your free account

Back
Top Bottom