Could This Lump Power the Planet?

CNN has a new article about this here.

"We have a very high confidence that we will be able to ignite the target within the next two years," thus proving that controlled fusion is possible, said Bruno Van Wonterghem, a manager of the project, which is called the National Ignition Facility.

That would put the lab a step closer to "our big dream," he said, which is "to solve the energy problems of the world."
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dogjones said:
Can someone explain to me why/how this would not break the laws of thermodynamics?
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Because when you fuse two elements that are lighter than iron together, the resulting mass is slightly smaller than the mass you started with. The missing mass is released as energy per E=MC^2.
 
Controlled fusion for power production will rock.

Naysayers are usually ignorant luddites or fundies (sorry for the redundancy - my fingers slipped).
 
Hello all, I hope this isn't too much of a derail. :)

If nearly free energy ever does turn out to be a success, by what percentage would the normal cost of energy drop?

In other words, approximately what percentage of the cost of electricity is tied up in transfer, maintaining the transfer structures, etc. (everything that isn't the actual production cost)?
 
There's still going to be operating costs associated with them - paying off the construction and research costs, running the deuterium-extraction plants, paying personnel etc. The main advantages of fusion is that the fuel source is much more abundant and radioactive waste is much lower (not zero, since the neutrons play havoc with surrounding materials). The construction costs may be higher or lower than fission plants - we don't know yet, so the final cost per kWh is uncertain.

There's also the added advantage that fusion plants don't suffer from the bad publicity that fission has had, so it'll be easier to sell to the voters. Given the outrageous amounts of renewable-energy power plants you'd have to build to replace even one fission power plant, fusion plants give us a better shot at becoming carbon-neutral.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
It's a joke all right, but unfortunately it's only funny because it has a kernel of truth: I think I first heard it over 30 years ago and, now as then, people are still saying 40 years away sounds reasonable.

Edit to add: Does anyone know just how old the joke is? I wonder when it was first put into print.
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I don't know about the joke, but I know that I was reading Scientific American articles about the Tokamak (MCF) and a design for laser bombarded pellets (ICF) for a fusion power plant in the late 60s. I would imagine the 40 year joke probably started in the 80s or 90s.
 
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OnlyTellsTruths said:
If nearly free energy ever does turn out to be a success, by what percentage would the normal cost of energy drop?

In other words, approximately what percentage of the cost of electricity is tied up in transfer, maintaining the transfer structures, etc. (everything that isn't the actual production cost)?
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The only thing I could find with a quick web search claims that about 1/3 of cost is transmission and distribution.
 
OnlyTellsTruths said:
If nearly free energy ever does turn out to be a success, by what percentage would the normal cost of energy drop?
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The problem here is that the term "free" in "free energy" does not refer to cost. We already have various sources of free energy, such as wind and solar power, that are (currently at least) significantly more expensive than other power sources. If fusion power is shown to be a viable energy source, that does not necessarily mean it will be cheap. In fact, given that the technology required is actually a bit past the cutting edge, it's likely to be extremely expensive, at least to begin with. One of the big advantages of fusion power (the other being the pollution angle) is that fuel will not become scarce for at least millions of years, so costs will never rise. Compare that to fossil fuels, which are much more expensive than they used to be, and likely to become much more expensive again. Fusion's advantage isn't in being cheaper than everything else, it's in remaining at the same cost while everything else gets more and more expensive.
 
I find this approach intriguing tho the whole "nuclear waste" thing is over blown since spent fuel rods from first gen reactors retain 90% recoverable energy..:rolleyes:


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Nuclear Fusion-Fission Hybrid Could Destroy Nuclear Waste And Contribute to Carbon-Free Energy Future

January 27, 2009
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http://www.utexas.edu/news/2009/01/27/nuclear_hybrid/
 
MRC_Hans said:
What has happened in the last 40 years in those areas? What can be expected to happen in the next?
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In the same timeframe the estimated laser energy required for ignition went from about 1 kJ in 1972(almost 40 years ago) to 1 MJ today. It wasn't merely a factor 1000 increase; todays lasers are much better in all sorts of other dimensions that have nothing to do with total energy(e.g. pulse shaping and short pulse-lengths).

Will it increase by another factor 1000 in the next 40 years?
 
macdoc said:
I find this approach intriguing tho the whole "nuclear waste" thing is over blown since spent fuel rods from first gen reactors retain 90% recoverable energy..:rolleyes:
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Oh, it's just a ploy; that's not why they want to make fission-fusion hybrids.

Destroying the slightly used nuclear fuel by fissioning the actinides is equivalent to recovering the energy that is left in the fuel! Almost any actinide has a reasonably large fission cross-section for very fast neutrons from deuterium-tritium fusion and each fission you cause generates ~10 times more energy than a D-T fusion and you get some more neutrons. The fission blanket "amplifies" the energy you produce, potentially allowing you to be much worse at fusion and still be able to make a viable powerplant. The extra neutrons from fission might improve the amount of tritium you can breed(you have to crunch the numbers on this one to see if it's a net gain or loss of neutrons as many fission products gobble neutrons, but usually not the fast ones).

Tritium-breeding is potentially quite problematic; if you can't make more of it than you consume from lithium it will delay commercialization of fusion until you can ignite tritium-lean targets. If you can ignite a tritium-lean target you get extra tritium from D-D fusion which produces either tritium and a proton or helium-3 and a neutron(~50% branch probability).
 
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One Skunk Todd said:
One thing I've never understood is how do you feed new pellets into the reaction?
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With a glorified BB-gun(possibly electrostatically or mechanically operated rather than gas, if that gives better precision). It needs to fire at approximately the same rate as a sub-machine gun, injecting several targets per second. Each target needs to be tracked and precisely aimed at by lasers.

NIF forgoes all this nasty business by simply having one stationary target in a hohlraum; they only fire a few times a day on various custom targets.

The HYLIFE-II concepts invisions kind of oscillating jets of FLiBe(not some kind of crazy abbreviation, those are the elements fluorine, lithium and beryllium; it's a molten salt) that periodically form cavities. Each target is injected to coincide with a cavity formed between the jets of FLiBe, so that when the target is ignited most of the neutrons will be captured in by the FLiBe. You both want to protect the first wall from being degraded by neutrons and capture as many neutrons as you can to make tritium.
 
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soylent said:
With a glorified BB-gun(possibly electrostatically or mechanically operated rather than gas, if that gives better precision). It needs to fire at approximately the same rate as a sub-machine gun, injecting several targets per second. Each target needs to be tracked and precisely aimed at by lasers.

NIF forgoes all this nasty business by simply having one stationary target in a hohlraum; they only fire a few times a day on various custom targets.

The HYLIFE-II concepts invisions kind of oscillating jets of FLiBe(not some kind of crazy abbreviation, those are the elements fluorine, lithium and beryllium; it's a molten salt) that periodically form cavities. Each target is injected to coincide with a cavity formed between the jets of FLiBe, so that when the target is ignited most of the neutrons will be captured in by the FLiBe. You both want to protect the first wall from being degraded by neutrons and capture as many neutrons as you can to make tritium.
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Cool! Thanks. So each... cycle? releases enough energy to spark the next cycle plus have some left over to put to other uses?
 
One Skunk Todd said:
Cool! Thanks. So each... cycle? releases enough energy to spark the next cycle plus have some left over to put to other uses?
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You don't want any direct interference between each target and the next. There's no continous reaction of some kind. The idea is that you inject a target into the chamber, you fire lasers at it to compress and heat it to the right conditions; it goes poof and releases a bunch of energy; then you wait just long enough for debris to settle before you start all over again.

The engine analogy isn't too bad. You put a fuel-air mix(target) into the engine cylinder(reactor), compress it and ignite it with a spark(lasers). Some of the energy thereby produced goes into operating the spark-plug, lights and whatever else a car needs in future cycles. If you get much more power out of the engine than it takes to operate the necessities, you have a lot of energy left over with which to make the car go forward(feed electricity into the grid), then you're in business.
 
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soylent said:
You don't want any direct interference between each target and the next. There's no continous reaction of some kind. The idea is that you inject a target into the chamber, you fire lasers at it to compress and heat it to the right conditions; it goes poof and releases a bunch of energy; then you wait just long enough for debris to settle before you start all over again.

The engine analogy isn't too bad. You put a fuel-air mix(target) into the engine cylinder(reactor), compress it and ignite it with a spark(lasers). Some of the energy thereby produced goes into operating the spark-plug, lights and whatever else a car needs in future cycles. If you get much more power out of the engine than it takes to operate the necessities, you have a lot of energy left over with which to make the car go forward(feed electricity into the grid), then you're in business.
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In the control room there were whispered introductions: "Dr. Remington, Dr. Mitty. Dr. Pritchard-Mitford, Dr. Mitty."
"I've read your book on plasma feedback control systems," said Pritchard-Mitford, shaking hands. "A brilliant performance, sir."
"Thank you," said Walter Mitty.
"Didn't know you were in the States, Mitty," grumbled Remington. "Coals to Newcastle, bringing Mitford and me up here for a tertiary."
"You are very kind," said Mitty. The tokamak, visible through the control room window, began at this moment to go pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.
"The new feed system is out of sync!" shouted a technician. "There is no one in the East who knows how to fix it!"
"Quiet, man!" said Mitty, in a low, cool voice. He sprang to a terminal, as the tokamak began going pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep . He began fingering delicately. Columns of twelve digit coefficients appeared on the screen. He glanced at them, paged down, glanced again.
The technician was no longer shouting, but stood tensely, leaning toward the exit.
"Give me the root password!" Mitty snapped, making a hasty edit. Someone set a card down by the keyboard. The short patch was sudo'd into place. "That should do for now," he said. "But tell them that control loop really needs a third order filter."
Another tech hurried over and whispered to Renshaw, and Mitty saw the man turn pale. "The decline in output has destabilized the grid," said Renshaw nervously. "If you would take over, Mitty?"
Mitty looked at him and at the craven figure of Benbow, who drank, and at the grave, uncertain faces of the two great specialists. "If you wish," he said.
 
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OnlyTellsTruths said:
Hello all, I hope this isn't too much of a derail. :)

If nearly free energy ever does turn out to be a success, by what percentage would the normal cost of energy drop?

In other words, approximately what percentage of the cost of electricity is tied up in transfer, maintaining the transfer structures, etc. (everything that isn't the actual production cost)?
Click to expand...
As long as we're asking interesting questions, I have another one.

Is it possible to build enough windmills on the planet to begin affecting the jet stream and other natural air currents?
 
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