Merged How Close is power from Nuclear Fusion

Gord_in_Toronto

Penultimate Amazing
Gord_in_Toronto
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I keep reading articles like the following:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/zap-energy-fusion-reactor

and

https://spectrum.ieee.org/general-fusion-takes-aim-at-practical-fusion-power

It might be time to retire that overused joke about nuclear fusion always being 30 years away.
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Fusion powerWP seems to explain the current state of the art.

I remember reading about:
The first experiment to achieve controlled thermonuclear fusion was accomplished using Scylla I at LANL in 1958. Scylla I was a θ-pinch machine, with a cylinder full of deuterium.
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in the magazine Nuclear Engineering, to which my Dad subscribed, at the time the study was published and the negative impact it had on the fission industry and uranium stocks.

Still waiting for success. ;)
 
It sure seems like there's a lot more effort now that there was 10 or 20 years ago. Lockheed Martin's got a thing going, along with a bunch of other groups.

There are some relatively new superconductors now that work at liquid nitrogen temps, along with advances in the understanding of plasma physics, computing power, lasers and other odds and ends.

I suppose at a minimum they are advancing science and engineering. And maybe, just maybe, they'll actually advance enough to crack that nut.
 
I'm going to say it's still at least 30 years away.

I hope I'm wrong about that, but nothing I've seen recently persuades me that something that will actually produce surplus energy that can be used to generate electricity for the general consumer is going to arrive in the near future (within the next 10 or 20 years, say).

Fission power is a much more realistic alternative in the near term, even with its downsides. The important features are that it doesn't generate CO2 and it provides stable baseload power that doesn't depend on the weather or the time of day.
 
Fusion has been 20 years away for the last 50 years, when fusion researchers said "this is how much it will cost over the next 20 years," and Congress said "new election, who dis?"
[imgw=640]https://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg[/imgw]


Don't hold your breath for ITER over in Europe. It's their space shuttle: a masterful feat of technical engineering in that it will work at all given it's a grossly expensive boondoggle that buries any hope of efficiency underneath a mountain of politically-driven design decisions.

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Beelzebuddy said:
Don't hold your breath for ITER over in Europe. It's their space shuttle: a masterful feat of technical engineering in that it will work at all given it's a grossly expensive boondoggle that buries any hope of efficiency underneath a mountain of politically-driven design decisions.
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I dunno. The Space Shuttle program produced the RS-25 rocket engine. Apparently this is a good engine, and enough of an improvement over previous designs that it will be used on the Shuttle's successor, the Space Launch System.

Maybe ITER, while being a dead end overall, will produce a subsystem of similar lasting value. That would be neat.
 
theprestige said:
I dunno. The Space Shuttle program produced the RS-25 rocket engine. Apparently this is a good engine, and enough of an improvement over previous designs that it will be used on the Shuttle's successor, the Space Launch System.
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It doesn't matter whether it's an improvement or not. Congress has legislated that it be used, so it must. Exactly the kind of practical thinking that made the Space Shuttle such a reliable workhorse.
 
It seems to me that the larger and more complex a project is, the less of the overall timeline and cost are captured in the initial project plan. Not only that, but having been on the project management side of things myself, it seems reasonable to me that it should be so. It's simply not possible to accurately forecast and budget for all the contingencies on a project like the JWST. Nor would you want to try. A lot of the early phases of the project will be discovery, as you start to figure out what problems you're running into, and how much time and money you'll need to solve them. So I don't really have a problem with major projects being revised upwards in time and budget as they move towards completion. And more and more I'm reluctant to tar such projects as "late" and "over budget".

That said, we do seem to be getting slower at building stuff:

https://patrickcollison.com/fast

But I don't know if this means that NASA and its contractors are doing it wrong, or if it just means they're doing the best they can within the system of the world as it is today.
 
theprestige said:
It seems to me that the larger and more complex a project is, the less of the overall timeline and cost are captured in the initial project plan. Not only that, but having been on the project management side of things myself, it seems reasonable to me that it should be so. It's simply not possible to accurately forecast and budget for all the contingencies on a project like the JWST. Nor would you want to try. A lot of the early phases of the project will be discovery, as you start to figure out what problems you're running into, and how much time and money you'll need to solve them. So I don't really have a problem with major projects being revised upwards in time and budget as they move towards completion. And more and more I'm reluctant to tar such projects as "late" and "over budget".
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Fair enough, as long as people understand that from the outset.
 
Beelzebuddy said:
It doesn't matter whether it's an improvement or not. Congress has legislated that it be used, so it must. Exactly the kind of practical thinking that made the Space Shuttle such a reliable workhorse.
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Actually, it is practical thinking. The RS-25, whatever you want to say about the Shuttle, has been reliable. All the development costs are paid for. Practicality says it's good enough, so use it.

Impractical thinking would say, "We can do better, so let's fund an entirely new engine, with development which (if history is any guide) will run over budget and over schedule."
 
10 years. It's about 10 years away. Same as it was 60 years ago, same as it will be 60 years from now.
 
Puppycow said:
Fair enough, as long as people understand that from the outset.
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I think the people involved in planning the project and approving the budget for the project understand that pretty well. I think the "late" and "over budget" narrative generally comes from people who know better but are looking for a short-term rhetorical advantage (e.g., people in Congress who must know how these things work but still need to get their dishonest sound bites in during election season), or people who don't want to know better because it's easier to be ignorant and just push their preferred narrative (e.g., journalists outside their area of expertise but who recognize a good story hook when they see one).
 
theprestige said:
I think the people involved in planning the project and approving the budget for the project understand that pretty well. I think the "late" and "over budget" narrative generally comes from people who know better but are looking for a short-term rhetorical advantage (e.g., people in Congress who must know how these things work but still need to get their dishonest sound bites in during election season), or people who don't want to know better because it's easier to be ignorant and just push their preferred narrative (e.g., journalists outside their area of expertise but who recognize a good story hook when they see one).
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My brain borked... I just read "pork".

And agreed. :-)
 
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