Fusion: 20 years out, and always will be? Or less than 10?
This entry is unfinished: for now, reminding myself how to add a Rants page.
Fusion
Dec. 14, 2022: The news last night was full of it.
Copying each other, and none going more than half an inch deep, each of the several news programs I watch reported that Lawrence Livermore National Labs National Ignition Facility, NIF, achieved the great milestone of “breakeven” yesterday: more energy out of a fusion reaction than it took to create it. In this case, the newsies said, LLNL put in two units of energy—2 MJ, mega joules— and got 3 out. 3.6 MJ is 1 KWH; the world’s most powerful laser only input ~half a KWH!? And they got about 1/3 enough energy out to dry a load of clothes? I think an early reporter must have misunderstood, and every follow-on repeated the error? In any case:
Big whoop.
The National Ignition Facility uses the world’s largest and most expensive laser to instantaneously flash a frozen pellet of deuterium and tritium to plasma, creating enough heat and pressure to fuse the D-T into a helium-4 nuclei, and a neutron goin’ thataway at 15 percent of the speed of light.
The fusion happens inside a “hohlraum,” a high-tech gold or uranium cylinder designed so that it reflects the laser, already split into 190-odd beams by a complex array of mirrors, very precisely onto the fuel pellet. Each “shot” (they can do around one a day, right now) destroys that hohlraum; you’d need ten a second to produce meaningful power. And I remember reading that a shot with that laser requires enough instantaneous power to run San Diego.
The NIF was not designed to develop fusion power; it was designed to recreate the conditions inside a hydrogen bomb. They can do one shot a day
Can do 1x/day: need to be able to do it 10 x/ second. Miles O’Brien
“The” other idea is the tokamak--Miles O’Brien
[Fusion is] “many years away.” Judy Woodruff
Old saw
Fusion is 20 years off and always will be Miles O’Brien
as left at Reddit Fusion
Meanwhile General fusion is building a 70 percent-scale demonstration reactor at the UK Atomic Energy Authority's Culham Campus in England, where several approaches to fusion are being explored. HB-11's approach to laser fusion sounds far more economical than NIF, and if they can make p-B11 work, aneutronic. TAE, Helion, and Lawrenceville Plasma Physics are all exploring aneutronic fusion, with p-B11 and D-He3, and field-reversed configuration (FRC) plasma control, which seems to work far better than magnetic confinement. . They all think they will be on line this decade. And aneutronic means far safer, simpler and longer-lasting reactors, and that they can use direct energy conversion, basically an induction coil, instead of an entire expensive Rankine cycle (steam turbine-generator-condenser) power plant.
That won't quite make electricity too cheap to meter, but LPP thinks (if they can make the DPF, dense plasma focus, work as a fusion engine) that they can give us 5 MW in a six-foot sphere for $ 1/2 million--10 cents / watt of capacity--and 1/2 cent / kWh. I'm sure a little more funding would speed all these entities up; meanwhile most of our funding goes to the NIF and ITER, both of which are already obsolete, and neither of which would ever make an economical power plant--and as you confirm, the NIF was never meant to.
Fourth-generation fission is far safer than the older nuclear power plants we are stuck with now, and the right mix of power plants could burn up our nuclear "wastes"--96 percent wasted fuel. We'd leave our kiddos 1/10 as much waste, dangerous for 300 - 500 years instead of millions, and we'd never have to dig up another Native American reservation for uranium. I think we need to do this even if fusion does come on line soon. But we need fusion, too, ASAP, and there are far more sensible approaches to fusion power than lasers or tokamaks. Those entities will either be on line, or not, far sooner than ITER, yet the NIF and ITER/tokamaks are pretty much all the media ever talk about, and all the journalism I see assumes tht NIF's "breaking even" is a big step toward fusion energy. If their approach can never become a power plant? I don't think so.
Meanwhile General fusion is building a 70 percent-scale demonstration reactor at the UK Atomic Energy Authority's Culham Campus in England, where several approaches to fusion are being explored. HB-11's approach to laser fusion sounds far more economical than NIF, and if they can make p-B11 work, aneutronic. TAE, Helion, and Lawrenceville Plasma Physics are all exploring aneutronic fusion, with p-B11 and D-He3, and field-reversed configuration (FRC) plasma control, which seems to work far better than magnetic confinement. . They all think they will be on line this decade. And aneutronic means far safer, simpler and longer-lasting reactors, and that they can use direct energy conversion, basically an induction coil, instead of an entire expensive Rankine cycle (steam turbine-generator-condenser) power plant.
That won't quite make electricity too cheap to meter, but LPP thinks (if they can make the DPF, dense plasma focus, work as a fusion engine) that they can give us 5 MW in a six-foot sphere for $ 1/2 million--10 cents / watt of capacity--and 1/2 cent / kWh. I'm sure a little more funding would speed all these entities up; meanwhile most of our funding goes to the NIF and ITER, both of which are already obsolete, and neither of which would ever make an economical power plant--and as you confirm, the NIF was never meant to.
Fourth-generation fission is far safer than the older nuclear power plants we are stuck with now, and the right mix of power plants could burn up our nuclear "wastes"--96 percent wasted fuel. We'd leave our kiddos 1/10 as much waste, dangerous for 300 - 500 years instead of millions, and we'd never have to dig up another Native American reservation for uranium. I think we need to do this even if fusion does come on line soon. But we need fusion, too, ASAP, and there are far more sensible approaches to fusion power than lasers or tokamaks. Those entities will either be on line, or not, far sooner than ITER, yet the NIF and ITER/tokamaks are pretty much all the media ever talk about, and all the journalism I see assumes tht NIF's "breaking even" is a big step toward fusion energy. If their approach can never become a power plant? I don't think so.
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