Nuclear fusion is on the brink of a milestone, but faces lack of funding [audio]
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
>Nuclear fusion is on the brink of a major milestone
ITER is supposed to ignite in 2025 if it stays on schedule. The project is in continual jeopardy from people pulling out. Fusion is bleak despite large variety in research[1]. This whole thing could be reduced to a 30 second endorsement soundbyte. Instead it's a longform that gives no actual idea of the state of fusion.
[1]: http://fusion4freedom.us/intensive-analysis-lockheed-martins...
The 80k Hours podcast does a fantastic job at this, providing a full transcript, a summary of the key points, and a time-indexed table of contents.
https://80000hours.org/2017/08/podcast-we-are-not-worried-en...
Then they get downvoted by people who think "TL;DR READ IT" is a masterful blow against everything wrong with Kids Today.
To be more serious, there's enough people who apparently regard summaries as lazy that it's hard to predict whether they'll be welcome in any given forum. Caring or not caring about downvotes aside, posting stuff that's unwelcome isn't very sociable.
Also a summary is only as good as it is accurate. If the piece being summarized has sufficient nuance it can't be summarized well, or is at a higher risk of being summarized incorrectly.
There's a joke here somewhere about judging a book by its cover.
If a summary covers all the relevant information in the article, then actually reading the article is a waste of time. And note how GP used compression to excise pieces that would be repetitious for an average HN reader.
How many articles are released every day? The sheer number of words published every minute, all with titles designed to demand attention, is truly staggering.
Assuming that everyone who wants an abstract/tl;dr is lazy is ridiculous (though, as always, not completely inaccurate). Anyone who enjoys staying up-to-date on a broad set of topics can hardly expect to maintain a functional lifestyle without some help in picking which articles and reports get read in-depth.
On a separate note, the bigger problem with Kids Today (imo) is the pursuit of arbitrary social points (karma/upvotes/likes/retweets) when engaging in discussions online. This seems to drive the trend toward low effort memes, jokes and pop culture references which decrease the signal/noise ratio.
I keep an eye on my total karma because I want to know whether I am, on the whole, fitting in around here, and which comments contribute to that the most one way or the other. Speaking truth to power can be useful, or fun, but if you're saying things that aren't being heard, you're just wasting your time and everyone else's screen space.
And some venues want the entertainment. That's signal in their world, and they deserve to have it.
With text you can tell by skimming if something is worth your time. Even with video preview you can get a bit of a gist. I hate audio with no context.
There are two ways humans can have self-sustaining fusion. See my crappy log-log plot: http://i.imgur.com/ZfCueCe.png
Inertial confinement fusion starts at the red point and goes straight up without heating up the plasma much. After it stagnates for ~2-5ns, the high-pressure plasma equilibrates so its temperature rises, putting it in the fusion range. The higher the pressure, the higher the final temperature, and ideally you want to get as deep into the fusion range as possible to more efficiently burn the fuel. The state of art neutron energy yield per laser capacitor yield is around 100%, but we need at least 5000% to make up the inefficiency of charging capacitors, amplifying lasers, converting neutron kinetic energy into steam, generating electricity via turbines, and still have some left over to supply a power grid.
Magnetic confinement fusion starts at the red point and goes to the right over a few milliseconds. The pressure is always about 1 atmosphere, so you have to get really hot. Tokamaks can hold this position for a few seconds, which is needed for efficient fusion to account for the slow burning because of low pressures. I'm not sure exactly what the engineering challenges of magnetic confinement are, but I can say that storing anything that hot for a while is very damaging to the tokamak, while at the same time you must have strong and precise magnets placed around it.
There's really no other way of getting into that "fusion" area of the plot. If you try to draw a diagonal line, you wouldn't be able to keep pressurizing because high temperature makes plasma difficult to compress. You have to choose one of the above two general methods, and the design space is pretty well explored, so there's not going to be a large breakthrough that researchers have completely missed at this point. Fusion will be achieved by a sequence of 1% improvements month by month, so law makers and tax payers must understand this when they allocate X dollars and are disappointed that their grant only gave a 10% improvement on previous methods.
This would be true for an overly complicated fusion reactor design. There might be approaches that rethink basic assumptions.
The remainder of your post focuses on the two main research avenues being explored with big money behind them. It's possible that smaller efforts, like Focus Fusion, or Polywell fusion might actually work though.
I don't think I completely agree with this. In ICF there is a lot of physics to be explored, in addition to just building a bigger NIF/LMJ.
What you're describing is incremental development. Whether or not there's an actual "breakthrough" out there is unknowable by the very nature of the word. There may be another way we can do fusion that nobody's thought of yet.
There is at least one more way that doesn't fall into either of the categories you described, which is dense plasma focus. Essentially you let the plasma collapse in on itself in a controlled way, and this collapsing plasma provides enough condensed energy for the fusion reaction to occur. This isn't just a theoretical approach either, multiple fusion reactors have been built that follow this approach. I kind of think of it as judo, instead of fighting against the plasma with magnetic containment, you work with its natural tendencies to produce the effect you want.
not true. Fission primary :)
While it clearly is a bit of marketing for his own baby (tokamak with modern superconducting magnets), it has a lot of good technical points.
The big one being that tokamak is the only fusion technology anywhere near being commercially feasible--by several orders of magnitude.
We could mass produce Liquid Molten Salt Reactors or many other reactors with current technology, current manufacturing processes and replace all carbon we use now and fulfil the growing demand.
I simply dont understand why people continue to hope for fusion when they refuse fission.
People have all sorts of deep seated fears about fission. They don't have to be accurate to be afraid.
Knowledgeable people are aware that more people have died falling off of roofs trying to install solar panels than have ever died from a nuclear power plant.
The problem is insufficient propaganda from the nuclear fission industry. The tech works fine, but people don't believe it.
[1] http://www.dw.com/en/belgium-says-its-nuclear-plants-are-saf...
Because of the time required to evacuate people from the impacted areas, one of the objectives of a response plan would be to minimize radiation exposure due to contaminated food and water.
Providing iodine tablets before an accident is intended to minimize radioactive exposure due to contaminated food and water sources from the time the hazard is discovered to the time you are evacuated, and allows planners to apply those resources that would otherwise be spent distributing those supplies to helping evacuate more people, or responding to the incident.
And since that's normal and predictable, it should never happen except in cases of major force, like earthquakes and tsunamis. A government should be able to resolve the situation would letting the risk rise to this point.
They aren't the same thing at all, obviously. But that said, it is much more likely that someone die from installing or servicing solar panels than someone die from a nuclear incident.
We tend to be afraid of abnormal but possibly fatal or maiming events - the ones that are newsworthy - compared to the risks we face on a daily basis. Which is why we are cautious when climbing a ladder twice a year but not when we get into the shower as an older adult, even though shower accidents, including broken hips, are incredibly common. The poster is putting the actual risk into perspective.
The point is that the risk of death with nuclear plants isn't nearly as high as people feel it is, even when factoring in the high-profile accidents that have occurred. Right now, a lot of people have an irrationally over-inflated perception of the risk posed by nuclear power.
This doesn't engage with the real world consequences of nuclear accidents that are devastating to life and the environment, long lasting and extremely expensive and complex to cleanup.
There's a real discussion to be made on the trade-offs between the potential environmental damage caused by an accident versus the looming threat of climate change. Unfortunately that discussion isn't really being had because nuclear power's public perception hurdle is so great.
It kills less people, it uses less land, it uses less resources, it uses less mining and so on.
Areas of nuclear fallout and in protection zones are actually reclaimed by nature and animals don't give a shit about living there.
Environmentalist should love nuclear. There is that movement called 'eco-modernist' who subscribe to that.
> nuclear accidents that are devastating to life
Hardly. Most of the people that were evacuated were not in danger, devastating to their live was government action because of fear mongering.
Far more people died of the evacuation then of the radiation.
People are again living in cities near Chernobyl and their cancer rates are not unusual.
If you can offer cheap power people will usually take it.
Well, kinda. Many of the possible revolutionary alternatives in fission reactor design would require new industries and industrial infrastructure. These would be able to build on existing technology and infrastructure, but as we've seen with the evolution of electric cars, this is hardly a trivial matter. (Witness: The Gigafactory.) If it weren't for the pre-existing demand and infrastructure for Li-ion laptop batteries, the current crop of electric cars may never have gotten off the ground.
So for fission alternatives to get off the ground, we'd need some entity with really big pockets to "pick a winner" and invest in that infrastructure -- preferably after investing in enough R&D to validate that pick. Either that, or the new alternative needs to be an order of magnitude better than the existing ones. When you account for the infrastructure costs, are any of the new alternatives that much better?
Nuclear has the advantage that it needs for less then any other infrastructure.
> When you account for the infrastructure costs, are any of the new alternatives that much better?
Yes, if you calculate it threw based on first principle it is much better.
It will talk 100 gigafactories and possible more just to get the required store to balance out wind and solar. 2-5 gigafactories sized reactors production plants could power most of the world in the next 30 years.
The scale of difference required in infrastructure, resources and investment is simply on another level.
The problem really is that in the west its practically impossible to do privately, and thus most nuclear startups move to the east and the government has no interest in doing it themselves.
China is already selling 4th gen pebble bed reactors, and after that they will probably commercialize different forms of MSR. It will however take another 10 years until you can buy them.
Number of electricity-generating molten salt reactors built: 0
I agree that the challenges of scaling up and industrializing molten salt fission reactors appear significantly less daunting than those of industrializing fusion power. But there is still R&D required. The last molten salt reactor to actually attain criticality shut down in 1969 (ORNL Molten Salt Reactor Experiment). That experiment was too small for direct translation to industrial practice (7.4 MW-thermal, e.g. 3.3 MW-electrical with 45% efficient conversion). It didn't generate electricity, didn't operate long enough to demonstrate industrial durability (only 13,172 hours (1.5 years) of full-power-equivalent operation), and didn't demonstrate the neutron economy of a breeder or even a near-steady-state burner reactor.
There are a lot of steps remaining before any molten salt reactor becomes a commercially available product that a utility company can buy from a nuclear supplier. It would take many fewer steps than for a fusion reactor, but saying that molten salt reactors can replace all carbon we use now with current technology and current manufacturing is way overstating their technological maturity and availability.
The good thing about PWR and BWR reactors is that the radioactive portion of the system is mechanically simple. All the complexity is outside. The working fluid is water, which is easy to handle and, other than the production of tritium, doesn't become radioactive.
Every reactor design which had complicated stuff happening in the radioactive portion of the system has been a commercial failure.
EDIT: oh, uranium and thorium halides hydrolyze except at very low pH. And so will a number of fission-product-halides. So maybe not simpler to start with halide salts instead of oxide fuels.
There are two main theoretical advantages for breeder reactors.
One advantage is that the total energy extractable from terrestrial mineral resources is much greater with dedicated breeder reactors than with reliance on naturally fissile U-235 in simpler non-breeding reactors. In practice, nuclear power production has not grown fast enough to cause uranium shortages. Until there is a significant uranium shortage, reflected in much higher prices for freshly mined uranium, the higher complexity/cost of a breeder reactor cannot be offset by cost savings on fresh uranium fuel.
The other theoretical advantage is a reduction in actinide waste production (plutonium, americium, curium). These heavy waste atoms dominate the radioactivity of spent nuclear fuel in the medium term, thousands to tens of thousands of years from now. But in the short term (years, decades, and centuries), the radioactivity of spent nuclear fuel is dominated by fission products rather than actinides. Breeder reactors do not notable reduce production of fission products compared to conventional reactors. Further, the reprocessing of nuclear fuel to separate the fission products has a tendency to turn potent but small, easily-handled waste problems into less potent but much larger and more unwieldy waste problems. Even though there are some theoretical waste advantages to reprocessing fuel instead of using it once and sealing it up forever, in practice waste reprocessing has always led to higher expenses and more radionuclides actually released into the wider environment.
Some startups actually propose to produce reactors with the fuel inside and then recycle the hole reactor.
Chemical plants might be a pain but its far easier then doing isotopic separation.
My point is that the technical challenges are pretty minor compared to the rest. Nobody believes what I am proposing is impossible. There might be a discussion if it can be built in 2, 5 to have a full scale reactor that could be commercialized.
The real point is that this could have been done 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago or at any time. The issue was never a technical one.
If the government made a serious push including regulatory changes, action by national labs and copy the NASA approach to commercialization I am certain we could mass produce these things in under 10 years. Once you mass produce reactors the energy production capacity you produce is quite unbelievable. It dwarfs everything else.
> current manufacturing
My point about manufacturing is that reactors are not more complicated or need higher tolerances then rocket engines for example. SpaceX is producing rocket engines for 2M a pop at a rate of more then a 100 year. Boeing is producing far more complex air planes for 200M a pop at the rate of 1 per week.
It is far easier then producing all these wind, solar and battery plants. The needed scales of production are multible order of magnitude different.
A mass produced nuclear reactor will produce between 100-300MW, while most wind turbine produce around 3MW while being just as hard to produce and harder to install.
The biggest barrier today is that it's more energy efficient to dig up new oil than to make it.
An army of engineers is much cheaper than what we are doing now with oil, solar and wind which each employ several armies.
Most of the world's electricity comes from coal. Most of the world's transportation fuel is oil. Most of the world's heating/cooking/etc is from gas/coal.
Unless, the rest of the 3rd world is content with living in 3rd world standard, consumption of oil, gas and coal is going to increase worldwide. Coal may stagnate in the west because of laws, but collectively ( oil/gas/coal ) usage is going to increase in the west and the rest of the world.
Unless there is a true economic collapse, increased oil/gas/coal is a fact of physics.
And of course, you pointed out that we use petrochemicals and their byproducts in almost every facet of modern life from toothpaste to smartphones to food packaging to fertilizers.
It is amazing how a small group of environmentalists and their allies at the "clean" energy industry are able to lie about basic physical facts.
The major growth in population and energy use is going to come from africa/south asia/southeast asia/middle east. Do they really expect these people mired in poverty to forgo oil/coal/gas/etc just for environmental reasons? Do they expect these people to live at 1/10th the living standards of the western world just to appease the wealthy environmentalists?
A 1GW coal plant burns a 100-car trainload of coal every three days. A conventional 1GW nuclear plant uses an 18-wheeler truck full of fuel rods every eighteen months.
More advanced nuclear is even better. A 1GW fast reactor or thorium reactor would use one ton of fuel, about the size of a beachball, every year. Your lifetime personal energy needs, including transportation, would come from a piece of fuel smaller than a golfball.
With fusion, the small amount of deuterium in your morning shower could provide for all of your energy needs for a year.
I know. That's why I compared oil, gas and coal to "solar, wind, etc". Not nuclear.
All things being equal, we should be going for nuclear rather than solar,wind,etc. But nuclear has a publicity problem.
Also some things (like asphalt) are only cheap because we're already refining oil to make fuels. It's essentially a byproduct. It may be that other road surfaces become more economic if the alternative is to refine oil just to get the asphalt.
Electric cars will kill oil more than fusion would, I think.
https://futurism.com/could-humanity-ever-really-build-a-dyso...
So what can you do with abundant energy? One thing is to make "active" structures like launch loops. This would allow you to make buildings larger than would be possible with normal materials (but your building collapses if there is a power failure).
Transport is 26% of world energy usage, oil is 31% of world energy source.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=23832 says that 12% of energy use for transport is air, 12% ships. So probably 75% of transport energy usage could be replaced by electricity. So about 75% of oil usage could be replaced easily.
http://thebulletin.org/fusion-reactors-not-what-they%E2%80%9...
PS: Considering it was 50 years away in 1980 we seem to be on track. Mostly though it just does not get much funding.
So yes, with a lot of effort you could design a smaller and less expensive to construct structure assuming higher field strengths, but it would take massive amounts of time and R&D to get to that point.
IMO, we really just need to bite the bullet and build something at scale. Version 1 needs not be efficient, but it's going to teach us a lot more about operations than simulations can.
When you need many countries to smoothly co-operate on a many-billion-dollar decades-long project that's hard to swiftly articulate or grasp, let alone pivot, while technology and geopolitics swiftly shifts around you, you're going to have a bad time.
ARC with modern superconductors is in many ways ITER but capable of being built on a multi-university budget, by virtue of those superconductors being much more powerful while being much smaller and lightweight and operating closer to room-temperature. The whole reactor needed for the same energy scale a ITER is physically much smaller.
The PSFC at MIT (who is proposing this plan) built the last great tokamak that got us closest to real fusion back in the 90s and that inspired ITER. ITER was the best plan available after that: the project size was necessary given conditions at the outset. Now many people are committed to it, and we're many billions in, so it likely isn't going away.
But ARC is probably a better version of basically the same plan given today's outlook: a scaled up tokamak, doable at university, national-lab, or skunkworks-level project sizes.
So I believe we could see huge progress from this in the next 5 years.
The only thing I have not seen articulated in Zach Hartwig or Dennis Whyte's otherwise fantastic talks in the past year is: what's next? What are the concrete steps between today and some version of ARC? They don't seem to be raising money yet, so it is clear there are some open questions about the other innovations in the ARC design, and I want to hear how/when we expect those to be solved or at least well-defined.
(I'm not making any claim about whether it will be it not)
- a cure for cancer (one of the oldest and still working), a testable string theory, nuclear fusion, genetic engineering, flying cars, a cure for AIDS, for addiction, for cellulite, or for that fungus that's been festering in your crotch for 10 years now, [insert your favorite here], ..., etc.
Never, never, never will you hear:
"We've got enough money, please don't send more!"
or
"We have the solution, it has been validated by an independent group and it works! You can get it today!"
Which reminds me of an old joke:
Bob: "Hey, didja hear? They finally found a cure for marital infidelity!"
Fred: "You don't say? What is it?"
Bob: "Nudity!"
Make the same list 100 years ago or 100 years from now and it's a different list... Because progress happens, some things are just more complex than SV style innovation and this weeks next big thing.
My experience is that no one survives a confirmed diagnosis of cancer. By "survive" _I_ mean that their life is unaffected and they die of something else and that their death is not sped by cancer.
Oh, there's the occasional "miracle" out there, but no one's paying attention to potential false positive diagnoses (i.e., person was diagnosed with cancer, is treated, later turns out to not be cancer at all, he's a "miracle", thank you Jesus, thank you Lord!)
The odds of being alive 20 years after a cancer diagnosis are not nearly as bad is you might think. Around 2x as many people are diagnosed with cancer every year as die from it.
There's also the possibility that the collective world will finally commit to action on climate change and start dumping money into technology, any technology, that could tilt things in our favour.
It's astonishing to me that during the Manhattan Project they tried every possible thing, both methods for uranium enrichment, both fundamental types of weapon, explored all possible avenues, and yet today the US can't be arsed to spend a dime on preventing climate change.
I'm less familiar with that research (doesn't come up on HN a lot) but very interested. The itch is killing me.
> "We've got enough money, please don't send more!"
Well, research problems (such as the ones you quoted) can only be solved by substained effort and that requires substained cash flow. And there has been progress in all of them.
Real-life research is not like in Civ., where you can exchange $10000 for the invention of electricity. There are unknown costs that pop up all the time.
They don't? How would you describe literally any invention that comes to market. It seems like people say that sentence all the time.
As others have mentioned, heavier than air flight seems to fit that category. So does recorded video and film. So does distributing video over the internet.
GPS, rocket launches, cell phones, etc.
Sure, you can use a selection bias and query for the problems that remain unresolved, but if you look at the universe of inventions and scientific inquiry it definitely looks like problems get resolved and to market all the time.
I wasn't speaking of all problems that exist.
Yes, and the word "unsolved" in there is the exact selection bias I was referring to.
Of course if you look at the universe of "unsolved" problems you don't see any verified solutions! It's a tautological statement. If you were looking specifically at unsolved problems, of _course_ there are no solutions yet. That was the definition of the term!
It seems to me that you are dismissing all the work we've actually done on these fronts. Of course there needs more money, as the research isn't finished. SOme of this is really complicated, and we didn't realize it was so much at first. Putting the same effort into this energy might not bring us what we dream, but similar improvements can be made.
We would still be better off for having tried this stuff, I think.
No, the point of the joke is that most people are not in fact as appealing when nude as we _imagine_ they might be beforehand. The joke is a poke at the optimism of imagination.
As for cancer:
- Certainly its complicated. But I question the value of and wisdom of the history of cancer "research", and especially chemotherapy, where people become essentially lab rats. And this has gone on for generations.
Broken_Hippo sez: "It seems to me that you are dismissing all the work we've actually done on these fronts. Of course there needs more money, as the research isn't finished."
Spoken like a true advertising shill for a cancer institute. Considering the amount of money spent, the actual _results_ are disappointing, to say the least. And money? Well, money! "Of course there needs more money, as the research isn't finished." [and one almost hears "... with luck, never _will_ be finished. We can milk this cash cow forever!"]
Considering the money spent, the war on cancer is a black hole that pays, pays, pays for institutions, laboratories, inflated salaries for doctors, big pharma, and mostly useless research.
http://www.newsweek.com/cancer-breakthroughs-cost-too-much-a...
How much will you pay to keep your child alive? [usual answer: everything you have and everything you can mortgage or steal.]
Who benefits? [Ans. cancer institutes, cancer hospitals, cancer doctors, big pharma, and their wives and families.]
Want to buy a new Mercedes for an ontologist? Contribute to one of the cancer charities/hospitals/institutes.