Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Agreed this a great history about how the standard designs came about, particularly the two big ones historically: Tokamak (Soviet approach, mentioned in this article) and Stellarator (US/Princeton approach). Then later in the 1970s ICE using lasers (inertial confinement fusion) which is the other dominant form in modern attempts since Stellarator hasn't worked out.

Reads a bit like those Manhattan Project books.

https://www.amazon.com/Piece-Sun-Quest-Fusion-Energy/dp/B00D...

View on HN

Approx four or five years ago I had an accidental/random conversation with one of the prominent researchers at the Princeton facility (PPPL). Long to short, he said, "We're getting there. The more funding we have, the sooner we'll get there. But yeah, we're really close."

Mind you, that's what any research scientist would say. But everything I've seen and read since tells me he's was being honest and has been accurate. I hope he's right.

https://www.pppl.gov/

I have a good friend who is a physics graduate student at Princeton working on fusion and he has said the same.

I was very close to finishing a 2 week project 6 weeks ago.

That's really one of my dream: that fusion ends up being up in the corner and suddenly the energy crisis is over.

I too will be happy to see the clean energy problem solved. On the other hand, if big oil - and the countries that depend on it - implodes then we have a new problem. That's not pretty.

ITER is 5 years from first plasma and 15 years from full operation.

With all the various experiments over the years, if we haven't gotten ignition by now, we'll never get it. Fusion is going to be perpetually "just 5-10 years away"

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/worlds-largest-nu...

He was lying to you, or misleading you. We may be really close to Q>1. That would put fusion where fission was in 1942. It would not mean we were, or ever could be, close to practical fusion power plants.

Stellator didn't work out? What is Wendelstein 7-X then? Christmas lights?

Apologies I didn't phrase that right. There's been more recent work on Stellator. The book takes a longer history look at it and didn't dwell very long on modern developments. Stellator definitely took a decline in popularity at one point before making a bit of a comeback with Wendelstein 7-X and some other places.

Stellarators will have the same low power density of tokamaks. They are not immune to the generic arguments Lidsky, Pfirsch, and Schmitter made against DT fusion reactors.

Inertial confinement fusion was for fusion bomb technology development. It's used to produce bomb-like conditions on a laboratory scale. It was once billed as having something to do with energy production, but that was for PR purposes only.

[citation needed]

It's not hard to find.[1]

[1] https://thebulletin.org/2013/07/nuclear-weapons-the-death-of...

Ok let's agree to disagree with the idea that ICF never had a legitimate energy purpose. Goodbye

What ICF did was play off the weapons and the energy people. When one side raised questions about the validity of the justification for ICF from their side's point of view, the ICF people could just point to the other side.

I think in the end the real justification was maintaining a cadre of physicists who were familiar and experienced with the physics of materials at H-bomb like conditions, in case new generations of bombs needed to be designed, and also to help validate improved computer codes for simulating those conditions without actual bomb tests.

An oldie but a goodie is "Man Made Sun: The Quest for Fusion Power" by T.A. Heppenheimer from 1984 or so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com