The Strange History
of Fusion and
the Science of
Wishful Thinking
by Charles Seife
Posted on 02/12/2022 10:10:21 AM PST by fireman15
“The old joke is that nuclear fusion is 30 years away and always will be,” quips Greg De Temmerman, managing director of Paris-based energy think tank Zenon Research. In fact, the joke has become so hackneyed over the decades it has been banned by editors at the Economist. “But more seriously, many things are happening right now in the field,” De Temmerman adds.
Jokes aside, they are. Earlier this month, China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor eclipsed previous records by sustaining a high plasma temperature for minutes (1,056 seconds). It reached two milestones: a one-million-ampere current and a 1,000-second duration 100-million-degree temperature (that is five times hotter than the sun). Back in August 2021, the National Ignition Facility at the US’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory also heralded a breakthrough using a different approach: it deployed powerful lasers to start a fusion reaction that generated 1.3 megajoules (MJ). That is only about 3% of the energy contained in 1kg of crude oil, but it was another milestone. Meanwhile, private nuclear fusion projects have been booming in recent years.
Nuclear fusion has long been considered the energy of the future: a supposedly infinite source of power that does not produce CO2 emissions. However, after decades of research, it is still to deliver on its potential. How much closer do these new breakthroughs bring us? What role could nuclear fusion play in the world’s race to hit net zero by 2050?
(Excerpt) Read more at energymonitor.ai ...
For those who want to understand why little is going toward LENR (cold fusion) here is an introductory article.
https://undsci.berkeley.edu/lessons/pdfs/cold_fusion.pdf
Unfortunately, charlatans and hucksters dominated the cold fusion scene for decades drowning out and causing sincere researchers to be ignored.
Short answer— NO.
Now in time maybe, possibly.. I hope. But if you really look into the field you will understand we are still no where near the level of technology needed to have any kid of production value from fusion other than bombs.
Just one Nuclear Professional’s opinion....
The short answer is no. Only clean solar energy and fresh pure wind energy should be used. That way large swaths of the world population can freeze and die and the world population can be brought down to a sustainable 400,000,000 people. That will be just enough for us oligarchs to have staff to support our standard of living and enough slave labor to produce the things we need (and not much else).
Yes, I have that book and it is very good.
What all the phony fusion hype means. Very good video. This woman is well worth following.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
Ping.
Thank you for your response. A professional’s opinion should always be valued. There are state of the art fission alternatives which could be deployed right now if we were actually facing the “climate catastrophe” that the left claims we are.
Thanks a lot! The thread will likely now be carpet bombed with a nasty stream of absolute nonsense.
Thanks, I just spent the last ten minutes watching the video and it was very good.
Instead of focusing on pie in the sky nuclear fusion, why not rethink what works, coal firing plants. I cannot fathom that all the energy and time wasted on the other alternative crap cannot be focused back on making a 100% clean burning coal plant! Focus on what to do with the output of burning coal.
It’s up to you if you wanna ping the Cold Fusion Ping list. I will follow up with notifying them that it is not a protected thread. Some of them don’t mind that at all.
Cold Fusion is 25 ORDERS of MAGNITUDE better bang for the buck than Controlled Hot Fusion (CHF).
Our reliance on fossil fuel dates back to the Carter days, when the NRC, under his instruction, made development of nuclear power plants exceedingly difficult and costly, essentially shutting down our nuclear energy program.
Due to excessive regulation existing U.S. nuclear plants are patched and cobbled for relicensing rather than building new, safer and more efficient plants.
Buy MY solar system on MY house paid for with MY money and tailored to MY needs is very efficient. Like everything else in life, it's always more efficient if the one that's paying for it and benefiting from it is also the one making the decisions.
That's why decentralized green energy works if you're in a good situation for it (mine produces 50% of all the electricity needed for my 2-story all-electric house and will pay for itself on about the 10th year). That's also why "green" energy like the Dims want it doesn't work: it's always inefficient because it's forced onto people who don't want it and paid for by people who don't want it, but decided on by bureaucrats.
Yes, within ten years.
Ten years from now, the answer will be the same.
when the NRC, under his instruction, made development of nuclear power plants exceedingly difficult and costly,
***Uhh, that was due to 3 Mile Island, which is STILL not cleaned up enough to walk your dog through it. Since then, fission can brag about 2 more accidents that will take 10,000 years to clean: Fukushima and Hiroshima.
That, combined with no real place to store nuke waste for 100,000 years and it’s NO Thanks. Once you work in the cost of cleanup and storage of waste, fission power is extremely expensive.
Instead of trying to keep atoms apart that wanna go together, it will be far safer trying to push atoms together that wanna repel. When the SHTF, the atoms repel and the reaction simply stops.
I see such your use as appropriate, however even that is massively subsidized. To date all such solar investments get massive tax payer subsidies. I could be wrong but I would guess your 10 year return would have gone past and useful time, for return of investment, if the government subsidies were not available.
Know several people who went your route and ALL of them stated unequivocally, “if not for the government subsidy it would have been unfeasible.” These are people in the Nuclear Power field just like myself.
Using tax dollars to prop up a failing business model is just another thing killing this country.
And the slave labor will be undernourished, living in unseated and uncooled apartments, and never straying more than fifty miles from where they were born. You might need a billion people to keep innovation and,production up, though.
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