Posted on 01/19/2025 4:52:03 AM PST by Pontiac
“Fusion is a reaction, and there’s a race right now to figure out the right machine to make that reaction happen here on Earth. The machine that would make the reaction would consume a fuel that everyone has access to - no need for uranium or plutonium and no nuclear waste - and would provide unlimited energy.”
Out of about 50 companies out there, CFS is the biggest. Mumgaard detailed advances that could lead to practical, production-level fusion processes. But challenges remain.
A reaction like this, he says, needs three things. It needs to be hot, dense and insulated.
Citing advances that outpace Moore’s law, Mumgaard suggested that a successful result in current research would lead to a plant that would outperform anything ever seen before. He explained that CFS purchased land on an inactive army base in Devens, Massachusetts, and created a commercially relevant demonstration facility called SPARC that uses high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets.
However, Mumgaard said his company announced the site on which CFS plans to build the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant outside of Richmond, Virginia, bolstered by a collaboration with the utility, Dominion Energy Virginia. The proposed plant is expected to connect to the grid in the early 2030s..
Specifically, a team at Princeton University has been able to figure out how to use AI to understand and forecast plasma instabilities as the magnets work on the plasma.
In some ways, this is the most important application of artificial intelligence that you can think of. If it ends up saving our world from climate Armageddon, everything else is going to seem secondary.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
A "demonstration" plant for billions sounds rather like "send money."
Remember Solyndra as "the future."
For wjat it's worth, almost 60 years ago, I saw the mockup of the plasma toroid project, and "hopes." Now with Lawrence-Livermore and other competitors, it is liekly someone will try to patent ( or trademarl ) some crucial little bit to keep getting paid a while. SSDD? We'll see.
The first one on Earth I think.
And so much fun!
Mumgaard detailed advances that could lead to practical, production-level fusion processes. But challenges remain.
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The only thing different from a similar statement from 50 years ago is the man’s name.
WHAT_COULD_GO_WRONG_PING
Actually, I saw a fairly large production facility so there is apparently some substance beyond just words.
Skynet here we come .
Folks, LLNL is not a competitor. THey are a national lab. They do neat far out stuff, but they don't do commercial anything. THere is a law against it, in the first place, in the second place they are not organized for commercial competition and efficiency, and third, their is a long way between their very occasional demonstration shot and commercial fusion.
Oh, and where are you getting the tritium? You breae it in fission reactors - you know those nasty dirty proliferating fission plants that actually work if you are in France or China and are dreadful things if you are climate activist in Germany or NY City. And don't tell me you will just breed it in a fusion reactor. The numbers are really dicey even before you start worrying about the difference between theory and practice.
Tulips, Madoff, Theranos are things that come to my mind when I read this stuff. PS Nuclear fission works just fine.
Once you really understand the concept of fusion you can understand the challenges to making it work. An example is the Sun which has unlimited free gravity to power it. Earth applications must use magnets and immense electrical power to imitate gravity. The free power is the difference between the power going in and the power produced which must be captured and converted into usable power.
Well they cannot burn money as fast as the US Treasury. That is one thing they have on their side.
You have access to tritium? 99.99% of us don't, not in any significant quantity.
AI the program that can’t reason , what could go wrong ,D’oh
I saw a fairly large production facility so there is apparently some substance beyond just words
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Lockheed Martin advertised a working thermonuclear reactor coming on line 5 years ago - Lockheed Martin has a very large production facility.
PS: no one anywhere in the world has sustained nuclear fusion beyond a handful of seconds, but some how these characters are way ahead of all the research facilities in the world?
Are you in the market for slightly used bridges?
I’m sure that burning money is scalable. I’m surprised Hunter Biden isn’t heading up one of these projects. I probably shouldn’t post that on a public forum. Joe has another 26 hours to go ....
5 or more years ago I read long article by one of the top fusion scientists for last decade or two. He said fusion will never happen - it’s a pipe dream.
The energy required just to start the fusion reaction would take more electricity than NYC and require that it be maintained for an impossible time-frame to get the fusion reaction going. I am only an old former science teacher, but it sure looked factual to me.
Well he’s wrong, there’s been one controlled fusion reaction already, Princeton Labratories in 1978, used about one month of energy equivalency of Albany New York, captured the produced energy, but the issue is continuous firing like a piston engine, the Toroidal Magnetic field was too damaged to repeat. Heat and pressure, are the two obstacles, to be overcome. We needs shields Scotty, like the Starship Enterprise!🤔
They aren’t talking about cold fusion. Cold fusion is a hoax. They are discussing just fusion, hence the difficulty with containing dense and hot hydrogen long enough to produce a reaction. The theory is not lacking for fusion. It is technical issues that must be overcome. It may turn out to be economically and/or technically non viable, but fusion is certainly theoretically possible.
Microsoft admits you will never make AI secure ,LOL
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