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.
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
Skynet here we come .
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.
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
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.
Microsoft admits you will never make AI secure ,LOL
Nuclear fusion coupled with left-wing AI? What could go wrong?
LOL. I recall the company I had worked for teaming with Princeton University on fusion. Princeton had this nifty Tokamac reactor concept that was the “ bees knees” so to speak of fusion reactor design. All the stuff of confining the plasma with supercooled magnets and such.
I asked one of their “scientists” how long before their fusion reactor would be commercially available. He replied 10 years maybe 15. The only problem is that was nearly 50 years ago. Still no fusion reactor.
The pilot plant should be ready within 30 years.
Yep, right around the corner! AGAIN!
Fusion is a reaction, as burning kerosene and oxygen is a reaction. But as everyone from Goddard to SPACEX have shown there is a lot of rocket science between a simple reaction and a flying controllable useable affordable relatively safe system.
The problem is not the reaction, but the system that is going to use that reaction to do all of the above. Anyone with a pedestrian accelerator can make the fusion reaction happen. What they cannot do is make a self sustaining fusion reaction that produces more thermal energy than it consumes and turns that energy into electrical energy at an economical cost with a sustainable fuel supply.
Just try this one trick.....
Global warming irrelevant, global resource Dr depletion is just cold hard mathematics. That math doesn’t work for 8 billion let alone ten billion, without fission or fusion. That fact is not even up for debate with real scientists and engineers who can do basic college level mathematics.
Humans have the technology today to harvest many times more energy than we could ever use. The resources needed to have 8+ billion at middle-class levels of living however are not there without synthetics. Those synthetic take huge amounts of primary energy to make. Fission reserves with fast reactors can sustain 10 billion for a couple thousand years, if we mine the oceans for uranium that goes to billions of years as the crust is 4 ppm uranium and the oceans get run off from the continent’s constantly replenishing the oceans uranium reserves.
Let me be clear in one thing there is not enough hydrocarbons even with coal to have ten billion humans all living at even EU standards of living it is mathematical and that math doesn’t care about politics, feelings or beliefs. There is a crash coming it’s inevitable unless we as a species move to fission, fusion , solar , wind, geothermal and biomass. Those are the only sources that are not by definition finite.
Humans have the technology today with the existing fusion designs to do fusion fission hybrids. You don’t even need breakeven which us fusion Q=1 to make them work. The blanket of depleted or natural uranium surrounding the fusion core multiples the energy by 80 to 200 times via 14MEV neutron induced fission. Humans since the 1990s have had Q=0.5 we recently got to Q=1 you need Q=10 or more for fusion power to be viable. You only need Q=0.5 for a hybrid to make gigawatt levels of net power.
The hybrid also makes 2000+ Kg of PU239 per year and that scares the crap out of nonproliferation types given that ten Kg makes a modern two stage weapon. That 2000 kg also fuels 20 heavy water reactors of a gigawatt each of 10 PWR types with out a single kg of enriched uranium it’s all depleted at that point plus PU from the hybird to make MOX fuel. A single hybrid of a gigawatt fuels 20 gigawatts of CANDU for the 80 year life of the hybrid and it’s daughter reactors using just the spent fuel already sitting at current reactor ponds actually a tiny fraction of the existing spent fuel. If you use all the spent fuel run through a fusion hybrid then to daughter reactors you have a thousand plus years of fuel just sitting in cooling ponds, then add in the huge stockpile of depleted uranium from enrichment plants sitting in waste piles get you another thousand years or so. This only works with breeding fuel via fast neutrons the 0.7% U235 on natural uranium if used in a once through cycle runs out in 50 years faster when China builds 200+ more reactors in the next decade they plan too.
We don’t need anything more than political will to move to a fission dominated energy system France proves in spades they can load follow with the right standardized design. We need either fusion hybrids or fast spectrum breed reactors to have anything more than 50 years of nuclear oower again the math is solid and doesn’t care about feelings or beliefs.