Posted on 12/09/2020 8:17:49 AM PST by BenLurkin
A 10-year plan presented last week to the federal Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee... calls for the Department of Energy (DOE), the main sponsor of U.S. fusion research, to prepare to build a prototype power plant in the 2040s that would produce carbon-free electricity by harnessing the nuclear process that powers the Sun.
The plan formalizes a goal set out 2 years ago by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and embraced in a March report from a 15-month-long fusion community planning process. It also represents a subtle but crucial shift from the basic research that officials in DOE’s Office of Science have favored. “The community urgently wants to move forward with fusion on a time scale that can impact climate change,” says Troy Carter, a fusion physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who chaired the planning committee. “We have to get started.”
Fusion scientists and DOE officials strived to avoid the sort of meltdown they suffered during their last planning exercise. Six years ago, the fractious community was already reeling from budget cuts that forced DOE’s Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) program to shutter one of three major experiments. Then, the associate director for FES decided to write the plan himself, with limited input. Many researchers rejected the road map.
The plan that emerged does not call for a crash effort to build the prototype power plant. During the next decade, fusion researchers around the world will likely have their hands full completing and running ITER, the international fusion reactor under construction in southern France. ITER, a huge doughnut-shaped device called a tokamak, aims to show in the late 2030s that fusion can produce more energy than goes into heating and squeezing the plasma.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencemag.org ...
Money sink.
So, between 2030, when we phase out oil, and 2040, when this is rolled out, we’ll just put on a sweater.
Would you trust a scientist with the power of the atom who believes in “Man-made climate change”? Not me like trusting a doctor who believes bloodletting will cure cancer.
Have they ever gotten the power in/power out ratio of a Fusion reactor beyond 1.0?
It won’t matter. The greenies, funded by massive energy companies, will never allow cheap clean energy. There could be a Mr. Fusion in every household that turns garbage and sewage in to all the electricity you could ever want and they will find a way to ban it.
Ban it for the masses but exempt themselves of course.
Only ten years away!
Since 1955.
And, after $100 billion of R&D.
Since 1955.
Not correct.
For most of that period, it was 20 years away.
Another government project that is a “10 year away” mirage like “returning to the Moon” and “going to Mars”. Once the money for the programs gets appropriated for new studies it all gets stolen pretty quickly.
That’s what I remember.
20 years away....and it always will be.
I hope not, but the potential Biden administration will be a black hole for taxpayer dollars when it comes to “alternative” energy.
“Six years ago, the fractious community was already reeling from budget cuts that forced DOE’s Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) program to shutter one of three major experiments.”
Please remind me, Greta, and the signers of the Paris Climate accord, who was the president, and for that matter the political party, at that time that claimed that Climate change was the biggest threat to the planet and we only and only had 10 years left before it was irreversible.
Now it really is 20 years away. For sure.
Breaking apart H2O with solar energy sounds clean, but it requires more energy input than you get from burning the hydrogen after you isolate it.
Not only that, since hydrogen is the least dense element, transporting and storing it also has huge costs.
It either has to be compressed at extreme pressures or liquefied.
Since hydrogen is explosive, that is not great idea, either.
“Hey...who’s the Doctor here?” (Theodoric of York)
If they can bioengineer kelp/seaweed to produce air sacs of hydrogen from sunlight and salt water, we’d be set.
“Have they ever gotten the power in/power out ratio of a Fusion reactor beyond 1.0?”
I think so, for a fraction of a second.
“Here’s my fusion plant”
That’s really a good one! We already have lots of fusion power!
Let me see now... how many programs of DOE from the energy crisis made it to successful application?
DOE to administer a pipe dream running into a trillion or more dollars for a pilot project? Ummmm..... NO.
From my experience DOE couldn’t successfully manage a 13 year-old’s nocturnal dreams, a piss up in a pub or a two car funeral.
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