Korean nuclear fusion reactor achieves 100M°C for 30 seconds

https://www.shiningscience.com/2022/09/korean-nuclear-fusion-reactor-achieves.html

by yreg • 4 years ago

705 765 4 years ago

gajus• 4 years ago

What is the significance of this?

groby_b• 4 years ago

Second sentence from The Fine Article: "While the duration and temperature alone aren’t records, the simultaneous achievement of heat and stability brings us a step closer to a viable fusion reactor – as long as the technique used can be scaled up."

terrorOf• 4 years ago

AFAIK, China has record for temperature and duration however it is known as China heated up electron rather than heating up ion which is more proper.

zxcvbn4038• 4 years ago

What? No reactor in every home? Those house of the future films lied to me in every way.

uwuemu• 4 years ago

Good luck trying to "scale up" (at least in the near future). Tokamaks are only getting to be "scaled up" now, after pretty much decades, and basically only thanks to ITER (factor of ten plasma volume compared to the second largest tokamak). And ITER is a megaproject comparable (both in budget and time) with the SLS program. Maybe even more expensive (depending on if you believe the official number, 22bn EUR, or the unofficial estimate, 40bn EUR) and DEFINITELY more complex with far more cutting edge science (plasma physics, material science...), technology, and engineering required.

If ITER succeeds (proves that fusion in a magnetic confinement device can be used to produce net electricity and it's "just" a matter of scaling things up that is holding fusion back), then sure, investors are going to line up, even for alternative designs. Fusion will be all the rage. But until then, I doubt anyone is scaling anything fusion-related up. Well and if ITER fails, then we are all fucked, and we can turn the fusion "are we there yet" clock back 50 years.

npunt• 4 years ago

It's just the new hotness

random314• 4 years ago

Alright, take the upvote!

mikeInAlaska• 4 years ago

"An error occurred during a connection to www.shiningscience.com"

Was it hosted at the facility?

Rackedup• 4 years ago

"as long as the technique used can be scaled up."

teaearlgraycold• 4 years ago

OOF

j15e• 4 years ago

As a newbie in nuclear fusion, this explanation is the most interesting part:

Lee Margetts at the University of Manchester, UK, says that the physics of fusion reactors is becoming well understood, but that there are technical hurdles to overcome before a working power plant can be built. Part of that will be developing methods to withdraw heat from the reactor and use it to generate electrical current.
“It’s not physics, it’s engineering,” he says. “If you just think about this from the point of view of a gas-fired or a coal-fired power station, if you didn’t have anything to take the heat away, then the people operating it would say ‘we have to switch it off because it gets too hot and it will melt the power station’, and that’s exactly the situation here.”

baby• 4 years ago

Similar to how energy is extracted from fission reactors currently: the heat is used to boil water which makes large turbines spin and produce energy. It's dumb engineering. (I don't mean that in a bad way.)

bryanlarsen3• 4 years ago

It's also very expensive engineering. That's how a coal plant works, and the last coal plant that the US built cost $2B for a 600MW plant. Given how much cheaper solar & wind are, fusion will be dead in the water if it doesn't come up with a cheaper way of extracting energy from the reaction.

lake_vincent2• 4 years ago

Yes, exactly! There are two problems here:

1. What's the most efficient way to boil water?

2. How do we generate electricity on a population scale without having to boil water?

Question 1 is, apparently, much more tractable. We are still pretty much building the world's most sophisticated tea kettle.

ok_dad3• 4 years ago

It's a fusion reactor, so how do you get the water into the part with the hot stuff? That's all inside a magnetic field, I think. Also, you have to consider the neutron radiation's effect on the pipes that carry the water into the core, it's going to activate several metals in there, and cause weakening of the pipe wall, which will necessitate inspections and replacements.

It's a way harder engineering problem than you're letting on. Your comment is like a software user saying "How hard could it be just to add feature X?".

tremon• 4 years ago

It's not my area, but I suspect that the heat extraction rate for a fusion reactor must be several orders higher than current fission reactors if we are to run them continuously. Fission reactions can be actively controlled by using reaction moderating material (control rods), which means we can tune the reactor activity to match the amount of heat extraction available.

Fusion plasma must be sustained at a few million Kelvin or it shuts down again, and I'm not sure how finely we can control the operating temperature without either overheating the reactor or shutting down the plasma. I think it will take a lot more than dumb engineering to accomplish this.

Gwypaas2• 4 years ago

Could be interesting if they couple it with a Closed Cycle Gas Turbine [1] and a tiny steam plant, like the gas CCGT plants of today. Then the heat engine part should see similar, or even higher, efficiencies compared to gas based CCGT plants.

Boiling water using the Rankine cycle [2] and it will be as dead in the water as nuclear and coal is today.

A thing to keep in mind though is that it is very hard to compete with the engineering of an axle straight into a generator like wind turbines or a solid state system like solar PV. Working fluids, cooling loops and what not are awful to build and maintain.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-cycle_gas_turbine

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_cycle

Twirrim• 4 years ago

I was talking about this with the my kids (10, 7) the other day. Blew their minds a little that pretty much every power source comes back to the same central thing: moving magnets.

Then I pointed out that our electric car does it in both directions too.

pdpi• 4 years ago

I always find it slightly amusing how there's remarkably few forms of power generation that don't eventually boil down to "use water/air/steam to make a turbine spin".

mandeepj2• 4 years ago

the heat is used to boil water which makes large turbines spin and produce energy

I believe the containers would have to be really large.

Also, if we have to continue boiling water at scale, we might reach water crisis some day. Although, it'd take very long time.

legohead• 4 years ago

Assuming we can run an actual fusion reactor consistently, how is the power taken out? I've seen lots of comments about water/steam, but we're talking 100M°C degrees here, that's insane! Do we bury this thing in the ocean?

I'm being silly, but I'm genuinely curious if there are any plans, even speculative ones, on how to do this.

kadoban2• 4 years ago

The question is more how you get the heat to the water in a sensible way. It's _probably_ just engineering, but it's still something that needs to be worked out.

NovaVeles• 4 years ago

“It’s not physics, it’s engineering,”

When it comes to fusion I am always in too minds about statements like this.

On one hand, yeah, it is something that we may be able to wrangle into something useful.

On the other, fusion can be seen as a perpetual motion machine that doesn't defy the laws of physics. It can kind of inhabit that same mind space.

YZF• 4 years ago

Right. It's not physics (though arguably plasma isn't that well understood but let's ignore that) it's just incredibly difficult engineering and needing to solve multiple extremely difficult engineering problems. In that same sense reversing climate change is just an engineering problem, populating Mars is just an engineering problem, a space elevator to orbit is just an engineering problem, quantum computers etc. etc. ;)

ncmncm102• 4 years ago

That is why it has this unholy fascination, and distracts attention from things that actually work here and now. It is pernicious that way.

pfdietz52• 4 years ago

And the engineering here is very problematic. Indeed, the issue mentioned may be a showstopper for DT fusion.

The problem is limits on power/area through the wall of the reactor. Because all the produced energy has to go through the wall, and because the area of the wall grows as r^2, the volumetric power density of a DT reactor (that doesn't exceed the power/area limit on the wall) must decline with increasing size.

This leads to DT fusion reactors having horrible volumetric power density. ITER, for example, has a volumetric gross fusion power density of 0.05 MW/m^3. The 2014 ARC design, 0.5 MW/m^3. A PWR's reactor vessel? 20 MW/m^3.

(If you look at the power density of the plasma alone, or the fission reactor core alone, you get similar wildly discrepant numbers: https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/research.seas.ucla.edu/dist/d/... see slide 26)

If you want to make heat to make steam to drive a turbine, a fission reactor will be much smaller, and much cheaper, than a DT fusion reactor.

IX-103• 4 years ago

What's wrong with pulling the energy from the magnetic containment system?

We already are using the magnetic containment system to redirect charged particles in the plasma back into the plasma. If we do so less forcefully than they were heading out, but still enough to stop them from leaving, we can convert particle velocity directly into electricity (AC with a relatively linearly decreasing frequency distribution, I think). This also has the effect of cooling the plasma (since temperature is related to average particle velocity).

The challenges I see here are: 1) The faster the control system, the more efficient it is at extracting energy -- it can extract the energy of higher frequency components. 2) You may need a very large magnetic field (larger than needed for containment) to make this practical 3) Coil geometry and efficiency becomes critical.

trhway2• 4 years ago

Yes, the Sun has volumetric intensity of a compost pile.

jiggawatts• 4 years ago

An idle thought I had related to this is that the real trick to scaling up fusion power may be to not try and extract the energy "through the walls", as you said.

You know how they tell you to "visualise success" because you need to know what it looks like to aim for it?

Along those lines I was visualising what it would look like if someone like Elon Musk was on YouTube showing off some sort of future fusion reactor that's "not just a piece of lab equipment", but something that would be dramatically better than any extant fission reactor or similar technology.

I visualised it as an enormous stationary rocket engine, where cooling water was pumped through a relatively narrow (~50cm) "reactor tube". The water needs leave a hole in the middle for the fusion fuel gases. The hole is achieved by imparting a rotation to the water, so it "spins out" to the sides. Fusion would occur not throughout a large volume, but at a small number of "pinch points" along the axis set up using powerful magnets -- and not necessarily superconducting magnets! To get sufficient current through the coils, the charged exhaust is allowed to expand through a magnetic "rocket engine bell", producing moving (and accelerating) electric charges. This current is recirculated through the engine to provide the enormous magnetic field strengths required, via thick copper conductors aggressively cooled with water.

Essentially it would be a magneto-hydrodynamic-fusion jet engine, using fields instead of impellers to achieve compression, expansion, and energy recovery to run the whole cycle.

The bulk of the energy would be in the super-heated steam produced, which could be used as in traditional power plants, or used as a bone-fide rocket in space.

Obviously there would be "challenges" to making this work, to put it mildly!

But consider that with the kind of computer power we can throw at modelling physics these days, it may be possible to use "topology optimisation" style tricks to figure out the required geometry of the parts to achieve the conditions required for fusion while staying within material design constraints.

If you ask me, a Manhattan-project style attempt at something like this would be a better way to "waste money" than yet another aircraft carrier, or whatever...

cma• 4 years ago

Can the wall be baffled like an air filter to increase area? I get that the flux through it in total at a given radius would be the same, but is the heat being pulled out through plumbing or something?

melony• 4 years ago

Back to stellarators? Mobius strips are very beautiful.

Mvandenbergh3• 4 years ago

On the other hand, basically every complicated bit of engineering on the PWR is due to the fact that it does have such a high volumetric power density. A PWR is basically a fancy (very fancy) pressure vessel which is cheap (in relative terms) and then parallel redundant cooling systems and containment buildings because dealing with such high power density is hard. Right after shutdown, the power density from decay heat is still 1.3MW/m3 and dealing with that decay heat in all currently conceived circumstances is where all the money goes.

concordDance4• 4 years ago

I'm confused about how 50kw/m^3 is "horrible". A 4m a side sphere would give 1.5mw, which is a decent sized plant.

What's wrong with a 3-6m size reactor vessel?

go_elmo• 4 years ago

Very wild idea: gaining electricity by induction instead heat since its charged matter.. but I know it doesnt make sense, as it only yields the kinetic energy which has too high entropy to be yieldable (no directed movement)..

wiz21c• 4 years ago

Euh ? In a few paragraph you basically say that even if fusion works, getting energy out of it will be almost impossible in a meaningful way (you're showing order of magnitudes of difference). But, don't the engineers at ITER and other facilities have already though about that ? It'd be very irresponsible to start such a project knowing in the beginning that, at the end, there's a high chance of failure...

xani_4• 4 years ago

Could the part of the plasma be diverted into heat exchanger and back into the stream somehow ? I guess problem there would be having one that doesn't just melt away. Maybe shoving water into it so it flash-evaporate and we're back to the ye olde steam?

dahfizz• 4 years ago

Taking your number of 0.05 MW/m^3, Back of the napkin calculation is that the USA would need ~8,000 gigafacory-sized reactors to meet 100% of electricity demand.

howenterprisey• 4 years ago

Does volumetric power density cause any issues besides making the devices relatively large (and thus more expensive)?

ngcc_hk• 4 years ago

Bomb vs power plant … explosion is quick heat in a sense.

Schroedingersat11• 4 years ago

So we think about the engineering problem and reject the entire concept on that basis.

Even if I give you a magic box full of near vacuum 100 million degree plasma that emits 1MW/m^3 in the form of neutrons whenever you want as long as you stop it from touching the sides with supercooled magnets. How do you turn that into a remotely viable power station?

Just the heat exchanger and steam turbine portion is going to be uneconomical against renewables+storage.

ncmncm102• 4 years ago

Yes. Just just keeping a steam turbine up and running, completely ignoring where the heat comes from, costs more than both building out and operating wind and solar.

pyinstallwoes8• 4 years ago

Thermoelectric generator. Take the differential and output a voltage?

Why hasn't this been done? Why do we go to the steam stage when we could just exploit the termoelectric properties of temperature and current?

1. Thermoelectric generator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator

2. Thermocouple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermocouple

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect

snaily• 4 years ago

The typical efficiency of TEGs is around 5–8%

A steam turbine is many times more efficient.

lambdatronics5• 4 years ago

It's been considered, for a variety of heat sources. I'm long-term bullish on a related technology (thermophotovoltaics), although presently the efficiencies are not great & the compatibility with nuclear radiation is probably poor.

fsniper• 4 years ago

I still don't understand why we don't really have a reliable and good way to convert chemical bond/radioactive energy into electrical energy directly? Why do we still require 2 conversions of Chemical -> Heat -> Electrical ?

Is that something that is impossible or not cracked yet?

tullianus• 4 years ago

Some examples exist for directly converting alpha, beta, and gamma particles into electricity, but I didn't find anything for neutrons in my brief search.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery#Radiovoltaic_co...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device

lambdatronics5• 4 years ago

Fuel cells convert chemical -> electrical directly, batteries go both ways.

For nuclear fusion, the only practical reaction releases 80% of the energy as uncharged particles (neutrons), for which the only way to harness their energy is to convert it to heat. The 20% of the energy that is emitted as charged particles could in principle be converted with high efficiency, but the other 80% dominates.

For fission, more of the energy is emitted as charged particles, but it's not clear how one would harvest it directly in bulk. (It can be done on small scales, but not efficiently.)

johndhi• 4 years ago

What % chance do we feel that we will have fusion power within the next 50 years?

weberer2• 4 years ago

Construction of the DEMO plant is currently set to begin in 2040. It is made to follow ITER, so any delay in ITER will propagate to DEMO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant#Time...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

DennisP24• 4 years ago

Yes but ITER is the world's slowest fusion project. Now we can build much smaller reactors, much more quickly, with the same output because we have better superconductors. Several startups are tackling it, and a lot of fusion scientists think CFS will beat ITER to net power by a decade.

anigbrowl• 4 years ago

73%

sien3• 4 years ago

On Metaculus :

Most likely - fusion ignition in the 2030s. Fusion supplying 10% of global electricity in the 2050s.

https://www.metaculus.com/questions/?order_by=-rank&main-fee...

zardo5• 4 years ago

Those two predictions don't seem to fit together.

yreg5• 4 years ago

This site seems interesting, thanks. Never heard of it.

mkaic• 4 years ago

90%. I'm not qualified in the slightest to make that prediction but I'm making it anyways!

fibonacc4• 4 years ago

99% but petrodollar will still be in power. Access to fusion power will be strictly controlled.

idontpost2• 4 years ago

0% chance.

ncmncm102• 4 years ago

Exactly 0%.

Achieving stable fusion does not make practical power from it possible. It would necessarily cost >10x fission, and fission is not competitive.

We can be absolutely ,confident that by 2100, there will have been zero kWh of commercial power from Tokamak fusion. It is just barely possible that D-3He fusion might work by then, but it would still struggle to compete. It might find use in outer-solar-system spacecraft.

scifibestfi• 4 years ago

Let's say they manage to scale this up. What effect would it have on humanity? Climate change is solved. What else?

MichaelCollins2• 4 years ago

Little effect I think. Fusion power can do little that fission power can't do already, which is provide "free" power after you look past the cost to build and maintain the plant. The best advantage of fusion power is the public perception is presently better.

ithkuil• 4 years ago

Is the safety profile any better? Or is it just public perception?

Thetawaves3• 4 years ago

Don't ignore the fact that uranium reserves would not last 100 years if we used it as our sole power source.

Blikkentrekker• 4 years ago

Even with fusion, it's very clear that many politicians are afraid of it simply because of the word “nuclear” in it.

As nuclear fission, nuclear fusion might simply not be used because of that scary word alone.

z3rgl1ng• 4 years ago

Jevon’s paradox implies we’d have a brief respite, chronologically speaking, before having to tackle something like heat shedding.

quonn• 4 years ago

Long term, yes. But much of the climate change problem is decided in the next 25 years. Even if this reactor would work right now, building enough of them in that time frame everywhere, switching all industry and factories to electric, switching all transportation and cars and heating systems in all the houses to electric is very tough.

So it's still very challenging.

notfish• 4 years ago

Exactly. I’d also add that climate change is a just a symptom of us reaching the natural carrying capacity of Earth for humans, so adding new ways of generating power doesn’t completely eliminate the issue.

alas44• 4 years ago

Climate change has inertia so probably not solved by the time we have industrial scale fusion + would not solve the two other main anthropic activity related problems: biodiversity loss and depletion of natural resources

blibble8• 4 years ago

with unlimited cheap energy you can pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, produce hydrocarbons and pump them back into the wells

wizofaus3• 4 years ago

Would depletion of natural resources be so much of an issue if we could use fusion to recreate them? (after all, they didn't come into existence by magic...) Biodiversity is a bigger problem given the sheer levels of complexity and our relatively poor understanding of exactly how we depend on the exact make-up of the biosphere. Most likely humanity could survive without it, but it would be a poor sort of existence - our bodies and brains evolved in tandem with the huge diversity of life around us and is optimised to thrive in that context.

ahmedk92• 4 years ago

My layman understanding tells me depletion of natural resources will be worse if we manage to find a sustainable source of energy.

mihaifm• 4 years ago

Cheap energy means lower costs of manufacturing therefore lower prices for consumer goods, thus increasing quality of life.

u32011• 4 years ago

There is no reason a priori to assume fusion power will be cheap. On the contrary, everything we know about it now suggests the opposite.

haliskerbas• 4 years ago

At least in North America, things tend to maximize corporate profits rather than maximize quality of life.

sien3• 4 years ago

With the knowledge that comes out of building fusion power plants the next thing to build is fusion rockets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus

yreg5• 4 years ago

Not to be confused with USS Daedalus

https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Daedalus

hinkley5• 4 years ago

Climate change not solved. This is another in our long series of silver bullets.

Greenhouse gases retain heat. Sea level temperature is a function of ambient heat due to sunlight and other heat sources, minus the rate at which it dissipates into outer space, mediated by the insulation effect of the atmosphere.

Projects that try to reduce the carbon intensity of energy are focused on changing the denominator in the equation. The current aim of these projects is to produce a cheap and plentiful energy source, via a heat engine. What they are actually chasing, whether they admit it to themselves or not, is a cheap and plentiful heat source. If they succeed they change both the numerator and the denominator, which ends up partially cancelling each other.

Wind and solar are different because they tap into an existing heat engine, instead of trying to build a new one.

What we as a people need is a fusion plant that costs less per KWH than a fossil fuel power plant with tariffs to account for the cost of the carbon dioxide, but still about as expensive as a fossil fuel plant where the carbon is free. If we actually got a fusion plant that was 10x more cost efficient then we'll just introduce the concept of heat pollution to the conversation, swapping out the villain in the story but keeping the same outcome.

93po2• 4 years ago

Are you saying the heat output of a fusion generator would be so great that it would impact climate change?

robertlagrant7• 4 years ago

Adding some invented constraints on to the problem of nuclear fusion is the most bikesheddy thing I've ever read.

u32011• 4 years ago

Heat pollution from power generation is a non-problem. We will run out of raw materials to build power plants out of long before this happens. This is what happens when people don't run the numbers.

coffeeblack2• 4 years ago

Question is, how much will the kWh cost, all costs considered. And how much time does it take to build.

Schroedingersat11• 4 years ago

What effect would it have on humanity? Climate change is solved.

Not really. It'll just be another tool for the fossil fuel lobby to use to misdirect attention from what will make them irrelevant forever (reduction and sunlight).

Even if the reactor part is free and 100% reliable. Getting heat out of a 100 million degree chamber that is spewing neutrons everywhere and turning it into electricity is much much harder and more expensive than collecting some photons and building a train.

yreg5• 4 years ago

As the fossil fuel industry becomes obsolete, it would be wise to rebrand themselves into carbon removal and lobby for high payouts of carbon credits.

https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2020/07/04/what-if-ca... (not sure how to overcome the paywall)

mmahemoff• 4 years ago

Terraforming, space exploration. On the compute side, running extremely fine grained simulations.

kibwen• 4 years ago

It might solve the greenhouse side of climate change, but you can't run away from thermodynamics. All electricity generated eventually turns into heat. Earth can only radiate so much heat into space in a given time period. If you generate more heat than Earth is capable of radiating, the planet warms. Don't start thinking that "free energy" from fusion reactors means that we can generate infinite power (as nice as that would be). It just means that the new negative externality would be heat itself.

ncmncm102• 4 years ago

The numbers say otherwise.

If we generated enough spare power to run lots of carbon capture equipment, and removed enough carbon, the planet would cool.

There are fantastic reasons to abandon fusion, and even better reasons to accelerate build-out of renewables, but that is not one of them.

ncmncm102• 4 years ago

Each dollar diverted to this from building out renewables brings climate disaster, global civilization collapse, and billions starving, incrementally nearer.

throwaway7422• 4 years ago

There is no reason we can't do both.

thehappypm• 4 years ago

Idk. If you want a steady stream of energy enough to power a small house, you can achieve that for $20k today with a big enough solar panel and a PowerWall. Fusion has to be cheap as well as effective.

myrmidon7• 4 years ago

None.

We already have proven basically unlimited electric energy in the form of PV panels (and batteries if you need it stored). So far, that tech has not solved climate change at all, because actually building enough of these things is something that people need to be willing to pay for.

boringg2• 4 years ago

Full steam ahead!

stevage2• 4 years ago

Steam behind. Fusion ahead.

boringg2• 4 years ago

Um actually the fusion then uses that heat to create steam which produces electricity...

So fusion then steam.

enviclash• 4 years ago

Are there game-changing implications for this result?

tinco2• 4 years ago

Nope, it's just the expected gradual progression to the game-changing result that fusion eventually is going to be.

ncmncm102• 4 years ago

No. Progress toward cancellation, as its gross impossibility fades into gross impracticality and grossly extreme cost.

You can safely ignore all future fusion announcements.

ajdegol9• 4 years ago

It's not like it's theoretical, it powers the sun; it's responsible for all atoms in the universe. It's essential for the long term survival of the species.

"Grossly extreme cost"? Shell made more money than ITER costs in the Q2 of 2022

https://www.shell.com/investors/results-and-reporting/quarte...

lake_vincent2• 4 years ago

"While the duration and temperature alone aren’t records, the simultaneous achievement of heat and stability brings us a step closer to a viable fusion reactor – as long as the technique used can be scaled up."

Half of the engineers on HN right now:

[...as long as the technique used can be scaled up...](PTSD_Chihuahua.jpg)

rjzzleep2• 4 years ago

It's interesting to see that South Korea has such strong nuclear research facilities. Taiwan lost a lot of nuclear researchers in the past decades. Some of it due to US lobby work and some of it due to stupid governmental policies in the recent past. Japan which is also quite strong in nuclear seems to be trying to sell part of their nuclear industry, a move which turned out disastrously for the french.

onlyrealcuzzo4• 4 years ago

a move which turned out disastrously for the french.

Any more to add?

IIUC, France has one of the highest percentages of nuclear energy of any country in the world.

Is this supposed to be bad?

rjzzleep2• 4 years ago

More than half of their reactors are currently out of commission. And Macron was one of the people responsible for signing off on the deal that sold off their turbine development to GE due to pressure of the DOJ. They were talking about buying "it" back. Although I don't know what the scope or timeline of the buyback is. I also remember that contrary to previous promises GE started dismantling one of those factories.

airstrike• 4 years ago

> a move which turned out disastrously for the french.
Any more to add?

The Battle of Waterloo?

mytailorisrich• 4 years ago

I think this has to do with the cooperation deals French company EDF signed with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

yongjik2• 4 years ago

South Korea also wasted recent years trying to shut down nuclear reactors and painting the nuclear industry as evil anti-environmental cabals. It's infuriating that Korea's politics is governed by either conservatives (who think environmental regulations should bend over for industries) or liberals (who think it's "eco-friendly" to shut down nuclear, when 44% of the electricity is coming from freaking coal).

fibonacc4• 4 years ago

The previous administration completely neutered its world class nuclear industry and built Chinese solar panels all over the mountain side causing landslides and environmental issues.

These are just some of the wonderful things the President Moon has accomplished.

summerlight• 4 years ago

This issue is not that simple to be framed as "painting the nuclear industry as evil anti-environmental cabals", like usual conservative propaganda. How many nuclear reactor actually has been shut down in last 5 years? Wait, zero? Yeah, the plan is shutting down reactors after its design life rather than blindly extending it more and more, which is the status quo.

Nuclear fission definitely has lots of advantages, but it comes with lots of geopolitical and operational challenges especially if you want to use it for decades, or so called "sustainability". One of the critical factor of "escaping from nuclear fission" was the fact that S Korea is not going to have permanent nuclear waste sites anytime soon; everyone have been talking about that over 30 years and no political party even dare to build the one because in S Korea, every single political issue eventually converges to a matter of real estate. And you know what? The capacity of the existing temporary storage for most plants will be exhausted within 5~10 years.

Now we're talking about the so-called "sustainability"; it's not about environment or whatever liberal propaganda but the dire facts that S Korea will be forced to shut down nuclear reactors unless it finds other ways around. The previous administration couldn't come up with a good solution so decided not to build more reactors. Oh yeah, they didn't even dare to shut down those reactors to earn a little bit more time. It's not even a propaganda, but just a mediocre compromise. Its territory is not big enough to construct just a single waste site.

Oh, then why don't we reprocess the waste? And now we're talking about geopolitical aspects. The US-Korea atomic energy agreement severely constrains what S Korea can do with the waste. Unlike many first world countries, it doesn't have the reprocessing technology and unlikely have the one unless it begins enjoying political tensions with the US.

Nuclear waste is just a tip of iceberg; you're going to find an arbitrary many number of operational and economical challenges on Nuclear fission reactor. And I also want to mention general public reception on nuclear energy, "I trust nuclear energy, but not its operators". Yeah, Korean nuclear industry is well corrupted to its root and it deserves its own reputation. In the era of climate crisis, going to nuclear fission seems no-brainer, but the devil is in the detail.

cyclingfarther• 4 years ago

What do South Korea, Taiwan and Japan have in common? Hint: it starts with C.

Which is why all three have/had such strong nuclear expertise.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_latency

jimhi• 4 years ago

Can you spell that out?

They are near / wary of China? That is why they have nuclear expertise?

butterfly771• 4 years ago

So is China

ncmncm102• 4 years ago

If they can unload those turkeys, good for them, bad for whoever gets taken in. If they can't, they are no worse off than today.

gerdesj3• 4 years ago

When I was at school in Abingdon, Oxfordshire (UK) around 1988 my physics class (A level aged 17) was somewhat enlivened by a visit by a bunch of clever chaps from JET at the Culham labs from up the road.

This was the first time I heard the "nuclear fusion is 25 years away" joke and it was told as such. We were also shown a graph of how many orders of magnitude away from ignition (for want of the correct word) by date. It had an initial steep decline but then turned right quite sharply and had annoying looking tendency to avoid the magic value.

Now, once you have ignition, you have to sustain it and extract power from it. That's quite tricky too!

cygx2• 4 years ago

We were also shown a graph of how many orders of magnitude away from ignition (for want of the correct word) by date

See p.4-5 of [1] for more recent plots. It includes earlier runs of both KSTAR (the experiment under discussion) and EAST (the Chinese one mentioned in another comment), but not their most recent ones.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10954

zamadatix• 4 years ago

For those wanting a quick in browser glance: https://i.imgur.com/z7MRk5X.png

Hallucinaut• 4 years ago

It may seem a bizarre tangent... but humour me: you don't know any of the members of Radiohead do you? Right town, time and age.

gerdesj3• 4 years ago

TY and EoB and co were about three or four years ahead of me.

I recall watching "On a Friday" play on the cricket pav. of Abingdon School ("Royce's") at the end of term, summer '87ish. Thom did wear some very colourful waistcoats with his suit and Ed in mufti generally minced around wearing slippers, no socks and an electric blue jumper and a whopping quiff - as was the style in those days ("I fastened an onion to my belt..."). Actually this was the time of the New Romantics so think Culture Club, The Smiths, The Cure, Duran Duran etc.

History is what is written and WP is not keen on first hand experiences: "The band disliked the school's strict atmosphere ..." is writ on WP.

My perspective:

The school is a public school - so borders, dayboys and any school needs some sort of discipline. At the time it was all boys, I think it is now co-ed. However, next door there was the Park which was "no man's land" (master's and mistresses kept away and let the kids get on with it, provided we didn't take the piss) and both Abingdon boys and St Katherine's girls or Fitz Harry's or whomever could meet up and have a fag (smoke) and socialise in general.

We also had a bar in the cellar of School House for the weekends that was run by the boys and financed etc by us. Again, we were given a lot of slack, it was actually educational too - money in - money out etc. There was also the H&J (Horse and Jockey pub) - keep to the snug and look adult was what the owner told me as ordered a pint the first time (bless). I was in Waste Court House at the time.

My memories of Abingdon School are rather golden - I was extremely lucky to go there at the time. The Army paid for quite a lot of it. Nowadays it costs £40,000 a year to go there.

I would never describe Abingdon School as strict as such in the late 1980s when I was there. The Head was affectionately known as "Freaky Beaky" (a Headmaster is always the Beak) which is pretty standard for any public school. However, Mr Parker was also known as "Miffie" and that was down to someone overhearing his wife using a term of endearment.

At the time, obviously, there was no hint that On a Friday would go on and become a worldwide phenomenon but they were pretty good entertainment for a school band. They clearly had an itch to scratch and buggering off to the US and re-branding etc worked rather well. Well done them. It has to be said that Abingdon school was (with hindsight) extremely supportive. Mr Parker sanctioned On a Friday to play on the cricket pav for end of term entertainment.

Well spotted, and sorry, I seem to have started waffling on a bit ...

Kukumber2• 4 years ago

China managed to reach 120 millions °C for 1000 seconds last year already

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-12-31/China-s-artificial-sun...

motokamaks• 4 years ago

They managed to do it all separately in separate experiments. This is the first time both stability & temperature were achieved simultaneously.

Kukumber2• 4 years ago

Oh you are right, important detail indeed

djyaz1200• 4 years ago

What if the stars in the galaxy are the remnants of civilizations fusion reactor gone wrong ;p

Aaronstotle• 4 years ago

What if stars are sentient beings?

fb03• 4 years ago

What if stars are nothing but accumulated powder that brushed against itself for too long to spark up?

wizofaus3• 4 years ago

Greg Matloff would like a word with you.

DennisP24• 4 years ago

What if the solar system is an atom in a giant brain?

kushan20202• 4 years ago

What if stars also experience global warming ?

rr888• 4 years ago

There was a positive fusion article in the WP a few weeks back. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/26/nuclear.... Looks like things are finally happening.

DubiousPusher• 4 years ago

Was this a successful ignition?

elihu2• 4 years ago

“This team is finding that the density confinement is actually a bit lower than traditional operating modes, which is not necessarily a bad thing, because it’s compensated for by higher temperatures in the core,” he says. “It’s definitely exciting, but there’s a big uncertainty about how well our understanding of the physics scales to larger devices. So something like ITER is going to be much bigger than KSTAR”.

This made me wonder when ITER was going to actually be up and running. From wikipedia:

"The reactor was expected to take 10 years to build and ITER had planned to test its first plasma in 2020 and achieve full fusion by 2023, however the schedule is now to test first plasma in 2025 and full fusion in 2035."

So, it sounds like it'll start doing something within a few years, but it'll probably be a long time before it produces significant scientific results.

By the time ITER is running, maybe some other group will beat them to it (like the MIT ARC or SPARC reactors, which use more recent, better superconductors and don't need to be anywhere near as big).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

yreg5• 4 years ago

Seems (like other contributors) Russia is manufacturing parts for it. Hope the current events won't delay the project.

Filligree2• 4 years ago

One of the main reasons it's so delayed, is that everyone gets to make some of the parts. Which then have to be put together on-site, despite inevitable mismatches.

Reducing the number of countries involved will probably just speed it up.

ncmncm102• 4 years ago

ITER if ever finished will have exactly zero apparatus to extract useful power.

They are not even talking about starting on a power plant before 2050, or finishing before 2070.

It will of course all be dropped long before then, one way or another. Either we build out renewables fast enough, or civilization collapses before we get there. Either way, no fusion power.

elihu2• 4 years ago

Extracting useful power isn't really the point of ITER; the main thing is to operate the machine long enough to produce useful data that everyone else can use to build reactors that aren't based on technology that's several decades out of date.

I don't think ITER would be dropped because of renewables. Even if we had enough energy to power our civilization, there's always other things we could do if we had more. Civilization collapse could put a halt to ITER, but another possibility is the project could be dropped because someone else beats them to it and they don't need to finish this expensive machine just to find out what everyone already knows about magnetic plasma confinement.

tonymet• 4 years ago

a question for nuclear experts : what does the unstable fusion state look like ? is there a catastrophic risk and now severe is it ?

sounds• 4 years ago

Pretty much overheating something, leading to a relatively boring shutdown and a long, potentially costly repair.

TedShiller• 4 years ago

While impressive, that is the easy part. Anyone can heat something up given enough energy put into the system. The hard part is producing energy on a net basis.

kushan20202• 4 years ago

Does anyone know how do scientists measure such high temperatures?

I doubt a regular thermometer will scale at such levels.

femto2• 4 years ago

Measuring the temperature is the same as measuring the average energy of particles in the plasma, which is the same as measuring the average speed of the particles. Basically you do that by measuring radiation, doing it in several different ways, so you can test the accuracy of your measurement. This article gives an overview:

https://www.scienceinschool.org/article/2013/fusion-4/

Incidentally, the plasma is of such low density (ie. few particles) that it has little stored heat energy. As soon as the plasma touches anything it cools down and fusion stops. You're unlikely to get a mushroom cloud out of today's fusion reactors, as there is just not enough stored energy in them. (Might that change if they are scaled to the point where large amounts of energy can be extracted, a bit like the bang out of a large charged capacitor?)

wrp• 4 years ago

...the plasma is of such low density...

I believe the chambers are operated at a pressure of 1/10,000th of an atmosphere.

ncmncm102• 4 years ago

When the thousands of tons of lithium hydroxide catch fire, you will notice.

pontifier• 4 years ago

Fusion? I've got a new and different design that needs testing. If anyone is interested there is more information at http://www.DDproFusion.com

fibonacc4• 4 years ago

If they can pull this for 30 seconds in 2022, they can do 30 minutes by 2025, 30 hours in by 2027 and then 30 weeks by 2030 being very optimistic here.

Right now things are bad in this world and will get worse but the future is filled with abundance and new levels of comforts not seen in human history.

aeternum• 4 years ago

It does seem like the cost vs. reward of fusion tech is ridiculous at this point.

I'm all for new tech but we should at least try to project the cost to build a working fusion power plant. Fusion not only has to work, it has to be at least somewhat cost-competitive with other forms of energy generation.

fibonacc4• 4 years ago

true as elon musk says it won't be economically viable for quite some time but fusion is the right step, what I'd be interested is if they can miniaturized to fit on rocket payloads.

notamy• 4 years ago

Fusion not only has to work, it has to be at least somewhat cost-competitive with other forms of energy generation.

Perhaps silly, but I wonder how this comparison would shape up if we were capable of calculating reasonably-accurate long-term figures about effects of pollution, mining for resources, construction costs, etc. in the process of producing each form of energy. I'm really curious what that'd look like.

alliao• 4 years ago

Hope I get to see it before I die... unlimited energy to combat climate change would be pretty damn epic.

ncmncm102• 4 years ago

Fusion will not provide unlimited energy. And not even affordable energy. There is nothing to see here but physicists having fun with other people's money.

Bolkan• 4 years ago

Unless they hit a fundamental limit. Think speed of light.

protoman3000• 4 years ago

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t a huge amount of released energy in this scale eventually heat up the planet?

I mean, doesn’t the atmosphere in our big greenhouse always retains a non-zero amount of energy, no matter the CO2 etc. in the air? If that is true, then so far the net energy out flux was positive, but now we see with rising greenhouse concentrations that it’s turning. If we then raise the stock of energy inside the greenhouse, it overheats, no?

ncmncm102• 4 years ago

No, it wouldn't. The sun dumps untold petawatts of heat on us 24/7. We will never produce anything as much as the difference from one week to the next.

In any case this stuff will never produce so much as one solitary kWh of commercial power, so the question is wholly academic. Fusion heat would cost much, much more to extract in usable form than fission, and fission is already not competitive.

The dream of unlimited power without spending on fuel -- capex but no opex -- is already here, and we call it renewables + storage. We just need to build it out fast enough that civilization doesn't collapse first. Fusion is a pernicious distraction, in present circumstance.

concordDance4• 4 years ago

The dream of unlimited power without spending on fuel -- capex but no opex -- is already here, and we call it renewables + storage.

This is inaccurate, both production and storage have service lives (in years, cycles or both) so need to be continually replaced. This is opex in practice

bluepnume• 4 years ago

Sure, but we can divert some of that energy to power wind turbines, which ought to cool things down a bit.

mabbo• 4 years ago

Not even close to the heat generated by the sun's light hitting the earth. Orders of magnitude different.

We currently generate most of this power in exactly the same way, but by burning coal and gas to make heat rather than by nuclear fusion.

The difference would be that no CO2 is released with a fusion power plant.

Schroedingersat11• 4 years ago

Current primary energy is ~35TW. Total insolation is around 150PW

5W/m^2 or 0.5% is enough forcing to be catastrophic which puts us roughly in the 20x current consumption or 2100-2140 range if we don't stop growth.

So yes. We're in exactly the same position now WRT heat as we were when scientists first started warning about greenhouse gases. Ironically switching to PVs and starting the transition was an option then too even though the first commercial PVs were thought to be thermoelectric.

We can all live well, but we can't all live in an air conditioned uninsulated mcmansion with a 9 tonne electric suv each going everywhere via highway and throwing out half our appliances which we move by truck every year.

stjohnswarts• 4 years ago

I think you are confusing heat with energy.

Schroedingersat11• 4 years ago

You are completely correct if we attempt to continue exponential growth. The limit is under a century away at historical energy growth rates.

10 billion or so people can live at current average western levels without it being a problem.

eek2121• 4 years ago

20 more years folks! Move along...

keepquestioning• 4 years ago

Compare this to other tech news today.. a marginal iPhone upgrade. Our priorities are wrong.

ncmncm102• 4 years ago

Yet, the iphone is the more significant event.

taylorbuley• 4 years ago

Malware and Phishing This site is blocked because it is a known security threat. Please contact your network administrator to gain access.

Higher quality source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2336385-korean-nuclear-...

redwood• 4 years ago

S. Korea's technology sophistication is so inspiring

jacknews6• 4 years ago

I completely support fusion efforts from a science point of view, but let's be honest, an economic reactor for electricity generation is still decades away, it may not even be feasible, and it certainly won't be as 'clean' as is being sold, using D-T fusion.

We should switch a good chunk of fussion funding towards 'clean' fission; travelling wave reactors, molten salt, small modular reactors, thorium, etc, etc. Some of these have a chance at being commercially viable and making a real impact this decade, not half a century or more hence.

DennisP24• 4 years ago

We have dozens of fusion startups, and dozens of fission startups working on everything you suggested. The fusion startups build test reactors. The fission startups do paper reactors and license applications, and in the US at least, if it's not a water-cooled solid uranium reactor, they probably won't get any further.

Fix the NRC, and we might get somewhere with fission.

jacknews6• 4 years ago

I agree, but further, government should be helping with this early stage research, and putting more of it towards fission, not leaving it to startups.

bborud6• 4 years ago

You can iterate the argument one step further and say that affordable nuclear is too far into the future, and that we should instead focus on more immediately realizable options such as wind, solar, geothermal etc.

This is where much of the energy debate in Europe is at now. It is exactly the same argument being used against fission.

Pick any technology that has come to fruition in the last decade. Video streaming as a substitute for cable and terrestrial TV. Mass adoption of Smart Phones. EVs becoming a viable option for broad populations of car owners. A space startup that came from nowhere and rapidly out-competed the incumbents. All of them.

Remember the Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon shitting on private space companies on C-SPAN not that many years ago?

Look at the time span between people dismissing these technologies as off in the distant future and when they arrived. People have a tendency to assume that tomorrow will be the same as today.

Affordable nuclear is still some years away. I think the events in Europe actually shortened that distance into the future by a significant amount just in the last 6 months. But fission power is still "too slow". Fusion is even more years away into the future. If/When it comes to fruition people are going to be surprised, and none more so than the experts.

Because the experts are almost always wrong for a good while after disruptive breakthroughs have already happened.

It means we have to think ahead and make sufficient bets on technologies that exist at all time scales. And the more potential they have for delivering stable base load, the higher the payoff.

Yes we have to invest in both fission and fusion. And we have to invest a lot more than we already do.

jacknews6• 4 years ago

I don't think this is quite the same argument. I agree with funding the future.

But in this case the 'experts' seem to be putting all the funding toward fusion, which is likely decades away, if at all, and almost not at all toward new fission, which could be viable this decade.

ncmncm102• 4 years ago

Affordable nuclear recedes further with each passing day, as costs for better tech continue on down.

Each dollar diverted from renewables build-out to nukes brings climate catastrophe incrementally nearer.

79522• 4 years ago

None of those technologies has ever been cheap exactly. It always costs someone a lot of money. But because it is desirable it can be justified. Nuclear power is identical to any other source of power as far as the consumer is concerned

Also, if we are going to be super optimistic about fission we can also be optimistic about battery storage and solar.

concordDance4• 4 years ago

Or just make more old style fission reactors and deregulate. Even an accident every decade would be well worth it if it got costs back down to what they were in the 70s (adjusted for inflation), in that the money saved could be invested into healthcare with far better returns than we're getting on nuclear safety.

jmyeet• 4 years ago

I'd love for commercial fusion power generation to be a reality but I'm skeptical that, at a minimum, hydrogen fusion will ever be practical. The reasons have remained a problem for considerable period of time:

1. Containing a hydrogen plasma involves containing a superheated turbulent fluid. This is inherently unstable that will be sensitive to very minor defects;

2. A superheated plasma produces a lot of high velocity particles. Those not contained by magnetic containment tend to destroy the container (ie "neutron embrittlement"); and

3. Possibly the biggest problem of all: neutrons represent energy loss by the system and there's no currently viable way of solving this problem.

To solve (2) and (3) various groups research so-called "aneutronic" fusion. I put that in quotes because it's just a lot less neutrons generally, not no neutrons.

Helium-3 fusion is one possibility but He-3 is exceedingly rare. The best source may be from the solar wind being collected on the Moon's surface. As you can imagine that presents it's own set of challenges to mine, contain and return.

Hydrogen fusion uses heavier isotopes of hydrogen (ie deuterium with 1 neutron and/or tritium with 2). Why? Because we currently need these neutrons to feed the fusion reaction.

And after all this we extract heat to boil water to turn a turbine. This too adds to cost and complexity.

Personally I think the future of humanity's energy production is space-based solar power collectors.

DennisP24• 4 years ago

If it's aneutronic fusion, you don't need a turbine. You have fast-moving charged particles, and can probably figure out a way to do direct conversion. Helion has already demonstrated it in their latest reactor.

They use a hybrid D-D/D-He3 reaction. The He3 is the waste product of the D-D reactions. They say the combination will release only 6% of its energy as neutron radiation, which is why they can skip the turbine.

(I'm also a fan of space solar though.)

kumarski2• 4 years ago

Fusion is pointless.

Fusion reactors make nuclear power plants marginally smaller.

Dispatch and transmission costs are still a thing.

ncmncm102• 4 years ago

Fusion reactors would have to be enormously bigger than fission plants. And cost correspondingly more both to build and to operate.

kumarski2• 4 years ago

There's no net benefit to fusion.

Dispatch and transmission are a thing even if all the software developer/ECE/Physicist folks downvote my comments.

la64710• 4 years ago

This is why California is so freaking hot this week !! Crazy

DennisP24• 4 years ago

I think you're joking, but I'll still point out that it's not actually much heat. The atoms of fusion fuel move very fast, but there aren't many of them.

holografix• 4 years ago

Wrap fusion reactor in huge domes of highest efficiency possible modified photo voltaic curved panels aimed at capturing decaying neutrons producing photons.

caseyavila• 4 years ago

I don't know everything about nuclear fusion so I have to ask: Is it actually renewable?

In other words, are the byproducts able to form back into the "fuel" at a reasonable rate with the energy input of the Sun? I know that a selling point of fusion is that there is such an abundance of fuel that this doesn't matter. But if we treat finite energy sources as infinite, exponential growth in our energy budget means that we will undoubtedly run out of energy, as is being done with forests and such.

After all, I have a feeling people at the dawn of the industrial revolution thought the amount of coal available in the world would serve their needs "practically forever," until energy consumption scaled up by thousands of times.

hoseja• 4 years ago

By the point we've fused significant portion of Earths hydrogen, it will really not be a problem to hop over to Jupiter for some more. The scales are insane. Energy input of the Sun ALSO isn't renewable if you think like this.

marcyb5st2• 4 years ago

So, the fusion we are talking about here is deuterium - tritium fusion as it should be the easiest to achieve. Deuterium is not a problem. A rough estimate says that there's enough of the stuff to cover 100% of the world needs for thousands of years. And it's easy to breed: surround the reactor with water so the hydrogen there can capture the stray neutrons.

Tritium, on the other hand, is a problem. It is radioactive with a half life of ~12 years and so the little we have needs to be produced since we can't really accumulate it. Currently it is produced by conventional nuclear reactors. Additionally, breeding tritium is harder than deuterium and requires a blanket around the reactor that uses other materials to multiply the number of stray neutrons. For each atom of Tritium that is fused we could get somewhere between 1.1 to 1.7 with a theoretical maximum of 2 Tritium atoms so, finally answering your question, it is renewable. It's just hard, but a piece of cake compared to actually maintaining a stable fusion.

ncmncm102• 4 years ago

Right: intractable, but much smaller than other problems.

pfdietz52• 4 years ago

Deuterium is not a problem. A rough estimate says that there's enough of the stuff to cover 100% of the world needs for thousands of years.

Far more than that is available.

ncmncm102• 4 years ago

People talking about fusion expect to "breed" tritium in their reactor. This takes the form of blasting GW of hot neutrons into a thousand (or ten-) tons of lithium hydroxide, and somehow extracting grams of tritium from it at parts-per-billion concentration.

There is no choice about that: it is the only way to get enough tritium to keep operating.

pfdietz52• 4 years ago

I don't know of any blanket design that uses lithium hydroxide.

BjoernKW• 4 years ago

Ultimately, no method of energy generation is truly renewable, including solar. The Sun will run out of fuel in five billion years, after all, give or take.

However, for all practical intents and purposes, solar energy is renewable. The same holds true for nuclear fusion for at least a couple of hundred years, even considering growing energy consumption.

DennisP24• 4 years ago

This article by a Berkeley physicist does the math on fusion fuel: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/01/nuclear-fusion/

Deuterium fuel is the most abundant. There's enough in your morning shower to supply all your energy needs for a year. There's enough in the oceans to last for billions of years. Fusion is as close to renewable as anything, because it'll last until the sun goes out.

Right now most projects are also using tritium fuel, which has to be made from lithium. That's plenty abundant but not to the extreme of deuterium. But pure deuterium fusion is possible, just a little harder. And one prominent fusion startup, Helion, is actually using deuterium (along with helium-3, which is the waste product of deuterium fusion).

rkagerer2• 4 years ago

The Wikipedia article on Tokamaks is refreshingly approachable:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak

rkagerer2• 4 years ago

For reference, the core of the Sun is around 15M°C (cooling to ~5500°C at its surface).

Oh, and about 160M times bigger in diameter.

empiricus• 4 years ago

What if instead of this huge engineering efforts (with no end in sight) you can just put two rocks together and get heat/energy? That is called fission btw.

moomoo11• 4 years ago

100M Celsius? Does this contribute to the planetary heating? Sorry if dumb question but that is so hot.

How is the heat controlled? Is there any resource that explains this thermal part?

bheadmaster• 4 years ago

Planetary heating depends on the amount of energy released. 100M Celsius refers to the temperature, not energy. On a small enough space, you could achieve 100M with very little energy.

Aicy2• 4 years ago

Planetary heating is caused by trapping more of the suns energy than in the past.

The sun is immensely powerful, and any heat generating activity done by humans is negligible compared to the sun. Except for activities which increase the suns effects, such as creating greenhouse gasses.

sai_c3• 4 years ago

Could someone please enlighten a physics noob?

As i understand it, nuclear fusion could (as soon as really achieved, i.e. there exist commercial plants) provide more energy than we are currently producing by all other methods. And if we can produce it, I have no doubt we would use more and more energy.

Which would mean that all this energy must end up somewhere somehow. What I would like to know is, don' we then (just in another form) contribute to the heating of the planet again? Are there any studies/theories about that? What would the impact of the ever increasing energy release/production be?

TaylorAlexander3• 4 years ago

It’s a good question. I recall someone saying that the amount of direct heat produced by energy generation is very small compared to the heat captured from the sun by the greenhouse effect.

Also I don’t think it’s true that commercial fusion power plants would in the near term produce extraordinarily high energy levels compared to a large hydroelectric or fission nuclear power plant. The thing that’s great about fusion is that it requires very little fuel and doesn’t produce nuclear waste.

sai_c3• 4 years ago

I hope i did not understand you wrong, but what I meant was the following. We create electric energy from source X. The electric energy is mutated to heat, or mechanical energy or what not (computers produce heat, electric cars mutate it into kinetic energy and so on). Energy is never destroyed, it just changes its form. So if we produce/consume more energy than now (yes that's just theoretical) would that contribute to climate change in a significant manner?

twic• 4 years ago

'Don't blame me,' said Poole, fighting back gamely after one round of criticism. 'Anyway, see what a mess the twenty-first century made.'
There was a chorus of 'What do you mean?'s around the table.
'Well, as soon as the so-called Age of Infinite Power got under way, and everyone had thousands of kilowatts of cheap, clean energy to play with - you know what happened!'
'Oh, you mean the Thermal Crisis. But that was fixed.'
'Eventually - after you'd covered half the Earth with reflectors to bounce the Sun's heat back into space. Otherwise it would have been as parboiled as Venus by now.'

-- 3001: The final Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke

Accuracy not guaranteed!

sai_c3• 4 years ago

Made my day :-).

lambdatronics5• 4 years ago

Yeah. This blog post [0] has a nice graph showing that at continued exponential growth of energy consumption, we have less than a few hundred years until the planet would become uninhabitable simply due to the amount of additional heat. In particular, in about 400 years, the energy demand would equal the total solar energy flux hitting the planet.

[0] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

greyhair• 4 years ago

Web link is flagged by Avast has containing a malware payload.

dikaio• 4 years ago

For some reason this website gets flagged as a fishing site with an Orbit router.

Korean nuclear fusion reactor achieves 100M°C for 30 seconds

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