So what about fusion?

[Alex Eisenhut]

I like this

www.generalfusion.com

because it looks so cool. Anyone know if this could be legit?

(takes forever to load, we know they ain't spending time or money on a web guy)

[retrolefty]

It's just ten years away. 

[Samogon]

Site is made by web designer rather than scientists. Clean energy, no radioactive vaste, it is just not true.
Fusion reaction produces high energy neutrons which impacting surrounding materials and thus producing so called inducted radioactivity.

[hayatepilot]

It's just ten years away. 

They say that line since the 70s. 

[donotdespisethesnake]

I went to Culham fusion lab as a youth when they were building JET, and they confidently predicted nuclear fusion "in a decade or two" - that was over 30 years ago.

Nuclear fusion is inherently hard to do - as far as we know. In order to make it a practical commercial proposition, there would need to be scientific/technological breakthroughs to make it possible. In comparison, with the light bulb, it was well known that heating a filament would create light - the commercial problem was creating a bulb where the filament lasted more than a few hours, which lead to Edison's observation "genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration".

Nuclear fusion is unlikely to ever be cheap, abundant or clean, if you actually look into the details behind the hype. When people start talking about business plans which include getting raw materials from the Moon, they are clearly hopeless. Business people shy away from multi-billion $ projects, unless there is a pretty guaranteed return on investment. When you throw in nuclear radiation and advanced technology, it becomes even less appealing.

We are a very long way away from practical, commercially viable fusion power. I predict we might build a government sponsored prototype eventually (maybe DEMO), but at such huge cost and complexity no business will ever build one.

As the morning sun shines through my window, surely it is easier and quicker to build wind turbines and solar panels, to exploit the nuclear fusion source we know already works?

[coppice]

I went to Culham fusion lab as a youth when they were building JET, and they confidently predicted nuclear fusion "in a decade or two" - that was over 30 years ago.

Maybe you were hearing what you wanted to here, rather than what they were saying. I was shown around JET when it was under construction in 1980. They said it would take a decade or two to get JET producing reliable, predictable fusion. They got that about right. JET is an experimental tool. It never had the potential to produce much more energy than it consumed, even the most optimistic of expectations. They vaguely talked about future designs taking half a century to achieve sufficient payback to be viable for commercial energy production.

[DenzilPenberthy]

I have a very mixed view on fusion. From a technological viewpoint it's a fascinating problem to work on and I fully support the efforts at JET and ITER etc for this reason. Undoubtedly there are benefits to be had by giving scientists the opportunity to work on this.

But... from a practical point of view... we already have a working fusion reactor - it produces around 1kW/m^2 at the surface of our planet without any problems of confinement or stability or fuelling or waste or radioactivity...

Collecting, storing and using that fusion power is entirely possible and feasible without any significant new technology. It just needs political will and resources to implement.

[donotdespisethesnake]

I went to Culham fusion lab as a youth when they were building JET, and they confidently predicted nuclear fusion "in a decade or two" - that was over 30 years ago.

Maybe you were hearing what you wanted to here, rather than what they were saying. I was shown around JET when it was under construction in 1980. They said it would take a decade or two to get JET producing reliable, predictable fusion. They got that about right. JET is an experimental tool. It never had the potential to produce much more energy than it consumed, even the most optimistic of expectations. They vaguely talked about future designs taking half a century to achieve sufficient payback to be viable for commercial energy production.

Maybe *you* were hearing what you wanted to "here", rather than what they were saying.

It was clear that JET was experimental, they didn't claim it was going to be a commercial reactor, or get anywhere near break-even In fact, they achieved fusion in much less than a decade.

Of course the joke is that *commercial* nuclear fusion is always about 30 years away - which is pretty much what they said. And it is still true today. And will be true in 30 years time...

Anyway, I have no idea what useful point you are trying to make, apart from to score points.

[Jeroen3]

They did a test run on Wendelstein 7-X iirc a few months ago.
A test run that lasted very very short, but a test run nonetheless. I can't find the source anymore, someone might?

[T3sl4co1l]

So, uh, what IS it, exactly?

After the enormous webpage finished loading, all I saw was a few pictures (not nearly as much as should've been downloaded in that time, go figure?), and a little text.  Hardly anything of substance.  They don't seem to have any articles, any diagrams, anything in depth at all.  What a useless piece of Web Two Point Oh-So-Disappointing!

I guess, but again this is a guess because there's so little information there: they're spinning molten Pb-Li alloy (Li would presumably be chosen for making tritium, but the Pb content would only absorb radiation, presumably spoiling nuclear efficiency; so, not sure on that one), so fast that, within its spherical container, a hollow center is formed, like the hollow center where liquid drains through a vortex funnel.  But fast enough that it's more or less vertical.  Then they somehow or another fire a huge ball of plasma (presumably deuterium and tritium) into that hole, and at same time, implode the sphere, nuclear weapon style.  Except explosives would be dumb, so it has to be repeatable, and they use steam powered hammers.

And I guess they claim the hammers are timed correctly, which will be the first large barrier to getting such a system working.  An imploding wavefront is not easy to generate.  It also has to be intense enough to achieve the required peak pressure and temperature, but I don't feel that intensity is as big a challenge as organizing all that metal to move within microseconds.

Obvious drawback: how smooth is the inner wall of that vortex cavity hole thing?  I would expect it's swishy and turbulent.  Which means, as it collapses, it's going to be swirling with bubbles of gas and plasma and streams and droplets of metal, probably forming a combined sparking mist of everything stirred together.  And fusion would largely take place within small bubbles in this froth.

On the upside, lithium would be quite available in the bubbles, which means if there's an option to significantly boost pressures and temperatures to make fusion of lithium nuclei possible (with whatever's available; Li6 + D = Be8 ==> 2 He4 for example), the power output would rise considerably.

I'd like to know how much peak pressure and temperature they're able to get, and how it compares to other methods.

But again, I'm just guessing.

Tim

[alho]

... which lead to Edison's observation "genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration".

If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. … I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.
Nikola Tesla 
New York Times (19 October 1931)

Site is made by web designer rather than scientists.

As sites usually are. Scientist probably won't make very good websites, not that whoever made this site did very good job either.

And I guess they claim the hammers are timed correctly, which will be the first large barrier to getting such a system working.  An imploding wavefront is not easy to generate.  It also has to be intense enough to achieve the required peak pressure and temperature, but I don't feel that intensity is as big a challenge as organizing all that metal to move within microseconds.

A 1 metre diameter mini-sphere with 14 full-scale acoustic drivers has been constructed to test liquid metal vortex formation and compression.
Full scale acoustic drivers have been constructed to demonstrate that they can achieve the required impact velocity (energy) and impact timing control.

Former Tektronix CEO Rick Wills is on their board of directors so I'm guessing they got some pretty good timers.

This TED talk has some info, first 8 minutes is "fusion is great" so skip that.

[Alex Eisenhut]

GF papers here:

http://www.generalfusion.com/blog/category/scientific-papers/

What always gets me, "gets" in a sort of negative way, is how we will have to surpass the conditions at the center of a star to get fusion to work as a power source.

Apparently the center of the Sun has high material density, but very low power density, not much more than a smoldering heap of compost. The Sun is just so freaking huge that even at that low density, it still manages to convert 4 million tons of matter into energy ... per second.

Fusion bombs surpass that for a few nanoseconds, if we could surround the explosion with windmills that might generate fusion power. 

[pmichel]

They did a test run on Wendelstein 7-X iirc a few months ago.
A test run that lasted very very short, but a test run nonetheless. I can't find the source anymore, someone might?

http://www.ipp.mpg.de/3984226/12_15

[coppice]

It was clear that JET was experimental, they didn't claim it was going to be a commercial reactor, or get anywhere near break-even In fact, they achieved fusion in much less than a decade.

Of course the joke is that *commercial* nuclear fusion is always about 30 years away - which is pretty much what they said. And it is still true today. And will be true in 30 years time...

Anyway, I have no idea what useful point you are trying to make, apart from to score points.

Achieving fusion is almost trivial. Lots of reactors have done that. The goal of JET was to achieve stable sustainable fusion. It took a couple of decades to achieve that. They largely achieved their goals in about the time scale they set out on day one. I never heard anyone in 1980 talk about 30 years to commercialised fusion energy. Some said at least half a century. Others said the middle of the next century. How could it ever have been as little as 30 years from that point, when the then current experimental systems like JET were expected to take more than half that time to produce the knowledge needed to move to the next stage?

Progress has occurred. Funding has always been the main throttle control for that progress. When oil goes up, more money goes into fusion. When oil goes down, funding goes down. Its little surprise that progress is less that stellar when the research is treated like that.

[modelman]

We already have enough energy available from nuclear fusion to satisfy our needs for the foreseeable future:  it's called the sun.  It makes hugely more sense to tap this resource than to invest so heavily in controlled nuclear fusion here on planet earth.

Modelman

I went to Culham fusion lab as a youth when they were building JET, and they confidently predicted nuclear fusion "in a decade or two" - that was over 30 years ago.

Nuclear fusion is inherently hard to do - as far as we know. In order to make it a practical commercial proposition, there would need to be scientific/technological breakthroughs to make it possible. In comparison, with the light bulb, it was well known that heating a filament would create light - the commercial problem was creating a bulb where the filament lasted more than a few hours, which lead to Edison's observation "genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration".

Nuclear fusion is unlikely to ever be cheap, abundant or clean, if you actually look into the details behind the hype. When people start talking about business plans which include getting raw materials from the Moon, they are clearly hopeless. Business people shy away from multi-billion $ projects, unless there is a pretty guaranteed return on investment. When you throw in nuclear radiation and advanced technology, it becomes even less appealing.

We are a very long way away from practical, commercially viable fusion power. I predict we might build a government sponsored prototype eventually (maybe DEMO), but at such huge cost and complexity no business will ever build one.

As the morning sun shines through my window, surely it is easier and quicker to build wind turbines and solar panels, to exploit the nuclear fusion source we know already works?

[Kleinstein]

The concept looks not that bad. At least it looks a lot more realistic that laser fusion, and they don't have the nasty neutron damage problem that ITER and following are facing.  But they seem to have similar problems with plasma instabilities as in the tokamak designs - so they may actually learn and profit from the competing experiments, even if they only need a small plasma ring to start with.

Still I think there is quite some work to be done - so I don't think this will be fast enougth to save the climate. It would likely also take quite some time from the first experimental powerstation to an economical one, as it takes experience to make the parts reliable and durable.

[Samogon]

We already have enough energy available from nuclear fusion to satisfy our needs for the foreseeable future:  it's called the sun.  It makes hugely more sense to tap this resource than to invest so heavily in controlled nuclear fusion here on planet earth.

Modelman

Can you estimate how big field needed to support industrial needs for steel producers, chemical plants, manufacturing?

[wraper]

We already have enough energy available from nuclear fusion to satisfy our needs for the foreseeable future:  it's called the sun.  It makes hugely more sense to tap this resource than to invest so heavily in controlled nuclear fusion here on planet earth.

Huge amount of "free" energy is worthless if you cannot effectively tap to it. For example, in my region, using solar panels is very dubious from a financial standpoint. You say as if solar energy is almost free to get which it is not at all, it's quiet expensive. Also it requires huge fields to cover with the solar panels. Yeah go for it if you have useless deserts around, not the case in Europe.

[Samogon]

We already have enough energy available from nuclear fusion to satisfy our needs for the foreseeable future:  it's called the sun.  It makes hugely more sense to tap this resource than to invest so heavily in controlled nuclear fusion here on planet earth.

Huge amount of "free" energy is worthless if you cannot effectively tap to it. For example, in my region, using solar panels is very dubious from a financial standpoint. You say as if solar energy is almost free to get which it is not at all, it's quiet expensive. Also it requires huge fields to cover with the solar panels. Yeah go for it if you have useless deserts around, not the case in Europe.

+++
Solar energy is a religion

[wraper]

BTW, the main issue with solar power is that it isn't continuous. So to use it, there also need to be the backup sources of similar power. Or huge batteries, though if there can be like 10 cloudy days in the row like here, it's not a solution. So solar power on it's own is basically worthless.

[DenzilPenberthy]

BTW, the main issue with solar power is that it isn't continuous. So to use it, there also need to be the backup sources of similar power. Or huge batteries, though if there can be like 10 cloudy days in the row like here, it's not a solution. So solar power on it's own is basically worthless.

My point, and the point that several others are making, is that this is an eminently solveable problem (mostly with existing technology) and much easier than developing nuclear fusion reactors.

[grumpydoc]

BTW, the main issue with solar power is that it isn't continuous. So to use it, there also need to be the backup sources of similar power. Or huge batteries, though if there can be like 10 cloudy days in the row like here, it's not a solution. So solar power on it's own is basically worthless.

Or perhaps a co-ordinated global approach - after all the sun is always shining somewhere on the planet.

[Samogon]

BTW, the main issue with solar power is that it isn't continuous. So to use it, there also need to be the backup sources of similar power. Or huge batteries, though if there can be like 10 cloudy days in the row like here, it's not a solution. So solar power on it's own is basically worthless.

Or perhaps a co-ordinated global approach - after all the sun is always shining somewhere on the planet.

How it would be economically feasible, such power lines would cost much and power losses should be considered. Solar systems are ok for home customers. But for industrial use it is questionable. Most power used by industrial customers. They require high power sources and solar panels not among them.

[wraper]

My point, and the point that several others are making, is that this is an eminently solveable problem

Tell this to the industry how this is solvable in any (economically) sensible way. Transferring electricity over half of the planet is not a solution.

[HAL-42b]

The problem with fusion is that you are still going to get a power bill. No matter how much you support it you will never get to bill anybody for the energy produced.

Big companies invest in it because they can charge people for energy. It is centralized power by its very nature.

Big companies do not invest in solar because they can't write bills for it over and over. There is no shortage of supply they can put a toll booth on.