I'm sure there are a few posters here who know more about this than me.
OT: AKB: Is Nuclear Fusion a Real Possibility?
- Thread starter LionJim
- Start date
Well yes we can start with our sun… as a source of commercial terrestrial energy I say yes it will happen
I've been trying to follow news of fusion development. Lately it seems there have been some breakthroughs which may lead to fusion power being commercially viable. Admittedly, I'm not a scientist so I have absolutely no idea about the process. It's still an exciting possibility to think about.
As a sustainable energy source? No I don't see it.
This is the way I view it: for nuclear fission radioactive materials are readily available in nature. All man has done is collect and purify them. Want to create a new material like plutonium? Slowly collect the emissions and bombard uranium. Nothing fancy, can be done relatively easily.
Fusion on the other hand is found nowhere in nature except in a star. Not on this planet, any other planet, asteroids, comets, etc. The amount of sustained pressure and temperature is phenomenal - a massive gas giant like Jupiter or even larger doesn't create it. Then you have the problem of materials of construction. Every material is created in the fusion reactor of a star. What materials hold up against a star? Nothing does, massive gravity holds that star together. How are you going to create that on earth? While it's nice to ponder, containing sustained fusion nuclear explosions is a pipe dream.
It's a massive waste of money. These articles use descriptive terms to describe progress. If you have to walk to the moon, and you climb the empire state building, sure, technically you've achieved orders of magnitude of improvement, but it's still meaningless.
I know squat about this subject, but in my past, I visited the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. It was a multi-billion-dollar facility that, if I recall correctly, had 192 lasers focused at a single spot within a concrete ball, in order to simulate the fusion energy of the sun.
I was just about to mention that I worked for a CAD software company in the early 90)s and I was lead rep selling our products to NIF at LLNL. They invested a ****-ton with us. I was cleared to have a guided tour of the facility. So amazing. Getting cleared to visit a DoE facility is harder than a DoD facility. I would disagree with 91Joe95 (above)... the collective scientific community has been working on fusion for 50+ years and by 2050 they will figure this out and figure out how to scale it down and make it sustainable. This is the single most impactful way to counter climate change long term... it should get more press.
I hope you're right, but I don't see it. Fusion, similar to the particle colliders, strikes me as a government boondoggle. Progress is hyped, yet practical results are always decades away.
I see three basic models for a reactor - the engine type, the furnace type, and the large reservoir of material slowly fusing, where the engine model requires feed, reaction, and ejection of waste products, with fusion needing to be reinitiated almost continually; furnace requires continuous feed and removal of waste materials; and the large reservoir model is essentially slowing down a bomb so that it goes slowly.
All three models have significant problems when it comes to generating consistent power for months or years on end. The engine model requires constant reinitiation of fusion, an extremely energy intensive process, and a huge penalty. Furnace requires constant exposure of materials to sun-like temperatures. I have not heard of any material that will not either liquefy or vaporize, nor am I aware of any chemical bond that won't break down at those energy levels for sustained amounts of time. The reservoir model - is there even a material that will slow down fusion without snuffing it?
If we're going to bring climate into the discussion then I will reiterate my support for nuclear fission reactors as the only realistic way to reduce carbon emissions.
As an aside, I used to love human space travel. But the engineer in me tells me it is a tremendous waste of resources with little gained. Robots are better and cheaper. I don't know why we're wasting resources on fusion. If someone other than the US figures it out then do what other countries do to us, invest minimal resources to steal it.
Can't these folks accidently blow up the earth by doing this stuff and get something wrong?
I remember when the Cold Fusion bubble collapsed in the 1980s. My high school physics teacher was crushed. God love him, he was a die hard science fan boy, and was really hoping that it would have been proven to be valid.
I remember that concern (or similar) before the LHC started up: might make a black hole that eventually swallows the earth.
I thought I read an article recently that the Chinese were successful in getting more energy OUT of a fusion experiment than they put IN (which is actually quite a milestone). But it shows how far we still have to go: how does one sustain a fusion reaction once started? Or maybe that actually would be a very bad thing.
Well, now I’m sorry I started this thread. It would have been nice to buy On3 and lord it over y’all.If it is possible I want in on the IPO.
Reminds me of the Asimov story about the creation of the warp drive. They did the work on a moon of Jupiter or somewhere similar to make sure they didn't accidently warp a big chunk of the earth out of the solar system.
Makes me think about time travel... Ok, you went back in time 100 years. The Earth is nowhere near where it was then in space so you've just time travelled your *** into the cold vacuum of space.
Yes, I'm bored.
The central issue, according to a recent article, is how to contain the fusion reaction. We have no materials that stand up to the temperatures created, so a heavy-duty magnetic field is used. It turns out the magnets overheat in about 5 seconds and the shutdown commences. This is a single step in a very difficult process of development. Some wholly new material science seems to be the missing feature.
Had a long, heated, and drunken discussion with a college roommate about this topic. Can't remember what our conclusion was.
So we need to develop force shields first. But the power needed for force shields requires fusion...
I guess my confidence comes from the discussions I had with the physicists and engineers at LLNL back 30 years ago (I am getting old). My undergrad IE degree only takes my understanding of the science so far. You certainly make valid points. I just remember a key program manager telling me over a cup of coffee, with deep passion in his eyes, "you can get as much energy from 5 gal of seawater as a 55 gal drum of oil... inexhaustible and nonpolluting form of energy... we must figure this out before we destroys the planet". Those folks out there are a bit "out there" but they are dead serious about this kind of work. My guess is their counterparts in Europe fell the same way.
All I remember is running out of Natty Light, so we did a shots of tequila - but we didn't have any lemons so we used Country Time powder, then played NHL Slapshot until.... Wait? Sorry, never mind. True story though...
I'm jumping in here kind of late but I'd like to throw a couple thoughts into the mix...My father-in-law was the head of safety (not sure of the exact title) in the nuclear division at the Dept. of Energy for a stretch sometime between 2005 - 2015. He ain't the type of dude to talk shop unprompted but if you ask him about subjects related to his profession he'll indulge you, at least to some degree.
My father-in-law is nuke guru. He would probably never describe himself as such, but he's an expert in the field. In addition to his position at the DOE, he has also captained a couple nuclear subs. So, when it comes to nuclear energy, he's an interesting guy to talk to.
I'm an engineer myself and I asked him not long ago about his opinion on nuclear fusion and its prospects relative to domestic power generation. As I recall, his opinion was that it may someday be viable, but likely not in the next 50 years. It is my understanding that containing and controlling the reaction are the primary challenges.
So you want a warp bubble? It's been done by accident. Seriously this is very interesting stuff.
DARPA Funded Researchers Accidentally Discover The World's First Warp Bubble
Warp drive pioneer Dr. Harold G “Sonny” White has reported research results that he believes could theoretically manifest a warp bubble under laboratory conditions.
thedebrief.org
“We ran out of vodka, we need more to solve the problem”
I'm working on a spacetime machine so I can kill my grandfather before he meets my grandmother. That should be interesting.
Had it since Mr. Fusion was developed in 2015
If we don’t find something sustainable in the next 100 years, at a certain point won’t we revert to a pre-industrial civilization by and large? We can’t keep increasing the human population indefinitely with just fossil fuels and planet earth as our backstops. Stupid humans.
Nuclear fusion is not my research specialty as a physicist but I took some particle physics and astrophysics courses in grad school so I can opine. When i was a young lad I toured the Princeton Plasma Physics Fusion Lab 50 years ago and they confidently announced then that commercial fusion reactors were about 50 years away. Today's prediction is, guess what, still about 50 years away. Nevertheless, I think that it will eventually happen. The technological challenges are severe but not insurmountable. For those who fear a catastrophic runaway fusion reaction, keep in mind that a fusion reaction is so difficult to ignite, let alone sustain, that unlike a fission rector, a fusion reactor could be shut down within microseconds.
As for cold fusion, I saw it first announced by Dan Rather on network news while I was sitting in a bar with some colleagues after a long day at a physics conference. We immediately did a calculation (yes, on a bar napkin) using a quantum mechanical techniaqe called the WKB approximation and some physics constants from memory (perhaps clouded by beer consumption) and got a probability of such a reaction about 80 orders of magnitude smaller than what they were announcing. Nevertheless, when we got back at the end of the week we quickly scrounged some heavy water, some palladium electrodes, and some neutron counters and built electrochemical cells out of soda cans and styrofoam cups immersed in a fish tank (the small plastic diver emitting bubbles added a bit of artistic whimsy) to duplicate the Pons and Fleischmann results. Because they claimed that their reactor had set fire to and melted a chemical fume hood containing the experiment, we set it up to run by computer over a weekend. We came in Monday morning and saw that the temperature of the cells had risen along with the neutron counts. Success!!!??? The first thing a physicist should ask is, "How could we be fooling ourselves?" A quick call to Lab Facilities asked if they turn off the air conditioning over the weekend. Yes, they do. A call to the owners of the neutron counters asked if the dark (i.e., false) neutron counts depended on temperature. Yes, as T rises, so do dark counts. Oops, results were coincidental, not confirmational. That same day, a group from Texas A&M announced "positive" results like ours that they later had to retract. A few weeks later we attended a special session on cold fusion at another physics conference where group after group announced negative results. A famous chemistry professor from CalTech (NathanLewis) gave a devastating rebuttal to cold fusion and summed up with the statement, "No reputable university without a good football team has shown positive cold fusion results". Ouch, but not entirely accurate. Texas A&M sucked at football back then (and still vastly underperforms). Cold fusion research sputtered along for a bit with its true believers, and then died. Nevertheless, those were among the most exciting six weeks of my scientific career.
PS For the poster who said particle accelerators (and by the way, they are not directly related to fusion research) are a wasteful boondoggle, I respond that, like the James Webb telescope,they do not lead to commercial products or new military systems but to fundamental knowkledge. As such, they do not contribute to national strength or defense, but to what makes the country worth defending and the human race worth preserving.
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I don't know much about Small Modular Reactors, but they sure look promising.
arstechnica.com
NuScale’s small nuclear reactor is first to get US safety approval
Small size can help with economics and safety.
arstechnica.com
We really need small reactors like this. Unfortunately, since TMI its become a NIMBY situation. FYI. I was literally watching the steam venting at TMI from my 9th grade English class at Red Land HS when the accident was announced over the intercom.
Solar is the only other real possibility. I watched Nova a few weeks ago and they were detailing how a coating on butterfly wings showed them how to increase the energy capture by I think 30%. That increase would make them very functional and financially feasible at the home level.Link
Solar is the only other real possibility. I watched Nova a few weeks ago and they were detailing how a coating on butterfly wings showed them how to increase the energy capture by I think 30%. That increase would make them very functional and financially feasible at the home level.Link
Yeah, agree 100%. I have no idea about the likelihood of these small reactors coming online, though, how safe they are, how effective they would be. There are too many articles on this, all over the place.
Add room temperature superconductors to the list of technological hurdles that needs to be overcome, which if you could actually figure out would itself greatly reduce the energy needs of civilization and almost eliminate the need for fusion or similar energy generation.
It looks like the first demonstration small reactor will be in Kemmerer , Wyoming.I t is replacing 2 coal fired plants and will produce 345 Megawatts, enough to provide enough electricity for the entire state. DOE funds along with private matching funds will have this up and functioning by 2028. I hope red tape and Protests.don't hinder the development.
Here is a nice article on the project.
www.geekwire.com
Here is a nice article on the project.
Bill Gates’ TerraPower makes its pick for next-gen nuclear power plant in Wyoming
TerraPower has chosen a soon-to-be-retired coal-fired power plant in Wyoming as its preferred location for a next-generation demonstration reactor.
www.geekwire.com
Uncovering a novel way to bring the energy that powers the sun and stars to Earth
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have uncovered critical new details about fusion facilities that use lasers to compress the fuel that produces fusion energy. The new data could help lead to the improved design of future laser...
Dang, this was a good thread, well worth re-reading. Kudos to the OP.
Not so sure the human population is increasing.
