
Fusion power could arrive sooner than expected - matt2000
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/137520-clean-limitless-fusion-power-could-arrive-sooner-than-expected
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bediger4000
Wow, fusion power in less than 15 years! Gee whiz!

Actually, the 15 years out time frame puts it beyond what I've expected, 10
years out. That's where fusion has been for most of my life, 10 years from
now.

~~~
juiceandjuice
1\. Who said it was 10 years out? I've never heard that. Sometimes milestones
are 10 years out and the public tends to confuse milestones with the finished
product.

2\. Ideas for parallel implementations of nuclear fusion have expanded, and as
a result, funding and research has arguably become fragmented and resources
have been diverted. In reality, there's a fixed amount of capital and
knowledge (which is also a function of the availability of money) available
for this kind of research. The amount of money the US puts into fusion
research is quite paltry compared to the potential benefits. It may be a
priority, but the way Washington spends money says otherwise.

Scientifically, fusion is maybe 10 years away. Politically, it's more like 40
for a real power plant, but with the current congress, I couldn't say. In
addition to that, it's an expensive enough endeavor that it would be corporate
suicide for a private company to attempt it, especially considering the
majority of companies with enough capital to pursue something like fusion tend
to be in the Oil and Gas industries.

~~~
DennisP
Well, some types of fusion are too expensive for private companies. But Tri-
Alpha, General Fusion, and Lawrenceville Plasma Physics are three private
companies trying to achieve practical fusion power within the decade.

Tri-Alpha has over $90 million in venture capital, some from Paul Allen.
General Fusion has about half that, with Jeff Bezos as an investor. LPP is a
lot smaller, but also doesn't need nearly as much at this point.

There are several other approaches in the works that could conceivably by
privately funded, including Helion (needs $20 million for a full-scale
reactor, already built a 1/3 scale version) and petawatt picosecond laser
fusion (once the lasers get a little better).

Another promising approach is levitated dipole, but I don't know what costs
look like for that one.

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adlep
Andrea Rossi's Ecat is already here: <http://www.e-catworld.com/>
<http://youtu.be/JWoaJ5NEj-w> <http://youtu.be/S7lAlzMBzLQ>
<http://youtu.be/2cOEHQmnG-I>
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGmgTo2Kw1U&feature=share...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGmgTo2Kw1U&feature=share&list=PL3D139E169DDAEA56)
(CC ON unless you can understand Italian)

Francesco Celani's experiment is being in a process of replication:
<http://youtu.be/Q2qWgh7Gx4g> <http://youtu.be/gHpYuUykWw0>
<http://youtu.be/qc5RoGg6n8E> <http://youtu.be/HN4VK82Mngc>

Please, please - at least watch this video: <http://youtu.be/26k3Cz3wW-8> ->
This is a great initiative.

Folks, the clean controllable energy source out of LENR process is almost
here. Please go through my links with an open mind and consider sharing them
with your family friends and colleagues...

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tocomment
I hadn't heard of magnetized liner inertial fusion before. Is it really as
promising as the article makes it seem?

What happens if they get just a little above break even?

~~~
DennisP
It's looking really good. Sandia ran simulations, found a sweet spot, and
recently ran a test in which they magnetically crushed a liner without fuel.
That test worked out exactly how the simulations predicted.

They have several other tests to do and plan to do a complete test by the end
of 2013. If it still works the way their simulation predicts, they'll
approximately hit breakeven.

The next step will be to build a machine several times bigger. According to
the sim, that would take us from breakeven to a 100x to 1000x energy gain
(depending on how powerful they make the machine.)

Such a large gain helps a lot for turning it into a practical plant. For one
thing, they'd only have to fire a shot every ten seconds or so. NIF's laser
approach, by comparison, would require ten shots per second.

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mturmon
This article does not mention some important context.

I don't know all the ins and outs, but it's important to understand that the
big US experiment in nuclear fusion was NIF, at LLNL. They (perhaps rashly)
promised net energy gain by the end of this fiscal year. This whole thing was
part of an elaborate political deal regarding maintaining nuclear expertise
during the test ban treaty.

Anyway, net gain did not happen; the ratio of energy out to energy in at the
NIF is 0.1. This had been expected for many months now (indeed, it was
predicted by some as soon as the deal was cut, years ago.)

At this point, the pie of nuclear research dollars is going to be re-cut with
different allocations. For one thing, the fusion/non-fusion balance at NIF is
going to tilt away from fusion.

So, in the absence of a NIF fusion success story, this press release could be
part of a campaign by other labs or other experiments to press their own
research agenda for fusion.

For partial background:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/science/fusion-project-
fac...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/science/fusion-project-faces-a-
frugal-congress.html)

------
gns24
I wouldn't mind a small amount of the money that goes into fusion research
heading to liquid fluoride thorium reactors instead:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor>

Amongst the many attractive properties of LFTRs is the ability to burn spent
fuel from existing nuclear plants.

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blacksqr
A new breakthrough is typically announced shortly before the current round of
funding is scheduled to run out.

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bunderbunder
"Clean"?

Less dirty than fission, absolutely. Enough less dirty to make it manageable
in a way that fission doesn't seem to be, more than likely. But not clean.

Any material in and around the reactor becomes nuclear waste in the same
manner as it does for fission: by getting blasted with high-energy particles
until it becomes radioactive. And while there wouldn't be any spent fuel rods
to deal with, one of the products of hydrogen fusion, tritium, is also a
source of concern.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Clean, yes.

By any measure, cleaner than what else is out there. Already a fission nuclear
power plant will produce less leakage of radioactivity into the environment
than many coal plants, fusion drops that level several orders of magnitude
more.

First off, no fission products, which are typically the most dangerous
radioactive waste from fission reactors. Second, the materials used in the
reactors don't have the same engineering constraints that fission reactors do
and so can be chosen to produce far lower quantities of hazardous radioactive
isotopes bred from intense neutron flux bombardment. Also, Tritium is a fuel,
and of enormous value so it would be handled very carefully. More so, it would
be bred specifically in custom built containment vessels within the reactor.

On top of all that you have the fact that a fusion reactor cannot be made to
undergo a meltdown or overload the way a fission reactor can. If something bad
happens in a fusion reactor the immediate result is usually that fusion stops,
which compares very favorably to the what happens in a fission reactor:
fission chain reactions continue, temperatures build as the heat from fission
products decaying builds up, etc. And you don't have weapon proliferation
concerns.

Overall what you have with nuclear fusion reactors is no chance of a meltdown,
very much less hazardous waste generated (by orders of magnitude) and a very
clean energy profile.

~~~
jpxxx
^ -intact- fission nuclear power plant ^ should ^ might ^ dramatically greater
engineering constraints than fission reactors ^ (if you exclude engineering
and manufacturing and plant construction costs)

Sorry for the highlighter attack, but fusion still means building
extraordinarily complex and expensive reactors that are going to have one hell
of a carbon footprint and shed tons of radioactive waste in normal operation.

Let's roll it back to "potentially cleaner in some key ways".

~~~
InclinedPlane
This is just plain FUD with no backing in reality.

Let me make it as clear as possible. Fusion energy is fundamentally safer and
cleaner than fission energy, period. Firstly, it is simply not physically
possible for fusion energy to generate even a tenth as much of the radioactive
waste as an equivalent fission power plant. Secondly, it is not possible to
have a dangerous power excursion at a fusion plant. When a fusion plant
malfunctions it doesn't experience a runaway reaction, it stops working. If a
fusion plant experiences some sort of catastrophic structural failure
everything stops. This is in stark contrast to fission reactors which can
undergo continued fission chain-reactions even if, and perhaps especially if,
the reactor vessel is disrupted and the fuel melts down and also produce
fission byproduct isotopes which continue to generate enough heat after the
fission reactions have stopped to melt the reactor core if it is not
continuously cooled.

Also, there is little evidence that the construction of a fusion reactor would
entail a higher energy-usage footprint than a fission reactor, and the lack of
a need for massive reinforced concrete structures in a fusion reactor tends to
argue that the footprint would be rather less.

Let's roll it forward back to: undoubtedly cleaner if it can be made to work.

~~~
jpxxx
I hear how passionate you are on this issue and I understand the enthusiasm.
I'm not here to strangle the baby in the cradle. But my concerns are real.

Granted: Fusion energy is a conceptually simpler process that is virtually
impossible to runaway by its very nature. That alone is a massive plus any way
you look at it.

Granted: the total bulk volume of radioactive waste products is dramatically
lessened.

Granted: the radionuclides created by a fusion reactor are likely to be less
problematic than those from a fission reactor.

My points: There is still radioactive waste: magnetic confinement reactor
liners will handle so much corrosive flux they'll essentially be disposable
and replaced frequently - possibly on the order of weeks or months. Same (but
lessened) story for inertial confinement reactor liners and the metallic waste
products. Those have to go somewhere safe. They're not small.

Same story for the electrical generation system. Regardless of the final
reactor type, it's still going to involve managing heat-exchange fluids with
neutron exposure.

Then there's the environmental + carbon load from building a reactor complex,
which is not going to be quantifiable until there are working reactor designs
and working fuel flows and a working understanding of how much staffing and
security and land and ancillary support is needed. NIMBY is going to be just
as strong for fusion as it is for fission, and that's going to mean
compromises.

Then there's going to be the cost of purifying the fuel source, which won't be
negligible when it literally involves boiling the seas. Then packaging it.
Then shipping it. Then handling the waste products. Then planning for the
plant's functional lifetime, which won't be forever.

The conceptual clarity of fusion is wonderful and I fully support the
research, but the execution is going to be quite a bit less sexy and come with
some well-known downsides.

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th0ma5
What about the combined fusion/fission options? I mean that's what the h-bomb
and the sun do right?

~~~
wtracy
In fusion-based nuclear weapons, a fission bomb is used to create the
temperature and pressure needed to kick off nuclear fusion. Calling that
"combined fusion/fission" is like calling my car an electric hybrid because it
uses an electric starter.

Detonating a nuclear weapon inside of a power plant isn't really practical.
:-) Existing nuclear power plants don't get anywhere near the temperature and
pressure needed to start nuclear fusion.

So, now we have the engineers trying all sorts of ways to get to the needed
temperature and pressure without turning the plant into a smoking crater.
That's where all the fancy lasers and magnetic pulses described in the article
come in: They're trying to aim the heat source so they can superheat the fuel
without melting the containment vessel.

~~~
jsn
That's a popular misconception, IIRC. Actually, in thermonuclear weapon the
bulk of energy comes from fission. [1] Fusion is technically only used to get
the high energy neutrons to get the bulk of fissionable material to undergo
fission. So, ironically, calling it a "fusion bomb" is very much like calling
your car an electric hybrid.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon>

~~~
Udo
Where those weapons get the most energy from depends heavily on the design.
It's true that multi-stage thermonuclear devices often have a final fission
stage where huge amounts of energy are released, however if one were to
purposefully maximize energy release while minimizing fallout there are some
relatively clean fusion/fission ratios achievable.

For instance, the test version of the Tsar bomb had its last fission stage
removed, reportedly resulting in a 97% fusion detonation. Of course, those
still cause a huge lethal neutron flux, but at least the amount of fission
material released is pretty small in relation to the overall power of the
device.

