
UW fusion reactor concept could be cheaper than coal - mrfusion
http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/10/08/uw-fusion-reactor-concept-could-be-cheaper-than-coal/
======
jobu
After so many years of hype around fusion it's hard to take press releases
seriously. This bit at least offers some hope:

 _" The researchers have successfully tested the prototype’s ability to
sustain a plasma efficiently, and as they further develop and expand the size
of the device they can ramp up to higher-temperature plasma and get
significant fusion power output."_

Unfortunately they don't mention how long the plasma was sustained.

~~~
jdnier
Yeah, that seems to imply they've already achieved a sustained fusion
reaction. Seems like that would be big news on it's own.

~~~
jdnier
The dynomak paper abstract
([http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920379614...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920379614002518))
makes it all sound conceptual/simulated.

------
discardorama
If I had a penny for every time I see how some so-called breakthrough
technology "could be X", I'd be very rich.

And the bigger the impact after the "could be", the lesser the chance that
it'll ever happen.

------
tokenadult
"University of Washington engineers hope to change that. They have designed a
concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large
electrical power plant, would rival costs for a new coal-fired plant with
similar electrical output.

. . . .

"Right now, the UW’s concept is about one-tenth the size and power output of a
final product, which is still years away. The researchers have successfully
tested the prototype’s ability to sustain a plasma efficiently, and as they
further develop and expand the size of the device they can ramp up to higher-
temperature plasma and get significant fusion power output."

Well, good luck to them. But this is a press release about a "concept," and it
has not been tested out as a source of electrical power (as contrasted with
being a test-bed for plasma containment) at all yet, at any scale. Solving the
plasma containment problem for a fusion reactor is something I have been
waiting for more than forty years. If it was easy, it would have already
happened. Maybe the new concept will help solve that problem, but maybe not.
At the very least, we still have NO IDEA what the economics of running a power
plant will be at scale when using this concept.

Many, many submissions to HN are based at bottom on press releases, and press
releases are well known for spinning preliminary research findings beyond all
recognition. This has been commented on in the PhD comic "The Science News
Cycle,"[1] which only exaggerates the process a very little. More serious
commentary in the edited group blog post "Related by coincidence only?
University and medical journal press releases versus journal articles"[2]
points to the same danger of taking press releases (and news aggregator
website articles based solely on press releases) too seriously. Press releases
are usually misleading. Not all press releases spin their statements as badly
as one very bad example a skeptical blogger commented on,[3] but all of them
should be compared to independent sources for a second opinion. Whether in
medical research or in reports about new breakthroughs in energy production,
press releases often run ahead of the facts.

The most sure and certain finding of any preliminary study will be that more
research is needed. All too often, preliminary findings don't lead to further
useful discoveries in science, because the preliminary findings are flawed.
The obligatory link for any discussion of a report on a research result like
the one kindly submitted here is the article "Warning Signs in Experimental
Design and Interpretation"[4] by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google,
on how to interpret scientific research. Check each news story you read for
how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in
the story.

~~~
BerislavLopac
[1]
[http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174](http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174)

[2] [http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/related-by-
coincidence-o...](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/related-by-coincidence-
only-journal-press-releases-versus-journal-articles/)

[3] ?

[4] [http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html](http://norvig.com/experiment-
design.html)

FTFY (well, almost) ;-)

~~~
tokenadult
Thanks; yes you did do a good job of fixing. (This is why I didn't like
following the pattern that users requested me to follow, which I have done at
their request, of showing external links as footnotes. Sometimes I misplace or
misnumber the footnotes.) I appreciate your help.

Here is footnote 3:

[3] "Anatomy of a Press Release"
[http://www.skepticblog.org/2012/06/21/anatomy-of-a-press-
rel...](http://www.skepticblog.org/2012/06/21/anatomy-of-a-press-release/)

------
brwnll
This article concludes with "The research was funded by the U.S. Department of
Energy.", does this impacts the availability of the research to other
researchers? Even with the University of Washington in my backyard, I hope the
advancements in such an important field are shared as widely as possible.

On the fusion topic, energy.gov reports 63 active US Fusion Program
Participants, and over 100 total (including gov't, private companies,
international with US pressence)[1]. But last year the Boston Globe reported
that MIT was shutting down, "The shutdown will leave only two fusion
experiments in the United States, one at Princeton University and the other at
General Atomics, a company in San Diego", due to a cutoff of federal
funding.[2]

Anyone have any insight on the actual current state of fusion energy R&D in
the U.S.?

[1] [http://science.energy.gov/fes/research/fusion-
institutions](http://science.energy.gov/fes/research/fusion-institutions)

[2] [http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/05/19/fusion-energy-
re...](http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/05/19/fusion-energy-research-mit-
shut-down-people-lose-their-jobs/x8CDMwik26faDd9FmwlrTO/story.html)

~~~
m0th87
How this works depends on the department that's funding the research. With
NSF/NIH grants, it's at the desecration of researchers on whether they want to
apply IP rights. Other departments (mostly DoD) do contracts for research and
own the IP afterward, but I'd bet DoE is in the former camp.

~~~
jff
The specific contract with the DoE may have defined ownership and distribution
of the results, but in general it should be possible for the creators to get
IP ownership from the DoE if for example they want to create a company around
the technology.

------
mikeash
Fission was supposed to be "too cheap to meter."

This seems to be getting way ahead of itself. Seems like they should look to
hit important milestones like producing more energy from the reaction than is
required to sustain it, before they start worrying about producing electricity
for pennies per kilowatt-hour. Walk before you run, and all that.

~~~
tedks
If we had stayed with fission instead of bailing after relative non-incidents
(Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island), wouldn't it have drastically increased the
power supply to almost that point?

The casualties, even the most indirectly computed casualties, from nuclear
accidents are far, far less than the casualties from coal. It's going to get
even worse once the sea levels really rise.

A single fission plant used to supply about a third of my energy; if they had
proliferated to the extent people thought they would have, it energy would
have, in fact, been a lot cheaper.

Democratic ignorance and regulation killed that dream, though. At least we
still have "clean coal."

~~~
Retric
China which cares little about what people think and has huge air quality
problems. Yet it is still building a lot of coal plants instead of nuclear.
Which might suggest there not the ideal solution you think they might be.
France was actually the most reliant on Fission of any country and even they
are stalling far back from there peak despite having few actual problems of
any kind.

~~~
slavik81
There are 72 nuclear reactors being built around the world right now. 29 of
them are in China. They're building more reactors than the next four builders
combined. That is, more than Russia, India, Korea and the United States put
together. [1]

The Chinese government has stated that they want to decrease their reliance on
coal by building more natural gas, nuclear and solar power capacity. [2]

Aside from a few regions, I don't think they've stopped building coal plants
entirely, but the Chinese government pretty clearly likes nuclear power.

[1]
[http://www.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/UnderConstructionRe...](http://www.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/UnderConstructionReactorsByCountry.aspx)

[2]
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2013/09/12/the...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2013/09/12/the-
war-on-coal-goes-global-china-bans-new-plants-as-obama-epa-plans-killer-regs/)

~~~
Retric
Of course they want to divirsify 77% of the total electrical capacity is coal.
More importantly they had to shut down 2.5% of the nation's coal plants (58
units or 14,020 MW of capacity) in 2008 due to coal shortages.

However, in the end these charts says more than I can:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#med...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#mediaviewer/File:Electricity_Production_in_China.svg)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China#mediaviewer/File:...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China#mediaviewer/File:China_Coal_Production.png)

PS: Of total annual production: Hydroelectric = 20.7% in 2006, Coal = 68.7% in
2006. = 89.4% Compared to France which get's 75+% of it's power from nuclear
and has little in the way of coal reserves. [http://our-future.nl/wp-
content/uploads/2012/02/coal_reserve...](http://our-future.nl/wp-
content/uploads/2012/02/coal_reserves_large-Source-Saturn-Minerals.png)

Edit: To be clear, even after that construction is over Nuclear is still going
to be a small fraction of overall capacity.

------
pyrocat
Neat! I wonder what the next steps for commercial use would be, since the
patent is filed through the UW's Center for Commercialization and funded by
the US Department of Energy. Could BP or whoever come in and say "we're
interested" and throw money at them to build a full scale reactor (in a few
years)?

~~~
johlindenbaum
I think "a few years" is optimistic. I would assume a lot of the community is
holding its breath to see how ITER fares once it's switched on in 8-12 years.
Nobody knows for certain if it's possible to generate a plasma on earth that
can heat itself, and then produce excess energy. And by that time the anti-
fusion lobby will have poisoned the mind of the average power user to believe
that fusion = fission.

~~~
Filligree
There's an anti-fusion lobby?

~~~
rfrey
It was editorial license by johlindenbaum to call it an "anti-fusion" lobby,
but we can all agree that there's a pro-fossil-fuel lobby.

~~~
johlindenbaum
Greenpeace is very outspoken against fusion, as they believe it carries the
same dangers as fission.
[http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/press/releases/IT...](http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/press/releases/ITERprojectFrance/)

------
cowardlydragon
Meanwhile, Thorium could be done now...

~~~
anigbrowl
What's stopping it, though? There are new nuclear plants being constructed in
Georgia and there's ~$1 trillion budgeted for renewal of the US nuclear
arsenal over the next 30 years (see [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/us/us-
ramping-up-major-ren...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/us/us-ramping-up-
major-renewal-in-nuclear-arms.html)).

This is about as favorable an environment for Thorium reactors as can be
imagined, certainly compared to the last few decades. While I think the
technology is promising, if it's such a done deal where's the private capital
seeking a building permit?

