Author Topic: Do we have a Fusion thread?  (Read 3514 times)

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Offline metrologistTopic starter

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Offline metrologistTopic starter

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Offline RJSV

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #2 on: December 13, 2022, 11:47:45 pm »
Toured that sucker...circa 1972...National Ignition Facility, or some such name.
BIG oval beams of light, for the 'confinement' pressures needed...35 cm diameter.
 

Offline TimFox

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #3 on: December 14, 2022, 12:37:13 am »
The announcement was important:  first report of positive energy gain from the laser light output to the fusion reaction.
The results are not good enough:  the laser efficiency (electrical power in to laser output) is still well below unity and kills the overall efficiency.
 

Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #4 on: December 14, 2022, 12:37:49 am »
Can we mix that with some hydrogen though?
 

Offline metrologistTopic starter

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #5 on: December 14, 2022, 02:12:57 am »
The announcement was important:  first report of positive energy gain from the laser light output to the fusion reaction.
The results are not good enough:  the laser efficiency (electrical power in to laser output) is still well below unity and kills the overall efficiency.

Is it 2.5 - 1.8 - 500 MJ efficient?
 

Offline Geoff-AU

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #6 on: December 14, 2022, 04:10:23 am »
Yep, interesting result but still well below unity considering efficiencies, and there is no indication of how you'd do this in extremely rapid fashion.

ITER is still the most plausible practical fusion power station.  The NIF laser method may find some niche applications which require a very brief pulse of energy.
 

Online BrianHG

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #7 on: December 14, 2022, 05:55:58 am »
ITER is still the most plausible practical fusion power station.  The NIF laser method may find some niche applications which require a very brief pulse of energy.

This is how it appears to be.

However, I would also like to see development of compact He-3 fusion reactors which use the escaping protons during it's fusion reaction to pump a magnetic fields generating electricity directly.  (no steam turbine)  Sadly, this probably wont work and we also would also need a reliable He-3 fuel source.
« Last Edit: December 14, 2022, 07:19:04 am by BrianHG »
 
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Offline james_s

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #8 on: December 14, 2022, 07:40:23 am »
Fusion has been a decade off for my entire life. I've kind of lost interest in it, although if somebody does actually get a practical system running it will be interesting.
 
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Offline JohanH

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #9 on: December 14, 2022, 08:10:27 am »
Scientifically this is worth noting. But there is no indication this could ever evolve into a real application, yet.

ITER is still not good enough. It might have about zero net output. It's important though to show the feasibility of continuous operation. The question after that is do we afford scaling it up and can we manage the effort to build a larger reactor with positive net output.

Keeping an eye here on the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator...
 
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Offline RoGeorge

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #10 on: December 14, 2022, 08:29:01 am »
It's good progress but not good enough to produce energy yet.

My understanding is that it gets more thermal energy out than the optical energy pumped in by the lasers.  However, the lasers takes 10-100 times more energy to output that light needed for fusion.  Overall the whole installation needs 100 times more energy to put in, than it gets out.

Quote
Although the latest experiment produced a net energy gain compared to the energy of the 2.05 megajoules in the incoming laser beams, NIF needed to pull 300 megajoules of energy from the electrical grid in order to generate the brief laser pulse.

Other types of lasers are more efficient, but experts say a viable laser fusion power plant would likely require much higher energy gains than the 1.5 observed in this latest fusion shot.

“You’ll need gains of 30 to 100 in order to get more energy for an energy power plant,” Dr. Herrmann said.
Source:  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/science/nuclear-fusion-energy-breakthrough.html
« Last Edit: December 14, 2022, 08:44:23 am by RoGeorge »
 

Offline tom66

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #11 on: December 14, 2022, 09:32:49 am »
Are there any promising alternatives to the NIF lasers that combined with improvements in efficiency could make NIF a practical demonstration of power generation?    Some lasers can reach 60-70% efficient, but it's hard to imagine they could supply the pulse power required.

It does look like they have begun to make progress:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#/media/File:NIF_output_over_10_years.png

But, it's still likely to be at least a few decades from commercial power production.
 

Offline Infraviolet

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #12 on: December 14, 2022, 11:06:31 pm »
Very good news, a great way to solve all the climate bothers without resorting to diasastrous (and ineffective) draconian measures. If only governments and corporations would put their money* in to getting fusion fully up and running rather than burning it on pointless bureaucracy.

Nuclear fusion really is the energy source of the future, and with this latest improvement it might be a viable energy source within the next two decades, though part of me suspects tokamak (ITER) or projectile type (First Light) fusion reactors might be more ideal for commercial power generation than NIF's lasers. I've always been a bit mystified as to how they would get the energy out and in to electrical form from a tiny pellet being collapsed at the centre of a large chamber.

I think we can now call this the break-even point for the fusion process itself, more energy came out of the pellet than went in to it, but clearly there is much work yet to be done for break-even in the full process from powering the lasers to extracting useful work.

*I saw a statistic that the US populations spends more per year on dog grooming than the US invests in to fusion research.
 

Online BrianHG

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #13 on: December 15, 2022, 12:05:30 am »
*I saw a statistic that the US populations spends more per year on dog grooming than the US invests in to fusion research.
This.....

Hydrogen and it's isotopes which makes fusion easier radiate a good chunk of their energy in spare neutrons flying out as well as the remainder of the fusion products.  Block these in a barrier material/fluid to capture the heat.  This shield barrier which will become neutron rich isotope is what eventually becomes radioactive for a good 50 to 100 years.

Helium 3 fusion radiates out protons.  Protons can be magnetically steered and drive a magnetic field to directly produce electricity as well as the ability of having no radioactive byproducts.  Helium 3 may be given off by our sun and our moon's surface may be peppered in it, but on earth, it is super-rare as it breaks apart in an oxygen rich environment.

(I'm not an expert, but I hope I got most of my specs correct.)
 

Offline boz

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #14 on: December 15, 2022, 12:07:58 am »
Sabin Hossenfelder did a great recent video on why we need to get magnitudes beyond break-even before we can do anything realistic (Hint Still a way to go)

 

« Last Edit: December 15, 2022, 02:51:20 am by boz »
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Online BrianHG

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #15 on: December 15, 2022, 12:18:16 am »
How a Helium 3 fusion reactor works: (American funded)



Boring Helion program results so far:


« Last Edit: December 15, 2022, 12:24:09 am by BrianHG »
 

Online BrianHG

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #16 on: December 17, 2022, 01:09:25 am »
Proper explanation of what was achieved at the National Ignition Facility:


 

Offline jonpaul

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #17 on: December 17, 2022, 01:25:46 am »
mostly news noise.

See IEEE SPECTRUM article on the realization of fusion by laser

As always we are 30 years off..IF IT EVER WORKS.....

just another government waste of money

Jon
An Internet Dinosaur...
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #18 on: December 17, 2022, 01:31:16 am »
The amount of money the government is spending on this is minuscule in the grand scheme of things. I think it's worth pursuing, there are lots of things that never would have happened at all if people had decided it was a waste of money to try because they would never work. I'd rather spend money on fusion than on bombing random countries.
 

Offline jonpaul

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #19 on: December 17, 2022, 06:04:43 am »
Rebonjour, was at LBL 1967, visits to LLNL in1980s,
LLNL laser program goes back to Star wars  SDI, conceived by Dr Edward Teller and funded with backings of President Ronald Reagan.
I toured predicesor Shiva/Nova, fantastic machine.

For perspective, one megajoule energy released if a jelly doughnut is throughly burned!

Even DOE, LLNL admits " wall plug efficiency" of NIF is nil as lasers are ((< 1% eff.
Need many shots per sec, at this time we have a shot every  month at best.
True purposes of LLNL NIF is classified nuclear defense tests. The fusion power is a façade to make the nuclear device research more palateble to the idiots in Washington DC.  NIF is indeed a tiny part of the $ is in the bloated and politically controlled 1T$ USA défense budget.

Easy solution to clean cheap energy..Voilà ! 

Conventional nuclear fission reactors! (70% power in France, no issues). We will see a working SSPS long before a NIF type working utilitaire power plant.

From an optimist in the nuclear age!

Jon

« Last Edit: December 17, 2022, 06:22:28 am by jonpaul »
An Internet Dinosaur...
 

Offline EPAIII

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #20 on: December 17, 2022, 08:11:38 am »
How close are we to fusion power?

I believe the generally accepted number is 93 million miles / 149 million Km.

I don't know what the big deal is all about. Earth has been running on fusion power for billions of years.
Paul A.  -   SE Texas
And if you look REAL close at an analog signal,
You will find that it has discrete steps.
 
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Offline JohanH

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #21 on: December 17, 2022, 10:46:12 am »
How close are we to fusion power?

I believe the generally accepted number is 93 million miles / 149 million Km.

I don't know what the big deal is all about. Earth has been running on fusion power for billions of years.

That's quite correct. There are also calculations that if humanity increases electricity and energy usage produced by fossil and nuclear, in a few hundred years the heat from all this will begin to affect the temperature on earth. The only way to not heat up the planet is to use existing energy that is transferred here by the sun, i.e. convert it using solar panels, wind turbines, water and wave turbines, photosynthesis (?). Now I don't know how this plays together with the climate change from green house gas. Partly the effect is probably reduced when transitioning to more climate friendly energy sources. But if all energy sources were replaced with nuclear fusion, there could be a problem in the future.
 

Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #22 on: December 17, 2022, 07:46:43 pm »
Yeah it's a very common misconception that what we need is a "clean" and unlimited source of energy (I mean, apart from the sun, which is one and has served Earth very well until now, but there will always be limits in how we can leverage it.)

If we ever get to that point and really master nuclear fusion, it will likely NOT be good news for the future of humankind. If it's really virtually unlimited (and thus, eventually very cheap), we're just gonna end up blowing ourselves up one way or another. It's not even sci-fi or pessimism, it's mainly just basic thermodynamics.

It is sad to see that most people, including the world "leaders", do not understand anything about energy, yet keep talking about it.
 

Online BrianHG

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #23 on: December 18, 2022, 02:48:54 am »
Wow, see Helion's actual 6th generation reactor.
Real Engineering got the first public glimpse and full explanation:


 
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Offline JohanH

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Re: Do we have a Fusion thread?
« Reply #24 on: December 18, 2022, 10:39:19 am »
Wow, see Helion's actual 6th generation reactor.

The concept is very intriguing, to generate electricity directly from the magnetic field, without heat transfer, steam and turbines. Pessimistically, there is always the n:th +1 generation prototype to wait for.
 


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