Fusion Discussion Thread

[Nuke]

19 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

According to wiki, the golden reserve of EU is ~11 000 t and of US ~8 000 t.

I hope, it's enough to make golden pellets for frozen tritium (hysterically laughing).
A golden capsule of frozen to nearly absolute zero tritium, Karl. It's a real economical breakthrough.

Well, the next step is to replace gold with much cheaper tungsten, happily they stopped making the electric spiral lamps to have it enough.

As we can see, the pellet shell has to be made of the exactly same materials as a tamper of fusion nuke secondary.
High Z, high density. Platinoids, actinoids, tungsten, tantalum...

(I forgot, did they find a tritium mine? Or still have to produce it from, say, lithium, in reactors?)

i somehow do not think laser based fusion is the answer either. they might have a q of 1.5, but i believe that's based on optical, not electrical power. i dont think lasers are efficient enough for that to be true from-the-wall breakeven. you need a couple orders of magnitude to make a viable power installation. the progress with lasers thus far has been in sub-integer steps every couple of years. if that rate continues we will have viable fusion in a few hundred years. even then the costs will be brutal. 

11 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

No I agree we’re talking about whats the best solution for that last 20%. In the US we’re already using nuclear for 18%, and we should absolutely keep as much as we can going as long as its affordable. What Im arguing is that as they age out we’d be wiser to replace them with grid scale storage than new plants. The LCOE for LiB grid scale batteries was higher than peaker gas 4 years ago, but now its in the $150/mwh range and NREL projects that to continue to fall over the foreseeable future.  Ive heard a lot of doom and gloom about Li supply, maybe thats fossil fuel companies scaremongering about the future or maybe its commodity speculators juicing the market, but NREL doesn’t seem to believe its a real problem long term. Meanwhile nuclear is up at 175$/Mwh and rising. And remember we’re not trying to cover the whole nut. We’re talking about scaling up from 2% to 20% over the next 20-30 years as it replaces aging nuclear plants and whatever’s left of NG.  But more importantly that smaller fraction taken up by storage is whats going to allow us to even out supply between wind and solar so that we can spend $30-50/Mwh the rest of the time. So in 10 years when storage is covering 10% of supply at $100/Mwh, plus the $30/Mwh from renewables it took to charge them, its still going to be cheaper than nuclear, all of which accelerates the rate at which we can hit that 60-70% mark replacing fossil fuels. 

way i see it nuclear sites will always be radioactive hot zones, since they all store their waste on site. these sites remain dead zones for awhile. also seems like the perfect place for a nuclear power plant. thus in situ waste can be managed properly. decommission first and second gen reactors for fourth and fifth gen as needed, all on the same site. if we develop better nuclear waste handling capabilities, we can start thinking about modular reactors that can plug into existing thermodynamic infrastructure, say replace old coal boilers. and when those reactors are spent, ship them to a reprocessing/recycling/decommissioning facility. 

as for fear mongering, i think the timetable is grossly exaggerated to stimulate action, they say 20, i think we might have 100 (its the fusion cliché in reverse).  sure we should behave as if the worst prediction is accurate, but that does not mean abandoning long term solutions. stopgaps buy time for those plants to be constructed, which in turn buys time to complete development of fusion. and maybe we will sidestep it all with beamed orbital solar (environmentalists seem to want to stop development on that front as well).  i like green technology, solar, wind, storage, etc, these are all effective technologies for specific purposes, but then again so is nuclear. to block one in favor of another feels like dumping out half your tool box into the ocean, and hoping to hell you don't need the wrench you just threw out when your ship starts sinking. 

1 hour ago, darthgently said:

Desalination via distillation might be a good nuke cogeneration use of 400K water, at least as a preheat step if nothing else.  Now sure why distillation gets short shift once you consider costs cradle to grave costs of reverse osmosis membranes 

any application that results in something that can be stored in tanks is a good application of wind/solar.  desalination is one application, but another is hydrogen production. hydrogen doesn't quite work for cars but it might work with trucks. intermittent production is acceptable, just price your product based on how full your tanks are at the time.

[darthgently]

31 minutes ago, Nuke said:

any application that results in something that can be stored in tanks is a good application of wind/solar.  desalination is one application, but another is hydrogen production. hydrogen doesn't quite work for cars but it might work with trucks. intermittent production is acceptable, just price your product based on how full your tanks are at the time.

Hydrogen is a nonstarter for most any nonstationary application.  Is is a real pain to store and transfer without leaks.  It must vent, so no pulling into closed maintenance bays, parking garages etc, without a lot of caveats, and a nightmare if in a highway accident.  The insulated and impact resistant tanks are huge and very poor wtt energy density.  But stationary, sure

[kerbiloid]

A more detailed  description, but in Russian, and google hangs trying to translate this site.

So, serve yourself or watch pictures.

https://pikabu.ru/story/naschyot_termoyadernogo_sinteza_na_nif_9755572

[Gargamel]

Ok, I see we’ve hopefully gotten global power production out of our systems.  It’s an easy tangent to make, but  let’s keep this thread for the discussion of fusion specifically.    Thanks.   

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

I could have sworn I had the previous video to this one linked: this guy does a deep dive on a new, commercial Fusion attempt quite different from the ignition method we got all excited about recently.

@HebaruSan - you may be interested in this.

 

For those interested - here's the previous one:

 

 

 

[Nuke]

that hellion video came across my feed yesterday. that reactor looks damn impressive. 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

15 hours ago, Nuke said:

that hellion video came across my feed yesterday. that reactor looks damn impressive. 

Those temps seem insane... and the device really small.

[K^2]

Helion just told NIF to hold their beer. Wow. If they can actually get power generation from Polaris in 2024, that's going to change the landscape of nuclear fusion completely. There are definitely big unanswered questions, but between what Trenta demonstrates and what they have planned for Polaris, this is closer to a commercially viable generator than absolutely anything that has been attempted or even seriously suggested in the past.

It's also noteworthy that it's one of the very few generator types that aren't just a steam turbine with a fancy heater. That has huge implications in miniaturization if we can get stronger field strengths with faster coils, perhaps with hybrid magnets. This is all very exciting.

[darthgently]

9 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Helion just told NIF to hold their beer. Wow. If they can actually get power generation from Polaris in 2024, that's going to change the landscape of nuclear fusion completely. There are definitely big unanswered questions, but between what Trenta demonstrates and what they have planned for Polaris, this is closer to a commercially viable generator than absolutely anything that has been attempted or even seriously suggested in the past.

It's also noteworthy that it's one of the very few generator types that aren't just a steam turbine with a fancy heater. That has huge implications in miniaturization if we can get stronger field strengths with faster coils, perhaps with hybrid magnets. This is all very exciting.

The thing about the Helion approach is what are they going to do with all the neutrons?  I gather they are typically harmless but at those levels it seems like they could have materials issues.  Plus it seems like a waste.  Could some kind of cogeneration from them could be figured out?  I'm really out of my depth here, so sorry if the questions are sub par

[K^2]

8 minutes ago, darthgently said:

The thing about the Helion approach is what are they going to do with all the neutrons?  I gather they are typically harmless but at those levels it seems like they could have materials issues.  Plus it seems like a waste.  Could some kind of cogeneration from them could be figured out?  I'm really out of my depth here, so sorry if the questions are sub par

The only thing you can do with neutrons is absorb them. I think, the goal here will be mostly to try and reduce the hazardous waste. The energy lost to neutrons isn't that high compared to Tokamaks, where that's the main energy output. So absorbing them safely without making secondary radioactive waste is the priority. I'm sure there will still be a good amount of heat produced, and there are definitely industrial uses for this. There are a lot of places in the world that still use the hot water from power plants (or even server farms these days) to heat residential areas. But even if helium production is going to be purely at a loss, that's still a lot of energy produced on the working reactor.

[AckSed]

If I don't miss my guess, Helion's fusion reactor is using a magnetohydrodynamic generator to gather energy, which makes sense. You already have the magnetic coils to compress the fusion plasma, so once the fuel fuses, they allow it to expand, pushing against the magnetic field & generating electricity  directly. It's not like the concept's unknown or unused, as the lack of moving parts is highly appealing, and Wikipedia says that it's been trialed on several coal or gas power plants around the world. (I have also seen it proposed in a kooky 70s design document plugged into a Saturn V 1st stage as a one-time megawatt power source.) But it lost out to fission, the Brayton cycle and boiling water. Its key advantage is compact size.

[Nuke]

i really dont like their plan to use helium 3, seems like the same problem that tokamaks would have with tritium. proton-boron seems the best way to go as it doesn't depend on a rare fuel component. protons dont fuse easy an so all your ash is alpha particles, which lends it to 100% direct conversion. but i figure this kind of thing is more for second or third gen reactors.

Edited December 21, 2022 by Nuke

[darthgently]

2 hours ago, AckSed said:

If I don't miss my guess, Helion's fusion reactor is using a magnetohydrodynamic generator to gather energy, which makes sense. You already have the magnetic coils to compress the fusion plasma, so once the fuel fuses, they allow it to expand, pushing against the magnetic field & generating electricity  directly. It's not like the concept's unknown or unused, as the lack of moving parts is highly appealing, and Wikipedia says that it's been trialed on several coal or gas power plants around the world. (I have also seen it proposed in a kooky 70s design document plugged into a Saturn V 1st stage as a one-time megawatt power source.) But it lost out to fission, the Brayton cycle and boiling water. Its key advantage is compact size.

They say as much in the vid.

[Jacob Kerman]

Is this even english? I specialize in physics and astronomy, not... witchcraft? Giberish? CONFUSION?

 

ha.

con-fusion.

HELP.

Edited December 21, 2022 by Jacob Kerman

[K^2]

6 hours ago, Nuke said:

i really dont like their plan to use helium 3, seems like the same problem that tokamaks would have with tritium. proton-boron seems the best way to go as it doesn't depend on a rare fuel component. protons dont fuse easy an so all your ash is alpha particles, which lends it to 100% direct conversion. but i figure this kind of thing is more for second or third gen reactors.

Helios makes their own He3. They can run the reactor in D-D mode that produces very little power output and spams neutrons, but produces a mix of hydrogen, helium-3, and tritium as its output, which are all easily separable. The tritium decays to He3 after a while, so they basically have their own supply.

Their goal is to run the D-D cycle energy neutral on a separate machine with lower field strengths, and therefore, cheaper parts to replace once they start suffering damage from neutron bombardment. But even if they have to go complete energy deficit on that to go even simpler and cheaper on the components, the energy production on the D-He3 cycle is high enough to easily eat that cost. This also lets them split the production facilities from power generation facilities, which don't have a lot of infrastructure overlap besides storage, and would let them carry the He3 production in more industrial areas, while taking power production (which is now neutron-free, and therefore exceptionally safe) closer to residential areas where it's needed.

Note that this means that the input fuel is just deuterium, which is by far the cheapest viable fuel, and since you don't rely on neutrons for energy production, you can capture them with much cheaper shielding material that can be designed to produce no long-living radioactive waste. Something that's just flat out impossible with Tokamaks. And while aneutronic, like proton-boron might be even cleaner and safer, it's not a fully proven concept, and boron-11 is way harder and more expensive to source as fuel than deuterium is, both because boron isn't nearly as abundant (though not scarce, which is nice) and because separating B10 from B11 is far more costly than purifying heavy water.

They really thought this through to the point where the disadvantage of He3 requirement starts to look like a key advantage of the system. And I would be way more skeptical of this if it was still just an on-paper concept, but Trenta shows what can be done with this, so I'm very much looking forward to the Polaris and power production. This is the only fusion technology that has been shown to have a chance of being commercially viable by the end of the decade, meaning it's the only one we have right now that's actually positioned to make a difference in the fight against the climate change.

[darthgently]

7 hours ago, Nuke said:

i really dont like their plan to use helium 3, seems like the same problem that tokamaks would have with tritium. proton-boron seems the best way to go as it doesn't depend on a rare fuel component. protons dont fuse easy an so all your ash is alpha particles, which lends it to 100% direct conversion. but i figure this kind of thing is more for second or third gen reactors.

I'd have to watch again to be sure, but I thought the next phase of their project is to have it produce the helium 3 during the process itself via a more complex chain of reactions and so be self maintaining 

[Pthigrivi]

5 hours ago, Jacob Kerman said:

Is this even english? I specialize in physics and astronomy, not... witchcraft? Giberish? CONFUSION?

 

ha.

con-fusion.

HELP.

Do you want to expand on this? As a lay person it sure sounds interesting, but my Vermonter sounds-too-good-to-be-true-investor-bait hackles are up. 

[kerbiloid]

If there is a confusion, there should be a confission.

[Nuke]

6 hours ago, K^2 said:

Helios makes their own He3. They can run the reactor in D-D mode that produces very little power output and spams neutrons, but produces a mix of hydrogen, helium-3, and tritium as its output, which are all easily separable. The tritium decays to He3 after a while, so they basically have their own supply.

Their goal is to run the D-D cycle energy neutral on a separate machine with lower field strengths, and therefore, cheaper parts to replace once they start suffering damage from neutron bombardment. But even if they have to go complete energy deficit on that to go even simpler and cheaper on the components, the energy production on the D-He3 cycle is high enough to easily eat that cost. This also lets them split the production facilities from power generation facilities, which don't have a lot of infrastructure overlap besides storage, and would let them carry the He3 production in more industrial areas, while taking power production (which is now neutron-free, and therefore exceptionally safe) closer to residential areas where it's needed.

Note that this means that the input fuel is just deuterium, which is by far the cheapest viable fuel, and since you don't rely on neutrons for energy production, you can capture them with much cheaper shielding material that can be designed to produce no long-living radioactive waste. Something that's just flat out impossible with Tokamaks. And while aneutronic, like proton-boron might be even cleaner and safer, it's not a fully proven concept, and boron-11 is way harder and more expensive to source as fuel than deuterium is, both because boron isn't nearly as abundant (though not scarce, which is nice) and because separating B10 from B11 is far more costly than purifying heavy water.

They really thought this through to the point where the disadvantage of He3 requirement starts to look like a key advantage of the system. And I would be way more skeptical of this if it was still just an on-paper concept, but Trenta shows what can be done with this, so I'm very much looking forward to the Polaris and power production. This is the only fusion technology that has been shown to have a chance of being commercially viable by the end of the decade, meaning it's the only one we have right now that's actually positioned to make a difference in the fight against the climate change.

i had hopes for polywell but that seems to have fizzled out. last word was they were doing simulations to improve a final design for a demo. but thats a long way from having a machine. one things for sure, that rapid iteration on a small machine seems like a more conductive path than the massive machines with slow progress. the iter reactor, which even if it works out and moves to demo which is in turn successful, the result would not be cost competitive with fission, and worse fossil fuel. and renewables only move by virtue of being an off the shelf product. 

Edited December 22, 2022 by Nuke

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Sharing this here, courtesy of @DDE

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq5273

 

[TomKerbal]

On 12/21/2022 at 5:05 PM, AckSed said:

If I don't miss my guess, Helion's fusion reactor is using a magnetohydrodynamic generator to gather energy, which makes sense. You already have the magnetic coils to compress the fusion plasma, so once the fuel fuses, they allow it to expand, pushing against the magnetic field & generating electricity  directly. It's not like the concept's unknown or unused, as the lack of moving parts is highly appealing, and Wikipedia says that it's been trialed on several coal or gas power plants around the world. (I have also seen it proposed in a kooky 70s design document plugged into a Saturn V 1st stage as a one-time megawatt power source.) But it lost out to fission, the Brayton cycle and boiling water. Its key advantage is compact size.

I wonder if they were able to manage the huge particle confinement problems of such systems in the last decades. During my PHD thesis in the 90th we also researched on an alternative (to ITER) fusion generator based on cyclotron resonance acceleration. But we were not able to stabilize the plasma (too many particle losses / too less particle concentration for fusion processes / problems with diamagnetic effects). I also perform a simulation of an Ion source for the Berkeley Labs since they had similar problems with particle losses (electrons). Good old days...

But since many years have passed they may have made great progress concerning these problems.

And as far as I understood the Helion confinement is based on a pulsed magnetic field generation. That's different to our approach we had (continuous operation). We had a maximum of about 3T , the pulsed fields have a much higher maximum (12T or something). Well, interesting.