It took over a century for steam to become a viable power source. Why should fusion take any faster?
669 kilojoules happens to be the same amount of energy as is found in a 1 cup serving of Campbell’s Chunky Baked Potato with Cheddar & Bacon Bits Soup, 159 Calories. Of course, the fusion energy is all in laser beam format, so it can be used in a much shorter timeframe than the soup energy.
Steam isn’t a power source; it’s a compressible medium for conversion of thermal energy to mechanical energy via the Rankine cycle.
It is interesting to look at conventional energy sources, such as fossil and biofuels (coal, petroleum, wood, plant oils, et cetera) which are readily accessed by simple chemical processes (combustion), and at most have to be refined by distillation, and thus, are accessible using 19th Century technology or before, although it took thousands of years of development to be able to use them in any way effectively (i.e. the steam engine), although the basic principles of combustion chemistry weren’t well understood. Nuclear fission became a viable energy source fairly quickly after the discovery of the phenomena (~40 years if we start from Rutherford, though understanding the principles didn’t come until Chadwick in 1934). Nuclear fission does naturally occur on Earth with radioactive materials at low rates, so it was just waiting around for sufficient instrumentation and inquisitiveness to be discovered.
Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, doesn’t and has never occurred under anything like terrestrial applications. We actually have a very good understanding of the basic science and ability to model the required conditions, but achieving those conditions for anything like a long duration is incredibly difficult, especially since the conditions that support fusion also tend to inhibit the ability to control it externally. I don’t think there is much question that we’ll be able to produce power via controlled fusion eventually. It’s really just a matter of when, and who will provide the sustained funding and effort to do so.
Stranger
Hate to break it to you guys, but we have a working fusion reactor that puts out more energy than it consumes now, and we can now use it for electricity. It’s called the sun. Regular photovoltaic cells will do just fine in capturing visible light as electricity. There are other methods too. “Peak fusion” is about a billion years (give or take) away and it is distributed all over the earth, even to poor people, even more to poor people when you consider that curvature gives more sunlight to poorer equatorial regions.
The thing is this. Everybody can use it, and the powers that be can’t enslave us unless power is centralized. Yes, there is always the canard that it doesn’t generate power at night, but power is not used as much at night. I think it is Fairbanks, Alaska that has a warehouse full of batteries to smooth power outages. That can be set up in home garages or in commercial facilities. Nighttime demands can also be met by other methods.
Lab made fusion, like the NIF in Livermore, 25 miles from me is not intended as a power generator and never was. Take a look at the pictures. There is no way to harvest the energy it gives off. None at all. ITER in France may have a way to harvest the energy, but it is 20 years off and in France. NIF was built to closely study controlled fusion by laser. It’s uses may help earth bound fusion reactors someday, but it’s primary use is pure science. (Psst, and hydrogen bombs.)
Wind and solar are the future of electricity as the fuel is even more free than mining it. In fact, Mother Nature has picked up transportation costs of the “fuel” to the collection method too. The reason this is not being pushed is because Wall Street cannot charge for it once it is installed in the home.
That’s not strictly speaking true. It just has a huuuuuuge fuel pile.
Enlighten me, what is “not strictly speaking true”?
That it puts out more energy than it consumes.
Why do you think solar is not more widely used? How many batteries would the average household have to use? Isn’t the average car battery only a few hundred watt hours in storage? You’d need dozens for a house, and cycling them deeply makes them wear out, doesn’t it?
Anyway, do you think it’s a conspiracy that more solar isn’t used? Big oil, big coal, so to speak? Enslaved by the powers that be?
How much does a solar cell cost? $1000 per square meter or so? Is it possible that centralized power is actually cheaper for most people?
:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
Ah, I see what you are saying. I was referring to the fact the the sun puts out a lot of power, and consumes only mass, and in fact only fuses the particles.
I have met a few “profound thinkers” like The Second Stone, who sincerely believe that the evil capitalists are withholding effective and easy to achieve technical solutions from us to make more money and have control. So let’s see here, the evil Wall Street withholds in America, now in Soviet Union, where there were no capitalists, that must have been, what, the evil Politburo? Who is that in modern China, another evil Politburo? Or has evil Wall Street secretly subjugated the Chinese already to prevent them from partaking in the natural goodness of technologies they, per The Second Stone, are hiding from us?
It is indeed true that in conditions of business or political monopoly some technologies can be suppressed. E.g. American government, along with the various greens and NIMBYs, have been quite successful at restricting, if not suppressing, the nuclear power around here. Meanwhile in other nations, like France and China, nuclear power expands and blossoms because it is indeed a viable, cost-effective source of energy. Not so much with those precious wind and solar power sources though, at least not in places where the government does not subsidize them massively.
I fully agree. It’s possible we won’t be able to make fusion work as a power source or that we won’t be able to make it work at an economic cost but the benefits if we can make it work are so great that it has got to be worth the bet.
I’ll not comment on NIF - inertial fusion is not my area and my understanding is that it is 10-20 year behind magnetic confinement - but the ITER/DEMO route looks credible. Massive engineering challenges but known science. ITER will cost about 10 Billion dollars to build over 10 years - split between more than half of the world’s population - against an annual world electricity market of 1 trillion dollars.
On a more local note, if any Brit Dopers want to encourage the UK Government to increase funding for fusion research there is a petition on the Downing Street web site at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/NuclearFusion/
Thats all I needed to hear to make up my mind.
Go Freedom Fusion.
Can I supersize that?
I suspect that research programs with the sole purpose of developing fusion power will have low rates of return since the commercial benefits are far in the future – well over 30 years. Note that even if the first commercial fusion reactor is introduced in 2040 (an optimistic scenario), the commercial benefits will only come as the more plants are built. Today, fission power tends to be more expensive than the alternatives (when cost of plant construction and waste disposal is factored in), so fission research in the mid 20th century wasn’t especially profitable either. Admittedly fission might very well make economic sense sometime in the next 50 years. Or not.
So large scale physics projects shouldn’t emphasize fusion, IMHO. Desktop tinkering and expensive experiments with multiple ramifications are another matter. If I understand Stranger On A Train correctly, ITER is mostly focused on fusion technologies (bad in my view) while NIF has other main goals.
There’s a diversification benefit to nuclear power – maybe shale gas will be a lot rarer than we believe for example. But I have the sense that fusion receives far more research funds than, say, geothermal power. So some rebalancing is probably in order.
This just in. Sounds too good to be true.
Well, here’s hoping. Controlled fusion is one of the three big-idea things I want to see in my lifetime, the other two being a space elevator and the Republic of Canada.
I’m slightly dubious, as Lockheed seems to be too small an entity – and I mean the ENTIRETY of Lockheed, let alone their research division, let alone this one branch of their research division. What is their budget, compared to the budgets of the really big players, the guys who build Tokomaks? Maybe I’m wrong, but this seems too much like the University of Iowa coming up with something that CERN couldn’t do.
That said, wow, I hope to blazes it’s real!
(An excess of caution follows having been suckered by the Cold Fusion farrago.)
It also has the side benefit of solving our helium shortage!
Lockheed Martin’s profit is more than twice CERN’s total budget.
The first few pages of searches produce nothing but the same video in the link. There’s no other info available. A search of the Lockheed Martin website doesn’t produce anything useful under fusion or the name Charles Chase. It does reveal that DOE contracts management of Sandia labs to Lockheed though. If this is real, they must be onto something otherwise not being dicussed publicly.
The guy does work there, unless a LinkedIn page for him is all part of some elaborate deception.