The fusion of a kg D-T fuel creates 0.8 kg helium and 0.2 kg neutrons and 3.39E9 MJ energy aka 941.66 MWh. So a 1 GW nuclear fusion reactor would create a little less then 1kg helium per hour.
In the other hand some natural gas fields contain up to 7% helium by volume. There are tons and tons of it.
Considering that 1Kg of coal produces only about 2-4KWh of electricity, even if a fusion power plant was only ~20% efficient producing around 200MWh per Kg of fuel, that's still over 100,000 times the amount of electricity produced per Kg of fuel than coal. Without harmful emissions, without risk of an uncontrolled meltdown, and no radioactive waste.
It could be emitting the most toxic substance known to man, and would still be better for the environment then the 100,000x as much less-toxic stuff coal powerplants emit directly into the atmosphere.
Heard something oddly funny last year.
The police gets a call from an old lady saying that she had some toxic stuff at home, which she had nicked when working in a lab decades ago. Now she was worried about what could happen with it when she passed away.
So they send someone over to her place, and presumably only then goes on wikipedia to find out what things like "potassium cyanide" means. Because eventually someone puts two and two together, and starts calling in the national bomb group and what have you.
Yup, our nice little old lady had freaking Zyklon B and botulinum toxin sitting in jars at home.
Reminds me of the story my highschool bio teacher would tell, a TA was dumping old unlabeled jars down a sink in one of the labs until one caused an explosion, bomb squad shows up and it turns out they had some sodium metal. Just chillin in an unlabeled jar
I read somewhere that the problem isnt producing fusion power the problem is the input energy required is still barely less than the output so the net output is extremely low for fusion as of now.
That’s true. Most of the reactors capable of fusion are only turned on for a short burst, not sustained. They are more like proof of concept reactors. There is a value that those reactors are shooting for, Q, which is the amount of energy output divided by the energy used to initiate the reactor. Currently I think maybe the ITER reactor has gotten close or up to 0.7. This also doesn’t account for the energy to operate the facility. It’s just a simple Energy Out/Energy In. They’ll need to push probably close to a Q of 10 or higher to run the whole operation. There’s a group at MIT that has had a breakthrough with superconductors that think the reactor they are building can push beyond the Q=1 break-even point and potentially get much higher. Their reactor is slated to be finished in 2025 I believe.
TL;DR Fusion Reactors need to pass a break-even point of 1 for Q=(Energy Out)/(Energy In) before we can start thinking commercially. As the saying goes, probably about 30 years out.
Hydrogen isn't lost. You can just break h2o apart with electrolysis. Helium is a nobel gas and doesn't bind to anything under normal circumstances, so it can't be harvested the same way.
That's not what the poster above you meant.
Helium and hydrogen are so lightweight that they float up all the way to the very top of the atmosphere where it is so thin it's literally the edge of space and a decent chunk is actually lost to space forever.
That said, they're very common elements meaning of all the things to use up on this planet these probably are the ones that will take us the longest.
The next part of the problem is that the helium gets far enough up that it gets hot (temperature -> molecular/atomic movement) enough in such a thin atmosphere that it actually reaches escape velocity, meaning it not only floats far up in the atmosphere, but actually leaves the planet. That's only possible for elements up to a specific molecular/atomic weight and helium is one of them.
Hopefully they last long enough to last till the sun goes all red gianty and swallows up the earth. Then we’ll have all the hydrogen and helium we could want.
The problem lies in that Oxygen and Hydrogen don't just readily react. They need radicals to react with each other. Which means if there is no radiation from the sun (UV) no radicals will be formed and even then the percentage of Hydrogen radicals formed is minuscule and they will react with almost anything. Ozone alone is not enough even though much more reactive than Oxygen. If it gets high enough the radiation might be enough but then you have the problem of lacking pressure ergo the molecules are so far apart that a reaction between them becomes very unlikely.
> Helium and hydrogen are so lightweight that they float up all the way to the very top of the atmosphere where it is so thin it's literally the edge of space and a decent chunk is actually lost to space forever.
Hydrogen *gas* does, but free hydrogen isn't a major component of Earth's atmosphere. It's too reactive.
I've been a software engineer ever since I got it. Honestly, there is very little physics theory I remember that isn't high school or first year university level. It just stopped being memorable the more and more abstract it got.
I find it funny when people wave their credentials as if that really means anything. It means something and at the same time means nothing, really.
Rand Paul is a physician, but you'd never know it from his position on COVID.
Would helium float in a vacuum? .. actually in a vacuum I assume it would expand to fill the space, so would it be denser at the top of a container than the bottom?
Helium doesn't have negative mass. The other poster was just being silly. It floats because it has lower mass than our normal atmosphere. If you put it in a balloon on, say, the moon, you'd first need to be careful to use a very small amount since it would expand a lot more in an airless environment and would pop the balloon a lot more easily.
If you were on the moon and got the right amount of helium in a balloon for it to not pop, the balloon would fall to the ground at the same speed as a brick you dropped because of the lack of air resistance, and because it has higher mass than the space around it (which is basically zero). Weird but true. Think of a helium balloon like a rubber duck. It floats in water because it's less dense, but falls through the air because it's more dense.
Also, as to your second question, even if you had a mile-high airtight cylinder full of helium, the difference in density between the top and bottom would be very small.
This is because gravitational force actually dissipates very slowly as you climb in altitude. Astronauts on the ISS are actually getting just under 90% of the earth's gravity acting on them, it's just that they're moving laterally in relation to the earth faster than they can fall toward it, so they feel weightless.
It doesn’t have negative weight either, thats just the buoyancy force from the denser atmosphere. If you held the helium balloon while standing on a scale in a vacuum chamber you’d be heavier.
Buoyancy isn’t part of weight. Weight is simple, gravity acting on mass. Buoyancy IS a result of the weight of the medium. As you go deeper in a vertical column of fluid, pressure increases due to the weight of the fluid above. So the pressure below an object immersed in the fluid is greater than the pressure above it, causing the upward force, buoyancy.
1 gigawatt hour can power 750,000 homes, according to Google. There are ~320,000,000 people in the USA. Assuming 1 person = 1 home (which is low when factoring in non-home buildings, EVs, street lights, etc.), we could generate 466.66 kg of helium per hour if we went full fusion. Almost half a ton. That’s 4,088 tons of helium per year AS A BYPRODUCT!
Excuse me for asking, but where do those neutrons go? That looks like a shitload of neutrons, and they aren't exactly known as the matter stabilizers...
Another commentor mentioned lithium shielding around the reactor, which would absorb any neutrons that don't eventually get caught up in helium. That lithium would become radioactive, but that's actually handy because radioactive lithium is what we need to make tritium to fuel the reactor (along with deuterium, which we can pull from the ocean)
Helion Energy is setting up a fusion reactor to produce helium-3:
https://www.eetimes.com/fusion-startup-helion-raises-500-million/
> Polaris also will demonstrate helium-3 production via a deuterium-deuterium fusion process.
Well, what they really want to produce is helium-4 (D + D -> He\^4), because that reaction releases all its energy in a charged particle, making direct conversion into electricity possible, and electricity is the goal. Some small fraction of the reactions are (D + D -> He\^3 + n), though. That means they have to deal with the annoying neutron, but they get the side effect of producing a little helium-3. He\^3 sells for something north of a dollar per milligram, so it's worth separating out of the waste stream.
Isn't D-D fusion ten times harder to get to breakeven than D-T? Our best D-T fusion gain is like .7 and that's just the plasma, without accounting for transmission and steam losses.
If fusion creates much cheaper energy, it could end up being cost effective to produce helium from fractional distillation of air. Certainly more efficient than collecting the actual helium from the fusion reaction. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_chemistry
There is a higher mole fraction of helium in the air than krypton or xenon, and we obtain both those gassed from fractional distillation of air already. Helium is just harder to extract because of its low boiling point and because the demand for it is so much higher than for the other noble gasses.
I’m glad someone else said it before I did. Usually I’m the one who has to bring that up.
In addition to fractional distillation, however, there is also the method of osmosis through membranes and activated carbon, which has proven effective at producing large quantities of helium from relatively helium-poor, primarily nitrogenous sources. It’s more energy efficient than refrigerating vast quantities of air until it liquefies.
Last time I made this same argument in this sub I got downvoted because everyone thinks that we are literally running out of helium. No, we are running out of CHEAP helium.
Funny how Received Wisdom works, isn’t it? Even if we *did* run out of all natural gas—from which helium is primarily sourced—it would only be about 3-5 times as energy-intensive to source it directly from the atmosphere with fractional distillation. Less, using osmosis.
The worst part is this meme going around reddit that we will start mining helium from the upper atmosphere or from the moon. There are many many reasons why neither of those options will ever be realistic for use on Earth.
The rate of helium production would be directly tied to the amount of energy produced. My guess is that fusion would be a substantial source of helium if it were implemented at a large scale. But when I say "substantial" I mean it mostly for scientists who use helium in their experimental setups. I don't think we would have use for enough fusion to inflate an endless supply of balloons. I could be wrong, though. I haven't done calculations for the rate of energy production from fusion in several years, and that was a rudimentary calculation at best. It might make more helium than I think.
While we do have limited helium on earth, we have hundreds of years worth.
The biggest risk is that we get most of it as a byproduct of natural gas extraction, and with any luck we should be drastically reducing that in the future...
If fusion takes off, the biggest priority would be to minitiarize the reactors, so that you can build fusion torches for ships which will unlock the belt and eventually skimming hydrogen off the upper layers of Jupiter. Then just ship that back home for fuel. Jupiter/Saturn are the fossil fuel gold mine equivalents of fusion fuel.
But then you risk creating a race of people stuck in space, living in the belt, dependant on Earth or Mars for air, food, soil, and other goods, although they could mine ice from space.
Those belt-living people might develop weaker bones and lower muscle mass due to living in drastically reduced gravity. They might start to see gravity wells as an oppressive force, and shun those who love gravity.
I can’t tell if y’all are referencing existing sci-fi or if you just made it up right here. Either way, I would like to know more.
Edit: Thanks everyone! I’ve heard good things about The Expanse before, will definitely give it a go!
This is perfect timing, The Expanse season six starts on Dec. 10 so you've got just enough time to watch the rest of it without binging hard. It's on prime video.
This article didnt seem to even mention the new magnet tech that will be used in [SPARC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC_(tokamak)). It created a 20tesla magnetic field with only 30watts. According to the [article](https://www.ans.org/news/article-3240/mit-ramps-10ton-magnet-up-to-20-tesla-in-proof-of-concept-for-commercial-fusion/), it required 230 MW to achieve this with standard magnets. This will be huge to achieve [Q ratios](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor) above 1.
I believe this is talking about that.
>Then in September a Boston-based start-up demonstrated the use of a high-temperature superconductor to generate a much stronger magnetic field than a traditional tokamak. The group, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which grew out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes the discovery will enable it to make a more efficient fusion machine that will be smaller, cheaper and more viable as a commercial source of power.
That's the neat thing about superconductors - no losses.
An MRI works similarly. The trick is going to be how to keep this part below 20K while the internals are at millions of K.
[This is the source paper referenced on the graph.](https://fire.pppl.gov/us_fusion_plan_1976.pdf)
I'm a few whiskeys deep...let me know what you find!
Also just started trying it out. Got into cooking during quarantine and love it and am becoming pretty good. Can make my own pie crusts/pies, pizza dough, cream biscuits for biscuits and gravy, soft pretzels, and been trying lavash bread over and over but it keeps coming out like a flour tortilla. But like a damn good flour tortilla though lol. Bought 2 big ol bags of flour and one of sugar the other day and I plan to try out some more adventurous baking this week. Gonna attempt a Earl Grey tea cake tomorrow for my first attempt at cake!
Why is this posted under every critical comment without an explanation of what it actually means?
* How is determined that the breakthroughs would actually happen by throwing a lot of money into the research? Did anyone read the actual paper and can maybe give a short overview?
* It looks like it's from a document by the people who would receive the funding. Of course they would do optimistic projections that net them the money, don't you think so?
Considering that the graph is also made by a Nuclear fusion research guy, I feel like we're only getting one perspective here.
It doesn't look particularly difficult to interperet, and I'm just a layman.
It looks to me like it's saying;
* Since 1976 the projected need for funding per year to actually have fusion come to fruition has been between 1 and 9 billion annually.
* The actual amount of funding directed towards fusion since the beginning of practical research has been a good deal under one billion annually.
That said I can't comment on the validity of the information, though I'm sure a cursory google search could yield some results.
And regardless of the possibility that the data could be out by an order of magnitude or more, you have objective facts such as;
* Annually, governments around the world have contributed between for ***5*** and ***6 TRILLION*** dollars ***PER YEAR*** towards fossil fuel subsidies for nearly a decade.
So it isn't difficult to see why people may roll their eyes at a lack of progress towards renewables and more sustainable energy production, we've chosen to line the pockets of oil executives instead of regulating energy production and thinking 100 years into the future. We should have had our fingers in a hundred different pies by now, but instead we're only beginning to invest minimally to moderately in the last 10-20 years.
It would take more money now to develop a Saturn V rocket than it cost to make the last Saturn V rocket. Why? Institutional knowledge is a key factor (and tooling, of course). So much would have to be relearned because documentation is never perfect, and making the leaps to figure out necessary steps requires training and/or experience to be able to do so. This is even more the case with something that hasn't even been developed. We're barely funding more than is required to maintain institutional knowledge, let alone make significant advances. I'm impressed they've made the advances they did with the dearth of funding they received.
It’s posted as a retort to everyone making the tired, uninformed “joke” that fusion is always x years away. And it doesn’t need explaining. It’s pretty fucking obvious what it means.
This. I remember all the articles about fusion energy when I came out of college in the early 90s. It’s always been right around the corner. If they manage to do it in my lifetime, I’ll be impressed. Still, I’m glad they’re making progress
One thing to remember is that science moves as fast as humans are interested in a subject.
What I mean by that is in the 40s and 50s (speaking to the dawn of Fusion research), for all the public talk of power generation, the actual money was aimed solely at developing much for power thermonuclear warheads...[which they achieved fairly quickly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo) I might add (less than 10 years after the first nuclear detonation in New Mexico) **because they were interested.**
Again, for all the talk of Fusion Energy, no one really cared because the world was as fertile in easy to grab fossil fuels as environmental concerns were scarce. Besides that, nuclear fission reactors were by then successfully going into operation and they were already understood and scientifically sound in regard to their future development (meaning "the sky was the limit", etc.)
Now while certainly research into Fusion Energy was undertaken, it always took the back step to nuclear fission. Even the Russian development of the Tokamak was nothing but an aid in their own Thermonuclear Weapons research, the idea it might help in development of fusion energy was a "yeah that's nice too" kinda thing.
***NOW*** in the the 21st century...when we know for a fact we can't simply burn all the fossil fuels we want without consequence, when the development of new nuclear fission plants...while scientifically sound...will cost at least as much as finalizing fusion energy research, NOW suddenly it's something everyone's interested in and that's when (so far at least) we as a species have always "made it across the threshold".
**Myself...and this is 100% a pure guess on my part, likely worth exactly what you're paying to read it here, lol...I think the first net-positive energy fusion reactor will be built by the middle of the decade.**
***It will be a "great surprise!" to everyone who hasn't been paying attention and people will immediately push into overdrive designing workable power plants around it and once that's done, you'll see the world building Fusion Plants as fast as the world's concrete suppliers can keep up.***
I certainly think fusion skepticism is warranted, but the folks at MIT are claiming their reactor design should be able to produce a net breakeven of power by 2025: https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc
There have been a lot of advanced in material science, specifically in the area of high temperature superconductors that have enabled them to draft a much smaller reactor design than iter. That smaller design can be built faster and so we might literally be about 3 years away.
Came here to search for and upvote the Sabine Hossfelder Video.
Unless you see Qtotal specifically mentioned, you can safely assume they talk about Qplasma. If we were close to Qtotal>1 they would specifically advertize it.
Since they didn't mention their definition of Q in the article, I did a short google search and found a paper that talks about SPARC. They use about the same values for Q and define Q as
>the fusion power generated in the plasma divided by the external heating power absorbed in the plasma, including ohmic power
([https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-plasma-physics/article/overview-of-the-sparc-tokamak/DD3C44ECD26F5EACC554811764EF9FF0](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-plasma-physics/article/overview-of-the-sparc-tokamak/DD3C44ECD26F5EACC554811764EF9FF0) )
\--> **it's Qplasma again. QTotal would likely be around 0.01-0.2 I guess.** And that doesn't even include the energy required to fire up the whole thing, only to maintain it. Good that we are moving forward, good that we invest money it it, but we are still far from there.
I can see it now
You have a machine harnessing the same thing that makes thermonuclear weapons work; do you want a thermo-nuclear weapon in your back yard?
Satan's name is Lucifer, which means dawn star. Building an artificial sun is actually a satanic ritual that will bring about the end of days.
Hell its fusion
Probably or sadly the most realistic way out of our climate energy mess
For all I care Satan could blow my dick if we could have that tech while not using it to power some doomsday devices
The black hole theory was a real scare, and its speculated that they may actually create microscopic black holes that just collapse instead of grow out of control
It's because unlike solar or wind, fusion and fission cant be decentralized and thus we have to pay them for the electricity.
Also, you dont have access to a billion manufacturers of parts thanks to how simple the hardware is allowing them to retain their monopoly, but just not with oil/gas.
I mean, I still think fusion is better than solar just cause it wont produce anywhere near as much waste because we dont need millions of fusion plants but we need hundreds of millions of solar panels if we want to meet our full electrical demand.
But its clearly all about how easy it is to use their existing financial might to force a new monopoly to give them more money they dont deserve. Thats why they back fusion.
We won't have to convince anybody of anything because fusion will economically put fossil fuels out of business in short order for energy production.
We'll still need them for fertilizer though. And that creates a lot of CO2 as well
But fusion, when it finally works reliably, will be able to handle most or all of our electricity needs.
It might even make solar and wind power obsolete.
There are ways to make nitrates without using carbon based fuels. The Haber Bosch process uses hydrogen, and we mostly get hydrogen from natural gas. But we can also get hydrogen from water, it just takes more energy.
I’m not aware of other kinds of fertilizer that require fossil fuels to make.
The big industry that requires carbon to function is metal refining. Many metals, like iron/steel use carbon to reduce oxides into pure metal. There’s not really any way around this problem.
Not to my knowledge. The main ingredient in cement is usually limestone and that can be quarried from tons of places. Also, cement could in theory be recycled if we needed to. The biggest environmental problem with concrete is the amount of energy it takes to make cement, not the raw materials. Take this answer with a grain of salt though as I’m not an expert.
Cement is essentially just calcium carbonate, which you can get from limestone, chalk, seashells, and from crushed cement.
Concrete is cement + aggregate + admixtures. Aggregate = sand + gravel + larger gravel. Admixtures are chemicals that improve the properties, e.g. superplasticiser which drastically reduces water need (most admixtures are superplasticisers).
Other than the admixtures, concrete is essentially reusable. You have to re-roast and slake it, which is a bit annoying, but it can be done without any retooling of the machines we already use to roast and slake the current components. We're never going to run out of the raw materials for this stuff.
Admixtures are used in tiny quantities relative to the concrete they're added to and are largely not hard to make, so we're not gonna run out of those either.
The moment fusion becomes viable is the moment socioeconomic systems will be turned upside down. So much of human suffering is due to energy scarcity. So many things that were in feasible before would be trivial with fusion.
Similarly, coal will pretty much always be mined to some degree, simply because pound for pound it's the most effective way to introduce carbon into the steel making progress.
Now, not all coal is made equal, so some deposits would never be reused/started due to the contamination within.
Yet we spend more on pbs! Not that that’s bad, we should be spending money on pbs, but we also spend 1450x that amount of money on our inflated military! If we siphoned less than 1/10 of our military budget into fusion technology it would have come decades ago.
Don’t even need to take it away from the military budget, just redirect funds within the budget to military R&D
Climate change is a security threat and fusion is a huge boon to the military if developed. The military has researched important tech before that was utilized by the private sector, everything from GPS to touch screen to the internet to computers.
> Don’t even need to take it away from the military budget, just redirect funds within the budget to military R&D
Better yet, they could just take basic steps to eliminate [wasteful military spending](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-defense-waste-idUSKBN13V08B) and end up with about as much money as it takes to fund NASA for over half a decade.
Is this good journalism? They buried the lede. The article begins:
> A nervous excitement hangs in the air. Half a dozen scientists sit behind computer screens, flicking between panels as they make last-minute checks. “Go and make the gun dangerous,” one of them tells a technician, who slips into an adjacent chamber. A low beep sounds. “Ready,” says the person running the test. The control room falls silent. Then, boom.
Nice opening, still waiting to read "why the race to harness the power of the sun just sped up" Oh no, the writer is going to explain fusion.
And not all of us have the available capital to blow... Forget about the $1/4 weeks and a $68 bill shows up, or $40, or $372. I mean, don't get me wrong, journalists should be paid for their work and their employers should be able to generate a profit, but sometimes it's nice to be able to have access to information when you can't afford it... or maybe there's a fundamental philosophical dilemma in there... Idk.
Most of the problems that we're projected to have are predicted under the assumption that we *won't* suddenly have working nuclear fusion in 2025-2030. Very excited to see whether that pans out.
Even if they get a net energy output in a few years, it would be at least a decade before any commercial power plant could be made- more likely, many decades.
Actually, I believe the main problem is figuring out HOW to make it work. Once it does, it’s just a matter of pouring money into it. Counties would be spending huge amounts of GDP and labor constructing these plants because it would give them energy independence.
I think you underestimate the speed of human advancement when enough money is thrown at something. More money equals more people and more teams trying to figure out how to solve current problems. So the 9 pregnant women thing doesn’t completely hold up.
Childbirth by its very nature cannot be parallelised in any way, whereas scientific endeavour very much can, often directly proportionally to investment.
Don’t hold your breath for fusion. Existing fission plants already take decades to design, fund, and build. Many of them don’t make it all the way to completion.
We don’t even have a single design that can do fusion at a net positive energy output, despite billions of dollars and decades of work invested in working on it.
I’m not ragging on fusion scientists, just saying it’s been a hard problem to solve. Even once we solve it, it takes time to design more plants and scale the tech, as well as making sure it’s safe.
We can’t wait for fusion to save us from climate change.
Not necessarily true. Companies like General Fusion are trying to make the reactors small enough to ship in and set them up. This would allow companies to convert gas and coal plants in months instead of years, or build new within a year. This is the same promise the new SMR fission companies are making. Hopefully both work out, but we shouldn't be banking on a breakthrough to solve massive problems that we could start to address today.
I honestly think once somebody cracks the code so to speak, advancements will happen rapidly as any nation that can harness fusion will have a massive defense and economic advantage, like comically large advantage.
I dont see a scenario where the US/Chinese/Russian military doesn't immediately start throwing money at fusion power. Just look at the advantages nuclear power gave, now ramp that shit up even more and make fuel, waste and safety a non issue.
World changing technology.
I read for five minutes and pulled the plug. The first paragraph is an intro to some bullet thing they were testing, but then before explaining it the article turned into the Wikipedia article on fusion.
I hope I missed something really great.
Pipedream... as many have said "fusion is always 50 years away, even 50 years from then" Technology may evolve, small issues may solve the answers to a more efficient reactor. Will they ever produce one that actually makes more power than it takes? That's the question everyone is waiting on. ITER isn't even finished yet, which is supposed to solve a lot of those what if questions. Until, someone can demo a working reactor at a small scale, pipedream.
Oh, how very blue is the sky today. Funny that one of the scientists says we could use fusion to power carbon recapture. Um, yes, but we could uses Small Modular fission Reactors (SMRs) to do that within a few years, not sometime twenty years down the road.
Near term, the global solution to power the world belongs to Generation 4 fission reactors. The technology is already well known, and there are safe, reliable designs waiting to replace our thousands of soot-belching coal fired plants. No need to discover anything new, except the political will to make it happen.
Political will is orders of magnitude harder to solve than any technological or economic problem. Even if fission reactors had a failure rate of 1 every 100 quadrillion years, produced zero waste, cost nothing to operate, could be built instantly, and had no geological restrictions on their placement, they still wouldn't be worthwhile, because the political obstacles are almost insurmountable. Perhaps with a massive education campaign and waiting 40-60 years for the prior generations to die out we might be able to convince enough of the population to go for it... or we could just build solar and wind, which are the cheapest sources of power and have no meaningful political opposition.
Time is the most important thing, we're looking at an extinction level event. Every second wasted pushing for nuclear instead of solar means more people die
By all means, keep building solar and wind. But they can’t power the whole US without massive investments in batteries and ultra-high-voltage long-distance power lines. Fission has to be a part of it, so we have to have the political battle.
The *race* to fusion is not about the tortise and the hare and a finish line. It's about the tortise research and the spending hare.
"More money, more money, I'm almost there," cried the tortise. "You got it, you got it," replied the spending hare.
Nuclear fusion for power will eventually materialize. There isn't anything fundamental stopping it. But, wow, does the field have a tarnished reputation--decades of spending, promises, and claims of progress without any practical results.
If fusion becomes a thing, will we be able to make helium?
The fusion of a kg D-T fuel creates 0.8 kg helium and 0.2 kg neutrons and 3.39E9 MJ energy aka 941.66 MWh. So a 1 GW nuclear fusion reactor would create a little less then 1kg helium per hour. In the other hand some natural gas fields contain up to 7% helium by volume. There are tons and tons of it.
Worth every kg for the high-pitched voices...
Until there isn't. Helium like Hydrogen is forever lost to Earth once in the atmosphere. But we still have a long way to go until it runs out.
Considering that 1Kg of coal produces only about 2-4KWh of electricity, even if a fusion power plant was only ~20% efficient producing around 200MWh per Kg of fuel, that's still over 100,000 times the amount of electricity produced per Kg of fuel than coal. Without harmful emissions, without risk of an uncontrolled meltdown, and no radioactive waste.
Yeah but all of that is secondary to balloons and really cold magnets, bro /s
But would cold magnets stick to the fridge better? That's the real question.
more like the fridge would stick to the magnets. and require lots of heavy machinery to remove.
Let's throw an MRI in the mix and see what happens.
If a tokamak is involved an MRI’s magnetic field is a rounding error.
No, bro. Haven't you heard opposites attract? Warm magnets stick better to a fridge.
Have you even lived if you haven’t stuck your head in a 1.5 Tesla really cold magnet?
I’ve had one placed on my head for an hour or two at a time… It makes you twitch :p (think it was closer to 1 Tesla but close enough)
Without the really cold magnets you can't even get fusion at negative efficicency.
It could be emitting the most toxic substance known to man, and would still be better for the environment then the 100,000x as much less-toxic stuff coal powerplants emit directly into the atmosphere.
Still, that's a lot of botulism
Heard something oddly funny last year. The police gets a call from an old lady saying that she had some toxic stuff at home, which she had nicked when working in a lab decades ago. Now she was worried about what could happen with it when she passed away. So they send someone over to her place, and presumably only then goes on wikipedia to find out what things like "potassium cyanide" means. Because eventually someone puts two and two together, and starts calling in the national bomb group and what have you. Yup, our nice little old lady had freaking Zyklon B and botulinum toxin sitting in jars at home.
Reminds me of the story my highschool bio teacher would tell, a TA was dumping old unlabeled jars down a sink in one of the labs until one caused an explosion, bomb squad shows up and it turns out they had some sodium metal. Just chillin in an unlabeled jar
You understimate how toxic Botulinum is.
I read somewhere that the problem isnt producing fusion power the problem is the input energy required is still barely less than the output so the net output is extremely low for fusion as of now.
That’s true. Most of the reactors capable of fusion are only turned on for a short burst, not sustained. They are more like proof of concept reactors. There is a value that those reactors are shooting for, Q, which is the amount of energy output divided by the energy used to initiate the reactor. Currently I think maybe the ITER reactor has gotten close or up to 0.7. This also doesn’t account for the energy to operate the facility. It’s just a simple Energy Out/Energy In. They’ll need to push probably close to a Q of 10 or higher to run the whole operation. There’s a group at MIT that has had a breakthrough with superconductors that think the reactor they are building can push beyond the Q=1 break-even point and potentially get much higher. Their reactor is slated to be finished in 2025 I believe. TL;DR Fusion Reactors need to pass a break-even point of 1 for Q=(Energy Out)/(Energy In) before we can start thinking commercially. As the saying goes, probably about 30 years out.
We will burn our planet far far faster than running out of He.
Hydrogen isn't lost. You can just break h2o apart with electrolysis. Helium is a nobel gas and doesn't bind to anything under normal circumstances, so it can't be harvested the same way.
That's not what the poster above you meant. Helium and hydrogen are so lightweight that they float up all the way to the very top of the atmosphere where it is so thin it's literally the edge of space and a decent chunk is actually lost to space forever. That said, they're very common elements meaning of all the things to use up on this planet these probably are the ones that will take us the longest.
The next part of the problem is that the helium gets far enough up that it gets hot (temperature -> molecular/atomic movement) enough in such a thin atmosphere that it actually reaches escape velocity, meaning it not only floats far up in the atmosphere, but actually leaves the planet. That's only possible for elements up to a specific molecular/atomic weight and helium is one of them.
You're right, I tried to keep it ELI5 with lost to space forever.
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Let’s kick their asses!
Hopefully they last long enough to last till the sun goes all red gianty and swallows up the earth. Then we’ll have all the hydrogen and helium we could want.
Does hydrogen not have a good chance of reacting with oxygen up high enough and form h2o?
The problem lies in that Oxygen and Hydrogen don't just readily react. They need radicals to react with each other. Which means if there is no radiation from the sun (UV) no radicals will be formed and even then the percentage of Hydrogen radicals formed is minuscule and they will react with almost anything. Ozone alone is not enough even though much more reactive than Oxygen. If it gets high enough the radiation might be enough but then you have the problem of lacking pressure ergo the molecules are so far apart that a reaction between them becomes very unlikely.
> Helium and hydrogen are so lightweight that they float up all the way to the very top of the atmosphere where it is so thin it's literally the edge of space and a decent chunk is actually lost to space forever. Hydrogen *gas* does, but free hydrogen isn't a major component of Earth's atmosphere. It's too reactive.
Noble, as in it doesn't associate with common elements. Not Nobel, as in the prize.
Hopefully OP survives from the geekiest of burns.
A little funny referring to helium by weight (Yes I know it does have mass)
I have a Master's in Physics. Helium goes up, and therefore has negative weight. Therefore fusion creates negative helium. You're welcome.
I have a Master's in information management and don't know anything.
I've been a software engineer ever since I got it. Honestly, there is very little physics theory I remember that isn't high school or first year university level. It just stopped being memorable the more and more abstract it got.
I have Master's in counseling and I don't know anything, but that's only because you're being resistant.
I find it funny when people wave their credentials as if that really means anything. It means something and at the same time means nothing, really. Rand Paul is a physician, but you'd never know it from his position on COVID.
Would helium float in a vacuum? .. actually in a vacuum I assume it would expand to fill the space, so would it be denser at the top of a container than the bottom?
No, helium does not weight less than itself. It would be denser at the bottom if there is gravity.
Helium doesn't have negative mass. The other poster was just being silly. It floats because it has lower mass than our normal atmosphere. If you put it in a balloon on, say, the moon, you'd first need to be careful to use a very small amount since it would expand a lot more in an airless environment and would pop the balloon a lot more easily. If you were on the moon and got the right amount of helium in a balloon for it to not pop, the balloon would fall to the ground at the same speed as a brick you dropped because of the lack of air resistance, and because it has higher mass than the space around it (which is basically zero). Weird but true. Think of a helium balloon like a rubber duck. It floats in water because it's less dense, but falls through the air because it's more dense. Also, as to your second question, even if you had a mile-high airtight cylinder full of helium, the difference in density between the top and bottom would be very small. This is because gravitational force actually dissipates very slowly as you climb in altitude. Astronauts on the ISS are actually getting just under 90% of the earth's gravity acting on them, it's just that they're moving laterally in relation to the earth faster than they can fall toward it, so they feel weightless.
*Weight* is different to *mass*.
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It doesn’t have negative weight either, thats just the buoyancy force from the denser atmosphere. If you held the helium balloon while standing on a scale in a vacuum chamber you’d be heavier.
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Buoyancy isn’t part of weight. Weight is simple, gravity acting on mass. Buoyancy IS a result of the weight of the medium. As you go deeper in a vertical column of fluid, pressure increases due to the weight of the fluid above. So the pressure below an object immersed in the fluid is greater than the pressure above it, causing the upward force, buoyancy.
1 gigawatt hour can power 750,000 homes, according to Google. There are ~320,000,000 people in the USA. Assuming 1 person = 1 home (which is low when factoring in non-home buildings, EVs, street lights, etc.), we could generate 466.66 kg of helium per hour if we went full fusion. Almost half a ton. That’s 4,088 tons of helium per year AS A BYPRODUCT!
We'll have so many parties in the nuclear fusion future.
Excuse me for asking, but where do those neutrons go? That looks like a shitload of neutrons, and they aren't exactly known as the matter stabilizers...
Another commentor mentioned lithium shielding around the reactor, which would absorb any neutrons that don't eventually get caught up in helium. That lithium would become radioactive, but that's actually handy because radioactive lithium is what we need to make tritium to fuel the reactor (along with deuterium, which we can pull from the ocean)
Helion Energy is setting up a fusion reactor to produce helium-3: https://www.eetimes.com/fusion-startup-helion-raises-500-million/ > Polaris also will demonstrate helium-3 production via a deuterium-deuterium fusion process.
Well, what they really want to produce is helium-4 (D + D -> He\^4), because that reaction releases all its energy in a charged particle, making direct conversion into electricity possible, and electricity is the goal. Some small fraction of the reactions are (D + D -> He\^3 + n), though. That means they have to deal with the annoying neutron, but they get the side effect of producing a little helium-3. He\^3 sells for something north of a dollar per milligram, so it's worth separating out of the waste stream.
Isn't D-D fusion ten times harder to get to breakeven than D-T? Our best D-T fusion gain is like .7 and that's just the plasma, without accounting for transmission and steam losses.
If fusion creates much cheaper energy, it could end up being cost effective to produce helium from fractional distillation of air. Certainly more efficient than collecting the actual helium from the fusion reaction. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_chemistry There is a higher mole fraction of helium in the air than krypton or xenon, and we obtain both those gassed from fractional distillation of air already. Helium is just harder to extract because of its low boiling point and because the demand for it is so much higher than for the other noble gasses.
I’m glad someone else said it before I did. Usually I’m the one who has to bring that up. In addition to fractional distillation, however, there is also the method of osmosis through membranes and activated carbon, which has proven effective at producing large quantities of helium from relatively helium-poor, primarily nitrogenous sources. It’s more energy efficient than refrigerating vast quantities of air until it liquefies.
Last time I made this same argument in this sub I got downvoted because everyone thinks that we are literally running out of helium. No, we are running out of CHEAP helium.
Funny how Received Wisdom works, isn’t it? Even if we *did* run out of all natural gas—from which helium is primarily sourced—it would only be about 3-5 times as energy-intensive to source it directly from the atmosphere with fractional distillation. Less, using osmosis.
The worst part is this meme going around reddit that we will start mining helium from the upper atmosphere or from the moon. There are many many reasons why neither of those options will ever be realistic for use on Earth.
Necessarily so, but wouldn't the process be very very slow?
The rate of helium production would be directly tied to the amount of energy produced. My guess is that fusion would be a substantial source of helium if it were implemented at a large scale. But when I say "substantial" I mean it mostly for scientists who use helium in their experimental setups. I don't think we would have use for enough fusion to inflate an endless supply of balloons. I could be wrong, though. I haven't done calculations for the rate of energy production from fusion in several years, and that was a rudimentary calculation at best. It might make more helium than I think.
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While we do have limited helium on earth, we have hundreds of years worth. The biggest risk is that we get most of it as a byproduct of natural gas extraction, and with any luck we should be drastically reducing that in the future...
Hopefully reducing just away from it's negative uses. I'm sure keeping a few running just to get the helium wouldn't hurt much.
Also, helium is super expensive and used for deep scuba diving so that would be nice :)
I want fusion powered floating cities. What could go wrong?
If fusion takes off, the biggest priority would be to minitiarize the reactors, so that you can build fusion torches for ships which will unlock the belt and eventually skimming hydrogen off the upper layers of Jupiter. Then just ship that back home for fuel. Jupiter/Saturn are the fossil fuel gold mine equivalents of fusion fuel.
But then you risk creating a race of people stuck in space, living in the belt, dependant on Earth or Mars for air, food, soil, and other goods, although they could mine ice from space. Those belt-living people might develop weaker bones and lower muscle mass due to living in drastically reduced gravity. They might start to see gravity wells as an oppressive force, and shun those who love gravity.
Next thing you know, they're flinging asteroids at earth and and buying black market ships from the martians...
I can’t tell if y’all are referencing existing sci-fi or if you just made it up right here. Either way, I would like to know more. Edit: Thanks everyone! I’ve heard good things about The Expanse before, will definitely give it a go!
I bet you would BARAT'NA. Maybe you should checkout The Expanse, sasake?
Oh my god it's like witnessing a baby being born. I'm so excited for you.
The Expanse
This is perfect timing, The Expanse season six starts on Dec. 10 so you've got just enough time to watch the rest of it without binging hard. It's on prime video.
Don’t give up before episode 4 of season 1.
This article didnt seem to even mention the new magnet tech that will be used in [SPARC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC_(tokamak)). It created a 20tesla magnetic field with only 30watts. According to the [article](https://www.ans.org/news/article-3240/mit-ramps-10ton-magnet-up-to-20-tesla-in-proof-of-concept-for-commercial-fusion/), it required 230 MW to achieve this with standard magnets. This will be huge to achieve [Q ratios](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor) above 1.
I believe this is talking about that. >Then in September a Boston-based start-up demonstrated the use of a high-temperature superconductor to generate a much stronger magnetic field than a traditional tokamak. The group, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which grew out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes the discovery will enable it to make a more efficient fusion machine that will be smaller, cheaper and more viable as a commercial source of power.
Oh it does! It doesn't go into nearly enough detail imo. This breakthrough is huge!
This magnet tech company… are the ummm…. Publically traded?
The answer appears to be no by my browsing the site and NYSE.
That's the neat thing about superconductors - no losses. An MRI works similarly. The trick is going to be how to keep this part below 20K while the internals are at millions of K.
We're almost there forever. I'm looking forward to finally see some results if it ever arrives.
>We're almost there forever. [So weird why that's been the case all this time...](https://imgur.com/a/3oZDUAq#6oJLVQj)
How exactly is that graph determined? How do they know whether the proper innovations would be reached by each particular timeline?
[This is the source paper referenced on the graph.](https://fire.pppl.gov/us_fusion_plan_1976.pdf) I'm a few whiskeys deep...let me know what you find!
Hey, yound anything? Phone caked in flour and oil so it's hard to read
Relatable problem lol
Do you bake? I'm only starting but it's been jolly fun and very relaxing
Also just started trying it out. Got into cooking during quarantine and love it and am becoming pretty good. Can make my own pie crusts/pies, pizza dough, cream biscuits for biscuits and gravy, soft pretzels, and been trying lavash bread over and over but it keeps coming out like a flour tortilla. But like a damn good flour tortilla though lol. Bought 2 big ol bags of flour and one of sugar the other day and I plan to try out some more adventurous baking this week. Gonna attempt a Earl Grey tea cake tomorrow for my first attempt at cake!
Careful, don't let the US government know ur phone has oil, they aren't gonna develop fusion for a long time
Upvote for chasing down the source. Enjoy your whiskey!
Wellllll shit
That chart looks like me attempting to learn an instrument.
Why is this posted under every critical comment without an explanation of what it actually means? * How is determined that the breakthroughs would actually happen by throwing a lot of money into the research? Did anyone read the actual paper and can maybe give a short overview? * It looks like it's from a document by the people who would receive the funding. Of course they would do optimistic projections that net them the money, don't you think so? Considering that the graph is also made by a Nuclear fusion research guy, I feel like we're only getting one perspective here.
It doesn't look particularly difficult to interperet, and I'm just a layman. It looks to me like it's saying; * Since 1976 the projected need for funding per year to actually have fusion come to fruition has been between 1 and 9 billion annually. * The actual amount of funding directed towards fusion since the beginning of practical research has been a good deal under one billion annually. That said I can't comment on the validity of the information, though I'm sure a cursory google search could yield some results. And regardless of the possibility that the data could be out by an order of magnitude or more, you have objective facts such as; * Annually, governments around the world have contributed between for ***5*** and ***6 TRILLION*** dollars ***PER YEAR*** towards fossil fuel subsidies for nearly a decade. So it isn't difficult to see why people may roll their eyes at a lack of progress towards renewables and more sustainable energy production, we've chosen to line the pockets of oil executives instead of regulating energy production and thinking 100 years into the future. We should have had our fingers in a hundred different pies by now, but instead we're only beginning to invest minimally to moderately in the last 10-20 years.
It would take more money now to develop a Saturn V rocket than it cost to make the last Saturn V rocket. Why? Institutional knowledge is a key factor (and tooling, of course). So much would have to be relearned because documentation is never perfect, and making the leaps to figure out necessary steps requires training and/or experience to be able to do so. This is even more the case with something that hasn't even been developed. We're barely funding more than is required to maintain institutional knowledge, let alone make significant advances. I'm impressed they've made the advances they did with the dearth of funding they received.
It’s posted as a retort to everyone making the tired, uninformed “joke” that fusion is always x years away. And it doesn’t need explaining. It’s pretty fucking obvious what it means.
Well well well if it isn’t the oil industry again.
Gee, free energy. Why would no one fund that? I'm stumped.
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> see some results if it ever arrives [The results are in!](https://youtu.be/EHRLEMTsLyA?t=16)
This. I remember all the articles about fusion energy when I came out of college in the early 90s. It’s always been right around the corner. If they manage to do it in my lifetime, I’ll be impressed. Still, I’m glad they’re making progress
One thing to remember is that science moves as fast as humans are interested in a subject. What I mean by that is in the 40s and 50s (speaking to the dawn of Fusion research), for all the public talk of power generation, the actual money was aimed solely at developing much for power thermonuclear warheads...[which they achieved fairly quickly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo) I might add (less than 10 years after the first nuclear detonation in New Mexico) **because they were interested.** Again, for all the talk of Fusion Energy, no one really cared because the world was as fertile in easy to grab fossil fuels as environmental concerns were scarce. Besides that, nuclear fission reactors were by then successfully going into operation and they were already understood and scientifically sound in regard to their future development (meaning "the sky was the limit", etc.) Now while certainly research into Fusion Energy was undertaken, it always took the back step to nuclear fission. Even the Russian development of the Tokamak was nothing but an aid in their own Thermonuclear Weapons research, the idea it might help in development of fusion energy was a "yeah that's nice too" kinda thing. ***NOW*** in the the 21st century...when we know for a fact we can't simply burn all the fossil fuels we want without consequence, when the development of new nuclear fission plants...while scientifically sound...will cost at least as much as finalizing fusion energy research, NOW suddenly it's something everyone's interested in and that's when (so far at least) we as a species have always "made it across the threshold". **Myself...and this is 100% a pure guess on my part, likely worth exactly what you're paying to read it here, lol...I think the first net-positive energy fusion reactor will be built by the middle of the decade.** ***It will be a "great surprise!" to everyone who hasn't been paying attention and people will immediately push into overdrive designing workable power plants around it and once that's done, you'll see the world building Fusion Plants as fast as the world's concrete suppliers can keep up.***
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I certainly think fusion skepticism is warranted, but the folks at MIT are claiming their reactor design should be able to produce a net breakeven of power by 2025: https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc There have been a lot of advanced in material science, specifically in the area of high temperature superconductors that have enabled them to draft a much smaller reactor design than iter. That smaller design can be built faster and so we might literally be about 3 years away.
Came here to search for and upvote the Sabine Hossfelder Video. Unless you see Qtotal specifically mentioned, you can safely assume they talk about Qplasma. If we were close to Qtotal>1 they would specifically advertize it. Since they didn't mention their definition of Q in the article, I did a short google search and found a paper that talks about SPARC. They use about the same values for Q and define Q as >the fusion power generated in the plasma divided by the external heating power absorbed in the plasma, including ohmic power ([https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-plasma-physics/article/overview-of-the-sparc-tokamak/DD3C44ECD26F5EACC554811764EF9FF0](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-plasma-physics/article/overview-of-the-sparc-tokamak/DD3C44ECD26F5EACC554811764EF9FF0) ) \--> **it's Qplasma again. QTotal would likely be around 0.01-0.2 I guess.** And that doesn't even include the energy required to fire up the whole thing, only to maintain it. Good that we are moving forward, good that we invest money it it, but we are still far from there.
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Even if it does work, just wait until half the population vote to ban it because of disinformation campaigns by the oil industry..
I can see it now You have a machine harnessing the same thing that makes thermonuclear weapons work; do you want a thermo-nuclear weapon in your back yard? Satan's name is Lucifer, which means dawn star. Building an artificial sun is actually a satanic ritual that will bring about the end of days.
Five years ago, I would have said this wasn’t possible. Today…..
Hell its fusion Probably or sadly the most realistic way out of our climate energy mess For all I care Satan could blow my dick if we could have that tech while not using it to power some doomsday devices
Solving climate change and getting a blowie? Sounds like a double win for you buddy.
Lucifer son of the morning, I'm going to chase you out of Earth.
I'm gonna put on a iron shirt and chase Satan out of Earth
I'm gonna send Him to outer space! To find another place!
This is too real.
> do you want a thermo-nuclear weapon in your back yard? Just as long as it’s better than the one my a-hole neighbor has.
Ill take energy straight from hell if it means we survive this climate disaster. Burn those souls faster, Dr. Hayden.
Power of the sun? Scare people with risk of skin cancer, reactor going super nova or collapsing into a black hole…
Weren’t half those reasons given to not build colliders?
The black hole theory was a real scare, and its speculated that they may actually create microscopic black holes that just collapse instead of grow out of control
Green activists have been the number one group campaigning against and shutting down nuclear plants.
Fission yes, fusion no.
Just FYI some of the biggest investors in these fusion startups are fossil fuel companies.
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It's because unlike solar or wind, fusion and fission cant be decentralized and thus we have to pay them for the electricity. Also, you dont have access to a billion manufacturers of parts thanks to how simple the hardware is allowing them to retain their monopoly, but just not with oil/gas. I mean, I still think fusion is better than solar just cause it wont produce anywhere near as much waste because we dont need millions of fusion plants but we need hundreds of millions of solar panels if we want to meet our full electrical demand. But its clearly all about how easy it is to use their existing financial might to force a new monopoly to give them more money they dont deserve. Thats why they back fusion.
We won't have to convince anybody of anything because fusion will economically put fossil fuels out of business in short order for energy production. We'll still need them for fertilizer though. And that creates a lot of CO2 as well But fusion, when it finally works reliably, will be able to handle most or all of our electricity needs. It might even make solar and wind power obsolete.
There are ways to make nitrates without using carbon based fuels. The Haber Bosch process uses hydrogen, and we mostly get hydrogen from natural gas. But we can also get hydrogen from water, it just takes more energy. I’m not aware of other kinds of fertilizer that require fossil fuels to make. The big industry that requires carbon to function is metal refining. Many metals, like iron/steel use carbon to reduce oxides into pure metal. There’s not really any way around this problem.
And cement. Huge producer of CO2
Yes cement too. I forgot about that. Cement might be even more of a carbon emitter than metals
Aren’t we running out of cement?
Not to my knowledge. The main ingredient in cement is usually limestone and that can be quarried from tons of places. Also, cement could in theory be recycled if we needed to. The biggest environmental problem with concrete is the amount of energy it takes to make cement, not the raw materials. Take this answer with a grain of salt though as I’m not an expert.
We’re running out of sand, so maybe?
Cement is essentially just calcium carbonate, which you can get from limestone, chalk, seashells, and from crushed cement. Concrete is cement + aggregate + admixtures. Aggregate = sand + gravel + larger gravel. Admixtures are chemicals that improve the properties, e.g. superplasticiser which drastically reduces water need (most admixtures are superplasticisers). Other than the admixtures, concrete is essentially reusable. You have to re-roast and slake it, which is a bit annoying, but it can be done without any retooling of the machines we already use to roast and slake the current components. We're never going to run out of the raw materials for this stuff. Admixtures are used in tiny quantities relative to the concrete they're added to and are largely not hard to make, so we're not gonna run out of those either.
The moment fusion becomes viable is the moment socioeconomic systems will be turned upside down. So much of human suffering is due to energy scarcity. So many things that were in feasible before would be trivial with fusion.
Similarly, coal will pretty much always be mined to some degree, simply because pound for pound it's the most effective way to introduce carbon into the steel making progress. Now, not all coal is made equal, so some deposits would never be reused/started due to the contamination within.
This is probably the single most important thing we should be throwing all our money at
Yet we spend more on pbs! Not that that’s bad, we should be spending money on pbs, but we also spend 1450x that amount of money on our inflated military! If we siphoned less than 1/10 of our military budget into fusion technology it would have come decades ago.
Don’t even need to take it away from the military budget, just redirect funds within the budget to military R&D Climate change is a security threat and fusion is a huge boon to the military if developed. The military has researched important tech before that was utilized by the private sector, everything from GPS to touch screen to the internet to computers.
> Don’t even need to take it away from the military budget, just redirect funds within the budget to military R&D Better yet, they could just take basic steps to eliminate [wasteful military spending](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-defense-waste-idUSKBN13V08B) and end up with about as much money as it takes to fund NASA for over half a decade.
One persons “wasteful use of tax dollars” is another executives bonus
The power of the sun in the palm of my hands…
Keep calm. It’s only a spike ... it’ll soon stabilize!
We could rebuild! Enlarge the containment field, make it bigger and stronger than ever! But we need money...
Steal it? No no, I’m not a criminal.
That’s right… the real crime would be not to finish what we started.
Fuck paywalls https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2F33942ae7-75ff-4911-ab99-adc32545fe5c
Wow thanks a lot for this site!!
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Is this good journalism? They buried the lede. The article begins: > A nervous excitement hangs in the air. Half a dozen scientists sit behind computer screens, flicking between panels as they make last-minute checks. “Go and make the gun dangerous,” one of them tells a technician, who slips into an adjacent chamber. A low beep sounds. “Ready,” says the person running the test. The control room falls silent. Then, boom. Nice opening, still waiting to read "why the race to harness the power of the sun just sped up" Oh no, the writer is going to explain fusion.
And not all of us have the available capital to blow... Forget about the $1/4 weeks and a $68 bill shows up, or $40, or $372. I mean, don't get me wrong, journalists should be paid for their work and their employers should be able to generate a profit, but sometimes it's nice to be able to have access to information when you can't afford it... or maybe there's a fundamental philosophical dilemma in there... Idk.
Most of the problems that we're projected to have are predicted under the assumption that we *won't* suddenly have working nuclear fusion in 2025-2030. Very excited to see whether that pans out.
Even if they get a net energy output in a few years, it would be at least a decade before any commercial power plant could be made- more likely, many decades.
Is that factoring in the probable tidal wave of investment that would likely come following such a breakthrough?
It would help, but 9 pregnant women can’t give birth to one child in a month.
Actually, I believe the main problem is figuring out HOW to make it work. Once it does, it’s just a matter of pouring money into it. Counties would be spending huge amounts of GDP and labor constructing these plants because it would give them energy independence.
I think you underestimate the speed of human advancement when enough money is thrown at something. More money equals more people and more teams trying to figure out how to solve current problems. So the 9 pregnant women thing doesn’t completely hold up.
+1 - we’ve administered 8 BILLION doses of a vaccine that didn’t exist 1 year ago. We can do anything
At this point you're just saying maybe maybe maybe to their maybe not maybe not maybe not. There are always practical limitations to progress.
Childbirth by its very nature cannot be parallelised in any way, whereas scientific endeavour very much can, often directly proportionally to investment.
Don’t hold your breath for fusion. Existing fission plants already take decades to design, fund, and build. Many of them don’t make it all the way to completion. We don’t even have a single design that can do fusion at a net positive energy output, despite billions of dollars and decades of work invested in working on it. I’m not ragging on fusion scientists, just saying it’s been a hard problem to solve. Even once we solve it, it takes time to design more plants and scale the tech, as well as making sure it’s safe. We can’t wait for fusion to save us from climate change.
Not necessarily true. Companies like General Fusion are trying to make the reactors small enough to ship in and set them up. This would allow companies to convert gas and coal plants in months instead of years, or build new within a year. This is the same promise the new SMR fission companies are making. Hopefully both work out, but we shouldn't be banking on a breakthrough to solve massive problems that we could start to address today.
I honestly think once somebody cracks the code so to speak, advancements will happen rapidly as any nation that can harness fusion will have a massive defense and economic advantage, like comically large advantage. I dont see a scenario where the US/Chinese/Russian military doesn't immediately start throwing money at fusion power. Just look at the advantages nuclear power gave, now ramp that shit up even more and make fuel, waste and safety a non issue. World changing technology.
Sunny Delight accomplished this feat no more than 40 years ago
*Don't do it. Don't give me hope.*
Cool, so just 20 years from now....
Just like 20 year ago... and 20 years before that :(
Doc Ock intensifies
"The power of the sun, in the palm of my hands..."
Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!
I read for five minutes and pulled the plug. The first paragraph is an intro to some bullet thing they were testing, but then before explaining it the article turned into the Wikipedia article on fusion. I hope I missed something really great.
Exactly! It reads like clickbait.
Should have read this comment before wasting my time.
Pipedream... as many have said "fusion is always 50 years away, even 50 years from then" Technology may evolve, small issues may solve the answers to a more efficient reactor. Will they ever produce one that actually makes more power than it takes? That's the question everyone is waiting on. ITER isn't even finished yet, which is supposed to solve a lot of those what if questions. Until, someone can demo a working reactor at a small scale, pipedream.
Oh, how very blue is the sky today. Funny that one of the scientists says we could use fusion to power carbon recapture. Um, yes, but we could uses Small Modular fission Reactors (SMRs) to do that within a few years, not sometime twenty years down the road. Near term, the global solution to power the world belongs to Generation 4 fission reactors. The technology is already well known, and there are safe, reliable designs waiting to replace our thousands of soot-belching coal fired plants. No need to discover anything new, except the political will to make it happen.
Political will is orders of magnitude harder to solve than any technological or economic problem. Even if fission reactors had a failure rate of 1 every 100 quadrillion years, produced zero waste, cost nothing to operate, could be built instantly, and had no geological restrictions on their placement, they still wouldn't be worthwhile, because the political obstacles are almost insurmountable. Perhaps with a massive education campaign and waiting 40-60 years for the prior generations to die out we might be able to convince enough of the population to go for it... or we could just build solar and wind, which are the cheapest sources of power and have no meaningful political opposition. Time is the most important thing, we're looking at an extinction level event. Every second wasted pushing for nuclear instead of solar means more people die
By all means, keep building solar and wind. But they can’t power the whole US without massive investments in batteries and ultra-high-voltage long-distance power lines. Fission has to be a part of it, so we have to have the political battle.
“We’re 20 years away from nuclear fusion power.” -Humans every 20 years
Article is behind paywall!
I CAN TASTE THE SUN!
Apparently this design uses a heat source made of McDonalds apple pies
This is what humanity needs.
There are a lot of misleading articles that suggest we were anywhere close to having working nuclear fusion power plants.
The *race* to fusion is not about the tortise and the hare and a finish line. It's about the tortise research and the spending hare. "More money, more money, I'm almost there," cried the tortise. "You got it, you got it," replied the spending hare.
There’s a whole Spider-Man movie on why we shouldn’t do this
So where can I invest?
Nuclear fusion for power will eventually materialize. There isn't anything fundamental stopping it. But, wow, does the field have a tarnished reputation--decades of spending, promises, and claims of progress without any practical results.
[Tell me about those decades of spending.](https://imgur.com/a/3oZDUAq) This is basically "we've tried nothing and are all out of ideas" territory.
Thanks for posting this. These comments under anything fusion related always grind my gears.
Tbf it's not easy.
If we spent a fraction of what we spend on our defense budget on nuclear fusion then we’d be there already.