Electricity too cheap to meter!

[ajohn]

When I heard the USA report I thought it said the first to get more energy out than what needs to be put in. Actually as that has been done before it seems it's a new record but may still be way way off what they think can be achieved. The graphic on the TV suggested a different set up - sort of packet of the right stuff zapped by lasers. Must see if I can find details. Wiki update
On December 13, 2022, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that a gain factor greater than 1 was achieved by the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California using inertial confinement fusion, delivering 2.05 MJ to generate 3.15 MJ from the resulting fusion reaction.[2][3] This is roughly equivalent to a gain factor Q = 1.54 and is the first time that a gain factor Q ≥ 1 has been achieved in the history of nuclear fusion.
There is a bit on it here

National Ignition Facility achieves fusion ignition

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today announced the achievement of fusion ignition at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) — a major scientific breakthrough decades in the making that will pave the way for advancements in...

www.llnl.gov

The more classic versions. Talk of demo versions that actually produce electricity. Seems dates have slipped. The problems with containing the stuff are so great because of the temperatures reached. Not sure for how long any of them have run once powered up.

It all sounds don't hold your breath - but - you never know.

 

[Justin Passing]

This one's not the tokamak. The yank one has been running - and failing to ignite properly, for years. But every time they did, or do, a run, the bang meant they had to do repairs to the reactor. Never meant to be a contiuous process.
The Harwell toroidal thing e.g. at Culham labs is meant to be a continuous process. I went in a small group to the place a few years ago. It was down for maintenance so we stuck our heads into the toroid. They still had a number of key problems to overcome, is putting it mildly. It was shortly after brexit and they still weren't sure what that meant for the ITER interational project.
The numbers like temperatures are genuinely astronomical - infinity and beyond stuff. They'll need tonnes of tungsten, and helium. Tritium will be something they'll have to make (strarting maybe with seawater) , by bombarding lithium with neutrons iirc, though the CHinese have found a source on the moon...

They need a lot of power to start the process, so there's a ruddy great flywheel underground which they spin up first.
Academic interest, it'll always be a generation away.

 

[IT Minion]

At the moment they fire frozen lumps of fuel in with a gun.

Pellet Injection | US ITER

www.usiter.org

Frozen because it's easier to work with solids, and because a who cares about a few hundred degrees when you're talking about something hotter than the center of the sun?

People have maintained fusion for as long as 17 minutes so while it isn't easy it is possible to keep fusion going for a useful period.

 

[Justin Passing]

The report on the Chinese efforts has an explanation: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/science...ion-reactor-runs-126MILLION-F-17-minutes.html
- not the USA laser fired version.

 

[mattylad]

The French will make reactors for us and we then get to pay 4x the expected price for it.

That's just how things go...

 

[Brigadier]

According to the scientist on R5L yesterday, a working reactor will have fuel basically machine-gunned in.

Perhaps it would be simpler / more realistic to put even more effort into harnessing the working fusion reactor up in the sky?

 

[Deleted member 174758]

Makes me wonder what Nikola Tesla would have thought about all this. He really did believe that he could generate electricity from the earth

 

[wobs]

that exactly what they said about the original nuclear power stations "power so cheap it wont be worth monitoring"

As has been said, was referring to fusion, but it doesn't really mater, as it is an irrelevant quote. First off, even we found it was impossible for energy X, does not mean we shouldn't use energy X. No energy source would ever be too cheap to meter, as someone would try to buy it all up.

This is not the same as:

Imagine if I announced a way to run petrol and diesel cars on tap water that wasn't detrimental to the engine. How long do you think it would be until I mysteriously fell from a tall building

from DIY_Fun_Uk
Which would not happen either.

 

[JohnD]

"US government scientists have achieved net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the second time, a result that is set to fuel optimism that progress is being made towards the dream of limitless, zero-carbon power.

Physicists have since the 1950s sought to harness the fusion reaction that powers the sun, but until December no group had been able to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumes — a condition also known as ignition.

Researchers at the federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, who achieved ignition for the first time last year, repeated the breakthrough in an experiment on July 30 that produced a higher energy output than in December, according to three people with knowledge of the preliminary results."

FT.com

 

[JP_]

They can't just start producing electricity at a price that will put all other methods out of business, because a huge part of our economy relies on that. So it'll be business as usual, with a few people getting much richer.

 

[JohnD]

"The most widely studied approach, known as magnetic confinement, uses huge magnets to hold the fuel in place while it is heated to temperatures hotter than the sun.

The NIF uses a different process, called inertial confinement, in which it fires the world’s largest laser at a tiny capsule of the fuel triggering an implosion."