We have worked on fusion for generations now, and will likely continue to work on it for generations more. This sucks but took generations for solar to get as good as it is today (where its viable in certain climates) Some things are just a hard slog.
United States Biden administration policies and actions - megathread
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We have worked on fusion for generations now, and will likely continue to work on it for generations more. This sucks but took generations for solar to get as good as it is today (where its viable in certain climates) Some things are just a hard slog.
mrttao
Well-known member
My point is that even when the technology becomes available, it won't be a game changer.
We are not going to build fusion reactors all over the world to provide all humanity with plentiful cheap energy.
Just like we didn't do the same with fission reactors.
Most countries won't even have the tech even if they wanted to build them.
The few countries that have it, will see people protesting against building them because "muh radioactive waste".
If some are actually built, they will be under utilized so that they can continue to price gouge customers.
A game changer would be alterations to society that would see the punting of all the retarded woke and green government officials. And mass worldwide deployment of fission reactors.
History Learner
Well-known member
Basically, from reading the announcement, Fusion is where Fission was in 1942. If money and focus continues to be spent here, then we could see commercialization starting by around 2040. Besides the immense energy generation benefits, some perks of Fusion (As well as Gen IV Fission!) include:
- Mass desalination, the high temperatures make it economical on a mass scale.
- Mass hydrogen production, based off the same. No need for electric batteries, Hydrogen cars can use modified ICE engines.
- Fertilizer production becomes possible without petrol inputs, as you can do electrolysis on an affordable basis.
Doomsought
Well-known member
No. Hydrogen sucks. Even space flight, where hydrogen has the most advantages, is moving away from hydrogen as a fuel. It has an insanely low density even with cryogenic storage, it always leaks, and corrodes structural metals.
A cryogenic high pressure gas tank is far more dangerous than a tank of gasoline (incredibly safe for its energy density) or even electric batteries (which are always full of face melting acid). A hydrogen powered car would have multiple paths towards explosion, compared to a gasoline powered car which requires multiple conditions to get to an explosion.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
...No.
Fission is very, very simple to get working at base. You literally just pile together enough fissile material to get chain reactions going. All of the expense and complication is in shielding the rest of the world from that reaction, controlling it to a rate that you want, and harnessing the energy that comes out of it.
Fusion requires tens/hundreds of millions of dollars just to make the reaction happen at all. And that's without having the reaction chamber apparatus redesigned to add in the function of harnessing the energy that you're generating.
As any engineer who has worked in machine design can tell you, as soon as you add an additional requirement to what a machine is supposed to do, you start having to make compromises to every single other thing the machine does, in order to fit that additional requirement. We have no idea when an energy-positive reactor design capable of harvesting useful amounts of energy will be within our technological capabilities to build, much less build economically.
It isn't impossible for Fusion to be economically viable by 2040. We could have some massive technological breakthrough that suddenly makes it possible, but that's extremely unlikely. Most of the factors working to the benefit of Fission are working against Fusion, and that isn't easy to overcome.
The only reason it's even come as far as it has, is because pop-culture perception of fusion as some sort of panacea for decades has gotten people to throw billions of dollars at development despite its continual failure to perform. If Fission infrastructure and technology had received that money instead, we'd be living in a world of much cheaper energy.
Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
GM really failed all of us when they didn't make practical fusion on schedule in 2020 like they where meant to. And if you don't get that reference give up your nerd card
Typhonis
Well-known member
I'm still waiting for MR. Fusion to come out.
History Learner
Well-known member
And yet, from the Chicago Pile in 1942 it took until the late 1950s to get a working commercial reactor going. At it's base, the same issues you note with Fission are the same issue with Fusion, just at a larger scale. The temperatures and pressures approach that of the sun, so you need to figure out confinement, and the "piling together fissile material" is essentially what a Fusion reaction entails. In this case, and demonstrating the concept is achievable in general, it was done with lasers compressing the fuel pellet is my understanding.
Just as we proved in 1942 Fission could work, we have done the same with Fusion. Now the challenge is scaling it out.
Fission took Billions, not inflation adjusted IIRC, to get figured out in the 1940s and then it took over a decade of military research to a similar tune of money to get it figured out sufficiently to enable Fission energy. This presents a barrier of resources and time, but not impossibility; the theoretical basis has now been proven after all.
Indeed, hence why it took almost twenty years between 1942 and the first commercial reactors. In order to get to that point, you have to invest money and time. Most modern plants in the U.S. can trace their lineage to the PWRs of Rickover, for example.
Rather, this sort of thinking served to create a self fulfilling prophecy:
So, what changed to enable this breakthrough? Federal funding massively increased under both Trump and Biden, while private sources have also stepped in to make up for the lack of public investment to the tune of $2 Billion. That infusion is why we are hearing about a lot of recent breakthroughs in Fusion research in the media.
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History Learner
Well-known member
We're already in a Peak Cheap Oil era and I don't foresee fully electric vehicles working out given the material input conditions, so that really just leaves HEVs.
Doomsought
Well-known member
Amonia fule cells, synthetic gasoline (there are hundreds of variants), synthetic propane, butane, methane... this list goes on.
History Learner
Well-known member
Ammonia can be distilled by Fusion, but it only has ~1/3 the energy density of gasoline. All the rest are fossil fuels in decline, or simply insufficient; ethanol already has a net negative cost balance on it.
Arch Dornan
Oh, lovely. They've sent me a mo-ron.
History Learner
Well-known member
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zerowww.zerohedge.com
Normalising child molestation aren't they?
[Fedpost]
Arch Dornan
Oh, lovely. They've sent me a mo-ron.
This administration invited a drag queen endorsing child sexual relations on their social media. I'm starting to be convinced.
Biden Invites Drag Queen Who Said, ‘Kids Are Out to Sing and Suck D!’
archived 14 Dec 2022 06:34:30 UTC
History Learner
Well-known member
This administration invited a drag queen endorsing child sexual relations on their social media. I'm starting to be convinced.
Biden Invites Drag Queen Who Said, ‘Kids Are Out to Sing and Suck D!’
archived 14 Dec 2022 06:34:30 UTCarchive.ph
Many such cases as of late, and it was obvious in the mid 2010s. The days after gay marriage was legalized there was tepid articles broaching the subject and the APA even back then tried to justify viewing pedos as a pathology; the religious right back then was still strong enough to put enough heat on them they backed off from it. Now?
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Your continuing ability to be hideously wrong and yet so confident about so many different subjects is mind-boggling.
The possibility of a self-sustaining nuclear fission reaction was first theorized in 1932. The first successful reactor (CP-1 in Chicago) was built in 1942, just ten years later, and cost 2.7 million dollars. The source didn't say whether that was 1942 or modern dollars, so just for comparison, that'd be 49.3 million dollars if it isn't. Given Fermi (project lead) described it as '"a crude pile of black bricks and wooden timbers" I doubt it was the higher number, but it's possible.
The Trinity Test took place in July 1945, and the first nuclear bombs were dropped the same year. The first commercial power plant came online in 1957, 25 years after the first fission reaction was theorized.
Nuclear Fusion reactions were first theorized no later than 1926 (first publication I found record of), first demonstrated eight years later in 1934 (fusing Deuterium into Helium by Rutherford), and the first commercial reactor came online in...
Never.
Funny, that.
The National Ignition Facility, the place where this recent test took place, has been in operation and/or development for decades, and the best number I could readily find for its cost was 4.2 Billion as of 2008. Even if we take the inflated number, that's more than eighty times the cost of the CP-1 pile. The facility came online in 2009, a mere eighty-three years after the idea was first posited, and involves enormous arrays of high-powered lasers focusing immense amounts of energy on pellets to initiate fusion reactions.
There's a little bit of a difference in the timetables there.
And, of course, things go much, much further than that.
NIF isn't the only facility working on Fusion, and hasn't been the only one for decades. The industrial and technological resources available over the last three decades dwarf those available to the team that developed, designed, and built CP-1. Further, the research on Fission was a tightly-guarded secret, highly classified and restricted, limiting the available talent pools, and of course open international cooperation was completely out of the question.
Fusion, on the other hand? It's openly researched all over the world, and aside from the Chinese, the research is openly shared as different teams work collaboratively towards a common objective, and have been doing so for decades.
Yet, for some reason, in spite of all the resources, manpower, technology, and time that fusion research has had available, it hasn't given us anything viable for energy production for almost ninety years.
It's almost like it's something monumentally harder to do. It's almost like there's very harsh physical reasons why Fission development was able to proceed rapidly and effectively, even while it was a highly-classified matter of state security, while Fusion research did not.
The sorts of reasons that mean your blithe assertion that Fusion will follow a similar time-table from 'first reactor' to 'commercial implementation,' are based on comparing apples to oranges. Yes, Fission and Fusion are both nuclear 'fruit,' but they function literally in the opposite way of each other, and one of them is just much, much, much easier to do than the other.
P.S. You may have noticed I didn't mention when the first fusion bomb was tested, even though I did for the fission bomb. That's because fusion bombs are actually two-stage nuclear weapons that need a fission detonation in order to create the energy necessary to trigger the secondary fusion detonation. That's how hard it is to make fusion happen. Hard enough that it's standard practice to kick it off with a fission nuke.
History Learner
Well-known member
No, I'm just simply correct and it's why you have to deliberate misinterpret what I said.
This is what I mean by misinterpreting what I said, in that I said getting Fission figured out cost over $2 Billion; I did not say the Chicago Pile was that amount. The amount was actually referring to the cost of the total Manhattan Project, given that took Fission from a theory to a reality, not the CP-1 in of itself. In constant 1996 dollars, this was $20 Billion when adjusted for inflation; in 2022, adjusting that figure means the cost of the Manhattan Project was ~$40 Billion.
Really undercuts the idea you're presenting here, no?
And about 20 years from the start of the Manhattan Project, yes.
Well yes, and I'd imagine you'd be saying the same about Fission if we didn't invest $40 Billion into that. You seem to be trying extremely hard to miss the central point here.
Indeed, because the NIF was underfunded by about 10x of the Manhattan Project and was not built in terms of a permissive war time environment, where everything goes and they get priority of resources in the country. It's been awhile since I looked into it, but a lot of the MP infrastructure was built in the TWA area simply because of the massive needs in resources, from energy to material inputs like aluminum. That's never been the case with Fusion funding or priority.
So we can conclude your comments on me speaking confidently while not knowing anything were project on your end, given you don't know the Manhattan Project included Canadian, Australian and British scientists? The entire project was born when the Commonwealth brought the Tube Alloys to the United States. Perhaps you should know more about the subject before arguing upon it?
Outside of ITER, no and I challenge you to prove otherwise.
Well yes, that's what happens when you don't fund something. Given we started funding it and started achieving milestones, including this one, perhaps you should stop and consider what your argument even is before continuing? As it stands, it's just circular logic.
Well yeah, injecting over $40 Billion in R&D tends to do that with anything, including Fusion as we've seen.
Going off costs of the both compared, not at all. $40 Billion in 2022 for Fission vs roughly $40 Billion for one of the medium development paths the U.S. outlined in 1976.
Sure, given we had not invested in any better methods into Fusion in the 1950s. Again, you seem dead set on purposefully missing the main point.
mrttao
Well-known member
fuck dammit. another 160$ from every single man woman and child in america.
> african warlords pocketing the money
nah. most will be pocketted by american politicians via their kickbacks. with a sizeable portion going to the "elected officials" in africa. the warlords will get the smallest slice of the pie.
> invest it in govt reforms and voter registration
> voter registration
say what? I thought voter registration was super mega ultra racis and literally hitler
also, not investing 1 single cent into infrastructure. all of the things he said they will "invest" in are the governments themselves.
Sergeant Foley
Well-known member
Biden tapping former US Rep. Joe Kennedy, III (D-MA) as US Envoy to Northern Ireland