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Do you think we'll ever see Nuclear Fusion power stations in our lifetime?

rich! said:
Well, I spent today at UKAEA at a workshop on ITER.

Quick conclusions:

  • This is one hell of a complex way to do it

In more detail: JET generated .75x input power. Other tokomak research makes ITER confident they will generate 10x input power, which means 500MW or so. ITER is a proof-of-concept of (a) big tokomak and (b) being able to build and maintain big tokomak, given that it would need 125 years after switchoff before someone could go into the torus.

ITER is first plasma in 2018, which looks like an aggressive schedule (!) given the insane number of things they are doing from scratch. After ITER, the plan is to build DEMO which is a proof-of-concept of power generation from the tokomak, then PROTO which is a prototype power plant. So that's 40-50 years in all.

Meanwhile, just down the road at Harwell, they're doing the next-stage laser ignited fusion plant. This seems more sane, somehow, even though it's still "you can't go in there", if only because they seem to be easier to build...

As to Polywell - have I mentioned Kelly Johnson yet in this thread? "Starve before doing business with the US navy"....
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Just so we're clear - JET currently generates 0.75 of the power input (i.e. 1mw in = 0.75mw out), or 0.75% over the energy input (i.e. 1mw in, 1.075mw out)? And this makes them confident that ITER will take 50mw and make 500mw out?

BTW, by Kelly JOhnson, do you mean this dude? Quite a design resumé!
 
I would have thought it would be like computer memory though. Consider the ZX Spectrum with it's 16K. And what has mine got now? 4 Gigs? The memory capacity of computers rose extraordinarily steeply with the increased complexity of the tasks. Think about all the new particle accelerators that will be built utilising this sudden glut of energy, not to mention the things that haven't been invented.

It would be the equivalent of building an ever expanding sun on our planet.
 
kyser_soze said:
Just so we're clear - JET currently generates 0.75 of the power input (i.e. 1mw in = 0.75mw out), or 0.75% over the energy input (i.e. 1mw in, 1.075mw out)? And this makes them confident that ITER will take 50mw and make 500mw out?

BTW, by Kelly JOhnson, do you mean this dude? Quite a design resumé!
Click to expand...

0.75 of power input, yes.

ITER is a lot bigger (hundreds of m3 of plasma) and a lot higher "forcing factor", I understand. Really big magnets. HUGE. SERIOUSLY HUGE. fifty-tonne parts to be casually moved in and out through tiny hatches.

And yes, the Blackbird guy....
 
Ah, so is the 'getting more out then you put in' thing a function of size in fusion, or is it simply that JET was never designed to generate more energy than is input?
 
kyser_soze said:
Ah, so is the 'getting more out then you put in' thing a function of size in fusion, or is it simply that JET was never designed to generate more energy than is input?
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It generally is a function of size, yes. That and field strength.
 
kyser_soze said:
Ah, so is the 'getting more out then you put in' thing a function of size in fusion, or is it simply that JET was never designed to generate more energy than is input?
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JET was the first one converted to run on a "fuel mix", but it hasn't been set up to generate power.
 
chazegee said:
I would have thought it would be like computer memory though. Consider the ZX Spectrum with it's 16K. And what has mine got now? 4 Gigs? The memory capacity of computers rose extraordinarily steeply with the increased complexity of the tasks. Think about all the new particle accelerators that will be built utilising this sudden glut of energy, not to mention the things that haven't been invented.

It would be the equivalent of building an ever expanding sun on our planet.
Click to expand...

I can't tell if you're being serious or not.

Then again, one poster on another thread asked if the tides and wind would 'run out' if we used them to generate renewable energy.

So I reckon it's possible you're serious. If you are have one of these - :facepalm: If not I apologise.
 
rich! said:
Wait till they send you out to service the offshore ones :D
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I can't wait.

Not that they're any bigger, generally, maybe a bit.

Next generation will be sunk in much deeper water (60m+) but there's not much advantage in going beyond 100 - 120m tower height, as that's where the wind is.

With the deeper sink, you can go beyond horizon from shore more often, thus making planning permission issues go away. All the NIMBYs shut their yapping holes when the turbines ANITBY.
 
spacemonkey said:
I can't tell if you're being serious or not.

Then again, one poster on another thread asked if the tides and wind would 'run out' if we used them to generate renewable energy.

So I reckon it's possible you're serious. If you are have one of these - :facepalm: If not I apologise.
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There is a point to it, with effectively unlimited power there would be no real need to economise on power usage. This would mean that more would be used and there is some feedback there with air conditioning as well as continual growth.

Don't think it would quite manage to hit Moore's law though. Nor would it be effectively unlimited with conventional Tokamak Fusion plants, they look like they're going to be hard pressed to meet current £/KW in the next 100 years. God only knows how expensive a Bussard reactor would be to run
 
That report made me do a teeny tiny sex-wee.

So at present, JET has demonstrated that you can get more out than in, NIF should be able to do the same later this year...

Baby steps, eh?
 
kyser_soze said:
Slighty more geeky stuff:

https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/news_releases/2010/NR-10-01-06.html

https://lasers.llnl.gov/newsroom/

https://lasers.llnl.gov/

And the ROW (rest of world) non-ITER fusion project...which apparently will be cheaper cos it's not designed to be a testbed for thermonuclear bombs the way the NIF is...

http://petal.aquitaine.fr/spip.php?lang=en

http://www.hiper-laser.org/
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I saw the head of HiPER give a talk. He was asked about ITER, and had great trouble giving the party line :D

HiPER will be built by 2020, but I suspect the NIF results may help it along a lot...
 
*bumps ancient thread*

I got my annual JET/ITER fix today.

Serious contracts are now being signed for ITER. The assembly guys have a plan where they spend 2015-2019 working 2 shifts 6 days a week to assemble everything and get first plasma. Assuming everything is delivered having been made to the right tolerances. (They didn't look like they thought that bit was likely).

JET is being upgraded, and so we got to go and poke around the base and watch the remote handling guys gauging antenna fins with gauge blocks. (which was more interesting than it sounds).

Talking to a fusion guy on the train home, he reckoned if they stopped messing around with "experimental" designs, and just built an over-specced design using the tech they know about, it would take about 6-10 years and only cost about 15Bn. (I didn't ask which currency)

Plausible reasons were advanced as to the problems with the laser method: you can't run it continuously...
 
No news from the Polywell team, but they are scheduled to report in April. Fingers crossed they have good things to say!
 
The Z pinch is an interesting machine, and they're a lot more open than the polywell team. But the instabilities they're having problems with bother me. Fission is easy because the 'stable' condition (ie. the one the system will assume without any outside control) is a runaway reaction. The tokamak and pinch machines are both combating 'instabilities' in their compressed plasma. Plasma just does not like being squeezed! I just don't see how you could ever hope to 'control' such instabilities - it's like saying you can shake a bowl of water up and then nullify all the waves by carefully shaking it in a different manner. The big attraction of the polywell machine is that there is no hot plasma, and the stable state of the machine is an energy-producing one. In theory, as always :D
 
Crispy said:
The Z pinch is an interesting machine, and they're a lot more open than the polywell team. But the instabilities they're having problems with bother me. Fission is easy because the 'stable' condition (ie. the one the system will assume without any outside control) is a runaway reaction. The tokamak and pinch machines are both combating 'instabilities' in their compressed plasma. Plasma just does not like being squeezed! I just don't see how you could ever hope to 'control' such instabilities - it's like saying you can shake a bowl of water up and then nullify all the waves by carefully shaking it in a different manner. The big attraction of the polywell machine is that there is no hot plasma, and the stable state of the machine is an energy-producing one. In theory, as always :D
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Would an elegant solution be possible in the less immediate future using your Quantum Vacuum Inertia Hypothesis thingumy? If the theory is correct could you not use it to just make a wee sun in a jar by increasing the mass interactions of the reaction?

Not that I'd have a clue about stuff like that of course.
 
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