I head this board believes that commercial nuclear fusion power plants are realistically impossible. Why is that?

We can figure out Fusion later; now the focus shifted toward AI. Even if you got fusion up and running tomorrow, by the time real commercial reactors where to be built, the world would be a much much different place.

What does one thing have to do with the other?

That means nobody gives a fuck about fusion anymore, including this board.

Pls tell me you're not referring to that horrid japanese gadget, the hologram blue waifu shit...

Who needs fusion when we have mEMeDrive?

I don't understand that meme

It's possible, fusion just isn't funded

this btw.
We could be 20 years into fusion already, it's just nobody wants fusion right now. Especially the americans would risk losing their precious petrodollars.

>Bussard says he has made breakthroughs with the Polywell.
>Dies from cancer 2 years later.

Sounds about right.

Did anyone else cringed hard on that fucking fecal matter of a scene with the fusion reactor on spider man 2?

antimatter fission can power a whole continent or power a spaceship for decades. But beware it could blow up a whole planet.

Nigga this is not angels and demons. No such thing as antimatter here

>doing nuclear fusion when you could make a Uranium plasma reactor

ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19730023874.pdf

It's like you people are boring and hate fun

I love fusion research, but I think it might be wise to focus on what we CAN do, right now, and that's fission. Given that the whole LOL We'LL BE OUT OF URANIUM IN 80 YEARS NUCLEAR BTFO thing is totally destroyed by ocean uranium mining, we should try to mass roll-out fission reactors like mad cunts.

>It's like you people are boring and hate fun
If you talk like this to a bunch of strangers, I swear people will think you are a retarded teenager asking to be ignored.

iter.org/

ibtimes.com/nuclear-fusion-germanys-wendelstein-7-x-stellarator-operating-expected-2456267

They're legit in development right now.
I think commercial nuclear fusion will be very well established by 2100 if we don't kill everyone.

One issue is that it does produce a massive amount of energy and I'm unsure if we have the means to contain all the energy it produces. If I recall from research I did, the energy produced from tests of any fusion reactors has just been discharged.
It makes me wonder, if we did try to use it commercially with the infrastructure we have, would we end up short circuiting the entire electrical grid?

Also, Lockheed Martin is designing a small fusion reactor with intentions to power future jets, tanks, and even cars. Look it up.

the EU spent like 700m euro on fusion and 800m on renewables in one year, the US and other nuclear states have been funding fusion research for 50 years. Fusion gets plenty of money, it's just the most complex feat in human history so it takes a lot of time. Combine that with how many disciplines are required and the tech in each discipline that needs to advance to make it work and it takes even longer.

>It makes me wonder, if we did try to use it commercially with the infrastructure we have, would we end up short circuiting the entire electrical grid?
that's not how power plants work user, there is already load balancing and large scale energy storage//distribution built into the system, it isn't like plugging too much shit in inside your kitchen and the circuit breaker tripping.

Doesn't all that funding accumulate? Graph makes it look like they are reinventing the wheel every time. Good work if you can get it I guess. Muh funding!

Neat

So hypothetically what would power plants do if they were loaded past storage and/or usage capacity?

It looks like the meme drive you idiot

>So hypothetically what would power plants do if they were loaded past storage and/or usage capacity?

Brownouts/Blackouts

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownout_(electricity)

Basically, what happens is that your power plant must be outputing the same amount of power (accounting for efficiency losses and such) that is used downstream.

If you are outputting more power than is used, you get powerspikes, overvoltages, tripped breakers/relays/etc...

If you are outputting less power than is being used, you get brownouts/blackouts, and these can actually be damaging to some senative electrical components.

Load balancing is the science of making sure that your output from the powerplant is equal to the downstream load...

And since there are plenty of reactor types that don't change their output very quickly, but the downstream load can change very quickly, there is a potential problem for over/under voltage.

So, some form of energy storage to collect overvoltage, and make up for undevoltage is needed, in order to allow the genorator time to spool up/down.

Your fastest response load balancing techniques are capacitors and batteries... but they are expensive, tempermental, require lots of maintinance, etc...

Some power plants use hydrolic/gravity energy storage, with excess power being used to pump water uphill to a storage tank, and underpower being made up with that water flowing downhill again.

Gas turbines can change their output very quickly, and are often used to make up for downstream load changes (especially natural gas/petrol gas turbines)

The main problem with load following in most genorators is that most genorators are steam turbine based, which means that in order to change the output you have to change the thermal input to a mass of water, thus altering the rate which it boils to steam, and given a certain volume of water, this change in output can lag the change in thermal input by several minutes.

And that's the memei don't understand, rancid swine.

>Doesn't all that funding accumulate
Research does, funding does not.

A lot of reactors have been build knowing they wouldn't get more energy out than they put in.
But we still have to build them to learn, supercomputers and models only get us so far.

Even the Wendelstein 7-x is made knowing it most likely wont produce enough energy.

Thanks user, that was educating!

Calm the fuck down sperglord, this is a pretty slow board.

>Thanks user, that was educating!

*tips over-voltage protection magnetic heater disconnect device.

>*tips

>*trips

>What is a stellarator?

>700m euro

so yeah, like he said. fusion isn't funded.

the DARE program got almost 20 billion dollars in the 80's/90's.

they could triple the amount of money into fusion research and it would still only be "presidential pet project" tier.

meme

Have fun creating small lightweight cooling for the magnets that doesn't weight as much as a tank itself.

>for jets
Not a chance, far too heavy even within the next 50 years and they would be incredibly slow to turn on and ramp to full power

>for cars
Yeah just like EM drive powered hover cars.

Chemical engines are amazingly efficient powerful and cheap as fuck. We won't see them replaced for at least 30 years when the only thing contending them are electric motors.

It seems to always be 10 years away.
I have a feeling with this tech, like fission or H bombs, once you start getting more out than you put in, stand back! Containment here is the real science.
I admire the people dicking around with it I suppose, you need some big cahunas to play with fire like that.

So you want a mini-sun gadget: with all the effects of, say, our sun's gravitational forces compressing hydrogen into helium (or heavier elements) but without the mass of an actual "functioning" sun.

Gee, what could go wrong trying this? Wasted resources, merely to begin the list..
What could go wrong with a bunch of inadequate guys and gals trying to do better at being a sun than a sun? Radiation has worked so well for us so far.

It's bad enough we got creepy freaks taking seeds back to their "workshop" and adding chemicals willy-nilly (and charging us), now you want to waste money on impractical when we could be feeding children by growing nutritious vegetables, building tractors, irrigation, weeding....

Many still believe in the lies of solar panels: look around at all the cheap (but disasterous) burning of un-newable oil and coal and you will see the "only" reason there can be solar panels.

But if you're one of those "know-it-alls," do enlighten all of us as to how you'll build all the solar panels and all the batteries (for when the sun doesn't shine) when you don't have energy from cheap sources of death (oil, methane, coal, cow poo).

fission is cheaper and always will be

just look at all this bullshit needed just to run one reactor (assuming this design even works)