>Lockheed compact fusion reactor design about 100 times larger than first plans
nextbigfuture.com
Holy shit.
Is fusion finished at this point?
There's literally 0% chance that it will ever be cheaper than fission, let alone other power sources.
Should we divert all energy research funds to new fission ideas like molten salt reactors instead?
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no
fuck off
this is called prototyping you mong
>nextbigfuture.com
got any non-popsci links?
That's lockheed martin, they're trying a design that's already been tried. It failed before, no surprise if it fails again.
Lockheed's fusion effort is just a publicity stunt.
>>There's literally 0% chance
show your math ass hole
>>Should we divert all energy research funds to new fission ideas like molten salt reactors instead?
No. If you diverted fusion funding for MSRs you'd barely have any funding at all.
I will say this though, clean coal and carbon capture research are a waste. Clean coal is a scam designed to extend the life of an energy source that should have been killed decades ago. Carbon capture ends up being more expensive than nuclear because of the thermodynamics of removing carbon. If we're gonna divert money to fucking crazy nuclear plant designs it should be from that.
>show your math ass hole
show your math proving that fusion will ever be viable, let alone cheap enough for utilities use
I don't understand this graph, how can they predict a date of completion when it's not even clear if a profitable reactor is even possible?
>2014
>The plan was to "build and test a compact fusion reactor in less than a year with a prototype to follow within five years."[2] The prototype would be a 100-megawatt deuterium and tritium reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet that could fit on the back of a large truck and would be about one tenth the size of current reactor prototypes.[3]
LUL
Let me put my tinfoil hat on for a second, but what if they are saying it's 100 times the size to conceal the fact that the military has fusion reactors that fit on the back of a truck?
You made an assertion yet have failed to support it with facts
Well so did you to be fair, you are assuming that throwing money to fusion will eventually lead to a viable reactor but where are you getting that idea from?
>Should we divert all energy research funds to new fission ideas like molten salt reactors instead?
that's dumb, we should be funding both.
I rather suspect they want to scam the DoD for laser money and just want to give them the impression that a portable MW power source (that is necessary to make missile defense lasers feasible) is around the corner.
>show your math proving that fusion will ever be viable, let alone cheap enough for utilities use
You are just deflecting the original question. Support your argument with facts. The burden of proof is on you.
by that logic, coal is also fusion power
>portable MW power source
Cant diesel engines output that kind of power?
you only need about 1,300 hp for a megawatt (before efficiency losses, of course)
triggered fusion baby detected
>by that logic, coal is also fusion power
that was the specific brand of logic I was using, yes.
>triggered fusion baby detected
Well, the basics of the whole argument, is that with a viable, compact fusion reactor, you reduce cost to orbit to dollars per kilogram, instead of thousands of dollar per kilogram.
What the fuck how can the burden of proof to show that a theoretical technology is viable be on me?
Look, this is Lockheed Martin. Their reason for existence is to suck in public funding. That is all. The F-35 is an absolute dog but successful as a money bilge pump. That won't last. hence the "fusion" power project. And guess what: this will require a merely grillion dollars. Form the public. No big deal really. Just wait and see.
The new high temperature super conductors are looking really promissing right now. They have the potential to drastically reduce reactor size. And I'm not talking about whatever the fuck wacky idea Lockheed or all these other start ups are messing around with. I'm talking about boring, old Tokamaks.
I found out about these guys the other day:
tokamakenergy.co.uk
I don't really believe it'll be smooth sailing and they'll actually deliver by 2030, but their approach at least looks more viable than the clusterfuck ITER turned out to be.
This. Lockheed Martin is doing exactly what they have been doing for several decades; selling cool ideas to politicians and proceeding to leech gubmint moneys through eternally prolonging projects with ridiculous overheads.
You made provided a number and did not show how it was calculated. You are still deflecting the original question
No, the F-35 is actually a very competent multi-role aircraft.
It had problems during development which have been solved. If you actually studied it instead of just reading memes on the internet you would know this.
It is horribly over budget, though.
>Clean coal is a scam designed to extend the life of an energy source that should have been killed decades ago.
Yeah we should just let coal emissions go totally untreated.
Clean coal produces water vapor and CO2 as emissions and only trace amounts of anything else.
Sure natural gas is cheaper to make clean and currently cheaper in price/production but we have lots of coal.
Fusion is a joke and is on the path to never being functional let alone economical.
We should be working on MSR tech.
Doesn't the budget include lifetime maintenance though?
Option A: Best overall - Solar continues to outperform all other energy production in price per kw, and battery production picks up juuuuuust fast enough to cover demand. Fusion takes place in smaller labs like MIT with SParc. This is used to cover the rest of the globe in power saturation, and fly our first starships.
>Fusion is a joke and is on the path to never being functional
I give you potentially economically unviable, but it is functional. We've had small reactors put out energy, just less than we put in. ITER will output more than gets put in. It's simple math at this point. All this stuff is already figured out.
It's a shame ITER was intentionally set-up as the most inefficient project ever devised by mankind and will needlessly take decades.
Tell me how steel is manufactured, since you're such a smartass.
Yes. MSR's are the answer.
>The amount of thorium in a ton of common granite has the same potential energy as 25 tons of pure coal
Why would we ever bother with anything else? Nuclear waste is bad and all, but it all comes out in one easily disposed of radioactive turd instead of releasing all sorts of gases into the atmosphere.
Maybe it's because it's a highly theoretical technology that hasn't even been prototyped properly. Or maybe it's because the big corps don't want cheap energy. Or maybe it's because the government is retarded. Personally i think it's a mix of all, scientifics and engineers not being able to shill their ideas due to a lack of proof of concept, plus lobbyists not wanting to be out of their jobs and the government being too dumb to realize the true potential.
Hard to get money without a prototype. The manhattan project and the moon landing are the only projects that come to mind that were like that, maybe the panama channel as well. But those came from necessity and I don't think there's such an apparent desperate need for thorium reactors right now, even if they would end up being revolutionary.
>It is horribly over budget, though.
It's cheaper than the Eurofighter and the Dassault Rafale and superior to both.
the best estimations put an all solar/wind energy system as ten times as expensive as a comparable fission system, and even then such a system would require a "flexible demand" to remain working (i.e. we're turning off your AC now because we don't have the power to run it lmao)
>the best estimations put an all solar/wind energy system as ten times as expensive as a comparable fission system
Is that before or after a million years of shuffeling ever increasing amounts of nuclear waste around? :^)
>he thinks attempting something seemingly not possible in a net benefit fashion can be done on the first attempt
this is good, more development goes into it, the tech gets better.
That's like saying we can eventually make wood-burning stoves competitive with natural gas for electricity by improving the technology enough.
Steel is manufactured using metallurgical coal for coking which is something like 10% the size of the thermal coal market.
Panama Canal was hardly the first canal, or the first transcontinental canal, or the first canal with locks.
As to a prototype thorium reactor, there was molten salt reactorbuilt for research purposes decades ago.
No waste. No waste. You're the waste. No, you're the waste.
Your understanding of coal markets and the forces driving them are equivalent to your understanding of the total environmental cost of policies you support because people you like on Facebook said they're good.
I still have faith in the stellarator design. If only it was aneutronic...
I find the optimized stellerator quite an admirable achievement. But ultimately it just seems too fucking complicated to be economically viable. You need ridiculous degrees of quality assurance at basically every single step of the construction and manufacturing of the construction elements.
Recent advancements in super conductors make me hope we eventually don't need to blow up a fusion power plant in size quite as much as we assumed a few years ago, but still, the prospect of building a device this precise at even slightly bigger scales seems incredibly daunting.
I don't see how the stellerator will be any useful, I seriously cant see any big advantage, it only features the lack of poloidal fields, but it irregular geometry and it's small traversal area and large transverse area/toroidal radius factor doesn't seems to be particularly good to smash ions or to give more probability for fusion in the super heated gas, it will end in a waste of time and resources.
It has no random instabilities because there's no electricity induced into the plasma.
That same lack of current is also why there's no need to shut down the reactor every once in a while.
So it looks like it overcomes some of the biggest remaining weaknesses of current tokamaks.
I'm not quite sure but it also might be easier to introduce new fuel and remove waste from the plasma.
Overall, the stellerator looks like it might be a charm to keep running for extended periods. All of this is of course going to be researched thoroughly in the coming years.
But ultimately, I agree with you that I'm skeptical of this being viable in the long run.
But then the people involved with it seem to be thinking of the whole thing more as an exercise in ridiculously meticulous engineering instead of the future of energy.
Ultimately, this thing just getting built migh've helped other fusion projects. Either with engineering solutions they had to come up with or generally just by raising demand for materials related to fusion tech. Several of the supplier companies were greatly advanced in the colaborations.
And in general it's a new device to study plasma physics in over extended periods. That might also be neat, I guess.
Does that weird steampunkish design from General Fusion have any chance of viability?
if people would pull their heads out of their asses. we could have enough fission energy for centuries.
Not really, no.
yes
They claimed they had an idea for a fusion reactor that would fit on the back of a truck, and that it would be easy and cheap to develop because the small size would make it fast and affordable to iterate the design.
The entirety of their idea was: build a fusion reactor that will fit on the back of a truck, figure out the details by iterating the design.
When they actually hired people to do it, they got told: we have no idea how this napkin sketch would work unless it's much bigger.
So now they're pretty much looking at building JET, ITER, then DEMO.
I need details you faggots
Your choices are...
Spinny spinny plasma ring
and
Mini-Sun-Sphere Trapped in the middle.
Problems seem to arise from stabillity in the first one.
The second one has problems with energy extraction.
Now combine the two and you get...
Twice the problems...
But if we do the opposite....what does a sphere and doughnut look like inside out?
>Dude the first internal combustion engine to come out weighs 1000 pounds, is 4% power efficient, and can't possibly fit on a horseless carriage, are horseless driving technologies btfo for good?
Yeah, most tank engines (which are usually diesel engines or gas turbines) are in the 750-2000 hp range. But I suspect that megawatt range being needed for practical anti-missile lasers means more than a few MW, which is still a bit out of reach for practical purposes.
The only proven technology in fusion is the Tokamak. Stellerator is looking good right now, but literally everything else is basically just throwing shit at the wall and hoping for a miracle.
...
ICF fusion is superior to MCF.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHA. You can't be serious can you? The national ignition is about as far from break even as you can get. Lasers are inefficient as hell.
Lasers are getting better constantly, and ICF requires high power densities, not a shitton of energy, and cooling equipment, like MCF. It requires 4 joules light, which is very little, compared to MCF. Our lab has made graphene boron nitride mim nano capacitor's, capable of 16 wh/kg, which means you could miniaturise, and make it cheaper, way more easily than MCF, and be able to make a pure fusion bomb, as a plus.
tri-alpha is the real deal everything else is just child's play.
Diesel locomotives are around 4000HP now if you want another comparison point.
Clean coal is a meme to keep the garbage whitetrash states and their ghetto version of the 1% afloat and nothing more.
Just focus on renewables as every sane person says. Solar and wind won't run out any time soon and there's no risk of entire continents being irradiated and rendered uninhabitable due to manmade environmental catastrophes.
>Solar and wind won't run out any time soon
Except all night and whenever it's not windy.
>entire continents being irradiated and rendered uninhabitable due to manmade environmental catastrophes
Bait. I should have realized it with your first sentence, but some people are legitimately that retarded instead of merely pretending.