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Bloody Pom posted:Isn't one of the big hurdles with getting fusion off the ground dealing with the crazy amounts of neutron flux generated by D-T fusion, something like a hundred times that observed in fission reactors? Seems like it would make performing maintenance on the (now highly irradiated) reactor vessel an absolute nightmare. That's not really the bottleneck yet. As mentioned earlier, lithium plating should theoretically work and have advantageous side effects for breeding more input material, since tritium just doesn't naturally exist (and ceases to exists after 12 years). Even if the lithium plan doesn't work out, there are materials like lead which can deal with fast neutrons quite well. The problem there is more the transformation of these fast neutrons to usable heat energy in order to boil water. Also, you know keeping the plasma stable in the first place. Ideally without spending 10 times the amount on magnetic confinement. ITER is a weird project. It takes an incredibly long time to built it, because it's absolutely massive since in theory the bigger those reactors are, the better they work. On the other hand, much of the hardware (like perhaps most importantly the giant magnets) is already obsolete tech. It kind of feels like you'd decide to build a super powered computer array with a million machines in 2005 and spent the next decade collecting funding to purchase those machines with those exact 2005 specifications. That being said, I genuinely believe that there is significant progress happening in the field. It's just so incredibly slow because plasma science is so much harder than taking some radioactive materials, putting them into water and watch it boil away. cant cook creole bream fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Nov 4, 2022 |
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Nov 4, 2022 19:17
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Kalman posted:Okay, this kind of polarizing belief is just repellent. Yeah, they should be paid a wage which is barely above the costs of living with a constant threat of termination over their head, to motivate them to continue to do extraordinary good work, or else... It's The American Way!
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Nov 4, 2022 21:02
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QuarkJets posted:Just wanted to point out to other readers that 12 years is the half-life of tritium; for any given sample, you'll have roughly half of it remaining after that time. The decay process is always happening, so every day you lose a little bit of fuel, and you're losing more fuel while the sample is fresh than when the sample is older (1/2^n) Sorry, thanks for specifying my reductive statement. Mathematically, tritium would never truly disappear and only half it's amount ad infinitum. Or more logically, until literally one particle is left. Of course, the same applies for fission waste with a half-life of thousands of years...
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Nov 4, 2022 21:16
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in a well actually posted:Maybe? Somebody did a writeup here or in the nuclear reactor thread in the last few pages that discussed Helion. I think you're referring to this one. cant cook creole bream posted:
That video certainly sums it up better than I could. I am not a plasma scientist with specialization in magnet confinement and ion induction, (IANAPSSMCII) so I can't tell if there are scientific holes in the process. But the current reactor produces some fusion, so the underlining principles seem to be sound. The question is if the upscaled reactor model is actually big enough to rise the amount of fusion to a level where it's net-positive and if they can do the upscaling without making the plasma unstable, so it doesn't fizzle out. Also I guess they have to make certain that the more frequent pulses don't break it down on an engineering level. Let's see what actually happens in 2024. I will continue to follow them. Regardless if you believe anything Helion is claiming, it's a well produced video. They actually go well into the details of the energy math for each reaction variant. cant cook creole bream fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Dec 17, 2022 |
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Dec 17, 2022 19:22
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First you need a really deep hole to make it somewhat safe. Then your salt needs to be cooled down by some form of heat exchange. Preferably, without letting all those pesky fast neutrons, which irradiated it after the nuclear fission/fusion explosion, seep in. And finally, you would have to get that hole cleaned because continuously boring new ones is not all that energy efficient or sustainable. Plus you would have to transport and use literal h-hombs to use this. Some people have concerns about those. Sure, you could make it a one time thing to get some energy, but why? Whole it's a lot, It's not like the energy from a single explosion could power us for long. The only reason you might want to do it is to prove net electricity from fusion on earth just to make everyone shut up who says that it is absolutely unattainable. The science is there, but it's not economical viable at all. So to answer your question. Yes, that would work. cant cook creole bream fucked around with this message at 13:52 on Dec 31, 2022 |
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Dec 31, 2022 13:47
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That's mostly just price gouging though. It's not like production of energy became that much more expensive. The energy cooperations just have a vaguely plausible reason to increase their prices now. Mind you, they were already paid horendous sums by the government for the losses of their nuclear profits.
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Apr 18, 2023 09:20
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Remember the Fusion company Helion? https://www.geekwire.com/2023/microsoft-and-helion-want-to-build-the-worlds-first-fusion-plant-and-seize-energys-holy-grail/ Apparently they made a deal with Microsoft to deliver a functional powerplant worth 50MW by 2028. You may think that it's some scam, where Microsoft paid in advance, but it's actually the opposite. They wont pay any money until the electricity flows and Helion has to pay a fine if they don't meet the deadline. I know that many people are sceptical of Helion, their approach and their tight timeline, but I think they must feel quite hopeful for their big test reactor in 2024, otherwise they wouldn't really gain anything from signing that deal. So either their confidence is genuine, or they intentionally set themselves up to pay massive fees for no gain, just to make other investors more confident. Either way, it seems like a win-win deal for Microsoft. cant cook creole bream fucked around with this message at 16:53 on May 11, 2023 |
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May 11, 2023 16:51
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Family Values posted:I'm of course hopeful, but let's just say I'll believe it when I see it. There'd better be a lot more to their system than what they've disclosed to the public. I saw that video a while ago. That guy didn't really put a lot of effort into into be quite honest. He mentioned some stuff which was disputed long before and presented mechanical hurdles like huge impassable baricades as if nobody before him had ever thought about those. Raenir Salazar posted:What is the theoretical advantage Helion is offering over Takomak or Stellerators or Big Lasers? There's actually a several ones (assuming any of it works out, of course.) The biggest one ist the fuel. Most attempts at fusion are based on the combination of the hydrogen isotopes Deuterium (D) and Tritium (T). While D absolutely plentyful and quite easy to produce from seawater, T doesn't really exists and decays after 12 years. The only supply is from radiation in cooling water for fission plants. And the production is way below what ITER alone would need. Helion's fuel cycle effectively only uses Deuterium as input. It produces and uses Helium3 (aka Helion) as an intermediate step. Another big advantage is that pulsed generation can be scaled. If the energy grid is full, you can chose not to add further reactions on a whim, while a tokamak could only be useful other longer contiuous operation, which are hard to maintain anyway. This also means that you can clean the used fuel from the barrel after each reaction, which seems dubiously possible in tokamaks. And then there is the big difference between netronic and aneutronic reactions: D T reaction produce almost all of their energy as fast neutrons (i.e. nuclear radiation .) While those are on another power level then the ones from a fission plant, you shouldn't stand near that. The only way to extract that energy is to do the same thing as yfission plants do. Heating and boiling water to make turbines run. This other reaction D+He3 releases the energy as a fast proton. The cool thing about that? Protons have a magnetic charge. The same magnets, which squeeze the hydrogen can steal the speed of those protons and directly convert that to electricity, no water heating required! That last part sounds a bit out there, but that concept has actually been demonstrated quite thoroughly. They already did extract electricity from that. Just not on a break even level. cant cook creole bream fucked around with this message at 20:21 on May 11, 2023 |
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May 11, 2023 20:17
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I'm actually aware of these points. To be honest, I didn't want to bother going to much into the detail phone posting during my train ride. The main takeaway of the question was what the theoretical advantages compared to a tokamak were and even though it is not fully aneutronic, the concept remains that the energy is extracted from that part. The (relatively) fast ~2.5 MeV neutron for a He3 + n result is baked into the fuel cycle as an acceptable loss. As for the harmful side reaction between a freshly minted T and a D (i.e. the bread an butter of a tokamak) I am no particle physicist, but from what I've read, directly after creation, the T has too high of an energy level to instantly jump into a new fusion and by the time that would be statistically likely, the compression pinch is already over. Afterwards the chamber actually gets cleared out. That's what I meant by used fuel. Plus extracting finished He4 which just makes the process less likely. This extraction process is actually fundamental, because Helion wants to get the Tritium out and trade it for more Helium3 or to set it on a shelf for 12 years to get the same result. If it is electrical positive despite the loss from that neutron, it's good enough on that part. That loss of heat energy is actually a relatively part of the total cycle as opposed to the DT-tokamak, where it is simply the only outcoming energy. As for material and security concerns of those ~2.5 MeV neutrons: The simple solution is to put the reactor in a pit and replace parts at some intervals which might be long enough to be financially viable. I wouldn't advise standing next to that thing either. But if it is actually possible to make the ~14 MeV DT side reaction rare, the degradation and the dangers would be far less than what a tokamak with water cooling would produce. * Over the lifetime of the current model, there have been a large amount of fusion reactions and from that they can estimate the total tear of a productive system with a higher pulse frequency and built the chamber in a way resistant to it. That doesn't sound easy, but it's an engineering challenge, rather than some physical impossibility. Another approach, in case this proves futile is to split the reaction into two processes. You have one breeder-reactor which does nothing but turn DD into T and He3 and some nasty neutrons which you extract and another one which is supposed to be almost 100% aneutronic, which takes D and He3 as a fuel. Now you may argue that this produces D+D too, but there is no reason to make those two inputs symmetrical. If you put in 1 D for every 1000 He3, suddenly the reaction is skewed heavily towards D+He3 (Besides, David Kirtley did a presentation where he postulated that under the right temperature and pressure conditions D+He3 is more likely than D+D under the same input amount.) Such a reactor would be almost fully aneutronic. In fact the plan for Polaris is to work as such a breeder reactor to extract He3 and T. They mostly just want to see the effectiveness of that breeding and to produce fuel in that iteration. But their (honestly quite baffling) assumption is that the half of the cases where D+D -> T+p happens is already enough aneutronic fusion to make the breeder reactor electricity positive. I honestly don't buy that claim but we will see next year. Maybe they haven't considered the problem of neutrons enough. And maybe they will find out that it does not scale up as they expected. Heck, maybe it turns out that their magnetic plasma tori don't scale at all and the reaction doesn't happen in the first place. But claiming that they haven't considered these points at all, is frankly speaking a bit arrogant. * Neutronic discharge for Tokamaks might work with a lithium blanket, which extracts the heat and uses the neutron to produce new tritium. That's honestly an elegant solution. But as far as I am aware, no reactor prototype has one of those yet and it is not yet proven if that concept can work at all. cant cook creole bream fucked around with this message at 21:49 on May 11, 2023 |
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May 11, 2023 21:44
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His Divine Shadow posted:Except for the people in those other countries whose electricity prices have risen due to increased german demand. Germany is still a net exporter though.
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Jun 1, 2023 06:10
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cat botherer posted:Pumped hydro is dumb, especially given water scarcity.
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Jun 4, 2023 23:16
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KillHour posted:It doesn't need to be boilable or even a liquid. Any fluid can theoretically work for pumped energy storage. Xakura posted:How do you think pumped hydro works Yeah, I had a genuine brainfart when I wrote that. Anyway there's certainly nothing wrong with filling a mine with mercury.
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Jun 5, 2023 06:39
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VictualSquid posted:And I will never grow tired of repeating this: The official pro-nuclear position in Germany is that ALL real problems of the Atomausstieg have been solved by Merkel's payouts to the nuclear power investment companies. If you do not believe that you are not pro-nuclear as the term is used in Germany. You have to give me a source for that claim. Maybe that's what some political group stated, but that's far from the position I see on the street.
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Jun 16, 2023 13:13
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Those YBCO magnets are really impressive but there haven't really been any actual news about those in the last two years. It will be a while until they get the reactor together.
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Sep 19, 2023 16:17
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TheMuffinMan posted:I thought with new catalysts/enzymes getting hydrogen from water is very low cost Still far more costly than just getting it out of the ground for pretty much free, if you have a viable reservoir. Obviously, you wont get to produce hydrogen from water at an actual energy win, so the energy has to come from somewhere else. Basically, ground hydrogen can be fuel, while produced hydrogen can only be a battery.
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Sep 20, 2023 21:58
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TheMuffinMan posted:plenty of energy to come from the sun though right via solar panels I know. But using that to produce hydrogen which you have to store, transport and burn later on still has a huge rate of loss compared to conventional forms of battery storage. Your argument boils down to, "why would someone burn coal from the ground, when they can just use the sun to grow trees for fuel?" TheMuffinMan posted:most of the sun is plasma The sun is just using it's unfair advantage in gravity to squeeze protons together until it basically runs out. And it's actually a really slow and inefficient process, which only seems impressive due to sheer size. Per cubic meter the sun produces less heat than a human or a pile of compost. But if one of the natural constants was just ever so slightly different, stars would either burn through their complete fuel in seconds, or not react ever. Hooray for the Anthropic principle! cant cook creole bream fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Sep 20, 2023 |
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Sep 20, 2023 22:10
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No one cares anymore. I was always a strong proponent of nuclear energy. But the fact that those things got turned off is a political decision which is straight up irreversible. We live in the world we have and have to deal with the situations as they are and not as they should be. I'm not saying that any of this is smart, but this is just what's happening and we have to accept it by now. Crying about those obvious implications feels like Pro-Brexiters who complain about import tariffs some years after their vote. Do you guys think it would have gone any different if there was a nuclear referendum first? Maybe if they waited a few months after the earthquake? Germans are just straight up idiots when it comes to this topic. Even people I consider quite smart otherwise. And it's not just some astroturfed propaganda network either. I will always disagree with that decision, but I have to admit that the politicians were absolutely following the voice of the people there. cant cook creole bream fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Oct 8, 2023 |
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Oct 8, 2023 00:30
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QuarkJets posted:In this analogy you've created the people who are pro-nuclear also voted for the nuclear power plants to close (???) Fair enough.
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Oct 8, 2023 11:22
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wolrah posted:Moving parts are fine, but moving solids is probably a dead end. Dams and pumped storage are probably the most well understood and proven energy storage technology out there and definitely involve moving parts, but there are few of them compared to the amount of storage. Clearly we need to reduce the absolute amount of moving parts. How about we built a city on a massive flywheel?
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Dec 19, 2023 14:44
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Ionicpsycho posted:If the earth could be used directly as a giant flywheel, imagine all the op-eds that we would see about the benefits of increasingly longer days/nights. Doesn't wind power pretty much do that? It's just a really inefficient process.
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Dec 22, 2023 23:05
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Potato Salad posted:We would have wind with or without rotation From what I gather, some (but by far not all) of the wind comes from the earths rotation. Wouldn't the generation of that energy take it from the earths rotation, thereby technicallly slowing it a minuscle amount? Now you also take some of the wind away and turn it into electricity. This means that some amount of rotation speed was indirectly converted to electric energy. Just what a flywheel does. Unless I am completely misunderstanding the concept of wind of course. Like is it even real? Has anyone ever seen wind? Like hypothetically, if we had enough wind wheels to suck up all the wind in current existence. New wind would apear from the water heat gradient. But the rotation and coreolis effect speeds this wind up so more can be turned into electrical energy. This increase in energy can only be possible if the rotaional energy was slightly drained in turn. cant cook creole bream fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Dec 24, 2023 |
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Dec 24, 2023 00:23
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Shooting Blanks posted:Why is German farmland so toxic? How does it compare (in general) to other neighboring countries with a significant agricultural footprint? Can this be improved/resolved within a reasonable timescale, or are we talking about "Let it go fallow for a generation and see what happens." I've never heard this before and don't disbelieve these statements, it's just news to me. As far as I know it's not particularly worse then the farmland in say France. It's just really effectively used to it's full extend in raising those particular crops to the point where the soil is drained. The other posters are mostly saying that it's nonsense to claim that it is an important factor for biodiversity, because aside from some mice and birds of prey, animals don't really live there. Taking some of that away wont cause some rare species of salamander to go extinct.
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Feb 14, 2024 20:39
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Kaal posted:Also, that’s all without getting into the gnarly topic of effective production (ie while Germany has 61 GW of wind power, it only produced 139 TWh of wind power in 2023, rather than a full 534 TWh). Still, hopefully they will continue to pursue their goals despite their political troubles. The economics of it are pretty clear - that’s why the US already had 146 GW of wind power in 2022, and hopes to keep adding 5-10 GW each year for the foreseeable future. The irony of states like Texas (with 44 GW) competing with Germany’s 61 GW on wind power continues to amaze. That comparison feels a bit stupid. Texas has twice the landmass and only about a third of the population. It's basically an empty void.
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Feb 14, 2024 22:10
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Oracle posted:Do they not practice crop rotation in Germany? Like at least alternating maize and soybeans so the beans can replenish the nitrogen in the soil? That’s like baby’s first farm lesson here and we aren’t exactly a Mecca of hippie dippy farming practices. I assume they practice it to some extend? I don't find any data about that when searching for it.
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Feb 25, 2024 21:44
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FMguru posted:Coal Is The Enemy Of All Living Things. We must destroy it as soon as possible so that it may not harm us. Let's burn it all down!
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Feb 28, 2024 19:25
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