Another great analysis of power fusion - The dream

Reflections on fusion history, current events, and predictions for the 'fusion powered future.
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Richard Hull
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Another great analysis of power fusion - The dream

Post by Richard Hull »

One of the best general analysis of the horrid roadblocks to any fusion power for a long time to come. The analysis is ever mindful of all the past and future hucksters including the pros financed by investors looking to sell out shares of stock on achieving fusion on the mere success of doing fusion, even over unity fusion, with no path possible to ever doing useful power fusion. A well done analysis of why we haven't done and are not likely to do power fusion in any near future time frame. For those looking to construct a fusor for building a project looking towards future energy from such a build. Hard sayin's for those having illusions about the fusor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JurplDfPi3U

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Paul_Schatzkin
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Re: Another great analysis of power fusion - The dream

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

Yeah, yeah, just what we need, another die-hard skeptic to echo the "X years in the future and always will be" trope. Well done.

Ironic, don't you think, that this narrator cites the particle accelerator properties of a cathode ray tube – television – and then jumps right to Taylor Wilson building a fusor when he was 14 years old – without so much as making the connection between the two? Now there's some effective research and reporting for you!

Really. I am tired of the whole "we're never going to have fusion" rhetoric. It's just too damn easy a foot to land on. It's not constructive, and especially on a website dedicated to exploring the concept, what's the point to repeating this over and over and over. You may as well say "do all the research you want, but it's never going to amount to anything..." Oh, yeah, I guess that is your point after all.

Insert angry red face emoji here.

On the other hand: the billions (is it trillions yet?) being raised to build giant, hot, whirling magnetic Russian donuts is equally laughable. Ponzi, meet Coulomb. Can I interest you in bridge? So, yeah, when he goes into how much those plants actually cost to build and operate, it's pretty hard to argue the point.

I have my own explanation for why we don't have fusion and why we will likely not have it in our lifetimes, whether we have 20, 30 or 50 years left (your mileage may vary): because fusion is the fundamental process that powers the universe, and the fundamental intelligence that permeates that universe has concluded that this particular bipedal terrestrial creature is not yet ready for or worthy of it.

It's not a matter of physics. It's a matter of metaphysics.

You don't have to ponder that possibility if you can write all the failure off to, say, substance abuse. That's a much more reasonable explanation, isn't it? For us terrestrials, anyway.

So please, you who read this: continue to experiment, continue to learn, and in your daily lives do what can to make the species worthy.

And ignore the rest of the "X years in future and always will be..." noise.

That is all.

--PS
Paul Schatzkin, aka "The Perfesser" – Founder and Host of Fusor.net
Author of The Boy Who Invented Television: 2023 Edition – https://amz.run/6ag1
"Fusion is not 20 years in the future; it is 60 years in the past and we missed it."
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Joe Gayo
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Re: Another great analysis of power fusion - The dream

Post by Joe Gayo »

The history of the pursuit of fusion is short, the history of humanity's pursuit of understanding the natural world is much longer.

What does this extended timeline tell us? Though there are doors yet to unlock, we have opened many that seemed out of reach.

The door to a grid-connected fusion power plant will be opened.

Joe
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Richard Hull
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Re: Another great analysis of power fusion - The dream

Post by Richard Hull »

Again, the fusion fuel isn't like the fission fuel or the coal, gas, or wood. (fossil fuels) There is no readily accessible "stored energy" in fusion fuels. In fusion energy, There is not the easy flame of a simple kitchen match to ignite the fuel to obtain the billions of watts as in fossil fuel. In fusion there is no simple push of two pieces of U-235 closer together to obtain billions of watts as in nuclear fission.

We are blessed in that what stored binding energy there is in the two fusible hydrogens resists all attempts to win large amounts of useful energy from them save for instantaneous destruction of life and property. We can make genuine, yet worthless, controlled fusion energy over long time spans in our fusors at one end of the fusion spectrum, and at the other end, in a single stroke, eviscerate and destroy vast parts of our human populations and lay waste to the millions of acres of land.

All the kings horses and all the kings men..............

Paul is correct whether fusion energy flows from out outlets in 2080 or 2880, I am sure that within a totally stable world where research continues unabated and smoothly by all nations, by what ever method, we will have controlled fusion energy at some future date. I stopped worrying about those X number of years to fusion a long time ago. I also stopped wondering by what method it will be done. You can't begin to understand how freeing that is. All I know is I am doing controlled fusion and understand a whole hell of a lot of how fusion is to be done.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Re: Another great analysis of power fusion - The dream

Post by Richard Hull »

Yet another thought provoking discussion by a Physicist. Not one word is mentioned about time X for fusion.
Instead, What I have always noted about the lies fed the public about the supposed "breakeven" and the fact the power companies will never invest until total absolute power into the fusion plant, itself, results in a total electrical energy out to the electrical grid exceeds 10X. The current "energy speak" related to fusion is as good as if Goebbels were the minister of public propaganda. The big lie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY

If fusion can't boil water (grossly inefficient) to turn a turbine (fairly efficient) and be transformed into high voltage via transformers (fairly efficent) then it will not fly. In general starting with the water boiling and continuous replacemkent of heat loss in the process, on through turbines and high voltage distribution transformers the losses at the head of this stream to electricity, coupled to transmission losses, and down converting through two further transfomers to the home's wall outlets is about 50%. This is for coal, natural gas, fission or fusion. It is a given.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Re: Another great analysis of power fusion - The dream

Post by Richard Hester »

Well, at least by the the time one of these fusion devices limps on line, we can use the latest developments in supercritical CO2-driven turbines to wring some more power out of them. The CO2 is likely Kinder to turbine blades than superheated steam.
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Re: Another great analysis of power fusion - The dream

Post by Nicolas Krause »

I think the thing that I find fascinating about these discussions is that I think the two poles, fusion is possible and current experiments will never achieve net gain fusion, are both true. Its pretty clear that mega science projects aren't great. There was an explosion in them after the success of the Manhattan project. Apollo, particle accelerators, cyclotrons, ITER etc... And for the most part I think even if they succeed at their initial goal ( a la Apollo) their cost makes them completely unsustainable. They're like the huge junks of the Chinese treasure fleets, susceptible to cost cutting by eunuchs of whatever palace is in charge at the moment. So you build the technology in a way that is really pretty useless, there is no possibility of continued progress. And that's the best case scenario. More likely, you've built a huge tower of babel that will collapse and be unable to achieve its original goal because the assumptions built into its design were wrong. I would go so far as to say that I think projects like the CERN, and the gravity wave detector aren't science. It's not possible to modify your theory once you begin building them because they're so expensive and complex the whole thing would collapse if you did. Since science is a mechanism to correct your erroneous assumptions about reality via experiment, it precludes designing your experiment in a way that prevents modification. So I think its quite clear that lots of these experiments have a low chance of success, but I think Paul's point is very well taken, every night when I look up at the night sky, I see thousands of stars all happily fusing away. How to do that here, I have no idea, but it seems to me that both sides of this argument are correct.
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Richard Hull
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Re: Another great analysis of power fusion - The dream

Post by Richard Hull »

I always had my "out" expressed over many years here in these forums....."the lucky donkey"....Someone bungles onto something while doing something else, like Becquerel or Roentgen. In the end, God knows when, we will do controlled fusion energy to useful, distributable, electricity. None of the methods now costing Billions will survive, as Nicolas muses.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Re: Another great analysis of power fusion - The dream

Post by Maciek Szymanski »

For me - if humanity really wanted to achieve fusion, it would. The price of fission was enormous, but the effort was needed for the A bomb and for powering the nuclear submarines. The civil energy production is just a side effect. The pity is the the hydrogen bomb was achievable without sustained fusion reactors. If there was such a need those reactors would be built without looking at the costs. That's sad but everything is too expensive as long as it has no use in mass killing.
That said, I'm very doubtful about all tokamak efforts. For me the main problem is that the needs for funds are high and the resources limited. This leads to focusing all efforts on the single solution and tames criticism. This leaves lots of options and research areas untouched, as it is not possible to get funding nor support for them.
The last experiment in which I took part was on the so called cavity pressure acceleration. The concept dates back to '70 but is largely untouched compared to other laser fusion schemes. It has no use in the energy production, like all laser fusion for me, but the very limited research we are doing led to increase of the neutron output by two orders of magnitude in the last session. With very moderate laser (500J, 300ps pulse) working at the unfavourable 1.3um wavelength the neutron flux was high enough to activate silver in one shot. I think there is much more such underfunded, underresearched areas, and maybe one of them is a way to affordable fusion?
Last edited by Maciek Szymanski on Fri Oct 08, 2021 1:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Another great analysis of power fusion - The dream

Post by Richard Hull »

I agree with Maciek! As Bob Hirsch told me in 1999, if net fusion energy is to be found, the path lay in multi-directional efforts in a relatively small experiment. (compared to the mega-projects of ITER and NIF).
The reason fusion funding languished in the 50's and 60's was a lot of different systems were being tested which ultimately showed little promise with each getting only limiting funding. However, but just like the monster projects of today, each team, once ensconced in their little world, sought to keep it going. Thus, the move to single focused big projects that looked really bright with giant funding efforts in an attempt to "bull head" past the issues to fusion no matter the size and the cost.

We need more smallish startups based of past knowledge gained, fund them only to the point of hitting the traditional "blind alley" or "brick wall", then, shut them down and move on. Some efforts at this are already underway. It is the megaladon thinking and the salaries of the many "pal-hires" and multiple "hangers-on" that blow costs of ideas out of proportion in the search for fusion.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Re: Another great analysis of power fusion - The dream

Post by Dennis P Brown »

I will add (like I usually do) that a semi-small effort has certainly been very successful: the Wendelstein 7x (a stellarator) by the Germans is coming along nicely and they refuse to make huge claims or make loud noise; rather, they are doing and achieving amazing results. See: https://www.ans.org/news/article-3166/g ... fficiency/ .

I have no doubt that within ten years they will create a stable plasma with a fusion power plant level/density plasma that the machine will hold stable for over 30 minutes. Better still, this will be routinely performed by that machine. Essentially proving that a stable, net energy fusion reactor is certainly possible using that configuration.

That all said, there is no chance what-so-ever any attempt at a net power plant fusion reactor will be built in the next fifty years or likely, this century. Such a 'power plant' machine would cost many times that of a fission plant (see iter - besides, iter is highly unlikely to work w/o massive failure and even if that issue is resolved, never achieve net power much less supply power.) The absolute fact remains that magnetic containment is far too expensive to build and protection of the magnets and maintenance of the shield walls are far too difficult engineering issues to solve in a cost effective manner - period. I will say that it is possible that a proto-type reactor using the German approach might be built within a thirty year time frame - maybe. But that would be research only and cost on the order of a fission nuke plant at the least.

Does this mean we shouldn't continue research? Of course not - we spend far more on the life cycle of one fleet carrier (aircraft/support ships) then all fusion research by all countries since the 1950's (iter included.) These research efforts have already shown one clear path (stellarator; still not cheap enough and needs SC magnets) and it is possible others might be developed - like recent advances in accelerator tech - the far cheaper methodologies that have been developed; here I'm talking ion beam fusion and break-throughs in making ultra cheap GeV beam protons. That is a path that might work for cost effective fusion but has zero funding interest or work to date.
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The New Yorker Weighs In on Fusion

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

I'll just stash this here, since it seems consistent with the gist of this thread and no need start another.

The New Yorker has a medium-length feature in this week's issue about fusion research. It is mostly a distillation of all the current, costly, large scale magnetic fusion projects going on around the world. There is some emphasis on 'high temperature superconductors' (HTS) like that's the thing that's going to make the difference that will produce fusion energy's 'Kitty Hawk' moment (remember, the first powered flight was what, all of 12 seconds?).

To me it reads like a recap-for-unitiated of what I get in my "nuclear fusion" Google Alert every day. Which is to say: it's all entirely in keeping with the '20 years in the future and always will be' mentality.

The article is available from newyorker.com:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021 ... ate-change

...but that link might require a subscription, so I exported the whole thing into a .pdf attached herewith.
TNYonFusion.pdf
(122.75 KiB) Downloaded 275 times
There is a modest attempt to recount the history of fusion research going back to Arthur Eddington's earliest hypotheses on the topic, and a nod to Edward Teller as the 'Shakespearean villain' in the story. Nothing about Farnsworth or any kind of fusion that doesn't involve magnets.

I still think best that can be said about the whirling hot Russian donuts is "it's like trying to wrap jello in rubber bands." Doesn't matter if the rubber bands are superconducting, the plasma is still hot jello.

--P
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Author of The Boy Who Invented Television: 2023 Edition – https://amz.run/6ag1
"Fusion is not 20 years in the future; it is 60 years in the past and we missed it."
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Re: Another great analysis of power fusion - The dream

Post by Richard Hull »

I agree with Pauls' synopsis on the article. Bringing the average unimaginitive, marginally educated citizen up to some genuinely useful background on fusion and its complexities at the power production end of the effort is a bridge too far. I do believe that the best among such folks can parrot, by rote, all the high points, but do they have any indepth understanding of what they parrot or is this just for the fellow intellictuals about them at a fashionable wine and chesse gathering.

The scientifically adept who read in depth on fusion physics can certainly own some of the issues at a usable level and speak intelligently on the subject. However those who have done fusion and read the texts and and have interacted with kindred spirits, will own so much more related to power fusion issues. This is why this fusor.net exists! A home for action and discussion by people who really want to understand why a process to create fusion works and why another process does not.

We discuss why some processes will never do power fusion and why others that seem reasonable at first blush, run into problems which, at the moment, seem insuperable. In the end, the really smart folks, the best among us can not advance one single process that seems a sure way to power producing fusion. The best among us also look at the engineering and can view power production from the power companies perspective bean counters. I call this the cradle to grave perspective. Fusion power must make someone money all along the way to the wall outlet. Currently fusion pays only physicists, engineers and technicians involed solely in research situations. Little spider monkies clamoring over over giant edifices under the direction of a sea of engineers directed by flatulent, dispeptic physicists whose dual job is to figure out a path forward long enough into the future to keep them employed as well as continously liying to the press in search of continued congressional funding of their fiefdom.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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