Seeing humanity achieve net fusion in my lifetime would be a total game changer and repoint a good chunk of our future. Things like this make me think we are closer than most people imagine if only because climate change is pushing is hard in this direction. Not only are the economics starting to make sense but also the political will to make this a reality before we all roast due to climate change.
It is a real achievement in plasma fluid dynamics engineering to have got a stable plasma so hot for so long.
However, it does not mean there will ever be practical, commercially competitive power produced using this method or anything much like it. The total mass of material fusing in a reasonable volume is so small that, despite the large amount of energy per nucleus fused, the power produced is nowhere near what would be needed to pay for plant construction, never mind operation and maintenance--not to speak of having to replace all the most expensive parts after minimal use, as they are destroyed by neutron irradiation.
Thus, every cent spent on this project actually takes us farther away from a renewable-energy future, vs. that same money put into building out wind and solar capacity and storage.
This is a fundamental problem in any hot-neutron fusion system. The real reason governments pour so much money into Tokamak fusion projects is as jobs programs for hot-neutron physicists, and subsidy for contractors, to keep them all ready for when they will be tapped for weapons work.
This is similar to the way NASA is still funding SLS: nobody expects it ever to be useful for anything, but the contractors involved need to be kept busy and employing staff for when a new missile system is needed.
There are lots of probably-practical ideas for aneutronic fusion that don't get peanuts because they fail to provide a conduit for funding to thd right places. E.g. D-H3 fusion in FRC may well be practical for spacecraft propulsion, but development is on a shoestring budget, hoping to test something in maybe 2035.
>Thus, every cent spent on this project actually takes us farther away from a renewable-energy future, vs. that same money put into building out wind and solar capacity and storage.
I believe you don't understand there is a law of diminishing returns on everything. If I spend 10x more on electronic chip research, I don't get 10x faster electronics, I get 1.2x, because improving becomes harder and more expensive.
The same happens with renevables. There is real state for solar and wind, places with lots of solar light and access to cheap refrigeration, like Algeria or Morocco, or places with lots of wind like the US Great Planes. Once you build on this real state, energy is way more expensive and it gives you worse returns.
On the contrary, it is a very good idea to explore different fields, because it is extremely cheap(the investment in nuclear fusion has been minimal compared to other energy sources) and gives you lots of scientific developments, because of the same law of diminishing returns.
It does not need to give you a new energy extraction mechanism. Just exploring what nobody else has done before, like getting plasmas at millions of degrees, have always provided scientific breakthroughs in the past.
Just putting all your eggs in one basket is not a good strategy.
I understand diminishing returns perfectly, thank you.
Tokamak fusion will never pay back even the money already spent on it, never mind the billions more to make it work at all, or the many tens of billions needed to build a power generating facility, or to build another one two or five years later as the first one destroys itself with neutron flux.
I.e., we are already in diminishing returns on hot-neutron fusion. Probably the only result of any value will be a generation of practical plasma fluid dynamicists, who will be needed for fusion propulsion systems.
Meanwhile, each dollar spent building out solar and wind generates production capacity at least in proportion, with discount for bigger sites: the literal opposite of diminishing returns.
I think what you're saying is that we should let the Sun do fusion because it's really good at that, and we should do photovoltaics and wind because we're really good at that, and maybe leaving fusion on the Sun where it belongs is sensible.
We have thousands of years of nuclear fission raw materials available, and we'll eventually have to turn to them despite what the anti-nuke people say.
We can but it means that you'll have solar captors (wind turbine, solar pv) littering the ground _or_ we'll just eat less energy. I'm afraid not many of us are ready for any of these two. Fusion would allow us to go on as usual. If only we had reliable information about the "is fusion for real use possible" question...
For a lot of places in the world you would need more storage than you need production units, especially further away you get from the equator and deserts. Fixing enough production from wind and solar is already well economical up to a point of 100% capacity with some countries already there, but with around 50% of actually energy consumption being from renewable.
We don't even need to litter the ground as ocean based wind farms are quite effective in using the wast amount of oceans we have. If however we are going to stop using fossil fuels we need to convert that energy into a storage medium like hydrogen, having massive pipelines to transport it, have large amount of storage facilities, and built equal amount of capacity of gas burning power plants as we have renewable capacity demands. The economics of that is the tricky bit.
> Do you really think we can cover our far-future energy needs with renewables alone?
No, but they don't need to. Nearly all of today's technologies are incredibly wasteful as they are black box and produced within a system that seeks infinite growth.
Just look at the corporate-product produced e-waste [1], the corporate move against 'right-to-repair', and the relentless corporate walling off of the knowledge commons (scientific research) [2]. The effects of black box technologies on the education and knowledge commons are harrowing on their own.
Instead we can have an open source society that doesn't block people from learning, re-using and repairing the tech in our daily lives (and make it all modular). That means we won't use all the bloated technology we use today (goodbye archaic Intellectual Property system):
"The current political economy is based on a false idea of “immaterial scarcity.”
It believes that an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies – for copyrights, trademarks and patents – should restrain the sharing of scientific, social and economic innovations.3 Hence the system discourages human cooperation, excludes many people from benefiting from innovation and slows the collective learning of humanity. In an age of grave global challenges, the political economy keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits." [3]
The way to get there is a better and more open quantification of the material flows/throughputs in society. The breakthroughs behind Valueflo.ws and Holo-REA (Holo-REA is a combination of http://valueflo.ws and http://holochain.org) make this possible. Together these projects enable a fully distributed Network Resource Planning software (in contrast to today's Enterprise Resource Planning systems/software that walls of the material accounting of planetary resources).
"The current political economy is based on a false idea of material abundance.
We call it pseudo-abundance. It is based on a commitment to permanent growth, the infinite accumulation of capital and debt-driven dynamics through compound interest. This is unsustainable, of course, because infinite growth is logically and physically impossible in any physically constrained, finite system." [4]
We don't really know our future projected energy costs in a post-climate change world.
Fusion might have a place if there is a massive amount of energy needed to reset the globe to a semi-controllable environment - either carbon control, air conditioning / heating on a city wide scale, natural disaster mitigation, etc.
Changing weather conditions can also affect solar and wind energy sources, which make it less permanent. Fission reactors still remain a crucial investment, but if Fusion ever 'arrives' it could prove a more fundamentally scalable solution - of course, around 50 years in the future.
If we need a massive amount of energy, we already know the way to get the most for our money: build out solar and wind.
In fact we do think we need a massive amount of energy, and society is slowly turning toward the correct answer. Each fragment that catches on invests in solar and wind. Some come late to the party, but everyone gets there in the end. The later you start, the lower your entry cost; but the earlier you start, the more benefit you get.
> This is a fundamental problem in any hot-neutron fusion system. The real reason governments pour so much money into Tokamak fusion projects is as jobs programs for hot-neutron physicists, and subsidy for contractors, to keep them all ready for when they will be tapped for weapons work.
This is quite the claim with no evidence to support it when the more obvious explanation is simply that fusion, if it become a reality, could power entire countries with a single reactor opposed to windmills.
That's not a given. It's also possible that fusion becomes a reality and in practice a working react is roughly the same size as a current fission reactor. Or smaller, or bit bigger. We don't know.
Fusion is sought after so much as the theoretical limits of the energy output are quite gargantuan compared to anything that exists now.
How much of that theoretical limit can be practically accessed remains to be seen as always, but the theoretical limits lie orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any other potential energy source.
To say that fusion research is simply pursued to create jobs with no evidence is quite a strange claim when the more obvious reason is that the potential gains from it are enormous and that it's possible, and indeed plausible, that it could solve all energy problems in this world for the foreseeable future, and perhaps even in our lifetime.
If they were even a little bit serious about ever getting power out, they would not be starving everything except hot-neutron fusion.
Actions speak louder than words. Their actions are deafeningly clear.
We already have a solution to all energy problems for the foreseeable future: the cheapest ever devised, with costs still plummeting. All we need is to build it out. Building it out slower delays the full solution, in exact proportion.
> If they were even a little bit serious about ever getting power out, they would not be starving everything except hot-neutron fusion.
> Actions speak louder than words. Their actions are deafeningly clear.
Yes, their actions are pumping money into it, and dismiss that without a source by saying they are doing so “simply to create jobs”, which is an absurd idea when they could have created those jobs with other research.
They are pumping money into it because they hope it will bear fruit.
> We already have a solution to all energy problems for the foreseeable future: the cheapest ever devised, with costs still plummeting. All we need is to build it out. Building it out slower delays the full solution, in exact proportion.
No we do not, wind and solar can not currently supply entire countries, even on a theoretical level, the way a single fusion reactor could theoretically supply an entire country from a bucket of sea water per year.
All of the serious promoters of fusion say a production reactor would need to be at least ten times as large as current fission designs. I see no reason to guess they are exaggerating.
The amount of graft to be extracted from a $100B 20-year construction project already has some politicians salivating.
> Thus, every cent spent on this project actually takes us farther away from a renewable-energy future
And, by extension, from a carbon light future through better nuclear in small form factor and molten salt reactors. Renewable is great but efficient, climate neutral finite source energy is, too.
Too bad so much of the green movement is still hanging on to its former peace movement sentiment of nuclear = nuclear weapons.
No, because just operating and maintaining a fission plant is more expensive than building out solar, wind, and storage, and operating those. (Never mind building and decommissioning nukes, another huge expense with nothing comparable for remewables.)
There is no place for nukes, existing or new, in a financially solvent future. Never was, really. It was always the high-cost choice, but (so) offered copious opportunities to divert money to ready pockets, like most high-ticket tax-funded projects in the US.
> Seeing humanity achieve net fusion in my lifetime would be a total game changer and repoint a good chunk of our future.
For the same reason, I hope it will never happen. We will fuse all the hydrogen currently stored in Earth oceans just to produce Bitcoins or do something equally crazy. Remember when Americans put down a lot of asphalt just because they had all the oil? It didn't turn out to be so great 50 years after. I don't believe fusion is going to help our planet, either.
Converting all hydrogen on earth would be thermal death for us even if done over centuries.
While I do think that humanity is a destructive force, and we don't know how to control ourselves, that doesn't mean to me we should not develop fusion reactors. Because we haven't only grown in energy-consumption, but also in responsibility. From my point of view, we should stay on that path. Which includes looking for clean sources of energy.
It's nice to see advancements like this but I'm not sure that they will come soon enough for climate change. We needed to move on that yesterday. The industrialized countries need to sort out their safer fission options as a stopgap measure, and it's something we can start moving on immediately.
If only everyone has been as radically rational back in the 1970's when the greenhouse effect was generally dismissed as an argument for nuclear (fission) power, we would have had a half century head start.
I agree it's a game changer in the long term (eg for multiplanetary life), but in the timeframe that we have to do something about climate change (rather short), the effect of fusion depends hugely on the cost of building and running a fusion plant. If it is more expensive per Watt than a solar panel and a battery, not much is gained. If it is much cheaper, then it will indeed be a game changer in the short term. But currently it doesn't really look like it will be super cheap when it becomes available.
Afaiu, fusion doesn't produce radioactive waste products that fission does, since the fuel used for fusion are isotopes of hydrogen, and the waste products are helium and neutrons.
Since the 70s people - also in Physics departments - thought we are really close to viable fusion. In these early days also a lot of money has been put into it. Therefore I highly doubt this approach is bringing any commercially usable results within the next decades.
"held plasma at a temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds and at the even hotter temperature of 160 million degrees Celsius for another 20 seconds."
at the end of that 121 seconds, did some one decide it was long enough and then powered it down and then why? did it fail, and that's why it stopped? if it failed, what does (would) that look like?
It is probably limited by heating of the diverter section where there's a magnetic x-point and plasma escape really tests the heat limits of materials. One of EAST's (and many Tokomak reactor's) main objectives is testing diverter materials and shapes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divertor
This video is so scifi.... Moreover I don't know why my gut feeling was "it looks so reassuring"... Do you know why it pulses ? And what are the little point-lights running around from time to time ?
Alcator C-Mod has been setting records like this for a long time, only with Pressure and Confinement, instead of Temperature and Confinement. IIRC, you need Pressure, Temperature, and Confinement time to be above the critical threshold. (eg. high temperature means nothing if your density is very low, you've barely got any gas)
So it's not clear this actually can be scaled to fusion.
I'll note that MIT's ARC reactor design (SPARC first), seems on track to deliver all three, and in a much more compact body, and with a liquid molten lithium salt blanket design that might actually be workable, and maintainable (e.g. serviced).
However, there's still the problem of helium "ash" and other by products produced by fusion, and how to remove them. It's not a problem now because after 100 seconds, you're emptying the entire chamber, but this means you can only "pulse" the fusion reaction, you can't run a continuous reaction, unless you figure out a way to clean out the products of the reaction, and no one has demonstrated that as yet I'm away. Perhaps the divertor design the Chinese have come up with can do that, but I feel like they would have publicized it as it is a long standing problem.
Because a star like ours has a power density of a compost pile. You can run a generator from one, but you need a LOT of it to get any appreciable power. Ludicrous amounts, really.
Thankfully for the viability of fusion, reactions scale with temperature to the 4th power (iirc), so you get 10000x higher power density by running things at 10x the temperature. Since the containment difficulty goes up at a far slower rate than this, it makes higher temperatures both more space efficient and power efficient, and eventually lets you extract more energy from the fusion reactions than you're spending on magnetic containment.
Or, to put it to intuitive human scale - a cubic meter from the very core of the Sun outputs 270W - about the consumption of a single gaming console, not enough to power even a vacuum cleaner.
Coincidentally, it's roughly the power output of a square meter solar panel.
4th power of magnetic field strength, not temperature. Increasing magnetic field strength increases your density and your temperature, and that compounding is what gets you 4th power scaling.
It's not about temperature, it's about pressure. The only way to achieve the pressure needed for fusion on earth is to heat up the plasma much hotter than the sun.
Whatever it takes for them! Nature will course correct if amphetamines hurt math professors to the point where they can no longer contribute to math. As of right now, it seems to be helping them.
They have nowhere near the density needed to do stellar levels of fusion. You need energy \times time \times areal density. For example, the inertial confinement fusion folks do very high densities but interactions that last for much less than a second.
More info on what it is, and why being subject to Chinese media law and being a state outlet are different things, and what the actual differences are: "Facts and Myths about Global Times, the most misunderstood publication in China": https://beijingchannel.substack.com/p/facts-and-myths-about-...
I'm not seeing anything in the piece that suggests that it isn't. VOA is state media but doesn't necessarily represent the official positions of the US government.
Just because its homepage articles have opinions that often align with actual state outlets, doesn't mean it acts as a state outlet. Many of those perspectives are shared by regular Chinese people. If you don't believe me maybe you should visit China and talk to some people to confirm.
The Chinese people that are afraid to talk about politics if any phone is even just close to them? They probably would confirm opinions shared by state outlets, if they'd even bother with you.
You are right that Chinese people don't like talking about politics, but not because they fear the government. They tend to avoid confrontation in general. And also Chinese media spends very little time bashing foreign countries, so most people have very favorable opinions about foreign countries even if there are political tensions.
Research by reputed western institutions show conclusively that it is false that people are afraid of the government.
This other Harvard paper about censorship shows that censorship's goal is not to remove criticism, but to limit collective action, regardless of whether the speech is pro or anti government. The paper shows that many people are not afraid of, and do, complain about the government, and that if their comments do not instigate collective action, then they are unlikely to be removed. https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-censorship-china-...
This video by a Canadian expat shows, with concrete and verifiable examples, that despite censorship, people complain about issues, and that the government listens to grievances and even actively addresses them. https://youtu.be/i6jBayUuB4A
And the articles about what a terrible country the USA is? Just checked, only one "USA bad" article and one "McDonald's Bad" article. Everything was about superior Chinese achievement and awesome CCP party members. lol
No, articles are usually not aggressive towards another country; light criticism could be found here and there, but not focused on the US.
The articles are e.g. about China becoming a leader in this/that economy sector. Focus topics seem to be (as far as I remember, been there in 2019 last):
- Progress and positive effects of the Belt and Road initiative
- Massive infrastructure projects in mainland China - railway
- Fighting pollution - stories about new regulations, violations and their prosecution
- Fighting corruption - stories about prosecution of corruption
- Aspiring economy sectors in China - domestic airplane development
- Joint ventures with technology leaders - like research centers
- Cooperation with other countries
- Messages of the CCP and the president himself - perfected message control
Read the citation you gave sensing the direct contradiction with the article and the 300M C (over 25KeV) is the reported peak (from the article, "up to" 300M C) while the "stable plasma" at an unspecified temperature was sustained for 70s.
The OP cites KSTAR as having the previous record but at a lower temp. It also says "100M C for 20 seconds" so I'm assuming the 70s number refers to a temperature graph that had some temperature but they had a bump that exceeded 100M C for a width of 20s in the overall time of 70s.
Impressive times! I remember the wendelstein 7x saying getting rid of the heat is the challenge and if you can suck it up a whole 5 seconds or something you can almost do it indefinitely.
This reflects China's industrial strength, but it is not clear whether such small progress has practical value.In a word, it's better to work hard than not.
There's tons of research trying to figure out how to achieve various feats. Not because the researchers are curious whether it is possible "in a pure research mindset" but because they accomplishing their goal is a stepping stone to industrially useful applications.
>maybe if you're trying to make money from it. if you're just trying to see if it's possible in a pure research mindset, then seems like success
My point is not about money. Plenty of research groups have achieved sustained fusion without net power generation. But if this is simply a linear scaling of input power based on existing techniques, there's nothing remarkable here.
They successfully held a temperature of 120 million degrees. That's not impressive? This seems like the experiment was more about the magnets and the temperature than it was about generating electricity. Small moves Ellie, small moves.
I imagine this was about exploring part of the fusion triple product. Which is very valuable as reaching the time/temp/density point for ignition is when generation even starts to become feasible. This article doesn’t say anything about density which is unfortunate. But showing proof of containing plasma at that temp for a longer amount of time than anyone else has (previous was KSTAR I think?) is an accomplishment.
said in another context, which talked about "dumping waste heat" -Surely the whole point of fusion is to extract useful energy, and unless I'm missing some MHD path, the energy it is going to emit we can use is heat energy: these things will drive turbines. Right?
So this "x MW for y seconds" thing needs to be come "z MW sustained forever" if we're going to extract usable energy, to heat steam, to drive turbines.
I mean sure: you can run an awesome laser off an explosion. Its no way to light your room up to read a book.
Pulsed energy is no limitation. As an example the internal combustion piston engine has had some success despite running in cycles with discrete energy pulses. This even with a continuous/cycle-free alternative being available in the form of gas turbines.
The flywheel is doing a lot of heavy lifting in an ICE. But sure, Freeman Dyson would agree with "Orion" the case in point.
Gas turbine always excited me as a propulsion unit for trains and cars. Never quite got traction, great shame. Certainly, from Ferranti/Parsons onwards, it has been a stalwart of highly efficient electric generation. Diesel backup has the advantage of speed, but I think most standby power now which can't be done as hydro or battery is gas-turbine, with Diesel as an alternate fuel: not bang-bang-go. I'm talking at scale. Sure, a honda jennie is a good thing to have when the power is out.
OK. I'm kind of there: How about we fire off a classic fission device every 5 years, and power the electricity supply off the heat we soak into the surrounding rocks?
Jokes aside, what is the future power take-off from fusion expected to be? If its not consumption of the neutrons, directly, in some electro-magnetic pathway to usable power, its almost certainly conversion of heat energy into another form.
Not-a-barrier aside Do you think they're -> aiming <- for pulses of that energy? If not, what is the plan?
> OK. I'm kind of there: How about we fire off a classic fission device every 5 years, and power the electricity supply off the heat we soak into the surrounding rocks?
That actually was the original plan, although you needed to detonate one every few days instead of every few years. The initial experiments detonated them in salt mines but the explosions did too much damage and couldn't be reliably contained, so the plan switched to a large steel cavity partially filled with water. Unfortunately the cost of nuclear weapons was far too high to produce power competitively and you'd get a substantial buildup of fission waste. This led to the idea of using lasers instead of fission to initiate the fusion reaction, which in turn developed into modern inertial confinement fusion (ICF).
And yes, for tokamaks they are aiming for pulsed energy.
If I've learned anything in the last 20 "get off my lawn" years of my life, this (fusion) thing will continue to make slow progress, until someone figures out how to marry fusion with The Surveillance Economy (e.g. some sort of AdTech) and then it will rapidly take off.
OK, got that (cynicism) off my chest. This is exciting to see. Fusion machines are like physics porn for me. Does anyone have any more links on this actual facility?
