1968

Depends on what its competing against and what you consider viable. I don’t think we’ll see anything as cheap as wind, water, or solar power - but Fusion power could be competitive against oil/coal/fission reactors as providing baseline power - or in remote locations where wind/solar/water is not viable (space! naval vessels! etc)

The things to remember about Fusion:
-net positive means energy, but not power. Almost all fusion reactors have to crank a turbine - which is very inefficient. So fusion reactors don’t just need net positive energy but a LOT of it (10x “breakeven”) because steam powered turbines still need to be turned!
-scaling them up in size also dramatically scales up costs (like in fission reactors)
-many will have a radioactive waste issue which adds disposal costs. Not as bad as fission - but neutron bombardment will render some components brittle and mildly radioactive.

There are exceptions to all the above rules - some are innovative and directly capture electricity without a turbine, some are less complex and will be cheaper to produce, and some won’t have the neutron/radioactivity issue…

1969

I am this morning attending a national conference to discuss both how the U.S. fusion energy research program can support ITER, and also what the research conducted at ITER can teach the U.S. fusion program about developing an upcoming power generating pilot plant. I am not a scientist, but some of these presentations present pretty compelling reasons why ITER’s science is critical to developing a burning plasma plant, even though the pilot plant’s construction will probably be quite different (and more economical) than ITER’s.

1970

Local news has been buzzing about fusion stuff as we have a bunch of MIT spinoffs and the like all spinning up. I particularly like the fact that the “Massachusetts Commonwealth Fusion Center” sounds like a location from fallout 4.

A local reporter was interviewing someone (scientist? engineer?) who said that some very very recent changes in the amount of energy it took to run the magnets (now much more efficient?) really changed where the break-even point was, and that (along with other recent discoveries) was pushing the timeline for fusion to run at commercial scale.

Mumgaard predicts that, by 2025, SPARC will produce ten times more energy than it consumes, and the company will have a commercial fusion device, capable of powering a town, in the early 2030s. He says the company will be selling them around the world.

1971

I want to believe in Commonwealth Fusion when they say its only 5 years away… but that’s just the standard line for the past decade. Helios says it, TAE says it, General Fusion says it, Lockmart says it, etc. So far the only two serious demonstration projects under construction is General Fusion’s and ITER… but it feels like there is some kind of critical mass growing - one of these things has to succeed, right?

1972

I don’t understand how you power a turbine when you have to run the reactions in an enclosed magnetic chamber…

1973

The chamber gets real hot? Wrap some tubing around it and pump water into it. Pure guesswork on my part.

1974

Yep. Nuclear reactors are just glorified steam engines.

1975

It feels like there are stories like this all the time. Eventually we’re gonna get there.

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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00391-1

1976

It depends on the reactor type - most fusion reactors - the kind you are probably thinking of like at ITER - pass water through the reactor’s outer shell to heat up and spin the turbine

General Fusion is a weird duck, as its essentially compressing with plasma with a liquid metal sheath, then using that liquid metal to move the heat to where it wants it:

1977

At DIII-D we’re investigating methods of coupling power into and out of the plasma using a big radio antenna called a helicon.

1978

Which is smart, because a lot of those other methods are fundamentally based on moving heat away from the reaction, where the challenge to fusion is keeping the temperature up in the first place.

I hadn’t seen this design before, that’s really cool (pun not intended, but I’ll leave it here anyway).

1979

Everything that generates power other than solar does it by spinning a turbine, and when you take out dams and wind, it’s all a steam engine. Silly and crazy, it’s one of the things that keeps me sane or perhaps incredulous that as far as we’ve come, we’re still eating bird eggs and animal muscles and we’re still heating our homes and doing all our electric stuff by boiling water. We just got really good at it.

1980

If you use a magnetohydrodynamic generator you don’t need a steam turbine, and in some ways it’s a natural fit for fusion.

1981

I saw a video that caught my eye in Youtube’s recommandation, followed the thread back to the source and discovered the MIT was hosting open courses. Dang: what have I been doing all these years!

I’ve been binging this since yesterday, and the teacher is brilliant. Excepting for the occasional dropping of an equation, the course has been very approachable so far, especially if you got an awesome teacher or friend who taught you how sexy the periodic table of elements really is, despite its looks.

1982

That sounds the curriculum for Navy Nuclear Power School. Cool!

1983

Heh, it does indeed.

1984

Xeno-transplanted pig heart recipient died. Hopefully they learned a lot. No cause of death stated so it may not even be rejection related.

1985

Two months with another creature’s heart. Incredible.

1986

They don’t say the web is fungus-based, but obviously this is a precursor to the mycelial network. :)

1987

TIL about pyrosomes: