Haven't been to /sci/ and catching up with the latest fusion news for a few years so how does it look for fusion now? What the most promising project, what new technologies have been developed and how long before we actually see net fusion gain?

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Anonymous Sat Jun 9 08:03:30 2018 No.9798550 [Reply] [Original]

Haven't been to /sci/ and catching up with the latest fusion news for a few years so how does it look for fusion now? What the most promising project, what new technologies have been developed and how long before we actually see net fusion gain?

Anonymous Sat Jun 9 08:13:33 2018 No.9798556

>>9798550
The most significant I can think of is advancement in superconductors that allow a 10x decrease in the size of the machine for the same amount of energy output, laid out in this lecture.

https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4

so the reduced costs in prototyping, running and testing will be cumulative and opens the doors for private startups to begin the innovation cycle in earnest,
MIT itself put a 2 year plan in place to build a new experiment based on this technology, and various news stories have been breaking about it in the past months.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/09/nuclear-fusion-on-brink-of-being-realised-say-mit-scientists
As you can see, it's significantly smaller.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 08:15:39 2018 No.9798559 >>9798550 as a little joke, probably 20 years :P ( yeah i know it has been 20 more years for 70 years already). But maybe take a look at the Wedelstein X-7 here in Germany( at Greifswald). Seems promising to me.

Anonymous Sat Jun 9 08:19:12 2018 No.9798564

>>9798550

We're Closer Than Ever Before™

If you want to eat tinfoil there's evidence Lockheed Martin's fusion reactor is going to be put into the new Columbia Class submarines, based upon their resizing of the reactor from a truck trailer size to the size that is the exact same dimensions/weight as submarine reactors. Likewise the Columbia Class submarines will use an all new contractor, Bechtel, that has a lot of experience building experimental fusors for the Dept. of Energy. This has historical precedence in that the first non-experimental nuclear reactor was launched in 1954 within the secret USS Nautilus (first nuclear powered submarine) while the first commercial nuclear power plant did not start operating until 1956.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 10:15:44 2018 No.9798753 >>9798550 Fusion is a meme

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 10:21:46 2018 No.9798764 >>9798550 Using high temperature to wait for something happens at some noisy distribution is for sure more efficient than isolating what we want to happen and reproduce just IT. Why?"

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 11:17:18 2018 No.9798848 >>9798764 What are you even saying?

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 11:18:14 2018 No.9798849 >>9798848 Using sequentiality is kinda less expensive than nois.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 11:21:56 2018 No.9798863 >>9798848 Let me translate: "I'm schizophrenic and I want attention"

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 11:36:53 2018 No.9798904 >>9798863 Your roleplaying games on scietists and doctors pushed humanity to dark age.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 13:05:04 2018 No.9799154 >>9798550 Look up ARC and SPARC

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 13:51:17 2018 No.9799262 >>9798550 Would Nuclear Fusion enable efficient space travel? t.brainlet

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 13:51:51 2018 No.9799265 >>9798764 Being this clueless...

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 13:53:04 2018 No.9799268 >>9799262 More efficient than using chemical power and less problems compared to fission power. But it'll never be efficient.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 13:55:55 2018 No.9799279 >>9799265 Temperature is "non cycle" per second, energy can be released if you commit cycle.

Anonymous Sat Jun 9 14:13:32 2018 No.9799327

>>9799279
Very simplified: to force fusion there have to be a lot of energy put into the system. That increases temperature no matter what you claim.
Even with very high temperatures and very good containment fusion is a matter of chance, getting better only improves the odds of fusion events.

So you have no fucking clue.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 14:16:10 2018 No.9799332 >>9799327 No, to get energy release, you must get protons with neurons into less energy holding material and harvest released energy. You don't have to use brute force.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 14:21:59 2018 No.9799348 >>9798550 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920379615301526?via%3Dihub https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmYmVYflIjM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjbkUIWWmVg

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 14:35:24 2018 No.9799376 >>9799262 No, no matter the energy source you will always need propellant, fusion actually adds problems because you now generate a lot of waste heat that you can't transfer anywhere. We're never going to leave this solar system.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 15:20:18 2018 No.9799500 >>9799376 Laser highways and solar sails retard. And fusion with ion drives can get to like 1-5% of lightspeed. More then enough to travel to nearby systems within a few century. Doable if you have some form of cyrosleep or an A.I crew

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 15:47:51 2018 No.9799550 >>9798753 Hydrogen bombs

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 16:19:43 2018 No.9799603 >>9799376 No, you don't always need propellant.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 16:50:50 2018 No.9799675 >>9799500 Yeah laser sails are the way to go. Hit .9999999c no worries bro.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 18:07:24 2018 No.9799927 >>9799500 In future centuries Antimatter Drives, Ramscoops and Conversion Drives could bring us to nearby systems. The crew probably is probably need to go full transhuman/posthuman but then interstellar travel will be no impossibility.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 18:37:14 2018 No.9800028 Can we get back to talking about Fusion?

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 19:08:42 2018 No.9800086 File: 475 KB, 1018x588, Capture.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>9798556 How could a scientist use such a manipulative graph with a fake axis.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jun 9 19:23:31 2018 No.9800108 >>9800086 It's not manipulative, they're comparing rate of change rather than absolute value.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 10 04:09:09 2018 No.9800807 >>9800086 That's pretty impressive

Anonymous Sun Jun 10 07:53:35 2018 No.9801046

>>9798550
Well there is that whole YBCO supercoductor stuff looking pretty great, which made a few projects jump in on that. MIT and Tokamak Energy come to mind.
There‘s also a bunch of your usual meme approaches like lockheed and general fusion that will very, very likely lead nowhere.
Meanwhile an optimized stellerator is being tested in Germany and that‘s looking incredibly promissing as an alternative to the Tokamak design that actuallly might allow continous opperation with much less hassle.
And alongside all of that, building of ITER is still lumbering along, which is still looking like it will sort out all remaining engineering dealbreakers of tokamak power plants and it will produce more energy than it consumes, technically. But that shit won‘t see first plasma until 2025 and won‘t do deuterium fusion until 2035. So if none of the start ups do it faster with the new magnet material, we‘ll probably have our first commercial fusion plant design through ITER and DEMO by 2040-2050.
>inb4 hurrdurr 30 years away
We actually know plasma physics now, so that‘s a proper estimate this time. Also half that time is literally just sitting around, waiting for ITER to finish construction.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 10 08:42:23 2018 No.9801095 >>9799332 I guess I'll believe you when you get the Nobel prize in physics.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 10 14:54:14 2018 No.9801803 File: 27 KB, 1024x1024, accepted].jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>9801095

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 10 14:58:27 2018 No.9801817 Now mantain that problem that people who try it dissappear and they are "killed" usually.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 10 15:09:21 2018 No.9801849 >>9800108 Its manipulative for a number of reasons. One of which is GPU's, not CPU's are better at additions per second.

Anonymous Sun Jun 10 15:12:26 2018 No.9801862

>>9801046
>Well there is that whole YBCO supercoductor stuff looking pretty great, which made a few projects jump in on that. MIT and Tokamak Energy come to mind.

And back in 2016, from this video: >>9798556
They said that REBCO magnets would be enough. That was a lie and neither are YBCO powerful enough or they wouldn't be bothering doing more magnet research.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 10 15:31:13 2018 No.9801901 >>9801849 Given that fusion devices actually only do one thing the correct comparison would be an ASIC running hardwired adders. Computers are general devices losing a lot of performance and efficiency compared to a specialized one.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 10 15:32:15 2018 No.9801906 >>9801862 So fusion is the only reason to improve superconductors? Really...

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 10 16:31:52 2018 No.9802050 >>9800108 It's not honest still. They reached 40MW in the 1980s, and we didn't improve much since.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 10 16:52:29 2018 No.9802085 >>9801862 >That was a lie Do you have any sources to back that up? Their maths using the conductivity of the superconductor holds up as far as I can see.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 10 16:57:20 2018 No.9802092 >>9801862 YBCO is a type of REBCO you retard

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 10 17:02:33 2018 No.9802106 >>9800108 They picked a parameter that doesn't mean that much fur fusion though, while calculations/seconds are everything for CPUs.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 10 17:27:30 2018 No.9802149 >>9802106 How the fuck is energy being produced NOT a reasonable scale to use for fusion?

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 10 17:55:03 2018 No.9802178 >>9802149 Because that doesnt mean much, you can drop a nuke to increase energy input, the difficult thing is confinement, where we are not making much progress.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 10 18:03:27 2018 No.9802190 >>9802178 It's energy output, not input. Did you even read the picture? also >20T field with YBCO superconductors >Not an advancement in containment

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 10 18:07:31 2018 No.9802194 >>9802190 Lol, we never had net output.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 10 18:09:38 2018 No.9802195 >>9802194 Nice goalpost moving faggot.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 10 18:18:57 2018 No.9802207 >>9802195 Uh, no, my point was from the beginning that the depicted energy input is not a very relevant metric. You seem to think we had net output, but we never did.

>>	Anonymous Sun Jun 10 18:47:57 2018 No.9802241 >>9800086 why would they say W.s instead of just joules i dont get it

Anonymous Sun Jun 10 19:15:53 2018 No.9802288

>>9802207
Once again you say the graph represents input, which it doesn't. It represents the energy output of the fusion reaction itself regardless of the initiation energy put into it, I am fully aware there has been no net gain but that is not the point. Are you being dense on purpose?

Anonymous Mon Jun 11 04:22:29 2018 No.9803253

>>9802288
Are you retarded or something? If there is no net gain, than what you are looking at is how much energy you injected, which is not hard to do. What is hard is achieving high peak temperatures and keeping those confined for as long as possible, which is something we didn't make any significant progress in decades.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 11 04:55:54 2018 No.9803279 >>9803253 But we did: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920379615301526?via%3Dihub https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmYmVYflIjM [Embed] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjbkUIWWmVg [Embed]

Anonymous Mon Jun 11 05:42:54 2018 No.9803307

>>9803253
This is like explaining this to a toddler

Energy in + Energy out = Net energy

If I put 500W in and get 200w from the reaction I still am left with -300W, but my device still produced it's own reaction power. This graph is measuring the output from the reaction itself.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 11 05:44:08 2018 No.9803308 Dude, just put the deuterium and tritium in a box then light the box lmao

Anonymous Mon Jun 11 06:19:39 2018 No.9803329

>>9803307
Energy out - energy in = net energy, you brainlet.

Besides, this doesn't contradict at all what I said. You just increased the amount of energy you are feeding into the reactor. This doesn't mean you are making good progress towards fusion e.g. comparable to microchip progress.

It would be like saying computers betweens 1950 and 1960 made good progress because their energy consumption grew, since they got bigger and bigger.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 11 09:46:14 2018 No.9803528 >>9799550 How the hell are they related?

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 11 10:01:09 2018 No.9803541 What's so difficult about building a fusion reactor anyway? Containing the fuel under high temperature/pressures?

Anonymous Mon Jun 11 10:31:26 2018 No.9803582

>>9803541

At least from what the guys on wedelstein say its essentially material science. You need good, stable magnets with really low tolerances, materials that can take high heat and pressure for an extended period of time without leaking hydrogen like crazy that also is way hotter on one part than the other et cetera. This seems to be the biggest problem by now.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 11 11:36:25 2018 No.9803682 What if they supercool the tritium while superheating the deuterium and make the reaction by shooting the deuterium plasma at the liquid tritium?

Anonymous Mon Jun 11 11:53:10 2018 No.9803702

>>9798556
for the potential gain a fusion reactor can give, this is ''meh'' to me. I'd rather hear the reaction can now be kept stable for a year. I also really don't like the private startup idea. I don't want Tyrone's fusion bomb destroying SanFran. Wait, let private startups happen after all.

Anonymous Mon Jun 11 11:54:42 2018 No.9803706

>>9803528
think of that kid with ADHD and the timid nerd that are brothers (I knew such a bunch, yarly) the ADHD kid sprays his energy all over in a short matter of time and then fall asleep on his desk, while the nerd contains his energy carefully through the whole day and get something done.

Anonymous Mon Jun 11 12:45:33 2018 No.9803810

>>9803541
The main issue is the extremely high temperatures.

There is also a good chance creating self-sustaining Plasmas this way is simply not possible. The core of stars have an extremely high pressure due to the gigantic gravity, the temperature though is comparatively low. The core of the sun is "only" 15 million degrees hot. To create fusion in a reactor, we would need temperatures more than 10 times that.

Now as we try to create Plasmas, we encounter countless problems with keeping them stable and growing, so those very well might come from the fact that we are trying to create them through heat alone, unlike stars do, with a lot of pressure. So self-sustaining plasmas might be literally impossible this way. We know for sure it is incredibely complicated this way.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 11 15:51:09 2018 No.9804112 >>9803810 Plasmas are ionized and vacuums cannot conduct heat. MAGNET CHAMBER VACUUM, PROBLEM SOLVED! I want my Nobel Prize by next Friday.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 11 18:35:39 2018 No.9804340 >>9798559 X-7 is a fusion resarch project is is terrible even by 1970s tokamak standard

Anonymous Mon Jun 11 19:01:07 2018 No.9804356
File: 573 KB, 1553x1600, serveimage (19).jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>9798550

> ctrl + f
> bussard
> polywell

the absolute state of the lot of (You)

This is our best shot at fusion providing one can demonstrate equilibrium in non thermal plasmas and bremsralung doesnt ruin the day

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

t. armchair plasma physicist

Anonymous Mon Jun 11 19:08:54 2018 No.9804370
File: 144 KB, 4928x1783, wb8.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

Also this a great video from the late Robert Bussard on his IEC approach to fusion energy. You should not be allowed to reply to this thread untill you have watched it.

Also you should be alarmed at how much money they threw at stupid tokamaks over the years and how little this guy got from the DOE. Its absolutely appalling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhL5VO2NStU

Anonymous Mon Jun 11 20:18:09 2018 No.9804437

>>9803810
they probably are possible, at least for short periods in experiments. i think there's enough evidence pointing to the possibility. however, the products quickly poison the reaction, and i don't think there's any good way to deal with it... you can't make helium ash removal completely selective, but you also want to maximize magnetic confinement of the fuel. so you're left with opposing problems.

also to your point about stars, they undergo fusion very very slowly (which is why it takes billions of years). the rate of fusion needed in reactors is ridiculously high.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jun 11 21:53:33 2018 No.9804506 >>9804356 >muh polywell Maybe because some of us are sick of years of following with no progress or we secret navy stuff now. Still if they can't do it with these YBCO magnets, then they can't do it!

>>	Anonymous Tue Jun 12 08:55:56 2018 No.9805128 WENDELSTEIN 7X STELLERATOR WILL PROVE THAT TOKAMAK IS A OBSOLETE TECHNOLOGY DUE TO UNAVOIDABLE DOWNTIMES PREVENTING CONTINUOS OPERATION. SRY ITER... >>9804340 YOU HAVE NO IDEA.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jun 12 08:57:26 2018 No.9805132 >>9804356 OLD OBSOLETE TECHNOLOGY, CANT HANDLE HIGH TEMPS, CANT HANDLE CONTINUOS OPERATION looks cool tho

>>	Anonymous Tue Jun 12 11:52:26 2018 No.9805360 >>9799262 Look up Solar sails if you are interested in more efficient space travel. We might even send probes to other solar systems with this tech.

Anonymous Tue Jun 12 12:50:26 2018 No.9805438

The one and ONLY project to have successfully replicated many of the sun's physical characteristics follows the electric sun model. If you want real results, don't blindly follow the conventional solar model like everyone else. Plasma is an electric phenomenon. Our sun is electric.

"SAFIRE generates the same energy densities as the sun’s photosphere and nuclear bombs ….. in a laboratory on Earth" SAFIRE Project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeVdzSjPx0g

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 13 02:22:20 2018 No.9806698 >>9803308 I don't know why this got me, but kek

Anonymous Wed Jun 13 02:44:01 2018 No.9806730
File: 132 KB, 1068x1051, French Voltigeur Crosses The River Neman Under The Cover Of Darkness (1807 - Colourised).jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>9803528
Hydrogen bombs can be used to generate energy.

You drop one into a giant sealed container full of water. Detonate it. Use the steam produced to drive turbines. Detonate more bombs inside the container when the steam pressure drops.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jun 13 11:59:37 2018 No.9807365 >>9806730 that would be too expensive to be worth it can't really miniaturize something like that, which ruins the idea

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 14 02:11:17 2018 No.9808630 >>9807365 It's not expensive. It's just that having a load of hydrogen bombs lying around and learning how to mass-produce them as cheaply as possible is a recipe for disaster.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 14 03:20:15 2018 No.9808731 File: 444 KB, 687x652, 1528890724672.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>9801862 >or they wouldn't be bothering doing more magnet research.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 14 03:26:24 2018 No.9808740 File: 22 KB, 286x280, 1528800396538.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>9803706

>>	Anonymous Thu Jun 14 06:48:23 2018 No.9809028 >>9802241 power-time is standard for generation and consumption, e.g. kilowatt-hours

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