The first planes only flew for a few seconds.
Well, the first ones didn’t fly at all, they usually just killed the inventor.
That’s basically where we are today with fusion, they don’t work at all yet. Luckily it’s not killing people.
Yeah, and we measured them to the purpose of flight… Not wingspan, or how soft the wheels were.
So maybe we should measure technology that’s about generating power by…
I’ll let you fill in the blank.
P.S I have a “perpetual” motions machine that can run for 30 minutes (8 minutes longer than this fusion reactor), are you interested in investing?
EDIT: Four years ago the British Fusion reactor (J.E.T. originally built in 1984) produced “59 megajoules of heat energy” none of which was harvested and turned into electricity. The project was then shutdown for good after 40 years of not generating power.
I’ll let you fill in the blank
Code switch for: “I don’t have a point so why don’t you make it for me”
Verified electrical output, the answer is verified electrical power generated.
…as in we should measure power generation experiments by how much power they generated.
Isn’t that obvious?
They weren’t trying to generate electricity in this experiment. They were trying to sustain a reaction. As you said in another comment, they are different problems.
Converting heat to electricity is a problem we already understand pretty well since we’ve been doing it basically the same way since the first power plant fired up. Sustaining a fusion reaction is a problem we’ve barely started figuring out.
Converting heat to electricity is a problem we already understand pretty well since we’ve been doing it basically the same way since the first power plant fired up.
I don’t think we do have a means of converting this heat energy into electrical energy right now. With nuclear we put radioactive rods into heavy water to create steam and drive turbines…
What’s the plan for these fusion reactors? You can’t dump them into water, nor can you dump water into them… I don’t believe we have a means of converting the energy currently.
Even if we could dump water into them it would explosively evaporate because they run at 100 million degrees Celsius. That would be a very loud bang and whatever city they were in would be gone.
The walls get hot, you absorb the heat from the walls with a fluid. You use the fluid to heat water, you use the steam to drive a turbine, you use the turbine to turn a permanent magnet inside of a coil of wire. In addition, you can capture neutrons using a liquid metal (lithium) which heats the lithium, which heats the walls, which heats the water, which makes steam, which drives a turbine, which generates electricity.
If you poured water onto them they wouldn’t explode. 100 million degrees Celsius doesn’t mean much when the mass is so low compared to the mass of the water.
Most fission plants transfer the heat away from the reactor before boiling water. The same can be done with fusion.
The main difference with fusion is you have to convert some of the released energy to heat first. Various elements have been proposed for this.
The idea is to have water or molten salt cool the walls of the torus from outside, and those drive ordinary turbines like any other generator. The main issue is that particles fly out of the confined plasma donut and degrade the walls, whose dust flys into the plasma and reduces the fusion efficiency. They’re focusing on the hard part - dealing with the health of plasma sustainment and the durability of the confinement walls over time. Hot thing that stays hot can boil water or salt to drive regular turbines, that’s not the main engineering challenge. I get your frustration where it feels from news coverage that they’re not focusing on the right stuff, but what you’ll likely eventually see is that the time between “we figured out how to durably confine a healthy plasma” will quickly turn into “we have a huge energy output” much like inventors puttered around with flight for hundreds of years until a sustained powered flight design, however crappy, finally worked. From that point, it was only 15 years until the first transatlantic flight.
Thank you for your understanding and explanation.
A fusion reactor has already output more power than its inputs 3 years ago. Running a reactor for an extended period of time is still a useful exercise as you need to ensure they can handle operation for long enough to actually be a useful power source.
Generating massive amounts of heat and harvesting that and converting it to power are two (or three) different problems.
Agreed. But just to go along with the flight analogy proposed earlier, it took hundreds of years from Da Vinci’s flying machine designs to get to one that actually worked.
In 1932, Walton produced the first man-made fission by using protons from the accelerator to split lithium into alpha particles.[5]
We’ve been at this for coming up to 100 years too.
Let me know when they actually generate power. I don’t want another article about a guy jumping off the eifle tower in a bird suit. A successful flight should be measured by the success of the flight.
Power generators should be measured by the power generated.
0 watts. Franz Reichelt went splat on the pavement having proven nothing.
America, the UK, France, Japan, and no doubt other places have been toying with fusion “power” for 90 years… We’ve created heat and not much else as far as I can tell.
At least learn a little bit about the technology you’re criticizing, such as the difference between fission (aka not fusion) and fusion (aka…fusion), before going on a rant about it saying it’ll never work.
None of the reactors are being built with output capture in mind at the moment, because output capture is trivial compared to actually having an output, let alone an output that’s greater than the input and which can be sustained. As you’ve clearly learned in this thread, we’re already past having an output, are still testing out ways to have an output greater than an input, with at least one reactor doing so, and we need to tackle the sustained output part, which you’re seeing how it’s actively progressing in real time. Getting the energy is the same it’s always been: putting steam through a turbine.
Fission is what nuclear reactors do, it has been used in the entire world, it’s being phased out by tons of countries due to the people’s ignorance of the technology as well as fearmongering from parties with a vested interest in seeing nuclear fail, is still safer than any other energy generation method, and would realistically solve our short term issues alongside renewables while we figure out fusion…but as I said, stupid, ignorant people keep talking shit about it and getting it shit down…remind you of anyone?
Fission isn’t fusion, the first artificial fusion was two years later in 1934. That gives us a mere 332 years to beat the time from Da Vinci’s first design to the Wrights’ first flight
0 watts. Franz Reichelt went splat on the pavement having proven nothing
He demonstrated pretty clearly his idea didn’t work.
Yes, but you’re asking how much cargo it can take while we’re barely off the ground. Research reactors aren’t set up to generate power, they’re instrumented to see if stuff is even working.
It’s almost as if fusion is a significantly more difficult problem to solve than powered flight
LLNL has achieved positive power output with their experiments. https://www.llnl.gov/article/49301/shot-ages-fusion-ignition-breakthrough-hailed-one-most-impressive-scientific-feats-21st
No fusion reactor today is actually going to generate power in the useful sense.
These are more about understanding how Fusion works so that a reactor that is purpose built to generate power can be developed in the future.
Unlike the movies real development is the culmination of MANY small steps.
Today we are holding reactions for 20 minutes. 20 years ago getting a reaction to self sustain in the first place seemed impossible.
Predicted fusion energy and energy actually harvested and converted to usable electricity are not the same thing. Your article is about “fusion energy” not experimentally verified electrical output.
It’s a physicist doing conversion calculations (from heat to potential electricity), not a volt meter measuring actual output produced.
If you’re not sure how the fire works, it seems kind of stupid to build a turbine for it.
We were absolutely not sure how fire really works (low temperature plasma dynamics and so on) when we used it in caves eons ago.
We also did not build turbines then.
Also, a campfire is not plasma, so you probably shouldn’t be building any turbines either.
Fire is low temperature plasma. A campfire has fire.
Very hot flames can contain enough ions / free electrons to be considered a plasma but a wood campfire the likes of which cavemen built, which is what we are discussing here, do not achieve such temperatures. If cavemen wielded acetylene torches then they might have more experience with plasma.
If you were thinking something simple like “fire is plasma” that is reductive, and the cases where flame is plasma are not the everyday kind. Hence, when I said “a campfire is not plasma” I was being pretty specific. Your reply that ”fire is a low temperature plasma,” as an unqualified blanket statement, is wrong. Go read on it. It’s interesting.
If you’re not sure how the fire works, it seems kind of stupid to build a turbine for it.
Leaving the arguments up to this point aside (because I am not agreeing with or supporting @DarkCloud), your comment on its own doesn’t make much sense. In general, the beauty of of a steam turbine electrical generator is that you don’t have to care how the heat gets generated. You can swap it out with any heat source, from burning fossil fuels, to geothermal, to nuclear, to whatever else and it works just fine as long as the rate of heat output is correctly calibrated for the size of the boiler.
That’s my point: fusion is just another heat source for making steam, and with these experimental reactors, they can’t be sure how much or for how long they will generate heat. Probably not even sure what a good geometry for transferring energy from the reaction mass to the water. You can’t build a turbine for a system that’s only going to run 20 minutes every three years, and you can’t replace that turbine just because the next test will have ten times the output.
I mean, you could, but it would be stupid.
Good point. Uncertainty over the magnitude and longevity of the heat source, and therefore how big to make the turbine and whether it would remain in operation long enough to exceed the payback period of its cost, is definitely a valid reason not to bother attaching a steam generator to a thing.
Not equivalent. Let’s measure the aircraft performance by its ability to carry passengers between capital cities.
It’s baby steps and we need to encourage more investment. Not dismiss the Wright brothers for being unable to fly from New York to London after ten years of development.
