Finally, Fusion Power Is About to Become a Reality

[Techno-Druid]

(Source)

Long considered a joke, or a pipe dream, fusion is suddenly making enormous leaps.

The idea first lit up Dennis Whyte when he was in high school, in the remote reaches of Saskatchewan, Canada, in the 1980s. He wrote a term paper on how scientists were trying to harness fusion (the physical effect that fuels the stars) in wondrously efficient power plants on Earth. This is the ultimate clean-energy dream. It would provide massive amounts of clean electricity, with no greenhouse gases or air pollution. It would do it on a constant basis, unlike solar and wind. Whatever waste it created would be easily manageable, unlike today’s nuclear power plants. And fuel would be limitless. One of the main ingredients needed for fusion is abundant in water. Just one little gram of hydrogen fuel for a fusion reactor would provide as much power as 10 tons of coal.

Whyte got an A on that paper, but his physics teacher also wrote: “It’s too complicated.” That comment, Whyte says with a hearty laugh, “was sort of a harbinger of things to come.”

Indeed, over the next few decades, as Whyte mastered the finicky physics that fusion power would require and became a professor at MIT, the concept seemingly got no closer to becoming reality. It’s not that the science was shaky: It’s that reliably bottling up miniature stars, inside complex machines on Earth, demands otherworldly amounts of patience, not to mention billions and billions of dollars. Researchers, like Whyte, knew all too well the sardonic joke about their work: fusion is the energy source of the future, and it always will be.

That line took on an especially bitter edge one day in 2012, when the U.S. Department of Energy announced it would eliminate funding for MIT’s experimental fusion reactor. Whyte was angry about the suddenness of the news. “It was absolutely absurd — you can put that in your article — fucking absurd that happened with a program that was acknowledged to be excellent.” But above all, he was dismayed. Global warming was bearing down year after year, yet this idea that could save civilization was losing what little momentum it had.

Imagine that I told you I was developing a special machine. If I put power into it, I could get 10 times as much out. Because of the undeniable laws of physics, I could show you on paper exactly why it should be a cost-effective source of vast amounts of electricity.

Oh, here’s the catch: My paper sketch would come true — especially the part about it being cost-effective — but only if I built the machine just right. Which might require materials that haven’t been invented yet. Until I perfected that design, my machine would use up more power than it produced. And I couldn’t get close to perfecting the design without spending years and years building expensive test machines that would reveal problems that I would try to address in subsequent versions.

If it seems crazy, well, that’s the story of fusion power.

Fusion definitely works. You see it every day. Our sun and other stars blast hydrogen atoms together with such intense force that their nuclei overcome their normal inclination to repel each other. Instead they fuse, sparking a reaction that transforms the hydrogen into helium and releases cosmic amounts of energy in the process.

We also have great paper sketches for fusion power machines. Fusion happens inside stars because of the crushing pressure created by their gravity. To generate that effect inside a fusion reactor, ionized gas — which is called plasma — must be heated and compressed by man-made forces, such as an ultra-powerful magnetic field. But whatever the method, there’s just one main goal. If you get enough plasma to stay hot enough for long enough, then you can trigger so much fusion inside it that a huge multiplier effect is unlocked. At that point, the energy that is released helps keep the plasma hot, extending the reaction. And there still is plenty of energy left over to turn into electricity.

The problem is that we’re still plugging away on predecessors to the machines that could generate that effect. Ever since the 1950s, scientists have used spherical or doughnut-shaped machines called tokamaks, including the one at MIT that lost funding a few years ago, to create fusion reactions in plasmas bottled up by magnetic fields. But no one has done it long enough — while also getting it hot enough and dense enough — to really tip the balance and get it going. Heating the plasma and squeezing it in place still takes more energy than you can harvest from it.

So, that’s the name of the game in fusion: to get past that point. ITER, a mega-billion-dollar reactor being built in France by an international consortium, is designed to do it and finally prove the concept. But ITER — which is also way behind schedule and over budget — overcomes the limitations of previous tokamaks by being enormous. It’s the size of 60 soccer fields, which probably isn’t an economical setup for power plants that the world will need by the tens of thousands.

Could you go the other direction, and instead make fusion machines much smaller, which is also to say much less expensive? That is what motivates all the fusion startups. Several have decided the answer is to use something other than a tokamak and its circular coils of magnets. They’re updating old designs, including hitting plasma with lasers, or cooking up new ones, such as compressing it with something like a particle accelerator. One startup plans to push on the material with pistons.

But Whyte and his colleagues at MIT made a different decision, one that could prove crucial to making fusion power arise sooner than people expect. Even though things looked dire a few years ago, when their fusion machine lost funding, Whyte’s team decided to double down on tokamaks. As Whyte saw it, why try to invent something totally new when you could take advantage of all those decades and billions spent researching tokamaks? Instead, they would rethink the design to make tokamaks modular and much cheaper and weave in brand-new materials that can induce and confine a fusion reaction.

After getting the news of the funding shutdown, the university, and other supporters of the program, persuaded Congress to grant a temporary reprieve. They could keep running their fusion reactor into 2016, enough time for experiments to be finished and to keep PhD students going on the research they had come to MIT to undertake. And then they dug in.

The most intriguing questions Whyte and his students were exploring had to do with how tokamaks could produce lots of electricity without being gigantic and expensive. MIT’s tokamak, which still sits in a two-story tall, garage-like room in a former Nabisco cookie warehouse, generated a magnetic field by running electricity through copper coils that surrounded a round metal chamber. In that chamber, plasma would be heated with microwaves and other methods to millions of degrees. On one of its last runs, it set a new record for plasma pressure while hitting 35 million Celsius.

Just outside the chamber, the vital measurement isn’t heat, but cold. The magnets that squeeze the plasma in place have to be kept well below minus-200 Celsius, or else their performance will degrade from a buildup of electrical resistance.

Fusion would definitely be the most efficient and simultaneously cleanest form of energy, assuming it can become sustainable. Although honestly at this point, I'm worried that fusion could become readily attacked by propaganda and lobbyists. Regardless, we need to solve both our environmental impact and finite energy issue.

[CheeseDoodlez]

Nothing in that article seems to indicate that fusion power is about to become a reality.

edit: Hey, we just need to invent some materials that don't exist yet, but we're totally getting there.

[Sunseeker]

Nothing in that article seems to indicate that fusion power is about to become a reality.

Yeah....I'm with this guy. Sounds like fusion is exactly where its always been and to quote the article, always will be.

[Deleted]

i think last i heard some japanese lab could keep fusion up for about a minute. which surely is an improvement from the seconds it used to be 10 years ago, but thats still a long ways off from military let alone commercial uses.

[Endus]

Fusion power is absolutely possible. As the article notes; the Sun is powered by that same process. Hydrogen bombs also use it, albeit in a spectacularly uncontrolled manner (which is what makes them effective as a weapon).

The problem is that replicating those kinds of conditions in a stable and controllable manner in such a way that you can effectively use it as a power source, that is really, really fuckin' hard.

And we've been 10 years away from fusion power for at least 30 years, now. I think it's clear there's an innovative leap required. And those really aren't predictable. We'll get there, we're really close, but I wouldn't try to set a timeline.

[Deleted]

Germany has been working on the Wendelstein 7-X. It is still far away from a fully functional fusion Reactor. But it has set several records.

[Azadina]

Finally, claim number 35836 of fusion hitting the market over the decades. How about postponing the celebration until it actually happens, instead of party at every random claim of development as the next coming of jesus....for nothing over and over again?

[Techno-Druid]

We'll get there, we're really close, but I wouldn't try to set a timeline.

Yeah, this is the point the article and experts are trying to make, at least based off my comprehension. We're still working towards practical fusion, but we're closer to getting there than any other time in history.

[Vash The Stampede]

Fusion is never going to happen cause we'll never make it affordable, assuming we can ever get it to work. The Sun's fusion is mostly free due to gravity crushing the core where we have to spend energy to make energy. A Dyson Sphere is more likely to happen and we can capture the most efficient source of fusion, the Sun.

[Doctor Amadeus]

Ah you might want to calm down there Techno Druid, this has all the hallmarks of a Em drive hesteria a few years back, and it doesn't actually suggest it's about to become a reality.

I actually appreciate and love some of your post on technology, but I am afraid this one is more hype than anything and kind of leads people to bigger disappointment than they already get when they realize how much Boring Science Work has to be done for this to become a reality before most reading it are dead.

[Adam Jensen]

Fusion is never going to happen cause we'll never make it affordable, assuming we can ever get it to work. The Sun's fusion is mostly free due to gravity crushing the core where we have to spend energy to make energy. A Dyson Sphere is more likely to happen and we can capture the most efficient source of fusion, the Sun.

I think we're closer to fusion than a Dyson sphere.

Fusion reactors, for example, wouldn't take an entire planet's worth of materials to create.

[Zensunni]

(Source)

Fusion would definitely be the most efficient and simultaneously cleanest form of energy, assuming it can become sustainable. Although honestly at this point, I'm worried that fusion could become readily attacked by propaganda and lobbyists. Regardless, we need to solve both our environmental impact and finite energy issue.

The ITER (and the tokamak reactor concept in general) hasn't even *addressed* the issue of material degradation in the parts of the reactor that get bombarded by neutrons and other high energy particles. The reason is, presumably, they will cross that bridge when they get to it, i.e. when they are able to create a sustainable, useful reaction.

As someone who has followed the progress of the ITER and tokamak research for literally decades, if you think it's about to become a 'reality' you are woefully ignorant.

[Phookah]

Fusion is never going to happen cause we'll never make it affordable, assuming we can ever get it to work. The Sun's fusion is mostly free due to gravity crushing the core where we have to spend energy to make energy. A Dyson Sphere is more likely to happen and we can capture the most efficient source of fusion, the Sun.

You think creating something on the scale of many, many planets -around- our sun is more likely and feasible than figuring our fusion in our own backyard? After saying something about affordability?

Elegiggle

[Shinra1]

Dyson sphere? People are living in a fantasy. Humanity will be long gone by then.

As a religious person, I am more concerned about the after life.

[cubby]

Fusion is never going to happen cause we'll never make it affordable, assuming we can ever get it to work. The Sun's fusion is mostly free due to gravity crushing the core where we have to spend energy to make energy. A Dyson Sphere is more likely to happen and we can capture the most efficient source of fusion, the Sun.

You realize the inherent problem with saying "we're never going to [blank]", right? Along with you saying fusion is never going to happen because of affordability - those two aren't mutually exclusive.

Thanks for the link on the Dyson Sphere though.

[vsb]

Nothing in that article seems to indicate that fusion power is about to become a reality.

edit: Hey, we just need to invent some materials that don't exist yet, but we're totally getting there.

There are multiple recent breakthroughs in fusion industry and some very promising startups are getting funded by a private investors. Fusion is likely approaching and it's the only real way to replace oil and coal-based civilization.

[Stormspark]

Fusion power is absolutely possible. As the article notes; the Sun is powered by that same process. Hydrogen bombs also use it, albeit in a spectacularly uncontrolled manner (which is what makes them effective as a weapon).

The problem is that replicating those kinds of conditions in a stable and controllable manner in such a way that you can effectively use it as a power source, that is really, really fuckin' hard.

And we've been 10 years away from fusion power for at least 30 years, now. I think it's clear there's an innovative leap required. And those really aren't predictable. We'll get there, we're really close, but I wouldn't try to set a timeline.

The problem isn't that we can't sustain a fusion reaction. We can. The problem is, it takes so much energy to contain the plasma (via magnetic fields and other stuff) enough to get it to fuse, that it takes more energy than the fusion reaction puts out. So it's a net energy loss. THAT is the problem, not that we somehow can't do fusion.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Fusion power is absolutely possible. As the article notes; the Sun is powered by that same process. Hydrogen bombs also use it, albeit in a spectacularly uncontrolled manner (which is what makes them effective as a weapon).

The problem is that replicating those kinds of conditions in a stable and controllable manner in such a way that you can effectively use it as a power source, that is really, really fuckin' hard.

And we've been 10 years away from fusion power for at least 30 years, now. I think it's clear there's an innovative leap required. And those really aren't predictable. We'll get there, we're really close, but I wouldn't try to set a timeline.

People have been claiming that fusion power is only 30 years away since the 1950s

[Deleted]

cheap free energy will never happen - anyone who does REALLY invent something and can be proven and who wants to give it to The People, will simply be assassinated, Like that has already happened over the last 15 years.

- - - Updated - - -

People have been claiming that fusion power is only 30 years away since the 1950s

+/- 30 years, so maybe next year 2020.

[Endus]

The problem isn't that we can't sustain a fusion reaction. We can. The problem is, it takes so much energy to contain the plasma (via magnetic fields and other stuff) enough to get it to fuse, that it takes more energy than the fusion reaction puts out. So it's a net energy loss. THAT is the problem, not that we somehow can't do fusion.

We can't maintain the stable reaction longer than about a minute, either. That's the current record, so far as I know. While you're right that we're also using more power than we generate, that's a problem that's likely fixable with iterative improvements; getting the reaction to be stable at all is the real boogaboo. Getting the reaction going takes a big spike in energy, the idea is to keep it running while feeding fuel into it at a controlled pace, so you eventually pull more energy out than it took to get it going.

cheap free energy will never happen - anyone who does REALLY invent something and can be proven and who wants to give it to The People, will simply be assassinated, Like that has already happened over the last 15 years.

We've had cheap free energy for about 2000 years. Hydro energy was easy to capitalize on; the earliest vertical water wheels were in use about 2000 years ago. That was mechanical energy, rather than electrical, but converting the former into the latter is dead easy and we've been doing that for over 150 years. The only challenge is that it's reliant on natural water flow, so it isn't a solution that's applicable everywhere. All the "work" of the system is produced by the natural water cycle; we're just sticking a wheel into it and getting "free" energy out.

The rest of what you posted is a literal conspiracy theory and not worth responding to