Elusive fusion reactors to be commercialised by 2025-2030... Or so they say

Fusion in nature isn't extremely rare, every single star, all the hundreds of trillions of them (correction, 200 billion-trillion stars) we can see currently or know of, all operate under fusion. When you have triple figure trillions of bodies in the known universe working the same way, it is anything but rare. It's the sheer mass of the star that sustains the fusion cycle before the fuel starts to run dry and the next phase of the star's lifecycle begins.

The sun is a perpetual fusion factory, made up of a gigantic burning ball of plasma. It fuses several hundred tons of hydrogen into helium each second.
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We don't have that sort of mass on Earth, instead fusion has to be done done with immense heat and plasma confinement. As Alan Partridge would say, these reactors are quite literally hotter than the Sun (by a factor of several multiples).
 
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This happened recently as well.

www.world-nuclear-news.org

British company pioneers new nuclear welding technique

Sheffield Forgemasters has completed weld-assembly of a full-sized small modular reactor nuclear vessel demonstrator assembly using Local Electron-Beam Welding. It said the technique took less than 24 hours to complete four, thick, nuclear-grade welds, typically requiring a year of work to...
www.world-nuclear-news.org
 
screenshotofthepurchase said:
Fusion in nature isn't extremely rare, every single star, all the hundreds of trillions of them (correction, 200 billion-trillion stars) we can see currently or know of, all operate under fusion. When you have triple figure trillions of bodies in the known universe working the same way, it is anything but rare. It's the sheer mass of the star that sustains the fusion cycle before the fuel starts to run dry and the next phase of the star's lifecycle begins.



We don't have that sort of mass on Earth, instead fusion has to be done done with immense heat and plasma confinement. As Alan Partridge would say, these reactors are quite literally hotter than the Sun (by a factor of several multiples).
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I don't mean rare as in the number of bodies where it occurs, I mean rare as in the number of reactions inside stars that result in fusion is about 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of the total number of reactions
 
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mrk said:
Seems like now every couple of months a new discovery, now thanks to AI.



www.vice.com

Scientists Claim AI Breakthrough to Generate Boundless Clean Fusion Energy

Princeton researchers report that a new AI model has solved one of the major roadblocks to generating fusion energy.
www.vice.com www.vice.com
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It's been like that for about 3 years. It's an easy article to write or get the AI to write.

Each ground breaking leap forward is just a slight change in max temperature attained or the energy output has been more than put in etc if you don't include all of the energy actually used.
 
Trusty said:
This happened recently as well.

www.world-nuclear-news.org

British company pioneers new nuclear welding technique

Sheffield Forgemasters has completed weld-assembly of a full-sized small modular reactor nuclear vessel demonstrator assembly using Local Electron-Beam Welding. It said the technique took less than 24 hours to complete four, thick, nuclear-grade welds, typically requiring a year of work to...
www.world-nuclear-news.org
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Disappointed that they're not welding using nukes.
 
mrk said:
Some late night bedtime reading/viewing, quite fascinating images too.

www.theguardian.com

‘A picture of hell’: inside the UK’s nuclear reactors – in pictures

Armed with a Geiger counter, Michael Collins was given access to multiple power stations across the UK – he found them tranquil, beautiful and sinister
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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I completely forgot we had fast breeder reactors. Such a shame we had to discontinue these things thanks to nuclear arms treaties as they chewed up so more fissile material that other reactor ls just cast of as 'waste'.
 
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www.nature.com

Avoiding fusion plasma tearing instability with deep reinforcement learning - Nature

Artificial intelligence control is used to avoid the emergence of disruptive tearing instabilities in the magnetically confined fusion plasma in the DIII-D tokamak reactor.
www.nature.com www.nature.com

Using AI to forecast instability and adjust accordingly. Could be a game changer.

The controller maintained the tearing likelihood under a given threshold, even under relatively unfavourable conditions of low safety factor and low torque. In particular, it allowed the plasma to actively track the stable path within the time-varying operational space while maintaining H-mode performance, which was challenging with traditional preprogrammed control. This controller paves the path to developing stable high-performance operational scenarios for future use in ITER.
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A year ago Lex Fridman did a really interesting interview with MIT nuclear scientist Dennis Whyte, it's long, but well suited to the subject.

 
Fusion would be amazing but I am not holding my breath!. Dont they currently take an order of magnitude more power to get going and keep stable than they generate?

obviously i am not saying its not promising or that they should give up........ but i do worry that fusion power is one of the standard fall back options to excuse kicking the can down the road when it comes to clean energy infrastructure.
 
bigmike20vt said:
Fusion would be amazing but I am not holding my breath!. Dont they currently take an order of magnitude more power to get going and keep stable than they generate?

obviously i am not saying its not promising or that they should give up........ but i do worry that fusion power is one of the standard fall back options to excuse kicking the can down the road when it comes to clean energy infrastructure.
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Fusion is a lot further away than most politicians believe.

Sure, there might be a sudden discovery, but unless there is then it is still the same as it's always been - 50 years away!!!

There are lots of different approaches these days, but few of them are easily scalable.

Fusion is always worth investment, but much of the current "misinformation" is from scientists over-selling their products. When they talk in terms of trying to break even, they aren't taking everything in to account, and when they do we are still a very long way away from a profitable commercial reactor.
 
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Stu999 said:
This relatively new company (founded 2013), thinks it can have something up and running by 2028.
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Got to snag those VC dollars!

SpellowHouse said:
Sure, there might be a sudden discovery, but unless there is then it is still the same as it's always been - 50 years away!!!
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I don't think this is really true. Fusion has advanced a lot, as the recent result from China shows. I think Helion's claims are unrealistic, but there is good reason to think that the slow, steady pace of advance in Fusion technology will grind out a working plant in the fairly near future. I think we'll see small scale, experimental, reactors capable of sustainable generating positive energy output in the next 5-10 years and commercial scale production 5-10 years after that.

Quite possibly, though, that'll render it too slow to make a real impact against the existing clean technology drawing power from the same fusion source as all our other energy systems are based on: solar. The price of solar is continuing to plummet, and the installation of new solar is still rising exponentially. I think it's quite realistic to believe that fossil fuels will be surpassed by solar long before they are surpassed by fusion.
 
Mr Jack said:
Got to snag those VC dollars!



I don't think this is really true. Fusion has advanced a lot, as the recent result from China shows. I think Helion's claims are unrealistic, but there is good reason to think that the slow, steady pace of advance in Fusion technology will grind out a working plant in the fairly near future. I think we'll see small scale, experimental, reactors capable of sustainable generating positive energy output in the next 5-10 years and commercial scale production 5-10 years after that.

Quite possibly, though, that'll render it too slow to make a real impact against the existing clean technology drawing power from the same fusion source as all our other energy systems are based on: solar. The price of solar is continuing to plummet, and the installation of new solar is still rising exponentially. I think it's quite realistic to believe that fossil fuels will be surpassed by solar long before they are surpassed by fusion.
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Did you know that the UK government is planning on there being commercial reactors available to build by 2035?

I don't think there is any hope of that. We are a lot further away from break-even than people are caring to admit. And most of the newest solutions aren't easy to scale.
 
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