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

[BananaDunka]

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.

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).

 

[Trusty]

This happened recently as well.

British company pioneers new nuclear welding technique : Corporate - World Nuclear News

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 complete.

www.world-nuclear-news.org

 

[Grim5]

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).

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

 

[ChroniC]

Seems like now every couple of months a new discovery, now thanks to AI.

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

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.

 

[BananaDunka]

Some late night bedtime reading/viewing, quite fascinating images too.

‘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

 

[FoxEye]

This happened recently as well.

British company pioneers new nuclear welding technique : Corporate - World Nuclear News

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 complete.

www.world-nuclear-news.org

Disappointed that they're not welding using nukes.

 

[Freddie1980]

Some late night bedtime reading/viewing, quite fascinating images too.

‘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

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'.

 

[Diddums]

Some late night bedtime reading/viewing, quite fascinating images too.

‘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

I can think of few things more interesting than doing that, absolutely fascinating.

 

[adidan]

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

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.

 

[BananaDunka]

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.