The Lemon Fool

For those within easy travel distance of central London....

The Engineering behind a Fusion Energy experiment
Tuesday 16 May 2023, 6:00pm - 9:00pm, IET London, 2 Savoy Place, London WC2R 0BL

UKAEA's 'MAST Upgrade' machine is researching the viability of fusion as a future energy source.  Fusion is the reaction that powers the sun and stars. This lecture will be exploring the engineering behind this machine and what it is like to operate this fusion experiment.

https://events.theiet.org/events/the-engineering-behind-a-fusion-energy-experiment/

I read this article, or the equivalent one, on the BBC. It is quite depressing really. This is the first time this millennium that fuel (deuterium and tritium) have been tested in the Culham Tokamak. Meanwhile ITER in France is about ten years behind schedule, and to quote the BBC, it is due to open in 2025, but won't start doing experiments until 2035. The UK hasn't been part of the project since Brexit. I really hope that means we haven't been wasting money on it.
I can but hope that some of the private venture fusion companies make better progress.

Bminusrob wrote:I read this article, or the equivalent one, on the BBC. It is quite depressing really. This is the first time this millennium that fuel (deuterium and tritium) have been tested in the Culham Tokamak. Meanwhile ITER in France is about ten years behind schedule, and to quote the BBC, it is due to open in 2025, but won't start doing experiments until 2035. The UK hasn't been part of the project since Brexit. I really hope that means we haven't been wasting money on it.
I can but hope that some of the private venture fusion companies make better progress.

The whole problem with jet is one of near impossible challenges. Where ever you look they are at the limits of material science, plasma heating, plasma containment, radiation protection etc etc.

Even if all of these issues are over come you would only have a steam making machine that might reach an efficiency of 50%, need regular maintenance & cost a fortune both to build, service & fuel.

Any power generation that is designed to create heat, then steam, then electricity is so last century.

Some of the private companies seek to go from fusion to electricity which is better, but they are very expensive tiny fish in a market where fusion has no hope of competing with the fusion reactor that is the sun, especially if solar can go to orbit & beam power down. There are other technologies being thought about such as extracting power from virtual particles, a sort of Hawking radiation where some of the energy of virtual particle or anti particle are collected before they recombine, but these ideas are abstract theoretical possibilities with no experimental tests as far as I know.

Every now & then some one talks about laser fusion, but the folk in the field say this is all about developing better hydrogen bombs & the recent demonstration of laser fusion in the US was all for defense, despite many popular channels saying it was for civil power, in direct contradiction to what the folk doing the work said.

Regards,

odysseus2000 wrote:

Bminusrob wrote:I read this article, or the equivalent one, on the BBC. It is quite depressing really. This is the first time this millennium that fuel (deuterium and tritium) have been tested in the Culham Tokamak. Meanwhile ITER in France is about ten years behind schedule, and to quote the BBC, it is due to open in 2025, but won't start doing experiments until 2035. The UK hasn't been part of the project since Brexit. I really hope that means we haven't been wasting money on it.
I can but hope that some of the private venture fusion companies make better progress.

The whole problem with jet is one of near impossible challenges. Where ever you look they are at the limits of material science, plasma heating, plasma containment, radiation protection etc etc.

Even if all of these issues are over come you would only have a steam making machine that might reach an efficiency of 50%, need regular maintenance & cost a fortune both to build, service & fuel.

Any power generation that is designed to create heat, then steam, then electricity is so last century.

Some of the private companies seek to go from fusion to electricity which is better, but they are very expensive tiny fish in a market where fusion has no hope of competing with the fusion reactor that is the sun, especially if solar can go to orbit & beam power down. There are other technologies being thought about such as extracting power from virtual particles, a sort of Hawking radiation where some of the energy of virtual particle or anti particle are collected before they recombine, but these ideas are abstract theoretical possibilities with no experimental tests as far as I know.

Every now & then some one talks about laser fusion, but the folk in the field say this is all about developing better hydrogen bombs & the recent demonstration of laser fusion in the US was all for defense, despite many popular channels saying it was for civil power, in direct contradiction to what the folk doing the work said.

Regards,

But what a beautiful steam engine! I wouldn't knock it, it's both new and traditional. We actually understand the steam bit.

Sorcery

But what a beautiful steam engine! I wouldn't knock it, it's both new and traditional. We actually understand the steam bit.

Yes, our Victorian ancestors understood the steam bit & back then it was so amazing & new, but nowadays it belongs in the history books: inefficient, expensive to build, maintain & run & prone to breaking down in all manner of inconvenient ways.

Regards,

odysseus2000 wrote:The whole problem with jet is one of near impossible challenges. Where ever you look they are at the limits of material science, plasma heating, plasma containment, radiation protection etc etc.

Why was radiation protection such a challenge for JET?

odysseus2000 wrote:Every now & then some one talks about laser fusion, but the folk in the field say this is all about developing better hydrogen bombs & the recent demonstration of laser fusion in the US was all for defense, despite many popular channels saying it was for civil power, in direct contradiction to what the folk doing the work said.

Yes it was, which is why the intermittency really didn't matter. But I could never understand how you could expect to go from the US National Ignition Facility to a continuous power generator.

XFool wrote:

odysseus2000 wrote:The whole problem with jet is one of near impossible challenges. Where ever you look they are at the limits of material science, plasma heating, plasma containment, radiation protection etc etc.

Why was radiation protection such a challenge for JET?

odysseus2000 wrote:Every now & then some one talks about laser fusion, but the folk in the field say this is all about developing better hydrogen bombs & the recent demonstration of laser fusion in the US was all for defense, despite many popular channels saying it was for civil power, in direct contradiction to what the folk doing the work said.

Yes it was, which is why the intermittency really didn't matter. But I could never understand how you could expect to go from the US National Ignition Facility to a continuous power generator.

Fusion creates lots of neutrons & they activate everything with half lives of decades, so that if you can get a fusion reactor to work, you will have to leave it 50+ years to decommission it after its lifetime, but if you have maintenance then it’s all about remote repair with robots.

Laser fusion is, at least for now, a way to study the conditions needed for an hydrogen bomb to operate. This took Teller et al a bit of time to work out, but once it was realized that the energy from the fission detonator could be focused on the fusion explosive, it became rather easy to make hydrogen bombs as once you set off the fusion explosive you get loads of neutrons that split the outer fission shell giving overall a gain of circa one thousand. Hiroshima needed 1 g of mass converted to energy, fusion bombs convert 1 kg+ of mass into energy.

Regards,

odysseus2000 wrote:

Sorcery

But what a beautiful steam engine! I wouldn't knock it, it's both new and traditional. We actually understand the steam bit.

Yes, our Victorian ancestors understood the steam bit & back then it was so amazing & new, but nowadays it belongs in the history books: inefficient, expensive to build, maintain & run & prone to breaking down in all manner of inconvenient ways.

Did the Victorians understood everything about steam?

Practical super-critical steam generators and turbines are definitely post-Victorian. Perhaps we need a distinction between science and engineering, The engineering was certainly beyond the limits of Victorian material science, so there was a conflict between improved Carnot efficiency and shrapnel in the powerhouse.

9873210 wrote:

odysseus2000 wrote:
Yes, our Victorian ancestors understood the steam bit & back then it was so amazing & new, but nowadays it belongs in the history books: inefficient, expensive to build, maintain & run & prone to breaking down in all manner of inconvenient ways.

Did the Victorians understood everything about steam?

Practical super-critical steam generators and turbines are definitely post-Victorian. Perhaps we need a distinction between science and engineering, The engineering was certainly beyond the limits of Victorian material science, so there was a conflict between improved Carnot efficiency and shrapnel in the powerhouse.

Most of the laws of thermodynamics were known by the 1860’s, with the third law somewhere around 1915:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics

But for most practical purposes the laws were known to the Victorians & they had great skill in the metallurgy of steel, creating things like the Maxim gun in the 1880’s:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_gun

Many of the more modern developments came with new materials & better ways to quantify metals & alloys, but as far as I am aware the steam engine was perfected into a practical technology by the Victorians & the fastest railway variants were made in the 1930’s, but perhaps there were innovations that I am nor aware of that gave the 1930’s steam rail engines their record setting performance. Please post if I am missing something.

Regards,

Sabine talks Fusion. An idea to control fusion plasma with AI (7 mins+):

https://youtu.be/4VD_DLPQJBU?si=J5ZGor45Pp6yfFpW

Still extremely elementary, but may be interesting background for some.

Regards,