Fusion Power - Never?

[Kitsune]

I am curious if there is a possibility that Fusion Power will never be a reality?

[Broomstick]

Well, sure.

It's possible that we might never sufficiently fund the research required to develop the technology.

It's possible that it's not possible to develop cost-effective, reliable fusion power.

It's possible we might opt for something else.

Until it actually develops it's possible the technology will never be developed.

[Kitsune]

I may have worded poorly but am concerned that there are insurmountable technical problems

[Starglider]

I may have worded poorly but am concerned that there are insurmountable technical problems

Highly unlikely. Tokamak technology is pretty much proven to work in principle; it's already produced net (thermal) power, just not in sustained bursts. The scaling laws are fairly well understood at this point; the main risks are economic ones (i.e. can fusion power ever be delivered at a sane cost). AFAIK inertial confinement is a bit more dicey because no one has yet demonstrated net power output. Off-the-wall designs like Bussard's are even more dicey, despite what the enthusiasts might tell you ('our three neutron detection events establish with complete certainty that we can build a power station with this technology and it will work first time!').

[wjs7744]

I see no reason whatsoever why fusion power would never happen. Do you have any evidence to this effect? Why would you ask such a thing?

(Not trying to be funny, I am curious why you would ask)

[Kitsune]

Fusion power has been first discussed in the 1950s and huge amounts of money appear to have been pumped into the programs....

In many ways, it does sound like the best solution in the future but hoping that I am not putting my hopes into a pipe dream.....

[Lusankya]

Fusion power has been first discussed in the 1950s

So what? People have been talking about going to the moon for millenia, and they only managed to reach it in 1969. There's nothing really to suggest that it is possible and we just don't have the technology for it yet.

[Kitsune]

So what? People have been talking about going to the moon for millenia, and they only managed to reach it in 1969. There's nothing really to suggest that it is possible and we just don't have the technology for it yet.

How much research was thrown towards that ends over those Millenniums....
It also seems like Fusion power has been around the corner since I can remember

[Chris OFarrell]

Perhaps because it is an incredibly complicated undertaking that dwaffs anything we have tried to do before?

Fusion technology in scientific terms is simple. In engineering terms, its absrudly hard. There is a GREAT difference between the two; you might have a good understanding of how a nuclear bomb works, it doesn't mean its easy to go out and make one.

Fusion technology is reliant on all manner of other technologies which have to be developed and matured. If you look at the histroy of various fusion reactors that have been built -there is a great graph somewhere that has been posted before- you can see that we HAVE been making very steady progress on getting them to produce more power for longer. We keep running into problems which require new materials, new techniques and new technologies to solve, but we solve them and move on. We're talking about artificially creating a procress that in nature only occurs in giant balls of fire known as stars because of the sheer gravitational weight of the things, its no easy task.

And the relative money sunk INTO fusion is actually rather low, when taken over the long time we've been researching the technology. Its not like all that money was spent in a year or something, or on a single, concentrated project. I mean we've spent 600 billion on the Iraqi war over 5 years, but the EU combinedspent 10 billion, total, on fusion research until the turn of the century, give or take IIRC?

Thankfully though, IETR and other like projects are starting to bring increasing numbers of projects and researchers together to combine resources.

[Shrykull]

What about Cold fusion?

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

What about Cold fusion?

Debunked pseudoscience. That's about all that can really be said about it.

[Gullible Jones]

"Cold fusion" using electrodes and heavy water: garbage. Irreproducable, very likely fraudulent.

Muon-catalyzed fusion: there's a 1-in-10 chance of the muons getting absorbed by the nuclei (IIRC, might be greater) and we can't produce "stable" muon atoms, let alone in the large quantities needed.

Fusion in collapsing bubbles bombarded with neutrons and ultrasound: dubious, basically an exotic parlor trick last I heard.

It seems to be down to the time-honored method of cramming lots of very hot plasma into a very small space.

[Starglider]

There's nothing really to suggest that it is possible and we just don't have the technology for it yet.

Only if you are a fucking moron who is willfully ignorant of the last few decades of fusion research. Guess what, retard, there is a mountain of evidence that we're very close. What, you thought $8 billion was approved for ITER on a whim?

[Lusankya]

There's nothing really to suggest that it is possible and we just don't have the technology for it yet.

Only if you are a fucking moron who is willfully ignorant of the last few decades of fusion research. Guess what, retard, there is a mountain of evidence that we're very close. What, you thought $8 billion was approved for ITER on a whim?

And you're clearly a moron who can't understand what I was saying.

Let's look at "This Thread for Dummies", shall we?

This is how it went:

Kitsune: I think fusion might be impossible.
Me: Or perhaps we haven't done it because we don't have the technology yet.
You: Lusankya, you're a moron. We're close to having the technology.

... and for the next bit, I'll give you the dummies version instead of the real version.

Me: Guess what! Being close to have the having the technology means that we don't have it yet, moron.

Now let's go to the comprehension questions for this chapter of "This Thread for Dummies".

Q: Why call the person who's saying "it's possible that we can't do it yet a moron instead of the person who's saying it's impossible?

A:Because you're a wanker who fucks his mother, much like Starglider.

Q: True or false: Starglider is a dickfaced drongo.

A: TRUE

[TheMuffinKing]

Could the recent advances in superconductors help fusion along? I'm totally ignorant as to how this all works.

[Zixinus]

Lovely flaming aside, we know how to do fusion for a long time, in various controlled circumstances, Tokamaks being merely the tip of the iceberg.

The problem is that making it do something aside waste energy, being expensive and having a few seconds of pretty lights is a problem that gets more and more complicated with every step.

The other problem is that the public is simply not interested. Fission research programs (meaning new reactor types), which would yield much more immediate results have enormous difficulty getting funds. The 8 bil going into ITER is mixed bunch due to politics, aside the "putting all your eggs into one basket" comment everyone is surely expecting from me.

The key, as far as I understand, is getting better superconductors. If we can get something that requires far less cooling, the engineering would be much easier.

As for cold fusion, I've heard that the guys behind did some tests under an army contract found it to be actually valid, the theory behind has something to do with electrons behaving strangely. I can't cite a source and I'm not sure. Also note, that even if it works, it doesn't mean it can work efficiently.

('our three neutron detection events establish with complete certainty that we can build a power station with this technology and it will work first time!')

Are the new members more and more stupid? The original yahoo-group bunch were fairly intelligent.

For the record, the only real reason to be enthusiastic about it is that there were even three neutrons at that power level to talk about. That's why some of the fusor community is nutballs all over it: fusors required ten times more the power level it was on to get the same results.

The more saner among us only wants more tests. I recall that the Navy is funding the thing again and are already making WB-7, which would tell us just how much promise and bullshit is in this approach. The research team wants to keep everything low-key until then, so this will stay under the political radar.

[Paolo]

The other problem is that the public is simply not interested.

It's not so much the public as it's the research community itself. There's only so many plasma and fusion physicists and only so many of them are working on any particular area of fusion research. Almost all if not all are happily employed and well funded to boot. And setting aside all the infrastructure limits to Big Science research of this scale (available draw from the grid, manageable computing power, etc.), all have a ceiling to their productivity. As for the engineers, JET, ITER, Megajoule and NIF will still principally concern investigation of ab initio predictions, so while they've got more than enough on their hands fulfilling wishlists for the experiment designers there's not much work commercially-oriented for them to do.

[Admiral Valdemar]

It is certainly physically possible and engineering-wise, we may be able to get there within our lifetimes. But it will most certainly not be a major power source for civilisation within our lifetimes and very likely neither will fission if things carry on as they are regarding investment and planning.

It would be wonderful to have an existing programme like JET prove we can get net return on energy invested tomorrow. That wouldn't suddenly mean we're able to discard all other energy sources and I very much doubt fusion will be as accessible for many nations as fission was, which at its heart is very simple to go about.

For space exploration in the far future, this kind of energy source is vital.

[Kitsune]

Just to make it clear, I mean fusion power which is stable and produces more power than the fusion bottle....

[Admiral Valdemar]

One would think so, since a glowing container of plasma is quite useful for fuck all. We can break even today, it's the getting work done from that reaction and keeping it self-sustainable which is the hard part. We may have nailed the dynamics of the plasma ion ITER's design, it just remains to be seen whether the larger unit can keep the thing going and get it producing net energy.

[Shrykull]

What about Cold fusion?

Debunked pseudoscience. That's about all that can really be said about it.

Nope that's what was thought at first

http://science.howstuffworks.com/fusion-reactor6.htm

But now:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0606/p25s01-stss.html

[Gullible Jones]

That is not the same as electrodes-in-heavy-water-style "cold fusion". Interesting though.

[daniel_gudman]

As long as you're smashing hydrogen together hard enough, you're going to get atomic fusion. The idea of "Cold Fusion" was ramping the pressure way up so that you don't have to be directly heating it as much. Same smashing, the road to getting there is different. There was a lot of political in-fighting because the original "fusion in the bottle" guys sorta went to the press before academic review.

Aside: Shrykull, is using the Christian Science Monitor as a source really such a hot idea on this board? I mean, it's cool but....

There are some good points raised about the engineering concerns. Really there are three levels of questions you're asking:
1) Is it theoretically possible?
2) Can it be built?
3) Is it worth the hassle?

Right now the state of the art has "yes" for one, they're working on two, and three is way off on the horizon.

The current method is using superconductors to generate a big ol' field to make hydrogen go squish. There are all sorts of issues surrounding them, like how do you feed them fresh hydrogen, how do they poop helium out, what happens if Lenny the Janitor unplugs the superconductors, etc.

so, yeah, they're possible, and building a working fusion reactor could happen. But is it really worth it for domestic energy? That depends a lot on other energy. If the wind turbine guys or solar folks or biofuel peeps come through, why bother?

[Darth Wong]

I may have worded poorly but am concerned that there are insurmountable technical problems

Highly unlikely. Tokamak technology is pretty much proven to work in principle; it's already produced net (thermal) power, just not in sustained bursts. The scaling laws are fairly well understood at this point; the main risks are economic ones (i.e. can fusion power ever be delivered at a sane cost). AFAIK inertial confinement is a bit more dicey because no one has yet demonstrated net power output. Off-the-wall designs like Bussard's are even more dicey, despite what the enthusiasts might tell you ('our three neutron detection events establish with complete certainty that we can build a power station with this technology and it will work first time!').

That does NOT mean that insurmountable technical problems are "highly unlikely". The fact that we can generate controlled fusion reactions does not mean it will ever be an economically viable means of power generation. It might be, and I hope it will be, but boundless faith in the unstoppable progress of technology can be just as much of a religion as belief in sky fairies. Making the fusion reaction itself is actually just the first step in making a commercially viable nuclear fusion power plant. You still need some way to harvest it into power efficiently, and without such a brutal maintenance and consumable schedule that it becomes a nightmare to operate and be commercially viable.

[Admiral Valdemar]

That is, in essence, the primary argument against rising out of an energy crisis we've blindly run into with the added issue of a monetary collapse on the cards. Even with fission technology fully matured, there is no guarantee even that can stave off blackouts if there is no concerted effort to implement such infrastructure. Just because we can doesn't mean we will, and historical precedent shows we frequently act far too late without a benevolent dictator with a clue guiding us.