Clean energy could be ‘closer than ever’ after a nuclear fusion machine smashed a record::JET’s final nuclear fusion experiment produced a record-breaking 69 megajoules of heat. Nice.
“closer than ever”
We are now closer than ever at anything that hasn’t happened yet and will happen in the future.
https://www.newsweek.com/energy-nuclear-fusion-test-jet-world-record-1868146
“By my estimate this is enough energy to make over 600 cups of tea,” professor Stuart Mangles—a physicist from Imperial College London, England—said in a statement.
The British version of Americans measuring things in football fields
Wait, how big IS a football field?
About 50 bald eagle wingspans.
It’s 20.7 Ford F150s long
“Smashed”
Yeah, I’m not reading this.
Excellent news. Small steps to hopefully thread the needle with. Don’t be discouraging, people, we need success and vigor.
Nice
Needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Actually capturing the heat for electricity, and getting more electricity out of it than required to run the reactor itself, remain massive open questions that this generation of research reactors does not even begin to tackle.
IIRC, this is a big deal because they are achieving more energy out than they put in.
If I’ve been reading these correctly they are achieving it with tiny amounts of fuel and slowly working up as they achieve success. I’m seeing these as proof of concept and fantastic steps in the right direction.
In this context, the “energy that they put in” only counts the heating of the plasma. It does not include the energy needed to run the rest of the reactor, like the magnets that trap the plasma. If you count those other energy needs, about an order of magnitude improvement is still required. Possibly more, if we have to extract the energy (an incredibly hard problem that’s barely been scratched so far).
So yeah, it’s nice to see the progress, but the road ahead is still a very long one.
I feel like the big scary problem is capturing the heat. The proposed method I’ve seen involves a beryllium “blanket” that captures the heat to send it off to a boiler. The problem is beryllium is quite expensive and quite limited in availability. And in fact we may only have enough beryllium (in the world) for a dozen or so reactors. But it’s worse, because these blankets absorb high energy neutrons, and become radioactive over time. And that means two problems, you need to replace the blanket and you need to dispose of radioactive waste.
When you put all that together, I just think “shouldn’t we stick with fission power?”
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the problem that Uranium has a half-life of a couple hundred million years, while the half life of beryllium is less than a second?
Only Beryllium-10 has a long half-life for beta decay. Adding another neutron drops that back down to a few seconds and additional neutrons drop it back to a fraction of a second. So as long as that specific type of Beryllium isn’t used, it would be fine, right?
Those quick half-lives decay right away, losing a neutron, right? So that Berillium-11 just decays back into Berillium-10.
The problem is that the blanket is constantly absorbing neutrons from the fusion reactions, that’s it’s job. So despite using simple berillium 5 to build your blanket, you end up with these heavy isotopes over time, and because the heavier ones quickly decay into lighter ones, you basically end up with a whole lot of berillium-10.
If only it were leaps and bounds closer and not just a few inches.
Why is the project ended? Is there a next prototype?
It’s ending because it’s old. JET has been running since the 80s. It’s successor is ITER, which ran into some delays, but is expected to be finished sometime next year.
‘Closer than ever’
So perpetually 49 years away rather than 50 years.
Tokamaks… sigh.
When it finally works, you will have invented the most expensive form of energy we’ve ever imagined. Congratulations.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m excited for fusion. Fusion has some amazing potential as a power source and propulsion for space ships. But outside of that application, I don’t know… I’m pissemistic. I do not think it will be the global energy revolution so many people seem to think it will be. It will not be unlimited cheap energy, not be a longshot.
its gonna be unlimited expensive energy, which is a start.
except we needed a start 20 years ago, not now lol
Is it unlimited though? I mean sure, the fuel is abundant, we have hydrogen. But the other support materials are quite limited, berillium, helium, nuclear engineers. I don’t think we have enough of all of that for an energy revolution.
There are several other topologies with promise. But even a tokamak can use its first wall latent heat to turn the archaic steam turbine.
While I also have low expectations for plasma density in tokamaks, they’re able to keep plasma at fusion temperatures for minutes at a time.
Because you don’t understand shit. This can be made self sufficient and eternally run.
And if there’s one thing we’ve all learned, it’s that if it’s cheap to make, the trillionaire owners won’t overcharge for it.
Yes, I think we’ll have trillionaires first.
