German Fusion Reactor About To Be Completed

  On 10/26/2015 at 2:53 PM, Mesh Gear Fox said:

what are you saying? that there's no future in solar / wind / hydro no matter how much research we put into it? do you think if we had taken some of the billions we throw down the toilet with fossil technology and invested in sustainable, non nuclear alternatives that they could one day be "realistic" alternatives?

no, renewables (solar in particular, but even some wind, and hydro definitely if it's geographically suitable) definitely have a part to play. diversity in energy sources is definitely a good thing. but they're never going to replace world-wide base load power generation from coal and oil. once we realised what was happening 20-30 years ago there should have been a Manhattan project style initiative to replace all the coal and oil power generation in sufficiently developed nations with nuclear reactors - we could have prevented the now inevitable 2 degree minimum rise if we'd have done that, we're still farting around though - thanks in part to ignorance and fear spread by so called environmentalists - useful idiots for the fossil fuel industry, good job assholes.

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i really dislike how the term "realistic" gets used in a social / political context because it is almost always used by conservatives who already have their way, asserting that their way is the only realistic or reasonable choice, because that's how things already are. i hope this is not the case here.

I'm using the term realistic in an entirely objective way, and it's certainly not some kind of spin to maintain the status quo, because nuclear power isn't the status quo, burning dead plants is.

reminds me of the end of akira....

lets hope it doesn,t end up like the beginning of akira....gulp!

  On 10/26/2015 at 3:32 PM, Mesh Gear Fox said:

i'm not necessarily anti nuclear power, but I am anti nuclear waste (is anyone pro nuclear waste though lol). i reckon that anything that has the potential to cause damage even in extreme circumstances needs to be handled with the appropriate amount of responsibility, and then some. i guess it says something that there hasn't been a major nuclear accident in the last 20 years, save for the thankfully non-fatal fukushima. speaking of which, aren't there a few reactors in california? what's the plan for the next earthquake? are they just assuming the 'big one' will hit and it won't really matter if they get damaged?

fear of nuclear waste is irrational though. read my long post above, most of the waste isn't actually waste at all, just more fuel. of course it has to be handled carefully, and well regulated, but that's true of all kinds of human activity, and when you do the cost-benefit analysis there really isn't a good reason not to deal with it.

California has a couple of plants near fault lines I think, Diablo Canyon is one (cool name). It's not like they just build them with no thought as to the impact tectonic events would have though, there's stringent regulatory oversight, they constantly re-evaluate things (in terms of safety upgrades, risk assessments, and response measures). You can never be 100% certain there'll never be a big event that could cause a problem, but even if it did come to pass I would hope a lot has been learnt from Fukushima about how overreacting to such a situation tends to do more harm than good (e.g. needlessly evacuating people).

  On 10/24/2015 at 2:24 PM, caze said:

 

  On 10/23/2015 at 11:52 PM, dna42 said:

And even when they will finally work nobody will want to use them, as wind/solar is already much cheaper per kWh (even disregarding the problems of radioactive byproducts in fusion reactors)

Seems more like an prestige-project than anything practical.

 

Solar and Wind aren't cheap, they're subsidised to fuck. Why do you think the British solar industry are complaining they're all about to go bankrupt now that Cameron is pulling the subsidies?

 

Fusion doesn't produce nuclear waste either, the only thing you need to worry about in a fusion reaction is free protons, it doesn't directly produce any radioactive isotopes at all. Most designs would use a metal shielding around the reactor to absorb them, which would become very mildly radioactive over time (might need to be replaced every decade or so - but it wouldn't be in any way dangerous), other designs (like the spherical tokamak) even use the protons to transmute radioactive waste from fission to more stable isotopes - these designs may not be used to generate power, but just clean up waste.

 

The costs of Solar and Wind depend on who you ask and what you compare them to - of course it's more expensive per kWh if you compare it to the fuel cost of an 30 year old coal plant, but if you start to compare it to building a brand new power plant (be it fossil or nuclear) it becomes a much better preposition (especially wind).

I think researching fusion is nice and all, but I think the better option for the near future is a combination of wind/solar and better transportation and storage capacities in the grid - because that would also lead to a more robust and decentralised grid than we have now.

Edit: a nice graph showing the expected cost per MWh for new powerplants

Data Source: EIA, Levelized Cost of New Generation Resources in the Annual Energy Outlook 2013

  On 10/26/2015 at 10:56 PM, dna42 said:

The costs of Solar and Wind depend on who you ask and what you compare them to - of course it's more expensive per kWh if you compare it to the fuel cost of an 30 year old coal plant, but if you start to compare it to building a brand new power plant (be it fossil or nuclear) it becomes a much better preposition (especially wind).

 

I think researching fusion is nice and all, but I think the better option for the near future is a combination of wind/solar and better transportation and storage capacities in the grid - because that would also lead to a more robust and decentralised grid than we have now.

 

Edit: a nice graph showing the expected cost per MWh for new powerplants

What that graph doesn't take into account is the fact that for every MWh of wind & solar, you need to build an additional MWh of backup power for when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining (the vast majority of which would be from Gas, pumped storage is the only economic renewable backup at the moment, and that's only suitable depending on the geography, battery backup is a long way off, and not a good idea anyway due to the environmental impact). Wind and Solar have very low capacity levels which makes them unsuitable for base load generation, something that can only be mitigated slightly by grid and storage technologies, which as I said, has not been factored into the costings in that graph.

The report itself is aware of this, it says:

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It is important to note that, while LCOE is a convenient summary measure of the overall competiveness of different generating technologies, actual plant investment decisions are affected by the specific technological and regional characteristics of a project, which involve numerous other factors. The

projected utilization rate, which depends on the load shape and the existing resource mix in an area where additional capacity is needed, is one such factor. The existing resource mix in a region can directly impact the economic viability of a new investment through its effect on the economics surrounding the displacement of existing resources. For example, a wind resource that would primarily displace existing natural gas generation will usually have a different economic value than one that would displace existing coal generation.

 

A related factor is the capacity value, which depends on both the existing capacity mix and load characteristics in a region. Since load must be balanced on a continuous basis, units whose output can be varied to follow demand (dispatchable technologies) generally have more value to a system than less flexible units (non-dispatchable technologies), or those whose operation is tied to the availability of an intermittent resource. The LCOE values for dispatchable and nondispatchable technologies are listed separately in the tables, because caution should be used when comparing them to one another.

 

This doesn't mean there's no use for wind & solar, that report goes on to describe how to compare the levelized cost to other metrics when you want to figure out what new power generation is required to add to the system. The bottom line though is that they're not suitable for large scale replacement of fossil fuel generation.

Just curious - Why is battery backup potentially so bad for the environment? Alkaline and lithium won't ever cut it so advances in tech are being worked on... I was working with a startup here in Seattle that was working on long storage batteries using honeycombed nano fabricated walls and they were a seriously environment-minded bunch...

  On 10/27/2015 at 7:53 PM, luke viia said:

Just curious - Why is battery backup potentially so bad for the environment? Alkaline and lithium won't ever cut it so advances in tech are being worked on... I was working with a startup here in Seattle that was working on long storage batteries using honeycombed nano fabricated walls and they were a seriously environment-minded bunch...

mining mostly, the quantity of rare earth elements and so on needed are ridiculous. remember for it to be of any use you'd need enough batteries to handle GWhs of juice. We don't even have the technology or resources currently to handle mass scale electric car and domestic use, never mind replacing the worlds current fossil fuel capacity.

Yeah, that makes sense. The team I was working with was focused on long term energy storage for electric vehicles only I think. And the mining costs of pretty much all nanofabricated materials was a big part of why I got out of that industry. And why I do some work with metal recycling now (which has been an economic shitshow this year).

reminds me of Akira ! great post oOOOo !

The stack of paper for fusion's MJ/kg is about 8x taller than U-238.

there is a youtube channel about the reactor and the science behind it:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAx243-m51RI-k_4lsAqidA/feed

this one is the most detailed with lots of in depth animation about the functionality

say hello to helium plasma:

http://www.ipp.mpg.de/3984226/12_15