What happened with thermonuclear fusion?

When I was in grade school back in the late 1960s/early 1970s there were predictions that thermonuclear fusion would be online by the year 2000. By the 1980s the predictions were for 2020. The latest predictions put the timeline at anywhere from 50 to 200 years from now. Putting aside the long-standing tag line "thermonuclear fusion is the power of the future, and always will be", what on earth happened? Fundamentally we know exactly what to do to make it work. Practically there are undoubtedly issues doing this in the real world. My question is would putting a lot more money into fusion research make it a reality within a decade, is there some other fundamental issue I'm not aware of, or are those in the field simply holding back to keep the research grants coming?

Fusion is a techology which will basically obsolete every other form of power generation should it be commercialized. It is safe enough to use on ships and planes and spacecraft. It can probably be scaled down enough to put on locomotives. It should be capable of producing very inexpensive electricity. In short, it is an enabling technology which could raise the world's standard of living more in ten years than occurred in the last 5000. With all this going for it, I would think the governments of the world would be all be in a race to be the first to commercialize it, and then sell it to the rest of the world.

So any ideas, either factual or speculation, as to what happened? Sure, there will be so big losers in world powered by fusion, but this has always been the case when new technology came out. The light bulb put most of the candlemakers out of business. The personal computer put typewriter manufacturers out of business. We can't just hold back new technology because some people will lose their jobs, but sadly that has sometimes happened when those people were influential. However, in all cases they only delayed the inevitable. Is this what is happening here? Or is the problem simply one of unanticipated complexity? Whatever the reasons, now couldn't be a better time to start a Manhattan-project style program whose goal is to commercialize fusion as quickly as possible, followed by rapid conversion of existing power plants as part of a huge public works project. I personally think our long-term survival as a species depends upon it.

I heard one theory that fusion isn't as easy as it looks. By that I mean there's a theory that the sun's fusion is made possible by outside influences from the black hole in the middle of the milky way galaxy. Don't ask me, it's just something I saw once in passing.

Interesting idea though.

edit: found some info on it. Don't know if this is legit or not.

http://www.pixelphase.com/sun/

NA8 said:

I heard one theory that fusion isn't as easy as it looks. By that I mean there's a theory that the sun's fusion is made possible by outside influences from the black hole in the middle of the milky way galaxy. Don't ask me, it's just something I saw once in passing.

Interesting idea though.

edit: found some info on it. Don't know if this is legit or not.

http://www.pixelphase.com/sun/

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So then why don't stars go out if they leave a galaxy?

About fusion, last I heard they were getting it down pretty well but the energy-in was much too large compared to evergy-out. I believe Princeton actually shut down their toroidal reactor a while back, and they were one of the driving forces of fusion innovations. I really haven't seen it mentioned even as a blip on the radar recently through - I think part of it is waiting for room-temperature superconductors which will reduce the amount of energy necessary to create the containment magnetic fields. Anybody else know anything more?

Daekar said:

So then why don't stars go out if they leave a galaxy?

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Leave ?

If I was to hazard a guess about something I'm not sold on, I'd say it was still "close" enough.

I'd just like to know if anyone reputable backs this guy. :devil:

Be sure and check out the .pdf file, the website is corny.

The way I know it is: nuclear fusion is possible, and has indeed been attained. However, the current state of technology only allows very, very brief reactions, and the machinery needed eats much more power than the fusion produces.

I think before we can get anywhere with fusion, advances in research technology will be needed. Let's see what happens when we start using quantum computers...

There's a long article at wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power

"Fusion power refers to power generated by nuclear fusion reactions. In this kind of reaction, two light atomic nuclei fuse together to form a heavier nucleus and in doing so, release energy. In a more general sense, the term can also refer to the production of net usable power from a fusion source, similar to the usage of the term "steam power." Most design studies for fusion power plants involve using the fusion reactions to create heat, which is then used to operate a steam turbine, similar to most coal-fired power stations as well as fission-driven nuclear power stations...."

Fallingwater said:

The way I know it is: nuclear fusion is possible, and has indeed been attained. However, the current state of technology only allows very, very brief reactions, and the machinery needed eats much more power than the fusion produces.

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It's funny you should mention that. Sandia labs was conducting a study on a fusion generating plant using Z-Pinch reactor design. Each individual chamber would only fire once every 10 seconds, but all chambers in series would provide the power requirements needed. I helped with some work on the RTL part of the project. RTL = recyclable transmission line, which is the big steel cone in the center of the chamber.

http://fire.pppl.gov/fpa04_olson.pdf
http://www.prod.sandia.gov/zmachine/

The entire 10 second process for each chamber would look something like this (the cone that is lowed in and expended is the RTL):
http://www.sandia.gov/media/NewsRel/NR1999/thermo.htm

The last info I had read several years ago stated that the most successful test to date only generated 60% of the energy to get the reaction going and containing it for a couple of nano seconds. Until we can create artifical gravity fields that can contain it and cause the molecules to fuse then it is all academic. All stars have the critical balance of mass/gravity/reaction going on to keep it going.

I also feel room temperature or higher superconductivity is a important key in a long list of critical technologies.

I think our material science limits us the greatest at this time. I have worked with plenty of high strength and high temperature material but have never seen on that had all of the parameters.

It might cost less money to put a power plant in the Lagrangian point to harness the existing heat and light into power to be beamed down. Buuuutttt,,,,,,, again our material science limits our ability to have single stage to orbit ability.



So, if you want to do anything you have to drop and ocean of money into the unglamorus life of material science research into very very high strength materials and very high temp superconductivity. I have seen some carbon nanotube material under a microscope. When a way is figured out to make it in volume then I believe there might be a chance.

Must... resist... temptation... to make snide Pons/Fleischmann remark. :tinfoil:

The challenge of containing the plasma necessary to have a continuous fusion reaction is daunting. It needs an incredibly strong magnetic "bottle" to contain it enough so it doesn't touch the sides of the actual containment vessel made from the best ceramic type material that is currently available. Currently this takes more energy [to contain the plasma] than is recoverable from the reaction. For efficiency to be achieved you need a large, sustained reaction in a very large vaccuum, and a method of energy transmission that does not rely on conducting material and doesn't interfere with our current environment. Kind of like a star. Nature know how to do this very well.

Our job is to find a way to use the energy that arrives every day.

jtr1962 said:

........there were predictions...........

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Predictions without supporting theory is just fortune telling.

Even if the challenge is met of containing the plasma with an acceptable energy efficiency, another great problem remains.

The reaction produces high energy neutrons that collide with the materials surrounding the chamber and cause them to undergo nuclear reactions. In fact, a majority of the energy released in deuterium/tritium fusion is in the form of neutrons. Depending upon the material used, it can then be converted to an entirely different element, though not typically the commonly found isotope. This is a particular problem for the materials needed to contain the heat-exchanging medium, because any material put in that environment would not last long at all. So, fusion reactors built using this type of design will not be economical because the reactor would have to be shut down regularly to dispose of and replace the materials damaged by high energy neutrons.

Now, this is going to sound like hog wash, but I actually had the idea to use liquid lithium as a radiation shield for fusion reactors back in about 1998. I was looking at a chart of how elements react to neutron addition and looking for a reaction 'loop' that wouldn't end up decaying the material into something useless like a gas, and lithium seemed like the only option. My idea was to pump liquid lithium around the chamber to absorb the neutrons and act as the heat-exchanging medium. Now, I don't really care if anyone believes me or not, but I didn't pursue the idea because I figured if it were really a good idea then someone else would have it. Not only that, but how do you contain liquid lithium without another material that would be damaged by the neutrons? Anyway, here is an article that supports my opinion.

Insert long-standing tag line here.

Empath said:

Predictions without supporting theory is just fortune telling.

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The 50's saw predictions that within a few years atomic energy (fission) would be so cheap that it would hardly be worth billing for it.

I don't think that happened.
I am a big fan of pebble bed reactors which can be safe and inexpensive.

LED_Thrift said:

Kind of like a star. Nature know how to do this very well.

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Not as well as you might think.

The fusion of 4 light hydrogen atoms into 1 helium atom, which is the fusion reaction that occurs in stars, is extremely slow. See here, for example. Yes, the sun's core produces less heat on a per-volume basis than the human body. (On a per-mass basis it's even worse.)

For power generation, research has been focused on more practical reactions such as deuterium-deuterium or deuterium-tritium.

asdalton said:

Not as well as you might think.
The fusion of 4 light hydrogen atoms into 1 helium atom, which is the fusion reaction that occurs in stars, is extremely slow...

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Maybe nature doesn't want a turbo bright star with a two-hour runtime.

thermalnuclear fusion can be done. It can be initiated but cannot be sustained or controlled effectively. By current technology the input requirement extends way beyond its output and therefore can only be illustrated by a runtime of hours:shrug:

someone somewhere made an analogous comment that compared fusion with a loop of xmas tree lights that outputs <5W of light and consumes 10MW of energy in the process...I don't know what he was referring to but it sure sounded like our old "9,12,15,18W luxeon LEDs doesn't it ]

It's predicted arrival time has grown from 30 years to 50 years in the last 40 years. At that rate, it'll be about 100 years away in a century or so...

maybe this has something to do with it, I hope;


Municipal Solar Power Plants
By Martin Roscheisen, CEO

At Nanosolar, we believe very much that meaningful scale for solar will come foremost from utility-scale solar power plants, in particular from municipal solar power plants of 2-10MW in size. These are rows of solar panels mounted onto the ground of free fields at the outskirts of towns and cities, feeding power directly into the municipal electricity grid.

A 2MW municipal solar power plant requires about 10 acres of land to serve a city of 1,000 homes ˜ that's acreage generally easily available at the outskirts of any city of such size in even the most developed countries. Similar for a 10MW plant for a city with 5,000 homes: This would require five such lots.

Municipal solar power plants are an avenue for delivering a GigaWatt of power in a state through one solar farm each in a few hundred cities ˜ local to where the power is needed ˜ as opposed to constructing a new coal-fired or nuclear plant. They can also be deployed very rapidly. (It takes 10-15 years to get a new coal plant done; a solar plant can be done in 12 months ˜ provided no administrative blocks exist).

In a solar power plant, solar panels are mounted onto rails above the ground so that grass and flowers can continue to flourish in between and below the rows of panels. Care is taken that sufficient amounts of rainwater can drop through between adjoining panels so that the flowers and organisms below are not starved.

Municipal solar power plants integrate very naturally into the existing landscape as well as the existing electricity grid. By feeding power into the grid directly at municipal voltage levels (typically 20kV), they even avoid the expense of a substation for down-transforming power from high (multi-100kV) transmission voltages as required by conventional power. Furthermore, the solar power plants utilize power inverter electronics with increasingly intelligent features which enlightened utilities around the world are now recognizing as a very good way to improve grid power quality especially at the outer branches of the electric grid where power quality is hard to manage otherwise.

In any region with a decent amount of sunshine, there is no more economic way of reliably providing municipal power during the day than through a municipal solar power plant.

Ground-mounted solar power plants are installed in industrially streamlined ways, with specialized tractors deploying standardized substructure components according to standard system block designs to achieve optimal cost efficiency.

While rooftops are surely a good application too for solar panels, it is a business that's difficult to scale rapidly in a truly meaningful way. Crawling onto rooftops and mounting solar panels in compliance with building codes is fundamentally always a somewhat more expensive proposition. The truth is that a lot of the money for residential solar only feeds bureaucracy.

Municipal solar power plants can be deployed at a different level of efficiency and speed. This is just not yet known very well to the public, particularly in the United States and in California (where we have California Solar Incentives which are adminstered by the state utilities and which presently block this most cost-efficient form of installing solar).

But towns and cities throughout Europe and Asia have already proven the concept, and more and more ˜ increasingly entire counties in fact ˜ are now implementing plans to go 100% renewable based on a mix of solar and biofuels. It works, it is economic, and it is possible now. (Any U.S. utility executive who is concerned about the new world of local power but desires to learn more should join this trip.) It is a silent revolution going on that the press rarely reports about.

A good exception is an article today in our local newspaper ˆ "Local communities reach for power over energy‰ (SF Chronicle) ˆ describing how Marin County in California is wrestling with going for local renewable power. We salute their effort. It is well timed, smart, and with a lot of foresight. They are on the right track based on what we see happening in our own industry and in energy overall. In a few years, they will have less expensive power than it is available in the rest of PG&E territory.

The amount of activity going on behind the scenes in readying technologies, sites, and financings for such is tremendous, and this will become very visible to the public in many locations in the United States in 2010. There is a reason why one of the world's largest power producers invested in Nanosolar.

But now is the time for cities and counties to lay the adminstrative foundation for having their own power, 100% renewable, if they care to make a difference by then.


EDF Energies Nouvelles Enters Strategic Partnership with California-Based Nanosolar

EDF Energies Nouvelles (Paris:EEN) announces the signing of a photovoltaic panel supply master agreement with Nanosolar and a $50 million investment in the company.

Silicon Valley based Nanosolar uses innovative technology to manufacture thin-film photovoltaic cells of Copper-Indium-Gallium-Selenide (CIGS) using a printing deposition process. Under the master supply agreement, EDF Energies Nouvelles will gain access from 2009 onwards to part of Nanosolar's production of solar panels.
In a solar market in which cutting production cost represents a major challenge, EDF Energies Nouvelles is thus securing its supply of panels at competitive prices. These panels will in particular also help EDF Energies Nouvelles to expand its solar activities in North America.
In parallel to the signing of the panel supply agreement, the Group, through its EDF Energies Nouvelles Réparties subsidiary, is also participating via a $50 million investment (•31 million) in an equity financing completed by Nanosolar to further accelerate the company's production ramp.

About EDF Energies Nouvelles EDF Energies Nouvelles is a world-class player in the green electricity generation market, with gross installed capacity of 1,443 MW worldwide at 31 December 2007 plus 1,100 MW in gross capacity under construction. With a presence in nine European countries and in the United States, EDF Energies Nouvelles operates in four renewable energy segments (wind, solar, biomass and hydro). Wind energy currently accounts for more than 80% of its installed capacity. With its unique profile as an integrated operator, EDF Energies Nouvelles has a presence spanning the entire value chain, from development and construction through to production and operations & maintenance. The Group also pursues the development and sale of structured assets, which consists primarily in selling renewable energy generating assets to individuals or to energy services companies.

About Nanosolar Nanosolar is a global leader in solar power innovation. Nanosolar's solar electricity panels deliver unparalleled cost efficiency, enabling customers to use green power without paying more.

....More information on Nanosolar is available on the Internet at http://www.nanosolar.com/

Ted, please edit your post to comply with our posted rules regarding quoted material.

Limit what you post to around 100 words and then post a link to the original source. Always post a link to the original source!

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Edited to add: After checking around, it looks like they've passed it around like candy. Your efforts to comply were appreciated. I've restored it.

TedTheLed said:

...snip... A 2MW municipal solar power plant requires about 10 acres of land to serve a city of 1,000 homes ˜ that's acreage generally easily available at the outskirts of any city of such size in even the most developed countries. Similar for a 10MW plant for a city with 5,000 homes: This would require five such lots.

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Figuring a city like NYC, and average houshold size of 2.5, and NO businesses, you would need 32 thousand acres - or 50 square miles. Now when you figure Manhattan is 22 square miles, you need to cover an area 2x the size of Manhattan to power JUST the housing in NYC, now add in industry...