Scientists in California make a significant step in what could one day be an important solution to the global climate crisis, driven primarily by burning fossil fuels.
I know this is probably tongue in cheek, but I genuinely thought the same until recently. There’s a company called Helion which is developing a really cool fusion process that doesn’t use steam as an energy transfer mechanism. Obviously it has its own set of drawbacks and roadblocks, but still really cool tech in the making.
Here’s the video I saw going into detail on it if anyone’s interested:
I hope this actually pans out, but I am suspicious that it won’t. Mostly just because of they way they have this air of tech bro hype around them; hopefully I just learned about it through poor sources because it would be freakin cool if it worked
Yep, this was pretty much my exact reaction as well. I haven’t really dug into it since, but it was an interesting twist on fusion that would be sweet if it made some progress!
Honestly I don’t have high hopes, they believe their next model will solve the shortcomings they face with it’s size, but that could reveal a whole other set of issues.
Same, expectations are definitely in check, but cool none the less! I feel like there are a lot of hiccups here that would need to be smoothed out before this would become anything remotely feasible.
Since everyone else gave a joke answer I’ll take a stab in the dark and say the upper limits would be the availability of hydrogen and physical limitations in transforming heat output into electricity. The hydrogen is the most common element but 96% of it is currently produced from fossil fuels. After that, it would be how well you can scale up turbines to efficiently convert heat to electricity.
The hydrogen is the most common element but 96% of it is currently produced from fossil fuels.
I’m not expert either, but I don’t think most of that 96% of hydrogen is a candidate for the fusion we’re doing today. NIF (like the OP article) uses Deuterium (Hydrogen with 1 neutron) and Tritium (Hydrogen with 2 neutrons) is what is squashed together to produce energy. The more neutrons make the fusion “easier” to produce energy.
Naturally occurring Deuterium isn’t crazy hard to find. Its in sea water, but you have to go through A LOT of sea water to pull out the rare atoms of Deuterium. Naturally occurring Tritium is much more rare with having to find very small amounts in ground water.
Humanity is also able to make Deuterium and Tritium as byproducts of nuclear fission.
If you have fusion energy, creating H2 from water via electrolysis is a joke. You can do it at home. It only requires a lot of energy. But with energy from fusion it will become super easy, barely an inconvenient
In the news, 5.000 years later : “Scientists warned that our mass extraction of hydrogen may produce global salinization, but no one wants to reduce its energy consumption.”
There is 1.4E21 kg of water on Earth. 0.03% of hydrogen is deuterium, a suitable fusion fuel. H2O has an atomic mass of 18 and O has an atomic mass of 16, so Earth has 4.7E16 kg of deuterium readily centrifuged out of ocean water.
D-D fusion converts about 0.1% of mass to energy (4 MeV / c^2 / 4 Daltons). E=mc^2. So we have 4.2E30 (420E28) Joules of fusion fuel ready for us on Earth. We used 2400 TWh of energy last year. If we used this amount indefinitely then we would have 485 billion years of fuel.
Bonus: deuterium depletion would have virtually no environmental effect.
You know how the sun radiates an incredible amount of power through millions and millions of tonnes of material undergoing nuclear fusion every minute, and the sun is expected to last for millions of years?
It’s near limitless in the sense that the fuel for it will not run out. … But to be honest, the ‘unlimited energy’ thing is mostly marketing hype. If we were worried about fuel running out, then solar would be the obvious go-to. That’s even less likely to run out than fusion power, and it has the advantage that we can already build it. And fusion, like solar and everything else, still requires land and resources to build the power plants. There are hopes that fusion power plants might be be more space efficient or something, but that obviously isn’t the case currently. Currently the situation is that people have been working on this for generations and the big breakthrough is that we can now momentarily break-even with power on a small scale with state of the art equipment. So I think it’s a bit too soon to claim it will have any advantages over solar. Right now it is not viable at all, and any future advantages are just speculation.
That said, fusion power is technology worth pursuing. It’s not complete garbage green-washing (unlike “carbon capture and storage”, which really is complete garbage), but the idea that fusion it’s some holy-grail of unlimited power is … well … basically just good marketing to keep the research funds flowing.
“Near limitless energy”. …
OK what are the limits? Preferably absurd answers please…
They boiled 10 kettles of water with this energy.
Ultimately, if everything is optimized, its probably only limited by the number of kettles available.
Could we somehow capture the steam from all the kettles to turn a turbine? I see zero problems with this plan.
Coal or nuclear, it’s all steam baby
I know this is probably tongue in cheek, but I genuinely thought the same until recently. There’s a company called Helion which is developing a really cool fusion process that doesn’t use steam as an energy transfer mechanism. Obviously it has its own set of drawbacks and roadblocks, but still really cool tech in the making.
Here’s the video I saw going into detail on it if anyone’s interested:
https://youtu.be/_bDXXWQxK38?si=iBpHfDxhRgHHRtN2
I hope this actually pans out, but I am suspicious that it won’t. Mostly just because of they way they have this air of tech bro hype around them; hopefully I just learned about it through poor sources because it would be freakin cool if it worked
Yep, this was pretty much my exact reaction as well. I haven’t really dug into it since, but it was an interesting twist on fusion that would be sweet if it made some progress!
Oh yeah I’ve seen that one.
Honestly I don’t have high hopes, they believe their next model will solve the shortcomings they face with it’s size, but that could reveal a whole other set of issues.
Same, expectations are definitely in check, but cool none the less! I feel like there are a lot of hiccups here that would need to be smoothed out before this would become anything remotely feasible.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/_bDXXWQxK38?si=iBpHfDxhRgHHRtN2
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
We’re gonna spin those turbines so good
And we’re gonna have the mexicans pay for it.
The UK will become an energy powerhouse.
Limitless only for the same visit. 1 customer per reaction.
No repeat visits or sharing allowed!
Since everyone else gave a joke answer I’ll take a stab in the dark and say the upper limits would be the availability of hydrogen and physical limitations in transforming heat output into electricity. The hydrogen is the most common element but 96% of it is currently produced from fossil fuels. After that, it would be how well you can scale up turbines to efficiently convert heat to electricity.
I’m not expert either, but I don’t think most of that 96% of hydrogen is a candidate for the fusion we’re doing today. NIF (like the OP article) uses Deuterium (Hydrogen with 1 neutron) and Tritium (Hydrogen with 2 neutrons) is what is squashed together to produce energy. The more neutrons make the fusion “easier” to produce energy.
Naturally occurring Deuterium isn’t crazy hard to find. Its in sea water, but you have to go through A LOT of sea water to pull out the rare atoms of Deuterium. Naturally occurring Tritium is much more rare with having to find very small amounts in ground water.
Humanity is also able to make Deuterium and Tritium as byproducts of nuclear fission.
For reference and because I was curious enough to look for it, Deuterium is 0.0156% of the hydrogen in ocean water.
If you have fusion energy, creating H2 from water via electrolysis is a joke. You can do it at home. It only requires a lot of energy. But with energy from fusion it will become super easy, barely an inconvenient
In the news, 5.000 years later : “Scientists warned that our mass extraction of hydrogen may produce global salinization, but no one wants to reduce its energy consumption.”
Well. Assuming the cost of splitting water is lower than the energy produced from the same amount of hydrogen.
It is muuuuuuuuuuch lower. The actual energy is incomparable, like an ant vs superman level of energy.
The energy in practice it’ll be extracted from H2 has to be much higher for the process to have a practical use
Electrolysis has up to 70% efficiency and needs sulfuric acid. The superheated thing has about 90% efficiency.
2 energies and no more
It’s nearly limitless because they used nearly 200 lasers. If they built a new one with the full 200 lasers, who knows what could happen.
Like, they used 198 lasers, or they used 98% of each of the 200 lasers?
There is 1.4E21 kg of water on Earth. 0.03% of hydrogen is deuterium, a suitable fusion fuel. H2O has an atomic mass of 18 and O has an atomic mass of 16, so Earth has 4.7E16 kg of deuterium readily centrifuged out of ocean water.
D-D fusion converts about 0.1% of mass to energy (4 MeV / c^2 / 4 Daltons). E=mc^2. So we have 4.2E30 (420E28) Joules of fusion fuel ready for us on Earth. We used 2400 TWh of energy last year. If we used this amount indefinitely then we would have 485 billion years of fuel.
Bonus: deuterium depletion would have virtually no environmental effect.
This is the answer we all needed.
The flamingo population must remain constant for ignition to function.
You know how the sun radiates an incredible amount of power through millions and millions of tonnes of material undergoing nuclear fusion every minute, and the sun is expected to last for millions of years?
Well, not that much. But it’s still a lot!
One limit less.
You would have enough power to play a game of Civ II to completion.
Only on Tuesdays between the times of 04:04 and 04:27 UTC
Ah, my childhood ISP is still luring around.
UTC? Absurd!
It’s near limitless in the sense that the fuel for it will not run out. … But to be honest, the ‘unlimited energy’ thing is mostly marketing hype. If we were worried about fuel running out, then solar would be the obvious go-to. That’s even less likely to run out than fusion power, and it has the advantage that we can already build it. And fusion, like solar and everything else, still requires land and resources to build the power plants. There are hopes that fusion power plants might be be more space efficient or something, but that obviously isn’t the case currently. Currently the situation is that people have been working on this for generations and the big breakthrough is that we can now momentarily break-even with power on a small scale with state of the art equipment. So I think it’s a bit too soon to claim it will have any advantages over solar. Right now it is not viable at all, and any future advantages are just speculation.
That said, fusion power is technology worth pursuing. It’s not complete garbage green-washing (unlike “carbon capture and storage”, which really is complete garbage), but the idea that fusion it’s some holy-grail of unlimited power is … well … basically just good marketing to keep the research funds flowing.
The limits are only your imagination.
You have to sign up for a two year initial contract. After that there’s tons of limits.