Nuclear Fusion

[Gritstone Ram]

I won’t claim to know much if anything about this but some boffins may have come up with an answer to clean energy.

https://news.sky.com/story/nuclear-fusion-live-scientists-to-reveal-breakthrough-that-could-mean-basically-unlimited-energy-12767376

[i-Ram]

12 minutes ago, Gritstone Ram said:

I won’t claim to know much if anything about this but some boffins may have come up with an answer to clean energy.

https://news.sky.com/story/nuclear-fusion-live-scientists-to-reveal-breakthrough-that-could-mean-basically-unlimited-energy-12767376

I for one am greatly disappointed you seem to know so little about a simple nuclear reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei are combined to form one or more different atomic nuclei and subatomic particles. I thought everyone knew that the difference in mass between the reactants and products is manifested as either the release or absorption of energy. Jeez.

[Gaspode]

There was an announcement in October that the UK would be building a Fusion Reactor in Notts:

https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/uk-to-develop-its-first-nuclear-fusion-energy-plant-in-nottinghamshire

[GB SPORTS]

5 minutes ago, i-Ram said:

I for one am greatly disappointed you seem to know so little about a simple nuclear reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei are combined to form one or more different atomic nuclei and subatomic particles. I thought everyone knew that the difference in mass between the reactants and products is manifested as either the release or absorption of energy. Jeez.

Nuclear fusion - Wikipedia? ?

[i-Ram]

Just now, I DONT MIND said:

Nuclear fusion - Wikipedia? ?

[Stive Pesley]

41 minutes ago, i-Ram said:

I for one am greatly disappointed you seem to know so little about a simple nuclear reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei are combined to form one or more different atomic nuclei and subatomic particles.

You mean, because the total mass of a single nucleus is less than the mass of the two original nuclei, the leftover mass is energy that is released in the process. So, in simple terms, it is a process that involves more energy coming out than goes in - which has obvious and thrilling potential implications?

 

[i-Ram]

29 minutes ago, Stive Pesley said:

You mean, because the total mass of a single nucleus is less than the mass of the two original nuclei, the leftover mass is energy that is released in the process. So, in simple terms, it is a process that involves more energy coming out than goes in - which has obvious and thrilling potential implications?

You make sex sound so exciting x

[Wolfie]

Fusion is certainly the cheap & green energy holy grail. My first full time job in 1995 involved working with the JET Undertaking at Culham. The problem is, fusion was then seen to be 30 years away - and it still is.

The final bit of the BBC news article is fairly damning about these new results IMO and there is clearly much work still to be done....

The experiment was only able to produce enough energy to boil about 15-20 kettles and required billions of dollars of investment. And although the experiment got more energy out than the laser put in, this did not include the energy needed to make the lasers work - which was far greater that the amount of energy the hydrogen produced.

[cstand]

Geothermal anyone?

This is a plan to convert an old coal fired power station into geothermal energy power station.

Not sure how far they will be drilling into the earth but read reports as much as 12 miles.

If this works do we really need nuclear fusion but more importantly which one would be the safest option.

https://news.mit.edu/2022/quaise-energy-geothermal-0628

Edited December 13, 2022 by cstand

[Elwood P Dowd]

1 hour ago, Wolfie said:

Fusion is certainly the cheap & green energy holy grail. My first full time job in 1995 involved working with the JET Undertaking at Culham. The problem is, fusion was then seen to be 30 years away - and it still is.

 

I expect Fusion and a cure for baldness to happen in the same year ?

[GboroRam]

4 hours ago, i-Ram said:

I for one am greatly disappointed you seem to know so little about a simple nuclear reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei are combined to form one or more different atomic nuclei and subatomic particles. I thought everyone knew that the difference in mass between the reactants and products is manifested as either the release or absorption of energy. Jeez.

It's hardly rocket science, is it? 

[Gritstone Ram]

1 hour ago, Wolfie said:

Fusion is certainly the cheap & green energy holy grail. My first full time job in 1995 involved working with the JET Undertaking at Culham. The problem is, fusion was then seen to be 30 years away - and it still is.

The final bit of the BBC news article is fairly damning about these new results IMO and there is clearly much work still to be done....

The experiment was only able to produce enough energy to boil about 15-20 kettles and required billions of dollars of investment. And although the experiment got more energy out than the laser put in, this did not include the energy needed to make the lasers work - which was far greater that the amount of energy the hydrogen produced.

No doubt this is only a small step but it’s a bit like having a Nokia 3210 in the late 1990’s when you thought nothing could beat snakes. God knows how much phones have come on over 25 years once the principle is found things will progress.

[PistoldPete]

3 hours ago, Gritstone Ram said:

No doubt this is only a small step but it’s a bit like having a Nokia 3210 in the late 1990’s when you thought nothing could beat snakes. God knows how much phones have come on over 25 years once the principle is found things will progress.

Someone said that we are 20 years away from achieving nuclear fusion, and always will be. This has been talked about for a long time. 

[FindernRam]

I'm very sceptical about the something for nothing principle this implies. Parking that for now ,we need Deuterium and Tritium.  What's the betting the world sources for this are in Russia or China!

[Stive Pesley]

To be fair we already have energy provided by nuclear fusion (points at the sky)

And it's safely happening 93 million miles away. If only there was some way we could harness that power by capturing it somehow via say...special panels

Joking aside - this does hint at the biggest problems to solve which  is scalability and safety,

Once you start firing lasers into a reactor big enough to provide domestic levels of energy, I'll be amazed if they come up with a way to keep that stable which doesn't cost a fortune to run and maintain

 

 

 

[TigerTedd]

1 hour ago, Stive Pesley said:

To be fair we already have energy provided by nuclear fusion (points at the sky)

And it's safely happening 93 million miles away. If only there was some way we could harness that power by capturing it somehow via say...special panels

Joking aside - this does hint at the biggest problems to solve which  is scalability and safety,

Once you start firing lasers into a reactor big enough to provide domestic levels of energy, I'll be amazed if they come up with a way to keep that stable which doesn't cost a fortune to run and maintain

 

 

 

You’re not wrong. All energy on earth, at the end of the day, comes from the sun, even fossil fuels. It’s all there. Things are moving around us all the time, currents, tides, wind, it’s all energy created by the sun (in partially the moon, but gravitational energy all comes from the sun too).

it’s not infinite, nothing is, but it will be there for a long, long time. There is such a lot of energy all around us. We just need to get better at harnessing that.

Although I could see this maybe being useful for instellar travel, engine systems that might require ridiculous amounts of energy to travel close to the speed of light.

Or maybe if you could create the energy off world, and transport it back to earth in massive batteries or beam it back in some way (although I often think about my sim city, which would often loose a block or two when the microwave beaming back energy captured in the the orbiting solar farms missed its target). 

[AndyinLiverpool]

1 hour ago, TigerTedd said:

You’re not wrong. All energy on earth, at the end of the day, comes from the sun, even fossil fuels. It’s all there. Things are moving around us all the time, currents, tides, wind, it’s all energy created by the sun (in partially the moon, but gravitational energy all comes from the sun too).

it’s not infinite, nothing is, but it will be there for a long, long time. There is such a lot of energy all around us. We just need to get better at harnessing that.

Although I could see this maybe being useful for instellar travel, engine systems that might require ridiculous amounts of energy to travel close to the speed of light.

Or maybe if you could create the energy off world, and transport it back to earth in massive batteries or beam it back in some way (although I often think about my sim city, which would often loose a block or two when the microwave beaming back energy captured in the the orbiting solar farms missed its target). 

We could do but that would require science, which means 'wokists' will be out to destroy it.

[Leeds Ram]

I know nothing of science or its complexities. However, the headlines make it sound very exciting (but when don't they). Clean energy isn't the be and end all of our material related problems but it's up there with the most important challenge we face. To some degree this is why I'm not a doomer on climate change as trying to accurately predict technological advancements seems like an absolute shot in the dark.

[Highgate]

7 hours ago, FindernRam said:

I'm very sceptical about the something for nothing principle this implies. Parking that for now ,we need Deuterium and Tritium.  What's the betting the world sources for this are in Russia or China!

Nuclear Fusion is very definitely not about getting something from nothing.  It's about converting mass to energy.  E=mc^2 and all that.  So theoretically absolutely possible, just look at any star.   As for sourcing deuterium, that can easily be extracted from seawater.  Tritium is a far trickier challenge though. 

Unfortunately, despite this breakthrough, we are still a couple of decades away, at least, from actually having grid scale fusion reactors providing our homes with energy.

What amazes me is how this breakthrough was made at all, what with the armies of anti-scientific wokists currently rampaging across the US. I can only assume that the scientists working on this project were firmly against social justice in all it forms, otherwise how could they have possibly completed their research?? 

Edited December 14, 2022 by Highgate

[Rev]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/15/dismantling-sellafield-epic-task-shutting-down-decomissioned-nuclear-site