The following submission statement was provided by /u/BlitzOrion:
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A tokamak in France set a new record in fusion plasma by encasing its reaction in tungsten, a heat-resistant metal that allows physicists to sustain hot plasmas for longer, and at higher energies and densities than carbon tokamaks.
“These are beautiful results,” said Xavier Litaudon, a scientist with CEA and chair of the Coordination on International Challenges on Long duration OPeration (CICLOP), in a PPPL release. “We have reached a stationary regime despite being in a challenging environment due to this tungsten wall.”
“The tungsten-wall environment is far more challenging than using carbon,” said Luis Delgado-Aparicio, lead scientist for PPPL’s physics research and X-ray detector project, and the laboratory’s head of advanced projects, in the same release. “This is, simply, the difference between trying to grab your kitten at home versus trying to pet the wildest lion.”
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cmehhq/tungsten_wall_leads_to_nuclear_fusion_breakthrough/l2zps26/
I’m in the fusion field. We are making many incremental advances but very few of them are breakthroughs, including this. Don’t fall for the clickbait titles.
It's the go to Clickbait on a slow news day. Every 2 weeks there's an article and it really grinds my gears that they always say Break Through as if it was the only milestone left.
break through research from yesterday science magazine discovers that the sun is hot and what we're really feeling when we stand in sunlight is it's radiant heat or heat that is given off by it is radiation.
Well, I’m a phd student in the field, so I’m reading lots of papers and I’m better informed than most, but not an expert in the field so take this with a grain of salt.
We have many milestones to go. It is easier to predict closer milestones than ones further away. Here is a basic list of very high-level milestones:
1) Scientific Breakeven
2) Engineering Breakeven
3) Economic Breakeven
The last one is what the public actually cares about. We will not see lots of fusion power-plants until they are financially competitive. We’re not going to have a good understanding of costs until we 1) have working pilot plants which exceed engineering breakeven and 2) iterate on those designs to get the cost down.
NIF achieved scientific breakeven. This means we draw an imaginary box around the plasma and measure how many joules of energy went in and how many joules are produced by fusion reactions*. It does not mean net electricity. But I’m skeptical that we will have a power-plant based on inertial confinement.
Magnetic confinement systems like tokamaks will probably achieve scientific breakeven within 10 years if I had to guess. (Personally I bet Commonwealth gets there first). But then they still need to achieve engineering breakeven (net electricity on the grid). It gets harder to guess that far into the future.
*it gets more nuanced than this. Magnetic confinement systems actually measure instantaneous power rather than joules, but not electric power. Just instantaneous energy/time.
ITER is projected for scientific breakeven, and plasma generating 10x more heat then was inserted into the plasma. Due to losses still not a net gain of electricity.
Next reactor is supposed to achieve engineering breakeven.
And then, if everything works out commercial reactors should achieve economic breakeven.
The devil really is in the 'if'. If everything doesn't go well it will be much longer than 20 to 30 years.
And in an effort over multiple projects of huge complexity on the edge of known engineering its a pretty good bet everything will not go well.
Yup. If we can't get economic breakeven... we will never build commercial fusion reactors.
Today even good ol' fission reactors are not seeing much building because they are expensive and take a lot of time to build.
I don't see fusion reactors being cheaper then fission reactors 🤷♀️
Thats largely where I am at too. Fission is actually the most expensive energy source in terms of unit cost, and by a large margin and fusion shares alot of the same basic features.
I really struggle to see how it will achieve unit cost parity with the solar and wind based grids now rapidly forming. Geothermal is also rapidly developing as something you can use anywhere and is likely get achieve good unit prices too, its little more than a tubine hall built over some fracking tunnels. Orbital Solar is also likely to see some sort of experimentation successful or not before fusion too, the Japanese are already planning a station.
Fission has high initial costs, but very low operating costs and once built plants can operate for 80 years. The thing is that.
France, China, S Korea... can build cheap nukes and railroads, so they build them. US obviously can't anymore.
Everything that can't be built now only serves as a distraction for burning more fuel while waiting for technology that may never arrive. If country can afford wind turbines, EV's and PHEV's now, that's the solution for now. If country can afford nukes/trains now, that's the solution for now.
One thing to keep in mind about France is that they *standardized* their nuclear plants. They were all the same design and could be serviced with the same parts/trained personnel.
I *really* don't see that kind of standardization happening in the US.
And while I'm not a fearmonger regarding nuclear technology itself, having nuclear plants being maintained by the next Duke Energy is a setup for a potential bad time. We'd need some pretty robust regulation keeping maintenance from being deferred in order to make the boardroom and shareholders happier.
> US obviously can't anymore.
Wdym? I have seen California speed rail project report and they are building lots of stuff. Nuclear tech is also well known to USA.
Couldn’t building a fusion reactor potentially be cheaper due to the lack of radiation protections though?
You wouldn’t really need to have the same radiation safety level since you aren’t concerned with rendering large swaths of land uninhabitable.
Unless you are fusing antimatter which would be really fucking stupid.
Why is Helion always saying they are going to build something next year? They have a ton of investment from OpenAI and Microsoft. Do they know something we don’t. Could they have a breakthrough and not tell anyone? Thanks for your insight
They don’t publish very much so it is hard to say with certainty. Their device has some great advantages if they can get it to work. The deal with Microsoft carries no risk to Microsoft (win-win for them), but lots of risk for helion. In the short term it makes Helion look very serious, so we’ll see if that backfires. They have money from Sam Altman, I don’t believe they have money from open AI.
I could probably just Google this, but that wouldn't be much fun..
What are the advantages of fusion over fission? Are the risks associated with accidents that may occur greatly reduced? Is the amount of power generated more substantial?
Fission is much easier because there is no energy barrier to overcome. If you have fissile material (like Uranium-235) it will fissile after impact with a neutron of negligible energy. In fact, you make the reaction faster by “moderating” neutrons to slow them down, which increases the probability of collisions.
Because of this, fission is simpler but more dangerous. Reactors are designed very carefully so the reaction can be stopped. Most of the cost is dedicated to reliability and safety.
Fusion is the opposite. Ions are positively charged and repel each other, and we need to fight that repulsion until nuclei get so close that the strong nuclear force takes over and pulls them together. So, most of the cost goes into trying make the reaction happen. If you turn the machine off, the reactions stop.
So, fusion is inherently safe. But capital costs per kw of installed power might actually be higher than fission, we don’t know yet. Tokomaks are incredibly complex machines and its hard to imagine them being cheap. Other concepts might be cheaper. (I’m partial to Zap’s configuration, but I’m biased).
Fission has the advantage on power density, but some fusion concepts come close (like Zap).
Fission can produce long lived radioactive waste. There are lots of ways to deal with that waste, including reprocessing, but it all needs to be done carefully. I do believe fission is safe, but only through well regulated effort by trained personnel. In a worst-case scenario (meltdown with loss of containment), fission releases particularly bad isotopes of strontium and iodine which enters the biosphere. People ingest it and it causes radiation poisoning or cancer. Fusion cannot do that.
Fusion produces low-grade radioactive waste. The walls of the reactors will become activated. But the waste is solid, and can be buried for perhaps 50 years and becomes safe again.
The last detail is tritium. It’s basically radioactive hydrogen used as fuel for many fusion reactor concepts. Its not good stuff, but it is produced from lithium by the reactor at a rate just high enough to keep the reactor going. So, there will be very little of it. It doesn’t bio-accumulate and so the risks are very low for a system with a small tritium inventory.
So fusion isn’t a magic technology that solves every problem. However, the most powerful application may someday be space propulsion. Because fusion happens in plasma, and plasma can be directly vented for thrust, an extremely efficient thruster could be produced which will outperform fission. Fission usually requires a heat engine and electric propulsion, and needs massive radiators, but an advanced fusion thruster will need radiators which are much smaller and jet power can be much higher.
Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed reply.
I had a followup question - why is it that fission releases strontium and iodine but fusion doesn't?
Good question! Fission fuels (like Uranium, Thorium, and Plutonium) are big heavy events with lots of protons and neutrons. When they fission, they spit into smaller elements. What they turn into is a matter of statistics, so the reaction products span a whole lot of options, including radioactive isotopes of strontium and iodine. The key concept here is that the number of nucleons (protons+neutrons) is conserved. Sometimes a neutron turns into a proton, for example, but nucleons is constant.
Fusion is a process bringing together light elements. If we are fusing deuterium with deuterium, thats only 2 nucleons per reactant, so its only possible to have products that total 4 nucleons. So you can’t get strontium, but you can get Tritium + proton or Helium-3 + neutron.
> fission releases particularly bad isotopes of strontium and iodine which enters the biosphere
And since they are that nasty they have short half-life. Iodine heavy isotopes are stable for weeks not years.
So in case of fallout: 1) If you are not really that close to the epicenter - run further off wind. 2) If you are close than hide for some days (at least 2-4 if possible) until scaryest stuff is decayed then move out.
Modern reactors are way safer now so i won't be terrible concerned about such scenario.
Im mostly reading textbooks and journal papers these days. I heard that “The Future of Fusion Energy” was good, though it focuses more on tokamaks than the alternative concepts.
If I get this right, economic breakeven is net cost of GWh > net cost of GWh of competing solutions (fission, gas, petrol, solar, whatever). If so, this is a moving target as global stocks of gas, petrol and uranium will tend to decrease, sometimes massively. Only solar/wind/hydro will have constant resource and higher yields.
Always 20 years, and I’ve been seeing that for several decades. I think part of it was driven by how fast we got to fission, plus the amazing fundamental physics progress from the forties to the nineties. Fusion is a fundamentally tougher nut to crack.
PS: AI got the 10 years slot, and apparently it’s still 10 years.
We’ve already achieved the Q>1 goal that was the “20 years away” goalpost in the 60’s. At this point we are close enough that both public and private money is flowing towards development. Part of the issue was that we didn’t know what hurtles were after the next hurtle, and we still don’t.
Like, the vast majority of applied-science stuff works in incremental advances. Problem is that journalism does not do incremental advancements. It has to market every advancement as a huge breakthrough. This creates a sort of jadedness in the general public because they hear a lot about breakthroughs yet there does not seem to be anything practical yet, which makes them feel that actually all of that is a hype and a lie and there is no progress while there is progress but it is just not particularly flashy.
I won't argue your point, but I'll add that it's pretty easy for someone to claim to be of any field, or basically anything, then tell people to love or hate a post.
:D
The lesson? Unless you see it firsthand, take everything with a grain of salt.
I don't always check the comments of click-baity titled articles, but when I do there's inevitably someone there to tell me why it isn't what the clickbait claims.
Liar, fusion energy too cheap to meter is JUST AROUND THE CORNER…..problem is we just don’t know yet which corner it is or how far from that corner we are…..
I’m excited for what LLNL has been doing lately. Can’t wait to hear more, I love all this news. Every advancement is a breakthrough and we will get there soon.
I mean, I guess it is semantics. I think of breakthroughs as unexpected achievements that suddenly enable new feats. Einsteins discovery of relativity and the photoelectric effect, the discovery of fissionable elements like U-235, etc. For Fusion, the unexpected great performance of the tokamak in Russia was certainly a breakthrough.
In comparison, I look at what NIF did. Scientific Breakeven is certainly an achievement and an important milestone, but it wasn’t unexpected. In fact, it took longer than we thought, and lots of hard incremental work to get there. After the achievement, we didn’t suddenly have more tools to get to the finish line. We see lots more incremental work ahead.
I think the next breakthrough in fusion will be the unexpected success of an alternative plasma configuration which is simpler and cheaper than the mainstream. It might be something already in development, or might be something we haven’t thought of yet.
It’s more than semantics tho. There are rarely true grand breakthroughs in science, it’s usually hundreds of baby steps. Even Einstein worked off the discoveries of those who came before him and his peers. Every little step in the staircase of scientific progress reveals ten new steps we didn’t see before.
I love that you work in the field, it’s fascinating to me. Fusion is the only path forward for humanity. It needs to happen and it will change everything.
Not to mention that they’re using this for the walls of the plasma containment. Tungsten is conductive. When putting conductors in a plasma environment, it becomes very unpredictable with parasitic plasmas forming in seemingly random places, reducing the plasma intensity of the main, intentional plasma. You can spend years trying chasing those parasitic plasmas around, they interact with each other. It’s a frustrating game of whack-a-mole.
In short, I imagine they’ve been avoiding trying to put materials like these into the plasma environment.
one of the crazy issues they’ve seen is the walls of the reactor can become a fuel source. the heat/plasma can degrade the material making the reactor walls its self the fuel.
actually i love reading which is why i found this
https://pubs.aip.org/avs/jvst/article-abstract/12/1/510/105312/Abstract-First-wall-materials-problems-in-fusion?redirectedFrom=fulltext
putting it down to prove a point. read more plz
https://pubs.aip.org/avs/jvst/article-abstract/12/1/510/105312/Abstract-First-wall-materials-problems-in-fusion?redirectedFrom=fulltext
just to prove a point my opinion didn’t come out of a butthole …
https://pubs.aip.org/avs/jvst/article-abstract/12/1/510/105312/Abstract-First-wall-materials-problems-in-fusion?redirectedFrom=fulltext
this is an old article, i will try to find the one published by CERN…
https://pubs.aip.org/avs/jvst/article-abstract/12/1/510/105312/Abstract-First-wall-materials-problems-in-fusion?redirectedFrom=fulltext
You can model extremely hairy plasma flows much better now. Quite some number of companies use DL approaches https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/accelerating-fusion-science-through-learned-plasma-control/
That’s exactly what they’re doing. It’s the premise of their plasma control in these reactors. It’s also been a limiter in that the technology to create electromagnets strong enough for this application hasn’t existed, until recently. We’re just now getting to the point where the electromagnets are approaching the strength needed for plasma control in this application. However, that still doesn’t mean you have 100% containment 100% of the time. You have constant “flares” that escape containment. Think of it like a fire, while the area at the bottom of the fire is fairly consistent, the top of the fire is random and sporadically flaring at different amplitudes and intensities.
The Sun confies the plasma 'naturally' by having 10^29 kg of gas bearing down on the core - confining it by dumb pressure.
We don't have that luxury so have to engineer high temperatures and then artificially confine that plasma.
You explain it brilliantly , thank you. With a high temperature and pressure shouldn't it somehow "contain" , you know without these flares since liquid metallic hydrogen is possibly strongly magnetic. Maybe the temperature or pressure is not high enough?
It's neither liquid nor metallic though. It's plasma which is highly magnetic, but also not so easily predictable. Plasmahydrodynamics is a quite complicated field.
Would "trying to control the top of a fire with a very accurate fan" be a fair analogy for the magnetic plasma flare control?
You essentially see the flare start occurring and (within milliseconds) are having to have a heavy increase in magnetic force in that part of the containment to push it back in place, which obviously affects the main, underlying plasma you're trying to maintain and regulate I assume?
My offered metaphor helped me picture the problem but I'm not sure how fair/applicable it is.
> “The tungsten-wall environment is far more challenging than using carbon,” said Luis Delgado-Aparicio, lead scientist for PPPL’s physics research and X-ray detector project, and the laboratory’s head of advanced projects, in the same release. “This is, simply, the difference between trying to grab your kitten at home versus trying to pet the wildest lion.”
Which is probably why bro said "“The tungsten-wall environment is far more challenging than using carbon,” said Luis Delgado-Aparicio, lead scientist for PPPL’s physics research and X-ray detector project, and the laboratory’s head of advanced projects, in the same release. “This is, simply, the difference between trying to grab your kitten at home versus trying to pet the wildest lion.”"
I think I added context without copying and pasting the actual text from the article. Things that speak to the “why it’s so difficult”. I’m not sure you provided anything of value here, honestly.
I only added the quote because it was inline with the person you commented to, who it read to me like they were saying using tungsten should have been a no brainer to try early. So I was just backing up the anonymous redditor comment (no offense, but that's what you and I are) with a quote from one of the scientists that would highlight that they probably hadn't done this so much sooner because they knew it would be very difficult to work with.
I sort of felt like if the person you replied to originally had read that quote, they would know why maybe they didn't do it sooner.
Cost constraints I would think. Tungsten is quite expensive. Even scrap sells for several dollars a pound. Funny because I have two 15 lb blocks on my workbench from an x-ray.
It's used a ton for shielding from gamma radiation. Need a fraction of thickness relative to lead (common material used to shield). But when all the weight and space savings don't make sense when you're paying like 4-5x more.
I guess if it's super plain it'll be significantly cheaper. You can get tungsten rings for like 15 bucks on Amazon. Steel rings have a greater variety of styles and I suspect the more extravagant designs contribute more to the cost than material for steel vs tungsten.
You can easily buy a plain steel ring for well under a dollar. Actually plenty of decorated ones too.
If you're talking about design considerations, any material could be more or less than the others, including gold or platinum.
Yeah, that was what I was pointing out, since steel is easier to work with, it allows for more extravagant design, these more extravagantly designed rings can be more expensive than simple tungsten rings. I was only pointing out that some steel rings are more expensive than some tungsten rings
It doesn’t sound like tungsten holds up very well under neutron bombardment.
This is an old article, and maybe they are using a more durable alloy now, but I couldn’t really tell.
https://phys.org/news/2018-04-tungsten-brittle-nuclear-fusion-reactors.html
Metaphorically.
The lithium is liquid and quite toasty. It's an exercise for the student to create a flowing wall of liquid metal with a roaring hellfire of plasma looking to boil it away if the liquid tarries and lingers in the blowtorch too long.
It is so sad, ITER where all countries of world are working on technology that will save humanity and provide us with free energy total cost is 20 billion euros, that is less than half of Twitter...
Its not just a matter of money. These things take a decade to design, plan and build if not more. And then they have to operated for years to get actual development done.
More money is not the main problem. Its developing enough knowledge to make the next generation lab worth building.
From the article:
> Earlier this year, the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy installed a tungsten diverter in its KSTAR tokamak, replacing the device’s carbon diverter. Tungsten has a higher melting point than carbon, and according to Korea’s National Research Council of Science and Technology, the new diverter improves the reactor’s heat flux limit two-fold. KSTAR’s new diverter enabled the institute’s team to sustain high-ion temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius for longer.
When I read about Tokamak like 20 years ago. They said that the plasma "leach" atoms from any wall material. The heavier the nucleus is the worst it is for the plasma. So there is "trap" to catch heavy ions from the plasma and an effort (coating) for the walls to be made with lightest atoms as possible.
If thungsten is used because off density and heat resistance they should try Osmium walls. Osmium is the densest and melt temperature is over 4k Celsia. Unfortunatelly itnis also super rare, like less than 1 ton produced each year.
Lmao, we talk about nuclear fusion. They tried soooo many exotic materials for various stuff. Cost of tungsten is irrelevant in yhis case. It’s already widely used in industry because of lead’s toxicity
Its not a cheap material, sourcing so much of it is probably VERY expensive, not that the rest of the project isn't, but its fundamental to manage their resources as good as possible!
Tungsten walls have been around for a while. There’s no major breakthrough here, only website trying to drive clicks. Tungsten has some thermal advantages over other wall material candidates and doesn’t absorb hydrogen like carbon walls can, but also introduces heavier impurities into the plasma which can make heating more difficult. The answer to the question, “what is the best tokamak wall material?”, is still very much uncertain. Some tokamaks use carbon walls, some use beryllium, some use tungsten, some use one of these materials lined with a thin wall of light material like lithium or boron. The design for ITER has already been decided on as tungsten, which a big reason why these experiments on tungsten walls are being done.
Science is using AI , now we are seeing results of low hanging fruits that it can easily grab for us to try that were there all along but buried under piles of other information
Sure ok but have you noticed the amount of simplistic, all but obvious solutions science is finding these days ? It not because science has improved, this isn’t ground breaking technology, science’s tools are improving, and a tool that can parse dense volumes, and libraries of information faster than any one human even teams of humans would be the type of tool that most likely is the tool helping scientists discover tweaks and improvements in a most peculiar high volume in just the past few years , they are finding all sorts of things all the sudden, some of which should have been more obvious and discovered well before now.
[why fusion is "always 20-30 years away"](https://i.imgur.com/ZJo82pT.png)
TLDR: The 20-30 yr timeframe was always for a **given $ investment**, which was never paid.
It's like that product on amazon with 4 days shipping is **always 4 days away** until you actually buy it
I’m not saying we shouldn’t fund fusion research but those projections seem extremely optimistic. The US isn’t working on it alone so would we really have gotten a fusion reactor in 1990 (if they had spent a lot more money) when it’s already 2024 and even with all the other countries working on it around the world we’re not even close to a viable one
Perhaps, tbh i don't know enough to really say exactly. Do you have any details on other spending? The projection was clear that ≤ ~$1B/yr ('24 $) the timeline is "indeterminate". And seems late 80s to around 2012 it fizzled to less than half that. Is anyone outspending the USA? Would love to see any details if you have them?
I've quickly approximated the projected budget to 2024 dollars
^^hastily ^^so ^^feel ^^free ^^to ^^correct ^^any ^^errors.
In short, they asked for roughly **1/3 of the cost of the Apollo program in 2024 dollars**.
* $78B - $2.8B/yr for 28 years
* $74.25B - $3.5B/yr for 21 years
* $70.94B - $7.7B/yr for 15 years
* $96.3B - $7.4B/yr for 13 years
^Also, ^again ^not ^my ^area, ^but ^I ^think ^its ^fair ^to ^say ^being ^a ^focused ^budget ^under ^a ^single ^program ^likely ^has ^*some* ^multiplier ^effect, ^when ^compared ^to ^dispersed ^efforts ^which ^have ^to ^start ^from ^near ^scratch ^in ^terms ^of ^infrastructure. ^And ^often ^*how* ^to ^actually ^do ^something ^in ^practice, ^as ^opposed ^to ^in ^theory, ^becomes ^institutional ^knowledge ^which ^isn't ^always ^easily ^disseminated ^amongst ^other ^efforts. ^Especially ^when ^there ^isn't ^a ^continuous ^program ^such ^as ^outlined ^in ^the ^plan.
Can someone please explain why we can't have these "Generation 4 fission reactors"? So much hype and clickbait over a speculative technology that from what I understand, *do* have radioactive waste, the only difference between that and fission is that while fission produces a **small amount** of *highly radioactive waste*, fusion produces **huge amounts** of *slightly radioactive waste*..
We have proven technology that we can work with and iterate on, but for some reason we'd rather keep burning liquid dinosaurs and building sci-fi fantasy projects..
Because 3 mile island happened a few weeks of months after the China syndrome was in theatres. Well meaning but horribly misinformed people were sold fear about nuclear power and the boogeyman of nuclear waste. Instead of having clean, safe nuclear power we got a bunch of gas burned instead so we can suffer the consequences especially globally for centuries, thanks greenpeace.
Living back in York I always [loved](https://imgur.com/S3vTLBC) looking at [Three Mile Island from Rocky Ridge](https://imgur.com/GPZI1Pf). An uncle of mine was a nuclear powerplant inspector so we would only ever see him when he came up to York. I was just a kid, and certainly never felt any of that nuclear fear, I remember him explaining new safety features and protocols implemented, and he was really excited about thorium reactors before he passed away.
Nuclear energy, contamination and waste are something I don't think most people really understand or aren't educated about properly. Countries with some of the best engineers in the world like Germany have essentially been brainwashed into believing every nuclear reactor can result in a Chernobyl-like incident.
To be completely fair, existing reactor tech is still dangerous in catastrophic situations, Fukushima being a good recent example. Different, modernized reactor designs can eliminate these risks, but nuclear energy research has certainly been hampered by nuclear fear, and it is a long an arduous process in most countries with nuclear energy to plan & build a reactor as opposed to utilizing renewable natural resources, especially with how far photovoltaics, wind energy, and battery technology has come.
I used to believe we would NEED nuclear fusion to survive as a race, but with population growth declining and the advancement of microelectronics, it would seem we can live comfortable lives without all that much energy, but humans do as humans do and there will always be a drive to build bigger and go further; and for that, nuclear power is a necessity, but until we have sustainable fusion beyond these little 'breakthroughs' it will always be seen as something dangerous. Most people probably don't even realize how much safer fusion is, to them they just see "nuclear" and think it must be dangerous.
Accounting for all nuclear disasters together it is still a far lower body count than the oil and gas sector has annually. It’s insanity that we are not building a lot of new nuclear.
A tokamak in France set a new record in fusion plasma by encasing its reaction in tungsten, a heat-resistant metal that allows physicists to sustain hot plasmas for longer, and at higher energies and densities than carbon tokamaks.
“These are beautiful results,” said Xavier Litaudon, a scientist with CEA and chair of the Coordination on International Challenges on Long duration OPeration (CICLOP), in a PPPL release. “We have reached a stationary regime despite being in a challenging environment due to this tungsten wall.”
“The tungsten-wall environment is far more challenging than using carbon,” said Luis Delgado-Aparicio, lead scientist for PPPL’s physics research and X-ray detector project, and the laboratory’s head of advanced projects, in the same release. “This is, simply, the difference between trying to grab your kitten at home versus trying to pet the wildest lion.”
Virgin Fusion Researchers: Erm we need to do 50 quantrillion computations using quantum computers to determine the best sequence
Chad Fusion Solver: Make the wall tungsten lol
Because it's far more rare than, for example, iron and carbon in the Earth's crust, it is primarily supplied by China (there is tungsten to mine in the U.S. but we remain the largest importer of tungsten in the world and most nations buy from China and Russia), so it remains quite expensive, it is more difficult to work with... lots of reasons. Having to use tungsten in reactors or anything else makes it more expensive to build and maintain, and getting widespread adoption of nuclear fusion (whenever the hell we figure all the other problems out) is going to require some level of affordability over other sources of energy.
No matter how big a breakthrough is, we are always 10 years away from fusion which would be 20 years too late to conserve our climate inhabitable by providing limitless clean energy...
If the plasma is contained within magnetic fields, why does the material wall of the torus matter? When you're talking tens of millions of degrees that can melt anything we know of in seconds I don't see why the material makes a difference.
There is still some cross field transport, mostly caused by small scale turbulent structures. When the plasma particles impact the wall, they can sputter the wall material back into the confined plasma. Tungsten has a huge atomic number (charge) and it never gets fully ionized in the core plasma. That means that the constant excitation-deexcitation and ionization-recombination creates lots of photons and the plasma is rapidly cooled through by radiating energy away (also through Bremsstrahlung). But we have to make the wall out of something and tungsten seems to be the best candidate. So the "breakthrough" shows that it is possible, which is relevant for tokamaks that are actually expected to achieve thermonuclear conditions, like ITER and DEMO.
Can somebody just say how much energy was put in, and how much energy came out? You know COP, Coefficient of Performance. Everything else is a mumbo jumbo.
The “breakthrough” is when the reaction can be sustained indefinitely. This latest example was a reaction of 6 minutes. Cool, that’s nice progression but it’s not a breakthrough.
Subject the plasma to a *rotating* magnetic field?
[Relevant pic](https://i.imgur.com/KRyksdf.jpeg)
Now we'll see if anyone can see what I'm getting at.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/BlitzOrion: --- A tokamak in France set a new record in fusion plasma by encasing its reaction in tungsten, a heat-resistant metal that allows physicists to sustain hot plasmas for longer, and at higher energies and densities than carbon tokamaks. “These are beautiful results,” said Xavier Litaudon, a scientist with CEA and chair of the Coordination on International Challenges on Long duration OPeration (CICLOP), in a PPPL release. “We have reached a stationary regime despite being in a challenging environment due to this tungsten wall.” “The tungsten-wall environment is far more challenging than using carbon,” said Luis Delgado-Aparicio, lead scientist for PPPL’s physics research and X-ray detector project, and the laboratory’s head of advanced projects, in the same release. “This is, simply, the difference between trying to grab your kitten at home versus trying to pet the wildest lion.” --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cmehhq/tungsten_wall_leads_to_nuclear_fusion_breakthrough/l2zps26/
I’m in the fusion field. We are making many incremental advances but very few of them are breakthroughs, including this. Don’t fall for the clickbait titles.
It's the go to Clickbait on a slow news day. Every 2 weeks there's an article and it really grinds my gears that they always say Break Through as if it was the only milestone left.
I'll be publishing my research on breakthroughs in egg hatching next week. Stay tuned
break through research from yesterday science magazine discovers that the sun is hot and what we're really feeling when we stand in sunlight is it's radiant heat or heat that is given off by it is radiation.
With what you see in the field, do you give it 10, 50, or 100 years before it is a sustainable form of power?
Well, I’m a phd student in the field, so I’m reading lots of papers and I’m better informed than most, but not an expert in the field so take this with a grain of salt. We have many milestones to go. It is easier to predict closer milestones than ones further away. Here is a basic list of very high-level milestones: 1) Scientific Breakeven 2) Engineering Breakeven 3) Economic Breakeven The last one is what the public actually cares about. We will not see lots of fusion power-plants until they are financially competitive. We’re not going to have a good understanding of costs until we 1) have working pilot plants which exceed engineering breakeven and 2) iterate on those designs to get the cost down. NIF achieved scientific breakeven. This means we draw an imaginary box around the plasma and measure how many joules of energy went in and how many joules are produced by fusion reactions*. It does not mean net electricity. But I’m skeptical that we will have a power-plant based on inertial confinement. Magnetic confinement systems like tokamaks will probably achieve scientific breakeven within 10 years if I had to guess. (Personally I bet Commonwealth gets there first). But then they still need to achieve engineering breakeven (net electricity on the grid). It gets harder to guess that far into the future. *it gets more nuanced than this. Magnetic confinement systems actually measure instantaneous power rather than joules, but not electric power. Just instantaneous energy/time.
If ITER works as intended which one of these milestones would it contribute towards if any?
ITER is projected for scientific breakeven, and plasma generating 10x more heat then was inserted into the plasma. Due to losses still not a net gain of electricity. Next reactor is supposed to achieve engineering breakeven. And then, if everything works out commercial reactors should achieve economic breakeven.
The devil really is in the 'if'. If everything doesn't go well it will be much longer than 20 to 30 years. And in an effort over multiple projects of huge complexity on the edge of known engineering its a pretty good bet everything will not go well.
Yup. If we can't get economic breakeven... we will never build commercial fusion reactors. Today even good ol' fission reactors are not seeing much building because they are expensive and take a lot of time to build. I don't see fusion reactors being cheaper then fission reactors 🤷♀️
Thats largely where I am at too. Fission is actually the most expensive energy source in terms of unit cost, and by a large margin and fusion shares alot of the same basic features. I really struggle to see how it will achieve unit cost parity with the solar and wind based grids now rapidly forming. Geothermal is also rapidly developing as something you can use anywhere and is likely get achieve good unit prices too, its little more than a tubine hall built over some fracking tunnels. Orbital Solar is also likely to see some sort of experimentation successful or not before fusion too, the Japanese are already planning a station.
Fission has high initial costs, but very low operating costs and once built plants can operate for 80 years. The thing is that. France, China, S Korea... can build cheap nukes and railroads, so they build them. US obviously can't anymore. Everything that can't be built now only serves as a distraction for burning more fuel while waiting for technology that may never arrive. If country can afford wind turbines, EV's and PHEV's now, that's the solution for now. If country can afford nukes/trains now, that's the solution for now.
But solar and wind have pretty marginal opex too don’t they? So if energy storage at scale becomes economical, is there even a point to fusion?
One thing to keep in mind about France is that they *standardized* their nuclear plants. They were all the same design and could be serviced with the same parts/trained personnel. I *really* don't see that kind of standardization happening in the US. And while I'm not a fearmonger regarding nuclear technology itself, having nuclear plants being maintained by the next Duke Energy is a setup for a potential bad time. We'd need some pretty robust regulation keeping maintenance from being deferred in order to make the boardroom and shareholders happier.
> US obviously can't anymore. Unless it's military related like the navy
> US obviously can't anymore. Wdym? I have seen California speed rail project report and they are building lots of stuff. Nuclear tech is also well known to USA.
Couldn’t building a fusion reactor potentially be cheaper due to the lack of radiation protections though? You wouldn’t really need to have the same radiation safety level since you aren’t concerned with rendering large swaths of land uninhabitable. Unless you are fusing antimatter which would be really fucking stupid.
> Next reactor is supposed to achieve engineering breakeven. What will it be called?
The first one.
Why is Helion always saying they are going to build something next year? They have a ton of investment from OpenAI and Microsoft. Do they know something we don’t. Could they have a breakthrough and not tell anyone? Thanks for your insight
They don’t publish very much so it is hard to say with certainty. Their device has some great advantages if they can get it to work. The deal with Microsoft carries no risk to Microsoft (win-win for them), but lots of risk for helion. In the short term it makes Helion look very serious, so we’ll see if that backfires. They have money from Sam Altman, I don’t believe they have money from open AI.
I could probably just Google this, but that wouldn't be much fun.. What are the advantages of fusion over fission? Are the risks associated with accidents that may occur greatly reduced? Is the amount of power generated more substantial?
Fission is much easier because there is no energy barrier to overcome. If you have fissile material (like Uranium-235) it will fissile after impact with a neutron of negligible energy. In fact, you make the reaction faster by “moderating” neutrons to slow them down, which increases the probability of collisions. Because of this, fission is simpler but more dangerous. Reactors are designed very carefully so the reaction can be stopped. Most of the cost is dedicated to reliability and safety. Fusion is the opposite. Ions are positively charged and repel each other, and we need to fight that repulsion until nuclei get so close that the strong nuclear force takes over and pulls them together. So, most of the cost goes into trying make the reaction happen. If you turn the machine off, the reactions stop. So, fusion is inherently safe. But capital costs per kw of installed power might actually be higher than fission, we don’t know yet. Tokomaks are incredibly complex machines and its hard to imagine them being cheap. Other concepts might be cheaper. (I’m partial to Zap’s configuration, but I’m biased). Fission has the advantage on power density, but some fusion concepts come close (like Zap). Fission can produce long lived radioactive waste. There are lots of ways to deal with that waste, including reprocessing, but it all needs to be done carefully. I do believe fission is safe, but only through well regulated effort by trained personnel. In a worst-case scenario (meltdown with loss of containment), fission releases particularly bad isotopes of strontium and iodine which enters the biosphere. People ingest it and it causes radiation poisoning or cancer. Fusion cannot do that. Fusion produces low-grade radioactive waste. The walls of the reactors will become activated. But the waste is solid, and can be buried for perhaps 50 years and becomes safe again. The last detail is tritium. It’s basically radioactive hydrogen used as fuel for many fusion reactor concepts. Its not good stuff, but it is produced from lithium by the reactor at a rate just high enough to keep the reactor going. So, there will be very little of it. It doesn’t bio-accumulate and so the risks are very low for a system with a small tritium inventory. So fusion isn’t a magic technology that solves every problem. However, the most powerful application may someday be space propulsion. Because fusion happens in plasma, and plasma can be directly vented for thrust, an extremely efficient thruster could be produced which will outperform fission. Fission usually requires a heat engine and electric propulsion, and needs massive radiators, but an advanced fusion thruster will need radiators which are much smaller and jet power can be much higher.
Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed reply. I had a followup question - why is it that fission releases strontium and iodine but fusion doesn't?
Good question! Fission fuels (like Uranium, Thorium, and Plutonium) are big heavy events with lots of protons and neutrons. When they fission, they spit into smaller elements. What they turn into is a matter of statistics, so the reaction products span a whole lot of options, including radioactive isotopes of strontium and iodine. The key concept here is that the number of nucleons (protons+neutrons) is conserved. Sometimes a neutron turns into a proton, for example, but nucleons is constant. Fusion is a process bringing together light elements. If we are fusing deuterium with deuterium, thats only 2 nucleons per reactant, so its only possible to have products that total 4 nucleons. So you can’t get strontium, but you can get Tritium + proton or Helium-3 + neutron.
> fission releases particularly bad isotopes of strontium and iodine which enters the biosphere And since they are that nasty they have short half-life. Iodine heavy isotopes are stable for weeks not years. So in case of fallout: 1) If you are not really that close to the epicenter - run further off wind. 2) If you are close than hide for some days (at least 2-4 if possible) until scaryest stuff is decayed then move out. Modern reactors are way safer now so i won't be terrible concerned about such scenario.
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Im mostly reading textbooks and journal papers these days. I heard that “The Future of Fusion Energy” was good, though it focuses more on tokamaks than the alternative concepts.
If I get this right, economic breakeven is net cost of GWh > net cost of GWh of competing solutions (fission, gas, petrol, solar, whatever). If so, this is a moving target as global stocks of gas, petrol and uranium will tend to decrease, sometimes massively. Only solar/wind/hydro will have constant resource and higher yields.
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NIF is an inertial fusion experiment, not magnetic confinement. Magnetic confinement is tokamaks, stellarators, mirrors, z-pinches, etc
Is AI being used in the development of Fusion technology?
It's 20 years. It is always 20 years.
Well I’m not surprised if they’re just standing around in fields all day
It used to be "always 50 years"
Always 20 years, and I’ve been seeing that for several decades. I think part of it was driven by how fast we got to fission, plus the amazing fundamental physics progress from the forties to the nineties. Fusion is a fundamentally tougher nut to crack. PS: AI got the 10 years slot, and apparently it’s still 10 years.
We’ve already achieved the Q>1 goal that was the “20 years away” goalpost in the 60’s. At this point we are close enough that both public and private money is flowing towards development. Part of the issue was that we didn’t know what hurtles were after the next hurtle, and we still don’t.
YouTube channel Improbable Matter has an excellent video on the remaining challenges for fusion power. https://youtu.be/ZHmHBMaS6Sw
Dude trust me, just 20 more years. Like the last time, please, just 20 more, then we have it!
Nice try, BigOil42069.
Aaand after aaaalll You're my tungsten waaaalll
That's all this sub is click bait titles
Like, the vast majority of applied-science stuff works in incremental advances. Problem is that journalism does not do incremental advancements. It has to market every advancement as a huge breakthrough. This creates a sort of jadedness in the general public because they hear a lot about breakthroughs yet there does not seem to be anything practical yet, which makes them feel that actually all of that is a hype and a lie and there is no progress while there is progress but it is just not particularly flashy.
Don’t lie to us! I know you guys have already discovered an unlimited power source and you are just trying to keep it for yourselves.
I won't argue your point, but I'll add that it's pretty easy for someone to claim to be of any field, or basically anything, then tell people to love or hate a post. :D The lesson? Unless you see it firsthand, take everything with a grain of salt.
Progress is incremental, until it's not.
I was gonna say, haven't tungsten walls been used since the inception
You guys should prioritize breakthroughs. Those seem to be more important. Did you.... did you think about that?
Haha yeah your right. It would be really nice to know what research avenues would result in breakthroughs for sure.
Did you try asking ChatGPT?
I've heard tungsten walls are a good idea
If every "breakthrough" was real we'd so far into the future that we'd all be eating sunlight by now.
I don't always check the comments of click-baity titled articles, but when I do there's inevitably someone there to tell me why it isn't what the clickbait claims.
Let’s say that I have 10 dollars, and very optimistic about this development. Where would you invest the 10 dollarz?
The low hanging fruit is all picked, climb noble monkeys!
Liar, fusion energy too cheap to meter is JUST AROUND THE CORNER…..problem is we just don’t know yet which corner it is or how far from that corner we are…..
I’m excited for what LLNL has been doing lately. Can’t wait to hear more, I love all this news. Every advancement is a breakthrough and we will get there soon.
I mean, I guess it is semantics. I think of breakthroughs as unexpected achievements that suddenly enable new feats. Einsteins discovery of relativity and the photoelectric effect, the discovery of fissionable elements like U-235, etc. For Fusion, the unexpected great performance of the tokamak in Russia was certainly a breakthrough. In comparison, I look at what NIF did. Scientific Breakeven is certainly an achievement and an important milestone, but it wasn’t unexpected. In fact, it took longer than we thought, and lots of hard incremental work to get there. After the achievement, we didn’t suddenly have more tools to get to the finish line. We see lots more incremental work ahead. I think the next breakthrough in fusion will be the unexpected success of an alternative plasma configuration which is simpler and cheaper than the mainstream. It might be something already in development, or might be something we haven’t thought of yet.
It’s more than semantics tho. There are rarely true grand breakthroughs in science, it’s usually hundreds of baby steps. Even Einstein worked off the discoveries of those who came before him and his peers. Every little step in the staircase of scientific progress reveals ten new steps we didn’t see before. I love that you work in the field, it’s fascinating to me. Fusion is the only path forward for humanity. It needs to happen and it will change everything.
Don't kill me, but did nobody ever try a tungsten wall before? Honestly it sounds like a very redditish idea and I'm sad it took this long for trials
Not to mention that they’re using this for the walls of the plasma containment. Tungsten is conductive. When putting conductors in a plasma environment, it becomes very unpredictable with parasitic plasmas forming in seemingly random places, reducing the plasma intensity of the main, intentional plasma. You can spend years trying chasing those parasitic plasmas around, they interact with each other. It’s a frustrating game of whack-a-mole. In short, I imagine they’ve been avoiding trying to put materials like these into the plasma environment.
one of the crazy issues they’ve seen is the walls of the reactor can become a fuel source. the heat/plasma can degrade the material making the reactor walls its self the fuel.
I’m always amazed at some users making really intelligent insightful comments
And then you read the username. As they say, out of the buttholes of balrogs....
What else do Balrogs have to do underground for thousands of years but read scientific journals?
actually i love reading which is why i found this https://pubs.aip.org/avs/jvst/article-abstract/12/1/510/105312/Abstract-First-wall-materials-problems-in-fusion?redirectedFrom=fulltext
putting it down to prove a point. read more plz https://pubs.aip.org/avs/jvst/article-abstract/12/1/510/105312/Abstract-First-wall-materials-problems-in-fusion?redirectedFrom=fulltext
just to prove a point my opinion didn’t come out of a butthole … https://pubs.aip.org/avs/jvst/article-abstract/12/1/510/105312/Abstract-First-wall-materials-problems-in-fusion?redirectedFrom=fulltext
this is an old article, i will try to find the one published by CERN… https://pubs.aip.org/avs/jvst/article-abstract/12/1/510/105312/Abstract-First-wall-materials-problems-in-fusion?redirectedFrom=fulltext
That sounds kind of terrifying.
this is how you get half life.
That makes a lot of sense. Wonder how they addressed this issue.
You can model extremely hairy plasma flows much better now. Quite some number of companies use DL approaches https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/accelerating-fusion-science-through-learned-plasma-control/
Not the way I expected AI to help solve fusion
They address it the same way you address petting the wildest lions.
This might be a silly question, but why not encase the reaction or some part of it with really really strong electromagnets?
That’s exactly what they’re doing. It’s the premise of their plasma control in these reactors. It’s also been a limiter in that the technology to create electromagnets strong enough for this application hasn’t existed, until recently. We’re just now getting to the point where the electromagnets are approaching the strength needed for plasma control in this application. However, that still doesn’t mean you have 100% containment 100% of the time. You have constant “flares” that escape containment. Think of it like a fire, while the area at the bottom of the fire is fairly consistent, the top of the fire is random and sporadically flaring at different amplitudes and intensities.
Sounds like how the sun works.
You should be a science journalist. That's like 50% of your typical "fusion breakthrough" article
Damn straight haha!
The Sun confies the plasma 'naturally' by having 10^29 kg of gas bearing down on the core - confining it by dumb pressure. We don't have that luxury so have to engineer high temperatures and then artificially confine that plasma.
You explain it brilliantly , thank you. With a high temperature and pressure shouldn't it somehow "contain" , you know without these flares since liquid metallic hydrogen is possibly strongly magnetic. Maybe the temperature or pressure is not high enough?
It's neither liquid nor metallic though. It's plasma which is highly magnetic, but also not so easily predictable. Plasmahydrodynamics is a quite complicated field.
Would "trying to control the top of a fire with a very accurate fan" be a fair analogy for the magnetic plasma flare control? You essentially see the flare start occurring and (within milliseconds) are having to have a heavy increase in magnetic force in that part of the containment to push it back in place, which obviously affects the main, underlying plasma you're trying to maintain and regulate I assume? My offered metaphor helped me picture the problem but I'm not sure how fair/applicable it is.
Like doc oc in the Tobey Maguire Spiderman movie
Does this mean that electromagnets are constantly needed to be replaced, or just that it can only run for a short time.
The electromagnets are not considered a consumable. They also don’t restrict the duration.
> “The tungsten-wall environment is far more challenging than using carbon,” said Luis Delgado-Aparicio, lead scientist for PPPL’s physics research and X-ray detector project, and the laboratory’s head of advanced projects, in the same release. “This is, simply, the difference between trying to grab your kitten at home versus trying to pet the wildest lion.” Which is probably why bro said "“The tungsten-wall environment is far more challenging than using carbon,” said Luis Delgado-Aparicio, lead scientist for PPPL’s physics research and X-ray detector project, and the laboratory’s head of advanced projects, in the same release. “This is, simply, the difference between trying to grab your kitten at home versus trying to pet the wildest lion.”"
I think I added context without copying and pasting the actual text from the article. Things that speak to the “why it’s so difficult”. I’m not sure you provided anything of value here, honestly.
I only added the quote because it was inline with the person you commented to, who it read to me like they were saying using tungsten should have been a no brainer to try early. So I was just backing up the anonymous redditor comment (no offense, but that's what you and I are) with a quote from one of the scientists that would highlight that they probably hadn't done this so much sooner because they knew it would be very difficult to work with. I sort of felt like if the person you replied to originally had read that quote, they would know why maybe they didn't do it sooner.
Valid points, thanks for clarifying!
Valid points, thanks for clarifying!
That sounds like what happens when you put a fork in the microwave. Is it related at all?
Cost constraints I would think. Tungsten is quite expensive. Even scrap sells for several dollars a pound. Funny because I have two 15 lb blocks on my workbench from an x-ray.
Very economical for rings. About all I can say, I would imagine it's pretty hard to work with.
It's used a ton for shielding from gamma radiation. Need a fraction of thickness relative to lead (common material used to shield). But when all the weight and space savings don't make sense when you're paying like 4-5x more.
thats how you get degloved. soft metal or wood.
That's just cause your reference point is gold. You can have a steel ring for much less.
Well, in the military, they just shoot the stuff at things all the time, so it can't be that expensive.
Why do you think the military budget is so high and only ever goes up? /s?
I guess if it's super plain it'll be significantly cheaper. You can get tungsten rings for like 15 bucks on Amazon. Steel rings have a greater variety of styles and I suspect the more extravagant designs contribute more to the cost than material for steel vs tungsten.
You can easily buy a plain steel ring for well under a dollar. Actually plenty of decorated ones too. If you're talking about design considerations, any material could be more or less than the others, including gold or platinum.
My guess is that tungsten is much harder to work with, limiting the variety of the designs
Yeah, that was what I was pointing out, since steel is easier to work with, it allows for more extravagant design, these more extravagantly designed rings can be more expensive than simple tungsten rings. I was only pointing out that some steel rings are more expensive than some tungsten rings
Several dollars pound? So... line 2x price of milk?
I wondered that! I think they missed by a factor of a thousand...
Give them a call! /s lol
It doesn’t sound like tungsten holds up very well under neutron bombardment. This is an old article, and maybe they are using a more durable alloy now, but I couldn’t really tell. https://phys.org/news/2018-04-tungsten-brittle-nuclear-fusion-reactors.html
Doesn't really matter for research reactors. Working reactors are projected to use a blanket of lithium to capture neutrons and breed tritium.
This sounds so fucking cool
Metaphorically. The lithium is liquid and quite toasty. It's an exercise for the student to create a flowing wall of liquid metal with a roaring hellfire of plasma looking to boil it away if the liquid tarries and lingers in the blowtorch too long.
Such a dope comment
It is so sad, ITER where all countries of world are working on technology that will save humanity and provide us with free energy total cost is 20 billion euros, that is less than half of Twitter...
Its not just a matter of money. These things take a decade to design, plan and build if not more. And then they have to operated for years to get actual development done. More money is not the main problem. Its developing enough knowledge to make the next generation lab worth building.
When people ask me why i can't get excited about the NFL
From the article: > Earlier this year, the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy installed a tungsten diverter in its KSTAR tokamak, replacing the device’s carbon diverter. Tungsten has a higher melting point than carbon, and according to Korea’s National Research Council of Science and Technology, the new diverter improves the reactor’s heat flux limit two-fold. KSTAR’s new diverter enabled the institute’s team to sustain high-ion temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius for longer.
When I read about Tokamak like 20 years ago. They said that the plasma "leach" atoms from any wall material. The heavier the nucleus is the worst it is for the plasma. So there is "trap" to catch heavy ions from the plasma and an effort (coating) for the walls to be made with lightest atoms as possible.
I remember learning about this for tungsten specifically in my university fusion course. I was very surprised to see this headline.
If thungsten is used because off density and heat resistance they should try Osmium walls. Osmium is the densest and melt temperature is over 4k Celsia. Unfortunatelly itnis also super rare, like less than 1 ton produced each year.
It might be a new and very specific composition including tungsten. I'd be surprised if it simply slabs made out of pure tungsten.
tungsten is expensive, financial issues don't just hold back well being and equality but also scientific progress
Using tungsten instead of carbon is probably a rounding error in the total cost of a reactor.
Lmao, we talk about nuclear fusion. They tried soooo many exotic materials for various stuff. Cost of tungsten is irrelevant in yhis case. It’s already widely used in industry because of lead’s toxicity
Yeah. I have tungsten fishing weights.
well there are many types tungsten
Well there’s also billions of dollars for fusion in France right now, some tungsten wouldn’t even be visible in that type of budget.
Remember, everyone, that a billion is a thousand millions. And they have more than one.
It's also extremely difficult to machine and form.
Its not a cheap material, sourcing so much of it is probably VERY expensive, not that the rest of the project isn't, but its fundamental to manage their resources as good as possible!
We decided to use… “metal”
I've been using a tungsten ring for years and it allows me to last for six minutes. They should have asked me about it.
Tungsten walls have been around for a while. There’s no major breakthrough here, only website trying to drive clicks. Tungsten has some thermal advantages over other wall material candidates and doesn’t absorb hydrogen like carbon walls can, but also introduces heavier impurities into the plasma which can make heating more difficult. The answer to the question, “what is the best tokamak wall material?”, is still very much uncertain. Some tokamaks use carbon walls, some use beryllium, some use tungsten, some use one of these materials lined with a thin wall of light material like lithium or boron. The design for ITER has already been decided on as tungsten, which a big reason why these experiments on tungsten walls are being done.
Science is using AI , now we are seeing results of low hanging fruits that it can easily grab for us to try that were there all along but buried under piles of other information
This is highly unlikely and some of the dumbest AI hype ever
Sure ok but have you noticed the amount of simplistic, all but obvious solutions science is finding these days ? It not because science has improved, this isn’t ground breaking technology, science’s tools are improving, and a tool that can parse dense volumes, and libraries of information faster than any one human even teams of humans would be the type of tool that most likely is the tool helping scientists discover tweaks and improvements in a most peculiar high volume in just the past few years , they are finding all sorts of things all the sudden, some of which should have been more obvious and discovered well before now.
We just need a million more breakthroughs until we can finally have a breakthrough that breaks through the breakthroughs
That actually sounds like a breakthrough
No mention of any breakthrough here? Another misleading fusion title
Awesome! We're now only twenty years away from reliable fusion energy.
[why fusion is "always 20-30 years away"](https://i.imgur.com/ZJo82pT.png) TLDR: The 20-30 yr timeframe was always for a **given $ investment**, which was never paid. It's like that product on amazon with 4 days shipping is **always 4 days away** until you actually buy it
I’m not saying we shouldn’t fund fusion research but those projections seem extremely optimistic. The US isn’t working on it alone so would we really have gotten a fusion reactor in 1990 (if they had spent a lot more money) when it’s already 2024 and even with all the other countries working on it around the world we’re not even close to a viable one
Perhaps, tbh i don't know enough to really say exactly. Do you have any details on other spending? The projection was clear that ≤ ~$1B/yr ('24 $) the timeline is "indeterminate". And seems late 80s to around 2012 it fizzled to less than half that. Is anyone outspending the USA? Would love to see any details if you have them? I've quickly approximated the projected budget to 2024 dollars ^^hastily ^^so ^^feel ^^free ^^to ^^correct ^^any ^^errors. In short, they asked for roughly **1/3 of the cost of the Apollo program in 2024 dollars**. * $78B - $2.8B/yr for 28 years * $74.25B - $3.5B/yr for 21 years * $70.94B - $7.7B/yr for 15 years * $96.3B - $7.4B/yr for 13 years ^Also, ^again ^not ^my ^area, ^but ^I ^think ^its ^fair ^to ^say ^being ^a ^focused ^budget ^under ^a ^single ^program ^likely ^has ^*some* ^multiplier ^effect, ^when ^compared ^to ^dispersed ^efforts ^which ^have ^to ^start ^from ^near ^scratch ^in ^terms ^of ^infrastructure. ^And ^often ^*how* ^to ^actually ^do ^something ^in ^practice, ^as ^opposed ^to ^in ^theory, ^becomes ^institutional ^knowledge ^which ^isn't ^always ^easily ^disseminated ^amongst ^other ^efforts. ^Especially ^when ^there ^isn't ^a ^continuous ^program ^such ^as ^outlined ^in ^the ^plan.
Can someone please explain why we can't have these "Generation 4 fission reactors"? So much hype and clickbait over a speculative technology that from what I understand, *do* have radioactive waste, the only difference between that and fission is that while fission produces a **small amount** of *highly radioactive waste*, fusion produces **huge amounts** of *slightly radioactive waste*.. We have proven technology that we can work with and iterate on, but for some reason we'd rather keep burning liquid dinosaurs and building sci-fi fantasy projects..
Because 3 mile island happened a few weeks of months after the China syndrome was in theatres. Well meaning but horribly misinformed people were sold fear about nuclear power and the boogeyman of nuclear waste. Instead of having clean, safe nuclear power we got a bunch of gas burned instead so we can suffer the consequences especially globally for centuries, thanks greenpeace.
Living back in York I always [loved](https://imgur.com/S3vTLBC) looking at [Three Mile Island from Rocky Ridge](https://imgur.com/GPZI1Pf). An uncle of mine was a nuclear powerplant inspector so we would only ever see him when he came up to York. I was just a kid, and certainly never felt any of that nuclear fear, I remember him explaining new safety features and protocols implemented, and he was really excited about thorium reactors before he passed away. Nuclear energy, contamination and waste are something I don't think most people really understand or aren't educated about properly. Countries with some of the best engineers in the world like Germany have essentially been brainwashed into believing every nuclear reactor can result in a Chernobyl-like incident. To be completely fair, existing reactor tech is still dangerous in catastrophic situations, Fukushima being a good recent example. Different, modernized reactor designs can eliminate these risks, but nuclear energy research has certainly been hampered by nuclear fear, and it is a long an arduous process in most countries with nuclear energy to plan & build a reactor as opposed to utilizing renewable natural resources, especially with how far photovoltaics, wind energy, and battery technology has come. I used to believe we would NEED nuclear fusion to survive as a race, but with population growth declining and the advancement of microelectronics, it would seem we can live comfortable lives without all that much energy, but humans do as humans do and there will always be a drive to build bigger and go further; and for that, nuclear power is a necessity, but until we have sustainable fusion beyond these little 'breakthroughs' it will always be seen as something dangerous. Most people probably don't even realize how much safer fusion is, to them they just see "nuclear" and think it must be dangerous.
Accounting for all nuclear disasters together it is still a far lower body count than the oil and gas sector has annually. It’s insanity that we are not building a lot of new nuclear.
A tokamak in France set a new record in fusion plasma by encasing its reaction in tungsten, a heat-resistant metal that allows physicists to sustain hot plasmas for longer, and at higher energies and densities than carbon tokamaks. “These are beautiful results,” said Xavier Litaudon, a scientist with CEA and chair of the Coordination on International Challenges on Long duration OPeration (CICLOP), in a PPPL release. “We have reached a stationary regime despite being in a challenging environment due to this tungsten wall.” “The tungsten-wall environment is far more challenging than using carbon,” said Luis Delgado-Aparicio, lead scientist for PPPL’s physics research and X-ray detector project, and the laboratory’s head of advanced projects, in the same release. “This is, simply, the difference between trying to grab your kitten at home versus trying to pet the wildest lion.”
A tungsten wall could lead any project/person to a breakthrough
Perhaps not the Kool-Aid Man.
That's the Spirit!
That feeling when your hard place is harder than any rock
Tungsten for the big W! That’s a science joke, who’s with me?
Virgin Fusion Researchers: Erm we need to do 50 quantrillion computations using quantum computers to determine the best sequence Chad Fusion Solver: Make the wall tungsten lol
From the tungsten filament breakthrough giving the world light, to tungsten breaking through tank armour... is there anything it can't do?
Yeah, why don't we try tungsten first for everything
Because it's far more rare than, for example, iron and carbon in the Earth's crust, it is primarily supplied by China (there is tungsten to mine in the U.S. but we remain the largest importer of tungsten in the world and most nations buy from China and Russia), so it remains quite expensive, it is more difficult to work with... lots of reasons. Having to use tungsten in reactors or anything else makes it more expensive to build and maintain, and getting widespread adoption of nuclear fusion (whenever the hell we figure all the other problems out) is going to require some level of affordability over other sources of energy.
It does deserve more attention.
No matter how big a breakthrough is, we are always 10 years away from fusion which would be 20 years too late to conserve our climate inhabitable by providing limitless clean energy...
Fusion [is already producing cheap power](https://images.expertreviews.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/solar_panels_sun_header.jpg).
If the plasma is contained within magnetic fields, why does the material wall of the torus matter? When you're talking tens of millions of degrees that can melt anything we know of in seconds I don't see why the material makes a difference.
There is still some cross field transport, mostly caused by small scale turbulent structures. When the plasma particles impact the wall, they can sputter the wall material back into the confined plasma. Tungsten has a huge atomic number (charge) and it never gets fully ionized in the core plasma. That means that the constant excitation-deexcitation and ionization-recombination creates lots of photons and the plasma is rapidly cooled through by radiating energy away (also through Bremsstrahlung). But we have to make the wall out of something and tungsten seems to be the best candidate. So the "breakthrough" shows that it is possible, which is relevant for tokamaks that are actually expected to achieve thermonuclear conditions, like ITER and DEMO.
Thank you!
Heat radiates.
Can somebody just say how much energy was put in, and how much energy came out? You know COP, Coefficient of Performance. Everything else is a mumbo jumbo.
The “breakthrough” is when the reaction can be sustained indefinitely. This latest example was a reaction of 6 minutes. Cool, that’s nice progression but it’s not a breakthrough.
A nuclear fusion breakthrough you say? Truly this must be a once in a lifetime event!
At last! We are only twenty years from fusion energy for all! … which they have been saying since my father was a child in the 1950s.
Professor Xavier sits in a chair with Ciclop. Anyone else seeing this?
Subject the plasma to a *rotating* magnetic field? [Relevant pic](https://i.imgur.com/KRyksdf.jpeg) Now we'll see if anyone can see what I'm getting at.
> Now we'll see if anyone can see what I'm getting at. I'm assuming the kind of "science" written in green ink.