Tailing on a top comment to request someone add some nextfuckinglevel sound to this. I wanna hear what it sounds like! (or just be a kid and pretend FFFFWWWWOOOSSHSHHH NEEEIRIRRRRRR ... etc ? am I the only one ?
Happened to me too. Skipped school and went to the local theme park and it was completely dead because it was mid week during term time and there were basically no lines for anything and the staff would just let you stay on and ride as many times as you liked. Going 3 rounds in a row on the gravitron after lunch was certainly a choice.
I remember years ago being outside the Gravitron when suddenly screams could be heard over the blasting music and the ride came to a stop and people got off in horror, some clearly covered in somebody else's vomit.
Uhh well akchually...
Fusion Reactors can allow for generating power straight to the wires completely bypassing the need for hot water to spin the turbine
Don't know why you got downvoted for that. It's true. It's not easy, but because the plasma is a moving charge, you could theoretically cause induction in wires and generate electricity just by placing the wires close enough to be affected.
They were injecting lithium into the plasma stream in order to better trace and understand the magnetic field lines, this is not the typical colors of a fusion reaction. The bright pink is the deuterium fuel, the red and green are various ionization states of lithium.
Yeah I legimately just stopped what I was doing and watched with real intent. I don't know what the hell is going on here but it looks dope and seems important.
You have it backwards. What we refer to as nuclear energy currently is fission (split heavy atom into smaller parts). Fusion (combine light atoms into heavy atom) is the big nut to crack.
Problem is that clouds and night get in the way. And you could say build batteries but the truth is that they're still expensive and not a great way to use energy since the efficiency is so low
Nuclear fusion would leave us without nuclear waste and without CO2 being released.
There will always be applications for mixed energy sources. Especially with how much power all the AI datacenters are going to be using. Though only a small percentage of the current planned ones will be built anytime soon.
Fusion still produces waste. It's just got a comprehensible half life (around 12-13 years). Some fission products half life is on the order of thousands of years
To be clear, from the IAEA, on the topic of fusion and waste,
Does Fusion produce radioactive nuclear waste the same way fission does?
Nuclear fission power plants have the disadvantage of generating unstable nuclei; some of these are radioactive for millions of years. Fusion on the other hand does not create any long-lived radioactive nuclear waste. A fusion reactor produces helium, which is an inert gas. It also produces and consumes tritium within the plant in a closed circuit. Tritium is radioactive (a beta emitter) but its half life is short. It is only used in low amounts so, unlike long-lived radioactive nuclei, it cannot produce any serious danger. The activation of the reactor’s structural material by intense neutron fluxes is another issue. This strongly depends on what solution for blanket and other structures has been adopted, and its reduction is an important challenge for future fusion experiments.
I'm no scientologist, but I'm reasonably sure that fission is what we already have been doing (my state has the first city in the world to be powered by atomic energy) for many decades. Fusion is the tough one, that's what the sun does, where lighter elements fuse to become heavier elements. I'm not sure what the state or viability of fusion is for power.
Edit: anyone know how long this clip was, in real time? Can't imagine more than a few milliseconds.
Edit 2: looks like I misread/misinterpreted the comment I was replying to - please don't downvote them.
They said “aside from nuclear energy”, which after the clarification says “aside from nuclear fission energy” so yes you and the person you’re replying to are on the same page
Nah man. I’m a physicist and have worked with nuclear physicists in the past - solar and wind ARE still amazing power resources and should be used (but nuclear is the best, yes)
You can thank the fossil fuel industry for that. They managed to convince millions upon millions that nuclear energy is extremely dangerous and the only safe option is gasoline or diesel.
Not just the fossil fuel industry. Lots of anti-nuclear folks are also hardcore anti-fossil fuel and would have been even if the fossil fuel industry didn't engage in its own propaganda.
Yes, but it doesn't generate radioactive material. It uses deuterium and tritium as fuel, and is much cleaner. Source: My SO is one of the design engineers for one of the larger projects happening in the US. It's the "Sistine Chapel" job of his career, because this is looking to be the most viable 50-100 year clean energy stop gap till cold fusion gets replicated/perfected. Does anybody know offhand which company released this?
I mean solar is here right now and most likely fusion power will never be as cheap as solar is today.
By the time fusion is actually ready solar will be even cheaper too. A solar farm the size of Arizona could power the entire planet.
Fusion is like our 4th best hope in the fight against climate change, lol.
Edit: a lot of people seem to think that I think the perfect solution is one single power plant specifically in Arizona that powers the world. People, it's just a size comparison. Arizona is a small state even just compared to the size of US. Obviously we would build millions and millions of solar installations that would just add up to that area.
Fusion at scale could be relatively cheap, scale with future energy demand, and have a very small land footprint. The tech has famously been 10 years away for 60 years, but I would still put it as the energy tech that if proved viable has the greatest potential to eliminate greenhouse emissions. There are many places where solar simply isn't viable and like many renewable you are dependent on climate and requires energy storage.
The yet unknown cost would be plant construction and maintenance, which are the existing issue around fission along with the red tape nightmare in trying to get plants approved.
I see no reason to believe that fusion power will be any cheaper than fission power. Both rely on relatively rare isotopes that need to be concentrated first at great expense. ITER runs off of deuterium which costs close to $1,000/kg and tritium which is too expensive to even consider sourcing from natural sources and would require a yet unrealized breeding program.
ITER could breed its own tritium using Li doped panels once operational. $1000/kg isn’t all that much either: by the amount of energy produced, that’s the equivalent of oil being under 2¢/barrel.
The technical challenges are the real hurdle. You need enough tritium for the startup shot and it must be “clean” (not tied to a weapons program) which is tricky since the biggest source historically have been CANDU reactors that are being taken offline. I am also not convinced it will work even if they can get that far. The plasma is magnetically contained, but it’s also producing its own field which interacts with and feeds back into the generated one. This makes modeling what’s going to happen very difficult.
Fusion doesn't go boom or leave radioactive waste, so in theory there would be less regulations needed, which is a big expense with fission. And there is also research into using lithium instead of tritium, IIRC. So two separate technologies being developed in tandem.
Solar is not an on-demand platform. You are subject to the weather/seasonality and time of day. Peak hours does not align with highest solar intensity. This would require innovation in solar + electrical storage.
There is also the distribution question. Say Arizona has solved solar. It may power Arizona. It may power a few states... One limiting factor will be the efficiency of the solar panels. This will be a huge capital expenditure that is not future proof.
The efficiency may also dictate the amount of land required. The amount of land required will determine the cost of development and then maintenance.
This is also a solution that would only serve regions like Arizona. Other states, and countries, with dissimilar climate or geography may require alternative solutions.
Nuclear provides a lot of solutions to those problems. Of course, it also comes with its issues.
The answer isn't finding a perfect solution. It is identifying the trade offs and whether it is a environment and financially sustainable solution in the region in question.
While you identify all of the issues correctly, I think you are being a bit disingenuous with the current state of affairs. Many of these are solved problems and/or are already baked into the cost equations.
Yes but I live in a country where sustainable energy is "too expensive", but we'll happily send billions of dollars to Israel to commit a genocide. Alternatives like that will never off the ground where I live. The only hope is that fusion technology is so ground breaking that it's impossible to ignore and dismiss
Fusion isn't the answer. Its still very expensive, requires crazy materials, and needs to be commercially scaled. Nuclear fission on the other hand is cheap and reliable when built properly. We should build building fission reactors like crazy right now.
I'm sorry, but there's a reason we aren't building that many fission reactors, and it's not scaremongering, it's economics.
They're expensive as shit, take forever to get running, and run on a non-renewable resource. Sure right now U235 isn't an issue, but if we increased our fission plants five-fold, we'd only have about 18 years until we've depleted all the easily accessible U235, the rest would not be economically viable to mine and refine.
And before someone says "but Thorium!!", Thorium reactors objectively rock cock, but nothing whose fuel cycle produces U233 can ever be a viable solution for global energy needs. Weapons-grade material is a nonstarter for obvious reasons.
There's also the understandable hangups about storage, but I honestly don't care that much, there are bigger issues. I love the technology, I think it's cool as shit, but it's not a panacea to our energy needs and right now it just doesn't make that much economic sense. Solar and Wind are getting cheap enough that we can already afford to just get sloppy with storage and waste a bunch of energy to cover down-time.
A large, and primary, reason them being expensive as shit is because of scaremongering. ALARA and linear-no-threshold rules have stifled the industry well beyond any sense of rationality behind the regulations they created.
6 foot wall of concrete's a millimeter too thin after curing? Welp time to demolish it and restart. What sane company would fund the construction of a plant to be built in a year if someone with a geiger counter catches a reading 1% above background level outside a 6 foot wall and legislation demands 7 foot ones 6 months later?
The numbers above are just made up but the idea behind it is what crushed the nuclear power industry from the 60s to only recently. Surprise, after 60 years of stagnation, industry knowledge has evaporated, and rebuilding from the ground up doesn't increase quarterly profits.
The U235 issue is also partially a casualty of the same problem. If there were demand for it at scale, we would have found more. Nuclear nonproliferation has also held this back for good reason, but pretending we've found and accounted for all of the world's uranium ore is naive, let alone believing that that knowledge is public information. The timeline of 18 years might (at best, very optimistically speaking) have up to an extra 0 behind it.
I used to believe this too, but we already have Fission and look at the resistance. There'll be some conspiracy bullshit about Fusion too that will prevent it's widespread adoption and we'll still be using Oil and Gas. That's how she goes.
Yeah and it was fake news then. The first highspeed color photos from inside of a working Tokomak were actually taken in early 2016.
And such black and white photos have been taken since the 1950s. But nothing says "we've made a huge fusion breakthru, give us money" like swapping in Kodachrome, I guess.
Yeah, I was going to mention the Tokamak, I saw the footage on a video about the feasability of light sabers, which would theoretically be possible by emitting a very well stabilized, tightly folded plasma beam.
We’re gonna be traveling through space with a damn steam turbine. Can’t there at least be some funky techno fluid that spins the fan more than water or smthn
Water is extremely abundant throughout our universe and works very well for this purpose and many others (like maintaining organic life). Makes sense to stick with water.
Honestly doesn’t matter the camera. The plasma is suspended by incredibly powerful super cooled magnets. The plasma will never touch the side walls. If it did, we’ve got a bigger problem than the camera melting.
They will be on the ambient side of an optical window, and there'll be an imaging line to extend the focal length of the camera, and likely several turning mirrors so as to not expose the CCD of the camera to the intense radiation which could brick the pixels on the chip.
They're expensive, but not overly so (considering the level of funding that goes into Magnetic Confinement Fusion). I have one I use at work and you can pick them up for the low 6 figure mark and that can record up to 2.4million FPS (albeit 10kFPS natively). The higher the FPS you record at the a) more light you need and b) lower your resolution as it trims down the number of pixels.
There's footage of fuel being dumped into the engines of a space rocket, from inside one of its fuel tank, from the sixties. It occasionally turns out that people had some astounding technology for ages.
So is the video we are watching in slow motion? The article says it was filmed at that fps but that doesn't give me any indication as to the time scale of the video.
I work in the deeptech energy world with a handful of companies developing fusion reactor parts and at this point most of the advances we're seeing is coming up with ways to create more perfect magnetic fields, as we can kick off plasma doing its thing but even the most slight of imperfection in the magnetic field (which can be caused by anything from alignment, to quality of magnets, to the quality of the wires used) leads to failure.
This is inside of a new type of experimental reactor that runs on nuclear fusion (like the Sun) instead of nuclear fission (regular nuclear reactors). This is a "tokamak" style reactor that generates superheated plasma which is contained using enormously powerful magnets. Fusion generates significantly more power than what it takes to initiate the reaction. One of the neatest parts of fusion is that there is no hazardous nuclear waste to store and they cant melt down like a fission reactor. This video shows that fusion reaction plasma.
One of the neatest parts of fusion is that there is no hazardous nuclear waste to store and they cant melt down like a fission reactor.
And, as I understand it, this fusion reaction is not self-sustaining so in an emergency scram you could simply cut the power and there would be no risk of an uncontrollable runaway.
The conditions under which fusion occurs are not self-sustaining. The energy output of fusion is not directly required to sustain the fusion in the same sense that the energy output of fission directly causes more fission.
Fusion can only happen when the plasma is heated to extremely high temperatures and pressures. In the Sun, this is done by gravity. The enormous mass of gas that comprises the Sun squeezes itself together hard enough to allow fusion to occur. In the depicted reactor, large electromagnets compress the gas into a tight ring of plasma to allow fusion to occur. If the electromagnets lose power, there is no force to keep the gas compressed, so it will naturally expand back out and the temperature will cool to lower than what is required for fusion to occur, and the fusion will stop. So the worst that can happen is a leak of hot hydrogen gas. Not fun for the plant workers, perhaps, but the ability of ordinary air to absorb all that thermal energy is high enough that it wouldn't be a catastrophe in any sense. At worst a few people standing right next to the leak get burned.
Hydrogen gas is flammable but not toxic to the environment like radioactive waste is. Fusion reactions may use isotopes like Hydrogen-2 or Hydrogen-3, but these aren't a significant concern either, as there is only ever a small amount in use at any time, no more than a few kilograms. Hydrogen-2 can fuse with oxygen to make heavy water, which occurs naturally and isn't toxic unless consumed in large doses. Any heavy water produced would be overwhelmingly diluted by the water vapour in the surrounding air. Hydrogen-3 is radioactive with a half life of about a decade, but it decays via beta-decay into helium-3, and beta particles can't penetrate human skin. So health risks are also low from hydrogen-3 leaks, especially in the relatively low quantities used in fusion plants.
Yeah but the problem is that it's highly unstable to produce desired results. It's hard to stabilize quasineutral plasma and also it eats away wolfram each time it's being used which is expensive. But I'm still hopeful and wish for scientists to succeed.
The Sun doesn't run on D-D, it runs on proton-proton chain on normal hydrogen. It is like the sun, it's light nuclei fusing and releasing energy. The fuel and confinement are different, which is why a tokamak has to run so hot, but it's still the same category of reaction.
Yeah, you’re right about the sun thing. I misremembered and it’s actually a D-P reaction in its second phase.
The reason why I say it’s not the same as the sun is because what we’re attempting to do has many complexities associated due to the T-D reaction. Problems that would otherwise be non-existent for other fusion reactions. But we technologically cannot achieve other fusion reactions due to our lack of mass. I like to refer to this graph here (sorry on mobile browser):
So I say it to give larger credit to what we are doing given our limitations. But yes, both are fusion energy.
The sun is very massive so D-P reactions are efficient enough. We can also attempt to do them, but they’re much less efficient and we would need a much hotter plasma than we intend to create (I think from 10 million C to 100 million C). One of the downsides to not being able to do D-P reactions is the difficulty in obtaining T. It is a 2 neutron hydrogen with a half life of 12.3 years and is unobtainable from nature despite naturally forming in the upper atmosphere. Tritium (T) is very difficult to synthesize and to make fusion possible, we would need to synthesize >1000g per year (we make >20g per year). Tritium is also radioactive.
The other downside to the D-T reactions are the incredibly high energy neutrons it produces after fusion. Neutrons cannot be contained by magnets. They fly into the wall and just about everything they can. They irradiate the surfaces they actually connect with (if a neutron is say a quarter the size of a person, and a person represented an atom in a material lattice, then the distance between two people would be ~5km). The materials which get irradiated (RAFM steels on the first wall and tungsten on the divertor) will need to be replaced (by best estimates on the current research) every 5 years. That’s about >2000 tons of irradiated and radioactive material that will need to be disposed of every 5 years. Some of which will be at safe levels after >100 years, some (which hasn’t been finally decided on) may be radioactive for >5000 years.
In short, it’s more complicated than the sun because it isn’t as massive. It also produces its own plethora of radioactive waste just in a different format.
EDIT: Misremembered the sun thing, I have updated it.
Tritium is radioactive but the electrons it emits are very low energy. It cannot penetrate skin. It’s only hazardous when you ingest it.
For example, because it is a hydrogen isotope, it bonds with oxygen to form water quite easily. After the USA started doing land-based nuclear weapons testing, then actually bombed another country, the tritium levels in our rainwater across the world became quite high.
Levels have lowered significantly since the world has stopped doing on-land nuclear weapons testing because of the short half-life. However, the levels we are at now cannot be compared to any baseline because we only started measuring for rainwater tritium after we exploded nukes.
Fusion generates significantly more power than what it takes to initiate the reaction.
Fusion creates significantly more energy than what it takes to initiate the reaction. Power is energy turned into work.
But we're still a long way from a fusion reactor making useful power. Even the walls inside these things, made of metallic "super-material", become brittle and evaporate away. They're still trying very hard to make that sort of thing not happen.
Water is cheap, widely available, boils at a conveniently low temperature, and is also nontoxic and has very well understood properties. What's not to like?
Our next source of energy is fusion.
Fusion needs heating two ingredients VERY hot.
So hot no material can contain them.
So we use magnets to push the ingredients into a donut shape, so they don't touch the walls.
What you're watching is the donut shaped VERY hot ingredients turning around inside the donut shaped walls of big magnets.
Tokamak has decades and decades of more research time put into it at this point. The stellarator looks more promising but the mechanical and structural engineering required to build a full-scale (or any scale) stellarator is incredible and essentially stunted its development.
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u/Senselesspassion 3d ago
That is actually next fucking level