I actually like the recirculation simulation. Although all kinds of cyclical engines have recirculation of power as part of their function, in fusion there is an important difference from what people are used to. In an internal combustion engine, the crankshaft and flywheel in a car recirculate power from the power stroke to the compression stroke, doing the same thing as the recirculated energy does in this simulation. But in fusion, this 'crankshaft' is very lossy. I suspect if you have a model in your head of how an internal combustion engine works, crankshaft losses are not a big thing. Teaching people that when they model fusion reactors that they need to include this because it's important, I think would help people develop better physical intuition. The 'lossy crankshaft' model was an important part of why I opted for partial direct conversion with the design I built back in the '90s. Set both eff sliders high to see how much this helps.
That said, one big missing thing (other than the economic stuff, mentioned by others) which would add a lot to this simulation would be more about 'where does Q come from?'. Obviously this could be too complicated for a little sim, but perhaps a few simple things could be added like showing how increasing the volume/surface ratio for tokomaks/sphereomaks can help, or how getting rid of certain types of instabilities can improve say mirror or pinch designs. This might help people to understand why certain design decisions (like building ITER so big) were made.
A good addition would be the sales price per MWh, price for the power plant, and the loan interest rate.
Because IMO all that is extremely critical. I fully support the pursuit of fusion as a scientific endeavor, but given that we're probably at least 30 years away from having anything approaching commercial deployment (assuming ITER is built, works, is followed promptly by DEMO, it works, and is followed promptly by people building more reactors. That's a heck of an assumption), it's not at all a given that it'll ever make a profit. That's a lot of time to build a lot of very cheap renewables.
And there's also opportunity costs. I see a lot of hopes put on fusion and don't really understand this chasing of the perfect solution. Even best case, it's not happening in decades, and it'll take decades more to build fusion as anything more than one off multi-decade-long research projects. That's a lot of time for the world to get worse while waiting for fusion to happen, and we might as well just throw renewables at the problem now instead of waiting.
So opportunity costs would also make for an interesting thing to calculate. Given that fusion will likely not make a major difference climate/pollution-wise for half a century, what else could we build in that time, and how much and what effect would that have?
Side note, all fusion start ups have built upon decades of science research funded in the ITER program, so opposing ITER to fusion start ups is misleading
ITER is definitely the best bet for a workable fusion concept. There are some unsolved issues left, but its nothing compared to the sci-fi solutions most US startups would require.
True, but we've built tokamaks and we're building ITER, which so far has an estimated price of between $45 billion and $65 billion.
Now of course that's a research reactor full of experiments and instrumentation that wouldn't be part of a normal power plant, but given current experience that I think we can expect we won't suddenly knock down the cost to $100M. It's going to be somewhere in the billions. And we have expectations of that DEMO is going to make 750MWe.
We can then plug those estimates into the calculator and basically figure out how cheap and how powerful a fusion reactor has to be for it to make economical sense.
For those interested not only in simplified energy balance of a fusion power plant as shown in Fusion Power Plant Simulator, but in more realistic engineering of heat extraction from a tokamak I recommend the following lecture by Dr. Dennis Whyte from MIT Plasma Science & Fusion Center.
One of the designs uses 3D printed silicon carbide vacuum vessel cooled by a layer of molten lead and a layer of FLiBe (a molten salt made from a mixture of lithium fluoride (LiF) and beryllium fluoride (BeF2)).
The lithium component of FLiBe is used for breeding of the radioactive isotope tritium, which will be extracted from the salt and used for making the deuterium-tritium fuel of the tokamak.
My favorite video that walks through fusion energy design/sizing/cost equations is also a lecture by Dennis Whyte: https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4?si=U8xaAAvjdnt6yqr8 It’s a really engaging lecture - I’m normally pretty put off by 100-minute lectures on YouTube but this one was both very easy to follow and perfectly scoped. Can highly recommend it - the learnings from it are timeless fundamentals that really make fusion power design and economics accessible.
The big takeaway is that better magnets reduce reactor size by the 4th power, and energy output and cost by the cubed power. Finding a material for the magnets which doubles their strength would reduce the size of the reactor by 94% and the cost by 88%.
A possible conclusion one could make is that with regular advancements in magnets it’s very possible that the first operational commercial fusion reactors will be relatively low-cost compared to current and planned fusion reactors, and even though they may begin construction after the next generation of super-sized fusion reactors - they might be finished and operational before their “predecessors” with inferior magnets have completed being built.
It would be quite outstanding if MIT Plasma Science & Fusion Center released their core courses on OpenCourseWare. Considering the potential impact of this technology and how much it's needed, humanity doesn't seem to be trying that hard to make it work.
>realistic engineering of heat extraction from a tokamak
This is why I love the idea of Helion so much.
Who knows if it will ever work, but skipping the thermal transport and doing direct current generation from EMF in the reactor seems like it has tremendous potential for simplifying (and eventually downsizing)
Apologies if I've missed something, but isn't this all just a fantasy? None of the current methods for getting fusion power are even close to being practical -- even the theoretical net output experiments require extensive and sensitive measurement setups just to establish whether or not they are positive energy.
We are not in a place where we expect fusion power to be incrementally achieved by the current systems. We need major breakthroughs that are both impossible to predict and may not even exist outside of stars or thermonuclear devices.
The idea that we'll get massive improvements in Qsci, while maintaining the same basic structure as existing fusion systems, is in the end a bit silly. What would we estimate our confidence to be that when someone invents the Fromboculator, that the Fromboculator will even have a heating system or "vacuum vessel" or a plasma system.
In the end, this looks like it's a steam engine simulator more than anything else, but with some fancy words thrown in.
On a serious note: I wonder how practical and safe it would be to build fusion pants close to city centers in order to harvest the excess heat for district heating. Would be a boon in e.g. NYC which already has a large district steam system. You can do cooling too, look up "steam absorption chiller."
> I wonder how practical and safe it would be to build fusion pants close to city centers in order to harvest the excess heat for district heating
The cost/benefit for doing this seems pretty similar between fusion as gas power. We don't usually do this with gas, so I guess it's probably not viable for fusion.
Combined heat and electricity production is uncommon in the US, but much more so in Europe. Especially in the Baltics, Scandinavia and the Netherlands, non-CHP generation is rare. Related: higher energy cost, and elaborate local heat distribution networks.
A fission power plant simulator lets you have fun playing through a meltdown disaster scenario. A fusion power plant simulator is "worse" because it takes away the "fun" of meltdowns. The humor is in reacting to the simulator as if it were a game (some are, but this one isn't).
Eh, a core-containment failure (in any magnetically-contained system) would involve superheated hydrogen getting friendly with oxygen. That, in turn, would give neutron-impregnated barrier materials a free ride on propellant. It's not strictly a melt down. But it's in the same practical category of failure.
Ths is a massive misunderstanding of the technology. First of all, the amount of hydrogen in the reactor is tiny. The magnetic confinement severely limits the density of the plasma. The inner containment vessel is a ultra high vacuum chamber. The chemical energy that would be released by a reaction between the hydrogen in the reactor amd oxygen from the air would be less than what is released by popping a hydrogen filled balloon with a lighter.
The truly concerning failure modes would be related to release of radiation or activated materials. But that would require damaging the reactor in ways that the reactor is incapable of imparting on itself.
> chemical energy that would be released by a reaction between the hydrogen in the reactor amd oxygen from the air would be less than what is released by popping a hydrogen filled balloon with a lighter
Thanks for the correction. If you're breeding lithium in the walls, might that be an incendiary concern?
There seems to be a number of different prototypes of blankets, but the average operating temperature seems to be 300-700C. Adding oxygen to some of these designs while that hot may cause metal burning. This said, many of them are ceramic designs and would likely resist combustion.
With all that said, it seems to be way less 'dangerous' material than would be in your average nuclear reactor, making it more of an industrial accident versus a planet contaminating mess.
The breeding blanket is entirely contained inside a vacuum vessel, so there isn't any oxygen to react with. Also, the are many blanket designs, but the lithium is never present in its elemental form (precisely because it would be very reactive), but in a stable chemical bond with some neutron multiplier (like lithium-lead alloys or beryllium ceramics). In some design the lithium is even immersed in the coolant itself, which is high pressure helium, so it's not going to ignite in any reasonable way.
> breeding blanket is entirely contained inside a vacuum vessel, so there isn't any oxygen to react with
When the vessel works. If the vessel breaches, that lithium could ignite. Note a showstopper. But I suppose a risk to be thought about by the engineers (probably not by policymakers).
There's only a few grams of hydrogen in the reactor's plasma, it's reaction with oxygen wouldn't be much more exciting than just losing containment. There are engineering challenges that have to be addressed but no worse than the 6 MW research reactor I used to walk by every day to my college classes in the middle of a dense city.
The proliferation risk of someone using the neutron flux to produce an atomic or dirty bomb are real but that exists no matter where it is.
Radiologically? Pretty much nothing. The regular industrial safety concerns will matter more.
The plant will have some tritium, and the material in reactor walls will get activated by the neutron flux. Some of the activated materials can disperse in case of a catastrophic explosion (e.g. a couple of large airplanes being flown the reactor building).
But the material of the walls is not volatile, so it'll stay on the site. And tritium is very volatile, so it'll quickly disperse to safe levels. You'll be able to detect them with sensitive equipment, but it won't be dangerous.
For pulsed power, with an optimistic beta of 1, the magnetic field energy is going to be comparable to the heat energy. The house load here seems tied to a static superconducting coil, not a pulsed field.
Something I've been asking my AIs to do when modelling with them is to ask for the algebra for the model so I may recreate it by hand. Including such a PDF with these links would be helpful because it succintly presents the logic in a denser form than an explainer article.
Those who like playing with this sort of thing might like to play with this superconductor-coil-as-a-battery exploration where electricity just goes round as storage![1]
It's a nice video, but a striking thing about it is that it ends with "I just want my infinite free energy". Where on earth is that supposed to come from?
Fusion is ultimately a fancy way to boil water. The tokamak (or stellarator) heats a given amount of water per second, which after losses to power the plant itself and the losses in the steam turbine, makes some finite amount of MWh to output to the grid. This contraption is as the video says very non-trivial to design and build and so it costs some very non-zero amount of money, and lasts a finite time (walls are damaged)
Big $$$ / finite_amount_of_mwh / life_expectancy = min_cost_per_mwh, if we want to pay this thing off. Very possibly more than existing methods.
I'm extremely on the side of doing scientific research, but I'm baffled by constantly bumping into people who suggest somehow fusion is going to mean infinite free power, or anything even close to that.
So far the tech seems headed towards just being an alternate form of a fission plant -- complex, expensive, slow to build, possibly won't ever make a profit. Likely worse, since fission is a known, mature tech.
IIRC the one of the first times a group put timelines to a fusion reactor they had time vs funding level of something like 20 years/50 years/never, and the funding level that actually materialised was below the 'never' amount and yet it started the 'always 20 years away' joke. Now I think the timeline was probably still optimistic but fusion is also obviously a very expensive thing to develop and while it's gotten a lot of funding it's still at the 'in the background' level.
That said, one big missing thing (other than the economic stuff, mentioned by others) which would add a lot to this simulation would be more about 'where does Q come from?'. Obviously this could be too complicated for a little sim, but perhaps a few simple things could be added like showing how increasing the volume/surface ratio for tokomaks/sphereomaks can help, or how getting rid of certain types of instabilities can improve say mirror or pinch designs. This might help people to understand why certain design decisions (like building ITER so big) were made.
Because IMO all that is extremely critical. I fully support the pursuit of fusion as a scientific endeavor, but given that we're probably at least 30 years away from having anything approaching commercial deployment (assuming ITER is built, works, is followed promptly by DEMO, it works, and is followed promptly by people building more reactors. That's a heck of an assumption), it's not at all a given that it'll ever make a profit. That's a lot of time to build a lot of very cheap renewables.
And there's also opportunity costs. I see a lot of hopes put on fusion and don't really understand this chasing of the perfect solution. Even best case, it's not happening in decades, and it'll take decades more to build fusion as anything more than one off multi-decade-long research projects. That's a lot of time for the world to get worse while waiting for fusion to happen, and we might as well just throw renewables at the problem now instead of waiting.
So opportunity costs would also make for an interesting thing to calculate. Given that fusion will likely not make a major difference climate/pollution-wise for half a century, what else could we build in that time, and how much and what effect would that have?
https://www.cfs.energy
Now of course that's a research reactor full of experiments and instrumentation that wouldn't be part of a normal power plant, but given current experience that I think we can expect we won't suddenly knock down the cost to $100M. It's going to be somewhere in the billions. And we have expectations of that DEMO is going to make 750MWe.
We can then plug those estimates into the calculator and basically figure out how cheap and how powerful a fusion reactor has to be for it to make economical sense.
Fusion Reactor First Wall Cooling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHJyoqDO0zw
One of the designs uses 3D printed silicon carbide vacuum vessel cooled by a layer of molten lead and a layer of FLiBe (a molten salt made from a mixture of lithium fluoride (LiF) and beryllium fluoride (BeF2)).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLiBe
The lithium component of FLiBe is used for breeding of the radioactive isotope tritium, which will be extracted from the salt and used for making the deuterium-tritium fuel of the tokamak.
The big takeaway is that better magnets reduce reactor size by the 4th power, and energy output and cost by the cubed power. Finding a material for the magnets which doubles their strength would reduce the size of the reactor by 94% and the cost by 88%.
A possible conclusion one could make is that with regular advancements in magnets it’s very possible that the first operational commercial fusion reactors will be relatively low-cost compared to current and planned fusion reactors, and even though they may begin construction after the next generation of super-sized fusion reactors - they might be finished and operational before their “predecessors” with inferior magnets have completed being built.
will AI help us get through blockers like this?
I'm out of the prediction business but my guess is: absolutely, but iff we don't collapse in some way first.
Wild to be alive as the centuries-long horse race of industrialization between doom, or the stars, approaches its finish line.
Really gives a perspective on the range of temperatures handled.
This is why I love the idea of Helion so much.
Who knows if it will ever work, but skipping the thermal transport and doing direct current generation from EMF in the reactor seems like it has tremendous potential for simplifying (and eventually downsizing)
We are not in a place where we expect fusion power to be incrementally achieved by the current systems. We need major breakthroughs that are both impossible to predict and may not even exist outside of stars or thermonuclear devices.
The idea that we'll get massive improvements in Qsci, while maintaining the same basic structure as existing fusion systems, is in the end a bit silly. What would we estimate our confidence to be that when someone invents the Fromboculator, that the Fromboculator will even have a heating system or "vacuum vessel" or a plasma system.
In the end, this looks like it's a steam engine simulator more than anything else, but with some fancy words thrown in.
On a serious note: I wonder how practical and safe it would be to build fusion pants close to city centers in order to harvest the excess heat for district heating. Would be a boon in e.g. NYC which already has a large district steam system. You can do cooling too, look up "steam absorption chiller."
E.g. Temelín Nuclear Power Plant, Paks Nuclear Power Plant And many more
The cost/benefit for doing this seems pretty similar between fusion as gas power. We don't usually do this with gas, so I guess it's probably not viable for fusion.
A fission power plant simulator lets you have fun playing through a meltdown disaster scenario. A fusion power plant simulator is "worse" because it takes away the "fun" of meltdowns. The humor is in reacting to the simulator as if it were a game (some are, but this one isn't).
Eh, a core-containment failure (in any magnetically-contained system) would involve superheated hydrogen getting friendly with oxygen. That, in turn, would give neutron-impregnated barrier materials a free ride on propellant. It's not strictly a melt down. But it's in the same practical category of failure.
The truly concerning failure modes would be related to release of radiation or activated materials. But that would require damaging the reactor in ways that the reactor is incapable of imparting on itself.
Overall, the technology is remarkably safe.
Thanks for the correction. If you're breeding lithium in the walls, might that be an incendiary concern?
With all that said, it seems to be way less 'dangerous' material than would be in your average nuclear reactor, making it more of an industrial accident versus a planet contaminating mess.
When the vessel works. If the vessel breaches, that lithium could ignite. Note a showstopper. But I suppose a risk to be thought about by the engineers (probably not by policymakers).
The proliferation risk of someone using the neutron flux to produce an atomic or dirty bomb are real but that exists no matter where it is.
I'd imagine this is, like with fission plants, deeply dependent on the specific design.
The plant will have some tritium, and the material in reactor walls will get activated by the neutron flux. Some of the activated materials can disperse in case of a catastrophic explosion (e.g. a couple of large airplanes being flown the reactor building).
But the material of the walls is not volatile, so it'll stay on the site. And tritium is very volatile, so it'll quickly disperse to safe levels. You'll be able to detect them with sensitive equipment, but it won't be dangerous.
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/three-mile-island-7mu
https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pop/article/29/6/062103/2847827/Pro...
It’s open access and you can download the PDF directly from there.
If I enable advanced mode, the "exiting" in Heating Power (exiting) gets overlapped with corresponding numbers
Display menu doesn't allow switching to Energy mode
[1] https://stateofutopia.com/experiments/wheeeeeloop/wheeeeeloo...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAJN1CrJsVE
(fusion is -always- just a decade away, perpetually, lol)
Fusion is ultimately a fancy way to boil water. The tokamak (or stellarator) heats a given amount of water per second, which after losses to power the plant itself and the losses in the steam turbine, makes some finite amount of MWh to output to the grid. This contraption is as the video says very non-trivial to design and build and so it costs some very non-zero amount of money, and lasts a finite time (walls are damaged)
Big $$$ / finite_amount_of_mwh / life_expectancy = min_cost_per_mwh, if we want to pay this thing off. Very possibly more than existing methods.
I'm extremely on the side of doing scientific research, but I'm baffled by constantly bumping into people who suggest somehow fusion is going to mean infinite free power, or anything even close to that.
So far the tech seems headed towards just being an alternate form of a fission plant -- complex, expensive, slow to build, possibly won't ever make a profit. Likely worse, since fission is a known, mature tech.
Wasn't it perpetually 20 to 50 years away? I'm not an expert on the space. But new computational methods and magnets seem to be genuine steps forward.
it consumes itself or makes molecules that are destructive to the walls or insanely toxic so can never risk leaks
whatever solution they come up with I suspect it will require a lot of constant maintenance on the first generation