After years of doubts, hopes grow that nuclear fusion is finally for real and could help address

[TexasTowelie]

After years of doubts, hopes grow that nuclear fusion is finally for real and could help address climate change


DEVENS — It’s been compared to everything from a holy grail to fool’s gold: the ultimate solution to clean, readily available energy or an expensive delusion diverting scarce money and brainpower from the urgent needs of rapidly addressing climate change.

For decades, scientists have been trying to harness the energy that powers stars, a complex, atomic-level process known as nuclear fusion, which requires heating a plasma fuel to more than 100 million degrees Celsius and finding a way to contain and sustain it. In theory, fusion could yield inexpensive and unlimited zero-emissions electricity, without producing any significant radioactive waste, as fission does in traditional nuclear power plants.

A range of daunting scientific and engineering hurdles has long made that possibility, at best, a distant promise. But now, after breakthroughs this year at MIT and elsewhere, scientists — and a growing number of deep-pocketed investors — insist that fusion is for real and could start sending power to electricity grids in about a decade.

To prove that, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, an MIT spinoff in Cambridge, is using a whopping $1.8 billion it raised in recent months from investors such as Bill Gates, Google, and a host of private equity firms to build a prototype of a specially designed fusion reactor on a former Superfund site in Devens. A host of excavators, backhoes, and other heavy machinery are clearing land there and laying concrete foundations on 47 acres of newly acquired land.

Read more: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/12/22/science/after-years-doubts-hopes-grow-that-nuclear-fusion-is-finally-real-could-help-address-climate-change/?p1=HP_Feed_ContentQuery

[Faux pas]

1. Kickin'

[bucolic_frolic]

2. Enter the age of unlimited growth until critical resources are quickly depleted

and if it solves the CO2 problem, does it solve the warming problem? I mean unlimited energy is not without consequences. We're going to build and build? Where will the wood come from? Battery metals? And you can't have plastics without some form of cracking. So I doubt this is the do-all, end-all it sounds like on the surface.

[localroger]

3. Great. Here we go again.

1. Fusion as it is being pursued for power generation is not what powers the stars. That is the proton cycle, which converts 4 hydrogen nuclei to 1 helium without producing neutrons. The proton cycle is completely beyond our means, requiring pressures unattainable on Earth by any means, and also being slow, generating about the same power as a warm blooded animal by mass. It only makes the sun so very hot because that energy accumulates and has no way to easily get out of the stellar core. None of this applies to terrestrial power stations.

2. The tech being pursued, D-T fusion, combines 1 deuterium nucleus and 1 tritium nucleus to create 1 helium nucleus and 1 neutron. The neutrons go out into the environment. They are very damaging and it is difficult to shield against them, since they have no electric charge. They have a nasty habit of turning ordinary materials into radioactive isotopes, weakening metals by knocking atoms out of their position in the crystalline lattice, and damaging electronics. Any practical D-T reactor will quickly become highly radioactive scrap much more difficult to deal with than even the remains of a fission reactor. And it will have a short lifetime for similar reasons.

3. When you confront a fusion enthusiast with #2, they invariably feint to "aneutronic reactions" which combine heavier nuclei in reactions that don't create the side neutron. What they don't like to mention is that while we are barely able to make D-T fusion go in an exploitable way, all the aneutronic reactions are 8 to 10 times more difficult to maintain, and most of them aren't really completely aneutronic in practice. (While they create a lot less neutrons than D-T fusion, that's like saying TNT produces a lot less havoc than an atom bomb. You still don't want to be around it when it blows.)

So the bottom line is that no, fusion is not going to come along like the Lone Ranger and save our asses from the situation we've gotten into. This isn't to say it's not worth doing the research, as we learn interesting things by trying to make such a reaction go, but it's foolish and really a lie to pretend it will fix the climate crisis.

[NNadir]

4. I find your knowledge of neutronics to be extremely unimpressive.

I personally don't believe that fusion reactors will be ready for prime time in the lifetime of anyone over the age of 20.

This said, item #2 in your list is just silly. The management of neutrons has been technologically and commercially in practice for more than 3/4 of a century. My son, as an undergraduate, 2 years ago, at Oak Ridge, worked with people doing precisely that, working with and controlling neutrons.

One has to be intellectually and morally a lightweight to believe that there are any radioactive materials on this planet in commercial use that have killed anything like the 18,000 people who die every day (from air pollution) because we don't utilize neutrons more widely.

[localroger]

5. That's too bad.

I will have to tell my father that I didn't learn much hanging out in the lab where he did neutron activation analysis when I was in my teens.

Controlling neutrons makes herding cats look easy. Yes, you can pick materials that aren't made radioactive by them, and construction materials that aren't weakened, but that seriously crimps your architectural possibilities. There simply is no such thing as instrumentation that isn't degraded by them and so all the electronics in the working space of any kind of fusion reactor will have to be regularly replaced, and lots of the old stuff will be radioactive because avoiding materials like aluminum just isn't practical at some points. And operating something like a fusion reactor without sensors to regulate its operation is just not possible.

Shielding is a big problem. Dad had a Californium neutron source and it was in a lead canister that weighed about 5,000 lb and that behind two rows of lead-impregnated cinder block walls for when they opened the access hatch to irradiate stuff. And a Californium source is nothing compared to a fusion reactor. I monitored chunks of aluminum that still made a Geiger counter scream months after being briefly irradiated.

It's true that not many people have been killed by nuclear compared to those who have been killed by other pollutants, but that's only because nuclear has never really been widely deployed. The whole premise of "fusion will save us" is that we deploy it everywhere, quickly, to save us from the other stuff. What do we do when we realize it is stabbing us in the back after all? I remember when fission was supposed to deliver electricity too cheap to meter. Considering Chernobyl, TMI (which was not nearly as benign as it is usually described) and Fukushima, where would we be had nuclear already "saved" us from coal? I am guessing the death toll would be at best comparable. And fusion is not the "clean" solution it is being sold as in any realistic fashion.

Do you remember when hydrogen bombs were being sold to us as "clean" because they were "powered like the sun" and not that dirty fission stuff like the a-bombs? Do you remember when the public was finally informed that far from being clean 80% of the energy of an h-bomb comes from the neutron activated fission of depleted uranium in the bomb's tamper, making them very dirty indeed? Oh you probably don't remember that, because if it wasn't for Howard Morland showing what a bunch of low IQ fools these idiots are protecting our nuclear "secrets" we still wouldn't know.

[Random Boomer]

6. Thank you.

Those pesky practical details matter.

[NNadir]

7. Tell it to someone who might find any such horseshit it believable.

One sees this kind of stuff, and one doesn't really want to believe it's possible.

Certainly the age of anti-vax shouldn't be surprising to anyone who has lived through the age of the anti-nuke, but still it is.

They are precisely equivalent in my view.

I mean really, nuclear has never been deployed? Let me guess, France runs on dreams? Everybody in France is dead from neutrons?

Here's the text what my son and I were discussing this week after he downloaded it: Elements of Slow-Neutron Scattering Basics, Techniques, and Applications

Now if someone who wants to tell me about neutron activation experiments conducted half a century ago before the development of modern ICP/MS that their Dad did, I couldn't care less. My wife's father was a physician. This doesn't mean that when I'm sick I ask her to diagnose and treat my illnesses.

In general, neutrons are not shielded by lead, gamma rays are. Neutrons are generally reflected or absorbed, using isotopes with high neutron capture cross sections.

If one were to open the book just cited, one could learn that. Of course, if one can't do math at the level of understanding how widely and for how long nuclear power has been practiced on this planet, one surely wouldn't be able to handle the math it that text, and it's written fairly simply with cute mathematical appendices, fairly straight forward, but beyond a high school level:

Chapter 7 in this book is entirely devoted to the physics of controlling neutrons, and devices for doing so and are not based on the memory of some kid talking to his Dad in the 1960's.

A diagram relevant to neutron control:



A picture of some sample text in the chapter.




This discussion of one type of neutron collimator, a double aperture collimator is part of a chapter 50 pages long.

It is considerably more sophisticated than some drivel about herding cats.

For the record, I have, in my tenure here, written a fair number of accounts with reference to Californium:

Recovery of Trivalent Lanthanides and Transplutonium Actinides with Resin Supported Diglycomides.

As mentioned in that post, the first mass spec I supervised had a Californium ionization source, this was before the invention of ESI.

It wasn't shielded in a sea of lead.

The nuclear industry is over half a century old, and still we have senile old bastards carrying on about nuclear war.

The last nuclear war was 3/4 of a century ago; the only nuclear war..

It was also a petroleum war. Was it also the last petroleum war?

Which killed more people in Japan? Napalm or plutonium?

How many dumbass anti-nukes have called for banning petroleum? Any?

Which is more dangerous, Fukushima or climate change?

In general the rhetoric of anti-nukes is highly immoral because it kills people, since nuclear power saves lives.

I do get tired of citing this widely read and widely cited paper to address the anti-nuke ignorance that kills people:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

It's really a waste of time to do so; these malignant types are not really educable. Like antivaxxers they elevate their only paranoia over the interests of humanity.

Usually, 3;/4 of a century into the nuclear age, I ask people displaying their highly paranoid selective attention if they have any idea, or if they give a shit about the following comprehensive series of papers published in the prestigious medical journal Lancet, the latest being this one:

Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249). This study is a huge undertaking and the list of authors from around the world is rather long. These studies are always open sourced; and I invite people who want to carry on about Fukushima to open it and search the word "radiation." It appears once. Radon, a side product brought to the surface by fracking while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come, appears however: Household radon, from the decay of natural uranium, which has been cycling through the environment ever since oxygen appeared in the Earth's atmosphere.

Here is what it says about air pollution deaths in the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Survey, if one is too busy to open it oneself because one is too busy carrying on about Fukushima:

The top five risks for attributable deaths for females were high SBP (5·25 million [95% UI 4·49–6·00] deaths, or 20·3% [17·5–22·9] of all female deaths in 2019), dietary risks (3·48 million [2·78–4·37] deaths, or 13·5% [10·8–16·7] of all female deaths in 2019), high FPG (3·09 million [2·40–3·98] deaths, or 11·9% [9·4–15·3] of all female deaths in 2019), air pollution (2·92 million [2·53–3·33] deaths or 11·3% [10·0–12·6] of all female deaths in 2019), and high BMI (2·54 million [1·68–3·56] deaths or 9·8% [6·5–13·7] of all female deaths in 2019). For males, the top five risks differed slightly. In 2019, the leading Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths globally in males was tobacco (smoked, second-hand, and chewing), which accounted for 6·56 million (95% UI 6·02–7·10) deaths (21·4% [20·5–22·3] of all male deaths in 2019), followed by high SBP, which accounted for 5·60 million (4·90–6·29) deaths (18·2% [16·2–20·1] of all male deaths in 2019). The third largest Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths among males in 2019 was dietary risks (4·47 million [3·65–5·45] deaths, or 14·6% [12·0–17·6] of all male deaths in 2019) followed by air pollution (ambient particulate matter and ambient ozone pollution, accounting for 3·75 million [3·31–4·24] deaths (12·2% [11·0–13·4] of all male deaths in 2019), and then high FPG (3·14 million [2·70–4·34] deaths, or 11·1% [8·9–14·1] of all male deaths in 2019).

There have been on this planet, since the 1980's well over 400 nuclear reactors operating, saving lives in spite of appeals to ignorance by people who apparently get their science out of comic books or webpages on Facebook written by other uneducated dweebs.

Thus any asshole whose paranoia about radioactivity and/or neutrons is always invited to demonstrate in this long, highly professional, internationally authored comprehensive document to show where radiation, other than NORM, is a huge risk.

Nuclear energy is not risk free and it doesn't have to be to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else which it is.

I really don't know why I bother. It's a waste of time to have discussions like these; they are as useful as discussing the need for vaccinations with Madison Cawthorn, Gym Jordan or Marjorie Taylor Green.

Theirs is not the only ignorance that kills people.

If one really wants to hand out this kind of toxic nonsense, one should find an uneducated rube with whom to share it.

I'm not interested.

[localroger]

8. Well that is a lot of impressive nomenclature

...most of which doesn't have much to do with anything practical in the sense of reactor shielding. A D-T fusion reactor is essentially a slow neutron bomb. I doubt neutrons do anything fundamentally different today than they did in 1974. Lead does in fact shield neutrons, what it does not do well is moderate them, and it has the advantage of being one of the elements that is not made insanely radioactive by them.

The neutron flux which will be created by a D-T power reactor is unlike anything short of an actual neutron or hydrogen bomb. (And a neutron bomb is basically an H-bomb without the uranium tamper, so it just releases its neutrons into the environment instead of using them to power a depleted U fission explosion.) It is not like the neutron flux from sources like Californium or medical equipment that uses beams aimed at targets. In fact the very first clue that Pons and Fleishmann had not discovered cold fusion was the fact that they were still alive, since their apparatus was unshielded and it was quickly realized that if they had generated even the very modest amount of power they thought they had measured their exposure would have been lethal.

These are very fundamental facts which were known in the 1950's and which have not changed.

As for mortality statistics, you are comparing a very small collection of 400 nuclear reactors with over 62,000 fossil fuel plants. Of those 400 nuclear plants about ten have had major mishaps that functionally destroyed the reactor and at least three of which posed a major threat to an extended environment beyond the plant itself. If fossil plants failed at that rate it would mean over 1500 catastrophic plant-destroying failures. If you are only willing to consider Chernobyl truly dangerous, it would mean 150 of those. Sure, what was done at Chernobyl was stupid and dangerous and shouldn't have been done, but that's because like all machines it was ultimately run by humans, and we have a bad habit of doing stupid and dangerous shit. Building all those fossil plants is one of those stupid and dangerous things. But trying to fix the fossil plant scourge with nuclear would be like trying to fix a burning building with a flamethrower.

[NNadir]

10. Like I said, educated people couldn't care less about such tripe except that...

...ignorance kills people.

I really don't care about whiny excuses about not giving a shit about 7 million air pollution deaths per year, either.

Again, ignorance kills people.

We accumulate, every decade, 4,500 reactor years of nuclear reactor operating experience. Every decade we also accumulate 70,000,000 air pollution deaths. In my experience, none of this factual information ever causes anti-nukes to remove their heads from their asses.

You know what? For 15 years, I've been attending lectures at the Princeton Plasma Physics laboratory every damn winter, except last winter, when the sessions were held on zoom.

The lectures there are conducted by people who work as primary researchers on plasma physics. Now. I don't believe for a New York second that fusion energy will be available in time to address climate change, particularly since it is already too late. This said, I don't need a lesson at a high schooler's level about fusion energy.

OK?

Got it?

No?

I've never met an anti-nuke for whom I could have a shred of intellectual or moral respect. Nearly 100% of them are simpletons.

[localroger]

9. P.S. Even though I disagree with you...

I have not lowered myself to the level of calling you an asshole or an uneduated rube or comparing you to anti-vaxxers or widely despised popular figures. You might want to consider which approach looks more educated and professional.

[NNadir]

11. Again, I couldn't care less.

If you want to call me an asshole, feel free to do so.

OK?

Whether I care for whether or not someone calls me an asshole depends wholly on whether I have a shred of respect for them.

If Madison Cawthorn called me an asshole - he is also someone who kills people by spreading ignorance - I'd take it as a mark of success.

[localroger]

12. Well, I don't need to call you an asshole.

You have done a very thorough job of applying that label to yourself.

If you weren't so blinded by your own own prejudice you might have noticed that I do have some idea what I am talking about. I am not "anti-nuke." If I was I doubt if I would have spent my senior year in high school with my personal computer open so that I could put radioactive sources on the memory chips trying to induce soft errors. (Didn't work. The ISEF judges were quite impressed that I recognized a negative result as being significant.)

Nuclear energy has been a very useful tool for humanity. But then, so were fossil fuels. Our technology would not exist in its current form without both things. The only thing that will really save us in a realistic time scale is to radically reduce our overall energy usage and adapt our usage patterns to the limitations of renewables. That will be difficult and expensive and crimp our style in a lot of ways. People will die because modalities we take for granted will not longer be available. But there is no magic bullet for the situation our ancestors have put us in. I have clear eyes about that and have done the single most important thing any individual human being can do to improve our species' future chance of survival.

I didn't have kids. And you?

[NNadir]

13. Great. Now leave me alone.

I'm really really really really tired of assholes who want to tell me how noble they are because they didn't have kids.

I'm not here to grade 8th grade essays on humanity's future written by people who have no stake in it.

It's easy to see why anti-nukes didn't have kids, because 100% of them feel nothing but contempt for the future.

It's rather surprising that they feel the need to repeat rote drivel, as well. I don't know what they did with their lives, but it's pretty clear that opening science books wasn't on the agenda.

[localroger]

14. Well son, leaving you alone would be an excellent option

...except that as I recall I was here first, and it was you who intruded with a rude post insulting me. I am curious as to what universe you think might exist where your own approach is actually persuasive. Or perhaps you don't believe in anything and are just trolling. On reflection, that seems like the most likely explanation for your behavioral anomaly, so whatevs.

[NNadir]

15. You were first with what?

If we look, we can see it was making nonsense statements about neutrons.

Your rationale for supporting these wrong statements was that you knew all about neutrons because your Daddy - who didn't live up to what you define as morality, not having children - took you to his lab back in the days when people did neutron activation analysis, an ancient now little used technique.

I'm a scientist. I have been studying neutrons for 30 years, and have quite literally thousands upon thousands of papers on the subject of neutrons in my personal library. It took me ten minutes to post references to a major work on neutron dynamics, which you then dismissed as "jargon" because it was over your head. This demonstrates that you don't know shit from applesauce when it comes to neutrons.

I have written hundreds upon hundreds of posts here on the topic of nuclear energy, because, as posted in a scientific publication, a highly cited and highly read paper, nuclear energy saves lives.

You mumbled more intellectual nothingness in reply.

Your remarks strike me as the remarks of some dumb shit anti-vaxx Trumper might strike the scientists who worked through a lifetime of sleepless nights on the development of RNA vaccines.

This is a public forum dedicated to the principals of the Democratic Party that I fully embrace. For me, these include environmental sustainability for future generations, the elimination of poverty, economic and environmental justice, and yes, respect for science.

My views on energy are not yet mainstream, I concede, but they are not pabulum either. This said, I'm not so ignorant as to compare neutronics to "herding cats."

My son, who apparently you believe has no right to exist so you can and your type can live in bourgeois hell so you can talk about shit like going to your Daddy's lab in the 1960s, has just applied to the finest schools in the United States (excluding Texas A&M as Texas is not a safe state) to enter a Ph.D. program in nuclear engineering. His motivation expressed in his personal statements on his applications are very much involved in the principles I expressed above that make me a Democrat. This fills me with immense pride.

The time for being polite to people muttering absurdities is over. On this planet, last year, at the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory we hit 420 ppm of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide, less than ten years after we hit 400 ppm for the first time. The rate of increase, what educated people who have taken science courses call the second derivative, has risen from 1.68 ppm/year^2 when I began writing here in 2002 to 2.45 ppm/year^2 as of last week. How do I know? Because I maintain something called "data." Why do I keep track of "data?" Because I give a shit. Nevertheless, for the entire time I've written here, I've listened to ignorant anti-nuke drivel, this while the planet dies.

I consider anti-nukes and anti-vaxxers to be cut from the same cloth, people making malicious and dangerous statements on topics about which they know nothing. I treat them accordingly.

Tough shit if you don't like it.

Facts matter.

[cstanleytech]

16. NNadir I honestly dont know why you guys are arguing so much over this. If it works great but if it

does not it will still contribute more to our knowledge so either way its a win win.

[NNadir]

19. I don't suffer fools well. Period.

[localroger]

17. Shouldn't be throwing rocks in that glass house, pal.

You're so smart you don't know that lead is the usual shielding material for Californium. You had all the information not to make a fool of yourself -- Dad, who inspired me to get my own education later TYVM, was doing neutron activation analysis. Californium is used as a source for that sort of thing because it emits relatively low energy neutrons that are easily absorbed by target materials. They don't need to be moderated like the high energy neutrons from a nuclear reaction; they are already slow enough to be absorbed, and lead has a nice fat cross section and doesn't turn radioactive when it absorbs neutrons. So, lead shielding.

You have not addressed a single actual substantive statement I've made. The only thing you've posted that might be considered substantive is a wall of math that actually applies to neutrons created in research situations where they are relatively limited in flux and energy. You probably don't expect anybody around here to know enough math to know that though. Surprise, I do. Using those techniques to control the neutron flux from a fusion reactor would be like having a very fine umbrella in a category 5 hurricane.

We do not do the rude thing around here. Name calling is against the site rules. The last time I faced someone who was this insistent about something of this nature it turned out that person didn't actually believe in anything and was just trying to get an emotional rise out of the other site members. I now believe that is the most likely explanation for how you are acting.

So with that observation I will take your advice and bow out. Have a nice day, and bless your heart.

[NNadir]

18. Oh jeeze... I'd suggest you look at the BNL website for neutron capture cross sections of lead...

...and for that matter try to explain how lead bismuth eutectic coolants work, but I'd just have to hear you repeat wrong information over and over and over and over and over.

Neutrons emerge in the spontaneous fission of Californium thermalized? Are you working hard to show how little physics you know, or does it just pop out spontaneously? Why are you so interested in digging deeper and deeper?

The kinetic energy of Cf-252 fission neutrons is 8.6270E+06 ev, 8.627 MeV.

It's publicly available here: Evaluated Nuclear Data File (ENDF) Retrieval & Plotting

Didn't your Daddy teach you anything?

Apparently not, but you did learn somewhere how to whine.

Like I said, "pal" ignorance kills people.