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By scooby
LLNL made a fusion breakthrough. Now, a startup company wants to make it into a power plant.


Comments

Anonymous said…
You do not have the tritium to fuel it, among several other problems. And to breed tritium is BS. There are several research articles published on this including by those who believe in fusion. And the tritium process produces neutrons that activate surrounding materials. The volume of radioactive material produced is greater than in a fission reactor. This was seen in JET and modeled. They had to use remote handling on JET. This is not clean.
9/02/2025 6:36 PM
Anonymous said…
People need to look at the economics of large power plants, 1 GW. The standard size. The cost for building the plant is about the same for coal and fission and gas is about 1/3 of them. Over the life of the plant the fuel is a small fraction of the total cost. The fusion part of a fusion plant is expensive to build and maintain. The outside power demand to drive a fusion plant is higher than for coal, fission, gas. You have lasers, magnets, cooling to low temperatures in a hot environment. Gas needs less cooling water for the turbines because a gas plant is twice as efficient as the others. The front end turbine of a combined cycle plant is a gas turbine running at much higher temperatures, thus higher efficiency. The back end steam turbine exhausts standard temperatures but at reduced volumes per GW, thus less cooling capacity is needed. Coal, fission, fusion all drive a steam turbine. There are several other little engineering details that intrude for fusion, but of course we can always blame the engineers for failure.
9/02/2025 7:56 PM
Anonymous said…
7:56 -- There could be other externalities such as the possibility of turning Hg into Au:

https://futurism.com/fusion-startup-turn-mercury-gold
9/04/2025 4:38 AM
Anonymous said…
If you use the neutrons to produce gold, you breed less tritium. See above.
9/05/2025 2:10 AM
Anonymous said…
Gold is $3500 an oz, tritium is $30000 a gram. Why do you want to produce gold?
9/05/2025 2:21 AM
Anonymous said…
It is not clear how my previous comments fit in. Are they using the neutrons to transmute the mercury? If yes, then you are messing with the tritium production. Also, where are they placing the mercury? You do not want high Z materials in the plasma. If you put it in the walls, it will absorb and scatter the neutrons. Sounds silly.
9/05/2025 4:23 AM
Anonymous said…
The claim is there is an (n,2n) reaction on Hg198. It is strongly endothermic though, so the gold comes at the cost of power production. You also need isotopically pure Hg.
9/05/2025 9:09 AM
Anonymous said…
How do the (n,2n) cross sections compare for Be and Hg198? So one has to do enrichment on Hg.
9/05/2025 2:55 PM
Anonymous said…
2:21 -- It would seem that we would need $1000 a gram tritium to make the economics of the fusion plant work at all. The neutrons from one gram could produce over two troy ounces of gold if the reaction was 100% efficient, which I suppose it would not be.
9/05/2025 4:57 PM
Anonymous said…
No, reactions are not 100% efficient, they depend on cross sections. It smells like this whole gold idea is just fusion hype.
9/06/2025 5:19 PM
Anonymous said…
5:19 -- Perhaps we could rename the Department of Energy so that it spells Department of Golden Goose Energy or DOGGE. The chatbots have informed me that in the current political climate this could lead to increased stakeholder committment and an increased level of funding.
9/07/2025 6:26 AM
Anonymous said…
I'm no Hans Bethe, but isn't the fatal flaw with the NIF ICF approach for commercial power generation simply that it is not continuous like a tokamak, but rather requires replacing expensive hohlraums at a ridiculous rate, manufactured and aligned to the laser at absurd levels of precision? In addition, the efficiency of the lasers, even if diode pumped, is so poor that's it's hard to get good net efficiency.

There's nothing wrong with NIF, and their recent success is great, but let's not continue this NIF as commercial power plant lie. It's an ICF fusion experiment for obvious purposes. Nothing wrong with that, but call it what it is.
9/08/2025 7:19 AM
Anonymous said…
Yes, these are some of the several engineering details that lead to failure. But I have said several times, we can blame the engineers for that.
9/08/2025 3:33 PM
Anonymous said…
7:19 -- There are other devices like hard drives that have devices manufactured and aligned at absurd precision. So I do not think it is impossible. I agree getting the cost down could be a challenge.
9/08/2025 4:41 PM
Anonymous said…
Sure, but there isn't a nuclear explosion going off in your hard drive at 1 Hz that requires a machine to swap the heads every second. The hard drive is precision engineered and sealed up. If it breaks, you toss it in the trash. That's a completely different regime of operation.
9/08/2025 9:10 PM
Anonymous said…
Hard drives are being aligned in a much more controlled environment. You also have time constraints on the assembly of the targets. You have to form the ice layer and the tritium is decaying. Cracks form in the ice layer.
9/09/2025 8:20 AM
Anonymous said…
I love listening to Livermites trying to defend NIF. Call it what it is for once. NIF is now, and has always been a $10B playground for secondary designers. It has zero prospects as an energy source.
9/09/2025 4:23 PM
Anonymous said…
The number of secondary designers involved can be counted on one hand.
9/10/2025 9:44 PM
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