They've just proven (if true of course) that it's possible at all. That is a massive, massive leap.
And once it's possible, it won't be long until it's optimized. We've seen this everywhere -- transistors were once huge and now nanometers; solar cells have improved in every where; batteries are cheaper and better than ever.
I was with you on the first part. If this proves room-temperature/ambient-pressure is possible at all, that is huge.
Not so sure about the "won't be long until it's optimized," though. There are a lot of examples where something seems perpetually 20 years away. I'd advise tempering the transistor-based optimism with just a skosh of fusion energy skepticism.
Compared to fusion it should be a lot simpler and if there is one material that exhbits these properties there might be more. I'm really hoping this isn't a scam and that there isn't some kind of critical error. Regardless of how much more work needs to be done to get this to commercially viable at scale if true I would imagine that massive investment will start chasing that goal.
Just thinking about the possible applications for storage makes me dizzy. Fingers crossed.
>There are a lot of examples where something seems perpetually 20 years away. I'd advise tempering the transistor-based optimism with just a skosh of fusion energy skepticism.
most of the common examples are in-the-works or exist in some form, they just don't satisfy the 'every-person' checkbox yet.
AI? sure. Flying cars? sure. Robots? sure.
Fusion is in the works, too. Tens of billions of dollars being thrown into the ring by private capital -- and recently -- which is a pretty good indicator of 'perceived realistic' historically.
Also, it's kind of apples/oranges. We had equivalent mechanisms before the transistor, transistors just lead to extreme miniaturization of logic gates that we now enjoy. Fusion energy production doesn't (really) have that equivalent.
similarly : room temperature atmospheric pressure superconductors are a new thing if proven possible.
My favorite example is the hydrogen fuel cell. It was invented before the lead acid battery back in the 1800s. PEM gave it a boost around the Apollo era, but that wasn't enough to make it widespread either. Lead-Acid went through its whole 100+ year character arc and hydrogen fuel cells still haven't found product market fit. Sometimes that's how it is.
There are plenty of commercial applications of hydrogen fuel cells though. The biggest issue has been pretty much a constant over the time since it has been invented: keeping the membranes free from impurities is hard.
But there are all kinds of transportation devices using hydrogen in production today.
Sure, but the point is that they hardly caused a revolution in energy storage. If fuel cells didn't exist, for the average person life would be exactly the same.
Revolutionary tech does change normal peoples lives, and sometimes very rapidly, but a lot of stuff that looks revolutionary just kind of never works out.
I'd say nuclear power is probably the prime example of this. It was supposed to bring us electricity too cheap to meter, but it's actually the most expensive form of generation that anyone bothers to build.
> It was supposed to bring us electricity too cheap to meter, but it's actually the most expensive form of generation that anyone bothers to build.
Hardly, coal is much more expensive if you price in the externalities. We just pretend they don't exist for coal, and we staple anything that moves to nuclear.
Coal kills 25 people per TWh generated, and the actuarial cost of a death is about $10M as used by the nuclear industry, not to mention the environmental costs. That means the all-in cost of coal is much much higher than the LCOE - about 16c/kWh according to the Government of Canada. [1] The 2019 US EIA LCOE for nuclear is about 7.7c/kWh. [2]
Nuclear is cheaper than coal and costs around the same as solar/wind + storage - less, depending on the desired level of equivalence between the two. It has high up-front capital costs and a long payback period so the cost depends primarily on cost of capital. Fuel costs are $0.015/kWh to $0.00015/kWh in uranium.
There are places that get lots of cheap, reliable no-carbon power from nuclear. For instance Ontario, at about $0.10CAD/kWh ($0.075USD/kWh), delivered. [3]
Can you give me an example of a nuclear power station that was built entirely without taxpayer subsidy by a private company, and manages to sell electricity to the grid cheaply and make a profit?
> Can you give me an example of a nuclear power station that was built entirely without taxpayer subsidy by a private company, and manages to sell electricity to the grid cheaply and make a profit?
Why is that a goal? Zero-carbon electricity is a goal, so that we don't all sink. Profit isn't. If ever there were a job for taxpayer dollars, IMO, this is it.
"Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."
Not at all. I quoted the US EIA in that 7.7c/kWh figure on the pre-subsidy LCOE of plants coming online in 2023. It was listed in my [2].
"In 2019 the US EIA revised the levelized cost of electricity from new advanced nuclear power plants going online in 2023 to be $0.0775/kWh before government subsidies, using a regulated industry 4.3% cost of capital (WACC - pre-tax 6.6%) over a 30-year cost recovery period" [old 2, sourced from new 1]
The response to you was a separate opinion on the role of government in the energy sector. After all, we've put trillions of subsidies into fossil fuels the least we could do is put money into something that solves problems instead of creating new ones. I also said I don't care whether it's public or private funds that are used to construct it.
Really nothing at that scale is built without subsidies, but the 7.7c/kWh rate was before subsidies.
Did I miss something? I thought I answered your question with that figure and its origin, it sounds like exactly what you wanted to know. I don't know which precise power plants they included but it's probably in [1].
[edit] I guess it's weird that we're so stuck on this one specific technology. What's the un-subsidized cost of oil power when the price of oil is set by OPEC, externalities aren't factored in, and every time it goes up we unload the Strategic Oil Reserve? How do you price in drilling in ANWR?
Coal, I mean, it's all unpriced externalities - death, environmental toll.
Solar 90% of the panels come from China, how much does the PRC subsidize the plants and materials that go into making the panels for their own geopolitical goals? Rare earths for wind? They all come from China too. Lithium for storage?
My question is sort of more "can anyone name any utility scale power project of any type that was built by a private entity without government subsidies of any sort? Why would they do that if they didn't have to? What does that even mean? And really, does that even matter?"
The reason is pretty obvious and doesn't require any kind of conspiracy.
Nuclear can be done safely, we know this, because every single time there has been an accident it's because an operator did something wrong.
The problem is that nobody has yet designed a reactor that a sufficiently amoral operator could not make unsafe. Even if you have completely automatic and passive safety features, a bad operator could disable them if a false positive happens even once and costs them money.
For this reason nuclear has a LOT of regulation and red tape. It has far more than any other kind of energy, because even though the risk of accident is low the outcome of an accident is worse than any other kind of energy except hydro. Hydro has fewer things that can go wrong that are cheaper to check however, so regulations there tend to not be as expensive.
Molten salt reactors manage to be expensive for perfectly normal engineering reasons though. The salt is highly corrosive, meaning you need tons and tons of extremely expensive piping that can withstand extremely high temperatures and extremely corrosive environments.
There's a reason none of _those_ have been built either. No amount of red tape would make them unviably expensive if the end product was cheap enough to run, but it isn't.
Also I should mention, part of what makes them passively safe is there is a plug at the bottom that melts if the reactor overheats. This is easy to bypass, put something over the plug that won't melt.
> There's a reason none of _those_ have been built either.
Let me introduce you to the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment[1].
What you probably meant is that none have been built commercially. That is true, but again as I mentioned, not because of their technical drawbacks but because of politics. In fact, the inventor of the light water reactor, Alvin Weinberg[2], was a strong proponent of the molten salt reactor over his own invention. So strong that he fired was from ORNL because he was claiming that light water reactors are inherently unsafe and that MSR is a better design.
Nixon ultimately sacked him because he (Nixon) chose to support LMFBR (Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor) because it was being built in California, and in return he got political support that he needed. MSR ultimately lost due to pork-barrelling.
> This is easy to bypass, put something over the plug that won't melt.
I mean you're shifting goalposts here. The "operator" has a specific meaning - someone controlling the reactor from the control room. They don't have access to the freeze plug during normal reactor operation.
But even if they did do what you're suggesting, the pressures inside the MSR are so low (on the order of couple of bars) that the damage would be quite limited.
We had a working reactor in the 1960s, but we chose not to develop it commercially due to our inability to choose rationally. That's why we are where we are now.
It's part of a larger trend of eroding competence at civic infrastructure scale construction, but also specific to nuclear we've found repeatedly that construction and decommissioning costs and schedules were wildly optimistic.
Plutonium-239 (just an example) has a halflife of 24,000 years, ground water is a thing and it moves a lot. Modern concrete is both water permeable and has a tendency to degrade aggressively in wet environments over alarmingly short periods of time. Try again?
Fuel cells are just another transformer like the dynamo, or any kind of motor. They turn one kind of energy into another and in the context of hydrogen (which you could produce out of water using electricity as a means of storing energy) it serves to reverse the storage step. This is nice to have but just like nuclear power it's a variation on stuff that we already have, it is at best a quantitative change (and hopefully an improvement).
Room temperature / ambient pressure super conductivity is something we do not currently have. The difference between having that and not having that is a qualitative difference and hence it will enable a whole raft of applications for which we currently do not have a solution.
> By that logic a super conductor is just a variation of a conductor.
No it is not. The difference between 0.1 and 0.0 can't be expressed in orders of magnitude.
> Nuclear power is more distinct from burning coal than any superconductor is distinct from copper wire.
Nuclear power is an incredible invention. Unfortunately it has some problems that won't go away by wishing it to be so, and there are many similarities with coal (as well as some obviously differences).
But this thread isn't about coal vs nuclear.
Frankly, if you don't actually see the difference between the relative importance of superconductors vs copper wire and nuclear vs coal then I really don't think I have anything to say that will interest you. Suffice to say that nuclear didn't change the world all that much (except in a weapons sense) but superconductors at room temperature and ambient pressure have the potential to change the world in ways that would be hard to even imagine. Even if true I still don't think it would be in time to help us address some of the more urgent problems we are facing. Neither does nuclear. And come to think of it: if this tech is real (big if) then it will actually probably cause a revolution in nuclear as well because it would allow for nuclear power to be transmitted the world over without the non-proliferation headaches associated with shipping reactors to various countries. It wouldn't solve the waste problem (though there are some interesting reactor designs now) and it won't happen overnight but it would make a difference.
> superconductors ... have the potential to change the world in ways that would be hard to even imagine.
Such as? I do not see how superconductors help with the challenges of Climate Change, food insecurity or danger of nuclear war. What will be the change for the average Joe? Maybe a better electric car?
Energy storage and distribution alone can affect all three of your examples and they are very trivial ones. Then there is medicine, possibly a better shot at fusion and so on. Better electric cars are at the bottom of my wish list (because they're still cars). But yes, those too (much lighter but more powerful motors means you can do away with the drive train completely and it would also allow you to get rid of the brakes) assuming the superconductivity can be maintained in strong magnetic fields (not a given).
okay, could you be more spesific - what kind of improvement can we expect in storage? Is the improvement measurable - like will I be able to buy more kilowathours of storage per dollar?
You'll be able to buy more KWh of storage per dollar (but likely not initially) and it will be relatively dense compared to current - pun intended - options and very likely have a much higher number of cycles (because there is no chemical cycle, just electron movement). The 'if only we had a room temperature superconductor' list of inventions that got temporarily shelved is longer than my arm, the words 'game changer' were never more applicable. If it is replicated. If it can manufactured competitively. If it (or a variation) works at higher current densities.
Nuclear power and coal power are both heat engines turning heat into mechanical energy and subsequently electricity. They merely use a different heat source.
They share a lot of qualities because of that. They are relatively centralized and best run in a base-load rather than a load-following mode to reduce mechanical stress and increase longevity.
>Nuclear power and coal power are both heat engines turning heat into mechanical energy and subsequently electricity. They merely use a different heat source.
Not completely true. There are some experimental nuclear reactors that convert nuclear energy directly to electricity without the heat cycle, such as [Helion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy).
When presenting working experimental nuclear reactors Helion is not the company that I would use as my example. They are borderline scammy and given their lack of progress they seem to be stuck in the moving the goalposts phase for a long long time now. I wouldn't bet on them ever completing a working reactor that produces net power.
Maybe, but my point is that it does seem to be possible to generate electricity directly from nuclear reactions, without going through a thermal cycle (making heat, creating steam, using that to turn a turbine). I think there's some other experimental process that promises to do this with fission.
Fusion, specifically, is meant to be the one 'too cheap to meter'. The thought being it'd be ready soon, and grouping both kinds of nuclear together worked as better branding for getting govt. funding.
Well, the other 'biggest issue' is that hydrogen is only a terrible battery.
You need an energy source to make hydrogen (eg out of water, or you make it via fossil fuels etc). When you use up the hydrogen, you get some energy back out. A lot less energy, to be honest.
So it's equivalent to a battery. Not to an energy source.
The bikini swimsuit was named after the Bikini Atoll. A bit of a mixup from OP though: it wasn’t named after fusion bombs. The bikini swimsuit was announced a few days after the first public fission bomb test there (Crossroads Able) in 1946. The first fusion bomb test there (Castle Bravo) wasn’t until 1954.
The sun's core is actually very hot, it is the outer layers of the sun that are much cooler. We're trying to do this at roughly twice the temperature than the core of the sun, and I realize the difference is millions of degrees but on a relative scale this doesn't add much complexity, it would be almost as difficult if the plasma would be only half the temperature that they are shooting for.
And in a way that higher temp is a result of trying to do this at a smaller scale, if you want to be net-positive it gets easier as you get hotter as far as I understand it.
So what we are doing is in fact to re-create conditions roughly on par with what is happening in the core of the sun. And it turns out that doing that small, for extended periods, net positive and reliable (without the machine suffering damage from the process) is a very hard problem. Even so I'm very much impressed with these projects, the engineering and the physics are way over my head but I do hope that one day they'll get it working. But I'm not going to hold my breath.
Incidentally, the implications for energy storage if TFA turns out to be on the money are possibly more interesting than fusion in the short term.
> what we are doing is in fact to re-create conditions roughly on par with what is happening in the core of the sun
My understanding is we are not. (Not an expert!) The Sun's core runs around 15 MK [1]. A tokamak, 150 MK [2]. Orders of magnitude rarely come for free in physics.
We need those higher energies because we can't, like the Sun, swaddle with the mass of a hundred thousand worlds a low-temperature, low-frequency weak-force mediated proton-proton reaction [3]. The Sun relies on quantum tunneling to overcome the Coulomb barrier. We humans have to increase the reaction energy so it doesn't all bleed off before anything happens [4], which means using the strong force [5].
If you start to think of 'temperature' of individual particles as 'speed with which they move' that is a useful rough approximation of trying to figure out what it means that something has a particular temperature. Containing the plasma is hard not just because of the temperature it is at but simply because it tends to destroy anything that contains it and that doesn't really change all that much for 15 million degrees Celsius, 30, 100 or 150. What it does change is that at 150 million degrees Celsius you have some hope of extracting useful work from a very small quantity of plasma. If you don't get it up to those temperatures - again, as far as I understand it - then you will always be putting in more energy than you are gaining because of some fundamental physics limitations.
So the smaller you make your reactor the hotter you'll have to make it to make it net positive. This leads to the counter intuitive result that making a much larger reactor is actually quite possibly easier than making a really small one. The rate of heat loss is much smaller for a larger reactor and so it becomes easier to sustain the reaction and to extract useful energy from it.
It is very well possible that none of the reactors currently on the drawing board and under construction are going to be working well enough to give us a sustained reaction resulting in net yield. But we're getting closer and closer to that and there is some (small) chance that I will still see this in my lifetime.
The catch is that as long as you can't get a small reactor to work getting funding for a much larger one (which you actually may be able to get to work) is going to be extremely difficult. We like to see proof before we scale up. In this case it may well be that such small scale proof can't be done or can't be done in a way that it it will convince backers that a larger scale device will work.
Yes, true. Apropos antimatter, recently I read here on HN somewhere that lightning generates antimatter as well, and it made me wonder if earthquakes do too but I haven't been able to get a clear answer on that. Fascinating stuff.
Larger reactors may simplify the plasma physics, but it complicates the materials engineering significantly. A huge problem already is creating a structure that can bear the weight of the reaction vessels and the gigantic magnetic fields used for containing the plasma, and also continue to do so for a decent amount of time after being exposed to the constant neutron bombardment of D-T fusion.
I very much doubt currently known materials and structures could be used to construct a reactor 10 times the size of ITER.
This is a high value comment - it's got a hook that I sort of mostly get, but follows that up with jargon laden things I don't understand well, and your references gave me a half hour of rabbit-hole learning. I appreciate the casual knowledge you've passed along. Thanks!
It has 4 fairly common ingredients and only needs a couple of days to create. You can be sure that China will make a spreadsheet with all possible combinations of synthesis and farm them out to their Universities for rapid development... and then they start hunting for the 'ideal' version... flexible, fast to synthesize etc.
The Manhattan project and moon landings happened because the US spent a significant % of it's GDP on the project. We might have Fusion already if they repeated it...
LK-99 is just chemistry... not nearly as complicated.
This was something that people said would change the world when I was in high school and it really hasn't. (For that matter, the fundamental physics is still not very well understood)
They rapidly got up to liquid nitrogen temperatures so when I was in high school we would go to the welding supply shop, bring back liquid nitrogen to the lab, and do the Meissner effect demo
Liquid nitrogen is very easy to handle (ordinary thermos), liquid helium is much more expensive and harder. WHen I was in grad school the one required class was the Physics 510 lab and for that I did an experiment that involved second sound in superfluid helium and that involved cooling stuff down with liquid nitrogen first, then rolling up a huge dewar full of liquid helium, attaching a vacuum pump to get the temperature down to 2K, etc. For all that trouble you get to see
Many years ago, as an undergrad, I was telling a grad student friend how I'd been learning about the Selection algorithm- it lets you pick the Kth largest element from an unsorted list in linear time, which is pretty neat.
I said "It's O(n), but the constant is ridiculous in most implementations so it's usually better just to sort and then pick the kth element". The grad student friend said something that stuck with me: "Sure, but the algorithm proves it's possible to find the kth element in linear time. That was never guaranteed. Now we just need to find a better way to do it."
Random conversation that stuck with me, and they probably forgot it a moment later.
Branching off into a philosophical thought here, but I find this to be completely wrong. It was always guaranteed; logic, like physics and chemistry is not an environment that changes.
We have discovered a functioning technique which might be improved upon. What wasn’t guaranteed was that it would be found.
Biology is the root of most, perhaps all, uncertainty. After all, it is our biology that makes us imperfect observers, thinkers, and makers(but also enables us to do those things at all!).
I think this is important, because their is a significant difference in mindset between making something, and looking for something. Science is looking, technology is making. Things are always “seen” before they are “made”.
And once it's possible, it won't be long until it's optimized. We've seen this everywhere -- transistors were once huge and now nanometers; solar cells have improved in every where; batteries are cheaper and better than ever.