Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy - BBC News

[mr moose]

21 hours ago, leadeater said:

I use Australia btw since they have history of power problems, although better now, sort of. I'm in New Zealand which has a lot shorter summer months and lower average of sunlight hours over the year.

 

Been here my whole life and don't really know what these problems are.

[LAwLz]

45 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Been here my whole life and don't really know what these problems are.

My guess is that he is referring to the fact that Australia uses a lot of power, and almost all of it is from fossil fuel (60% coal, 20% natural gas).

Each Australian citizen produces somewhere between 2 to 2.5 times as much CO2 as the average developed country in Europe.

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

My guess is that he is referring to the fact that Australia uses a lot of power, and almost all of it is from fossil fuel (60% coal, 20% natural gas).

Each Australian citizen produces somewhere between 2 to 2.5 times as much CO2 as the average developed country in Europe.

Maybe,   We could solve that if the morons here would let us have nuclear.   I mean we are one of the most geologically stable places in the world and we have our own supply of everything.   Simple fact is that we could also safely store the worlds nuclear waste and it wouldn't make a difference to us,  but people keep complaining about Chernobyl and now Fukushima. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, mr moose said:

Been here my whole life and don't really know what these problems are.

The problems SA had and still sort of has. Some states like SA are quite reliant on importing power from other states, not itself a problem until it is then it's a real big problem. The issues isn't really capacity it's supply resilience which was proven to be not up to standard in 2016. Bad weather is a problem, but the affect it had shouldn't have been as much as it was. The failure was so big a "grid restart" had to be conducted and that is not simple task. Grid networks are largely designed and operated on the assumption that they will never completely fail and reference frequency will always been maintained, well that assumption was broken.

 

Then again in 2017 SA had a large scale blackout without weather damage being to blame.

 

These may have been some time ago but it's not like much has significantly changed, it's better now due to a few things but a lot of the fail risks and the cross state importing reliance is still all there.

 

Probably should have said SA rather than Aus, oh well.

 

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

My guess is that he is referring to the fact that Australia uses a lot of power, and almost all of it is from fossil fuel (60% coal, 20% natural gas).

Each Australian citizen produces somewhere between 2 to 2.5 times as much CO2 as the average developed country in Europe.

Not so much, in a run off between environmentalism and providing a necessity I will always fall on providing the necessity. Will never stop me from advocating for better but I'm not going to back any plan that puts supply at risk in any way.

[tikker]

11 hours ago, Imbadatnames said:

Fukushima was due to two natural disasters, it withstood the earthquake and if the tsunami was an individual event it would have weathered that too. 

It was the tsunami that took out power and caused the meltdown, so I wouldn't be so quick as to say it would have weathered it, especially after they ignored warnings about this potentially happening:

Quote

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/29/fukushima-daiichi-operator-tsunami-warning
Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) officials rejected "unrealistic" estimates made in a 2008 internal report that the plant could be threatened by a tsunami of up to 10.2 metres, Kyodo news agency said.

The tsunami that crippled backup power supplies at the plant on the afternoon of 11 March, leading to the meltdown of three reactors, was more than 14 metres high.
<snip>
The accident was triggered when seawater flooded power supply lines, disabling cooling systems and triggering a meltdown in three of Fukushima Daiichi's six reactors.

 

[leadeater]

12 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Maybe,   We could solve that if the morons here would let us have nuclear.   I mean we are one of the most geologically stable places in the world and we have our own supply of everything.   Simple fact is that we could also safely store the worlds nuclear waste and it wouldn't make a difference to us,  but people keep complaining about Chernobyl and now Fukushima. 

Aus really should just go almost 100% nuclear, like you said you have all the raw material and you also have the technical capability to run them as well. But no don't leverage a literal massive advantage that your country has that few others do.

[Spindel]

Ahhh peace time nuclear fusion, the technology that has been only 20 years away since the 1950s... 

 

Sarcasm aside. 

 

Even if this is a step in the right direction the big elephant in the room is that it still takes more energy to make the fusion happen than what you get out of it. And that has been the deal ever since tries with "controlled" and "cold" fusion started.

 

It feels like the biggest step towards peace time nuclear fusion was the invention of the Tokamak and the first Tokamak reactor was built in 1958. 

 

 

EDIT:// After reading through this thread I can inform you I have studied (fission) reactor technology when I was at university AMA (I don't remember anything  , well actually I do remember the broad concepts but since I don't work with it now the math behind it is gone)

 

EDIT2:// BTW I recommend anyone that is currently studying technology at university level to take at least a basic reactor technology class, it really is very interesting and finally somewhere you have real life applications for math concepts like furier series etc

[LAwLz]

2 hours ago, mr moose said:

Maybe,   We could solve that if the morons here would let us have nuclear.   I mean we are one of the most geologically stable places in the world and we have our own supply of everything.   Simple fact is that we could also safely store the worlds nuclear waste and it wouldn't make a difference to us,  but people keep complaining about Chernobyl and now Fukushima.

It's a real shame people are so against nuclear. I know several people who watched the HBO Chernobyl series and afterward said "wow, nuclear power is scary stuff" and completely missed the massive part that soviet played in causing the disaster, and also missed that the show even brought up what steps we have taken for it to not happen again, such as improved reactors.

[suicidalfranco]

13 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

It's a real shame people are so against nuclear. I know several people who watched the HBO Chernobyl series and afterward said "wow, nuclear power is scary stuff" and completely missed the massive part that soviet played in causing the disaster, and also missed that the show even brought up what steps we have taken for it to not happen again, such as improved reactors.

Italy pretty much in the same boat sadly

[mr moose]

9 hours ago, leadeater said:

The problems SA had and still sort of has. Some states like SA are quite reliant on importing power from other states, not itself a problem until it is then it's a real big problem. The issues isn't really capacity it's supply resilience which was proven to be not up to standard in 2016. Bad weather is a problem, but the affect it had shouldn't have been as much as it was. The failure was so big a "grid restart" had to be conducted and that is not simple task. Grid networks are largely designed and operated on the assumption that they will never completely fail and reference frequency will always been maintained, well that assumption was broken.

 

Then again in 2017 SA had a large scale blackout without weather damage being to blame.

 

These may have been some time ago but it's not like much has significantly changed, it's better now due to a few things but a lot of the fail risks and the cross state importing reliance is still all there.

 

Probably should have said SA rather than Aus, oh well.

 

Not so much, in a run off between environmentalism and providing a necessity I will always fall on providing the necessity. Will never stop me from advocating for better but I'm not going to back any plan that puts supply at risk in any way.

I find it a little bit annoying that the official cause listed for the 2017 black out was "wind turbine settings",  when they shutdown hazelwood power station (25% of victoria's base load capacity which was sold to SA) just 5 months prior tot he black out.  The report said that power from victoria could not be imported due to these settings.  Given my experience with these organizations and all the political BS that surrounds them it is more likely that SA invested too fast in renewables and vic shut down hazelwood too early.  I say this because power was not really an issue before that time and now everything from "settings" to infrastructure is being blamed for the uptick in blackouts.

 

 

[leadeater]

3 minutes ago, mr moose said:

I find it a little bit annoying that the official cause listed for the 2017 black out was "wind turbine settings",  when they shutdown hazelwood power station (25% of victoria's base load capacity which was sold to SA) just 5 months prior tot he black out.  The report said that power from victoria could not be imported due to these settings.  Given my experience with these organizations and all the political BS that surrounds them it is more likely that SA invested too fast in renewables and vic shut down hazelwood too early.  I say this because power was not really an issue before that time and now everything from "settings" to infrastructure is being blamed for the uptick in blackouts.

The cause was simply damage to transmissions lines, but that was such a problem because they needed to import power and couldn't

[mr moose]

3 hours ago, leadeater said:

The cause was simply damage to transmissions lines, but that was such a problem because they needed to import power and couldn't

Not officially.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-28/wind-farm-settings-to-blame-for-sa-blackout-aemo-says/8389920

 

Quote

Overly sensitive protection mechanisms in some South Australian wind farms are to blame for the catastrophic statewide blackout in September last year, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) says.

and :

 

Quote

"Had the generation deficit not occurred, AEMO's modelling indicates SA would have remained connected to Victoria and the black system would have been avoided,"

 

 

This might be true, but as I said earlier, interstate connections and infrastructure don't just start failing causing blackouts on such a scale.  And it's way to coincidental that it all happened at the start of the peak demand season immediately after shutting down a major power supply.

 

I'm trying not to be absolute in this, however while what they claim might well contain truth, it is not uncommon for these organizations to bend the reality a little so that governmental decisions leading to a catastrophe aren't highlighted as the problem.

EDIT:

 

You know what, I'm not sure even that carries enough rational consideration to be worth posting.  When you said the power lines were damaged, I thought you meant between Vic and SA.   Also the report said it was not wind damage that caused the problem but that's exactly what started it.  They are basically claiming a failed safety process 3 problems in was the cause of the black out. Which to me sounds lie a terrible bending of the truth.

 

Also hazelwood closed down a year after this black out so I retract my accusations of it being involved.

 

 

[IPD]

13 hours ago, LAwLz said:

It's a real shame people are so against nuclear. I know several people who watched the HBO Chernobyl series and afterward said "wow, nuclear power is scary stuff" and completely missed the massive part that soviet played in causing the disaster, and also missed that the show even brought up what steps we have taken for it to not happen again, such as improved reactors.

Ironically, that's not even the big takeaway from the miniseries, imho.  Rather it's how a closed-system, with tight controls on the media and rampant misinformation (read: propaganda) will always produce an inferior result to transparency and openness.

 

Hardly the first time it happened, and won't be the last.  Kursk is another key example.

[CarlBar]

@Imbadatnames The filters at Windscale where pushed through by a fairly senior individual on the project spending influence he had at the political and budgetary level to make it happen. Thats why 1 person was able to them added on after the fact to the design. That said as i allready elaborated the dangers where poorly understood at the time, especially early on in the project. Which is why they didn't see a danger initially and where sceptical later on.

 

@wanderingfool2 Please look up the history of industrial accidents of all kinds. No matter how well you site and run somthing, eventually some combination of events will catch you out. Keeping reactors away from geologically unstable zones won't prevent incidents from occurring. rather you need to focus on ensuring the consequences of any incident are adequately contained. Which isn't to say preventative precautions against failure are futile, but they're the less important aspect of the matter, you have to assume that if it is physically possibble for it to somwhere somehow fail, it will, and take steps to put in place somthing that can eliminate or reduce to tolerable levels the consequences thereof.

 

Fukushima and Windscale were cases where the existing containment measures where inadequate to the accidents that occurred, and Chernobyl flat out lacked containment of any kind. But that doesn't mean adequate measures couldn't be taken, and that with similar reactor designs. There are those that eliminate various different problem points. That vastly changes the danger level and problems thereof.

[Imbadatnames]

5 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

@Imbadatnames The filters at Windscale where pushed through by a fairly senior individual on the project spending influence he had at the political and budgetary level to make it happen. Thats why 1 person was able to them added on after the fact to the design. That said as i allready elaborated the dangers where poorly understood at the time, especially early on in the project. Which is why they didn't see a danger initially and where sceptical later on.

So the senior engineer who companies hire to design and plan an operation recommended something on safety grounds and they did it? Shocker that one is 

[Imbadatnames]

20 hours ago, tikker said:

It was the tsunami that took out power and caused the meltdown, so I wouldn't be so quick as to say it would have weathered it, especially after they ignored warnings about this potentially happening:

 

It took power because of the damage sustained by the earthquake 

[leadeater]

17 minutes ago, Imbadatnames said:

It took power because of the damage sustained by the earthquake 

Wasn't it the tsunami that cause the backup generators to be under water resulting in loss of cooling power? Reactors automatically shutdown past a seismic threshold so these generators were critical to maintain safety until the reactors were cleared for operation.

 

Because of the tsunami the extent of the earthquake damage just wasn't possible to really ascertain, however I have seen no evidence or comments on direct damage to the facility or reactors due to the earthquake, so it's quite clear the majority if not all of the factor that lead to the reactor incident was the tsunami and little to do with the earthquake.

 

There may have been superficial damage to some buildings, probably no critical ones, maybe even critical ones but nothing that would have prevented operation of the reactors after safety clearance.

 

Based on the indecent details it's quite clear nothing would have happened to the reactors at all without the tsunami. We can only blame the earthquake on loss of main grid supply which is exactly why there are onsite generators to maintain coolant systems. Hindsight is easy but come on, putting critical safety generators below water and flood lines, colossally stupid and utterly obvious flaw.

[Imbadatnames]

15 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Wasn't it the tsunami that cause the backup generators to be under water resulting in loss of cooling power? Reactors automatically shutdown past a seismic threshold so these generators were critical to maintain safety until the reactors were cleared for operation.

 

Because of the tsunami the extent of the earthquake damage just wasn't possible to really ascertain, however I have seen no evidence or comments on direct damage to the facility or reactors due to the earthquake, so it's quite clear the majority if not all of the factor that lead to the reactor incident was the tsunami and little to do with the earthquake.

 

There may have been superficial damage to some buildings, probably no critical ones, maybe even critical ones but nothing that would have prevented operation of the reactors after safety clearance.

 

Based on the indecent details it's quite clear nothing would have happened to the reactors at all without the tsunami. We can only blame the earthquake on loss of main grid supply which is exactly why there are onsite generators to maintain coolant systems. Hindsight is easy but come on, putting critical safety generators below water and flood lines, colossally stupid and utterly obvious flaw.

The Earthquake has already begun the process of shutting the reactor down but due to this the reactors couldn’t power the cooling system, meaning that generators fired up to keep the cooling system on. The tsunami flooded the generators meaning the cooling no system was shut off. Without the earthquake the reactors would have still been generating power which would have kept the cooling system active. The system would have been fine with either event as a lone event or even a bit further apart or even if some of the other reactors weren’t already down for refuelling they could have kept the power to the cooling system. 

[leadeater]

12 minutes ago, Imbadatnames said:

The Earthquake has already begun the process of shutting the reactor down but due to this the reactors couldn’t power the cooling system, meaning that generators fired up to keep the cooling system on. The tsunami flooded the generators meaning the cooling no system was shut off. Without the earthquake the reactors would have still been generating power which would have kept the cooling system active. 

And? That means exactly what I sad, the earthquake was not the result or cause of the incident. You can't blame a system designed to do what it's supposed as a significant contributor to the incident when it did exactly what it supposed to do. The only cause of the incident was the tsunami.

 

Remove the tsunami, no incident.

Remove the earthquake (arguments sake tsunami still happened), incident.

 

The reactors would have been shutdown in a tsunami only situation and would have resulted in the same outcome.

 

The safety systems were inadequately designed, flooding was the only cause of the disaster outside of all the human factors the report blamed and I don't particularly care much about those. Simply relocating the reactor generators and the remote switching building to areas that were not flood prone and above water lines would have prevented this.

 

The earthquake is just a 'thing' that happened, you can only really blame that as the cause of the tsunami, the actual natural disaster event that resulted in the disaster.

 

The facility was designed, or supposed to be, that it would be safe if all reactors were not operating, that design failed.

[leadeater]

23 minutes ago, Imbadatnames said:

The system would have been fine with either event as a lone event or even a bit further apart or even if some of the other reactors weren’t already down for refuelling they could have kept the power to the cooling system. 

No it would not, ALL reactors would have gone offline during an earthquake. The fact that 3 were down for maintenance is irrelevant beyond only 3 going critical instead of 6 or however many are normally operating at full capacity.

 

If you think the reactors wouldn't have been shutdown during a tsunami then I have no idea what to tell you. Do you really think it would have been deemed safe in such a situation? I do not.

 

SCRAM would have been activated and disaster would have followed. I don't know that for 100% sure but my opinion is that's precisely what would have happened.

 

Edit:

Quote

These operated normally until the tsunami destroyed the generators for Reactors 1–5. The two generators cooling Reactor 6 were undamaged and were sufficient to be pressed into service to cool the neighboring Reactor 5 along with their own reactor, averting the overheating issues the other reactors suffered.

So reading the report again even reactors down for maintenance were at risk and didn't go critical only because there were two working generators. Ergo reactors 4-6 being down did not prevent them from being at risk at all and also would never have been started up either as their SCRAMs had been activated too.

[IPD]

4 hours ago, Imbadatnames said:

So the senior engineer who companies hire to design and plan an operation recommended something on safety grounds and they did it? Shocker that one is 

It is shocking.  That you flippantly discard this anecdote only underscores how important this event was.  The past 100 years have been littered with examples of someone who is a SME (or authoritative figure) who provides a recommendation--and then disaster ensues because that person was not listened to.

 

Challenger disaster is another prime example of this.  Not only was the ambient temperature outside design spec, and engineers kept pointing this out--but there had been previous shuttle missions which clearly had forensic evidence of similar, impending failures--due to lower temperatures at launch.

 

Or take pretty much every CIO of any big corporation pleading to upgrade from XP on their POS machines, only for large data-breaches to ensue when they are not heeded.

 

T.O.'s are written in blood.  Design and safety upgrades are too.  Simply because a crisis was averted due to a random, unprecedented chance that someone safety-minded got their way...doesn't invalidate the impending catastrophe had that situation not been so lucky.  How close we have come to disaster (or had an incident) is well documented.  Here's a primer, the United States Chemical Safety Board's YT channel:

 

https://www.youtube.com/user/USCSB/videos

[CarlBar]

6 hours ago, Imbadatnames said:

So the senior engineer who companies hire to design and plan an operation recommended something on safety grounds and they did it? Shocker that one is 

 

No simply a very senior official. He then ordered the extra design work done. It's why i mentioned the political and budgetary capital. No other person involved in the project had the necessary clout and believed there was a danger.

 

@leadeater he's doing a bad job of explaining but the plant was setup to allow external power to run everything, the lines running in for that and transformers e.t.c. where as i understand it untouched by the Tsunami, but the earthquake had allready wreaked those. A tsunami alone wouldn't have cut the power.

 

p.s. @Imbadatnames they had to scram everything when the earthquake hit anyway, they lost grid connection and without that there would have been no way to balance the load resulting in the frequency going off the charts and rendering it useless/dangerous to use in trying to run the plant.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, CarlBar said:

@leadeater he's doing a bad job of explaining but the plant was setup to allow external power to run everything, the lines running in for that and transformers e.t.c. where as i understand it untouched by the Tsunami, but the earthquake had allready wreaked those. A tsunami alone wouldn't have cut the power.

Maybe or maybe not. The surrounding area was pretty devastated and much of the lines were torn down by the tsunami, ones that hadn't already been compromised. Further to that there were generators under each reactor but there is also other emergency generators located further away up higher and away but the switching building used to get supply from those were flooded by the tsunami.

 

I have no doubt the tsunami would have resulted in loss of grid power anyway and thus the exact same outcome, earthquake is therefore unnecessary to cause a disaster at that facility in that way, other than it was the cause of the tsunami itself.

 

Too many critical things were below flood and tsunami lines.

[wanderingfool2]

38 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

@leadeater he's doing a bad job of explaining but the plant was setup to allow external power to run everything, the lines running in for that and transformers e.t.c. where as i understand it untouched by the Tsunami, but the earthquake had allready wreaked those. A tsunami alone wouldn't have cut the power.

I mean, a major folly though is he's considering the earthquake and Tsunami as almost distinct mutually exclusive events...a Tsunami the size that they were warning about would always be preceded by a major earthquake, and I can tell you that major earthquakes typically knock out power grids.  [Well I guess aside from the "big one" that will eventually happen on West Coast of NA...because that will trigger a tsunami that hits Japan].

 

7 hours ago, CarlBar said:

Please look up the history of industrial accidents of all kinds. No matter how well you site and run somthing, eventually some combination of events will catch you out. Keeping reactors away from geologically unstable zones won't prevent incidents from occurring. rather you need to focus on ensuring the consequences of any incident are adequately contained. Which isn't to say preventative precautions against failure are futile, but they're the less important aspect of the matter, you have to assume that if it is physically possibble for it to somwhere somehow fail, it will, and take steps to put in place somthing that can eliminate or reduce to tolerable levels the consequences thereof.

I'm more than aware about industrial accidents that happen, but I'm more than aware than designs fail...and when talking about major earthquakes where a failure could potentially cause building integrity issues isn't something I personally feel is worth the risk.

 

An example of this, a public building nearby where I live is the designated emergency shelter after a major earthquake.  It's meant to withstand a major earthquake...there was a minor earthquake that hit about 15 years ago, big enough to shake things, but no where close to the earthquakes people in CA experience frequently and no where close to "the big one".  I suspect it wouldn't survive a major earthquake...as the minor earthquake had caused a large crack running the length of the concrete to form in one of the support pillars.

 

It's why I don't think it's a good concept to building in areas where earthquakes are likely (well I should clarify, where the is a chance of a major earthquake event).

 

Money has a tendency to drive things, which means cost cutting measures will take place and I'm betting eventually we will have another disaster.  I'm not against Nuclear, but I do feel that there are a lot of people who still are dismissive that modern day designs won't have unforeseen issues that we haven't thought of.

 

Without the want to cut costs, Chernobyl wouldn't have happened.  The issue was known about, but they thought no one would push the reactor to that limit so they continued as is instead of spending money to fix the fundamental flaw.

Without the want to cut costs, Fukushima would have enacted the safety concerns raised and the Tsunami would have hopefully been a non-issue.

[leadeater]

14 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

I mean, a major folly though is he's considering the earthquake and Tsunami as almost distinct mutually exclusive events...a Tsunami the size that they were warning about would always be preceded by a major earthquake, and I can tell you that major earthquakes typically knock out power grids.  [Well I guess aside from the "big one" that will eventually happen on West Coast of NA...because that will trigger a tsunami that hits Japan].

I know I was literally doing it for arguments sake. Also tsunami's have and are caused by underwater rock falls by earthquake or volcanic activity (pacific island tsunami recently).

 

My point was the tsunami was itself alone most likely the only thing required to have caused the problem, how much damage the earthquake itself did didn't matter and didn't contribute because the tsunami flooded everything that supplied power and also took out (some) grid power lines anyway.  Ergo non factor in reality to the nuclear incident, only unless a tsunami of that size wouldn't have meant the activation of SCRAM and I find that to be highly dubious.