Nuclear fusion is 'a question of when, not if'
bbc.com
bbc.com
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29074/skunk-works-exot...
Unless the whole thing is just cover for some other dark money project.
Deleted comment
Translation: "we need more money, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future".
People working on technologies which are truly "when not if" don't go around advertising it - they are too busy trying to be the one to profit off it before the next guy does.
That's not how innovation works. Moonshot projects take time. And they are risky and expensive.
The risk/expense is too high for one or even a few investors to bear. That's why innovators can't get "too busy to profit off it." These efforts need buy-in from a large crowd, from charities, states, institutional investors, etc. Convincing such a large crowd needs a PR effort, which is why such articles get written.
Are all of these efforts genuine? Of course not. But a project being long-term and "needing more money for the foreseeable future" is not a good heuristic to tell that it's not.
Of course, if the technology turns out to be impossible, then it's no big deal, because your rivals can't benefit from it either (in fact this was one of the main motivators for the Manhattan project - to see if it could be done, and make sure the Allies got there first if it could).
SDI also funded a vast amount of scientific research, although I don't know of any specific success stories to result.
Regardless, I wouldn't classify it as a textbook example of a moonshot failure.
Here's Robert Zubrin in "The Case for Space": "The national fusion programs progressed well during the Cold War because of fierce international competition. They have stopped moving forward since the late 1980s because the decision to consolidate them into a single global project, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), removed all stimulus for action. Indeed, it took nearly a quarter century for the bureaucrats in charge of ITER to manage to reach consensus in 2010 on where to put it, and it will take another quarter century before the machine even attempts to reach thermonuclear ignition in 2035."
( * ) Cost comparison: Manhattan Project $23BN in 2018 dollars [1]. ITER cost, construction only: $22BN as per their own estimate, $65BN as per the US Department of Energy estimate [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
[2] https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.2018041...
Quite frankly, controlled thermonuclear fusion is far more difficult than splitting an atom. It would be a shock if the same amount of funding would accomplish the equivalent goal. Next I’ll be told about pitfalls and hazards and biases around such a statement. People are scared of a real solution costing money.
Well, that's exactly the reason a Manhattan Project of Apollo Program style of push was inappropriate. Those two projects were fundamentally easy problems. By the time they were green-lighted, all their underlying physics was understood, and the only remaining challenges were engineering ones. In the case of fusion, that was not the case in 1991 (the year you picked) by any means.
The interviewer, a software engineer by trade, was extremely surprised, and asked him how complexity could be an advantage.
The physicist replied that it means that there's a lot of variables you can fiddle before you start coming up against real physical limits.
It sticks in the mind because you can sort of see why a scientist would think of fusion as a definite, next-few-decades thing, and at the same time, that doesn't mean it in the engineering sense of, these reactors will actually be just like a nuclear or coal plant.
- Internet - packet-switching routers for LANs
- Microchips - ballistic missile guidance
- Nuclear - radioactive tracers, radiotherapy, watch faces, ...
- Microbiology - vaccines, insulin, ...
Who on earth is making money out of controlled nuclear fusion? Where are the waypoints? Where can we make something useful in the short to medium time horizon?
I also dispute your point of "little appetite for....30+ year timeline" projects, as the MEMS industry has routinely funded 30 year development cycles before technology maturation. The difference is, as I said, there are usually useful waypoints before the technology has fully matured.
This is not something any VC-investor I know of would risk or can afford.
Would something like Intel or MOS technology get vc money today?
Yes, because when they were founded, it was already established that you could make money making semiconductors.
The more concerning question is whether the invention of the transistor could be funded today. Historically, it was not funded by VC money, but out of the financial surplus of a big monopoly (AT&T). Are today's big, wealthy corporations doing as much of that sort of long-term research?
case in point - SpaceX. Before Musk private space on a big scale (not the laughable Pegasus) was may be just a couple notches below fusion. Once Musk shown the way for everybody, now we have VCs going all in. VCs are really very risk averse - they aren't going to dump money into being the first to make fusion because it is risky, they are going to dump money into the 20 startups of the second wave to make money for sure even if most of those startups fail.
Stellarators have traditionally lagged tokamaks in terms of Lawson criterion performance, but they've also been less funded because tokamaks have performance advantages. Stellarators are steady state and don't risk the same number of plasma instabilities. Germany is so confident that it's the right approach that they built the largest magnetic confinement device ever to test optimizing for quasi-omnigineity. Stellarators in general are becoming closer to the mainstream approach and given another 5 or 10 years you'll likely hear about them as much as tokamaks (at least in terms of non ITER research).
What are the numbers if you know, of the speed or rate at which plasma can destabilize?
https://www.energy.gov/science/fes/articles/zero-tolerance-t...
I attended a presentation today that, at one point, showed toroidal flow rate over radius in a 1m major radius device. It ranged from 30 to 100 km/s. There are many effects operating at different timescales. Turbulence is among the shorter timescales, making it difficult to simulate and why it is only now the current focus of many researchers.
Less snarky reply: More fission would let us do all kinds of new things today, if people weren’t so irrational about it.
In order for renewables to be truly as convenient as grid power, there has to be a storage system of some kind at the site of use. Generally that means, in your car, in your home, etc.
The environmental cost of disposing of batteries hardly insignificant.
https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-b...
"The key determinant of our forecast is the relationship between price and volume. From the observed historical values, we calculate a learning rate of around 18%. This means that for every doubling of cumulative volume, we observe an 18% reduction in price. Based on this observation, and our battery demand forecast, we expect the price of an average battery pack to be around $94/kWh by 2024 and $62/kWh by 2030."
TLDR Batteries will work out fine as storage. Recycling batteries is a known materials handling process.
To replace strip mined coal burning generators and fracked gas we need a mix of just about everything.
I also think we can get more mileage out of chemical fuels produced with renewables - ammonia, hydrogen.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/siemens-ammonia...
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/03/new-fuel-cell-could-...
Problem with the technology is a) not viable in the current market. b) It's a mind numbingly boring idea. c) There is no 'disruption' potential here. All the companies that can build this at scale are huge established multi-nationals like General Electric.
Of course it will run out eventually but so will the sun, in a similar amount of time.
When the US was first making the switch from wood to coal as a principle fuel, in the 1880s, the argument in contemporaneous accounts was that a small fraction of the probable reserves of coal would serve all energy needs for millions of years, given that perennial caveat, at present rates of consumption.
What happened, of course, was that rates of consumption increased somewhat. Coal went from fueling a small number of structural heating, locomotion, and smelting uses to vastly expanded railroad, steelmaking, and most especially, electrical generation uses. Trainloads of coal arrive daily at power plants, still. Others are located at mineheads themselves as electrons transport more readily than lumps of fossilised tree. The Jevons paradox is a mighty bastard. By present estimates, again, at present values of consumption, coal reserves are estimated at 100-300 years.
At present rates of electrical energy generation, existing terrestrial (non-oceanic) uranium would suffice for fewer than two decades worth of energy use. When you factor in even probable growth due to:
- Extending Western standards of living to another five billions of the world's population.
- Expansion of total population from 7.5 billions to 11-12 billions.
- Continued "normal" economic growth at 2-3% per annum, that is, doubling every 25-30 years, roughly.
... the total energy requirements increase tremendously.
(Note that renewables also strain to keep up with such growth -- my sense is that the fact that incident solar power on Earth of some 7,000x present human energy consumption actually represents a dangerously narrow margin of safety.)
I'd worked out at one point the remaining reserves given some rate of projected annual growth, a fairly simple application of exponential math. The numbers are exceedingly sobering.
TL;DR: If there is some putatively nonrenewable fuel source whose reserves would extend to some point in time beyond the viability of some specified landmark (h. sapiens as a viable species, C3 photosynthesis on Earth, etc., variously a few million to about 800 million years), then the resource is not meaningfully constrained, and we can make reasonable use of it.
But given any notion of continued exponential growth, which is to say, a constant percentage increase in economic activity, given all available history, if not some putative but very-much-unproved virtualisation-of-activity hypotheses, that's a high bar to meet.
It feels like you're double-dipping here: I don't see how we extend "western standards of living to 5 billions of the worlds population" without concurrently extending the same GDP per unit of energy use to the same populations.
It's not like we all decide to just buy exponentially bigger houses and cars, for all that a look around certain parts of the US tend to suggest this in the near term. :-)
It also seems to me that a steady increase in GDP per unit of energy is a likely consequence of higher energy prices - while energy is dirt-cheap (and often subsidized), use tends to be profligate.
Less energy intensive, perhaps. But not less electricity intensive. As cars and trains go electric, electricity demand will increase. If we're going to make planes and ships hydrogen powered, that's going to be another big electricity demand.
- Economic policy, targets, and theory are currently expressed in terms of constant percentage economic growth. Which is to say, exponential growth.
- All empirical evidence ties past growth to increased resource consumption, most especially energy. "Dematerialisation" studies tend not to be well supported, and arguments for nonmaterial mechanisms for economic growth prove to be largely unfounded far more hypothetical or theological than even theoretical.
The point that extending Western standards of living beyond the ~1 billion residents of the US, EU, JP, CA, AU, & NZ (line noise), and the additional 1 billion of China who are still on net nowhere near Western levels of affluence, but have seen appreciable growth over the past two decades, accompanied by massive increases in energy consumption, resource utilisation, and sinks (effluent) exploitation, much of that energy from coal, to the five billions elsewhere, requires a similar energy-intensity-per-unit-GDP is precisely the one I'm trying to make.
There is some space for optimising efficiency in terms of GDP per unit energy, and within specific nations, there's been some evidence of this -- see the US since the oil shocks of the 1970s. But progress has been limited, most especially progress in the absence of further price shocks. Applying imposed efficiency requirements has worked poorly, and the tolerance of imposing, say, higher fuel taxes (as is practiced in Europe and Japan, neither having much by way of indigenous petroleum supply) has been scant.
(Higher prices for petroleum in petroleum-exporting countries themselves is even less viable, and is a major component of a theory of their collapse, the Export Lands Model. See Venezuela, Egypt, Syria, and Yemen as examples, with Russia potentially another, though its production has yet to fall markedly.)
Steve Keen has been doing some remarkable recent work on the role of energy in production functions, including a rewrite of the Cobb-Douglas production function to include energy as a term along with capital and labour. He's been working with a long-time researcher in the area, Robert Ayres, and making quite substantial progress, though whether or not that will be accepted by the field remains an open question. Economics has been exceedingly resistant to such messages in the past.
Keen's conceptual insight is that "labour without energy is a corpse, capital without energy is a sculpture". It's possible to increase efficiencies. Early steam engines operated in the 1-10% thermodynamic efficiency range, modern dual-cycle gas-turbine generation can exceed 50%, and when making use of waste heat for other processes can approach 80% efficiencies. But you're always limited to some theoretical maximum.
One area I've been exploring is the question of just what specific technolgical mechanisms there are. Economists describe technology generally as "efficiency", but it's an efficiency gained through specific means. I've identified nine:
1. Fuels. Applying more (or more useful) energy to a process.
2. Energy transmission and transformation.
3. Materials. Specific properties, abundance, costs, effects, limitation.s
4. Process knowledge -- how to do things. What's generally described as "technical knowledge", here considered as a specific mechanism of technology.
5. Structural or causal knowledge -- why things work. What's generally described as "scientific knowledge".
6. Networks. Interactions between nodes via links, physical or virtual, over which matter, energy, information, or some mix flow. (People would be one possible flow.) Transport, comms, power, information.
7. Systems. Constructs including sensing, processing, action, and feedback. Ranging from conceptual to mechanical to human and social.
8. Information. Sensing, perceiving, processing, storing, retrieving, and transmitting. Ranging from our natural senses to augmented ones, from symbolic systems (language, maths) to algorithms.
9. Hygiene. Sinks and unintended consequences, affecting the function and vitality of systems, and their mitigations or limits.
I've been playing with this ontology for a few years, and have yet to either remove or add to the basic nine factors. A dematerialisation that succeeded in doing so would be quite remarkable. I'm open to suggestions and criticisms.
Jevons paradox is something that can happen, not a claim or proof that it always happens.
And exponential growth never continues. I mean, we can all agree Moore's law and population growth, that people irrationally thought would go on forever, are reaching their limits, right?
I agree that exponential growth cannot continue. However you'll find a matter of faith in mainstream economics that it can. Even severe critics, as Thomas Piketty, state this, as in this offhand passage from Capital in the 21st Century:
The median scenario I will present here is based on a long-term per capita output growth rate of 1.2 percent in the wealthy countries, which is relatively optimistic compared with Robert Gordon's predictions (which I think are a little too dark).
That's still doubling every 58 years.
The cornucopians are far more explicit and optimistic. Kahn & Simon, Maddox. Tom Worstall, here:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/timworstall/100017248/i...
This won't scale well with anticipated energy needs. It would be a real struggle to cover our current energy needs with wind and solar (with other renewables like hydro and geothermal being geographically limited, subject to environmental issues and more or less already maximized where they can be used)...and we need more. We're heading toward electric cars with batteries that hold 3x what the average household uses in a day (which drain in a few hundred miles), and will need more energy for carbon capture and desalination as time goes on...
>sounds ... environmentally preferable.
The main waste of fusion is helium, it's entirely possible that renewables and batteries are more damage to the environment.
Then again, if you want to look at things on that timescale, there's no such thing as renewables.
And why do you think geothermal power isn't renewable?
Though small scale energy production does seem to be renewable, using just geothermal to reach our needs would likely overuse the resource.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide > Nineteen years is preferred because the Earth, Moon and Sun's relative positions repeat almost exactly in the Metonic cycle of 19 years, which is long enough to include the 18.613 year lunar nodal tidal constituent.
C'mon mate, it wasn't even two sentences. Cool about the Metonic cycle, though.
In the long term, we won't just need power as good as today; we need something much better than today.
The next step after fusion would be some form of total conversion, of which the only feasible chances seem to involve black holes, so, a ways off yet. Probably not save to use on a planet.
Managing the millions of turbines and solar panels isn't a small task.
I would love a world where the skyline wasn't dotted with wind turbines and solar panels.
I as much as anyone would love a Mr Fusion from back to the future, even if it required hydrogen/etc rather than food waste, but the truth is none of the current designs have clear paths forward to grid scale production, or even small self contained units as used on subs or potentially space applications.
I do think we should be funding the research, but I also think we should be spending equal amounts on engineering better fission processes. The former is basic research while the latter is targeted engineering.
It’s a breathtaking sight, and the knowledge that it’s producing clean energy makes it all the better.
https://www.epa.gov/energy/power-profiler#/NWPP
California doesn't have as much renewables in their fuel mix, but they get better emissions per megawatt, since they burn less coal: https://www.epa.gov/energy/power-profiler#/CAMX
As far as I can tell, upstate New York has the lowest carbon emissions per megawatt in the United States, 294.7, thanks to lots of nuclear and hydro: https://www.epa.gov/energy/power-profiler#/NYUP
These graphs prove the failings of modern "green energy" because all that hydro was built 50+ years ago, and if instead of fighting Nukes and getting coal plants the environmentalist would have embraced Nukes we wouldn't really be talking about CO2, particularly if the widespread use of breeders brought the price down so that buying electric cars made sense without the huge subsidies both in purchase price and electric charging.
Put another way, making electric cheaper via modern fission would make electric cars more appealing than the unsustainable subsidy models currently in use.
Hydro/geothermal: nice steady power but not easily available everywhere.
Wind/solar: available everywhere but variable output.
Obviously it's easy to run a city on "renewables" if you have a convenient dam, but if you only have wind/solar it's more challenging.
But yes, in general compared to fossils it certainly wins.
https://www.ecowatch.com/iceland-worlds-largest-clean-energy...
>Today, all of Iceland’s electric power is generated by hydropower and geothermal energy, and about 95 percent of the nation’s heating demands are warmed by geothermal means.
https://www.sciencealert.com/costa-rica-has-been-running-on-...
>Costa Rica ran on 100 percent renewable energy for 76 straight days between June and August this year, according to a new report, demonstrating that life without fossil fuels is possible - for small countries, at least.
This is the second time in two years that the Central American country has run for more than two months straight on renewables alone, and it brings the 2016 total to 150 days and counting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Norway#M...
Montreal runs on hydro
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2019-iter-nuclear-fusion/
We are not quite there yet.
But fission has now lost to renewables, which are now at a levelized cost 3-4x lower than fission. Fusion's putative safety/env benefits mean nothing now.
The program now is existing on institutional inertia. I don't see this coming to anything but an inglorious end.
https://www.vox.com/2019/5/17/18624740/fossil-fuel-subsidies...
[1] and quotes a figure closer to 500billion, globally. Which isn't nothing, but probably also includes places like Venezuala who massively subsidize their domestic consumption.
This isn't even one of those situations where their use of the word is technically correct. I've never seen a definition of 'subsidy' that wasn't an out-of-pocket expense paid by governments.
The use of the word subsidy is intended to put the idea into our heads that we're all paying out of pocket via taxes to support the fossil fuels industries. But that is the opposite of the truth. With a few exceptions (the Petro-states) fossil fuel prices aren't artificially lowered by subsidies, but rather are bloated by taxes paid by corporations and by end consumers. Fossil fuel industries fund our governments, our roads and infrastructure.
In terms of human working time, £200M roughly pays for 1000 person years of work, so it's certainly more than "a drop of water". Yes, I know there's more than salaries and research tools and material are expensive in this case. But still, imagine 50 people just working on theory and cheap experiments for 20 years; they could achieve a lot.
You still need to work the HTS material into magnets, a vacuum vessel, turbo and mechanical pumps, lots of fittings and mechanical engineering work, gyrotrons and their high voltage supplies and all the engineering that goes with (including wave guides), neutral beam injection, two dozen diagnostic systems, coil power supply system, and all of the work that goes with cryogenics.
Edit: If this would be for a medium scale science machine then you would need divertor and first wall materials, as well as a decent cooling system if you want long pulse operation. If this is a power plant then you can ditch most diagnostics, make everything twice as large, add a breeding layer between the coil cryogenics and the vacuum vessel, add a tritium separation facility ($$$), and add a big ass heat exchange/steam turbine system. ITER is in between these two and is the first time it's ever been done, with all of the diagnostics and full D+T operation caked into the design. It's not surprising it costs 20 billion Euro and even then if it was a power plant it wouldn't be priced out of reasonability (~twice current electric costs). At what point do we say we just need to pay more for our energy and kick fossil fuels?
Basically this level of funding gives Tokamak Energy the ability to order purchases of HTS tape in bulk and start ramping up to building all their full-scale magnets as they get deliveries over the next 3-5 years.
Edit: I find nothing in the announcement that says this is going towards magnets or HTS material, but this would be a the scale of advance funding for 3 meter radius magnet development.
$200M is laughable - as is the 20 year plan. I recently reread Summa Technologicae by Stanislaw Lem. Written in 1961, it also guessed that fusion will be there 20 years in the future - meaning 1981 :)
The budget for ITER is 20b. The UK is only pitching in 200m. Other countries are pitching in the rest. The USA already pitched in $1b for example. The article only mentioned the UK because it was written for UK readers.
Nuclear fusion has a chance of being the solution to that problem.
These smaller reactors should be cheaper and faster to build.
Are suitcase-sized fusion reactors still on the table, or does this just mean smaller-than-a-football-stadium fusactors are probably possible?
A not unlikely outcome would be that at some point humanity is able to build fusion plants, but almost nobody will do, because they're just too expensive. Given the extremely declining price of wind and solar which shows no sign of stopping this seems rather plausible.
The energy produced by a fusion reactor could be plentiful enough that we can build more fusion reactors at lower cost than before using that extra energy to save money (either by selling it or by using it to use more energy costly but faster and cheaper processes).
I suspect that solar will become dirt-cheap for anyone who has enough roof space in full sunlight that it's essentially free energy. However, this doesn't account for people who live in apartment buildings, or activities that need to consume a HUGE amount of energy.
Case in point: the cost of getting electricity from point A to point B is a big part of many of our bills. "Free" solar and wind power still needs a well-maintained electric grid.
Step 2: burn said fuel for power, when needed
Step 3: profit
I'm not convinced we'll see a significant amount of fusion power in electricity grids, but for specialised applications, it would make a lot of sense (e.g., powering ships, or a hypothetical Mars colony that would like to keep the lights on during a dust storm). Building such limited numbers will, of course, do nothing to get the price of fusion power down. Maybe subsidies will be able to overcome the cost dilemma posed by this, but there's no clear motivation for providing them if the power sources replaced by fusion would already be majority-renewable.
aka enable them to be installed on submarines and so on.
CO2-neutral, stable energy generation independent of weather, season, time... with amounts large and stable enough to be independent of storage solution.
Wind and solar need to be regulated because intensity varies. They are location dependent (German North produces a lot of wind, but there's no feasible way to bring it to the South...)
Technically feasible or politically feasible? There's a lot of NIMBYism around building new high-capacity power transmission lines in Germany (e.g., Suedlink, Südostlink).
Fusion solves this problem in large part because it uses and produces significantly less radioactive materials... materials that wouldn’t count as a security concern.
by that time putting it on a Starship, and sending it to the Sun might become a feasible option.
Make fission 10x cleaner or 10x safer and people still wouldn't build them.
Make existing reactors 10x cheaper, but no safer or cleaner, and they'd be selling like hotcakes.
This has recently been upgraded to about four times capacity.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbekreuzung_2 (sorry for tze german, didn't find any english wiki, this are the largest masts in Europe, they have to be, otherwise the large freight ships won't make it into the harbour of Hamburg)
[2] https://eqos-energie.com/_press/eqos-energie-erneuert-leiter... (Press release from the executing contractor.)
[3] https://www.tennet.eu/de/news/news/tennet-startet-umbeseilun... [4]https://www.tennet.eu/de/news/news/tennet-vervierfacht-die-s... (Press release from the begin and end of upgrade project.)
Assorted videos and press releases from a few years before, directly related to the preparation of surrounding infrastructure, their upgrading, and moving heavy transformers around:
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU2OUtETD7I (8 Minutes, for rail nerds only, crossing a bridge in town during normal operations with modern diesel-hydraulic switcher loco, bridge making funky sounds because of weight.)
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7eWzeMxPTo (2m:47s, corporate PR of production site of transformer.)
[7] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Drachenfels&t=ffab&iax=images&ia=i... (Transported by ship from below the Drachenfels near Bonn at the Rhine into the North Sea, and then back on land.)
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88PLBOKZ8-0 (4m:32s, loading onto ship, boring, for transport nerds only, added for completeness.)
[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Vw6h64uzNY (8m:56s, offloading of transformer from ship and moving to substation.) [10] https://baumann-move.com/transformator-uw-heide-west/ (Same, press release of moving company.)
[11] https://www.powertransformernews.com/2019/04/30/abb-transfor... (Another one, same general area.)
[12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKjYD6CCgLo (43m:45s, another one, from ship to another substation, for transport nerds only, FF)
[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCpEw7wRgN4 (Removal of 'old' transformer from substation for shipping and reuse in another substation for the grid of Norderstedt & Hamburg, for transport nerds only, FF)
[14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnvY77LYSKQ (5m:6s, same one, by rail, trough the core of small town northern Germany with cobblestones and Russian 'Taiga Drum/Stalin´s last revenge', for rail nerds, because [15]!)
[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M62_locomotive
[16] https://baumann-move.com/transport-von-zwei-416-t-schweren-t... (Another press release from moving company.)
For being 'unfeasible' that was a lot of action, i think. And this goes on and on, not only in the locations i focused on.
Solar is great for decentralized grids where one's neighbour basically buys excess power from you, but transferring gigawatts of power from a large amount of solar panels to something like a major industrial area /might/ be trickier.
Installed cost of utility scale solar: about $1/W and falling
The cost of fusion (or fission) is so grossly uncompetitive that any use seems unlikely.
We don't have a finished design yet, so who knows what parts are needed (yeah, a turbine is a given, but still...)?
I do regularly see articles from that one nuclear proponent who tries to get Street cred by claiming to be an environmentalist while attacking basically all other environmentalists as communists that want to return to the stone age and competing renewables as a hoax/environmental disaster/communist plot. But he seems a bit extreme.
Indeed all solar panels on earth are just capturing byproducts of a fusion reactor that is the sun. But a fusion reactor at the scale of ITER is not proved to be lucrative even in an ideal world. I would have hoped that modern physics would allow to predict with great accuracy how energy efficient would an ITER-like be in an ideal world where all enginering issues would be solved. Maybe the proof exist and I'm just anaware of it.
If fusion becomes commercially viable, it will be well after we've gotten rid of fossil fuels. IMHO this will be somewhere deep into the second half of this century at the earliest. I might live to see that day but it's going to require some medical breakthroughs to increase longevity way beyond the current averages.
Realistically, existing fossil fuel based energy production is already at a cost disadvantage relative to newly built solar/wind + battery. That gap seems to be widening through ongoing innovation and also simply economies of scale. I doubt there will be a lot of fossil fuel based production surviving the next 2-3 decades because of this. At some point it will shift from being uncomfortably expensive to "this is just plain indefensibly/ludicrously more expensive; lets stop doing this yesterday". I mean, why would you pay 10-20x the nominal price of a kwh just to keep some ancient gas plant going.
The only natural brake on decommissioning this stuff is short term supply constraints for batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, and the associated support industry. Yes, it's cheaper but buying enough of it for everyone is just not possible even if you have the cash on hand until production capacity ramps up which may take a decade or two. We're currently deploying many Gwhs but we'll need many Twhs. That's 3 orders of magnitude difference. We'll get there, and when we do, prices will be a fraction of what they are today. But it will take time.
That in a nutshell is also the challenge for fusion. First we'll need to make it work and then we need to make it insanely cheap. Like fractions of a $ct/kwh. That's also the problem for new nuclear/gas plants. It does not make sense to plan based on current energy prices because they are going to drop by orders of magnitudes.
But it's necessarily the wrong kind of fusion (D-T, unlike the sun's fusion), and it won't be efficient, or clean, or cheap even when it "works".
The whole endeavor is pie-in-the-sky if you ask me, which reminds me, there is already a fusion reactor quite nearby that runs 24/7/365(.25), for the next few billion years. We should find better ways to harness it.
will the walls be replaced daily?
Practical quantum-computing is being achieved, but wasn't even dreamed of until the 80s. Have we not advanced in our understanding and scientific capability since the 60s?
It would really help to quantify how far we are from lucrative nuclear fusion.
As others have mentioned, funding is the main reason why energy production from nuclear fusion hasn't taken off. The better question is, what isn't being funded?
Ask yourself: how do you hold the sun in a bottle? The answer is that it's very hard, but it's doable. You just need to cool the walls fast enough and make sure the sun doesn't melt the bottle.
Based off this rough problem description, the main issues are the following:
- Materials: what do you make the bottle out of? Do you know of any materials which can withstand millions of degrees of heat? Probably not, so you should look into using magnets to suspend the sun in the middle of the bottle.
- Confinement: how do you hold the sun? The sun (that is, plasma) reacts to magnetic fields. Classical designs such as the tokamak drove the plasma around a donut to keep it confined. Problem there is that you need two magnetic fields: one to drive and one to steer. Some decades ago, people got smart and figured out you could design the road in such a way that the car will always drive straight, so great, you don't need to steer anymore. (This is the main difference between ITER and Wendelstein 7-X; personally, I think ITER will turn out poorly, but they'll learn a lot from building the thing...)
- Reactions: guess what? Your sun emits high-energy neutrons, making the bottle radioactive. You could use a different type of sun, but those are expensive and weird or would require you to go to the Moon, which is also expensive. You figure out you can line the walls of the reactor with lithium and breed fuel for your sun, which works but isn't perfect. You know other suns are out there, but no one knows how to build a bottle to hold that sun.
- Self-sustainment: you put some ingredients in your bottle, shake it up, and presto, you have a sun. For about ten milliseconds. Problem is, your bottle got too hot and your reaction creates exhaust you have to scrape out. Also, the magnets used to keep the sun in the middle of the bottle draw more energy than your sun makes! That won't do.
Self-sustaining fusion reactors are very hard problems to crack because there's so many moving parts. The fusion research community has suffered from underfunding for decades because people wrongfully associate the principles of Chernobyl with ITER. People don't want their politicians funding more Chernobyls, and Bob's your uncle. Because the funding has been so low, the problems which should be solved by now, well, haven't been.
Fusion's economic prospects are horrific, even if it can be made to "work", and this has been known for a long time.
A 25 year availability of a GWe plant (the conventional first gen plants that have the fewest engineering hurdles remaining) that sells all electricity it makes generates 22 billion USD in revenue.
Solar heating is on the order of 5000 times our current energy utilization (there's a similar amount of cooling).
Which isn't to say it can never be a problem, just that we are a blip right now as far as direct heat added to the Earth's energy budget.
From another comment: "Mankind's waste heat (~10^12 W) is utterly miniscule compared to sun's energy delivered to earth (~10^17 W)".
5000 smells bad — imagine that power output concentrated in cites or production areas — that would be severely noticeable.
Oh, wow, that's it!? We have MUCH greater energy utilization than I thought. That's impressive.
Our sole issue is greenhouse gasses trapping more heat than they should.
Disclaimer: I also don't agree with the GP's position
Even all the heat generated by appliances and devices in the world combined is actually negligible in examining global warming.
The problem is the greenhouse effect because that heat is a positive reinforncement feedback loop from where we get all energy ulimately -- the sun.
Both are correct in this instance (when replying to you I can't recall if it was the first post however I knew it was your parent / my grandparent post).
> Even all the heat generated by appliances and devices in the world combined is actually negligible in examining global warming.
I agree. Like I said, I don't agree with the original conjecture however it is still important to note that if one is only discussing waste heat production then the problem isn't just the generation of electricity. However the problems clean energy addresses are obviously more significantly other, far more hazardous, waste products. Hence why they're called "clean" energy.
So best case you will save about 30% on your bill. A fusion power station is probably going to be more expensive however, so you will be more likely to save less than 30% on bills.
MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy - Zach Hartwig
tl;dr: it's a matter of funding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryllium
Seems like there's just not enough demand yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
So about 30 years away?
Quoted from the first link on your PROTO wikipedia page:
https://community.dur.ac.uk/superconductivity.durham/The%20r...
Automobiles required a suitable fuel and a lightweight powerplant capable of highly dynamic power output. The first powered carriages date to the early 19th century, on rails, though coal and steam were not responsive, dynamic, or efficient. Good for railroads, not for untracked vehicles (not that this wasn't tried).
Discovery and refinement of petroleum (1835 - 1865), creation of the reciprocating engine (Otto, Deisel, 1860s - 1880s), suitable tyres (vulcanised rubber, 1844), and high-quality steelmaking (Bessemer process, 1856 - 1860s). With the basic parts together, the first automobiles appeared in the 1880s, but further expansion required both mass-production assembly-line practices (Ford, 1901), and expanded and reliable fuel supplies (major oilfield discoveries including Spindletop, 1901, Lakeview, 1910, and East Texas -- "Pappy" Joiner's "Daisy Bradford No. 3", 1930). Well into the 1930s, it wasn't entirely clear that petroleum or petrol would be the fuels of choice, with other petroleum distilates (NGLs, condensate, and deisel) and ethanol among contenders.
Once the automobile was developed, a period of rapid innovation and patent filing followed ... and largely tapered off by the 1930s. There's been incremental improvement since. Even in areas such as safety, mortality per billion passenger miles has improved at a remarkably constant rate of halving about every two decades, since the 1920s (the rate was twice that in the decade 1910-1920).
Heavier-than-air craft were also largely dependent on the same factors: high power-to-weight powerplants, a high energy-density fuel, and a basic knowledge of aeronautics. Development of aircraft trailed automobiles only slightly, with similar trends of patent filings. The DC-3, described as a perfect aircraft design in Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth saw first flight in 1935, only 29 years after the Wrights on first first flight. It remains in active commercial use.
Gordon on the DC-3:
The very aircraft, the “Flagship Detroit,” that operated the first American flight from Chicago to New York is owned by the Flagship Detroit Foundation and often flies around the country to visit air shows. DC-3s are used everywhere because they are cheap; one can be purchased for $100,000. Their popularity eight decades after the first flight demonstrates that the DC-3 is the best-designed aircraft in aviation history. Its ruggedness is legendary; a common saying among pilots is that “the only replacement for a DC-3 is another DC-3.”
Aircraft designed in the 1950s, and built in the 1960s, not only still fly, but serve as the backbone of strategic military bombing capabilities of the United States, in the form of the B-52, specific airframes of which will continue in combat missions through the 2040s if not beyond, and hold status as the fastest operational manned aircraft, in the form of the SR-71.
That is: there are inventions for which, once the prerequisite requirements are met, rapidly emerge and attain levels of maximum development.
DNA's existence was suggested by Darwin, the basic mechanics of genetics by Mendel, its structure by Watson and Crick, based on the work of others including Rosalind Franklin, and relying largely on the insights of X-ray crystallography. Direct manipulation and reading of DNA was achieved in the 1970s through enzymatic processes, though not well-developed for several decades further -- the problem is a fundamentally difficult one. Even now, the benefits of direct genetic manipulation are scant, another point covered by Gorden, in his general assessment of medical advances, or largely lack thereof since the 1970s. Still, at least there's been demonstrable progress.
And then there's practical nuclear fusion.
It's not just about CO2: a high energy society is a society that will hit other ecological limits.
I would add that centralized power production is an issue by itself, as it seems difficult now to avoid social and political instability. So unless we develop small scale fusion, which does not seem ideal (lots of disseminated nuclear waste in the form of activated reactor materials), fusion is not ideal.
>fusion is not ideal. Why does it have to be ideal? It should be sufficient. Anything is better than burning coal.
The best proposal so far is growth with speed of light in all directions.
> Do we really need growth or do we need happiness?
What about the people who are not happy when our knowledge about world, and the number of populated planets does not grow or does not grow fast enough?
> Once we scientifically solved major health issues
The two greatest health issues are senescence and limited capability of learning new things, when we solve those we'll need even more people to create art so that we don't get bored, and to develop new technologies so that we do not die when sun explodes in couple of billion years.
You say 'we' like humanity wasn't 7 billions or so completely autonomous actors.
This would be a more accurate sentence: '7 billions autonomous actors could decide to act as one, and the act could be lowering its growth rate'.
You see, it simply won't happen.
Which are mostly democracies, or sort of. China, Russia and North Korea apart, every big population center is governed in a way or another threw a certain form of consensus.
> humanity at the moment already agrees blindly that the only way forward is reckless growth
Again you talk as if humans were a single body. You're not agreeing blindly on 'reckless growth', as far as I can tell, and you're far from being alone in that case.
Humanity speaking and thinking as one is just a dream (you're free to dream, thought!).
Temperature is basically atomic/molecular movement and the more energetic the movement the more likely that crashing nuclei will react and fuse.
There are currently two major magnetic field designs:
- Tokamak, such as ITER [1] - Stellerator, such as Wendelstein-7X [2]
Apparently Iter was designed to make sure the energy balance works out, but we'll see.
Needless to say, but it also requires loooooots of related research, eg materials to handle the magnetic flux, temperature, etc etc etc.
Pressures are no-where near the core of the sun (300 billion bar), nor are confinement times (years).
Which is why we use D-T fusion, which is not at all the same as the "clean, natural hydrogen fusion" in the sun. That whole "clean energy, like the sun" argument is fake.
In particular, the D-T reaction is especially easy, and tokamaks have well-known scaling laws. The JET reactor in the UK is the only reactor using tritium and has produced 67% of its input power. In 1999 the JT-60 in Japan achieved results with D-D fuel that would have hit breakeven with D-T.
With a larger reactor, stronger magnetic fields, and D-T fuel, net power is the expected result.
(Not to mention, we've already achieved net power at human scales with thermonuclear bombs, which have far more energy density than a dung hill.)
You do have high-energy neutron radiation, but most of that you're capturing to breed tritium fuel from lithium. Some of it makes reactor parts radioactive, but that's not a major waste problem; according to presentations I've seen from MIT fusion scientists, they'd stop being significantly radioactive after a few decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor
The hard part is getting more power out than you put in, under controlled conditions. Here's an overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power
Probably the most reliable route to practical fusion is outlined in this presentation by the head of MIT's fusion program: