U.S. physicists rally around plan to build fusion power plant
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
I'm just a layperson, I only know pop science level stuff here, but they seem clearly like the best game in town -- so, seriously, can a person in the physics world shed some light on why they aren't at least a small part of every article about fusion, but ITER is?
1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC_(tokamak)
(And, for those with an interest who still haven't seen Zach Hartwig's absolutely excellent 2017 talk: https://youtu.be/L0KuAx1COEk -- watch it!)
Are we going to wait until the sea level rises 20 feet and then say, geez, compared to the costs this imposed, fusion would have been easy?
Why are we letting a silly thing like scarcity, supply, and demand dictate whether we self-destruct?
People would be able to plan on the price increasing every year and make sound economic decisions on whether they wanted to move closer to work, etc.
Unfortunately, it became apparent about the same time that the US is almost incapable of doing something in an organized fashion. People would scream about the price of gas going up and it would be rolled back. Or there'd be subsidies that would negate the tax increases.
I'd say that killing coal would have a large effect. It would also put entire town populations out of work — a really hard problem, read about how UK tackled it in 1970s and 1980s, it was painful and ugly.
In fact, it would even be cheaper than the healthcare costs of pollution from coal plants, which amounts to $187 billion in the U.S.[3] And in Appalachia, healthcare costs from coal production are $75B annually, so we'd come out ahead there too, which would be a double benefit for the miners since they'd be both richer and healthier.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Stat...
[2] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/coal-miner-salary-SRCH_KO...
[3] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/coal-costs-us-half-trillion-ann...
But it still won't be built, because Solar PV and wind are roughly two-thirds the cost and falling. (Including the cost of backup power supplies for periods of low sun or low wind.)
(Not to mention having much shorter construction times until first revenue, lower delay risk, lower investment risk, and lower operation and maintenance costs.)
Nuclear had its chance in the 1990s. Today, we have cheaper and better options.
Personally, I think, for United States it does make perfect sense to redirect, say, half of the military budget onto solving real homeland security issues: climate change, sustainability, ecology, pandemics. There might be enough budget there to address climate change [1].
It'd be a risk to spend less on military, but considering that the United States has nuclear weapons and allies, is it a risk really?
I think nukes is the future but nukes belong in space; just build some fission on high orbit to perfect fusion, and bring the meat down over microwave or as bulk hydrocarbons or whatever that works.
Solar system has unlimited free meal supplies of raw materials on first-come-first-serve basis. It’s been said that extraterrestrially constructed spacecraft can be launched for free merely by gently pushing it out of dockyard, or at most shooting out of a maglev train, for at least half a century.
So build some gigantic fission satellites in space!
It can be both when the consent is manufactured! :)
Edit- link to article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/18/warning-...
It’s far too late to stop it with prevention, though there is still value in trying to cut CO2 when possible to blunt it a bit.
Well, yeah, the US spent the last 50 years (e.g. "WTF Happened In 1971?"[0]) widening the income gap and doing everything possible to keep their "undesirable" ethnic groups as poor as possible. When the bottom falls out, the only people left standing will be the people who would have been able to use the nice water fountain back when America was "Great", and anyone suffering will get individual blame for their lack of individual bootstraps.
e: In case I was unclear, I think this is a bad thing :)
[0]: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/, but I would ask "WTF Happened in 1968?" instead.
Interesting point of reference: the Manhattan project cost around around $25 billion in today's dollars. The US government spent at least $6 trillion on the coronavirus response, which could buy 200 Manhattan Projects. Coronavirus will kill around a million people this year at most; air pollution kills around five million per year (and sea level rises could kill a lot more).
1. Chapter 8, "Invention", p198 in my paperback edition.
25 billion USD buys a lot of necessary stuff, but one Feynman doing his best to crack a secret of nature is priceless.
And as opposed to the current advertisement websites with auxiliary functions, I believe they had a more physics centered role
Then one B-29 had an emergency landing in Sovjet and the soviets reversed engineered it into the TU-4. Tu-94 which is still flying is a newer scaled up version of this.
It's amazing how much of the innovation the U.S did in the 1940s ended up in others hands(the bomb, B-29). The world would probably be very different if it hadn't happened.
Jets and Rockets were built by the Germans first.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160201-the-wwii-flying-...
It's common knowledge that the US spends much more per capita on Healthcare, however the commonly offered explanation for this is that the private healthcare system in the US is less efficient than the public systems in Europe. But the graph in the provided link shows that US costs are split evenly between private spending and public spending.
This is confusing because the private system in the US covers twice as many people as the public system. Per the US Census Bureau: "in 2018, private health insurance coverage continued to be more prevalent than public coverage, covering 67.3 percent of the population and 34.4 percent of the population, respectively."[0] If the provided data are correct, this would indicate that US private spending is nearly twice as efficient as public spending.
What am I missing?
[0]https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-26...
This was the original article I saw when it was $700B: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/09/how-the-u...
More recent one, I thought it was $950B but this puts it at $760-935B. The potential savings are lower but still in the low hundreds of billions.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2752664
I originally started thinking about "how do we understand large numbers" when I saw the article as I think I had roughly the same emotional reaction as I would have done if the number was $70B. Most "big number" comparisons go to things like "dollar bills up to the moon" or "swimming pool full of X" which only gets across "this is a big number". I found comparing it to other enormous projects was hard even as if you take out the US contribution to the LHC you don't move the needle, so you need to then cover all countries costs, then the full project budget for all years and you're still left with almost the entire figure left.
The situation is quite different with nuclear fusion.
Anyway, I let Wellerstein reply to this:
"""The Manhattan Project was an unusual, somewhat dubious enterprise that had massive, world-affecting consequences. Ignoring that not only misunderstands the Manhattan Project, it misunderstands what happens when you pour essentially unlimited resources into a given field — which actually is the primary goal of those who use this metaphor.
The problem is, the Manhattan Project “worked,” if by “worked” you mean, “produced atomic bombs for use in the Pacific theatre during World War II.” It almost didn’t work — there are plenty of reasons to believe that the war would have been over fairly soon with or without the bombs (the main historical question is not whether it would soon end, but on what terms and at what costs)."""
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/04/02/do-we-want-another...
This is just one of many lacklustre attempts at justifying a hideous war crime. From Eisenhower:
"I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon."
America was more keen, but the logistics of actually invading the USSR would make any war essentially unwinnable.
Maybe if the nukes didn't exist, the USSR would have annexed western Berlin, but I don't really know how they would have managed more than that, even if they had wanted to.
I also don't think nuclear weapons would have prevented a war if the USSR was more aggressive or more close to the USA in military power.
*So called because intra-state conflict outside of NATO doesn't count.
You can't tell people to live a lower-quality life and expect to win elections, and you'll have the combined lobbyists of a lot of different interests against you.
It's actually more tractable to invent fusion than to try and win that battle long-term -- at least it's theoretically possible to make fusion work. And heck, if we could put some $ in pockets while doing it, that's something that could pass!
Developing fusion, carbon recapture schemes, we need to be thinking in terms of boondoggles that get the job done.
Fixing market failures increases economic wellbeing.
You can see this by comparing it to fission.
Fission fuels is not expensive on a kWh base, so cheaper fuel is not really a big advantage.
Fusion plants produce radioactive waste too (perhaps less?), so you don't save yourself from that headache. Which isn't actually that big of a problem either, even if the costs are probably underestimated for fission plants.
Now, the real killer for fission is the cost of the plants. They are just so incredibly complex and expensive that they are not competitive.
Will a fusion plant be cheaper? Probably not. It will most likely, with current tech, be much more expensive. So it won't be able to compete with fission. And fission can't compete (in most parts of the world) with renewables, that are still falling exponentially in price.
So fusion may still be interesting from a scientific stand point, and perhaps things will change in the far future.
An argument I often see is that renewables need storage, and that's true. But so does a fission or a fusion plant, unless you overbuild and accept a bad capacity factor. Some amount of overbuild combined with storage looks like the most economical solution currently - the specifics depend very much on where you are in the world.
You can't have a runaway reaction, because you need energy input to the magnet field to get more energy out. Instead of creating the right environment to get a chain reaction started if your control rods end up in the wrong place. Drop the magnet field and it all collapses.
Even if you lose control of it with the magnet field on the quantity is limited, tokamaks can only sustain bursts before going unstable. Wendelstein like designs would also be limited by the quantity contained.
If everything goes completely wrong you simply end up with a dirty bomb from the neutron bombarded core material and an initial burst of radiation. Sure not amazing but not a meltdown releasing vast quantities of heavy radioactive decay materials which can leach into the environment. Remember, fission is messy, it's not a chemical reaction where A+B = C. You get a spread of materials and energies, as seen by the Z number here. [0]
Essentially, you can at any point do an unsafe abort which might damage something or if everything aligns it's no more than a dirty bomb, but you will never lose control. Your Swiss cheese model needs to have far fewer and simpler layers compared to fission, vastly bringing at least those costs down.
I'm still betting on renewables for the near future, but my guess is at least harnessing fusion will have a place for projects with extremely specific goals in the 50-100 year timescale.
[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Th...
Fusion will also require highly reliable equipement, just like fission. Not because of safety, but because the fusion reactor will be complicated and very difficult to repair. The reactor itself, even the magnets, will be irradiated and activated beyond the point where hands on maintenance could be performed.
While the fusion reaction itself isn't very dangerous, the magnetic coils in a fusion reactor can potentially quench, causing them to explode, which because of their position will throw radioactive debris from the irradiated reactor vessel all over the place, as well as your tritium breeding blanket which will be highly flammable, toxic, and a bit radioactive. Worse, you can't make the magnets passively-safe.
Then there are the standard issues like tritium release. And you have nuclear proliferation concerns as a fusion reactor is great at making plutonium by just doping the tritium breeding blanket with some natural uranium. In fact, the first "fusion" reactors will probably do this anyways as they need to produce more tritium to get more reactors online and because this dramatically increases power output - so you get all the fun of dealing with fission products too.
I would be willing to bet complying with the safety standards for fusion will in fact be more expensive than for fission. Yes the general population doesn't have the same irrational fear of fusion that it has of fission, but once people start seriously proposing to put these in people's backyards that will likely change.
I am not qualified to assess whether that hope is well-founded, but there are real differences in the approach.
It's not that clear how much economy of scale is there with a modular design and if it's enough to displace the diseconomy of making smaller plants. But the one thing that gets cheaper with a small size is safety mechanisms, and those are a big thing.
See Bob Mumgaard's slides from last year's annual meeting of Fusion Power Associates where he outlines the research for technologies needed for by all the approaches to fusion power.
http://www.firefusionpower.org/FPA19_Speed_Mumgaard_CFS.pdf
Quote from the last slide: "It would be a travesty for somebody to have a concept that works and have fusion stall because we, CHOSE not to prioritize the parts that help everybody."
This is where government funded research helps the emerging fusion power industry.
I sincerely doubt we will see any uranium-based energy technology ascend to dominance/ubiquity while over half of Earth's known uranium deposits are in the Afghanistan/Kazakhstan/Ukraine region alone. Nobody would want to buy crude (priced exclusively in USD in most markets) if nuclear were widespread. We might have to lay off a few Stuxnet malware developers then too. Takin' their jobs :p
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...
Nuclear plants are using radioactive sources like uranium to generate energy. Fusion tech would use hydrogen and fuse it to helium.
Investment in nuclear has essentially evaporated. This is because fission plants take billions of dollars and around a decade to stand up. If you go through the numbers the ROI looks pretty ugly. Meanwhile you can look at the trend over time in levelized energy costs and storage costs, and can see that we're very near the thresholds for simply doing it all with renewables plus storage. All together this makes it clear to any investor doing the most basic of diligence that fission is a risky bet. Even if you waved a magic wand and eliminated any form of political opposition, that doesn't change this less than favorable cost picture.
The cost is the manifestation of the political opposition.
I want to be clear: I'm generally pro nuclear. I'm just exhausted by the smug "scared idiots and politics ruins fission" when the situation is considerably more complex.
More practically, Commonwealth & other private fusion efforts have been advocating for (A) federal funds to be allocated to solving the thorny nuclear materials science issues common to (essentially) all fusion schemes (B) a NASA-COTS-inspired cost-share approach to building the eventual pilot plant. (Presumably the industry players would like to get federal support for building their pilot plants (like ARC), much the way SpaceX got support for Falcon 9 / Crew Dragon development.)
This plan reflects (A) for sure, and a step in the direction of (B). I was involved in the early stages of the community input to the plan. I think there's openness to increased partnership with industry like this.
Except at Lockheed's Skunk Works, which is quietly plugging away on their own.
The other wishlist item is to build support for doing cost-share programs with industry to implement the larger facilities. If this gets traction, then the government wouldn't actually build the power plant, it would be more like NASA COTS where they help sponsor private companies that actually carry out the work. The INFUSE and ARPA-E fusion programs are tentative steps in this direction.
Edit: BTW, rallying around an improved pitch is big deal for the federal fusion program. Budgets have generally been in decline ever since it peaked in the 70's, and for many years there was nothing much in terms of a vision for the next steps.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21806334 "General Fusion"
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23979608 "ITER"
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629828 "SPARC"
[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24986528 "MAST Upgrade"
[5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25209666 "NIF"
[6]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25261068 "KSTAR"
However I also have the same impression, and HN is one of my leading indicators so it could well be coalescing.
Of course we must be aware of our "me,me,me" tendencies, its a good warning.
And that’s long before we discuss the tendency of specialists to over-extend into other fields with predictably bad results.
Additionally, with the new administration it's expected that nuclear may not be viewed favorably as wind and solar continue dropping in price. So there's a lot of threats going on and all these press pieces may be attempts at buttering up the people in power and also the general population to get them excited about fusion and hopefully etch bits off of the general fear regarding nuclear power.
Personally, NIF is stuck, it's not gonna work under its current design, and convincing Congress to fork out some 60 billion dollars for a modest increase in laser energy when we probably need 10x laser energy does not seem like a good idea. Especially when the food lines are getting longer and we're approaching an insolvency event. It's hard to justify.
There will never be a commercial tokamak power plant. There has never, at any time, been any reasonable expectation of getting practical, commercial power from magnetic-confinement hot-neutron fusion.
Renewables, with practical energy storage, will always be much, much cheaper than fusion could ever have been, even if it could be made into a workable idea. Any practical fusion plant would have to absolutely huge -- an order of magnitude bigger than the biggest fission plant. Then, it would destroy its most expensive parts with neutron flux in short order. To continue using it, it would have be be rebuilt, frequently, and at even more ruinous expense, using robots.
"Break-even" is nowhere near enough to get practical power out, because the energy extraction process must be so inefficient, with two stages of heat exchange before you get a working fluid you can run through your turbine.
Tokamak fusion research is, first, foremost, and always, a jobs program to maintain a population of high-neutron-flux physicists as a population to draw upon for weapons work. Actual useful power has never been the point, or any sort of practical goal.
Thus, the burgeoning hype is meant to counter the dawning realization that the whole program always was, still is, and can only ever be a shuck. They need enough billions poured into the project to make it politically self-sustaining, where no amount of failure can ever threaten its funding, because so much has already been sunk that it would be too embarrassing to admit failure.
As it is, to ever actually break even, all the fusion plants that could be built would have to operate for decades just to pay back all the money that has already been sunk, without any commercial construction, before even starting to pay back any of the actual (huge) construction costs. But the only way to keep them operating would be via enormous public subsidies, because they could never compete on a level field with solar and wind. So, the longer they were operated, the deeper in the hole they would get.
Correction: break-even is most of the way to a working plant. A “burning fusion plasma” is one that self heats. The plant requires very little power when the plasma is supplying most of its own heating. Keep the confining coils cool, keep the control systems (correction coils and heaters) running, and watch as the heat comes in. Q = 1 is the balance point. The distance (in terms of lawson criterion) between Q = 0.5 and 1 is much larger than Q = 1 and infinity,
Also, two stages of heat exchange are not needed and not a killer for power generation regardless. A liquid lithium wall blanket operates as tritium breeder and coolant. Run the lithium through a heat exchanger to boil water. Watch as the turbine spins. Very similar to PWRs.
So, there's been effort to try to maximize the power/area at the first wall. One part of that is the power that directly strikes the surface (ions, electrons, photons). The capacity to carry away this heat is limited by the strength of the wall material and its thermal conductivity, a fact that was pointed out by Pfirsch and Schmitter in the 1980s.
https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2131865_1/component/file... (see section 4.1.1)
One could raise this limit by doing away with a solid wall (with its limits on thermal conductivity and stress) and instead using a liquid wall. This would also address erosion of the wall by sputtering, and help reduce damage from plasma disruptions (which may well otherwise be a showstopper for tokamaks.)
Not true. The existence of privately-funded fusion efforts implies that some people think there is a reasonable expectation, and are willing to put money behind it. This costing study suggests that $2-6/W could be achievable for some fusion concepts[0]. Using some rough calculations, that would translate to $20-60/(MW*hr), which is competitive.
>Any practical fusion plant would have to absolutely huge -- an order of magnitude bigger than the biggest fission plant.
Not necessarily. Fission power plans with low power density have been operated, and may even be desirable from a safety standpoint. The current crop of small modular reactors for fission seems to target power densities in the range of 1-10MW/m^3, rather than the 50-100 MW/m^3 of PWR reactors. This suggests that reduced power density may pay off in terms of reducing the costs associated with risk mitigation (highly redundant systems, large containment structures, etc). Fusion reactors could probably get to the 1-10MW/m^3 range.
> "Break-even" is nowhere near enough to get practical power out
Yes, there's a distinction between 'scientific breakeven' of gain > 1, and 'engineering breakeven' of gain > 10 (ish) which is necessary to have net power output. But we gotta crawl before we can run. It's an important milestone along the way.
>Tokamak fusion research is, first, foremost, and always, a jobs program to maintain a population of high-neutron-flux physicists
Not really -- the high-energy-density plasma physics research (which is not tokamak-related at all) is more relevant in terms of producing people with the skills to work on weapons.
> They need enough billions poured into the project to make it politically self-sustaining, where no amount of failure can ever threaten its funding, because so much has already been sunk that it would be too embarrassing to admit failure.
I'll admit that I see aspects of this, particularly with the failure of NSTX-U & politcally-motivated decision to repair it. However, what I mostly see with the DOE has been trying to get the most of the 'sunk costs' by slowly ramping down the program (ie, not investing in new devices to replace old ones that are shuttered). I suspect that Synakowski's reasoning was: "if a breakthrough happens somewhere around the world, it's worth having a skeleton program in the US that can be ramped up to take advantage of it at that time." Now that Van Dam has taken over, I think we may be seeing more optimism & willingness to invest, particularly if that means partnering with industry (which is trending in Washington).
[0]https://woodruffscientific.com/pdf/ARPAE_Costing_Report_2017...
Examine some of those efforts in detail and you will realize utterly bonkers nonsense can still get funding. One well known effort was told 20 years ago their scheme didn't work, but wishful thinking springs eternal.
VC fusion seems relatively harmless, vs public subsidy, but each one is siphoning money away from projects that could actually work, particularly battery improvements, solar electrolysis catalysts, ammonia synthesis, and other renewables support.
For all Musk's faults, he recognizes such timelines are untenable, and pushes people to do the 'impossible'.
> Forty years ago, when studying for my engineering degree, I learnt a rule of thumb that said that nuclear fusion is always 20 years away. I was therefore reassured by the date given in the report (“Sites sought for Step change in energy supply”, December 3) for the Step nuclear fusion plant — 2040.
(Edit: Unfortunately it’s behind a paywall but will include the link anyway https://www.ft.com/content/e5af6548-a3a9-451f-8f92-268679d5d...)
It's not on "schedule" because we aren't putting the resources towards it.
It probably is the last one, considering that the enacted 2012 budget of the US DOE for Fusion Energy Sciences was $401 MM ([1], p 16).
But then, why is only the US DOE supposed to invest in fusion?
In any case, as of 2020, this budget was increased to $671 MM [2].
[1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/FY13Highlights.pdf
[2] https://www.aip.org/fyi/2020/final-fy20-appropriations-doe-o...
So, if that money had been allocated, it would have been a failure. There was also not the appreciation then of the grave nature of the engineering challenges facing fusion, even if the plasma physics worked wonderfully.
The implication that we'd have had fusion if that money had been spent is not supported by the evidence.
Turns out doing cutting edge science is expensive... Jesus Christ, who knew?!
Pebbles are uranium coated with multiple protective layers, extremely strong. They could be collected and reused if the launch vehicle plainly explodes on the launch pad.
As a result, the fusion "in 20 years" is much more plausible and feasible for the likes of SpaceX than fission.
We should be able to beat fusion's Isp with direct matter to energy conversion.
Certainly the mass of fuel needed will be 3 OM lower.
Edit to add: Isp is a measure of velocity. The thing about velocity is, energy goes quadratically but momentum imparted to the vessel (the impulse) only goes linearly with velocity.
Since no process can be 100% efficient, you're dealing with quadratically more and more waste heat from the engines. And space is an excellent insulator.
There are people researching that too, but not as many as fusion. And well, determining the capacity of things that don't exist is the first step on the work of making them exist.
No, because the effective specific impulse is so low, as a fusion reactor will only be able to fuse a small fraction of its mass before it is too radiation damaged to work. ITER, for example, would take 300,000 years to fuse its own mass in fusion fuel, but no DT reactor could operate more than a few years (if that) before parts need replacing.
If you want high effective specific impulse and high thrust at high specific impulse, beamed power is the way to go.
I mean, if you look at both Tesla and SpaceX, nothing they've done was thought to be "impossible" from the outset from a scientific perspective. Electric cars already existed when Tesla was started, and we've been shooting rockets into space for decades. This isn't at all meant to minimize the huge achievements of those companies, but the science was never really in question.
Viable fusion is simply much harder.
SpaceX has numberous "firsts", including reusable rockets and some engine designs. So it's not right to say they just do things we've been doing for decades.
And on the other end, the physics behind fusion is pretty well understood. The difficulties/expense are in building the thing, and dealing with issues like plasma instability. We call that "science" mostly because it is a state funded project. If a private company were doing the same thing, it would be called R&D.
Interesting perspective. I agree that arguably most of the difficulties are more in the applied side of things, although calling it engineering might be going too far.
The big looming physics uncertainty is crossing the 'burning plasma' threshold, where the plasma becomes dominantly self-heating. There are two aspects to this: (1) will the plasma settle into a nice self-consistent steady state? (2) will the large quantity of fast fusion-born helium nuclei destabilize the plasma in an unexpected way? Theory says it should work, but the proof is in the experiment (which is why SPARC & ITER are being built).
Better ones, driven by the government (albeit during a hot and cold war): the Manhattan Project and landing humans on the Moon, respectively.
Both had insane timelines, no clear or certainty of success but the pressure, backing and motivation delivered.
We need more of this, and yesterday.
But only where there would appear to be a benefit.
Fusion power generation will almost certainly operate like fission, in that it will need steam turbines, generators, elaborate cooling systems, and water treatment plants for the turbines and cooling.
The operation and maintenance on these alone is higher than that for wind or solar--never mind the operation of the reactor itself. The capital costs just for these modules are almost certainly higher too.
The project risk as seen by investors (delay, cancellation for social or undiscovered geotechnical reasons) is higher too.
So: generating electricity is not a use for fusion.
Fusion may have uses in scientific discovery. But a putative fusion power plant would operate well inside the limits of our knowledge, for reliability and safety reasons, so it would be no help there.
True, but the difference between too hard and only needing an organized push is often only obvious in hindsight.
You're putting the wrong construction on "too f'in' slow!!"
Technical difficulty is irrelevant to "too f'in' slow". If a technology is to make a difference now, when we need it to make a difference, it must already be deployed commercially at global scale.
Our menu of choices is: nuclear (fission), wind, and solar PV.
I get the impression that there's still plenty of details that we don't understand how to do. It's not like solar + batteries where we have plenty of working solar + battery setups, and we just need to figure out how to make more of them more cheaply. It looks like there's still some fundamental research needed before fusion can generate more power than it consumes.
Heck, 10-ish years ago, I met someone who told me his cabin in the woods was off-grid solar because an off-grid system was cheaper than running electricity to the cabin. We're not even close to that state with Fusion.
I'm impatient too, but perspective is important here. Even the leading private efforts don't have plans to put power on the grid for at least 10 years. Also, before this report, there wasn't an official plan of any sort for the US federal fusion program to get to a pilot plant -- so this is progress. (FWIW, I participated in the early community input stages of this report.)
>For all Musk's faults, he recognizes such timelines are untenable, and pushes people to do the 'impossible'.
Musk has a good nose for what's possible to commercialize in a medium-term (5-10 year) time horizon on a few $bn budget. I have reason to believe he's considered fusion (he has a background in physics after all). Instead, he's made a play in batteries & solar.
Now, if someone had ~$1-5bn to gamble, it might be possible to leapfrog the existing crop of private efforts by ~5 years. Just pick one concept and build the engineering-breakeven experiment (gain ~ 20) without the intermediate scientific-breakeven experiment (gain ~ 1). It would be significantly riskier, but it would save time if it worked.
Fusion power has been set back 5 years.
Someone please help me evaluate my design. Please!
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/2945/choice-of-...
Short version: because it can be read as “we, the author and the reader”.
But the site above uses phrases like “we have been granted a patent”, which come across as somewhat dishonest, making it appear on first glance as though this is the work of a team, corporate body, or at least two collaborators (and two is a huge step up from one in terms of credibility of any idea).
I’m not saying there was any dishonest intention on the part of this author - I’m just suggesting that radical transparency is a good technique for introducing an idea to a skeptical audience, in a domain which is very noisy with bad actors.
I'm working with suppliers, and discussing the concept openly with everyone who is interested.
Most of the time however, I am working alone.
Should I pay someone to sit around and twiddle their thumbs for semantic reasons?
I believe a royal "WE" is appropriate, but I could be wrong.
You might need to make a tough call to do one or the other.
The research is obviously the most important thing at this point. Without validation it's all just conjecture.
I know I'll need solid evidence to back up the idea, but I've reached the end of my ability to evaluate the concept. I can't find a fatal flaw, and that's why I keep trying.
I'm really looking for an answer either way. I need help to prove it will work, or to show it's a dead end.
While it's in limbo I can't, in good conscience, drop it.
Do you really think having a patent and an LLC to organize under are fatal flaws?
This isn't LENR with some mystic explanation requiring new physics. This is hot, thermal fusion contained by a novel, but very simple to understand set of fields.
I've talked to many, physicists and am open to criticism about the design. If I don't know the answer to a question I admit it.
Since it's such a new device, there hasn't been any rigorous analysis of it yet, so there is nothing to publish. It's a chicken and egg problem.
for those curious: http://www.envirotechdme.com
If I could offer you some pointers:
- Separate the Youtube account you use for this technology from the one you use personally.
- Specify in nontechnical language the advantage this tech has over similar fusion technologies. (still working on this myself)
- Seek peer review and then highlight that peer review directly on your website. My intuition is that most people or departments who are capable of funding a demonstration are not capable of validating the science behind your technology.
- I would recommend writing and attaching a succinct summary of your technology distinct from your patent, and devoid of the legalese and cruft that fills up a patent.
I took a look at your site and had some thoughts I wanted to share with you.
Have you submitted your research for peer review, and if not, why?
See if you can convince yourself that the arguments he makes about non-equilibrium systems don't apply to your concept, and then write a white paper explaining your argument.
The instant ions leave the hot thermal focus, each one flys off on its own independent cyclotron trajectory. Their collective motion results in another dense, hot, thermal focus one period later.
I'd say that China will have a fully functioning plant in 3-5 years.
this doesn't seem terribly "ambitious"
Take that away and the wells lose their competitiveness really quickly
http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/contours/rtmLmp.html
Right as I post this there's a spot in NE Texas where the wholesale price of electricity is negative 6.275 cents per kWh.
There's a good reason everyone gave up building nuclear power plants in Texas.
Honestly, fission is probably the best 0 carbon power technology though, it just blows everything out of the water. We’re almost recovered from the no nuke nonsense of the 60s and the rumblings of new power plant designs and companies are growing louder so there’s hope yet.
I guess that's kind of what I am afraid of. Plus the issue of waste storage.
Rank 33: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...
[0]: https://newpacificmetals.com/mining-101/mineral-estimates-re...
“Worldwide lithium resources identified by USGS started to increase in 2017 owing to continuing exploration. Identified resources in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 were 41, 47, 54, 62 and 80 million tonnes, respectively.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Reserves
There is little to suggest this trend will suddenly stop unless we simply stop looking. Further, a 5x increase in lithium has minimal impact on the long term EV or grid storage economics. That’s a lot of wiggle room for more expensive extraction.
Even resources is an underestimation as again it’s based on economic assumptions that are quite flexible. New technology for example can change what’s considered economically feasible.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery...
One of my favorite debunkers of these terrible rumors and studies is Auke Hoestra. One of his more recent debunkings, in addition to being very wrong on the facts, was funded by a shell of Aston Martin, and shilled without criticism by several "journalists" in UK papers:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/astongate-fake-emission-figur...
Those in the renewable industry are too busy building to mount much of a defense. Perhaps once they've become rich and indolent they can start acting this way.
Also, as a side note, a typical electric car battery is enough to power the typical US house for three days. Three days of storage is probably more than we will need to get to 100% renewable energy. The very idea of converting cars to electric entails an amount of batteries that most skeptics will say is impossible. Yet we know it won't be that hard, as new reserves are developed all the time.
Including transit, shipping, airlines, and other industries where batteries won't quite cut it (not to mention deep-space exploration).
* As long as the generation and consumption both take place under the same government and the transmission infrastructure is safe from disruption.
So many plans about theoretical continental grids in Europe (with the extra mile of them being powered by solar in Africa) ignore the political reality that no government is going to give up significant chunks of the energy security of their country to something ouside their control.
Houston is a big city. Its metro population is about 7 million. And Houston has a lot of industry, probably the most industrial of the major Texas cities.
Texas is big, and depending on what part of West Texas you're talking about, Houston is pretty far away from it. For example, it's a 350 mile (~550km) drive between Abilene and Houston, and it's a 600 mile (~950km) drive between Amarillo and Houston.
After lots of wind generation got built in West Texas, they had to add more power lines to bring the power to the more populated part of the state. And they did, and it worked.
Fusion shouldn't be considered an essential prerequisite to address climate change, but it would be better to have it as an option than not. Being able to generate constant power reliably is very convenient.
Also storage isn't even a concern until solar/wind reaches far greater penetration.
Typical solar irradiance is 1000W/m^2. Mean sunshine hours where I live is 3000hrs/y. Assuming 100% efficiency, 100% solar irradiance, perfect angle etc for those 3000hours, we get ~10^10J of energy. Those are bad assumptions, but very generous.
In a gram of deuterium, per e=mc^2, we get ~10^12J. There is 100x more energy in a single gram of deterium than a year of intense sunshine. Deterium is far from rare -- 1 part in ~10,000. Consider the vast amounts of deterium in the oceans and realize if fusion becomes a reality, nuclear, solar, oil, wind etc all become irrelevant overnight.
I recommend this https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/01/nuclear-fusion/
for a layman's introduction of the energy scales involved here.
You might end up being right, but I think it's actually very far from clear that fusion will ever win on cost.
Deuterium is not antimatter, where they entire mass of the substance is converted to energy. In nuclear reactions only a very small percentage of matter (~1%) is converted to energy.
per square meter.
Both are fair small quantities.
From the Wikipedia, D+T fusion leads to 17.6MeV, while their total energy is around 4.5GeV, so 1% is overstating it a few times.
To get all the energy out of a deuteron, you need an anti-deuteron. This is dramatically less practical than thermonuclear fusion because we have no credible source of meaningful amounts of anti-matter fuel.
The linked ucsd page is pretty solid.
I guess the existing economics will be broken at some point if the cost of everything will be driven down in such a way. Are there any articles/works that explore this issue?