However, it does not mean there will ever be practical, commercially competitive power produced using this method or anything much like it. The total mass of material fusing in a reasonable volume is so small that, despite the large amount of energy per nucleus fused, the power produced is nowhere near what would be needed to pay for plant construction, never mind operation and maintenance--not to speak of having to replace all the most expensive parts after minimal use, as they are destroyed by neutron irradiation.
Thus, every cent spent on this project actually takes us farther away from a renewable-energy future, vs. that same money put into building out wind and solar capacity and storage.
This is a fundamental problem in any hot-neutron fusion system. The real reason governments pour so much money into Tokamak fusion projects is as jobs programs for hot-neutron physicists, and subsidy for contractors, to keep them all ready for when they will be tapped for weapons work.
This is similar to the way NASA is still funding SLS: nobody expects it ever to be useful for anything, but the contractors involved need to be kept busy and employing staff for when a new missile system is needed.
There are lots of probably-practical ideas for aneutronic fusion that don't get peanuts because they fail to provide a conduit for funding to thd right places. E.g. D-H3 fusion in FRC may well be practical for spacecraft propulsion, but development is on a shoestring budget, hoping to test something in maybe 2035.
I believe you don't understand there is a law of diminishing returns on everything. If I spend 10x more on electronic chip research, I don't get 10x faster electronics, I get 1.2x, because improving becomes harder and more expensive.
The same happens with renevables. There is real state for solar and wind, places with lots of solar light and access to cheap refrigeration, like Algeria or Morocco, or places with lots of wind like the US Great Planes. Once you build on this real state, energy is way more expensive and it gives you worse returns.
On the contrary, it is a very good idea to explore different fields, because it is extremely cheap(the investment in nuclear fusion has been minimal compared to other energy sources) and gives you lots of scientific developments, because of the same law of diminishing returns.
It does not need to give you a new energy extraction mechanism. Just exploring what nobody else has done before, like getting plasmas at millions of degrees, have always provided scientific breakthroughs in the past.
Just putting all your eggs in one basket is not a good strategy.
Tokamak fusion will never pay back even the money already spent on it, never mind the billions more to make it work at all, or the many tens of billions needed to build a power generating facility, or to build another one two or five years later as the first one destroys itself with neutron flux.
I.e., we are already in diminishing returns on hot-neutron fusion. Probably the only result of any value will be a generation of practical plasma fluid dynamicists, who will be needed for fusion propulsion systems.
Meanwhile, each dollar spent building out solar and wind generates production capacity at least in proportion, with discount for bigger sites: the literal opposite of diminishing returns.
We don't even need to litter the ground as ocean based wind farms are quite effective in using the wast amount of oceans we have. If however we are going to stop using fossil fuels we need to convert that energy into a storage medium like hydrogen, having massive pipelines to transport it, have large amount of storage facilities, and built equal amount of capacity of gas burning power plants as we have renewable capacity demands. The economics of that is the tricky bit.
China cannot meet it's energy demand increase even with building nuclear plants at a massive rate.
Whatever our far-future energy use is going to be, it'll be from renewables alone because that is all there will be.
No, but they don't need to. Nearly all of today's technologies are incredibly wasteful as they are black box and produced within a system that seeks infinite growth.
Just look at the corporate-product produced e-waste [1], the corporate move against 'right-to-repair', and the relentless corporate walling off of the knowledge commons (scientific research) [2]. The effects of black box technologies on the education and knowledge commons are harrowing on their own.
Instead we can have an open source society that doesn't block people from learning, re-using and repairing the tech in our daily lives (and make it all modular). That means we won't use all the bloated technology we use today (goodbye archaic Intellectual Property system):
"The current political economy is based on a false idea of “immaterial scarcity.”
It believes that an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies – for copyrights, trademarks and patents – should restrain the sharing of scientific, social and economic innovations.3 Hence the system discourages human cooperation, excludes many people from benefiting from innovation and slows the collective learning of humanity. In an age of grave global challenges, the political economy keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits." [3]
The way to get there is a better and more open quantification of the material flows/throughputs in society. The breakthroughs behind Valueflo.ws and Holo-REA (Holo-REA is a combination of http://valueflo.ws and http://holochain.org) make this possible. Together these projects enable a fully distributed Network Resource Planning software (in contrast to today's Enterprise Resource Planning systems/software that walls of the material accounting of planetary resources).
"The current political economy is based on a false idea of material abundance.
We call it pseudo-abundance. It is based on a commitment to permanent growth, the infinite accumulation of capital and debt-driven dynamics through compound interest. This is unsustainable, of course, because infinite growth is logically and physically impossible in any physically constrained, finite system." [4]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27152968 / https://torrentfreak.com/fbi-has-gained-access-to-sci-hub-fo...
[3], [4] http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/peer-peer-economy-and-ne...
Fusion might have a place if there is a massive amount of energy needed to reset the globe to a semi-controllable environment - either carbon control, air conditioning / heating on a city wide scale, natural disaster mitigation, etc.
Changing weather conditions can also affect solar and wind energy sources, which make it less permanent. Fission reactors still remain a crucial investment, but if Fusion ever 'arrives' it could prove a more fundamentally scalable solution - of course, around 50 years in the future.
In fact we do think we need a massive amount of energy, and society is slowly turning toward the correct answer. Each fragment that catches on invests in solar and wind. Some come late to the party, but everyone gets there in the end. The later you start, the lower your entry cost; but the earlier you start, the more benefit you get.
This is quite the claim with no evidence to support it when the more obvious explanation is simply that fusion, if it become a reality, could power entire countries with a single reactor opposed to windmills.
Fusion is sought after so much as the theoretical limits of the energy output are quite gargantuan compared to anything that exists now.
How much of that theoretical limit can be practically accessed remains to be seen as always, but the theoretical limits lie orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any other potential energy source.
To say that fusion research is simply pursued to create jobs with no evidence is quite a strange claim when the more obvious reason is that the potential gains from it are enormous and that it's possible, and indeed plausible, that it could solve all energy problems in this world for the foreseeable future, and perhaps even in our lifetime.
Actions speak louder than words. Their actions are deafeningly clear.
We already have a solution to all energy problems for the foreseeable future: the cheapest ever devised, with costs still plummeting. All we need is to build it out. Building it out slower delays the full solution, in exact proportion.
> Actions speak louder than words. Their actions are deafeningly clear.
Yes, their actions are pumping money into it, and dismiss that without a source by saying they are doing so “simply to create jobs”, which is an absurd idea when they could have created those jobs with other research.
They are pumping money into it because they hope it will bear fruit.
> We already have a solution to all energy problems for the foreseeable future: the cheapest ever devised, with costs still plummeting. All we need is to build it out. Building it out slower delays the full solution, in exact proportion.
No we do not, wind and solar can not currently supply entire countries, even on a theoretical level, the way a single fusion reactor could theoretically supply an entire country from a bucket of sea water per year.
The amount of graft to be extracted from a $100B 20-year construction project already has some politicians salivating.
And, by extension, from a carbon light future through better nuclear in small form factor and molten salt reactors. Renewable is great but efficient, climate neutral finite source energy is, too.
Too bad so much of the green movement is still hanging on to its former peace movement sentiment of nuclear = nuclear weapons.
There is no place for nukes, existing or new, in a financially solvent future. Never was, really. It was always the high-cost choice, but (so) offered copious opportunities to divert money to ready pockets, like most high-ticket tax-funded projects in the US.
For the same reason, I hope it will never happen. We will fuse all the hydrogen currently stored in Earth oceans just to produce Bitcoins or do something equally crazy. Remember when Americans put down a lot of asphalt just because they had all the oil? It didn't turn out to be so great 50 years after. I don't believe fusion is going to help our planet, either.
While I do think that humanity is a destructive force, and we don't know how to control ourselves, that doesn't mean to me we should not develop fusion reactors. Because we haven't only grown in energy-consumption, but also in responsibility. From my point of view, we should stay on that path. Which includes looking for clean sources of energy.
Fusion research budgets are a tiny, almost negligible, fraction of GDP as it is.
We aren't so starved for cash we have to choose between fusion or fission - but that might mean less money for wars, the ultra-rich etc.
- Much more common fuels
- Lower risks of catastrophic explosions