Lots of negative comments in this thread. I've been following CFS for a few years now and I honestly believe this is an historic event - probably the beginning of the "fusion age".
I feel that fusion is one of humanity's best shots at actively reversing climate change, and it is disheartening to see such widespread pessimism about it. Yeah it's hard. There are huge hurdles in making it economicly viable, but if we can go from first powered flight to the moon in 70 years, and put billions of transistors on a chip in 50, then maybe we can get fusion going. It's clearly possible.
Couldn't the same thing be said about current fission reactors?
I get that fusion doesn't have the downsides of fission... but I'm also worried that people will be "scared" of fusion in the same way they're against GMO vegetables and irradiated fruits, totally irrationally...
People are terrified of radiation, even if the danger is very low. This means it becomes prohibitively difficult and hence expensive to build and run a fission plant because safety has to be prioritized so heavily. That is even if permission is granted to build in the first place.
I think it is unlikely for irrational fear of fusion to become mainstream like it has with fission.
Because of this I think the barriers to fusion power are at this point lower than the barriers to scaling up fission power.
We can just rename fission to #goodenergy or something, that would be cheaper then developing fusion.
People don't even know that nuclear reactors use fission, so the idea that this would change anything is crazy. People opposed will call fusion reactors 'nuclear' just like they do fission.
If a Fusion reactor blows up, the radiation risk is basically 0, aside from the lack of potential melt downs.
Fusion does indeed come with radiological hazards: a fire could release radioactive gas and dust. If designed right, the worst-case scenario would still be way less severe than for a fission plant -- and the worst-case scenario is really what stokes all the popular fears about 'nuclear'. OTOH, tritium leakage could mean that routine emissions are larger.
The day-to-day danger perhaps, but it's kind of hilarious in a sad way to read this right after fukushima spent god knows how long leaking radioactive shit into the ocean.
Environmentally clean energy source is not enough, it needs to be ideologically pure as well.
There are all sorts of approaches to fusion, and things such as type 2 superconductors were undiscovered 30 ago and uneconomic/unpractical 10 years ago. Timing control systems for magnetised target fusion were impossible but now are doable. Our understanding of plasma has been advancing a lot, simulations are good now, we can control plasmas much better. Chirped pulsed laser amplification is a thing now and really good at making high amplitude pulsed lasers for inertial approaches...
I could go on and on. This isn't the 90s anymore, and our technology is still rapidly advancing. What happens if we find more efficient/cheap/high power density thermocouples, or find a direct energy electrostatic power capture method?
Fusion's economic realities today may be overcome soon, we really do not know what we can do in even 20 years from now. The fundamental truth is that there is vast amounts of energy available in hydrogen, and all it takes is 100MK to ignite it.
And then you have the problem of having to stick sophisticated stuff in the hot zone where hands-on maintenance is impossible (compared to a fission reactor, where just the fuel and relatively simple hardware is in that zone.)
It's not clear why one should expect fusion to have good experience effects. Fission didn't, and the non-nuclear parts of fusion power plants will be mature technologies.
If reactors were ten times cheaper but no safer, we'd be building them like hotcakes.
The western world has made development of new fission plants practically impossible. Requiring 100s of millions in development before you might get a hint if the government would actually allow you to build a plant.
Thankfully this has finally started to change. Mostly in Canada and that's where we will likely see next generation fission first.
What has also prevented changes from happening is that nuclear scales down poorly, so the cost of iterating designs is so large. Making a new kind of PV cell or module, or wind turbine, is comparatively much cheaper, because these are individually much smaller and cheaper. The replicated nature of these sources is an advantage in so many ways.
No it isn't. If you have a regulatory structure that makes progress so expensive and counter to the government plan then progress is very hard to make.
Even the regulatory agency themselves have realized this and are changing their structures.
> What has also prevented changes from happening is that nuclear scales down poorly, so the cost of iterating designs is so large.
US regulation allows nothing between fully commercial and university research making any time of prototyping impossible.
Its in fact very possible to make smaller reactors that can teach you a lot and are not absurdly expensive and still useful. That data then could be used for to further inform regulatory agencies.
> The replicated nature of these sources is an advantage in so many ways.
Yes but even if it doesn't scale down well in terms of engineering you can still do factory construction of reactors. If we can mass produce plans, rocket engines, rockets and cars then the same could be done with reactors.
The reality is the government selected one winner and made deploying anything else practically impossible. The change in regulatory agencies has basically made progress impossible beyond marginal improvements.
The engineering undesirability of DT fusion has been known for decades. All the recent excitement doesn't address any of the known showstoppers.
I wouldn't call it that, even if there would be a energy gain.
I call it beginning of "fusion age", when we solved fusion ad can build them reliable and reproducible - and if we still need them by that time, for main energy production.
Since any fusion plant would necessarily cost more than 10x fission, and fission is not competitive, that is well out of reach.