Fusion News Ignites Optimism
nature.com
nature.com
Also, I spent a few years as an engineer at a stellarator. This video[0] recently came out and I find it's the best crash course on the nuances of reactor design that I've seen. It really nails the thoughts and feelings of fusion researchers. It was especially refreshing to hear in public that ECRH is the only viable heating method for a reactor.
If you watch this you might think I'm pessimistic about fusion, but I'm not. Fusion has been sold as this secret Ace up our sleeve that will come in and decarbonize our grid in a matter of decades. It isn't that. That's what's been sold because it's difficult to justify the field when the timelines don't decarbonize the grid in 50 years. The important thing to know is that the world doesn't end in 50 years. Energy demands are ever increasing and the supply is ever diminishing. Fusion science is expensive and time consuming. Humans will have to do the work if they want to stay on the current track beyond the next 100 years. It might seem like a subtle point and a doomed one to make considering how shortsighted we as a society have demonstrated to be.
These past 2 years have highlighted to many how a combination of poor critical thinking and politicisation of so many aspects of our lives can lead to literal catastrophes.
Will the public see Fusion as the wonderful advancement for humanity that it will likely be, or will they see it as another dangerous nuclear thing? Will they see it as taking jobs from hard-working coal/oil workers? Will it be spun as the green energy sector not making their minds up and flip flopping between solar/wind/fusion/etc? Will there be stories about how we could accidentally create a black hole and destroy the world?
Hopefully I'm just being cynical, but I am worried about how the general public will perceive it, and/or how it will be sold by politicians and the less reputable parts of the media.
I think the first ~50 years of fusion projects are likely to be very expensive and I'd expect that reputation to stick.
Fusion, in any of its forms, requires some of the highest technology ever produced by mankind. It then exposes these ultra-high-tech wonders to extreme temperatures, and extreme temperature differences, and large amounts of extreme radiation (neutron bombardment), plus corrosion from the extremely fine hydrogen gas. Initial fusion power plants will operate at a very small energy efficiency, and they will need constant maintenance via high-tech robots capable of withstanding the radioactive environment that the neutron bombardment will create all around the reactor. Most pieces of the reactor will probably not last for more than a few months or at best years, due to all of the pressures described before.
Not to mention, the potential for catastrophic failure, though much less than with fission, is still enough to completely destroy the reactor and a good chunk of the plant, if the plasma containment fails. While of course incomparably safer than a fission reactor meltdown, it would still be a massive economic issue.
So commercial fusion, when it does finally arrive (or if), will be extremely expensive, with its only plausible use case as a somewhat reliable base load. Cheap fusion, if it is even possible, is much further away into the future than that - I would confidently bet that cheap fusion will not exist this century, even if ITER or others reach all of their milestones as planned.
If you claim either fuel cost or waste handling cost, neither of those is a major part of the cost of fission power. Capital cost is, and fusion moves that in the wrong direction.
But even then, assuming a version of "fusion tech currently in R&D" realized today, we can probably build a lot of windmills and battery parks for the price of one fusion power plant.
Again, on the long term it seems ideal. (It can be made portable, abundant fuel in the universe, safer than fission, etc.)
> Will it be spun as the green energy sector not making their minds up and flip flopping between solar/wind/fusion/etc?
Well, the green energy sector is big. Solar companies push solar, wind folks push wind, and well, fusion folks are pushing for funding and VC money.
But the important thing is, we need all of them. Plus batteries (and battery-like systems).
And, yes, there will be spin doctors trying to discredit "green" because X, but that's what they do anyway, fusion or not.
> Will there be stories about how we could accidentally create a black hole and destroy the world?
Good idea, maybe :D But we'll sure hear a lot about how much irradiated/activated waste it will produce, and how it's not green at all, and so on.
Why do we need fusion?
But fusion as a power source: abundant fuel source, cleanest (no emissions, minimal raw materials required, minimal waste to bury), safest (no proliferation risk, safest to install and operate, no need to climb towers), no intermittency problem.
Of course (economically) the optimal allocation of current resources/funds probably would not involve fusion research, but instead instant (ASAP) replacement of coal, oil, gas power plants. Then working on fusion. But if we look at what fusion researchers should do, either they could be retrained or we can simply go ahead and print some money to pay them to work on what they want to do anyway (fusion research).
I think this really understates the case against nuclear power. The problem with nuclear power stations is they are prone to the same kind of industrial accidents all large plants are prone to, and they are on the more dangerous end of the scale when it comes to what can happen if there is an industrial accident. You can say that people aren't accurately weighing the risks, but you can't say it's irrational for people in, say, Japan, to be very skeptical of their government's capacity to either regulate industry or respond to industrial accidents and spills in a way that protects public health.
Fusion power, as far as I can see, is not on the more dangerous end of the scale, so would probably pass all of the mainstream, basically reasonable objections to new nuclear plants.
(For the record, I'm not anti-nuclear.)
Fusion promises to make this main problem worse, not better.
Fusion is a great example of solving the wrong problem.
Fission has two problems: the emotional one – weapons/danger, and the practical one – cost. Yes weapons could be a practical issue, but I think it's more an "emotional" issue.
The question is, is it only the practical reason that is preventing widespread adoption of fission power? On the surface, maybe! Unpacking it a bit, I'm not sure. Anti-nuclear sentiment has caused government policy changes, not the cost issue. Similarly, restricting nuclear power technology to only certain countries is a political issue, not a cost issue, and more closely aligned with the former.
Cost is a big issue, but I do wonder if we'd get over it if the danger aspect disappeared. The long term economics of nuclear power are actually really good, it's just that it takes ~10 years to realise those economics compared to (e.g.) ~3 for natural gas.
Nuclear's long term prospects are poor, for one big reason: it has never shown good experience effects. This means its cost has not come down with time. Any technology like that is doomed, if it has competitors that are improving. PV started off orders of magnitude more expensive than nuclear (levelized cost of energy) but now is much cheaper, because PV improved 20% for each doubling of cumulative production and nuclear didn't.
Good point, I hadn't considered this. I would suggest that a possible cause for this is lack of investment though. We had the 1st generation. Most current reactors are gen-2 or gen-3. Gen 4 hasn't really started use, still in R&D I think. There are ideas for Gen 5 but no progress. Each generation seems to bring moderate energy improvements, and significant cost, safety, and waste management improvements, but the interest just isn't there.
It might be better if a string of smaller but identical NPPs were built with overlapping construction timelines, so groups of workers could specialize on one part of the construction of each and switch to the next in line to repeat the process. This would be a kind of assembly line without a factory. But this would require construction of many reactors, which means they'd have to be small. Renewables benefit from having huge opportunity for this kind of pipelining, because individual units are so small.
Human energy consumption has always gone up when the supply got more efficient, from coal to oil to fission. While here, the power generation itself won't have such a drastic impact (unless humanity overdoes it, though, we seem to always do that) but maybe more power means more consumption and demand for other goods that get used up while using things that consume power. And with enough power you can think about making things that consume more or even build more things that consume more power. Lots of processes that were considered too wasteful suddenly become feasible.
Just like with digital documents, when people predicted that paper wouldn't be needed in the modern economy and the demand for paper would decline, it has actually skyrocketed - because a paper document isn't important anymore. You throw it away and print a new one when it has a crease.
Historically, we've been very bad at predicting such side effects. So I won't buy in a 'fusion solves everything' mindset. Fusion power can be a boon for humanity on a global scale but it could also make some problems worse.
And we are much better at running an energy-efficient economy: energy use/real $ GDP has halved in the last century.
The trend may not continue. People might start to do much more air travel (which would require massive runway building). Global warming might increase the need for AC. But my intuition is that there is some limit to the amount of energy one person can consume.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/pdf/sec1_13.pdf
Edit: I found an interesting nature article[0] that looks at different correlations of population and consumption to identify if there is an anthropocene epoch. There are pretty clear-cut trends but who knows, maybe Earth's population will actually reach a kind of steady state.
Bigger cars? Supersonic city trips to the other side of the world? Weekends in Antarctica? A week in one of SpaceX’s hotels? High-resolution screens on every wall of your home, plus the AC needed to keep your house cool? Reshape a mountain to improve your view? Transform lead into gold? Mine bitcoin?
If energy were free, I foresee accelerated destruction of nature. At best, the world would become a gigantic park.
[0] https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-the...
Perhaps the reverse, eventually. If costs of space travel dropped enough, we could push polluting industry out into orbit and further, and start repairing Earth. It's impossible now, but if there were little difference on the margin for the businesses between working on the surface and upwell, then businesses would hesitantly say "ah, what the hell, we'll do our stuff up there, you go ahead with your silly environmental programs if that floats your boat". Social progress happens when the market stops caring about it, and doesn't resist it anymore.
The problem would be the demand for resources. Yes, there’s the asteroid belt, but it is far away. Would we get there before we would have dug up the earth? Maybe.
> Jim Crow laws established apartheid, that is, legally enforced segregation. Railroad companies provide an interesting historical example of business incentives. These private companies were often willing, against the political correctness of the times, to sell tickets to both blacks and whites and to not segregate their customers in different cars or compartments. Poor whites and poor blacks purchased second-class tickets, while rich whites and occasionally rich blacks rode in first-class cars. The situation was far from perfect, and violence sometimes erupted, but it was better than the segregationist state-enforced laws that followed.
> A historian of populism observes:
>> More than any other institution, train cars and railroad stations exemplified the modern dilemma of the racial order. They were places where mobile, unsupervised, anonymous travelers met in close quarters. Making the situation more explosive, those whites, including most farmers, who could not afford a first-class ticket met blacks on equal terms. In contrast to the workplace where blacks served white employers, or in the supply store where blacks owed debts to white merchants, in a railroad car blacks and whites paid the same fare for the same right to a seat. Accordingly, whites made the railroads a primary target of the new segregation laws. Reform-minded southerners considered these laws a mark of modern and progressive race relations. (Charles Postel, The Populist Vision, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 178)
Luckily, people are hypocrites, so they will say that we should 'buy American', but then happily engage in free trade. Or they say that we should segregate races, but then greed dictates that it's more profitable not to discriminate like that.
Yes, if people are bought and sold, that also happens on a market. Alas.
Apropos that topic, you might like https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/09/05/antebellum_ussouth_cott...
1980, actually.
I worry about this, too, but couldn't there be some positive effects here, too? E.g. what if it made desalination a lot cheaper?
E.g. if some process in steel manufacturing is improved to require less power, you might think, yay, there's less power needed so less CO2 released. Good for mitigating global warming. But what might actually happen instead is that it becomes feasible to make more things out of steel because it is cheaper than before, so more energy is used on steel production in total, even though per unit it is more efficient.
The same thing could happen with fusion energy, but in ways we can barely imagine now. What high-power workloads are not even considered now that would be cheap enough with fusion power?
Your explanation reminds of the common example that increased car safety leads to more speeding. And somehow arguing that increased safety is futile.
But people like having more steel and like being able to go faster at the same level of safety.
Eh, we are sitting on a giant ball of matter. Not much worry about using stuff up.
(We might use up any one particular thing. But there are substitutes.)
IMO it is not clear that fusion will ever be useable for power plants: Depending on costs (construction/maintenance/decomissioning), it might never be competitive with (battery backed) photovoltaics (or wind), no matter how much progress we make.
Personally I believe that fusion research is worthwile no matter the outcome, but calling it a "purely academic waste of ressources without positive environmental/economical ROI" might turn out to be correct (playing devils advocate here but this is important to consider, no matter how much pro-nuclear you are).
One thing to remember is that a major goal of fusion research is also weapons applications, those that is never publically admitted.
Could you give some more detail? What form would a fusion weapon take? Is it about the laser technology?
Having relatively easily handled, high density energy sources would also probably lead to deployment of energy weapons.
The NIF experiment explained here, which uses a laser to generate X rays by heating the walls of a heavy metal hohlraum, and then uses these X-rays inside the hohlraum to compress a pellet of gas to ignite a fusion reaction is very similar to the conditions inside an H-bomb, which also generates X-rays (via a fission reaction) to compress and ignite a fusion reaction.
The weapons use is relatively simple - fusion reactions expel much more energy than fission reactions, and using the power of a fission reaction to compress and to ignite a fusion reaction inside a large amount of gas expels much more energy than simply exploding the power of the fission reaction outwards.
JET, ITER, Wendelstein and other magnetic confinement facilities on the other hand are investigating fusion as a source of grid energy.
Or maybe you had completely different weapon applications in mind?
Also, fission weapons tests are currently banned, which also indirectly bans fusion weapons tests, as fusion weapons require a fission step. ICF experiments perfectly mirror conditions inside a fission-fusion bomb though, so are a way of furthering research into improving the yields or other characteristics of such bombs (which have existed since the early 1950s, this is not some far-fetched concept).
Are just reasons for countries to not want nuclear weapons. But if e.g. Japan announced a nuclear weapon program (or it was uncovered by foreign intelligence) I highly doubt that anyone could/would stop them-- hinder their economy or facilities with sanctions or sabotage, sure, but outright stop them from becoming a nuclear power? Unlikely.
IMO every bigger western-ish nation state has the ressources required to build nuclear weapons; they just lack motivation to do so.
Just consider that smaller states like France were already able to do this in the 1950ies, and relevant helper technologies (computer aided design, simulation, industrial control) are MUCH more accessible and advanced today.
Fusion research, on the other hand, is not going to help with the major challenge in becoming a nuclear power: it does not help with obtaining highly enriched fissile material.
If countries wanted to throw research funds at becoming a nuclear power, it seems infinitely more likely to me that those would go into "innovative reactor research" with the endgoal of producing HEU or plutonium.
I do not agree with you that Japan could in practice successfully acquire nuclear weapons with only economic sanctions to fear. I believe that China would be likely to declare war before allowing Japan to become a nuclear power, and I think it would have significant international support. Of course, that would be many years away, as a last resort if all else failed and their weapons program is nearing fruition. But I do believe it would happen eventually.
Whenever they talk about putting a fusion reactor in a shipping container, or on the back of a truck that's a red flag. Any fusion plant capable of useful power output is going to have to kick out enough neutron radiation to need some pretty serious shielding that just makes that impossible.
Another problem is the way they often pitch the energy gain numbers. Q=1 sounds great, the output energy equals the input energy, but that's only the input energy required to maintain the plasma. The actual energy to power the plant and run the heat exchange system and such as a whole (Engineering Gain = 1) is likely to be about 22x that. Then to be economically viable in practice the gain might need to be an order of magnitude or more again.
Since fusion does not work sustainable yet (or at all), I would not classify it as green energy. (Where is for example the tritium coming from?)
But once it works - it likely will not magically supply all of humanity at once in a way, that is way cheaper than what we can have with wind, water and sun now.
So why flip flopping? We use what works. If fusion really works soon, awesome.
But honestly, I have to see, to believe. What I see is, that solar and co. are working now and do not require a fundamental breakthrough for very, very complex machinery under heavy fusion fire to work consistently.
And desserts for solarfarming, we have enough. As well, as many, many roofes in the cities. Solarfoils might be the next big thing to cover them big scale cheaply. And stationary batteries can be made of cheap materials avaible in abundance. Lots of other possibilities, too. Simple, reliable tech, compared to Fusion. So fusion would be nice to have, but I would not allocate more critical ressources to it, that might be better spend elsewhere.
Sure, investing into the energy grid, sounds not as sexy and interesting as building a fusion reactor. But maybe that is, what is currently more needed, to make it more flexible for the fluctating renewable energy sources.
And with the sun, we have already a big working fusion reactor. Why not focus on harvesting that energy more?
Why do you think fission wouldn't be sustainable? Or do you mean, fusion alone wouldn't be sustainable? I guess that you'd always have some auxiliary industries.
This is where we are at, that is what we are aiming for.
We have know for centuries that all you need to go high is a big fire pointing down, but soon realized that the hard part was maintaining the fire long enough to reach orbit or other planets.
And even when that would become possible, the problem of how to land in the destination, build shelters and grow food remains.
So, why we insist on this irrational pursuit?
First because we can.
Second because the the search needed to achieve that generates far more societal benefit than just the space goals.
And third because society can pursuit many goals at once. We have several people, just let them explore.
So, fusion is hard, but very probably not impossible. The pursuit of it will advance science and technology. If successful, can trigger societal changes we can only imagine today (serious carbon capture becomes possible. Smelting of very energy intensive alloys becomes cheaper and possible).
And if the ultimate goal of a miniaturized reactor becomes possible, our spaceships can fly basically anywhere.
Indeed, the brute-force approach is to simply detonate a hydrogen bomb underground, tap off steam, then repeat. That was seriously investigated (I believe as part of Project Plowshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare ), but the high cost of the bombs made it uncompetitive with other methods.
Fission devices have been very well understood since the early 1950s, but fusion reactions are somewhat less so. The NIF provides an instrument for probing the plasma densities and temperatures that occur inside a nuclear fireball, so is directly relevant to H-bomb research.
This becomes trivially obvious when you realize that a laser implosion fusion reactor producing power would need to achieve in excess of ten ignitions per second to produce the sort of power output needed just to power its own lasers ... and that each hohlraum costs on the order of a third of a million dollars. (What kind of power plant costs $11Bn per hour to operate?) Answer: it's not a remotely practical design for generating electricity, so it must be something else, and promoting it as "clean energy from fusion power" is a cynical propaganda move to disguise a nuclear weapons research tool.
The final clue is that the NIF is operated by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, whose primary job is designing and ensuring the reliability of nuclear weapons.
ED: By now I assume I would be ignored if I was wrong.
The theory is there, but the implementation is not and worse than that, there is no "it will get cheaper with industrialization" in sigh, because we are not even at that stage and there is no indication there is a realistic path to achieve the efficiency needed to be economically viable ( ever! ).
The best positioned to deliver something tangible seems to be ITER, many of the rest seems to be more of a pump & dump scheme than anything else.
It's also possible ITER will just deliver a negative outcome, if they can't figure out how to control disruptions sufficiently. A reactor that violently breaks itself is not something anyone would want to buy.
Whenever there are articles written about inertial confinement, they always describe the current process (which I understand at a layperson level) but never how this design could be implemented in a repeatable manner?
The initial investment may be scary, but I think this is discounted per people's experience with Moore's law (whether right or wrong).
The goal is to start fusion by compressing the pellet using lasers and then use magnets to keep the plasma (charged, very hot gas/thing) confined to a small volume and hot enough so fusion becomes a chain reaction until all atoms of the pellet becomes a heavier element, when fusion stops (because a much higher temperature and pressure is required to fuse those).
This will generate a lot of energy which you car harness capturing the heat (by stoping the neutrons it emits or other method).
Use that heat to vaporize water to very high temperatures and use the high pressure to squeeze it through a pipe and then to push a generator.
So, this is a pulse thing. Pellet, laser, fusion, discard. Repeat.
"Energy too cheap to meter" was already an obvious scam with nuclear power in 1954* (because plants obviously cost TONS of money to build/operate/decomission).
I don't see how fusion power is going to change that.
edit: * "Obvious scam" might be a bit harsh, but it was definitely naive overenthusiasm at the very least.
Or is it just various fusion startups making PR waves to get more investments?
NIF is inertial confinement fusion. Magnetic confinement fusion startups have been making waves because of a new type of magnet which doesn’t need to be supercooled and can create the same amount of magnetic pressure w a smaller device (I think). In addition to that, there are the same old and not-so-old publicly funded experiments which have been making good progress of their own. ITER is still being built, but a lot of these publicly funded experiments are tied to ITER.
I have a hard time seeing the NIF approach becoming economical. It's more of a science experiment.