How close is nuclear fusion power?
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It really nails the feel of the fusion engineering community I've been in. Little things said in passing in this video don't show up in public facing videos (such as a reactor needing to be primarily heated via ECRH) yet are regular topics with experts.
TFV picks apart reported successes by fusion experiments that say they have Q ~= 0.7 when in fact they are reporting the ratio of energy delivered to plasma (laser cost only) over heat measured (not electricity).
TFV says actual Q values are closer to 0.1 or 0.01.
Yes, that's silly of them to hype. The question is who is fooled. Do policy makers know? General public? The community? Sometimes context matters when reading tech papers but at any rate honesty and clarity matters.
The important thing to note is that even though all climate projections end after 2050, the world does not. Better late than never. A carbon-neutral, virtually-limitless fuel, on-demand baseload energy source will still be handy even if it's "too late to reverse climate change". It will likely have a longer term of being handy than than the internal combustion engine will.
The argument this video makes at the end about "needing to spend research dollars wisely" is the exact thing the fusion researchers fear when overselling the state of the art to the public. They've been continually defunded and in spite of that still make progress. If they didn't tell the politicians what they wanted to hear do you think any fusion program wouldn't be mothballed by this point? The reality of the long-term value of the research should be enough.
We, as a society, can and should afford fusion energy research. We can also afford solar panel research, energy storage research, scaling up of carbon-neutral energy sources, and still have plenty left over to address aging infrastructure and wealth inequality. The issue is how the effort of society is actually being spent is not really beneficial to society. Whether we fund fusion research or not will not change that. Fund the research.
Intentionally deceiving the public about the state of your research in order to procure funding might work in the short term. But in the long term it is bad for science. Why should the public fund people who lie?
It is a bald faced lie. They know exactly what we think they mean when they talk about energy gains.
Indeed they do. They think "the metric we've been using to gauge relative fusion reactor performance for the past 50 years". You're suggesting not changing the metric as breakeven is approached is a lie.
It's so absurd when talking about an energy generation technology to talk about any energy metric other than energy in versus energy out, it's unfathomable to me that you could possibly believe it's not intentionally deceptive. Either these people can't be trusted with public communication from demonstrated incompetence or intentional deceit. Which one is worse?
They are using this metric in public communication because they know it gets them funding. Full stop. Do they not stop and wonder "why does this metric get us funding?" Your take is incredibly naive.
Fortunately, despite what's going on with fusion, I think most scientists are forthright and don't believe that the ends justify the means as you apparently do.
Yes, the Congress shares some of the responsibility for following the science so loosely that point wasn’t challenge. Still folks here are arguing about the moral relativism of deception to maintain funding.
Is there any dispute that the use of Q by scientist is anything but misleading?
Q is certainly misleading, but no one is misled.
>Mr. FOSTER. Well, thank you. And thank you, Mr. Chairman, for allowing me to sit on this committee hearing. I guess my first question is, assuming that ITER succeeds and that sometime around 2025, 2030, would succeed at everything including DT—the DT program, what are the—going to be the remaining unsolved problems A) to be able to design a production which—you know, something that is an energy plant, you know, what’s on the list of things that will be unsolved problems? And secondly, what will be needed to understand what the levelized cost of electricity from a tokamak of those dimensions might be? You know, those are the two things that have to succeed to make fusion succeed as—succeed scientifically and engineering-wise, and it has to succeed economically. And so what will be the unsolved problems in 2025 or 2030, assuming everything goes nominally? I’m happy to have—you two can split it.
>Dr. BIGOT. May I start? Yes. Okay. I do believe that the main problem which will have—okay, there is two main problem from my point of view. Once—okay, the ITER will have in delivery, okay, full demonstration that we could have, okay, 500 megawatt coming out of the 50 megawatt we will put in. It is materials, okay. When we will have continuous production of plasma energies, with some energy flux with neutrons which are as large as 20 megawatt per square meter, when we know, for example, when many——
>Mr. FOSTER. That’s the power density on the diverter or not——
>Dr. BIGOT. Yes, on the diverter.
>Mr. FOSTER. Right. Okay. Right.
>Dr. BIGOT. Okay. So all we could manage is some material which could be able to sustain such a flux continuously. And the second, we know if we want to take full advantage of the investment of industry or tokamak, we’ve—okay, the superconducting coils which could last for very long because there is no real use with, okay, superconducting coils because there is no energy dissipation, as you know. And so it will be the remote handling. How could we change some of the piece, for example, okay, tiles which will be facing the plasma or we could make all this remote handling properly done in such a way that, okay, we could take the best investment and have a long lifetime, okay, expectation for the delivery. So in order to come to the point you mentioned about the economy: it is a big investment, but if the operational costs in the long lifetime of the equipment are very low, it will be quite economical process."
>Mr. FOSTER. And is that—are there actually designed studies where you say just, okay, imagine that you’re not making one of ITER but you’re making worldwide 100 of them? You know, how cheap could you imagine making all the superconducting coils? How cheap could you imagine making all the different components? You know, you can be optimistic there, but if you find that the levelized cost of electricity doesn’t look—you know, doesn’t look attractive, then you have to actually step back and maybe reallocate between more adventurous but potentially cheaper ones and straight ahead with the current plan. And so what’s the current state of knowledge of what the economics might be, just assuming everything works technically here?
>Dr. BIGOT. Okay. Right now, there are several studies. As we know, ITER is the first of a kind, okay, and we have a lot of equipment around, the technology and so on. So the people mentioned to me very recently that when we will be moving to a real industrial facility, maybe the cost will be down compared to the cost of the ITER facility——
>Mr. FOSTER. Oh, unquestionably. And if you tell me you are optimistic it will be a factor of the—the unit cost will drop by a factor of five, it’s not unthinkable, but then you still have to do the cost of electricity calculation and see if you’re happy with the result. And that’s—I wonder if—those sort of studies must have been done for different versions of fusion machines at different levels of accuracy. What’s the current understanding for whether the ITER design point has a shot? I mean, that’s the question I’m trying to get at.
>Dr. BIGOT. Okay. From my point of view all the studies I have seen so far we expect that the cost of the electricity which will come is—from such a facility will be around, okay, what we call 100 euro—I speak in euro, okay, which will be 100, okay, dollars, okay, per megawatt, as you have now, for example, with some of the, okay, windmills or solar energy.
>Mr. FOSTER. That’s——
>Dr. BIGOT. So it would be comparable.
>Mr. FOSTER. —13 cents a kilowatt hour, right?
>Dr. BIGOT. Yes.
>Mr. FOSTER. Yes. Stu, do you have anything?
>Dr. PRAGER. I agree with everything Dr. Bigot said. I think for challenges, let me list three. I think one in the plasma science we have to learn how to hold the plasma in steady-state persistently. ITER will teach us about that but ITER will burn for about 8 minutes or so, and we need to learn how to have a burning plasma that lasts for months on end. That is in part a plasma science challenge, and there’s research underway to accomplish that, number one. Number two, as Bigot said, there’s a whole—the whole issue of materials research, both the plasma-facing component and the structural material that has to manage the neutron bombardment, and that’s a set of challenges, and there are ideas how to meet those challenges. And third, while ITER is operating, we are working on how to make the reactor concept even more attractive economically. So ITER will teach us all about burning plasma science and then maybe by the time we get that, we’ll have evolved beyond simply duplicating ITER for a reactor. So we can take that burning plasma science, ideas that have been developed in parallel maybe have a more highly optimized reactor. On cost of electricity, over the years there have been—the best engineering studies that could be done taking the cost of materials, the cost of assembly and calculating, you know, capital cost and cost of electricity, they always come out to be competitive with baseload power generation of today. However, projecting economics 30 years into the future is highly theoretical. We have an interesting data point with ITER, and we do ask ourselves the question, does the cost to construct ITER, is it consistent with the engineering calculations of what a reactor will cost? ITER is not a reactor, first of a kind, and so on. And at PPPL we had the beginnings of a study to try to quantify that, try to quantify how much extra cost is in ITER because it’s an experiment, it’s the first of a kind, internationally managed. And so we’re in the process of trying to get financial, if you like, data from the ITER partners so we can quantitatively answer your question.
>Mr. FOSTER. Well, thank you. And, you know, that’s very important to our—the strategic decisions that we’re going to have to make. I guess at this point I yield back.
In previous discussions here several times I’ve seen comments that not enough is spent of fusion research, and what we need is a fusion power Manhattan project.
Manhattan cost about $22bn in 2021 dollars, but ITER by itself will cost around $18bn to $22bn, although some third party estimates come to more than double that. The project was supposed to cost $6bn, so this is hardly a case of defunding. Vast sums of money have been and still are being spent on fusion.
I read plenty of SF with cheap powerful fusion reactors back on the day. I shared the dream, but the fact is there’s no guarantee fusion power will ever be practical. Let’s finish ITER, see where the alternate projects take us and see how it goes.
I'm skeptical of alt-fusion projects, but... MIT's Commonwealth Fusion SPARC reactor uses a similar Tokamak design but with much higher magnetic field superconductors to be much more compact and thus is planning on a much earlier first full fusion date of 2025, i.e. a full decade earlier and actually potentially relevant to addressing climate change: https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/cfs-commercial-fusion-powe...
All of this would be garden-variety corruption, wholly legal under modern norms, except that a rapidly unfolding existential disaster looms: global climate disruption, and the project steals money from work that could actually help.
The reason is likely just incompetence and management failure, not conspiracy to swindle money.
The same process occurs anywhere billions of public dollars/euros are involved, and it is not easy to track what they are supposed to buy, or how quickly results should be expected.
Since commercially competitive fusion power is already known not to be possible, no actually-useful result need ever be achieved. The longer it takes to get to the ultimate failure, the better it is for everybody actually involved. Taxpayers excepted, of course.
I missed that law of physics which says commercial fusion power is impossible.
Massively subsidized commercial (I should qualify, here, hot-neutron) fusion power seems technically possible, and could even happen, given enough corruption. But total cost to the public will necessarily be overwhelmingly more than long mature (by then) alternatives.
It starts out many tens of $billions in the hole, before the first watt-hour comes out. And taxpayers are already paying for that, today.
Mealy-mouthed wishy-washiness should not be rewarded.
You're talking like someone who has no clue.
(I should make clear that I make no assertion about the potential viability of aneutronic fusion. I am talking specifically about Tokamak.)
Guessing you can't, as no one else has.
We have to decide how to apportion research funds from a limited pool. One project's gain is another project's loss. We also have to take into account that we don't know if the research is too far ahead of it's time or not. If the underlying technology just isn't there yet, we could be spinning our wheels on progress because other fields need to catch up. That money could be used for nuclear fission research instead, which it's looking more and more like we're going to need to fund in the near future.
This is not total consumption vs. usable energy output of whole plant as you might expect. That one might well be 100 times less.
It might be, but it isn't.
Turn to page 170 of your copy of The Future of Fusion Energy. It goes through typical efficiencies of each subsystem then concludes:
>"Multiplying these conversion factors (i.e. eta h&cd = 0.4 from the heating/current drive systems, eta steam = 0.4 from the steam cycle, and f blanket = 1.3 from the blanket), we see that Qeng is roughly a factor of 5 smaller than Q of the plasma."
So why are scientists lying to the public? The answer appears that they are not, but they simply are not being asked to explain the entire history and projected designs of fusion reactors. You need more than a TED talk or an audience who at least knows anything about physical sciences in order to even start that.
Anyway, what kind of error bars do these numbers have? We still aren't even at Qplasma = 1. As Sabine says it went from 0.67 to 0.7 in 24 years. For me that's clearly too soon to talk about "typical setup".
If she wanted to actually show the progress of MCF performance she would have plotted triple product vs. time, where gains have been made faster than Moore's Law when Moore's Law still applied, for a period that began before Moore's Law and is continuing past Moore's Law.
I didn't draw my conclusions from 3 second supercuts of testimonies or TED Talks presented by someone who's making conclusions for me. Read the testimonies. Read the questions given to them by congress. Then you're at least partially equipped to pass judgment on whether or not Bigot was being deceitful. To be fully equipped you'll need to learn the history of fusion energy research and how the DoE conducts its communications.
0. https://docs.house.gov/meetings/SY/SY20/20160420/104815/HHRG...
It's always 20 years away.
The costs of alternatives to fusion are falling so fast that fusion cannot possibly ever catch up.
Fusion was always going to be an extremely expensive source of power--much more than fission, which is itself not now competitive. Spend as much as you like on development, construction, maintenance, each dollar spent takes you farther from commercial competitiveness. Meanwhile, each dollar spent instead of on building out solar and wind brings climate catastrophe nearer.
FRC D-He3 fusion might be a superb space drive. We don't know because dead-end Tokamak steals all the funding.
(I also recall it being 30 years, for about the past 50.)
Energy production is but a tiny problem to solve to keep our planet habitable by humans. It's not even a big part of fixing climate change as even if we found the miracle technology today, it would take the best part of the current century to deploy it on an industrial scale, which would be too late.
We need to fix what we _do_ with the energy, not just how we produce it. If we keep on building car parks and shopping malls and generally destroying what keeps us alive, even with clean energy, we are still doomed.
Of course, research is essential and this is good research, but it's the press enthusiasm around experimental fusion reactors that I am criticizing here.