Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change?
newyorker.com
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Yeah sure, why not
Nuclear is already the answer but people are afraid and even countries lead by "smart people" such as Germany are slowly decommissioning their nuclear power plants...
In the meantime we're using more and more energy while putting all our eggs in the "intermittent energy sources" basket. It might have been fine if we all lived like 1960s era people but I don't see how that would work in today's world
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27202794
There are no accidents when it comes to big things like that
I live in Berlin and I don't know any German who is for nuclear power
It's about the same cost on a per-megawatt basis. Modern fission plants are totally safe. Nuclear waste is basically a non-problem, especially with the most recent technology.
And fission has the huge benefit of being a mature, proven technology.
What's the big benefit of fusion that makes it worth investing so much money?
The only thing I can see is that it doesn't require uranium, which can be abused to make weapons. But does that by itself justify the investment?
Just removing that as part of the rhetoric around the tech makes fusion invaluable.
It's best to think of fusion as a way to generate effectively unlimited amounts of energy, kicking in 50-100 years from today. This could be super useful for the long-term ambitions of human civilization - energy has been such a hard constraint for so long that people have barely thought about the amazing stuff we could do with an effectively unlimited energy supply.
For addressing climate change, it's likely to be too-little-too-late to bank on. But a century from now it'll be nice for cheap fresh water / agriculture / climate control anywhere on this planet, space elevators, interplanetary/interstellar travel, terraforming, cheap fresh water / agriculture / climate control on other planets, etc. This sort of stuff is incredibly energy-hungry and it's unlikely that renewables will be able to supply the requirements alone.
(It'd be awesome if one of the private fusion start-ups gets us there a lot faster, but this is what I'm projecting for now!)
I don't understand where this concept is coming from. The best ever fusion power experiments so far have not even produced 1 miliwatt net electrical power. ITER, if it succeeds in its 30 year timeline, will not be even close to engineering breakeven (net power generation) - they estimate 0.57 output power/input power ratio - with DEMO hoping to break even 20 years later.
Why is there this bizarre idea that we'll jump from <massive effort to get even one miliwatt> to <unlimited power> with fusion?
The hype is coming from REBCO tape magnets which aren’t in ITER. Many consider ITER to already be obsolete.
This is like how computers used to take up whole rooms in the 50s but later could sit in the corner. Fusion takes up whole buildings (ITER) but the MIT ppl proved a magnet so that it can fit in just a room.
As our magnets get stronger the tokamaks can get smaller. Room sized tokamak is manageable for commercialization. Commonwealth Fusion Systems has a pretty clear path it seems.
Jokes aside, fusion would provide way more energy per fuel mass than any other source if we could only contain sufficiently hot plasma. Better magnets may be the key, as the other comment alludes.
Here is another physicist warning about the hype just a few days ago: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-close-is-nuclea...
$2.2bn over 5 years is about $1.50 per person per year. It's comparable to the funding for the CPB.
Add to that the fact that there is no fukushima style meltdown in a fusion power plant. If something goes wrong, it just stops.
Finally, contrary to fission, fusion power plants will be able to adjust their power output as fast as gaz power plants. It takes months to turn on or off a fission power plant.
So yes, there is definitely a few benefits to fusion. And take a step back on the numbers. Look at how much we injected in banks in 2008. If it works (and indeed there is a risk they won't make it work and this is probably where the argument should be) the investment would be amortize over thousands of years...
Can you imaging a guy, 3000 years ago in China, complaining about spending money on a kiln to smelt that thing called iron?...
If it reduces the cost. But it doesn't seem to.
>Add to that the fact that there is no fukushima style meltdown in a fusion power plant. If something goes wrong, it just stops.
Same as the most recent fission plants.
How are these 2 things the same?
On one hand, you rely on a good design and execution to achieve an automatic stop. History has shown time and again that there will always be something that goes wrong: from the cracking rods of Chernobyl to the backup power at Fukushima.
On the other, if you don't design and execute perfectly, nothing works, so there is nothing to shut down. This is the definition of "fail safe".
It's like saying both a meteorite and a rocket will reach 500km/h in the atmosphere, but me it's pretty obvious one is much more likely to do so.
Absolutely. But these benefits are vastly outweighed by one benefit shared by fission, solar cells, and wind turbines: those things are real.
Wind power was exploited since the 11th century? Or is it 13th? I'm not that clear on that. Solar cell appeared somewhat late in the 19th century.
Fusion is real too, and older than all of those. The issue is the scale.
What are you referring to?
There does seem to be some movement in fusion technology, but it has also been in the “soon” state for decades now. There is no obvious way to balance these two contending data points
Not feasible, too expensive, doesnt work.
And yet here we are.
Well, so does any gen3 fission reactor. That makes the gen 3.5 EPR "now with core-catcher" an over-engineered, useless and costly project.
>> Finally, contrary to fission, fusion power plants will be able to adjust their power output as fast as gaz power plants. It takes months to turn on or off a fission power plant.
No, it takes up to 6 hours on gen3, depending on design. Some French reactors can go from 100% to 0 in less than an hour, and from >0% to 100% in two (although this is very, very inefficient). A 5% change, in some cases, can be reached in 15s. The issue is that everytime a reactor is not running at 100%, you loose a lot since all the cost stay the same (fuel cost is less than marginal).
The main advantage of fusion is near-infinite available fuel at current energy consumption. That said, with Gen4 and all those new shiny research on surgenerating reactors, the same could be said of fission. I guess the main issue is our appreciation of risk.
That's already the case with the CANDU reactors. They also don't need upgraded uranium, and can use uranium from decommissioned nuclear weapons.
If you're talking about the US, those were loans which, simply put, returned a profit to the US within a short number of years.
https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/
$634 billion out, $743 billion in for about $109 billion in profit for the taxpayers in about ten years.
While I agree that major investment into future technology is important, I think comparing it to short term loans that had collateral in the form of bank equity, and which were repaid with a profit to the government, is a poor comparison.
That's not true actually. A fusion plant can leak highly radioactive tritium, poisoning anyone in the plant or relatively near. A magnetic containment plant can lose plasma containment and get a pretty giant explosion, definitely destroying the extremely expensive machinery, and likely also killing many inside the plant. This explosion would also throw parts of the radioactive reactor all around.
It's definitely nowhere near Chernobyl risks, but "if anything goes wrong it just stops" is not as guaranteed as is often made out.
Fusion sort of looks like it will give you that dynamic, only more extreme. Fuel even cheaper, plants even more expensive and time-consuming (and risky, given lack of track-record)
Solving the waste problem is nice, but not climate-relevant (and you will still be generating a bunch of activated metal due to all the fusion neutrons)
I agree with you that humanity wants to be fusing a lot of hydrogen in 100 years. I don't think it's super relevant to the challenges of the next 20, though
Please elaborate on both. And I think we can all agree there's no such thing as totally safe, only risk management.
For the nuclear wast beeing a non-problem: i don't agree, but i understand where he is coming from.
There is basically 3 type of nuclear waste: low-activity waste is waste that we could ignore, and the most present. radioactivity levels are what is find in granitic area. Often indirectly contaminated materials, or very long-lived isotope (radioactive decay is long, the the material is not very radioactive). It can still be dangerous and create radon gas if poorly stored (as do caves in granitic areas). We have no good answer to that. Maybe separate long=lived isotopes from the rest, store it, and reuse the contaminated materials after waiting a dozen years, mixing it with new cement or something.
intermediate-activity waste: still extremely dangerous, its often contaminated material (filter, pipes), or active (and dangerous) isotopes, with a half-life of up 500 years (i think the most present have an half-life of 200 years, and you need 10 cycles basically to be rid of it). Those are not direct fission byproduct (i don't think so, i don't remember exactly, maybe a small number is?).
High-activity waste: This is the real dangerous stuff. Those can stay hot for years. There is to kind:
- direct fission byproducts. Some degrade not in stable isotopes, but in the intermediate-activity waste, so even with a short half-life, they take as long as the intermediate ones to get rid of (since they degrade into it. If i'm over-explaining, sorry). Some degrade into stable heavy metals that also poison the environment, in a different way.
- transuranic elements. The graphite from Chernobyl could be counted in this category? (not sure, if an expert is here, can you infirm this?). I do not exactly understand this category, but its basically elements from the reactor core that are not fission products.
The reason why GP said "Nuclear waste is basically a non-problem" might be because we are able to re-use some the fission products, and to deactivate the rest. Both technologies are at an experimental stage, the first one could be in commercial use in the decade if China doesn't fail. And since the fission product decay is what's create the most troublesome waste (half-life between 100 and 500 years mean the wast stay dangerous for between 1000 and 5000 years), its a "non-problem".
I don't have the material on hand, i learned that in 2019. i could find it again if you wanted (probably mostly be in French, sorry), and to be fair, i might have oversimplified things i did not understand in the first place.
Ha what? The number of flaws in any system is unknowable. We thought the Fukushima Daiichi reactors were safe and then what happened? Meltdown because the backup generators were flooded.
That statement transposed to software engineering is like saying "we use Kubernetes so we have 24/7 uptime".
4-20 times the energy density of fissionable materials[0] and fuel that's the most common element in the universe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#In_nuclear_reac...
I'll leave that as an (fairly obvious) exercise for you, dear reader.
Unless there's a war. Unless corruption leads to poor management of the plants. Unless nuclear waste is mismanaged. Unless there is an earthquake or tsunami of completely unexpected intensity.
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/critics-challenge-...
No for mismanagement, earthquake or tsunami, the gen3 are completely safe, all security mesures are passives, unless the fault is directly on the core, it will fail gracefully. Irradiated water might leak, but to be fair, underground water in granitic areas are more irradiated than the fission product pool.
Issues are war (and in this case, direct sabotage from an actor with actual knowledge, or a direct hit into a functioning reactor, so pretty much on purpose strike. I wouldn't be afraid of terrorism) and waste.
Based on a HN recommendation, I read this book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Fusion-Energy-Popular-Scienc...
The authors argue that ITER will get there and it's a matter of time, funding, and politics. SPARC might be able to get there around roughly the same time. Neither will be hooked up to the grid, but they will demonstrate the tech needed to make a viable fusion power plant. Unfortunately none of the other exciting fusion projects out there will be able to get off the ground due to fairly fundamental limitations.
If you ignore any tedious jokes about when fusion power will be ready, and assume it will be ready in a few decades, it's still a process that converts reasonable quantities of seawater into power, with no CO2 emissions, and is relatively safe compared to fission.
It won't be ready in time to reduce emissions enough to prevent catastrophic climate change. However, it can be ready soon enough to power the devices we'll need to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere once we've reduced our emissions to the point of diminishing returns.
After the concept has been demonstrated, there's plenty of scope for improvement which will make it better and cheaper. On the other hand, the price of oil will increase as emissions taxes are introduced (I hesitate to say that we'll run out of reserves).
There's a lot more mileage in fission technology that what's commonly deployed for power, but the new types of reactors needed make it far easier to produce weapons(). Also, although fission technology is mature and safe, the human factors around it are not, which will still lead to accidents, contamination, and deliberate theft.
() Fusion reactors would also make it possible to breed fissile material since they are a neutron source but it would be slower and easy to detect.
Agreed, that seems like the biggest opportunity for fusion to fit into climate change.
Nuclear fission is one of a few (if not the only) viable ways to have significant positive impact on climate change short-term (20 years).
Small rant on nuclear waste. I don't think it's a problem. I think it's a solution to fuel future generations of reactors (50+ years). I'd go as far as assume that e.g. Finland could import nuclear waste and store it in that new state-of-the-art nuclear waste repository. They would make money now to store the waste, and then make money eventually when tech is there to reuse it and generate power.
What you can do switching to nuclear (in some industries, at least) is to not increase as much as previous years what we add to the problem.
It's not stopping, nor slowing down or keeping the current speed, but just accelerating a bit less than before.
Massive carbon capture is needed (orders above the gigantic amount that is added each year, because you need to take out the carbon emitted in the previous years too, and there is the feedback loops playing too), along with bringing new emissions sharply down. And all of that at least for many years after reaching below preindustrial carbon levels (global temperature should drop enough to turn off the positive feedback loops).
Even China, which internally can impose any policy it wants, can't build them fast enough to match e.g. wind in terms of GWh delivered. That has been the case since 2012 or so.
Well those are only problems because the people who benefit from climate change, like politicians, UN and organizations like extinction rebellion, do not want the problem solved.
Chernobyl has supposedly cost over $300b inflation-adjusted. Gorbachev wrote that in his opinion, it was a major contributor to the collapse of the USSR. Both figures are from Wikipedia.
Fission is safe, but even one accident can wipe out decades of profits. Is it still cost-effective when considering that?
That seems quite high.
> Fission is safe, but even one accident can wipe out decades of profits. Is it still cost-effective when considering that?
You can put a number on the cost of the Fukushima disaster, but you're not putting one on that of other power sources. Coal burners make the whole world pay, nuclear operators have to deal with their own shit. And yes, I'm not counting Chernobyl-type accidents, because while it would be foolish to claim that events like Fukushima will never happen again, it's equally foolish to not recognize that dodgy old dinky soviet plants with no passive safety measures whatsoever are a solved problem.
[1] http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-close-is-nuclea...
not 500 MW of usable power. Have a watch of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
Also note, the 500MW are the power of the plasma - in the best case scenario, maybe 50% of that could be converted into electrical energy, the rest will be lost as heat.
So grid-to-grid, they will be taking out 440MW of power and putting back in 250MW. Except that is useless, so they didn't even bother with a turbine the full 500MW of plasma power will have to be vented as heat in ITER itself (DEMO will take over, and aims to deliver net power generation ~20 years after ITER is successful).
And yes, it costs a lot, but if they succeed, it would solve so many problems, it would be worth it.
And for scale, compare this to the amount of money being spent on, I don't know, the video game industry[1].
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190509014637/https://newzoo.co...
Well yes, because people who benefit from climate change do their utmost to ensure this is the case.
This is news to me, this is not the case where I am, but sucks for you, just goes to show that people don't want to solve the problem. Where I am hydro power works well and most of our power comes from that, but that does not change the fact that many people fight as hard as they can to stop new hydro from being constructed.
Fission arguably went from the first serious attempt at a reactor (U of Chicago, Dec. 1942, successful self-sustaining reaction) to powering a large, high-performance naval vessel (USS Nautilus, Jan. 1955, in service for ~25 years) in 12 years. Its technological and social problems are very complex, but pretty well-known.
Fusion experts have yet to achieve any self-sustaining reaction - in spite of numerous, well-funded attempts going back ~60 years. Roughly speaking, there seems to be no plausible prospect for fusion being a viable power source for anything outside of a lab. So its technological problems amount to "not actually possible", and its social problems amount to "very cool waste of money".
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER for visuals.
The rest of the power gets dumped into the divertor. This is a pretty violent section of the hull that has an enormous power density slamming into it (in ITER it will be similar to an atmospheric re-entry vehicle). There are games to play here though and the strike points can be blown up in size.
From the article you referenced:
> ITER will not produce enough heat to produce net electricity and therefore is not equipped with turbines to generate electricity. Instead, the heat produced by the fusion reactions will be vented.
So in a fusion plant, the particle energy would turn into heat (by the particles interacting with matter), this would heat up water (or some other carrying fluid), turning a turbine that produces electricity. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant which contains some diagrams showing just how that would be done.
More exotic reactions (e.g. p-B11) have been proposed, where almost no energy is in the form of neutrons. Theoretically, you could then use electrostatic devices to capture the energy directly without any of the mess with Carnot efficiency. However, getting p-B11 fusion going is much harder than d-t.
"Can Nuclear fusion bail out our ship before it sinks?" No.
"Can Nuclear Fusion help us re-float our ship after its sunk?" Maybe.
At this point, we don't have new fission plants being built, and we're converting all the coal plants to run on natural gas, which is just going to jack up the prices for consumers who use it for heat.
The time to fix this was 5 decades ago.
Even if nuclear had 0 environmental impact during production, which is absolutely not the case, we still must cool down the planet.
We need energy sources that work by CAPTURING energy that otherwise would be turned into atmospheric heat.
SPARC doesn't seem to publish such numbers, but ITER, which is aiming for Q ~ 10 is going to be nowhere near to generating net energy, so SPARC's 2 < Q < 10 is unlikely to be able to do it either.
Edit: ITER is also going for Q~=10
Carbon Capture is what will matter. Carbon taxes are an interesting attempt at political solutions, but this requires coordination between Russia, CCP, and the USA. We need something that can be done despite what other foreign powers can be made to do, lest we want to wage WW3 over this.
Carbon Capture is also proportionately underfunded compared to renewables. Global warming is not something that will stop when we stop being bad; it has momentum. Greenhouse gases are like a blanket we’ve been wrapping around ourselves. We have to unwrap to get back to normal: carbon capture.
Climate change is an emergency, one that we're far behind on tackling. Talking about future technologies that are many decades away (if ever) is the opposite of helpful.
Imagine in 1943 the headline:
"Can hypersonic missiles put the brakes on Hitler's Army?"
And more to the point, nobody waited for nukes. The allies tackled the problem with the tools they had available at the time, and made use of the nukes when they were ready.
edit: the comparable timeline would be "currently approved power plants that are planning construction could put the brakes on climate change", I mean, if it were true. Because deadlines for substantial impact on climate change are "next few years, decade or two tops", and fusion will be ready far too late.