They're still a very long way from getting a net gain in energy: https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY
Edit: Confirmed by this comment https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/soc5xo/oxfords_jet_...
A breakthrough is a breakthrough, and that's good news.
The best bet for sustainable and clean energy is to stop using fossil fuels and figure out how to deal with the economic consequences.
I feel this optimism around this far off solutions for decades has been just a detrimental to climate action as out right climate denialism.
Growing up in the 90s I was always told "everything will be fine, since we'll figure it all out with technology". It wasn't until decades later, when I kept hearing this promising but seeing CO2 emissions rise that I looked into the details and realized how incredibly in danger our society is, as well as how nearly impossible to solve this problem is at this point.
The reason we shouldn't put our enthusiasm into it is because it's a distraction from the fact that we may already be past essential limits in our climate system and if we want any chance of survival as a civilization and potentially species we need drastic action now.
you mean the death of billions of people ?
I think you're pointing to the very likely reality which is that there is no way out. More often than not I agree with you. It's just a shame that, as a society, we've chosen not to even publicly allow conversations about what's really happening and the choices we have to make.
There is not one.
I was merely pointing what I think is an euphemism.
> we've chosen not to even publicly allow conversations about what's really happening and the choices we have to make.
Because we are ashamed. We all know that the price of our current comfort is blood. Now and in the future. And our human nature seem to be unable to abandon comfort once we have it.
Wind and Solar. They soon will beat natural gas for cheapest unsubsidized LCOE, and considering all fossil fuels are shadow-subsidized, that's huge.
Fusion needs to prove is can be cheaper than old-crappy-pressurized solid rod fission first, which is right now getting killed by alternative energy.
I was a big LFTR stan for a while. But wind/solar has won. Keep investing in fusion and fission, but they are subsidy and research projects right now only.
Land issues? Seriously?
The land issue for solar is a non-issue, it's like fake hand-wringing by the oil astroturfers over birds and windmills when skyscrapers kill 100xs more birds. There's this type of land called desert. Also, there is this thing called roofs where modern solar panels only need a small part of the roof to do a suburban house or apartment building including recharging your EV.
The land issue for wind is even less on an issue:
As for wind, I don't know if you've seen windmills on farms but... yeah, the pole doesn't take up much space. Then there is offshore wind. Windmills can integrate with existing use land (why not nature preserves?), you don't need to dedicate acreage to windmill farms.
Meanwhile, fusion reactors have a wee bit of problems with neutrons flying everywhere and turning the reactor vessels slightly radioactive from neutron capture. Maybe they'll fix that with good absorption spectrum elements, but let's not pretend fusion is 100% clean.
https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-the...
But again, the promise is there for fusion and LFTR/"new" fission. Keep the research, maybe the economics will turn around. Industry sure would need it to fully decarbonize, or, heck, space colonies. Or flying cars! Or any of the other sci-fi stuff we have given up on.
Right now we have an existential threat from GW, and an actual industrialized / productized and economic path is right there: wind and solar. That's what we need money printing for.
To power the US energy needs, you need an area about the size of New Jersey. Also roughly equivalent to the area taken up by roads. The interstate highway system alone has been cited as the largest public works project in history, and that's "just" asphalt.
Look, any new nuclear or fusion project won't turn on for a decade. Given that even with inflation wind/solar STILL dropped in LCOE cost last year, and still likely has technological and economies of scale, you REALLY think a 10 year out fusion or nuclear project will launch at a price competitive with what even solar/wind + storage will be?
Solar/wind likely will be half the inflation adjusted cost it currently is now even with storage in 10 years.
LFP batteries are coming on the market now for storage that are half what lithium ion cost. Sodium will be release by CATL later this year or next. I'm not handwaving anything.
There is a LOT of roof real estate. A fair amount more than the interstate system. The costs are already pushing wind/solar to deploy as fast as it can be made, it basically is a production scaling problem.
New Jersey is not a large state, given we have west texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and lots of other desert. Which we don't need, because of rooftops and wind.
Storage isn't solved, land space isn't solved, efficiency isn't solved, just like fusion isn't a solved problem.
Sure, once storage is solved it will be a non-issue. But it is not currently solved, and you will forgive my skepticism.
I also never brought up land issues; I agree that it's not a real problem.
TL;DR we need to be realistic about the capabilities of solar + wind. You argue that storage will solve itself. Your sibling argues that we don't need storage at all.
The reality is that storage is a huge issue right now. It's the #1 technical issue stopping us from shutting down coal and natural gas plants.
So if you want to ignore the storage problem, you need to rely on wind only. And if you have to dramatically over provision production to be able to meet demand, the cost benefits disappear.
Storage is a must for renewables to really take off.
"Not cost-effective to be the majority of power production while CO2 pollution is free." is very different from "near useless".
But I am not claiming there is any cost benefit at all - alI am claiming it's doable, and we will have zero or negative electricity price on windy days, that coupd be put to good use for electrolysis, hydrogen production, etc.
I think both fusion and geothermal are very exciting, crazy thing is although geothermal sounds simpler, I have no idea what's holding it back technology-wise, yet I have a pretty good understanding of the state of fusion research right now.
Why couldn't we get geothermal without fracking? Is it so hard to establish a more controlled heat exchange channel down there? Harder than developing nuclear fusion?
Consider how much commerce is done in the US via truck. Those trucks average 6 miles per gallon diesel. That represents a huge amount of energy. But it currently relies on fossil fuels so people don’t think of it as being potentially served by renewable energy sources.
Space travel is an entirely separate type of energy use, and I could see it being the only option for lots of applications. But that would be much further away, and the significant hurdles there can also be solved by other future tech advances like direct conversion for fusion to electricity.
I doubt we can scale geothermal indefinitely. Fusion might suffer from similar constraints, but afaik, doesn't need "much" space or specific geographic structures.
But my primary concern with fusion is cost. I don't see the path to being cheaper than geothermal, nor fission, and new fission is already some of our most expensive energy. The goal may be eventual space travel, which seems like a more plausible goal to talk about than sustainable energy.
If it does not incluse precision engineering to build largest vacuum vessel, supercomputers, superconductors, generation and containment of hottest substance on the planet, and largest magnetic fields we can produce. If that's not 'fundamentally expensive', then what is?
Especially when your interlocutor is asking for geothermal, a.k.a. a hole in the ground?
That's a whole lot more of precision engineering than is needed to build a nuclear fusion reactor, and you can buy it on the order of a hundred bucks.
And it's not just a hole in the ground, last time I checked the thermal conductivity of rocks isn't exactly stellar.
With semiconductors, prices fall continuously because there is continuous iteration, and starting from the very very first lithographic circuits there was a market. There's an entire industry, competitors, and it's a factory system.
Fusion is not like that, it will be like building monuments, there's not thousands or millions of the same thing getting churned out, it will be all specialized construction for each piece.
You may say that a chip did specialized in that each of the transistors re wired together in very specific ways, but the semiconductor industry is a factory factory in some sense, you build a set of masks and that's your factory for your chip.
Let's say you design a fusion reactor, and then 12 months later you see how to shave off 1% of the costs somewhere. That iterative gain is lost, because the fusion reactors will be built very rarely, and building each one in a new custom way poses lots more risk than doing the same design for 10 years. They are just too big and expensive to show the same sort of mass manufacturing gains that can be seen with technologies that have learning curves.
I could be wrong, and I certainly hope I am, but I would bet a hell of a lot more money on a new battery chemistry than I would on fusion as being a terrestrial power device.
At least, that's what the promise is, we'll have to see of course.
I think fission reactors and ITER have shown the downside of building really large one off reactors, I don't think they're gonna make that mistake again.
You are commenting on an article about how scientists had to build a reactor out of berillium and tungsten.
Have you ever touched those materials? Is there any berillium in your car, or your washing machine? If you go around your neighbourhood looking for someone who can weld or work tungsten, will you find anyone? Can you buy a tool on amazon that will cut tungsten?
The number of facilities that can produce precision-enginered thousand-ton vacuum vessel with exotic materials, are counted with fingers on one hand.
> Tritium is very exotic, and fuel cost is a small and irrelevant cost to fission powerplant
This is downright delusional, solar is the only technology that you can go and buy off the shelf and it is much cheaper than an MRI machine, any joe with basic electrical education can put together a solar power system and poor people in developing nations do it. Anyone who thinks that fusion will be easier than slapping solar panels together is smoking some serious dope
How much power the subsystems takes has no influence on the plasma's performance. How much power goes into the plasma (and what type of power and where and when, etc.) do influence the plasma's performance.
The end goal is so far away at this point, not a single player in this space is even trying to do it, even on their farthest-out roadmaps...
They did this in support of ITER, but there are also likely other political motivations. There has been no nuclear MCF operation on Earth in decades and now the UK has invested in resuming theirs rather than mothballing it.
You can't make claims about the motivations of the campaign (such as it being a signpost?) if you don't know what was even done.
And again, you shouldn't talk about the roadmaps if you haven't looked at them. Look at PPPL FIRE and power plant studies.
There are no showstoppers.
Here is a good (stellarator-focused) resource made by PPPL: