Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms

nature.com

311 pointsbryanrasmussen278 comments

As much as I enjoy reading this news. It is feels heavily sensationalized.

"Smashes" the energy record.

We're talking about a fusion generator here, that after 25 years of work, now manages to output 'double' the energy, to 59 MJ in 5s -like 20 MW- while requiring 180 MJ input power.

Somewhere hidden in the article is the news that this could mean a input/output ratio of 10 in a full scale reactor, but that's also something we've been waiting on for decades.

I find it easy to be enthusiastic about fusion, but the news and research surrounding it makes me sad.

They are forever smashing this or that record, on the verge of break-even, on track to producing free energy without nasty radionuclides. But it is always a con. If they ever do get Q high enough to make energy production conceivable -- it will need Q > 100, when said and done -- a Tokamak reactor will cost 10x much as the equal-grade fission reactor, and cost >10x as much to operate. As fission reactors are today not competitive, and get less competitive by the day, power from Tokamak fusion will not ever be lighting up your house. That is not a bad thing: solar and wind are wholly up to the task, and just need building out. The more there is, the cheaper it gets.

The only reliable product of the hot-neutron fusion research industry is dishonesty.

There is also aneutronic fusion, that might actually have a future, even if only in space: If we are ever to operate in the outer solar system, something of the sort will be needed. Unfortunately it gets almost no money.

> The more there is, the cheaper it gets.

This also applies to nuclear fusion (and, BTW, fission) reactors.

Tokamak fusion can only ever be far more expensive, per watt and per watt-hour, than existing fission. Fission is getting more expensive all the time.

> Tokamak fusion can only ever be far more expensive, per watt and per watt-hour, than existing fission.

Why?

The energy flux density in the most compressed plasma imaginable is orders of magnitude less than in fissile uranium. So, to match power out, it has to be big. Really, really big. And a fusion reaction chamber is a much more expensive affair than a fission pile: super high-tech materials and construction, enormous magnets (blasted by the hot-neutron flux output), piping for thousands of tons of melted lithium that have to be replaced (by robots! because super radioactive) every couple of years as the neutrons destroy them. The (radioactive) lithium itself, and containment for if it breaks out of the piping. Continuous processing of the lithium to extract synthetic tritium for fuel. Heat exchangers for lithium to a working fluid that won't pick up radioactivity, and more heat exchangers from that to water for steam. And then the usual steam turbines, which demand regular, very expensive maintenance. Cooling towers to condense the steam, after.

A hundred billion dollars estimated for one several GW plant, and decades for construction. Meanwhile, solar and wind get cheaper every year, with no bottom in sight. The longer they take on fusion, the less competitive it gets, and it starts out way behind, with no possibility of ever catching up.

This was with previous designs of fusion reactors. Read about proposed Ark and currently constructing Spark reactors. By using stronger superconductive magnets it was possible to reduce the size of the plant by order of magnitude. Spark even has a chance to get to Q>1 before ITER and it’s chamber is less than 2m in diameter. Plus it is possible to replace its parts without disassembling the whole reactor.

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC_(tokamak)

That might be nice if they had solutions to the other problems not addressed (see above). But operating it will necessarily still be enormously more expensive than solar or wind, which cost practically nothing.

Somebody with one leg can do a lot better in a race than somebody with none, but that is not the measure to consider when the competition is with two-legged runners. (Hint: they win.)

In Europe after the last autumn when for months there were little wind and cloudy sky there is a realization that energy based purely on renewables will require much bigger storage and much more solar or at least significantly more expensive solar that works under clouds. Doable, but cost is non-trivial.

So if any of fusion startups can make operating plant within the next 20 years, it can be used. But if that takes longer, then I agree that large-scale fusion will not happen.

Long term darkness/calm is solved with hydrogen. Europe has plenty of underground geology suitable for mass hydrogen storage (it's just like natural gas is stored.) Most of the energy still would go directly from solar/wind to the grid, or through efficient batteries, so the low round trip efficiency of power to gas to power doesn't matter much.

If hydrogen is produced from electricity at scale, it won't be used for energy storage. It'll get sold to chemical plants first. They'll pay good prices.

Yes, surely that will be a major market. It just makes the case easier for renewables, as that's a major source of dispatchable demand that can smooth variation in renewable output without having to pay a cost for turning it back to electric power later.

Or to steel smelters.

And, anywhere it is used, it will also be stockpiled. And sold back whenever the spot price rises.

Electricity -> Hydrogen -> Electricity is insanely wasteful. If this is the only large scale long term storage we can come up with, we have a huge problem...

It would be a serious problem if hydrogen were used for diurnal storage. But for rare event backup, efficiency is really unimportant, since so little of the energy produced will go through that channel. What matters for use cases like that is minimizing capital cost, not maximizing efficiency.

I'll add that the alternative proposal, excess renewables with curtailment, has 0% efficiency on the curtailed power. Using that power for anything at all, including making hydrogen, is more efficient that just dropping it on the ground.

Hydrogen is so useful for so many other things that its (present) poor round-trip efficiency doesn't matter much. And, that efficiency will only ever get better, not worse, and will get better faster the more of it there is.

But hydrogen is very far from the only storage choice, it is just one that is attractive for numerous ancillary reasons: we need to make the hydrogen regardless, so might as well store it too.

I suspect long-term, large-scale hydrogen storage is not "just like natural gas"... those pesky little H₂ molecules are awfully small, and may leak out rather easily compared to hydrocarbons.

There are already underground storage caverns for hydrogen, and more planned. It works fine.

Hydrogen storage is difficult only in metal tanks at high pressure and temperature. Store it underground or liquify it, and the problem dissipates.

Heating and lamp gas composed of of hydrogen and carbon monoxide (!) were once delivered throughout cities through cast-iron plumbing. That was displaced by "natural gas" as increasing numbers of people were found to have been asphyxiated after a lamp flame in their house died, typically from a pressure fluctuation.

Natural gas then had to have mercaptan odorants added after leaking gas accumulated undetected and exploded. Then, valves that would only stay open when hot came into regular use, for pilot lights. Now pilot lights are gone, replaced by spark generators. Hydrogen will displace natural gas in industrial settings, but synthetic methane or propane will probably be needed for domestic use.

Compare that to a simple molten salt fission reactor. It will simply never be cheaper.

Molten solt reactors do not solve the problem of nuclear waste. It is very expensive to deal with it as it has to be stored for hundreds of years unless some technology would appear to separate that cheaply. Fusion produce like order of magnitude less radioactive waste which will be short-lived.

Plus a fusion plant can be very quick to start and shutdown or throttle down which is very useful for base load.

Molten salt reactors inherently don't. But you can burn up higher actinides resulting in waste that only needs to be stored a few 100 years and pose very little danger even in the most absurd scenarios.

You don't need to separate all the different parts. You reprocess our old waste into fuel for modern reactors. In those reactors higher actinides will be burned up. And the resulting output does not have higher actinides and only needs to be stored as long.

Moltex Energy is currently engaged with the Canadian regulator for such a facility, the process is called WATSS. Doing this is actually cheaper then the deep storage storage facilities proposed in many countries. Sadly because of political bullshit reprocessing has been made illegal in the US.

Such things would have been doable decades ago, and the money for it is already on bank accounts in most countries. But politician force the 'dig a hole for everything' solutions instead.

> Plus a fusion plant can be very quick to start and shutdown or throttle down which is very useful for base load.

Next generation fusion would also be very reactive to changes. Far more then traditional.

But the reality is you actually want to run full power as much as you can, no matter if fission or fusion.

Nuclear waste is not the major problem with fission, capital cost is.

Fusion solves a minor problem of fission while making the major problem worse. It's a great example of misplaced focus.

Cooling down the magnets of a fusion plant is not a quick process, btw. Hell, just getting a fusion plant built with RAFM steel up to operating temperature is a delicate process. Once irradiated, the temperature window that material can operate at is rather narrow (300 C to 550 C; below that it's too brittle and above that it creeps.)

Exactly, capital cost of large civil engineering project and the financing of that is actually the driver of the cost.

If you can build a nuclear plant with 500MW output and reduce the amount of concrete needed by significant factor, all of a sudden your are quite competitive.

Just for comparison, this is one of the furthest along commercial GenIV projects designs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pZC_ajI8Hs

No massive cooling towers. No gigantic containment cylinder. No gigantic low-pressure steam turbine.

In a PWR the core containment vessel is incredibly expensive and can only be built a few places, but its actually not the cost driver. Even so, compare to those, modern GenIV core vessels are vastly cheaper.

Not having to weld 8 inch gigantic steel vessels is far easier. See:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OgTgV3Kq49U/maxresdefault.jpg

And, not building them at all is easier yet. And, massively cheaper.

You are making a commonly seen mistake there.

Yes, making magnetic fields stronger can give one higher power density than ITER. But one runs into a limit because of power density at the wall. Once you're at that limit, higher magnetic fields don't really help.

ARC's volumetric thermal power density (volume of reactor, not of the plasma) is just 1/40th that of the primary reactor vessel of a commercial pressurized water fission reactor.

60% of the mass of an ARC reactor is in the steel structural supports for the magnets, so it's about at the upper limit for steady magnetic fields in a fusion reactor.

I find it hard to believe that people would be seriously researching this if we already knew there could never be any sensible commercial application.

More likely we just don’t know the way to make it viable yet.

In some hypothetically possible world, policy choices are based the best reasoning from the latest information. We, alas, live in this world, where policy is mainly a product of history. The H bomb legacy looms large here.

We are in the position of the person whose car keys were lost somewhere, but we are looking only under the D-T fusion streetlight because we can't see anywhere else.

> So, to match power out, it has to be big. Really, really big.

Fusion has all of the characteristics of something you'll want to do if you are in space. Add to that the fact that its fuel is much easier to acquire than fission and that solar isn't available everywhere and you have a winner.

Meanwhile down to Earth, yes, most likely it will never be an important energy source.

I must strongly disagree, particularly for DT fusion.

DT fusion reactors would be very heavy. ARC, for example, would have the weight of a couple of US WW2 destroyers. DT fusion delivers its energy as heat. A fission reactor would be far smaller, simpler, cheaper, and more reliable.

You might make the case for advanced fuels, but that likely means you have to get 3He from somewhere. I suspect beamed power will beat even advanced fuel fusion in all missions in the future (a weak prediction as I will not be around to see.)

But you dont need a lot of fuel for fission and you also need many other things to keep a ship/station running. Isnt fuel in the ballpark of just one of many consumables that you need?

Fission-powered ion propulsion is the best mature tech we have.

In space, the fission doesn't need containment, or even much shielding if it is far enough away from the rest of the ship.

In the cloud tops of Titan, Venus, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune, a nuclear power plant may be as simple as a naked pile suspended near the bottom of a big fabric tube with wind turbines at the top. The radioactively-heated, buoyant air inside holds it up, and, escaping through the turbine, generates power. (Enough is held back so it stays up.)

Perhaps surprisingly, gravity is almost Earth-normal on all four planets. Perhaps more surprisingly, the temperature at a not unreasonably-high pressure is also close to Earth-normal (except on Titan). But getting back to orbit from any of the last three would be very, very difficult, so such a reactor would only ever power robots.

Getting back to orbit from Titan is easy. From Venus, it is pretty hard; and once in orbit you would need to refuel to get anywhere else.

Titan is perhaps the best place in the solar system for nuclear energy. An open Brayton cycle system on Titan wouldn't even require a very hot reactor, when the inlet gas is dense nitrogen (mostly) at around 94 K.

For use in space, you need a reactor whose energy does not come out as hot neutrons. Even gamma rays would be better.

D-He3 (deuterium and synthetic helium) is attractive, except you have to make the He3 by making tritium and waiting for it to decay. pB (hydrogen and boron) is attractive, but much harder to make work than D-He3.

There is work on a D-He3 rocket, tagged "Princeton FRC", that they hope to loft for a trial maybe in 2035. Elon could get it tried out earlier, and ought to. We should be cranking tritium production up immediately so there will be enough He3 when we need that.

I'm not that familiar with the subject, but this phrase sounds suspiciously like the 1943 IBM executive saying there is a market for only five computers in the world - i.e. it completely discounts technological progress. Of course, this progress has been painfully slow until now, but comparing it with fission is still unfair - fission is well-researched and it getting more expensive is tied to the inherent dangers of radioactivity (and the ever more complicated measures which try to mitigate them), and the costs of spent fuel storage.

Fission getting more expensive is tied to the very lucrative fully-legal corruption industry. Once a fission plant construction project is started, the money starts flowing, and is practically impossible to stop. If it is ever finished, the money would stop, and nobody actually involved wants that ever to happen, at least not until their kids graduate college. So the project blows through deadline after deadline, and cost overruns pile up without limit, until somebody manages to pull the plug. Once it looks like the money will stop regardless, there is some incentive to deliver a reactor; we saw that in Finland recently. South Carolina is the more typical cancellation after billions are spent, except in that case with a few indictments.

Normally nobody gets indicted, and nobody ever has to give any money back.

Wow this is brutal but feels like it's correct. What a frightening state of affairs.

Is the construction industry really so corrupt? Is government and industry unaware or unwilling/unable to detect this earlier and stop it?

I spent some fair amount of years as both a government employee in DoD and then some years as a defense contractor amd I can tell you the military industrial complex is a real thing. In my contracting days I worked with a handful of DoE engineers that were more familiar with reactor projects and as I understood it, reactor peojects basically follow the same type of workflow as any big DoD prohect. So OPs comment is much in line with my understanding of the issue. It is an unfortunate state of affairs.

I've worked in fusion research and defense. MIC corruption and incompetance is quite high but virtually not present in the fusion research community. The researchers, you know, give a shit. They're not there to make a buck and milk the gravy train. If a machine gets greenlit then they pour everything into getting it to succeed because it might be the only research advancement greenlit in their life. Failure is always an option. Look at NCSX.

The fusion researchers are not who would finance a fusion reactor. The people who finance those would be the ones financing fission plants, and then milking the project for as long as it can be made to run. Since nobody expects a fusion plant construction project to take less than 20 years and $50B after it is proved possible, they will be on it like flies.

What the fusion research community has instead is people who have committed their careers or even lives to a particular field. Getting them to admit they made a mistake is very hard. What did Upton Sinclair say? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Most of them will rationalize as hard as they can for as long as they can.

You sometimes see bitter comments when they are approaching or are in retirement.

This seems... dubious at best? In terms of large nuclear reactor projects recently, we have the Finnish and Flamanville ones as examples of major overruns... but they're the first two examples of a type. Other EPR builds are going much better; one of the Chinese ones is finished and the UK one is basically on track. The timing was bad, in that EPR starts coincided with a general loss of interest in nuclear over Fukushima, but there's nothing too unusual here.

Historically the first build of a type has _generally_ been problematic.

It is, anyway, a bigger problem in the US than in some other places, and, in the US, a bigger problem in public projects than in private projects. So, we see it operating today on NASA's SLS rocket, but not on SpaceX's Starship.

But there has never been a privately financed nuke plant.

The South Caroline indictments were because some of those involved decided to pull the plug. The indictments were revenge for pulling out and derailing the gravy train.

Actually, fission power plants have shown a distressing lack of good experience effects. They got more expensive as more were built, not less expensive.

Fission did keep getting cheaper up until FUD about accidents and explosions caused regulations that strangled it (that and overblown fears about proliferation of nuclear weapons).

Yeah, like all those whiners complaining about how first generation BWR containment was totally inadequate.

Never mind what happened at Fukushima, right? /s

The amount of accidents and their severity does not line up with the disproportion strangling the technology has experienced at the hands of regulators. If we go down that road, all coal plants should be shut down long ago as they’ve been responsible for more radiation-caused deaths than all nuclear deaths combined (including due to the bombs if I recall correctly). That’s not even counting the deaths they’ve caused through air pollution.

Heck, nuclear is still competitive with solar and wind in terms of deaths/MW produced. And this is all the more stark considering nuclear designs stagnated 60 years or so ago. If we hadn’t divested from that technological path we’d have drastically cheaper and safer nuclear energy today and global warming potentially wouldn’t even be a problem.

> fission reactors are today not competitive, and get less competitive by the day

No, we are just incompetent idiots. This has nothing to do with fissions and everything to do with degradation of contruction and practical egnineering skills - now it takes 30 years and 100 billion dollars to make a small railway in California. Victorian England or China could do this without much trouble.

The english-speaking western nations have definitively and measurably degraded - every time an airport or a port or any major piece of infrastructure needs to be built, its a source of drama and infighting for 30 years. A nuclear powerplant is just a big construction project, and nations that can build a railway without a fuss, have demonstrated their ability to build a reactor without a fuss.

We are going to have to fix this if we don't want to decline into barbarity in the next 100 years. We can trade and launder the world's money and stocks but we can't build a bridge. Eventually the physical really will catch up to us "cough climate change', and you can't bribe laws of nature.

Sure you can 'cheat' by buying pre-built solar panels and wind turbines made in China, but you will have to build storage for them, the only proven viable storage is large scale hydro, so you are back as square one.

I have a suspicion that the layer of our society responsible for management and oversight of these projects, both in government and private sectors, is much more inconpetent than that of rival nations, and maybe that's an area to explore.

> This has nothing to do with fissions and everything to do with degradation of contruction and practical egnineering skills - now it takes 30 years and 100 billion dollars to make a small railway in California. Victorian England or China could do this without much trouble.

Not to mention over-regulation driven by a general lack of political will. Its easier to win some votes by bashing nuclear than stand by it, even if it is the most likely alternative for baseload power in a carbon-free energy mix.

It is much simpler than that: fission is mature tech; its cost is not on the way down. Solar costs are still in free fall, wind almost as much so. The cheaper those get, the less competitive fission gets, just standing still.

The corruption tax on fission projects just exacerbates its structural problem.

most of that cost is politically based not technical

Fission is being built at all only for political reasons. People who build power plants on their own dime are shunning the technology. No merchant nuclear power plant selling into a competitive market has ever been built anywhere.

China will construct 150 fission reactors between now and 2035 to produce 200 gigawatts of power at a total cost of $440B.

A similar buildout in the US would take 70 years and cost well over a trillion dollars.

Do you think China is building all those reactors for political reasons as opposed to generating reliable power 24/7 for a century?

Do you think China does things without regard to politics?

They have clear political motivation to continue to build nuclear power plants. For example, this keeps their nuclear sector occupied and preserves the technology against deterioration. Even if civilian NPPs are not military, the overall technology has direct connection to their military (as it does in France.)

Even with that, they are installing more renewables than nuclear. And China is pushing aggressively to reduce the cost of hydrogen. They are now exporting electrolysers at < $300/kW, a fraction of the cost from elsewhere. Cheap electrolysers are a crucial technology for pairing with intermittent renewables to get to a 100% renewable grid and remove the last tenuous argument in favor of nuclear.

I seriously doubt they will build that many reactors by 2035, btw.

China doesn't need to build 150 nuclear reactors at breakneck speed to keep their nuclear sector occupied. They're making a massive investment in this technology from the education level all the way to the construction level.

China isn't planning to realize a majority of their power supply from solar until after 2045.

Like you, I doubt they'll hit that solar goal. Instead, they'll likely build more reactors.

> They have clear political motivation to continue to build nuclear power plants.

If realizing what a terrible bet solar and wind are is political, then yes I agree their motivation is political.

Strange, then, that they are building more solar and wind than fission.

Why not build both? Nuclear is great, and pound-for-pound is a much better energy source than solar, but you can build solar much more quickly than nuclear. I don't think your rebuttal is particularly damning.

My points against solar I raised to you in another thread stand: to build the panels/batteries we need, it will create an extreme excess of carbon in the atmosphere. That's not to say we shouldn't build solar, but to pretend it can solely serve all of our collective energy needs is myopic give the constraints.

To be clear, I'm all for covering the entire planet in solar panels...after we switch our production to be powered via fission.

I.e., never.

"What a terrible bet solar and wind are", as you claim immediately above, would be a reason not to build out solar and wind, if it were correct. But it's not, and they are.

And, it is at best naive to believe that it takes more energy to produce a solar panel than it will generate. People mining and refining silicon, cadmium, and tellurium and making solar panels out of them do not get power for free. They pay open market prices for energy, which they pass directly on to customers all down the chain to the final buyer. When your panel's production output pays off its purchase cost, its output has (much more than) exceeded the energy used to produce it.

> as you claim immediately above

The claim was regarding nuclear VS solar (either/or), in which case yet, solar is a terrible bet. I stand by that.

> People mining and refining silicon, cadmium, and tellurium and making solar panels out of them do not get power for free

And you say I'm being naive...

Firstly, the price of the panels doesn't even match the price of production because of subsidies.

Secondly, they do get power for free: the well-known, terrible cost of burning fossil fuels at their current scale is not incorporated into the price of fossil fuels. Capitalist markets are not capable of doing so.

So my point is if you were to actually price fossil fuels according to their cost solar panel production would not be competitive with nuclear in any way.

> When your panel's production output pays off its purchase cost, its output has (much more than) exceeded the energy used to produce it.

Sure, it can pay off its purchase cost, but as above, that means absolutely nothing. A more interesting payment would be watts-in, watts-out, in which case I'd wager you get marginal gains. And if the watts-in are generated with fossil fuels, you're doing a lot more damage than you think.

Regarding nuclear, sure it's expensive, but a lot of that is artificial, and a lot of the high comparative cost is due to the price/cost disparity in fossil fuels. And hey, as a bonus, it works at night and on cloudy days and you don't need to build an enormous battery which is another can of worms people love to gloss over.

I see that you have completely abandoned rational argumentation and are just making shit up, so I leave this here.

Guess I struck a chord somewhere.

Struck a rock.

Fission costs would absolutely be on the way down if we continued to invest in it. Fission is a fundamental aspect of China’s energy strategy. They don’t spend 30 years building these reactors and they don’t consider it fully matured tech.

You can build a fission reactor in five years and it will reliably power a city 24 hours a day for decades and decades. That will never be true for solar.

The west has become comically inept at hard projects. Solar is easy. Just buy panels from China. Funny that China thinks fission is the future. I guess no one told them about solar.

The west’s engineering skills are not in decline, though if you have a metric that indicates that, it would be interesting. Europe has not had USA-level problems with building a popular rail network, or other major works.

The main differences in costs and time from 150 years ago are:

(A) Accounting for Extrinsic Costs. as the nations have become more dense and more democratic, peoples voices need to be heard. Environmental, wildlife habitat, etc. are complex issues that have only become important in recent decades. People sometimes get tempted by authoritarian rule because they “get shit done cheaply”, but this is a ruse. By not engaging openly, there are often massive extrinsic costs, so the project is “cheap” by cheating and not counting the true costs. Europe seems to have streamlined this, the USA is still stuck in “might over right” political power struggles rather than compromises.

(B) Cheap labor. Most infrastructure doesn’t require large numbers of high skilled labor, it needs a mix of skilled and unskilled labor. The railways in the 1800s we’re built with large quantities of immigrant labor. This is in rarer supply in the West these days, for a variety of reasons.

(C) Labor rights and safety. Construction projects and rail projects were happy to bury dead workers by the wayside (or in the concrete of the Empire State Building). Or work them to unsustainable hours with limited pay. It took many strikes, some violent, to sort this out. Today’s standards don’t put up with that level of labor abuse.

(D) Investment sources. Many large projects were state funded, or were funded by investors with a lot of patience. That kind of patience is in short supply, as is state funding in the USA due to Republicans being Republicans. Europe seems to be able to pull this kind of funding off.

(E) Contract Grift. There is a lot more incentive and skill to slow roll and milk the cash flow of construction projects, given their complexity. Traditional large works were more vertically integrated and managed by those with incentive to see the job done, rather than paid by the hour. The solution to this is more vertical integration but that’s hard to pull off because of labor shortages.

I’d also note that China has a vested interest in publishing propaganda about its engineering and public works prowess while hiding its extrinsic costs.

I agree with everything you listed, except the political quip in point (D). Most of these large projects are funded with federal dollars, and both parties have no shame in clamoring for that money. The comment you're responding to was concerning a bloated project in a blue state. The issue isn't red vs blue- it's organizational. Politicians don't see the intrinsic value of such projects so much as they see the value of money intended for such projects. Unfortunately, grifting has become such an issue that people are opposed to the undertaking of infrastructure projects, but usually their objections only extend so far as their own state lines.

(E) has been going on for hundreds of years in the US is the thing. The difference is that the cost of goods used to be where the primary grift was instead of on labor (T&M contracts historically). But now T&M contracts are not very common at least in DoD but there is still obviously some level of grift but it’s partly due to extremely terrible guidelines for government procurement processes leading to contractors that do the bare minimum getting more money than contractors that exceed expectations (one rare exception of this happening was during the reconstruction of Atlanta’s I-95 when contractors were getting massive bonuses for finishing ahead of schedule contingent upon safety inspections passing - all work completed months ahead of schedule).

Note that South Korea and France have nuclear cheaper than renewables still because their processes over decades have led to basically producing nuclear plants with horizontal scaling, driving costs down dramatically. In essence, all energy production within the borders of a country is a matter of political will moreso than even technical requirements. If a culture wants to push back on X and wins politically, it becomes more expensive and distorts intrinsic costs. If a culture pushes for Y and eventually subsidizes it, it becomes dramatically cheaper even below intrinsic costs and is over-consumed (see: fossil fuels)

One other factor I think is really interesting is what Poppendieck calls, "the tyranny of The Plan": https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of...

The basic notion is that the way non-experts think about the work has changed in ways that have drastically increased system inefficiency.

I know zip about construction megaprojects. But this is definitely true in software. Many executives want to pretend that projects are perfectly predictable, which a) diverts a lot of effort to non-value-creating outputs (fantasy plans, fantasy schedules), b) creates huge inefficiency by favoring fantasy plans over what's actually happening, and c) creates plenty of rework and chaos trying to solve the real-world problems when the gaps between fantasy and reality become too big to ignore.

To me, this problem is mainly rooted in executive culture, and is related to the phenomenon some call managerialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism

Solar costs stay in line because it is easy to count panels, and multiply by by the very public cost per panel. Similarly for wind, and for storage.

But few have the skills to estimate what any part of nuke should cost.

And also because the turnaround time from conception to execution is short, allowing bad practices to be identified and addressed. It also helps that solar construction at the utility scale requires lower skill labor and is more forgiving of mistakes.

One thing I would like to support in your statement is (A)The Extrinsic Costs. This was not accounted for in China and is shaping up to be a very volatile national issue for them for their Railways.

https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/chinas-high-speed-rai...

https://factsanddetails.com/china/cat13/sub86/item1848.html

>the only proven viable storage is large scale hydro

Japan's experience with sodium-sulfur batteries stands in contrast.

https://www.sandia.gov/ess-ssl/wp-content/uploads/2021/LDES/...

Na-S is less popular for new projects these days because of rapid decreases in the price of lithium batteries, but that's not a fundamental limitation of the technology — and we have no risk of running out of sodium nor sulfur.

In fairness, Japan's construction sector seems much healthier than that of the United States.

Solar and wind are not and likely will never be "wholly up to the task" unless you install about 4X as much as you need, which is quite the tall order and certainly changes the numbers. You might say "solar is cheaper per MW than fission" but someone planning your local grid sees "I need to setup 4X the solar MW that I do fission, and I need a battery solution as well" and the numbers look very different.

A great example is Germany over the past year had uncharacteristically low wind for months and months on end, dropping power generation by as much as 30% for the year from that source.

The result? They burned A LOT of gas and coal. A LOT.

The reality is that power use doesn't necessarily follow the sun or the wind, and so buildouts of those technologies need to be done at extreme multiples of baseline need to account for entire seasons of low output (or just burn hydrocarbons...). You have to build your wind and solar to support a hypothetical 10 or 50 year minimum production, and just overproduce at all times.

This is why baseload nuclear generation will remain a fantastic choice for nations for decades to come, even at a higher price. Nuclear runs at night. It runs when the wind is still. It runs and runs and run no matter what, providing consistent and predictable power. For every MW generated by nuclear, you need about 4 produced by solar/wind, to achieve the same up-time and reliability.

And that's before we discuss the ecological concerns of one tiny little nuclear facility versus dozens of square kilometers of solar/battery builds out to match it.

If our society abandons fission in favor of solar/wind only, it will be to our detriment

Base load isn’t an inherent advantage it’s strictly worse than dispatchable power unless it’s cheap, and Nuclear isn’t that cheap. Which is a problem because excess wind and solar makes Nuclear power economically worthless for much of the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation#/media...

Subsides could make up the difference for nuclear as could vastly increased nighttime prices.

PS: It’s only when your looking at islands like say Hawaii where you want that kind of massive overproduction. Across larger areas you never see 100% production from everywhere at the same time, but you also don’t see minimum production from everywhere at the same time.

The LCOE for utility scale solar is around $68/MWh while new nuclear is $88/MWh.

The LCOE for grid storage of power (necessary addition to solar) is $160/MWh.

Double solar with grid storage is as much as $300/MWh at the utility scale using globalized averages reported to NEA, BNEF, Lazard, IRENA 2018-2020. Obviously some countries will be a lot more or less on costs depending on their circumstances and location.

Interconnect isn't enough, all of the US is in darkness for several hours a day. (And Texas will never connect). You require storage, and I still question if 2X is enough to produce enough power during a 10 year minimum without firing up extensive hydrocarbon peaker plants.

Nuclear is nowhere near that cheap, LCOE even with massive subsides in the US sees 2020 nuclear well past 160$/MWH and rising. Wind and solar are both under 50$/MWH LCOE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy#/medi...

The number I quoted is from the same Wikipedia article on LCOE that you used, and I used a globalized average as I said in my post.

Your $50MWh also does not include storage LCOE, and not including secondary costs for solar when Nuclear has no secondary costs is considered "a trick" to lie about solar costs.

Include the costs of gigawatts of Elon's lithium ion batteries, and include the cost of having to 2X-4X solar compared to Nuclear to account for variable solar output due to days and seasons, as I said, and your $50MWh becomes around $300MWh

First demand isn’t flat, so 100% nuclear needs massive amounts of storage to reduce the number of nuclear power plants that would sit idle 90+% of the time. In the end something needs to take up the slack and nuclear doesn’t work by it’s self. If natural gas isn’t an option the only thing left is hydro which is limited or storage.

Your also trying to cherry pick numbers the Wikipedia article also lists “$164/MWh” for nuclear. I found the table you got those numbers from which included multiple estimates from 2018 that used data from 2015 and double counting very optimistic nuclear estimates. Frankly utility solar is already being installed at sub 2c/kWh in the US. 68$/MWh would be 6.8c/kWh which shows how far off your umbers are.

Anyway, I would be happy to see the power plant actually run that cheaply but your looking at very optimistic estimates for something that isn’t even online yet and is getting some serious subsides.

Having said that if you’re data is from “Source: IEA/NEA, 2015.” https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2018/7441-full-costs-2018-.... I can understand why you picked those numbers.

Yeah. Si monocrystalline PV modules fell in price by a factor of 4 from 2015 to 2020.

So many people talking about energy seem to be stuck in an obsolete past.

You are being unfair in the other direction. LCOE for wind/solar needs to be blended by figuring out the optimal mix of wind and solar for your area and adding on 4hrs of battery storage. There is not one set number for this but $200Wh and falling is a fair estimate.

Those interconnects take a long time to build, mostly due to political opposition, and aren't that cheap either. For example, the 2GW 400-mile Southern Cross has turned out to be a 17-year project, costing $2 billion. https://www.eenews.net/articles/what-a-2b-texas-project-says...

They're not the only ones:

> the 732-mile TransWest Express high voltage transmission line filed its first permit application in 2007, but did not receive all of the approvals until 2020. The Environmental Impact Statement alone took eight years to complete.

Local landowners tend to object to these projects. On average, they take over a decade to complete and that includes much shorter lines, which are quicker. Building underground can help with political resistance but multiplies cost by 5X to 10X.

As of 2020, over 750 GW of proposed generation, most of it wind and solar, were waiting for transmission to be built.

https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/challenges-decarbon...

China builds transmission a lot faster, and we might be able to speed things up with the SITE Act, which gives the federal government authority to override local and state resistance: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/07/america-...

But if our solution set can include unpopular new laws to override NIMBYism, then we can make nuclear a lot faster and cheaper, too.

That’s a solid point, but it only needs 3-4 years to build. “$2 billion project, proposed by Pattern Energy Group LP, likely won’t be ready until 2026 at the earliest, if construction starts in 2023.”

Nuclear also takes 4-6 years to build but can take decades to get permission to start.

Of course. I used "complete" in a later sentence, which is really what I meant, and why I talked about political opposition being the main issue.

Delays in interconnect construction call for local storage, which usually are needed anyway, because long-distance interconnect is not reliable or, often, strategic.

So, the main role of interconnect is to deliver power that is cheaper than replenishing your storage locally, or to use replenishing your storage faster than you could with local generation or by ship.

Far-northern climates will need to keep stockpiles of anhydrous ammonia or hydrogen to burn in gas turbine generators when transmission lines fail, probably synthesized using equatorial solar and shipped, or synthesized using transmission-line delivered hydro power. Each place will use the cheapest power available in each moment.

Germany‘s Problem is different. We can generate way More wind energy but we cant Transfer it, thus we can only use the wind regionally. And our transfer projects are estimated to take longer than planned…

> solar and wind are wholly up to the task, and just need building out.

This. Every time I read a fusion "breakthrough" story I imagine the history books of the year 3000: "Back in the early 21st century, they spent billions trying to build a star on Earth, when there was a perfectly good one in the sky that produced 1000W per square meter that they could have used for free."

We do not have enough energy storage capability to rely completely on Solar and Wind yet. Both are intermittent producers so to get truly reliable power from them we need storage capacity. There are projects that promise to meet that need but positioning solar and wind as all we need is not a true statement.

> We do not have enough energy storage capability to rely completely on Solar and Wind yet.

How is this an interesting argument? Of course we don't have things before we build them. That's true of nuclear power plants, too. We can likely build out storage faster than NPPs, with more aggressive cost decline with cumulative production.

I put numbers in another comment, but this isn't a "just build some more batteries" type of problem. The scale of storage needed completely dwarfs our current production capacity. This problem cannot be solved in the near future, with current production/technology.

It is dishonest to pretend batteries are the only viable storage method.

>We can likely build out storage faster than NPPs

First, this is yet to be determined. Even assuming it is true, which I'm not sure it is, The problem is not limited to storage - you also need massive transmission system upgrades that will cost on the same order of magnitude as an Apollo program. I think in the long term it should certainly be done, but pretending that the cost of solar and wind power is the cost of solar panels, or even the cost of solar panels + storage is not comparing apples to apples.

We are down for many, many times the cost of Apollo, regardless. The only question is how much available power we will get for that. The very best one running is solar+wind+storage, far ahead of the others.

Energy is huge. The world will likely spend the equivalent of approaching a quadrillion dollars over the next century on energy. The Apollo program, in comparison, was less than a rounding error.

Yes dispatchability is an issue with renewables. We need more transmission too. Both can be solved (and are being solved) with existing technology today, and both are improving all the time. It's both practical and economical today to build an off-grid house with PV and enough Li-Ion storage to bridge the nighttime gap and charge an EV.

With distributed electricity generation e.g. microgrids, the need for big, centralized storage decreases, as does the need for large-scale transmission.

By the time fusion generators exist in a practical form (at least 20 years from now), we won't need them.

Imagine if we went the other way: "they spent billions on solar infrastructure, so that they could keep the lights on only when the sun was shining".

We don't have the storage. We are not close to sniffing the amount of storage we need to be 100% reliant on solar + wind.

To get a sense of scale: The USA uses on average ~76 twh per day. Tesla produced ~100 gwh of batteries over the whole last year.

So if we nationalized all the tesla gigafactories, it would take us over 760 years to produce enough batteries to store a single days worth of electricity.

I do not think grid storage is solvable with current technology.

What a terrible argument. A global energy supply system is a huge thing. That means it will make sense to spend literally trillions of dollars on it. This will mean building enormous capacity to build its components, including as many battery factories as we need.

Once we agree that the solar + wind solution will cost trillions and take decades to scale up anyway, the benefits of fusion start to shine through. We may as well invest all that time and money in scalable production that doesn't exhaust the earth's supply of natural resources.

What benefits? The fusion solution would be even more expensive, and not available for decades, if ever.

That sounds like a proposal for just not de-carbonizing until fusion is ready. Is that what you mean? When do you think we could have say 5% of the worlds power coming from fusion reactors?

I'm happy to increase renewable energy production where possible. My point is that saying "we can just be 100% solar" is just as impractical and far fetched as saying "we can just be 100% fusion".

Renewable advocates would be more successful if they were realistic about the problems with significant solar reliance.

I disagree. 100% solar is much less far-fetched than 100% fusion, because the latter is a much larger technological and economic stretch.

So don't use batteries. Pumping water uphill is still the most efficient large-scale technology for electrical storage.

Pumped hydro is a lot more promising than batteries for sure, in that current capabilities is off by a factor of a thousand instead of a million.

The largest pumped hydro station[1] provides up to 24 gwh of storage. So three thousand of these stations (costing $12 trillion) would store one day's worth of electricity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...

Agreed that pumped hydro is the most efficient storage solution but it's limited by geography: You can only do it where there's an existing significant elevation change. Building a sufficiently elevated lake artifically by heaping thousands of cubic kilometers of dirt is not cost-effective. That is, the energy that would be required to build it would vastly exceed the total energy it could store integrated over its lifetime.

Yeah building mountains is not a realistic solution. Thermal storage is probably the best replacement where pumped hydro isn't feasible.

Inventing absurd versions of sound ideas just to have something to criticize is such a standard dishonest argument mode as to have been named.

We all know the name, but its main feature is its dishonesty.

What's the sound idea for build pumped hydro storage on flat land?

There is such a thing as a water tower, but that also is probably not practical utility-scale energy storage.

The sound idea is water stored up an existing hill. On flat land you store your energy some other way: underground hydrogen or compressed air, or iron-air batteries, or liquified air, or any of various other choices that are more expensive and less efficient than pumped hydro. Or just run a wire over to someplace that does have hills.

> That is, the energy that would be required to build it would vastly exceed the total energy it could store integrated over its lifetime.

Storage ‘buys’ energy when it’s cheap and ‘sells’ it when it’s expensive, where ‘cheap’ can even mean ‘free’ at times.

You would build it using averagely priced energy (using only cheap energy is impractical, as it would keep machines and personnel tied up waiting for prices to drop)

Also, having a large buffer can mean having to spend a lot less money on excess solar and wind farms. They wouldn’t have to meet all peaks in demand.

Those still could make it economically viable.

It is a good thing, then, that pumped hydro is not limited to existing dams, or even to places where a hydroelectric power station would be practical. Pumped hydro does not need the large watershed and elevated river valley a hydroelectric dam needs. All pumped hydro needs is an elevated depression somewhere not too porous. There are myriads of those, and building a penstock up to one is very cheap.

Some places have no hills, so are not candidates for pumped hydro storage, and would need to rely on something else, such as long-distance transmission lines, or liquified air, or synthesized hydrogen, or synthesized ammonia, or underground compressed air, or iron-air batteries, or numerous others, or (most usually) some combination of them.

> But it is always a con.

I think you should rephrase that, because it's pretty insulting to researchers who have been working incredibly hard on taking steps towards Fusion.

I think the phrase you were grasping for is: "I doubt it will ever be economically viable".

The con is in calling every last incremental improvement a "breakthrough". No, you didn't break through anything. The only upcoming breakthrough is the plasma eroding a hole in the chamber wall.

Be fair. It's the relativistic electron beam from a disruption that's going to do that, not the plasma itself. :)

"They are forever smashing this or that record, on the verge of break-even, on track to producing free energy without nasty radionuclides."

Hacker News comment in late 19th century: "They are forever making flying machines have a little more lift, on the verge of break-even, on track to enabling free flight without nasty immediate crashes. But it is always a con.... The only reliable product of flying machine research is dishonesty."

Oh? By your logic, we shouldn't say negative things about perpetual motion machines, as they keep getting better and who knows what the future holds!

The truth is that people both over- and under-estimate what can happen in the future. You can't use simple-minded heuristics either way; technoutopianism is at least as dangerous as blind opposition to change.

We have currently demonstrable laws of physics stating why perpetual motion can't be achieved. We have a visible universe of examples of fusion.

Not saying that fusion power on earth is viable (I personally think that it is), but it's disingenuous to compare it to perpetual motion.

I think the obstacles to practical, competitive fusion power, particularly DT fusion, and especially the mainstream approach of JET/ITER, are so great that calling investment in it "the economic equivalent of perpetual motion" is not far off.

Good thing I didn't compare fusion to perpetual motion, then. I was pointing out that his too-simple approach could be easily misapplied, and picked an especially obvious negative example to counter his especially obvious positive one.

At this point we just don't know whether fusion is like airplanes or whether it's like perpetual motion. Unless you are proposing building an actual star, the existence of stars tells us approximately nothing about whether a fusion-based power plant is economically achievable in our lifetimes.

I think it's an interesting idea and I'd love to see it happen. But I think it's important to be realistic in our discussion of it.

The "stars exist!" argument really annoys me. Among other objections, stars don't even use the specific fusion reactions that terrestrial fusion reactors would use.

Stars are, anyway, not subject to economics. It is the combination of Tokamak fusion power generation with economic viability that resembles perpetual motion.

I don't disagree at all with what you say above, and I do not think it's inevitable that fusion reactors will be useful in the foreseeable future. You are right that "You can't use simple-minded heuristics either way". I was just pointing out that they were being used in one direction in the comment I responded to.

> they were being used in one direction in the comment

That's not correct at all. The simple-minded heuristic is along the lines of "technology is bad" or "this new thing will never work".

But the dream of fusion as "too cheap to meter" has been going on for 70 years. The comment you're replying to wasn't talking in general terms, but had specific critique of both the long track record and the practical utility of the product they're shooting for.

It might work and it might not; I have no idea. But your attacking a straw man won't help it get there.

I will let other readers of this thread judge for themselves.

I am asking you to judge for yourself. In particular, to recognize that not only did you ignore his specific critique, you have now ignored mine.

Notably, none of the people getting big grants and promoting their flying machine experiments succeeded, or were even on track to succeed someday.

ITER is the Samuel Langley of the present day.

> That is not a bad thing: solar and wind are wholly up to the task

Exactly! If we just used every last drop of fossil fuels we had to build, ship, and constantly replace solar and wind generators (and do the same for the massive battery arrays we'll need), nuclear will be a distant memory.

> fission reactors are today not competitive

...because price =/= cost. Fission is the least costly form of energy generation, but our economy is too worthlessly opaque to realize the true cost of building all those beloved solar panels. If we got price and cost more in parity, nuclear would be the painfully obvious choice.

Markets fail yet again, I suppose.

> The only reliable product of the hot-neutron fusion research industry is dishonesty.

I can agree with you there. Every few months there's a "breakthrough!!" article where Qtotal is still < 0.01...cool, that's helpful...

> Fission is the least costly form of energy generation

This has ceased to be true.

When these things become viable they’re likely to be competing with battery storage systems for cheap power to start and restart the reactors. Though I suspect they’re likely to form partnerships, those partnerships will end up being profit sharing and blunt the prospects of such a plant.

Nope, this is good news.

JET is a 1980s research project into how to contain a plasma and squish it enough to achieve fusion at all, not a practical generator. It doesn't have superconducting magnets, it runs on big lumps of copper, with limited cooling and no way of recovering output power.

In the latest run, they achieved fusion and kept it running until JET ran out of power for its magnets. The plasma didn't touch the reactor walls, didn't destabilize, didn't crap out in any of the numerous other ways. They had to shut it down before it overheated and burned out.

(I've been reading reports for a while about the use of massive amounts of computer power -- and deep learning -- being necessarily to stabilize plasma in a reactor. That seems to be what this demonstrates.)

This is probably JET's swan song. They've pushed it as far as it can go; also, the D-T reaction produces surplus neutrons so tends to generate radioactive waste via secondary irradiation of the reactor core -- which makes it hard to get inside and fiddle with it.

This is a really great achievement for a fusion reactor, and actually is a breakthrough that makes me think that it might be on its way to serious commercialization.

Unfortunately, a lot of other fusion news is not similarly fundamental, though, so it can get tiring to see "we made a few extra watts but the reactor still went unstable."

A lot of research into plasma confinement is completely empirical. No theory at all. The scientists try new settings, see how they work, and draw a line on a graph extrapolating from them to higher power settings. That's why you need all these small experiments, which have no hope of generating net energy: because you're trying to solve plasma confinement by tinkering, without much of a map to guide you.

Confined plasmas have complex behaviors that are really, really hard to model computationally. Experimentation definitely beats computation in this field.

I would be surprised if they do not keep pushing for the Q=1 record. This last campaign was in support of ITER. Now that DT operations have resumed they wouldn't go out without a moonshot.

For what its worth, the strongest magnets in the world are not superconducting but copper. My understanding is that the high magnetic field interferes with the superconducting mode.

https://nationalmaglab.org/user-facilities/dc-field/instrume...

Not that it has anything to do with plasma research, I just thought it an interesting fact.

Here's a fun table at which field strengths various superconductors fall out of the superconducting mode https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Upper-critical-fields-an...

ITER uses NbTi, SPARC uses YBCO.

Interestingly one of the things they proved out in this experiment was a new core lining that doesn't get anywhere near as radioactive as the carbon walls they were using before. That was a bit of a big deal in itself: if it hadn't tracked theory as well as it did, it would have invalidated one of the material choices for ITER and knocked it back a fair bit.

Correct me if I’m wrong but the neutrons eventually cause the reactor to eat itself as well, don’t they? Unless you can build a sacrificial layer inside to absorb all the damage you have to keep building new ones, even if it weren’t radioactive.

As long as people keep researching it, progress will continue. Just ignore it until the first commercial plant is built and you won’t be disappointed.

Personally I find this news very exciting, but I’m a fairly half-full glass kind of person!

It's an easy article to write, and it's easy because so many others have written the same thing.

It's like articles about Facebook and how their value fluctuates and this or that privacy issue is going to be fixed soon. People have heard about the big players, so big players get the attention.

I'm trying to do some fusion research myself, but it's extremely difficult to get anyone to take what I'm doing seriously.

I've got a completely new design, and it still needs to be tested. Do you know how difficult that is when nobody will even look at it, and I have to do everything myself?

I don't even know why I talk about it at all.

I've got some info about it at http://www.DDproFusion.com

Recommendations include:

1) ditching the toxic negative attitude. It pushes away interest.

2) spend an afternoon or a few bucks on a web designer making your site look better than the "time cube" site. It practically screams crackpot theory.

3) build credibility with academics first. People not in the field will assume you're a swindler by default.

1 - I agree, I've been fighting too many battles on too many fronts and my optimism has been taking a hit.

2 - I see, I'll look into presenting more professionally.

3 - I believe Ideas should be evaluated on their merit, and what people think about the idea or myself isn't going to change the physics. It will either work or it won't

3 - It could work, but badly. That is what they are shooting for at ITER.

You have a 48 second youtube simulation video, and one paragraph explaining nothing.

How is this supposed to help people take you seriously? What are your credentials? Why should anyone take you seriously?

Are you an academic? Have you submitted this to academic journals or individuals? Have you tried to make or made any connections to anyone in the field?

Also, are you the guy who bought the warehouse full of CD's?

It's difficult to find the right balance between details and general concepts, and it's clear that I haven't refined my message clearly enough.

I'm not an academic, but have a reasonable level of physics understanding. The concept is simple enough that it should be understandable by people that have a basic understanding of how charged particles behave in a magnetic field.

It should be taken seriously because it's a good idea, and deserves to be studied. I readily admit that a full analysis is beyond my abilities, but I haven't been able to find anyone that can do any better at evaluating it, and I've talked to a lot of people.

I'm moving forward with the self funded construction of the prototype, because with this type of thing, I don't think ANYBODY can say with certainty that it will work or not. Even simulations aren't enough to tell for sure.

And yeah, I'm also trying to restart Murfie among other things.

Can I recommend dropping the use of royal we, with respect to how you describe your work on the project.

This is usually a lot more common in software projects, and it doesn't come across well when most the effort is clearly (at least from a quick overview)from a single person.

I'm sorry I keep forgetting to ask for your permission before I hire or fire someone.

Fusion researcher here. Yes, this piece is sensationalized, as are most pieces about fusion, and about science/technology in general, unfortunately. It's depressing that tokamak performance hasn't improved much in all that time. The only two ways to scale up the gain are to build the device larger (like ITER) or with higher magnetic field (like SPARC). The existing devices have been around for many years and have been pushed basically as far as they can go, the only way forward is to build new devices. There's really no reason to expect a breakthrough on tokamak performance that will suddenly change the game. The only really positive news for tokamaks in the last ~30 years is the advent of REBCO superconductors & the success Commonwealth Fusion has had so far in capitalizing on this technology.

Excellent news, we need this so badly, especially now in Europe with Germany shutting down its nuclear (fission) plants and NS2 being cancelled. It's astonishing to me that the world isn't pulling out all the stops on fusion development, something like the space race or Manhattan project.

Unfortunately, last I heard ITER building has halted: http://news.newenergytimes.net/2022/02/21/french-regulator-h...

Even if fusion succeeds in net positive energy (which is still a ways off - even ITER, planned to finish in 2030, will not actually generate energy, they didn't even add a turbine to try), there are huge hurdles to scanning it up.

It's impossible for fusion to be a significant source of energy in the time left to avert catastrophic global warming. Even with the most optimistic estimates, we will at best have a handful of small plants, nothing comparable to a fission power plant.

This is a really common kind of comment to this issue, but I think it's extremely short-sighted. At this point, because we're probably well past the point that anything we can practically do is likely to get us to net zero carbon before catastrophe (it's already here, really), we're at a point where we're probably going to need to go extremely negative even once we do get there. We're (ironically) going to need a lot of non-carbon-sourced energy to do that, it seems to me.

We can't just be thinking about what we'll do to stem the tide, we have to keep working on how we're going to push it back.

We're realistically at a very good point in time to avert some of the worst case scenarios, I fail to see your point?

We definitely want to be looking at technologies that have a high ROI for emission reduction in the next 10 year span, mixed with longer term projects.

Fission is a longer term project. Simple as that.

> We definitely want to be looking at technologies that have a high ROI for emission reduction in the next 10 year span, mixed with longer term projects.

This... is my point? So I think you do see it. "Fusion can't save us now so we shouldn't invest in it at all" is short-sighted. This is not an either-or proposition, and frankly people have completely out of whack ideas of the scale of money that's been invested in fusion. Tens of billions of dollars are nothing in what's going to be a trillions of dollars problem.

We need to be building out renewables, and ideally fission too, now. We need to get to carbon zero asap. And then comes the project of getting things back to where we need to be, and we are just not ready for the energy we're going to need to do that.

See this is the thing.

People thing 10 billion dollars is a lot of money.

My view is that 10 billion dollars is nothing.

My view is that the total OECD investment in fusion R&D should be 10 billion. A year. For the next 50 years.

The investment in the high ROI technologies, principally solar R&D and overnight energy capacity projects like water pump batteries, should be 100 billion (across the OECD). And the investment in CapEx, installing new panels, 200 billion.

Our investment in STEM R&D, as a society, is just pitiful across the Western world.

The portion of our tax dollars that go to long term R&D, the primary driver of productivity growth and progress in our nation's, is scrap.

I don't really disagree with any of this, so I guess that's confirmation that you did see my point.

Certainly, the fact that solar and wind are sure things right now warrants massive investment. Just throwing endless gobs of money at a problem that's as-yet unsolved doesn't necessarily lead to good outcomes, it also takes directed goals and all that. That's in theory what ITER is all about, though I think the slowness with which it got started will hamper it and we'll see success on other projects before it even gets to the testing phase. It was an attempt to create a moonshot that kinda failed, but the private sector seems more interested now so it might not matter.

That said I'd actually be surprised if there isn't already much more than $200bil going into building out solar capacity worldwide. It's just not easily enumerated because it's not special anymore, and a lot of it is on small scales (ie. I'm gonna install about $20k of solar panels to my home this spring and I'm not alone, but it's hard to tell how much that adds up to).

The point isn't that people don't think some green energy source is needed, but that fusion energy has been 'two decades away' for three quarters of a century.

Unthinkable quantities of fossil fuel energy was within reach for 10,000 years of human history had anyone put 20 years of effort in to reach for it. 75 years without success when trying to tap into a new energy source isn't that disheartening.

It is well worth keeping focus on fusion energy, especially if there are theoretical reasons to think it works.

Obligatory "at levels of funding that haven't materialized" reply you can go find sources for elsewhere in this post. Also, when I was a kid it was "always 40 years away" so the timescale of the joke has changed for the better. :P

The catastrophic global warming you mention is not a boolean. It can always get worse, with the planet becoming more and more inhospitable, up to the point where mankind can't survive (wet bulb temperature permanently above 35c --> everyone dies without air conditioning) - and beyond.

Even if it's too late to avoid it completely, it still makes very much sense to work on not making it even worse.

Suggesting to abandon efforts in something because it will anyway not be ready in time, or to stop restrictions because "anyway it's too late" is just the next step in the strategy of the deniers - or, rather, their agitators, motivated by immense profit.

Should we build N Wind turbines or blow the money on more fusion research? I would guess that we need to keep fusion research alive but the real bulk of the money should be for things that will work now.

Why not do both? Unless the wind turbines are in my back yard of course (which they can't be, according to the rules where I live wind turbines have to be ~2 km away from anyone's back yard, but still).

Because money is fungible.

A dollar spent on fusion is a dollar not spent on solar panels or turbines that would displace fossil fuels immediately. And, it would be a dollar wasted, because the fusion work will never produce any commercially competitive power, anyway. So, it is a choice between buying something that contributes to a solution, or just pissing it away.

> A dollar spent on fusion is a dollar not spent on solar panels or turbines that would displace fossil fuels immediately

I see this claim a lot, but what makes this true? Why would money allocation be so inelastic, and why can't it become flexible?

Meaning, why can't we just spend an unlimited amount on everything we think we might like?

Who says we can't? Money is a social construct.

Are you a troll? Come on. Money is a proxy for human labor. Human labor is not a social construct, it is a physical reality.

Because money, in the end, is just a proxy for labor, energy, land and raw materials. One can print money, but cannot print factors of production

Sure, but then the poster said that we can't allocate labor to this specific goal without taking it away from that specific goal. Why would that be true? Energy supply takes a minuscule fraction of our total labor, and nothing stops us from supporting fusion without unsupporting solar.

Or am I missing something?

The argument is that it would be far more effective to take all of the allegedly wasted fusion research money and spend it immediately on wind and solar.

No one knows the future but with the way things have gone so far, fusion in its current form looks like a giant waste of time and money.

Yeah, I'm not really seeing the justification for that argument, especially not when expressed as a dichotomy.

Have you really never had to choose between spending money on this or on that?

Few lack that experience.

Why don't we choose between spending money on coal/war/farm subsidies/health care or fusion? There are more than two options.

The amount of money spent on fusion research sounds large but it's really not that much in the grand scheme of things. And most of it is really being spent on efforts to improve things that have widespread application outside fusion, like material sciences and superconducting. It's really likely that a lot of major advancements will come of this research, in line with the space race advancing technology at an accelerated pace for a while. At least fusion has, from an optimistic perspective, an inherently worthwhile goal besides climbing an absurdly tall virtual mountain to go with it.

Anyways, at the scale of international project budgets, "killing fusion to increase money spent on other green projects" is, at this point, like not buying a daily coffee so you can afford a car.

Even pessimistic estimates of ITER's cost are still under $100B for a 5 decade long project. Or, put another way, less than $2 billion dollars a year. There are highway interchanges that have cost that much. And the EU and the US alone of ITER's contributors have a combined GDP of $35 trillion.

We can, and we should, do both. Most of the money raised by MIT's ARC / SPARC project has not been taken away from wind and solar - it's extra money that people chose to invest because, financially, it looks like a decent gamble (or, in some cases, even without looking so profitable, but a step in the right direction, and some people value that).

I'm a big believer in wind and solar, although their intrinsically intermittent operation causes me to also worry about baseload power options, and nuclear fusion is the most attractive and promising development in that field.

I think it's stupid to look at one part of the solution and not at the other(s).

I get your point but honestly you have to be an optimist to think that way. Al Gore was nearly voted in office on a global warming campaign. And since then nearly nothing good happened and it only got worse. So how can you judge someone who is just thinking about themself or profits at this times? I try to be optimistic and engage in politics to change the world a bit but as time pass by it feels more and more like a last „ grab what you can to have good life“ before catastrophe.

ITER is a scientific experiment. Even if goes according to plan ( and they are already late again ) and according to their official documents, the experiment will only start in 2035.

Fusion vs. renewables are not zero-sum. It’s possible to research one while supporting the other. All these fusion threads bash on fusion because renewables are here now, but in actuality fusion research and renewable rollouts can come from very different budgets.

I'm not saying research into fusion should be stopped. But I also don't think it's important to increase spending into fusion power, as the comment that I was replying to suggested. Even more so, i don't think we should be blocking investment into fission power on expectations that fusion power will make it deprecated in 10 years.

It's good to have fusion power in our back pockets, but we shouldn't be relying on it for our energy plans quite yet.

We should really stop using ITER as the reference. SPARC uses the same plasma physics with newer superconductors, and is expecting ITER-level performance in 2025. Most fusion scientists agree with that assessment.

SPARC won't have a turbine either, but with a construction time of four years, it brings us a lot closer to the next reactor which will.

ITER is still the biggest and best funded project. If SPARC shows anything impressive, we'll see, but so far I'd still bet on the bigger project.

> ITER is still the biggest and best funded project.

Which may be the core explanation for its failure.

Fusion will not solve any energy problems we have today, and is unconnected to them.

Fusion will have to, maybe, compete with solar/wind/storage in 20-30 years, and beat the prices for that 20-30 years from now. With solar+storage being cheaper than many fossil fuels today, fusion is going to have to be extremely cheap to be able to be a competitive terrestrial energy source with 20-30 years more of solar and storage improvements.

I agree that solar/wind price points have massively gone down but how is storage a solved problem? I have only seen research projects in this field, is there anyone who has commercially deployed an energy storage solution? (other than hydro projects)

I don't think it is correct. Offshore wind is cost competitive with fossil fuels in the UK. However, if you include storage I believe this cost balloons significantly.

That said, there are significant grid scale batteries coming online. The largest of these in California is 1.2GWh. By comparison the UK has about 30GWh of pumped storage.

These look almost there (I know, I know, "almost"):

https://ambri.com/ (liquid metal battery)

https://www.hydrostor.ca/ (compressed air)

This short read should answer your questions:

https://www.energy-storage.news/battery-storage-at-us20-mwh-...

It seems that we are at the turning point.

The only problems we have with storage are (1) determining which will end up cheapest, or has the most valuable side benefits, and (2) building out.

Hydrogen, anhydrous ammonia, and liquified air all produce a valuable industrial product once the tanks are full. Used to be their round-trip efficiency was considered too low, but with solar panels getting dirt cheap, just putting up more panels accommodates almost any conceivable loss. Likewise for long-distance high-voltage transmission lines; China is even building cables to Chile (!) for winter power from desert panel farms.

Factories for industrial amounts of iron-air batteries are already under construction, and will be in full production by end of next year.

It turns out that pumped hydro, the most mature and efficient current method, has far more potential than generally assumed. A regular hydro power dam has to be in a river valley with a big watershed area. But for hydro storage, all you need is a penstock up to a depression in the hills, no watershed or river needed. There are millions of those. Even if you build a dam along one end, it's cheap. And you can float solar panels on it, where they will reduce evaporation and also run more efficiently.

Storage is a solved problem. We don't have much of it yet just because a renewable dollar is today better spent on a panel or turbine, and because cost for storage is falling even faster than for solar panels. Wait a bit, get more for the same money.

> China is even building cables to Chile (!)

Where did you read this? China is 18000 km from Chile, so this seems really unlikely.

I doubt it will end up built. But losses would only be like 50% with current tech, which is actually tolerable nowadays because solar panels are so cheap.

These are somewhat old stats:

> One growing solution to this, Bolinger said, is the addition of batteries to utility scale solar projects. While adding storage can increase the PPA price from $5-$20/MWh depending on the size and duration of the battery, Bolinger said, they are growing in popularity. Of 460 GW of solar projects in queues around the nation as of 2020, 160 GW included a battery.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/developers-increasingly-pai...

We are right at the inflection point of deployment, where projects are cheaper with storage than without, so the amount of projects with storage is going to skyrocket very soon. The thing that makes it cheaper to include storage is lowering of prices during peak production hours, or even curtailment. So after a state gets > ~10% or so of their energy from solar you will see far more storage.

Standalone, for-profit batteries are also becoming common these days, especially on highly-renewable grids that are purely profit driven, like Texas' ERCOT grid. And ERCOT is purely pay-for-energy, so deploying a battery there requires analysis of the arbitrage opportunities, and understanding the grid congestion, etc.

Here's a small battery deployment, but the interesting thing was this current analysis of arbitrage market depth:

> According to John Hancock’s Andrew Mazze, the first hour of energy arbitrage is the most valuable in ERCOT’s market construct and adding extra hours of storage does not justify the extra capital cost required. “I don’t need four hours to maximise the value of the battery [in Texas], you can get 90% of the value with much less capital cost, with a one or two-hour battery [system],” he said.

https://www.energy-storage.news/texas-broad-reach-power-brin...

The issue with solar is the land area usage in densely populated countries, less of a problem in the US but here in the UK the is a lot of push back against building solar farms on agricultural land. There is a convincing argument that we need to discourage the practice in order to maintain domestic food production.

Obviously there are alternative locations such a roofs of commercial buildings and over the top of car parks. But that bring some of there own problems, structural problems with old roofs and cost to modify car parks.

The UK have done a brilliant job of offshore wind, that works well.

My point is traditional Nuclear and Fusion use a lot less land and that is an important factor to consider long term.

Solar is probably not the right technology for the UK. That said, on a cool sunny spring day I'm often amazed by the amount of solar energy we are generating, 2-4GW of power. Nearly 10% of the normal demand. Compared to its impact, virtual none, I think that is quite impressive.

There is also a reasonable chance that solar panel efficiency could practically double. That would definitely make things interesting.

There is absolutely no problem with land area for solar and wind.

First, the amount of land used for fossil fuel extraction today is less than the total needed to park all the power generation equipment we will need. All of that land will soon be unused.

Second, putting up solar over existing farm and pasture land increases yield and reduces water needs. Solar over canals and reservoirs cuts evaporation loss. Solar over parking lots keeps off sun and rain, making cars last longer. There is no need to devote any land exclusively to energy production.

Finally, wind also coexists nicely with agriculture. A wind turbine not connected to the grid can be synthesizing ammonia whenever the wind blows, for local use as both fertilizer and fuel, much more cheaply than central industrial production that then must be trucked in.

Oh I’m not saying for a second it shouldn't be done. The main issue here is a combination NIMBY and misaligned incentives.

Quite right you can graze sheep (and other cattle) under solar. You cannot grow crops though, which is what I was suggesting by “agricultural” land, should have made that more clear.

I live about two miles from what is proposed to be the UKs largest solar farm [0], I believe it will be 8.7x the size of the next largest by area [1]. The local community largely don’t want it [2], personally I would not be unhappy if it happed. However I can see and understand the arguments about placing it on such fertile land that should be used for growing crops - their main argument against it. But there is also a NIMBY sentiment too.

There are good reasons for placing it in that location, there is a significantly large substation there and it’s either side of a major railway line.

The point is, we in the UK need to be growing as much of our own food as possible. Solar is a potential threat to that under the current incentives. The government absolutely should be incentivising solar but in other locations, all that you have listed, but currently farmers can get a better return from solar than crops.

0: https://www.mallardpasssolar.co.uk/

1: https://www.deegesolar.co.uk/uks_biggest_solar_farms/

2: https://www.mallardpassactiongroup.com/

https://www.stamfordmercury.co.uk/news/amp/clock-is-ticking-...

You can, in fact, grow crops under solar. And they yield more that way.

The panels do not cover every square inch of farm; 50% is common. Most plants, including the most productive crops, will only do a certain maximum of photosynthesis in a day; insolation after that just adds heat stress.

It can be done, but its not currently and there is legitimate problems with it due to the logistics of existing farm machinery. For example the structure required to position solar panels in a way that would enable existing combine harvesters or sprayers to continue to work is unlikely to be feasible. It would be a different way of farming, back towards smaller machinery. So it may be possible but I don't see it happing without massive government incentives and maybe more automation.

Fully support it if it can be made to work, but I'm sceptical.

The problems to solve are all in the realm of mechanical and small-scale civil engineering, the sort we have been used to solving for a century or two, routinely.

Certainly pasture and row crops most easily coexist with elevated solar, but there is a lot of pasture. The yield benefits for row crops are attractive, though. In water-stressed areas, the reduced irrigation need might be the main benefit, but they all add up.

There are loads of empty rooftops in much of the populated US which typically has a lot of suburbs with endless stretches of the usual franchises typically housed in boxy buildings and equipped with some power hungry AC units. That's a huge amount of largely unused roof and potentially a massive amount of power generation. These buildings typically have even larger parking lots right next to them. Ideal place to cover with solar. And you get nice shady/dry parking spots as a side effect. Also a great place to put up some car chargers. And lower power bills for the before mentioned AC. Win win.

Walmart figured that out years ago: https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/sustainability/201405...

The US has plenty of room for solar. And that's before you even consider vertical space. Several companies have solar power generating windows in the market already. Nice if you are building a new skyscraper.

And of course you can use good old fashioned copper cables to transport energy around. E.g. California has some nice salt lakes and deserts close to where millions of people live (e.g. LA). After all, you wouldn't put a nuclear plant in the middle of a city either. Nimby's wouldn't allow that. Solar is a lot less controversial.

I would think about more practical ways to reduce cost fuel consumption. We are still 10-15 years away from practical fusion. We have been, for the last 50 years.

As for Germany, maybe it would make more sense not to hastily shut down nuclear reactors, in favor of coal and gas, or at least until the equivalent capacity of renewable energy is online, if they really cared about the environment?

The distance to energy production through fusion is better expressed in funding, less so in time.

https://m.slashdot.org/story/167399

... says researcher trying to get their research funded.

This seems to me like a comment driven by jealousy. Simply because it doesn't add any reason to it, like for example: a discussion or at least a comment about how the capital invested in fusion is needed somewhere else.

Sorry if it sounded flippant. The point I wanted to make, and which was not clear from the comment above without opening the link, was that this statement comes from someone with a clear conflict of interest.

I think the burden of proof should be on the scientist, it just doesn't seem plausible to me that fusion progress is so fungible, especially not at timescales less than what it takes to train a fusion researcher.

Thank you very much for this artikel. I found the explainations in that Q&A for most parts very understandable, and felt like they actually give direct answers to direct questions. Also I perceived the questions to be a very good composition.

Unfortunately, it's from 2012, if I understand correctly. Can anybody recommend a similarly braod discussion of the big questions for the 'simple (wo)man'?

I can't see the European Green movement embracing anything that has "nuclear" in it.

I have anecdotal evidence to the contrary: myself.

In the short and medium term, it's obvious that wind and solar are going to help us avoid the worst of the climate crisis. In the long term, we might need something more to reverse climate change.

Existing nuclear fission energy capacity might be a short term stopgap. It's just clearly not sustainable because inherently too risky:

- military/terror/nuclear proliferation risk

- uninsurable accident risk

- long-lived waste risk

- uranium sourcing geopolitical risk

Nuclear fusion however should be able to avoid most of these risks.

All of this could be moot of course if dangerous idiots like Vladimir decide to solve the problem by killing a sufficiently large fraction of humanity. I'm cautiously optimistic though that a better solution is possible.

The German green party had made it part of their program to stop all research into all kinds of "nuclear" technologies, explicitly listing fusion research as something to be stopped. I think that this passage has been removed again, but the whole thing still serves as a good indicator for the sentiments here.

They do not mention fusion, but they are still clearly against fission:

> Wir vollenden den Atomausstieg und bekennen uns zum verabredeten Pfad der Endlagersuche mit höchsten Sicherheitsstandards bei größtmöglicher Transparenz und Beteiligung der Bevölkerung. Der Rückbau der bestehenden Atomkraftwerke muss schleunigst und ohne Zeitverzögerung auf höchstem Sicherheitsniveau erfolgen. Die Atomfabriken in Gronau und Lingen wollen wir schnellstmöglich schließen Auch in der EU werden wir den Einstieg in den Atomausstieg vorantreiben.

https://www.gruene.de/themen/energie

Google Translation:

> We are completing the nuclear phase-out and are committed to the agreed path of searching for a repository with the highest safety standards and the greatest possible transparency and participation of the population. The dismantling of the existing nuclear power plants must be carried out as quickly as possible and without any delay at the highest level of safety. We want to close the nuclear factories in Gronau and Lingen as quickly as possible. In the EU, too, we will promote the phase-out of nuclear power.

I believe it is misguided. Fission is a great intermediary technology, which killed way less people than coal, oil, and gas per energy produced, including the nuclear accidents.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#nuclear-...

Shutting down fission before finding a solution for when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing is nuts, and results in emergency fuel burning (gas and coal).

>They do not mention fusion

I believe they've spoken against it in the EP.

The last time I checked the sun is shining 24/7.

A useful distinction if one migrates between locations in the Arctic and Antarctic Circles that are never clouded, possibly. Anyone else has to deal with pesky details like weather and night-time.

So much misconceptions in this opinion. It seems you dupped by the anti-nuclear lobby and the pro-fusion lobby.

Non of the things you suggest are even remotely true.

- Fusion are as big a proliferation risk, and existing fusion reactors and GenIV reactors that are being built are very small proliferation risk.

- Fusion would be equally uninsurable. Practically speaking a accident that leaves the exclusion zone is less likely with a modern GenIV reactor that are currently in regulatory approval.

- Nuclear waste of modern reactors (and past reactors) can be broken down burned up. The outcome is waste that needs only a few 100 years of storage and isn't really all dangerous in that time. Its not actually a big practical issue. No deep Geo-1000000 year storage needed.

- Literally every country has practically unlimited thorium in the ground. Isolating thorium pretty easy and its a by product of rare earth mining. Non supply of fertile material is a non issue. So once you have actual nuclear reactors running there is no chance of supply issue.

And all of this could have been done 40+ years ago as well. Fusion is not needed.

>- Fusion are as big a proliferation risk

You either don't understand fusion or proliferation.

we could just pull all the stops to turn the fission reactors back on. we already found a magical solution to our energy problems, like 80 years ago. how can you expect it would turn out any different for fusion?

In the same timeframe, much more success has been found in improving the efficiency of renewable power solutions which are functional out of the box, easier to maintain/update, cheaper, and an easier sell.

I agree that fusion is important to research, but comparing it to the Manhattan Project or the Space Race is to forget that the world was at war when the atomic bomb was delivered from theory to reality in, what, 27 months?

The world was locked in the grip of paranoia about nuclear armageddon and the US/Russia both felt the same existential need to establish a space presence to avoid losing ground or giving so much as a hint that either side might be technologically less capable of catastrophically second striking the other.

Fusion is a notion that has been actively researched and experimented with in a time of relative peace. There's less pressure on the world because no one sees climate change in the same light as nuclear war.

The world still has conflicts, but in the minds of the West, the nations that are in conflict are always in conflict, it's just how it is out there. Obviously this view is absolutely ethnocentric and absurd, but that's the mindset.

War's just something to report on, something people almost expect to see on breakfast TV when they go to work. It would almost be eerie for them not to see or read about a war somewhere.

Thus, I would argue in the absence of existential crisis, and in the presence of the climate change narrative where words like "renewable" and "green" are easily distinguished over "less waste than fission", fusion power ultimately just lost as a business prospect to renewable energy.

What we should have actually done is build new and more fission reactors decades ago and not shut the current once down.

That how we could have solved the while issue decades ago.

France had green energy for literally 40 years and nobody cares. Because 'nuke = evil' attitude, specially in Germany.

> and NS2 being cancelled

Only the certification has been suspended. I bet it resumes before the next winter season. All in good faith ofc - to overcome the inevitable energy crisis. Which in turn results from lobbying to shutdown so many nuclear plants so quickly.

Skeptical. This video by Sabine clearly explains why a lot of these fusion research claims are dubious with a focus on ITER and JET: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY

Agreed. She really did a great job explaining how the progress of fusion research is regularly miscommunicated to the public as more significant or quickly applicable than it actually is.

Fusion in general seems like a false hope for any of our near term energy problems.

Moreover she communicates that to achieve the desired goal, Qtotal is the one that must exceed 1, and that is harder to achieve. That is, total electrical energy generated to exceed total energy to run the system. You have losses down the road, particularly when converting heat to electricity.

It doesn't take away from research that is being done/must be done, but rather how far we are today from the results.

> JET’s latest experiment sustained a Q of 0.33 for 5 seconds, says Rimini. JET is a scaled-down version of ITER, at one-tenth of the volume — a bathtub compared to a swimming pool, says Proll. It loses heat more easily than ITER, so it was never expected to hit breakeven. If engineers applied the same conditions and physics approach to ITER as to JET, she says, it would probably reach its goal of a Q of 10, producing ten times the energy put in.

"If engineers applied the same conditions and physics..."

"...probably reach its goal of a Q of 10..."

So casually thrown about!

Source (the OP nature article): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00391-1

Came here to post this. Thanks for your service. Sabine explains clearly the problems while still advocating for Fusion research to continue.

I would really like to see her discuss the MIT SPARC reactor.

Worth noting she makes several mistakes in her analysis, although her point stands she is likely over estimating the detla.

As this video is always posted on threads about fusion I'll just link to the last time it came up.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30271677&p=2#30273453

Not dubious claims, misleading claims. ITER is designed with the goal of achieving Qplasma=10, which is energy break-even, but not electricity break-even, which as Sabine points out is at around Qplasma=20 (for ITER specifically, had it been designed to achieve electricity, in theory).

That Sabine has a point that some media outlets miscommunicated the Qtotal, it does not mean every article that does not mention Qtotal is somehow a scam. Qtotal is only relevant for project in which achieving a positive Qtotal is actually a goal, which it isn't for any of these projects.

What Sabine doesn't mention is what the theoretical limit of Qplasma actually is. ITER was explicitly designed for Qplasma>=10 to save costs. There's no other reason why Qplasma couldn't be higher. It's just money that is the limit.

People quoting Sabine should get this in their head, ITER was not designed for generating electricity. Its Qtotal is intentionally lower than 1. Yes there have been journalists who got important details in their articles wrong, but anyone who knows anything about these reactors is not being mislead by the ITER or JET experiments.

Spark notes on issues: Lies by omission.

- No mention of lawson criterion performance.

- Only 3 nuclear MCF machines ever (ie that even have a Q).

- Conflates MCF machines with ICF machines (ICF machines are funded under DoE's "nuclear stockpile maintenance" line item, not energy research).

- No mention of plasma self-heating. ITER is 50% shy of lawson criterion performance necessary for a Q=infinity reactor (if it were a stellarator).

previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30271677

1128 points | 792 comments

indeed this news was already published a few days ago.

Battery prices are falling like a rock. Solar and wind prices are falling like a rock. EVs are going mainstream. Fusion is showing signs of progress after years of stagnation.

Oil and gas sales accounted for 68% of Russia's export revenues in 2013. That number is probably higher today. Oil and gas are between 15% and 20% of Russia's entire economy.

I really wonder if Russia's behavior is related to the impending end of the fossil fuel age. The Saudis and other petrostates lack Russia's military power and so they are instead frantically throwing money at crazy future-city projects and other boondoggles to try to build a future for themselves that is not rooted in oil and gas. Russia has nukes and a lot of conventional weapons, so maybe a militaristic path seems more viable to them.

As with every fusion article, I encourage anyone interested in the space to look into General Fusion. They're using liquid metal as both the reaction vessel and as a means to extract power. Really cool stuff.

This actually looks like it could be practical. Important differences from the Tokamak concept are:

1. No enormous magnets

2. No exposure of fragile equipment to hot neutrons

3. The reaction occurs in a bubble inside molten lead/lithium, compressed mechanically.

4. None of the pipes carrying hot metal (or anything else) are exposed to hot neutrons, so need not be replaced frequently.

5. The amount of molten metal is relatively small -- not thousands of tons, but just tons (much of it lead, why?)

Similarities are that the fusion energy is carried by kinetic neutrons absorbed in molten metal, and extracted by heat-exchange with another fluid, thence to steam; and the molten metal is processed continuously or periodically to extract tritium, which will serve as more fuel.

Big question is if the reaction rate is high enough. It seems to depend on how much plasma can be packed into the bubble before it is compressed, and how long you have to keep it compressed before releasing and exhausting the synthetic helium. It seems like if there is any tritium left over afterward, you would want to cool and reclaim that.

You get one hot neutron out per tritium in, which in a Li6/Li7 mixture might breed [0] two tritium out, plus some helium. With lead mixed in, wouldn't it steal slow neutrons you need to get above parity? I guess as long as the lead doesn't steal too many, it is OK? But what is the lead for?

[0] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/NucEne/fusion.htm...

Guessing the lead is so the ball of molten metal to make the bubble in can be not so big as to be impractical to handle.

I truly hope to live long enough to live in a fusion-powered "free energy" world. It will be truly science fiction. Along with positronic brains and anti-gravity devices, to get a glimpse of my childhood Asimov dreams again will be a fitting end to my life.

Sadly, the notion of "free energy" in a capitalist context is probably why the concept hasn't taken off.

If you can generate the energy for "free" then you can sell it for cheap and undercut every other producer.

It seems to me that it works very well in a capitalist context.

That is, indeed, the solar power value proposition. Nukes, not so much: the operating cost is very high.

Sad that JET is still the premier fusion machine in existence. Forty years! Fusion is always x years away because nobody has been building anything of significance for so long. All eggs in the ITER basket. Big mistake.

It's not like the reactor they're running today has had the same parts for those 40 years. In fact this experiment was partially to test an upgrade.

Fusion has no practice reason to exist compare to advanced fission. The improvements in energy density are not really relevant factor at that scale, meaning the difference from oil to fission, and oil to fusion doesn't really gain you much.

Fusion fuel cost over the long term is likely more expensive then a fission fast breeder (not to mention a potential of thorium thermal breeder).

Is a fusion reactor going to be cheaper to build then a advanced fission reactor? Not from anything know so far. Advanced fission concept are viable with pretty normal tubes pretty industrial steels or at most advanced aerospace materials. Any fission reactors actually consider would have waste more complex and expensive parts.

The nuclear waste argument is sometimes made in favor of fusion but with the right kind of fission reactor this problem and issue that has very viable practical solutions and storage for a few hundred years is viable.

Its really cool science but don't wait for fusion to solve any of our practical energy problems.

Maybe at some point fusion can build really small making electricity directly (Aneutronic fusion). Then it would actually be relevant. I would prefer fusion research to focus on that problem, rather then trying to build an oversized power-plant style fusion.

> this problem and issue that has very viable practical solutions and storage for a few hundred years is viable.

So you mean to say that there is no practical reason for fusion power to exist for as long as you ignore the long term consequences of what you're doing?

What consequences. That you need a parking lot full of nuclear waste that just basically stands there and does nothing? Can we not spare a single tennis court sized storage facility?

What are the consequences you are talking about?

We are not talking about some absurd 300000 year storage facility build into the earths core. That is not needed.

Guaranteeing something for 100 years is far easier then for 300000 years. And it can be easily monitored, if one location for some reason is a an issue after 100 years, just move it to another location.

Isn't fusion safer? If fusion was a viable option for countries that are phasing out fission like Germany then it could solve a lot of problems especially decreasing reliance on gas

We don't have fusion that is even remotely practical so making a safety case for it is very difficult.

In general, fission is very safe and next generation fission plants in development are incredibly safe. To a point where you have to really be Micheal Bay to come up with a scenario where radiation is escaping the exclusion zone.

Germany does not have a safety problem, they have a culture problem. This is driven by a 70s anti-nuclear war agenda that basically makes civil nuclear plant = nuclear weapon argument. I have lived in Berlin and the amount of anti-nuclear nonsense you see there is amazing. Anti-nuclear foot mats are common.

Fusion is not a practical viable option in the next 2 decades likely more.

You can right now go to South Korea and order 10 1GWh nuclear plants for the next decade and probably much more. Germany could have started built nuclear 2 decades ago and they would be as or more carbon free then they are now.

Next generation fission plants are going threw regulatory process in a number of places and I am not informed on China. Canada is your best bet for a internationally recognized regulator to license an GenIV plant. The US is cooperating with Canada and hopefully will issue dual-licenses.

Most of these companies have a hard time getting money, the process could speed up if other countries really invested in this tech.

See the current state here:

https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li...

The furthest along are Terrestrial Energy with a Molten Salt fast reactor. They have been in 'Phase 2' for a few almost 4 years now and should finish that relatively soon. This is the furthest along any non-research GenIV design has ever come as far as I know.

Hopefully by the end of this decade we will see some actually operating.

Technology wise this could have been done long ago, but the Canadian regulator is really the first to be so forward thinking. In the US non of this would have really been possible.

Thousands of tons of radioactive molten lithium would be quite noticeable if spilled, especially since it would instantly burst into flame, and spraying water on that would make it explode.

On the plus side, it wouldn't be very radioactive, not like a nuke meltdown. Mostly molten and on fire.

... and emitting deadly lithium oxide fumes:

"Acute inhalation toxicopathology of lithium combustion aerosols in rats", A.H.Rebar, B.J.Greenspan, M.D.Allen

"Male and female F344/Lov rats were exposed to aerosols produced by burning lithium metal under conditions designed to simulate a fire in the containment building of a fusion reactor. ... 14-day LC50 values ... were 940 mg/m^3 ... necrotizing laryngitis and ulcerative rhinitis"

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3089861/

[1] https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/0272-0590(86)90197-1

Even if true, fusion could definitely have a place in space travel where every kg matters.

But not hot-neutron fusion, which requires thousands of tons of molten lithium to absorb the neutrons.

In space, you want D-H3 fusion, or pB fusion if you can manage it.

Are we actually learning new bits of fundamental science from these experiments?

Are there still bits of these fusion reactions we can't simulate accurately enough due to insufficient compute?

Or is it just a matter of ironing out engineering issues?

I think given recent progress from several companies and research institutes, we might be seeing an increasing shift to solving engineering challenges indeed. Fusion has definitely moved beyond the proof of concept stage. It's no longer just a theoretical possibility.

Many challenges still remain of course. But it might be a lot closer than the 20-30 years that people have historically assumed it would take. It seems there are a couple of companies shooting for working power plants a lot sooner than that that are getting a lot of funding. Maybe even this decade. From there to commercialization might still take a lot of time of course.

It's both in every case so far. Machines are made and operated to discover empirical data, but we invent the engineering along the way.

Computation is woefully insufficient for particle level simulation. If we had a proper model of turbulence that issue would be lessened. We don't have a full grasp on plasma physics. If we did we could point to a single stellarator geometry and say "that one".

The physics and engineering also interplay at many levels. Optimal decisions at every level take both the plasma physics and engineering into account.

It depends where on the "fundamental science <-> engineering" spectrum you think materials science sits. Some of the thorniest problems in reactor design are "wtf do you make it out of and can such a thing exist". There's some science going on confirming material theoretical properties under reactor conditions.

Mind you, insufficient compute is also a problem. Although "insufficient" is probably underselling the scale of the issue. Simulating plasma is horrid. It's all the worst bits of both fluid dynamics and electromagnetics all rolled into one: you've got a potentially chaotic fluid where all the particles aren't just interacting with the things they bounce off, they're also interacting with other particles all throughout the body of the fluid through electromagnetic effects. Everything affects everything else, and (because chaos) the details matter.

Fusion is "sensational" science

Much like AGI, "room temperature superconductors", "Mars colonization" and so on - the science is intense, the reporting hyped up and every tiny step will continue to be posted again and again as if something revolution happened.

Meanwhile the world needs to many more nuclear reactors pronto if at all we stand a chance of climate change mitigation

We need better web security and privacy, better engineered cities and so on But no one cares about mundane engineering that may actually work - they only like pies in the skies

If averting climate disruption depended on fission or fusion, we would be doomed.

Fortunately, solar and wind are up to the task.

We would be doomed? Somebody should have told France who had a clean green grid 40 years ago.

If everybody had simply done nuclear we would be 10000x better of now.

The false promise of solar/wind held up by fossil-fuel and anti-nuclear people prevented green energy grids for literally decades.

If anything we are doomed because it took so long to actually bring solar/wind practically into being.

If we invested in nuclear and its advanced reactors decades ago, like we did in the 60s/70s we would also have high temperature reactors that could do things like provide industrial heat for chemical processes such as water desalinization, synthetic fuel production and so on.

You could even do very high temperature reactors if you wanted to decarbonize even chemical process that take 1000C without going threw inefficient electricity production and heat generation.

But coal plants were cheaper to build and that's why id didn't happen. Imagine a world where the US had build 100s of nuclear plants. The amount of nuclear engineers that would exists, the amount of knowledge and innovation that such an industry could have.

The problem is in the 70s what mattered was price, that coal plants were horrible to human and the environments was not considered.

So please explain why depending on fission would doom anybody. Germany could have replicated what France did in the 70s and simply started to build nuclear reactors when they started their green revolution 20 decades ago. In fact had Germany done so they would like be closer to fully de-carbonized now.

Literally any country that wants to be 100% green can right now call South Korea and order X reactors and within 10 years all but the largest industrial nations in the world could be 100% green power.

Why doomed? Because ever person on earth needs access to energy in the end. Simplified this leads to 5 outcomes:

- keep burning fossil fuels and have resulting climate change

- nuclear power stations in every country including unstable countries, countries with high corruption, dictatorships ... Which means proliferation risk ~1.

- nuclear power generation in "stable" countries and a world wide power grid to distribute energy

- intermittent power (solar, wind) and a world wide grid (almost no) batteries (sun always shines somewhere)

- decentral intermittent power and decentral storage

1&2 will be doom. I hope you agree. 3 is financially inferior to 4 due to the high capacity cost of nuclear compared to intermittent sources. 5 is 2 but with solar instead of nuclear so none of these problems apply. That seems to be the course we are on.

Personally I prefer 4 because we will need to cut down trade to reduce emissions too but diverse trade seems to be a quiet effective way to prevent war. So I hope that a 24/7 energy trade around the globe and "we are literally all connected" is enough to keep us from large scale war.

- nuclear power stations in every country including unstable countries, countries with high corruption, dictatorships ... Which means proliferation risk ~1.

Overblown issue when you think about it. And there are many reactor designs and fuel cycles that make it totally unpractical for a whole host of reasons. Neither for dictators nor terrorist are these all that relevant targets.

It would take to long to get into this in detail but its certainty doable in a safe way.

The reality is, its a very unlikely vector, if a nation has the finances to do it, they will just do it.

-----------------------

Nuclear power with a heat-based battery driving commercial turbines places right at the location of current coal plants is likely the best possible solution.

Modern nuclear power plants already have a heat battery almost by definition, if you just circulate a larger amount of salt, you basically have the same thing as a Concentrated Solar Plant.

Every country has ample fertile nuclear material, once you give them a started reactor they can refuel it with domestically mined materials. So every country could be safe in assuming that they would continue to have power even if international trade was blocked.

> Overblown issue when you think about it.

>> Assume good faith.

I think about it and I come to a different conclusion. Thank you for stating that I type such a long message without thinking about it.

> And there are many reactor designs and fuel cycles that make it totally unpractical for a whole host of reasons.

I am not convinced this is true. Please suggest a fuel cycle which could not be use for proliferation when one is allowed to spike it with other materials and one also can add steps to the waste nuclear processing to extract products? Fuel cycles also don't address nuclear waste which can be processed further allowing at least dirty bombs and fuel can be disposed in manners which violate out western sensibilities in totalitarian states.

> The reality is, its a very unlikely vector, if a nation has the finances to do it, they will just do it.

Well having nuclear capabilities makes it a lot more feasible to have the means and money to build them.

> you basically have the same thing as a Concentrated Solar Plant.

Except instead of solar mirrors which can be taken care of by every country you have a highly complicated plant which locals might not be able to maintain, build in slightly unsafe ways, not inspect properly, not maintain properly, not shutdown when it needs to be shutdown, shutdown wrongly or use for proliferation.

> So every country could be safe in assuming that they would continue to have power even if international trade was blocked.

This would be objectively be a bad thing though. Isolationism is what allowed for war in the last century. Borders which goods cross, soldiers (or nukes) do not. It also would weaken human rights in countries which are no longer dependent on the good will of the world. I hope that you were not aware of these implications.

> JET is a scaled-down version of ITER, at one-tenth of the volume — a bathtub compared to a swimming pool, says Proll.

They either have amazing bathtubs or terrible swimming pools.

Before reading the article, I had hoped the power ratio would be something close to 0.7-0.8 but was disappointed that it was only 0.33

Even with ITER it should be a very long way until we will get a ratio of 1:1, not to mention of greater than 1.

Will the AI controlling method would help to a breakthrough?

Note, the power output was about 1/3 the power needed to sustain the reaction.

This seems odd to me, nobody has reached a Q of 1 yet, and she's claiming to be able to reach 10? That's great if it's true, but it seems a little fishy...

The good thing about fusion is that a lot of problems stem from the size of the surface area as compared to the volume.

The bigger the reaction vessel gets, the favorably this ratio is.

This experiment just shows that the predictions about ITER seem to be in a realistic region.

Bigger being better is not a plus.

You have that backwards.

The bad thing about fusion is that the power has to radiate through the surface of the reactor. That means that when you are at the engineering limit of what that wall can withstand, your volumetric power density decreases as you make the reactor larger.

This is unlike a fission reactor, where heat is transferred through the surfaces of large numbers of thin fuel pins, and where the surface area increases in proportion to the volume of the core.

Q=10 is still not enough if you actually measure the whole experimental setup. Don't forget that to goal is to make a power plant where the whole building produces more energy than it consumes, and does it economically.

A 1000% return is insane economically. Perhaps I'm not seeing the logic but the pure YOY return on 1000% seems to logically conclude a rational strategy of "nothing else matters besides building this and it will easily pay off and investment"

A 1000% return only just covers unavoidable inefficiencies.

No Tokamak will ever pay off its investment.

Right, that’s the ridiculousness of it.

Q is just energy out over energy in. It is not an economic return.

Yeah but what else puts out more than puts in energy wise?

Any energy source that people actually use. And most of them have near-zero energy input during active use.

This just means for every n W of _heat_ injected the fusion creates 10n W of heat. But I'm pretty sure the experiment itself consumes much more electricity than it could theoretically produce (don't forget that converting heat to electricity has an efficiency below 50%). Fusion researchers mislead the public to get more funding when they say ITER will make more energy than it requires. Fusion might be never viable.

Yeah well anything above a ratio of 1 would be beyond anything we have in terms of return based on investment in relation to cost to generate heat and it’s output. Basically all technology thus far is <1 right?

The best part to me:

> ... If engineers applied the same conditions and physics ...

& __physics__

Even if this works, it's just an experiment and we will need decades more to make it practical.

Here's an interesting article that puts this into perspective and provides a lot of history about nuclear research:

https://quillette.com/2022/02/21/fusion-power-is-coming/

EDIT:

The above article talks about some other approaches, such as:

> MIT physicist Bruno Coppi proposed achieving fusion in a very small tokamak by the simple expedient of using ultra-strong magnetic fields. The magnetic field lines of a tokamak confine particles to follow them, spiraling around the chamber, with the radius of the spirals being inversely proportional to the strength of the magnetic field. Coppi reasoned that the relevant dimension of a tokamak was not its size per se, but the ratio of its size to the radius of the spiral, because it is this ratio that determines how long a particle will last before it hits the wall. Furthermore, as noted above, the higher the magnetic field strength, the faster the particle is likely to react. So if you want a particle to take part in a fusion reaction before it hits the wall (which would cool it too much for fusion), the key is just to go for broke with ultra-powerful magnets. But the problem is that the highest magnetic field it is practical to achieve with traditional low temperature superconducting magnets is about 6 Tesla, and Coppi needed 12 T. So, he designed an experimental machine called “Ignitor” using copper magnets. This could not be a practical commercial reactor, because the resistive copper magnets would use too much power. Nevertheless, if it had been built, we probably would have achieved thermonuclear fusion ignition in the 1990s. But all of the US Department of Energy funds were committed to ITER, so Ignitor was never built. But starting around 2014, an MIT group led by Professor Dennis Whyte decided to pick up where Coppi had left off, improving on the Ignitor concept by making use of high temperature super conductor magnets, which require no electric power and can reach 12 T. As a result, with more than twice the magnetic field strength as ITER, the CFS reactor, known as SPARC (for Smallest Possible Affordable Robust Compact) fusion reactor, will achieve 1/5th the power hoped for by ITER in a reactor 1/65th the volume. Furthermore, CFS aims to do it by 2025, achieving in seven years what ITER hopes to do in half a century.

how many kettles this time

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