I am not an energy expert but isn't 50 gigawatts extremely low? Whats the path forward for replacing our energy consumption on a larger scale?
The US divides 1084.37GW among its 330 million people, which comes out at 3.2kw each.
There has to be significant room for efficiency savings there.
For example in other contexts you'll see mention of a preference for single family dwellings. Unavoidably all the external walls of that property lose heat in winter. Even if they were well-insulated, which they usually are not, they're losing. Britain has a lot denser housing, with terraces (most properties share walls on each side with another home) or at least semi-detached (sharing one wall) being popular layouts. Obviously if the far side of the wall is just another home you're not really losing heat.
But the major points are that the tokamak is a well understood design. Their system uses the same physics basis as ITER, but their more powerful high temperature superconducting magnets mean they can produce a machine with the same Q gain as ITER in 1/10th the total volume. That smaller size means that they can build the machine much faster.
A few youtube videos to absorb all of this:
[2] Is their original pitch lecture from 2016, and makes a compelling argument that tokamak is well understood and simply using new high temperature superconductors allows them to design better magnets to make a small reactor work. It’s the oldest but it’s my favorite talk on the system.
[3] Is from last year so is more up to date. It is a recorded video meeting so it is kind of boring, but the subject matter is very interesting. I actually got this funny feeling like "it is the future and we are discussing fusion power plants over boring zoom meetings". Like it feels more real because it is almost boring. But a good talk.
[4] Is a good 15 minute high level overview for a general audience. If you don't want long lectures, listen to this.
[5] Is a short 4 minute video with highlights from their event last september where they demonstrated a 20 Tesla field in a large bore magnet for the first time ever.
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[1] https://cfs.energy/technology
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKwWGUT8rCw
Because IMO ANY path towards commercial fusion (that is not a total moonshot) needs to go through:
1) small demonstrator (JET, Wendelstein 7-x)
2) scaled up research reactor (ITER-like)
3) demo plant capable of electrical energy generation (ITER successor)
4) Mass construction of a somewhat standardized design (kinda like EPR or APR-1400 construction)
IMO, considering somewhat comparable steps in nuclear fission reactor design it is SUPER unrealistic to expect steps 2, 3 and 4 to take less than 10 years each (and even that is EXTREMELY optimistic already).
Throwing more ressources at the problem might help, but not that much; IMO only step 4 is really amenable to parallelization...
They recently proved their magnets work in a demonstration last September or thereabouts. They have the strongest large bore magnets ever created, and this directly leads to a much smaller machine. That is why I say they are promising. Really, check out the links!
We could build out fission power plants, but if the Vogtle power plant in georgia is an indication of how fission build outs will go, it will be extremely expensive and take a very long time.
> Especially if these fusion power plants are actually simpler to build than fission plants.
2025 is the date that they will complete their demonstration system and show net energy gain. But it will not be a fully functional power plant. Their slightly larger successor system will do that.
But you’d have to listen to their lectures to really understand. The tokamak is a well understood system. They are just using more powerful magnets than ever before, and they recently proved their magnets work. They published their physics basis research paper in Nature, and these are academics from MIT who have talked very openly about their system design. It doesn’t sound like there are any big unknowns remaining except the engineering design of the system itself which is well underway.
Maybe building this tokamak will be harder for some reason. But it really sounds like they can make it happen.
At a fundamental level, our lowest cost energy options are really simple - wind blows and makes stuff spin, dig a black rock and throw it into fire, inject gas into fire, let sun shine on a blue brick, chop wood and burn, make water flow and spin stuff
Now compare that to - keep superconducting magnets 250 degrees below ambient temperature, inject high precision beams of deuterium and tritium into a vacuum chamber, capture escaping neutrons in blankets of pure lithium and berylium. Eventually, capture the generated heat in a primary-secondary heat exchange loop of pressurized water, generating steam and spinning a turbine. All of which requires thousands of highly specialized scientists and engineers to design and operate
I doubt it will ever be cost efficient. And we're not even talking about the cost of fuel. Tritium is mind-boggingly expensive - we need deuterium-deuterium fusion, tritium is just an experimental stepping stone
Actually if you have fusion you start to think of power hungry things to use it for that were previously infeasible. Carbon capture is one.
For tritium, I’m a little fuzzy on this but I thought maybe the system generates the tritium from duterium inside the reactor? It sounded like it only needs duterium as an input.
Sure, there might be potential savings compared to fission because less safety concerns, but the reactor complexity is an order of magnitude higher, and its far from clear to me that fusion power will even be able to compete with current (admittedly often state-subsidized) fission on price, MUCH less with the price of renewables now (or, worse, in 20 years)...
Fusion in the long-term answer will provide benefits far beyond just eliminating power station greenhouse gas emissions, I suspect, but there are many technical and economic hurdles that have to be overcome, any of which could be pointed to when questions about allocation of state funding come up.
It could also be that it makes total sense to use 100% solar/wind + battery in everything not city and use fusion in city/for cities.
I would also argue that the 'no longer needed solar' will then be sold and used everywere else until all poor countries also are using solar energy.
Are people unable to learn from Ukraine? Fission/fusion reactors are just one missile away from nation-wide blackout and panic.
This distance could probably be shrunk if some of the gains from matsi for meta-materials translated into fluids engineering, where some kind of "meta" fluid has certain differential properties at a given thermal load (im imagining that the side/region with the thermal load, the particles in the fluid would have some type of glassy dynamics behavior to spontaneously create a radiant barrier back toward the source, would need to talk more with my friend about this since his thesis covered quasi-1d models of glassy dynamics and spontaneous partial arrangements under various conditions on initial perturbation and at steady state).
"A record 260 gigawatts (GW) of new renewable energy capacity was added worldwide in 2020, up 50% from the year before, ... Cumulatively, installed global renewable generation capacity amounted to 2,799 GW at the end of 2020, including hydropower. .. The share of renewables in energy generation worldwide now stands at nearly 30%, according to the International Energy Agency and other sources."[1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/record-260-gw-new-re...
edit: removed a reference to wiki for global energy production (wiki is in TWh, not TW)
eh? did you mean to say the year before last?
According to https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy the energy mix in renewables in 2020 was, in order:
Hydropower: 4355.04
Wind: 1590.19
Solar: 844.39
Others, inc. bioenergy: 702.89
Last time I looked, nobody compiled the 2021 data yet.
The thing to notice is that hydropower is growing very slowly. It is the largest share of the total, but nearly all the growth is due to wind and solar. And if you look at the growth rates, wind and solar grow by absurd amounts (with no indication of slowing down) where everything else has a normal growth or decline.
a) I guess I was pointing out that a lot of people tout big renewable numbers when a good deal of those numbers currently include (1) hydropower (some of the mega projects have drawn a lot of controversy, as I'm sure you know, from displacing people to changing ecosystems to causing resource conflicts with those downstream of the mega-dam) and (2) bioenergy (we should be using fertile soil to grow food crops).
b) Wind and solar are variable outputs whereas every other widely used energy tech is predictable (if you ignore resource wars). So wind and solar must always include a discussion of batteries (batteries are not "green") or peaker plants (which are either coal or nat-gas or nuclear).
c) Wind and solar are so new we still haven't figured out the whys and wherefores of dealing with the waste materials when they reach the end of their lifecycle.
d) Power density of hydro is terrible: https://phe.rockefeller.edu/docs/PowerDensity_Final120815.pd...
So as wind and solar scale there are a bunch of challenges that will have to be overcome for them to become proven technologies the way fossil fuels are.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/how-much-power-1-gigawa...
edit: I'll never get this right. it's 4 trillion kilowatt hours of generation, not kilowatts of capacity.
[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
You have a total 4X10^12 kwh/year of production, that's energy. 50 GW that's power.
Wtf!!!???
Teasing it out I think. Solar you get probably 5 hours a day. Wind maybe more? eh, lets assume 5 hours. 5 hours a day, 1825 hours a year.
So 50GW... lets say 50Mkw instead.
50X10^6 kw X1825 hr/year => 91,250,000,000 kwh/year
How does that compare to current production?
Percent added is 9.125X10^10/4X10^12 = 0.0228 or 2.23%
Seems like a small amount but it's growing exponentially.
If it increases by 25% a year then you'll be adding 5% a year of renewables per year in 5 years.