White House: Developing a Bold Decadal Vision for Commercial Fusion Energy
whitehouse.gov
whitehouse.gov
Fact sheet
https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/03/15/fact...
Agenda
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/031522...
Event stream
https://web.archive.org/web/20220317014710/https://www.white...
I'm offended that half of the speakers beat the drum of recruitment for a field that has produced more jaded ex-researchers than actual positions many times over. Filling seats is not an issue.
I don't like how they're combining energy security with progressive politics. I'm progressive, but the president isn't and neither are most democrat career politicians. Tying the fate of fusion to something volatile such as public opinion of progressivism provides no benefit to fusion research programs but adds risk. It's done so the administration can simplify their progressive efforts. "Look we gave all you people a summit and 50 million dollars, now fuck off and get us some margin votes". When they're voted out fusion progress may go with it and start being treated as a football. Not needed. Not wanted.
It's annoying that every politician was like "silly physicists don't know how to communicate" as if communication isn't nearly half of a scientist's job. It's like the politicians have never talked to a scientist. I'm sure they have but making jokes about scientists being science automatons with autism makes the politicians seem relatable to a wide range of voter demographics. Smile for the camera.
The DEI advocates viewed fusion under a scrutunous eye without appreciating that it has the potential to be an equalizer. It fucks people over the least in terms of land usage and fuel/waste issues. Not mentioned once. The people equipped to make these points were not asked about them and yet they label it a conversation. A conversation with themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_ion_fusion
as opposed to laser-based ICF?
"...Fusion – the same reaction that powers the sun – has the potential to be a game-changing technology to help us achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, increase energy security, and enhance U.S. technology leadership...'"
ITER [1] one of the leading scientific experiments, not a prototype, not a first commercial reactor, but just a scientific experiment, is currently already delayed. The original plan was to start in 2035.
They will have a first test phase of the soundness of the Tokamak then stop for 3 to 5 years and the experiment starts in 2035. After maybe 10 years there would be procurement and contruction ( 20 years ?) of the next step. So would be maybe 2070 or 2080, when we can see the first commercial prototype. DEMO [2]
The comes the question if they are economically viable.
Sounds like the Whitehouse needs to get another team advising them on Fusion....
They are referring to HTS magnets and startups such as CFS and Tokamak Energy. Previous tracks that were railroaded financially have too slow and inefficient of a track for public appeal. CFS' demonstration 20T coil changes the game. That's why this briefing happened.
I agree with everything in this statement except the idea that anything other than inducing a depression will have the US reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. It simply will not happen. Fusion has the potential to be an aid in hitting that by 2100.
But: Yes. Just one of those avenues is what MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center[0] has been talking about publicly since at least 2017 -- here's a fantastic talk[1] by them about how to think about fusion research and engineering, different approaches available, and about what is different in a world of high strength magnetic tapes, which they have subsequently worked to produce at industrial scales in partnership with CFS[2][3], which was founded by people from the PSFC to take advantage of this research. The bottom line is: these new very strong magnets allow way, way smaller tokamaks to hit net positive.
The hard research here is mostly done. The magnets it gave us have cleared a path forward at a far more tractable time and complexity scale than ITER can dream of. The work is now an engineering and industrial process problem, which is well under way: serious scientists and engineers around the world are hard at work at over a dozen different startups, working on reactors that could fire net-positively in well under a decade.
Will those reactors fix our energy problems? Hey, there's still fuel, waste, maintenance (neutrons hit hard!), regulations, etc... -- commercialization and politics are their own whole problems. But I would absolutely take the long bet that we'll have at least one net positive tokamak running before 2030.
0 - https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk (really, if you're at all interested, this is simply an amazing talk and clarifies a lot)
2 - https://news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusio...
3 - https://www.cfs.energy/ -- you can see Bob Mumgaard, CFS'CEO, is listed as a speaker at the white house event
If they offered the power exactly at cost, they would get no bids. Fission is today not competitive, and nobody involved can promise that Tokamak fusion could ever be competitive even with fission, never mind with what renewable power will be priced at, by then.
So, no, those reactors will not fix our energy, or any other, problem, unless our problem is too much money and not enough things to waste it on.
The expensive thing about fission is not getting a fission reactor to work, nor keeping it running. It's in getting the reactor greenlit at all, bespoke-designed, and handling supply and waste management. In many places, it is simply not an option due to geopolitics. So fission problem is not impractical because it is cost-prohibitive. Instead, it is impractical because it is responsible-waste-management and weapons-proliferation-regulations and spooky-stuff-difficult-political-battle-PR-nightmares-prohibitive. Sadly, very few people a) want a nuclear reactor in town, b) want to shoulder the risk of building, maintaining, and staffing a fission plant for 50 years, or c) want any "risky" nations to have easy access to them. That, far more than dollar-cost-per-megawatt-hour, is why we don't have nuclear plants everywhere today.
Solar and wind are amazing, and obviously essential to any future we have, but today they cannot do everything, everywhere. Further revolutions in power storage and transmission might enable that (like huge flywheels?) but that's not what we're discussing, we're discussing whether fusion a) can work, b) is useful at all, and c) will ever see large scale use for power production. I do grant that it's _possible_ that a flywheel-revolution could outpace a fusion-revolution.
Because of fission's problems, the niche of fusion over the next 30-50 years may be "nuclear power, but safer": it's more expensive, but it can be sold or built anywhere, the fuel control is not so vital/tough, and the waste is handleable on a timescale we can _at least_ wrap our heads around. Wind and solar currently need baseline plants for supplementation, and fusion may be the ticket to turning off the last remaining gas and coal plants out there, or in supplying power to underpowered nations with less favourable conditions for wind and solar. That is wonderful! That is lightning in a goddamned bottle. Literally! Does it have to be the cheapest option, when for many it's the only option?
Past 50 years, well, history would suggest it'll likely get better. Fission would likely be a lot better today (read: cheaper, smaller) if it were safer to begin with, and solar and wind have gotten astoundingly cheap as they've seen investment and use expand over time, so why shouldn't fusion do the same?
So the argument is: we're now likely to get net-positive tokamaks by ~2030. And if we have any net-positive tokamaks by 2030, then they can likely fill a power-niche that fission just can't. And if we spend 50 years making fusion plants and proliferating the technology, by 2080 it might get pretty damn cost effective. I think that's the bet all these smart people are making, and personally, I'm inclined to take it.
Well, with storage, they can do everything, everywhere. At worst, you make chemical fuels and ship them off to any weird place that has no sun and wind.
And PV is making electricity at $0.013/kWh in Dubai. Fusion will be lucky to come in within an order of magnitude of that.
Any place where renewables, local storage, and power delivered via transmission line are all unavailable, even if only temporarily, can surely get by on synthetic fuel shipped in from places that have reliable-enough power to make and stockpile that. So, it is hard to understand a claim that extremely cheap renewables "cannot do everything, everywhere." Indeed, we all are long used to relying on liquid fuels shipped in from across the globe, and I do not know why we would abandon the capacity.
I also see no need for extremely expensive "baseline plants" when the cost for storage is falling much faster, even, than the cost of the energy to be stored. Besides the very mature pumped hydro, we may turn the similarly mature liquified-air technology to storage. Factories for iron-air batteries are under construction. Synthetic hydrogen, methane, ammonia and even kerosene are known to be practical. Even long-distance transmission will often be a cheap substitute for drawing down storage stocks.
While chemical storage is less "round-trip" efficient than some other alternatives, it offers the important advantages that, when the tanks are full, the product is always immediately useful industrially, so synthesis equipment need almost never sit idle; and extra tanks are very cheap, anywhere more would be useful. Synthesis efficiency will only ever improve.
So, supposing somebody did manage to get "net-positive" Tokamak fusion as early as 2030, it is hard to imagine who would still care, by then. Do wake me up, though, if you find a way to get aneutronic D-3He fusion going that I can use for outer solar system operations.
This is dishonest, because the fusion reactions that occur in the Sun, and the fusion reactions that would occur in a manmade fusion reactor, are different reactions.
It's the same type of nuclear reaction. Both stellar nucleosynthesis and DT are more energetic per reactant mass than typical fission reactions and several orders of magnitude more energetic per mass than any chemical reaction.
They are not the same reactions, in the sense they have different reactants and go at much different rates. And for the purpose of this subject, they are different in the sense that "the sun uses fusion" does nothing to imply that "manmade fusion is interesting or practical".
I'll be excited about the possibilities of usable fusion in my lifetime when SpaceX starts iterating toward a production design.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_(mathematics)
SpaceX is not, in fact, pursuing production fusion reactor designs.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-06/doe-fy202...
Where you and he differ is in your judgment of how likely fusion programs are to succeed.
I personally don't think ITER is worth pursuing. I'm skeptical about other tokamak efforts as well. Small efforts that might yield more attractive reactors (Zap, Helion) may be worth pursuing, not least because such efforts would be cheaper.
magnetic confinement, lasers, material sciences have all advanced because of these projects and had impacts in other markets.
even if the money invested never ends up with an ITER reactor. we've still come out ahead economically.
without the original research, the spinoffs may never occur because the initial capital outlay isn't warranted for the various individual uses.
the fact of the matter is fusion reactors are such a game changer ignoring them because of the chance they might not work is insane. meanwhile all the research into getting them to work generates a ton of economic activity because other smaller markets can take advantage of the technological progress that was made in the attempt.
Whatever "economic activity" happens around fusion would be overwhelmingly better devoted to building out solar, wind, and storage, to slow the fast developing climate disruption catastrophe.
Claims that space spending had a 8:1 (or 24:1, or whatever) payback via spinoffs have typically just assumed the spending has the same macroeconomic payoff of private R&D spending, which demonstrates absolutely nothing.
Without that contribution inflation, one has to somehow show that a particular technology would not exist without the putative spinoff contribution. And that's really difficult to do in most cases. Here, the military has had an interest in high power millimeter wave sources for a variety of reasons.
The argument remains, also, that if spinoffs are an inherent part of research, then it doesn't matter what the research is on, and so you get the highest payoff by funding research that makes sense via direct benefits, as the spinoffs come regardless. You'd need to argue that fusion is somehow better at producing spinoffs than other research. I find that likely; I suspect small scale research is more likely to provide spinoffs, as desktop technologies seem likely to have more applications.
you can hand wave 'possible alternative realities' all you want but the fact is they triggered those economic returns. spacex would be another (recent) example of a primarily NASA funded endeavor that will generate massive returns in the future and would not exist without said funding.
anyways good luck.
> the fact is they triggered those economic returns.
Your blind faith in this dogma is touching, but it isn't supported by real evidence. For example, if you examine what actually happened, the NASA role in developing integrated circuits was rather minor.
D-D and D-T fusion would cost even more than fission, for the same power output. Fission is today uncompetitive. Fusion would thus be more uncompetitive. The longer it takes to get fusion power working, the more uncompetitive it becomes. Tokamak fusion will thus, also, never be commercially competitive.
But it will be able to absorb an unlimited amount of money.
The designs they publish for the fateful day they do get anything out are overwhelmingly bigger than a fission plant of similar capacity, overwhelmingly more costly to build, and overwhelmingly more expensive to operate. Leaving aside the plasma physics, no solutions are known for basic engineering questions in construction and operation.
Fission has turned out to be a dead end, for cost reasons: renewables are cheaper, and easier and quicker to field, and cost is still plummeting, making fission less competitive with each passing day. So, anything that costs more obviously has no chance.
All of this is a click away, if you care to know. Nobody is obliged to know, or care. But not bothering says all.
The reactor described there has a thermal power density 1/40th that of a PWR reactor vessel. And it uses so much beryllium that using the entire world's estimated resource of that element would let you build enough reactors to supply maybe 1% of world primary energy demand.
$25 billion would build a hell of a lot of solar, wind, and storage, that would start displacing fossil-generated power immediately, and then generate revenue to build out more.
In the mean time, there are arguments from analogy/difference. The market for fusion power is electricity production. (Other possible uses such as hydrogen production, district heat, desalination, or carbon sequestration have been hypothesized[1], but adding fusion to any of those needlessly adds technical risk, and is unlikely to be greenlit.)
At a very high level, fusion electric power plants would be like fission power plants in all economic respects except being more complicated and therefore having higher O & M costs, and that they operate with bigger parasitic losses and startup power and energy requirements. Therefore fusion plants would have a worse return on capital employed than fission plants.
We observe (1) that capital costs are nearly all of the cost of fission plants, and the same would be true of fusion, and (2) that fission power plants are uncompetitive[2] and will almost certainly remain so. Therefore fusion, being strictly less profitable than fission, will not be competitive.
1. ARPA-E review of initial markets for fusion energy: https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-01/105PM_...
2. Lazard's LCOE Analysis: https://www.lazard.com/media/451881/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
If the thousand tons of molten radioactive lithium/beryllium gets loose, it it distinguishable from a fission meltdown by being worse. Ordinary beryllium oxide dust is worse than radioactives; radioactive beryllium might be worse, or only just equally bad. Molten lithium burns on contact with air and explodes on contact with water, and lithium oxide vapor turns into drain opener on contact with your nose or throat.
"Hull maintenance" is I guess your name for dismantling and replacing the whole hundreds-of-tons and miles-of-pipes radioactive innards of the reactor using only R/C robots.
The most reliable product of fusion promotion has always been falsehood. It seems unlikely tho change.
A tritium leak is orders of magnitude less worse than a fission meltdown in terms of poisoning the water table. In the absolute worst case the exclusion zone lasts 100 years.
A tritum or molten salt leak also trivial to contain compared to a fission meltdown. Ten feet of concrete. This is reflected in lower costs to build and relative ease to comply with regulation. Draw me the scenario where there is an explosion that cannot be contained by existing engineered solutions.
Your most reliable product is FUD and misinformation born of confident ignorance. You really ought to stop until you know more.
Simply cooling the magnets back to operating temperature will take longer than that. ITER's coils will take a month to cool down from room temperature.
The problem with leaks isn't so much that tritium is dangerous; the problem is that a leak (of coolant, or air) into the vacuum vessel destroys the ability of the fusion reactor to function at all.
One of the big problems with fusion that Lidsky pointed out is they cram all this complexity into a space that's off limits to people (due to induced radioactivity). Anything breaks there, even something minor? Time consuming pain. Abdou has put up numbers on estimated MTBF and MTTR for fusion reactors that given uptimes of maybe 4%.
A fission reactor can operate with 2% of its fuel rods leaking. A fusion reactor will cease to operate with a single leak from a blanket module into the reactor vessel.
A $30 billion reactor complex, judging by recent experience with nukes, would never be completed, but would burn $100 billion before finally being cancelled.
None of the money spent would be returned, afterward.
Nobody has ever come forward with any such thing, to my knowledge.
Suddenly those scaling laws are invalid because someone on the internet who has no idea how to make an MCF machine implicitly thinks they are incorrect. You'll pardon my skepticism.
I will welcome any skepticism you can muster.
After you get all of 1, 2, and 3, you are ready to begin actual work on turning emitted neutrons into electrical power in an economically viable way. We have not had occasion to begin such work. If begun, it will predictably fail, for relentlessly practical economic reasons.
Based on the estimates given in 1976 on the linked graph, if we were to dedicate roughly $10B/yr to funding fusion—a tiny fraction of, say, the US military budget—it is likely we would have something at least close to a practical application within no more than about 20 years.
It's more plausible, I suggest, to reverse the causality here: fusion funding has been restricted because the technology was problematic, not the other way around.
If we do get fusion expect a monster disinformation campaign similar to the one running now against EVs or the ridiculous 5G FUD campaign.
ITER and its spinoffs share the failing that, even if 100% successful in all their aims, power produced would be much more expensive than from fission. But fission is already uncompetitive, and gets moreso every day. So, the longer they take to get to their projected endpoint, the farther they get from usefulness. And they are today far from useful. QED.
This is always true at first. People laughed at the idea of getting truly significant power from solar and wind only a decade or two ago. First you make something work, then you scale it.
We are reasonably close to this moment with fusion:
https://www.alamy.com/the-first-light-bulbs-ever-lit-by-elec...
There have been lots of nuke plant projects that successfully absorbed billions of dollars before finally being cancelled. Every cent found a ready pocket. Producing power was not necessary for that. None of the money has ever been given back.
It would be better for fusion if these obstacles were taken more seriously, and reactors designed to avoid them, rather than just pretending (via sufficiently optimistic assumptions, for example very large reduction in costs on Nth-of-a-kind plants) they will go away.
The Nth-of-a-kind argument didn't work for fission, btw. It's also not clear how it applies to the non-fusion parts of a fusion power plant. Are the turbines going to suddenly jumpstart a new learning curve just because their heat source is a fusion reactor?
Of the commercial reactor efforts I've been looking at, only Helion and perhaps Zap don't immediately strike me as destined to fail (they may still be destined to fail, I just can convince myself of that yet.)