This is great news.
That said, what the literal fuck -- we've previously been investing 1/850,000th of global GDP in one of 4-5 truly promising energy technologies while the world burns before our eyes?
That said, what the literal fuck -- we've previously been investing 1/850,000th of global GDP in one of 4-5 truly promising energy technologies while the world burns before our eyes?
Unless I've missed something, nuclear fusion meanwhile has yet to demonstrate realistic commercial power generation, even as a proof of concept or a complete path to get to that point. In other words, more research is definitely worthwhile, but it also seems possible it will be a dead end at least in the near term. It's hard to argue prioritizing that over other things that have been generating real commercial power for decades. I'm all in favor of an all-of-the-above approach, but prioritization almost always has to be the reality.
Out of all sources of energy only atomic energy is something that we can practically scale at the moment to cover almost all our needs (air travel and maritime shipping being notable exceptions). We just need to think a bit harder how to ensure this is done responsibly and safely. Not saying it is an easy problem, but I think the issue is too little resources are devoted to solving it. I would say this probably isn't harder than sending a man to the Moon. It is just something that should be possible to fix practically with existing technology and just good design.
The cost of humanity that can't decide on what needs to be done is that we are still reliant on fossil fuels and are distracting ourselves with half measures that have a lot of problems that in hindsight were pretty obvious. Like solar energy -- only works when the sun is up, is difficult to scale and we still haven't figured out how to store energy for when it is needed.
Our children will curse us.
... what?
Criticism 1: you'd need, what, like 100 nuclear plants planned and approved? If you started now, maybe in three years you'd get like ... 10 approved. five years maybe 20-30.
Criticism 2: nuclear is not price competitive with current wind/solar installations, and CERTAINLY won't be competitive even with efficiency improvements with wind/solar in 10-20 years when any plant actually leaves the boondoggle funding phase and goes online.
Criticism 3: what design of plant? LWR/PWR/huge dome/solid fuel rod/oh shit it melts down in a natural disaster? Yeah uh, no thanks. If nuclear had gotten its act together about ... let's say 30-40 years ago and designed a reactor that:
1) meltdown proof
2) consumes almost all its fuel
3) scalable / easily replaced
Then we might be able to do it. Problem is, the entire nuclear industry was invested in solid fuel rod designs, the military loved it for the weapons isotopes, the politicos blocked funding for LFTR and other designs, the solid fuel rod reprocessors were making bank, there was probably other shadow industries like waste handlers/transporters on the dole.
So... nuclear is a no go. Solar/wind for now, use natural gas and existing nuclear for levelling until storage and solar/wind+storage drop to levels unattainable by nuclear/fusion/naturalgas/geothermal/hydro. Synthfuels for aviation. Long haul shipping can probably be done with swappable batteries and/or synthfuels. ... maybe... hydrogen if it's not the current trojan horse for hydrogen-from-methane being pushed by the oil companies.
Maybe nuclear can be competitive when solar/wind even out, and battery/storage finishes its incredible scaling and tech development. Maybe.
But the path forward is wind/solar, and maybe synthfuels and green hydrogen if the green isn't "green" like clean coal was "clean" coal.
Our children should already curse us. The science was there, and my and ESPECIALLY the boomers picked SUVs, big houses, moving to florida, and lots of cheap crap shipped 5000 miles from overseas labor over dealing with problems.
Dams also need many years to build, but you won't say they are useless because of this...
Second, nuclear is price competitive with wind/solar. The way nuclear is competitive is because it allows removing dependency on fossil fuels and wind/solar do not. We can't afford using fossil fuels anymore because it does not matter if you get lower $/kWh if along we cause drastic climate changes.
Stop thinking in terms of $/kWh produced by the powerplant alone. To compare cost of nuclear vs solar/wind you would need to include humongous batteries that would be needed to smooth out output of solar/wind stations which nuclear powerplants do not need. We don't have the technology to build those batteries in sufficient capacity and so the price of solar/wind is currently very, very high (the price of us all cooking/freezing/suffocating/starving, etc.)
Which will be cheaper? Especially, what will be cheaper in 10 years?
Which will be online faster? As in, can be scaled out in 3-5 years?
With forthcoming 200 wh/kg LFP / LMFP, 140 wh/kg sodium ion, and various other schemes, I will heavily bet on batteries + solar / wind beating out nuclear. I don't know if you're engaging in FUD based on cobalt and nickel chemistries, or just are ignorant of the forthcoming Gotion/CATL production lines for high density LFP and sodium ion chemistries. Those aren't resource limited, they just need to build the factories, and factories are a lot better than nuclear power plants in timescale.
PLUS, storage + solar can be distributed to the home to reduce the amount the grid needs to move from a centralized generator, make the grid and homes much more resilient, and function as a backup battery store to grid storage.
I never see hydro listed on LCOE charts. I'm going to assume it's at the scale of nuclear which is already not competitive. Hydro is actually the best grid storage if you have a mountain and two big lakes or some similar setup. As I understand it, the efficiency is 90% pumping and then getting it back.
ITER [1] is expected to produce more thermal energy than it consumes and is currently under construction. No electricity though.
The follow up plant, DEMO [2], should produce electricity (750MW).
If it will ever be built and then go online. Which is highly unlikely given the slow progress of ITER and its very difficult problems - some it even does not try to solve. Like getting enough Tritium: https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run...
750MW (again using thermal energy, which is probably not the future of electricity production) from such an expensive & complex device? Probably you would need pools of several fusion power plants, since it is unlikely that one fusion power plant will run for a longer periods of time. Maybe a pool of six would provide two running (just a wild guess).
The technical problems will be huge and the costs gigantic. I can't imagine how this will be competitive when in production (with outputs in tens of Gigawatts, to make any impact) in 2060 or later.
In the meantime, all of the experimental devices (JET, AUG, EAST, DIII-D, etc.,) have been gathering evidence on how to operate ITER when it is turned on, and not necessarily focused on achieving breakeven.
This is one of those numbers that only seem big without context. Medium-sized cities spend more than this on interchanges and highway development over shorter timespans than any of the various multi-decade price tags that get thrown around for ITER.
The hefty price tag seems smaller when considering the development and design of ITER began during the cold war.
The literal size is definitely big even without context, which is why it has the nickname: gigantomak :D.
[1] until recently
It is very very very doubtful it will beat wind/solar as they continue to drop in cost, at least not for probably... 40 years. We're looking at 10-20 years to a viable commercial design and construction.
I place fusion like next-gen fission: worthy of continued investment in research and maybe some subsidized consumer plants (if/when fusion becomes viable).
Even with viable fusion, there will likely be degradation/radioactivity of the power generation cores from fast neutrons and other problems.
There will always be places where solar+battery isn't viable. Northern Canada and Alaska come to mind.
Solar is great but not simply alone. (Latitude is less of an issue as (proper) power systems are interconnected markets that sell/buy excess load.)
India is going to end up with perhaps two billion people and will have extraordinary population density/spacing problems. They're going to desperately need huge numbers of nuclear fission power plants or fusion plants to provide for that. They will not have the space for epic scale solar farms. Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Philippines, Vietnam, Israel, Belgium, Netherlands (among others) are in the same space vs population situation. And given the population explosion across parts of the Middle East and Africa, it's a certainty nations in those regions will have the same problem as well.
Your math is totally wrong, space was never an issie for solar. It tales 100x less space for a coutry to cover it's power needs with solar, than it does for a country to grow it's own food and feed it's own people. So every country thats not a city-state, like Vatikan, is fine.
All the challaneges of Solar are around intermittency, cost and ofcourse it's less viable in northern lattitudes. But none of them are around space.
Solar needs more space in such locations but space is abundant and also nobody lives there so you dont need much power anyway.
The sun shines 24 hrs a day during summer, so you can generate lots of hydrogen for use during winter.
Basically everything except fission, tidal and a portion of geothermal. Admittedly it's not a terribly useful classification.
I'm not sure what benefit density provides, especially since people obsessed with density seem to only focus on the reaction chamber, which is the smallest part of the massive building and heat rejection apparatus that will be needed.
Rejecting waste heat is a real difficulty, and part of the reason that's France's fission fleet is at less than 50% capacity right now.
Thermal electricity production has a chance of becoming obsolete compared to direct conversion of photons into electricity. When solar plus storage costs less than steam turbines plus heat rejection, then it doesn't matter how cheap or dense the fusion part is in terms of economics.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/technology-government-and-politic...
> But a group of residents organized as “Save Our Mesa” argued such a large installation would be an eyesore and could curtail the area’s popular recreational activities — biking, ATVs and skydiving — and deter tourists from visiting sculptor Michael Heizer’s land installation, “Double Negative.”
I also searched the page and the word 'climate' doesn't appear even once. Why do you consider this to be an example of 'climate activists' shutting down a solar farm project, and do you have any other (actual) examples of it happening?
For another actual example of this happening, see the scaling back of the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility
Those are NIMBYS who want their view. Maybe with a mix of oil lobbyists.
Don't get me wrong, I am very frustrated by people who see themselves as environmentalists, for whom climate change (and thus non-carbon energy sources) is not the top priority. I think they have wrong priorities. But that doesn't mean they're hypocrites, they're just (IMO) wrong.
All that said, I agree with your topline observation that we need all the help we can get.
If that's too annoying to store you can get it hot and squeeze it over some nickel to get methane.
Electrolyzation becomes cheaper than mining methane for hydrogen (and thus ammonia) production if solar hits the $0.2-0.3/Watt threshold somewhere (which is predicted to happen in 3-7 years).
It's complicated and expensive, but I'm not sure I'd bet on a sabatier reactor (or hydrogen storage if it gets cheap), an electrolyzer and 4x the solar panels being more expensive than a fusion reactor with the average output of 1 unit of solar.
Plus the sabatier thing means we don't have to upgrade all the heating furnaces and expand the grid to have 8x the capacity.
Fusion will be real handy where power density is king though. And if there's some non thermal way of getting work out of it, I can see it being cheaper.
Maybe in a few more years/decade/s we will reach a point where in some places in the world it will be economical viable to have exclusive solar and battery, and that assuming prices will continue to drop and that there won't be any resource or physical limitations. Then we got colder climates where solar + battery is unlikely to ever become viable. Exports of solar generated green hydrogen could solve that assuming that the technology for that becomes cheap enough.
Multiple different directions where specific technologies could be economical dominant in the future.
Hydroponics with fusion technology allows us to produce food without relying on the sun at all. I'd say that alone is worth the investment.
As for the future, beamed power will work out to interstellar distances, so energy sources other than our Sun (and other stars) aren't necessarily required.
(From your question you might have been thinking of laser propelled light sails. These are best at speeds high enough that fusion is out of the picture.)
- under the earth
- under the ocean
- deeper into space
Granted, we don't need a lot of power in these places right now. But if we have the option...then maybe we'll find some good ways to use it.
Wouldn't any energy we can realistically generate be a drop in the bucket compared to what the Sun throws at us every second? And even if not, what would a heat sink do about it? I think I'm missing something.
Investment in something that might not pay off is wise if it does, and foolish if it doesn’t.
Though, luckily, it looks like that was a little over-pessimistic: it's not like the field has been sitting on its thumbs despite having, in terms relative to the potential, negligible funding: [2].
[1]: https://imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png
[2]: https://phys.org/news/2021-11-unveiling-steady-fusion-energy...
3 meals per day, 5$ per meal for 365 days is 3,832,500,000,000$
Even in the European Union, it is possible to pay around $5 for all the meals of a day, including not only adequate quantities of vegetables and fruits, but also a moderate amount of chicken meat.
However, for that, you must be cost-conscious, because from the same shops you could buy an equivalent quantity of food, but at a price even 10 times greater, when you choose to buy processed foods, even those as cheap as bread, instead of buying only raw ingredients.
a meal of 65g dry rice and 55g dry beans per person.
700m * 3 = 2.1b meals per day 115,500 tons beans = $80.9m 136,500 tons rice = $68.3m
Total $149.1m/day
I'm sure at these quantities you can get much better prices of rice and beans, even just browsing on alibaba. I'd guess we can probably get that down under $100m from alibaba. Probably even lower at the quantities we're talking about.
1 - https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/red-bean-wholesales-s...
2 - https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Jasmine-Rice-Long-Gra...