Why fusion will never happen (2012)
matter2energy.wordpress.com
matter2energy.wordpress.com
The company is also hiring: https://blog.samaltman.com/helion-needs-you
I do not personally have the ability or knowledge to independently evaluate claims, but the history of "it will never work" for something that does not outright violate the laws of physics as we understand them is notable too.
https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/zo9831/the_real_eng...
Interestingly, I am told Helion looked at using their scheme for DT fusion and concluded it would be more expensive than going to advanced fuels, since it would require heat -> electricity conversion in turbines and rotating generators.
Will this still be too expensive to compete with renewables? Quite possibly, but I think it's more than attractive enough to spend the money to find out.
I'm glad Helion seems to have broken into that exponentially increasing mindshare hype phase. It's going to be interesting waiting for Polaris to come online in 2024. It's also going to be interesting see the effect on other fusion efforts. I suspect this is good news for the other FRC competitors (TAE, Princeton Fusion Systems). Possibly it will not be good news for the more staid traditional approaches, like those using tokamaks.
At a more practical level, any device actually producing non trivial amounts of fusion using helium 3 would quickly make the device extremely radioactive from all the high energy protons being produced.
PS: DD fusion produces H3 half the time, it also produces tritium the other half which isn’t generally going to be a waste product it’s going to fuse in the reaction chamber filled with D producing very high enegry neutrons.
Why exactly do you think they need to provide public data? They're a company, not academics. They've provided data to their funders, who have also had external experts review the results, including the famous JASON physicists. The result of this got them $500M for Polaris and another $1.7B conditioned on the success of that machine.
My impression of Helion is from when I thought their ideas didn't work. This invariably ended up being because I had some misunderstanding of what they were doing. When I thought of a concern, I would find they had already addressed it. This makes all of the things they're doing ring very true. Maybe it will end up not working, but it's not because of anything obvious.
Your comment about high energy protons is wrong. The fraction of MeV-scale protons that will undergo a nuclear reaction in a target is very small and drops to essentially zero if the material has high atomic number (because the Coulomb barrier is too high). The induced radioactivity from the protons will be negligible in a properly designed system.
About the tritium: the pulse in Helion's design is so short that the tritium nuclei do not have time to thermalize. At the energy they are initially produced the DT fusion cross section is about an order of magnitude smaller. So, most of the T (I'm estimating all but a few percent) will not fuse before the pulse ends. If they have a gas with a low D:3He ratio, DT fusion is suppressed even more. They appear to planning a scheme where there are DD reactors that make 3He, and then D3He reactors that consume it. The latter could be designed with a much more favorable neutron environment.
High energy Neutrons are nasty, the issue with high atomic number shielding is it doesn’t slow them down very well. Sort of like tossing a ping pong ball at a bowling ball it just doesn’t transfer much energy. Even 1% Tritium would be a problem.
Of course neutrons will cause issues, but the point is the very energetic ones could be much less of a problem than in a DT reactor. It might make the difference between replacing the first wall once a year and replacing it once a decade (say). I will add that the cylindrical geometry should make such replacement much easier.
I advise you to study what they've said with an open mind. I believe you'll change your opinion, or at least convince you to reserve judgment.
It’s really the technical details they are providing actually makes them seem more like a scam, if they shared less it might seem more reasonable. But sharing a lot except any relevant numbers while suggesting it’s ready soon screams scam.
For example they need 2 DD reactions to on average produce 1 H3 which means their producing more high energy neutrons than a pure DT design for the same energy. If T is a waste product then they need to do separation etc. At the same time they are also going to have some DT reactions which means they will need basically identical radiation shielding either way.
The idea of extracting energy from magnetic field interactions sounds plausible until you consider all the waste heat that’s being produced. Even if everything worked as described they would still want massive amounts of cooling which is either a problem or another power source. If they had said they are using a mix of both that would be far more believable.
Really, what is your problem here? I get a strong Dunning-Kruger impression from your objections. You think you know more than you do.
Example: your objection to recovery of energy from the magnetic field. This is not hard to understand! They increase the magnetic field to compress the FRC. This heats the particles adiabatically, just like a piston compresses a gas. And JUST LIKE A PISTON, this is a completely reversible process: allowing the FRC to expand again does work on the coil, sustaining its current and allowing energy to be extracted.
Sure, some energy might be recoverable that way but what percentage of energy is extracted and what percentage ends up as waste heat. At a minimum those neurons from DD fusion, and photons from hot plasma etc are’t being recovered. A mere 100 MW device operating at an awe inspiring 90% efficiency would still be producing a 10MW aka a fuck ton of waste heat and I doubt anything close to 90% would be theoretically possible.
Not to mention mechanical stresses etc from such detonations.
The heating part I'd worry about most is photons hitting the inner surface of the fusion chamber. These will be absorbed in a thin surface layer, and since the system is pulsed the instantaneous heating could be quite high. They might have to resort to a liquid layer that's ablated by the thermal pulse. This would eject gas into the chamber, but they're using a pulsed approach anyway so this could be ok, if the pulse is shorter than the time the evaporated gas needs to reach the plasma.
PS: Anyway, to correct a mistake breeding Tritium from D doesn’t produce a neutron the reactions should roughly equal amounts of:
D-D → He3 + n + 3.268 MeV
D-D → T + p + 4.032 MeV
D-He3 → He4 + p + 18.354 MeV (Slightly less due to escaping He3)
Plus some contamination with Tritium resulting
D-T → He4 + n + 17.571 MeVNot waste, but they do want to store it for ~20 years to wait for it to decay into He3.
If someone says they came up with a perpetual motion device you can say they didn’t without actually investigating the device in question.
If you call someone a pedo because you don’t have any evidence their not a pedo and you don’t like them then that’s malicious disregard for the truth.
The bar is very low, you can for example call someone a murder even if they got acquitted at trial.
It's so strange to see someone use a PR logic process ("optics") to evaluate a technical claim, rather than using physics and engineering.
The advanced fuel cycle and the direct conversion of plasma pressure to energy are connected. The former enables the latter, and the latter is quite clever.
I think it’s fair to apply the “smell test” in this case.
We’ve recently see several high profile collapses of fraudulent companies like Nikola and Theranos that claimed to have miraculous technology breakthroughs.
Nikola claimed to have solve problems in hydrogen synthesis, transportation, fueling, electricity generation, engine miniaturization, and more. They didn’t have a piece of that technological chain and yet made some incredibly bold claims so they could continue inflating the hype around the company and skyrocket its valuation.
I’m not saying Helion is in the same boat as Nikola but it’s fair to be skeptical.
Nikola was always an obvious fraud if you looked at the technology. Tech claims demand tech analysis.
For me the biggest reason to take them seriously is their biggest investor, Sam Altman, believes in them and he's smart and presumably can see the data. Maybe they've conned him - who knows? Still I think they'll do ok.
Commercial success is one of the possible outcomes.™ That's more than I can say for ITER et al.
It would take more energy to extract lunar ³He than could be got by fusing it. In principle, input energy could be intermittent solar, but it is still a losing proposition.
The mistakes made, or else those allowed for but not predicted, listed without particular order,
* Not all fusion requires turbines. Eg. Helion's designs don't.
* Most if not all renewables require either energy storage, or much better energy transport, which must be factored into their price.
* The size of commercial magnetic confinement plants is not well represented by DEMO, given new high temperature superconductors.
* (Personal opinion) The cost of fission plants is mostly a consequence of regulation, and this dominates the financial aspect.
That said, the idea that fusion has extremely tough cost competition from solar and wind, and that it will get increasingly tougher over time, is (and has turned out to be) absolutely true.
Solar and wind are comparatively cheap and quick to deploy and are great solutions for decentralised power generation. Wherever reliable continuous power is required, however, other methods of power generation have to step in. This could also still change of course, depending on how storage technology progresses. But the cheap super-battery is probably just as ambitious as fusion power is today.
How would that work? Solar is very cheap. Nuclear is several times more expensive. Ergo, if the sun is shining at all the economically rational decision is to buy as much solar as you can.
Same goes for wind.
This means renewables will cut into nuclear, a lot.
The whole "base load" ideal only works assuming nuclear is dirt cheap, but inflexible, and is supplemented with expensive but flexible sources for the times it's too slow moving. That would be the ideal scenario.
The unfortunate thing is that nuclear isn't cheap, and renewables aren't expensive.
When the nukes are mothballed, every kWh they ever produced becomes suddenly more expensive.
That renewables are not expensive is not unfortunate.
I mean unfortunate for the intended business model of nuclear
It would be stupid to build out storage before you have built enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from: when renewables are not producing enough, you fill in with gas turbines, as now. As renewable generating capacity rises, and storage is built to take up the surplus, you rarely need to run the turbines. The turbines will eventually be converted to burn ammonia or hydrogen cracked from ammonia, when that becomes cheaper.
There is never a time when you have enough storage for all possible scenarios. Instead, you plan to fill in with other methods when storage runs low. Storage is a cost-cutting measure. Importing ammonia from tropical solar farms is always on the table.
What is actually happening, according to this author, is that bankers are evaluating specific energy projects, individually, and choosing to fund the ones which look like they will offer the best return on investment. That's it: there is no system. The future grid will consist of whatever happened to get built along the way, and our economy will adapt to the emergent characteristics of that "system".
This was the big one for me. Many people underestimate the complexity of energy transport over long distances. At some scales, this is still a materials science research topic, but even when it has been commercialised it's exorbitantly expensive over the international distances that would be required.
As for storage, despite the medium scale battery deployments we've seen in the last ~5 years, and pumped hydro, I'm remaining unconvinced that storage is something we'll rely on for industrial-scale grid usage in a post-fossil fuel world. These solutions need to be able to power a country, with all its industry, for ~days while wind and solar aren't running at necessary levels.
>This was the big one for me. Many people underestimate the complexity of energy transport over long distances. At some scales, this is still a materials science research topic, but even when it has been commercialised it's exorbitantly expensive over the international distances that would be required.
There's plenty of long distance electricity links that operate commercially, and they are cash positive simply due to price differentials between regions. To give you some examples, both Sweden and Norway are connected to Denmark/Germany and essentially power countries like Italy or France when the demand is there. Essentially much of the European energy grid is already integrated and it is profitable to build extra links simply because of price differentials due to weather. So if you have different evidence, please provide it.
> As for storage, despite the medium scale battery deployments we've seen in the last ~5 years, and pumped hydro, I'm remaining unconvinced that storage is something we'll rely on for industrial-scale grid usage in a post-fossil fuel world. These solutions need to be able to power a country, with all its industry, for ~days while wind and solar aren't running at necessary levels.
Again if your grid is large enough you really don't need to power the whole country, but even so unlike nuclear and fusion, storage solutions are on an exponential cost reduction curve (however you are correct that they are currently still expensive).
If everybody would simply have the rule of every per X00000 people you build one reactor in a geographic location near them. Then you would simply not need the waste majority of all long and medium distance energy transport.
You need some connection to be able to support temporary maintenance but for the most part each region is pretty independent and relatively simply.
That reduces your grid complexity a great deal and doesn't require country or even continent wide coordination with lots and lots of highly variable inputs, complex energy price markets and so on.
Do you have any evidence to actually back that up? This is being brought up every time we talk about nuclear and every time someone asks for evidence there's nothing. All the serious analyses of the cost, actually show this is not the case. I mean this very article explains why, nuclear reactors are thermal plants based on a steam engine. The article directly mentions even if the reactor is free they are more expensive than wind or solar, in other words just the steam engine is already too expensive.
With renewables you need a great deal more transportation of power, you need a gigantic deal of storage of power to be truly independent.
I would still go with nuclear even if its more expensive in terms of dispatch energy cost. Because as we have seen, you can have pretty long period where both wind and solar are at 5% capacity, and you better have a backup that can last weeks if you have no fossil backup.
All that said however, I think just saying 'regulation'. Doesn't capture the problem. I think the more accurate description of the problem is 'innovation'. After a golden period of the 50/60 innovation slowed down dramatically in the 70s and came to essentially a dead stop and since then we have barley improved other then some marginal gains on old designs.
Not only way most state research money removed all over the world, the current state of the art was embedded in regulation and even if somebody would be willing to put up the capital to research a new reactor making it commercial was essentially impossible. Specially in the US, one of the few places where state independent nuclear might have had some chance, regulation were essentially defined in a way that only water cooled reactors could ever be legal.
In Europe all nations other then France turned on nuclear pretty hard and while some plants were built, actual innovative designs were not ready to be commercial and mood turned against nuclear and most projects were canceled.
France did build a lot of nuclear but overall they were not really innovative, the just scaled the production of existing technology. This is great of course and gave France green energy. However even there as time went on nuclear was seen as a legacy, just waiting to be finally replaced.
So nuclear today is still low mostly temperature, and this requires specially gas turbines. The kind of turbines that are no longer used in modern gas and coal plants. As coal and gas used better turbines and scaled their production nuclear was unable to take advantage of those better steam turbines. And because no high temperature nuclear power existed, there also wasn't much effort put into turbines required for such high temperature reactors.
So today building a PWR you have a couple of big issues. The 'Pressure' in PWR requires you to build a hugely expensive reactor with gigantic heat exchanges that need to be contained in a huge secure building that needs to be able to contain a hydrogen explosion (and that doesn't actually work as you could see at Fukushima). Second, you need a hugely expensive very large, not very efficient steam turbine that today is only used for nuclear, and thus is even more expensive then historical was.
Third, because of the scale of these projects, in addition to the nuclear bit, they are simple gigantic public civil engineering projects that suffer from all the same problems that huge civil engineering projects suffer from.
Now had we innovated and moved to what is now called 'GenIV' reactors many of these things could be solved. First I would say, the term 'GenIV' is really a bad term because some reactors we now call 'GenIV' have been in development of some kind since the very beginning and have no iterative evolution with the Gen1-Gen3. The 'Gen' here refers to commercialization not research.
So how would these reactors potentially solve many of the issues. First, you can massively decrease the size of both your reactor, heat exchanger and your steam turbine. All of this results in a massive improvement in capital cost and therefore also the scale civil engineering project. In addition the increase of safety of these of these plants, should have a significant effect on the required operation cost. The more efficient fuel burn of most of these reactors, also leads to improved operation because refueling is required far less often and can mostly be done online, improving the utilization.
So if you combine those advantages, I would consider all in these plants would make a hell of a lot more sense. And the reason they don't exist is partly regulatory but but those regulations and maybe more importantly the regulatory environment are reflection of the the overall turn against nuclear most of Western society has made. Some of the regulation we have today are over the top or unnecessary, but changing these would not instantly impact the price of the next PWR we build.
A nuclear regulatory agency and a country need to actually WANT nuclear innovation. As an example of such a process, look at what Canada did once they sold CANDU. They actually said, we want to innovated and be part of the next generation of nuclear and they changed their regulatory process and environment to reflect that.
https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li...
Something like this could have happened already 40-50 years ago and in a much larger market like the US. But that was not the direction the government went in. In the US, there is clear pre-and-post Nuclear Regulatory Commission (1974) where before new reactors happened all the time, essentially no progress happened. That is not just the fault of the NRC, but also the broader changes in the state and society reflected in those changes.
In my opinion we should go back to building nuclear, for a country like mine, Switzerland, I do not see the extra cost of a nuclear plant as the big problem. We should be able to have energy independence with years worth of energy stored. Renewables are not great here, neither solar nor wind is really well suited to the situation. And if you really want to go 100% the storage requirements are very scary. The capital cost of nuclear can be paid off over literally the next 80-100 years while the plant is in operation.
I think the example of France shows that we could have had green energy for the last 40 years, and that Frances big mistake was to go away from nuclear (they actually started depending on gas). France was one of the few shining lights, and built amazing projects like Superphénix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix) but instead of building more, they were killed politically.
I predict in 100 years, nuclear fission will be what powers most of society. All in, from first principle, a very high energy density fuel will simply win the race in the long term. Its only a matter of building the right reactor, and turbine (or figure out aneutornic fusion).
> I think the example of France shows that we could have had green energy for the last 40 years, and that Frances big mistake was to go away from nuclear (they actually started depending on gas). France was one of the few shining lights, and built amazing projects like Superphénix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix) but instead of building more, they were killed politically.
The reason they moved away from nuclear was economical not political. France is probably the most pro-nuclear nation in the west all major parties are strongly pro nuclear, even the french greens are ambivalent. The argument does not make sense.
That might change the economics, for nuclear fission as well as fusion.
Fusion and fission are extremely capital expensive with quite hefty marginal costs through the steam side. They're simply awful at solving the last 20%. Even worse when they're undercut badly enough to never run for the first 80%.
I find it amusing that Helion's approach also strongly depends on the cost of storage, just in a very different part of storage parameter space.
That has been looked into, in the context of propelling very large spacecraft. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls... )
It's difficult for political reasons, not economic or practical ones.
Then the way EVs are trending, each home should have giant batteries in their garage and a good percentage will likely be incentivized to charge their EV when the sun/wind is strong and potentially release it back to the grid when its not.
After there is enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from, storage will be built out, and NG turbines will be used decreasingly often. Many will be converted to burn ammonia instead, which will be fixed at solar farms in the tropics and shipped wherever it is wanted.
If there is dystopia it will be via failure to build out fast enough.
Stuff will become more expensive, economic activity might be somewhat dampened, but that might be offset by the cheapness of wind and solar, and by the fact that building the new infrastructure will create a lot of growth. And in the end, it will literally save the planet. I'd choose a bit slower economic activity over accelerating climate change any time.
But nationwide nearly everyone is on a fixed price per kWh deal, and current electricity meters don't usually even support pricing that chances every few minutes, as would need to happen to incentivize people to only use power when the wind blows.
The cost of simply upgrading every electricity meter to a modern one is many years of profits for most energy companies.
As the sibling post said, the transition will be difficult. But there is absolutely no way the government will allow widespread brownouts or industrial collapse (in the worst case we'll use just enough fossil as necessary). We are talking about reduced profit margins for a couple of years, and having to wait a bit more longer to buy shiny new gadgets. The real challenge is to orchestrate everything so that it is socially fair and the weakest, or those most dependent on cars, etc. don't get hit too hard.
The big thing I see with a ton of arguments about changing the way we produce and consume energy assume that things will change overnight and the whole system will come crashing down because it's not ready.
Perfect is the enemy of good. Things aren't going to happen overnight, there will be a transition period.
Electric vehicle transition is a good example of this. * OMG, the grid will crash with all the charging. * OMG, You won't be able to charge it <because reasons>. * OMG, it doesn't solve <random gas car use case here>.
The transition to electric vehicles is coming, but slowly. It basically started at 0 in 2010 and a decade later it's still only at 2-5% in the US and something like 5-10% in the EU, China, etc. The ball is just getting rolling.
The grid hasn't crashed, charging is getting deployed where there's demand, and not every <random gas car use case here> needs to be solved now, or even in the mid term future.
Don't you realise the consequences of phasing out fossil fuels? So much of that is used for, well fuels.. and even when it isn't, like fertilisers, it's still something that's produced in bulk in large quantities and stored. We'll have to produce a HUGE amounts of hydrogen, ammonia, etc. .. and in the absolute worst case scenario we can store some of that hydrogen and use in in existing natural gas power plants (yes, running a turbine on 100% hydrogen has been demonstrated already).
We're already seeing the prices swing more due to renewables, and we're already seeing that it's creating a lot of solutions for shifting energy consumption. Right now I can connect my EV directly to my electricity provider and they'll stop or start charging based on prices. There's an entire parking garage in the Netherlands full of EV rental cars that can deliver power back to grid when prices are higher.
People seem to think nuclear will let us avoid solving the energy storage problems. No. You might be able to run some big ships on nuclear, but not much else. If we solve the problems we need to solve to stop climate change (in a sustainable way.. don't get me started on CCS), then we'll be doing energy storage at just around the same scale needed to balance renewables. BEVs is a pretty good illustration of that, where, if you have one you suddenly have enough energy storage to run your house a day or three. If we're making enough batteries for all cars to be EVs, we're making battery at a scale where a doubling could give most households dedicated battery storage. I'm not sure exactly that will be the solution, maybe it'll be more specialised grid-level batteries like Ambri.. point is, we're moving towards a world where we HAVE to become experts at transforming and storing energy. Cause we're not getting "free" storable/transportable energy from the ground for eternity.
This is why one must look at the whole spectrum not only on wind and solar. There is hydro, biomass[1] and geothermal as well. The latter is currently not so relevant directly for electricity in most regions, but has a hugh potential to replace other energy sources, including electricity, for heating buildings via heat pumps.
[1] In the USA biomass plays a comparatively minor role in electricity production: 1.3% of all, 6.5% of renewables (half of solar). In a more advanced country like Germany the numbers are: 8.8% of all, 19% of renewables (a little less than solar). -- Sources: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany
It does mean that to keep the cost of full systems falling, we need cheaper installation methods, such as rolling out rather than bolting up frames.
For example, they claim the sole reason nuclear is declining in the West is because of capital. This is straightforwardly not true. Politics have played a huge role, most notably in Germany.
Oh, you mean that he refers to actual business costs where no one else does?
They call that "the internet".
To be fair politics are a factor in the economics. Looking at the US the politics. Especially in California, make building or expanding nuclear power much lore expe since than it really should be.
Eg, suppose for a second we make a nuclear power plant that can profitably sell power for half the price that anything else on the market does. Well, you're a smart business person, so you don't price yourself at 50% of the competition. You price yourself at say, 90% of the competition, so you're still the cheapest, but now have a crazy profit margin.
And with that huge profit margin you can do things like having elaborate security systems to reassure people, donate to politicians, run PR campaigns, build cool stuff to buy people's love, etc. You'd have a very straightforward comeback of "shut us down and everything gets more expensive".
There's a reason why oil despite being a nasty, dirty and accident prone business isn't going anywhere.
Neither is true.
Wind and solar were the choices solution BEFORE they became cheap and profitable. The became cheap and profitable because of a sustained demand from society and politics, both domestic and international to make it so.
Jimmy Carter banned nuclear fuel processioning, killed nuclear research projects and much more, and partly justified this by putting up solar collectors on the white house. The republicans of that period were all in on fossil and no longer had ideas like 'Atoms for Peace'.
So to act as if wind and solar just happened to be cheap and profitable and nuclear just happened to be expensive is simply a misreading of history.
Certainly not! But money helps, a lot.
> So to act as if wind and solar just happened to be cheap and profitable and nuclear just happened to be expensive is simply a misreading of history.
Nuclear is inherently expensive, when done well. You don't exactly find a company making nuclear reactor vessels in your local neighborhood. Yeah, you can do it "on the cheap" without say, a containment building, but that turns out not to be a great idea. So got to make one of those, at a considerable expense renewables get to miss on. Plus a few other safety technologies.
Solar and wind aren't inherently expensive. They're both made of common components and are extremely amenable to mass manufacturing. Long term, nuclear was always sure to lose. Even the USSR-style, dangerous designs aren't cheap enough.
Wind is a generator with some blades attached, on a stick.
Nuclear is a generator with a nuclear reactor feeding it.
Exactly how do you expect "nuclear reactor" to be cheaper than "blades + stick"?
A pebble bed reactor is basically just a ball pit full of very expensive balls that will "get cheaper with scale bro we swear" that gets hot and needs stirring from time to time.
The steam generator part, even if you're not using one that already exists, is about the same cost and upkeep as a wind turbine as the added maintenance from the temperature and steam is roughly offset by the smaller size.
So it comes down to whether the ball pit once it gets all the indirect and hidden subsidies that nuclear gets can be about the same price again, then the slightly higher load factor makes up the difference.
My money is on we get a few shoved down our throats whether we like it or not at prices about comparable with wind (lower up front but more expensive once it's obvious that O&M is 5x the estimate), then the IAEA and NRC will be all shocked pikachu when they start dispersing a not-immediately-provably-fatal amount of fission products as if it's a surprise and not inevitable. Then the limits will be raised during some energy crisis pointing to the failure of wind after a large storm knocks out a bunch of power lines and one wind turbine.
Not building a containment building would never happen, and if you have small high power density reactor, the containment building is not actually the expensive part.
This is an example of a modern pebble bed reactor: https://kairospower.com/technology/
Building containment about a reactor like that isn't expensive. Containment is expensive if you have to build it around a gigantic PWR reactor with steam heat exchangers.
Also I'll believe the inexpensive molten salt cooled reactor when I see one.
> Solar and wind aren't inherently expensive.
Wind requires a gigantic amount of resources. A single super large wind power plant that produces 4MW at low utilization and has to be replaced every 30 years requires as many resources as a comparative 200MWe nuclear reactor.
If you go from first principle, and you really look, at what goes into these things, fission nuclear is clearly the cheapest. This goes for land use, general resource use and for the environment.
> Even the USSR-style, dangerous designs aren't cheap enough.
In fact making safer nuclear plants is CHEAPER not more expensive. Building inherently safe air cooled plants makes it massively cheaper.
[1] https://www.taxpayer.net/energy-natural-resources/nuclear-po... [2] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Too_much_money_for...
Even in Germany the decision to shutdown the reactors was partly economical. 10 years ago assumption about using cheap Russian gas until renewables catches up was not entering unreasonable.
To contribute to the discussion you could have maybe brought some evidence if it was so clear cut.
Nuclear was and is often excluded from renewable subsidies. France just had to pay 500M Euro because they missed their 'renewables' target, all while being green. The same thing in the US when they favored solar. There are lots of example.
CDU isn't business friendly, they are Russia and Fossil friendly. They knew it was a popular choice that would be supported by the anti nuclear left. It was a populist choice.
All that said, even some old nuclear plants that currently exist do sell long term electricity at quite good prices. Germany was actually pretty good at operating them and given their security, base load capabilities, being green and long term viability, turning them off because of per kWh pricing was basically an insanely delusional populist choice based on fear mongering and incomplete estimation of the pros and cons.
But I guess the Germans are now breathing the dirty air that this has produce (sadly blasting it all over central Europe and Western Europe). The South of France at the same time had nice clean air since 40 years.
Nuclear power plants have typical design lifetimes of 40 years. France nuclear power plants are suffering from increasing maintenance costs and outages because they are getting so old and they are nowhere close to 60-100 years. If you mean that markets favor cheaper solutions and that this is not good for nuclear you are correct.
> Nuclear was and is often excluded from renewable subsidies. France just had to pay 500M Euro because they missed their 'renewables' target, all while being green. The same thing in the US when they favored solar. There are lots of example.
Nuclear has received more subsidies than solar and wind combined (see my citations in a different post).
There are lots of nuclear plants older then 40 years.
Benznau in Switzerland has been operating since 1972 and will continue to do so for quite a while.
There are a number of PWR plants that are currently being re-certified for 80 years. And many, many more could be. And that is not the end, likely they could be re-certified for even long live.
I don't see your evidnece:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Too_much...
This is a bad graph, measure from 1974 makes little sense, solar and wind were not really relevant for most of that. It makes absolute sense to support nuclear if your alternative is coal.
And I also question how in measures like this, the value of base-power is measured.
Because if you think of it as a level of society, and not spot price electricity, things look quite different.
So, unless "never" really means "not anytime soon", you need to look at what fusion can do instead of what it can do with existing design concepts. Fusion is fully capable of direct conversion, even without aneutronic fusion, as long as you are willing to throw away waste heat on par with internal combustion engines. My own D+D design included this feature back in the 1990s. The reason why you don't see the big projects focus on this is because it does you no good until you actually have enough fusion for ignition (or an equivalent state), and on most designs it would be an added cost or complication.
It's too bad, because I actually agree with what the article says in the final paragraph (and I've been saying that since 1995). Fusion development does have a real issue with a need for funding, and how that funding is obtained and directed. It would be nice if we did better in this generation. But give it a couple of hundred years, and it's likely that will change at some point. Never is a very long time.
Here in lies the problem. Waste heat on a powerplant scale is expensive to deal with. Ask any coal plant.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Also, there's a TON of assumptions in the arguments he's making. For example, he takes an existing fusion reactor design and assumes every one built from now until forever will be exactly the same or that they'll even use the heat->steam method of energy extraction. When it comes to fusion you can extract energy energy from the charged particles themselves via Aneutronic Fusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion) and skip that 1-meter-thick lithium shielding and a whole lot of other expensive things.
Have to concede that wind and solar seem pretty good now, if combined with good grid-wide battery technology.
How are you going to generate power with your fusion plant? Steam?
Coal and nuclear are uncompetitive simply from the cost of the steam side. Today you can just about give a steam plant free energy and it still makes a loss.
Solar or wind does not have this limitation. CCGT gas plants gets around it by having a turbine giving raw mechanical power and then utilizing the same awful steam side to get the last percentage points of efficiency at a much smaller required scale. Unless you can step around the steam turbine I am not so positive on fusions future outside of incredibly small niches.
Coal still gets built where gas infrastructure does not exist, but that's about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion
Also, discussing solar and wind without discussing the base load/storage problem skews the discussion towards solar/wind. Steam plants don’t face those challenges in the way those two do; storage is as much a challenge for solar as steam is for nuclear.
(I watched the video and really it's as simple as charged particles moving in and creating a magnetic field inside loops of metal which in turn generates a current that can be used. (Just add several dozen years worth of post-doc maths to sort out the details)
For all traditional water reactors you are using the water to slow down the neutrons. Enter the Pressurized Water Reactor(PWR). Now the entire reactor is pressurized with all the complications that bring and through Carnot's Theorem you gain some efficiency.
This is nuclear's problem with trying to become more efficient.
https://clearpath.org/our-take/a-reversible-rust-battery-tha...
Also, is the true cost of land being factored? The vast majority of "empty" land in the US is actively used for farming.
Land is utterly a non-issue. Not only is there plenty of spare land, solar and wind can be sited on dual-use pasture and cropland, as well as floated on reservoirs.
If land is not an issue then I challenge you to sequester 156,000 square miles (~1.7% of the total land in the US). This is a relatively optimistic estimate with no overhead given for overproduction or growth. This goes without speaking of the carbon footprint of the carbonized industry necessary to grow solar production by 50x.
If you care about land use and is not using it to simply sow discontent mandate solar above parking. The US is a complete wasteland when you consider land use. Or simply build it together with agricultural use. Wind is perfect for that, solar may lower some crops output while increasing others.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/11/27/parking-domin...?
Next, start eating vegetarian.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-kcal-poore
> This goes without speaking of the carbon footprint of the carbonized industry necessary to grow solar production by 50x.
Great that we're aiming to decarbonize the industry.
Unless you're talking about north of the arctic circle, then sure. You can fill that niche of a couple of hundred thousand people living in the global north and not within striking distance of massive hydro reserves.
https://globalwindatlas.info/en
Or like this study a while back finding building SMRs in the Canadian north close to a laughable proposition given the power requirements, costs and tiny niche market.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
Of course in places where transmission lines are practical, power will be imported that way instead.
No one will ever be able to maintain a cartel on the synthetic fuel supply.
A efficient small CO2 turbine powered by a small GenIV nuclear reactor would be absolutely incredible, in terms of economics, reliability, environment, efficiency, energy security and so on.
But sadly, neither high temperature reactors nor turbines have received the funding they should have over the last 50 years.
Even with a CCGT a high temperature nuclear plant could be really competitive specially if you want to have power when both wind and solar are at 5% utilization.
I'm confident with enough bright minds we can solve all of these problems with clean energy. It will just require time and energy and actual investment that isn't lobbied against by big oil. For example I'm confident that if we commit to nuclear energy we can find a way to get reactors built in under five years. And even if we didn't if enough were being built in parallel you could have one being onlined every year in every state just like how a new phone comes out every year, even though it takes years of development to make the next one.
Rather, the tradeoff is between nuclear power and carbon-based power (and also hydro, but most places already built all the hydro power that geography permits). And the problem is that nuclear is also more expensive than natural gas power plants. However, those are slowly ruining the planet, and if you take the cost of climate change into account, the carbon is much more expensive.
The solution is for the government to either subsidise nuclear or tax carbon, to account for the externalities. This still won't make fusion power attractive right now, but in a couple of centuries we will be running out of the most accessible uranium deposits, at which point fusion might look better.
But, nobody cares! See, because there's not a single party responsible for everything with sane priorities.
People will build wind because it makes a profit. People won't build nuclear because it doesn't. This will keep going until you end up with a heavily wind-powered system that lacks stability, but nobody building plants will care about that. Eventually power goes out, and solutions will be sought, but nuclear still won't be profitable.
One possible solution is overbuilding. Have lots of wind and solar. Another solution is interconnection -- maybe half the power gets burned in transmission losses, but if you need it, you need it. And probably there will be a lot more interest in grid storage.
The article makes the main point that a lot of the costs of a theoretical fusion plant are the same as those for a fission plant, namely a way of turning heat into power. It also claims that 2/3 of the costs of a nuclear plant are for that conversion.
If you look at energy costs by source [1] you see the wind and solar are already 4-8 times cheaper than fission.
We're not really any closer to solving the profound technological challenges that existed when this was written 10 years ago. The most optimistic estimates still put fusion at decades away.
My view is that our long-term power generation will come from space-based solar collectors.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Honestly the nut we should be cracking is putting solar in our deserts and figuring out how to transmit the electricity. Tons of land with really not current uses and a whole bunch of sun shine.
We have figured out the latter already. High-voltage direct-current transmission has losses in the low single digit percent per 1000km. China is transferring several nuclear power plants worth of power over thousands of kilometers already today.
Edit: Wikipedia says that the Chinese connection I remembered has a capacity of 12GW over 3300km.
But, battery technology has been at a standstill for a while. New battery technology seems as far away as cold fusion some days. And without battery storage, I don't think you could really serve the world's power needs with just wind and solar. (But I'm also 100% a layperson, so hell if I know.)
But most of the world's energy storage is not and will not be chemical batteries.
you can use hydro power as energy storage as well, just pump some water back uphill into water reservoir and use it later to generate electricity when you need it.
that way you can store energy in form of potential energy of water
Deserts are hot, reducing conversion efficiency and panel lifetime, and dusty, blocking sunlight at the surface unless cleaned frequently.
Having power available on demand all the time is a huge advantage and fusion could well beat battery-backed wind/solar for that.
(Obviously this is overly simplistic, there is a set of natural disasters that France isn't subject to that other countries are, so France is just a starting point. But every addition should be justified by answer the question "What about our circumstances makes us different from France here?")
Have a look at Flamanville 3 and try to sell another 50 of those to the public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
Obviously, as you point out, it could be better. But I'll take France, issues and all, over coal plants every day of the week.
I expect France will get their act together.
Re: net importer, their amount of import is basically a rounding error, on the order of 0.1% of their energy usage. They are energy neutral.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...
> Now here’s the key point I’m trying to make: it’s not that fusion is expensive, it’s that everything else is cheaper.
Fission is the only operational technology that can replace fossil fuels for base load. Grid storage for solar and wind is just so under-developed and difficult to scale. We have to stop emitting CO2 ASAP, we can't wait for tech that may or may not work. Ruling out fission because of these demonstrably small risks is wildly irrational, when the alternative is total global social and ecological collapse.
Humans tend to judge unfamiliar but small risks as being much larger - think of how there are annual panics about razor blades/fentanyl/whatever in Halloween candy, but not the cars that kill over 70 children each Halloween on average. This same tendency is exactly why there is so much irrational fear around nuclear.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Base load on the producer side is an outdated term. It simply came into existence because the most inflexible plants used to be the cheapest, that is not the case anymore. You can talk about base demand, but that can be fulfilled using any source.
Or as Wikipedia puts it:
> The base load (also baseload) is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time, for example, one week. This demand can be met by unvarying power plants, dispatchable generation, or by a collection of smaller intermittent energy sources, depending on which approach has the best mix of cost, availability and reliability in any particular market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load
> This same tendency is exactly why there is so much irrational fear around nuclear.
Or because you still have to measure the radioactivity of wild game and mushrooms in northern Sweden and Bavaria.
> Although game is considered a delicacy in Bavaria, large amounts of meat are disposed of. Because many wild boars are still contaminated with radioactivity - even 35 years after the Chernobyl reactor accident.
https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2021-04-26-35-years-after-...
> Base load on the producer side is an outdated term. It simply came into existence because the most inflexible plants used to be the cheapest, that is not the case anymore. You can talk about base demand, but that can be fulfilled using any source.
Oh really? What's this more flexible power? Is it perhaps natural gas? It's interesting how anti-nuclear people always gloss that over.
> Or because you still have to measure the radioactivity of wild game and mushrooms in northern Sweden and Bavaria.
Having to test some mushrooms and game meat is nothing compared to the damage fossil fuels do in their intended use. Rivers and soils in many places have been poisoned by fossil fuel extraction, including from natural gas.
> Much of the resistance towards 100% Renewable Energy (RE) systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276].
> However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]–[282]; storage (battery, compressed air, pumped hydro)[40]–[43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]–[92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
Or we can take a look at Wikipedia for an even broader view
> 100% renewable energy means getting all energy from renewable resources. The endeavor to use 100% renewable energy for electricity, heating, cooling and transport is motivated by climate change, pollution and other environmental issues, as well as economic and energy security concerns.
> Research into this topic is fairly new, with very few studies published before 2009, but has gained increasing attention in recent years. The majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and desalination – is feasible and economically viable.[5][6][7][8] A cross-sectoral, holistic approach is seen as an important feature of 100% renewable energy systems and is based on the assumption "that the best solutions can be found only if one focuses on the synergies between the sectors" of the energy system such as electricity, heat, transport or industry.[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy
Use power-to-x, biofuel, or even in emergencies, burn natural gas for the last percentage points for all that I care. The important part is economically solving the energy transition for the vast majority of cases, not being an absolutist.
The only feasable 0 carbon options are to either install an absolutely massive amount of Hydrogen storage and conversion, to give up any hope of self-sufficiency and import all electricity during the winter from places on the other side of the world, or to use Nuclear.
My dad is fond of talking about how his Astronomy professor said we’ll never be able to detect planets outside our solar system, and proceeded to prove it through optics calculations. That didn’t age well.
We’ll get to fusion too. It might take a ridiculously long time to be economically competitive, or it might not. But it will happen.
Now when we have mining and manufacturing in space, and can use the energy there, that’s a different story.
https://illumin.usc.edu/space-based-solar-power-a-new-path-t...
Losses in transmission from space would be significant (I'm seeing 9.6% microwave efficiency) and never mind that it costs $1000/kg to put something in space.
Here is NASA's SPS-ALPHA study, which estimates 15 cents/kWh with $500/kg launch cost and minimal technological development (pdf): https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/niac_20...
The old designs from the 1970s would have been absurdly expensive. Modern designs like NASA's SPS-ALPHA are cheap to manufacture at scale. The book The Case for Space Solar Power has a detailed cost breakdown and puts a 2GW geostationary plant at 15 cents/kWh, but was published before SpaceX did much. I plugged in Starship launch costs and it came to 4 cents/kWh, which is pretty great for 24/7 clean power without storage.
Here is NASA's study (pdf): https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/niac_20...
> It states that a transmitting antenna which is synthesized from a coherent phased array of smaller antenna apertures that are spaced apart will have a smaller minimum beam spot size, but the amount of power that is beamed into this main lobe is reduced by an exactly proportional amount, so that the total power density in the beam is constant.
A big, very low-mass reflector concentrating sunlight on laser tubes tuned for various wavelengths found in sunlight, and beaming visible light at only solar intensity onto wavelength-matched solar PV farms on the ground, at night, would substitute for storage. Since the light intensity is no more than in sunshine, there is no danger.
Sure, Fusion may be risky for Bankers. It won't be for Billionaires or even ultra-rich eccentric Billionaires.
Billionaires can also take lots of risk with their capital.
Once again the Author dismisses human ingenuity and singular obsession of people to make things happen.
Money is the worst reason. You can always print Money (We printed $10 Trillion of them). What Next? Is there anything fundamentally expensive about the raw materials used? If not, you can reduce the cost to it's commodity prices. The commodity prices itself will collapse to ~$0 if energy and labor is ~$0. Finally you need labor. With ChatGPT and Robots, labor is also ~$0
So, never is absolutely the wrong choice of word
Say, Musk is worth 169 billion. UK's Hinkley Point C is somewhere around 25 billion. Now, maybe that particular plant is a special problem child, but I wouldn't expect to have a new, untested yet technology built for cheaper than a troublesome nuclear one.
So Musk can build a total of 6 of those, probably a good deal less because that's just theoretical wealth -- he'd have to sell everything he owns, and wouldn't get the full price for that.
To build more he'd need more money. To get money, those plants need to make a profit, and pay off their loans. At that construction price it's virtually certain they never will.
So the attempt would probably die at that -- at most 6 plants, producing power at a price nobody wants to pay. They either idle since nobody's buying, or sell at a huge loss until money runs out.