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Comment by lambdatronics | Hacker News Reader

Working on nuclear fusion. Debatable whether that's ultimately the best way to tackle climate change given how well solar is doing these days, but hey...

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Spent almost a decade working on fusion. While I think that fusion has great long-term potential, I don't currently see any quick wins that I personally can contribute towards. But I do believe that energy issues are among the most important problems in the world. So now I'm working on an evaporation engine which runs on the same process that powers hurricanes. It is indirect solar power, which can run at night. It's basically an engine that literally runs on global warming.

I should probably be running turbine tests instead of posting on HN, but it's a Sunday morning and I'm feeling lazy. Maybe posting this will help motivate me.

Like big picture does it actually make sense for power generation? It seems like even if you could get costs below fusion for the reactor it’s still not a good deal due to all the infrastructure costs of converting such high heat to electricity.

No, not even close

Have a look at this study for a tokamak-based system: "The cost of the fusion-specific technologies accounts for approximately 75% of the total direct costs of constructing the plant" [0] They also conclude that "The model levelized cost of electricity was found in the amount of ∼160 $/MWh." Note that 57% of that cost is due to depreciation of the hardware, and another 23% is replacement costs for materials damaged by the neutron radiation.

Another source says: "Setting the capital cost of the fusion-specific technology to zero results in a LCOE of 72 $/MWh, which borders current prices for renewables, but is clearly physically implausible."[1]

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421... [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.05727

Hehe, I'm working on fusion too!

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