When Will Fusion Energy Light Our Homes?
nautil.us
nautil.us
On the other hand, if Helion succeeds with their 2024 attempt at net electricity, they plan to build a factory churning out twenty 50MW reactors every day.
1GW/day seems… surprising.
Even if they are justified in the science, that's less than a decade to fully replace all existing electrical supply.
This sort of grand vision feels even more ambitious than Musk wanting a thousand Starships in each Mars transfer window.
I'm not going to say it can't be done — not my field, how would I know — only that it's surprising.
(The big leap of course is getting to a fully-working prototype.)
The neutrons from D-D fusion are much lower energy than D-T fusion, and don't cause the same damage to materials. They're similar to fission neutrons, and modern fission reactors last sixty years without refurbishment.
According to Helion and other sources I've seen, their hybrid reaction would only release 6% of its energy as neutron radiation, compared to 80% from D-T. They could also build reactors dedicated to D-D and hence He3 production, designing their power plants to mostly burn D-He3. That would reduce power plant neutrons to less than 1% of power output.
Regarding net power and scaling, I'm not competent to talk about it but here's the CEO of Helion going into some detail on their view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1vyMcqiVtA
Plus their idea to convert fusion energy directly into electricity depends on many unknowns to assert that it will work with reasonable efficiency.
So even if their approach may work to produce positive energy output in few years, a practical device will still be far away.
Edit: Helion itself admits that net positive in electricity with D-3He is tricky even with their design at that presentation.
So most likely their first prototype will be D+D with all the problems associated with high-energy neutrons.
The presentation says they think they can get a 5X gain with D-3He, and they think that's sufficient given the efficiencies of their heating and extraction.
It's perhaps worth noting that the high speed, high power electronics required to implement their approach are fairly new. I don't know how old the concept of FRC merging is, but if it existed in the 70's they wouldn't have had the technology to build it.
Edit: and to be clear, I'm talking about the dynamic control circuits, not the capacitors. That's old technology.
As for the input heating loss, presumably that's included in the 95% recovery figure. If it's not, then it would definitely be good to know what the actual figure is including input heating losses.
To make fusion viable you have to generate a substantial surplus of power that can be converted into usable energy. Nothing in that video touches on that subject at all. The most he can say is that it is possible D-He3 can reach scientific breakeven, which of course, is no where close to net power generation.
It is strange to see claims about Q > 10 using D-T fusion being possible and then immediately pivot to talking about being excited about Q > 1 using D-He3. If you can build a fusion reactor that could produce Q > 10 why would you bother pursuing Q > 1? The 'benefits' of direct electrical generation from D-He3 are not relevant if you can't even produce net positive energy in the first place. Electrical generation is a solved problem; if you can produce net energy you can produce heat that can power a turbine.
If the most you can do is talk about how Q > 1 is possible it seems unlikely you are going to start producing electricity any time soon.
But Helion hopes that with their design where the theoretical efficiency of electricity generation is 100%, they do not need such high Q allowing one to be excited about Q > 1. Their models predicts Q around 5.
The problem is the model uncertainty. If the real Q will be just 2, I very much doubt that they can limit the total losses below 50%.
But even if they can get net gain in power per pulse, they are too optimistic about neutron flux and its consequences. Again, model uncertainty is big.
So overall there is very little room for unexpected in their design so I am very skeptical based just on that alone.
I was pretty sceptical about achievable power density going in and the gish gallop actually pushed me into believing helion a bit more if someone who allegedly is an expert needs to be this duplicitous to criticize it.
For example, Helion’s patent https://patents.google.com/patent/US11469003B2/en hints how critical is suppression of the secondary D+T reactions and removal of T to their design, but patent itself does not describe how they are going to archive that. The only claim is that there would be no time for secondary D+T in their design. But that is based on those imprecise models at best. Nobody knows if that is true for sure. Plus the patent does not tell at all how they are going to remove mechanically all T after the pulse as keeping even 1% of T can be problematic.
In addition the extended video cites Helion own admission that the neutron flux from D+D alone will be like 1e18 neutrons/day based on their models. That type of flux damages a lot of materials within days with slower fission neutrons.
While their aluminum coils may handle that better especially if partially shielded, nobody knows for sure again as modeling effects of radiation damage is hard.
I really didn't expect this kind of reaction. If an MCF experiment reached ignition, I think I too would be disappointed for ICF, but also happy that science has made a step forward. I too would then ditch my research and try my darnest to get into an MCF group.
Not so here, first I saw the harsh reaction on the internet, I chalked up to a bad sample of the usual nerdy types drawn to ranting on the internet[0]. But now disgruntled scientists are taking to puff pieces in general media? Are you that afraid of your jobs? This reminds me honestly like high school. When you're single or rejected, you listen to emo punk songs loud in the car, or cry to break up songs. But when you are in a relationship, you're too busy having fun to do the emo thing. I'm getting the sense that everyone in ICF and adjacent research fields aren't really the ones pitching puff pieces because they're now writing grants for fusion again now that the spigot is definitely turning on. And that leaves the MCF people to mope.
Idk, the message here is the one I learned years ago and I still have to remind myself every so often: scientists are humans and subject to rather pathetic and selfish motives after all. Funding, money, position, status, bragging rights. Somewhere deep down, may be some of us really believe in the mission of moving society's knowledge forward, and for the fusion people, really saving the world from climate change. But let's be real, that's all in the mix of one's heart, but the mundane motivations are more central for most people.
[0] Yes, I am self-aware enough to know this applies to me in this very post. I just have to remind myself ranting nerds on the internet are not representative of everyone in any group.
Have those economically conservative groups considered the armies of NIMBYs that descend upon each new wind turbine project (and yes, also solar projects)? That won't stop renewables completely, but the limiting factor will be not the speed at which you can build them, but the speed of the bureaucracy and of the courts. Not saying those same NIMBYs wouldn't descend with even more force upon a fusion plant of course...
But my reaction to the headline is "do you have windows?".
We've had proofs of concept that prove it is is possible to generate more power with fusion than you put in. That happened fairly recently. So, we sort of have the first of the 3 checked off. The rest is going to take lots of time. So, fusion may happen; and I actually believe it will. But it will likely be costly for the foreseeable future. And when I say costly, I really mean prohibitively expensive for all but the most desperate of situations where literally nothing else can do the job. From there to actually being cheaper is going to be a long journey. 2100 is about the earliest I can see this working. But frankly, I think its optimistic.
As the article points out. Renewables work now and they work cheaply. And they are already scaling faster than anything else in the energy sector. We'll have decades more to do better than we are already doing. Renewable prices dropping by one or two orders of magnitude would shut down most of our legacy energy providers. That's what fusion is up against. It's a race to the bottom. Not a great context for what looks like it's going to be a highly capital intensive thing with essentially no ROI for the foreseeable future.
For 1) Eisenhower needed Atoms for Peace to quell the rising hysteria about nuclear weapons
For 2) Rickover and the weapons labs needed a civil reactor industry for their people to switch too. the US military has a strategic interest in maintaining nuclear weapons and nuclear submarines. One needs breeder reactors, they both need trained operators. Ensuring a life-long source of employment is necessary to maintain incoming classes of nuclear engineers, plant operators, etc.
Against 1) But you can't train enough of these folks to grow the industry for the same reason the industry is somewhat unsustainable now: the replacement rate is sooooo long. A nuclear reactor's fuel lifespan is on the order of 25 years. The replacement rate for reactors is even longer.
Against 2) There is still enough hysteria that people have allowed all sorts of inspection and credentialing requirements to creep into the process so the cost of bringing a reactor to market exceeds the value proposition.
[0] https://ams.confex.com/ams/103ANNUAL/meetingapp.cgi/Person/2...
Everything is also manufactured out of petroleum derivatives. Without it, we go back to making literally everything out of wood and metal, or not making it. 90% of the items you have contact with everyday is made with some kind of petroleum derivative.
EV vehicles are impossible to manufacture without petroleum, so this is certainly a lot more nuanced than just free energy from space...
And that petroleum also comes from solar energy. Some of it from dead stars.
It's a classic capitalist evasion of externalities.
Every single drill site is toxic waste disaster, that no one ever has to pay for (except of course, the impoverised who live down stream).
To ignore the many gigawatts of free energy beamed in from space because petroleum will still be used in some way is evading the question.
The fact remains: free fusion power is heating and lighting our homes every time we open a window shade.
And if the combined mafia influence of the contruction-mafia and the petro-mafia didn't have us building houses with NO relation to how they point at the sun, we would use that energy to MUCH greater efficiency...
[0] mostly plants, IIRC
It’s also factually true, despite a seeming loss of recognition in the last decade, that fossil fuels are not limitless. We might as well not wait for exhaustion before planning about what to do next, no?
FWIU, algae, cellulose, and flax or hemp are strong candidates for sustainable eco-friendly products and packaging.
The fact is that they used 50 kWh of energy and produced 0.7 kWh of energy. The fact that at some tiny part of the flow diagram we achieved > 1:1 energy doesn't change the fact that the actual fraction of energy out compared to energy in has barely changed in ten years.
The latest experiment produced a Q-total of 0.014, while before it was something like 0.012.
We can't just hand-wave away the energy in.
Has that net-positive finding been reproduced yet in any other Tokamoks?
How does this compare to Helion's (non-Tokamok, non-Stellerator fusion plasma confinement reactor) published stats for the Trenta and Polaris products?
Could SYLOS or other CPA Chirped Pulse Amplification lasers be useful for this problem with or without the high heat of a preexisting plasma reaction to laser pulse next to? https://www.google.com/search?q=nuclear+waste+cpa
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.2021102...
But sure, they haven't achieved engineering breakeven, but that's not what they claimed. But they're a lot closer than it seems when you don't take modern lasers into account. Even considering turbine losses, they're down to one order of magnitude.
And this is worth noting:
> The researchers also expect the energy gains to scale dramatically with energy input. We expect it to be strongly nonlinear, and it will only get better as we build designs that accommodate the increase in energy,” Spears said. “For some perspective, between the last event and this one, we put in 8% more energy in the laser and we got 230% more energy out in fusion.”
https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/12/21/supercomputings-critical-...
We can make it, one of the ways is D-D fusion.
The way ITER is planning to get tritium is by bombarding a lithium lining with neutrons. But the neutrons tend to miss lithium and so they’re using a beryllium lining on top of that to multiply neutrons. So you’re making a tritium gas that’s on the wrong side of a very expensive barrier, how are you going to harvest that from a power plant that’s supposed to run 24 hours a day?
Slowing neutrons is one thing. You can do that with plentiful stuff. Creating new ones means donor material. You’re consuming the beryllium. Almost nobody produces beryllium, and I don’t think 400k tons of the ore - not beryllium, ore - is going to be sufficient for a consumable. A highly toxic, easily oxidized one at that.
ETA: the reaction for neutron multiplication using beryllium apparently splits the beryllium into a neutron and two helium. The lithium reaction produces tritium and more helium.
No, but it's (genuinely) been on my to-do list for while.
But bigger than a pocket, more like very large rucksack at best, probably more like CRT monitor sized.
> So you’re making a tritium gas that’s on the wrong side of a very expensive barrier, how are you going to harvest that from a power plant that’s supposed to run 24 hours a day?
No idea, but I used to live in Cambridge, and IIRC one of locals did his PhD on neutron induced atom dislocation within metallic crystals specifically with regard to the engineering of fusion reactors, so I can say with a certain level of confidence both that (a) I wouldn't understand the answer and (b) that it wouldn't fit into this comment box.
If your friend did his PhD on something then the clock might have started ticking on that tech but many, many things that work in a lab never get used to make products or medicines. For everything else it takes around twenty years, which is a huge fraction of 30.
But then I'm finding that the naysayers are pointing out that nuclear physics is a big statistics game and you don't get to cherry-pick which reactions happen. Any one that can happen does and you have to be able to mop up/separate/repair the consequences of each.
Is Wikipedia right about beryllium, or do you know of other reactions that render it nastier than some ionized helium?
Switching fuels is at least one full international collaboration and two generations of reactor away, and if you think that’s going to happen in fifteen years then boy are you gonna be disappointed by geopolitics.
So basically Helion defected and hopes that partial honesty distracts from their other problems.
(Just joking I'm sure your account has nothing to do with Hinkley Point )
(Or does it o_O ? )
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3vUPhsFoniw
As I said elsewhere, Helion interviews made me feel bad about ITER’s chances, and this guy’s video made me feel bad about Helion’s chances. Just because someone is explaining a con to you doesn’t mean they aren’t also conning you.
I think this is absolutely wrong. Limitless cheap energy will create unprecedented demand for new, previously wasteful ideas. Think about how energy availability made climate-controlled houses possible. Now try to imagine how future capitalists will sell us something previously unimaginable with a 10x or 100x energy supply.
It might cost almost nothing once it gets efficient enough but will that cost savings be passed on to customers or pocketed by the fusion businesses?
The NRC has already decided they get to regulate it.
There was another article I read that any values outside of self-preservation, such as taking care of the earth, or the poor, are only possible during a surplus.
Part of the reason that the right is afraid of committing to help the poor is because they don't think the economy could handle it. If the economy is at a new level, we might be able to agree on trying new things.
It'll be time to let the robots do the work, at least until they rebel and get granted citizenship.
> It might cost almost nothing
That's just a buzzword for "we don't have to pay for the fuel", but depending on the exact isotopes they are planning to use it may be more difficult.
But note that solar energy also doesn't pay for fuel, but there is still a cost to build, maintain and keep working a solar energy generator, and also the cost to distribute the energy to the houses/factories.
The energy generation sector is quite competitive, so expect the price to drop when there is enough fusion generator to replace more expensive sources. (And hopefully make carbon power plants too expensive so they have to be closed.)
It might interest you to know that even now during the "energy crisis" in Europe we (as in "my family here in Sweden") pay about twice as much in electricity-related taxes as we do for the actual power we use. Electricity itself can be remarkably cheap here but those taxes don't change (other than being increased because of inflation like the energy tax recently was) since they are levied per kWh. Add the "certificate charges" for "green energy" and a 25% sales tax on top of everything (including the mentioned taxes) and the situation quickly becomes clear - most of the money paid for electricity is pocketed by the state, not by the electricity producers. Even when the prices rise to hitherto unknown heights the lion share of the increase is due to the state levying charges - in this case "bottle neck charges" for electricity transferred from the hydro-electric plants in the middle and north of Sweden to the south. The actual tax burden on electricity lies between 60% and 70% depending on the current price at NordPool (the electricity market for the Nordic countries).
Realise also that those 60% to 70% are paid from an income which has already been taxed at a rate of 50%-60% for most people.
But.. Capitalism.