Space based solar or fusion power - which one will work commercially first?
Only uranium proudly stands apart.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
Well, kind of. That comes from fusion reactions in _other_ suns.
Though one might argue that they're also ultimately stellar-based power in the sense that in the case of geothermal energy both the residual gravitational thermal heat and heavy-element radioactive decay, and in the case of tidal power, the formation of our own proto-solar-system nebula were themselves based on earlier-generation stars.
But then so is nuclear fission based on heavy elements such as uranium, plutonium, or thorium.
Fusion on the other hand makes total sense if you can do it. It's just a really really really hard engineering problem.
Space based power belongs in the same category as solar roadways, energy harvesting speed bumps, solar windows, etc. Clearly if you want to scam investors an energy project is the way to go.
That would be my gut feeling, but what simple calculation would you use to disproof it?
Fusion is currently not working at all - but we can transmit power (with big losses over that distance) via laser etc. But since space is expensive, I just see no way to make this work economically.
Both fundamentally are engineering problems now.
Also considering that there has been a lot of investment in space launch vehicles of late the cost to lift things into orbit are lowering.
Technology takes a while to develop and mature with applications for this beyond just beaming power to Earth.
Yes, but the cost of installing solar panels on the ground are astronomically cheaper than anything you can do in space and I do not see the gap closing in the near future, even with breakthroughs. Rather the contrary, we still have lots of cheap unused land (deserts). And solar panels are getting cheaper every day. Having a space based laser/power beam sounds cool - but complicated and expensive.
Additionally there was a lot more useful testing of various related aspects in this beyond just beaming power to Earth per the article.
Near future, I agree it's hard to imagine available resources for this outpacing available resources for fusion.
Though fusion does have some more difficult technical engineering issues than SBS.
By that I mean, as far I know, we have a decent understanding of what materials we would need and how to utilize said material for space based solar.
While with fusion we are close to self sustainings reactions, we still lack understanding on containing the reaction itself for it to be feasible. That is, understanding the magnetic fluctuations around the plasma reaction and having material to housing it for extended periods of time.
Of course with computing simulations becoming increasingly more accurate and powerful, those technical hurdles may not be as stringent as we see them today.
Edit: If you assume a ground based array has a 20% utilization factor, the space based panels + receivers can only be 5x the cost of the standard solar installation. Which requires ~free space launches, plus probably other technology we do not currently possess.
You could also say that space based solar makes total sense "if you can do it, it's just a really hard engineering problem"
For fusion, the equivalent envelope calculation is the cost of a large thermal electricity generation installation, where the heat source is, say, half the cost of fission or even a tenth the cost of fission. The floor of fusion's end cost is that thermodynamic conversion, if the promos of fusion is super cheap heat energy. And when you start calculating the cost of 2GW of turbines plus 2GW of cooling towers, one might conclude that there's only a decade or two left before solar and wind and storage makes thermal electricity generation obsolete. Thermal electricity generation equipment isn't getting any cheaper, but the competition is getting cheaper exponentially.
I would say that fusion is prettt close to a scam as a power source. There may be some cool physics and should be pursued for those reasons. But the idea of fusion as any sort of economical source of energy, when it has all the radioactivity problems of fission, massive scale challenges, and no reason to think that it will ever be anything except massive construction project, is just wishful sci fi thinking. I know it's not a popular opinion here, but "solar roads for sci fi fans" really is the shortest possible description of fusion power I can think of.
The thing is that while they are both really hard engineering problems, space solar (which includes energy transmission via lasers) is also a massive ongoing logistics and coordination problem.
Solar power without wireless transmission makes a lot of sense the closer you get to the sun and in the inner solar system it almost certainly makes more sense than fusion but once you get to the asteroid belt or further out, inverse square law would suggest that it quickly becomes infeasible.
Solar roads are expensive and worked out economocially nowhere, where they were build. Unless you mean roads that have roofs of solar panels - that is a sound concept, because you can have standard cheap panels and replace them at will, but is not what is generally understood with solar roads.
Also about fusion:
"when it has all the radioactivity problems of fission"
Not at all the same. What exactly are you referring to? Fission with heavy isotopes has radioactivity by design - but Fusion not really. There is some radiation with some designs, but the basic idea of fusing hydrogen into helium works without radioactivity.
"massive scale challenges"
And where exactly are they? Once a small reactor runs, what is the problem to build a big one?
"and no reason to think that it will ever be anything except massive construction project"
Because fusion bombs work since 70 years. And fusion in labs are not hard either. We can do fusion - we just cannot do it in a controlled way yet. But recent records with controlling hot plasma indicate that there is real progress. So (allmost) no one is currently betting that we will soon have fusion power, but at some point we will, if we keep on working.
This would be really cool and may make sense with cheap/efficient enough panels.
But of course, you have to solve the 11'8" problem wherever these things get installed.
This is exactly my claim for fusion: an uneconomical idea that sounds really cool in theory.
> the basic idea of fusing hydrogen into helium works without radioactivity.
Where does the deuterium come from? There's going to be neutrons bombarding everything, by design, all sorts of radioactivity. It's literally at the core of the entire thing. This point is swept under the rug, but ensuring that the radioactivity is short lived will be a major design requirement of most components for the reactor.
> scale challenges
The scale challenge might be building a small reactor, instead of a large one. We don't know what sort of containment will work, and at what sort of physical scales. Which is why massive construction projects are a problem. We are terrible at massive scale construction, and much better at small scale manufacturing.
> fusion bombs
Not sure why fusion bombs would indicate we could ever do sustained and controlled fusion reactions. These are entirely different processes with almost no connection to each other. This is an error on the order of magnitude of thinking that fusion is not radioactive.
And this is why fusion is solar roads for sci fi fans. People love solar roads because they don't know the particulars about solar panels and roads and why they are a bad fit for each other. People love fusion power because they don't know the specifics about fusion or power and why they are a bad fit for each other.
Sea water, it's surprisingly plentiful. What I'm not convinced by is that the neutron emissions that come from D+D fusion are in any sense "safe" or claims that that the neutrons are in a form that "can't" ever be used for development of fission weapons…
Tritium comes from D+D reactions, which… make a lot of neutrons in the process.
D-T fusion generates 17.6 MeV and 1 neutron, so 17.6 MeV per neutron. So for the same amount of energy produced it makes about 3.5x more neutrons. Worse yet, in D-T fusion, 14.1 MeV of the energy released is in the kinetic energy of the neutron. Compare this to the 8.8 MeV energy of all three neutrons in a fission reaction. Neutron activation and damage are significant engineering concerns for fusion reactors.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-235 [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterium%E2%80%93tritium_fusi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-235
And then you need to use that neutron to breed new tritium from lithium-6, which is only about 2% of lithium. And since our only feasible source of tritium is a single tritium atom from that single neutron from a D-T fusion reaction that consumes a tritium, we had better be damn efficient at making sure the neutrons go only to breeding new tritium. Which is good, because then they cause less neutron radioactivity of all the rest of the reactor parts. But bad, because it's pretty unrealistic to capture all the neutrons via lithium blanket.
Which means we need ultimately need an outside tritium source, external from the fusion reactions, which means another neutron source, which means, fission reactors!
The whole idea of controlled terrestrial fusion being an inexpensive source of electricity is just absolutely baffling to me. As is the idea that it will somehow be a good extraterrestrial energy source, or power some sort of spaceship. Fission is far more realistic, likely to be compact, etc. Direct conversion of aneutronic fusion is complete sci-fi at the moment, we may as well be talking warp drives.
Ok well, I see the use of tritium only as a step towards normal hydrogen as fuel in fusion reactors. Tritium as fuel is just the "easy" target and yes, it is in limited supply and causes problems. But "in theory" we could have higher temperatures and not be dependant on tritium.
The proposal and technology were obviously nonviable to anyone with the least technical knowledge from the beginning.
Wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Roadways>
Phil "Thunderf00t" Mason on YouTube had a particularly brutal critique. Repetitively repetitious and occasionally repeating itself (as is his wont), but on point:
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=H901KdXgHs4>
(Several follow-ups, including an on-site visit.)
In contrast solar roadways and space based solar don't make sense. Sure you could build them. But it would never make sense to do so because there's always a better way to spend your money. It's never* going to make sense to build a solar panel into a road than just on a field. And it's never going to make sense to build space based solar rather than just Earth based solar + batteries.
*standard HN pedantry disclaimer
This is inherent to the way fusion is even being developed. It's always assumed that the fusion part is going to be more expensive than the equipment to convert thermal energy to electricity, which is why it makes sense to make it as energy dense as possible, and therefore more cost efficient.
But from that very starting point, it's clear that there will always be better ways to generate electricity than fusion: solar and wind combined with batteries.
We have much more reason to be optimistic about the cost case of extraterrestrial solar than the cost case for fusion.
I am 100% for renewable energies and would not wait for fusion - but I am very hesistant to use the word always here. If there is a breakthrough in handling the plasma - and recent developements indicate that this might be possible - it could make fusion very cheap. So when you have a cheap, compact and reliable energy source - most people would favor it over something unstable that takes a lot of space.