Will Fusion Energy Ever Come Together?
nautil.us
nautil.us
But like the article, I also find it sad that we've not been able to build more Gen IV projects. You want to fix climate change? Build nuclear plants. Unfortunately not a message that resonates well, although the Chinese seem to be thinking that way. Hard not too with all that coal soot in the air.
A more interesting question will be the cost of fusion energy (or even Gen IV fission) versus existing fuels. It's one thing to be "able" to make a net positive fusion generator, and something else again to make it profitable.
I think we need innovation in the nuclear energy sector - Thorium and Fusion cry out for investment.
Obviously, a tonne of carbon and a tonne of radioactive waste aren't really comparable. In fact, I'd argue that the radioactive waste produced by a fission power plant is better for the environment: it remains in the reactor facility, where it can be easily contained and buried in geologically stable rock formations, or reused/reprocessed to extract further energy from it.
The carbon produced by burning fossil fuels is dumped into the atmosphere, where it can't be easily collected, disposed of, or reused.
That's not what I was disputing. The half-life of radioactive material produced from nuclear power is what makes it's maintenance expensive.
Do you really think maintaining nuclear waste for 24,000 years is cheaper than the 25% added cost for carbon capture?
Burning fossil fuels and ignoring the future impact is probably the best thing we ever did as a species, especially if you like whales.
There's not much that we'll be able to do about the massive amounts of plastic released into the oceans, or the levels of mercury and lead pollution throughout the world.
If the fact that we were not able to externalize the costs of carbon pollution ends up leading to the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves leading to a massive sea level rise that can't ever be fixed then that sort of kills the argument. The same can be said for the destruction of ecosystems that can never be recovered for that matter.
They are focusing on nuclear for reasons of energy diversification and independence. (look at how Russia has Germany by the balls right now)
Seems like the far better option is to exhaust the renewables option as much as possible and then fall back to nuclear.
Both fusion and fission convert mass to energy but are crude ways to do it. Physics is currently stuck and has been for 60-70 years. Physicists cannot integrate the large scale theory (General Relativity) with the small scale theory (Quantum Mechanics). They are incompatible. I can't prove it but I suspect that once this impasse is resolved we will find elegant ways to convert mass to energy and the energy problem will be solved.
“China just put a huge chunk of money and hired hundreds of people to work on molten salt reactors. I think that’s probably going to come first—and it’s going to come from China”
China also built a pebble bed reactor at Shidaowan, and has plans to build up to 19 more. (http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-21/china-wants-...) (http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/04/construction-progresses-on-...)
It will be interesting to see if the Chinese can make nuclear fission clean and economical over the long term.
If you want to make a point about relative dangers, you should be comparing apples-to-apples. Simply expressing fission as a phenomenon is even easier than fusion, you can dig up rocks that do it all on their own.
Weaponizing a phenomenon, on the other hand, always requires some additional work.
What was decided 20 years ago? Where?
>What was decided 20 years ago? Where?
Somewhere in 199x i remember reading something like a Congress committee's paperwork where cost of fusion was very unfavorably compared to the $0.04 cost of coal energy with thus pretty clear conclusion about economical unviability of fusion. It was like a bulb lit in my head back then - "that explains!" :).
Edit: to the comment below - i should have worded better, the inertial confinement schemas are obviously better for developing future reactors as, at least, since understanding of bremsstrahlung losses in thermodynamically equilibrium plasmas it became clear the enormous, on the border of any practicality, size of possible break-even reactor and other limitation on them. Like no aneutronic p-Boron even in the great-great future of Star Trek. Where is inertial confinement have no such limits. As H-bomb - a successful break-even inertial confinement device shows - it is just a matter of miniaturization. Look at Sandia Z-machine for example - basically miniature model of what happens inside H-bomb after fission primary goes off - they aren't in a rush for any practical reactor, mind you, only to reproduce explosion conditions for weapons research - yet even from the start - something like in 1998 they were immediately closer to the goal than everybody else. 10-15% input conversion into X-rays at the 100TWt+ peak - that can be reached by NIF only today only if they replace the current lasers with semiconductor ones.
If producing fusion were the only concern then we'd stop at Hirschorrn fusors and call it a day.
There's also Helion Energy[2], which is a YC startup, but their process seems to involve some sort of magnetic reflectivity from the fusion reaction.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion [2]http://www.helionenergy.com/
Some of our energy production machines use only a subset of these steps (e.g. internal combustion engines just use mechanical energy -> rotational mechanical energy), but pretty much everything save solar uses at least one of these conversions. So I find anything outside this cycle very interesting.
We have been doing so for 60 years, we were just smart enough to let the sun boil the ocean for us and harness the power of kinetic energy, rather than try to build fancy schmancy electronics. See the snow on the mountains? That's what we like to call a 'solar battery'.
Often smart people making fancy things look down on those with working systems because the solution to the problem was so obvious that they couldn't make themselves look smart by doing something that actually works.
Like really how hard is it to build a concrete structure that contains water, and allow that water to fall over a wheel... Who cares how inefficient or old it may be when it's so easy and cheap.
It's like the guy who walks into a java shop armed with a few UNIX command line utils and bash and they all look down on him and call his system hacky when it works in a week and they're still figuring out their object model.
Society needs to do what they can to increase energy independence and sustainability with whatever they can use now, as time is limited.
If China gets this first, and doesn't share it with the rest of the world, that would solve a lot of their problems.
If I had to choose one, I'd choose the one I get actual returns on.
To make it viable in general, you'll have to figure out a way to send a working fluid down deep enough to pick up enough heat and bring it back up again without losing all of that heat on the way back up, and do it with huge flowrates to extract enough energy, and in such a way that it can run pretty much continuously for years.
Amusingly, there is also a comment on the article asking why it doesn't mention ITER and another comment pointing out that it does....