Fusion Power Is About to Become a Reality? | Hacker News Reader

Fusion Power Is About to Become a Reality?

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118 pointszepto161 comments

FWIW, I consider fusion power to be one of two possible black swan events that will change the the future from what we consider 'gloom and doom' into something much more fun to live in. The other, if you're wondering, is fully decoded cell biology[1].

So if we have enough energy to operate at a high standard of living without any imported raw material, it enables countries to switch from energy negative economies to energy positive economies. For example African countries that smelt the iron and aluminum that is being mined and exporting finished goods rather than raw materials can capture more of the economic value of those resources and keep it local. Building transport systems based on indigenous electricity generation, removing dependency on pipelines and other fossil fuel taxes. At a low enough cost, excess energy allows for the production of fresh water from seawater, nitrogen from the atmosphere (for fertilizer and farming), and long chain hydrocarbons (gas, oil, plastics, etc) using the Fischer-Tropsch cycle.

[1] Basically we know a lot about how cells work and I expect at some point we will know exactly how they work, allowing us a genetically remove errors that result in disease, regenerate and replace any component of the body, and fix any side effects from material exposure (like cancer).

I don't understand your enthusiasm here, what are the potential wins of fusion energy over any other energy source that we currently have?

Do you expect it to be super cheap, i.e. more than an order of magnitude cheaper than solar? If so, how do you justify that belief? I ask this of everyone that's enthusiastic about fusion, but I've never heard a reason why fusion is such a desirable energy source.

Fusion is safe, clean, produces no waste, runs 24/7 on demand, and after startup costs should be cheap, assuming repairs and maintenance aren't enormously costly. Not to mention, more space efficient than wind or solar. You don't need a particular environemt for it like hydro.

No more minig/drilling for energy. No more emissions. No toxic waste. No hourly power variability. No need for batteries. Fusion is the perfect energy source on paper, if it ever becomes a reality.

I wonder about politics. No country needs another country for energy anymore. Hum...

D+D => 2% He4, 49% T (radioactive) + proton, 49% He3 + neutron (to a first approximation, the only radiation which makes almost everything else radioactive).

All tritium-based reactions require a steady manufacture of tritium because the half life is too short.

All He3-based reactions either require it to be manufactured (conveniently it’s the decay product of tritium, unfortunately see the earlier paragraph for side effects), or mined — from a gas giant, because despite the meme, concentrations on the moon are so low that it makes more sense to turn moon rock into plasma, separate by isotope in a cyclotron, condense the metal into cylinders, catapult the cylinders to earth, and the burn the cylinders in a repurposed coal plant.

Even if you want to call fusion “clean” because you can design it so the radioisotopes the neutron activation gives you are mostly benign, or because you’re hoping for an aneutronic reaction like P-B11, it’s still a proliferation hazard.

On the other hand, I’d love to see a rocket made from an open-ended fusion reactor.

Can't tritium be bred in the reactor walls from lithium?

Yes, by absorbing neutrons. It’s a good use for the neutrons, but neutrons (and any source of them) are both a hazard in themselves and a proliferation risk.

Fusion is an energy source. Like any other energy source it's automatically also a weapon. All energy sources have historically saved many more lives than they ever cost, including nuclear power.

And even solar power is a weapon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes#Heat_ray

Yes.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that even current nuclear causes less deaths per GWh than anything else including solar, it’s also the only power source currently offering humanity a self-made extinction apocalypse.

(Also the heat mirror was debunked twice by Mythbusters, as referenced in your own link).

True, but that's only because it's a really good power source. For instance, it's also what allows us to have working devices outside our solar system, and for similar reasons.

Any really good power source will have this problem, as will a great many other technologies, should we have them.

Indeed. I would rather we had mass interplanetary/lunar colonisation before making interstellar propulsion, for that very reason.

"after startup cost" is the elephant in the room. [this](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421...) estimates a price of 59.31$ / MWh for the proposed DEMO2 fusion reactor. 34 $ of this is depreciation, ie construction cost.

Wind power is currently at 20$ / MWh..

Estimates like that for fusion reactors are utterly preposterous. That's a fraction of the cost of a fission powerplant, even those the fusion plant will be much larger and more complex.

Fusion potentially solve a lot of the problems of renewables:

1. Can be built anywhere, not just where there's wind/sun/hydro.

2. Can provide baseload power because the output can be controlled. Renewables (excepting hydro) require storage for baseload power.

3. Can be centralized which makes it more compatible with existing electrical grids.

So if we take existing natural gas plants, and ignore the emissions, they are identical. We've been ignoring emissions forever. So I don't see what is a "black swan" event at all about fusion. At best it's a drop in replacement for what we have now. But it looks to be immensely expensive, far more expensive than renewables plus batteries.

I tend to agree.

What if solar plus batteries are actually another one of those black swans but one with a (very) slow fuse rather than a big bang breakthrough?!

Solar plus batteries comes with

1) massive investment (at the moment at least)

2) enormous physical footprint, which needs to be solved either through reserving large amounts of space for it, or by having a large transmission grid and all the services required around that

3) lots of greenhouse emissions to produce 1 and 2 in the first place

Neither of these are difficult to deal with. For battery costs, I posted this recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18808842

Batteries are dropping in cost far faster than nearly anybody realizes, and people seem to think we're paying 8088 costs when we're up to pentium costs for computing.

Space concerns are pretty minor, it really doesn't take much compared to current human land use. In addition to covering land that's already used by humans for parking or building, we will likely see more farm land that's currently producing things like soybeans or field corn converted to solar farms, and solar is more environmentally friendly to those ecosystems than the current farming practice.

Neither of these have significant greenhouse emissions, and as the energy supply chain lessens its carbon use so will all the manufacturing and recycling.

> Space concerns are pretty minor, it really doesn't take much compared to current human land use.

Well, sure. But in absolute terms that's still a pretty large space which we can't just allocate near every city. By contrast, current power plants are the size of a large apartment block, which we can allocate, even inside the cities.

And if we build that solar infrastructure away from cities where land is available and cheap, then we need to connect it and we need to build the grid to support that, which also isn't cheap, and has other problems.

We can judge the importance of space concerns by cost. What fraction of solar/battery installs is the cost of land? Answer: it's pretty small in most of the world. In particular, land in desert regions is almost free.

Natural gas plants are supplied by a network of hundreds of thousands of gas wells, each of which carries risk of groundwater contamination, and frequently noise/light/air pollution as well. Many gas wells impinge on residential property a little bit as well, in states where mineral rights are sold separately to "surface" property rights, like West Virginia.

All of that is a non-issue with fusion, so it's not quite a drop-in replacement.

Ok, so take away all those risks that you talk about. Is that a "black swan" type of improvement?

Gas plants require gas. That means drilling, processing, and transporting. Gas plants require huge amount of backing logistics to be able to operate.

Nuclear plants use readily available resources in very small quantities, no pipelines, no supporting logistics. You can literally build one anywhere where there is an electrical grid, without logistical considerations.

Fine, so eliminate those logistical considerations, what sort of big advantage is there? Turns out, about none. What new applications are opened up? What is now possible? Not much.

And most fusion that I've heard does require massive processing to get enough input fuel, just read through all the technical discussions down below.

Take a coal plant (or bigger), and remove the need for fuel and the emissions. What's the big benefit over what we have now? And I say this as somebody who views climate change and carbon emission as the biggest issue of our time. I just can't get the least bit excited about fusion. Solar, wind, and batteries will deliver, we know now that they will be cheap enough to outcompete gas and coal and everything within a decade or two.

I maintain that the only thing that was ever promising about fusion was the potential for cheap electricity, the fabled "too cheap to meter" type of energy. However it's really clear now that fusion will never deliver that, unless there's also huge technology gains in direct conversion.

And we've known this a long time. Go back and look at articles from 50 years ago, and you'll see different criticisms of fusion that still apply today. Today, we also have the decreasing cost of renewables + storage.

In developing countries, we will likely see solar and storage built, without even needing that hugely expensive transmission grid. That's more of a black swan event than what fusion can hope to provide.

I guess our differing point of view comes mainly from the fact that I don't see energy storage solutions become viable in the near or medium future.

I believe battery tech is progression slower than fusion. We will also need a clean baseline power solution, and AFAIK only fusion can give us that.

Energy storage is viable and being deployed right now. Moss Landing California has one of the larger installs in the near future, at more than 1 GWh, because it's cheaper than gas peakers.

Recent bids for solar/wind attached to storage are coming in at record braking prices in Colorado, Nevada, and Indiana. Every month there are "record breaking" bids for storage projects, today's news is about Hawaii:

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/hawaiian-electr...

But in a few weeks there will be a new low cost somewhere.

Batteries are getting cheaper faster than anybody expected, just like solar and wind did before. Fusion is progressing more slowly than anyone imagined, and will likely never be financially competitive. Nobody even talks about it being cheap anymore when I ask people why they think fusion is exciting. At best we're getting simplified supply chains, or baseload power. Even baseload power is not desirable, coal plants are shutting down all over.

And in addition to all the grid storage that will be added, people with electric cars will keep 3 days worth of their own electricity in their garages at night. Huge amounts of storage will be deployed by the EV switch, and as those batteries age out they can have second lives as grid storage, before finally being recycled.

Fusion power is 24x7 (unlike solar) and can provide base load. Fuel transportation costs are minimal as there is enough D2 in pretty much any source of water (even rainwater) to provide all the deuterium you need. You need a bit of lithium to make tritium but on the order of a few hundred kilograms, not tonnes. So a water truck and maybe a dump truck can transport the raw material you need for power generation to a local power plant.

That means no oil or gas pipeline, no train loads of coal. Just a couple of easy to acquire vehicles on a trip that they do, perhaps every couple of YEARs.

And this power plant isn't your typical 10MW peaker plant that runs on Natural gas, no a fusion plant of the type being discussed in the article and elsewhere are multi-gigawatt plants. So imagine the entire energy budget for California provided by a dozen power plants[1] that are fueled up once a year by a couple of trucks.

So it is easier on infrastructure because you can distribute plants around, it makes the fuel issue a non-problem since there is so much energy available to the process.

So think about the externalities that eliminates. No coal fumes, no CO2 generation, no tank cars of oil or coal, no pipelines for natural gas, no risk of contamination, and no long term waste that escapes the plant.

Those advantages are especially powerful in a country like Japan which imports fossil fuels for their energy production, or Somalia which is economically constrained by an inability to protect pipelines that might otherwise operate a fossil fuel power plant. Or Israel which is using power to desalinate water.

Having the ability to generate the entire economy's domestic requirement for energy with a fuel that is both locally accessible and easily transported, means that you stabilize geo-political issues like the Russian gas pipelines going into the European Union[2].

The availability of energy, in quantity, reliably, also jump starts investment in manufacturing, refining, and other energy intensive endeavors.

[1] https://www.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/total_sys...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/why-russian-natural-gas-w...

I assume Fusion can't be used for scaling up and down energy output ( So even if it is baseload it is a constant value ), so we will need some form of Energy Storage to make full use of it?

I imagine with AI, Data Science, Robotics, means Manufacturing will move from overseas to local? We can already 3D Print most parts. We cant already do Multi Floor Plant Farming, Currently it is mostly an electricity issues, if that becomes cheap enough we could do Plant based meat based on it. So every nation on earth will become self sustainable by default?

How is Economy going to change with much less trading?

What if the construction cost of the fusion plant is so high that the electricity price is not competitive? That's already a concern with recent fission reactor projects, where the investors demand price guarantees from the public.

That is a valid concern, if perhaps a fusion plant requires the outside be coated in platinum or something. It would have to be both expensive and difficult to manufacture/obtain. It is essentially where we are today with ITER, which is to say if ITER generated net power it would still be a hard pill to swallow if it costs $100B per power plant.

Fortunately, many of the significant costs the plague fission plants (like the legal expense of dealing with all the lawsuits, the cost of unlimited insurance, Etc.) would likely not apply to fusion plants.

Fusion reactors will be both much larger than and much more complex than fission reactors. They will necessarily be more expensive, even if they aren't made of resublimated unobtainium.

The size difference follows from limits on heat transfer through the first wall, and has been known for 35 or more years.

If fusion ever becomes practical, this could be a game changer for a lot of countries which rely on other countries to provide them with power (e.g. the Baltics rely on Russia for gas).

Otoh, many petroleum exporting country will become worthless because their land is incapable for other users...

>fully decoded cell biology

Am I the only one thinking we are stepping into an area which is an act of God. And needs to be 1000000x careful with what we do. ( We already mess about with Food...... )

Depends on your theology. Is a car running over a deer the act of the entity who made the car? Or is it an act of the entity that is controlling the car? Upon such questions many a thesis has been written.

you'll get downvoted for bringing God into it but humans do have a bad habit of arrogance

ITER project manager said 1gr of H nuclear power is 8Tons of fossil fuel. That's a game changer of cosmic (literally) proportions.

Except it's not, if the reactor is too expensive. It just becomes a very complicated way of burning money.

Seems like partially a Dennis Whyte puff piece.

The problem all tokomaks have is that ELMs exist and will remove the inner lining of the containment unit over time, and current cutting edge research is on how a plasma will react with specific impurities and their distribution within said plasma. A major problem is lack of true experimental evidence, as most fusion experiments are crude approximations of reality and then subsequent closed source, poorly documented, or guess-the-fellow-researchers code is at play.

Source: talked a lot this past holiday from a friend at ITER.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge-localized_mode

For anyone wondering what ELMs are.

Another problem, apparently, is plasma disruptions [1]. They are more dramatic, can irreparably damage the vessel, and hard to solve or mitigate. ITER has a taskforce dedicated to them [2], but it remains to be seen if that approach will work (and the energy will still be dumped into the first wall and support structure, albeit less local than with relativistic electrons).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak#Plasma_disruptions

[2]: https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/3183

Another approach to this is to not use solid walls. General Fusion (BC, Canada) is playing with the idea of a spherical plasma within a void of spinning liquid lead. The lack of solid walls makes for some very interesting options in terms of damage mitigation.

They already abandoned that idea AFAIK. Liquid lead wall introduced too much contamination into the plasma, making fusion impossible.

More specifically, they went to a scheme where liquid metal compressed the plasma more slowly against a solid inner column. The slowness was needed to keep the magnetic field below 100T, beyond which currents in the surface of the metal begin to vaporize it. But there are a host of other extremely challenging problems that pushes this idea to the "be very skeptical" column.

As long as "over time" isn't too short of a time, the MIT has it covered. Their design makes it easy to crack open the reactor and replace the inner wall, which will be 3D-printed. They plan to do it annually.

I read the article. I wasn't clear in my original post. The issue isn't the ablation of the containment wall and replacing the wall, the issue is how to properly manage the plasma as the containment impurities disperse throughout the plasma and how it impacts the fusion, magnetic, pressure, and temperature characteristics on both a local and macro level. Which is a common problem between the MIT and other tokomak reactors.

This was my impression as well. Seems like the only significant development here is that superconducting tape might work better than regular magnets. Or it might not.

I don't disagree with this: ELMs exist and will remove the inner lining of the containment unit over time, and current cutting edge research is on how a plasma will react with specific impurities and their distribution within said plasma.

It is one of the things that I look forward to from the stellarator folks[1] is their ability to continuously run plasma up against a variety of materials.

[1] https://www.ipp.mpg.de/w7x

What do you mean "finally"? It's been about to become a reality for decades!

It's been 20 years away for the past 60 years. Now it's only 10 years away.

Same with AGI and now apparently, Martian colonies, according to Elon.

So we are only 30 years from it being 5 years away?

Commercial fusion will coincide with the Singularity.

As expected. It's often forgotten that acceleration of technology caused by runaway recursively-improving AI would require rapidly increasing availability of energy - after all, something has to power all this tech. Who knows, maybe lack of fusion power is the one thing that'll delay the singularity? :).

This used to be the joke with solar power too. After decades of being 10 years away it became "5 years away but we're subsidizing it now" and just like that, it started scaling out to viability.

More like It's been 60 years away for the past 60 years. Now it's only 50 years away.

The time remaining is an asymptotic curve never quite reaching 0, right...

See Xeno's paradox, valve time, etc.

This is lazy nonsense. Fusion is underfunded and yet we've still made fantastic progress on power density and stability.

I believe this (long!) video of a Dennis Whyte talk from 2016 was posted to HN way back when:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4

It sounded pretty encouraging, but I have no idea what progress has been made or if these ideas had run into any roadblocks in two years since this was first discussed.

Paul Erdös said mathematicians were god's way of converting coffee into theorems. I claim programmers are god's way of converting coffee into profanity.

Fusion research is god's way of converting money into promises. This same article could have been written in the 1980s.

"Fusion definitely works. You see it every day. Our sun and other stars blast hydrogen atoms together with such intense force that their nuclei overcome their normal inclination to repel each other."

And all we need to do it is a mass of hydrogen the size of the sun.

> And all we need to do it is a mass of hydrogen the size of the sun.

Done. Now we just need to set up lots of panels to collect the energy.

I have never understood why people are so hot for fusion.

Fusion gives you 10^15 energy density, fission gives you 10^12 already. So the difference between fusion and fission is really not relevant compared to what we have now.

Fusion has many of the same potential practical problem as fission and many even worse.

Yet fission is here, its the highest low-carbon energy source, it has proven to be able to replace fossil on a MASSIVE scale, see France, US, South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden and so on.

Fusion is the dream in the future that makes it easy for people to dismiss fission. And that is keeping us back. I'm not saying studying fusion is not useful, but a we should put 10x more resources in fission research.

The world just does not make sense to me.

The new trouble with fusion and even near-future fission projects is that solar and wind costs have plummeted. It's a lot harder to get investment in anything else when solar is now $.03/kWh.

You are mistaken. Grid level battery storage cannot provide baseline power for days, and until that's a reality we will need a baseline power source that can supply when there is no sun, wind (or hydro, wave etc where available). Fusion & fission plants are the sustainable alternatives for this sector.

> baseline power

FYI, it's "baseload power"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load

Indeed, sorry - fast typing.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/01/01/solar-tsunami/

> Developers have applied to build 139 GWac of large-scale solar projects in the territory of six grid operators – around five times what is currently online across the country – and that figure doesn’t even cover the entire United States. By any metric, we are looking at an unprecedented boom in solar development over the next five years.

> The six grid operator queues we investigated also showed more than 16 GW of battery projects which have filed for interconnection. And this number should not be too surprising to anyone who is watching the meteoric growth of energy storage.

> Per the US Energy Storage Monitor, from Wood Mackenzie Renewables & Power along with the Energy Storage Association (ESA), total energy storage deployed expanded by 60% in terms of energy and 300% on a power basis in the third quarter of 2018 versus the prior year. Going out mostly until 2023, the report noted that the front of the meter pipeline expanded to approximately 33 GW of power.

Natural gas picks up the slack until batteries (which everyone underestimates; we're going to have an enormous amount of energy storage cumulatively to go 100% low carbon) get a bit cheaper; wind, solar, hydro, and long distance transmission lines combined with utility scale storage is more than adequate to replace traditional base load (and all are possible today, not decades later if we started building fission/fusion commercial generators today).

For domestic power requirements just change building regulations to require a Powerwall style battery and solar panels in every new house. That plus integrating all the electric cars that sit idle all day and the problem gets noticeably smaller. Add in all the old EV batteries and it gets better still <https://easyelectriclife.groupe.renault.com/en/outlook/energ....

Are there really any occasions when there is no sun, no wind, no hydro over the whole of Europe? Better east-west interconnects and use of Norwegian hydro as pumped storage should help too.

Not perfect but very scalable and can be implemented a little at a time as the baseload fossil fuel stations slowly go out.

This is incredibly out of touch. Ignoring the lack of available materials to put a huge battery in every home, the cost is currently about a quarter of the median yearly income across the EU. Adding that much cost to every home is a non-starter.

I didn't say every home. I said every NEW home.

Which will result in far less new construction.

The construction industry employs millions directly and indirectly. Those poeple vote.

Politicians may be dumb about a lot of things, but few are dumb enough to intentionally threaten the livelihood of millions of voters.

Is there a metric for demand weighted average price of energy by source?

Calling it now: granite piston based gravity storage is going to be the grid-scale storage solution: http://gravitypower.net

fun read

If you find it interesting, the founder / inventor recently was a guest on the Omega Tau science & engineering podcast: http://omegataupodcast.net/299-gravity-storage/

They go into much greater detail than the website.

Aaah, the elusive V12 mountain!

Yeah, not gonna happen. Forget safety. It's just too expensive.

Batteries + large grids averaging out weather and load fluctuations, plus smart grids, plus electric car batteries as buffers when the car isn't needed, plus efficiency gains lowering demand, plus some gravity storage, plus some natural gas.

Nuclear power is actually quite useless, because it's not baseload that's needed when you want to quickly react to changing weather conditions or load, it's peakers (i. e. gas)

What If government mandate every home to have a Battery Storage installed? ( Assuming it is safe.... which I have my doubt )

Grid level storage (with wind and solar) can, however, so destroy the market for baseload that nuclear (fission or fusion) become completely excluded.

There needs to be backup for the occasional times solar/wind/batteries are not enough, but hydrogen (made during the high solar/wind times) is likely cheaper for that than nuclear fission or fusion would be.

On the other hand, fusion/fission have the advantage of also working at night. Solar is cheap during the day, but at night it's the cost of solar + storage infrastructure + conversion losses.

It's also theoretically possible that working fusion could be cheaper than fission, because fission is as expensive as it is as a result of the perverse coalition of confused environmentalists and self-interested fossil fuel companies lobbying to make it expensive on purpose. But fusion doesn't have long-lived nuclear waste to contend with (not that modern fission reactors do either) and the fossil fuel industry is going to decline one way or another, so that leaves fusion (and fission) with more hope in the future, if the regulations can be fixed once the lobby for them to be purposely stupid wanes.

> perverse coalition of confused environmentalists

I actually don't see how environmentalist have had any impact on the cost of fission. Unless, of course, you're just considering all safety costs the result of "confused environmentalists".

If so, you should seriously consider if you have maybe adopted some sort of perverted scientism as a quasi-religion. Because in reality, there's essentially consensus regarding required safety measures within the community of actual nuclear scientists, who have always been the driving force behind improved safety–starting with Richard Feynman during the Manhattan Project.

Literally the whole nuclear industry government, private and the public went pretty crazy after Three Mile Island and doubled down on those mistakes with Chernobyl. There was a massive bias against nuclear on pretty much every level. Fortunately this is now changing slowly (GAIN for example), at least in the government. Pretty much any not so well informed person is against nuclear, and most of them can not say why other then some wage Greenpeace slogan that is simply scientifically inaccurate.

Regulation is insanely high for lots of stuff that really is not safety critical. Citing for a nuclear project is insanely difficult. The regulated energy market (in the US) simply does not value long term 100 year assets in the way they are set up. Nuclear cites are discriminated against in terms of low carbon benefits and tax credits (Solar gets tax credit when dispatching negatively priced energy). Nuclear cites get routinely sued and the environmentalist know that every month of delay is costing them millions, because up front capital has massive interest. Innovation has come to a virtual stand still, regulation has made it essentially impossible to innovate in nuclear for anything but the most incremental changes. The government has utterly failed at coming up with anything regarding nuclear 'waste', and instead of using one of the many straight forward solution is is basically in political limbo while the nuclear plants still pay millions to the government every year.

If you even want the nuclear regulatory body to take a look at your new design, you have to pay them a lot of money. If you want them to actually regulate it, they will say 'Ok thanks, we get back to you in the next couple of years we don't know how long its gone take and remember that's gone cost you 100 million at least'.

The regulation have hard coded in them that a reactor needs to have certain features, like 'Must have system to cool steam'. Now great, what if my reactor isn't water cooled? Well, pay them a couple 100 million more and 10-20 years and they can probably work out what regulations they would apply to your design. People couldn't build the old designs cheaply and they couldn't design new ones without the government leading the way to a commercial system it was impossible.

Nuclear was on target of replacing fossil fuels in energy production and was growing exponentially and was on target to be the fastest energy transition in human history and then 1 single safety failure that killed nobody wiped out that whole tech tree (Yes that's overly dramatic).

So, I agree more safety regulations were needed, but instead the nuclear industry was basically killed, practically every outstanding project (and there were many) was cancelled and almost no nuclear plants have been built after that. The few that have been built are often close to existing once.

At the same time, coal plants that are MUCH, MUCH more radioactive are allowed to operate. In fact, a nuclear plant that was as radioactive as a coal plant would not be allowed to operate AT ALL.

What if wind/solar + inefficient storage, conversion losses still turn out to be cheaper than fusion? I'm all for doing fusion research, but fusion might be a completely uneconomical solution to the energy problem.

Investments in fusion is the most rational long term energy investment.

* Fusion has the potential to increase the amount of energy we generate by several orders of magnitude.

* Fusion has the potential to be much cheaper than $.03/kWh.

* We have a near unlimited supply of deuterium is the seawater. All countries in the world can gain energy independence.

* Countries cannot claim a nuclear weapons research program is really a nuclear fusion power research program, like they can with a nuclear fission power research program.

* Fusion energy does not suffer from diseconomies of scale. As we produce more solar panels it becomes more expensive to produce more solar panels. As we place solar panels in the best location the next batch will have to use the second best location. These diseconomies of scale also apply towards the current generation batteries that solar panels relay on.

* Some problems, including life or death problems like removing CO2 from the air or desalination of water can be solved much easier with an abundance of energy.

Wind and solar also don't work well for powering spacecraft, space stations, or anywhere else in the solar system further away from the sun than Earth. The surface of Mars or Ceres, for example.

Nuclear actually doesn't work well for spacecraft either, because there's no convenient way to get rid of all that excess heat. It might work well on Mars or Ceres, but solar isn't all that bad; you'd just need more panels for an equivalent amount of energy as you'd need on Earth.

For nuclear propulsion you just use the propellant to cool the reactor. You are still going to want to have a bunch of propellant with a fission or fusion reactor and, like a chemical engine, you can use it as a coolant when it enters the engine.

Solar has a few problems for spacecraft, especially when talking about objects not in an earth-centric orbit.

1. The further the spacecraft is from the sun the less efficient solar panels are.

2. Solar panels are a pretty heavy thing to launch.

3. Solar panels have a tendency to degrade in performance over decades.

RTG's are pretty damn good for spacecraft. But they are dangerous to launch. The nice thing about fusion is that a RUD doesn't matter from a nuclear perspective.

And we aren't making as much plutonium-238 as we did in the cold war

I stand corrected

I'm talking about spacecraft for humans. Going fast is much more important for humans than robots and nuclear is the only way to go. (BTW RTG's are also nuclear, just really low power and don't allow for adjustable output)

> * Countries cannot claim a nuclear weapons research program is really a nuclear fusion power research program, like they can with a nuclear fission power research program.

Weapons are a physics problem, where you're trying to direct large amounts of energy at unwilling recipients. Nukes are so effective and so feared because they carry a huge amount of energy in a relatively small package. Being able to, as you put it, "generate several orders of magnitude" more energy will almost certainly result in new, better or more destructive weapon systems being devised.

> Being able to, as you put it, "generate several orders of magnitude" more energy will almost certainly result in new, better or more destructive weapon systems being devised.

We already use fusion technology in nukes. Hydrogen bombs work by using a fission reaction to start up an uncontrolled fusion reaction.

The hard part is controlling the fusion. So, I disagree - learning how to control fusion will not result in better weapons (at least, from a destruction standpoint).

On the other hand, our current nuclear bombs initiate a fusion reaction with a fission reaction. The radiation comes from the fission. If fusion research finds a way to initiate nuclear fusion in a payload small enough to fit in a warhead that does not make use of heavy elements then we will not have to worry about radiation poisoning, one of the most horrific aspects of current generation nuclear bombs. This would result in a less deadly bomb while still having the current or higher levels of deterrence. It could be seen as a net positive.

Fallout looms large in the public imagination but it's the giant explosions and loss of infrastructure that would cause the vast majority of deaths in a nuclear war. A bomb offering "all the explosive power of fission-triggered fusion weapons, but clean enough to use routinely" would be a terrible technology for humans to invent.

I'm not convinced such a bomb would be routinely used. It doesn't break MAD. The current trend in warfare is towards precision strikes, and this is pretty much the opposite of precision.

I am convinced that, in the case that there is a global thermal nuclear war, it would be much better for humanities' long term prospects if there was no radiation involved.

Railguns.

> Fusion energy does not suffer from diseconomies of scale. As we produce more solar panels it becomes more expensive to produce more solar panels. As we place solar panels in the best location the next batch will have to use the second best location. These diseconomies of scale also apply towards the current generation batteries that solar panels relay on.

Is this true? Why would solar panel cost go up if you make more? Is there some rare-earth element that's a bottleneck resource?

Also, we're nowhere near using up space for putting solar panels. They're less efficient in places with cloudy weather or in latitudes far from the equator, but otherwise any place to install a solar panel farm is as good as any other; choice of location is dominated mostly by convenience, cheapness of land, proximity to power lines, local politics, and so on. We've only used up a tiny percentage of all the "good spots" to put solar panels.

The current diseconomies of scale hitting solar panels is that we have a limit on the number of batteries we can produce, as we are expanding our battery production as fast as humanly possible. We can use solar cells to offset peak performance, but until the storage problem is solved we can't consider using them as a primary power generation at scale in markets demanding 24hr energy access.

I agree that storage is a problem if you get most of your energy from solar, but in most places we're still in the mode of "on a sunny day we just burn a less coal or natural gas".

In the long run it may become a bigger problem. Pumped hydroelectric storage should work great in places where the geography is amenable, and regular battery technology is getting better.

> As we produce more solar panels it becomes more expensive to produce more solar panels.

This is the complete opposite of the truth. As we produce more solar panels it has become cheaper to make them. Solar has tracked down an experience curve where costs decline 20% (or more) per doubling of cumulative production.

Most of the articles I read, suggest most sub 3cents /Kwh were only achievable in certain location, certain peak timing, and assume Cheap Capital from Government or other funds, and make barely any profits unless cost reduction are even faster than the current trend.

So from an investment point of view, both Nuclear Fission like traveling-wave reactor or Nuclear Fusion are still worth while. And still required as baseload

Although I think Solar Price isn't the main point anymore. It is Battery, Super Solid state Battery that is cheap will make an even bigger impact. Imagine Everyone's home has an PowerWall like devices that offer 3x more Cycles than current battery and 3x the energy density.

The title picture is misleading. It's not a "fusion reactor", it's a training facility at Culham, never having an actual reaction going (it's actually a few spare sectors of the reactor vessel assembled together to form 3/4th of its circumference). Those reflections all over the right part of the picture? That's plexiglass window between the vessel and an access platform.

My problem with this article is the focus on the "startup" mythology of moving fast and breaking things. Break a Coulomb barrier, first, and then come talk to us.

I really liked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk for a discussion of how to evaluate and understand fusion claims, as well as a discussion of the high-field REBCO tapes that seem poised to enable the ARC/SPARC reactors out of MIT. Another video I like is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMxOvuSMAug , featuring Steven Cowley.

In short, newly commercially available high temperature superconductors in mass quantities seem poised to give us at least a doubling of available magnetic field strength, and all the figure of merit that improve only linearly with size improve to the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th power with magnetic field strength. This is what could lead to break-even before ITER, not the mythology of American entrepreneurial moxie.

In my opinion, the article author knows whom he's flattering.

Some other articles about vapor power:

2016 - https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&obj...

2014 - http://techgenmag.com/2014/10/why-nuclear-fusion-will-soon-b...

2012 - https://www.rt.com/usa/plasma-fusion-energy-nuclear-080/

2010 - https://www.universetoday.com/52696/nuclear-fusion-power-clo...

2008 - https://cleantechnica.com/2008/11/13/will-nuclear-fusion-sol...

Our whole civilization might just depend on if we can get viable fusion working in the near future. With global warming, I do not have any hope of a political solution in the timeframe required. We can only hope for a technical solution, and that solution will be very, very energy intensive (carbon sequestration from the atmosphere, massive desalination to provide fresh water for humans and agriculture, etc). Fusion is the only candidate that can provide that level of energy at the density and scale in a location independent manner.

Valuable, valuable helium-3 can be mined on the moon and used for fuel after we put a lightweight, working fusion reactor there with enough personnel and spare parts to run it (puff,puff,inhale).

Helium-3 is a whole 'nother kettle of fish. Deuterium/Tritium is a lot easier to fuse and is what pretty much everybody working on the problem is looking at. If, later, we were able to get get helium-3/deuterium fusion working that would be great because then there wouldn't be any neutrons created reducing the already modest fusion nuclear waste problem to zero. But that's still a ways off.

Well, the gamma rays produced by fusion can still photo-desintegrate various elements which in turn leads to secondary neutron radiation and unstable isotopes. I don't know what the cross sections of those interactions are but it's not quite zero.

As I understand it, if you have conditions that allow deuterium-helium3 fusion you will always get some deuterium-deuterium fusion. So the number of neutrons produced is way less than D-T or pure D-D fusion, but it is still a significant problem.

Agreed about He3, but it's not just D/T; there's at least a bit of money going onto p/B11, as a way of sidestepping the problems of neutron embrittlement. I think TAE is working on it?

And some clones to oversee the operation

And a robot Kevin Spacey to prevent the clones from revolting.

I'm glad someone got the reference :)

Interestingly, the corporation robot/A.I. doesn't seem to put up much resistance at all in Moon, and IIRC even actively helps the main character to escape. I'm really glad they subverted that particular Sci-Fi trope.

There's little need to mine the moon for He3, because it's easier to get net power from deuterium fusion, and the output of deuterium fusion is He3 (and tritium which decays to He3). There's some neutron radiation from deuterium fusion, but that's probably easier to deal with than sifting through millions of tons of lunar dirt.

Not likely: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2834/1

tl;dr He3 mining the moon is more of a sci-fi trope to justify moon colonization than a practical proposition.

It sounds like we really don't know what the maintenance/running costs will be. Is there a good reason to think that this will certainly beat the cost of fission?

There's excellent reason to think it won't.

Eh, it is my opinion that we are a long way from even having a net-positive prototype reactor (if ever).

Even if we get one operational, I suspect the construction cost alone would be an order of magnitude more than a traditional nuclear reactor. Then, how much of a net output will you actually be capable of generating, probably a fraction of the energy it consumes which is something but by the time you factor in construction costs as well as maintenance/upkeep costs you're probably going to have a fantastically expensive power source.

Then consider that if we had a viable fusion reactor TODAY, and only needed 10,000 of them to replace the 62,000 something power plants in the world it would likely take many decades to build them all. Then of course, energy consumption increases over time.

Between 1990 and 2008 world energy consumption increased 39%. Since 2008 we've added considerably more electronics to our lives just in 'the first world' nations so I suspect that increase has been even greater in the past decade. Factor in electric vehicles being added and...

So even if we do get fusion working in the near future, it's not going to be anywhere near a miracle.

The consumption probably grew due to Asia and Africa using more electricity, but in the western world?

In 2008 I had a stationary computer taking 350W-400W, a bunch of 100W lightbulbs in my house, a TV, and an old fridge. Now I have 60W laptop that took over my TV as well, and most of the lightbulbs are the power efficient ones taking 10-20W, 100W ones are not even being sold in Europe (a few exceptions aside).

(Just checked - in Europe, electricity consumption was on the rise to around 2008, and then remained static and even fell a bit)

I think we can expect electricity consumption to go back up quite soon. Contributing factors are electrification of transportation, transition to electric heating, ever growing software bloat, increasingly compute-intensive ideas like deep learning and blockchains requiring more and more powerful data centres... and let's not forget that software hasn't eaten the world yet.

Some of it will be a demand shift from fossil fuels, which is a good thing, but it still means we need more electricity.

>The consumption probably grew due to Asia and Africa using more electricity, but in the western world?

Fair, looking at more recent data it looks like between 2008 and 2017 the US has bounced back and forth about 100 TWh in total use.

BUT if you look at things like Bitcoin... one estimate ( https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/05/new-study-quanti... ) put the Bitcoin network alone using 30-70 TWh a year.

If we look at https://yearbook.enerdata.net/ we see more recent data and yeah the biggest culprit is Asia with 1-3% increases each year. I imagine a good chunk of this is manufacturing for 'first world' countries though which one could argue should be assigned to the countries being exported to not the country doing the manufacturing but that's going to be way too complicated to estimate. I work in international freight and I've definitely seen freight grow in the past decade, especially Asia (if we exclude the past few months with Section 301 and China) and if EVs start to catch on in the next 5-10 years you'll likely see a large jump in actual electrical demand as well.

The middle east is consistently growing, I'm guessing a lot of that isn't 'third world' areas though and more likely cities like Dubai.

Something to keep in mind though is global warming, if budgets allow I imagine we're going to see cost of cooling increase in the coming years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Co...

In 2016 the total US consumption of electricity was 4,137.1 terawatt-hours (TWh).

"bounced back and forth about 100 TWh" as in on year 4000, one year 3900, one year 4100.

Oh, OK, I misunderstood.

I figured :)

Construction cost of ITER is very high, but these new designs use new superconductors and are ten times smaller for the same output (500MW). The JET reactor in the U.K. is about the same size, and was built in four years for half a billion dollars. That's without the facilities to actually extract electricity, but it's also a one-of-a-kind experimental device and you get economies of scale by producing lots of them in factories (which we could do, since it's not that big).

So a billion dollars a gigawatt seems about the right order of magnitude, and that's comparable to power sources we use today.

So that goes from being 400x worse than a PWR to only being 40x worse (metric: power density of the primary reactor vessel). It's still not going to be competitive.

the headline is clickbaity but the gist of the article is different: even if its a long way off or even if it might not work, its very important to try

It seems like there's a segment of the tech crowd forever living in some 1950s sci-fi fantasy. There must be something about big hairy difficult-to-control technology that has an emotional appeal to a certain segment.

Meanwhile, in the real world, wind and especially solar power, as well as battery technology, are close to being cost-competitive with even the cheapest power sources (i. e. coal and gas).

I know it still stings how the general public just insisted on their black swans or whatever, and didn't quite like the idea of radiation as much as you do.

But the safety argument has long become irrelevant. Nuclear power has lost on economic terms now, and it has absolutely no chance of catching up with renewables in the one or two decades until those become so cheap as to render that fight irrelevant, too.

There's something Dieselpunk about fusion reactors. One could make the case it's a replay of vacuum tubes (read fusion) vs. transistors (read photovoltaic cells). The former are hot and bulky and relatively dangerous; the latter are made churned out by the billions at ever decreasing costs.

I'm at about the point where I will finally believe fusion power is a reality when the utilities board has just approved a $0.005/kWh rate increase to handle some unexpected cost overruns, experienced during the decommissioning of a 50-year-old fusion plant.

If fusion works (and that's a really big if) it could be the miracle humanity needs.

Until someone works out how to weaponize it which always seems to be the way....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon

It has already been weaponized. Hydrogen/thermonuclear fusion bombs are a thing and have been since the 50s.

We already have the capability to wipe out humanity with nuclear weapons. Nothing would really change in this respect.

Weaponized fusion has been around for decades. Getting a confined, long-term reaction from which to draw usable power is the difficult part remaining.

While other replies have addressed your misunderstanding about the existence of fusion based weapons it is also worth highlighting that the radioactive waste by-products from fusion power generation are far more manageable than by-products from existing fission power generation methods.

Fusion already 'works.'

The sun is a giant ball of fusion and fission.

On earth we have already achieved net energy positive fusion at the JET experiment reactor.

Tokamak's have been in testing for decades with live fusion.

Home experiments like the Farnsworth Fusor have been built by teenagers.

The question around fusion power is not an 'if', it is a 'how much'. How much more time and money will it take to develop appropriate materials and processes to make fusion an economically viable power generation process?

> How much more time and money will it take to develop appropriate materials and processes to make fusion an economically viable power generation process?

That's what I meant with "works".

A technical demo is irrelevant. Something "works" when it can be used to solve a problem which, as you pointed out, is still an unknown.

Wikipedia says JET at best did Q = 0.67, am I missing it hitting the break even point?

Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

That said, the actual article doesn't have a question. But they've been saying "Fusion is Just Around the Corner" since I was a kid so a solid "No" is probably applicable.

In the 1950s they said fusion was around the corner, because they were just getting started and didn't understand the problems yet.

In the 1970s they said it was 30 years away, but conditioned that on a much higher level of funding than they actually got. For the level of funding they got, they said it would never happen.

Now we have a very good understanding of tokamak plasmas, and some new enabling technologies including much better superconductors.

And in the 1980s, it was pointed out that fundamental limitations on power density will likely keep any DT fusion reactor from being competitive.

No??

Relying on fusion power solving our problems is a foolish. We need to solve our energy problems with the technology we have now, and if we end up with cheap clean electricity on top of it, well, we'll already have the infrastructure to take advantage of it.

Here I come again to lament the lack of interest in the reactor I've designed. I've become very pessimistic about even trying to work on it.

Think about that for a minute... imagine that my design works, but our society is so jaded by con artists and corrupted by insiders theiving and politics that it never gets a chance.

I feel like I'm starting to identify with bond style supervillains. I could fund the research alone, and keep the fruits of my labor to myself. I'm sure I could also weaponize it.

Got a link for the curious?

Www.ddprofusion.com

It's not what you know, it's what you can prove.

That's exactly the problem in our society right now. How am I supposed to prove this without building a prototype?

I don't have the resources to personally build one right now, and nobody else seems to care. Our entire society stands to benefit from this, yet I'm expected to complete this work alone?

I used to be altruistic and optimistic, now, not so much. I'm inclined to let the world rot while I take my sweet time. It's not like I have much choice in the matter anyway.

Tie into the grid and get paid from your utility.

Few things: no government really want unlimited energy for all for a simple reason: power&control. If any country in the planet can be autonomous if it can produce enough food for their citizens there is only war as a means to control it's development and that's unacceptable for nearly all ruling classes.

Second things: we have already achieved nuclear fusion in France and UK and perhaps other researches I do not know but from there to arrive to a positive sustainable heat production and in turn to arrive at industrial scale the road is super long only technically leaving apart any political and business consideration.

Third and last thing: actual fission based nuclear power is useful to produce plutonium so usable and powerful nuke, and anyone like the idea of having many of them in it's arsenal. With fusion we only produce heat. Usable for many things, mostly to produce steam and so electricity and even to heat cities in the winter. But with little use for military purpose.

Long story short: I think even if someone know and can produce a working fusion-powered electrical plant no government will let seriously develop it, at least for next few decades...

Wouldn't that imply that less powerful governments would want unlimited energy to become less dependent on richer and more powerful governments?

They simply can't... Less powerful in that sense means less developed. Such kind of research demand enormous resources and knowledge.

These days industrial knowledge is mostly in private hands with universities that are not anymore a "center of (public) knowledge" bu mere gym to form Ford-models workers with a different skillset respect of classic one but not much different in terms of ability to understand the big picture, being autonomous etc.

In present society there is no room for new "Einstein", "Tesla" etc.

Your post that I replied to said that no governments wanted free energy, now you are shifting the goal post to some sort of further made up hypothetical world where big governments have free energy and small governments don't.

I reformulate: no governments that theoretically can achieve free energy want it, perhaps governments that can't dream it as a temporary solution to find a way to lock it out for their own sake. Better?

Keep in mind a thing: hitler was not blocked via military operation forces against forces nor interior civil war but due to the lack of gasoline. And that's true for essentially anything. If you can "ground" a country you can rule it to a certain extent a thing any government powerful enough want.

Did you remember prohibitionist in the USA to avoid an improbable development of alcohol powered cars because produce alcohol is easy, produce gasoline it's not?

I can cite many more examples.

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