Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
In the press conference just ended, they repeated how exactly the JET reactor worked as predicted by theory. In my layman's understanding, for the exact same reason (seemingly very sound theoretical groundwork), the SPARC reactor should exceed breakeven within the next few years.
From Wiki on CFS:
* Back in September 2021, they built the strongest high-room-temperature superconducting magnet (20 Tesla) suitable for a fusion reactor
* Theory dictates that with stronger magnets, the reactor can be scaled down (with the square/cube, can't remember exactly), and thus cost and time to develop
* Back in November 2021, they raised $1.8 billion from the likes of Bill Gates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Fusion_Systems
Boy, do I think it would be crazy cool if they succeed, even taking twice as long as they've planned! :)
OTOH, in a tokamak, the plasma volume (and potential energy output) scales quadratically with the torus' aspect ratio (ratio of major to minus radius), so I'm not sure that tokamak-based fusion really is particularly suitable to miniaturization.
Again, I'm very much a layman to this subject, but how does miniaturization necessarily affect that particular aspect ratio? Since it's literally a ratio of two dimensions of the torus, shouldn't this be invariant to the overall size? (Assuming all things being equal, which I have no idea whether holds.)
TLDR: Tokamak economics scale in size with 1/B^5 -- so doubling the magnet field strength reduces the physical size substantially. This factor dominates other scaling parameters by a substantial margin, and is entirely enabled by high-temperature superconductors. A host of other key fusion parameters also scale beneficially with B^x (for some value of x) -- most of which are discussed in first half the video.
The secret sauce is better high temperature superconductors, and the ridiculous magnets you can build with them. They're pretty much putting these coils together as quickly as they can accumulate the HTSC wiring, and once they have all 18, they basically just need to put them all in a ring and light it up, and in theory they'll be generating over 10x the amount of power that they're putting into it.
This is the kind of tangible progress that gets me really excited. I wish there was a tracker on the CFS site to see how many coils they've completed so far, similar to tracking the progress of the JWST. Last I checked they were estimating completion around 2025, and at this pace that actually seems reasonable.
Another important material is FLiBe, which is a liquid that I think absorbs the energy from the fusion reactor. I don't really understand the properties that make it particularly well suited to the task, but I gather it's important.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_barium_copper_oxide
I don't really see why it's important for a fusion reactor though, where efficiency isn't really a concern at this point.
We've known how to produce fusion reactions for a long time, the difficult part is to generate net energy.
Accordingly, the ratio of 1430°C to 100°C is roughly 1703/373=4.6.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/breeding-bl...
n + ⁷Li → T + ⁴He + n′
n′ + ⁶Li → T + ⁴He
(and ⁴He + n → D + T)
It didn't help that I was scanning the equations for ²H and ³H, not D or T.
Does this mean 9/10ths of the power can be sold and the other 1/10th can be re-used to power the reactor endlessly?
How much power does this produce compared to a nuclear reactor?
In theory, yes, but in practice it doesn't. But it does mean that they'll've proven the concept sound, and we can start making real fusion reactors.
Anyway, the important part: In addition to the output being thermal, with losses from conversion, only the energy going into the plasma is being counted. So measuring the entire system, this reactor might still be a little short of break-even.
I think the newer higher temperature super conductors helps, but then I wonder if the cooling facilities of the older generation of super conductors might have been a potential future safety feature on earth but not in space.
Well, if that's not under understatement... There are surely many more challenges in the high-field line of research, probably more than we know of, since they're kind of pioneering this field. Large size tokamaks, depsite their huge costs, have some considerable benefits like longer timescales for MHD instabilities and smaller stresses (both thermal and mechanical).
There was alot of debate about spending so much money on the large hydron collider when there was other social programs the money could be spent on instead of probing the fundamental nature of the universe.
LHC actually paved the way for commercial production of novel superconductors and magnets, leading in some way to helping fusion become a reality. In my opinion, Fusion and solving death should be my generations guiding star. (i'm 26)
My biggest question is with the crazy temperatures involved will we ever see one of these things able to run for hours at a time? With SPARC they are shooting for 10 second bursts, so that would double this breakthrough for the JET reactor. Even with the magnetic containment there are components in there exposed to millions of degrees Celsius right? That leaves us with some significant material science problems to solve.
You don't know that until the failure is complete, though, and "it may fail" is a terrible reason to not try the best shots we have.
I'm very onboard for any potential fusion power generation, I just don't think it has any hope of saving us from global warming.
I guess there are some irreversible effects once warming reaches a certain threshold however.
On the contrary, unlimited energy would exacerbate the man-made crises we are having today by further pushing the potential impact of man on its environment.
Here's the quick summary:
B: magnetic field strength
R: length scale
Fusion rate ∝ (plasma pressure)^2 ∝ B^4
Energy gain (Q) ∝ R^1.3 B^3
Power density ∝ R B^4
Cost ∝ R^3
So, say for example you're targeting a fixed Q. Doubling the magnetic field strength results in R1 = R0 / 2^(3/1.3) = 0.2 R0. And 0.2 R0 translates to 1/(0.2)^3 = 0.008 = 0.8% the cost.
The scaling is absolutely insane, and a stronger magnetic field has other advantages (such as making plasma instability far less of a concern), though structural loads can be an issue (that, at least is a relatively straightforward engineering problem).
If you take 12T for ITER and 20T for SPARC, that's not actually 2x, it's 1.67, which translates to 30% the size and 3% the cost (and time). It should also be noted that this is just rough, order-of magnitude estimation, but it should be broadly accurate.
For a more detailed explanation: https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4
Here's the section in Professor Whyte's talk: https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4?t=2215
> It's even more subtle than that, in fact this is really one of the things we've studies at MIT, is that there's other things that come in terms of benefits, particularly when you make the magnetic field very high, it basically starts to tame, just all of the whole suite of plasma instabilities that exist.
<joke> I guess windows will be resetting the house energy provider on each update soon
</Joke>
The next breakthrough that will come will be YBCO powder-in-tube wires, that will allow much stronger fields than currently. They'll be here within a decade, probably much less, as working prototypes exist now.
It's easy to produce, handling is well understood and cheap.
-273.15°C == −459.67°F
I'm not sure what "high room temperature" would even entail :)
What are the chances these guys have a pile of problems they can't solve with their approach, but rather than trying to approach it from another direction like an engineer would, instead they continue development because collecting more investor cash while the investors are unaware of the showstoppers is good employment.
This is not a major breakthrough, it's a benchmark.
A major breakthrough would be materials that could withstand the neutron bombardment longer, the ultimate limiting factor for fusion energy plants after we achieve positive net energy.
You won't be able to have a serious conversation about the pros and cons of fusion power because any serious conversation will always be trampling on people's dreams.
Fortunately we've seen tons of progress in other fields: computing, quantum computing, solar energy, medical, gene therapy. Even superconductors are slowly getting better.
Do you remember ten years ago when nobody had heard of mRNA or CRISPR? Or fifteen years ago when neural networks were a dead end and SVM were all the rage?
I'm not saying fusion is the "best thing" or have any insight as to where it might be in the curve of adoption, but it feels weird to be making a race out of fusion with these other technologies.
I hope it will be possible some day, but it's not going to help with out energy needs in our lifetime. (Unless that longevity research is going to pay off, I guess.)
You have to understand that fusion has been funded at "fusion never" levels for 5 decades now.
The amount of money that we poured at the mining engineering that later became "fracking" was larger.
Had we funded fusion at the amount we have funded petroleum extraction, we'd have free energy by now. :(
Nuclear fusion? There's this urban myth that fusion could have been achieved if only we'd have poured more money into it, but where's the evidence? Plasma modeling requires a lot of computational power. What you have now in your iPhone in your pocket you could not have had for 10 billion dollars back in 1970. How much money were we supposed to put into fusion research? Do you think with lots of money and just a slide rule, you can solve the fusion problem?
https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/us-government-role...
The Government gets involved in a lot of things, but it doesn't mean its contribution is essential. For a recent example, the NIH is claiming the Moderna vaccine is due to their contribution, and sure, you'll be able to find one or a few grants here or there of a few hundred thousand dollars, but the massive investments of tens of millions of dollars were done by Moderna itself.
As for fracking, the father of fracking is considered to be George P. Mitchell [1].
George Mitchell’s team studied those results while developing the Barnett Shale near Fort Worth, the first modern fracking play. The company relied on research from the Sandia National Laboratory to use micro-seismic technology to map the shale fractures in wells, and Mitchell also benefited from federal tax credits for unconventional drilling, which helped underwrite the cost of developing hydraulic fracturing. " https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorensteffy/2013/10/31/how-much...
“The government’s role in fracking’s development was important, but not so important that it eclipses the effort and investment of private industry”
But at that stage it's semantics really.
Maybe we could ask the question: "would private industry have funded all the basic research to get to the same starting point?" I doubt it since it would not have been shown returns for many decades and had a high risk of showing no returns. But maybe they would have, who knows?
A parallel question: "would private industry have developed semiconductor transistors without WW2 research into radar systems?
But of course, it also means that we should not rely on nuclear fusion being available in the short term...
Fusion hasn't really produced much utility at all so far, aside from some interesting discussions.
https://www.energy.gov/science/articles/fusion-research-igni...
It seems to me that fusion is unfairly criticized because there is an obvious end-goal.
I'm reminded of the Crazy Horse Memorial... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Horse_Memorial
For a Cathedral, you have a general idea of how long it's going to take (at least finite) and know that every piece of material added onto the structure is going to move it closer to the end goal.
For things like fusion, anything beyond say 20 years is basically a bullsh_t speculative guess that sounds better than "we don't really know whether this will even work out in the end". It doesn't really matter whether it's 30 or 60. The real question is whether the number is finite or infinite.
- Nuclear Fusion - AGI - Driverless cars - Quantum Gravity - Carbon Nanotubes
There appears to either be a problem where these are either convenient money sinks, problems that are missing key break-throughs or missing critical technologies. Nuclear Fusion would be easy if we had 400T magnetic fields and the structures to support them.
We seem to be missing a critical cultural element required to drive these types of innovations - or we are missing the slow tooling, process, and incremental innovations required to support these technologies.
But maybe that's also the risk of driverless cars: it would make them more attractive than they should be, because they're really too inefficient to be able to afford them as society's main form of transportation.
IIRC, there is some sort of Silicon Carbon based material that need to be economically feasible to manufacture (that can withstand a fair amount of neutron bombardment without crumbling like other materials) before a plant will ever make sense. There may be alternative materials but none of them are cheap enough to build a long-term TOKAMAK even if we could achieve the incremental net power necessary for a power plant.
This made me laugh. How much more British can you get?
59MJ / (80C * 4184J/kg/C) = 176kg ~= 176L ~= 100 kettles.
Water has a latent heat of vaporization of 2260 kJ/kg. So to boil it dry:
59MJ / (80C * 4184J/kg/C + 2260 kJ/kg) = 22kg ~= 22L ~= 12 kettles.
I have no idea what the journalist calculated.
With this in mind, you aren't saving any money on your electric bill by turning off lights when your furnace is on.
Although obviously those kettles wouldn't achieve much in those 5 seconds!
Good at math, but I'm not sure they could boil any water.
Most British people are aware that the national grid used to spend a lot of time making sure they had the power available to draw during the commercial breaks of mass-media TV events (series finales, half time in a cup match etc) purely for the nation boiling water with electric kettles en masse.
Great intersection of hard science (energy necessary to boil water + extremely efficient energy transfer) and everyperson knowledge. Good journalism!
Edit: I would love to see some sort of hybrid 110/220 V residential wiring/plug standard take hold in the US. It would require more expensive cable in the walls (since you need one additional conductor) and plugs, but it's totally doable. Most electrical products and appliances made these days are easily converted between 110/220, or run just fine on either.
Any sort of outlet upgrade would need a really good plan for how to make it viable, because even if 100% of new construction used the new outlet, it would be decades before you could sell devices that relied on it.
However, I doubt it'd pass inspection if they were easily accessible from the counter-top.
If you're going to flout building codes anyway, it'd probably be easier/more practical to just run circuits with foreign outlets instead. Also, it might be easier to find appropriate GFCI breakers.
Thanks!
I'm not sure about the phase alignment but that may be an issue as well. US is split phase, but Europe has 220 on a single conductor?
Also, I boil my water on an induction stove plugged into 50 amps at 220 volts. I'm not waiting around, to put it mildly.
That's only 7.35kW of power. Do you have significantly more powerful cookers?
If you don’t have these amounts of energy available, the temperature your instant water heater can reach or the speed with which you can cook obviously suffers (which I suspect is one of the reasons why americans prefer gas stoves so much).
You can have upgrade your domestic supply to three phrase, but AFAICT it's uncommon. Perhaps with electric cars and induction hobs replacing natural gas and petrol, it will become more common.
TL,DR: you probably don't want to be shocked by a big Tesla coil, even though it won't kill you.
Perhaps it's because all houses have residual current devices which trigger much faster than fuses if current leaks to earth (eg through a person).
Similarly, in most of continental Europe phase-to-phase is 400V but most outlets are 230V. E.g. in my apartment only the stove has a 400V three-phase (4-wire) connection.
You're almost always better off with higher voltage and less current, when given a choice. An obvious exception being when you get shocked. :-P Or when corona losses come into the picture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tea_consu...
There are other "oddities" that make me suspicious. e.g. Saudi Arabia and UAE have extremely similar native population (bedouin Arab origins) and neither culturally drink black tea, but KSA ranks much higher than UAE. My immediate guess is the massive (underpaid) southeast asian labor force in KSA¹, which I know firsthand consume tea ceaselessly - but India supposedly has a lower per-capita consumption rate than the UAE. In fact, I'm sure both KSA and UAE are up there because of their foreign laborers, lending credence to my suspicion that countries with local tea production (such as India) are massively under-represented in that list.
¹: KSA does admittedly have a higher percentage of Levantine and North African permanent residents.
That sentence really hit me. Is that really only how far we've come? If so, the pace is so glacial that...I don't know, maybe this isn't worth it?
> There's huge uncertainty about when fusion power will be ready for commercialisation. One estimate suggests maybe 20 years. Then fusion would need to scale up, which would mean a delay of perhaps another few decades.
> And here's the problem: the need for carbon-free energy is urgent - and the government has pledged that all electricity in the UK must be zero emissions by 2035. That means nuclear, renewables and energy storage.
> In the words of my colleague Jon Amos: "Fusion is not a solution to get us to 2050 net zero. This is a solution to power society in the second half of this century."
Between promising results like this, the Wendelstein-7X (which sadly seems to have been delayed by COVID), and then the exceptionally exciting CFS in Massachusetts, I have a sense that we're making real progress toward fusion for the first time in a few decades. Doom and gloom won't do anything to increase investment in fusion that is beginning to look like a reasonable bet.
This has gotta be one of the most important investments for humanity and our planet. Hard to fathom these timeline predictions in the same world where mRNA vaccines and various spacecraft have scaled in <1 year.
If you think climate change is an existential threat, we should divert fusion research money into immediate construction of traditional nuclear power plants.
The main point is, if you aren't taking nuclear power seriously, you really aren't taking climate change seriously. Subsidizing Teslas for rich Californians is metaphorically rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
The point I take exception with is diverting funding away from fusion. Fusion has a great many benefits. I argue these benefits are existential to our society in the 100-200 year timeframe.
Either way, it's actually hard to imagine fusion will ever be a promising power source, at least with any tech resembling what we know today. It is extremely complex technology living in proximity to extreme radiation bombardment and extreme temperature differences. A fusion reactor will need basically complete replacing every 20 years in the best possible conditions, assuming nothing goes wrong. Re-building the most expensive power plant in the world every decade or two is not likely to be a great way of powering your country.
Also, despite the common narrative, it requires an extremely rare fuel: tritium. Basically the only way to create tritium is to run a fission reactor, which negates the safety promises of fusion.
I think overall wind+solar+fission are a much better and safer investment in the future. Fusion is fine as an experiment progressing along in the background, but nowhere near as promising as it's made out to be.
Wind & solar are fine where they make sense (i.e. windy or particularly sunny places), though solar panel production depends on rare earth metals, and wind + solar at scale require huge land areas covered with panels or turbines. Fission is fine, but is expensive and has a serious regulatory hurdle to getting safer, modern designs up and running, and produces long-lived radioactive isotopes.
Anyway, I'm interested in all of the above. Any of them are better than fossil fuels, and some scale better than others.
They are supposed to be half the cost of LFP.
And let's face it, nat gas / coal are effectively subsidized by ingrained government policy while they SHOULD be subject to a ten year escalating carbon tax.
Nuclear is still ... ok, it's on the high end of solar/wind deployments.
Perovskites may solve even more problems, but that hasn't really panned out like hoped, probably a ten year project.
Wind and solar don't require "huge areas of land". Well, not new land or land we need. There's a LOT of roofs everywhere. Residential power can be almost completely addressed with rooftop solar + storage, I haven't seen single family homes that need "more than the roof", and the excess can go to multifamily buildings.
Windmills can be offshore, or sticking out of farmland or nature preserves.
Utility solar can use deserts, there's plenty of that. I hate the hype about "green hydrogen" since it is a shadow play by oil companies to keep other "color" hydrogen sources which are invariably oil/gas.
Fusion should continue to get research dollars. We should be pursuing LFTR and other new gen fission.
But let's be real, no fission or fusion project initiated now will be ready in ten years, and no one can predict the price of solar/wind/storage in ten years. It won't drop like the previous ten years, but there is enough in the works that it will likely drop ... 50%?
I don't think new fission/fusion can be commercially planned until wind/solar/storage prices stabilize. It doesn't matter how cool a fusion reactor is if the energy it produces is 3x the cost of wind/solar.
I think the hardest thing to say about fusion is that the "it's always 20/30/40 years in the future" was always a technological commentary.
But now the new challenge even if they get a working plant in 20/30/40 years is "is it cheaper?"
Constant 3D printing reactor walls sounds like an expensive proposition. Granted I think the same strategies are in LFTR designs since the materials is hard there too. Liquid metal fusion and molten salts has all the materials engineering and endurance issues LFTR had. I guess fusion fuel is effectively liquid though, so they could just move the liquid to another generator while they "overhaul" the one that has neutron degradation. I figured if LFTR hit mainstream they would do the same: mass produce the reactors and then just move the fuel between them as they wear out, and then recondition the "spent reactor".
Can a LFTR expert comment on whether it can "burn"/breed/transmute/process most nuclear waste as usable fuel, or at least move the isotopes to other better isotope decay paths? LFTR is supposed to be able to use 99% of its thorium fuel without nuclear waste.
Also, most people don't live in single family homes, they live in 30-100 family apartment blocs, where even at the equator there won't be enough roof space to power the whole building through solar.
Wind does have a massive land use problem as well (as does hydro). In most of the world outside the USA, there aren't huge swaths of unused land anywhere near residential or industrial areas.
Which is why for example France has green-lit 6 new fission reactors, and the EU in general is looking at declaring fission green energy to get the required subsidies. This is also why Germany, that went all in on wind and solar and even has a few days each year where the entire grid is running on wind+solar+hydro, still produces about twice the GHG as France (both total and per capita).
My understanding is that even these molten salt or molten lithium blankets can only catch some of the neutrons - so the magnets and other outer structures will still get neutron bombardment, and the tritium you can produce will not fully replace the tritium you put in. The once a decade or two replacement of the entire reactor number I heard was predicated on a shield like this - without a shield IT would probably be once every few years.
Note that I am not claiming wind, solar and fission don't have problems. It's just that they all seem to be much simpler problems than fusion has, fundamentally, even in the long run.
I'm not suggesting we shouldn't keep researching fusion technology, but I also don't think it can or should he treated as a priority, or as if once it's done it will solve all of our energy woes. It will take a huge amount of time even after the first actual plant is operational until fusion becomes in any way economical and widespread, with initial fixed costs that will make fission seem like chump change.
The experiment produced
> 11 megawatts of power
and at Jet
> two 500 megawatt flywheels are used to run the experiments
log_2(2*500/11)*(2022-1997) + 2022 = 2185
At this rate we will have fusion by 2185 I guess?
https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/why-nuclear-fusi...
https://bigthink.com/videos/fusion-really-is-20-years-away-2...
It would be easier to do a project that provide some kind of immediate benefit while having long term multigenerational long term effect.
Science is kinda that way. We get immediate knowledge with long term unknown payoff.
(I'm citing the techniques used in the north frisian wadden sea, I'm unsure if the same techniques were used in west frisia as well)
This also means you need drainage systems to remove the water from already reclaimed land, as it's still exactly at sea level and will be relatively wet marshland otherwise.
And it might not even take an all out nuclear war, social media may turn out to have been even more destructive than nukes.
"On 19 March 1882, construction of the Sagrada Família began ... It was anticipated that the building would be completed by 2026, the centenary of Gaudí's death, but this has now been delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic."
Continuing construction (admittedly not continuosly) for roughly 150 years is pretty impressive in my opinion.
There are technologies, materials, and methods we've developed, tested, and perfected because of some specific need. I mean, how much of the internet do we have today as a result of CERN having to store and share vast amounts of data and information?
Sure, you can say /eventually/ we would've come up with alternatives. But a lot of the internet and technology in the 90s came as a direct result of CERN doing practical things. How would we know we'd need solid state drives today if we didn't develop a need for hard drives? The same can be said of NASA, the space shuttle, the Hubble telescope, etc.
Going back to CERN, maybe it would've been better to wait for the Superconducting Super Collider because it was going to be more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider. But so far only one of these particle accelerators has detected the Higgs boson.
You can't skip inventing ironworks because eventually titanium will be invented.
This isn't rocket science :-)
Might be a good idea if nobody wants to go on the 2nd ship though.
I presume almost no one in 1920 could have imagined that anything approaching the output of fission energy would become common in their lifetime.
What makes you think it will be any more politically viable to scale out than fission reactors?
Tungsten is a good choice for a first wall material because of its uniquely high melting point, low rate of embrittlement in high neutron flux, and short-lived radioisotopes.
IIRC a major difference would be the danger potential in case of a "meltdown", since a fusion reactor wouldn't have kilograms or even tons of uranium etc. laying around to form another elephant's foot but "just" the irradiated reactor vessel which AIUI is both not as dangerous or as long-lived as fission fuel, a fission reactor itself and fission waste products.
Also IIRC the actual "meltdown" of a fusion reactor would involve the reaction environment (extremely high temperatures and pressures) breaking down at which point the reaction stops almost immediately no longer producing any additional radiation or waste products, leaving only the already irradiated reactor vessel to deal with since the comparatively tiny volume of reactant(s) (probably one or more different Hydrogen isotopes) and reaction product(s) (probably Helium) will escape quickly and with pretty much no harm done.
I'm just worried. If sane, logical arguments worked, then there'd be a lot more fission reactors in the world and a lot fewer coal plants.
From a political perspective, there is little incentive to plan further ahead than the current administration.
Maybe I'm going too far but in the future cryonics and being frozen and be brought back when the promise of these investments be resolved in the future might create some incentives.
Even though this seems super-scifi for now, it probably won't be in about 100 years.
We see this pattern on every single piece of science news that comes across the front page of HN.
Since the calculation involves taking log_2, even if the estimate for the "used power" is off by a factor of 4 the result will only change by 50 years.
Can you make your qualitative comment quantitative and update the numbers in my doubling thought experiment?
I would be curious about what you think is more realistic.
ITER will use roughly the same amount of power as JET, produce 10x the power 40 years later. Even using poor metrics such as Q you have enough data points to p-hack whatever incorrect timeframe model you want.
ITER isn't even using HTS coils.
If you really want a quantitative projection of MCF performance over time, here you go. Don't lie with numbers if you don't know what you're talking about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fustion_triple-product_di...
A breakthrough is a breakthrough, and that's good news.
I think both fusion and geothermal are very exciting, crazy thing is although geothermal sounds simpler, I have no idea what's holding it back technology-wise, yet I have a pretty good understanding of the state of fusion research right now.
Why couldn't we get geothermal without fracking? Is it so hard to establish a more controlled heat exchange channel down there? Harder than developing nuclear fusion?
Consider how much commerce is done in the US via truck. Those trucks average 6 miles per gallon diesel. That represents a huge amount of energy. But it currently relies on fossil fuels so people don’t think of it as being potentially served by renewable energy sources.
Space travel is an entirely separate type of energy use, and I could see it being the only option for lots of applications. But that would be much further away, and the significant hurdles there can also be solved by other future tech advances like direct conversion for fusion to electricity.
I doubt we can scale geothermal indefinitely. Fusion might suffer from similar constraints, but afaik, doesn't need "much" space or specific geographic structures.
But my primary concern with fusion is cost. I don't see the path to being cheaper than geothermal, nor fission, and new fission is already some of our most expensive energy. The goal may be eventual space travel, which seems like a more plausible goal to talk about than sustainable energy.
If it does not incluse precision engineering to build largest vacuum vessel, supercomputers, superconductors, generation and containment of hottest substance on the planet, and largest magnetic fields we can produce. If that's not 'fundamentally expensive', then what is?
Especially when your interlocutor is asking for geothermal, a.k.a. a hole in the ground?
You are commenting on an article about how scientists had to build a reactor out of berillium and tungsten.
Have you ever touched those materials? Is there any berillium in your car, or your washing machine? If you go around your neighbourhood looking for someone who can weld or work tungsten, will you find anyone? Can you buy a tool on amazon that will cut tungsten?
The number of facilities that can produce precision-enginered thousand-ton vacuum vessel with exotic materials, are counted with fingers on one hand.
> Tritium is very exotic, and fuel cost is a small and irrelevant cost to fission powerplant
This is downright delusional, solar is the only technology that you can go and buy off the shelf and it is much cheaper than an MRI machine, any joe with basic electrical education can put together a solar power system and poor people in developing nations do it. Anyone who thinks that fusion will be easier than slapping solar panels together is smoking some serious dope
That's a whole lot more of precision engineering than is needed to build a nuclear fusion reactor, and you can buy it on the order of a hundred bucks.
And it's not just a hole in the ground, last time I checked the thermal conductivity of rocks isn't exactly stellar.
With semiconductors, prices fall continuously because there is continuous iteration, and starting from the very very first lithographic circuits there was a market. There's an entire industry, competitors, and it's a factory system.
Fusion is not like that, it will be like building monuments, there's not thousands or millions of the same thing getting churned out, it will be all specialized construction for each piece.
You may say that a chip did specialized in that each of the transistors re wired together in very specific ways, but the semiconductor industry is a factory factory in some sense, you build a set of masks and that's your factory for your chip.
Let's say you design a fusion reactor, and then 12 months later you see how to shave off 1% of the costs somewhere. That iterative gain is lost, because the fusion reactors will be built very rarely, and building each one in a new custom way poses lots more risk than doing the same design for 10 years. They are just too big and expensive to show the same sort of mass manufacturing gains that can be seen with technologies that have learning curves.
I could be wrong, and I certainly hope I am, but I would bet a hell of a lot more money on a new battery chemistry than I would on fusion as being a terrestrial power device.
At least, that's what the promise is, we'll have to see of course.
I think fission reactors and ITER have shown the downside of building really large one off reactors, I don't think they're gonna make that mistake again.
Wind and Solar. They soon will beat natural gas for cheapest unsubsidized LCOE, and considering all fossil fuels are shadow-subsidized, that's huge.
Fusion needs to prove is can be cheaper than old-crappy-pressurized solid rod fission first, which is right now getting killed by alternative energy.
I was a big LFTR stan for a while. But wind/solar has won. Keep investing in fusion and fission, but they are subsidy and research projects right now only.
So if you want to ignore the storage problem, you need to rely on wind only. And if you have to dramatically over provision production to be able to meet demand, the cost benefits disappear.
Storage is a must for renewables to really take off.
"Not cost-effective to be the majority of power production while CO2 pollution is free." is very different from "near useless".
But I am not claiming there is any cost benefit at all - alI am claiming it's doable, and we will have zero or negative electricity price on windy days, that coupd be put to good use for electrolysis, hydrogen production, etc.
Land issues? Seriously?
The land issue for solar is a non-issue, it's like fake hand-wringing by the oil astroturfers over birds and windmills when skyscrapers kill 100xs more birds. There's this type of land called desert. Also, there is this thing called roofs where modern solar panels only need a small part of the roof to do a suburban house or apartment building including recharging your EV.
The land issue for wind is even less on an issue:
As for wind, I don't know if you've seen windmills on farms but... yeah, the pole doesn't take up much space. Then there is offshore wind. Windmills can integrate with existing use land (why not nature preserves?), you don't need to dedicate acreage to windmill farms.
Meanwhile, fusion reactors have a wee bit of problems with neutrons flying everywhere and turning the reactor vessels slightly radioactive from neutron capture. Maybe they'll fix that with good absorption spectrum elements, but let's not pretend fusion is 100% clean.
https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-the...
But again, the promise is there for fusion and LFTR/"new" fission. Keep the research, maybe the economics will turn around. Industry sure would need it to fully decarbonize, or, heck, space colonies. Or flying cars! Or any of the other sci-fi stuff we have given up on.
Right now we have an existential threat from GW, and an actual industrialized / productized and economic path is right there: wind and solar. That's what we need money printing for.
Sure, once storage is solved it will be a non-issue. But it is not currently solved, and you will forgive my skepticism.
I also never brought up land issues; I agree that it's not a real problem.
TL;DR we need to be realistic about the capabilities of solar + wind. You argue that storage will solve itself. Your sibling argues that we don't need storage at all.
The reality is that storage is a huge issue right now. It's the #1 technical issue stopping us from shutting down coal and natural gas plants.
Storage isn't solved, land space isn't solved, efficiency isn't solved, just like fusion isn't a solved problem.
To power the US energy needs, you need an area about the size of New Jersey. Also roughly equivalent to the area taken up by roads. The interstate highway system alone has been cited as the largest public works project in history, and that's "just" asphalt.
Look, any new nuclear or fusion project won't turn on for a decade. Given that even with inflation wind/solar STILL dropped in LCOE cost last year, and still likely has technological and economies of scale, you REALLY think a 10 year out fusion or nuclear project will launch at a price competitive with what even solar/wind + storage will be?
Solar/wind likely will be half the inflation adjusted cost it currently is now even with storage in 10 years.
LFP batteries are coming on the market now for storage that are half what lithium ion cost. Sodium will be release by CATL later this year or next. I'm not handwaving anything.
There is a LOT of roof real estate. A fair amount more than the interstate system. The costs are already pushing wind/solar to deploy as fast as it can be made, it basically is a production scaling problem.
New Jersey is not a large state, given we have west texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and lots of other desert. Which we don't need, because of rooftops and wind.
The best bet for sustainable and clean energy is to stop using fossil fuels and figure out how to deal with the economic consequences.
I feel this optimism around this far off solutions for decades has been just a detrimental to climate action as out right climate denialism.
Growing up in the 90s I was always told "everything will be fine, since we'll figure it all out with technology". It wasn't until decades later, when I kept hearing this promising but seeing CO2 emissions rise that I looked into the details and realized how incredibly in danger our society is, as well as how nearly impossible to solve this problem is at this point.
The reason we shouldn't put our enthusiasm into it is because it's a distraction from the fact that we may already be past essential limits in our climate system and if we want any chance of survival as a civilization and potentially species we need drastic action now.
you mean the death of billions of people ?
I think you're pointing to the very likely reality which is that there is no way out. More often than not I agree with you. It's just a shame that, as a society, we've chosen not to even publicly allow conversations about what's really happening and the choices we have to make.
There is not one.
I was merely pointing what I think is an euphemism.
> we've chosen not to even publicly allow conversations about what's really happening and the choices we have to make.
Because we are ashamed. We all know that the price of our current comfort is blood. Now and in the future. And our human nature seem to be unable to abandon comfort once we have it.
How much power the subsystems takes has no influence on the plasma's performance. How much power goes into the plasma (and what type of power and where and when, etc.) do influence the plasma's performance.
There are no showstoppers.
Here is a good (stellarator-focused) resource made by PPPL:
The end goal is so far away at this point, not a single player in this space is even trying to do it, even on their farthest-out roadmaps...
They did this in support of ITER, but there are also likely other political motivations. There has been no nuclear MCF operation on Earth in decades and now the UK has invested in resuming theirs rather than mothballing it.
You can't make claims about the motivations of the campaign (such as it being a signpost?) if you don't know what was even done.
And again, you shouldn't talk about the roadmaps if you haven't looked at them. Look at PPPL FIRE and power plant studies.
Edit: Confirmed by this comment https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/soc5xo/oxfords_jet_...
If you're curious about why the bottom glows: ExB drift pushes electrons to the bottom. I'm sure that doesn't make sense, but unfortunately there isn't really a shortcut to understanding here. Some books are pretty accessible though (I'm a fan of The Future of Fusion Energy).
https://ebrary.net/174598/mathematics/drift_motion_energetic...
And, of course, there is always the freely available IAEA textbook:
I was excited for a little bit there.
So by the time captain Picard is born, we might have a very expensive and massive fusion reactor that will generate the same kind of energy we can generate today with very expensive and massive fission reactors.
Really now, this is pure garbage and does not solve the major problems in the field nor do most of the myriad startups trying to cash in on speculative seed funds.
The laws if physics don't owe us a free lunch. Light, safe and cheap powersource does not exist
Fossil fuels aren't a power source, they wre a power store - that power was collected and millions of years ago.
Also 100% productivity on 25 years is quite good - what did combustion engines improve in that time, 5%?
(...i think i chose comparable trim levels to do that comparison, there are a stunning number of choices there!)
[0] https://www.cars.com/research/ford-f_150-1997/specs/103719/ [1] https://www.edmunds.com/ford/f-150/2022/features-specs/
[-1] https://www.edmunds.com/fuel-economy/heres-why-real-world-mp...
ICE engines have advanced a lot in 20 years, especially in terms of cost per HP/MPG.
We had an old pre-fuel injected pickup. It had a bigger bed than the current truck, and seated six instead of five. It got 33% more miles to the gallon. The new one's transmission likes to overheat, even when not towing.
Seriously, wtf?
I have a 2015 Colorado with a 6 speed manual, long bed, 4.10 read end, and the 2.5L 200Hp four cylinder. Probably as basic as you can get, and nobody buys them, because for like 2k more you can get a v6 and fancy electronics.
Tows 4k lb trailer fairly fine...
The main difference would be in testing EPA methodology which which would be a bit more stringent/realistic to world use. On top of that, there likely is more rolling resistance at lower speed due to larger tires and heavier weight, offset somewhat by lower C/D at speed.
Basically it's hard to extrapolate ICE efficiency gains... they're there are sure, but probably in the single or low double digits.
There’s a fully functioning fusion reactor 91 million miles from us that sends a lot of energy our way.
ITER alone will cost $21B minimum and won’t make power. DEMO will conservatively cost about the same, but let’s be generous and round up the total “fusion research cost” to just $30B.
That would buy about 1.5e18 joules, or around the same amount of energy as the electrical generation of the United States… for a month.
So, a drop in the bucket compared to what we use globally…
Even if you use much bigger numbers for fusion research and assume further solar power cost improvements, fusion might still be worth it.
However, it’ll only be worthwhile if the total cost the production fusion plants is not too high. If they end up costing $10B each then the whole thing will be a dead end economically.
- They need large, highly advanced cryocooled superconducting magnets in very close proximity to a hundred million degree plasma. This only makes economic sense in massive, and expensive plants.
- They are a very strong source of fast neutrons useful to transmute cheap depleted uranium into plutonium, so carry massive proliferation risks, need close regulatory scrutiny and will require mounts of paperwork to operate, thus exceptionally inflexible to improvements and rapid iteration. Just like the current fission crop.
- Aneutronic fusion is a currently a purely theoretical concept, in the last 70 years nobody has been able to contain even the much cooler D-T plasma for economically viable durations and temperatures.
- The structure of the reactor becomes radiologically active and cleanup operations must be considered. Highly penetrating neutron radiation means some radiation will escape regardless of containment, requiring a radiological exclusion zone. No Mr. Fusion in your car, sorry.
- They operate and must breed sensitive nuclear materials - Tritium, a well known component of boosted thermonuclear weapons. The limited efficiency of tritium production from lithium-6 might require obtaining some from fission reactors to top up the fuel cycle and keep fusion reactors operating.
So when you draw the line, a life time of magnetic containment research has produced a speculative design that even if it were to work, which it doesn't, would be, in the best case scenario, comparable to existing fission designs that are being phased out for cost and risk issues.
A PhD money pit with zero chance of ever building anything useful.
For a practical reactor we need Q around 30, which might seem far away but tokamak output scales with the square of reactor volume and the fourth power of magnetic field strength. Double the field, 16X the output, and we can generate much more powerful magnetic fields with modern superconductors than we can with JET's copper coils.
Why is it not yet done?
HTS was known but not practical when ITER was planned, but it's almost done. ITER is almost large enough to be an LTS-based power plant.
ITER will still produce a lot of useful science, but there is a now a potential class of mid-scale HTS machines that would help develop plasma models.
These iterations seem frustrating and time consuming, but their results are lowering the cost of a hypothetical power plant until one day maybe society will decide they're worth making for power generation.
I’d assume that anything >1 is theoretically “profitable” and something like 2~5 might already be economically viable.
Did we figure out how we could harness the energy released? It appears to me that all current research are about maximizing Q without really looking at how the energy will be converted into usable form.
Aneutronic fusion produces fast-moving charged particles instead of neutrons, so if anyone gets that working, we could extract electricity without a thermal cycle.
The device will cycle between a hot dense implosion (similar to NIF) and a cold, rotating cloud, at a very high frequency in a large Penning trap.
I have more information at my website, http://www.DDproFusion.com
If things go well, I should begin building the first prototype in a few months. I just acquired the main magnet, an old permanent magnet MRI machine, that will provide the field for the giant Penning trap.
--The live announcement is going on now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H99hvPlC4is (from 12:00 until 13:00 GMT)--
There is really nothing to see in this article, move along.
I really think these fusion people just need more money. MIT wants to build their SPARC reactor prototype, which will make ITER look stupidly large and expensive, but they need $40 Billion.
I dream of the future of SpaceX fusion powered star-ships with quantum computers and Alcubier warp drives are thing.
There doesn’t seem to be much to lose (these economies are already unreasonably inflated) but so much to gain from viable fusion.
SpaceX would beg to disagree here. The reason why they are so cheap, agile and sustainable (=reusable rockets) is precisely because SpaceX got a load of money without the "pork" requirements that were commonplace with ULA & friends. That enabled SpaceX to embrace vertical, on-site integration and go for what was technically the best option instead of what was required by some buffoons in Congress.
Although a point may be made that a "hand out cash" program needs a competent, strong and undisputed leader at the top. There's a lot of issues with Elon Musk, but it is undeniable that he is a very effective and inspiring leader.
ITER is a high risk foray into still-experimental technology with no hope of direct return on investment (it can not function as a commercial power plant). It had to be built at this scale because they had reached the limits of smaller-scale prototypes (tho I think there was not unanimity about this). Pooling resources makes sense here.
SpaceX is a more efficient take on technologies and processes that have been battle tested over many decades. This gives them a clear path to profitability, with some risk, but low enough to get investors on board, which ITER would have no hope of doing. Granted they are innovating, but incrementally, not from scratch. Very different.
Yes, but still - instead of all the components needed being manufactured on or near site, they are shipped from across the world... so parts end up damaged [1], not made according to spec or the spec having errors introduced somewhere among dozens of companies and institutions. With sometimes weeks or months of shipping round-trip times, that is causing a fucking lot of delays. Not to mention that shipping all the stuff around itself is also causing issues given the current COVID-caused shipping delays.
The problem is that ITER, ULA, EADS, Airbus, the ISS and a bunch of other international cooperative projects all are considered by politicians primarily as a way to distribute pork, secondarily as a way to show off on the international stage and only then as a way to actually advance scientific knowledge.
[1]: https://news.newenergytimes.net/2021/09/26/component-issues-...
Boeing has 1 boss and what are they better at, defrauding regulators to sell dangerous aircraft? And all other private manufacturers combined are a rounding error?
What's needed is people who know the subject matter and are experts at running large companies.
SpaceX turned rockets into a production line, experimented, blew a load up, and then fixed the problems with landing. But that's productising last year's thing, not inventing a new possibly impossible thing. Interesting to see how Starship goes.
Need a leader to stay: you do x, you do y, not a committee where every country gets to make one of the 12 magnets because they're a primary school and everything has to be "fair"
(This is not a further joke about Brexit I pinky promise)
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.2018041...
The latest ITER budget update puts the cost at $65 billion dollar.
And, yes, there's 1 million, 10 million, 100 million and so on grants for smaller scale efforts too, JET being one example.
https://images.app.goo.gl/58YdLFt7R9uY8dyR6
The much maligned prediction that fusion is 30 years away was always anticipating stronger financial support.
As for green R&D in general, the EU is massively investing in hydrogen research, as something that can be made with excess variable solar and wind power, and be used as a green alternative to natural gas in many situations.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mariannelehnis/2021/12/31/the-e...
IPBES reports as well as the literature in relevant conservation journals are recommended readings.
As far as "carbon sequestration" - that is just a tree. No R&D required.
A great deal of VC money is going into nuclear fusion at the moment, and there is obvious interest in creating the impression that economically viable fusion reactors are just around the corner. It would be prudent to guard against the efforts of publicists and PR professionals by providing context.
You couldn't have better timing to encourage the public that this is a positive thing for us to develop.
FWIW I'm a big fan of JET, Wendelstein, and fusion research in general. And, I think this STEP project is very positive.
* World electricity production: 25000TWh/year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation
* Energy per Helium atom: 17.6MeV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterium%E2%80%93tritium_fusi...
So per year (with a 100% efficiency [1]) you would produce as a side effect 25000TWh/17.6MeV ~= 3E31 Helium atoms.
The Avogadro constant is 6,022E23 and that produces 22.4 liters of gas, so you get 1.2E9 liters, that is 1.2E6 cubic meters. Let's round that to 1 million cubic meters per year.
The worldwide production of Helium is 140 million cubic meter per year https://www.statista.com/statistics/925214/helium-production...
[1] A 100% efficiency is too optimistic. The second law and the nasty details of the real world reduce the efficiency a lot. Let me guess 50% from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_conversion_efficiency#E... But this is good! If you waste half of the produced energy, you need the double of fusion plants, and that means the double of Helium balloons.
If all power generated right now was from D+T fusion, it would generate about 8.2% of the current helium consumption. We consume 153,596 TWh of thermal energy per year [1]. Each D+T reaction releases 17.59 MeV [2]. Multiply by the atomic mass of He4 and divide by Avogadro's number to get the mass of He4 produced per energy produced. Divide by the density of He4 at STP to get volume of He4 produced per second [3]. Divide by the consumption of He4 to get the ratio of He4 produced to He4 consumed [4].
(153596 TWh / year) / (17.59 MeV) / (avogadro's number 1/mol) * (4.002602 g/mol) / (0.1786 g / liter) / (88 million m^3 / year)
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(153596+TWh+%2F+year)+...
1. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-and-changing-en...
2. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/NucEne/fusion.htm...
3. https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/gas-density-d_158.html
4. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11053-017-9359-y
For the foreseeable, we use HTS materials, that can superconduct at LN2 temperatures, with helium.
No.
> Could anyone more in the know here explain in simpler and more practical terms please?
It's impossible to tell because the story is incoherent. The central claim is that they "release[d] a record 59 megajoules of sustained fusion energy" but this makes no sense. One can talk about sustained power (over a period of time) but "sustained energy" is a category error because energy is just power integrated over time. You can get 59 megajoules out of your wall socket if you wait long enough.
They apparently did something that had never been done before, but there's no way to tell exactly what that was from what is written in this story.
(This kind of obfuscation is not unusual in fusion research. A cynic might argue that this is because if they were clear about the actual state of things their funding would cease.)
We already know that fusion power plants are going to operate by igniting plasma in short bursts -- a few seconds, maybe 10s at most -- and generating a huge amount of power during that single burst. You then ignite it again and again.
The question is how much total energy you can extract from each of those bursts. By that metric, the total energy is what's important, not the power. Producing 10 quadrillion watts of power isn't that useful if it's only for 100 trillionths of a second. (Both numbers pulled from an actual recent result last August. [1])
"59 megajoules of sustained fusion energy" means a single burst produced that much. That's significantly more than the paltry 1.3MJ from that other result I just linked to.
Yes, of course you could get that much from a wall socket over the course of hours, but we know we haven't been able to sustain a fusion reaction for a few seconds, so that's the timeframe we're talking about for a single burst.
1. https://www.livescience.com/fusion-experiment-record-breakin...
EDIT: And, at the bottom of the article it says that the reaction ran at 11MW, so plugging that in it sounds like, indeed, it ran for 5 seconds.
0: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/215544178_Fusion_In...
Nor does it take into account the difference between a prototype investigation being constantly modified for experimentation and analysis and a production system built to purpose.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%A4rtsil%C3%A4-Sulzer_RTA9...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXHvY-zY9hA
Still, I think you will find that even this doesn't help all that much. A cycle time measured in seconds rather than milliseconds is still orders of magnitude away from what can presently be achieved.
> the difference between a prototype investigation being constantly modified for experimentation and analysis and a production system built to purpose.
AFAICT, no one has ever built an ICE that is within even an order of magnitude of realistic operating parameters of a fusion ICE. It's a whole 'nuther level of engineering challenge beyond just getting the fusion itself to work. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'll give you long odds against seeing it happen in any of our lifetimes.
In what sense is that "sustained"? A typical power plant produces that much energy in less than a second on a continuous (i.e. sustained) basis. Producing 59 megajoules once is basically a joke. It is analogous to detonating a pipe bomb (at a cost of several billion dollars) and claiming that as significant progress towards an internal combustion engine.
Fusion power plant aren't typical though
The record is for energy generated. They generated the most energy, however they did not generate the most power (unlike the previous record which generated both the most energy and most power) because they were focusing on sustained generation
The sentence "59 megajoules of sustained fusion-energy", where fusion is the source of the energy, doesn't make sense
I think they meant it as "59 megajoules of sustained-fusion energy" where sustained fusion is the focus of the experiment (not sure I managed to get through what I meant and it's worded awfully on the website)
I hope / expect the actual paper/technical reports which will come out will be worded more clearly
Assuming a French wall socket, 240 V at 13 amps, and a pure resistive load, that will take
$ units
Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2020-11-15
3677 units, 109 prefixes, 114 nonlinear units
You have: 59 MJ
You want: (240 V * 13 A) * s
* 18910.256
/ 5.2881356e-05
You have: 18910.256 s
You want: hms
5 hr + 15 min + 10.256 sec
No. The issue is that most people only report the gain over the plasma (i.e. how much energy was put into generating the plasma) rather than the full amount of energy put into the process (i.e. superconductors, magnets, generating the deuterium/tritium, maintaining the sun-like heat, etc). If you add this to the computation, you end up having to have a "fusion-gain" of around 50x to break even. The reason people report the plasma efficiency instead of the actual operating efficiency is to get funding and hype.
Don't get me wrong, this result is still impressive, but it's still orders of magnitude off of the required efficiency.
This is the main take away for me, JET is not a standalone project, it's part of the whole ITER project which is supposed to go like this:
+ JET as a scaled down model provides testing and data for + ITER which I believe is a full scale model and is supposed to generate net gain (heat in vs heat out, not net electricity) and provide information to + DEMO which is supposed to produce net electricity (though not at market rate costs)
So the fact that it worked as predicted is a good sign (or at least as good as we can get) that ITER will work which will be a good sign for DEMO etc
Also not an expert though
For a long time one of the hardest problems in fusion reactor design is what the hell you make it out of. The big win here is that they replaced the walls of the reactor with a new alloy, and it worked according to what theory predicted, which gives them the green light for using that material in ITER.
To simplify a little (ok, a lot) there are two big materials problems inside the reactor. The first is the walls: you need something that's going to survive the temperatures, not disturb the reaction, and not get too radioactive in the process. They previously used carbon, which isn't great: it gets radioactive because it absorbs tritium, which is in the fuel. This experiment used a beryllium alloy, which doesn't absorb nearly as much, and worked, validating the material choice for ITER.
The second problem is to do with the exhaust. You need to get hot plasma out of the chamber without disturbing the ongoing reaction, and with a tokamak that means ridiculously energetic particles hitting a solid divertor. Again, the problem here is what materials you might come up with that stand a chance of surviving useful operational periods. ITER is currently planned to use beryllium walls and a tungsten divertor, but I don't know what JET's divertor is made of at the moment to know whether this experiment will have informed whether tungsten is a good enough choice.
What all this means is that there's one less thing on the "ITER might fail because of..." list.
Google translation of the beginning of the Strahlenschutzaspekte (radiation protection concerns) section from the German Wikipedia article [1]. There will only be a tiny bit of accidental fusion.
Wendelstein 7-X only examines plasmas made of hydrogen (H) or deuterium (D), so it does not use a mixture of deuterium and tritium, as is necessary for later fusion reactors. The omission of this reduces the release of neutrons and enables access to the facility and the surrounding instruments immediately after the end of each experiment. This facilitates modifications for subsequent experiments. During operation, however, access to the torus hall is generally not possible for safety reasons (danger of voltage flashovers, stored energy in the magnetic fields).
Hydrogen is provided as the working gas for normal operation. In addition, experiments with deuterium are to be carried out in order to extrapolate the properties of a plasma mixture of deuterium and tritium. Fusion reactions between deuterium nuclei, in which neutrons are released, can occur to a small extent. To shield them, the torus hall is surrounded by a 1.8 m thick wall made of borated concrete.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X#Strahlenschutz...
Until recently no MCF device on Earth was nuclear. Today's headline is the return of JET's nuclear operations.
There are dozens of MCF machines operating right now and only one is nuclear. That means Q as a metric is only useful for one machine. Something to think about when people toss around Q-related rhetoric around here.
Isn't that what solar power offers?
Nobody wants to deploy solar due to high upfront cost. However, wouldn't the startup on a fusion reactor be much greater?
Solar has the upside of actually producing a power surplus already, though.
Also, the lifespan is 25-30 years, but after that time the panels will still maintain 50-80% efficiency - so they can be reused for different purposes (or shipped to Africa, where there is a plenty of cheap space, sunlight, and they will work well).
Yes, we should take the problem serious, but it is also grossly overrated. It is certainly not a reason to avoid solar panels.
https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/recycling-solar-panel-wa...
But we really need more energy storage, and there are plenty of good ideas in this area too: better batteries, gravity bases systems, crowd sourced storage, etc.
Maybe thats acceptable in some deserts, but pretty terrible in other places. 1 step forward, 1 step back.
Plus that figure is for our current energy usage, which is only going to increase over time.
Production is very near the usage sites (for BEVs, very near). It keeps the cars cooler in summer. And you can't make the parking lots any uglier.
(I am aware there aren't enough parking lots, but this deals with a fraction of the needed space.)
29000 sq km = 2900 TWh
Which is 10x the current electricity use of UK.
I think they may be overestimating the numbers by taking the petrol, oil and gas verbatim - whereas they should consider that electric cars have way higher efficiency, and electric heating can be done also way more efficiently than gas heating (because heat pumps).
In the end, my mother will have a significant surplus of power during summer (even with storage), and will still need to heat up house in winter using gas, or grid electricity (coal :/).
I read about some Nordic researchers developing long-term heat storage, which would be way better.
how is a factor of 4 "only". It's absurdly high.
You only get 3 times less power/area of solar in Scotland than in California. That's pretty surprising (part of it is higher efficiency of photovoltaic cells in lower temperatures) and pretty great for our future.
For example it means once we switch from fossil fuels pumped out of the ground to fossil fuels generated with surplus renewable energy (and it's not that far - it will probably be profitable in most of the world in next decade) - there will be much less incentives for fossil fuel dictatorships.
https://nextjournal.com/erik-engheim/renewable-energy-calcul...
They show that you need roughly 25 m2 to cover energy use of a family. That easily fits on most roofs. A regular apartment is at least 80 m2, so you only use a fraction of the roof space. That means regular roof could in principle cover a 3 story apartment building with all the needed power.
Of course industry and business also use power. But if every house had 50 m2 solar panels on the roof on average you would cover that as well.
Thus roofs are in principle more than enough for most countries. Sure this will not always work, but it actually works quite well to combine solar power and agriculture: Agrovoltics. It can actually improve yields and give extra income to farmer which can sell electricity.
These kinds of things is not taken into consideration when comparing land usage of nuclear power and solar power. Solar power can be mixed with residential areas and farms. Nuclear power can't. You are not going to place a fusion power plant on people's roofs.
First off, the daylight cycle is an obvious concern and there still isn't a great way to store solar energy during the day for use by cities (or generally large consumers) at night. Not to say it's not possible, but people are largely still trying to figure out what the right solution for that is.
Second, the startup requires a significant amount of land in advantageous locations for sunlight. There's a lot of the planet that just won't see the same advantages as others, and transporting energy long distances to them is another unsolved problem.
Lastly, and this is more for fun, but solar won't be as useful when we as a species aren't exclusively on earth anymore. Fusion would be a pretty nice step forward for things like space travel.
Both have a really high startup, but achieving fusion would mean 24/7 clean energy that works regardless of environment.
Solar makes great sense for places where energy consumption is higher during the summer than during winter.
Not a concern at all. Google renewable energy storage. It is there but there is profit merit, so it is not welcome
CSP has been dying for years however because Photovoltaics are cheaper. However, this is largely due to regulation. Solutions are picked based on price per kWh. CSP cannot compete on that with Solar cells. However today government have started modifying regulation so that a premium price is paid to those which can deliver power at night.
CSP projects then become competitive since unlike solar cells they can deliver power at night. In the past CSP projects delivered power the whole day. Now they are increasingly only delivering power at night, thus getting the premium price.
This goes to show that to get desired development in renewable energy it is crucial to get regulation right. Until now, regulation has not properly rewarded projects which can deliver power on demand.
However once that is in place, thermal and cryogenic storage of power will become competitive and be built.
The main issues with renewable energy sources today are electricity storage and transmission. If it weren't for these limitations, wind and solar would already be superior to other means of energy production.
Most likely problems with storage and transmission will be solved first, before fusion energy is proven to be commercially viable. However, there is no guarantee that they will be—especially in the case of transmission, which is primarily a political problem.
Dealing with the instability of solar and wind energy is very complex and requires numerous measures, such as better integration of wide-area electricity grids, more electricity storage, more generation reserves, etc.
But even nuclear power generation is dependent on the weather. During heat waves, nuclear power plants located on rivers in Germany and France repeatedly had to shut down because there was not enough cooling water available or the water in the rivers would otherwise have become too warm.[1] During cold spells, nuclear power plants had sometimes to be shut down because the supply of cooling water was no longer guaranteed due to ice.[2]
[1] For example: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa...
[2] For example: https://fortune.com/2019/01/31/ice-shutdown-new-jersey-nucle...
Both of these are solved with fusion power.
Energy market operates on the assumption that whoever unbalances the network has to pay for balancing it. Providing too much and too little energy is both bad - you have to pay someone else to use more/less or to produce less/more to balance the mess you made. There are specialized powerplants for this, they are "on standby" and jump in when needed - and they charge much more than the normal powerplants. When there's a big shortage they can charge absurd prices for energy. And if you caused the shortage by mispredicting weather - you have to pay for it.
This makes the energy provided by solar panels much less valuable than the energy provided by a predictable, controllable source. Often by 1:10 factor.
I would say solar’s problem is controllability. You can only turn it up to the limit of the amount of sun received, which is none at night, and sometimes very little in the day.
It remains to be seen how controllable fusion power will be. Will it be for base load only, or will it also be useful to flexibly dial up and down for variable load? Much of current nuclear power is base load only. Clean base load power is still super useful, but it is not a complete solution.
Meanwhile solar is unexpected on the scale of minutes to hours, every day. It's not the same.
Also thermal storage and cryogenic storage can easily provide enough capacity. The problem is that they are not as efficient as batteries. If you buy electricity but only get 50% of that electricity back after storage, then you need to sell at 200% the price you paid.
Electricity prices don't swing enough today to make the feasible. But if far more wind and solar was built, then you would get much cheaper power at peak, which storage providers could buy and sell with a profit.
Meanwhile Australia has retooled for 10% Solar and batteries in a matter of years, that number is rapidly increasing, and is turning off their coal plants.
Minutes, even. Perhaps you meant fission?
Meanwhile, we have massive grids of solar and battery being installed _today_, and existing installations replacing coal plants.
I'm tired of people talking about fusion (or even nuclear, as it's so mired in public FUD) as if it's some panacea. We have a solution right now: Solar and batteries. It works in places with cloudcover. It works in cold and hot climates. It works at night. It's getting cheaper every year.
Solar and batteries are nice but they're not yet cost effective. They're getting better. But you can't just handwave away real problems from your armchair viewpoint and assume thats all fine.
We don't have working fusion power, at all.
> Solar and batteries are nice but they're not yet cost effective
"Cost effective" is a judgement call, not physics. If I told you that the cost of coal-generated electricity was that your great-grandchildren would live in an impoverished and difficult world, you might not view that a particular cost-effective either, yet somehow that's the "standard" against which things are judged.
Sure we do. Look no further than this article. We can make it, but its not commercially viable.
> "Cost effective" is a judgement call, not physics. If I told you that the cost of coal-generated electricity was that your great-grandchildren would live in an impoverished and difficult world, you might not view that a particular cost-effective either, yet somehow that's the "standard" against which things are judged.
Ah yes, think of the children.
Yes, coal is problematic, but the reality is that energy is expensive and we need a lot of it. If we tried to go full solar right now it would cost trillions of dollars, and the grid would still fail in the winter when heating is most important, and the economy would enter a massive depression as the cost of doing things gets both more expensive on average and extremely volatile.
You say this is a judgement call, not physics, but then go on to just broadly make assumptions about all of the relevant facts. You're not the one being logical and fact based. You're the one observing, yes, we have a climate crisis, and thus assuming that a radical solution for which you have no particular understanding of the economic or infrastructure implications is the right one because it's at least different from what we have now.
Renewables are good. They are getting cheaper. They're growing in capacity. And yet, I guarantee you, we cannot go full solar now. And I also guarantee that you do not have nearly sufficient of a view of the system dynamics to be making statements as bold as you are. This is hard. It's not just evil greedy coal mine operators ruining everything.
Q total is way below 1 (translation: it took far more energy to make the energy that was produced, than was produced). We do not have working fusion power, if "working fusion power" means "you get more out than you put in".
As for the rest of this, I have no idea who you think you're replying to. Just one follow up, neverthless:
> And yet, I guarantee you, we cannot go full solar now.
The USA spent more than US$300M per day on the war in Afghanistan, for 20 years. I guarantee you that if "we wanted to go full solar" now, we could. US$2T buys you a lot of anything, including even today's vaguely clunky battery tech.
That's not what it means. Working means it works. Can you produce fusion power? Yes. Can you do so in a commercially viable way? No. Q is obviously a part of this. Uninteresting semantics.
> The USA spent more than US$300M per day on the war in Afghanistan, for 20 years. I guarantee you that if "we wanted to go full solar" now, we could. US$2T buys you a lot of anything, including even today's vaguely clunky battery tech.
And I'm telling you, no, we could not, because that's not how the world works. From many perspectives, including economics of how to actually acquire all these solar assets many of which are already being consumed as fast as produced and dependent on limited metals supply chains; land availability with reasonable transmission setups; grid capacity to absorb these new generation facilities on the transmission lines; power availability during non peak times; and the preposterous externalities of trying to rapidly undermine the global energy market.
If it takes more than 1W of input power to produce 1W of power from fusion, then I'd say the answer is no. The distinction is not "commercially viable", it's "net energy production". We're not there yet (and are actually quite a lot way from it).
> And I'm telling you,
... that US$2T is a lot of money, and that's just what we spent on 1 war. Yes, there would be complications and side effects and what have you. Money, in our system, combined with the other abilities of the federal government, can do a lot.
Solar is getting so much cheaper, at such a fast pace, that I really don't understand how one can disagree that it's the future of our energy grids. Installing solar is a no-brainer in some parts of the world now, and in the very near future (extrapolating from the last 10 years), it'll be every part of the world soon.
What problems am I hand waving away?
https://www.statista.com/chart/26085/price-per-megawatt-hour...
But this chart is the levelized cost of energy. Its not the price at which you can get it. Energy demands are higher in winter. They are non trivial at night. The cost of energy might be low, but the price at which you can get it may be very high if not enough is available.
I use 6kWh / day. (not sure how! but that's what the power company says)
A decent EV battery holds 20 kWh or more.
Boom. There is my night time storage buffer.
Battery tech and solar is great, but its not the perfect solution.
It's like being back in the 1700s and arguing that research into petrol is a waste of time. I absolutely do not understand this mindset.
We will not be here in 200 years to enjoy fusion if we don't adopt solar and battery _right now_.
Technically, none of us will be here in 200 years.
I very much doubt if climate change will lead to an end to the human species, so I think a better way talk about this stuff is to frame it in terms of our descendants living in an impoverished, less beautiful, more strife-filled world.
But yes, FFS, action yesterday or last week, and make it trillions of dollars worth of action, like an actual war, but for infinitely better reasons.
When I was 16 I remember reading a Scientific American article that was describing how nuclear fusion was around the corner. Within the next 2 years!
It's always been clearly communicated to me that fusion is extremely hard and we're not that close to getting it working.
Solar, even under ideal conditions, needs backup and much more manpower and management to make it work... and even then, it is not reliable.
So, solar is not a replacement for fusion, or nuclear or coal for that matter. It is great for supplementation though.
Fusion is having our own little portable sun that can be utilized more efficiently.
While Fusion obviously has merits I think it is overhyped as a solution. Molten Salt Reactors are a much more sensible solution if nuclear power is the desired solution. Why? Because they actually generate LESS nuclear waste than Fusion power plants.
The big selling point of Fusion reactors is that they don't generate any nuclear waste. Except they kind of do. Molten Salt Reactors (MSR) in contrast actually "eat up" nuclear waste. You can power them on nuclear waste and get less waste out. Thus an MSR has negative radioactive waste production. Fusion has positive waste production.
Unlike Fusion reactors we have already proven that we can build MSR reactors. It doesn't mean I think we should give up Fusion research. I just think that if we want to get cheap, clean and reliable power today, then solar, wind and MSRs are probably the most sensible options, not fusion.
https://erik-engheim.medium.com/yes-clean-nuclear-power-exis...
Don't get me wrong, fusion (IANANP) seems to be the best approach for long-term energy, and I'm strongly in favor of lots of research and experimentation in this area, and this seems like incremental progress. Kudos to the team!
It's in the article: 500 MW. Scientists hope further experiments move into breaking even and later having net gains.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
For years, I was hoping fusion is close. After watching Sabine's video, I'm not so optimistic anymore.
Second a great deal of ITER’s energy usage is as a science experiment not a fusion reactor. Most of their monitoring equipment for example is irrelevant to an operating power plant. Thus Qplasma is giving relevant information where Qtotal is largely meaningless at this stage.
It’s important not to forget the big picture. Otherwise you end up optimizing one piece of the system, and causing another piece of the system to work less well in a way the degrees overall system performance.
I get frustrated because it paints science in an undeserved negative light. It is at least truthful, in a way that most anti science writing is not. Mostly I find it unhelpful in that it points out problems without either explaining why they were reasonable or giving a real alternative.
IFLS pushers are motivated by money, clicks, and clout and to a large extent misinform the public.
I suppose you could say that they also get benefits from appealing to the IFLS crowd, so live and die by the same sword. I believe IFLS does more harm than good, but it's hard to be sure.
It's incredible that the term "Lawson criterion" wasn't mentioned once.
I don't think much of her "just do something different, don't ask me what" approach.
I felt like the Calculus SWAT Team was going to burst through the doors in that class, ha.
The British and their penchant for tea...
German Schuko is also 230V and even safer (in countries that use it), yet still significantly smaller than British plugs.
The UK has fuses in their plugs, which if I recall correctly had something to do with copper shortage during the war constraining the electrical cabling for houses, but I don't want to accidentally put wrong information out, so better look it up yourself.
But what I've heard is that the voltages staid the same, but 240V is still within spec of 230V with tolerances.
This corroborates that enough that I'm not checking their sources: https://www2.theiet.org/forums/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=2... moved from 240±6% to 230 +10%/-6%.
"110v vs 220v amp tone" https://www.thegearpage.net/board/index.php?threads/110v-vs-...
Doesn't seem like a mystery on why the reference was used.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-4326/ab2276/...
Sorry for the noob question but there is something I do not understand. I thought ITER design was more or less decided now as they are building it. Should I understand that they started building ITER without really knowing where they were going to go and are using JET experiment as a way know how to build ITER?
All new fusion plants are a risk, that's why they're experimental. I suspect they were reasonably confident they could make ITER work and that's why they started building, but this will give them confirmation that the material choice was a good one and will also show them in advance some of the operational obstacles and possible solutions.
In other words, they knew "where they were going to go" but this gives them more confidence they were correct in deciding the direction, and will speed up their learning curve setting up the machine once built. Even if it is built and something fundamentally doesn't work about the concept, that will still be useful scientific knowledge, even if it is disappointing.
> This is more than double what was achieved in similar tests back in 1997.
> It's not a massive energy output - only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water. But the significance is that it validates design choices that have been made for an even bigger fusion reactor now being constructed in France.
I thought this was interesting as 59 megajoules of energy or 11 megawatts of power seems more than you would need to boil 60 kettles' of water. In fact, it takes 4,184 joules to raise the temperature of 1kg of water by 1 degree. Or 313800 joules to raise 1kg of water by 75 degrees. That means JET could have boiled about 188 kg of water.
So net power is -989MW, assuming both flywheels are at full pelt the whole time and no power is required before fusion is acheived.
Plasma heating in JET is done via NBI+ICRH and is about 59 MW.
> only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water
Exactly, no one has 3l kettles, but it's the right ballpark. You could also run about 9k kettles for that 5 seconds but not boil them, and if you tried to run 60 kettles consuming all that power for 5 seconds you would have quite the fire...
I have! Duckduckgo it.
They already started construction on a larger one? What if it had invalidated design choices?
The government money was already allocated and even the government can't unring that bell!
This is missing the heat of vaporization[1] needed to actually boil the water though, i.e. to turn 100C liquid water to 100C steam. That's another 2250kJ/kg on top of the 313.8kJ/kg you've mentioned.
It's why steam is such a great carrier of energy for industrial applications.
I guess you could argue that you wouldn't evaporate all water in the kettle, but then you do want a rolling boil. It's probably a bit up for discussion at which point you'd stop heating the kettle.
One does not have to argue for that interpretation - raising the temperature to boiling point, not boiling it dry, is indisputably the accepted and intended meaning of the phrase wherever English is spoken... though it would fit with a certain stereotype of scientists if a bunch of plasma physicists did not know how to make a pot of tea!
Not exactly. In American English "bring a pot to a boil" is much more common. When I read "enough energy to boil 60 kettles of water" I thought "vaporize".
Disagree that this is a) a much more common phrasing or b) that your interpretation would be the common one. I've yet to run into a situation where somebody asked me to "boil some water" and intended for me to vaporize all the water in some vessel.
It's also an incredible waste of time to argue over definitions. They're always disputable because they always arise in response to two people using a word differently. Maybe they're wrong and you're right, or maybe others also use the word that way—it doesn't matter. Humility and aiming at mutual understanding is far more worthwhile.
Here, as soon as someone recognizes that the amount of energy cited is way higher or lower than would be implied by their own definition, they should 1) identify the difference ("Boil here means 'boil n kettles dry' rather than 'bring n kettles to boil'") and 2) in most cases, avoid the wasted debate by adopting the other person's language if further conversation using the concept is needed.
In the light of this, what is your objection to my comment? As far as I can tell, it is in conformance with your numbered principles.
However to go from liquid water to water vapor you need to add even more energy [0]. The enthalpy of vaporization for water is 2257 kJ/kg, it takes much more energy to boil water at 100°C than it takes to get there from room temperature.
Warming by 75 degrees + boiling = 2570 kJ/kg -> enough to boil 23 liters of water
I'm guessing in reality the energy needed to operate the kettles would lie somewhere in between, as a small part of the water will be boiled and most of it kept around 100°C. For 2L kettles the value seems in the right ballpark.
I understand this just to validate design choices and it is a good step forward. However, it doesn't make nuclear fusion a reality in two decades unless further records are set using this design
When discussing fusion power, we can all debate how many kettles we can boil.
Kind of funny :)
I am 50. All my life, we have been told that workable fusion would end our energy problems. But now we have the climate crisis, which is a result of inhabitants of the planet not being responsible for externalities.
If we all had cheap fusion reactors, wouldn't humanity just use a lot more energy, creating waste heat and dumping it into the atmosphere?
I'm not convinced humans can be trusted with cheaper energy if it leads to more waste heat.
But I still wonder what happens when we can cheaply generate orders of magnitude more energy. I don’t see how we would be stopped from causing problems with it.
Though I do agree with you that once human mastered nuclear fusion, it will only be a matter of time before we have to start worrying about overheating our planet. A potentially Sci-Fi solution would be to build planet-scale radiators to disseminate the waste heat.
That being said, with today's social climate, I won't be surprised if countries race to do it just to boost their PR image; that would require some serious carbon-shaming though.
Hopefully the current crop of VC funded fusion projects can improve the tech a little faster than this.
Net energy output is one thing but neutrons are the big problem. The two issues are energy loss and destruction of the container (aka neutron embrittlement). I see ITER plans to handle this with basically a large, thick absorption layer (steel and water). CFS OTOH is looking at molten salt solutions.
But these solutions seem to be aimed at the embrittlement issue and not really the energy loss issue.
Predictions about the future of fusion are notoriously difficult to make.
"The fusion announcement is great news but sadly it won't help in our battle to lessen the effects of climate change.
"There's huge uncertainty about when fusion power will be ready for commercialisation. One estimate suggests maybe 20 years. Then fusion would need to scale up, which would mean a delay of perhaps another few decades.
"And here's the problem: the need for carbon-free energy is urgent - and the government has pledged that all electricity in the UK must be zero emissions by 2035. That means nuclear, renewables and energy storage.
"In the words of my colleague Jon Amos: "Fusion is not a solution to get us to 2050 net zero. This is a solution to power society in the second half of this century.""
1) desalinization to provide water to everyone. 2) massive carbon capture 3) convert the world away from liquid fuels - and for the cases we are unable to do that, make the fuels from captured atmospheric carbon.
I bet whoever 'estimated' that said it as a joke. I'm no physicist, but that seems like reporting 'insiders suggested the toroid could be made about as long as a piece of string' to me.
MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy (IAP 2017) - Zach Hartwig
It also produces huge amounts of activating radiation. The reactor walls will be highly radioactive, as will everything from the fuel supply to the helium itself. In principle you can split that off, but I wouldn't want to try. Fission reactors are a lot more tractable.
"These experiments we've just completed had to work,"
Situations like this create a pressure cooker of bias. Maybe they got the result they wanted by force of will not because of the underlying science or engineering.
It sounds like what you are talking about is "motivation" not "bias".
(And if I'm terribly wrong please don't flame, not a nuclear physics expert here)
Because if so, that's the first thing governments are going to do with it, not free/cheap power for the masses.
Even if that wasn’t the case, why would they? Once you can kill the whole planet, there’s no extra points for killing it multiple times over.
Focusing on absolute numbers is pretty irrelevant, wouldn’t you say ?
We know once we get a working prototype it can be scaled up relatively easily.
Strange to see a storage mechanism (battery) compared to a generation mechanism (fusion plant)
If they get this to work, they will just build something with 100x or 1000x the output.
The number isn’t really important here, some indication of how the development of the technology is coming along is what we care about. Compare this energy to the last best output.
If this works and we productionize it, we will suddenly go from 1/4 Tesla battery to 10,000 Tesla batteries.
edit: since JET is used for research rather than practical power generation, they might not have a steam turbine at all. I was thinking more of the scenario where they're past the research phase and actually doing power generation.
Edit: maybe I’m needlessly pessimistic but I feel societies are much more fragile than they seem. We had it unreasonably good in ‘the west’ for the last 77 years but that time span is so short in the grander scheme of things, it gives a false sense of security.
In some part, due to societal changes, schisms, injustices, the increasing distrust that eats at the foundation of society,
At some point, there may be nothing worth left to power with nuclear fusion.
Although I start to wonder if we should keep powering a lot of things in today’s world. There is so much needless unnecessary madness going on.
Replace money with "technology that sustains society".
Just to be clear, I 100% believe in climate change, and do what I think is a fair amount to help (cycle as much as I can, don't take long haul flights, take train instead of short haul flights, drive EV, insulate house, don't eat much meat, Solar PV panels).
BUT!
I feel like humanity and the earth are way more fault-tolerant than the parent comment gives them credit for. I don't think we are going to see the total collapse of civilisation - far from it. But I would welcome any links on people/studies/groups who have theorised what might happen in a medium-case scenario?
So other than nuclear apocalypse, I fail to see what could remove society by 2050? Climate Change's worst effects will not be seen by 2050, they'll be very bad but they won't destroy society in all places, just hamper its economy and lower societal living standards.
But we need to go nuclear [fission] in the mean time... I can't imagine any other way that wouldn't devastate the environment excessively at the same time (e.g. river dams are bad IMHO).
They will start in 2025, then will stop for a few years then will really only start in 2035. ITER is a scientific experiment not the first commercial prototype.
Assuming it succeeds you are looking at a procurement and construction process of 20 years for the first commercial prototype by 2060!
At best, you will start constructing commercial power in 2060 and making in impact in 2080. If its even commercially feasible and not an incredibly expensive toy.
Fantastic achievements from the SPARC (MIT) project are not likely to impact this. Conclusion: Forget about Fusion as a solution to help with the current climate change emergency. The planet will be here, but Gaia will clean us up as parasitic extras, if we don't do something in the next 5 to 10 years.
And no, you wont be allowed in the Belt.
Fusion research is still very interesting, but honestly it's starting to feel more like an expensive hobby by now. It certainly shouldn't take precedence over more attainable and faster solutions.
Given that, wouldn't it make more sense to focus on technology to capture energy from the giant, already working fusion reactor in the sky?
We heat up water until it turns to steam which moves a turbine to spin some magnets to generate electricity.
Fusion’s advantage over solar is it can theoretically generate unlimited energy in a relatively small footprint. It also doesn’t go out 8-12 hours per day.
But I think the reality is that we need to pursue many options for clean energy.
I really wish we'd gone with Nixon's 1970s proposal to make our entire grid carbon-neutral using fission, but given how the politics of that worked out, I'm also incredibly grateful that people kept working on photovoltaic technology anyway.
We're building out solar pretty rapidly, and the technology has been advancing at an incredible rate, but we can work on multiple solutions simultaneously, and solar is a clear case study in why working on not-yet-viable technology is incredibly worthwhile pursuit.
I wonder who's right?
Does anyone know the details here?
My take is that the crux of her argument is that fusion is unlikely to be the great solution of all our energy problems any time soon, so we should not let that false hope direct our funding decisions in the race to a sustainable energy future.
It would be an insanely good outcome if fusion becomes viable and massively scaled by the end of the century, and frankly, that's not soon enough for our climate and peak oil problems.
However, since it has such mighty political backing as a solemn hope to tackle climate change, politics will always win.
/s
The outcome itself is not nearly enough, if it even matters (see Afghanistan, it's not like the outcome was a surprise): What needs to happen is that the money river* needs to flow through areas that have influential congress(wo)men and senators who benefit both financially (campaign contributions) and politically (good headlines, get something they can use in deals, etc.).
This is for anything where the outcomes are far away and/or uncertain. In those cases the money flow itself becomes the actual target. It is something concrete, with impact right away, compared to those types of goals.
A politician will probably support military spending in case the homeland is actually really threatened, but when it's not it's all about the benefits not of the military equipment for the troops, which are questionable (even when it works, do they actually need it?), but the benefits of the spending itself, pretty much disregarding the final products.
Example Afghanistan, which at first glance seems to fit my claim less than military spending for hardware:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/11/us-afg...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-won-in-afghanistan-private-... (paywall)
> One-third to half of that sum went to contractors, with five defense companies— Lockheed Martin Corp. , Boeing Co. , General Dynamics Corp. , Raytheon Technologies Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp. —taking the lion’s share, $2.1 trillion, for weapons, supplies and other services
Just imagine where we'd be if the US had a similar "Focus here" initiative for semiconductors since the 1960s.
I think independent of how well it works, or how terrible, to me it's an example of the "life finds a way" meme. Some great need exists, but also some great constraints, and a large amount of irrationality, so the outcome is what it is.
.
> Just imagine where we'd be if the US had a similar "Focus here" initiative for semiconductors since the 1960s.
You may want to buckle up and watch the excellent talk https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo
> Today, Silicon Valley is known around the world as a fount of technology innovation and development fueled by private venture capital and peopled by fabled entrepreneurs. But it wasn't always so. Unbeknownst to even seasoned inhabitants, today's Silicon Valley had its start in government secrecy and wartime urgency.
> In this lecture, renowned serial entrepreneur Steve Blank presents how the roots of Silicon Valley sprang not from the later development of the silicon semiconductor but instead from the earlier technology duel over the skies of Germany and secret efforts around (and over) the Soviet Union. World War II, the Cold War and one Stanford professor set the stage for the creation and explosive growth of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. The world was forever changed when the Defense Department, CIA and the National Security Agency acted like today's venture capitalists funding this first wave of entrepreneurship.
Edited to add the link (now on HN front page): https://www.euro-fusion.org/news/2022/european-researchers-a...
The title is as misleading as calling ITER French because it's located in France.
In this case, the celebration seems well-reasoned. From the article:
"It's a landmark because they demonstrated stability of the plasma over five seconds. That doesn't sound very long, but on a nuclear timescale, it's a very, very long time indeed. And it's very easy then to go from five seconds to five minutes, or five hours, or even longer."
-- Wikipedia
So the reason it is called European is that it was conceived by the EU and it's partners and it primarily funded by the EU's Horizon 2020 funding programme.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20170830004728/http://horizon202...
Or will this fusion go out of control and demolish the UK in a nuclear fireball?
It's probably related to brexit in that this outlook is very likely at least part of why Brexit happened (or rather why the UK was never a particularly good fit for the EU)