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Comment by TheMagicHorsey | Hacker News Reader

It's always been close. But now, finally, I think it's really close. As in, I think I may still be alive when the first fusion power comes into the grid, even if I probably won't be alive to see the full dream of infinite cheap energy come true.

Its interesting to think about how our economies will change if the price of energy drops by one or two orders of magnitude.

Desalination could then be used for agriculture and industry. Coastlines could become more valuable.

We could make huge amounts of aluminum for almost nothing. We'd probably end up with aluminum packaging for everything as it's much easier to recycle than plastic if you don't have to worry about electricity.

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> won't be alive to see the full dream of infinite cheap energy come true.

You won't. Sorry for being cynical, but the true cost of energy is the capital invested in the equipment to harvest it. A fusion reactor would be at the minimum, as expensive as a fission one, which means all that capital will have to be amortised over the years. This doesn't even take into account the cost of extracting deuterium from sea water or producing helium 3 and tritium from lithium. Fusion doesn't even solve the problem of nuclear waste, since it will create radioactive isotopes by bombarding components of the reactor with neutrons.

You want cheaper, cleaner energy ? Solar and wind with battery storage is the best option, and it's already here, no need need to wait for fusion magic that may or may not happen in our lifetimes.

> A fusion reactor would be at the minimum, as expensive as a fission one

What are you basing that on? Many of the fusion designs being talked about are quite small.

So does fission reactors. Modern French nuclear subs are powered by 48 MW reactors. They're still expensive to build and maintain.

Probably we will just burn the world with the free energy.

Probably? Oh ye of little faith.

Even if that was literally done, it would still be a better home than Mars :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GjOuqAlFEk#t=6m45s

(not trying to make any kind of point, just a fun fact / video)

That video is full of widely discredited claims.

I don't see why would it be cheap.

Nuclear is mostly capital costs, not the fuel. Fusion doesn't look any cheaper to build. Like any other bit of complicated infrastructure, it'll have a limited lifetime.

So, power cost is ((capital_costs + running_costs) / amount_produced) * profit_margin

While I'm very much in favor of research, I don't understand the expectation of that it'll make power cheap. I'm pretty sure nothing will beat solar and wind because they're cheap, simple and very amenable to mass production in ways that fusion and fission can never be.

At this point IMO neither fusion nor fission have a future as a main source of grid power. They're still worth researching, and will still have specialized uses in places like submarines and aircraft carriers.

Helion says they want to make small, modular plants that are amenable to mass production, opening up the same scale economies that have benefited solar.

That's assuming their stuff even works at all, which I believe there's some reasons to doubt. Perhaps all we'll get working in the end is a honking huge tokamak and then we're exactly in the same situation as fission.

But let's suppose their stuff works as well as they imagine. IMO, not even then. Just look at their youtube videos. All sorts of big, complicated, and expensive looking magic. Huge capacitors, vacuum chambers, extremely high temperatures, etc.

Will that scale better than nuclear? Maybe. Will it scale better than a tech that can be pumped out by the million, shipped to normal people and put on any random roof? Highly doubt it.

To my understanding, the time limit of fission is mostly due to political/security reasons.

Of course keeping it indefinitely on will require huge maintenance costs but if the infrastructure is modular enough to be able to replace every elements, that may be doable.

With fission the structure of the building is part of the infrastructure’s security so it’s harder to change when it’s too damaged. Maybe I’m wrong but it seems like fusion doesn’t require huge cement walls that would take a lot of constraint and which would effectively limit the maximum lifetime of the building.

What has changed to make you think it’s finally really close now? I found the short article a little light on details, although as a layman I have noticed people seeming cautiously excited about ITER and speaking about SPARC as if its near-term promises may be credible.

Are there other signals that you’d point to as influencing your shift to optimism?

There is a massive amount of investment into fusion startups right now, so much that it is difficult to keep track of all the really innovative approaches that are being tried, often with billions of $$$ backing them.

Lots of people assume that fusion energy will be cheap but this is not true for the tokamak designs, which have the highest chance of success. Helion's approach should be very cost-competitive but it has a high chance of failure.

> Desalination could then be used for agriculture and industry

This is likely going to happen anyway because of the rapidly falling costs of solar power. Although it certainly doesn't hurt to make energy cheaper yet again.

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