I agree. If we were able to eventually miniaturise fusion reactors, they would be incredible for space flight. Back on Earth, if they could be made safe enough, maybe we could even use them to run container ships?
With all the fast neutrons emanating from a fusion reactor (and the heavy confinement that it requires) I don't think a container ship would be a safe enough environment (threat of disaster at sea, constantly jostling which might affect plasma stability etc.).
But yes, there is a potential for a lot of space applications and other things we haven't thought of yet.
Well fusion reactors are likely to cost a huge amount of money when they do become operational. No point having them sinking in a storm. Probably just safer to charge a huge battery and put it on a ship (if you don’t want to use fossil fuels). Avoids a lot of unfoseen commercial risk. Even though you could use water for shielding, the metal container and other things that hold the reactor would be highly radioactive and brittle due to continuous neutron bombardment. You wouldn’t want that to be lost at sea spewing radiation (even though the reactor itself would shutdown automatically).
> Probably just safer to charge a huge battery and put it on a ship
Large container ships burn through 16 tons of bunker oil per hour, and each journey can last up to 3 weeks - any idea what size of battery such a ship would need? I have no clue how to calculate that), but I'm guessing it would be completely impractical, even if we made huge strides in battery energy density.
There seem to be efforts towards battery powered container ships out there[1], independently of any speculated use of nuclear power to charge them. Most likely they'd be battery banks in containers that get swapped out and charged at port using the same equipment as is used to load and unload cargo I believe.
I remember reading that they would have more limited range and lower top speeds, but that this might not be as much of a problem as it seems because the current routes are built around large container + long haul but that's not necessarily required (for all shipping at least).
1 ton of oil is roughly 12 MegaWatt-hours[1], so 12 MWh in a ton × 16 tons per hour × 24 hours in a day × 21 days in three weeks = ~96000 MWh or ~0.1GWh.
Here's[2] a company offering a 1MWh battery in a standard 20ft container. EverGiven[3] carries ~20,000 standard containers. So, five EverGivens?
No need for complicated calculations here... Back of an envelope:
- The energy density of LiIon batteries (or molten salt, or liquidy nitrogen etc) is roughly 100x smaller than that of gasoline/diesel/bunker fuel in weight terms and 40x smaller in volume terms
- The efficiency of electric motors is roughly 2x that of large diesel engines
So the amount of batteries needed for the same performance is 50x larger in weight and 20x larger in volume than the oil it carries (which for a big container ship is 6,000-10,000 tons I think). Which would be impractical.
I'm hoping that some of the battery technology currently under development (such as flow batteries, or aluminium-sulphur batteries) can trade space and weight for increased total capacity. A good battery for grid storage would probably work well for a container ship.
>There are hundreds of nuclear powered ships already - submarines, Icebreakers, carriers, etc.
Aren't they all operated by militaries though? So if a conspiracy of crew members tries to steal some enriched fuel or fission products, it is legal to just shoot them or throw them in jail for decade for trying.
On board the ship itself, all the nuclear material is inside a running reactor, any would-be criminal would be dead before you could shoot them
Russian nuclear icebreakers are civilian ships, and people working at normal nuclear power stations are civilians too.
It is actually only relevant what happens in the part of the chain that handles nuclear fuel - thats the shipyard plus processing of spent fuel. But again, we do that for powerplants already.
DT fusion would be just ridiculous for space flight. Anything a DT reactor could do a fission reactor could do much better -- much smaller, much higher power density, much less complexity. And similarly for use in ships down here on Earth.
In practice, synfuels would be better than either for ships on Earth.
Isn't the main reason for us not having fission rockets the fact that we don't want to have radioactive material explode a few kms above our head aka a dirty bomb?
A DT fusion reactor would have a thrust/weight ratio much less than 1, so it could not be used in a launch vehicle. It would be purely for use up in space. So, none of this "a few kms above our heads" nonsense.
I don't understand this; if fission reactors were "better", we wouldn't be pouring so much into fusion?
Also, if it makes a difference, I didn't mean we'd be bolting a first gen tokamak to a container ship; I meant, much later down the line, if we were able to miniaturise (similar to how we have nuclear powered subs and ice breakers).
Much more money is "poured into" fission than fusion, likely by a few orders of magnitude. There's one mega project around fusion (ITER) that has a price tag of about 1-2 billion dollars a year if you average it out over the many-decade life of the project, while any given fission plant built also costs billions of dollars.
Like, whether or not fusion itself is a "meme," the idea that we spend obscene amounts of money on it is absolutely a meme with no real backing in reality.
The appeal of fusion is really more about getting out of worrying so much about meltdowns and weapon proliferation, and that there is potential for much higher overall energy output if we can figure it out.
That last bit is why, imo, we should be investing in it now even though it won't really help us reach net zero carbon "in time". If we want to reverse our carbon impact, if and when we get to net zero, we're going to need immense amounts of energy to do it.
Some people quite reasonably object to spending billions of dollars every year on a project with a vanishingly small prospect of success, and of exactly zero practical value if it ever did succeed. There will never be so much as a single kWh of commercial power from these turkeys.
We can all think of numerous projects going unfunded that would have much higher chances of success, and much greater positive impact. But we have a research institution whose only possible recommendation is to continue giving it money, indefinitely.
We see the same dynamic in Alzheimer Syndrome research, where almost all the research money goes to people still fooling with amyloids and tau tangles. The people who control publication, funding, and hiring are people who would have nothing to do if funding for amyloid work stopped. So, they continue funding amyloid work long after it was recognized as a dead end. They have bred up mice that get dementia, and literally everything they do is about the mice.
This is somewhat different from the current crewed spaceflight program in the US, where the absurdly expensive SLS rocket is mandated to be used because senators have constituents in their districts depending on income from building them, useless as they are. In this case NASA would dearly love to abandon SLS, but is required by law to try to launch them. The best they can do is delay launches. Anytime the shoot one, they have to spend $billions building another one.
> We can all think of numerous projects going unfunded that would have much higher chances of success
I can think of far more things getting funded that are either even less likely to succeed or likely to succeed and, in so doing, will cause harm and death to many people. There are so many things we're spending so much money on that do nothing but harm it's absurd to laser focus on something you consider merely pointless as a Boogeyman.
Who said it was "obscene"? You seem to be putting words in mouths.
I will say I do think money has been spent unwisely on fusion, particularly on approaches that have very little chance of success, with programmatic dysfunction that even fusion advocates have noted with anger. Chance of success does have to enter into the evaluation of whether funding is wise, or else one could argue for spending on perpetual motion machines.
I.. wasn't replying to you? And I wasn't referring to you or the person I was replying to specifically anyways, but the common sentiment whenever this comes up.
But it is absolutely a common misconception that fusion is very well funded when, given the challenges involved, it is funded quite poorly. If it was well funded, ITER might have been finished 20 years ago.
That said I think the results would have been disappointing, it doesn't really seem like material science was there yet and it's not clear more money thrown at it then would have gotten us there.
Imo I think even if you think it's a boondoggle it'd be better to fund it well (much better than we are) now and find out than drag this slow march of wasted money on old designs and ideas out forever. The ITER funding should have probably gone to something more like milestone awards and letting a bunch of paths proliferate.
You seem to think that government decisions are rational.
Fusion is a meme technology. People just have this assumption that's it's valuable, without having rationally arrived at that conclusion (which, when you examine it in detail, is very difficult to justify.) I suspect this was because it started back in the 1950s when consent was easier to manufacture and nuclear was being pushed. Fission lost that glamour with most people, but fusion somehow has retained it.
It's not only governments pouring cash in, but private equity too.
With all due respect, it seems ridiculous to me that fusion is a "meme technology" - aside from money, are all those many thousands of scientists really working on a technology they know can't work?
Some of that private investment has been sadly lacking in critical due diligence.
Look at Tri-Alpha. The people involved with that (Rostoker, Binderbauer and Monkhorst) were told 23 years ago that their colliding beam H-11B concept didn't work, for multiple reasons. Yet look at how much money they raised.
Let us just observe that securities fraud is very unevenly enforced.
None of these startup companies will ever produce a lone kWh of commercial power. But they will very diligently spend every dollar they are handed by VCs. The VC brokers know the score, but the money spent goes for equipment from quite profitable companies. It is not their money, and there seems to be plenty of it.
