We have a large and wonderful fusion reactor fully operational and running already, at a safe distance of 1.5e11 meters. All we have to do is harvest its energy output, with solar panels, windmills, or hydroelectric.
The price of panels has been going down by 15% a year for the last couple of years. What's more likely, incremental improvements to solar panels and batteries that make them the cheapest energy source, or a breakthrough in nuclear fusion? My bet is on the small but steady improvements...
I think fusion power is a useful thing to research though, in case the sky goes dark one day.
> I think fusion power is a useful thing to research though, in case the sky goes dark one day.
"Someone started a war, and no one knows who, but it was known that it was mankind who blotted out the sky, attempting to deprive the machines of the solar power they required to function."
In the long run, the sky going dark is not such an unlikely scenario. Big asteroid impact or a large volcanic eruption would be enough. Or some big war, sadly we tend to have them quite frequently. I forgot that was the background story to The Matrix... :-)
I agree that fusion power would also be great for travelling into deep space. In the reeeally long run, there is no other choice for mankind.
I think fusion power or nuclear in general is a vital area of research, given the massive problems we need to overcome for solar (or "solar-indirect") renewables to ever have a hope of sustaining civilisation as it is now.
Solar power is making progress all the time, so I fail to see how there are "massive problems". In fact, it seems like the massive problems are with fusion - after decades of government-backed research and very little progress.
Energy storage at the scale that would be needed to run civilization on solar is a difficult problem. Tom Murphy's Do the Math blog has a lot of articles on how hard it would be to run civilization on renewables alone. For example: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-bat...
In that article, Murphy calculates the difficulty of doing it with lead acid batteries which seems more of a strawman than a serious attempt to estimate requirements for a storage technology to match up to renewable power sources.
He says he picked lead-acid because it's the cheapest and lead is relatively abundant. The situation isn't any better with other technologies.
Even the new liquid-metal "grid-scale" batteries that have been in the news don't work out too well. A while back I ran the numbers to see; to run the world on them we'd need thousands of years' worth of our current annual production of the metals they use.
Storage with hydro works pretty well but it's geographically limited. Murphy wrote another post on that. No way it can scale far enough.
Storage at civilization scale is hard. I think we'll crack fusion first. If not that, then advanced fission (molten salt reactors, fast reactors).
I can't help but compare the investment timing & structure of fusion research vs recent renewable development. Fusion has had many years and billions of dollars of investment and it still hasn't been cracked.
I hope fusion succeeds wildly. But, grid-scale storage has just recently started being a focus, and I note that it, like renewable investments, can be made on a much smaller, much more distributed scale. Payback starts when a grid-battery economically succeeds in a niche, and small successes will shift more capital and R&D into that area, and there are already some small scale successes in the grid battery market.
If either area is at all physically possible, I think just because of the structure of investment/discovery/payback cycle, that grid-batteries will be available quicker. The "search function" for grid battery tech will execute much faster. Recent "small" fusion investments may change that, but I strongly suspect those small fusion projects, even if they succeed at their near term objectives, will still have many fundamental long term problems to solve, and so would be longer iteration time technologies.
Regardless of how we individually assess the chances of success, civilization really needs research in both areas and more because our current civilization runs on processes that aren't sustainable long term.
And using advanced fission seems easier than either.
We need engineers attempting to solve all these problems. But what we don't need is people assuming that hard problems are already solved, and that other lines of research therefore aren't important.
Sure, just insure your advanced fission reactors against desaster with a prudent insurer instead of relying on the government to bail you out in case anything happens. Proving something with long-tail risk is secure takes ages.
There are just too many ways to store energy to go through them here, and it doesn't make sense to take any single one and claim it cannot scale to the problem at hand.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on the difficulty of storing energy vs. getting nuclear fusion working.
I think fusion would be great to have and research is important, but i'm also glad that we don't need to get it working real soon now.
We are marching towards the fusion age, looking forward to that since we do not need to pump monarchy/dictator oil in the cars which is directly funding extreme religion which is a source for terrorism.
Combine fusion with a battery breakthrough for electric cars and we will have clean air cities and cheap transportation!
Also Helion, UW's Dynomak, Sandia's MagLIF, LPP's focus fusion, IEC's polywell, General Fusion, and Tri-Alpha, just to take a selection of active projects with relatively near-term timelines. Ycombinator put some money into Helion: http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/y-combinator-and-mithril-in...
Yes, but it's not a traditional fission reactor that uses 1% of the fuel and wastes the other 99%. "Fission" is only a dirty word because of the types of fission reactors that have been built.
If you build a fission reactor that burns say, 99% of the fuel and only wastes 1% of it, suddenly it's just as good as fusion, but better because we already know how to do it and we already have tested the design.
Fission or fusion doesn't matter, it's the fuel lifecycle, plant lifecycle and the quantity of waste products per energy output that matter.
It is. Interesting approach, instead of tackling corrosion with advanced alloys, they just use plain ol' steel and design the reactor so it's easy to replace all the pipes every four years.
"We don’t know where we are going to get our energy from in the second half of this century, and if we don’t get fusion working we are going to be really stuck."
We have nuclear, solar, and wind. Even if Iter is successful it will take -guessing here- decades to bring it to production and the better part of half a century to roll it out in any significant way.
I think the next technological leap will be in manipulating huge amounts of energy, maybe we can warp space and go to the starts. So something like fusion power is probably necessary for that.
In the mean time, I think we can keep the lights on.
"The promise of fusion, if scientists can get it to work, is huge – unlimited power without any carbon emissions and very little radioactive waste."
I'm interested in how much CO2 is emitted to produce 400,000 tonnes of steel and concrete. I wonder what the life time emissions are for a fusion power plant, given that nothing lasts forever it will have to be maintained and have major rebuilds. This is an experimental design, so it will probably never pay back construction related CO2 emissions, so we should look at the numbers for a theoretical production unit, and how those numbers compare to other power generation technologies.
"ITER has been designed to produce 500 MW of output power for 50 MW of input power" and its construction "will require 16,000 tons of rebar, 150,000 m³ of concrete and 7,500 tons of steel for the building structures." [0]
By comparison, "a MW of installed capacity for wind requires 460 metric tons of steel and 870 m3 of concrete compared to the 98 metric tons of steel and 160 m3 of concrete for coal, and the even lower 40 metric tons of steel and 90 m3 of concrete for nuclear" [1]
So to match ITER's 450MW net with wind power, your turbines would require 270,000 metric tons of steel and 391,500 m^3 of concrete, several times more than ITER will need.
This neglects thermal inefficiency for ITER, but on the other hand ITER is an experimental reactor and the followup DEMO plant is supposed to get 2 to 4 gigawatts with a size only 15% larger. [2] Also, the wind figures are for capacity, not actual output, so the numbers are pretty comparable anyway...it'd be reasonable to assume 30% thermal efficiency and 30% wind capacity factor.
But you're right that ITER/DEMO has a pretty long timeline, which is why I favor smaller-scale alternate approaches (as well as advanced fission).
A typical coal plant burns a box-car of pure carbon every 15 minutes. Compared to that, the amount of CO2 generated producing 400,000 tonnes of steel and concrete is negligible.
Fission is currently our only scalable, safe, cost-effective replacement for baseload coal. Fusion would be an alternative-alternative. Wind/solar plus batteries is a backup plan.
At this point, given what we know about climate change--and more to the point what we don't know yet, but will find out empirically if we keep down the no-nukes road--it is very difficult to be opposed to fission power. We are only "stuck" with out fusion because anti-technology crusaders have made it effectively impossible to build more of the solution we have in hand.
Yes, in the pursuit of perfect we appear to be overlooking good.
With what we know about Gen III+ and what we're told about Gen IV nuclear fission, we should probably be doing a war-like roll-out of existing and new nuclear technology.
I grew up in South Australia which is host to the worlds largest known single deposit of uranium in the world.[1] Maralinga in the Woomera Prohibited Area is the site of seven British nuclear tests.[2] Australia is also host to the OECD's dirtiest coal fired power station, Hazelwood Power Station in Victoria[3].
There's definitely some irony going there. I suppose if it weren't for Greenpeace and Friends Of the Earth Australia might have had nuclear power by now, or at least process and value-add our uranium ore.
> I'm interested in how much CO2 is emitted to produce 400,000 tonnes of steel and concrete.
If the steel and concrete plants are powered by electricity generated using coal, a lot. If they're powered by electricity generated using Fusion, much, much less. It's not just those plants either, if the ships transporting the materials have fusion power plants. If the trains and trucks run on fusion generated electricity. All of a sudden the carbon footprint of the entire economy collapses.
I wonder what the life time emissions are for a fusion power plant, given that nothing lasts forever it will have to be maintained and have major rebuilds.
For the first fusion plant it'll be a huge loss environmentally speaking. But they'll improve as we learn and iterate the design and building process until eventually they're better than anything we can imagine today. That can't happen unless we build the first one.
In the long term they're definitely the best possible energy source for the environment.
You do realize that maintaining windmills is a constant affair, their install costs and such are not insignificant. I won't even touch the damage they can do to birds and bats. Solar might be worse depending on which tech you implement. Besides simply all the site improvements required you have entire factories elsewhere making the bulk of the parts and many of those processes are not that clean.
Then top it all off with getting the power to where it is needed. Wind power pretty much has locations where its more ideal to build. Solar's foot print does similar. A fusion plant, probably could simply replace any large coal facility which would get you two birds with one stone
Yes, I'm well aware of the input and maintenance requirements for wind turbines. One company I have worked for manufactured a bunch of turbine masts. Lots of steel, lots of welding.
Though I reckon, with nuclear fission + solar + wind, when and where it makes sense to use each technology, we can keep the lights on, buying us time to develop even cleaner more efficient forms of electricity production.
The small modular reactor designs we've been hearing more about recently sound like a really good idea for drop-in replacements for existing coal fired power stations. Though retro-fitting new technology to existing plant is often a better idea on paper. But at least the existing sites can be reused.
Thumbs up for the article! We should talk more about this topic and less about some 2 year projects.
Take for example Google Maps project... it sure made a huge impact of the geographic mobility of humans but IMHO even today is questionable does it even match the impact that SABRE made. :)
The price of panels has been going down by 15% a year for the last couple of years. What's more likely, incremental improvements to solar panels and batteries that make them the cheapest energy source, or a breakthrough in nuclear fusion? My bet is on the small but steady improvements...
I think fusion power is a useful thing to research though, in case the sky goes dark one day.