Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change? (newyorker.com) 293
Amid an escalating crisis, the power source offers a dream -- or a pipe dream -- of limitless clean energy. From a report: Let's say that you've devoted your entire adult life to developing a carbon-free way to power a household for a year on the fuel of a single glass of water, and that you've had moments, even years, when you were pretty sure you would succeed. Let's say also that you're not crazy. This is a reasonable description of many of the physicists working in the field of nuclear fusion. In order to reach this goal, they had to find a way to heat matter to temperatures hotter than the center of the sun, so hot that atoms essentially melt into a cloud of charged particles known as plasma; they did that. They had to conceive of and build containers that could hold those plasmas; they did that, too, by making "bottles" out of strong magnetic fields. When those magnetic bottles leaked -- because, as one scientist explained, trying to contain plasma in a magnetic bottle is like trying to wrap a jelly in twine -- they had to devise further ingenious solutions, and, again and again, they did. Over decades, in the pursuit of nuclear fusion, scientists and engineers built giant metal doughnuts and Gehryesque twisted coils, they "pinched" plasmas with lasers, and they constructed fusion devices in garages. For thirty-six years, they have been planning and building an experimental fusion device in Provence. And yet commercially viable nuclear-fusion energy has always remained just a bit farther on.
As the White Queen, in "Through the Looking Glass," said to Alice, it is never jam today, it is always jam tomorrow. The accelerating climate crisis makes fusion's elusiveness more than cutely maddening. Solar energy gets more efficient and affordable each year, but it's not continuously available, and it still relies on gas power plants for distribution. The same is true for wind power. Conventional nuclear power has extremely well-known disadvantages. Carbon capture, which is like a toothbrush for the sky, is compelling, but after you capture a teraton or two of carbon there's nowhere to put it. All these tools figure extensively in decarbonization plans laid out by groups like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but, according to those plans, even when combined with one another the tools are insufficient. Fusion remains the great clean-energy dream -- or, depending on whom you ask, pipe dream. Fusion, theoretically, has no scarcity issues; our planet has enough of fusion's primary fuels, heavy hydrogen and lithium, which are found in seawater, to last thirty million years.
Fusion requires no major advances in batteries, it would be available on demand, it wouldn't cause the next Fukushima, and it wouldn't be too pricey -- if only we could figure out all the "details." (A joke I heard is that fusion operates according to the law of the "conservation of difficulty": when one problem is solved, a new one of equal difficulty emerges to take its place.) The details are tremendously complex, and the people who work to figure them out have for years been dealing with their own scarcities -- scarcities of funding and scarcities of faith. Fusion, as of now, has no place in the Green New Deal. In 1976, the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration published a study predicting how quickly nuclear fusion could become a reality, depending on how much money was invested in the field. For around nine billion a year in today's dollars -- described as the "Maximum Effective Effort" -- it projected reaching fusion energy by 1990. The scale descended to about a billion dollars a year, which the study projected would lead to "Fusion Never." "And that's about what's been spent," the British physicist Steven Cowley told me. "Pretty close to the maximum amount you could spend in order to never get there."
As the White Queen, in "Through the Looking Glass," said to Alice, it is never jam today, it is always jam tomorrow. The accelerating climate crisis makes fusion's elusiveness more than cutely maddening. Solar energy gets more efficient and affordable each year, but it's not continuously available, and it still relies on gas power plants for distribution. The same is true for wind power. Conventional nuclear power has extremely well-known disadvantages. Carbon capture, which is like a toothbrush for the sky, is compelling, but after you capture a teraton or two of carbon there's nowhere to put it. All these tools figure extensively in decarbonization plans laid out by groups like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but, according to those plans, even when combined with one another the tools are insufficient. Fusion remains the great clean-energy dream -- or, depending on whom you ask, pipe dream. Fusion, theoretically, has no scarcity issues; our planet has enough of fusion's primary fuels, heavy hydrogen and lithium, which are found in seawater, to last thirty million years.
Fusion requires no major advances in batteries, it would be available on demand, it wouldn't cause the next Fukushima, and it wouldn't be too pricey -- if only we could figure out all the "details." (A joke I heard is that fusion operates according to the law of the "conservation of difficulty": when one problem is solved, a new one of equal difficulty emerges to take its place.) The details are tremendously complex, and the people who work to figure them out have for years been dealing with their own scarcities -- scarcities of funding and scarcities of faith. Fusion, as of now, has no place in the Green New Deal. In 1976, the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration published a study predicting how quickly nuclear fusion could become a reality, depending on how much money was invested in the field. For around nine billion a year in today's dollars -- described as the "Maximum Effective Effort" -- it projected reaching fusion energy by 1990. The scale descended to about a billion dollars a year, which the study projected would lead to "Fusion Never." "And that's about what's been spent," the British physicist Steven Cowley told me. "Pretty close to the maximum amount you could spend in order to never get there."
Betteridge's law of headlines applies (Score:4, Insightful)
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You might be right, but only in the sense that it will be too little, too late at the current level of funding/effort.
You'd think this problem would be important enough for governments to step in and get it sorted, but nope. We need more F35s before we need carbon-free energy.
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We have carbon-free energy in several different forms: hydro power, solar, wind, geothermal, and nuclear. I'm sure there are more that I'm forgetting. All those are available today, which is good because we need zero-carbon power today, not at some unspecified point in the future. It would be very interesting to get fusion power working, but we'll need to stick to what we already have working until that day.
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Why can't we have both? The amount of money being sought is tiny in the grand scheme of things.
Who know what else we might learn along the way?
Re:Betteridge's law of headlines applies (Score:5, Informative)
Who know what else we might learn along the way?
Fusion research is reasonable.
Expecting fusion to be a significant energy source in the next few decades is NOT reasonable.
We haven't even reached energy breakeven. Once that is accomplished, we will face the far harder problem of building cost-effective reactors.
Do you really believe that we can build Tokamaks for less money than installing wind turbines in Oklahoma or PV arrays in Arizona?
Fusion is a con job (Score:5, Informative)
Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist who is not afraid to tell the ttuth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Thanks for this - it's tremendously informative, and those with mod points should consider modding it up.
The TL;DR message is that the Q factors widely quoted in the press, (that talk about getting 70% of the input energy back out), are talking about the plasma Q, not the total Q. There's a LOT of energy required in these reactors that doesn't make it into the plasma. Once you add in the energy required for the magnets and the lasers and the cooling and such to arrive at a total Q, and then figure in a conv
Re: Fusion is a con job (Score:5, Informative)
The point of ITER is to prove the scaling and modeling of tokamaks is correct. The facility that will produce more electricity overall is called DEMO, and it will be built after ITER. This was stated from the very beginning, I have no clue how fools got confused. ITER exists to prove that Tokamak modeling works, that ELM model and control schemes work, etc.
If the modeling is correct it will provide the confidence needed to build DEMO. And yes, it is worth it.
As far as the NIF the same thing is true, with the added point that it is for nuclear weapons modeling.
ITER is 80% built, and is the greatest international scientific and engineering collaboration ever. At minimum it will prove that international scientific and engineering cooperation to build something complex is possible. China, Europe, Japan, Korea, India, Russia, and the US â" actually 35 nations in total, working together on a single project. When since WWII did so many countries come together to do something? Hell that alone ought to be worth a lot.
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LHC is CERN, only European countries run CERN. They do have non-European countries as observers, cooperation members, or, recently, associated members .. but they played little to no role in building the LHC. The USA, Japan, and Russia are observer members. Also, LHC is less complicated than ITER.
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Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist who is not afraid to tell the ttuth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Ha! I left a link to that video as well.
People here would do well to watch her videos. She is a good teacher, and does a great job teaching.
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She's not really misleading. Her point is that quoting Q plasma is misleading. ITER's Q plasma is 10, which sounds like "holy shit, ITER is going to produce lots of power!" Except it's not. It's sized to maybe produce a net gain, but more importantly demonstrate the scaling relationship.
Saying ITER will scale Q total from 0.01 to somewhere around 1, and demonstrate that a viable fusion plant is simply a matter of scaling up the design, is accurate.
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> Expecting fusion to be a significant energy source in the next few decades is NOT reasonable.
First prototype should be ready 2025 and it takes 5 years to build it. What is interesting in it is that it is not based on any individual component that has not been demonstrated already. Main reason for why it has not been done before or why ITER is not doing it is the development in creating better magnets.
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Why can't we have both? The amount of money being sought is tiny in the grand scheme of things.
Who know what else we might learn along the way?
Their approach is pretty deceptive, which can be a bit annoying for people who understand a bit about fusion power.
It's kind of like the cult of Musk, where a lot of people believe whatever comes out of Spacex, where despite years of failed promises, they are true believers.
When scientists try to generate fans like a religion, it's really uncomfortable.
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The fine article was getting long so I didn't read the entire thing, it appeared to be aiming for word count over informing and entertaining. I did get to the part where they claimed a government fusion project lost funding for no clearly stated reason. The reason was that it was duplicating work at ITER, and if someone got to ITER goal before ITER then that would make a lot of people look bad.
Governments, or rather politicians that make up these governments, around the world are not taking global warming
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You might be right, but only in the sense that it will be too little, too late at the current level of funding/effort.
You'd think this problem would be important enough for governments to step in and get it sorted, but nope. We need more F35s before we need carbon-free energy.
Fusion power is a real canard. We've been regaled with breathless reports that we are on the verge of limiteless clean power that has no radioactive waste because we can now produce more power out than we can put in.
One of the issues is that no, we aren't. The parasitic power requirements are immense. and are not being taken into account at all.
The next issue is that we produce this for a few moments. Not the full time operating that will need to be used to generate power.
Unless fusion uses magick
Re:Betteridge's law of headlines applies (Score:4, Funny)
I'm convinced that the Slashdot editors now pick these controversial topics on purpose just to drive traffic to the comments session.
Slashdot: Flamebait for Nerds, stuff that really doesn't matter?
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Not only is the answer headline's question "No" but we can elaborate easily without reading the article.
No, because fusion would have to have been available 5-10 years ago for us to have any meaningful chance of slowing down climate change today. Big globe-spanning projects using cutting edge (and currently unproven) technology takes time.
Your choice today is: convert current Fission plants and dedicate them carbon capture. Build more fission plants to offset the ones you just "stole" for the project. And p
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Except that windpower + solar power + batteries is only HALF the price.
Fusion's a bad bet (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a lovely dream, I'd love to see it happen, but practical over-unity fusion may be impossible outside of extremely large spheres of hydrogen collapsing under gravity.
It's always tantalizingly close, but while there is no reason to write it off as outright impossible, there's also no reason to place large bets on it being possible. The apparently likely result of a global 'Manhattan Project' for fusion is the long term employment of fusion researchers and not much else.
We have less elegant but immediately practical solutions to pursue, and that's probably the better bet right now.
Re:Fusion's a bad bet (Score:4)
The apparently likely result of a global 'Manhattan Project' for fusion is the long term employment of fusion researchers and not much else.
Even if the chance is only 1% it seems worth trying. Nine billion/year isn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of governmental things.
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The apparently likely result of a global 'Manhattan Project' for fusion is the long term employment of fusion researchers and not much else.
Even if the chance is only 1% it seems worth trying. Nine billion/year isn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of governmental things.
The problem as I see it is that there are some really fundamental problems that have to be addressed, and should be before we pump billions a year into it. And the researchers are not being terribly forthright about their claims. Because much of what they are claiming is wrong (I'm restraining myself from saying false)
Re:Fusion's a bad bet (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, fusion research and plasma physics and material sciences in that area have made steady progress. They are nowhere close, but they have not stalled either. These things take time. No, not 30 years, more like 100 years. There are too many hard scientific and engineering problems to solve for this to go much faster, and you have to take them one step at a time.
Re: Fusion's a bad bet (Score:2)
Over unity (net energy) fusion outside of gravitational compression is possible and proven. Itâ(TM)s called the hydrogen bomb, ever heard of it? Google it. Educate yourself man. Energy from fusion is possible. Doing it on a small and controlled is what is proving difficult. Ironically, itâ(TM)s getting controlled low net energy output that is difficult. Basically 1,000,000x net energy is output is easy, 2x or 10x is what is difficult.
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Don't tell me to 'educate myself' when I clearly included the word 'practical' which you had to edit out to be so condescending.
Get your own damn education and learn how to read clear English sentences.
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Over unity (net energy) fusion outside of gravitational compression is possible and proven. Itâ(TM)s called the hydrogen bomb, ever heard of it? Google it. Educate yourself man. Energy from fusion is possible. Doing it on a small and controlled is what is proving difficult. Ironically, itâ(TM)s getting controlled low net energy output that is difficult. Basically 1,000,000x net energy is output is easy, 2x or 10x is what is difficult.
I wouldn't exactly call making H-Bombs easy. You are surely right about the difficulty of controlling it. I do believe that what will limit the ability of fusion reactors to produce electricity will be the immense parasitic loads needed to produce, control and cool the reactors. And we haven't been counting those parasitic loads.
This could end up being the most expensive party trick ever.
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"is within the realm of practical?" - Practical enough to support all life on Earth, and theoretically self-sustaining for billions of years. Sure it may kill us all someday, but the fact remains that we wouldn't be here without it.
"I don't wish to get into useless pedantic arguments that add no value" - LOL, that's the funniest comment I've seen today. I'm seriously not trying to attack anyone here. Re-read what you posted and, if you're honest with yourself, you should see that you cast the first pedantic
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Well said.
The cost of a fusion plant will make fission plants look cheap. And we know how the last "power too cheap to meter" worked out.
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Re: Fusion's a bad bet (Score:2)
Given the total investment over the past 60 years into fossil fuels is roughly the same as is invested into fossil fuels every 7-10 data, I'm going to argue that no bet has ever been made on fusion.
I'm also going to argue that you can't prop up fossil fuels at $11 million every minute and call it a resounding success.
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I explain it by calling you an illiterate idiot who didn't understand my post. Unless there's some way a hydrogen bomb is a practical power source that I've missed.
Why don't you tell me about that? I'm sure fusion energy researchers would really appreciate your insight.
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What a load of BS you talk. How do you explain the hydrogen bomb? Let us hear it.
What's to explain. A fission bomb sets off a fusion device, and you gets a first class kaboom.
Other than the work to make sure the kaboom happens, when it does, there's no more control of it. Superduper destructive.
That process doesn't work too well when you're trying to generate electrical power.
Car's will need batteries to run as well power pla (Score:2)
Car's will need batteries to run as well power plants to power the gird needed to fill them up.
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Need.... no. But how else are you going to hold your beer and your flashlight with a single hand?
https://www.amazon.com/NEBO-Gl... [amazon.com]
Re: Car's will need batteries to run as well power (Score:2)
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Need.... no. But how else are you going to hold your beer and your flashlight with a single hand?
https://www.amazon.com/NEBO-Gl... [amazon.com]
Thank you for the link sir! You are doing the lord's work. ;^)
Re: Car's will need batteries to run as well power (Score:3, Funny)
What disadvantages? (Score:5, Insightful)
Conventional nuclear power has extremely well-known disadvantages.
Older designs have issues...which are well known and easy to manage. Newer designed have fewer downsides, but they are still well known and easy to manage.
What's not to like about "conventional nuclear power"? It's more reliable than solar/wind, produces enough to be a reasonable replacement candidate for gas and coal.
This, incidentally, is why I have a hard time taking environmentalists seriously. They have solutions to problems, they just don't like them. Almost as if they're more interested in there BEING a problem than solving it.
Re:What disadvantages? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's not to like about "conventional nuclear power"?
The decades of delays and massive cost overruns.
When Vogtle is finally finished, it will produce power for four times the cost of wind turbines. Hinkley Point is an even bigger debacle.
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Genuinely curious - how much of that cost and delay is due to environmentalist resistance and excessive permitting/studies, etc required by antinuclear legislators?
Put another way, if someone were to build a natgas plant and a nuke plant, how much MORE would the certification/planning/approval of that nuke plant be?
Genuine question.
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But it will produce power when sun does not shine and wind does not blow. That is a great advantage.
That is what local diesel generators are for.
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Being first is expensive. The examples you gave are first-of-a-kind or first-in-nation
Hogwash. Vogtle and Hinkley are standard PWRs like we have been building for 70 years.
Vogtle is an AP1000. Hinkley is an EPR. These are standard designs that were supposed to dramatically lower costs.
It is only in hindsight that the nuclear fanbois are saying, "Well, we expected these to be total economic disasters. But the next one will work. We promise."
Cost (Score:3)
Nobody wants to spend tens of billions of dollars on a nuclear plant that still needs government subsidies to stay above the red. Look at the cost for Watts Bar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] over $12 billion!
Re: Cost (Score:2)
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What if coal, and later natural gas, became very expensive to run due to carbon taxes, or the cost of carbon capture? Would that change the calculus, do you think?
That does change things. It will means people will vote to remove the carbon taxes. If this is a nation that does not respect the vote of the public then expect a more violent means to remove the taxes.
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The main problem with conventional nuclear power is economics. If someone were to *give* you a brand new nuclear plant for free you could easily operate it at a profit, but if you count the cost of building it, especially the time cost of money for the decade or more your investment money is tied up, it's close to impossible for a new nuclear project to pay for itself.
The reason Texas has become a nationwide leader in renewable energy isn't environmentalism, it's economics; you can break ground on a wind f
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The biggest problem is cost. Much of that cost is driven by politics and regulation. As much as I'd love to see a resurgence in nuclear power, western politics is probably not going to make it possible on a meaningful timeline. Similar NIMBYing is going to make it hard to build long-distance (possibly including intercontinental!) transmission that will make renewables viable without huge amounts of storage.
At this point it seems more likely that local batteries and a more fragmented grid fed by wind and sol
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Both major political parties have, at least on their publicly available platform documents, expressed support for nuclear fission power. There may be NIMBY problems in some states but not all. We will see more nuclear power plants in the USA soon enough. More likely than solar and wind because those have NIMBY issues too.
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This, incidentally, is why I have a hard time taking environmentalists seriously. They have solutions to problems, they just don't like them. Almost as if they're more interested in there BEING a problem than solving it.
Same here. Climate change is ostensibly a problem, but nuclear power is for them as big or bigger a problem.
That makes them both pretty equally small problems in the grand scheme of things.
Which "environmentalists" are you fabricating? (Score:2)
This, incidentally, is why I have a hard time taking environmentalists seriously. They have solutions to problems, they just don't like them. Almost as if they're more interested in there BEING a problem than solving it.
Which environmentalists are you referring to? What are their roles in gov or infrastructure planning?
I don't give a shit about what mentally disturbed randos on Twitter say in the name of environmentalism or what people said 30 years ago. What influential environmentalists are advocating absolutely no nuclear under any situation?
Nuclear makes a lot of sense and if you know anything about burning things, you know coal and gas are too harmful to not consider nuclear alternatives, particularly under ca
I've heard this before (Score:2)
I've heard this before, that all fusion really needs is proper funding.
Not even the sort of funding that built the atomic bomb factories in the 1950s or the funding that went to the moon. Just "a few F35s" level of funding. To solve the biggest single problem we have right now. Why can't it be done?
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I've heard this before, that all fusion really needs is proper funding.
The NIF at Lawrence Livermore was supposed to cost $1 billion. It ended up costing $4 billion. That's *only* counting construction costs, and not the prototype systems that came before. Remember the "laser lab" in TRON? That was the NIF prototype (the building, not the in-movie laser, of course.) It never achieved energy-positive fusion.
So, how much *more* money is needed?
Re: I've heard this before (Score:2)
$4 billion is how much fossil fuels receive in subsidies every 6 hours.
First, that shows just how absolutely nothing $4 billion really is in the energy sector.
Second, it tells us that if we required fossil fuels to pay for themselves for a week or two, there'd be enough to double the total ever spent on fusion.
Which, given how close the Chinese are to cracking the problem, should be more than sufficient to nail it completely. Without giving the Chinese total world domination over the power sector.
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$4 billion is how much fossil fuels receive in subsidies every 6 hours.
Sure, if you are talking about *all* fossil fuels. Fusion reactors are, pretty much, going to replace coal fired power plants. Coal only gets about 20% of all subsidies. How much you count as a subsidy depends on what you consider a subsidy. Coal companies benefit from tax breaks that cover the entire energy and manufacturing sectors. You could argue they shouldn't be getting them, but then, you could argue that nobody should be getting them.
First, that shows just how absolutely nothing $4 billion really is in the energy sector.
It's still a lot of money. There is a *lot* of overhead. The fossi
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I've heard this before, that all fusion really needs is proper funding.
I never heard that. You must have been credulous of random people, or journalists.
What I've always heard is that it is multiple generations of technology away from being commercialized, that the current generation of technology is successful, and that the next generation past what is currently being constructed is usually 10-30 years away.
You'll have idiots in the thread who thought, 20 years ago, that they were being promised fusion power to their homes in 10 years, when at that same historical moment ther
My magical rock has as good a chance (Score:3, Insightful)
Right now my magical rock(*) has as good a chance of stopping climate change as fusion does.
Ask me again when there is an actual net positive power generation fusion plant that can readily be implemented for a realistic price.
----
(*) On the other hand, my magical rock does a great job of keeping tigers away.
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Right now my magical rock(*) has as good a chance of stopping climate change as fusion does.
That's what the article summary says, yes.
It also gives reasons why. I assume you read that part as well as just the headline.
Oh, wait...
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Re: My magical rock has as good a chance (Score:2)
Fossil fuels are subsidised to the tune of $11 million per minute. So, let's assume you call that a reasonable price.
10 days of such subsidies would equal the sum total all nations combined have ever spent on fusion research.
Since research is always the expensive part, and you're calling $11 million a minute reasonable, it's reasonable to conclude that if we divert 10 days of subsidies to fusion each year, fusion is still well inside what you've called reasonable.
On the other hand, it's likely to be cracked
Best case scenario (Score:3, Interesting)
The best case scenario for fusion is that we find a way to make something that costs about as much as a traditional fossil plant. That would be zero-carbon. Great.
Why is that the best case? Consider the alternatives:
1. We discover really cheap fusion. "Too cheap to meter" becomes reality. Fools that we are, we switch from heating the Earth via the greenhouse effect to heating it by doing stupid things like heating the roads in Winter to save on snow removal.
2. The real nightmare scenario. We don't just get over-unity. We get fantastic, cheap over-unity and it's easy to make the device. Why is this bad? Consider the status quo. Before anybody can make a fusion bomb, they need to make a fission bomb. Making a fission bomb requires enriched uranium which is such a huge industrial process that even a country like Iran or a really locked-down country like North Korea can't do it without attracting a lot of attention. Then once they have a fission bomb they could use them as triggers for fusion bombs, although for small states just having fission bombs is probably bad enough.
So now what happens if nuclear trigger suddenly become cheap and easy? Anybody who can refine Deuterium (a much easier process) can build a fusion bomb as easily as they can build the trigger.
The civilization-ending scenario is the one where cheap, easy fusion triggers are discovered and the plans are leaked so people like ISIS have them. If it exists now, it's got to be one of the most heavily guarded secrets; but science is science. It can't stay secret forever... if it's possible. I worry about it more than an asteroid strike.
Re: Best case scenario (Score:2)
If we were to achive that super cheap energy those problems go away. Desalination becomes affordable, alleviating water scarcity for billions, food distribution becomes affordable at massive scales. If we satisfy those basic needs. for the entire planet aggrssion becomes counter productive. We can finally start working together.
Re: Best case scenario (Score:2)
Wtf are you on about? Lol! Everything in our current societal setup is based around access to resources! Once the value of that goes to zero things change. Try thinking a bit.
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1. We discover really cheap fusion. "Too cheap to meter" becomes reality. Fools that we are, we switch from heating the Earth via the greenhouse effect to heating it by doing stupid things like heating the roads in Winter to save on snow removal.
Would this be such a bad idea considering that the current options are chemicals that destroy our environment and vehicles, or ridiculously inefficient fossil-fueled methods of heating the road surface? Causing global warming through pure waste heat production would be many orders of magnitude more difficult than heating it through GHG emissions. If we switch to EVs that that turn <5% of their input energy into waste heat rather than ~65% as ICEs do, that will greatly reduce waste heat production as well
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So now what happens if nuclear trigger suddenly become cheap and easy? Anybody who can refine Deuterium (a much easier process) can build a fusion bomb as easily as they can build the trigger.
This is a major stretch (and yes I've seen "Final Exam" https://theouterlimits.fandom.com/wiki/Final_Exam [fandom.com]). You don't just need a fusion trigger (which is by everything we've seen, going to be a device the size of ... well ... a power plant, not exactly something you can slip into a briefcase or a Toyota truck) - you need a fusion trigger that can fuse a LARGE amount of fuel, very quickly, before it blows itself apart and the reaction stops. Nobody is working on that problem - they are trying to create devi
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Probably not. If we cut our emissions sufficiently the earth will catch up and sequester the carbon (just like it did the first time). There are a lot of natural ways this happens. Not least of which is that the higher the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere th
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An Amazingly Accurate Prediction! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm struck by the accuracy of the 1976 prediction of how soon fusion would be developed.
"In 1976, the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration published a study predicting how quickly nuclear fusion could become a reality, depending on how much money was invested in the field. For around nine billion a year in today's dollars -- described as the "Maximum Effective Effort" -- it projected reaching fusion energy by 1990. The scale descended to about a billion dollars a year, which the study projected would lead to "Fusion Never." "And that's about what's been spent," the British physicist Steven Cowley told me. "Pretty close to the maximum amount you could spend in order to never get there."
Wow. Right on the mark.
Solar is nuclear fusion power for all. (Score:2)
If you get solar power, then you are getting nuclear fusion power. Just be sure you are collecting in excess and store the remaining in some other energy storage form for use when the earth is just kinda blocking the fusion power from reaching you.
Worth thinking through (Score:3, Interesting)
It's worth thinking through what it would mean to have relatively abundant and cheap energy.
No more water crises: now we can desalinate and transport water anyplace it's needed.
A LOT less infant mortality, because no more need to drink from polluted streams and rivers and lakes. Cheap energy means cheaply purified water.
No more energy/fuel crises. Use cheap electricity to convert CO2 to liquid fuels using processes that aren't economical today, but would be in the presence of sufficiently cheap electricity. Carbon-neutral as a bonus.
Semi-automated and very inexpensive public and private transport, at least as compared to now. Safer as well.
Huge reduction in absolute and relative poverty since energy costs are a huge burden for the poor, both directly, and indirectly in the form of being a large component of the costs of about everything.
Considerably less pollution, and an end to any possibility of human contribution to climate change because as noted above everything can be made, at worst, carbon-neutral.
Cheap energy would be awesome for almost all of us.
Although it may not be as awesome from the perspective of those who use access to energy as a means to control the rest of us.
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Re: Worth thinking through (Score:2)
We need to increase fusion energy research budgets 10x, minimum.
Towards the end. (Score:2)
Limitless clean energy to support a society of bad habits.
What if we spent the same on solar and wind? (Score:3, Interesting)
What if we spent the ITER budget ($45-$65bil) installing solar on every house in the US and wind turbines in every place practical? Energy problem solved. The real problem is congressmen, who have a salary of $174K/yr, but somehow have anet worth of $315mil. Corporate and industry interests are blocking progress. We need extreme measures to audit all government officials and strict term limits. There is no way we will make any progress that is good for the people, until we clean house.
Re:What if we spent the same on solar and wind? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not gonna go very far in putting in panels everywhere practical, and doesn't even touch factories or businesses.
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There is no way we will make any progress that is good for the people, until we clean house.
I believe "house" needs to be capitalized in this context, and don't forget Senate. We need to clean House and clean Senate. How it is that Pelosi is still Speaker of the House? She's been there too long, and so have many other members of Congress.
Re: What if we spent the same on solar and wind? (Score:5, Informative)
Where did you get that 315 million number from? Congressmen net worth, median, is 1 million dollars. Given many of them are old, it is not unreasonable for someone who has been making six figures for decades to be worth 1 million. I mean, usually people who run and win congressional races are already either wealthy or successful in careers before running.
Re: What if we spent the same on solar and wind? (Score:2)
Only a small percent of that 45 billion number, if even true, is US contribution. Why should Europe, China, Russia, Korea, India, Japan, and others pay for your solar? I do not know how you throw around numbers like that with zero research or context.
Won't work logistically. (Score:3)
The production capacity can't support it.
Fossil Fuel Barons Enjoying Their Pyrrhic Victory (Score:2)
Does anyone doubt that all governments actually report to wealthy, private interests?
No, obviously not (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if we had plans to build a perfect Fusion plant right now, it would still take several years to long to build it. Building such huge things like Nuclear power plants takes at least a decade.
BTW we already have the technology to do something against the climate catastrophe. We have solar, we have wind, we have ways to increase efficiency in areas like transport. This is not a question of technology. This is a question of political will.
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BTW that doesn't mean that we shouldn't research that area. The science and technology behind such plants is primarily the science and technology of managing plasma. There are many areas which will benefit of the side products of that research. Even if we never reach a productive Fusion plant, we will have learned so many things on the way.
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BTW we already have the technology to do something against the climate catastrophe. We have solar, we have wind, we have ways to increase efficiency in areas like transport.
You forgot natural gas. Solar and wind are pretty much useless without natural gas.
"wouldn't be too pricey" (Score:2)
And how the fuck does one know THIS?
You're talking about a technology that doesn't currently exist as a stable end product.
So how can you price out something that doesn't exist?
Time? (Score:2)
Even if this pipe dream could come to some sort of fruition, that could revolutionise the energy market, what time scale are we looking at before it is too late?
We are assured by the very conservative IPCC report, that we have at best, a decade to end up with a bad situation, rather than a terminal one.
My favourite analogy, is we have the chance to "belly land" rather than "nose dive" our collective aircraft into the ground.
I guess, at best, if it happens that nuclear fusion becomes a possibility in the nex
Problem is the Militlary (Score:4, Insightful)
There are lots of far safer ways to do nuclear power that we do not use - for one reason: They do not create nuclear bombs. Current nuclear power plants are as much about creating weapons grade material as it is about creating power.
If we switch to thorium reactors, they are safer but do not create nuclear bombs.
If we switch to sealed micro-reactors, they can be scattered around a city creating no more danger in any one neighborhood than industrial chemical plants, but they do not create nuclear bombs.
Personally I used to want the thorium salt based reactors to be built, but I have come around to the sealed micro-reactors. Even should things go wrong, they are too small to create any real problems and the whole thing can be treated as nuclear waste rather than trying to fix it.
Not happening (Score:2)
There are several milestones in fusion development;
Working at all.
Produces more energy than it consumes.
Produces more energy that can be captured and turned into useful energy than it consumes.
Runs for a reasonable amount of time.
Produces energy cheaper than (or at least close to as cheap as) the next cheapest alternative.
Many would argue that we haven't even done "Produces more energy than it consumes" yet.
We're so far from "cheaper than the alternatives" that it's
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And given that it currently takes something the size of a building, it's quite possible we'll never get there.
I remember being quite impressed with the work done on the Polywell Fusor. This was started long ago by Dr. Robert Bussard and funded by the US Navy under their nuclear propulsion program. Dr. Bussard did some public speaking events to get public or private funding since it appeared the Navy would not be able to continue funding at the needed levels for political reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I was impressed by some numbers he gave on the size of the reactors they built, the power output they g
, they have ..a fusion device in Provenece (Score:2)
I sure hope not... too centralized (Score:2)
Solar and wind, solar especially, both have potential for decentralizing the system. Fusion does not. This period of transition is a golden opportunity for everyone to become less dependent on our failing infrastructure. It is a sick thing that we still have power outages of a week and more in major metropolitan areas 100ish years into the onset of the electrical age. Solar+battery will keep coming down and within a couple of decades will cost so little that it will be a no-brainer for homeowners to dump th
When it comes to fusion (Score:3)
Less has been spent on fusion in total over the past 60 years than is spent on fossil fuel subsidies each year.
Less isn't more. Fusion research is stymied by lack of cold, hard cash. JET may have to close. ITER is running only a fraction of planned projects.
If you gave 10 days of fossil fuel subsidies over to the fusion crowd each year, fossil fuels would barely notice.
Fusion, on the other hand, would be getting about as much each year as they've ever received up until now in total.
Then there's the problems of national security paranoia. The Chinese are close to fusion, the Europeans are next closest, but the Americans restrict the selling of highly advanced technology to either.
Another reason EU's fusion research is in second place is because American politicians preferred to divert money from joint ventures.
What the money was spent on is unclear, but the US' supercollider was abandoned when more money was spent on potted plants than on the accelerator itself.
Ten days worth of subsidies plus genuine international collaboration (including from Britain, who need to scrap all restrictions on visiting scientists and academics) would see fusion solved.
I am convinced, at this point, that politicians are too heavily invested in fossil fuels to want that to happen.
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There will not be fusion.
There will be fusion. That is if the human race can keep its industrial base going. Fusion has made steady progress for the past decades. However, fusion would be too late for a real impact on climate change even if there was a working prototype today. As it is, that working prototype is probably 30-50 years in the future, maybe more. And after that it needs at least 20 more years for general availability of a proven designs, probably more. And then another 10-30 years to build enough installations. So call
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There will not be fusion.
There will be fusion.
Guys, let's all get together on this... like our minds all together as one, like ... -- damn, can't think of a word/saying for it ... :-)
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There is fusion.
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There is fusion.
There is not fusion generated power, it is not clean, it is not limitless, and the parasitic power requirements may make it impossible to ever produce more power out than in.
It's a group of researchers acting like used car salesmen. And a starry eyed public who is ready to believe whatever they spout.
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That nicely sums it up.
The researchers are doing their job pretty well and _they_ know this is a very long-term activity. They also strongly expect that the chances of getting things working eventually are actually pretty good and that the payoff will be very likely be worth it. Whether it will take 50 years, 100 years or longer, they do not know. But even if it takes 200 years, it will be worth it. Current installations are _all_ aimed at understanding the physics better, there is not a single actually aim
Linear correlation (Score:2)
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Once upon a time the earth didn't even exist. Checkmate!
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Why not adjust human population ?
Uh huh. This is where we are now.