I’m pessimistic this will ever be able to work. Doesn’t fusion require tremendous pressure that’s equivalent to the Sun’s gravity? How on Earth are we going to be able to generate such a pressure?
Not a nuclear physicist, but IIRC sustainable fusion requires three factors: time, pressure, temperature. So far, you can basically choose two of them at a time, and much research goes into having all three at the same time.
Needless to say, but it also requires loooooots of related research, eg materials to handle the magnetic flux, temperature, etc etc etc.
Time has really been the killer. It’s been well understood since the beginning (a brief 60 years ago) how to make plasma hotter and more dense. We’ve learned about limits to pushing these two, but at the end of the day if confinement time was infinity then fusion would be trivial. The thing is even 10^-6 Torr conductive particles squeezed by a 1 Tesla field still like to drift outward and hit the wall. I cannot, in short form, explain how complicated this problem is. However there are no apparent show stoppers.
I think we can only really do 1 of them, temperature.
Pressures are no-where near the core of the sun (300 billion bar), nor are confinement times (years).
Which is why we use D-T fusion, which is not at all the same as the "clean, natural hydrogen fusion" in the sun. That whole "clean energy, like the sun" argument is fake.
We already are. Instead of gravity, magnetic fields are used to compress hot plasma and cause it to reach very high temperature levels to allow fusion.
Temperature is basically atomic/molecular movement and the more energetic the movement the more likely that crashing nuclei will react and fuse.
There are currently two major magnetic field designs:
- Tokamak, such as ITER [1]
- Stellerator, such as Wendelstein-7X [2]
Generating the necessary heat and pressure is already possible. The problem is keeping the whole process stable over long periods while getting more usable energy out of the fusion than is needed to maintain it, if I remember correctly the experiments so far had extremely short durations.
Apparently Iter was designed to make sure the energy balance works out, but we'll see.
It's been made to work, as I recall from a visit to Culham, the problem is keeping it there. We can 'do fusion' briefly, and more expensively than the value of the energy produced.
But still a question of if it will make financial sense. Assuming this generates heat and drives a steam turbine, solar, wind and battery is likely to be cheaper than just the steam turbine and the transmission costs, never mind the fusion bit.
Fusion has the same advantages as fission but the disadvantages are reduced to a minuscule amount.
CO2-neutral, stable energy generation independent of weather, season, time... with amounts large and stable enough to be independent of storage solution.
Wind and solar need to be regulated because intensity varies. They are location dependent (German North produces a lot of wind, but there's no feasible way to bring it to the South...)
> German North produces a lot of wind, but there's no feasible way to bring it to the South...
Technically feasible or politically feasible? There's a lot of NIMBYism around building new high-capacity power transmission lines in Germany (e.g., Suedlink, Südostlink).
I disagree. The biggest (technical) disadvantage of fission is the creation and use of radioactive materials.
Fusion solves this problem in large part because it uses and produces significantly less radioactive materials... materials that wouldn’t count as a security concern.
Fusion reactors turn themselves into radioactive waste. Neutron radiation is inherent to nuclear fusion and when previously stable non-radioactive substances are subjected to neutron radiation, they may absorb some of those neutrons and become radioactive. (This is called neutron activation.) Some materials are less prone to this than others and that would be considered during the construction of a production fusion reactor, but even so components of the reactor would likely become so radioactive that the only way to perform maintenance on the reactor would be robotics. And when the reactor eventually needs to be decommissioned, it needs to be treated accordingly.
This talk from the MIT fusion lab lays out some approaches they have for solving problems in current fusion reactor design, in particular dealing with the radiation problem in a cost-effective manner.
https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4
The ARC reactor is still unacceptably large and expensive. Its volumetric power density is still a factor of 40 worse than a PWR primary reactor vessel.
This has recently been upgraded to about four times capacity.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbekreuzung_2
(sorry for tze german, didn't find any english wiki, this are the largest masts in Europe, they have to be, otherwise
the large freight ships won't make it into the harbour of Hamburg)
Assorted videos and press releases from a few years before, directly related to the preparation of surrounding infrastructure, their upgrading, and moving heavy transformers around:
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU2OUtETD7I
(8 Minutes, for rail nerds only, crossing a bridge in town during normal operations with modern diesel-hydraulic switcher loco, bridge making funky sounds because of weight.)
[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCpEw7wRgN4
(Removal of 'old' transformer from substation for shipping and reuse in another substation for the grid of Norderstedt & Hamburg, for transport nerds only, FF)
That's indeed a big if, but even if it ends up being cheaper to use solar for most applications I can imagine fusion power would be a nice thing to have locally around major production centres where the power demand is much higher.
Solar is great for decentralized grids where one's neighbour basically buys excess power from you, but transferring gigawatts of power from a large amount of solar panels to something like a major industrial area /might/ be trickier.
There is no reason to think such cost decline will apply to fusion reactors. Many of the parts in the system are mature (like, all the non nuclear parts like turbines.)
I'm hopeful that the research might bear fruit at some point, so I am glad to see it continue. We definitely shouldn't put all eggs in one basket, though.
We don't have a finished design yet, so who knows what parts are needed (yeah, a turbine is a given, but still...)?
There is value in having the means to generate power independent of environmental factors (sun, wind). A stated goal in the article is also to build small-scale fusion reactors, which would reduce transmission costs. Wind power and non-residential solar power also need similar transmission equipment because you can't have them in the middle of a city. The price of renewable power generation is reaching extremely favourable levels even now, but I'm not sure how realistic it is to expect transmission costs to decrease as far as you seem to expect.
I'm not convinced we'll see a significant amount of fusion power in electricity grids, but for specialised applications, it would make a lot of sense (e.g., powering ships, or a hypothetical Mars colony that would like to keep the lights on during a dust storm). Building such limited numbers will, of course, do nothing to get the price of fusion power down. Maybe subsidies will be able to overcome the cost dilemma posed by this, but there's no clear motivation for providing them if the power sources replaced by fusion would already be majority-renewable.
The power density of even these putative "small" reactors would still be grossly inferior to fission reactors. So using them in space limited applications like subs would make no sense at all.
I think if you graphed environmentalist support of nuclear, you'd see it rise and then fall as renewables performed better and better. 10 years ago it made some kind of sense to cover our bets but renewables and storage have got so much better, while fusion continues to drag on and fission continues to have cost issues that I'm not aware of many prominent environmentalists that are still on board with it in anything other than a small complementary role to renewables.
I do regularly see articles from that one nuclear proponent who tries to get Street cred by claiming to be an environmentalist while attacking basically all other environmentalists as communists that want to return to the stone age and competing renewables as a hoax/environmental disaster/communist plot. But he seems a bit extreme.
So much this. The fusion projects are all huge and expensive. Compare this with the relative ease with which viable fission reactors were made. The first useful (designed for plutonium production, but could produce power) reactor took only a year:
It didn't take very long for people to tickle the dragon either. Of all the plasma confinement research devices made I have not heard of a single person even getting a shock, let alone an X-ray dose. Fission is an inherently dangerous process to work with.
There are several companies working on fusion designs that can capture electricity directly, such as dense plasma focus, and some of these devices fit inside a shed. If successful, they could be used for trains, ships, spacecraft, as well as base power. Personally, I wish the huge tokamak and laser designs would get less funding because I also question their economics.
Total world estimated Be resource would make ARC reactors capable of supplying just 1% of current world primary energy demand (using the USGS estimate of 100,000 tonnes.)
Nuclear Fusion has a really interesting history. There's a good book called A Piece of the Sun I highly recommend to anyone interested in the subject. I was surprised on just how much money has been spent by so many countries on research, how different designs have evolved and just how much politics has influenced its development.
What was the number they stated? I’ve heard “60 billion USD” before, which was spent by many countries over 60 years. In reality this seems like a small cost compared to something like the Manhattan Project, which was 23 billion USD spent over 5 years by one country.
A 25 year availability of a GWe plant (the conventional first gen plants that have the fewest engineering hurdles remaining) that sells all electricity it makes generates 22 billion USD in revenue.
$60 billion USD is probably less than my home city of Houston has spent on freeways. There was recently talk of a $7 billion plan to widen I-45 north because people who want to live nowhere near Houston want to get here slightly faster for work.
Looking through the history of technology the same could have been said at one time for the automobile, aviation, genetic engineering, etc. The timescale during which nuclear fusion has been pursued is relatively short and declaring it a dead end at this early stage is premature.
Automobiles required a suitable fuel and a lightweight powerplant capable of highly dynamic power output. The first powered carriages date to the early 19th century, on rails, though coal and steam were not responsive, dynamic, or efficient. Good for railroads, not for untracked vehicles (not that this wasn't tried).
Discovery and refinement of petroleum (1835 - 1865), creation of the reciprocating engine (Otto, Deisel, 1860s - 1880s), suitable tyres (vulcanised rubber, 1844), and high-quality steelmaking (Bessemer process, 1856 - 1860s). With the basic parts together, the first automobiles appeared in the 1880s, but further expansion required both mass-production assembly-line practices (Ford, 1901), and expanded and reliable fuel supplies (major oilfield discoveries including Spindletop, 1901, Lakeview, 1910, and East Texas -- "Pappy" Joiner's "Daisy Bradford No. 3", 1930). Well into the 1930s, it wasn't entirely clear that petroleum or petrol would be the fuels of choice, with other petroleum distilates (NGLs, condensate, and deisel) and ethanol among contenders.
Once the automobile was developed, a period of rapid innovation and patent filing followed ... and largely tapered off by the 1930s. There's been incremental improvement since. Even in areas such as safety, mortality per billion passenger miles has improved at a remarkably constant rate of halving about every two decades, since the 1920s (the rate was twice that in the decade 1910-1920).
Heavier-than-air craft were also largely dependent on the same factors: high power-to-weight powerplants, a high energy-density fuel, and a basic knowledge of aeronautics. Development of aircraft trailed automobiles only slightly, with similar trends of patent filings. The DC-3, described as a perfect aircraft design in Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth saw first flight in 1935, only 29 years after the Wrights on first first flight. It remains in active commercial use.
Gordon on the DC-3:
The very aircraft, the “Flagship Detroit,” that operated the first American flight from Chicago to New York is owned by the Flagship Detroit Foundation and often flies around the country to visit air shows. DC-3s are used everywhere because they are cheap; one can be purchased for $100,000. Their popularity eight decades after the first flight demonstrates that the DC-3 is the best-designed aircraft in aviation history. Its ruggedness is legendary; a common saying among pilots is that “the only replacement for a DC-3 is another DC-3.”
Aircraft designed in the 1950s, and built in the 1960s, not only still fly, but serve as the backbone of strategic military bombing capabilities of the United States, in the form of the B-52, specific airframes of which will continue in combat missions through the 2040s if not beyond, and hold status as the fastest operational manned aircraft, in the form of the SR-71.
That is: there are inventions for which, once the prerequisite requirements are met, rapidly emerge and attain levels of maximum development.
DNA's existence was suggested by Darwin, the basic mechanics of genetics by Mendel, its structure by Watson and Crick, based on the work of others including Rosalind Franklin, and relying largely on the insights of X-ray crystallography. Direct manipulation and reading of DNA was achieved in the 1970s through enzymatic processes, though not well-developed for several decades further -- the problem is a fundamentally difficult one. Even now, the benefits of direct genetic manipulation are scant, another point covered by Gorden, in his general assessment of medical advances, or largely lack thereof since the 1970s. Still, at least there's been demonstrable progress.
Nah, we have a clear timeline today. Right now, we have fusion reactors that consume more power than they produce. Now we're developing ITER, which will produce more power than it consumes, but will only run for 20 seconds at a time. Once that's complete, we will move on to DEMO, which will continuously produce as much power as a small power plant. After that, projected to be after 2050, there will be PROTO, which should be the reference model for worldwide mass produced fusion power plants.
"This scenario assumes that ITER will deliver on the promise of tokamak-based fusion. That isn’t guaranteed. Magnetic confinement fusion remains a scientific research problem rather than an engineering problem, and the engineering issues have barely been touched."
Quoted from the first link on your PROTO wikipedia page:
Neither are demonized. With fission, the concerns are lower, but still there will be radioctive waste which eventually has to be disposed of, but it is much less of a problem than with fission reactors. Still, fusion has not only to be shown to work at all but then will have to show that it is price-competetive to reneweables.
You know, we could instead revisit the concept we have of growth. Instead of growing for the sake of it, like a tumor, we could define what kind of growth we want and in what direction, and see if it's compatible with our resources. Do we really need growth or do we need happiness? Once we scientifically solved major health issues does it really make sense to keep growing indefinitely? Couldn't we just put a limit to our population and enjoy our fully automated utopia?
The population of Europe is already declining and other continents are likely to follow as their standard of living increases. Average fertiliy across the world has been in decline for about 50 years now and has halved over this period [1]. If the trend continues we will simply run out of people and go extinct.
First of all, it's not 7 billions sentients but rather a handful of government. Furthermore, humanity at the moment already agrees blindly that the only way forward is reckless growth, if we all managed to agree on something without even knowing why, perhaps we can also agree on something more rational.
Which are mostly democracies, or sort of. China, Russia and North Korea apart, every big population center is governed in a way or another threw a certain form of consensus.
> humanity at the moment already agrees blindly that the only way forward is reckless growth
Again you talk as if humans were a single body. You're not agreeing blindly on 'reckless growth', as far as I can tell, and you're far from being alone in that case.
Humanity speaking and thinking as one is just a dream (you're free to dream, thought!).
> we could define what kind of growth we want and in what direction
The best proposal so far is growth with speed of light in all directions.
> Do we really need growth or do we need happiness?
What about the people who are not happy when our knowledge about world, and the number of populated planets does not grow or does not grow fast enough?
> Once we scientifically solved major health issues
The two greatest health issues are senescence and limited capability of learning new things, when we solve those we'll need even more people to create art so that we don't get bored, and to develop new technologies so that we do not die when sun explodes in couple of billion years.
You didn't get what I mean. We need to foster a culture that prevents reckless growth by discouraging having more than n children per family. I'm talking cultural peer pressure, not imposition. You can have as many children as you want (if you so selfishly want to behave), the important is that the majority of the population understands that they're not doing a favor to their fellow humans by having more than n children.
The viable technological path is using less energy.
It's not just about CO2: a high energy society is a society that will hit other ecological limits.
I would add that centralized power production is an issue by itself, as it seems difficult now to avoid social and political instability. So unless we develop small scale fusion, which does not seem ideal (lots of disseminated nuclear waste in the form of activated reactor materials), fusion is not ideal.
Unfortunately just using less energy will not happen by asking nicely, and as most do not want that, it will not happen. Instead we should focus on the things that are achievable, like increasing efficiency.
>fusion is not ideal.
Why does it have to be ideal? It should be sufficient. Anything is better than burning coal.
Fission isn't demonized. There are valid concerns with using fission energy concerning general risk of contamination after an accident, waste disposal and finally that new plants are too expensive to build so it is plainly too expensive. Having fusion working would be a big benefit, but as there is no production-ready technology, so reneweables are our only hope in the fight against climate change.
Why? I know people always mention billions of investment "until we have fusion". But those things cannot be reliably predicted, guesses are all pretty wild.
In terms of human working time, £200M roughly pays for 1000 person years of work, so it's certainly more than "a drop of water". Yes, I know there's more than salaries and research tools and material are expensive in this case. But still, imagine 50 people just working on theory and cheap experiments for 20 years; they could achieve a lot.
$200M is laughable - as is the 20 year plan. I recently reread Summa Technologicae by Stanislaw Lem. Written in 1961, it also guessed that fusion will be there 20 years in the future - meaning 1981 :)
>Building a conventional fission plant can easily cost $10B. $200M is laughable
The budget for ITER is 20b. The UK is only pitching in 200m. Other countries are pitching in the rest. The USA already pitched in $1b for example. The article only mentioned the UK because it was written for UK readers.
Hopefully this means that we’ll never achieve nuclear fusion in a practical way. As far as I can understand this will practically create energy at close-to-nothing prices, which while it will certainly solve some of our today’s issues (burning fossils is quite bad) at the same time it will also create a lot other bigger issues. For example, if you make it energy-free (i.e. price-free) to cut trees and build highways wherever you want I’m pretty sure the Amazon rain-forest will disappear a lot faster compared to what’s happening now.
Great, then it won’t happen (probably I had mistaken it with something else). Everything that makes energy less expensive and/or more easily available creates lots and lots of bad externalities. It’s time we stop believing that technology and technologic advancement will take us out of this mess, it is technology that threw us under the bus in the first place.
AFAIK the basic science has advanced enough that cheap experiments are not the best way forward. We basically know that designs like ITER work if you build them sufficiently large. There are still some engineering hurdles to be taken, and there might be better designs that can be built cheaper (e.g. Stellarators?), but we're at the stage where we need to build big machines if we want to progress rapidly.
The limiting factor for ITER was the strength of magnetic fields that could be attained from the superconductors available at the time. The promise for ARC/SPARC at MIT is that the field strengths available have recently doubled, and performance goes something like the 4th power of field strength, so a smaller reactor can reach the conditions that only a larger one could have reached when ITER was designed.
These smaller reactors should be cheaper and faster to build.
The limiting factor for high temperature superconductor magnets will likely be the mechanical strength of the structural steel holding the magnets together, not the limitations of the HTS. This is not a bad thing, just that the HTS are so much better than traditional superconductors at handling high magnetic field strength that you now have to optimize for the steel enclosures.
This is actually refreshingly exciting, coming from the usual "interstellar travel is slow and depressingly hard, space elevators are iffy at best, we probably aren't smart enough to build programmable nanotech" we get from most news updates on future tech.
Are suitcase-sized fusion reactors still on the table, or does this just mean smaller-than-a-football-stadium fusactors are probably possible?
You still need a one meter thick blanket of lithium to capture the neutrons from the D-T reaction (and to generate more Tritium) so you are looking at modular 500MW reactors, although locating multiple reactors on the same site makes sense for fueling and maintenance purposes.
200 million Euro would cover the raw material cost of the HTS material of a medium-large (3m major radius) scale reactor.
You still need to work the HTS material into magnets, a vacuum vessel, turbo and mechanical pumps, lots of fittings and mechanical engineering work, gyrotrons and their high voltage supplies and all the engineering that goes with (including wave guides), neutral beam injection, two dozen diagnostic systems, coil power supply system, and all of the work that goes with cryogenics.
Edit: If this would be for a medium scale science machine then you would need divertor and first wall materials, as well as a decent cooling system if you want long pulse operation. If this is a power plant then you can ditch most diagnostics, make everything twice as large, add a breeding layer between the coil cryogenics and the vacuum vessel, add a tritium separation facility ($$$), and add a big ass heat exchange/steam turbine system. ITER is in between these two and is the first time it's ever been done, with all of the diagnostics and full D+T operation caked into the design. It's not surprising it costs 20 billion Euro and even then if it was a power plant it wouldn't be priced out of reasonability (~twice current electric costs). At what point do we say we just need to pay more for our energy and kick fossil fuels?
As an aside, one of the design goals of the Commonwealth Fusion/MIT team was to lower the construction cost of HTS magnets to 100% of the material cost. So something like $100M for the superconducting tapes and another $100M to build them into magnets. Current superconducting magnets cost 10 times the material cost to construct.
Basically this level of funding gives Tokamak Energy the ability to order purchases of HTS tape in bulk and start ramping up to building all their full-scale magnets as they get deliveries over the next 3-5 years.
Edit: I find nothing in the announcement that says this is going towards magnets or HTS material, but this would be a the scale of advance funding for 3 meter radius magnet development.
Further Edit: The numbers are for SPARC which is about a 1.65 meter radius. 3 meters is the smallest size for a power plant, so on the order of $1.2 billion for the magnets assuming no significant decrease in material cost.
'Subsidy' is the wrong term and there isn't 5.2T to just 'divert' out of fossil fuel -- and your linked article goes on to make just that point[1].
[1] and quotes a figure closer to 500billion, globally. Which isn't nothing, but probably also includes places like Venezuala who massively subsidize their domestic consumption.
It is an intentionally misleading term. The first sentence of the IMF study's abstract makes it clear the their 5.2T figure is the difference between market prices and imaginary prices that account for all externalities, including some quant's estimated cost of climate change.
This isn't even one of those situations where their use of the word is technically correct. I've never seen a definition of 'subsidy' that wasn't an out-of-pocket expense paid by governments.
The use of the word subsidy is intended to put the idea into our heads that we're all paying out of pocket via taxes to support the fossil fuels industries. But that is the opposite of the truth. With a few exceptions (the Petro-states) fossil fuel prices aren't artificially lowered by subsidies, but rather are bloated by taxes paid by corporations and by end consumers. Fossil fuel industries fund our governments, our roads and infrastructure.
Scientists with grant proposals who are actually making substantial progress, just not enough to give us fusion in next 10 years. But that is also because the problem is really hard.
Fusion Real Soon Now would mean that we wouldn't need to change our lifestyles to stop global warming. So, the list of those who would, if not make, at least not lose money is nearly infinite.
Ah quasi-omnigeneity. If anyone could explain it I would appreciate it. I know that optimizing for it "minimizes radial drift", as does quasi-helical-symmetry and quasi-axis-symmetry depending on your model for particle drift. I just don't have a grasp of omnigeneity and haven't found an easily consumed explanation for it yet.
Tokamaks are different beasts than stellarators. They have a toroidal current induced by a central solenoid (literally a transformer). There are pros and cons to this. For one, you get a lot of ohmic heating and some focusing benefits from the current. However, there are plasma instabilities and there needs to be electrical feedback systems operating with microseconds of latency. This isn't trivial when dealing with huge currents and voltages at high inductance. Additionally the transformer can only induce current in one direction for a finite time (you cannot ramp current to infinity). No one has figured out how to make tokamaks steady state. The best hope is for runs of a few days and 80% uptime. It's undetermined if this is "good enough".
Stellarators have traditionally lagged tokamaks in terms of Lawson criterion performance, but they've also been less funded because tokamaks have performance advantages. Stellarators are steady state and don't risk the same number of plasma instabilities. Germany is so confident that it's the right approach that they built the largest magnetic confinement device ever to test optimizing for quasi-omnigineity. Stellarators in general are becoming closer to the mainstream approach and given another 5 or 10 years you'll likely hear about them as much as tokamaks (at least in terms of non ITER research).
There is a lot of reading out there on the various types of instabilities, but generally the timescale for these effects are in the microsecond to millisecond range. I think particles move toroidally in the transsonic range, which depends on the temperature (which is a gradient from the core). This would be in the range of 300-1000 m/s in a device with a circumference of a meter or less (for most science machines made so far). I think it only takes a handful or orbits for an instability to grow. It depends on how much abnormal magnetic shear there is. I’m not comfortable saying more.
I can’t edit this post for some reason so I’ll just put my correction here.
I attended a presentation today that, at one point, showed toroidal flow rate over radius in a 1m major radius device. It ranged from 30 to 100 km/s. There are many effects operating at different timescales. Turbulence is among the shorter timescales, making it difficult to simulate and why it is only now the current focus of many researchers.
Even if you just bounce it back to space, that would generate heat on Earth. Whatever we do with that energy will generate entropy. Our economy already produces too much entropy (in the form of pollution and ecosystem destruction, on top of bare heat) for the biosphere to cope with.
But also unlimited cheap power to reduce the heat in the atmosphere, through some kind of worldwide air conditioning. Maybe with unlimited power we can finally control our weather through heating, cooling and redirecting ocean currents and whatnot.
Yeah, but no. Air conditioning and refrigeration produce localised cooling, but an overall heating effect thanks to inefficiencies. Worldwide air conditioning would dump even more waste heat into the atmosphere. Just as trying to cool the kitchen by leaving the freezer door open warms it, trying to cool the atmosphere with worldwide air conditioning will warm it even more.
The gp might have been thinking of more interesting methods of cooling - space sunshades, aerosols, massive creation of artificial snow... (not sure if the latter is a net heat loss)
Or you manage to store it somewhere. Thinking extreme here, we can get massive energy out of nuclear fission, what if we could revert it and put massive energy back into elements to do reverse nuclear fission. Or maybe convert lead into gold. And use it to create fuel to power our space trips.
Burning fuel isn't the only process of modern society that produces heat as a by-product. Lighting (though we're massively more efficient these days) and circuitry (computers and other electronic gadgets) for example. Then you have people running central heating more frequently as energy costs come down or people building less energy efficient housing because it becomes less important to people. I'm sure there are more examples I've not thought of too.
Disclaimer: I also don't agree with the GP's position
Both are correct in this instance (when replying to you I can't recall if it was the first post however I knew it was your parent / my grandparent post).
> Even all the heat generated by appliances and devices in the world combined is actually negligible in examining global warming.
I agree. Like I said, I don't agree with the original conjecture however it is still important to note that if one is only discussing waste heat production then the problem isn't just the generation of electricity. However the problems clean energy addresses are obviously more significantly other, far more hazardous, waste products. Hence why they're called "clean" energy.
It'd be interesting to try to estimate the future energy budget available to cybercoin mining. I sort of expect that at least half of the total has been spent already, and more or less demonstrated that distributed consensus by proof of work is not a great idea, just a neat one.
I know of no way to generate lift in a vacuum using a battery with unlimited power. You still need to eject mass away from you using fuel which is finite.
Outer space is pretty much a nuclear furnace with no gravity, not a very appealing place to go. I haven't heard of an serious solutions to either of those problems.
Global warming isn't caused by dumping heat into the atmosphere. It's caused (very simplified) by changing the planet's properties such that it's thermal equilibrium, the balance between sun's radiation heating it up and radiatively losing heat to space, lies higher. Mankind's waste heat (~10^12 W) is utterly miniscule compared to sun's energy delivered to earth (~10^17 W).
This. Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere is basically the earth's thermostat. The amount of energy coming from the sun is constant. It must be balanced by the thermal radiation leaving the upper atmosphere. But the more CO2 there is, the higher the elevation of that thermal radiation and the higher the surface temperature.
I think that is precisely OP's point: on the long term, solar & friends are the only things that matter. If we get unlimited cheap power, we can only ever use it to generate an 'utterly miniscule' fraction of energy compared to what's available from solar because if you want to add a meaningful contribution to the energy content of the planet, you'll simply cook yourself, not from chemical global warming, but from thermodynamic waste heat.
It doesn't all have to be destructive. We could build fusion powered fully automated tree planters and plant entire forests. CO2 scrubbers, etc. The problem is when the waste heat can't escape into space due to things like greenhouse gases.
I don't begrudge the research, which I think will yield infinitely more benefit than the goal.
But it's necessarily the wrong kind of fusion (D-T, unlike the sun's fusion), and it won't be efficient, or clean, or cheap even when it "works".
The whole endeavor is pie-in-the-sky if you ask me, which reminds me, there is already a fusion reactor quite nearby that runs 24/7/365(.25), for the next few billion years. We should find better ways to harness it.
Do you have any support to the claim that nucleosynthesis is preferred to D-T other than nature shows it working in the high gravity regime? Also do you have any support for the claims of inefficiency or cleanliness? Activated neutron wall materials have half lives in the ranges of days to 15 years, making storage less of an issue.
There is absolutely no reason to think this is true. The sun has the approximate energy density of a dung hill. The idea that nature will cooperate and make break even possible at convenient human scales is ... optimistic. There's basically zero evidence for it.
I'm sorry but that's ridiculous. The sun uses a different fusion reaction. There is plenty of evidence that with other fuels, net power from fusion is feasible on Earth.
In particular, the D-T reaction is especially easy, and tokamaks have well-known scaling laws. The JET reactor in the UK is the only reactor using tritium and has produced 67% of its input power. In 1999 the JT-60 in Japan achieved results with D-D fuel that would have hit breakeven with D-T.
With a larger reactor, stronger magnetic fields, and D-T fuel, net power is the expected result.
(Not to mention, we've already achieved net power at human scales with thermonuclear bombs, which have far more energy density than a dung hill.)
It's not all that bad though. The troublesome waste from fission is the end products of the nuclear reactions. With D-T fusion that's just helium.
You do have high-energy neutron radiation, but most of that you're capturing to breed tritium fuel from lithium. Some of it makes reactor parts radioactive, but that's not a major waste problem; according to presentations I've seen from MIT fusion scientists, they'd stop being significantly radioactive after a few decades.
in practice it will not be so neat.
I suspect it will be as polluting as fission, perhaps worse, as the contamination will be in the superstructure, not the waste. And less efficient, and even more expensive.
Whether it will be neat depends on the reactor design. MIT's for example 3D-prints the inner core and replaces it annually; it's surrounded by molten salt with a lot of lithium, and everything around that hinges so it can be opened up easily. Regardless, the waste won't need long-term containment.
The economics of fusion reactors will also depend on the design. Some look economically feasible, others not so much. But it's clear that fusion is possible, contrary to the comment above.
"OK dude" is not a rebuttal. There are arguments to be made about fusion's practicality, but your claim that it's not achievable at all is simply inaccurate. Fusion researchers do it all the time. In fact, for about a thousand dollars in parts you can do it yourself:
Too late to edit: just read your above comment again and I see you're just saying breakeven isn't doable. So skip that first wiki link, I think you're not disputing that fusion is doable at a net loss. The links on fusion power and MIT's design are still relevant though.
FWIIW I've worked in this field, have written popular articles on Farnsworth and his Fusors, have written popular articles on present day fusion efforts, and will not be convinced by MIT press releases any more than I was the LLNL press releases or anyone else's until they actually start making measurable progress, which nobody has ... in a long time. The most likely useful efforts are at Tri-Alpha, not MIT, and they're about as likely to pan out as I am to find 100lbs of gold outside my front door this evening.
The average volumetric thermal energy density of the sun is a red herring. The vast majority of the mass of the Sun isn't fusing at any given moment; most of the gas contributes only by applying gravitational pressure, a conspicuously inefficient method for achieving fusion pressures, volumetrically speaking - particularly when the gas in question is hydrogen, the lightest element that can exist.
Some years ago, likely around 2010, I had the priviledge to visit Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (it was called UKAEA Culham back then). During my visit, we were shown around various experiments and after a long evening, we had the opportunity to attend a Q&A with the staff. The question everyone wanted to know the answer to was When will it be ready? The scientists and everyone else involved honestly thought 10 years would be more than enough time for the technology to mature and find its way into everyday lives.
I’ve heard the argument that it’s a matter of money rather than time. The physics is such that a big device is a good choice. Even the compact designs based on high field HTS coils will need to overcome their high power density in the divertor, that hasn’t come up much yet but it will. So we want a big device to figure out divertors and breeding and managing instabilities. Great. We’ll a just make the one, ITER. Well we’re still waiting. If someone with a lot of money wanted it to happen Right Now they could. You just need a 40 billion dollar c(r)ash program.
The volumetric power density of fusion reactors is inherently lower than fission reactors, because of the square cube law and the need for the fusion reactor to radiate it's output through the wall of the reactor. This means th e nuclear core of the fusion reactor will be both much larger and much more complex than a fission reactor.
Certainly a fusion reactor will be a large, expensive, and complicated device. If it’s going to be directly compared to fission solely on cost to generate power then yes fission is less expensive. The allures of fusion is its lack of ability to meltdown, global abundance of fuel, and the ability to choose what elements get activated. That seems like things that add value to me, but I don’t think the conversations on funding fusion research are at that level. I’ve read the transcripts of the US House Subcommittee on Science, Space, and Technology’s discussions on fusion energy science. It’s clear that the politicians that represent fusion scientists when the budget is made don’t have a strong grasp of what the devices are, their potential impact, the realistic failure modes for these projects, etc. It’s simply a game of politics.
You are repeating the hoary old argument for fusion. That argument depended on it competing only against fission, and making grand nebulous claims that environmental and safety credits would let it pull ahead, even though it was otherwise more expendive than fission.
But fission has now lost to renewables, which are now at a levelized cost 3-4x lower than fission. Fusion's putative safety/env benefits mean nothing now.
The program now is existing on institutional inertia. I don't see this coming to anything but an inglorious end.
Wind/solar aren't that cheap if you include enough storage to get through a windless night, and enough overcapacity to get through cloudy winter weeks.
If you're backing them up with fossil, then sure, they're pretty darn cheap.
How about today's costs? After all, presumably you're using today's cost for nuclear.
It's plausible that, for example, some molten salt reactors currently under development will be a lot cheaper than light water reactors, so it doesn't make sense to compare future renewables with nuclear today.
No molten salt reactor could be available by 2030. Simply resolving material issues would take at least that long.
Proving materials will last X years takes at least X years.
More importantly, the decision whether to build such a reactor will depend on decline in costs of its competition in the future, not just now, when the business case for the reactor requires it operate for 40 years or more.
There are several ways to fix the materials issue, pursued by active projects. One is simply to replace the reactor core every few years; Terrestrial Energy and Thorcon are using that approach.
So I'll ask again: how do the numbers look if you compare today's wind/solar/storage costs without fossil backup to today's nuclear costs? We can argue until our fingers wear out about what the costs will be in eleven years, but there are hard numbers for today.
If they replace the entire core every few years the economics will suck. If they replace every, say, 7 years, then this will take long enough to demonstrate that commercial operation will be at 2030 or beyond.
Insisting on looking at today's solar and wind numbers ? Ok, then I also insist we stick with the numbers for currently available nuclear reactors. You wouldn't want to hypocritically allow only projections of future nuclear, right?
Yes, I mean today's nuclear. But for solar/wind I mean what I said above: enough storage for a windless night and enough overcapacity for cloudy winter weeks, so it's the cost to actually run a grid on wind/solar/storage alone.
Seems like there are still plenty of scenarios for power generation that aren’t easily amenable to wind and solar: mountainous, high latitude or small countries; at sea, underwater, or in space; on Mars; or in the event that storage technologies don’t pan out the way we hope.
You know it's not too far out because Saudis are selling shares in their oil wealth. When this stuff actually starts to work, the impact on the world economy will be insane. I suspect this is why it's not being adequately funded: nobody in power wants to flip over the massive fossil fuel apple cart.
If nuclear fusion can be >= lucrative than nuclear fission is an open scientific question.
Indeed all solar panels on earth are just capturing byproducts of a fusion reactor that is the sun.
But a fusion reactor at the scale of ITER is not proved to be lucrative even in an ideal world.
I would have hoped that modern physics would allow to predict with great accuracy how energy efficient would an ITER-like be in an ideal world where all enginering issues would be solved.
Maybe the proof exist and I'm just anaware of it.
Honestly, if the cost of renewables continue to drop and thus make fusion economically unattractive, why the hell bother? Outside of edge cases (such as space flight, inaccessible places, propulsion systems, & cetera) it seems that relying on renewables, storage, off-grid/smart-grid solutions sounds economically and environmentally preferable.
Do you know any city that have a majority of it's energy that come from renewable?
Are there any smart grid that really works, that manage the absence of solar energy the night, the load balancing, etc without just pumping nuclear energy at the moments where solar/etc can't keep up with the electrical demand?
The ecological impact of dams is totally local, but the ecological impact of CO2 is global. If we were to power the entire earth with hydro, the local damage to ecosystems would be a very small price to pay indeed.
A lot of the impact can be mitigated by building fish pass channels, building new habitat such as compensation channels, and controlling the rate of change of water levels.
How big of a city? Does 1.6 million people count? If Auckland, New Zealand runs on 80% renewable electricity which is certainly a majority in my books.
This argument annoys the hell out of me. Renewables gave gone from too exoensive to cheapest over a time short compared to the lifespan of our generating infrastructure. So the installed base is zombie tech, not what would be installed today.
In the US, the NWPP (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, and part of some other states) is 47.2% hydro, 8.6% wind, 3.4% nuclear, 0.7% geothermal and 0.5% solar = 60.4%. CO2 emissions come out to 651 pounds per megawatt.
As far as I can tell, upstate New York has the lowest carbon emissions per megawatt in the United States, 294.7, thanks to lots of nuclear and hydro: https://www.epa.gov/energy/power-profiler#/NYUP
Put another way the NW with 60% renewable is 3x higher than NY, which mixes its hydro with Nukes and avoids the use of coal.. If you assume 60% renewable with natural gas as the peak/remainder then your still 2x higher than France.
These graphs prove the failings of modern "green energy" because all that hydro was built 50+ years ago, and if instead of fighting Nukes and getting coal plants the environmentalist would have embraced Nukes we wouldn't really be talking about CO2, particularly if the widespread use of breeders brought the price down so that buying electric cars made sense without the huge subsidies both in purchase price and electric charging.
Put another way, making electric cheaper via modern fission would make electric cars more appealing than the unsustainable subsidy models currently in use.
>Today, all of Iceland’s electric power is generated by hydropower and geothermal energy, and about 95 percent of the nation’s heating demands are warmed by geothermal means.
>Costa Rica ran on 100 percent renewable energy for 76 straight days between June and August this year, according to a new report, demonstrating that life without fossil fuels is possible - for small countries, at least.
This is the second time in two years that the Central American country has run for more than two months straight on renewables alone, and it brings the 2016 total to 150 days and counting.
I love a skyline dotted with wind turbines and solar panels, especially when the current alternative is not being able to see the skyline due to the fumes and toxic particulates from fossil fuels.
On the drive to Cornwall in the UK there’s a moment where as you approach a hill you can see the tips of turbine blades appearing and disappearing over the top. As you get higher you see more and more of the wind farm laid out across the valley.
It’s a breathtaking sight, and the knowledge that it’s producing clean energy makes it all the better.
Which by itself wouldn't really be a problem if they had any real advantages over fission, or some overwhelming lifecycle/weight/etc type advantage. But right now they pretty much loose on every metric that isn't measured in "gee-wiz".
I as much as anyone would love a Mr Fusion from back to the future, even if it required hydrogen/etc rather than food waste, but the truth is none of the current designs have clear paths forward to grid scale production, or even small self contained units as used on subs or potentially space applications.
I do think we should be funding the research, but I also think we should be spending equal amounts on engineering better fission processes. The former is basic research while the latter is targeted engineering.
Not generating long-lived "nuclear waste" is a strong political advantage. The waste problem for fission reactors is overstated, but as long as it continues to be overstated, not having it at all is an advantage.
It's an advantage of fusion over fission. It's not a terribly strong one, since the cost of dealing with fission reactor waste is small. The cost of dealing with the large mass of activated material from a fusion reactor may well exceed that cost. And, of course, it's no advantage whatsoever over the non-radioactive power sources that are currently beating, and pulling away from, fission.
It's not a terribly strong one in engineering, but it's a strong one in politics, because it gives no cover to the people railing against fission over the long-lived waste.
And then you still have all of the usual advantages of nuclear reactors -- low land use, steady power that doesn't depend on weather, etc.
We don't know what they'll cost per unit of energy production or otherwise until they actually exist. And using the cost of research reactors built by hand by research physicists in order to test theories is obviously not a good indication of what they would cost in mass production.
We can judge what they will cost from general principles. Any DT reactor will be much larger than, and much more complex than, a fission reactor, and require replacement of major elements many times during the life of the reactor. The only hope is advanced fuels, but the most reactive of those (D-3He) is 50x less reactive than DT.
The elephant in the room with "renewables" is batteries.
In order for renewables to be truly as convenient as grid power, there has to be a storage system of some kind at the site of use. Generally that means, in your car, in your home, etc.
The environmental cost of disposing of batteries hardly insignificant.
Actually, since uranium in the ocean is at equilibrium, if we take some out then the concentration will go back up as more uranium is dissolved from rocks.
Of course it will run out eventually but so will the sun, in a similar amount of time.
There's an estimated 2 billion years worth of dissolved uranium. Not truly renewable I suppose, but by that metric solar power isn't renewable either. Eventually all the hydrogen in th sun will be fused.
Um, no it doesn't. It claims that dissolved U would be replenished faster than we'd u se it (but that claim is wrong, I think); it doesn't say the U that us currently dissolved would last a billion years.
FWIW, this might be the primary source everybody is unintentionally quoting, or at least much closer to the primary source:
> Although the concentration of uranium is quite low, about 3.3 ppb (parts per billion) in seawater of average oceanic salinity, the amount present in the total volume of the oceans is very great, some 4.5 billion tonnes. Of this, perhaps only that uranium contained in the upper 100 meters or so of the surface well-mixed layer should be considered accessible for recovery, some 160 million tonnes. Practically speaking, the amount contained in the ocean surface layers is unlimited with respect to large scale extraction in the forseeable future. This results from the replenishment by continental weathering and river runoff being much larger than forseeable extraction rates.
...
> 1) The surface waters of the oceans comprise a virtually inexhaustible uranium resource of some 160 million tonnes, extractible indefinitely at a rate of a few thousand tonnes per year.
Exxon Nuclear Company, "EXTRACTION OF URANIUM FROM SEAWATER:
EVALUATION OF URANIUM RESOURCES AND PLANT SITING,
VOLUME I", pp 6-7, 9, February 1979, https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/6191296
The above quotes are from the executive summary. Page 35 has the money quote:
> This represents an influx of about 9000 tonnes annually.
Which supports your contention that sea water CANNOT provide an endless supply considering that current annual consumption is ~90,000 tonnes, 10x the replacement rate.
The problem with pointing to the influx from rivers is that you also have to look at the outflow of uranium (and there must be such an outflow, probably reduction of uranium to insoluble U(IV) in sediments, since it's in steady state.) Any human extraction is on top of this existing outflow, it doesn't replace it.
The outflow is from the earth's crust at the bottom of the ocean. Sure, it doesn't get replaced. But there's enough uranium to last on the order of billions of years. By this logic, solar power isn't renewable either because the hydrogen in the sun doesn't get replaced.
No, I believe it's mostly from rivers. Oceanic crust is depleted in uranium relative to continental crust. Moreover, uranium becomes soluble in oxidizing conditions (as U(VI)), not in reducing conditions (as U(IV)).
Anyway, in steady state the consumption from the oceans can be only equal to the inflow from rivers. If that's (as I've seen estimated) 25,000 tons/year, that's enough to power the world if breeders are used, but not enough if today's thermal burner reactors are used.
The paper does look at the outflow. In fact, in the same paragraph as the "money quote" I copied it says, "uranium has a residence time of approximately 500,000 years". It's not clear to me that the 9000 tonnes is net or gross, but either way your original point still stands: ocean uranium is nowhere near a limitless resource, and could likely be made economically unviable[1] in a rather short timespan, perhaps even in a single human lifespan if we switched overnight to 100% energy generation from dissolved uranium.
What's more surprising, actually, is how much uranium we consume currently. And AFAIU, we do so very inefficiently. Seems to me we'd get a much better RoI by using uranium more efficiently than by turning to seawater for more uranium to waste.
[1] Assuming it becomes viable in the first place. It certainly doesn't seem economically viable, today.
> However, seawater concentrations of uranium are controlled by steady-state, or pseudo-equilibrium, chemical reactions between waters and rocks on the Earth, both in the ocean and on land. And those rocks contain 100 trillion tons of uranium. So whenever uranium is extracted from seawater, more is leached from rocks to replace it, to the same concentration. It is impossible for humans to extract enough uranium over the next billion years to lower the overall seawater concentrations of uranium, even if nuclear provided 100% of our energy and our species lasted a billion years.
As someone strongly critical of orthodox economic treatment of pricing for nonrenewable resources, especially fuels, I'm still inclined to say that there is a point at which the distinction is irrelevant. Whether or not nuclear fission meets this bar isn't clear (though I suspect it doesn't).
When the US was first making the switch from wood to coal as a principle fuel, in the 1880s, the argument in contemporaneous accounts was that a small fraction of the probable reserves of coal would serve all energy needs for millions of years, given that perennial caveat, at present rates of consumption.
What happened, of course, was that rates of consumption increased somewhat. Coal went from fueling a small number of structural heating, locomotion, and smelting uses to vastly expanded railroad, steelmaking, and most especially, electrical generation uses. Trainloads of coal arrive daily at power plants, still. Others are located at mineheads themselves as electrons transport more readily than lumps of fossilised tree. The Jevons paradox is a mighty bastard. By present estimates, again, at present values of consumption, coal reserves are estimated at 100-300 years.
At present rates of electrical energy generation, existing terrestrial (non-oceanic) uranium would suffice for fewer than two decades worth of energy use. When you factor in even probable growth due to:
- Extending Western standards of living to another five billions of the world's population.
- Expansion of total population from 7.5 billions to 11-12 billions.
- Continued "normal" economic growth at 2-3% per annum, that is, doubling every 25-30 years, roughly.
... the total energy requirements increase tremendously.
(Note that renewables also strain to keep up with such growth -- my sense is that the fact that incident solar power on Earth of some 7,000x present human energy consumption actually represents a dangerously narrow margin of safety.)
I'd worked out at one point the remaining reserves given some rate of projected annual growth, a fairly simple application of exponential math. The numbers are exceedingly sobering.
TL;DR: If there is some putatively nonrenewable fuel source whose reserves would extend to some point in time beyond the viability of some specified landmark (h. sapiens as a viable species, C3 photosynthesis on Earth, etc., variously a few million to about 800 million years), then the resource is not meaningfully constrained, and we can make reasonable use of it.
But given any notion of continued exponential growth, which is to say, a constant percentage increase in economic activity, given all available history, if not some putative but very-much-unproved virtualisation-of-activity hypotheses, that's a high bar to meet.
I don't think it makes any sense to project economic growth as being exponential while assuming that its energy-intensiveness will just keep increasing. As nations become more advanced their GDP becomes less energy-intensive. Surely this makes sense at some level: we consume more services and more rarefied goods.
It feels like you're double-dipping here: I don't see how we extend "western standards of living to 5 billions of the worlds population" without concurrently extending the same GDP per unit of energy use to the same populations.
It's not like we all decide to just buy exponentially bigger houses and cars, for all that a look around certain parts of the US tend to suggest this in the near term. :-)
It also seems to me that a steady increase in GDP per unit of energy is a likely consequence of higher energy prices - while energy is dirt-cheap (and often subsidized), use tends to be profligate.
> As nations become more advanced their GDP becomes less energy-intensive.
Less energy intensive, perhaps. But not less electricity intensive. As cars and trains go electric, electricity demand will increase. If we're going to make planes and ships hydrogen powered, that's going to be another big electricity demand.
It's pretty certain that all kinds of power transmission or delivery mechanisms, including basic heating and cooling, as well as transport and process mechanisms, will be driven by electricity, assuming we remain on a technological path.
- Economic policy, targets, and theory are currently expressed in terms of constant percentage economic growth. Which is to say, exponential growth.
- All empirical evidence ties past growth to increased resource consumption, most especially energy. "Dematerialisation" studies tend not to be well supported, and arguments for nonmaterial mechanisms for economic growth prove to be largely unfounded far more hypothetical or theological than even theoretical.
The point that extending Western standards of living beyond the ~1 billion residents of the US, EU, JP, CA, AU, & NZ (line noise), and the additional 1 billion of China who are still on net nowhere near Western levels of affluence, but have seen appreciable growth over the past two decades, accompanied by massive increases in energy consumption, resource utilisation, and sinks (effluent) exploitation, much of that energy from coal, to the five billions elsewhere, requires a similar energy-intensity-per-unit-GDP is precisely the one I'm trying to make.
There is some space for optimising efficiency in terms of GDP per unit energy, and within specific nations, there's been some evidence of this -- see the US since the oil shocks of the 1970s. But progress has been limited, most especially progress in the absence of further price shocks. Applying imposed efficiency requirements has worked poorly, and the tolerance of imposing, say, higher fuel taxes (as is practiced in Europe and Japan, neither having much by way of indigenous petroleum supply) has been scant.
(Higher prices for petroleum in petroleum-exporting countries themselves is even less viable, and is a major component of a theory of their collapse, the Export Lands Model. See Venezuela, Egypt, Syria, and Yemen as examples, with Russia potentially another, though its production has yet to fall markedly.)
Steve Keen has been doing some remarkable recent work on the role of energy in production functions, including a rewrite of the Cobb-Douglas production function to include energy as a term along with capital and labour. He's been working with a long-time researcher in the area, Robert Ayres, and making quite substantial progress, though whether or not that will be accepted by the field remains an open question. Economics has been exceedingly resistant to such messages in the past.
Keen's conceptual insight is that "labour without energy is a corpse, capital without energy is a sculpture". It's possible to increase efficiencies. Early steam engines operated in the 1-10% thermodynamic efficiency range, modern dual-cycle gas-turbine generation can exceed 50%, and when making use of waste heat for other processes can approach 80% efficiencies. But you're always limited to some theoretical maximum.
One area I've been exploring is the question of just what specific technolgical mechanisms there are. Economists describe technology generally as "efficiency", but it's an efficiency gained through specific means. I've identified nine:
1. Fuels. Applying more (or more useful) energy to a process.
2. Energy transmission and transformation.
3. Materials. Specific properties, abundance, costs, effects, limitation.s
4. Process knowledge -- how to do things. What's generally described as "technical knowledge", here considered as a specific mechanism of technology.
5. Structural or causal knowledge -- why things work. What's generally described as "scientific knowledge".
6. Networks. Interactions between nodes via links, physical or virtual, over which matter, energy, information, or some mix flow. (People would be one possible flow.) Transport, comms, power, information.
7. Systems. Constructs including sensing, processing, action, and feedback. Ranging from conceptual to mechanical to human and social.
8. Information. Sensing, perceiving, processing, storing, retrieving, and transmitting...
You can always change the baseline. What percentage of the available solar energy falling on a territory is converted to electrical power, or otherwise used (for heating or farming)? In the US, near zero. What, of wind? Near zero. What, of geothermal? Near zero.
The baseline is a given in terms of net intensity (roughly 1kW/m^2).
2/3 of sunlight falls on the oceans, unlikely to be developed as technological solar farms. Marine environments are exceedingly harsh. You can also discount Antarctica. We're already down to ~25% of the grand total surface are, and hence energy.
Panel efficiency (~<20% typically), spacing factor (shaded panels generate no power), and further losses greatly cut into the remaining surplus. In net, ~1-10% of the resource might potentially be available. And other terrestrial ecosystem resources need their own cut.
There's still a possible surplus relative to present consumption, but the margins begin to look uncomfortably thin. Population growth and expansion of industrial standards of living cut further into that, as discussed up-thread.
Expressed as population, area, and energy, over time, the plots are interesting.
Jevons paradox is something that can happen, not a claim or proof that it always happens.
And exponential growth never continues. I mean, we can all agree Moore's law and population growth, that people irrationally thought would go on forever, are reaching their limits, right?
The Jevons paradox most concisely is an observation that greater efficiency acts precisely as a reduction in cost, inducing demand. Unless there are other fundamental constraints (e.g., humans can only eat so much food in a day, even at caloric surplus), it actually is remarkably consistent in occurrence.
I agree that exponential growth cannot continue. However you'll find a matter of faith in mainstream economics that it can. Even severe critics, as Thomas Piketty, state this, as in this offhand passage from Capital in the 21st Century:
The median scenario I will present here is based on a long-term per capita output growth rate of 1.2 percent in the wealthy countries, which is relatively optimistic compared with Robert Gordon's predictions (which I think are a little too dark).
That's still doubling every 58 years.
The cornucopians are far more explicit and optimistic. Kahn & Simon, Maddox. Tom Worstall, here:
A chief mode of expansion isn't in intensive use, that is, per person or concern (firm, agency, organisation), but extensive use: the number of individuals, concerns, and applications making use.
The access to artificial light by people, by entities, by activities, has exploded. More people have access. Lighted billboards, sport fields, indoor agriculture, vanity outdoor lighting, etc., etc., etc.
New York City's Broadway became known as The Great White Way in 1910 due to its spectacular use of electric lighting. That is now every populated hamlet save North Korea, and regions of central Africa, Amazonia, and Oceania, have comparable lighting levels outdoors.
"The key determinant of our forecast is the relationship between price and volume. From the observed historical values, we calculate a learning rate of around 18%. This means that for every doubling of cumulative volume, we observe an 18% reduction in price. Based on this observation, and our battery demand forecast, we expect the price of an average battery pack to be around $94/kWh by 2024 and $62/kWh by 2030."
TLDR Batteries will work out fine as storage. Recycling batteries is a known materials handling process.
They're predicted to work out fine. And maybe they will -- which would be great. But even if there is a 75% chance of that happening, we should still be prepared for the alternative if it doesn't. Don't put all your eggs in one basket etc.
Limited resources require prioritization when allocating resources. Batteries are proven (there are GWs of utility battery storage provisioned and operating as expected), fusion is not.
It's hard to argue limited resources when they're talking about spending £200M against the size of the global energy market. Limited resources is an argument for spending 80% on storage and 20% on fusion, not an argument for not even spending <0.1% on fusion.
There are so many energy storage devices besides batteries. Yes, they’re confident for storing electric charge, but (as I mentioned elsewhere) pumping water up into a reservoir when energy is plentiful and using it to drive turbines and generators is another large-scale energy storage system, as is melting salts, as is driving compressors to pressurise large cambers and then drive them in reverse when power dips, as is spinning up flywheels...
Completely boring thermal storage schemes give you 40-70% round trip energy return. As long as you can sell the stored power for 1.5 to 2.5 times more than you paid for it then it's economically feasible.
Problem with the technology is a) not viable in the current market. b) It's a mind numbingly boring idea. c) There is no 'disruption' potential here. All the companies that can build this at scale are huge established multi-nationals like General Electric.
Pumped storage requires very specific geography and how much energy can be stored is very dependant on height differences. It is also only 70-80% efficient. Compressed-air energy storage also requires specific geography. Molten salt is not going to be a great idea in places that have lots of wind, but not a lot of sun (UK in winter for example).
To replace strip mined coal burning generators and fracked gas we need a mix of just about everything.
I agree it's going to be a combination of solutions with energy storage, depending on what you need. Batteries are good for short-term, portable storage. The other solutions you mentioned may be better for long-term, non-portable storage.
I also think we can get more mileage out of chemical fuels produced with renewables - ammonia, hydrogen.
Or low energy yield per square meter required. e.g. solar is like 200W/m^2 (and doesn't run all day, so the watt-hour rating gets kneecapped), wind isn't fantastic either.
This won't scale well with anticipated energy needs. It would be a real struggle to cover our current energy needs with wind and solar (with other renewables like hydro and geothermal being geographically limited, subject to environmental issues and more or less already maximized where they can be used)...and we need more. We're heading toward electric cars with batteries that hold 3x what the average household uses in a day (which drain in a few hundred miles), and will need more energy for carbon capture and desalination as time goes on...
"Renewables" are nuclear fusion with the actual reactor 90 million miles away, assuming wind is a product of heat. The amount of energy that can be produced is staggering, and there's no guaranteed that current "renewables" can keep up with our need.
>sounds ... environmentally preferable.
The main waste of fusion is helium, it's entirely possible that renewables and batteries are more damage to the environment.
Tides don't rely on the sun's gravity. It does affect them, but if the sun disappeared there would still be lunar tides, which are the majority of tidal activity. Well, I suppose the subsequent frozen oceans would be detrimental. The gravitational tidal forces would still exist though.
And why do you think geothermal power isn't renewable?
They do actually. I learned in a marine navigation class that the tides are on a cycle of 18.6 years. If only the moon affected the tides, the cycle would be about 28 days.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide
> Nineteen years is preferred because the Earth, Moon and Sun's relative positions repeat almost exactly in the Metonic cycle of 19 years, which is long enough to include the 18.613 year lunar nodal tidal constituent.
That shows that the lowest-frequency component of tidal motion is driven by the sun's gravity. But the highest-amplitude component by far is the effect of the moon's gravity, which has a period of 12 hours and 25 minutes. So yes, tides are affected by the sun, but they don't depend on it.
If you want to look at things on that timescale, then the tides aren't renewable either. They're gradually slowing our rotation. Once the earth's rotation has slowed to once per year, we'll no longer be able to extract energy from the tides.
Then again, if you want to look at things on that timescale, there's no such thing as renewables.
Tides depend on the moon’s gravity, not the sub’s (mostly, anyway). Besides, if the sun suddenly blinked out, I think having a few fusion reactors in operation wouldn’t do us much good...
Batteries are not the only means of storing e every. Hydraulic, pneumatic, and flywheel-based systems are all relatively well-known, and I’m sure there’s plenty of research being put into lowering the impact and resource intensivity of batteries (including devices based on carbon dioxide).
"Battery" can be a generic term for an energy storing device, all of those devices are also batteries. But none of this resarch ensures it'll have less environmental impact than fusion's also low impact.
I believe it will be difficult to generate all the energy we need with renewables alone (source: https://www.withouthotair.com/), and even if that’s possible, a massive surplus of energy would presumably allow us to start sucking CO2 back out of the atmosphere, and undo some climate change.
Because fusion will let us do things that we may not be able to do right now. Especially if fusion takes the form of one of the non-ITER-style reactors that merely costs millions instead of billions, it may still be by far a more environmentally-friendly power generation method; no massive construction of square miles of solar panels, no need for windmills, power for space craft and space stations. Things like desalinization may be far more practical with fusion.
In the long term, we won't just need power as good as today; we need something much better than today.
The next step after fusion would be some form of total conversion, of which the only feasible chances seem to involve black holes, so, a ways off yet. Probably not save to use on a planet.
As a reader what I really want to learn is the list of technical reasons why nuclear fusion / ITER isn't yet working.
I would like to see something like a github.com repository where issues would be technical issues.
And I could follow technical discussions on the issues showing progress or absence of it.
It would really help to quantify how far we are from lucrative nuclear fusion.
The physics of fusion are well-understood. Nuclear fusion was achieved before nuclear fission. The most common nuclear fusion reaction--the deuterium-tritium reaction--can be readily performed by research groups across the world.
As others have mentioned, funding is the main reason why energy production from nuclear fusion hasn't taken off. The better question is, what isn't being funded?
Ask yourself: how do you hold the sun in a bottle? The answer is that it's very hard, but it's doable. You just need to cool the walls fast enough and make sure the sun doesn't melt the bottle.
Based off this rough problem description, the main issues are the following:
- Materials: what do you make the bottle out of? Do you know of any materials which can withstand millions of degrees of heat? Probably not, so you should look into using magnets to suspend the sun in the middle of the bottle.
- Confinement: how do you hold the sun? The sun (that is, plasma) reacts to magnetic fields. Classical designs such as the tokamak drove the plasma around a donut to keep it confined. Problem there is that you need two magnetic fields: one to drive and one to steer. Some decades ago, people got smart and figured out you could design the road in such a way that the car will always drive straight, so great, you don't need to steer anymore. (This is the main difference between ITER and Wendelstein 7-X; personally, I think ITER will turn out poorly, but they'll learn a lot from building the thing...)
- Reactions: guess what? Your sun emits high-energy neutrons, making the bottle radioactive. You could use a different type of sun, but those are expensive and weird or would require you to go to the Moon, which is also expensive. You figure out you can line the walls of the reactor with lithium and breed fuel for your sun, which works but isn't perfect. You know other suns are out there, but no one knows how to build a bottle to hold that sun.
- Self-sustainment: you put some ingredients in your bottle, shake it up, and presto, you have a sun. For about ten milliseconds. Problem is, your bottle got too hot and your reaction creates exhaust you have to scrape out. Also, the magnets used to keep the sun in the middle of the bottle draw more energy than your sun makes! That won't do.
Self-sustaining fusion reactors are very hard problems to crack because there's so many moving parts. The fusion research community has suffered from underfunding for decades because people wrongfully associate the principles of Chernobyl with ITER. People don't want their politicians funding more Chernobyls, and Bob's your uncle. Because the funding has been so low, the problems which should be solved by now, well, haven't been.
Imagine a world where everyone's house is supplied with free, practically limitless, cheap energy! We could start heating our homes better, finally put to the end worries about whether we left the iron turned on, power more sources of light!
Hm, but wait...
Fusion will never make energy "free". Currently fuel only takes up about a third of the cost of electricity, the remaining two thirds spread between the cost of maintaining a grid, and running/building a power station.
So best case you will save about 30% on your bill. A fusion power station is probably going to be more expensive however, so you will be more likely to save less than 30% on bills.
The more times someone feels the need to tell you a particular technology is inevitable, the more sceptical you should be.
Translation: "we need more money, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future".
People working on technologies which are truly "when not if" don't go around advertising it - they are too busy trying to be the one to profit off it before the next guy does.
I agree. If a technology (especially one as significant as fusion) is viable and the production kinks need to be worked out, then VC-backers are going to dump money into it in an effort to be first-to-market. The less viable a technology currently is, the more governments will be paying for the research.
It's not just about viability, it's about complexity and timeline. There's very little appetite for projects with a 30+ year timeline among private investment. You can't expect VC backing for stuff like ITER.
Who on earth is making money out of controlled nuclear fusion? Where are the waypoints? Where can we make something useful in the short to medium time horizon?
I also dispute your point of "little appetite for....30+ year timeline" projects, as the MEMS industry has routinely funded 30 year development cycles before technology maturation. The difference is, as I said, there are usually useful waypoints before the technology has fully matured.
> Would something like Intel or MOS technology get vc money today?
Yes, because when they were founded, it was already established that you could make money making semiconductors.
The more concerning question is whether the invention of the transistor could be funded today. Historically, it was not funded by VC money, but out of the financial surplus of a big monopoly (AT&T). Are today's big, wealthy corporations doing as much of that sort of long-term research?
Assuming we are talking about generating electricity at scale, you can probably count the number of private entities with enough cash to finance a project like ITER on one hand, and it would be a massive loss to them if it failed. And even if private-ITER worked, you still only have a prototype, not an actual product you can sell.
This is not something any VC-investor I know of would risk or can afford.
> If a technology (especially one as significant as fusion) is viable and the production kinks need to be worked out, then VC-backers are going to dump money into it in an effort to be first-to-market.
case in point - SpaceX. Before Musk private space on a big scale (not the laughable Pegasus) was may be just a couple notches below fusion. Once Musk shown the way for everybody, now we have VCs going all in. VCs are really very risk averse - they aren't going to dump money into being the first to make fusion because it is risky, they are going to dump money into the 20 startups of the second wave to make money for sure even if most of those startups fail.
> they are too busy trying to be the one to profit off it before the next guy does
That's not how innovation works. Moonshot projects take time. And they are risky and expensive.
The risk/expense is too high for one or even a few investors to bear. That's why innovators can't get "too busy to profit off it." These efforts need buy-in from a large crowd, from charities, states, institutional investors, etc. Convincing such a large crowd needs a PR effort, which is why such articles get written.
Are all of these efforts genuine? Of course not. But a project being long-term and "needing more money for the foreseeable future" is not a good heuristic to tell that it's not.
The only "moonshot" projects which ever worked were military ones. Ie, moon landing, the Manhattan project, etc. In these situations you have a state which can throw virtually unlimited resources at a project (even if it fails! see Star Wars and many other failed military "moonshot" projects) because it poses an existential threat for your opponent to develop it first.
Of course, if the technology turns out to be impossible, then it's no big deal, because your rivals can't benefit from it either (in fact this was one of the main motivators for the Manhattan project - to see if it could be done, and make sure the Allies got there first if it could).
While I don't necessarily disagree about SDI being a overall failure, we did get our current missle defence program and technology directly from the program.
SDI also funded a vast amount of scientific research, although I don't know of any specific success stories to result.
Regardless, I wouldn't classify it as a textbook example of a moonshot failure.
On the other hand many are of the mind that the progress in fusion was quite fast paced, due to competition, until many nations decided to join forces and invest in ITER. After which it pretty much stalled. ITER was supposed to be the Manhattan Project of fusion ( * ). So there's that.
Here's Robert Zubrin in "The Case for Space": "The national fusion programs progressed well during the Cold War because of fierce international competition. They have stopped moving forward since the late 1980s because the decision to consolidate them into a single global project, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), removed all stimulus for action. Indeed, it took nearly a quarter century for the bureaucrats in charge of ITER to manage to reach consensus in 2010 on where to put it, and it will take another quarter century before the machine even attempts to reach thermonuclear ignition in 2035."
( * ) Cost comparison: Manhattan Project $23BN in 2018 dollars [1]. ITER cost, construction only: $22BN as per their own estimate, $65BN as per the US Department of Energy estimate [2].
How can a project that received $23 billion over 5 years be considered equivalent to a project that received the same amount of money over 30 years? Had the $23 billion been shelled out in 1991 we would have had break even fusion before Y2k.
Quite frankly, controlled thermonuclear fusion is far more difficult than splitting an atom. It would be a shock if the same amount of funding would accomplish the equivalent goal. Next I’ll be told about pitfalls and hazards and biases around such a statement. People are scared of a real solution costing money.
> Quite frankly, controlled thermonuclear fusion is far more difficult than splitting an atom.
Well, that's exactly the reason a Manhattan Project of Apollo Program style of push was inappropriate. Those two projects were fundamentally easy problems. By the time they were green-lighted, all their underlying physics was understood, and the only remaining challenges were engineering ones. In the case of fusion, that was not the case in 1991 (the year you picked) by any means.
The Manhattan Program delivered a militarily useful weapon. ITER will not deliver a commercially useful reactor. The resulting device will be a physics experiment, not something that can be used to produce useful power.
why? it is no different than any prediction ten or more years off. guess it depends on the subject matter, if you already believe in something they any number of years is acceptable
There's this interview on omega-tau of a couple of plasma physicists(?) working on a fusion project in the UK, and there was this funny moment where one of them said that fusion was almost definitely going to work at some point, simply because the problem was so complex.
The interviewer, a software engineer by trade, was extremely surprised, and asked him how complexity could be an advantage.
The physicist replied that it means that there's a lot of variables you can fiddle before you start coming up against real physical limits.
It sticks in the mind because you can sort of see why a scientist would think of fusion as a definite, next-few-decades thing, and at the same time, that doesn't mean it in the engineering sense of, these reactors will actually be just like a nuclear or coal plant.
Not in this case - if we want to move off of hydrocarbons (let's assume we want to, let alone need to), nuclear is the only real candidate at this point. Renewables can't do it. What other options are there? Thus, nuclear is inevitable. Not saying this warrants giving these specific people money, but as a technology I think it's safe to say that it's inevitable.
This meme needs to die. Moving off fossil fuels is easier and cheaper with renewables than it would be with nuclear, and the disparity is widening with time as renewables (and storage) crash down their experience curves.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadNeedless to say, but it also requires loooooots of related research, eg materials to handle the magnetic flux, temperature, etc etc etc.
Pressures are no-where near the core of the sun (300 billion bar), nor are confinement times (years).
Which is why we use D-T fusion, which is not at all the same as the "clean, natural hydrogen fusion" in the sun. That whole "clean energy, like the sun" argument is fake.
Temperature is basically atomic/molecular movement and the more energetic the movement the more likely that crashing nuclei will react and fuse.
There are currently two major magnetic field designs:
- Tokamak, such as ITER [1] - Stellerator, such as Wendelstein-7X [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X
Apparently Iter was designed to make sure the energy balance works out, but we'll see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2019-iter-nuclear-fusion/
CO2-neutral, stable energy generation independent of weather, season, time... with amounts large and stable enough to be independent of storage solution.
Wind and solar need to be regulated because intensity varies. They are location dependent (German North produces a lot of wind, but there's no feasible way to bring it to the South...)
Technically feasible or politically feasible? There's a lot of NIMBYism around building new high-capacity power transmission lines in Germany (e.g., Suedlink, Südostlink).
Fusion solves this problem in large part because it uses and produces significantly less radioactive materials... materials that wouldn’t count as a security concern.
by that time putting it on a Starship, and sending it to the Sun might become a feasible option.
Make fission 10x cleaner or 10x safer and people still wouldn't build them.
Make existing reactors 10x cheaper, but no safer or cleaner, and they'd be selling like hotcakes.
This has recently been upgraded to about four times capacity.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbekreuzung_2 (sorry for tze german, didn't find any english wiki, this are the largest masts in Europe, they have to be, otherwise the large freight ships won't make it into the harbour of Hamburg)
[2] https://eqos-energie.com/_press/eqos-energie-erneuert-leiter... (Press release from the executing contractor.)
[3] https://www.tennet.eu/de/news/news/tennet-startet-umbeseilun... [4]https://www.tennet.eu/de/news/news/tennet-vervierfacht-die-s... (Press release from the begin and end of upgrade project.)
Assorted videos and press releases from a few years before, directly related to the preparation of surrounding infrastructure, their upgrading, and moving heavy transformers around:
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU2OUtETD7I (8 Minutes, for rail nerds only, crossing a bridge in town during normal operations with modern diesel-hydraulic switcher loco, bridge making funky sounds because of weight.)
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7eWzeMxPTo (2m:47s, corporate PR of production site of transformer.)
[7] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Drachenfels&t=ffab&iax=images&ia=i... (Transported by ship from below the Drachenfels near Bonn at the Rhine into the North Sea, and then back on land.)
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88PLBOKZ8-0 (4m:32s, loading onto ship, boring, for transport nerds only, added for completeness.)
[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Vw6h64uzNY (8m:56s, offloading of transformer from ship and moving to substation.) [10] https://baumann-move.com/transformator-uw-heide-west/ (Same, press release of moving company.)
[11] https://www.powertransformernews.com/2019/04/30/abb-transfor... (Another one, same general area.)
[12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKjYD6CCgLo (43m:45s, another one, from ship to another substation, for transport nerds only, FF)
[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCpEw7wRgN4 (Removal of 'old' transformer from substation for shipping and reuse in another substation for the grid of Norderstedt & Hamburg, for transport nerds only, FF)
[14] https:&#x...
Solar is great for decentralized grids where one's neighbour basically buys excess power from you, but transferring gigawatts of power from a large amount of solar panels to something like a major industrial area /might/ be trickier.
Installed cost of utility scale solar: about $1/W and falling
The cost of fusion (or fission) is so grossly uncompetitive that any use seems unlikely.
We don't have a finished design yet, so who knows what parts are needed (yeah, a turbine is a given, but still...)?
I'm not convinced we'll see a significant amount of fusion power in electricity grids, but for specialised applications, it would make a lot of sense (e.g., powering ships, or a hypothetical Mars colony that would like to keep the lights on during a dust storm). Building such limited numbers will, of course, do nothing to get the price of fusion power down. Maybe subsidies will be able to overcome the cost dilemma posed by this, but there's no clear motivation for providing them if the power sources replaced by fusion would already be majority-renewable.
aka enable them to be installed on submarines and so on.
I do regularly see articles from that one nuclear proponent who tries to get Street cred by claiming to be an environmentalist while attacking basically all other environmentalists as communists that want to return to the stone age and competing renewables as a hoax/environmental disaster/communist plot. But he seems a bit extreme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-10_Graphite_Reactor
MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy - Zach Hartwig
tl;dr: it's a matter of funding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryllium
Seems like there's just not enough demand yet.
A 25 year availability of a GWe plant (the conventional first gen plants that have the fewest engineering hurdles remaining) that sells all electricity it makes generates 22 billion USD in revenue.
Automobiles required a suitable fuel and a lightweight powerplant capable of highly dynamic power output. The first powered carriages date to the early 19th century, on rails, though coal and steam were not responsive, dynamic, or efficient. Good for railroads, not for untracked vehicles (not that this wasn't tried).
Discovery and refinement of petroleum (1835 - 1865), creation of the reciprocating engine (Otto, Deisel, 1860s - 1880s), suitable tyres (vulcanised rubber, 1844), and high-quality steelmaking (Bessemer process, 1856 - 1860s). With the basic parts together, the first automobiles appeared in the 1880s, but further expansion required both mass-production assembly-line practices (Ford, 1901), and expanded and reliable fuel supplies (major oilfield discoveries including Spindletop, 1901, Lakeview, 1910, and East Texas -- "Pappy" Joiner's "Daisy Bradford No. 3", 1930). Well into the 1930s, it wasn't entirely clear that petroleum or petrol would be the fuels of choice, with other petroleum distilates (NGLs, condensate, and deisel) and ethanol among contenders.
Once the automobile was developed, a period of rapid innovation and patent filing followed ... and largely tapered off by the 1930s. There's been incremental improvement since. Even in areas such as safety, mortality per billion passenger miles has improved at a remarkably constant rate of halving about every two decades, since the 1920s (the rate was twice that in the decade 1910-1920).
Heavier-than-air craft were also largely dependent on the same factors: high power-to-weight powerplants, a high energy-density fuel, and a basic knowledge of aeronautics. Development of aircraft trailed automobiles only slightly, with similar trends of patent filings. The DC-3, described as a perfect aircraft design in Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth saw first flight in 1935, only 29 years after the Wrights on first first flight. It remains in active commercial use.
Gordon on the DC-3:
The very aircraft, the “Flagship Detroit,” that operated the first American flight from Chicago to New York is owned by the Flagship Detroit Foundation and often flies around the country to visit air shows. DC-3s are used everywhere because they are cheap; one can be purchased for $100,000. Their popularity eight decades after the first flight demonstrates that the DC-3 is the best-designed aircraft in aviation history. Its ruggedness is legendary; a common saying among pilots is that “the only replacement for a DC-3 is another DC-3.”
Aircraft designed in the 1950s, and built in the 1960s, not only still fly, but serve as the backbone of strategic military bombing capabilities of the United States, in the form of the B-52, specific airframes of which will continue in combat missions through the 2040s if not beyond, and hold status as the fastest operational manned aircraft, in the form of the SR-71.
That is: there are inventions for which, once the prerequisite requirements are met, rapidly emerge and attain levels of maximum development.
DNA's existence was suggested by Darwin, the basic mechanics of genetics by Mendel, its structure by Watson and Crick, based on the work of others including Rosalind Franklin, and relying largely on the insights of X-ray crystallography. Direct manipulation and reading of DNA was achieved in the 1970s through enzymatic processes, though not well-developed for several decades further -- the problem is a fundamentally difficult one. Even now, the benefits of direct genetic manipulation are scant, another point covered by Gorden, in his general assessment of medical advances, or largely lack thereof since the 1970s. Still, at least there's been demonstrable progress.
And then there's practical nuclear fusion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Station
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTO_(fusion_reactor)
So about 30 years away?
Quoted from the first link on your PROTO wikipedia page:
https://community.dur.ac.uk/superconductivity.durham/The%20r...
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
You say 'we' like humanity wasn't 7 billions or so completely autonomous actors.
This would be a more accurate sentence: '7 billions autonomous actors could decide to act as one, and the act could be lowering its growth rate'.
You see, it simply won't happen.
Which are mostly democracies, or sort of. China, Russia and North Korea apart, every big population center is governed in a way or another threw a certain form of consensus.
> humanity at the moment already agrees blindly that the only way forward is reckless growth
Again you talk as if humans were a single body. You're not agreeing blindly on 'reckless growth', as far as I can tell, and you're far from being alone in that case.
Humanity speaking and thinking as one is just a dream (you're free to dream, thought!).
The best proposal so far is growth with speed of light in all directions.
> Do we really need growth or do we need happiness?
What about the people who are not happy when our knowledge about world, and the number of populated planets does not grow or does not grow fast enough?
> Once we scientifically solved major health issues
The two greatest health issues are senescence and limited capability of learning new things, when we solve those we'll need even more people to create art so that we don't get bored, and to develop new technologies so that we do not die when sun explodes in couple of billion years.
It's not just about CO2: a high energy society is a society that will hit other ecological limits.
I would add that centralized power production is an issue by itself, as it seems difficult now to avoid social and political instability. So unless we develop small scale fusion, which does not seem ideal (lots of disseminated nuclear waste in the form of activated reactor materials), fusion is not ideal.
>fusion is not ideal. Why does it have to be ideal? It should be sufficient. Anything is better than burning coal.
In terms of human working time, £200M roughly pays for 1000 person years of work, so it's certainly more than "a drop of water". Yes, I know there's more than salaries and research tools and material are expensive in this case. But still, imagine 50 people just working on theory and cheap experiments for 20 years; they could achieve a lot.
$200M is laughable - as is the 20 year plan. I recently reread Summa Technologicae by Stanislaw Lem. Written in 1961, it also guessed that fusion will be there 20 years in the future - meaning 1981 :)
The budget for ITER is 20b. The UK is only pitching in 200m. Other countries are pitching in the rest. The USA already pitched in $1b for example. The article only mentioned the UK because it was written for UK readers.
Nuclear fusion has a chance of being the solution to that problem.
These smaller reactors should be cheaper and faster to build.
Are suitcase-sized fusion reactors still on the table, or does this just mean smaller-than-a-football-stadium fusactors are probably possible?
You still need to work the HTS material into magnets, a vacuum vessel, turbo and mechanical pumps, lots of fittings and mechanical engineering work, gyrotrons and their high voltage supplies and all the engineering that goes with (including wave guides), neutral beam injection, two dozen diagnostic systems, coil power supply system, and all of the work that goes with cryogenics.
Edit: If this would be for a medium scale science machine then you would need divertor and first wall materials, as well as a decent cooling system if you want long pulse operation. If this is a power plant then you can ditch most diagnostics, make everything twice as large, add a breeding layer between the coil cryogenics and the vacuum vessel, add a tritium separation facility ($$$), and add a big ass heat exchange/steam turbine system. ITER is in between these two and is the first time it's ever been done, with all of the diagnostics and full D+T operation caked into the design. It's not surprising it costs 20 billion Euro and even then if it was a power plant it wouldn't be priced out of reasonability (~twice current electric costs). At what point do we say we just need to pay more for our energy and kick fossil fuels?
Basically this level of funding gives Tokamak Energy the ability to order purchases of HTS tape in bulk and start ramping up to building all their full-scale magnets as they get deliveries over the next 3-5 years.
Edit: I find nothing in the announcement that says this is going towards magnets or HTS material, but this would be a the scale of advance funding for 3 meter radius magnet development.
https://www.vox.com/2019/5/17/18624740/fossil-fuel-subsidies...
[1] and quotes a figure closer to 500billion, globally. Which isn't nothing, but probably also includes places like Venezuala who massively subsidize their domestic consumption.
This isn't even one of those situations where their use of the word is technically correct. I've never seen a definition of 'subsidy' that wasn't an out-of-pocket expense paid by governments.
The use of the word subsidy is intended to put the idea into our heads that we're all paying out of pocket via taxes to support the fossil fuels industries. But that is the opposite of the truth. With a few exceptions (the Petro-states) fossil fuel prices aren't artificially lowered by subsidies, but rather are bloated by taxes paid by corporations and by end consumers. Fossil fuel industries fund our governments, our roads and infrastructure.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X
Stellarators have traditionally lagged tokamaks in terms of Lawson criterion performance, but they've also been less funded because tokamaks have performance advantages. Stellarators are steady state and don't risk the same number of plasma instabilities. Germany is so confident that it's the right approach that they built the largest magnetic confinement device ever to test optimizing for quasi-omnigineity. Stellarators in general are becoming closer to the mainstream approach and given another 5 or 10 years you'll likely hear about them as much as tokamaks (at least in terms of non ITER research).
What are the numbers if you know, of the speed or rate at which plasma can destabilize?
https://www.energy.gov/science/fes/articles/zero-tolerance-t...
http://www.ccfe.ac.uk/assets/Documents/POPVOL17p082509.pdf
I attended a presentation today that, at one point, showed toroidal flow rate over radius in a 1m major radius device. It ranged from 30 to 100 km/s. There are many effects operating at different timescales. Turbulence is among the shorter timescales, making it difficult to simulate and why it is only now the current focus of many researchers.
1) Why would you select a frequency that water absorbs?
2) Who gets to be in charge of aiming the orbital death ray?
2) I mean not for nothing, whoever gets their reactor and satellite in orbit first.
Solar heating is on the order of 5000 times our current energy utilization (there's a similar amount of cooling).
Which isn't to say it can never be a problem, just that we are a blip right now as far as direct heat added to the Earth's energy budget.
Oh, wow, that's it!? We have MUCH greater energy utilization than I thought. That's impressive.
From another comment: "Mankind's waste heat (~10^12 W) is utterly miniscule compared to sun's energy delivered to earth (~10^17 W)".
5000 smells bad — imagine that power output concentrated in cites or production areas — that would be severely noticeable.
Disclaimer: I also don't agree with the GP's position
Even all the heat generated by appliances and devices in the world combined is actually negligible in examining global warming.
The problem is the greenhouse effect because that heat is a positive reinforncement feedback loop from where we get all energy ulimately -- the sun.
Both are correct in this instance (when replying to you I can't recall if it was the first post however I knew it was your parent / my grandparent post).
> Even all the heat generated by appliances and devices in the world combined is actually negligible in examining global warming.
I agree. Like I said, I don't agree with the original conjecture however it is still important to note that if one is only discussing waste heat production then the problem isn't just the generation of electricity. However the problems clean energy addresses are obviously more significantly other, far more hazardous, waste products. Hence why they're called "clean" energy.
Our sole issue is greenhouse gasses trapping more heat than they should.
But it's necessarily the wrong kind of fusion (D-T, unlike the sun's fusion), and it won't be efficient, or clean, or cheap even when it "works".
The whole endeavor is pie-in-the-sky if you ask me, which reminds me, there is already a fusion reactor quite nearby that runs 24/7/365(.25), for the next few billion years. We should find better ways to harness it.
will the walls be replaced daily?
In particular, the D-T reaction is especially easy, and tokamaks have well-known scaling laws. The JET reactor in the UK is the only reactor using tritium and has produced 67% of its input power. In 1999 the JT-60 in Japan achieved results with D-D fuel that would have hit breakeven with D-T.
With a larger reactor, stronger magnetic fields, and D-T fuel, net power is the expected result.
(Not to mention, we've already achieved net power at human scales with thermonuclear bombs, which have far more energy density than a dung hill.)
You do have high-energy neutron radiation, but most of that you're capturing to breed tritium fuel from lithium. Some of it makes reactor parts radioactive, but that's not a major waste problem; according to presentations I've seen from MIT fusion scientists, they'd stop being significantly radioactive after a few decades.
The economics of fusion reactors will also depend on the design. Some look economically feasible, others not so much. But it's clear that fusion is possible, contrary to the comment above.
but for sure no panacea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor
The hard part is getting more power out than you put in, under controlled conditions. Here's an overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power
Probably the most reliable route to practical fusion is outlined in this presentation by the head of MIT's fusion program:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
FWIIW I've worked in this field, have written popular articles on Farnsworth and his Fusors, have written popular articles on present day fusion efforts, and will not be convinced by MIT press releases any more than I was the LLNL press releases or anyone else's until they actually start making measurable progress, which nobody has ... in a long time. The most likely useful efforts are at Tri-Alpha, not MIT, and they're about as likely to pan out as I am to find 100lbs of gold outside my front door this evening.
We are not quite there yet.
But fission has now lost to renewables, which are now at a levelized cost 3-4x lower than fission. Fusion's putative safety/env benefits mean nothing now.
The program now is existing on institutional inertia. I don't see this coming to anything but an inglorious end.
If you're backing them up with fossil, then sure, they're pretty darn cheap.
It's plausible that, for example, some molten salt reactors currently under development will be a lot cheaper than light water reactors, so it doesn't make sense to compare future renewables with nuclear today.
More importantly, the decision whether to build such a reactor will depend on decline in costs of its competition in the future, not just now, when the business case for the reactor requires it operate for 40 years or more.
So I'll ask again: how do the numbers look if you compare today's wind/solar/storage costs without fossil backup to today's nuclear costs? We can argue until our fingers wear out about what the costs will be in eleven years, but there are hard numbers for today.
Insisting on looking at today's solar and wind numbers ? Ok, then I also insist we stick with the numbers for currently available nuclear reactors. You wouldn't want to hypocritically allow only projections of future nuclear, right?
Fusion's economic prospects are horrific, even if it can be made to "work", and this has been known for a long time.
Indeed all solar panels on earth are just capturing byproducts of a fusion reactor that is the sun. But a fusion reactor at the scale of ITER is not proved to be lucrative even in an ideal world. I would have hoped that modern physics would allow to predict with great accuracy how energy efficient would an ITER-like be in an ideal world where all enginering issues would be solved. Maybe the proof exist and I'm just anaware of it.
But yes, in general compared to fossils it certainly wins.
Hydro/geothermal: nice steady power but not easily available everywhere.
Wind/solar: available everywhere but variable output.
Obviously it's easy to run a city on "renewables" if you have a convenient dam, but if you only have wind/solar it's more challenging.
Montreal runs on hydro
https://www.epa.gov/energy/power-profiler#/NWPP
California doesn't have as much renewables in their fuel mix, but they get better emissions per megawatt, since they burn less coal: https://www.epa.gov/energy/power-profiler#/CAMX
As far as I can tell, upstate New York has the lowest carbon emissions per megawatt in the United States, 294.7, thanks to lots of nuclear and hydro: https://www.epa.gov/energy/power-profiler#/NYUP
These graphs prove the failings of modern "green energy" because all that hydro was built 50+ years ago, and if instead of fighting Nukes and getting coal plants the environmentalist would have embraced Nukes we wouldn't really be talking about CO2, particularly if the widespread use of breeders brought the price down so that buying electric cars made sense without the huge subsidies both in purchase price and electric charging.
Put another way, making electric cheaper via modern fission would make electric cars more appealing than the unsustainable subsidy models currently in use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Norway#M...
https://www.ecowatch.com/iceland-worlds-largest-clean-energy...
>Today, all of Iceland’s electric power is generated by hydropower and geothermal energy, and about 95 percent of the nation’s heating demands are warmed by geothermal means.
https://www.sciencealert.com/costa-rica-has-been-running-on-...
>Costa Rica ran on 100 percent renewable energy for 76 straight days between June and August this year, according to a new report, demonstrating that life without fossil fuels is possible - for small countries, at least.
This is the second time in two years that the Central American country has run for more than two months straight on renewables alone, and it brings the 2016 total to 150 days and counting.
Managing the millions of turbines and solar panels isn't a small task.
I would love a world where the skyline wasn't dotted with wind turbines and solar panels.
It’s a breathtaking sight, and the knowledge that it’s producing clean energy makes it all the better.
I as much as anyone would love a Mr Fusion from back to the future, even if it required hydrogen/etc rather than food waste, but the truth is none of the current designs have clear paths forward to grid scale production, or even small self contained units as used on subs or potentially space applications.
I do think we should be funding the research, but I also think we should be spending equal amounts on engineering better fission processes. The former is basic research while the latter is targeted engineering.
And then you still have all of the usual advantages of nuclear reactors -- low land use, steady power that doesn't depend on weather, etc.
In order for renewables to be truly as convenient as grid power, there has to be a storage system of some kind at the site of use. Generally that means, in your car, in your home, etc.
The environmental cost of disposing of batteries hardly insignificant.
Of course it will run out eventually but so will the sun, in a similar amount of time.
> Although the concentration of uranium is quite low, about 3.3 ppb (parts per billion) in seawater of average oceanic salinity, the amount present in the total volume of the oceans is very great, some 4.5 billion tonnes. Of this, perhaps only that uranium contained in the upper 100 meters or so of the surface well-mixed layer should be considered accessible for recovery, some 160 million tonnes. Practically speaking, the amount contained in the ocean surface layers is unlimited with respect to large scale extraction in the forseeable future. This results from the replenishment by continental weathering and river runoff being much larger than forseeable extraction rates.
...
> 1) The surface waters of the oceans comprise a virtually inexhaustible uranium resource of some 160 million tonnes, extractible indefinitely at a rate of a few thousand tonnes per year.
Exxon Nuclear Company, "EXTRACTION OF URANIUM FROM SEAWATER: EVALUATION OF URANIUM RESOURCES AND PLANT SITING, VOLUME I", pp 6-7, 9, February 1979, https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/6191296
The above quotes are from the executive summary. Page 35 has the money quote:
> This represents an influx of about 9000 tonnes annually.
Which supports your contention that sea water CANNOT provide an endless supply considering that current annual consumption is ~90,000 tonnes, 10x the replacement rate.
EDIT: s/CANNOT NOT/CANNOT/
Anyway, in steady state the consumption from the oceans can be only equal to the inflow from rivers. If that's (as I've seen estimated) 25,000 tons/year, that's enough to power the world if breeders are used, but not enough if today's thermal burner reactors are used.
What's more surprising, actually, is how much uranium we consume currently. And AFAIU, we do so very inefficiently. Seems to me we'd get a much better RoI by using uranium more efficiently than by turning to seawater for more uranium to waste.
[1] Assuming it becomes viable in the first place. It certainly doesn't seem economically viable, today.
When the US was first making the switch from wood to coal as a principle fuel, in the 1880s, the argument in contemporaneous accounts was that a small fraction of the probable reserves of coal would serve all energy needs for millions of years, given that perennial caveat, at present rates of consumption.
What happened, of course, was that rates of consumption increased somewhat. Coal went from fueling a small number of structural heating, locomotion, and smelting uses to vastly expanded railroad, steelmaking, and most especially, electrical generation uses. Trainloads of coal arrive daily at power plants, still. Others are located at mineheads themselves as electrons transport more readily than lumps of fossilised tree. The Jevons paradox is a mighty bastard. By present estimates, again, at present values of consumption, coal reserves are estimated at 100-300 years.
At present rates of electrical energy generation, existing terrestrial (non-oceanic) uranium would suffice for fewer than two decades worth of energy use. When you factor in even probable growth due to:
- Extending Western standards of living to another five billions of the world's population.
- Expansion of total population from 7.5 billions to 11-12 billions.
- Continued "normal" economic growth at 2-3% per annum, that is, doubling every 25-30 years, roughly.
... the total energy requirements increase tremendously.
(Note that renewables also strain to keep up with such growth -- my sense is that the fact that incident solar power on Earth of some 7,000x present human energy consumption actually represents a dangerously narrow margin of safety.)
I'd worked out at one point the remaining reserves given some rate of projected annual growth, a fairly simple application of exponential math. The numbers are exceedingly sobering.
TL;DR: If there is some putatively nonrenewable fuel source whose reserves would extend to some point in time beyond the viability of some specified landmark (h. sapiens as a viable species, C3 photosynthesis on Earth, etc., variously a few million to about 800 million years), then the resource is not meaningfully constrained, and we can make reasonable use of it.
But given any notion of continued exponential growth, which is to say, a constant percentage increase in economic activity, given all available history, if not some putative but very-much-unproved virtualisation-of-activity hypotheses, that's a high bar to meet.
It feels like you're double-dipping here: I don't see how we extend "western standards of living to 5 billions of the worlds population" without concurrently extending the same GDP per unit of energy use to the same populations.
It's not like we all decide to just buy exponentially bigger houses and cars, for all that a look around certain parts of the US tend to suggest this in the near term. :-)
It also seems to me that a steady increase in GDP per unit of energy is a likely consequence of higher energy prices - while energy is dirt-cheap (and often subsidized), use tends to be profligate.
Less energy intensive, perhaps. But not less electricity intensive. As cars and trains go electric, electricity demand will increase. If we're going to make planes and ships hydrogen powered, that's going to be another big electricity demand.
Or more briefly: yes ;-)
- Economic policy, targets, and theory are currently expressed in terms of constant percentage economic growth. Which is to say, exponential growth.
- All empirical evidence ties past growth to increased resource consumption, most especially energy. "Dematerialisation" studies tend not to be well supported, and arguments for nonmaterial mechanisms for economic growth prove to be largely unfounded far more hypothetical or theological than even theoretical.
The point that extending Western standards of living beyond the ~1 billion residents of the US, EU, JP, CA, AU, & NZ (line noise), and the additional 1 billion of China who are still on net nowhere near Western levels of affluence, but have seen appreciable growth over the past two decades, accompanied by massive increases in energy consumption, resource utilisation, and sinks (effluent) exploitation, much of that energy from coal, to the five billions elsewhere, requires a similar energy-intensity-per-unit-GDP is precisely the one I'm trying to make.
There is some space for optimising efficiency in terms of GDP per unit energy, and within specific nations, there's been some evidence of this -- see the US since the oil shocks of the 1970s. But progress has been limited, most especially progress in the absence of further price shocks. Applying imposed efficiency requirements has worked poorly, and the tolerance of imposing, say, higher fuel taxes (as is practiced in Europe and Japan, neither having much by way of indigenous petroleum supply) has been scant.
(Higher prices for petroleum in petroleum-exporting countries themselves is even less viable, and is a major component of a theory of their collapse, the Export Lands Model. See Venezuela, Egypt, Syria, and Yemen as examples, with Russia potentially another, though its production has yet to fall markedly.)
Steve Keen has been doing some remarkable recent work on the role of energy in production functions, including a rewrite of the Cobb-Douglas production function to include energy as a term along with capital and labour. He's been working with a long-time researcher in the area, Robert Ayres, and making quite substantial progress, though whether or not that will be accepted by the field remains an open question. Economics has been exceedingly resistant to such messages in the past.
Keen's conceptual insight is that "labour without energy is a corpse, capital without energy is a sculpture". It's possible to increase efficiencies. Early steam engines operated in the 1-10% thermodynamic efficiency range, modern dual-cycle gas-turbine generation can exceed 50%, and when making use of waste heat for other processes can approach 80% efficiencies. But you're always limited to some theoretical maximum.
One area I've been exploring is the question of just what specific technolgical mechanisms there are. Economists describe technology generally as "efficiency", but it's an efficiency gained through specific means. I've identified nine:
1. Fuels. Applying more (or more useful) energy to a process.
2. Energy transmission and transformation.
3. Materials. Specific properties, abundance, costs, effects, limitation.s
4. Process knowledge -- how to do things. What's generally described as "technical knowledge", here considered as a specific mechanism of technology.
5. Structural or causal knowledge -- why things work. What's generally described as "scientific knowledge".
6. Networks. Interactions between nodes via links, physical or virtual, over which matter, energy, information, or some mix flow. (People would be one possible flow.) Transport, comms, power, information.
7. Systems. Constructs including sensing, processing, action, and feedback. Ranging from conceptual to mechanical to human and social.
8. Information. Sensing, perceiving, processing, storing, retrieving, and transmitting...
2/3 of sunlight falls on the oceans, unlikely to be developed as technological solar farms. Marine environments are exceedingly harsh. You can also discount Antarctica. We're already down to ~25% of the grand total surface are, and hence energy.
Panel efficiency (~<20% typically), spacing factor (shaded panels generate no power), and further losses greatly cut into the remaining surplus. In net, ~1-10% of the resource might potentially be available. And other terrestrial ecosystem resources need their own cut.
There's still a possible surplus relative to present consumption, but the margins begin to look uncomfortably thin. Population growth and expansion of industrial standards of living cut further into that, as discussed up-thread.
Expressed as population, area, and energy, over time, the plots are interesting.
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/_bi5uhywbdyukhfy-eayjw
Jevons paradox is something that can happen, not a claim or proof that it always happens.
And exponential growth never continues. I mean, we can all agree Moore's law and population growth, that people irrationally thought would go on forever, are reaching their limits, right?
I agree that exponential growth cannot continue. However you'll find a matter of faith in mainstream economics that it can. Even severe critics, as Thomas Piketty, state this, as in this offhand passage from Capital in the 21st Century:
The median scenario I will present here is based on a long-term per capita output growth rate of 1.2 percent in the wealthy countries, which is relatively optimistic compared with Robert Gordon's predictions (which I think are a little too dark).
That's still doubling every 58 years.
The cornucopians are far more explicit and optimistic. Kahn & Simon, Maddox. Tom Worstall, here:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/timworstall/100017248/i...
A chief mode of expansion isn't in intensive use, that is, per person or concern (firm, agency, organisation), but extensive use: the number of individuals, concerns, and applications making use.
The access to artificial light by people, by entities, by activities, has exploded. More people have access. Lighted billboards, sport fields, indoor agriculture, vanity outdoor lighting, etc., etc., etc.
New York City's Broadway became known as The Great White Way in 1910 due to its spectacular use of electric lighting. That is now every populated hamlet save North Korea, and regions of central Africa, Amazonia, and Oceania, have comparable lighting levels outdoors.
https://www.spotlightonbroadway.com/the-great-white-way-0
https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/55000/551...
And that excludes interior residential, commercial, and industrial lighting.
Light pollution is now a thing.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/04/nights-ar...
https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-b...
"The key determinant of our forecast is the relationship between price and volume. From the observed historical values, we calculate a learning rate of around 18%. This means that for every doubling of cumulative volume, we observe an 18% reduction in price. Based on this observation, and our battery demand forecast, we expect the price of an average battery pack to be around $94/kWh by 2024 and $62/kWh by 2030."
TLDR Batteries will work out fine as storage. Recycling batteries is a known materials handling process.
Problem with the technology is a) not viable in the current market. b) It's a mind numbingly boring idea. c) There is no 'disruption' potential here. All the companies that can build this at scale are huge established multi-nationals like General Electric.
To replace strip mined coal burning generators and fracked gas we need a mix of just about everything.
I also think we can get more mileage out of chemical fuels produced with renewables - ammonia, hydrogen.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/siemens-ammonia...
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/03/new-fuel-cell-could-...
This won't scale well with anticipated energy needs. It would be a real struggle to cover our current energy needs with wind and solar (with other renewables like hydro and geothermal being geographically limited, subject to environmental issues and more or less already maximized where they can be used)...and we need more. We're heading toward electric cars with batteries that hold 3x what the average household uses in a day (which drain in a few hundred miles), and will need more energy for carbon capture and desalination as time goes on...
>sounds ... environmentally preferable.
The main waste of fusion is helium, it's entirely possible that renewables and batteries are more damage to the environment.
And why do you think geothermal power isn't renewable?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide > Nineteen years is preferred because the Earth, Moon and Sun's relative positions repeat almost exactly in the Metonic cycle of 19 years, which is long enough to include the 18.613 year lunar nodal tidal constituent.
C'mon mate, it wasn't even two sentences. Cool about the Metonic cycle, though.
Though small scale energy production does seem to be renewable, using just geothermal to reach our needs would likely overuse the resource.
Then again, if you want to look at things on that timescale, there's no such thing as renewables.
Less snarky reply: More fission would let us do all kinds of new things today, if people weren’t so irrational about it.
In the long term, we won't just need power as good as today; we need something much better than today.
The next step after fusion would be some form of total conversion, of which the only feasible chances seem to involve black holes, so, a ways off yet. Probably not save to use on a planet.
It would really help to quantify how far we are from lucrative nuclear fusion.
As others have mentioned, funding is the main reason why energy production from nuclear fusion hasn't taken off. The better question is, what isn't being funded?
Ask yourself: how do you hold the sun in a bottle? The answer is that it's very hard, but it's doable. You just need to cool the walls fast enough and make sure the sun doesn't melt the bottle.
Based off this rough problem description, the main issues are the following:
- Materials: what do you make the bottle out of? Do you know of any materials which can withstand millions of degrees of heat? Probably not, so you should look into using magnets to suspend the sun in the middle of the bottle.
- Confinement: how do you hold the sun? The sun (that is, plasma) reacts to magnetic fields. Classical designs such as the tokamak drove the plasma around a donut to keep it confined. Problem there is that you need two magnetic fields: one to drive and one to steer. Some decades ago, people got smart and figured out you could design the road in such a way that the car will always drive straight, so great, you don't need to steer anymore. (This is the main difference between ITER and Wendelstein 7-X; personally, I think ITER will turn out poorly, but they'll learn a lot from building the thing...)
- Reactions: guess what? Your sun emits high-energy neutrons, making the bottle radioactive. You could use a different type of sun, but those are expensive and weird or would require you to go to the Moon, which is also expensive. You figure out you can line the walls of the reactor with lithium and breed fuel for your sun, which works but isn't perfect. You know other suns are out there, but no one knows how to build a bottle to hold that sun.
- Self-sustainment: you put some ingredients in your bottle, shake it up, and presto, you have a sun. For about ten milliseconds. Problem is, your bottle got too hot and your reaction creates exhaust you have to scrape out. Also, the magnets used to keep the sun in the middle of the bottle draw more energy than your sun makes! That won't do.
Self-sustaining fusion reactors are very hard problems to crack because there's so many moving parts. The fusion research community has suffered from underfunding for decades because people wrongfully associate the principles of Chernobyl with ITER. People don't want their politicians funding more Chernobyls, and Bob's your uncle. Because the funding has been so low, the problems which should be solved by now, well, haven't been.
So best case you will save about 30% on your bill. A fusion power station is probably going to be more expensive however, so you will be more likely to save less than 30% on bills.
Translation: "we need more money, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future".
People working on technologies which are truly "when not if" don't go around advertising it - they are too busy trying to be the one to profit off it before the next guy does.
- Internet - packet-switching routers for LANs
- Microchips - ballistic missile guidance
- Nuclear - radioactive tracers, radiotherapy, watch faces, ...
- Microbiology - vaccines, insulin, ...
Who on earth is making money out of controlled nuclear fusion? Where are the waypoints? Where can we make something useful in the short to medium time horizon?
I also dispute your point of "little appetite for....30+ year timeline" projects, as the MEMS industry has routinely funded 30 year development cycles before technology maturation. The difference is, as I said, there are usually useful waypoints before the technology has fully matured.
Would something like Intel or MOS technology get vc money today?
Yes, because when they were founded, it was already established that you could make money making semiconductors.
The more concerning question is whether the invention of the transistor could be funded today. Historically, it was not funded by VC money, but out of the financial surplus of a big monopoly (AT&T). Are today's big, wealthy corporations doing as much of that sort of long-term research?
This is not something any VC-investor I know of would risk or can afford.
case in point - SpaceX. Before Musk private space on a big scale (not the laughable Pegasus) was may be just a couple notches below fusion. Once Musk shown the way for everybody, now we have VCs going all in. VCs are really very risk averse - they aren't going to dump money into being the first to make fusion because it is risky, they are going to dump money into the 20 startups of the second wave to make money for sure even if most of those startups fail.
That's not how innovation works. Moonshot projects take time. And they are risky and expensive.
The risk/expense is too high for one or even a few investors to bear. That's why innovators can't get "too busy to profit off it." These efforts need buy-in from a large crowd, from charities, states, institutional investors, etc. Convincing such a large crowd needs a PR effort, which is why such articles get written.
Are all of these efforts genuine? Of course not. But a project being long-term and "needing more money for the foreseeable future" is not a good heuristic to tell that it's not.
Of course, if the technology turns out to be impossible, then it's no big deal, because your rivals can't benefit from it either (in fact this was one of the main motivators for the Manhattan project - to see if it could be done, and make sure the Allies got there first if it could).
SDI also funded a vast amount of scientific research, although I don't know of any specific success stories to result.
Regardless, I wouldn't classify it as a textbook example of a moonshot failure.
Here's Robert Zubrin in "The Case for Space": "The national fusion programs progressed well during the Cold War because of fierce international competition. They have stopped moving forward since the late 1980s because the decision to consolidate them into a single global project, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), removed all stimulus for action. Indeed, it took nearly a quarter century for the bureaucrats in charge of ITER to manage to reach consensus in 2010 on where to put it, and it will take another quarter century before the machine even attempts to reach thermonuclear ignition in 2035."
( * ) Cost comparison: Manhattan Project $23BN in 2018 dollars [1]. ITER cost, construction only: $22BN as per their own estimate, $65BN as per the US Department of Energy estimate [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
[2] https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.2018041...
Quite frankly, controlled thermonuclear fusion is far more difficult than splitting an atom. It would be a shock if the same amount of funding would accomplish the equivalent goal. Next I’ll be told about pitfalls and hazards and biases around such a statement. People are scared of a real solution costing money.
Well, that's exactly the reason a Manhattan Project of Apollo Program style of push was inappropriate. Those two projects were fundamentally easy problems. By the time they were green-lighted, all their underlying physics was understood, and the only remaining challenges were engineering ones. In the case of fusion, that was not the case in 1991 (the year you picked) by any means.
The interviewer, a software engineer by trade, was extremely surprised, and asked him how complexity could be an advantage.
The physicist replied that it means that there's a lot of variables you can fiddle before you start coming up against real physical limits.
It sticks in the mind because you can sort of see why a scientist would think of fusion as a definite, next-few-decades thing, and at the same time, that doesn't mean it in the engineering sense of, these reactors will actually be just like a nuclear or coal plant.