The efficiency of the lasers is awful though and they will have to get at least 100x that energy yield for it to be a net power source. A lot of heat winds up in the laser glass and it takes it a long time to cool between shots so you are doing very good to make a few shots a day. A real power plant is going to need more like 10 shots per second.
Heavy-ion fusion has been talked about since the 1970s and it seems much more practical than lasers for energy production because the efficiency of particle accelerators is pretty good (maybe 30% or more) but it takes a very big machine, the size of a full powerplant, to do do meaningful development. Something like that seems to need about 100 beamlines because otherwise space charge effects prevent you from getting the needed luminosity. Given that you are going to need to protect the wall of the reactor and the beamlines from the blasts and also have a lot of liquid lithium flowing around to absorb neutrons and breed tritium it is hard for me to picture the beam quality being good enough.
There hasn't been much work on it since then. If I had $48 billion to spend I'd think a heavy ion fusion lab would be better than some other things I could buy.
Yeah, either heavy-ion beams or electrically-pumped excimer lasers seems like the path forward for the driver. Higher efficiency, higher repetition rate, possibly more robust. They also need to do away with holraums and switch to direct drive, to reduce target cost, ease alignment issues, and increase energy efficiency.
I don't hold out much hope for a practical, economical reactor from inertial confinement, but it's certainly exciting to see them achieve ignition & scientific breakeven, even if it's 10 years behind schedule. The one nice thing about ICF is that the energy gain shoots up dramatically once you cross the ignition threshold. That means they're arguably closer than tokamaks, even though both concepts need ~100x the demonstrated gain to get from where they are now to a workable reactor. (Ie, tokamaks have hit Q~0.3, need to get Q~30, vs ICF that has hit Q~1, needs Q~100).
It's not worthless research (not that you said it was), as it still validates various aspects of fusion energy and some of the engineering around it. And it's always been ahead of magnetic containment devices because they only have to keep the conditions for nanoseconds.
But NIF was never, and is not, designed to be a generating reactor, or even a prototype of a testbed. It's a weapons physics facility that happens to do some energy generating research sometimes.
That aside, hitting Q=1 (and be able to use the device again) in any way at all using any equipment is a major milestone that proves humans can get there. From that point, in theory, it's just engineering.
Unfortunately large fusion is unlikely to ever be economic because the cost of solar/battery is coming down so quickly and is already in the 1-2 cents per kilowatt hour for the solar component. And costs will continue to drop.
Small scale fusion on the other hand would have a viable niche application at the poles, in the sea or underground or any other environment that is without sun or space.
We won't know what the cost of solar/battery will be in a sustainable energy economy, until someone builds a solar-powered solar panel and battery factory. At the moment, productions costs are heavily (as in, entirely) subsidised by fossil fuels (mostly coal).
You miss my point. The reason solar is so cheap right now (along with the huge amount of government subsidies) is that the huge amount of energy required to manufacture them is currently done with very cheap coal in China.
>Cost of current production is an upper bound.
Under the current state of the energy economy, maybe. If we had to replace all manufacturing power sources with renewables - absolutely not.
Maybe - with government grants, and coal-powered manufacture of all of the associated generation equipment.
That's not very interesting though - what is interesting, which has been my topic of conversation this entire time, is what the energy economy would look like if it were not still fundamentally rooted in fossil fuels.
Given that coal and other fossil fuels are basically free energy - it does not take much at all to get energy from it (ie, set it on fire), it is not physically possible for PV generation to beat that. Therefore, it follows that renewable power will be more expensive than fossil fuel power. I don't see why this is so hard to acknowledge - we are living in a time of unreasonably cheap power, fuelled by several million years worth of stored solar energy. It can't last.
You make the same mistake fission boosters make. Converting heat to electricity is expensive. Solar and wind skip the expensive step, going straight to electricity. Electric power from solar and wind is already much cheaper than coal, without subsidy, for this reason, and because coal has to be dug up and transported. Coal has a high operating cost. Solar and wind have extremely low operating cost, and also very low capital cost, always falling.
Solar and wind, un-subsidized, are the cheapest power the world has ever seen, and their cost is still falling at exponential rate.
Why not? Plenty of places have enough sunlight to do so even in winter. Parts of Alberta have similar sunlight mid winter to PNG mid summer.
Plus storage is a thing. Using a heat pump to dry NaOH or melt Sodium Acetate, or heat a large pond can store low grade heat economically for months. Ammonia, or methanol can do so indefinitely.
Then there's transmission. HVDC can transport energy 10GW pernline for thousands of km at costs comparable to local generation.
I'd be very surprised if you could avoid using a solar panel to heat your home in 40 years even if you go out of your way to do so.
We're talking about the cost of power. Putting aside the unbelievable idea that Alberta has as much mid-winter solar energy available as at the equator, using solar to heat my house is more expensive than burning some stuff inside.
Bifacial isn't in this model, but it boosts the snowy region by about 20% and the tropical one by about 5%
And what will the stuff available to burn be made from when there are plants producing ethylene or methanol or ammonia in chile or saudi arabia or mongolia for less than what gas costs to dig up?
So the energy that is cheaper than coal and driving operating coal plants out of business will make the cost of producing it go up when the share increases?
These mental gymnastics routines are olympic level.
The reason we can ignore the huge manufacturing energy inputs required to make solar panels, is because it's powered by cheap domestic coal in China.
>driving operating coal plants out of business
Any specific ones? The only coal plants I've seen get shut down are because of environmental reasons (or age). Some countries, like Germany and China, are re-opening or building new coal plants.
Talking of mental gymnastics - fundamentally, the energy economy boils down to EROI (energy returned on energy invested). It's just wishful thinking that we can replace energy sources that are basically free (coal, oil, gas), with those that have energy payback periods in the mid-double digits of their expected lifespan (solar).
Try a new solar panel rather than one from the 90s. Your Shellenberger tripe about EROI went off when the EROI of solar surpassed that of nuclear and EPBT dropped below 18 months (or 6 months in sunny countries). Then it went even more ranc
If you're really worried about it, buy a panel from europe, the polysilicon (90% of the energy) comes from hydro, wind, and nuclear powered countries.
Even if all the money for a solar module went to coal generation at chinese or indian prices and nothing else it would pay back that power in under two years.
If the only activity involved in making PV was to spend the entire system cost on lignite and burn it directly at the mine front, it would *still* produce more energy in its lifetime than putting the coal in a coal plant.
It's absolutely laughable that you think you can keep spouting this ridiculous lie.
That's exactly the problem. This is a significant portion of the lifetime output of the panels.
>it would still produce more energy in its lifetime than putting the coal in a coal plant.
I'm not arguing that solar panels are a net negative, as you seem to be implying. I'm arguing that the energy economics of a world fuelled entirely by solar (and other renewable technologies - solar is about the worst for EROI) would look very different to what we have now.
Crystalline Solar panels have a benchmark lifetime of 30 years and are consistently outperforming predicted degradation rates. None have worn out yet, but the best guess is a median 40 year lifetime. A new panasonic or jinko mono panel installed in india has epbt under 6 months and an eroi around 100.
You're the one making the insane claims. You back them up.
Prove new solar in a median location is lower EROI than the median for new gas using up to date info on the whole process and solar cells you would buy for a project started now such as 155 micron wafer mono PERC.
Nope, I said that it's lower than other sources of power, and thus an energy economy based on solar will look very different than what we currently have.
Given that electricity represents a relatively small percentage of our power usage, in the majority of cases (materials manufacture, industry, heating, etc), the EROI of renewables will be worse than fossil fuels.
Prove that thermal energy from shale oil or tar sands is higher EROI than that same solar panel using a resistor or arc furnace then.
Then add heat pumps and PV+Heliostat or PV+CSP derived hydrogen compounds to your equation and realise that adding heat and chemical stocks shipped from distant places to the equation makes it favour renewables even more as you can turn 120MJ of electricity and 40MJ of direct sunlight at Chile's 35% capacity factor into 120MJ of hydrogen or 100MJ of Ammonia you don't have to refine. With the heat pump you'd get more low grade heat even if you burnt the fossil fuel for electricity.
Wind + PV is a pure upgrade from an EROI perspective, and electrolysers and CSP are following very close behind.
I only mentioned solar/battery for brevity but clearly wind/battery is already substantial in many parts of the world. In addition, HVDC transmissions line costs are also dropping year by year and these allow solar/wind generated electricity to be inexpensively shifted across long distances.
For example, such a transmission line is currently being built to send solar energy from Northern Australia to Singapore across about 3000km of ocean. Another project is generating wind energy near Iceland and sending it to the UK a distance of 800km.
Ok, and thank You for remember about Australia to Singapore transmission line.
Unfortunately, most of territories I mention, also have low population density, about 1/10 of western Europe, and have low middle income, so it is not right to directly compare them with western Europe or Singapore, in possibilities to achieve same infrastructure power.
There's well under a hundred million people that aren't within easy transmission distance of somewhere with at least 10% capacity factor for a bifacial system in mid winter and don't already have more than enough hydro to go wind/hydro.
If 1% of the world needs to get 30% of their energy from gas while we figure out the hydrogen thing, it's not really a problem.
"Although many scientists believe fusion power stations are still decades away, the technology’s potential is hard to ignore. Fusion reactions emit no carbon, produce no long-lived radioactive waste and a small cup of the hydrogen fuel could theoretically power a house for hundreds of years."
Not sure if you were expecting things to progress faster. But it it "only" takes 20 years. That would be insanely fast and world changing.
The potential is hard to ignore, but that doesn't mean the potential will ever be achieved. This (like crypto currency) is the realm of vapourware I am afraid. Always just around the corner. :(
What's sort of my point: we've had big projects that would totally definitely work this time every few years since the 90s. Will ITER work? Maybe. Would it be the first to fail (or even the 10th) if it doesn't? No. Per your own link there are literally 100s of other "reactors".
It's important to note that while this is technically true, it's mostly irrelevant. Sure, there's no material that will remain radioactive for the next 10k years, but instead you get much more highly radioactive material that will emit high doses for a "short" hundred years or so.
It's worth noting that the last 2 generations of fission plants were guaranteed to produce no waste, to be cheap, efficient, reliable etc. The unpalatable truth here is that we have no idea what fusion power will look like until we have built a few. The quoted section made me laugh as it's easy to be zero carbon when you don't actually exist... :)
I would say there have been a handful of important milestones this year, but this I would consider a breakthrough. Most of the other stuff is overhyped for sure.
I hope I'm wrong, but this seems like a lot of other "firsts". I'm guessing the total (and I mean -total-, lasers typically aren't that efficient) energy put into this will be much greater than the output.
MJ, not mJ. 2.5mJ is roughly the energy of a single keyboard keypress. 2.5MJ is over half a kilo of TNT.
Fun fact that Wolfram alpha just informed me of: a phone uses between 10 and 20 MJ a year: multiple kilos of TNT. 4000mAh * 3.7V * 365: yep, it's about right.
Last time, they got something like 80% return on the laser energy input, now it's over 100% apparently. And, they had trouble repeating that last record, so people were questioning how meaningful it was if it couldn't be repeated. Now they've been able to repeat it & improve on it.
I guess I don't really get it. Nobody doubts that you can get a tremendous output of energy from a fusion bomb with modest inputs. This thing they've ignited is a tiny fusion weapon without a fission blanket and with a huge, inconvenient optical primary. I mean I'm all for science but I don't see the road from this to civilian fusion power as people generally understand the term.
The analogy doesn't really work. The utility of a steam engine was obvious to antiquity, but they did not have the materials technology to build it. They did not need basic science to do steam power. The first practical steam engine predates the understanding by chemists of combustion. It was invented when phlogiston was still the going theory.
NIF on the other hand is already a miracle of materials science. An absolute triumph. But you can't enumerate the list of unsolved problems that, if eventually solved, lead to inertial confinement fusion as a civilian energy source. On the other side you can make that list for magnetic confinement. There is a clear path from magnetic confinement research to commercialization, with a known set of major problems.
They correctly dismissed it as a curiosity because it was far too inefficient to do anything useful with the amounts of fuel they would have had available. They couldn't have made a more efficient one because they didn't have any idea how to construct reasonably uniform pressure-bearing cylinders.
Real innovation didn't happen until much later on, at British coal mines because 1. there was lots of fuel because it's already at a coal mine, 2. there was a useful task for the work in pumping water out of the mine, and 3. materials technology had advanced enough to make it possible to construct an engine that did a useful amount of work from a manageable amount of fuel.
No, this is like research into TNT being presented as a potential way of creating a power plant by capturing the energy of the explosion. The real purpose is producing better explosives.
This is not some bizarre idea - Lawrence Livermore is officially a part of the DoE's research into maintaining and improving thermonuclear weapons. That there are some vaguely imaginable applications in energy generation is at the very best a bonus.
Remember that each shot of the lasers also destroys 10 million dollars or so of the highly precision engineered "housing" for the fuel pellet (called a hohlraum).
The lasers don't directly hit the pellet - they hit the metal walls of this hohlraum, causing it to grow so hot that it emits x-rays, and its shape is perfectly aligned so that those pellets hit the two sides of the pellet at exactly the same time, causing two "ripples" to compress it so much that they force the atoms to fuse in the middle and produce a chain reaction that has to consume the entire amount of fuel before the force of the implosion dissipates, at which time all of the matter violently explodes. The brunt of that explosion (and the neutron bombardment from the fusion process) is taken up by the hohlraum, which is ireedemably destroyed and can only be, at best, melted down as raw material for the next hohlraum.
Edit: tldr, this is exactly as useful for energy generation as an internal combustion engine whose pistons are destroyed every time the fuel ignites.
No, the hohlraum is, which costs millions of dollars by itself. And it costs so much because it is essentially the piece that handles the synchronization of hitting the fuel pellet perfectly symmetrically. Its also built from solid gold right now, though depleted uranium may also work - either way, the raw material is only a fraction of the cost, the perfection required in achieving its exact shape is the problem.
I think that people are waiting to see the real announcement not the scoop with limited details. Let's see what the Granthom announces tomorrow. Tough to be excited about scoops with limited information and without the level of robustness of the accomplishment.
This is not energy research, it's weapons research. Inertial containment fusion is only interesting because it replicates some of the conditions inside a fusion bomb - there is no plausible way to use it to generate electricity with anything approaching cost efficiency.
The common thread is that they tend to aim directly for an electrical output rather than simply generating energy, and don't necessarily plan to have a self-sustaining reaction.
The response does not disagree with Hossenfelder. It just points out, that Q_Plasma is a useful metric to track progress for research and science projects on fusion. However for building a useful fusion power plant only Q_Total is relevant in the end. This has been misrepresented very often and Hossenfelders criticism is absolutely justified.
Even if for workable viability Q (Q_? Currently 1.2?) must reach values on the order of 50 to 100, if considering real-world losses and efficiencies. It's absolutely great news!
While I appreciate all the effort in nuclear fusion and do think we should continue to invest a little of each years global R&D budget, it seems these reactors (e.g ITER and this one) still require tritium which is rather hard to come by efficiently.
Which means normal nuclear reactors will be needed to make it and minimising any economic viability of the dependent fusion rector for a long long time.
Normal nuclear reactors are a good thing too, and they alone are enough to solve all of humanity’s energy problems (though we should pursue fusion power too, of course). See Integral Fast Reactor.
Breeder reactors are not "notoriously dangerous", they are just a little too expensive to justify their construction when the uranium is cheap (like it is now). Also, there are proliferation risks. However, these are not engineering problems nor scientific problems, breeder reactors are production-ready and safe.
I've never really gotten the "proliferation risk" in the context of US power production (or China, Russia, or even France, for that matter). We're talking about existing nuclear powers, they already have the capacity to make nuclear weapons. If they wanted more they would make more, for the simple reason that having nuclear weapons is table stakes for being a serious player in geopolitics.
> tritium which is rather hard to come by efficiently
I'm not by any means well informed on the matter, but isn't the lunar surface covered in tritium deposits?
It might make sense to mine the moon sooner than later. Once we have the necessary equipment and resources there, the delta-v for getting the mined product to Earth isn't nearly as substantial.
Building lunar mining tech is likely to unlock all sorts of advances for the human race.
I believe the tritium issue is addressed through the inclusion of lithium in the reactor's inner blanket [1]. Something about the neutron interaction with the lithium results in some non-trivial production of tritium which is then freed into the reactor. tl;dr - they've thought of that.
Isn't this the case with nearly every aspect of "proposed" fusion reactors. Just because it's proposed or "not yet tested on a commercial fusion reactor" does not necessarily mean that the mechanism is not well understood.
I think if it were so well understood, ITER wouldn't be testing over 100 different breeder blanket designs. I've seen breeder blanket design described as one of the biggest challenges with fusion today.
I would expect that it is more a matter of selecting the best/optimized design rather than demonstrating the fundamental viability of tritium breeding.
Tritium will be bred in the reactor that uses it. Exactly how is a problem which will be solved further down the development path but there’s little question about the viability of that.
I think it's there for people who may not be familiar with what fusion energy is, so they can understand that it's a potential climate change solution.
A fusion rector does not have control rods. It has a magnetic containment field around a plasma which is, something like 10x hotter than the sun. if you put a control rod in there it would instantly vaporize.
At the risk of being pedantic, if this is the LLNL NIF, then it's ICF, not MCF, though putting a graphite rod at the heart of a laser-driven thermonuclear event probably looks about the same either way.
It’s unnecessary greenwashing hyperbole. Of course there will still be carbon emissions from the production of the reactor parts and the sourcing of fuel ingredients. The potential benefits of working fusion are far greater than carbon worries, and the media sells it short with narrow-minded labeling.
I live near Princeton NJ. Approx 4+ years ago years ago I bumped into a friend one evening at a local restaurant / bar. As it turned out, her date was a top guy at the Princeton Plasma Labs.
Long to short, Gates assured me (paraphrasing), "We're close. It's doable. All we need is more funding."
I hope he's right.
p.s. I know PPPL might not be directly involved in this announcement. I was sharing context on the topic.
I'd take all of that with a grain of salt. First he was probably trying to impress the girl, and second, every scientist says their work is possible, they just "need more funding". If they didn't think it was possible, they wouldn't be working on it.
After a few more major breakthroughs we'll be where fission was in 1942 after Fermi made the first man made neutron chain reaction. After that, we can see what a practical electricity producing plant looks like, and see how much people actually care about small amounts of tritium radiation.
At the moment fuel costs in fission are like 5-10% of total costs for a fission fleet. In fusion it could be lower, but that will not be any means mean the overall system will be cheaper.
We'll have to see the cost tradeoffs: fusion makes much less radioactive material per kWh than fission (but it still makes some) vs. simplicity. Fission is relatively trivial: just put special rocks in a grid and pump water over them as they pour out their star energy.
Progress is good and exciting, but I don't see any reason to think this will have major implications for energy systems anytime soon. Would be happy to be wrong though.
Disclaimer: I switched from studying fusion energy to advanced fission 16 years ago.
Right. But slapping boiling water around the burning plasma is kind of a rube goldberg usually. See LLNL's LIFE design for example [1]. Things like molten salt walls circulating through a steam turbine and all that.
There are other ideas too, but it's hard to beat a Rankine cycle.
You can't just slap boiling water around the burning plasma in a DT reactor, since you need almost all the neutrons to make more tritium. Water would absorb too many neutrons. The IFE designs use thick showers of liquid lithium or molten FLiBe for this reason.
Well, there is hydro, wind and photovoltaic. And in the fusion field there are startups working on aneutronic fusion, which can generate power directly from charged particles. LPPFusion is one that seemed promising a few years ago, but unfortunately less so now.
I'm surprised too. I've looked into this before, and it's absolutely right - just not intuitive to me.
We do have radio-photo-voltaic devices, but they're so inefficient it's laughable. And we have RTG generators, which are only practical in limited situations, and again have a very low efficiency.
I think we just haven't found the right fusion design.
If we use a reaction that primarily produces beta radiation or other high energy charged particle, sending it through a coil of wire would induce a voltage that we could extract as electric energy.
For that matter, appropriately located coils could be used to extract thermal energy from the plasma directly. The trick there is that we can't get much with the current tokamak and stellarator designs -- the thermal energy is too disordered to use a large coil and the plasma flow is not sufficiently confined to use small coils. There are almost certainly better configurations, but the electrohydrodynamics simulations are tricky. If we keep at it I'm sure we can find a stable configuration with fewer degrees of freedom.
I'm not super excited about current SMR projects either, sadly. The economies of scale that they explicitly turn away from are very real. The economies of mass production that they rely on can't be achieved unless a lot of people are willing to buy the first N for high cost. But who will buy after the first few boondoggle a bit?
I am excited about standardized large light-water reactors at the moment, like the US/Japanese ABWR or Korean's APR-1400 designs. I wish there was more hype around them rather than SMRs and advanced reactors.
My favorite idea in nuclear to rapidly deeply decarbonize is to use a shipyard to mass-product large floating reactors. This gives you economies of scale and economies of mass production. Amazingly, this was seriously attempted in the 1970 and 80s in Jacksonville, Fl on Blount Island, where Offshore Power Systems installed the world's largest gantry crane and got an honest-to-goodness manufacturing license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build 8 of these. [1]
Sadly, my concern above with SMRs happened to OPS and they couldn't break through. Such a good idea though.
I'm curious, when you're talking about the SMR projects, does that include the Natrium reactors from TerraPower? I think they're backed by the Gates Foundation? Those seemed pretty interesting to me as a nuclear layman. Also, I don't know a lot about Bill Gates, but he does seem like the kind of guy that if they showed some real success, boondoggle or not, he'd be willing to brute force his way past those issues by throwing money at the problem.
Wouldn't the possible location for floating reactors be much more limited than SMR projects? I would think special financing might get the ball rolling for SMRs, strong decades spanning incentives for first movers.
Reactors like ISMR from Terrestrial Energy and SSR from Moltex that will operate at 500MW (rather then true 'small' reactors) are for more reasonable for scale.
They look like 'small' reactors but they pack quite a punch in comparison to PWR designs.
Any nation that just seriously commits to a single reactor design like this and plans to build 50 of them will do really well.
But I agree the same could be done with APR-1400 or AP1000.
It's still decades off but as I understand it, this was the hardest nut to crack. They got what, 2.5 megajoules out of 2.1 in?
I might be in the opposite camp as you but this is very much a "where were you when—" moment for me. I'm sure someone will pop in to disappoint me but I think the point is it's no longer a hypothetical exercise.
Of laser energy into a tiny control volume that doesn't consider how much energy went into the laser systems. If you draw the control volume around the building and see that the lasers require vastly more energy than what came out, I think you'll be less excited, right?
We've been getting lots of energy out of fusion since the early 1950s with thermonuclear bombs. We know we can get energy out of a control volume. But is it a practical energy source is still the question imho.
I don't know what people get out of repeating this on every single fusion article. It's not inventive or insightful, and it doesn't further the discussion in the slightest.
Because it's A) true, B) relevant to keep all of the hype in check. The year of Linux on the desktop is always right around the corner too. Yes, they are tropes, but they were not born out of nothing.
Someone has to keep the bloviated PR campaigns checked with reality. Otherwise, some crazy fools might actually start believing that fusion is real and gets duped out of their money. If you can't stand a bit of real criticism, then maybe you should sell your scam somewhere else. Otherwise, take it on the chin, retool your message, and come at it honestly.
It's not a trope; it's a cliché. There's nothing wrong with poking holes in overinflated hype, but do they have to be so boring and repetitive about it.
If you keep telling me the same thing with the same lack of results, I could say the same to you as being boring and repetitive. Just because you say 2+2=5 and someone tells you you're wrong every time doesn't mean they are boring and repetitive.
How is this "lack of results"? This particular announcement is a huge result!
Maybe it's not the result you think it should be ("with all they hype over decades, we should have fusion power by now"), but... too bad. It is what it is, and this particular announcement is indeed impressive.
It is not, in fact, a huge result, except insofar as it is convenient for further weapons research. It does not bring civil fusion power even a single day nearer.
It's also just a parrot trick. There's no reason behind why it is 30 years away or even why 30 instead of 15 instead of 20. It is just a line. These numbers are meaningless but touted as a way to add validity to the argument without providing actual evidence for why fusion is such a tough nut to crack. We should dispose of hype, but let's do it from a place of understanding. I hope we're a bit smarter than parrots.
It's not true. The original quote was 30 years given current funding. They reduced the funding and surprise surprise it didn't get done. It's like when you estimate how long a project will take given a thousand people, and they reduce the number of people on the project to one person and then hold you to the original estimate.
Okay, but then if the funding has decreased, what hasn't the "years away" increased? No, that wouldn't sound good in a press release now would it. So they keep saying it is just around the corner. It's like the religious people saying that the second coming is right around the corner for over a thousand years now. I know, I know, religious zealots and science (zealots?) are different. Or are they?
Show me a fusion scientist saying fusion is 30 years away.
No one in the article is even saying that. It's people in the comments repeating the same thing from the 80s.
What article? It's people speculating on the announcement that another announcement is coming. It just feeds into the hype machine. With this level of hype, watch them come out and show off the Segway!
If you want to keep the hype in check, do it with facts like /acidburnNSA did above. Let people debate. You don’t even know what will be announced. Repeating the same joke in every single fusion article is tiresome and has long past its funny expiration date.
Why does it have to be funny? It's just a sad statement about the situation. Maybe you're tired of people not being as excited as you, or even willing to for a second hold their breath any longer on this topic. But here we are at another announcement essentially saying "this shit is hard. with more funding, we could possibly maybe do something in the nearish future". Anything announced in the PRs is just mumbojumbo hand waving to explain why what they are saying isn't really saying anything substantive other than to keep fusion in the news so it is easier to raise money. This is the main perception of fussion by the masses.
Personally, I just don't see fusion being a viable solution for anything in any of our lifetimes. I will gladly admit how wrong I was if/when someone solves it. I just have a much stronger doubt in sci-fi vs reality, and don't get swooned by the hype machines surrounding fusion.
What is tiring to me is calling the skeptics tiring. But to each their own
I think one can be simultaneously excited about a big breakthrough like this, but also understand that there's still a ton more to do before we have viable fusion power.
And it's unreasonable and annoying to expect everyone to say "This is amazing, but..." rather than just "This is amazing". Yes, we know, fusion power isn't ready, and we have no idea when (or if) it will be.
I haven't been "holding my breath". I've been watching from afar, checking in occasionally (like when this sort of news comes out), and I genuinely think this particular breakthrough is exciting. I don't need the tiresome -- yes, incredibly, frustratingly tiresome -- legion of naysayers coming in and stating the obvious every single time.
It's also weird to watch people debate passionately but without the passion to actually gain expertise in the thing they are debating. I find it weird that we do this. I'm not immune, we all do it. We should at least be cognizant and try to reduce how heated we get over things we know so little about. It is just weird.
some people are new to the Fusion discussion. They've missed the last 50 yrs of "fusion is 10 yrs away" claims. Over the years, I've learned to temper all discovery excitement. Its the other side of the coin equivalent of the the XKCD 10000 comic[1].
Could you elaborate on that? What do you mean that the lasers could require more energy?
Is it that in a specific volume they got X EM energy coming in from the laser and Y thermal energy coming out, with Y>X BUT the electricity consumption of the lasers is Z>Y>X?
If so that's sort of misleading, like the plethora of claims from ITER. I hoped this was different.
So the laser energy that went into the reaction in the form of light is less than what came out of the reaction. However, the energy needed to produce that laser energy may be orders of magnitude more depending on the laser. AKA: the Wall Plug Efficiency.
Tabletop rigs can be as efficient as 50%, however high power such as we see here tends to come with drastically reduced efficiency.
Not /u/acidburnNSA, but what was meant is that no laser is 100% efficient. Not only do they not convert 100% of their electrical input into laser energy, but they also require other support systems, notably cooling. So we need to consider the total energy costs of the building the fusion experiment is conducted in, not just the physically small area where the fusion reaction is happening inside the reactor.
Still, this is an important step in the development of fusion energy reactors.
Presumably they mean that there are efficiency losses in charging the supercapacitor banks used to fire the lasers; so that if you consider the system over multiple duty cycles rather than over a single cycle, it's no longer energy-positive. (I.e. if the system were capturing its emitted energy — and that emitted energy needed to be enough to act as a grid power source feeding input power to the supercapacitors, rather than merely being the equivalent of the direct output power of the lasers per shot — then it wouldn't be enough to sustain the reaction.)
But personally, I don't know whether that's actually important. Power plants usually consume a nontrivial fraction of their own produced power to power themselves, and in fact consume more than 100% of produced power when starting from a full stop — meaning that in initial few-shot conditions, even when feeding back their own produced power into themselves, they still need (huge amounts of) external power input to get going, like a car engine needing a battery + starter motor. Only a rare few kinds of power plant can be used to "black start" a power grid. Most types of generator need to overcome initial higher resistances, e.g. inertia (and thereby back-EMF resistance at the transformer) in getting heavy turbines spinning from a stop.
It wouldn't be at all strange if a practical fusion power plant turned out to be energy-negative over a few-shot run (i.e. required "bootstrapping"), but then became energy positive over a theoretical 24/7 run at whatever its optimal duty cycle is. And a single-shot run becoming net-positive would be a good point to start to consider those more practical calculations, since they'd have been useless to consider until then—a power plant can't possibly be net-positive over any kind of runtime + duty cycle, if its core reaction can't be net-energy-positive when considered in isolation.
Which is, to me, why it probably does make sense for ITER to be excited. They've reached the point where they can stop using a lab-bench model of power efficiency, and start trying to come up with another, more full-scale model of power efficiency to replace it with.
Exactly. Looking at the Wikipedia article [1] suggest that they start out with 422 MJ stored in capacitors, turn this into 4 MJ IR laser light, convert it into 1.8 MJ UV laser light, this into x-rays of which 0.15 MJ heat the target of which finally 0.015 MJ heat the fuel. Depending on what in this chain you consider the input energy, you can get orders of magnitude different numbers - 15 kJ of energy produced could either be a gain of 1 or a gain of 0.0000036 or anything in between. And this is before trying to capture the released energy and converting it into electricity, this will come with another sizable loss.
> The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers, the people with knowledge of the results said, adding that the data was still being analysed.
They probably upgraded the rig since the Wikipedia article was written, so most likely the 2.1 MJ refers to the UV light numbers.
If this is assumption is true, they only produced 0.6 % of the energy they spent. Another question would then be, how relevant this is, i.e. could the UV light be produced much more efficiently than the experiment does? Maybe some constraints forces them to use a very inefficient process? In that case it might be reasonable to use the UV laser power as the reference for the gain.
Sure, and if they upgrade the lasers themselves to current laser tech (as I understand it, the NIF's hardware is around 25 years out of date on that front), then that 0.6% number probably jumps to 20% or so. Which still isn't enough, but is way closer than 0.6%.
Add to that the fact that improvements in laser efficiency is a hot research area (as lasers are used commercially in a lot of places, and cost-cutting is always a concern), and this is starting to feel a little more attainable.
I think the more interesting question is "how does this scale with more laser power?"
Even if the lasers are 1% efficient does it matter if 100 GJ of electrical power results in 100 TJ of fusion heat? I'm not saying this is at all how it scales, but it is the logic behind pursuing an ICF power plant. The fuel gets ignited and heats itself.
Also, for fun, 100 TJ is 24 kT TNT equivalent: slightly more than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Trying to capture this energy released instantaneously would be a fun engineering challenge.
Not an engineer in this field, so I may have misread/misunderstood, but I read that 2.5MJ out for 2.1MJ of laser energy in, NOT the total energy needed to make the whole thing work.. So, in a layman’s world, it is not a net gain of power, only a small subset of the system yielding more power than it took in.
Happy to be proven wrong and told that it is more of a breakthrough than I think it is..
So they are ignoring the laser efficiency as well as the thermal to electric efficiency? If you did the same for a tokamak, stellerator or Bussard, would you get a similar ratio?
Reminds me of solar. That took a century to get to where we are today where the net energy output is much greater than the energy needed to manufacture them.
It being hard and it requiring continual progress does not mean that progress does not occur.
How long has humanity been working on fusion? Wasn't Ivy Mike in the early 50's? Glaciers continually progress too, but it's not obvious on human timescales.
Note that energy in the case of ICF is produced instantaneously. There is no approach to capture this energy in production at this moment. Capturing that enery is still ongoing research topic.
Much of fissions complexity comes from safety/damage management. Even after years of advancements we hear about some incidents and radioactive leaks every other decade.
Fusion is a much safer alternative both in incidents and fallout
Is it? Well I guess it is because we don't have a working fusion power reactor yet so the likelihood of an accident is zero. However, if we did have a fusion reactor it would be producing a lot more radioactive waste than a fission reactor.
I definitely wouldn't want to make any broad sweeping statements about something that hasn't been built yet.
I'm a bit at a lost, can you elaborate on how fusion would produce more radioactive waste than fission? We already have a few fusion generators designs so is not a sweeping statement on something totally unknown. AFAIK, the by-product of fusing Tritium/Hydrogen is Helium, which is far from radioactive. I might imagine that some radioactive isotopes might get produced as well, but I can't imagine it being nowhere near as dangerous as spent uranium fuel and contaminated components in fission reactors.
In a case of an accident I would also imagine an explosion from a Fusion Reactor, but the fallout of it would not even close as dramatic as a Fission Reactor leak or explosion
More in the sense of a larger mass and volume of activated material. Fission waste has more curies of radioisotopes, but they're concentrated in the fuel rods.
Fuel is hardly the only advantage, the major issue with fission is the enormous costs of trying to avoid problems or cleanup after them. Thus 24/7 security, redundancy on top of redundancy, walls thick enough to stop aircraft etc. Fission is still by far the most expensive power source even with massive subsides and is only even close to economically viable as base load power backed up with peaking power plants.
In theory much of that is excessive but there is a long history of very expensive mistakes with massive cleanup efforts. The US talks about three mile island as the largest nuclear accident ignoring the Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One that killed 3 people. All that complexity and expense comes from trying to avoid real mistakes that actually happened.
LCOE of nuclear is cheaper than almost all other possibilities we have. sure nuclear is very expensive up front, but a nuclear powerplant can run for 100 years while wind and solar had to be completely replaced every 25 years.
your correct that nuclear has had some very expensive accidents, but the chance of a modern gen3+ plant that we'd build today causing any accidents like that in a western country is so very close to 0 that it's not even worth discussing.
You see a lot of handwaving such as that very close to 0 statement with nuclear but someone’s got to be on the hook.
The rate and cost of failures directly relate to insurance costs. A 1 in 100,000 chance per year to cause a 500 billion dollar accident represents a ~5 million per year insurance cost to offset that risk before considering the risk premium associated with insurance. And that’s on top of the normal risks for large complexes that have little to do with nuclear just high voltage equipment etc. Unsubsidized insurance costs are something like 0.2c/kWh which is quite significant for these projects.
In the end you see a lot of people talking nonsense around nuclear costs using wildly optimistic numbers, but there hasn’t been a power plant built and operated in the last 20 years that come even close to these numbers. Let alone when you start to compare predictions for decommissioning costs with actual decommissioning costs.
Sure, I have no issue saying nuclear could in theory cost 40% less with reasonable regulation and a large scale deployment across decades. I just have problems with people saying well it could in theory cost X, therefore it does cost X.
that's simply still not true. the last three plants built in Europe (England, France and Finland) has been very expensive because they've all been first of its kind and there hasn't really been built anything else. but if you take a look at what's happening elsewhere in the world KHNP for example has their standardized APR1400 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/APR-1400 reactor that seems to be very affordable
Poland just decided to build our nuclear to the tune of 40bn eur and their first contract is with westinghouse and their ap1000 reactor but also signed a letter of intent with KHNP to also built out further. I'm sure they cost Westinghouse for strategic reasons though and not because of price.
heck.. even Finland with their massively delayed and over budget Olkiluoto 3 also plans to built out even more nuclear. it's almost like some countries are now realizing that putting your faith in the weather gods for supply safety is not a good idea and that solar and wind are simply not viable for baseload or the grid in general.
i still think wind and solar has a place for creating synthetic fuels, but let's stop pretending it's been comparable to nuclear for the grid.
edit:
also.. are your saying IEA has wrong data? and if so, would you mind bringing since sources into your argument about people being way too optimistic
Someone suggesting the organization which made these predictions about solar https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FOoa6xYXIAQKUnv?format=jpg&name=... and is headed by an ex OPEC employee might be making bad cost projections when real prices of real projects in 2022 have a median far lower than their projection from 2020?
solar is fine in some places for some usecases and yes it's very cheap to add, but we've currently got no viable solution for storing the energy efficiently.
Batteries have had a lot of problems meeting capacity as a storage solution. Pumped Hydro is pretty good but highly location dependent, Gravity and compressed air I believe show a lot of promise. I don't know enough about Hydrogen or thermal storage to comment. But we are no where near actually solving the energy storage needs to use solar and wind exclusively. Unless we demonstrate real breakthroughs in production ready storage we'll always need a backup. Nuclear whether fission or fusion would have been a better route to clean energy but we basically stopped innovating there decades ago and now we are too far behind.
The best storage solution is to offset normal hydro generation to build up capacity to be released when you have unmet demand. That massively changes the need for storage because dams are already storing months worth of energy so shifting demand within the day is effectively free barring possibly adding some turbines.
Globally 16% of electricity is produced by traditional hydro annually that can cover the majority of the projected need for storage in a pure wind/solar grid.
Also, by the time we need significant batteries the costs will have fallen even further. If you want to eventually cover 10% of the grids daily demand from batteries using projected costs from 2030 to 2040+ it doesn’t look unreasonable.
Gravity storage is an absolute joke. About the cheapest substance you can use is iron ore because it reduces the size and cost of the frame, and if you had everything else for free it would still cost you over $70/kWh for a box of it to store 1kWh in a 500m high tower.
Renewables with straight gas backup and no other storage are already lower carbon than any other option, and batteries and off river PHES have only just started getting cheap.
The breakthroughs we need to cover the final gap have already been made if you're paying any attention at all.
Pumped hydro is not, in fact, "highly location dependent". It needs a hill, but there are many millions of hills.
Storage does not need any "breakthroughs". It will be built out when there is renewable generating capacity to charge it from. In the meantime, NG plants fill shortfalls.
It is also perfectly capable of meeting dispatchable loads like heating, chemical production, and EV charging, and adding them to the grid will bring the ability to meet electricity even higher. Considering the storage and dispatchable low carbon energy that already exists, the remaining part would produce less carbon than would be released by expanding Uranium mining.
There is not enough uranium to meet 50% of world electricity demand using current technology for long enough to wear out a single generation of wind turbines or solar panels.
Your imaginary all nuclear future is both impossoble and worse than the trajectory we are currently on.
It’s not just the United Kingdom that has had issues with APR-1400.
United Arab Emirates has had massive issues. Unit 1 began construction in 2012 and was “completed” in 2018, but didn’t enter commercial operation until 2021 due to literally hundreds of issues. “In December 2018, it was reported that voids were found in the concrete containment buildings for units 2 & 3. Grease was found to have leaked through the unit 3 containment, which may have been due to a crack in the concrete.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant
South Korea also ran into multiple delays, “Shin Kori-3 was initially scheduled to commence operation by the end of 2013, but the schedules for both Units 3 & 4 were delayed by approximately one year to replace safety-related control cabling, which had failed some tests.”
Poland isn’t a failure at this point, but they don’t have a power plant yet and their cost projections before delays aren’t very rosy.
Objectivity it’s reasonable to blame bad management for issues within a single project or even country, but when several different projects in different countries run into issues that suggest more fundamental problems.
If Britain decided to build 10 APR-1400 in the next 10 years with each one they would improve.
France built like 50 reactors in 15 years with 60s technology. Yes they had issue early on but after a while they were completing reactors within 4-5 years and very few issues.
The reality is from 2000 to 2020 every country in Europe could have 100% green energy if they had just started building multiple reactors every year.
Germany could have easily have a green grid by now. A nation like Germany could very much have gone and do that, just as France did in 1980s.
Note that economics doesn't work even with Korean nuclear plants: Korean nuclear is cheaper than Korean gas, but more expensive than European gas, because European gas is pipelined, Korean gas is liquified, and liquified gas is so much more expensive than pipelined gas.
European nuclear initiatives are mostly about strategic concerns to get out of Russian gas. Economically, even the cheapest nuclear power on Earth can't compete with gas, if it is pipelined. (It can compete if it is liquified.) Or you need to penalize gas to unreasonable degrees for carbon emission.
European gas is cheap as long as we're willing to hand over control of Europe's energy supply to Putin. Which most countries in Europe no longer are, and maybe never will be again.
Meanwhile the largest known deposits of Uranium can be found in Australia and Canada, making them much safer sources for western countries.
If EU countries allow fracking domestically, this will change, of course. Though the same "green" movement that opposes nuclear is likly to try to block this. Maybe we should look at how much funding these people get from Russia?
As far as I can tell, it's in Russia's interest to encourage any energy source that synergizes with NG (ie wind and solar) and to work against energy sources that are full alternatives (nuclear, coal and large scale storage), while at the same time ignore the downsides of NG.
It would make sense to fund groups aligned with these interests, even those that are generally negative to Russia politically. Such funding would not need to be done directly, but could be done through subsidiaries.
> You see a lot of handwaving such as that very close to 0 statement with nuclear but someone’s got to be on the hook.
Yes, and that one is society. It what we do with any risk that is so great that if any company would have to carry it then the company would fold and society would still have to carry it.
Hydro power is one prime example. If a dam would break the damage downstream would be too high for any power company to pay. Individuals living downstream might have insurance, but no insurance company can handle the cost of a major flood. The only entity able to do so would be the government.
An other example is forest fires caused by poor maintenance of power lines. Such things happens from time to time and it not the power company or their insurance that will cover if half a country is up in literal flames and a few towns are lost. There might be a bit of bad press, a few millions/billions in damages, but the true cost won't land anywhere near the power company.
Fully eliminate the risk of floods and fire from the power grid would be very difficult, and putting the power company on the hook for the full cost would be impractical and counter productive. Society need electricity. The best they can do is impose regulations, and in exchange society will pick up some of the risk.
Unfortunately your examples have been litigated in practice already, and reality does not agree with you. See for example [0], which is a nice writeup on the liability for dam failure. As it turns out, there are very few cases in which the operator would not be liable. Similarly, Pacific Power has been sued for wildfires in Colorado, and PG&E even plead guilty to manslaughter in the Paradise fire - and had to file for bankruptcy after being faced with a $30bn liability.
Those companies can and should be held responsible for the damages they cause. You can't just privatize all the profits and leave all the losses to the government! If you want to do something so dangerous nobody is willing or even able to insure you, you should not be allowed to do it.
That is not what is being said. What is being said is that there are two factors to nuclear accidents:
1. The actual costs of containment, cleanup, repair.
2. The arbitrarily imposed costs to satisfy a terrified public.
For power generation, humans just need electricity. This requires large networks of high voltage lines crisscrossing the country. Those lines will start wildfires at some rate X. A utility cannot survive being liable for all damages by that wildfire.
So what you do - is everyone buys insurance and the government sets "best practice" regulations designed to reduce X to a number considered reasonable. Investigations that result in litigation are usually what happens when the company has clearly violated best practice.
The problem with all things nuclear is that our vision of acceptable number and severity of nuclear incidents is that it needs to be negative.
The Oroville Dam in California had a failoure in 2017 leading to the evacuation of 188,000 people. Who paid for that? See for example [0], were a very low estimate ends up around 1 billion with the Federal Emergency Management Agency expecting to pay around 75% of that. Who and what funds that department?
When a company files for bankruptcy the result is a legal process where the company seeks relief from debt. PG&E caused California second biggest wild fire named "Camp Fire" which destroyed 1,329 structures, and burned 963,309 acres, with an estimated cost of $16bn. The next year they caused a second wild fire, and yes they did get sued for that. They are estimated to have caused over 40 wild fires.
In the bankruptcy filing that got accepted by the judge they might be paying $13.5 billion for all of the wildfires, with half of that being paid as "stocks" in the company (for how much that is worth). All the remaining costs of the wildfires will be carried by the victims. Since September 30 this year the total amount PG&E has actually paid is $5.08 billions.
If one of Californias nulcear power plant would explode tomorrow with the effect of 40 wild fires then the result would be identical to PG&E. They would be sued, they would file for bankruptcy, and then a portion of the true costs will be paid out. That is reality regardless of what you thought it was.
The Oroville Dam was built by California Department of Water Resources primarily for water supply and flood control with electricity generation effectively a useful byproduct.
As a California government agency it’s self insured by the state government, which is a very different situation than a private company building a power plant exclusively to generate power.
As to bankruptcy, insurance is normally required. Wildfires are an odd case because unlike nuclear the people who suffer damage are partially responsible for failing to mitigate risks as eventually fires will happen.
That is just exceptionalism. People view floods and fire as natural events even when they are directly caused by humans. Risk is risk. Insurance and regulations on energy production should be technology neutral. If technology X put $100 risk on society per 1TW/h, and a regulation targeting them reduces that to $1 per 1TW/h, then what technology X is doesn't matter. It is a risk that is carried by society and society has a responsibility to protect itself by balancing the benefit of risk reducing regulations with potential drawbacks.
Who is the primary owners in a power company matter very little. In many countries, especially in EU, the government tend to be the majority owners in power companies operating nuclear power plants. It doesn't change the risk factors.
Also I would never blame victims of flooding or wildfires. People who choose to live downstream of a hydro power dam, or chooses to live in areas with high risk of wild fires, has just as much power as people who choose to live next to a nuclear power station. If operators of dangerous and critical infrastructure do a bad job then the blame tree start with the owners and trickles down to each leaf.
The point you seem to be missing is that Oroville Dam would still have been created even if it didn’t have hydroelectric generation. The risk from adding hydroelectric generation to a dam you where going to create anyway is effectively zero.
People have been making dams for quite literally thousands of years before we discovered AC electricity. They are useful structures to ensure water security and reduce damage and deaths from regular flooding. So yes the Marib Dam for example produces electricity and it’s failure would pose a risk, but it’s on the same location people a dam failed all the way back in 575 and there is evidence of earlier dams in that location going back to 1750 BC.
> sure nuclear is very expensive up front, but a nuclear powerplant can run for 100 years while wind and solar had to be completely replaced every 25 years.
Hinkley Point C is currently expected to cost around $31 billion once finished for a measly 3,000 MW.
For that money you could build ~2,300 15MW onshore wind turbines - which would add up to roughly 34,500 MW capacity. So even under the assumptions that
- you have to replace the wind turbines 3x to reach 100 years life span and
- you always have to build more renewables since they don't run at 100% their capacity throughout their lifespan
seriously.. bring some evidence. onshore wind is just not going to happen it just has too many problems. and offshore wind is more expensive, less reliable and takes roughly the same time to build as nuclear. Denmark is currently planning to build a 3Gw energy island that will cost a whopping 40bn dollars and is planed to be finished in 2033. insane if you ask me
Onshore wind has been happening for decades. See for example the 1.5GW farm in California, the 1GW farm in New Mexico, the 1GW one in Oklahoma, the 900MW one in Texas, or the 845MW one in Oregon.
Offshore has a rather fast construction time, it turns out. For example, the United Kingdom's Hornsea Wind Farm Project 2 was given planning permission in 2016, and it reached its full capacity of 1.4GW less than six years later. Project 1 at the same wind farm reached 1.2GW in less than five years.
And when it comes to cost, Hornsea Project 3 is to start construction next year - with commercial operation scheduled in 2025 - at $12bn for 2.4GW. Not bad when you compare it to Finland's Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant unit 3 costing an estimated $11bn for 1.6GW - which took 22 years from first license application to design output power.
6GW initially with the expensive part done for upto 10GW, €28 billion, and 2030.
That is insane. They're building a FOAK project for less than NOAK nuclear reactors like Hinkley C in less time and it will be generating at higher capacity from day one than new nukes manage for their first decade or so of operation. Nice pro wind factoid.
More power, sooner, with low enough O&M that you could build another one with the money you saved just during the time it would take for another EPR to be built and come to full power? Sign me up.
Hinkley Point C is a first of its kind project, if you want to be economical you should look to KNGR
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/APR-140 they've built several in Korea and one in Saudi Arabia where the cost was $24.4 billion for 5380 MW.
it's cute that you are mentioning onshore wind but that will just never happen, takes up way too much space and most places have a capacity factor of below 20% making your 34500 Mw 6900Mw as well as giving you erratic output. so for wind to work you either need fossil fuels, power 2x or some new magical battery that will make the cost of such a solution insane because you'd have to completely overhaul your infrastructure.
offshore wind is more realistic, but costs way more than nuclear.
wind makes sense of you want to built something fast, but it won't bring down your carbon footprint. og at least it haven't in Germany or Denmark. the only reduction we've seen is because we burn trash and biomass which fair some messed up reason is considered green and renewable.
Have a look at the availability factors of those 'cheap' Korean nukes, there's a lot of overlap with the capacity factor of offshore wind even including curtailment. Then the running cost differences are enough to pay for the wind farm in about 15 years.
Then also look at the $20 billion dollar 'service' contract for the Saudi one that doesn't include any labour or running costs. It suddenly costs about the same as Hinkley C even before overruns.
Once you look at the total in rather than comparing overnight costs to renewable all in costs, they're the same $8-10 per net watt as nuclear always is anywhere except china - and China's renewables are cheaper by close to the same ratio.
The penetration rates at a given cost favour renewables right up until your peaker gas plants are causing less emissions than the Uranium mine.
please stop calling them nukes, it makes you sound like Greenpeace crazy person that actually think that a nuclear power plant has anything to do with nuclear weapons that nuke is normally referring to.
could you please provide some evidence that the capacity factor and supply safety is remotely comparable between APR1400 and offshore wind?
What do you think service costs are for offshore/onshore wind and hinkley point? having maintenance and an industry is actually a good thing for the economy.
where do you get your numbers? you sure make many claims without a shred of evidence. and are you seriously suggesting that we continue using natural gas?
> What do you think service costs are for offshore/onshore wind and hinkley point? having maintenance and an industry is actually a good thing for the economy.
Stop with the broken window fallacy. If subsidizing jobs is important, open a battery or PV plant with the tax money instead.
> and are you seriously suggesting that we continue using natural gas?
Using gas 2-20% of the time with a mean of around 8% produces fewer emissions than opening new uranium mines and only needs to happen whilst the storage industry matures. Your plan entails burning more gas whilst the reactors, mines, and enrichment are built out over decades, then it also entails burning more gas at the end for outages unless you overprovision and build seasonal storage and long distance transmission.
Colloquially speaking, which your conversation here is, nuke has always meant bombs not reactors. He's not pearl clutching, he's reacting to what sounds like unnecessarily negative terminology.
It unambiguously means nuclear reactor in context and is widely used. The only people who even pretend it doesn't are the ones simultaneously making disingenuous arguments about why renewables are terrible and we immediately need to drop them and wait 50 years for nuclear to save the day.
As do I, I personally have never heard someone refer to a nuclear fission power plant as a nuke, but I guess I don't hang around with the same people as you...
In the US, the average capacity factor for wind turbines is about 33%, so your nameplate 34,500 MW capacity is immediately ~11.5 GW actual. Wind makes sense, but deceptive numbers don’t help your argument.
that is exactly what i am talking about in my second point?! you‘re at 11.5 GW considering the capacity factor, divide that by 3 (first point) and you’re still above whatever you’ll produce with Hinkley Point C!
Real world data says that unless you spend insane amounts on it and then pretend the reactors that shut down decades early due to issues or destroyed themseves don't exist, or are China then something goes wrong and forces a shut down or low output about 20% of the time.
In most regions you can get a lower forced downtime rate for a lower cost with renewables, and then you also get the curtailed energy to feed dispatchable loads. You need the electrolysers anyway for chemical feed, and you need storage to meet variable loads so it's just a matter of which can be deployed faster.
Additionally you get a very long forced downtime when you burn through your Uranium reserves in under a decade by trying to provide current final energy.
Currently a lot of reactors are hitting the 30-40 year mark, and they are running into significant issues with the aging equipment. We are seeing an increasing number of minor incidents, often caused due to manufacturing defects finally rearing its head, or just plain fatigue.
Meanwhile, solar has a 25-year economic lifespan. At that point you can make more money by replacing them with more efficient panels. However, manufacturers have already started offering 40-year warranties for consumer panels, at which point they have a guaranteed 88% power output. Wind indeed has a lifespan of 25 years, which seems pretty average when compared to literally any other power plant with moving parts.
When it comes to accidents, they are indeed extremely unlikely. However, the figure to look at is the potential damages multiplied by the likelyhood of the accident. When we look at those two together, they are definitely worth discussing.
well i guess a 100 years lifetime was kind of pulled out of my ass, what i was trying to communicate is that you can I'm theory maintain a nuclear power plant to last for 100s of years but i guess if you'd just let it run without doing anything it would probably run for 30-40 years.
solar is fine for those who can afford it, but workout subsidies and the ability to sell electricity back to the grid it's a crazy long term investment in many places of the world especially northern Europe where I'm from (for hopefully obvious reasons). so different milage may apply elsewhere. i guess we'll have to see if those 40 years are for real and if the companies offering it are even around in 20 years.
wind needs constant maintenance to have a 20 year lifespan, but beyond the 25 years you'd have to replace the whole thing. so while a nuclear powerplant also requires constant maintenance you don't have to treat down the whole plant after 40 years. even the German ones that are closing now could easily have their lifetime extended https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/could-germany-keep-i...
>When it comes to accidents, they are indeed extremely unlikely. However, the figure to look at is the potential damages multiplied by the likelyhood of the accident. When we look at those two together, they are definitely worth discussing.
i guess what I'm trying to say is that we as a civilization engage in activities that are way more risky and dangerous than the miniscule risk of a serious accident in a modern gen 3+ nuclear power plant. of course we should have strict regulation here, but it's just not that dangerous or risky
> if you'd just let it run without doing anything it would probably run for 30-40 years.
Let it run? You mean, presumably, the huge amount of testing and preventative and planned maintenance that is scheduled in as part of a reactors expected lifetime, plus anything new discovered along the way. That doesn't come for free.
> In theory maintain a nuclear power plant to last for 100s of years
Sure, given enough effort you can fix anything. But extending a fission plant's lifetime can require massive overhauls, replacing reactor components, replacing materials that have experienced radiation embrittling and activation, etc. Keeping a plant running indefinitely is so complicated and expensive that we haven't managed it so far.
Extension is something we should absolutely consider but it's not a magic fix all. Sometimes it's not worth it to keep an old thing running.
Mechanical equipment like pumps in active use don’t last anywhere close to 50 years and need to be overhauled or replaced several times over that 50 year lifespan. You can find videos of turbines being replaced which is incredibly expensive. In the end you don’t get a clear this is the final date you can operate limit just increasing costs every year.
The ~fifty year lifespan is in part based on physical corrosion of pipes running through concrete there really isn’t a way to economically replace them all that costs less than simply building a new power plant. But even here not everything fails on the same day so there is some wiggle room.
> manufacturers have already started offering 40-year warranties
A warrantee of that length is only valuable if the manufacturer is a stable business with multiple income streams (say GE) or the warrantee is backed by stable insurance (say Lloyds). Liabilities are supposed to be on the balance sheet, so they are not free to mint.
If there were a long term issue where consumers needed to claim on the warrantee, I would guess most manufacturers would just get liquidated, but the executives and owners will have already cashed out. The same business model gets used for lots of other businesses with long term warrantees - limited liability is very handy.
> your correct that nuclear has had some very expensive accidents, but the chance of a modern gen3+ plant that we'd build today causing any accidents like that in a western country is so very close to 0 that it's not even worth discussing.
But that's precisely why nuclear power plants are so expensive to construct. If the generation technology was inherently less risky, it stands to reason the facilities would be cheaper to build
Any claims about 100 years of trouble-free operations of a nuclear reactor is a wishfull thinking at best.
For example, in France nuclear power reactors were stopped because unexpected cracks appeared in pipes after just 25 years of operations requiring expensive maintenance, https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/France-Cl... That put reactors off-line for over a year.
Fusion will also have to go to enormous efforts to avoid problems -- not because of public safety, but because it's very difficult to repair anything in the reactor if it breaks. This was a lesson of Three Mile Island: a nuclear accident that doesn't kill anyone is still ruinous for a utility, since their large investment is destroyed.
Came here for the F.U.D and you did not disappoint.
>. Fission is still by far the most expensive power source even with massive subsides and is only even close to economically viable as base load power backed up with peaking power plants.
> the major issue with fission is the enormous costs of trying to avoid problems or cleanup after them. Thus 24/7 security, redundancy on top of redundancy, walls thick enough to stop aircraft etc.
A fusion reactor will also require wall thick enough to stop aircraft. Security will likey be the same to. And there is no fundamental reason why fusion should require any less for any of these.
In fact the actual cost of nuclear is CAPX and comes from the large civil engineering project with high specification, the steam turbine and water towers.
There are lots of fission based reactor designs that have non of these things. So nothing you describe has really much to do with 'fission' itself. Fission plants can also be made so that airborn radiation is practically impossible.
We simply stopped fundamentally advancing fission reactors in the early 70s and instead of solving problems fundamentally, we added lots of regulation.
Personally I think fission power's failure is a political and marketing one. I don't agree that the waste disposal issues, or the safety issues, are quite the big deal people make of them. (Not saying there are no unsolved issues, just that the issues that exist are not significantly worse than those present burning fossil fuels, and are better in some dimensions. They're just different, and in some ways very emotionally so.)
I think it might be fine that fusion power may be more expensive in some ways than fission, as long as its reputation is kept clean (figuratively and literally). Market fusion power as the savior of humanity, and get enough people to believe it, and it'll be fine.
Yep, and fusion reactors will probably be even more expensive (especially the first ones). Looking at the current prices of renewables, I don't see a market for fusion reactors at all to be honest.
After all we already have a giant fusion reactor just 12 light-minutes away from us! We just have to harvest that energy. The direction were already going (mostly market-driven nowadays actually!) is generation from renewable sources, flexible grids and storage systems to balance everything out.
This minimizes the main problem with really going full renewables, storage. Fusion is 24/7 output at the same level. Solar and wind are not, which means batteries, and all the problems associated with that.
Fusion could obviate the need for grid-wide storage systems which would be a huge advantage.
Not if fusion would cost orders of magnitude more than storage.
"All the problems associated with" what? Modern batteries don't burst into flame. Anyway the overwhelming bulk of storage is not and will not be chemical batteries.
Economic challenges of quickly building grid-scale battery storage , battery production for the entire globe, NIMBY's etc.
> Modern batteries don't burst into flame
they literally do
> the overwhelming bulk of storage is not batteries
Well overwhelming bulk is a high bar and storage is geography dependent. Germany f.e. can't build as much pumped storage as Australia and Australia built a large amount of battery storage vs PSH.
Lithium-ion batteries burn. But the topic was "modern batteries", which at the instant moment means LiFeP batteries, not "previous-generation batteries".
Lithium is anyway not favored for use in utility-scale storage, where its light weight offers no compelling value. Up-and-coming chemistries include iron-air (no explosions), calcium-antimony (no explosions), and bromine-zinc (no explosions). Hundreds of other chemistries are available.
Making the box of salty radiation medicine an order of magnitude cheaper and shoving a bit of hydrogen in a salt cavern solves the storage problem (which is already far smaller than you're pretending) entirely.
Fissions reactors that don't have incredibly strict and expensive regulation are already pretty unreliable, and they're operating within the bounds of known materials rather than an order of magnitude outside of them.
Even the mythical 100% uptime nuclear reactor still needs just as much storage for abritrage because it is so much more expensive.
There is a lot of background on nuclear costs. From https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-nuclear-p... & other sources, I've heard safety standards around radiation were set higher than ever proven necessary, and also ratchet up to obviate any cost gains per unit output.
Safety standards were set higher and higher because accidents kept happening, resulting in some well-known extremely large scale disasters and numerous minor ones. As with every industry, the rules were written with blood.
When you are building a power plant which has the capability of making a significant portion of your country permanently incompatible with human life, you generally want to be really sure you aren't going to have an oopsie.
> Safety standards were set higher and higher because accidents kept happening, resulting in some well-known extremely large scale disasters and numerous minor ones.
I think Chernobyl was the only really big nuclear plant disaster right? And even then, what we've really learned in the long term is that human habitation is more dangerous to wildlife than nuclear radiation (the area around the plant is now a thriving wildlife preserve).
FYI, there were zero radiation deaths from Fukishima, although there were ~2200 from the evacuation. Keep in mind this was during the aftermath of a tsunami.
I think there was a lot of hard work that went into to prevention of anything worse happening at Fukushima. At least that is what I remember from reading the iaea report a couple of years ago. I remember it being a very good and interesting read: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1710-Repor...
I accept this as one point; I do question whether the opposite side of the benefit calculation was made - i.e. did we have a public debate where we correctly looked at the tradeoffs of increased fossil fuel carbon pollution, economic impacts from lack of energy and failures to advance, balanced out with honest cost estimates of disaster profiles? It doesn't seem like it. It seems the debates were fairly one-sided; this leads me to believe a better outcome would be weighted more towards pro-nuclear.
Same with wind, "you must pay a fine if you kill a bald eagle", but if you slowly kill all of them with pollution, that's free.
"The fly ash emitted from burning coal for electricity by a power plant carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy."
There was simply a false assumption about how dangerous radiation was. Some of this still persists to this day.
A nuclear reactor that had the same radiation as a coal plant would not be legal? How does this make any sense at all?
The Safety standards were actually put at to high a level to early, specially given how instantly save nuclear was.
Consider this, how safe were coal plants? Would nuclear instead of coal have saved 100000s of lives since then? Yes of course nuclear would have, even if you had an accident once in a while.
The problem is that there was 0 tolerance for nuclear accident, because of populist nonsense, but if coal plant and supply chain killed 5 people here 10 people and 1000s of people get sick, nobody cares.
So the reality is, that nuclear went uneconomical because nuclear and existing power production (mostly coal, later gas) were no treated the same in terms of their safety requirements.
> When you are building a power plant which has the capability of making a significant portion of your country permanently incompatible with human life
That's not actually what happens. 3 Mile Island or Fukushima didn't even remotely come close to what you describe. And even for Chernobyl this is questionable statement. And Chernobyl was a type of reactor not built in the West, so in the West something that bad simply can't happen with PWRs.
The learning cycle is too long. It takes ~10 years to build a reactor, so if you spot a way to improve on costs or safety it will take another 10 years for the innovation to see the light.
At the contrary in renewables the learning cycle is in months so costs fall exponentially.
That's the real reason of high costs in fission, not red tape or public sentiment.
According to the lore it looks like you're right, but the fact that it glows makes people think of Cherenkov radiation, i.e. radioactive. Perception and reality, ya know?
> Personally I think fission power's failure is a political and marketing one.
I think it's because of the occasional catastrophic failures that spatter our short history with the technology. Fukushima made headline news around the world, leaked large amounts of caesium-137 into the ocean, caused a 20km evacuation radius, is projected to take a total of 30-40 years to clean up, and people think of it as not that bad of a nuclear incident.
In comparison burning fossil fuels is a classic tragedy of the commons problem. Way less sensational. You can do math and say nuclear has a safer track record than coal/oil. You can point to design, engineering or management faults with historical failures. It doesn't change the fact that nuclear had a very fair chance at being the future and shown itself to not be trustworthy. If humanity was a little more perfect maybe we could have pulled it off
Nuclear fission is probably one of the greatest victims of populist democracy. It seems the more modern "socially-democratic" a country was over the last 30-40yrs the more anti-nuclear it became. The raw output of markets or the tough hand of socialist dictatorship was the biggest positive driving force in the early history of fission energy.
But ultimately it's such an expensive and society-tier level of investment that it's at the whims and pressures more than almost any other technology that has benefited society in resent history. So likewise it's also most at risk of the downside of populist politics (short term thinking, highly reactive to noisy local issues, driven by emotional outrage, etc).
I wonder if it's prospects are even worse off now that's to social media.
> Nuclear fission is probably one of the greatest victims of populist democracy.
Oh yes indeed. Nuclear energy is not legal in Italy, so I did some research:
We had nuclear reactors in the 80s, until we held a referendum on nuclear energy, 3 months after Chernobyl. The result: overwhelmingly against, so we dismantled our reactors. Decades later, the Government pushed for a new referendum. When did they choose to do it? 6 months after the Fukushima disaster... you can guess what did the Italian population voted for.
> The raw output of markets or the tough hand of socialist dictatorship was the biggest positive driving force in the early history of fission energy.
Is this true?
I always considered fission tech to be used for the following reasons, and none of them are economic. The number's I've crunched say fission isn't the economic choice, but that varies depends on how much value is placed on 'base load'.
1. Cold war era vanity tech. Nuclear weapons were used to end World War 2, and now they are just another infrastructure project for us.
2. Code shifted weapons research. Countries blame each other for this all the time in the nuclear non-proliferation era.
3. Strategic choice to avoid traditional energy imports (France, Japan).
I disagree that its not the economic choice. I think everybody would agree that for 50 years before lets say the year 2000 is was overwhelmingly the only economic choice for green energy (outside to hydro limited by geography).
After 1990 specially 2000 lots of governments around the world started to massively subsidize solar and wind. While often at the same time having policies punishing nuclear in various ways.
The uneconomical solar and wind became economic because of massive government orders and investment. Even the US often simply set targets for solar and wind that utility providers had to reach. Even nuclear nations like France did so.
So why did wind and solar turn economical, massive investment around the world in making it so. Had Germany, France and the rest of the EU simply gone all in on even a Gen3+ reactor design, and had order 200 of them since 1990, it would also be very economical. History of nuclear shows that if you build the same plant in large numbers, they can be built and finished far faster and cheaper.
And that is even before we consider the huge reduction in capital cost if you go from a PWR design to a GenIV design. Just in terms of the scale of the project, there is a huge difference. Sadly by the time that technology was getting ready for serious commercialization, nuclear was basically seen as legacy and almost all government stopped most research and stop investing in it.
Imagine if nuclear in the 80s had the support wind/solar did in the last decade. If every utility in the US simply sad 'you need X% nuclear by Y date'. And in Europe at the same time as France was building its reactors, Germany, Nordics, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Britain had also built reactors at the same time.
During the Kyoto protocol talks, France already had a mostly green grid because of nuclear. But somehow essentially nobody copied this success story because it simply wasn't politically viable in most places. It took decade plus after Kyoto before wind/solar were commercially viable but really only if you don't consider intermittency a problem and the market doesn't give you a penalty for it (it usually didn't because before wind/solar that just wasn't an issue). Yet despite solar and wind not being economical, massive investment in it happened and eventually it was made economical thanks to economics of scale.
I would claim if all the investment that was made in wind/solar since 1992 had been made in nuclear, we would produce more green energy now and the cost curve would be driven even lower, and baseload power would be solved as intermittency is simply not a thing. We would not need to redesign grids because nuclear plants would map nicely onto the current grid, if you just replace coal with nuclear.
So, its all about economics of scale, that makes it energy production cheap. Putting up huge wind mills is cheap because there are lots of trained people to do it, the factories can produce large volumes. The largest wind mills now are by themselves large then a whole GenIV plant would be. And produce like 95% less energy and not even consistently.
> I always considered fission tech to be used for the following reasons, and none of them are economic.
You missed that it is green and no CO2. That was not a reason anybody cared about before 2000 but since then it was part of the rational in some countries.
I would like to hear why you think fission can't be economic in principle. Maybe you can make the argument that Gen3 reactors can't be economical but based on first principles, fission itself can be economical if you had economics of scale seems a stretch.
People think of Fukushima as (1) one of the very worst nuclear incidents there has ever been, and also as (2) something that cost very few lives.
Yes, something like 150k people were evacuated because of worries about radiation. What you don't mention is that the total number of people evacuated was 470k. Most of the people who had to leave their homes had to leave not because of anything nuclear but because the enormous tsunami destroyed their homes.
So the Fukushima story is: massive natural disaster that caused enormous destruction and tens of thousands of deaths; a nuclear power plant was in a badly affected area; the damage was expensive to deal with but the total number of resulting deaths was, er, maybe about 1.
I think you're missing key elements to the Fukushima story. It wasn't a surprise natural disaster, it was a predictable eventuality.
1. People tried to ring alarm bells about the building codes (and the reactor specifically) not being able to handle earthquakes of a size Fukushima was likely to experience. They were on deaf ears.
2. Japanese government admitted guilt for poor oversight and regulation.
3. Three executives were put on trail for negligence. There were found not guilty, but that's not the same as innocent.
Oh, for sure, Fukushima's story is not one where everyone did the right thing. It's one where there was negligence and carelessness, as well as a huge (and, yes, in some sense predictable) natural disaster ... and despite all that, the actual reactor-related consequences were not so very bad.
If the question were, say, "how much should we trust the Japanese government?" then Fukushima is not very encouraging. But if it's "how worried should we be about nuclear power?" it seems pretty encouraging to me. Lots of errors and negligence, huge natural disaster, and even so scarcely any lives lost and most of the harm done would have been the same without the nuclear power plant.
I think fissions failure is a inability to plan for complete failure scenarios, were society folds in on itself, suppliers are no longer available or power plants are actually fought over. So the inability is not to get the tech going, but to plan for how it can it be usefull in a unravelling world.
Already economic downturns corelate with fission problems, as plants are not properly maintained. We have one blowing up every thirty years atm. Our reach exceeds our grasp, and there is no shame in admitting to that.
> I think fissions failure is a inability to plan for complete failure scenarios, were society folds in on itself, suppliers are no longer available or power plants are actually fought over.
Are you referring to the need for electricity now at the Ukraine plants? Newer technologies such as NuScale require no external electricity for their cooling. The reaction only occurs if there is water and when all the water evaporates then the reaction stops.
> Already economic downturns corelate with fission problems, as plants are not properly maintained. We have one blowing up every thirty years atm. Our reach exceeds our grasp, and there is no shame in admitting to that.
Gas turbines in aviation also blew up way more often in the past than they do now. Who says the blowing up of plants is a constant? There have been many improvements in safety. Also, apart from the Three Mile Island accident, there haven't been major nuclear problems in the US in the last 50 or so years. Furthermore, the thing that lead to the Chernobyl disaster is not possible, by law, in modern reactors. Furthermore, newer reactors require an extra casing of concrete which would also have contained the Chernobyl disaster. You can even fly an airplane in those newer housing buildings and nothing would happen (with the building at least).
There has been a major back-logging in nuclear equipments investments, so big in fact, that some countries who should by right be netto exporters of energy (france) became importers. Its a valid technology in a theoretical world, that does all the upkeep measures, does actual credible threat analysis.
In 2014 the government they elected basically went all in switching to renewables and they actually stopped or delayed a lot of stuff.
That said, well, they stopped building new reactors, most of their reactors were built in 15 years in the 70/80s. Since then they have not done as much as they should have and all those reactors are starting to need more maintenance now.
Because they have not built much new things, they don't have as many people with knowledge as they used to.
But they are managing most of these issues pretty well overall.
I would say France did pretty well having 40 years of green energy.
> Personally I think fission power's failure is a political and marketing one
Probably the fact that it's literally the same thing that killed 140 thousands people in an instant and imposed the spectre of a nuclear winter upon us all, had its importance.
> At the moment fuel costs in fission are like 5-10% of total costs for a fission fleet.
Yeah and with a breeder fission reactor we could reduce this to below 1% probably. With a thorium breeder the fuel cost might be essentially 0%. In the vision of Alvin Weinberg you literally just drop some thorium into the fuel salt every once in a while.
But the real issue for nuclear energy is currently capital cost and time not fuel cost. And capital cost can go down massively with GenIV reactors as well.
So I don't see how fusion will be cheaper.
> In fusion it could be lower
But eventually you have to start breeding tritium, so wouldn't that make it more expensive.
> Disclaimer: I switched from studying fusion energy to advanced fission 16 years ago.
Awesome, we desperately need GenIV reactors (even if I dislike that term).
Well... if Nuclear Fusion becomes actually possible in a cost-effective manner, so much for the need to roll out solar and wind-based electricity, which looks very much like a 1st-generation modern green energy technology in retrospect.
I'm not complaining. If we do crack the code on Nuclear Fusion, if I was the government, my next step would be to figure out how to build so many reactors that electricity costs go to basically zero. If you can charge your electric car for pennies, even the most diehard gas-car fans won't be able to resist. Offering a better product attracts far more users than, say, trying to shame people for CO2 usage (more flies with honey instead of vinegar).
> even the most diehard gas-car fans won't be able to resist
They just won't have a choice; if we can provide a real alternative, we can just forbid gas car altogether. Just like we banned CFC to save the ozone when better alternatives were developed.
The main issue is that our electricity grids and production facilities aren't ready yet to sustain a mass shift to electric, so we need to ease in the transition. But the moment they are, there is no reason to delay any further.
You don't even have to ban it outright; you just ban making new ones (though even the CFC ban wasn't 1000% complete; there's been evidence that some companies were 'faking finding old supplies').
People who "really want to" will keep old ones working and most people will slowly start using the new ones.
After all you can still get a horse-drawn carriage if you want to, and you can drive a Model T, but few people bother.
> They just won't have a choice; if we can provide a real alternative, we can just forbid gas car altogether. Just like we banned CFC to save the ozone when better alternatives were developed.
Banning gas cars outright, I think, would be a political miscalculation. There is broad mistrust of anything the government does right now in the US (not wholly undeserved), and it is likely to continue getting stronger, so not tainting it with a political ban would be a better solution in my view. Otherwise you risk polarization and failure, because not everyone buys climate change, or banning something because X is determined to be better now. It also would breed widespread resentment from people who aren't ready to switch (because, let me tell you, outside of cities, "reduces climate change" is something nobody cares about as a selling point). Just let electric vehicles naturally become better at everything and let gas cars slowly die naturally. The "invisible hand" will take care of the rest - just like it did with the horse and buggy.
Even with such a breakthrough, cost-effective fusion would still probably be 50 years away. Why would you assume it to be super cheap right out the house?
Even if fusion ends up producing more power than consuming in the real world, it still has to compete on cost. People too enthusiastic about fusion tend to ignore that it might not actually be a cost effective source of power.
Solar panels are cheap and batteries are easier to build and there are lots of ways of making them.
Unfortunately, energy storage is still an unsolved problem. Research on batteries may get us there soon, but today they aren't feasible. It's very much worth putting effort into both approaches. IMO the best outcome is a wide variety of clean energy sources and storage solutions, so the best solution can be chosen for a given geographical/political/etc situation.
Solar and batteries are already cheaper than fossil fuels in most markets. Nuclear isn’t competing with renewables, it’s competing against batteries and almost free renewables that charge them.
Nuclear is still possibly a great fit for niche locales where renewables aren’t feasible at all. Not a nuclear hater by any means (we need every innovation we can get), just show your math.
Keep in mind HVDC. 3300 KM north of the Sahara desert, and you are relatively close to the Arctic circle. North of that is still a "niche," but now we're talking about a million people living hugely spread out.
Most of those people living in Russia, Norway, and Sweden with easy access to an abundance of hydro, to the level that energy flows north to south in the Scandinavian countries.
Are solar + batteries feasible to heat every house in Minnesota with electricity when it's below -20F (-30C) for a week, we have <9 hours of daylight per day, and failing power literally means death? I genuinely don't know. Like I said, having a variety of solutions is the best outcome so we can choose the right one & have backups.
> just show your math.
I admit I can't. It's mostly gut-feeling from various science news sources I keep up with (e.g. Ars Technica; Skeptic's Guide to the Universe).
I wonder if we should seriously consider moving people away from such cold climates and towards warmer ones. Air conditioning is cheaper and coincidentally happens at about the same time as maximum solar power.
Only if you limit yourself to using solar generated with Minnesota's state borders.
Solar, Wind, HVDC transmission lines, short-term battery storage get us most of the way there, and is all on the process of being built out now. Medium term storage is still up in the air (flow batteries? compressed air?). Long term storage looks like hydrogen or natural gas with carbon capture. All these things seem more achievable than fusion in the next few decades.
> if you limit yourself to using solar generated with Minnesota's state borders
I live in a cold state. The idea of relying on out-of-state power, regulated and controlled by people with zero accountability to you, for life-and-death energy is a tough sell.
Bad news then. You most assuredly rely on natural gas from Texas traveling through a long underground pipeline to heat your homes and businesses. Relying on solar electricity from Texas or Arizona traveling through a long wire isn't going to change the status quo much.
> most assuredly rely on natural gas from Texas traveling through a long underground pipeline to heat your homes and businesses
Last I checked, we mine our own coal, pump our own oil and put up our own wind farms [1]. Minnesota, for what it’s worth, runs on renewables, coal and nukes [2]. The fifth of natural gas it does use comes from Canada, the Dakotas and Iowa.
These cold-state energy security concerns are a big part of the political puzzle that gets missed in the national discourse.
In northern states almost all residential energy use is heating. The amount of electricity used is minimal, therefore even modest amounts of electricity generation can meet need. Wyoming is the only northern state that has natural gas in notable amounts, all other states import a lot of their energy (especially heating) needs.
If most states stopped importing energy they would have to go back to wood and coal-fired stoves. That would be a huge quality of life reduction in terms of convenience and home air quality.
Heat pumps should be paired with rooftop solar and batteries whenever possible for resiliency. I admit the use of natural gas will decline in my lifetime, but probably won’t be fully deprecated.
The state you live in has one of the highest potentials for wind power in the country, easily backed by transmission, batteries, and as a last resort, natural gas.
High level, the energy transition isn't simply a fossil->renewables story, but also a centralization->highly decentralized story.
Totally agree, though I don’t know how wind performs in extended and deep subzero / heavy snow conditions. Hydropower is the traditional baseload for the Midwest, but it’s tough to square the destruction to natural beauty that entails in comparison with a remote nuclear set-up.
What does the geothermal story look like? I expect it's expensive to first set up, but after that, maybe it's cost-effective and reliable? Asking because I genuinely don't know, but haven't seen it mentioned in this subthread.
Note that there are two common uses of "geothermal". One is for geothermal power generation, and but there's also an unfortunate use of the term in describing ground-loop heat pumps and similar technologies. Ground loop heat exchanges are a godsend for heat pump efficiency in the deep of the Minnesota winter, but it's very different from a source of heat that's practically exploitable for electricity generation.
From the context, I think your link is relevant to the GP's question.
However, if you search for "geothermal Minnesota", you'll get hits primarily related to ground-loop heat pumps.
Note that in the Minneapolis area, the ground will freeze down about 3 feet in winter, so you need to bury your ground loop deeper than that. The frost line is even deeper up in the Duluth area. (Also, you need to use an air compressor to purge the vast majority of water out of any in-ground sprinkler systems before the ground freezes.)
I grew up in Minnesota, but left before there was much wind farming in the SW part of the state. (I've been told, SW Minnesota is one of the best places for wind farming.) Wind farming does work well in SW Minnesota.
However, I also remember a news story about some used wind turbines relocated from California that had trouble due to inadequate heaters to keep the lubricant from getting too viscous.
I honestly wonder if large scale population of the northern areas is feasible without carbon fuels. Historically chopped wood was used to heat northern homes and camps, later coal and oil and I guess now to some extent electricity, but as you say, renewable energy doesn't apply there. If places like Minnesota are a net negative for green/renewable energy, their costs may be much higher to offset generation in more favorable climates.
Not are carbon fuels are carbon negative - biofuel pulls down carbon from the atmosphere when it's created, so is considered carbon neutral.
I think it's highly likely we'll be burning a lot of algae fuel in the coming decades in situations where the energy density of carbon fuels is necessary.
Eventually we have to get to zero net carbon emissions. But the worst case is just to create carbon based fuels from CO2 extracted from the atmosphere and use it in places/for uses which cannot be covered by renewable electricity directly (the far north, airplaines, ...)
I think because it's the learned defensive reaction. What ends up happening is that you have someone who really hates fossil fuels who is more than willing to back policies that require a quality of life drop or a massive cost shift onto individuals to achieve 100% renewables. So whenever it comes up anything positive you say about renewables has to be come with the explicit caveat that it's not yet a 1-1 replacement.
It's one of those issues the overwhelming majority of people are on the same page about what we should do but at the ends you have "my livelihood depends on coal" on one end and "my life is insulated against the downsides of full-renewables so I'm privileged enough to have out of touch opinions" on the other and that's who shows up in comment sections.
We don't need to do that. But the media focuses on things like that and turns everything into some sort of weird argument that renewables are literally going to freeze gramma to death. Its overwhelmingly about emotion.
Its the same as what we see with EVs, tbh. Oh noes, what if you get caught in a snowstorm!? Imagine if 80% of the cars were EVs and they got stuck and there were... no chargers! Picture yourself freezing to death because of "those people".
Real world performance and goals are not correlated well with media hyperbole.
There are plenty of other renewables usable than solar. Wind power would be the obvious one, as wind is often a great complement to solar anyway. Then there are long-distance transmission lines, water power, energy from biomass. Finally, if everything else fails, create hydrocarbons from CO2 in sunny places, ship those "eFuels" to Minnesota.
Thanks, this was informative. It wasn't clear to me, but I think the study does not account for switching heating from burning NG in the dwelling to electricity. I don't have numbers, but I'm pretty sure that's going to introduce an enormous load on the system, and is my main source of skepticism for wind/solar/storage as a solution for all electricity generation in places like Minnesota.
In central California with ideal conditions, one day’s worth of storage roughly doubles the price of a solar system that is correctly sized for net zero production in November (assuming a wood stove is supplementing a heat pump).
I don’t think storage will be feasible in places like Minnesota. The following makes far more economic sense:
- Double solar / wind production by buying 2x more panels vs. “normal” states.
- Go all electric (heat pump / induction) for appliances and vehicles.
- Buy 8-24h worth of house batteries.
- Use a fossil fuel generator to top off batteries during outages (this more than doubles the generator’s end to end efficiency)
- Sell excess electricity to the grid, where it is used for subsidized carbon capture.
This should be completely resilient against storms and power outages, and extremely carbon negative. It would cost about 2x as much as best case renewables.
To keep warm, I'm estimating 2,628 kwh for a month for a home for a family of 3. In our magical Minnesota where everyone lives in houses with 3 people and only electric heat pumps, we'd have 1,900,000. This means, we'd need 4,993,200,000 kwh in the coldest month (4.993 Twh).
500,000 kilowatt of panels would produce ~33 gwh in the worst month (January). So, we'd need 151 times that many to have a good chance of doing this with purely solar. That'd mean 75,500,000 kw of solar panels. Assuming that we could install these for $1.50/w, that'd cost 113,250,000,000 and there's still a chance that we'd freeze people to death.
To mitigate that risk, we'd want to add ~500 gwh of batteries (just guessing as to needed capacity here). At a price of ~150/kwh, we'd be looking at ~75,000,000,000 in energy storage prices.
Feel free to check my math, as I did that pretty quickly. The figures are absurdly high due to scaling for the worst case type scenarios. Summer months would correlate with lower demand and more than double the supply.
Sensibly speaking, noone would try to do this. Its like building an offgrid home. You can get 90% of the way there and add a generator, or you can spend 10x more be truly offgrid. Almost everyone chooses the former. Maybe even 80%. Solar is great and very cost effective, but the returns diminish the deeper one goes.
Nice. I just looked up last February's bill for my ~1700sqft detached SFH in Saint Paul. It was apparently 6.8 therms/day (12 deg F average temp for the month). That maths out to about 5916 kWh for the coldest month (6.8 therms * 29 kwh/therm * 30 days), or a little more than double your estimate. March was 5.9 therms/day and Jan was 5.4 therms/day. So I think your costs are on the conservative side of things... or possibly my home is very inefficient :)
E: Ah, it occurs to me that you're using electric heat pumps, which are probably much more efficient than my NG boiler.
Yes, I pulled the estimate for really efficient heat pumps. To convert to all electric heat like that estimate, we'd have to replace a lot of gas heat with electric. Might as well go for the most efficient thing.
Compared to the nearly $200B in infra investment that I was estimating, that looks easy, lol.
I realize this isn't relevant for a discussion about future investment, but the current "value" of the whole energy infrastructure for a state is probably in the hundreds of billions of dollars, right? It's been built out over decades, of course, so the actual costs per year are much lower.
That's definitely possible. Going based upon the output of something like Catawba, that looks like ~3 nuclear plants. I bet that could be done for less than 100B, though I'd just be guessing. I also don't know anything about operations costs for that.
Also, I estimated solar at $1.5/watt. That's probably at least 50% too high.
We can look at how solar/wind/storage compete with putative fusion. Fusion is a baseload source, so let's see how they would do to provide "synthetic baseload".
Selecting the state of Minnesota, 2011 weather data, and 2030 cost assumptions, this would be about 70 Euro/MWh. The cost optimized solution would involve 222 hours of hydrogen storage, 5 hours of battery storage, 4.2x peak power of solar and 2.4x peak power of wind.
Solar generates electricity during the day. It would have to be overprovisioned and paired with storage in order to handle dark hours. There are some battery banks out there (Tesla), but I don't think they're very common.
Coal handles baseline load. We should be using nuclear for baseline instead.
Construction still hasn't begun on that project, 3 years later. When is the last time LA had a large construction project come in under budget?
I'll believe it when the batteries are actually installed and the bill is paid.
Also, the solar farm is planned for 800-MWh of storage. In 2021, LA used over 65 TWh of electricity[1]. That's over 7 GWh, per hour. So this storage would run the city for a few minutes. Not exactly a replacement for base load generation.
See you in ten years at the earliest when any nuclear generator you break ground on today generates its first kWh of power (assuming it isn’t wildly late or over budget, as every one built since the 70s has been).
I'm not saying fusion is necessarily the answer. I'm just tired of hearing "solar plus storage is the cheapest option" when the sources always rely on projected costs and a pathetically small amount of storage.
We need a major breakthrough in storage tech to make grid-scale storage a reality. Li-ion batteries are never going to cut it. Who knows whether grid scale storage will come along faster than fusion.
> Solar and batteries are already cheaper than fossil fuels in most markets.
This is false. This has only ever been shown to be true in extremely narrow edge cases where the batteries only needed to last overnight in extremely sunny locations.
For solar+batteries to be cheaper they need to be large enough to power through weeks/months of cloudy/snowy/leafy/rainy weather in places that are at least near higher latitude locations.
> Unfortunately, energy storage is still an unsolved problem.
Mechanical, lithium based, flow, heat, compressed air, pumped hydro are all types of batteries that are able to store quite large amounts of power today or in the near future. Certainly cheaper than fusion has any hope to be within 20 years.
> Solar panels are cheap and batteries are easier to build and there are lots of ways of making them.
Right now they are, but they often rely on materials from politically unstable regions (particularly Africa), or potential political rivals (China). Also, many solar panels require polysilicon from China, which is almost certainly produced with forced labor.
"On batteries, there were major issues with the mining of between 15% and 30% of the world’s cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Amnesty International found that children, some as young as seven, were working in artisanal cobalt mines, often for less than $2 a day. Mining conditions were reportedly hazardous, and workers often did not have adequate protective equipment and were exposed to toxic dust that contributed to hard metal lung disease."
The US is trying to crack down but Europe is lagging behind on it. However, if the report's claim (which I see no reason to doubt) that China has 82% of the global polysilicon market is true, with most of their polysilicon production being in the Xinjiang region, calling solar panels (or batteries) "cheap" is fairly distasteful considering their sources.
Mechanical, flow, heat, compressed air, pumped hydro are all types of batteries. All capable of storing MW to GW of power. It is not all lithium and cobalt.
Once again, I am reminding HackerNews that the technology to build a battery capable of storing enough renewable electrical energy for the (world|nation) for even half a day *does not exist* at any reasonable cost.
And if you want to store multiple days for a northerly nation with very cold winters, frequent high pressure anticyclones (so, no wind) that can last about a week, and you want to switch everyone to zero carbon heating, then the technology doubly doesn't exist.
And the only retort to the above will be mumbling "yeah, but exponential improvement in batteries plus didn't someone say something about hydrogen?" which is essentially, wishful thinking. When you can build a zero carbon grid out of nuclear fission plants - and we've known how to do so since the 60s.
> Once again, I am reminding HackerNews that the technology to build a battery capable of storing enough renewable electrical energy for the (world|nation) for even half a day does not exist at any reasonable cost.
But it is almost certainly closer to existence than fusion.
Almost certainly not. The US alone generates 4,095 billion kWh yearly. For a half a day, you would need to store 5,600,000,000 kWh. Tesla Megapack can store 3916 kWh fully loaded. This means you would need 1,430,000 Megapacks to power the US for half a day. With Tesla only being capable of producing roughly 40,000,000 kWh of Megapacks annually, it would take 140 years to produce all the batteries. If Tesla created 100 times the factory capacity they have now (which, could the supply of raw materials even withstand the smallest fraction of that?), it would take 14 years, for batteries that have a warranty of 15 years. These are lithium-ion batteries which are the most space-efficient, unless you don't mind clearing hundreds of square miles of space for this project. Did I mention it costs about $1 million per Megapack right now, so this project would cost $1.4 TRILLION assuming all Lithium+Cobalt+Supplies+Labor cost the same as they do now despite demand being increased 100x, and ignoring all engineering costs, and factory scaling costs, which could multiply the cost exponentially. All to power the US for just half a day. Now consider how to add Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, the rest of North America...
We're not close, and it's basically completely unfeasible. Fusion will be closer in 100 years than such a project.
I have listed 5 different types of batteries than Tesla makes. A number more are much farther than the fundamental science stage of Fusion. Tesla primarily makes batteries for cars, grid storage is actually way more flexible in the type of battery that can be used. You are missing the forest for the trees.
Consider pumped thermal energy storage. Use a thermal cycle to generate hot and cold (say, by compressing a gas, probably argon, extracting the heat, then reexpanding, and then storing the resulting "cold"), then reversing that cycle to generate power.
This scales embarrassingly well. It can be made entirely from cheap materials available in essentially infinite supply. No component operates at a temperature above the creep limit of ordinary steel. Round trip efficiency could reasonably be 75%. This requires no technological breakthroughs -- it's 19th century technology.
There are quite a few battery chemistries now that don't involve any cobalt. And the ones that do can get their cobalt from more reputable sources than the mining industries founded by colonial powers in Africa. (often backed by big oil and mining corporations). Cobalt and other minerals were mined long before lithium ion batteries came along, for example.
For all the crocodile tears about children mining cobalt, it's easy to forget how other industries can be just as bad or much worse. Of course, critics of batteries are laser focused on only and exclusively criticizing how bad things are when it comes to batteries and literally nothing else whatsoever.
I mean, do you want to talk about oil? Or coal? Or copper? Or uranium? Nasty industries, each of them. Especially oil. Lots of environmental destruction, poor working conditions, the occasional bit of genocide or sponsored corruption, wars, etc. Mining and oil/gas industry just are a nasty. Especially when everybody just accepts it as normal and looks the other way.
I agree. There is no breakthrough on the horizon that is going to make a fusion plant have the complexity closer to a natural gas plant than a nuclear fission plant. Therefore the costs will remain high.
It could still be a useful technology, especially in space. I could see a moon or mars base powered by fusion.
Gas has low capital cost but relatively high fuel cost, especially outside the US. For most fusion designs (possibly excluding NIF), the fuel cost is insignificant.
Also of course we might want to consider the carbon emissions of gas plants.
That is what I mean. Some people are imagining the capital costs of a natural gas plant with the fuel and environmental costs being almost nothing. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that a fusion plant would cost anything less than a fission plant at this point.
Solar panels are cheap and batteries are easier to build because they're already taking advantage of economies of scale and aren't in the R&D phase still.
The viability of fusion has been centered for a long time around getting more power out than you put in and once that marker is met it's viewed as the last giant hurdle in the way. There's still plenty more R&D that needs to be done before it can easily / readily scale though.
It's where nuclear was in the 60s basically. Even if it only ever gets to be comparable to nuclear in terms of costing but with none of the hazardous byproduct, it will come out ahead. When you consider the environmental factors involved in battery production it is pretty clear that fusion at least has the potential to be the cleanest sources of energy. Whether it ultimately gets there is another question.
Pessimists were saying solar panels and batteries were too expensive too, not so long ago. If we discover fusion power to be viable in our lifetime, it will be a breathtaking accomplishment to witness. It's a fork in the timeline with repercussions that will reverberate for millenia, across trillions of human lives.
Beautifully stated. I teared up. This and watching us settle on the moon and Mars would be incredible. And achieving more breakthroughs in AI and medicine and everything else. I am an optimist and really excited by everything on the horizon.
They laughed at Galileo, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Most skepticism is ratified by subsequent events.
DT fusion doesn't appear to have much to recommend it, since it still requires a thermal cycle like fission or coal, and that keeps its cost high. From an engineering point of view it involves large monolithic plants with very complex and stressed equipment. This seems the opposite of good engineering.
My impression is that the research efforts have been focused on "can we do it?" Then, if the answer is yes, they'll focus on "how do we do it efficiently?" Where efficiency can mean anything from capital efficient, to resource efficient, to energy conversion efficiency. Limiting one's focus on the next blocker in the critical path and not increasing scope beyond it sounds like perfectly good engineering to me.
It seems like terrible myopic project management to me. You want to avoid first steps that you know are very likely going to lead to dead ends down the line.
We're constantly being told to take the long term view. Are we only to do that when it's favorable to the technological optimist's case or budget?
If you have to build a steam turbine to convert the energy from your fusion reactor into electricity, it's never going to compete with solar and wind power in most of the world.
Doesn't mean that there won't be applications (if you can make all those lasers compact enough, submarines, ships, and ultimately spacecraft come to mind), but grid electricity is doubtful.
Not everything is expressed in cost, externalities like the looks and intrusiveness of something do matter.
1 fusion plant has less NIMBYs to deal with than wind-on-land, for example.
But yes, could be that still it's too expensive by the time it becomes available. By then I hope we can make a fusion plant so small it fits on a space ship and power an Epstein drive :-)
Fusion will have plenty of NIMBY once the tritium leaks start. It doesn't take leaking a very large fraction of a DT plant's tritium to reach levels that already cause fission power plants PR problems.
Yeah, the cost of capsules for NIF is something like 4 orders of magnitude higher than it needs to be for commercialization, though admittedly it's not like they've industrialized the process yet.
The other thing is that if LLNL is still using their own definition of Q, it's not necessarily the case that they've demonstrated net-energy breakeven; they like to compare direct energy delivery to energy release, so when calculating Q they basically pretend there aren't any energy losses from actually running the huge laser facility itself. As a result, LLNL assumes that laser technology will improve to the point that real-life Q can catch up with their "scientific Q" metric. (IIRC I think "Project LIFE" was supposed to develop some of those technologies, but it never worked out, possibly since NIF is so far behind their promised schedule.)
Solar and wind are bad and unsustainable due to mining of rare earth minerals and photovoltaic cells degrading and becoming a landfill liability.
Cost effectiveness is also a myth perpetrated by the death of nuclear executed through bureaucracy.
The nuclear, however, is currently the true energy source to use, technologically much simpler (than fusion) to execute with decades of experience making it the safest out there. It is the zero-carbon environmentally friendly energy source.
What were the estimated damage and deaths caused by Fukushima incident? When was the reactor site built, when was the reactor designed?
A few extra questions you may also be interested in: lithium, cobalt mining, costs of nanolitography for high efficiency photovoltaic cells. All that with tax breaks and heavy govt incentives vs insane regulatory burden on nuclear industry. Also nuclear scare in education that makes the public treat opinions like yours as even remotely realistic.
Why did people back then think it was save and then it exploded? Were they wrong in their assessment back then? Why were they wrong? Are you sure your assesment is correct today? Why is it better than their assessment back then? Are you sure you are not making the same mistakes that they made back then? Oh look, I can ask questions too, because I am a sealion.
where is most of the uranium mined that is used in european reactors?
what environmental damages are done by reprocessing uran? costs of the buildback of reactors? who will pay for it when the costs for this are 10x what the operators put aside for it? how much subsidies go into nuclear? how do you prevent proliferation in rougue nations that use nuclear for example iran?
Most things don’t start off cost effective, they become so due to investment, demand, industrialisation, competition, etc.
Maybe fusion will stay a small part of the energy mix for decades even after the first commercial plants are built but be part of what eventually enables us to use orders of magnitude more energy than we do now…
* The output is greater than the energy *in the lasers*, but the lasers deliver 1% of the energy required to power them. Need 100x improvement to break even.
* Converting the generated energy into electricity would cut the output in half. We need a further 2x improvement here, so it's ~200x to break even end-to-end.
* The scientific equipment requires immense & expensive maintenance.
* Plus the $3B facility around the equipment, that theoretically could deliver just 2.5 MW.
So we might be as close as 10-20 years away, as always!
Probably 5-10 years if this turns out to be the key unlocking it. If it is, the floodgates will open for funding, public and private, and we'll see a race to build the first reactor. Similar to how the first COVID vaccine was predicted to take 2-3 years and it took 8 months instead because it was a priority.
It took only 8 months because covid has been in existence for decades. Covid 19 strain was new and the vaccines had to be adjusted to new strains not created from ground up
Not so; the mRNA technology used to develop and deliver the vaccine has been in progress for decades. The hardest parts were done before SARS-CoV-2 ever existed, but it's wrong to claim that "the vaccines" needed to be tweaked - they never existed.
For people confused about this, there were prior commercial attempts at coronavirus vaccines, with mixed success. They were not RNA vaccines. The COVID-19 vaccines built on that research (regarding what proteins to target, in particular), but the COVID vaccines that were rolled out were completely novel technology.
Well, they can operate on just DD, so they can start from no 3He and make 3He.
This video of a presentation by Helion's Kirtley at Princeton has a slide where the reactivity vs. energy loss is shown for a DD system at beta=1. That system will make 3He directly, and also make tritium by two modes (directly from DD, and by capture of neutrons on 6Li in a blanket.) The net result would be production of 1.5 3He nuclei per DD fusion, on average. It takes a while for some of those 3He to be produced though, as the tritium has to decay (halflife of 12 years.)
To be honest, looking at those numbers, that doesn't look 10-20 years away. We'd need Moore's law style improvement in efficiency and to productionize it. So we're really saying 20 years at best for the technology, and then let's look at quickly we can build Nuclear power plants today... uh oh. In the UK for example it has taken 12 years to even agree to build a new Nuclear plant on a site that already has Nuclear plants!.
No, not as always. The laser confinement mechanism works, it has been shown, lasers that are more than 20 times as efficient as these NID lasers are now available, so the improvement needed to scale and "commercialize it," whatever that really means looks more like 10x than 200x. In the world of fusion, that counts as really good progress. For one thing, perhaps a lot of the research money will move to lasers now.
I mean, you nail it on the head. It's not "congrats on limitless free energy" but more "looks we might still get value in the future if we keep pouring money into this." Positive indicators at milestones are good. Onward.
> so the improvement needed to scale and "commercialize it," whatever that really means looks more like 10x than 200x. In the world of fusion, that counts as really good progress.
Yes it's good progress, but an order of magnitude is not nothing. Squeezing another order of magnitude efficiency out of the lasers will be very difficult. It took 30 years or so to go from 1% efficiency to 20%, and law of diminishing returns applies.
Diminishing returns usually applies if you assume there are no major breakthroughs. Can we assume that there won't be any major breakthroughs in this field?
Diminishing returns describes a trend. A breakthrough describes a single data point that bucks the trend. I'm not sure these are mutually exclusive, as after any breakthrough the diminishing returns trend is reestablished.
I wouldn't bet on no breakthroughs happening in laser efficiency, but more efficient lasers doesn't look like it will be enough to get to net energy given other inefficiencies in the system.
That is trivially true at the extremes of energy input. If you input an infinite amount of energy you will not get an infinite amount out.
But that’s not what we’re talking about. This is a physical process which is known to be exothermic for the energy ranges we care about.
As another example, raising the temperature of a flammable material 1 degree from room temperature will probably not light. Ditto with 2 degrees. But eventually, if you raise the temperature high enough, you’ll get more energy out than you put in. That’s the type of process we’re talking about now.
"Fast ignition and similar approaches changed the situation. In this approach gains of 100 are predicted in the first experimental device, HiPER. Given a gain of about 100 and a laser efficiency of about 1%, HiPER produces about the same amount of fusion energy as electrical energy was needed to create it (and thus will require more gain to produce electricity after considering losses). It also appears that an order of magnitude improvement in laser efficiency may be possible through the use of newer designs that replace flash lamps with laser diodes that are tuned to produce most of their energy in a frequency range that is strongly absorbed. Initial experimental devices offer efficiencies of about 10%, and it is suggested that 20% is possible."
This is irrelevant - each shot also requires a highly precision engineered piece of metal called a hohlraum to be destroyed.
With current technology, running an ICF plant would cost literally hundreds of millions of dollars per hour in hohlraums, since a single one costs millions, and you need to shoot several times per minute to produce energy.
That's why ICF is not even close to being a plausible electricity generation technology, so it is only being researched by nuclear weapons research labs like LLNL.
hohlraums are not expensive because of base materials, but because today we generally produce them as one offs and the process is incredibly man hour intensive. The DOE "roundtable" on the announcement today addressed this.
They are one-offs, but even if they were to be mass-produced, they require extraordinary precision. I very much doubt claims that one can be built in the range of a few dollars that each shot is worth in terms of generated electricity.
The reports you quote actually mention the target costs very clearly. The IAEA one talks about needing 500,000 targets per day, and sets a target of 0.30$ per target. At the time it was written, it says that a target costs 1000$, which is probably before NIF found put just how much more stringent the requirements for the shape of the target were (since the numbers I saw last time NIF achieved ignition were closer to hundreds of thousands of dollars per target, though maybe I am misrembering).
It's also worth noting that that report was expecting NIF to achieve the current milestone within 3-6 years, and it actually took 13. So I feel their numbers can well be considered optimistic.
The NIF is using old laser technology. Current tech can get above 20% efficiency. Sure, that still means more improvement is needed, but 200x is probably an overstatement by an order of magnitude.
> So we might be as close as 10-20 years away, as always!
I don't really get the cynicism here. This is a huge milestone that's been passed. Maybe with this, we actually will be 10-20 years away. Or maybe it's more like 30-40, who knows. But this experiment shows that net-positive energy is actually possible to do with our current understanding and technology; before this, I believe much of the skepticism was based on a belief that it may not actually be possible to get more energy out than put in, at least not without technology that's significantly out of reach.
Anyone have insight into how this new development differs from this article from back in 2014 about the NIF, entitled: "Fusion Leaps Forward: Surpasses Major Break-Even Goal"
Back then they were comparing to the energy actually absorbed by the fusion fuel. This is indirect drive, the laser hits a metal container first and only some of the energy gets to the fuel pellet.
This time, they're comparing to the total energy in the laser beams.
They're ignoring the inefficiency of the laser devices, but that kinda makes sense because they're using really old, inefficient lasers and much better ones are available now.
> This time, they're comparing to the total energy in the laser beams.
How do you know? Nothing has been published yet; it’s science through press release. In the past, published papers from NIF have been a real wake-up call after absorbing the misleading hype (the papers are most honest than the folks taking to the reporters).
> The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers
I guess we'll see how things develop. But from a quick google, 2.1 megajoules is about what the lasers deliver, unless they've significantly increased their power recently.
Right. Livermore has been working on this since the 1970s, with increasingly powerful lasers. Now, they claim "theoretical breakeven" - slightly more energy came out of the reaction than went into the reaction. But 100x less than went into the lasers, let alone the whole facility. Nor is energy being recovered.
This was never expected to be a power plant technology. It's a research tool, for studying fusion.
"Technical breakeven" is when the plant generates enough energy to run itself. This is at least 100x below that.
"Commercial breakeven" is when it makes money.
How's that Lockheed-Martin fusion thing coming along?[1]
I wasn't diminishing the achievement but clarifying its place in the context of how far we are from commercialization. The director of LLNL who announced the breakthrough discovery said she expects we are 3-4 decades away from commercializing it.
Even if the lasers were currently 100% efficient, the Q still needs to be increased by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude. That's because they're making less than a penny's worth of energy here, and the system cannot be economically feasible with that little energy per expendable target.
I don't yet understand why this is better than Fission. Surely Fission provides us with unlimited carbon free energy (given enough fissionable material).
What will Fusion give us that Fission can't already? Is it safer perhaps?
I think it's just like thorium molten salt reactors. It's a new awesomer kind of nuclear energy that doesn't have any of the baggage of fission!
Certainly, fusion does have the big advantage that it makes far fewer Curies of radioactive material per kWh as it operates. That has been the main driver of nuclear fission safety and waste issues.
On the other hand, there are good arguments suggesting that conventional fission has been reasonably good at containing and controlling the radiation, such that it's among the safest and cleanest forms of energy known already. But the PR issue is a hard one, and people don't think like actuaries.
I think the main difference is safety. Simplifying / IAMAPhysicist, but you can't get a runaway chain reaction with Fusion, and the reaction tends to just burn itself out if you shut it off.
That being said, fission is already pretty darn safe. But the public perception of it is not good.
Issues of potential output and safety considerations aside:
> Surely Fission provides us with unlimited carbon free energy (given enough fissionable material).
The crux of the problem is, there is a limited supply of fissionable material. If we manage to survive as a species, our energy demand will continue to grow, and one day we would meet a hard cap, limiting what humanity as a species, is able to do.
As a very very rough estimate, if we burnt through all the fissionable material that we have available on earth, it would be about enough energy to launch the mass of Mt. Everest into orbit. Long term (as in, many generations from now) we will need more energy than that.
> I don't yet understand why this is better than Fission
Realistically, today, it's only better because of decades of lobbying and propaganda for fear mongering around fission. There is no reason why nuclear energy couldn't be the vast majority producer of all electricity in the world while massively lowering environmental damage and loss of human life.
Long term, fusion might be better because it can produce a lot more energy and be safer. I feel like the safety improvement is negligible however compared to modern fission reactors that are properly maintained and governed.
Yes there is reason: The high cost, the unsolved waste issue and the inherent strategic danger such a centralization of power production would pose. You'd only have to hit a few large power plants to take out the electricity of an entire country. When done right, attackers can even create more destruction and chaos by initiating a meltdown.
Since you brought up lobbying, it's fascinating to me how many nuclear power fans the industry has created who are not informed by data and facts but are utterly convinced that nuclear power is the solution to all our energy issues.
The cost is not high if you consider the cost of pollution caused by other methods. And nuclear waste is absolutely a solved problem and is entirely unproblematic. These are thoroughly debunked talking points.
> attackers can even create more destruction and chaos by initiating a meltdown
This is not a feasible thing to do with modern reactor designs, and the same danger is present for infrastructure like dams or even just a big building.
It's not feasible but also it's the same danger as with dams? Which is it? In reality, both nuclear power plants and dams have been attacked many times over the past decades. More decentralized power production has other disadvantages but clearly it can't be targeted as easily. The attacker would take out a single wind turbine or someone's roof PV. The effects would be negligible on a national level.
The cost btw is even higher than most people think considering that energy companies aren't paying for most of it but tax payers do. Some not even born yet. But even without factoring in those future costs, as you suggested we do, nuclear power in its current form is among the most expensive forms of power production. Again, look at the data, not energy company propaganda:
More than 8 million people die every year from breathing polluted air containing particles from fossil fuel emissions. What would you put the cost of that at? Until we factor that in as an a cost for carbon emitting power generation, we cannot make a fair comparison of the cost of nuclear.
832 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 386 ms ] threadHeavy-ion fusion has been talked about since the 1970s and it seems much more practical than lasers for energy production because the efficiency of particle accelerators is pretty good (maybe 30% or more) but it takes a very big machine, the size of a full powerplant, to do do meaningful development. Something like that seems to need about 100 beamlines because otherwise space charge effects prevent you from getting the needed luminosity. Given that you are going to need to protect the wall of the reactor and the beamlines from the blasts and also have a lot of liquid lithium flowing around to absorb neutrons and breed tritium it is hard for me to picture the beam quality being good enough.
There hasn't been much work on it since then. If I had $48 billion to spend I'd think a heavy ion fusion lab would be better than some other things I could buy.
I don't hold out much hope for a practical, economical reactor from inertial confinement, but it's certainly exciting to see them achieve ignition & scientific breakeven, even if it's 10 years behind schedule. The one nice thing about ICF is that the energy gain shoots up dramatically once you cross the ignition threshold. That means they're arguably closer than tokamaks, even though both concepts need ~100x the demonstrated gain to get from where they are now to a workable reactor. (Ie, tokamaks have hit Q~0.3, need to get Q~30, vs ICF that has hit Q~1, needs Q~100).
But NIF was never, and is not, designed to be a generating reactor, or even a prototype of a testbed. It's a weapons physics facility that happens to do some energy generating research sometimes.
That aside, hitting Q=1 (and be able to use the device again) in any way at all using any equipment is a major milestone that proves humans can get there. From that point, in theory, it's just engineering.
Small scale fusion on the other hand would have a viable niche application at the poles, in the sea or underground or any other environment that is without sun or space.
Production is not subsidized: factories pay full price for their power.
>Cost of current production is an upper bound.
Under the current state of the energy economy, maybe. If we had to replace all manufacturing power sources with renewables - absolutely not.
That's not very interesting though - what is interesting, which has been my topic of conversation this entire time, is what the energy economy would look like if it were not still fundamentally rooted in fossil fuels.
Given that coal and other fossil fuels are basically free energy - it does not take much at all to get energy from it (ie, set it on fire), it is not physically possible for PV generation to beat that. Therefore, it follows that renewable power will be more expensive than fossil fuel power. I don't see why this is so hard to acknowledge - we are living in a time of unreasonably cheap power, fuelled by several million years worth of stored solar energy. It can't last.
Solar and wind, un-subsidized, are the cheapest power the world has ever seen, and their cost is still falling at exponential rate.
And? Most of our power usage is not supplied through electricity. Solar panels are never going to heat my house.
Plus storage is a thing. Using a heat pump to dry NaOH or melt Sodium Acetate, or heat a large pond can store low grade heat economically for months. Ammonia, or methanol can do so indefinitely.
Then there's transmission. HVDC can transport energy 10GW pernline for thousands of km at costs comparable to local generation.
I'd be very surprised if you could avoid using a solar panel to heat your home in 40 years even if you go out of your way to do so.
https://globalsolaratlas.info/detail?c=-5.462873,137.384064,...
Bifacial isn't in this model, but it boosts the snowy region by about 20% and the tropical one by about 5%
And what will the stuff available to burn be made from when there are plants producing ethylene or methanol or ammonia in chile or saudi arabia or mongolia for less than what gas costs to dig up?
These mental gymnastics routines are olympic level.
>driving operating coal plants out of business
Any specific ones? The only coal plants I've seen get shut down are because of environmental reasons (or age). Some countries, like Germany and China, are re-opening or building new coal plants.
Talking of mental gymnastics - fundamentally, the energy economy boils down to EROI (energy returned on energy invested). It's just wishful thinking that we can replace energy sources that are basically free (coal, oil, gas), with those that have energy payback periods in the mid-double digits of their expected lifespan (solar).
If you're really worried about it, buy a panel from europe, the polysilicon (90% of the energy) comes from hydro, wind, and nuclear powered countries.
Even if all the money for a solar module went to coal generation at chinese or indian prices and nothing else it would pay back that power in under two years.
If the only activity involved in making PV was to spend the entire system cost on lignite and burn it directly at the mine front, it would *still* produce more energy in its lifetime than putting the coal in a coal plant.
It's absolutely laughable that you think you can keep spouting this ridiculous lie.
Where do you get your numbers from?
>it would pay back that power in under two years.
That's exactly the problem. This is a significant portion of the lifetime output of the panels.
>it would still produce more energy in its lifetime than putting the coal in a coal plant.
I'm not arguing that solar panels are a net negative, as you seem to be implying. I'm arguing that the energy economics of a world fuelled entirely by solar (and other renewable technologies - solar is about the worst for EROI) would look very different to what we have now.
You're the one making the insane claims. You back them up.
I certainly haven't made any claims as specific as this without any backup!
Prove new solar in a median location is lower EROI than the median for new gas using up to date info on the whole process and solar cells you would buy for a project started now such as 155 micron wafer mono PERC.
Nope, I said that it's lower than other sources of power, and thus an energy economy based on solar will look very different than what we currently have.
Given that electricity represents a relatively small percentage of our power usage, in the majority of cases (materials manufacture, industry, heating, etc), the EROI of renewables will be worse than fossil fuels.
Then add heat pumps and PV+Heliostat or PV+CSP derived hydrogen compounds to your equation and realise that adding heat and chemical stocks shipped from distant places to the equation makes it favour renewables even more as you can turn 120MJ of electricity and 40MJ of direct sunlight at Chile's 35% capacity factor into 120MJ of hydrogen or 100MJ of Ammonia you don't have to refine. With the heat pump you'd get more low grade heat even if you burnt the fossil fuel for electricity.
Wind + PV is a pure upgrade from an EROI perspective, and electrolysers and CSP are following very close behind.
And they have to use traditional energy sources, or buy energy from neighbors.
For example, such a transmission line is currently being built to send solar energy from Northern Australia to Singapore across about 3000km of ocean. Another project is generating wind energy near Iceland and sending it to the UK a distance of 800km.
Unfortunately, most of territories I mention, also have low population density, about 1/10 of western Europe, and have low middle income, so it is not right to directly compare them with western Europe or Singapore, in possibilities to achieve same infrastructure power.
If 1% of the world needs to get 30% of their energy from gas while we figure out the hydrogen thing, it's not really a problem.
"Although many scientists believe fusion power stations are still decades away, the technology’s potential is hard to ignore. Fusion reactions emit no carbon, produce no long-lived radioactive waste and a small cup of the hydrogen fuel could theoretically power a house for hundreds of years."
Not sure if you were expecting things to progress faster. But it it "only" takes 20 years. That would be insanely fast and world changing.
https://www.engineering.com/story/why-is-fusion-power-is-alw...
The potential is hard to ignore, but that doesn't mean the potential will ever be achieved. This (like crypto currency) is the realm of vapourware I am afraid. Always just around the corner. :(
Have you never heard of ITER? Its set to power on in 2025.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
Its the same as crypto or emissions reductions.
That's pretty much the definition of vaporware, but maybe it will actually go the route of Duke Nukem :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Timeline_and_status
It's important to note that while this is technically true, it's mostly irrelevant. Sure, there's no material that will remain radioactive for the next 10k years, but instead you get much more highly radioactive material that will emit high doses for a "short" hundred years or so.
Fun fact that Wolfram alpha just informed me of: a phone uses between 10 and 20 MJ a year: multiple kilos of TNT. 4000mAh * 3.7V * 365: yep, it's about right.
Also, interesting fun fact indeed.
NIF on the other hand is already a miracle of materials science. An absolute triumph. But you can't enumerate the list of unsolved problems that, if eventually solved, lead to inertial confinement fusion as a civilian energy source. On the other side you can make that list for magnetic confinement. There is a clear path from magnetic confinement research to commercialization, with a known set of major problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
They correctly dismissed it as a curiosity because it was far too inefficient to do anything useful with the amounts of fuel they would have had available. They couldn't have made a more efficient one because they didn't have any idea how to construct reasonably uniform pressure-bearing cylinders.
Real innovation didn't happen until much later on, at British coal mines because 1. there was lots of fuel because it's already at a coal mine, 2. there was a useful task for the work in pumping water out of the mine, and 3. materials technology had advanced enough to make it possible to construct an engine that did a useful amount of work from a manageable amount of fuel.
This is not some bizarre idea - Lawrence Livermore is officially a part of the DoE's research into maintaining and improving thermonuclear weapons. That there are some vaguely imaginable applications in energy generation is at the very best a bonus.
Remember that each shot of the lasers also destroys 10 million dollars or so of the highly precision engineered "housing" for the fuel pellet (called a hohlraum).
The lasers don't directly hit the pellet - they hit the metal walls of this hohlraum, causing it to grow so hot that it emits x-rays, and its shape is perfectly aligned so that those pellets hit the two sides of the pellet at exactly the same time, causing two "ripples" to compress it so much that they force the atoms to fuse in the middle and produce a chain reaction that has to consume the entire amount of fuel before the force of the implosion dissipates, at which time all of the matter violently explodes. The brunt of that explosion (and the neutron bombardment from the fusion process) is taken up by the hohlraum, which is ireedemably destroyed and can only be, at best, melted down as raw material for the next hohlraum.
Edit: tldr, this is exactly as useful for energy generation as an internal combustion engine whose pistons are destroyed every time the fuel ignites.
It is possible though that they could also use this for some fundamental research into how fusion works as a process.
The common thread is that they tend to aim directly for an electrical output rather than simply generating energy, and don't necessarily plan to have a self-sustaining reaction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
So they probably are talking again about Q_plasma, not Q_total .
https://youtu.be/KtqC8W0_Ups
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor#Engi...]
Which means normal nuclear reactors will be needed to make it and minimising any economic viability of the dependent fusion rector for a long long time.
I'm not by any means well informed on the matter, but isn't the lunar surface covered in tritium deposits?
It might make sense to mine the moon sooner than later. Once we have the necessary equipment and resources there, the delta-v for getting the mined product to Earth isn't nearly as substantial.
Building lunar mining tech is likely to unlock all sorts of advances for the human race.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeding_blanket
>It’s unnecessary greenwashing hyperbole
OP's question provides evidence that not all people understand the carbon benefits of this technology.
Long to short, Gates assured me (paraphrasing), "We're close. It's doable. All we need is more funding."
I hope he's right.
p.s. I know PPPL might not be directly involved in this announcement. I was sharing context on the topic.
https://www.pppl.gov/
At the moment fuel costs in fission are like 5-10% of total costs for a fission fleet. In fusion it could be lower, but that will not be any means mean the overall system will be cheaper.
We'll have to see the cost tradeoffs: fusion makes much less radioactive material per kWh than fission (but it still makes some) vs. simplicity. Fission is relatively trivial: just put special rocks in a grid and pump water over them as they pour out their star energy.
Progress is good and exciting, but I don't see any reason to think this will have major implications for energy systems anytime soon. Would be happy to be wrong though.
Disclaimer: I switched from studying fusion energy to advanced fission 16 years ago.
I guess we still don't have anything better than boiling water, right?
There are other ideas too, but it's hard to beat a Rankine cycle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy
https://web.archive.org/web/20150404075829/https://hifweb.lb...
We do have radio-photo-voltaic devices, but they're so inefficient it's laughable. And we have RTG generators, which are only practical in limited situations, and again have a very low efficiency.
So hot water it is!!
If we use a reaction that primarily produces beta radiation or other high energy charged particle, sending it through a coil of wire would induce a voltage that we could extract as electric energy.
For that matter, appropriately located coils could be used to extract thermal energy from the plasma directly. The trick there is that we can't get much with the current tokamak and stellarator designs -- the thermal energy is too disordered to use a large coil and the plasma flow is not sufficiently confined to use small coils. There are almost certainly better configurations, but the electrohydrodynamics simulations are tricky. If we keep at it I'm sure we can find a stable configuration with fewer degrees of freedom.
I am excited about standardized large light-water reactors at the moment, like the US/Japanese ABWR or Korean's APR-1400 designs. I wish there was more hype around them rather than SMRs and advanced reactors.
My favorite idea in nuclear to rapidly deeply decarbonize is to use a shipyard to mass-product large floating reactors. This gives you economies of scale and economies of mass production. Amazingly, this was seriously attempted in the 1970 and 80s in Jacksonville, Fl on Blount Island, where Offshore Power Systems installed the world's largest gantry crane and got an honest-to-goodness manufacturing license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build 8 of these. [1]
Sadly, my concern above with SMRs happened to OPS and they couldn't break through. Such a good idea though.
[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/offshore-nuclear-plants.html
They are taking an active approach:
https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li...
Reactors like ISMR from Terrestrial Energy and SSR from Moltex that will operate at 500MW (rather then true 'small' reactors) are for more reasonable for scale.
They look like 'small' reactors but they pack quite a punch in comparison to PWR designs.
Any nation that just seriously commits to a single reactor design like this and plans to build 50 of them will do really well.
But I agree the same could be done with APR-1400 or AP1000.
Because some countries consider even 500MW reactors SMR if they are GenIV.
SMR has become kind of widely used for lots of different things.
I might be in the opposite camp as you but this is very much a "where were you when—" moment for me. I'm sure someone will pop in to disappoint me but I think the point is it's no longer a hypothetical exercise.
Of laser energy into a tiny control volume that doesn't consider how much energy went into the laser systems. If you draw the control volume around the building and see that the lasers require vastly more energy than what came out, I think you'll be less excited, right?
We've been getting lots of energy out of fusion since the early 1950s with thermonuclear bombs. We know we can get energy out of a control volume. But is it a practical energy source is still the question imho.
Edit: I was wrong, fusion is always 30 years away: https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/why-nuclear-fusi...
Someone has to keep the bloviated PR campaigns checked with reality. Otherwise, some crazy fools might actually start believing that fusion is real and gets duped out of their money. If you can't stand a bit of real criticism, then maybe you should sell your scam somewhere else. Otherwise, take it on the chin, retool your message, and come at it honestly.
Maybe it's not the result you think it should be ("with all they hype over decades, we should have fusion power by now"), but... too bad. It is what it is, and this particular announcement is indeed impressive.
Personally, I just don't see fusion being a viable solution for anything in any of our lifetimes. I will gladly admit how wrong I was if/when someone solves it. I just have a much stronger doubt in sci-fi vs reality, and don't get swooned by the hype machines surrounding fusion.
What is tiring to me is calling the skeptics tiring. But to each their own
And it's unreasonable and annoying to expect everyone to say "This is amazing, but..." rather than just "This is amazing". Yes, we know, fusion power isn't ready, and we have no idea when (or if) it will be.
I haven't been "holding my breath". I've been watching from afar, checking in occasionally (like when this sort of news comes out), and I genuinely think this particular breakthrough is exciting. I don't need the tiresome -- yes, incredibly, frustratingly tiresome -- legion of naysayers coming in and stating the obvious every single time.
[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/
Is it that in a specific volume they got X EM energy coming in from the laser and Y thermal energy coming out, with Y>X BUT the electricity consumption of the lasers is Z>Y>X?
If so that's sort of misleading, like the plethora of claims from ITER. I hoped this was different.
Tabletop rigs can be as efficient as 50%, however high power such as we see here tends to come with drastically reduced efficiency.
Still, this is an important step in the development of fusion energy reactors.
But personally, I don't know whether that's actually important. Power plants usually consume a nontrivial fraction of their own produced power to power themselves, and in fact consume more than 100% of produced power when starting from a full stop — meaning that in initial few-shot conditions, even when feeding back their own produced power into themselves, they still need (huge amounts of) external power input to get going, like a car engine needing a battery + starter motor. Only a rare few kinds of power plant can be used to "black start" a power grid. Most types of generator need to overcome initial higher resistances, e.g. inertia (and thereby back-EMF resistance at the transformer) in getting heavy turbines spinning from a stop.
It wouldn't be at all strange if a practical fusion power plant turned out to be energy-negative over a few-shot run (i.e. required "bootstrapping"), but then became energy positive over a theoretical 24/7 run at whatever its optimal duty cycle is. And a single-shot run becoming net-positive would be a good point to start to consider those more practical calculations, since they'd have been useless to consider until then—a power plant can't possibly be net-positive over any kind of runtime + duty cycle, if its core reaction can't be net-energy-positive when considered in isolation.
Which is, to me, why it probably does make sense for ITER to be excited. They've reached the point where they can stop using a lab-bench model of power efficiency, and start trying to come up with another, more full-scale model of power efficiency to replace it with.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility
> The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers, the people with knowledge of the results said, adding that the data was still being analysed.
They probably upgraded the rig since the Wikipedia article was written, so most likely the 2.1 MJ refers to the UV light numbers.
Add to that the fact that improvements in laser efficiency is a hot research area (as lasers are used commercially in a lot of places, and cost-cutting is always a concern), and this is starting to feel a little more attainable.
Even if the lasers are 1% efficient does it matter if 100 GJ of electrical power results in 100 TJ of fusion heat? I'm not saying this is at all how it scales, but it is the logic behind pursuing an ICF power plant. The fuel gets ignited and heats itself.
Also, for fun, 100 TJ is 24 kT TNT equivalent: slightly more than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Trying to capture this energy released instantaneously would be a fun engineering challenge.
Happy to be proven wrong and told that it is more of a breakthrough than I think it is..
So there is at the moment no working design for a generator as a plant that produces more electricity than it takes in.
It's always the same…
There are always these articles: net energy gain finally! and then: no not really.
It being hard and it requiring continual progress does not mean that progress does not occur.
Fusion is a much safer alternative both in incidents and fallout
I definitely wouldn't want to make any broad sweeping statements about something that hasn't been built yet.
In a case of an accident I would also imagine an explosion from a Fusion Reactor, but the fallout of it would not even close as dramatic as a Fission Reactor leak or explosion
In theory much of that is excessive but there is a long history of very expensive mistakes with massive cleanup efforts. The US talks about three mile island as the largest nuclear accident ignoring the Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One that killed 3 people. All that complexity and expense comes from trying to avoid real mistakes that actually happened.
https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el...
LCOE of nuclear is cheaper than almost all other possibilities we have. sure nuclear is very expensive up front, but a nuclear powerplant can run for 100 years while wind and solar had to be completely replaced every 25 years.
your correct that nuclear has had some very expensive accidents, but the chance of a modern gen3+ plant that we'd build today causing any accidents like that in a western country is so very close to 0 that it's not even worth discussing.
The rate and cost of failures directly relate to insurance costs. A 1 in 100,000 chance per year to cause a 500 billion dollar accident represents a ~5 million per year insurance cost to offset that risk before considering the risk premium associated with insurance. And that’s on top of the normal risks for large complexes that have little to do with nuclear just high voltage equipment etc. Unsubsidized insurance costs are something like 0.2c/kWh which is quite significant for these projects.
In the end you see a lot of people talking nonsense around nuclear costs using wildly optimistic numbers, but there hasn’t been a power plant built and operated in the last 20 years that come even close to these numbers. Let alone when you start to compare predictions for decommissioning costs with actual decommissioning costs.
If we are being honest, that also has a lot to do with why nuclear is so expensive.
Poland just decided to build our nuclear to the tune of 40bn eur and their first contract is with westinghouse and their ap1000 reactor but also signed a letter of intent with KHNP to also built out further. I'm sure they cost Westinghouse for strategic reasons though and not because of price.
heck.. even Finland with their massively delayed and over budget Olkiluoto 3 also plans to built out even more nuclear. it's almost like some countries are now realizing that putting your faith in the weather gods for supply safety is not a good idea and that solar and wind are simply not viable for baseload or the grid in general.
i still think wind and solar has a place for creating synthetic fuels, but let's stop pretending it's been comparable to nuclear for the grid.
edit:
also.. are your saying IEA has wrong data? and if so, would you mind bringing since sources into your argument about people being way too optimistic
Must be a conspiracy theorist.
Globally 16% of electricity is produced by traditional hydro annually that can cover the majority of the projected need for storage in a pure wind/solar grid.
Also, by the time we need significant batteries the costs will have fallen even further. If you want to eventually cover 10% of the grids daily demand from batteries using projected costs from 2030 to 2040+ it doesn’t look unreasonable.
Renewables with straight gas backup and no other storage are already lower carbon than any other option, and batteries and off river PHES have only just started getting cheap.
The breakthroughs we need to cover the final gap have already been made if you're paying any attention at all.
Stop concern trolling
Storage does not need any "breakthroughs". It will be built out when there is renewable generating capacity to charge it from. In the meantime, NG plants fill shortfalls.
It is also perfectly capable of meeting dispatchable loads like heating, chemical production, and EV charging, and adding them to the grid will bring the ability to meet electricity even higher. Considering the storage and dispatchable low carbon energy that already exists, the remaining part would produce less carbon than would be released by expanding Uranium mining.
There is not enough uranium to meet 50% of world electricity demand using current technology for long enough to wear out a single generation of wind turbines or solar panels.
Your imaginary all nuclear future is both impossoble and worse than the trajectory we are currently on.
United Arab Emirates has had massive issues. Unit 1 began construction in 2012 and was “completed” in 2018, but didn’t enter commercial operation until 2021 due to literally hundreds of issues. “In December 2018, it was reported that voids were found in the concrete containment buildings for units 2 & 3. Grease was found to have leaked through the unit 3 containment, which may have been due to a crack in the concrete.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant
South Korea also ran into multiple delays, “Shin Kori-3 was initially scheduled to commence operation by the end of 2013, but the schedules for both Units 3 & 4 were delayed by approximately one year to replace safety-related control cabling, which had failed some tests.”
Poland isn’t a failure at this point, but they don’t have a power plant yet and their cost projections before delays aren’t very rosy.
Objectivity it’s reasonable to blame bad management for issues within a single project or even country, but when several different projects in different countries run into issues that suggest more fundamental problems.
If Britain decided to build 10 APR-1400 in the next 10 years with each one they would improve.
France built like 50 reactors in 15 years with 60s technology. Yes they had issue early on but after a while they were completing reactors within 4-5 years and very few issues.
The reality is from 2000 to 2020 every country in Europe could have 100% green energy if they had just started building multiple reactors every year.
Germany could have easily have a green grid by now. A nation like Germany could very much have gone and do that, just as France did in 1980s.
European nuclear initiatives are mostly about strategic concerns to get out of Russian gas. Economically, even the cheapest nuclear power on Earth can't compete with gas, if it is pipelined. (It can compete if it is liquified.) Or you need to penalize gas to unreasonable degrees for carbon emission.
Meanwhile the largest known deposits of Uranium can be found in Australia and Canada, making them much safer sources for western countries.
If EU countries allow fracking domestically, this will change, of course. Though the same "green" movement that opposes nuclear is likly to try to block this. Maybe we should look at how much funding these people get from Russia?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/19/russia-s...
https://www.newsweek.com/putin-funding-green-groups-discredi...
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/german-green-group-brande...
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/putins-green-fifth-co...
Just to pick a few random google results.
As far as I can tell, it's in Russia's interest to encourage any energy source that synergizes with NG (ie wind and solar) and to work against energy sources that are full alternatives (nuclear, coal and large scale storage), while at the same time ignore the downsides of NG.
It would make sense to fund groups aligned with these interests, even those that are generally negative to Russia politically. Such funding would not need to be done directly, but could be done through subsidiaries.
Yes, and that one is society. It what we do with any risk that is so great that if any company would have to carry it then the company would fold and society would still have to carry it.
Hydro power is one prime example. If a dam would break the damage downstream would be too high for any power company to pay. Individuals living downstream might have insurance, but no insurance company can handle the cost of a major flood. The only entity able to do so would be the government.
An other example is forest fires caused by poor maintenance of power lines. Such things happens from time to time and it not the power company or their insurance that will cover if half a country is up in literal flames and a few towns are lost. There might be a bit of bad press, a few millions/billions in damages, but the true cost won't land anywhere near the power company.
Fully eliminate the risk of floods and fire from the power grid would be very difficult, and putting the power company on the hook for the full cost would be impractical and counter productive. Society need electricity. The best they can do is impose regulations, and in exchange society will pick up some of the risk.
Those companies can and should be held responsible for the damages they cause. You can't just privatize all the profits and leave all the losses to the government! If you want to do something so dangerous nobody is willing or even able to insure you, you should not be allowed to do it.
[0]: https://damsafety.org/sites/default/files/files/Legal%20Liab...
For power generation, humans just need electricity. This requires large networks of high voltage lines crisscrossing the country. Those lines will start wildfires at some rate X. A utility cannot survive being liable for all damages by that wildfire.
So what you do - is everyone buys insurance and the government sets "best practice" regulations designed to reduce X to a number considered reasonable. Investigations that result in litigation are usually what happens when the company has clearly violated best practice.
The problem with all things nuclear is that our vision of acceptable number and severity of nuclear incidents is that it needs to be negative.
When a company files for bankruptcy the result is a legal process where the company seeks relief from debt. PG&E caused California second biggest wild fire named "Camp Fire" which destroyed 1,329 structures, and burned 963,309 acres, with an estimated cost of $16bn. The next year they caused a second wild fire, and yes they did get sued for that. They are estimated to have caused over 40 wild fires.
In the bankruptcy filing that got accepted by the judge they might be paying $13.5 billion for all of the wildfires, with half of that being paid as "stocks" in the company (for how much that is worth). All the remaining costs of the wildfires will be carried by the victims. Since September 30 this year the total amount PG&E has actually paid is $5.08 billions.
If one of Californias nulcear power plant would explode tomorrow with the effect of 40 wild fires then the result would be identical to PG&E. They would be sued, they would file for bankruptcy, and then a portion of the true costs will be paid out. That is reality regardless of what you thought it was.
[0]: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article165448747.html
As a California government agency it’s self insured by the state government, which is a very different situation than a private company building a power plant exclusively to generate power.
As to bankruptcy, insurance is normally required. Wildfires are an odd case because unlike nuclear the people who suffer damage are partially responsible for failing to mitigate risks as eventually fires will happen.
Who is the primary owners in a power company matter very little. In many countries, especially in EU, the government tend to be the majority owners in power companies operating nuclear power plants. It doesn't change the risk factors.
Also I would never blame victims of flooding or wildfires. People who choose to live downstream of a hydro power dam, or chooses to live in areas with high risk of wild fires, has just as much power as people who choose to live next to a nuclear power station. If operators of dangerous and critical infrastructure do a bad job then the blame tree start with the owners and trickles down to each leaf.
People have been making dams for quite literally thousands of years before we discovered AC electricity. They are useful structures to ensure water security and reduce damage and deaths from regular flooding. So yes the Marib Dam for example produces electricity and it’s failure would pose a risk, but it’s on the same location people a dam failed all the way back in 575 and there is evidence of earlier dams in that location going back to 1750 BC.
Hinkley Point C is currently expected to cost around $31 billion once finished for a measly 3,000 MW.
For that money you could build ~2,300 15MW onshore wind turbines - which would add up to roughly 34,500 MW capacity. So even under the assumptions that
- you have to replace the wind turbines 3x to reach 100 years life span and
- you always have to build more renewables since they don't run at 100% their capacity throughout their lifespan
wind make more sense economically nowadays.
Offshore wind pays into the public purse now via the leases and still costs about half what subsidised nuclear does. It's still a very young industry.
Offshore has a rather fast construction time, it turns out. For example, the United Kingdom's Hornsea Wind Farm Project 2 was given planning permission in 2016, and it reached its full capacity of 1.4GW less than six years later. Project 1 at the same wind farm reached 1.2GW in less than five years.
And when it comes to cost, Hornsea Project 3 is to start construction next year - with commercial operation scheduled in 2025 - at $12bn for 2.4GW. Not bad when you compare it to Finland's Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant unit 3 costing an estimated $11bn for 1.6GW - which took 22 years from first license application to design output power.
That is insane. They're building a FOAK project for less than NOAK nuclear reactors like Hinkley C in less time and it will be generating at higher capacity from day one than new nukes manage for their first decade or so of operation. Nice pro wind factoid.
More power, sooner, with low enough O&M that you could build another one with the money you saved just during the time it would take for another EPR to be built and come to full power? Sign me up.
it's cute that you are mentioning onshore wind but that will just never happen, takes up way too much space and most places have a capacity factor of below 20% making your 34500 Mw 6900Mw as well as giving you erratic output. so for wind to work you either need fossil fuels, power 2x or some new magical battery that will make the cost of such a solution insane because you'd have to completely overhaul your infrastructure.
offshore wind is more realistic, but costs way more than nuclear.
wind makes sense of you want to built something fast, but it won't bring down your carbon footprint. og at least it haven't in Germany or Denmark. the only reduction we've seen is because we burn trash and biomass which fair some messed up reason is considered green and renewable.
Then also look at the $20 billion dollar 'service' contract for the Saudi one that doesn't include any labour or running costs. It suddenly costs about the same as Hinkley C even before overruns.
Once you look at the total in rather than comparing overnight costs to renewable all in costs, they're the same $8-10 per net watt as nuclear always is anywhere except china - and China's renewables are cheaper by close to the same ratio.
The penetration rates at a given cost favour renewables right up until your peaker gas plants are causing less emissions than the Uranium mine.
could you please provide some evidence that the capacity factor and supply safety is remotely comparable between APR1400 and offshore wind?
What do you think service costs are for offshore/onshore wind and hinkley point? having maintenance and an industry is actually a good thing for the economy.
where do you get your numbers? you sure make many claims without a shred of evidence. and are you seriously suggesting that we continue using natural gas?
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/ThreeYrsEnergyAva...
Cheap reactors are unreliable reactors.
> What do you think service costs are for offshore/onshore wind and hinkley point? having maintenance and an industry is actually a good thing for the economy.
Stop with the broken window fallacy. If subsidizing jobs is important, open a battery or PV plant with the tax money instead.
> and are you seriously suggesting that we continue using natural gas?
Using gas 2-20% of the time with a mean of around 8% produces fewer emissions than opening new uranium mines and only needs to happen whilst the storage industry matures. Your plan entails burning more gas whilst the reactors, mines, and enrichment are built out over decades, then it also entails burning more gas at the end for outages unless you overprovision and build seasonal storage and long distance transmission.
The mock outrage is tiresome and transparent.
As do I, I personally have never heard someone refer to a nuclear fission power plant as a nuke, but I guess I don't hang around with the same people as you...
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/nuke
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nuke
Your mock ignorance is tiresome and transparent
Everyone in the area simply calls it "the nuke plant".
It is a directional landmark : "yeah, so once you get to the nuke plant turn left...."
"Once you see the nuke plant you know you are getting close"..
Its full name is a mouth full : Pickering Nuclear Generating Station.
Citing wikipedia sometimes backfires.
No one is even slightly confused by the usage.
The same people moving form project to project, on-boarding new people. Just as France did in 1980s.
This would result in very cheap competently green grid for the next 100 years.
Wind turbines have to be replaced 3x in that time and you don't have to deal with intermittency at all.
Just as with everything else, without economics of scale it doesn't work.
You certainty don't have anything close to the intermittency of wind and solar. And this is clearly evident in the production graphs.
In most regions you can get a lower forced downtime rate for a lower cost with renewables, and then you also get the curtailed energy to feed dispatchable loads. You need the electrolysers anyway for chemical feed, and you need storage to meet variable loads so it's just a matter of which can be deployed faster.
Additionally you get a very long forced downtime when you burn through your Uranium reserves in under a decade by trying to provide current final energy.
Currently a lot of reactors are hitting the 30-40 year mark, and they are running into significant issues with the aging equipment. We are seeing an increasing number of minor incidents, often caused due to manufacturing defects finally rearing its head, or just plain fatigue.
Meanwhile, solar has a 25-year economic lifespan. At that point you can make more money by replacing them with more efficient panels. However, manufacturers have already started offering 40-year warranties for consumer panels, at which point they have a guaranteed 88% power output. Wind indeed has a lifespan of 25 years, which seems pretty average when compared to literally any other power plant with moving parts.
When it comes to accidents, they are indeed extremely unlikely. However, the figure to look at is the potential damages multiplied by the likelyhood of the accident. When we look at those two together, they are definitely worth discussing.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/iaea-data-animation-nuc...
solar is fine for those who can afford it, but workout subsidies and the ability to sell electricity back to the grid it's a crazy long term investment in many places of the world especially northern Europe where I'm from (for hopefully obvious reasons). so different milage may apply elsewhere. i guess we'll have to see if those 40 years are for real and if the companies offering it are even around in 20 years.
wind needs constant maintenance to have a 20 year lifespan, but beyond the 25 years you'd have to replace the whole thing. so while a nuclear powerplant also requires constant maintenance you don't have to treat down the whole plant after 40 years. even the German ones that are closing now could easily have their lifetime extended https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/could-germany-keep-i...
>When it comes to accidents, they are indeed extremely unlikely. However, the figure to look at is the potential damages multiplied by the likelyhood of the accident. When we look at those two together, they are definitely worth discussing.
i guess what I'm trying to say is that we as a civilization engage in activities that are way more risky and dangerous than the miniscule risk of a serious accident in a modern gen 3+ nuclear power plant. of course we should have strict regulation here, but it's just not that dangerous or risky
Let it run? You mean, presumably, the huge amount of testing and preventative and planned maintenance that is scheduled in as part of a reactors expected lifetime, plus anything new discovered along the way. That doesn't come for free.
> In theory maintain a nuclear power plant to last for 100s of years
Sure, given enough effort you can fix anything. But extending a fission plant's lifetime can require massive overhauls, replacing reactor components, replacing materials that have experienced radiation embrittling and activation, etc. Keeping a plant running indefinitely is so complicated and expensive that we haven't managed it so far.
Extension is something we should absolutely consider but it's not a magic fix all. Sometimes it's not worth it to keep an old thing running.
The ~fifty year lifespan is in part based on physical corrosion of pipes running through concrete there really isn’t a way to economically replace them all that costs less than simply building a new power plant. But even here not everything fails on the same day so there is some wiggle room.
A warrantee of that length is only valuable if the manufacturer is a stable business with multiple income streams (say GE) or the warrantee is backed by stable insurance (say Lloyds). Liabilities are supposed to be on the balance sheet, so they are not free to mint.
If there were a long term issue where consumers needed to claim on the warrantee, I would guess most manufacturers would just get liquidated, but the executives and owners will have already cashed out. The same business model gets used for lots of other businesses with long term warrantees - limited liability is very handy.
But that's precisely why nuclear power plants are so expensive to construct. If the generation technology was inherently less risky, it stands to reason the facilities would be cheaper to build
For example, in France nuclear power reactors were stopped because unexpected cracks appeared in pipes after just 25 years of operations requiring expensive maintenance, https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/France-Cl... That put reactors off-line for over a year.
Then Sweeden closed one of its reactors because it bacame unprofitable due to raising maintainance costs, https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-sweden-europe...
Seems like power generation still counts on externalities being external.
>. Fission is still by far the most expensive power source even with massive subsides and is only even close to economically viable as base load power backed up with peaking power plants.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/748580/electricity-cost-...
Seems Solar is the most expensive, and by a large margin?
It looks like nuclear is cheaper vs almost all "renewables"?
There is a nuclear power plant ~10KM from me that set world records:
- On October 7, 1994, Pickering Unit 7 set the world record for continuous runtime at 894 days, a record that stood for 22 years.
Can you provide the number of days that "WIND" or "Solar" have provided continuous power for?
That complexity and expense is because you are building machines which can run for 894 days NON-STOP. (CANDU plants can be refuelled while operating)
Diesel locomotives are expensive, a lot of this is attributed to the engine designed to run at high-output for an extended amount of time.
A fusion reactor will also require wall thick enough to stop aircraft. Security will likey be the same to. And there is no fundamental reason why fusion should require any less for any of these.
In fact the actual cost of nuclear is CAPX and comes from the large civil engineering project with high specification, the steam turbine and water towers.
There are lots of fission based reactor designs that have non of these things. So nothing you describe has really much to do with 'fission' itself. Fission plants can also be made so that airborn radiation is practically impossible.
We simply stopped fundamentally advancing fission reactors in the early 70s and instead of solving problems fundamentally, we added lots of regulation.
I think it might be fine that fusion power may be more expensive in some ways than fission, as long as its reputation is kept clean (figuratively and literally). Market fusion power as the savior of humanity, and get enough people to believe it, and it'll be fine.
After all we already have a giant fusion reactor just 12 light-minutes away from us! We just have to harvest that energy. The direction were already going (mostly market-driven nowadays actually!) is generation from renewable sources, flexible grids and storage systems to balance everything out.
Fusion could obviate the need for grid-wide storage systems which would be a huge advantage.
"All the problems associated with" what? Modern batteries don't burst into flame. Anyway the overwhelming bulk of storage is not and will not be chemical batteries.
Economic challenges of quickly building grid-scale battery storage , battery production for the entire globe, NIMBY's etc.
> Modern batteries don't burst into flame
they literally do
> the overwhelming bulk of storage is not batteries
Well overwhelming bulk is a high bar and storage is geography dependent. Germany f.e. can't build as much pumped storage as Australia and Australia built a large amount of battery storage vs PSH.
Modern batteries do not burn. Teslas do.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/recycling-firm-fined...
Lithium is anyway not favored for use in utility-scale storage, where its light weight offers no compelling value. Up-and-coming chemistries include iron-air (no explosions), calcium-antimony (no explosions), and bromine-zinc (no explosions). Hundreds of other chemistries are available.
That's not sufficient for pumped storage at scale, but Germany is mostly focusing on hydrogen for now.
Fissions reactors that don't have incredibly strict and expensive regulation are already pretty unreliable, and they're operating within the bounds of known materials rather than an order of magnitude outside of them.
Even the mythical 100% uptime nuclear reactor still needs just as much storage for abritrage because it is so much more expensive.
Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity (LFSCOE) does include storage and suddenly nuclear fission gets a lot more competitive:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4028640
When you are building a power plant which has the capability of making a significant portion of your country permanently incompatible with human life, you generally want to be really sure you aren't going to have an oopsie.
I think Chernobyl was the only really big nuclear plant disaster right? And even then, what we've really learned in the long term is that human habitation is more dangerous to wildlife than nuclear radiation (the area around the plant is now a thriving wildlife preserve).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
"The fly ash emitted from burning coal for electricity by a power plant carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy."
A nuclear reactor that had the same radiation as a coal plant would not be legal? How does this make any sense at all?
The Safety standards were actually put at to high a level to early, specially given how instantly save nuclear was.
Consider this, how safe were coal plants? Would nuclear instead of coal have saved 100000s of lives since then? Yes of course nuclear would have, even if you had an accident once in a while.
The problem is that there was 0 tolerance for nuclear accident, because of populist nonsense, but if coal plant and supply chain killed 5 people here 10 people and 1000s of people get sick, nobody cares.
So the reality is, that nuclear went uneconomical because nuclear and existing power production (mostly coal, later gas) were no treated the same in terms of their safety requirements.
> When you are building a power plant which has the capability of making a significant portion of your country permanently incompatible with human life
That's not actually what happens. 3 Mile Island or Fukushima didn't even remotely come close to what you describe. And even for Chernobyl this is questionable statement. And Chernobyl was a type of reactor not built in the West, so in the West something that bad simply can't happen with PWRs.
At the contrary in renewables the learning cycle is in months so costs fall exponentially.
That's the real reason of high costs in fission, not red tape or public sentiment.
I think it's because of the occasional catastrophic failures that spatter our short history with the technology. Fukushima made headline news around the world, leaked large amounts of caesium-137 into the ocean, caused a 20km evacuation radius, is projected to take a total of 30-40 years to clean up, and people think of it as not that bad of a nuclear incident.
In comparison burning fossil fuels is a classic tragedy of the commons problem. Way less sensational. You can do math and say nuclear has a safer track record than coal/oil. You can point to design, engineering or management faults with historical failures. It doesn't change the fact that nuclear had a very fair chance at being the future and shown itself to not be trustworthy. If humanity was a little more perfect maybe we could have pulled it off
But ultimately it's such an expensive and society-tier level of investment that it's at the whims and pressures more than almost any other technology that has benefited society in resent history. So likewise it's also most at risk of the downside of populist politics (short term thinking, highly reactive to noisy local issues, driven by emotional outrage, etc).
I wonder if it's prospects are even worse off now that's to social media.
Oh yes indeed. Nuclear energy is not legal in Italy, so I did some research:
We had nuclear reactors in the 80s, until we held a referendum on nuclear energy, 3 months after Chernobyl. The result: overwhelmingly against, so we dismantled our reactors. Decades later, the Government pushed for a new referendum. When did they choose to do it? 6 months after the Fukushima disaster... you can guess what did the Italian population voted for.
Is this true?
I always considered fission tech to be used for the following reasons, and none of them are economic. The number's I've crunched say fission isn't the economic choice, but that varies depends on how much value is placed on 'base load'.
1. Cold war era vanity tech. Nuclear weapons were used to end World War 2, and now they are just another infrastructure project for us.
2. Code shifted weapons research. Countries blame each other for this all the time in the nuclear non-proliferation era.
3. Strategic choice to avoid traditional energy imports (France, Japan).
After 1990 specially 2000 lots of governments around the world started to massively subsidize solar and wind. While often at the same time having policies punishing nuclear in various ways.
The uneconomical solar and wind became economic because of massive government orders and investment. Even the US often simply set targets for solar and wind that utility providers had to reach. Even nuclear nations like France did so.
So why did wind and solar turn economical, massive investment around the world in making it so. Had Germany, France and the rest of the EU simply gone all in on even a Gen3+ reactor design, and had order 200 of them since 1990, it would also be very economical. History of nuclear shows that if you build the same plant in large numbers, they can be built and finished far faster and cheaper.
And that is even before we consider the huge reduction in capital cost if you go from a PWR design to a GenIV design. Just in terms of the scale of the project, there is a huge difference. Sadly by the time that technology was getting ready for serious commercialization, nuclear was basically seen as legacy and almost all government stopped most research and stop investing in it.
Imagine if nuclear in the 80s had the support wind/solar did in the last decade. If every utility in the US simply sad 'you need X% nuclear by Y date'. And in Europe at the same time as France was building its reactors, Germany, Nordics, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Britain had also built reactors at the same time.
During the Kyoto protocol talks, France already had a mostly green grid because of nuclear. But somehow essentially nobody copied this success story because it simply wasn't politically viable in most places. It took decade plus after Kyoto before wind/solar were commercially viable but really only if you don't consider intermittency a problem and the market doesn't give you a penalty for it (it usually didn't because before wind/solar that just wasn't an issue). Yet despite solar and wind not being economical, massive investment in it happened and eventually it was made economical thanks to economics of scale.
I would claim if all the investment that was made in wind/solar since 1992 had been made in nuclear, we would produce more green energy now and the cost curve would be driven even lower, and baseload power would be solved as intermittency is simply not a thing. We would not need to redesign grids because nuclear plants would map nicely onto the current grid, if you just replace coal with nuclear.
So, its all about economics of scale, that makes it energy production cheap. Putting up huge wind mills is cheap because there are lots of trained people to do it, the factories can produce large volumes. The largest wind mills now are by themselves large then a whole GenIV plant would be. And produce like 95% less energy and not even consistently.
> I always considered fission tech to be used for the following reasons, and none of them are economic.
You missed that it is green and no CO2. That was not a reason anybody cared about before 2000 but since then it was part of the rational in some countries.
I would like to hear why you think fission can't be economic in principle. Maybe you can make the argument that Gen3 reactors can't be economical but based on first principles, fission itself can be economical if you had economics of scale seems a stretch.
Airliners have the same problem, yet their spin doctors are much more successful. Everybody keeps believing they're the safest form of travel.
Yes, something like 150k people were evacuated because of worries about radiation. What you don't mention is that the total number of people evacuated was 470k. Most of the people who had to leave their homes had to leave not because of anything nuclear but because the enormous tsunami destroyed their homes.
So the Fukushima story is: massive natural disaster that caused enormous destruction and tens of thousands of deaths; a nuclear power plant was in a badly affected area; the damage was expensive to deal with but the total number of resulting deaths was, er, maybe about 1.
1. People tried to ring alarm bells about the building codes (and the reactor specifically) not being able to handle earthquakes of a size Fukushima was likely to experience. They were on deaf ears.
2. Japanese government admitted guilt for poor oversight and regulation.
3. Three executives were put on trail for negligence. There were found not guilty, but that's not the same as innocent.
If the question were, say, "how much should we trust the Japanese government?" then Fukushima is not very encouraging. But if it's "how worried should we be about nuclear power?" it seems pretty encouraging to me. Lots of errors and negligence, huge natural disaster, and even so scarcely any lives lost and most of the harm done would have been the same without the nuclear power plant.
> caused a 20km
Questionable if that is actually necessary or just over-reaction.
Already economic downturns corelate with fission problems, as plants are not properly maintained. We have one blowing up every thirty years atm. Our reach exceeds our grasp, and there is no shame in admitting to that.
Are you referring to the need for electricity now at the Ukraine plants? Newer technologies such as NuScale require no external electricity for their cooling. The reaction only occurs if there is water and when all the water evaporates then the reaction stops.
> Already economic downturns corelate with fission problems, as plants are not properly maintained. We have one blowing up every thirty years atm. Our reach exceeds our grasp, and there is no shame in admitting to that.
Gas turbines in aviation also blew up way more often in the past than they do now. Who says the blowing up of plants is a constant? There have been many improvements in safety. Also, apart from the Three Mile Island accident, there haven't been major nuclear problems in the US in the last 50 or so years. Furthermore, the thing that lead to the Chernobyl disaster is not possible, by law, in modern reactors. Furthermore, newer reactors require an extra casing of concrete which would also have contained the Chernobyl disaster. You can even fly an airplane in those newer housing buildings and nothing would happen (with the building at least).
I have yet to see such a world.
If you built nuclear at scale, then these problems solve themselves. Just as France solved them in 15 years in the 70/80s.
Just as these problems were solved for solar/wind by economics of scale.
Solar/wind was not economical, it was basically forced into being economical by creating economics of scale.
That said, well, they stopped building new reactors, most of their reactors were built in 15 years in the 70/80s. Since then they have not done as much as they should have and all those reactors are starting to need more maintenance now.
Because they have not built much new things, they don't have as many people with knowledge as they used to.
But they are managing most of these issues pretty well overall.
I would say France did pretty well having 40 years of green energy.
Probably the fact that it's literally the same thing that killed 140 thousands people in an instant and imposed the spectre of a nuclear winter upon us all, had its importance.
I'm pretty sure I saw that in a 'goop' sales pitch.
Yeah and with a breeder fission reactor we could reduce this to below 1% probably. With a thorium breeder the fuel cost might be essentially 0%. In the vision of Alvin Weinberg you literally just drop some thorium into the fuel salt every once in a while.
But the real issue for nuclear energy is currently capital cost and time not fuel cost. And capital cost can go down massively with GenIV reactors as well.
So I don't see how fusion will be cheaper.
> In fusion it could be lower
But eventually you have to start breeding tritium, so wouldn't that make it more expensive.
> Disclaimer: I switched from studying fusion energy to advanced fission 16 years ago.
Awesome, we desperately need GenIV reactors (even if I dislike that term).
I'm not complaining. If we do crack the code on Nuclear Fusion, if I was the government, my next step would be to figure out how to build so many reactors that electricity costs go to basically zero. If you can charge your electric car for pennies, even the most diehard gas-car fans won't be able to resist. Offering a better product attracts far more users than, say, trying to shame people for CO2 usage (more flies with honey instead of vinegar).
They just won't have a choice; if we can provide a real alternative, we can just forbid gas car altogether. Just like we banned CFC to save the ozone when better alternatives were developed.
The main issue is that our electricity grids and production facilities aren't ready yet to sustain a mass shift to electric, so we need to ease in the transition. But the moment they are, there is no reason to delay any further.
People who "really want to" will keep old ones working and most people will slowly start using the new ones.
After all you can still get a horse-drawn carriage if you want to, and you can drive a Model T, but few people bother.
Banning gas cars outright, I think, would be a political miscalculation. There is broad mistrust of anything the government does right now in the US (not wholly undeserved), and it is likely to continue getting stronger, so not tainting it with a political ban would be a better solution in my view. Otherwise you risk polarization and failure, because not everyone buys climate change, or banning something because X is determined to be better now. It also would breed widespread resentment from people who aren't ready to switch (because, let me tell you, outside of cities, "reduces climate change" is something nobody cares about as a selling point). Just let electric vehicles naturally become better at everything and let gas cars slowly die naturally. The "invisible hand" will take care of the rest - just like it did with the horse and buggy.
Solar panels are cheap and batteries are easier to build and there are lots of ways of making them.
Nuclear is still possibly a great fit for niche locales where renewables aren’t feasible at all. Not a nuclear hater by any means (we need every innovation we can get), just show your math.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.365.6449.108
Most of those people living in Russia, Norway, and Sweden with easy access to an abundance of hydro, to the level that energy flows north to south in the Scandinavian countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
> just show your math.
I admit I can't. It's mostly gut-feeling from various science news sources I keep up with (e.g. Ars Technica; Skeptic's Guide to the Universe).
Solar, Wind, HVDC transmission lines, short-term battery storage get us most of the way there, and is all on the process of being built out now. Medium term storage is still up in the air (flow batteries? compressed air?). Long term storage looks like hydrogen or natural gas with carbon capture. All these things seem more achievable than fusion in the next few decades.
I live in a cold state. The idea of relying on out-of-state power, regulated and controlled by people with zero accountability to you, for life-and-death energy is a tough sell.
Last I checked, we mine our own coal, pump our own oil and put up our own wind farms [1]. Minnesota, for what it’s worth, runs on renewables, coal and nukes [2]. The fifth of natural gas it does use comes from Canada, the Dakotas and Iowa.
These cold-state energy security concerns are a big part of the political puzzle that gets missed in the national discourse.
[1] https://www.wsgs.wyo.gov/products/wsgs-2012-electricalgenera...
[2] https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=MN
If most states stopped importing energy they would have to go back to wood and coal-fired stoves. That would be a huge quality of life reduction in terms of convenience and home air quality.
Resistive heating.
> most states stopped importing energy they would have to go back to wood and coal-fired stoves
Most states don’t have high-baseload, low-latency life-or-death energy requirements. Those that do have the options I outlined above.
High level, the energy transition isn't simply a fossil->renewables story, but also a centralization->highly decentralized story.
EDIT: It seems not too badly [1].
[1] https://empoweringmichigan.com/how-do-wind-turbines-work-in-...
https://www.nrel.gov/geothermal/assets/images/resource-asses...
From the context, I think your link is relevant to the GP's question.
However, if you search for "geothermal Minnesota", you'll get hits primarily related to ground-loop heat pumps.
Note that in the Minneapolis area, the ground will freeze down about 3 feet in winter, so you need to bury your ground loop deeper than that. The frost line is even deeper up in the Duluth area. (Also, you need to use an air compressor to purge the vast majority of water out of any in-ground sprinkler systems before the ground freezes.)
However, I also remember a news story about some used wind turbines relocated from California that had trouble due to inadequate heaters to keep the lubricant from getting too viscous.
https://www.energystar.gov/campaign/seal_insulate/identify_p...
I don't really see a hot/cold stratification in this chart-
https://www.statista.com/chart/12098/the-us-states-with-the-...
And even then, the difference in costs seems quite small. Alaska is $332 and Georgia is $310.
I think it's highly likely we'll be burning a lot of algae fuel in the coming decades in situations where the energy density of carbon fuels is necessary.
The goal is to reduce emissions so it would be great even if we can just stop burning coal in the summer.
It's one of those issues the overwhelming majority of people are on the same page about what we should do but at the ends you have "my livelihood depends on coal" on one end and "my life is insulated against the downsides of full-renewables so I'm privileged enough to have out of touch opinions" on the other and that's who shows up in comment sections.
Its the same as what we see with EVs, tbh. Oh noes, what if you get caught in a snowstorm!? Imagine if 80% of the cars were EVs and they got stuck and there were... no chargers! Picture yourself freezing to death because of "those people".
Real world performance and goals are not correlated well with media hyperbole.
https://energytransition.umn.edu/modernizing-minnesotas-grid...
I don’t think storage will be feasible in places like Minnesota. The following makes far more economic sense:
- Double solar / wind production by buying 2x more panels vs. “normal” states.
- Go all electric (heat pump / induction) for appliances and vehicles.
- Buy 8-24h worth of house batteries.
- Use a fossil fuel generator to top off batteries during outages (this more than doubles the generator’s end to end efficiency)
- Sell excess electricity to the grid, where it is used for subsidized carbon capture.
This should be completely resilient against storms and power outages, and extremely carbon negative. It would cost about 2x as much as best case renewables.
500,000 kilowatt of panels would produce ~33 gwh in the worst month (January). So, we'd need 151 times that many to have a good chance of doing this with purely solar. That'd mean 75,500,000 kw of solar panels. Assuming that we could install these for $1.50/w, that'd cost 113,250,000,000 and there's still a chance that we'd freeze people to death.
To mitigate that risk, we'd want to add ~500 gwh of batteries (just guessing as to needed capacity here). At a price of ~150/kwh, we'd be looking at ~75,000,000,000 in energy storage prices.
Feel free to check my math, as I did that pretty quickly. The figures are absurdly high due to scaling for the worst case type scenarios. Summer months would correlate with lower demand and more than double the supply.
Sensibly speaking, noone would try to do this. Its like building an offgrid home. You can get 90% of the way there and add a generator, or you can spend 10x more be truly offgrid. Almost everyone chooses the former. Maybe even 80%. Solar is great and very cost effective, but the returns diminish the deeper one goes.
E: Ah, it occurs to me that you're using electric heat pumps, which are probably much more efficient than my NG boiler.
Compared to the nearly $200B in infra investment that I was estimating, that looks easy, lol.
Also, I estimated solar at $1.5/watt. That's probably at least 50% too high.
https://model.energy/
Selecting the state of Minnesota, 2011 weather data, and 2030 cost assumptions, this would be about 70 Euro/MWh. The cost optimized solution would involve 222 hours of hydrogen storage, 5 hours of battery storage, 4.2x peak power of solar and 2.4x peak power of wind.
Removing 20% of emissions will make a huge difference.
ETA on this should be around 2030?
What I don’t get is since solar is cheaper, why are we building so many coal power plants?
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2317274-china-is-buildi...
Coal handles baseline load. We should be using nuclear for baseline instead.
I'll believe it when the batteries are actually installed and the bill is paid.
Also, the solar farm is planned for 800-MWh of storage. In 2021, LA used over 65 TWh of electricity[1]. That's over 7 GWh, per hour. So this storage would run the city for a few minutes. Not exactly a replacement for base load generation.
[1] https://ecdms.energy.ca.gov/elecbycounty.aspx
We need a major breakthrough in storage tech to make grid-scale storage a reality. Li-ion batteries are never going to cut it. Who knows whether grid scale storage will come along faster than fusion.
This is false. This has only ever been shown to be true in extremely narrow edge cases where the batteries only needed to last overnight in extremely sunny locations.
For solar+batteries to be cheaper they need to be large enough to power through weeks/months of cloudy/snowy/leafy/rainy weather in places that are at least near higher latitude locations.
Mechanical, lithium based, flow, heat, compressed air, pumped hydro are all types of batteries that are able to store quite large amounts of power today or in the near future. Certainly cheaper than fusion has any hope to be within 20 years.
Form Energy is working on iron air batteries as a new class of multi-day energy storage, launching its first test installation in 2023
The US passed a tax credit for energy storage, to encourage building more pumped storage capacity
Congress is working on transmission line permitting reform
There are some good reasons to be optimistic in the near term
Right now they are, but they often rely on materials from politically unstable regions (particularly Africa), or potential political rivals (China). Also, many solar panels require polysilicon from China, which is almost certainly produced with forced labor.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/dark-spot-solar-energy-industr...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/12/clean-energy-china-xinj...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/29/evidence...
And it's not just a China problem.
"On batteries, there were major issues with the mining of between 15% and 30% of the world’s cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Amnesty International found that children, some as young as seven, were working in artisanal cobalt mines, often for less than $2 a day. Mining conditions were reportedly hazardous, and workers often did not have adequate protective equipment and were exposed to toxic dust that contributed to hard metal lung disease."
The US is trying to crack down but Europe is lagging behind on it. However, if the report's claim (which I see no reason to doubt) that China has 82% of the global polysilicon market is true, with most of their polysilicon production being in the Xinjiang region, calling solar panels (or batteries) "cheap" is fairly distasteful considering their sources.
And if you want to store multiple days for a northerly nation with very cold winters, frequent high pressure anticyclones (so, no wind) that can last about a week, and you want to switch everyone to zero carbon heating, then the technology doubly doesn't exist.
And the only retort to the above will be mumbling "yeah, but exponential improvement in batteries plus didn't someone say something about hydrogen?" which is essentially, wishful thinking. When you can build a zero carbon grid out of nuclear fission plants - and we've known how to do so since the 60s.
Close to me is the oldest one, built in 1972 and still operational today: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraftwerk_Huntorf
But it is almost certainly closer to existence than fusion.
We're not close, and it's basically completely unfeasible. Fusion will be closer in 100 years than such a project.
Consider pumped thermal energy storage. Use a thermal cycle to generate hot and cold (say, by compressing a gas, probably argon, extracting the heat, then reexpanding, and then storing the resulting "cold"), then reversing that cycle to generate power.
This scales embarrassingly well. It can be made entirely from cheap materials available in essentially infinite supply. No component operates at a temperature above the creep limit of ordinary steel. Round trip efficiency could reasonably be 75%. This requires no technological breakthroughs -- it's 19th century technology.
For all the crocodile tears about children mining cobalt, it's easy to forget how other industries can be just as bad or much worse. Of course, critics of batteries are laser focused on only and exclusively criticizing how bad things are when it comes to batteries and literally nothing else whatsoever.
I mean, do you want to talk about oil? Or coal? Or copper? Or uranium? Nasty industries, each of them. Especially oil. Lots of environmental destruction, poor working conditions, the occasional bit of genocide or sponsored corruption, wars, etc. Mining and oil/gas industry just are a nasty. Especially when everybody just accepts it as normal and looks the other way.
It could still be a useful technology, especially in space. I could see a moon or mars base powered by fusion.
Also of course we might want to consider the carbon emissions of gas plants.
The viability of fusion has been centered for a long time around getting more power out than you put in and once that marker is met it's viewed as the last giant hurdle in the way. There's still plenty more R&D that needs to be done before it can easily / readily scale though.
It's where nuclear was in the 60s basically. Even if it only ever gets to be comparable to nuclear in terms of costing but with none of the hazardous byproduct, it will come out ahead. When you consider the environmental factors involved in battery production it is pretty clear that fusion at least has the potential to be the cleanest sources of energy. Whether it ultimately gets there is another question.
Plants built in the 70s are still operating. It is nowhere near a decade away.
I do think it'll be a decade or so to go from net gain -> commercial fusion reactors coming online.
Most skepticism is ratified by subsequent events.
DT fusion doesn't appear to have much to recommend it, since it still requires a thermal cycle like fission or coal, and that keeps its cost high. From an engineering point of view it involves large monolithic plants with very complex and stressed equipment. This seems the opposite of good engineering.
We're constantly being told to take the long term view. Are we only to do that when it's favorable to the technological optimist's case or budget?
If you have to build a steam turbine to convert the energy from your fusion reactor into electricity, it's never going to compete with solar and wind power in most of the world.
Doesn't mean that there won't be applications (if you can make all those lasers compact enough, submarines, ships, and ultimately spacecraft come to mind), but grid electricity is doubtful.
1 fusion plant has less NIMBYs to deal with than wind-on-land, for example.
But yes, could be that still it's too expensive by the time it becomes available. By then I hope we can make a fusion plant so small it fits on a space ship and power an Epstein drive :-)
The other thing is that if LLNL is still using their own definition of Q, it's not necessarily the case that they've demonstrated net-energy breakeven; they like to compare direct energy delivery to energy release, so when calculating Q they basically pretend there aren't any energy losses from actually running the huge laser facility itself. As a result, LLNL assumes that laser technology will improve to the point that real-life Q can catch up with their "scientific Q" metric. (IIRC I think "Project LIFE" was supposed to develop some of those technologies, but it never worked out, possibly since NIF is so far behind their promised schedule.)
Cost effectiveness is also a myth perpetrated by the death of nuclear executed through bureaucracy.
The nuclear, however, is currently the true energy source to use, technologically much simpler (than fusion) to execute with decades of experience making it the safest out there. It is the zero-carbon environmentally friendly energy source.
A few extra questions you may also be interested in: lithium, cobalt mining, costs of nanolitography for high efficiency photovoltaic cells. All that with tax breaks and heavy govt incentives vs insane regulatory burden on nuclear industry. Also nuclear scare in education that makes the public treat opinions like yours as even remotely realistic.
where is most of the uranium mined that is used in european reactors? what environmental damages are done by reprocessing uran? costs of the buildback of reactors? who will pay for it when the costs for this are 10x what the operators put aside for it? how much subsidies go into nuclear? how do you prevent proliferation in rougue nations that use nuclear for example iran?
Maybe fusion will stay a small part of the energy mix for decades even after the first commercial plants are built but be part of what eventually enables us to use orders of magnitude more energy than we do now…
My TLDR (from a layman):
So we might be as close as 10-20 years away, as always!Continual refinement may finally get us where we need to be, but it's going to take a long time.
This video of a presentation by Helion's Kirtley at Princeton has a slide where the reactivity vs. energy loss is shown for a DD system at beta=1. That system will make 3He directly, and also make tritium by two modes (directly from DD, and by capture of neutrons on 6Li in a blanket.) The net result would be production of 1.5 3He nuclei per DD fusion, on average. It takes a while for some of those 3He to be produced though, as the tritium has to decay (halflife of 12 years.)
https://mediacentral.princeton.edu/media/JPP08December2022_D...
Maybe this could also open up more avenues for money.
Yes it's good progress, but an order of magnitude is not nothing. Squeezing another order of magnitude efficiency out of the lasers will be very difficult. It took 30 years or so to go from 1% efficiency to 20%, and law of diminishing returns applies.
Edit: to clarify, lasers will have some maximum efficiency that is less than 100% and approaching that maximum is subject to diminishing returns.
I wouldn't bet on no breakthroughs happening in laser efficiency, but more efficient lasers doesn't look like it will be enough to get to net energy given other inefficiencies in the system.
But that’s not what we’re talking about. This is a physical process which is known to be exothermic for the energy ranges we care about.
As another example, raising the temperature of a flammable material 1 degree from room temperature will probably not light. Ditto with 2 degrees. But eventually, if you raise the temperature high enough, you’ll get more energy out than you put in. That’s the type of process we’re talking about now.
It has nothing to do with energy generation though, and never has.
That's utterly incorrect:
"Fast ignition and similar approaches changed the situation. In this approach gains of 100 are predicted in the first experimental device, HiPER. Given a gain of about 100 and a laser efficiency of about 1%, HiPER produces about the same amount of fusion energy as electrical energy was needed to create it (and thus will require more gain to produce electricity after considering losses). It also appears that an order of magnitude improvement in laser efficiency may be possible through the use of newer designs that replace flash lamps with laser diodes that are tuned to produce most of their energy in a frequency range that is strongly absorbed. Initial experimental devices offer efficiencies of about 10%, and it is suggested that 20% is possible."
With current technology, running an ICF plant would cost literally hundreds of millions of dollars per hour in hohlraums, since a single one costs millions, and you need to shoot several times per minute to produce energy.
That's why ICF is not even close to being a plausible electricity generation technology, so it is only being researched by nuclear weapons research labs like LLNL.
For an actual look at the challenge of ICF i'd say look here: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/TE_1704_web.p...
and also consider that it might be used in combination with MCF for example: https://medium.com/fusion-energy-league/the-fundamental-para...
The reports you quote actually mention the target costs very clearly. The IAEA one talks about needing 500,000 targets per day, and sets a target of 0.30$ per target. At the time it was written, it says that a target costs 1000$, which is probably before NIF found put just how much more stringent the requirements for the shape of the target were (since the numbers I saw last time NIF achieved ignition were closer to hundreds of thousands of dollars per target, though maybe I am misrembering).
It's also worth noting that that report was expecting NIF to achieve the current milestone within 3-6 years, and it actually took 13. So I feel their numbers can well be considered optimistic.
HiPER is also dead, I think.
> So we might be as close as 10-20 years away, as always!
I don't really get the cynicism here. This is a huge milestone that's been passed. Maybe with this, we actually will be 10-20 years away. Or maybe it's more like 30-40, who knows. But this experiment shows that net-positive energy is actually possible to do with our current understanding and technology; before this, I believe much of the skepticism was based on a belief that it may not actually be possible to get more energy out than put in, at least not without technology that's significantly out of reach.
https://www.livescience.com/43318-fusion-energy-reaches-mile...
This time, they're comparing to the total energy in the laser beams.
They're ignoring the inefficiency of the laser devices, but that kinda makes sense because they're using really old, inefficient lasers and much better ones are available now.
How do you know? Nothing has been published yet; it’s science through press release. In the past, published papers from NIF have been a real wake-up call after absorbing the misleading hype (the papers are most honest than the folks taking to the reporters).
> The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers
I guess we'll see how things develop. But from a quick google, 2.1 megajoules is about what the lasers deliver, unless they've significantly increased their power recently.
This was never expected to be a power plant technology. It's a research tool, for studying fusion.
"Technical breakeven" is when the plant generates enough energy to run itself. This is at least 100x below that.
"Commercial breakeven" is when it makes money.
How's that Lockheed-Martin fusion thing coming along?[1]
[1] https://lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.htm...
Look, it's really simple:
1. This is a very hard and expensive problem.
2. Progress IS being made.
It's not clever or cute to diminish progress on this problem.
What will Fusion give us that Fission can't already? Is it safer perhaps?
Certainly, fusion does have the big advantage that it makes far fewer Curies of radioactive material per kWh as it operates. That has been the main driver of nuclear fission safety and waste issues.
On the other hand, there are good arguments suggesting that conventional fission has been reasonably good at containing and controlling the radiation, such that it's among the safest and cleanest forms of energy known already. But the PR issue is a hard one, and people don't think like actuaries.
That being said, fission is already pretty darn safe. But the public perception of it is not good.
> Surely Fission provides us with unlimited carbon free energy (given enough fissionable material).
The crux of the problem is, there is a limited supply of fissionable material. If we manage to survive as a species, our energy demand will continue to grow, and one day we would meet a hard cap, limiting what humanity as a species, is able to do.
As a very very rough estimate, if we burnt through all the fissionable material that we have available on earth, it would be about enough energy to launch the mass of Mt. Everest into orbit. Long term (as in, many generations from now) we will need more energy than that.
Realistically, today, it's only better because of decades of lobbying and propaganda for fear mongering around fission. There is no reason why nuclear energy couldn't be the vast majority producer of all electricity in the world while massively lowering environmental damage and loss of human life.
Long term, fusion might be better because it can produce a lot more energy and be safer. I feel like the safety improvement is negligible however compared to modern fission reactors that are properly maintained and governed.
Since you brought up lobbying, it's fascinating to me how many nuclear power fans the industry has created who are not informed by data and facts but are utterly convinced that nuclear power is the solution to all our energy issues.
> attackers can even create more destruction and chaos by initiating a meltdown
This is not a feasible thing to do with modern reactor designs, and the same danger is present for infrastructure like dams or even just a big building.
> not informed by data and facts
Said by the person who's repeating misinformation
The cost btw is even higher than most people think considering that energy companies aren't paying for most of it but tax payers do. Some not even born yet. But even without factoring in those future costs, as you suggested we do, nuclear power in its current form is among the most expensive forms of power production. Again, look at the data, not energy company propaganda:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity