I'm kind of disappointed. This article discussed almost none of the dozen small-scale fusion projects out there today. Coverage of them along with the fission companies that were covered would have made for an excellent article. Especially as some of them are running experiments now.
I'm no expert in this, but from what I've seen, most of the small players are working on variants of aneutronic fusion[1] a method that reduces the quantity and energy of the neutrons that come out of the reaction. There you have Polywell Fusion, Tri-Alpha Energy, and Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (Who are supposed to be running tests on their device this month).
There's also Helion Energy[2], which is a YC startup, but their process seems to involve some sort of magnetic reflectivity from the fusion reaction.
We've become very good at the thermal energy differential -> mechanical energy -> rotational mechanical energy -> electrical energy system, just because it's trivially easy to get that first step since nearly every form of energy can be converted to heat.
Some of our energy production machines use only a subset of these steps (e.g. internal combustion engines just use mechanical energy -> rotational mechanical energy), but pretty much everything save solar uses at least one of these conversions. So I find anything outside this cycle very interesting.
Who cares how fancy things are, in my province we generate 90% of our electricity from the sun.
We have been doing so for 60 years, we were just smart enough to let the sun boil the ocean for us and harness the power of kinetic energy, rather than try to build fancy schmancy electronics. See the snow on the mountains? That's what we like to call a 'solar battery'.
Often smart people making fancy things look down on those with working systems because the solution to the problem was so obvious that they couldn't make themselves look smart by doing something that actually works.
Like really how hard is it to build a concrete structure that contains water, and allow that water to fall over a wheel... Who cares how inefficient or old it may be when it's so easy and cheap.
It's like the guy who walks into a java shop armed with a few UNIX command line utils and bash and they all look down on him and call his system hacky when it works in a week and they're still figuring out their object model.
The hydrogen+boron fusion reaction produces three helium nuclei moving at about 2 million volts. All the energy is kinetic and held by charged particles, which means it can be extracted using normal electromagnetic techniques. Charged plates, coils, etc to step down the voltage are all that is needed, no 'boiler' intermediary step.
He turned things upside down. It isn't that fusion power has no risk of proliferation, it is just being developed only in the ways that have no (or extremely low) weaponization potential - limiting development this way significantly slows down overall progress on reaching efficient power production. Add to that the policies (at least in the US) established almost 20 years ago when it was decided that fusion generated energy can't be cheaper than coal (yep, because most of the cost is actual turbines/generators and distribution) and thus no point in pursuing in the foreseeable future.
It's such an odd stance--presumably fissile reactions are already dangerous enough that the cat is out of the bag. Everyone who CAN weaponize it can already wreak devestation.
fissile weapons are very hard to produce - huge enrichment facilities. Where is inertial confinement fusion device is just a matter of focusing enough power into small enough volume during very small period of time - pure engineering task and once technology is mastered we either have an easy way to colonize Solar system or to destroy ourselves as any ISIL would be able to use it. And judging by the current mindset of our species i doubt that Solar system if the first thing on our collective mind.
I must admit I don't know enough to really comment on the danger of fissile vs fusible materials; however, I was taught that one of the boons of fusion was that the energy source was stable (radioactive-wise) before entering the reaction.
If you want to make a point about relative dangers, you should be comparing apples-to-apples. Simply expressing fission as a phenomenon is even easier than fusion, you can dig up rocks that do it all on their own.
Weaponizing a phenomenon, on the other hand, always requires some additional work.
Even 30-40 years ago inertial confinement schemas were obviously better at producing fusion. They have also been more promising at miniaturization and thus weaponization. So, except for the laser driven - which due to low efficiency of lasers have very low miniaturization potential - the inertial confinement hasn't got any meaningful development during all that time until current days when mostly private money got into it.
>What was decided 20 years ago? Where?
Somewhere in 199x i remember reading something like a Congress committee's paperwork where cost of fusion was very unfavorably compared to the $0.04 cost of coal energy with thus pretty clear conclusion about economical unviability of fusion. It was like a bulb lit in my head back then - "that explains!" :).
Edit: to the comment below - i should have worded better, the inertial confinement schemas are obviously better for developing future reactors as, at least, since understanding of bremsstrahlung losses in thermodynamically equilibrium plasmas it became clear the enormous, on the border of any practicality, size of possible break-even reactor and other limitation on them. Like no aneutronic p-Boron even in the great-great future of Star Trek. Where is inertial confinement have no such limits. As H-bomb - a successful break-even inertial confinement device shows - it is just a matter of miniaturization. Look at Sandia Z-machine for example - basically miniature model of what happens inside H-bomb after fission primary goes off - they aren't in a rush for any practical reactor, mind you, only to reproduce explosion conditions for weapons research - yet even from the start - something like in 1998 they were immediately closer to the goal than everybody else. 10-15% input conversion into X-rays at the 100TWt+ peak - that can be reached by NIF only today only if they replace the current lasers with semiconductor ones.
Nitpick: in most H-bomb designs most of the energy from the secondary comes from the fission of the uranium tamper by the fast neutrons from the fusion step.
As someone who follows various fusion efforts I expect the answer to the headline is 'yes' (in opposition to Betteridge's law). The trick of course is 'when'.
But like the article, I also find it sad that we've not been able to build more Gen IV projects. You want to fix climate change? Build nuclear plants. Unfortunately not a message that resonates well, although the Chinese seem to be thinking that way. Hard not too with all that coal soot in the air.
A more interesting question will be the cost of fusion energy (or even Gen IV fission) versus existing fuels. It's one thing to be "able" to make a net positive fusion generator, and something else again to make it profitable.
They're not nearly on the same scale. There are estimates that the US has, in its entire history, produced about 56 thousand metric tonnes of high-level radioactive waste as of 2008 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_ma...). On the other hand, the EPA estimates that in 2012 alone, the United States produced 6.5 billion metric tonnes of carbon emitted due to transportation.
Obviously, a tonne of carbon and a tonne of radioactive waste aren't really comparable. In fact, I'd argue that the radioactive waste produced by a fission power plant is better for the environment: it remains in the reactor facility, where it can be easily contained and buried in geologically stable rock formations, or reused/reprocessed to extract further energy from it.
The carbon produced by burning fossil fuels is dumped into the atmosphere, where it can't be easily collected, disposed of, or reused.
The history of humanity is doing things that don't scale, aren't sustainable, and then figuring out how to deal with the problems created by the massive leaps forward we made, utilizing the surpluses generated by ignoring the long term impacts of our decisions.
Burning fossil fuels and ignoring the future impact is probably the best thing we ever did as a species, especially if you like whales.
Physics and the environment don't work that way. Our society has never been as energy-intensive as it is now, nor has its impacts been as wide.
There's not much that we'll be able to do about the massive amounts of plastic released into the oceans, or the levels of mercury and lead pollution throughout the world.
If the fact that we were not able to externalize the costs of carbon pollution ends up leading to the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves leading to a massive sea level rise that can't ever be fixed then that sort of kills the argument. The same can be said for the destruction of ecosystems that can never be recovered for that matter.
So basically you are saying there is no upper limit to our ability to engineer our way out of the disasters we create. A lot of people, myself included, are extremely skeptical of this point of view. It seems incredibly arrogant.
No, I'm basically saying that the current CO2 problem is something we can engineer our way out of.
There are plenty of other theoretical problems that I don't think quickly engineer our way out of, like escaping an expanding sun, a sufficiently large blackhole, etc.
However for the strawman of "we can engineer our way out of anything in 20 years" I would agree with you that that is arrogant.
As I noted in the deleted post, the reason the IPCC still publishes reports is because it's a problem we can do something about. Do you disagree with this assessment? Are we beyond the point of no return?
Physics and the environment don't work that way. Our society has never been as energy-intensive as it is now, nor has its impacts been as wide.
There's not much that we'll be able to do about the massive amounts of plastic released into the oceans, or the levels of mercury and lead pollution throughout the world.
If the fact that we were not able to externalize the costs of carbon pollution ends up leading to the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves leading to a massive sea level rise that can't ever be fixed then that sort of kills the argument. The same can be said for the destruction of ecosystems that can never be recovered for that matter.
This is a false dichotomy that keeps being restated. The air pollution is China is not primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels, but due to poor regulations. If their coal plants and automobiles were modern and up to western standards , there wouldn't be any issues. The air above Beijing and Shanghai doesn't look horrible b.c of CO2, but because of soot and other particulates produced by inefficient plants and factories.
They are focusing on nuclear for reasons of energy diversification and independence. (look at how Russia has Germany by the balls right now)
You can't blame people for not being thrilled about nuclear. At every stage people have been assured that "this design is perfectly safe" and then something happens and people die and regions are contaminated. Once bitten. Twice shy.
Seems like the far better option is to exhaust the renewables option as much as possible and then fall back to nuclear.
The various combined sources of energy available today can help to keep society going more sustainably while Nuclear Fusion technology is under development.
Wouldn't it make more sense to pour money into this instead of solar? On one hand, the solar industry provides jobs but the discovery of fusion would be a huge step to energy independence and reducing pollution.
If China gets this first, and doesn't share it with the rest of the world, that would solve a lot of their problems.
On the other hand, you can pour money into fusion for decades, maybe centuries, and get nothing useable. Solar gets much better the more money you put into it, and that's on top of already being competitive vs other traditional energy sources now.
If I had to choose one, I'd choose the one I get actual returns on.
Increasing the power output of solar panels is very costly. The more money you put into it, the smaller increase you get. It's like charging a battery to 100%, you'll spend enormous amount of energy ($$) for nothing at some point.
“China just put a huge chunk of money and hired hundreds of people to work on molten salt reactors. I think that’s probably going to come first—and it’s going to come from China”
I don't know that it will be fusion but I think eventually we will solve the energy problem. If we look at nature the energy scale of natural processes such as solar flares, movement of planets, oceans and atmospheres, etc dwarf human needs. The energy is out there we just haven't figured out how to efficiently access it. When we look at atomic processes the conversion of even tiny amounts of mass to energy also easily dwarf human needs. I know we are constrained by the First and Second laws of Thermodynamics but I think this is powerful evidence that there has to be a way.
Both fusion and fission convert mass to energy but are crude ways to do it. Physics is currently stuck and has been for 60-70 years. Physicists cannot integrate the large scale theory (General Relativity) with the small scale theory (Quantum Mechanics). They are incompatible. I can't prove it but I suspect that once this impasse is resolved we will find elegant ways to convert mass to energy and the energy problem will be solved.
All forms of energy extraction ultimately convert mass to energy. The coal we burn weighs imperceptibly more than the combustion products. That's really a red herring, though -- you must be able to harness an exothermic reaction to convert what you have into energy, and unifying QM and GR is unlikely to have any implications about reactions at energy densities we can usefully use.
Ever is a long time... It's an engineering problem, and it seems prudent to keep working at it until it succeeds, given that the available supply of fissile materials is vastly more limited than that of fusible ones. Uranium mining isn't exactly an activity with negligible environmental impact, either.
I don't understand why more resources aren't devoted to developing geothermal. We are all floating on top of endless layers of energy-dense molten rock.
In brief, we can extract energy not from heat, but from temperature differences. It's very easy to extract energy from a conventional power plant, because the hot stuff is right next to the cool stuff - the environment here. The molten rock has a huge amount of energy, but we can't extract it unless it's close enough to something cool to build a heat engine between the hot and the cold. Thus, geothermal is only viable at a select number of sites where the lava or other carriers of heat naturally flow near the surface.
To make it viable in general, you'll have to figure out a way to send a working fluid down deep enough to pick up enough heat and bring it back up again without losing all of that heat on the way back up, and do it with huge flowrates to extract enough energy, and in such a way that it can run pretty much continuously for years.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadAmusingly, there is also a comment on the article asking why it doesn't mention ITER and another comment pointing out that it does....
http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/
There's also Helion Energy[2], which is a YC startup, but their process seems to involve some sort of magnetic reflectivity from the fusion reaction.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion [2]http://www.helionenergy.com/
Some of our energy production machines use only a subset of these steps (e.g. internal combustion engines just use mechanical energy -> rotational mechanical energy), but pretty much everything save solar uses at least one of these conversions. So I find anything outside this cycle very interesting.
We have been doing so for 60 years, we were just smart enough to let the sun boil the ocean for us and harness the power of kinetic energy, rather than try to build fancy schmancy electronics. See the snow on the mountains? That's what we like to call a 'solar battery'.
Often smart people making fancy things look down on those with working systems because the solution to the problem was so obvious that they couldn't make themselves look smart by doing something that actually works.
Like really how hard is it to build a concrete structure that contains water, and allow that water to fall over a wheel... Who cares how inefficient or old it may be when it's so easy and cheap.
It's like the guy who walks into a java shop armed with a few UNIX command line utils and bash and they all look down on him and call his system hacky when it works in a week and they're still figuring out their object model.
If you want to make a point about relative dangers, you should be comparing apples-to-apples. Simply expressing fission as a phenomenon is even easier than fusion, you can dig up rocks that do it all on their own.
Weaponizing a phenomenon, on the other hand, always requires some additional work.
What was decided 20 years ago? Where?
>What was decided 20 years ago? Where?
Somewhere in 199x i remember reading something like a Congress committee's paperwork where cost of fusion was very unfavorably compared to the $0.04 cost of coal energy with thus pretty clear conclusion about economical unviability of fusion. It was like a bulb lit in my head back then - "that explains!" :).
Edit: to the comment below - i should have worded better, the inertial confinement schemas are obviously better for developing future reactors as, at least, since understanding of bremsstrahlung losses in thermodynamically equilibrium plasmas it became clear the enormous, on the border of any practicality, size of possible break-even reactor and other limitation on them. Like no aneutronic p-Boron even in the great-great future of Star Trek. Where is inertial confinement have no such limits. As H-bomb - a successful break-even inertial confinement device shows - it is just a matter of miniaturization. Look at Sandia Z-machine for example - basically miniature model of what happens inside H-bomb after fission primary goes off - they aren't in a rush for any practical reactor, mind you, only to reproduce explosion conditions for weapons research - yet even from the start - something like in 1998 they were immediately closer to the goal than everybody else. 10-15% input conversion into X-rays at the 100TWt+ peak - that can be reached by NIF only today only if they replace the current lasers with semiconductor ones.
If producing fusion were the only concern then we'd stop at Hirschorrn fusors and call it a day.
But like the article, I also find it sad that we've not been able to build more Gen IV projects. You want to fix climate change? Build nuclear plants. Unfortunately not a message that resonates well, although the Chinese seem to be thinking that way. Hard not too with all that coal soot in the air.
A more interesting question will be the cost of fusion energy (or even Gen IV fission) versus existing fuels. It's one thing to be "able" to make a net positive fusion generator, and something else again to make it profitable.
I think we need innovation in the nuclear energy sector - Thorium and Fusion cry out for investment.
Obviously, a tonne of carbon and a tonne of radioactive waste aren't really comparable. In fact, I'd argue that the radioactive waste produced by a fission power plant is better for the environment: it remains in the reactor facility, where it can be easily contained and buried in geologically stable rock formations, or reused/reprocessed to extract further energy from it.
The carbon produced by burning fossil fuels is dumped into the atmosphere, where it can't be easily collected, disposed of, or reused.
That's not what I was disputing. The half-life of radioactive material produced from nuclear power is what makes it's maintenance expensive.
Do you really think maintaining nuclear waste for 24,000 years is cheaper than the 25% added cost for carbon capture?
Burning fossil fuels and ignoring the future impact is probably the best thing we ever did as a species, especially if you like whales.
There's not much that we'll be able to do about the massive amounts of plastic released into the oceans, or the levels of mercury and lead pollution throughout the world.
If the fact that we were not able to externalize the costs of carbon pollution ends up leading to the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves leading to a massive sea level rise that can't ever be fixed then that sort of kills the argument. The same can be said for the destruction of ecosystems that can never be recovered for that matter.
There are plenty of other theoretical problems that I don't think quickly engineer our way out of, like escaping an expanding sun, a sufficiently large blackhole, etc.
However for the strawman of "we can engineer our way out of anything in 20 years" I would agree with you that that is arrogant.
As I noted in the deleted post, the reason the IPCC still publishes reports is because it's a problem we can do something about. Do you disagree with this assessment? Are we beyond the point of no return?
There's not much that we'll be able to do about the massive amounts of plastic released into the oceans, or the levels of mercury and lead pollution throughout the world.
If the fact that we were not able to externalize the costs of carbon pollution ends up leading to the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves leading to a massive sea level rise that can't ever be fixed then that sort of kills the argument. The same can be said for the destruction of ecosystems that can never be recovered for that matter.
They are focusing on nuclear for reasons of energy diversification and independence. (look at how Russia has Germany by the balls right now)
Seems like the far better option is to exhaust the renewables option as much as possible and then fall back to nuclear.
Society needs to do what they can to increase energy independence and sustainability with whatever they can use now, as time is limited.
If China gets this first, and doesn't share it with the rest of the world, that would solve a lot of their problems.
If I had to choose one, I'd choose the one I get actual returns on.
“China just put a huge chunk of money and hired hundreds of people to work on molten salt reactors. I think that’s probably going to come first—and it’s going to come from China”
China also built a pebble bed reactor at Shidaowan, and has plans to build up to 19 more. (http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-21/china-wants-...) (http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/04/construction-progresses-on-...)
It will be interesting to see if the Chinese can make nuclear fission clean and economical over the long term.
Both fusion and fission convert mass to energy but are crude ways to do it. Physics is currently stuck and has been for 60-70 years. Physicists cannot integrate the large scale theory (General Relativity) with the small scale theory (Quantum Mechanics). They are incompatible. I can't prove it but I suspect that once this impasse is resolved we will find elegant ways to convert mass to energy and the energy problem will be solved.
To make it viable in general, you'll have to figure out a way to send a working fluid down deep enough to pick up enough heat and bring it back up again without losing all of that heat on the way back up, and do it with huge flowrates to extract enough energy, and in such a way that it can run pretty much continuously for years.