French ITER Fusion Project To Take At Least 6 Years Longer Than Planned (sciencemag.org) 193
sciencehabit writes: The multibillion dollar ITER fusion project under construction in France will take at least an additional 6 years to complete, compared with the current schedule, a meeting of the governing council was told this week. ITER management has also asked the seven international partners which are backing the project for additional funding to finish the job. Under recent estimates, ITER was expected to cost some $13 billion and not begin operations until 2019. The new start date would be 2025.
Cue the flood... (Score:2, Funny)
.. of ignorant "Fusion power is only 30 years away, and has been for the past half century!" comments in 3, 2, 1...
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I have heard that saying about '20 years away'. Has estimation been updated from perpetual +20 years to perpetual +30 years? This indeed is a big hit to fission research community. This puts it even further behind +5 years for working nanobots, +10 years for strong AI and +15 years for flying cars.
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Actually, it won't hurt the fission research community in any way. The FUSION research community, on the other hand....
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You should try political science instead of an actual scientific discipline. There trying to preemptively shut down discussion is considered valid. In physics it makes you look like an idiot.
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There's a reason my dad taught me that joke in the 80s. Let me continue the trend: in 6 years, it will take 14 more years longer than planned!
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Re: Cue the flood... (Score:2)
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Tsar bomba, being a test, was mostly fusion, because they didn't put in the U238 radiation casing that would have made the yield potentially 150MT, because they didn't want the insane amounts of fallout that would have produced.
Militarily deployed H-bombs are actually fusion boosted fission weapons. They are radiological weapons. That is the very ugly fact.
To make them clean would make them less powerful, as it is so easy to get another 100% or more increase in yield by just adding a casing of dirt chea
Re: Cue the flood... (Score:2)
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The joke is 20 years, not 30. And if get net energy positive fusion in, say, 2020, then the joke will have been accurate for around 20 years, and overly pessimistic for an additional 20. Either way, the joke is more accurate than it is inaccurate, given that fusion has been 20 years away for around 30 years plus.
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No we could not have. Read Rei's comments above you.
TL;DR - research is hard, unpredictable and expensive. You only solved one of the issues.
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Maybe someone will point out that it isn't a French project; clue being in the I of ITER.
Yeah, but they probably just named it that to head off the inevitable "FTER, I barely know her" jokes.
Re:Cue the flood... (Score:5, Informative)
I see lots of "it's X years away and always will be" comments below but no response to this. Why am I not surprised?
The "Fusion power is 30 years away and always will be" meme started around 1960 as a result of the British ZETA project, a Z-pinch system. When they got it into full operation, they indicated temperature readings of 1-5 million degrees and a level of neutron production matching the predicted values for those plasma temperatures. It was huge news in the late 1950s, as it meant that they were ready to make a demonstration power production reactor (ZETA II), and then a commercial reactor. They started development on ZETA II.
The only problem was, it was wrong. The matching temperature and neutron production levels were coincidental. The temperature readings were wrong because the high energy electrons were interfering with their spectral readings in a manner that had not been seen before. The neutrons were due to an unknown effect going on at tiny scales where instabilities at the edge of the plasma created enormous electrical potentials, acting as miniature particle accelerators and creating neutrons through spallation. This would have been obvious had they measured the neutron energy levels (random vs. consistent 14,1MeV neutrons) and directionality (directionally biased vs. random). And indeed, these measurements ultimately disproved the ZETA claims. The only issue was, they had to develop the technology to do so in the process - the technology to measure the directionality and energy of weak neutron fluxes wasn't available to the ZETA team. That's how immature the technology was at the time. Likewise, they had no way to know that plasma would behave as it did because the study of plasma behavior was very much in its infancy. Computer models would have helped, but of course they didn't have them then, and computers at the time were far too underpowered to do more than the most rudimentary of particle interaction calculations anyway, nothing like simulating plasma instabilities and neutron production through spallation interactions.
Fusion research, unlike fission research, was never given a Manhattan project. It gets funding, but never at the levels of "a relevant chunk of the nation's entire GDP". So it moves forward, but not through giant leaps - one can only test a few concepts at once, and the work doesn't race along. But plasma physics is a vastly different world today than it was in 1960. We have incredibly powerful computer simulations. We have decades of experience working with tokamaks, high power lasers, etc. We have far higher magnetic field strengths, which are critical to scaling down workable and affordable reactors. We have lasers for ICF and other related fusion forms orders of magnitude more powerful than those back in the day. And on and on and on. We've gone from Q factors that were a thousandth of a percent to greater than unity. And on and on and on.
Technology doesn't just show up when you want it to, or necessarily in whatever method you attempt first. The standard for radical, revolutionary new technology is that it's more often than not a long time between when the technology is conceieved and when it's widely commercialized, and full of initially promising starts that turn out ultimately to not work well. Look at, say, the development of the internal combustion engine. The earliest design was from 1661, and was based on gunpowder. Inventors tried and tried again - mainly with gunpowder, but also with everything from hydrogen to moss and coal dust - up until the 1800s where practical designs were realized and their usage took off.
This is normal. This is how technological development generally works. You have to gather knowledge and sometimes wait for other technologies to catch up to what you need (think of the limitations Babbage faced, for example, due to the technology of his day). Sometimes you may encounter promising starts, but hit roadblocks later on with your design, requiring a switch to a different approach. But ultimate
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That's all well and good, but it doesn't actaully invalidate the "fusion power still 30 years away" comments. There may well be good reasons for the slow pace of development (I'd assume that was the case anyway), but that doesn't change the fact of it. Fusion power was supposed to be a few decades away when I was a kid, and it is still decades away (even if ITER does get turned on in 2025, and achieves its objectives, which will take a few years, it's just a research reactor, there will be more years of wor
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So if I understand you, you're saying that we'll get fusion energy about the same time we all have flying cars and jet packs?
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Flying cars and jetpacks aren't some future tech, we can have them today. That doesn't make them practical, and I, for one, absolutely don't care for a flying car or a jetpack. On my morning commute today we had probably a 100ft ceiling and perfect icing conditions. I would only feel safe taking off in an empty 777 in such weather. I also like to come to work without having red rings around my ears from wearing a helmet or hearing protection. You really need them when you fly a jetpack or a flying car, both
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I want a self-driving electric car that flies.
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With majority of cars being self-driving, existing road infrastructure will become so efficient that there'll be little incentive for anyone to desire an off-road vehicle - whether one that flies, goes on water, underground, on rails, etc. Road-based transportation systems only get congested because of human drivers. The same ones that argue that driving is a pleasure to them and that they'll give up manual driving over their dead bodies. As far as I'm concerned - good riddance. They want to make my life mi
Re: Cue the flood... (Score:2)
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And that's probably the case. Even assuming they get it working at all, power produced in a giant tokamak will be more expensive than battery backed solar. What's the point?
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I see lots of "it's X years away and always will be" comments below but no response to this. Why am I not surprised?
The "Fusion power is 30 years away and always will be" meme started around 1960 as a result of the British ZETA project, a Z-pinch system.
The excessive optimism for controlled fusion, followed by skepticism, predates this by several years, and started with the US projects Matterhorn/Sherwood starting in 1951. For their first several years the two closely related projects were highly classified, as working fusion reactors were expected to be produced within a few years. By 1958, all of the optimism had been dashed, and the work was declassified and relegated to basic research, the prospects for imminent success having become quite bleak, with
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This is normal. This is how technological development generally works. You have to gather knowledge and sometimes wait for other technologies to catch up to what you need
A good example in my mind was Leonardo da Vinci's helicopter drawings. He had the concept of a vehicle with an air screw on top pushing air down, but he didn't have a light enough engine to power it. If he had that engine and access to the right materials he would have likely built it or someone would have built it and then proceeded to solve further problems with stability and control through an iterative process. W
With fusion power we are well past the drawing board stage and further development is a
Re: Cue the flood... (Score:2)
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We're already over the break-even point in terms of raw energy (the aforementioned Q, aka fusion energy gain, factor) - JT-60 in Japan can achieve Q=1.25. Of course, while that's net energy production, it's not self-sustaining, even your Carnot losses alone would mean you're not going to capture nearly as much power as you put in. But it's a real testament to how far we've come, from Q factors a tiny fraction of a percent. ITER is projected to have a Q factor of around 10, and DEMO 25.
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I really, seriously appreciate this comment!
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And anyway... "News flash, giant multinational project sees schedule slip - details at 9!"
The reasons for the schedule slip?
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And anyway... "News flash, giant multinational project sees schedule slip - details at 9!"
Multinational? But the headline says that it's French! I thought it was only a multinational project in stories with a positive spin.
Re:Cue the flood... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Root cause of the delay (Score:2)
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Surely you can cite some of these "early attempts at production of fusion power", right?
ITER is the first experimental reactor intended to produce power. Most of the research devices don't even use real fusion fuel...they know fusion works, it's the plasma physics they are researching, and building a big power-producing reactor, handling tritium, and dealing with fusion neutrons is unnecessary for that and far beyond the budgets typically allocated to fusion experiments.
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TFTR had 15 MW of fusion reactions in the 90s, which is what is usually meant by fusion power in these reactors. That is the same definition for which ITER is using to, as it is not until DEMO that actual generators will be hooked up and electrical power comes out.
Nope. DEMO won't do this - no actual generators. That has to wait for the follow-on to DEMO, called PROTO. And even that may not an actual first power plant, but rather a technology demonstration of power production.
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Actually, they never will hook generators to a fusion plant.
The plan is to convert he energy in the plasma directly via the magneto hydrodynamic effect into electric current. While the plasma is HOT it is not suitable (and it would not make any sense at all) to generate steam to drive an ordinary generator.
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Ah, I see that they must have added power production to the original DEMO goals. If you consult : this 2009 142 slide presentation [pppl.gov] there is not a single mention of power production as one of the facets of the project, it is relegated entirely to a follow-on project.
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> why did early attempts at production of fusion power fail to work out
Largely due to unrealistic assumptions on the part of the researchers involved.
Are you familiar with the Lawson criterion? Probably. Are you familiar with WHY he wrote it? Probably not.
He wrote it because he was tired of seeing everyone in the field making utterly ridiculous estimates about performance. There are countless experiments where basic math suggested the system would not work, but they went ahead and built it anyway without
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"The power companies have said they're not interested"
Would they be interested if the government no longer provided insurance and protection from liability in the event of nuclear disasters at fission plants, combined with having to pay a meaningful tax or royalty for CO2 emission, on the order of doubling the price of burning coal?
"how much money do we have to spend to change that?"
How much would private insurance for a fission plant cost? Without knowing that, the real economics of fission power forev
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Well it is always going to be 30 years away at the current level of funding.
Right now US funding for fusion power (mostly our share of ITER and NIF) is an order of magnitude higher than our funding for battery research. Given that even in the most widely optimistic case, the ITER or NIF paths to commercial fusion won't produce commercial power before 2050, one has to wonder if taking away a little bit from fusion research and giving it to research for batteries and renewables might be a better use of limited resources.
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There are commercial drivers for battery and renewable research though - there are existing industries that will benefit, and clear advantages. Batteries and renewables are technologies in use NOW and the commercial sector excels at improving existing tech.
What it sucks at is basic research. We need more money for fusion, not less, and spread across multiple projects. Really, I wish they'd declare war on the energy crisis and have a Manhattan Project for fusion, alas, there's a more obvious target, and that
Re:Cue the flood... (Score:5, Insightful)
one has to wonder if taking away a little bit from fusion research and giving it to research for batteries and renewables might be a better use of limited resources
If you do that it will never end up working. Ever.
Very hard problems require lots of money to solve. Batteries have been around for over 200 years, and are rather well developed. There's also strong commercial intrest in developing them further.
Fusion is much less far along. One thing the government can do which corporations won't is long term strategically important things. Fusion is one of those, batteries are not, because there are enough short term advantages that other people will fund development.
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we already have a fusion reactor in the sky that put out more energy than 1000 earths could use. we don't need to be wasting money on making one here. all the energy needs of the USA could be met with collection in desert, and transported over the continent on UHVDC lines. That's tech we have now, not some dream tech.
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" one has to wonder if taking away a little bit from fusion research and giving it to research for batteries and renewables might be a better use of limited resources."
Probably not. Battery research is already getting a huge amount of funding from commercial sources. Every cell phone, laptop, tablet, and power tool maker is putting money into batteries. All the incentives for development are already in place for batteries. Frankly the problems with improved batteries is one of chemistry and physics at this
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More funding does not change much.
The "reactor" won't be build faster, nor would we build a bigger one, nor would we build two or more of them.
More funding would perhaps very slightly sped up the project. The only true improvement more funding would give, we could educate more plasma physicists.
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Anti-gravity (Score:2)
Re:Anti-gravity (Score:4, Funny)
Anti-gravity is more promising.
Yes, all that progress they've been making recently in anti-gravity research is bound to start paying off any day.
Oh, wait, no, it's all just charlatans and wackos.
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Yes, all that progress they've been making recently in anti-gravity research is bound to start paying off any day. Oh, wait, no, it's all just charlatans and wackos.
Yep. Time to move on to the EM drive. That is much more promising...
ab vg nva'g
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Yeah we've never even detected gravitons or gravitational waves, ...
This is the point. As soon as gravitons or gravitational waves are detected (the gravity is real after all, it definitly exists, no one just tried seriously and systematically) all is needed to be done is to change plus + to minus - in the formula.
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Your comments are hysterical, especially the part where you seem to believe what you're saying. Don't bogart that joint, man, that's the good stuff you have there.
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all is needed to be done is to change plus + to minus - in the formula.
And that is as impossible as it is to change the charge of an electron from -1 to +1.
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More than that we even have working fusion reactors all over the planet - you can even make one in your basement for a few hundred bucks using if you're so inclined (see Farnsworth Fusor. And beware the x-rays and neutron radiation.) The challenge has only been in making a reactor that produces more energy than it consumes. Someone above posted saying Japan has even cracked that, though not by enough to overcome the inefficiencies of converting the energy to electricity.
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Speak for yourself. It's raining.
Too Big To Fail (Score:2)
I really hope one of the other fusion projects succeeds before then. The earlier we get it, the better.
Lockheed claim they might have a prototype by 2019 and a commercial unit by 2024.
Then you have the likes of the Focus Fusion thing, shooting for the big prize, proton-boron fusion (less neutrons, no need to breed tritium, efficient solid-state energy conversion), that has made more progress (in terms of particle energy * confinement time) in the last 5 years on a few million bucks than ITER has in 8 with b
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From reading on Focus Fusion, it says
"emits most of its energy in the form of [...] X-rays,[...] which can be converted very efficiently into electricity "
How do you very efficiently convert X-rays into electricity with today technologies inside a 'shipping container sized' device?
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The theory is using a photoelectic method ; an "onion" of metallic layers which the x-rays jostle electrons out of.
TBH that could/should probably be researched in parallel.
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The theory is using a photoelectic method ; an "onion" of metallic layers which the x-rays jostle electrons out of.
So if your photons are energetic enough, ordinary metal becomes a solar cell? Neat!
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There are several video's I've seen on the net that explain it some.. we can already convert x-rays and streams of electrons into an electrical potential...we just haven't tried to do it in an industrial capacity. I'm not a physicist or anything, but it appears from the video that the 'beams' of x-rays and streams of ions are directed over small foil plates or antenna looking structures.
The current test reactor they've built fits inside the bay of a car garage. Granted it's a test reactor but if/when they
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The same way photovoltaic cells work, just at a different bandwidth.
If you know the wavelength, you can make PV cells that are close to 100% effective.
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So would a teenager working in his garage on a Farnsworth fusor, tweaking his design. That doesn't mean anything. What matters is what the scientific community thinks of the scaleability. Do you have a published comparative metastudy of the literature on the prospects of focus fusion vs. tokamaks to back that? Heck, has Lerner even demonstrated getting pas
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But the pulsed methods all face commercialization challenges on achieving rapid firing rates
You're not joking. You'd need 10 shots a second ; I liken it to developing the worlds most accurate and reliable machine gun, firing the worlds most expensive cryogenically cooled ammunition (while gold-plated uranium bullets are pretty expensive, the real kicker is the tritium, $30,000 a gram), into the heart of a machine that somehow combines a laser array several orders of magnitude more efficient than anything else we've ever developed AND the heat exchangers required to get the energy out somehow witho
Re: Too Big To Fail (Score:2)
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That said, it still won't be "cheap". The lithium blanket will actually contain more beryllium than lithium, which will be consumed faster than the lithium - and beryllium is something like $1500/kg. Nothing like $30k/g, but not pocket change. It's a big initial cost because you need enough of it to form the initial blanket, which is very large. It's also expensive to work with due to its toxicity (although it's relatively safe when not in a dust/vaporizeable form)
They looked at using heavy metals like lea
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Last I checked, non-nuclear grade had risen to around $500/kg and nuclear-grade about $1500/kg. But maybe it's changed since then, or maybe I'm remembering wrong.
Not according to the last paper I read, they did optimization work on the blanket for ITER and found that a significantly higher percentage of beryllium than lithium yields a higher breeding rate. Same paper that covered that lead-based breeding is impractical for ITER.
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THIS!!!
Aneutronic fusion, should it pan out (and it is certainly making some serious headway) is like the holy grail of power production!!! It's so good it's almost like a fairy tale come true. A way to produce power directly to electricity w/out having to convert nuclear-->heat---->electricity. Not only that, but it would be very very small, have very little infrastructure costs (shielding and containment) and be walkaway safe to operate, w/out almost no long term radioactivity to worry about. AND
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Won't happen, the only plausible reaction, proton beryllium-11, takes 10 times the ion energies of DT
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I really hope one of the other fusion projects succeeds before then. The earlier we get it, the better.
Lockheed claim they might have a prototype by 2019 and a commercial unit by 2024.
Then you have the likes of the Focus Fusion thing, shooting for the big prize, proton-boron fusion (less neutrons, no need to breed tritium, efficient solid-state energy conversion), that has made more progress (in terms of particle energy * confinement time) in the last 5 years on a few million bucks than ITER has in 8 with billions.
Both approaches are a lot smaller than the aircraft-carrier sized reactor (no, not sized for an aircraft carrier, as big as an aircraft carrier) that tokamak designs predict will be useful ; a bunch of small, municipal reactors the size of shipping containers will make for a more robust, more democratic, less monopolistic and corrupt energy generation system.
In addition to continuing with the big research reactors, I'd like to see more smaller scale funding for this kind of multimillion dollar scale development. Success or failure could come down to very very very minute differences in reactor design and operation and the more teams that are working on this and sharing results and techniques the more likely we can make faster progress.
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But do we still need fusion? (Score:5, Interesting)
There is an interesting talk on TED by the guy who started general fusion. Basically he shows a graph of the progress towards over unity production from commercial reactor designs since the 1950s. The progress has actually been surprisingly good, but the trouble is it has had to come from a long way back. If you consider that there is no fundamental law that makes the over-unity line special, it does seem like we are very close to crossing it now.
I think the biggest question though is whether these reactors will ever make commercial sense. The big benefit of fusion is that it has basically zero fuel costs and the potential to provide endless amounts of energy. But this is basically the same as renewables for all intents and purposes*. In the end it will really be a competition of capital costs, and given how simple something like a solar panel is, it may require an even bigger breakthrough beyond just getting a commercial reactor going to make fusion viable. Of course if they can get the size of the reactor down then that will open up huge opportunities as a high density power source (ships, aircraft, spacecraft), but again, that is going to need big breakthroughs beyond just achieving over-unity.
*while fusion has the potential to provide more energy than harvestable insolation, this would represent a massive injection of heat into the biosphere and I doubt that would have good implications for climate change. It is also hard to imagine what we could possibly do with that much energy without causing serious issues.
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Fusion could produce power 24/365 while most renewables only produce power when the sun shines or the wind blows.
But yeah, aside from that they're basically the same.
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Fusion could produce power 24/365 while most renewables only produce power when the sun shines or the wind blows.
But yeah, aside from that they're basically the same.
Of course, we don't know how to build a commercial fusion plant. So there is no way of knowing how reliable they will be.
We do know that commercial fission plants do not achieve 100 percent reliability. In all probability a fusion plant will be a much more complex beast, so it is exceedingly unlikely that a hypothetical fusion plant would be more reliable than an existing fission plant.
One thing about renewables, while it is true that they do not produce power one hundred percent of the time, due to more
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while most renewables only produce power when the sun shines or the wind blows. ... and there are plenty of more renewables as wave energy, tidal anergy etc. which is truly always on.
Which is always the case considering how big the world is, and always the case regarding wind, considering how big your country is
S yes, they are basically the same, considering that the technology for renewables is right here and the costs are *known*
Fusion makes no sense at all unless you can scale it down and use it in spac
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fusion has the potential to provide more energy than harvestable insolation
Yeah, but we don't use anything like the amount of harvestable insolation ; the effect from reduced greenhouse gas emissions is likely to be more significant than the increased thermal emissions. If we're replacing existing energy consumption with fusion, the heat emissions shouldn't change. If we expand our energy usage, we can also look at methods of sequestering carbon or other forms of geoengineering.
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*while fusion has the potential to provide more energy than harvestable insolation, this would represent a massive injection of heat into the biosphere and I doubt that would have good implications for climate change. It is also hard to imagine what we could possibly do with that much energy without causing serious issues.
Huh? An x GWt fusion reactor buts no more heat in the biosphere than an x GWt coal plant, fission plant, NG plant or hydroelectric plant. Besides, the effect of such has very little to do with climate change. It may impact local ground-based measurements, but only as a function of error. The effect on the climate is trivial.
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I'd love to see fusion reactors eventually, but no, we really don't need them now.
What we have is a huge nuclear waste problem from the light-water fission reactors. That is a primitive design that only uses 3% of the fuel and the waste is going to be hot for 300,000 years. Leaving that to posterity is wildly irresponsible.
Fortunately, we have a solution. Anybody with a high school diploma should know that the only thing that can be done with nuclear waste is to transmute it down to less radioactive elem
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Perhaps you should read up again your physics text book from high school as you find that so important.
There is no "transmutation down". Transmutations only go upward.
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I think the biggest question though is whether these reactors will ever make commercial sense. The big benefit of fusion is that it has basically zero fuel costs and the potential to provide endless amounts of energy. But this is basically the same as renewables for all intents and purposes*. In the end it will really be a competition of capital costs...
The other benefit of fusion over renewables is that it would almost certainly fit in a vastly smaller space. A modern solar installation might take up a square mile of land. A modern wind farm might take up multiple square miles of land. That's a lot of land. Land is not especially cheap already, and it's getting more expensive by the day. Wind farms and solar plants also have their own economic impacts, and some people (not necessarily me) consider them an eyesore. If your power generator fits in a s
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Wind farms and solar plants also have their own economic impacts
Sorry, I meant to say environmental impacts. Got to start proofreading better.
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Wind farms don't take up land up at all. You simply place them on farm land.
(*Facepalm*)
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Re:But do we still need fusion? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not when you include enhanced geothermal [wikipedia.org]. Its potential dwarfs human consumption.
Geothermal is one of those technologies that keeps slowly advancing without anyone ever seeming to take notice. It's the most underhyped cleantech of them all, in a field that normally suffers from way too much hype. Ironically it's been "dirty" energy extraction that's been helping them - the drilling technology advancements made by oil and gas companies are usually directly applicable to geothermal as well.
And some of the discoveries are accidental. Here in Iceland at the Krafla power plant they accidentally drilled into a magma chamber. Magma backed up into their well dozens of meters before stopping. Big screwup, right? Well, unlike the only other time in history this has happened (Hawaii), they decided "what the heck" and tried turning it into a production well rather than just sealing it. And it not only worked, this one well now produces half of the plant's total power generation (30 of the 60 MW). Its production temperature is 450C, which is crazy-hot for geothermal. They're now planning to do it again on purpose.
Re:But will some idiot bite? (Score:2)
With all that energy we could just run load of fridges with the doors open. Do I have to do all the thinking around here?
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Why don't they cough up more money? (Score:2)
I don't understand why they can't fund the project more lavishly and try to get results from this thing sooner. It seems like the potential rewards would be worth the risk.
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Why do you think money solves this problem?
Tocamak critics rejoice! (Score:2)
This is water on the mills of the tocamak critics. ... I always thought they *do* have a point or two.
Net energy with magnetic cages required to keep super-hot plasma controlable is a very difficult thing, even *if* we manage to achieve stable prolonged tocamak fusion.
They've spent 16 billion or so already. I'd thoroughly review their plans and perhaps cap the entire project at 25 billion or so. If they max that out, put the money into solar and space exploration. It's better off there for now I'd say. Even
Is China involved in this project? (Score:2)
If not, we should bring them in. They have a record of getting things done.
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I'm old enough to remember when this was the standard union-guy response to innovation in Japan and Korea.
Time Magazine recently on private plasma fusion R& (Score:2)
Re:Time Magazine recently on private plasma fusion (Score:2)
They are working on the wrong problem. The non-nuclear portion of the system costs more than a wind turbine of the same rating. You can improve the reactor all you want, but unless you make it negative dollars, you're still losing out to existing technologies.
Forgive me, but... (Score:3)
I'm going to post this blogroll again:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/
money talks . . . (Score:2)
There are forces in the nuclear equation that are greater than simple megawatts. These are economic forces. Throughout the energy industry are forces and counter forces trying to determine where our energy will come from. The players include governments and lobbyists from the oil, gas, coal, nuclear, solar and wind industries. You and I don't have a lobbyist. So what will be financed is what will be profitable for the most powerful lobbyist. (Assuming 'free' market conditions.)
The utility companies have an
Re: (Score:2)
Cows do run on solar energy. So do steak and milk eaters by running on cows. Mmmm! Mmmm! Cows are edible solar energy stores. Mmmmmm!