[HN Gopher] Will we ever get fusion power?
___________________________________________________________________
Will we ever get fusion power?
Author : pseudocoup
Score : 131 points
Date : 2024-06-26 12:06 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.construction-physics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.construction-physics.com)
| pixiemaster wrote:
| there is some fundamental thing that attracts humans to big
| things.
|
| technical challenges aside, fusion power as a research + building
| + disvtributil project is so expensive - for the same amount of
| money we could already build a decentralized solution out of
| over-abundant solar cells, but it seems looking for the one big
| thing is still more interesting.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| It's just 50 years away.
| marssaxman wrote:
| ...or 500 seconds away, depending on your point of view!
| DesiLurker wrote:
| AI was also 30years away forever then it was not. its a
| function of dollar spent researching not fairy dust powered by
| hopes and dreams. problem is the problem seems so
| unsurmountable that private sector (until now) was never
| interested in exploring this and govt funding is really mostly
| about making things blow up. so there you are. all that said
| the fusion triple product neutron-flux _time_ energy has been
| steadily getting better over decades & hence a flurry of recent
| funding. That is until AI started sucking up all oxygen.
| more_corn wrote:
| There's a fusion reaction in the sky. All you have to do is
| harvest it. If you want to bring a fusion reaction home you have
| to deal with pesky things like INSANE AMOUNTS OF HEAT. Luckily
| the sky furnace is safely surrounded by 93M miles of insulting
| vacuum rendering the radiation harmless and even pleasant. We
| have a handy-dandy magnetic shield to handle surges, and
| atmospheric buffer for anything that sneaks through (now with
| protective ozone!) It's really an ingenious design. I can't think
| of any way to improve upon it.
| fragmede wrote:
| Harvesting energy from this "sky fusion reactor" (if it really
| exists) has this small pesky problem of being unavailable if
| you can't see the fusion reactor, in a daily phenomena known to
| scientific experts as "night", as well as this other
| intermittent problem dubbed "clouds" by scientific experts in
| weather and weather-related fields, so I can think of at least
| two places to improve upon sky-fusion-energy-harvesting
| technology. An at-home fusion reactor would not have problems
| there.
| hyperhello wrote:
| Do you really not know of the progress that's been made in
| the thirty years since you've been telling that joke?
| nullhole wrote:
| One of my old favouries:
|
| "Rotation Of Earth Plunges Entire North American Continent
| Into Darkness"
|
| https://www.theonion.com/rotation-of-earth-plunges-entire-
| no...
| audunw wrote:
| Just by buying an electric vehicle I already have more than
| enough batteries to solve these problems for my household.
|
| The transition to EVs - which is a _hard_ necessity to solve
| climate change, and well on the way - implies battery
| production that's already within an order of magnitude of
| storing enough solar to supply power year round. As long as
| you're not too close to the poles, but most people don't live
| there anyway (said as someone who lives relatively close to
| the arctic circle.. so I don't mean to ignore our people,
| there's just not that many of us so doesn't matter so much in
| terms of global warming impact)
|
| Nuclear energy can often benefit from some energy storage
| too. One of the first pumped hydro plants was to balance
| nuclear. It's the opposite problem: people consume most of
| their energy during the day (when the sun is shining!) but
| nuclear should ideally run 100% 24/7.
|
| I suspect a renaissance of nuclear, whether it's fusion or
| fission, will also be paired with lots of battery storage. As
| batteries will probably soon be a cheaper way of load
| balancing than having to ramp production from nuclear up and
| down.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| > Just by buying an electric vehicle I already have more
| than enough batteries to solve these problems for my
| household.
|
| Not if you live in Northern Europe. Solar is basically
| worthless there during winter. I'm not even talking about
| polar nights, just places like Denmark where the difference
| in production between January and June is 20x. No batteries
| (that we know of) would solve that.
| kobalsky wrote:
| doesn't long-distance power transmission solve that
| problem? just put the solar panels somewhere else?
| travisb wrote:
| The 'somewhere else' is a big issue though. In order to
| deal with Northern Europe winter power demands you
| probably want those solar panels to be on the Tropic of
| Capricorn in the southern hemisphere.
|
| That's along ways away. It'll take a lot of costly
| electrical infrastructure to move that power.
|
| Even worse, if you want to work during the night, you
| also want the solar panels about 45 degrees west. So like
| in South America. Tough luck for those places where that
| sweet spot is in the middle of a large ocean.
| moogly wrote:
| Indeed. I live in Northern Europe and have a 17.2 kWp
| solar plant. During the summer, I see ~100 kWh uselessly
| (for me) go to the grid every day for a pittance, and I
| can't really use it.
|
| 4 months of the year (almost 5 if it's a really bad year
| like last year), there's virtually no production.
|
| I work in the smart energy field, including with home
| batteries. The de facto standard size is still 10 kWh
| because the promised drop in price hasn't yet
| materialized on this market. I'd fill that up in 45
| minutes during a sunny summer day. I maybe can use half
| of that during the night. If I were to charge my car
| during the night, then sure, I could use that, but it's
| just 10 kWh. That's like an 1/8th of the car battery.
|
| 50 kWh? Okay great, I'd fill that up in 5 hours. Don't
| really know what I'd use those 50 kWh for. Charge my car?
| Okay sure, but I don't drive every day, and never in the
| morning, so it makes so much more sense to do solar
| surplus charging once or twice a week. You rarely want to
| charge to 100% SoC anyway, and you should probably leave
| some additional capacity for FCR purposes.
|
| 100 kWh? The problem is that in summer when I can fill
| that in a day (assuming max power scales with the
| capacity), I cannot really empty the battery because my
| consumption is so much lower during the summer. I will
| only top it up a little bit every day at best.
|
| What I really need is a fucking 10 MWh sand battery
| underneath my driveway that I can seasonally charge and
| then use during the winter for heating. Maybe it could
| also keep my driveway snow and ice free? Who knows.
|
| And A/C in the summer I guess. That is actually what I'm
| going to get, because it turned out to be more stressful
| and agonizing to see 100 kWh go out on the grid for
| almost no monetary gain than I thought it would. Call me
| egotistical I guess.
|
| Domestic solar is kind of a scam. I knew that going in,
| but I didn't anticipate the accompanying stress.
| katbyte wrote:
| Insane amounts of heat is exactly what you want from your power
| plant..
| choilive wrote:
| Being pedantic, but most heat is considered "waste" heat -
| aka it is high entropy energy, which is much harder to
| convert into the more useful forms of energy (mechanical,
| electrical, etc.)
| mr_toad wrote:
| Most power plants (coal, gas, geothermal, nuclear) and some
| solar plants already use a heat engine. Modern designs can
| capture nearly half the heat energy for use as electricity.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| One way to improve upon the design is being able to capture the
| radiation from all sides of the reaction.
| arp242 wrote:
| If it was that easy people would just do it, hm? Classic "HN
| commenter solves world problem after thinking about it for 5
| seconds".
|
| > insulting vacuum rendering the radiation harmless
|
| Not even this is correct. Vacuum doesn't really "insulate"
| against radiation, at least not very effectively. It's the
| earth magnetic field and atmosphere that protects us. And even
| with that it's not harmless - surely you heard of "sunburn" and
| "skin cancer"?
| encoderer wrote:
| SimCity predicted 2050
| feoren wrote:
| I'm also very excited for Arcologies. Well, not the dark one
| with a Morlock-like race wandering its labyrinthine tunnels.
| The bright ones with lots of greenery. Or maybe I just want
| more Singapore.
| orson2077 wrote:
| Fusion is always 50 years away for a reason:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/5gi9yh/fusion_i...
|
| IIRC, the sum total of all fusion research throughout all of
| history is USD$100-200B. It's obvious
| governments/industry/humanity doesn't really want it, or they'd
| go fund it.
| travisb wrote:
| The lack of funding angle isn't really convincing.
|
| Modern designs depend on material science and computing
| abilities which could never have been made in the 70's no
| matter how much money was thrown at it.
| orson2077 wrote:
| Fusion-relevant materials research could have absolutely
| advanced with funding back in the 70s. Lithium compatible
| structural material and 14MeV neutron source experiments
| immediately come to mind, not to mention tritium permeation
| and extraction. There was tonnes to learn, and they chose not
| to fund it.
| choilive wrote:
| We already have a zero maintenance fusion power plant that will
| last billions of years and that outputs millions of times more
| energy per second than humanity uses in a year.
|
| We already have technology that can take the electromagnetic
| waves this fusion power plant produces and _directly_ convert it
| into electricity without needing pesky intermediaries like
| boiling water to turn a turbine.
|
| This technology is relatively cheap to produce, extraordinarily
| safe, can last for decades with minor maintenance, can scale
| almost indefinitely, and there are many practical improvements we
| can make to it that are going to applied commercially in years
| and not decades.
|
| I don't doubt that trying to achieve commercially viable fusion
| is a worthy engineering and science challenge and that we will
| learn and develop many useful technologies along the the way -
| but fusion is probably the hardest engineering challenge humanity
| has ever attempted and after many decades of R&D there is still
| no clear path to commercial viability.
|
| Solar panels today work, and they work well, and we can
| practically throw endless amounts of money building them and it
| will work. Today. And we needed solutions that work today, not 50
| years from now... maybe.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| > Solar panels today work
|
| But not tonight
| choilive wrote:
| Luckily about 50% of the Earth is lit up by the sun at any
| moment and energy storage capabilities are advancing much
| faster than fusion's capabilities are.
|
| Distribution and storage are way more tractable problems than
| fusion.
|
| If you want to be really ambitious you can go to space and
| have 100% capacity :).
| okanat wrote:
| Unless you colonize it, you cannot utilize 50% of the
| Earth's energy. If it proven anything, what the war in
| Ukraine showed us is how terrible of an idea to outsource
| energy, especially to nations who don't share interests
| with us.
| janalsncm wrote:
| It would be interesting if there was a global grid and
| market for (hopefully clean) energy so that a joule of
| energy could be sold anywhere instantaneously, just like
| any other commodity. This would allow countries to
| quickly power up without even building a power plant. It
| would also allow large base load power stations (like
| nuclear) to have permanent demand.
|
| Of course there are technical challenges of building out
| UHVDC everywhere. This probably means a joule isn't
| perfectly fungible.
|
| Perhaps Europe's problem was being overly reliant on only
| one supplier.
| IMTDb wrote:
| A global and free market for electricity means that
| African citizens are going to have to outbid bitcoin
| miners and ai trainers for electricity.
|
| I would much rather see a world where governments are at
| least partially in charge of the grid to ensure that
| their population gets their share of the capacity.
| npoc wrote:
| It will be almost impossible to _not_ outbid bitcoin
| miners for electricity due to the fact that mining is a
| non-geographically constrained free market where miners
| are not profitable unless their electricity cost is very
| close to zero (i.e. otherwise wasted energy). As soon as
| there 's other demand for the same energy, bitcoin mining
| will instantly become unprofitable in that area and they
| will need to relocate.
| metadat wrote:
| This is a nice fantasy, but you still need the
| infrastructure to efficiently transmit said energy.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Needing the sun for energy and improving solar panel feels
| like trying to make the best ICE engine ten years ago or
| working on an expert system for AI in the 90s. There are
| obvious immediate gains in the short term, but research has
| shown there is something else better out there and its best
| if someone is doing the R&D now so we can get a leap frog
| moment eventually.
| RAM-bunctious wrote:
| I think it's clear that solar panels, while working today,
| clearly haven't been able to solve today's problems, or else
| this discussion wouldn't be happening. But we should keep
| investing in them, one way or another.
|
| Similarly, we should keep investing in the prospect of
| commercially viable fusion reactors. The harnessing of fusion
| reactors would be instantly revolutionary as opposed to the
| incremental progress solar promises. Therein lies the
| difference. Once is not necessarily better than the other.
|
| And it's not a zero-sum game.
| audunw wrote:
| I would say it's clear that solar panels are absolutely
| working extremely well today, at least as long as you don't
| live too close to the poles.
|
| Renewables all together is growing faster than nuclear ever
| did. And solar is now a huge part of that.
|
| We have models where solar or solar+wind is providing all the
| power to everything from small remote weather stations
| through houses to large islands. Some small countries and
| regions are getting close too.
|
| It's clear that we have all the technologies we need to do
| 100% renewables. There's studies that indicate that the long
| term costs of this is lower than the traditional fossil and
| nuclear energy infrastructure. We just need to build the
| factories to continue scaling up. And of course the
| transition is more expensive than it'll be when we just
| maintain and expand on the system.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| > all the power to everything from small remote weather
| stations through houses to large islands
|
| Not without very large capacity gas/etc. plants available
| on standby (unless you're fine with will below 99%
| availability)
| immibis wrote:
| We have to get fine with below 99% availability.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| Why? I don't agree that wouldn't be at all acceptable.
|
| And even > 90% would be very expensive to achieve in
| winter in much of Europe (of course there are
| alternatives to solar so it's not such a huge issue)
| orson2077 wrote:
| Don't take this the wrong way, but I envy your naivete.
| You are extremely optimistic about people and politics.
| XMPPwocky wrote:
| How so? To my ears, "we need to accept significant
| degradations in the availability of electricity" is a
| deeply pessimistic statement.
| throwAGIway wrote:
| Why would we do that? I'd rather pay more than this.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It depends how that's distributed.
|
| If we had one hour per day without power that would be
| about 95% availability. Most of us wouldn't even notice
| that if it happened in the middle of the night.
|
| If we had 100% availability with an 18-day stretch
| without power that would be about 95% availability, but
| it would be hugely disruptive.
| iceyest wrote:
| Less then 99% means not having a working fridge for 3-12
| hours or more in 30c heat so there went all your
| perishable foods. It means no lights in the house will
| work. No cooling or heating of any kind. No computers. No
| phone. None of your other random applicances will work
| either. None of the stuff you use to navigate a city like
| street lights will be working. Of course it can be
| mitigate with a generator or an expensive battery bank
| with solar panels provided you don't have a large enough
| load. Of course solar panels only work during the day so
| if the outage lasted into the night then you better hope
| to have a large enough bank to power all your essential
| equipment.
|
| Suffice to say, less then 99% available is pretty
| terrible. You should come down and talk to a South
| African.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Don't molten salt and similar energy storage technologies
| augur well for that?
| jfengel wrote:
| I'm fine with gas plants available on standby. If they
| run 1% of the time, then they are no longer a significant
| contributor to climate change.
|
| Even if they have to run 10% of the time, we've still
| taken an enormous cut out of greenhouse gases. We would
| turn our attention to many other sources of greenhouse
| gas (agriculture, concrete, transportation, etc.)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The nice thing about power plants on stand-by is that
| they emit almost no pollution.
|
| (And yeah, batteries will probably never be enough for
| any place out of the tropics.)
| jandrese wrote:
| Grid scale storage has lagged behind solar and wind
| generation, but it's starting to catch up. By the time we
| have a viable commercial fusion power plant all of the grid
| storage issues will have been long since solved.
| more_corn wrote:
| That's funny. My take is exactly the reverse.
|
| Solar power can 100% solve our energy needs today. It's cost
| effective at the unit level. It works at scale. It
| decentralizes nicely. Did I mention that it works? Every home
| could have rooftop solar for less than it costs to produce
| centralized power plants. (I have rooftop solar and it cost
| significantly less than a new car now my power costs won't go
| up for 20 years at which point the panels might need a
| refresh but that part of the system is the cheapest part)
|
| We could easily flip from subsidizing fossil fuels to
| subsidizing rooftop solar today and realize significant gains
| (higher roi by shifting the investment). If you spent one
| years investment in fusion and fossil fuel subsidies on
| deploying rooftop solar and grid scale batteries you'd change
| the energy story permanently. Energy would suddenly be
| plentiful. Fossil fuels would permanently shift out of
| relevance. Fission reactors would look like quaint and
| staggeringly expensive tools of a bygone age. And fusion
| which DOES NOT WORK. Would look even more like a silly
| dream.(We are no closer to fusion than we were 30 years ago.)
|
| Why the fuck are we still talking about fusion when we have
| something that works?
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Solar panels clearly don't work wel enough to be able to solve
| our energy demands. A very significant portion of the day they
| don't work at all.
| burnished wrote:
| We call that the 'night' and our battery tech is improving
| enormously. Personally I hope solar becomes so cheap that
| mechanical batteries become popular - pumped resevoirs,
| inexplicable wood flywheel
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| > We call that the 'night
|
| Or winter sufficiently close to the north pole (i.e.
| significant proportion of Europe). Days get short and it's
| usually cloudy so solar becomes extremely inefficient.
| immibis wrote:
| Luckily, most people don't live there and they are well
| connected to a big grid that isn't like that.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| Well... over 80 million of people live in Germany:
| https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/monthly-
| gener...
|
| Over-provisioning by 7x might not be extremely practical.
|
| I guess there is a lot of space in Spain that could be
| filled with solar panels (production only falls by ~50%
| there in winter so it's not to bad) but there is
| certainly not enough grid capacity to transfer all of
| that north (and building new infrastructure is painfully
| slow and expensive in Europe so it will take a few
| decades to solve that)
|
| My point is that solar is only a part of the solution and
| wind/etc. is probably more practical and more important
| in much of Europe.
| jmpman wrote:
| Will orbiting solar panels ever work? Now that starship is
| viable, payload cost to orbit will dramatically drop. Is it
| cheaper to have orbiting solar plants than solar/battery(or
| whatever long term energy storage)? It's that baseload problem
| which makes the manmade fusion/fission attractive.
| mr_toad wrote:
| For a space based solution you have all the costs of solar,
| plus launch costs, plus the receivers are very large and
| costly themselves.
|
| It's never going to be cheaper than solar, but it does have
| the advantage of working at night and through cloud cover.
|
| In the very long run it might make more sense to launch
| whatever's using the power into space as well, saving on the
| cost of the transmission and receiving infrastructure, but
| also removing further sources of pollution from Earth.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| So you have orbiting panels that will do what? Beam the
| energy back to earth? Isn't the sun beaming energy to earth
| directly? What problems do orbiting panels solve?
| choilive wrote:
| I actually don't think space based solar to beam it back to
| Earth will ever really be practical short of a space-
| elevator style tether to transmit the electricity down. But
| some of the pros would be as follows.
|
| * Capable of 100% capacity - power generation can be
| 24/7/365 if in orbits around the sun or stationed at the
| Earth-Sun Lagrange points.
|
| * Greater panel efficiency - less energy lost to the
| atmosphere that can be captured by the panels, closer
| orbits will increase efficiency even more due to more
| power/area
|
| * Surface area - minimum 1x10^20 square kilometers of area
| you can build panels
|
| There are of course many cons - but it could be a vital
| part to a space based industry - you need a lot of fuel or
| power to really do anything in space, and the power from
| space based solar could to be used to kickstart a fuel
| production facility off Earth. Fun stuff but not very
| terrestrially relevant.
|
| EDIT: Some more numbers: You get about 40% more power/area
| in space vs on the ground. You need about ~22 TW to "power"
| humanity. So you need about 70,000 km^2 of space based
| solar assuming 25% end to end efficiency, which might be a
| generous estimate. So lets round it to 100,000 km^2. But
| thats a significantly smaller area than the terrestrial
| equivalent of about 500,000 km^2. Right now it costs about
| $1B installed for a square kilometer solar installation, so
| we if can build solar panels on the Moon or something
| anywhere close to the same cost as on Earth (very very BIG
| if), potentially a difference of $400T dollars at todays
| terrestrial prices.
| ethn wrote:
| Schockley-Quiesser limit
| JohnFen wrote:
| "Ever" is a very long time.
|
| Will we get fusion power in the next few decades? I wouldn't bet
| on it, but I also wouldn't bet against it.
| avidiax wrote:
| I would bet against it. We haven't even built one of the key
| facilities to test the materials that we would hope to make a
| fusion reactor from. Once built, it will still take 20 years or
| so (as I recall) to come to some conclusions about suitable
| materials.
|
| The sun is able to use gravity containment. Terrestrial fusion
| has to use magnetic and physical containment. The extremely
| high energy neutrons produced rapidly deteriorate common
| engineering materials. A replacement schedule is very difficult
| because of induced radioactivity, which means that the reactor
| cladding would need to be replaced by robots most likely.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fusion_Materials...
| jandrese wrote:
| At this point I would bet against commercial fusion power
| plants. It was always questionable if they would be cost
| competitive with fission power plants, but now even those are
| being replaced by renewables and grid storage.
|
| The bigger problem is that fusion plants aren't useful for
| making weapons. Fission plants were basically a side project of
| the nuclear arms race, which is why they're a dying industry
| now. The world already has all of the nuclear bombs it will
| ever need and despite all of the promises they never managed to
| compete on cost. It's so much easier and cheaper to install
| wind turbines, solar panels, and grid scale batteries that
| there will probably never be a market for a commercial fusion
| power plant.
| deburo wrote:
| There's a huge surge of investment into Nuclear these last
| few years. Innovation is starting again in that sector, I
| wouldn't bet against it.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Strong Wind doesn't exist on asteroids and many planets, so I
| think there will be a long term need. Solar power decreases
| with the cube root of distance from the sun,so twice the
| distance is 1/8th the flux
| jandrese wrote:
| I'm not concerned about commercially viable space colonies
| in my lifetime.
|
| The real reason for fusion was that fission is not a
| renewable resource. In a few thousand years there will be a
| fuel problem with fission and we would be forced to switch
| to fusion if we had a fully nuclear power system.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Who said anything about concern? Im not in charge of
| making global decisions about fusion research, and I
| doubt you are either.
|
| That leaves low stakes idle speculation.
| TobTobXX wrote:
| Nitpick: Radiation decreases with the square of the
| distance (twice the distance, 1/4 the energy). This is
| because the surface of a sphere (which is where energy is
| collected) is 2D, not 3D.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I stand corrected
| grecy wrote:
| Given how rapidly the price of batteries and solar are falling,
| it seems absurd to think it will make any economic sense to
| spend tens of billions of dollars on a monster fusion plant.
|
| China are churning out regular old fission plants, and have 27
| under construction _right now_. Even still, the average build
| time is 7 years.
|
| So even _if_ we get some breakthrough and figure out how to
| build a commercial fusion plant, it 's a certainty it won't be
| up and running for something like 10-15 years. Solar and
| batteries will be so cheap there won't be any discussions.
| bsder wrote:
| The big problem is that we have funded fusion at "Fusion Never"
| levels.
|
| Had we shoved as much money at fusion as we have at, say,
| horizontal drilling for liquified dinosaurs, we'd have fusion
| _right now_.
| jmpman wrote:
| Is that true of the Chinese?
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| Yes
| mayama wrote:
| Fission is pathway to nukes, so every nation with intention
| of building nukes invests in fission regardless of commercial
| viability. Fusion on the other hand is pure r&d project and
| may give bragging rights if a country gets it first. So even
| in China it is not priority.
| Detrytus wrote:
| Wait, isn't fusion also possibly applicable as a weapon? I
| mean, thermonuclear weapons exist today with fission bomb
| being the fuze, once we achieve fusion ignition can't we
| build thermonuclear bomb from it that would not need
| uranium/plutionium?
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Would love to see comments that actually respond to the article!
| Everyone here seems to be sharing their general opinions on
| fusion or a reaction to the article title. The article is
| actually very detailed!
| sien wrote:
| Yep.
|
| It's a well done article that had a lot of research behind it.
|
| FWIW if you're interested in Fusion the book 'The Future of
| Fusion Energy' is very good.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43700662-the-future-of-f...
|
| Also Commonwealth Fusion Systems put out a lot of interesting
| stuff about how they are going. Even having a look at their
| YouTube channel is worthwhile.
|
| Metaculus has a lot of stuff on predictions about when fusion
| will be made viable :
|
| https://www.metaculus.com/questions/?search=fusion
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Agreed, I think it is a great article. Personally, I'm most
| inclined to agree with the "bear case" summarized at the bottom
| of the article:
|
| 1. I think it's highly likely that, at some point (and probably
| in the not-too distant future with ITER and DEMO), humans will
| produce fusion reactors that are self-sustaining with net
| positive output (ignition).
|
| 2. Given the inherent complexity and difficulty with fusion, I
| think it's unlikely to ever be cost competitive with simpler
| power generation technologies.
|
| 3. Perhaps most importantly, at least in the next human
| lifetime, I think fusion will be largely irrelevant in the
| quest for carbon-free power generation, mostly as a result of
| the timescales required. I think right now that everyone pretty
| much understands that the problem with decarbonization tech is
| base load and storage: carbon-free renewables like solar and
| wind are _already_ the cheapest form of energy generation, but
| they 're intermittent and unreliable. Given the latest climate
| data, I think it's imperative that we develop base load and
| storage tech in the text 10/20/50 years, or we're REALLY f'd.
| But I haven't heard even fusion's biggest boosters say that
| fusion will be ready for large scale deployment in those
| timeframes, at cost-competitive economics. Point being, by the
| time I think fusion _might_ be ready for large scale
| deployment, we better have already solved the base load and
| storage problems with cheaper tech.
| buu700 wrote:
| Personally, I don't see fusion as relevant on a time scale
| that will impact the climate crisis in any significant way,
| but it could be a major asset in taking us from net zero
| emissions to preindustrial carbon levels. It could also
| simply just be a way to achieve cheap and abundant energy in
| general, irrespective of climate issues.
|
| But as you said, of course it's an open question whether
| fusion will actually be more economical at scale. It could
| conceivably turn out to be a day late and a dollar short on
| Earth, and more relevant elsewhere.
|
| I'm keeping my eye on Helion (the one Sam Altman invested
| in). Seems they're making some pretty big claims, and have
| already entered into contracts to deliver to customers by
| 2030 or face financial penalties. Could still be vaporware,
| but they seem to think they have something.
| rcxdude wrote:
| "Base load" doesn't really enter into it: you just need
| storage to make renewables make sense by supplying when
| generation doesn't meet demand and recharging when demand is
| less than supply. (or, if you have a cheap "base load" you
| use storage to even out the peaks and troughs in the same
| way). Base load is just a somewhat arbitrary line drawn
| across the lowest point of demand, it's not an actual
| requirement of the grid like supply and demand always
| matching.
| Animats wrote:
| It's detailed, but dated. Most of the graphs stop between 2000
| and 2005. Yet the article is from 2024. Somebody took the easy
| way out and copied and pasted old graphs, probably.
|
| Whatever happened to Lockheed's compact fusion program?[1]
|
| [1] https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-
| fusion...
| immibis wrote:
| I hope not. If we find a way to convert water into bitcoins
| cheaply, we will rapidly boil the oceans. This will be worse than
| global warming. The biosphere can re-evolve after a CO2 and
| temperature spike, but all known forms of life require water.
| codethief wrote:
| Not sure why you're getting downvoted. You are absolutely right
| that we likely would end up boiling ourselves, and articles
| like those below have been discussed here on HN several times:
|
| https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
|
| https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
| dave333 wrote:
| There's a better way to get power or heat from hydrogen that is
| 200 times better than burning it:
|
| https://brilliantlightpower.com/shareholder-meeting-presenta...
| philipkglass wrote:
| Brilliant Light Power is nonsense. They've been promising
| amazing products for nearly 10 years now. Here's a Wayback
| Machine capture of their home page from 2015:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20151122183613/https://brilliant...
|
| _BrilliantLight has developed a commercially competitive,
| nonpolluting source of energy from water. A SunCell(tm)
| catalytically converts H2O-based solid fuel directly into
| brilliant light which is converted to electricity using
| photovoltaic panels._
|
| If they actually had this "commercially competitive,
| nonpolluting source of energy" they'd be selling the machines
| or selling the electricity by now.
| dave333 wrote:
| There have been a well documented series of engineering
| solutions to problems in the implementation that have taken
| time to solve. Melting electrodes due to too much power -
| solved by molten stream electrodes C 2016. Melting holes in
| the reaction chamber eventually resolved after many different
| things tried by quartz that is transparent to UV. Etc.
| Demonstrations are offered to qualified parties.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| They're not rewriting physics. Whatever's going on over
| there, it's fake.
|
| Though the main suncell page mostly just claims to be a
| solar concentrator? Like, okay, you can do that, but
| carefully aimed mirrors don't really save you any money
| over the same surface area of solar cells. Or twice the
| area of solar cells, looking at the efficiency claim on
| that page.
| hcfman wrote:
| If we do almost certainly its first use will be for some horrific
| things for the people of this planet. Such is the nature of the
| sick ones in charge.
| Koshkin wrote:
| What horrific things a power plant can be used for?
| wildylion wrote:
| Powering TVs so people can get even dumber. But we seem to be
| fine doing this with existing power plants :)
| rmbyrro wrote:
| In 100,000 years from now, after we're past the next ice age,
| archeologists will unearth tokamaks all around the world. Regular
| people will speculate aliens and a worldwide connection between
| the peoples of the world to explain the multiple occurrences.
|
| They'll have unlimited energy based on some quantum shit.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| 20 years from now. And the same answer after 20 years.
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