"Can _insert technology we don't have yet and that requires breakthrough_ save use"
Yeah sure, why not
Nuclear is already the answer but people are afraid and even countries lead by "smart people" such as Germany are slowly decommissioning their nuclear power plants...
In the meantime we're using more and more energy while putting all our eggs in the "intermittent energy sources" basket. It might have been fine if we all lived like 1960s era people but I don't see how that would work in today's world
Germany is slowly decommissioning their nuclear power plants because of Nord Stream 2. Gerhard schroeder almost immidietly becomes head of NS2 after he steps down as chancellor.
I used to be so excited about fusion, but then I actually learned more about it. Perhaps I'm missing something, but the benefits over fission seem underwhelming.
It's about the same cost on a per-megawatt basis. Modern fission plants are totally safe. Nuclear waste is basically a non-problem, especially with the most recent technology.
And fission has the huge benefit of being a mature, proven technology.
What's the big benefit of fusion that makes it worth investing so much money?
The only thing I can see is that it doesn't require uranium, which can be abused to make weapons. But does that by itself justify the investment?
Don't you think that the fact that you can use sea water as input and you get hydrogen as output is a huge advantage over fission?
Add to that the fact that there is no fukushima style meltdown in a fusion power plant. If something goes wrong, it just stops.
Finally, contrary to fission, fusion power plants will be able to adjust their power output as fast as gaz power plants. It takes months to turn on or off a fission power plant.
So yes, there is definitely a few benefits to fusion. And take a step back on the numbers. Look at how much we injected in banks in 2008. If it works (and indeed there is a risk they won't make it work and this is probably where the argument should be) the investment would be amortize over thousands of years...
Can you imaging a guy, 3000 years ago in China, complaining about spending money on a kiln to smelt that thing called iron?...
Since a commercial fusion reactor hasn't yet been developed, you can't argue that it is or will be the same cost per-megawatt as fission power. That's because you can't predict any advances in technology that make fusion easier or reduce the capital cost.
The authors argue that ITER will get there and it's a matter of time, funding, and politics. SPARC might be able to get there around roughly the same time. Neither will be hooked up to the grid, but they will demonstrate the tech needed to make a viable fusion power plant. Unfortunately none of the other exciting fusion projects out there will be able to get off the ground due to fairly fundamental limitations.
If you ignore any tedious jokes about when fusion power will be ready, and assume it will be ready in a few decades, it's still a process that converts reasonable quantities of seawater into power, with no CO2 emissions, and is relatively safe compared to fission.
It won't be ready in time to reduce emissions enough to prevent catastrophic climate change. However, it can be ready soon enough to power the devices we'll need to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere once we've reduced our emissions to the point of diminishing returns.
After the concept has been demonstrated, there's plenty of scope for improvement which will make it better and cheaper. On the other hand, the price of oil will increase as emissions taxes are introduced (I hesitate to say that we'll run out of reserves).
There's a lot more mileage in fission technology that what's commonly deployed for power, but the new types of reactors needed make it far easier to produce weapons(). Also, although fission technology is mature and safe, the human factors around it are not, which will still lead to accidents, contamination, and deliberate theft.
() Fusion reactors would also make it possible to breed fissile material since they are a neutron source but it would be slower and easy to detect.
Unless there's a war. Unless corruption leads to poor management of the plants. Unless nuclear waste is mismanaged. Unless there is an earthquake or tsunami of completely unexpected intensity.
Ha what? The number of flaws in any system is unknowable. We thought the Fukushima Daiichi reactors were safe and then what happened? Meltdown because the backup generators were flooded.
That statement transposed to software engineering is like saying "we use Kubernetes so we have 24/7 uptime".
Assuming there are multiple breakthroughs on the research, design, and scale-up phase, fusion will only help us in a couple decades, put on the brakes is a 2020/2030s task. Putting on the brakes means slowing down, which means decarbonizing power, transport, industry, and agriculture, amongst other things. We don't need fusion to do that, we need to transform our current system. Fusion could be nice as a future-fuel, perhaps it could power carbon sequestration efforts. But unless we put on the brakes NOW with what we have, this car is going to crash.
Best time to invest into fusion research was 50 years ago. Second best time is now.
Nuclear fission is one of a few (if not the only) viable ways to have significant positive impact on climate change short-term (20 years).
Small rant on nuclear waste. I don't think it's a problem. I think it's a solution to fuel future generations of reactors (50+ years). I'd go as far as assume that e.g. Finland could import nuclear waste and store it in that new state-of-the-art nuclear waste repository.
They would make money now to store the waste, and then make money eventually when tech is there to reuse it and generate power.
No. The car will still be running even if we fully stop right now. There is an excess of carbon in the atmosphere, there are feedback loops that are emitting carbon due to the already existing warming, you don't shutdown the greenhouse effect with just a halt or slowdown of emissions because what is already there will keep doing its job.
What you can do switching to nuclear (in some industries, at least) is to not increase as much as previous years what we add to the problem.
It's not stopping, nor slowing down or keeping the current speed, but just accelerating a bit less than before.
Massive carbon capture is needed (orders above the gigantic amount that is added each year, because you need to take out the carbon emitted in the previous years too, and there is the feedback loops playing too), along with bringing new emissions sharply down. And all of that at least for many years after reaching below preindustrial carbon levels (global temperature should drop enough to turn off the positive feedback loops).
Nuclear fission is good enough, available right now, causes much fewer deaths than the alternatives, does not pollute the atmosphere, and accidents are extremely rare and nowhere near as dangerous as they've been portrayed. To wit, Fukushima: 1 dead from the nuclear accident, compared to 10000 from the tsunami.
All good qualities, but there's one problem - cost and time to rollout.
Even China, which internally can impose any policy it wants, can't build them fast enough to match e.g. wind in terms of GWh delivered. That has been the case since 2012 or so.
Fukushima didn't kill many people, but it's projected to cost $187b to clean up.
Chernobyl has supposedly cost over $300b inflation-adjusted. Gorbachev wrote that in his opinion, it was a major contributor to the collapse of the USSR. Both figures are from Wikipedia.
Fission is safe, but even one accident can wipe out decades of profits. Is it still cost-effective when considering that?
Probably not. ITER takes 440 megawatts of total power to generate 500 megawatts of power, at the cost of many years of development & billions of dollars. [1]
From your article it's more: "Okay, so ITER will have delivered in that full demonstration that we could have okay 500 Megawatt coming out of the 50 Megawatt we will put in."
Sadly, nuclear fission power that works at scale - both on the technology and social sides - seems to be mostly beyond the capabilities of current human societies.
In a fission reactor, I know the energy goes into the water, which creates steam and that turns a turbine. But it looks like fusion reactors use a near vacuum and high powered magnets. Once two atoms actually fuse, where does that energy "go"? Does the new helium atom just bounce around the containment unit? How do we actually extract meaningful energy from such a closed system?
In the same way. Most proposed fusion systems use deuterium-tritium fusion where a significant amount of the energy is carried away as neutrons, so direct energy conversion wouldn't be possible anyway.
From the article you referenced:
> ITER will not produce enough heat to produce net electricity and therefore is not equipped with turbines to generate electricity. Instead, the heat produced by the fusion reactions will be vented.
So in a fusion plant, the particle energy would turn into heat (by the particles interacting with matter), this would heat up water (or some other carrying fluid), turning a turbine that produces electricity. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant which contains some diagrams showing just how that would be done.
More exotic reactions (e.g. p-B11) have been proposed, where almost no energy is in the form of neutrons. Theoretically, you could then use electrostatic devices to capture the energy directly without any of the mess with Carnot efficiency. However, getting p-B11 fusion going is much harder than d-t.
In both cases energy comes from neutrons. In the case of a fusion reactor, some neutrons escape plasma containment, presumably then heat up something outside, then heat transferred to water as usual.
Can captured space alien technology based on element 115 help solve climate change? It's about as likely to generate real commercially usable amounts of power in the next decade.
At this point, we don't have new fission plants being built, and we're converting all the coal plants to run on natural gas, which is just going to jack up the prices for consumers who use it for heat.
The claims on nuclear fission being just around the corner are wildly exaggerated. Sabine Hossenfelder has a great video [1] on this topic. I want fusion to be real too, but focussing on small scale fission and solar is probably a better idea.
SPARC is going to be relatively small in size. If they can make the commercial reactors as small as SPARC then they can be created in a factory. Which will make roll out and cost much better than fission.
SPARC will also not produce net power gain, as far as I know. They are planning to achieve "breakeven", which is energy going into plasma < energy of plasma, promising Q > 2, with an optimistic expectation of Q ~ 10. But best estimates for plasma energy -> electrical energy conversions are 50% efficiency, and energy going into plasma is typically many times smaller than the amount of energy drawn from the grid (couldn't find any numbers for SPARC).
SPARC doesn't seem to publish such numbers, but ITER, which is aiming for Q ~ 10 is going to be nowhere near to generating net energy, so SPARC's 2 < Q < 10 is unlikely to be able to do it either.
No, Fusion can not put the brakes on climate change. It is the best long term option for generating heat, but the problem is not about what we add, but instead about what we remove.
Carbon Capture is what will matter. Carbon taxes are an interesting attempt at political solutions, but this requires coordination between Russia, CCP, and the USA. We need something that can be done despite what other foreign powers can be made to do, lest we want to wage WW3 over this.
Carbon Capture is also proportionately underfunded compared to renewables. Global warming is not something that will stop when we stop being bad; it has momentum. Greenhouse gases are like a blanket we’ve been wrapping around ourselves. We have to unwrap to get back to normal: carbon capture.
Climate change is an emergency, one that we're far behind on tackling. Talking about future technologies that are many decades away (if ever) is the opposite of helpful.
Imagine in 1943 the headline:
"Can hypersonic missiles put the brakes on Hitler's Army?"
Why would any government or international organization want to put the brakes on Climate change if it is the single biggest reason to increase their power? Do people think it's coincidental that the people who shriek loudest about climate change also shriek loudest about nuclear? And the thing is, I know whoever wrote this drivel for the new yorker knows better.
lm28469|4 years ago
Yeah sure, why not
Nuclear is already the answer but people are afraid and even countries lead by "smart people" such as Germany are slowly decommissioning their nuclear power plants...
In the meantime we're using more and more energy while putting all our eggs in the "intermittent energy sources" basket. It might have been fine if we all lived like 1960s era people but I don't see how that would work in today's world
me_me_me|4 years ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27202794
There are no accidents when it comes to big things like that
d_theorist|4 years ago
It's about the same cost on a per-megawatt basis. Modern fission plants are totally safe. Nuclear waste is basically a non-problem, especially with the most recent technology.
And fission has the huge benefit of being a mature, proven technology.
What's the big benefit of fusion that makes it worth investing so much money?
The only thing I can see is that it doesn't require uranium, which can be abused to make weapons. But does that by itself justify the investment?
skywal_l|4 years ago
Add to that the fact that there is no fukushima style meltdown in a fusion power plant. If something goes wrong, it just stops.
Finally, contrary to fission, fusion power plants will be able to adjust their power output as fast as gaz power plants. It takes months to turn on or off a fission power plant.
So yes, there is definitely a few benefits to fusion. And take a step back on the numbers. Look at how much we injected in banks in 2008. If it works (and indeed there is a risk they won't make it work and this is probably where the argument should be) the investment would be amortize over thousands of years...
Can you imaging a guy, 3000 years ago in China, complaining about spending money on a kiln to smelt that thing called iron?...
leephillips|4 years ago
Here is another physicist warning about the hype just a few days ago: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-close-is-nuclea...
scanny|4 years ago
Just removing that as part of the rhetoric around the tech makes fusion invaluable.
tambourine_man|4 years ago
Please elaborate on both. And I think we can all agree there's no such thing as totally safe, only risk management.
cantagi|4 years ago
Based on a HN recommendation, I read this book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Fusion-Energy-Popular-Scienc...
The authors argue that ITER will get there and it's a matter of time, funding, and politics. SPARC might be able to get there around roughly the same time. Neither will be hooked up to the grid, but they will demonstrate the tech needed to make a viable fusion power plant. Unfortunately none of the other exciting fusion projects out there will be able to get off the ground due to fairly fundamental limitations.
If you ignore any tedious jokes about when fusion power will be ready, and assume it will be ready in a few decades, it's still a process that converts reasonable quantities of seawater into power, with no CO2 emissions, and is relatively safe compared to fission.
It won't be ready in time to reduce emissions enough to prevent catastrophic climate change. However, it can be ready soon enough to power the devices we'll need to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere once we've reduced our emissions to the point of diminishing returns.
After the concept has been demonstrated, there's plenty of scope for improvement which will make it better and cheaper. On the other hand, the price of oil will increase as emissions taxes are introduced (I hesitate to say that we'll run out of reserves).
There's a lot more mileage in fission technology that what's commonly deployed for power, but the new types of reactors needed make it far easier to produce weapons(). Also, although fission technology is mature and safe, the human factors around it are not, which will still lead to accidents, contamination, and deliberate theft.
() Fusion reactors would also make it possible to breed fissile material since they are a neutron source but it would be slower and easy to detect.
nobody9999|4 years ago
4-20 times the energy density of fissionable materials[0] and fuel that's the most common element in the universe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#In_nuclear_reac...
goodpoint|4 years ago
Unless there's a war. Unless corruption leads to poor management of the plants. Unless nuclear waste is mismanaged. Unless there is an earthquake or tsunami of completely unexpected intensity.
c7DJTLrn|4 years ago
Ha what? The number of flaws in any system is unknowable. We thought the Fukushima Daiichi reactors were safe and then what happened? Meltdown because the backup generators were flooded.
That statement transposed to software engineering is like saying "we use Kubernetes so we have 24/7 uptime".
WhompingWindows|4 years ago
ip26|4 years ago
Agreed, that seems like the biggest opportunity for fusion to fit into climate change.
FBISurveillance|4 years ago
Nuclear fission is one of a few (if not the only) viable ways to have significant positive impact on climate change short-term (20 years).
Small rant on nuclear waste. I don't think it's a problem. I think it's a solution to fuel future generations of reactors (50+ years). I'd go as far as assume that e.g. Finland could import nuclear waste and store it in that new state-of-the-art nuclear waste repository. They would make money now to store the waste, and then make money eventually when tech is there to reuse it and generate power.
gmuslera|4 years ago
What you can do switching to nuclear (in some industries, at least) is to not increase as much as previous years what we add to the problem.
It's not stopping, nor slowing down or keeping the current speed, but just accelerating a bit less than before.
Massive carbon capture is needed (orders above the gigantic amount that is added each year, because you need to take out the carbon emitted in the previous years too, and there is the feedback loops playing too), along with bringing new emissions sharply down. And all of that at least for many years after reaching below preindustrial carbon levels (global temperature should drop enough to turn off the positive feedback loops).
himinlomax|4 years ago
Tade0|4 years ago
Even China, which internally can impose any policy it wants, can't build them fast enough to match e.g. wind in terms of GWh delivered. That has been the case since 2012 or so.
triceratops|4 years ago
Chernobyl has supposedly cost over $300b inflation-adjusted. Gorbachev wrote that in his opinion, it was a major contributor to the collapse of the USSR. Both figures are from Wikipedia.
Fission is safe, but even one accident can wipe out decades of profits. Is it still cost-effective when considering that?
devoutsalsa|4 years ago
[1] http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-close-is-nuclea...
skywal_l|4 years ago
And yes, it costs a lot, but if they succeed, it would solve so many problems, it would be worth it.
And for scale, compare this to the amount of money being spent on, I don't know, the video game industry[1].
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190509014637/https://newzoo.co...
chii|4 years ago
not 500 MW of usable power. Have a watch of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
yboris|4 years ago
https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc
leephillips|4 years ago
erazor42|4 years ago
loourr|4 years ago
bell-cot|4 years ago
PhileinSophia|4 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
BitwiseFool|4 years ago
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER for visuals.
someguyorother|4 years ago
From the article you referenced:
> ITER will not produce enough heat to produce net electricity and therefore is not equipped with turbines to generate electricity. Instead, the heat produced by the fusion reactions will be vented.
So in a fusion plant, the particle energy would turn into heat (by the particles interacting with matter), this would heat up water (or some other carrying fluid), turning a turbine that produces electricity. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant which contains some diagrams showing just how that would be done.
More exotic reactions (e.g. p-B11) have been proposed, where almost no energy is in the form of neutrons. Theoretically, you could then use electrostatic devices to capture the energy directly without any of the mess with Carnot efficiency. However, getting p-B11 fusion going is much harder than d-t.
leephillips|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
dboreham|4 years ago
willis936|4 years ago
"Can Nuclear fusion bail out our ship before it sinks?" No.
"Can Nuclear Fusion help us re-float our ship after its sunk?" Maybe.
mikewarot|4 years ago
At this point, we don't have new fission plants being built, and we're converting all the coal plants to run on natural gas, which is just going to jack up the prices for consumers who use it for heat.
The time to fix this was 5 decades ago.
FredPret|4 years ago
carapace|4 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
tylermauthe|4 years ago
[1] - https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY
goodpoint|4 years ago
Even if nuclear had 0 environmental impact during production, which is absolutely not the case, we still must cool down the planet.
We need energy sources that work by CAPTURING energy that otherwise would be turned into atmospheric heat.
arichard123|4 years ago
simiones|4 years ago
SPARC doesn't seem to publish such numbers, but ITER, which is aiming for Q ~ 10 is going to be nowhere near to generating net energy, so SPARC's 2 < Q < 10 is unlikely to be able to do it either.
Edit: ITER is also going for Q~=10
arcanon|4 years ago
Carbon Capture is what will matter. Carbon taxes are an interesting attempt at political solutions, but this requires coordination between Russia, CCP, and the USA. We need something that can be done despite what other foreign powers can be made to do, lest we want to wage WW3 over this.
Carbon Capture is also proportionately underfunded compared to renewables. Global warming is not something that will stop when we stop being bad; it has momentum. Greenhouse gases are like a blanket we’ve been wrapping around ourselves. We have to unwrap to get back to normal: carbon capture.
Pxtl|4 years ago
Climate change is an emergency, one that we're far behind on tackling. Talking about future technologies that are many decades away (if ever) is the opposite of helpful.
Imagine in 1943 the headline:
"Can hypersonic missiles put the brakes on Hitler's Army?"
darkmarmot|4 years ago
zohch|4 years ago