ITER fusion energy pushed back beyond 2050(bbc.co.uk)
bbc.co.uk
ITER fusion energy pushed back beyond 2050
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-40558758
160 comments
> Modern Generation III/III+ reactor designs have actually made this "chunkiness" worse; there's no modern reactor design under 500 MWe that's certified in the US, Canada, Japan, South Korea, or the EU
China has Generation IV pebble bed reactors coming online this year that are smaller (210 MWe) [1]. They would be the world's first Gen IV reactors in production. Would be interesting to see how that goes.
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095809916...
China has Generation IV pebble bed reactors coming online this year that are smaller (210 MWe) [1]. They would be the world's first Gen IV reactors in production. Would be interesting to see how that goes.
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095809916...
There was an experimental pebble bed test reactor in Germany. That didn't end well, it will be interesting to see if China does it better.
A collague of my grandfahther spend most of his lives work errecting that reactor, and then building it back until there was only green fields left where the building did stand.
Strange thing to do.
Strange thing to do.
For anyone else curious, MWe stands for "megawatt electric". The average American home uses very roughly 1000 watts on average [0], so a 500 MWe plant serves very roughly 500,000 American homes.
[0]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3
901,000 watt-hours per month / (30 * 24) ~= 1,250 watts
[0]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3
901,000 watt-hours per month / (30 * 24) ~= 1,250 watts
An average isn't very helpful here. A single kettle / oven / heater will use 1 kW by itself.
Not every house will have one of those on at all times. Sure, a house could use many multiples more than 1 kW for a bit, but will go back down eventually.
Yes, that's why an average isn't too meaningful. The times these things are on aren't the same for every house, but they are correlated.
The South Koreans are building large, Gen-III APR-1400s on time and on budget. They picked a standard design, perfected the project management of constructing them, and can now sell them internationally.
South Korea already sold APR-1400 to UAE. Four of them are currently in construction.
> Some countries have formally committed to eliminating power from nuclear fission. Most have not.
Most countries have not formally committed to eliminating power from fossil fuels, either - though there's obviously more of a trend in that direction.
Point being that past lack of commitment is no indicator of future direction.
> Most countries have at least some regions that would be happy to accept the good, stable employment and tax base offered by a nuclear power plant in exchange for the very slight risk of accidents.
Given there's 195 countries - 'most' may be misapplied here. I think it's optimistic to believe that there'll be stable employment for more than a handful of people per nuclear fission power plant.
Tax legislation comes and goes. And as to slight risk .. I think that's misrepresenting things too. A risk matrix typically takes into account likelihood vs effect. You may be suggesting there's a 'small likelihood', while ignoring the massive potential effects of an incident -- equating to significant actual risk.
A review of the history and progress <sic> of the Hinkley nuclear fission power plant in the UK - a country that certainly meets the pro-nuclear-fission requirement - is sobering.
This article (from late 2015), and apologies for Telegraph link [1] is highly depressing.
The wikipedia page [2] has a few more recent details.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/nuclearpower/11...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
Most countries have not formally committed to eliminating power from fossil fuels, either - though there's obviously more of a trend in that direction.
Point being that past lack of commitment is no indicator of future direction.
> Most countries have at least some regions that would be happy to accept the good, stable employment and tax base offered by a nuclear power plant in exchange for the very slight risk of accidents.
Given there's 195 countries - 'most' may be misapplied here. I think it's optimistic to believe that there'll be stable employment for more than a handful of people per nuclear fission power plant.
Tax legislation comes and goes. And as to slight risk .. I think that's misrepresenting things too. A risk matrix typically takes into account likelihood vs effect. You may be suggesting there's a 'small likelihood', while ignoring the massive potential effects of an incident -- equating to significant actual risk.
A review of the history and progress <sic> of the Hinkley nuclear fission power plant in the UK - a country that certainly meets the pro-nuclear-fission requirement - is sobering.
This article (from late 2015), and apologies for Telegraph link [1] is highly depressing.
The wikipedia page [2] has a few more recent details.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/nuclearpower/11...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
Maybe someday those power plants will be available in smaller sizes, e.g. for fusion with the discovery of better confinement techniques, or high magnetic field materials
Nuclear plants were originally designed small, as for submarines. For some reason the design trend has been towards larger plants. Perhaps for economies of scale?
An interesting watch is Adam Curtis' documentary "A is for Atom", which covers the history of nuclear power.
It's usually pretty easy to find Adam's content on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3i9WHHl3qA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FDrA7yUdFc
Summary on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_Box_(TV_series)#Pa...
An interesting watch is Adam Curtis' documentary "A is for Atom", which covers the history of nuclear power.
It's usually pretty easy to find Adam's content on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3i9WHHl3qA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FDrA7yUdFc
Summary on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_Box_(TV_series)#Pa...
The larger reactors were supposed to improve the economics of nuclear power once they reached series production. Making the minimum size larger seems to have impeded progression toward series production, zeroing out (and then some) the expected reduction in cost-per-megawatt from larger units.
For example, the 1117 MWe AP1000 design that's driven Westinghouse to bankruptcy derives from the AP600 design of only 600 MWe. After-the-fact criticism is too easy, but it seems to me that Westinghouse and its US partners would have suffered less if they were trying to build 4x 600 MWe reactors, and the projects fell behind schedule/over budget, than in their actual situation where they're behind schedule/over budget on 4x 1117 MWe reactors.
For example, the 1117 MWe AP1000 design that's driven Westinghouse to bankruptcy derives from the AP600 design of only 600 MWe. After-the-fact criticism is too easy, but it seems to me that Westinghouse and its US partners would have suffered less if they were trying to build 4x 600 MWe reactors, and the projects fell behind schedule/over budget, than in their actual situation where they're behind schedule/over budget on 4x 1117 MWe reactors.
Would it be possible to make them modular? As in, build X number of the best submarine-size reactors and drop them in side-by-side in essentially secure concrete warehouses cooled by water pumped from a nearby lake? Kind of like racking servers is what I'm picturing.
That's the "small modular reactor" concept, under development by a few companies. I think that the concept has considerable merits. I hope that it will be tested in practice. I'm pretty bullish on renewables but nuclear power is very low emissions over its life cycle, safe enough (IMO), and nuclear construction capability should be (again IMO) maintained as a complement/alternative to renewable generation for the post-fossil era. For continued viability new nuclear construction needs lower, more predictable costs or steady long-term support from governments; I think that cost improvements would be the better of the two.
Sounds like a viable model, thanks!
One advantage submarine reactors have is that they can use fully enriched uranium (bomb-quality, >90% U-235). You can still make pretty small reactors with non-weapons uranium (defined as <20% enriched) but they are not as performant or long-lasting as the pure U-235 submarines.
Interesting. So can the core of uranium weapons be re-used for nuclear reactors? (Assuming there is a big arms reduction event)
Yes. Plutonium from disassembled nuclear weapons is also used this way, under the name "mixed oxide fuel". Some reactor designs are better at burning "MOX" than others; CANDU reactors are particularly good at this, and in the early post-cold-war years there was a very active US-Canada-Russia programme to use Canadian reactors to burn surplus Russian fuel, funded by the USA (which was very concerned about the potential for fuel from decommissioned Russian weapons to get onto the black market).
Absolutely. In fact, from 1993 to 2013, fully 10% of the electricity in the USA came from dismantled ex-Soviet nuclear bombs through just such a arms reduction effort [1]. The material was downblended with U-238 to take it from weapons-grade to reactor-grade. The bombs that were once pointed at American cities ended up powering them. It was glorious.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program
Money. Fission is both expensive and risky.
With the growing understanding of externalizing costs and risks is a bad thing for communities and countries making externalized costs explicit to companies more and more, in many countries energy companies fear they would need to insure their plants which together with sinking costs of solar would make fission too costly and non-competing.
Fission was killed by Fukushima. While in theory we can build safe reactors, practice shows otherwise.
It's important to keep in mind the reactors at Fukushima were designed in the 1960s -- literally fifty years ago. During that same time period, we were doing things like designing machines for efficiently burning down the rainforest so we could open up land for farming, and pouring miscellaneous mixed nuclear waste into underground vats for future generations to figure out.
It might be debatable whether humanity is sufficiently responsible to maintain any dangerous machinery requiring generation-level planning, but it is important to keep in mind how far removed we are from the era in which every nuclear reactor ever having experienced a major nuclear incident was designed.
It might be debatable whether humanity is sufficiently responsible to maintain any dangerous machinery requiring generation-level planning, but it is important to keep in mind how far removed we are from the era in which every nuclear reactor ever having experienced a major nuclear incident was designed.
Give it a second look. Practice shows that nuclear reactors are actually extraordinarily safe compared to most other options. In fact, by 2013 they saved 1.8 million lives simply by displacing air pollution deaths, and prevented 65 billion tonnes CO2-eq. [1]
[1] http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197?source=cen
[1] http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197?source=cen
Construction on the 4 new US AP1000s that bankrupted Westinghouse went ahead after Fukushima. There were regions of the US perfectly willing to take new reactors even after Fukushima, and power companies willing to buy the power from those new reactors. But construction is years behind planned schedules and billions over planned budgets. "Overruns" more than "Fukushima" seems like the greatest barrier to future US orders for more AP1000s.
We've certainly shown that reactors designed in the 60s and built in the 70s are problematic in very rare cases.
So you're saying that the nuclear industry was saying before that "yes, we fully agree that we could have a full blown meltdown at one of the older reactors in very rare cases".
BTW, how it's a tsunami a very rare case on a decades long horizon? There were warnings about the possibility of a big tsunami. It wasn't a black swan, it was a white one.
> A spokesman from the Tokyo Electric Power Corporation [TEPCO] told FRONTLINE that the company was aware of Minoura’s work and was in the process of considering plant modifications in case of a massive tsunami.
Fission fails deadly, and humans are really bad at managing these kinds of things (ie: I don't want to pay 200 mil to build a better tsunami barrier for a 1 in a million chance...)
BTW, how it's a tsunami a very rare case on a decades long horizon? There were warnings about the possibility of a big tsunami. It wasn't a black swan, it was a white one.
> A spokesman from the Tokyo Electric Power Corporation [TEPCO] told FRONTLINE that the company was aware of Minoura’s work and was in the process of considering plant modifications in case of a massive tsunami.
Fission fails deadly, and humans are really bad at managing these kinds of things (ie: I don't want to pay 200 mil to build a better tsunami barrier for a 1 in a million chance...)
Like the sibling commenter, I can't parse your sentence and intention except as "we've certainly shown they're not commonly problematic" which is quite a weak statement.
Is your sentence a positive sentence (do you mean we've certainly shown they're problematic essentially never) or is your sentence negative (we've certainly shown they're problematic definitely sometimes - which is unacceptable)?
I tried to read your attitude but failed.
Is your sentence a positive sentence (do you mean we've certainly shown they're problematic essentially never) or is your sentence negative (we've certainly shown they're problematic definitely sometimes - which is unacceptable)?
I tried to read your attitude but failed.
I was mostly rebuffing the structure of the argument "While in theory we can build safe reactors, practice shows otherwise" which has two different reference classes for reactors (modern safer ones, and less safe fukushima ones).
Oh, okay! It was confusing because it sounds like "they're rarely problematic" which is not your meaning. Thanks for the clarification!
I don't think so. Fission is being killed by its lack of competitiveness and how long reactors take to build in a world where renewables are getting better so quickly people think twice about locking themselves up in a multi billion nuclear power plant project that takes 10 years to build.
Fission was killed by cheap oil and fracking revolution. Thankfully, these things don't last forever.
Very cheap oil is very recent and it's an artificial situation created by pumping by OPEC countries. Fracking was only worth it because of how expensive oil was before, now it's not worth it anymore while oil stays this cheap. I think current fission nuclear tech is competitive with fossil fuels in the "fracking era". It's not competitive with current oil but that wouldn't kill it, just at most put it on hold until inevitably oil goes up again. Not to mention environmental issues, which massively favor nuclear over fossil fuels.
IMHO it is competitive renewables that is a death sentence for current reactor tech. Nuclear needs to go back to the drawing board and come up with more efficient and realistic designs.
IMHO it is competitive renewables that is a death sentence for current reactor tech. Nuclear needs to go back to the drawing board and come up with more efficient and realistic designs.
There are no competitive renewables. Photovoltaics can't survive at scale without massive government subsidies or screwing the environment like in China (choose one), wind power doesn't scale, and don't even get me started about biodiesel.
PV are pretty much competitive now without subsidies in current studies and getting better all the time. The "renewables are not competitive" is a thing of the past.
Like I said -- only if you disregard the environmental impact and account for reusing the scraps from microelectronics industry (which is a good thing, sure -- but can't be expanded much). Crystalline silicon production is messy.
Isn't PV a primary market for silicon? Sure looks like it:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Polysilicon_prices_h...
(the price drop is mostly a result of pretty big increases in production)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Polysilicon_prices_h...
(the price drop is mostly a result of pretty big increases in production)
Environmental impact of PV is negligible compared with the alternatives, especially fossil fuels.
Well, fossil fuels are not an option anyway, but going full nuclear with closed cycle is much cheaper and environmentally safe. The only problem are proliferation concerns...
I disagree. I don't even think nuclear waste is that big of a problem. I think at this point is a efficiency and engineering issue. From 2010 to 2017 the $/Mhw projections in Solar have gone down by 81% while in Nuclear it was only 19%. Wind 63%. PV is lower than nuclear now. Estimates for 2022 are even more difference. Nuclear is just not worth it at this point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
PV and wind power cannot provide base load power.
Some studies beg to differ. Also improvements in batteries will make this problem much less important. And even then, they don't have to cover 100% of the energy generation, if they cover a significant % with the rest provided by more traditional sources, it might be enough.
http://redgreenandblue.org/2017/07/18/myth-baseload-power-no...
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2010/12/02/3081889.ht...
http://redgreenandblue.org/2017/07/18/myth-baseload-power-no...
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2010/12/02/3081889.ht...
Good luck with storing GWh of electricity in batteries for more than 15 minutes. They have terrible energy density even before mentioning costs. In fact they're not even cost efficient for home scale battery backed solar/wind projects. You need to replace the batteries every 8 years. How do I know that? We've been installing PV for 10 years. The only uses for battery backed PV/wind were remote areas with no grid access.
The only commercially viable electricity storage available today is pumped hydro. Flywheels and molten salts are also working technical solutions and could be used for wind and solar thermal.
The only commercially viable electricity storage available today is pumped hydro. Flywheels and molten salts are also working technical solutions and could be used for wind and solar thermal.
The articles mention many options and reasons why the base load problem is vastly overblown. Batteries will probably help in households. The combination of all these methods is what you have to look at. And these technologies are still rapidly improving, they should start being a significant % of energy generation and start taking on the base load issue slowly of course.
Did China stop building after Fukushima? As I recall, they had by far the longest list of planned new reactors.
The article mentions one big issue: plasma containment. It doesn't even mention what I think of as being the biggest hurdle to commercial fusion power generation: neutron containment.
Fusion hydrogen requires heavy isotopes, namely tritium, to generate sufficient reactions. This generates s lot of free neutrons however, enough that they will tend to destroy what container they're in. This is a significant, possibly commercially insurmountable, engineering problem.
Helium-3 is one alternative but is super rare on Earth ( even the heavier Helium-4 escapes the Earth's gravity once it reaches the atmosphere (so party balloons are consuming an irreplaceable resource thanks to an effective subsidy from Congress who narrowmindedly decided to offload the Strategic Helium Reserve at submarket rates).
People like to bandy about phrases like "free energy" when it comes to fusion. Well, free fuel and free energy aren't the same thing. A plant has a capex and running costs, a finite lifetime and a power output. Put those numbers together and you have a base energy cost even with free and essentially limitless fuel.
The article talks about producing tritium from lithium. Great. The demand for batteries is already going to stretch the worlds lithium supply so that's another advance we need.
Fusion hydrogen requires heavy isotopes, namely tritium, to generate sufficient reactions. This generates s lot of free neutrons however, enough that they will tend to destroy what container they're in. This is a significant, possibly commercially insurmountable, engineering problem.
Helium-3 is one alternative but is super rare on Earth ( even the heavier Helium-4 escapes the Earth's gravity once it reaches the atmosphere (so party balloons are consuming an irreplaceable resource thanks to an effective subsidy from Congress who narrowmindedly decided to offload the Strategic Helium Reserve at submarket rates).
People like to bandy about phrases like "free energy" when it comes to fusion. Well, free fuel and free energy aren't the same thing. A plant has a capex and running costs, a finite lifetime and a power output. Put those numbers together and you have a base energy cost even with free and essentially limitless fuel.
The article talks about producing tritium from lithium. Great. The demand for batteries is already going to stretch the worlds lithium supply so that's another advance we need.
> The demand for batteries is already going to stretch the worlds lithium supply
The usual comparison here is that one laptop battery's worth of Lithium is enough to provide an individual's energy need for life. So at current consumption rates, there is enough Li available through traditional mining to supply the world with one thousand years of energy, and closer to one million years' worth if we recover it from seawater.
The usual comparison here is that one laptop battery's worth of Lithium is enough to provide an individual's energy need for life. So at current consumption rates, there is enough Li available through traditional mining to supply the world with one thousand years of energy, and closer to one million years' worth if we recover it from seawater.
> so party balloons are consuming an irreplaceable resource thanks to an effective subsidy from Congress who narrowmindedly decided to offload the Strategic Helium Reserve at submarket rates
I prefer to think of this as "providing incentives necessary to exploit the resources of Jupiter and Saturn."
Maybe when the history of space settlement is written it will have a chapter on the contribution party balloons and political squandering of strategic reserve had on resource prices...
I prefer to think of this as "providing incentives necessary to exploit the resources of Jupiter and Saturn."
Maybe when the history of space settlement is written it will have a chapter on the contribution party balloons and political squandering of strategic reserve had on resource prices...
That is one way to look on the bright side. Fairly certain I read a write up on HN about why the helium situation isn't actually a big problems balloons aside with the crux of the argument being most of Helium's practical applications it can be effectively recycled in. Wish I remembered it better, chemistry is not my strong suit.
The main industrial use of helium is in selling cold -- things that need to be done cold are done at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Things that need to be _really_ cold are done at liquid helium temperatures. Think superconducting magnets and MRI scanners. This usage can, should, and usually is recycled. Being a noble gas it doesn't really have much chemical applications per se. However according to wikipedia it is also used in "pressurizing and purging systems, welding, maintenance of controlled atmospheres, and leak detection." These usages are lossy by their very nature.
However helium leaks like almost nothing else. Only hydrogen is worse. It is so small that it is able to leak (slowly) through the crystal lattice structure of metals, ceramics, and other materials used to contain it. So recycling systems can't be made perfect.
And of course, even if recycling systems were perfect, a limited supply means no room for growth.
However helium leaks like almost nothing else. Only hydrogen is worse. It is so small that it is able to leak (slowly) through the crystal lattice structure of metals, ceramics, and other materials used to contain it. So recycling systems can't be made perfect.
And of course, even if recycling systems were perfect, a limited supply means no room for growth.
Actually I'm not sure hydrogen is worse, because it's normally found in diatomic form. What's bigger, a single helium atom or a pair of conjoined hydrogen atoms with their own nuclei?
Hydrogen will leak through porous metals like palladium, but as you say, helium will leak through almost everything.
Hydrogen will leak through porous metals like palladium, but as you say, helium will leak through almost everything.
If I'm not mistaken, the amount of lithium required for tritium production is quite small compared with the needs for lithium batteries
The article talks about producing tritium from lithium. Great. The demand for batteries is already going to stretch the worlds lithium supply so that's another advance we need.
Can't imagine that this sort of process will use anywhere near as much lithium as the battery industry. It's fusion, after all.
Can't imagine that this sort of process will use anywhere near as much lithium as the battery industry. It's fusion, after all.
Helium-3 is the waste product of pure deuterium fusion. The YCombinator-funded fusion startup Helion is working on a hybrid D-D/D-He3 reactor, which it says will produce only 6% of its energy as neutron radiation. Deuterium of course is absurdly abundant on Earth.
Another aneutronic reaction is proton-boron. Boron isn't as abundant as deuterium but there's still enough on Earth to last tens of thousands of years. (The reaction use B11, which is 80% of natural boron.) pB11 fusion is especially difficult but several startups are trying it; the biggest is Tri Alpha, with about $500M invested. They attained stable plasma a year ago and just completed a larger reactor.
With D-T, the easiest reaction, there may be ways to engineer around the neutron issue. General Fusion does fusion pulses in the middle of a vat of molten lead and lithium. MIT's ARC design is more conservative, with a compact tokamak and modular construction. The inner wall is 3D-printed and replaced annually; they say after a couple decades the radioactivity will have decayed enough for cheap disposal. They surround the core with a blanket of molten FLiBe salt as coolant and breeding blanket.
Another aneutronic reaction is proton-boron. Boron isn't as abundant as deuterium but there's still enough on Earth to last tens of thousands of years. (The reaction use B11, which is 80% of natural boron.) pB11 fusion is especially difficult but several startups are trying it; the biggest is Tri Alpha, with about $500M invested. They attained stable plasma a year ago and just completed a larger reactor.
With D-T, the easiest reaction, there may be ways to engineer around the neutron issue. General Fusion does fusion pulses in the middle of a vat of molten lead and lithium. MIT's ARC design is more conservative, with a compact tokamak and modular construction. The inner wall is 3D-printed and replaced annually; they say after a couple decades the radioactivity will have decayed enough for cheap disposal. They surround the core with a blanket of molten FLiBe salt as coolant and breeding blanket.
I listened to an interview that discussed ITER's blanket in detail recently and while it seems like a very impressive bit of materials science, they seemed to have no doubt it'd work.
Plus, won't nearly all neutrons be incident on lithium to breed tritium in a final reactor anyway? And you don't need very much lithium anyway so there shouldn't be a concern over lithium availability.
Plus, won't nearly all neutrons be incident on lithium to breed tritium in a final reactor anyway? And you don't need very much lithium anyway so there shouldn't be a concern over lithium availability.
On the neutron absorption challenge: There are big advances in material science, especially with a FLiBe salt blanket fill. The challenge is more on the engineering side, i.e. how can you build it so that you can do maintenance and replace the blanket on a regular interval in a fully automated manner without interrupting the service of the fusion plant for too long.
Fission also generates a large amount of neutrons, but we still managed to build reactors it just required a large amount of shielding. This is a much smaller problem than finding a way to contain high energy plasma long enough to allow us to produce a fusion reaction.
I also don't understand why you're complaining about the loss of super-rare helium isotopes, but think that we're going to run out of Lithium due to this process, which is orders of magnitude more common.
The bottom line is that even a rudimentary fusion power system can capture 10x whatever energy you put in place. This blows away any other form of power generation no matter what measure you go by. Which is why it's still getting research money even if the result may be decades away.
I also don't understand why you're complaining about the loss of super-rare helium isotopes, but think that we're going to run out of Lithium due to this process, which is orders of magnitude more common.
The bottom line is that even a rudimentary fusion power system can capture 10x whatever energy you put in place. This blows away any other form of power generation no matter what measure you go by. Which is why it's still getting research money even if the result may be decades away.
> neutron containment
Well... If you run a fusion reactor for long enough, you can dismantle it and use the scrap as fuel for much easier to build fission ones. ;-)
Well... If you run a fusion reactor for long enough, you can dismantle it and use the scrap as fuel for much easier to build fission ones. ;-)
You need a big enough reactor that a particular type of extreme dismantling produces reasonable amounts of fission-fertile radioisotopes; the bright side however is that the bigger such reactors are the less time "long enough" tends to be. And of course there's the time one might have to wait before beginning to mine them from the scrap...
correction.. ITER & derivative based fusion is delayed NOT fusion itself.
Honestly I feel ITER is such a big boondoggle that its cannibalizing pretty much all other fragments of research in fusion. for reference even based on tokamak design MIT ARC is uses much higher T REBCO superconductor based magnets that ITER cannot even adopt. which do you think has a better chance of success? besides that there are multiple other efforts like German stellarator, FRC based design by trialpha and even the opensource focus fusion. IMO its much better to spread the resources into these efforts rather than dumping a bunch of money into monstrosity like ITER and going back into the lap of fossils for next 2 decades.
thinking about [lack of] fusion funding really pisses me off.
/end-rant
Honestly I feel ITER is such a big boondoggle that its cannibalizing pretty much all other fragments of research in fusion. for reference even based on tokamak design MIT ARC is uses much higher T REBCO superconductor based magnets that ITER cannot even adopt. which do you think has a better chance of success? besides that there are multiple other efforts like German stellarator, FRC based design by trialpha and even the opensource focus fusion. IMO its much better to spread the resources into these efforts rather than dumping a bunch of money into monstrosity like ITER and going back into the lap of fossils for next 2 decades.
thinking about [lack of] fusion funding really pisses me off.
/end-rant
The other efforts you mention are much further from having Q>1 (energy producing) fusion. FRCs and focus have not even reached Q=0.000001 and have little theoretical basis for being power producing. Stellerators have their own problems as well. Tokamaks have achieved Q=0.69, and so ITER has very little risk of missing its goal of Q>1 if it does get constructed and run DT.
I agree that fusion is severely underfunded, and that it is dangerous for us to put all our eggs in the Tokamak basket. And this article is pretty strange for its fixation on DEMO which at this point might as well be made of unicorn horns. But ITER was proposed and is supported by a huge number of scientists for a good reason: it's the best way for us to hit a goal that fusion science has been dreaming of for 50 years, that is key to understanding and designing real fusion reactors.
I agree that fusion is severely underfunded, and that it is dangerous for us to put all our eggs in the Tokamak basket. And this article is pretty strange for its fixation on DEMO which at this point might as well be made of unicorn horns. But ITER was proposed and is supported by a huge number of scientists for a good reason: it's the best way for us to hit a goal that fusion science has been dreaming of for 50 years, that is key to understanding and designing real fusion reactors.
The ARC reactor is a tokamak design though, just (I appreciate the work this word is doing in this sentence) smaller and with much more powerful magnets. They quite explicitly want to not have a different type of reactor.
Problem w/ the ARC reactor is that it is just a design. The real life engineering challenges are still daunting. E.g. for the supra conductors at the Wendelstein 7-X, which provide a much less powerful magnetic field, just assembling and connecting the supra conductor cables for each module was a mind blowingly complex and fickle process that was described at length in this (unfortunately German) super awesome podcast [0].
[0]: http://alternativlos.org/36/
[0]: http://alternativlos.org/36/
Yes but stellarators are much more complicated to build than tokamaks. They accept the construction difficulty in exchange for simpler plasma physics.
ARC is not designed to be cheaper or faster to build than ITER. Its purpose is closer to that of DEMO (engineering breakeven). ITER data will be critical for verifying the ARC design.
I thought that one of the very fundamental ideas behind ARC was about trying to get the scale down so that it can be built more cheaply and quickly (not requiring global collaboration).
In the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4 he talks about ITER being too slow. Certainly the smaller SPARC reactor looks like they want to get things up and running far before ITER is performing fusion experiments, and the possible timescale for ARC is before
While their timescale might be optimistic or wrong, it doesn't sound like they're planning to wait for ITER.
I'm not in the field though so things might not match up with this output or I'm missing something obvious.
In the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4 he talks about ITER being too slow. Certainly the smaller SPARC reactor looks like they want to get things up and running far before ITER is performing fusion experiments, and the possible timescale for ARC is before
While their timescale might be optimistic or wrong, it doesn't sound like they're planning to wait for ITER.
I'm not in the field though so things might not match up with this output or I'm missing something obvious.
> IMO its much better to spread the resources into these efforts rather than dumping a bunch of money into monstrosity like ITER
It's great to have a diverse approach in the R&D phase, but sooner or later you're going to have to build a viable machine to study it, and that's when you run into the problem of scale. Confining a plasma of hundreds of millions of Kelvin is no joke even with superconducting magnets, so to get any sort of useful confinement it will have to be at least as big as ITER. And since neither individual governments nor the private sector want to unilaterally fund something so big without a guaranteed ROI, if we want the progress then there's really no way around this stepping stone of a huge, expensive, politically-charged multinational project.
It's great to have a diverse approach in the R&D phase, but sooner or later you're going to have to build a viable machine to study it, and that's when you run into the problem of scale. Confining a plasma of hundreds of millions of Kelvin is no joke even with superconducting magnets, so to get any sort of useful confinement it will have to be at least as big as ITER. And since neither individual governments nor the private sector want to unilaterally fund something so big without a guaranteed ROI, if we want the progress then there's really no way around this stepping stone of a huge, expensive, politically-charged multinational project.
ITER is an almost pointless project, because its design is already outdated even before it has completed. DEMO, if it ever exists, will almost certainly have more in common with ARC than with ITER.
Yeah, this seems to be about ITER, not about the overall state of fusion research. Last I heard EAST was going great guns in maintaining a stable plasma.
There is still ICF research, although it has its own problems.
Mods: can we change the title?
Ok we added "ITER" at the beginning. If someone suggests a better (more accurate and neutral) title we can change it again.
More descriptive is Tokamak rather than ITER, since ITER is still going to have burning DT plasma in 2035 (at the earliest, according to article).
So it should say "Tokamak fusion energy pushed back beyond 2050"? I'm worried that this will provoke more objections. The combo of highly technical + controversial makes it hard to get a title like this right.
So the people pushing fusion say it won't even start producing commercial electricity until after 2050? But by then we will be all on renewables plus cheap storage, or at least pretty close. What would the incentive be for ripping that all out and replacing it with immensely costly fusion plants?
Footprint, probably. By then there will be a lot of people fairly crabby about how much space the renewable infrastructure takes up. once people realize that "an acre of solar panels" is an acre of land that we are taking all the energy that Mother Nature uses to, you know, be Mother Nature.
You can see the first few faint traces of it today with complaints about killing birds and such.
You can see the first few faint traces of it today with complaints about killing birds and such.
Solar power for 1,000 homes would require 32 acres of land. [1]
Food for 1,000 homes requires 7800 acres. [2,3]
That's ~240x as much for food as compared to energy. It's a rounding error in terms of "damage to Mother Nature" and could be easily compensated for by not wasting so much of our produced food.
This came to mind because filling an entire roof with solar panels would definitely meet all the power requirements of a house (except for probably electric vehicles), but I was relatively confident that it took a whole lot more area to farm food for that household.
My math could have a mistake somewhere, did this pretty quickly. Feel free to tear it apart. :)
[1] https://www.energymanagertoday.com/it-takes-2-8-acres-of-lan...
[2] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.AGRI.K2?locations... -> 4,082,000 sq km / 321 million = 3.1 acres per person.
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-size-of-h... -> 2.5 people per household, x 3.1 acres per person = 7.8 acres per house = 7800 acres per thousand homes.
Food for 1,000 homes requires 7800 acres. [2,3]
That's ~240x as much for food as compared to energy. It's a rounding error in terms of "damage to Mother Nature" and could be easily compensated for by not wasting so much of our produced food.
This came to mind because filling an entire roof with solar panels would definitely meet all the power requirements of a house (except for probably electric vehicles), but I was relatively confident that it took a whole lot more area to farm food for that household.
My math could have a mistake somewhere, did this pretty quickly. Feel free to tear it apart. :)
[1] https://www.energymanagertoday.com/it-takes-2-8-acres-of-lan...
[2] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.AGRI.K2?locations... -> 4,082,000 sq km / 321 million = 3.1 acres per person.
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-size-of-h... -> 2.5 people per household, x 3.1 acres per person = 7.8 acres per house = 7800 acres per thousand homes.
Math seems about right to me. Photosynthesis is only 3% efficient, vs. about 30% for current-generation solar panels, so that's already 320 acres. Current agricultural crops put about 40-50% of their incoming solar energy towards the edible parts, so that's 640 (you can thank the green revolution for that - wild plants put only about 5% of their incoming energy towards fruit/seed production, but we've selectively bred them for a 10x improvement in productivity). You lose a factor of about 10 going up a trophic level to eat meat, so if half your diet is meat, that'd be 3200 + 320 = 3520 acres to support your diet. Figure on transportation losses and food waste for the additional factor of 2.
All numbers are from a sustainable agriculture course I took in college, with a few spot checks by Googling.
This, BTW, should drive home just how environmentally-damaging carnivorism is and how switching to a vegetarian diet is actually significantly more impactful than almost any household energy conservation you do. However, as a long-time meat eater, I don't care, and just accept that I'm a terrible person.
All numbers are from a sustainable agriculture course I took in college, with a few spot checks by Googling.
This, BTW, should drive home just how environmentally-damaging carnivorism is and how switching to a vegetarian diet is actually significantly more impactful than almost any household energy conservation you do. However, as a long-time meat eater, I don't care, and just accept that I'm a terrible person.
Cool, thanks for the extra info.
I justify my meat consumption because in Australia most of our beef cattle are grazed on land that's useless for anything else. But I do agree that we should reduce meat consumption. Even if just for health we're eating twice as much as we should, let alone the environment.
I justify my meat consumption because in Australia most of our beef cattle are grazed on land that's useless for anything else. But I do agree that we should reduce meat consumption. Even if just for health we're eating twice as much as we should, let alone the environment.
Red meat
Build solar where sun is abundant and space is unconstrained: in Sahara.
Quite a few technical challenges due to the sand, though.
Quite a few technical challenges due to the sand, though.
Quite a few political challenges, as well. This is not the most stable corner of the world.
And then you end up spending far more on powerlines than it would cost to get working fusion.
Not really - ITER alone is expected to be in excess of $20 billion, that would buy you about 20 modern HVDC Transmission lines, each with a length of 1000 km and able to transmit 40 GW of power in total. That's a lot of power. :-)
http://electrical-engineering-portal.com/analysing-the-costs...
http://electrical-engineering-portal.com/analysing-the-costs...
But Elon Musk says it would take only a an area of land a hundred miles square to power the whole US
https://www.inverse.com/article/34239-how-many-solar-panels-...
It's not if it would be nice to free up that land, but rather whether or not countries would be willing to spend the many trillions of dollars it would take, when they always have lots of other financial priorities.
https://www.inverse.com/article/34239-how-many-solar-panels-...
It's not if it would be nice to free up that land, but rather whether or not countries would be willing to spend the many trillions of dollars it would take, when they always have lots of other financial priorities.
It's desert but animals and plants and people live there.
I feel like if it were as easy as a 10x10 mile plot of solar panels to power the entire US, some enterprising disruptor would have done it already. Think of the revenue from powering the entire US...
You've also got to consider transmission and the infrastructure required, probably storage for time-shifting the energy as well, since it's solar.
I feel like if it were as easy as a 10x10 mile plot of solar panels to power the entire US, some enterprising disruptor would have done it already. Think of the revenue from powering the entire US...
You've also got to consider transmission and the infrastructure required, probably storage for time-shifting the energy as well, since it's solar.
"a hundred miles square" means 100 x 100 miles, 10,000 square miles. The linked article makes this clear.
At $250 per square meter, 10,000 square miles of panels would come to $6.4 trillion.
I think we should be heading in this direction anyway. But it's not so small, it's not so cheap, it will take time. No surprise; the system we need to replace is not small or cheap, and it took time, too.
At $250 per square meter, 10,000 square miles of panels would come to $6.4 trillion.
I think we should be heading in this direction anyway. But it's not so small, it's not so cheap, it will take time. No surprise; the system we need to replace is not small or cheap, and it took time, too.
>I feel like if it were as easy as a 10x10 mile plot of solar panels to power the entire US, some enterprising disruptor would have done it already. Think of the revenue from powering the entire US...
Solar is expanding rapidly, and it will do so more rapidly as it gets cheaper. And wind is advancing rapidly too.
And remember, the article is about fusion electricity not starting up for another 30 years. By then, as my original comment said, it will be mostly or all renewables, and so there will be no way to persuade countries to spend trillions on fusion.
Solar is expanding rapidly, and it will do so more rapidly as it gets cheaper. And wind is advancing rapidly too.
And remember, the article is about fusion electricity not starting up for another 30 years. By then, as my original comment said, it will be mostly or all renewables, and so there will be no way to persuade countries to spend trillions on fusion.
Musk's comment were intended to demonstrate that powering the US on solar is practical - you don't need to cover the whole country in panels, you actually only need 10 square miles.
You wouldn't actually put all these panels in one place, because of transmission losses, putting all your eggs in one basket, etc...
The point being, that you can power the US with a reasonable, practical amount of panels.
You wouldn't actually put all these panels in one place, because of transmission losses, putting all your eggs in one basket, etc...
The point being, that you can power the US with a reasonable, practical amount of panels.
You just need to cover the otherwise unused roofs to build what is essentially a distributed power generator. Maybe even use a 10 kWh battery for backup if it's cheap enough (under $1000) for each PV covered roof.
Yes. Tesla/SolarCity are doing exactly that - they're about 400,000 roofs in, so far.
Limiting those enterprising disruptors to those with 32 billion dollars to spare narrows the field a touch. :)
[1] http://innovativesolarfarms.com/solar-farm-cost-per-acre/ gives $500k per acre
[1] http://innovativesolarfarms.com/solar-farm-cost-per-acre/ gives $500k per acre
That's a square a hundred miles on a side (10,000 square miles), not a square ten miles by ten miles (100 square miles).
Musk's point was that even a 10,000 square miles isn't all that big compared to the rest of the United States.
Musk's point was that even a 10,000 square miles isn't all that big compared to the rest of the United States.
Should solar + batteries be considered truly renewable? Both panels and batteries do degrade. Solar panels last, what, 20-30 years? Big batteries probably around the same, if not less. And the production of them is not exactly clean, though probably much cleaner than gas/oil/coal for the same energy output.
>>>...by then we will be all on renewables plus cheap storage, or at least pretty close. What would the incentive be for ripping that all out and replacing it with immensely costly fusion plants?
That's a valid concern. Probably in 37 years, we'll all be riding in self-driving electric buggies that recharge in 10 minutes from stored solar power.
Lockheed-Martin[1] is working on a compact fusion design that some day might fit on a truck yet power a city. It might keep a C-130 plane aloft for a year, or keep an aircraft carrier at sea for multiple years. It might power a spacecraft to Mars, shortening the trip from six months to one month.
There is a need for a compact, concentrated, continuously generating power plant at least for these kinds of specialized applications. Whether it will still make financial sense by the time it's actually working is another question. Perhaps the main use case will be military, though the idea of an airship that can stay aloft for months or years is rather appealing -- given enough power, you could put a city in the sky.
1. http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.htm...
That's a valid concern. Probably in 37 years, we'll all be riding in self-driving electric buggies that recharge in 10 minutes from stored solar power.
Lockheed-Martin[1] is working on a compact fusion design that some day might fit on a truck yet power a city. It might keep a C-130 plane aloft for a year, or keep an aircraft carrier at sea for multiple years. It might power a spacecraft to Mars, shortening the trip from six months to one month.
There is a need for a compact, concentrated, continuously generating power plant at least for these kinds of specialized applications. Whether it will still make financial sense by the time it's actually working is another question. Perhaps the main use case will be military, though the idea of an airship that can stay aloft for months or years is rather appealing -- given enough power, you could put a city in the sky.
1. http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.htm...
From that LockMart page on their compact fusion reactor:
> ENERGY CREATED THROUGH FUSION IS 3-4 TIMES MORE POWERFUL THAN THE ENERGY RELEASED BY FISSION
I'm not entirely sure how to parse that...?
> ENERGY CREATED THROUGH FUSION IS 3-4 TIMES MORE POWERFUL THAN THE ENERGY RELEASED BY FISSION
I'm not entirely sure how to parse that...?
There's no incentive for "ripping it out", but even a prototype Fusion reactor should be, at a minimum, 4-5x more efficient than a nuclear Fission reactor and probably 10x more efficient than solar or wind. I doubt we'd ever rely on a single source of energy on Earth, but if we had to pick one, Fusion would be it.
I think fusion could probably produce energy on a much larger scale than renewables. I don't think we can get to ten times or hundred times of current energy consumption with renewables.
>I don't think we can get to ten times or hundred times of current energy consumption with renewables.
We can easily get to ten times. And we have no need for a hundred.
We can easily get to ten times. And we have no need for a hundred.
the incentive would be mostly the fact that fusion scales really well and can make electricity [adjusting for fixed costs] super cheap. almost too cheap to meter!
also there are other uses that can make really plentiful rocketfuel esp for exploration outside of the inner solar system.
also there are other uses that can make really plentiful rocketfuel esp for exploration outside of the inner solar system.
>the incentive would be mostly the fact that fusion scales really well and can make electricity [adjusting for fixed costs] super cheap. almost too cheap to meter!
At first I was going to make a counter-argument. But then I noticed the exclamation mark at the end, and decided to defy Poe's law.
At first I was going to make a counter-argument. But then I noticed the exclamation mark at the end, and decided to defy Poe's law.
Diversity of energy sources?
Considering the advances of renewables, both solar and in/off-shore wind, do we really need fusion?
Most of the issues with current fission are political ("spent" fuel can be reprocessed) and economic (these beasts are insanely expensive to build and operate safely) and we haven't even touched MSR's and Thorium. I get fusion would be beautiful, but it has its problems too (heavy neutron bombardment will eventually turn the reactor into a pile of hot nuclear waste - or, at best, MSR fuel) and we may need to face the simple fact our technology isn't up to that challenge just yet.
Although stellarators may offer some shortcuts.
Maybe we'll need fusion for multi-generation starships supposed to operate for many centuries on a closed loop system, but that need seems a bit too far into the future for us to concern ourselves too much with it. Solar should be fine up to Mars and compact fission should be enough up to the Oort cloud.
Most of the issues with current fission are political ("spent" fuel can be reprocessed) and economic (these beasts are insanely expensive to build and operate safely) and we haven't even touched MSR's and Thorium. I get fusion would be beautiful, but it has its problems too (heavy neutron bombardment will eventually turn the reactor into a pile of hot nuclear waste - or, at best, MSR fuel) and we may need to face the simple fact our technology isn't up to that challenge just yet.
Although stellarators may offer some shortcuts.
Maybe we'll need fusion for multi-generation starships supposed to operate for many centuries on a closed loop system, but that need seems a bit too far into the future for us to concern ourselves too much with it. Solar should be fine up to Mars and compact fission should be enough up to the Oort cloud.
Renewables can't provide power where it's needed, and largely can't provide reliable baseline power (hydroelectric being the exception, but it causes huge environmental damage in terms of both direct flooding and disruption to downstream ecosystems).
Fission could power us for 100-200 years at current consumption rates - substantially less if consumption continues to grow. It's not time to panic yet, but we can't afford not to be doing fusion research.
Fission could power us for 100-200 years at current consumption rates - substantially less if consumption continues to grow. It's not time to panic yet, but we can't afford not to be doing fusion research.
> can't provide power where it's needed
I grew up with energy generated by a mix of hydro from 800km away and nuclear from 200km. An off-shore wind farm could be built anywhere between 100 and 250km from my city. In-shore wind, if distributed and connected, can provide a lot of reliable with little need for constant hydro or nuclear.
Also, hydro can be rather helpful in other aspects - it can be a store of drinking water, fisheries and agriculture. The environmental impact is, of course, huge, buy far more benign than the current fashion of fossils. Plus, if you are really clever, you can use it to host carbon-fixating algae you can bury to remove a lot of carbon from the atmosphere.
Mind you that fission's environmental impact is not restricted to those rare occasions when everything goes bad and the reactor melts down. Mining for fissiles is not exactly environment friendly.
And while local photovoltaic may have some nasty industrial processes involved, solar-thermal doesn't. It also provides a nice and smooth generation pattern that can cover for baseline generation.
I grew up with energy generated by a mix of hydro from 800km away and nuclear from 200km. An off-shore wind farm could be built anywhere between 100 and 250km from my city. In-shore wind, if distributed and connected, can provide a lot of reliable with little need for constant hydro or nuclear.
Also, hydro can be rather helpful in other aspects - it can be a store of drinking water, fisheries and agriculture. The environmental impact is, of course, huge, buy far more benign than the current fashion of fossils. Plus, if you are really clever, you can use it to host carbon-fixating algae you can bury to remove a lot of carbon from the atmosphere.
Mind you that fission's environmental impact is not restricted to those rare occasions when everything goes bad and the reactor melts down. Mining for fissiles is not exactly environment friendly.
And while local photovoltaic may have some nasty industrial processes involved, solar-thermal doesn't. It also provides a nice and smooth generation pattern that can cover for baseline generation.
> I grew up with energy generated by a mix of hydro from 800km away and nuclear from 200km.
Impressive, but those grids aren't cheap, and their maintenance is only getting more expensive with modern safety standards and labour costs.
> Also, hydro can be rather helpful in other aspects - it can be a store of drinking water, fisheries and agriculture. The environmental impact is, of course, huge, buy far more benign than the current fashion of fossils.
Anything but coal is progress, sure. But hydro is still damaging enough that it's well worth replacing.
> Mind you that fission's environmental impact is not restricted to those rare occasions when everything goes bad and the reactor melts down. Mining for fissiles is not exactly environment friendly.
The fuel density of fissiles is so high that that's not really an issue though - the amount of fuel mining needed is tiny.
> And while local photovoltaic may have some nasty industrial processes involved, solar-thermal doesn't. It also provides a nice and smooth generation pattern that can cover for baseline generation.
Solar-thermal has potential, but it still has some time/storage issues (yes it doesn't go to zero immediately at dusk, but it's not entirely aligned with demand either, and e.g. seasons are a big issue further from the equator) and location issues.
Ultimately while conventional renewables will be part of the mix - maybe a big part - it's hard to imagine we won't have cases where we need reliable, consistent power in a specific arbitrary location, and nuclear is really the only viable clean power source that can offer that. Maybe storage tech will improve to the point where that's no longer the case, but we can't rely on that - at least, not the extent of closing off nuclear research. The cost of the likes of ITER is a drop in the bucket compared to the world's total energy expenditure.
Impressive, but those grids aren't cheap, and their maintenance is only getting more expensive with modern safety standards and labour costs.
> Also, hydro can be rather helpful in other aspects - it can be a store of drinking water, fisheries and agriculture. The environmental impact is, of course, huge, buy far more benign than the current fashion of fossils.
Anything but coal is progress, sure. But hydro is still damaging enough that it's well worth replacing.
> Mind you that fission's environmental impact is not restricted to those rare occasions when everything goes bad and the reactor melts down. Mining for fissiles is not exactly environment friendly.
The fuel density of fissiles is so high that that's not really an issue though - the amount of fuel mining needed is tiny.
> And while local photovoltaic may have some nasty industrial processes involved, solar-thermal doesn't. It also provides a nice and smooth generation pattern that can cover for baseline generation.
Solar-thermal has potential, but it still has some time/storage issues (yes it doesn't go to zero immediately at dusk, but it's not entirely aligned with demand either, and e.g. seasons are a big issue further from the equator) and location issues.
Ultimately while conventional renewables will be part of the mix - maybe a big part - it's hard to imagine we won't have cases where we need reliable, consistent power in a specific arbitrary location, and nuclear is really the only viable clean power source that can offer that. Maybe storage tech will improve to the point where that's no longer the case, but we can't rely on that - at least, not the extent of closing off nuclear research. The cost of the likes of ITER is a drop in the bucket compared to the world's total energy expenditure.
Not to sound like a fossil shill, but I want to agree with "anything but coal is progress" and suggest that natural gas, done sufficiently cleanly and only for demand curve smoothing, could be part of a 'good enough' solution in the near future.
Hydroelectric power, like geothermal, is only applicable if the geography permits it. It is also a potential WMD, so you'd better hope the area where you are building your dam is either not near a population center or is (geo)politically stable.
Fission, developed, could power us for another 10,000 years if we actually wanted it to. We simply haven't been building up the industrial base to make that possible.
If we want electric cars (and stop burning fuel in general), we need a lot of cheap electricity (like, 100x more generation than today, 10x cheaper). Photovoltaics is not environmentally friendly. Wind power is not scalable. Only next-gen nuclear and fusion fit the bill.
That said, ITER is not a good approach. Way too expensive, not scalable. It is good as a research project, but we need scalable and cheaper solutions.
That said, ITER is not a good approach. Way too expensive, not scalable. It is good as a research project, but we need scalable and cheaper solutions.
> 100x more generation than today, 10x cheaper
Or we can rethink our use of cars. I drive one about once per week. The rest of my transportation needs are neatly provided by electric light rail.
We can also tax fossil-burning cars and their fuels according to their environment impact (like "we'll be all dead in a century"). That alone would make electric cars a lot more attractive.
About that, for most of my adult life my cars ran on sugarcane ethanol, which has a pretty close to zero carbon footptint. Plus, if the refining ops were more efficient and didn't burn the refuge to power the operation, it'd have a substantial negative carbon footprint.
Or we can rethink our use of cars. I drive one about once per week. The rest of my transportation needs are neatly provided by electric light rail.
We can also tax fossil-burning cars and their fuels according to their environment impact (like "we'll be all dead in a century"). That alone would make electric cars a lot more attractive.
About that, for most of my adult life my cars ran on sugarcane ethanol, which has a pretty close to zero carbon footptint. Plus, if the refining ops were more efficient and didn't burn the refuge to power the operation, it'd have a substantial negative carbon footprint.
The problem with the "saving energy" argument is that it goes against our behaviour in all of recorded History. Mankind has always used more and more energy, and that use of more energy is entirely justified, as it has given us increasing quality of life. Quality of life translates to more than extra comfort. It means new purposes, new goals, new horizons.
If, apart from civilization de-evolution, we never lowered per-capita energy consumption in ~10k years, I have very little faith we can do it now.
If, apart from civilization de-evolution, we never lowered per-capita energy consumption in ~10k years, I have very little faith we can do it now.
> Or we can rethink our use of cars. I drive one about once per week. The rest of my transportation needs are neatly provided by electric light rail.
How do you deal with doing groceries ? I have to do groceries for 5 people, have to actually cook for them about 14x a week, at, let's say, 150gr of food per person per meal, at 50% waste to allow for actual cooking, so let's say 150gr * 14 * (1/(1-50%))= 5 kilogram, plus stuff to drink. Humans drink about 1.5 liter per day. So all in all, I need the ability to carry some 25-40kg easily. How do I do that using light rail ?
Note: going twice, by itself, increases the cost of groceries due to economies of scale. Going 5 times increases it by a lot, ignoring the lost time. Also, let's not pretend 12x1.5 liter bottles are easy to carry on light rail, even if it's just that and nothing else.
Also light rail, at least in Sydney and London (ie. the metro), only connects places that are ridiculously expensive to rent, and to top that off, light rail is only a little cheaper than a car compared to using a car by myself. With 5 people, they are ridiculously more expensive than using a car. Compared to using a nice secondhand car and traveling 30 times a week (20 of which are simply dropping the kids off at school), the price difference is so high that we cannot discuss using light rail for this.
So how can you claim that this is a solution ? When you're 20 and alone, perhaps. When you have a family, the financial difference is off the scale.
Come to think of it, once I turn 60 or so, is this still your suggestion ? Because then it'll be physically impossible for me to do it at all without a car, just for 2 people.
Personally, I think public transport is effectively a failure. The only function it has is to allow rich middle classers to travel in for their job from the suburbs, taking the car for part of the way. Aside from that it's useful for going out and the like, but it cannot reasonably be a primary mode of transportation.
If it were up to me, I'd tear down public transport entirely and replace it with "uber rail cars". Replace all tracks with normal road, reserved for a government-run fast automated-cars-only network that get called on request using an app, with ride sharing. As soon as possible, make that a network for automated call cars that can actually drive to supermarkets, jobs, ... and use the extensive right of way that we have on rail to have essentially a better highway system. No more stations. No more horrible overcrowded-and-ill-ventilated-and-source-of-countless-infections trains (guess what industry I work in).
> sugarcane ethanol, which has a pretty close to zero carbon footptint.
It also has a 1.05 or so ROEI (or, more likely, <1, when you count full cycle) and is a gimmick. We can probably support a 1905 economy on it. We cannot support the current economy on it.
How do you deal with doing groceries ? I have to do groceries for 5 people, have to actually cook for them about 14x a week, at, let's say, 150gr of food per person per meal, at 50% waste to allow for actual cooking, so let's say 150gr * 14 * (1/(1-50%))= 5 kilogram, plus stuff to drink. Humans drink about 1.5 liter per day. So all in all, I need the ability to carry some 25-40kg easily. How do I do that using light rail ?
Note: going twice, by itself, increases the cost of groceries due to economies of scale. Going 5 times increases it by a lot, ignoring the lost time. Also, let's not pretend 12x1.5 liter bottles are easy to carry on light rail, even if it's just that and nothing else.
Also light rail, at least in Sydney and London (ie. the metro), only connects places that are ridiculously expensive to rent, and to top that off, light rail is only a little cheaper than a car compared to using a car by myself. With 5 people, they are ridiculously more expensive than using a car. Compared to using a nice secondhand car and traveling 30 times a week (20 of which are simply dropping the kids off at school), the price difference is so high that we cannot discuss using light rail for this.
So how can you claim that this is a solution ? When you're 20 and alone, perhaps. When you have a family, the financial difference is off the scale.
Come to think of it, once I turn 60 or so, is this still your suggestion ? Because then it'll be physically impossible for me to do it at all without a car, just for 2 people.
Personally, I think public transport is effectively a failure. The only function it has is to allow rich middle classers to travel in for their job from the suburbs, taking the car for part of the way. Aside from that it's useful for going out and the like, but it cannot reasonably be a primary mode of transportation.
If it were up to me, I'd tear down public transport entirely and replace it with "uber rail cars". Replace all tracks with normal road, reserved for a government-run fast automated-cars-only network that get called on request using an app, with ride sharing. As soon as possible, make that a network for automated call cars that can actually drive to supermarkets, jobs, ... and use the extensive right of way that we have on rail to have essentially a better highway system. No more stations. No more horrible overcrowded-and-ill-ventilated-and-source-of-countless-infections trains (guess what industry I work in).
> sugarcane ethanol, which has a pretty close to zero carbon footptint.
It also has a 1.05 or so ROEI (or, more likely, <1, when you count full cycle) and is a gimmick. We can probably support a 1905 economy on it. We cannot support the current economy on it.
> How do I do that using light rail?
Doing groceries is one of the reasons I still have a car.
> Also, let's not pretend 12x1.5 liter bottles are easy to carry on light rail
Water is transported in pipes. This reduces my need to transport beverages substantially.
> I think public transport is effectively a failure
Most Europeans would disagree.
> It also has a 1.05 or so ROEI (or, more likely, <1, when you count full cycle)
Where did you get that number? Also keep in mind ethanol manufacturing from biomass can probably be very optimized. Sugarcane is just one case that yielded an enormous success in Brazil.
Doing groceries is one of the reasons I still have a car.
> Also, let's not pretend 12x1.5 liter bottles are easy to carry on light rail
Water is transported in pipes. This reduces my need to transport beverages substantially.
> I think public transport is effectively a failure
Most Europeans would disagree.
> It also has a 1.05 or so ROEI (or, more likely, <1, when you count full cycle)
Where did you get that number? Also keep in mind ethanol manufacturing from biomass can probably be very optimized. Sugarcane is just one case that yielded an enormous success in Brazil.
> Water is transported in pipes. This reduces my need to transport beverages substantially.
They even come with free lead. Also they're government-owned, almost guaranteeing that if these pipes cause health issues (as they have in numerous examples, like Flint, Michigan) you won't get any restitution.
> Most Europeans would disagree.
I have lived in Europe. No they won't. Well, if you put it in those exact terms they might.
But the question asked here: "can public transport replace a car for you ?" would get a very strong "no" from most Europeans.
They even come with free lead. Also they're government-owned, almost guaranteeing that if these pipes cause health issues (as they have in numerous examples, like Flint, Michigan) you won't get any restitution.
> Most Europeans would disagree.
I have lived in Europe. No they won't. Well, if you put it in those exact terms they might.
But the question asked here: "can public transport replace a car for you ?" would get a very strong "no" from most Europeans.
>How do you deal with doing groceries ?
Home delivery. It's far more efficient to have a single van going to a bunch of houses than to have a bunch of people take individual cars to the store and back. Supermarket delivery in the UK is already cheap and convenient, I don't see why it couldn't be similarly good elsewhere.
>Also light rail [...] only connects places that are ridiculously expensive to rent
I think that's largely a symptom of housing shortages in general. Decent public transport makes a property effectively equivalent to one closer to job centres, so it becomes more expensive. Build enough housing and that becomes less of a problem.
>If it were up to me, I'd tear down public transport entirely and replace it with "uber rail cars".
I definitely see the potential of self-driving taxis for public transport, but I don't see why you want to completely replace existing efficient infrastructure. Rather I think their role in future will be to provide last-mile connectivity for efficient public transport links. That way you still get the door-to-door transport, but with a more efficient backbone network.
Home delivery. It's far more efficient to have a single van going to a bunch of houses than to have a bunch of people take individual cars to the store and back. Supermarket delivery in the UK is already cheap and convenient, I don't see why it couldn't be similarly good elsewhere.
>Also light rail [...] only connects places that are ridiculously expensive to rent
I think that's largely a symptom of housing shortages in general. Decent public transport makes a property effectively equivalent to one closer to job centres, so it becomes more expensive. Build enough housing and that becomes less of a problem.
>If it were up to me, I'd tear down public transport entirely and replace it with "uber rail cars".
I definitely see the potential of self-driving taxis for public transport, but I don't see why you want to completely replace existing efficient infrastructure. Rather I think their role in future will be to provide last-mile connectivity for efficient public transport links. That way you still get the door-to-door transport, but with a more efficient backbone network.
In the days before general car ownership, you had small shops in walking distance. They were no longer competitive once shopping centers near the highway could shift the cost of delivery to their car-owning customers.
It was mostly employment costs and logistics cost (one big store is much cheaper than lots of small ones).
So sorry, but this option and home delivery too come at a significantly higher cost to me (about 2x for this one, about 1.3x for home delivery).
In both cases, I think having a car is cheaper. Definitely cheaper than going to local stores.
So sorry, but this option and home delivery too come at a significantly higher cost to me (about 2x for this one, about 1.3x for home delivery).
In both cases, I think having a car is cheaper. Definitely cheaper than going to local stores.
> Photovoltaics is not environmentally friendly.
citation needed
citation needed
It says that the dirtiest solar panels have a carbon footprint of ~70g/kWh.
Even in Germany or the US with their extremely high electricity consumption this amounts to 1 tonne of CO2 per capita annually - that's around the target footprint for sustainability.
For comparison coal has a footprint of ~880g/kWh and natural gas ~450g/kWh.
In short, solar panels are currently environmentally friendly.
Even in Germany or the US with their extremely high electricity consumption this amounts to 1 tonne of CO2 per capita annually - that's around the target footprint for sustainability.
For comparison coal has a footprint of ~880g/kWh and natural gas ~450g/kWh.
In short, solar panels are currently environmentally friendly.
Carbon footprint is not the only metric of environmental damage.
Every other kind of environmental damage(as long as it's containable) can be prevented or undone with enough energy, so as long as that's being done all we need to worry about is the energy ROI.
Solar panels, throughout their life cycle, produce much more energy than it is required to produce and recycle them in an environmentally friendly way.
Solar panels, throughout their life cycle, produce much more energy than it is required to produce and recycle them in an environmentally friendly way.
Sure, but carbon is the gun pointed at our heads right now. I suggest paying attention to it.
"DEMO fusion reactor pushed beyond 2050" would be a much more honest headline.
Shees... I really wish they would cancel it already. All technical and scientific concerns aside, the patient is already dead of cost sickness, and is only kept alive by pumping money into its scabrous leaking veins.
If they took even 1/10th of the money and spread it around some of the more promising, smaller, non-tokamak, scrappier fusion projects like tri-alpha, polywell, or the Lockheed skunkworks one that actually have a plausible path to power generation I think that the money would make a better impact. Even next gen fission would be a better investment. India and China are doing very nice things with thorium these days... Too bad they'll never turn off the pork faucet until forced.
If they took even 1/10th of the money and spread it around some of the more promising, smaller, non-tokamak, scrappier fusion projects like tri-alpha, polywell, or the Lockheed skunkworks one that actually have a plausible path to power generation I think that the money would make a better impact. Even next gen fission would be a better investment. India and China are doing very nice things with thorium these days... Too bad they'll never turn off the pork faucet until forced.
> that actually have a plausible path to power generation
Those other approaches are far less proven than the ITER design (through its precursors like JET). I'm not saying that some of them won't outpace ITER eventually, but as far as things go that are actually being built ITER is still ahead of the pack.
Those other approaches are far less proven than the ITER design (through its precursors like JET). I'm not saying that some of them won't outpace ITER eventually, but as far as things go that are actually being built ITER is still ahead of the pack.
2 relevant podcast episodes from the great science and engineering podcast omega tau. Podcasts/interviews with people close to the work.
http://omegataupodcast.net/22-nuclear-fusion-at-mpi-fur-plas...
http://omegataupodcast.net/157-fusion-at-iter/
lets hope this international collaboration will survive through the decades, and that no war or political chaos will stop it.
Funny, but war sometimes accelerates specific technologies. The atomic age was brought about by WWII. I'm not saying war is good... the advances at one field can come at the expense of scientific research across a broad number of other fields
You have a point, but for controlled fusion the applications look only civil to me. Military application/uncontrolled fusion/H bomb already exists!
[deleted]
International collaboration seems more relevant to a John Lennon song than actually getting things done.
[deleted]
2050? Maybe they can run their systems on GNU Hurd then.
(</sarcasm> I've been hearing how fusion reactors are "just around the corner" since I was a teenager, at least 40 years now.)
(</sarcasm> I've been hearing how fusion reactors are "just around the corner" since I was a teenager, at least 40 years now.)
That's actually a standard joke in fusion research: "Always 20 years away."
Although it looks like they're updating their model to be more accurate, as now it appears to be "Always 30 years away."
Although it looks like they're updating their model to be more accurate, as now it appears to be "Always 30 years away."
I cannot wait to play Half-Life 3 on GNU/HURD!
Joking aside, fusion research is infamously underfunded. At the current rate, it may never come to fruition.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._his...
Joking aside, fusion research is infamously underfunded. At the current rate, it may never come to fruition.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._his...
"It is an international project with seven partners: China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States."
Found the problem.
Found the problem.
There are already some more or less successful fusion reactors out there like Wendelstein [1] with a way smaller budget (~€1B) and that are already completed. Why does ITER need such a huge budget, long time to completion and the involvement of 7 countries/organizations to essentially proof the point of fusion energy?
As far as I understood ITER is not meant to be commercially viable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X
EDIT: originally I wrote 195 countries, which is BS of course :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X
EDIT: originally I wrote 195 countries, which is BS of course :)
Wendelstein is a smaller demonstration that will never come close to producing power. It's comparable to JET which cost ~500 million in today's money.
No fusion reactor so far has achieved ignition, that is, producing more energy than we put in. Are you suggesting we just assume one would work without building one?
ITER isn't meant to be commercially viable, it's the step in between something like Wendelstein/JET and a commercializable plant. If all goes well the plan is to follow up with DEMO which will be a commercial design that can be replicated for actual power plants.
Science and engineering cost money, and investment in fusion has consistently been substantially below what scientists estimated as necessary. There's a whole bunch of materials science, control systems, and so on that needs to be done. (And while there's plenty that could probably have been done more efficiently if this wasn't a multinational project, the political reality is that no country is willing to fund such a project on its own, and everyone who contributes wants some of the contracts to go to back to their own constituents; it's not great, but politics is the art of the possible).
No fusion reactor so far has achieved ignition, that is, producing more energy than we put in. Are you suggesting we just assume one would work without building one?
ITER isn't meant to be commercially viable, it's the step in between something like Wendelstein/JET and a commercializable plant. If all goes well the plan is to follow up with DEMO which will be a commercial design that can be replicated for actual power plants.
Science and engineering cost money, and investment in fusion has consistently been substantially below what scientists estimated as necessary. There's a whole bunch of materials science, control systems, and so on that needs to be done. (And while there's plenty that could probably have been done more efficiently if this wasn't a multinational project, the political reality is that no country is willing to fund such a project on its own, and everyone who contributes wants some of the contracts to go to back to their own constituents; it's not great, but politics is the art of the possible).
Wendelstein-7X is not a fusion machine, it's only a test for the plasma vessel design.
High school kids build fusors in their garages, fuse deuterium, and get neutron counts. Wendelstein certainly will as well. It'd be very silly not to, and if you look at their technical specs, you'll see that the fuel will include deuterium, at over 100M degrees, enough for plenty of fusion reactions.
http://www.ipp.mpg.de/16931/einfuehrung
Their initial tests did not use deuterium, and that gave a lot of people the wrong impression.
(For net power at this temperature they would need tritium, which they aren't using. Tritium is expensive and hard to deal with, and most fusion projects don't bother with it.)
http://www.ipp.mpg.de/16931/einfuehrung
Their initial tests did not use deuterium, and that gave a lot of people the wrong impression.
(For net power at this temperature they would need tritium, which they aren't using. Tritium is expensive and hard to deal with, and most fusion projects don't bother with it.)
Question by a noob: I heard they have 4 grams tritium diluted in ~770000 tons of water in Japan. Can't we use/extract that if it is that valuable? Or isn't it that hard to produce?
I'm not sure but I think it'd be pretty hard to extract four grams of tritium from 770000 tons of water.
The main issue with tritium isn't the expense of getting it, but the problems you face in dealing with it. It's hydrogen with two extra neutrons; it's hard to keep it from leaking and it's radioactive.
The main issue with tritium isn't the expense of getting it, but the problems you face in dealing with it. It's hydrogen with two extra neutrons; it's hard to keep it from leaking and it's radioactive.
While the Wendelstein is incredibly impressive (and my personal bet for the path that will produce the first commercially viable fusion plants), it is not a fusion reactor. Or at least not yet. They have produced a plasma for a very short burst, but that's about it.
That's a bit like saying an automobile is not yet an automobile, because you haven't yet put gasoline in it. Wendelstein will fuse deuterium. (It won't produce net power, but we still call it a fusion reactor if it fuses atoms.)
I'm saying that calling an automobile a successful automobile before you have even put gasoline in it is premature.
The Wendelstein has so far been successful, and will likely perform fusion soon, but as yet it isn't a successful fusion reactor.
The Wendelstein has so far been successful, and will likely perform fusion soon, but as yet it isn't a successful fusion reactor.
Modern Generation III/III+ reactor designs have actually made this "chunkiness" worse; there's no modern reactor design under 500 MWe that's certified in the US, Canada, Japan, South Korea, or the EU. Designs in that lower power range were built decades ago, and a few still run, but now it's big-or-nothing. AP1000 and EPR are 1117 and 1600 MWe, respectively, and all projects using them are behind schedule/over budget. And since these large projects are leading to such poor outcomes for involved companies, it will be difficult to get follow-on orders that will benefit from the hard earned lessons of their initial builds.
Even if all the technical problems are solved and fusion proves capable of producing net electricity, fusion power risks hitting this same too-big-to-build problem afflicting fission if it can't scale down. If the only approaches that work are enormous tokamaks with an entry level price of $10-billion-or-more, then they'll be engineering marvels that hardly anyone builds. Maybe they'll someday supply 10% of China's electricity.