Would love to see comments that actually respond to the article! Everyone here seems to be sharing their general opinions on fusion or a reaction to the article title. The article is actually very detailed!
Agreed, I think it is a great article. Personally, I'm most inclined to agree with the "bear case" summarized at the bottom of the article:
1. I think it's highly likely that, at some point (and probably in the not-too distant future with ITER and DEMO), humans will produce fusion reactors that are self-sustaining with net positive output (ignition).
2. Given the inherent complexity and difficulty with fusion, I think it's unlikely to ever be cost competitive with simpler power generation technologies.
3. Perhaps most importantly, at least in the next human lifetime, I think fusion will be largely irrelevant in the quest for carbon-free power generation, mostly as a result of the timescales required. I think right now that everyone pretty much understands that the problem with decarbonization tech is base load and storage: carbon-free renewables like solar and wind are already the cheapest form of energy generation, but they're intermittent and unreliable. Given the latest climate data, I think it's imperative that we develop base load and storage tech in the text 10/20/50 years, or we're REALLY f'd. But I haven't heard even fusion's biggest boosters say that fusion will be ready for large scale deployment in those timeframes, at cost-competitive economics. Point being, by the time I think fusion might be ready for large scale deployment, we better have already solved the base load and storage problems with cheaper tech.
Personally, I don't see fusion as relevant on a time scale that will impact the climate crisis in any significant way, but it could be a major asset in taking us from net zero emissions to preindustrial carbon levels. It could also simply just be a way to achieve cheap and abundant energy in general, irrespective of climate issues.
But as you said, of course it's an open question whether fusion will actually be more economical at scale. It could conceivably turn out to be a day late and a dollar short on Earth, and more relevant elsewhere.
I'm keeping my eye on Helion (the one Sam Altman invested in). Seems they're making some pretty big claims, and have already entered into contracts to deliver to customers by 2030 or face financial penalties. Could still be vaporware, but they seem to think they have something.
"Base load" doesn't really enter into it: you just need storage to make renewables make sense by supplying when generation doesn't meet demand and recharging when demand is less than supply. (or, if you have a cheap "base load" you use storage to even out the peaks and troughs in the same way). Base load is just a somewhat arbitrary line drawn across the lowest point of demand, it's not an actual requirement of the grid like supply and demand always matching.
Base load was a useful concept when steady output power plants with high capital cost produced energy at the lowest cost. It then made sense to use them as much as possible -- to handle the "base load" -- and cover the rest with more expensive to operate but lower capital cost sources.
But that's no longer the world we live in. The lowest cost energy is now from intermittent sources, and the optimal grid design will look very different.
Right. Primary power sources will be solar, wind, and batteries. What we need now are peaking plants with low capital cost and high output. High operating cost when running is acceptable because they won't be running much. They're backup generators. Currently, gas turbines can do that, but not much else does.
Nuclear, fission or fusion, is the opposite. It's all fixed cost. A higher fixed cost than solar or wind.
Gas turbines can not do that if we include the cost of pollution. Currently we do not have anything that has low capital cost, high operating cost, overall cheap, and carbon free.
Natural gas just trade pollution, a problem for the future, in return for cheaper energy price today.
There will be times when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. Storage can come to the rescue if this is a few hours, but over much longer time periods will be a problem. It's rare, but not unheard of. Gas will be part of the solution for many years to come.
> Gas will be part of the solution for many years to come.
True. But if we’re talking about rare - maybe once a year or two - dunkelflaute, then the gas power plants aren’t actually going to consume much gas at all. And thus the CO2 emissions will become negligible.
Those gas power plants already exist in most industrial countries. They’ll have made their return on investment so using them for backup will be fairly cheap. Especially in the coming age of robots/ drones for inspection work.
To get to zero emission we can just use biogas or hydrogen. If the consumption is low this will be sustainable and financially viable since the fuel cost will be a very small part of the total operating costs, and making the hydrogen will be very cheap since there will be an abundance of days with excess electricity.
So I don’t see that we will actually have a problem w.r.t. energy storage. Battery storage for short term has already outpaced pumped hydro. The transition to EVs already imply battery production capacity on a scale to handle energy balancing for hours or even days.
Trash burning power plants is a good solution for seasonal demand. Yeah, reuse and recycle first. But eventually when materials degrade we should burn it to avoid landfills.
The industry is starting to say that hydrogen is not going to happen. It's expensive to make even with hydrolysis, explosive, and extremely leaky. That makes transportation and storage really difficult. Also, I think it contributes to warming when enough leaks.
Hydrogen as fuel won't work, yes; but generating it and immediately making hydrocarbons or ammonia or other chemical feedstocks with it is perfectly feasible. It's already being done. Just not with electrolysis.
Yes. On the super long term - wind doesn't blow, sun doesn't shine, oil doesn't flow, coal doesn't mine. Then the feasibility of nucular is a no brainer. That's all that's left besides renewables, nucular fishin. And when we run of of nucular fishin, and that day will come too... Fusion will be all that's left of the non-renewables. And it will be used surely, provided it's a net-positive delta energy.
Plenty of wars have been fought already over oil and gas, and it’s waay easier to redirect tankers when a geopolitical player starts trying to squeeze someone hard. Note however that pipelines already have been caught in the middle of geopolitical drama.
And oil and gas are energy dense enough (and storing it is cheap/easy enough), it’s possible and common to stockpile months to years worth of supplies. All it takes is some big metal tanks.
Not sure how that is going to play out when it takes a decade plus to build a HVDC line, that line is in a fixed position (so easy to sabotage/destroy) and it’s orders of magnitude more expensive to store electricity - so most places will be lucky to even have a couple of days worth of storage.
I’m honestly not sure which will be more dramatic looking if someone bombs it though.
For somewhere with constant good insolation and low winter energy needs (like the Australian Outback, for instance), not likely to be a problem. Australia has never been meaningfully invaded or bombed either. So centralization is likely not a huge concern for them.
For somewhere with peak energy needs that coincide with minimal insolation (and often wind!), like long dark winters? And temps that can easily result in people freezing to death? And that has a history of conflict with neighbors?
I find that fact that the UK would depend on another country for power generation in a serious way really really dumb. There is no other way of putting it. If we did that we might as well sell off our armed forces and declare global peace unilaterally, that is how naive that option is. It would make the UK, or any country that did that, incredibly vulnerable. We cannot ever lose power.
The UK imports 5 Twh of electricity from France as it is so I guess you should start up the auctions.
After failing to successfully launch a Trident missile for 8 years it probably wouldn't change much.
You've only managed to send to Ukraine what the US spends on parks.
Honestly at some point you all need to accept that you really aren't a meaningful player in geopolitics anymore and focus on getting GDP per capital higher than that of Americas poorest state.
Seriously you can't afford to not dump feces in your waterways, what other option do you have.
Uncle Sam and the Polish will keep you safe. The only threat you need to worry about is the machete gangs you keep importing to keep your Pret delivery under 3 quid.
The comment is harsh, but it is not fair. Nor is (most of it) relevant and it even contradicts itself in places. It is a list of hot takes designed to anger and provoke instead of elucidate anything as I have said something they do not like.
Energy security is something every country should aim for, regardless of the size or perceived importance of the country.
You keep deliberately conflating energy and electricity. Importing energy and electricity is not the same thing. The UK cannot source its energy requirements locally but it can source electricity by importing energy and converting it to electricity.
Where we import from matters, importing from France and the Nordic countries is far more viable and easily defensible than importing from Morocco. It is still not a great idea to rely on them.
I agree that renewable generation being more distributed is harder to destroy than oil infrastructure (not that anyone has the operational capacity to attack the UKs infrastructure barring the USA with any great success) but that is not what it is a risk - the HVDC lines are! They are much easier to take out. If renewables require a HVDCs to less stable and friendly areas of the world then they make the UK more vulnerable - it is dumb.
>> We might as well sell off our armed forces.
> I don't see how this is relevant outside of the UK's desire to defend its foreign energy interests / trade, which it very obviously cant do anyways.
That's hyperbole, selling off our armed forces is a naive move that no nation would rationally do, as is becoming so incredibly dependent on a chain of other countries for electricity generation.
I prefer a solution that does not involve rationing electricity.
I already know this, it doesn't change anything. Who is able to blockade the UK's access to oil, gas or uranium, all of which are much easier to stockpile than electricity? The only one with that capability is the USA. Who is able to attack a HVDC line? Anyone with a fifth rate navy.
That's a false argument. Uranium gives you power for years, and can be sourced from multiple sellers. That is very different from a line that the other side or a third party can simply cut. Point in case: NordStream pipelines that supplied Germany.
It isn't FUD. This is something the system operators and utilities are taking very seriously and talk about daily.
We have decarbonized a lot in the US already, but we still have a long ways to go. A future of just solar, wind, and storage is still a very long ways off. We'd need a lot of load that is responsive to price and we're just not there yet. That's unattractive politically. People are fine with renewables until all those fixed costs creep into their bills and they're told that they have to go to dynamic pricing to make you hyper conserve electricity during the times you want to use it the most.
Yes, we'll eventually get there, but I strongly believe that gas will still be a big player as a backstop/reserve...maybe with carbon capture technology which runs all out during times of renewable abundance to counter the carbon output of the gas. Will it be practical though?
It’s not clear there would be much longer time periods. Build enough low carbon generation to guarantee a surplus every day and you have a surplus every day.
Anyone claiming we need days worth of storage is inherently making an argument that days worth of storage is cheaper than simply building more generation and generation is really cheap while batteries aren’t.
I often point to this, but it's such a fun and useful site I'll do it again.
What you get is typically (it depends on where you are) producing steady output from solar + wind requires some hours of batteries (typically much less than a day) and usually a fairly large backup of hydrogen (particularly far from the equator). The hydrogen gets burned in combined cycle plants with a mediocre round trip efficiency; most of the stored energy goes through batteries and back again at high round trip efficiency.
So, yes, one does need days worth of storage, but it's not batteries, it's a rainy day hydrogen account where storage capacity is very cheap.
According to several studies you need up to 2 weeks of storage, not just 24hrs, because checking on the long term, every decade or 2 you get 2 weeks of clouds or 2 weeks of no wind, etc....
AND not OR. To actually need 2 weeks of storage you would need both 0 output in solar for 2 weeks and 0 wind for two weeks and 0 output from hydro. That doesn’t happen.
You still get solar power on cloudy days, it just takes more panels to generate some specific level of power.
The goal is to minimize X$ for generation + Y$ for storage while guaranteeing sufficient supply. Any study approaching things from any other set of assumptions is going to give you nonsensical answers.
So I'm living up north here where from Nov 15 to Jan 26 we get less than 9 hours of daylight per day and the sun is at a low angle above the horizon. We won't be generating anywhere near nameplate capacity even if the sky is clear due to the ubiquity. Add clouds and the short day... and it's really rough for a few months. Sometimes it's windy when it's dark and cold, and sometimes it just stays cloudy and calm for a while. To make it through the winter here you're going to need to either build out massive amounts of storage or dramatically over-provision the wind and solar and deal with curtailing it in the summer.
This is why advances in even-longer transmission lines will be necessary. Even if you your power is generated 3000km south of you and needs to be shipped up, the transmission line losses will only be, what, around 10% or so? That might mean your electricity is a little more expensive than it is for people who live farther south, but it's probably still cheaper than what we have now.
Sending a meaningful chunk of US electricity through HVDC lines is probably not that expensive.
A hypothetical estimate of 100% NYC’s electricity from Southern Arizona to NYC across HVDC adds up to ~1,300$/per person for infrastructure that lasts ~50 years.
East/west is even cheaper because people on both ends would want to move electricity. Florida solar kicks in early in the morning for California and California solar is still available late into the evening Florida time. You have some losses across HVDC, but you have losses and battery degradation with storage.
The only reason to build them is because they lower your total costs. Over its lifespan the value of power lost in transmission over a 1,000km HVDC line in regular operation is significantly more than the direct costs to build and operate one. But you can get a lot more efficiency building solar in Nevada vs the northeastern US which more than pays for those costs.
So, if by short distances you’re talking 1,000+km and 10GW then sure it’s billions. However, the US is only so big and Billion’s don’t actually mean much to move over 2% of the US’s total electricity.
Corollary: energy is going to much more expensive the further you get away from the equator (in the absence of very predictable winds/lots of hydro/cheap geothermal).
Yup… we’re probably building nuke plants. We are also building wind and solar. And some new natural gas plants. We don’t really have a whole lot left to tap for hydro, don’t really have good geography for pumped hydro storage, and while there is a pilot project on the go to try to generate electricity from mediocre geothermal we definitely don’t have good geothermal potential either. But… we sure grow a lot of food! And are starting to look at shuttering the coal plants.
That is the opposite of what we are seeing though. Which largely comes down to "hydro works really well with melting snow" and some level of "it's windy up here". But for solar, you probably have a point
> You still get solar power on cloudy days, it just takes more panels to generate some specific level of power.
That is wrong. On cloudy winter days the inverters often just stop. Source: have 20kW of panels on a house in the south of France.
That’s a technical problem on your end. I still get electricity on cloudy days when the panels are covered in inches of snow.
Now my personal power output does tank during this period, but such extremes are local events. Further hydro, nuclear, and geothermal just don’t care about clouds.
Theres something wrong with your setup. I get about 10-15w of production in the dead of night with a full moon. Source: 5.5kW of panels on a house in South Africa.
There are counter arguments to this. Clouds and wind are local weather patterns. We can use cables to move power around between areas with and without clouds. Moving power over large distances has gotten more feasible with high voltage direct current (HVDC) cables. There are a few projects in the works to move power from e.g. Australia to Singapore and Morocco to the UK. And there are already cables moving power between e.g. Canada and California, Norway and various countries in Europe, etc. More cables means more resilience in the grid. Continent wide absence of wind and solar generation is not a thing that happens a lot. Certainly not for weeks.
Another point here is that demand shaping is an effective way to deal with fluctuating supply of power. By creating financial incentives, you can get energy consumers to scale up or down their consumption of power. Night tariffs are still common in places with a lot of static generation, for example. With solar generation now being so common, we even get occasional negative energy rates in some places where the static generation can't be scaled down.
Batteries and cables are a key enabler for demand shaping. Also, the time windows that energy gets sold for are getting shorter. It used to be that you'd buy x amounts of mwh for some price for hours. It's now getting down to minutes. That means grids can respond more rapidly to fluctuations in supply and demand. And of course it creates incentives for companies to invest in being able to scale up or down their energy consumption from the grid and benefit from these price fluctuations. For example by having batteries and using their roofs for solar generation.
Base load is of course a very flimsy concept and the discussions about it tend to be very hand wavy and rarely cite specific numbers in GW needed. Because as soon as you do that, you can talk solutions: cables, storage, more solar (it always generates some power), etc. And cost.
Hysterical assertions that we need to spend double digit percentages of GDP on things like nuclear or fusion kind of fall over when you apply some rationality to that. How much power for how much $? Maybe do something less mad and cheaper instead. Build some cables. Add some off shore wind. Much cheaper, faster, and way less risky.
Of course the reality is that we still have plenty of base load for the foreseeable future. That's why the vast increases in wind and solar generation, which are now the dominant source of power in a growing number of places, isn't really causing any outages or rolling blackouts. Whatever amount of base load we need, apparently it's way less than we currently have because we have been removing lots of it from the grid.
A reminder that 40% of the world's shipping is just there to move oil and gas around.
If someone was starting from scratch and looking at fossils, the arguments against would be so obvious and compelling that any arguments for would look insane. Nukes aren't much better.
The arguments against renewables are purely opportunistic and political.
We need clean energy now, not 10/20/50 years from now. We could have clean energy with some fairly cheap local build out - panels over carparks, for example - combined with regional power farms, and buffered with existing storage technologies and an improved grid.
Sounds good, but even in the most optimistic scenario it will take decades to build out significant storage capacity and the supporting grid improvements. None of that will be cheap. Expect electricity prices to continue rising even as the cost of solar generation falls.
It may be decades to hit 100%, but the grid can be 90% carbon free reasonably quickly at which point there’s far less need to hurry.
Further, the economics will dictate what happens not just our current predictions. It makes a real difference if solar panels are 25% or 30% efficient in 2035+ similarly how flexible demand for charging EV’s is and how expensive battery storage ends up being etc.
Given the sheer thermodynamic effect of the earth's rotation I have to ask what would it even take to get 2 weeks without wind? It would probably take at least globe spanning superconductors or very careful heating of the world to ensure constant temperatures in order to not have wind from the temperature cycling. That is 'Dyson sphere builders fooling around with their power for laughs' territory.
Also Commonwealth Fusion Systems put out a lot of interesting stuff about how they are going. Even having a look at their YouTube channel is worthwhile.
Metaculus has a lot of stuff on predictions about when fusion will be made viable :
It's detailed, but dated. Most of the graphs stop between 2000 and 2005. Yet the article is from 2024. Somebody took the easy way out and copied and pasted old graphs, probably.
Whatever happened to Lockheed's compact fusion program?[1]
My long run prediction is that ITER will work and everything people on HN kept insisting would work in 5 years will suffer a similar fate.
I'll stake my claim now that I think Helion is probably not going anywhere (just a vibe, but there's something off about their recent big marketing push).
ITER will "work" in the sense of achieving its goals, but that will all ultimately be pointless, as it's a dead end. A device with a volumetric power density 400x lower than a PWR cannot conceivably lead to a competitive energy source.
From 2 years ago. Large region of Australia running fully on solar/wind/storage for 10+ days. Seems like the focus has to be on storage and continued improvement of grid-scale and rooftop solar and wind.
South Australia has just chalked up what is undoubtedly a world first – a run of
more than 10 consecutive days over which the average production of wind and solar
accounted for 100 per cent of local demand.
No other gigawatt scale grid in the world has come close to this amount of “variable
renewable energy”, or for such a long time.
RenewEconomy reported on Monday that South Australia had just enjoyed a seven day
run of wind and solar that produced more than 104 per cent of average demand. Closer
inspection proved it was even more impressive than that.
According to Geoff Eldridge at data providers GPE NemLog2, the supply of wind and
solar averaged 100 per cent of local demand for 10 days and 9 hours (a total of 249
hours) from 08:20 on Friday, December 9, to 1720, Monday, December 19. [1]
Those sounds interesting and is likely a nice achievement, but averages really hide the critical information here. What was the min and max, and how did they deal with periods of low supply?
Denmark is a nice example why this matter. During optimal weather their wind power produce around twice their local demand. However, in terms of actually consumption each year they need to import about 50% of their total amount of energy. This despite the fact that they export more energy than they import. The only way that would make mathematically sense is if export and import occur during different periods over the year.
This has multiple issues. The biggest being that they are heavily dependent on nearby countries fossil fueled power plants. A secondary problem is that prices they get for exports are low, since optimal weather conditions means a general surplus of energy in EU, while periods of bad weather results low supply and very high import costs. Their exports do not pay for their imports, despite exporting more than importing (in terms of energy, not money).
One can not remove the word averages and conclude that they ran fully on solar/wind/storage for 10+ days. It would be the same as saying that Denmark is running fully on wind a decade+.
Why would ChatGPT have any idea about this at all? Its dataset wasn't made up of estimations for energy funds, and it makes absolutely no sense to ask it about that? I'm not sure why these figures or even their ratio would be trustworthy.
ChatGPT didn't use it's dataset for the numbers sourced in the linked chat. That said you do have to still go validate the sources it finds and see they say it says what they say it says, which I don't think is true for the second claim.
It's more terrifying that people have claims about things they didn't even check. Why exactly is it bad? Do you really think that a human quickly skimming few web pages is better than a bot quickly skimming few web pages? Or did you think it's pulling the data from its trained weights?
People slam this for being ChatGPT but I wonder how often the references it finds on the web are more relevant than ones in this [1] style of HN [2] comment that often get to the top of this type of thread yet lack any deep analysis either. Slamming it for not validating the sources support the claim at least makes sense but isn't really specific to the ChatGPT fixation.
Perhaps somewhat telling on that is the comments are focusing on how the source was found rather than debating or correcting the figures themselves. The first figure sourced seems both accurately sourced and accurately estimated. The second figure I'm having trouble finding in the linked source and the figure seems to be more based on renewable energy investment not renewable energy research. I'm also having a hard time finding any good source for current renewable energy research investment to replace that with though so I can't say much in regards to how the final conclusion fairs.
The problem has nothing to do with how you're finding your sources and everything to do with the lack of bothering to verify and understand them properly. What does it matter if you got your source list from tea leaves so long as you validate the information in the sources?
Nothing replaces actually going out and verifying anything yourself (yet) but that doesn't make tools which do a first past somehow to blame for someone's laziness while tools that put no effort in at all are supposed to be just fine.
That is an apples to oranges comparison. You are comparing r&d on an emerging technology to deployment of a mature technology. Its like spending on developing a new plane to purchasing an existing one.
We need to rebrand chatgpt and this generation of AI as "the Internet (tm)."
"Asking the Internet and it says..." Well, yeah, the Internet is full of crazy ideas and people untethered from reality and scientific inquiry. But enough people have put samples of things we do know, so sometimes The Internet gets things right.
ChatGPT fails miserably at questions like this. It cherrypicks various data points and arbitrarily runs sums.on them, convoluting nuance and meaning, conflating disparate or overlapping measures, and presents them as fact.
Always ask it to quote all its sources, and check them.
Cumulative funding required for demonstration commercial fusion reactor
Was compelling. Belief we're prepared to invest seems lacking.
I think achieving multi second "stable" plasma conditions has been amazing. But, I think that's a cigarette lighter held next to petrified wood (to use an atomic bomb era analogy) away from ignition as a useful energy over time equation.
We're also somewhat behind "what's embrittlement" or "what's xenon poisoning" problems. Things which don't emerge until a few months in your life of run-time. Again, from early fission reactor design, these things can sink a project.
Or, unexpected fission or other nasty behaviours. Things which make it hard to get inside the structure to fix it. The unknown unknowns in this feel huge. But, linear energy in, energy out, and the approach to viable ignition temperature. That's science and engineering at its best.
> cigarette lighter held next to petrified wood (to use an atomic bomb era analogy)
Can you, or anyone, explain the lore here? I get it's impossible to light it on fire, but what's the context? I tried searching for the expression and couldn't find anything.
George Gamow found a way to dramatize how unpromising Teller’s Super had proven to be. John McPhee reports the story as Los Alamos physicist Theodore Taylor remembered it. “One day, at a meeting of people who were working on the problem of the fusion bomb . . . Gamow placed a ball of cotton next to a piece of wood. He soaked the cotton with lighter fuel. He struck a match and ignited the cotton. It flashed and burned, a little fireball. The flame failed completely to ignite the wood, which looked just as it had before—unscorched, unaffected. Gamow passed it around. It was petrified wood. He said, ‘That is where we are just now in the development of the hydrogen bomb.’
I think there’s some possibly good investment advice to extract here, if you’re able and willing to invest in fusion startups: based on the need to compete with renewables alone, commercial success implies that highly complex reactors simply may not have a market based on construction cost, even if they do generate power.
Of the fusion startups mentioned in the article, I’d say that makes Zap Energy the one worth gambling on (if you’re a gambler that is), as its success apparently depends on exploiting a fluid dynamics effect which was not well known in the past (“shear flow”). If this sufficiently solves the confinement problem, the resulting device looks ludicrously simple in comparison to contemporaries.
Of course it may not work at all, I sure don’t know if it will; but if you had to invest in one of these, that seems like the one where successful power generation actually creates a marketable product.
I think a line from the end of the article - part of the bear case - "fusion is just another in a long line of energy technologies that boil water to drive a turbine" - should be at the start.
The entire premise of fusion generation is based on world view where the limiting factor for generating electricity was the cost of providing fuel for combustion to generate heat. This thinking was pretty natural if you looked around the world in the first half of the 20th century when coal and steam engines were still kings of energy. This was a pre-semiconductor and pre-plastic age. That's why they ended up using long of fairly primitive technologies: a chemical (combustion) process to generate heat, a heat capture process to boil a tank of water, a mechanical process to convert the steam pressure into mechanical energy, and an electro-magnetic process to extract usable electricity.
But in an age of advanced materials and semiconductors, it feels more and more that fusion is an attempt to solve a problem that is no longer really relevant. Working towards a "better" heat source for an electricity generation process which still involves steam-age tech is akin to trying to breed faster/cheaper horses to improve modern transport.
The cost of fuel is almost negligible for fission - non-fuel operating costs are killing off perfectly functioning nuclear plants like at Indian Point[1] - so the problem that fusion will "solve" is not actually a significant problem.
I'm convinced that we have moved beyond boiling water and generating heat, etc. in electricity generation. We no longer need massive steam engines to generate electricity. Modern technologies like wind, solar and batteries dispense with all this cost and complexity and the shackles of Carnot efficiency.
Neither semiconductors nor plastics shift the energy generation paradigm. "Advanced materials"- alright, well, which ones? And do they give us a better return than good old steam?
Wind, solar and batteries are products of combustion-fueled industry. The extent to which we have electrified the world industrial base is minimal, and to do so at the current scale on the basis of wind and solar would take a larger quantity of several metals than is available in the crust, to set aside the consequences of a massive expansion in mining, the poor recycling rates for most of the relevant materials, and the fact that, even with a much-improved recovery rate, this would only buy us on the order of several hundred years.
A more promising energy production system for a resource-limited world is thorium molten salt, which is comfortably Carnot in spirit, relatively cheap and easy to build, fuel and operate, no danger of meltdown, no "dual-use" for weapons, can consume existing nuclear waste... And we would do well to explore alternative battery chemistries as lithium is neither unique nor optimal, simply popular, and our hunger for it at present seems to be motivating some unpleasant political machinations.
You really believe it would have been possible to construct a modern wind turbine with the materials available in 1950?
Yes they do give a much better return than any thermal source according to any recent study of LCOE I've come across. Reflected in investment numbers - renewables account for 70% of new global capacity added last year.
Wind, solar and batteries are products of an energy intensive process NOT a combustion based process.
The shift to electricity as the primary energy source is well underway in multiple industries and sectors. Growth appears slow because industrial equipment is built to last decades. In transport (equally as energy hungry as industry), it's happening a lot faster as with domestic (induction cooking and heat pump sales).
Thorium molten salt, promising? You mean they were back in the 1950s/1960s in Oak Ridge? The first experimental molten salt reactor ran for a few days before springing a leak and being decommissioned. Or the later one in the 1960s which ran for 4 years (only managing to operate for 40% of the time)? There's a whole bunch of reasons that the PWR emerged as the dominant nuclear generation tech from forest of experimental reactor designs in the mid 20th century.
> You really believe it would have been possible to construct a modern wind turbine with the materials available in 1950?
Sure, modern materials make for a more modern wind turbine. But they don't shift the paradigm. Nothing has since fission, right?
> Wind, solar and batteries are products of an energy intensive process NOT a combustion based process.
The fact remains that energy intensive industry is currently accomplished mainly via combustion. The degree of electrification is small and an effort to fully electrify faces what appear to be prohibitive resource limitations. If you have any ideas on this point I would be interested to hear them.
Electrification is happening in personal transport. We have made minimal progress towards an electric shipping fleet, electric air travel, electric trucking, etc. And if we do begin to make serious progress, it will come with serious environmental (and likely political) costs.
Oak Ridge was a testbed. The Chinese have an MSR that has been selling power to the grid for several years. Copenhagen Atomics is building them to fit into shipping containers. Is this not enough to prove the technology viable? The main reason traditional fission became dominant, as I understand, is that it allowed nuclear-capable nations to conceal nuclear weapons programs with energy programs. And once the supply chain and institutional expertise gets some inertia, it is hard to change tracks.
Modern wind turbines absolutely have shifted the paradigm - both in size, efficiency and durability. Across the globe, demand for new turbines in the market is insatiable. No other electricity generation technology (even nuclear in its heyday back in the 1980s) has grown as fast as wind has in the last 15 years - although I expect it's soon to be overtaken by PV growth. It's likely that this year the amount of electricity consumed globally from wind turbines (around 2.5TWh) will match that of nuclear reactors despite nuclear's 60 year head start in grid scale operations.
But the most obvious difference, and that which contributes most to the paradigm shift, is the difference in price.
The existence of technology alone isn't enough to shift any paradigm - the tech has to be relatively cheap - transistors were a curiosity until they became cheap and then they shifted the paradigm, same thing happened with integrated circuits and nearly every technology breakthrough in history.
Batteries, PV and wind turbines are mass-produced and their prices are falling as you'd expect given the expansion in production (between 80% and 95% in the last 15 years). This has been the way since Henry Ford and is not going to change. What is also inevitable is that once mass-production is introduced into any human endeavour, then the existing technology is doomed.
The TMSR-LF1 in China has not being selling into the grid for several years. It was never envisaged to do so - it's absolutely tiny (only 2MW) and it's intended that it will operate intermittently for the first 5 or more years before they try running it continuously. This is a science experiment, not a viable commercial reactor. The 2nd Oak Ridge reactor back in the 1960s was 7 or 8 times bigger - although it never managed to run properly and only ever achieved 7MW of output.
I really don't understand why thorium liquid salt reactor enthusiasm is widespread. It's just one of endless reactor designs which failed to make it into commercial operation because of a host of genuine technical/engineering reasons. Just read the wikipedia page[1] - the list of disadvantages is longer than the list of advantages. For every problem it solves, it introduces several more.
It's not enough to count the problems in the list, you also weigh the ones it solves against those it introduces. I'm not a nuclear engineer, but none of the issues seem insurmountable, and some are addressed in modern designs. I see a few big advantages:
1) Apparently much lower resource requirements for construction, maintenance, and mining/refining the fuel, than for traditional nuclear power, and also (!) the wind and solar equivalent. We don't have the metals, as far as we know, to maintain a fleet of wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries for very long without an almost perfect recycling rate.
2) Some designs can consume spent nuclear fuel. This is a more cost-effective (and more sane) option for disposing nuclear waste than burying it.
3) Steady availability. Wind and solar are unreliable, so you need a buffer, which means batteries (or pumped hydro, or rapidly spinning hunks of metal, or something).
Mass production is a force to be reckoned with, and the cost of wind and solar has fallen relative to other power sources, but given the dominance (still) of combustion, this not only reflects economies of scale in manufacturing wind/solar equipment, which I don't by any means deny, but it reflects also the rising costs of of legacy fuels. It is not getting easier to find coal, oil, or many of the metals we use to manufacture energy systems and the material economies they sustain.
It seems to me we need an energy system that can function reliably in a world facing resource shortages and other stressors, and in this context smaller scale, modular power plants may even be an advantage.
I know TMSR-LF1 is small and a research program; I thought it had sold some power, but might have been misinformed
This is why I call them the "least dubious" fusion effort. Sure, things have to break right for them to succeed, but at least they have a chance, unlike tokamaks.
At this point I would bet against commercial fusion power plants. It was always questionable if they would be cost competitive with fission power plants, but now even those are being replaced by renewables and grid storage.
The bigger problem is that fusion plants aren't useful for making weapons. Fission plants were basically a side project of the nuclear arms race, which is why they're a dying industry now. The world already has all of the nuclear bombs it will ever need and despite all of the promises they never managed to compete on cost. It's so much easier and cheaper to install wind turbines, solar panels, and grid scale batteries that there will probably never be a market for a commercial fusion power plant.
Strong Wind doesn't exist on asteroids and many planets, so I think there will be a long term need. Solar power decreases with the cube root of distance from the sun,so twice the distance is 1/8th the flux
Nitpick: Radiation decreases with the square of the distance (twice the distance, 1/4 the energy). This is because the surface of a sphere (which is where energy is collected) is 2D, not 3D.
I'm not concerned about commercially viable space colonies in my lifetime.
The real reason for fusion was that fission is not a renewable resource. In a few thousand years there will be a fuel problem with fission and we would be forced to switch to fusion if we had a fully nuclear power system.
I'm entirely content on relying on sci-fi energy production for a few thousand years from now.
This might sound like the same attitude that put us in our present climate crisis, but that was on the order of decades to centuries. Thousands of years include such unbelievable potential of technological development that there seems no point in trying to predict the actual challenges we'll face.
Interestingly enough, some of the advancements in fusion research and lasers may help with fission waste fuel recycling. [1] Though breeder reactors might end up being more economical.
So replacing old infrastructure is now an investment? There are just many reactors EoL and I'd say replacing those is not a sign that nuclear is booming right now.
I would bet against it. We haven't even built one of the key facilities to test the materials that we would hope to make a fusion reactor from. Once built, it will still take 20 years or so (as I recall) to come to some conclusions about suitable materials.
The sun is able to use gravity containment. Terrestrial fusion has to use magnetic and physical containment. The extremely high energy neutrons produced rapidly deteriorate common engineering materials. A replacement schedule is very difficult because of induced radioactivity, which means that the reactor cladding would need to be replaced by robots most likely.
Given how rapidly the price of batteries and solar are falling, it seems absurd to think it will make any economic sense to spend tens of billions of dollars on a monster fusion plant.
China are churning out regular old fission plants, and have 27 under construction right now. Even still, the average build time is 7 years.
So even if we get some breakthrough and figure out how to build a commercial fusion plant, it's a certainty it won't be up and running for something like 10-15 years. Solar and batteries will be so cheap there won't be any discussions.
Prices are decreasing much slower now. At this pace, large scale energy storage for replacing stable energy sources like coal and fission power plants is far out of reach.
If you look at the beginning of the chart, the price decrease (from $780 to $258 in 2017) over the same four year period was 67%. And for 2023 it was only 24%. So progress has slowed a lot. In 2022 there was even a year-over-year price increase. That's bad news when you want to build massive energy storage systems that can replace power plants.
I'm saying that prices are falling increasingly more slowly and that using solar+batteries to replace coal, gas and fission power plants will probably not happen.
Solar and wind energy are impossible without stable energy sources like coal or fission. Solar and wind energy are highly volatile, and battery energy storage is far too expensive.
You already said that, and you're ignoring the fact that many countries are switching from coal and nuclear to renewables, thanks in part to the rapidly falling prices.
This is irrelevant to what we were discussing originally. Neither the UK nor any other country does have battery storage of the size of major power plants. Those are required to provide stable energy. Otherwise the power would go out during calm or in the night.
Probably nobody notices it, but the article called Juan Domingo Peron to be a dictator. I get it, some detractors might say that. But that's hardly the truth. From wikipedia:
> Perón is the only Argentine president elected three times and holds the highest percentage of votes (61.86%) in clean elections with universal suffrage.
I hope not. If we find a way to convert water into bitcoins cheaply, we will rapidly boil the oceans. This will be worse than global warming. The biosphere can re-evolve after a CO2 and temperature spike, but all known forms of life require water.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. You are absolutely right that we likely would end up boiling ourselves, and articles like those below have been discussed here on HN several times:
Worked with a bunch of plasma physics postdocs in the early 90s, and fusion was 30 years away... checks calendar... 34 years ago. And that was the joke then.
However, with advances like REBCO tape and so on, it's far more realistic now. I hope we get it in my lifetime, but I'm not confident.
I left the world of protein folding in 1987 (quit my PhD) because I was certain that workable solutions were at least 25 years away, and I didn't think I was that kind of person to beat my head against a problem for more than two decades.
By 2013 (25 years later), still no real progress on protein folding.
there is some fundamental thing that attracts humans to big things.
technical challenges aside, fusion power as a research + building + disvtributil project is so expensive - for the same amount of money we could already build a decentralized solution out of over-abundant solar cells, but it seems looking for the one big thing is still more interesting.
In 100,000 years from now, after we're past the next ice age, archeologists will unearth tokamaks all around the world. Regular people will speculate aliens and a worldwide connection between the peoples of the world to explain the multiple occurrences.
They'll have unlimited energy based on some quantum shit.
They will assume they are religious centres like the stone circles found elsewhere. In 100,000 years, the difference between 2000AD and 3000BC is quite small.
Note that this is not because the iron there is ferromagnetic (iron loses its ferromagnetism at its Curie temperature, which is far below the temperature of the Earth's core) but because the iron there is liquid, and convection in the core, interacting with magnetic fields, induces electrical currents that generate the field, the "geodynamo". This process is highly nonlinear and not well understood.
Hopefully nobody reads this comment of mine, but there's something I've been drying to get off my chest.
With no evidence, I believe that there is a quantum computing algorithm for fusion. It feels like there might be some way of using quantum computers to fuse "qubits" in such a way as to generate netenergy, one particle at a time.
But of course, ancients fantasized a boat could land on the moon.
I'm also very excited for Arcologies. Well, not the dark one with a Morlock-like race wandering its labyrinthine tunnels. The bright ones with lots of greenery. Or maybe I just want more Singapore.
We already have a zero maintenance fusion power plant that will last billions of years and that outputs millions of times more energy per second than humanity uses in a year.
We already have technology that can take the electromagnetic waves this fusion power plant produces and directly convert it into electricity without needing pesky intermediaries like boiling water to turn a turbine.
This technology is relatively cheap to produce, extraordinarily safe, can last for decades with minor maintenance, can scale almost indefinitely, and there are many practical improvements we can make to it that are going to applied commercially in years and not decades.
I don't doubt that trying to achieve commercially viable fusion is a worthy engineering and science challenge and that we will learn and develop many useful technologies along the the way - but fusion is probably the hardest engineering challenge humanity has ever attempted and after many decades of R&D there is still no clear path to commercial viability.
Solar panels today work, and they work well, and we can practically throw endless amounts of money building them and it will work. Today. And we needed solutions that work today, not 50 years from now... maybe.
I think it's clear that solar panels, while working today, clearly haven't been able to solve today's problems, or else this discussion wouldn't be happening. But we should keep investing in them, one way or another.
Similarly, we should keep investing in the prospect of commercially viable fusion reactors. The harnessing of fusion reactors would be instantly revolutionary as opposed to the incremental progress solar promises. Therein lies the difference. Once is not necessarily better than the other.
I would say it’s clear that solar panels are absolutely working extremely well today, at least as long as you don’t live too close to the poles.
Renewables all together is growing faster than nuclear ever did. And solar is now a huge part of that.
We have models where solar or solar+wind is providing all the power to everything from small remote weather stations through houses to large islands. Some small countries and regions are getting close too.
It’s clear that we have all the technologies we need to do 100% renewables. There’s studies that indicate that the long term costs of this is lower than the traditional fossil and nuclear energy infrastructure. We just need to build the factories to continue scaling up. And of course the transition is more expensive than it’ll be when we just maintain and expand on the system.
I'm fine with gas plants available on standby. If they run 1% of the time, then they are no longer a significant contributor to climate change.
Even if they have to run 10% of the time, we've still taken an enormous cut out of greenhouse gases. We would turn our attention to many other sources of greenhouse gas (agriculture, concrete, transportation, etc.)
Batteries have huge potential, simply due to the fact that they're so broadly defined - must store energy, output it as electricity on demand, and be cheap. There's a high chance that we find some way to make grid-scale batteries extremely cheaply, in the future.
In the mean time, getting to 90% will basically stop climate change in its tracks, giving us time to research dirt-cheap batteries.
It doesn't even have to always be electricity on demand, sometimes we also need heat. I wonder if heat storage will be a thing we'll have in the households (or maybe it's enough to have it in district heating facilities?).
Less then 99% means not having a working fridge for 3-12 hours or more in 30c heat so there went all your perishable foods. It means no lights in the house will work. No cooling or heating of any kind. No computers. No phone. None of your other random applicances will work either. None of the stuff you use to navigate a city like street lights will be working. Of course it can be mitigate with a generator or an expensive battery bank with solar panels provided you don't have a large enough load. Of course solar panels only work during the day so if the outage lasted into the night then you better hope to have a large enough bank to power all your essential equipment.
Suffice to say, less then 99% available is pretty terrible. You should come down and talk to a South African.
The historical trend line https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline, that those involved in this business seem optimistic that this will continue into the future, and that I am not aware of any technical barriers preventing that (even with no technological breakthroughs it seems likely that we would continue to see declining costs for some time even just due to economies of scale).
If we had one hour per day without power that would be about 95% availability. Most of us wouldn't even notice that if it happened in the middle of the night.
If we had 100% availability with an 18-day stretch without power that would be about 95% availability, but it would be hugely disruptive.
Why? I don’t agree that wouldn’t be at all acceptable.
And even > 90% would be very expensive to achieve in winter in much of Europe (of course there are alternatives to solar so it’s not such a huge issue)
Go to a country with just that and witness how stupidly wasteful it is to have an energy grid with regular outages. Everyone who can afford it has an expensive backup generator, batteries, etc.
For industry, it's a disaster.
I live off-grid, with solar and LifePo4, but I'm not naive enough to think that would scale to an economy any time soon. And for the record, no below 99% availability should be seen as unacceptable.
The implication is that it's a voluntary political decision to forgo more reliable sources of electricity. There's basically zero chance of that happening in any political entity, hence that expectation is optimistic.
Of course, it frequently happens involuntarily, and just saying "get used to it" is pessimistic, as you say.
Both reflect the same thing: it's politically untenable to voluntarily accept poor reliability of electricity supply.
Solar power can 100% solve our energy needs today. It’s cost effective at the unit level. It works at scale. It decentralizes nicely.
Did I mention that it works?
Every home could have rooftop solar for less than it costs to produce centralized power plants. (I have rooftop solar and it cost significantly less than a new car now my power costs won’t go up for 20 years at which point the panels might need a refresh but that part of the system is the cheapest part)
We could easily flip from subsidizing fossil fuels to subsidizing rooftop solar today and realize significant gains (higher roi by shifting the investment). If you spent one years investment in fusion and fossil fuel subsidies on deploying rooftop solar and grid scale batteries you’d change the energy story permanently.
Energy would suddenly be plentiful. Fossil fuels would permanently shift out of relevance.
Fission reactors would look like quaint and staggeringly expensive tools of a bygone age. And fusion which DOES NOT WORK. Would look even more like a silly dream.(We are no closer to fusion than we were 30 years ago.)
Why the fuck are we still talking about fusion when we have something that works?
I agree with everything you say about rooftop solar. If you have a suitably unshaved roof, and you are in a reasonably sunny climate, the current economic math works. And as energy costs go up, and capital costs come down it works better all the time.
That said, we still need a grid to distribute electricity to places that consume more energy than roof space. Think apartment blocks, factories etc. And yes, a huge chunk of that load can still be supplied by grid-scale solar and wind etc.
Even with large-scale storage (another fruitful place to spent investment money) there's going to need to be peak-generation.
However you look at it, I don't think fusion will be the answer. Since fusion was first proposed and the landscape of requirements have shifted. By the time it's practical, it'll be solving a problem we dont have.
The science may lead to a working reactor. But no one will build it at scale because it simply won't solve the problem well have then.
Grid scale storage has lagged behind solar and wind generation, but it's starting to catch up. By the time we have a viable commercial fusion power plant all of the grid storage issues will have been long since solved.
Luckily about 50% of the Earth is lit up by the sun at any moment and energy storage capabilities are advancing much faster than fusion's capabilities are.
Distribution and storage are way more tractable problems than fusion.
If you want to be really ambitious you can go to space and have 100% capacity :).
Unless you colonize it, you cannot utilize 50% of the Earth's energy. If it proven anything, what the war in Ukraine showed us is how terrible of an idea to outsource energy, especially to nations who don't share interests with us.
It would be interesting if there was a global grid and market for (hopefully clean) energy so that a joule of energy could be sold anywhere instantaneously, just like any other commodity. This would allow countries to quickly power up without even building a power plant. It would also allow large base load power stations (like nuclear) to have permanent demand.
Of course there are technical challenges of building out UHVDC everywhere. This probably means a joule isn’t perfectly fungible.
Perhaps Europe’s problem was being overly reliant on only one supplier.
A global and free market for electricity means that African citizens are going to have to outbid bitcoin miners and ai trainers for electricity.
I would much rather see a world where governments are at least partially in charge of the grid to ensure that their population gets their share of the capacity.
It will be almost impossible to not outbid bitcoin miners for electricity due to the fact that mining is a non-geographically constrained free market where miners are not profitable unless their electricity cost is very close to zero (i.e. otherwise wasted energy). As soon as there's other demand for the same energy, bitcoin mining will instantly become unprofitable in that area and they will need to relocate.
Needing the sun for energy and improving solar panel feels like trying to make the best ICE engine ten years ago or working on an expert system for AI in the 90s. There are obvious immediate gains in the short term, but research has shown there is something else better out there and its best if someone is doing the R&D now so we can get a leap frog moment eventually.
Improving solar panels might be nice, but the panels themselves are a cheap part of the system. And the big gains have already been made.
Solar panels are now being produced and install at gigawatt scale. Per year. (Over 400gw per year, and climbing). Capital is being supplied by individuals (rooftop) and companies (utilities).
I'm not sure what leap-frog tech you have in mind, but its not fusion.
In the 60s fusion was touted as "free energy for all". But fusion is very (very) much not "free". The cost of a fusion plant will make your eyes water. The lead-time to build it will be measured in years. The output from one plant won't move the needle (we'd need hundreds of them). Electricity from these plants will be expensive, because at the very least it'll need to generate a return to the investors. And that's before we factor in running costs which (I guess) won't be cheap.
The problem with fusion is not physics, it's economics. As long as we present fusion as a physics problem interest remains. Because once we view it as an economics problem it dies overnight.
Will orbiting solar panels ever work? Now that starship is viable, payload cost to orbit will dramatically drop. Is it cheaper to have orbiting solar plants than solar/battery(or whatever long term energy storage)?
It’s that baseload problem which makes the manmade fusion/fission attractive.
For a space based solution you have all the costs of solar, plus launch costs, plus the receivers are very large and costly themselves.
It’s never going to be cheaper than solar, but it does have the advantage of working at night and through cloud cover.
In the very long run it might make more sense to launch whatever’s using the power into space as well, saving on the cost of the transmission and receiving infrastructure, but also removing further sources of pollution from Earth.
So you have orbiting panels that will do what? Beam the energy back to earth? Isn't the sun beaming energy to earth directly? What problems do orbiting panels solve?
I actually don't think space based solar to beam it back to Earth will ever really be practical short of a space-elevator style tether to transmit the electricity down. But some of the pros would be as follows.
* Capable of 100% capacity - power generation can be 24/7/365 if in orbits around the sun or stationed at the Earth-Sun Lagrange points.
* Greater panel efficiency - less energy lost to the atmosphere that can be captured by the panels, closer orbits will increase efficiency even more due to more power/area
* Surface area - minimum 1x10^20 square kilometers of area you can build panels
There are of course many cons - but it could be a vital part to a space based industry - you need a lot of fuel or power to really do anything in space, and the power from space based solar could to be used to kickstart a fuel production facility off Earth. Fun stuff but not very terrestrially relevant.
EDIT: Some more numbers: You get about 40% more power/area in space vs on the ground.
You need about ~22 TW to "power" humanity. So you need about 70,000 km^2 of space based solar assuming 25% end to end efficiency, which might be a generous estimate. So lets round it to 100,000 km^2. But thats a significantly smaller area than the terrestrial equivalent of about 500,000 km^2. Right now it costs about $1B installed for a square kilometer solar installation, so we if can build solar panels on the Moon or something anywhere close to the same cost as on Earth (very very BIG if), potentially a difference of $400T dollars at todays terrestrial prices.
> You get about 40% more power/area in space vs on the ground. You need about ~22 TW to "power" humanity. So you need about 70,000 km^2 of space […]. So lets round it to 100,000 km^2. But thats a significantly smaller area than the terrestrial equivalent of about 500,000 km^2.
Those number are inconsistent with each other. Seems you calculated with 400% more power/area in space vs on the ground. That seems incorrect to me, as it would make space solar convert close to 100% of incident solar energy to electricity.
Ground based solar has a capacity factor of about ~25% depending on ___location, while a space based installation would have nearly a 100% capacity factor. So to generate the same amount of energy per year you need about 4x as many panels on the ground. I probably should not have said power but instead something like exajoules/year.
Another important issue is that in space, PV can be extremely thin. The actual active layer of semiconductor can be maybe 50 microns (for silicon) or less than 1 micron (for CdTe). This also suggests solar-powered electric propulsion in space can have high acceleration, limited by heat dissipation in the engine.
"With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive."
We call that the 'night' and our battery tech is improving enormously. Personally I hope solar becomes so cheap that mechanical batteries become popular - pumped resevoirs, inexplicable wood flywheel
Or winter sufficiently close to the north pole (i.e. significant proportion of Europe). Days get short and it’s usually cloudy so solar becomes extremely inefficient.
Over-provisioning by 7x might not be extremely practical.
I guess there is a lot of space in Spain that could be filled with solar panels (production only falls by ~50% there in winter so it’s not to bad) but there is certainly not enough grid capacity to transfer all of that north (and building new infrastructure is painfully slow and expensive in Europe so it will take a few decades to solve that)
My point is that solar is only a part of the solution and wind/etc. is probably more practical and more important in much of Europe.
Only applies to single-junction cells. 68%-efficient solar panels are quite theoretically possible, they'll just be incredibly difficult to manufacture cheaply. The current world record for solar panel efficiency is 47.6%.
I agree, however the author is convinced about current popular solar panel technology.
Indeed even theoretically we can do 86% multi and 99% with quantum dots——in the current state of technology these remain science fiction considering the commercial manufacturing processes available.
Sure there are many novel solar technologies that subvert the SQ assumptions thereby avoiding the conclusion. However, the author of the parent post believes that existing technology today is sufficient.
I think claiming that it is an ecological disaster is catastrophizing at best and certainly subjective. The ecological impacts involved in coal mining, oil drilling et al., are much worse than installing some solar panels that can easily be ripped out and let nature recover the land if we so wanted.
Humanity will get the energy in one form or another, solar panels certainly seems less damaging than fossil fuels. The land will either be dug up for resources, or paved away for a power plant regardless. In addition, solar panels can be put up basically everywhere in an urban environment - an area already "destroyed" by human occupation - there are many many viable locations for solar outside of deserted wastelands.
replacing it with endless sheets of silicon wafers literally injected with heavy metals of your preference, be it gallium or cadmium or arsenic(PVs are photodiodes; it's created by doping silicon coated substrates), which is polar opposite of environmentalist attitude.
Doped silicon is a solid and stable material - it can't leach out into the environment. In addition, the dopants are in very low concentration (on the order of 1 atom per million), you can ground the silicon to dust and not make a significant impact to the soil's concentration of the dopants. Also, gallium/cadmium/arsenic are not common dopants for silicon based photovoltaics, so you might be conflating dopants and GaAs based PVs, which are not used in large installations due to their cost. Silicon is cheap, plentiful, and safe.
basically zero environmental resistance too[2] and don't last a year. In case it's not clear, `less than a year` is at most 10% of a decade.
This is blatantly false. The vast majority of solar panel installations last longer than a year. Is your point that nature will find a way to destroy a man made creation therefore it is a poor choice? Sorry to say that NOTHING is immune to the whims of the environment.
Conversion efficiency of solar panels is also capped to ~30% by "chemistry" of Si-based PV, which is lower than even typical hybrid ICE cars.
The conversion efficiency of most power plants are limited by the Carnot cycle - and in practice are about ~40% efficient. So yes - while a Si only panel that only captures that single bandgap is capped at about ~29% - most forms of power generation are not THAT much more efficient relative to the complexity and cost of operation. There are no other commercially viable forms of energy generation that is a solid state material with no moving parts.
Solar cells had only ever worked in extremely mild climate such as California, surfaces of Mars, and inner orbits[3] of Solar system. There's no prospect that that will change soon.
I would not say Mars has an "extremely mild climate". I certainly would not go outside in my beach outfit. Solar cells work basically anywhere where the sun shines.
The ecological impacts involved in coal mining, oil drilling et al.,
Those aren't fusion powers. The context is nuke vs solar.
The vast majority of solar panel installations last longer than a year. Is your point that nature will find a way to destroy a man made creation therefore it is a poor choice? Sorry to say that NOTHING is immune to the whims of the environment.
I would not say Mars has an "extremely mild climate". I certainly would not go outside in my beach outfit. Solar cells work basically anywhere where the sun shines.
We're getting news stories of solar cell installation ripped out nearly every year and environmental issues in-between, in Japan. Every year we get typhoons or earthquakes or severe rainstorms, and every time it wipes out a mass solar installation or two. "Solar cells work basically anywhere" is just so plainly false unless your definition of `anywhere` is confined to continental US.
The reason why it works on Mars and the reason why I said it has "extremely mild climate" is simple; there's no routine earthquakes, surface water, seasonal rainstorms, or atmosphere for that matter. That makes it mild for machines like solar cells, just not for humans.
But in ways I define "weather" and "land", solar cells don't seem to work with any level of those whatsoever.
IIRC, the sum total of all fusion research throughout all of history is USD$100-200B. It's obvious governments/industry/humanity doesn't really want it, or they'd go fund it.
The lack of funding angle isn't really convincing.
Modern designs depend on material science and computing abilities which could never have been made in the 70's no matter how much money was thrown at it.
Fusion-relevant materials research could have absolutely advanced with funding back in the 70s. Lithium compatible structural material and 14MeV neutron source experiments immediately come to mind, not to mention tritium permeation and extraction. There was tonnes to learn, and they chose not to fund it.
You could put teleportation on that bottom squiggle as well. Sometimes you stop funding things because it isn't physically possible or we have better alternatives.
There's absolutely no reason to believe that fusion power is impossible. It being very, very difficult and very, very expensive to reach a practical system is the problem.
But you're right about better alternatives. Right now that alterative is a combination of solar, wind, hydro and storage, with perhaps a bit of more exotic systems (wave power? solar towers?) in the mix.
No. We never will. Simply ran out of time. Electricity will be provided fully by renewables only in EU and China in a timeframe shorter than it takes to build a new nuclear reactor of already well-debugged type, from scratch - let alone a thermonuclear one for which no designs exist. We are speaking 2035-2040 to fully get rid of fossil fuels in electricity grid, and 2030-2035 before they are reduced to low (10-20%) levels.
It took 12 years to build first unit of Belarusian NPP - of a type that's been built by the dozen for decades, and in a country where all-powerful government controls and owns everything, there is no NIMBY or the "society" thing in the Western understanding at all, and where if you try to protest you just disappear. Can't be done faster. By 2036, fossil fuel electricity will be a thing of the past in some places, and quickly disappearing in all others.
In reality electricity in China will NOT "be provided fully by renewables".
The country's current fleet stands at 56 reactors. China expects to build 6 to 8 new nuclear power plants each year for the foreseeable future and is projected to pass the U.S. in nuclear-generated electricity by 2030. In total, China intends to build a total of 150 new nuclear reactors between 2020 and 2035.
China has an impressive expansion of solar. That's a fact.
China is also expanding coal power stations (while closing older shitty coal stations) to provide base energy for its planned and ongoing expansion of both solar and nuclear.
Currently something of the order of 60% of the energy requirement of building solar (for local use and for global supply) in China comes directly from coal power.
I'm all for renewables, it's the sensible direction.
Well ok, in 10-15 years all fossil and nuclear electricity in China will be a drop in the bucket. They will probably be commissioning a terawatt per year of solar by then, or more.
Fission is pathway to nukes, so every nation with intention of building nukes invests in fission regardless of commercial viability. Fusion on the other hand is pure r&d project and may give bragging rights if a country gets it first. So even in China it is not priority.
Wait, isn't fusion also possibly applicable as a weapon? I mean, thermonuclear weapons exist today with fission bomb being the fuze, once we achieve fusion ignition can't we build thermonuclear bomb from it that would not need uranium/plutionium?
Why are we fighting each other now? It's largely cultural and religious motivations, if we worked together as a planet we could get some really interesting things done.
“We” don’t have and don’t want to seriously fight each other. But it’s not “us” at the wheel. They have their own idea what we should do and until we get rid of them completely, your question will stay naive. This feature of our species was important for building civilization, but it will drag future generations down to the monkey bottom forever.
There’s a fusion reaction in the sky. All you have to do is harvest it. If you want to bring a fusion reaction home you have to deal with pesky things like INSANE AMOUNTS OF HEAT. Luckily the sky furnace is safely surrounded by 93M miles of insulting vacuum rendering the radiation harmless and even pleasant. We have a handy-dandy magnetic shield to handle surges, and atmospheric buffer for anything that sneaks through (now with protective ozone!) It’s really an ingenious design. I can’t think of any way to improve upon it.
Harvesting energy from this "sky fusion reactor" (if it really exists) has this small pesky problem of being unavailable if you can't see the fusion reactor, in a daily phenomena known to scientific experts as "night", as well as this other intermittent problem dubbed "clouds" by scientific experts in weather and weather-related fields, so I can think of at least two places to improve upon sky-fusion-energy-harvesting technology. An at-home fusion reactor would not have problems there.
Just by buying an electric vehicle I already have more than enough batteries to solve these problems for my household.
The transition to EVs - which is a hard necessity to solve climate change, and well on the way - implies battery production that’s already within an order of magnitude of storing enough solar to supply power year round. As long as you’re not too close to the poles, but most people don’t live there anyway (said as someone who lives relatively close to the arctic circle.. so I don’t mean to ignore our people, there’s just not that many of us so doesn’t matter so much in terms of global warming impact)
Nuclear energy can often benefit from some energy storage too. One of the first pumped hydro plants was to balance nuclear. It’s the opposite problem: people consume most of their energy during the day (when the sun is shining!) but nuclear should ideally run 100% 24/7.
I suspect a renaissance of nuclear, whether it’s fusion or fission, will also be paired with lots of battery storage. As batteries will probably soon be a cheaper way of load balancing than having to ramp production from nuclear up and down.
> Just by buying an electric vehicle I already have more than enough batteries to solve these problems for my household.
Not if you live in Northern Europe. Solar is basically worthless there during winter. I’m not even talking about polar nights, just places like Denmark where the difference in production between January and June is 20x. No batteries (that we know of) would solve that.
Indeed. I live in Northern Europe and have a 17.2 kWp solar plant. During the summer, I see ~100 kWh uselessly (for me) go to the grid every day for a pittance, and I can't really use it.
4 months of the year (almost 5 if it's a really bad year like last year), there's virtually no production.
I work in the smart energy field, including with home batteries. The de facto standard size is still 10 kWh because the promised drop in price hasn't yet materialized on this market. I'd fill that up in 45 minutes during a sunny summer day. I maybe can use half of that during the night. If I were to charge my car during the night, then sure, I could use that, but it's just 10 kWh. That's like an 1/8th of the car battery.
50 kWh? Okay great, I'd fill that up in 5 hours. Don't really know what I'd use those 50 kWh for. Charge my car? Okay sure, but I don't drive every day, and never in the morning, so it makes so much more sense to do solar surplus charging once or twice a week. You rarely want to charge to 100% SoC anyway, and you should probably leave some additional capacity for FCR purposes.
100 kWh? The problem is that in summer when I can fill that in a day (assuming max power scales with the capacity), I cannot really empty the battery because my consumption is so much lower during the summer. I will only top it up a little bit every day at best.
What I really need is a fucking 10 MWh sand battery underneath my driveway that I can seasonally charge and then use during the winter for heating. Maybe it could also keep my driveway snow and ice free? Who knows.
And A/C in the summer I guess. That is actually what I'm going to get, because it turned out to be more stressful and agonizing to see 100 kWh go out on the grid for almost no monetary gain than I thought it would. Call me egotistical I guess.
Domestic solar is kind of a scam. I knew that going in, but I didn't anticipate the accompanying stress.
1. The price drop for batteries has been huge. They are down to 3000 EUR where I live.
2. Domestic solar is just a way to save money. If you bought more than you need then you wasted money. A typical consumer would be fine with 10 kwp system + 10kwh battery which in Europe costs now less than 20,000 EUR.
This is solved by also using wind and hydrogen. Europe has salt formations that could store millions of gigawatt hours of hydrogen, far more than they'd need for long timescale leveling of variable supply.
The 'somewhere else' is a big issue though. In order to deal with Northern Europe winter power demands you probably want those solar panels to be on the Tropic of Capricorn in the southern hemisphere.
That's along ways away. It'll take a lot of costly electrical infrastructure to move that power.
Even worse, if you want to work during the night, you also want the solar panels about 45 degrees west. So like in South America. Tough luck for those places where that sweet spot is in the middle of a large ocean.
>The transition to EVs - which is a hard necessity to solve climate change
If we're talking about batteries, trains don't need them. While we'll never get rid of cars/trucks entirely, we are massively overdependent on cars/trucks for the bulk of our transport and (land-based) shipping needs. Especially in cities.
Being pedantic, but most heat is considered "waste" heat - aka it is high entropy energy, which is much harder to convert into the more useful forms of energy (mechanical, electrical, etc.)
Most power plants (coal, gas, geothermal, nuclear) and some solar plants already use a heat engine. Modern designs can capture nearly half the heat energy for use as electricity.
If it was that easy people would just do it, hm? Classic "HN commenter solves world problem after thinking about it for 5 seconds".
> insulting vacuum rendering the radiation harmless
Not even this is correct. Vacuum doesn't really "insulate" against radiation, at least not very effectively. It's the earth magnetic field and atmosphere that protects us. And even with that it's not harmless – surely you heard of "sunburn" and "skin cancer"?
Given the U.S. consumes about 4 petawatts hours of electricity per year, It would take about 13,600,000 acres or 21,250 square miles of solar panels to meet the total electricity requirements of the United States for a year.
I see you didn't even try to justify your bullshit there.
Of course corn and solar panels are different. For one thing, an acre of solar panels produces vastly more economic value per year than an acre of corn. What the corn observation does is show that the idea that this is too much area is insipid nonsense.
I could have easily compared the area to other things, like golf courses, parking lots, roads, or areas given over to fossil fuel production.
At face value, how is this sentence not implying something like that a car battery that gives 10 miles of range and takes up most of the weight and volume of the vehicle would be perfectly okay, if it cost $10 (including installation), and could be fully charged for 10 cents.
IMO I think the driver for fusion is going to be commercial or military need for orders of magnitude larger than today massive power generation. Climate change isn't going to get us there.
No, there are multiple projects and companies that are making good progress toward commercially practical fusion reactors.
Helion Energy has a contract to deliver Microsoft a fusion reactor by 2028. It's only four years away so we don't need to speculate about it. Helion will either deliver or they won't:
MIT's Commonwealth Fusion Systems has started construction of their small scale SPARC reactor. Once that has proven itself they will build a larger scale ARC reactor. They should get to first plasma in 2025:
China are currently building 27 fission reactors, and the construction time is 7 years.
If it takes 7 years to build something that is known and has been done a couple of hundred times before, I think it's safe to say it will take more than 4 years to build something of similar complexity that has never been done before.
No one can generate enough energy with fusion at the moment. Even if Helion could do it today they would need to build a larger reactor and test that too. Then build the one for Microsoft. To do all of this in 4 years is pretty much impossible
The prototype currently under construction is Polaris. It's 25% larger than the previous prototype and they expect it to achieve net electricity production:
The only reason the answer is always 20 years from now is because governments have withdrawn funding to such an absurd degree that projects have to take long, well measured risks otherwise they lose their funding versus rapid iteration of projects with high risks of failure (and high costs).
This is ultimately a capital game and without enough capital researchers and engineers have to go with the safest bets lest they lose funding. So you get ITER which will almost certainly work but has taken forever to build because it's a gargantuan feat of overengineering in all the ways that matter to make sure it works.
And for what it's worth, ITER's new baseline schedule will be announced this upcoming Wednesday (July 3). Likely first plasma will be in the next 2 or 3 years with first fusion operation some time between 2035 and 2040.
Or it’s always in the future because people are trying to do with an accelerator what normally takes the mass of a star to do. Whether or not it’s even possible is up for debate.
It's really not. Inertial Confinement Fusion tests have already produced energy positive results quite a few times. The most recent ICF tests that made the rounds were notable because they were consistently repeatable.
i.e. we know a well defined lower bound on the conditions required for energy positive fusion.
These bounds are more or less what we expected so sustainable energy positive fusion is essentially guaranteed to be feasible, it's just ungodly expensive until we can learn how to reduce the lower bounds for fusion or improve our ability to achieve those conditions.
So ITER will work. There really isn't a discussion on whether ITER will work or not. Like technically there's a small fraction of a percent chance it won't work for a number or reasons but even then it's less likely to be "it will never work" and more "we need to make changes and it'll work eventually".
This is actually part of the reason for the updated baseline schedule. It's apparently going to be far more aggressive now that there are better assurances that the existing model is in line with experimental evidence.
So, there’s cost, sure. But from what I understand, ITER was only energy positive when one discounts everything involved in building and running it. That is, the energy positive result was essentially just containment and reaction, and not everything else needed. It’s a big jump from that to viable.
That was the case for the ICF project at LLNL as the lasers used for confinement are grossly inefficient and it's a research facility but that's not the case for ITER to my understanding.
ITER won't be a power plant of course. It's a research facility first and foremost but it will produce power at a 10 to 1 ratio relative to the input which should be a net 450GW of power before you factor in the secondary equipment.
Containment and chilling will require quite a bit of energy of course but all together the energy usage for the reactor facilities should still be less than the produced power.
But yes ITER isn't designed to produce power out to the grid. It's just designed to work sustainably and any power it does produce will almost certainly just be sunk into a resistive load on site. It's a research project to build a viable nuclear power plant first and foremost.
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Then provided ITER doesn't outright fail, the DEMO reactor will be built and that facility will be optimized for power generation and will be built to the requirements to efficiently produce energy (vs ITER which is significantly overbuilt "to produce power at Q=10 so help me god"). The DEMO project will of course actually hook up to the grid with the intent of being a sustained base load power generator.
I recently started thinking that even if we master fusion and know how to keep it safe, we as a society have become way too science averse that we will not let it happen. See the reaction to nuclear fission based power plants now. Everyone is scared of it and the byproducts. Germany, one of the most progressive nations on the earth,went and shut down all of its nuclear plants as a knee jerk reaction. I don’t have hope that fusion will be allowed.
> Germany, one of the most progressive nations on the earth, went and shut down all of its nuclear plants as a knee jerk reaction.
Anti nuclear sentiment had been building in Germany since at least the 70s. Then Chernobyl happened in 1986 and it got even stronger. It was part of what propelled the Greens into the administration 1998.
That administration reached an agreement for the nuclear exit in 2000 and the first plant went offline in 2003.
Merkels cabinet tried to extend the planned runtimes for the remaining plants, and it was that extension that was rolled backed after Fukushima.
Now, you can think that it was a big mistake, but it certainly was not a knee jerk reaction. It was a decision that was 50 years in the making.
It's wildly overpriced and never formed a huge part of Germany's electricity mix anyway.
Given the extortionate cost of building and maintenance and nonzero risks, its only really "benefit" is for the military industrial complex to keep a ready supply of nuclear skills and supply chains.
It's the latter that formed the basis of the American led PR campaign to shame Germany. Pioneering a low carbon zero nuclear generation mix was threatening to established nuclear. It had fuck all to do with the environment. None of them ever gave two shits about Poland's chronic coal addiction next door.
People talk about solar + wind with storage as leaving hypothetical fusion in the dust.
If a fusion reactor can be made practicable, then we have a clean, low-radiation power generation system that will still work in the face of nuclear / asteroid-impact / supervolcanic winter.
...granted, any of those events could take out most or all of the hypothetical reactors, but it still seems worth noting to me.
I think there’s a good chance that we’ll see (yet again) that $6 billion in private investment distributed over 43 startups is a lot more than $22 billion in tax money sunk into some hole in France.
AI was also 30years away forever then it was not. its a function of dollar spent researching not fairy dust powered by hopes and dreams. problem is the problem seems so unsurmountable that private sector (until now) was never interested in exploring this and govt funding is really mostly about making things blow up. so there you are. all that said the fusion triple product neutron-fluxtimeenergy has been steadily getting better over decades & hence a flurry of recent funding. That is until AI started sucking up all oxygen.
Brilliant Light Power is nonsense. They've been promising amazing products for nearly 10 years now. Here's a Wayback Machine capture of their home page from 2015:
BrilliantLight has developed a commercially competitive, nonpolluting source of energy from water. A SunCell™ catalytically converts H2O-based solid fuel directly into brilliant light which is converted to electricity using photovoltaic panels.
If they actually had this "commercially competitive, nonpolluting source of energy" they'd be selling the machines or selling the electricity by now.
There have been a well documented series of engineering solutions to problems in the implementation that have taken time to solve. Melting electrodes due to too much power - solved by molten stream electrodes C 2016. Melting holes in the reaction chamber eventually resolved after many different things tried by quartz that is transparent to UV. Etc. Demonstrations are offered to qualified parties.
They're not rewriting physics. Whatever's going on over there, it's fake.
Though the main suncell page mostly just claims to be a solar concentrator? Like, okay, you can do that, but carefully aimed mirrors don't really save you any money over the same surface area of solar cells. Or twice the area of solar cells, looking at the efficiency claim on that page.
They have a new (since 1990s) classical model of atomic structure that is superior to the electron probability cloud model. It models the electron as a thin fluid shell that spins around the nucleus along all great circle paths. It allows calculations of molecular structure in closed form equations.
You misunderstand the suncell - the source of UV light is a hydrogen reaction when it bumps into a catalyst able to accept the right amount of energy that pushes the "ground state" electron into a lower energy orbit nearer to the nucleus releasing said energy. Solar concentrator photovoltaic cells are used to convert the intense UV light into electricity because they are cheaper per kW and much smaller.
Their lack of progress in producing power from their system suggests otherwise. Meanwhile the standard quantum mechanical model of matter goes on making correct, testable predictions. Including in fusion experiments.
Except for dark matter, dark energy, accelerating expansion of the universe, sun's coronal temperature, mature galaxies in the earliest times after the big bang...
See engineering challenges documented above and https://brilliantlightpower.com/plasma-video/ and their video archive also they have hydrinos isolated in a test tube and have performed many analytical experiments to measure properties that definitively prove exactly what it is and matches the theoretical predictions.
Videos they make aren't good evidence of anything. Just send samples of one or two pieces that show off these improved physics. It would change the world, make them famous, and let them get them rich off of patents. No need to wait until they have a full working product.
The only reason to hold back so much is that it's not real.
Videos are evidence of the many problems they have run into getting it to work reliably.
One good reason to hold back would be intellectual property/stealth mode development. They have many patents but have had some patents rescinded after skeptics objections about "breaking known laws of physics" as if there is ever a final unimpeachable unimprovable laws of physics.
Even so the theory is openly published and samples of hydrinos are available to qualified parties I understand.
Yes everyone, especially including all the believers, is waiting for the definitive demonstration that makes everyone stop and say whoa, WTF is going on. I envisage something like putting a suncell on top of a mountain and illuminating the whole county at night, but the FAA might not like that.
It's interesting that skeptics are always vague and dismissive - I think very few have actually studied the theory - I'm not aware of any specific rebuttal other than the infamous Rathke paper that initially had a sign error in the main equation and had 5 other significant errors as stated by Mills. In any case all it was saying was logically equivalent to this apple cannot be an orange.
Article is click-bait. Most of it is dedicated to general information and history, not the question. It would be a good article if its title were “All that you just suddenly wanted to know about nuclear fusion if you never got the itch before, in one big gulp.” Of course, somebody who knows nothing of nuclear fusion and want to would be better served by a tittle that says so “Have you heard the good news? Nuclear fusion is coming! Let me tell you everything about it!”
If you read to the end (or indeed just scroll down to the last few paragraphs) the answer is "almost certainly yes, but only if we have the will (and budget) to do so".
What puts fusion development in peril is the rapid improvement of known renewable technologies, and the likelihood that 100% renewables is possible in the near future using only those technologies at lower cost.
