Question for this knowledgeable group of people: Which fusion start-ups look promising? How does inertial confinement look? Any thoughts on the newly funded start-up Blue Laser Fusion? Any thoughts on one of the older players, TAE? How about Commonwealth? Helion? Others?
Also their concept is just so weird, I love it. Worst case it works in space as a nuclear fusion drive :)
My guess is that they're all going to tank without government money, unless by some miracle they have truly found some special low-cost of operation on the first try that beats the current heavily optimized solutions for power generation.
I feel like it's more like saying, we should build an airport here, because it's near a city and in a good ___location, and the land is cheap because no one else wants it for a number of reasons and this is the only thing that practically makes sense to go there.
It's not going to save a meaningful amount of money. But that doesn't mean it's a bad idea.
Sure. But even in your example the site selection won't help you much to build the airport, you still need to do that, and it's still going to be massively expensive.
I'm also in general skeptical about conversions of coal power plants into nuclear even for fission. Typical nuclear plants produce much milder steam temperatures and pressures than coal power plants, so their steam turbines are optimized for different conditions.
I think Helion is most promising for two reasons.
1. Even if the more traditional fusion power plants manage to generate the plasma itself in a device that’s not too expensive (big if) it seems that just the heat exchange mechanism itself would be extremely complicated and expensive. And since they’re thermal power plants you’re limited in where you can put them and how big they must be to be economical.
2. As CO2 emissions come down, I think there will be some focus on thermal power plants contribution to global warming. Helion will still be adding heat to the planet that wasn’t there before, but there will be less heat for a given amount of electric energy. It’s also not going to rely on dumping all that heat in a river.
I don’t know if Helion is feasible. But it feels like it’s the only technology that could be feasible.
I used to think Helion might have a chance, until I looked into the energetics graph. At the temperature they hope to operate, a deuterion would much rather fuse with another deuterion, producing a neutron, than with a helion.
And Helium3 is not available in useful quantity. No, not even on the moon.
Literally none of the projects running will ever lead to so much as a single erg of commercial power. They might spin off interesting plasma materials-processing tech.
It would be much more expensive to build a fusion power plant than a similar-capacity fission plant, but fission is already uncompetitive, and falls farther behind by the day. Start thinking hard about uses for stable contained plasma that doesn't fuse. Advantage is, it doesn't need to be especially hot. What they have already is more than hot enough for any plausible use.
