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> get fusion ASAP If we rely on fusion to save us then we're thoroughly fucked – please excuse my language, but it's the most accurate portrayal of the situati

by adwn 11y ago

> get fusion ASAP If we rely on fusion to save us then we're thoroughly fucked – please excuse my language, but it's the most accurate portrayal of the situation. - The best-known research project, ITER, is incredibly expensive and it will be 2050 until we can even start building commercial reactors using this concept (note that this is the current official schedule, so expect to add several decades to this). It is not even certain whether we can overcome the immense engineering challenges within the next 100 years. - Other approaches only receive a fraction of the funding of ITER. Some of them might be more promising, but are still far away from breakeven, and it is still unknown, if and when they reach commercial viability. We already know how to generate CO2-neutral energy: solar, wind, and fission nuclear. Let's do those instead, and keep researching fusion energy, but don't bet the future of our planet on it.

jcrei 11y ago
I really like solar and wind (personally invested in some) but can you (or someone) clarify the CO2-neutral aspect of solar? Until some time ago, we still kept hearing about the impacts of building the panels, etc...
adrianN 11y ago
I link this in every discussion about how we will never get fusion power: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusion-researchers-answer-your-questions http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusi... See the nice funding graph in question three. If we were to decide that fusion is the way to go and would fund it appropriately, we could get commercial reactors much faster. However, note that building power plants takes a lot of time. Building a new nuclear power plant for example takes 6-8 years just for the actual construction. Planning and bureaucracy have to be added to this. So even if we speed up fusion power development so that we can start building commercial fusion power plants in say twenty years, that's still mostly too late if we want to limit warming to two degrees. At current CO2 production rates we have time until 2039 for that. http://trillionthtonne.org/ http://trillionthtonne.org/
- adwn 11y ago
  > See the nice funding graph in question three. Oh please, that graph is dug out whenever the feasibility of fusion is discussed. It's a prediction from 1976 – you should know how credible decade-long predictions on the progress of unproven technologies are. It's also pure fantasy that if we just throw enough money at the problem, we'll get the work done quickly. That's not even the case for large software projects, so how do you expect that to work for a task with so many hard scientific and engineering challenges?
  - tormeh 11y ago
    Imagine that instead of writing "javac file.java" every time you wanted to recompile you had to hire workers and buy materials to build the program using cogs and levers. Development would obviously slow down a lot if you had to ration your recompiles because of funding. Also, a project has an optimal amount of employees. I'm pretty sure ITER and the like has less than that number right now. Throwing money at the problem seems like an excellent way to speed things up.
  - adrianN 11y ago
    Besides the obvious problems of building very expensive machines like ITER with a limited budget, there are multiple routes that might lead to commercial fusion. Magnetic confinement is just one of them. Currently it's the only one that gets any significant funding. If we had unlimited money we could pursue all options simultaneously. That's how it worked in the Manhattan Project. They tried all ways to a working nuke in parallel. So they came up with Little Boy (gun type assembly) and Fat Man (implosion type assembly).
Ygg2 11y ago
> If we rely on fusion to save us then we're thoroughly fucked As far as I understand, it's a problem of funding and bureaucracy problems rather than technology. We're thoroughly fucked already, the only thing that changes now, is how deeply fucked are we, to pardon by French. People are unjustifiedly afraid of fission, wind and solar are unreliable and come with a carbon cost. Fusion ticks all the right fields - self-containing, stable (barring catastrophes), cheap and highly energetic. Question is - is it easier to sway people on nuclear power or to get fusion ready?
- gambiting 11y ago
  The problem is that regular fuels are still absurdly cheap. Considering their environmental impact - too cheap. Running coal power plants still produces cheaper electricity than a nuclear power plant or solar or wind, because coal is so absurdly cheap. As soon as that changes, and coal becomes scarce enough to make the price go up, other technologies will take off very rapidly. Fusion is really difficult because it's costing a tonne of money and no one has actually proven that it would actually pay for itself or in fact produce a surplus of power.
- adwn 11y ago
  > As far as I understand, it's a problem of funding and bureaucracy problems rather than technology. No, it's very much a problem of technology. One of the challenges of most fusion approaches is that we don't have materials that survive the heavy neutron bombardment from the fusion process for very long. You don't simply solve this through more funding (although it helps). Another problem is that we still haven't managed to build a fusion device that delivers even close to break-even energy return, not even under laboratory conditions for very short timespans. > cheap That is doubtful. Fusion reactors with the ITER concept are extremely large and complex devices. Note that I'm not against fusion in general. In fact, I think we should fund research in alternative fusion technologies a lot more than we do now.
  - Ygg2 11y ago
    > No, it's very much a problem of technology. Well, you can't make technology without funding and time. But given enough of both, its definitely achievable. There is nothing scientific preventing us from creating fusion reactor. Perhaps I misspoke, but the thing is, the main issue is funding, you can't expect research without funding. If the project was well funded, we'd probably have it by now. > cheap Cheap as in resources required to produce energy. Not cheap to make. By same measure how much infrastructure you need to mine, transport and make a power plant.

by adwn 11y ago

jcrei 11y ago

I really like solar and wind (personally invested in some) but can you (or someone) clarify the CO2-neutral aspect of solar? Until some time ago, we still kept hearing about the impacts of building the panels, etc...

adrianN 11y ago

I link this in every discussion about how we will never get fusion power: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusion-researchers-answer-your-questions http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusi... See the nice funding graph in question three. If we were to decide that fusion is the way to go and would fund it appropriately, we could get commercial reactors much faster. However, note that building power plants takes a lot of time. Building a new nuclear power plant for example takes 6-8 years just for the actual construction. Planning and bureaucracy have to be added to this. So even if we speed up fusion power development so that we can start building commercial fusion power plants in say twenty years, that's still mostly too late if we want to limit warming to two degrees. At current CO2 production rates we have time until 2039 for that. http://trillionthtonne.org/ http://trillionthtonne.org/

adwn 11y ago
> See the nice funding graph in question three. Oh please, that graph is dug out whenever the feasibility of fusion is discussed. It's a prediction from 1976 – you should know how credible decade-long predictions on the progress of unproven technologies are. It's also pure fantasy that if we just throw enough money at the problem, we'll get the work done quickly. That's not even the case for large software projects, so how do you expect that to work for a task with so many hard scientific and engineering challenges?
- tormeh 11y ago
  Imagine that instead of writing "javac file.java" every time you wanted to recompile you had to hire workers and buy materials to build the program using cogs and levers. Development would obviously slow down a lot if you had to ration your recompiles because of funding. Also, a project has an optimal amount of employees. I'm pretty sure ITER and the like has less than that number right now. Throwing money at the problem seems like an excellent way to speed things up.
- adrianN 11y ago
  Besides the obvious problems of building very expensive machines like ITER with a limited budget, there are multiple routes that might lead to commercial fusion. Magnetic confinement is just one of them. Currently it's the only one that gets any significant funding. If we had unlimited money we could pursue all options simultaneously. That's how it worked in the Manhattan Project. They tried all ways to a working nuke in parallel. So they came up with Little Boy (gun type assembly) and Fat Man (implosion type assembly).

Ygg2 11y ago

> If we rely on fusion to save us then we're thoroughly fucked As far as I understand, it's a problem of funding and bureaucracy problems rather than technology. We're thoroughly fucked already, the only thing that changes now, is how deeply fucked are we, to pardon by French. People are unjustifiedly afraid of fission, wind and solar are unreliable and come with a carbon cost. Fusion ticks all the right fields - self-containing, stable (barring catastrophes), cheap and highly energetic. Question is - is it easier to sway people on nuclear power or to get fusion ready?

gambiting 11y ago
The problem is that regular fuels are still absurdly cheap. Considering their environmental impact - too cheap. Running coal power plants still produces cheaper electricity than a nuclear power plant or solar or wind, because coal is so absurdly cheap. As soon as that changes, and coal becomes scarce enough to make the price go up, other technologies will take off very rapidly. Fusion is really difficult because it's costing a tonne of money and no one has actually proven that it would actually pay for itself or in fact produce a surplus of power.
adwn 11y ago
> As far as I understand, it's a problem of funding and bureaucracy problems rather than technology. No, it's very much a problem of technology. One of the challenges of most fusion approaches is that we don't have materials that survive the heavy neutron bombardment from the fusion process for very long. You don't simply solve this through more funding (although it helps). Another problem is that we still haven't managed to build a fusion device that delivers even close to break-even energy return, not even under laboratory conditions for very short timespans. > cheap That is doubtful. Fusion reactors with the ITER concept are extremely large and complex devices. Note that I'm not against fusion in general. In fact, I think we should fund research in alternative fusion technologies a lot more than we do now.
- Ygg2 11y ago
  > No, it's very much a problem of technology. Well, you can't make technology without funding and time. But given enough of both, its definitely achievable. There is nothing scientific preventing us from creating fusion reactor. Perhaps I misspoke, but the thing is, the main issue is funding, you can't expect research without funding. If the project was well funded, we'd probably have it by now. > cheap Cheap as in resources required to produce energy. Not cheap to make. By same measure how much infrastructure you need to mine, transport and make a power plant.