4 ms·

> "Should we succeed at controlled, sustained, net-positive fusion, we would qualify it as a new face at the table. I might characterize it as the most expensiv

> "Should we succeed at controlled, sustained, net-positive fusion, we would qualify it as a new face at the table. I might characterize it as the most expensive way to create electricity ever devised (and electricity is not the hard nut to crack)." It's not even been developed, yet the author is convinced it will be 'the most expensive way to create electricity ever devised'. The article is riddled with statements like that, that twist history to serve the author's narrative. In the list of developments unfamiliar to the person from the 19th century we have the toaster and the blender, listed as if these would be modern marvels. In comparison, the push into space over the last 65 years is downplayed, as if the fact we aren't all taking space holidays is some indication that the field has been stagnant. Whilst it's a shame there haven't been any manned missions to moons and planets since the 70s, there's been a ton of development in the field... satellites, telescopes, space probes, space stations, etc... I'd also suggest that a lot of the developments in technology over the past 65 years have been too small to see. Semiconductor manufacturing, bio sciences, etc... Does it really matter if developments aren't immediately obvious to the eye?

Tharkun 11y ago
> It's not even been developed, yet the author is convinced it will be 'the most expensive way to create electricity ever devised'. Sounds to me like the author is right in a sense. A lot of money has been going into fusion for many, many years now. If you look at the bottom line you're going to need to be generating a LOT of electricity from fusion before you're ever going to break even. I'm not saying that this is the right way of looking at it, financial gains aren't everything, after all. But fusion IS very expensive electricity.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  > "But fusion IS very expensive electricity." You're falling into the same trap as the article author, you have no way of knowing that. For example, this article on the dense plasma focus approach to nuclear fusion shows the costs are far below that of other non-nuclear sources: http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/cost-advantage-roi/ http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/cost-advantage-roi/ Even if you take into account the research costs (which I think is a mistake, the cut off point is too hard to define, I mean would you include R&D into petrol-based cars in the solar car R&D costs?) the level of funding that the dense plasma focus has had to date has been relatively small, it could recoup those costs quickly. You can get a sense for the investment costs involved in one dense plasma focus project here (though admittedly this doesn't include all similar research projects, of which there are a few): http://www.integrityresearchinstitute.org/FutureEnergy/FocusFusion-Ver6.htm http://www.integrityresearchinstitute.org/FutureEnergy/Focus... So you see, because you have no way of knowing which fusion approach would win out, you cannot say with any certainty that it is expensive electricity.
  - ju-st 11y ago
    You have also now way to know if these 0.5ct/kWh are correct. And that article is actually sales material from the plasma fusion company. The wikipedia article on this topic suggests that no progress has been made since 2012.
    - ZenoArrow 11y ago
      > "You have also now way to know if these 0.5ct/kWh are correct. And that article is actually sales material from the plasma fusion company." The article I linked to contained an estimate. The point I'm making is that nobody knows what the final cost will actually be. If you want to play guessing games then you should be happy to know what information is available to base that guess on. > "The wikipedia article on this topic suggests that no progress has been made since 2012." Progress has been made since 2012, though the progress has been slower than it could've been as there's been a lack of funding. This year the focus appears to have been on improving one of the key parts. The team update their website fairly frequently, last news update about the project was made less than a month ago: http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/news-and-archives/lpp-news/ http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/news-and-archives/lpp-...
- richmarr 11y ago
  > A lot of money has been going into fusion for many, many years now Sure, but if you're going to holistically include the cost of the science in the comparison price per KWh you should also balance it against the cost of dealing with the consequences of sustained carbon emissions from other types of power generation.
  - jlarocco 11y ago
    That's really not an unusual or surprising thing. Most products have research and development costs factored into their prices. It's the primary reason why bleeding edge stuff costs so much. As far as carbon emissions go, it's hard to compare without knowing what byproducts fusion will generate.
  - duaneb 11y ago
    > Sure, but if you're going to holistically include the cost of the science in the comparison price per KWh you should also balance it against the cost of dealing with the consequences of sustained carbon emissions from other types of power generation. Guess what? They all still beat fusion hands down. Think of all the cows that farted and then died to feed the researchers. Think of all the carbon emissions generated by the actual research. Think about the real, actual return we have today. You seem to be banking on the fact that we actually CAN produce an efficient fusion reactor in the near future. Total efficiency of our investment is very, very, very dependent on how fast it can crank out. Now compare it to military investments and you might get somewhere.... EDIT: if you disagree, I'd obviously love feedback. It just seems silly to think that fusion is at all something we can depend on being able to pull out of our ass. The manhattan project was never a sure thing.
    - ZenoArrow 11y ago
      > "if you disagree, I'd obviously love feedback." You've clearly made your mind up that pursuing nuclear fusion is a waste of money, there's no point in debating if you're not prepared to consider that the research could pay off.
      - 11y ago
- relkor 11y ago
  > A lot of money has been going into fusion for many, many years now. Maybe the ~$29 billion [1] spent by the US on fusion total since 1953 to date seems like a lot from a personal perspective, but consider the modern cost of $3.5 billion for building 1 Giga Watt of generation capacity [2] for a coal power plant, the claim that fusion is unreasonably expensive and impracticable doesn't hold water. Compare fusion research to other broad spectrum research projects that benefit broad swaths of mankind, you see a remarkably different attitude and perception. This one cancer research foundation in the UK raised 460 million pounds in 2012/13 [3], more than twice the total international spending on ITER in 2014 [4]. There is clearly a double standard when it comes to comparing the results of fusion R&D with other long term efforts that still fail to offer satisfactory solutions after decades of concerted effort. [1] http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/reframe/wasteful/ http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/reframe/wasteful/ [2] http://schlissel-technical.com/docs/reports_35.pdf http://schlissel-technical.com/docs/reports_35.pdf [3] http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/prod_consump/groups/cr_common/@abt/@gen/documents/image/cr_111520.pdf http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/prod_consump/groups/cr_commo... [4] (page 20) https://www.iter.org/doc/all/content/com/Lists/depts/Attachments/40/2014_iter_financial_statements.pdf https://www.iter.org/doc/all/content/com/Lists/depts/Attachm...
  - duaneb 11y ago
    That's completely irrelevant to efficiency. It's objectively a terribly inefficient technology as it stands now for watt generated per dollar spent.
    - relkor 11y ago
      Using watt's generated per dollar as a metric of success for fusion research (emphasis mine) is a false analogy. No commercial fusion power plant exists, however you seem to want to hold research reactors constructed for the purpose of discovery to the same financial standard as operating coal power plants. When the first commercial fusion reactor is turned on then we can bemoan capital costs using real data. Until then, don't compare apples and oranges.
DennisP 11y ago
If he's only looking at ITER he might have a point. He's ignoring much cheaper possibilities, ranging from conservative but more compact approaches like MIT's ARC design and UW's dynomak, to aneutronic designs like Tri-Alpha and Helion. UW claims the dynomak would cost less than coal: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/inside-the-dynomak-a-fusion-technology-cheaper-than-coal http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/inside-the-dynomak-a... Aneutronic fusion has the potential to be far cheaper than any other energy source.
- outofcuriosity 11y ago
  Lockheed will probably lap ITER within the next few years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_beta_fusion_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_beta_fusion_reactor Let's not forget that the end-game for fusion is "virtually limitless, safe, clean, carbon-neutral, very high-density power"--a set of characteristics literally none of our other sources of electricity have. The author also neglects all of the scientific advancements that we've made but haven't yet transmuted into engineering advancements. Graphene, nanotubes, metamaterials, etc.
- mtgx 11y ago
  LENR, too, which the US Navy and NASA seem to be considering: http://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/index.php/Attachment/386-IEEE-brief-DeChiaro-9-2015-pdf/ http://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/index.php/Attachment/386-IEE...
  - selimthegrim 11y ago
    LENR has never recovered from the shellacking Koonin and Lewis gave it.
    - leaveyou 11y ago
      It just needs a change of the name or the initials and it's good to go..
- gus_massa 11y ago
  I made some calculations. The total cost of ITER is $14 billons (and going up :) ). The total production of electricity in the word is 20000TWh/year. If we magically switch to 100% tokamak fusion production, and we want to recoup the inversion in one year, it would add 0.7 $/MWh to the production (and distribution cost). A more realistic scenario is to generate only the mythical 1% using tokamak fusion reactors, and recoup the money in 10 years. With this modification the R&D cost is 7 $/MWh. Just for comparison, the current cost of electricity is 50-150 $/MWh. So 0.7-7 $/MWh is not too much. Anyway, the ITER project is not even close to make a functional power generator, so the final cost may be much bigger than $14 billons.
duaneb 11y ago
> It's not even been developed, yet the author is convinced it will be 'the most expensive way to create electricity ever devised'. Counting R&D costs, plus the fact that it still doesn't work, implies an ROI that would make anyone agree. I think "breakthroughs" (e.g. discontinuous breaks in research where research is leapfrogged) are slowing down. This doesn't imply scientific or technological advancements are slowing down, which I think you misread. All the author is arguing is that maybe we should reconsider investing our money in hugely expensive projects whose success is completely unbounded EXPECTING breakthroughs. This just seems rational.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  > "Counting R&D costs, plus the fact that it still doesn't work, implies an ROI that would make anyone agree." The work on nuclear fusion is broader than the tokamak approach you're alluding to. All other forms of fusion have had far lower levels of investment.
  - duaneb 11y ago
    I'm not aware of any fusion reactor that has "broken even" with just collecting the energy investment. Until that happens, total efficiency for "nuclear fusion" is going to continue to plummet.
    - ZenoArrow 11y ago
      If some of the predicted timelines about excess energy generation from nuclear fusion turn out to be true then it'll work out to be cheaper than coal, even in the short-to-medium term after that goal is reached. It's too early to write such predictions off, unless you know something I don't know about the future.
      - duaneb 11y ago
        Ahh, this is what I was lookin for. Do you have a source for these predicted timelines? I'd like to dig in further. I wasn't even aware they existed.
slowmovintarget 11y ago
Thorium reactors [0], Lightsail tech [1], and vertical helix-shaped wind turbines, throw in some Stirling Engine action [2]. Why aren't we past all this yet? Oh, right, politics. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor [1] http://www.lightsail.com/ [2] http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-tech/remediation/slingshot-water-purifier2.htm

Tharkun 11y ago

> It's not even been developed, yet the author is convinced it will be 'the most expensive way to create electricity ever devised'. Sounds to me like the author is right in a sense. A lot of money has been going into fusion for many, many years now. If you look at the bottom line you're going to need to be generating a LOT of electricity from fusion before you're ever going to break even. I'm not saying that this is the right way of looking at it, financial gains aren't everything, after all. But fusion IS very expensive electricity.

ZenoArrow 11y ago
> "But fusion IS very expensive electricity." You're falling into the same trap as the article author, you have no way of knowing that. For example, this article on the dense plasma focus approach to nuclear fusion shows the costs are far below that of other non-nuclear sources: http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/cost-advantage-roi/ http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/cost-advantage-roi/ Even if you take into account the research costs (which I think is a mistake, the cut off point is too hard to define, I mean would you include R&D into petrol-based cars in the solar car R&D costs?) the level of funding that the dense plasma focus has had to date has been relatively small, it could recoup those costs quickly. You can get a sense for the investment costs involved in one dense plasma focus project here (though admittedly this doesn't include all similar research projects, of which there are a few): http://www.integrityresearchinstitute.org/FutureEnergy/FocusFusion-Ver6.htm http://www.integrityresearchinstitute.org/FutureEnergy/Focus... So you see, because you have no way of knowing which fusion approach would win out, you cannot say with any certainty that it is expensive electricity.
- ju-st 11y ago
  You have also now way to know if these 0.5ct/kWh are correct. And that article is actually sales material from the plasma fusion company. The wikipedia article on this topic suggests that no progress has been made since 2012.
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    > "You have also now way to know if these 0.5ct/kWh are correct. And that article is actually sales material from the plasma fusion company." The article I linked to contained an estimate. The point I'm making is that nobody knows what the final cost will actually be. If you want to play guessing games then you should be happy to know what information is available to base that guess on. > "The wikipedia article on this topic suggests that no progress has been made since 2012." Progress has been made since 2012, though the progress has been slower than it could've been as there's been a lack of funding. This year the focus appears to have been on improving one of the key parts. The team update their website fairly frequently, last news update about the project was made less than a month ago: http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/news-and-archives/lpp-news/ http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/news-and-archives/lpp-...
richmarr 11y ago
> A lot of money has been going into fusion for many, many years now Sure, but if you're going to holistically include the cost of the science in the comparison price per KWh you should also balance it against the cost of dealing with the consequences of sustained carbon emissions from other types of power generation.
- jlarocco 11y ago
  That's really not an unusual or surprising thing. Most products have research and development costs factored into their prices. It's the primary reason why bleeding edge stuff costs so much. As far as carbon emissions go, it's hard to compare without knowing what byproducts fusion will generate.
- duaneb 11y ago
  > Sure, but if you're going to holistically include the cost of the science in the comparison price per KWh you should also balance it against the cost of dealing with the consequences of sustained carbon emissions from other types of power generation. Guess what? They all still beat fusion hands down. Think of all the cows that farted and then died to feed the researchers. Think of all the carbon emissions generated by the actual research. Think about the real, actual return we have today. You seem to be banking on the fact that we actually CAN produce an efficient fusion reactor in the near future. Total efficiency of our investment is very, very, very dependent on how fast it can crank out. Now compare it to military investments and you might get somewhere.... EDIT: if you disagree, I'd obviously love feedback. It just seems silly to think that fusion is at all something we can depend on being able to pull out of our ass. The manhattan project was never a sure thing.
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    > "if you disagree, I'd obviously love feedback." You've clearly made your mind up that pursuing nuclear fusion is a waste of money, there's no point in debating if you're not prepared to consider that the research could pay off.
    - 11y ago
relkor 11y ago
> A lot of money has been going into fusion for many, many years now. Maybe the ~$29 billion [1] spent by the US on fusion total since 1953 to date seems like a lot from a personal perspective, but consider the modern cost of $3.5 billion for building 1 Giga Watt of generation capacity [2] for a coal power plant, the claim that fusion is unreasonably expensive and impracticable doesn't hold water. Compare fusion research to other broad spectrum research projects that benefit broad swaths of mankind, you see a remarkably different attitude and perception. This one cancer research foundation in the UK raised 460 million pounds in 2012/13 [3], more than twice the total international spending on ITER in 2014 [4]. There is clearly a double standard when it comes to comparing the results of fusion R&D with other long term efforts that still fail to offer satisfactory solutions after decades of concerted effort. [1] http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/reframe/wasteful/ http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/reframe/wasteful/ [2] http://schlissel-technical.com/docs/reports_35.pdf http://schlissel-technical.com/docs/reports_35.pdf [3] http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/prod_consump/groups/cr_common/@abt/@gen/documents/image/cr_111520.pdf http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/prod_consump/groups/cr_commo... [4] (page 20) https://www.iter.org/doc/all/content/com/Lists/depts/Attachments/40/2014_iter_financial_statements.pdf https://www.iter.org/doc/all/content/com/Lists/depts/Attachm...
- duaneb 11y ago
  That's completely irrelevant to efficiency. It's objectively a terribly inefficient technology as it stands now for watt generated per dollar spent.
  - relkor 11y ago
    Using watt's generated per dollar as a metric of success for fusion research (emphasis mine) is a false analogy. No commercial fusion power plant exists, however you seem to want to hold research reactors constructed for the purpose of discovery to the same financial standard as operating coal power plants. When the first commercial fusion reactor is turned on then we can bemoan capital costs using real data. Until then, don't compare apples and oranges.

DennisP 11y ago

If he's only looking at ITER he might have a point. He's ignoring much cheaper possibilities, ranging from conservative but more compact approaches like MIT's ARC design and UW's dynomak, to aneutronic designs like Tri-Alpha and Helion. UW claims the dynomak would cost less than coal: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/inside-the-dynomak-a-fusion-technology-cheaper-than-coal http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/inside-the-dynomak-a... Aneutronic fusion has the potential to be far cheaper than any other energy source.

outofcuriosity 11y ago
Lockheed will probably lap ITER within the next few years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_beta_fusion_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_beta_fusion_reactor Let's not forget that the end-game for fusion is "virtually limitless, safe, clean, carbon-neutral, very high-density power"--a set of characteristics literally none of our other sources of electricity have. The author also neglects all of the scientific advancements that we've made but haven't yet transmuted into engineering advancements. Graphene, nanotubes, metamaterials, etc.
mtgx 11y ago
LENR, too, which the US Navy and NASA seem to be considering: http://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/index.php/Attachment/386-IEEE-brief-DeChiaro-9-2015-pdf/ http://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/index.php/Attachment/386-IEE...
- selimthegrim 11y ago
  LENR has never recovered from the shellacking Koonin and Lewis gave it.
  - leaveyou 11y ago
    It just needs a change of the name or the initials and it's good to go..
gus_massa 11y ago
I made some calculations. The total cost of ITER is $14 billons (and going up :) ). The total production of electricity in the word is 20000TWh/year. If we magically switch to 100% tokamak fusion production, and we want to recoup the inversion in one year, it would add 0.7 $/MWh to the production (and distribution cost). A more realistic scenario is to generate only the mythical 1% using tokamak fusion reactors, and recoup the money in 10 years. With this modification the R&D cost is 7 $/MWh. Just for comparison, the current cost of electricity is 50-150 $/MWh. So 0.7-7 $/MWh is not too much. Anyway, the ITER project is not even close to make a functional power generator, so the final cost may be much bigger than $14 billons.

duaneb 11y ago

> It's not even been developed, yet the author is convinced it will be 'the most expensive way to create electricity ever devised'. Counting R&D costs, plus the fact that it still doesn't work, implies an ROI that would make anyone agree. I think "breakthroughs" (e.g. discontinuous breaks in research where research is leapfrogged) are slowing down. This doesn't imply scientific or technological advancements are slowing down, which I think you misread. All the author is arguing is that maybe we should reconsider investing our money in hugely expensive projects whose success is completely unbounded EXPECTING breakthroughs. This just seems rational.

ZenoArrow 11y ago
> "Counting R&D costs, plus the fact that it still doesn't work, implies an ROI that would make anyone agree." The work on nuclear fusion is broader than the tokamak approach you're alluding to. All other forms of fusion have had far lower levels of investment.
- duaneb 11y ago
  I'm not aware of any fusion reactor that has "broken even" with just collecting the energy investment. Until that happens, total efficiency for "nuclear fusion" is going to continue to plummet.
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    If some of the predicted timelines about excess energy generation from nuclear fusion turn out to be true then it'll work out to be cheaper than coal, even in the short-to-medium term after that goal is reached. It's too early to write such predictions off, unless you know something I don't know about the future.
    - duaneb 11y ago
      Ahh, this is what I was lookin for. Do you have a source for these predicted timelines? I'd like to dig in further. I wasn't even aware they existed.

slowmovintarget 11y ago

Thorium reactors [0], Lightsail tech [1], and vertical helix-shaped wind turbines, throw in some Stirling Engine action [2]. Why aren't we past all this yet? Oh, right, politics. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor [1] http://www.lightsail.com/ [2] http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-tech/remediation/slingshot-water-purifier2.htm