5 ms·

I can say upfront that I'm extremely skeptical about nuclear fusion in general. I don't think that it will ever play any major role in energy production. The I

by hannob 11y ago

I can say upfront that I'm extremely skeptical about nuclear fusion in general. I don't think that it will ever play any major role in energy production. The ITER project is only fueling that skepticism. They started with projected building costs of around 6 billion euro and before they really started these costs have already more than doubled. It seems very likely that if this project ever gets finished the costs will rise a lot more. If you're advocating for nuclear fusion and projects like ITER then my first advice would be to be honest: It won't be a bargain. That said I want to mention why I'm so skeptical about fusion: It is often quoted as some kind of magical energy source without problems. Although it's hard to make predictions about a technology that isn't working yet, most likely it will mean expensive, huge power plants that generate large amounts of energy at one place. That means even if you are able to build these plants technically, you face a number of additional challenges: Getting it to work so that it makes any economic sense (competing probably mostly against much cheaper wind and solar which will likely be much cheaper than today when fusion is ready) and getting energy transmission working at a huge scale. Right now for many energy projects transmission lines are a major cost and acceptance factor already.

yc1010 11y ago
Climate change called and states that she doesn't care about your skepticism, renewables alone will not bring us into carbon free future. We have to try EVERYTHING in order to beat climate change, up to and including moonshots like this. Sadly this strange hatred of anything nuclear by environmentalists has done more to harm this planet and its people. BTW 6 billion is nothing when compared to over a hundred billion that for example Germany has spent on renewables, same Germany that replacing nuclear with coal on the other hand. Aside was just watching this documentary on BBC on tv there > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtp51eZkwoI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtp51eZkwoI The vision and drive of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs back in 19th and 20th centuries have lifted the world from literal darkness into the modern system of grids and electricity on a flick of a switch. I am sure there were many naysayers back in their day on top of all the obstacles they faced, these guys such as Edison and his team kept buggering on, and the modern world is thankful for foundations they laid. Let the scientists and engineers at ITER do their job and instead of moaning about it keep pressure on politicians to spend money on projects like this instead of bombing people in other countries.
- epistasis 11y ago
  > renewables alone will not bring us into carbon free future. They certainly can, and going 100% renewable by 2050 is feasible. [1] Once you add in nuclear, it's only more feasible (though maybe more expensive). Taking a look at the five potential plans for the UK from 2009 [2], they are now much more potentially feasible as solar and storage technology has plummeted in price far more quickly than anticipated. It's only a matter of political feasibility, not engineering or industrial feasibility. That's why these plans need to be reevaluated every 12 months, because technology for renewables is changing so much more quickly than any of the conventional technologies do, and the boundary for economic feasibility is quickly quickly shifting. [1] http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CountriesWWS.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Count... [2] http://www.withouthotair.com/c27/page_203.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c27/page_203.shtml
- hannob 11y ago
  It's interesting that you bring up climate change in the context of fusion. Because even in optimistic scenarios fusion will only play a role in a couple of decades. If we want to do something about climate change we have to do it within the next 10-20 years - and nuclear fusion certainly won't play a role in that timeframe. Also saying you want to try "everything" without considering potential downsides seems strange to me. There's only so much money there to spend. And I think there are other technologies more promising and more needed that would need better funding (e.g. new energy storage methods could need some support). The 6 billion is not the number this will cost. This is the original number that is now deprecated by a much higher number. And the comparison to the German renewable costs is comparing apples and oranges. Germany spends this money on electricity generation, which is a very different thing from funding a technology which may or may not produce energy in a distant future.
DennisP 11y ago
It's not a problem inherent to fusion, just to ITER's approach. MIT's ARC is a tokamak design with more advanced superconductors. It would be much smaller and cheaper, quicker to build, and produce 500MW [1]. UW's Dynomak is similar to tokamaks, but eliminates most of the superconductors. Capital cost of a 1 GW plant would be similar to a coal plant [2]. Those are both mainstream projects that leverage the work on tokamaks, so the risk is relatively low. A bunch of companies are pursuing higher-risk alternatives that could be even better. Tri Alpha, for example, recently achieved stable plasma in their field-reversed configuration [3]; their last milestone is to increase temperature, and see whether the plasma gets more stable as their model predicts. Last I saw, they were planning a 100MW reactor. Helion, which has a similar but pulsed design, is aiming for 50MW [4]. [1] http://news.mit.edu/2015/small-modular-efficient-fusion-plant-0810 http://news.mit.edu/2015/small-modular-efficient-fusion-plan... [2] 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... [3] http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/08/secretive-fusion-company-makes-reactor-breakthrough http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/08/secretive-fusion-... [4] http://www.helionenergy.com/?page_id=199 http://www.helionenergy.com/?page_id=199
andrepd 11y ago
Is 6 billion euro a large sum to invest on such a potentially game-changing project? How much does the US spend on coal, or solar, or wind each year?
- epistasis 11y ago
  Spending that 6 billion euro on, say, lithium ion batteries would generate 40GWh of batteries at current prices, but would likely drive down the price drastically as a guaranteed market is established the learning rate on batteries increases. We're at the point with current technology that we have tremendous gains that can be had simply by scaling industry. We don't need one GigaFactory, we need 200 of them.
  - XorNot 11y ago
    Lithium ion batteries aren't an energy source.
    - epistasis 11y ago
      Which is why they are called batteries... I'm not sure what point you're trying to make by stating the obvious. So I'll just say that electrical storage is a key component of any carbon neutral renewable energy grid. And whether they're in cars or attached to wind turbines or solar panels, an investment of that size would generate great benefits for the technology in general in addition to the economic benefits.
- hannob 11y ago
  The 6 billion is the original number. The real number is 15 billion + X with X largely unknown. That was my whole point: I find a project that is so dishonest about its real cost not trustworthy. Whether you consider that worth the price will largely depend on whether you believe it's game-changing. I don't.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    It will be game-changing at any price, the first problem is to find a solution that works sustainable at the scales we are looking for, then we can look at the economics. I agree that that is the harder problem but I'd be more than happy if ITER or any other fusion project would get to > 1.
jacquesm 11y ago
> I can say upfront that I'm extremely skeptical about nuclear fusion in general. I don't think that it will ever play any major role in energy production. Nuclear fusion pretty much powers everything you see around you. Whether or not we can do it artificially and controllably is another matter but nuclear fusions plays an extremely major role in energy production right today, in fact there are only very few energy sources that are not somehow a derivative of nuclear fusion.
- tempestn 11y ago
  That's a bit pedantic, don't you think?
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    No, not really. 'Ever' and 'in general' are pretty big words to deny feasibility for the concept that is powering everyday life and has been doing so since before humanity even existed. So far we've been able to harness each and every source of power that we ever ran into, fusion will be harnessed too. The bigger question is whether or not we can do it economically.
jessriedel 11y ago
I think you're wrong because you don't have an order-of-magnitude estimate of how much has actually been spent, how much we can reasonably expect, how much nuclear power is worth, and therefore how much spending would be a bargain. (I hope you don't mind me copying this previous comment when the New Yorker article was on HN....) When I read this article on ITER http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bottle http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bot... I was blown away by this passage: > Typically, outsiders cannot comprehend how the massive expenditures never manage to yield energy. Typically, insiders cannot comprehend how little is being invested in a project that presents such immense technical obstacles and also such potential. A graph commonly passed around among the insiders—an enduring scrap of twentieth-century budgetary ephemera—depicts the 1976 federal plan to build a working thermonuclear reactor. The graph tracks various scenarios for attaining fusion energy. The “maximum” effort, the most expensive up front, with initial spending as high as nine billion dollars a year, was projected to yield a reactor by 1990. The “moderate” effort, with spending never exceeding four billion dollars in a year, would take fifteen more years. The fusion community might be easy to criticize for its many unmet milestones, but for decades the United States has never come close to even the moderate effort. In 1977, when the American fusion budget was at its peak, government investment in the research, adjusted for inflation, was seven hundred million dollars; by 1991, this had fallen by more than half. It is now half a billion, not appreciably more than the Korean budget. The chart was produced by Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), which was later subsumed into the Department of Energy and presumably represented the expert wisdom at the time. (Please correct me if you have info that most experts were in fact more optimistic.) It can be found, in 1976 dollars, as figure 1 here: http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_2009/Who_Killed_Fusion.pdf http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_2... I am having a hard time getting over the importance of this. For all the discussion of global warming, energy prices, population crunches, etc., etc., fusion is always ignored as a solution for the simple reason that people think it's unfeasibly costly. And they think that only because they think it's had a history of being grossly more expensive than promised. But if we've really known how much it would cost to get commercial fusion power since 1976, then this reasoning is completely faulty. So then if we just haven't spent the modest amount of money on it...isn't this insane? Someone please tell me what I'm missing.

by hannob 11y ago

yc1010 11y ago

Climate change called and states that she doesn't care about your skepticism, renewables alone will not bring us into carbon free future. We have to try EVERYTHING in order to beat climate change, up to and including moonshots like this. Sadly this strange hatred of anything nuclear by environmentalists has done more to harm this planet and its people. BTW 6 billion is nothing when compared to over a hundred billion that for example Germany has spent on renewables, same Germany that replacing nuclear with coal on the other hand. Aside was just watching this documentary on BBC on tv there > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtp51eZkwoI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtp51eZkwoI The vision and drive of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs back in 19th and 20th centuries have lifted the world from literal darkness into the modern system of grids and electricity on a flick of a switch. I am sure there were many naysayers back in their day on top of all the obstacles they faced, these guys such as Edison and his team kept buggering on, and the modern world is thankful for foundations they laid. Let the scientists and engineers at ITER do their job and instead of moaning about it keep pressure on politicians to spend money on projects like this instead of bombing people in other countries.

epistasis 11y ago
> renewables alone will not bring us into carbon free future. They certainly can, and going 100% renewable by 2050 is feasible. [1] Once you add in nuclear, it's only more feasible (though maybe more expensive). Taking a look at the five potential plans for the UK from 2009 [2], they are now much more potentially feasible as solar and storage technology has plummeted in price far more quickly than anticipated. It's only a matter of political feasibility, not engineering or industrial feasibility. That's why these plans need to be reevaluated every 12 months, because technology for renewables is changing so much more quickly than any of the conventional technologies do, and the boundary for economic feasibility is quickly quickly shifting. [1] http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CountriesWWS.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Count... [2] http://www.withouthotair.com/c27/page_203.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c27/page_203.shtml
hannob 11y ago
It's interesting that you bring up climate change in the context of fusion. Because even in optimistic scenarios fusion will only play a role in a couple of decades. If we want to do something about climate change we have to do it within the next 10-20 years - and nuclear fusion certainly won't play a role in that timeframe. Also saying you want to try "everything" without considering potential downsides seems strange to me. There's only so much money there to spend. And I think there are other technologies more promising and more needed that would need better funding (e.g. new energy storage methods could need some support). The 6 billion is not the number this will cost. This is the original number that is now deprecated by a much higher number. And the comparison to the German renewable costs is comparing apples and oranges. Germany spends this money on electricity generation, which is a very different thing from funding a technology which may or may not produce energy in a distant future.

DennisP 11y ago

It's not a problem inherent to fusion, just to ITER's approach. MIT's ARC is a tokamak design with more advanced superconductors. It would be much smaller and cheaper, quicker to build, and produce 500MW [1]. UW's Dynomak is similar to tokamaks, but eliminates most of the superconductors. Capital cost of a 1 GW plant would be similar to a coal plant [2]. Those are both mainstream projects that leverage the work on tokamaks, so the risk is relatively low. A bunch of companies are pursuing higher-risk alternatives that could be even better. Tri Alpha, for example, recently achieved stable plasma in their field-reversed configuration [3]; their last milestone is to increase temperature, and see whether the plasma gets more stable as their model predicts. Last I saw, they were planning a 100MW reactor. Helion, which has a similar but pulsed design, is aiming for 50MW [4]. [1] http://news.mit.edu/2015/small-modular-efficient-fusion-plant-0810 http://news.mit.edu/2015/small-modular-efficient-fusion-plan... [2] 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... [3] http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/08/secretive-fusion-company-makes-reactor-breakthrough http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/08/secretive-fusion-... [4] http://www.helionenergy.com/?page_id=199 http://www.helionenergy.com/?page_id=199

andrepd 11y ago

Is 6 billion euro a large sum to invest on such a potentially game-changing project? How much does the US spend on coal, or solar, or wind each year?

epistasis 11y ago
Spending that 6 billion euro on, say, lithium ion batteries would generate 40GWh of batteries at current prices, but would likely drive down the price drastically as a guaranteed market is established the learning rate on batteries increases. We're at the point with current technology that we have tremendous gains that can be had simply by scaling industry. We don't need one GigaFactory, we need 200 of them.
- XorNot 11y ago
  Lithium ion batteries aren't an energy source.
  - epistasis 11y ago
    Which is why they are called batteries... I'm not sure what point you're trying to make by stating the obvious. So I'll just say that electrical storage is a key component of any carbon neutral renewable energy grid. And whether they're in cars or attached to wind turbines or solar panels, an investment of that size would generate great benefits for the technology in general in addition to the economic benefits.
hannob 11y ago
The 6 billion is the original number. The real number is 15 billion + X with X largely unknown. That was my whole point: I find a project that is so dishonest about its real cost not trustworthy. Whether you consider that worth the price will largely depend on whether you believe it's game-changing. I don't.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  It will be game-changing at any price, the first problem is to find a solution that works sustainable at the scales we are looking for, then we can look at the economics. I agree that that is the harder problem but I'd be more than happy if ITER or any other fusion project would get to > 1.

jacquesm 11y ago

> I can say upfront that I'm extremely skeptical about nuclear fusion in general. I don't think that it will ever play any major role in energy production. Nuclear fusion pretty much powers everything you see around you. Whether or not we can do it artificially and controllably is another matter but nuclear fusions plays an extremely major role in energy production right today, in fact there are only very few energy sources that are not somehow a derivative of nuclear fusion.

tempestn 11y ago
That's a bit pedantic, don't you think?
- jacquesm 11y ago
  No, not really. 'Ever' and 'in general' are pretty big words to deny feasibility for the concept that is powering everyday life and has been doing so since before humanity even existed. So far we've been able to harness each and every source of power that we ever ran into, fusion will be harnessed too. The bigger question is whether or not we can do it economically.

jessriedel 11y ago

I think you're wrong because you don't have an order-of-magnitude estimate of how much has actually been spent, how much we can reasonably expect, how much nuclear power is worth, and therefore how much spending would be a bargain. (I hope you don't mind me copying this previous comment when the New Yorker article was on HN....) When I read this article on ITER http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bottle http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bot... I was blown away by this passage: > Typically, outsiders cannot comprehend how the massive expenditures never manage to yield energy. Typically, insiders cannot comprehend how little is being invested in a project that presents such immense technical obstacles and also such potential. A graph commonly passed around among the insiders—an enduring scrap of twentieth-century budgetary ephemera—depicts the 1976 federal plan to build a working thermonuclear reactor. The graph tracks various scenarios for attaining fusion energy. The “maximum” effort, the most expensive up front, with initial spending as high as nine billion dollars a year, was projected to yield a reactor by 1990. The “moderate” effort, with spending never exceeding four billion dollars in a year, would take fifteen more years. The fusion community might be easy to criticize for its many unmet milestones, but for decades the United States has never come close to even the moderate effort. In 1977, when the American fusion budget was at its peak, government investment in the research, adjusted for inflation, was seven hundred million dollars; by 1991, this had fallen by more than half. It is now half a billion, not appreciably more than the Korean budget. The chart was produced by Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), which was later subsumed into the Department of Energy and presumably represented the expert wisdom at the time. (Please correct me if you have info that most experts were in fact more optimistic.) It can be found, in 1976 dollars, as figure 1 here: http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_2009/Who_Killed_Fusion.pdf http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_2... I am having a hard time getting over the importance of this. For all the discussion of global warming, energy prices, population crunches, etc., etc., fusion is always ignored as a solution for the simple reason that people think it's unfeasibly costly. And they think that only because they think it's had a history of being grossly more expensive than promised. But if we've really known how much it would cost to get commercial fusion power since 1976, then this reasoning is completely faulty. So then if we just haven't spent the modest amount of money on it...isn't this insane? Someone please tell me what I'm missing.