5 ms·

Fusion is still exciting, but with normal renewable (solar, wind) costs plummeting the way they are is there still such a compelling case for pouring money into

by vosper 9y ago

Fusion is still exciting, but with normal renewable (solar, wind) costs plummeting the way they are is there still such a compelling case for pouring money into fusion? This one aims to produce a working plant within 15 years. I'm not sure that any of the other efforts are closer to being viable (if they work at all). That's the kind of time frame in which we may master offshore wind and grid-attached storage like the Tesla batteries. Might not even need fusion at the point. (Except maybe for spacecraft, in the much more distant future)

tinco 9y ago
Solar and wind will never be enough to cover all energy demand. It is a common misconception, it is not even possible to reduce energy consumption to low enough that solar and wind would be sufficient. If we want to stop burning fuel, we must research nuclear. Of course it is unlikely that we would stop burning fuel any time soon, and that's why 15 years is unfortunately not an inconvenient timeline. If you're interested in the numbers behind this argument I highly recommend the book "Sustainable energy without the hot air".
- newnewpdro 9y ago
  https://www.inverse.com/article/34239-how-many-solar-panels-to-power-the-usa https://www.inverse.com/article/34239-how-many-solar-panels-...
  - tinco 9y ago
    Right, as Musk said, we're going to need a mixture of nuclear and wind. If my calculations are correct you need about 500.000 windmills to cover electricity demand in the US. But electricity demand is only a small fraction of total energy use. How much energy do all cars in the US use? How much do tractors working the fields? How much do factories burning their own? How much do ships transporting goods? How much do planes flying around? How much do factories in China making our goods? Or mining operations in Indonesia or Congo mining our materials? If you look at the full picture of sustainable energy, you'll find that covering electricity use by spending a trillion dollars on a 100x100 mile wind farm is a cool idea and a step in the direction, but it's only a step. There's a whole journey ahead of us, and that's what that book teaches.
    - newnewpdro 9y ago
      Musk refers to Nuclear as a potential part of the transitional story. Your comment suggests Nuclear is a permanent part of the "mixture", and that there's not enough capacity for all the energy needs without it.
- jfaucett 9y ago
  Came here to say the same thing. Anytime an energy discussion comes up, I try to help dispell this myth that wind and solar will solve all our problems, especially in the global context of rising energy needs. If you care about the enviroment and our future on this planet, it behooves you to look into nuclear research and get uptodate. I would love to see us solve the clean energy problem fully this century, and the key factor is going to be nuclear.
  - kungtotte 9y ago
    It's always been my instinct that decentralisation of energy production is the true path forward, regardless of method. If most of us had solar panels on our roofs for example you would reduce the demand on the power grid. It's not enough to be completely self reliant except for a very few people, but if everyone dropped their consumption by say 20% on average, that's a whole lot of power that centralised plants don't need to generate. For people living on larger properties, a small wind turbine or two is also not out of the question. Every little bit helps.
  - Jedd 9y ago
    > ... I try to help dispell this myth that wind and solar will solve all our problems, especially in the global context of rising energy needs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16473729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16473729 I can't see any comment from you on this story from 10 days ago that was titled: "After rising for 100 years, electricity demand is flat (vox.com)" Not everyone agrees that rising energy needs are a given, or even just a myth that we should be politely accommodating. It would behoove <sic> you to separate fusion and fission from any call to action to investigation 'nuclear' as they are substantially different in terms of waste and safety.
    - jfaucett 9y ago
      Yes, I didn't mention fission for 2 reasons #1 anyone who looks into nuclear already knows this and #2 anyone else is usually just confused by it. I don't spend every day on HN so I just missed that story and dont have time to look into it now, but almost every article I've ever read till now had ways the energy was displaced and not actually reduced or at a plateau. Also why would you not want more energy? You can do more things, better, faster, etc. The only reason not to want energy is because of externalities, which is reasonable but needs to be weighed in the context of what your giving up i.e. convience, efficiency, productivity, etc.
- slfnflctd 9y ago
  > it is not even possible to reduce energy consumption to low enough that solar and wind would be sufficient. Readers should remember that this is due to the needs of industrial, infrastructure, transport and military applications, which dwarf everything else. Most residential and commercial needs are much more practical to make 100% wind/solar.
- nine_k 9y ago
  We're not going to stop burning fuel, because of the superior energy density of hydrocarbons. It's important for e.g. aircraft. This needs not be fossil fuel, though; with plenty of electric energy, liquid fuels can be synthesized.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  > it is not even possible to reduce energy consumption to low enough that solar and wind would be sufficient. What do you really mean by that? Solar has enough capacity to power some million times our energy usage, so you are clearly not talking about bare capacity.
  - tinco 9y ago
    So a panel is about 261 KWh per year per square meter. We need about 25PWh, so that is about 100.000km2 of solar panel. There's lots of desert in the U.S., so we could sacrifice one of them and cover it with solar panels, and cover all of our needs. Note that a solar farms come in at around 120 million USD per square KM, that would be about 12 trillion dollars. (And those are largely the expensive import-raw-materials-from-abroad kind of dollars, not the cheap give-jobs-to-americans dollars). I suppose you could make it part of the wall with mexico to share some construction costs. So yeah the US has enough area to solar power the US a couple hundred times over (not a couple million). What I meant by that we can't reduce energy consumption enough is that even without our electricity costs, and reducing transport costs etc, there are still petawatts of power spent on services we have no direct control over but that make our lives easy, healthy and comfortable.
    - marcosdumay 9y ago
      Indeed I overestimated the solar potential. It can cover many thousand times the human energy consumption, not many million. I don't know where you are placing that 260kWh/year panel, but it not top quality by any means. About solar panels being "expensive import raw materials", they are a process literally created by the US, mostly developed there, and that you only import for political reasons. About the actual price, the theoretical limits are way too cheap to matter on our current context, it just requires engineering improvements.
- epistasis 9y ago
  >If you're interested in the numbers behind this argument I highly recommend the book "Sustainable energy without the hot air". The numbers in that book do not support your case. And that's for a small island nation without many renewable resources, trying to be energy independent, written at a time when renewable cost many multiples of what they cost now. Wind and solar can easily provide many multiples of our total energy demand, even after the entire world is brought up to a European standard of energy consumption. Nuclear may have an impact, but it's going to be 20+ years before it can. Every attempt to build is met with massive delays and almost criminal incompetence. We can't build nuclear right now. Maybe SMRs will be different, if they will never be as cheap as renewables. SMR might be the expensive thing that gets us from 80% to 100% renewables, or it may be some other technology for seasonal energy storage. The nuclear industry has let the world down when nuclear was needed most. The so called nuclear renaissance that should have started in 2008 in the US and the UK has fizzled due to construction mismanagement. We needed those reactors to be built quickly, and cheaply, and then to replicate that success again and again, but due to the failure we must invest heavily in wins solar and storage until a new generation of more competent nuclear construction is possible.
  - tinco 9y ago
    Thanks, I agree that the nuclear industry has been letting the world down. I don't know why it's so hard for the nuclear industry to get a grip on itself, but it clearly hasn't. I've always felt that nuclear energy is more promising because of the significantly lower resource intensity. If at some point some company manages to reliably produce nuclear power plants at a predictable and reasonable cost, then just by sheer economics it should outperform crazy ideas like building hundreds of thousands of windmills. Not to mention the unforeseen consequences building that many windmills could have on the environment. But in practice, if it's safe and easy to invest in wind energy, and even marginally cost effective, then it will become reality. From what I remember of the book, all the numbers were order of magnitude estimates, and things like solar panels being a few factors cheaper doesn't really change the idea that they're expensive and have to cover a lot of land. That said, it might have underestimated wind, especially for a large country like the US.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  > " it is not even possible to reduce energy consumption to low enough that solar and wind would be sufficient." I don't think it's accurate to say it's not possible, it's clearly possible as humans have lived without electricity and fossil fuels before, and all we'd need in order to survive would be for the existing renewable energy production to be made available for water processing and transportation. However, the chances of us collectively reducing our energy consumption in time to avoid long lasting environmental damage so that we can make our current renewable energy installations to cover all energy demand is very slim, so non-renewable clean energy technology like nuclear should be made part of our energy mix.
PoachedSausage 9y ago
With fusion we could power systems dedicated to pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere.
exo762 9y ago
Renewables are ecological disaster in slow motion. Renewables do not provide baseline energy. Renewables do not produce anywhere amount of energy fusion can produce. Fusion is the cleanest energy source. Fusion allows to cheaply reverse any chemical process that is reversible using huge amounts of energy. I.e. fusion makes electric cars obsolete - just produce high-energy-density whatever chemical fuel you can imagine. Fusion revolutionizes agriculture - you can produce fertilizers very very cheaply. Fusion makes desalinization cheap and affordable for anyone. Fusion is civilizational game changer.
- sgt101 9y ago
  Wohha - we need to go to 0 emissions in 30 years. Even in the very best case Fusion will be producing ~20% of our energy by then (and I stress, this was achieved with Fission in some states because of bomb making; so it proves it's possible but definitely not going to happen by itself). So we need renewables and electric cars for at least 70 years. And electric cars actually seem better (faster, more reliable) than ice ones. Also, just because you can make fertilizers and put them on crops doesn't mean that's a good idea. Water courses all over the world are poisoned with chemical fertilizers. Same for desalinization - the by products are nasty. And fusion itself will produce radioactive waste. The linings of the reactors become ablated and radioactive and I think that one of the great benefits of Professor Whyte's scheme is that servicing the reactor becomes much easier and faster - but the removed components need to be dealt with carefully. It's a great and exciting thing - but not a panacea; we have to work hard to deliver a liveable world for 10 billion and the 500 years after the peak.
  - exo762 9y ago
    I never said it is panacea. I said it is civilizational game changer. Some of your intuitions are wrong because they assume no source of cheap energy. With cheap clean energy you can scrub CO2 out of air, you can rework any nasty byproduct of desalination into its components and recombine them into something safe or reuse in other industrial processes. You can recycle literally anything. > And fusion itself will produce radioactive waste. This is not a technical or economical problem. You put this stuff into metal containers, you put those metal containers into a hangar, you put guards to prevent people from damaging containers. We do it now and we do it well. > And electric cars actually seem better (faster, more reliable) than ice ones. While I love electric cars (and I want to buy one), they are not really better. Those batteries are both toxic and put a huge ecological burden on environment in production and recycling. They have a short term future and promise, since we need to stop producing CO2 now. Long term? Not so sure, since progress on batteries front is and was very slow.
no1youknowz 9y ago
If we put aside the energy requirements for our planet and think more upward bound. Fusion solves the problem of being too far away from the Sun and using that as an energy source. Imagine being able to live in Mars, Titan, Ganymede, Enceladus or beyond and have access to energy. It would truly be a game changer. In a 100 years of it's inception, humans could truly be a multi-planet species.

by vosper 9y ago

tinco 9y ago

Solar and wind will never be enough to cover all energy demand. It is a common misconception, it is not even possible to reduce energy consumption to low enough that solar and wind would be sufficient. If we want to stop burning fuel, we must research nuclear. Of course it is unlikely that we would stop burning fuel any time soon, and that's why 15 years is unfortunately not an inconvenient timeline. If you're interested in the numbers behind this argument I highly recommend the book "Sustainable energy without the hot air".

newnewpdro 9y ago
https://www.inverse.com/article/34239-how-many-solar-panels-to-power-the-usa https://www.inverse.com/article/34239-how-many-solar-panels-...
- tinco 9y ago
  Right, as Musk said, we're going to need a mixture of nuclear and wind. If my calculations are correct you need about 500.000 windmills to cover electricity demand in the US. But electricity demand is only a small fraction of total energy use. How much energy do all cars in the US use? How much do tractors working the fields? How much do factories burning their own? How much do ships transporting goods? How much do planes flying around? How much do factories in China making our goods? Or mining operations in Indonesia or Congo mining our materials? If you look at the full picture of sustainable energy, you'll find that covering electricity use by spending a trillion dollars on a 100x100 mile wind farm is a cool idea and a step in the direction, but it's only a step. There's a whole journey ahead of us, and that's what that book teaches.
  - newnewpdro 9y ago
    Musk refers to Nuclear as a potential part of the transitional story. Your comment suggests Nuclear is a permanent part of the "mixture", and that there's not enough capacity for all the energy needs without it.
jfaucett 9y ago
Came here to say the same thing. Anytime an energy discussion comes up, I try to help dispell this myth that wind and solar will solve all our problems, especially in the global context of rising energy needs. If you care about the enviroment and our future on this planet, it behooves you to look into nuclear research and get uptodate. I would love to see us solve the clean energy problem fully this century, and the key factor is going to be nuclear.
- kungtotte 9y ago
  It's always been my instinct that decentralisation of energy production is the true path forward, regardless of method. If most of us had solar panels on our roofs for example you would reduce the demand on the power grid. It's not enough to be completely self reliant except for a very few people, but if everyone dropped their consumption by say 20% on average, that's a whole lot of power that centralised plants don't need to generate. For people living on larger properties, a small wind turbine or two is also not out of the question. Every little bit helps.
- Jedd 9y ago
  > ... I try to help dispell this myth that wind and solar will solve all our problems, especially in the global context of rising energy needs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16473729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16473729 I can't see any comment from you on this story from 10 days ago that was titled: "After rising for 100 years, electricity demand is flat (vox.com)" Not everyone agrees that rising energy needs are a given, or even just a myth that we should be politely accommodating. It would behoove <sic> you to separate fusion and fission from any call to action to investigation 'nuclear' as they are substantially different in terms of waste and safety.
  - jfaucett 9y ago
    Yes, I didn't mention fission for 2 reasons #1 anyone who looks into nuclear already knows this and #2 anyone else is usually just confused by it. I don't spend every day on HN so I just missed that story and dont have time to look into it now, but almost every article I've ever read till now had ways the energy was displaced and not actually reduced or at a plateau. Also why would you not want more energy? You can do more things, better, faster, etc. The only reason not to want energy is because of externalities, which is reasonable but needs to be weighed in the context of what your giving up i.e. convience, efficiency, productivity, etc.
slfnflctd 9y ago
> it is not even possible to reduce energy consumption to low enough that solar and wind would be sufficient. Readers should remember that this is due to the needs of industrial, infrastructure, transport and military applications, which dwarf everything else. Most residential and commercial needs are much more practical to make 100% wind/solar.
nine_k 9y ago
We're not going to stop burning fuel, because of the superior energy density of hydrocarbons. It's important for e.g. aircraft. This needs not be fossil fuel, though; with plenty of electric energy, liquid fuels can be synthesized.
marcosdumay 9y ago
> it is not even possible to reduce energy consumption to low enough that solar and wind would be sufficient. What do you really mean by that? Solar has enough capacity to power some million times our energy usage, so you are clearly not talking about bare capacity.
- tinco 9y ago
  So a panel is about 261 KWh per year per square meter. We need about 25PWh, so that is about 100.000km2 of solar panel. There's lots of desert in the U.S., so we could sacrifice one of them and cover it with solar panels, and cover all of our needs. Note that a solar farms come in at around 120 million USD per square KM, that would be about 12 trillion dollars. (And those are largely the expensive import-raw-materials-from-abroad kind of dollars, not the cheap give-jobs-to-americans dollars). I suppose you could make it part of the wall with mexico to share some construction costs. So yeah the US has enough area to solar power the US a couple hundred times over (not a couple million). What I meant by that we can't reduce energy consumption enough is that even without our electricity costs, and reducing transport costs etc, there are still petawatts of power spent on services we have no direct control over but that make our lives easy, healthy and comfortable.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    Indeed I overestimated the solar potential. It can cover many thousand times the human energy consumption, not many million. I don't know where you are placing that 260kWh/year panel, but it not top quality by any means. About solar panels being "expensive import raw materials", they are a process literally created by the US, mostly developed there, and that you only import for political reasons. About the actual price, the theoretical limits are way too cheap to matter on our current context, it just requires engineering improvements.
epistasis 9y ago
>If you're interested in the numbers behind this argument I highly recommend the book "Sustainable energy without the hot air". The numbers in that book do not support your case. And that's for a small island nation without many renewable resources, trying to be energy independent, written at a time when renewable cost many multiples of what they cost now. Wind and solar can easily provide many multiples of our total energy demand, even after the entire world is brought up to a European standard of energy consumption. Nuclear may have an impact, but it's going to be 20+ years before it can. Every attempt to build is met with massive delays and almost criminal incompetence. We can't build nuclear right now. Maybe SMRs will be different, if they will never be as cheap as renewables. SMR might be the expensive thing that gets us from 80% to 100% renewables, or it may be some other technology for seasonal energy storage. The nuclear industry has let the world down when nuclear was needed most. The so called nuclear renaissance that should have started in 2008 in the US and the UK has fizzled due to construction mismanagement. We needed those reactors to be built quickly, and cheaply, and then to replicate that success again and again, but due to the failure we must invest heavily in wins solar and storage until a new generation of more competent nuclear construction is possible.
- tinco 9y ago
  Thanks, I agree that the nuclear industry has been letting the world down. I don't know why it's so hard for the nuclear industry to get a grip on itself, but it clearly hasn't. I've always felt that nuclear energy is more promising because of the significantly lower resource intensity. If at some point some company manages to reliably produce nuclear power plants at a predictable and reasonable cost, then just by sheer economics it should outperform crazy ideas like building hundreds of thousands of windmills. Not to mention the unforeseen consequences building that many windmills could have on the environment. But in practice, if it's safe and easy to invest in wind energy, and even marginally cost effective, then it will become reality. From what I remember of the book, all the numbers were order of magnitude estimates, and things like solar panels being a few factors cheaper doesn't really change the idea that they're expensive and have to cover a lot of land. That said, it might have underestimated wind, especially for a large country like the US.
ZenoArrow 9y ago
> " it is not even possible to reduce energy consumption to low enough that solar and wind would be sufficient." I don't think it's accurate to say it's not possible, it's clearly possible as humans have lived without electricity and fossil fuels before, and all we'd need in order to survive would be for the existing renewable energy production to be made available for water processing and transportation. However, the chances of us collectively reducing our energy consumption in time to avoid long lasting environmental damage so that we can make our current renewable energy installations to cover all energy demand is very slim, so non-renewable clean energy technology like nuclear should be made part of our energy mix.

PoachedSausage 9y ago

With fusion we could power systems dedicated to pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere.

exo762 9y ago

Renewables are ecological disaster in slow motion. Renewables do not provide baseline energy. Renewables do not produce anywhere amount of energy fusion can produce. Fusion is the cleanest energy source. Fusion allows to cheaply reverse any chemical process that is reversible using huge amounts of energy. I.e. fusion makes electric cars obsolete - just produce high-energy-density whatever chemical fuel you can imagine. Fusion revolutionizes agriculture - you can produce fertilizers very very cheaply. Fusion makes desalinization cheap and affordable for anyone. Fusion is civilizational game changer.

sgt101 9y ago
Wohha - we need to go to 0 emissions in 30 years. Even in the very best case Fusion will be producing ~20% of our energy by then (and I stress, this was achieved with Fission in some states because of bomb making; so it proves it's possible but definitely not going to happen by itself). So we need renewables and electric cars for at least 70 years. And electric cars actually seem better (faster, more reliable) than ice ones. Also, just because you can make fertilizers and put them on crops doesn't mean that's a good idea. Water courses all over the world are poisoned with chemical fertilizers. Same for desalinization - the by products are nasty. And fusion itself will produce radioactive waste. The linings of the reactors become ablated and radioactive and I think that one of the great benefits of Professor Whyte's scheme is that servicing the reactor becomes much easier and faster - but the removed components need to be dealt with carefully. It's a great and exciting thing - but not a panacea; we have to work hard to deliver a liveable world for 10 billion and the 500 years after the peak.
- exo762 9y ago
  I never said it is panacea. I said it is civilizational game changer. Some of your intuitions are wrong because they assume no source of cheap energy. With cheap clean energy you can scrub CO2 out of air, you can rework any nasty byproduct of desalination into its components and recombine them into something safe or reuse in other industrial processes. You can recycle literally anything. > And fusion itself will produce radioactive waste. This is not a technical or economical problem. You put this stuff into metal containers, you put those metal containers into a hangar, you put guards to prevent people from damaging containers. We do it now and we do it well. > And electric cars actually seem better (faster, more reliable) than ice ones. While I love electric cars (and I want to buy one), they are not really better. Those batteries are both toxic and put a huge ecological burden on environment in production and recycling. They have a short term future and promise, since we need to stop producing CO2 now. Long term? Not so sure, since progress on batteries front is and was very slow.

no1youknowz 9y ago

If we put aside the energy requirements for our planet and think more upward bound. Fusion solves the problem of being too far away from the Sun and using that as an energy source. Imagine being able to live in Mars, Titan, Ganymede, Enceladus or beyond and have access to energy. It would truly be a game changer. In a 100 years of it's inception, humans could truly be a multi-planet species.