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I don't know about commercial by 2030 but leap frogging ITER doesn't seem far fetched at all because of the all signficant advances in superconductors achieved

I don't know about commercial by 2030 but leap frogging ITER doesn't seem far fetched at all because of the all signficant advances in superconductors achieved after ITER was planned out. Also, if the new superconductors do work out, it's very likely that all other forms of energy generation and grid level storage will become almost immediately obsolete and any additional focus moving forward would be only on improving the efficiency of fusion. The remaining use cases for solar would probably then be on small off-grid type situations.

gh02t 6y ago
I'm a nuclear engineer working at a laboratory known for fusion research. Commercial fusion power at any scale is not happening by 2030. 2040 or 2050 are more realistic and may still be a stretch.
- benjaminjackman 6y ago
  That's interesting, do you think that SPARC and HTS advancements like for example VIPER cables point towards a faster path to market for fusion than ITER?
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    No, because the fusion reactors using HTS still have horribly lower power density. The ARC design has a power density 40x worse than a PWR primary reactor vessel, and involves far more difficult engineering. How is this going to be cheaper than fission, which itself is not competitive?
    - tinco 6y ago
      Fission is only not competitive because of regulation and safety measures, is it not?
      - pfdietz 6y ago
        Not. Nowhere has it done well. It's just too complex with too many interdependent parts. Construction has proved to be beyond the competency of those trying to build plants. And now, it's just too late. The iteration time for nuclear designs is measured in decades, going up against renewable and storage technologies iterating in periods of a few years. Fusion would make fission look dead simple. If fission reactors cannot be constructed on schedule or budget, how bad would fusion reactors be? If you think regulation is the problem, explain just which regulations you mean.
        tinco 6y ago
        It was an honest question. I don't know which specific regulations, I've never built one but I have heard those who did lament the cost and trouble in even obtaining a site. From what I can see fission reactors are doing just fine in France and Belgium. I don't know the specific numbers but the French don't seem worse off economically, despite having the greenest grid on the planet. Fission has a number of disadvantages over fusion that make it a reasonable possibility of it being economically more viable than fission. Because there's no compounding risks it is way more attractive to mass produce smaller reactors. Once the key hurdles are solved it will be a simple calculation to decide how much investment will yield how much return, that means it will be an interesting investment opportunity. Contrast this with fission, where a project is usually just one or two reactors, with tens of billions invested, loads of risk, slow and steady reward with various threats. It is not the complexity that makes power plants intractible, we build more complex things than fission reactors every day. Its the lack of supply chain because of the unsteady build rate. The iteration time of fusion reactors is measured in years, not decades by the way. Tokamak Energy is building its third iteration in 12 years, and plans to start the 4th in 2025. Obviously we aren't there yet, but if it's possible, and a relatively small company like Tokamak Energy can build a proof of concept, then I don't see why we wouldn't have thousands of reactors spread through cities all over the world within the next 20 years.
        pfdietz 6y ago
        It was a leading question, pretending to claim that regulation was the cause. Nice walkback, though. Nuclear is in a bad state in France. Their recent attempts to build new reactors have gone massively over budget. Existing reactors are aging and it looks like they cannot replace them. Fission has some disadvantages over fusion, but those disadvantages won't make fusion cheaper than fission (the costs of fuel and waste disposal for fission are minor compared to other costs.) Fusion is inherently much lower in power density than fission, which will make the nuclear island much more expensive to build. It will require a minor miracle for fusion to be competitive with fission, never mind the cheaper sources of energy that are beating fission. > Tokamak Energy is building its third iteration in 12 years, They haven't built a fusion reactor. They have built experiments that are smaller and less complex that what a fusion power plant would have to be. Small fission reactors iterated well too; they weren't commercial power plants. The chance that we have thousands of fusion reactors all over the world in the next 20 years is indistinguishable from zero.
- dataflow 6y ago
  What signs do you see that it might work at all (and that it's not a hopeless endeavor)? As a layman it's so hard to understand how something so hot and so confined could ever be made to react reliably with continuous fuel and energy production to produce power on a large scale.
  - a1369209993 6y ago
    I don't think anyone is proposing continuous fuel (even fission reactors typically don't work like that - you have to shut them down to swap out the fuel rods periodically). The idea is that you inject (say) some deuterium into a blast chamber, it explodes like a miniature thermonuclear bomb, and you gather the explosive energy in vaguely the same way a internal combustion engine (like in cars) gathers energy from fuel-air bombs in its engine cyliders. And we already know (roughly) how to build that, it's just that the version we know how to build is so ridiculously, impractically huge that you could fit a small city in its blast chamber... because it runs on actual, non-miniature, thermonuclear bombs. The difficulty is scaling that down to something that doesn't have a upfront cost measured in multiples of the world GDP before it starts generating power (in quantities measured in multiples of current global electrical consumption, and likely multiples of global energy consumption period).
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      Wait, are you saying we know how to build a World Wonder that produces infinite energy, but we’re not doing it? What’ll we do if Ghandi builds it first?
      - a1369209993 6y ago
        Because we don't have enough energy demand to make it worthwhile. Even if we had enough money (and political will) to fund it, we'd be better off spending it on a space elevator, since we can actually use that enough to cover the costs.
- gary_0 6y ago
  The only way significant progress on commercial fusion is likely by 2030 is if it's approached by industry and government similarly to how COVID vaccine development was -- everyone drops everything and throws everything they've got at it. Another example of similar financial and institutional commitment would be the Apollo program. This level of commitment will probably only happen if climate change (and the related ecological and economic collapses) are taken as seriously as COVID, which is unlikely since, once the effects become obvious as COVID, it will be too late. And even COVID has large numbers of people denying reality. Even if a massive commitment to fusion started now, by 2030 we'd likely only have a promising proof-of-concept or two, with several more failed projects on the side. Wide-scale deployment would still be years away even with many companies tooling up to start building pilot commercial reactors while assuming high financial risk, since profitability would be far from guaranteed. [edit] Another point of comparison would be semiconductor manufacturing advances over the past 10 years. Tens of billions were spent researching and building factories, and in the end only a few companies made it to 7nm. And that was a clearly profitable endeavor iterating on already proven techniques!
- jariel 6y ago
  Help me answer this: If it's 'likely' to happen, then why are we not allocating 10's of billions towards it right now, to accelerate it so that it happens in 5 years? Many, many things can be done in parrallel. Some effort would be wasted, bit it'd be worth it. If fusion works, it's basically going to be priceless in terms of impact and value. Even starting to account for climate change ... we could suck Co2 out of the air on demand.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    It's not likely to work in the sense of being profitable to build the reactors. There are fundamental engineering constraints that make it unlikely to be competitive.
- deleted 6y ago
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exporectomy 6y ago
What makes you think fusion power will be cheaper than solar, wind, fossil fuels or fission? Efficiency isn't really a good metric when the fuel is free. We see that in solar power where expensive high efficiency devices lose out to cheaper less efficient ones. It's more about capital cost and operating cost per unit of energy.
- southerntofu 6y ago
  To elaborate on the topic, there is ample evidence that nuclear energy is by far the most expensive source of energy, when you take into account the government (for example here in France) entirely subsidizing the construction and hypothetical demolition. I say hypothetical because french attempts at "safely dismantling" nuclear power point are not going so well and are over-budget by an order of magnitude. Then these people who can't even build/dismantle a plant (see the many Areva scandals) would like us to believe they can build an underground storage area for highly radioactive materials that's gonna be safe for at least 100 000 years? Despite growing evidence of the contrary There's also growing evidence that nuclear and renewables tend to be incompatible, mostly because nuclear means a grid with huge centers of energy production, far away from energy consumption (the opposite is true with renewables). https://www.sussex.ac.uk/news/research?id=53376 https://www.sussex.ac.uk/news/research?id=53376
  - selectodude 6y ago
    I'm always kind of curious as this "expensive" line of thinking. Yes, nuclear is expensive. Extremely expensive. But is it more expensive than a week's worth of catastrophic grid collapse due to global warming? We have the ability to build nuclear plants. We can reprocess the waste to make more energy with. We can get better at it to drive down the price. It's more reliable as a base load than any renewable. My state gets over fifty percent of its energy from nuclear power plants. I pay a few pennies more per kWh than neighboring states. I'd pay a few more pennies than that to figure out the rest of this issue.
    - southerntofu 6y ago
marcosdumay 6y ago
If ITER proves its style to be a success (what may happen this decade, but I'm not holding my breath), we can expect a decade (about half the time of the original) to just complete the first generation of commercially viable reactors (what ITER will not be). After that, lithium supplied T grows exponentially with the reactor usage, with a doubling time of a bit less than a decade. So, if it becomes the bottleneck (what means, if people to everything else right) you can expect some 3 or 4 decades before fusion even becomes a major power source.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  It would take far longer than a decade, and I think likely would never happen at all.

gh02t 6y ago

I'm a nuclear engineer working at a laboratory known for fusion research. Commercial fusion power at any scale is not happening by 2030. 2040 or 2050 are more realistic and may still be a stretch.

benjaminjackman 6y ago
That's interesting, do you think that SPARC and HTS advancements like for example VIPER cables point towards a faster path to market for fusion than ITER?
- pfdietz 6y ago
  No, because the fusion reactors using HTS still have horribly lower power density. The ARC design has a power density 40x worse than a PWR primary reactor vessel, and involves far more difficult engineering. How is this going to be cheaper than fission, which itself is not competitive?
  - tinco 6y ago
    Fission is only not competitive because of regulation and safety measures, is it not?
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      Not. Nowhere has it done well. It's just too complex with too many interdependent parts. Construction has proved to be beyond the competency of those trying to build plants. And now, it's just too late. The iteration time for nuclear designs is measured in decades, going up against renewable and storage technologies iterating in periods of a few years. Fusion would make fission look dead simple. If fission reactors cannot be constructed on schedule or budget, how bad would fusion reactors be? If you think regulation is the problem, explain just which regulations you mean.
      - tinco 6y ago
        It was an honest question. I don't know which specific regulations, I've never built one but I have heard those who did lament the cost and trouble in even obtaining a site. From what I can see fission reactors are doing just fine in France and Belgium. I don't know the specific numbers but the French don't seem worse off economically, despite having the greenest grid on the planet. Fission has a number of disadvantages over fusion that make it a reasonable possibility of it being economically more viable than fission. Because there's no compounding risks it is way more attractive to mass produce smaller reactors. Once the key hurdles are solved it will be a simple calculation to decide how much investment will yield how much return, that means it will be an interesting investment opportunity. Contrast this with fission, where a project is usually just one or two reactors, with tens of billions invested, loads of risk, slow and steady reward with various threats. It is not the complexity that makes power plants intractible, we build more complex things than fission reactors every day. Its the lack of supply chain because of the unsteady build rate. The iteration time of fusion reactors is measured in years, not decades by the way. Tokamak Energy is building its third iteration in 12 years, and plans to start the 4th in 2025. Obviously we aren't there yet, but if it's possible, and a relatively small company like Tokamak Energy can build a proof of concept, then I don't see why we wouldn't have thousands of reactors spread through cities all over the world within the next 20 years.
        pfdietz 6y ago
        It was a leading question, pretending to claim that regulation was the cause. Nice walkback, though. Nuclear is in a bad state in France. Their recent attempts to build new reactors have gone massively over budget. Existing reactors are aging and it looks like they cannot replace them. Fission has some disadvantages over fusion, but those disadvantages won't make fusion cheaper than fission (the costs of fuel and waste disposal for fission are minor compared to other costs.) Fusion is inherently much lower in power density than fission, which will make the nuclear island much more expensive to build. It will require a minor miracle for fusion to be competitive with fission, never mind the cheaper sources of energy that are beating fission. > Tokamak Energy is building its third iteration in 12 years, They haven't built a fusion reactor. They have built experiments that are smaller and less complex that what a fusion power plant would have to be. Small fission reactors iterated well too; they weren't commercial power plants. The chance that we have thousands of fusion reactors all over the world in the next 20 years is indistinguishable from zero.
dataflow 6y ago
What signs do you see that it might work at all (and that it's not a hopeless endeavor)? As a layman it's so hard to understand how something so hot and so confined could ever be made to react reliably with continuous fuel and energy production to produce power on a large scale.
- a1369209993 6y ago
  I don't think anyone is proposing continuous fuel (even fission reactors typically don't work like that - you have to shut them down to swap out the fuel rods periodically). The idea is that you inject (say) some deuterium into a blast chamber, it explodes like a miniature thermonuclear bomb, and you gather the explosive energy in vaguely the same way a internal combustion engine (like in cars) gathers energy from fuel-air bombs in its engine cyliders. And we already know (roughly) how to build that, it's just that the version we know how to build is so ridiculously, impractically huge that you could fit a small city in its blast chamber... because it runs on actual, non-miniature, thermonuclear bombs. The difficulty is scaling that down to something that doesn't have a upfront cost measured in multiples of the world GDP before it starts generating power (in quantities measured in multiples of current global electrical consumption, and likely multiples of global energy consumption period).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    Wait, are you saying we know how to build a World Wonder that produces infinite energy, but we’re not doing it? What’ll we do if Ghandi builds it first?
    - a1369209993 6y ago
      Because we don't have enough energy demand to make it worthwhile. Even if we had enough money (and political will) to fund it, we'd be better off spending it on a space elevator, since we can actually use that enough to cover the costs.
gary_0 6y ago
The only way significant progress on commercial fusion is likely by 2030 is if it's approached by industry and government similarly to how COVID vaccine development was -- everyone drops everything and throws everything they've got at it. Another example of similar financial and institutional commitment would be the Apollo program. This level of commitment will probably only happen if climate change (and the related ecological and economic collapses) are taken as seriously as COVID, which is unlikely since, once the effects become obvious as COVID, it will be too late. And even COVID has large numbers of people denying reality. Even if a massive commitment to fusion started now, by 2030 we'd likely only have a promising proof-of-concept or two, with several more failed projects on the side. Wide-scale deployment would still be years away even with many companies tooling up to start building pilot commercial reactors while assuming high financial risk, since profitability would be far from guaranteed. [edit] Another point of comparison would be semiconductor manufacturing advances over the past 10 years. Tens of billions were spent researching and building factories, and in the end only a few companies made it to 7nm. And that was a clearly profitable endeavor iterating on already proven techniques!
jariel 6y ago
Help me answer this: If it's 'likely' to happen, then why are we not allocating 10's of billions towards it right now, to accelerate it so that it happens in 5 years? Many, many things can be done in parrallel. Some effort would be wasted, bit it'd be worth it. If fusion works, it's basically going to be priceless in terms of impact and value. Even starting to account for climate change ... we could suck Co2 out of the air on demand.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  It's not likely to work in the sense of being profitable to build the reactors. There are fundamental engineering constraints that make it unlikely to be competitive.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

exporectomy 6y ago

What makes you think fusion power will be cheaper than solar, wind, fossil fuels or fission? Efficiency isn't really a good metric when the fuel is free. We see that in solar power where expensive high efficiency devices lose out to cheaper less efficient ones. It's more about capital cost and operating cost per unit of energy.

southerntofu 6y ago
To elaborate on the topic, there is ample evidence that nuclear energy is by far the most expensive source of energy, when you take into account the government (for example here in France) entirely subsidizing the construction and hypothetical demolition. I say hypothetical because french attempts at "safely dismantling" nuclear power point are not going so well and are over-budget by an order of magnitude. Then these people who can't even build/dismantle a plant (see the many Areva scandals) would like us to believe they can build an underground storage area for highly radioactive materials that's gonna be safe for at least 100 000 years? Despite growing evidence of the contrary There's also growing evidence that nuclear and renewables tend to be incompatible, mostly because nuclear means a grid with huge centers of energy production, far away from energy consumption (the opposite is true with renewables). https://www.sussex.ac.uk/news/research?id=53376 https://www.sussex.ac.uk/news/research?id=53376
- selectodude 6y ago
  I'm always kind of curious as this "expensive" line of thinking. Yes, nuclear is expensive. Extremely expensive. But is it more expensive than a week's worth of catastrophic grid collapse due to global warming? We have the ability to build nuclear plants. We can reprocess the waste to make more energy with. We can get better at it to drive down the price. It's more reliable as a base load than any renewable. My state gets over fifty percent of its energy from nuclear power plants. I pay a few pennies more per kWh than neighboring states. I'd pay a few more pennies than that to figure out the rest of this issue.
  - southerntofu 6y ago

marcosdumay 6y ago

If ITER proves its style to be a success (what may happen this decade, but I'm not holding my breath), we can expect a decade (about half the time of the original) to just complete the first generation of commercially viable reactors (what ITER will not be). After that, lithium supplied T grows exponentially with the reactor usage, with a doubling time of a bit less than a decade. So, if it becomes the bottleneck (what means, if people to everything else right) you can expect some 3 or 4 decades before fusion even becomes a major power source.

pfdietz 6y ago
It would take far longer than a decade, and I think likely would never happen at all.