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I'm honestly not sure why there seems to be so much interest in fusion these days. Wind and solar seem to offer a limitless, carbon-free energy supply with rela

I'm honestly not sure why there seems to be so much interest in fusion these days. Wind and solar seem to offer a limitless, carbon-free energy supply with relatively cheap, well understood technology that is already price competitive with coal and gas. By contrast fusion seems super expensive and technologically very complex - even fission plants take 10+ years to bring on line. Does fusion offer some advantage over wind + solar that I'm missing?

stronglikedan 5y ago
My best guess? Space.
Roboprog 5y ago
More 9s. Closer to 24x7.
sbierwagen 5y ago
As stronglikedan said, spaceflight propulsion/institutional inertia. (Stationary space facilities will use solar, just like on Earth. Space transport, unlike Earth transport, will be an awful combo of slow and expensive. Space stations will need to be simple. One type of computer. One type of microcontroller board. Maybe three sizes of screw. Solar panels are simple, identical, and interchangeable. And not radioactive! (Fun fact: every bolt on the outside of the ISS uses the exact same head size: 7/16" hex)) Seasonal variation with solar is a bit of a bummer. If we need to fully electrify everything, (Transport and heating) then winter will be a problem. Either we massively overprovision solar in order to still have heat on the shortest day of the year, or we run thousand mile cross-country transmission lines and enormous battery banks. Even so, the economics are such that heavy industry might become a seasonal job. Right now we run aluminum smelters 24/7 because baseload power is fairly consistent, but if solar power is free in July but dear in January you might see multi-month shutdowns. This gives headaches to central planners, and makes them inclined to pour billions into fusion if it can preserve some of the status quo.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  > Even so, the economics are such that heavy industry might become a seasonal job. Or it will move to locations where seasonality is not as important.
  - sbierwagen 5y ago
    Something of a question mark of how long the tropics are going to remain habitable. We're still on the "business as usual" emissions curve, with no signs of meaningfully changing that. That puts us 5C higher by the century, and will keep going up after that. Many equatorial regions will either be too hot for human life, (https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838) or be active combat zones as a result of refugees escaping heat. Some cities in India are now routinely hitting 50C during the summer, and we've only had 1C of warming.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      If the tropics threaten to become uninhabitable countries like India will go ahead with direct climate engineering by dispersing fine particles in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight. This need not be at all expensive, even for them. No credible threat from other countries would deter them, as they'd face mass destruction otherwise.
joak 5y ago
Solar+wind(+energy storage) needs a lot more materials and land to produce the same amount of energy. So the footprint of fusion would be a lot smaller. Also for the same reason deployment would be faster allowing a faster phase out of fossil fuels.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  Solar and wind can be deployed very quickly, and can be deployed today. Fusion will be available somewhere between "decades from now" and "never".
  - stevenhuang 5y ago
    A tired response, and a false choice at that. Deploying solar and wind does not preclude continued research and development into alternative energy production methods.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      It's a direct rebuttal to the false statement "Also for the same reason deployment would be faster allowing a faster phase out of fossil fuels." Fossil fuels had better be phased out soon, and fusion cannot be available in that time. IMO, the prospects of fusion reaching a practical state are so remote that even the current level of funding on it is difficult to justify. There are fundamental engineering constraints that render it inferior to fission -- and fission is now going extinct itself, being too expensive.
stevenhuang 5y ago
How about advancing the frontiers of science? That alone is worth it, it is not? You seem to want to halt all further research into alternative energy and settle with the current state of our solar/wind capabilities, which is strange. We can do both.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  Fusion is a poor kind of science. It's very inward focused, answering questions that are relevant to fusion but not much else. As pure science, it would not merit the $$$ being focused on it.
nitrogen 5y ago
My armchair/spectator interest in fusion comes from the idea of significantly increasing the energy available per capita, without increasing carbon footprint. Traditional renewables might meet our current energy needs eventually. Fusion could let everyone on the planet enjoy the same, or even a significantly increased, lifestyle. As the saying used to be long before I was born, "energy too cheap to meter" (though obviously it still would be metered). With enough surplus energy, you could run entire reactors just for carbon sequestration, or nation-scale desalination, or climate engineering, or what have you.
noobermin 5y ago
Fusion (and fission, if we are willing) would be the only way to actually reverse climate change by using CO2 capture and then electrolysis to put carbon back in the ground. Solar and wind might be able to just sustain human consumption for energy but only fusion would give us enough energy to take CO2 out of the atmosphere.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  > Fusion (and fission, if we are willing) would be the only way to actually reverse climate change Why are you excluding renewables? Argue quantitatively and show your work.
elihu 5y ago
I think wind and solar are plan A at this point, if for no other reason than they're hard to beat on cost. Battery storage is still expensive, though. If fusion works out, it could be used to make up the difference when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing (though if we eventually get high-capacity transcontinental HVDC lines to buy and sell power from practically anywhere or batteries become really cheap, that becomes less of a concern). Fusion would also would require far less land, and some people object to having a landscape covered in windmills and solar panels. Fusion might be useful in places where renewables are less practical, like on ships. Naval vessels might conceivably replace fission reactors with fusion. If they're safe and relatively simple to run, you might even see them on civilian ships. Or you could have fusion reactors in remote places, like floating on a buoy in the middle of the ocean, to serve as a charging station for battery-powered ships. Fusion may be useful for establishing a human foothold outside of Earth. For instance, methane production on Mars (for rocket fuel) will require enormous amounts of energy, which could be supplied by a fusion reactor. (A fission reactor would perhaps work just as well, but there are legitimate reasons why people get nervous about launching hazardous materials into space on a rocket that might blow up before it achieves escape velocity.) We might also begin engaging in projects that require enormous amounts of energy. For instance, if certain CO2 absorption strategies are energy-intensive, and we can't practically generate that amount of energy from renewables. At this point, we really don't know if it'll work much less what the practical limitations will be, so perhaps the best we can do is say "if a fusion reactor can produce X amount of energy and weighs Y tons and requires such-and-such amount of cooling and requires an overhaul once every N months at a cost of D dollars, we might want to use it in these applications".
- pfdietz 5y ago
  Hydrogen made from renewables and burning in combined cycle turbines would likely be far cheaper than fusion. Fusion would be horrible for ships. Ships are volume constrained, and fusion reactors are very large. Land constraints are not globally significant at current energy demand. The world is constantly hit by 100,000 TW of sunlight; average global primary energy demand is about 18 TW. In space, DT fusion reactors will be inferior to fission reactors, which will be much smaller and lighter for a given power output (and also much simpler). It's very difficult now to make a case for fusion. In the past, the case was something like "fission will be a big winner, but then we'll have trouble with uranium availability and safety and waste, and fusion, while slightly more expensive than fission, will still be cheap and solve these problems." But that's not how it turned out -- fission failed because it was too expensive, and fusion being even more expensive than fission makes it a nonstarter.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
It doesn't scale or do 24/7 power like fission/fusion would. Not sure why everyone is still against nuclear but that's fine too. I certainly have nothing against solar or wind and think we need a mix.
- kbelder 5y ago
  And, honestly, my life would be way better if I could spend twice the energy I do now, without destroying the planet. Energy use is basically a synonym for quality of life for humans. If we can expand it without destroying the world, we should.
doctorwho42 5y ago
A joke some friends of mine who study fusion make to this kind of comment; wind and solar are fusion powered. In a simpler way of looking at it, (1) what is the source of the energy of solar/wind? (2) how much land and materials are required to linearly increase power production? There is a finite amount of space and resources on the planet to continue to scale power production with humanities consumption. Fusion, preferably MCF/tokamaks in the style of smaller sized ones like SPARC @ MIT and less like ITER (behemoths that take decades to build and maintain) offer two things (1) the fuel is comprised of the most common elements in the universe, (2) power per square foot is much greater than solar or wind... And bonus (3) once developed it should in theory require less material per watt generated. And less materials mean less processing and fabrication which in turn reduces the environmental impact on the planet.
- dede175 5y ago
  Excuse my lack of knowledge on the subject, but from a few comments/articles it seemed that although Tritium can be recuperated through contact of the charged neutrons with lithium "blankets" surrounding the enclosure, it is still incredibly hard to achieve self-sustainability, to the point where we might need fission reactors just to produce that isotope. Am I missing something or isn't Tritium not so readily available?
  - lambdatronics 5y ago
    The margins for 'breeding' tritium from lithium are slim, yes. I don't think fission reactors can help in the long term, but right now that is how we get tritium for our experiments.

stronglikedan 5y ago

My best guess? Space.

Roboprog 5y ago

More 9s. Closer to 24x7.

sbierwagen 5y ago

As stronglikedan said, spaceflight propulsion/institutional inertia. (Stationary space facilities will use solar, just like on Earth. Space transport, unlike Earth transport, will be an awful combo of slow and expensive. Space stations will need to be simple. One type of computer. One type of microcontroller board. Maybe three sizes of screw. Solar panels are simple, identical, and interchangeable. And not radioactive! (Fun fact: every bolt on the outside of the ISS uses the exact same head size: 7/16" hex)) Seasonal variation with solar is a bit of a bummer. If we need to fully electrify everything, (Transport and heating) then winter will be a problem. Either we massively overprovision solar in order to still have heat on the shortest day of the year, or we run thousand mile cross-country transmission lines and enormous battery banks. Even so, the economics are such that heavy industry might become a seasonal job. Right now we run aluminum smelters 24/7 because baseload power is fairly consistent, but if solar power is free in July but dear in January you might see multi-month shutdowns. This gives headaches to central planners, and makes them inclined to pour billions into fusion if it can preserve some of the status quo.

pfdietz 5y ago
> Even so, the economics are such that heavy industry might become a seasonal job. Or it will move to locations where seasonality is not as important.
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  Something of a question mark of how long the tropics are going to remain habitable. We're still on the "business as usual" emissions curve, with no signs of meaningfully changing that. That puts us 5C higher by the century, and will keep going up after that. Many equatorial regions will either be too hot for human life, (https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838) or be active combat zones as a result of refugees escaping heat. Some cities in India are now routinely hitting 50C during the summer, and we've only had 1C of warming.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    If the tropics threaten to become uninhabitable countries like India will go ahead with direct climate engineering by dispersing fine particles in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight. This need not be at all expensive, even for them. No credible threat from other countries would deter them, as they'd face mass destruction otherwise.

joak 5y ago

Solar+wind(+energy storage) needs a lot more materials and land to produce the same amount of energy. So the footprint of fusion would be a lot smaller. Also for the same reason deployment would be faster allowing a faster phase out of fossil fuels.

pfdietz 5y ago
Solar and wind can be deployed very quickly, and can be deployed today. Fusion will be available somewhere between "decades from now" and "never".
- stevenhuang 5y ago
  A tired response, and a false choice at that. Deploying solar and wind does not preclude continued research and development into alternative energy production methods.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    It's a direct rebuttal to the false statement "Also for the same reason deployment would be faster allowing a faster phase out of fossil fuels." Fossil fuels had better be phased out soon, and fusion cannot be available in that time. IMO, the prospects of fusion reaching a practical state are so remote that even the current level of funding on it is difficult to justify. There are fundamental engineering constraints that render it inferior to fission -- and fission is now going extinct itself, being too expensive.

stevenhuang 5y ago

How about advancing the frontiers of science? That alone is worth it, it is not? You seem to want to halt all further research into alternative energy and settle with the current state of our solar/wind capabilities, which is strange. We can do both.

pfdietz 5y ago
Fusion is a poor kind of science. It's very inward focused, answering questions that are relevant to fusion but not much else. As pure science, it would not merit the $$$ being focused on it.

nitrogen 5y ago

My armchair/spectator interest in fusion comes from the idea of significantly increasing the energy available per capita, without increasing carbon footprint. Traditional renewables might meet our current energy needs eventually. Fusion could let everyone on the planet enjoy the same, or even a significantly increased, lifestyle. As the saying used to be long before I was born, "energy too cheap to meter" (though obviously it still would be metered). With enough surplus energy, you could run entire reactors just for carbon sequestration, or nation-scale desalination, or climate engineering, or what have you.

noobermin 5y ago

Fusion (and fission, if we are willing) would be the only way to actually reverse climate change by using CO2 capture and then electrolysis to put carbon back in the ground. Solar and wind might be able to just sustain human consumption for energy but only fusion would give us enough energy to take CO2 out of the atmosphere.

pfdietz 5y ago
> Fusion (and fission, if we are willing) would be the only way to actually reverse climate change Why are you excluding renewables? Argue quantitatively and show your work.

elihu 5y ago

I think wind and solar are plan A at this point, if for no other reason than they're hard to beat on cost. Battery storage is still expensive, though. If fusion works out, it could be used to make up the difference when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing (though if we eventually get high-capacity transcontinental HVDC lines to buy and sell power from practically anywhere or batteries become really cheap, that becomes less of a concern). Fusion would also would require far less land, and some people object to having a landscape covered in windmills and solar panels. Fusion might be useful in places where renewables are less practical, like on ships. Naval vessels might conceivably replace fission reactors with fusion. If they're safe and relatively simple to run, you might even see them on civilian ships. Or you could have fusion reactors in remote places, like floating on a buoy in the middle of the ocean, to serve as a charging station for battery-powered ships. Fusion may be useful for establishing a human foothold outside of Earth. For instance, methane production on Mars (for rocket fuel) will require enormous amounts of energy, which could be supplied by a fusion reactor. (A fission reactor would perhaps work just as well, but there are legitimate reasons why people get nervous about launching hazardous materials into space on a rocket that might blow up before it achieves escape velocity.) We might also begin engaging in projects that require enormous amounts of energy. For instance, if certain CO2 absorption strategies are energy-intensive, and we can't practically generate that amount of energy from renewables. At this point, we really don't know if it'll work much less what the practical limitations will be, so perhaps the best we can do is say "if a fusion reactor can produce X amount of energy and weighs Y tons and requires such-and-such amount of cooling and requires an overhaul once every N months at a cost of D dollars, we might want to use it in these applications".

pfdietz 5y ago
Hydrogen made from renewables and burning in combined cycle turbines would likely be far cheaper than fusion. Fusion would be horrible for ships. Ships are volume constrained, and fusion reactors are very large. Land constraints are not globally significant at current energy demand. The world is constantly hit by 100,000 TW of sunlight; average global primary energy demand is about 18 TW. In space, DT fusion reactors will be inferior to fission reactors, which will be much smaller and lighter for a given power output (and also much simpler). It's very difficult now to make a case for fusion. In the past, the case was something like "fission will be a big winner, but then we'll have trouble with uranium availability and safety and waste, and fusion, while slightly more expensive than fission, will still be cheap and solve these problems." But that's not how it turned out -- fission failed because it was too expensive, and fusion being even more expensive than fission makes it a nonstarter.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

It doesn't scale or do 24/7 power like fission/fusion would. Not sure why everyone is still against nuclear but that's fine too. I certainly have nothing against solar or wind and think we need a mix.

kbelder 5y ago
And, honestly, my life would be way better if I could spend twice the energy I do now, without destroying the planet. Energy use is basically a synonym for quality of life for humans. If we can expand it without destroying the world, we should.

doctorwho42 5y ago

A joke some friends of mine who study fusion make to this kind of comment; wind and solar are fusion powered. In a simpler way of looking at it, (1) what is the source of the energy of solar/wind? (2) how much land and materials are required to linearly increase power production? There is a finite amount of space and resources on the planet to continue to scale power production with humanities consumption. Fusion, preferably MCF/tokamaks in the style of smaller sized ones like SPARC @ MIT and less like ITER (behemoths that take decades to build and maintain) offer two things (1) the fuel is comprised of the most common elements in the universe, (2) power per square foot is much greater than solar or wind... And bonus (3) once developed it should in theory require less material per watt generated. And less materials mean less processing and fabrication which in turn reduces the environmental impact on the planet.

dede175 5y ago
Excuse my lack of knowledge on the subject, but from a few comments/articles it seemed that although Tritium can be recuperated through contact of the charged neutrons with lithium "blankets" surrounding the enclosure, it is still incredibly hard to achieve self-sustainability, to the point where we might need fission reactors just to produce that isotope. Am I missing something or isn't Tritium not so readily available?
- lambdatronics 5y ago
  The margins for 'breeding' tritium from lithium are slim, yes. I don't think fission reactors can help in the long term, but right now that is how we get tritium for our experiments.