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You are right, people who flippantly dismiss fusion just don't understand it. -Fusion has made consistent improvement, roughly in line with expectations for th

You are right, people who flippantly dismiss fusion just don't understand it. -Fusion has made consistent improvement, roughly in line with expectations for the level of investment (20 years away predictions were considering if we invested massively, which we did not). - Fusion is in theory something that could give us true energy abundance. Want to just desalinate water like crazy? Want to extract gigatons of carbon? Working fusion enables these to happen woth existing technologies. I like to think of solar, batteries, fission, and wind as compelling ways to go mostly carbon free and lower energy costs about 2x over the next 20 years or so. Fusion is what reduces energy cost potentially another 10x, which really changes the game for lots of things. Exciting stuff. Kudos to this team.

pfdietz 5y ago
> Fusion is what reduces energy cost potentially another 10x How did you arrive at that conclusion?
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Probably counting in the cost of unlimited global warming and all the damage it will do if we don't stop it, which we won't if current efforts are par for the course.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    That would make sense if he's comparing only against fossil fuels. But what was written was: > I like to think of solar, batteries, fission, and wind as compelling ways to go mostly carbon free and lower energy costs about 2x over the next 20 years or so. > Fusion is what reduces energy cost potentially another 10x, which really changes the game for lots of things. Exciting stuff. Kudos to this team. If the 10x is from avoiding fossil fuels, why does fusion get that credit, but the other non-fossil sources don't?
    - Nevermark 5y ago
      > which we won't if current efforts are par for the course. Because while renewable energy production is increasing rapidly, it is nowhere where we need it to cancel fossil fuels. Nothing will be soon enough. That would have been now or ten years ago. But anything that gets us there sooner will reduce the damage we have done, and fingers crossed, allow us to start undoing it.
      - olau 5y ago
        If you have a cheap means to an end or an expensive one, and you have limited funding because of politics, you will want to pour all your money into scaling the cheap means - then you'll get there much, much faster. I live close to a wind turbine factory. They could easily have scaled production multiple times over the past five years. The only reason they didn't is funding, in fact during that period they at some point cut production when subsidies were cut. I think it's getting to a point now where subsidies are not needed. But still, if you're talking about speeding up the process, you can just provide a little extra funding and get big results.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Anybody looking at numbers sees fusion never, ever producing so much as a single erg of commercially viable energy. So, anybody saying otherwise is simply making it up.
  - craftinator 5y ago
    > So, anybody saying otherwise is simply making it up. You do see the irony of embedding this statement in a comment full of generalization and hyperbole, and lacking any evidence or credible sources, right? I genuinely laughed until I realized it may not have been intended as a joke.
  - vajrabum 5y ago
    What numbers are those? Or perhaps you even have a citation from work done on the topic by reputable physicists?
  - tcmart14 5y ago
    And neither did any other invention until they reached a certain scale, price point or level of sophistication. The counter to your comment would be, fusion is still very much in the R&D phase. As being in the R&D phase like so many other products were at one time, of course it has not met your expectation. But neither did Airplanes after the first flight.
  - JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
    The sun does pretty well.
    - wiz21c 5y ago
      Except we didn't need to invest money in it...
- tuatoru 5y ago
  Yeah, really, how? Fusion power plants still need land, buildings, generators, switchyards, wire, own power consumption, environmental impact reports, planning permits, regulations, inspections, and all the rest. And they need exotic materials and weird engineering in their construction. Really: how does fusion get us to ~1% (correction: ~5%) of current power prices? I've never seen a convincing explanation. Usually it's bare assertion. Infrequently it's handwavium/unobtanium.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    One of the big problems with existing power plants is that you have to build them near where people are. So then land is expensive and you get a bunch of regulations because people are worried about what's happening in their back yard. If you could hypothetically build a fusion plant that would generate several times more power than existing fission reactors at a similar construction cost, you would have so much power you wouldn't have to worry much about transmission losses. At which point you could put it in the middle of nowhere without those constraints and make it actually less expensive for several times more power. Then for cities power gets cheaper, but for anything that can be built out in the middle of nowhere near the reactor, power gets a lot cheaper.
    - tuatoru 5y ago
      How is that reasoning specific to fusion? Unless fusion power is dramatically more efficient than other thermal plants, like 99.9%, your bigger plant will still need massive heat removal structures and systems, which means siting them near water. All the good spots are already taken. Alternatively you can use truly massive air heat transfer structures, driving up your construction costs again. I neglected to mention finance costs also. With an untried technology the rate of return demanded is going to be very high, further driving up project costs.
      - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        > How is that reasoning specific to fusion? A major cost of the most utilized existing power plants (coal and natural gas) is fuel. If you build a natural gas plant which is twice as big so that you can put it out where the land is cheaper and eat the transmission losses, now you need twice as much natural gas. Renewables don't need fuel but their construction cost is fully linear, you get no economies of scale. If you want twice as many solar panels then you need twice as much land. If you want to double the size of your fusion reactor, you build an eight story building instead of a four story building on the same piece of land. > Unless fusion power is dramatically more efficient than other thermal plants, like 99.9%, your bigger plant will still need massive heat removal structures and systems, which means siting them near water. All the good spots are already taken. An obvious solution is to build them out in the ocean. Then you have plenty of water and you're still not near anything. And the good spots near population centers are already taken. Some lake a hundred miles from any city won't be. > I neglected to mention finance costs also. With an untried technology the rate of return demanded is going to be very high, further driving up project costs. That's only true for the first one. If it's hypothetically ten times more power for the same money, that'll get one built even at a high interest rate. Then once you have it running it's proven technology.
- godelski 5y ago
  Responding for the parent. They are basically making predictions with S curves. Technology often starts out as really expensive but after awhile gets super cheap, following what appears to be an exponential curve (bottom of the S), before it levels off (top of the S). Yeah, look more like an integral sign or sigmoid. But with fusion the endless claims of "too cheap to meter" are because how much energy there is in a fusion reaction. [0] We know that fission produces a lot of energy (but is expensive) but fusion produces significantly more. It also doesn't have the radiation drawbacks and so it is expected to follow the S curve (fission did initially but things changed. This is part of why France has so much nuclear). So if (big if) fusion does follow this S curve (which there are good reasons to expect it to) then it could provide a very cheap and sustainable energy source. Yes, it is a bet, but every technology is. We won't know until we spend significant time and money into researching it. But honestly, a few billion dollars isn't that crazy for the potential upsides. We've spent that money on far greater risks with lower payout. Despite what the OP said, the money for ITER does not require international collaboration. Any rich country could do it themselves. [0] (Fission and fusion can yield energy graph) http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/NucEne/nucbin.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/NucEne/nucbin.htm...
  - brazzledazzle 5y ago
    If we got to the point where cost wasn't a factor would the carbon footprint be extremely low? I assume at some point we'll be unable to ignore climate change and our survival will depended on minimizing it using large amounts of energy from a source that doesn't have a high carbon footprint.
    - Terr_ 5y ago
      If only ~30% of CO2 emissions are from power-plants (at least in the US, probably higher globally considering developing nations) then replacing those installations with fusion won't directly zero things out... ... But if "cost wasn't a factor" then we could just simply dedicate the electrical output of fusion plants to brute-force CO2 out of the air.
      - 5y ago
baryphonic 5y ago
I'd add the sentiment of GP that this particular team also seems to have something special. I've been following them for a while as well, and they've impressed me by meeting self-imposed deadlines for project milestones (like this magnet experiment), being quite ingenious in designing economical components (the design of their original superconductor is quite simple but brilliant), and just having a no-BS approach.
clusterfish 5y ago
Is it really limitless if both generating and consuming energy produces heat? Or is that too small of an effect even despite the heat inefficiency of fusion?
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  Earth gets multiple orders of magnitude more heat from the Sun than humans can ever hope to generate. In concrete terms, Earths gets 153 PW of energy in terms of solar radiation. It also radiates as much. In comparison, humanity uses something like 20 TW in total (that includes not only electricity, but also transportation etc). So, we could increase our energy use 100 times, and still be only around 1% of what we get from the Sun.
  - kongin 5y ago
    So that's between 150 and 250 years with the 2.5% energy consumption grows, then that much again for us to produce more energy than the sun shines on Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...
    - xyzzyz 5y ago
      Yes, and with 2.5% energy consumption growth, in only 2500 years, we'll consume entire power output Milky Way galaxy. Extrapolating exponential growth over long timescales leads to silly results.
      - baq 5y ago
        nothing silly about it if the purpose is to make a point in a discussion with an economist. some of them just don't get it that energy consumption is correlated with economic growth and you can't just grow yourself out of every problem.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
xbmcuser 5y ago
Yeah we need Fusion if we want to put back the carbon into the ground as the rest can mostly help us bring down new carbon use but Fusion can bring down the cost of carbon capture to actually reverse global warming as well. So far the world is just looking at mitigating or slowing it down only which is simply put not enough.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  > we need Fusion if we want to put back the carbon into the ground There is nothing about fusion that makes it essential for putting carbon back into the ground.
isoskeles 5y ago
Imagine how much Bitcoin we could mine with that kind of energy source...
- wsc981 5y ago
  > Imagine how much Bitcoin we could mine with that kind of energy source... Not much more nor less, since the amount of Bitcoin generated every 10 minutes is controlled by an algorithm independent on how many machines are mining.
  - dodobirdlord 5y ago
    Yea, but imagine how secure we could make the blockchain! /s
singularity2001 5y ago
don't solar panel prices half every five years (similar to moores law modified)? fusion would need to speed up then to be competitive with the solar revolution
- dboreham 5y ago
  I have a Dyson sphere to sell you..
- baq 5y ago
  solar needs sun and massive batteries to handle base load. fusion base load + solar + wind + batteries sounds like the end game.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Don’t forget long distance transmission in that mix: HVDC can be done with losses of only 3.5%/1000km, which makes it a cost/geopolitics issue for your night to be someone else’s day, your winter someone else’s summer.
    - crubier 5y ago
      The issue with long distance transmission is not efficiency. It is the raw amount of material needed. Feeding 100% of Europe electricity use with solar panels in North Africa would required many years (!) of the world’s current aluminium production, just to build the transmission cables. Do the calculation, you’ll see. Long distance power lines do not work to transmit massive amount if electricity on a global scale.
      - ben_w 5y ago
        I’m not sure why you imagine that building this at full-grid power levels might take less than a decade, nor why it might be an all-or-nothing proposition given every single gigawatt can be seen as as a (12GWh? I’m not sure but that magnitude) battery system not purchased, but I’ll gladly do the maths. 1) HVDC designs I’ve seen are copper (towers use aluminium because it’s light, IIRC) 2) http://www.necplink.com/docs/Champlain_VT_electronic/04%20L.%20Eng/Exh.%20TDI-LE-4%20(HVDC%20Cable%20Design%20Sheet%20(ABB)).pdf http://www.necplink.com/docs/Champlain_VT_electronic/04%20L.... Gives 2500mm^2 cross section for a 1 GW cable 3) WolframAlpha says Europe’s electricity production is 410 GW: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+Europe+electricity+production+in+GW https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+Europe+electrici... Which means the total conductor cross section needed is ~1 million mm^2 = 1m^2. Ok, this sounds like it’s going to be a lot. 4) Lets put a line across the Sahara to connect all the panels plus connections to the existing EU grid in Gibraltar, Athens, and Milan. It’s about 3700km from Casablanca to the middle of Egypt: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=casablanca+to+egypt https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=casablanca+to+egypt Likewise 350km for Gibraltar, 1000 km Awjilah to Athens: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Awjilah+to+athens https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Awjilah+to+athens This gives a total length of about 5000km, if I spec the cable for 100% of EU power going through each cable, which is excessive as I was trying to suggest this as an adjunct to batteries and local PV rather than a total replacement for either: any combination (including none) of transmission and storage only has to cover lower nighttime/seasonal averages). This gives me a total volume of 5000km * 1m^2 = 5e6 m^3. 5) This is copper, worldwide production of copper is 14.6e6 tons/year, given the density this is indeed 1.4e6 m^3/year and therefore multiple years at current mining. 6) Global aluminium production is 82.6 million tons/year: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=worldwide+aluminium+production https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=worldwide+aluminium+pr... Aluminium is 60% the conductivity of copper; I assume that means I need the conductor to be 1/0.6 times the cross section? Not my field. Assuming that, I want 8.3e6 m^3 aluminium, given the density that’s 22 million tons, so 3 months. Edit: I forgot Milan! 7) Tataouine to Milan is about 1500 km: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Tataouine+to+Milan+ https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Tataouine+to+Milan+ Therefore multiply my mass estimates by 1.3 Edit 2: 410 GW is also 2-2.5 times current global PV installation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics If you did put enough PV for all of Europe on top of/along side the Casablanca-Egypt line, the PV would need to be about 550m wide: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28410GW%2F%281kW%2Fm%5E2%2A20%25%29%29%2F3700km http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28410GW%2F%281kW%2Fm%5... (I only need to care about peak power in this case, not average, hence only the 20% efficiency factor and not including the additional 25% duty factor).
kongin 5y ago
>You are right, people who flippantly dismiss fusion just don't understand it. I have a couple of physics degrees, hot fusion is the energy of the future and it always will be. This is not a physics problem, this is an engineering problem and we are just not willing to invest enough money to solve the engineering.
- maccam94 5y ago
  Commonwealth Fusion Systems is privately funded and aiming to demonstrate net energy gain in 4 years. It's not like the lumbering ITER project.
- sgt101 5y ago
  I had a chat with Professor Whyte about this about 5 years ago when he was starting on this quest. The key insight that he emphasized to me (that I could understand!) was the need to deal with the engineering. He told me that compact magnets would facilitate construction and maintenance because simply they would need less space and energy to be physically manipulated. This, as I understood it, would allow for huge reductions in cost because buildings and components scale in cost massively as their size increases. Small magnets won't need a huge building, they won't need special vehicles to move them, they won't need cranes to install, they can be swapped in and out during maintenance, and the work can be planned and executed by small teams at low risk. Who really cares if a team of 5 working for a week have a 10% overrun - that's 2.5 person days. On the other hand a team of 500 working for a year -> 50 person years. Scale is the overhead that they are targetting.
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >I have a couple of physics degrees, hot fusion is the energy of the future and it always will be. This is not a physics problem, this is an engineering problem and we are just not willing to invest enough money to solve the engineering. You're spot on. Which makes no sense at all. Given the potential of commercial fusion, we should be (globally) spending at least several tens of billions per year on R&D. Assuming the engineering issues are solved, those hundreds of billions would be chump change compared to the economic benefits of volume of cheap, clean power.
DrNuke 5y ago
The fusion equivalent of Ballmer’s infamous “developers developers developers” line is “materials materials materials”… and we’re getting there quickly!
- pfdietz 5y ago
  And materials may not be the biggest problem! That should be "RAMI RAMI RAMI" (Reliability Availability Maintainability Inspectability). Paper studies of fusion reactor designs given an availability figure, but this is mere aspiration, chosen because that number is necessary, not because it known to be achievable. The few actual studies of how available a fusion power plant would be (using MTBF and MTTR figures from related technologies) have come to very troubling conclusions: the plant may be operating just a few percent of the time. Getting fusion technology to the point where working reactors aren't perpetually down for repair is even more important than developing materials tolerating higher neutron displacements-per-atom (because it's hard to do the latter without the former). This requires building an experience base with all the kinds of things that will go into a fusion reactor. It also argues for making fusion reactors as small as possible (so there are fewer things to break); this is probably the best argument for these small high field devices (but an even better argument for high-beta plasma configurations).
p0nce 5y ago
What is the downside?
tsimionescu 5y ago
> Fusion is in theory something that could give us true energy abundance. The biggest problem is the 'in theory' part. With current plausible designs, the vast majority of the fusion reaction's energy is carried away by high-powered neutrons, which are entirely waste products.
- ajdegol 5y ago
  The neutrons are what we will extract energy from, the alpha particles continue heating the plasma.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Some do, but most of them escape from the plasma, carrying away energy, and need to be captured by the neutron blanket. This amounts to a whopping 80% of the reaction energy. The real dream are fusion reactions which don't produce neutrons, such as H1+H1 or much more realistically, H2+B11 (though still many times harder than H2+H3).
codethief 5y ago
> Fusion is in theory something that could give us true energy abundance. Well, at least for a few hundred years but then: > if you plot the U.S. energy consumption in all forms from 1650 until now, you see a phenomenally faithful exponential at about 3% per year over that whole span. The situation for the whole world is similar. […] the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate [in energy consumption] (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. […] And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase. Source: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
- roenxi 5y ago
  If there is enough ambient energy to literally boil the seas then we're probably going to find it easy enough to leave the earth and go somewhere cooler.
  - codethief 5y ago
    I don't think it'll be easy. We would have the same (if not higher) energy consumption per capita on any other planet. And unless that planet is humongously large (which would also increase its surface-level gravity, thus rendering it uninhabitable), the relation between surface temperature and energy consumption will be similar[0]. Now there's only a finite number of planets in our solar system and leaving our solar system, say in the direction of Proxima Centauri (the star nearest to the Sun), amounts to traveling ~4.2 light-years. At a velocity of 0.1c (which is a lot – especially if you're trying to move an entire species[1]) that means a travel time of 42 years (as seen from our current frame of reference). Any velocity lower than that and we're getting into hundreds-of-years territory, so we'll be needing space ships across we can live for generations. Also, a space ship is not that different from a planet, in that it also has to obey thermodynamics. So the surface temperature issue there is just the same. (In fact it's worse, since our space ship will likely be smaller and we also need to factor in additional waste energy of the space ship's propulsion engine or whatever we're using.) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law [1]: Or, say, half the species (or whatever amount necessary to make the total energy consumption on the planets we already inhabit drop to levels such that the planets' surfaces don't start to boil).
phreeza 5y ago
> I like to think of solar, batteries, fission, and wind as compelling ways to go mostly carbon free and lower energy costs about 2x over the next 20 years or so. > Fusion is what reduces energy cost potentially another 10x, which really changes the game for lots of things. Exciting stuff. Kudos to this team. Citation needed... If the fusion reactors end up needing tape of room temperature superconductors to keep their confinement going, and they degrade rapidly due to neutron radiation, I could easily see solar being cheaper in the long run. I'm not saying this is exactly what will happen, but I have never seen compelling proof that fusion will really be so cheap in terms of capex or opex per Watt.
qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
"Fusion is in theory something that could give us true energy abundance." What does fusion give us that existing nuclear power plant tech doesn't?
- drexlspivey 5y ago
  The reactor can’t meltdown and contaminate the whole planet. Also there is no radioactive waste
  - ziotom78 5y ago
    Well, there is some radioactive waste [1], but its decay time is far smaller and is thus far easier to handle. (Moreover, there is a larger choice of elements.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Radioactive_waste
    - el_nahual 5y ago
      Aren't fast decay times harder to handle?
      - baq 5y ago
        it's easier in the sense that a single accident doesn't make the area uninhabitable in the human civilization timescales. fast decay = it'll kill you today in a minute, but will be safe to approach in a week, or 50 years.
- kamaal 5y ago
  >>What does fusion give us that existing nuclear power plant tech doesn't? Water is more abundant than Uranium?
  - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
    Fair enough, I hope fusion plants aren't adjacent to bomb technology in that case? Because that could lead to a lot of nuclear proliferation.
nico_h 5y ago
This is the kind of comment that make me really hope that we can kill energy intensive coins before that happens. I mean if we 10x the waste heat that could be produced by asics solely for the purpose of mining coins, it could be enough to create a mini climate.

pfdietz 5y ago

> Fusion is what reduces energy cost potentially another 10x How did you arrive at that conclusion?

stjohnswarts 5y ago
Probably counting in the cost of unlimited global warming and all the damage it will do if we don't stop it, which we won't if current efforts are par for the course.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pfdietz 5y ago
  That would make sense if he's comparing only against fossil fuels. But what was written was: > I like to think of solar, batteries, fission, and wind as compelling ways to go mostly carbon free and lower energy costs about 2x over the next 20 years or so. > Fusion is what reduces energy cost potentially another 10x, which really changes the game for lots of things. Exciting stuff. Kudos to this team. If the 10x is from avoiding fossil fuels, why does fusion get that credit, but the other non-fossil sources don't?
  - Nevermark 5y ago
    > which we won't if current efforts are par for the course. Because while renewable energy production is increasing rapidly, it is nowhere where we need it to cancel fossil fuels. Nothing will be soon enough. That would have been now or ten years ago. But anything that gets us there sooner will reduce the damage we have done, and fingers crossed, allow us to start undoing it.
    - olau 5y ago
      If you have a cheap means to an end or an expensive one, and you have limited funding because of politics, you will want to pour all your money into scaling the cheap means - then you'll get there much, much faster. I live close to a wind turbine factory. They could easily have scaled production multiple times over the past five years. The only reason they didn't is funding, in fact during that period they at some point cut production when subsidies were cut. I think it's getting to a point now where subsidies are not needed. But still, if you're talking about speeding up the process, you can just provide a little extra funding and get big results.
ncmncm 5y ago
Anybody looking at numbers sees fusion never, ever producing so much as a single erg of commercially viable energy. So, anybody saying otherwise is simply making it up.
- craftinator 5y ago
  > So, anybody saying otherwise is simply making it up. You do see the irony of embedding this statement in a comment full of generalization and hyperbole, and lacking any evidence or credible sources, right? I genuinely laughed until I realized it may not have been intended as a joke.
- vajrabum 5y ago
  What numbers are those? Or perhaps you even have a citation from work done on the topic by reputable physicists?
- tcmart14 5y ago
  And neither did any other invention until they reached a certain scale, price point or level of sophistication. The counter to your comment would be, fusion is still very much in the R&D phase. As being in the R&D phase like so many other products were at one time, of course it has not met your expectation. But neither did Airplanes after the first flight.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  The sun does pretty well.
  - wiz21c 5y ago
    Except we didn't need to invest money in it...
tuatoru 5y ago
Yeah, really, how? Fusion power plants still need land, buildings, generators, switchyards, wire, own power consumption, environmental impact reports, planning permits, regulations, inspections, and all the rest. And they need exotic materials and weird engineering in their construction. Really: how does fusion get us to ~1% (correction: ~5%) of current power prices? I've never seen a convincing explanation. Usually it's bare assertion. Infrequently it's handwavium/unobtanium.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  One of the big problems with existing power plants is that you have to build them near where people are. So then land is expensive and you get a bunch of regulations because people are worried about what's happening in their back yard. If you could hypothetically build a fusion plant that would generate several times more power than existing fission reactors at a similar construction cost, you would have so much power you wouldn't have to worry much about transmission losses. At which point you could put it in the middle of nowhere without those constraints and make it actually less expensive for several times more power. Then for cities power gets cheaper, but for anything that can be built out in the middle of nowhere near the reactor, power gets a lot cheaper.
  - tuatoru 5y ago
    How is that reasoning specific to fusion? Unless fusion power is dramatically more efficient than other thermal plants, like 99.9%, your bigger plant will still need massive heat removal structures and systems, which means siting them near water. All the good spots are already taken. Alternatively you can use truly massive air heat transfer structures, driving up your construction costs again. I neglected to mention finance costs also. With an untried technology the rate of return demanded is going to be very high, further driving up project costs.
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      > How is that reasoning specific to fusion? A major cost of the most utilized existing power plants (coal and natural gas) is fuel. If you build a natural gas plant which is twice as big so that you can put it out where the land is cheaper and eat the transmission losses, now you need twice as much natural gas. Renewables don't need fuel but their construction cost is fully linear, you get no economies of scale. If you want twice as many solar panels then you need twice as much land. If you want to double the size of your fusion reactor, you build an eight story building instead of a four story building on the same piece of land. > Unless fusion power is dramatically more efficient than other thermal plants, like 99.9%, your bigger plant will still need massive heat removal structures and systems, which means siting them near water. All the good spots are already taken. An obvious solution is to build them out in the ocean. Then you have plenty of water and you're still not near anything. And the good spots near population centers are already taken. Some lake a hundred miles from any city won't be. > I neglected to mention finance costs also. With an untried technology the rate of return demanded is going to be very high, further driving up project costs. That's only true for the first one. If it's hypothetically ten times more power for the same money, that'll get one built even at a high interest rate. Then once you have it running it's proven technology.
godelski 5y ago
Responding for the parent. They are basically making predictions with S curves. Technology often starts out as really expensive but after awhile gets super cheap, following what appears to be an exponential curve (bottom of the S), before it levels off (top of the S). Yeah, look more like an integral sign or sigmoid. But with fusion the endless claims of "too cheap to meter" are because how much energy there is in a fusion reaction. [0] We know that fission produces a lot of energy (but is expensive) but fusion produces significantly more. It also doesn't have the radiation drawbacks and so it is expected to follow the S curve (fission did initially but things changed. This is part of why France has so much nuclear). So if (big if) fusion does follow this S curve (which there are good reasons to expect it to) then it could provide a very cheap and sustainable energy source. Yes, it is a bet, but every technology is. We won't know until we spend significant time and money into researching it. But honestly, a few billion dollars isn't that crazy for the potential upsides. We've spent that money on far greater risks with lower payout. Despite what the OP said, the money for ITER does not require international collaboration. Any rich country could do it themselves. [0] (Fission and fusion can yield energy graph) http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/NucEne/nucbin.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/NucEne/nucbin.htm...
- brazzledazzle 5y ago
  If we got to the point where cost wasn't a factor would the carbon footprint be extremely low? I assume at some point we'll be unable to ignore climate change and our survival will depended on minimizing it using large amounts of energy from a source that doesn't have a high carbon footprint.
  - Terr_ 5y ago
    If only ~30% of CO2 emissions are from power-plants (at least in the US, probably higher globally considering developing nations) then replacing those installations with fusion won't directly zero things out... ... But if "cost wasn't a factor" then we could just simply dedicate the electrical output of fusion plants to brute-force CO2 out of the air.
    - 5y ago

baryphonic 5y ago

I'd add the sentiment of GP that this particular team also seems to have something special. I've been following them for a while as well, and they've impressed me by meeting self-imposed deadlines for project milestones (like this magnet experiment), being quite ingenious in designing economical components (the design of their original superconductor is quite simple but brilliant), and just having a no-BS approach.

clusterfish 5y ago

Is it really limitless if both generating and consuming energy produces heat? Or is that too small of an effect even despite the heat inefficiency of fusion?

xyzzyz 5y ago
Earth gets multiple orders of magnitude more heat from the Sun than humans can ever hope to generate. In concrete terms, Earths gets 153 PW of energy in terms of solar radiation. It also radiates as much. In comparison, humanity uses something like 20 TW in total (that includes not only electricity, but also transportation etc). So, we could increase our energy use 100 times, and still be only around 1% of what we get from the Sun.
- kongin 5y ago
  So that's between 150 and 250 years with the 2.5% energy consumption grows, then that much again for us to produce more energy than the sun shines on Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...
  - xyzzyz 5y ago
    Yes, and with 2.5% energy consumption growth, in only 2500 years, we'll consume entire power output Milky Way galaxy. Extrapolating exponential growth over long timescales leads to silly results.
    - baq 5y ago
      nothing silly about it if the purpose is to make a point in a discussion with an economist. some of them just don't get it that energy consumption is correlated with economic growth and you can't just grow yourself out of every problem.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

xbmcuser 5y ago

Yeah we need Fusion if we want to put back the carbon into the ground as the rest can mostly help us bring down new carbon use but Fusion can bring down the cost of carbon capture to actually reverse global warming as well. So far the world is just looking at mitigating or slowing it down only which is simply put not enough.

pfdietz 5y ago
> we need Fusion if we want to put back the carbon into the ground There is nothing about fusion that makes it essential for putting carbon back into the ground.

isoskeles 5y ago

Imagine how much Bitcoin we could mine with that kind of energy source...

wsc981 5y ago
> Imagine how much Bitcoin we could mine with that kind of energy source... Not much more nor less, since the amount of Bitcoin generated every 10 minutes is controlled by an algorithm independent on how many machines are mining.
- dodobirdlord 5y ago
  Yea, but imagine how secure we could make the blockchain! /s

singularity2001 5y ago

don't solar panel prices half every five years (similar to moores law modified)? fusion would need to speed up then to be competitive with the solar revolution

dboreham 5y ago
I have a Dyson sphere to sell you..
baq 5y ago
solar needs sun and massive batteries to handle base load. fusion base load + solar + wind + batteries sounds like the end game.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Don’t forget long distance transmission in that mix: HVDC can be done with losses of only 3.5%/1000km, which makes it a cost/geopolitics issue for your night to be someone else’s day, your winter someone else’s summer.
  - crubier 5y ago
    The issue with long distance transmission is not efficiency. It is the raw amount of material needed. Feeding 100% of Europe electricity use with solar panels in North Africa would required many years (!) of the world’s current aluminium production, just to build the transmission cables. Do the calculation, you’ll see. Long distance power lines do not work to transmit massive amount if electricity on a global scale.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      I’m not sure why you imagine that building this at full-grid power levels might take less than a decade, nor why it might be an all-or-nothing proposition given every single gigawatt can be seen as as a (12GWh? I’m not sure but that magnitude) battery system not purchased, but I’ll gladly do the maths. 1) HVDC designs I’ve seen are copper (towers use aluminium because it’s light, IIRC) 2) http://www.necplink.com/docs/Champlain_VT_electronic/04%20L.%20Eng/Exh.%20TDI-LE-4%20(HVDC%20Cable%20Design%20Sheet%20(ABB)).pdf http://www.necplink.com/docs/Champlain_VT_electronic/04%20L.... Gives 2500mm^2 cross section for a 1 GW cable 3) WolframAlpha says Europe’s electricity production is 410 GW: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+Europe+electricity+production+in+GW https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+Europe+electrici... Which means the total conductor cross section needed is ~1 million mm^2 = 1m^2. Ok, this sounds like it’s going to be a lot. 4) Lets put a line across the Sahara to connect all the panels plus connections to the existing EU grid in Gibraltar, Athens, and Milan. It’s about 3700km from Casablanca to the middle of Egypt: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=casablanca+to+egypt https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=casablanca+to+egypt Likewise 350km for Gibraltar, 1000 km Awjilah to Athens: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Awjilah+to+athens https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Awjilah+to+athens This gives a total length of about 5000km, if I spec the cable for 100% of EU power going through each cable, which is excessive as I was trying to suggest this as an adjunct to batteries and local PV rather than a total replacement for either: any combination (including none) of transmission and storage only has to cover lower nighttime/seasonal averages). This gives me a total volume of 5000km * 1m^2 = 5e6 m^3. 5) This is copper, worldwide production of copper is 14.6e6 tons/year, given the density this is indeed 1.4e6 m^3/year and therefore multiple years at current mining. 6) Global aluminium production is 82.6 million tons/year: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=worldwide+aluminium+production https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=worldwide+aluminium+pr... Aluminium is 60% the conductivity of copper; I assume that means I need the conductor to be 1/0.6 times the cross section? Not my field. Assuming that, I want 8.3e6 m^3 aluminium, given the density that’s 22 million tons, so 3 months. Edit: I forgot Milan! 7) Tataouine to Milan is about 1500 km: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Tataouine+to+Milan+ https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Tataouine+to+Milan+ Therefore multiply my mass estimates by 1.3 Edit 2: 410 GW is also 2-2.5 times current global PV installation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics If you did put enough PV for all of Europe on top of/along side the Casablanca-Egypt line, the PV would need to be about 550m wide: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28410GW%2F%281kW%2Fm%5E2%2A20%25%29%29%2F3700km http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28410GW%2F%281kW%2Fm%5... (I only need to care about peak power in this case, not average, hence only the 20% efficiency factor and not including the additional 25% duty factor).

kongin 5y ago

>You are right, people who flippantly dismiss fusion just don't understand it. I have a couple of physics degrees, hot fusion is the energy of the future and it always will be. This is not a physics problem, this is an engineering problem and we are just not willing to invest enough money to solve the engineering.

maccam94 5y ago
Commonwealth Fusion Systems is privately funded and aiming to demonstrate net energy gain in 4 years. It's not like the lumbering ITER project.
sgt101 5y ago
I had a chat with Professor Whyte about this about 5 years ago when he was starting on this quest. The key insight that he emphasized to me (that I could understand!) was the need to deal with the engineering. He told me that compact magnets would facilitate construction and maintenance because simply they would need less space and energy to be physically manipulated. This, as I understood it, would allow for huge reductions in cost because buildings and components scale in cost massively as their size increases. Small magnets won't need a huge building, they won't need special vehicles to move them, they won't need cranes to install, they can be swapped in and out during maintenance, and the work can be planned and executed by small teams at low risk. Who really cares if a team of 5 working for a week have a 10% overrun - that's 2.5 person days. On the other hand a team of 500 working for a year -> 50 person years. Scale is the overhead that they are targetting.
nobody9999 5y ago
>I have a couple of physics degrees, hot fusion is the energy of the future and it always will be. This is not a physics problem, this is an engineering problem and we are just not willing to invest enough money to solve the engineering. You're spot on. Which makes no sense at all. Given the potential of commercial fusion, we should be (globally) spending at least several tens of billions per year on R&D. Assuming the engineering issues are solved, those hundreds of billions would be chump change compared to the economic benefits of volume of cheap, clean power.

DrNuke 5y ago

The fusion equivalent of Ballmer’s infamous “developers developers developers” line is “materials materials materials”… and we’re getting there quickly!

pfdietz 5y ago
And materials may not be the biggest problem! That should be "RAMI RAMI RAMI" (Reliability Availability Maintainability Inspectability). Paper studies of fusion reactor designs given an availability figure, but this is mere aspiration, chosen because that number is necessary, not because it known to be achievable. The few actual studies of how available a fusion power plant would be (using MTBF and MTTR figures from related technologies) have come to very troubling conclusions: the plant may be operating just a few percent of the time. Getting fusion technology to the point where working reactors aren't perpetually down for repair is even more important than developing materials tolerating higher neutron displacements-per-atom (because it's hard to do the latter without the former). This requires building an experience base with all the kinds of things that will go into a fusion reactor. It also argues for making fusion reactors as small as possible (so there are fewer things to break); this is probably the best argument for these small high field devices (but an even better argument for high-beta plasma configurations).

p0nce 5y ago

What is the downside?

tsimionescu 5y ago

> Fusion is in theory something that could give us true energy abundance. The biggest problem is the 'in theory' part. With current plausible designs, the vast majority of the fusion reaction's energy is carried away by high-powered neutrons, which are entirely waste products.

ajdegol 5y ago
The neutrons are what we will extract energy from, the alpha particles continue heating the plasma.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Some do, but most of them escape from the plasma, carrying away energy, and need to be captured by the neutron blanket. This amounts to a whopping 80% of the reaction energy. The real dream are fusion reactions which don't produce neutrons, such as H1+H1 or much more realistically, H2+B11 (though still many times harder than H2+H3).

codethief 5y ago

> Fusion is in theory something that could give us true energy abundance. Well, at least for a few hundred years but then: > if you plot the U.S. energy consumption in all forms from 1650 until now, you see a phenomenally faithful exponential at about 3% per year over that whole span. The situation for the whole world is similar. […] the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate [in energy consumption] (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. […] And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase. Source: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

roenxi 5y ago
If there is enough ambient energy to literally boil the seas then we're probably going to find it easy enough to leave the earth and go somewhere cooler.
- codethief 5y ago
  I don't think it'll be easy. We would have the same (if not higher) energy consumption per capita on any other planet. And unless that planet is humongously large (which would also increase its surface-level gravity, thus rendering it uninhabitable), the relation between surface temperature and energy consumption will be similar[0]. Now there's only a finite number of planets in our solar system and leaving our solar system, say in the direction of Proxima Centauri (the star nearest to the Sun), amounts to traveling ~4.2 light-years. At a velocity of 0.1c (which is a lot – especially if you're trying to move an entire species[1]) that means a travel time of 42 years (as seen from our current frame of reference). Any velocity lower than that and we're getting into hundreds-of-years territory, so we'll be needing space ships across we can live for generations. Also, a space ship is not that different from a planet, in that it also has to obey thermodynamics. So the surface temperature issue there is just the same. (In fact it's worse, since our space ship will likely be smaller and we also need to factor in additional waste energy of the space ship's propulsion engine or whatever we're using.) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law [1]: Or, say, half the species (or whatever amount necessary to make the total energy consumption on the planets we already inhabit drop to levels such that the planets' surfaces don't start to boil).

phreeza 5y ago

> I like to think of solar, batteries, fission, and wind as compelling ways to go mostly carbon free and lower energy costs about 2x over the next 20 years or so. > Fusion is what reduces energy cost potentially another 10x, which really changes the game for lots of things. Exciting stuff. Kudos to this team. Citation needed... If the fusion reactors end up needing tape of room temperature superconductors to keep their confinement going, and they degrade rapidly due to neutron radiation, I could easily see solar being cheaper in the long run. I'm not saying this is exactly what will happen, but I have never seen compelling proof that fusion will really be so cheap in terms of capex or opex per Watt.

qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago

"Fusion is in theory something that could give us true energy abundance." What does fusion give us that existing nuclear power plant tech doesn't?

drexlspivey 5y ago
The reactor can’t meltdown and contaminate the whole planet. Also there is no radioactive waste
- ziotom78 5y ago
  Well, there is some radioactive waste [1], but its decay time is far smaller and is thus far easier to handle. (Moreover, there is a larger choice of elements.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Radioactive_waste
  - el_nahual 5y ago
    Aren't fast decay times harder to handle?
    - baq 5y ago
      it's easier in the sense that a single accident doesn't make the area uninhabitable in the human civilization timescales. fast decay = it'll kill you today in a minute, but will be safe to approach in a week, or 50 years.
kamaal 5y ago
>>What does fusion give us that existing nuclear power plant tech doesn't? Water is more abundant than Uranium?
- qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
  Fair enough, I hope fusion plants aren't adjacent to bomb technology in that case? Because that could lead to a lot of nuclear proliferation.

nico_h 5y ago

This is the kind of comment that make me really hope that we can kill energy intensive coins before that happens. I mean if we 10x the waste heat that could be produced by asics solely for the purpose of mining coins, it could be enough to create a mini climate.