5 ms·

Even without fuel, geothermal still has constraints. Where can we build it? What are the build costs and costs to run (maintenance, staffing, etc)? I doubt we

Even without fuel, geothermal still has constraints. Where can we build it? What are the build costs and costs to run (maintenance, staffing, etc)? I doubt we can scale geothermal indefinitely. Fusion might suffer from similar constraints, but afaik, doesn't need "much" space or specific geographic structures.

epistasis 5y ago
FWIW, drilling tech is advancing at an incredible rate, making geothermal possible in all sorts of new places all the time. But my primary concern with fusion is cost. I don't see the path to being cheaper than geothermal, nor fission, and new fission is already some of our most expensive energy. The goal may be eventual space travel, which seems like a more plausible goal to talk about than sustainable energy.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  There’s nothing fundamentally expensive about a Tokamak. We’re in the phase of fusion of “computers have 1 Kb of memory and take up a whole basement.”
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    What does 'fundamentally expensive' mean? If it does not incluse precision engineering to build largest vacuum vessel, supercomputers, superconductors, generation and containment of hottest substance on the planet, and largest magnetic fields we can produce. If that's not 'fundamentally expensive', then what is? Especially when your interlocutor is asking for geothermal, a.k.a. a hole in the ground?
    - thehappypm 5y ago
      There’s no piece of the Tomamak individually that can’t be miniaturized or benefit from economies of scale. It doesn’t require exotic fuel like nuclear fission reactors do. It doesn’t need gigantic quantities of space and material like wind and solar. It doesn’t have high up front engineering costs like geothermal. One day a tokamak might be an off the shelf industrial purchase, maybe akin to an MRI machine.
      - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
        "It doesn’t have high up front engineering costs like geothermal." You are commenting on an article about how scientists had to build a reactor out of berillium and tungsten. Have you ever touched those materials? Is there any berillium in your car, or your washing machine? If you go around your neighbourhood looking for someone who can weld or work tungsten, will you find anyone? Can you buy a tool on amazon that will cut tungsten? The number of facilities that can produce precision-enginered thousand-ton vacuum vessel with exotic materials, are counted with fingers on one hand. > Tritium is very exotic, and fuel cost is a small and irrelevant cost to fission powerplant This is downright delusional, solar is the only technology that you can go and buy off the shelf and it is much cheaper than an MRI machine, any joe with basic electrical education can put together a solar power system and poor people in developing nations do it. Anyone who thinks that fusion will be easier than slapping solar panels together is smoking some serious dope
        thehappypm 5y ago
        You’re missing the point a little bit. No one is arguing that solar is going to be more expensive than fusion. The point is that fusion is about as far fetched as a lot of technology seem at first. Like microprocessors (billions of transistors?) or medical imaging (put a human into a giant magnetic field to see inside them) or internal combustion engines.
    - tinco 5y ago
      You mean fundamentally expensive like building billions of nano meter scale devices, aligning and wiring 24 million of them to be individually addressable on a 6 inch plane? Oh and we build those by the thousands on factory lines. That's a whole lot more of precision engineering than is needed to build a nuclear fusion reactor, and you can buy it on the order of a hundred bucks. And it's not just a hole in the ground, last time I checked the thermal conductivity of rocks isn't exactly stellar.
      - epistasis 5y ago
        I think this is a great example of why fusion will probably not drop in price. With semiconductors, prices fall continuously because there is continuous iteration, and starting from the very very first lithographic circuits there was a market. There's an entire industry, competitors, and it's a factory system. Fusion is not like that, it will be like building monuments, there's not thousands or millions of the same thing getting churned out, it will be all specialized construction for each piece. You may say that a chip did specialized in that each of the transistors re wired together in very specific ways, but the semiconductor industry is a factory factory in some sense, you build a set of masks and that's your factory for your chip. Let's say you design a fusion reactor, and then 12 months later you see how to shave off 1% of the costs somewhere. That iterative gain is lost, because the fusion reactors will be built very rarely, and building each one in a new custom way poses lots more risk than doing the same design for 10 years. They are just too big and expensive to show the same sort of mass manufacturing gains that can be seen with technologies that have learning curves. I could be wrong, and I certainly hope I am, but I would bet a hell of a lot more money on a new battery chemistry than I would on fusion as being a terrestrial power device.
        tinco 5y ago
        I think you're underestimating how small fusion reactors are. We're going to be needing not just fusion reactors per city, but per city block. If we manage to get them to break-even, they're going to be super plentiful. At least, that's what the promise is, we'll have to see of course.

epistasis 5y ago

FWIW, drilling tech is advancing at an incredible rate, making geothermal possible in all sorts of new places all the time. But my primary concern with fusion is cost. I don't see the path to being cheaper than geothermal, nor fission, and new fission is already some of our most expensive energy. The goal may be eventual space travel, which seems like a more plausible goal to talk about than sustainable energy.

thehappypm 5y ago
There’s nothing fundamentally expensive about a Tokamak. We’re in the phase of fusion of “computers have 1 Kb of memory and take up a whole basement.”
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  What does 'fundamentally expensive' mean? If it does not incluse precision engineering to build largest vacuum vessel, supercomputers, superconductors, generation and containment of hottest substance on the planet, and largest magnetic fields we can produce. If that's not 'fundamentally expensive', then what is? Especially when your interlocutor is asking for geothermal, a.k.a. a hole in the ground?
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    There’s no piece of the Tomamak individually that can’t be miniaturized or benefit from economies of scale. It doesn’t require exotic fuel like nuclear fission reactors do. It doesn’t need gigantic quantities of space and material like wind and solar. It doesn’t have high up front engineering costs like geothermal. One day a tokamak might be an off the shelf industrial purchase, maybe akin to an MRI machine.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      "It doesn’t have high up front engineering costs like geothermal." You are commenting on an article about how scientists had to build a reactor out of berillium and tungsten. Have you ever touched those materials? Is there any berillium in your car, or your washing machine? If you go around your neighbourhood looking for someone who can weld or work tungsten, will you find anyone? Can you buy a tool on amazon that will cut tungsten? The number of facilities that can produce precision-enginered thousand-ton vacuum vessel with exotic materials, are counted with fingers on one hand. > Tritium is very exotic, and fuel cost is a small and irrelevant cost to fission powerplant This is downright delusional, solar is the only technology that you can go and buy off the shelf and it is much cheaper than an MRI machine, any joe with basic electrical education can put together a solar power system and poor people in developing nations do it. Anyone who thinks that fusion will be easier than slapping solar panels together is smoking some serious dope
      - thehappypm 5y ago
        You’re missing the point a little bit. No one is arguing that solar is going to be more expensive than fusion. The point is that fusion is about as far fetched as a lot of technology seem at first. Like microprocessors (billions of transistors?) or medical imaging (put a human into a giant magnetic field to see inside them) or internal combustion engines.
  - tinco 5y ago
    You mean fundamentally expensive like building billions of nano meter scale devices, aligning and wiring 24 million of them to be individually addressable on a 6 inch plane? Oh and we build those by the thousands on factory lines. That's a whole lot more of precision engineering than is needed to build a nuclear fusion reactor, and you can buy it on the order of a hundred bucks. And it's not just a hole in the ground, last time I checked the thermal conductivity of rocks isn't exactly stellar.
    - epistasis 5y ago
      I think this is a great example of why fusion will probably not drop in price. With semiconductors, prices fall continuously because there is continuous iteration, and starting from the very very first lithographic circuits there was a market. There's an entire industry, competitors, and it's a factory system. Fusion is not like that, it will be like building monuments, there's not thousands or millions of the same thing getting churned out, it will be all specialized construction for each piece. You may say that a chip did specialized in that each of the transistors re wired together in very specific ways, but the semiconductor industry is a factory factory in some sense, you build a set of masks and that's your factory for your chip. Let's say you design a fusion reactor, and then 12 months later you see how to shave off 1% of the costs somewhere. That iterative gain is lost, because the fusion reactors will be built very rarely, and building each one in a new custom way poses lots more risk than doing the same design for 10 years. They are just too big and expensive to show the same sort of mass manufacturing gains that can be seen with technologies that have learning curves. I could be wrong, and I certainly hope I am, but I would bet a hell of a lot more money on a new battery chemistry than I would on fusion as being a terrestrial power device.
      - tinco 5y ago
        I think you're underestimating how small fusion reactors are. We're going to be needing not just fusion reactors per city, but per city block. If we manage to get them to break-even, they're going to be super plentiful. At least, that's what the promise is, we'll have to see of course.