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More money definitely is not going to hurt in developing fusion. I am surprised nooone has been able to get a more significant portion of the militaries funding

More money definitely is not going to hurt in developing fusion. I am surprised nooone has been able to get a more significant portion of the militaries funding going directly making fusion reactors workable - it seems like they could be a huge strategic advantage militarily. A submarine or spacecraft using a fusion reactor that also was able to output clean water for its occupants seems like a pretty damn nice win win. And certainly the military must also have tons of other needs for reliable, uninterruptible energy production.

ncmncm 5y ago
The military is not funding fusion generation because current planned designs will never produce any viable power. (Actually all of inertial confinement is really military, but is about nuclear weapons research.) If the money poured into fusion for the past N decades had gone into solar and storage, good cheap solar panels would have come out decades earlier, and we would have already built out our clean power system. But the fossil companies did not want that. There will never be a commercially competitive Tokamak fusion power plant.
- willis936 5y ago
  The Navy did fund electrostatic fusion designs for a few decades. Considering any plasma physicist could have told you it was a fool's errand 60 years ago I'm not sure I would trust the military's judgment on what future energy sources warrant research. Also, some tips on making convincing arguments: making baseless and unfounded speculations on alternate histories with not even a whiff of empiricism is not going to convince anyone. Additionally, saying "something won't work" without articulating why it won't work isn't helpful. I've heard the power density arguments. It's a 40 year old argument that does not hold up in a world with HTS magnets and optimized stellarators.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    HTS or stellarators don't have a damned thing to do with those power density limits of DT fusion reactors. Those limits come from power/area on the walls, and they'd still exist even with much higher magnetic fields and plasma beta.
    - willis936 5y ago
      Optimized stellarators have exceeded the Greenwald limit so tokamak empirical scaling laws don't apply. If you increase the power in the same vessel is that not increasing the power density?
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        Yes, you can increase power density with sufficiently neat plasma physics. But no, the fundamental limit on power density in DT fusion doesn't come from plasma physics, it comes from engineering (specifically, limits on power/area on the first wall, coupled with minimum reactor size set by the cross section of neutrons w. blanket materials). You might have a sufficiently sucky design that can't even reach that limit, but once you reach it all the improvement in plasma physics or magnetic fields you can imagine doesn't help.
- adamsmith143 5y ago
  >If the money poured into fusion for the past N decades had gone into solar and storage, good cheap solar panels would have come out decades earlier, and we would have already built out our clean power system. Panels have been viable for decades already. Storage is an entirely different problem. >But the fossil companies did not want that. Then they would really hate Fusion which would probably put every energy company on the planet out of business. >There will never be a commercially competitive Tokamak fusion power plant. Seems a bold claim.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    A Tokamak fusion plant would necessarily be, at best, an order of magnitude more expensive to build and operate than a fission plant of equal capacity. Fission is already not competitive, and gets less so every year. It is not bold to say, about relative costs, that (n > 1) implies (10n > 1), when n is itself reliably increasing.

ncmncm 5y ago

The military is not funding fusion generation because current planned designs will never produce any viable power. (Actually all of inertial confinement is really military, but is about nuclear weapons research.) If the money poured into fusion for the past N decades had gone into solar and storage, good cheap solar panels would have come out decades earlier, and we would have already built out our clean power system. But the fossil companies did not want that. There will never be a commercially competitive Tokamak fusion power plant.

willis936 5y ago
The Navy did fund electrostatic fusion designs for a few decades. Considering any plasma physicist could have told you it was a fool's errand 60 years ago I'm not sure I would trust the military's judgment on what future energy sources warrant research. Also, some tips on making convincing arguments: making baseless and unfounded speculations on alternate histories with not even a whiff of empiricism is not going to convince anyone. Additionally, saying "something won't work" without articulating why it won't work isn't helpful. I've heard the power density arguments. It's a 40 year old argument that does not hold up in a world with HTS magnets and optimized stellarators.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  HTS or stellarators don't have a damned thing to do with those power density limits of DT fusion reactors. Those limits come from power/area on the walls, and they'd still exist even with much higher magnetic fields and plasma beta.
  - willis936 5y ago
    Optimized stellarators have exceeded the Greenwald limit so tokamak empirical scaling laws don't apply. If you increase the power in the same vessel is that not increasing the power density?
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      Yes, you can increase power density with sufficiently neat plasma physics. But no, the fundamental limit on power density in DT fusion doesn't come from plasma physics, it comes from engineering (specifically, limits on power/area on the first wall, coupled with minimum reactor size set by the cross section of neutrons w. blanket materials). You might have a sufficiently sucky design that can't even reach that limit, but once you reach it all the improvement in plasma physics or magnetic fields you can imagine doesn't help.
adamsmith143 5y ago
>If the money poured into fusion for the past N decades had gone into solar and storage, good cheap solar panels would have come out decades earlier, and we would have already built out our clean power system. Panels have been viable for decades already. Storage is an entirely different problem. >But the fossil companies did not want that. Then they would really hate Fusion which would probably put every energy company on the planet out of business. >There will never be a commercially competitive Tokamak fusion power plant. Seems a bold claim.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  A Tokamak fusion plant would necessarily be, at best, an order of magnitude more expensive to build and operate than a fission plant of equal capacity. Fission is already not competitive, and gets less so every year. It is not bold to say, about relative costs, that (n > 1) implies (10n > 1), when n is itself reliably increasing.