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If fusion becomes a godsent reality, do you think we will see solar and wind companies fighting tooth and nail against it just like we see oil and coal companie

If fusion becomes a godsent reality, do you think we will see solar and wind companies fighting tooth and nail against it just like we see oil and coal companies fighting those today?

cinquemb 5y ago
To me, it will basically be areas where solar and wind companies are weakest in a local market/jurisdiction where this will take off (as we've seen a lot of the newer solar MW capacity build out not in the US to date).
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  Also places that want to cater to industrial customers who may need access to continuous high power draw day and night. Like metal refineries etc.
geenew 5y ago
There will most likely be some sophistry/FUD on the part of lobbyists. Fusion in the long-term answer will provide benefits far beyond just eliminating power station greenhouse gas emissions, I suspect, but there are many technical and economic hurdles that have to be overcome, any of which could be pointed to when questions about allocation of state funding come up.
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
Maybe. But oil companies were huge behemoths while solar I think is more smaller companies. (Though this may change in 15 years.) Plus the value proposition for fusion is so clear that it is going to be hard to argue against. We are going to need to use fusion power to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Heneeqr 5y ago
This would / will still take ages / decades. It could also be that it makes total sense to use 100% solar/wind + battery in everything not city and use fusion in city/for cities. I would also argue that the 'no longer needed solar' will then be sold and used everywere else until all poor countries also are using solar energy.
myrmidon 5y ago
Considering that wind and solar is already cost-competitive with nuclear (fission) power, fusion power might never be viable (opinionated fusion fans often gloss over this possibility). Sure, there might be potential savings compared to fission because less safety concerns, but the reactor complexity is an order of magnitude higher, and its far from clear to me that fusion power will even be able to compete with current (admittedly often state-subsidized) fission on price, MUCH less with the price of renewables now (or, worse, in 20 years)...
goodpoint 5y ago
Why having highly centralized power production when you can have it decentralized? Are people unable to learn from Ukraine? Fission/fusion reactors are just one missile away from nation-wide blackout and panic.
- cinquemb 5y ago
  With the new magnet engineering (basically the electromagnets are using some kind of metamaterial for the wiring that's needed to wrap around the toroid that's way better than copper, thus confinement is much easier with the stronger B field in way smaller space [the first research paper that talks about this being theoretically possible was back in 1987, but the engineering capabilities were not there to do such]), you are not limited by volume compared to strength of the B field, so you could have portable decentralized fusion reactors (they talk about this in the video).
  - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    He did say there are other practical limits to how small it can be though. You have to stuff other stuff inside the coils and the plasma has to be physically separated from the walls of the chamber by some distance since it is so hot it would melt the walls, and it just gets hard to squeeze everything in there. But I wonder for example if SPARC could be made in to a system that could operate continuously, even though ARC makes more sense from a power generation perspective.
    - cinquemb 5y ago
      > physically separated from the walls of the chamber by some distance since it is so hot it would melt the walls This distance could probably be shrunk if some of the gains from matsi for meta-materials translated into fluids engineering, where some kind of "meta" fluid has certain differential properties at a given thermal load (im imagining that the side/region with the thermal load, the particles in the fluid would have some type of glassy dynamics behavior to spontaneously create a radiant barrier back toward the source, would need to talk more with my friend about this since his thesis covered quasi-1d models of glassy dynamics and spontaneous partial arrangements under various conditions on initial perturbation and at steady state).

If fusion becomes a godsent reality, do you think we will see solar and wind companies fighting tooth and nail against it just like we see oil and coal companies fighting those today?

cinquemb 5y ago

To me, it will basically be areas where solar and wind companies are weakest in a local market/jurisdiction where this will take off (as we've seen a lot of the newer solar MW capacity build out not in the US to date).

TaylorAlexander 5y ago
Also places that want to cater to industrial customers who may need access to continuous high power draw day and night. Like metal refineries etc.

geenew 5y ago

There will most likely be some sophistry/FUD on the part of lobbyists. Fusion in the long-term answer will provide benefits far beyond just eliminating power station greenhouse gas emissions, I suspect, but there are many technical and economic hurdles that have to be overcome, any of which could be pointed to when questions about allocation of state funding come up.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

Maybe. But oil companies were huge behemoths while solar I think is more smaller companies. (Though this may change in 15 years.) Plus the value proposition for fusion is so clear that it is going to be hard to argue against. We are going to need to use fusion power to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Heneeqr 5y ago

This would / will still take ages / decades. It could also be that it makes total sense to use 100% solar/wind + battery in everything not city and use fusion in city/for cities. I would also argue that the 'no longer needed solar' will then be sold and used everywere else until all poor countries also are using solar energy.

myrmidon 5y ago

Considering that wind and solar is already cost-competitive with nuclear (fission) power, fusion power might never be viable (opinionated fusion fans often gloss over this possibility). Sure, there might be potential savings compared to fission because less safety concerns, but the reactor complexity is an order of magnitude higher, and its far from clear to me that fusion power will even be able to compete with current (admittedly often state-subsidized) fission on price, MUCH less with the price of renewables now (or, worse, in 20 years)...

goodpoint 5y ago

Why having highly centralized power production when you can have it decentralized? Are people unable to learn from Ukraine? Fission/fusion reactors are just one missile away from nation-wide blackout and panic.

cinquemb 5y ago
With the new magnet engineering (basically the electromagnets are using some kind of metamaterial for the wiring that's needed to wrap around the toroid that's way better than copper, thus confinement is much easier with the stronger B field in way smaller space [the first research paper that talks about this being theoretically possible was back in 1987, but the engineering capabilities were not there to do such]), you are not limited by volume compared to strength of the B field, so you could have portable decentralized fusion reactors (they talk about this in the video).
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  He did say there are other practical limits to how small it can be though. You have to stuff other stuff inside the coils and the plasma has to be physically separated from the walls of the chamber by some distance since it is so hot it would melt the walls, and it just gets hard to squeeze everything in there. But I wonder for example if SPARC could be made in to a system that could operate continuously, even though ARC makes more sense from a power generation perspective.
  - cinquemb 5y ago
    > physically separated from the walls of the chamber by some distance since it is so hot it would melt the walls This distance could probably be shrunk if some of the gains from matsi for meta-materials translated into fluids engineering, where some kind of "meta" fluid has certain differential properties at a given thermal load (im imagining that the side/region with the thermal load, the particles in the fluid would have some type of glassy dynamics behavior to spontaneously create a radiant barrier back toward the source, would need to talk more with my friend about this since his thesis covered quasi-1d models of glassy dynamics and spontaneous partial arrangements under various conditions on initial perturbation and at steady state).