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> power produced would be much more expensive than from fission. This is always true at first. People laughed at the idea of getting truly significant power fr

by api 5y ago

> power produced would be much more expensive than from fission. This is always true at first. People laughed at the idea of getting truly significant power from solar and wind only a decade or two ago. First you make something work, then you scale it. We are reasonably close to this moment with fusion: https://www.alamy.com/the-first-light-bulbs-ever-lit-by-electricity-generated-by-nuclear-power-at-ebr-1-at-argonne-national-laboratory-west-december-20-1951-image229149990.html https://www.alamy.com/the-first-light-bulbs-ever-lit-by-elec...

ncmncm 5y ago
Some things are only true at first. Other things are true forever. The bigger your fusion plant gets, the more uncompetitive it becomes. Your "scaled-up" fusion plant would never deliver so much as one erg of commercially-competitive energy. But it could absorb an unlimited amount of money, in the meantime. There have been lots of nuke plant projects that successfully absorbed billions of dollars before finally being cancelled. Every cent found a ready pocket. Producing power was not necessary for that. None of the money has ever been given back.
pfdietz 5y ago
Pointing to technologies that succeeded is survivor bias. There are plenty of technologies that lost their race, even renewable ones (for example, wave energy, tidal, OTEC, vertical wind turbines, space solar power, ORC geothermal, thermal biomass). And in general, for any given market niche, there can be only one winner. Most technologies lose. It's presumptuous to assume that fusion will be one that succeeds, for example by presuming that learning will reduce its cost, but not the costs of its competitors. It's especially presumptuous when fusion has very significant obstacles, above and beyond just reaching sufficiently high Q. It would be better for fusion if these obstacles were taken more seriously, and reactors designed to avoid them, rather than just pretending (via sufficiently optimistic assumptions, for example very large reduction in costs on Nth-of-a-kind plants) they will go away. The Nth-of-a-kind argument didn't work for fission, btw. It's also not clear how it applies to the non-fusion parts of a fusion power plant. Are the turbines going to suddenly jumpstart a new learning curve just because their heat source is a fusion reactor? Of the commercial reactor efforts I've been looking at, only Helion and perhaps Zap don't immediately strike me as destined to fail (they may still be destined to fail, I just can convince myself of that yet.)

by api 5y ago

ncmncm 5y ago

Some things are only true at first. Other things are true forever. The bigger your fusion plant gets, the more uncompetitive it becomes. Your "scaled-up" fusion plant would never deliver so much as one erg of commercially-competitive energy. But it could absorb an unlimited amount of money, in the meantime. There have been lots of nuke plant projects that successfully absorbed billions of dollars before finally being cancelled. Every cent found a ready pocket. Producing power was not necessary for that. None of the money has ever been given back.

pfdietz 5y ago

Pointing to technologies that succeeded is survivor bias. There are plenty of technologies that lost their race, even renewable ones (for example, wave energy, tidal, OTEC, vertical wind turbines, space solar power, ORC geothermal, thermal biomass). And in general, for any given market niche, there can be only one winner. Most technologies lose. It's presumptuous to assume that fusion will be one that succeeds, for example by presuming that learning will reduce its cost, but not the costs of its competitors. It's especially presumptuous when fusion has very significant obstacles, above and beyond just reaching sufficiently high Q. It would be better for fusion if these obstacles were taken more seriously, and reactors designed to avoid them, rather than just pretending (via sufficiently optimistic assumptions, for example very large reduction in costs on Nth-of-a-kind plants) they will go away. The Nth-of-a-kind argument didn't work for fission, btw. It's also not clear how it applies to the non-fusion parts of a fusion power plant. Are the turbines going to suddenly jumpstart a new learning curve just because their heat source is a fusion reactor? Of the commercial reactor efforts I've been looking at, only Helion and perhaps Zap don't immediately strike me as destined to fail (they may still be destined to fail, I just can convince myself of that yet.)