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It’s amazing just how many problems scaled up fusion would solve. War in iraq? Why bother. War in Ukraine? Just stop giving Russia fossil fuel money Climate

• rapsey 4y ago
  Because it is still very much up in the air if fusion is cost effective. If the price to build a plant is astronomical it can not make enough energy to pay for itself. A better question is why we are not investing in solar, wind and hydrogen more.
  • grej 4y ago
    Those have a role in the energy landscape to be sure, but they don’t offer the benefits of fusion because they don’t have the same power density.
    • ncmncm 4y ago
      Fusion does not "offer benefits" of any energetic or economic kind. It is interesting in the same ways that microkelvin cryogenic and gigapascal hyperpressure are, exercising extreme physics. Fusion does not offer energy density even approaching commercial fission.
    • deepspace 4y ago
      Yes, but they have the incredible advantage that they produce large amounts of energy economically today, whereas, as the article states, it is not yet clear whether fusion will ever be able to produce significant energy, let alone economically.
      • p1mrx 4y ago
        Wind and solar only produce energy when the weather is cooperating, and it's difficult to predict how climate change will impact future availability. Hydrogen might be economical someday, but currently it's rather difficult to generate, store, and transport.
        • ncmncm 4y ago
          There is always wind and solar somewhere. It need only be transmitted or stored to be used in other places and times. Both of those are cheap. People advocating nukes wish they were not.
          • mcronce 4y ago
            Hand-waving away the transmission/storage required to make intermittent energy sources "reliable" does not magically make them trivial, or even solved, problems. I don't really care whether or not nukes are cheap when they're the only reliable low-carbon energy source we have, and when they're the safest energy source we have. Some things are more fundamentally important than economics.
            • ncmncm 4y ago
              Yet, people deciding where to spend their own money are spending it on solar. Nukes are always built with money coerced from other people.
              • deleted 4y ago
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            • pfdietz 4y ago
              We can look at simulations using actual historical weather data and actual cost estimates to determine how much it would cost to deal with intermittency of wind/solar using storage. The result is something that looks cheaper than fission (or cheap than fusion is likely to achieve.) https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/
            • rapsey 4y ago
              If solar/wind is used to make hydrogen when they are available, you have a energy generating loop that provides energy usable at any time.
  • stormbrew 4y ago
    > A better question is why we are not investing in solar, wind and hydrogen more. This always comes up in discussions about fusion but do you really think we aren't? Solar didn't get where it is now from a lack of funding. A lot of money and time and effort has gone into it, just not mostly into one boondoggle project everyone can point to. I would really like to hear numbers to back up the idea that investment into these (esp. solar and wind) is "small" in total because I'd easily bet on it being several orders of magnitude more invested in than fusion.
    • ncmncm 4y ago
      It is small in exactly the sense that it must become much bigger if we hope to fend off climatic catastrophe.
      • stormbrew 4y ago
        Sure, I agree with that. But when you raise this in the context of fusion it implies that you think fusion is somehow preventing this, so where's the evidence? If you took every dollar of ITER and put it into solar would it make a meaningful difference? Probably not. It just reads as extremely misdirected, and maybe even sealioning. And to be clear, I think ITER specifically probably is a waste of money, but it's a waste of money on a shockingly tiny scale for how much negative attention it draws, it's by far the bulk of spending on fusion, and none of it really has much to do with anything to do with scaling out manufacturing and deployment of proven technology.
        • ncmncm 4y ago
          Add up the money spent on fusion over decades. Imagine it spent instead, at the time, on improving solar panel manufacturing processes, initiating the exponential decline in cost two decades earlier than we got it. But just now probably the biggest effect is confusing people about the cost structure of power generation, leading them to believe that lots of heat per unit mass input results in cheap power.
          • 4y ago
  • hotpotamus 4y ago
    Show me your budget and I’ll show you your priorities. What pays better, fusion researcher or CRUD app writer?
    • willis936 4y ago
      Public fusion researcher pays pittance. Private fusion researcher pays fair. More butts than seats on that fast-moving ride.
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    The best information available says fusion as pursued will never be anywhere close to competitive even with fission (which is not today economically competitive), never mind with photovoltaic solar panels (which are). Fusion research is cool beans, but not for any plausible practical reason. Given that, all the work on making it happen at big scale is a wholly wasted. The companies issued billion-dollar contracts to build parts of it do not see those contracts as wasteful, and hope we won't.
• mrtksn 4y ago
  Probably because it's not a solved problem that simply needs money to scale up? If you think about it, you can't simply give money to JS developers to do fusion research instead of making HTML buttons for internal use. Those who can work in the field already do but so far there's nothing to show in terms of practical solutions. They even receive fair bit of criticism for misrepresenting the outcomes of their work to get more funding. Every now and then a startup or something will come up to claim that they thought of something novel that will solve all of the problems and how the people who work in expensive government funded programs are amateurs with no creativity, then disappear in the valley of vaporware dreams. Humanity is deeply invested in it, it's just that it's really hard. Oh, BTW, We already have a reliable and extremely powerful nuclear fusion reactor in the sky. We can actually pour enormous amount of our resources into harnessing it and succeed but it is considered a divisive topic.
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    "a divisive topic" On HN, anyway. The wider world is all in on solar, except where it might compete with oil extraction subsidy.
  • breadloaf 4y ago
    But it is not available in the night and energy storage is still unsolved mystery. It is like planning a project and ignoring half of issues which will make or break your project.
    • mrtksn 4y ago
      The storage is not an unsolved mystery at all, we have many methods to store energy. Maybe it's not perfected yet and not optimal and cost effective as we would like it to be yet but it's nowhere near the situation with fusion technology. Unlike the fusion, the science of it is well developed and it boils down to its commercialisation optimisation. Besides, as we are creatures who sleep roughly in sync with the fusion in the sky, we don't really need to have 24/7 constant energy input. Combination of storage and older tech like good old fission energy and natural gas can be enough.
• peteradio 4y ago
  > War in iraq? Why bother. I guess we take as a given we were there for cynical oil based reasons? > War in Ukraine? Just stop giving Russia fossil fuel money The oil/gas doesn't cease to have value under sanctions, at worst it can all be consumed internally to drive their war machine. Climate change isn't driving Russia to desire Ukraine, it just does. > Climate change? Let’s just not. The government we are cynical of now has the power to control climate and our cynicism vanishes?
  • jonplackett 4y ago
    1) yes definitely. The only reason anyone in the west cares about the Middle East is the oil. 2) it they have less value, to the point you wouldn’t have to be a slave to the producers of energy. 3) even cynics can’t sell ice to eskimos. If fusion really did pan out and make energy abundant it doesn’t matter if they have lots of oil and gas. No one would need it. As many other comments have pointed out though, fusion seems kinda unlikely to actually do that, but arguing that even if it did it wouldn’t change anything is a bit pessimistic for me.
• andi999 4y ago
  It will produce a lot of nuclear waste though (neutrons activating and damaging the hull)
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    Anyway, short-lived reactors.
• baryphonic 4y ago
  I sort of feel this way, but the problem seems sufficiently complex that the solution is "path dependent," much in the way chip process generations are (we couldn't have jumped straight from a 100nm process to the present 5nm processes just by spending all of our money on it). Just spewing out money would likely lead to lots of fraud, and the outcome would be similar to the current funding regime.
• walkhour 4y ago
  Politicians aren't here to offer to solution or to improve the state of the country, they are here to maintain themselves in power and reward their friends. Their friends don't like fusion, and supporting fusion would make it less likely for them get reelected. Until the winds change and supporting fusion would make it more likely for them to get reelected, they will be making up all sort of stuff of why we should waste money in less proven and more unreliable, and possibly dirtier sources of energy.
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    Politicians do better when they can ride on things delivering popularly valued results. Fusion won't. Solar and wind are, already.
• anovikov 4y ago
  Because the whole field is an easy to debunk bullshit which is worthless in practice. If today somebody came up with a working thermonuclear reactor with a positive energy output, nothing at all will change in energy markets, because it basically means you are getting a complex and expensive steam boiler that runs on effectively free fuel. But even electricity made from coal has only 20% of the coal price in it, meaning, there won't be a dramatic improvement in energy cost if fossil fuels were free. Renewable energy today provides very cheap energy inputs and no improvement in this field can yield any dramatic difference. And everything that comes further downstream has to be paid, anyway. Research in it is still a good thing though because a lot of other discoveries and technology improvements are done on the way, bringing benefit even if result itself is useless (like with the moon landing).
• chrisco255 4y ago
  If only all practical problems could be solved with money. We're more awash with money than ever but competence is carefully rationed.
• simonh 4y ago
  There's no guarantee it's a solvable problem. With the Manhattan Project we knew it was feasible and how to do it, all we needed was engineering. With fusion we don't know how to do it. There are many, many ideas we could pursue, and they are being pursued, but we have no idea if any of them will actually work. It's quite possible none of them will, or that solving it might take enabling technology we haven't even thought of developing yet. For context we have already spent several Manhattan Projects worth of fund on fusion research, in inflation adjusted terms.
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    We have certainty they will not be solved. Anyway, not to anywhere in sight of commercial competitiveness. Fusion can never even come close to competing with fission, and fission is not today competitive. It gets less so every year.
    • anarazel 4y ago
      You made 10+ comments along those lines, just for this article. How about providing at least some justification, rather than making absolutist statements?
      • pfdietz 4y ago
        DT fusion has inherently lousy volumetric power density. ITER's thermal power density, for example, is 400x worse than a commercial pressurized water reactor's primary reactor vessel. ARC's is 40x worse. Now couple that with those cores being far more complex than a fission core, and the difficulty of maintenance (they will be too activated for hands on maintenance.) IMO, the only fusion company that has a real chance is Helion. Most of the breathless hype runs into generic showstopping issues like the ones above. If someone presents a new fusion concept, ask them about their power density, and how much complexity there is in that core.
  • narag 4y ago
    There's no guarantee it's a solvable problem. And there's the more insidious variant of this: to solve it we need new physics. I say it's more insidious because, if we used all the money in current approaches, we would be diverting it from the research that could really solve it.
• 77pt77 4y ago
  Abundant clean energy for humans would be a social disaster of cataclysmic consequences.
• spurgu 4y ago
  We could also look at simpler ways of living. Simply not using that much energy. Politically that's a suicide move (to promote), but it can happen on a grassroots level. Housing policy for example would need to change. People should be able to build simple houses using natural methods without having to comply with complex building codes. Upgrading living standards for poor people is (or should/would be) easy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtbjQ51NvDg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtbjQ51NvDg A bigger problem is making people less career-driven and settle for a simpler life, small-scale farming, permaculture etc. Photosynthesis is free and abundant! But we're locked into this mental trap of constant growth. We just assume that the only way should be up - more energy, more people, more stuff...
  • spurgu 4y ago
    There's an interesting analogy about how we've been depleting our huge supplies of fossil fuels at an alarming rate, causing the population to spike out of control, with little planning ahead for when they eventually run out (the effects of which we've already started to see the effects of): "On the far end of the overshoot spectrum are situations in which a community of living things receives a surplus of energy through some accidental event that happens only once. Imagine how the lives of field mice would be transformed if a truck full of grain overturned on the nearby freeway and spilled its load in their meadow. The mice suddenly have more energy than they can use and their population soars far beyond the meadow’s carrying capacity. As the number of mice in the meadow grows, though, the rate at which the grain is consumed also rises, until the grain begins to run short. At this point nothing the mice can do will spare them from dieoff; most of the mice will starve, and the survivors’ struggle to keep themselves fed may damage the meadow badly enough to decrease its carrying capacity over the long term. Years later, the meadow may still not support as many mice as it did the day before the truck overturned." From John Michael Greer's book The Ecotechnic Future