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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
by 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 agoThose 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 agoFusion 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 agoYes, 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 agoWind 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 agoThere 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 agoHand-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 agoYet, 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[deleted]
- pfdietz 4y agoWe 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 agoIf 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 agoIt is small in exactly the sense that it must become much bigger if we hope to fend off climatic catastrophe.
- stormbrew 4y agoSure, 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 agoAdd 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 agoShow me your budget and I’ll show you your priorities. What pays better, fusion researcher or CRUD app writer?
- willis936 4y agoPublic fusion researcher pays pittance. Private fusion researcher pays fair. More butts than seats on that fast-moving ride.
- ncmncm 4y agoThe 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.