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This is great news. That said, what the literal fuck -- we've previously been investing 1/850,000th of global GDP in one of 4-5 truly promising energy technolo
by Digital28 4y ago
This is great news.
That said, what the literal fuck -- we've previously been investing 1/850,000th of global GDP in one of 4-5 truly promising energy technologies while the world burns before our eyes?
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoOn one hand, you had "traditional" companies (oil, coal, gas,...) lobbying against it, and on the other hand, you had the "green" organizations lobbying (and protesting) against it.
- champtar 4y agoAnd if you combine both hands you get Greenpeace energy
- paul80808 4y agoExactly. The past of fusion has been grim, but the future looks (probably) bright. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-future-of-fusion https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-f...
- toveja 4y agoI wouldn't say the (recent) past was grim, but rather that the technology to build an _affordable_ commercial device had not yet been developed yet. We designed and built ITER at such a large size and cost (€20 billion) since high temperature superconducting magnets were not yet available. In the meantime, all of the experimental devices (JET, AUG, EAST, DIII-D, etc.,) have been gathering evidence on how to operate ITER when it is turned on, and not necessarily focused on achieving breakeven.
- stormbrew 4y ago> We designed and built ITER at such a large size and cost (€20 billion) since high temperature superconducting magnets were not yet available. This is one of those numbers that only seem big without context. Medium-sized cities spend more than this on interchanges and highway development over shorter timespans than any of the various multi-decade price tags that get thrown around for ITER.
- toveja 4y agoI agree. The hefty price tag seems smaller when considering the development and design of ITER began during the cold war. The literal size is definitely big even without context, which is why it has the nickname: gigantomak :D.
- dtagames 4y agoDoesn't IETR consume more power than it produces? Fusion (like solutions for aging fission plants and their waste products) always seems just around the corner -- yet never arrives.
- orzig 4y agoFor me, it was eye opening to inside its progression in terms of dollars, not years. It’s barely had the chance to get started.
- samhain 4y agoHave you heard of MITs SPARC reactor? It’s way more interesting than ITER. It is 3x smaller, with Q greater than 10 (compared to ITERs ~10). It’s also slated to be finished -before- ITER.
- willis936 4y ago3x smaller major radius. 42x smaller plasma volume.
- nilsbunger 4y agoThis was an awesome overview of current state of fusion attempts!
- barkingcat 4y agothe profits in 1 year from silicon valley can solve world hunger by buying every single man woman child 3 meals a day, every day.
- _Algernon_ 4y agosource?
- stuartd 4y agoStill doesn’t stop the world burning, though
- throwaway71271 4y ago700 million people live in poverty 3 meals per day, 5$ per meal for 365 days is 3,832,500,000,000$
- stuartd 4y agoIf meals cost 5$ all over the planet then there would be mass starvation
- adrian_b 4y agoYes, indeed. Even in the European Union, it is possible to pay around $5 for all the meals of a day, including not only adequate quantities of vegetables and fruits, but also a moderate amount of chicken meat. However, for that, you must be cost-conscious, because from the same shops you could buy an equivalent quantity of food, but at a price even 10 times greater, when you choose to buy processed foods, even those as cheap as bread, instead of buying only raw ingredients.
- the-smug-one 4y agoFive bucks? 1kg of beans in Sweden is like 3 bucks.
- koverda 4y agobeans, $700 / metric ton [1] rice, $500 / metric ton [2] a meal of 65g dry rice and 55g dry beans per person. 700m * 3 = 2.1b meals per day 115,500 tons beans = $80.9m 136,500 tons rice = $68.3m Total $149.1m/day I'm sure at these quantities you can get much better prices of rice and beans, even just browsing on alibaba. I'd guess we can probably get that down under $100m from alibaba. Probably even lower at the quantities we're talking about. 1 - https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/red-bean-wholesales-supplier-crop-long_62039743604.html?spm=a2700.7724857.0.0.675963e1lxG5Wh https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/red-bean-wholesales-s... 2 - https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Jasmine-Rice-Long-Grain-Fragrant-Rice_60640299922.html?spm=a2700.7724857.0.0.569f51b9BpLJv0 https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Jasmine-Rice-Long-Gra...
- sacrosancty 4y agoFusion isn't a silver bullet even if it works. If it costs more than solar+battery then it's worthless.
- Teever 4y agoNot at all. There will always be places where solar+battery isn't viable. Northern Canada and Alaska come to mind.
- eftychis 4y agoAlso we are talking about totally different load over time characteristics. And we don't want time plus weather to dictate our industrial and shipping power needs. Solar is great but not simply alone. (Latitude is less of an issue as (proper) power systems are interconnected markets that sell/buy excess load.)
- Digital28 4y agoDon't forget that we're perpetually one temper tantrum away from nuclear winter now, which would cripple all solar infrastructure for years. I'm actually a little surprised the DoD hasn't deeply invested in fusion for this reason alone.
- adventured 4y agoAlong with small and or very high population density nations. India is going to end up with perhaps two billion people and will have extraordinary population density/spacing problems. They're going to desperately need huge numbers of nuclear fission power plants or fusion plants to provide for that. They will not have the space for epic scale solar farms. Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Philippines, Vietnam, Israel, Belgium, Netherlands (among others) are in the same space vs population situation. And given the population explosion across parts of the Middle East and Africa, it's a certainty nations in those regions will have the same problem as well.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago> They will not have the space for epic scale solar farms. ...space vs population situation. Your math is totally wrong, space was never an issie for solar. It tales 100x less space for a coutry to cover it's power needs with solar, than it does for a country to grow it's own food and feed it's own people. So every country thats not a city-state, like Vatikan, is fine. All the challaneges of Solar are around intermittency, cost and ofcourse it's less viable in northern lattitudes. But none of them are around space.
- rainsford 4y agoI'd love to see viable nuclear fusion power, but the lack of more investment at the moment doesn't really seem unreasonable. As you said, there are a number of other green alternatives, including traditional nuclear fission power, that have proven they can be real alternatives to fossil fuels and that would benefit from continued investment. Unless I've missed something, nuclear fusion meanwhile has yet to demonstrate realistic commercial power generation, even as a proof of concept or a complete path to get to that point. In other words, more research is definitely worthwhile, but it also seems possible it will be a dead end at least in the near term. It's hard to argue prioritizing that over other things that have been generating real commercial power for decades. I'm all in favor of an all-of-the-above approach, but prioritization almost always has to be the reality.
- Digital28 4y agoIt's an equal level of insanity that technologies like thorium breeder reactors haven't been getting whole number percentages of first world budgets, especially considering how extremely high of a priority climate change has become and how costly the alternatives (e.g., disaster mitigation) are getting.
- twawaaay 4y agoBudgets are decided by elected officials and elected officials are steered by their polling numbers. Out of all sources of energy only atomic energy is something that we can practically scale at the moment to cover almost all our needs (air travel and maritime shipping being notable exceptions). We just need to think a bit harder how to ensure this is done responsibly and safely. Not saying it is an easy problem, but I think the issue is too little resources are devoted to solving it. I would say this probably isn't harder than sending a man to the Moon. It is just something that should be possible to fix practically with existing technology and just good design. The cost of humanity that can't decide on what needs to be done is that we are still reliant on fossil fuels and are distracting ourselves with half measures that have a lot of problems that in hindsight were pretty obvious. Like solar energy -- only works when the sun is up, is difficult to scale and we still haven't figured out how to store energy for when it is needed. Our children will curse us.
- otikik 4y agoCompare that to what we have invested in crypto globally and weep.
- Noughmad 4y agoCompare it to what we have invested in killing each other, and despair.
- joe_name 4y agoIt's only top 5 most promising if you're heavily weighting based on theoretical upside. We should always be taking moonshots but for climate change and global warming we need to be taking active steps yesterday, and for that fusion shouldn't even be on the list. Fission + some renewables is all we need anyway for almost everything, and carbon capture/removal can take care of stuff that will likely need to rely on fossil fuels moving forward, like aircraft. It's not a matter of way, just will.
- tsimionescu 4y agoIf you look more into it, it's not clear at all that fusion is actually a promising source of power. None of the currently contemplated technologies have any realistic chance of producing power anywhere near competitively in cost, even ignoring the huge research costs left to get there (no currently planned fusion experiment has any hope of producing more power than it consumes).
- ac29 4y ago> no currently planned fusion experiment has any hope of producing more power than it consumes ITER [1] is expected to produce more thermal energy than it consumes and is currently under construction. No electricity though. The follow up plant, DEMO [2], should produce electricity (750MW). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant
- tsimionescu 4y agoYes, I should have said electrical power. ITER isn't even attempting to produce any. DEMO is a concept, not a planned facility; the plans will be drawn up based on the results of ITER, hopefully by 2030. Note that DEMO won't even be a particular plant, several countries participating in ITER are hoping to go on to construct DEMO plants.
- lispm 4y ago> follow up plant, DEMO [2], should produce electricity (750MW) If it will ever be built and then go online. Which is highly unlikely given the slow progress of ITER and its very difficult problems - some it even does not try to solve. Like getting enough Tritium: https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run-fuel-even-gets-started https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run... 750MW (again using thermal energy, which is probably not the future of electricity production) from such an expensive & complex device? Probably you would need pools of several fusion power plants, since it is unlikely that one fusion power plant will run for a longer periods of time. Maybe a pool of six would provide two running (just a wild guess). The technical problems will be huge and the costs gigantic. I can't imagine how this will be competitive when in production (with outputs in tens of Gigawatts, to make any impact) in 2060 or later.
- more_corn 4y agoWhat if I told you commercially viable fusion power has been 10 years away for the last 40 years? What if I told you it always will be? Investment in something that might not pay off is wise if it does, and foolish if it doesn’t.
- orzig 4y agoI think the people who said “10 years away “we’re assuming it would get actual serious investment. I would argue that this is year 1
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoIndeed, fusion has never been a certain number of years away, it's only ever been number of billions of dollars away, as projected here [1]. Though, luckily, it looks like that was a little over-pessimistic: it's not like the field has been sitting on its thumbs despite having, in terms relative to the potential, negligible funding: [2]. [1]: https://imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png https://imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png [2]: https://phys.org/news/2021-11-unveiling-steady-fusion-energy-gain.html https://phys.org/news/2021-11-unveiling-steady-fusion-energy...
- api 4y agoThe world burning is the basis of the economy for dozens of petrostates and some of the world’s largest corporations.
- no_wizard 4y agoI’d love to see a Manhattan project for nuclear fusion research. Just pour money into it until we crack it. I think out of all the energy alternatives it’s the most game changing.
- TaylorAlexander 4y agoI hate to say it, but this is the result of fossil fuel interests running the largest [1] economy in the world. We will literally spend 1 trillion dollars a year on war in the middle east and associated commitments but couldn't bother to spend a few billion on fusion research. Absurd. [1] until recently
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoI can't remember who said it but I remember reading a quote one time to the effect that the man who invented a new form of energy for the world without also inventing a new heat sink would be history's greatest monster. Not sure I agree, but does give one pause if prone to pessimism as I am.
- formerkrogemp 4y agoPerhaps this was referring to humanity's use of fossil fuels?
- bryanrasmussen 4y agono, fossil fuels aren't a new form of energy. The implication would be that a new form of energy would just be used with all the other forms of energy, it may also have been a new cheap form of energy in the quote, implying that we would take a cheap form of energy and overuse it so that the world burned faster.
- kadoban 4y agoI don't get it. Why would a new form of energy need a new heat sink? Wouldn't any energy we can realistically generate be a drop in the bucket compared to what the Sun throws at us every second? And even if not, what would a heat sink do about it? I think I'm missing something.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoIt is doubtful that fusion will even be cheaper than old-crappy-PWR-fission. It is very very very doubtful it will beat wind/solar as they continue to drop in cost, at least not for probably... 40 years. We're looking at 10-20 years to a viable commercial design and construction. I place fusion like next-gen fission: worthy of continued investment in research and maybe some subsidized consumer plants (if/when fusion becomes viable). Even with viable fusion, there will likely be degradation/radioactivity of the power generation cores from fast neutrons and other problems.