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> * Get more energy out of fusion fuel that it took you to make the energy you put into it What does that mean if the cost of energy is 0 ? (e.g renewables)
by zikero 4y ago
> * Get more energy out of fusion fuel that it took you to make the energy you put into it
What does that mean if the cost of energy is 0 ? (e.g renewables)
- aaronblohowiak 4y agoThen why build a fusion reactor?
- giantrobot 4y agoThere's a few reasons as I understand it, the power output can be on the same order as a nuclear fission plant. So a single plant taking relatively little real estate can output gigawatts of power to the grid. The fuel is abundant to the point of being practically unlimited. The fuel also needs little in the way of refinement and is not hazardous. A fusion core is naturally fail safe since energy and fuel need to be constantly applied, an accident might destroy a core or plant but not irradiate the surrounding countryside.
- prox 4y agoIt could quite literally save the world in terms of clean energy. I can understand why one would at least try.
- ncmncm 4y ago100% false. As with fission, most of the operating costs would have nothing to do with buying fuel. Solar and wind power suffer none of these costs, so fusion, like fission, would be wholly unable to produce power at a price anyone would pay without being forced to. The fission plants still operating will find themselves increasingly unable to produce power at a price anyone will pay, so will be mothballed long short of their design life.
- ehvatum 4y agoGenerating electricity from sunlight and wind is anything but free. I prefer to pay $0.12/kWh for nuclear energy, as compared to $1.75/kWh for wind or solar, in fact.
- ncmncm 4y agoIf you know you have to lie to make your case, what does that say about your case? And, who do you imagine you are fooling?
- ehvatum 4y agoI don’t follow. If anything, the nuclear energy electric rate I quoted is too high. Regarding Diablo Canyon nuclear plant: “The plant produces electricity for about 6 cents per kWh, less than the average cost of 10.1 cents per kWh that PG&E paid for electricity from other suppliers in 2014.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant#:~:text=The%20plant%20produces%20electricity%20for,from%20other%20suppliers%20in%202014 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant#:~....
- panick21_ 4y agoFission literally demonstrated that 40 years ago. But we refuse to seriously try that.
- ncmncm 4y agoThere will never be a commercial fusion reactor power plant. And if there were, this would not contribute to its development. Fuel for such a plant (tritium) is practically non-existent. What of it that exists is synthesized at great expense.
- panick21_ 4y ago> The fuel is abundant to the point of being practically unlimited. Well, only insofar as we have all the required elements on earth. You still have to go threw a considerably complex and expensive process to make that fuel. You need to mine lithium and then expose it to plasma to breed tritium. > A fusion core is naturally fail safe since energy and fuel need to be constantly applied With a breeder reactor that can be consciously refueled you can also keep its access reactivity very low. And even better, if its fuel is a molten salt the dangerous elements are chemically bound in the fuel. So even if an explosion (terrorist planting C4) would happen in the power plant, and fuel would get spread but the dangerous elements would remain in the molten salt. The dangerous elements are never gaseous and thus never leave the safety boundary of the plant. A fission reactor in comparsion when hit by C4 can actually release gaseous radioactive material. Just not very much. So I am not saying fusion reactors are unsafe, but rather then fission reactors can be incredibly as safe. For myself I would much rather sleep next to a molten salt breeder reactor rather then fusion reactor.
- bell-cot 4y agoPrestige, social status, bragging rights, money (a $billion is table stakes for fusion reactors, so a lot of folks are getting fat cuts), and cool & cushy high-tech careers. Really expensive research has been going on for 50+ years now, with no sign of development - let alone deployment - of actual, practical power reactors.
- ncmncm 4y agoThere are many reasons to build a fusion reactor: It keeps hot-neutron physicists, who you must recruit from among for weapons work, busy. It provides continual practical challenges to plasma fluid dynamics physicists, who otherwise have great difficulty funding experiments. It provides cash flow to the (chiefly) military contractors who build the test apparatus. In this particular case, it lets you conduct tests for thermonuclear weapons concepts paid for out of a different budget. Any expectation of ever getting useful energy out would be the worst reason, because there will never be one solitary erg of that.
- upwardbound 4y agoThe reason I'm personally most excited is interplanetary or even (generation ship) interstellar travel. Fusion fuel is the only practical fuel we know of with enough energy density to provide enough "umph" for long-distance trajectories to be traveled along, at speeds faster than what the Voyager probes had to achieve using multi-year planetary slingshot trajectories. Fusion rocket information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_rocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_rocket https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/3303 https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/3303 http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/realdesignsfusion.php http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/realdesignsfusi... A supplement to a fusion power plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Specific_Impulse_Magnetoplasma_Rocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Specific_Impulse_Magn... http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-drive.html http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-dri... The only fuels that could achieve better energy density than fusion fuel would be antimatter, or maybe some fanciful sci-fi thing we may discover down the line, such as quark fusion ( https://www.sciencealert.com/new-quark-fusion-releases-significant-energy-won-t-make-weapons https://www.sciencealert.com/new-quark-fusion-releases-signi... ) or subatomic compression ( a concept from fiction that involves packing an immense amount of solid electrons together so tightly that the electrostatic repulsion functions as a compressed spring (perhaps using mutual gravitation almost but not quite strong enough to be a black hole as a way of preventing disastrous spontaneous decompression) ).
- elteto 4y agoIt’s not the source of energy that has a cost, it’s the process of actively capturing it, conditioning it and providing it that does. Therefore, providing energy, no matter the source, always has a cost.
- acidburnNSA 4y agoWait, are you suggesting that renewables will make energy too cheap to meter? I've been waiting for this moment. While renewables are making increasingly cheap generators, the overall systems involved in delivering reliable energy from them are increasingly expensive at increasing scale. Check energy costs to customers e.g. in Germany. Mining, energy storage, transmission, demand control, recycling, maintenance, land rights, etc. for any energy source at world scale will continue to cost well >$0. For nuclear fission, fuel cost is only 5% of the total cost. For renewables, fuel cost is 0%, but that doesn't mean there aren't costs.
- throw827474737 4y agoAh come on that wouldn't have been necessary... energy costs could be a lot lower if the path towards renewables hadn't been blocked and undermined for years, if something in the current situation is keeping it not from exploding more it is the renewables. Please better check France for the often touted right way of going nucelar, with half of their overaged reactors taken off the grid due to failing safety regulations (which are not too hard but have been dangerously softened over ye years..), cracks and corrosion problems, and their unfolding catastrophe in regard to nonavailable cooling fluid, which is a problem that will only become much bigger in the future years. Also don't distract and mix energy with energy, if something we have a heating and fuel problem, not electeicity. Secondly our gas reservoirs are already 75% filled again ahead of plan surprise surprise.. seems the lasts months panic had a little bit too much agenda involved. If you ask me energy prices here are still much too low for what is upcoming and humanity should really focus on... this will make current debates so absurd and laughable, not getting it. Why not look at some other examples who fully went renewables and doing it succesfully? Stop looking at a wanted or at least easily prevented politic, lobbyism and incompetence failure, that now leads to prices that are still much too cheap for what our wastage of resources should actually cost, lol.
- acidburnNSA 4y agoI'm stating a simple concept, which is that if you put some wind and solar into a heavily-fossil powered grid, the first 30% wind and solar are easy, and the last 30% are harder. But if you do 100% wind and solar, then you have to start spending money on things other than generators. The fraction of cost that is wind/solar generators vs. e.g. energy storage systems, transmission, recycling, etc. shifts from 1 to ~0 at scale.
- ipsi 4y agoAs far as I understand, it means something more along the lines of "This laser hits the fuel with 1MJ of energy which ignites it, but it took us 100MJ of energy to make that happen, because the laser is inefficient/only 20% of the laser hits atoms/etc, etc." Step 1, in this case, is producing more than 1MJ, and Step 2 is producing more than 100.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoImagine you 'spend' 10 GW to get 10.0001 GW out, and to do it you need a massive industrial facility. That doesn't cost $0. It probably costs billions of dollars.
- vlovich123 4y agoBy renewables I’m assuming you mean wind & solar because fusion is 100% renewable. Even fission is basically close enough in that there’s sufficient easily accessible resources to power human society for eons. Additionally, solar panels and batteries use rare earth metals, so they’re technically not as renewable as fusion / fission (although to be fair I don’t know what materials go into a fusion / fission reactor so those metals may be needed there). Anyway, the cost of energy with solar / wind is obviously not 0. You have to produce the panels / windmills, perform maintenance, for solar you need to clean, etc. Additionally, the energy isn’t available always so you need energy reserves like batteries, pumped water, etc to store it for use which increases the cost further. Finally, there are energy demands that solar / windmills can’t meet where you need *really* hot temperatures. That’s why fission repeatedly is shown as the only solution to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Fusion is great but we should be building insane amounts of nuclear reactors right now to meaningfully decarbonize our energy generation. * EDIT: Here’s a talk [1] by Michel Laverne CSO of General Fusion. He starts talking at the ~6 minute mark and explains why renewables will never see more than 10-20% market penetration. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zzwnt0cNXM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zzwnt0cNXM
- acidburnNSA 4y agoEven fission is renewable (i.e. can power 100% of primary energy until the sun burns out) using breeder reactors, which can run with huge EROI on just the uranium and thorium traces in average crustal granite. Conveniently, breeder reactors were first demonstrated in 1952 in Idaho at the Experimental Breeder Reactor 1. The term "renewable" is such a poor word for 'long-term sustainable'. I wish we had something that didn't make everyone think we were violating the laws of energy conservation.
- panick21_ 4y agoRenewable is an incredibly dumb term. You know what was renewable, using whale oil. That's very renewable in fact, but somehow most people are against running the global economy on whale oil. Fission is incredibly sustainable in the long term. In fact, even if we mined all the easily expressible thorium volcanic activity actually continuously brings up more.
- bawolff 4y agoRenewables don't have zero (energy) cost. Wind turbines don't make themselves, solar panels involve an energy intensive manufacturing process.
- Double_a_92 4y agoIt's about practical losses. The reactor is useless if it's more effective to just use the input energy directly.