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Let's say they manage to scale this up. What effect would it have on humanity? Climate change is solved. What else?
by scifibestfi 4y ago
Let's say they manage to scale this up. What effect would it have on humanity? Climate change is solved. What else?
- myrmidon 4y agoNone. We already have proven basically unlimited electric energy in the form of PV panels (and batteries if you need it stored). So far, that tech has not solved climate change at all, because actually building enough of these things is something that people need to be willing to pay for.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MichaelCollins 4y agoLittle effect I think. Fusion power can do little that fission power can't do already, which is provide "free" power after you look past the cost to build and maintain the plant. The best advantage of fusion power is the public perception is presently better.
- ithkuil 4y agoIs the safety profile any better? Or is it just public perception?
- ok_dad 4y agoThe lack of major radioactive waste is a plus, only the pipes and stuff inside the core of the reactor will have radioactive elements due to neutron activation. The only waste from it otherwise is helium (and tritium, which is re-used in the reaction later).
- rosywoozlechan 4y agoisn't helium valuable? seems like a good "waste" to produce
- Apocryphon 4y agoSafe airships for all!
- OJFord 4y agoYeah that's GP's point by the 'only'. It's 'waste' as in a byproduct. It's part of the reason fusion's so sought after - it doesn't result in anything bad or that has to be carefully sequestered. (Apart from extraordinary heat I suppose. Perhaps there's an argument the actual reactor would always be a pretty risky place. But any incident isolated at least, worst case a remote industrial building burns down beyond economical repair.)
- DennisP 4y agoThe temperature is high but the amount of heat is no different than other thermal power plants. The atoms move very fast, but there aren't many of them.
- pfdietz 4y agoVery little will be produced. Indeed, a fusion reactor may leak more He from its cryo system than it creates.
- cygx 4y agoThere are major differences. For one, in case of catastrophic failure, the plasma will dissipate, its temperature will drop and the fusion reaction will stop.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoThis. The hard part is keeping it going, not getting it to stop. Also, if I understand correctly, the waste products are a lot less nasty.
- wizofaus 4y ago> The hard part is keeping it going, not getting it to stop. I'm rather glad that doesn't apply to the fusion reactor in the sky that we'll be fully dependent on for a while yet.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoIt's a lot easier to build passively safe fission power plants than any sort of fusion power plant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety
- ncmncm 4y agoIn case of catastrophic failure, thousands of tons of radioactivated lithium hydroxide burn uncontrollably, the smoke producing drain opener in contact with mucus membranes and lungs.
- ncmncm 4y ago(Lithium hydride. The resulting caustic vapor is lithium hydroxide.)
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoDoesn't matter. Public perception > reality. Look at hydroelectric. Terrible for ecosystems, decent number of deadly failures over the years, way better perception and less pushback from the public than fission.
- ncmncm 4y agoDams are being taken down at an increasing rate as it is recognized that the fisheries they destroyed are far more valuable than anything they produce.
- u320 4y agoThe safety profile is better with fusion, but I think you underestimate how good the safety profile of nuclear is these days. We haven't had any significant incidents since Fukushima, but we upgraded the safety mechanisms of our nuclear plants a lot based on that experience. Nuclear is on a path similar to flight, were we started off with very risky airline travel and got to a point where you are more likely to suffer an accident on the taxi on your way to the airport.
- coffeeblack 4y agoFission power is already the second safest form of energy production, after hydro.
- 93po 4y agoAt least one source saying hydro causes more deaths than fission: https://www.businessinsider.com/dam-safety-statistics-risk-of-death-2017-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/dam-safety-statistics-risk-o...
- DennisP 4y agoAnd the worst power plant accident ever was Banqaio Dam, which killed 26,000 people immediately, and another 150,000 or so in the aftermath.
- Thetawaves 4y agoDon't ignore the fact that uranium reserves would not last 100 years if we used it as our sole power source.
- yreg 4y agoThat seems like an estimate on the lower side, but still, in those 100 years we should be able to at least move to thorium, no? Which could last a lot longer.
- flaviut 4y agoYou should say "current" uranium reserves. As demand goes up, so does supply, as additional reserves are prospected for and more costly uranium sources become economically viable. There's not much reason to prove reserves if you won't be able to profitably mine them.
- akvadrako 4y agoThere is enough uranium on Earth for getting all our current power for millions of years. (source: wikipedia) There just isn't much at current prices, but fuel costs are not significant so prices cam rise.
- Thetawaves 4y agoLinky? It seems preposterous to assume that we will be able to map the energy budget of earthlings over a thousand millennia.
- DennisP 4y agoIf you're comparing with solar, it seems fair to assume a level of energy usage that could reasonably be supplied by solar. We're not going to cover the planet in solar panels. With that assumption, fission can last for a very long time if we get uranium from the oceans, and burn it in fast reactors. The oceans hold four billion tons of uranium, and with fast reactors we'd use it a hundred times more efficiently than we do today.
- 4y ago
- Blikkentrekker 4y agoEven with fusion, it's very clear that many politicians are afraid of it simply because of the word “nuclear” in it. As nuclear fission, nuclear fusion might simply not be used because of that scary word alone.
- DennisP 4y agoIt's possible that some Western countries will be that silly at first, but China certainly won't. Everybody else will come to their senses before long.
- z3rgl1ng 4y agoJevon’s paradox implies we’d have a brief respite, chronologically speaking, before having to tackle something like heat shedding.
- quonn 4y agoLong term, yes. But much of the climate change problem is decided in the next 25 years. Even if this reactor would work right now, building enough of them in that time frame everywhere, switching all industry and factories to electric, switching all transportation and cars and heating systems in all the houses to electric is very tough. So it's still very challenging.
- notfish 4y agoExactly. I’d also add that climate change is a just a symptom of us reaching the natural carrying capacity of Earth for humans, so adding new ways of generating power doesn’t completely eliminate the issue.
- vanviegen 4y agoVery true. Though an abundance of cheap energy may prove helpful in brute force engineering some other problems out of existence. I'm thinking of recycling and geo-engineering in particular.
- ncmncm 4y agoFusion cannot produce cheap energy, in any case. Fuel cost is a substantial fraction of exactly none of the generation methods in use.
- u320 4y agoCan you explain what you mean by "the natural carrying capacity of Earth for humans". You framed this like it's something that exists outside of technology.
- elf25 4y ago
- Schroedingersat 4y agoPeak everything is happening over the next little while. Direct thermal climate foring is a couple of orders of magnitude out from current energy use. Classical computing is almost finished. Many minerals are at the point where extraction takes a rapidly increasing amount of energy per tonne. Land used for grazing and agriculture is over half of habitable land. Fishing is wiping out entire ecosystems. It's time to think about moving earth to a steady state economy.
- alas44 4y agoClimate change has inertia so probably not solved by the time we have industrial scale fusion + would not solve the two other main anthropic activity related problems: biodiversity loss and depletion of natural resources
- ahmedk92 4y agoMy layman understanding tells me depletion of natural resources will be worse if we manage to find a sustainable source of energy.
- blibble 4y agowith unlimited cheap energy you can pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, produce hydrocarbons and pump them back into the wells
- anon291 4y agobetter yet... you can kep current hydrocarbon economy factories, vehicles, etc in operation by simply producing fuels from air. Wil be cheap enough. Hydrocarbons are a great, usable source of dense energy.
- macksd 4y agoI don't know what the math looks like here, but there is waste heat in this, right? We could lower CO2, but "unlimited cheap energy" at the scale required to make a dent in climate change surely gives off a pretty phenomenal amount of heat. I wonder what the equation looks like for the overall effect on the planet.
- blibble 4y agomy understanding of chemistry is poor, but presumably if energy is liberated from combustion, reversing that reaction requires energy (with some input to kick it off possibly) regardless, the earth receives 173,000 TW of solar radiation from the sun we have a way to go yet
- X6S1x6Okd1st 4y ago
- mihaifm 4y agoCheap energy means lower costs of manufacturing therefore lower prices for consumer goods, thus increasing quality of life.
- u320 4y agoThere is no reason a priori to assume fusion power will be cheap. On the contrary, everything we know about it now suggests the opposite.
- haliskerbas 4y agoAt least in North America, things tend to maximize corporate profits rather than maximize quality of life.
- robertlagrant 4y agoThey are aligned, at least for those things where consumers are the purchaser.
- hackerlight 4y agoEveryday goods becoming cheaper have significantly increased the quality of life of Americans. That trend will continue as energy becomes more abundant. Corporations can't monopolize profits on goods that are perfectly competitive. What has decreased the quality of life, which offsets the above slightly and makes it appear as thought things aren't improving much, is goods that require domestic labor, such as education, whose price has outstripped CPI, and goods that have artificial regulatory capture which cause their price to be artificially high, such as insulin, and demerit goods such as opioids which detract from the utility of the customer.
- colinmhayes 4y agoProfits tend toward 0 in competitive markets.
- sien 4y agoWith the knowledge that comes out of building fusion power plants the next thing to build is fusion rockets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus
- yreg 4y agoNot to be confused with USS Daedalus https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Daedalus https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Daedalus
- hinkley 4y agoClimate change not solved. This is another in our long series of silver bullets. Greenhouse gases retain heat. Sea level temperature is a function of ambient heat due to sunlight and other heat sources, minus the rate at which it dissipates into outer space, mediated by the insulation effect of the atmosphere. Projects that try to reduce the carbon intensity of energy are focused on changing the denominator in the equation. The current aim of these projects is to produce a cheap and plentiful energy source, via a heat engine. What they are actually chasing, whether they admit it to themselves or not, is a cheap and plentiful heat source. If they succeed they change both the numerator and the denominator, which ends up partially cancelling each other. Wind and solar are different because they tap into an existing heat engine, instead of trying to build a new one. What we as a people need is a fusion plant that costs less per KWH than a fossil fuel power plant with tariffs to account for the cost of the carbon dioxide, but still about as expensive as a fossil fuel plant where the carbon is free. If we actually got a fusion plant that was 10x more cost efficient then we'll just introduce the concept of heat pollution to the conversation, swapping out the villain in the story but keeping the same outcome.
- 93po 4y agoAre you saying the heat output of a fusion generator would be so great that it would impact climate change?
- hinkley 4y agoIf you give people a generator that produces "cheap and plentiful energy"? Absolutely. Total world power dissipation increases as fast as they can build the plants. If we never produce another molecule of CO2 again we might be okay in that situation, but things like that don't change overnight. edit: conclusion edit again: I'm extrapolating from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox but didn't remember what it was called
- Thetawaves 4y agoHardly. The amount of energy trapped by the atmosphere is vastly greater than the heat capacity we would wish to be able to produce, and the corollary - the amount of energy irradiated by the earth into space is vastly greater than amount of heat we wish to produce.
- coffeeblack 4y agoQuestion is, how much will the kWh cost, all costs considered. And how much time does it take to build.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago> What effect would it have on humanity? Climate change is solved. Not really. It'll just be another tool for the fossil fuel lobby to use to misdirect attention from what will make them irrelevant forever (reduction and sunlight). Even if the reactor part is free and 100% reliable. Getting heat out of a 100 million degree chamber that is spewing neutrons everywhere and turning it into electricity is much much harder and more expensive than collecting some photons and building a train.
- yreg 4y agoAs the fossil fuel industry becomes obsolete, it would be wise to rebrand themselves into carbon removal and lobby for high payouts of carbon credits. https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2020/07/04/what-if-carbon-removal-becomes-the-new-big-oil https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2020/07/04/what-if-ca... (not sure how to overcome the paywall)
- DennisP 4y agoArchive gets around their paywall: https://archive.ph/Q9b6b https://archive.ph/Q9b6b Pretty interesting article.
- mmahemoff 4y agoTerraforming, space exploration. On the compute side, running extremely fine grained simulations.
- kibwen 4y agoIt might solve the greenhouse side of climate change, but you can't run away from thermodynamics. All electricity generated eventually turns into heat. Earth can only radiate so much heat into space in a given time period. If you generate more heat than Earth is capable of radiating, the planet warms. Don't start thinking that "free energy" from fusion reactors means that we can generate infinite power (as nice as that would be). It just means that the new negative externality would be heat itself.
- ncmncm 4y agoThe numbers say otherwise. If we generated enough spare power to run lots of carbon capture equipment, and removed enough carbon, the planet would cool. There are fantastic reasons to abandon fusion, and even better reasons to accelerate build-out of renewables, but that is not one of them.
- ncmncm 4y agoEach dollar diverted to this from building out renewables brings climate disaster, global civilization collapse, and billions starving, incrementally nearer.
- throwaway742 4y agoThere is no reason we can't do both.
- ncmncm 4y agoDollars are fungible. A dollar spent on X is manifestly not spent on Y, except by accident.
- throwaway742 4y agoThe money could come from somewhere else like say military budgets.
- thehappypm 4y agoIdk. If you want a steady stream of energy enough to power a small house, you can achieve that for $20k today with a big enough solar panel and a PowerWall. Fusion has to be cheap as well as effective.