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I love to follow this field because the engineers working on tokamaks/stellarators/other fusion devices are dealing with some truly extreme technical challenges

I love to follow this field because the engineers working on tokamaks/stellarators/other fusion devices are dealing with some truly extreme technical challenges. However, creating devices that economically overcome those challenges at scale seems unlikely when solar panels and batteries are aggressively decreasing in cost. How will these compete if scientists figure out the longevity problem for perovskite solar? Just my opinion as a layman. I still think the research is worthwhile because of possible future applications (space?)

wefarrell 4y ago
There's only so much surface area on the earth that we can cover with solar panels and global energy consumption is exponential. Abundant energy will enable more possibilities such as removing CO2 from the atmosphere, desalinating water and pumping it into arid regions, and opening up space tourism for the majority of the worlds' population.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  False. There is exactly zero need to devote any land surface at all exclusively to the solar panels that will provide for all our needs. Solar coexists nicely with numerous other uses. Similarly, for wind turbines. Storage may consume some area, but nowhere near what existing fossil fuel extraction activities do. There will be no fusion.
  - mmazing 4y ago
    > There will be no fusion. Scream it into the ether with veins popping out of your head all you want, it doesn't make you correct. Additionally, there's literally no reason to not pursue both avenues.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Nobody is screaming. Even presuming usable structural materials can be discovered (not worked on in 3 decades) and tritium at PPB concentration can be extracted from thousands of tons of blanket material every day (never worked on at all), a working plant would cost more than an order of magnitude more on every axis than fission. But fission is already not competitive. Fission falls farther behind better methods each day. So, no one will build a fusion power plant, and there will be no fusion power. "Pursuing avenues" with no possibility of desirable results is wasted effort and wasted money. We have valid reasons to avoid waste.
      - Apocryphon 4y ago
        If no one is building fusion power plant, what money or effort is being wasted? Also, do you think all of these nuclear physicists are able to pivot to working on renewable energy, as if they are Silicon Valley tech startups? From what point of view of action are you even operating from?
        Schroedingersat 4y ago
        Doing science is fine. It's the thousands of scam artists that will divert resources from actual solutions as soon as their lies are plausible to rubes that are not. If we're busy paying for 100s of victoria county stations that will never open, the coal plants will remain on.
        Apocryphon 4y ago
        But that has literally never happened nor is likely to happen, given the political marginalization of nuclear power. The previous poster is ranting against a tiny threat, if even that, to wind and solar while the fossil fuel lobby reigns supreme. Just a completely disproportionate response.
        Schroedingersat 4y ago
        So to pick one of hundreds of examples, the money that SCE&G's customers are forced to pay for infrastructure that will never be turned on while the contractors make out like bandits was always going to be scammed out of them by the nuclear industry? Props for honesty I guess.
        ncmncm 4y ago
        There is no such "threat". Investors are being defrauded. Money that could be going for important, useful research is being diverted to pockets of fraudsters promising sky castles.
        Apocryphon 4y ago
  - the_third_wave 4y ago
    Either you have not seen solar parks taking up arable land or you do not understand how this type of land use makes the land unavailable to agriculture. This may not be an issue when those solar parks are built in a desert but it does when they're displacing good farm land like they're doing in e.g. the Netherlands. There are experiments with less dense solar parks and those with vertically placed bifacial panels which should allow combined land use but this has not gotten beyond the experimental stage yet. Of course it is possible to forego on using arable land for solar parks, only using rooftops and similar constructions for this purpose. Roofs - especially large flat ones like used in industry - are natural locations for PV panels and it is hard to see why one would not install them on new constructions, either on top of traditional roof cladding or in place of it. The same goes for large south-facing walls. Wind turbines can be placed on farm land without unduly reducing land availability to farming, here the problem comes from nearby population complaining about noise pollution (infrasound, [1]) coming from those turbines as well as 'horizon pollution' [2]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97107-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97107-8 [2] https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/skyscrapers-turbines-and-the-problem-of-39horizon-pollution39 https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/skyscrapers-turbines...
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      I have seen plenty of land foolishly wasted on single-use solar farms. That does not make it smart. In the future those will find themselves undercut by dual-use farms that continue doing what they did before solar was added. Rooftops will not be much that. Deserts are a particularly dumb place for solar farms, but ignorant investors love the idea, so lots of money is wasted on them.
      - lovemenot 4y ago
        You could be right, and I hope you are. But, given the current state of development in agrivoltaics and such, your prediction has too much certainty. All power to those projects, but they are really just experimental at this point. Not inevitable.
- scythe 4y ago
  >global energy consumption is exponential. From the link: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution?time=1960..latest https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio... The trend since 1960 appears instead linear. Also, population growth is slowing. But it's fun to extrapolate "exponential" trends and look at the big numbers.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  We are many orders of magnitude away from needing to worry about solar using up precious land.
- jacknews 4y ago
  If energy consumption continues exponentially we will cook ourselves. There's plenty of land for solar, and then there are the oceans, and it's here now. In the medium term we should look at modular fission, and deep geothermal, potentially re-deploying fossil extraction technology. I'm all for fusion as scientific research, but let's drop the pretense that using it to generate power is remotely realistic for many decades, if ever.
  - wefarrell 4y ago
    Once you start covering land that isn't a complete desert with solar panels you start competing with photosynthesizing organisms, even more-so with oceans. I don't think anyone expects fusion to be viable within a decade or two. Beyond that I don't know but I absolutely think it's worth funding.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Any amount of primary energy consumption that covers more than the already built up areas or the land currently used for fuel ethanol with solar will rapidly cook the planet through nuclear. Current primary energy is 18TW. Total insolation is 170PW. GHG forcing is about 200TW. We can provide enough solar with smaller than a 1000km square. More than that will kill us no matter the technology used (but solar is better than most as the total heat it produces is a bit more than the work done rather than 3x). Growth must end or physics will end it for us. Climate change is the warning shot across the bow, not the full volley.
  - wefarrell 4y ago
    "Total insolation is 170PW" - That assumes 100% efficiency, it's from the upper atmosphere, and making full use of it would mean there would be no light left for plants or the ocean. After accounting for solar panel efficiency, battery efficiency, and the amount of surface where it's possible to put panels without displacing nature and agriculture it'll be somewhere in the low hundreds of TWs. "Current primary energy is 18TW" - That's outdated and only consists of the energy converted from electricity. It doesn't include non-electric heating, driving, maritime transportation, aviation and freight. Taking those int account our total consumption is around 100TW.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      > That's outdated and only consists of the energy converted from electricity. It doesn't include non-electric heating, driving, maritime transportation, aviation and freight. Taking those int account our total consumption is around 100TW. That's what primary energy means (as well as the heat wasted from allof the above). My best guess as to how you got 100 is you're mixing up 160,000TWh with TW > That assumes 100% efficiency, it's from the upper atmosphere, and making full use of it would mean there would be no light left for plants or the ocean. After accounting for solar panel efficiency, battery efficiency, and the amount of surface where it's possible to put panels without displacing nature and agriculture it'll be somewhere in the low hundreds of TWs. I wasn't implying all of that was available, merely that around 0.1% of that in thermal forcing is enough to be a problem on the same scale as GHG emissions. Wind is the technology which produces the least new heat (none, although if you exceed around 1W/m^2 for too large an area you change the climate in other ways), followed by solar on existing asphalt, grass, or water (up to ~1W of new heat per watt). Any thermal fuel that didn't recently come from sunlight is in the 1.4 to 3 range (excluding extraction and processing). This caps primary energy around 400TW for renewables or 200TW for nuclear (with only around 70W as work if you are using a steam engine). Nuclear provides less end-state access to abundant energy on earth than renewables at higher cost. There is no reason to pursue it.
ncmncm 4y ago
Perovskite longevity is up to five years, which at the price is already sufficient to be immediately useful in many places. There will be no fusion.
- px43 4y ago
  CFS completed the first of 18 coils on their prototype device last October, and it worked better than expected, far more than enough for commercially viable fusion plants. Their prototype is scheduled to be completed and lit up in 2025, and the first commercial plants should be ready in the early 2030s. The new high temperature superconducting materials that they're using to build the containment coils make them significantly smaller, cheaper, and less complicated. Definitely worth reading up on if you haven't. https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/commonwealth-fusion-systems-closes-1-8-billion-series-b-round/ https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/commonwealth-fusion-system...
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    That is what they tell their pigeon investors. But they don't say there is not enough tritium to operate commercial reactors, or that no material has been identified that can hold the structure together after bombardment with hot neutrons. They don't say that the reactor would need to be maintained using robots nobody has ever built. Come 2025, there will not be a useful reactor. They will instead offer an excuse, which is easy to come by.
bombcar 4y ago
Even if solar and wind can easily supply all our power needs for the foreseeable future and beyond, it would still be worth experimenting with fusion. If we can get it to work, we will know much more about the universe than we do now, and if we can get it affordable, we will have nearly unlimited power. muahahahahaHAAHAHAHAHHA er, oops
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Why exactly do you think fusion offers "nearly unlimited" power? In any design conceived today, it is in no way impressive in terms of power/plant, and fusion power plants will be the most expensive power plants ever designed (since they are at the extreme limits of materials science and several other branches of engineering).
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Exactly - IF we can get it to work, we'll know much more. And IF we can do it affordably (these are both big IFs), the amount of energy available is huge. I see 1 gallon of water to 300 gallons of gas numbers thrown about; that's huge. https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsdeuterium-tritium-fusion-reactor-fuel https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsdeuterium-tritium... (Gotta love their optimism - "when").
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      As Hamlet says, "It's as easy as lying."
  - TheDudeMan 4y ago
    Not "unlimited", but "more than anything else". We know the energy density is there, based on thermonuclear weapons. Yes, the designs for a power plant that are similarly impressive don't exist today. That's where research and engineering can help. Yes, any new thing is expensive. These points are not necessarily intrinsic to the process.
    - 4y ago

wefarrell 4y ago

There's only so much surface area on the earth that we can cover with solar panels and global energy consumption is exponential. Abundant energy will enable more possibilities such as removing CO2 from the atmosphere, desalinating water and pumping it into arid regions, and opening up space tourism for the majority of the worlds' population.

ncmncm 4y ago
False. There is exactly zero need to devote any land surface at all exclusively to the solar panels that will provide for all our needs. Solar coexists nicely with numerous other uses. Similarly, for wind turbines. Storage may consume some area, but nowhere near what existing fossil fuel extraction activities do. There will be no fusion.
- mmazing 4y ago
  > There will be no fusion. Scream it into the ether with veins popping out of your head all you want, it doesn't make you correct. Additionally, there's literally no reason to not pursue both avenues.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Nobody is screaming. Even presuming usable structural materials can be discovered (not worked on in 3 decades) and tritium at PPB concentration can be extracted from thousands of tons of blanket material every day (never worked on at all), a working plant would cost more than an order of magnitude more on every axis than fission. But fission is already not competitive. Fission falls farther behind better methods each day. So, no one will build a fusion power plant, and there will be no fusion power. "Pursuing avenues" with no possibility of desirable results is wasted effort and wasted money. We have valid reasons to avoid waste.
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      If no one is building fusion power plant, what money or effort is being wasted? Also, do you think all of these nuclear physicists are able to pivot to working on renewable energy, as if they are Silicon Valley tech startups? From what point of view of action are you even operating from?
      - Schroedingersat 4y ago
        Doing science is fine. It's the thousands of scam artists that will divert resources from actual solutions as soon as their lies are plausible to rubes that are not. If we're busy paying for 100s of victoria county stations that will never open, the coal plants will remain on.
        Apocryphon 4y ago
        But that has literally never happened nor is likely to happen, given the political marginalization of nuclear power. The previous poster is ranting against a tiny threat, if even that, to wind and solar while the fossil fuel lobby reigns supreme. Just a completely disproportionate response.
        Schroedingersat 4y ago
        So to pick one of hundreds of examples, the money that SCE&G's customers are forced to pay for infrastructure that will never be turned on while the contractors make out like bandits was always going to be scammed out of them by the nuclear industry? Props for honesty I guess.
        ncmncm 4y ago
        There is no such "threat". Investors are being defrauded. Money that could be going for important, useful research is being diverted to pockets of fraudsters promising sky castles.
        Apocryphon 4y ago
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  Either you have not seen solar parks taking up arable land or you do not understand how this type of land use makes the land unavailable to agriculture. This may not be an issue when those solar parks are built in a desert but it does when they're displacing good farm land like they're doing in e.g. the Netherlands. There are experiments with less dense solar parks and those with vertically placed bifacial panels which should allow combined land use but this has not gotten beyond the experimental stage yet. Of course it is possible to forego on using arable land for solar parks, only using rooftops and similar constructions for this purpose. Roofs - especially large flat ones like used in industry - are natural locations for PV panels and it is hard to see why one would not install them on new constructions, either on top of traditional roof cladding or in place of it. The same goes for large south-facing walls. Wind turbines can be placed on farm land without unduly reducing land availability to farming, here the problem comes from nearby population complaining about noise pollution (infrasound, [1]) coming from those turbines as well as 'horizon pollution' [2]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97107-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97107-8 [2] https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/skyscrapers-turbines-and-the-problem-of-39horizon-pollution39 https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/skyscrapers-turbines...
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    I have seen plenty of land foolishly wasted on single-use solar farms. That does not make it smart. In the future those will find themselves undercut by dual-use farms that continue doing what they did before solar was added. Rooftops will not be much that. Deserts are a particularly dumb place for solar farms, but ignorant investors love the idea, so lots of money is wasted on them.
    - lovemenot 4y ago
      You could be right, and I hope you are. But, given the current state of development in agrivoltaics and such, your prediction has too much certainty. All power to those projects, but they are really just experimental at this point. Not inevitable.
scythe 4y ago
>global energy consumption is exponential. From the link: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution?time=1960..latest https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio... The trend since 1960 appears instead linear. Also, population growth is slowing. But it's fun to extrapolate "exponential" trends and look at the big numbers.
IshKebab 4y ago
We are many orders of magnitude away from needing to worry about solar using up precious land.
jacknews 4y ago
If energy consumption continues exponentially we will cook ourselves. There's plenty of land for solar, and then there are the oceans, and it's here now. In the medium term we should look at modular fission, and deep geothermal, potentially re-deploying fossil extraction technology. I'm all for fusion as scientific research, but let's drop the pretense that using it to generate power is remotely realistic for many decades, if ever.
- wefarrell 4y ago
  Once you start covering land that isn't a complete desert with solar panels you start competing with photosynthesizing organisms, even more-so with oceans. I don't think anyone expects fusion to be viable within a decade or two. Beyond that I don't know but I absolutely think it's worth funding.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Any amount of primary energy consumption that covers more than the already built up areas or the land currently used for fuel ethanol with solar will rapidly cook the planet through nuclear. Current primary energy is 18TW. Total insolation is 170PW. GHG forcing is about 200TW. We can provide enough solar with smaller than a 1000km square. More than that will kill us no matter the technology used (but solar is better than most as the total heat it produces is a bit more than the work done rather than 3x). Growth must end or physics will end it for us. Climate change is the warning shot across the bow, not the full volley.
- wefarrell 4y ago
  "Total insolation is 170PW" - That assumes 100% efficiency, it's from the upper atmosphere, and making full use of it would mean there would be no light left for plants or the ocean. After accounting for solar panel efficiency, battery efficiency, and the amount of surface where it's possible to put panels without displacing nature and agriculture it'll be somewhere in the low hundreds of TWs. "Current primary energy is 18TW" - That's outdated and only consists of the energy converted from electricity. It doesn't include non-electric heating, driving, maritime transportation, aviation and freight. Taking those int account our total consumption is around 100TW.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    > That's outdated and only consists of the energy converted from electricity. It doesn't include non-electric heating, driving, maritime transportation, aviation and freight. Taking those int account our total consumption is around 100TW. That's what primary energy means (as well as the heat wasted from allof the above). My best guess as to how you got 100 is you're mixing up 160,000TWh with TW > That assumes 100% efficiency, it's from the upper atmosphere, and making full use of it would mean there would be no light left for plants or the ocean. After accounting for solar panel efficiency, battery efficiency, and the amount of surface where it's possible to put panels without displacing nature and agriculture it'll be somewhere in the low hundreds of TWs. I wasn't implying all of that was available, merely that around 0.1% of that in thermal forcing is enough to be a problem on the same scale as GHG emissions. Wind is the technology which produces the least new heat (none, although if you exceed around 1W/m^2 for too large an area you change the climate in other ways), followed by solar on existing asphalt, grass, or water (up to ~1W of new heat per watt). Any thermal fuel that didn't recently come from sunlight is in the 1.4 to 3 range (excluding extraction and processing). This caps primary energy around 400TW for renewables or 200TW for nuclear (with only around 70W as work if you are using a steam engine). Nuclear provides less end-state access to abundant energy on earth than renewables at higher cost. There is no reason to pursue it.

ncmncm 4y ago

Perovskite longevity is up to five years, which at the price is already sufficient to be immediately useful in many places. There will be no fusion.

px43 4y ago
CFS completed the first of 18 coils on their prototype device last October, and it worked better than expected, far more than enough for commercially viable fusion plants. Their prototype is scheduled to be completed and lit up in 2025, and the first commercial plants should be ready in the early 2030s. The new high temperature superconducting materials that they're using to build the containment coils make them significantly smaller, cheaper, and less complicated. Definitely worth reading up on if you haven't. https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/commonwealth-fusion-systems-closes-1-8-billion-series-b-round/ https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/commonwealth-fusion-system...
- ncmncm 4y ago
  That is what they tell their pigeon investors. But they don't say there is not enough tritium to operate commercial reactors, or that no material has been identified that can hold the structure together after bombardment with hot neutrons. They don't say that the reactor would need to be maintained using robots nobody has ever built. Come 2025, there will not be a useful reactor. They will instead offer an excuse, which is easy to come by.

bombcar 4y ago

Even if solar and wind can easily supply all our power needs for the foreseeable future and beyond, it would still be worth experimenting with fusion. If we can get it to work, we will know much more about the universe than we do now, and if we can get it affordable, we will have nearly unlimited power. muahahahahaHAAHAHAHAHHA er, oops

tsimionescu 4y ago
Why exactly do you think fusion offers "nearly unlimited" power? In any design conceived today, it is in no way impressive in terms of power/plant, and fusion power plants will be the most expensive power plants ever designed (since they are at the extreme limits of materials science and several other branches of engineering).
- bombcar 4y ago
  Exactly - IF we can get it to work, we'll know much more. And IF we can do it affordably (these are both big IFs), the amount of energy available is huge. I see 1 gallon of water to 300 gallons of gas numbers thrown about; that's huge. https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsdeuterium-tritium-fusion-reactor-fuel https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsdeuterium-tritium... (Gotta love their optimism - "when").
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    As Hamlet says, "It's as easy as lying."
- TheDudeMan 4y ago
  Not "unlimited", but "more than anything else". We know the energy density is there, based on thermonuclear weapons. Yes, the designs for a power plant that are similarly impressive don't exist today. That's where research and engineering can help. Yes, any new thing is expensive. These points are not necessarily intrinsic to the process.
  - 4y ago