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Even if fusion ends up producing more power than consuming in the real world, it still has to compete on cost. People too enthusiastic about fusion tend to igno

• coldpie 4y ago
  Unfortunately, energy storage is still an unsolved problem. Research on batteries may get us there soon, but today they aren't feasible. It's very much worth putting effort into both approaches. IMO the best outcome is a wide variety of clean energy sources and storage solutions, so the best solution can be chosen for a given geographical/political/etc situation.
  • toomuchtodo 4y ago
    Solar and batteries are already cheaper than fossil fuels in most markets. Nuclear isn’t competing with renewables, it’s competing against batteries and almost free renewables that charge them. Nuclear is still possibly a great fit for niche locales where renewables aren’t feasible at all. Not a nuclear hater by any means (we need every innovation we can get), just show your math. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.365.6449.108 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.365.6449.108
    • Matticus_Rex 4y ago
      "Places where sun availability makes solar inefficient" is still a niche so massive that "niche" seems like a bad descriptor.
      • Gwypaas 4y ago
        Keep in mind HVDC. 3300 KM north of the Sahara desert, and you are relatively close to the Arctic circle. North of that is still a "niche," but now we're talking about a million people living hugely spread out. Most of those people living in Russia, Norway, and Sweden with easy access to an abundance of hydro, to the level that energy flows north to south in the Scandinavian countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
        • selimthegrim 4y ago
          Well maybe once they finish blowing up the ones they built in Donbass and half-built near Saratov we can revisit it.
    • coldpie 4y ago
      Are solar + batteries feasible to heat every house in Minnesota with electricity when it's below -20F (-30C) for a week, we have <9 hours of daylight per day, and failing power literally means death? I genuinely don't know. Like I said, having a variety of solutions is the best outcome so we can choose the right one & have backups. > just show your math. I admit I can't. It's mostly gut-feeling from various science news sources I keep up with (e.g. Ars Technica; Skeptic's Guide to the Universe).
      • rootusrootus 4y ago
        I wonder if we should seriously consider moving people away from such cold climates and towards warmer ones. Air conditioning is cheaper and coincidentally happens at about the same time as maximum solar power.
        • coldpie 4y ago
          This might work with post-Surak Vulcans, but it's not gonna fly here on Earth with humans :)
        • finnh 4y ago
          We are doing that actually, but the other way: rather than moving the people, we are moving the climate.
      • hadlock 4y ago
        I honestly wonder if large scale population of the northern areas is feasible without carbon fuels. Historically chopped wood was used to heat northern homes and camps, later coal and oil and I guess now to some extent electricity, but as you say, renewable energy doesn't apply there. If places like Minnesota are a net negative for green/renewable energy, their costs may be much higher to offset generation in more favorable climates.
        • VaxWithSex 4y ago
          Minnesota can use wind, which is also cheaper.
    • melling 4y ago
      That’s great! Because there are [ONLY] 8500 coal power plants producing 20% of the CO2 emissions globally. Removing 20% of emissions will make a huge difference. ETA on this should be around 2030? What I don’t get is since solar is cheaper, why are we building so many coal power plants? https://www.newscientist.com/article/2317274-china-is-building-more-than-half-of-the-worlds-new-coal-power-plants/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2317274-china-is-buildi...
      • throitallaway 4y ago
        Solar generates electricity during the day. It would have to be overprovisioned and paired with storage in order to handle dark hours. There are some battery banks out there (Tesla), but I don't think they're very common. Coal handles baseline load. We should be using nuclear for baseline instead.
    • dahfizz 4y ago
      Construction still hasn't begun on that project, 3 years later. When is the last time LA had a large construction project come in under budget? I'll believe it when the batteries are actually installed and the bill is paid. Also, the solar farm is planned for 800-MWh of storage. In 2021, LA used over 65 TWh of electricity[1]. That's over 7 GWh, per hour. So this storage would run the city for a few minutes. Not exactly a replacement for base load generation. [1] https://ecdms.energy.ca.gov/elecbycounty.aspx https://ecdms.energy.ca.gov/elecbycounty.aspx
      • toomuchtodo 4y ago
        See you in ten years at the earliest when any nuclear generator you break ground on today generates its first kWh of power (assuming it isn’t wildly late or over budget, as every one built since the 70s has been).
        • dahfizz 4y ago
          I'm not saying fusion is necessarily the answer. I'm just tired of hearing "solar plus storage is the cheapest option" when the sources always rely on projected costs and a pathetically small amount of storage. We need a major breakthrough in storage tech to make grid-scale storage a reality. Li-ion batteries are never going to cut it. Who knows whether grid scale storage will come along faster than fusion.
          • pfdietz 4y ago
            We don't need major breakthroughs, we just need to watch technologies proceed down their experience curves.
        • vlovich123 4y ago
          But at least we’ve built them and we know we can provide the necessary capacity.
    • q1w2 4y ago
      > Solar and batteries are already cheaper than fossil fuels in most markets. This is false. This has only ever been shown to be true in extremely narrow edge cases where the batteries only needed to last overnight in extremely sunny locations. For solar+batteries to be cheaper they need to be large enough to power through weeks/months of cloudy/snowy/leafy/rainy weather in places that are at least near higher latitude locations.
  • rapsey 4y ago
    > Unfortunately, energy storage is still an unsolved problem. Mechanical, lithium based, flow, heat, compressed air, pumped hydro are all types of batteries that are able to store quite large amounts of power today or in the near future. Certainly cheaper than fusion has any hope to be within 20 years.
  • conradev 4y ago
    CATL is working on sodium batteries as a lithium replacement shipping in 2023 Form Energy is working on iron air batteries as a new class of multi-day energy storage, launching its first test installation in 2023 The US passed a tax credit for energy storage, to encourage building more pumped storage capacity Congress is working on transmission line permitting reform There are some good reasons to be optimistic in the near term
• gjsman-1000 4y ago
  > Solar panels are cheap and batteries are easier to build and there are lots of ways of making them. Right now they are, but they often rely on materials from politically unstable regions (particularly Africa), or potential political rivals (China). Also, many solar panels require polysilicon from China, which is almost certainly produced with forced labor. https://www.csis.org/analysis/dark-spot-solar-energy-industry-forced-labor-xinjiang https://www.csis.org/analysis/dark-spot-solar-energy-industr... https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/12/clean-energy-china-xinjiang-uyghur-labor/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/12/clean-energy-china-xinj... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/29/evidence-grows-of-forced-labour-and-slavery-in-production-of-solar-panels-wind-turbines https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/29/evidence... And it's not just a China problem. "On batteries, there were major issues with the mining of between 15% and 30% of the world’s cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Amnesty International found that children, some as young as seven, were working in artisanal cobalt mines, often for less than $2 a day. Mining conditions were reportedly hazardous, and workers often did not have adequate protective equipment and were exposed to toxic dust that contributed to hard metal lung disease." The US is trying to crack down but Europe is lagging behind on it. However, if the report's claim (which I see no reason to doubt) that China has 82% of the global polysilicon market is true, with most of their polysilicon production being in the Xinjiang region, calling solar panels (or batteries) "cheap" is fairly distasteful considering their sources.
  • rapsey 4y ago
    Mechanical, flow, heat, compressed air, pumped hydro are all types of batteries. All capable of storing MW to GW of power. It is not all lithium and cobalt.
    • automatic6131 4y ago
      Once again, I am reminding HackerNews that the technology to build a battery capable of storing enough renewable electrical energy for the (world|nation) for even half a day *does not exist* at any reasonable cost. And if you want to store multiple days for a northerly nation with very cold winters, frequent high pressure anticyclones (so, no wind) that can last about a week, and you want to switch everyone to zero carbon heating, then the technology doubly doesn't exist. And the only retort to the above will be mumbling "yeah, but exponential improvement in batteries plus didn't someone say something about hydrogen?" which is essentially, wishful thinking. When you can build a zero carbon grid out of nuclear fission plants - and we've known how to do so since the 60s.
• megaman821 4y ago
  I agree. There is no breakthrough on the horizon that is going to make a fusion plant have the complexity closer to a natural gas plant than a nuclear fission plant. Therefore the costs will remain high. It could still be a useful technology, especially in space. I could see a moon or mars base powered by fusion.
  • DennisP 4y ago
    Gas has low capital cost but relatively high fuel cost, especially outside the US. For most fusion designs (possibly excluding NIF), the fuel cost is insignificant. Also of course we might want to consider the carbon emissions of gas plants.
    • megaman821 4y ago
      That is what I mean. Some people are imagining the capital costs of a natural gas plant with the fuel and environmental costs being almost nothing. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that a fusion plant would cost anything less than a fission plant at this point.
• BeefWellington 4y ago
  Solar panels are cheap and batteries are easier to build because they're already taking advantage of economies of scale and aren't in the R&D phase still. The viability of fusion has been centered for a long time around getting more power out than you put in and once that marker is met it's viewed as the last giant hurdle in the way. There's still plenty more R&D that needs to be done before it can easily / readily scale though. It's where nuclear was in the 60s basically. Even if it only ever gets to be comparable to nuclear in terms of costing but with none of the hazardous byproduct, it will come out ahead. When you consider the environmental factors involved in battery production it is pretty clear that fusion at least has the potential to be the cleanest sources of energy. Whether it ultimately gets there is another question.
  • rapsey 4y ago
    > It's where nuclear was in the 60s basically. Plants built in the 70s are still operating. It is nowhere near a decade away.
    • BeefWellington 4y ago
      Fair, my statement had an implied "if they cleared this hurdle" attached but I probably should have made it explicit. I do think it'll be a decade or so to go from net gain -> commercial fusion reactors coming online.
• gabesullice 4y ago
  Pessimists were saying solar panels and batteries were too expensive too, not so long ago. If we discover fusion power to be viable in our lifetime, it will be a breathtaking accomplishment to witness. It's a fork in the timeline with repercussions that will reverberate for millenia, across trillions of human lives.
  • codealot 4y ago
    Beautifully stated. I teared up. This and watching us settle on the moon and Mars would be incredible. And achieving more breakthroughs in AI and medicine and everything else. I am an optimist and really excited by everything on the horizon.
  • pfdietz 4y ago
    They laughed at Galileo, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. Most skepticism is ratified by subsequent events. DT fusion doesn't appear to have much to recommend it, since it still requires a thermal cycle like fission or coal, and that keeps its cost high. From an engineering point of view it involves large monolithic plants with very complex and stressed equipment. This seems the opposite of good engineering.
    • gabesullice 4y ago
      My impression is that the research efforts have been focused on "can we do it?" Then, if the answer is yes, they'll focus on "how do we do it efficiently?" Where efficiency can mean anything from capital efficient, to resource efficient, to energy conversion efficiency. Limiting one's focus on the next blocker in the critical path and not increasing scope beyond it sounds like perfectly good engineering to me.
      • pfdietz 4y ago
        It seems like terrible myopic project management to me. You want to avoid first steps that you know are very likely going to lead to dead ends down the line. We're constantly being told to take the long term view. Are we only to do that when it's favorable to the technological optimist's case or budget?
• ragebol 4y ago
  Not everything is expressed in cost, externalities like the looks and intrusiveness of something do matter. 1 fusion plant has less NIMBYs to deal with than wind-on-land, for example. But yes, could be that still it's too expensive by the time it becomes available. By then I hope we can make a fusion plant so small it fits on a space ship and power an Epstein drive :-)
  • pfdietz 4y ago
    Fusion will have plenty of NIMBY once the tritium leaks start. It doesn't take leaking a very large fraction of a DT plant's tritium to reach levels that already cause fission power plants PR problems.
• HillRat 4y ago
  Yeah, the cost of capsules for NIF is something like 4 orders of magnitude higher than it needs to be for commercialization, though admittedly it's not like they've industrialized the process yet. The other thing is that if LLNL is still using their own definition of Q, it's not necessarily the case that they've demonstrated net-energy breakeven; they like to compare direct energy delivery to energy release, so when calculating Q they basically pretend there aren't any energy losses from actually running the huge laser facility itself. As a result, LLNL assumes that laser technology will improve to the point that real-life Q can catch up with their "scientific Q" metric. (IIRC I think "Project LIFE" was supposed to develop some of those technologies, but it never worked out, possibly since NIF is so far behind their promised schedule.)
• neonsunset 4y ago
  Solar and wind are bad and unsustainable due to mining of rare earth minerals and photovoltaic cells degrading and becoming a landfill liability. Cost effectiveness is also a myth perpetrated by the death of nuclear executed through bureaucracy. The nuclear, however, is currently the true energy source to use, technologically much simpler (than fusion) to execute with decades of experience making it the safest out there. It is the zero-carbon environmentally friendly energy source.
  • VaxWithSex 4y ago
    • neonsunset 4y ago
      What were the estimated damage and deaths caused by Fukushima incident? When was the reactor site built, when was the reactor designed? A few extra questions you may also be interested in: lithium, cobalt mining, costs of nanolitography for high efficiency photovoltaic cells. All that with tax breaks and heavy govt incentives vs insane regulatory burden on nuclear industry. Also nuclear scare in education that makes the public treat opinions like yours as even remotely realistic.
      • VaxWithSex 4y ago
        Why did people back then think it was save and then it exploded? Were they wrong in their assessment back then? Why were they wrong? Are you sure your assesment is correct today? Why is it better than their assessment back then? Are you sure you are not making the same mistakes that they made back then? Oh look, I can ask questions too, because I am a sealion.
      • VaxWithSex 4y ago
        extra questions you might be interested in: where is most of the uranium mined that is used in european reactors? what environmental damages are done by reprocessing uran? costs of the buildback of reactors? who will pay for it when the costs for this are 10x what the operators put aside for it? how much subsidies go into nuclear? how do you prevent proliferation in rougue nations that use nuclear for example iran?
• barnabee 4y ago
  Most things don’t start off cost effective, they become so due to investment, demand, industrialisation, competition, etc. Maybe fusion will stay a small part of the energy mix for decades even after the first commercial plants are built but be part of what eventually enables us to use orders of magnitude more energy than we do now…