7 ms·

UK's nuclear fusion site ends experiments after 40 years

40 points by samizdis 3y ago

anovikov 3y ago
Why doesn't anyone see the elephant in the room: time for fusion has run out, renewables have won. There is no way in the world fusion will ever be cheaper than current costs of solar + LiFePo battery power. And as well no chance commercially proven fusion will exist even on a minimal scale before electricity needs are fully covered by renewables. Continuing fusion research is important to keep the scientific process going, it will surely result in a lot of byproduct discoveries in physics, material science, and a lot more, but the lie about fusion-derived electricity as being a viable and/or necessary thing for humankind, should stop.
- ragebol 3y ago
  I don't think we'll ever have enough energy, we'll always find ways to use more, on earth or elsewhere.
  - kiba 3y ago
    I am pretty sure we'll run into the problem of too much heat long before we need more power.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    Fusion will become usable only elsewhere, not on Earth. On Earth, fusion does not make sense unless it would provide more energy than the energy received from the Sun. However, if an amount of energy comparable to that received from the Sun would be produced by fusion, after being used, that energy would become heat, causing an even more dramatic climate change than what we are facing now. Fusion energy could be very useful, but only on spaceships or on planets/satellites/asteroids that are far from the Sun, and never on Earth. The same is true for nuclear fission energy. In the short term, it can be useful to replace power plants that use fossil fuels with nuclear fission reactors, but the total amount of energy produced by nuclear reactions can never become so great as what can be obtained by capturing directly or indirectly solar energy, without causing climate changes. The most important research direction should be for efficient methods of long-term high-capacity energy storage, e.g. in synthetic hydrocarbons or in flow batteries, and not in nuclear energy.
- sgt101 3y ago
  I think it all depends who you believe about how batteries will develop and the consequences of manufacturing them. On the other hand from what I understand fusion isn't all that clean itself. The problem is that it's impossible to separate the pr from reality; only time will do that.
- Neil44 3y ago
  That is a failure of imagination, like the guy who said let's close the patent office in the 1800s because everything had been invented. We have no idea what such a surplus of energy would make possible that we don't even have the imagination for today.
  - simonh 3y ago
    If we want such a surplus of energy, at this point it's pretty clear Fusion isn't the way to get it in even the medium term, and maybe even not remotely affordably in the long term. We've already sunk 4 or 5 Manhattan projects' worth of resources into Fusion with essentially nothing to show for it. How many more Manhattans is it going to take? I'm not against pursuing some of the modern, safety first fission technologies. They may well have a place. Maybe Fusion will eventually become viable, but I think it's very clear now that our technological reach is way longer than our grasp. We poured way too many resources into it long before we actually had any reasonable chance of success. We'd be better off dropping the big super expensive projects that aren't going anywhere, and continue with the many smaller basic technology development projects until it becomes a lot clearer if any of those is going to pan out.
  - jimworm 3y ago
    Failure of imagination indeed. There's much more to energy than the regular usage cycle of the average electrical supply grid. What if creating easily-fusable isotopes is the most efficient way to store "renewable" energy? Fusion is the most concentrated release of power humans are able to muster. What's to say such concentrated power will never be required for any purpose?
    - anovikov 3y ago
      That's totally right, fusion might have it's uses in the future. For example, the goal it was originally intended to be used when first tokamaks were created: cheap production of large amounts of tritium, enabling more compact thermonuclear bombs producing much less fallout with very flexible yields. Just not electricity production.
  - anovikov 3y ago
- paganel 3y ago
  > than current costs of solar + LiFePo battery power As far as I know there's no way yet to set that up at scale, meaning to be able to provide power to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of homes (and more) based on power stored inside of batteries. All I've seen are some gimmicks set up/installed in some Western suburbia houses.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    Pumped storage seems to fit the need pretty well, in that it’s trivially easy to build and there are hundreds of thousands of potential sites in the US alone.
    - inglor_cz 3y ago
      "trivially easy to build and there are hundreds of thousands of potential sites in the US alone." Yeah, but plenty of people don't live in the US and their geography is much less suitable for pumped storage than the American (or Norwegian) one. For example, Finland is very flat, so are the Baltic states and most of Poland. So is Bangladesh, which has three times as many people as all the above together, and a nascent industry that needs energy. In Czechia, we have rolling hills that are suitable for some pumped storage, but we built up almost all the good locations. In one case, an entire top of a mountain was cut off in order to make a reservoir: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dlouh%C3%A9_str%C3%A1n%C4%9B_(horn%C3%AD_n%C3%A1dr%C5%BE)#/media/Soubor:Dlouhe_strane_horni_nadrz.jpg https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dlouh%C3%A9_str%C3%A1n%C4%9B_(...
      - ben_w 3y ago
        I have a vague memory that someone suggested turning a significant fraction of what is now Czechia into a single huge hydro lake — probably one of the many mad things suggested in the inter-war period — but I can't remember the name now to search for it.
        inglor_cz 3y ago
        At least we could have some mean naval battles. Our landlocked history is severely lacking those.
- barrysteve 3y ago
  What hogwash. People crave security more than they do anything else and it's completely toxic. Space travel can use infinite energy. Fusion works underground where many renewables do not. Infinite energy can be used for climate control of the whole planet. Fusion plants can fuel megafactories even in war conditions. Fusion can enable more energy expensive technologies like hydrogen batteries, to be trivially affordable. I'm starting to find the Western malaise that has come around this decade, to be offensive. It's like the knees have given out and people are just begging for a comfortable death. Come on! We're better than this!
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    Where does this idea that fusion == infinite energy come from? Nothing could be further from the truth, all fusion power plant designs have a very fixed amount of power they can generate (limited by the size of the reactor), and the costs to build and maintain one are gigantic, in ways that are unlikely to go down in the next century or so. Scaling them up (building bigger reactors) is extremely hard because of fundamental geometric reasons, and scaling horizontally (many many power plants) is hard because they require teams of experts to run and monitor. And pretty much the whole plant, with all the expensive magnets, supports, and reactor chamber, has a lifespan of maybe 10-15 years before the constant neutron bombardment makes the materials too brittle to keep supporting their weight. You then need robots to come in and dismantle the highly radioactive components and store them securely for a few 1-200 years while they cool off. Sure, it's nice that fusion requires relatively little fuel (though even that is not that great, since it requires an extremely rare substance, tritium), but that doesn't mean it's in any way going to scale up infinitely, or even a lot, or even as much as nuclear fission.
    - barrysteve 3y ago
      I said infinite energy, because that is exactly the phrase required to break people out of the limited mould that traps minds into erroneous thinking. Neutrons are a problem in JET/Tokamaks. They are less of a problem in other fusion designs. I feel like I'm the last person on this planet who actually enjoys being uncertain, and uncertain enough to see the big picture. Most of the problems you have described are getting solved piece by piece in small scale projects, and then the evidence collected from their successes will be combined into a more effective solution that you are willing to discuss. I'm so tired of the constant emotional vortex sucking the intellect out of the West. Get off my back.
- rgmerk 3y ago
  Yeah, for grid energy applications in our lifetimes it's hard to see fusion beating a grid made up of solar, wind, lithium-ion and other battery chemistries, topped up with some chemical storage (eg hydrogen) for places with cold winters. However, in the long term some kind of nuclear propulsion is the only realistic way to open up the outer solar system, and I'd prefer our descendents had a safer option than "nuclear pulse propulsion" - the physically plausible but very 1950s idea of pushing a spacecraft along with nuclear detonations...
- eigenket 3y ago
  Renewables have currently very difficult problems to solve with storage. As far as I know the only sufficiently scalable energy storage method is pumped hydro. Storing enough energy to deal with the intermittency of renewables at the scale required involves essentially digging a very large number of very large reservoirs. This is a huge civil engineering undertaking with massive environmental issues of its own. I've not seen anyone in any government really talking about investing in that much storage. Batteries do not seem to be realistic for the near and medium term (and also come with massive environmental problems), pumped air works where you have appropriate geology, everything else is essentially a meme. Renewables are great as long as you ignore the storage problem, just as coal is great as long as you ignore the waste problem.
  - dmurray 3y ago
    > everything else is essentially a meme. I don't think this is fair: even if something like hydrogen storage isn't practical or economic now, it might be if generation cost falls 3x or 10x. Which is plausible for renewables in the medium to long term.
  - hannob 3y ago
    > Renewables have currently very difficult problems to solve with storage. And fusion does nothing to solve these problems. Even in an optimistic scenario, what you'd end up with fusion is a very expensive power plant that can generate large amounts of energy. Running that as a peaker plant to complement renewables is unlikely to be economically viable. So your only bet really is to have fusion running as baseload power. However there won't be baseload power in the future, because we'll have times where renewables will provide more than 100% of the energy needed. I really don't see how fusion fits into any of this. SUre, intermittency problems of renewables need to be solved. But Fusion ain't the solution. Look at hydrogen-fired power plants, advanced geothermal, or heat storage, those are promising options.
    - mirzap 3y ago
      Fusion doesn't have those problems. With fusion, you generate electricity 24h/day. Storage is needed for solar and wind for obvious reasons.
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  "current costs of solar + LiFePo battery power" At what scale? Can you even build enough batteries to supply, say, entire Europe for 1 hour?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > At what scale? Can you even build enough batteries to supply, say, entire Europe for 1 hour? Personally? No. As a species? Sure, why not. Looks like China makes most of them, but looking at this graph, the world total battery production last year was 5-EU-hours: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lithium-ion-battery-manufacturing-capacity-2022-2030 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lithium-ion-b... https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2%2C753%2C320GWh%2F1year+*+1+hour https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2%2C753%2C320GWh%2F1yea... With significant production increases forecast. Those things will probably last in the order of ten years before needing replacement/refurbishment/recycling, which would mean around 50-EU-hours steady-state capacity today Worldwide is more interesting than just the EU. Current production is global production per year of storage sufficient for storing 30m of global electricity demand, with the same 10-year assumption that's a steady-state level of 5 hours; assuming the forecast growth is correct, the annual production in 2030 rises to 6.79 TWh/year, which is storage for 2.33 hours of global electricity demand made in that year or 23.3 hours with the same 10-year-steady-state assumption.
    - inglor_cz 3y ago
      Interesting, thank you. The graph that you linked to is interesting in more than one way. If/when China decides to take Taiwan by force, the democratic world is going to be screwed. We've already had a massive gas supply shock in Europe when Russia attacked Ukraine. We were able to overcome it, but it required kowtowing to disgusting regimes such as Qatar and Azerbaijan. Sure, batteries last longer than gas. An immediate rupture in supply wouldn't be catastrophic, unless the Chinese vendors can somehow turn off/disable batteries remotely. But just replacing the ones that fail would probably overwhelm our current manufacturing capability. We've slept on an eco-bio-financial cushion too long.
- b59831 3y ago
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- Moldoteck 3y ago
  Elephant in the room is renewables can't provide the same security/constant power as nuclear/fusion. Even more, I'm not sure it's even possible to cover all our rising needs with renewables only in combo with batteries and hydropower, especially when accounting that not all areas are good for renewables. And there are different challenges too like space needed to provide that amount of energy+storage, managing when that equipment should be replaced and so on. I'm genuinely happy France managed to perform needed maintainance on their nuclear plants so that (in theory) they will import much less from Germany in the winter, or potentially even export and also happy they succeeded to push nuclear as net zero technology
  - gnfargbl 3y ago
    The sun is on 100% of the time. The only reason that renewables can't provide us with reliable power is because of our human political problems: we can't reliably cable up the always-sunny areas of the planet to the areas where people live, because the governments in the always-sunny areas are unstable.
    - orra 3y ago
      Well, it will also cost an estimated £16 billion, to build two high capacity electricity transmission lines from Morocco to the UK. You can build a lot of capacity locally for that price.
      - marksbrown 3y ago
        Or a tiny portion of a railway! Do you have a citation for that 16 billion?
        orra 3y ago
        It's the Xlinks project. This is where I got the 16bn figure: <https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/sectors/energy/uk-morocco-subsea-cable-power-electricity/ https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/sectors/energy/uk-morocco-s...>. This source says £20 billion, but half is for the cable, and the other half the solar farm and other expenses: <https://sifted.eu/articles/xlinks-morocco-uk-electricity-cable https://sifted.eu/articles/xlinks-morocco-uk-electricity-cab...>. Reporting is a bit inconsistent. My point is, transmitting electricity extremely long distances has its own downsides (construction costs & power losses), even if we assume Morocco gets a fair deal out of this. And this project is "only" 7% of UK electricity supply. What of the rest? What of other countries? Saying "export" and "import" doesn't solve all the problems of intermittency (unfortunately).
- pyrale 3y ago
  > renewables have won. As evidenced by the fact that they have completely replaced fossil fuels and already sustain multiple grids in flat lands 100% now.
- enqk 3y ago
  Money and price is a really poor information vessel for this kind of decision making, as they are disconnected from the actual physical flows involved. Renewables require a lot of minerals compared to any centralized energy production facility, as they are really diffuse, and also they compete with the surface we need to grow our food and live. This is absolutely not present in current prices.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > they compete with the surface we need to grow our food and live They can, but they don't need to. Rooftops, extra shade for car parks (or walkways), deserts, gaps between directions of the same road[0]… in principal, if we were solving this together at a global scale rather than a bunch of local competing interests, we can supply well over 100% of current demand just by PV without needing any farm land to be used in the process. [0] https://www.google.com/maps/@39.740634,-119.0682473,2221m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@39.740634,-119.0682473,2221m/da...
- mirzap 3y ago
  That's false. Renewables have not won. See Germany to understand why renewables can not replace stable energy sources. They burn lignite now and buy French nuclear energy to offset nuclear. Renewables have two major issues that need to be solved: one is recycling, and the other one is storage. Nuclear is the only real "renewable" energy source worth pursuing until fusion is achieved.
  - anovikov 3y ago
    Well, in EU overall, we went to only 1/3 of electricity being produced with fossil fuels. I think it pretty much proves that fossil fuels aren't necessary. We are going to be down to under 10% in less than 10 years, using the already existing technologies and with no assumption of further cost declines: just with incremental buildout.
- tim333 3y ago
  Well maybe but on the other hand we have >Helion announces world’s first fusion energy purchase agreement with Microsoft New facility aims to deliver at least 50 MW and begin producing electricity by 2028 https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-announces-worlds-first-fusion-ppa-with-microsoft/ https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-announces-world... I mean that may be BS, but renewables have not exactly stopped fossil fuel use yet so why not try both approaches?
bullen 3y ago
The problem with all turbine electric generation is the 30% efficiency of steam turbines. You need to generate 3x the amount of heat, with nuclear you are converting matter into energy; it's boiling the planet. Solar and wind is a loosing proposition (you put more hydrocarbons into making them than they will generate in their lifetime, and you don't get to pick when they generate), and it can't carry the losses of hydrocarbons. Hydro is ok, but it's fully installed globally, and again it can never offset the collapse of civilization once hydrocarbons reach peak EROEI: coal peaked in the 70s, oil back in ~2010 and gas is peaking now. RIP Humans.
- fodkodrasz 3y ago
  Turbines can have higher efficiency at higher steam temperatures. You have the night and the radiative heat transfer, so you are not boiling the planet. Hydro ruins ecosystems and accelerates soil depletion by withholding sediment normally deposited by floods.
- krisoft 3y ago
  > You need to generate 3x the amount of heat, with nuclear you are converting matter into energy; it's boiling the planet. This doesn’t make sense to me. Our problems with climate change is not caused by the heat output of the reactors we use. It is because the by-products of combustion increases our atmosphere’s capacity to trap energy from the big fusion reactor in the sky.
  - t_von_doom 3y ago
    My interpretation of your quote was that the boiling wasn’t referring to the heat produced, but instead the idea that mass (our planet) is being converted to energy, reducing the mass of the planet
    - ben_w 3y ago
      This may be technically correct, but all the sunlight falling on the ground (which is about 10,000 times our current power usage) is about a kilogram per second under E=mc^2 — it isn't going to be measurable on the timescale of this planet's future existence before being consumed by the sun or ejected from the system due to orbital instabilities, and only even significant compared to the current planetary mass over time periods significantly longer than when all stars in the universe will finish burning all their fuel.
manojlds 3y ago
Just to be clear it's about this site and UK is focussing on its new site > The UK government has committed to spending £650m on an alternative UK fusion programme between now and 2027. This includes a new prototype fusion energy plant in Nottinghamshire called STEP.
- sylware 3y ago
  Allright, they are just changing of project and perspective. People must understand: fusion research will stop the moment there is a set of scientific/mathematical proofs we cannot do it. If we are lucky, we still have a few millions of years to reach that point.
  - tim333 3y ago
    It seems clear fusion power is possible in principle. Whether it will make economic sense is another matter.
    - sylware 3y ago
      Economics are not the issue right now, the issue is really getting out more energy than inputted and at scale.
  - Gud 3y ago
    Why "must I understand" this? Because amazing teams are working on realizing nuclear fusion in my lifetime. https://cfs.energy/technology/sparc/ https://cfs.energy/technology/sparc/
    - sylware 3y ago
      You did not understand my point: research won't stop.
- fanf2 3y ago
  The article doesn’t mention the MAST Upgrade experiment (mega amp spherical tokamak) which (like JET) is at Culham and was commissioned in 2019. As far as I can tell, MAST will remain in operation while JET is being decommissioned.
djaychela 3y ago
Classic current UK move.... go it alone, for 'reasons'. In a field where 40 years of work hasn't yet led to a workable prototype which generates useful energy. I have no idea what is going on in my country any more. Brexit was self-harm promoted as some kind of 'sticking it to the man', and now it seems we are doing so in other areas. Fusion power would be amazing if it ever happens. I'm not qualified to know whether or not it will actually happen in my lifetime, but it's worth persuing.
- tim333 3y ago
  I agree UK politics are a mess but the new Step project seems quite interesting. >Engineers are hopeful that Step will generate 1.6GW of power – about half as much as Hinkley Point C – which equates to a net output of up to 200 MWe. https://archive.ph/NQ7Wg https://archive.ph/NQ7Wg They don't actually have a design yet but the idea is there.

40 points by samizdis 3y ago

Why doesn't anyone see the elephant in the room: time for fusion has run out, renewables have won. There is no way in the world fusion will ever be cheaper than current costs of solar + LiFePo battery power. And as well no chance commercially proven fusion will exist even on a minimal scale before electricity needs are fully covered by renewables. Continuing fusion research is important to keep the scientific process going, it will surely result in a lot of byproduct discoveries in physics, material science, and a lot more, but the lie about fusion-derived electricity as being a viable and/or necessary thing for humankind, should stop.

ragebol 3y ago
I don't think we'll ever have enough energy, we'll always find ways to use more, on earth or elsewhere.
- kiba 3y ago
  I am pretty sure we'll run into the problem of too much heat long before we need more power.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  Fusion will become usable only elsewhere, not on Earth. On Earth, fusion does not make sense unless it would provide more energy than the energy received from the Sun. However, if an amount of energy comparable to that received from the Sun would be produced by fusion, after being used, that energy would become heat, causing an even more dramatic climate change than what we are facing now. Fusion energy could be very useful, but only on spaceships or on planets/satellites/asteroids that are far from the Sun, and never on Earth. The same is true for nuclear fission energy. In the short term, it can be useful to replace power plants that use fossil fuels with nuclear fission reactors, but the total amount of energy produced by nuclear reactions can never become so great as what can be obtained by capturing directly or indirectly solar energy, without causing climate changes. The most important research direction should be for efficient methods of long-term high-capacity energy storage, e.g. in synthetic hydrocarbons or in flow batteries, and not in nuclear energy.
sgt101 3y ago
I think it all depends who you believe about how batteries will develop and the consequences of manufacturing them. On the other hand from what I understand fusion isn't all that clean itself. The problem is that it's impossible to separate the pr from reality; only time will do that.
Neil44 3y ago
That is a failure of imagination, like the guy who said let's close the patent office in the 1800s because everything had been invented. We have no idea what such a surplus of energy would make possible that we don't even have the imagination for today.
- simonh 3y ago
  If we want such a surplus of energy, at this point it's pretty clear Fusion isn't the way to get it in even the medium term, and maybe even not remotely affordably in the long term. We've already sunk 4 or 5 Manhattan projects' worth of resources into Fusion with essentially nothing to show for it. How many more Manhattans is it going to take? I'm not against pursuing some of the modern, safety first fission technologies. They may well have a place. Maybe Fusion will eventually become viable, but I think it's very clear now that our technological reach is way longer than our grasp. We poured way too many resources into it long before we actually had any reasonable chance of success. We'd be better off dropping the big super expensive projects that aren't going anywhere, and continue with the many smaller basic technology development projects until it becomes a lot clearer if any of those is going to pan out.
- jimworm 3y ago
  Failure of imagination indeed. There's much more to energy than the regular usage cycle of the average electrical supply grid. What if creating easily-fusable isotopes is the most efficient way to store "renewable" energy? Fusion is the most concentrated release of power humans are able to muster. What's to say such concentrated power will never be required for any purpose?
  - anovikov 3y ago
    That's totally right, fusion might have it's uses in the future. For example, the goal it was originally intended to be used when first tokamaks were created: cheap production of large amounts of tritium, enabling more compact thermonuclear bombs producing much less fallout with very flexible yields. Just not electricity production.
- anovikov 3y ago
paganel 3y ago
> than current costs of solar + LiFePo battery power As far as I know there's no way yet to set that up at scale, meaning to be able to provide power to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of homes (and more) based on power stored inside of batteries. All I've seen are some gimmicks set up/installed in some Western suburbia houses.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  Pumped storage seems to fit the need pretty well, in that it’s trivially easy to build and there are hundreds of thousands of potential sites in the US alone.
  - inglor_cz 3y ago
    "trivially easy to build and there are hundreds of thousands of potential sites in the US alone." Yeah, but plenty of people don't live in the US and their geography is much less suitable for pumped storage than the American (or Norwegian) one. For example, Finland is very flat, so are the Baltic states and most of Poland. So is Bangladesh, which has three times as many people as all the above together, and a nascent industry that needs energy. In Czechia, we have rolling hills that are suitable for some pumped storage, but we built up almost all the good locations. In one case, an entire top of a mountain was cut off in order to make a reservoir: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dlouh%C3%A9_str%C3%A1n%C4%9B_(horn%C3%AD_n%C3%A1dr%C5%BE)#/media/Soubor:Dlouhe_strane_horni_nadrz.jpg https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dlouh%C3%A9_str%C3%A1n%C4%9B_(...
    - ben_w 3y ago
      I have a vague memory that someone suggested turning a significant fraction of what is now Czechia into a single huge hydro lake — probably one of the many mad things suggested in the inter-war period — but I can't remember the name now to search for it.
      - inglor_cz 3y ago
        At least we could have some mean naval battles. Our landlocked history is severely lacking those.
barrysteve 3y ago
What hogwash. People crave security more than they do anything else and it's completely toxic. Space travel can use infinite energy. Fusion works underground where many renewables do not. Infinite energy can be used for climate control of the whole planet. Fusion plants can fuel megafactories even in war conditions. Fusion can enable more energy expensive technologies like hydrogen batteries, to be trivially affordable. I'm starting to find the Western malaise that has come around this decade, to be offensive. It's like the knees have given out and people are just begging for a comfortable death. Come on! We're better than this!
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  Where does this idea that fusion == infinite energy come from? Nothing could be further from the truth, all fusion power plant designs have a very fixed amount of power they can generate (limited by the size of the reactor), and the costs to build and maintain one are gigantic, in ways that are unlikely to go down in the next century or so. Scaling them up (building bigger reactors) is extremely hard because of fundamental geometric reasons, and scaling horizontally (many many power plants) is hard because they require teams of experts to run and monitor. And pretty much the whole plant, with all the expensive magnets, supports, and reactor chamber, has a lifespan of maybe 10-15 years before the constant neutron bombardment makes the materials too brittle to keep supporting their weight. You then need robots to come in and dismantle the highly radioactive components and store them securely for a few 1-200 years while they cool off. Sure, it's nice that fusion requires relatively little fuel (though even that is not that great, since it requires an extremely rare substance, tritium), but that doesn't mean it's in any way going to scale up infinitely, or even a lot, or even as much as nuclear fission.
  - barrysteve 3y ago
    I said infinite energy, because that is exactly the phrase required to break people out of the limited mould that traps minds into erroneous thinking. Neutrons are a problem in JET/Tokamaks. They are less of a problem in other fusion designs. I feel like I'm the last person on this planet who actually enjoys being uncertain, and uncertain enough to see the big picture. Most of the problems you have described are getting solved piece by piece in small scale projects, and then the evidence collected from their successes will be combined into a more effective solution that you are willing to discuss. I'm so tired of the constant emotional vortex sucking the intellect out of the West. Get off my back.
rgmerk 3y ago
Yeah, for grid energy applications in our lifetimes it's hard to see fusion beating a grid made up of solar, wind, lithium-ion and other battery chemistries, topped up with some chemical storage (eg hydrogen) for places with cold winters. However, in the long term some kind of nuclear propulsion is the only realistic way to open up the outer solar system, and I'd prefer our descendents had a safer option than "nuclear pulse propulsion" - the physically plausible but very 1950s idea of pushing a spacecraft along with nuclear detonations...
eigenket 3y ago
Renewables have currently very difficult problems to solve with storage. As far as I know the only sufficiently scalable energy storage method is pumped hydro. Storing enough energy to deal with the intermittency of renewables at the scale required involves essentially digging a very large number of very large reservoirs. This is a huge civil engineering undertaking with massive environmental issues of its own. I've not seen anyone in any government really talking about investing in that much storage. Batteries do not seem to be realistic for the near and medium term (and also come with massive environmental problems), pumped air works where you have appropriate geology, everything else is essentially a meme. Renewables are great as long as you ignore the storage problem, just as coal is great as long as you ignore the waste problem.
- dmurray 3y ago
  > everything else is essentially a meme. I don't think this is fair: even if something like hydrogen storage isn't practical or economic now, it might be if generation cost falls 3x or 10x. Which is plausible for renewables in the medium to long term.
- hannob 3y ago
  > Renewables have currently very difficult problems to solve with storage. And fusion does nothing to solve these problems. Even in an optimistic scenario, what you'd end up with fusion is a very expensive power plant that can generate large amounts of energy. Running that as a peaker plant to complement renewables is unlikely to be economically viable. So your only bet really is to have fusion running as baseload power. However there won't be baseload power in the future, because we'll have times where renewables will provide more than 100% of the energy needed. I really don't see how fusion fits into any of this. SUre, intermittency problems of renewables need to be solved. But Fusion ain't the solution. Look at hydrogen-fired power plants, advanced geothermal, or heat storage, those are promising options.
  - mirzap 3y ago
    Fusion doesn't have those problems. With fusion, you generate electricity 24h/day. Storage is needed for solar and wind for obvious reasons.
inglor_cz 3y ago
"current costs of solar + LiFePo battery power" At what scale? Can you even build enough batteries to supply, say, entire Europe for 1 hour?
- ben_w 3y ago
  > At what scale? Can you even build enough batteries to supply, say, entire Europe for 1 hour? Personally? No. As a species? Sure, why not. Looks like China makes most of them, but looking at this graph, the world total battery production last year was 5-EU-hours: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lithium-ion-battery-manufacturing-capacity-2022-2030 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lithium-ion-b... https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2%2C753%2C320GWh%2F1year+*+1+hour https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2%2C753%2C320GWh%2F1yea... With significant production increases forecast. Those things will probably last in the order of ten years before needing replacement/refurbishment/recycling, which would mean around 50-EU-hours steady-state capacity today Worldwide is more interesting than just the EU. Current production is global production per year of storage sufficient for storing 30m of global electricity demand, with the same 10-year assumption that's a steady-state level of 5 hours; assuming the forecast growth is correct, the annual production in 2030 rises to 6.79 TWh/year, which is storage for 2.33 hours of global electricity demand made in that year or 23.3 hours with the same 10-year-steady-state assumption.
  - inglor_cz 3y ago
    Interesting, thank you. The graph that you linked to is interesting in more than one way. If/when China decides to take Taiwan by force, the democratic world is going to be screwed. We've already had a massive gas supply shock in Europe when Russia attacked Ukraine. We were able to overcome it, but it required kowtowing to disgusting regimes such as Qatar and Azerbaijan. Sure, batteries last longer than gas. An immediate rupture in supply wouldn't be catastrophic, unless the Chinese vendors can somehow turn off/disable batteries remotely. But just replacing the ones that fail would probably overwhelm our current manufacturing capability. We've slept on an eco-bio-financial cushion too long.
b59831 3y ago
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Moldoteck 3y ago
Elephant in the room is renewables can't provide the same security/constant power as nuclear/fusion. Even more, I'm not sure it's even possible to cover all our rising needs with renewables only in combo with batteries and hydropower, especially when accounting that not all areas are good for renewables. And there are different challenges too like space needed to provide that amount of energy+storage, managing when that equipment should be replaced and so on. I'm genuinely happy France managed to perform needed maintainance on their nuclear plants so that (in theory) they will import much less from Germany in the winter, or potentially even export and also happy they succeeded to push nuclear as net zero technology
- gnfargbl 3y ago
  The sun is on 100% of the time. The only reason that renewables can't provide us with reliable power is because of our human political problems: we can't reliably cable up the always-sunny areas of the planet to the areas where people live, because the governments in the always-sunny areas are unstable.
  - orra 3y ago
    Well, it will also cost an estimated £16 billion, to build two high capacity electricity transmission lines from Morocco to the UK. You can build a lot of capacity locally for that price.
    - marksbrown 3y ago
      Or a tiny portion of a railway! Do you have a citation for that 16 billion?
      - orra 3y ago
        It's the Xlinks project. This is where I got the 16bn figure: <https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/sectors/energy/uk-morocco-subsea-cable-power-electricity/ https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/sectors/energy/uk-morocco-s...>. This source says £20 billion, but half is for the cable, and the other half the solar farm and other expenses: <https://sifted.eu/articles/xlinks-morocco-uk-electricity-cable https://sifted.eu/articles/xlinks-morocco-uk-electricity-cab...>. Reporting is a bit inconsistent. My point is, transmitting electricity extremely long distances has its own downsides (construction costs & power losses), even if we assume Morocco gets a fair deal out of this. And this project is "only" 7% of UK electricity supply. What of the rest? What of other countries? Saying "export" and "import" doesn't solve all the problems of intermittency (unfortunately).
pyrale 3y ago
> renewables have won. As evidenced by the fact that they have completely replaced fossil fuels and already sustain multiple grids in flat lands 100% now.
enqk 3y ago
Money and price is a really poor information vessel for this kind of decision making, as they are disconnected from the actual physical flows involved. Renewables require a lot of minerals compared to any centralized energy production facility, as they are really diffuse, and also they compete with the surface we need to grow our food and live. This is absolutely not present in current prices.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > they compete with the surface we need to grow our food and live They can, but they don't need to. Rooftops, extra shade for car parks (or walkways), deserts, gaps between directions of the same road[0]… in principal, if we were solving this together at a global scale rather than a bunch of local competing interests, we can supply well over 100% of current demand just by PV without needing any farm land to be used in the process. [0] https://www.google.com/maps/@39.740634,-119.0682473,2221m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@39.740634,-119.0682473,2221m/da...
mirzap 3y ago
That's false. Renewables have not won. See Germany to understand why renewables can not replace stable energy sources. They burn lignite now and buy French nuclear energy to offset nuclear. Renewables have two major issues that need to be solved: one is recycling, and the other one is storage. Nuclear is the only real "renewable" energy source worth pursuing until fusion is achieved.
- anovikov 3y ago
  Well, in EU overall, we went to only 1/3 of electricity being produced with fossil fuels. I think it pretty much proves that fossil fuels aren't necessary. We are going to be down to under 10% in less than 10 years, using the already existing technologies and with no assumption of further cost declines: just with incremental buildout.
tim333 3y ago
Well maybe but on the other hand we have >Helion announces world’s first fusion energy purchase agreement with Microsoft New facility aims to deliver at least 50 MW and begin producing electricity by 2028 https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-announces-worlds-first-fusion-ppa-with-microsoft/ https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-announces-world... I mean that may be BS, but renewables have not exactly stopped fossil fuel use yet so why not try both approaches?

bullen 3y ago

The problem with all turbine electric generation is the 30% efficiency of steam turbines. You need to generate 3x the amount of heat, with nuclear you are converting matter into energy; it's boiling the planet. Solar and wind is a loosing proposition (you put more hydrocarbons into making them than they will generate in their lifetime, and you don't get to pick when they generate), and it can't carry the losses of hydrocarbons. Hydro is ok, but it's fully installed globally, and again it can never offset the collapse of civilization once hydrocarbons reach peak EROEI: coal peaked in the 70s, oil back in ~2010 and gas is peaking now. RIP Humans.

fodkodrasz 3y ago
Turbines can have higher efficiency at higher steam temperatures. You have the night and the radiative heat transfer, so you are not boiling the planet. Hydro ruins ecosystems and accelerates soil depletion by withholding sediment normally deposited by floods.
krisoft 3y ago
> You need to generate 3x the amount of heat, with nuclear you are converting matter into energy; it's boiling the planet. This doesn’t make sense to me. Our problems with climate change is not caused by the heat output of the reactors we use. It is because the by-products of combustion increases our atmosphere’s capacity to trap energy from the big fusion reactor in the sky.
- t_von_doom 3y ago
  My interpretation of your quote was that the boiling wasn’t referring to the heat produced, but instead the idea that mass (our planet) is being converted to energy, reducing the mass of the planet
  - ben_w 3y ago
    This may be technically correct, but all the sunlight falling on the ground (which is about 10,000 times our current power usage) is about a kilogram per second under E=mc^2 — it isn't going to be measurable on the timescale of this planet's future existence before being consumed by the sun or ejected from the system due to orbital instabilities, and only even significant compared to the current planetary mass over time periods significantly longer than when all stars in the universe will finish burning all their fuel.

manojlds 3y ago

Just to be clear it's about this site and UK is focussing on its new site > The UK government has committed to spending £650m on an alternative UK fusion programme between now and 2027. This includes a new prototype fusion energy plant in Nottinghamshire called STEP.

sylware 3y ago
Allright, they are just changing of project and perspective. People must understand: fusion research will stop the moment there is a set of scientific/mathematical proofs we cannot do it. If we are lucky, we still have a few millions of years to reach that point.
- tim333 3y ago
  It seems clear fusion power is possible in principle. Whether it will make economic sense is another matter.
  - sylware 3y ago
    Economics are not the issue right now, the issue is really getting out more energy than inputted and at scale.
- Gud 3y ago
  Why "must I understand" this? Because amazing teams are working on realizing nuclear fusion in my lifetime. https://cfs.energy/technology/sparc/ https://cfs.energy/technology/sparc/
  - sylware 3y ago
    You did not understand my point: research won't stop.
fanf2 3y ago
The article doesn’t mention the MAST Upgrade experiment (mega amp spherical tokamak) which (like JET) is at Culham and was commissioned in 2019. As far as I can tell, MAST will remain in operation while JET is being decommissioned.

djaychela 3y ago

Classic current UK move.... go it alone, for 'reasons'. In a field where 40 years of work hasn't yet led to a workable prototype which generates useful energy. I have no idea what is going on in my country any more. Brexit was self-harm promoted as some kind of 'sticking it to the man', and now it seems we are doing so in other areas. Fusion power would be amazing if it ever happens. I'm not qualified to know whether or not it will actually happen in my lifetime, but it's worth persuing.

tim333 3y ago
I agree UK politics are a mess but the new Step project seems quite interesting. >Engineers are hopeful that Step will generate 1.6GW of power – about half as much as Hinkley Point C – which equates to a net output of up to 200 MWe. https://archive.ph/NQ7Wg https://archive.ph/NQ7Wg They don't actually have a design yet but the idea is there.