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Will we ever get fusion power?
- JohnClark1337 2y ago[dead]
- pixiemaster 2y agothere is some fundamental thing that attracts humans to big things. technical challenges aside, fusion power as a research + building + disvtributil project is so expensive - for the same amount of money we could already build a decentralized solution out of over-abundant solar cells, but it seems looking for the one big thing is still more interesting.
- shrimp_emoji 2y agoIt's just 50 years away.
- marssaxman 2y ago...or 500 seconds away, depending on your point of view!
- DesiLurker 2y agoAI was also 30years away forever then it was not. its a function of dollar spent researching not fairy dust powered by hopes and dreams. problem is the problem seems so unsurmountable that private sector (until now) was never interested in exploring this and govt funding is really mostly about making things blow up. so there you are. all that said the fusion triple product neutron-fluxtimeenergy has been steadily getting better over decades & hence a flurry of recent funding. That is until AI started sucking up all oxygen.
- Apocryphon 2y agoHow long is AI away now?
- DesiLurker 2y agoby most estimates 4-7 years away.
- more_corn 2y agoThere’s a fusion reaction in the sky. All you have to do is harvest it. If you want to bring a fusion reaction home you have to deal with pesky things like INSANE AMOUNTS OF HEAT. Luckily the sky furnace is safely surrounded by 93M miles of insulting vacuum rendering the radiation harmless and even pleasant. We have a handy-dandy magnetic shield to handle surges, and atmospheric buffer for anything that sneaks through (now with protective ozone!) It’s really an ingenious design. I can’t think of any way to improve upon it.
- fragmede 2y agoHarvesting energy from this "sky fusion reactor" (if it really exists) has this small pesky problem of being unavailable if you can't see the fusion reactor, in a daily phenomena known to scientific experts as "night", as well as this other intermittent problem dubbed "clouds" by scientific experts in weather and weather-related fields, so I can think of at least two places to improve upon sky-fusion-energy-harvesting technology. An at-home fusion reactor would not have problems there.
- hyperhello 2y agoDo you really not know of the progress that’s been made in the thirty years since you’ve been telling that joke?
- nullhole 2y agoOne of my old favouries: "Rotation Of Earth Plunges Entire North American Continent Into Darkness" https://www.theonion.com/rotation-of-earth-plunges-entire-north-american-contine-1819568317 https://www.theonion.com/rotation-of-earth-plunges-entire-no...
- audunw 2y agoJust by buying an electric vehicle I already have more than enough batteries to solve these problems for my household. The transition to EVs - which is a hard necessity to solve climate change, and well on the way - implies battery production that’s already within an order of magnitude of storing enough solar to supply power year round. As long as you’re not too close to the poles, but most people don’t live there anyway (said as someone who lives relatively close to the arctic circle.. so I don’t mean to ignore our people, there’s just not that many of us so doesn’t matter so much in terms of global warming impact) Nuclear energy can often benefit from some energy storage too. One of the first pumped hydro plants was to balance nuclear. It’s the opposite problem: people consume most of their energy during the day (when the sun is shining!) but nuclear should ideally run 100% 24/7. I suspect a renaissance of nuclear, whether it’s fusion or fission, will also be paired with lots of battery storage. As batteries will probably soon be a cheaper way of load balancing than having to ramp production from nuclear up and down.
- encoderer 2y agoSimCity predicted 2050
- feoren 2y agoI'm also very excited for Arcologies. Well, not the dark one with a Morlock-like race wandering its labyrinthine tunnels. The bright ones with lots of greenery. Or maybe I just want more Singapore.
- choilive 2y agoWe already have a zero maintenance fusion power plant that will last billions of years and that outputs millions of times more energy per second than humanity uses in a year. We already have technology that can take the electromagnetic waves this fusion power plant produces and directly convert it into electricity without needing pesky intermediaries like boiling water to turn a turbine. This technology is relatively cheap to produce, extraordinarily safe, can last for decades with minor maintenance, can scale almost indefinitely, and there are many practical improvements we can make to it that are going to applied commercially in years and not decades. I don't doubt that trying to achieve commercially viable fusion is a worthy engineering and science challenge and that we will learn and develop many useful technologies along the the way - but fusion is probably the hardest engineering challenge humanity has ever attempted and after many decades of R&D there is still no clear path to commercial viability. Solar panels today work, and they work well, and we can practically throw endless amounts of money building them and it will work. Today. And we needed solutions that work today, not 50 years from now... maybe.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- arrowsmith 2y ago> Solar panels today work But not tonight
- choilive 2y agoLuckily about 50% of the Earth is lit up by the sun at any moment and energy storage capabilities are advancing much faster than fusion's capabilities are. Distribution and storage are way more tractable problems than fusion. If you want to be really ambitious you can go to space and have 100% capacity :).
- okanat 2y agoUnless you colonize it, you cannot utilize 50% of the Earth's energy. If it proven anything, what the war in Ukraine showed us is how terrible of an idea to outsource energy, especially to nations who don't share interests with us.
- orson2077 2y agoFusion is always 50 years away for a reason: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/5gi9yh/fusion_is_always_50_years_away_for_a_reason/#lightbox https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/5gi9yh/fusion_i... IIRC, the sum total of all fusion research throughout all of history is USD$100-200B. It's obvious governments/industry/humanity doesn't really want it, or they'd go fund it.
- travisb 2y agoThe lack of funding angle isn't really convincing. Modern designs depend on material science and computing abilities which could never have been made in the 70's no matter how much money was thrown at it.
- orson2077 2y agoFusion-relevant materials research could have absolutely advanced with funding back in the 70s. Lithium compatible structural material and 14MeV neutron source experiments immediately come to mind, not to mention tritium permeation and extraction. There was tonnes to learn, and they chose not to fund it.
- Mistletoe 2y agoYou could put teleportation on that bottom squiggle as well. Sometimes you stop funding things because it isn't physically possible or we have better alternatives.
- orson2077 2y agoThere's no physics basis for teleportation, whereas there is a clear physics basis for fusion. The way you assess things is terribly flawed.
- lambdaone 2y agoThere's absolutely no reason to believe that fusion power is impossible. It being very, very difficult and very, very expensive to reach a practical system is the problem. But you're right about better alternatives. Right now that alterative is a combination of solar, wind, hydro and storage, with perhaps a bit of more exotic systems (wave power? solar towers?) in the mix.
- JohnFen 2y ago"Ever" is a very long time. Will we get fusion power in the next few decades? I wouldn't bet on it, but I also wouldn't bet against it.
- avidiax 2y agoI would bet against it. We haven't even built one of the key facilities to test the materials that we would hope to make a fusion reactor from. Once built, it will still take 20 years or so (as I recall) to come to some conclusions about suitable materials. The sun is able to use gravity containment. Terrestrial fusion has to use magnetic and physical containment. The extremely high energy neutrons produced rapidly deteriorate common engineering materials. A replacement schedule is very difficult because of induced radioactivity, which means that the reactor cladding would need to be replaced by robots most likely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fusion_Materials_Irradiation_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fusion_Materials...
- jandrese 2y agoAt this point I would bet against commercial fusion power plants. It was always questionable if they would be cost competitive with fission power plants, but now even those are being replaced by renewables and grid storage. The bigger problem is that fusion plants aren't useful for making weapons. Fission plants were basically a side project of the nuclear arms race, which is why they're a dying industry now. The world already has all of the nuclear bombs it will ever need and despite all of the promises they never managed to compete on cost. It's so much easier and cheaper to install wind turbines, solar panels, and grid scale batteries that there will probably never be a market for a commercial fusion power plant.
- bsder 2y agoThe big problem is that we have funded fusion at "Fusion Never" levels. Had we shoved as much money at fusion as we have at, say, horizontal drilling for liquified dinosaurs, we'd have fusion right now.
- jmpman 2y agoIs that true of the Chinese?
- bitmasher9 2y agoYes
- mayama 2y agoFission is pathway to nukes, so every nation with intention of building nukes invests in fission regardless of commercial viability. Fusion on the other hand is pure r&d project and may give bragging rights if a country gets it first. So even in China it is not priority.
- Detrytus 2y agoWait, isn't fusion also possibly applicable as a weapon? I mean, thermonuclear weapons exist today with fission bomb being the fuze, once we achieve fusion ignition can't we build thermonuclear bomb from it that would not need uranium/plutionium?
- arrosenberg 2y agoIf we could build such a device we would effectively have unlimited energy. At that point, why fight each other when we can colonize the galaxy?
- BobaFloutist 2y agoWhy are we fighting each other now? It's largely cultural and religious motivations, if we worked together as a planet we could get some really interesting things done.
- TaylorAlexander 2y agoWould love to see comments that actually respond to the article! Everyone here seems to be sharing their general opinions on fusion or a reaction to the article title. The article is actually very detailed!
- sien 2y agoYep. It's a well done article that had a lot of research behind it. FWIW if you're interested in Fusion the book 'The Future of Fusion Energy' is very good. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43700662-the-future-of-fusion-energy https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43700662-the-future-of-f... Also Commonwealth Fusion Systems put out a lot of interesting stuff about how they are going. Even having a look at their YouTube channel is worthwhile. Metaculus has a lot of stuff on predictions about when fusion will be made viable : https://www.metaculus.com/questions/?search=fusion https://www.metaculus.com/questions/?search=fusion
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoAgreed, I think it is a great article. Personally, I'm most inclined to agree with the "bear case" summarized at the bottom of the article: 1. I think it's highly likely that, at some point (and probably in the not-too distant future with ITER and DEMO), humans will produce fusion reactors that are self-sustaining with net positive output (ignition). 2. Given the inherent complexity and difficulty with fusion, I think it's unlikely to ever be cost competitive with simpler power generation technologies. 3. Perhaps most importantly, at least in the next human lifetime, I think fusion will be largely irrelevant in the quest for carbon-free power generation, mostly as a result of the timescales required. I think right now that everyone pretty much understands that the problem with decarbonization tech is base load and storage: carbon-free renewables like solar and wind are already the cheapest form of energy generation, but they're intermittent and unreliable. Given the latest climate data, I think it's imperative that we develop base load and storage tech in the text 10/20/50 years, or we're REALLY f'd. But I haven't heard even fusion's biggest boosters say that fusion will be ready for large scale deployment in those timeframes, at cost-competitive economics. Point being, by the time I think fusion might be ready for large scale deployment, we better have already solved the base load and storage problems with cheaper tech.
- immibis 2y agoI hope not. If we find a way to convert water into bitcoins cheaply, we will rapidly boil the oceans. This will be worse than global warming. The biosphere can re-evolve after a CO2 and temperature spike, but all known forms of life require water.
- codethief 2y agoNot sure why you're getting downvoted. You are absolutely right that we likely would end up boiling ourselves, and articles like those below have been discussed here on HN several times: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
- aristofun 2y agoWhat a terrible perspective. So many invalid implications embedded in your ignorant comment
- dave333 2y agoThere's a better way to get power or heat from hydrogen that is 200 times better than burning it: https://brilliantlightpower.com/shareholder-meeting-presentation/ https://brilliantlightpower.com/shareholder-meeting-presenta...
- philipkglass 2y agoBrilliant Light Power is nonsense. They've been promising amazing products for nearly 10 years now. Here's a Wayback Machine capture of their home page from 2015: https://web.archive.org/web/20151122183613/https://brilliantlightpower.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20151122183613/https://brilliant... BrilliantLight has developed a commercially competitive, nonpolluting source of energy from water. A SunCell™ catalytically converts H2O-based solid fuel directly into brilliant light which is converted to electricity using photovoltaic panels. If they actually had this "commercially competitive, nonpolluting source of energy" they'd be selling the machines or selling the electricity by now.
- dave333 2y agoThere have been a well documented series of engineering solutions to problems in the implementation that have taken time to solve. Melting electrodes due to too much power - solved by molten stream electrodes C 2016. Melting holes in the reaction chamber eventually resolved after many different things tried by quartz that is transparent to UV. Etc. Demonstrations are offered to qualified parties.
- Dylan16807 2y agoThey're not rewriting physics. Whatever's going on over there, it's fake. Though the main suncell page mostly just claims to be a solar concentrator? Like, okay, you can do that, but carefully aimed mirrors don't really save you any money over the same surface area of solar cells. Or twice the area of solar cells, looking at the efficiency claim on that page.
- dave333 2y ago
- hcfman 2y agoIf we do almost certainly its first use will be for some horrific things for the people of this planet. Such is the nature of the sick ones in charge.
- rmbyrro 2y agoIn 100,000 years from now, after we're past the next ice age, archeologists will unearth tokamaks all around the world. Regular people will speculate aliens and a worldwide connection between the peoples of the world to explain the multiple occurrences. They'll have unlimited energy based on some quantum shit.
- m463 2y ago> They'll have unlimited energy based on ...probably mining the center of the earth after finding it is methane or similar like thomas gold theorized, something like jupiter.
- Qwertious 2y agoThe centre of the earth is iron, it's how compasses work.
- pfdietz 2y agoNote that this is not because the iron there is ferromagnetic (iron loses its ferromagnetism at its Curie temperature, which is far below the temperature of the Earth's core) but because the iron there is liquid, and convection in the core, interacting with magnetic fields, induces electrical currents that generate the field, the "geodynamo". This process is highly nonlinear and not well understood.
- cryptonector 2y agoThey'll either wonder at our stupidity, or they'll wonder what they missed since it will appear to them that maybe we got it working.
- rmbyrro 2y agoTokamaks will look to them as pyramids and mummies look to ourselves today.
- nvader 2y ago
- markus_zhang 2y ago20 years from now. And the same answer after 20 years.
- peutetre 2y agoNo, there are multiple projects and companies that are making good progress toward commercially practical fusion reactors. Helion Energy has a contract to deliver Microsoft a fusion reactor by 2028. It's only four years away so we don't need to speculate about it. Helion will either deliver or they won't: https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-buy-power-nuclear-fusion-company-helion-2023-05-10/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-buy-power-nucle... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38 https://www.helionenergy.com/ https://www.helionenergy.com/ MIT's Commonwealth Fusion Systems has started construction of their small scale SPARC reactor. Once that has proven itself they will build a larger scale ARC reactor. They should get to first plasma in 2025: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3Giq6NuPYs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3Giq6NuPYs https://energy.mit.edu/news/mit-designed-project-achieves-major-advance-toward-fusion-energy/ https://energy.mit.edu/news/mit-designed-project-achieves-ma... https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/23/1090425/mits-superconducting-magnets-are-ready-for-fusion/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/23/1090425/mits-sup... https://cfs.energy/ https://cfs.energy/
- Dr4kn 2y agoNo one can generate enough energy with fusion at the moment. Even if Helion could do it today they would need to build a larger reactor and test that too. Then build the one for Microsoft. To do all of this in 4 years is pretty much impossible
- peutetre 2y agoHelion's reactors are smaller and simpler field reversed configuration reactors. They've built multiple prototypes over the last 11 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy#Development_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy#Development_hist... The prototype currently under construction is Polaris. It's 25% larger than the previous prototype and they expect it to achieve net electricity production: https://www.helionenergy.com/polaris/ https://www.helionenergy.com/polaris/
- bjornsing 2y agoI think there’s a good chance that we’ll see (yet again) that $6 billion in private investment distributed over 43 startups is a lot more than $22 billion in tax money sunk into some hole in France.
- yalogin 2y agoI recently started thinking that even if we master fusion and know how to keep it safe, we as a society have become way too science averse that we will not let it happen. See the reaction to nuclear fission based power plants now. Everyone is scared of it and the byproducts. Germany, one of the most progressive nations on the earth,went and shut down all of its nuclear plants as a knee jerk reaction. I don’t have hope that fusion will be allowed.
- pacificmint 2y ago> Germany, one of the most progressive nations on the earth, went and shut down all of its nuclear plants as a knee jerk reaction. Anti nuclear sentiment had been building in Germany since at least the 70s. Then Chernobyl happened in 1986 and it got even stronger. It was part of what propelled the Greens into the administration 1998. That administration reached an agreement for the nuclear exit in 2000 and the first plant went offline in 2003. Merkels cabinet tried to extend the planned runtimes for the remaining plants, and it was that extension that was rolled backed after Fukushima. Now, you can think that it was a big mistake, but it certainly was not a knee jerk reaction. It was a decision that was 50 years in the making.
- bratbag 2y ago50 years of many individual short sighted knee jerk reactions.
- pydry 2y agoIt's wildly overpriced and never formed a huge part of Germany's electricity mix anyway. Given the extortionate cost of building and maintenance and nonzero risks, its only really "benefit" is for the military industrial complex to keep a ready supply of nuclear skills and supply chains. It's the latter that formed the basis of the American led PR campaign to shame Germany. Pioneering a low carbon zero nuclear generation mix was threatening to established nuclear. It had fuck all to do with the environment. None of them ever gave two shits about Poland's chronic coal addiction next door.
- tedd4u 2y agoFrom 2 years ago. Large region of Australia running fully on solar/wind/storage for 10+ days. Seems like the focus has to be on storage and continued improvement of grid-scale and rooftop solar and wind. South Australia has just chalked up what is undoubtedly a world first – a run of more than 10 consecutive days over which the average production of wind and solar accounted for 100 per cent of local demand. No other gigawatt scale grid in the world has come close to this amount of “variable renewable energy”, or for such a long time. RenewEconomy reported on Monday that South Australia had just enjoyed a seven day run of wind and solar that produced more than 104 per cent of average demand. Closer inspection proved it was even more impressive than that. According to Geoff Eldridge at data providers GPE NemLog2, the supply of wind and solar averaged 100 per cent of local demand for 10 days and 9 hours (a total of 249 hours) from 08:20 on Friday, December 9, to 1720, Monday, December 19. [1] [1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australias-remarkable-100-per-cent-renewables-run-extends-to-over-10-days/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australias-remarkable-100-...
- TrainedMonkey 2y ago[flagged]
- ropejumper 2y agoWhy would ChatGPT have any idea about this at all? Its dataset wasn't made up of estimations for energy funds, and it makes absolutely no sense to ask it about that? I'm not sure why these figures or even their ratio would be trustworthy.
- zamadatix 2y agoChatGPT didn't use it's dataset for the numbers sourced in the linked chat. That said you do have to still go validate the sources it finds and see they say it says what they say it says, which I don't think is true for the second claim.
- nindalf 2y ago
- dsign 2y agoArticle is click-bait. Most of it is dedicated to general information and history, not the question. It would be a good article if its title were “All that you just suddenly wanted to know about nuclear fusion if you never got the itch before, in one big gulp.” Of course, somebody who knows nothing of nuclear fusion and want to would be better served by a tittle that says so “Have you heard the good news? Nuclear fusion is coming! Let me tell you everything about it!”
- mjd89 2y ago[flagged]
- oezi 2y agoIf this is your bar to call an article clickbait, everything with a title could be called that.
- lambdaone 2y agoIf you read to the end (or indeed just scroll down to the last few paragraphs) the answer is "almost certainly yes, but only if we have the will (and budget) to do so". What puts fusion development in peril is the rapid improvement of known renewable technologies, and the likelihood that 100% renewables is possible in the near future using only those technologies at lower cost.
- ggm 2y agoCumulative funding required for demonstration commercial fusion reactor Was compelling. Belief we're prepared to invest seems lacking. I think achieving multi second "stable" plasma conditions has been amazing. But, I think that's a cigarette lighter held next to petrified wood (to use an atomic bomb era analogy) away from ignition as a useful energy over time equation. We're also somewhat behind "what's embrittlement" or "what's xenon poisoning" problems. Things which don't emerge until a few months in your life of run-time. Again, from early fission reactor design, these things can sink a project. Or, unexpected fission or other nasty behaviours. Things which make it hard to get inside the structure to fix it. The unknown unknowns in this feel huge. But, linear energy in, energy out, and the approach to viable ignition temperature. That's science and engineering at its best. Fusors tapped out. "Mr fusion" isn't happening.
- vasco 2y ago> cigarette lighter held next to petrified wood (to use an atomic bomb era analogy) Can you, or anyone, explain the lore here? I get it's impossible to light it on fire, but what's the context? I tried searching for the expression and couldn't find anything.
- ggm 2y agoGeorge Gamow found a way to dramatize how unpromising Teller’s Super had proven to be. John McPhee reports the story as Los Alamos physicist Theodore Taylor remembered it. “One day, at a meeting of people who were working on the problem of the fusion bomb . . . Gamow placed a ball of cotton next to a piece of wood. He soaked the cotton with lighter fuel. He struck a match and ignited the cotton. It flashed and burned, a little fireball. The flame failed completely to ignite the wood, which looked just as it had before—unscorched, unaffected. Gamow passed it around. It was petrified wood. He said, ‘That is where we are just now in the development of the hydrogen bomb.’ From "Dark Sun" by Richard Rhodes.
- vasco 2y agoPerfect, thank you.
- mrtracy 2y agoI think there’s some possibly good investment advice to extract here, if you’re able and willing to invest in fusion startups: based on the need to compete with renewables alone, commercial success implies that highly complex reactors simply may not have a market based on construction cost, even if they do generate power. Of the fusion startups mentioned in the article, I’d say that makes Zap Energy the one worth gambling on (if you’re a gambler that is), as its success apparently depends on exploiting a fluid dynamics effect which was not well known in the past (“shear flow”). If this sufficiently solves the confinement problem, the resulting device looks ludicrously simple in comparison to contemporaries. Of course it may not work at all, I sure don’t know if it will; but if you had to invest in one of these, that seems like the one where successful power generation actually creates a marketable product.
- NateEag 2y agoPeople talk about solar + wind with storage as leaving hypothetical fusion in the dust. If a fusion reactor can be made practicable, then we have a clean, low-radiation power generation system that will still work in the face of nuclear / asteroid-impact / supervolcanic winter. ...granted, any of those events could take out most or all of the hypothetical reactors, but it still seems worth noting to me.
- anovikov 2y agoNo. We never will. Simply ran out of time. Electricity will be provided fully by renewables only in EU and China in a timeframe shorter than it takes to build a new nuclear reactor of already well-debugged type, from scratch - let alone a thermonuclear one for which no designs exist. We are speaking 2035-2040 to fully get rid of fossil fuels in electricity grid, and 2030-2035 before they are reduced to low (10-20%) levels. It took 12 years to build first unit of Belarusian NPP - of a type that's been built by the dozen for decades, and in a country where all-powerful government controls and owns everything, there is no NIMBY or the "society" thing in the Western understanding at all, and where if you try to protest you just disappear. Can't be done faster. By 2036, fossil fuel electricity will be a thing of the past in some places, and quickly disappearing in all others.
- defrost 2y agoIn reality electricity in China will NOT "be provided fully by renewables". The country's current fleet stands at 56 reactors. China expects to build 6 to 8 new nuclear power plants each year for the foreseeable future and is projected to pass the U.S. in nuclear-generated electricity by 2030. In total, China intends to build a total of 150 new nuclear reactors between 2020 and 2035. China has an impressive expansion of solar. That's a fact. China is also expanding coal power stations (while closing older shitty coal stations) to provide base energy for its planned and ongoing expansion of both solar and nuclear. Currently something of the order of 60% of the energy requirement of building solar (for local use and for global supply) in China comes directly from coal power. I'm all for renewables, it's the sensible direction. I'm also big on factual statements.
- anovikov 2y agoWell ok, in 10-15 years all fossil and nuclear electricity in China will be a drop in the bucket. They will probably be commissioning a terawatt per year of solar by then, or more.
- derriz 2y agoI think a line from the end of the article - part of the bear case - "fusion is just another in a long line of energy technologies that boil water to drive a turbine" - should be at the start. The entire premise of fusion generation is based on world view where the limiting factor for generating electricity was the cost of providing fuel for combustion to generate heat. This thinking was pretty natural if you looked around the world in the first half of the 20th century when coal and steam engines were still kings of energy. This was a pre-semiconductor and pre-plastic age. That's why they ended up using long of fairly primitive technologies: a chemical (combustion) process to generate heat, a heat capture process to boil a tank of water, a mechanical process to convert the steam pressure into mechanical energy, and an electro-magnetic process to extract usable electricity. But in an age of advanced materials and semiconductors, it feels more and more that fusion is an attempt to solve a problem that is no longer really relevant. Working towards a "better" heat source for an electricity generation process which still involves steam-age tech is akin to trying to breed faster/cheaper horses to improve modern transport. The cost of fuel is almost negligible for fission - non-fuel operating costs are killing off perfectly functioning nuclear plants like at Indian Point[1] - so the problem that fusion will "solve" is not actually a significant problem. I'm convinced that we have moved beyond boiling water and generating heat, etc. in electricity generation. We no longer need massive steam engines to generate electricity. Modern technologies like wind, solar and batteries dispense with all this cost and complexity and the shackles of Carnot efficiency. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center
- voidfunc 2y agoIMO I think the driver for fusion is going to be commercial or military need for orders of magnitude larger than today massive power generation. Climate change isn't going to get us there.
- DrBazza 2y agoWorked with a bunch of plasma physics postdocs in the early 90s, and fusion was 30 years away... checks calendar... 34 years ago. And that was the joke then. However, with advances like REBCO tape and so on, it's far more realistic now. I hope we get it in my lifetime, but I'm not confident.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoI left the world of protein folding in 1987 (quit my PhD) because I was certain that workable solutions were at least 25 years away, and I didn't think I was that kind of person to beat my head against a problem for more than two decades. By 2013 (25 years later), still no real progress on protein folding. In 2018 (30 years later) AlphaFold was revealed.
- baxtr 2y agoIt’s just another 40 years away!
- aristofun 2y agoThis is the only scalable way out of current energy crisis. It must be done, we have no choice (longterm).
- pfdietz 2y agoUtterly wrong. Renewables scale just fine.
- aristofun 2y agoUtterly ignorant. Renewables are not even close to others in for example energy density. Covering half the country with expensive and costly solar panels is not a scalable option.
- pfdietz 2y agoYou repeat some of the nonsense talking points. Energy density doesn't matter, cost does. It would not be necessary to "cover half the country", as you would know if you had done the arithmetic. Any other easily debunked points you'd like to bring up?
- kazinator 2y ago> Energy density doesn't matter, cost does. At face value, how is this sentence not implying something like that a car battery that gives 10 miles of range and takes up most of the weight and volume of the vehicle would be perfectly okay, if it cost $10 (including installation), and could be fully charged for 10 cents.
- pfdietz 2y agoBecause I'm talking about supplying energy to the economy, not powering your car. "Energy density" is one of the canonical nuclear bad faith arguments. Do you think he was talking about putting a nuclear reactor in your car?
- adr1an 2y agoProbably nobody notices it, but the article called Juan Domingo Peron to be a dictator. I get it, some detractors might say that. But that's hardly the truth. From wikipedia: > Perón is the only Argentine president elected three times and holds the highest percentage of votes (61.86%) in clean elections with universal suffrage.