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I do enjoy sharing this kind of news with all the fusion haters online. Fusion tech is legitimately cracking away on their "perpetually X-years away" stigma. Th

• sightbroke 2y ago
  At the risk of coming off as a nay-sayer, let's say engineering hurtles related to fusion power generation is overcome. How is the presumably high upfront capital costs going to compare with the ROI? That is, it would seem likely that fusion power would be costly to build. It would also seem apparent that if it were to fulfil its promise then the power it generates is sold at or less than the current amount. That would then seem to imply a lengthily time to make a return on the initial investment. Or am I missing something else with this equation?
  • jl6 2y ago
    Even if fusion is an expensive power source, it may still be desirable in areas which aren’t well suited to wind or solar.
    • ponty_rick 2y ago
      If we figure it out, it might end up being cheaper than fission eventually.
    • epistasis 2y ago
      Compared to fission? It's still quite unclear that fusion will provide improvements over fission.
      • colechristensen 2y ago
        People won't be afraid of fusion, fusion plants can't be used to make bombs, fusion plants could maybe explode, but they won't poison the nearby land (or the whole planet) for decades-eons.
        • jahnu 2y ago
          I wouldn’t bet on a sane response to it. People are afraid of 5G, vaccines, and even masks.
          • forgetfreeman 2y ago
            Man I was doing ok this afternoon, why did you have to go poke a stick in people's totally rational responses to respiratory PPE?
          • elcritch 2y ago
            IMHO, dislike of masks is built into us as a social species that place significant value on facial expressions. Makes sense from an evolutionary game theory perspective for societies to discourage them. Easy to find research showing the detrimental effects of masks on communication, etc: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10321351/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10321351/
        • pfdietz 2y ago
          > fusion plants can't be used to make bombs Helion's reactor, if it works, could become a source of the cheapest neutrons on the planet. It would greatly enable nuclear proliferation by providing neutrons for breeding of fissionable material for bombs. A 50 MW DD reactor would produce enough neutrons to make half a ton of plutonium per year. Remember, none of these neutrons have to be turned around to make tritium, as they would have to be in a DT reactor.
      • gpm 2y ago
        Without any of the meltdown concerns a fusion powerplant is a lot simpler to actually build than a fission plant. It has a small fraction of the security, reliability, regulatory, etc concerns (not none, just way way less). Unless it's so marginal that it's barely producing electricity I'd be pretty surprised to find out we had Q>1 fusion and yet it couldn't out compete fission anywhere fission is practical.
        • beeflet 2y ago
          I think that it will depend on economies of scale.
        • epistasis 2y ago
          That's astounding, I've never heard anybody claim that the reactors would be simpler before! Do you have any estimates of anybody working on the problem that thinks that? Every schemer I have ever seen is quite a bit more complex than a fission reactor. Often, designs will depend on materials that do not yet exist. That said there is a tremendous variety of techniques that fit under the umbrella term of "fusion," so I'm hoping to learn something more.
          • elcritch 2y ago
            Not simpler in terms of technology, but simpler in terms of deployment, regulation, and security. Those are the majority of costs in fission power plants.
            • epistasis 2y ago
              The majority of the cost in fission is in the massive construction build, change orders, logistics, massive concrete pours, welding, etc. I've looked a lot into this in terms of how to get a project like Georgia's Vogtle to have cost less, or Olkioluoto in Finland, or Flamanville 3 in France. Big complex construction projects are expensive, and it's not clear at all to me that fusion would be simpler or smaller, or escape the rest of Baumol's cost disease that has been plaguing fission in highly developed economies.
  • colechristensen 2y ago
    There is a certain amount of "who cares about the cost" when it comes to fusion power. Nations will want to build them to lower or eliminate reliance on foreign energy, to address climate change concerns, and as a backup for renewables, and for other non-economic reasons. Many things that governments will want to fund that have nothing to do with directly "how much does the electricity cost?" or "when can we expect a return on investment?" And the first generation will be expensive. That's how all new technology is.
    • sroussey 2y ago
      The non-national-state investors care about the cost and roi.
      • colechristensen 2y ago
        And they’ll be subsidized such that they have a positive ROI
  • credit_guy 2y ago
    > return on the initial investment. It's not only initial investment. Half of the fusion fuel is tritium, which is one of the most expensive substances on Earth (a google search finds that the price of tritium is about $30k per gram [1]). For comparison, fission reactors need enriched uranium, and that costs only about $4000 per kilogram [2]. People have the idea that fusion produces many times more energy than fission, probably because fusion bombs have a higher yield than fission bombs. This is not true. The most typical fusion reaction involves one deuterium and one tritium and yields 17.5 MeV from a total or 5 nucleons. A fission reaction involves one neutron and one atom of U-235 and yields 190 MeV from 236 nucleons. So fusion yields about 4.3 times more energy per nucleon. That's respectable, but in the popular imagination fusion yields 100 or 1000 times more energy than fission, so the fuel cost can be neglected. Nothing could be further from the truth. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=tritium+price https://www.google.com/search?q=tritium+price [2] https://www.uxc.com/p/tools/FuelCalculator.aspx https://www.uxc.com/p/tools/FuelCalculator.aspx
    • zdragnar 2y ago
      The myth of unbounded / free energy from fusion comes from being able to use any old hydrogen atoms, rather than the much rarer deuterium and tritium. Perhaps one day we'll get there, but I worry that the current advancements using the rarer isotopes will end up proving to be a dead end on that road, much like so many attempts at GAI. In the short term I suspect we'd have better odds with getting thorium reactors to be economical.
      • DennisP 2y ago
        Deuterium is not rare at all. There's enough in your morning shower to provide all your energy needs for a year. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/01/nuclear-fusion/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/01/nuclear-fusion/ Tritium is rare but lithium isn't, and we can make tritium from lithium using the neutrons from fusion. (We also get tritium from fission plants, which is how we'd build the first fusion reactors.)
        • credit_guy 2y ago
  • onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
    We'll never know until (or if it ever comes) but there's reason to believe Fusion could be >50% cheaper than Fission. That would still be more expensive than Solar and Wind (by 100% or more) - but I am skeptical in the same time frame those sources will be able to take over baseload generation. It's really comparing apples to oranges. Plus, it's a very hypothetical future. Anything could happen between now and then.
    • myrmidon 2y ago
      What is your exact scenario for cheap fusion? Because IMO the only approach that is even capable of delivering here is the Helion one (=> direct conversion). And that design is incredibly far from ready, the whole approach is completely unproven and their roadmap is mainly wishful self-delusion (from what we can tell by evaluating past milestones, like "first 50MW reactor finished by 2021"-- there is no 50MW reactor even now). From my PoV, ITER-style tokamaks are the most conservative/certain design, and also the furthest along by far. That would imply: => Cryogenics for the magnets => big hightemperature vacuumchamber for plasma => all the thermal/turbogenerator infrastructure needed in conventional plants => super high neutron radiation flux (this is a problem) I just don't see where you save anything. This is basically just a fission reactor, only a magnitude more complicated and demanding. I absolutely don't see how it could ever get significantly cheaper than conventional nuclear powerplants.
      • DennisP 2y ago
        Helion's promised dates were conditioned on funding, which they didn't actually get for several years. Adjusting for when they did get funding, they're pretty much on track.
      • fpoling 2y ago
        Fission reactor has to be big and has to deal with storage of a lot of nuclear waste and must implement a lot of expensive measures to stop runaway reaction in case of unexpected events. Fusion has none of this. Assuming Q >> 1 will be demonstrated in a design that can be commercialized the next biggest problem is dealing with high-energy neurons on a scale never experienced before with potential much faster degradation of materials than anticipated leading to prohibiting operational costs.
  • SecretDreams 2y ago
    > At the risk of coming off as a nay-sayer, let's say engineering hurtles related to fusion power generation is overcome. How is the presumably high upfront capital costs going to compare with the ROI? Does money even matter once fusion is attainable?
    • epistasis 2y ago
      I'm not sure if you're being serious, but I'm going to assume you are. Let's say energy costs 1/10th it does today. That's far cheaper than I see anybody predicting fusion will be, but I think renewables will get there. How much does cheap energy change in the economy? What is bottlenecked by expensive energy at the moment? It turns out that matter, people, people's wants, still have a huge impact. Make all energy free. What does that change? It lowers operating costs for many things, but up front capital costs are still there. Land still matters. Food still matters. Money will still matter. Allocation of time, of resources, all that still matters a lot. Energy is big for the economy, but if its free we shift our focus to other matters of logistics.
      • SecretDreams 2y ago
        If energy was truly free, it would revolutionize the economy and would fundamentally change how money matters.
  • tkahnoski 2y ago
    There's definitely an existential question around if fusion will ever be able to beat renewables plus batteries, but who knows with our energy demands ever increasing at some point renewables may hit a breaking point in land cost. I'm generally pro-publicly funded research. There is not any direct ROI on say the LHC, but it does fund advanced manufacturing and engineering work that might enable other more practical industrial applications. The ROI might be a century away.
  • taneq 2y ago
    Agreed. I think fusion power would be great, but the sales pitch of 'limitless free power' just isn't true. The thought experiment I use is this: Let's imagine coal is magically free in every way. How does my power bill change? The answer is "barely at all" because the cost of utility electric power is mostly in distribution. We pay around 30c/kWh while the wholesale energy price is more like 2c/kWh. It'll still make a difference in large scale energy intensive stuff, like desalination, aluminium refining, etc. but the average punter is going to save a lot more by installing solar panels.
• legitster 2y ago
  CEA themselves are saying fusion is not going to be ready by 2050. Don't mistake skepticism for hate. I will be the first one to applaud a commercial fusion reactor. But fusion proponents often use it's pending development as an argument against fission - a technology we already have and desperately need to adopt now.
  • kergonath 2y ago
    Yes, there are significant issues. Nothing we do not anticipate solving, but still. It will take time and solving these issues in a resource-effective way so that it can actually work as a power plant will be a challenge. > But fusion often use it's pending development as an argument against fission - a technology we already have and desperately need to adopt now. If it helps, CEA is also doing a ton of R&D on fission (and batteries, among others). But there, the real issues are mostly political.
  • simonw 2y ago
    Now that we've made it to 2025, 2050 doesn't feel nearly as far away to me.
  • willis936 2y ago
    As a big proponent of fusion: we should be spending more money and effort on it. We should be spending more money and effort on fission too. Sustainable energy sources shouldn't be fighting for scraps.
  • bluGill 2y ago
    20 years ago I would have agreed with you. However today we have proof that wind and solar work, are cheap, and are useful. The world doesn't need fusion or fission, other technology is plenty good. Unless you can do a science fiction thing of turning off the sun, and harvesting the hydrogen in it to power local reactors in earth orbit to provide the energy (light) we need without letting the vast majority escape our solar system unused. Otherwise that big fusion reactor in the sky provides all the energy we need.
    • legitster 2y ago
• otherme123 2y ago
  I don't hate it, but am not fanboy either. Imagine you can have nuclear fission and uranium is already found in nature ready to go to the reactor. Even in that case, nuclear fission could not beat solar or eolic ROI. Even if nuclear fussion had the advantage of free combustible, the costs of building and manteinance alone could make it not practical. As of today it's not enough to have positive net return, but to have a LCOE of maybe $60/MWh (and going down). Current estimates put fussion at $120/MWh. If it can't keep up with solar and eolic rade of fallig prices, it might be only suitable to replace fission power (which is not falling), about 10% of the grid. And there have been literally billions spent in research.
  • legitster 2y ago
    Solar is cheap, but it's only a supplementary power source. If you add in energy costs it becomes much, much more expensive than fission. The elephant in the room is natural gas which is the true competitor to fission and is still dirt cheap in the US.
    • pfdietz 2y ago
      No, with proper system design solar + wind + storage is cheaper than new construction nuclear. There's a reason China is installing two orders of magnitude more solar than nuclear these days (nameplate capacity basis).
      • legitster 2y ago
        China is also the top consumer in the world of coal and they continue to break their record every year. On the margin I don't argue that renewables are cheaper, but you still need a way to generate base load power on demand.
        • pfdietz 2y ago
          You can generate baseload power from non-baseload sources. Renewables + storage can do the whole job. There is no need for anything called a "baseload source". Indeed, that label indicates a deficiency, not a capability: it's a source that has to run (almost) all the time to make economic sense.
• p2detar 2y ago
  It's insane how many people like that are out there. "Fission is bad, fusion is bad, we should only do renewables." C'mon, fission brought us where we are and fusion might be the future. I believe they both deserve further research and improvements.
  • kergonath 2y ago
    It’s a common fallacy: “$thing is good, new and exciting, therefore everything else is old and rubbish”. The pattern is very easy to see if we pay attention. It’s very common in tech circles, where people tend to be easily excited about new things.
    • forgetfreeman 2y ago
      This has always seemed wild to me. New tech always always sucks. In complex problem spaces it takes years to effectively identify use cases, edge cases, and bugs and get all that shit ironed out, and yet the enthusiasm you speak of is pervasive.
      • mrguyorama 2y ago
        That's because tech fetishists are buying hope and optimism. If they actually cared about how to build the future they would be into engineering: Paperwork, standards, logistics, non-destructive tests, monitoring, certification, other "boring" stuff. Tech people LOVED bitching about how complicated the USB-C standard is, how it does too much, etc. Guess what? As a consumer, I can plug pretty much anything into anything else, use literally any brick to charge nearly any device, deliver outstanding amounts of wattage over cables the size of headphone wires, for pretty cheap, and USB-C docks that you just plug into whatever and things just hook up and function. It does that because of the millions spent on human beings spending time to work out bugs, work around edge cases, discover what people tolerate and care about with the standard, etc. Consumers ignored all the complaints about it being complicated and just fucking used it and it's ubiquitous and works for pretty much everyone and the only people who have bad experiences are the ones buying exclusively fraudulent cables off amazon and only some of those people are hitting those problems! I can just plug a cable into the power port and get HDMI out of my steam deck. Holy shit. THAT'S the future.
• himinlomax 2y ago
  There's just no economic case for fusion. It's useful research, but current fission does the job better, and we already have decades of proven reserves, centuries likely if we kept looking for new reserves ... and then thousands of years from sea water extraction. There's also many paths to improved fission. Fast neutron reactors, thorium, small fast neutron reactors for industrial heat, thorium reactors, accelerator-driven subcritical reactors ... Millions of years of fuel available and new ways to use the output beyond boiling water for electricity. Note that I'm not mentioning slow neutron SMR, they're mostly pointless and just an excuse not to build current and perfectly fine PWR/BWR/heavy water reactors.
  • felbane 2y ago
    I like the idea of the passively-safe, waste-reducing LFTR but it's still a materials science issue at this point, and there's no real solution in sight. Fission still has this huge stigma about "nuclear=dangerous and bad" which clearly isn't true with the growing number of passively-safe designs... but nobody wants to fund development of those into proper commercial reactors. Meanwhile, fusion is still different and futuristic enough to have support from governments and the general public.
    • naasking 2y ago
      > I like the idea of the passively-safe, waste-reducing LFTR but it's still a materials science issue at this point, and there's no real solution in sight. Seems ironic that in a thread about fusion with loads of difficult technical challenges that will still require decades of research after 60 years of investment and research have already been poured into it, a minor issue of slight corrosion in LFTR requiring maybe a few years of research is seen as an insurmountable obstacle with "no real solution in sight".
      • himinlomax 2y ago
        The solution may already be here, in the form of ceramics already used in aeronautics. A French startup is working on a small reactor for industrial heat with them.
• rqtwteye 2y ago
  I definitely prefer spending the money on fusion over rushing a Mars mission. Fusion is probably cheaper than Mars and will actually benefit humanity. Which is not something I can say about going to Mars (or even the moon).
  • slashdev 2y ago
    A Mars mission would benefit humanity, but less directly. The past lunar missions and space program benefited humanity in many ways. For pure return on investment, I agree with your take. Provided of course that any future threats to humanity as a single planet civilization don’t materialize. There’s a low and uncertain tail risk ignored in our calculation.
    • GaggiX 2y ago
      Are you saying that the benefit to humanity of a Mars mission is that if the Earth explodes, we have an uninhabitable planet (under any realistic expectations) to stay on?
      • nwiswell 2y ago
        No, he clearly said that a "second home for humanity" is of dubious (but potentially nonzero) value. Rather, the main benefit would lie in the technological advances made in order to enable such a Mars mission in the first place (similar to advances during Apollo).
        • GaggiX 2y ago
          >Rather, the main benefit would lie in the technological advances made in order to enable such a Mars mission in the first place I agree with this view, but the comment I was replying to only mentioned as a benefit that Mars could be a second home (which I find rather ridiculous).
          • nwiswell 2y ago
• zamalek 2y ago
  I think the funding has had a modest stimulus, and that was always the locus of causation for "perpetually x years away." Private fusion especially (but I do think their claims are somewhat overstated).
• pfdietz 2y ago
  I do enjoy how mindless some of the fusion advocacy is. Why do you think a result like this would make anyone less skeptical of fusion? Ability to run a device for this long is not the obstacle to success for nuclear fusion. This is just another vastly overhyped "breakthrough", which we seem to have every week. I've followed fusion for probably longer than you've been alive, and there are fundamental showstoppers for the common approaches, particularly tokamaks and stellarators. Fusion may have a chance with unconventional approaches, like Helion's, but the consensus approach looks like an exercise in groupthink that won't lead anywhere.
  • arrobbiato 2y ago
    Agreed with all of this. And, there’s an implicit criticism of science journalism here. Any article that suggests useful fusion reactors are X years away should address the massive unsolved engineering problems that have to be surmounted. But no news source is going to spend five or six extra paragraphs explaining neutron metal activation or hydrogen embrittlement.
  • 1970-01-01 2y ago
    >Why do you think a result like this would make anyone less skeptical of fusion? Just 9 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43000301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43000301 >>Ability to run a device for this long is not the obstacle to success for nuclear fusion. What an odd take. Do you also consider the list of flight endurance records to be immaterial to aircraft evolution? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_endurance_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_endurance_record
    • pfdietz 2y ago
      Focus on relatively unimportant subtasks has a name. It's called "bikeshedding". This achievement is relatively unimportant. It's not the major issue that would block a DT fusion reactor. As such, achieving it doesn't move the needle much on the plausibility of DT fusion in tokamaks.
      • 2y ago
• 0x457 2y ago
  Actually, this only reinforces "fusion is only 10 years away". I blame journalists not being able to proprely report on this subject.