8 ms·

Just out of curiosity: what if fusion was perfected? what are the consequences? massive economic growth & population? Does the earth become an heat sink?

Breakthrough 14y ago
It's a heat sink right now. Hydroelectric generation aside, efficiency for electricity generation is pretty much always below 40%! That, however, is since almost all our plants use the Carnot/Rankine cycle heat engine. Again though, even those watts of electricity eventually get turned back into heat. Gotta love entropy... The consequences of us having fusion? The good, we get cheap, abundant electricity for the entirety of the planet's lifespan with almost no harmful byproducts, made by a nuclear plant that's impossible to melt down or be used in the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The bad, we have to build the plants, and possibly replace the old ones. That indicates a large shift in jobs, and makes you wonder how we can afford it (although improving economic conditions should make the latter less of a downside as fusion becomes viable).
- Retric 14y ago
  There are power plants that hit 42% theremal and dump waste heat, others reuses that waste heat for things like home/office heating and hit 70+ efficiency. So really one of the best solutions is simply to find ways to reuse waste heat. Granted, you would still need massive shielding even with a tin can sized fusion reactor, but assuming ther safe enough to put near city's you could got a lot of winter heating practically for free.
  - Breakthrough 14y ago
    Yes, that's called co-generation (or combined heat/power plants). I can't comment on fusion reactors, but this isn't really feasible with fission reactors, since the coolant becomes radioactive. Sure you could run it through several loops to bring it down to a safe level, but then you're losing efficiency at each sub-stage. I'd also like to point out you can only achieve those high efficiency numbers when you're actually using the heat.
    - icegreentea 14y ago
      The coolant in the actual nuclear reactor itself is radioactive. But all the working fluid in the heat engine (including heat dissipation) is safe. Could you imagine how ridiculous it would be to do maintenance on your radioactive turbines?
      - Retric 14y ago
        The turbines become slightly radioactive. http://natgeotv.com/asia/worlds-toughest-fixes/videos/going-nuclear http://natgeotv.com/asia/worlds-toughest-fixes/videos/going-... but one more loop and your home free.
networked 14y ago
For one thing (the one that's guaranteed), nuclear power would get a lot safer [1]. If our expectations about fusion's efficiency [2] are correct then in the long run we would have to worry much less about our conventional sources of energy and the environmental price that comes with using them. The questions of peak oil and CO_2 emissions would be at least partially defused regardless of how much of a threat they really represent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Accident_potential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Accident_potentia... [2] http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/its_not_fission http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/its_not_fissio...
fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago
Even if perfected it still wont be free. Creating it and then sending it all over the world will cost quite a bit of money. So we'll probably (hopefully!) just get cheaper energy. And that's why I don't think it will impact economic growth that much. But it will hopefully reduce our CO2 emissions. The reduced CO2 should make the climate colder. Continued economic growth will dump more heat into the air. But as we expect global population to peak at only a couple more billion people, would the energy humanity dumps into the air be comparable to how much the sun dumps into each square meter of the earth every day?
- rayiner 14y ago
  > And that's why I don't think it will impact economic growth that much. Economic growth is hugely tied to energy costs.
- ISL 14y ago
  The sun drops roughly a kilowatt/square meter of energy onto the earth. A toaster uses roughly a kilowatt. The sun delivers a huge quantity of energy compared with that used by humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earths_energy_budget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earths_energy_budget
ScotterC 14y ago
There are a great amount of powers that do not want cheap electricity for the world. "Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun." - Paul Ehrlich. Or Amory Lovins, who was advisor to many U.S. presidents who said "If you ask me, it'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it." I completely disagree with the above sentiment, but you can be sure that energy companies will always try to limit supply so that demand can be set at the right price for them to make the profit they want. We're seeing it right now with natural gas cornering the american market. NG's prices are notoriously volatile because it's easy for the companies delivering it to change the supply until demand is where they want it.
- javert 14y ago
  If that's the case, you should start a natural gas company, and set your prices to be profitable but still beat all those other companies.
  - ScotterC 14y ago
    It's certainly not a bad idea. I'm avoiding capital intensive companies for the moment :)
ChuckMcM 14y ago
The world changes in a very significant way. Three things become true: 1) Oil no longer has to be dug out of the ground, various long chain hydrocarbons can be created with the CO2 in the air and water. 2) Fresh water no longer becomes an issue because arbitrary amounts of sea water can be converted into fresh water. 3) Generally food becomes easier to produce as both more land is available for it (irrigate with desalinated water) and 'food products' like corn aren't used in energy products. The other two fusion science experiments go under the monikers of 'polywell fusion' and 'focus fusion'. That stays away from the various "low energy nuclear" type devices which are currently considered hoax material (and popular on the e-cat site) by most scientists. The discovery of a practical fusion system is one of the 'good' things that could happen in the next 50 years which would change the world in mostly 'good' ways (mostly because economies that depend on oil exports would lose pricing authority on oil and slowly collapse, leaving behind angry and often dysfunctional nation-states)
- fulafel 14y ago
  You seem to be assuming zero capital costs for fusion plants and hydrocarbon synth capacity. Think about how cheap those would have to be in order to make oil burning economically unprofitable. And what about after oil price adjusts to decreased demand. The vast majority of oil production is profitable at very low oil prices (it was still making oil sheiks filthy rich at < $20 a barrel). So you'd need to get something like $5/barrel synthetic oil to stop a free market system from pumping up and burning the fossilized oil.
  - justincormack 14y ago
    Oil costs are way higher than $20 a barrel now. Extraction takes a lot of drilling and so on even in the easy places.
    - fulafel 14y ago
      that's the marginal cost of new hard to reach oil. the existing established wells are on average cheap. eliminating just the hardest few percent of production doesn't help with our co2 problem.
dalke 14y ago
No one can answer that question without knowing what "perfected" looks like. A Back to the Future-style Mr. Fusion, which can produce 1.21 GW in a volume the size of a household coffee grinder, is quite different than a large plant which produces the same. The large power plants based on oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, etc. are thermal power stations. They use heat to convert liquid water into steam, which then drives steam turbines. These necessarily (by the laws of thermodynamics) produce a lot of waste heat. More than half of the energy used to heat the water is not turned into power at the end. The waste heat is dumped in the large condensers of the cooling towers, which often have the characteristic hyperboloid shape because it's the most efficient form. This requires a lot of space. So a commercial fusion system for large-scale use, if it can be built, would likely be little different than a nuclear power plant now, because it requires a big steam turbine at a large facility. On a smaller scale, you might replace a large ship's diesel engines with electrically-driven fusion powered systems. This would reduce ship pollution and reduce the number of times it needs to refuel. (Assuming that a perfected system needs little maintenance otherwise.) We don't think it's possible to get fusion power to an even smaller scale, other than people whose proposals and work are difficult to distinguish from a perpetual motion machine scams. If we did have Mr. Fusion, then it would be a game changer. We would be able to have airplanes and helicopters driven by electric motors, powered by Mr. Fusion. You could probably think about the other things possible of power were essentially free. What about heaters under the sidewalks to melt the ice? I loved going to the outdoor heated pools in Iceland, heated by cheap geothermal. With free power, we would see more outdoor pools elsewhere. More people would have hothouses for growing flowers and plants in winter. Canada could become a major producer of orchids. People in Haiti wouldn't have to strip their country of trees in order to get power. And so on. Mr. Fusion isn't going to happen, at least not soon. We'll still need transmission lines. This sets a lower limit on the cost of power. Life would be like in Iceland or the Pacific NW, where power is cheap enough that aluminum smelters relocated there for access to cheap power, or where data centers get located in the Dells for cheap power and cooling for data centers. (And where farmers use the cheap power for moving water around.) In other words, not much different than it is now. Except with less dependency on petroleum sources and the global politics that that entails.
- cstross 14y ago
Someone 14y ago
Assuming 'perfected' means you could produce power effectively for free: global politics would change a lot, as coal, oil and natural gas prices would drop. Also, power usage would skyrocket. Obvious growth areas would be flying cars, mining other than for coal/gas/oil (for example, somebody might think of ways to locate likely locations for dinosaur skeletons a mile down and start digging for them) and space exploration. Flying cars could lead to people living more dispersed (with cars, there is pressure to live near a road; if everybody has a heli, pressure likely would be to not live too close together, as that would make flying your car more dangerous) Environment-wise, I guess that spread of population would negatively affect nature. On the other hand, with free energy, we would not need fracking or other mining operations might be able to stop pumping up water, recycling it instead. Chances also are that people would start terraforming on a small scale. For example, Egypt has pyramids and a few tropical beaches, but could have some closer by them. While at it, it also could have ski slopes next to them. Additional heat production could become a problem, but that would only become problematic if energy consumption grew by huge factors. Solar irradiation in Wh currently is way higher than what is produced from burning coal, gas, etc, and we would produce way fewer greenhouse gases. It also is fixable. For example, if we were to melt the ice caps because of unlimited energy use, we could paint the poles and, if needed, the Sahara, whiter than they have ever been, thus reflecting more of the sun's heat. Eventually, I think we would either move mostly of the planet or change earth so much that nobody would recognize it anymore.
bcoates 14y ago
The short answer is that realistic fusion plants would have few advantages over uranium fission plants that exist today. Long answer: Fuel: Both are likely to use expensive but not scarce fuels but produce so much output from it that it doesn't matter. Cost: Almost entirely in the plant infrastructure for both. Fusion is likely to be at a permanent disadvantage here, as both coal and fission plants are simple compared to hypothetical fusion plants. Waste: Likely small advantage to fusion, as it probably won't produce proliferation-sensitive waste just a bunch of irradiated eqiupment and buildings that are easier to deal with. Safety: It'll probably be more dangerous to work at a fusion plant than a fission one by orders of magnitude, but the negligible danger to people outside the plant will be lower. A Fukushima/Chernobyl situation at a fusion plant would be bad but less bad. NIMBY: Equal for both, the scariness of an energy generating technology is inversely proportional to its practicality. Did you know that Einstein predicted that a fusion containment loss would cause the atmosphere to light on fire in a runaway reaction that kills all life on earth except for oil company executives and people who work in the advertising industry? Do we really want to take that risk with our children?
- eliben 14y ago
  Genuinely curious - aren't fusion plants both safer and use cheaper-to-get and more-abundant materials?
  - ISL 14y ago
    See other posts referencing D-T and other fuel cycles. The D is deuterium and the T is tritium. Hydrogen-Hydrogen fusion is more challenging than more exotic types. D-T is, in a sense, the easiest, but both ingredients have non-trivial costs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Fuel_cycle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Fuel_cycle The GP post is erudite on activation. Fusion creates a lot of neutrons, which will render the reactor assembly itself radioactive, especially on short timescales. The waste problem is smaller, especially when compared to non-reprocessed fission waste, but not zero. An upside to fusion is the lack of usable bomb material in the waste stream. So, safer, yes, but not completely safe.
rst 14y ago
Re "heat sink": Most of the global climatic effects of our current energy infrastructure are due to the greenhouse effect, not direct heating. This stops going, which can only be a good thing (though at this point, a lot of greenhouse gains are already "baked in", absent some significant, and hugely expensive, project to take the greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere). Here's a physicist doing the math: http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2013/02/19/direct-and-indirect-heating-why-dont-power-plants-change-local-climate/ http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2013/02/19/direct-and-ind...

Breakthrough 14y ago

It's a heat sink right now. Hydroelectric generation aside, efficiency for electricity generation is pretty much always below 40%! That, however, is since almost all our plants use the Carnot/Rankine cycle heat engine. Again though, even those watts of electricity eventually get turned back into heat. Gotta love entropy... The consequences of us having fusion? The good, we get cheap, abundant electricity for the entirety of the planet's lifespan with almost no harmful byproducts, made by a nuclear plant that's impossible to melt down or be used in the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The bad, we have to build the plants, and possibly replace the old ones. That indicates a large shift in jobs, and makes you wonder how we can afford it (although improving economic conditions should make the latter less of a downside as fusion becomes viable).

Retric 14y ago
There are power plants that hit 42% theremal and dump waste heat, others reuses that waste heat for things like home/office heating and hit 70+ efficiency. So really one of the best solutions is simply to find ways to reuse waste heat. Granted, you would still need massive shielding even with a tin can sized fusion reactor, but assuming ther safe enough to put near city's you could got a lot of winter heating practically for free.
- Breakthrough 14y ago
  Yes, that's called co-generation (or combined heat/power plants). I can't comment on fusion reactors, but this isn't really feasible with fission reactors, since the coolant becomes radioactive. Sure you could run it through several loops to bring it down to a safe level, but then you're losing efficiency at each sub-stage. I'd also like to point out you can only achieve those high efficiency numbers when you're actually using the heat.
  - icegreentea 14y ago
    The coolant in the actual nuclear reactor itself is radioactive. But all the working fluid in the heat engine (including heat dissipation) is safe. Could you imagine how ridiculous it would be to do maintenance on your radioactive turbines?
    - Retric 14y ago
      The turbines become slightly radioactive. http://natgeotv.com/asia/worlds-toughest-fixes/videos/going-nuclear http://natgeotv.com/asia/worlds-toughest-fixes/videos/going-... but one more loop and your home free.

networked 14y ago

For one thing (the one that's guaranteed), nuclear power would get a lot safer [1]. If our expectations about fusion's efficiency [2] are correct then in the long run we would have to worry much less about our conventional sources of energy and the environmental price that comes with using them. The questions of peak oil and CO_2 emissions would be at least partially defused regardless of how much of a threat they really represent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Accident_potential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Accident_potentia... [2] http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/its_not_fission http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/its_not_fissio...

fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago

Even if perfected it still wont be free. Creating it and then sending it all over the world will cost quite a bit of money. So we'll probably (hopefully!) just get cheaper energy. And that's why I don't think it will impact economic growth that much. But it will hopefully reduce our CO2 emissions. The reduced CO2 should make the climate colder. Continued economic growth will dump more heat into the air. But as we expect global population to peak at only a couple more billion people, would the energy humanity dumps into the air be comparable to how much the sun dumps into each square meter of the earth every day?

rayiner 14y ago
> And that's why I don't think it will impact economic growth that much. Economic growth is hugely tied to energy costs.
ISL 14y ago
The sun drops roughly a kilowatt/square meter of energy onto the earth. A toaster uses roughly a kilowatt. The sun delivers a huge quantity of energy compared with that used by humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earths_energy_budget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earths_energy_budget

ScotterC 14y ago

There are a great amount of powers that do not want cheap electricity for the world. "Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun." - Paul Ehrlich. Or Amory Lovins, who was advisor to many U.S. presidents who said "If you ask me, it'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it." I completely disagree with the above sentiment, but you can be sure that energy companies will always try to limit supply so that demand can be set at the right price for them to make the profit they want. We're seeing it right now with natural gas cornering the american market. NG's prices are notoriously volatile because it's easy for the companies delivering it to change the supply until demand is where they want it.

javert 14y ago
If that's the case, you should start a natural gas company, and set your prices to be profitable but still beat all those other companies.
- ScotterC 14y ago
  It's certainly not a bad idea. I'm avoiding capital intensive companies for the moment :)

ChuckMcM 14y ago

The world changes in a very significant way. Three things become true: 1) Oil no longer has to be dug out of the ground, various long chain hydrocarbons can be created with the CO2 in the air and water. 2) Fresh water no longer becomes an issue because arbitrary amounts of sea water can be converted into fresh water. 3) Generally food becomes easier to produce as both more land is available for it (irrigate with desalinated water) and 'food products' like corn aren't used in energy products. The other two fusion science experiments go under the monikers of 'polywell fusion' and 'focus fusion'. That stays away from the various "low energy nuclear" type devices which are currently considered hoax material (and popular on the e-cat site) by most scientists. The discovery of a practical fusion system is one of the 'good' things that could happen in the next 50 years which would change the world in mostly 'good' ways (mostly because economies that depend on oil exports would lose pricing authority on oil and slowly collapse, leaving behind angry and often dysfunctional nation-states)

fulafel 14y ago
You seem to be assuming zero capital costs for fusion plants and hydrocarbon synth capacity. Think about how cheap those would have to be in order to make oil burning economically unprofitable. And what about after oil price adjusts to decreased demand. The vast majority of oil production is profitable at very low oil prices (it was still making oil sheiks filthy rich at < $20 a barrel). So you'd need to get something like $5/barrel synthetic oil to stop a free market system from pumping up and burning the fossilized oil.
- justincormack 14y ago
  Oil costs are way higher than $20 a barrel now. Extraction takes a lot of drilling and so on even in the easy places.
  - fulafel 14y ago
    that's the marginal cost of new hard to reach oil. the existing established wells are on average cheap. eliminating just the hardest few percent of production doesn't help with our co2 problem.

dalke 14y ago

No one can answer that question without knowing what "perfected" looks like. A Back to the Future-style Mr. Fusion, which can produce 1.21 GW in a volume the size of a household coffee grinder, is quite different than a large plant which produces the same. The large power plants based on oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, etc. are thermal power stations. They use heat to convert liquid water into steam, which then drives steam turbines. These necessarily (by the laws of thermodynamics) produce a lot of waste heat. More than half of the energy used to heat the water is not turned into power at the end. The waste heat is dumped in the large condensers of the cooling towers, which often have the characteristic hyperboloid shape because it's the most efficient form. This requires a lot of space. So a commercial fusion system for large-scale use, if it can be built, would likely be little different than a nuclear power plant now, because it requires a big steam turbine at a large facility. On a smaller scale, you might replace a large ship's diesel engines with electrically-driven fusion powered systems. This would reduce ship pollution and reduce the number of times it needs to refuel. (Assuming that a perfected system needs little maintenance otherwise.) We don't think it's possible to get fusion power to an even smaller scale, other than people whose proposals and work are difficult to distinguish from a perpetual motion machine scams. If we did have Mr. Fusion, then it would be a game changer. We would be able to have airplanes and helicopters driven by electric motors, powered by Mr. Fusion. You could probably think about the other things possible of power were essentially free. What about heaters under the sidewalks to melt the ice? I loved going to the outdoor heated pools in Iceland, heated by cheap geothermal. With free power, we would see more outdoor pools elsewhere. More people would have hothouses for growing flowers and plants in winter. Canada could become a major producer of orchids. People in Haiti wouldn't have to strip their country of trees in order to get power. And so on. Mr. Fusion isn't going to happen, at least not soon. We'll still need transmission lines. This sets a lower limit on the cost of power. Life would be like in Iceland or the Pacific NW, where power is cheap enough that aluminum smelters relocated there for access to cheap power, or where data centers get located in the Dells for cheap power and cooling for data centers. (And where farmers use the cheap power for moving water around.) In other words, not much different than it is now. Except with less dependency on petroleum sources and the global politics that that entails.

cstross 14y ago

Someone 14y ago

Assuming 'perfected' means you could produce power effectively for free: global politics would change a lot, as coal, oil and natural gas prices would drop. Also, power usage would skyrocket. Obvious growth areas would be flying cars, mining other than for coal/gas/oil (for example, somebody might think of ways to locate likely locations for dinosaur skeletons a mile down and start digging for them) and space exploration. Flying cars could lead to people living more dispersed (with cars, there is pressure to live near a road; if everybody has a heli, pressure likely would be to not live too close together, as that would make flying your car more dangerous) Environment-wise, I guess that spread of population would negatively affect nature. On the other hand, with free energy, we would not need fracking or other mining operations might be able to stop pumping up water, recycling it instead. Chances also are that people would start terraforming on a small scale. For example, Egypt has pyramids and a few tropical beaches, but could have some closer by them. While at it, it also could have ski slopes next to them. Additional heat production could become a problem, but that would only become problematic if energy consumption grew by huge factors. Solar irradiation in Wh currently is way higher than what is produced from burning coal, gas, etc, and we would produce way fewer greenhouse gases. It also is fixable. For example, if we were to melt the ice caps because of unlimited energy use, we could paint the poles and, if needed, the Sahara, whiter than they have ever been, thus reflecting more of the sun's heat. Eventually, I think we would either move mostly of the planet or change earth so much that nobody would recognize it anymore.

bcoates 14y ago

The short answer is that realistic fusion plants would have few advantages over uranium fission plants that exist today. Long answer: Fuel: Both are likely to use expensive but not scarce fuels but produce so much output from it that it doesn't matter. Cost: Almost entirely in the plant infrastructure for both. Fusion is likely to be at a permanent disadvantage here, as both coal and fission plants are simple compared to hypothetical fusion plants. Waste: Likely small advantage to fusion, as it probably won't produce proliferation-sensitive waste just a bunch of irradiated eqiupment and buildings that are easier to deal with. Safety: It'll probably be more dangerous to work at a fusion plant than a fission one by orders of magnitude, but the negligible danger to people outside the plant will be lower. A Fukushima/Chernobyl situation at a fusion plant would be bad but less bad. NIMBY: Equal for both, the scariness of an energy generating technology is inversely proportional to its practicality. Did you know that Einstein predicted that a fusion containment loss would cause the atmosphere to light on fire in a runaway reaction that kills all life on earth except for oil company executives and people who work in the advertising industry? Do we really want to take that risk with our children?

eliben 14y ago
Genuinely curious - aren't fusion plants both safer and use cheaper-to-get and more-abundant materials?
- ISL 14y ago
  See other posts referencing D-T and other fuel cycles. The D is deuterium and the T is tritium. Hydrogen-Hydrogen fusion is more challenging than more exotic types. D-T is, in a sense, the easiest, but both ingredients have non-trivial costs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Fuel_cycle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Fuel_cycle The GP post is erudite on activation. Fusion creates a lot of neutrons, which will render the reactor assembly itself radioactive, especially on short timescales. The waste problem is smaller, especially when compared to non-reprocessed fission waste, but not zero. An upside to fusion is the lack of usable bomb material in the waste stream. So, safer, yes, but not completely safe.

rst 14y ago

Re "heat sink": Most of the global climatic effects of our current energy infrastructure are due to the greenhouse effect, not direct heating. This stops going, which can only be a good thing (though at this point, a lot of greenhouse gains are already "baked in", absent some significant, and hugely expensive, project to take the greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere). Here's a physicist doing the math: http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2013/02/19/direct-and-indirect-heating-why-dont-power-plants-change-local-climate/ http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2013/02/19/direct-and-ind...