6 ms·

When you wish upon a star: nuclear fusion and the promise of a brighter tomorrow

58 points by wowsig 12y ago

TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
"We don’t know where we are going to get our energy from in the second half of this century, and if we don’t get fusion working we are going to be really stuck." We have nuclear, solar, and wind. Even if Iter is successful it will take -guessing here- decades to bring it to production and the better part of half a century to roll it out in any significant way. I think the next technological leap will be in manipulating huge amounts of energy, maybe we can warp space and go to the starts. So something like fusion power is probably necessary for that. In the mean time, I think we can keep the lights on. "The promise of fusion, if scientists can get it to work, is huge – unlimited power without any carbon emissions and very little radioactive waste." I'm interested in how much CO2 is emitted to produce 400,000 tonnes of steel and concrete. I wonder what the life time emissions are for a fusion power plant, given that nothing lasts forever it will have to be maintained and have major rebuilds. This is an experimental design, so it will probably never pay back construction related CO2 emissions, so we should look at the numbers for a theoretical production unit, and how those numbers compare to other power generation technologies.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  A typical coal plant burns a box-car of pure carbon every 15 minutes. Compared to that, the amount of CO2 generated producing 400,000 tonnes of steel and concrete is negligible. Fission is currently our only scalable, safe, cost-effective replacement for baseload coal. Fusion would be an alternative-alternative. Wind/solar plus batteries is a backup plan. At this point, given what we know about climate change--and more to the point what we don't know yet, but will find out empirically if we keep down the no-nukes road--it is very difficult to be opposed to fission power. We are only "stuck" with out fusion because anti-technology crusaders have made it effectively impossible to build more of the solution we have in hand.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
    Yes, in the pursuit of perfect we appear to be overlooking good. With what we know about Gen III+ and what we're told about Gen IV nuclear fission, we should probably be doing a war-like roll-out of existing and new nuclear technology. I grew up in South Australia which is host to the worlds largest known single deposit of uranium in the world.[1] Maralinga in the Woomera Prohibited Area is the site of seven British nuclear tests.[2] Australia is also host to the OECD's dirtiest coal fired power station, Hazelwood Power Station in Victoria[3]. There's definitely some irony going there. I suppose if it weren't for Greenpeace and Friends Of the Earth Australia might have had nuclear power by now, or at least process and value-add our uranium ore. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Dam,_South_Australia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Dam,_South_Australia 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nuclear_tests_at_Maralinga http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nuclear_tests_at_Marali... 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_Power_Station http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_Power_Station Edit: fixed a word
- Shivetya 12y ago
  You do realize that maintaining windmills is a constant affair, their install costs and such are not insignificant. I won't even touch the damage they can do to birds and bats. Solar might be worse depending on which tech you implement. Besides simply all the site improvements required you have entire factories elsewhere making the bulk of the parts and many of those processes are not that clean. Then top it all off with getting the power to where it is needed. Wind power pretty much has locations where its more ideal to build. Solar's foot print does similar. A fusion plant, probably could simply replace any large coal facility which would get you two birds with one stone
  - TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
    Yes, I'm well aware of the input and maintenance requirements for wind turbines. One company I have worked for manufactured a bunch of turbine masts. Lots of steel, lots of welding. Though I reckon, with nuclear fission + solar + wind, when and where it makes sense to use each technology, we can keep the lights on, buying us time to develop even cleaner more efficient forms of electricity production. The small modular reactor designs we've been hearing more about recently sound like a really good idea for drop-in replacements for existing coal fired power stations. Though retro-fitting new technology to existing plant is often a better idea on paper. But at least the existing sites can be reused.
- onion2k 12y ago
  I wonder what the life time emissions are for a fusion power plant, given that nothing lasts forever it will have to be maintained and have major rebuilds. For the first fusion plant it'll be a huge loss environmentally speaking. But they'll improve as we learn and iterate the design and building process until eventually they're better than anything we can imagine today. That can't happen unless we build the first one. In the long term they're definitely the best possible energy source for the environment.
- simonh 12y ago
  > I'm interested in how much CO2 is emitted to produce 400,000 tonnes of steel and concrete. If the steel and concrete plants are powered by electricity generated using coal, a lot. If they're powered by electricity generated using Fusion, much, much less. It's not just those plants either, if the ships transporting the materials have fusion power plants. If the trains and trucks run on fusion generated electricity. All of a sudden the carbon footprint of the entire economy collapses.
- DanBC 12y ago
  We've learnt a lot from Sellafield - an early nuclear plant in Britain (which was mostly used to provide material for military use). That site is a disaster and will take very many years and a lot of money to clean.
- DennisP 12y ago
  "ITER has been designed to produce 500 MW of output power for 50 MW of input power" and its construction "will require 16,000 tons of rebar, 150,000 m³ of concrete and 7,500 tons of steel for the building structures." [0] By comparison, "a MW of installed capacity for wind requires 460 metric tons of steel and 870 m3 of concrete compared to the 98 metric tons of steel and 160 m3 of concrete for coal, and the even lower 40 metric tons of steel and 90 m3 of concrete for nuclear" [1] So to match ITER's 450MW net with wind power, your turbines would require 270,000 metric tons of steel and 391,500 m^3 of concrete, several times more than ITER will need. This neglects thermal inefficiency for ITER, but on the other hand ITER is an experimental reactor and the followup DEMO plant is supposed to get 2 to 4 gigawatts with a size only 15% larger. [2] Also, the wind figures are for capacity, not actual output, so the numbers are pretty comparable anyway...it'd be reasonable to assume 30% thermal efficiency and 30% wind capacity factor. But you're right that ITER/DEMO has a pretty long timeline, which is why I favor smaller-scale alternate approaches (as well as advanced fission). [0] http://www.iter.org/factsfigures http://www.iter.org/factsfigures [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/07/01/is-the-answer-my-friend-blowing-in-the-wind/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/07/01/is-the-ans... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO
  - TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
    Thank you.
- jobposter1234 12y ago
  900 kg of CO2 per ton of cement. According to Wikipedia, it generates up to 5% of worldwide manmade CO2 emissions. 1.8 metric tons of CO2 per ton of steel. 200k metric tons of cement = 180k metric tons of CO2 200k metric tons of steel = 360k metric tons of CO2.
acd 12y ago
Thorcon power underground fusion molten salt reactor using ship design. http://thorconpower.com/ http://thorconpower.com/ Lockheed martin compact fusion http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.htm... We are marching towards the fusion age, looking forward to that since we do not need to pump monarchy/dictator oil in the cars which is directly funding extreme religion which is a source for terrorism. Combine fusion with a battery breakthrough for electric cars and we will have clean air cities and cheap transportation!
- arethuza 12y ago
  Isn't Thorcon a molten salt fission reactor?
  - DennisP 12y ago
    It is. Interesting approach, instead of tackling corrosion with advanced alloys, they just use plain ol' steel and design the reactor so it's easy to replace all the pipes every four years.
  - msandford 12y ago
    Yes, but it's not a traditional fission reactor that uses 1% of the fuel and wastes the other 99%. "Fission" is only a dirty word because of the types of fission reactors that have been built. If you build a fission reactor that burns say, 99% of the fuel and only wastes 1% of it, suddenly it's just as good as fusion, but better because we already know how to do it and we already have tested the design. Fission or fusion doesn't matter, it's the fuel lifecycle, plant lifecycle and the quantity of waste products per energy output that matter.
- DennisP 12y ago
  Also Helion, UW's Dynomak, Sandia's MagLIF, LPP's focus fusion, IEC's polywell, General Fusion, and Tri-Alpha, just to take a selection of active projects with relatively near-term timelines. Ycombinator put some money into Helion: http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/y-combinator-and-mithril-invest-in-helion-a-nuclear-fusion-startup/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/y-combinator-and-mithril-in...
mohawk 12y ago
We have a large and wonderful fusion reactor fully operational and running already, at a safe distance of 1.5e11 meters. All we have to do is harvest its energy output, with solar panels, windmills, or hydroelectric. The price of panels has been going down by 15% a year for the last couple of years. What's more likely, incremental improvements to solar panels and batteries that make them the cheapest energy source, or a breakthrough in nuclear fusion? My bet is on the small but steady improvements... I think fusion power is a useful thing to research though, in case the sky goes dark one day.
- jimktrains2 12y ago
  > I think fusion power is a useful thing to research though, in case the sky goes dark one day. "Someone started a war, and no one knows who, but it was known that it was mankind who blotted out the sky, attempting to deprive the machines of the solar power they required to function." or perhaps: Johann Johannsson - Sun's Gone Dim (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv4CuIIspdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv4CuIIspdE) Moreover (and more seriously), though, fusion could be incredibly useful in terms of rocketry and power generation further out in the solar system.
  - mohawk 12y ago
    In the long run, the sky going dark is not such an unlikely scenario. Big asteroid impact or a large volcanic eruption would be enough. Or some big war, sadly we tend to have them quite frequently. I forgot that was the background story to The Matrix... :-) I agree that fusion power would also be great for travelling into deep space. In the reeeally long run, there is no other choice for mankind.
- nmeofthestate 12y ago
  I think fusion power or nuclear in general is a vital area of research, given the massive problems we need to overcome for solar (or "solar-indirect") renewables to ever have a hope of sustaining civilisation as it is now.
  - 12y ago
enterx 12y ago
Thumbs up for the article! We should talk more about this topic and less about some 2 year projects. Take for example Google Maps project... it sure made a huge impact of the geographic mobility of humans but IMHO even today is questionable does it even match the impact that SABRE made. :)

58 points by wowsig 12y ago

"We don’t know where we are going to get our energy from in the second half of this century, and if we don’t get fusion working we are going to be really stuck." We have nuclear, solar, and wind. Even if Iter is successful it will take -guessing here- decades to bring it to production and the better part of half a century to roll it out in any significant way. I think the next technological leap will be in manipulating huge amounts of energy, maybe we can warp space and go to the starts. So something like fusion power is probably necessary for that. In the mean time, I think we can keep the lights on. "The promise of fusion, if scientists can get it to work, is huge – unlimited power without any carbon emissions and very little radioactive waste." I'm interested in how much CO2 is emitted to produce 400,000 tonnes of steel and concrete. I wonder what the life time emissions are for a fusion power plant, given that nothing lasts forever it will have to be maintained and have major rebuilds. This is an experimental design, so it will probably never pay back construction related CO2 emissions, so we should look at the numbers for a theoretical production unit, and how those numbers compare to other power generation technologies.

tjradcliffe 12y ago
A typical coal plant burns a box-car of pure carbon every 15 minutes. Compared to that, the amount of CO2 generated producing 400,000 tonnes of steel and concrete is negligible. Fission is currently our only scalable, safe, cost-effective replacement for baseload coal. Fusion would be an alternative-alternative. Wind/solar plus batteries is a backup plan. At this point, given what we know about climate change--and more to the point what we don't know yet, but will find out empirically if we keep down the no-nukes road--it is very difficult to be opposed to fission power. We are only "stuck" with out fusion because anti-technology crusaders have made it effectively impossible to build more of the solution we have in hand.
- TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
  Yes, in the pursuit of perfect we appear to be overlooking good. With what we know about Gen III+ and what we're told about Gen IV nuclear fission, we should probably be doing a war-like roll-out of existing and new nuclear technology. I grew up in South Australia which is host to the worlds largest known single deposit of uranium in the world.[1] Maralinga in the Woomera Prohibited Area is the site of seven British nuclear tests.[2] Australia is also host to the OECD's dirtiest coal fired power station, Hazelwood Power Station in Victoria[3]. There's definitely some irony going there. I suppose if it weren't for Greenpeace and Friends Of the Earth Australia might have had nuclear power by now, or at least process and value-add our uranium ore. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Dam,_South_Australia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Dam,_South_Australia 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nuclear_tests_at_Maralinga http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nuclear_tests_at_Marali... 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_Power_Station http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_Power_Station Edit: fixed a word
Shivetya 12y ago
You do realize that maintaining windmills is a constant affair, their install costs and such are not insignificant. I won't even touch the damage they can do to birds and bats. Solar might be worse depending on which tech you implement. Besides simply all the site improvements required you have entire factories elsewhere making the bulk of the parts and many of those processes are not that clean. Then top it all off with getting the power to where it is needed. Wind power pretty much has locations where its more ideal to build. Solar's foot print does similar. A fusion plant, probably could simply replace any large coal facility which would get you two birds with one stone
- TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
  Yes, I'm well aware of the input and maintenance requirements for wind turbines. One company I have worked for manufactured a bunch of turbine masts. Lots of steel, lots of welding. Though I reckon, with nuclear fission + solar + wind, when and where it makes sense to use each technology, we can keep the lights on, buying us time to develop even cleaner more efficient forms of electricity production. The small modular reactor designs we've been hearing more about recently sound like a really good idea for drop-in replacements for existing coal fired power stations. Though retro-fitting new technology to existing plant is often a better idea on paper. But at least the existing sites can be reused.
onion2k 12y ago
I wonder what the life time emissions are for a fusion power plant, given that nothing lasts forever it will have to be maintained and have major rebuilds. For the first fusion plant it'll be a huge loss environmentally speaking. But they'll improve as we learn and iterate the design and building process until eventually they're better than anything we can imagine today. That can't happen unless we build the first one. In the long term they're definitely the best possible energy source for the environment.
simonh 12y ago
> I'm interested in how much CO2 is emitted to produce 400,000 tonnes of steel and concrete. If the steel and concrete plants are powered by electricity generated using coal, a lot. If they're powered by electricity generated using Fusion, much, much less. It's not just those plants either, if the ships transporting the materials have fusion power plants. If the trains and trucks run on fusion generated electricity. All of a sudden the carbon footprint of the entire economy collapses.
DanBC 12y ago
We've learnt a lot from Sellafield - an early nuclear plant in Britain (which was mostly used to provide material for military use). That site is a disaster and will take very many years and a lot of money to clean.
DennisP 12y ago
"ITER has been designed to produce 500 MW of output power for 50 MW of input power" and its construction "will require 16,000 tons of rebar, 150,000 m³ of concrete and 7,500 tons of steel for the building structures." [0] By comparison, "a MW of installed capacity for wind requires 460 metric tons of steel and 870 m3 of concrete compared to the 98 metric tons of steel and 160 m3 of concrete for coal, and the even lower 40 metric tons of steel and 90 m3 of concrete for nuclear" [1] So to match ITER's 450MW net with wind power, your turbines would require 270,000 metric tons of steel and 391,500 m^3 of concrete, several times more than ITER will need. This neglects thermal inefficiency for ITER, but on the other hand ITER is an experimental reactor and the followup DEMO plant is supposed to get 2 to 4 gigawatts with a size only 15% larger. [2] Also, the wind figures are for capacity, not actual output, so the numbers are pretty comparable anyway...it'd be reasonable to assume 30% thermal efficiency and 30% wind capacity factor. But you're right that ITER/DEMO has a pretty long timeline, which is why I favor smaller-scale alternate approaches (as well as advanced fission). [0] http://www.iter.org/factsfigures http://www.iter.org/factsfigures [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/07/01/is-the-answer-my-friend-blowing-in-the-wind/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/07/01/is-the-ans... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO
- TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
  Thank you.
jobposter1234 12y ago
900 kg of CO2 per ton of cement. According to Wikipedia, it generates up to 5% of worldwide manmade CO2 emissions. 1.8 metric tons of CO2 per ton of steel. 200k metric tons of cement = 180k metric tons of CO2 200k metric tons of steel = 360k metric tons of CO2.

acd 12y ago

Thorcon power underground fusion molten salt reactor using ship design. http://thorconpower.com/ http://thorconpower.com/ Lockheed martin compact fusion http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.htm... We are marching towards the fusion age, looking forward to that since we do not need to pump monarchy/dictator oil in the cars which is directly funding extreme religion which is a source for terrorism. Combine fusion with a battery breakthrough for electric cars and we will have clean air cities and cheap transportation!

arethuza 12y ago
Isn't Thorcon a molten salt fission reactor?
- DennisP 12y ago
  It is. Interesting approach, instead of tackling corrosion with advanced alloys, they just use plain ol' steel and design the reactor so it's easy to replace all the pipes every four years.
- msandford 12y ago
  Yes, but it's not a traditional fission reactor that uses 1% of the fuel and wastes the other 99%. "Fission" is only a dirty word because of the types of fission reactors that have been built. If you build a fission reactor that burns say, 99% of the fuel and only wastes 1% of it, suddenly it's just as good as fusion, but better because we already know how to do it and we already have tested the design. Fission or fusion doesn't matter, it's the fuel lifecycle, plant lifecycle and the quantity of waste products per energy output that matter.
DennisP 12y ago
Also Helion, UW's Dynomak, Sandia's MagLIF, LPP's focus fusion, IEC's polywell, General Fusion, and Tri-Alpha, just to take a selection of active projects with relatively near-term timelines. Ycombinator put some money into Helion: http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/y-combinator-and-mithril-invest-in-helion-a-nuclear-fusion-startup/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/y-combinator-and-mithril-in...

mohawk 12y ago

We have a large and wonderful fusion reactor fully operational and running already, at a safe distance of 1.5e11 meters. All we have to do is harvest its energy output, with solar panels, windmills, or hydroelectric. The price of panels has been going down by 15% a year for the last couple of years. What's more likely, incremental improvements to solar panels and batteries that make them the cheapest energy source, or a breakthrough in nuclear fusion? My bet is on the small but steady improvements... I think fusion power is a useful thing to research though, in case the sky goes dark one day.

jimktrains2 12y ago
> I think fusion power is a useful thing to research though, in case the sky goes dark one day. "Someone started a war, and no one knows who, but it was known that it was mankind who blotted out the sky, attempting to deprive the machines of the solar power they required to function." or perhaps: Johann Johannsson - Sun's Gone Dim (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv4CuIIspdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv4CuIIspdE) Moreover (and more seriously), though, fusion could be incredibly useful in terms of rocketry and power generation further out in the solar system.
- mohawk 12y ago
  In the long run, the sky going dark is not such an unlikely scenario. Big asteroid impact or a large volcanic eruption would be enough. Or some big war, sadly we tend to have them quite frequently. I forgot that was the background story to The Matrix... :-) I agree that fusion power would also be great for travelling into deep space. In the reeeally long run, there is no other choice for mankind.
nmeofthestate 12y ago
I think fusion power or nuclear in general is a vital area of research, given the massive problems we need to overcome for solar (or "solar-indirect") renewables to ever have a hope of sustaining civilisation as it is now.
- 12y ago

enterx 12y ago

Thumbs up for the article! We should talk more about this topic and less about some 2 year projects. Take for example Google Maps project... it sure made a huge impact of the geographic mobility of humans but IMHO even today is questionable does it even match the impact that SABRE made. :)