He says this is also a world record, but JET got 0.67 in 1997 (according to Wikipedia). The missing asterisk may be that this Q was the average for the whole shot, whereas the 1997 result may have been measured over a short time. Just my speculation, based on slide 21 here: https://fire.pppl.gov/iea_bp_w60_stork.pdf
The best bet for sustainable and clean energy is to stop using fossil fuels and figure out how to deal with the economic consequences.
I feel this optimism around this far off solutions for decades has been just a detrimental to climate action as out right climate denialism.
Growing up in the 90s I was always told "everything will be fine, since we'll figure it all out with technology". It wasn't until decades later, when I kept hearing this promising but seeing CO2 emissions rise that I looked into the details and realized how incredibly in danger our society is, as well as how nearly impossible to solve this problem is at this point.
The reason we shouldn't put our enthusiasm into it is because it's a distraction from the fact that we may already be past essential limits in our climate system and if we want any chance of survival as a civilization and potentially species we need drastic action now.
Describe to me the scenario where billions don't die?
I think you're pointing to the very likely reality which is that there is no way out. More often than not I agree with you. It's just a shame that, as a society, we've chosen not to even publicly allow conversations about what's really happening and the choices we have to make.
> Describe to me the scenario where billions don't die?
There is not one.
I was merely pointing what I think is an euphemism.
> we've chosen not to even publicly allow conversations about what's really happening and the choices we have to make.
Because we are ashamed. We all know that the price of our current comfort is blood. Now and in the future. And our human nature seem to be unable to abandon comfort once we have it.
What? We have the best bet for sustainable and clean energy.
Wind and Solar. They soon will beat natural gas for cheapest unsubsidized LCOE, and considering all fossil fuels are shadow-subsidized, that's huge.
Fusion needs to prove is can be cheaper than old-crappy-pressurized solid rod fission first, which is right now getting killed by alternative energy.
I was a big LFTR stan for a while. But wind/solar has won. Keep investing in fusion and fission, but they are subsidy and research projects right now only.
Storage likely will be a non-issue once sodium ion batteries scale up, even cheaper and safer than LFP. A couple more years of scale efficiencies and alt+storage will be cheaper without subsidies. Consumer solar+storage will be cheaper than nat gas in a couple years with any rational subsidy.
Land issues? Seriously?
The land issue for solar is a non-issue, it's like fake hand-wringing by the oil astroturfers over birds and windmills when skyscrapers kill 100xs more birds. There's this type of land called desert. Also, there is this thing called roofs where modern solar panels only need a small part of the roof to do a suburban house or apartment building including recharging your EV.
The land issue for wind is even less on an issue:
As for wind, I don't know if you've seen windmills on farms but... yeah, the pole doesn't take up much space. Then there is offshore wind. Windmills can integrate with existing use land (why not nature preserves?), you don't need to dedicate acreage to windmill farms.
Meanwhile, fusion reactors have a wee bit of problems with neutrons flying everywhere and turning the reactor vessels slightly radioactive from neutron capture. Maybe they'll fix that with good absorption spectrum elements, but let's not pretend fusion is 100% clean.
But again, the promise is there for fusion and LFTR/"new" fission. Keep the research, maybe the economics will turn around. Industry sure would need it to fully decarbonize, or, heck, space colonies. Or flying cars! Or any of the other sci-fi stuff we have given up on.
Right now we have an existential threat from GW, and an actual industrialized / productized and economic path is right there: wind and solar. That's what we need money printing for.
The land requirement for solar should not be so casually dismissed.
To power the US energy needs, you need an area about the size of New Jersey. Also roughly equivalent to the area taken up by roads. The interstate highway system alone has been cited as the largest public works project in history, and that's "just" asphalt.
The LCOE of solar and wind is cheaper than all fossil fuel plants and nuclear plants. Existing generation will peak load.
Look, any new nuclear or fusion project won't turn on for a decade. Given that even with inflation wind/solar STILL dropped in LCOE cost last year, and still likely has technological and economies of scale, you REALLY think a 10 year out fusion or nuclear project will launch at a price competitive with what even solar/wind + storage will be?
Solar/wind likely will be half the inflation adjusted cost it currently is now even with storage in 10 years.
LFP batteries are coming on the market now for storage that are half what lithium ion cost. Sodium will be release by CATL later this year or next. I'm not handwaving anything.
There is a LOT of roof real estate. A fair amount more than the interstate system. The costs are already pushing wind/solar to deploy as fast as it can be made, it basically is a production scaling problem.
New Jersey is not a large state, given we have west texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and lots of other desert. Which we don't need, because of rooftops and wind.
You can't say fusion is impractical while saying solar and wind is better by hand waving all the current concerns and technological walls we still haven't solved. Plans on an whiteboard do not count, sorry.
Storage isn't solved, land space isn't solved, efficiency isn't solved, just like fusion isn't a solved problem.
> Storage likely will be a non-issue once sodium ion batteries scale up, even cheaper and safer than LFP.
Sure, once storage is solved it will be a non-issue. But it is not currently solved, and you will forgive my skepticism.
I also never brought up land issues; I agree that it's not a real problem.
TL;DR we need to be realistic about the capabilities of solar + wind. You argue that storage will solve itself. Your sibling argues that we don't need storage at all.
The reality is that storage is a huge issue right now. It's the #1 technical issue stopping us from shutting down coal and natural gas plants.
Not nessesarily, alternative approach is to overbuild them 10x so thay we always generate more wnergy than we need and have continent spanning super-grid because it's always windy and sunny somewhere.
Today Boston has a sunrise at 11:47 am utc and Los Angeles has a sunset 1:30am utc. That is 10+ hours where the USA gets zero sunlight. Inconveniently, we also hit peak energy usage during those 10 dark hours.
So if you want to ignore the storage problem, you need to rely on wind only. And if you have to dramatically over provision production to be able to meet demand, the cost benefits disappear.
Storage is a must for renewables to really take off.
But I am not claiming there is any cost benefit at all - alI am claiming it's doable, and we will have zero or negative electricity price on windy days, that coupd be put to good use for electrolysis, hydrogen production, etc.
Going in the wrong direction with development that can never work as intended is always a waste no matter how good the goal. Incorrectly reporting this modest incremental change is the kind of thing that allows doomed projects like this to consume vast resources of money, material and skilled labor that could be used to explore other alternatives.
In what sense do you think this is good for sustainable energy? Do you think it will cost less, or have less environmental impact than, say, newer deep well geothermal? I'm not so optimistic that costs could ever be competitive with geothermal.
Doesn't deep geothermal generally require fracking? At least the geothermal plants that I've seen being implemented right now do. Is there any fancy new tech breaking through there currently?
I think both fusion and geothermal are very exciting, crazy thing is although geothermal sounds simpler, I have no idea what's holding it back technology-wise, yet I have a pretty good understanding of the state of fusion research right now.
Why couldn't we get geothermal without fracking? Is it so hard to establish a more controlled heat exchange channel down there? Harder than developing nuclear fusion?
Geothermal is very location sensitive and requires huge outlays upfront. Maybe it’d be a clearer choice if energy storage were better solved. It also requires political support to cross NIMBYism.
Aren't we at the point where most large scale infrastructure projects require huge outlays? Unless geothermal is an order of magnitude more expensive per MW or GWH than say nuclear, is it a point against it?
I think people both aren’t making the logical connection for why they need more power for their current way of life. Also, the NIMBYism against geothermal may be even stronger than that against nuclear because of the governments involved.
Consider how much commerce is done in the US via truck. Those trucks average 6 miles per gallon diesel. That represents a huge amount of energy. But it currently relies on fossil fuels so people don’t think of it as being potentially served by renewable energy sources.
The idea is that it would cost less and make energy so cheap and abundant that it would completely change society. Fusion would allow you to get 30x energy out vs energy in and has 10,000x the energy density of coal. If you want to explore space, it’s a good option.
I guess, why is it thought that it could be cheaper than geothermal, for example? Geothermal doesn't have fuel at all. I don't see how fusion produces energy cheap enough for it to be super abundant. And maybe that's just a failure of my imagination, but there seem to be massive gaps in others' reasoning that nobody has been able to fill me in on.
Space travel is an entirely separate type of energy use, and I could see it being the only option for lots of applications. But that would be much further away, and the significant hurdles there can also be solved by other future tech advances like direct conversion for fusion to electricity.
Even without fuel, geothermal still has constraints. Where can we build it? What are the build costs and costs to run (maintenance, staffing, etc)?
I doubt we can scale geothermal indefinitely. Fusion might suffer from similar constraints, but afaik, doesn't need "much" space or specific geographic structures.
FWIW, drilling tech is advancing at an incredible rate, making geothermal possible in all sorts of new places all the time.
But my primary concern with fusion is cost. I don't see the path to being cheaper than geothermal, nor fission, and new fission is already some of our most expensive energy. The goal may be eventual space travel, which seems like a more plausible goal to talk about than sustainable energy.
If it does not incluse precision engineering to build largest vacuum vessel, supercomputers, superconductors, generation and containment of hottest substance on the planet, and largest magnetic fields we can produce. If that's not 'fundamentally expensive', then what is?
Especially when your interlocutor is asking for geothermal, a.k.a. a hole in the ground?
You mean fundamentally expensive like building billions of nano meter scale devices, aligning and wiring 24 million of them to be individually addressable on a 6 inch plane? Oh and we build those by the thousands on factory lines.
That's a whole lot more of precision engineering than is needed to build a nuclear fusion reactor, and you can buy it on the order of a hundred bucks.
And it's not just a hole in the ground, last time I checked the thermal conductivity of rocks isn't exactly stellar.
I think this is a great example of why fusion will probably not drop in price.
With semiconductors, prices fall continuously because there is continuous iteration, and starting from the very very first lithographic circuits there was a market. There's an entire industry, competitors, and it's a factory system.
Fusion is not like that, it will be like building monuments, there's not thousands or millions of the same thing getting churned out, it will be all specialized construction for each piece.
You may say that a chip did specialized in that each of the transistors re wired together in very specific ways, but the semiconductor industry is a factory factory in some sense, you build a set of masks and that's your factory for your chip.
Let's say you design a fusion reactor, and then 12 months later you see how to shave off 1% of the costs somewhere. That iterative gain is lost, because the fusion reactors will be built very rarely, and building each one in a new custom way poses lots more risk than doing the same design for 10 years. They are just too big and expensive to show the same sort of mass manufacturing gains that can be seen with technologies that have learning curves.
I could be wrong, and I certainly hope I am, but I would bet a hell of a lot more money on a new battery chemistry than I would on fusion as being a terrestrial power device.
I think you're underestimating how small fusion reactors are. We're going to be needing not just fusion reactors per city, but per city block. If we manage to get them to break-even, they're going to be super plentiful.
At least, that's what the promise is, we'll have to see of course.
I've never heard anyone suggest that fusion could scale to be really tiny like that. Do you have any pointers on where I could look to learn about something like that? Because every existing thermal electricity generator scales to be really big for the efficiency gains, and fusion is a thermal electricity generator as planned so far. Tiny steam turbines in each block does not sound cost effective, even if the heat is free.
I'm basing this basically on the size of the experimental reactors currently being developed like sparc and the ST40. No doubt building larger plants is going to be more efficient, but if the fusion reactors themselves are going to be that small a single plant will probably have multiple ones.
I think fission reactors and ITER have shown the downside of building really large one off reactors, I don't think they're gonna make that mistake again.
There’s no piece of the Tomamak individually that can’t be miniaturized or benefit from economies of scale. It doesn’t require exotic fuel like nuclear fission reactors do. It doesn’t need gigantic quantities of space and material like wind and solar. It doesn’t have high up front engineering costs like geothermal. One day a tokamak might be an off the shelf industrial purchase, maybe akin to an MRI machine.
"It doesn’t have high up front engineering costs like geothermal."
You are commenting on an article about how scientists had to build a reactor out of berillium and tungsten.
Have you ever touched those materials? Is there any berillium in your car, or your washing machine? If you go around your neighbourhood looking for someone who can weld or work tungsten, will you find anyone? Can you buy a tool on amazon that will cut tungsten?
The number of facilities that can produce precision-enginered thousand-ton vacuum vessel with exotic materials, are counted with fingers on one hand.
> Tritium is very exotic, and fuel cost is a small and irrelevant cost to fission powerplant
This is downright delusional, solar is the only technology that you can go and buy off the shelf and it is much cheaper than an MRI machine, any joe with basic electrical education can put together a solar power system and poor people in developing nations do it. Anyone who thinks that fusion will be easier than slapping solar panels together is smoking some serious dope
You’re missing the point a little bit. No one is arguing that solar is going to be more expensive than fusion. The point is that fusion is about as far fetched as a lot of technology seem at first. Like microprocessors (billions of transistors?) or medical imaging (put a human into a giant magnetic field to see inside them) or internal combustion engines.
Pardon the analogy, but bringing up Q_engineering in this context is like someone shopping for a car running into Ford's engine design department and complaining that the engineers are not using the car's fuel economy to increase the engine's performance.
How much power the subsystems takes has no influence on the plasma's performance. How much power goes into the plasma (and what type of power and where and when, etc.) do influence the plasma's performance.
We (now) know but most people don't, when somebody says it'll "produce X amount of power than you put in" any normal human being would think "it's done" but then they'll wonder for next X decades why there are no power plants yet? Because nobody told them that you need more power than it produces at the end and positive net was just for final reaction and without heat to electricity conversion.
It's tough to say because the campaign is a signpost on the way to an eventual end goal. But the end goal is easy to describe: "a working fusion power plant."
The end goal is so far away at this point, not a single player in this space is even trying to do it, even on their farthest-out roadmaps...
No, the campaign's goals were to push higher plasma energy out of a JET pulse. This required upgrades to many subsystems and to dust off everything necessary for nuclear operations.
They did this in support of ITER, but there are also likely other political motivations. There has been no nuclear MCF operation on Earth in decades and now the UK has invested in resuming theirs rather than mothballing it.
You can't make claims about the motivations of the campaign (such as it being a signpost?) if you don't know what was even done.
And again, you shouldn't talk about the roadmaps if you haven't looked at them. Look at PPPL FIRE and power plant studies.
Clearly the end goal is to beat the First Law of Thermodynamics and its pesky "conservation of energy." We already know how to print money, now it's time to print energy! /s
When you are comparing across different fusion techniques, which we implicitly are in our brains (because we are not sophisticated plasma physicists and not every strategy right now is magnetic confinement), Q_engineering is important to think about: different strategies will have different capabilities of harvesting the energy and turning it into power, and maybe some of the strategies (laser inertial confinement cough cough) are super-unlikely to ever have reasonable and efficient capture strategies. It would be nice to have an "estimated Q_engineering" come out of these experiments, even if they are wildly overinflated and crap estimates (as long as the assumptions that go into that are recorded). For that matter, it's not entirely clear to me how one harvests energy from magnetically confined fusion plasmas. Can someone give me a soundbyte on that?
You're asking for a simplification when there is no way to do it without lying. The fact is you do need to know more than a layman to appreciate how impractical ICF really is or how useless looking at Q is in nearly every context that matters. No MCF machine has even attempted to get a higher Q in the past 25 years. Look at lawson criterion and scaling laws for progress.
No, unless you count thermonuclear explosives. This experiment didn't demonstrate it either. The fusion only yielded 1/3 the energy used to heat the plasma.[1] That doesn't include the energy needed to run the rest of the machine (magnetic containment etc) and it doesn't include any losses converting the fusion energy to electricity (which was not attempted).
