If we do the fusion in zero g then we have solved the confinement issue. The problem is creating conditions for fusion in zero g. The simplest way would probably be aggregating enough material to a single spot that gravity itself creates conditions for fusion. But then the power plant becomes too energetic for earth so it has to be at an enormous distance away to be safe. And with that of course you have the problem of transmitting the power back to earth. But I think photons could be gathered at a safe distance from this fusion, to harvest it without having to be so close.
The issue with that is how to direct the energy back to Earth, and then collect it. If you can’t direct it and it radiates in all directions then only a tiny fraction of the produced photons will reach Earth. Then you need to collect those photons in order to do useful work, otherwise they will just heat the earth. If the distance needed to remain safe is greater or less than geosynchronous orbit, you’ll need collectors all over the Earth as they won’t have constant line of sight towards the source and experience a “nighttime” of sorts. There is also the issue of atmospheric effects, such as high densities of moisture, absorbing or scattering the photons, reducing the efficiency of the collectors. So it could work, but the effective maximum capacity will always be quite limited and the overall process highly inefficient relative to the total fusion energy produced.
Actually you don't want the transmission process to be 100% efficient. If you really captured all the fusion energy transmitted (or even just the small part of it reaching Earth), all sorts of people would complain, trust me! But fortunately that fusion reactor has more than enough power to go around...
If only it were smaller and closer. We could make it smaller by using a force other than gravity to compress the matter. Perhaps a very strong magnetic field? If it was strong enough you’d only need a fraction of the matter.
OTOH, the concept proposed by OP is already implemented and has been working reliably for billions of years with trillions of successful deployments, while this newfangled technology you are proposing still has to be demonstrated to work...
Unfortunately the original developers left long ago taking the source with them, and none of them are reachable to provide an explanation even through exotic means of communication.
That's another plus! If you ever get to the end of the fusion reactor's life (which is not very likely), it's literally end of life for you (and everyone else who might still be around) too, so no need to worry about decommissioning costs and exhausted fuel anymore...
Trillions of deployments that are all subject to the inverse square law at a distance of 100 million miles. It's hard to comprehend how bad that efficiency is.
That sounds great, but those batteries are both too expensive right now and not available. People choose the cheaper alternative which are to use thermal energy where they burn gaseous hydrocarbons when the panels can’t see the power source. When the time and price is right we may stop building new such thermal power sources, but for now we can define them as the current best choice and even call them green since everyone has the intention to replace them in the future some day.
> That sounds great, but those batteries are both too expensive right now and not available.
In December, Chinese battery pack prices declined to 100 $/kWh according to BNEF, which was a new record low. Also battery production goes up by at least 20% per year for the last years and battery energy storage installations go up by 30%, see BYD, CATL, and Tesla annual reports.
Availability might be a problem in the West, but China is installing them on a massive scale. So being “not available” (if that’s the case) should, I think, be interpreted as a Western call to action and not as a fact of life. South Korea produces 30% of all car batteries and multiple South Korean plants are planned for the US, so I have hope that things will start moving.
Europe has a fresh new battery factory in northen Sweden called Northvolt. When the subsidies ran out they filed for a loan from EU, and when those money ran out they asked the goverment for more subsidies and they got a no. They were offered a loan, but they declined that offer since they are already $6 billion in debts.
As a result they filed instead for bankruptcy last fall.
I would like to see EU issue a law against building new natural gas power plants, dictating that either countries start building that cheap grid-scale battery solutions or find non-fossil fuel alternatives, which ever is currently cheapest. Im tired of seeing that even countries like Sweden are investing into new natural gas power plants in order to address days when the wind and sun are not producing enough energy.
I don’t think such a ban would be a good idea but I agree 100% with your sentiment that non-fossil based energy generation would probably be a better idea (especially for energy independence for example).
Maybe we can use the excess photons in another way? We could bio-engineer sunlight collection devices that would take in sunlight and use it to break apart CO2 and produce other useful materials. We could then spread them around the planet to use the excess photons in a productive way. We gain valuable complex molecules and break down CO2 so a win win!
Hm, it could be possible to engineer devices that use the excess photons reaching Earth along with environmental CO2 and H2O to assemble sugars and other carbohydrates. Depending on the specific reactions, we could even end up with O2 as a by-product, which would be additionally useful for us.
There may also be a side business selling skin products to protect people who may be exposed to the radiation from this new reactor. Possibly people may even choose to vacation in areas of elevated radation, as it is likely to be warmer. Interesting...
If you only have one of them then the photons would only be available on that side of the earth at any given time and the other side wouldn't have power, but two of them would confuse the animals and disrupt everyone's circadian rhythm and then you'd have to deal with the three-body problem. Even the reactor-facing side would also have issues with the photons not getting through when it's cloudy.
The photons will also create heat and that heat can be used for useful work at any time, even when there are no photons hitting that side of the earth. For example it will evaporate water which will later condense into rivers, where you can put turbines. So it's a kind of fusion power, but less direct. Pure science fiction, of course.
The energy density of gravity-based storage is very low, so it could work in places where you have mountainous terrain and a lot of cheap land, but what do you do after the sites suitable for it are already in use? To make that work you'd need a scalable storage technology with a low enough cost per kWh of capacity to economically scale to multiple TWh of storage in case it's cloudy for an extended period of time.
For example, if you could make batteries at a price of $115/kWh, the cost for enough capacity to sustain the US power grid for a week would be around 24 trillion dollars, and that's just for the batteries and not any of the associated electronics or the land or the photon collectors themselves. It seems like to make your plan work you'd need a scalable storage technology with a significantly lower cost per kWh of capacity.
It looks like ultimate goal of this is creating a self-sustaining fusion reactor approximately 1AU away from earth (for safety) and using photovoltaic arrays to absorb the energy... Ingenious!
That's what OP was implying. Energy (..and its derivative global warming ) is just infrastructure and finance problem now onwards. Balancing grid, Moving power from sunshine area to non-sunshine area, storing some power at night, handling fluctuation all are more or less solved problem. Fusion is just research subject ( ..or for may be powering colony on mars ? ).
.....
saying that, I hope our collective curiosity for fusion will take us to new inventions and space opportunities.
…is this an elaborate joke about solar power? And by extension, virtually all the energy that’s accumulated on the earth over the eons? It took me a minute :)
I certainly got a laugh! And I agree about the /s. Chalk it up to this reader’s slow mind on a slow day!
In a forum where people credulously propose orbital platforms to “sell sunlight at night” [0], I find myself erring on the side of assuming seriousness…
I find that many younger people have a hard time 'getting' sarcasm and irony when it is not explicitly pointed out. I wonder if it may be due to the prevalence of '/s' in online discussions, or if something else changed.
A majority of the people on HN think there is an explicit no-humor policy. Judging by the fact that a lot of people here are genuinely confused when they come across something really funny, I can see why they try to pretend humor can’t insightful, useful or informative. It saves them from embarrassment.
I mostly read HN news for the laughs, although the odd technical insights posted by those that know is fun too.
I don't know why I post, somethings just to dissipate negative emotions, sometimes to share a favorite anecdote. Sometimes to joke, maybe,? Although those are more likely to be closed without posting.
You'd have to stick it in a lagrange point 1.5M km away though since just in orbit is not true zero G.
Microwave energy transfer should work. That's what I like about the Helion fusion reactor design they don't use steam to power generators it's direct power no water or steam.
I did some back of the envelope calculations for this and it turns out that almost all life will eventually evolve to have reasonable protection against it. Except in Australia.
> This was a 25% improvement on the previous record time achieved with EAST, in China, a few weeks previously
I applaud this nuclear arms race. 22 minutes is really impressive for a technology that’s always been “20 years away”. I think I will do a deep dive on the technical challenges of fusion.
I'm glad the bear case includes the "will never be economically practical" which is my core criticism of fusion, even with "high funding".
I also didn't see anything about vessel irradiation, which also never seems to be discussed. I get it probably isn't as big a problem as solid fuel rod fission in terms of waste creation, and tritium breeding may help, but it still will be kind of the same problem with LFTRs: a reactor design will fundamentally need an ongoing reconstruction/replacement strategy due to the vessel irradiation and transmutation from high energy neutrons.
Feel free to correct me if this isn't as big a problem as I think it is.
Not to downplay it, but it's still only half as hot as would be required of a commercial reactor. Also this reactor had no mechanisms to recover energy or neutrons to breed tritium. Still impressive and encouraging.
Right but that's what ITER is for. This type of research is to validate control systems which can be transferred to that project (i.e. prove you can do it, then prove its not machine-dependent).
No, it's not. It's just a legit illustration of somethings state of development on fundamental levels. It simply means "we have no f**ing clue how we can do this, but future..". This is different from something we have already solved, and you just need to throw money on it to scale it to whichever level you need it.
> Cracking natural language comprehension with digital computers is an example from our field and it’s here.
That's the point, everything in research is always x0 years away, until the breakthrough happens and it's finished.
> This is different from something we have already solved, and you just need to throw money on it to scale it to whichever level you need it.
We can already do fusion, and by every metric it is scaling. Triple product is increasing, etc.
Fusion does not become a viable source of energy until it scales beyond a certain point, but there is no "leap" between here and there that we know about, just better and better containment. We are descending a gradient, not looking for one.
If we had never managed to get fusion outside, say, hydrogen bombs, then I'd agree that we have no idea how to do it, but we have -- using many methods. Tokamaks seem to be the best one for scaling it so far, but there's other possibilities that I wish we would research more.
That's not really how it works. We do know SOME ways to reach fusion, but they are not on the level we need. We haven't mastered fusion yet, we still need to research the foundations. We don't even know if scaling is all we need, and we don't know how to scale it to the level we seek.
Technology usually has a range of performance, what it can do and what not. And our technology for fusion-process is not in the range for a commercial reactor, so we still need a breakthrough in our understanding.
Hmm... in that case the analogy with AI is even better. This sounds like neural networks before things like deep learning and the transformer architecture -- before we figured out how to scale them. Turns out this did require some innovations. It wasn't just a matter of making a bigger model.
I see what you’re getting at but it does feel like goalposts are being moved, no? By and large we can ask a computer today a question and it will almost certainly spit back a sensible (!= correct) answer. We can ask what the words mean and ask it to translate it to other languages, and we can have a conversation.
How are we disentangling comprehension of natural language itself from comprehension of the subject matter being discussed via said language sample?
I think that by most reasonable metrics LLMs can reasonably be said to comprehend natural language itself. However they clearly are deficient in logic and reasoning, as well as comprehension of many of the concepts that the natural language is used to express.
> Triple product (efficiency ) has increased faster than moors law for the last 50 years
Fusion research progress is underappreciated. But Moore's Law is for an existing industry. Prior to that, it took 10 ^ 6+ improvements in various technologies to make computing possible.
Not sure what you mean by that. There was a bunch of computing technology long before photolithography or even transistors. And mores law was coined in 1965 when individual chips had far less than 10^6 transistors while the first one was made by hand.
Moore's law is self propagating: improvements in compute beget improvements in compute by improving the computers used to design compute devices. fusion, while in an impressive bootstrapping phase, does not get that acceleration until commercial break-even.
Untrue on both counts. Moore's law is not due to improved computing power in the design process, it's due to an incredibly long series of process improvements which become easier to develop because of the increased understanding of the problems they are seeking to solve.
Likewise advancements in fusion beget advancements in fusion by increasing understanding of the challenges faced.
Probably not. Materials science research is much more dependent on analog electronics, specifically measuring voltage signals, than on digital electronics.
Modern computers are certainly a nice quality of life improvement for researchers though.
That said, commercial production lines might be a different story. Now I'm wondering what the minimum viable computer system would be to implement the firmware for ASMLs machines, for example. Probably more than vacuum tubes but I'm guessing you could pull it off with an old 8 bit chip. That's just a guess though.
Yeah, it's aided by better computational models, but not appreciably by having those models run on chips with smaller feature sizes.
If a time traveler from the future gave everyone at ASML and TSMC computers that ran 4 times as quickly so they could run their models faster, but no one could take a look at how they worked or were made, it wouldn't have any noticeable effect.
moore's law is just the observation that chips are 2d: linear shrinks produce exponential benefit.
I can't see anything like a linear/square relation in fusion reactor design (even accepting that ML's premise of shrinks being linear in time is not a law, just something that sometimes happened, and sometimes didn't...)
Specifically they were able to maintain a tokamak plasma (presumably at fusion temperatures) for 1337 seconds, using two megawatts of heating. 1337 is not a joke; presumably the "leet" reading is coincidental.
With China spying around, you probably don't want to reveal the full potential of your technologies before you are sure that you will have permanent lead.
Doubtful. While fusion is a fascinating engineering problem and has niche uses, it's unlikely to be competitive in either of the two big energy domains: electricity generation and transport. Fusion requires extremely large, extremely complicated machines that share many of the issues of fission reactors but more extreme and with decades less operational experience. While fusion has better PR than fission, which could lead to some real cost savings from less regulation, it's unlikely to be enough to be cost competitive with a fission reactor of the same output, nonetheless the various other options that have rendered fission uncompetitive. Even with extensive process improvements to reduce cost, the other options will be decreasing in cost at a faster rate due to their wider adoption and lower barrier to entry. It's really tough for artificial fusion to compete with the free fusion reactor in the sky. Fusion will probably make its way into the ecosystem but only as one player, and a minor one at that.
Agreed. Multi-multi billion. It is a fundamental change in the global energy dynamic -- including the fact that D-T reactors are still use heat exchange which means heat is also a useful output product for industrial purposes. MSRs are really good for this but of course are fission not fusion reactors.
>> In the H-mode, a calm edge without turbulence reduces how much heat and how many charged particles the plasma loses. This leads to a sharp increase in pressure across the entire volume of the plasma, including the core where the conditions that can lead to fusion occur. The reduced energy and particle losses also minimize damage to the material surfaces surrounding the plasma.
Neutrons and photons pass through magnetic fields, so they always escape the plasma and provide heat that can be turned into steam. Keeping the plasma ions better confined doesn't impair energy recovery.
One issue I see for applying prediction markets to things like “there is a commercially successful fusion power plant before the year 2070” is the long time until resolution. Now, of course, one can hope to sell your shares in “yes” or “no” 5 years from now, but there may not be enough liquidity?
Suppose we had one prediction market M_1 for “On January 1st 2070, resolves ‘yes’ if there has been a commercially successful nuclear fusion power plant, and otherwise resolves ‘no’”, and then another market M_2 that, maybe it resolves in 5 years as ‘yes’ if the price of M_1’s ‘yes’ is greater than 30%? Or… hm, that seems problematic because people could just buy a bunch of M_1’s “yes” right before M_2 resolves? Or maybe that’s a self-correcting problem because people could… no, still seems like a problem..
Well, what if instead of a prediction market about the future value of another prediction market, it was futures contracts for the shares in a prediction market? Like, the right to buy or sell shares in “yes” or “no” at a particular price?
So like, if you’re confident that the prediction market will assign probability p or higher on a particular day 5 years from now, then if you bought futures which, on that day each of the futures could be used to sell a share in “no” at the price (1-p), then…
well, if the probability assigned to “yes” on that day is indeed p or higher, then the price of “no” would be (1-p) or lower, so one buy a share in “no” at a price less than (1-p) and then sell it at (1-p)..
Hm, issue there is one still needs to buy the “no” in order to sell it, so that doesn’t seem to really fix the “what if there is no liquidity in 5 years?” issue?
I guess one could spend 1 to create a share of “yes” and a share of “no”, and then sell the “no”, and be left with the share in “yes” which is ostensibly worth at least p, and then like, sell it a bit later when there’s more liquidity or something?
I probably don’t know what I’m talking about about this.
You should look into options - you're describing various forms of options contract.
None of them solve this problem, though:
> Now, of course, one can hope to sell your shares in “yes” or “no” 5 years from now, but there may not be enough liquidity?
In general, if there isn't liquidity in the primary market you should expect the derivative markets to be even worse. You would use options not to find extra liquidity - and binary options on illiquid markets like you describe are indeed particularly prone to market manipulation - but to express very particular views.
> another market M_2 that, maybe it resolves in 5 years as ‘yes’ if the price of M_1’s ‘yes’ is greater than 30%?
Like this one - you should buy this contract if you really do want to make a bet the price will be over 30%, and you don't care much about getting a big payday if the price is 90 or keeping most of your money if the price is 29.
I don't think a long pay-off horizon is a problem for this market. It the same as for shares in companies that don't pay dividends. What creates a price for Berkshire Hathaway (BRK/A) if owning the share never gives you anything in the form of dividend? It's because in the far future, you can be confident they'll have enough money in the bank that they will pay out. Maybe not in your lifetime, but you can sell to someone, who'll sell to someone, etc. who will eventually collect a dividend. The market is so abstract that that pay-off time could be infinity years in the future and still, the share still has market value today.
The future value could be shared with the entire humanity.
For example, Bill Gates is going to die like everyone else and give most of the money away, like Warren Buffet.
They can spend a significant amount of money in life if they see nuclear fusion is possible, even if they do not recover the costs.
The only thing that is needed for this to happen is investors being confident that the money is not going to be wasted.
I personally know rich people that are betting a significant part of their wealth in fusion(millions USD) even when they know there is a risk that they will never recover the money.
Poor Bill Gates wants to give his money away, but he hasn’t gotten around to it yet. Why are we still pretending he is a philanthropist and not one of the biggest oligarchs of our time?
As I understand it, most of his wealth is tied up in Microsoft stocks, so without collapsing the company he built, his hands are at least partially tied.
As we should all know by now, what oligarchs do is use their stock as collateral for loans, providing all the capital access without the capital gains hit.
Being a philanthropist connotes having a purely altruistic rationale for giving away money.
If you’re giving away money to shush people, or gather support for your politics, or gain something else out of it then you do not receive the beneficial connotation.
Strictly going by definition, dictators can be philanthropists.
He spends money lobbying the WHO to buy drugs from companies he's a major shareholder in. Then he pays journalists so they always write about him positively. He's brilliantly figured out how the world works.
How would you define "commercially successful"? The first fusion power plants will only get built with huge government subsides. Some governments like China look at this as a strategic, existential issue and will pay whatever it costs to make it work. They don't like being dependent on foreign fossil fuel supplies that the USA could easily interdict.
I’m in the USA and don’t like being dependent on foreign fuel supplies!
I think there was (maybe still possible?) a real missed opportunity to pitch green energy in a national security or America First way. I don’t think the average republican voter wants us to be as tied to OPEC the way we are.
We could still product as much—or more!—oil in Texas while reducing our care for anything in the Middle East.
Whether it's a net importer or net exporter is a red herring. If something unsavory happens in Iran, the price of gas is going to move.
National security arguments also don't work in cases like this, because "national security" isn't the real reason the government does a thing, it's the excuse given to the public when Republicans want an unconstitutional boondoggle. But fossil fuel companies are a Republican constituency so it would typically be the Democrats advocating for something like that and their excuse calendar uses different phrases.
If you want to get Republicans to support it you either need to bring it within their cultural norms to want it, e.g. American-made Cybertruck can stomp their old truck in a drag race and the Tesla guy is their friend now, or it just needs to be more profitable so they want solar on their roof to save on electricity.
You can also use different methods when appealing to people with different values. Typical plan from the left is to subsidize it with tax dollars, but you can also ask things like, what makes solar installations expensive? Are there ways to make it easier for homeowners to do it themselves to avoid costly professional installation? Is there some kind of regulatory capture causing things like inverters and transfer switches to cost two orders of magnitude more than the price of their raw materials? Try thinking like the people you're trying to convince if you want to get them on your side.
The USA used to prohibit crude oil exports and only lifted the ban in 2015. If there was a major international supply disruption then we could temporarily reimpose an export ban to essentially turn our country into an oil "island" and shield customers from the impact of higher external market prices.
Crude oil is the stuff that comes directly out of the ground. That wasn't an export ban on refined oil. The rule was a protectionist measure at the behest of US refineries. This is the money quote:
> We found that repealing the ban was associated with:
> ...
> Decreasing profit margins for petroleum refiners as they paid more for domestic crude oil relative to international prices
The US is a net exporter of oil. That doesn't mean they're not importing a ton of it and then exporting even more, e.g. because the Northeast is closer to Canada than Texas so New York uses a lot of oil from Canada and then the gulf states export to other countries.
Changing that in the long-term would raise prices (higher transportation costs, less competition) and changing it in the short-term (i.e. in immediate response to a foreign supply shock) would raise prices significantly because of short-term logistical issues. Also, to the extent that it lowered relative prices, the difference would come out of the profits of US oil companies and increase the profits of their foreign competitors as customers in the EU and other places experience even more of a shortage. "Piss off your allies and domestic industry to the benefit of foreign adversaries" is usually not a winning strategy.
Meanwhile those sorts of export bans will leak like a sieve anyway. Even without formally violating them, you'll see things like energy-intensive industries moving production to the place with cheaper energy until the cross-border price stabilizes, which means higher prices outside the US would lead to higher demand (and thus higher prices) within the US.
It's a global commodity market and you don't even want it to be otherwise.
California has chosen to be dependent on foreign oil for political reasons. There's still quite a bit under our feet but we hypocritically block the extraction industry from expanding here while continuing to consume.
It's certainly feasible to build a crude oil pipeline from Texas, but the local refineries don't necessarily want it. They prefer the flexibility that comes from getting supplies by ships and trains, even though pipelines have a much lower risk of major spills or fires.
i think California accidentally did well by not allowing fracking; if they fo eventually allow it the technology will habe rendered it safer and more efficient. could probably drill kern valley and go full independent without huring the environment nearly as much as it would have 10 years ago..
I'm not sure that would be easy. We'd probably need to build a pipeline to get the needed volume in. I think Peter Zeihan talked about this recently in the context of general US self-sufficiency
Green energy has its own fundamental economic advantages over any petroleum energy generation. You know, barring grid and storage adaptation.
I believe the trend in Lazards is that storage+wind or storage+solar will drop under natural gas combined cycle this year or next year on a LCOE basis.
I believe that was actually their point. To say that it is still a long way before a functioning fusion reactor will be build, let alone the first that will be built as commercially viable standalone without subsidies.
I mean I could generate power and sell it by burning antique furniture but that doesn't make it commercially viable. At some point any new power source will have to show a positive return on investment by some reasonable accounting measure.
It’s not that I want to bet, but that I want a good probability estimate about whether commercially viable fusion power will be around by such and such date.
No, we'd simply get another financial product completely detached from any real economic value, of which we have plenty already.
What more insight could gamblers provide about nuclear fusion that expert physicists and engineers can't? Why and how would their predictions be more accurate than industry leaders?
Prediction markets are known to have an optimism bias when it comes to stuff like this.
Speculation with positive expected return is a good thing. So the question is, does fusion have positive expected return?
The world spends 10% of global GDP on energy, about $10 trillion per year. The world will spend something like a quadrillion dollars on energy this century, possibly more as the world gets wealthier and per capita energy use increases. A billion dollar investment is just one part in a million of that. Fusion doesn't have to be very likely to succeed to make such speculation worthwhile.
The location they have that's "well into construction" is SPARC, which is not intended to be a net power production facility. It will host their net gain demonstrator that they intend to have first plasma in next year and target a net gain demonstration in 2027.
ARC which they announced siting for and is intended to be their first grid-attached net power provider only just had the location selected so I don't believe its got much construction going on yet. The goal for that plant to be producing power is "early 2030s".
Ah, maybe not well into construction. But a friend of mine works with exotic materials and they are purchasing lots of things for ARC. Though I imagine these materials have a long lead time.
For people more aware of the fusion industry, what is it that stopped the plasma at 22 minutes (or lower times in alternate tests)? Did they just stop injecting power to maintain the heat as they achieved their benchmark?
Is this something where it's on the precipice and small tweaks bridges from 22 minutes to basically indefinitely?
Tokamaks need the central solenoid to have a current ramp, so at some point you run out of voltage. You can turn that way down, but you get less plasma performance. You're traditionally limited by heat rejection capabilities of the vacuum vessel.
These are science machines to learn about plasma and increase performance of future machines. A real reactor involves a lot of engineering to handle the heat rejection problem (and turn it into a revenue stream if you're clever). In terms of the pulsed nature: not really a problem if you keep the duty cycle high enough and maintain sufficient buffers in your coolant to keep the turbines happily turning away.
I learned recently that another limit to plasma duration is contamination. As fusion occurs and high energy particles that escape magnetic confinement blast the toroid wall, ions of metal get mixed into the plasma and degrade performance.
I've seen photos of what the inside of experimental tokamaks look like after many cycles. Metal is eroded away and deposited around the chamber in interesting patterns. Unfortunately a image search isn't surfacing the images I have in mind.
Impossible with just the basic inductive principle of tokamaks, yes. Some years back I learned that you can keep the current going with microwaves, not sure about recent progress. You can also approximate steady state by reversing polarity of the warp - ehm - magnetic field regularly.
The current ramp in the central solenoid is used to set the plasma rotation direction. Theoretically this is more like Alternating Current, since there is not a fundamental reason the central solenoid couldn't ramp back down (and then proceed to ramp up in the opposite polarization). The existing plasma would need to be cooled and removed first, or some similar mechanism of stabilizing the torus again in the opposite direction.
I look at it as a large optimization problem at this point. Each part of the machine is workable but not yet sufficiently optimized to achieve profitable operation.
While that avoids directly engaging with Twitter, I'd avoid even indirect contact. That said, I'm confident that most Twitter enagement is indirect anyway, via embeds, screenshots, and services like these.
Musk is part of the administration that has threatened to take European territory by force. He's meddling in—and funding according to some sources—extremism in Germany.
Neither he, nor his administration, have been overly bothered to characterize themselves as friends of Europe, and Europeans are returning the feelings.
> Noticed there is some serious anti Trump/musk campaign going on there.
And Americans should be very concerned about Trump's coup as well - because that's what it is. There is no level of sugar coating that can cover that up.
As if right wing media have a legitimate place in a democracy. It was and will only ever be a vehicle for fascism.
Maybe we Europeans enjoyed proper schools with history lessons and remember how Faschism played out last time?
Besides following US media is enough to know what Musk is about.
It's unfair to say that no right wing media has a right to exist. Media that is hostile to democracy should be stomped out, but because its hostile to democracy (or secretly a propaganda machine run by foreign influence), not because it's right wing.
If anything, that the classic right wing still exists, however much you might disagree with the ideology, is something to hope for.
My dad laments that "Caring about the environment used to be a Conservative position" and "We just need to take the effort to care about people who are different from us" and "I think the gun rights people take it too far and it's fine to have regulation on gun ownership".
But he didn't vote for a classic conservative. He voted for Trump.
Yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me if the vast majority are more moderate than the two-party system can account for. And that consequently, the White House might be overestimating what they have popular mandate to do.
As somebody from Europe.. it is. The media is extremely biased and left-oriented. As soon as something is slightly more right leaning it immediately gets labelled as extreme-right here.
Wildly untrue, European media is very diverse, and where it sits on average from an American point of view varies from country to country. It may turn out to be not right-leaning enough for your personal tastes, but that doesn't mean it isn't from the PoV of that particular country.
Related: PBS Space Time just did a neat episode on plasma, focusing on what the requirements are for confinement, called "The Final Barrier to (Nearly) Infinite Energy"
From the announcement, "1,337 seconds: that was how long WEST, a tokamak run from the CEA Cadarache site in southern France and one of the EUROfusion consortium medium size Tokamak facilities, was able to maintain a plasma for on 12 February. This was a 25% improvement on the previous record time achieved with EAST, in China, a few weeks previously."
Considering it's fusion we're talking about, 1,337 seconds is about as arbitrary as 1,000 seconds. On a 24-hour clock, 13:37 is 1:37pm. 137 is the fine-structure constant or α. Who knows what they're actually capable of. A second more at this point would be pointless.
I wonder how much of an effect this kind of truly international (not in the same 'bloc') competition will have on budgets and speed of progress. Cold war tech race, etc.
It's always a good time to be an engineer. These public comps are more recruitment and training. It's not like new discoveries are made during these events. It's partly a party for the industry.
From people hearing about fission bombs (1945) to full scale commercial fission power plant (1957) was barely more than 10 years so fusion power plants must have already felt late in the mid 60s!
As for "why not 50 years", even the pessimistic reports of that video have it at ~30 years. Besides, the point is "we won't really know a good estimate for when until it's already about to hit us in the face" not "we should just assume 50 years is a more correct guess than other ones".
As for the comments about votes, they aren't a measure of terseness either. The point is to bubble comments likely to result in curious and thoughtful conversation to the top while comments which will distract from that kind of conversation (combative, vague, distractly offtopic, or whatever else the reason may be) tend to get hidden away. Whether a comment is totally on the money or absolutely incorrect, how you present the conversation starter has a far bigger drive on what types follow-on conversation will appear. Here, that also strongly implies what types of votes will appear too.
> As for "why not 50 years", even the pessimistic reports of that video have it at ~30 years.
When a prediction is at a timescale where the person making the prediction will be retired by the time the prediction applies, you can safely ignore the prediction. That person has no reputational skin in the game.
And how about a honest discussion about whether 30 years away for fusion research may boil down to never ? We are in a contraction already,people voting for decomplexification of society because that is just a natural felt trade off- feed my family now with less tax and forget about leechers promising free energy since almost a 100 years.Its not reasonable , its not historically backed up (science saved the day multiple times ) but this window of research opportunities is closing rapidly and its time to find alternatives to finance such endeavours besides state and oligarchy conglomerate investment scams.
Sustained fusion is already a thing in the universe but while we can't undiscover what powers the sun we could certainly give up replicating it on Earth if we'd like. That would be less an estimate of how long it'd take and more a measure of what we want to invest our limited resources in though.
I think everyone would agree we should find ways of investing that aren't scams. The hard part is who agrees on what is a scam. I don't mind more purely private investment myself though, which has seemed to be a trend in recent years.
How can they build something commercial/grid-scale when not a single research-level reactor truly generates net energy out, and none can do it anywhere near continously enough to be of any practical use?
This news is either based on misleading the public, or I am about to be updated with where Fusion is?
Watch this clip with Prof. Whyte from 8 years ago. It’s the team behind CFS(then still at MIT).
Highly interesting. He will explain exactly what they will do(now doing), how they will do it, and why they will do it they way they are doing it.
Please note that they are pretty much on target since. I have been following CFS closely.
Essentially the breakthrough has been the ability to manufacture more powerful magnets. CFS makes the most powerful magnets in the world.
That was always the main issue, how to contain the plasma.
Now ask: what is the power density of their proposed reactor?
The predecessor, the ARC reactor in the 2014 paper, had a power density of 0.5 MW/m^3.
In comparison, a commercial PWR, which you can buy today, has a power density of 20 MW/m^3.
So, even with all the HTSC hype, their machine is still a factor of 40 worse than existing proven fission technology.
How is such a bloated, much more complex machine even going to compete with fission, never mind the alternatives that have sidelined new fission construction? The capex will be completely out of bounds.
"Scientists working on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Commonwealth Fusion Systems collaboration have misled members of the science news media again. The latest casualty is Philip Ball, an experienced U.K. science reporter.
In a Nov. 17, 2021, news story, Ball wrote that scientists working with the MIT/CFS collaboration are planning to deliver the “first fusion machine expected to generate more energy than it uses” in 2025.
Actually, the MIT/CFS SPARC reactor is designed only to produce a fusion plasma that produces power at a higher rate than it consumes power. That measurement does not account for the input power required to operate the reactor. It’s the same trick that fusion promoters used to sell the idea of ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor."
Because they are more or less certain (because of their magnets) they will get the necessary temperatures for ignition, giving more energy that it consumes.
If they get ignitions, all the other problems will be solved very fast, because there will be an enormous rush from investors wanting to invest billions.
I hope they succeed, but throwing more money at problems like this doesn't necessarily accelerate progress. There is still basic research needed. Building large, high-precision devices can't be rushed.
> throwing more money at problems like this doesn't necessarily accelerate progress
"Necessarily" being your Zeno's Arrow. Necessary to what threshold? I can literally argue against anything to an arbitrary level of necessity. (Breathing doesn't necessarily ensure living.)
What makes them industry leaders? Do they have a prototype? Can they get Q>1, much less >5 or similar for what will be needed to break even on all the rest of the inefficiencies?
If they don't have a prototype, and are going straight to plans for a 400MW "commercial" plant, why should we believe this is possible? What evidence is there that these plans for a massive breakthrough ten years from now will work out?
This looks, walks, and talks like a ploy to get in on AI energy demand hype. It may not be, but it has all those features, and not many other features.
They have a plausible relatively well understood path to fusion, have credibility with their background (coming out of fusion research at MIT), and have raised something like 2 billion dollars in funding.
> Can they get Q>1, much less >5 or similar for what will be needed to break even on all the rest of the inefficiencies
They think so
> and are going straight to plans for a 400MW "commercial" plant
They aren't. They're currently developing "SPARC", a Q>1 demonstration plant targeting 2027. The 400 MW commercial plant, ARC, is a follow on design targeting 2030s.
> This looks, walks, and talks like a ploy to get in on AI energy demand hype
They predate the AI boom by a lot. The project started in 2018. They had a $1.8 billion dollar funding round in 2021.
The basic concept is "hey look, someone figured out how to build better superconductors. What if we took what ITER is trying to do, but used modern super conductors to make it smaller and actually achievable". I'm not saying I think they're certain to succeed, but I don't think they're a scam and I think it's very reasonable to include them amongst the group of "industry leaders"
The reason Iter is so big is not to achieve controlled fusion, but to be able to capture the fusion energy output. I'm not doubting their ability to reach the self-sustaining plasma, I'm doubtful about their ability to capture energy from it though.
ITER is as big as it is because it would not achieve the targeted Q with the given magnet technology if it were smaller. This has nothing to do with capturing energy.
The Sun consumes a mass equivalent of a mount Everest worth of hydrogen via fusion to shine for just an hour (or thereabouts, if I did my math right :)). For perspective, this amount of energy is more than enough to power the Earth's current electrical usage for over a billion years.
That's all before getting into how a containment failure doesn't imply "and then everything nearby just started a self sustaining fusion reaction". The confinement itself is a key part of what enables the conditions for the fusion to continue.
I am a plasma researcher, though not in the fusion field. Containment and stability are required on tokamaks to keep a plasma burning. Losing either of these will quench the reaction. The best way to control a plasma - magnetic fields, also causes significant instabilities, which is why fusion is so difficult.
Because the plasma itself is charged and moves within the field, generating eddy currents which self-interact in complex and unpredictable ways. At a much much larger scale, the twisting of magnetic fields from convection within the sun causes sunspots and other phenomena around the solar surface.
No. It just does not make sense from physical rules. Fusion only happens in a very high vacuum, at ridiculous temperatures, with very specific fuel, in the confined space. Just the cooling effect of having oxygen atoms there(in the plasma) stops the reaction, let alone touching anything so cold(millions of times colder and denser) as the walls or the outside gas.
You can extract heat, in fact you'd have to extract it or let it leak out somewhere. The whole point of it is that it generates more energy than you put in, so energy has to come out somewhere for it to maintain stability.
Gp is just saying that if you cracked it open like an egg (or just had a minor leak even) all that would happen is it would stop fusing. The room this happened in would be a bad place to be, but it's just going to start a fire or something, not destroy the world.
Neutron radiation doesn't get contained, and leaves the reactor easily carrying heat with it. That heat has to go somewhere, and so that's what we take energy from.
Seems implausible. The fusion presumably wouldn’t keep going if it breached the walls.
Also, to be bright enough that we would see it from here as a star, I imagine it would require enough material that one might as well just let gravity do the job rather that use a Tokamak?
Maybe there are efficiency gains that are large enough that it wouldn’t actually require as much material as a star? I wouldn’t guess so though.
> wonder if many of the stars in the sky are from groups that almost nailed containment and stability on their Tokamak
Different fusion systems. Stars fuse, in general, by statistically overloading the weak force. (The Sun is volumetrically about an order of magnitude less powerful than a human being. Like 200 to 1,110 W/m^3.)
In smaller volumes, e.g. on Earth, we have to break the strong force. This releases more energy, I think. But it also requires temperatures and energy densities far higher than that which stars produce.
Not sure if that strengthens or weakens your hypothesis...
Strong and weak force don't come into it in either case. Fusion requires overcoming electrostatic repulsion, that's about it. The problem is the Sun is gigantic but it's fusion process is actually very inefficient. To make it practical on Earth we need more particle interactions, and thus higher temperatures, to make it Q>1
> Strong and weak force don't come into it in either case. Fusion requires overcoming electrostatic repulsion, that's about it
You're wrong and right. Electrostatic repulsion is the barrier, and at its limit, defines electron degeneracy pressure. But the strong force is the ultimate source of energy of the reaction, and the weak force is important in stellar reactions.
The weak force initiates proton-proton fusion [1]. (We still struggle to empirically measure its cross section because it's so low. Weak force be weak.) DT fusion, on other hand, has to crack open the energy in those delicious gluons with raw temperature. This is why PP fusion occurs around 4 MK while DT fusion needs over 1,000 MK.
I think that it is inaccurate to say that weak force "initiates" fusion.
Fusion is initiated by bringing nuclei very close one of another, overcoming the electrostatic repulsion.
When fusion is successful, the output energy is a consequence of the strong forces, i.e. it is the difference between the binding energies caused by strong forces in the output and input reactants.
The role of the weak force is that it can determine the probability of success of the fusion.
When the input nuclei have enough neutrons, the nuclei that have collided may remain fused. Otherwise, even after being fused for an extremely short time, the compound nucleus will break again, regenerating the input nuclei which are repulsed, so fusion fails.
In cases when fusion would fail due to a bad proton/neutron ratio in the fused nucleus, e.g. for the case of proton-proton fusion, during the very short time when the input nuclei are fused, weak forces may transform a proton into a neutron, preventing the separation of the fused nuclei and allowing fusion to succeed.
So overcoming the electromagnetic forces initiates fusion, strong forces determine the amount of energy obtained per fusion event and weak forces can determine the probability for fusion to succeed when nuclei collide.
> Fusion is initiated by bringing nuclei very close one of another, overcoming the electrostatic repulsion
Protons overcoming their electrostatic repulsion doesn't mean fusion--formation of a deuteron does [1]. Protons overcoming their repulsion creates the initial conditions for fusion, but in most cases no fusion occurs. The weak force "chooses" whether fusion occurs or two protons come unusually close and fly apart.
This is a bit of a pedantic line. But nuclear physisist say the weak force initiates fusion because if we take something with as low a cross section as proton-proton interaction to be the starting point of fusion, we might as well extend it to protons being in a star at all. (A greater fraction of protons in a star will fuse than proton-proton interactions graduate to fusion.)
Without the weak force, we have no stellar fusion. Without the weak force, artificial fusion is still possible. That's both a blessing and a curse, since the weak force permits lower-temperature fusion.
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. That perpetual barrier can very reasonably be viewed as a normal technology barrier now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wind and solar power are proving very cheap and good at the margin, but it doesn't solve for the massive needs of a modern grid. Unlike plants, we do not necessarily have the option of turning society off when it's not sunny or windy.
Energy storage is far from a solved problem. Tesla produces ~40 gigawatts of storage capacity an entire year. California alone consumes ~800 gigawatts of power in a day. Even if Tesla dedicated every bit of lithium it had to building storage capacity for just one state, and demand didn't increase, it would realistically still take over a decade to keeping the lights on purely with renewables for a 24 hour period. At which point the first battery packs would be nearing the end of their service life.
This is an incredibly misinformed and outdated opinion. Tesla produces 40 gigawatts of storage capacity only because demand for storage capacity is currently quite low, and because China is more cost effectively producing storage. As demand increases, production will increase to match demand.
Most states currently only care about installing solar and wind -- not storage -- because they are still majority fossil fuels, and at the current moment it makes no sense to install storage if you still have fossil fuel to dislodge. The only exception is really California, who are installing storage, but their bottleneck is not the market's ability to deliver enough supply.
There are also many storage options beyond lithium ion if you only spent a moment to look.
Grid scale storage holds potential but for now it isn't economically viable for industrial base load. Residential customers are probably manageable but factories and data centers have to run 24×7: they can't shut down just because the sun isn't shining and wind isn't blowing. It's clear that the USA has to rapidly reindustrialize if we want to keep having stuff. For political and demographic reasons we won't be able to count on China as a reliable supplier much longer. Domestic electricity demand is going to grow much faster than the storage supply can keep up. The only realistic current options for that base load are a mix of fission and natural gas.
Maybe fusion will be an alternative someday but for now it's just a fantasy. We need to act based on what's proven to work today.
"Base load" can be achieved with renewables, batteries and natural gas. There have been lots of simulation studies demonstrating this. Not only is it achievable, it's also significantly cheaper and faster than fission with natural gas, even after accounting for all costs related to renewables such as the need for more transmission lines. This is especially true in the United States, which is uniquely blessed with abundant solar resources and well diversified wind resources.
Fission as a solution is something that is popular on social media, for reasons that are utterly mystifying to me. The arguments are invariably a few words that reach sweeping conclusions with no actual data backing it up, and lots of data contradicting it that the individual appears oblivious to.
I suspect the main reason fission is having a resurgence of popularity is because it maintains the current power structure of a rare large facilities controlled by a handful of actors. This has obvious advantages if you are a rich person concerned about keeping wealth concentrated into a few sets of hands.
Renewables are by their nature much more distributed in space, which makes them much harder to enclose and control in the way required to reproduce the current structure, especially as they are mainly being built by challengers who aren't really interested of forming monopolies with the fossil industry.
Well it's theoretically possible to supply industrial base load with battery storage but with the rate that demand is growing and the constraints on battery manufacturing that just won't be realistic for many years to come. How many battery cells does it take to keep a steel mill running through the night, and how will that impact power prices for large customers? As for natural gas, we're going to increasingly need that as a chemical feed stock to sustain the reindustrialization. So that leaves fission as the only known long-term option for sustainably meeting a large increase in base load demand.
Your one and only argument is that supply of batteries cannot keep up with demand. This is not only false, it's actually the inverse of the truth, due to Wright’s Law.
Current supply of storage matches current demand. Supply is low only because demand is low. However, as demand increases, supply will continue to match demand, and moreover the price will actually decrease because of the fact that the learning curve is a function of production volume.
This has been a steady empirical phenomenon for 30+ years, and it's predicted by basic economics principles. It's not going to change now!
This is true for all battery types, but especially for sodium ion and iron air, which are constituted of abundant materials. Sodium ion in particular has very similar behavior and cost to lithium ion.
This confusion you're having is you seem to be conflating manufactured goods (like batteries) with scarce goods like land or services, whereby there's a fixed supply that can't be increased and where Wright's Law doesn't apply. This is not correct.
Storage is more like televisions or light bulbs, where you can basically make as much of it as you want, and the price will keep declining as more is made. And supply will always be there for demand, whatever the level of demand happens to be (in this case, a lot).
> How many battery cells does it take to keep a steel mill running through the night, and how will that impact power prices for large customers?
Steel mills run when power is cheap. They historically have run at night (and only minimum power during the day) because cheap power is available at night. Of course there are lots of different steel mills, older ones can't shut down - but modern ones don't run 24x7, they run when power is cheap. Even the old 24x7 ones did their yearly maintenance in December - when power demand is highest (Christmas lights).
Wind and solar are easially predicted a few days in advance with high accuracy, and thus the mills change their shifts/output to follow the cheap power. If it is cloudy/no wind they will send their employees home (with pay) or do maintenance for that week while waiting on more cheaper energy. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to melt iron and so they manage this carefully because it makes them money. They can't deal with months of no production, but they can manage a week here and there.
Battery manufacturing has to be at massive scale even in a nuclear powered world, just to supply battery electric vehicles.
Converting every passenger car and light truck in the US to a BEV would involve enough batteries to store something like two days of the average grid output, which is more than would be needed for a cost optimal wind/solar/battery/hydrogen system for a 100% renewable grid.
> Converting every passenger car and light truck in the US to a BEV would involve enough batteries to store something like two days of the average grid output, which is more than would be needed for a cost optimal wind/solar/battery/hydrogen system for a 100% renewable grid.
Assuming the power stored in these vehicles can be reclaimed by the grid anytime they want?
No, I was just pointing out the scale of the required battery manufacturing.
It's an argument I like to use. When someone claims "we can't use X because of reason Y, we have to do Z instead" I look to see if Z also is hit by objection Y.
Another example of this is "renewables require too much material that we can't recycle", at which point I observe that the quantity of materials produced by society as a whole greatly exceeds what renewables would involve, even if the society is powered by nuclear. The US produces 600 megatons of construction and demolition waste a year, for example. Renewable waste would just be a minor blip on this existing waste stream. So, either recycling this waste isn't actually needed, or a putative sustainable nuclear-powered society has discovered how to recycle it, so just toss the renewable waste (which is almost entirely things like steel, aluminum, and glass) into that same recycling infrastructure.
Calculate the area-under-the-curve (AUC) of two time series over, say, the next 50 years:
(1) the emissions of a 98% renewable + 2% natural gas grid that comes online in 6 years, assuming fossil fuels for t between [t, t+6 years].
(2) the emissions of a 100% fission grid that comes online in 16 years, assuming fossil fuels for t between [t, t+16 years].
If you insist on ignoring the temporal nature of cumulative emissions, then sure, you can arrive at a convenient but false conclusion. But any honest analysis will consider the emissions in that [t+6 year, t+16 year] interval.
(... it would also consider things like social licensing risks leading to early plant closures like what's happening in Germany, or the fact that nuclear will likely be paired with natural gas too because demand itself is variable, and overbuilding nuclear is expensive.)
Ehm, you should be fair and not fudge the numbers in your favor. :-)
Start both with the same (current) % for renewables and
(1) have some realistic ramp-up of renewables to reach 98%, and
(2) keep the renewables more modestly rising in the fission version, while fading-out fossils in favor of fission
You should also account the carbon foodprint of grid-level energy storage (yes, it will be needed, even with the natural gas plans), vs the foodprint for fission plants (undoubtedly quite bad).
There are so many more cost-effective grid-scale options like pumped storage. I think it's daft to "waste" the energy density of lithium batteries on stationary applications.
Battery storage has become cheaper than pumped hydro, I believe, at least for diurnal storage. The price declines in Li-ion cells have been remarkable, particularly recent decline in LFP cell prices.
Battery production/year is following an exponential curve right now. Tons of new research on promising new directions is continually being produced and incorporated into batteries. Projecting only continued production at the current rate isn't "realistic", it's wildly pessimistic.
The total electricity grid requirements are also growing - it’s at 30TWh annually and before the AI explosion was ~2-3% (let’s conservatively estimate 2030 as 40TWh). Let’s say 20% of that is satisfied direct from renewables without storage leaving 32TWh.
Aggressive predictions have us generating ~6-10TWh of batteries by 2030 meaning we’re going to still need about another 3-6 years to actually satisfy demand (ignoring complexity of hooking up the batteries). On top of that, the batteries require rare earth metals that companies are gearing up to satisfy by strip mining the ocean floor for those polymetallic nodules, operations which have a very real risk of completely destroying deep ocean life. It seems to me like it’s slow and ecologically potentially more destructive than even global warming. Is it really wise to be betting on batteries at this scale vs tried and true nuclear fission which doesn’t carry any of these risks?
We can make an effectively unlimited amount of battery storage, especially sodium ion or iron air (which don't need ocean floor mining...). There are no practical limits on the timescales of ~10-20 years.
What people forget is batteries are a manufactured good, which follows Wright's Law. Manufactured goods (like energy storage, TVs, lightbulbs) obey different economic principles to scarce goods (like land, services, or goods with scarce inputs), and they have effectively unlimited supply. The supply is strictly set by demand.
Aggressive predictions of ~6-10TWh/year of batteries in 2030 are more predictions of demand, not so much predictions of supply. If market demand in 2030 is 30TWh/year, then that's what the market will produce. But don't blame manufacturers for the fact that demand in 2030 will only be 6-10TWh/year! And don't confuse this for a sector's inability to increase supply!
The response when seeing a "6-10TWh/year" prediction should be "how can we incentivize demand so that this number is 30TWh/year instead".
You didn't address the need for rare earth metals. Can you link sources talking about the 'unlimited amounts of battery storage'? I was also under the impression (albeit uninformed) that battery storage was not a solved problem, either technically or ecologically.
There is no need for rare earth metals for stationary storage. See sodium ion, which performs similar to lithium ion batteries and are only slightly more expensive (but that cost differential has nothing to do with the product itself, it's because of economies of scale and Wright's Law has been operating on lithium ion for longer).
Lithium ion is preferred for vehicles because it's lighter, but again we are talking about stationary storage, so the extra weight of sodium ion isn't a problem.
The technology is solved, and the materials needed to make it abundant. It's all about demand. If the demand is there, the industrial capacity will follow. But right now, the market is only demanding about 3TWh/year of storage, and so that's how much industry is producing.
> The technology is solved, and the materials needed to make it abundant. It's all about demand. If the demand is there, the industrial capacity will follow
It takes a lot of time for new battery technologies to scale and disrupt existing ones and entrenched players have an incentive to continue competing. Sodium ion, iron air etc might replace lithium ion on the 30 year time scale but lithium ion will continue to drive down costs and up its capacity to try to compete and it has significantly more revenue to fund this by being the only player in the market. So it’s not clear when alternative batteries will start to replace lithium ion, but at scale it’s unlikely to be a quick process. And please don’t pretend like it’s all a demand side problem. It takes time to build out new factories from manufacturing all the equipment needed to acquiring and training employees. There’s plenty of demand for cheap batteries and the ability to manufacture simply isn’t there either and it’s being brought online. Oh and that capacity being added? It’s all lithium ion and requires a long pay off for that investment. Lithium ion is going to be potential a significant ecological debt worse than fossil fuels if the ocean floor strip mining gets going.
Well yes that is what happens when the market is left to its own devices and external costs aren't accounted for. The solution isn't to abandon storage it's to embrace the many options out there that don't require rare earths.
And it is all a demand side problem. If the world wanted to buy 10 or 20 TWh a year at current market prices, that's how much would be produced. But the world doesn't want to do that and hence that much isn't produced. This is Econ 101 for goods with non scarce inputs. It doesn't take ten years to scale up production for commodity goods.
Since we're teaching each other first principles, bringing a new mass-scale battery manufacturing facility online to full production typically takes anywhere from 2 to 5 years. Planning takes ~1-2 years, construction & setup takes ~1-2 years and ramp to full output takes 6 months to 1 year. And since we're on Econ 101, investments require payoff so all of this is done carefully to not tank the price of batteries by overproducing supply. In control systems terms, supply side investments always aim for undershooting demand as overshooting hurts how much money you make and risks destabilizing your market.
As for scarcity, inputs to lithium ion ARE scarce which negates your entire model. Pretending they aren't is where you're making a mistake. Lithium, cobalt & nickle are relatively scarce and the mines for that have to scale up to meet demand as well. You've also got a workforce to train to do the work which takes time & is also input-constrained. That's why there's massive NEW lithium mines being opened in the US & elsewhere to extract existing reserves to meet the growth in lithium ion batteries. If the world thought that sodium ion or ion air was an immediate future, you wouldn't see these massive large-scale investments into lithium. Lilthium-ion batteries is going to be a large and growing market for decades which brings me back to the strip mining of the ocean floor that's coming to support that.
Whright's law by the way isn't also an inevitable effect that goes on forever. At some point your exponential plateau's and you no longer see such exponential decrease in pricing. That's why processors aren't getting cheaper and compute isn't scaling up quite in the same way as in the early days. There's only so efficient you can make something.
Hang on. So the reaction to companies intending to perform actions that will destroy the economy system of the oceans is to prevent more demand? Why this instead of just forbidding that mining?
Well without that mining batteries will run out of cost effective materials quite quick and temper the ability to hit the demand necessary to decarbonize the grid. There’s also complicated legal matters since a lot of this happens in international waters. Oh, and the body that nominally regulates the matter has been clearly regulatory captured and is handing out mining licenses left and right. So while it might be nice to hypothesize what a sensible regulatory framework might look like, what’s actually happening is “full steam ahead” mining. It’s really bleak.
Also if we're planning for the long term; wind and solar sound like bad options for going into major global catastrophes like large asteroid hits or a nuclear war. It'd be better as a matter of principle to be using systems that can cope with massive climate disruptions. I like to bring up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer - an event like that will happen sooner or later and it'd be pretty rough if we've all gone too heavy with solar.
One of those hopefully-you-don't-need-it concerns but it is starting to become a more pressing with the uptick in wars and unrest that seems to be going on.
> The world doesn't need fusion or fission, other technology is plenty good.
It's not. If it was the world wouldn't be using 140k TWh of fossil-fuel-produced energy[1], and would be using a lot more than 9k TWh of renewable energy[2]
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?
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.
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.
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.)
> we can make tritium from lithium using the neutrons from fusion
Each fusion reaction consumes one tritium atom and produces one neutron. If that neutron hits a lithium atom, it can split that and produce a tritium atom. If everything goes perfectly and there are no losses, then you get a 100% replacement of all the tritium that you consume. If you have a 90% replacement ratio (highly optimistic), you essentially lower the cost of your tritium fuel by a factor of 10, so from $30000 per gram to $3000 per gram, or $3 MM per kilogram.
> We also get tritium from fission plants
Yes we do. Mainly from Candu reactors. There are 49 Candu and Candu-like reactors in the world, and each produces less than 1kg of tritium per year. According to [1] a 1 GW fusion power plant would consume about 55 kg of tritium per year. So you'd need to run more than 50 fission power plants to operate one fusion power plant. Most people who dream of fusion think that fission will become irrelevant, not that you'll need 50 fission power plants for each fusion power plant.
That's why fusion blankets for D-T reactors use lead or beryllium as neutron multipliers. CFS for example uses FLiBe molten salt. Doing it this way a tokamak can not only sustain its own tritium supply, but periodically provide startup fuel for additional reactors.
Initial tritium load for a small, high-field reactor like CFS is much smaller than for ITER. And I'll note that the paper you linked has this conclusion:
> The preliminary results suggest that initial operation in D–D with continual feedback into the plasma of the tritium produced enables a fusion reactor designed solely for D–T operation to start-up in an acceptably short time-scale without the need for any external tritium source.
Beryllium is very efficient as a neutron multiplier, but it is also extremely rare. It would not be acceptable as a consumable for energy production, as it is much more useful for other purposes.
In the Solar System, the abundance of beryllium is similar to that of gold and of the platinum-group metals. On Earth, the scarcity of beryllium is less obvious only because it is concentrated in the continental crust, where it is relatively easily accessible, even if its amount in the entire Earth is much smaller.
Lead neutron multipliers would be preferable, because they only inter-convert isotopes of lead, so it is not destroyed, like beryllium.
However lead used for this purpose becomes radioactive, with a very long lifetime, unless expensive isotope separation would be used for it.
Ok, let's talk about that. For those who are not familiar, CFS stands for Commonwealth Fusion Systems, as startup with links to MIT. CFS aims to build a fusion reactor similar to ITER, but many times smaller, the secret sauce being that they use superconductors to achieve high magnetic fields. Back in 2022 some of the MIT guys got an ARPA-E grant to investigate the use of FLiBe to achieve atritium breeding ratio higher than 1 [1]. The results are in [2], they were published in January 2025. Here are some quotes:
> The long-term goal of LIBRA is to demonstrate a TBR ⩾ 1 in a large volume (1000 kg ∼ 500 l) of FLiBe molten salt using D–T neutron generators. Note that a full-scale LIB in an ARC-class FPP will require ∼250 000 l of FLiBe, hence the importance of understanding tritium behavior in large salt volumes.
ARC is the fusion reactor designed by CFS. This paper states that it will need 250000 liters of FLiBe. This is an insane amount. To understand how large this amount is, consider this: this ARPA-E project that took 3 years, used a quantity of 100 ml, so 0.1 liters.
Anyway, what breeding ratio was achieved? 3.57 x 10^(-4), or 0.0357%. It's a long way to go from here to 1.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but too many things related to fusion are just "engineering details".
Wow. The ARC reactor is supposed to deliver 270 MWe (when/if it will be built) [1]. So 20% of the world annual production of beryllium for one power plant that would deliver about one quarter of the power of an AP-1000 fission reactor.
No, it comes from foolishly thinking that the cost of fuel will dominate cost of energy. That doesn't require fusion of protons; deuterium and lithium are cheap.
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.
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.
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.
That's a problem, but it's not necessarily even the biggest problem. Other huge problems include the shear size of the machines per MW of output (and hence cost per MW), coupled with their dreadful complexity and the difficulty of keeping them operating when they become too radioactive for hands-on maintenance. Designs typically just assume the reactors will be reliable enough, when there's no empirical evidence to support that (and the one study that tried to estimate uptime based on analogies with other technologies found the reactor would have an uptime percentage of just 4%!)
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.
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.
Modern fission designs mitigate meltdown concerns well enough that I'm not sure the safety & security around a fusion plant would actually be any better/cheaper, although public sentiment may be enough of an advantage. Tritium & neutron activated metals are dangerous enough to require keeping the traditional nuclear plant safeguards IMO. As far as proliferation concerns go, I don't see any reason you couldn't breed plutonium in the neutron flux of a fusion reactor, & the tritium is clearly viable for boosted warheads.
Modern fission designs plausibly mitigate meltdown concerns well enough...
To move that "plausibly" into "actually" you have to have very careful design review by regulators. Very careful review of construction to make sure what is constructed is what was designed. And so on and so forth. It's a lot of friction that skyrockets costs. Legitimately. People inevitably attempt to cut corners, and there's no way to make sure they aren't on the safety parts without checking. Actual currently regulatory costs seem to bear out the difference between these, with SMR people spending large amounts of money to convince regulators they didn't screw up, vs Helion fusion being "regulated like a hospital".
I'm not saying fusion has no proliferation concerns. But it's the difference between "low grade nuclear waste, or a very high tech very advanced program to weaponize a working reactor" and "even a broken reactor can be strapped to some explosives to make a dirty bomb". I can't say I'm very aware of how much proliferation concerns drive costs.
I was thinking more of large scale D-T fusion, e.g. the tokamak design, which requires breeding tritium & is expected to create a lot of neutron activated waste. The tritium is especially concerning, as it's roughly as deadly as polonium-210 & highly bioavailable in the form of super heavy water.
You're probably right for smaller aneutronic designs like Helion's. If they can actually be made to work, they'll be much safer.
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.
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.
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.
The more plausible looking modern fusion companies tend to be designing very small reactors compared to those projects. Vogtle is 5000 MWs. Olkioluoto is 1600. Helion is promising reactors that are 50 and can be shipped via trains by 2028 (or 2030 depending on how you read some statements/interpret what I just said). They still need some neutron shielding to actually operate them safely (boronated concrete, probably not shipped by train), but nothing on the scale of what you need for a fission plant.
Helion also promised 50MW prototypes by 2021. It's 2025 and they have no 50MW prototype still. Fusion power roadmaps are generally exercises in wishful thinking, while fusion power startup roadmaps are basically gaslighting-as-a-serivce.
I still think its worth researching and we'll get there at some point, but I'm not holding my breath-- the whole industry has overpromised in the past, continues to overpromise now and will be probably be irrelevant for de-carbonizing the grid by the time the technology is actually ready at an industrial scale.
Mass media reporting on the whole sector is admittedly even worse; especially for uninformed readers without an engineering background.
I believe the promise you are referring to was contingent upon Helion getting funding that they did not get. It's not gaslighting to publish an amibitious timeline for a startup and be wrong, but that's not even what happened here. They said "if X (funding), then Y". X didn't happen.
I believe the current timetable is no longer contingent upon funding (since they've got the funding they think they need). It's no doubt still an optimistic startup timeline, a target, that they might well fail to achieve (even without the startup failing, just being late).
Meh. They promised 50MW by 2021 in 2018. In 2021, they got half a billion $, but the 50MW plant is still not running. But the bigger problem is that those are all just pretty prototypes; according to a 2018 ARPA report, magnetic field compression in the 40T range is needed for commercial viability. The various prototyes have pushed this from 4T to 10T (and presumably soonish 15T) since 2014. Extrapolating that trend is much less promising than Helions roadmaps, and doing linear extrapolation there is probably doing them a favor...
It's a cool concept, but probably not gonna be viable anytime soon (if ever!).
With regards to scaling, I think there are two components:
Does the physics change as they scale up the field strength? No one is really going to know until they try (unless we get a lot better at simulating plasma real fast). If not, they lost a bet, but they lost it honestly and as far as I can tell (not a physicist) it was a reasonably good bet to make.
Can they physically build the bigger magnets they need fast enough to meet their timelines (and everything else. I understand they are currently bottlenecked on capacitors)? Apart from normal "startups are overly optimistic" issues I don't see any reason to think that they shouldn't be able to reliably predict how fast they can scale magnet size, or be limited to a linear rate. While they are big magnets, it's not exactly new physics.
I'm not sure I'd say they are "probably going to be viable" anytime soon either. I think they have a good chance, but "probably" as in ">50%" is probably pushing it. (Also depends on where you put the goalposts of course)
FWIW I believe that 2018 report was for a high gain low pulse rate plan that Helion rejected, and they are aiming for substantially lower strength magnets as a result. I can't find anything more than rumors to confirm that though.
Just to be clear: I'm not accusing Helion of being dishonest or even fraudulent.
It's just that from everything I know about the project, they still have a long way to go, and there are a lot of milestones to hit that are just pipe dreams for now (actually fusing He3, breeding it, net-gain energy extraction, ...).
I would expect progress to slow down significantly as the scale of prototypes and their complexity increases (like what happens for basically every engineering project ever)-- but progress is already slow/behind schedule to begin with...
That’d be interesting to learn more about. What I’ve seen always leans toward regulation driving costs.
Though I guess some of that infrastructure could be overbuilt due to excessive regulation.
Also much of the concrete and steel is needed for the containment domes. Fusion power likely wouldn’t require nearly as much protection. Perhaps just a fairly standard industrial building.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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).
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.
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?
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).
>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).
"that comment literally say" even thought it doesn't say that one of the benefit would be "technological advances" so in reality "that comment literally doesn't say it" and that's why I was asking.
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).
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Even in that case, nuclear fission could not beat solar or eolic ROI.
Neither solar or wind are free. There are costs associated e.g. with building, shipping, maintaining, decommissioning these things (and hopefully at some point recycling, but that’s not solved). Looking at the whole picture, these costs are not that different. These technologies are complementary, they have very different characteristics.
> Current estimates put fussion at $120/MWh.
Current estimates are completely unreliable, because no industrial-scale demonstrator was built. They are a useful tool for planning and modeling, but not solid enough to build an industrial strategy on them. (And it’s “fusion”)
Did anybody say they are free? But the costs of running solar or eolic are way lower than the costs of running fission, or the costs that likely would be running a fusion central. In case you don't know what ROI means, it is return on investment (i.e. building, shipping, mantaining decomission...).
As of today, we are closer to mass batteries as renewable companion than fusion, at least in terms of ROI. If both end up competing for lithium, it would go to batteries unless fusion becomes dirty cheap.
Current estimations are useful because they mark the starting point for fusion: they are at around 120. They need to reach 80 to replace fission. They need to reach 60 to replace batteries. Assuming batteries don't get better ROI.
Same numbers were useful 30 years ago for solar: it was fully functional, but not yet economically sound. It was not much than a toy and a promise (as it is fusion today). Only when prices made sense it turned to a serious energy source.
About lithium: DT fusion needs mostly Li-6. If it were separated, batteries would work just fine with Li-7.
I recall a story of some lab that was trying to make a lithium-based neutron detector. It wouldn't work, and when they investigated they discovered the lithium they had bought was almost pure Li-7. It was surplus sold back into the chemicals market from the US hydrogen bomb program (which needed Li-6).
I don't think current costs for fusion are useful for modeling, or really anything, because there's nothing there yet. We don't even have prototypes.
But if there is not a clear and speedy path to get fusion to $30/MWh it's not going to make it. Batteries, solar wind, and geothermal are all busy deploying and getting cheaper every month, year, and decade. The grid system possible with 2035's solar and battery tech is going to be completely unimaginable to today's grid ops.
When I go to https://model.energy/ and solve for the cost of energy from renewables + storage in the US, using 2030 cost assumptions, the cost is less than $0.05/kWh. This is providing synthetic 24/7/365 baseload power, so all intermittency has been taken care of.
You're answering to a post I made saying that prices that were quoted from the Lazard report don't reflect all that's writen in the report.
Your answer gives a model unrelated to the figures I was discussing, with extremely agressive prices [1] set as hypotheses and zero network costs factored in. Sure, I can accept it as a minimum limit for the cost of a system, but that's not a very useful information, and you're not quoting this price as a lower limit either.
I don't see an honesty issue here, just someone believing that spherical cows are going to produce milk tomorrow.
[1]: e.g. the Lazard report quotes utility PV at $29-92/MWh, while your tool quotes it at 21.7€/MWh.
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.
I've seen cost estimates around there for tokamaks. If Helion actually works, their estimate is more like $20/MWh, and it looks pretty plausible given their reactor design. They would have relatively low neutron radiation, direct electricity extraction without a turbine, factory-built reactors transportable by rail, and no particularly expensive components like superconductors or fancy lasers.
Some of the other designs also look relatively cheap. Tokamaks are just the one we understand the best, so we have the highest confidence that they'll work.
We have highest confidence that tokamaks will "work" in the sense of reaching a physics goal. We have very little confidence tokamaks will "work" in the sense of reaching an engineering/economic goal. Too often the former is confused with the latter in these discussions.
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.
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.
Bikeshedding is focusing on triviality at the expense of important issues. That is just what is happening here. The showstopper issues with tokamaks are size, cost, reliability, materials. This has nothing to do with any of those.
It's an issue that wasn't high risk. I mean, sure, check off the box, but don't pretend this moves the needle much. This was minor compared to those issues that have no clear solutions, or reasons to think there won't be solutions.
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.
Challenges persist, notably in developing materials that can endure prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures and neutron radiation within fusion reactors. Addressing these material durability issues is essential for the realization of continuous, commercially viable fusion power.
I fail to find this info: how much energy did they get out? How much did they pump in? How long does it have to burn until there's energy in-out equilibrium?
* This expirement wasn't about energy in-out, it was about plasma control. Specifically stopping at 1337 seconds is a way of announcing "and we could have gone longer, but we liked this number"
It still eludes me how we are going to be able to reproduce the same temperature and pressure as in the core of a star considering the humongous amount of mass (hence energy) required to create those conditions.
There are tantalizing ways to create fusion which don’t require these precise conditions. For example, a simple farnsworth fusor device gets fusion reactions just by causing atoms to cross paths at super high speed until they collide - they simply don’t collide often enough to release anywhere near a net energy gain.
Inertial confinement fusion, such as the National ignition facility, does generate comparable pressures and temperatures to the core of the sun within the fuel pellet for an extremely small moment during an implosion. This is done by focusing a lot of energy on small target.
Plasma confinement techniques don’t utilize high pressure to create fusion; they rely on extreme temperatures which are significantly hotter than the core of the sun, which can produce fusion events in a plasma which is only pressurized to around 1 atmosphere (they also rely on different fuel types than the sun which fuse much more readily). The key is once again focus, a large amount of energy is put into a small amount of gas. The obvious issue with this is that the extreme temperatures would destroy any physical container rapidly - but given the electromagnetic nature of plasma, it can be contained using a strong magnetic field without reaching the surface of its physical container.
While temperature may be in the stellar ballpark, pressure should be much lower. That is fine because we are not trying to do proton-proton fusion (that one is very slow even in a star) but a much easier deuterium-tritium fusion.
So, deuterium needs to be obtained from sea water through distillation and electrolysis - both energy intensive operations. And tritium comes from nuclear reactors.
I have always wondered - assuming that the confinement problem is solved, how does the cost of the fuel compare to fission (or other generation methods?
The energy cost to extract deuterium from seawater is about 1/238000th (0.00004%) the energy released from fusing that deuterium.
Nuclear fusion breeds its own tritium from lithium.
Running a 1 GW thermal fusion reactor for a year would consume $483,000 of deuterium and $1300 of lithium. At 40% conversion efficiency and 5 cents per kwh, the fusion reactor would produce $175 million of electricity in that same year.
For comparison, fuel is about 5% of the cost of electricity from fission, and about 50% the cost from coal.
Controlled fusion does not require the conditions of the interior of a star, because the nuclear fuels involved are many orders of magnitude more reactive. All the Sun's initial deuterium (and all the lithium in the core) were burned away long ago.
I don’t care about sex jokes. 42 (or 72) OTOH are cool because both are surrounded by twin primes!!! how cool is that? (semiprime coolness is significantly smaller than twin prime coolness)
Why is that the correct interpretation? It seems like another would be: "This is a ~33% improvement over a record set only three seeks ago. Innovation is rapidly accelerating to a point where plasma can be contained indefinitely."
> Nevertheless, given the infrastructure needed to produce this energy on a large scale, it is unlikely that fusion technology will make a significant contribution to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. For this, several technological sticking points need to be overcome, and the economic feasibility of this form of energy production must still be demonstrated.
It's very cool, but the article itself paints a long time line. Indefinite containment is just one part of the puzzle.
Being a viable form of electricity and becoming a significant contributor to mitigating climate change by a specific date are two different things. Geothermal is a viable form of electricity for example even if it is less than 1% of power produced.
Point taken, of course. But the fact that emerging technologies (or technologies that people wish would emerge) are often overhyped is not exactly an argument that "commercially viable fusion electricity still remains a looooong way off."
And, FWIW, I think it's far from clear at this point that progress towards AGI has been overhyped. It's true that we're not there yet, but how many serious people were actually predicting we'd get there in early 2025? If anything, that one seems like it could be coming up on us faster that many had expected. But, of course, nobody really knows — certainly not me.
Actually...same with FSD, now that I'm thinking about your comment a bit more critically. There are a few people out there who keep selling a snake-oil version of the technology. But, if you tune them out, my sense is that we've actually made pretty substantial progress on that problem too. After all, there are cities in the U.S. today where you can get picked up in a driverless taxi!
Are you trying to be sarcastic? There are cities where you can book a car to drive itself to you and then fully autonomously drive you to your destination.
Aren't we talking about Waymo? It's not perfect everywhere but it's definitely already better than most people driving around SF. That's pretty full to me.
I guess they haven't been allowed on freeways yet?
Commercially viable likely also means: cost competitive with nuclear fission. Which might well never happen, since the reactor designs for fusion are orders of magnitude more complex (and therefore more expensive).
They also need a lot of ignition energy which requires a powerful separate power source, which limits where the fusion reactor can be built.
Moreover, there is the issue of the reactor core being degraded by the heavy neutron radiation which is produced by the fusion reaction. So the chamber has to be replaced regularly. Which may also be quite expensive.
Does the commercial viability change when one considers regulatory constraints on building new fission plants? People may be more inclined to allow fusion reactors than fission reactors, since the former doesn't require uranium. (I'm sure there are dangerous failure modes for fusion, like there are for everything else, but Chernobyl continues to haunt the nuclear industry in the popular imagination.)
I guess the existing regulations apply to all reactors which handle radioactive materials, not just to fission reactors which produce radioactive uranium isotopes with long half-life, and which include the risk of a nuclear meltdown. Though it would make sense if the safety requirements are significantly lower for fusion reactors because of their higher innate safety.
My understanding as well is that fusion could take care of base load, but it can't be scaled up or down based on grid demand to the same degree that fission reactors can. So fusion and renewables alone would not be capable of a carbon-free future grid.
I think this is hopelessly optimistic. From what I can tell, they have not even started building the ARC reactor. There is about zero reason to believe that all the completely unproven concepts, like the molten-salt liquid blanket (or tritium breeding in general) are gonna work without a hitch and zero delays-- thats just straight up self-delusional.
In comparison with ITER, the have the advantage of newer magnet technology (which certainly helps!), but thats the only actually proven thing, and every other aspect of ARC is basically complete vaporware.
It would be a very pleasant surprise to have them extract electrical energy from the thing in early 2030, but I'm not even holding my breath for first plasma by then. But we'll see.
No one has demonstrated stable plasma operations for any lengths of time and they are claiming to not just get Q-plasma > 1 but Q-total > 1 by 2030? This is more optimistic than Full Self Driving by 2016
The thing is, after repeatedly getting excited about commercial fusion power for the past sixty years, it's tough to maintain enthusiasm.
For me I worry it's like the search for the northwest passage. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage). Explorers spent about 400 years searching for something that they knew just had to be there, but when they finally did it (1957), it really wasn't important anymore.
> The thing is, after repeatedly getting excited about commercial fusion power for the past sixty years, it's tough to maintain enthusiasm.
It’s very easy if you’re even a tiny bit interested in the scientific aspects. Since we started we’ve had several generations of superconductors, huge advances in our understanding of materials and plasma physics (a bit niche but still very cool).
ITER itself is fascinating if you’re into large-scale engineering and planning. If you are into this and not interested in ITER, I would recommend having another look.
> Explorers spent about 400 years searching for something that they knew just had to be there, but when they finally did it (1957), it really wasn't important anymore.
Yes, it’s a risk and it might well end up that way. Still, many discoveries have already been made along the way, and it is impossible to predict its success or failure without actually trying to do it.
The Northwest Passage is important now tho. The short path from most of Eurasia to North America goes through the Arctic. Ice caps are diminishing/going away. The US wants Greenland. All of these are related.
What's funny is that AI has been failing to be achieved for much longer than fusion energy yet so many here are convinced we're on the cusp of an AI apocalypse.
What's pointless for anyone who cares about fusion is commenting on it from the peanut gallery (i.e., any form of social media) rather than participating in R&D in any way whatsoever. The same goes for online outrage: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10095997
This entire site is nothing more than a sales and marketing tool and otherwise exists to waste peoples' time.
> What's pointless for anyone who cares about fusion is commenting on it from the peanut gallery (i.e., any form of social media) rather than participating in R&D in any way whatsoever.
Does anyone have a top 5 issues list of things that are holding up fusion progress? Like there are basic material science issues that still need work to bring costs down, so that critical materials don't cost too much? Or there is still some theoretical plasma physics that we're still working out the details on? Or magnetic confinement simulations are still too crude, and we need 100x on computing power. Or whatever.
1. We don't have a perfect understanding of plasma dynamics and how they'll react to different conditions. Predicting plasma instabilities before they mess with your reactor remains a big challenge for our computation capabilities.
2. Yeah, material science is also a big one. When you are working with the magnetic forces typical in a modern fusion reactor, your materials undergo a lot of mechanical stress. The "first wall" that has to bear the brunt of the nuclear reactions becomes radioactive. Some plasma ions invariably go off trajectory and we have a "diverter" to prevent them from hurting the reactor but that reduces the temperature.
3. Our reactors aren't efficient enough. Everyone taking about "q" value means the energy they put into creating the reaction to get the plasma to fuse. It's called q-plasma which is a misleading metric. The true breakthrough will be sustained q-total, which will be the ratio of the total energy you get out over the total energy you put in. Nobody in the industry likes to talk about it, because we are decades away from reaching this.
4. Modern designs are becoming extremely expensive. The most serious design right now is being funded not by a state of a country but by the biggest countries in the planet.
5. The fuel is notoriously difficult to contain. There will be leaks, and even small ones can spoil the reaction and tip your device into unpredictability. Also, the fuel has a tendency to infiltrate metals and embrittle them.
If I understand correctly, the Top 1 and 2, 3, 4, 5 etc. issue is how to make that plasma do actual work. So far the designs which boast Q>1 or are close enough, all produce plasma in short burst and no one has invented a way to make that burst generate electricity somehow. And tokamak design has clearer path to generating electricity but have problems in reaching stable Q>1 at all. This is all very amateurish understanding, please correct me if I'm wrong.
I'm afraid the top 1 issue forever is that it really only works if you are a sun. No need to try and harvest or contain the energy, high energy neutrons damaging the whole thing is a non-issue, and the gravity does the rest.
We already have a fusion source and a way to harvest it from afar in solar panels.
AFAIU, no existing tokamaks can handle sustained plasma for any significant period of time because they'll burn down.
Did this destroy the facility?
What duration of sustained fusion plasma can tokamaks like EAST, WEST, and ITER withstand? What will need to change for continuous fusion energy to be net gained from a tokamak or a stellerator fusion reactor?
If this destroyed the facility that would be the headline this news article.... WEST highest is 22 minutes (it's in the title) and you could google EAST and ITER but the title tells you it is less than 22 minutes. WEST is a testing ground for ITER. The fact that you can have sustained fusion for only 22 minutes is the biggest problem since you need to boil water continuously because all power sources rely on taking cold water and making it warm constantly so that it makes a turbine move.
To rephrase the question: what is the limit to the duration of sustained inertial confinement fusion plasma in the EAST, WEST, and ITER tokamaks, and why is the limit that amount of time?
Don't those materials melt if exposed to temperatures hotter than the sun for sufficient or excessive periods of time?
For what sustained plasma duration will EAST, WEST, and ITER need to be redesigned? 1 hour, 24 hours?
The magnets in the device make the plasma be in a doughnut like shape to prevent it from touching the rest and it has active cooling, the parts that are around the plasma are made out of tungsten to dissipate heat. The sustained plasma duration would have to be turned on for as long as a traditional power generation device like a fission reactor or an oil / coal power station.
>> Compared to similar experiments with solid targets, the water sheet reduced the proton beam's divergence by an order of magnitude and increased the beam's efficiency by a factor of 100
That energy gain was only in the plasma, not in the entire system.
The extremely low efficiency of the lasers used there for converting electrical energy into light energy (perhaps of the order of 1%) has not been considered in the computation of that "energy gain".
Many other hidden energy sinks have also not been considered, like the energy required to produce deuterium and tritium, or the efficiencies of capturing the thermal energy released by the reaction and of converting it into electrical energy.
It is likely that the energy gain in the plasma must be at least in the range 100 to 1000, in order to achieve an overall energy gain greater than 1.
> all power sources rely on taking cold water and making it warm constantly so that it makes a turbine move.
PV (photovoltaic), TPV (thermopohotovoltaic), and thin film and other solid-state thermoelectric (TE) approaches do not rely upon corrosive water turning a turbine.
Turbine blades can be made of materials that are more resistant to corrosion.
> 5% efficient; you usually get less than 5% of the thermal energy converted into electricity
(International space law prohibits putting nuclear reactors in space without specific international approval, which is considered for e.g. deep space probes like Voyager; though the sun is exempt.)
> The term "thermoelectric effect" encompasses three separately identified effects: the Seebeck effect (temperature differences cause electromotive forces), the Peltier effect (thermocouples create temperature differences), and the Thomson effect (the Seebeck coefficient varies with temperature).
Gas turbines are more efficient than steam turbines simply because they can be used at higher temperatures.
However the exhaust gas of a gas turbine will still contain a great part of the input energy.
Therefore in order to reach maximum efficiency in a power plant, you must start with a gas turbine, which must be followed by a cascade of 2 or 3 steam turbines that run at lower and lower temperatures (this combination of a gas turbine with some steam turbines is what "combined cycle" means), until you obtain exhaust steam that is not much hotter than ambient temperature, and which can be used for heating, to recover even more of the input energy than what has been converted into electric energy.
Instead of gases or steam, turbines may also use supercritical fluids, e.g. carbon dioxide, which may lead to using less turbine stages and with much smaller turbines (that must work at much higher fluid pressures).
A gas turbine that is used alone, without steam turbines that recover the heat from its exhaust gas, has normally a too low efficiency. Its use can be acceptable only for mobile generators or emergency generators, where the size and complexity are more important than the efficiency.
Maybe solar energy storage makes sense for storing the energy from fusion reactor stars, too.
There's also MOST: Molecular Solar Thermal Energy Storage, which stores solar energy as chemical energy for up to 18 years with a "specially designed molecule of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen that changes shape when it comes into contact with sunlight."
there is destroyed and then there is a smoking hole in the side of the planet:)
but I think it fair to say, that after 22 min running, that there is no way that it can be turned back on later kind of thing, fairly sure its a pwhew!, lookatdat!, almost lost plasma containment....
keep in mind that they are trying to replicate the conditions found inside a star with some magnets
and stuff, sure its ferociously engineered stuff
but not at all like the stuff that could exist inside a star
so all in all a rather audacious endevour, and I wish them luck with it
The system is not breakeven and the plasma was contained for 22 minutes so the situation would be the plasma was contained until it ran out of fuel. It is made out of tungsten for heat dissipation, has active cooling, has magnetic confinement with superconductors to prevent the system from destroying itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WEST_(formerly_Tore_Supra)
> A fusion energy gain factor, usually expressed with the symbol Q, is the ratio of fusion power produced in a nuclear fusion reactor to the power required to maintain the plasma in steady state
There is no danger of destroying the facility. The problem is keeping the plasma going. Even with self-sustaining fusion, the plasma doesn't have that much energy, it is really hot but low density.
The duration is because plasma is heated by rising current, and that hits limit after some period of time. With self-sustaining fusion, heating shouldn't be needed after the initial pulse.
No, none of the dozens of reactors constructed so far have gone through the trouble of building a steam system with a turbine and a generator.
Which is understandable, since this is the easy part (not very different than the setup in a fission or coal plant), and there's absolutely no reason to do so until we have seen ignition.
I'd just assume that temperature would be an important factor in the reactor.
With the millions of degrees being involved, seems a little more than "not very different" than a fission reactor. But would like to hear how this is supposed to work.
The temperatures are far beyond anything matter can stand, so its very important that the magnetic confinement keeps the plasma from touching anything.
But one end product of the fusion process is neutrons. Neutrons are unaffected by the magnetic confinement, they pass right through and hit the jacket of the reactor, where they are absorbed. This heats up the material, which is why you can run cooling water through the jacket which turns into steam. This steam spins a turbine.
There's some engineering challenges (neutron bombardment turns steel and concrete brittle, and later radioactive), but in the end its very similar to a normal fission reactor.
Fusion will not be commercial ever at least not for power generation.
Fission has potential for far cheaper fuel cost and can be done with less capital cost.
We are spending a crazy amount of money researching fusion while we have only explored like 1% of the potential of fission. If only part of this money was invested in fission we could have a competition for multiple advanced fission reactors.
They turned it off specifically then. Just like the previous one at 1066. We used to do stuff like this in our labs as a joke. Or try and stop timers exactly on :00
well done on the french achieving yet another extraordinary feat of engineering and research while still bearing the stigma of being shit at everything for some reason
I hope this international race ends up bearing fruit in a few decades, we need it
As a secondary effect it kind of is; the general assumption still is that the slop-generating AI will need a lot of power to train, so there is surprisingly a lot more private investment into fusion and fission innovation in recent years.
Well, AI also has something else for it : at this point, no one is expecting any ROI soon, but they all imagine that it's going to be huuuuge, so the "expected" (as in, "wished for") ROI might as well be infinite.
As soon as AI investors start demanding dividends, then the ROI of investing in AI will be compared to the ROI of investing in electricity production "for production sake".
Even if we shut down chatgpt, people who still switch light on.
If we only keep enough fusion reactors to run LLM inferences, but no one can afford lights, well...
The need to process the large amount of data gathered by the fusion test rig drove many fields of computer science. The freaking internet was supposedly invented because the physicists at CERN needed a way to collaboratively process and interpret this data.
If we do the fusion in zero g then we have solved the confinement issue. The problem is creating conditions for fusion in zero g. The simplest way would probably be aggregating enough material to a single spot that gravity itself creates conditions for fusion. But then the power plant becomes too energetic for earth so it has to be at an enormous distance away to be safe. And with that of course you have the problem of transmitting the power back to earth. But I think photons could be gathered at a safe distance from this fusion, to harvest it without having to be so close.
The issue with that is how to direct the energy back to Earth, and then collect it. If you can’t direct it and it radiates in all directions then only a tiny fraction of the produced photons will reach Earth. Then you need to collect those photons in order to do useful work, otherwise they will just heat the earth. If the distance needed to remain safe is greater or less than geosynchronous orbit, you’ll need collectors all over the Earth as they won’t have constant line of sight towards the source and experience a “nighttime” of sorts. There is also the issue of atmospheric effects, such as high densities of moisture, absorbing or scattering the photons, reducing the efficiency of the collectors. So it could work, but the effective maximum capacity will always be quite limited and the overall process highly inefficient relative to the total fusion energy produced.
Actually you don't want the transmission process to be 100% efficient. If you really captured all the fusion energy transmitted (or even just the small part of it reaching Earth), all sorts of people would complain, trust me! But fortunately that fusion reactor has more than enough power to go around...
If only it were smaller and closer. We could make it smaller by using a force other than gravity to compress the matter. Perhaps a very strong magnetic field? If it was strong enough you’d only need a fraction of the matter.
OTOH, the concept proposed by OP is already implemented and has been working reliably for billions of years with trillions of successful deployments, while this newfangled technology you are proposing still has to be demonstrated to work...
Unfortunately the original developers left long ago taking the source with them, and none of them are reachable to provide an explanation even through exotic means of communication.
You’re not looking at the entire cost. What are the end of life procedures when fuel is exhausted?
That's another plus! If you ever get to the end of the fusion reactor's life (which is not very likely), it's literally end of life for you (and everyone else who might still be around) too, so no need to worry about decommissioning costs and exhausted fuel anymore...
I can say the same thing about my basement fission reactor.
YBGIBG, but not in a dickish way.
Trillions of deployments that are all subject to the inverse square law at a distance of 100 million miles. It's hard to comprehend how bad that efficiency is.
> But fortunately that fusion reactor has more than enough power to go around...
"All the energy we could ever use, forever and forever and forever."
"Not forever,"
Insufficient data for a meaningful answer.
They wouldn't complain for long though
How about we use solar panels to collect that energy? And then we add batteries to fix holes in supply when the panels can’t see the power source.
That sounds great, but those batteries are both too expensive right now and not available. People choose the cheaper alternative which are to use thermal energy where they burn gaseous hydrocarbons when the panels can’t see the power source. When the time and price is right we may stop building new such thermal power sources, but for now we can define them as the current best choice and even call them green since everyone has the intention to replace them in the future some day.
> That sounds great, but those batteries are both too expensive right now and not available.
In December, Chinese battery pack prices declined to 100 $/kWh according to BNEF, which was a new record low. Also battery production goes up by at least 20% per year for the last years and battery energy storage installations go up by 30%, see BYD, CATL, and Tesla annual reports.
Availability might be a problem in the West, but China is installing them on a massive scale. So being “not available” (if that’s the case) should, I think, be interpreted as a Western call to action and not as a fact of life. South Korea produces 30% of all car batteries and multiple South Korean plants are planned for the US, so I have hope that things will start moving.
Europe has a fresh new battery factory in northen Sweden called Northvolt. When the subsidies ran out they filed for a loan from EU, and when those money ran out they asked the goverment for more subsidies and they got a no. They were offered a loan, but they declined that offer since they are already $6 billion in debts.
As a result they filed instead for bankruptcy last fall.
I would like to see EU issue a law against building new natural gas power plants, dictating that either countries start building that cheap grid-scale battery solutions or find non-fossil fuel alternatives, which ever is currently cheapest. Im tired of seeing that even countries like Sweden are investing into new natural gas power plants in order to address days when the wind and sun are not producing enough energy.
I don’t think such a ban would be a good idea but I agree 100% with your sentiment that non-fossil based energy generation would probably be a better idea (especially for energy independence for example).
I think you are on to something here
> The issue with that is how to direct the energy back to Earth, and then collect it.
‘Simpler’: move earth to where the energy goes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
Maybe we can use the excess photons in another way? We could bio-engineer sunlight collection devices that would take in sunlight and use it to break apart CO2 and produce other useful materials. We could then spread them around the planet to use the excess photons in a productive way. We gain valuable complex molecules and break down CO2 so a win win!
Hm, it could be possible to engineer devices that use the excess photons reaching Earth along with environmental CO2 and H2O to assemble sugars and other carbohydrates. Depending on the specific reactions, we could even end up with O2 as a by-product, which would be additionally useful for us.
[dead]
There may also be a side business selling skin products to protect people who may be exposed to the radiation from this new reactor. Possibly people may even choose to vacation in areas of elevated radation, as it is likely to be warmer. Interesting...
And another side business selling tanning beds.
If you only have one of them then the photons would only be available on that side of the earth at any given time and the other side wouldn't have power, but two of them would confuse the animals and disrupt everyone's circadian rhythm and then you'd have to deal with the three-body problem. Even the reactor-facing side would also have issues with the photons not getting through when it's cloudy.
The photons will also create heat and that heat can be used for useful work at any time, even when there are no photons hitting that side of the earth. For example it will evaporate water which will later condense into rivers, where you can put turbines. So it's a kind of fusion power, but less direct. Pure science fiction, of course.
The energy density of gravity-based storage is very low, so it could work in places where you have mountainous terrain and a lot of cheap land, but what do you do after the sites suitable for it are already in use? To make that work you'd need a scalable storage technology with a low enough cost per kWh of capacity to economically scale to multiple TWh of storage in case it's cloudy for an extended period of time.
For example, if you could make batteries at a price of $115/kWh, the cost for enough capacity to sustain the US power grid for a week would be around 24 trillion dollars, and that's just for the batteries and not any of the associated electronics or the land or the photon collectors themselves. It seems like to make your plan work you'd need a scalable storage technology with a significantly lower cost per kWh of capacity.
Three Body Problems are only systematically unsolvable, you can still numerically calculate and manually move them with some algorithm.
A huge fusion reactor at an enormous distance away... isn't that the sun? :-)
It looks like ultimate goal of this is creating a self-sustaining fusion reactor approximately 1AU away from earth (for safety) and using photovoltaic arrays to absorb the energy... Ingenious!
This truly is a miracle of modern science, something we could only accomplish in this day and age.
yes, exactly, no need for any fusion reactors in space. Collect space solar energy and beam it back to earth via microwave radiation.
Space solar is an old idea and the Soviets/Russians have worked on it since the 70's; and nowadays, like most other Russian inventions the Chinese are commercializing it. https://www.ft.com/content/2d43ed21-9f9d-4e90-a18b-ad46f0a47...
That's what OP was implying. Energy (..and its derivative global warming ) is just infrastructure and finance problem now onwards. Balancing grid, Moving power from sunshine area to non-sunshine area, storing some power at night, handling fluctuation all are more or less solved problem. Fusion is just research subject ( ..or for may be powering colony on mars ? ). ..... saying that, I hope our collective curiosity for fusion will take us to new inventions and space opportunities.
> If we do the fusion in zero g then we have solved the confinement issue.
If me move the reactor close enough to the center of the earth, eventually we can get to zero g. We then also solved the confinement problem.
…is this an elaborate joke about solar power? And by extension, virtually all the energy that’s accumulated on the earth over the eons? It took me a minute :)
I thought it was obvious but apparently not. Sarcasm is only funny when not tagged with the /s.
I certainly got a laugh! And I agree about the /s. Chalk it up to this reader’s slow mind on a slow day!
In a forum where people credulously propose orbital platforms to “sell sunlight at night” [0], I find myself erring on the side of assuming seriousness…
[0] e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42995403
I find that many younger people have a hard time 'getting' sarcasm and irony when it is not explicitly pointed out. I wonder if it may be due to the prevalence of '/s' in online discussions, or if something else changed.
They're making serious efforts to get AI to recognize sarcasm. Yeah, good luck with that.
A majority of the people on HN think there is an explicit no-humor policy. Judging by the fact that a lot of people here are genuinely confused when they come across something really funny, I can see why they try to pretend humor can’t insightful, useful or informative. It saves them from embarrassment.
I mostly read HN news for the laughs, although the odd technical insights posted by those that know is fun too.
I don't know why I post, somethings just to dissipate negative emotions, sometimes to share a favorite anecdote. Sometimes to joke, maybe,? Although those are more likely to be closed without posting.
The problem is that there are numerous people on HN that spew these insane takes fully sincerely
A Modest Proposal is a lot less funny when you have people who really do believe we should eat babies to solve the Irish problem.
One teacher handed out sour patch kids gummy babies and had the students read A Modest Proposal. Really drove the point home. It was epic. https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1hz41n1/a_modest_...
Try building a structure around the fusion source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
You'd have to stick it in a lagrange point 1.5M km away though since just in orbit is not true zero G.
Microwave energy transfer should work. That's what I like about the Helion fusion reactor design they don't use steam to power generators it's direct power no water or steam.
In Germany, we call this „Fernfusion“. It‘s actually working beautifully, and I‘m a happy customer.
I reckon Earth would need to be around 93M miles from the fusion reactor.
About 1 AU distance, right?
I think you just invented the solar system.
Patent troll level 10/10
We shall be as gods!
Tbh it sounds like that cure is worse than the problem…
That sounds hard to meter and charge for.
beam energy down to the earth from space? My god man, did you learn nothing from Sim City’s microwave power plants??
I did some back of the envelope calculations for this and it turns out that almost all life will eventually evolve to have reasonable protection against it. Except in Australia.
Let's do it!
> This was a 25% improvement on the previous record time achieved with EAST, in China, a few weeks previously
I applaud this nuclear arms race. 22 minutes is really impressive for a technology that’s always been “20 years away”. I think I will do a deep dive on the technical challenges of fusion.
I'm a layman, and so can't comment too specificaly. I found this Construction Physics article interesting, which was posted here some months back: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/will-we-ever-get-fusi...
I'm glad the bear case includes the "will never be economically practical" which is my core criticism of fusion, even with "high funding".
I also didn't see anything about vessel irradiation, which also never seems to be discussed. I get it probably isn't as big a problem as solid fuel rod fission in terms of waste creation, and tritium breeding may help, but it still will be kind of the same problem with LFTRs: a reactor design will fundamentally need an ongoing reconstruction/replacement strategy due to the vessel irradiation and transmutation from high energy neutrons.
Feel free to correct me if this isn't as big a problem as I think it is.
Not to downplay it, but it's still only half as hot as would be required of a commercial reactor. Also this reactor had no mechanisms to recover energy or neutrons to breed tritium. Still impressive and encouraging.
Right but that's what ITER is for. This type of research is to validate control systems which can be transferred to that project (i.e. prove you can do it, then prove its not machine-dependent).
good one haha, the properly scary part of the other nuclear arms race is fusion too even!
The “20 years away” meme is stupid. There really are technologies that are possible but incredibly hard and require decades of sustained effort.
Cracking natural language comprehension with digital computers is an example from our field and it’s here.
> The “20 years away” meme is stupid.
No, it's not. It's just a legit illustration of somethings state of development on fundamental levels. It simply means "we have no f**ing clue how we can do this, but future..". This is different from something we have already solved, and you just need to throw money on it to scale it to whichever level you need it.
> Cracking natural language comprehension with digital computers is an example from our field and it’s here.
That's the point, everything in research is always x0 years away, until the breakthrough happens and it's finished.
> This is different from something we have already solved, and you just need to throw money on it to scale it to whichever level you need it.
We can already do fusion, and by every metric it is scaling. Triple product is increasing, etc.
Fusion does not become a viable source of energy until it scales beyond a certain point, but there is no "leap" between here and there that we know about, just better and better containment. We are descending a gradient, not looking for one.
If we had never managed to get fusion outside, say, hydrogen bombs, then I'd agree that we have no idea how to do it, but we have -- using many methods. Tokamaks seem to be the best one for scaling it so far, but there's other possibilities that I wish we would research more.
That's not really how it works. We do know SOME ways to reach fusion, but they are not on the level we need. We haven't mastered fusion yet, we still need to research the foundations. We don't even know if scaling is all we need, and we don't know how to scale it to the level we seek.
Technology usually has a range of performance, what it can do and what not. And our technology for fusion-process is not in the range for a commercial reactor, so we still need a breakthrough in our understanding.
Hmm... in that case the analogy with AI is even better. This sounds like neural networks before things like deep learning and the transformer architecture -- before we figured out how to scale them. Turns out this did require some innovations. It wasn't just a matter of making a bigger model.
I would debate the fact that LLMs have "cracked natural language comprehension"...
Not that it's not impressive, but LLMs do not "comprehend", for a start.
I see what you’re getting at but it does feel like goalposts are being moved, no? By and large we can ask a computer today a question and it will almost certainly spit back a sensible (!= correct) answer. We can ask what the words mean and ask it to translate it to other languages, and we can have a conversation.
> I see what you’re getting at but it does feel like goalposts are being moved, no?
I don't think so. I am not setting the "goalpost" here, it was expressed as "LLMs have cracked natural language comprehension".
I just don't think they have. There are tons of statements I would agree with regarding what LLMs have achieved, but this one is not part of them :-).
What is the metric to measure comprehension?
How are we disentangling comprehension of natural language itself from comprehension of the subject matter being discussed via said language sample?
I think that by most reasonable metrics LLMs can reasonably be said to comprehend natural language itself. However they clearly are deficient in logic and reasoning, as well as comprehension of many of the concepts that the natural language is used to express.
Fair enough! Out of curiosity, in your words, what have LLMs achieved?
what's your definition of "comprehend"?
Even more impressive would be when humans can actually comprehend LLMs!
>Cracking natural language comprehension with digital computers is an example from our field and it’s here.
Exactly, there are experts in the field less than a decade a way who said 50+ years easily. And there we are.
Triple product (efficiency ) has increased faster than moors law for the last 50 years.
Still people make jokes about fusion research, some things just take time.
I recommend this excellent review of the even more excellent book „The future of fusion energy“
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-future...
> Triple product (efficiency ) has increased faster than moors law for the last 50 years
Fusion research progress is underappreciated. But Moore's Law is for an existing industry. Prior to that, it took 10 ^ 6+ improvements in various technologies to make computing possible.
Not sure what you mean by that. There was a bunch of computing technology long before photolithography or even transistors. And mores law was coined in 1965 when individual chips had far less than 10^6 transistors while the first one was made by hand.
Indeed, I often think if I were transported to the past I would use rivers and dams to make logic gates.
If you were transported to the past with the knowledge you currently possess as a result of the work already done, sure.
Developing it from scratch is a whole other matter.
Similarly, I would like to think that if I had been born a hundred years earlier, I would have invented something like MONIAC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Machine
Moore's law is self propagating: improvements in compute beget improvements in compute by improving the computers used to design compute devices. fusion, while in an impressive bootstrapping phase, does not get that acceleration until commercial break-even.
Untrue on both counts. Moore's law is not due to improved computing power in the design process, it's due to an incredibly long series of process improvements which become easier to develop because of the increased understanding of the problems they are seeking to solve.
Likewise advancements in fusion beget advancements in fusion by increasing understanding of the challenges faced.
> improvements which become easier to develop because of the increased understanding of the problems they are seeking to solve.
Surely this is aided by ever more sophisticated computational models? Maybe not the dominant factor in Moore's law, but maybe not negligible?
Probably not. Materials science research is much more dependent on analog electronics, specifically measuring voltage signals, than on digital electronics.
Modern computers are certainly a nice quality of life improvement for researchers though.
That said, commercial production lines might be a different story. Now I'm wondering what the minimum viable computer system would be to implement the firmware for ASMLs machines, for example. Probably more than vacuum tubes but I'm guessing you could pull it off with an old 8 bit chip. That's just a guess though.
Yeah, it's aided by better computational models, but not appreciably by having those models run on chips with smaller feature sizes.
If a time traveler from the future gave everyone at ASML and TSMC computers that ran 4 times as quickly so they could run their models faster, but no one could take a look at how they worked or were made, it wouldn't have any noticeable effect.
Moore's law is empirical, and do you honestly think an asml duv machine could exist with 1980s computing power?
moore's law is just the observation that chips are 2d: linear shrinks produce exponential benefit.
I can't see anything like a linear/square relation in fusion reactor design (even accepting that ML's premise of shrinks being linear in time is not a law, just something that sometimes happened, and sometimes didn't...)
Specifically they were able to maintain a tokamak plasma (presumably at fusion temperatures) for 1337 seconds, using two megawatts of heating. 1337 is not a joke; presumably the "leet" reading is coincidental.
I assumed it was their target, and indeed a semi-private joke... but you make the case for coincidental. I prefer to believe it was by design :D
With China spying around, you probably don't want to reveal the full potential of your technologies before you are sure that you will have permanent lead.
That is not how science works best.
Unfortunately that is how capitalism works; whoever "cracks" nuclear fusion and can productize it will win multi-billion projects.
Doubtful. While fusion is a fascinating engineering problem and has niche uses, it's unlikely to be competitive in either of the two big energy domains: electricity generation and transport. Fusion requires extremely large, extremely complicated machines that share many of the issues of fission reactors but more extreme and with decades less operational experience. While fusion has better PR than fission, which could lead to some real cost savings from less regulation, it's unlikely to be enough to be cost competitive with a fission reactor of the same output, nonetheless the various other options that have rendered fission uncompetitive. Even with extensive process improvements to reduce cost, the other options will be decreasing in cost at a faster rate due to their wider adoption and lower barrier to entry. It's really tough for artificial fusion to compete with the free fusion reactor in the sky. Fusion will probably make its way into the ecosystem but only as one player, and a minor one at that.
Agreed. Multi-multi billion. It is a fundamental change in the global energy dynamic -- including the fact that D-T reactors are still use heat exchange which means heat is also a useful output product for industrial purposes. MSRs are really good for this but of course are fission not fusion reactors.
It borders on a national security issue.
This is a scientific project at a state-funded lab, not a capitalist project.
The article says it was not fusion temperatures, and that they intend to get hotter in future tests.
I see, thanks! I missed that.
That makes it less impressive; any fluorescent-light tube can maintain a stable plasma for years, after all, without even magnetic confinement.
Good technical intro to H-mode (high-confinement mode) for fusion reactions to work:
https://www.energy.gov/science/articles/science-close-develo...
>> In the H-mode, a calm edge without turbulence reduces how much heat and how many charged particles the plasma loses. This leads to a sharp increase in pressure across the entire volume of the plasma, including the core where the conditions that can lead to fusion occur. The reduced energy and particle losses also minimize damage to the material surfaces surrounding the plasma.
Wouldn’t that make energy recovery from the plasma much more difficult?
Neutrons and photons pass through magnetic fields, so they always escape the plasma and provide heat that can be turned into steam. Keeping the plasma ions better confined doesn't impair energy recovery.
One issue I see for applying prediction markets to things like “there is a commercially successful fusion power plant before the year 2070” is the long time until resolution. Now, of course, one can hope to sell your shares in “yes” or “no” 5 years from now, but there may not be enough liquidity?
Suppose we had one prediction market M_1 for “On January 1st 2070, resolves ‘yes’ if there has been a commercially successful nuclear fusion power plant, and otherwise resolves ‘no’”, and then another market M_2 that, maybe it resolves in 5 years as ‘yes’ if the price of M_1’s ‘yes’ is greater than 30%? Or… hm, that seems problematic because people could just buy a bunch of M_1’s “yes” right before M_2 resolves? Or maybe that’s a self-correcting problem because people could… no, still seems like a problem..
Well, what if instead of a prediction market about the future value of another prediction market, it was futures contracts for the shares in a prediction market? Like, the right to buy or sell shares in “yes” or “no” at a particular price?
So like, if you’re confident that the prediction market will assign probability p or higher on a particular day 5 years from now, then if you bought futures which, on that day each of the futures could be used to sell a share in “no” at the price (1-p), then… well, if the probability assigned to “yes” on that day is indeed p or higher, then the price of “no” would be (1-p) or lower, so one buy a share in “no” at a price less than (1-p) and then sell it at (1-p)..
Hm, issue there is one still needs to buy the “no” in order to sell it, so that doesn’t seem to really fix the “what if there is no liquidity in 5 years?” issue?
I guess one could spend 1 to create a share of “yes” and a share of “no”, and then sell the “no”, and be left with the share in “yes” which is ostensibly worth at least p, and then like, sell it a bit later when there’s more liquidity or something?
I probably don’t know what I’m talking about about this.
You should look into options - you're describing various forms of options contract.
None of them solve this problem, though:
> Now, of course, one can hope to sell your shares in “yes” or “no” 5 years from now, but there may not be enough liquidity?
In general, if there isn't liquidity in the primary market you should expect the derivative markets to be even worse. You would use options not to find extra liquidity - and binary options on illiquid markets like you describe are indeed particularly prone to market manipulation - but to express very particular views.
> another market M_2 that, maybe it resolves in 5 years as ‘yes’ if the price of M_1’s ‘yes’ is greater than 30%?
Like this one - you should buy this contract if you really do want to make a bet the price will be over 30%, and you don't care much about getting a big payday if the price is 90 or keeping most of your money if the price is 29.
I don't think a long pay-off horizon is a problem for this market. It the same as for shares in companies that don't pay dividends. What creates a price for Berkshire Hathaway (BRK/A) if owning the share never gives you anything in the form of dividend? It's because in the far future, you can be confident they'll have enough money in the bank that they will pay out. Maybe not in your lifetime, but you can sell to someone, who'll sell to someone, etc. who will eventually collect a dividend. The market is so abstract that that pay-off time could be infinity years in the future and still, the share still has market value today.
The future value could be shared with the entire humanity.
For example, Bill Gates is going to die like everyone else and give most of the money away, like Warren Buffet.
They can spend a significant amount of money in life if they see nuclear fusion is possible, even if they do not recover the costs.
The only thing that is needed for this to happen is investors being confident that the money is not going to be wasted.
I personally know rich people that are betting a significant part of their wealth in fusion(millions USD) even when they know there is a risk that they will never recover the money.
Poor Bill Gates wants to give his money away, but he hasn’t gotten around to it yet. Why are we still pretending he is a philanthropist and not one of the biggest oligarchs of our time?
As I understand it, most of his wealth is tied up in Microsoft stocks, so without collapsing the company he built, his hands are at least partially tied.
As we should all know by now, what oligarchs do is use their stock as collateral for loans, providing all the capital access without the capital gains hit.
> Bill Gates wants to give his money away, but he hasn’t gotten around to it yet
How much have you given away? If you just don't like rich people, say that, don't disguise it with false facts and moralising.
> Why are we still pretending he is a philanthropist and not one of the biggest oligarchs of our time?
My pet is both a cat and brown coated.
Is he one of the richest people in the world?
Yes
Has given money in the order of hundreds of billions to charity?
Yes
Both can be true.
Being a philanthropist connotes having a purely altruistic rationale for giving away money.
If you’re giving away money to shush people, or gather support for your politics, or gain something else out of it then you do not receive the beneficial connotation.
Strictly going by definition, dictators can be philanthropists.
He spends money lobbying the WHO to buy drugs from companies he's a major shareholder in. Then he pays journalists so they always write about him positively. He's brilliantly figured out how the world works.
How would you define "commercially successful"? The first fusion power plants will only get built with huge government subsides. Some governments like China look at this as a strategic, existential issue and will pay whatever it costs to make it work. They don't like being dependent on foreign fossil fuel supplies that the USA could easily interdict.
I’m in the USA and don’t like being dependent on foreign fuel supplies!
I think there was (maybe still possible?) a real missed opportunity to pitch green energy in a national security or America First way. I don’t think the average republican voter wants us to be as tied to OPEC the way we are.
We could still product as much—or more!—oil in Texas while reducing our care for anything in the Middle East.
The US is a net fossil fuel exporter at this point. In 2023 we inported $283 billion in fossil fuels and exported $361 billion (sauce: https://oec.world/en/profile/country/usa?yearlyTradeFlowSele...)
The real missed opportunity IMO is one of not communicating how well we are doing.
Whether it's a net importer or net exporter is a red herring. If something unsavory happens in Iran, the price of gas is going to move.
National security arguments also don't work in cases like this, because "national security" isn't the real reason the government does a thing, it's the excuse given to the public when Republicans want an unconstitutional boondoggle. But fossil fuel companies are a Republican constituency so it would typically be the Democrats advocating for something like that and their excuse calendar uses different phrases.
If you want to get Republicans to support it you either need to bring it within their cultural norms to want it, e.g. American-made Cybertruck can stomp their old truck in a drag race and the Tesla guy is their friend now, or it just needs to be more profitable so they want solar on their roof to save on electricity.
You can also use different methods when appealing to people with different values. Typical plan from the left is to subsidize it with tax dollars, but you can also ask things like, what makes solar installations expensive? Are there ways to make it easier for homeowners to do it themselves to avoid costly professional installation? Is there some kind of regulatory capture causing things like inverters and transfer switches to cost two orders of magnitude more than the price of their raw materials? Try thinking like the people you're trying to convince if you want to get them on your side.
The USA used to prohibit crude oil exports and only lifted the ban in 2015. If there was a major international supply disruption then we could temporarily reimpose an export ban to essentially turn our country into an oil "island" and shield customers from the impact of higher external market prices.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-118
Crude oil is the stuff that comes directly out of the ground. That wasn't an export ban on refined oil. The rule was a protectionist measure at the behest of US refineries. This is the money quote:
> We found that repealing the ban was associated with:
> ...
> Decreasing profit margins for petroleum refiners as they paid more for domestic crude oil relative to international prices
The US is a net exporter of oil. That doesn't mean they're not importing a ton of it and then exporting even more, e.g. because the Northeast is closer to Canada than Texas so New York uses a lot of oil from Canada and then the gulf states export to other countries.
Changing that in the long-term would raise prices (higher transportation costs, less competition) and changing it in the short-term (i.e. in immediate response to a foreign supply shock) would raise prices significantly because of short-term logistical issues. Also, to the extent that it lowered relative prices, the difference would come out of the profits of US oil companies and increase the profits of their foreign competitors as customers in the EU and other places experience even more of a shortage. "Piss off your allies and domestic industry to the benefit of foreign adversaries" is usually not a winning strategy.
Meanwhile those sorts of export bans will leak like a sieve anyway. Even without formally violating them, you'll see things like energy-intensive industries moving production to the place with cheaper energy until the cross-border price stabilizes, which means higher prices outside the US would lead to higher demand (and thus higher prices) within the US.
It's a global commodity market and you don't even want it to be otherwise.
worth noting that california is still dependent on OPEC iirc. i suppose in a pinch they could get their fuel from the rest of the states
California has chosen to be dependent on foreign oil for political reasons. There's still quite a bit under our feet but we hypocritically block the extraction industry from expanding here while continuing to consume.
It's certainly feasible to build a crude oil pipeline from Texas, but the local refineries don't necessarily want it. They prefer the flexibility that comes from getting supplies by ships and trains, even though pipelines have a much lower risk of major spills or fires.
https://www.lubbockonline.com/story/news/state/2013/05/31/ki...
i think California accidentally did well by not allowing fracking; if they fo eventually allow it the technology will habe rendered it safer and more efficient. could probably drill kern valley and go full independent without huring the environment nearly as much as it would have 10 years ago..
I'm not sure that would be easy. We'd probably need to build a pipeline to get the needed volume in. I think Peter Zeihan talked about this recently in the context of general US self-sufficiency
Green energy has its own fundamental economic advantages over any petroleum energy generation. You know, barring grid and storage adaptation.
I believe the trend in Lazards is that storage+wind or storage+solar will drop under natural gas combined cycle this year or next year on a LCOE basis.
> first fusion power plants will only get built with huge government subsides
This is true of every energy system ever.
I believe that was actually their point. To say that it is still a long way before a functioning fusion reactor will be build, let alone the first that will be built as commercially viable standalone without subsidies.
Something requiring huge government subsidies has no bearing on its timeline. (Source: the literal Manhattan Project.)
> let alone the first that will be built as commercially viable standalone without subsidies
The entire enterprise is practically government subsidies. The recent advent of VC is a rounding error.
I just meant “they generate power and sell it”, which, I realize now isn’t exactly what I said / what I said wasn’t exactly what I meant.
I mean I could generate power and sell it by burning antique furniture but that doesn't make it commercially viable. At some point any new power source will have to show a positive return on investment by some reasonable accounting measure.
At this point, just go to a casino. The last thing our world needs is more gambling and fruitless speculation.
It’s not that I want to bet, but that I want a good probability estimate about whether commercially viable fusion power will be around by such and such date.
No, we'd simply get another financial product completely detached from any real economic value, of which we have plenty already.
What more insight could gamblers provide about nuclear fusion that expert physicists and engineers can't? Why and how would their predictions be more accurate than industry leaders?
Prediction markets are known to have an optimism bias when it comes to stuff like this.
Speculation with positive expected return is a good thing. So the question is, does fusion have positive expected return?
The world spends 10% of global GDP on energy, about $10 trillion per year. The world will spend something like a quadrillion dollars on energy this century, possibly more as the world gets wealthier and per capita energy use increases. A billion dollar investment is just one part in a million of that. Fusion doesn't have to be very likely to succeed to make such speculation worthwhile.
I was talking about prediction markets, not fusion.
I had no idea that Commonwealth fusion was already well into their construction of a grid connected plant. Apparently it might finally be happening?
I'm not sure how this works, how are they confident enough that they can make it produce net power?
The location they have that's "well into construction" is SPARC, which is not intended to be a net power production facility. It will host their net gain demonstrator that they intend to have first plasma in next year and target a net gain demonstration in 2027.
ARC which they announced siting for and is intended to be their first grid-attached net power provider only just had the location selected so I don't believe its got much construction going on yet. The goal for that plant to be producing power is "early 2030s".
Ah, maybe not well into construction. But a friend of mine works with exotic materials and they are purchasing lots of things for ARC. Though I imagine these materials have a long lead time.
"The company plans to produce its first plasma in 2026"
They haven't even gotten to Q>1, let alone building a real power plant.
For people more aware of the fusion industry, what is it that stopped the plasma at 22 minutes (or lower times in alternate tests)? Did they just stop injecting power to maintain the heat as they achieved their benchmark?
Is this something where it's on the precipice and small tweaks bridges from 22 minutes to basically indefinitely?
Tokamaks need the central solenoid to have a current ramp, so at some point you run out of voltage. You can turn that way down, but you get less plasma performance. You're traditionally limited by heat rejection capabilities of the vacuum vessel.
These are science machines to learn about plasma and increase performance of future machines. A real reactor involves a lot of engineering to handle the heat rejection problem (and turn it into a revenue stream if you're clever). In terms of the pulsed nature: not really a problem if you keep the duty cycle high enough and maintain sufficient buffers in your coolant to keep the turbines happily turning away.
I learned recently that another limit to plasma duration is contamination. As fusion occurs and high energy particles that escape magnetic confinement blast the toroid wall, ions of metal get mixed into the plasma and degrade performance.
I've seen photos of what the inside of experimental tokamaks look like after many cycles. Metal is eroded away and deposited around the chamber in interesting patterns. Unfortunately a image search isn't surfacing the images I have in mind.
Does that mean it's impossible to have steady-state operation? (And are stellarators different here?)
Impossible with just the basic inductive principle of tokamaks, yes. Some years back I learned that you can keep the current going with microwaves, not sure about recent progress. You can also approximate steady state by reversing polarity of the warp - ehm - magnetic field regularly.
Yes, stellarators are different.
The current ramp in the central solenoid is used to set the plasma rotation direction. Theoretically this is more like Alternating Current, since there is not a fundamental reason the central solenoid couldn't ramp back down (and then proceed to ramp up in the opposite polarization). The existing plasma would need to be cooled and removed first, or some similar mechanism of stabilizing the torus again in the opposite direction.
I look at it as a large optimization problem at this point. Each part of the machine is workable but not yet sufficiently optimized to achieve profitable operation.
I keep track of nuclear related news.
An easier (more fun) version of this with some context is here: https://x.com/olshansky/status/1892069988707729614
> x.com
I'm not clicking that shit
You might be interested in:
Those Firefox extensions automatically redirect any link that points to Shitter.While that avoids directly engaging with Twitter, I'd avoid even indirect contact. That said, I'm confident that most Twitter enagement is indirect anyway, via embeds, screenshots, and services like these.
Might I suggest https://libredirect.github.io/index.html and https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/
[flagged]
Musk is part of the administration that has threatened to take European territory by force. He's meddling in—and funding according to some sources—extremism in Germany.
Neither he, nor his administration, have been overly bothered to characterize themselves as friends of Europe, and Europeans are returning the feelings.
> Noticed there is some serious anti Trump/musk campaign going on there.
And Americans should be very concerned about Trump's coup as well - because that's what it is. There is no level of sugar coating that can cover that up.
Your logic is that someone has to be brainwashed by woke European media to dislike musk or trump?
As if right wing media have a legitimate place in a democracy. It was and will only ever be a vehicle for fascism. Maybe we Europeans enjoyed proper schools with history lessons and remember how Faschism played out last time? Besides following US media is enough to know what Musk is about.
It's unfair to say that no right wing media has a right to exist. Media that is hostile to democracy should be stomped out, but because its hostile to democracy (or secretly a propaganda machine run by foreign influence), not because it's right wing.
If anything, that the classic right wing still exists, however much you might disagree with the ideology, is something to hope for.
My dad laments that "Caring about the environment used to be a Conservative position" and "We just need to take the effort to care about people who are different from us" and "I think the gun rights people take it too far and it's fine to have regulation on gun ownership".
But he didn't vote for a classic conservative. He voted for Trump.
Yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me if the vast majority are more moderate than the two-party system can account for. And that consequently, the White House might be overestimating what they have popular mandate to do.
As somebody from Europe.. it is. The media is extremely biased and left-oriented. As soon as something is slightly more right leaning it immediately gets labelled as extreme-right here.
Wildly untrue, European media is very diverse, and where it sits on average from an American point of view varies from country to country. It may turn out to be not right-leaning enough for your personal tastes, but that doesn't mean it isn't from the PoV of that particular country.
As someone from Europe.. it is not true. There are lots of media outlets with different angles. Certainly lots of Murdoch funded garbage here.
We need to recalibrate the overton window. Anything remotely based in reality is immediately labelled far-left these days.
You do this by knowing the talking points and asking the right questions. Many questions cant be answered easily. And this leads to Rethinking.
Name a question that the right hasn't utterly defeated with thought terminating cliches? They handwave away clear nazi salutes
https://twitter.com/olshansky/status/1892069988707729614
Related: PBS Space Time just did a neat episode on plasma, focusing on what the requirements are for confinement, called "The Final Barrier to (Nearly) Infinite Energy"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAJN1CrJsVE
PBS Spacetime is great. Excellent, accessible explanations of advanced topics without feeling dumbed down or overhyped.
Related?
Nuclear fusion: New record set at Chinese reactor EAST https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42917662 03-feb-2025
China's artificial sun burns for 1000 secs, creates record in fusion research https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42854306 28-jan-2025
From the announcement, "1,337 seconds: that was how long WEST, a tokamak run from the CEA Cadarache site in southern France and one of the EUROfusion consortium medium size Tokamak facilities, was able to maintain a plasma for on 12 February. This was a 25% improvement on the previous record time achieved with EAST, in China, a few weeks previously."
1,337-second burn.
Lots of leet scientists there, in all seriousness. CEA is my alma mater, though I worked on quantum computing, not fusion.
how many more seconds did they push it to hit 133t xD
Considering it's fusion we're talking about, 1,337 seconds is about as arbitrary as 1,000 seconds. On a 24-hour clock, 13:37 is 1:37pm. 137 is the fine-structure constant or α. Who knows what they're actually capable of. A second more at this point would be pointless.
I wonder how much of an effect this kind of truly international (not in the same 'bloc') competition will have on budgets and speed of progress. Cold war tech race, etc.
It should be a good time to be an engineer.
It's always a good time to be an engineer. These public comps are more recruitment and training. It's not like new discoveries are made during these events. It's partly a party for the industry.
Still 50 years away...
our physics teacher at school (late 90s) already joked that "usable fusion power is only 30 years away, for 30 years in a row now"
A relative of mine told me that in 1960s they were saying fusion was only 10 years away
From people hearing about fission bombs (1945) to full scale commercial fission power plant (1957) was barely more than 10 years so fusion power plants must have already felt late in the mid 60s!
It was an era of optimism, I see.
Ok this was a terse comment, but so is a downvote. Please explain why is not 50 years away from first real industrial use. I am waiting....
https://youtu.be/RbZ-XYy0k10
As for "why not 50 years", even the pessimistic reports of that video have it at ~30 years. Besides, the point is "we won't really know a good estimate for when until it's already about to hit us in the face" not "we should just assume 50 years is a more correct guess than other ones".
As for the comments about votes, they aren't a measure of terseness either. The point is to bubble comments likely to result in curious and thoughtful conversation to the top while comments which will distract from that kind of conversation (combative, vague, distractly offtopic, or whatever else the reason may be) tend to get hidden away. Whether a comment is totally on the money or absolutely incorrect, how you present the conversation starter has a far bigger drive on what types follow-on conversation will appear. Here, that also strongly implies what types of votes will appear too.
> As for "why not 50 years", even the pessimistic reports of that video have it at ~30 years.
When a prediction is at a timescale where the person making the prediction will be retired by the time the prediction applies, you can safely ignore the prediction. That person has no reputational skin in the game.
If that's the singular prediction a report makes it can be safely regarded as suspicious regardless of the timeframe.
And how about a honest discussion about whether 30 years away for fusion research may boil down to never ? We are in a contraction already,people voting for decomplexification of society because that is just a natural felt trade off- feed my family now with less tax and forget about leechers promising free energy since almost a 100 years.Its not reasonable , its not historically backed up (science saved the day multiple times ) but this window of research opportunities is closing rapidly and its time to find alternatives to finance such endeavours besides state and oligarchy conglomerate investment scams.
Sustained fusion is already a thing in the universe but while we can't undiscover what powers the sun we could certainly give up replicating it on Earth if we'd like. That would be less an estimate of how long it'd take and more a measure of what we want to invest our limited resources in though.
I think everyone would agree we should find ways of investing that aren't scams. The hard part is who agrees on what is a scam. I don't mind more purely private investment myself though, which has seemed to be a trend in recent years.
https://news.mit.edu/2024/commonwealth-fusion-systems-unveil...
So according to the industry leaders, we will have the first 400MW plant within 10 years.
How can they build something commercial/grid-scale when not a single research-level reactor truly generates net energy out, and none can do it anywhere near continously enough to be of any practical use?
This news is either based on misleading the public, or I am about to be updated with where Fusion is?
I think you are about to be updated.
Watch this clip with Prof. Whyte from 8 years ago. It’s the team behind CFS(then still at MIT). Highly interesting. He will explain exactly what they will do(now doing), how they will do it, and why they will do it they way they are doing it.
Please note that they are pretty much on target since. I have been following CFS closely.
Essentially the breakthrough has been the ability to manufacture more powerful magnets. CFS makes the most powerful magnets in the world.
That was always the main issue, how to contain the plasma.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4&pp=ygUrYnJlYWt0aHJ...
Now ask: what is the power density of their proposed reactor?
The predecessor, the ARC reactor in the 2014 paper, had a power density of 0.5 MW/m^3.
In comparison, a commercial PWR, which you can buy today, has a power density of 20 MW/m^3.
So, even with all the HTSC hype, their machine is still a factor of 40 worse than existing proven fission technology.
How is such a bloated, much more complex machine even going to compete with fission, never mind the alternatives that have sidelined new fission construction? The capex will be completely out of bounds.
https://news.newenergytimes.net/2021/11/21/commonwealth-fusi...
Sorry, what are you responding to?
"Scientists working on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Commonwealth Fusion Systems collaboration have misled members of the science news media again. The latest casualty is Philip Ball, an experienced U.K. science reporter.
In a Nov. 17, 2021, news story, Ball wrote that scientists working with the MIT/CFS collaboration are planning to deliver the “first fusion machine expected to generate more energy than it uses” in 2025.
Actually, the MIT/CFS SPARC reactor is designed only to produce a fusion plasma that produces power at a higher rate than it consumes power. That measurement does not account for the input power required to operate the reactor. It’s the same trick that fusion promoters used to sell the idea of ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor."
And what does this have to do with anything I posted?
I don’t know exactly what went on in that interview. I have not read it.
It’s a complex topic and easy to misunderstand.
It has all to do with this
> Please note that they are pretty much on target since. I have been following CFS closely.
And their credibility.
What credibility was lost because some blog alleges something? CFS is run by world class fusion engineers.
Because they are more or less certain (because of their magnets) they will get the necessary temperatures for ignition, giving more energy that it consumes.
If they get ignitions, all the other problems will be solved very fast, because there will be an enormous rush from investors wanting to invest billions.
I hope they succeed, but throwing more money at problems like this doesn't necessarily accelerate progress. There is still basic research needed. Building large, high-precision devices can't be rushed.
They are doing the “basic research” and are actually world leading nuclear fusion engineers…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4&pp=ygUrYnJlYWt0aHJ...
> throwing more money at problems like this doesn't necessarily accelerate progress
"Necessarily" being your Zeno's Arrow. Necessary to what threshold? I can literally argue against anything to an arbitrary level of necessity. (Breathing doesn't necessarily ensure living.)
Also, is living really necessary?
What makes them industry leaders? Do they have a prototype? Can they get Q>1, much less >5 or similar for what will be needed to break even on all the rest of the inefficiencies?
If they don't have a prototype, and are going straight to plans for a 400MW "commercial" plant, why should we believe this is possible? What evidence is there that these plans for a massive breakthrough ten years from now will work out?
This looks, walks, and talks like a ploy to get in on AI energy demand hype. It may not be, but it has all those features, and not many other features.
> What makes them industry leaders?
They have a plausible relatively well understood path to fusion, have credibility with their background (coming out of fusion research at MIT), and have raised something like 2 billion dollars in funding.
> Can they get Q>1, much less >5 or similar for what will be needed to break even on all the rest of the inefficiencies
They think so
> and are going straight to plans for a 400MW "commercial" plant
They aren't. They're currently developing "SPARC", a Q>1 demonstration plant targeting 2027. The 400 MW commercial plant, ARC, is a follow on design targeting 2030s.
> This looks, walks, and talks like a ploy to get in on AI energy demand hype
They predate the AI boom by a lot. The project started in 2018. They had a $1.8 billion dollar funding round in 2021.
The basic concept is "hey look, someone figured out how to build better superconductors. What if we took what ITER is trying to do, but used modern super conductors to make it smaller and actually achievable". I'm not saying I think they're certain to succeed, but I don't think they're a scam and I think it's very reasonable to include them amongst the group of "industry leaders"
The reason Iter is so big is not to achieve controlled fusion, but to be able to capture the fusion energy output. I'm not doubting their ability to reach the self-sustaining plasma, I'm doubtful about their ability to capture energy from it though.
ITER is as big as it is because it would not achieve the targeted Q with the given magnet technology if it were smaller. This has nothing to do with capturing energy.
I looked up this Commonwealth Fusion Systems company.
"The company plans to produce its first plasma in 2026 and net fusion energy shortly after."
Looks like your argument is build on just promises, not backed by any tech developments.
No, they have developed the world’s most powerful magnets based on superconducting tape which is essential for containing the plasma.
Their key tech development is the manufacture of high temperature superconducting magnets. This is the key to their reactor design.
Fake news: https://news.newenergytimes.net/2021/11/21/commonwealth-fusi...
"I am waiting..." was unnecessary.
True...But I am still waiting for the scientific and technical arguments to prove me wrong.
I wonder if many of the stars in the sky are from groups that almost nailed containment and stability on their Tokamak.
The Sun consumes a mass equivalent of a mount Everest worth of hydrogen via fusion to shine for just an hour (or thereabouts, if I did my math right :)). For perspective, this amount of energy is more than enough to power the Earth's current electrical usage for over a billion years.
That's all before getting into how a containment failure doesn't imply "and then everything nearby just started a self sustaining fusion reaction". The confinement itself is a key part of what enables the conditions for the fusion to continue.
I am a plasma researcher, though not in the fusion field. Containment and stability are required on tokamaks to keep a plasma burning. Losing either of these will quench the reaction. The best way to control a plasma - magnetic fields, also causes significant instabilities, which is why fusion is so difficult.
Could you elaborate on how magnetic fields cause instabilities? As a layman, it's not immediately obvious to me why that would be the case.
Because the plasma itself is charged and moves within the field, generating eddy currents which self-interact in complex and unpredictable ways. At a much much larger scale, the twisting of magnetic fields from convection within the sun causes sunspots and other phenomena around the solar surface.
Have you tried implementing bacteria with them?
No. It just does not make sense from physical rules. Fusion only happens in a very high vacuum, at ridiculous temperatures, with very specific fuel, in the confined space. Just the cooling effect of having oxygen atoms there(in the plasma) stops the reaction, let alone touching anything so cold(millions of times colder and denser) as the walls or the outside gas.
Also stops immediately if no fuel is given.
Naive question here : how do we expect to collect thermal energy from it if we can't allow it to cool even a little ?
You can extract heat, in fact you'd have to extract it or let it leak out somewhere. The whole point of it is that it generates more energy than you put in, so energy has to come out somewhere for it to maintain stability.
Gp is just saying that if you cracked it open like an egg (or just had a minor leak even) all that would happen is it would stop fusing. The room this happened in would be a bad place to be, but it's just going to start a fire or something, not destroy the world.
Neutron radiation doesn't get contained, and leaves the reactor easily carrying heat with it. That heat has to go somewhere, and so that's what we take energy from.
Seems implausible. The fusion presumably wouldn’t keep going if it breached the walls.
Also, to be bright enough that we would see it from here as a star, I imagine it would require enough material that one might as well just let gravity do the job rather that use a Tokamak?
Maybe there are efficiency gains that are large enough that it wouldn’t actually require as much material as a star? I wouldn’t guess so though.
> wonder if many of the stars in the sky are from groups that almost nailed containment and stability on their Tokamak
Different fusion systems. Stars fuse, in general, by statistically overloading the weak force. (The Sun is volumetrically about an order of magnitude less powerful than a human being. Like 200 to 1,110 W/m^3.)
In smaller volumes, e.g. on Earth, we have to break the strong force. This releases more energy, I think. But it also requires temperatures and energy densities far higher than that which stars produce.
Not sure if that strengthens or weakens your hypothesis...
Strong and weak force don't come into it in either case. Fusion requires overcoming electrostatic repulsion, that's about it. The problem is the Sun is gigantic but it's fusion process is actually very inefficient. To make it practical on Earth we need more particle interactions, and thus higher temperatures, to make it Q>1
> Strong and weak force don't come into it in either case. Fusion requires overcoming electrostatic repulsion, that's about it
You're wrong and right. Electrostatic repulsion is the barrier, and at its limit, defines electron degeneracy pressure. But the strong force is the ultimate source of energy of the reaction, and the weak force is important in stellar reactions.
The weak force initiates proton-proton fusion [1]. (We still struggle to empirically measure its cross section because it's so low. Weak force be weak.) DT fusion, on other hand, has to crack open the energy in those delicious gluons with raw temperature. This is why PP fusion occurs around 4 MK while DT fusion needs over 1,000 MK.
[1] Anthony Phillips' The Physics of Stars
I think that it is inaccurate to say that weak force "initiates" fusion.
Fusion is initiated by bringing nuclei very close one of another, overcoming the electrostatic repulsion.
When fusion is successful, the output energy is a consequence of the strong forces, i.e. it is the difference between the binding energies caused by strong forces in the output and input reactants.
The role of the weak force is that it can determine the probability of success of the fusion.
When the input nuclei have enough neutrons, the nuclei that have collided may remain fused. Otherwise, even after being fused for an extremely short time, the compound nucleus will break again, regenerating the input nuclei which are repulsed, so fusion fails.
In cases when fusion would fail due to a bad proton/neutron ratio in the fused nucleus, e.g. for the case of proton-proton fusion, during the very short time when the input nuclei are fused, weak forces may transform a proton into a neutron, preventing the separation of the fused nuclei and allowing fusion to succeed.
So overcoming the electromagnetic forces initiates fusion, strong forces determine the amount of energy obtained per fusion event and weak forces can determine the probability for fusion to succeed when nuclei collide.
> Fusion is initiated by bringing nuclei very close one of another, overcoming the electrostatic repulsion
Protons overcoming their electrostatic repulsion doesn't mean fusion--formation of a deuteron does [1]. Protons overcoming their repulsion creates the initial conditions for fusion, but in most cases no fusion occurs. The weak force "chooses" whether fusion occurs or two protons come unusually close and fly apart.
This is a bit of a pedantic line. But nuclear physisist say the weak force initiates fusion because if we take something with as low a cross section as proton-proton interaction to be the starting point of fusion, we might as well extend it to protons being in a star at all. (A greater fraction of protons in a star will fuse than proton-proton interactions graduate to fusion.)
Without the weak force, we have no stellar fusion. Without the weak force, artificial fusion is still possible. That's both a blessing and a curse, since the weak force permits lower-temperature fusion.
> When the input nuclei have enough neutrons
Irrelevant for proton-proton fusion.
[1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/526471/why-is-th...
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. That perpetual barrier can very reasonably be viewed as a normal technology barrier now.
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.
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.
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.
Now that we've made it to 2025, 2050 doesn't feel nearly as far away to me.
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.
Wind and solar power are proving very cheap and good at the margin, but it doesn't solve for the massive needs of a modern grid. Unlike plants, we do not necessarily have the option of turning society off when it's not sunny or windy.
Energy storage is far from a solved problem. Tesla produces ~40 gigawatts of storage capacity an entire year. California alone consumes ~800 gigawatts of power in a day. Even if Tesla dedicated every bit of lithium it had to building storage capacity for just one state, and demand didn't increase, it would realistically still take over a decade to keeping the lights on purely with renewables for a 24 hour period. At which point the first battery packs would be nearing the end of their service life.
This is an incredibly misinformed and outdated opinion. Tesla produces 40 gigawatts of storage capacity only because demand for storage capacity is currently quite low, and because China is more cost effectively producing storage. As demand increases, production will increase to match demand.
Most states currently only care about installing solar and wind -- not storage -- because they are still majority fossil fuels, and at the current moment it makes no sense to install storage if you still have fossil fuel to dislodge. The only exception is really California, who are installing storage, but their bottleneck is not the market's ability to deliver enough supply.
There are also many storage options beyond lithium ion if you only spent a moment to look.
Grid scale storage holds potential but for now it isn't economically viable for industrial base load. Residential customers are probably manageable but factories and data centers have to run 24×7: they can't shut down just because the sun isn't shining and wind isn't blowing. It's clear that the USA has to rapidly reindustrialize if we want to keep having stuff. For political and demographic reasons we won't be able to count on China as a reliable supplier much longer. Domestic electricity demand is going to grow much faster than the storage supply can keep up. The only realistic current options for that base load are a mix of fission and natural gas.
Maybe fusion will be an alternative someday but for now it's just a fantasy. We need to act based on what's proven to work today.
"Base load" can be achieved with renewables, batteries and natural gas. There have been lots of simulation studies demonstrating this. Not only is it achievable, it's also significantly cheaper and faster than fission with natural gas, even after accounting for all costs related to renewables such as the need for more transmission lines. This is especially true in the United States, which is uniquely blessed with abundant solar resources and well diversified wind resources.
Fission as a solution is something that is popular on social media, for reasons that are utterly mystifying to me. The arguments are invariably a few words that reach sweeping conclusions with no actual data backing it up, and lots of data contradicting it that the individual appears oblivious to.
I suspect the main reason fission is having a resurgence of popularity is because it maintains the current power structure of a rare large facilities controlled by a handful of actors. This has obvious advantages if you are a rich person concerned about keeping wealth concentrated into a few sets of hands.
Renewables are by their nature much more distributed in space, which makes them much harder to enclose and control in the way required to reproduce the current structure, especially as they are mainly being built by challengers who aren't really interested of forming monopolies with the fossil industry.
Well it's theoretically possible to supply industrial base load with battery storage but with the rate that demand is growing and the constraints on battery manufacturing that just won't be realistic for many years to come. How many battery cells does it take to keep a steel mill running through the night, and how will that impact power prices for large customers? As for natural gas, we're going to increasingly need that as a chemical feed stock to sustain the reindustrialization. So that leaves fission as the only known long-term option for sustainably meeting a large increase in base load demand.
Your one and only argument is that supply of batteries cannot keep up with demand. This is not only false, it's actually the inverse of the truth, due to Wright’s Law.
Current supply of storage matches current demand. Supply is low only because demand is low. However, as demand increases, supply will continue to match demand, and moreover the price will actually decrease because of the fact that the learning curve is a function of production volume.
This has been a steady empirical phenomenon for 30+ years, and it's predicted by basic economics principles. It's not going to change now!
This is true for all battery types, but especially for sodium ion and iron air, which are constituted of abundant materials. Sodium ion in particular has very similar behavior and cost to lithium ion.
This confusion you're having is you seem to be conflating manufactured goods (like batteries) with scarce goods like land or services, whereby there's a fixed supply that can't be increased and where Wright's Law doesn't apply. This is not correct.
Storage is more like televisions or light bulbs, where you can basically make as much of it as you want, and the price will keep declining as more is made. And supply will always be there for demand, whatever the level of demand happens to be (in this case, a lot).
> How many battery cells does it take to keep a steel mill running through the night, and how will that impact power prices for large customers?
Steel mills run when power is cheap. They historically have run at night (and only minimum power during the day) because cheap power is available at night. Of course there are lots of different steel mills, older ones can't shut down - but modern ones don't run 24x7, they run when power is cheap. Even the old 24x7 ones did their yearly maintenance in December - when power demand is highest (Christmas lights).
Wind and solar are easially predicted a few days in advance with high accuracy, and thus the mills change their shifts/output to follow the cheap power. If it is cloudy/no wind they will send their employees home (with pay) or do maintenance for that week while waiting on more cheaper energy. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to melt iron and so they manage this carefully because it makes them money. They can't deal with months of no production, but they can manage a week here and there.
Battery manufacturing has to be at massive scale even in a nuclear powered world, just to supply battery electric vehicles.
Converting every passenger car and light truck in the US to a BEV would involve enough batteries to store something like two days of the average grid output, which is more than would be needed for a cost optimal wind/solar/battery/hydrogen system for a 100% renewable grid.
> Converting every passenger car and light truck in the US to a BEV would involve enough batteries to store something like two days of the average grid output, which is more than would be needed for a cost optimal wind/solar/battery/hydrogen system for a 100% renewable grid.
Assuming the power stored in these vehicles can be reclaimed by the grid anytime they want?
No, I was just pointing out the scale of the required battery manufacturing.
It's an argument I like to use. When someone claims "we can't use X because of reason Y, we have to do Z instead" I look to see if Z also is hit by objection Y.
Another example of this is "renewables require too much material that we can't recycle", at which point I observe that the quantity of materials produced by society as a whole greatly exceeds what renewables would involve, even if the society is powered by nuclear. The US produces 600 megatons of construction and demolition waste a year, for example. Renewable waste would just be a minor blip on this existing waste stream. So, either recycling this waste isn't actually needed, or a putative sustainable nuclear-powered society has discovered how to recycle it, so just toss the renewable waste (which is almost entirely things like steel, aluminum, and glass) into that same recycling infrastructure.
"we can get clean energy by continuing to burn fossil fuels".
If this isn't about ceasing carbon emissions then none of this is necessary. Fire up the coal plants!
Calculate the area-under-the-curve (AUC) of two time series over, say, the next 50 years:
(1) the emissions of a 98% renewable + 2% natural gas grid that comes online in 6 years, assuming fossil fuels for t between [t, t+6 years].
(2) the emissions of a 100% fission grid that comes online in 16 years, assuming fossil fuels for t between [t, t+16 years].
If you insist on ignoring the temporal nature of cumulative emissions, then sure, you can arrive at a convenient but false conclusion. But any honest analysis will consider the emissions in that [t+6 year, t+16 year] interval.
(... it would also consider things like social licensing risks leading to early plant closures like what's happening in Germany, or the fact that nuclear will likely be paired with natural gas too because demand itself is variable, and overbuilding nuclear is expensive.)
Ehm, you should be fair and not fudge the numbers in your favor. :-)
Start both with the same (current) % for renewables and (1) have some realistic ramp-up of renewables to reach 98%, and (2) keep the renewables more modestly rising in the fission version, while fading-out fossils in favor of fission
You should also account the carbon foodprint of grid-level energy storage (yes, it will be needed, even with the natural gas plans), vs the foodprint for fission plants (undoubtedly quite bad).
There are so many more cost-effective grid-scale options like pumped storage. I think it's daft to "waste" the energy density of lithium batteries on stationary applications.
Battery storage has become cheaper than pumped hydro, I believe, at least for diurnal storage. The price declines in Li-ion cells have been remarkable, particularly recent decline in LFP cell prices.
Battery production/year is following an exponential curve right now. Tons of new research on promising new directions is continually being produced and incorporated into batteries. Projecting only continued production at the current rate isn't "realistic", it's wildly pessimistic.
The total electricity grid requirements are also growing - it’s at 30TWh annually and before the AI explosion was ~2-3% (let’s conservatively estimate 2030 as 40TWh). Let’s say 20% of that is satisfied direct from renewables without storage leaving 32TWh.
Aggressive predictions have us generating ~6-10TWh of batteries by 2030 meaning we’re going to still need about another 3-6 years to actually satisfy demand (ignoring complexity of hooking up the batteries). On top of that, the batteries require rare earth metals that companies are gearing up to satisfy by strip mining the ocean floor for those polymetallic nodules, operations which have a very real risk of completely destroying deep ocean life. It seems to me like it’s slow and ecologically potentially more destructive than even global warming. Is it really wise to be betting on batteries at this scale vs tried and true nuclear fission which doesn’t carry any of these risks?
We can make an effectively unlimited amount of battery storage, especially sodium ion or iron air (which don't need ocean floor mining...). There are no practical limits on the timescales of ~10-20 years.
What people forget is batteries are a manufactured good, which follows Wright's Law. Manufactured goods (like energy storage, TVs, lightbulbs) obey different economic principles to scarce goods (like land, services, or goods with scarce inputs), and they have effectively unlimited supply. The supply is strictly set by demand.
Aggressive predictions of ~6-10TWh/year of batteries in 2030 are more predictions of demand, not so much predictions of supply. If market demand in 2030 is 30TWh/year, then that's what the market will produce. But don't blame manufacturers for the fact that demand in 2030 will only be 6-10TWh/year! And don't confuse this for a sector's inability to increase supply!
The response when seeing a "6-10TWh/year" prediction should be "how can we incentivize demand so that this number is 30TWh/year instead".
You didn't address the need for rare earth metals. Can you link sources talking about the 'unlimited amounts of battery storage'? I was also under the impression (albeit uninformed) that battery storage was not a solved problem, either technically or ecologically.
There is no need for rare earth metals for stationary storage. See sodium ion, which performs similar to lithium ion batteries and are only slightly more expensive (but that cost differential has nothing to do with the product itself, it's because of economies of scale and Wright's Law has been operating on lithium ion for longer).
Lithium ion is preferred for vehicles because it's lighter, but again we are talking about stationary storage, so the extra weight of sodium ion isn't a problem.
The technology is solved, and the materials needed to make it abundant. It's all about demand. If the demand is there, the industrial capacity will follow. But right now, the market is only demanding about 3TWh/year of storage, and so that's how much industry is producing.
> The technology is solved, and the materials needed to make it abundant. It's all about demand. If the demand is there, the industrial capacity will follow
It takes a lot of time for new battery technologies to scale and disrupt existing ones and entrenched players have an incentive to continue competing. Sodium ion, iron air etc might replace lithium ion on the 30 year time scale but lithium ion will continue to drive down costs and up its capacity to try to compete and it has significantly more revenue to fund this by being the only player in the market. So it’s not clear when alternative batteries will start to replace lithium ion, but at scale it’s unlikely to be a quick process. And please don’t pretend like it’s all a demand side problem. It takes time to build out new factories from manufacturing all the equipment needed to acquiring and training employees. There’s plenty of demand for cheap batteries and the ability to manufacture simply isn’t there either and it’s being brought online. Oh and that capacity being added? It’s all lithium ion and requires a long pay off for that investment. Lithium ion is going to be potential a significant ecological debt worse than fossil fuels if the ocean floor strip mining gets going.
Well yes that is what happens when the market is left to its own devices and external costs aren't accounted for. The solution isn't to abandon storage it's to embrace the many options out there that don't require rare earths.
And it is all a demand side problem. If the world wanted to buy 10 or 20 TWh a year at current market prices, that's how much would be produced. But the world doesn't want to do that and hence that much isn't produced. This is Econ 101 for goods with non scarce inputs. It doesn't take ten years to scale up production for commodity goods.
Since we're teaching each other first principles, bringing a new mass-scale battery manufacturing facility online to full production typically takes anywhere from 2 to 5 years. Planning takes ~1-2 years, construction & setup takes ~1-2 years and ramp to full output takes 6 months to 1 year. And since we're on Econ 101, investments require payoff so all of this is done carefully to not tank the price of batteries by overproducing supply. In control systems terms, supply side investments always aim for undershooting demand as overshooting hurts how much money you make and risks destabilizing your market.
As for scarcity, inputs to lithium ion ARE scarce which negates your entire model. Pretending they aren't is where you're making a mistake. Lithium, cobalt & nickle are relatively scarce and the mines for that have to scale up to meet demand as well. You've also got a workforce to train to do the work which takes time & is also input-constrained. That's why there's massive NEW lithium mines being opened in the US & elsewhere to extract existing reserves to meet the growth in lithium ion batteries. If the world thought that sodium ion or ion air was an immediate future, you wouldn't see these massive large-scale investments into lithium. Lilthium-ion batteries is going to be a large and growing market for decades which brings me back to the strip mining of the ocean floor that's coming to support that.
Whright's law by the way isn't also an inevitable effect that goes on forever. At some point your exponential plateau's and you no longer see such exponential decrease in pricing. That's why processors aren't getting cheaper and compute isn't scaling up quite in the same way as in the early days. There's only so efficient you can make something.
Hang on. So the reaction to companies intending to perform actions that will destroy the economy system of the oceans is to prevent more demand? Why this instead of just forbidding that mining?
Well without that mining batteries will run out of cost effective materials quite quick and temper the ability to hit the demand necessary to decarbonize the grid. There’s also complicated legal matters since a lot of this happens in international waters. Oh, and the body that nominally regulates the matter has been clearly regulatory captured and is handing out mining licenses left and right. So while it might be nice to hypothesize what a sensible regulatory framework might look like, what’s actually happening is “full steam ahead” mining. It’s really bleak.
Also if we're planning for the long term; wind and solar sound like bad options for going into major global catastrophes like large asteroid hits or a nuclear war. It'd be better as a matter of principle to be using systems that can cope with massive climate disruptions. I like to bring up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer - an event like that will happen sooner or later and it'd be pretty rough if we've all gone too heavy with solar.
One of those hopefully-you-don't-need-it concerns but it is starting to become a more pressing with the uptick in wars and unrest that seems to be going on.
More[1] reading material. The volcanic winter of 536 made it one of the worst years for humanity.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter
Sorry, how is having a few, very delicate, power sources more resilient than an abundance of mechanically simple and widely distributed power sources?
They work if light is massively cut down for 12 months. And can be fortified to the nth degree.
This has to be the most hilariously desperate anti-renewable argument yet.
> The world doesn't need fusion or fission, other technology is plenty good.
It's not. If it was the world wouldn't be using 140k TWh of fossil-fuel-produced energy[1], and would be using a lot more than 9k TWh of renewable energy[2]
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-fossil-fuel-consum... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/modern-renewable-energy-c...
> wind and solar work, are cheap, and are useful. The world doesn't need fusion or fission, other technology is plenty good
Which is why we aren't building record-setting amounts of natural gas infrastructure, oh wait...
We (the US) aren't building record-setting amounts of natural gas capacity. That was 20 years ago.
https://headwaterseconomics.org/wp-content/uploads/HE_electr...
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?
> 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
[2] https://www.uxc.com/p/tools/FuelCalculator.aspx
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.
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/
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.)
> we can make tritium from lithium using the neutrons from fusion
Each fusion reaction consumes one tritium atom and produces one neutron. If that neutron hits a lithium atom, it can split that and produce a tritium atom. If everything goes perfectly and there are no losses, then you get a 100% replacement of all the tritium that you consume. If you have a 90% replacement ratio (highly optimistic), you essentially lower the cost of your tritium fuel by a factor of 10, so from $30000 per gram to $3000 per gram, or $3 MM per kilogram.
> We also get tritium from fission plants
Yes we do. Mainly from Candu reactors. There are 49 Candu and Candu-like reactors in the world, and each produces less than 1kg of tritium per year. According to [1] a 1 GW fusion power plant would consume about 55 kg of tritium per year. So you'd need to run more than 50 fission power plants to operate one fusion power plant. Most people who dream of fusion think that fission will become irrelevant, not that you'll need 50 fission power plants for each fusion power plant.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09203...
That's why fusion blankets for D-T reactors use lead or beryllium as neutron multipliers. CFS for example uses FLiBe molten salt. Doing it this way a tokamak can not only sustain its own tritium supply, but periodically provide startup fuel for additional reactors.
Initial tritium load for a small, high-field reactor like CFS is much smaller than for ITER. And I'll note that the paper you linked has this conclusion:
> The preliminary results suggest that initial operation in D–D with continual feedback into the plasma of the tritium produced enables a fusion reactor designed solely for D–T operation to start-up in an acceptably short time-scale without the need for any external tritium source.
Beryllium is very efficient as a neutron multiplier, but it is also extremely rare. It would not be acceptable as a consumable for energy production, as it is much more useful for other purposes.
In the Solar System, the abundance of beryllium is similar to that of gold and of the platinum-group metals. On Earth, the scarcity of beryllium is less obvious only because it is concentrated in the continental crust, where it is relatively easily accessible, even if its amount in the entire Earth is much smaller.
Lead neutron multipliers would be preferable, because they only inter-convert isotopes of lead, so it is not destroyed, like beryllium.
However lead used for this purpose becomes radioactive, with a very long lifetime, unless expensive isotope separation would be used for it.
> CFS for example uses FLiBe molten salt
Ok, let's talk about that. For those who are not familiar, CFS stands for Commonwealth Fusion Systems, as startup with links to MIT. CFS aims to build a fusion reactor similar to ITER, but many times smaller, the secret sauce being that they use superconductors to achieve high magnetic fields. Back in 2022 some of the MIT guys got an ARPA-E grant to investigate the use of FLiBe to achieve atritium breeding ratio higher than 1 [1]. The results are in [2], they were published in January 2025. Here are some quotes:
ARC is the fusion reactor designed by CFS. This paper states that it will need 250000 liters of FLiBe. This is an insane amount. To understand how large this amount is, consider this: this ARPA-E project that took 3 years, used a quantity of 100 ml, so 0.1 liters.Anyway, what breeding ratio was achieved? 3.57 x 10^(-4), or 0.0357%. It's a long way to go from here to 1.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but too many things related to fusion are just "engineering details".
[1] https://arpa-e.energy.gov/programs-and-initiatives/search-al...
[2] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-4326/ada2ab/...
250000 liters of FLiBe contains 44 tons of beryllium, and the current annual production is 220 tons, so it's possible but not cheap.
Wow. The ARC reactor is supposed to deliver 270 MWe (when/if it will be built) [1]. So 20% of the world annual production of beryllium for one power plant that would deliver about one quarter of the power of an AP-1000 fission reactor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_fusion_reactor
No, it comes from foolishly thinking that the cost of fuel will dominate cost of energy. That doesn't require fusion of protons; deuterium and lithium are cheap.
I don't know much about this but I assume that the tritium will be created somehow while fussion is done [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterium%E2%80%93tritium_fu...
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.
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.
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.
That's a problem, but it's not necessarily even the biggest problem. Other huge problems include the shear size of the machines per MW of output (and hence cost per MW), coupled with their dreadful complexity and the difficulty of keeping them operating when they become too radioactive for hands-on maintenance. Designs typically just assume the reactors will be reliable enough, when there's no empirical evidence to support that (and the one study that tried to estimate uptime based on analogies with other technologies found the reactor would have an uptime percentage of just 4%!)
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.
Even if fusion is an expensive power source, it may still be desirable in areas which aren’t well suited to wind or solar.
If we figure it out, it might end up being cheaper than fission eventually.
Compared to fission? It's still quite unclear that fusion will provide improvements over fission.
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.
Modern fission designs mitigate meltdown concerns well enough that I'm not sure the safety & security around a fusion plant would actually be any better/cheaper, although public sentiment may be enough of an advantage. Tritium & neutron activated metals are dangerous enough to require keeping the traditional nuclear plant safeguards IMO. As far as proliferation concerns go, I don't see any reason you couldn't breed plutonium in the neutron flux of a fusion reactor, & the tritium is clearly viable for boosted warheads.
Modern fission designs plausibly mitigate meltdown concerns well enough...
To move that "plausibly" into "actually" you have to have very careful design review by regulators. Very careful review of construction to make sure what is constructed is what was designed. And so on and so forth. It's a lot of friction that skyrockets costs. Legitimately. People inevitably attempt to cut corners, and there's no way to make sure they aren't on the safety parts without checking. Actual currently regulatory costs seem to bear out the difference between these, with SMR people spending large amounts of money to convince regulators they didn't screw up, vs Helion fusion being "regulated like a hospital".
I'm not saying fusion has no proliferation concerns. But it's the difference between "low grade nuclear waste, or a very high tech very advanced program to weaponize a working reactor" and "even a broken reactor can be strapped to some explosives to make a dirty bomb". I can't say I'm very aware of how much proliferation concerns drive costs.
Public sentiment also helps.
A lot depends on the actual reactor design.
I was thinking more of large scale D-T fusion, e.g. the tokamak design, which requires breeding tritium & is expected to create a lot of neutron activated waste. The tritium is especially concerning, as it's roughly as deadly as polonium-210 & highly bioavailable in the form of super heavy water.
You're probably right for smaller aneutronic designs like Helion's. If they can actually be made to work, they'll be much safer.
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.
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.
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.
The more plausible looking modern fusion companies tend to be designing very small reactors compared to those projects. Vogtle is 5000 MWs. Olkioluoto is 1600. Helion is promising reactors that are 50 and can be shipped via trains by 2028 (or 2030 depending on how you read some statements/interpret what I just said). They still need some neutron shielding to actually operate them safely (boronated concrete, probably not shipped by train), but nothing on the scale of what you need for a fission plant.
(and other than that I echo elcritch's comments)
Helion also promised 50MW prototypes by 2021. It's 2025 and they have no 50MW prototype still. Fusion power roadmaps are generally exercises in wishful thinking, while fusion power startup roadmaps are basically gaslighting-as-a-serivce.
I still think its worth researching and we'll get there at some point, but I'm not holding my breath-- the whole industry has overpromised in the past, continues to overpromise now and will be probably be irrelevant for de-carbonizing the grid by the time the technology is actually ready at an industrial scale.
Mass media reporting on the whole sector is admittedly even worse; especially for uninformed readers without an engineering background.
I believe the promise you are referring to was contingent upon Helion getting funding that they did not get. It's not gaslighting to publish an amibitious timeline for a startup and be wrong, but that's not even what happened here. They said "if X (funding), then Y". X didn't happen.
I believe the current timetable is no longer contingent upon funding (since they've got the funding they think they need). It's no doubt still an optimistic startup timeline, a target, that they might well fail to achieve (even without the startup failing, just being late).
Meh. They promised 50MW by 2021 in 2018. In 2021, they got half a billion $, but the 50MW plant is still not running. But the bigger problem is that those are all just pretty prototypes; according to a 2018 ARPA report, magnetic field compression in the 40T range is needed for commercial viability. The various prototyes have pushed this from 4T to 10T (and presumably soonish 15T) since 2014. Extrapolating that trend is much less promising than Helions roadmaps, and doing linear extrapolation there is probably doing them a favor...
It's a cool concept, but probably not gonna be viable anytime soon (if ever!).
With regards to scaling, I think there are two components:
Does the physics change as they scale up the field strength? No one is really going to know until they try (unless we get a lot better at simulating plasma real fast). If not, they lost a bet, but they lost it honestly and as far as I can tell (not a physicist) it was a reasonably good bet to make.
Can they physically build the bigger magnets they need fast enough to meet their timelines (and everything else. I understand they are currently bottlenecked on capacitors)? Apart from normal "startups are overly optimistic" issues I don't see any reason to think that they shouldn't be able to reliably predict how fast they can scale magnet size, or be limited to a linear rate. While they are big magnets, it's not exactly new physics.
I'm not sure I'd say they are "probably going to be viable" anytime soon either. I think they have a good chance, but "probably" as in ">50%" is probably pushing it. (Also depends on where you put the goalposts of course)
FWIW I believe that 2018 report was for a high gain low pulse rate plan that Helion rejected, and they are aiming for substantially lower strength magnets as a result. I can't find anything more than rumors to confirm that though.
Just to be clear: I'm not accusing Helion of being dishonest or even fraudulent.
It's just that from everything I know about the project, they still have a long way to go, and there are a lot of milestones to hit that are just pipe dreams for now (actually fusing He3, breeding it, net-gain energy extraction, ...).
I would expect progress to slow down significantly as the scale of prototypes and their complexity increases (like what happens for basically every engineering project ever)-- but progress is already slow/behind schedule to begin with...
That’d be interesting to learn more about. What I’ve seen always leans toward regulation driving costs.
Though I guess some of that infrastructure could be overbuilt due to excessive regulation.
Also much of the concrete and steel is needed for the containment domes. Fusion power likely wouldn’t require nearly as much protection. Perhaps just a fairly standard industrial building.
Regulation generally drives costs by making us build more. Generally safety systems and other redundancy.
I would guess the preventative maintenance over the lifetime of a fission reactor exceeds the initial build costs.
I think that it will depend on economies of scale.
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.
> 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.
I wouldn’t bet on a sane response to it. People are afraid of 5G, vaccines, and even masks.
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/
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?
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.
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.
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.
The non-national-state investors care about the cost and roi.
And they’ll be subsidized such that they have a positive ROI
> 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?
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.
If energy was truly free, it would revolutionize the economy and would fundamentally change how money matters.
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).
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.
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?
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).
>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).
> the comment I was replying to only mentioned as a benefit that Mars could be a second home
The first and second sentences of that comment literally say
> A Mars mission would benefit humanity, but less directly. The past lunar missions and space program benefited humanity in many ways.
And then it goes on to acknowledge the "second home" element, but only as a small consideration.
"that comment literally say" even thought it doesn't say that one of the benefit would be "technological advances" so in reality "that comment literally doesn't say it" and that's why I was asking.
No, for a succesful Mars mission certain scientific progress has to be made. Unlike in economy, in science such things trickle down to us mortals.
No, that’s not what I’m saying. That seems of questionable value. Unless some crazy tail event happens that makes it valuable.
The benefit to humanity is the technological advancement.
The planet Mars is a gift from God for humanity
Thats what they said about lead!
A 'gift of God'?: The public health controversy over leaded gasoline during the 1920s: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1646253/
https://hal.science/hal-03924698/document
> The planet Mars is a gift from God for humanity
I bet I can guess the name of the god too!
God really lowered his standards after he created Earth.
“Well, created one nice one, and one desolate, irradiated, lifeless shit-hole! My work here is done!” Haha
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).
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
Yeah but I still think it would be a great scientific achievement and should be pursued.
Fusion has better security properties than fission, so perhaps it will find some use case in the far future.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Even in that case, nuclear fission could not beat solar or eolic ROI.
Neither solar or wind are free. There are costs associated e.g. with building, shipping, maintaining, decommissioning these things (and hopefully at some point recycling, but that’s not solved). Looking at the whole picture, these costs are not that different. These technologies are complementary, they have very different characteristics.
> Current estimates put fussion at $120/MWh.
Current estimates are completely unreliable, because no industrial-scale demonstrator was built. They are a useful tool for planning and modeling, but not solid enough to build an industrial strategy on them. (And it’s “fusion”)
Did anybody say they are free? But the costs of running solar or eolic are way lower than the costs of running fission, or the costs that likely would be running a fusion central. In case you don't know what ROI means, it is return on investment (i.e. building, shipping, mantaining decomission...).
As of today, we are closer to mass batteries as renewable companion than fusion, at least in terms of ROI. If both end up competing for lithium, it would go to batteries unless fusion becomes dirty cheap.
Current estimations are useful because they mark the starting point for fusion: they are at around 120. They need to reach 80 to replace fission. They need to reach 60 to replace batteries. Assuming batteries don't get better ROI.
Same numbers were useful 30 years ago for solar: it was fully functional, but not yet economically sound. It was not much than a toy and a promise (as it is fusion today). Only when prices made sense it turned to a serious energy source.
About lithium: DT fusion needs mostly Li-6. If it were separated, batteries would work just fine with Li-7.
I recall a story of some lab that was trying to make a lithium-based neutron detector. It wouldn't work, and when they investigated they discovered the lithium they had bought was almost pure Li-7. It was surplus sold back into the chemicals market from the US hydrogen bomb program (which needed Li-6).
I don't think current costs for fusion are useful for modeling, or really anything, because there's nothing there yet. We don't even have prototypes.
But if there is not a clear and speedy path to get fusion to $30/MWh it's not going to make it. Batteries, solar wind, and geothermal are all busy deploying and getting cheaper every month, year, and decade. The grid system possible with 2035's solar and battery tech is going to be completely unimaginable to today's grid ops.
> As of today it's not enough to have positive net return, but to have a LCOE of maybe $60/MWh
If you don't count externalities (see cost of firming intermitency [1]).
> (and going down).
Not the last two years according to LCOE+ 2024. the main culprit is inflation, but the curve was nearing flat anyway.
[1]: https://www.lazard.com/media/gjyffoqd/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
When I go to https://model.energy/ and solve for the cost of energy from renewables + storage in the US, using 2030 cost assumptions, the cost is less than $0.05/kWh. This is providing synthetic 24/7/365 baseload power, so all intermittency has been taken care of.
Problem solved then?
We should give the folks at model.energy the next peace prize for their effort.
You don't have to go that far, but you could at least listen honestly to what that model, and what more complex models, are telling you.
You're answering to a post I made saying that prices that were quoted from the Lazard report don't reflect all that's writen in the report.
Your answer gives a model unrelated to the figures I was discussing, with extremely agressive prices [1] set as hypotheses and zero network costs factored in. Sure, I can accept it as a minimum limit for the cost of a system, but that's not a very useful information, and you're not quoting this price as a lower limit either.
I don't see an honesty issue here, just someone believing that spherical cows are going to produce milk tomorrow.
[1]: e.g. the Lazard report quotes utility PV at $29-92/MWh, while your tool quotes it at 21.7€/MWh.
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.
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).
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.
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.
China needs every power generation it can build.
I've seen cost estimates around there for tokamaks. If Helion actually works, their estimate is more like $20/MWh, and it looks pretty plausible given their reactor design. They would have relatively low neutron radiation, direct electricity extraction without a turbine, factory-built reactors transportable by rail, and no particularly expensive components like superconductors or fancy lasers.
Some of the other designs also look relatively cheap. Tokamaks are just the one we understand the best, so we have the highest confidence that they'll work.
We have highest confidence that tokamaks will "work" in the sense of reaching a physics goal. We have very little confidence tokamaks will "work" in the sense of reaching an engineering/economic goal. Too often the former is confused with the latter in these discussions.
No argument there, I just didn't spell it out since we were already throwing around specific levelized costs anyway.
Actually, this only reinforces "fusion is only 10 years away".
I blame journalists not being able to proprely report on this subject.
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.
>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
>>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
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.
This is not the definition of bikeshedding.
Bikeshedding is focusing on triviality at the expense of important issues. That is just what is happening here. The showstopper issues with tokamaks are size, cost, reliability, materials. This has nothing to do with any of those.
>The showstopper issues with tokamaks are size, cost, reliability, materials.
Plasma runtime in not a showstopper then?
It's an issue that wasn't high risk. I mean, sure, check off the box, but don't pretend this moves the needle much. This was minor compared to those issues that have no clear solutions, or reasons to think there won't be solutions.
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.
1337 seconds is a pretty meaningful result.
If you're a programmer, that is. Could mean something else in physics, right?
I can't find any significance for physics, unfortunately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1337_(disambiguation)
Challenges persist, notably in developing materials that can endure prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures and neutron radiation within fusion reactors. Addressing these material durability issues is essential for the realization of continuous, commercially viable fusion power.
1337 seconds... nice
nice to see the competition between the east and west as this records was broken just a few weeks back
https://physicsworld.com/a/chinas-experimental-advanced-supe...
I fail to find this info: how much energy did they get out? How much did they pump in? How long does it have to burn until there's energy in-out equilibrium?
* No energy was 'captured'.
* They pumped in "2 MW of heating power".
* This expirement wasn't about energy in-out, it was about plasma control. Specifically stopping at 1337 seconds is a way of announcing "and we could have gone longer, but we liked this number"
It still eludes me how we are going to be able to reproduce the same temperature and pressure as in the core of a star considering the humongous amount of mass (hence energy) required to create those conditions.
There are tantalizing ways to create fusion which don’t require these precise conditions. For example, a simple farnsworth fusor device gets fusion reactions just by causing atoms to cross paths at super high speed until they collide - they simply don’t collide often enough to release anywhere near a net energy gain.
Inertial confinement fusion, such as the National ignition facility, does generate comparable pressures and temperatures to the core of the sun within the fuel pellet for an extremely small moment during an implosion. This is done by focusing a lot of energy on small target.
Plasma confinement techniques don’t utilize high pressure to create fusion; they rely on extreme temperatures which are significantly hotter than the core of the sun, which can produce fusion events in a plasma which is only pressurized to around 1 atmosphere (they also rely on different fuel types than the sun which fuse much more readily). The key is once again focus, a large amount of energy is put into a small amount of gas. The obvious issue with this is that the extreme temperatures would destroy any physical container rapidly - but given the electromagnetic nature of plasma, it can be contained using a strong magnetic field without reaching the surface of its physical container.
While temperature may be in the stellar ballpark, pressure should be much lower. That is fine because we are not trying to do proton-proton fusion (that one is very slow even in a star) but a much easier deuterium-tritium fusion.
So, deuterium needs to be obtained from sea water through distillation and electrolysis - both energy intensive operations. And tritium comes from nuclear reactors.
I have always wondered - assuming that the confinement problem is solved, how does the cost of the fuel compare to fission (or other generation methods?
The energy cost to extract deuterium from seawater is about 1/238000th (0.00004%) the energy released from fusing that deuterium.
Nuclear fusion breeds its own tritium from lithium.
Running a 1 GW thermal fusion reactor for a year would consume $483,000 of deuterium and $1300 of lithium. At 40% conversion efficiency and 5 cents per kwh, the fusion reactor would produce $175 million of electricity in that same year.
For comparison, fuel is about 5% of the cost of electricity from fission, and about 50% the cost from coal.
The energy needed to separate deuterium is many orders of magnitude less than the energy liberated by fusion of the deuterium.
The fuel cost is small compared to fission, but note that even with fission fuel is a small fraction of the total cost, so this doesn't save much.
Basically, electromagnetic force is much stronger than the sun's gravitational force. (But it's also more difficult to get it to eork just right)
Consider this - you are able to overpower the force of gravity on earth. The earth is very large, but you are stronger than it's gravity.
Gravity is so much less powerful than the other forces.
Controlled fusion does not require the conditions of the interior of a star, because the nuclear fuels involved are many orders of magnitude more reactive. All the Sun's initial deuterium (and all the lithium in the core) were burned away long ago.
According to the linked article this was achieved at 50 million degrees. The Chinese record was achieved at 100 million degrees.
I have also read that achieving productive fusion will require temperatures above 100 million degrees.
Most of my sources are pop-sci, so correct me if I'm wrong.
“1,337 seconds.” Nice.
WEST beat EAST... what a bunch of nerds :)
WEST side is the BEST side
They've got the best-side story, or something
Next milestone is 69 minutes. No, not 60.
First they need to achieve 42 minutes sustained
Full 420 minutes.
Would be really NICE.
but 69 is lame because it merely is 3*13
I don’t care about sex jokes. 42 (or 72) OTOH are cool because both are surrounded by twin primes!!! how cool is that? (semiprime coolness is significantly smaller than twin prime coolness)
I think you’re doing it wrong
Whatever you say, Ramanujan.
Erm. Why?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet
Classic MegaTokyo strip[1] for illustration purposes.
[1]: https://megatokyo.com/strip/9
t00 l4m3 4 U
this just gets my conspiracy nutjob of a mind flying.
how about the NORTH versus SOUTH team contests? ugh
Why
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet
This is pretty cool, but it's a good reminder that commercially viable fusion electricity still remains a looooong way off.
Why is that the correct interpretation? It seems like another would be: "This is a ~33% improvement over a record set only three seeks ago. Innovation is rapidly accelerating to a point where plasma can be contained indefinitely."
> Nevertheless, given the infrastructure needed to produce this energy on a large scale, it is unlikely that fusion technology will make a significant contribution to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. For this, several technological sticking points need to be overcome, and the economic feasibility of this form of energy production must still be demonstrated.
It's very cool, but the article itself paints a long time line. Indefinite containment is just one part of the puzzle.
Being a viable form of electricity and becoming a significant contributor to mitigating climate change by a specific date are two different things. Geothermal is a viable form of electricity for example even if it is less than 1% of power produced.
And we are on the verge of AGI any week now. And Full Self Driving.
Point taken, of course. But the fact that emerging technologies (or technologies that people wish would emerge) are often overhyped is not exactly an argument that "commercially viable fusion electricity still remains a looooong way off."
And, FWIW, I think it's far from clear at this point that progress towards AGI has been overhyped. It's true that we're not there yet, but how many serious people were actually predicting we'd get there in early 2025? If anything, that one seems like it could be coming up on us faster that many had expected. But, of course, nobody really knows — certainly not me.
Actually...same with FSD, now that I'm thinking about your comment a bit more critically. There are a few people out there who keep selling a snake-oil version of the technology. But, if you tune them out, my sense is that we've actually made pretty substantial progress on that problem too. After all, there are cities in the U.S. today where you can get picked up in a driverless taxi!
Are you trying to be sarcastic? There are cities where you can book a car to drive itself to you and then fully autonomously drive you to your destination.
I don't think that qualifies as "full" self driving.
Aren't we talking about Waymo? It's not perfect everywhere but it's definitely already better than most people driving around SF. That's pretty full to me.
I guess they haven't been allowed on freeways yet?
Nothing ever happens
I think if the "burns" are long enough, it will be sufficient to extract net energy...
actually...
All that depends on how much burn heat we can get from those ~30mins burns... :)
Commercially viable likely also means: cost competitive with nuclear fission. Which might well never happen, since the reactor designs for fusion are orders of magnitude more complex (and therefore more expensive).
They also need a lot of ignition energy which requires a powerful separate power source, which limits where the fusion reactor can be built.
Moreover, there is the issue of the reactor core being degraded by the heavy neutron radiation which is produced by the fusion reaction. So the chamber has to be replaced regularly. Which may also be quite expensive.
>the issue of the reactor core being degraded by the heavy neutron radiation which is produced by the fusion reaction.
There are some reactor designs that use aneutronic fusion, which eliminate this particular issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion
Does the commercial viability change when one considers regulatory constraints on building new fission plants? People may be more inclined to allow fusion reactors than fission reactors, since the former doesn't require uranium. (I'm sure there are dangerous failure modes for fusion, like there are for everything else, but Chernobyl continues to haunt the nuclear industry in the popular imagination.)
I guess the existing regulations apply to all reactors which handle radioactive materials, not just to fission reactors which produce radioactive uranium isotopes with long half-life, and which include the risk of a nuclear meltdown. Though it would make sense if the safety requirements are significantly lower for fusion reactors because of their higher innate safety.
My understanding as well is that fusion could take care of base load, but it can't be scaled up or down based on grid demand to the same degree that fission reactors can. So fusion and renewables alone would not be capable of a carbon-free future grid.
CFS is building their demo reactor that should achieve Q>1 and are already building their first commercial plant: https://blog.cfs.energy/cfs-will-build-its-first-arc-fusion-...
Barring some kind of engineering failures and delays they seem on track to have things ready in the early 2030s.
I think this is hopelessly optimistic. From what I can tell, they have not even started building the ARC reactor. There is about zero reason to believe that all the completely unproven concepts, like the molten-salt liquid blanket (or tritium breeding in general) are gonna work without a hitch and zero delays-- thats just straight up self-delusional.
In comparison with ITER, the have the advantage of newer magnet technology (which certainly helps!), but thats the only actually proven thing, and every other aspect of ARC is basically complete vaporware.
It would be a very pleasant surprise to have them extract electrical energy from the thing in early 2030, but I'm not even holding my breath for first plasma by then. But we'll see.
Our first clue that it was bollocks was when it was called ARC reactor.
No one has demonstrated stable plasma operations for any lengths of time and they are claiming to not just get Q-plasma > 1 but Q-total > 1 by 2030? This is more optimistic than Full Self Driving by 2016
You fell for the oldest trick in the fusion book.
We don't know what innovation will bring or when. The important thing is trying and the direction of travel.
No it’s pointless doing it because some guy on HN said it’s a long way off and therefore you are not allowed to be excited or enthusiastic about it.
The thing is, after repeatedly getting excited about commercial fusion power for the past sixty years, it's tough to maintain enthusiasm.
For me I worry it's like the search for the northwest passage. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage). Explorers spent about 400 years searching for something that they knew just had to be there, but when they finally did it (1957), it really wasn't important anymore.
> The thing is, after repeatedly getting excited about commercial fusion power for the past sixty years, it's tough to maintain enthusiasm.
It’s very easy if you’re even a tiny bit interested in the scientific aspects. Since we started we’ve had several generations of superconductors, huge advances in our understanding of materials and plasma physics (a bit niche but still very cool).
ITER itself is fascinating if you’re into large-scale engineering and planning. If you are into this and not interested in ITER, I would recommend having another look.
> Explorers spent about 400 years searching for something that they knew just had to be there, but when they finally did it (1957), it really wasn't important anymore.
Yes, it’s a risk and it might well end up that way. Still, many discoveries have already been made along the way, and it is impossible to predict its success or failure without actually trying to do it.
The Northwest Passage is important now tho. The short path from most of Eurasia to North America goes through the Arctic. Ice caps are diminishing/going away. The US wants Greenland. All of these are related.
What's funny is that AI has been failing to be achieved for much longer than fusion energy yet so many here are convinced we're on the cusp of an AI apocalypse.
I have more faith in fusion power in 20 years than anyone claiming AGI is coming in the exact same timeframe.
What's pointless for anyone who cares about fusion is commenting on it from the peanut gallery (i.e., any form of social media) rather than participating in R&D in any way whatsoever. The same goes for online outrage: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10095997
This entire site is nothing more than a sales and marketing tool and otherwise exists to waste peoples' time.
> What's pointless for anyone who cares about fusion is commenting on it from the peanut gallery (i.e., any form of social media) rather than participating in R&D in any way whatsoever.
Some of us do both :)
Beautiful irony in getting ratioed for this post.
Does anyone have a top 5 issues list of things that are holding up fusion progress? Like there are basic material science issues that still need work to bring costs down, so that critical materials don't cost too much? Or there is still some theoretical plasma physics that we're still working out the details on? Or magnetic confinement simulations are still too crude, and we need 100x on computing power. Or whatever.
1. We don't have a perfect understanding of plasma dynamics and how they'll react to different conditions. Predicting plasma instabilities before they mess with your reactor remains a big challenge for our computation capabilities.
2. Yeah, material science is also a big one. When you are working with the magnetic forces typical in a modern fusion reactor, your materials undergo a lot of mechanical stress. The "first wall" that has to bear the brunt of the nuclear reactions becomes radioactive. Some plasma ions invariably go off trajectory and we have a "diverter" to prevent them from hurting the reactor but that reduces the temperature.
3. Our reactors aren't efficient enough. Everyone taking about "q" value means the energy they put into creating the reaction to get the plasma to fuse. It's called q-plasma which is a misleading metric. The true breakthrough will be sustained q-total, which will be the ratio of the total energy you get out over the total energy you put in. Nobody in the industry likes to talk about it, because we are decades away from reaching this.
4. Modern designs are becoming extremely expensive. The most serious design right now is being funded not by a state of a country but by the biggest countries in the planet.
5. Someone help me here I've ran out of points
5. The fuel is notoriously difficult to contain. There will be leaks, and even small ones can spoil the reaction and tip your device into unpredictability. Also, the fuel has a tendency to infiltrate metals and embrittle them.
5. Working big pieces of steel and making large process plants is not cheap or easy.
If I understand correctly, the Top 1 and 2, 3, 4, 5 etc. issue is how to make that plasma do actual work. So far the designs which boast Q>1 or are close enough, all produce plasma in short burst and no one has invented a way to make that burst generate electricity somehow. And tokamak design has clearer path to generating electricity but have problems in reaching stable Q>1 at all. This is all very amateurish understanding, please correct me if I'm wrong.
Series of short bursts, which heat a neutron-absorbing fluid. That part is relatively straightforward.
Helion is an exception, since they have a different fuel which gives them a way to extract electricity directly.
I'm afraid the top 1 issue forever is that it really only works if you are a sun. No need to try and harvest or contain the energy, high energy neutrons damaging the whole thing is a non-issue, and the gravity does the rest.
We already have a fusion source and a way to harvest it from afar in solar panels.
> 1337 seconds
AFAIU, no existing tokamaks can handle sustained plasma for any significant period of time because they'll burn down.
Did this destroy the facility?
What duration of sustained fusion plasma can tokamaks like EAST, WEST, and ITER withstand? What will need to change for continuous fusion energy to be net gained from a tokamak or a stellerator fusion reactor?
If this destroyed the facility that would be the headline this news article.... WEST highest is 22 minutes (it's in the title) and you could google EAST and ITER but the title tells you it is less than 22 minutes. WEST is a testing ground for ITER. The fact that you can have sustained fusion for only 22 minutes is the biggest problem since you need to boil water continuously because all power sources rely on taking cold water and making it warm constantly so that it makes a turbine move.
To rephrase the question: what is the limit to the duration of sustained inertial confinement fusion plasma in the EAST, WEST, and ITER tokamaks, and why is the limit that amount of time?
Don't those materials melt if exposed to temperatures hotter than the sun for sufficient or excessive periods of time?
For what sustained plasma duration will EAST, WEST, and ITER need to be redesigned? 1 hour, 24 hours?
The magnets in the device make the plasma be in a doughnut like shape to prevent it from touching the rest and it has active cooling, the parts that are around the plasma are made out of tungsten to dissipate heat. The sustained plasma duration would have to be turned on for as long as a traditional power generation device like a fission reactor or an oil / coal power station.
EAST, WEST, URNER
[LLNL] "US scientists achieve net energy gain for second time in nuclear fusion reaction" (2023-08) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/06/us-scien...
But IDK if they've seen recent thing about water 100X'ing proton laser plasma beams from SLAC published this year/month;
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43088886 :
> "Innovative target design leads to surprising discovery in laser-plasma acceleration" (2025-02) https://phys.org/news/2025-02-discovery-laser-plasma.html
>> Compared to similar experiments with solid targets, the water sheet reduced the proton beam's divergence by an order of magnitude and increased the beam's efficiency by a factor of 100
"Stable laser-acceleration of high-flux proton beams with plasma collimation" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56248-4
Timeline of nuclear fusion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_nuclear_fusion
That energy gain was only in the plasma, not in the entire system.
The extremely low efficiency of the lasers used there for converting electrical energy into light energy (perhaps of the order of 1%) has not been considered in the computation of that "energy gain".
Many other hidden energy sinks have also not been considered, like the energy required to produce deuterium and tritium, or the efficiencies of capturing the thermal energy released by the reaction and of converting it into electrical energy.
It is likely that the energy gain in the plasma must be at least in the range 100 to 1000, in order to achieve an overall energy gain greater than 1.
> all power sources rely on taking cold water and making it warm constantly so that it makes a turbine move.
PV (photovoltaic), TPV (thermopohotovoltaic), and thin film and other solid-state thermoelectric (TE) approaches do not rely upon corrosive water turning a turbine.
Turbine blades can be made of materials that are more resistant to corrosion.
On turbine efficiency:
"How the gas turbine conquered the electric power industry" https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=38314774
It looks like the GE 7HA gas/hydrogen turbine is still the most efficient turbine? https://gasturbineworld.com/ge-7ha-03-gas-turbine/ :
> Higher efficiency: 43.3% in simple cycle and up to 64% in combined cycle,
Steam turbines aren't as efficient as gas turbines FWIU.
/? which nuclear reactors do not have a steam turbine:
"How can nuclear reactors work without steam?" [in space] https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7ojhr8/how_can_... :
> 5% efficient; you usually get less than 5% of the thermal energy converted into electricity
(International space law prohibits putting nuclear reactors in space without specific international approval, which is considered for e.g. deep space probes like Voyager; though the sun is exempt.)
Rankine cycle (steam) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_cycle
Thermoelectric effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect :
> The term "thermoelectric effect" encompasses three separately identified effects: the Seebeck effect (temperature differences cause electromotive forces), the Peltier effect (thermocouples create temperature differences), and the Thomson effect (the Seebeck coefficient varies with temperature).
"Thermophotovoltaic efficiency of 40%" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04473-y
Multi-junction PV cells are not limited by the Shockley–Queisser limit, but are limited by current production methods.
Multi-junction solar cells: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-junction_solar_cell#Mult...
Which existing thermoelectric or thermopohotovoltaic approaches work with nuclear fusion levels of heat (infrared)?
Gas turbines are more efficient than steam turbines simply because they can be used at higher temperatures.
However the exhaust gas of a gas turbine will still contain a great part of the input energy.
Therefore in order to reach maximum efficiency in a power plant, you must start with a gas turbine, which must be followed by a cascade of 2 or 3 steam turbines that run at lower and lower temperatures (this combination of a gas turbine with some steam turbines is what "combined cycle" means), until you obtain exhaust steam that is not much hotter than ambient temperature, and which can be used for heating, to recover even more of the input energy than what has been converted into electric energy.
Instead of gases or steam, turbines may also use supercritical fluids, e.g. carbon dioxide, which may lead to using less turbine stages and with much smaller turbines (that must work at much higher fluid pressures).
A gas turbine that is used alone, without steam turbines that recover the heat from its exhaust gas, has normally a too low efficiency. Its use can be acceptable only for mobile generators or emergency generators, where the size and complexity are more important than the efficiency.
Okay so I meant to say the simplest way is to heat water in this situation. But there are alternatives here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power?wprov=sfti1#Tripl...
I wouldn't have looked this up otherwise.
Maybe solar energy storage makes sense for storing the energy from fusion reactor stars, too.
There's also MOST: Molecular Solar Thermal Energy Storage, which stores solar energy as chemical energy for up to 18 years with a "specially designed molecule of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen that changes shape when it comes into contact with sunlight."
"Chip-scale solar thermal electrical power generation" (2022) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xcrp.2022.100789
> Multi-junction PV cells are not limited by the Shockley–Queisser limit, but are limited by current production methods.
Such as multilayer nanolithography, which nanoimprint lithography 10Xs; https://arstechnica.com/reviews/2024/01/canon-plans-to-disru...
Perhaps multilayer junction PV and TPV cells could be cost-effectively manufactured with nanoimprint lithography.
there is destroyed and then there is a smoking hole in the side of the planet:) but I think it fair to say, that after 22 min running, that there is no way that it can be turned back on later kind of thing, fairly sure its a pwhew!, lookatdat!, almost lost plasma containment.... keep in mind that they are trying to replicate the conditions found inside a star with some magnets and stuff, sure its ferociously engineered stuff but not at all like the stuff that could exist inside a star so all in all a rather audacious endevour, and I wish them luck with it
The system is not breakeven and the plasma was contained for 22 minutes so the situation would be the plasma was contained until it ran out of fuel. It is made out of tungsten for heat dissipation, has active cooling, has magnetic confinement with superconductors to prevent the system from destroying itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WEST_(formerly_Tore_Supra)
Fusion energy gain factor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor :
> A fusion energy gain factor, usually expressed with the symbol Q, is the ratio of fusion power produced in a nuclear fusion reactor to the power required to maintain the plasma in steady state
There is no danger of destroying the facility. The problem is keeping the plasma going. Even with self-sustaining fusion, the plasma doesn't have that much energy, it is really hot but low density.
The duration is because plasma is heated by rising current, and that hits limit after some period of time. With self-sustaining fusion, heating shouldn't be needed after the initial pulse.
Why hasn’t the US announced anything like this?
That's impressive, but what's the real-world application?
* Fusion's potential is enormous.
* Health software, like fusion, needs breakthroughs.
* Are we ready for the data deluge?
* Can we build it fast enough?
To eat the plasma? Hope they are missing an H
You have to imagine the press release being read in a French accent.
If you lean your ear to the reactor you can faintly hear a "Om nom nom nom nom"
It's pretty tasty actually though you can only taste it once :-/
Has any fusion reactor produced usable electricity, if only as a proof of concept?
No, none of the dozens of reactors constructed so far have gone through the trouble of building a steam system with a turbine and a generator.
Which is understandable, since this is the easy part (not very different than the setup in a fission or coal plant), and there's absolutely no reason to do so until we have seen ignition.
I'd just assume that temperature would be an important factor in the reactor.
With the millions of degrees being involved, seems a little more than "not very different" than a fission reactor. But would like to hear how this is supposed to work.
The temperatures are far beyond anything matter can stand, so its very important that the magnetic confinement keeps the plasma from touching anything.
But one end product of the fusion process is neutrons. Neutrons are unaffected by the magnetic confinement, they pass right through and hit the jacket of the reactor, where they are absorbed. This heats up the material, which is why you can run cooling water through the jacket which turns into steam. This steam spins a turbine.
There's some engineering challenges (neutron bombardment turns steel and concrete brittle, and later radioactive), but in the end its very similar to a normal fission reactor.
Fusion will not be commercial ever at least not for power generation.
Fission has potential for far cheaper fuel cost and can be done with less capital cost.
We are spending a crazy amount of money researching fusion while we have only explored like 1% of the potential of fission. If only part of this money was invested in fission we could have a competition for multiple advanced fission reactors.
Sounds like its getting close!
>1,337 seconds: that was how long WEST, a tokamak run from the CEA Cadarache site in southern France and one of the EUROfusion consortium medium size
Is this a joke and reference to internet culture or a coincidence? Probably the latter, but i found it entertaining.
They turned it off specifically then. Just like the previous one at 1066. We used to do stuff like this in our labs as a joke. Or try and stop timers exactly on :00
I work for the IFMIF project, an ITER-adjacent project with the goal of researching new materials suitable for future fusion reactors.
Trust me, we are all massive geeks, including my colleagues from CEA. There is a non-small chance that the result is deliberate.
The last record was 1066
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hastings
Would it make any sense for the Chinese to choose such a date?
It was the year of Halley's Comet.
Does it have a signifiance in Chinese's culture?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JurplDfPi3U
well done on the french achieving yet another extraordinary feat of engineering and research while still bearing the stigma of being shit at everything for some reason
I hope this international race ends up bearing fruit in a few decades, we need it
WEST vs EAST? Did both sides agree on the naming scheme or something?
I was wondering about that too. I think it's deliberate and friendly because they're both technology testbeds for ITER.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Advanced_Supercon...
Imagine if the world's engineering talent was focused on this rather than making AI to generate slop?
As a secondary effect it kind of is; the general assumption still is that the slop-generating AI will need a lot of power to train, so there is surprisingly a lot more private investment into fusion and fission innovation in recent years.
Well, AI also has something else for it : at this point, no one is expecting any ROI soon, but they all imagine that it's going to be huuuuge, so the "expected" (as in, "wished for") ROI might as well be infinite.
As soon as AI investors start demanding dividends, then the ROI of investing in AI will be compared to the ROI of investing in electricity production "for production sake".
Even if we shut down chatgpt, people who still switch light on.
If we only keep enough fusion reactors to run LLM inferences, but no one can afford lights, well...
What value do you think Software Engineers focused on AI would provide to Fusion Research?
Why is the entire planet incapable of walking and chewing gum at the same time?
Maybe the AI trained by the best engineers will help other people get into physics and then study nuclear fusion.
Why would comp sci majors be working on plasma? Prob want physicists working on that stuff.
Anthropic likes to hire physicists.
Also: https://www.energy.gov/science/fes/articles/ai-tackles-disru...
The need to process the large amount of data gathered by the fusion test rig drove many fields of computer science. The freaking internet was supposedly invented because the physicists at CERN needed a way to collaboratively process and interpret this data.
There's a good chance this is not an either/or question, but that AI will get us to viable fusion power much earlier. For example:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/23/doe_fusion_ai/
https://openai.com/index/strengthening-americas-ai-leadershi...
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