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MIT Used Lobbying, Influence To Restore Nuclear Fusion Dream
An anonymous reader writes in with the story of how MIT's fusion energy experiment is alive and well even though its federal funding was axed. "'In the end, it is about picking a winner and a parochial effort to direct money to MIT,' said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington-based watchdog group. 'It's certainly a case of lawmakers bucking the president and putting their thumb on the scale for a particular project.' MIT enlisted the support of a wealthy Democratic donor from Concord and the help of an influential Washington think-tank co-founded by John Kerry. These efforts were backed by lobbyists, including a former congressman from Massachusetts, with connections to the right lawmakers on the right committees. The cast also included an alliance of universities, industry and national labs, all invested in the fusion dream. 'It's ground-breaking research that could lead an energy revolution,' [Senator Elizabeth] Warren said. 'This was not about politics. This was about good science.' The revival of MIT's project, whatever its merits, clearly demonstrated what the combination of old-fashioned Washington horse-trading and new-fangled power — both nuclear and political — can do."
If that's the general argument, then it's wrong. Deuterium-Tritium fusion (the kind that all fusion efforts are currently pursuing) would produce not-insignificant amounts of neutron-irradiated waste. The waste would be just as hard to deal with as current nuclear waste is, although it would be produced in much smaller quantities. Still, though, both fission and fusion are much better than the alternatives (fossil fuels).
Aneutronic fusion would be virtually waste-free, but it's very hard and in no one's plans for the foreseeable future.
About us environmentalists, there are many different groups, and not all of us are retarded. People need electrical power, I accept that. Electrical power brings prosperity and higher standard of living, and a happier populace. I've been advocating for years for people to stop building fossil fuel plants and replace them with nuclear plants, and a lot of other environmentalists agree with me. Environmentalism isn't just Greenpeace and hippies.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
> there is some truth
There's *all* truth to that. Let me put this simply; there is almost zero chance that fusion, in its current form, will *ever* be a practical power source.
Now when people read a statement like that they get their backs up about the future, and progress and science and all that. But that's not the issue. The issue is that *fusion isn't the only power source on the planet*. As long as one of these is "better" that fusion, then fusion won't happen. That's all there is to it.
So why do I state my conclusion so forcefully? Because math.
The Levelized Cost of Electricity is the key determinant in telling you whether or not a system will be built. The formula basically tells you what you have to charge for the power coming out of your system in order to break even. Anything above that number is gravy.
The formula, which you can read in depth here:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/your-own-grid-parity-pv-system/
basically boils down to five numbers. The first is the amount of money you pay for the plant, and more specifically, the amount of interest you pay on the loans you took out to build it. The second is the cost of fuel to produce a given amount of power. The next is the peak power that the plant can produce, and next is the percentage of time that the plant actually does produce that. Finally there's the lifetime of the plant, which feed into all of the others. It's something like this:
price of your power = (all the money you put into the plant over its lifetime) / (all the power that you exported to the grid)
We measure money in dollars and cents. We measure power in kWh. This is why your power bill lists a figure in cents/kWh, and why the grid operators measure in $/MWh.
Ok, so fusion. So the price of fuel for a fusion reactor is low, about the same as a fission plant. So we can eliminate that figure for a rule-of-thumb calculation, and leaves us with the lifetime cost of the plant, the CAPEX+OPEX. Now we look at the other side, and we see two figures, the peak power and the percentage of time it runs. We can simplify by listing our CAPEX/peak power as a single number, dollars per watt.
So basically the entire cost structure comes down to the cost of the reactor, and the amount of time it spends running. The rest we can scale out linearly against other power sources.
So what do we know about these two factors?
Well in terms of percentage power, or capacity factor as we call it, fusion reactors are not competitive. Because of neutron embrittlement, they need to be shut down all the time so the reactor core liner can be removed and replaced. Newer designs place lithium-infused blocks inside the containment vessel; this means the vessel itself lasts longer but you still need to open it up all the time to get at those blocks. Generally we might expect a fusion plant to have a capacity factor on the order of a good hydro plant, on the order of 60%. For comparison, a fission plant is around 90%, a wind turbine is 30%, a solar panel is about 15%.
Ok, now the CAPEX. Any fusion reactor of practical output is going to be one of the most fantastically complicated devices ever made. They are utterly crammed with high-end materials, poisons, huge electrical and magnetic systems, high-end vacuum pumps, etc. Depending on the design, it's also flammable, and the fire will cause radioactive rain, so you still need a complete containment building. Now on top of this all, the energy density of a fusion system is *tiny*, so you need to build *enormous* reactors.
And that's where it falls apart. There is simply no way, under any reasonable development line, that the cost of building the plant, and servicing its debt, can possibly be made up by the electricity coming out. PV, one of the worst power sources in terms of cents/kWh, is currently running at about 15 to 20 cents/kWh. A fusion reactor almost certainly cannot be built that will produce power at under ten times that cost. And that's assuming it ever "works