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If Fusion Is the Answer, We Need To Do It Quickly
Lasrick writes: Yale's Jason Parisi makes a compelling case for fusion power, and explains why fusion is cleaner, safer, and doesn't provide opportunities for nuclear smuggling and proliferation. The only downside will be the transition period, when there are both fission and fusion plants available and the small amount of "booster" elements (tritium and deuterium) found in fusion power could provide would-be proliferators what they need to boost the yield of fission bombs: "The period during which both fission and fusion plants coexist could be dangerous, however. Just a few grams of deuterium and tritium are needed to increase the yield of a fission bomb, in a process known as 'boosting.'" Details about current research into fusion power and an exploration of relative costs make fusion power seem like the answer to a civilization trying to get away from fossil fuels.
Fusion confusion
With facial hair cruisin'.
Fission frission
Bears smooth-faced derision.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Fusion would break the stranglehold of petro-exporting countries in the Middle East as well as belligerent exporters like Russia and Iran.
As it always has, and likely always will be.
Did I miss the part where the human race had a miraculous breakthrough in fusion technology? Even setting aside the expected issues with neutron radiation (sorry, no Mr. Fusion Home Energy Kit) there isn't any fusion technology today that is even close to breakeven on an experimental basis. As for commercial operations...
mdsolar submitting a poorly thought out jingoistic rebuttal in 3... 2... 1...
Transfusion, transfusion
My red corpsuckles are in mass confusion
Never, never, never gonna speed again...
Pass the crimson to me, Jimson!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The answer is magnets. Lots and lots of magnets.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
which we've heard for 50 years.
mfwright@batnet.com
Look at ITER: $20B and rising, it will only make 500 MW(th) -- six times less thermal energy than a 1 GW(e) fission reactor -- and it doesn't even include the advanced materials needed to withstand commercial reactor levels of integrated neutron flux.
Uh, ITER is a government project. Of course it's expensive and doesn't achieve much.
"Thorium"
Fusion power is roughly 20 years away from being viable...and has been for the last 40 years LOL.
Seriously, I'll start worrying about proliferation risks when a commercially viable fusion reactor DESIGN is created. Building one -- assuming it's ever viable to begin with -- would take years, which is plenty of time to address proliferation concerns before it came online.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fusion reactors capable of producing net power are big, or seem to be being as we haven't actually built one yet.
However, if you just want to produce tritium for a boosted fission bomb, you don't need to generate net power. A farnsworth fusor will do and they are small and inconspicuous.
As for deuterium: Deuterium is produced for industrial, scientific and military purposes, by starting with ordinary water—a small fraction of which is naturally-occurring heavy water—and then separating out the heavy water by the Girdler sulfide process, distillation, or other methods.
So, no point in securing your fusion reactor because the bad guys don't have any real motivation to break in. At least, not to steal anything.
Although there is some lip service to seeking "aneutronic" fusion the truth is that fusion is so hard to achieve that we don't have the luxury of being picky about the reactions we aim for, and all the practical ones generate a metric fuckton of neutrons, enough to be lethal even on the other side of thick shielding, enough to induce dangerous secondary radioactivity in many elements, and enough to knock enough atoms out of their place in metal crystalline lattices to seroiusly weaken structures made from elements that dont' become radioactive too. It's a serious enough problem that the first and most important clue that Pons and Fleischmann had not achieved cold fusion was that they were still alive.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Yeah, I'm always excited about garage experimenters running a 500 MW neutron source away from the heavy hand of the government.
If all the resources (funding, brain power, political support, etc) went into Gen 4 or Gen 5 reactor designs using liquid rather than solid fuels, would LFTR's or other such reactors be in production and/or online right now?
"The only downside will be the transition period"?!?!?!
WHAT
THE
FUCK!?!?!
Oh yeah, other than, "It don't fucking work yet."
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
The article's concern about Tritium and Deuterium is misguided.
Deuterium is commonly available on the open market:
https://www.unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=135
Tritium is harder to get, but can still be formed by several well understood methods:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Production
Anyone with the skills and equipment to build a nuclear weapon, who wants these two compounds, likely already has them.
This amounts to using the power that already comes from the Sun &, in effect, the results of the Sun on the Earth or under the seas.
You can get power from solar energy on the surface, wind above or deep ocean currents and they all work.
Deep ocean power seems like the least disruptive and those current run 24x7. It is the easiest to design for submerged turbines and they are relatively easy to service, with oil platform technology already in use. No unproven technologies, no radiation, no birds killed with solar collectors or wind turbine blades.
Of course this is too easy for politicians and the people looking for trillions of $s in government handouts as deep ocean power isn't "sexy" or supported by some of the big Fortune 500 power entities.
We must all say F-U-S-I-O-N-H-O. The timing has to be precise, and our index fingers have to carefully touch our neighbours' fingers in an exact dance. You can learn more about this here :)
Other interesting and scientifically sound approaches are limping along on pitiful drips of venture money e.g. General Fusion.
And while some public money goes into Polywell research, it's produced on a dime when compared to ITER.
Don't mean to knock the work that's done to advance the Tokamak design, but it shouldn't be the only game in town.
People are stupid. Politicians are worse. Film at 11.
It'll be figured out when there is a need. There is no need now.
Climate change? We'll figure out how to fix that, too, with all the power from the fusion reactors.
Ass backwards, but that's how these things go.
Step 1: Collect hydrogen
Step 2: ?
Step 3: Profit!
Magic pixie hair. As everyone knows, magic pixie hair, if harvested correctly, could supply all the energy needs of an exponentially growing global economy for centuries, nay, millenia. Engineers just need to figure out how to find the pixes, and harvest their hair. I'm a compelling idea man.
I comment occasionally so that I can mod others -1 overrated or -1 offtopic.
solar PV panels are essentially fusion collectors on your roof.
I'd really appreciate if somebody with deeper fusion knowledge could take a look at this paper: http://www.aneutronicfusion.or...
It's possible that it's wrong, but if true, it would mean that tokamak fusion is fundamentally impossible (which would suck for ITER). The paper is by a bunch of alternative fusion research approach guys, so it's possible they're not objective here (not cold fusion, that's bunk).
If it were only just getting a few grams of tritium, it isn't that hard to do. On the scale of a few grams you can just get something like this baby and hide it in a commercial seawater desalinization plant to get a few grams after a bit of time (and energy)...
Of course that isn't the most economical way to do it. I think a common military-industrial method today is to put lithium control rods into an experimental-sized fission reactor and collect the tritium gas that comes off... Still no fusion necessary...
The government does 10's of thousands of project a year. ON time, within budget with little waste.
the ITER is using extremely cutting edge experimental reactor. Of course there are unknowns.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If bomb makers have access to fission plants, they can make tritium. It doesn't require fusion.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I'm also not convinced that eliminating fission plants would make it impossible to make nuclear bombs. It might just mean that they'd need to find a new way of generating enriched uranium -- say by a variation of the method they use to make tritium from fusion.
In other words, I don't know that there is any point to requiring a quick switch.
Nevertheless, fusion would make for an awesome ship engine. It's probably worth studying just for that.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Look at ITER: $20B and rising, it will only make 500 MW(th) -- six times less thermal energy than a 1 GW(e) fission reactor -- and it doesn't even include the advanced materials needed to withstand commercial reactor levels of integrated neutron flux.
Well, that's ITER's point now isn't it? We know what is required to make fusion work, we just don't know how long we can sustain a reaction because we do not understand how the large neutron flux will affect the materials in the container and we still have difficulties maintaining the containment. It's an engineering problem now, not something that is clearly impossible.
IMHO, investments in such experiments should be expanded, by both government and industry. Just like getting a man on the moon, We need a JFK'esk commitment to making this work.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
We either pass it or we pass away, so yeah better get the sucker working ASAP.
That's because ITER is a research project. We'll use it to conduct research that will help understand and develop solutions on the way to a commercial reactor.
the small amount of "booster" elements (tritium and deuterium) found in fusion power could provide would-be proliferators what they need to boost the yield of fission bombs
The primary issue of proliferation is getting the bomb grade uranium in the first place. Fission power by itself doesn't lead to weapons proliferation so long as enrichment processes are restricted to producing only 'reactor grade' fuel. Given a source of weapons grade material, the availability of deuterium/tritium boosters aren't going to make a damned bit of difference to rogue states trying to build bombs. Crappy, low yield bombs will suit their purposes just fine.
Have gnu, will travel.
That has to be one of the most misguided ideas I've ever seen...
Worry about using deuterium and tritium being used to boost the output of a fission weapon is like worrying about whether a heavily armed maniac's getaway car can do 120mph rather than 115mph. The basic problem isn't the speed of the get away car. If a proliferator can get their hands on sufficient U235 or Pu in the first place, they're 99.99996% of the way towards their goal - the extra .00003 provided by the availability of deuterium and tritium is all but meaningless because when it comes to proliferators it's the mere fact that they have a weapon in the first place that's the problem. That they can now build two or more, or increase the yield of a single weapon simply doesn't count for much when even a low kiloton range weapon is sufficient for their needs. (Which is deterrence generally, or failing that attacks against non military area targets. They aren't trying to crack open Cheyenne Mountain.)
If you want to accelerate the development of fusion power then you need to invest more money to do more research. We should not be afraid to fail. And we should not put all of our eggs in one basket.
But are there unknown knowns? LOL
Look at ITER: $20B and rising, it will only make 500 MW(th) -- six times less thermal energy than a 1 GW(e) fission reactor -- and it doesn't even include the advanced materials needed to withstand commercial reactor levels of integrated neutron flux.
International Thermonuclear *Experimental* Reactor
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Aren't uranium (as opposed to plutonium) bombs pretty bulky?
"If Fusion Is the Answer, We Need To Do It Quickly"
This is the excuse every politician uses to spend YOUR TAX DOLLARS.
Of course there is nothing in it for him or his campaign contributors or his corporations in his state or district (or for Pelosi's husband for instance), so why wouldn't we allow our politicians to ramrod this through by saying "we need to do it quickly.", but why:
1. The FIRST answer is is it not proven to be economically possible as of yet.
2. Politicians rarely pick winners, just graft partners
3. Entrepreneurial behavior overwhelmingly produce the innovations to make society work and always have done so. If it was up to the Pharoahs, all transport would be human, camel or donkey. It was the Phoenicians who invented the fast high capacity cargo sailing ships that transformed trade in the Mediterranean.
That's the kind of thinking that led navies across the world to build dreadnaughts. which could be sunk by a couple of airplanes dropping torpedoes.
Fusion in it's current configuration, and our current state of knowledge, sure it's a joke.
But, going with the airplane example; you're looking at the Wright Brother's first plane, and saying "nope, will never be useful, look at it, it can only fly 3 feet off the ground for a couple hundred yards". Solar panels 30-40 years ago were laughable as well mind you.
Knowledge has a way of building on itself in an exponential fashion. Once the first working (energy positive) reactor is built, you can bet it will be only a matter of months before that design gets improved upon by a thousand different scientists.
But yes, short-sighted people like yourself are what drive the issues in the US. If it doesn't go from drawing board to mature product instantaneously it's clearly a waste of time, effort, and money.
Solar panels 30-40 years ago were laughable as well mind you.
They were not laughable. There just wasn't enough of economical and environmental incentives back then to push for their mass production. Now there is.
Ezekiel 23:20
Fusion isn't developed to the point where it's viable yet. It's currently short-duration and net-energy negative at the moment.
Second, trying to get to fusion with existing fossil fuel plants will just kill the planet that much faster. DUMB!
There ARE relatively clean and safe options for fission power. And in the long run, we're better off transitioning base load power to fission plants, eliminating coal, oil and NG now, then chasing fusion while not poisoning the planet.
Is there a possibility of something like the original article describes?
Sure.
But there's also a possibility of a rogue black hole eating the system too. Do we crouch here, wet ourselves and just wait for it to happen?
It's called "risk management" for a reason.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The same predictions are recycled about every ten years. Pundits who wish to appear mature and rational predict thirty to fifty years. Those less concerned with reputation and filled with exuberance predict ten years or less. The rest are somewhere in between. The problem is; the cycle repeats and, no fusion power.
Look at ITER: $20B and rising, it will only make 500 MW(th) -- six times less thermal energy than a 1 GW(e) fission reactor -- and it doesn't even include the advanced materials needed to withstand commercial reactor levels of integrated neutron flux.
Well, that's ITER's point now isn't it? We know what is required to make fusion work, we just don't know how long we can sustain a reaction because we do not understand how the large neutron flux will affect the materials in the container and we still have difficulties maintaining the containment. It's an engineering problem now, not something that is clearly impossible.
IMHO, investments in such experiments should be expanded, by both government and industry. Just like getting a man on the moon, We need a JFK'esk commitment to making this work.
ITER is also heavily instrumented and represents the design prototype for power generation. It's successor - DEMO - is expected to be bigger, but cheaper, because the design will be known, the manufacturing for the parts will be understood, and it won't include the scientific instrumentation since it'll be a power generating reactor, not an experiment.
My big worry with fusion is that it'll be shown possible, but the cost per MW of capacity will be so high that you can't pay the interest on the cost of capital by charging competitive rates for electricity. Thus rendering fusion forever uneconomical compared to alternatives.
Nuclear fission seemingly has this problem right now, though much of the expense is due to implacable unreasonable opposition.
--PM
Is this anything new? Someone come up with a working fusion reactor and we're all in.
Therefore, if it cannot be done quickly, it's not the answer.
Fusion has been almost there for four decades.
Try LFTR
In the 80's and 90's kochs used to say solar energy is the future, but for now buy our oil and coal. Now that solar is replacing coal/oil energy effectively they have pushed local governments to tax home solar generation to keep their fossil fuels cheaper. I read in the new scientist write in section from a koch brother who said fusion is the future, but for now we need fossil fuel plants. Solar can already put them out of business so they changed the tune to the new unavailable energy generation... cloudy days and night are limits but it works. When fusion gets going (which is isn't yet) there will be plenty of coal/oil people spreading the FUD.
With nuclear the fear is not uncertain or doubted.
Current fission plants actually are making people sick. Breeder reactors(we don't use) can use up 95% of the spent nuclear waste from current reactors and solve the pile up problem of waste, but all the facilities have the problem of leaking pipes and accidents, cruddy maintenance etc. This happens with all industrial facilities, especially as they age. It only takes small levels of crap leeching out of facilities into the groundwater and ingested to kill. Even worse is when babies get formula mixed with the low level radioactive groundwater. Tap water should be safe, but near plants it is not. Telling everyone that their free groundwater is no longer safe makes them mad, and they want to kill the messenger. Oh well. Learn the lesson from the neighborhoods who trusted the nuclear industry.
When the conservative "woman" with an adams apple Ann Coulter says small amounts of radiation is good for your health, and you believe her, then you deserve to ingest all the radioactive crap you think you need. Filter it out for the rest of us.
Nuclear is great in theory, but the for profit energy companies skimp where they can. Fusion isn't much better than fission. It is the tritium that can't be contained and it makes people sick. Tritium decays with a low energy beta (electron) that travels a few feet at most in air and would be absorbed by the outer most layer of dead skin cells outside your body. However, low energy beta delivered right next to your DNA is bad news. Water goes everywhere in your body and you never know when that tritium will decay. You have no way to separate the heavy water from the normal water in your house. I've seen deuterium water ice sink in chem lab and all, but mix it in normal water and it stays uniform.
If ann coulter or anyone in the nuclear industry will drink a glass of pure heavy water (T2O not H2O or D2O)that I can verify with a geiger counter before they drink up, I would be more likely to believe the safety of what they are pushing.
Uranium is more scary because it can be made to go boom, and kicks out high energy neutrons and a gamma that gets past your skin. Tritium is not safe in your body and it does get produced and released by nuclear plants.
One giant plant in the Mojave, transmission lines to the rest of the continent, no groundwater to contaminate (in a few years that is since they are pumping their aquifers dry). That could work and not ruin the continent for the next 5000 years.
well if gridtied solar -aka- filtering the output of the fusion reactor in the sky, is any indication then connecting my neodymium chain driven butan boasted fusion reactor to the grid will require about half the amazon rain forrest for paper and document production. ... .... fusion cannot work unless we change our thinking about "energy". production and income are really words linked to a world with finite resources. real or artificially imposed.
also what will the fossile fuel team print their "promissory" notes (dollar bills) on then?
obviously we should/need to keep track of how much natural resources we have "destroyed" which at this very moment in time has the very elegant solution of making lil green paper bills on which we print how much destruction has been going on
if you can get 1 so called barrel of oil from under the earth surface ready for destruction, then you receive a confirmation bill of destruction for just over 100 so-called oil dollars.
srsly thou
On other methods that don't fall into the bigger hotter heavier paradigm...
There are three kinds of people in the world. Those that can count, and those that can't.
Having visited the NIF and seeing the cartoons that the DoE put together with their "vision" of what a fusion reactor will be, relative to what we have after 40 years of development, makes me think that we should be using the existing fusion reactor at the center of our solar system and capturing its output to generate electricity (solar PV) and heat. The disruption of the Jet Stream from global warming and the acidification of the oceans is just the start of our reaping the "benefits" of burning fossil fuels, and we need to be cutting our energy consumption through energy efficiency and also deploying renewables as fast as humanly possible.
It's an engineering problem now, not something that is clearly impossible.
While entirely true, I was visiting the Princeton Plasma Physics lab in 1990 and heard just that. The sad part was I'd have to wait until 2012 for the first commercial fusion reactor to be viable! It was sweet to stand in the control room while they fused a few atoms in the tokamak. And the flywheels they had were the stuff of a steampunk's wet dream!
To be fair, funding did decrease over the same time period and J.H.F.C., if the money spent on screwing up Iraq even more than it was had been spent on fusion research instead, Iraq would be much less relevant today in so many ways.
IMHO, investments in such experiments should be expanded, by both government and industry. Just like getting a man on the moon, We need a JFK'esk commitment to making this work.
We just need "JFK" to get out of the way and stop squashing every attempt commercialize technologies that actually put a huge dent into the carbon energy industry. Big oil plus big taxes on it is the stuff of _DC_ wet dreams.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"We're busy killing brown people in the middle east, no time for hippie shit like the environment or energy... let the next generation figure that shit out (if there is a world left by the time we're done). We just want our millions in retirement money. The rest of you peasant scum can just FUCK OFF."
Solar IS still laughable. The watts per square meter are still very low, the panels very expensive, the land and installation requirements still onerous, there is still the problem of energy storage without incurring huge additional costs and large reductions in efficiency. It still doesn't work very well at night or on cloudy days.
Face it, the only people buying solar are those who are off the grid and have no choice, or rich environmentalists who have the money to waste and who feel no guilt having their feel good toy subsidized on the taxpayer's dime.
Boosting a fission bomb entails injecting tritium-deuterium gas into the center of a plutonium core implosion design before detonation. It boost the yield 2x to 2.5x. If an entity can build a reactor to create plutonium then it can create hydrogen isotopes. It would be easier for a clandestine terrorist group to figure out how to steal enough enriched uranium and build a gun bomb then steal enough plutonium to make an implosion bomb. Enriched uranium is safe to handle and figuring out a gun design easier to do. Little Boy was a gun design and didn't need a live test before being dropped on Hiroshima. As everybody has pointed out, if this world ever gets to the point where tritium-deuterium gas are produced in large enough amounts where theft is a worry so much time will have gone past that the world will be a very different place.
1950: Fusion power! Only 20 years away! ...
1960: Fusion is the way to go! Only 20 years away!
1970: Fusion is almost here! Only 20 years away!
1980: Fusion is the future now! Only 20 years away!
1990: Fusion is what you should be usin! Only 20 years away!
2000: Fusion for everyone! Only 20 years away!
2010: Fusion is the fossil fuel solution! Only 20 years away!
Every generation of fusion researcher sees it as a mid-career endpoint. 70 years of miracles, nothing to show.
Where is Polywell Fusion in all of this? Is it really a total crock, or is it legit? Navy is apparently moving out of research into commercial reactor design as of July 2014... Anyone know more about this?
We have a unlimited supply of energy which will last millions of years. Yet, we cant be bothered to pull our fingers out of our arse and make it really happen.
Fusion is a great bit of fun years down the line if it works, but we need to think of now.
Fix now, make solar plants on our planet or in space, then let the scientists play with other methods.
Either way, energy companies really dont care about the future. All they care for is profits and now. We are going to be stuck in this era for a very long time, unless someone outside of the corrupt energy group can step in and start the ball rolling.
HA! Fuuuuusion-Ha!! .... Fuuuuuuuuusion-Ha!! Fusion-uhh!
We need a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun and a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer to get it working. We do not have either in this generation of scientists.
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-state-economy-except-at-a-very-basic-level/
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growth-at-our-doorstep-but-not-recognized
http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-consumption-are-inseparable.html
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
Yes, and the unknown unknowns, we know, east, west, south and north somewhat.
... for 4 billion years. Why switch now?
> The watts per square meter are still very low, the panels very expensive, the land and installation requirements still onerous
All-in, including land, clearing it, levelling it, installing equipment, trenching lines, all CAPEX and REG, every single penny from one end to the other, costs $1.79 a Watt.
In comparison, fission plants are currently going in for at least $5 a Watt, but have overrun their budgets almost every time.
Fusion reactors would be fantastically more complex and expensive than fission. To put that in perspective, the start-up load of lithium-6 will cost about $1.80 a watt. The concrete in the floor will be another 15 cents. So just for the floor and one ingredient, you're already more expensive than a complete spinning-the-meter PV system.
> Face it, the only people buying solar
... is everyone on the planet. PV is the second fastest growing power source in history. Wind is the fastest. Numbers:
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/03/18/37-gw-solar-capacity-installed-worldwide-2013/
http://www.mercomcapital.com/global-solar-installations-to-reach-approximately-43-gw-in-2014
http://www.epia.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Publications/GMO_2013_-_Final_PDF.pdf
As a result of this activity, PV alone has gone from nowhere to a real bump on the graphs:
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2013/02/100-gw-of-solar-pv-now-installed-in-the-world-today
100 GW of PV compared to about 370 GW of fission, before many of them were turned off. It took about 40 years to get to that point with fission, so PV is on track to surpass it quite rapidly.
OK here's a simple wikipedia peek for you my mouthy friend:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"The power production by fusion in the core varies with distance from the solar center. At the center of the Sun, theoretical models estimate it to be approximately 276.5 watts/m3,[55] a power production density that more nearly approximates reptile metabolism than a thermonuclear bomb."
Thank you, You nicely demonstrated his point about misuse of an average. This has to rank right up there with the Bush tax cut "saving the average taxpayer $1700."
Perhaps the author should have done more research.... "LENR" is the new thing.
http://www.lenrnews.eu/dod-darpa-and-cold-fusionlenr-are-they-watching-or-trying-to-save-usa-industry/
http://peswiki.com/index.php/News:Cold_Fusion
Let's not forget about the increase in terrorism and drug smuggling that's sure to follow the invention of star trek transporters. We really should be thinking and planning for this problem while there's still time.
Play Command HQ online
Yes, an actual working commercial reactor will be even more expensive, since it will include things not present in ITER (like tritium breeding blankets, exotic materials that can withstand the neutron load, robotic systems for changing out damaged reactor segements when they reach their neutron exposure limits, and a turbine/generator set.) But even if $20B were too much, understand that a fusion reactor making 500 MW(th) would be uncompetitive even if it cost $2 B, an order of magnitude less. And ITER does not have $18 B of instrumentation in it.
Yes, an actual working commercial reactor will be even more expensive
I think that once the process is identified to achieve the orders of magnitude required to scale up fusion to commercial quantities that there will be a period of very expensive reactors that will perfect the required industrial processes to bring the cost down.
I know it's a long way off and the issues you point out are similar to the neutron embrittlement of fission reactor cores, however I also think it is reasonable to presume that there will be some advances in materials technology that are more likely to have a greater impact on society than the fusion reactor. The fusion process will just be one of a number of benefactors.
I would expect an experimental reactor to have more instrumentation than a full production reactor making it more expensive because it is also exploring concepts and has flexibility built in so that it can be reconfigured. However you are saying that a production fusion reactor won't realise those cost benfits. I'm interested in learning your reasoning as to why the costs of such technology won't come down if it becomes production technology?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
As best I can tell, the only problem with practical fusion power is that it doesn't exist. Other than that, it's prefect.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Yes, just imagine a guy killed by an a-bomb, floating up to heaven wondering if he was killed by a regular a-bomb or by a boosted a-bomb.
I think that once the process is identified to achieve the orders of magnitude required to scale up fusion to commercial quantities that there will be a period of very expensive reactors that will perfect the required industrial processes to bring the cost down.
Your comment there brings up a very important general point about how technology develops.
ALL successful technologies develop by iteration, and this iteration can only happen if the cost of an iteration is sufficiently small. This means benchtop, or garage scale, technologies advance. If a technology starts at a point where an iteration costs $20B, it will go nowhere.
If fusion is to have any chance at all, it will be with technologies that can be investigated for $20M, not $20B. And once an iteration gets sufficiently expensive relative to the size of the market (see, for example, passenger airliners), advancement slows way down or stops.
I worked on NIF for 7 years. I hold a doctorate in engineering, with extensive fusion experience. For 5 years, I have been running a fusion blog: http://thepolywellblog.blogspo.... Got some traffic from here, thought I would say hello!
Fusion is changing and it is much closer than you think. Consider what has happened, just this year:
1. In April, Livermore has failed to get Ignition and cancelled LIFE. 13 BILLION Dollar program Ended.
2. In June, the Navy published new polywell research, showing evidence of cusp confinement.
3. In March, Jamie Edwards became the youngest person to fuse the atom, at 13! He was on The David Letterman Show,
4. In March, General Fusion presented a 55 million dollar device to the TED conference. Jeff Bezos funded them.
5. In May, LPPX raised tens of thousands in an online fund raising campaign for fusion.
6. Last May, High school students won 2nd at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for doing fusion in a garage.
7. This Year, Phenoix Nuclear Labs pushed out new fusion devices, which make 3E11 Nuetrons/Second with IEC fusion.
This is the new, 2014, reality of fusion. It is not BS - but, real and substantial developments. It's not cold fusion. It's not even lasers or tokamaks. Fusion is changing. We will see what happens next. It is very exciting.