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.

Comments

Fusion Confusion

[smittyoneeach]

Fusion confusion
With facial hair cruisin'.
Fission frission
Bears smooth-faced derision.
Burma Shave

Re: Fusion Confusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Confusion is correct. This guys damn confused. I'd love to have the problem hes talking about as that would mean that we actually have working fusion reactors. Wake me from my grave when we have one actual working power producing fusion reactor (I'm in my early 30s).

Re:Fusion Confusion

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Yes, we were definitely confused. Back in the 80's, we were trying to do the fusion "cold".

Instead, this guy suggests now that we do the fusion "quick" instead.

I see an Ig Nobel coming for "quick" fusion.

Re: Fusion Confusion

[gewalker]

Well, since the whole purpose of fusion reactors is to make commercially useful power, it is pretty clear that we do not have a working fusion reactor by any reasonable definition.

Despite having spent billions (22 Billion USD on hot fusion research by US alone) on the problem so far, with billions yet to come, we do not have working fusion reactors. Even ITER will just be a prototype with no power generation at all. Cost to develop commercially, unknown but bound to be a lot of money.

The US alone has also spent around 15 Billion developing Fast Breeder reactors, and has little to show for it. Other countries have similar experience.

Estimated cost to develop commercial LFTR reactors seems to be in the range 3 - 20 Billion USD. A commercial LFTR prototype seems to be likely 1 billion USD by most observers.

And you still have to build the reactors -- that won't be cheap either. Every known possible solution to replacing our energy infrastructure has a large economic cost, and significant to large environmental cost as well. Kind of the way large-scale engineering works.

Yet the cost of doing nothing will be larger yet, at least eventually. Peak fossil fuel is coming sooner or later, even if you master shale and methane hydrates with high recovery rates and limited environmental impact. There are a lot of third-world people in this world that would gladly join the first-world lifestyle which puts a severe constraint on expanding fossil fuels usage to match the growth in demand.

Personally, the combination of LFTR and renewable sources seems most likely to me to be commercially successful by 2050. Why, because the needed development seem to be within or nearly withing the capabilities of current engineering in both cases. Engineers are very happy to deliver good enough when the perfect seems unattainable.

Re: Fusion Confusion

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I find it hilarious that the supposed downside of having a future-proof source of energy is that on the unlikely occasion that a terrorist group gets their hand on plutonium, the resulting threat is going to be in the 50kt class instead of 20kt. Any larger entity most likely wouldn't have a problem with generating it for themselves anyway.

Re:Fusion Confusion

[rogoshen1]

isn't that an h-bomb?

Re: Fusion Confusion

[rubycodez]

We do have a functioning fusion reactor. It has about four and a half billion years left worth of fuel. It pours more energy into the earth alone than a hundred civilizations could use, to say nothing of the untapped energy it pours elsewhere.

Re: Fusion Confusion

[kamapuaa]

I think if there really was something like that, we would have heard of it by now.

Re: Fusion Confusion

[Lotana]

Not to mention how much of its output is wastefully beamed into empty space!

Need that Dyson sphere damn it!

Re: Fusion Confusion

[Alioth]

$22bn is only 0.03 Iraq Wars, so it's really not that much money in the grand scheme of things.

Ready in 30 years

[Moof123]

As it always has, and likely always will be.

Re:Ready in 30 years

[roc97007]

We all hope not. And past performance is not an indication of future results. (Which is a good thing, in this case.) But the past several decades have pretty much beaten all the enthusiasm out of many of us.

Practical fusion would be a complete game changer in many different areas. Cheap enough, it would not only pretty much kill the oil industry, but may even make the "green" energy industry redundant. (Solar, wind, tides, geothermal.) Dirt cheap electricity, commonly available, would make electric vehicles a lot more interesting. Cheap centralized power would probably reverse the current tendency to diversify power and make upgrading our aging electric power infrastructure a priority. And so forth. Fusion is a very disruptive technology.

Maybe that's the real reason we don't have it yet.

Re:Ready in 30 years

[bobbied]

As it always has, and likely always will be.

I don't think you are correct. Fusion seems to be quite doable to me. Right now we have some issues with materials and reactor designs, but the basic physics are in place and understood. I think we are closer than 30 years myself.

Of all the things we spend money on, the national ignition facility seems to be one of the best scientific investments we can make and IMHO we should redouble our investments in similar research equipment.

Re:Ready in 30 years

[ShanghaiBill]

past performance is not an indication of future results.

That is a good rule of thumb when INVESTING. When doing science or engineering, it is nonsense. Past performance (also known as experimental results) are the ONLY reliable indicator of future results. There is little reason to expect cost effective fusion power in the next several decades.

Re:Ready in 30 years

[ShanghaiBill]

Right now we have some issues with materials and reactor designs, but the basic physics are in place and understood.

The basic physics was in place and understood in 1952. They just had some issues with materials and reactor designs.

Re:Ready in 30 years

[roc97007]

Nobody needs to get murdered. You merely must create an environment where it's more profitable to research fusion energy than it is to commercialize fusion energy.

Re:Ready in 30 years

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in fusion, so I assure you that I and most of those I work with actually *agree* with this article to one extent or another. Optimistically let's look at the following: ITER is built and achieves breakeven (but no power tapping), then DEMO is built and demonstrates power to grid. You're still talking 20 billion dollars for a Fusion plant that (if built using Tokamak tech) will be fragile and prone to failure (disruptions, ELMs, and other physics issures). No company in their right mind will pay this sort of money for something that fission can do much cheaper and more reliably. IMHO fusion is the answer of the future, but will require technologies that do not yet exist (extreme radiation resistant materials, better superconductors, and so on). What the article points out is that current fusion research has the problem of being a physics solution looking for an engineering solution, where it should have been an engineering solution (i.e. aneutronic fusion) looking for a physics solution. The article, while harsh, is unfortunately very valid.

Re:Ready in 30 years

[Rei]

You're arguing against Tokamak fusion. But what about, say, HiPER? Looks to me to be a much more comercializeable approach, yet it's still "mainstream" fusion, just a slight variant on inertial confinement ala NIF to make it much smaller / cheaper / easier to have a high repeat rate (smaller compression pulse + heating pulse rather than a NIF-style super-massive compression pulse). The only really unstudied physics aspect is how the heating pulse will interact with the highly compressed matter; NIF and pals have pretty much worked out the details of how laser compression works out. Beyond this, pretty much everything else is just engineering challenges for commercialization, such as high repeat rate lasers, high-rate hohlraum injection and targeting, etc.

I've often thought (different topic) about how one can get half or more of fusion's advantages via fission if you change the game around a bit. Fusion is promoted on being passively safe (it's very hard to keep the reaction *going*, it really wants to stop at all times), it leads to abundant fuel supplies, and there's little radioactive waste (no long-term waste). But what about subcritical fission reactors? Aka, a natural uranium or thorium fuel target being bombarded with a spallation neutron source. Without the spallation neutrons, there's just not enough neutrons for the reaction, so the second the beam gets shut off, the reactor shuts down, regardless of what else is going on. It'd be a fast reactor, aka a breeder, aka, your available fuel supplies increase by orders of magnitude. And your long-term waste would be much, much less in a well-designed reactor. Spallation neutron sources have long been proposed as a way to eliminate long-lived nuclear waste by transmuting it into shorter-lived elements.

Re:Ready in 30 years

[50000BTU_barbecue]

" The "real" reason we don't have fusion power yet is because it requires creating a little piece of THE SUN inside a contained vessel. That's mind bogglingly difficult."

Not really. The conditions for fusion inside the Sun are actually mind-bogglingly MILD. Overall, the Sun converts ~4 million tons of matter into energy every second, yet it only has the energy density of decomposing manure. It's just that the Sun is so freaking HUGE.

The problem with getting fusion power on Earth is that we need to SURPASS by orders of magnitude the conditions at the heart of a star.

Re:Ready in 30 years

[BigFootApe]

Nope. Plasma physics was very young, and nobody had truly studied plasma turbulence.

Re:Ready in 30 years

[NoKaOi]

Perhaps if Fusion is the answer, then the question is "What should we be spending money on developing?"

Which makes more sense:
1. Spend a trillion or so dollars (it's been about $400Billion so far, and rising) on the F-35, which won't be viable for a long time but has already been making a few rich people richer. Money comes from taxpayers, and it's the ultra-wealthy who directly benefit from the contracts who get richer. In reality our actual military power is unchanged.

2. Spend that money instead on R&D for fusion (spend a bit of it on battery research too for electric cars/trucks). The US saves $380Billion per year on oil imports. The economy and thus quality of life for everyone improves. The rich still get richer because manufacturing and transportation costs have been reduced. F-16's, F-18's, etc and UAV's continue to give us military superiority.

Re:Ready in 30 years

[jo_ham]

http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg

Pretty much covers it, even with the speculative forecasting. The money put into it is equivalent to throwing the spare change you have in your car's ashtray toward a new car fund every year.

Re:Ready in 30 years

[jo_ham]

The main problem they had with materials is that they couldn't source enough of these small, green, flexible rectangles that they could exchange for almost anything - building materials, labour, research effort, rent, food, etc.

Re:Ready in 30 years

[Pausanias]

What a load of bull. Only in the core of the Sun does fusion actually occur. The temperature at the core is 15 million Kelvin and the central density is 160,000 kg/m^3. That is an energy density fucking orders of magnitude about decomposing manure. The numbers you get are by averaging over the entire Sun, which is irrelevant, because only a tiny central region of the Sun is hot enough for fusion.

10+ years on Slashdot and in the past few years it has really been taken over by amateurs. Every hard physics / astronomy article is filled with nonsense patently FALSE comments modded up to +4. Our collective intelligence has been decreasing, friends.

Please know what you are doing before you mod up an incorrect article... a simple Wikipedia peek will fix it for you folks.

Re:Ready in 30 years

[50000BTU_barbecue]

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."

An average fission reactor gives you about 1GW of electrical power and more like 3GW thermal power. To get a 1GW of power at the density of the Sun, you'd need a a building about 150 x 150 x 150 meters, just for the power production.

Since a fission reactor's core is much smaller than that, in many ways, we've already surpassed the conditions at the core of the Sun.

But anyways, maybe you can learn some lessons from this, like humility, and doing some simple peeking yourself before opening your big yap and inserting both your feet tonsil-deep.

Re:Ready in 30 years

[Maury Markowitz]

> But what about, say, HiPER?

I wrote the wiki article on HiPER (check the history if you don't believe me). The lead researcher has moved to LLNL, and the fast ignition method turned out to be a dead end. HiPER still exists on paper as what would best be described as a laser development effort, but for all intents it's dead. The entire fast ignition field has moved on to another holy grail, although there's continuing effort in Japan as their experiments were furthest along.

Simply put, laser-based ICF cannot ever work economically. We have suspected this since the 1960s. There was a brief period during the early 1970s when it appeared the driver energies were low enough and isotopic smoothness was not all that critical, so we might be able to build one. By the 1980s it was clear both of these were not true, and that you needed extremely powerful highly smoothed laser systems, along with extremely expensive highly machined holoraums.

What that means is that even if you get the energy output to be higher than the input, and we're several orders of mag away, the amount of *money* you burn is higher than what you get back out. Every time. And we know enough about the instabilities of the implosion process to say that that's just the way it has to be:

http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/fusion-the-power-of-wishful-thinking/

Did I miss the breakthrough?

[sphealey]

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...

Re:Did I miss the breakthrough?

[Anonymous Coward]

What you've missed about fusion technology could fill a journal. Maybe even more than one.

Re:Did I miss the breakthrough?

[bobbied]

It's not a "physics" problem to solve, it's an engineering problem. The Physics are fairly well understood. What we need now is the equipment to be engineered which will require some new engineered materials and a few engineering breakthroughs..

Re:Did I miss the breakthrough?

[jo_ham]

If that is the real goal of the Tokamak then they're doing a hilariously poor job of it - the funding is minuscule.

Re:Who needs oil?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Fusion would break the stranglehold of petro-exporting countries in the Middle East as well as belligerent exporters like Russia and Iran.

Then? The Banking vampire elite will need to generate new, ethnically-rationalized hate-conflict to keep us all at each other's throats - instead of removing their boot from our collective face.

The power of the future...

[prisoner-of-enigma]

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.

Big fusion reactor unnecessary for boosting

[erice]

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.

Re:Who needs oil?

[prisoner-of-enigma]

Why would they need to create a new hate conflict? There's plenty of that to go around as is. Arab vs. Jew, black vs. white, East vs. West...it's not like conflict wasn't around before banking cartels, you know.

a few grams of tritium a problem?

[slew]

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...

Re:Fusion Has Already Failed

[geekoid]

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.

Re:Fusion Has Already Failed

[bobbied]

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.

Re:Fusion is not the answer

[bobbied]

Funny because the Fusion solution requires magnets, really strong ones.

Re:Who needs oil?

[MrKaos]

Why would they need to create a new hate conflict? There's plenty of that to go around as is. Arab vs. Jew, black vs. white, East vs. West...it's not like conflict wasn't around before banking cartels, you know.

Sure, banking cartels just turned it into business practice.

So badly misguided

[DerekLyons]

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.)

Re:Fusion Has Already Failed

[rogoshen1]

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.

Re:They can produce tritium at fission plants

[PvtVoid]

Aren't uranium (as opposed to plutonium) bombs pretty bulky?

Not really. The critical mass for U235 is 50 kg or so, while for PU240 it's about 40 kg. Moreover, a U235 bomb is way easier to make, because it doesn't have a predetonation problem like plutonium. Just take two hunks of U235 and drive one into the other with an explosive charge. Bang. City gone. This was the way Little Boy worked. It was so simple they didn't even bother to test it before dropping it on Hiroshima. You can't do that with PU240: the neutrons get so thick as it nears criticality that it blows the charge apart in a sub-critical burst. This is why you have to use very sophisticated shaped charges to assure a perfectly spherical implosion.

PU240 is easier to produce. U235 is easier to build a bomb with. It has proved very fortunate for the world that these two things are true.

Re:They can produce tritium at fission plants

[amazeofdeath]

Pu-240 isn't used for nuclear weapons, though. The isotope for bombs is Pu-239, with a critical mass of ~10 kg. The spontaneous fission rate for Pu-240 is much higher than for Pu-239 (about 30000 times as high), and it's also more highly radioactive, leading to additional problems with keeping the bomb cool before detonation.

The critical mass isn't that important in "normal" bomb designs. For example, Little Boy and Fat Man weighed about 4500 kg (the former being a couple hundred kg lighter), so a difference of a few tens of kg in the critical mass is negligible when compared to the total bomb mass. However, if you are aiming at the smallest possible physical bomb size, plutonium has a big advantage. Compare two actual weapons with ~1 kt yields, W33 and W54. The former is a gun-type uranium device, weighing something like 110-120 kg, based on the estimates I've seen, and it's an artillery shell with a base diameter of 20 cm and length of roughly 70 cm. The latter is a miniature plutonium implosion device with a weight of 23 kg and a diameter 27 cm.

Re:Fusion Has Already Failed

[Maury Markowitz]

> 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.

Re:proving his point...

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Could you read that again, please? How is there an average in there? Also, he mixed up density, temperature and energy density without blinking.

I'm not impressed.