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Fusion Reactor Concept Could Be Cheaper Than Coal
vinces99 writes Fusion energy almost sounds too good to be true – zero greenhouse gas emissions, no long-lived radioactive waste, a nearly unlimited fuel supply. Perhaps the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that the economics haven't penciled out. Fusion power designs aren't cheap enough to outperform systems that use fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas. University of Washington engineers hope to change that. They have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant, would rival costs for a new coal-fired plant with similar electrical output. The team published its reactor design and cost-analysis findings last spring and will present results Oct. 17 at the International Atomic Energy Agency's Fusion Energy Conference in St. Petersburg, Russia.
They predict that the costs will be comparable to a coal-fired plant. Even if it ends up costing more, it might be worth it because the coal-fired plant isn't being held accountable for all the externalities of coal-fired plants - the extra deaths due to pollution, etc. Hopefully this time "in 20 years" will really be true.
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The problem isn't just "expense" as the summary pretends. It's that the energy output is less than the energy inputs.
Scaling the reactor is like the old joke about "losing money on every sale, but making up for it on volume."
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This has been legal for at least 34 years. As someone who has to deal with the consequences of Bayh-Dole on a regular basis, I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it causes universities to lock up a lot of basic research as restricted IP, which holds back progress and actually makes it more difficult for the results to reach the market. Or, even worse, the inventors (or eventual IP holders) treat it as a money-making machine and are basically using using the federal funding to do product development. (As opposed to using federal funding to come up with the initial concept, then private funding to develop the product.)
On the other hand, for something that's extremely capital-intensive to develop, where commercialization requires orders of magnitude more funding than the government initially provided, no one is going to invest the money required unless they're guaranteed exclusivity. This is certainly one of those cases. The alternative is for the DOE, or the UW, to invest $2.8 billion of its own money (which, ultimately, is other people's money) developing a commercial-scale reactor - and that still doesn't really get it to "market".
There are no theoretical limitations, but there very well could be engineering limitations. We won't know that until we actually build ITER because even though engineering is a science it's mostly a practical applied science. The entire point of ITER is to see if the engineering can be worked out at a power plant scale. ITER is so expensive because they don't know how to engineer them yet. This will mean they will vastly over design it so nothing very bad happens. After running it for a while they will have a better understanding of the actual forces/energy and the upper limits of those inputs and the design can be fine tuned and costs reduced.
The fact is a tokamak of this scale just isn't understood that well (engineering, not the theory). They will be breaking all kinds of new ground in many different fields with ITER and that's expensive. But even if it doesn't work they will learn unbelievable amounts from it. I expect there will massive developments in many fields not the least of which will be material science as a results of this reactor.
This subject makes me wish I had the math background, because I sure don't see it.
This comment makes me wish you had a math background too.
You are actually doing math when you make the assertion that fusion "will always take more power to contain than it creates". You're doing lots of things, including physics and probably chemistry. Unfortunately, you seem to be doing all of them based on what your imagination tells you, and as we know from 300 years of science and 3000 years of pre-science, what "just makes sense" in our imaginations has nothing much to do with what is real.
You are correct to say that containment in stars is free. You have no basis for saying that it is impossible to produce an artificial containment that uses substantially less power than is produced by the fusion processes within it. That is a mathematical assertion about the physics of fusion:
Pfusion Pcontainment
That is the math you are doing, without any attempt to make it physically plausible.
Nor is the lack of non-stellar containment in nature much of an argument. Want to know what else doesn't exist in nature? Reciprocating steam engines. Repeating rifles. Spaceships. Digital computers. Yet mysteriously we have all those things, and more. It's almost as if humans, informed by physics, are capable of making machines that instantiate processes that otherwise do not exist.
Whether fusion is one of those processes remains to be seen. It is clearly a hard problem, but the jury is still well out on its ultimate feasibility.
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