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How Close Are We, Really, To Nuclear Fusion?
StartsWithABang writes: The ultimate dream when it comes to clean, green, safe, abundant energy is nuclear fusion. The same process that powers the core of the Sun could also power everything on Earth millions of times over, if only we could figure out how to reach that breakeven point. Right now, we have three different candidates for doing so: inertial confinement, magnetic confinement, and magnetized target fusion. Recent advances have all three looking promising in various ways, making one wonder why we don't spend more resources towards achieving the holy grail of energy.
Can any of the three methods fuse practically any matter like a Mr Fusion? Or do they all take ultra-pure atom mixes or tritium or something else ridiculously hard to get?
30 years. Didn't you get the memo? It came out 40 years ago.
I would say roughly 1 AU, but it varies with the elliptical orbit of the earth.
year() +10;
Achieving practical nuclear fusion for power generation would be a very nice step forward. But "holy grail" is rather overselling it, I suspect.
Even when practical, we're still talking very big, very expensive plants that depend on a long supply chain for all its parts, the high-purity fuel and so on. When you consider the building, running and maintenance costs, and the cost of dealing with the spent fuel (much better than for fission plants of course) the energy won't be all that cheap. Hopefully cheaper than fossil fuels at least, but I would not be surprised if a first generation of plants, at least, become more expensive than that.
And they'll be competing with rapidly dropping costs for solar and other renewables. A big, expensive plant like that will need a 40-50 year lifetime to pay for itself. If you can't show that it will likely run profitably for that time period few or no companies will be willing to take on the very major investment. We may well see a technical breakthrough for fusion, and still get no plants actually built.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
GP is right, if we really wanted to we could use a heat pump to collect and condense Earth's thermal energy, and radiate it into space (energy radiated is proportional to temperature to the fourth power). Literal space heaters. Of course, the craziest environmentalist's most expensive idea would be cheaper than air conditioning the planet.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
This graph explains very clearly how far away we are, and why it is taking so long. The reality is, with all the cheap coal (and natural gas), it's just not a priority. Besides, environmentalists hate nuclear so it's not a political winner to fund it. This story is good, too.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
How close are we, really, to StartsWithABang growing some hair, shaving off that ridiculous beard, and getting a proper job?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I've explained this on Slashdot before: Even if such plants reach "break even", creating more available energy than they use to run, they can't possibly scale to production use because the tests that are even _slightly_ successful use tritium as a critical fuel component. And the only viable source of tritium is ordinary nuclear fission reactors: there is no scalable natural source for it.
There is _no_ fusion technology ever tested, nor realistically proposed that does not rely on tritium. And every source of tritium itself, either earth-bound fission or potentially solar sail collectors for solar tritium, is _itself_ far more efficiently used as a straight power supply by itself. Sustainable fusion is interesting as a technological accomplishment, but it's not a viable power source unless the need for tritum is eliminated.
about 8.3 light-minutes
First of all, a proton is an hydrogen nucleus. Also, matter and anti-matter aren't the same thing at all. The fundamental particles with positive and negative charges with stable arrangements making atoms are called quarks. E.g.: a proton is made of 2 up quarks (charge +2/3) and one down quark (charge -1/3) for a total of one atomic mass and 1 elementary charge. An anti-proton is made of 2 anti-up quarks (-2/3) and one anti-down quark (1/3) for a total of one atomic mass and -1 elementary charge. Baryons are made of quarks and anti-baryons are made of anti-quarks, not the same thing, not the same thing.
No, they don't. Protons and electrons squeeze together quite a lot in white dwarfs and pulsars, both types of objects being extremely stable, so we know for a fact that it doesn't happen. Again nothing surprising taking into account that protons and electrons aren't anti-particles of one another.
Besides my own personal interest in fusion, what really excites me, is the chance to finally destroy Saudi Arabia. These worthless Bedouin brigands do and contribute nothing besides sitting on top of their Allah-given oil (which they can't extract without Western technology anyway), yet they attack, bully and undermine the world at every opportunity.
Fusion won't ever be "too cheap to meter". However, it scales limitlessly, unlike just about every other energy source out there. And this is excellent news for Western civilization, which currently faces real constraints on how much energy it can generate and consume (renewables aren't dense; fossil fuels are unsustainable and ruin the environment; fission nuclear is dirty and dangerous, etc).
When fusion power plants are finally in production and being scaled up, we will no longer be forced to tolerate these barbarians. At this point, we should cut the savages off without so much as a cent or a trinket.
Except when it's a cloudy day.
Except when it's night time where you need power.
Except where it's not practical or possible to have solar panels.
Except that, I surmise, the power density and lifespan of a practical fusion reactor will make it many times more practical than littering every available horizontal surface with solar panels that will have to be replaced in 20 years or less.
Oh, and don't tell me 'battery banks!' because unless someone comes up with a way of directly storing electric power that scales up very, very cheaply, it's not really a practical solution to have bank after bank after bank of Li+ (or whatever) batteries, which in way less than 20 years will have to be junked and replaced, too.
I suspect you're the environmentalist type, like the Sierra Club or similar, and really are going to be against any type of centralized power generation; get over it already. We need nuclear power, if we're going to get out of the downward spiral that will turn the Earth into a copy of what Venus looks like now: A searing, lifeless black hell hot enough to keep lead molten on it's surface.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Hard to get solar panels to work when its cloudy, shortened daylight hours or snow on the pannels for more than half the year. Especially with the solar panels we have available right now. Wind and solar right now are so inefficient its not even funny. Totaly useless for anywhere other than the sunniest of places.
The solar panels i have seen up here on the motorized platforms 5 days out of 7 are sitting flat all day because there is no best angle. This happens from about september until april or may.
Even if you could say with certainty that in 10-20 years the practical technology could be established, wouldn't you be looking at another 30+ years before it was actually a meaningful force in power generation, making fusion more like 50+ years out?
Say they solve the technology hurdles in 10 years. They will then need to build a test plant that operates at a scale large enough to generate meaningful power (a few megawatts). That would probably take 10 years. That plant would need to run for, what, 5 years, to demonstrate that everything works like its supposed to and you can actually make the thing work.
At that point you're out another 10-15 years to plan and build a large, utility scale plant comparable to the ones that exist now -- 1.5GW. This plant would then have to run for 5 years to demonstrate (at least to investors, regulators, politicians, etc) that it works.
So worst case, 45 years later you have a single fusion plant producing electricity at utility scale.
Assuming it all works perfectly and everyone loves it in the next 20 years you might add another 3 plants. 65 years out, you now have 4 plants producing 6 TW, a drop in the bucket.
And all of this is assuming the economics make sense relative to other trends, like residential solar, improved battery storage and so on. After all this, fusion as a source of power seems closer to a 100 years out.
"Ultimately, the source of our power will have to be the sun."
No, going all solar would not be a way around the ultimate heating problem. First, every solar panel 'blackens' its tiny patch of the Earth, this being an area of lower albedo. Then you get the same waste heat from consuming PV electricity as you would get from electricity generated any other way.
In any case, the thermodynamic heating problem has nothing to do with carbon warming and is minuscule in comparison to trapping of solar heat by greenhouse gases.
You do realize that there are proposal to build an orbital solar capture satellite. It'd be very cool to do that by the way.
About $30 billion away. When the predictions of fusion being 20 years away were made, they were based on there being an adiquately funded research program. Since then we've spent less than what was projected as the "fusion never" scenario, which lo and behold is what we've got. Even ITER took 20 years just to figure out who was going to pay for it (first proposed in 1985)
There are also proposals to put a large solar array several square kilometers in area in the Sahara Desert that could generate power for the entire planet. Then there's the Gobi Desert where it could also be done, the Mojave already has some solar concentrator sites with more planned (if they can fix the bird frying problem). So, there are ways for us to generate the electricity that we will need for a long time from renewable sources. I don't discard or disparage nuclear fusion research because it is also important going forward, but we do have other practical ways of generating electricity from natural phenomena, wind and tidal being two others that are coming along a lot faster than better fission and currently non-existent fusion reactors.
Here on Planet Earth, we invented both mechanical and electric motors quite some time ago.
And we've found ways to heat things. And we have weather forecasting, which to the surprise of some is quite accurate.
When the snow is falling, stand the panels up to minimize the amount that sticks to the surface. When the storm is over or abating, apply heat to the panel surface to melt the residue. Solar is not going to be the primary power source in snowy or cloudy countries and no reasonable person expects it to be.
But it's still very useful.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Don't worry, all of that global warming is making for colder winters which dries the air and we get less snow and what snow does drop tends to be light and dry, so it blows itself off. In my childhood, my parent's childhood, and my grandparents childhoods, we all had several feet of packy snow every winter, but the past decade has been only a few inches of this wispy crap that can't even cover the grass. Every year we seem to get less snow, but lots of rain during the summer. But damn, seem like every few years we break another record for high temps.
Germany provides about between 6 and 7% of its total net electricity with solar. It's southernmost city (Munich) has the lattitude of St. John in Newfoundland. And yes, there is snow.
It's there, but we have to put an absurd amount of relatively rare resources into photovoltaic cells to make *use* of that energy. Otherwise, it performs a very useful function in that it gives us this thing called heat, so we don't all freeze to death and die (and so we can have an ecosystem of animals and plants that we don't have to keep in climate-controlled environments that also won't freeze and die).
No, I'm sorry, but the primary purpose of the sun is to give us energy in the form of light for plants and heat for everything else (including plants). With current technology we can't make use of the sun well enough to meet more than a fraction of our energy demands.
Now, if we had a steadily shrinking worldwide population, we might be able to do it, since we'd have more and more surplus energy every year without even doing anything -- which means if we continue to increase production of renewables like solar and wind year over year, and population decreases, it's mathematically certain that at a point not too far in the future the two will intersect and we can shut down the last coal/diesel/natural gas/nuclear plants.
But unless you can find a way to cause the population to shrink worldwide year over year in a controlled, preferably non-violent manner, I don't see a way that renewables will ever become dominant. It's not economically feasible. We can't divert enough resources to making solar panels and wind farms to meet energy demands, even if we cut worldwide energy demands per capita by 25% immediately and cut the energy use of the most energy-intensive top 5% by 75%. Even with such unrealistic and aggressive cuts in per capita consumption, an exponentially increasing population will ultimately make the exercise pointless.
Have you analyzed how much energy you will expend to melt the snow, relative to the time rate of electric energy produced by the panel? Nice powder snow falls are not a big problem, but freezing rain, rime ice accretions, and slop which then freezes solid when the temperature falls prior to your heat application are all conditions a lot of us live with every winter.
The complication and expense of providing the distributed electric-resistance or other type of heating equipment, not to mention the machinery to tilt the panels 90 degrees, would be substantial. And the machinery would have to operate under extremely unfavorable conditions of icing.
I don't suggest these measures cannot be taken, but I do suggest they might have a serious effect on overall cost (initial capital, maintenance, and energy consumption) -to-production performance.
You can, if you want, allow yourself to be wowed by "man behind the curtain" fraud, but I've got better things to do. At least conventional fusion relies only on well-enunciated and well-accepted physics, something which cannot be said for the E-Cat. If Rossi actually possessed anything beyond ego and selfishness, he would have published and cooperated freely with the scientific community. If he possessed anything which anyone who matters considered worth anything, someone would have stolen his "secret" by now and it would actually be released in service to an energy-thirsty world.
We have several cheap battery technologies. Molten salt (big vat of hot liquid, heated by incoming power to charge, steam engine taking off heat to provide electricity), and hydroelectric (big reservoir up high in the mountains, recharge by pumping water into it, water turned generators to draw power off).
I live in those conditions too - since the early 70s and did outdoor construction work through 4 consecutive winters.
None of these issues are more difficult than keeping homes, vehicles & roads in working condition through severe weather.
It takes work, planning, foresight and innovation but that's how we got from half-naked subsistence scrounging to where we are today.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Are you that incapable of thinking or reading or just that lazy?
I mentioned weather forecasting - stand the panels up before the snow starts falling if its going to be heavy or do it after its going to be light.
"Think outside the box" - take your own advice. Or if you need to generate heat, put some batteries in the box.
Every method of power generation has downsides. Do gas pumps work without electricity these days? After Hurricane Sandy, there were quite a few New Jersey residents who got more quickly back to functioning even though the grid was in horrible shape.
Why?? Because they had.....wait for it.....SOLAR PANELS. Some of the unprepared folks with generators couldn't get fuel.
No system is perfect and just because you find flaws that make it unattractive personally doesn't make it worthless.
"Heating is the same problem, when it is - 30 and snowing" - I've lived in a few places with severe winters.
There's usually VERY FEW times where you have temps that low AND lots of snow.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
It's good to have options. As you say, wind and solar are doing just fine. They're today's technologies. Fusion is looking promising. It's the technology of tomorrow. The power density, self containment and controllability of a practical fusion reactor lets you do things that wind and solar can't.
Have we learned nothing from Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima?Â
That the bean counters should never be in charge of making operational decisions?
And look how much it is subsidised and how much people pay for the electricity.
My power here in ontario is already through the roof because of "green energy" the government has to subsidize. 1400sqft house, all compact fluorescent bulbs, off durring the day etc. 180 a month for power oved half that is in fees and taxes.
Generating the power is only half the issue; you have to DISTRIBUTE the power to where it's needed as well, otherwise it's useless. Remind me again how many of the world's population centers are near the Sahara and Gobi deserts?
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Oh for fuck's sake, you've really got your panties in a bunch, don't you? Actual trolls must have a field day with you.
I never said 'solar sucks'. I am however saying that it's not the end-all, be-all, long-term solution to our energy needs. Neither is wind power. If you actually stop and think about it, it becomes fairly obvious.
Now, bashing fusion power is just plain silly, even if we don't have it yet. It's being worked on. Treating it like it's snake oil isn't going to help anyone. Enjoy your solar panels. For now. Eventually we will have fusion power. Probably in addition to solar power. But poo-pooing fusion now while it's being developed is just plain not necessary and very unhelpful.
And, finally: I'm sick and bloody well tired of the NIMBYs, environmentalists, and whoever else that gets their panties in a twist over anything with the word 'nuclear' in it. We have to transition out of fossil fuels, and the sooner the better, and nuclear power of some sort or another frankly one of the best and cleanest alternatives. Fission is messy but honestly it may be the best short-term solution in addition to solar power. Could even be thorium-based, which looks to be overall safer than what we've had in the past, and apparently is much tougher to subvert into producing anything weapons-grade. So environmentalists and their alarmist ways need to calm the hell down and stop spreading FUD to the uneducated masses, I'm sick of hearing it, as are apparently so many others.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I have solar panels on my roof and when it's cloudy but "bright" the entire 5KW system only outputs a few hundred watts.
When it's cloudy and "dark" the system does not generate any power at all.
Oh for fuck's sake, you've really got your panties in a bunch, don't you? Actual trolls must have a field day with you.
Umm, no I don't got 'm in a bunch. Your reply indicates I really pissed you off though.
I never said 'solar sucks'.
You did write this:
Except when it's a cloudy day.
Except when it's night time where you need power.
Except where it's not practical or possible to have solar panels.
Two comments about that, one, it's true you disn't specifically use the word "sucks"
But if we're going to be that precise, and since you used quote marks, why don't you point out where I said that you said "solar sucks"
Now, bashing fusion power is just plain silly, even if we don't have it
Seriously pal - who you arguing with? I think you are having conversations in your head about what I've said.
I'm not bashing fusion power at all. I'm bashing your not very clever comments about solar panel technology by comparing to a technology that doesn't exist yet.
And, finally: I'm sick and bloody well tired of the NIMBYs, environmentalists, and whoever else that gets their panties in a twist over anything with the word 'nuclear' in it.
Yes, I can see you have some anger issues. Don't transfer them onto me.
We have to transition out of fossil fuels, and the sooner the better, and nuclear power of some sort or another frankly one of the best and cleanest alternatives.
I wholheartedly agree.
Fission is messy but honestly it may be the best short-term solution
I likewise believe that fission can be made safe. It's really a matter of true recognition of the concentration of energy, the effects of radiation on materials, and allowing a conservative engineer have the final decision on every matter of safety. Not bean counters, not CEO's, not the guvmint.
So environmentalists and their alarmist ways need to calm the hell down and stop spreading FUD to the uneducated masses, I'm sick of hearing it, as are apparently so many others
Here is where I have some telling for you, although given your brittleness, I know you won't take it.
Do not for a minute think that a lot of people were told that nuclear power generation was prefectly safe. You can look up those words and see them emblazoned for you. Do not think for a minute that people were told Fukushima was safe. Three Mile island was a close call, but in the end, relatively minor.
So what you and your "sick and bloody well tired" of an opposing view folks have is a real and serious credibility problem.
1. You can rail on about how safe nuclear power is, but not many people are going to believe you. They are going to remember how they were told it was safe, then figure you are just telling them more of the bullshit - and you can quote me on that one.
2. Watching Chernobyl and Fukushima - not many want to get any of that yummy nukey fireworks. See number 1.
3. Acting as if anyone who has any ideas to the contrary is your enemy, or stupid, is not going to further your cause. You made completely incorrect assumptions about me based on my calling you out for comparing a technology that doesn't exist yet to a technology that is operating right now.
That's all I did, and you managed to extrapolate a lot of things from that, all completely untrue. You are a really bad advocate for nuclear power.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I Have a 7kWh setup and no if it is cloudy you get peanuts. The whole sky doesn't have to be covered just as soon as a cloud comes in front of the panels you can see a huge power fall off, from say 5kW on a typical day to as the previous poster mentioned triple digit watts. At that rate the panels aren't economical. On a whole they are just not during those periods.
The problem is if you have a constant base load you need you can't rely on solar (unless you are willing to install 10-50x the panels you need on a clear day). The biggest benefit for renewables are if we can shutdown peaker stations. For that I think we really need moderate duration storage, say 12hrs so we can make it over night and cloudy bits and should it continue to be cloudy have time to fire up the coal/oil/whatever plants. Some from of nuclear or hydroelectric (IMO) should supply the base load.
Right, and Germany is sunnier than the USA
Strawman. I never said anything of the sort.
You're right. I didn't see you anywhere in that video. It was just an interesting vdeo of what some folks on your side were talking about. We doing Oxford debate rules here?
Remind me again what portion of the INDUSTRIALIZED FIRST WORLD runs off of local wind turbines and/or local solar? Oh, that's right: not much. There's a perfectly good reason for that: it's not reliable power like grid power. Solar doesn't work when it's cloudy, at night, or when panels are covered by snow. Wind doesn't work unless it's windy.
And yet, looking at the Allegheny front near my place, there are a lot of wind turbines that seem to be running all the time. You occasionally see one in a turbine field that is stopped - I suspect that's for maintenance.
And as a small correction, the solar panels aren't charging at night. That's when we use the batteries tht the solar panels charge during the day. Works pretty well.
Grid power works all the time, every time.
Oh - bullshit. Here's a small sampling of your "works all the time, every time":
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/25/...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
http://www.foxnews.com/weather...
Living here in the Northeast, we've had a lot of major power interruptions, that put that "Grid power works all the time, every time." claim as utter bunkum. The interruptions are generally due to freak weather, but caused me to get first a generator, and I'm now working my way over towards solar. Some of the interruptions have been around a week, and it doesn't take too many freezerfulls of spoiled food to make you think about the need for alternative power.
Power that isn't there when you need it most is rather useless.
I agree wholeheartedly. However, your vaunted grid is not the uninterruptible power source that you claim it is. I really needed the power not available from the grid until I got those alternatives. I can't rely on your promises for power. Thos promises don't make power come out of the wall sockets. It gets too cold when we're out of it for a week.
Oh, and nice dig at Fox News, not that it's remotely relevant to the discussion. But it does show your bias.
I'm not a liberal, if that's your implication. I'm a pragmatist who likes to point out bullshit. And yes, the idea that Germany is successful in their attempts to use solar power because they are sunnier than we are is bullshit.
And the overall point of that post is that Fox News is not the only group spreading bullshit about alternative forms of power.
Especially when those folk write:
Grid power works all the time, every time
So really what was that? Was the quote bullshit? Or do you actually believe that :
Grid power works all the time, every time
Because it certainly doesn't.
Not even in Germany.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.