UK's Newest Tokamak Fusion Reactor Has Created Its First Plasma (futurism.com)

After being switched on for the first time last Friday, the UK's newest fusion reactor has successfully generated a molten mass of electrically-charged gas, or plasma, inside its core. Futurism reports: Called the ST40, the reactor was constructed by Tokamak Energy, one of the leading private fusion energy companies in the world. The company was founded in 2009 with the express purpose of designing and developing small fusion reactors to introduce fusion power into the grid by 2030. Now that the ST40 is running, the company will commission and install the complete set of magnetic coils needed to reach fusion temperatures. The ST40 should be creating a plasma temperature as hot as the center of the Sun -- 15 million degrees Celsius (27 million degrees Fahrenheit) -- by Autumn 2017. By 2018, the ST40 will produce plasma temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit), another record-breaker for a privately owned and funded fusion reactor. That temperature threshold is important, as it is the minimum temperature for inducing the controlled fusion reaction. Assuming the ST40 succeeds, it will prove that its novel design can produce commercially viable fusion power.

Comments

That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether it produces more energy out than it takes to maintain tells you it can run. I *assume* it passes this because prototype designs in a lab have managed, but this needn't be the case. Then it has to produce it with enough gain to make it a viable scale producer for the cost. Still not commercially viable yet. The running costs for maintenance and fixing need to be less than the viable profit next. And then decommissioning and cleanup costs have to be deducted. After that, insurance costs. Finally it has to last long enough to pay back investors and the sunk costs.

After all that, it proves it's commercially viable.

Solar and wind had to pass those tests.

Nukes in a changing climate over the timescale of a plant's lifetime means it fails the commercial lifetime test now. You can't guarantee a useful site for cooling will remain viable long enough to pay back the sunk costs.

And depending on whether this needs similar levels of cooling water (fracked water at that...) would stymie this the same way.

If deniers and do-nothings and anti-ecology idiots had not been so invested in their mantras, 30 years ago we could have cut enough that the future was a little more certain. But their intransigence and stupidity (and cupidity) has delayed things that we can't be sure the nuclear age can even start yet.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Computershack]

Still waiting for solar to pass its commercial viability test and I suspect wind power is a similar story. So far it only succeeds here in the UK because of government subsidies. If I pay for and install my own 5kWh solar system the returns over 20 years don't cover the cost of the initial installation, let alone a replacement inverter after 10 years or any other maintenance.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

The U.S. isn't any better

A few numbers
http://news.energysage.com/how...

In 2017, most homeowners are paying between $2.87 and $3.85 per watt to install solar, and the average gross cost of solar panels before tax credits is $16,800. Using the U.S, average for system size at 5 kW (5000 watts), solar panel cost will range from $10,045 to $13,475 (after tax credits).

Last I looked a Dollar a watt was breakeven with net metering in place and no incentives.

 

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[CustomSolvers2]

Whether it produces more energy out than it takes to maintain tells you it can run.

After all that, it proves it's commercially viable.

Your abstract words seem to be assuming many premises which aren’t still there. Bear in mind that all what they (+ and all the fusion-power research since quite a few years ago) are doing is plainly working on getting a stable- and controllable-enough source of heat (= the first input of any thermodynamic cycle).

After making the aforementioned preliminary step work (if possible at all under the current technology/budget/expectations), they will have to come up with a reliable way to convert that stable source of heat into electricity. In principle, they should be relying on the typical thermal-power-plants approach which basically consists in using that heat source to boil water (which moves a turbine coupled with an electricity generator). The problem here is that the ranges of temperatures of the heat sources in conventional power plants (including nuclear-fission ones) are very similar to the target 100 degree and they don't have to deal with the "tiny" issue of hugely decreasing the temperature. So, even after being able to reach a stage where they can get plasma reliably and securely, they will still have to work a lot in order to actually generate electricity from all that heat. To not mention the small detail that power plants are expected to deliver stable loads during months, what forces any replacing alternative to deliver something equivalent.

In summary, your "commercially viable" actually means "making work something extremely complex and expensive which has never been accomplished before, under very demanding conditions and whose exact motivation isn't completely clear as far as many other much simpler alternatives can do the same".

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[dbIII]

Still waiting for solar to pass its commercial viability test

Thanks to price gouging from energy utilities it passed that point long ago for residential solar users in a lot of places. It doesn't have to be the cheapest energy to produce, just cheaper than what you have to pay for.
For energy utilities themselves it's not quite so obvious since the cheapest power station is usually the one built and paid for long ago.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh

It's easy to be viable in mythical places. How bout actually citing examples.

About the only spots where it is are those that have ridiculous taxes/regulations on fossil fuels, wont permit nuclear batteries, or are isolated and low population so grid ties/large power plants are uneconomic.

Hell the unreliability of wind and solar has Australians going back to diesel.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[AmiMoJo]

With zero subsidy and zero feed in tariff solar in the UK will pay for itself in 5-15 years, depending on where you live and what your consumption is like. Panels typically come with a 25 year warranty, and the ROI factors in some maintenance on the inverters etc.

Solar heating works very well too.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[AmiMoJo]

Eventually fusion will have a role in special applications. Space, unusual parts of the world where other sources can't be used, very high energy projects etc.

The problem for basically every source of energy is that renewables are cheap and growing rapidly, and so is storage. It's very hard to compete with that.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[h33t l4x0r]

After all that, it proves it's commercially viable.

Well I can see McDonald's licensing it for their coffee makers if that's what you mean.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Rei]

The cost is no longer the panels; it's the installation. Panels are dirt cheap in bulk.

When talking about solar prices, it's important to make a distinction between home installs and grid-scale installs. The latter in the US is now averaging around $1,50 per kW, and some installs are coming in around $1 per kW. Which is crazy-cheap, even taking into account the capacity factor.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[jblues]

Wind turbines reached grid parity in some areas of Europe in the mid-2000s, and in the US around the same time. Falling prices continue to drive the levelized cost down and it has been suggested that it has reached general grid parity in Europe in 2010, and will reach the same point in the US around 2016 due to an expected reduction in capital costs of about 12%.[25] Nevertheless, a significant amount of the wind power resource in North America remains above grid parity due to the long transmission distances involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity#Wind_power

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[CustomSolvers2]

Eventually fusion will have a role in special applications

A magic wand would also be useful there. Unfortunately, the transition from dreaming about an ideal solution and actually creating such a solution is quite difficult or even completely/practically impossible.

In any case, if you want to go deeper into elucubrations about the possible applications of what doesn't exist (and perhaps will never do), you should bring both positive and negative issues into account. For example, even by assuming that you are able to safely generate electricity from fusion power, you should bear in mind all the problems which that alternative will always provoke. Even in an ideal scenario, it will have to be used under very specific conditions (we are talking about sun-like temperatures!!! Something extremely dangerous whose confinement will certainly imply lots of constraints on many fronts). So, forget about putting all this in a spaceship or creating a portable device which you might bring anywhere. It will require extremely-expensive, huge, non-moveable facilities under constant surveillance and located in very specific areas. A particle accelerator or the whole CERN probably represent the best present-day examples of how an eventual fusion power plant might look like.

Fission power is much more adaptable than what the fusion power would ever be: on one hand, you have some dangerous materials which only need to be adequately contained; on the other hand, you have theoretically-much-less-dangerous materials but needing crazily high temperatures, what can only be generated with very expensive and complex equipment under very specific conditions. There is a very good reason why we first tried fission power: it is orders of magnitude easier, safer, more certain, controllable and adaptable than what fusion power will ever become; it is dealing with dangerous stuff vs. dealing with a whole sun!!

The problem for basically every source of energy is that renewables are cheap and growing rapidly, and so is storage. It's very hard to compete with that.

Why do you complain about objectively better alternatives outputting better results? Why do you think that you have to invest lots of money in something when you can get the same for a fraction of that? To accomplish a dream of someone? Even though that dream might be a pure nonsense and/or extremely dangerous (another very important issue: we will not know the real problems of fusion until after having suffered them; exactly the same than happened with fission, originally also assumed to be a magic wand expected to solve everything, and with any other innovation ever)? What you want is a cheaper way to generate cleaner energy, not to make something happen no matter what. If renewables are cheaper and easier why don't you spend all the planned-in-fusion huge amounts of money on them? Why not over-optimising what certainly works or adapting your needs to what you can get rather than pursuing the magic-wand solution? Or what is even worse: why complaining about the most practical alternatives to be much more affordable than the magic-wand research and seeing that as an excuse to continue their unmotivated over-funding?

Sorry to blow your bubble but, until this moment, there is only one good reason for continuing the tremendously-expensive-and-far-from-practical research on fusion energy: supporting theoretical/dreamy/other expectations for whatever reason, where practical and objective concerns are being (not sure if consciously) plainly ignored.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[tehcyder]

The level of subsidies for solar or wind are not even in the same league as the subsidies for nuclear power.

Personally, I think that all energy production here in the UK should be nationalised anyway, so I don't find subsidies an issue in themselves, but regardless of your ideological view on this, it is simply absurd to pretend that nuclear power is some sort of magically efficient pure free market solution. .

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[idji]

Solar has reached parity in different parts of the world - e.g. California, Arizona, Saudi, South Australia. You will see many countries join this list like dominoes over 2017 to 2018. South Australia has a return for Solar + Tesla Battery under 10 years. A quarter of Australian houses have solar. Just because you are in the UK, doesn't mean it's not happening. India wants all cars to be electric by 2030 to combat air pollution. You can bet it will be a lot of solar. Subscribe to https://electrek.co/ to read what is going on. Or watch the UK channel https://www.youtube.com/user/f.... There are numerous sources of good information.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Whatever happened to the Princeton Perpetual Particle Plasma Power Physics Laboratory (PPPPPPL)? They've been cooking soup in their Tokamaks since the Big Bang was invented in the 60's, and in the early 80's, they were "just a few years away from commercially viable power."

Or did they get closed, due to the invention of cold fusion . . . ?

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[TheRaven64]

Rooftop solar is about the least cost-effective way of running solar power. The panels are pretty cheap, but the cost of rooftop installation is high, the cost of the inverter is relatively high (and not amortised across a large number of panels) and the cost of the grid-feeding equipment is also relatively high. A field full of solar panels has a far lower per-panel cost, but the same per-panel power output. These typically have a 3-5 year RoI without subsidies.

The real problem with domestic solar power is the rate at which panels are improving (which is something the subsidies were intended to encourage). If I'm going to install something with a 20 year lifetime, I don't want to be able to get one that's 50% more efficient a year later for the same price. I started looking at roof-top solar about 10 years ago. Back then, the cheap panels were 8% efficient. Now they're 16-20% efficient for about the same price (and have longer warranties). Given how small a fraction of the total price of a small installation the panels are, it seems like a bad idea to buy them before they improvements slow down a bit (above 30% is likely to be really hard, so 25-30% efficient is probably the time to buy, as the difference between 25% and 30% is far less pronounced than the difference between 16% and 25%).

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

"wont permit nuclear batteries"

LOL WUT? This isn't the Bionic Man... What "nuclear batteries" are you talking about here?

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[angel'o'sphere]

What exactly makes a fission plant safer than a fusion plant?

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

Solar and Wind still depend on conventional sources to make them viable at all, and even with that they are expensive. Solar and Wind have only been commercially profitable with huge subsidies, much greater per MWH than any other source has ever received.

Nuclear has proven viable. We have built, operated, and decommissioned plants that have produced huge amounts of low cost energy.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

100%. Utilities should never have been nationalised.
Publically run for profit and that profit invested back into them and a sovereign wealth fund.
The UK now suffers from fuel povery in places whilst the companies running the energy sector make millions and billions.

Nuclear much like the banking industry is commerical private profits and all losses are publically owned.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's an observation I've made: programmers are prone to fantasies about technology. They are used to typing a few things on a screen and making things happen on a screen. So they think the real world is just that simple too.
It's very rare to find a programmer who also understands the limits of the real world and won't say things like "well computers got faster therefore everything gets better at the same rate." And you'll never convince them otherwise.
If you try, you'll typically get answers like "On my desk there's a four terabyte hard drive and somebody 40 years ago didn't think it was possible therefore fusion powered warp drive time travelling 3D printers are possible."

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

Nowhere is Europe is wind producing 50% of the annual power on the grid. Not even close. Wind power cannot exist on the grid today without conventional sources to back up its intermittency.

Re: That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

When considering the solution on a national and global scale, cost is absolutely what matters, not price. And for now we don't include the cost of intermmittancy, which becomes huge once solar becomes a larger percentage of total generation.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[TheRaven64]

Are you sure it's $1/kW, not $1/W? The former would mean that it would pay for itself in about two days, the latter in a year or two. If the RoI is under a week, then I'd expect a lot more construction than exists currently.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[CustomSolvers2]

What exactly makes a fission plant safer than a fusion plant?

Firstly, I didn't use those words, mainly because no actual fusion plant has ever been built and I am not the kind of person who likes throwing blind guesses at what doesn't exist. But by assuming that fusion power will ever exist under the current expectations, it would likely be much unsafer than fission because of this having-your-own-sun requirement (you know? Dealing with temperatures able to immediately melt any existing material for long periods of time is the kind of situation which I consider quite dangerous). Even despite not being pro-fission and thinking that it is a quite dirty alternative, I do consider it acceptably safe. In case of assuming equivalent requirements, fusion power would have to go through its whole evolution (+ 50 years + lots of problems) to reach a stage of equivalent safety. But fusion requirements (again: dealing with sun-like temperatures) sound intrinsically much more dangerous to me than fission ones and that's why I assume that an actually working fusion plant would be much unsafer than a fission one.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[dbIII]

mythical places ... Australians going back to diesel

No, it's called guzzaline in that mythology.
Maybe you should learn about the world via something other than movies?

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, there are a class of small nuclear reactors referred to as 'nuclear batteries'; Here's one;

http://thefutureofthings.com/3299-hyperion-nuclear-batteries/

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Chas]

Actually there is such a thing as a nuclear battery.

Essentially it's a chunk of pure plutonium which generate power as the element decays.

It's useful for low power operations over a VERY extended period (like space probes).

Elsewhere, it's not so useful.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[drinkypoo]

Are you sure it's $1/kW, not $1/W?

It's $/W. Interestingly, though, it's under 2 now and almost to 1, and when I started looking seriously at buying panels ten years ago it was over 4.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[angel'o'sphere]

You said in your previous post: we started with fission because it is 'easier, safer and cheaper'.

Anyway, fission power plants are no danger. The multiple 100 million degrees plasma is basically a vacuum. The whole amount of 'hydrogen' is not much more than a thimble.

If the plasma touches the walls it is basically not melting anything but just cooling down ...

Well, I only glanced over the article, but it looks like they are pretty close to have a long running probably even net positive fusion reaction soon. I wonder how their design differs from ITER.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[CustomSolvers2]

programmers are prone to fantasies

I do agree with most of your post except for that starting part which includes a pretty arbitrary reference. "Programmer" is a quite generic label which applies to a wide variety of people with different backgrounds and expectations. I am a programmer myself, but I am also a mechanical engineer and a very practical guy. Also I haven't ever seen the kind of big salaries and ideal conditions about which I read here or in other sites.

I think that you meant "programmers living in a bubble of ignorance because of having learned/experienced a few things in their lives but who, due to the perhaps-not-completely-motivated relevance of their environment, seriously think that the conclusions outputted by their limited understanding of virtually any situation are much more accurate than what they really are". It is also called (unaware) ignorance, living in a bubble/in denial or even stupidity.

This doesn't happen just with programming, but almost everywhere. Some people complain about non-technical CEO/managers, others about VCs, others about rich people, others about theoretical physicists, others about rednecks, etc. All those are just specific conditions under which the aforementioned attitudes are likely to appear, but the underlying reality is always the same: pure and simple ignorance exclusively associated with the given person.

Re: That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

A fusion reactor that generates more power than it consumes is the holy grail. No device has been able to do it so far. Fusion isn't hard. In fact, people have built fusion reactors in their garages. Controlled net energy positive fusion is one of the hardest things humans have ever tried to do.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[KeensMustard]

It's cheaper or at least competitive here in Australia to go off grid with your own solar install comparative to a new grid connection - especially if you live in rural and semi-rural areas. Utilities charge exorbitant prices to maintain the grid connection because they upgraded the networks anticipating another 40 years of coal, only to have coal fade from the scene and the new grid underutilized (costing them money, which is passed on to consumers). You'd be a moron to connect to the grid these days, unless you are in the suburbs.

Re: That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

Those subsidies in the UK have ended. That will probably affect the rate of build as profit will be lower, but most schemes will still be profitable.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen nuclear batteries made out of tritium as well. They aren't high power, but they do last for ages.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[CustomSolvers2]

You said in your previous post: we started with fission because it is 'easier, safer and cheaper'.

I meant the most likely requirements to accomplish the intended goals, not plants because there are none. Anyway, this was just a secondary clarification.

Well, I only glanced over the article, but it looks like they are pretty close to have a long running probably even net positive fusion reaction soon. I wonder how their design differs from ITER.

I haven't read the article either, but have read quite a few ones before and am quite sure about what they have: nothing. They can keep the plasma for a short while (if you want to emulate what a power plant can deliver, the target performance would be months non-stop) and nothing else.

We are still very far from having a fusion power plant (most likely, it will never happen). The more serious and better funded attempt is ITER, so the best way to get a proper idea about what to expect from all this is to take a look at them (+ at the multiple delays which they will be having during the next years until reaching the probable outcome of running out of funding/credibility).

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Barsteward]

Do you buy anything that depreciates and needs maintenance and topping up with fuel like a car? If you are able to install your own system as you suggest, you'd probably save a lot on labour so it'll be a lot cheaper. The UK average usage is about 4kWh and you can get that installed from £5000-8000 and expected break even is 14 years. People will spend that much on double glazing and the ROI on that is very low.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Rei]

That should read $1/W, not kW. Shuold porffraed bettre.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Barsteward]

Don't forget Nuclear and Fossil fuel subsidies have been going for decades and they still can't produce low enough costs without them. the new UK nuclear site is cost each UK household about £30+ per year in subsidy (£2.b per year for 30 years works out quite a lot)

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[ISayWeOnlyToBePolite]

Nowhere is Europe is wind producing 50% of the annual power on the grid. Not even close. Wind power cannot exist on the grid today without conventional sources to back up its intermittency.

Denmark, 49.2% of supply in 2015 (no figures for 2016 on wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Curiously the winds are a lot stronger in the winter, so thats when they have a lot of excess power to export.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Barsteward]

have a look at Denmark, they are getting close

Re: That won't prove commercially viable power

[Barsteward]

Where are you talking about? the UK has subsidised the nuclear for decades to keep the prices down, renewable subsidies are a drop in the ocean in comparison

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

temperature is high, energy density is low. There's no danger of the plasma melting anything.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

what in that article makes you think they're close??? the fact that the have generated a plasma. I hate to break the news, but this is not newsworthy at all. It's a PR piece designed to make investors think that the project is making progress. It's the equivalent of saying "we turned it on and none of the power supplies blew up" it may well be a milestone for them as a company, but it means literally nothing.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[zwarte piet]

Power grids are linked across countries in Europe. It isn't unusual to borrow power from a neighbouring country only to return the favour later. So if the wind is still in Denmark for a while, it might not be in Germany. Germany uses massive amounts of solar btw, even though it is not a super sunny place.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Aren't you using old data? Solar panels these days are dirt cheap, have better ratings and longer life expectancies. In Belgium solar subsidies for new installations were recently eliminated. People here have now turned to large collective purchases (mostly organized by local governments) to get good deals for installations. Our sunshine hours and energy prices are mostly comparable to the UK. If current energy price trends hold, my new 7kWh installation will pay for itself within 10 years. This includes 1 inverter replacement, all other equipment comes with a 25 year warranty.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

So just to be clear, you don't think fusion powered warp drive time traveling 3D printers are possible?

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[CustomSolvers2]

temperature is high, energy density is low. There's no danger of the plasma melting anything.

These are just experimental implementations (almost trial-and-error) to accomplish certain goal: using the residual heat generated by chain reactions of atoms being fused, a process which requires tremendously high temperatures to be started. Any version of nuclear fusion will always be associated with those temperatures and, consequently, with a huge risk.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

Unreliability of solar in Australia? You are kidding right? Apart from at night it is the one place it does work. Diesel was used en masse by Tasmania after the Bass connector failed and also after they'd decided to flog all their stored hydro at top prices to Victoria before said connector broke. A classic mismanagement of resources - we'll sell it high and buy it back cheap using the connector. Oops.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[rickb928]

Or you could unplug and sit in the dark.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

But Denmark is a net importer of electricity and they don't include that in the statistic.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[CustomSolvers2]

So just to be clear, you don't think fusion powered warp drive time traveling 3D printers are possible?

Of course not! All my time-travelling 3D-printed warp drives are powered with love.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[rickb928]

And another reason to send people to Mars. Developing reliable, self-contained, perhaps recyclable nuclear power generation would be really useful on Mars.

Similar designs as 'neighborhood' generation would be really useful on Earth, also. Form what I can tell, it just needs another round of serious engineering, and a change in attitude. And proof.

Re: That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the per units of production subsidies in particular;

http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/eia-subsidy-report-solar-subsidies-increase-389-percent/

 

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[rickb928]

I'm pretty certain that there will be failure modes where plasma will jet and melt whatever it touches, if only for a moment. That will be devastating to the reactor and things close by.

Of course fission plants are known to also melt, the difference being that fission plants don;t stop melting as quickly. Oh, and the waste products are somewhat more lethal and long lasting than hydrogen and its fusion products...

Having said all that, fission plants are either surprising safer than they might have been, or we've been fortunate. Or both. The next generation of fission generation needs to be much better designed, or it will be rejected.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

" So, forget about putting all this in a spaceship or creating a portable device which you might bring anywhere. It will require extremely-expensive, huge, non-moveable facilities"

The minimum size limit for Fusion is an engineering problem where the surface area of the hot ball goes with r**2 while the mas goes with r**3.
So small masses have more surface area per unit mass to loose heat through.

Small fusion is not a violation of nuclear physics. It's just we have no clue how to do it yet. I would not be so definite that it will never happen.

For now, the best fusion system is already running and solar systems collect its' energy just fine.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Maury Markowitz]

> Rooftop solar is about the least cost-effective way of running solar power

It is highly competitive above about 50 kW.

> but the cost of rooftop installation is high

For a large install on a flat roof it is close to even with ground mounts. The extra work of getting it all up there and installing around various HVAC and such is offset by the mechanically simpler and lighter install systems. It only really gets expensive in relative terms in small installs on tilted roofs.

> the cost of the inverter is relatively high

The inverters we sold scaled from about 50 cents/W for the smallest 250W models to about 22 cents (Canadian) for the 1 MW models. Unlike most forms of power, PV scales VERY linearly above about 50 kW.

> I don't want to be able to get one that's 50% more efficient a year later for the same price

You won't. I installed my system in 2010 using what were then one-down-from-the-best you could by panels, 230W a panel. That same panel today is 285W. That's a great improvement, but not 50% per year.

> I started looking at roof-top solar about 10 years ago. Back then, the cheap panels were 8% efficient

In 2007 most panels were around 160 W, but in the smaller form-factor using 5" cells. The jump that occurred between then and 2010 was due almost entirely to the move to 1 x 1.6m panels using 6" cells. Average efficiency during that period improved only slightly from about 10 to 12%, I'm not sure what type of panels you were looking at but apparently not A-quality examples?

We have largely reached the top of the S-curve, and price declines from here out will be smaller in conventional technologies. The epitaxial guys might have something to say, and the perkosites, but both are relatively low chances. $1/W is where it's going to be for a while.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

And Denmark and Germany have much higher electricity prices than the rest of Europe. So people should stop telling us how cheap wind and solar are.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[CustomSolvers2]

Small fusion is not a violation of nuclear physics. It's just we have no clue how to do it yet.

The minimum mass size is also an issue but this wasn't my point. I meant all the equipment and conditions which are required to reach the target temperatures. With fission you just need fissionable material, proper isolation and throwing some particles to start the process. With fusion you need the material to reach very high temperatures, what requires a relevant amount of additional equipment (to increase/maintain the temperature and to isolate the plasma) and stable enough conditions.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Maury Markowitz]

>Dealing with temperatures
You understand that temperature and heat are two different things, right?

Fusion takes place at high *temperatures*, but the *heat* loads are about the same as fission. That should not be surprising given that it outputs about the same amount of *power* (the rate of energy).

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

http://pbfcomics.com/115/

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty certain you're wrong. The plasma density in ITER will be what most people would consider a vacuum. There isn't enough material to hold enough energy to melt any significant amount of a solid.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, even by assuming that you are able to safely generate electricity from fusion power, you should bear in mind all the problems which that alternative will always provoke. Even in an ideal scenario, it will have to be used under very specific conditions (we are talking about sun-like temperatures!!! Something extremely dangerous whose confinement will certainly imply lots of constraints on many fronts). So, forget about putting all this in a spaceship or creating a portable device which you might bring anywhere. It will require extremely-expensive, huge, non-moveable facilities under constant surveillance and located in very specific areas. A particle accelerator or the whole CERN probably represent the best present-day examples of how an eventual fusion power plant might look like.

Remind a lot what was said of computers in the '60...

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

I know someone with a 750kVA diesel set and he's at or better than parity 90% of the time, all this means is that energy prices in the UK are through the roof.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Maury Markowitz]

> They've been cooking soup in their Tokamaks since the Big Bang was invented in the 60's,

Actually, they started with stellarators in 1951.

They got a whole lot of money in the 70s and 80s to build the TFTR, which everyone was sure was going to reach break even.

It didn't.

So they got some more money to keep the ancient Alcator going, now in C-Mod form. It keeps running, zombie like, in spite of the fact that there's nothing left to learn from it. They also have some smaller-scale machines, but most of the interesting ones were cancelled.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

Decommissioning and cleanup costs should be pretty low for a fusion reactor, no? As I understand it, the reactor itself might be hot but the waste products won't be.

What are the cleanup costs for solar? How much of those panels can you recycle? Genuinely curious here.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[CustomSolvers2]

You understand that temperature and heat are two different things, right?

Evidently, I do. In which part of any of my comments isn't this point clear? (Because I guess that my reference to powering a time-machine with love was clearly understood as a joke. Yes, I know, I should explain every not extremely evident reference on the same spot, but what can I say? Some times I do make the terrible mistake of trusting in people's proper understanding).

Fusion takes place at high *temperatures*, but the *heat* loads are about the same as fission. That should not be surprising given that it outputs about the same amount of *power* (the rate of energy).

Are you saying that the heat generated by millions of degree temperature is the same than the one generated by about 100 degree?! Evidently, they are not. It seems that the only one with problems to understand heat/temperature (and quite a few other basic concepts) is you. The heat (= energy) generated by a plasma at millions of degrees is much higher than what would be generated by the heat source of a conventional power plant (around 100 degrees); but, as explained in some of comments, all this energy cannot be directly used, that's why the temperature would have to be highly decreased (= lots of heat/energy would be lost in the process) to reach a level which might output actually usable energy, for example, via boiling water.

I will try an easier summary for you (and for any other equally-confused person feeling like wasting my time with nonsense): all your abstract words have no real meaning when talking about comparing fusion-nuclear power to any other way in which a power plant generates electricity. Roughly speaking, you have a source of heat + a conversion of this heat into mechanical energy (e.g., via boiling water which is converted into steam which moves a turbine which moves an electricity generator); and all the fusion research is exclusively focused on having a source of heat ready!! Nothing else! There is no conversion to mechanical energy (nobody has ever worked on that part because nobody has completed the first step yet) and, consequently, no electricity is generated, what means no power to measure/compare against what a conventional power plant does. Any claim of a fusion reaction delivering x GW has nothing to do with what a power plant does and it can only be compared with other outputs under equivalent conditions (e.g., other fusion reactor). Nobody knows the electricity/electrical power that a fusion reaction might generate because nobody has ever created such a thing; they are still stuck in the first step of creating a stable source of heat (whose power will have to be highly reduced to ever become usable anyway).

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem with "incidental" solar or wind power is that it breaking the power grid.
Ask why Czechs and Poles installed phase shifting "breakers" at their borders. Simulate when there is plenty of power generated in north Germany but consumption is in Austria or southern Germany. Electrons do not know borders and power surges in neighboring countries are annoying at least.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Falconhell]

Yeh, Im in SA, bought a high end 2kw system with micro inverters on each panel, for $4k Aust, that reduced my bill by 2/3, from $600/Quarter to $150. Summer yields averages around 14kw/h per day in summer, winter about 10kwh.
Will get another 2kw of panels and a 10kwh battery next year, at about $10k, and virtually go off grid, for a total cost of $14k Aust.
Its been interesting to watch the slow acceptance of solar here on Slashdot.

Re: That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

And computers will always be the size of rooms. "Game changing" technologies are invented every decade. Imagine someone invents an extremely efficient solid state thermoelectric material. That might nearly eliminate the heating problem. These things are hard to predict. Even the law of physics are subject to occasional revision or expansion.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[vtcodger]

Whether it produces more energy out than it takes to maintain tells you it can run. ...

It also needs to not blow up. The Tokamak design is awfully complex and seems to me to depend on a lot of things never, ever failing. While a failed fusion power plant probably isn't going to be a Chernobyl style disaster, it's probably not going to be all that cheap or easy to clean up.

Not that I wouldn't like fusion power to work. But I'd like to see a few of these things running in the Mojave and delivering power to the grid with reasonable capacity factors over a period of a few years before I developed any enthusiasm for them anywhere near my back yard.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

That's only because of fracking which made fossil fuel production cheaper.... Well that and because the long term environmental issues that nuclear, along with the increasing regulations, has driven up costs.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not a battery. Batteries can be charged. What you describe is a Radioisotope thermoelectric generator.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to know too, but renewables seem to get a free pass on both environment destruction and decommissioning. We are expected to simply accept that the damage and cost are inevitable, and for a righteous cause. Proponents go out of their way to obfuscate the relevant data, and focus on metrics like LCOE, which ignore that intermittency is the main driver of cost.

Look up the facts; wind and solar use a whole lot more concrete, steel, rare earths, land, etc. than nuclear. Then they need a network of access roads and transmission lines, which are also damaging and expensive. Finally, they need 100% fossil backup generation, because adequate storage is complete fantasy. Typically, renewable installations and colocated with natural gas plants to solve this problem.

Re: That won't prove commercially viable power

[zmooc]

So either you have a super deal on electricity or you need a better solar panel supplier. Or your spreadsheet has a bug:p

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[CustomSolvers2]

Remind a lot what was said of computers in the '60...

Yes, because the space requirements of power plants and, mainly, of the equipment required to reach millions of degrees is likely to shrink by orders of magnitude within the next few years. Because what applies to electronics and computer chips applies to everything else. Because there is a huge probability of finding ways to allow smaller masses to release equivalent amounts of energy. Sorry for not having realised about all this before! (Sarcasm)

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, but unfortunately they're paying about a 33% markup when selling to Norway in Winter and buying that back in summer. (+DKK150, -DKK 200). And it just proves the point of the GP: Norwegian hydro is the conventional source that backs up Denmarks wind power.

Re: That won't prove commercially viable power

[CustomSolvers2]

Thanks for helping me see the light! Because something changed once, everything might change! Everything is possible! Everything might be right or wrong just because of whatever! You are right! (Is it required? pfff... Sarcasm!!).

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

While you have about the right level of pessimism about fusion power your reasoning is all wrong. Temperature isn't a problem, the mass of plasma is very low so it isn't going to melt anything. The problem is actually that the power released by fusion isn't in the form of heat, primarily, it is in the form of fast neutrons. Much higher energy neutrons than are released in fission. These neutrons will destroy chemical bonds in any material they come in contact with while also breeding radioactive isotopes in that material. The containment vessel that needs to be strong enough to hold a hard vacuum will be degraded by fast neutron flux and itself become a strong and highly hazardous gamma emitter. Most anything exposed to the neutron flux will break down over time and become a lethal gamma emitter that is long lasting. The magic material for making the containment vessel that will be able to maintain a vacuum while also being almost completely transparent to fast neutrons so they can pass through without damaging it to safely heat up water and breed tritium fuel does not exist. Perhaps you are assuming they find the magic material, but your objection to high temperature being dangerous is preposterous. Neutron flux is dangerous. High temperature plasma becomes harmless the moment the vacuum is broken or it comes in contact with the containment vessel and cools down. There is a way to make a hydrogen power plant that we have known about for a long time. You detonate a hydrogen bomb in a huge volume of water in an underground tank (think many miles in diameter). It heats the water and you run turbines off the heat until the water cools and needs to be recharged with another hydrogen bomb. The plant would need to be on a scale beyond human feats of engineering to date, but it's otherwise straightforward. There is a somewhat serious problem that the water becomes contaminated with dangerous radioactive products of the bombs, of course, and problems that the tank might leak making it an unattractive option. It isn't fair to say we don't know how to build a fusion power plant, it is fair to say that fission is cheaper, cleaner and safer, given what we do know and that we haven't figured out a way to do fusion that is economical, clean and safe.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

U showld join mi tipeing klass, I teach u to spel gud two!

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

Even in an ideal scenario, it will have to be used under very specific conditions (we are talking about sun-like temperatures!!! Something extremely dangerous whose confinement will certainly imply lots of constraints on many fronts).

This is misleading. The temperature sounds scary - but it's not scary if only a tiny mass of material is actually reaching those temperatures. A gram of plasma at 10^8 degrees will explode your face and your neighbourhood; a picogram of plasma at the same temperature won't even scorch your eyebrows.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[CustomSolvers2]

objection to high temperature being dangerous is preposterous

I also think that high temperature is the main problem here. In fact, this aspect is what explains the design of the fusion reactors so far, including the problems you are referring (not intrinsically associated with the fusion concept, but the attempted implementations precisely concerned about the high-temperature problems).

High temperatures is the most important problem with nuclear-fusion electricity generation and what explains the tremendous difficulties associated with this approach. If some implementations have converted this into a somehow secondary concern, it has been via creating other problems. In any case, an equipment able to generate the high temperatures and to confine the plasma (both issues being a direct consequence of the high-temperature requirements) will always be required and just this fact provokes many problems like lack of adaptability.

In any case, it seems better to not forget that there hasn't been yet a single operative nuclear-fusion power plant and, consequently, all the theories so far regarding how to proceed might not even be the best ones. So, rather than focusing on very specific problems of very specific (failing) approaches, it might be better to keep looking at the big picture as defined by the simple: you have to deal with a high-temperature mass, but are only interested in a small fraction of the associated heat.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because processing information is *JUST LIKE* handling nuclear fusion at the center of stars.

Yup, that smaller hard drive sure means we'll be cruising the Galaxy in fusion-powered starships soon!

Information is massless, weightless, and requires almost no energy to process. All the progress in computers since the 1960s has been about *shrinking* our manufacturing capabilities to make smaller and smaller transistors that can still signal 1s and 0s.

What does this have to do with the energy levels and material requirements for nuclear fusion?

I'll wait here for your clarification.

PS: And no matter "what was said about computers in the '60s", I'd like to remind you the maiden flight of the Boeing 747 was in 1969. They still make them of the same materials today, they are the same size, use the same fuel, and fly at the same speed and altitude as in 1969.

PPS: We don't even have the Concorde anymore.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[CustomSolvers2]

This is misleading.

Perhaps you are right. I was trying to keep my ideas as abstract as possible without coming into specific implementations. And generally speaking, the main problem of fusion is the huge temperatures which are required. This is something which will remain no matter what and independently upon your approach to the problem: the only way to fuse atoms is by increasing their temperatures a lot. Additionally, you want self-sustaining chain reactions, what means that the high temperatures have to be kept high enough for all the involved atoms (= the plasma). You can play with that reality as much as you want to come up with the most adequate way to get what is expected, but the huge-temperatures will always be an issue. This was my point.

Re: That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

And computers process information. What does this have to do with fusion reactors?

Can you compare the size of fission reactors from the 1960s to the size of more modern reactors?

Can you contrast this to the size of computers you are referring to?

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

Solar has far exceeded the commercial viability test. Solar is the cheapest energy source in the world, without subsidies. Now you have crappy solar insolation there in the UK, so it isn't the cheapest source for you yet.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Chas]

Yes but they're commonly referred to as "nuclear batteries".

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[turbidostato]

"Are you saying that the heat generated by millions of degree temperature is the same than the one generated by about 100 degree?! Evidently, they are not."

Evidently they are simply non comparable. The heat stored on sea is orders upon orders of magnitude bigger than that of a burning match despite its much lower temperature so, your point is?

"The heat (= energy) generated by a plasma at millions of degrees is much higher than what would be generated by the heat source of a conventional power plant (around 100 degrees);"

That's so obviously false it hurts. I can produce plasma in my backyard using, say, a Fansworth fusor but you can bet I can't produce a Terawatt by boiling water as lots of power plants can.

"Nobody knows the electricity/electrical power that a fusion reaction might generate because nobody has ever created such a thing"

Sorry, man, but after reading some of your messages on this thread and despite you not being conscious of it, you are talking about things that are miles above your head.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Maury Markowitz]

>Are you saying that the heat generated by millions of degree temperature is the same than the one generated by about 100 degree?!

Sure, if there's less of it. Fusion reactors operate at conditions best described as a very good vacuum.

I'm sorry you find all of this so difficult to believe, but there's plenty of resources on the 'net you can read on the topic.

> It seems that the only one with problems to understand heat/temperature (and quite a few other basic concepts) is you.

I'm a physicist who worked in the energy industry for about a decade. I've written extensively on fusion technologies, and you've probably read some of those articles (assuming you've read any).

So go ahead, tell me all about how wrong I am...

Re: That won't prove commercially viable power

[HiThere]

There are designs for solar power that don't have a problem with intermittancy, but they are more expensive. Molten salt is one. It's generally cheaper to use some storage mechanism, like a flow battery, or some local feature that enables energy storage, e.g. pumping water up-hill. This *does* increase cost, but not enough to compare with alternatives once you include all external costs. (But do note that solar power has it's own external costs. Nothing is free.)

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[CustomSolvers2]

Evidently they are simply non comparable. The heat stored on sea is orders upon orders of magnitude bigger than that of a burning match despite its much lower temperature so, your point is?

What?!

"The heat (= energy) generated by a plasma at millions of degrees is much higher than what would be generated by the heat source of a conventional power plant (around 100 degrees);" That's so obviously false it hurts. I can produce plasma in my backyard using, say, a Fansworth fusor but you can bet I can't produce a Terawatt by boiling water as lots of power plants can.

Although my original statement wasn't too accurate, any properly-understanding (not your case right?) person with a basic knowledge (neither) should be able to get my intention right. Logically, the associated mass has lots to say there. I meant under equivalent conditions: same mass via fusion requiring a much higher temperature would generated much more energy/heat than the same mass under the conventional 100 temperatures. This was pretty evident, but I was trying to address the claims of the other guy (your pal?).

Sorry, man, but after reading some of your messages on this thread and despite you not being conscious of it, you are talking about things that are miles above your head.

Do you know the most ironic part of this? You are the one who isn't in the right place. Your knowledge and understanding capabilities seem so low that I cannot even believe that I have answered your whole post (I was really close to stop reading right after your first sentence). Please, don't bother me anymore.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, even by assuming that you are able to safely generate electricity from fusion power, you should bear in mind all the problems which that alternative will always provoke. Even in an ideal scenario, it will have to be used under very specific conditions (we are talking about sun-like temperatures!!! .

The inherent safety characteristics of a fusion reactor are due to the very low fuel inventory in the reactor during operation and to the rapid cooling that extinguishes the fusion reactions should a malfunction occur.

source

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[angel'o'sphere]

We have actually quite a few parallel running fusion projects.
Germany also has its own reactor btw.

Erm, I read the article just not in depths. So I have to contradict you, it looks very promising for a sustained reaction. Not sure if it would be net positive so.

Re: That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

Fusion plants are intrinsically far safer than fission plants. The only issue is neutron flux, and with the right fuel, even that problem goes away. High temperatures are potentially damaging to the hardware if they get out of control, but that isn't quite the same as a fission plant melting down and irradiating the countryside.

Re: That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether this reactor is able to provide only 1mW (miliwatt) net power will be a game changer.

First concepts are useful to validate technology. Developing them could take years, even decades, but finally it will be materialized.

Given the net worth of fusion and the problems we are causing ourselves, the interest of developing it won't fade.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

You detonate a hydrogen bomb in a huge volume of water in an underground tank (think many miles in diameter). It heats the water and you run turbines off the heat until the water cools and needs to be recharged with another hydrogen bomb.

That's stupid in so many levels...

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[CustomSolvers2]

Sure, if there's less of it. Fusion reactors operate at conditions best described as a very good vacuum.

OK. Let me try one last time and I am done with all this let's-talk-say-random-nonsense-about-basic-physics. Heat is a form of energy and the energy is the result of a variation which, when talking about thermal aspects, is a temperature variation. If you do a quick research about heat you would see how all the formulae depend upon either temperature (direct relationship with the temperature variation; meaning that the higher the temperature increase, the higher the generated energy) or other form of energy (which might be ultimately converted into heat and, consequently, into the aforementioned temperature-based formula). What all this means that heat is precisely defined by a variation of temperature or, in other words, without a temperature variation (= having something hotter/colder) there will be no heat. In summary and by adequately understanding my not too precise first statement (where I didn't mention mass/density), under equivalent conditions a higher temperature would imply a higher generation of heat/energy.

I'm sorry you find all of this so difficult to believe, but there's plenty of resources on the 'net you can read on the topic.

To believe what? I am an engineer with a very solid background in physics (learned in the university, through personal research and in my work; curiously, I specialised in energy/nuclear engineering when studying for my MEng). I don't need to believe in anything/anyone when talking about physics, I know or I don't know (in that case, I try to know it). Here, I know enough to not need any further literature on this specific implementation or in equivalent ones; I certainly don't require any kind of support to understand basic physics.

I've written extensively on fusion technologies, and you've probably read some of those articles (assuming you've read any).

That explains quite a few things. No, I am sure that I didn't read any of your articlest.

So go ahead, tell me all about how wrong I am...

After reading my other posts you should be able to easily understand my position regarding fusion power/research/work and also why answering this is kind of uncomfortable to me. Bear in mind that I am a kind of person who prefers to live and let live; don't need to convince you of anything (at least, not here and now where I don't see what would be the benefit/prejudice for anyone). Why not focusing on dealing with compatible-with-us people :)

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[CustomSolvers2]

Erm, I read the article just not in depths. So I have to contradict you, it looks very promising for a sustained reaction. Not sure if it would be net positive so.

Thanks for the info, but I am not interested. Although I try to be a reasonable person, not fanatically-believing-in-anything and ready to be proven wrong as many times as required, I think that I will pass on this one. The sole intention of my comments here was to clarify some aspects which might not be too clear to some people, but I don't want to get involved in certain discussions (+ reading about certain issues). In fact, this will be most likely the last Slashdot fusion-related thread in which I will participate.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[mikael]

Since the 1990's, opposition to nuclear was due to where to put the reactors and the nuclear waste. The English NIMBY's just thought Scotland was the best place since it was the least densely populated part of the UK. The Scots figured that since the South coast of England was where all the population growth was happening the reactors should be done there. After all, if nuclear power is so safe, why not install the reactors in Battersea power station? It's right next to the Thames.

They've finally got the location sorted out, but now the major obstacle is cost due to the requirement by the insurance companies that the owners take out insurance to cover the compensation bill in the case that the surrounding area is contaminated and has to be evacuated like Chernobyl or Fukushima. That pushes up the price per energy unit.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

You know that a 1MW stream of superheated plasma is still not going to burn a hole through your face at 20 miles away in the unlikely event all of the containment magically disappears all at once and you're standing directly in direction of the plasma stream, right?

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

Give a rundown of your solar installation. If you have one. If you don't have one then... well that would be embarrassing wouldn't it?

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[sims 2]

I look into it occasionally IIRC getting enough power to run the HVAC was the biggest issue.

I think for us a grid tie system would be best a hybrid grid tie that could run when the grid is down would be better but a inverter capable of running both AC units would cost a about $2-4K by itself.

On average we use about 2,300kWh but in the summer it peaks around 3,600kWh

A 10kW inverter could probably handle both ac units but not much else.

So a 25K-30K kit would handle our average use but that doesn't include the install.

Assuming we used 3,600kWh every month (we don't) and power cost's $0.12/kWh (it doesn't)
That would be $432/mo savings
Assuming we got the system sized to handle the peak load every month instead of average and it only cost $42,000 (it won't installation would cost thousands more.) it would pay itself off in a little over 8 years. Although that's unreasonably optimistic.

Anyway did you ever get any panels rigged up?

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? There's a reason why there are more jobs in solar and wind than in fossil fuels, even in a country that officially hates renewable energy (the US). They're already the cheapest, fastest way to add capacity so those commercial entities use them regardless of your ideological opposition.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[dbIII]

Indeed, but for extra irony for those pushing nukes for purely political purposes they use photovoltaics to produce electricity from the photons given off by the nuclear material.
As well as probes they were one of the best choices for powering spy satelllites that needed to encounter a fair bit of atmosphere at one end of a very elliptical orbit (and may still be used in those for all we know).

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[dbIII]

Diesel was used en masse by Tasmania

Oh really? In a place with so much hydro that they make aluminium and export a lot of power when the link is up?
It sounds incredibly unlikely.
Extraordinary claims typically require a little more than the word of an AC - have you got a link to something better?

Re: That won't prove commercially viable power

[dbIII]

The hassle is that thermal projects, solar included, are best at large scale and that comes with a large capital cost. Getting funding in the west for large projects based on emerging technologies is difficult as the nuke crowd can also tell you (hence a very small number of AP1000 reactors getting built today when something almost identical could have been built in the late 1970s while next-gen nukes (that could have been built in the 1990s) are seen as too radical to get finance for).

There have been some very effective small baseload solar thermal pilot plants, salt heat storage, steam heat storage and various co-generation ideas, but despite success the modern investment market doesn't want to touch anything other than short term returns.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

(we are talking about sun-like temperatures!!! Something extremely dangerous whose confinement will certainly imply lots of constraints on many fronts)

This is where you show how little you know about tokamaks, and fusion power in general.

Containment, when it comes to plasma experiments, is more about keeping things outside the chamber. Things like air, mainly, but essentially anything that could have what you think of as a temperature. Fusion power is difficult to make practical not because it's hard to do safely - like fission - but because it's hard to do at all.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[drinkypoo]

Anyway did you ever get any panels rigged up?

I just have a smattering of el cheapo panels I have picked up here and there, doing boring things like charging batteries. One of them is a folding portable system with two 20W panels and an e-bike battery, and the dinkiest Morningstar charge controller.

There keep being side reasons not to actually buy in. I'm a renter for one thing. I tend to find alternatives which reduce my power consumption.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[jabuzz]

People get double glazing in the UK for reasons other than reduction in energy bills. Things like being able to get the room/house to a comfortable temperature in winter for example is one. Often people forget that if your home is cold insulating it may well not reduce your energy bills, just enable you to heat it to a reasonable temperature.

Another big driver is often that the existing windows are shot and in need of replacement anyway. At which point the incremental cost of double glazing means the ROI is actually very good.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Chas]

Well, the US doesn't.

Mainly because we have no more P238 in stock.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

"Still waiting for solar to pass its commercial viability test and I suspect wind power is a similar story."

I don't know for certain without researching solar more, but your suspicion about wind is completely wrong. Wind is more profitable than coal already. Even conservative states like Texas can't deny it, hence the HUGE wind farms they have already.

Or in my neck of the woods, see the Columbia Gorge wind machines, like http://www.airphotona.com/stockimg/images/13252.jpg .

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

The cost is no longer the panels; it's the installation. Panels are dirt cheap in bulk.

You're neglecting one the biggest costs: disposal.

The production of all semiconductors involves toxic products, leading to toxic waste - hence there is a disposal problem both for the chemicals involved in creating the panels, and the panels themselves when they eventually fail.

Batteries - a key part of a solar installation - also involve toxic compounds in both creation and disposal.

Nothing lasts forever - and battery disposal was a big problem even before solar power became practical. Adding large solar battery installations is only going to make a hard problem worse.

These types of costs are often referred to be economists as negative externalities - the solar panel manufacturers and users are in many cases shifting the true costs of their products and installations onto the rest of society. In similar cases for other technology, some governments have required the use of specific disposal procedures with special fees and/or specially licensed (and expensive) removal experts or disposal facilities in order to try to make people pay the full costs of their decisions.

Solar will probably end up being handled in a similar way - expect the long term costs for solar to be considerably higher than current estimates suggest.

Re: That won't prove commercially viable power

[dbIII]

When considering the solution on a national and global scale

So who is doing that AC? The trend has been to shift to private enterprise and nobody is large enough in that sector to even think about things on a national scale.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[turbidostato]

"Although my original statement wasn't too accurate, any properly-understanding (not your case right?) person with a basic knowledge (neither) should be able to get my intention right. Logically, the associated mass has lots to say there. I meant under equivalent conditions: same mass via fusion requiring a much higher temperature would generated much more energy/heat than the same mass under the conventional 100 temperatures."

Which, again, shows how really, really, really far from your comfort zone you are. You don't even know what's in your sentence above so ludicrous, right?

Hint: your "conventional 100 temperatures" are managing a chemical reaction; fusion is a nuclear reaction. Now: how does this affect the involved masses' magnitudes? In case you still don't get it: Hiroshima atomic bomb involved the transformation of about 1 gram of matter; the equivalent TNT bomb would have involved about 10.000.000.000.000 grams of explosive. There is no "given the same mass..." involved here and, so, "temperature being so high that it can't be confined because it would melt everything around" is *not* the problem. The problem is, quite on the contrary, "mass being so low, the difficult part is for the mass not to immediately cold back, much before it has the chance to start a fusion reaction, by sharing its minuscle amount of heat to its sorroundings" just like introducing a red hot metal into the sea is not going to be a problem for the sea because the metal is so hot but to the metal which will cold back immediately because the sea is so big.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[CustomSolvers2]

What is your exact problem? Cannot you get a nice "let's avoid problems and just deal with people like us"? I even wrote a summary clearly explaining my position to everyone: https://slashdot.org/comments.....

Do you prefer a different version? OK, here it goes: I think that you and all the other people getting arbitrarily angry with me and/or misunderstanding each single word I said are stupid, quite fanatic (+ coward) and extremely ignorant. Each of my explanations was provoked by your limited understanding capabilities (not sure if intentionally; perhaps you are too dumb/ignorant or perhaps you are plainly a fanatic wanting a specific nonsense to prevail via obsessive repetitions of extremely misleading information). Just the fact of you not understanding my words adequately, just the first clarification you and your pals needed was enough for me to not want to talk to you anymore. I was nice by spending my time explaining what I consider extremely evident for anyone with basic physics and/or general understanding skills; a gesture which you have repaid me by getting involved in an endless loop of misunderstanding-prone obsessive repetitions of pure nonsense, further confirming your limited knowledge on many fronts.

Do you want me to go even further? OK. I have seen this kind of obsessive, aggressive, tremendously-ignorant-but-seriously-thinking-to-be-knowledgeable attitudes various times in Slashdot and in other places; and every time it was when dealing with the same "fields of knowledge": modern physics, quantum whatever, relativity whatever, etc. The kind of sick attitudes provoking two innocent (perhaps a bit too aggressive and too clear, but proper-understanding-prone and clearly meant to help and to get involved in a constructive discussions) comments to grow into a recursive set of misunderstandings of each single word across multiple other comments. I have always shown the same attitude here and anywhere else and only got reactions of this kind in these specific situations! All this makes me think that there are quite a few people with attitudes very far from what I consider scientific (although very similar to what I think that can be found in religious and/or group-thinking organisation/sects) in certain fields. In fact and although I am quite generic-prejudice-free person who traditionally had a quite good perception of physicists, I am starting to think twice before assuming that something coming from (theoretical) physics is reliable, true and even actually-scientific.

I have read only the first line of your comment; exactly the same than what I did with quite a few previous ones from you and/or others like you in this thread. As said in my aforementioned aftermath post, I am not afraid of any kind of person (and/or fanatic) and I will never allow aggressive nonsense to succeed when I am around. I have plainly accepted that you/your whole world has only one thing for me: sadness. Please, stop being sad and stop getting angry with a person plainly ignoring you and all your concerns. BTW, if you want to know a bit more about the first moment when I stopped taking certain people and ideas seriously, you might want to take a look at the only article which I have submitted here. It refers to a small research which I did quite a few years ago (while studying actual physics/engineering/science), but made public only two years ago (not exactly saying that I regret it, but I would have preferred to never witness certainly reactions). Feel free to read it as slowly as you need because it will be there for a very long time. Please, don't talk to me ever again.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[angel'o'sphere]

Welcome back then when we have indeed breaking news regarding fusion :)

hot hOT HOT!

[NaughtyNimitz]

100 million degrees celsius? I hope the containment system will hold... I know the dangers of extreme heat: I burned my tongue on a microwaved chocolate milk once.

Re:hot hOT HOT!

[Harold Halloway]

It doesn't matter if the containment field doesn't hold - the company is based in Milton Keynes.

Re:hot hOT HOT!

[91degrees]

It's made from the stuff they make pop-tarts out of. It can handle the ridiculous temperatures that the filling gets to, so a mere 100 million degrees is nothing.

Re:hot hOT HOT!

[Bowdie]

If that explodes and destroys the surrounding area it could do literally twenty quids worth of damage. Even more if it hits the local Argos.

Re:hot hOT HOT!

[Shimbo]

It doesn't matter if the containment field doesn't hold - the company is based in Milton Keynes.

Hate to spoil your joke but the company is based down the road from JET in Oxfordshire, nowhere near Milton Keynes. Different Milton.

Re:hot hOT HOT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your chocolate milk presumably is a lot denser

Re:hot hOT HOT!

[Gravis Zero]

100 million degrees celsius? I hope the containment system will hold...

Containment of a 100 million degree microwaved plasma? Is it just me or does it sound suspiciously like a Hot Pocket? ;)

Re:hot hOT HOT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of the jokes which sometimes got thrown around about IRA bombs.

"The explosion caused tens of thousands of pounds of improvements to the surrounding area."

Re: hot hOT HOT!

[Type44Q]

Before or after you've eaten it??

Re:hot hOT HOT!

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as it's not Milton Jones. an explosion of one-liners and bad jokes would not be welcome!

Re:hot hOT HOT!

[Harold Halloway]

Oh yes, what a shame. Never mind, I don't have much love for Oxfordshire either.

Re:hot hOT HOT!

[Big Hairy Ian]

If it blows it will cause millions of pounds worth of refurbishments

Re:hot hOT HOT!

[Quatermass]

Minimum! :)
These reactors are still prototypes.Has any country managed to generate Plasma for 5 minutes let along 24 hours?

Re:hot hOT HOT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yes, what a shame. Never mind, I don't have much love for Oxfordshire either.

Oxfnordshire, or the people?
I like the environs, can't say the same for the inhabitants..

Re: hot hOT HOT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you eat a hot pocket, they're not made of edible materials.

Re:hot hOT HOT!

[Bongo]

It doesn't matter if the containment field doesn't hold - the company is based in Milton Keynes.

If the magnetic containment doesn't hold the plasma, the grid of boring streets will.

Re: hot hOT HOT!

[budgenator]

During, while you're bouncing it around your mouth fast enough to avoid third degree burns.

Re:hot hOT HOT!

[rickb928]

Mostly improved windows?

Re:hot hOT HOT!

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1plizv/what_temperature_would_be_required_to_ignite_the/

its only in the atmosphere and what what lol

Long road ahead...

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW they don't plan on breaking net zero energy with this model. Their current plam is their *next* model to break even energy by 2020...

Re:Long road ahead...

[swb]

If you think about it, even if a lab-scale version were to be net positive energy tomorrow, it would still be, what, 20-odd years to see a true grid-scale version?

5 years to fund and build a scaled-up model plant at some reasonable fraction of a grid scale plant, say, 100 megawatts, another 5 years of debugging and operation to convince anyone that a grid-scale version was workable, and then another 10 years to fund, site, build and operate the first grid-scale plant.

And even if it worked perfectly as intended and with frantic investment and building, another 10 years to get the next 5 plants built?

So 30-odd years for fusion to generate a fraction of the grid demand. I want fusion to work, but I think the reality is that even if it was a sorted out system today I question whether it will be a viable system in my lifetime.

I also wonder if the R&D dollars wouldn't be better spent on energy storage/battery systems and wind/solar.

Re:Long road ahead...

[angel'o'sphere]

As this project is run by a private company, you hardly can tell them how to 'better invest their money' :)

Re:Long road ahead...

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the whole point of this design approach was the smaller units. We can do smaller because we have beefier magnets now, and smaller iterates faster and (if it works) is faster/cheaper/easier to build at modest plant scale.

Re:Long road ahead...

[Bongo]

Of course you can work out the maximum we'll ever get out of wind and solar, and then think, will that be enough for humanity in 500 years? I'm guessing the answer is no. And 500 years is not long. For civilisations, that's like a couple of months. So any technology that has any theoretical potential is worth pursuing.

I think we need to recognise the mood of the times, especially since the 60s in the West, which see life as pointless and winding down, as reaching limits, where values become void and meaninglessness.

But the nature of life is actually creativity, it is just that it goes in cycles of wild experimentation followed by cautious pruning. But those cycles of creativity and then pruning, last maybe 50 or 100 years, something like that, and just because the mood of the times right now is in the withdrawing phase, doesn't mean we should delay on the things which might pay off in 200 years. As I say, 200 years is nothing.

As the lead character in Interstellar said in his little speech to the camera, our place is up in the stars, not down in the dirt. Who here would agree with the person who 500 years or 1000 years ago decided that, "this far is enough"? And if 1000 years ago, why not 10,000 or 50,000? Gee, this agriculture thing, it is too much trouble, and will cause too many problems (which, incidentally, it did, directly and indirectly, lead to massive amounts of suffering and problems).

One other thing... is there anyone who doesn't implicitly believe or assume that the pursuit of renewables will go hand in hand with a reduction in energy consumption? If I had to take a guess about the future it is that we will consume vastly more energy than we do today, vastly more.

Re:Long road ahead...

[swb]

A grid scale (2 TW?) fusion plant is likely to be massively expensive, especially if it is the first one built. The planning process will take ages, and some group of geniuses will decide it makes sense to merge it into an existing fusion plant site ("because nuclear" or "economies of scale"), further complicating the process and jacking up costs.

I'm guessing the total tab would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 billion if you were lucky in today's dollars. So yes, despite being a "private company" there would be investors involved financing the whole thing. Unless your private company is one a handful of the existing large industrial concerns with the cash flow and know-how to build the entire thing themselves, there will be outside money and outside agendas involved.

Re:Long road ahead...

[vtcodger]

I also wonder if the R&D dollars wouldn't be better spent on energy storage/battery systems and wind/solar.

I think there is plenty of R&D money available for energy storage of all sorts. And lots of profits to be made/being made as "batteries" improve. It's a long, slow slog from where we are to where we want to be. Sort of like in 1965 when we knew we'd eventually have supercomputer computing capacity in desktop units. We just didn't know how long it would take. I suspect that more R&D money probably wouldn't have speeded the development of modern PCs very much.

The big problem with wind and solar is that they really aren't all that much use without abundant cheap electrical storage -- a point that seems to be completely lost on those who advocate them.

I am a bit surprised that so little of the money going toward "green" R&D isn't directed at storage. I don't think money would help (much), but I'm surprised we aren't trying anyway.

Re:Long road ahead...

[swb]

The big problem with wind and solar is that they really aren't all that much use without abundant cheap electrical storage -- a point that seems to be completely lost on those who advocate them.

I am a bit surprised that so little of the money going toward "green" R&D isn't directed at storage. I don't think money would help (much), but I'm surprised we aren't trying anyway.

Based solely on the science of interpreting Slashdot comments, it strikes me that green energy advocates look at storage as a "solved" problem -- you just need to flood a reservoir for pumped hydro, and every place you get good insolation or wind has a spare million or so acre-feet of space with a suitable head drop and supply of water, or batteries, which Evon Musk has already figured out.

IMHO, there hasn't been much effort put into energy storage that's "universal" and can be built near anywhere green energy is generated other than batteries. Little interest in some of the gravitational storage techniques (such as giant weights suspended by a column of captured water) or a water->hydrogen->methane process. They're all seen as impractical (as if pumped hydro was practical) or too "inefficient", even when the energy is free and otherwise ungenerated or wasted.

There's also a ton of cheerleading for green energy, too, a glossing over the costs (ie, ignore subsidies) and ignoring the downsides like storage or cyclical unreliability (eg, clouds, windless days), basically anything that makes green energy seem less practical is ignored, which I think includes storage most of the time.

Re:Long road ahead...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fusion has potential for more than grid deployment. What about mobile power for vehicles like aircraft carriers and a like. Given the fusion requires nor produces any radioactive or dangerous material, it could be used in highly volatile areas where fission would pose a security risk (dirty bomb, fallout, etc)

Dyson sphere ?

[wolfheart111]

So essentially a civilization would not need to create a Dyson sphere. Only a fusion reactor like this one?

Re:Dyson sphere ?

[Anonymous Coward]

i think the Dyson sphere concept is cool, but I wonder if there is enough accessible mass in the solar system to build one?? i would think that we would need at least all of the astroids in the asteroid belt and Mars, at the minimum. Oh ya, of course we would have to 'flatten' the earth too.

Re:Dyson sphere ?

[ShanghaiBill]

I wonder if there is enough accessible mass in the solar system to build one??

If you built a Dyson Sphere at one AU (150M km), it would have a surface area of 4 pi r^2 = 2.8e17 km^2, If it was one cm thick, that would be 2.8 trillion cubic km. The volume of the earth is about 1.1 trillion cubic km, so you would need approximately two and a half earths.

You could save a lot of material by building it closer to the sun, maybe at the orbit of Venus. Or just build a Dyson Ring instead. A full sphere may have to wait till Trump's second term.

Re:Dyson sphere ?

[Ihlosi]

So essentially a civilization would not need to create a Dyson sphere. Only a fusion reactor like this one?

Using an artificial fusion reactor as an energy source is superior to a Dyson sphere in any scenario where you don't want to take an entire star with you.

Besides, a solid "sphere" would get smashed to bits by all the rocks, dirty snowballs and other debris that's also orbiting the star or just passing through its vicinity.

Re:Dyson sphere ?

[sheramil]

A Dyson ring is a good compromise to building a Dyson sphere - uses less material, lower construction costs. Even easier is the Dyson lump. Also known as a planet.

Re:Dyson sphere ?

[loonycyborg]

No idea why anyone would ever suggest 1AU. Obviously you'd make it as small as possible while not getting trashed by destructive power of solar wind, probably a lot smaller than Mercury's orbit.

Re:Dyson sphere ?

[Anonymous Coward]

What, why?

A species technically capable on that scale would have HUGE energy requirements.
Only a star would suffice, unless they can produce antimatter cheaply in large amounts or some other exotic method.
A pitiful little fusion reactor is only going to be useful for planetary based civilization.
Once we ACTUALLY get out in to space and start colonising the whole solar system, then it becomes an issue.

We'd want to extend our stars lifetime as much as possible.
So what these reactors actually could be used for is the generation of super-heavy elements.
Then we get a Stargate, throw the super-heavy element in to it and terminate right as the wormhole traverses through the sun. Wait. But really, launching some super-heavy in to the sun should slow it down over time.
This after we built a partial dyson sphere around it to capture stardust being launched off it in the winds.
Once it has slowed down considerably, we finish the sphere, we all move in, happy days!
Create huge thrusters all around the sphere, huge empty containers for storing any stray stardust, use more fusion reactors to turn this in to useful fuel, we can now turn things around and such.
How to move the sun as well as the sphere, that's another question.
I'm not sure opening a section of the sphere in the opposite direction would work. The sun and sphere is only connected loosely by some extremely sparse dust and gravity. I dunno, SCIENCE.

Re:Dyson sphere ?

[TFlan91]

I would imagine, once fully encapsulated, solar wind will be the least of your concerns.

Asteroids, comets, whatever the fuck happens when you bottle up a star in terms of heat, radiation, and eventual collapse.

Re:Dyson sphere ?

[Anonymous Coward]

A much easier way would be to cover parts of the surface of the Dyson Lump with equipment that can harness that fusion energy from the star. I mean, i don't want to think of the cost for a copper cable to Mercury, it'd be much cheaper to have the energy production close (astronomically speaking) to the place of energy consumption.

You could even dedicate whole swathes of land to these energy harnessing machines. Then you could call it a "solar farm"!

Re:Dyson sphere ?

[TheRaven64]

The advantage of 1AU is that the available sunlight is enough that you'd be able to walk outside without shielding. The down side of making it closer to the sun is that you reduce the amount of available living space (although that's not likely to be a real concern for a long time after building one). A swarm wouldn't necessarily have this as a design goal.

Re:Dyson sphere ?

[drinkypoo]

Besides, a solid "sphere" would get smashed to bits by all the rocks, dirty snowballs and other debris that's also orbiting the star or just passing through its vicinity.

If you can build a dyson sphere, you can probably move to a quiet neighborhood before building. If you have all that energy, and some way to store large parts of it, you can shoot down all the stuff that is coming your way.

Re:Dyson sphere ?

[Ihlosi]

If you can build a dyson sphere, you can probably move to a quiet neighborhood before building.

I would assume that moving an entire star by a meaningful distance requires even more advanced civilizations than building a Dyson sphere (which "only" requires moving several planets worth of matter).

If you have all that energy, and some way to store large parts of it, you can shoot down all the stuff that is coming your way.

It will be hard to deal with debris of all sizes and velocities.

Building the "sphere" with a number of smaller, independent satellites would allow individual components of the sphere to move out of the way.

Re:Dyson sphere ?

[drinkypoo]

I would assume that moving an entire star by a meaningful distance requires even more advanced civilizations than building a Dyson sphere (which "only" requires moving several planets worth of matter).

There are other options, though, like "only" moving a planet... to a different star.

Re:Dyson sphere ?

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as you both make sure to call yourselves idiots.

Re:Dyson sphere ?

[110010001000]

This isn't possible because you cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Science. Learn it.

Re:Dyson sphere ?

[budgenator]

An added benefit is if you spin the ring just right the magnetic fields will steer the solar wind in a direction and you can actually go somewhere if you want.

Re:Dyson sphere ?

[garyok]

Wouldn't 1AU be too close for the inner surface (for humans, anyway)? You'd be dealing with radiant energy reflected back from the rest of the inside as well as the radiation directly from the sun. Toasty.

Re:Dyson sphere ?

[drinkypoo]

This isn't possible because you cannot travel faster than the speed of light.

Point to where I suggested that it be done faster than the speed of light.

Science. Learn it.

My balls. Suck them.

Re:Dyson sphere ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some unimaginative person (000110010001?) 200 years ago, discussing travel:
"This isn't possible because you cannot fly. Science. Learn it."

Obviously we can't now. This does not mean we shouldn't try to figure out how.

Re:Dyson sphere ?

[angel'o'sphere]

I would prefer something like the "Glitter Band" anyway :D

My hobby

[ByteSlicer]

My hobby: extrapolating.

I'm rooting for viable fusion power as much as the next guy, but only time will tell if they will be able to reach those temperatures.
Until now, nobody has been able to make a tokamak fully work, so the burden of proof is on them.

Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[Anonymous Coward]

Both already have a ROI in less than a decade and are profitable almost immediately, having zero fuel cost.

You're waiting because you refuse to stop waiting and complaining.

ALL power "only succeeds" here in the UK because of government subsidies. If you pay for or install your own coal fired power station it will never pay back. Don't even try nuke.

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[thegarbz]

Both already have a ROI in less than a decade

Except solar definitely does not in the wonderful cloudy parts of the world near the north sea.

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[Chas]

No. Both only have an ROI of less than a decade IN CERTAIN SPECIFIC SITUATIONS.

Solar in SoCal, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona generally have a fast payback. Because they see tons of son overall.
Solar in Hawaii has a fast payback because the price of power in Hawaii is high due to geographic isolation.

Solar power in Chicago, or Minneapolis or Detroit or Seattle is a MUCH different story.
Sure, they can provide economical power. But, without subsidies, the payback period extends pretty much to the EOL for the system itself.

Wind power is great through most of the middle of the US, colloquially known as "Tornado Alley".

But in Idaho, upstate Washington, and Eastern Tennesee? You will NEVER see a payback on on a Wind Turbine install. Even with HUGE subsidies.

And the only reason Nuclear (in any form) will not be successful is down to religion/politics. The cult of "Nukes = Bombs = Bad" has indoctrinated so many people that a discussion can't even be had without a bunch of autistic screeching that nobody really has the time or patience for.

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[gtall]

Yes and no. I think if we were to include the carbon tax (i.e., global warming, acidification of the oceans, heavy metals released from burning coal, removal of waste coal ash, the cost of transporting oil, etc.) and include the cost of building solar and wind, the equation might look a bit different.

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[Barsteward]

and coal and gas plants don't work if you don't feed them coal or gas

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[necro81]

Except solar definitely does not in the wonderful cloudy parts of the world near the north sea

Does that include Germany? Because everyone knows that Germany is a lot sunnier than the U.S. I suppose the U.K. must be in the same situation.

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[Maury Markowitz]

No. Both only have an ROI of less than a decade IN CERTAIN SPECIFIC SITUATIONS.

Solar in SoCal, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona generally have a fast payback. Because they see tons of son overall.
Solar in Hawaii has a fast payback because the price of power in Hawaii is high due to geographic isolation.

Solar power in Chicago, or Minneapolis or Detroit or Seattle is a MUCH different story.

Really? Let's test that theory. Everyone reading this can make a single change and figure it out for their own location. Here we go...

Open http://pvwatts.nrel.gov/
Type in Chicago as the location and hit go
Pick a weather station, likely the default, and hit go
Change the system size to 1 (to unitize everything, you'll see that's the input to the steps below) and the module type to Premium (all panels made today are super-premium according to the definition in this program)
Change the tilt to 30 degrees if you are between 40 and 50 north, and 35 if you are 50 to 60. I have not tried optimizing north of that
Press go again. Write down the big blue number at the top. For Chicago I got 1312. I know this is lower than what people actually get, but PVWatts is a wonderful conservative estimate, so let's run with it.

Now that production number is useful,but for the next part what we really want to know is the Capacity Factor. That is easy to calculate, it's that number divided by the number of hours in a year, so in this case 1312 / (24 x 365) = 15% (which is less than my real-world array in Toronto, so this is why I say it's conservative).

Ok now we have the production side of things. That's half the problem. The other half is the money part. So here we go on that side...

Open the NREL LCoE calculator here: http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/tech_lcoe.html
Change the period to 25, at a minimum. PV is generally thought to last about 40, but 25 is the warranty period so use that for now
Change the Capital Cost to 1000, which is the current price for 1 kW (I told you that number would reappear) of commercial solar in the US
Change the Capacity Factor to whatever you calculated above, in this case 15%
Change the Fixed O&M to 17 (click the link to see why)
Change the Variable O&M, Heat Rate and Fuel Cost to 0 (sunlight is free)

Look at the bottom line, the "Simple Levelized Cost of Renewable Energy". For the inputs above, that is 6.4 cents/kWh. That is competitive with wholesale averages (5.5), and *extremely* competitive for daytime peak.

Please, take 4 minutes of your life and do that calculation for your area. And if you want to know what it would be if you did it on your roof, change the 1000 to about 2500 to 3500, which accounts for the much higher costs of labor and construction on a small project.

So let's do one more? For the UK? Let's use York, which gets me 875 for the output of a 1k array at 30 degrees, which is 10% CF. That gets you a LCOE of 9.6 cents, which is highly competitive with wholesale rates in the UK.

Now your homework: repeat these calculations for your home using the closest weather station, with a Capital Cost of $3.50/W.

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[Anonymous Coward]

Trying it for Minneapolis, I notice "system losses" figures in 0% for snow.

Something tells me that system isn't that accurate.

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[wildfish]

Not sure what you mean by upstate Washington but eastern Washington has several substantial wind farm installations. While the winds are not as good as some other places, the transmission infrastructure is already built to service the dam sites so that getting the power to market is cheap. Private utilities that do not have access to cheap federal power have found wind (with the federal tax credit) to be a good investment, even before the state decided to mandate a minimum fraction of renewables. Again individual circumstances. Another issue lost in this discussion is the total cost of the technology. A home solar installation is dependent upon the grid. Depending upon the location, the solar installation may or may no reduce grid costs. In Washington, most of the grid is built to handle January mornings and PV does not reduce system cost but does reduce energy sales. With the capital infrastructure and overhead making up 80% of the cost of utilities, PV is making grid power more expensive for everyone else.

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[Archangel Michael]

More taxes, taxes the rich can avoid, and the poor pay through the nose. Thanks for adding another tax to my growing list of "Taxes are Regressive" examples.

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[kaatochacha]

You do realize we're talking about a different kind of "Nuke", right?

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[Chas]

Yeah. No.

Things like "carbon taxes" are just a scam.

Because it doesn't affect the industry power generator AT ALL. The costs are simply passed on to the customer.

As the poster above said, the rich can avoid those, and the non-rich simply don't have the capital to switch over to something else. So they're STUCK.

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[Chas]

Exactly. He's assuming an adjustable system for more or less perfect angle with a true solar south facing and minimal property shading.

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[Maury Markowitz]

> Trying it for Minneapolis, I notice "system losses" figures in 0% for snow.

Actually it does figure it it, just not there. Snow often *increases* production, because it reflects more light onto clean panels. Snow coverage is modeled during the day-to-day simulation run.

> Something tells me that system isn't that accurate.

Is that "something" based on a single input and your decision to stop at that point complain about it rather than just put in a number? I'm sure you're capable of making this estimate. It's about 1/3rd of your roof's coverage because the cells heat up and cause the snow to slide off. Maybe 5 days a year.

The tool itself is considered to be accurate to within 10 to 12%, but there is widespread agreement it almost always underestimates actual production:

http://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/06/18/2013/beware-misleading-solar-data
https://enphase.com/sites/default/files/Study-Performance-Versus-PVWatts_ENG_0.pdf

But of course, you're free to offer an alternative. You could try RETScreen.

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[Enigma2175]

The costs are simply passed on to the customer.

Yes, because it's not the power company who is emitting the carbon, they are doing it on behalf of the customer. If the customer is using power that generates pollution, why shouldn't they pay for it? If the power source is not competitive when externalities are paid for then maybe we shouldn't be using it.

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[Chas]

Reread the part when I talk about the divide between the rich and the poor.

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[DaveAtWorkAnnoyingly]

What exactly are the subsidies applied to nuclear power in the UK? Unless you mean the government support in case of emergency, there are no government subsidies applied to the MWs generated by nuclear power stations. We (disclosure, I work for a nuclear power company) simply sell to the open market and get the market price.

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what you're referring to as "upstate Washington", but there are a lot of wind turbines in central and eastern WA. Clearly they must be making money for someone.

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[Anonymous Coward]

Guarantees for insurance, MoD protection, injected cash through its entire life to develop new designs, and the guarantees of over-inflation increases in the power to get hinkley C built.

Unlike solar which has been massively cut, quicker than it was planned, and will go to zero soon, nuke is increasing.

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[stealth_finger]

Both already have a ROI in less than a decade

Except solar definitely does not in the wonderful cloudy parts of the world near the north sea.

Mirrors is what you need. An intricate system of mirrors.

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[Anonymous Coward]

Were it 1896, computershack would be investing heavily in buggy and buggy whip manufacturers, because automobiles are just a fad and have no long-term future.

Re:Wind cheaper than coal, solar than nuke/oil

[Anonymous Coward]

New build has a strike price of £92.50 per MWh, for 35 years. That's about three times the current price, and the current price is very low at the moment due to over supply of gas.

Only assuming 3% inflation, things will treble in price in 35 years anyway. Electricity prices are increasing at higher than inflation rates and are predicted to for some time. Most analysts expect prices to more than double over the next 20 years. Also, having certainty in prices is valuable.

IMO, at worse the tax payer will break even which in reality is profit since you've got stability for free. I think it's a pretty good deal for both parties, supplier and consumer has stable price, and the UK gets its much needed energy supply.

Guarantees of insurance do cost money, I agree. However, the cost of loss of supply is far far higher. It's another hedge, and again IMO it's worth it.

If you were founded in 2009

[Anonymous Coward]

then you're not a world-leading fusion energy company. You make fusion sound like toy science.

First plasma is kinda like getting a new boat wet

[Solandri]

You can generate plasma at home for a few bucks.

Now that is just weird

[dbIII]

Now that is just weird - is the above poster assuming all cooling water is destroyed on contact with a heat exchanger from the boiler water and that no more will flow in?
All you have to do is leave the hot water somewhere to cool down, like a lake, or if you have to, seawater, and you can use it over and over again. Thermal pollution is worked around by just having a lot of outlets to dilute the heated cooling water.
I really don't get how someone can make such an obvious mistake unless it's pretended stupidity to push an argument.

Re:Now that is just weird

[Anonymous Coward]

The device you are groping for is called a cooling tower.

They are those things foolish people confuse with nuclear reactors

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Now that is just weird

[dbIII]

I've worked in one - face mask required due to the nasty stuff growing in the warm water.
I'm commenting on the very odd "You can't guarantee a useful site for cooling will remain viable long enough to pay back the sunk costs"

While it is a constraint there's no shortage of sites - it's not as if the water used for cooling has to be drinkable. You do need a LOT of water, but it's not as if much gets used up.

Re:Now that is just weird

[rickb928]

Certainly you can use huge mass to solve the cooling problem. Siting a fusion reactor next to an ocean doesn't carry the same risks as fission plants, and we did those...

Re:Now that is just weird

[Anonymous Coward]

Waste heat is a pretty stupid objection to nuclear. It is also based upon the global warming hypothesis that there is a 3X forcing of warming feedback that will mean that existing sources of cool water won't be available in the future. The models that assume all warming observed in the past was due to CO2 and that the excess warming not directly attributable to CO2 is due to forcing and indirectly attributed to CO2 produced projections that wildly overestimated future warming that after a couple decades have been shown to be incorrect. Despite developing a hypothesis, making a prediction, testing the prediction and getting a negative result the hypothesis is still being pushed as settled science because all the models agree, it is just reality that is an outlier data point. The claim that you can't guarantee cool water supply for waste heat disposal is a claim that you can't disprove the models that have already been shown to be wrong. If you used a model with significantly less forcing you could make a better prediction for the future, but then you would make predictions for warming that sound 3X less alarming than those made in the past, which is politically untenable. Only more alarming predictions have political utility.

Re:Now that is just weird

[dbIII]

Ocean? WTF is wrong with you guys? Seas, lakes and rivers that never run dry also exist.

melt some gas

[Anonymous Coward]

Plasma is molten gas? Never thought of it that way before.

Re: melt some gas

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they're both fluids...

A molten mass of dumbing down

[jandersen]

"Molten mass" indeed. Wouldn't you expect, when writing to an audience, that is at least marginally interested in technical and scientific issues, that they would be able to understand (or at least willing to put up with) technical terms? Too many popularisers of science go too far in dumbing down what they write, or perhaps that is their own level of understanding. I find it disrespectful of your audience, when you try to convert everything to baby-language and inept simile. Like that other gripe of mine: why does a large number like 10^18 have to become something like "a million million million"? People who don't understand 10^18 won't have much idea about "a million million million" either - it's just something huge. Stop treating people like they were idiots, please.

Re:A molten mass of dumbing down

[aberglas]

Science Journalists are often journalists that write about science. TV producers even more so. So they write what they understand. At least this talks a bit about the science and not just about the scientists -- human interest, journos understand that.

Re:A molten mass of dumbing down

[budgenator]

"a molten mass of electrically-charged gas, or plasma,"
plasma isn't a gas either. The way he describes it some people would get a mental image of a chocolate fudge covered cake getting hit by lightning!

Re:First plasma is kinda like getting a new boat w

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called a fluorescent light bulb. But that's certainly not energy production.

Re:First plasma is kinda like getting a new boat w

[NicknameUnavailable]

It's called a fluorescent light bulb. But that's certainly not energy production.

Neither is releasing atomic bonds, it's energy transformation in both cases.

Waste

[Anonymous Coward]

Fusion is a waste of money. Tokamaks more so compared to stellarators.

Making a plasma in a Tokamak has been done

[Anonymous Coward]

many times before. What's apparently new about this one is that they used high temperature superconductors to make the magnetic field.

Re:Making a plasma in a Tokamak has been done

[Maury Markowitz]

Actually if you read it carefully, their claim of "first" refers only to the funding mechanism. And that's wrong too, there have been private reactors in the past.

Re:Making a plasma in a Tokamak has been done

[sl3xd]

"First plasma" is a term referring to an event in the life of a fusion reactor.

It's not all that different from a telescope's "first light".

For the obligatory auto comparison: the equivalent of saying an electric starter was able to turn an engine over -- it doesn't even mean the engine runs, produces power, etc.

"First Plasma" by a private organization is a yawner, though: EMC2, for example, produced plasma in its reactors back in the '90's, and high school kids have built working Fusion reactors for science projects. It just isn't hard to create a reactor capable of Fusion

The difficult part is creating energy from it.

Make a fair comparison

[sjbe]

Still waiting for solar to pass its commercial viability test and I suspect wind power is a similar story.

Either you are willfully ignoring facts or you don't understand them. Solar has been economically viable in a wide variety of circumstances for quite a few years now. It's not the cheapest option everywhere (nothing is) but it's easily competitive in a great many places. Even better it's cost per unit of power generated has been dropping very rapidly with no evidence of an end in sight.

So far it only succeeds here in the UK because of government subsidies.

I could say the same thing about oil and gas in the UK. The UK subsidizes fossil fuels to the tune of billions per year directly, not to mention the indirect subsidy of not requiring coal and oil to pay the full cost of their emissions. Solar is already competitive with coal and oil in many situations and it is easily competitive if you compare the full cost of each which folks like yourself arguing against solar tend not to do.

If I pay for and install my own 5kWh solar system the returns over 20 years don't cover the cost of the initial installation, let alone a replacement inverter after 10 years or any other maintenance.

The plural of anecdote is not data. Even if we take your statement at face value (and we shouldn't), it doesn't follow that there are no solar installations anywhere (UK or elsewhere) that do not recoup their costs. It is a trivial exercise to find examples of solar installations that pay for themselves within their operational lifespan.

So use what you have

[sjbe]

Except solar definitely does not in the wonderful cloudy parts of the world near the north sea.

You mean those locations with cloudy skies and lots of wind? So use wind power if your specific location isn't ideal for solar. Last I checked there was no lack of wind in the North Sea.

I don't get why some people keep arguing that solar isn't good in general because it doesn't work for every circumstance everywhere. Solar works fine and it's now economic in a huge number of cases. Better yet it's going to continue to get cheaper and more efficient with time. Yes if you live somewhere where it is foggy 300+ days a year solar is probably not for you. That doesn't describe most places where people live.

Re:So use what you have

[jonnyj]

Solar works fine and it's now economic in a huge number of cases...

So here's the problem for the UK. As I write, renewables are doing well at 18.5% of power generation: a rare sunny day means that 15.1% is from solar with a gentle breeze producing a further 2.9%.

But the sun doesn't shine at night. Britain is a cold, dark country so we need lots of energy at night. At 6.30 this morning, only 4% of our energy came from renewables and, as a result, we had to import more than 10% of our energy requirements from France's largely nuclear power stations. Thanks, France - without you, my morning would have been a bleak one.

Data from here: http://nationalgrid.stephenmor...

Re:So use what you have

[thegarbz]

You mean those locations with cloudy skies and lots of wind?

Yes that's exactly what I mean. And I'm not against green energy, just against stupid catch all remarks that say something is better than something else or has some specific ROI without taking into account any specifics.

So use wind power

Residential wind hasn't taken off for a simple reason, it is incredibly inefficient. The GP was specifically talking about a home installation. Wind simply doesn't work in these cases. That said yes the UK could use a lot more wind energy.

I don't get why some people keep arguing that solar isn't good in general because it doesn't work for every circumstance everywhere

No one here said anything like that, read through the thread again.

Re:So use what you have

[Barsteward]

We still have to wait until they get their act together and invest in a suitable storage solution to store all the power produced by things like wind (which does work at night) then there will be less reliance on power from abroad

Re:So use what you have

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people don't realize the challenges of wind in colder climates where icing is common. There are large sections of the far north where its not viable, and solar is useless for half the year.

Also, there are still challenges with wind and large areas being under anticyclone conditions (like half of Europe or half the US) where wind is essentially non-existent yet there is oppressive heat. Solar can only help for a few hours a day, and for that make a big difference you need huge capacity to offset the lack of wind. This is one of the reasons why the French Academy of Sciences recently issued a statement regarding the importance of nuclear power in fighting global warming.

Re:So use what you have

[conquistadorst]

It's almost as if people want a single answer to any problem instead of understanding the complexities of multiple answers in most situations. There are after all over 20 different types of hammers, they all do something better than the other. Not every hammer is ideally suited for every situation.

Re:So use what you have

[Anonymous Coward]

"There are large sections of the far north where its not viable, and solar is useless for half the year."

Then don't live there?

Re:So use what you have

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who lives in the mountains: please no more hydro storage.

It's energy efficient and relatively cheap, but drowning entire valleys to power the cities is an ecological and social disaster. Supercapacitors and the like aren't quite there yet, but hopefully they will be soon.

I don't mind windmills everywhere; I think they actually look quite nice, and although their effect on wildlife isn't negligible it's better than a lot of the alternatives. It would be nice if the south took their fair share, but I suppose they have to put up with city arseholes more than we do, so it's a reasonable trade...

Re:So use what you have

[Anonymous Coward]

...we'll never make widespread use of internal combustion engines because they have difficulty at very high altitudes and they don't work at all underwater. Everyone who works on them has been wasting their time...
Never change, Slashdot.

Re:So use what you have

[Maury Markowitz]

> Britain is a cold, dark country so we need lots of energy at night

No you don't. The night time load is about 1/2 the daytime, and that's why it's cheaper if you're on Economy 7 and 10.

> we had to import more than 10% of our energy requirements

Canada is awash with hydro and nuclear, and we import power all the time. It makes load balancing much easier if your grid spans as wide an area as possible.

Re:So use what you have

[rickb928]

As someone who missed being able to fish for anadromous species, please, no more hydro. Impoundment is bad enough, but barriers to spawning are just the last insult to species that have to run a gauntlet of commercial fisheries, numerically advantaged predators, and escaped cultured variants that disrupt the native, free run populations and cause spawning failures,

We are learning that hydro isn't free of negative consequences either.

Re:So use what you have

[Maury Markowitz]

> just against stupid catch all remarks that say something is better than something else or has some specific ROI without taking into account any specifics.

Like your statement, which has no specifics?

Here, anyone can do this themselves. Go to pvwatts.nrel.gov and type in a nearby location. Change the system size to 1 kW and adjust the tilt angle - if you're above 40 degrees use 30 degrees instead of whatever they default to for California. You may also want to change the panel type to premium, because by the definitions of the program every panel made today is super-ultrapremium.

Re:So use what you have

[Anonymous Coward]

..who said that? Are you invoking a fantasy strawman to defend your techno-utopian world-view?

Never change, Space Nutter.

Re:So use what you have

[hackertourist]

The UK has 2 large pumped-storage stations, Dinorwig and Ffestiniog are good for 4 GW combined.

Re:So use what you have

[jonnyj]

> Britain is a cold, dark country so we need lots of energy at night

No you don't. The night time load is about 1/2 the daytime, and that's why it's cheaper if you're on Economy 7 and 10.

You're missing the point.

Our peak electricity demand usually falls between 5.00pm and 6.00pm in winter when people get home and switch on their electric kettles, electric cookers, electric lights, electric TVs, electric showers, electric water heating and, in many cases, supplementary electric heating. In winter it's dark at that time of day; hence my use of the term 'night'. In the winter months, it's exceptionally rare for solar power to produce any of our power needs at the time of peak demand. Typically the only exception is Christmas Day when millions of turkeys and roast potatoes are simultaneously roasted whilst the weak winter sun feebly attempts to spark a photo-voltaic reaction through dense blankets of winter cloud.

Of course energy consumption falls dramatically later in the day when people do to bed, but it also rises again when they get up before dawn. The problem comes when it's cold and dark outside but we're all wide awake inside.

Re:So use what you have

[Ed Avis]

Half of the daytime load is still "lots of energy" which is what the grandparent post said was needed at night. I agree that importing power is not a sign of failure (nor is exporting it a sign of national virility).

Re:So use what you have

[jabuzz]

Er how is it a social disaster, at least here in the UK? The next one in the UK is in Corie Glas, here is a picture

https://commons.wikimedia.org/...

So apart from a few deer, which need a minigun taking to anyway exactly who is this going to inconvenience? The other actively considered scheme in the UK that I am aware of is to expand the existing facility at Ben Cruachan, by digging a new turbine hall out the inside of the mountain and a larger dam up the mountain. There was an option for another one at Balmacaan but that has been shelved as far as I know. There is potential for some 500GWh of pumped storage in Scotland alone, which is about enough to power the UK overnight entirely from pumped storage. There is of course extra capacity in Wales and England that could be built to make going overnight easy peasy. That's before we figure in some tidal power which of course generates in the middle of the night anyway.

Re:So use what you have

[Archangel Michael]

whatever they default to for California.

California is a long N/S state, (750 miles/ 1250km). I doubt that there is a one size fits all "default" in CA

Re:So use what you have

[haruchai]

"Britain is a cold, dark country"
Britain is a country with a huge number of poorly insulated homes.
Just about every place I've lived in NorthAm is much colder for much of the year than any place in the UK

Re:So use what you have

[Anonymous Coward]

Peak power is not the problem. Capacity is; together they can hold a few _minutes_ of the UK's electric consumption. Solar at these degrees needs several hours of storage capacity (basically 4 PM sundown to midnight).

Re:So use what you have

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could build a fusion generator and have power available all day every day.

Re:So use what you have

[Anonymous Coward]

If only there were some way of capturing electrical energy... stupid git.

Re:So use what you have

[Cederic]

The night time load is about 1/2 the daytime

I'd say that's still classed as "lots of energy" and it's still a fuckload more than is generated by supposedly renewable sources.

Re:So use what you have

[Albanach]

Cruachan can run for over 20 hours at peak
Dinorwig can run for 6 hours
Ffestiniog can run for four hours

No one suggested they can meet the UK electric consumption alone, but the idea that any of these stations is only good for minutes of generation is demonstrably false.

Re:So use what you have

[Maury Markowitz]

> You're missing the point.

I responded directly to your point. Don't blame me if you choose to redefine the terms "night" and "lots". And for that matter "cold", which no one in the UK should dare to define to someone who lives in Toronto!

In any event, its besides the issue anyway. As one can see on the National Grid's website:

http://www2.nationalgrid.com/uk/Industry-information/Electricity-transmission-operational-data/Data-Explorer/

There is plenty of demand during the day that PV can take. Every watt that comes from that is one that didn't come from something else, which is generally a good thing. Sure, if you keep moving the goalposts and coming up with new reasons why "it will never work" you could probably keep us going forever. But if you want to solve actual problems, PV is certainly part of that solution, as those very same CSV files demonstrate (they even have a separate column for it). Also surprising is the amount of pumped storage.

Re:So use what you have

[angel'o'sphere]

Britain is a cold, dark country so we need lots of energy at night
Unlikely. In Germany nightly load is about 45% of daily peak. In France is about 65% I think
Chances are that you are in the same range. I never heard about country that uses more _electricity_ at night then during daytime. But there probably are some.

Re:So use what you have

[Maury Markowitz]

> Britain is a country with a huge number of poorly insulated homes.

I lived in Ireland for a year. One night I was getting cold on a windy night and noticed the drapes on the main window in the living room were blowing around. Ah ha, I just need to close the window!

The window was closed.

Re:So use what you have

[shmlco]

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

"There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance."

Re:So use what you have

[HiThere]

It's true that the cost of solar/wind power needs to be increased to include the cost of a storage system. It would still be cheaper than fission prices if you include external costs.

Fusion is a very interesting alternative. It is *potentially* a low pollution, high intensity, relatively portable power source. Whether it will actually become such is quite uncertain. But it's plausible. And while it will probably be expensive it could be used in places where other sources can't be used, e.g. a manned space station in Pluto's orbit. (You'd need a huge radiator, of course.) Lockheed's current estimate seems to be about the size of a fission plant used on a nuclear sub. I don't know what their estimated power production is, but the reports are that they've mainly done simulations rather than experiments.

So I'm quite interested in fusion power as a long term component in the solution to power needs, but for the short term I think a combination of solar and wind is better, combined with one of the proven storage methods. There are several, but they all add to the cost, so except in exceptional circumstances they aren't used.

Re:So use what you have

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get why some people keep arguing that solar isn't good in general because it doesn't work for every circumstance everywhere.

It's because some people would rather drown in a septic tank than admit that their opinions were outdated or wrong.

Re: So use what you have

[jonnyj]

I didn't say that solar doesn't work or provide any benefit. I simply drew attention to its principal drawback in a country like ours.

Instead of a meaningless argument over language, the issue is that solar energy doesn't contribute anything toward the UK's peak energy usage. It clearly reduces CO2 emissions when, during daylight hours, it allows fossil fuel power stations to be temporarily scaled back or shut down. But the capital cost of solar has to be incurred in addition to the capital cost of conventional power generation, not instead of it.

That doesn't make investment in solar power bad per se. It just makes it far more expensive than a naive assessment might suggest.

Re:So use what you have

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean those locations with cloudy skies and lots of wind? So use wind power if your specific location isn't ideal for solar. Last I checked there was no lack of wind in the North Sea.

Pretty much any area north or south of the 40th parallel has enough dark time during late fall, winter, and early spring that solar does not even come close to breaking even. Yet.

Plenty of wind power abounds in these areas, however.

Re:So use what you have

[brianerst]

Possibly because most solar / wind advocates (which I am all for) hand wave away the scope problems. Solar and wind are extremely energy diffuse - you need a lot of land to gather the amount of energy of even a modest coal or gas plant.

I'm a big fan of David MacKay's (RIP) work - Without the Hot Air. He, like me, wanted to move to a decarbonized energy economy but he worked out the hard numbers and showed the magnitude of the scope involved. Just to get to 1/6th of the current consumption of UK energy, you need wind farms covering the entirety of Wales - every square foot would need to be within a few hundred meters of a wind mill.

He advocated large-scale energy efficiency measures to try to drive down that amount, but even dropping the UK energy consumption in half (which is already nearly half of the US per capita) still results in a Wales sized wind farm supplying only a third of the power required. Solar within the UK was basically a non-starter in terms of total impact, but if you created a solar farm twice the size of Greater London in the Sahara, you could get another third. Add another 50 of the largest possible nuclear plants and you reach your no-carbon goal.

But all of this assumes enormous efficiency gains. If the efficiency stays about the same, double those numbers. Technology has gotten somewhat better since he died, but not enough to significantly change the numbers.

Re:So use what you have

[Anonymous Coward]

These are all examples relating to information processing. How does this apply to materials and energy?

Re:So use what you have

[brianerst]

And that's just 18.5% of electrical power. It doesn't cover transport, heavy industry or other things that use combustion heat directly.

Re:So use what you have

[Anonymous Coward]

In the Netherlands the water boards, responsible for the water levels, realized they can do their share by operating their pumping stations preferably when energy production exceeds consumption otherwise. I believe they get a discount from energy companies when they do that. Any sector that has some room in choosing when they consume energy can become part of a buffer mechanism that is already in place.

Re:So use what you have

[thegarbz]

Like your statement, which has no specifics?

You fail at reading comprehension. Let me quote myself for you:

Except solar definitely does not in the wonderful cloudy parts of the world near the north sea.

Now please go away.

Re:So use what you have

[Anonymous Coward]

Please stop confusing people with facts.
#alternativefacts are preferred. There is a few minutes of capacity, tops, which is why we need Trump to bring coal back. #MAGA /s

Re:So use what you have

[eionmac]

No problem with wind WHEN it is in the viable wind-speed range. My location about 40 miles from coast has available wind only 40% of time. (Many days it is much to high to operate wind turbines, they are all locked off. Other days calm. Like solar; wind is not 365/7/24 dependable so you cannot tie an ecomony or hospitals to them. There must be a 365/7/24 back up or availability of 60% of demand or we cannot access /.

Re:So use what you have

[z0idberg]

... Add another 50 of the largest possible nuclear plants and you reach your no-carbon goal.

But all of this assumes enormous efficiency gains. If the efficiency stays about the same, double those numbers. Technology has gotten somewhat better since he died, but not enough to significantly change the numbers.

Is that "50" a typo, or are you suggesting that it would take 100 of the largest possible nuclear plants to generate 1/3 of the UKs current energy usage.

Re:So use what you have

[brianerst]

You need about 50 nuclear reactors the size of Sizewell B (1.2 GWe) to get to 1/6th of the current net energy use of the UK. We're not talking about just electricity but replacing all hydrocarbons (fuel for transport and industry, embedded energy from imports). MacKay actually assumed some fairly significant efficiency gains from electrification and technological advances, enough so that those 50 plants might handle a full third.

If you want to read a short and informative (but depressing) page that goes into what you can actually achieve with renewables based on solid physics, read this,

Dyson spheres are silly fanciful ideas

[sjbe]

i think the Dyson sphere concept is cool, but I wonder if there is enough accessible mass in the solar system to build one??

No there is not. Not even close. Even if you used all the mass in the solar system, much/most of it isn't usable for such a project. The entire mass of the asteroid belt is about 4% of the mass of the moon. The entire Oort cloud might be something like 5 earth masses.

Dyson spheres are fun thought experiments but they are an utter fail unless you assume we possess a level of technology that modern humans would consider near god like.

Re:Dyson spheres are silly fanciful ideas

[Anonymous Coward]

i think the Dyson sphere concept is cool, but I wonder if there is enough accessible mass in the solar system to build one??

No there is not. Not even close. Even if you used all the mass in the solar system, much/most of it isn't usable for such a project. The entire mass of the asteroid belt is about 4% of the mass of the moon. The entire Oort cloud might be something like 5 earth masses.

Dyson spheres are fun thought experiments but they are an utter fail unless you assume we possess a level of technology that modern humans would consider near god like.

Umm, the ability to create a Dyson sphere already assumes "a level of technology that modern humans would consider near god like".

For example, how do you prevent whatever's hanging on the inside from falling into the central star?

Re:Dyson spheres are silly fanciful ideas

[drinkypoo]

For example, how do you prevent whatever's hanging on the inside from falling into the central star?

One way is to spin it. You can't use all the interior capacity for living space in that case, but you can still use it for power collection.

Re:Dyson spheres are silly fanciful ideas

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a long post to answer this, but it got lost.

Short form: spheres and rings are unstable because every actual bit of mass is simultaneously in many more unstable orbital positions than the number of stable positions it can be calculated as having. If the effective gravitational force deviates from uniform, the whole object will begin a very messy arrangement of falling in until the objects left are disperse enough to act as independent point-masses and some of them may be in valid orbits.

Just treat the whole thing as a giant live-in fusion reactor. Burn most of the solar power in an EM field strong enough to push the star slightly smaller than its original volume. The strength of the EM field also drops off with the square of the distance, but if it is set to a higher intensity than the gravitational force of the star, deviations in position will be minor compared to the EM field's normal push against itself. You can still expect some flares to get through.

Re:Dyson spheres are silly fanciful ideas

[Cederic]

You appear to be assuming we need to keep Jupiter.

Is it a mass of incandescent gas or

[sabbede]

a miasma of incandescent plasma? Should I give up on thinking This Might Be Gas?

Re:Is it a mass of incandescent gas or

[mooterSkooter]

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace...not

Re:Is it a mass of incandescent gas or

[sabbede]

Are you sure? I could have sworn it was where hydrogen is turned into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees.

Re:Is it a mass of incandescent gas or

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah! Best band ever!

Stop Converting to F

[Anonymous Coward]

We shouldn't keep enabling the US to keep using its backwards measurement system, let alone the UK or Canada where it's mixtures of metric and imperial in inconsistent ways.

Just give C, no one here should need F

Re:Stop Converting to F

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, especially at temps well above what any human is familiar with. Its like Library of congress. You can just give us the raw stat and make a related trump joke and get on with life.

Re:Stop Converting to F

[Anonymous Coward]

Imperial is better than your stupid metric when it comes to temperature. Both assign an arbitrary scale, and either is just as capable of being multiplied or divided, since they are both counted in base 10 numbering.

  There is nothing better about making 100 degrees the difference between boiling and freezing water. In fact it's worse for 2 reasons:

1. Fahrenheit gives over twice the precision when describing the weather or setting the thermostat without resorting to decimals.
2. 0 to 100 is a much better span for describing outdoor temperature in human inhabited climates. 0 is really effing cold and 100 is really effing hot. In Celsius 0 isn't cold enough to describe winter in most places without going negative while 100 is unrelatable.

It's simply an awkward scale for human relatability and that is more important in colloquial language. It's a similar reason I don't call cats "Felis catus". Yeah it's great if that helps with scientific precision. But it's stupid to push for every day vernacular.

Re:Stop Converting to F

[Anonymous Coward]

But your mother needs F in order to C.
And believe me-- she gets all she needs.

Re:First plasma is kinda like getting a new boat w

[Anonymous Coward]

You can generate plasma at home for a few bucks.

You pay that much for beans?

Molten gas?

[Anonymous Coward]

How exactly do you melt gas? This is what we get for hiding the fourth state of matter in elementary science classes. Nobody knows what plasma is.

Re:Molten gas?

[DontBeAMoran]

The different states of matter are, in order:
solid, liquid, gas, plasma, hot pocket right out of the microwave

It's not rocket science.

Re:Molten gas?

[jfdavis668]

I hate molten gas. My house is full of it, and no matter what I do it keeps coming in.

British electrical stuff???

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm thinking Lucas electrical.
Wild and wonderful, but not very practical or reliable.

A little scary when you are talking fusion on an island.
Hope it works out.

Fusion power is a success story

[Opportunist]

For at least 50 years now, commercially viable fusion power has been about 10 years away.

Re:Fusion power is a success story

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Fifty years ago, it was 30 years away. Now it's only 20 years away, we're making progress!

What's its flux capacity?

[goombah99]

It's the not the temperature it's the flux capacitance I care about. When it reaches 1.21 jigawatts look out!

Circumstance dependant

[sjbe]

And I'm not against green energy, just against stupid catch all remarks that say something is better than something else or has some specific ROI without taking into account any specifics.

We are in accord on that point.

Residential wind hasn't taken off for a simple reason, it is incredibly inefficient.

Again, whether residential wind power is useful is circumstance dependent. Sometimes it makes perfect sense as a supplement even on a home installation. I know a few local hobby farms that have smallish wind turbines which were economically sensible for their location. And who said it had to be residential? Communities can install large wind turbines and share the power. If rooftop solar doesn't work and the geography doesn't work for residential wind, then get the neighbors together for a large wind turbine. Battery systems for both home and grid scale are starting to become a real thing too.

Where my house is located (near the upper Great Lakes) wind doesn't make much sense but both grid and residential turbines make a ton of sense just 80 miles from my house and in fact are used. Conversely our local power company and a fair number of houses have solar installations which work great. Just our local geography. No one power source fits every circumstance and location.

No one here said anything like that, read through the thread again.

The claim was "Except solar definitely does not in the wonderful cloudy parts of the world near the north sea." which has nothing specifically to do with residential. Furthermore my statement was something of a more general statement aimed towards the people who invariably and unhelpfully point out that the sun doesn't shine 24/7.

What twaddle

[Maury Markowitz]

"We are unveiling the first world-class controlled fusion device to have been designed, built, and operated by a private venture. "

What complete BS. Off the top of my head I can name the KMS ICF and the Riggatron as pure private-venture reactors that pre-date this one by*decades*. The later is named for the bank that funded it.

Microwave-heated Hot Pocket

[Latent Heat]

Eww, people eat that dreck?

Re:Microwave-heated Hot Pocket

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course they eat it!

- People eat Cheet-Os;
- People eat Cheese Doodles;
- People eat Doritos;
- People eat Gummy Bears.

People will eat anything, if you put the right amount of salt, sugar and ever so tasty artificial flavours and colours in it!

100 Million isn't that hot,what's the density?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a bogus number designed to impress people. People in the nuclear business usually talk about the energy of the ions in electron volts, or keV, or MeV, etc. Back in the 40s they had the Bevatron (producing > 1 GeV) and more recently, we have things like the Tevatron (>1 TeV)

At 11,000 degrees/eV, 100 Million degrees is about 9keV - your old CRT monitor produces higher energy particles than that accelerating electrons to hit the screen.

Folks do fusion at home with Farnsworth Fusors, typically with accelerating voltages of 20-40kV, so temperatures of hundreds of millions of degrees. But the number density is low, so they don't get a lot of neutron production.

The true figure of merit is the product of density, temperature and time - lots of fast moving ions, at a high enough density, for long enough to actually react.

This is what power lines are for...

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I checked, it's about 1300 km from sunny Spain (Madrid) to cloudy London. There's a *single power line* about 1400km long from Oregon to southern California that carries >3GW. That's about 5-10% of California's peak demand (60 GW). Overall, California imports about 10-15% of its electricity. More than half is generated in state by burning natural gas.

Say you wanted to power all of California with solar: 60GW - Sunlight is about 1000W/square meter, but say you get 10% conversion efficiency, so 100W/square meter. To get 60GW, you need about 600 million square meters. A square km is a million square meters, so 600 square km. That's a square about 15 miles on a side. Think we could find a 15 mile square somewhere out in the desert?

The UK has about 60 million people, and they consume about 550 Watts per person (hey, 1 HP...), that's about 33 GW, or half of what California does.

Sunny Spain is your answer.

Re:This is what power lines are for...

[kaatochacha]

This is anecdotal, but having grown up in Southern California and visited Spain, the weather and geography seem reasonably similar. I always assumed that's why the priests setup shop here originally.

Re:First plasma is kinda like getting a new boat w

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need that. I can make a plasma a lot easier than that.

Always surprises me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Always surprises me the small sums of money been invested in fusion research. Fusion is the power of the gods. It is unlimited power. Enough power to give us the stars. Enough power to make us masters of the universe. And yet we quibble about a few dollars. Maybe the smallest of our ambitions say that we should stay here on this small clump of dirt until a speedy rock comes an wipes away our existences.

So everywhere in the UK is in N. Scotland????

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, no, that's bullshit. So your comment is pointless and does not apply to the UK because it;s more than the Shetland Isles.

Nope. I'm assuming adequate flow.

[Anonymous Coward]

When you cool something with water, that water HEATS UP and it can't be used for cooling until that cools (nobody does that). If it didn't, then where did the thermal energy go?

If you don't have enough flow, and that depends on the temperature of the water and allowed outflow, then you can't cool your power station (whether coal, oil or nuke, they generally all use steam turbines), and you have to shut it down.

That's happened to France several times. Last summer they had to get the government to waive the law so they could run their power station. Outflow too warm kills off water creatures and aids algal and other microorganism blooms.

Why are you so intollerant of others' views?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in the US we're told to be inclusive and acquiesce to others accepted methods of thinking and communication. Why aren't you held to the same standard of open communication, where we're all tollerant of others' established means of communication? We use the imperial measurement system, you use the metric system; so what. Why are you so intollerant of others' established views?

We already have it. Used for nuke and coal.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hydro, the HVDC links to France (And being added to to Denmark), both built to service the backup of nukes.

We have massive standing "storage" backing up the entire grid and have since well before solar was a blip and wind limited to pet projects. It's called "cold generation" and "spinning reserve".

We already have "our act together" for backup. Because we had to have enough to cover outages of the current grid.

So the same for all generation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then it can't be a problem with solar, can it? Why pick out solar for this problem when it exists for all sources of power?

Re:So the same for all generation?

[Chas]

I am not picking out solar.

I am picking out solar AT THIS TIME.

Assuming

A) Further improvements in efficiency (currently seen in the lab but having not made it to market yet) and form factor, both for the solar cells themselves, as well as power storage systems

B) Scaling of the industry, resulting in further price drops,

C) Elimination of subsidies so true, universal pricing can be factored.

Basically, out in the future, I can see my minor complaints about solar TOTALLY falling away. In fact, I EXPECT them to.
So, when I say "It's not "there" yet. It doesn't mean I think "there" is an unreachable end-point that isn't worth striving for.

Re:So the same for all generation?

[Anonymous Coward]

"AT THIS TIME"

So, yes, you are. Way to admit to lying in the next sentence, retard.

Re:So the same for all generation?

[Chas]

"AT THIS TIME"

So, yes, you are. Way to admit to lying in the next sentence, retard.

Wow. You normally this ignorant of grammar? Or did you have to practice?

One is not a negation of the other. It's a distinction.

I'm saying, as of right now, there are problems with solar that will continue to prevent it, in its current format, from being a truly significant fraction of the US power budget. Both on a carrier level and on a personal system level.

Given a bit more time for the technology to advance, as well as ancillary technologies (like batteries), and it'll begin being more sensible in a broader application. And THAT is when we'll see it start taking off into appreciable percentage points.

So, anything else you wish to troll about?

How will they extract electrical current?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do they plan to extract and convert electrical current from this plasmatic ring? Via water steam exchanger like in current nuclear power plants? But at 27 milion degrees C?

Re:How will they extract electrical current?

[Miamicoastguard]

With a billion thermocouples... turbines are so last century.

Climate hange sea level rise

[Anonymous Coward]

nuff said.

It's close if not already cost effective...

[scatbomb]

Seems to be pretty close though. Just running some numbers, typical UK year has 1000kWh/m2 of sunlight. A 21m^2 solar installation costs roughly 5000 pounds, and is around 18% efficient, hence it produces about 3780kWh/year and 56700kWh over a 15 year lifetime. So the total cost over the lifetime is 5000pounds/56700kWh or ~0.088pounds/kWh. Average electricity cost in UK is ~0.11pounds/kWh in 2017. If electricity price rises this seems like not such a bad deal. Am I missing something?

http://solargis.com/assets/graphic/free-map/GHI/Solargis-United-Kingdom-GHI-solar-resource-map-en.png

http://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/how-much-do-solar-panels-cost-uk

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/604131/QEP_Q416.pdf

Re: First plasma is kinda like getting a new boat

[Anonymous Coward]

Just put a lit candle in your microwave. Don't say i didn't warn you.

wtf is molten gas ?

[kjhambrick]

This simply means that the reactor was able to successfully generate a molten mass of electrically-charged gas â" plasma â" inside its core

Maybe I'm missing something here ....

[dasgoober]

For all of this work, cost and doubt, trying to heat plasma up to 100million degrees ... why not just heat water to create steam ???

Re:Maybe I'm missing something here ....

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing the part about the fission reaction. This would provide orders of magnitude more energy out than the energy put in to heat up the material.

Re:Maybe I'm missing something here ....

[Anonymous Coward]

*fusion, not fission. Sorry, it's late here.

27 million degrees Fahrenheit??

[thisisauniqueid]

Once you are no longer talking about the weather outside (or even then), why on earth would you give a temperature in Fahrenheit? Particularly for engineering and science purposes, this makes no sense.

Aftermath of my participation in this thread

[CustomSolvers2]

I have got my first Slashdot foe (one of the ACs replying to some of my comments here?)! There are only two major milestones left for me to become a proper Slashdot member: being mentioned in a conversation where I am not participating by a person not knowing me at all; and (by reaching the Slashdot's Olympus) someone creating a nickname after me! For anyone planning to do so now or in the near feature, here you have some suggestions: "CustomSolvers2IsAnIdiot", "ThisAlvaroGuyIsAFuckingMoron", "VarocarbasIsDumbAsARock" (someone creating a nickname after me by following one my suggestions would be the Olympus of the Olympus!).

Seriously now: I always try to not offend anyone and to not get involved in faith-based discussions not heading anywhere. That's why I don't want to take part in certain threads. Look at this one! So many comments! So many misunderstandings! So many people getting offended (even though this was a very mild version of my opinions!)! Warning for anyone interested in knowing a bit more about me and about my probable reaction in certain situations: I don't want to waste my time on what I consider useless like too evident stuff or people not willing to adequately understand, but will never agree on what I don't consider right either. I will try to avoid threads/people likely to provoke situations on these lines, although without ever being afraid of anyone/anything and much less of ignorance/fanaticism. Please, understand this warning as per my intention: providing some valuable information for self-conscious and reasonable people applying live-and-let-live ideas who aren’t interested in getting involved in not-beneficial-to-anyone situations.

Well over 95%.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's aluminium and glass for 97% of its mass. And much of the rest recyclable but not worth the cost rather than waste.

Re:Well over 95%.

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

Thanks - I assume you mean for solar panels, yeah? Is the remainder dangerous or is it reasonable to treat it like normal trash?