More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

https://www.growthbusiness.co.uk/more-invested-in-nuclear-fusion-in-last-12-months-than-past-decade-2560528/

by bilsbie • 4 years ago

692 662 4 years ago

growthbusiness.co.uk

Digital283• 4 years ago

This is great news.

That said, what the literal fuck -- we've previously been investing 1/850,000th of global GDP in one of 4-5 truly promising energy technologies while the world burns before our eyes?

paul80808• 4 years ago

Exactly. The past of fusion has been grim, but the future looks (probably) bright. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-f...

toveja6• 4 years ago

I wouldn't say the (recent) past was grim, but rather that the technology to build an _affordable_ commercial device had not yet been developed yet. We designed and built ITER at such a large size and cost (€20 billion) since high temperature superconducting magnets were not yet available.

In the meantime, all of the experimental devices (JET, AUG, EAST, DIII-D, etc.,) have been gathering evidence on how to operate ITER when it is turned on, and not necessarily focused on achieving breakeven.

nilsbunger• 4 years ago

This was an awesome overview of current state of fusion attempts!

barkingcat• 4 years ago

the profits in 1 year from silicon valley can solve world hunger by buying every single man woman child 3 meals a day, every day.

_Algernon_• 4 years ago

source?

throwaway71271• 4 years ago

700 million people live in poverty

3 meals per day, 5$ per meal for 365 days is 3,832,500,000,000$

stuartd2• 4 years ago

Still doesn’t stop the world burning, though

sacrosancty3• 4 years ago

Fusion isn't a silver bullet even if it works. If it costs more than solar+battery then it's worthless.

Teever• 4 years ago

Not at all.

There will always be places where solar+battery isn't viable. Northern Canada and Alaska come to mind.

LegitShady2• 4 years ago

its not worthless either way. plenty of places that dont get large amounts of solar radiation during some seasons where fusion could be useful

grej• 4 years ago

Totally disagree. Solar + battery will never match the energy density of fusion.

paconbork2• 4 years ago

One advantage of other technologies over solar is space efficiency. Obviously we're not physically lacking in space to install solar, but when even solar farms installed in the desert can be shut down by "climate activists" [1], then we really need all the help we can get

[1] https://apnews.com/article/technology-government-and-politic...

otikik2• 4 years ago

I agree the cost is important. I disagree in the breaking point at witch it’s “not worth it”. To me, assuming our battery tech doesn’t find a similar breakthrough before, if fusion reaches one order of magnitude above the cost of solar, it is worth it, as a backup. Better to have it and use it when there’s clouds instead of coal or gas

belorn3• 4 years ago

battery for solar installation is at the point where between 2-6hrs of capacity can be economical viable.

Maybe in a few more years/decade/s we will reach a point where in some places in the world it will be economical viable to have exclusive solar and battery, and that assuming prices will continue to drop and that there won't be any resource or physical limitations. Then we got colder climates where solar + battery is unlikely to ever become viable. Exports of solar generated green hydrogen could solve that assuming that the technology for that becomes cheap enough.

Multiple different directions where specific technologies could be economical dominant in the future.

tremon• 4 years ago

No, this is way too shortsighted. Fusion allows us to use other energy sources than our own sun, which means it's essential for viable space missions, and we won't need to compete with the rest of nature (including agriculture!) for our energy needs.

Hydroponics with fusion technology allows us to produce food without relying on the sun at all. I'd say that alone is worth the investment.

edem• 4 years ago

False. At this point environmental impact trumps everything else in my mind.

danaris3• 4 years ago

Solar + battery isn't much help for

- under the earth

- under the ocean

- deeper into space

Granted, we don't need a lot of power in these places right now. But if we have the option...then maybe we'll find some good ways to use it.

rainsford• 4 years ago

I'd love to see viable nuclear fusion power, but the lack of more investment at the moment doesn't really seem unreasonable. As you said, there are a number of other green alternatives, including traditional nuclear fission power, that have proven they can be real alternatives to fossil fuels and that would benefit from continued investment.

Unless I've missed something, nuclear fusion meanwhile has yet to demonstrate realistic commercial power generation, even as a proof of concept or a complete path to get to that point. In other words, more research is definitely worthwhile, but it also seems possible it will be a dead end at least in the near term. It's hard to argue prioritizing that over other things that have been generating real commercial power for decades. I'm all in favor of an all-of-the-above approach, but prioritization almost always has to be the reality.

Digital283• 4 years ago

It's an equal level of insanity that technologies like thorium breeder reactors haven't been getting whole number percentages of first world budgets, especially considering how extremely high of a priority climate change has become and how costly the alternatives (e.g., disaster mitigation) are getting.

otikik2• 4 years ago

Compare that to what we have invested in crypto globally and weep.

Noughmad• 4 years ago

Compare it to what we have invested in killing each other, and despair.

joe_name• 4 years ago

It's only top 5 most promising if you're heavily weighting based on theoretical upside. We should always be taking moonshots but for climate change and global warming we need to be taking active steps yesterday, and for that fusion shouldn't even be on the list. Fission + some renewables is all we need anyway for almost everything, and carbon capture/removal can take care of stuff that will likely need to rely on fossil fuels moving forward, like aircraft. It's not a matter of way, just will.

tsimionescu11• 4 years ago

If you look more into it, it's not clear at all that fusion is actually a promising source of power. None of the currently contemplated technologies have any realistic chance of producing power anywhere near competitively in cost, even ignoring the huge research costs left to get there (no currently planned fusion experiment has any hope of producing more power than it consumes).

ac29• 4 years ago

no currently planned fusion experiment has any hope of producing more power than it consumes

ITER [1] is expected to produce more thermal energy than it consumes and is currently under construction. No electricity though.

The follow up plant, DEMO [2], should produce electricity (750MW).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant

more_corn• 4 years ago

What if I told you commercially viable fusion power has been 10 years away for the last 40 years? What if I told you it always will be?

Investment in something that might not pay off is wise if it does, and foolish if it doesn’t.

orzig3• 4 years ago

I think the people who said “10 years away “we’re assuming it would get actual serious investment. I would argue that this is year 1

api• 4 years ago

The world burning is the basis of the economy for dozens of petrostates and some of the world’s largest corporations.

no_wizard• 4 years ago

I’d love to see a Manhattan project for nuclear fusion research. Just pour money into it until we crack it. I think out of all the energy alternatives it’s the most game changing.

ajsnigrutin• 4 years ago

On one hand, you had "traditional" companies (oil, coal, gas,...) lobbying against it, and on the other hand, you had the "green" organizations lobbying (and protesting) against it.

champtar• 4 years ago

And if you combine both hands you get Greenpeace energy

TaylorAlexander• 4 years ago

I hate to say it, but this is the result of fossil fuel interests running the largest [1] economy in the world. We will literally spend 1 trillion dollars a year on war in the middle east and associated commitments but couldn't bother to spend a few billion on fusion research. Absurd.

[1] until recently

bryanrasmussen2• 4 years ago

I can't remember who said it but I remember reading a quote one time to the effect that the man who invented a new form of energy for the world without also inventing a new heat sink would be history's greatest monster. Not sure I agree, but does give one pause if prone to pessimism as I am.

formerkrogemp• 4 years ago

Perhaps this was referring to humanity's use of fossil fuels?

kadoban• 4 years ago

I don't get it. Why would a new form of energy need a new heat sink?

Wouldn't any energy we can realistically generate be a drop in the bucket compared to what the Sun throws at us every second? And even if not, what would a heat sink do about it? I think I'm missing something.

AtlasBarfed3• 4 years ago

It is doubtful that fusion will even be cheaper than old-crappy-PWR-fission.

It is very very very doubtful it will beat wind/solar as they continue to drop in cost, at least not for probably... 40 years. We're looking at 10-20 years to a viable commercial design and construction.

I place fusion like next-gen fission: worthy of continued investment in research and maybe some subsidized consumer plants (if/when fusion becomes viable).

Even with viable fusion, there will likely be degradation/radioactivity of the power generation cores from fast neutrons and other problems.

eatonphil• 4 years ago

The article doesn't seem to mention why exactly but I'm guessing it's some combination of 1) visible climate change (extreme heat, wildfires, drought, etc.) so people want better energy sources and 2) the mayhem Russia started seeing as it is one of the bigger energy providers.

Or has there been anything else?

bawolff• 4 years ago

Better high temp super conductor lowering barrier to entry maybe? (im pretty ignorant of this field)

ISL• 4 years ago

The really big deal in the last decade has been better magnets -- many of the "novel" approaches attracting recent funding are probably doomed to fail, but the MIT-associated consortia that simply aspire to building better tokamaks with modern magnets look encouraging.

Filligree• 4 years ago

Some breakthroughs in plasma modelling, too. https://www.sciencealert.com/physics-breakthrough-as-ai-succ...

drtgh• 4 years ago

Interesting. By that link, it seems they was able to stabilizing 'droplets' where two plasmas co-existed simultaneously inside Tokamak.

I wonder if they thought if it would be possible to accelerate such plasma droplets in opposite directions for to take Helion's aproach [1] if needed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29119180

ianburrell• 4 years ago

REBCO high-temperature superconductors have potentially changed the game. They can support stronger fields which means smaller devices for same confinement. Commercial production seems to only started in the last decade.

MIT's research, spun out as CFS, may be prompting other startups.

epicureanideal• 4 years ago

Is there any fundamental limit we’re hitting on magnetic fields or might we see another 10-100x increase in field strength in the future?

SkyMarshal• 4 years ago

Actual advances in fusion and related energy generation tech. For example, at least one startup, Helion, is developing a way to generate electricity directly from the fusion reaction and magnetic field, instead of indirectly by heating water into steam that then turns a turbine generator. The increased efficiency from that might enable it produce net electricity. And quite frankly, it's way past time that we advanced beyond converting energy -> heat -> motion -> electricity, and shortened that cycle to energy -> electricity.

whatshisface• 4 years ago

Magnetohydrodynamic generators were invented for coal plants 70 years or so ago but turbines are more efficient.

V__• 4 years ago

There seems to be a lot of innovative ideas and a lot of them seem to be quite doable, which is interesting for investors. One I really like is FirstLightFusion [1]. They are using a ballistic system to shoot at a small fuel cube, which creates a fusion reaction and then use the generated heat to power a turbine. There is a nice behind the scene video with some interview from FullyCharged [2].

[1] https://firstlightfusion.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1RsHQCMRTw

tsimionescu11• 4 years ago

Inertial confinement fusion is orders of magnitude less likely to ever be economically viable than magnetic confinement. The targets (and projectiles in this case) will require such high precision to be able to achieve fusion in the moment of impact that it is virtually impossible to imagine this could ever be done economically.

Further, you will need huge quantities of such targets and projectiles, as the power plant will have to destroy them at a rate of one per second or so, in constant operation. So even for a single day, you will require 86,400 targets and as many projectiles - each being a marvel of precision engineering. Also, there is a good chance that you wouldnt even be able to recycle the material from spent targets to make new ones, as they will become radioactive from being in contact with the fusing plasma.

Essentially an ICF plant would actually be running on the world's most expensive fuel, and consuming it at an extraordinary rate.

oconnor663• 4 years ago

Those things might explain some rising investment in alternative energy in general, but I don't think either them would be specific to fusion.

asdf123a• 4 years ago

missing 3) tons of public funding lead to recent advances that the private sector is ready to take over and profit.

capitalism innovation as usual.

peter303• 4 years ago

MIT's SPARC figured out how to manufacture high temperature superconductor magnets. That shrinks the size of the magnets and power consumption.

mrshadowgoose• 4 years ago

The taste of immense profit is in the air. In the minds of potential investors, fusion is no longer a "lol maybe in 50 years" technology. Advances in magnetic modeling and magnet technology have resulted in cheaper, easier-to-develop alternatives to the classic Tokamak. Timelines are now believably "this decade" for demonstration reactors.

Energy production/harvesting is a foundational element of our civilization. Literally all of the comforts of modern society require the expenditure of some form of energy. Any entity that develops an unlimited, clean and cheap source of energy essentially has access to a money printer.

Invictus0• 4 years ago

If nuclear fusion were ever developed, I imagine the government would seek to seize its patent protection under the Invention Secrecy Act.

scaramanga2• 4 years ago

The first part, the taste of immense profit, sure. But the idea that people are thinking of profits on the timescale of "this decade" is almost laughable, given the situation we are already in with climate change.

A much more rational explanation would be "they are trying to grab as much cash as they can right now, for as long as people believe that this is a thing that we should be doing, and may be possible", regardless of whether it's a good idea (it isn't), or whether it would work (doesn't look like it). But sure, maybe they are completely sincere and really believe in it all, who knows?

But the issue isn't just that "all of the comforts of modern society require the expenditure of some form of energy" it's also the case that "exponentially increasing energy expenditure is just accelerating the rate at which we are asset stripping and polluting the earth" and the latter continues to be true even if we stop emitting CO2.

I think it should now be apparent to all that comfort-seeking and suicide are essentially the same process (ask any addict), at least for the definitions of "comfort" that our current political and economic system are organised around. Of course, quite a lot of people still do not experience a lot of "comfort" even with the practically limitless energy that we have from fossil fuels.

Edit: sorry for the ramble, but to summarize, I think you give people too much credit to imagine they can design such a complex money printer with a 10 year plan, and if they could plan to that timescale, they are probably going to see that society so far in to collapse by then, that even with infinite energy, there will not be much value in the money that it prints.

credit_guy• 4 years ago

In the minds of potential investors, fusion is no longer a "lol maybe in 50 years" technology.

No. Potential investors are used to extremely skewed investments results for startups. Most startups fail, but some of those that succeed, succeed spectacularly.

A successful fusion startup is almost guaranteed to have a spectacular success, something that would make Facebook or Uber or Tesla look like small potatoes. Given that, a VC is ok with investing in it even if they think the likelihood of success is only 1%. They would not if they think that likelihood is only 0.01%, because at that level estimates are not reliable (who's to say it's 0.01% and not 0.00001% ?). But if there's a reasonable argument that P(success) ~ 1%, then it's a no-brainer to invest, because even a mistake of 2 orders of magnitude would still result in a positive return.

For the rest of us though, the "fusion is 50 years in the future" can simply be replaced with "there's a 99% chance fusion will not be done in the next 50 years". Or, what the heck, just leave it at "fusion is 50 years in the future" and you'll be much more right than wrong.

tsimionescu11• 4 years ago

Any entity that develops an unlimited, clean and cheap source of energy essentially has access to a money printer.

Well, one thing that should be clear to anyone watching the space is that fusion will be neither unlimited, clean nor cheap. At the very least, not with any approach being looked at today.

First of all, being based on state-of-the-art science and tech, it's clear that it cannot be cheap for another 20-30 years even if it was working today.

Secondly, fusion reactors will produce large quantities of radioactive waste, probably larger than fission reactors, because everything that comes in close proximity to the reactor will be bombarded by 30+ times as many neutrons than in a fission reactor (or 5x-20x as many for DD fusion), and much higher energy neutrons at that, making it brittle and radioactive. Most of the reactor components are expected to need changing every 2-4 years, by which time they will be radioactive waste. Not to mention, fusion plants will work with large amounts of tritium, which is notoriously hard to contain, making tritium leaks all but guaranteed. So, definitely not clean.

Thirdly, fusion reactors require large amounts of tritium, which is virtually non-existent on Earth and must be created in fission power plants. The neutrons from the fusion reaction can theoretically also be used to recycle tritium (when hitting the lithium blanket), but you would have to recapture 100% of the tritium produced this way to recreate fuel, which is not possible. So, to run a fusion reactor you will be limited by tritium availability, and that will mean you also need a small fission reactor, and that in turn requires uranium - so, not really that unlimited.

Not to mention, even Deuterium is not actually that easy to obtain, as you need to either get it from fossil fuels (the way it is mostly obtained today) or from water hydrolysis, which is another waste of your produced energy.

Overall, fusion seems extremely unlikely to be an economically viable source of energy in the coming decades. Every new reactor will require massive investments, it will waste a good portion of its output to keep itself running (powering the superconducting magnets, pumping coolant, void pumping the reactors, water hydrolisis, lithium processing to extract the tritium etc). It will require highly trained engineers to design, build and maintain. It will have a high risk of catastrophic damage to the reactor itself, easily vaporizing much of the investment in an instant if the magnetic containment of the plasma fails, for example, or melting down spectacularly if the cooling system fails. Virtually all components of the reactor, including the high tech magnets, will require constant replacement as they become brittle from the neutron bombardment - and all the old parts will require expensive radioactive storage for at least a few decades to centuries.

scaramanga2• 4 years ago

A much more reasonable first guess would be "the desire to increase the next-quarter earnings of industries which make political contributions." Which is the main driving force of all public investment. If politicians can take advantage of climate chaos and put it down as part of their "climate bullshit, whatever" policies then they can get a larger pay day, so why not?

Here in Korea for example, they are building out the worlds most dangerous fission reactors because domestic heavy industry, concrete companies, and so on are extracting very good earnings from that. Meanwhile, Korea is the leader in offshore wind (but only to export to other countries, and it's all manufactured in Thailand) presumably the lack of interest in the Korean government in stimulating domestic demand, and the cheap labour in Thailand are factors, along with oil prices, in why it is so cost-effective.

A belief in the free market would lead us to expect that eventually the green options would become just as corrupt and be able to hold the world hostage and capture policymakers, but it does not seem to have happened yet, maybe there is just a lead time for industries to develop their capacities for political corruption?

greenthrow• 4 years ago

I don't believe the hype. From what I can see fusion still isn't anywhere near being a viable source of energy, other than in the form or solar power.

wetpaws• 4 years ago

So was solar and nuclear.

twarge• 4 years ago

Agree. There have been no breakthroughs. The projects getting funding are just different enough to be not immediately disprovable and continue to spectacularly overpromise without solving any of the real problems. Chamber embrittlement? Nuclear waste? (activation of the apparatus by the 12 MeV fusion netrons is a lot worse than the 100 keV fission neutron.)

JumpCrisscross• 4 years ago

have been no breakthroughs

Magnet miniaturisation and CADs like the stellarator [1] refute this.

With respect to waste and embrittlement, those are simpler consumables and waste products than fossil fuels and atmospheric emissions.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator

pfdietz48• 4 years ago

Some of the efforts you hear about actually are immediately disprovable.

felixmeziere12• 4 years ago

Yes, it will be for the second half of this century, if we make it there.

Side comment: fusion can be seen as a solution to many of our worst problems. But another way to see it is that without a complete change in what societies value and how they act (i.e. a cultural/philosophical/storytelling change), fusion is just going to increase the rate at which we are transforming this planet into a giant pile of garbage, whether its solid and liquid garbage (leading to wiping out 60% of wildlife in 50 years, spilling the phosphorus of our soils into the sea -making them sterile and killing life in the sea- etc etc), or gas garbage (typically greenhouse gases).

We do that by extracting resources nature concentrated for us for free for millions of years and dispersing them all around in our buildings, phones, playstations, fertilizers, fuel etc.

As long as Black Friday is the highlight of the year, there are reasons to think fusion might be more dangerous than helpful.

It’s good to have an increasing ability to transform matter, as long as you are using that ability in the right direction.

ambrozk• 4 years ago

I don't know what makes you so so confident about your prediction, and what you've written about fusion's relationship to waste is, I'm pretty sure, inaccurate.

Nition2• 4 years ago

Great point that I hadn't considered before. Like how adding more lanes to a road just creates more traffic. I hope things don't go that way but I can see it happening.

idlehand2• 4 years ago

Commercial fusion power probably makes it more economical to spend more energy recycling materials.

goodpoint5• 4 years ago

fusion is just going to increase the rate at which we are transforming this planet into a giant pile of garbage

Thank you for saying this. Unlimited almost-free energy makes energy-saving measures moot, including building insulation. People would heat or cool even open spaces with little regard for the environment.

And all the heat is eventually released into the atmosphere.

Consumerism would be supercharged as well. Indeed we need a huge shift of societal priorities.

(Needless to say, when I point that out HN downvoted me. Here technology is always and only good.)

edit: there you go, already downvoted at -2 for saying the same thing as the parent.

slothtrop8• 4 years ago

fusion is just going to increase the rate at which we are transforming this planet into a giant pile of garbage

That rate does not scale negatively with energy prices. It scales positively with population, in the West.

We could just accelerate towards stagnant global population growth. Improving economies and access to contraceptives in poor nations could do that. Everybody wins, except the very richest.

Coercing the population to stop consuming is a non-starter. We could also create stronger incentives and regulations surrounding waste. There are lots of new biodegradable tech companies now, to replace plastics, for instance.

NewEntryHN• 4 years ago

other than in the form or solar power

and wind and hydro

robotresearcher2• 4 years ago

and fossil fuels, stored for a while.

magila• 4 years ago

Where is this $1.9 billion over the last decade figure coming from? ITER alone has surely burned through more than double that.

Edit: Sounds like it might only be counting investment in private companies.

Apocryphon• 4 years ago

Crazy to imagine what would’ve happened if in the past it had been more than sub-fusion never.

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

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fus...

shadowofneptune2• 4 years ago

I've known about this chart for a long while, but recently I've become skeptical of it. What says that fusion would be a success even if that level of funding was reached? The most mature fusion reactor being built, ITER, is gigantic and it's not clear how it could be made cheaper or miniturized.

danaris3• 4 years ago

That's part of the problem with fairly basic research like what we're putting into fusion. Without making the investment, doing the science and engineering to actually study these things and learn how they work and how we can do them better, we won't know how or whether they can be made cheaper, miniaturized, etc.

This isn't the same kind of problem that most of us are used to dealing with in our daily lives—where the fundamental components, and the fundamental science, that make it all up are well-understood and fairly mature, and what we have to do is come up with creative ways to apply it. This is the kind of "we don't know if any specific avenue of research will ever pay back a positive monetary ROI, but pursuing them is important anyway" science that we need to be doing with or without fusion as a specific goal, because over time, it will produce years or decades of silence, punctuated by small, incremental improvements in our understanding of the universe...and then an amazing breakthrough like practical, commercially-viable fusion power.

But only if we are willing to patiently fund it through those years or decades of boring stuff.

DennisP7• 4 years ago

Actually it's quite clear: use REBCO superconductors.

Tokamak output scales with the square of reactor volume and the fourth power of magnetic field strength. Double the field, 16X the output.

Modern REBCO superconductors can support much stronger magnetic fields than ITER will manage. That's why CFS is building a reactor using REBCO which is much smaller than ITER, but should have the same performance. It'll be half the size of JET, which was built in a year. They're planning a net power attempt in 2025 and a lot of independent fusion researchers think they'll succeed.

CFS is a spinoff from MIT, whose Alcator C-Mod had more powerful magnets than any other tokamak in the world.

pfdietz48• 4 years ago

That chart was about a proposed crash program for tokamaks. It was put together based on an optimistic (and disproved) idea about how tokamak physics would scale. Had that program actually been funded, it would have been a guaranteed failure.

rbanffy• 4 years ago

I’m glad, but I hope we still invest in Plan-B’s because we are literally betting our civilisation on moving away from carbon.

timmg• 4 years ago

I wonder how this compares to the amount of money invested in crypto startups in the past few years. (I don't mean the value of crypto or the amount of money that was traded into it -- just the amount VCs invested into crypto startups.)

I don't know if that means people that allocate capital think crypto has a better chance of changing the world than nuclear fusion -- or if it's something else. But it is strange to compare the funding of each.

rjmunro2• 4 years ago

Not that it has a better chance of changing the world, just that it has a better chance of making them some money back in a reasonable time.

missedthecue2• 4 years ago

There are probably a lot more founders with crypto ideas than founders with fusion ideas.

ricardobeat2• 4 years ago

That would be an argument for having more investment into fusion.

kortilla2• 4 years ago

or if it's something else

It’s something else. Many people want their money invested in something with a good risk adjusted returns. Only a tiny subset of investors invest significant portions of their capital into significantly lower expected value outcomes because they like the field.

meowkit• 4 years ago

Apples to oranges. Investments are compared by their up front costs and rates of returns.

Crypto up front costs are dirt cheap as most of it is open source software, and in a bull mania the rates of returns are astronomical.

Nuclear is a mature industry with R&D for fusion that has some of the largest up front capital costs on the planet for cutting edge materials, controls, land, and safety requirements. To top that off, the rates of returns are abysmal and take forever even compared to coal plants.

ricardobeat2• 4 years ago

The total of crypto VC investments for 2021 was reported at $33B.

ushakov• 4 years ago

i wonder how this compares to the amount of money invested in autonomous driving startups

mbgerring• 4 years ago

One novel approach to clean energy deployment would be to spend some of this money to deploy enough solar, wind and batteries to provide the enormous amounts of energy needed for all these sub-breakeven fusion experiments. Then, whether we get a viable fusion reactor or not, we all win.

kortilla2• 4 years ago

Maybe we should fraud these people trying to invest in a better solution with worse ones!

ChadNauseam• 4 years ago

It seems more reasonable to me to try to figure out what would be a reasonable amount of money to spend on these projects independently, instead of tying the amount of clean energy deployment to the amount clean energy research for no apparent benefit

willis9368• 4 years ago

We've spent far more on solar than fusion. Why divert the nth dollar rather than diversify?

https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2018/11/f57/Exami...

pfdietz48• 4 years ago

The problem with that argument is that it could also be used to justify diverting some money to invest in perpetual motion machines.

The likelihood of the technology paying off has to enter into it somehow.

mkl95• 4 years ago

Good news. But let's not forget that fission is the present and near future of nuclear energy. And it just works.

toveja6• 4 years ago

To those interested in discussion outside of HN, there is a discord community [0] with professional, academic, and hobby fusion afficionados.

[0] https://discord.gg/Rcum9zkBtg

LegitShady2• 4 years ago

Discord is a black hole in the internet. People have discussions you can't search for and isn't indexed on Google etc.

It's convenient but it's worse than a forum for creating knowledge people can search through later. It's a shame it's used for such interesting discussion.

toveja6• 4 years ago

Thanks for pointing that out. What would be your suggestion/alternatives?

_dain_• 4 years ago

People have discussions you can't search for and isn't indexed on Google etc.

this is a feature not a bug. the real problem is lack of user ownership over data, not lack of searchability.

shadowofneptune2• 4 years ago

It's a chat room. The conversations are disposable, it is part of the medium. Having a record of discussion is not really what interests me about instant messaging.

alexnewman• 4 years ago

Finally. I wonder if what's going on in ukraine has helped investment.

TT-392• 4 years ago

Maybe it is only 19 years in the future this time

thriftwy2• 4 years ago

I believe that there might be a way to have a compact and efficient fusion reactor which we just don't know yet (and a time traveller would be able to "hold my beer" us into it)

For example, there's this plasma-producing microwave + cut grape trick, what if you use something like this to supply really hot deuterium plasma?

jleahy2• 4 years ago

Then you get super hot deuterium plasma, which is unconfined and so won't fuse.

thriftwy2• 4 years ago

Maybe you can generate it in one place and confine it in the other? Not dissimilar to how ICEs work. Produce plasma and then burn (fuse) it in pulses.

willis9368• 4 years ago

That's actually exactly what existing MCF machines do. The gyrotron (ECRH, same as a microwave's magnetron) resonant frequency is tuned to the confinement field strength of the plasma so it absorbs the energy. On top of that there's a vacuum so air doesn't pull all the heat away and a magnetic bottle so the plasma doesn't touch the wall. Fusion is very far away from happening spontaneously on Earth.

fnordpiglet• 4 years ago

It’s happening!

rjmunro2• 4 years ago

There was also a breakthrough in late 2021, when researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET) facility in Oxford managed to release a record-breaking 59 megajoules of fusion

59 megajoules in useful units is 16kWh, less than 2 days use of my house. That's the biggest fusion reaction ever.

chris_va• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba ... was slightly larger than that.

Anyway, 59MJ isn't terrible if you can run it at 60Hz. Of course, I agree that the reality is a bit far away.

toveja6• 4 years ago

59 megajoules of sustained energy ^over the course of a few seconds^.

Ideally this energy output would be sustained for days within ITER.

JET is not designed to do this, as it has a copper magnet system, which means if you try to sustain such a plasma (confined with around 5 T magnet and around 2 MA plasma current) for longer than a few seconds, you would melt the magnet.

Edit: ITER would operate at 5-10 T, and around 15-20 MA plasma current.

tsimionescu11• 4 years ago

Note that these are 59MJ of energy released by the fusion reaction. No attempt was made to actually catch them. And even if they had been captured, they would not have been able to power the magnets + cooling systems used to confine the plasma. We are very very far away from actually producing even 1W of usable fusion power.

DeIonizedPlasma• 4 years ago

59MJ over the short period of 7s, equivalent to 8.5 MW (https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/3722). A research reactor (not built to be a power plant) that is still capable of powering over 20,000 households while running isn't really as underwhelming as you seem to imply it is.

tiborsaas• 4 years ago

The first human flight lasted 12 seconds, don't judge achievements by the numbers.

bloodyplonker22• 4 years ago

It means we are closer to success when we see a lot more VC funding of nuclear fusion versus government (taxpayer) funding. VCs don't have the timeline or ability to lose money without much consequence or blame like the government does.

acidburnNSA29• 4 years ago

It could also mean there are lots more rich people who want to spend money on a gamble to "save the world" and don't care to do sufficient due diligence to dig below the fancy slide decks they get spoon fed in the board room every quarter.

lven7• 4 years ago

You're better off donating money to fusion companies directly than paying taxes to the government. Wish musk had donated his taxesto companies last year instead.

ClumsyPilot2• 4 years ago

If VC's are so great, they could have invested in fusion 20 years ago and presumably they'd have it solved by now. Why didn't they?

They didn't because they don't have the guts to create entire new branch of science.

Once the government has built research laboratiries, trained physicists and engineers, built prototypes, waited untill those engineers come up with viables plans, then the VC are ready to swoop in and take all the credit.

Thats fine if Venture capital can't make 60 year investments. Whats not cool, is everyone else buying the narrative that we don't need government funding for fundamental research, that VCs will solve all problems in the world as long as we let them run wild and don't tax them

dreamcompiler• 4 years ago

There's a huge amount of hype in fusion these days. Companies are getting big investments just by saying "we're over unity." None of their investors will recoup any money.

Getting above unity is important but it's still a very long way from systemic over unity of the entire lifecycle of the process that turns fusion into electricity on the grid. And that simply won't happen in my lifetime or most of your lifetimes.

What will likely happen during our lifetimes is we develop large-scale electricity storage mechanisms. Together with decentralized microgrids, storage will enable most of the world's electricity to be generated by renewables. The sun is a giant fusion engine, and it's the only fusion engine that will be practical for us during at least the next 50 years.

acchow2• 4 years ago

Private Investments usually need returns within a 10-15 year time scale. Once practical fusion gets to that point, we should expect money to come pouring in which will help make it a reality.

We’re seeing something similar happening in self driving cars

Terr_• 4 years ago

My pet theory is that it's no coincidence the self-driving-car investment craze started the same time the baby-boom generation started to enter "grandpa can't drive himself anymore" territory.

In other words, I suspect it's not fueled by a technology trend, but by trying to capture a potential customer trend.

jillesvangurp• 4 years ago

I think investments are happening because recent progress in this space is indicating that this might in fact happen in the next decade or so. The cliche that fusion reactors are perpetually 30 years away, might have actually been correct up to about 20 years ago.

There are no guarantees here of course, but there are now quite a few companies acting like they are going to get their first test plants up and running in the next ten or so years. From there to commercialization is of course still a long and risky path. But it's very different once you can prove that the process works and more energy comes out then goes in.

As you say, fusion reactors will have to compete with absolutely dirt cheap solar, wind, and storage. As well as with future fission plants that may or may not become cheaper than the current state of the art (which is super expensive). Just getting things working is not going to be good enough. It will need to work cheaply.

tsimionescu11• 4 years ago

The biggest problem to take any of these companies seriously, even the MIT spin-off, is that no one has ever attempted yet to extract a single watt of electricity from the fusion reaction. The part where the thermal energy is actually converted to electrical power is still entirely at the theoretical design level. While it is nowhere near as complex scientifically as actually containing the plasma, it will still be a huge engineering challenge.

When these companies come and claim that their better magnets will allow them to supply power to the grid 3 years from now when they haven't even arrived where JET is yet, so they haven't even started in the unknowns of actually running the reactor continously and extracting power from it, it is clear that they are gifting with their timeline. And if they are willing to lie about the timeline, I don't see why anyone believes them about the fundamental technology as well.

pydry• 4 years ago

The "30 years away" thing assumed investment.

It's quite weird to think that seeing a potentially endless source of free energy we wouldnt be throwing a trillion dollars or so at it but thats humanity for you.

Scientists were similarly optimistic about space exploration after landing on moon shortly before NASA's budget dwindled.

tim333• 4 years ago

Helion are planning for systemic returns over unity quite soon really.

dx034• 4 years ago

Any green gas could be that storage. With solar power around $.01/kwh in some sunny places, converting that energy into storable gas/liquids can be profitable even at low efficiency rates. And we already have an existing network to transport, store and burn gases. Converting those from natural gas to other gases is likely easier than rebuilding everything.

From all that I read, Ammonia is a prime candidate. Especially because there's an existing large market for it, so producers don't have to bet on a new market to ramp up production. But there's no real reason why some power plants, ships and maybe even trucks couldn't be driven by Ammonia in the future.

borissk2• 4 years ago

When all these starups fail to deliver anything of value in a few years, the investors will disappear.

Commercial fusion power is such a huge challenge IMHO there are only two ways we can get there currently: ITER/DEMO (if it doesn't get overcome by bureaucracy and the members don't loose interest in funding it) or Elon Musk (who is probably the only person who can attract the top talent needed, motivate it to work day and night and secure the funding).

anothernewdude• 4 years ago

Musk doesn't attract talent - the wealth does that, Elon himself is a negative.

dotnet004• 4 years ago

Yes, clearly that's why SpaceX was successful in an industry where the adage was "How do you become a millionaire in aviation? Start with a billion!".

pfdietz48• 4 years ago

ITER/DEMO won't deliver value either.

borissk2• 4 years ago

Why?

sva_• 4 years ago

Something I wondered about fusion is, where does all that 'excess energy' go?

I mean don't understand me wrong, it is obvious that is a much better form of energy release than all the other forms of energy production we have; but let us consider we manage to gain energy from fusion, the electricity released still releases heat, so how does it dissipate, if we have near-infitite energy, and anyone can spend as much as they want?

orzig3• 4 years ago

It is a valid question, but to put it in perspective, the sun bathes us in dramatically more kWh than we need to annually power the world every few minutes. So fusion would be a drop in the bucket at a global scale.

adrian_b4• 4 years ago

In the beginning, of course.

Nevertheless, the heating of the Earth puts a limit on the total usable nuclear power on Earth, both fission and fusion, it cannot be "infinite", but it must remain forever a small fraction of the power of the incoming Solar radiation, otherwise it would cause an excessive heating of the Earth by itself.

hobscoop4• 4 years ago

It'll ultimately be dissipated by infrared radiation into space. Earth receives something like 173,000 terawatts of radiation from the sun; this is equal to the amount radiated out as infrared, except for the "radiative forcing" which is the amount by which the world is heating. Radiative forcing is currently something like 1000 TW. All of human civilization is powered by something like 20 TW. If we want to stop global heating we need to use a fraction of those 20 TW to "turn the ship" of size 1000 TW.

MaxDPS• 4 years ago

I'd imagine the excess energy goes out into space.

They key difference between nuclear and fossil fuels is the emissions each generates. Fossil fuels burn into greenhouse gasses which trap in heat. If we switch to nuclear, those greenhouse gasses won't accumulate as much.

freeflight2• 4 years ago

The near-perfect vacuum of space actually makes it quite bad at absorbing heat, that's why anything we put up there, like space stations and satellites need huge radiators to keep everything cool enough to actually operate.

While thermal pollution in Earths atmosphere is a very real and relevant issue with energy generation and all kinds of other human activities; A whole bunch of French fission nuclear reactors are regularly shut/throttled down during summer heat waves due to lack of appropriate cooling.

The combination of these factors sometimes makes me wonder if the game Oxygen Not Included is a crude simulation of what we are doing to this planet. There the biggest end-game problem is the asteroid colony overheating due to creating a whole bunch of extra heat inside of it from using up fossil fuels, yet lacking any good way to actually vent all these massive amounts of extra heat from the little biosphere.

googlryas• 4 years ago

We could build a bunch of space radiators. But really this isn't something we need to think about for a while...global energy consumption is less than 1/10,000th of the energy deposited in soil and water by the sun.

joak7• 4 years ago

The total amount of waste heat is low. Thermal pollution is a local problem (rivers getting hot) but not a global issue.

jason0597• 4 years ago

I am genuinely surprised that there is so much interest in the comments here and excitement about fusion energy powering the future. Yet I see surprisingly few numbers or physics being discussed. Kind of disappointed for a forum that is supposedly technically-minded and able to speak mathematics.

There was this great MIT paper [1] published a while back that's still to be rebuked, talking about the serious technical challenges. Furthermore, there's Maury Markowitz's blogs that have been around for more than a decade showcasing why economically future can never work competitively on the grid [2].

Fusion is great science, it may eventually return a net positive in energy, but it has so many problems that make it impossible to use commercially.

[1] http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trou...

[2] https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-wi...

lven7• 4 years ago

One morea article worth reading about the con-fusion https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion

acidburnNSA29• 4 years ago

But where are the fusion neutrons? (See Voodoo Fusion [1])

[1] https://vixra.org/pdf/1812.0382v1.pdf

I'm a professional fission guy. I started out in fusion and switched to advanced fission. These days I don't see why we don't just build lots more regular old LWR fission reactors.

Imagining that somehow fusion is going to a) work, b) be cheap (fuel cost is only 5% of total nuclear fission cost so who cares), and c) not have the same stigma as fission is kind of weird in my mind.

For example, there are leaks of tiny amounts of tritium at some fission plants and people lose their minds. Fusion reactors will have many orders of mag more tritium. Will people not lose their minds just the same? Tritium is notoriously hard to contain since it's so small. It can permeate through metal like a hot knife through butter.

Also, lots of people worry about fission and nuclear weapons proliferation. So does fusion get around this? Not really. In fact it's worse. Did you know that the two materials you need to make thermonuclear weapons are tritium and plutonium? Tritium breeding is required by almost all practical fusion power plants (the other reactions are 100s to 1000s of times harder, I don't care what x random fusion CEO says, they're in it for the sweet billionaire side project money).

Plutonium is made by irradiating natural uranium from the dirt with neutrons. Practical fusion reactors have lots of neutrons. Really high energy ones too.

Anyway let's just do fission you guys. It's way easier. It has been working fine since the 1950s. It's zero carbon. Waste problem is solved (see Onkalo, and reprocessing). It net saves millions of lives by displacing air pollution. It runs 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint. We have enough uranium and thorium to run the whole world for 4 billion (with a b) years using breeder reactors (demonstrated in 1952 in Idaho). Get the Koreans over here to build some ARP1400s or the Chinese to build some Hualong Ones until we figure out how to project manage again and then call it good.

einpoklum4• 4 years ago

It's way easier.

Is that why power plants go years over time and hugely over-budget?

It has been working fine since the 1950s.

Oh, yeah, just fine, not a hitch:

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

Waste problem is solved

The solution being: Ignore it, I guess?

net saves millions of lives by displacing air pollution

And we fight wars for peace too.

It's zero carbon

Not if you count the mining aspect. But even if you didn't: Wind and solar are now 3 times cheaper or more, and take a lot less time to set up. The power output stability benefit is wearing thin.

mwint• 4 years ago

Waste problem - drive through the US state of Nevada. There’s nothing for hundreds of miles. You could likely just throw the waste out of an airplane over Nevada and be more or less fine.

With containment techniques combined with the ridiculous amount of uninhabited desert the US has, this is a non issue.

robotresearcher2• 4 years ago

> It's way easier.
Is that why power plants go years over time and hugely over-budget?

'Late and over-budget' sounds easier than 'has never been demonstrated'.

acidburnNSA29• 4 years ago

Groan here we go again.

Oh, yeah, just fine, not a hitch:

Now show me list of the 8 million people who die per year from air pollution.

https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution

The solution being: Ignore it, I guess?

I mentioned the solutions but didn't provide a link. here you go.

https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html

And we fight wars for peace too.

See the literature https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/kh05000e.html

Not if you count the mining aspect.

Nuclear has rock bottom full lifecycle carbon emissions of 12 gCO₂-eq/kWh, including mining. C.f. 11 for wind, 40 for solar, 490 for gas, 800+ for coal. Hard to beat.

Wind and solar are now 3 times cheaper or more

You're comparing the worst US nuclear builds with wind/solar without storage, transmission, overbuilds needed for storage, etc. LCOE is not an appropriate metric for systems costs. Never was. Lazard are a bunch of kooks. Look at Hualong One costs.

Details on cost comparison for deeply decarbonized grid here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.08.006

jimbob45• 4 years ago

The solution being: Ignore it, I guess?

The waste is completely solid and can be safely buried and forgotten. Is that ignorance?

jcranmer• 4 years ago

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

How many industries are there where the list of notable accidents has such few fatalities? I mean, have you actually looked at the accidents on that list? The vast majority of them are basically garden-variety industrial accidents--and there's only so many because people are minded to exhaustively list every mishap that occurs at a nuclear power plant in a way that they're not for, say, a coal power plant.

pfdietz48• 4 years ago

Fission reactors can be easier than fusion reactors, and still go over time and hugely over budget. This just means fusion reactors are likely to also go over time and budget.

spawarotti• 4 years ago

How long will the fuel last? Sabine Hossenfelder references studies in which we have enough Uranium for 50 years max.

6:08 here: https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k

acidburnNSA29• 4 years ago

Uranium and thorium fuel on earth can make 100% of today's primary energy for about 4 billion years, using breeder reactors, which were proven in 1952 near Arco Idaho at the Experimental Breeder Reactor 1.

Writeup explaining this with lots of actual scientific references at the bottom here:

https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...

People who say uranium will last 50 years either aren't aware of breeder reactors, which have been the long-term plan for nuclear fission since the 1940s, or they're misleading you. We found a lot more uranium than expected in the interim so they have been put off for a while. But we know they work and have built many.

pfdietz48• 4 years ago

If you fully fission the U + Th in an average chunk of crustal rock (using breeding so you can use the 238U and 232Th) then said rock releases fission energy equal to the combustion energy of 20x its mass in coal. So with breeders we can in effect treat the entire Earth's crust as something an order of magnitude more energy rich than coal.

(Whether breeders are practical or competitive is another matter, but then fusion looks pretty challenged in that respect also.)

iambateman• 4 years ago

This was a great comment and very helpful.

I think it’s all a PR issue. The public doesn’t really understand and there are a lot of lobbyists pushing every other kind of energy.

acidburnNSA29• 4 years ago

Agreed. The excitement in fusion indicates a total failure of fission people to effectively explain what they are capable of.

tenpies• 4 years ago

"There is a lot of money to be made from implement the wrong solution, as long as you are not part of the problem."

* Adapted from a consultant proverb

AughFuckFusion2• 4 years ago

Tf say does the public have? This is a terrible excuse. The public doesn't have any say in the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of decision making that happens in this country.... blame politicians ffs, not people who don't matter.

dmead• 4 years ago

Is it wise to write off safety issues? Chernobyl, Fukushima and three mile island all seem pretty bad.

There is also the Robert Heinlein story "Blowups happen". I'm just not understanding how this can all be hand waved away.

acidburnNSA29• 4 years ago

They were bad, but just bad enough to roll over and give up on fission.

While Chernobyl killed people from radiation (around 50, with a hotly debated number between 0 and 4000 from long term effects), TMI and Fukushima did not. We have only directly amd definitively linked about 50 deaths to radiation released in commercial fission accidents. It's like a really bad bus crash. And that doesnt even count the social and emotional costs of fear and evacuation, which are large.

But context matters. Particlates from fossil and biofuel cause more death every 7 hours than the high estimate of deaths from nuclears entire history (using 4000 in chernobyl).

So nuclear fission is very safe. It's not perfectly safe, but it is orders of magnitude safer than the average energy source. Oh and it is carbon free so it prevents future deaths from climate change. So yeah.

sweezyjeezy4• 4 years ago

Also hand waving away the fact that the waste products have to be managed for civilisation-length time scales.

JohnBooty8• 4 years ago

It's not hand-waving. We've got got what, close to a billion fission reactor-hours worth of data? Perhaps more? We know exactly how safe they are.

Also: "safety issues?" Useless to talk about safety issues in a vacuum. Safety issues compared to what?

- Fossil fuels, which are literally guaranteed to fry this planet?

- Wind, water, solar? Great but not sufficient and/or feasible in all locales.

- An imaginary energy source with zero downsides? Let us know once you work out the details.

You point to Fukushima, thanks to which a region was rendered uninhabitable. I point to climate change caused by fossil fuel, thanks to which large swathes of the planet will soon be uninhabitable. I know which one I prefer. I'd prefer ten or a hundred Fukushimas in exchange for what's about to happen to our planet in the coming decades.

pfdietz48• 4 years ago

From the viewpoint of a utility, what matters is not large accidents (because their liability is capped) but rather smaller accidents that could ruin their investment. The TMI accident didn't kill anyone, but it gravely damaged the owner of the power plant, as they had just lost a large investment.

Because of this, fusion is likely WORSE from the utility's point of view than fission. While fusion reactors are less likely to have catastrophic accidents with large external effects, they are probably more likely to have localized accidents that ruin the reactor. In any case, a fusion reactor will have to be designed to be extremely reliable because repairing it after any accident will be so difficult, as it will be too radioactive for anyone to get in to repair it. All repairs will have to be done remotely.

pfdietz48• 4 years ago

I started out in fusion and switched to advanced fission.

You are in good company. Lawrence Lidsky, the fusion guy at MIT who wrote the famous article "The Trouble with Fusion" back in the 1980s, also switched to advanced fission reactors. His critique of DT fusion is still worth reading. The big issue, the lousy volumetric power density of DT fusion reactors compared to fission reactors, is still a huge albatross around the necks of all these private DT efforts.

joak7• 4 years ago

And what about non-DT fusion?

Helion, funded by Sam Altman, is doing DD/DHe3 fusion. Non-thermal fusion with direct energy conversion. They are attempting net electricity for 2024.

mlindner7• 4 years ago

His critique of DT fusion is still worth reading. The big issue, the lousy volumetric power density of DT fusion reactors compared to fission reactors, is still a huge albatross around the necks of all these private DT efforts.

That was largely a product of the times, before high magnetic fields could be achieved. ITER has all those problems, but newer ideas do not.

downrightmike2• 4 years ago

The problem is energy companies and the entrenched family assholes that run them. Three Mile Island was being forced to push ahead and use the crane to move the vessel, even though it WAS damaged and would have likely lead to a meltdown. Engineers knew it wasn't safe and were punished and fired for not using the crane unless it was actually checked and in working order. The public is right to be wary of nuclear when these are the types of assholes that put all our lives in danger.

socialdemocrat3• 4 years ago

If I could upvote this a hundred times. It is easy to mock the public for not getting nuclear power and being paranoid.

People today have really forgotten how much people got lied to constantly about nuclear power. France which they like to pull out as this amazing nuclear country built all the reactors they hype up by faking safety checks on nuclear reactors.

It is just really naive to assume every nuclear plant is run by the books.

People complain about over regulation of the nuclear industry. Yeah… they kind of brought that upon themselves.

thrown_226• 4 years ago

And how is it better when those assholes kill tens of thousands with coal every year instead?

If we lynched a few of them every time a nuclear reactor blew up we'd have a lot fewer energy related deaths and the market would eventually self correct.

iforgotpassword• 4 years ago

Exactly. People here on HN unsurprisingly approach nuclear with this naive enthusiasm that's operating under the assumption of a spherical cow in vacuum.

In reality the nuclear lobby heavily got politics to relax safety requirements, operators are corrupt and cut costs at every corner, inspections are not performed at all or not thoroughly, and when important decisions are being made, like where to store the waste, it's where politicians in charge find it convenient, and not where scientists and engineers actually recommend. Then you end up with metal containers in a salt mine, rusting away because thirty years ago who could have known the connection between salt and oxidation.

godelski5• 4 years ago

Honestly, I don't understand why we can't do both. I don't think this has to be framed as a zero sum problem (I think way too many issues are naively framed that way). With reference to the article, the funding levels over the past decade (globally) were roughly $200m/yr. That's really nothing in terms of government money and well within the realm that just the US could sustain such an effort alone. It would be roughly 0.004% of our yearly budget! That's an insanely low amount of money to spend given the potential upsides. You're right that there's weapons proliferation problems with both, but honestly that also seems like a good argument for pulling that funding out of what is already allocated to military budgets (not trying to defend nuclear weapons here, but we do have to acknowledge the existence of the military industrial complex and that they dictate a lot of the US budget).

Anyway let's ~~just~~ do fission you guys.

So I agree with you. Let's do fission, but not _just_ fission. Let's put a lot of money into it and bring down the costs. The cost of climate change clearly far outweighs the cost of nuclear plants and waste. And that the waste really isn't a problem, as you yourself have extensively written about. These arguments always go "nuclear vs x" and honestly I want to see "fission + fusion + solar + wind + hydro + batteries." I don't see why we can't have it all. The zero sum arguments seem to make such a dream more difficult to achieve.

Also, good to see you back. Always glad to see your input on these posts.

acidburnNSA29• 4 years ago

Sure, that's a good and fair point. I shouldn't say I oppose fusion R&D. I feel more like we should be more focused on deploying 100s of serialized LWR fission plants right now alongside all the wind/solar/batteries/hydro to solve climate change, while also investing R&D into things like advanced fission and fusion, and geothermal. There's certainly an under-investment in low carbon energy tech in general compared to the world GDP imho.

Still, I do feel that some fusion hype is partially due to people not giving fission enough credit though.

Happy to be back, thanks!

smaudet11• 4 years ago

The cost of climate change clearly far outweighs the cost of nuclear plants and waste.

Um, yes until you factor in failure rates due to incompetence + natural failure. Chernobyl, look it up, massive cost, massive loss of land, death/cancer rate of all exposed nearly 100%.

Until you can solve the "corrupt bureaucrat cuts corners he doesn't understand" problem, and also demonstrate that the failure of a single reactor doesn't cascade and cause every reactor to blow (if you increase the density of reactor distribution a single fallout has the potential to cascade to every reactor).

I remain skeptical about the fuel waste issue being solved, I've heard that a number of times and its not exactly been true, what is usually meant is that the fuel can be re-used somewhat indefinitely, after being repurposed in special containment facilities, not that the spent fuel safety issue is resolved.

And, it won't even solve the climate change issue - even after going 100% electricity and/or renewable fuels, we still have a considerable chemical infrastructure to resolve, and we still have the heat waste issue to resolve (making things electrical doesn't solve energy and chemical expenditure affecting weather patterns, albeit it is better than pumping CO2), an infrastructure which will need to be utilized to create said nuclear reactors.

Climate change will slowly roast us all to death, a nuclear failure will, instantly fry us all to molten pulp, I know which one I prefer.

thrown_226• 4 years ago

Honestly, I don't understand why we can't do both.

Because we're been doing neither for 40 years.

deltasevennine• 4 years ago

The main reason is because fission isn't cool anymore. Been there, done that.... Fusion is still super cool with all the big devices they're building.

acidburnNSA29• 4 years ago

You're probably right that fission isn't considered cool anymore. I guess my heartburn is in that it most definitely should be.

I guess most people don't appreciate the relatively tiny fission plant workhorses producing >50% of all zero-carbon electricity in the USA.

At least we have nuclear tiktok influencers nowadays!

8bitsrule• 4 years ago

It runs 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint.

How much cooling water does it use? Who'll want to drink it? How much waterwill 'lots more regular old LWR fission reactors' need, and where will it come from? Oh, and let's see the hands of those who want one in their back yard. 'Whoops'.

It's way easier. It has been working fine since the 1950s.

Gosh, I never heard 'fine' used in that way before. I could paste in a list of dozens of failures, leaks (including tritium), accidents (public and hushed-up). Look away from San Onofre, that was just a one-time expense. Why, I'd even bet it will continue to be "safe, clean, and too cheap to meter", guys. /s

JohnBooty8• 4 years ago

    and let's see the hands of those who want one in their back yard. 'Whoops'

Me. Actually I've already lived in the back yard of one. Extremely populous suburb of a major American city.

Apparently lots of people don't mind having one in their back yard.

GeekyBear• 4 years ago

For example, there are leaks of tiny amounts of tritium at some fission plants and people lose their minds.

If a fusion reactor loses power, fusion ceases. The reactor shuts down.

If a fission reactor loses power, fission continues. A reactor that cannot be cooled melts down.

I don't think people will be as wary when fail safe reactor designs come off the drawing board and are in use long enough to have their own track record.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/08/02/158134/fail-safe...

lven7• 4 years ago

This is not true. Fission reactors have to deal with decay heat, not fission reactions when cooling is lost. This can be managed. Fusion reactors also have decay heat. In new reactors like the Micro Modular Reactor, it's actually less decay heat than a fusion power plant. Please please read my post :https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion#financial-risk-of-powerp...

AughFuckFusion2• 4 years ago

I'm a professional fission guy. I started out in fusion and switched to advanced fission. These days I don't see why we don't just build lots more regular old LWR fission reactors.

Well, a comment posting without financials pretty much underlines why more fission reactors don't get built: the nuclear community is insanely bad at pitching to investors without magic on the line. Unfortunately, investors in our society are the closest things we get to planners so we're pretty fucked.

acidburnNSA29• 4 years ago

If you add district heating to LWRs their effective efficiency goes from 33% to over 57%. If we adjust markets to value on-demand (including nights/weekends/winters) low-carbon heat and electricity, LWR economics would be good, even in the USA.

They're already expected to be essential for decarbonizing at scale.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...

I have plenty of rants about how LCOE is wholly inappropriate as a metric of overall decarbonized system costs. If you look from that perspective, LWRs built by Koreans, Chinese, Indians, or Russians are an incredible deal.

We just need to have the Koreans come over and re-teach us how to build reactors. It's beautifully symmetric because we originally taught them. They've perfected the knowledge, enhanced it, saved it, and can now teach us.

gwbrooks• 4 years ago

This is a solvable problem if there's political will to solve it.

Much of the uncertainty and cost of a new fission plant is tied to regulatory, permitting and litigation costs. No one's suggesting eliminating regulation, but the near-limitless ability to hold up a project with specious lawsuits could be curtailed.

unchocked• 4 years ago

Fuckin’ A… I don’t have a charitable explanation for why folks are holding their breath for another neutron source, while the world burns.

paulcole• 4 years ago

The reality is that there is no charitable explanation. On a global scale, society doesn’t care about what the world is like and what humanity will have to deal with 100, 200, or 500 years from now. We care about things like finding our next meal or finding our next Amazon package on our doorstep.

ncmncm29• 4 years ago

We don't actually need or want extra neutrons. We have all the neutrons we will ever want, right where they already are.

Protons will become increasingly valuable, after being separated from oxygen.

socialdemocrat3• 4 years ago

I would rather see some push towards high temperature reactors. Whether gas cooled or molten salt. Point is it that if we have high temperature differentials we can more easily do thermal storage or produce hydrogen. Both are kind of important combos for renewable energy.

Wind, solar, battery and some kind of variant of hydrogen economy is bound to stay/evolve and nuclear light to be built with that in mind so it can be more of a complementary technology rather than living in an alternative universe.

lven7• 4 years ago

I tried to describe this problem in further detail in a post called con-fusion. Kind of sad to see money burn like this. https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion

acidburnNSA29• 4 years ago

Excellent post with lots of detail, thanks, and wow! I'm not alone in my skepticism it seems.

rewgs• 4 years ago

This is one of my favorite comments I’ve seen on HN. If only more people would see this and go bjnovaknodding.gif

lawrenceyan3• 4 years ago

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it impossible for fusion to generate a nuclear meltdown scenario that fission has the potential for?

dongobongo• 4 years ago

Meltdown accident: basically, reactor is turned off, however heat continues to be generated because of a thing called decay heat which is when isotopes generated by the fission reactions decay to more stable isotopes and release energy. It's about 7% of a fission reactor's power and continues for a few hours until it's negligible. 7% of a gigawatt reactor is like having a couple of jet engines going full blast inside the core. This heat has to be removed, and meltdowns happen when people fail to do so - basically pumps break, coolant leaks, or coolant is blocked from cooling down the core. Recent micro reactors get around this because they don't need active coolant or people to cool down the reactor - they just cool off by conduction or simple heat rejection systems. I read recently that fusion reactor will also generate decay heat from all the activated components and this is comparable to a fission reactor. The difference is there's a lot less radioactive crap in a fusion reactor - but the fusion reactor will still meltdown and they are expensive...

ncmncm29• 4 years ago

A fusion reactor would have at least a thousand tons of molten lithium coursing through miles of plumbing, that if breached explodes and burns uncontrollably; and the reaction product dissolves mucus membranes.

Fortunately none will be built.

cratermoon• 4 years ago

See also "Former fusion scientist on why we won't have fusion power by 2040" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JurplDfPi3U

mlindner7• 4 years ago

Imagining that somehow fusion is going to a) work, b) be cheap (fuel cost is only 5% of total nuclear fission cost so who cares), and c) not have the same stigma as fission is kind of weird in my mind.

The cost of fission comes doubly from the nuclear proliferation risk and the safety risk, neither of which apply at all to fusion. The levels of radioactive waste produced is at basically the same levels as medical practices.

Plutonium is made by irradiating natural uranium from the dirt with neutrons. Practical fusion reactors have lots of neutrons. Really high energy ones too.

In that case you're intentionally trying to irradiate something, you can do the opposite and engineer for things to not be irradiated, and even then it tends to be long lived low radiation isotopes.

acidburnNSA29• 4 years ago

No proliferation risk at all in a tritium fountain full of 14 MeV neutrons? Are you sure you know what you're talking about?

These will all be guarded with pseudo military guns guards and gates just like fission, and monitored by the IAEA.

As for radiological safety, see point about tritium. And google tritium leak nuclear plant for good measure.

Youre right that there is less radioactivity in fusion plants, but maybe not enough less to really matter.

shawn-butler• 4 years ago

fusion has better marketing in the marketplace of the uninformed. "Harnesses the power of the sun" vs "nuclear bombs"

I'm sure the greens will try and tear it down it if it ever comes to commercial viability and start calling it thermonuclear power or some nonsense.

adrian_b4• 4 years ago

Which is pretty much a complete lie, because the proton-proton and Bethe cycles that power the Sun and most stars will not be used in a fusion reactor, any time soon.

The fusion reactions that are likely to be used in the first fusion reactors are precisely the same as those used in the thermonuclear bombs, a.k.a. H-bombs.

baxtr• 4 years ago

Fusion is just around the corner! Just 20 years away!

johnchristopher2• 4 years ago

It runs 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint.

Isn't that a myth though ? Nuclear plants have planned and unplanned maintenance downtime. They actually have enough of these in my country that it's deemed unreliable or as reliable as wind turbines (depends on who you ask).

smaudet11• 4 years ago

I think tiny relative to a coal installation? I'm just guessing here, though, all nuclear facilities I have seen are fairly enormous, albeit their size is small compared to the number of required non-nuclear plants it would take to replace their energy output.

dignick2• 4 years ago

There are several problems with fission (probably fusion too) as I understand it:

1. Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable.

2. Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait.

3. Decommissioning is expensive and a long way in the future. Is that cost built into the cost per MW? How can we be sure the money will be protected, and will be enough to cover it?

4. Spent fuel. The project you mentioned isn’t complete yet, but even then it’s a huge liability to leave for future generations to manage indefinitely.

Meanwhile, renewables don’t have these problems and are available immediately. We should be building huge factories to produce wind and solar en masse.

Source for the figures: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSK...

bratbag• 4 years ago

Cost factor isn't as relevant as you think, as this is an apple's to oranges comparison.

Renewables are too unreliable to act as baseline generation for a country.

In the UK last year for example we had very little wind, so we had to ramp up our gas power output to make up for our shortages in renewables. We burned through much of our gas reserves before the Ukraine war started, because of Renewable power unreliability.

Fission is the replacement for that baseline role that hydrocarbons currently fill, not the unpredictable-but-clean role that renewables fill.

The ideal future has both, with renewables producing as much power as possible and fission running on low capacity and ready to ramp up when renewables fall short.

jamesrom• 4 years ago

Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait.

This is a fallacy in two ways:

1. Scaling up nuclear projects will decrease construction time and cost. Efficiencies are found by with scale.

2. The opportunity cost of not starting nuclear projects now will surely be worse than attempting 100% renewables. The point is that we can invest in both.

formerly_proven• 4 years ago

1. Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable.

You can't directly compare cost per generating capacity, because nuclear, gas, coal etc. are available according to schedule, while most renewables aren't. Adding storage around renewables to make them schedulable raises costs.

troorl• 4 years ago

Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling).

Do you count in all the subsidies the renewables get from governments, including the production of the solar panels/wind mills, land ownership, utilities and all kinds of tax cuts and preferential treatment? In my country billionaires own massive solar farms and make tons of money at the expense of everyone else.

rmbyrro• 4 years ago

Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable.

Doesn't make it cheaper, only hides the cost. Subsidies are many times perversive. Prices are communicating something. When Gov messes with it, people and organizations tend to make bad decisions for themselves, society, environment or everything.

nixass• 4 years ago

2. Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait

You've been saying that for last 20 years. It's pathetic by this point. Best time to start doing things (anything) was 30 years ago. Second best time is now

rawoke083600• 4 years ago

May I ask your views on Thorium reactors ? Is this the next step/direction in fission reactors ?

ncmncm29• 4 years ago

Thorium costs more.

There are nice vids on YouTube that explain how thorium is no fix for what ails nukes.

Ultimately, nukes just cost too much to build and operate. They are uncompetitive. Now that we have radically cheaper alternatives, we have no desire to engage with the deceitful, slipshod, heavily subsidized builders and operators of nukes, anymore. Never again.

acidburnNSA29• 4 years ago

Thorium reactors are a type of breeder reactor that can breed using slow neutrons, whereas most breeder reactors built so far use uranium and fast neutrons.

There is a lot of hype about thorium online, but almost all of it is about breeder reactors vs. non-breeders. None of the hype is truly thorium specific.

I wrote up a few pages on it around 2014.

https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html

https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium.html

Thorium is often associated with fluid fuel reactors.

https://whatisnuclear.com/msr.html

zigzag3122• 4 years ago

Is there any progress in design of nuclear fission power plants regarding safety?

Fukushima was build in the 70s, so it might have been a bit outdated (as a layman I have no idea). Was there any significant progress in design of nuclear power plants since then? Can they be shut down more quickly and reliably?

Given enough R&D, could safety of nuclear fission power plants be improved further or is that very unlikely?

madacol• 4 years ago

Is there a good estimate / measure of the safety problems of fukushima?

In wikipedia it says that only 1 person has died from cancer, while >2000 died from the evacuation itself

It seems that being less aggressive with evacuations and letting some people be exposed to radiation would have actually save more lives

Though maybe that's only in hindsight?. Maybe at the time there was a considerable risk of something terrible but didn't happen?

dmitriid8• 4 years ago

Is there any progress in design of nuclear fission power plants regarding safety?
Fukushima...

You mean, hit by the most powerful earthquake recorded in Japan, flooded by a tsunami with 13-14 meter-high waves, evacuated, failed to shutdown, had three core meltdowns and several explosions, and resulted in... 1 death from radiation, 2000 deaths from evacuation and 45 radiation-resulted injuries.

I'd say even this outdated design was very, very, very safe.

CTDOCodebases3• 4 years ago

Does it make sense to build nuclear reactors when the environment we are engineering for them to exist in is rapidly changing?

Fukushima showed us the drastic and long lasting consequences of one little design oversight and that was in an environment the reactors where engineered for.

Personally I can't answer this question with the limited knowledge that I have. It seems like a catch 22 type situation.

feet3• 4 years ago

The consequences from pushing more carbon out are worse than one nuclear plant failure

BMc20203• 4 years ago

*These days I don't see why we don't just build lots more regular old LWR fission reactors.*

Because they lose money. Nobody, not the USA, Russia, China, France, Japan, Korea has ever made them profitable. They are always subsidized. The CCP bought Westinghouse AP1000s so they could steal their design and they still couldn't make it work. And you can't blame the environmentalists when it's in China.

Full disclosure: I'm not an accountant, but since I started taking an interest in this subject several years ago I've learned about wishing away decomissioning costs by claiming the plants will last 60 or 100 years. Ask the taxpayers of Oregon what 'stranded costs' are. Making 150 square km of Japan uninhabitable is also a bit spendy. IIRC almost all of the Dept of Energy's budget goes to nuclear.

But, nothing will change because military nuclear is a national security issue and that always trumps every other issue.

Back to fusion: Fusion power plants will be at least as big and complicated as fission plants, so it's never going to be 'too cheap to meter' electricity. I do hold out hope for it to be a drive for space craft though.

acidburnNSA29• 4 years ago

Cost for deeply decarbonized grids are cheapest if you have low carbon firm energy like nuclear. The LCOE numbers thrown around today are meaningless wrt systems costs.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...

nuclear plants save a fraction of their revenue in a trust that pays for decommissioning. for thr vast majority of plants this has been and will be more than sufficient. therr are exceptions but it isnt fair to dwell on them given the other successess.

The dose rates are barely above background already in most of the area around Fukushima. I'm with Elon in that I will gladly eat vegetebles from slightly elevated dose areas because I belive the science that says damger starts at 100 mSv acute/300 mSv annual. Getting an extra 40 mSv in a year is not uninhabitable.

civilian nuclear power has pretty much nothing to do with military nuclear so not sure I follow your point there.

And for the record, here's the full Too Cheap To Meter quote, from a Science Writers Dinner in 1954:

"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age"

DrBazza2• 4 years ago

Because they lose money, nobody has ever made them profitable ....They are always subsidized

That's how it appears but that's not an argument against them. Two things: firstly they are regulated because nuclear fuel can be used for warfare, so when a government gets involved things cost more, that's just an unfortunate fact, secondly they've never been commercialised.

Could you imagine if cars or jumbo jets were built ad-hoc? What would the profit or loss be? A better example, perhaps, is Space X vs NASA. How much does a NASA rocket cost (government controlled), versus Space X (private industry) that has had to industrialise a process? And how much profit does NASA make per launch versus Space X?

Nuclear power stations could be industrialised and would definitely be cheaper.

DrBazza2• 4 years ago

The nuclear waste 'problem' annoys me because it's absurd in comparison to everything else.

I challenge anyone to go onto google right and give me a firm number of people that have died from nuclear waste, not just nuclear accidents.

I'll start -

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

about 200 for all nuclear accidents. Waste itself? Zero? Which is less than people that have fallen down the stairs, tripped over a cat, or choked on a pizza.

Now search for deaths to humans (and wildlife for that matter) from fossil fuel pollution, oil spills, gas pipeline explosions and so on.

As I've said before if we bury it in a mine, and lose the ability to read that it's down there and dangerous, we've likely lost the ability to dig a mine in the first place.

hexnuts2• 4 years ago

Honestly curious, what do you see as a solution to the heat problems reactors are experiencing? There was discussion about the combination of lack of sufficiently cool water and droughts in the new heatwave cycles.

acidburnNSA29• 4 years ago

Most of those problems are related to fish populations and their tolerance of warm water. I think we will probably need to either adjust the regulations and/or somehow keep the fish farther away from the discharge so that they don't get injured.

Cooling a 375°C core with ambient water can be done even well into climate change conditions.

As for drought, if reactors are cooled by rivers that can dry up rather than oceans or large lakes, then they'll have to consider switching to dry cooling, which is less efficient but works with almost zero water usage. This would work better with higher temperature reactors than typical water cooled ones.

I also am a huge proponent of using reactors district heating and cooling, so we can put that warm water to good decarbonized uses.

Banana6992• 4 years ago

According to my layman's understanding and Issac Arthur's science and futurism videos, fusion is great because of how universally common the fuel is. Maybe fission fuels are not a big deal on Earth, but they are on the moon, Mars, orbital habs or Europa. Meanwhile fusion is just hydrogen. Literally what's the universe is mostly made of.

So maybe right know fission is as good as fusion (better because it exists), but space is soon, and fusion is better for space.

alex_young3• 4 years ago

Why don’t we just leave the fusion where it works best, i.e. the sun?

Put the same amount of spending into building a robotic solar collection factory on the moon and beam the power where we need it. No crazy particles to deal with and zero nuclear weapons byproducts.

jefftk2• 4 years ago

A beam of power many times stronger than the Sun sounds like a pretty terrifying weapon

topher515• 4 years ago

This is actually one of the classic "disasters" in Sim City 2000[1]. The "Microwave Powerplant" works by bouncing a concentrated beam of sunlight to earth. It provides plentiful, pollution free power... The only downside is sometimes the satellite beam misses, melting everything surrounding it.

[1] https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/Microwave_(disaster)

alex_young3• 4 years ago

The microwave beam would be pretty wide by the time it reached the surface. The power levels wouldn’t make an effective weapon but would take up a sizable footprint for the collectors.

manholio2• 4 years ago

You could say the same thing about Bitcoin. Fusion is in the VC hype cycle but there are no new developments that suggest it can become cheaper and more predictable than fission, which itself is dying, primarily because of financial uncertainties and risks.

On the contrary, physics suggest that performance scales with size, so even the extraordinary expensive ITER project is way too small to achieve engineering break even, let alone financial break-even. You will only hear about scientific break-even, which is a useless milestone because, yes, you get more energy than you put it, but you put electric energy and get fast neutron energy, only you need an order of magnitude more of that to get back the electricity you put in.

Understanding different types of break-even would be an obligatory primer to anyone navigating hyped fusion claims: https://news.newenergytimes.net/2022/04/08/fusion-q-values-a...

pfdietz48• 4 years ago

Fusion reactors (after they're big enough to have ignited) have diseconomy of scale, due to the square-cube law. Cost scales (at least) as reactor volume, while power is limited by power/area through the surface of the reactor vessel.

manholio2• 4 years ago

But are we hitting that power density ceiling yet? It doesn't seem so, we're not even in the "big enough to have ignited" range, only scraping at the door of "big enough for scientific break-even", but have already blown any reasonable chance for such designs to be cost effective even if they were to be mass produced.

Massive superconducting magnets generating megatons of force, building-sized vacuum chambers that are almost guaranteed to leak some amount tritium, which only adds to the unavoidable regulatory burden imposed by the fast neutron environment, activated structure and every day production of weapon-grade material etc. etc., even if the current technology magically works tomorrow, it's still an economic dead-end.

The present fusion crop is megascience at its worst, draining public funds for something that can't possibly ever work and producing very little substantial science in the way. We need to take a step back and reassess. At least Helion is trying a new path, even if they are likely to end up in a similar dead-end.

Kukumber3• 4 years ago

They should have invested in education 20 years ago

Vulture capitalist always show up during the last mile after government (us, the people) paid for kickstarting everything

What's sad is China already ahead despite all of that

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-12-31/China-s-artificial-sun...

https://eurasiantimes.com/artificial-sun-china-claims-design...

charlieyu1• 4 years ago

The only true form of green energy other than geothermal.

fission, solar, wind, waterfall energy all have their own negative environmental impacts

joak7• 4 years ago

Geothermal, and all thermal power energy, have a big issue: thermal pollution.

You need a lot of water for the cooling phase of the thermodynamic cycle that transform heat into electricity.

That's why during drought episodes fission plants have to be stopped.

There is however a non-thermal path to fusion energy, aneutronic fusion with direct energy conversion. In this scheme, the fusion reaction produces no neutrons and the kinetic energy of ions is directly converted to electricity.

acidburnNSA29• 4 years ago

Given how much zero carbon warm water we need, it's easy to see zero carbon thermal pollution as a feature rather than a bug.

https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/workshops/nucogen/presentations...

boringg• 4 years ago

Hmm I suspect that this isn't accurate but if it is, also relevant is that in the last 12 months we were at the top of the crazy money market so people were handing out cash and desperate for something with a seeming return to it. Seems like a click-baity title to me.

lven7• 4 years ago

Fusion is generally touted by many as an energy "Holy Grail." Indeed, it appears to have similar qualities, being both perpetually elusive and miraculous, able to solve all mankind's problems. Media reporting tends to discuss the benefits of fusion with misleading and false statements and no discussion of fusion’s negative attributes. The financial and practical perspective of fusion based power is missing. I've written a post about this here: https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion. I cover fusion's issues compared to fission. In particular: far worse neutron and gamma damage, 10x more demanding heat transfer, parasitic power draws, 50-100x larger radiological waste volume, higher financial and nuclear accident risk compared to new new micro reactors, higher cost by any metric, similar or worse proliferation characteristics, etc. My aim was to add a dissenting perspective on the practicality of near-term fusion energy systems.

jupp0r• 4 years ago

There is a gigantic stable fusion reaction from which we just need to convert energy into electricity - our sun. Bring out the dyson sphere.

jeandejean• 4 years ago

For a technology that has the promise of clean energy for humanity, I am shocked it's receiving that small amount of funding, while we have been distributing literally trillions globally during the pandemic...

dogcomplex• 4 years ago

A friendly reminder that the idea posed by a pioneer of nuclear energy of just dumping big bombs in a hole and harvesting the heat energy with steam/plasma has never been invalidated and remains the most efficiently-simple solution immediately viable

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

If containment is your concern (though underground blast effects are decently understood, and blast chambers could be constructed with still strongly net economic/energy positive) - this does not need to be built around any population centers. At a cost of 1.5% efficiency loss per 1000 km, UHV power lines can direct it from a single write-off location anywhere on earth. That single location can likely be scaled to supply well beyond the total current global energy production.

https://en.geidco.org.cn/aboutgei/uhv/

brtkdotse• 4 years ago

Lmao, that sounds like something straight out of Futurama.

The Wikipedia article you liked says it “economically unviable”, but fails to provide a source

therealdrag0• 4 years ago

What about earth quakes?

(I didn’t click the links)

lostmsu• 4 years ago

Another no container idea (this one is crazy): just blow them in the ocean, that will evaporate some water and speed up evaporation of some more. Harvest energy with existing hydroelectric setuos once it passes the weather cycle.

willis9368• 4 years ago

There are much less ecologically disastrous and less illegal cloud-seeding techniques. They're still very illegal though.

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

pixiemaster• 4 years ago

I love the concept of fusion from a scientific point. I’d love to see even more money put into this.

But for real world deployment, we can have decentralized systems that have an ROI of 6yrs (Solar) and 10 yrs (Wind), - i think that’s the thing we should be doubling down on NOW. [https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/145C...]

blippage• 4 years ago

Scientists have been futzing around with fusion energy since I was a schoolboy in the 70's, and undoubtedly before. Maybe they'll be a breakthrough, but I think the odds are heavily against them.

Fission, OTOH, seems an interesting bet. The problem with old-style reactors is that there's basically no ESD (Emergency Shutdown) that you can perform. Those radioactive rods are going keep radiating heat no matter what. Newer styles seem a much saner approach, were two different materials must be in contact for a reaction to occur. In an emergency you just let one of them drain out, thereby stopping the reaction.

Coal is an abundant source of fuel with a proven track record. The big problem is with pollution. But there's no rule that says you have to puke out the waste into the atmosphere. It can be processed. After all, oil is pretty shitty when it comes up out of the ground, and needs a lot of processing. This is a costly exercise, of course, but one that we willingly undertake. The question now is one of economics: will the cost of waste processing mean that coal burning is feasible? It's a question that nobody seems interested in asking. We just seem to have the default assumption that coal energy was shitty in the past and must be shitty in the present. "Eww, coal".

rep_movsd• 4 years ago

We already have clean energy - its called Fission, all we need is to start doing it at scale

Gud• 4 years ago

Such a controversial topic these days. I got one am happy billions are being poured into fusion. Yes, massive investments in fission, solar and wind are required. But one by one the technical obstacles are being overcome for fusion. I say give fusion a chance

alexalx666• 4 years ago

Deady epidemic - let’s work from home!

Russians attack Europe - let’s invest in nuclear!

What is the next disaster that will make another common sense thing happen ?

greyhair• 4 years ago

So much more funding now. That will getting it working twenty years from now, just like it has been 'working twenty years from now' for the last fifty years.

More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

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