Will we ever get fusion power?

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/will-we-ever-get-fusion-power

by pseudocoup • 2 years ago

251 285 2 years ago

there is some fundamental thing that attracts humans to big things.

technical challenges aside, fusion power as a research + building + disvtributil project is so expensive - for the same amount of money we could already build a decentralized solution out of over-abundant solar cells, but it seems looking for the one big thing is still more interesting.

shrimp_emoji• 2 years ago

It's just 50 years away.

marssaxman• 2 years ago

...or 500 seconds away, depending on your point of view!

DesiLurker2• 2 years ago

AI was also 30years away forever then it was not. its a function of dollar spent researching not fairy dust powered by hopes and dreams. problem is the problem seems so unsurmountable that private sector (until now) was never interested in exploring this and govt funding is really mostly about making things blow up. so there you are. all that said the fusion triple product neutron-fluxtimeenergy has been steadily getting better over decades & hence a flurry of recent funding. That is until AI started sucking up all oxygen.

Apocryphon• 2 years ago

How long is AI away now?

more_corn2• 2 years ago

There’s a fusion reaction in the sky. All you have to do is harvest it. If you want to bring a fusion reaction home you have to deal with pesky things like INSANE AMOUNTS OF HEAT. Luckily the sky furnace is safely surrounded by 93M miles of insulting vacuum rendering the radiation harmless and even pleasant. We have a handy-dandy magnetic shield to handle surges, and atmospheric buffer for anything that sneaks through (now with protective ozone!) It’s really an ingenious design. I can’t think of any way to improve upon it.

fragmede2• 2 years ago

Harvesting energy from this "sky fusion reactor" (if it really exists) has this small pesky problem of being unavailable if you can't see the fusion reactor, in a daily phenomena known to scientific experts as "night", as well as this other intermittent problem dubbed "clouds" by scientific experts in weather and weather-related fields, so I can think of at least two places to improve upon sky-fusion-energy-harvesting technology. An at-home fusion reactor would not have problems there.

hyperhello• 2 years ago

Do you really not know of the progress that’s been made in the thirty years since you’ve been telling that joke?

nullhole• 2 years ago

One of my old favouries:

"Rotation Of Earth Plunges Entire North American Continent Into Darkness"

https://www.theonion.com/rotation-of-earth-plunges-entire-no...

audunw3• 2 years ago

Just by buying an electric vehicle I already have more than enough batteries to solve these problems for my household.

The transition to EVs - which is a hard necessity to solve climate change, and well on the way - implies battery production that’s already within an order of magnitude of storing enough solar to supply power year round. As long as you’re not too close to the poles, but most people don’t live there anyway (said as someone who lives relatively close to the arctic circle.. so I don’t mean to ignore our people, there’s just not that many of us so doesn’t matter so much in terms of global warming impact)

Nuclear energy can often benefit from some energy storage too. One of the first pumped hydro plants was to balance nuclear. It’s the opposite problem: people consume most of their energy during the day (when the sun is shining!) but nuclear should ideally run 100% 24/7.

I suspect a renaissance of nuclear, whether it’s fusion or fission, will also be paired with lots of battery storage. As batteries will probably soon be a cheaper way of load balancing than having to ramp production from nuclear up and down.

katbyte• 2 years ago

Insane amounts of heat is exactly what you want from your power plant..

choilive5• 2 years ago

Being pedantic, but most heat is considered "waste" heat - aka it is high entropy energy, which is much harder to convert into the more useful forms of energy (mechanical, electrical, etc.)

xboxnolifes• 2 years ago

One way to improve upon the design is being able to capture the radiation from all sides of the reaction.

arp242• 2 years ago

If it was that easy people would just do it, hm? Classic "HN commenter solves world problem after thinking about it for 5 seconds".

insulting vacuum rendering the radiation harmless

Not even this is correct. Vacuum doesn't really "insulate" against radiation, at least not very effectively. It's the earth magnetic field and atmosphere that protects us. And even with that it's not harmless – surely you heard of "sunburn" and "skin cancer"?

encoderer• 2 years ago

SimCity predicted 2050

feoren• 2 years ago

I'm also very excited for Arcologies. Well, not the dark one with a Morlock-like race wandering its labyrinthine tunnels. The bright ones with lots of greenery. Or maybe I just want more Singapore.

orson20774• 2 years ago

Fusion is always 50 years away for a reason: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/5gi9yh/fusion_i...

IIRC, the sum total of all fusion research throughout all of history is USD$100-200B. It's obvious governments/industry/humanity doesn't really want it, or they'd go fund it.

travisb2• 2 years ago

The lack of funding angle isn't really convincing.

Modern designs depend on material science and computing abilities which could never have been made in the 70's no matter how much money was thrown at it.

orson20774• 2 years ago

Fusion-relevant materials research could have absolutely advanced with funding back in the 70s. Lithium compatible structural material and 14MeV neutron source experiments immediately come to mind, not to mention tritium permeation and extraction. There was tonnes to learn, and they chose not to fund it.

Mistletoe• 2 years ago

You could put teleportation on that bottom squiggle as well. Sometimes you stop funding things because it isn't physically possible or we have better alternatives.

lambdaone5• 2 years ago

There's absolutely no reason to believe that fusion power is impossible. It being very, very difficult and very, very expensive to reach a practical system is the problem.

But you're right about better alternatives. Right now that alterative is a combination of solar, wind, hydro and storage, with perhaps a bit of more exotic systems (wave power? solar towers?) in the mix.

orson20774• 2 years ago

There's no physics basis for teleportation, whereas there is a clear physics basis for fusion. The way you assess things is terribly flawed.

choilive5• 2 years ago

We already have a zero maintenance fusion power plant that will last billions of years and that outputs millions of times more energy per second than humanity uses in a year.

We already have technology that can take the electromagnetic waves this fusion power plant produces and directly convert it into electricity without needing pesky intermediaries like boiling water to turn a turbine.

This technology is relatively cheap to produce, extraordinarily safe, can last for decades with minor maintenance, can scale almost indefinitely, and there are many practical improvements we can make to it that are going to applied commercially in years and not decades.

I don't doubt that trying to achieve commercially viable fusion is a worthy engineering and science challenge and that we will learn and develop many useful technologies along the the way - but fusion is probably the hardest engineering challenge humanity has ever attempted and after many decades of R&D there is still no clear path to commercial viability.

Solar panels today work, and they work well, and we can practically throw endless amounts of money building them and it will work. Today. And we needed solutions that work today, not 50 years from now... maybe.

arrowsmith• 2 years ago

Solar panels today work

But not tonight

choilive5• 2 years ago

Luckily about 50% of the Earth is lit up by the sun at any moment and energy storage capabilities are advancing much faster than fusion's capabilities are.

Distribution and storage are way more tractable problems than fusion.

If you want to be really ambitious you can go to space and have 100% capacity :).

RAM-bunctious• 2 years ago

I think it's clear that solar panels, while working today, clearly haven't been able to solve today's problems, or else this discussion wouldn't be happening. But we should keep investing in them, one way or another.

Similarly, we should keep investing in the prospect of commercially viable fusion reactors. The harnessing of fusion reactors would be instantly revolutionary as opposed to the incremental progress solar promises. Therein lies the difference. Once is not necessarily better than the other.

And it's not a zero-sum game.

audunw3• 2 years ago

I would say it’s clear that solar panels are absolutely working extremely well today, at least as long as you don’t live too close to the poles.

Renewables all together is growing faster than nuclear ever did. And solar is now a huge part of that.

We have models where solar or solar+wind is providing all the power to everything from small remote weather stations through houses to large islands. Some small countries and regions are getting close too.

It’s clear that we have all the technologies we need to do 100% renewables. There’s studies that indicate that the long term costs of this is lower than the traditional fossil and nuclear energy infrastructure. We just need to build the factories to continue scaling up. And of course the transition is more expensive than it’ll be when we just maintain and expand on the system.

jandrese3• 2 years ago

Grid scale storage has lagged behind solar and wind generation, but it's starting to catch up. By the time we have a viable commercial fusion power plant all of the grid storage issues will have been long since solved.

more_corn2• 2 years ago

That’s funny. My take is exactly the reverse.

Solar power can 100% solve our energy needs today. It’s cost effective at the unit level. It works at scale. It decentralizes nicely. Did I mention that it works? Every home could have rooftop solar for less than it costs to produce centralized power plants. (I have rooftop solar and it cost significantly less than a new car now my power costs won’t go up for 20 years at which point the panels might need a refresh but that part of the system is the cheapest part)

We could easily flip from subsidizing fossil fuels to subsidizing rooftop solar today and realize significant gains (higher roi by shifting the investment). If you spent one years investment in fusion and fossil fuel subsidies on deploying rooftop solar and grid scale batteries you’d change the energy story permanently. Energy would suddenly be plentiful. Fossil fuels would permanently shift out of relevance. Fission reactors would look like quaint and staggeringly expensive tools of a bygone age. And fusion which DOES NOT WORK. Would look even more like a silly dream.(We are no closer to fusion than we were 30 years ago.)

Why the fuck are we still talking about fusion when we have something that works?

romski• 2 years ago

Find the graph of GW of solar installed over time

rowanG077• 2 years ago

Solar panels clearly don't work wel enough to be able to solve our energy demands. A very significant portion of the day they don't work at all.

burnished• 2 years ago

We call that the 'night' and our battery tech is improving enormously. Personally I hope solar becomes so cheap that mechanical batteries become popular - pumped resevoirs, inexplicable wood flywheel

pfdietz24• 2 years ago

The conclusion of the experts who have studied renewables is that they very clearly can be made to work, and more cheaply than nuclear.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

"With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive."

jmpman2• 2 years ago

Will orbiting solar panels ever work? Now that starship is viable, payload cost to orbit will dramatically drop. Is it cheaper to have orbiting solar plants than solar/battery(or whatever long term energy storage)? It’s that baseload problem which makes the manmade fusion/fission attractive.

mr_toad2• 2 years ago

For a space based solution you have all the costs of solar, plus launch costs, plus the receivers are very large and costly themselves.

It’s never going to be cheaper than solar, but it does have the advantage of working at night and through cloud cover.

In the very long run it might make more sense to launch whatever’s using the power into space as well, saving on the cost of the transmission and receiving infrastructure, but also removing further sources of pollution from Earth.

SoftTalker2• 2 years ago

So you have orbiting panels that will do what? Beam the energy back to earth? Isn't the sun beaming energy to earth directly? What problems do orbiting panels solve?

ethn3• 2 years ago

Schockley-Quiesser limit

Qwertious5• 2 years ago

Only applies to single-junction cells. 68%-efficient solar panels are quite theoretically possible, they'll just be incredibly difficult to manufacture cheaply. The current world record for solar panel efficiency is 47.6%.

lambdaone5• 2 years ago

That's certainly a hard limit for a cell with a single P-N junction. However, with a bit of ingenuity, we can do much better than that; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limi...

sdenton4• 2 years ago

Exactly this! Fusion power is eight minutes away. Always has been.

JohnFen• 2 years ago

"Ever" is a very long time.

Will we get fusion power in the next few decades? I wouldn't bet on it, but I also wouldn't bet against it.

avidiax• 2 years ago

I would bet against it. We haven't even built one of the key facilities to test the materials that we would hope to make a fusion reactor from. Once built, it will still take 20 years or so (as I recall) to come to some conclusions about suitable materials.

The sun is able to use gravity containment. Terrestrial fusion has to use magnetic and physical containment. The extremely high energy neutrons produced rapidly deteriorate common engineering materials. A replacement schedule is very difficult because of induced radioactivity, which means that the reactor cladding would need to be replaced by robots most likely.

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

jandrese3• 2 years ago

At this point I would bet against commercial fusion power plants. It was always questionable if they would be cost competitive with fission power plants, but now even those are being replaced by renewables and grid storage.

The bigger problem is that fusion plants aren't useful for making weapons. Fission plants were basically a side project of the nuclear arms race, which is why they're a dying industry now. The world already has all of the nuclear bombs it will ever need and despite all of the promises they never managed to compete on cost. It's so much easier and cheaper to install wind turbines, solar panels, and grid scale batteries that there will probably never be a market for a commercial fusion power plant.

deburo• 2 years ago

There's a huge surge of investment into Nuclear these last few years. Innovation is starting again in that sector, I wouldn't bet against it.

s1artibartfast3• 2 years ago

Strong Wind doesn't exist on asteroids and many planets, so I think there will be a long term need. Solar power decreases with the cube root of distance from the sun,so twice the distance is 1/8th the flux

grecy10• 2 years ago

Given how rapidly the price of batteries and solar are falling, it seems absurd to think it will make any economic sense to spend tens of billions of dollars on a monster fusion plant.

China are churning out regular old fission plants, and have 27 under construction right now. Even still, the average build time is 7 years.

So even if we get some breakthrough and figure out how to build a commercial fusion plant, it's a certainty it won't be up and running for something like 10-15 years. Solar and batteries will be so cheap there won't be any discussions.

cubefox9• 2 years ago

Given how rapidly the price of batteries and solar are falling

Battery prices are pretty stable, which is huge problem for wind and solar energy.

bsder• 2 years ago

The big problem is that we have funded fusion at "Fusion Never" levels.

Had we shoved as much money at fusion as we have at, say, horizontal drilling for liquified dinosaurs, we'd have fusion right now.

jmpman2• 2 years ago

Is that true of the Chinese?

bitmasher9• 2 years ago

Yes

mayama• 2 years ago

Fission is pathway to nukes, so every nation with intention of building nukes invests in fission regardless of commercial viability. Fusion on the other hand is pure r&d project and may give bragging rights if a country gets it first. So even in China it is not priority.

pfdietz24• 2 years ago

You have that backwards: the prospects for fusion looked so poor that there wasn't much stakeholder push for funding.

The argument "with funding, it will come" is cargo cult thinking, reversing cause and effect.

TaylorAlexander• 2 years ago

Would love to see comments that actually respond to the article! Everyone here seems to be sharing their general opinions on fusion or a reaction to the article title. The article is actually very detailed!

sien• 2 years ago

Yep.

It's a well done article that had a lot of research behind it.

FWIW if you're interested in Fusion the book 'The Future of Fusion Energy' is very good.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43700662-the-future-of-f...

Also Commonwealth Fusion Systems put out a lot of interesting stuff about how they are going. Even having a look at their YouTube channel is worthwhile.

Metaculus has a lot of stuff on predictions about when fusion will be made viable :

https://www.metaculus.com/questions/?search=fusion

hn_throwaway_99• 2 years ago

Agreed, I think it is a great article. Personally, I'm most inclined to agree with the "bear case" summarized at the bottom of the article:

1. I think it's highly likely that, at some point (and probably in the not-too distant future with ITER and DEMO), humans will produce fusion reactors that are self-sustaining with net positive output (ignition).

2. Given the inherent complexity and difficulty with fusion, I think it's unlikely to ever be cost competitive with simpler power generation technologies.

3. Perhaps most importantly, at least in the next human lifetime, I think fusion will be largely irrelevant in the quest for carbon-free power generation, mostly as a result of the timescales required. I think right now that everyone pretty much understands that the problem with decarbonization tech is base load and storage: carbon-free renewables like solar and wind are already the cheapest form of energy generation, but they're intermittent and unreliable. Given the latest climate data, I think it's imperative that we develop base load and storage tech in the text 10/20/50 years, or we're REALLY f'd. But I haven't heard even fusion's biggest boosters say that fusion will be ready for large scale deployment in those timeframes, at cost-competitive economics. Point being, by the time I think fusion might be ready for large scale deployment, we better have already solved the base load and storage problems with cheaper tech.

buu700• 2 years ago

Personally, I don't see fusion as relevant on a time scale that will impact the climate crisis in any significant way, but it could be a major asset in taking us from net zero emissions to preindustrial carbon levels. It could also simply just be a way to achieve cheap and abundant energy in general, irrespective of climate issues.

But as you said, of course it's an open question whether fusion will actually be more economical at scale. It could conceivably turn out to be a day late and a dollar short on Earth, and more relevant elsewhere.

I'm keeping my eye on Helion (the one Sam Altman invested in). Seems they're making some pretty big claims, and have already entered into contracts to deliver to customers by 2030 or face financial penalties. Could still be vaporware, but they seem to think they have something.

rcxdude• 2 years ago

"Base load" doesn't really enter into it: you just need storage to make renewables make sense by supplying when generation doesn't meet demand and recharging when demand is less than supply. (or, if you have a cheap "base load" you use storage to even out the peaks and troughs in the same way). Base load is just a somewhat arbitrary line drawn across the lowest point of demand, it's not an actual requirement of the grid like supply and demand always matching.

Animats2• 2 years ago

It's detailed, but dated. Most of the graphs stop between 2000 and 2005. Yet the article is from 2024. Somebody took the easy way out and copied and pasted old graphs, probably.

Whatever happened to Lockheed's compact fusion program?[1]

[1] https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion...

XorNot• 2 years ago

Cancelled in sometime before 2021: https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/aircraft-propulsion/s...

My long run prediction is that ITER will work and everything people on HN kept insisting would work in 5 years will suffer a similar fate.

I'll stake my claim now that I think Helion is probably not going anywhere (just a vibe, but there's something off about their recent big marketing push).

giarc• 2 years ago

Welcome to online forums.

doctorpangloss• 2 years ago

Lemme sum it up for you: Not from fucking Helion.

wnc3141• 2 years ago

I use the comments to see if the article is worth reading.

immibis3• 2 years ago

I hope not. If we find a way to convert water into bitcoins cheaply, we will rapidly boil the oceans. This will be worse than global warming. The biosphere can re-evolve after a CO2 and temperature spike, but all known forms of life require water.

codethief• 2 years ago

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. You are absolutely right that we likely would end up boiling ourselves, and articles like those below have been discussed here on HN several times:

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

aristofun6• 2 years ago

What a terrible perspective. So many invalid implications embedded in your ignorant comment

dave3339• 2 years ago

There's a better way to get power or heat from hydrogen that is 200 times better than burning it:

https://brilliantlightpower.com/shareholder-meeting-presenta...

philipkglass• 2 years ago

Brilliant Light Power is nonsense. They've been promising amazing products for nearly 10 years now. Here's a Wayback Machine capture of their home page from 2015:

https://web.archive.org/web/20151122183613/https://brilliant...

BrilliantLight has developed a commercially competitive, nonpolluting source of energy from water. A SunCell™ catalytically converts H2O-based solid fuel directly into brilliant light which is converted to electricity using photovoltaic panels.

If they actually had this "commercially competitive, nonpolluting source of energy" they'd be selling the machines or selling the electricity by now.

dave3339• 2 years ago

There have been a well documented series of engineering solutions to problems in the implementation that have taken time to solve. Melting electrodes due to too much power - solved by molten stream electrodes C 2016. Melting holes in the reaction chamber eventually resolved after many different things tried by quartz that is transparent to UV. Etc. Demonstrations are offered to qualified parties.

hcfman• 2 years ago

If we do almost certainly its first use will be for some horrific things for the people of this planet. Such is the nature of the sick ones in charge.

Koshkin• 2 years ago

What horrific things a power plant can be used for?

wildylion• 2 years ago

Powering TVs so people can get even dumber. But we seem to be fine doing this with existing power plants :)

rmbyrro2• 2 years ago

In 100,000 years from now, after we're past the next ice age, archeologists will unearth tokamaks all around the world. Regular people will speculate aliens and a worldwide connection between the peoples of the world to explain the multiple occurrences.

They'll have unlimited energy based on some quantum shit.

cryptonector• 2 years ago

They'll either wonder at our stupidity, or they'll wonder what they missed since it will appear to them that maybe we got it working.

rmbyrro2• 2 years ago

Tokamaks will look to them as pyramids and mummies look to ourselves today.

nvader• 2 years ago

Hopefully nobody reads this comment of mine, but there's something I've been drying to get off my chest.

With no evidence, I believe that there is a quantum computing algorithm for fusion. It feels like there might be some way of using quantum computers to fuse "qubits" in such a way as to generate netenergy, one particle at a time.

But of course, ancients fantasized a boat could land on the moon.

tsimionescu2• 2 years ago

You can't get energy out of computation. This follows directly from mathematical principles and the definition of energy.

m463• 2 years ago

They'll have unlimited energy based on

...probably mining the center of the earth after finding it is methane or similar like thomas gold theorized, something like jupiter.

Qwertious5• 2 years ago

The centre of the earth is iron, it's how compasses work.

philipwhiuk• 2 years ago

They will assume they are religious centres like the stone circles found elsewhere. In 100,000 years, the difference between 2000AD and 3000BC is quite small.

markus_zhang• 2 years ago

20 years from now. And the same answer after 20 years.

peutetre3• 2 years ago

No, there are multiple projects and companies that are making good progress toward commercially practical fusion reactors.

Helion Energy has a contract to deliver Microsoft a fusion reactor by 2028. It's only four years away so we don't need to speculate about it. Helion will either deliver or they won't:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-buy-power-nucle...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38

https://www.helionenergy.com/

MIT's Commonwealth Fusion Systems has started construction of their small scale SPARC reactor. Once that has proven itself they will build a larger scale ARC reactor. They should get to first plasma in 2025:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3Giq6NuPYs

https://energy.mit.edu/news/mit-designed-project-achieves-ma...

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/23/1090425/mits-sup...

https://cfs.energy/

Dr4kn• 2 years ago

No one can generate enough energy with fusion at the moment. Even if Helion could do it today they would need to build a larger reactor and test that too. Then build the one for Microsoft. To do all of this in 4 years is pretty much impossible

grecy10• 2 years ago

China are currently building 27 fission reactors, and the construction time is 7 years.

If it takes 7 years to build something that is known and has been done a couple of hundred times before, I think it's safe to say it will take more than 4 years to build something of similar complexity that has never been done before.

CuriousCosmic3• 2 years ago

The only reason the answer is always 20 years from now is because governments have withdrawn funding to such an absurd degree that projects have to take long, well measured risks otherwise they lose their funding versus rapid iteration of projects with high risks of failure (and high costs).

This is ultimately a capital game and without enough capital researchers and engineers have to go with the safest bets lest they lose funding. So you get ITER which will almost certainly work but has taken forever to build because it's a gargantuan feat of overengineering in all the ways that matter to make sure it works.

And for what it's worth, ITER's new baseline schedule will be announced this upcoming Wednesday (July 3). Likely first plasma will be in the next 2 or 3 years with first fusion operation some time between 2035 and 2040.

BirAdam4• 2 years ago

Or it’s always in the future because people are trying to do with an accelerator what normally takes the mass of a star to do. Whether or not it’s even possible is up for debate.

bjornsing• 2 years ago

I think there’s a good chance that we’ll see (yet again) that $6 billion in private investment distributed over 43 startups is a lot more than $22 billion in tax money sunk into some hole in France.

yalogin• 2 years ago

I recently started thinking that even if we master fusion and know how to keep it safe, we as a society have become way too science averse that we will not let it happen. See the reaction to nuclear fission based power plants now. Everyone is scared of it and the byproducts. Germany, one of the most progressive nations on the earth,went and shut down all of its nuclear plants as a knee jerk reaction. I don’t have hope that fusion will be allowed.

pacificmint• 2 years ago

Germany, one of the most progressive nations on the earth, went and shut down all of its nuclear plants as a knee jerk reaction.

Anti nuclear sentiment had been building in Germany since at least the 70s. Then Chernobyl happened in 1986 and it got even stronger. It was part of what propelled the Greens into the administration 1998.

That administration reached an agreement for the nuclear exit in 2000 and the first plant went offline in 2003.

Merkels cabinet tried to extend the planned runtimes for the remaining plants, and it was that extension that was rolled backed after Fukushima.

Now, you can think that it was a big mistake, but it certainly was not a knee jerk reaction. It was a decision that was 50 years in the making.

bratbag• 2 years ago

50 years of many individual short sighted knee jerk reactions.

tedd4u• 2 years ago

From 2 years ago. Large region of Australia running fully on solar/wind/storage for 10+ days. Seems like the focus has to be on storage and continued improvement of grid-scale and rooftop solar and wind.

    South Australia has just chalked up what is undoubtedly a world first – a run of 
    more than 10 consecutive days over which the average production of wind and solar 
    accounted for 100 per cent of local demand.

    No other gigawatt scale grid in the world has come close to this amount of “variable 
    renewable energy”, or for such a long time.

    RenewEconomy reported on Monday that South Australia had just enjoyed a seven day 
    run of wind and solar that produced more than 104 per cent of average demand. Closer     
    inspection proved it was even more impressive than that.


    According to Geoff Eldridge at data providers GPE NemLog2, the supply of wind and 
    solar averaged 100 per cent of local demand for 10 days and 9 hours (a total of 249 
    hours) from 08:20 on Friday, December 9, to 1720, Monday, December 19. [1]

[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australias-remarkable-100-...

belorn2• 2 years ago

Those sounds interesting and is likely a nice achievement, but averages really hide the critical information here. What was the min and max, and how did they deal with periods of low supply?

Denmark is a nice example why this matter. During optimal weather their wind power produce around twice their local demand. However, in terms of actually consumption each year they need to import about 50% of their total amount of energy. This despite the fact that they export more energy than they import. The only way that would make mathematically sense is if export and import occur during different periods over the year.

This has multiple issues. The biggest being that they are heavily dependent on nearby countries fossil fueled power plants. A secondary problem is that prices they get for exports are low, since optimal weather conditions means a general surplus of energy in EU, while periods of bad weather results low supply and very high import costs. Their exports do not pay for their imports, despite exporting more than importing (in terms of energy, not money).

One can not remove the word averages and conclude that they ran fully on solar/wind/storage for 10+ days. It would be the same as saying that Denmark is running fully on wind a decade+.

dsign• 2 years ago

Article is click-bait. Most of it is dedicated to general information and history, not the question. It would be a good article if its title were “All that you just suddenly wanted to know about nuclear fusion if you never got the itch before, in one big gulp.” Of course, somebody who knows nothing of nuclear fusion and want to would be better served by a tittle that says so “Have you heard the good news? Nuclear fusion is coming! Let me tell you everything about it!”

oezi2• 2 years ago

If this is your bar to call an article clickbait, everything with a title could be called that.

lambdaone5• 2 years ago

If you read to the end (or indeed just scroll down to the last few paragraphs) the answer is "almost certainly yes, but only if we have the will (and budget) to do so".

What puts fusion development in peril is the rapid improvement of known renewable technologies, and the likelihood that 100% renewables is possible in the near future using only those technologies at lower cost.

ggm2• 2 years ago

Cumulative funding required for demonstration commercial fusion reactor

Was compelling. Belief we're prepared to invest seems lacking.

I think achieving multi second "stable" plasma conditions has been amazing. But, I think that's a cigarette lighter held next to petrified wood (to use an atomic bomb era analogy) away from ignition as a useful energy over time equation.

We're also somewhat behind "what's embrittlement" or "what's xenon poisoning" problems. Things which don't emerge until a few months in your life of run-time. Again, from early fission reactor design, these things can sink a project.

Or, unexpected fission or other nasty behaviours. Things which make it hard to get inside the structure to fix it. The unknown unknowns in this feel huge. But, linear energy in, energy out, and the approach to viable ignition temperature. That's science and engineering at its best.

Fusors tapped out. "Mr fusion" isn't happening.

vasco2• 2 years ago

cigarette lighter held next to petrified wood (to use an atomic bomb era analogy)

Can you, or anyone, explain the lore here? I get it's impossible to light it on fire, but what's the context? I tried searching for the expression and couldn't find anything.

ggm2• 2 years ago

George Gamow found a way to dramatize how unpromising Teller’s Super had proven to be. John McPhee reports the story as Los Alamos physicist Theodore Taylor remembered it. “One day, at a meeting of people who were working on the problem of the fusion bomb . . . Gamow placed a ball of cotton next to a piece of wood. He soaked the cotton with lighter fuel. He struck a match and ignited the cotton. It flashed and burned, a little fireball. The flame failed completely to ignite the wood, which looked just as it had before—unscorched, unaffected. Gamow passed it around. It was petrified wood. He said, ‘That is where we are just now in the development of the hydrogen bomb.’

From "Dark Sun" by Richard Rhodes.

mrtracy• 2 years ago

I think there’s some possibly good investment advice to extract here, if you’re able and willing to invest in fusion startups: based on the need to compete with renewables alone, commercial success implies that highly complex reactors simply may not have a market based on construction cost, even if they do generate power.

Of the fusion startups mentioned in the article, I’d say that makes Zap Energy the one worth gambling on (if you’re a gambler that is), as its success apparently depends on exploiting a fluid dynamics effect which was not well known in the past (“shear flow”). If this sufficiently solves the confinement problem, the resulting device looks ludicrously simple in comparison to contemporaries.

Of course it may not work at all, I sure don’t know if it will; but if you had to invest in one of these, that seems like the one where successful power generation actually creates a marketable product.

NateEag• 2 years ago

People talk about solar + wind with storage as leaving hypothetical fusion in the dust.

If a fusion reactor can be made practicable, then we have a clean, low-radiation power generation system that will still work in the face of nuclear / asteroid-impact / supervolcanic winter.

...granted, any of those events could take out most or all of the hypothetical reactors, but it still seems worth noting to me.

anovikov2• 2 years ago

No. We never will. Simply ran out of time. Electricity will be provided fully by renewables only in EU and China in a timeframe shorter than it takes to build a new nuclear reactor of already well-debugged type, from scratch - let alone a thermonuclear one for which no designs exist. We are speaking 2035-2040 to fully get rid of fossil fuels in electricity grid, and 2030-2035 before they are reduced to low (10-20%) levels.

It took 12 years to build first unit of Belarusian NPP - of a type that's been built by the dozen for decades, and in a country where all-powerful government controls and owns everything, there is no NIMBY or the "society" thing in the Western understanding at all, and where if you try to protest you just disappear. Can't be done faster. By 2036, fossil fuel electricity will be a thing of the past in some places, and quickly disappearing in all others.

defrost3• 2 years ago

In reality electricity in China will NOT "be provided fully by renewables".

    The country's current fleet stands at 56 reactors. China expects to build 6 to 8 new nuclear power plants each year for the foreseeable future and is projected to pass the U.S. in nuclear-generated electricity by 2030. In total, China intends to build a total of 150 new nuclear reactors between 2020 and 2035.

China has an impressive expansion of solar. That's a fact.

China is also expanding coal power stations (while closing older shitty coal stations) to provide base energy for its planned and ongoing expansion of both solar and nuclear.

Currently something of the order of 60% of the energy requirement of building solar (for local use and for global supply) in China comes directly from coal power.

I'm all for renewables, it's the sensible direction.

I'm also big on factual statements.

anovikov2• 2 years ago

Well ok, in 10-15 years all fossil and nuclear electricity in China will be a drop in the bucket. They will probably be commissioning a terawatt per year of solar by then, or more.

derriz3• 2 years ago

I think a line from the end of the article - part of the bear case - "fusion is just another in a long line of energy technologies that boil water to drive a turbine" - should be at the start.

The entire premise of fusion generation is based on world view where the limiting factor for generating electricity was the cost of providing fuel for combustion to generate heat. This thinking was pretty natural if you looked around the world in the first half of the 20th century when coal and steam engines were still kings of energy. This was a pre-semiconductor and pre-plastic age. That's why they ended up using long of fairly primitive technologies: a chemical (combustion) process to generate heat, a heat capture process to boil a tank of water, a mechanical process to convert the steam pressure into mechanical energy, and an electro-magnetic process to extract usable electricity.

But in an age of advanced materials and semiconductors, it feels more and more that fusion is an attempt to solve a problem that is no longer really relevant. Working towards a "better" heat source for an electricity generation process which still involves steam-age tech is akin to trying to breed faster/cheaper horses to improve modern transport.

The cost of fuel is almost negligible for fission - non-fuel operating costs are killing off perfectly functioning nuclear plants like at Indian Point[1] - so the problem that fusion will "solve" is not actually a significant problem.

I'm convinced that we have moved beyond boiling water and generating heat, etc. in electricity generation. We no longer need massive steam engines to generate electricity. Modern technologies like wind, solar and batteries dispense with all this cost and complexity and the shackles of Carnot efficiency.

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

vincvinc• 2 years ago

Would be relevant criticism but here’s fusion startups skipping the “boiling water” step - see Helion Energy (Sam Altman funded)

tuatoru2• 2 years ago

On paper.

walleeee3• 2 years ago

Neither semiconductors nor plastics shift the energy generation paradigm. "Advanced materials"- alright, well, which ones? And do they give us a better return than good old steam?

Wind, solar and batteries are products of combustion-fueled industry. The extent to which we have electrified the world industrial base is minimal, and to do so at the current scale on the basis of wind and solar would take a larger quantity of several metals than is available in the crust, to set aside the consequences of a massive expansion in mining, the poor recycling rates for most of the relevant materials, and the fact that, even with a much-improved recovery rate, this would only buy us on the order of several hundred years.

A more promising energy production system for a resource-limited world is thorium molten salt, which is comfortably Carnot in spirit, relatively cheap and easy to build, fuel and operate, no danger of meltdown, no "dual-use" for weapons, can consume existing nuclear waste... And we would do well to explore alternative battery chemistries as lithium is neither unique nor optimal, simply popular, and our hunger for it at present seems to be motivating some unpleasant political machinations.

derriz3• 2 years ago

You really believe it would have been possible to construct a modern wind turbine with the materials available in 1950?

Yes they do give a much better return than any thermal source according to any recent study of LCOE I've come across. Reflected in investment numbers - renewables account for 70% of new global capacity added last year.

Wind, solar and batteries are products of an energy intensive process NOT a combustion based process.

The shift to electricity as the primary energy source is well underway in multiple industries and sectors. Growth appears slow because industrial equipment is built to last decades. In transport (equally as energy hungry as industry), it's happening a lot faster as with domestic (induction cooking and heat pump sales).

Thorium molten salt, promising? You mean they were back in the 1950s/1960s in Oak Ridge? The first experimental molten salt reactor ran for a few days before springing a leak and being decommissioned. Or the later one in the 1960s which ran for 4 years (only managing to operate for 40% of the time)? There's a whole bunch of reasons that the PWR emerged as the dominant nuclear generation tech from forest of experimental reactor designs in the mid 20th century.

voidfunc• 2 years ago

IMO I think the driver for fusion is going to be commercial or military need for orders of magnitude larger than today massive power generation. Climate change isn't going to get us there.

DrBazza• 2 years ago

Worked with a bunch of plasma physics postdocs in the early 90s, and fusion was 30 years away... checks calendar... 34 years ago. And that was the joke then.

However, with advances like REBCO tape and so on, it's far more realistic now. I hope we get it in my lifetime, but I'm not confident.

PaulDavisThe1st• 2 years ago

I left the world of protein folding in 1987 (quit my PhD) because I was certain that workable solutions were at least 25 years away, and I didn't think I was that kind of person to beat my head against a problem for more than two decades.

By 2013 (25 years later), still no real progress on protein folding.

In 2018 (30 years later) AlphaFold was revealed.

baxtr• 2 years ago

It’s just another 40 years away!

aristofun6• 2 years ago

This is the only scalable way out of current energy crisis.

It must be done, we have no choice (longterm).

pfdietz24• 2 years ago

Utterly wrong. Renewables scale just fine.

aristofun6• 2 years ago

Utterly ignorant.

Renewables are not even close to others in for example energy density.

Covering half the country with expensive and costly solar panels is not a scalable option.

adr1an• 2 years ago

Probably nobody notices it, but the article called Juan Domingo Peron to be a dictator. I get it, some detractors might say that. But that's hardly the truth. From wikipedia:

Perón is the only Argentine president elected three times and holds the highest percentage of votes (61.86%) in clean elections with universal suffrage.

Will we ever get fusion power?

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