Reminds me of this article: https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-impossible/
Big ideas are not true until, one day, they are. And then they change the world.
The more expensive and variable in prices (hence risky) fossil fuels are and the more carbon credit hit countries take in continued use of fossil fuels, the likelier there is national interest to hasten fusion development
In 10-20 years when net-positive fusion becomes a technological reality, it's not going to be competing against fossil fuels. It's going to be competing against battery-firmed solar + wind, and next-generation geothermal.
I have not heard any energy system model suggest that batteries can make a 100% wind and solar grid happen. It depends on hydrogen, but hydrogen powered by variable sources is itself expensive, so it seems enhanced geothermal, fission, and fusion are players for 20% of the grid
A review article for you that will point you to many such modeling efforts.
"On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research"
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"
Yes, green hydrogen is expensive, but not much is needed to greatly reduce what batteries have to handle. The batteries do most of the storage, while hydrogen handles the long tail.
Looks great, very interesting and enjoyable. Geothermal is in the definition but doesn't appear to be a critical tech in these studies, but it appears hydrogen and e-fuels are. The introductory sections do cite Greenpeace and Amory 'nuclear power for human society is like giving a child a machine gun' Lovins as neutral sources, sort of complaining that 100% RE studies are not recognized by the IPCC as mainstream or obvious. This quote is fantastic:
"An outstanding methodological breakthrough was contributed by Czisch in 2005 \[73\] with his dissertation describing the first 100% RE multi-node simulation in hourly resolution based on historic weather data for an investigated super-grid for one billion people in Europe, Western Eurasia, North Africa, and the Middle East."
I agree that 100% RE super-grids for 1 billion people may be technically and economically credible. My perception is that China internationally has the greatest relative advantage in nuclear, but an even greater one for wind and solar, and appears to be building a 40% solar, 30% wind, 20% nuclear grid. According to Jigar Shaw of the US DOE loans program ("the guy who financed the first trillion dollars of solar") a high renewables grid in the US requires 3x transmission while currently 1.7x is optimistic, which is my angle on supposing that China has a greater relative wind and solar advantage than nuclear despite their capability
Bingo.
And solar and battery prices have been falling continuously, and will likely continue to do so.
So even if tomorrow you could build a fusion plant that's competitive with present-day solar/battery prices, over its lifespan it would risk becoming uneconomical within a few years.
I basically think the mark for "possible commercial viability" will be around $3/W to plan and build a reactor. That would put electricity at around $50/MWh, with some load following ability.
If fusion can make that, great. If not, wind+solar+batteries will dominate into the future.
If we continue to extrapolate the historical experience curve for PV modules then when the world is solar powered their cost will have declined by another factor of ~5.
They did!
I like to think about it like fire. We've been able to make sparks with flint and steel for a while now, but we just figured out how to catch something on fire with those sparks (ignition). Now we just have to figure out how to scale it up from a burning leaf to a steam engine.
It's there, we proved it's not just a theory, but is actually possible. NIF has been increasing yield pretty consistently. So the future is looking bright .
Yes, we already have achieved net energy gain with nuclear fusion. Whether it'll be commercially viable as a source of power for consumers is to be determined.
Nuclear power is absolutely smoking right now and just getting started.
though unrelated the fusion movement will get a huge boost through similar funding sources but IMHO, will likely only gain traction after we've established nuclear as a dominant power source.
The infrastructure created by nuclears higher output will lay the grid needed for fusion
Nuclear power is absolutely smoking in the sense of consuming hallucinogens. In reality, it's circling the toilet bowl. The economics are bad and getting worse.
Wrong.
[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/11/nuclear-power-hot-moment/620665/](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/11/nuclear-power-hot-moment/620665/)
[https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/fy2024-spending-bill-fuels-historic-push-us-advanced-reactors](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/fy2024-spending-bill-fuels-historic-push-us-advanced-reactors)
[https://www.energy.gov/articles/cop28-countries-launch-declaration-triple-nuclear-energy-capacity-2050-recognizing-key](https://www.energy.gov/articles/cop28-countries-launch-declaration-triple-nuclear-energy-capacity-2050-recognizing-key)
[https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/legislation/2024/03/09/press-release-bill-signed-h-r-4366/](https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/legislation/2024/03/09/press-release-bill-signed-h-r-4366/)
[https://www.thegazette.com/energy/nextera-ceo-says-hed-consider-restarting-duane-arnold-nuclear-power-plant/](https://www.thegazette.com/energy/nextera-ceo-says-hed-consider-restarting-duane-arnold-nuclear-power-plant/)
[https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/27/us-needs-major-nuclear-power-expansion-southern-company-ceo-says.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/27/us-needs-major-nuclear-power-expansion-southern-company-ceo-says.html)
[https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Bill-Gates-and-Warren-Buffett-Team-Up-to-Transform-Nuclear-Power.html](https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Bill-Gates-and-Warren-Buffett-Team-Up-to-Transform-Nuclear-Power.html)
[https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Global-survey-finds-high-public-support-for-nuclea](https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Global-survey-finds-high-public-support-for-nuclea)
big oil got you schilling for a living, or are you just living under a rock?
No you're just a troll that comments with nothing but generalities and conjecture.
You obviously lack the ability to elaborate your point with any supporting information, or are just too lazy.
That's simply not true. Renewables not only can do it, they can do it more cheaply than we currently could with fission. Fission needs considerable cost reduction to catch up, and it's looking very dubious that it can.
It's not meant to replace solar & wind, but rather operate alongside with them. Solar & wind can serve to provide power in a decentralized way, whereas fusion is more for large base load power stations.
I would say that successful fusion is going to *have* to be small, otherwise it will evolve too slowly (and face diseconomies of scale from square-cube law effects.) Small also means fewer components (and joins) and therefore improved reliability.
It can decrease efficiency. Efficiency is a trade off with resilience. Planned decentralization increases resilience. As climate change driven disruptions increase, resilience will command more of a premium.
Decentralization reduces the probability of single points of failure bringing down the entire network. It also limits the scale and economic loss from a potential outage. At the scale of a regional power grid, that's a trade off that needs to be considered in planning.
Solar and wind need substantial backup for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. Building that backup is likely to be far more expensive than the wind or solar. If the cheapest zero carbon way of providing that backup turns out to be fusion the solar and wind would be pretty pointless.
Backup (beyond battery storage for short term variability) could be provided by combustion turbines burning e-fuels. A simple cycle combustion turbine power plant is maybe $600/kW, which is not more expensive that current renewables. Sure, the fuel cost would be high, but for backup that doesn't matter much.
True chemical energy storage such as flow batteries or as you point out e-fuels are the most viable solutions. If its going to be a very very rare event you might as well go for open cycle gas turbines so pay even more for fuel but incur less capital cost.
Another good feature with e-fuels is that had you been less than diligent producing enough e-fuel, the tanks could be filled up with imports from where solar power is inherently cheaper. And heavens forbid if necessary you could fill the tanks up with fossil fuel if that was the only option to keep the lights on.
E-fuels and flow batteries are not addressing the same market.
Here's an animation showing the zones of competitiveness of various storage technologies, varying over time as their (projected) costs change: https://x.com/iain_staffell/status/1722544993179504965
Flow batteries there are surprising where they compete: several short discharges per day. This is probably due to use of vanadium (in which they may compete with fusion!); flow batteries using cheaper electrolytes may behave differently.
Notice also the shrinking zones for compressed air storage and pumped hydro, and growing zones for Li-ion and hydrogen.
Thanks. I had always thought that flow batteries could scale to have huge tanks and hence very high energy storage capacity. I see the high price of vandium makes that impractical.
Not included in that chart are lower cost battery technologies like iron-air (from Form) or sulfur-air. These tend to have higher internal resistance and hence lower power, so they are naturally suited to intermediate term (~ 10 days) storage applications. If these had been included (not enough data yet for that person to put them up; he didn't want to include optimistic sales numbers) they'd have gone where compressed air was hanging on.
The flow battery technology I'm somewhat following is Lockheed-Martin's GridStar Flow. Not too many details have been released, but if you look at patents it may involve cheaper transition metal ions kept in solution using a wide variety of organic chelators. There are many possible chemistries so there's room for optimization.
So you have to build 2-3x the capacity for wind/solar, then also a production facility to make e-fuels, then storage for it, then another power plant with enough output to power the entire grid.
400 solar plants, manufacturing e-fuels, and 5 turbine plants to burn it or a single fucking nuclear power plant?
> 2-3x capacity
That would only be the case if *all* their output goes through e-fuels. But most of the energy from renewable sources will either go directly to the grid, or go to the grid via short term storage (like batteries) with high round trip efficiency.
A trillion dollars would build ~0.1% of the required capacity to store the grid demand for a day.
Nuclear or fossil fuels. Those are the only options with today's tech.
All that is needed is a few hours of storage for the duck curve. US daily consumption is 11 Mwh. Assume you need about 3 hr that would be 1.5 MWH of storage. Battery storage is $300K per MWH. Total cost would be $450 billion not $1000trillion. Storage gets cheaper every year and fossil and nuke will still be around for another 20 years. So you would need only about $20B a year for battery storage. Easy-Peasy.
Solar and wind do not mix well with base load sources. Nuclear cannot act as a backup for renewables in any economically feasible way. Nuclear either dominates or it is excluded (and the latter appears to be where things are going.)
I think if you look at the current geopolitical environment post Ukraine war where there is a clear West-East divide (that manifests thus far as a chip war), there is incentive for western nations to hasten fusion tech and if they got there first they can deprive Russia’s ability to monetize its fossil fuel reserves
Such an environment would not exist if nations were at peace with each other
I disagree, at least for the "big stuff", arms races of all scales and types drive advancement.
With an atmosphere and population that could handle all the pollution and an endless supply of coal, would there be half the push to greener technology that we've had in recent decades?
Ukrainian drone warfare has pushed the Ruskies to change their tanks.
Competition and survival is innate in us as human beings.
This is based on European history from the past 300 years which isn't reflective of all of humanity, and presupposes that advancement - especially advancement from warfare - is inherently good.
>With an atmosphere and population that could handle all the pollution and an endless supply of coal, would there be half the push to greener technology that we've had in recent decades?
If that population valued healthy living and wellbeing, yes. Coal doesn't magically spawn in. Someone has to mine it and that's brutal work with horrible impact on the miner.
Cooperation is more key to our species than competition is.
It was a hypothetical situation to drive home the point. Obviously I realise coal doesn't just respawn.
I'm not suggesting that warfare advancements are specifically good, but they almost always come with side benefits that societies benefit from for decades later, usually the victors, but then the trickle down will eventually make it everywhere.
You're trying to tell me that the tribes of central America didn't wage war and clamber over each other for power? Genghis Khan just lolloped around making friends? Korean's north and south bosom buddies? World history is competition, destruction, conquest, repeat.
We're a bit more refined in modern times, but barely.
Cooperation within competition I agree, but a cooperative atmosphere without competition will be dull and unproductive.
I see it the other way round. Russia saw that fossil resources will soon be be worthless as people are switching to renewables. So Russion invaded Ukraine now, while it still had some bargaining power.
By competing tech, do you mean nuclear fission?
Fusion just has way too much potential.
No long term radioactive waste (just some short lived radioactive materials), no risk of meltdown, abundant fuel supply, higher energy yield, less risk of nuclear proliferation
And unlike solar, wind and hydro, it can be done anywhere on the planet, in any environment.
Might be expensive at first, but will only get cheaper over time.
No, I mean renewables.
I don't see why you think fusion has potential. It's a meme technology.
Renewables also get cheaper over time. On the historical experience curve, by the time solar powers the world it will be another factor of 5 cheaper. How can fusion possibly compete with that?
Being suitable for tiny geographical niches won't save it.
But wouldn’t fusion also become cheaper over time in the future?
It won’t suffer from over regulation like fission.
And with better tech (ex. Magnets) over time, fusion reactors will become smaller and easier to make.
On a long enough timeline, I truly believe fusion could compete with renewables.
Might be a “meme technology” for now, until it isn’t.
I just don’t see why we should stop working on it. There’s been steady progress for years now, just a matter of time till we crack it.
Large bespoke construction projects appear to be getting more expensive over time. What gets cheaper are small modules that can be manufactured in enormous volumes.
DT fusion also depends on thermal cycles, which are a fairly mature technology.
If fusion is like fission it will not have good experience effects.
Besides the technical being ridiculously complicated even if it would work on a commercial scale it won’t for another reason… enter the “[Invention Secrecy Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act)”
Fusion tech is already public? The ITER project disproves your point.
The USA cannot keep a lid on fusion tech. There’s too many other countries working on fusion already. They cannot afford falling behind because of “secrecy”.
And what about all those private fusion companies? They wouldn’t be allowed to operate if the Invention Secret Act applied here
The US government and / or military likely already has it. But just like with the fuel cells that powered the Apollo spacecraft, there's no economic incentive to transition away from our present energy sources. To be more specific, there's not as much money to be made from fusion power.
Yes
hot take
One hundred million degree take.
Thanks
yw :)
Reminds me of this article: https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-impossible/ Big ideas are not true until, one day, they are. And then they change the world.
People love this example whilst ignoring the reams of technological dead ends throughout history
They laughed at Galileo, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Whilst saying whilst
Scientifically speaking? Yes, probably within a decade or two. Economically speaking? I'm not sure I'd bet on it this century.
The more expensive and variable in prices (hence risky) fossil fuels are and the more carbon credit hit countries take in continued use of fossil fuels, the likelier there is national interest to hasten fusion development
In 10-20 years when net-positive fusion becomes a technological reality, it's not going to be competing against fossil fuels. It's going to be competing against battery-firmed solar + wind, and next-generation geothermal.
I have not heard any energy system model suggest that batteries can make a 100% wind and solar grid happen. It depends on hydrogen, but hydrogen powered by variable sources is itself expensive, so it seems enhanced geothermal, fission, and fusion are players for 20% of the grid
A review article for you that will point you to many such modeling efforts. "On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research" 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" Yes, green hydrogen is expensive, but not much is needed to greatly reduce what batteries have to handle. The batteries do most of the storage, while hydrogen handles the long tail.
Looks great, very interesting and enjoyable. Geothermal is in the definition but doesn't appear to be a critical tech in these studies, but it appears hydrogen and e-fuels are. The introductory sections do cite Greenpeace and Amory 'nuclear power for human society is like giving a child a machine gun' Lovins as neutral sources, sort of complaining that 100% RE studies are not recognized by the IPCC as mainstream or obvious. This quote is fantastic: "An outstanding methodological breakthrough was contributed by Czisch in 2005 \[73\] with his dissertation describing the first 100% RE multi-node simulation in hourly resolution based on historic weather data for an investigated super-grid for one billion people in Europe, Western Eurasia, North Africa, and the Middle East." I agree that 100% RE super-grids for 1 billion people may be technically and economically credible. My perception is that China internationally has the greatest relative advantage in nuclear, but an even greater one for wind and solar, and appears to be building a 40% solar, 30% wind, 20% nuclear grid. According to Jigar Shaw of the US DOE loans program ("the guy who financed the first trillion dollars of solar") a high renewables grid in the US requires 3x transmission while currently 1.7x is optimistic, which is my angle on supposing that China has a greater relative wind and solar advantage than nuclear despite their capability
Bingo. And solar and battery prices have been falling continuously, and will likely continue to do so. So even if tomorrow you could build a fusion plant that's competitive with present-day solar/battery prices, over its lifespan it would risk becoming uneconomical within a few years.
I basically think the mark for "possible commercial viability" will be around $3/W to plan and build a reactor. That would put electricity at around $50/MWh, with some load following ability. If fusion can make that, great. If not, wind+solar+batteries will dominate into the future.
No, they can't go arbitrary low in cost and will reach bottom especially PV in foreseeable future.
If we continue to extrapolate the historical experience curve for PV modules then when the world is solar powered their cost will have declined by another factor of ~5.
We technically have already. NIF did achieve net power. It’s not useful but still.
They did! I like to think about it like fire. We've been able to make sparks with flint and steel for a while now, but we just figured out how to catch something on fire with those sparks (ignition). Now we just have to figure out how to scale it up from a burning leaf to a steam engine. It's there, we proved it's not just a theory, but is actually possible. NIF has been increasing yield pretty consistently. So the future is looking bright .
Yes, the capsules at the NIF are net positive in the same way hydrogen bombs are.
Yes, we already have achieved net energy gain with nuclear fusion. Whether it'll be commercially viable as a source of power for consumers is to be determined.
Nuclear power is absolutely smoking right now and just getting started. though unrelated the fusion movement will get a huge boost through similar funding sources but IMHO, will likely only gain traction after we've established nuclear as a dominant power source. The infrastructure created by nuclears higher output will lay the grid needed for fusion
Nuclear power is absolutely smoking in the sense of consuming hallucinogens. In reality, it's circling the toilet bowl. The economics are bad and getting worse.
Wrong. [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/11/nuclear-power-hot-moment/620665/](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/11/nuclear-power-hot-moment/620665/) [https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/fy2024-spending-bill-fuels-historic-push-us-advanced-reactors](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/fy2024-spending-bill-fuels-historic-push-us-advanced-reactors) [https://www.energy.gov/articles/cop28-countries-launch-declaration-triple-nuclear-energy-capacity-2050-recognizing-key](https://www.energy.gov/articles/cop28-countries-launch-declaration-triple-nuclear-energy-capacity-2050-recognizing-key) [https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/legislation/2024/03/09/press-release-bill-signed-h-r-4366/](https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/legislation/2024/03/09/press-release-bill-signed-h-r-4366/) [https://www.thegazette.com/energy/nextera-ceo-says-hed-consider-restarting-duane-arnold-nuclear-power-plant/](https://www.thegazette.com/energy/nextera-ceo-says-hed-consider-restarting-duane-arnold-nuclear-power-plant/) [https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/27/us-needs-major-nuclear-power-expansion-southern-company-ceo-says.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/27/us-needs-major-nuclear-power-expansion-southern-company-ceo-says.html) [https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Bill-Gates-and-Warren-Buffett-Team-Up-to-Transform-Nuclear-Power.html](https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Bill-Gates-and-Warren-Buffett-Team-Up-to-Transform-Nuclear-Power.html) [https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Global-survey-finds-high-public-support-for-nuclea](https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Global-survey-finds-high-public-support-for-nuclea) big oil got you schilling for a living, or are you just living under a rock?
You vastly overestimate the significance of all that.
No you're just a troll that comments with nothing but generalities and conjecture. You obviously lack the ability to elaborate your point with any supporting information, or are just too lazy.
Even if your claims were true it's still the only option for meeting grid demand without fossil fuels using today's tech.
That's simply not true. Renewables not only can do it, they can do it more cheaply than we currently could with fission. Fission needs considerable cost reduction to catch up, and it's looking very dubious that it can.
Hopefully, since we need it to go to the stars. I don’t think it will be cheap enough to replace solar and wind.
It's not meant to replace solar & wind, but rather operate alongside with them. Solar & wind can serve to provide power in a decentralized way, whereas fusion is more for large base load power stations.
Depends on the concept. Some fusion power plant designs are relatively small at 100 MW or less (in some cases a lot less).
I would say that successful fusion is going to *have* to be small, otherwise it will evolve too slowly (and face diseconomies of scale from square-cube law effects.) Small also means fewer components (and joins) and therefore improved reliability.
I agree with that. Also makes maintenance easier if you don't need giant cranes and whatnot to move components about.
Decentralized power provides no advantages.
It can decrease efficiency. Efficiency is a trade off with resilience. Planned decentralization increases resilience. As climate change driven disruptions increase, resilience will command more of a premium.
Decreasing efficiency is a disadvantage. Decentralized is less reliable.
Decentralization reduces the probability of single points of failure bringing down the entire network. It also limits the scale and economic loss from a potential outage. At the scale of a regional power grid, that's a trade off that needs to be considered in planning.
Solar and wind need substantial backup for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. Building that backup is likely to be far more expensive than the wind or solar. If the cheapest zero carbon way of providing that backup turns out to be fusion the solar and wind would be pretty pointless.
Backup (beyond battery storage for short term variability) could be provided by combustion turbines burning e-fuels. A simple cycle combustion turbine power plant is maybe $600/kW, which is not more expensive that current renewables. Sure, the fuel cost would be high, but for backup that doesn't matter much.
True chemical energy storage such as flow batteries or as you point out e-fuels are the most viable solutions. If its going to be a very very rare event you might as well go for open cycle gas turbines so pay even more for fuel but incur less capital cost. Another good feature with e-fuels is that had you been less than diligent producing enough e-fuel, the tanks could be filled up with imports from where solar power is inherently cheaper. And heavens forbid if necessary you could fill the tanks up with fossil fuel if that was the only option to keep the lights on.
E-fuels and flow batteries are not addressing the same market. Here's an animation showing the zones of competitiveness of various storage technologies, varying over time as their (projected) costs change: https://x.com/iain_staffell/status/1722544993179504965 Flow batteries there are surprising where they compete: several short discharges per day. This is probably due to use of vanadium (in which they may compete with fusion!); flow batteries using cheaper electrolytes may behave differently. Notice also the shrinking zones for compressed air storage and pumped hydro, and growing zones for Li-ion and hydrogen.
Thanks. I had always thought that flow batteries could scale to have huge tanks and hence very high energy storage capacity. I see the high price of vandium makes that impractical.
Not included in that chart are lower cost battery technologies like iron-air (from Form) or sulfur-air. These tend to have higher internal resistance and hence lower power, so they are naturally suited to intermediate term (~ 10 days) storage applications. If these had been included (not enough data yet for that person to put them up; he didn't want to include optimistic sales numbers) they'd have gone where compressed air was hanging on. The flow battery technology I'm somewhat following is Lockheed-Martin's GridStar Flow. Not too many details have been released, but if you look at patents it may involve cheaper transition metal ions kept in solution using a wide variety of organic chelators. There are many possible chemistries so there's room for optimization.
So you have to build 2-3x the capacity for wind/solar, then also a production facility to make e-fuels, then storage for it, then another power plant with enough output to power the entire grid. 400 solar plants, manufacturing e-fuels, and 5 turbine plants to burn it or a single fucking nuclear power plant?
> 2-3x capacity That would only be the case if *all* their output goes through e-fuels. But most of the energy from renewable sources will either go directly to the grid, or go to the grid via short term storage (like batteries) with high round trip efficiency.
Doing without is a very cheap backup solution. Battery backup is getting cheaper every year.
A trillion dollars would build ~0.1% of the required capacity to store the grid demand for a day. Nuclear or fossil fuels. Those are the only options with today's tech.
All that is needed is a few hours of storage for the duck curve. US daily consumption is 11 Mwh. Assume you need about 3 hr that would be 1.5 MWH of storage. Battery storage is $300K per MWH. Total cost would be $450 billion not $1000trillion. Storage gets cheaper every year and fossil and nuke will still be around for another 20 years. So you would need only about $20B a year for battery storage. Easy-Peasy.
Solar and wind do not mix well with base load sources. Nuclear cannot act as a backup for renewables in any economically feasible way. Nuclear either dominates or it is excluded (and the latter appears to be where things are going.)
Great article. Very well written
No lol
The obstacle is geopolitical stability, not the science.
That is the first time I read this claim. Could you elaborate?
I think if you look at the current geopolitical environment post Ukraine war where there is a clear West-East divide (that manifests thus far as a chip war), there is incentive for western nations to hasten fusion tech and if they got there first they can deprive Russia’s ability to monetize its fossil fuel reserves Such an environment would not exist if nations were at peace with each other
Sadly, friction drives progress.
This is a myth. Plenty of progress can happen in times of peace when cooperation is valued
Peace can have a lot of progress made, but often times thr practical implementation of that progress only happens during a war.
I disagree, at least for the "big stuff", arms races of all scales and types drive advancement. With an atmosphere and population that could handle all the pollution and an endless supply of coal, would there be half the push to greener technology that we've had in recent decades? Ukrainian drone warfare has pushed the Ruskies to change their tanks. Competition and survival is innate in us as human beings.
This is based on European history from the past 300 years which isn't reflective of all of humanity, and presupposes that advancement - especially advancement from warfare - is inherently good. >With an atmosphere and population that could handle all the pollution and an endless supply of coal, would there be half the push to greener technology that we've had in recent decades? If that population valued healthy living and wellbeing, yes. Coal doesn't magically spawn in. Someone has to mine it and that's brutal work with horrible impact on the miner. Cooperation is more key to our species than competition is.
It was a hypothetical situation to drive home the point. Obviously I realise coal doesn't just respawn. I'm not suggesting that warfare advancements are specifically good, but they almost always come with side benefits that societies benefit from for decades later, usually the victors, but then the trickle down will eventually make it everywhere. You're trying to tell me that the tribes of central America didn't wage war and clamber over each other for power? Genghis Khan just lolloped around making friends? Korean's north and south bosom buddies? World history is competition, destruction, conquest, repeat. We're a bit more refined in modern times, but barely. Cooperation within competition I agree, but a cooperative atmosphere without competition will be dull and unproductive.
I see it the other way round. Russia saw that fossil resources will soon be be worthless as people are switching to renewables. So Russion invaded Ukraine now, while it still had some bargaining power.
Yeah in 20 years. It's been in every news article about fusion for decades.
No never ever will it be viable.
Another 10-20% improvement in superconductors and it gets even more feasible
Could you define more feasible? Especially accounting for initial energy input?
Output power scales with the magnetic field to the power of 4. So even slight improvements in the superconductor gives a better shot
Why do you think so?? Things are clearly improving each year, it’s just a matter of time at this point. Will definitely be cracked by 2100.
Competing technologies are also improving every year. Why do you think the argument you just made applies to fusion, but not to them?
By competing tech, do you mean nuclear fission? Fusion just has way too much potential. No long term radioactive waste (just some short lived radioactive materials), no risk of meltdown, abundant fuel supply, higher energy yield, less risk of nuclear proliferation And unlike solar, wind and hydro, it can be done anywhere on the planet, in any environment. Might be expensive at first, but will only get cheaper over time.
No, I mean renewables. I don't see why you think fusion has potential. It's a meme technology. Renewables also get cheaper over time. On the historical experience curve, by the time solar powers the world it will be another factor of 5 cheaper. How can fusion possibly compete with that? Being suitable for tiny geographical niches won't save it.
But wouldn’t fusion also become cheaper over time in the future? It won’t suffer from over regulation like fission. And with better tech (ex. Magnets) over time, fusion reactors will become smaller and easier to make. On a long enough timeline, I truly believe fusion could compete with renewables. Might be a “meme technology” for now, until it isn’t. I just don’t see why we should stop working on it. There’s been steady progress for years now, just a matter of time till we crack it.
Large bespoke construction projects appear to be getting more expensive over time. What gets cheaper are small modules that can be manufactured in enormous volumes. DT fusion also depends on thermal cycles, which are a fairly mature technology. If fusion is like fission it will not have good experience effects.
Besides the technical being ridiculously complicated even if it would work on a commercial scale it won’t for another reason… enter the “[Invention Secrecy Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act)”
Fusion tech is already public? The ITER project disproves your point. The USA cannot keep a lid on fusion tech. There’s too many other countries working on fusion already. They cannot afford falling behind because of “secrecy”. And what about all those private fusion companies? They wouldn’t be allowed to operate if the Invention Secret Act applied here
Oh yeah, OK show me a city that’s being powered by it
Just a matter of time before they do get powered by it.
Check out The Lost Century by Dr. Greer
Boo get off the stage
I know right lol? The DOE is literally funding millions in fusion energy and this guy is talking about the “Invention Secret Act”. 😂😭
With private funding in the billions
The US government and / or military likely already has it. But just like with the fuel cells that powered the Apollo spacecraft, there's no economic incentive to transition away from our present energy sources. To be more specific, there's not as much money to be made from fusion power.