
Will Fusion Energy Ever Come Together? - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/will-fusion-energy-ever-come-together?utm_source=tss&utm_medium=desktop&utm_campaign=linkfrom
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ChuckMcM
As someone who follows various fusion efforts I expect the answer to the
headline is 'yes' (in opposition to Betteridge's law). The trick of course is
'when'.

But like the article, I also find it sad that we've not been able to build
more Gen IV projects. You want to fix climate change? Build nuclear plants.
Unfortunately not a message that resonates well, although the Chinese seem to
be thinking that way. Hard not too with all that coal soot in the air.

A more interesting question will be the cost of fusion energy (or even Gen IV
fission) versus existing fuels. It's one thing to be "able" to make a net
positive fusion generator, and something else again to make it profitable.

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hyperbovine
Burning fossil fuels would be a lot less profitable if the long-term impacts
of doing so were capitalized in.

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fleitz
The history of humanity is doing things that don't scale, aren't sustainable,
and then figuring out how to deal with the problems created by the massive
leaps forward we made, utilizing the surpluses generated by ignoring the long
term impacts of our decisions.

Burning fossil fuels and ignoring the future impact is probably the best thing
we ever did as a species, especially if you like whales.

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Daishiman
Physics and the environment don't work that way. Our society has never been as
energy-intensive as it is now, nor has its impacts been as wide.

There's not much that we'll be able to do about the massive amounts of plastic
released into the oceans, or the levels of mercury and lead pollution
throughout the world.

If the fact that we were not able to externalize the costs of carbon pollution
ends up leading to the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves leading to a
massive sea level rise that can't ever be fixed then that sort of kills the
argument. The same can be said for the destruction of ecosystems that can
never be recovered for that matter.

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dmfdmf
I don't know that it will be fusion but I think eventually we will solve the
energy problem. If we look at nature the energy scale of natural processes
such as solar flares, movement of planets, oceans and atmospheres, etc dwarf
human needs. The energy is out there we just haven't figured out how to
efficiently access it. When we look at atomic processes the conversion of even
tiny amounts of mass to energy also easily dwarf human needs. I know we are
constrained by the First and Second laws of Thermodynamics but I think this is
powerful evidence that there has to be a way.

Both fusion and fission convert mass to energy but are crude ways to do it.
Physics is currently stuck and has been for 60-70 years. Physicists cannot
integrate the large scale theory (General Relativity) with the small scale
theory (Quantum Mechanics). They are incompatible. I can't prove it but I
suspect that once this impasse is resolved we will find elegant ways to
convert mass to energy and the energy problem will be solved.

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fleitz
We already have a pretty elegant self assembling method of building fusion
reactors, we just lack sufficient hydrogen.

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graycat
Indeed, we already have such a reactor, just about where we would want it!

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jobu
This was an interesting quote:

 _“China just put a huge chunk of money and hired hundreds of people to work
on molten salt reactors. I think that’s probably going to come first—and it’s
going to come from China”_

China also built a pebble bed reactor at Shidaowan, and has plans to build up
to 19 more. ([http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-21/china-
wants-...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-21/china-wants-
nuclear-reactors-and-lots-of-them))
([http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/04/construction-progresses-
on-...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/04/construction-progresses-on-chinas-
high.html))

It will be interesting to see if the Chinese can make nuclear fission clean
and economical over the long term.

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trhway
He turned things upside down. It isn't that fusion power has no risk of
proliferation, it is just being developed only in the ways that have no (or
extremely low) weaponization potential - limiting development this way
significantly slows down overall progress on reaching efficient power
production. Add to that the policies (at least in the US) established almost
20 years ago when it was decided that fusion generated energy can't be cheaper
than coal (yep, because most of the cost is actual turbines/generators and
distribution) and thus no point in pursuing in the foreseeable future.

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duaneb
It's such an odd stance--presumably fissile reactions are already dangerous
enough that the cat is out of the bag. Everyone who CAN weaponize it can
already wreak devestation.

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trhway
fissile weapons are very hard to produce - huge enrichment facilities. Where
is inertial confinement fusion device is just a matter of focusing enough
power into small enough volume during very small period of time - pure
engineering task and once technology is mastered we either have an easy way to
colonize Solar system or to destroy ourselves as any ISIL would be able to use
it. And judging by the current mindset of our species i doubt that Solar
system if the first thing on our collective mind.

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Terr_
"Inertial confinement fusion device" != "Fusion Weapon"

If you want to make a point about relative dangers, you should be comparing
apples-to-apples. Simply expressing fission as a phenomenon is even _easier_
than fusion, you can dig up rocks that do it all on their own.

 _Weaponizing_ a phenomenon, on the other hand, always requires some
additional work.

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infogulch
Question: How is the energy released during fusion collected? Just turned into
heat for a turbine?

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aperrien
It depends on the process. Some of the plasma focus devices being experimented
with create electricity directly from the ionization process.

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80ProofPudding
Any you can recall? I'm curious, and tired of having it pointed out to me that
almost anything but solar is just a fancy way of boiling water.

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infogulch
We've become very good at the _thermal energy differential_ -> _mechanical
energy_ -> _rotational mechanical energy_ -> _electrical energy_ system, just
because it's trivially easy to get that first step since nearly every form of
energy can be converted to heat.

Some of our energy production machines use only a subset of these steps (e.g.
internal combustion engines just use _mechanical energy_ -> _rotational
mechanical energy_ ), but pretty much everything save solar uses at least one
of these conversions. So I find anything outside this cycle very interesting.

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Kompulsa
Maybe it will. However, I would remain hopeful, but not bank on it too much,
as it may not happen for now.

Society needs to do what they can to increase energy independence and
sustainability with whatever they can use now, as time is limited.

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Kompulsa
The various combined sources of energy available today can help to keep
society going more sustainably while Nuclear Fusion technology is under
development.

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bluedino
Wouldn't it make more sense to pour money into this instead of solar? On one
hand, the solar industry provides jobs but the discovery of fusion would be a
huge step to energy independence and reducing pollution.

If China gets this first, and doesn't share it with the rest of the world,
that would solve a lot of their problems.

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afterburner
On the other hand, you can pour money into fusion for decades, maybe
centuries, and get nothing useable. Solar gets much better the more money you
put into it, and that's on top of already being competitive vs other
traditional energy sources now.

If I had to choose one, I'd choose the one I get actual returns on.

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JTon
Good thing we don't have to pick just one. I like the idea of big hairy
audacious goals.

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afterburner
Yes. Parent commenter phrased it as one or the other. The choice of fusion
given that restriction is even stranger.

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lutorm
Ever is a long time... It's an engineering problem, and it seems prudent to
keep working at it until it succeeds, given that the available supply of
fissile materials is vastly more limited than that of fusible ones. Uranium
mining isn't exactly an activity with negligible environmental impact, either.

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guelo
I don't understand why more resources aren't devoted to developing geothermal.
We are all floating on top of endless layers of energy-dense molten rock.

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ufmace
In brief, we can extract energy not from heat, but from temperature
differences. It's very easy to extract energy from a conventional power plant,
because the hot stuff is right next to the cool stuff - the environment here.
The molten rock has a huge amount of energy, but we can't extract it unless
it's close enough to something cool to build a heat engine between the hot and
the cold. Thus, geothermal is only viable at a select number of sites where
the lava or other carriers of heat naturally flow near the surface.

To make it viable in general, you'll have to figure out a way to send a
working fluid down deep enough to pick up enough heat and bring it back up
again without losing all of that heat on the way back up, and do it with huge
flowrates to extract enough energy, and in such a way that it can run pretty
much continuously for years.

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fleitz
Outlook seems sunny :)

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iaw
Why doesn't this article discuss ITER?

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aperrien
I'm kind of disappointed. This article discussed almost none of the dozen
small-scale fusion projects out there today. Coverage of them along with the
fission companies that were covered would have made for an excellent article.
Especially as some of them are running experiments now.

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iaw
Same here, I expected a lot more when I clicked.

