
When you wish upon a star: nuclear fusion and the promise of a brighter tomorrow - wowsig
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/25/iter-nuclear-fusion-cadarache-international-thermonuclear-experimental-reactor-steven-cowley
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mohawk
We have a large and wonderful fusion reactor fully operational and running
already, at a safe distance of 1.5e11 meters. All we have to do is harvest its
energy output, with solar panels, windmills, or hydroelectric.

The price of panels has been going down by 15% a year for the last couple of
years. What's more likely, incremental improvements to solar panels and
batteries that make them the cheapest energy source, or a breakthrough in
nuclear fusion? My bet is on the small but steady improvements...

I think fusion power is a useful thing to research though, in case the sky
goes dark one day.

~~~
jimktrains2
> I think fusion power is a useful thing to research though, in case the sky
> goes dark one day.

"Someone started a war, and no one knows who, but it was known that it was
mankind who blotted out the sky, attempting to deprive the machines of the
solar power they required to function."

or perhaps: Johann Johannsson - Sun's Gone Dim
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv4CuIIspdE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv4CuIIspdE))

Moreover (and more seriously), though, fusion could be incredibly useful in
terms of rocketry and power generation further out in the solar system.

~~~
mohawk
In the long run, the sky going dark is not such an unlikely scenario. Big
asteroid impact or a large volcanic eruption would be enough. Or some big war,
sadly we tend to have them quite frequently. I forgot that was the background
story to The Matrix... :-)

I agree that fusion power would also be great for travelling into deep space.
In the reeeally long run, there is no other choice for mankind.

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acd
Thorcon power underground fusion molten salt reactor using ship design.
[http://thorconpower.com/](http://thorconpower.com/)

Lockheed martin compact fusion
[http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-
fusion.htm...](http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html)

We are marching towards the fusion age, looking forward to that since we do
not need to pump monarchy/dictator oil in the cars which is directly funding
extreme religion which is a source for terrorism.

Combine fusion with a battery breakthrough for electric cars and we will have
clean air cities and cheap transportation!

~~~
arethuza
Isn't Thorcon a molten salt fission reactor?

~~~
msandford
Yes, but it's not a traditional fission reactor that uses 1% of the fuel and
wastes the other 99%. "Fission" is only a dirty word because of the types of
fission reactors that have been built.

If you build a fission reactor that burns say, 99% of the fuel and only wastes
1% of it, suddenly it's just as good as fusion, but better because we already
know how to do it and we already have tested the design.

Fission or fusion doesn't matter, it's the fuel lifecycle, plant lifecycle and
the quantity of waste products per energy output that matter.

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TheSpiceIsLife
"We don’t know where we are going to get our energy from in the second half of
this century, and if we don’t get fusion working we are going to be really
stuck."

We have nuclear, solar, and wind. Even if Iter is successful it will take
-guessing here- decades to bring it to production and the better part of half
a century to roll it out in any significant way.

I think the next technological leap will be in manipulating huge amounts of
energy, maybe we can warp space and go to the starts. So something like fusion
power is probably necessary for that.

In the mean time, I think we can keep the lights on.

"The promise of fusion, if scientists can get it to work, is huge – unlimited
power without any carbon emissions and very little radioactive waste."

I'm interested in how much CO2 is emitted to produce 400,000 tonnes of steel
and concrete. I wonder what the life time emissions are for a fusion power
plant, given that nothing lasts forever it will have to be maintained and have
major rebuilds. This is an experimental design, so it will probably never pay
back construction related CO2 emissions, so we should look at the numbers for
a theoretical production unit, and how those numbers compare to other power
generation technologies.

~~~
DennisP
"ITER has been designed to produce 500 MW of output power for 50 MW of input
power" and its construction "will require 16,000 tons of rebar, 150,000 m³ of
concrete and 7,500 tons of steel for the building structures." [0]

By comparison, "a MW of installed capacity for wind requires 460 metric tons
of steel and 870 m3 of concrete compared to the 98 metric tons of steel and
160 m3 of concrete for coal, and the even lower 40 metric tons of steel and 90
m3 of concrete for nuclear" [1]

So to match ITER's 450MW net with wind power, your turbines would require
270,000 metric tons of steel and 391,500 m^3 of concrete, several times more
than ITER will need.

This neglects thermal inefficiency for ITER, but on the other hand ITER is an
experimental reactor and the followup DEMO plant is supposed to get 2 to 4
gigawatts with a size only 15% larger. [2] Also, the wind figures are for
capacity, not actual output, so the numbers are pretty comparable
anyway...it'd be reasonable to assume 30% thermal efficiency and 30% wind
capacity factor.

But you're right that ITER/DEMO has a pretty long timeline, which is why I
favor smaller-scale alternate approaches (as well as advanced fission).

[0] [http://www.iter.org/factsfigures](http://www.iter.org/factsfigures)

[1] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/07/01/is-the-
ans...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/07/01/is-the-answer-my-
friend-blowing-in-the-wind/)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO)

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Thank you.

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enterx
Thumbs up for the article! We should talk more about this topic and less about
some 2 year projects.

Take for example Google Maps project... it sure made a huge impact of the
geographic mobility of humans but IMHO even today is questionable does it even
match the impact that SABRE made. :)

