I like how they don't even try to pretend that this is a route to practical power generation, it's all about research into the fundamental physics of fusion - which is a worthy goal in itself.
> The record shot was a major scientific advance in fusion research, which establishes that fusion ignition in the lab is possible at NIF,” said Omar Hurricane, chief scientist for LLNL’s inertial confinement fusion program. “Achieving the conditions needed for ignition has been a long-standing goal for all inertial confinement fusion research and opens access to a new experimental regime where alpha-particle self-heating outstrips all the cooling mechanisms in the fusion plasma."
My understanding is that one big reason so much money was invested in this lab is because the research has direct applications to nuclear weapon design. It's a dual use lab so to speak. The process they are studying is very similar to what's happening in the core of a thermonuclear bomb.
> 1978: This report reviews aspects of the military applications of the inertial confinement fusion (ICF) program at Sandia Laboratories
> Today, research on inertial confinement fusion—the other leading approach—remains largely under the control of US national weapons labs. The military focus has had profound impacts on the development of inertial fusion energy.
Which is kind of the point. Everyone involved in the process from the leader at the top making the call, to the individuals manning the silos, has to make a conscious decision to end the world.
No, the point of mutually assured destruction is to ensure that retaliation is credible and even perhaps automated.
You seem to have it backwards. The only reason we are alive is because the designed system that was built failed following a computer error. The point was to respond.
Regarding chalking things down to "personal choice," the pool of scientists is large enough and the pool of permanent staff positions small enough that there will always be scientists willing to make the "personal choice" to do weapons research. That's the thing about "personal choices," someone somewhere, under the right conditions will make the "personal choice" to do something. If you want people to stop making bad "personal choices," change the underlying situation or the politics.
Societies and the world do not run on personal choices. Sometimes personal choices matter and can have reverberations throughout society, but assuming society can function on an accumulation of personal choices is a child's way of viewing the world. If you want to change something you find disagreeable, influence policy makers or somehow figure out how to change the academic landscape in America (which probably means you again need to influence policy makers). Otherwise, you'll keep finding more scientists making the "personal choice" to develop weapons for uncle sam.
I fail to see how the fact that other people might be willing to do this research changes the ethical propositions at play. You are responsible for your research! Especially when you know what it is going to be used for. Refusing to do the research yourself might not stop it, but you refusing loudly, and convincing a couple people around you to not do so, adds up over time!
You are of course correct that the best thing is to institutionally change things. But the institutional changes are usually pushed for due to actual public pressure.
China has an explicit No First Use policy. It also has a nuclear arsenal that is more than 10x smaller than the US.
You might say that China has a secret huge arsenal. The US might have comparable things! And even among the assumed amount of 350 warheads, a lot of damage can be done. The US can do a lot of this as well! There is a nuclear triad on both sides.
Perhaps the No First Use policy is a lie. It is not a law of physics. But it is something. It is a posture that makes it harder for a nation to navigate in some liminal space that makes defensive and offensive posturing look exactly the same.
But the main point of course is that the current state of affairs is already amazingly powerful. What more do people want from their nukes? In what universe is 1500 deployed warheads (out of a stockpile of 5000) not enough to accomplish any sort of strategic objective? There have been many conflicts where 0 has been enough
China's "policies" last as long as their dictator cares to keep them. At the first sign of change that policy will disappear as well.
Also it's a clear lie as in a fictional world where China mainland was invaded and China was losing the war, it's rather absurd to think they would just sit on their nuclear weapons and not use them.
The US also wouldn't use them in a first strike, but drawdowns have to happen on both sides.
> You might say that China has a secret huge arsenal. The US might have comparable things!
The US cannot. That's the entire point of international inspections. China would have to allow US inspections of their arsenal like is done to the US.
Policy is political and will change if the situation changes. If China was the only one in the world with nukes, of course they'd use them.
China's warheads are also generally higher yield - they're intended for counter-city ops, not counter-force.
The idea with the currently deployed warheads is that even after losses to a hostile first strike, they can still respond and cause unacceptable losses in the enemy. How many nukes does it take to cause 10% fatalities in the USSR? How many in China? And what percentage of those nukes are destroyed before launch, and how many make it though enemy defences to detonate where they should?
The point is that we need to maintain that stockpile and knowledge. If the US abandons its nuclear capability, there is nothing to hold others to their no first strike policy.
Definitely. I was likely being too glib in my response here, and wasn't trying to say to throw all the nukes into the trash.
I think that it is possible to maintain an existing set of weapons without trying to continue pushing the envelope towards even more destructive weapons, and that 5000 is a lot/enough.
With existing nuclear weapons the US could easily wreck large population centers very easily. They also completely destroy a nations infrastructure. Blowing up population centers of course would be a case of indiscriminate bombing and kill tens of thousands of civilians.
In WW2, even before dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US committed to a large bombing campaign that completely destroyed the country. The damage was so vast and total that the Japanese government did not even register Hiroshima to be unusual! Around that time other cities were also being razed to the ground, it just took more bombs to do so. During that war, in Europe and in Japan there were large bombing campaigns that indiscriminately killed many civilians. I find it hard to justify this (no, "they were doing the same" does not actually feel like a legitimate reason, especially when the narrative nowadays is that it was a battle between good and evil)
Low-yield tactical nukes seem to be playing with the idea of being able to have this option to massacre people more easily and play around with the idea of using nukes with no consequence. Higher-yield nukes seem to serve the purpose of more effectively wiping chunks of a city from a map. What magical weapon are we looking for that will make the world safer, and that accomplishes strategic objectives that are not already covered by both the existing nuclear arsenal and the conventional weapons of the US? Remember, normal bombs actually do things too!
Meanwhile, actual, legitimate No First Use policies would be much more effective at making the world a safer place. Stronger treaties to reduce nuclear arsenals, giving militaries less space to just push other countries around.
What would you have done instead to reduce their civilian casualties, under the constraints that the Allies still win the war and that Allied casualties don't increase?
[0] is a critique of Gladwell's book about those bombing campaigns. I do not believe it will have all the answers for you, but there is one component of truth: The US was looking for an unconditional surrender for Japan. That was a choice.
Unconditional surrender in Japan lead to the US occupational government for 9 years (along with over 20 years occupation of Okinawa, which had to be pried out of the hands of the US military, who wanted to indefinitely keep it as a colony).
Now, I'm not going to cry over Nazis or the Japanese military not being able to get a conditional surrender. But Japan is especially stark: except for a handful of high profile executions, not only did most decision makers not face punishment, many of them ended up back in the government and as heads of state. All of this more or less at the behest of the US.
What is my point? The US chose to reach for an unconditional surrender, for some pretty realpolitik objectives, prolonging the suffering of the civilians on the ground. There is decent documentation that part of this is so that the US could determine surrender conditions rather than the USSR. There is an alternate universe of a negotiated surrender that shortened the Pacific front.
What does that universe look like? I do not know. It probably would not have lead to the US having military bases all over the country. But conditional surrenders are the norm in wars. Air campaigns allow for militaries to just decide "no, we will just continue to attack forever, as we suffer few casualties anyway".
The US basically did what no losing power ever think would happen. They do unconditionally surrender but then the US enforced pretty damn easy terms on them.
Given that they let the emperor continue, they might as well have just allowed surrender with the promise the emperor would remain. But of course that choice was not made at that point.
An what I think people need to consider is that all of WW2 basically happened because the allies did not force unconditional surrender on Germany in WW1. A mistake that many wanted to avoid. Of course famously Wilson debated this question with Henry Cabot Lodge and that disagreement is a huge part in the US rejecting Versailles. Wilson justified himself by basically formulating the two Germans theory, ie there is the evil militaristic Prussian Germany and the good German people. Henry Cabot Lodge didn't buy that.
Sean McMeekin in his new book makes the point that FDR announced the unconditional surrender doctrine basically to placate Stalin and did it basically without fully coordinating that with the British. Attempting to offer the German military some sort of deal that would have made them remove the Nazis prevent Eastern Europe falling to Communism would have been a better policy. That is of course very controversial.
And if I have learned one thing, its that unconditional surrender is always a incredibly hot issue with people passionately arguing both sides.
> In the three weeks prior to Hiroshima, 26 cities were attacked by the U.S. Army Air Force. Of these, eight — or almost a third — were as completely or more completely destroyed than Hiroshima (in terms of the percentage of the city destroyed). The fact that Japan had 68 cities destroyed in the summer of 1945 poses a serious challenge for people who want to make the bombing of Hiroshima the cause of Japan’s surrender. The question is: If they surrendered because a city was destroyed, why didn’t they surrender when those other 66 cities were destroyed?
> On August 2, you would have arrived at the office to reports that four more cities have been attacked. And the reports would have included the information that Toyama (roughly the size of Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1945), had been 99.5 percent destroyed. Virtually the entire city had been leveled. Four days later and four more cities have been attacked. On August 6, only one city, Hiroshima, was attacked but reports say that the damage was great and a new type bomb was used. How much would this one new attack have stood out against the background of city destruction that had been going on for weeks?
Of course the perspective of people who actually were on the ground is totally different. But if we are talking about strategic objectives, then how the leadership sees thing is in fact relevant!
This is false, almost all of those employees have a Q clearance. You can search the job listings for keywords like ‘Wci’ ‘high energy density’, etc to confirm.
Part of the purpose is definitely personnel related though. Part of the US nuclear deterrence is the projection of having a large, highly skilled nuclear weapon related workforce.
Those experiments and supercomputer modelling is what allowed US to get sub-10kt nukes without actual testing. Credible promise of responding with those small nukes directly against Russian regime is what stopped Putin's threat of using nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
Wrt. inertial confinement fusion productization I think the delay is intentional (just look at Sandia z-machine results from 20+ years ago and all the ways of tempering and redirecting progress since then there) as such schemes allow for fusion weapons without fission primary which will completely break the non-proliferation regime.
W-54 isn't here anymore. So instead US have tuned down W-76 into 5-8kt. I.e. getting new capabilities without testing (there are recent tuned down, though not that low, versions of B61 too). And that is open information. One can expect that classified would be at least a step ahead, i.e. something like 1kt. Coupled with high precision delivery and earth-penetration designs (that US has been using across the range - from conventional to B61) that makes for extremely effective deterrence as it allows to take out a dictator like Putin deep in his underground bunker if he crosses the line (Putin becoming the first and primary target himself is the cornerstone of the current deterrence architecture), and other strategic keypoints without initiating full scale war.
> Putin becoming the first and primary target himself is the cornerstone of the current deterrence architecture
Do you have any reference for this?
I'm familiar with US Nuclear bunker buster bombs. But I've never seen any writing that makes the claim the US deterrence policy is targeting Putin.
Indeed [1] makes the claim that the US in incapable of successfully attacking Russian command and control bunkers and seems from a reasonably credible writer.
> Credible promise of responding with those small nukes directly against Russian regime is what stopped Putin's threat of using nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
Link to credible reports where the US said they would respond with nukes? AFAIK, this never happened and I paid close attention
I have no inside knowledge whatsoever but we can all rest assured that each side is in a near constant back and forth of implicit unstated "communication" about capabilities and doctrine.
Merely publishing a paper on a certain subtopic in the fusion space can easily be interpreted as an implied threat or threat response.
Of course the US does have a stated doctrine of using nukes only in response to nukes used against it or its allies. It is enormously doubtful that the US would trigger an end-of-days scenario in response to Russia using tactical/low-yield nukes against a non-US-ally like Ukraine, but the uncertainty is for sure purposefully cultivated.
Do sub-10kt nukes really involve any fusion at all?
I have read of spiking conventional fission warheads with a core of fusible material to boost yield, but maximizing yield does not seem to be the goal of these devices.
One kind of the low yield weapons is to have very precisely placed smaller explosion - those ones is mostly fission core, and the other is to have high neutron flux with minimal blast effects - with that instead of a point you'd want to cover a wide area.
You're partially correct on accident. It _is_ single use, but not in the way you think. The NIF facility was built for the express purpose of nuclear weapon design, and any fusion science that comes out of it should be considered a happy accident. I can assure you that very nearly 100% of the people working at the NIF have Q level or higher clearance. The costs are absolutely astronomical.
All nuclear bombs involve fission. Some (termed "thermonuclear") involve fusion. A fission first stage is detonated to ignite a (much higher yielding) fusion second stage. Most bombs deployed today are thermonuclear simply because it's the most sensible way to scale up the yield of a weapon.
Nitpick, AFAIK (which is t far) the real crust-busters (e.g. Tsar Bomba) use yet a third stage of fissile material that gets rapidly burnt up at truly absurd neutron densities to get that last 40-90 Mt and as a result are dirty as all hell. The Soviets turned that weapon down from 100Mt designed yield to 50 because there was no way to keep it from just radiating everything.
Usually if it's called an "atom bomb" or "A-bomb" it's pure fission, and a nuclear bomb, thermonuclear bomb, or hydrogen bomb is fission-fusion-fission. A fission bomb compresses the hydrogen to cause it to fuse, and the extra energy and neutrons from the hydrogen fusion cause a whole lot of additional fission in the uranium tamper. For details look up the "Teller-Ulam" design, wikipedia has some good descriptions.
The "hydrogen" in "hydrogen bomb" relates to fusion. In a nutshell, these types of devices use a fission bomb to create the environment (pressure/temperature) that causes lighter atoms to undergo fusion, which significantly boosts the explosive yield compared to a pure fission bomb.
Nope, the most powerful bombs use both - in effect they use fission to perform fusion. Obviously the problem with this for energy production is that it is not a very controlled reaction.
I'd like us to focus on practical power generation. It will be the most defining aspect of future of US and largely the world. Everything is tied to energy and if we can make energy cheap enough so that its not worth metering; we'd secure the future from literally any calamity (including CC). Even the shittiest efficiency of carbon capture can be put to use when energy is cheap. 4% efficiency? Cool. Entropy increase from residual heat loss wouldn't make meaningful dent on the world's temperature. It is the carbon that is the problem (greenhouse effect).
We have an almost unlimited source of energy from nuclear + solar. There are always going to be people and ideologies that oppose technological progress and prevent humanity from propelling forward. I belong to the camp where I'd want us to become a Kardeshev Type 1 civilization. Fusion would be a direct contributing factor for it.
Not really. A direct hit by a CME from the Sun would probably seriously damage a fusion plant. Magnets would need to be replaced along with a lot of electrical equipment.
You know as a matter of fact credit cards are not a wrong answer, really. We only got to the point of 9 billion humans on a tiny planet meant for a few million at best, because the only way out of compound interest debt--synonymous with credit cards--is economic growth--usually more humans.
China saw it that way, in the time of Han Chin, the first Chinese emperor. Wealth comes fundamentally from agriculture because then you can make more servants slash slaves for the emperor, that's literally what he called them, then instead of emperor you have an Emperor, Emperor of China. That's what the original historical sources say! More food more people more servitude more wealth for the man at the top of society.
So credit cards are that. Uniformly crazy interest rates, and shitty scams to jack up the rates just barely before getting taken to court. Or a French Revolution, which they know about and fear. Know the harm they do, the houses they take, the homeless they make, the people they imprison indirectly, the children they starve, they know. What's it's name, FICO score, patio11 talked about them, they are 100% certain you--anybody who reads this--is strictly inferior to them. He says if you talk back to their claim you are an inferior debtor who deserves a low credit score they react like it's a shoe factory dealing with a talking shoe. An object. A servant slash slave.
Owes them money just because. Or because that debt was inherited. They actually have all the machine learning models and all the statistics you could possibly ask for (generally they claim this is fraud detection, but it's price discrimination too) to determine exactly how much--to the thousandth of a percentage--they can fuck with people with their usury--their theft--before people go bananas. Usury means you gotta pay back the debt or be homeless. Tolerate crimes in your gainst with no recourse. Any crime. No recourse. In my case murder. No recourse. Cops won't show up for you.
Debt grows surprisingly fast. Just as surprisingly fast as the equity in the home grows surprisingly slow. People always feel cheated by their mortgage because they did get cheated by unforgivably incorrect math. What does that mean? Ignoring all the intermediate steps, more kids to inherit the debt.
And technically--and I can justify this mathematically and in a court of law--even simultaneously--compound interest is contradictory to the laws of physics. It would not work out mathematically even if they did do the math correctly, which they do not. It could work in an infinitely-dimensional universe. If they did it correctly. But not in a 3-dimensional universe. You can have, at absolute most, cubic growth. Otherwise you end up with shitty debt. Unforgivably incorrect math declaring you are a servant slash slave. A letter demanding you make a choice: servitude or tolerating crime against you.
> I'd like us to focus on practical power generation.
Then what they should invest in is fission. Fuel for fission is much cheaper and CapEx is much less. And we have all the basic tech needed to make it happen. Its the missing will more then anything else.
I feel like the pendulum has swung too far the other direction these days. It used to be we'll have cold fusion in 20 years which was hopelessly over optimistic. Nowdays its. We are spending 10 years on a myopic proof of concept that has no practical uses and never will.
I hope you win! I usually get my reality checks from Sabine Hossenfelder, who a while back explained that all these fusion claims are wildly optimistic. You can find her video here: https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY
I am no scientist, so it is hard for me to know if team optimistic or team pessimistic is right. But even if it is the latter, I think we should put more money and research on it!
The video isn't nuts, but it's mostly focused on clearing up a common misconception around what "break even" means. It discusses how ITER is not going to be powering the grid in 2025 (strong agree) but I don't see any discussion of the commercialization projects (of which Commonwealth is the strongest) or discussion of timescales anywhere near 2100.
One of my elderly relatives commented last week that he has been hearing that the new experimental results will promise reliable fusion plants in less than a decade
...
Since 1960
(He used to be one of those guys inside an ICBM silo during the Cold war)
Exactly. The fervor around reproducibility seems more to do with managerial level politics.
They've proven they can do something impressive, that's a huge leap. Understanding the underpinnings better so you can do it reliably: that's a matter of research effort and engineering. But they've already done the hard part, let them do their work.
They’ve analyzed the data from the experiment to prove that they achieved it (i.e. ruling out all possible other explanations). Assuming there’s been no fraud, then it’s likely they did achieve it. They’re trying to figure out what the problems are that make reproducibility difficult & I think there’s a new reactor being built that addresses the challenges with reproducing in the current design.
It’s an early signal indicating that we may have line of sight to someone demonstrating working fusion within the next 5 years. Is that not impressive?
That do you mean by "working fusion"? This is a weapons research program wearing a very thin figleaf as a kinda sorta maybe possible power generation option. And fusion weapons have existed for decades - so nothing that nivel here.
It's a bit odd how people think nuclear weapons research needs a fig leaf in the US, where overt nuclear weapons funding is about a hundred times more than the government's fusion energy funding.
It seems more likely that scientists used the weapons angle to dip into that massive flow of military money for their energy program.
That may be more likely a priori (after all, much "military" funding is in fact a convenient way for the government to fund R&D without huge budget fights in Congress).
But, ICF is simply not a viable way to produce fusion power, it is far far far too expensive to operate such a device. So, we can only conclude that they are either deluding themselves, or they are in fact doing fusion weapons research (or, at best, simply fundamental theoretical research into how fusion works) - since the same kinds of conditions or forces are what happens inside a fusion bomb.
Nuclear weapons tests have political implications outside and inside the US.
It's arguable how much of the NIL is still validating models useful for simulating nuclear weapons vs fundamental research vs energy research. And it’s likely the relative importance of each factor has changed over the programs lifetime.
So, you have a source proving the motivations of the people who founded it and run it now? Because I argued above that it makes little sense to simply assume that weapons are the only goal, or even necessarily the primary goal.
> I argued above that it makes little sense to simply assume that weapons are the only goal, or even necessarily the primary goal.
You can argue all you want. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a government-owned, contractor-operated facility managed through a contract between the LLNS Board of Governors and the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The NNSA in turn works to ensure that the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons is safe and secure.
That is a remarkably pedantic take on the situation, no?
Difficult tasks are difficult. Difficult tasks take time.
A credible indicator that they have achieved something significant is the widespread acclaim they have received from the global physics and fusion communities.
Repeatability isn’t the only tool in science and nobody is claiming reproducibility isn’t a goal.
If five years from now nobody can reproduce the results, people will take notice. But the evidence is they did what they think they did.
> A credible indicator that they have achieved something significant is the widespread acclaim they have received from the global physics and fusion communities.
How do those people know the result wasn't spurious, if it can't be reproduced? This comment and the one above are questions, do you have an answer?
And your measurement devices can error or be configured improperly.
Seriously some large % of "breakthrough" results are just errors in methodology/measurement. It's why no one serious gives a damn about results until they're replicated(or at least they shouldn't). And that's before you get into outright fraud where they just claim they measured something.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you claim you've gotten that kind of fusion reaction, and can't reproduce it, then it casts doubt on if you ever really got that reaction at all.
That's not the line taken with Fleischmann and Pons.
To be clear I'm not supporting/rejecting either F&P or this article's writers at all as I'm not knowledgable in the field, merely pointing out that the need for reproducibility was reinforced by their reported results and the inability of others to duplicate it. It's a good lesson - nothing is proven until it is repeated.
Before you get cosmic energy out of nuclear fusion fuel (usually isotopes of hydrogen), you have to put a bunch of energy into the fuel to get it into fusion conditions. Namely, you have to heat it up and compress it so the nuclei get close enough to fuse (after which they'll release energy).
There are a few milestones along the way to commercial fusion energy:
* Get more energy out of a fusion fuel than you put into it
* Get more energy out of fusion fuel that it took you to make the energy you put into it
* Build a way to capture the net gain energy and convert it into electricity
* Demonstrate the integrated power plant as a prototype system
* Build and operate the first commercial power plant
* Assuming good economic and technical performance, start building a fleet
Is commercial ICF realistic though? Each shot needs a carefully prepared fuel pellet. To get commercial power they'd have to fire a shot per second or so. That seems like a really expensive manufacturing operation to keep it going.
While obviously true, I think it's also useful to distinguish where items in category b fall on the spectrum from "this will be commercially viable with minor refinement" to "this is three orders of magnitude away from commercial viability and we don't even have a theoretical path to get there".
AFAIK energy generation with ICF is much closer to the latter than the former.
Not sure I agree. Fusion solves non of the problem of fission actually has.
- Will Capx be lower compared to a advanced fission plant. Almost certainty not.
- Will Fusion plan be significantly cheaper to fuel. Almost certainty not, uranium and thorium are available in waste quantities.
- Will it solve proliferation concerns? No, if you have a control of a fission reactors you have the potential to do all sorts of things.
- Will it solve the nuclear waste issue. Maybe slightly but advanced fission can produce waste that need to be stored for around 300 years and that is not actually that difficult.
And that is of course if you assume that the 100s of billions in investment required will not have be be paid back in any way. That is partly fair because fission didn't have to do that either, but there the investment is shared with nuclear weapons (for better or worse).
So I would say its closer to the second suggestion. I don't see a theoretical path of how a fusion reactor can be built cheaper then a comparable fission reactor.
But I'm not a expert on fission, I have heard of some fission that could be built very small but all actual real designs for suggestion of commercial fission I have seen do not fall into that category.
In one of Elon's video interviews with The Everyday Astronaut where they are staggered at the sheer scale of Starship, the booster and the launch/landing system, Elon said "We're not violating and laws of physics here... there's no reason this won't work".
Also: "Here at SpaceX we specialize in turning the impossible into just late".
Not to mention a tritium shortage [1?] -- assuming this is D-T fusion -- which it seems is going to be hard to get in the first place let alone throw it into a generator.
I don’t know if it’s all fusion reactors but General Fusion breeds tritium by surrounding the plasma with moving liquid lithium which breeds tritium and helium and they send the tritium back in. Seems sustainable.
I don’t know why their plan is to just vent helium given the shortage although I imagine that’s a second order problem they can solve later.
Thorium is something that is literally a waste product that falls out of refining of rare metals. And natural Uranium is also available in waste quantities. Without even trying we would have enough for the whole world.
And then compare to that the very complex and expensive process of process of breeding tritium.
How does that make any sense?
Sure, fusion is about 3 order of magnitude denser, but fission is already incredibly dense. The increase density doesn't really benefit you in any practical way unless maybe if you are trying to do interstellar flight or something.
Is there really enough lithium in the world to supply fusion reactors while also meeting the demand for its use in batteries over the next 1000 years? It will be interesting to see what the actual long term consequences are for building fusion reactors, as humans are notoriously bad at predicting what unforeseen circumstances arise from new technologies.
Maybe the Belters will mine lithium from asteroids and send them back to earth in exchange for air and water...
Fusion uses 6Li, which is only a minor fraction of natural lithium. The 7Li (93% of the element) can be used in batteries just fine.
At one point back in the 1960s some physicists were trying to make a neutron detector using lithium, and it wouldn't work. They eventually discovered the lithium they had purchased from a chemical supply company was nearly pure 7Li. It had been sold back into the chemical market from the waste stream of the government's lithium enrichment facility.
I think the general hostility is a reaction to the hype that "this breakthrough means we're closer to an infinite source of cheap, clean energy."
It clearly does not. I can understand the researchers feeling unable to tell the press, "Look, this is just basic research. Like the JWST." It might lead to a massive reaction that "well, then you have to just get in line for those basic research dollars, instead of being a top-priority thing we throw money at."
The JWST cost about 3 times as much as the NIF. The annual budget for the NIF is about the cost of 6 F-35s, which the US is acquiring 152 of in FY2022. It's not getting top-priority money.
OK, I don't think comparing research to the defense budget is at all useful, but comparing JWST research to fusion research IS. So I'll stand corrected on US money.
However, ITER is a global effort, so it isn't just the US budgets we have to consider, right?
Somewhere between the second and fourth bullet you need to significantly limit the process' energy overhead (almost certainly, heat) to something manageable at scale. If you can't do that, then a net gain is not good enough: If you can power a town but boil a lake's worth of water with the excess heat, that's not much of a viable process.
Would you mind answering a layman's question on where the energy comes from in fusion: my understanding is that the problem here is that energy has to be put in to overcome electromagnetic repulsion between atom nuclei so that the strong force can take over and combine them into a new nuclei, releasing energy at that time.
This is not the first time. But it’s the biggest net gain so far by a good wide margin.
Still a very long way to go before becoming similar to a fossil burning power plant. They got equivalent of 1 megawatt for a single second. A typical coal plant is hundreds of megawatts continuously.
Wait, are you suggesting that renewables will make energy too cheap to meter? I've been waiting for this moment.
While renewables are making increasingly cheap generators, the overall systems involved in delivering reliable energy from them are increasingly expensive at increasing scale. Check energy costs to customers e.g. in Germany.
Mining, energy storage, transmission, demand control, recycling, maintenance, land rights, etc. for any energy source at world scale will continue to cost well >$0. For nuclear fission, fuel cost is only 5% of the total cost. For renewables, fuel cost is 0%, but that doesn't mean there aren't costs.
The issue is rather that due to the unpredictable nature of renewables, sometimes the stars align so that the combined output of wind, solar, and hydro end up far beyond what the grid needs.
During those times, in some parts of Europe for example, renewable energy really is practically free. This is a problem for nuclear and fossil plants which lose money during those times. The renewable operators don't make much either but at least they don't have very high input costs.
Ah come on that wouldn't have been necessary... energy costs could be a lot lower if the path towards renewables hadn't been blocked and undermined for years, if something in the current situation is keeping it not from exploding more it is the renewables.
Please better check France for the often touted right way of going nucelar, with half of their overaged reactors taken off the grid due to failing safety regulations (which are not too hard but have been dangerously softened over ye years..), cracks and corrosion problems, and their unfolding catastrophe in regard to nonavailable cooling fluid, which is a problem that will only become much bigger in the future years.
Also don't distract and mix energy with energy, if something we have a heating and fuel problem, not electeicity. Secondly our gas reservoirs are already 75% filled again ahead of plan surprise surprise.. seems the lasts months panic had a little bit too much agenda involved.
If you ask me energy prices here are still much too low for what is upcoming and humanity should really focus on... this will make current debates so absurd and laughable, not getting it.
Why not look at some other examples who fully went renewables and doing it succesfully? Stop looking at a wanted or at least easily prevented politic, lobbyism and incompetence failure, that now leads to prices that are still much too cheap for what our wastage of resources should actually cost, lol.
I'm stating a simple concept, which is that if you put some wind and solar into a heavily-fossil powered grid, the first 30% wind and solar are easy, and the last 30% are harder.
But if you do 100% wind and solar, then you have to start spending money on things other than generators. The fraction of cost that is wind/solar generators vs. e.g. energy storage systems, transmission, recycling, etc. shifts from 1 to ~0 at scale.
If you look at the minimum cost of providing synthetic baseload in a 100% renewable scenario, the renewable inputs can be > 50% of the cost (the other parts being various kinds of storage). This is geographically variable, though.
By which you mean, of course, the least difficult part, and the part that is needed only after all the hard parts, the ones that actually produce energy in useful form, have been built out.
No, energy storage is a far more challenging task than generating it. To put this in perspective, the world uses 60TWh of energy per day. Most energy storage projects are in the hundreds of megawatt hour range, a few in the gigawatts. Estimated for a 100% renewable grid depends on the solar to wind ratio and degrees of overproduction, but they usually fall in the range of 12-24 hours for a 0 carbon grid. And that figure of 60 TWh is only going to grow as underdeveloped countries become more wealthy and want A/C and other amenities.
This is a colossal amount of storage, far outside the bounds of existing storage methods. Hence why plans for a renewable grid assume untested mechanisms like power to gas or compressed air will just scale to near-infinity.
In fact energy storage is a trivial matter of high-school-level physics.
Most existing storage, taking advantage of existing hydro-power dams, uses excess energy to force water up to the reservoir, which energy is later extracted by letting it flow out through a turbine. New pumped-hydro systems built just for storage will be radically cheaper than existing dams, and be practical in hundreds of times as many places: you just need a hilltop no one is using, and water to pump up to it. The reservoir may be much cheaper than a hydro power dam because it does not need to contain high pressure; an earthen dike suffices.
There are numerous other, equally simple methods, for places without enough hills or water. Synthetic fuels like hydrogen and ammonia are an attractive choice because tankage is cheap, and they are transportable and have myriad industrial uses, so after your tankage is full you can sell all further production.
Of course one only builds storage after there is excess energy to put in it. We will need a lot of it, in time, but it is all just construction and mechanics: ordinary civil engineering.
(If you have to lie about the practicality of storage in order to promote nukes, what does that really tell us about your nukes?)
Fusion is trivial high school level physics, too. We all learn about the physics that goes on in the sun's core.
You're right that hydroelectric offers lots of storage potential. But it's geographically limited. Great for countries like Norway that have lots of it. But countries that don't can't just summon dam-able mountain valleys.
You need more than just a hilltop to build pumped hydro. You need a hilltop, with access to a water source. It also needs to be close to a transportation network otherwise construction costs will be prohibitively expensive. Pumped hydro plants do indeed cost a lot: the biggest one in the US in Bath County cost $4 billion dollars for a capacity of 24 GWh.
Furthermore, it will get more expensive as it scales up: as the most accessible sites are developed, subsequent facilities have to be built in more and more suboptimal sites.
> The reservoir may be much cheaper than a hydro power dam because it does not need to contain high pressure; an earthen dike suffices
This makes absolutely no sense. I needs high pressure to generate electricity. Low pressure would mean there's hardly any potential energy to tap. If you're suggesting we have a tunnel leading out from under the reservoir, then those have to be built in exactly the right geography where there's an alpine lake with a height difference.
> There are numerous other, equally simple methods, for places without enough hills or water.
Yet, despite these methods purported simplicity you didn't actually specify them (Edit: you added a couple in an edit after I typed my reply). Because then you'd have to defend their viability.
Since you edited in hydrogen and ammonia:
* Power to hydrogen: electrolysis of water remains expensive, hence why most hydrogen is built with steam reformation. It's not just the electricity costs, but also maintaining the electrodes that perform the hydrolysis.
* Power to Ammonia: this needs a source of hydrogen, so it shares all of the above's issues. Ammonia is really just a storage mechanism for hydrogen, actually producing usable energy from ammonia is done by releasing the hydrogen from the ammonia and then running it through a fuel cell.
You're the one being overly optimistic about the practicality of storage. We've had excess production during peak renewable generation for close to a decade now. The excuse that we won't build storage until there's an excess of electricity isn't valid. Places like Hawaii and California already are saturating the energy market, but the storage is systems you propose aren't being built because they aren't feasible.
Intermittent sources are fine to chip away at fossil fuel use, or in places with widespread hydroelectric power. But we can't kid ourselves into thinking that storage will make it feasible every. Grid scale energy storage should be approached like fusion: maybe it'll be invented and change the energy landscape. But it's foolish to treat that possibility as a given.
Again, if you have to lie to make your case, what does that say about your case?
Pumped hydro storage does not, as I already pointed out, require river valleys. It does not, in fact, need those other things. You make clear that you know nothing about, even, pumped storage. (Maybe look up the word "penstock"?) Why would anyone trust you about others?
People often badly overspend on civil projects, but that does not give you honest numbers -- if indeed what you want is honest numbers. You make very clear that you do not want honest numbers.
Pretending that fuel synthesis depends on access to scarce raw materials (hydrogen, nitrogen? Really?) will not fool anyone. Neither will anyone be fooled by your insistence that its energy must be extracted via fuel cells.
I'm not the person you've been replying to, but I note that your replies in this chain are getting more and more acrimonious. If you're going to repeatedly accuse the other commenter of bad faith, it's probably best to stop replying.
I'm not a civil engineer, nor any kind of expert in grid-scale energy storage, so I can only note that in my amateur readings I've seen many different people (alleged experts) say the same things that Manuel_D is saying. That doesn't mean it's true, that's not my point. My point is that if you know something that all these other commentators don't, I and others would greatly appreciate it if you would explain that. But you'd need to actually explain it, not just accuse others of bad faith.
Literally no one with any expertise says that energy storage is an unsolved problem.
All do acknowledge that building out storage will be a project of a scale similar to that of building out renewables. Only the most dishonest would insist that the relatively small amount of storage already built demonstrates anything other than that capital is overwhelmingly better used, today, to build out new generating capacity. It would be obviously stupid to spend on building storage you have not generating capacity to charge up.
> Pumped hydro storage does not, as I already pointed out, require river valleys. It does not, in fact, need those other things. You make clear that you know nothing about, even, pumped storage. (Maybe look up the word "penstock"?) Why would anyone trust you about others?
I'm well aware of what a penstock is. This [1] graphic shows how a penstock functions in pumped hydro storage. You see that "upper reservoir"? That's an alpine lake that forms the body of water that flows down through the penstock and drives the electric turbine.
You have to have the right geography to form that upper reservoir. If you tried to build a pumped hydro storage in Nebraska, you'd have to move massive amounts of earth to build that upper reservoir - essentially building an artificial alpine lake. This is prohibitively expensive to do, which is why hydroelectric storage is geographically limited.
> Pretending that fuel synthesis depends on access to scarce raw materials (hydrogen, nitrogen? Really?)
Hydrogen is almost entirely produced through steam reformation, which emits carbon dioxide. Effective hydrogen electrolysis needs expensive materials like titanium electrodes.
The graphic does not, in fact, portray an "alpine lake". It says, exactly, "Upper Reservoir". Did you hope people would not click through and see?
The place where water in the system is at high pressure is not in the upper reservoir, but only lower down, inside the penstock. Which you now claim you already knew, after lying about it.
> You see that "upper reservoir"? That's an alpine lake that forms the body of water that flows down through the penstock and drives the electric turbine.
The pressure is at the bottom of the penstock at the turbine. I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that I wrote otherwise.
If the upper reservoir isn't raised - as in, an alpine lake - the there's no pressure in the penstock. Look at any picture of a hydroelectric storage facility:
If the upper reservoir isn't raised well above the river or lower reservoir, then there's no pressure to drive the turbines. If you didn't build the upper reservoir up high on a mountain forming an alpine lake, and instead built it on flat ground you'd just have a big useless pond. This is why geography is crucial for pumped hydroelectricity storage.
Pumped hydro requires an elevated reservoir ("news at 11!"). It does not, in fact, require an alpine lake. Nor does the upper reservoir need concrete construction, as the pressure on its dike, if in fact one is needed at all, is limited to the depth of the water in it.
You knew all of the above, but chose to lie about it.
If pumped hydro+renewables is so cheap, why have developing countries like Vietnam chosen to build coal plants instead? Which large country has been able to replace fossil generation with wind/solar & storage and keep prices down?
Countries where corruption is a big problem have difficulty responding to honest market signals. Autocracies are worst, this way, but the US's innovation of making corruption explicitly legal also slows response to market signals. Incumbents see plenty still to be raked off people locked into existing infrastructure.
Cost today? Or last year? Lithium prices have increased over 400% last year. If demand increases suddenly, price will increase as well. The demand for batteries has led to drastic increases in the cost of input materials: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/chart-lithium...
This is the scaling problem: if you try to deploy batteries at scales relevant to the energy grid you outstrip the supply of inputs. In order to keep up with demand, extraction industries have to tap more and more inaccessible reserves thus driving up costs. Remember, global electricity usage is 60 TWh per day. And that's just electricity, total energy use is about twice that at 120 TWh per day. Even just 12 hours of storage is hundreds of times the annual battery output - most of which isn't going to grid storage but rather electric vehicles.
> if the path towards renewables hadn't been blocked and undermined for years
That's a pretty hilarious claim given the absurd amount of global investment in the last 30 years.
And lets be real here, nuclear has actually been blocked far more then renewables. In 1982 a green activists literally shot a french nuclear reactor with RPGs. Activists have surrounded nuclear plant and prevented them from being built, only for the state to build a coal plant in the same location. Research projects were canceled as soon as they hit slight issues because politicians did not want to stick their neck out.
Compare this with renewables despite 20 decades of green transition and huge cost in Germany the results are not that great. France in 2 decades basically turned its whole gird green, Germany in comparison is not very close and still operates waste coal plants.
Even project that were actually very successful and did show path for the future had to be killed of as was the case in France:
> A 1998 "Inquiry commission on Superphenix and fast neutrons reactor sector" [3] reported that "decision to close Superphénix was included in Jospin's program ... in the agreement between Socialist Party and Green Party". Also the same report says "despite many difficulties, the technical results are meaningful". In the explanation of vote at the end of the report, commission members says "give up on Superphenix has been a big error" and "Superphenix has to die because is a symbol".
France could have build multiple more of these, but of course instead of that they are building the same old PWRs.
And generally the transition to nuclear would have happened in the US for example if coal had not been cheaper. Just as the transition to renewables had not happened without the state pushing the technology. The difference is just that now states are willing to accept higher prices and higher spending to push the preferred technology and in the 70/80s that was a total non-starter.
> Please better check France for the often touted right way of going nucelar
You mean the country that had a essentially green grid for the last 40 years? Are you aware of the fact that CO2 not produced earlier is far better for the environment then CO2 not produced now?
Because the reality is France has done the whole world a major favor by running a large industrial economy with nuclear. The real failure in France is that they didn't double down on next generation nuclear and instead simply gave up and essentially stopped adding new capacity and instead relying on gas and German coal.
Had Germany gone with nuclear the way France did both Germany and the world we would be in a much better position now. The health effects of coal in Germany alone are staggering. And that doesn't just go for Germany, German coal ash is distributed overall all of Europe, including low countries, France and Switzerland.
So to say 'look France has a few issues with nuclear now what a failure of a strategy' is ridiculous when the country next to it burns huge amount of coal and gas.
The reality is, had the world moved to nuclear we wouldn't nearly have the problem we have now. The grid would be much greener both in terms of CO2 and other emissions. Based on that you also have a great strategy to push out carbon from home heating and replacing it with electric. The same goes for home cocking with gas.
Even for Deep Decarbonization of industry and transport nuclear provides solution. High temperature nuclear heat can be used to make hydrogen or provide heat for all kinds of other chemical process that currently use gas.
We could have even done things like moving to nuclear power synthetic fuel production and added increasingly more methanol into gas (this technology was available in the form of Flex-Fuel Vehicles and has been used in the US and Brazil for example). That would have been a way to reduce carbon emission in transportation before electric cars became possible (thanks to Li-Ion). These are all things that nuclear visionaries like Alvin Weinberg advocated and that would have been possible had we pushed forward nuclear technology.
Now non of it is to say that renewable now are bad, and since we have done the investment renewable are cheap and often make more sense then nuclear (given nuclear progress has been very limited). However to claim that the nuclear strategy was the wrong one is absurd given both the CO2 output and the general emissions produced by country that didn't have a strong nuclear strategy. The world made a huge mistake by not embracing nuclear.
As far as I understand, it means something more along the lines of "This laser hits the fuel with 1MJ of energy which ignites it, but it took us 100MJ of energy to make that happen, because the laser is inefficient/only 20% of the laser hits atoms/etc, etc." Step 1, in this case, is producing more than 1MJ, and Step 2 is producing more than 100.
By renewables I’m assuming you mean wind & solar because fusion is 100% renewable. Even fission is basically close enough in that there’s sufficient easily accessible resources to power human society for eons. Additionally, solar panels and batteries use rare earth metals, so they’re technically not as renewable as fusion / fission (although to be fair I don’t know what materials go into a fusion / fission reactor so those metals may be needed there).
Anyway, the cost of energy with solar / wind is obviously not 0. You have to produce the panels / windmills, perform maintenance, for solar you need to clean, etc. Additionally, the energy isn’t available always so you need energy reserves like batteries, pumped water, etc to store it for use which increases the cost further. Finally, there are energy demands that solar / windmills can’t meet where you need *really* hot temperatures.
That’s why fission repeatedly is shown as the only solution to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Fusion is great but we should be building insane amounts of nuclear reactors right now to meaningfully decarbonize our energy generation.
* EDIT: Here’s a talk [1] by Michel Laverne CSO of General Fusion. He starts talking at the ~6 minute mark and explains why renewables will never see more than 10-20% market penetration.
> He starts talking at the ~6 minute mark and explains why renewables will never see more than 10-20% market penetration.
...and yet market penetration of wind and solar in the UK was 26.4% in July[0] and still climbing as we build more offshore wind. Plus 1.3% hydro (and 5.9% biomass if you count that as renewable).
I think the ~20% is how much it should take up if people are behaving rationally (and can also be an exaggeration, so it wasn’t intended to be something mathematically rigorous). The current regulatory environment and decades of divesting in fission construction coupled with continued investment in wind and solar makes those options look more attractive than they are economically and politically. Also important to note that there are regional differences that impact the cost benefit for a given type of tech and I don’t know if the UK has a particular geographic strength around wind like California does with solar.
There’s simply not enough battery capacity and physical land in the world for solar power plants and wind turbines to provide all the energy. Everyone always does the solar calculations ignoring the fact that energy has to be produced semi locally to where it’s used (long distance transmission is expensive and lossy). Additionally the calculations for energy capacity of renewables ignores the fact that energy that the capacity can’t be shifted to match load (without batteries).
Seriously. This is why the fossil fuel industry loves solar and wind. They’re not a serious enough threat to their business.
> Everyone always does the solar calculations ignoring the fact that energy has to be produced semi locally to where it’s used (long distance transmission is expensive and lossy).
This is untrue. They are building a solar farm in Australia to export electricity to Singapore 3,100 miles (5,000 km) away.
Even fission is renewable (i.e. can power 100% of primary energy until the sun burns out) using breeder reactors, which can run with huge EROI on just the uranium and thorium traces in average crustal granite. Conveniently, breeder reactors were first demonstrated in 1952 in Idaho at the Experimental Breeder Reactor 1.
The term "renewable" is such a poor word for 'long-term sustainable'. I wish we had something that didn't make everyone think we were violating the laws of energy conservation.
You know what was renewable, using whale oil. That's very renewable in fact, but somehow most people are against running the global economy on whale oil.
Fission is incredibly sustainable in the long term. In fact, even if we mined all the easily expressible thorium volcanic activity actually continuously brings up more.
There's a few reasons as I understand it, the power output can be on the same order as a nuclear fission plant. So a single plant taking relatively little real estate can output gigawatts of power to the grid. The fuel is abundant to the point of being practically unlimited. The fuel also needs little in the way of refinement and is not hazardous. A fusion core is naturally fail safe since energy and fuel need to be constantly applied, an accident might destroy a core or plant but not irradiate the surrounding countryside.
> The fuel is abundant to the point of being practically unlimited.
Well, only insofar as we have all the required elements on earth. You still have to go threw a considerably complex and expensive process to make that fuel.
You need to mine lithium and then expose it to plasma to breed tritium.
> A fusion core is naturally fail safe since energy and fuel need to be constantly applied
With a breeder reactor that can be consciously refueled you can also keep its access reactivity very low. And even better, if its fuel is a molten salt the dangerous elements are chemically bound in the fuel. So even if an explosion (terrorist planting C4) would happen in the power plant, and fuel would get spread but the dangerous elements would remain in the molten salt. The dangerous elements are never gaseous and thus never leave the safety boundary of the plant.
A fission reactor in comparsion when hit by C4 can actually release gaseous radioactive material. Just not very much.
So I am not saying fusion reactors are unsafe, but rather then fission reactors can be incredibly as safe.
For myself I would much rather sleep next to a molten salt breeder reactor rather then fusion reactor.
As with fission, most of the operating costs would have nothing to do with buying fuel. Solar and wind power suffer none of these costs, so fusion, like fission, would be wholly unable to produce power at a price anyone would pay without being forced to.
The fission plants still operating will find themselves increasingly unable to produce power at a price anyone will pay, so will be mothballed long short of their design life.
Generating electricity from sunlight and wind is anything but free. I prefer to pay $0.12/kWh for nuclear energy, as compared to $1.75/kWh for wind or solar, in fact.
I don’t follow. If anything, the nuclear energy electric rate I quoted is too high.
Regarding Diablo Canyon nuclear plant: “The plant produces electricity for about 6 cents per kWh, less than the average cost of 10.1 cents per kWh that PG&E paid for electricity from other suppliers in 2014.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant#:~....
The reason I'm personally most excited is interplanetary or even (generation ship) interstellar travel. Fusion fuel is the only practical fuel we know of with enough energy density to provide enough "umph" for long-distance trajectories to be traveled along, at speeds faster than what the Voyager probes had to achieve using multi-year planetary slingshot trajectories.
The only fuels that could achieve better energy density than fusion fuel would be antimatter, or maybe some fanciful sci-fi thing we may discover down the line, such as quark fusion ( https://www.sciencealert.com/new-quark-fusion-releases-signi... ) or subatomic compression ( a concept from fiction that involves packing an immense amount of solid electrons together so tightly that the electrostatic repulsion functions as a compressed spring (perhaps using mutual gravitation almost but not quite strong enough to be a black hole as a way of preventing disastrous spontaneous decompression) ).
Prestige, social status, bragging rights, money (a $billion is table stakes for fusion reactors, so a lot of folks are getting fat cuts), and cool & cushy high-tech careers. Really expensive research has been going on for 50+ years now, with no sign of development - let alone deployment - of actual, practical power reactors.
Maybe seen to many sci-fi, but can a fusion reactor go out of control and fuse any atom it comes in contact with? I mean with more energy going out than in. Sounds a bit like a nuclear reactor.
The neutrons released by the fusion reaction can be captured by the atomic nuclei of other materials it encounters, in a sense fusion. This induces radioactivity in those materials, called neutron activation, but won't create a run-away reaction. Nuclear fission reactors also produce neutron radiation that behaves in the same way, except in nuclear fission fuel it does create a chain reaction.
> Sounds a bit like a nuclear reactor.
They are nuclear reactors. Nuclear fusion reactors, rather than nuclear fission reactors.
Fusion reactors and conventional nuclear (fission) reactors are very different. Only poorly designed fission reactors can meltdown and release large amounts of highly radioactive material into the environment. And no nuclear power reactor of any kind can explode into a giant fireball like a nuclear bomb; that only happens on TV shows.
Molten lithium (or Pb-Li) probably won't be used in magnetic fusion reactors, because the magnetic forces from induced currents in the flowing metal would cause unacceptable pressures to develop. There was hope that insulating coatings for metal structures could be developed to deal with this, but apparently even small cracks are too much.
There are some great videos on YouTube about how alkali metals behave in contact with air or, for extra amusement, water. Those don't generally present superheated, molten alkali metals.
Fusion reactor can, in theory, go out of control, but it won't "fuse any atom it comes in contact with". Somewhat simplified:
The failure mode for a regular (fission) reactor can be twofold. The better scenario is that by some kind of mechanical failure the radioactive materials escape the confinement, and instead of putting their energy into the electricity generation mechanisms, just start shooting it around, irradiating things, thus breaking them (including living organism's cells and DNA) and causing them to become secondary sources of radiation. The worse scenario is that that before that, radioactive materials become too close together, starting self-sustaining chain reaction, which outputs immense amounts of energy (essentially, like a nuclear bomb), inevitably leading to destruction of whatever container it is in (no container can survive it for long, too much energy) and spreading around, by which time we're back to the scenario above (since once the materials have spread around, the chain reaction would stop) only with much more material which is much more energetic and thus will spread around wider and do more mess.
The failure mode of fusion reactor, if it happens, would be different, since it does not contain fissile material. Instead, it contains some light elements (usually the mix of deuterium and tritium, both of which are just hydrogen with some extra neutrons) which are heated and compressed a lot to start forming helium. If something breaks, the elements would not have anything to contain them (since, unlike what happens in the Sun, they don't have nearly enough gravity in themselves to be able to counter the thermal forces taking them apart) so what you'd get is a lot of very hot gases (mostly hydrogen) flying around. It's no fun, especially given hydrogen likes to explosively combine with oxygen in the air under the right conditions, but there would be no radiation involved, and it won't be able to "fuse" with anything else because it won't have enough energy to initiate the fusion process (that why we needed to compress and heat it up in the first place). So if everything goes very wrong - which is not very likely, but we're assuming the absolutely worst case scenario - we will have an explosion but noting like fission reactor. The containment is absolutely necessary - at least in current fission reactors - to achieve more energy out than in - and if it fails, the energy output will stop. This is one of the reasons fusion reactors are supposed to be safer.
There still could be some radioactive contamination involved due to fusion causing neutrons to fly around, hit the surrounding materials and turn them radioactive, and these could be spread around by the explosion, but less than in the fission case.
Now you may ask how hydrogen bombs are so destructive then? The big difference they use a regular nuke to ignite the reaction. Unless somebody builds a fusion reactor inside an exploding nuke, that's not the scenario we'll be dealing with in the fusion reactor case.
Right now nobody has a functioning fusion reactor, so nobody knows how expensive it would be to run one. Hopefully, there would be some way to make it cost reasonable money - since it has many advantages over existing solutions - but I have no idea if it's feasible with current technology.
Nope, failure of containment simply means they fizzle out. Some massively hot plasma might go to areas immediately next to reactor, but it won't blow up. There isn't just enough temperature or pressure for fusion to continue.
There is lots of sci-fi where the reactors go in full overload. Startrek, Starwars, Stargate. Don’t quite recall where I got the idea exactly from to be honest.
Start Trek uses matter-antimatter reaction as power source. Provided we ever find out how to do that, if this reactor stores any substantial amount of anti-matter - which appears to be the case in Star Trek, with the confinement being achieved by usage of dilithium crystals - the failure mode would be loss of confinement, with the result of antimatter coming into contact with regular matter. This will lead to all anti-matter instantly converted to energy (taking the equivalent mass of matter with it) resulting in enormous explosion probably converting any matter in the vicinity into a superheated plasma cloud and enormous burst of high-energy radiation. Star Trek reactors are not very safe, as it looks from the descriptions.
Iron Man's "arc reactor" is explicitly supposed to be a fusion reactor and it blows up, taking a building with it, during the events of the first Iron Man movie.
It's easy to trigger some fusion in a D-T mix. As in, an enterprising high school student can do it on his tabletop with parts mostly scavenged from tube televisions.
The problem is that the fuel mass that undergoes fusion has a lot of mechanisms for energy loss, which mean that you need to continously apply a lot of energy into the system to keep it going.
"Ignition" refers to achieving conditions where the energy output of fusion matches the energy loss from the hot spot. In this situation, it is no longer necessary to feed in energy to keep the reaction going, so long as there is sufficient fuel.
The failure to replicate the alleged ignition of a fusion target one year ago suggests that the event was an accident, in the sense that we still don’t understand how to create the conditions leading to ignition in an indirect-drive laser experiment. Even if we could predictably ignite such a target, that would be almost completely irrelevant for commercial power generation. The total system gain is still << 10%. Fusion is not an attractive or desirable approach: https://progressive.org/op-eds/let-cut-our-losses-on-fusion-...
> While the repeat attempts have not reached the same level of fusion yield as the August 2021 experiment, all of them demonstrated capsule gain greater than unity with yields in the 430-700 kJ range, significantly higher than the previous highest yield of 170 kJ from February 2021.
That looks like some steady progress. How long should it take to consistently yield one more order of magnitude? Are they expecting to hit a plateau at some point?
No, that's just a different way of writing Q. There is not a continuous gradient along which nuclear fusion research progresses. It will have a negative $/kWh ratio until the first commercial plant is built. Until then it's milestones that show possibilities.
That's like claiming that gas mileage is the only way to evaluate a car, and when hearing someone say "only a fan would think you can make a decision like this from a single number," asking what you would use instead of gas mileage
You can't even evaluate if a good choice for location 1 is still a good choice for a different location without knowing what the other location is
There is no easy number for a casual to try to make these decisions with
Lots of respect for the people who build the hohlraums (gold target cylinders) since it's such a frustrating task with low yields. It paid off and achieved something.
solar power here today & for way less money & anywhere in the world can have it. You expect Namibia to have a fusion reactor? Solar will the primary power source of the future.
This whole comment chain is utter nonsense. Not only is the research publicly available (so much for capitalism locking knowledge behind patents) but the research was done at a government funded lab (capitalism had nothing to do with getting this done). Not a huge fan of capitalism myself, but these comments literally make no sense.
Modern capitalism is effectively local optimization. Academic research doesn't follow that same flow, so to claim capitalism is responsible for academic progress is an interesting claim.
Yes, but not in the ironic meaning you probably meant it in. China is more capitalist than the United States or Europe at this point in time. It's why they managed to catapult themselves so quickly ahead.
> Capitalism is why there is no chip fab in the US
Umm what? My friend works at one. There's dozens of them in the US.
Also the reason why chip fabs took off in certain other countries is because of state sponsorship by feeding their development off of the tax base. i.e. corporate welfare.
It kills me that more people don't know about General Fusion. They have a practical design for a fusion reactor and are currently building a test reactor in the UK.
I believe that General Fusion has been in business for over 10 years and that they have yet to actually demonstrate fusion. Definitely not fusion with net energy gain. It's all smoke and mirrors. Their press releases read like they were written by business majors, not scientists. What is the "test reactor" going to test?
They're building a small scale reactor to test the design. And are you really criticizing a private company for taking just 10 years to get to working reactor? Their approach to fusion can't work in small scale tests.
It has worked perfectly thus far, at separating investors' money from the investors. Most private fusion projects operate on similar principles.
We are starting to see similar projects in the renewables space, most notably Energy Vault (NRGV). Their stuff does not work, and cannot work, but it does not matter because the customer is the investors, not the utilities, and what the investors buy is pipe dreams.
Investors make a speculative bet that the people involved will make things work. They also generally understand the risks associated with it and are willing to do it despite that because they think there’s a meaningful non-0 chance of success.
I think with fusion investors would be thinking about generational ROI (20-40 years) instead of 5-10 years.
What I don’t understand is why there isn’t a similar push to really shake things up with fission. Our current power mix will take a century or so to replace. Fission should be a MUCH faster path.
There are very serious companies making investment in fission.
The problem is that there are very few places in the West where there is anything like a market.
In the US, any progress is basically blocked because the only type of reactor that can get a license is a PWR. Anything else is essentially impossible because of incredibly dumb and regressive technology depended licensing schemes. Thankfully even the DoE has realized this and his slowly changing course. However we are talking decades.
NuScale is building a small PWR, that is why they were able to do it in the US.
That is why, most Western advanced fission companies go to Canada. Canada has a good internationally reorganized regulator and a regulatory framework that is sensible.
See their process here, and a list of companies going threw the process:
As you can see Terrestrial Energy Inc. has passed into Phase 2 in 2018 and is thus the furthest along company in terms of bringing a GenIV plant into commercial operation.
What we need to realize is that these companies operate with comparatively little money and thus are operating pretty slowly. If a government would to really push these projects, they could be much faster.
That said, France of course had GenIV plant operating and producing as far back as 1986 but sadly the project was killed by short sited politics.
There is also an interesting US company called Kairos Power. They are attempting to go threw licensing in the US but they have a very complex plan to 'hack' the traditional path of licensing.
My personal favorite design is by Moltex Energy as it is a molten salt reactor that is burning nuclear 'waste'.
Fission would be faster if the path to deployment was realistic, but it isn't. A recently approved small modular reactor design was the first one to be approved in the US in several decades and it still has another 10 years and several more regulatory bodies to go through to build it, let alone start deploying it.
I suggest that the regulatory bodies are acting (likely intentionally) more of a hindrance than a help. It’s highly likely there’s been regulatory capture by the fossil fuels industry given their political clout and significant lobbying experience. It’s not an accident that the recent “climate bill” just has a bunch of concessions for the oil industry [1]:
> it requires the U.S. Department of the Interior to lease 2 million acres in federal lands onshore and 60 million acres offshore each year for oil and gas development (or whatever acreage the industry requests, whichever is smaller). These quotas must be met to allow federal leasing for onshore and offshore renewables development, respectively.
> In an online statement, a senior scientist at 350.org called the bill a “sham” and said that it “contained so many giveaways to the fossil fuel industry” that it “turns all of the gains in addressing the climate crisis into a moot point.”
Nuclear power plants with today’s technology are already safe. Small modular designs are nice but it’s not an either or. We should be building reactors with the best technology available at the time, not waiting for a hypothetical future. In fact, building with today’s technology helps because a) provides clarity that allows for greater private investment b) Wright’s law tells us it’ll have compound benefits where nuclear technology gets cheaper and safer.
Look at China. They’ve already build 47 power plants with another 11 approved [2]. They know what kind of problem oil is and they’re making significant effort to fix it while the rest of the world is sitting on their hands. It plans to build another 150 reactors, 30 of which are outside of China [3]. They’re spending 440B (almost 0.5T) in building out nuclear fission [4].
Fission has a realistic path to displacing all fossil fuels. We should have been doing this for the past 60 years - it would have been even cheaper in the past. Even with all the accidents, nuclear technology has fewer deaths per KWh produced than almost any other technology [5] (on par with solar and wind).
It's a really good article that points out that this additional land will only be leased if the companies request it, and that will be driven by consumer demand. To quote:
> Analysis from Energy Innovation shows that for every one ton of expected emissions from the bill’s fossil fuel provisions, the bill will result in 24 tons of emissions reductions.
...
> The fossil fuel demand-reducing portions of the bill work at cross purposes with the fossil fuel leasing provisions. It’s an odd way to write legislation, but if that’s what it takes to pass the most important climate bill ever, so be it. As I’ve written before, ending U.S. oil and gas production is not the way to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The world has plenty of oil and gas (even though it doesn’t feel that way right now) and the United States will import whatever it doesn’t produce, perhaps from countries with lower environmental standards and higher greenhouse gas emissions profiles than our own. Fighting fossil fuel demand is the way to lower emissions, and this bill does just that.
This isn't really the case, its not a conspiracy. What happened in the US is that because of public opinion and a few issues the regulator was replaced with a very conservative one.
When they wrote the regulation it was written when PWRs were the only commercial type of reactor, so regulations were hard coded to regulate those reactors.
And the DoE would not, at least not for free, even attempt to regulate anybody else. So if you wanted to get a license, you would literally have to pay the DoE to develop a licensing process first.
Even if you had the huge financial power to do this, it would likely be a decade+ before the DoE would even tell you what exactly the requirements are that your design has to pass.
Other regulator such as the one in Canada or Britain don't suffer from that technology dependency. But even without that, the regulator still needs to be motivated to regulate non standard reactor. In Britain this is not the case and that's why Moltex Energy for example, relocated from Britain to Canada.
In Canada, after CANDU was sold commercially, the Canadian regulator was very motivated to actually look into GenIV reactors and SMRs. Thus that is where all advanced reactor development takes place.
This is mostly not a fossil fuel conspiracy, but rather an over reaction based on uniformed politicians and uninformed public.
There's a company in the UK that has already built multiple test reactors: https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/ The more the better of course, but I'm not sure why more people would need to know of them, it's not like we could buy shares. I like TE because they post regular updates on the construction of their reactors, though it's been a while since they've posted anything concrete.
General Fusion was interesting until they repeatedly failed to meet their own timelines. Commonwealth Fusion Systems is meeting their own timelines thus far as their design is very run of the mill, other than the magnet technology, which they've already demonstrated.
They also changed their design to use a rod down the middle (because the previous design didn't work for three different reasons.) Now they are exposing that rod to orders of magnitude higher neutron fluence than the wall of a typical DT reactor design, as well as subjecting it to forces from magnetic fields up to 100 T. I am not optimistic this will work.
While the repeat attempts have not reached the same level of "fusion yield as the August 2021 experiment, all of them demonstrated capsule gain greater than unity with yields in the 430-700 kJ range, significantly higher than the previous highest yield of 170 kJ from February 2021. "
Does this mean they are producing energy? 10,000 kilo watt hours is not to be sniffed at
> The record shot was a major scientific advance in fusion research, which establishes that fusion ignition in the lab is possible at NIF,” said Omar Hurricane, chief scientist for LLNL’s inertial confinement fusion program. “Achieving the conditions needed for ignition has been a long-standing goal for all inertial confinement fusion research and opens access to a new experimental regime where alpha-particle self-heating outstrips all the cooling mechanisms in the fusion plasma."