The efficiency of the lasers is awful though and they will have to get at least 100x that energy yield for it to be a net power source. A lot of heat winds up in the laser glass and it takes it a long time to cool between shots so you are doing very good to make a few shots a day. A real power plant is going to need more like 10 shots per second.
Heavy-ion fusion has been talked about since the 1970s and it seems much more practical than lasers for energy production because the efficiency of particle accelerators is pretty good (maybe 30% or more) but it takes a very big machine, the size of a full powerplant, to do do meaningful development. Something like that seems to need about 100 beamlines because otherwise space charge effects prevent you from getting the needed luminosity. Given that you are going to need to protect the wall of the reactor and the beamlines from the blasts and also have a lot of liquid lithium flowing around to absorb neutrons and breed tritium it is hard for me to picture the beam quality being good enough.
There hasn't been much work on it since then. If I had $48 billion to spend I'd think a heavy ion fusion lab would be better than some other things I could buy.
It's not worthless research (not that you said it was), as it still validates various aspects of fusion energy and some of the engineering around it. And it's always been ahead of magnetic containment devices because they only have to keep the conditions for nanoseconds.
But NIF was never, and is not, designed to be a generating reactor, or even a prototype of a testbed. It's a weapons physics facility that happens to do some energy generating research sometimes.
That aside, hitting Q=1 (and be able to use the device again) in any way at all using any equipment is a major milestone that proves humans can get there. From that point, in theory, it's just engineering.
Yeah, either heavy-ion beams or electrically-pumped excimer lasers seems like the path forward for the driver. Higher efficiency, higher repetition rate, possibly more robust. They also need to do away with holraums and switch to direct drive, to reduce target cost, ease alignment issues, and increase energy efficiency.
I don't hold out much hope for a practical, economical reactor from inertial confinement, but it's certainly exciting to see them achieve ignition & scientific breakeven, even if it's 10 years behind schedule. The one nice thing about ICF is that the energy gain shoots up dramatically once you cross the ignition threshold. That means they're arguably closer than tokamaks, even though both concepts need ~100x the demonstrated gain to get from where they are now to a workable reactor. (Ie, tokamaks have hit Q~0.3, need to get Q~30, vs ICF that has hit Q~1, needs Q~100).
Unfortunately large fusion is unlikely to ever be economic because the cost of solar/battery is coming down so quickly and is already in the 1-2 cents per kilowatt hour for the solar component. And costs will continue to drop.
Small scale fusion on the other hand would have a viable niche application at the poles, in the sea or underground or any other environment that is without sun or space.
We won't know what the cost of solar/battery will be in a sustainable energy economy, until someone builds a solar-powered solar panel and battery factory. At the moment, productions costs are heavily (as in, entirely) subsidised by fossil fuels (mostly coal).
You miss my point. The reason solar is so cheap right now (along with the huge amount of government subsidies) is that the huge amount of energy required to manufacture them is currently done with very cheap coal in China.
>Cost of current production is an upper bound.
Under the current state of the energy economy, maybe. If we had to replace all manufacturing power sources with renewables - absolutely not.
Maybe - with government grants, and coal-powered manufacture of all of the associated generation equipment.
That's not very interesting though - what is interesting, which has been my topic of conversation this entire time, is what the energy economy would look like if it were not still fundamentally rooted in fossil fuels.
Given that coal and other fossil fuels are basically free energy - it does not take much at all to get energy from it (ie, set it on fire), it is not physically possible for PV generation to beat that. Therefore, it follows that renewable power will be more expensive than fossil fuel power. I don't see why this is so hard to acknowledge - we are living in a time of unreasonably cheap power, fuelled by several million years worth of stored solar energy. It can't last.
You make the same mistake fission boosters make. Converting heat to electricity is expensive. Solar and wind skip the expensive step, going straight to electricity. Electric power from solar and wind is already much cheaper than coal, without subsidy, for this reason, and because coal has to be dug up and transported. Coal has a high operating cost. Solar and wind have extremely low operating cost, and also very low capital cost, always falling.
Solar and wind, un-subsidized, are the cheapest power the world has ever seen, and their cost is still falling at exponential rate.
Why not? Plenty of places have enough sunlight to do so even in winter. Parts of Alberta have similar sunlight mid winter to PNG mid summer.
Plus storage is a thing. Using a heat pump to dry NaOH or melt Sodium Acetate, or heat a large pond can store low grade heat economically for months. Ammonia, or methanol can do so indefinitely.
Then there's transmission. HVDC can transport energy 10GW pernline for thousands of km at costs comparable to local generation.
I'd be very surprised if you could avoid using a solar panel to heat your home in 40 years even if you go out of your way to do so.
We're talking about the cost of power. Putting aside the unbelievable idea that Alberta has as much mid-winter solar energy available as at the equator, using solar to heat my house is more expensive than burning some stuff inside.
Bifacial isn't in this model, but it boosts the snowy region by about 20% and the tropical one by about 5%
And what will the stuff available to burn be made from when there are plants producing ethylene or methanol or ammonia in chile or saudi arabia or mongolia for less than what gas costs to dig up?
So the energy that is cheaper than coal and driving operating coal plants out of business will make the cost of producing it go up when the share increases?
These mental gymnastics routines are olympic level.
The reason we can ignore the huge manufacturing energy inputs required to make solar panels, is because it's powered by cheap domestic coal in China.
>driving operating coal plants out of business
Any specific ones? The only coal plants I've seen get shut down are because of environmental reasons (or age). Some countries, like Germany and China, are re-opening or building new coal plants.
Talking of mental gymnastics - fundamentally, the energy economy boils down to EROI (energy returned on energy invested). It's just wishful thinking that we can replace energy sources that are basically free (coal, oil, gas), with those that have energy payback periods in the mid-double digits of their expected lifespan (solar).
Try a new solar panel rather than one from the 90s. Your Shellenberger tripe about EROI went off when the EROI of solar surpassed that of nuclear and EPBT dropped below 18 months (or 6 months in sunny countries). Then it went even more ranc
If you're really worried about it, buy a panel from europe, the polysilicon (90% of the energy) comes from hydro, wind, and nuclear powered countries.
Even if all the money for a solar module went to coal generation at chinese or indian prices and nothing else it would pay back that power in under two years.
If the only activity involved in making PV was to spend the entire system cost on lignite and burn it directly at the mine front, it would *still* produce more energy in its lifetime than putting the coal in a coal plant.
It's absolutely laughable that you think you can keep spouting this ridiculous lie.
That's exactly the problem. This is a significant portion of the lifetime output of the panels.
>it would still produce more energy in its lifetime than putting the coal in a coal plant.
I'm not arguing that solar panels are a net negative, as you seem to be implying. I'm arguing that the energy economics of a world fuelled entirely by solar (and other renewable technologies - solar is about the worst for EROI) would look very different to what we have now.
Crystalline Solar panels have a benchmark lifetime of 30 years and are consistently outperforming predicted degradation rates. None have worn out yet, but the best guess is a median 40 year lifetime. A new panasonic or jinko mono panel installed in india has epbt under 6 months and an eroi around 100.
You're the one making the insane claims. You back them up.
Prove new solar in a median location is lower EROI than the median for new gas using up to date info on the whole process and solar cells you would buy for a project started now such as 155 micron wafer mono PERC.
Nope, I said that it's lower than other sources of power, and thus an energy economy based on solar will look very different than what we currently have.
Given that electricity represents a relatively small percentage of our power usage, in the majority of cases (materials manufacture, industry, heating, etc), the EROI of renewables will be worse than fossil fuels.
Prove that thermal energy from shale oil or tar sands is higher EROI than that same solar panel using a resistor or arc furnace then.
Then add heat pumps and PV+Heliostat or PV+CSP derived hydrogen compounds to your equation and realise that adding heat and chemical stocks shipped from distant places to the equation makes it favour renewables even more as you can turn 120MJ of electricity and 40MJ of direct sunlight at Chile's 35% capacity factor into 120MJ of hydrogen or 100MJ of Ammonia you don't have to refine. With the heat pump you'd get more low grade heat even if you burnt the fossil fuel for electricity.
Wind + PV is a pure upgrade from an EROI perspective, and electrolysers and CSP are following very close behind.
I only mentioned solar/battery for brevity but clearly wind/battery is already substantial in many parts of the world. In addition, HVDC transmissions line costs are also dropping year by year and these allow solar/wind generated electricity to be inexpensively shifted across long distances.
For example, such a transmission line is currently being built to send solar energy from Northern Australia to Singapore across about 3000km of ocean. Another project is generating wind energy near Iceland and sending it to the UK a distance of 800km.
Ok, and thank You for remember about Australia to Singapore transmission line.
Unfortunately, most of territories I mention, also have low population density, about 1/10 of western Europe, and have low middle income, so it is not right to directly compare them with western Europe or Singapore, in possibilities to achieve same infrastructure power.
There's well under a hundred million people that aren't within easy transmission distance of somewhere with at least 10% capacity factor for a bifacial system in mid winter and don't already have more than enough hydro to go wind/hydro.
If 1% of the world needs to get 30% of their energy from gas while we figure out the hydrogen thing, it's not really a problem.
Heavy-ion fusion has been talked about since the 1970s and it seems much more practical than lasers for energy production because the efficiency of particle accelerators is pretty good (maybe 30% or more) but it takes a very big machine, the size of a full powerplant, to do do meaningful development. Something like that seems to need about 100 beamlines because otherwise space charge effects prevent you from getting the needed luminosity. Given that you are going to need to protect the wall of the reactor and the beamlines from the blasts and also have a lot of liquid lithium flowing around to absorb neutrons and breed tritium it is hard for me to picture the beam quality being good enough.
There hasn't been much work on it since then. If I had $48 billion to spend I'd think a heavy ion fusion lab would be better than some other things I could buy.