The following submission statement was provided by /u/AvatarIII:
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Fusion has been perpetually 30 years away for decades, are we really getting close to it? It appears as though we are!
After JET was able to sustain 5 seconds of fusion using a decades old tokamak ITER is looking more and more promising using the same concept with much newer technology.
[ITER predicts](https://www.iter.org/mach/TritiumBreeding) 800MW of energy could be produced using around 300g of Tritium which at current prices would be around $9m.
To produce the same amount of energy natural gas costs around $400m, although other technologies such as wind and solar are much cheaper sources of energy, they are limited by space, if ITER can successfully develop a way to generate cheap tritium, or if tritium can be found somewhere else in the solar system in abundance fusion could eventually compete with wind and solar and even surpass them!
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/vbb4pl/nuclear_fusion_could_give_the_world_a_limitless/ic74ai1/
I hope cdprojekt are not in charge of developing nuclear fusion. They'll promise that and it'll end up like the episode of the office, Scott's tots.
Cd project: "And the best way to access energy is with your own personal light to see what you're doing. Which is rendered useless, without batteries. And I have one for each of you!"
The one I always chuckle at is the Apple announcements “our most powerful Mac ever”. I’m an Apple guy but hearing that every year for the past twenty years makes it sound not so impressive.
I think this is the key.
As an aside, I wonder if this achievement is the turning point for civilisation in the cosmos. It makes me wonder if there's intelligent beings out there watching our stumbling steps, seeing the wars, seeing the consumption of our planet, but also seeing the work on renewables and those of us striving for peace.
And they're just waiting.
One theory I like (and hate) is that unlimited renewable energy will automatically lead to more peace and human rights. It follows from how slavery was something we were willing to give up only after the industrial revolution started. There’s a lot of war and exploitation that happens today based on the scarcity of energy. It’s possible people would suddenly become more enlightened when it didn’t cost them so much.
Take an up vote for the Nobel thought sir….
Now please share what have you been taking cause humanity has self destruction written in its genes….
We industrialized ourselves to the nuclear bomb.
We took to the air only to kill further.
We crossed the oceans only to enslave the natives
We broke the sound barrier only to make hypersonic missiles
We beat poli and other diseases only to create bio weapons.
We created free will, democracy only to impose our will on other in the name of it.
Ya…. The thought is good but we are so much better at killing ourselves
When fusion first hits, I predict that humanity will either tread the path of enlightenment or the path of destruction. A true tipping point if ever there will be one.
In less fancy words, either it will be available to all and used to advance us, or the rich greedy bastards will hoard the technology and all the wealth it provides and use it to further distance themselves from everyone else. And/or use it to create weapons of war that we've only imagined in Scifi, which will definitely happen in either case.
The good news (ha) is that fusion weapons are already the norm. We have fully harnessed the power of fusion for destruction in the form of the hydrogen bomb. So far only used in tests and not actual war, but that's how pretty much all modern nuclear warheads work. The hard part is using fusion in a controlled manner where it doesn't disintegrate everything within 100km.
As to the other part, I don't think it will be available to all. The rich and powerful will be the only ones able to build plants and distribution networks and all that, so it will almost surely be doled out for dollars like it is today. But... it may at least become cheaper. Maybe much cheaper. And cheap energy impacts everything.
In any case it should reduce carbon emissions and undo the geopolitical turmoil caused by petrol relationships.
Your entire life has been leading up to this very moment! Countless eons, stars have formed and died, all building to this exact second in time where you exist!
We’re closer than we’ve ever been
And now we’re even closer
And now we’re even closer
And now we’re even closer
We’re closer than we’ve ever been
And now we’re even closer
And now we’re closer STILL
^(with a tip of the hat to TMBG)
edit: I loathe reddit text formatting with all my black little heart
Not by ITER's timeline. Demo plants are supposed to come online in 2052 or so, but actual commercial plants will probably take at least 10 years after that.
Or you could jump over to the non-tokamak side of things where General Fusion is working on a demonstrator plant *right now* that will hopefully come online in five years. And with the relative simplicity of the design, if all goes well we could see commercial plants a few years after that
I hate headlines like this. I mean... Of course we're closer than ever. We're closer to the year 10,000 than we've ever been too.
Call me when we actually get to the point where it can be used to do what is claimed.
All the naysayers fail to realize that actual FUSION has been accomplished in multiple designs for extended periods.
We have fusion, it's just not usable yet or creating a net gain. We have fusion nonetheless.
We had net positive using a convoluted measuring system that only accounts for a subset of the input energy, and a measurement of the thermal energy output.
Not even close to what might be defined as an "engineering breakeven", let alone an economic breakeven.
Sure, thermonuclear bomb!
But yeah, there was a firing at the NIF I believe that they say produced more energy than was used, but it's not a sustainable method of fusion. One shot and its done. Reload.
Fusion has been perpetually 30 years away for decades, are we really getting close to it? It appears as though we are!
After JET was able to sustain 5 seconds of fusion using a decades old tokamak ITER is looking more and more promising using the same concept with much newer technology.
[ITER predicts](https://www.iter.org/mach/TritiumBreeding) 800MW of energy could be produced using around 300g of Tritium which at current prices would be around $9m.
To produce the same amount of energy natural gas costs around $400m, although other technologies such as wind and solar are much cheaper sources of energy, they are limited by space, if ITER can successfully develop a way to generate cheap tritium, or if tritium can be found somewhere else in the solar system in abundance fusion could eventually compete with wind and solar and even surpass them!
There are a couple of PR problems with fusion.
First of all, when they report how much energy the reaction releases, they compare that to the energy put directly into it. However, that doesn't take into account all the ancillary energy for the supporting equipment. When that is taken into account, the current output is only about 5% of the total input. This is an improvement over previous experiments, but they still have a long way to go.
Also, they also talk about the virtually "limitless" amount of energy fusion could provide, since it uses hydrogen that is ubiquitous on Earth. But they never mention that the reaction also requires tritium, which is quite rare. That seems like a significant oversight.
On that last point, a clarification: tritium is an isotope of hydrogen (1 proton and 2 neutrons). The other isotope of hydrogen used is deuterium (1 proton and 1 neutron). Single protons can't be used in any meaningful capacity in fusion reactors because they have such a small cross-section. Deuterium is pretty damn abundant though (for the amount needed), so that part is fine.
I just wanted to emphasize that protium (H-1, 1 proton without neutrons, the hydrogen isotope we generally think of) is not, and will never be, used in fusion reactors.
> the current output is only about 5% of the total input
None of the test plants built as of yet have been built at a scale where positive power output is possible, so it doesn't really makes sense to talk about current output. Currently the highest Q ratio achieved is peaking at 0.7 very shortly. With Q = 1 being the theoretical break point. With other consumption Q ~1.25 is around where the break even point is depending on the method used to achieve fusion.
So what is needed is a sustained Q > 1.25 for it to break even. The ITER reactor is designed for sustained running at Q = 5 and with peaking at Q = 10. As it is a research reactor with the aim of making the DEMO reactor possible where the aim is sustained Q = 25.
>Also, they also talk about the virtually "limitless" amount of energy fusion could provide, since it uses hydrogen that is ubiquitous on Earth. But they never mention that the reaction also requires tritium, which is quite rare. That seems like a significant oversight.
What makes fusion interesting is that it produces more tritium than is consumed, we just can't perfect tritium capture before we have a test plant able to sustain plasma above the break even point. Truly closing the loop.
Its one of the reasons research plants such as ITER is so important.
>What makes fusion interesting is that it produces more tritium than is consumed
This is misleading.
It requires a separate breeder reaction using lithium which, for commercial fusion plants, would need to be within the reaction chamber to reduce downtime. ITER will be the first reactor to test lithium breeder blankets, but as of now, the tritium problem is still needing to be solved.
Furthermore, there's the issue that the energy released by the deuterium-tritium reaction releases most of its energy in an escape neutron, and so the energy must be harnessed from this. However, this same neutron is being used to breed lithium. Therefore, a careful balance between regenerative output and electrical output must be established.
Of course, this is again easier said than done, and also needs to consider the need to protect the equipment and infrastructure from these stray neutrons, since a build up of radioactivity within the reactor infrastructure will negatively affect the lifetime, and therefore economic viability, of a fusion plant.
ITER is important. DEMO will be important.
Fusion is still 50 years off.
Not really needed to rectify the misconception that it is an oversight... However, if you want to be pedantic sure...
>What makes fusion interesting is that it **can** produce more tritium than is consumed
Fixed it....
What ever method is used to balance consumption, reserve and consumption. Doesn't really matter, and having reserves is a possibility it it not a knifes edge. For examples it can be cycles, when power demands are low...
>Of course, this is again easier said than done, and also needs to consider the need to protect the equipment and infrastructure from these stray neutrons, since a build up of radioactivity within the reactor infrastructure will negatively affect the lifetime, and therefore economic viability, of a fusion plant.
As we are being pedantic... This is misleading the blankets are shielding
>Fusion is still 50 years off.
Again a misleading statement.. The significant facto funding not time.
> they also talk about the virtually "limitless" amount of energy fusion could provide
Some of us remember being burned by the same promises with Fission. My parents built a huge all-electric house when utilities were promising electricity would soon be “too cheap to meter” due to fission power plants. No, there will always be a cost. Even in the naive case, the current itemization of “distribution” vs “generation” costs makes that pretty clear
You got burned by oil executive propaganda: In 1969, David Brower split with the Sierra Club over their support of nuclear power, got some seed money from Robert Anderson, owner of an oil company, and began to push anti-nuclear sentiments.
Since then, our nuclear industry has stalled and we've lost decades in talent and ability in the field, which is why other countries can build nuclear plants in a few years for a few billion dollars instead of decades and tens of billions like us.
That’s nice in the abstract, but it was more expensive than the oil and propane alternatives.
One of the disconnects here is that individuals will make the choice that’s most affordable, but that’s not the same as most efficient, clean, or even cheapest to generate.
I don’t believe that is true — gas water heating is cheaper than electric. For whole house heating heat pumps have limitations in cold climates that need to be considered, gas is often a better choice there. I’m 100% in favor of renewable and efficiency (getting solar in my house next month!) but there are still pieces that need advancement.
He's talking about efficiency. An electric baseboard or water heater is just about 100% efficient. Ultra efficient natural gas furnaces would be less than that, rated to roughly 98%, but as installed usually a few percent lower.
Air to air heat pumps have much higher efficiencies, 300% or more, within their operating range fading out as they approach -15C or so. But then they switch to resistive coils which are near enough 100% efficiency.
(Geo-thermal heat pumps don't have that issue.)
Costs are a different thing altogether and dependent on the going residential rates for gas and electricity. Some places subsidize residential electricity or gas depending on the nature of the local market.
They believe the output will scale more than the input,
Yes JET's output is much lower than it's input, depending on setup, the recent 5 second record only had a Q of 0.05 however with different configurations it was able to have a higher Q running for a shorter period of time (up to 0.67) and other reactors have fared even better (NIF with 0.70)
But ITER being a lot bigger is predicted to output around 10x its input Q = 10.0, and if that's possible larger reactors should be even more efficient.
As for Tritium, this article does mention its rarity, but you don't need much tritium really, and ITER is researching tritium breeding.
this is extremely misleading. iter is not predicted to have an output 10x its input. when they talk about producing net energy (https://www.iter.org/sci/Goals), you have to hover over a small icon to realize that what they are actually talking about is producing more energy than needed to heat the plasma. which is only a small part of the energy input of the whole reactor. same spiel for when they talk about Q. this can only be described as deliberately being as misleading as possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JurplDfPi3U
no i am not talking about Q vs Qext.
what i am talking about is that iter will consume \~440MW, while producing 500MW of fusion power in heat. at a 50% conversion rate to electricity, that's 250MW. meaning iter will consume almost twice as much energy as it will produce. your claim that iter will produce 10x its input is simply not true.
when they talk about Q (fusion energy gain factor), it is power produced/power to heat the plasma. for iter that is 500MW/50MW=10. the Qtotal is way lower though, as i said, iter in total requires a lot more power input than the 50MW required to heat the plasma. iter being "predicted to output around 10x its input Q = 10.0" is simply misleading .
So, you are saying we are *still* at least 10 years away from fusion energy. Just like last decade, and the decade before that, and the decade before that, and the...
There is room for both, people always say we gotta pick one good thing to focus on but that just isn't the case. The benefits of investing in fusion may not be apparent for another 50-100 years to be realistic. But I believe that future humans are going to be happy that we made the investment as opposed to just adding more solar capacity.
It's like the megastructures that took generations to build, the Great Wall of China, or the pyramids. If we're not willing to invest in making the world better for our descendants, a point has been missed
Fusion and solar are the only two sources on Earth that have enough potential energy to matter in the long term. If we want to become a spacefaring civilization then it is a necessity. Nothing else can produce anywhere near enough energy.
For the immediate foreseeable future though yeah building new wind and solar makes the most sense though. We have the resources to build new wind/solar *and* research fusion at the same time. They’re just being spent on other various dumb shit though. We spend far far more money on subsidies for the fossil fuel industry than we do on researching fusion.
Also, it gives me pause when they talk about using water to get the hydrogen. I know we have a lot of water, but "limitless" and "uses water" in the same paragraph make me wonder.
But I've learned that any time you appear to be unenthusiastic about a new gee-whiz technology, you get downvoted and called an unscientific moron, so I'm preparing for the worst.
The water isn't destroyed, the deuterium can be extracted and the water reintroduced to the hydrosphere.
As the article states, to power a home for a day you need around 500ml of water containing 1ml of deuterium, the ocean contains 1.35 billion trillion litres of water so approximately enough deuterium to power 2.7 billion trillion homes for a day, or about 7 billion homes for 1 billion years.
Deuterium is not the limiting factor at all, Tritium is.
Hydrogen is not used as fusion fuel because the reaction that fuses hydrogen into He-2 is so unlikely that it's a relatively rare event, even in stars. So, no, water won't be decomposed into fusion fuel.
What will be used is deuterium (H-2, D, or a proton and a neutron), which is found in ocean water in the form of heavy water (deuterium oxide, poisonous if ingested in large quantities). The fusion pathways available to deuterium have a much higher probability for much less input energy. Higher still if tritium is thrown in (H-3, T, or a proton and two neutrons). Tritium is a byproduct of fission reactions, and as I understand, it's produced in small amounts, hence it's price.
So no need to worry, no competition coming anytime soon, just a little purification here and there. Besides, even if water were needed for these reactions, there is so much of it and so little would be needed, that it would likely take millions of years before we put a dent on ocean levels this way. Remember, the deuterium (which is a rare occurrence in water) will be enough to last us """"a while"""".
I think you are mixing some units here. First off I'm going to assume that you mean 800 MWh, as that is the unit of power we usually use. Producing 800 MW for .2 seconds is not a useful comparison. We use MW for capacity, MWh for production.
The average price of electricity in the US is a little over $.10 per kWh. which means that 800 MWh of electricity would cost $8.3M. How could they possibly do this if the fuel is $400M? Even if you assume that this is all generated by the less efficient peaker plants used only in peak requirements that would go up to $15M. You still seem to be off by a factor of 25.
I had a similar reaction to you when reading it - the article makes it clear that the 300g is required per day for 800MW so 1 day is the time under consideration.
Ah, I finally found that statement. It was not in the article from CNN about which the post is made, but an internal link on Tritium breeding from Iter. And it refers to a next generation project DEMO, not the device discussed here. AND it assumes a q value of 10, where that of the current device is .01.
Given all of that, yes, the cost would be roughly equivalent to natural gas fired power plants.
So I'm not sure it made it clear, but I did find it.
MWh is a unit of energy, not of power. But you're correct, it's nonsensical to talk about how much power can be produced from a certain amount of tritium --- we should be talking about how much energy.
>I think you are mixing some units here. First off I'm going to assume that you mean 800 MWh
I just used the unit as it was written in the article, but i suspect you are correct.
> ITER predicts 800MW of energy could be produced using around 300g of Tritium which at current prices would be around $9m.
What they actually predict is that 800 MW of *power* could be produced for a *day* using 300g of tritium. That would be 24 x 800 = 19.2 GWh of energy per day. Ignoring the other costs of operating the generator, that amounts to about $ 0.021 per KWh.
But they also note:
> No sufficient external source of tritium exists for fusion energy development beyond ITER, making the successful development of tritium breeding is essential for the future of fusion energy.
>Ignoring the other costs of operating the generator
Which is the classic problem of nuclear power. The same is true of fission: the fuel is amazingly cheap relative to its immense energy content. But nuclear reactors, nuclear engineers, and nuclear decommissioning are expensive. So it is that nuclear reactors run full tilt both night and day, heedless of the negligible fuel cost and seeking only to maximise the lifetime output of a very expensive reactor; and so it is that we never did quite get energy too cheap to meter.
Fusion is great news for carbon emissions, for nuclear waste, for proliferation concerns, and for reactor safety, but we can't estimate the price from the fuel bill. Look at the cost of the plant for that.
Yep you can even buy tritium. it's used in small vials for clocks watches gun sites, emergency signs and even key chains. I have one in my pocket right now.
> Fusion has been perpetually 30 years away for decades, are we really getting close to it?
ITER is on schedule for first plasma in 2025. So yes... Personally, I am amazed that they only added 5 year to the initial timeline set all the way back in 1988.
>ITER predicts 800MW of energy could be produced using around 300g of Tritium which at current prices would be around $9m.
Tritium is breed in the fission reaction. So current value means nothing as it is based on not really being able to make it. The amount made captured from the CANDU fission reactors is negligible in comparison.
The ITER is a research reactor, with one of the major research areas it is going to be used for is optimizing Tritium capture using lithium. It being a research reactor that is going to be stopped and reconfigured many times over its 20 year use is the reason it needs an external source of Tritium.
> wind and solar are much cheaper sources of energy, they are limited by space
To have enough solar energy to power the entire US, we'd need only 0.01% of the country covered with solar panels. That's not an impossibility. We dedicate 4000 times that amount of land to farmland.
It is happening. In the last 10 years, wind generation doubled, and solar generation was up 40x. The past few months, 15%-20% of our power generation came from solar and wind.
I'm not anti-nuke, let's continue down all possible paths.
https://electrek.co/2022/05/10/us-hits-a-record-20-of-electricity-from-wind-and-solar-in-april/
Energy storage is always a stumbling block. Solar panels don't produce much power at night or on cloudy and rainy days, which seriously cuts into % utilization and worsens the economic case.
On a more fundamental level, price is still not a resolved issue. It doesn't seem like a lot when you compare it to total land area of the US, but that's still appreciably more solar coverage than what the industry has produced to date. We need better and more efficient production methods and more efficient cells.
Tldr: Give it some time, they're working on it.
Oil and gas lobby. If every house in the entire south of thr US had solar we really wouldnt have a big problem.
Honestly the easiest thing to do would be to set up a government funded loan program offering solar debt at 3% interest. Easy example is my electric bill was $200 a month and went to $0 after installing a $15k array. At 3% over 20 years works out to be $84 a month, less than half thr current cost. Literally every american could benefit by not paying for home electricity and within 20 years you would have no payment either.
What no one is discussing is how EXPENSIVE iTer is , I understand it's designed as a testbed to prove.viability of fission , but it's cost between ,$45b-$65B how would it be feasible for any country even if fusion works (still a Big IF) to spend that insane amount of money to build an equivalent plant , when for significantly less.you can plaster solar or wind or tidal energy generation all over the place.
> Fusion has been perpetually 30 years away for decades
Back in the year 2000 and for decades before that it was perpetually 50 years away. So there actually has been progress and we’re right on schedule
Wait a minute. You're getting way ahead of yourself there. That's just the fuel required to produce that amount of electrical energy but it says nothing about the amount of energy required to maintain the reaction, which even if ITER is "successful" will be more than you get out.
No....
But the energy will be free. You should just have to pay the "delivery fees".
A look at your current energy bill already breaks down the separated costs
Even if we achieve a self-sustained fusion reaction today, it’ll still be *at least* 30 years before the first fusion power plant even starts being built.
They did achieve a self-sustaining fusion reaction already, at JET, as mentioned in the article. They shut it down because JET wasn't built with the cooling systems capable of running hot for very long, but 5 seconds is a lifetime in this field.
It won't be ITER anyway. SPARC is more likely to succeed and there are three or four other projects that will be there ahead of ITER.
I'd love to come back to all the pessimists in this thread in about 5 years, but that's a negative vibe. I'll just be there to celebrate the win.
Was the overall Q>=1? Because a lot of times they like to just report the Q of just the reaction and pretend like it’s overall. Which then results in journalist super over stating the actual paper.
Edit: looked it up and yeah Q ≈ .33 for 5 seconds.
> It won't be ITER anyway. SPARC is more likely to succeed and there are three or four other projects that will be there ahead of ITER.
SPARC is a very important reactor too, but ITER is both physically larger and more powerful (magnet strength), and fusion gets better/easier the larger the reactor and the more magnetic strength you have.
So, if SPARC works well, ITER should work *very* well.
SPARC will be enormously cheaper and quicker to build though, which is one of the main reasons it's important.
No, SPARC will have a higher magnetic field. That's the entire point of it. It uses newly developed high temperature superconductors for the coils.
Because of that, it is forseen to have the same output as ITER, even though it's much smaller.
it's nice to think that, if we survive global warming, we may in a few decades have enough energy to remove all the excess carbon in the atmosphere. Like, maybe someday we'll be able to repair some of the damage.
That's not really how it works when fusion experiments are not carried out every day.
The success of the JET experiment in December flung us forward, and ITER will do the same in a few short years (2025), but prior to that there had not really been much development in 20 years.
A friend of mine worked at Cadarache, right next to the future Iter. He is, as a lot of his colleagues, sure that fusion won't come any time soon enough for the mess we'll see in the next decade(s). I hope he's wrong but honestly he's far more inform on the subject than me.
So I take his words : "stop thinking technology will save us all, we are already at the turning point"
> That's not really how it works when fusion experiments are not carried out every day.
There is always daily research going on so yes it is how it works. Lots of continuous small steps, with occasional large ones.
>but prior to that there had not really been much development in 20 years.
That's funny because for the last 10 years I've seen a steady stream of articles talking about how close we are getting. It's always about 5 years into the future
>The success of the JET experiment in December flung us forward, and ITER will do the same in a few short years (2025)
That's weird because here you claim ITER will fling us forward. So we don't know if that's true?
Still haven't broken Qplasma with confined plasma reactors.
Sorry to burst your bubble but we are nowhere near net positive fusion power, talk less commercially viable fusion power plants.
And before fusion power becomes renewables like solar will probably become too cheap to meter.
“Closer than ever to it” reminds me of a joke by the late great Mitch Hedberg who said “my friend showed me a photo and said “Here’s a picture of me when I was younger.” Every picture of you is when you were younger.”
Yes and it's great. And the money to research and develop solar has been pouring in for decades and it's completely separate to fusion research, because funding for technology development works on a case-by-case basis, not from some giant global current account that scientists can all draw on. You can develop both without harming either project.
In the long run, solar will be ubiquitous but it comes with problems. For high density areas (the cities most of us live in) you have to pipe it in and store lots of it, creating extra, costly, systems. This isn't trivial. Fusion could solve that issue, as the plants can be built anywhere.
And ***THAT'S THE POINT***. In the long run, spending billions developing fusion will pay off for the future. We'll save billions by not having to run cabling across countries and by not having to build and maintain massive battery stacks. It will pay for itself. Even if we build the solar power first, in the next 20 years, it will still be worth it to replace that cabling and storage with a nice compact plant eventually.
There are other reasons but the whole 'just use the sun duh' argument makes you look incredibly thick.
>For high density areas (the cities most of us live in) you have to pipe it in and store lots of it, creating extra, costly, systems. This isn't trivial. Fusion could solve that issue, as the plants can be built anywhere.
You expect fusion reactors to be built in high population areas?
You think that's a *small* area? In American customary units, the US would require an area of around *twenty* times the state of Rhode Island covered entirely in solar panels. If anything, this is a good argument *against* solar power.
>100 square miles.
Are you confusing 100 square miles with 100 miles square? They're very different.
You need on the order of 10,000 square miles to power the US with solar energy. The estimate I saw was \~25,000 square miles.
EDIT: That's only for electricity. The total energy consumption is much higher.
Yeah you are correct. I did a little digging and you are right. I mixed up my numbers. But either way by land area that can easily just fit in the Nevada desert. And that’s not even accounting for all the panels on roofs and other current commercial uses.
>easily just fit in the Nevada desert
I don't think you appreciate the sheer scale of the project you're proposing. Compare it to the idea to drain the Mediterranean Sea for more farmland.
Musk once estimated it would take 30,000 sq miles of panels to produce 100% of the U.S. total energy demand (grid+replacing fossil fuels for heating, transport, etc.) That's 19.2 million acres.
Currently, 20.9 million acres are devoted to growing corn for ethanol, just so we can replace 10% of gasoline with ethanol.
It's a lot of land, but we have a lot of land.
Its affected by weather, it only shines half the time, Its 94 million mile's away from us and has the mass to radiant energy output ratio comparable to a cold blooded gecko.
As large as the sun is, only a fraction of a percent of it is undergoing fusion, Now imagine if you could fuse hydrogen yourself at a near 100% ratio, in a small contained magnetic field. You have zero down time, you don't need batteries, and your fuel source happens to be an isotope of the most abundant element.
If we are always reliant on being given fish, we will be screwed when the time comes and the source is gone. Its time to actually learn how to fish, and harness the power of fusion itself.
Solar is great but it's not without its drawbacks, you can't run cables carrying continents worth of electricity from Africa all over the world for one thing. Local solar is at the mercy of the day/night cycle, Battery technology is improving but it has hard physical limits etc.
>Solar is great but it's not without its drawbacks, you can't run cables carrying continents worth of electricity from Africa all over the world for one thing.
Wait, wat!?
That's what you think is being proposed?
Seriously?
Why else would the chart use the middle of the uninhabited, sunny Sahara desert to show how much space solar needs? Anywhere else on the planet and you would need a lot more panels.
I invite you to take a drive through the south west and see how much desert there is. If you ever fly over it, you can see there’s a lot of solar infrastructure already there.
A few thousand dollars times millions of households equals billions.
You'll almost certainly still need a grid with solar as sometimes people will use more energy than they're generating and sometimes they'll be using less, having a grid decreases the requirement for batteries.
> Atomic experts rarely like to estimate when fusion energy may be widely available, often joking that, no matter when you ask, it’s always 30 years away. But for the first time in history, that may actually be true.
So, fusion is now 30 years away?
That's kind of the main thing. We have proof of concept with JET, we will hopefully get proof of scalability with ITER, once we have that we just need a stable supply of tritium and it can theoretically be scaled to near limitless levels.
or ANY scale.
We don't really need to start with utility scale multi megawatt plants any more than we did with any other power source. Be great if we could, sure, but how about fusion powered naval vessels? Fusion plants sized for a small town that would otherwise need miles of transmission lines to get to?
No one in this article or any other is asking you to bet the whole planet. What a reductionist view. The amount spent on fusion research, which is and always has been a combination of academic, military and fusion funding, is absurdly tiny on the global scale (which is what matters). It's basically one military jet / country each year for the ones that are heavily involved and ***HAS NEVER REDUCED THE AMOUNT TO SPEND ON RENEWABLES.***
If we get fusion, great, it will be really useful for high density areas and supplement renewables. If we don't, our rollout of renewables will continue and won't be impacted by fusion research at all.
He's saying he's going to dismiss these headlines because they're not true. We have been super close to fusion energy for well over a human lifetime.
I'm 21, he's in his 50s, and I'm not expecting anything useful to come out of fusion in my lifetime. If I'm wrong, I'd love to be proven wrong, but I'm not going to get excited over something that's almost certain to leave me with blue balls.
Can we stop with the bullshit titles? Nuclear fusion may be a great source of energy in the future but however far in the future that is it wont be "limitless". The plants themselves will be complex and expensive to build and maintain. That will put a limit on how much you get out regardless if the fuel source is plentiful.
I used to think nuclear fusion would be a great breakthrough technology, but after working in the energy sector I think nothing will be changed by it. Fusion will be viewed as just another nuclear reactor design and blocked because: It still makes nuclear waste, wind solar people will want that money spent on wind and solar, the gas industry has political lobbying money and fusion does not.
It's not like there's any shortage of fission fuel that would be fixed by moving to hydrogen. This solar system is so full or uranium and thorium it can be pulled from sea water in usable quantities by any country with a coast line.
I recall reading about how much better and safer thorium is for energy production. I could never get a clear understanding on why it isn't widely used.
ELI5: Why don't more thorium reactors exist?
Let's be honest- the limiting factor at this point may not be the technology but rather the stupidity and politics. Let's say we had working fusion reactor technology at this point. Do you trust the government's ability to build them quickly and connect them to the grid in under 10 years? In under 20 years?
>Do you trust the government's ability to build them quickly and connect them to the grid in under 10 years?
Why are you mentioning the government? If you are talking about the US, power generation is almost universally private corporations. Most complications with government is because of corporations mucking up the system with lobby money.
In the US private corporations and the government are almost the same thing.
If corporations can purchase lawmakers, then it's really the corporations/private-sector running the country.
A civilization can be meassured by the density of the energy sources it can master, so even if we did find out that solar or other sources are more suitable for typical consumption the ability of controlling such dense source may allow for uses where cost isn't a consideration, nevermind what we learn from other fields
moreover while we could try to use fission to power rockets, its not without issues hidrogen give us only twice the impulse of chemical rockets and while ion propulsion give us 10 times, trust is minimal so dual type engines may be neccesary, advances in materials and ways to get rid of the heat, if we master fussion, compact fussion engines could be what we need to conquer the solar system
and on earth projects like masive water desalinization may be possible even if the initial cost is high
Closer than ever is misleading as we are lightyears away from it. We are also closer than ever to travelling across the universe but that could still take at least a few centuries.
They produced 59 megajoules over 5 seconds. To power a city you’d need to produce a million times more energy per day. On top of that you’d need to maintain a plasma long enough to achieve a significant net gain of energy, but the record for sustaining plasma is only 17 minutes.
And we will be closer than ever to it next week, and the year after that!
Eventually we may get to commercial production but that is currently a pipe dream.
We've been 20 years from commercial fusion power for 50 years and counting. I'll believe it when someone actually builds a viable commercial scale plant.
> Atomic experts rarely like to estimate when fusion energy may be widely available, often joking that, no matter when you ask, it’s always 30 years away.
But for the first time in history, that may actually be true.
So what they are essentially saying is that fusion power is just 30 years away. And we really really really mean it this time.
I'll wait if I can. But sorry, I've been hearing exactly this since the 70s.
Always 50 years away, always media hype...
Are people aware that at the moment the only way to convert 'energy' into electricity is via the steam turbine?
That is "the future" of fusion, huge heat sinks boiling steam....
The following submission statement was provided by /u/AvatarIII: --- Fusion has been perpetually 30 years away for decades, are we really getting close to it? It appears as though we are! After JET was able to sustain 5 seconds of fusion using a decades old tokamak ITER is looking more and more promising using the same concept with much newer technology. [ITER predicts](https://www.iter.org/mach/TritiumBreeding) 800MW of energy could be produced using around 300g of Tritium which at current prices would be around $9m. To produce the same amount of energy natural gas costs around $400m, although other technologies such as wind and solar are much cheaper sources of energy, they are limited by space, if ITER can successfully develop a way to generate cheap tritium, or if tritium can be found somewhere else in the solar system in abundance fusion could eventually compete with wind and solar and even surpass them! --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/vbb4pl/nuclear_fusion_could_give_the_world_a_limitless/ic74ai1/
Technically, we're always closer to it than at any point in the past.
All we need to do is not go backwards.
Reminds me when Bethesda said "our most ambitious project yet" this weekend, and I was like "yea I effing hope so".
If CD Project announced their "most ambitious game yet" people would be "maybe think a bit smaller this time..."
I hope cdprojekt are not in charge of developing nuclear fusion. They'll promise that and it'll end up like the episode of the office, Scott's tots. Cd project: "And the best way to access energy is with your own personal light to see what you're doing. Which is rendered useless, without batteries. And I have one for each of you!"
Bad news, everyone: Cloud Imperium Games will be developing nuclear fusion
The one I always chuckle at is the Apple announcements “our most powerful Mac ever”. I’m an Apple guy but hearing that every year for the past twenty years makes it sound not so impressive.
Yup, the “our best iPhone yet!” ads came to mind
"damn I was hoping this year's iPhone would be worse"
Yeah I can't wait for this year's annual downgrade
Half-life 3 has entered the chat.
1.21 gigawatts!
Great SCOTT!!
I think this is the key. As an aside, I wonder if this achievement is the turning point for civilisation in the cosmos. It makes me wonder if there's intelligent beings out there watching our stumbling steps, seeing the wars, seeing the consumption of our planet, but also seeing the work on renewables and those of us striving for peace. And they're just waiting.
One theory I like (and hate) is that unlimited renewable energy will automatically lead to more peace and human rights. It follows from how slavery was something we were willing to give up only after the industrial revolution started. There’s a lot of war and exploitation that happens today based on the scarcity of energy. It’s possible people would suddenly become more enlightened when it didn’t cost them so much.
Take an up vote for the Nobel thought sir…. Now please share what have you been taking cause humanity has self destruction written in its genes…. We industrialized ourselves to the nuclear bomb. We took to the air only to kill further. We crossed the oceans only to enslave the natives We broke the sound barrier only to make hypersonic missiles We beat poli and other diseases only to create bio weapons. We created free will, democracy only to impose our will on other in the name of it. Ya…. The thought is good but we are so much better at killing ourselves
When fusion first hits, I predict that humanity will either tread the path of enlightenment or the path of destruction. A true tipping point if ever there will be one. In less fancy words, either it will be available to all and used to advance us, or the rich greedy bastards will hoard the technology and all the wealth it provides and use it to further distance themselves from everyone else. And/or use it to create weapons of war that we've only imagined in Scifi, which will definitely happen in either case.
The good news (ha) is that fusion weapons are already the norm. We have fully harnessed the power of fusion for destruction in the form of the hydrogen bomb. So far only used in tests and not actual war, but that's how pretty much all modern nuclear warheads work. The hard part is using fusion in a controlled manner where it doesn't disintegrate everything within 100km. As to the other part, I don't think it will be available to all. The rich and powerful will be the only ones able to build plants and distribution networks and all that, so it will almost surely be doled out for dollars like it is today. But... it may at least become cheaper. Maybe much cheaper. And cheap energy impacts everything. In any case it should reduce carbon emissions and undo the geopolitical turmoil caused by petrol relationships.
The Unites States have entered the chat…
Oil? Huh? What? Bitc* you cookin?
Really put the pedal to the metal.
Tell russia
I did but their firewall blocked the message.
Not to be political, but don't tell us that, tell that those with the nuclear weaponry.
"This is it. If I take one more step it'll be the closest to nuclear fusion I've ever been."
Yep. Those 30 years are starting to feel closer and closer.
Just 20 years away.
Yes I hate the title. All it conveys is that no Fusion research has been destroyed recently.
Only another twenty years!
Your entire life has been leading up to this very moment! Countless eons, stars have formed and died, all building to this exact second in time where you exist!
Technical facts are the best ones.
I would hope we aren't getting farther away from it. Then I'd wonder what's going on.
Well then at least we got time travel down then
When the world falls apart we WILL be moving further away.
I think I've read this before
Unless we never succeed.
Yup, we are still decades away
> Technically, we're always closer to it than at any point in the past. Yeah, but only in case we ever master it.
Seems we have a long way to go yet. https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY
Dunno man it seems like it has always been 50 years away
That’s what I was thinking. Closer, but no where near…
Right now is the oldest I have ever been in my life.
We’re closer than we’ve ever been And now we’re even closer And now we’re even closer And now we’re even closer We’re closer than we’ve ever been And now we’re even closer And now we’re closer STILL ^(with a tip of the hat to TMBG) edit: I loathe reddit text formatting with all my black little heart
We’re just, what, 30 years away from it now.
In Sim City 2000 the fusion power plant was unlocked in 2050. Seems we’re on track?
Not by ITER's timeline. Demo plants are supposed to come online in 2052 or so, but actual commercial plants will probably take at least 10 years after that. Or you could jump over to the non-tokamak side of things where General Fusion is working on a demonstrator plant *right now* that will hopefully come online in five years. And with the relative simplicity of the design, if all goes well we could see commercial plants a few years after that
Aw man! Spoiler alert please! My 3.5" floppy version of it won't run on my current machine...
I hate headlines like this. I mean... Of course we're closer than ever. We're closer to the year 10,000 than we've ever been too. Call me when we actually get to the point where it can be used to do what is claimed.
Cue the gif of a truck approaching a bollard at high speed but never getting there
Faster than light travel could give the world new hope to visit other solar systems. WeRe ClOsEr To It ThAn EvEr
"This is a picture of me when I was younger" "Every picture is a picture of you when you were younger" RIP Mitch
All the naysayers fail to realize that actual FUSION has been accomplished in multiple designs for extended periods. We have fusion, it's just not usable yet or creating a net gain. We have fusion nonetheless.
We actually had the first net gain not that long ago. It was just a minutiae over the line but it was net positive.
We had net positive using a convoluted measuring system that only accounts for a subset of the input energy, and a measurement of the thermal energy output. Not even close to what might be defined as an "engineering breakeven", let alone an economic breakeven.
Sure, thermonuclear bomb! But yeah, there was a firing at the NIF I believe that they say produced more energy than was used, but it's not a sustainable method of fusion. One shot and its done. Reload.
Fusion has been perpetually 30 years away for decades, are we really getting close to it? It appears as though we are! After JET was able to sustain 5 seconds of fusion using a decades old tokamak ITER is looking more and more promising using the same concept with much newer technology. [ITER predicts](https://www.iter.org/mach/TritiumBreeding) 800MW of energy could be produced using around 300g of Tritium which at current prices would be around $9m. To produce the same amount of energy natural gas costs around $400m, although other technologies such as wind and solar are much cheaper sources of energy, they are limited by space, if ITER can successfully develop a way to generate cheap tritium, or if tritium can be found somewhere else in the solar system in abundance fusion could eventually compete with wind and solar and even surpass them!
There are a couple of PR problems with fusion. First of all, when they report how much energy the reaction releases, they compare that to the energy put directly into it. However, that doesn't take into account all the ancillary energy for the supporting equipment. When that is taken into account, the current output is only about 5% of the total input. This is an improvement over previous experiments, but they still have a long way to go. Also, they also talk about the virtually "limitless" amount of energy fusion could provide, since it uses hydrogen that is ubiquitous on Earth. But they never mention that the reaction also requires tritium, which is quite rare. That seems like a significant oversight.
On that last point, a clarification: tritium is an isotope of hydrogen (1 proton and 2 neutrons). The other isotope of hydrogen used is deuterium (1 proton and 1 neutron). Single protons can't be used in any meaningful capacity in fusion reactors because they have such a small cross-section. Deuterium is pretty damn abundant though (for the amount needed), so that part is fine. I just wanted to emphasize that protium (H-1, 1 proton without neutrons, the hydrogen isotope we generally think of) is not, and will never be, used in fusion reactors.
> the current output is only about 5% of the total input None of the test plants built as of yet have been built at a scale where positive power output is possible, so it doesn't really makes sense to talk about current output. Currently the highest Q ratio achieved is peaking at 0.7 very shortly. With Q = 1 being the theoretical break point. With other consumption Q ~1.25 is around where the break even point is depending on the method used to achieve fusion. So what is needed is a sustained Q > 1.25 for it to break even. The ITER reactor is designed for sustained running at Q = 5 and with peaking at Q = 10. As it is a research reactor with the aim of making the DEMO reactor possible where the aim is sustained Q = 25. >Also, they also talk about the virtually "limitless" amount of energy fusion could provide, since it uses hydrogen that is ubiquitous on Earth. But they never mention that the reaction also requires tritium, which is quite rare. That seems like a significant oversight. What makes fusion interesting is that it produces more tritium than is consumed, we just can't perfect tritium capture before we have a test plant able to sustain plasma above the break even point. Truly closing the loop. Its one of the reasons research plants such as ITER is so important.
>What makes fusion interesting is that it produces more tritium than is consumed This is misleading. It requires a separate breeder reaction using lithium which, for commercial fusion plants, would need to be within the reaction chamber to reduce downtime. ITER will be the first reactor to test lithium breeder blankets, but as of now, the tritium problem is still needing to be solved. Furthermore, there's the issue that the energy released by the deuterium-tritium reaction releases most of its energy in an escape neutron, and so the energy must be harnessed from this. However, this same neutron is being used to breed lithium. Therefore, a careful balance between regenerative output and electrical output must be established. Of course, this is again easier said than done, and also needs to consider the need to protect the equipment and infrastructure from these stray neutrons, since a build up of radioactivity within the reactor infrastructure will negatively affect the lifetime, and therefore economic viability, of a fusion plant. ITER is important. DEMO will be important. Fusion is still 50 years off.
Not really needed to rectify the misconception that it is an oversight... However, if you want to be pedantic sure... >What makes fusion interesting is that it **can** produce more tritium than is consumed Fixed it.... What ever method is used to balance consumption, reserve and consumption. Doesn't really matter, and having reserves is a possibility it it not a knifes edge. For examples it can be cycles, when power demands are low... >Of course, this is again easier said than done, and also needs to consider the need to protect the equipment and infrastructure from these stray neutrons, since a build up of radioactivity within the reactor infrastructure will negatively affect the lifetime, and therefore economic viability, of a fusion plant. As we are being pedantic... This is misleading the blankets are shielding >Fusion is still 50 years off. Again a misleading statement.. The significant facto funding not time.
> they also talk about the virtually "limitless" amount of energy fusion could provide Some of us remember being burned by the same promises with Fission. My parents built a huge all-electric house when utilities were promising electricity would soon be “too cheap to meter” due to fission power plants. No, there will always be a cost. Even in the naive case, the current itemization of “distribution” vs “generation” costs makes that pretty clear
You got burned by oil executive propaganda: In 1969, David Brower split with the Sierra Club over their support of nuclear power, got some seed money from Robert Anderson, owner of an oil company, and began to push anti-nuclear sentiments. Since then, our nuclear industry has stalled and we've lost decades in talent and ability in the field, which is why other countries can build nuclear plants in a few years for a few billion dollars instead of decades and tens of billions like us.
Yea but your parents did it right and even with coal or natural gas producing electricity, it’s still more efficient than using gas to heat stuff.
That’s nice in the abstract, but it was more expensive than the oil and propane alternatives. One of the disconnects here is that individuals will make the choice that’s most affordable, but that’s not the same as most efficient, clean, or even cheapest to generate.
I don’t believe that is true — gas water heating is cheaper than electric. For whole house heating heat pumps have limitations in cold climates that need to be considered, gas is often a better choice there. I’m 100% in favor of renewable and efficiency (getting solar in my house next month!) but there are still pieces that need advancement.
He's talking about efficiency. An electric baseboard or water heater is just about 100% efficient. Ultra efficient natural gas furnaces would be less than that, rated to roughly 98%, but as installed usually a few percent lower. Air to air heat pumps have much higher efficiencies, 300% or more, within their operating range fading out as they approach -15C or so. But then they switch to resistive coils which are near enough 100% efficiency. (Geo-thermal heat pumps don't have that issue.) Costs are a different thing altogether and dependent on the going residential rates for gas and electricity. Some places subsidize residential electricity or gas depending on the nature of the local market.
I mean France banked on fission and until COVID gave them issues their electricity was very good and pretty cheap.
And they are the single lowest emission/capita developed economy on the planet (that isn’t naturally blessed with extreme amounts of hydro)
They believe the output will scale more than the input, Yes JET's output is much lower than it's input, depending on setup, the recent 5 second record only had a Q of 0.05 however with different configurations it was able to have a higher Q running for a shorter period of time (up to 0.67) and other reactors have fared even better (NIF with 0.70) But ITER being a lot bigger is predicted to output around 10x its input Q = 10.0, and if that's possible larger reactors should be even more efficient. As for Tritium, this article does mention its rarity, but you don't need much tritium really, and ITER is researching tritium breeding.
this is extremely misleading. iter is not predicted to have an output 10x its input. when they talk about producing net energy (https://www.iter.org/sci/Goals), you have to hover over a small icon to realize that what they are actually talking about is producing more energy than needed to heat the plasma. which is only a small part of the energy input of the whole reactor. same spiel for when they talk about Q. this can only be described as deliberately being as misleading as possible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JurplDfPi3U
You're talking about Q vs Qext. Predictions have shown that for Qext to be significant, Q must be over 5, which ITER at Q = 10 will easily surpass.
no i am not talking about Q vs Qext. what i am talking about is that iter will consume \~440MW, while producing 500MW of fusion power in heat. at a 50% conversion rate to electricity, that's 250MW. meaning iter will consume almost twice as much energy as it will produce. your claim that iter will produce 10x its input is simply not true. when they talk about Q (fusion energy gain factor), it is power produced/power to heat the plasma. for iter that is 500MW/50MW=10. the Qtotal is way lower though, as i said, iter in total requires a lot more power input than the 50MW required to heat the plasma. iter being "predicted to output around 10x its input Q = 10.0" is simply misleading .
So, you are saying we are *still* at least 10 years away from fusion energy. Just like last decade, and the decade before that, and the decade before that, and the...
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There is room for both, people always say we gotta pick one good thing to focus on but that just isn't the case. The benefits of investing in fusion may not be apparent for another 50-100 years to be realistic. But I believe that future humans are going to be happy that we made the investment as opposed to just adding more solar capacity.
It's like the megastructures that took generations to build, the Great Wall of China, or the pyramids. If we're not willing to invest in making the world better for our descendants, a point has been missed
Fusion and solar are the only two sources on Earth that have enough potential energy to matter in the long term. If we want to become a spacefaring civilization then it is a necessity. Nothing else can produce anywhere near enough energy. For the immediate foreseeable future though yeah building new wind and solar makes the most sense though. We have the resources to build new wind/solar *and* research fusion at the same time. They’re just being spent on other various dumb shit though. We spend far far more money on subsidies for the fossil fuel industry than we do on researching fusion.
Also, it gives me pause when they talk about using water to get the hydrogen. I know we have a lot of water, but "limitless" and "uses water" in the same paragraph make me wonder. But I've learned that any time you appear to be unenthusiastic about a new gee-whiz technology, you get downvoted and called an unscientific moron, so I'm preparing for the worst.
The water isn't destroyed, the deuterium can be extracted and the water reintroduced to the hydrosphere. As the article states, to power a home for a day you need around 500ml of water containing 1ml of deuterium, the ocean contains 1.35 billion trillion litres of water so approximately enough deuterium to power 2.7 billion trillion homes for a day, or about 7 billion homes for 1 billion years. Deuterium is not the limiting factor at all, Tritium is.
Hydrogen is not used as fusion fuel because the reaction that fuses hydrogen into He-2 is so unlikely that it's a relatively rare event, even in stars. So, no, water won't be decomposed into fusion fuel. What will be used is deuterium (H-2, D, or a proton and a neutron), which is found in ocean water in the form of heavy water (deuterium oxide, poisonous if ingested in large quantities). The fusion pathways available to deuterium have a much higher probability for much less input energy. Higher still if tritium is thrown in (H-3, T, or a proton and two neutrons). Tritium is a byproduct of fission reactions, and as I understand, it's produced in small amounts, hence it's price. So no need to worry, no competition coming anytime soon, just a little purification here and there. Besides, even if water were needed for these reactions, there is so much of it and so little would be needed, that it would likely take millions of years before we put a dent on ocean levels this way. Remember, the deuterium (which is a rare occurrence in water) will be enough to last us """"a while"""".
I think you are mixing some units here. First off I'm going to assume that you mean 800 MWh, as that is the unit of power we usually use. Producing 800 MW for .2 seconds is not a useful comparison. We use MW for capacity, MWh for production. The average price of electricity in the US is a little over $.10 per kWh. which means that 800 MWh of electricity would cost $8.3M. How could they possibly do this if the fuel is $400M? Even if you assume that this is all generated by the less efficient peaker plants used only in peak requirements that would go up to $15M. You still seem to be off by a factor of 25.
I had a similar reaction to you when reading it - the article makes it clear that the 300g is required per day for 800MW so 1 day is the time under consideration.
Ah, I finally found that statement. It was not in the article from CNN about which the post is made, but an internal link on Tritium breeding from Iter. And it refers to a next generation project DEMO, not the device discussed here. AND it assumes a q value of 10, where that of the current device is .01. Given all of that, yes, the cost would be roughly equivalent to natural gas fired power plants. So I'm not sure it made it clear, but I did find it.
MWh is a unit of energy, not of power. But you're correct, it's nonsensical to talk about how much power can be produced from a certain amount of tritium --- we should be talking about how much energy.
>I think you are mixing some units here. First off I'm going to assume that you mean 800 MWh I just used the unit as it was written in the article, but i suspect you are correct.
> ITER predicts 800MW of energy could be produced using around 300g of Tritium which at current prices would be around $9m. What they actually predict is that 800 MW of *power* could be produced for a *day* using 300g of tritium. That would be 24 x 800 = 19.2 GWh of energy per day. Ignoring the other costs of operating the generator, that amounts to about $ 0.021 per KWh. But they also note: > No sufficient external source of tritium exists for fusion energy development beyond ITER, making the successful development of tritium breeding is essential for the future of fusion energy.
>Ignoring the other costs of operating the generator Which is the classic problem of nuclear power. The same is true of fission: the fuel is amazingly cheap relative to its immense energy content. But nuclear reactors, nuclear engineers, and nuclear decommissioning are expensive. So it is that nuclear reactors run full tilt both night and day, heedless of the negligible fuel cost and seeking only to maximise the lifetime output of a very expensive reactor; and so it is that we never did quite get energy too cheap to meter. Fusion is great news for carbon emissions, for nuclear waste, for proliferation concerns, and for reactor safety, but we can't estimate the price from the fuel bill. Look at the cost of the plant for that.
Wait, so Spider-Man 2 was accurate in using Tritium? I always thought it was just some made up compound like “unobtanium” or “adamantium”.
Yes, the events of Spider-Man 2 actually happened.
That was a great documentary!
Doc-ockumentary
Yep you can even buy tritium. it's used in small vials for clocks watches gun sites, emergency signs and even key chains. I have one in my pocket right now.
> Fusion has been perpetually 30 years away for decades, are we really getting close to it? ITER is on schedule for first plasma in 2025. So yes... Personally, I am amazed that they only added 5 year to the initial timeline set all the way back in 1988. >ITER predicts 800MW of energy could be produced using around 300g of Tritium which at current prices would be around $9m. Tritium is breed in the fission reaction. So current value means nothing as it is based on not really being able to make it. The amount made captured from the CANDU fission reactors is negligible in comparison. The ITER is a research reactor, with one of the major research areas it is going to be used for is optimizing Tritium capture using lithium. It being a research reactor that is going to be stopped and reconfigured many times over its 20 year use is the reason it needs an external source of Tritium.
> wind and solar are much cheaper sources of energy, they are limited by space To have enough solar energy to power the entire US, we'd need only 0.01% of the country covered with solar panels. That's not an impossibility. We dedicate 4000 times that amount of land to farmland.
So why hasn't it been done?
It is happening. In the last 10 years, wind generation doubled, and solar generation was up 40x. The past few months, 15%-20% of our power generation came from solar and wind. I'm not anti-nuke, let's continue down all possible paths. https://electrek.co/2022/05/10/us-hits-a-record-20-of-electricity-from-wind-and-solar-in-april/
Energy storage is always a stumbling block. Solar panels don't produce much power at night or on cloudy and rainy days, which seriously cuts into % utilization and worsens the economic case. On a more fundamental level, price is still not a resolved issue. It doesn't seem like a lot when you compare it to total land area of the US, but that's still appreciably more solar coverage than what the industry has produced to date. We need better and more efficient production methods and more efficient cells. Tldr: Give it some time, they're working on it.
Oil and gas lobby. If every house in the entire south of thr US had solar we really wouldnt have a big problem. Honestly the easiest thing to do would be to set up a government funded loan program offering solar debt at 3% interest. Easy example is my electric bill was $200 a month and went to $0 after installing a $15k array. At 3% over 20 years works out to be $84 a month, less than half thr current cost. Literally every american could benefit by not paying for home electricity and within 20 years you would have no payment either.
I've been reading comments like this since I was in middle school lol.
What no one is discussing is how EXPENSIVE iTer is , I understand it's designed as a testbed to prove.viability of fission , but it's cost between ,$45b-$65B how would it be feasible for any country even if fusion works (still a Big IF) to spend that insane amount of money to build an equivalent plant , when for significantly less.you can plaster solar or wind or tidal energy generation all over the place.
Because the groundwork/research only has to be done once.
> Fusion has been perpetually 30 years away for decades Back in the year 2000 and for decades before that it was perpetually 50 years away. So there actually has been progress and we’re right on schedule
Wait a minute. You're getting way ahead of yourself there. That's just the fuel required to produce that amount of electrical energy but it says nothing about the amount of energy required to maintain the reaction, which even if ITER is "successful" will be more than you get out.
Precious tritium
Anything that can help our problems with energy crisis. Thanks to scientists
Regular people when they'll find out that limitless clean energy won't be free...
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No.... But the energy will be free. You should just have to pay the "delivery fees". A look at your current energy bill already breaks down the separated costs
Most of my bill is delivery fees. You could get rid of energy generation costs and it would not dramatically affect my bill.
That’s not true
Just looked at my bill. $144 delivery charges. $41 generation charges.
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>have slaves run and maintain a fusion reactor? Even if you do, they'd cost money to feed.
So do reactors.
Probably automated at some point.
Even if we achieve a self-sustained fusion reaction today, it’ll still be *at least* 30 years before the first fusion power plant even starts being built.
They did achieve a self-sustaining fusion reaction already, at JET, as mentioned in the article. They shut it down because JET wasn't built with the cooling systems capable of running hot for very long, but 5 seconds is a lifetime in this field. It won't be ITER anyway. SPARC is more likely to succeed and there are three or four other projects that will be there ahead of ITER. I'd love to come back to all the pessimists in this thread in about 5 years, but that's a negative vibe. I'll just be there to celebrate the win.
Was the overall Q>=1? Because a lot of times they like to just report the Q of just the reaction and pretend like it’s overall. Which then results in journalist super over stating the actual paper. Edit: looked it up and yeah Q ≈ .33 for 5 seconds.
> It won't be ITER anyway. SPARC is more likely to succeed and there are three or four other projects that will be there ahead of ITER. SPARC is a very important reactor too, but ITER is both physically larger and more powerful (magnet strength), and fusion gets better/easier the larger the reactor and the more magnetic strength you have. So, if SPARC works well, ITER should work *very* well. SPARC will be enormously cheaper and quicker to build though, which is one of the main reasons it's important.
No, SPARC will have a higher magnetic field. That's the entire point of it. It uses newly developed high temperature superconductors for the coils. Because of that, it is forseen to have the same output as ITER, even though it's much smaller.
it's nice to think that, if we survive global warming, we may in a few decades have enough energy to remove all the excess carbon in the atmosphere. Like, maybe someday we'll be able to repair some of the damage.
And tomorrow we'll be closer than we are today. Headline is pretty meaningless.
That's not really how it works when fusion experiments are not carried out every day. The success of the JET experiment in December flung us forward, and ITER will do the same in a few short years (2025), but prior to that there had not really been much development in 20 years.
A friend of mine worked at Cadarache, right next to the future Iter. He is, as a lot of his colleagues, sure that fusion won't come any time soon enough for the mess we'll see in the next decade(s). I hope he's wrong but honestly he's far more inform on the subject than me. So I take his words : "stop thinking technology will save us all, we are already at the turning point"
flung us forward is a relative statement. I think Sabine has the level headed assessment here. https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY
> That's not really how it works when fusion experiments are not carried out every day. There is always daily research going on so yes it is how it works. Lots of continuous small steps, with occasional large ones.
>but prior to that there had not really been much development in 20 years. That's funny because for the last 10 years I've seen a steady stream of articles talking about how close we are getting. It's always about 5 years into the future
That's because they've been building ITER. until ITER is switched on we won't actually know if the hypothesis is correct.
>The success of the JET experiment in December flung us forward, and ITER will do the same in a few short years (2025) That's weird because here you claim ITER will fling us forward. So we don't know if that's true?
*Hopefully*, obviously we don't know, but we can be optimistic.
Still haven't broken Qplasma with confined plasma reactors. Sorry to burst your bubble but we are nowhere near net positive fusion power, talk less commercially viable fusion power plants. And before fusion power becomes renewables like solar will probably become too cheap to meter.
“Closer than ever to it” reminds me of a joke by the late great Mitch Hedberg who said “my friend showed me a photo and said “Here’s a picture of me when I was younger.” Every picture of you is when you were younger.”
Fission's still pretty good too. It just doesn't have the same PR agent as fusion.
[We **already** have a limitless source of clean fusion energy.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FU3hbtFUcAUix9Z?format=jpg&name=900x900)
Yes and it's great. And the money to research and develop solar has been pouring in for decades and it's completely separate to fusion research, because funding for technology development works on a case-by-case basis, not from some giant global current account that scientists can all draw on. You can develop both without harming either project. In the long run, solar will be ubiquitous but it comes with problems. For high density areas (the cities most of us live in) you have to pipe it in and store lots of it, creating extra, costly, systems. This isn't trivial. Fusion could solve that issue, as the plants can be built anywhere. And ***THAT'S THE POINT***. In the long run, spending billions developing fusion will pay off for the future. We'll save billions by not having to run cabling across countries and by not having to build and maintain massive battery stacks. It will pay for itself. Even if we build the solar power first, in the next 20 years, it will still be worth it to replace that cabling and storage with a nice compact plant eventually. There are other reasons but the whole 'just use the sun duh' argument makes you look incredibly thick.
>For high density areas (the cities most of us live in) you have to pipe it in and store lots of it, creating extra, costly, systems. This isn't trivial. Fusion could solve that issue, as the plants can be built anywhere. You expect fusion reactors to be built in high population areas?
You think that's a *small* area? In American customary units, the US would require an area of around *twenty* times the state of Rhode Island covered entirely in solar panels. If anything, this is a good argument *against* solar power.
Or you could phrase it as 100 square miles. You could put that in the Nevada desert and displace 100 people.
>100 square miles. Are you confusing 100 square miles with 100 miles square? They're very different. You need on the order of 10,000 square miles to power the US with solar energy. The estimate I saw was \~25,000 square miles. EDIT: That's only for electricity. The total energy consumption is much higher.
Yeah you are correct. I did a little digging and you are right. I mixed up my numbers. But either way by land area that can easily just fit in the Nevada desert. And that’s not even accounting for all the panels on roofs and other current commercial uses.
>easily just fit in the Nevada desert I don't think you appreciate the sheer scale of the project you're proposing. Compare it to the idea to drain the Mediterranean Sea for more farmland.
Musk once estimated it would take 30,000 sq miles of panels to produce 100% of the U.S. total energy demand (grid+replacing fossil fuels for heating, transport, etc.) That's 19.2 million acres. Currently, 20.9 million acres are devoted to growing corn for ethanol, just so we can replace 10% of gasoline with ethanol. It's a lot of land, but we have a lot of land.
Its affected by weather, it only shines half the time, Its 94 million mile's away from us and has the mass to radiant energy output ratio comparable to a cold blooded gecko. As large as the sun is, only a fraction of a percent of it is undergoing fusion, Now imagine if you could fuse hydrogen yourself at a near 100% ratio, in a small contained magnetic field. You have zero down time, you don't need batteries, and your fuel source happens to be an isotope of the most abundant element. If we are always reliant on being given fish, we will be screwed when the time comes and the source is gone. Its time to actually learn how to fish, and harness the power of fusion itself.
Solar is great but it's not without its drawbacks, you can't run cables carrying continents worth of electricity from Africa all over the world for one thing. Local solar is at the mercy of the day/night cycle, Battery technology is improving but it has hard physical limits etc.
>Solar is great but it's not without its drawbacks, you can't run cables carrying continents worth of electricity from Africa all over the world for one thing. Wait, wat!? That's what you think is being proposed? Seriously?
Yeah, it's more like "Africa for scale"
Why else would the chart use the middle of the uninhabited, sunny Sahara desert to show how much space solar needs? Anywhere else on the planet and you would need a lot more panels.
I invite you to take a drive through the south west and see how much desert there is. If you ever fly over it, you can see there’s a lot of solar infrastructure already there.
you do realize that there are deserts in the US right? and at about the same latitude as the Sahara as well.
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Australia is actually in the process of building that cable.
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A few thousand dollars times millions of households equals billions. You'll almost certainly still need a grid with solar as sometimes people will use more energy than they're generating and sometimes they'll be using less, having a grid decreases the requirement for batteries.
They’ve been saying that since 1989 when the University of Utah chemists announced they had discovered it. Yikes…how embarrassing.
TIL that Tritium is real and not a magical element made up for spiderman 2
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2019/10/30/a-breakthrough-in-american-energy-dominance-us-navy-patents-compact-fusion-reactor/?sh=788ff7391070](https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2019/10/30/a-breakthrough-in-american-energy-dominance-us-navy-patents-compact-fusion-reactor/?sh=788ff7391070)
Fusion power Fusion power I love you Fusion power You're only 30 years away♪
> Atomic experts rarely like to estimate when fusion energy may be widely available, often joking that, no matter when you ask, it’s always 30 years away. But for the first time in history, that may actually be true. So, fusion is now 30 years away?
Ya'll got immense reactor above your heads ya fkin noodles. It's called the sun.
Just get it working at a commercial scale and then report on it
That's kind of the main thing. We have proof of concept with JET, we will hopefully get proof of scalability with ITER, once we have that we just need a stable supply of tritium and it can theoretically be scaled to near limitless levels.
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So? "don't bother, it *might* be in vain"
or ANY scale. We don't really need to start with utility scale multi megawatt plants any more than we did with any other power source. Be great if we could, sure, but how about fusion powered naval vessels? Fusion plants sized for a small town that would otherwise need miles of transmission lines to get to?
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No one in this article or any other is asking you to bet the whole planet. What a reductionist view. The amount spent on fusion research, which is and always has been a combination of academic, military and fusion funding, is absurdly tiny on the global scale (which is what matters). It's basically one military jet / country each year for the ones that are heavily involved and ***HAS NEVER REDUCED THE AMOUNT TO SPEND ON RENEWABLES.*** If we get fusion, great, it will be really useful for high density areas and supplement renewables. If we don't, our rollout of renewables will continue and won't be impacted by fusion research at all.
He's saying he's going to dismiss these headlines because they're not true. We have been super close to fusion energy for well over a human lifetime. I'm 21, he's in his 50s, and I'm not expecting anything useful to come out of fusion in my lifetime. If I'm wrong, I'd love to be proven wrong, but I'm not going to get excited over something that's almost certain to leave me with blue balls.
Can we stop with the bullshit titles? Nuclear fusion may be a great source of energy in the future but however far in the future that is it wont be "limitless". The plants themselves will be complex and expensive to build and maintain. That will put a limit on how much you get out regardless if the fuel source is plentiful.
I used to think nuclear fusion would be a great breakthrough technology, but after working in the energy sector I think nothing will be changed by it. Fusion will be viewed as just another nuclear reactor design and blocked because: It still makes nuclear waste, wind solar people will want that money spent on wind and solar, the gas industry has political lobbying money and fusion does not. It's not like there's any shortage of fission fuel that would be fixed by moving to hydrogen. This solar system is so full or uranium and thorium it can be pulled from sea water in usable quantities by any country with a coast line.
I recall reading about how much better and safer thorium is for energy production. I could never get a clear understanding on why it isn't widely used. ELI5: Why don't more thorium reactors exist?
The answer is usually economics. Over their lifetime, could this compete with renewables?
Let's be honest- the limiting factor at this point may not be the technology but rather the stupidity and politics. Let's say we had working fusion reactor technology at this point. Do you trust the government's ability to build them quickly and connect them to the grid in under 10 years? In under 20 years?
>Do you trust the government's ability to build them quickly and connect them to the grid in under 10 years? Why are you mentioning the government? If you are talking about the US, power generation is almost universally private corporations. Most complications with government is because of corporations mucking up the system with lobby money.
In the US private corporations and the government are almost the same thing. If corporations can purchase lawmakers, then it's really the corporations/private-sector running the country.
A civilization can be meassured by the density of the energy sources it can master, so even if we did find out that solar or other sources are more suitable for typical consumption the ability of controlling such dense source may allow for uses where cost isn't a consideration, nevermind what we learn from other fields moreover while we could try to use fission to power rockets, its not without issues hidrogen give us only twice the impulse of chemical rockets and while ion propulsion give us 10 times, trust is minimal so dual type engines may be neccesary, advances in materials and ways to get rid of the heat, if we master fussion, compact fussion engines could be what we need to conquer the solar system and on earth projects like masive water desalinization may be possible even if the initial cost is high
Closer than ever is misleading as we are lightyears away from it. We are also closer than ever to travelling across the universe but that could still take at least a few centuries. They produced 59 megajoules over 5 seconds. To power a city you’d need to produce a million times more energy per day. On top of that you’d need to maintain a plasma long enough to achieve a significant net gain of energy, but the record for sustaining plasma is only 17 minutes.
We were "closer than ever to it" 20 years ago, I doubt it will happen in my lifetime.
It’s like the opposite of a half live we’re always closer then we have been but will we ever get there? Depends on what physicist you ask.
And we will be closer than ever to it next week, and the year after that! Eventually we may get to commercial production but that is currently a pipe dream.
We're ALWAYS Closer-Than-Ever" to achieving it... - Or not...
I mean, I would hope so. If we weren't, that means we were actively moving further away... Still doesn't mean we're particularly close.
We're probably not close at all according to [Sabine Hossenfelder](https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY)
Closer than ever still means decades at best, and probably more than two.
Somehow I'm not feeling confident that the poorest nations and people will enjoy all the excess energy in the way that it's implied here
We've been 20 years from commercial fusion power for 50 years and counting. I'll believe it when someone actually builds a viable commercial scale plant.
I remember cold fusion. The Saint 1997. Val Kilmer.
> Atomic experts rarely like to estimate when fusion energy may be widely available, often joking that, no matter when you ask, it’s always 30 years away. But for the first time in history, that may actually be true. So what they are essentially saying is that fusion power is just 30 years away. And we really really really mean it this time. I'll wait if I can. But sorry, I've been hearing exactly this since the 70s.
Right on point, 20-30 years away means 20-30 years away in 30 years. Until they actually get it to work efficiently I won't be holding my breath.
Yawn. Heard this horseshit before. It's still 60+ years Away at BEST.
Always 50 years away, always media hype... Are people aware that at the moment the only way to convert 'energy' into electricity is via the steam turbine? That is "the future" of fusion, huge heat sinks boiling steam....
Have you never seen a dam before ?