A nuclear fusion reactor in China, dubbed the "artificial sun," has broken its own record to bring humanity one step closer to near-limitless clean energy.
moar energy! there will never not be an application for energy production. specifically fusion has the benefit of being highly dense large scale production. which makes it attractive on a number of levels.
Economical energy production, sure, not any energy production. There is a reason we no longer burn wood to heat public baths.
I realize the science marketing of fusion over the past 60 years has been ‘unlimited free energy’, but that isn’t quite accurate.
Fusion (well, at least protium/deuterium) would be ‘unlimited’ in the sense that the fuel needed is essentially inexhaustible. Tens of thousands of years of worldwide energy demand in the top few inches of the ocean.
However that ‘free’ part is the killer; fusion is very expensive per unit of energy output. For one, protium/deuterium fusion is incredibly ‘innefficient’, most of the energy is released as high-energy neutrons which generates radioactive waste, damages the containment vessel, and has a low conversion efficiency to electricity. More exotic forms of fusion ameliorate this downside to a degree, but require rarer fuels (hurting the ‘unlimited’ value proposition) and require more extreme conditions to sustain, further increasing the per-unit cost of energy.
Think of it this way, a fusion plant has an embodied cost of the energy required to make all the stuff that comprises the plant, let’s call that C. It also has an operating cost, in both human effort and energy input, let’s call that O. Lastly it has a lifetime, let’s call that L. Finally, it has an average energy output, let’s call that E.
For fusion to make economical sense, the following statement must be true:
(E-O)*L - C > 0.
In other words, it isn’t sufficient that the reaction returns more energy than it requires to sustainT, it must also return enough excess energy that it ‘pays’ for the humans to maintain the plant, maintanence for the plant, and the initial building of the plant (at a minimum). If the above statement exactly equals zero, then the plant doesn’t actually given any usable energy - it only pays for itself.
This is hardly the most sophisticated analysis, I encourage you to look more into the economics of fusion if you are interested, but it gets to the heart of the matter. Fusion can be free, unlimited, and economically worthless all at the same time.
The nuclear industry likes to say that its uranium costs of energy are under 2c/kwh. There are operations costs, unpaid security and insurance. The biggest cost factor of nuclear is, with Vogtle as latest example, capital costs of over $15/watt and 10+ year construction phase. This is completely unbankable, and requires taxpayer advances + subsidies, Even if you hope that construction time financing is included in the $15/w, 5000 revenue hours/year needs to pay 6c/kwh to pay for capital costs at 0% interest rates/ROI over 50 years. With 8% ROI, an extra 24c/kwh in revenue is needed. You only get your revenue hours if all other cheaper energy is suppressed.
Fusion will have higher capital costs than fission. The 2c/kwh “fuel cost” is irrelevant to the cost of energy from the plant.
oh boy another economics dweeb who thinks they know what theyre on about. those were a lot of words for a false premise. There is no doubt that fusion can produce more energy than it costs to maintain. we have literal empirical examples of this occurring in nature. You forgetting a significant factor in your analysis: time.
The problem with fusion isnt the science behind its energy production. its the engineering behind the design of plants, unfortunately for fusion it suffers from being fairly unique in that its a high radiation, high heat domain which makes the engineering incredibly difficult to get funded and there isnt anything else comparable to piggy back off of. That’s currently your C value and those costs are one time. solar and wind also suffered from this for decades. fortunately those tech could piggy back off discovers in other domains.
The cost of fusion plants and the energy production they’ll eventually unlock will disappear soon as we figure out the containment issues, and we’re getting close. the reason you’re hearing about fusion more and more is because we had a break through in 2010 on superconductors allowing for stronger containment fields.
We’ve probably spent less than 500 billion globally on fusion research over the entire lifetime of the field. the ‘C’ value is actually remarkably low economically speaking for the return we’ll get.
I encourage you to seriously engage with the topic and not just read and regurgitate platitudes from popsci articles.
Solar and wind are nothing like fusion.
Educate yourself, but first maybe pause and spend a second to think that perhaps you aren’t the smartest person in the room and you shouldn’t begin a discussion by speaking down to someone.
When everything hard looks easy, it is a sign you don’t understand it as well as you think you do.
moar energy! there will never not be an application for energy production. specifically fusion has the benefit of being highly dense large scale production. which makes it attractive on a number of levels.
Economical energy production, sure, not any energy production. There is a reason we no longer burn wood to heat public baths.
I realize the science marketing of fusion over the past 60 years has been ‘unlimited free energy’, but that isn’t quite accurate.
Fusion (well, at least protium/deuterium) would be ‘unlimited’ in the sense that the fuel needed is essentially inexhaustible. Tens of thousands of years of worldwide energy demand in the top few inches of the ocean.
However that ‘free’ part is the killer; fusion is very expensive per unit of energy output. For one, protium/deuterium fusion is incredibly ‘innefficient’, most of the energy is released as high-energy neutrons which generates radioactive waste, damages the containment vessel, and has a low conversion efficiency to electricity. More exotic forms of fusion ameliorate this downside to a degree, but require rarer fuels (hurting the ‘unlimited’ value proposition) and require more extreme conditions to sustain, further increasing the per-unit cost of energy.
Think of it this way, a fusion plant has an embodied cost of the energy required to make all the stuff that comprises the plant, let’s call that C. It also has an operating cost, in both human effort and energy input, let’s call that O. Lastly it has a lifetime, let’s call that L. Finally, it has an average energy output, let’s call that E.
For fusion to make economical sense, the following statement must be true:
(E-O)*L - C > 0.
In other words, it isn’t sufficient that the reaction returns more energy than it requires to sustainT, it must also return enough excess energy that it ‘pays’ for the humans to maintain the plant, maintanence for the plant, and the initial building of the plant (at a minimum). If the above statement exactly equals zero, then the plant doesn’t actually given any usable energy - it only pays for itself.
This is hardly the most sophisticated analysis, I encourage you to look more into the economics of fusion if you are interested, but it gets to the heart of the matter. Fusion can be free, unlimited, and economically worthless all at the same time.
The nuclear industry likes to say that its uranium costs of energy are under 2c/kwh. There are operations costs, unpaid security and insurance. The biggest cost factor of nuclear is, with Vogtle as latest example, capital costs of over $15/watt and 10+ year construction phase. This is completely unbankable, and requires taxpayer advances + subsidies, Even if you hope that construction time financing is included in the $15/w, 5000 revenue hours/year needs to pay 6c/kwh to pay for capital costs at 0% interest rates/ROI over 50 years. With 8% ROI, an extra 24c/kwh in revenue is needed. You only get your revenue hours if all other cheaper energy is suppressed.
Fusion will have higher capital costs than fission. The 2c/kwh “fuel cost” is irrelevant to the cost of energy from the plant.
oh boy another economics dweeb who thinks they know what theyre on about. those were a lot of words for a false premise. There is no doubt that fusion can produce more energy than it costs to maintain. we have literal empirical examples of this occurring in nature. You forgetting a significant factor in your analysis: time.
The problem with fusion isnt the science behind its energy production. its the engineering behind the design of plants, unfortunately for fusion it suffers from being fairly unique in that its a high radiation, high heat domain which makes the engineering incredibly difficult to get funded and there isnt anything else comparable to piggy back off of. That’s currently your C value and those costs are one time. solar and wind also suffered from this for decades. fortunately those tech could piggy back off discovers in other domains.
The cost of fusion plants and the energy production they’ll eventually unlock will disappear soon as we figure out the containment issues, and we’re getting close. the reason you’re hearing about fusion more and more is because we had a break through in 2010 on superconductors allowing for stronger containment fields.
We’ve probably spent less than 500 billion globally on fusion research over the entire lifetime of the field. the ‘C’ value is actually remarkably low economically speaking for the return we’ll get.
I encourage you to seriously engage with the topic and not just read and regurgitate platitudes from popsci articles.
Solar and wind are nothing like fusion.
Educate yourself, but first maybe pause and spend a second to think that perhaps you aren’t the smartest person in the room and you shouldn’t begin a discussion by speaking down to someone.
When everything hard looks easy, it is a sign you don’t understand it as well as you think you do.
Just some advice for you as you grow up.