Would love to see comments that actually respond to the article! Everyone here seems to be sharing their general opinions on fusion or a reaction to the article title. The article is actually very detailed!
From 2 years ago. Large region of Australia running fully on solar/wind/storage for 10+ days. Seems like the focus has to be on storage and continued improvement of grid-scale and rooftop solar and wind.<p><pre><code> South Australia has just chalked up what is undoubtedly a world first – a run of
more than 10 consecutive days over which the average production of wind and solar
accounted for 100 per cent of local demand.
No other gigawatt scale grid in the world has come close to this amount of “variable
renewable energy”, or for such a long time.
RenewEconomy reported on Monday that South Australia had just enjoyed a seven day
run of wind and solar that produced more than 104 per cent of average demand. Closer
inspection proved it was even more impressive than that.
According to Geoff Eldridge at data providers GPE NemLog2, the supply of wind and
solar averaged 100 per cent of local demand for 10 days and 9 hours (a total of 249
hours) from 08:20 on Friday, December 9, to 1720, Monday, December 19. [1]
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australias-remarkable-100-per-cent-renewables-run-extends-to-over-10-days/" rel="nofollow">https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australias-remarkable-100-...</a>
<i>Cumulative funding required for demonstration commercial fusion reactor</i><p>Was compelling. Belief we're prepared to invest seems lacking.<p>I think achieving multi second "stable" plasma conditions has been amazing. But, I think that's a cigarette lighter held next to petrified wood (to use an atomic bomb era analogy) away from ignition as a useful energy over time equation.<p>We're also somewhat behind "what's embrittlement" or "what's xenon poisoning" problems. Things which don't emerge until a few months in your life of run-time. Again, from early fission reactor design, these things can sink a project.<p>Or, unexpected fission or other nasty behaviours. Things which make it hard to get inside the structure to fix it. The unknown unknowns in this feel huge. But, linear energy in, energy out, and the approach to viable ignition temperature. That's science and engineering at its best.<p>Fusors tapped out. "Mr fusion" isn't happening.
I think there’s some possibly good investment advice to extract here, if you’re able and willing to invest in fusion startups: based on the need to compete with renewables alone, commercial success implies that highly complex reactors simply may not have a market based on construction cost, even if they do generate power.<p>Of the fusion startups mentioned in the article, I’d say that makes <i>Zap Energy</i> the one worth gambling on (if you’re a gambler that is), as its success apparently depends on exploiting a fluid dynamics effect which was not well known in the past (“shear flow”). If this sufficiently solves the confinement problem, the resulting device looks ludicrously simple in comparison to contemporaries.<p>Of course it may not work at all, I sure don’t know if it will; but if you had to invest in one of these, that seems like the one where successful power generation actually creates a marketable product.
I think a line from the end of the article - part of the bear case - "fusion is just another in a long line of energy technologies that boil water to drive a turbine" - should be at the start.<p>The entire premise of fusion generation is based on world view where the limiting factor for generating electricity was the cost of providing fuel for combustion to generate heat. This thinking was pretty natural if you looked around the world in the first half of the 20th century when coal and steam engines were still kings of energy. This was a pre-semiconductor and pre-plastic age. That's why they ended up using long of fairly primitive technologies: a chemical (combustion) process to generate heat, a heat capture process to boil a tank of water, a mechanical process to convert the steam pressure into mechanical energy, and an electro-magnetic process to extract usable electricity.<p>But in an age of advanced materials and semiconductors, it feels more and more that fusion is an attempt to solve a problem that is no longer really relevant. Working towards a "better" heat source for an electricity generation process which still involves steam-age tech is akin to trying to breed faster/cheaper horses to improve modern transport.<p>The cost of fuel is almost negligible for fission - non-fuel operating costs are killing off perfectly functioning nuclear plants like at Indian Point[1] - so the problem that fusion will "solve" is not actually a significant problem.<p>I'm convinced that we have moved beyond boiling water and generating heat, etc. in electricity generation. We no longer need massive steam engines to generate electricity. Modern technologies like wind, solar and batteries dispense with all this cost and complexity and the shackles of Carnot efficiency.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center</a>
"Ever" is a very long time.<p>Will we get fusion power in the next few decades? I wouldn't bet on it, but I also wouldn't bet against it.
Probably nobody notices it, but the article called Juan Domingo Peron to be a dictator. I get it, some detractors might say that. But that's hardly the truth. From wikipedia:<p>> Perón is the only Argentine president elected three times and holds the highest percentage of votes (61.86%) in clean elections with universal suffrage.
I hope not. If we find a way to convert water into bitcoins cheaply, we will rapidly boil the oceans. This will be worse than global warming. The biosphere can re-evolve after a CO2 and temperature spike, but all known forms of life require water.
Worked with a bunch of plasma physics postdocs in the early 90s, and fusion was 30 years away... checks calendar... 34 years ago. And that was the joke then.<p>However, with advances like REBCO tape and so on, it's far more realistic now. I hope we get it in my lifetime, but I'm not confident.
there is some fundamental thing that attracts humans to big things.<p>technical challenges aside, fusion power as a research + building + disvtributil project is so expensive - for the same amount of money we could already build a decentralized solution out of over-abundant solar cells, but it seems looking for the one big thing is still more interesting.
In 100,000 years from now, after we're past the next ice age, archeologists will unearth tokamaks all around the world. Regular people will speculate aliens and a worldwide connection between the peoples of the world to explain the multiple occurrences.<p>They'll have unlimited energy based on some quantum shit.
We already have a zero maintenance fusion power plant that will last billions of years and that outputs millions of times more energy per second than humanity uses in a year.<p>We already have technology that can take the electromagnetic waves this fusion power plant produces and <i>directly</i> convert it into electricity without needing pesky intermediaries like boiling water to turn a turbine.<p>This technology is relatively cheap to produce, extraordinarily safe, can last for decades with minor maintenance, can scale almost indefinitely, and there are many practical improvements we can make to it that are going to applied commercially in years and not decades.<p>I don't doubt that trying to achieve commercially viable fusion is a worthy engineering and science challenge and that we will learn and develop many useful technologies along the the way - but fusion is probably the hardest engineering challenge humanity has ever attempted and after many decades of R&D there is still no clear path to commercial viability.<p>Solar panels today work, and they work well, and we can practically throw endless amounts of money building them and it will work. Today. And we needed solutions that work today, not 50 years from now... maybe.
Fusion is always 50 years away for a reason:
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/5gi9yh/fusion_is_always_50_years_away_for_a_reason/#lightbox" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/5gi9yh/fusion_i...</a><p>IIRC, the sum total of all fusion research throughout all of history is USD$100-200B. It's obvious governments/industry/humanity doesn't really want it, or they'd go fund it.
No. We never will. Simply ran out of time. Electricity will be provided fully by renewables only in EU and China in a timeframe shorter than it takes to build a new nuclear reactor of already well-debugged type, from scratch - let alone a thermonuclear one for which no designs exist. We are speaking 2035-2040 to fully get rid of fossil fuels in electricity grid, and 2030-2035 before they are reduced to low (10-20%) levels.<p>It took 12 years to build first unit of Belarusian NPP - of a type that's been built by the dozen for decades, and in a country where all-powerful government controls and owns everything, there is no NIMBY or the "society" thing in the Western understanding at all, and where if you try to protest you just disappear. Can't be done faster. By 2036, fossil fuel electricity will be a thing of the past in some places, and quickly disappearing in all others.
The big problem is that we have funded fusion at "Fusion Never" levels.<p>Had we shoved as much money at fusion as we have at, say, horizontal drilling for liquified dinosaurs, we'd have fusion <i>right now</i>.
There’s a fusion reaction in the sky. All you have to do is harvest it. If you want to bring a fusion reaction home you have to deal with pesky things like INSANE AMOUNTS OF HEAT. Luckily the sky furnace is safely surrounded by 93M miles of insulting vacuum rendering the radiation harmless and even pleasant. We have a handy-dandy magnetic shield to handle surges, and atmospheric buffer for anything that sneaks through (now with protective ozone!) It’s really an ingenious design. I can’t think of any way to improve upon it.
IMO I think the driver for fusion is going to be commercial or military need for orders of magnitude larger than today massive power generation. Climate change isn't going to get us there.
I recently started thinking that even if we master fusion and know how to keep it safe, we as a society have become way too science averse that we will not let it happen. See the reaction to nuclear fission based power plants now. Everyone is scared of it and the byproducts. Germany, one of the most progressive nations on the earth,went and shut down all of its nuclear plants as a knee jerk reaction. I don’t have hope that fusion will be allowed.
People talk about solar + wind with storage as leaving hypothetical fusion in the dust.<p>If a fusion reactor can be made practicable, then we have a clean, low-radiation power generation system that will still work in the face of nuclear / asteroid-impact / supervolcanic winter.<p>...granted, any of those events could take out most or all of the hypothetical reactors, but it still seems worth noting to me.
I think there’s a good chance that we’ll see (yet again) that $6 billion in private investment distributed over 43 startups is a lot more than $22 billion in tax money sunk into some hole in France.
There's a better way to get power or heat from hydrogen that is 200 times better than burning it:<p><a href="https://brilliantlightpower.com/shareholder-meeting-presentation/" rel="nofollow">https://brilliantlightpower.com/shareholder-meeting-presenta...</a>
Article is click-bait. Most of it is dedicated to general information and history, not the question. It would be a good article if its title were “All that you just suddenly wanted to know about nuclear fusion if you never got the itch before, in one big gulp.” Of course, somebody who knows nothing of nuclear fusion and want to would be better served by a tittle that says so “Have you heard the good news? Nuclear fusion is coming! Let me tell you everything about it!”