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.
Even if we crack fusion power today, I can’t see it being deployed cheaply enough and quickly enough to compete with solar/wind+batteries. By the time we could get production fusion plants up and ready to feed power into the grid, it’d be 2050 and nobody would be interested in buying electricity from it.
Even in a world already powered 100% by renewables, fusion is attractive for high energy applications. For a current example see training of LLMs. However there are Industries with immense power requirements like Aluminium smelting that could use fusion power as well.
So far humans have found applications for all energy they were able to produce.
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.
Yes, of course, there is financing and everything else. I was getting a bit deeper:
If you have to spend 100 joules building a power plant, it better give back more than 100 joules during its lifetime - otherwise it was never worth it to build. That isn’t strictly true, there are special purposes, but certainly as a grid-scale energy deployment you would need - at a bare minimum - for each plant to pay for itself in terms of energy investment.
The dollars follow from that physical reality.
The first hurdle for fusion to clear is that the reaction outputs more energy than it needs to sustained. This would be a great academic success, and not much more.
The second hurdle is that it outputs enough energy such that it exceeds the sustainment energy even after accounting for capture losses (e.g. from neutrons, turbine efficiency, etc.) and production efficiencies (lasers need more energy input than they impart to the reaction chamber, magnets need cooling, etc.).
The third hurdle is that over the lifetime of a plant, it produces enough excess energy to build itself and pay the embodied costs of all maintenance and operations work. If the reaction is technically energy positive, but you need to replace the containment vessel every 48 hours due to neutron embrittlement, then the plant better be productive enough to pay for refining all that extra steel.
The fourth hurdle is then that it produces more excess energy per unit of invested energy than any other form of power generation - at which point we’d never build solar panels again.
These final hurdles are in no way guaranteed to be cleared. Artificial fusion needs to be orders of magnitude denser than natural fusion (Stars) to make any sense… a fusion power plant the size of Earth’s moon, with the same power density as the Sun, could only power around 1 million US homes.
a fusion power plant the size of Earth’s moon, with the same power density as the Sun, could only power around 1 million US homes.
Capital costs alone are prohibitive.
TIL/google ai:
The power density of the sun at its core is about 276.5 watts per cubic meter ((W/m^{3})). This is similar to the power density of a compost pile, but lower than the power density of an adult human’s metabolism.
ok. wow. But solar energy reaching earth can be converted to electricity by commercial PV at 250w/m^2. Even in US installed at under $1/watt with 50 years of useful output, and under 2c/kwh unamortized energy costs. That seems like the actual bar to pass, which is impossible for fusion or fission.
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.
Oh child, you’re the one who walked into this conversation with a grade school take. Ive worked on software for these systems before i retired from the industry last year.
I never said solar and wind were anything like fusion beyond they’re all used to generate power and varying ranges of energy density per area. But I’m certainly better grounded than you in both the economics and ongoing challenges with fusion.
If you want people to take you seriously maybe don’t start the conversation with a grade school take on the situation and you wont be dismissed.
I think if we figure out nuclear fusion there will be induced demand for energy, in applications that were previously infeasible: desalination via distillation instead of reverse osmosis, direct capture of CO2 from the atmosphere, large scale water transport, ice and snowmaking, indoor farming, synthesized organic compounds for things like carbon sequestration or fossil fuel replacement or even food, etc.
Geoengineering might not be feasible today, but if energy becomes really cheap we might see something different.
The specifics are a pipe dream but the general principle holds: if energy suddenly becomes more plentiful and cheaper by orders of magnitude, society will find a way to use that new plentiful resource in ways that we can scarcely imagine today. That’s always been true of new inventions, where much of the post-invention innovation comes in the form of finding new applications for a thing that has already been invented.
Long distance transmission creates enormous power wastage, and cities are rarely located in places ideal for large scale wind and solar. Fusion can help deliver power to urban centres, reducing the acreage needed for a solar farm.
There are also inland places in northern latitudes that benefit little from solar. Wind and fusion would be a great energy mix for those places.
Long distance transmission creates enormous power wastage, and cities are rarely located in places ideal for large scale wind and solar. Fusion can help deliver power to urban centres, reducing the acreage needed for a solar farm.
A fusion plant will need either nearby solar or nearby fusion plant, with solar only ok if restarting it can wait until daytime. More likely than not, a fusion plant is needed to help regulate plasma temperature based on reaction rate, and cool magnets. But a 10gw fusion plant still is extremely unlikey to need its output overnight compared to day peak demand. A fusion plant needs to be located near a low property value power plant, instead of close to high property value customers.
Fusion would provide orders of magnitude more power than solar. There’s a limit on how much we can practically get from solar, fusion would allow us to exceed that.
There’s a limit on how much we can practically get from solar,
Most residential buildings can self sustain from solar. Dense cities not, but there is dual use grazing and agriculture land, and small portions of desert that could power the world. Solar is enough for type 1 civilization. Nuclear plant energy density is overstated due to their + uranium mine exclusion zones, which could produce more solar power than the uranium content available in those mines.
‘Too much power’ has never been an issue, and will likely not be an issue ever with solar. There are multitudes of technologies, especially in industry, that are currently impractical because they would consume too much energy.
There’s a ton of stuff in industry and manufacturing that aren’t practical because of energy. A lot of processes could be run cleaner too, leading to better environment practices.
It seems like it’s probably too late.
Even if we crack fusion power today, I can’t see it being deployed cheaply enough and quickly enough to compete with solar/wind+batteries. By the time we could get production fusion plants up and ready to feed power into the grid, it’d be 2050 and nobody would be interested in buying electricity from it.
Even in a world already powered 100% by renewables, fusion is attractive for high energy applications. For a current example see training of LLMs. However there are Industries with immense power requirements like Aluminium smelting that could use fusion power as well.
So far humans have found applications for all energy they were able to produce.
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.
Yes, of course, there is financing and everything else. I was getting a bit deeper:
If you have to spend 100 joules building a power plant, it better give back more than 100 joules during its lifetime - otherwise it was never worth it to build. That isn’t strictly true, there are special purposes, but certainly as a grid-scale energy deployment you would need - at a bare minimum - for each plant to pay for itself in terms of energy investment.
The dollars follow from that physical reality.
The first hurdle for fusion to clear is that the reaction outputs more energy than it needs to sustained. This would be a great academic success, and not much more.
The second hurdle is that it outputs enough energy such that it exceeds the sustainment energy even after accounting for capture losses (e.g. from neutrons, turbine efficiency, etc.) and production efficiencies (lasers need more energy input than they impart to the reaction chamber, magnets need cooling, etc.).
The third hurdle is that over the lifetime of a plant, it produces enough excess energy to build itself and pay the embodied costs of all maintenance and operations work. If the reaction is technically energy positive, but you need to replace the containment vessel every 48 hours due to neutron embrittlement, then the plant better be productive enough to pay for refining all that extra steel.
The fourth hurdle is then that it produces more excess energy per unit of invested energy than any other form of power generation - at which point we’d never build solar panels again.
These final hurdles are in no way guaranteed to be cleared. Artificial fusion needs to be orders of magnitude denser than natural fusion (Stars) to make any sense… a fusion power plant the size of Earth’s moon, with the same power density as the Sun, could only power around 1 million US homes.
Capital costs alone are prohibitive.
TIL/google ai:
ok. wow. But solar energy reaching earth can be converted to electricity by commercial PV at 250w/m^2. Even in US installed at under $1/watt with 50 years of useful output, and under 2c/kwh unamortized energy costs. That seems like the actual bar to pass, which is impossible for fusion or fission.
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.
Oh child, you’re the one who walked into this conversation with a grade school take. Ive worked on software for these systems before i retired from the industry last year.
I never said solar and wind were anything like fusion beyond they’re all used to generate power and varying ranges of energy density per area. But I’m certainly better grounded than you in both the economics and ongoing challenges with fusion.
If you want people to take you seriously maybe don’t start the conversation with a grade school take on the situation and you wont be dismissed.
I think if we figure out nuclear fusion there will be induced demand for energy, in applications that were previously infeasible: desalination via distillation instead of reverse osmosis, direct capture of CO2 from the atmosphere, large scale water transport, ice and snowmaking, indoor farming, synthesized organic compounds for things like carbon sequestration or fossil fuel replacement or even food, etc.
Geoengineering might not be feasible today, but if energy becomes really cheap we might see something different.
This seems like a pipe dream but I don’t disagree that it could open up some new applications
The specifics are a pipe dream but the general principle holds: if energy suddenly becomes more plentiful and cheaper by orders of magnitude, society will find a way to use that new plentiful resource in ways that we can scarcely imagine today. That’s always been true of new inventions, where much of the post-invention innovation comes in the form of finding new applications for a thing that has already been invented.
Indeed
Long distance transmission creates enormous power wastage, and cities are rarely located in places ideal for large scale wind and solar. Fusion can help deliver power to urban centres, reducing the acreage needed for a solar farm.
There are also inland places in northern latitudes that benefit little from solar. Wind and fusion would be a great energy mix for those places.
A fusion plant will need either nearby solar or nearby fusion plant, with solar only ok if restarting it can wait until daytime. More likely than not, a fusion plant is needed to help regulate plasma temperature based on reaction rate, and cool magnets. But a 10gw fusion plant still is extremely unlikey to need its output overnight compared to day peak demand. A fusion plant needs to be located near a low property value power plant, instead of close to high property value customers.
Nah, it’d be quite useful for interstellar travel as but one example I’m helping with.
Fusion would provide orders of magnitude more power than solar. There’s a limit on how much we can practically get from solar, fusion would allow us to exceed that.
Most residential buildings can self sustain from solar. Dense cities not, but there is dual use grazing and agriculture land, and small portions of desert that could power the world. Solar is enough for type 1 civilization. Nuclear plant energy density is overstated due to their + uranium mine exclusion zones, which could produce more solar power than the uranium content available in those mines.
Yeah, but there’s no prizes for producing way more power than we use. We’re not running out of space to put solar panels or batteries.
‘Too much power’ has never been an issue, and will likely not be an issue ever with solar. There are multitudes of technologies, especially in industry, that are currently impractical because they would consume too much energy.
Maybe for deep sea or space?
What I would like fusion to do is power space ships
Why so you can spread the disease known as humanity and increased human suffering to near infinite levels?
Jk. Space would be fun.
With what infrastructure are we even going to use all this electricity?
There’s a ton of stuff in industry and manufacturing that aren’t practical because of energy. A lot of processes could be run cleaner too, leading to better environment practices.