The world's biggest experimental nuclear fusion reactor in operation was inaugurated in Japan on Friday, a technology in its infancy but billed by some as the answer to humanity's future energy needs.
Neat. But I’m not very optimistic about fusion. We’ve been at it for over 50 years and hundreds of billions of dollars with only very little incremental progress. I’d love to be wrong, but at this point it just seems to me like a pipe dream.
The ITER was basically supposed to have been built starting in the 80s from my understanding… Until cheap fossil fuels dried up all interest in funding fusion research. When it takes 40 years to fund a single project via international collaboration, 50 years is a short timescale.
Even with renewed recent interest, fusion still has less than half the funding it did during the energy crisis. Of course the predictions from that era were optimistic given they were no longer able to do experiments like these when they expected them to proliferate.
The biggest delays for ITER were all political in deciding where it would be built and who would contribute what. Yes, there’s been some technical delays since then, but compared to other projects of this scale it has actually gone fairly well.
The DEMO units to follow ITER should be able to be built by individual nations. Those should go a lot faster and hence cheaper. The whole point of structuring ITER the way they did was to give all the contributing countries experience in every critical system. That’s very inefficient for this particular project, but should make follow up projects a lot more feasible.
Oh, I believe working fusion reactors are in the very near future, without a doubt. However, I also believe it can’t possibly work out to be as transformative as people seem to expect. In the end, we’ll be saying “congratulations, you’ve developed the most expensive form of energy production yet! It’s nearly useless!”
And worst of all, we don’t have enough beryllium in the world to produce the fusion breeding blankets needed to make more than a few fusion power plants. And even if we could make all those shiny beryllium blankets, we then have another problem… one of the side effect of using a heavy metal to absorb high energy particles and turn then into heat, is that over time the entire blanket becomes highly radioactive. Now we’re back to the same problems we have with fission, but at a much higher cost.
Will fusion work? Absolutely, and it will be extremely useful for long duration space missions, or antarctic bases. But beyond edge cases, the tokamak will probably never make sense.
I’m curious to see if other solutions like helion’s reactor will work, that certainly seems a lot more sustainable.
Helion says they will generate power directly from the electromagnetic field of the amplified plasma pulses (and then more from waste heat). It may work to some degree, but their proposed tritium reaction will produce enough neutrons to sterilize a couple cubic kms and render the entire assembly too radioactive to maintain by humans.
I’m not optimistic about it as a solution to climate change nor any current day energy needs primarily because it feeds right into the techbro/capitalist lame kink that if we just had wayyyyy more power it would solve everything. Most of the problems we are experiencing today stem from having too much power, too much capability to extract resources violently from the earth, too much power from oil to the point that we built a batshit insane transportation system based around cars (even in the center of the worlds largest and densest cities) and most importantly too much power in the hands of energy and fossil fuel companies.
Fusion would solve 0% of any of those problems, and the more people fixate on it as the kind of solution we should be holding out for to save us, the more dangerous it is.
However, the science is cool, it is definitely worth investing in and studying because one day it could be huge. I just think if we discovered an energy source that provided us with limitless power today, right now, it would actually be the precise thing that would doom the human race into not fixing any of the problems that truly threaten our survival as a species nor would it save the planet from us.
There is zero evidence it wouldn’t just lead to even more extraction or destruction of the environment than is already happening. There is also little evidence that the power would actually get into the hands of the power and third world and it wouldn’t just be the US, Europe and the most powerful nations in Asia living off cheap power while keeping it from the rest of the planet.
We have not spent a hundred billion dollars on fusion energy research collectively as a planet in the past 70 years of working on it. We do spent 10x that every year for the US defense budget.
Heh, in 2010 the ITER project had already been funded with $16 billion euros, which would be $22 billion euros adjusting for inflation. Kind of funny that they were hoping to have it producing 500 megawatts of thermal energy by 2020… However, the funding for ITER itself is kind of a hot mess of debate, with differing opinions on how much has truly been spent on it thus far and how much more it will need: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITERhttps://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Investment-in-fusion-has-reached-USD6-21-billion
I’m not sure if that’s saying $6.21b USD just for 2023 for private funding efforts or if that’s the cumulative thus far in general.
I’d say it’s safe to say if you tally it all up–public and private investments–it’s around a hundred billion or more. But yes, the US does dump an awful lot of money into the military industrial complex instead of towards more universally beneficial endeavors; though, that wasn’t really what was being discussed.
Neat. But I’m not very optimistic about fusion. We’ve been at it for over 50 years and hundreds of billions of dollars with only very little incremental progress. I’d love to be wrong, but at this point it just seems to me like a pipe dream.
The ITER was basically supposed to have been built starting in the 80s from my understanding… Until cheap fossil fuels dried up all interest in funding fusion research. When it takes 40 years to fund a single project via international collaboration, 50 years is a short timescale.
Even with renewed recent interest, fusion still has less than half the funding it did during the energy crisis. Of course the predictions from that era were optimistic given they were no longer able to do experiments like these when they expected them to proliferate.
The biggest delays for ITER were all political in deciding where it would be built and who would contribute what. Yes, there’s been some technical delays since then, but compared to other projects of this scale it has actually gone fairly well.
The DEMO units to follow ITER should be able to be built by individual nations. Those should go a lot faster and hence cheaper. The whole point of structuring ITER the way they did was to give all the contributing countries experience in every critical system. That’s very inefficient for this particular project, but should make follow up projects a lot more feasible.
Progress is always incremental, except in hindsight
Funding is almost nothing compared to other endeavors.
We’ve been working on AI for 50 years too.
I wouldn’t frame it like that.
Oh, I believe working fusion reactors are in the very near future, without a doubt. However, I also believe it can’t possibly work out to be as transformative as people seem to expect. In the end, we’ll be saying “congratulations, you’ve developed the most expensive form of energy production yet! It’s nearly useless!”
And worst of all, we don’t have enough beryllium in the world to produce the fusion breeding blankets needed to make more than a few fusion power plants. And even if we could make all those shiny beryllium blankets, we then have another problem… one of the side effect of using a heavy metal to absorb high energy particles and turn then into heat, is that over time the entire blanket becomes highly radioactive. Now we’re back to the same problems we have with fission, but at a much higher cost.
Will fusion work? Absolutely, and it will be extremely useful for long duration space missions, or antarctic bases. But beyond edge cases, the tokamak will probably never make sense.
I’m curious to see if other solutions like helion’s reactor will work, that certainly seems a lot more sustainable.
Yeah I mean at the end of the day the goal is still “make water hot to turn spinny thing with steam”.
deleted by creator
There is a helium fusion reaction that produces electrons. I’m not sure how feasible the process is for electricity generation, though.
Helion says they will generate power directly from the electromagnetic field of the amplified plasma pulses (and then more from waste heat). It may work to some degree, but their proposed tritium reaction will produce enough neutrons to sterilize a couple cubic kms and render the entire assembly too radioactive to maintain by humans.
I’m not optimistic about it as a solution to climate change nor any current day energy needs primarily because it feeds right into the techbro/capitalist lame kink that if we just had wayyyyy more power it would solve everything. Most of the problems we are experiencing today stem from having too much power, too much capability to extract resources violently from the earth, too much power from oil to the point that we built a batshit insane transportation system based around cars (even in the center of the worlds largest and densest cities) and most importantly too much power in the hands of energy and fossil fuel companies.
Fusion would solve 0% of any of those problems, and the more people fixate on it as the kind of solution we should be holding out for to save us, the more dangerous it is.
However, the science is cool, it is definitely worth investing in and studying because one day it could be huge. I just think if we discovered an energy source that provided us with limitless power today, right now, it would actually be the precise thing that would doom the human race into not fixing any of the problems that truly threaten our survival as a species nor would it save the planet from us.
Purged by creator
There is zero evidence it wouldn’t just lead to even more extraction or destruction of the environment than is already happening. There is also little evidence that the power would actually get into the hands of the power and third world and it wouldn’t just be the US, Europe and the most powerful nations in Asia living off cheap power while keeping it from the rest of the planet.
The problem isn’t technology here.
Now that we have unlimited power we can finally extract all that gold!
Purged by creator
We have not spent a hundred billion dollars on fusion energy research collectively as a planet in the past 70 years of working on it. We do spent 10x that every year for the US defense budget.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/margraf1/
That’s just the US government’s contributions. Harder to find totals for private investments and the historical contributions from all countries.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-energy-iter-idUKTRE6581JB20100609/
Heh, in 2010 the ITER project had already been funded with $16 billion euros, which would be $22 billion euros adjusting for inflation. Kind of funny that they were hoping to have it producing 500 megawatts of thermal energy by 2020… However, the funding for ITER itself is kind of a hot mess of debate, with differing opinions on how much has truly been spent on it thus far and how much more it will need: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Investment-in-fusion-has-reached-USD6-21-billion
I’m not sure if that’s saying $6.21b USD just for 2023 for private funding efforts or if that’s the cumulative thus far in general.
I’d say it’s safe to say if you tally it all up–public and private investments–it’s around a hundred billion or more. But yes, the US does dump an awful lot of money into the military industrial complex instead of towards more universally beneficial endeavors; though, that wasn’t really what was being discussed.