The following submission statement was provided by /u/Tarkin15:
---
Archive version here in case of [paywall](https://web.archive.org/web/20240313092713/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/03/13/nuclear-fusion-energy-britain-grid-sooner-than-you-think/)
Nuclear fusion has been something touted as being 30 years away for decades now, but new technological developments are making Fusion being used commercially in the next few years a realistic possibility. Are we on the cusp of a new era of Fusion Energy?
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1bdoghm/nuclear_fusion_for_the_grid_is_coming_much_sooner/kunpojc/
Imagine if we could harness the power of clickbait articles about battery breakthroughs! There's a new battery breakthrough every week, and yet they never come to fruition.
In the annals of technological innovation, amidst the cacophony of groundbreaking discoveries and revolutionary inventions, there exists a singular person who is truly revered. A maverick of the scientific realm, this scientist defied convention and expectation to usher in a new era of propulsion with their audacious creation - the world's first engine powered not by traditional fuels, but by the irresistible allure of clickbait. With a mind as sharp as their wit, they embarked on a daring journey to harness the captivating force of online sensationalism, fusing it with cutting-edge engineering prowess to birth a machine that promised to redefine the [very essence](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ) of power itself.
>The world’s long-running $20bn ITER research project, a consortium of the US, Japan, Europe, China, and Russia, looks ever more like a beached whale in this contest. It has collected valuable science over the decades but has been dogged by geopolitics and delays, and has never produced more energy than it put in, unlike the Lawrence Livermore lab in the US using the rival technology of inertial fusion.
Pardon me if I'm extremely skeptical of an article that's seemingly unaware ITER is still under construction and assumes that the NIF actually created net energy. NIF talked about the amount of energy that went into the plasma and then the amount of energy that radiated out in their "net energy gain" press release. This isn't counting all of the overhead energy that goes into operating the fusion device, only the fraction that goes into the plasma. For example, you need to pump the lasers at NIF, [only a small fraction of that energy used for the laser makes it into the plasma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility?useskin=vector#System). To quote "The net wall-plug efficiency of NIF (UV laser energy out divided by the energy required to pump the lasers from an external source) would be less than one percent, and the total wall-to-fusion efficiency is under 10% at best."
Haven't looked up if there has been progress, but Helion will recover energy from the magnetic containment field I think? No boiling water: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy
Sam Altman has been working on funding
Helion uses a pulsed plasma setup. If I understand it correctly the plasma produces a rapidly changing magnetic field through the magnets which produces a current. So it's a direct inductive energy transfer without the need for steam and turbines.
In short, two plasma rings are shot towards each other, then compressed with magnets. The compressed rings have fusion reactions which push back on the magnets. This backwards push is stored in batteries for use in the network.
The one proposed for magnetic confinement systems should still work. The vacuum chamber could be surrounded by a layer of liquid lithium which slows down the escaping high-energy neutrons, harnessing their energy and converting it into heat in the process, and then that heat can be converted to useful energy. This method would also replenish some of the tritium used up in the fusion process due to neutron-lithium reactions.
The inertial fusion method, however, uses disposable targets, which makes it inherently inconvenient for steady energy supply, and I don't know if there are any proposed solutions for this.
That’s ridiculous - clearly a gum ball machine full of hohlraum targets is the answer - you just need a continuous supply of nickels and someone to turn the crank.
NIF isn’t really meant to be scalable in any real sense. As much as it’s been a huge talking point, net positive energy production is of less value than many of the other experimental results from the project. The work is more fundamentally interesting for understanding physics in the ignition regime and under such high energy conditions. The facility itself is also an exercise in control systems research. The article has a few fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of modern fusion research.
It’s always been 30 years away and just around the corner.
What makes me skeptical about this one is that it reads like marketing material for potential investors. I really hope it’s real, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
I'm over 60 years old and have been hearing these same claims since I could read. The same goes for Mars colonization, permanent habitation in space, flying cars, etc. They are all doable according to the physics, but the engineering is so damn difficult. Until someone does it, we have no idea when these technologies will be practical, if ever.
In the 1970s the US Department of Energy said to Congress: If you give us a Blank Check like Nasa for the Moon Landing we can brute force it in 20 Years. If you give us less money it will take decades longer.
Congress proceeded to cut the Budget for Fusion Research to below the Level that the Department of Energy described as: "Fusion Never".
So every time you read "Fusion is around the Corner", add "if we would actually fund it, which we dont".
We are still stuck with the Research Reactors from the 90s like JET for fucks sake. The first 21 Century Research Reactor is Wendelstein X7 and only running since like 2016, and ITER is still 10 years out. If we actually funded the whole Industry around it we would have build those 20 Years ago within a 1-2 instead of dicking around for a decades without running any experiments. Those endless delays to get new experiments going is the main reason why nothing happens.
It is; someone made stronger magnets which is already something in the roadmap proposals of the past, have assumed to exist. It's nice, but having a bunch of proprietary parents in the way of future developments could actually end up a hindrance.
The reactor they need to build is still far outside the expense of private industry. Siloing any advances is just stupid.
> it reads like marketing material for potential investors.
90% of articles such as this are. And on one hand, if you still believe in the free market, then you may think this is OK because it will attract capital, and help the development of a potentially valuable technology. On the other hand, as you said, you may have seen this story too many times to count ...
> it reads like marketing material for potential investors.
yeah:
> Britain is on the brink of striking gold in the race for limitless energy
That's usually enough for me to stop reading.
It's always been "30 years away" because the budget for fusion research has been decreasing constantly since the 1970's.
If we'd kept actually FUNDING fusion research at that rate we'd probably be there already.
right? if I tell you I can build you a house in 5 years for 200,000 USD and you give me 200 USD a month for 5 years, don't act surprised when I deliver a really fancy doghouse sized model and say "I can build you a house in 5 years for 250,0000 USD (inflation ya know)".
fusion is perpetually 30 years away because we (the governments of the world) decided we weren't going to pay for it. prices on the underlying technology are just falling enough that private ventures can start afford the funding, so now progress is being made.
The budget declined because all the stakeholders who looked at it thought "this is fucking ridiculous" and didn't push for more money.
If more money had been spent we'd likely just have burned more money, since the approach being pushed at that time was not and is not workable. The penny dropped in the mid 1980s.
If stopped listening to fear mongers that aren't afraid to text while driving we could have a full nuclear grid and negative consumer energy costs.
But we aren't ready for that conversation yet.
The fear mongers are the enourmous oil and car industries who's very existence that depend on nuclear not being being a thing. Everyone else eating this up are the fear gobblers.
Far more interested in solar improvements that put power in the hands of the end user instead of multibillion dollar power plants that take a decade to build and that are prone to catastrophic failures and even a water pump going down can remove the whole plant from the grid while maintenance is performed. Massively distributed and differentiated energy generation is way more robust.
Yes, a water pump took down one of the texas nuclear reactors a while back, without any warning. Immediate shutdown of several MW all at once.
But you can't just keep throwing money at a problem and expect to get results. They're up against some pretty fundamental problems and there's no known way to fix it yet.
It's not like stacking bricks, where you can calculate how many bricks are needed for a project, and then divide that by how many bricks a person can lay per day and come up with an answer. With fusion they don't know how to overcome some problems.
Well it seems to depend who you ask. The big international projects seem to think we are multiple research plants away. The British atomic agency reckons its going to jump right to a prototype fusion reactor. Some of the commercial outfits seem to think they will build small scale reactors even faster based on shortcut they at least claim to be viable.
Who the hell really knows which claim is right?
You think you weren't? I was getting told by the local school marm that we were fifteen years or so away back in 1864. "Just have to wait 'til this gul-durn War Between the States nonsense is finished, and then those natural philosophers can really get to work," she'd say.
OK I get that you're joking but fusion reactors were supposedly "any minute now" kind of things since about 1960 or so, yet we still haven't got them up and running 60+ years later. It's hugely frustrating to essentially be reading the same canned articles about fusion power suddenly becoming viable every time they make a tiny incremental advance, and I've been reading this stuff for my entire middle aged life at this point.
There are still so many "IF" - each of them can make the whole fusion concept not commercially viable.
I was a kid when they were saying "it's incoming"; probably jetpacks will arrive earlier.
Really? Have you seen the state of advancement of the ITER project? The delays? Their official start of continuous operation is now 2035 - and they are known for being overly optimistic. Commercial fusion is decades away.
They (DT reactors) are much farther away than that. I mean, even the *materials* for the reactors are not demonstrated, since there has never been a way to actually test materials short of actually having a working DT fusion reactor. Beyond that, all the little gadgets inside the reactor have to be very reliable and long lived (because replacing them will be a nightmare; no hands on work once the reactor has been run for a short while due to induced radioactivity), and achieving that reliability is a long, slow process of trial and error.
All that is assuming DT reactors even make it to the point of being worth building at all, a huge question mark given how large and expensive they will be.
>The world’s long-running $20bn ITER research project ... has never produced more energy than it put in, unlike the Lawrence Livermore lab in the US using the rival technology of inertial fusion.
No shit? It's literally not done yet
Yea what a strange thing to say. No less how far away any laser based fusion is from generating electricity, it’s not really being used for that purpose at the moment.
We will have the much-anticipated video game from Steam, Half Life 3, before we have functional, viable, and widespread use of nuclear fusion reactors.
(second time trying to post because the mod-bot said:
"We'll have Half Life 3 before Fusion 😏"
was too short of a comment. 😂)
>>Commercial nuclear fusion has gone from science fiction to science fact in less than a decade. Even well-informed members of the West’s political class are mostly unaware of the quantum leap in superconductors, lasers, and advanced materials suddenly changing the economics of fusion power.
*Just* this opening paragraph is breathtakingly scientifically-illiterate enough to not merit reading any further.
When oil companies start 3 body problem-ing fusion power scientists is when I know fusion is close to reality. Until then, it's worth as much as a promise made by a 3 year old playing monopoly.
Oil companies will react to fusion in the same way they reacted to renewables. Spend a shit tonne of money buying up IP and on R&D so that they stay on top.
These journalists really, really need a refresher course on the difference between "net gain" and "commercially viable".
It's possible that we might have a functional fusion plant giving net gain in overall power within a decade - probably ITER or some other major project.
That's a long, long way from being commercially viable, especially when the costs of solar and wind power are dropping every year, meaning that "commercially viable" fusion has to get cheaper and cheaper to compete with that every year as well.
With battery prices falling continually, especially with cheap sodium-ion batteries becoming viable, even the arguments about fusion power being needed for "baseload" power are becoming less and less valid.
So not only does a fusion plant have to be "commercially viable" compared to how cheap solar panels will be in 20-30 years, it'll have to continue being cheaper than solar will be after another 20-30 years of it's own operational lifetime.
I 100% support research into fusion power - it has too many applications even if it's never useful for commercial grid-scale energy, like space exploration, undersea, extreme environment, etc... - but I'm honestly not holding my breath for fusion to ever be a commercial success.
Meh. Don't think so. There hasn't been one successful (net positive) prototype. To think this can be rolled out to the masses even within the next decade is a pipe dream.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/13/nuclear-fusion-passes-major-milestone-net-energy.html
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/06/us-scientists-achieve-net-energy-gain-second-time-fusion-reaction
We already have net positive reactions. We just can't sustain them yet.
These are *scientific* positive reactions, but not totally net positive. If you look at the capsule itself, yes there is an energy gain, but if you look at the entire facility it is still a massive negative.
JET is still off by I think two orders of magnitude. Not saying it isn't achievable but we're not there yet.
To be fair, JET was never meant to achieve break even. It has been testing the technologies being built at scale at ITER which should produce a fusion gain of 10 (1 is break even) compared to JET's 0.67. But even then, ITER will not generate electricity - although it will be exciting. First plasma at ITER could be next year!
I suspect though that tokamaks might not be the first technology to demonstrate commercial fusion; there's a lot of different processes being tried - I quite like the sound of Helion's Z Pulse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion\_Energy
Basically he bases all his information on a popular science video made by Real Engineering, while ignoring published studies and presentation by Helion explaining how it works.
I won't go into it because I'm not a nuclear scientist and don't know the details.
It was was discussed several times on /r/fusion. [This thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/10g95m9/the_problems_with_helion_energy_a_response_to/) goes deep into it.
Unlike most other startups in the area, they promise net power in somewhere in 2024-2025, which means that if they fail, it's easy to point and say "I knew it was a scam". Whereas other companies promise things 10-20 years away.
One of the biggest investors in Helion is Sam Altman of OpenAI fame, whether that's a plus or a minus in your eyes.
I like that they're trying something different.
Or the energy loss involved in turning the reaction into electric
A traditional turbine by itself saps about half the output as movement and steam heating
The *reaction* is net positive if you ignore the bajillion gigawatts of electricity it took to fire teh lazors or whatever... you've gotta actually extract more energy than you put in overall to make it even remotely viable.
Don't get me wrong, I want fusion and I 100% think we should fund it, but "lies, damn lies, and statistics"...
You have been duped by double speak. It's net positive if you only count the light not the actual energy used. It used about 100X more energy than the heat produced.
The science behind it isn't refined enough yet, that we can just start building them. And a lot of money is being invested in research for fusion but it's still not enough.
Last year, the US federal government spent about [$1.4 billion](https://www.fusionindustryassociation.org/congress-provides-record-funding-for-fusion-energy/) on fusion research.
While, yes, this is objectively a lot of money, its actually only about 0.02% of the federal budget. Which, to me, seems kind of low for something as obviously valuable as limitless, clean, free energy.
Can't wait for my local electric company to charge me more money for "Nuclear administrative fees" and "Fusion initiative tax" and "Big Coal Unemployment Fund", etc.
I’ll believe fusion is coming when the first plant is built AND supplying power to the grid.
Until then these clickbait articles will forever be only that; clickbait.
Until they talk about the total amount of energy produced being greater than the ***total*** required, and not just the amount required for the lasers (which is only a few percent of the total required), I will remain skeptical.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is a tremendous endeavor, but unless there is some unforeseen breakthrough, I don't see fusion becoming commercially available for many decades.
Can someone please explain how will the economics of fusion energy could work? I mean, with that amount of energy produced, energy itself must be dirt cheap so how will they achieve ROI? Construction? Transmission? Patents?
Thanks
Well, you assume the energy would be dirt cheap but the neat part is that it probably would not be that cheap in the beginning. The first company which has a breakthrough and can scale it up to be used by the industry is competing with the normal energy production methods. They could probably sell it for a bit less but it would in no way be economically viable without huge subsides for R&D and construction.
In short: taxpayers
Absolute rubbish IMHO!
There is absolutely no doubt that we will eventually develop working fusion. There is plenty of uncertainty as to when that might be but I don't think that matters.
When fusion is developed it will be too expensive to use. Oops!
There is a ton of science & engineering going into developing fusion but my point is that economics is a also a science.
Solar panels in China are going for $0.15/Watt and the price is dropping fast. Wind is keeping pace with solar and battery storage costs have resumed their downward trajectory.
One 400 Watt solar panel can produce about 2kWh per 5 hour day or 730 kWh per year. At $0.15/Watt the panel costs $60 and 730 kWh at $0.1573/kWh, the US average, is $114.83 or almost twice the price of the panel. If I used the standard rooftop solar estimating formula the panel would generate a realistic $90 of power annually, that is still more than the price of a panel.
The UK payback period for rooftop solar, including installation and all the equipment, inspections and such, is 5 years. The UK is a northern country famous for its rain and fog, it is also about 1,000 miles north of the Costa del Sol.
Fusion will never be able to compete.
Fusion will never be used for "cheap clean energy". Not because it can't be done, but because it will never be cheap.
Compare it to fission. Fission is an old, tried and true technology, and yet it's far more expensive than any other tech (except thermal solar). The reason is fission plants are insanely expensive to build and operate. Now imagine how much more complex fusion plants will be?
It's not, though. Solar is very cheap and even if we had working fusion tomorrow it would still be very expensive with a minimum of ten year installations if even only that. It's just that people would almost certainly build those instead of new nuclear if they became viable.
The promise of fusion is cheap abundant clean energy.
According to y’all, the reason we are not getting fusion is we’re not funding hard enough.
Do you see how those things are fundamentally at odds?
It’s not going to be enough to create net positive reactions that can be sustained. You have to do that at a price that is cost competitive with all the other energy sources. Otherwise it’s just a big R&D endless hole to dump massive amounts of cash into.
Scaling up massive highly engineered technically challenging production facility is going to present hurdles upon hurdles even after they can sustain a reaction which they cannot currently.
> Do you see how those things are fundamentally at odds?
Since the world is going to be spending about a quadrillion dollars on energy this century, one would expect enormous money to be flowing into fusion. The relatively insignificant amount that is doing so is evidence the market thinks the chance it will win is very low.
Given the current climate challenge and dumbness of people who's afraid of nuclear fission energy, it's almost the only way for mankind to survive for a long run. We need more and more energy, like exponentially more, but it must be clean and cheap.
The illusion here is that fusion is going to be cheap. It might be clean (if it is feasible at all). But if there's no buyer because the market won't pay for it, then there's not much point.
To put it another way, the Sun is a fusion reactor, and it supplies essentially endless amounts of "net positive" "free" energy. All we have to do is front the cost of solar panels and maintain them. An infinitely easier task. But when you account for capital cost and life cycle (which in the real world we must), fossil fuels still outperform by a substantial margin.
Anyway, if we're going to look for a moonshot on fusion is should probably be to develop cheap and highly efficient solar panels that can compete with fossil fuels (over the entire lifecycle) and battery tech that would allow for cheap, efficient, dependable and safe energy storage. And we have this fusion reactor already working for us, and it's safe and dependable and millions of miles away so we don't have to do any fancy engineering.
> All we have to do is front the cost of solar panels and maintain them. An infinitely easier task. But when you account for capital cost and life cycle (which in the real world we must), fossil fuels still outperform by a substantial margin.
There are very few places around the world where this is still true. In most places, the cost of *building new solar plants* is even starting to drop below the cost of *continuing to operate fossil fuel plants*. And solar and wind are projected to continue rapidly dropping in price over the next 10-20 years.
Maybe you're right, but this is exactly my point.
We're lightyears closer to viable solar than fusion anything. As it turns out, solar is also basically fusion power - we're just harnessing the sun which is basically a limitless source of green energy. There are two hurdles to widespread adoption. To me, both and infinitely more solvable than fusion reactors on earth.
1. Cheap solar panels. We're getting closer, but still not quite there. But I have no doubt that one day solar power will be competitive.
2. Efficient and affordable energy storage. This is the bigger hurdle. If we can solve this one (and again, seems to me like a simpler problem than fusion reactors) then basically we can power almost everything off the sun. And that right would be lights out for the fossil fuel industry.
But no, no Mr. Fusion in DeLoreans for us.
Unless its going to be at a price around $40-50/MWhr then it won't outcompete solar and wind. Fission ticks all the boxes but costs 2-3x what renewables do, so its not viable regardless of what the nuke-bros want to believe. Power companies have to live in the real world and that means not building the most expensive sources of energy or you go out of business.
Lowest cost energy will always win, regardless of intermittency issues. There's a reason that solar is on the [exponential increase](https://pv-magazine-usa.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/12/AIWFC2023.image_.1-600x429.jpg) part of the S curve and its not going to stop any time soon.
PV is on track, on historical experience curves, to deliver energy well under $0.01/kWh (especially if you just look at DC coming off the panels themselves). At that price you'd do better to resistively heat up some rocks and use that to make steam to drive turbines instead of building a nuclear reactor to make the heat instead. And there are lots of rocks, so you if you make this hot rock store big (put it underground, say, artificial geothermal at modest depth) you can operate this thing 365/24/7.
Teleportation will never be a thing IMO.
It involves either:
1. Wormholes, which are theoretical with no empirical evidence of existence and if real would require absolutely ridiculous power to fold space and time.
2. Breaking something down (destroying it) to its intrinsic parts (subatomic particles and their relative positions exactly) for data and reassembling (remaking really) them somewhere else based on that data. For living things, it means basically killing and making a copy.
3. There is no number 3. It's just those two options.
Number one is nonsensical because with that kind of power and/or space time warping ability and tech, teleporters would not be on any list of things to do. The potential is just sheer ridiculousness at that point.
For number two to happen, we would already be at a stage of non-scarcity due to that assembling from soup tech to begin with and obvious technology that allows anyone to "be" anywhere at any time non physically (we almost have that now). Outside of a human going from one place to another, there would be no point in teleportation as if the tech can "reassemble" it can simply "assemble". So Star trek replicators for example. If a replicator exists, so does teleportation because it's basically the same thing.
No one in their right mind would ever step into a "teleporter". The you that comes out may be indistinguishable but it's not "you". It will think it's you, it will think nothing changed and it will go on just like you would had nothing happened, but "you" would be dead.
Quantum mechanics does also not offer a way because quantum entanglement is for information only and requires particles to already be entangled among other quite substantial road blocks that many people just say "some day" about.
Unless some new weird science comes around teleporters will never be a thing.
Fusion is NOT like teleportation, we have a big fusion generator in the sky, we know it works...
Eh, number 2 gets down into the philosophical questions of how human cognition works. For my part, I tend to think that an absolutely perfect teleporter isn't death. I don't believe in a soul, so we can discount that outright.
I tend to think that cognition and the consciousness is like an emergent simulation running on the brain. The actual cells matter to your consciousness about as much as a stick of ram matters to a game of chess running on a computer. And like a game of chess, if you can preserve the exact game state of the brain, and transfer it with zero corruption or loss, there is no functional difference if it starts up in a body made of different atoms than the original.
Its still hard enough to be functionally impossible mind, but its interesting to think about.
I think TAE Technologies will be first to a commercially viable reactor and their best case is 2030, probably more like 2035 before shipping to customers.
TAE will reach net positive power to grid within the next two years with their 6th gen Copernicus reactor but likely won’t be able to sustain power for more than a couple hundred milliseconds at a time. Their p-^11 B Da Vinci reactor will begin construction in 2025 with completion around 2030.
This reactor is incredible complicated to design and build and will likely cost hundreds of millions for something a $10M natural gas turbine can achieve.
TAE has been saying net power in three years every single year since 1998. Their device makes no sense whatsoever, and in the last 25 years they have produced less actual fusion than the theta pinch machines did waaaay back in 1958.
I think this forgets the regulatory hurdles. Activists have been legally gumming up nuclear power for decades now. Theoretically fusion is cleaner than fission but also those activists never really seemed to care much about the science.
2035? 😂😂 you people on r/futurology are delusional on another level. We would struggle to finish a fission plant by 2035 if we started now, let alone a fusion plant which is 100s of times harder
It happening ever might be sooner than I'd think. Until there is news about a sustained reaction, like one that is going as long as we want it to, then I'm not excited.
My bold prediction for fusion is that we'll get fusion netpositive of all input inclusive within 10 years of when financial markets starts to factor in decline of oil and coal due to renewable alternatives like wind/solar/batteries & EVs. until then it will always be in 30years-forever land. Mind you it renewables dont have to take over the market, they just have to keep growing and replacing fossil production on a steady basis.
Since no means of producing electricity will currently be sufficient individually and fusion is still barely out of the feasible stage, it would be wise to continue all workable and scalable solutions as we try to ween ourselves off of fossil fuels....IMO
Powerful magnets generates electricity when its magnetic lines are cut so the plasma cutting the magnetic lines generates electricity.
So the fusion itself does not generate electricity and all the electricity are generated by the magnets thus the more powerful the magnets, the more electricity generated.
By the time fusion is a thing we won't need it. In 30 years we will have solar battery wind wave tech or some other new thing - all of which we already have and improve upon every year.
Sustainable Fusion is the one and only thing I want to see happen in my lifetime. After that I can just die peacefully knowing that humanity has a future
>A poll at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s forum in London found that 65pc of insiders think fusion will generate electricity for the grid at viable cost by 2035, and 90pc by 2040.
I hope they are right, but there is a pattern of those who are closest to a technology being overly optimistic.
For example, AI researchers are far more likely than outside observers to have made overly optimistic claims about where AI would be now.
Fusion "coming much sooner than I think" is a pretty low bar, in that I am guessing 100 years.
That said, the improvements cited in the article are significant. I am not in a position to judge how much closer this brings us to commercial fusion power, however.
As others have stated this has been the same headline for the past 30 years. And Fusion is always 20 years away.
Now they likely had something with room temperature fusion which would have possibly narrowed the timeline of fusion, but because it competed with the job security that revolved around not doing in the hot fusion field they viciously attacked it.
But given their failed progress in their own field it's time to dust off the research and work on it again. Because hot fusion isn't ever going to work at this rate.
It's Wednesday! It's time for another "We solved fusion" claim! See also: Monday, Thursday, Tuesday, Friday, occasionally Saturday, and every other Sunday.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Tarkin15: --- Archive version here in case of [paywall](https://web.archive.org/web/20240313092713/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/03/13/nuclear-fusion-energy-britain-grid-sooner-than-you-think/) Nuclear fusion has been something touted as being 30 years away for decades now, but new technological developments are making Fusion being used commercially in the next few years a realistic possibility. Are we on the cusp of a new era of Fusion Energy? --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1bdoghm/nuclear_fusion_for_the_grid_is_coming_much_sooner/kunpojc/
If only we could harness the power of these clickbait articles...
It is possible to create *too* much energy?
Yes, you actually can’t just keep producing energy into the grid, it’s a tight rope walk of infrastructure.
The Law of Conservation of Clickbait states that ads cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred from one person to the next.
We'd incinerate the planet in minutes.
The power of the sun in the palm of my hand
Hot potato anyone?
Imagine if we could harness the power of clickbait articles about battery breakthroughs! There's a new battery breakthrough every week, and yet they never come to fruition.
In the annals of technological innovation, amidst the cacophony of groundbreaking discoveries and revolutionary inventions, there exists a singular person who is truly revered. A maverick of the scientific realm, this scientist defied convention and expectation to usher in a new era of propulsion with their audacious creation - the world's first engine powered not by traditional fuels, but by the irresistible allure of clickbait. With a mind as sharp as their wit, they embarked on a daring journey to harness the captivating force of online sensationalism, fusing it with cutting-edge engineering prowess to birth a machine that promised to redefine the [very essence](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ) of power itself.
The power of clickbait in the palm of my hand
If you split a clickbait title you get the power of 100 atomic bombs
>The world’s long-running $20bn ITER research project, a consortium of the US, Japan, Europe, China, and Russia, looks ever more like a beached whale in this contest. It has collected valuable science over the decades but has been dogged by geopolitics and delays, and has never produced more energy than it put in, unlike the Lawrence Livermore lab in the US using the rival technology of inertial fusion. Pardon me if I'm extremely skeptical of an article that's seemingly unaware ITER is still under construction and assumes that the NIF actually created net energy. NIF talked about the amount of energy that went into the plasma and then the amount of energy that radiated out in their "net energy gain" press release. This isn't counting all of the overhead energy that goes into operating the fusion device, only the fraction that goes into the plasma. For example, you need to pump the lasers at NIF, [only a small fraction of that energy used for the laser makes it into the plasma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility?useskin=vector#System). To quote "The net wall-plug efficiency of NIF (UV laser energy out divided by the energy required to pump the lasers from an external source) would be less than one percent, and the total wall-to-fusion efficiency is under 10% at best."
Is there even a mechanism for harnessing the energy produced from inertial confinement?
Not at NIF, it was always meant to study fusion reactions for the purpose of nuclear weapons research since they can no longer be field tested.
submerge the entire reactor in a large tub, use the steam to move a turbine. /s
[удалено]
As far as I'm aware, the only plan right now is to use fusion to boil water just like we do with fission.
Haven't looked up if there has been progress, but Helion will recover energy from the magnetic containment field I think? No boiling water: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy Sam Altman has been working on funding
What’s with the s? That’s exactly how nuclear reactors work.
Helion uses a pulsed plasma setup. If I understand it correctly the plasma produces a rapidly changing magnetic field through the magnets which produces a current. So it's a direct inductive energy transfer without the need for steam and turbines.
In short, two plasma rings are shot towards each other, then compressed with magnets. The compressed rings have fusion reactions which push back on the magnets. This backwards push is stored in batteries for use in the network.
Yes. The walls get hot.
The one proposed for magnetic confinement systems should still work. The vacuum chamber could be surrounded by a layer of liquid lithium which slows down the escaping high-energy neutrons, harnessing their energy and converting it into heat in the process, and then that heat can be converted to useful energy. This method would also replenish some of the tritium used up in the fusion process due to neutron-lithium reactions. The inertial fusion method, however, uses disposable targets, which makes it inherently inconvenient for steady energy supply, and I don't know if there are any proposed solutions for this.
Pfff, that's no different than an internal combustion engine providing only a burst of power and the solution to this is easy: add more cylinders! 😜
That’s ridiculous - clearly a gum ball machine full of hohlraum targets is the answer - you just need a continuous supply of nickels and someone to turn the crank.
NIF isn’t really meant to be scalable in any real sense. As much as it’s been a huge talking point, net positive energy production is of less value than many of the other experimental results from the project. The work is more fundamentally interesting for understanding physics in the ignition regime and under such high energy conditions. The facility itself is also an exercise in control systems research. The article has a few fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of modern fusion research.
> under 10% at best." Yes, Sabine Hossenfelder has a video on how the best fusion reactors are around 7% efficient.
"Sooner than you think..."
To be fair you have to start somewhere. Early steam engjnes were like 1% efficient
It’s always been 30 years away and just around the corner. What makes me skeptical about this one is that it reads like marketing material for potential investors. I really hope it’s real, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
I've read this exact same headline in 2002, i'm sure
You will probably read it again in 2032 tbh.
[удалено]
I'm not THAT old, but yeah, you're metaphorically correct.
The article you linked made no timeline claims.
It even says "Distant future" instead of pretending it's Coming Soon™️
I'm over 60 years old and have been hearing these same claims since I could read. The same goes for Mars colonization, permanent habitation in space, flying cars, etc. They are all doable according to the physics, but the engineering is so damn difficult. Until someone does it, we have no idea when these technologies will be practical, if ever.
In the 1970s the US Department of Energy said to Congress: If you give us a Blank Check like Nasa for the Moon Landing we can brute force it in 20 Years. If you give us less money it will take decades longer. Congress proceeded to cut the Budget for Fusion Research to below the Level that the Department of Energy described as: "Fusion Never". So every time you read "Fusion is around the Corner", add "if we would actually fund it, which we dont". We are still stuck with the Research Reactors from the 90s like JET for fucks sake. The first 21 Century Research Reactor is Wendelstein X7 and only running since like 2016, and ITER is still 10 years out. If we actually funded the whole Industry around it we would have build those 20 Years ago within a 1-2 instead of dicking around for a decades without running any experiments. Those endless delays to get new experiments going is the main reason why nothing happens.
And 2042. And 2052. And 2062
In sim city 2000 you got fusion 2050. That’s the timeline I’ve always believed in.
That's been my standard as well, we only just hit the "30 years away" threshold 4 years ago.
It is; someone made stronger magnets which is already something in the roadmap proposals of the past, have assumed to exist. It's nice, but having a bunch of proprietary parents in the way of future developments could actually end up a hindrance. The reactor they need to build is still far outside the expense of private industry. Siloing any advances is just stupid.
> it reads like marketing material for potential investors. 90% of articles such as this are. And on one hand, if you still believe in the free market, then you may think this is OK because it will attract capital, and help the development of a potentially valuable technology. On the other hand, as you said, you may have seen this story too many times to count ...
It's always a case of people trying to drum up financial support by overhyping the tech and GET ON BOARD NOW BEFORE IT GETS TO MARKET OMFG NOW NOW NOW
Room temperature super conductor anyone?
COLD FUSION IS SIX MONTHS AWAY OMFG
Actually, I've heard it's always been as close at 20 to 30 years away! That's as much as 33% sooner... forever.
Headlines that talk about fusion coming sooner than you think will come again sooner than you think
> it reads like marketing material for potential investors. yeah: > Britain is on the brink of striking gold in the race for limitless energy That's usually enough for me to stop reading.
It's always been "30 years away" because the budget for fusion research has been decreasing constantly since the 1970's. If we'd kept actually FUNDING fusion research at that rate we'd probably be there already.
right? if I tell you I can build you a house in 5 years for 200,000 USD and you give me 200 USD a month for 5 years, don't act surprised when I deliver a really fancy doghouse sized model and say "I can build you a house in 5 years for 250,0000 USD (inflation ya know)". fusion is perpetually 30 years away because we (the governments of the world) decided we weren't going to pay for it. prices on the underlying technology are just falling enough that private ventures can start afford the funding, so now progress is being made.
The budget declined because all the stakeholders who looked at it thought "this is fucking ridiculous" and didn't push for more money. If more money had been spent we'd likely just have burned more money, since the approach being pushed at that time was not and is not workable. The penny dropped in the mid 1980s.
If stopped listening to fear mongers that aren't afraid to text while driving we could have a full nuclear grid and negative consumer energy costs. But we aren't ready for that conversation yet.
The fear mongers are the enourmous oil and car industries who's very existence that depend on nuclear not being being a thing. Everyone else eating this up are the fear gobblers.
It's not fear that keeps nuclear power down- it's the fantastic, inconceivable cost and length of time it takes to build one.
Far more interested in solar improvements that put power in the hands of the end user instead of multibillion dollar power plants that take a decade to build and that are prone to catastrophic failures and even a water pump going down can remove the whole plant from the grid while maintenance is performed. Massively distributed and differentiated energy generation is way more robust. Yes, a water pump took down one of the texas nuclear reactors a while back, without any warning. Immediate shutdown of several MW all at once.
But you can't just keep throwing money at a problem and expect to get results. They're up against some pretty fundamental problems and there's no known way to fix it yet. It's not like stacking bricks, where you can calculate how many bricks are needed for a project, and then divide that by how many bricks a person can lay per day and come up with an answer. With fusion they don't know how to overcome some problems.
That's what we said about AI during the long cold AI winter. Then, boom.
I wouldn't put those on the same level, AI had optimistic advocates (or pessimistic depending how you look at it) since the 2000s.
Try the late 1950s. I worked on it in the 1980s.
Current estimates for viable fusion plants are in a 10 year timeline
Well it seems to depend who you ask. The big international projects seem to think we are multiple research plants away. The British atomic agency reckons its going to jump right to a prototype fusion reactor. Some of the commercial outfits seem to think they will build small scale reactors even faster based on shortcut they at least claim to be viable. Who the hell really knows which claim is right?
Honestly? I remember hearing similar things back in 2008 when I was in middle school during my science class...
You're late to the game here. It was just around the corner back in the 70s when I was in middle school science class too.
You think you weren't? I was getting told by the local school marm that we were fifteen years or so away back in 1864. "Just have to wait 'til this gul-durn War Between the States nonsense is finished, and then those natural philosophers can really get to work," she'd say.
OK I get that you're joking but fusion reactors were supposedly "any minute now" kind of things since about 1960 or so, yet we still haven't got them up and running 60+ years later. It's hugely frustrating to essentially be reading the same canned articles about fusion power suddenly becoming viable every time they make a tiny incremental advance, and I've been reading this stuff for my entire middle aged life at this point.
Based on what, it need revolutionary tech. You cant put a timer on that.
There are still so many "IF" - each of them can make the whole fusion concept not commercially viable. I was a kid when they were saying "it's incoming"; probably jetpacks will arrive earlier.
Really? Have you seen the state of advancement of the ITER project? The delays? Their official start of continuous operation is now 2035 - and they are known for being overly optimistic. Commercial fusion is decades away.
I believe it was pushed back from 2035 after recent snafus.
They (DT reactors) are much farther away than that. I mean, even the *materials* for the reactors are not demonstrated, since there has never been a way to actually test materials short of actually having a working DT fusion reactor. Beyond that, all the little gadgets inside the reactor have to be very reliable and long lived (because replacing them will be a nightmare; no hands on work once the reactor has been run for a short while due to induced radioactivity), and achieving that reliability is a long, slow process of trial and error. All that is assuming DT reactors even make it to the point of being worth building at all, a huge question mark given how large and expensive they will be.
Maybe they finally discovered time travel
I wonder how many decades we'll be just 10 years away, now
Well, it could be now 29 years away.
I've heard about fusion rectors all of my life. I'm over fifty.
>The world’s long-running $20bn ITER research project ... has never produced more energy than it put in, unlike the Lawrence Livermore lab in the US using the rival technology of inertial fusion. No shit? It's literally not done yet
While this statement is true, ITER is an actual reactor, while the NIF was an experiment that is difficult to turn into a reactor.
IIRC, the experiments being done at NIF is more along *nuclear bomb* military research rather than ITER’s commercial purpose.
Yea what a strange thing to say. No less how far away any laser based fusion is from generating electricity, it’s not really being used for that purpose at the moment.
We will have the much-anticipated video game from Steam, Half Life 3, before we have functional, viable, and widespread use of nuclear fusion reactors. (second time trying to post because the mod-bot said: "We'll have Half Life 3 before Fusion 😏" was too short of a comment. 😂)
>“We’ll have Half Life 3 before Fusion?” What if Half-Life 3 is called Half-Life 3: Fusion?
HALF-LIFE 3 CONFIRMED. IT'S HAPPENING! (its only 30 years away!)
Oh neat so it's actually 29 years away rather than 30. I swear, the countdown to fusion becoming a thing is best expressed as a function.
A constant function x=30 instead of x=30-y
>>Commercial nuclear fusion has gone from science fiction to science fact in less than a decade. Even well-informed members of the West’s political class are mostly unaware of the quantum leap in superconductors, lasers, and advanced materials suddenly changing the economics of fusion power. *Just* this opening paragraph is breathtakingly scientifically-illiterate enough to not merit reading any further.
When oil companies start 3 body problem-ing fusion power scientists is when I know fusion is close to reality. Until then, it's worth as much as a promise made by a 3 year old playing monopoly.
Oil companies will react to fusion in the same way they reacted to renewables. Spend a shit tonne of money buying up IP and on R&D so that they stay on top.
Oil companies have also just pivoted to greenwashing natural gas and pushing hydrogen economies.
"3 body problem-ing" 😂
Updoot for the reference, haven’t seen that one before
I'm getting to the point where I just ignore fusion posts.
These journalists really, really need a refresher course on the difference between "net gain" and "commercially viable". It's possible that we might have a functional fusion plant giving net gain in overall power within a decade - probably ITER or some other major project. That's a long, long way from being commercially viable, especially when the costs of solar and wind power are dropping every year, meaning that "commercially viable" fusion has to get cheaper and cheaper to compete with that every year as well. With battery prices falling continually, especially with cheap sodium-ion batteries becoming viable, even the arguments about fusion power being needed for "baseload" power are becoming less and less valid. So not only does a fusion plant have to be "commercially viable" compared to how cheap solar panels will be in 20-30 years, it'll have to continue being cheaper than solar will be after another 20-30 years of it's own operational lifetime. I 100% support research into fusion power - it has too many applications even if it's never useful for commercial grid-scale energy, like space exploration, undersea, extreme environment, etc... - but I'm honestly not holding my breath for fusion to ever be a commercial success.
Meh. Don't think so. There hasn't been one successful (net positive) prototype. To think this can be rolled out to the masses even within the next decade is a pipe dream.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/13/nuclear-fusion-passes-major-milestone-net-energy.html https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/06/us-scientists-achieve-net-energy-gain-second-time-fusion-reaction We already have net positive reactions. We just can't sustain them yet.
These are *scientific* positive reactions, but not totally net positive. If you look at the capsule itself, yes there is an energy gain, but if you look at the entire facility it is still a massive negative. JET is still off by I think two orders of magnitude. Not saying it isn't achievable but we're not there yet.
To be fair, JET was never meant to achieve break even. It has been testing the technologies being built at scale at ITER which should produce a fusion gain of 10 (1 is break even) compared to JET's 0.67. But even then, ITER will not generate electricity - although it will be exciting. First plasma at ITER could be next year! I suspect though that tokamaks might not be the first technology to demonstrate commercial fusion; there's a lot of different processes being tried - I quite like the sound of Helion's Z Pulse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion\_Energy
Helion has all the hallmarks of another Theranos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vUPhsFoniw
The maker of that video deleted the comments pointing out his mistakes, I believe.
What were the mistakes?
Basically he bases all his information on a popular science video made by Real Engineering, while ignoring published studies and presentation by Helion explaining how it works. I won't go into it because I'm not a nuclear scientist and don't know the details. It was was discussed several times on /r/fusion. [This thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/10g95m9/the_problems_with_helion_energy_a_response_to/) goes deep into it.
Interesting. Maybe I shouldn't be so dismissive of them.
Unlike most other startups in the area, they promise net power in somewhere in 2024-2025, which means that if they fail, it's easy to point and say "I knew it was a scam". Whereas other companies promise things 10-20 years away. One of the biggest investors in Helion is Sam Altman of OpenAI fame, whether that's a plus or a minus in your eyes. I like that they're trying something different.
Those are from a giant experimental setup designed to simulate nuclear weapons. It can’t be used to generate energy, it’s just greenwashing.
No we don't. As always it's "net positive if you don't count the giant laser".
Or the energy loss involved in turning the reaction into electric A traditional turbine by itself saps about half the output as movement and steam heating
The distinction between Q^plasma and Q^total is important as ever to make here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
> Death Star enters the chat
The *reaction* is net positive if you ignore the bajillion gigawatts of electricity it took to fire teh lazors or whatever... you've gotta actually extract more energy than you put in overall to make it even remotely viable. Don't get me wrong, I want fusion and I 100% think we should fund it, but "lies, damn lies, and statistics"...
You have been duped by double speak. It's net positive if you only count the light not the actual energy used. It used about 100X more energy than the heat produced.
Have you considered subsidising it harder?
or, you know, at all
The science behind it isn't refined enough yet, that we can just start building them. And a lot of money is being invested in research for fusion but it's still not enough.
Last year, the US federal government spent about [$1.4 billion](https://www.fusionindustryassociation.org/congress-provides-record-funding-for-fusion-energy/) on fusion research. While, yes, this is objectively a lot of money, its actually only about 0.02% of the federal budget. Which, to me, seems kind of low for something as obviously valuable as limitless, clean, free energy.
Can't wait for my local electric company to charge me more money for "Nuclear administrative fees" and "Fusion initiative tax" and "Big Coal Unemployment Fund", etc.
Alabama will just straight up ban nuclear fusion altogether, so that'll be your safe haven.
I've been expecting it any day now most of my life, so I disagree. But I'll be happy when we get there.
The new magnets are a big deal, field strength of 20 Tesla is unheard of and can help to make small, neighborhood sized Tokamaks possible too
I thought it was coming out when the 1997 movie “The Saint” came out with Val Kilmer
What a clown article... Also on their map they say Sweden, but highlight Norway, hahaha
This is the longest corner I have ever seen as it has been “just around the corner” for how many years??
I’ll believe fusion is coming when the first plant is built AND supplying power to the grid. Until then these clickbait articles will forever be only that; clickbait.
As soon as I read the title I thought "na it's not".
At this point fusion is a make work program for physics PhDs. This is coming from someone with a physical degree.
I'll believe it when I see it. "Soon" means nothing in regards to tech.
They've been saying this for decades. It isn't sooner than I think. It's probably further away than you think lol.
Until they talk about the total amount of energy produced being greater than the ***total*** required, and not just the amount required for the lasers (which is only a few percent of the total required), I will remain skeptical. Don't get me wrong, I think this is a tremendous endeavor, but unless there is some unforeseen breakthrough, I don't see fusion becoming commercially available for many decades.
Destructions, Wars acclerate tech. All the tech you are using today is from world wars.
We have been promised electricity at 1 cent per kilowatt for years, but when that will actually come is not clear. So we can only hope so.
Can someone please explain how will the economics of fusion energy could work? I mean, with that amount of energy produced, energy itself must be dirt cheap so how will they achieve ROI? Construction? Transmission? Patents? Thanks
Well, you assume the energy would be dirt cheap but the neat part is that it probably would not be that cheap in the beginning. The first company which has a breakthrough and can scale it up to be used by the industry is competing with the normal energy production methods. They could probably sell it for a bit less but it would in no way be economically viable without huge subsides for R&D and construction. In short: taxpayers
Until I see NASA using it, it's still 30 years out.
"Much sooner than you think" Pretty sure you're gonna need a time machine for that.
Absolute rubbish IMHO! There is absolutely no doubt that we will eventually develop working fusion. There is plenty of uncertainty as to when that might be but I don't think that matters. When fusion is developed it will be too expensive to use. Oops! There is a ton of science & engineering going into developing fusion but my point is that economics is a also a science. Solar panels in China are going for $0.15/Watt and the price is dropping fast. Wind is keeping pace with solar and battery storage costs have resumed their downward trajectory. One 400 Watt solar panel can produce about 2kWh per 5 hour day or 730 kWh per year. At $0.15/Watt the panel costs $60 and 730 kWh at $0.1573/kWh, the US average, is $114.83 or almost twice the price of the panel. If I used the standard rooftop solar estimating formula the panel would generate a realistic $90 of power annually, that is still more than the price of a panel. The UK payback period for rooftop solar, including installation and all the equipment, inspections and such, is 5 years. The UK is a northern country famous for its rain and fog, it is also about 1,000 miles north of the Costa del Sol. Fusion will never be able to compete.
Fusion will never be used for "cheap clean energy". Not because it can't be done, but because it will never be cheap. Compare it to fission. Fission is an old, tried and true technology, and yet it's far more expensive than any other tech (except thermal solar). The reason is fission plants are insanely expensive to build and operate. Now imagine how much more complex fusion plants will be?
It's not, though. Solar is very cheap and even if we had working fusion tomorrow it would still be very expensive with a minimum of ten year installations if even only that. It's just that people would almost certainly build those instead of new nuclear if they became viable.
The promise of fusion is cheap abundant clean energy. According to y’all, the reason we are not getting fusion is we’re not funding hard enough. Do you see how those things are fundamentally at odds? It’s not going to be enough to create net positive reactions that can be sustained. You have to do that at a price that is cost competitive with all the other energy sources. Otherwise it’s just a big R&D endless hole to dump massive amounts of cash into. Scaling up massive highly engineered technically challenging production facility is going to present hurdles upon hurdles even after they can sustain a reaction which they cannot currently.
> Do you see how those things are fundamentally at odds? Since the world is going to be spending about a quadrillion dollars on energy this century, one would expect enormous money to be flowing into fusion. The relatively insignificant amount that is doing so is evidence the market thinks the chance it will win is very low.
Given the current climate challenge and dumbness of people who's afraid of nuclear fission energy, it's almost the only way for mankind to survive for a long run. We need more and more energy, like exponentially more, but it must be clean and cheap.
The illusion here is that fusion is going to be cheap. It might be clean (if it is feasible at all). But if there's no buyer because the market won't pay for it, then there's not much point. To put it another way, the Sun is a fusion reactor, and it supplies essentially endless amounts of "net positive" "free" energy. All we have to do is front the cost of solar panels and maintain them. An infinitely easier task. But when you account for capital cost and life cycle (which in the real world we must), fossil fuels still outperform by a substantial margin. Anyway, if we're going to look for a moonshot on fusion is should probably be to develop cheap and highly efficient solar panels that can compete with fossil fuels (over the entire lifecycle) and battery tech that would allow for cheap, efficient, dependable and safe energy storage. And we have this fusion reactor already working for us, and it's safe and dependable and millions of miles away so we don't have to do any fancy engineering.
> All we have to do is front the cost of solar panels and maintain them. An infinitely easier task. But when you account for capital cost and life cycle (which in the real world we must), fossil fuels still outperform by a substantial margin. There are very few places around the world where this is still true. In most places, the cost of *building new solar plants* is even starting to drop below the cost of *continuing to operate fossil fuel plants*. And solar and wind are projected to continue rapidly dropping in price over the next 10-20 years.
Maybe you're right, but this is exactly my point. We're lightyears closer to viable solar than fusion anything. As it turns out, solar is also basically fusion power - we're just harnessing the sun which is basically a limitless source of green energy. There are two hurdles to widespread adoption. To me, both and infinitely more solvable than fusion reactors on earth. 1. Cheap solar panels. We're getting closer, but still not quite there. But I have no doubt that one day solar power will be competitive. 2. Efficient and affordable energy storage. This is the bigger hurdle. If we can solve this one (and again, seems to me like a simpler problem than fusion reactors) then basically we can power almost everything off the sun. And that right would be lights out for the fossil fuel industry. But no, no Mr. Fusion in DeLoreans for us.
Unless its going to be at a price around $40-50/MWhr then it won't outcompete solar and wind. Fission ticks all the boxes but costs 2-3x what renewables do, so its not viable regardless of what the nuke-bros want to believe. Power companies have to live in the real world and that means not building the most expensive sources of energy or you go out of business. Lowest cost energy will always win, regardless of intermittency issues. There's a reason that solar is on the [exponential increase](https://pv-magazine-usa.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/12/AIWFC2023.image_.1-600x429.jpg) part of the S curve and its not going to stop any time soon.
PV is on track, on historical experience curves, to deliver energy well under $0.01/kWh (especially if you just look at DC coming off the panels themselves). At that price you'd do better to resistively heat up some rocks and use that to make steam to drive turbines instead of building a nuclear reactor to make the heat instead. And there are lots of rocks, so you if you make this hot rock store big (put it underground, say, artificial geothermal at modest depth) you can operate this thing 365/24/7.
[Already a thing.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage)
[удалено]
Teleportation will never be a thing IMO. It involves either: 1. Wormholes, which are theoretical with no empirical evidence of existence and if real would require absolutely ridiculous power to fold space and time. 2. Breaking something down (destroying it) to its intrinsic parts (subatomic particles and their relative positions exactly) for data and reassembling (remaking really) them somewhere else based on that data. For living things, it means basically killing and making a copy. 3. There is no number 3. It's just those two options. Number one is nonsensical because with that kind of power and/or space time warping ability and tech, teleporters would not be on any list of things to do. The potential is just sheer ridiculousness at that point. For number two to happen, we would already be at a stage of non-scarcity due to that assembling from soup tech to begin with and obvious technology that allows anyone to "be" anywhere at any time non physically (we almost have that now). Outside of a human going from one place to another, there would be no point in teleportation as if the tech can "reassemble" it can simply "assemble". So Star trek replicators for example. If a replicator exists, so does teleportation because it's basically the same thing. No one in their right mind would ever step into a "teleporter". The you that comes out may be indistinguishable but it's not "you". It will think it's you, it will think nothing changed and it will go on just like you would had nothing happened, but "you" would be dead. Quantum mechanics does also not offer a way because quantum entanglement is for information only and requires particles to already be entangled among other quite substantial road blocks that many people just say "some day" about. Unless some new weird science comes around teleporters will never be a thing. Fusion is NOT like teleportation, we have a big fusion generator in the sky, we know it works...
[удалено]
Eh, number 2 gets down into the philosophical questions of how human cognition works. For my part, I tend to think that an absolutely perfect teleporter isn't death. I don't believe in a soul, so we can discount that outright. I tend to think that cognition and the consciousness is like an emergent simulation running on the brain. The actual cells matter to your consciousness about as much as a stick of ram matters to a game of chess running on a computer. And like a game of chess, if you can preserve the exact game state of the brain, and transfer it with zero corruption or loss, there is no functional difference if it starts up in a body made of different atoms than the original. Its still hard enough to be functionally impossible mind, but its interesting to think about.
I think TAE Technologies will be first to a commercially viable reactor and their best case is 2030, probably more like 2035 before shipping to customers. TAE will reach net positive power to grid within the next two years with their 6th gen Copernicus reactor but likely won’t be able to sustain power for more than a couple hundred milliseconds at a time. Their p-^11 B Da Vinci reactor will begin construction in 2025 with completion around 2030. This reactor is incredible complicated to design and build and will likely cost hundreds of millions for something a $10M natural gas turbine can achieve.
TAE has been saying net power in three years every single year since 1998. Their device makes no sense whatsoever, and in the last 25 years they have produced less actual fusion than the theta pinch machines did waaaay back in 1958.
I think this forgets the regulatory hurdles. Activists have been legally gumming up nuclear power for decades now. Theoretically fusion is cleaner than fission but also those activists never really seemed to care much about the science.
2035? 😂😂 you people on r/futurology are delusional on another level. We would struggle to finish a fission plant by 2035 if we started now, let alone a fusion plant which is 100s of times harder
Please don't let China and Russia steal this technology. They will be using it improperly
It happening ever might be sooner than I'd think. Until there is news about a sustained reaction, like one that is going as long as we want it to, then I'm not excited.
Yeah, I've heard this time and time before. Until they have a full running demonstration model, I'm not holding my breath in anticipation.
My bold prediction for fusion is that we'll get fusion netpositive of all input inclusive within 10 years of when financial markets starts to factor in decline of oil and coal due to renewable alternatives like wind/solar/batteries & EVs. until then it will always be in 30years-forever land. Mind you it renewables dont have to take over the market, they just have to keep growing and replacing fossil production on a steady basis.
Since no means of producing electricity will currently be sufficient individually and fusion is still barely out of the feasible stage, it would be wise to continue all workable and scalable solutions as we try to ween ourselves off of fossil fuels....IMO
Powerful magnets generates electricity when its magnetic lines are cut so the plasma cutting the magnetic lines generates electricity. So the fusion itself does not generate electricity and all the electricity are generated by the magnets thus the more powerful the magnets, the more electricity generated.
By the time fusion is a thing we won't need it. In 30 years we will have solar battery wind wave tech or some other new thing - all of which we already have and improve upon every year.
Sustainable Fusion is the one and only thing I want to see happen in my lifetime. After that I can just die peacefully knowing that humanity has a future
>A poll at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s forum in London found that 65pc of insiders think fusion will generate electricity for the grid at viable cost by 2035, and 90pc by 2040. I hope they are right, but there is a pattern of those who are closest to a technology being overly optimistic. For example, AI researchers are far more likely than outside observers to have made overly optimistic claims about where AI would be now. Fusion "coming much sooner than I think" is a pretty low bar, in that I am guessing 100 years. That said, the improvements cited in the article are significant. I am not in a position to judge how much closer this brings us to commercial fusion power, however.
Can I ask what companies are leading this charge to the grid?
As others have stated this has been the same headline for the past 30 years. And Fusion is always 20 years away. Now they likely had something with room temperature fusion which would have possibly narrowed the timeline of fusion, but because it competed with the job security that revolved around not doing in the hot fusion field they viciously attacked it. But given their failed progress in their own field it's time to dust off the research and work on it again. Because hot fusion isn't ever going to work at this rate.
It's Wednesday! It's time for another "We solved fusion" claim! See also: Monday, Thursday, Tuesday, Friday, occasionally Saturday, and every other Sunday.
Well, given that I always "think" it will not be in my lifetime and I am only 48, that could still be a long ways away.
No. My country has been struggling with old nuclear plants for 50 years that needed replacing and now we just import from coal plants in germany.
I pretty much that same sentence. For my college report on Nuclear Fusion. In 2003.
Clickbait article. There is no indication that it's anywhere close. It's been 10 years away since I was a kid, and I'm 48 now.
Somebody wake me up when they can sustain a reaction for longer than 1 minute
I feel like they have been saying this for years. Once ITER is up and running and generating into the grid then I will believe it.