It's hard to fully comprehend the impact of new energy sources on civilization. So much of what we do is only possible because we have the necessary energy at our disposal.
When civilization finds new energy sources, most other technologies level up as well.
Consider one of the biggest problems with desalinization systems: pumping water inland. The actual separation of salt from seawater isn't the most energy intensive part of the process. Desalinization works great for wealthy coastal communities.
But a large nation like the US or China would never be able to fulfill the water demand of its people through desalinization alone because the cost of transporting coastal water inland would be prohibitive.
Enter something like fusion, which is orders of magnitude more efficient on a per pound of fuel basis than fossil fuels and something like distributing water to everyone in the US from the coasts becomes possible.
I wonder if extra dissipated heat while doing this would contribute to global warming. But probably scale of adding heat directly to atmosphere isn't comparable to insulation effect of CO2
This is yet another area where high temperature superconductors revolutionizes its engineering. I can't wait for more insights to be made in this domain: the way superconductors behave is actually becoming clearer and clearer from one year to another.
Ambient temperature superconductors are the holy grail of the field, of course, but this project shows that even ~80 K superconductors can substantially reduce the size of magnets (cooling apparatus included), which can open doors to new applications.
Exciting times... Oh, and I can't wait for ITER either. While the project was never meant to be commercially viable, it should offer some great insights into commercial fusion energy.
I cannot help but think that ITER has been a harmful mistake. With at least 17 years to go before it is operational, it already seems obsolescent in some key technological areas, such as magnets, yet it keeps on going, sucking up funds that might be better applied elsewhere (though whether they would be is an open question.) The project reminds me of Britain's attempt to build the airliner of the future in the Bristol Brabazon [1], but which was obsolete by the time it flew. The biggest cost was probably in lost time.
And even then, the time until “operational” is not spent idling, the project has sparked and funded lots of research in various domains. It’s like the space race, at some point you just have to start building something for there to be any actual progress.
Indeed, but I wonder if ITER has had a chilling effect on other such projects that could take advantage of newer technology to leapfrog it. In fact, some of the recent projects are looking more like the space race, which is an encouraging sign, and perhaps especially if it lights a fire under ITER - let's have a fusion race!
The article cited 2035 as the date when ITER is expected to begin producing fusion energy. While preliminary R&D is necessary, it is all for (nearly) nothing unless and until it results in fusion at a scale that advances the state of the art.
ITER reminds me of the Space Shuttle, the Joint Strike Fighter, and (to give a private sector example) Intel Itanium.
Large bureaucracies seem prone to fixation on huge omnibus money sponge projects that "everyone can get behind" but that starve out everything else. The fact that these projects are so big tends to make them slow and not very innovative.
ITER is a political tool, not a scientific one. The real cutting edge fusion research is being done at some small private companies trying to make aneutronic fusion work, and from places like MIT. If we’re ever going to break the endless cycle of “in 50 years” it will not be a result of ITER.
ITER has some real engineering value, though. A lot of it is figuring out the missing pieces about logistics, control apparatus, material behaviour, the technologies that are actually practical to implement, and various requirements that have not necessarily been foreseen before construction.
A lot of that can probably explain the various construction delays that happened over the course of its construction, and it probably explains in part why this articles states that it is complementary to ITER.
A big part of those insights will be had before it starts operating, so I wouldn't rule out its contribution to a hypothetical sub-2050 commercial fusion industry.
Edit: and it probably has some scientific value as well, but not being a fusion expert, I can't comment on this.
ITER isn’t really a source of breakthroughs in necessary materials; it didn’t develop new superconductors, hasn’t solved the fusion blanket problem, it won’t be breakeven, Stellerators already are superior in terms of containment, and ITER’a fusion vessel is still intolerant of sputtering. The delays are famously a result of so many countries vying for contracts, and the result is a high performance machine built by committee.
It doesn’t even attempt to generate “new insights” it’s just a bad, old idea at scale.
Tokamak Energy[1] seems to have taken a similar path with smaller, HTS-based reactors. I don't have the expertise to evaluate these projects but, judging from the statements of the people working with these new superconductors, fusion power might actually be 10 years away this time.
Go ENI! It's amazing how an Italian Oil and Gas company is working hard to collaborate with research with the aim of revolutionizing energy extraction.
This is inspiring and giving hope on the future.
The key is diversifying, ENI also just started the largest non-institutional supercomputer [0] to improve oil exploration, it's not like they are giving up on fossil, just hedging their position.
Most oil and gas companies have rebranded themselves as "energy companies" and are fortunately starting to invest in alternative technologies. Norwegian Statoil is another great example: They are invested in offshore floating wind farms. These companies know the reliance on fossil fuels is ending.
Cheap nuclear fusion energy would be a great human achievement. I do wonder about its effects on society though. Any reading containing well reasoned speculation on that? Here's what I can think of myself.
* A cheaper, cleaner energy source might outcompete fossil fuel. Less air polution, yay!
* Cheaper energy would significantly increase energy consumption. Think Jevons paradox[0]. The effect of that increased heat production on global warming can't be good...
* Globally stabilising geopolitical effect. Less dependence on geographically confined scarce energy resources like Middle Eastern/Siberian/Venezuelan oil, Sahara sun, ... thanks to a globally available basic resource.
There is one effect you're missing, the part where those countries which were dependent on income from fossil fuels won't just quietly subside back into their previous state of being. While Venezuela has already dealt with the problem by self-immolation the same can not be said about two other big oil and gas exporters: the middle eastern countries and Russia. To start with the latter, Russia stands to lose not only a major source of income if the demand for natural gas were to plummet but also a lot of influence which they hitherto exert by virtue of having control over the natural gas supply for a large part of Europe. The country has the potential to replace the income from gas with income from other natural resources and from industrial output but they'll need time to gear up their economy for the switch.
The middle east is a different story. Apart from oil and gas exports the region does not have much to offer in the way of natural resources or industrial output. When - not if - oil and gas end their dominance in the energy hierarchy the region will be hit hard, also due to the fact that, in contrast to Norway, no substantial provisions have been made for this scenario. Some countries are trying to find alternative sources of income, e.g. Dubai which seems to be set to become the Las Vegas of the middle east but this scenario is only feasible as long as their is an audience which is willing and able to spend lavishly. When the oil money goes, so does that audience. Fusion energy will be a boon in the long term but in the short time it will have a destabilising effect in at least this region.
The demand for Russian natural gas will only plummet if there's a huge shift from natgas heating to electric heat, and that would take hundreds of billions (if not trillions) of Euros to accomplish.
If electricity would be free, I would convert to electric heating in a heartbeat. Replacing a gas burner with an electric coil should be pretty cheap compared to the yearly costs of heating.
The problem with that is that electricity isn't free. Even if energy production suddenly became basically free and we removed taxes and renewable energy charges, I would still pay €0.07/kWh just for using the power grid. And that's unlikely to go down since the grid would need massive upgrades to handle large but cheap fusion plants.
There will be, whatever way the wind blows. The Netherlands is a good example here, a country which produces natural gas itself and moved from coal and oil to natural gas heating (and cooking) after natural gas was found in Slochteren in the province of Groningen in 1959 [1]. Back then all houses (with few exceptions) were connected to the natural gas distribution network. Natural gas was the mainstay of both the Dutch economy for decades to come. This is changing, rapidly. All new houses will be fossil-free in 2050, many houses already are. I bought a new house in 1995 which was not connected to the gas pipes, heating was done through surplus heat from a nearby power plant.
In Sweden - where I live now - geothermal heating using heat pumps is currently the biggest growing sector in a market where around 40% of houses uses some form of electric heating [2 (Swedish)] due to a push from the government in the '60s to move to (then cheap) electric heating.
Both Sweden and the Netherlands are highly developed countries which are in the forefront of developments so this does not mean all countries will immediately dump natural gas. It does give an idea of where developments are going though, especially seen in the light of rising tensions between gas-producing countries and those which are dependent on them.
Point 2 is largely not an issue, solar insolation vastly outweighs human energy consumption in all forms.
CO2 is bad because it increases the energy trapped from insolation, a CO2 free power source that double energy consumption as a whole would be far better than the effects of CO2 on the atmosphere, very much a nice problem to have tbh.
> Global energy consumption is roughly 15 terawatts annually. The sun provides around 174 petawatts of energy to Earth, of which 89 petawatts is absorbed by the planet.
> Cheaper energy would significantly increase energy consumption... The effect of that increased heat production on global warming can't be good...
Electric energy being generated and turned to heat energy is an insignificant part of the global energy budget.
Solar irradiance hits the earth with about 1000W/square meter, or a total of 1.73x10^17 W aka 173 petawatts [1], non-stop. Imagine a grid of electric space heaters, all separated by just the lengths of their cords, covering every wave of the oceans, every row of the cornfields, every inch of Antarctica. That's the effect of the sun.
Global energy production averages some 0.018 petawatts. Not quite as big a difference as I would have expected, actually.
But the point stands that using less of energy types which have a side-effect of increasing the heating effect of the Sun by a little, even if it means multiplying total energy use by a lot, has a net negative effect on global warming.
I truly hope this is true, but when I think about the creation of some technology that lets us do this, I'm left with a roadblock I can't get around: Who is going to pay for this, when we can't even get the US to agree to cost-saving commitments to reduce CO2 output?
If we get to a grid that's ~100% renewable, we'll likely have oversized it a massive amount, like 50%-200% more energy could be produced than is needed at the time of productions, to deal with seasonal and weather variability. Let's call all that energy free, because it has zero marginal cost and would be curtailed otherwise. Who pays for the capital on the equipment to pull out CO2 from the atmosphere, and the disposal of the resulting tons of carbon?
1) People, who don't want to be affected by global warming. Right now nobody is affected enough to pay and it is too costly (estimates are $500/metric ton, while emission per capita is around 20 tonnes/year).
2) Captured carbon can be sold commercially for use in plastics industry, at some point it will be cheaper, than oil/gas extraction.
3) Carbon emission trading already exists, some companies even doing it voluntary, like Google. Direct air capture can piggy-back that system.
Fusion propulsion would be very beneficial to any space operations beyond the Earth's orbit. I think NASA have a project investigating this technology.
Mini-Self Contained Electric Charging Stations, that can charge 100-200 cars simultaneously.
Better recycling of material due to energy abundance.
Less Waste on Energy Transport.
Tons of light pollution.
Did I say, Much better recycling technologies ?
I'm dreaming here, but could we with "unlimited" power radiate this power into space ?
I'm thinking about a heat pump which would make the Earth colder, and radiate the heat to space, effectively cooling Earth (that's how indians made ice in the past) ?
In theory that should be possible. But it seems much simpler to remove some greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere, or to deploy ultrathin sunshades into orbit to decrease the brightness of the sun for part of the day.
Replacing crude oil, removing the market for Middle-Eastern oil would not cause political stability in the short to mid term. Suddenly yanking the economic rug out from under those nations would cause massive instabilty.
There is also the problem of the fossil-fuel lobby that just can't accept their source of income is going to become less relevant by the year and hopefully fades into the pages of history within the century.
Fusion is still exciting, but with normal renewable (solar, wind) costs plummeting the way they are is there still such a compelling case for pouring money into fusion? This one aims to produce a working plant within 15 years. I'm not sure that any of the other efforts are closer to being viable (if they work at all). That's the kind of time frame in which we may master offshore wind and grid-attached storage like the Tesla batteries. Might not even need fusion at the point.
(Except maybe for spacecraft, in the much more distant future)
Solar and wind will never be enough to cover all energy demand. It is a common misconception, it is not even possible to reduce energy consumption to low enough that solar and wind would be sufficient.
If we want to stop burning fuel, we must research nuclear. Of course it is unlikely that we would stop burning fuel any time soon, and that's why 15 years is unfortunately not an inconvenient timeline.
If you're interested in the numbers behind this argument I highly recommend the book "Sustainable energy without the hot air".
>If you're interested in the numbers behind this argument I highly recommend the book "Sustainable energy without the hot air".
The numbers in that book do not support your case. And that's for a small island nation without many renewable resources, trying to be energy independent, written at a time when renewable cost many multiples of what they cost now.
Wind and solar can easily provide many multiples of our total energy demand, even after the entire world is brought up to a European standard of energy consumption.
Nuclear may have an impact, but it's going to be 20+ years before it can. Every attempt to build is met with massive delays and almost criminal incompetence. We can't build nuclear right now. Maybe SMRs will be different, if they will never be as cheap as renewables. SMR might be the expensive thing that gets us from 80% to 100% renewables, or it may be some other technology for seasonal energy storage.
The nuclear industry has let the world down when nuclear was needed most. The so called nuclear renaissance that should have started in 2008 in the US and the UK has fizzled due to construction mismanagement. We needed those reactors to be built quickly, and cheaply, and then to replicate that success again and again, but due to the failure we must invest heavily in wins solar and storage until a new generation of more competent nuclear construction is possible.
Thanks, I agree that the nuclear industry has been letting the world down. I don't know why it's so hard for the nuclear industry to get a grip on itself, but it clearly hasn't.
I've always felt that nuclear energy is more promising because of the significantly lower resource intensity. If at some point some company manages to reliably produce nuclear power plants at a predictable and reasonable cost, then just by sheer economics it should outperform crazy ideas like building hundreds of thousands of windmills. Not to mention the unforeseen consequences building that many windmills could have on the environment.
But in practice, if it's safe and easy to invest in wind energy, and even marginally cost effective, then it will become reality.
From what I remember of the book, all the numbers were order of magnitude estimates, and things like solar panels being a few factors cheaper doesn't really change the idea that they're expensive and have to cover a lot of land. That said, it might have underestimated wind, especially for a large country like the US.
> " it is not even possible to reduce energy consumption to low enough that solar and wind would be sufficient."
I don't think it's accurate to say it's not possible, it's clearly possible as humans have lived without electricity and fossil fuels before, and all we'd need in order to survive would be for the existing renewable energy production to be made available for water processing and transportation. However, the chances of us collectively reducing our energy consumption in time to avoid long lasting environmental damage so that we can make our current renewable energy installations to cover all energy demand is very slim, so non-renewable clean energy technology like nuclear should be made part of our energy mix.
> it is not even possible to reduce energy consumption to low enough that solar and wind would be sufficient.
What do you really mean by that? Solar has enough capacity to power some million times our energy usage, so you are clearly not talking about bare capacity.
So a panel is about 261 KWh per year per square meter. We need about 25PWh, so that is about 100.000km2 of solar panel. There's lots of desert in the U.S., so we could sacrifice one of them and cover it with solar panels, and cover all of our needs.
Note that a solar farms come in at around 120 million USD per square KM, that would be about 12 trillion dollars. (And those are largely the expensive import-raw-materials-from-abroad kind of dollars, not the cheap give-jobs-to-americans dollars). I suppose you could make it part of the wall with mexico to share some construction costs.
So yeah the US has enough area to solar power the US a couple hundred times over (not a couple million).
What I meant by that we can't reduce energy consumption enough is that even without our electricity costs, and reducing transport costs etc, there are still petawatts of power spent on services we have no direct control over but that make our lives easy, healthy and comfortable.
Indeed I overestimated the solar potential. It can cover many thousand times the human energy consumption, not many million. I don't know where you are placing that 260kWh/year panel, but it not top quality by any means.
About solar panels being "expensive import raw materials", they are a process literally created by the US, mostly developed there, and that you only import for political reasons. About the actual price, the theoretical limits are way too cheap to matter on our current context, it just requires engineering improvements.
Came here to say the same thing. Anytime an energy discussion comes up, I try to help dispell this myth that wind and solar will solve all our problems, especially in the global context of rising energy needs. If you care about the enviroment and our future on this planet, it behooves you to look into nuclear research and get uptodate. I would love to see us solve the clean energy problem fully this century, and the key factor is going to be nuclear.
I can't see any comment from you on this story from 10 days ago that was titled:
"After rising for 100 years, electricity demand is flat (vox.com)"
Not everyone agrees that rising energy needs are a given, or even just a myth that we should be politely accommodating.
It would behoove <sic> you to separate fusion and fission from any call to action to investigation 'nuclear' as they are substantially different in terms of waste and safety.
Yes, I didn't mention fission for 2 reasons #1 anyone who looks into nuclear already knows this and #2 anyone else is usually just confused by it.
I don't spend every day on HN so I just missed that story and dont have time to look into it now, but almost every article I've ever read till now had ways the energy was displaced and not actually reduced or at a plateau. Also why would you not want more energy? You can do more things, better, faster, etc. The only reason not to want energy is because of externalities, which is reasonable but needs to be weighed in the context of what your giving up i.e. convience, efficiency, productivity, etc.
I always draw the distinction between fission and fusion when talking to people who do, or don't, know the difference - as the former benefits from the clarity, and the latter from the (new) understanding.
It's like using solar now to describe only photo-voltaic cells - solar thermal is likely to be a much more interesting technology for grid-supply, but few people that aren't interested in the area know about it (at least here in Australia, where we haven't dabbled much, and have an administration that's very pro-coal).
As to your question - you answered it yourself, I see. You wouldn't want more energy if it's going to ultimately cost you your civilisation -- that's the easy answer.
But also if you have any concept of restraint, moderation, efficiency improvements, etc. (Though mostly if it's going to cost you your civilisation.)
It's always been my instinct that decentralisation of energy production is the true path forward, regardless of method.
If most of us had solar panels on our roofs for example you would reduce the demand on the power grid. It's not enough to be completely self reliant except for a very few people, but if everyone dropped their consumption by say 20% on average, that's a whole lot of power that centralised plants don't need to generate.
For people living on larger properties, a small wind turbine or two is also not out of the question.
Right, as Musk said, we're going to need a mixture of nuclear and wind. If my calculations are correct you need about 500.000 windmills to cover electricity demand in the US. But electricity demand is only a small fraction of total energy use.
How much energy do all cars in the US use? How much do tractors working the fields? How much do factories burning their own? How much do ships transporting goods? How much do planes flying around? How much do factories in China making our goods? Or mining operations in Indonesia or Congo mining our materials?
If you look at the full picture of sustainable energy, you'll find that covering electricity use by spending a trillion dollars on a 100x100 mile wind farm is a cool idea and a step in the direction, but it's only a step. There's a whole journey ahead of us, and that's what that book teaches.
If we put aside the energy requirements for our planet and think more upward bound.
Fusion solves the problem of being too far away from the Sun and using that as an energy source. Imagine being able to live in Mars, Titan, Ganymede, Enceladus or beyond and have access to energy.
It would truly be a game changer. In a 100 years of it's inception, humans could truly be a multi-planet species.
Renewables are ecological disaster in slow motion. Renewables do not provide baseline energy. Renewables do not produce anywhere amount of energy fusion can produce. Fusion is the cleanest energy source. Fusion allows to cheaply reverse any chemical process that is reversible using huge amounts of energy. I.e. fusion makes electric cars obsolete - just produce high-energy-density whatever chemical fuel you can imagine. Fusion revolutionizes agriculture - you can produce fertilizers very very cheaply. Fusion makes desalinization cheap and affordable for anyone.
Wohha - we need to go to 0 emissions in 30 years. Even in the very best case Fusion will be producing ~20% of our energy by then (and I stress, this was achieved with Fission in some states because of bomb making; so it proves it's possible but definitely not going to happen by itself). So we need renewables and electric cars for at least 70 years. And electric cars actually seem better (faster, more reliable) than ice ones.
Also, just because you can make fertilizers and put them on crops doesn't mean that's a good idea. Water courses all over the world are poisoned with chemical fertilizers. Same for desalinization - the by products are nasty.
And fusion itself will produce radioactive waste. The linings of the reactors become ablated and radioactive and I think that one of the great benefits of Professor Whyte's scheme is that servicing the reactor becomes much easier and faster - but the removed components need to be dealt with carefully.
It's a great and exciting thing - but not a panacea; we have to work hard to deliver a liveable world for 10 billion and the 500 years after the peak.
I never said it is panacea. I said it is civilizational game changer.
Some of your intuitions are wrong because they assume no source of cheap energy. With cheap clean energy you can scrub CO2 out of air, you can rework any nasty byproduct of desalination into its components and recombine them into something safe or reuse in other industrial processes. You can recycle literally anything.
> And fusion itself will produce radioactive waste.
This is not a technical or economical problem. You put this stuff into metal containers, you put those metal containers into a hangar, you put guards to prevent people from damaging containers. We do it now and we do it well.
> And electric cars actually seem better (faster, more reliable) than ice ones.
While I love electric cars (and I want to buy one), they are not really better. Those batteries are both toxic and put a huge ecological burden on environment in production and recycling. They have a short term future and promise, since we need to stop producing CO2 now. Long term? Not so sure, since progress on batteries front is and was very slow.
the concept (which would produce 190MW(e)) uses 90 tonnes of beryllium.
According to the USGS, the current total world annual production of Be is 220 tonnes, and total global resource is estimated at 100,000 tonnes.
The world uses ~20 TW of primary energy, so roughly 100,000 ARC reactors would be needed to supply the world, using about 100x as much Be as the estimated amount available for mining.
Unless Be supplies can be drastically increased, this concept is at best a niche player.
It's said that practical fusion energy is always 10 years in the future. I see this project innovates and projects instead 15 years in the future!
In all seriousness, I'm happy to see new projects using current superconducting technology, I just wish we could build these things faster and iterate more quickly.
