I don't know about commercial by 2030 but leap frogging ITER doesn't seem far fetched at all because of the all signficant advances in superconductors achieved after ITER was planned out. Also, if the new superconductors do work out, it's very likely that all other forms of energy generation and grid level storage will become almost immediately obsolete and any additional focus moving forward would be only on improving the efficiency of fusion. The remaining use cases for solar would probably then be on small off-grid type situations.
I'm a nuclear engineer working at a laboratory known for fusion research. Commercial fusion power at any scale is not happening by 2030. 2040 or 2050 are more realistic and may still be a stretch.
What signs do you see that it might work at all (and that it's not a hopeless endeavor)? As a layman it's so hard to understand how something so hot and so confined could ever be made to react reliably with continuous fuel and energy production to produce power on a large scale.
I don't think anyone is proposing continuous fuel (even fission reactors typically don't work like that - you have to shut them down to swap out the fuel rods periodically). The idea is that you inject (say) some deuterium into a blast chamber, it explodes like a miniature thermonuclear bomb, and you gather the explosive energy in vaguely the same way a internal combustion engine (like in cars) gathers energy from fuel-air bombs in its engine cyliders.
And we already know (roughly) how to build that, it's just that the version we know how to build is so ridiculously, impractically huge that you could fit a small city in its blast chamber... because it runs on actual, non-miniature, thermonuclear bombs. The difficulty is scaling that down to something that doesn't have a upfront cost measured in multiples of the world GDP before it starts generating power (in quantities measured in multiples of current global electrical consumption, and likely multiples of global energy consumption period).
The blast chamber that you chuck nuclear weapons in is not a good analogy, I suspect we don't know how to build such a thing that has a net positive energy yield when you factor in how much energy it takes to build a thermonuclear weapon and the terrible thermal efficiency such a contraption would have. Inertial confinement fusion is basically a more manageable version of this idea and we still haven't hit breakeven there. Magnetic confinement fusion is widely believed to be the more viable path to commercial fusion energy anyway. Right now fusion is largely a game of chasing margins to get things efficient enough that first the plasma is self sustaining (ignition) and then second yields a net positive of energy. ITER or its successor will hopefully achieve the first goal (ITER was originally supposed to but is no longer targeting full ignition, at least initially), then hitting the second goal is what will be needed to be practical as a power source.
Also, just to add to your point there are (basically) continuously fueled fission reactors, see e.g. CANDU as well as some more exotic actually continuously fueled designs that use liquid fuels. Continuously fueled designs would probably be more desirable if they weren't such a proliferation concern but that's a different story.
Wait, are you saying we know how to build a World Wonder that produces infinite energy, but we’re not doing it? What’ll we do if Ghandi builds it first?
Because we don't have enough energy demand to make it worthwhile. Even if we had enough money (and political will) to fund it, we'd be better off spending it on a space elevator, since we can actually use that enough to cover the costs.
And I'm only half joking. The energy yield of fusion is there and the basic physics are pretty well understood. Progress has been agonizingly slow but steady. We generally understand what needs to be done to get there, but it's a slow and complicated process that will take a long time and several more expensive, large-scale tests like ITER to push it along. The payoff is still a ways away and the up front costs are high, so barring investment on the scale of the Manhattan project it is something we will have to continue slowly grinding away at. The upside is fusion research is truly pushing the bounds of engineering, which will continue to yield benefits in other areas along the way.
Edit: I'll also add that we have already built fusion reactors, we just haven't gotten them efficient enough that they generate enough energy to sustain themselves.
>barring investment on the scale of the Manhattan project
The Manhattan project cost about $30 billion in today's dollars, I believe.
We have IPOs that raise close to that amount of money these days (e.g. Alibaba).
It's half a percent of federal spending in 2020 (admittedly not a normal year).
GameStop has lost over $30 billion from its peak valuation.
Your matter of fact claim that there's not enough capital in today's world for fusion power development really makes me wonder.
Once upon a time, I read a comment by someone somewhere that "everyone" (who is "in the know") knows fusion break-even is infeasible, but the research is relevant to maintaining nuclear weapons stockpiles.
Besides, if fusion power was possible...wouldn't Elon Musk be working on it?
Comparing the raw numbers in terms of cost I don't think quite gives the right picture, you have to think about scale of investment. Whole (large) towns and biggest-in-the-world facilities were raised and the brightest minds committed. And it would likely take longer. Maybe a better comparison would be to the Manhattan project and the atomic weapons research apparatus in the decades that followed. Current input to fusion research is a big monetary investment worldwide, but I think in terms of effort it's not quite the same scale especially if you talk about the whole world committing to that degree.
I will add that I'm not sure it would be worth committing this amount of resources solely to fusion. Obviously I think it's worth pursuing long term, but not necessarily at that scale given the costs it would have in terms of other scientific research. I never claimed the amount of capital isn't there nor meant to imply it; it probably is possible (by 2040-2050, 2030 seems impossible to me) but not realistic barring some dramatic changes in the world.
Regarding why wouldn't Elon Musk be working on it... let's ignore that several other prominent billionaires have invested in fusion. But currently fusion is not an appealing private investment outside of philanthropy. There are a lot of up front costs and uncertainty for a payoff that is way down the road. Whether it's worth investing in is up to him, but "whether or not Elon Musk is doing it" is not a good measure of viability.
Regarding the comment that everybody in the know thinks breakeven is infeasible, that's certainly not the prevailing nor even a common view with the people I know working on fusion. Opinions are mixed on how far we are from breakeven and how far we are in terms of the technology required to achieve it, but as I noted previously the basic energy yield of fusion is there and the route to get there is mostly clear, if long. ITER has little cross-application with nuclear weapons, that would be facilities like NIF which aren't the main focus of research towards power production.
I'll add that I have no skin in this game, my research is unrelated to fusion I just happen to talk with those guys a lot and took some classes in grad school. I see none of those sweet gubbment fusion research bucks.
>currently fusion is not an appealing private investment outside of philanthropy. There are a lot of up front costs and uncertainty for a payoff that is way down the road
As opposed to the Mars rocket business? As opposed to money-losing biotech? Bitcoin, now representing around $1 trillion in total? Is the disinterest in long term investments why the US government is thinking about issuing 50 and 100 year bonds, as well as the 30 year that already exist?
In 2021, saying that significant capital is only available to non-speculative investments with short term payoffs sounds like something from another dimension. One without the GameStop hearings.
Elon Musk isn't literally the sole litmus test of whether fusion is feasible; he just represents the general zeitgeist. If a few billion dollars would make it happen in the near future, how could it be that everyone is disinterested? Especially now that taking climate change seriously seems to be snowballing.
SpaceX talks a lot about Mars, but so far they've mostly stuck to Earth orbit, because that's where the money is. They are starting to do some Moon-related stuff – because both NASA and space tourists will pay to go there. Even Starship, which was designed as a vehicle to get to Mars, most of its actual use is going to be Earth orbit or lunar, it is going to be very many years before its Martian use cases outnumber its Earth/Moon ones.
SpaceX will probably fund a few unmanned trips to Mars out of their own pocket – land a couple of Starships containing supplies that might be useful to future colonists. But I'm sure straight after doing that they'll be knocking on NASA's door suggesting that NASA pay them for some Mars missions... imagine how many (and how big) rovers you could fit on a Starship.
Musk has said he wants SpaceX to develop the necessary transport technologies to support colonisation of Mars – and they'll try to use non-Mars-related revenue sources to pay for that development. But he's also said the role of actually setting up a Martian colony (as opposed to just providing transportation to get there) won't fall to SpaceX.
I have a theory – which could just be wild speculation on my part – at some point Musk is going to set up something like a "Mars Colonisation Foundation" as a non-profit tasked with colonising Mars. And when he dies he's going to leave it the vast bulk of his assets to it (I'm sure he'll leave his family enough to live comfortably, but they don't need billions to do that). And the "Foundation" will end up owning a big chunk of SpaceX, and will be a major customer of SpaceX, but will remain separate from it. It will actually try to pay for the colonisation of Mars, not SpaceX themselves. And it will stick at it as long as it takes (even if it takes a few lifetimes to pull it all off.)
It's not a few billion dollars, it's hundreds, and probably decades before it pays off. Private investors have dabbled with alternative approaches to fusion that promise lower costs, but none of them have really panned out and it's pretty much all fallen to government sponsored research.
I expect private investment will pick up eventually, when the technology is a little closer to market. I'm not at all disagreeing that we should be investing more in it and that it's looking increasingly urgent, it's still a relatively small effort compared to other things.
The only way significant progress on commercial fusion is likely by 2030 is if it's approached by industry and government similarly to how COVID vaccine development was -- everyone drops everything and throws everything they've got at it. Another example of similar financial and institutional commitment would be the Apollo program.
This level of commitment will probably only happen if climate change (and the related ecological and economic collapses) are taken as seriously as COVID, which is unlikely since, once the effects become obvious as COVID, it will be too late. And even COVID has large numbers of people denying reality.
Even if a massive commitment to fusion started now, by 2030 we'd likely only have a promising proof-of-concept or two, with several more failed projects on the side. Wide-scale deployment would still be years away even with many companies tooling up to start building pilot commercial reactors while assuming high financial risk, since profitability would be far from guaranteed.
[edit] Another point of comparison would be semiconductor manufacturing advances over the past 10 years. Tens of billions were spent researching and building factories, and in the end only a few companies made it to 7nm. And that was a clearly profitable endeavor iterating on already proven techniques!
That's interesting, do you think that SPARC and HTS advancements like for example VIPER cables point towards a faster path to market for fusion than ITER?
No, because the fusion reactors using HTS still have horribly lower power density. The ARC design has a power density 40x worse than a PWR primary reactor vessel, and involves far more difficult engineering. How is this going to be cheaper than fission, which itself is not competitive?
Not. Nowhere has it done well. It's just too complex with too many interdependent parts. Construction has proved to be beyond the competency of those trying to build plants. And now, it's just too late. The iteration time for nuclear designs is measured in decades, going up against renewable and storage technologies iterating in periods of a few years.
Fusion would make fission look dead simple. If fission reactors cannot be constructed on schedule or budget, how bad would fusion reactors be?
If you think regulation is the problem, explain just which regulations you mean.
It was an honest question. I don't know which specific regulations, I've never built one but I have heard those who did lament the cost and trouble in even obtaining a site.
From what I can see fission reactors are doing just fine in France and Belgium. I don't know the specific numbers but the French don't seem worse off economically, despite having the greenest grid on the planet.
Fission has a number of disadvantages over fusion that make it a reasonable possibility of it being economically more viable than fission.
Because there's no compounding risks it is way more attractive to mass produce smaller reactors.
Once the key hurdles are solved it will be a simple calculation to decide how much investment will yield how much return, that means it will be an interesting investment opportunity.
Contrast this with fission, where a project is usually just one or two reactors, with tens of billions invested, loads of risk, slow and steady reward with various threats.
It is not the complexity that makes power plants intractible, we build more complex things than fission reactors every day. Its the lack of supply chain because of the unsteady build rate.
The iteration time of fusion reactors is measured in years, not decades by the way. Tokamak Energy is building its third iteration in 12 years, and plans to start the 4th in 2025.
Obviously we aren't there yet, but if it's possible, and a relatively small company like Tokamak Energy can build a proof of concept, then I don't see why we wouldn't have thousands of reactors spread through cities all over the world within the next 20 years.
It was a leading question, pretending to claim that regulation was the cause. Nice walkback, though.
Nuclear is in a bad state in France. Their recent attempts to build new reactors have gone massively over budget. Existing reactors are aging and it looks like they cannot replace them.
Fission has some disadvantages over fusion, but those disadvantages won't make fusion cheaper than fission (the costs of fuel and waste disposal for fission are minor compared to other costs.) Fusion is inherently much lower in power density than fission, which will make the nuclear island much more expensive to build. It will require a minor miracle for fusion to be competitive with fission, never mind the cheaper sources of energy that are beating fission.
> Tokamak Energy is building its third iteration in 12 years,
They haven't built a fusion reactor. They have built experiments that are smaller and less complex that what a fusion power plant would have to be. Small fission reactors iterated well too; they weren't commercial power plants.
The chance that we have thousands of fusion reactors all over the world in the next 20 years is indistinguishable from zero.
> Nuclear is in a bad state in France. Their recent attempts to build new reactors have gone massively over budget. Existing reactors are aging and it looks like they cannot replace them.
This is a political problem which has nothing to do to with technology or costs themselves.
Most infrastructures are aging and in a bad state in France, and the skills and knowledge to build or replace it has long been lost.
Add on top of this politically strong ecologist-extremists who decided that nuclear is evil and must be gone, and who will do everything to sabotage any project.
To take a counter example, nuclear is doing fine and growing in many countries, including China.
> This is a political problem which has nothing to do to with technology or costs themselves.
No, nowhere in the world is nuclear power economically competitive. Construction costs are about 3x-4x the cost per kW compared to solar or wind. [0 page 11][1]
> nuclear is doing fine and growing in many countries, including China.
No, net nuclear plants in Asia are not increasing. [0 page 4]
> No, nowhere in the world is nuclear power economically competitive.
I only said that the problems in France are mostly due to politics, and so that we cannot use this specific example as an argument. This does not imply any affirmation from me about the absolute costs.
> No, net nuclear plants in Asia are not increasing.
Your link (0) page 4 only shows that the construction rate is not especially increasing lately.
Page 5 of your document (0) shows that almost all reactors < 25 years old are in Asia, which contradicts your affirmation. And it also shows that the number of reactors < 5~10 years old is bigger than the ones of about 10~25 years old, which implies a growth.
I don't have the knowledge or patience to read this further, but it is a very interesting read anyway, thanks.
> It was a leading question, pretending to claim that regulation was the cause.
I just stated the opposite, are you calling me a liar? And then you mock me for crediting your argument, does that make you feel good? Are we like fighting or something?
> From what I can see fission reactors are doing just fine in France and Belgium.
They aren't, France has had nuclear for geopolitical reasons, not primarily economic ones. And now that these plants are old, they won't be replaced with new ones (save 1 big project that is already way over budget and won't be price competitive once it is live).
And we will soon find out that renewables are not reliable enough and require a higher degree of planning than we are typically good at.
Texas recently is a prime example, wind turbines froze and gas turbines had co2 regulations that made it difficult to ramp up. Other issues aside these were major contributing factors and indicative of the challenges many states will have.
We can't control the weather and many of these renewable are dependent on it. In comparison every fossil or nuclear based energy source has well developed supply chains, control and planning. Issues will be likely compounded because severe weather often times means increased energy needs as well.
Texas's problems have very little to do with renewables.
There were some wind turbines that froze, but wind power output overall is actually exceeding projections for this time of year. Not to mention that wind turbines can be winterized to withstand temperatures like in Texas right now. They just didn't because they didn't expect such low temps and it costs money.
It looks like renewables accounted for about 13% of the under-generation. Mostly it was issues with coal and nat gas as well as a nuclear plant going offline.
That's not to say that there won't need to be more storage technology or backups for renewables to become a large slice of the power pie.
It's not likely to work in the sense of being profitable to build the reactors. There are fundamental engineering constraints that make it unlikely to be competitive.
What makes you think fusion power will be cheaper than solar, wind, fossil fuels or fission?
Efficiency isn't really a good metric when the fuel is free. We see that in solar power where expensive high efficiency devices lose out to cheaper less efficient ones. It's more about capital cost and operating cost per unit of energy.
To elaborate on the topic, there is ample evidence that nuclear energy is by far the most expensive source of energy, when you take into account the government (for example here in France) entirely subsidizing the construction and hypothetical demolition.
I say hypothetical because french attempts at "safely dismantling" nuclear power point are not going so well and are over-budget by an order of magnitude.
Then these people who can't even build/dismantle a plant (see the many Areva scandals) would like us to believe they can build an underground storage area for highly radioactive materials that's gonna be safe for at least 100 000 years? Despite growing evidence of the contrary
There's also growing evidence that nuclear and renewables tend to be incompatible, mostly because nuclear means a grid with huge centers of energy production, far away from energy consumption (the opposite is true with renewables).
I'm always kind of curious as this "expensive" line of thinking. Yes, nuclear is expensive. Extremely expensive. But is it more expensive than a week's worth of catastrophic grid collapse due to global warming? We have the ability to build nuclear plants. We can reprocess the waste to make more energy with. We can get better at it to drive down the price. It's more reliable as a base load than any renewable.
My state gets over fifty percent of its energy from nuclear power plants. I pay a few pennies more per kWh than neighboring states. I'd pay a few more pennies than that to figure out the rest of this issue.
Like you, i don't believe price to be an argument of concern. I'm merely stating this because over and over, both in French media and on HN, i've seen stated that nuclear is the cheapest energy which is a blatant lie.
> We can reprocess the waste to make more energy with.
Source? From my limited understanding, all nuclear research that produced either less-dangerous waste or re-usable waste was shut down decades ago because there was no foreseeable way to turn that into weapons. The nuclear industry is deeply tied to the military industrial complex and (neo)colonial extractivism (see Françafrique networks for references).
> It's more reliable as a base load than any renewable.
Source? Here in France there's uncountable accidents/scandals in the nuclear industry and reactors are often stopped for weeks/months at a time. The same cannot be said about hydro power (dams) for instance.
> I'd pay a few more pennies than that to figure out the rest of this issue
Economic incentives is only part of the problem in my view. We in the industrialized world are aiming for ever-growing (ideally infinite) energy production and consumption, which necessarily leads to ecocide and other environmental damages. Don't you believe reducing our resources/energy footprint as a society is a more sustainable way to address the problem? There are many strategies we can put in place to reduce energy consumption, but these would contradict basic tenets of capitalism. For the most obvious example (from HN's perspective), see planned obsolescence or how/why we build more devices every few years than there are humans on earth (and yet we keep on having to buy new ones, which is severely damaging the environment).
>Source? From my limited understanding, all nuclear research that produced either less-dangerous waste or re-usable waste was shut down decades ago because there was no foreseeable way to turn that into weapons. The nuclear industry is deeply tied to the military industrial complex and (neo)colonial extractivism (see Françafrique networks for references).
The existence of La Hague site in northwest France has been very successful at nuclear reprocessing.
>Source? Here in France there's uncountable accidents/scandals in the nuclear industry and reactors are often stopped for weeks/months at a time. The same cannot be said about hydro power (dams) for instance.
It's not uncountable. There have been like ten in the entire country over the past fifty years.
>Don't you believe reducing our resources/energy footprint as a society is a more sustainable way to address the problem?
No. The one actual resource we can make and use is energy. We need to use less consumables. Energy isn't a consumable in our timeline. So many things are predicated on significant increases in clean energy. We could literally suck carbon out of the air with enough energy.
Reprocessing went out of fashion because it's economically pointless. Separated plutonium from spent fuel has negative value -- it costs more to fabricate fuel from it than it would to use freshly enriched uranium.
Yes. Even fossil fuels contain far more nuclear energy than chemical energy so the engines we use are ~0% efficient if you actually count that as part of the input, even though we could, in principle, build an engine which does use it. How then do you compare two different nuclear fuels for efficiency?
If ITER proves its style to be a success (what may happen this decade, but I'm not holding my breath), we can expect a decade (about half the time of the original) to just complete the first generation of commercially viable reactors (what ITER will not be).
After that, lithium supplied T grows exponentially with the reactor usage, with a doubling time of a bit less than a decade. So, if it becomes the bottleneck (what means, if people to everything else right) you can expect some 3 or 4 decades before fusion even becomes a major power source.
