Nuclear Fusion is closer! I guess.

[Lord Torath]

From the BBC: Nuclear fusion is 'a question of when, not if'.

The main point is that a working ITER prototype is about 5 years out.

Just like Lockheed-Martin's claim of 5 years ago. Actually, it looks like they are making progress, but there's still nothing substantial on their website.

[Khedrac]

Yes, I tend to ignore any claim of "we're nearly there" when it comes to nuclear fusion power egneration - they have been saying much the same things for 30 or 40 years - they just keep finding there is more to do first.

[Radar]

Truth be told they did make a progress: they claim to reach it in 5 years instead of 50, which was what we were hearing in tha past decades. Personaly I am convinced that ITER will work as intended, since most of it is just scaling up known and tested designs, so there is no reason for it to fail. Key challenges were in actually scaling up all the important parts, which involves power distribution, cooling and plain construction issues. The problem is, even when ITER achieves net power gain, it will take even more time to come up with a commercially viable power plant design. Still, it will help convince people to increase the funding.

As for the Lockheed-Martin design, I hope it will work, but this one is more uncertain. Still, if they keep going and say they do understand the underlying physics, it will happen in due time. It might be 5 years ahead for a few more years though.

[BeerMug Paladin]

I'm only one year out from it.

Invest in my business please.

Or maybe I should just show off my working prototype of a glass of water now?

[Fat Rooster]

If we are at the point where fusion is "5 years away and always will be" instead of 30, we are definitely making progress. Maybe 50 years is reasonable now.

Lockheed martin will not say anything. They will just quietly put it on aircraft carriers and radar stations, getting paid through the nose to do so. Department of energy will be interested, but in the US there is so much money around maintaining the status quo in terms of energy supply that they find it difficult to phase out coal never mind pushing forward with advanced tech.

The US military budget looks silly, until you realise that a lot of it is a hack to get around the cranky politics. The US navy is the largest spender on green energy tech in the world. It is much more palatable for the rednecks to say "The government spends x on the military" than "the government spends x on green energy".

[Lvl 2 Expert]

A while ago we had a discussion on nuclear fusion here, and someone posted a link that made a good case against the wide use of fusion anytime soon. The article was not based on science, but on economics.

What it came down to is this: a coal powered plant looks like two buildings joined together. The smaller building is where the coal is actually burned and the energy is used to make steam, the larger building is full of turbines and such to turn this steam into electricity. A fusion plant would still need that second building. But that small first building, that one is replaced by this super high tech site full of superconducting magnets cooled by systems powerful enough to keep them going even though the ceramic heatshield inside the reactor is being treated to the kind of temperature a balrog would describe as hot. So you pay for most of a coal plant, and than you make it more expensive. The big advantage fusion reactors have if that it's a lot harder to sit on large parts of the supply of fuel and ask for lots of money than it is with oil. But purifying deuterium can't be super cheap either, for now. And even if it does become cheaper to run a fusion plant than a fossil fuel plant, you're still looking at large costs up front, which investors don't like. The author argued that investors like windmills a lot better. Smaller investments let you spread your risks, and they're relatively quick to earn back.

I'm not sure if I fully believe the argument, but it's a way of thinking about it that hadn't occurred to me. Fusion has more than just technical problems to overcome.

[Gnoman]

That's... not how fusion power is expected to work. While it is possible to extract power from a fusion reaction via conventional fluid heating, direct energy conversion would almost certainly be much more efficient.

[Mechalich]

A while ago we had a discussion on nuclear fusion here, and someone posted a link that made a good case against the wide use of fusion anytime soon. The article was not based on science, but on economics.

What it came down to is this: a coal powered plant looks like two buildings joined together. The smaller building is where the coal is actually burned and the energy is used to make steam, the larger building is full of turbines and such to turn this steam into electricity. A fusion plant would still need that second building. But that small first building, that one is replaced by this super high tech site full of superconducting magnets cooled by systems powerful enough to keep them going even though the ceramic heatshield inside the reactor is being treated to the kind of temperature a balrog would describe as hot. So you pay for most of a coal plant, and than you make it more expensive. The big advantage fusion reactors have if that it's a lot harder to sit on large parts of the supply of fuel and ask for lots of money than it is with oil. But purifying deuterium can't be super cheap either, for now. And even if it does become cheaper to run a fusion plant than a fossil fuel plant, you're still looking at large costs up front, which investors don't like. The author argued that investors like windmills a lot better. Smaller investments let you spread your risks, and they're relatively quick to earn back.

I'm not sure if I fully believe the argument, but it's a way of thinking about it that hadn't occurred to me. Fusion has more than just technical problems to overcome.

By the time fusion is ready, building a fossil fuel plant may well be effectively illegal due to some combination of climate change legislation and pollution regulations. That means it will only have to compete against various forms of green energy and old-school fission. The former of those has serious peak/off-peak issues, while the latter has various specific risks attached to it. As a result, fusions ability to compete, or not, economically against fossil fuels may be largely irrelevant.

[snowblizz]

By the time fusion is ready, building a fossil fuel plant may well be effectively illegal due to some combination of climate change legislation and pollution regulations. That means it will only have to compete against various forms of green energy and old-school fission. The former of those has serious peak/off-peak issues, while the latter has various specific risks attached to it. As a result, fusions ability to compete, or not, economically against fossil fuels may be largely irrelevant.

For the renewables a friend of mine in the industry (of providing power to consumers, reagardless of how it is made, they care about effect, not who makes it and how) mentioned that it is calculated with needing about 10x the effect in renewables to ensure steady enough supply. In other words, if you replace a 500 MwH coal/nuclear plant with 5 MwH windturbines (numbers are just SimCity numbers, let's not get bogged down in that) the cost of replacement is not 100 windturbines, but 1000.

The powergrid people like big steady effects.

This is not an argument against renewables. It's a complex question. Our future is going to be revolving a lot around patching in various types of powergeneration into our grids compared to the previous model. But something like fusion, if it works generally the way I understand it, would undoubtedly revolutionize our ability to waste energy. And let's face it, the human species as a whole is going to be much more comfortable doing that than not.