The "Now" implication of Fusion Power

[Cikomyr]

I am extremely fanboyish about the possibility of the arrival of Fusion Power in our age. I know a lot of people here have had reservations about Lockheed Martin Skunkwork's announcement back in October, but i try to be optimist!

However, what i want to talk about is the "now" appication of the arrival of relatively safe, reliable and pocket size fusion reactors in our economy.

I know some dreamers would immediately say stuff like "we could have electric cars for everyone!!", whereas i realize that our energy distribution infrastructure for vehicle is based on a liquid. Converting everything to a pure electric base would require billions, hundred of billions of dollars in investment.

Same with all the people in the world that uses Gas appliances or heating. They wont be able to convert overnight to the cheap fusion-powered electricity.

So... With the admission that we might eventually phase out fossil fuel infrastructures with time and progress, what do you think would be the immediate effect?

Is it possible to synthetise gasoline, for example? If we have nearly unlimited electricty, synthetic gasoline might become a viable mean of storing energy for our vehicle fleet...

I guess many places in the world would be happy to have access to pentiful energy, especially for atmospheric capture of water for irrigation purpose.

...what other impact on the world do you think qe would get to see within, say, 5-10 years of economically viable Fusion Power?

[Tev]

I used to be fusion fanboy too. Then I actually grasped how much stuff like ITER costs and realized it's not going to be economically viable in our century.

Only chance for something sooner is some breakthrough in projects like LPP - aneutronic fusion and completely skipping the "heat -> electricity" part. THAT might bring very cheap energy . . . if we can handle conditions ten times worse than those in classic tokamaks.

Overall engineering challenge of fusion has made me very sceptical of every PR statement about "we'll have fusion in x years". Skunkworks is no exception, I've not heard any real details about their progress but maybe it's just side-effect of the overblown hype.


With that in mind . . .


What comes "after economically viable fusion" depends how you picture that fusion to work. If we're really lucky with aneutronic fusion we actually can have power plants and large transportable "compact reactors " in 10-20 years after initial breakthrough. And that will really be usable everywhere, so there might be actual energy revolution you speak about.

If the mainstream (tokamaks) method manages to actually produce electricity with some usable efficiency we can start using large reactors in 30 years after that, so we'll have maybe a little cheaper electricity (building them will be even more expensive than today's fission reactors), but with quite a bit radioactive waste. Breeder fission reactors or something else to process that waste will be necessary to actually make it more "green" than current fission power plants.

Overall, I don't think fusion will significantly change anything in this century. But with so many people researching it we might luck out and make it practical somehow. But media won't be able to tell difference between that and random PR hype, so best bet to recognize it is educating yourself and ignoring whatever people say in the tv / on the internet.

[Flickerdart]

There was some process the military developed a few months back that could create liquid fuel out of saltwater, meant to be used by nuclear carriers. From what I recall, the process was a net energy loss (though the Navy doesn't care - converting ship fuel into plane fuel is very useful anyway) but if we had fusion, we would probably harness enough energy that it wouldn't matter, so we could produce liquid fuel for cars that way.

[avr]

If vast quantities of fusion power cost vast quantities of money to build (very likely) then you could have plenty of time to change the infrastructure for personal transport.

If it is a lot cheaper than other electrical power plants, then likely the fossil fuel burning power plants will be replaced first, the price of oil/gas will drop like a stone and there'll be little financial incentive to build more plants to make gasoline.

[Yora]

I think car engines and cooking on fire a pretty minor things when it comes to global energy consumption. The biggest impact would be on coal and nuclear power plants. Even if it would take decades to switch to electric cars, the impact of no longer requiring nuclear fuel (and reducing waste to almost nothing) and using coal only in steel making would be much bigger much sooner. Yes, early fusion reactors would be fantastically expensive, but you would no longer have to mine, transport, and burn all that coal or make, transport, and store fuel rods. And these all are already fantastically expensive.

Synthesizing oil would be pretty pointless, though. There are still huge amounts readily available and switching infrastructure to electric will probably happen faster than synthetic oil being commercially viable.

[factotum]

However, what i want to talk about is the "now" appication of the arrival of relatively safe, reliable and pocket size fusion reactors in our economy.

Hold on, wind back a bit--"pocket size"? Isn't that a bit of a "run before you can walk" thing? Let's get all our coal, oil and nuclear power plants replaced with fusion ones before we try to shrink a reactor small enough to fit in someone's pocket--that would be plenty enough of a quantum leap over what we have, methinks; you'd be a situation where generating electricity really would be so cheap that it costs the company more to pay meter readers etc. than they can realistically charge, so you just get it for free!

For that matter, I'm not sure they would even bother trying to shrink the technology that small anyway. There's enough negative publicity when somebody's laptop battery overheats and catches fire, can you imagine the headlines if something similar happened with a fusion reactor? Shrinking them small enough to use in vehicles is about as far as I can see them practically wanting to take it.

[Flickerdart]

you'd be a situation where generating electricity really would be so cheap that it costs the company more to pay meter readers etc. than they can realistically charge, so you just get it for free!

That's very optimistic - nothing stops the power companies from simply dialing down the frequency of meter readings. Call them audits instead, do them every 6 months or something, and if how much has been paid doesn't match up with how much is owed, then you get a letter in an envelope marked Urgent.

Besides, only a fraction of your power bill is the actual electricity. About half of it (here in New York, anyway) will come from infrastructure charges. You pay for using the company's cables for every Watt you pull, in addition to paying for that Watt. Even if I paid nothing for the electricity I consume, I'd still drop about $25-40 a month on just infrastructure charges.

[Madcrafter]

For that matter, I'm not sure they would even bother trying to shrink the technology that small anyway. There's enough negative publicity when somebody's laptop battery overheats and catches fire, can you imagine the headlines if something similar happened with a fusion reactor? Shrinking them small enough to use in vehicles is about as far as I can see them practically wanting to take it.

Military will. And the consumers will want them too then so a company will make them. If they get sued out of existence after a few people die will remain to be seen, but I don't doubt that people are going to try and shrink them as small as they possibly can.

[Lord Torath]

Military will. And the consumers will want them too then so a company will make them. If they get sued out of existence after a few people die will remain to be seen, but I don't doubt that people are going to try and shrink them as small as they possibly can.

I don't know. Is the military currently looking into pocket-sized fission plants? Probably not. I'm sure they'd love more efficient battery storage, though. Better batteries could have a bigger (and quicker) impact on power supplies than viable fusion plants. We could start storing solar and wind energy, allowing us to better match fluctuating power demand.

[Tyndmyr]

Military will. And the consumers will want them too then so a company will make them. If they get sued out of existence after a few people die will remain to be seen, but I don't doubt that people are going to try and shrink them as small as they possibly can.

Extremely high energy density is inherently dangerous. Be it batteries, gasoline, or wallet sized power plants, something goes wrong, everything goes boom.

So, that's an issue, even ignoring the ludicrous economic/tech challenges that make the whole scenario highly unlikely.

But if it did exist, then Iron Man suits, etc are reasonable.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Hold on, wind back a bit--"pocket size"? Isn't that a bit of a "run before you can walk" thing?

Not literally pocket-size, but figuratively so when compared to actual electrical plants. If Lockheed Martin is to be believed, they might have successfully designed an energy-positve fusion in a reactor the size of a lorry (link to an article about it, google to find others), which I would not nit-pick to be called pocket size. The OP asked "what if lockheed martin is correct - what are the economic implications", so I won't comment on how realistic the announcement is, just assume for the purposes of this thread that they are telling the truth.

Grey Wolf

[Madcrafter]

I don't know. Is the military currently looking into pocket-sized fission plants? Probably not. I'm sure they'd love more efficient battery storage, though. Better batteries could have a bigger (and quicker) impact on power supplies than viable fusion plants. We could start storing solar and wind energy, allowing us to better match fluctuating power demand.

I wouldn't think so, since for fission there is always a certain minimum mass/size needed to be critical. Better storage would be an easy method to improve energy; it's not solving the exact same problem, but it would still work.

Extremely high energy density is inherently dangerous. Be it batteries, gasoline, or wallet sized power plants, something goes wrong, everything goes boom.

So, that's an issue, even ignoring the ludicrous economic/tech challenges that make the whole scenario highly unlikely.

Since when has something being dangerous ever stopped humanity?

[Cikomyr]

Hold on, wind back a bit--"pocket size"? Isn't that a bit of a "run before you can walk" thing? Let's get all our coal, oil and nuclear power plants replaced with fusion ones before we try to shrink a reactor small enough to fit in someone's pocket--that would be plenty enough of a quantum leap over what we have, methinks; you'd be a situation where generating electricity really would be so cheap that it costs the company more to pay meter readers etc. than they can realistically charge, so you just get it for free!

For that matter, I'm not sure they would even bother trying to shrink the technology that small anyway. There's enough negative publicity when somebody's laptop battery overheats and catches fire, can you imagine the headlines if something similar happened with a fusion reactor? Shrinking them small enough to use in vehicles is about as far as I can see them practically wanting to take it.

What Grey Wolf said. The point is made about the Lockheed Martin truck-sized 100MW reactor. For a 100MW generator, it is effectively pocket sized.

The engineering advantage for LM is that they build new itterations of the thing extremely quickly rather than spend 10 years on a test.

Think of how it could change the world if you could jump-start the energy production of any country by 10 GW with a single freighter transporting them.

Makes them mobile. Makes them easy to build.

[thorgrim29]

And they're designing it to be easily integrated into existing power grids and even facilities, the guy in the presentation said he saw them replacing the burners in a gas or coal plant with his reactor.

Don't know how realistic this all is but if even if we say it takes them 15 more years then they think it's still a huge gamechanger

[BannedInSchool]

And then I start thinking about the space ship thread and wondering if the next big problem will be heat pollution from making and using cheap fusion power.

[Yora]

Thorium really is just an alternative to uranium. It has some advantages, but you're still dealing with a boiling radioactive acid, which is a bit difficult to control.

Extremely high energy density is inherently dangerous. Be it batteries, gasoline, or wallet sized power plants, something goes wrong, everything goes boom.

That's the wonderful thing about fusion reactors. They can't really explode, overheat, meltdown, or anything like that. If you have them connected to a steam generator, the pressurised steam tanks might explode, but I don't see that being used in consumer appliances.
Fusion reactors rely on a near vacuum. As soon as anything goes wrong and there is the tinyest leak anywhere, the reaction breaks down and stops. Inside the reactor, there's only a very small amount of deuterium, which can't do anything dangerous. The more serious problem is that the inside of the reactor gets highly radioactive during the fusion process, so it's not safe to crack open your reactor and put your fingers inside it.
Worst case scenario, the steam vessels rupture and the pressure wave rips the reactor to pieces and throws the fragments everywhere. But it's only the debris of the reactor that is radioactive, there's no fuel or waste to get blown into the atmosphere.

[Tyndmyr]

Thorium really is just an alternative to uranium. It has some advantages, but you're still dealing with a boiling radioactive acid, which is a bit difficult to control.


That's the wonderful thing about fusion reactors. They can't really explode, overheat, meltdown, or anything like that. If you have them connected to a steam generator, the pressurised steam tanks might explode, but I don't see that being used in consumer appliances.
Fusion reactors rely on a near vacuum. As soon as anything goes wrong and there is the tinyest leak anywhere, the reaction breaks down and stops. Inside the reactor, there's only a very small amount of deuterium, which can't do anything dangerous. The more serious problem is that the inside of the reactor gets highly radioactive during the fusion process, so it's not safe to crack open your reactor and put your fingers inside it.
Worst case scenario, the steam vessels rupture and the pressure wave rips the reactor to pieces and throws the fragments everywhere. But it's only the debris of the reactor that is radioactive, there's no fuel or waste to get blown into the atmosphere.

Jumping a car wrong can make a battery go boom. Wait until someone fails to hook their Portable Fusion Machine up correctly to something. And SOMEBODY will.

Then you get a boom. A boom that, if it breaks containment, tosses around some chunks of radioactive bits for everyone to freak out about.

[Max™]

Fusion reactors don't have the same sort of radioactivity problems as fission ones do, and even with fission reactors it takes pretty severe lack of oversight combined with persistent and major error to get serious excursions like Chernobyl. Fukushima was just gas releases, Chernobyl actually went boom and sprayed radioactive material everywhere for a long period of time, like actual chunks of reactor core containment material laying in the parking lot bad.

A pocket fission reactor wouldn't do that, much less a pocket fusion reactor.

You stick light elements together and make heavier ones and release energy, that means you're working with stuff like hydrogen and heavy water.

We ended up getting more dramatic yields from the later generation fusion bombs but a big part of the push for fusion bombs was to reduce the tendency fission bombs had of spraying radioactive material everywhere. Fusion bombs still did some, but compared to the yield it was negligible if you look at what would have come out of the same number of fission bombs.

Getting rid of coal will do a lot though, that is the nastiest most dangerous stuff around, honestly, I worked in a powered down plant for a week, cleaning dust hoppers, sometimes I still get coughing fits and the pores in my nose probably still have traces of coal dust in them. I left the bathtub black for a month after I quit.

Shutting down and decomissioning coal plants would be my hopeful outcome of widespread fusion adoption, get those poor bastards out of the deathtraps and put them somewhere nice and safe with lower radioactivity like a nuclear waste cleanup facility or something.

[Gnoman]

If Lockheed's CFR project works, and can be made at a tolerable price, several things would happen. The coal industry would die (well, mostly, it would still be useful as a carbon source unless we managed to find a workable means of trapping atmospheric CO2 for the purpose), practically overnight. Smog would become a thing of the past, especially since a fusion reactor can not be used to make nuclear weapons - meaning that there's a significant national security reason to give them to everyone. Every conflict over oil would cease - oil would no longer be valuable enough to fight over. Sea traffic would drop significantly, as there would no longer be a need for oil supertankers. This would also mean no more oil spills. Global warming would end - not only would the amount of greenhouse gasses going into the atmosphere plummet, but there's already several possible methods of removing them - these would just create more pollution than they'd remove with current technology.

[Cikomyr]

Each reactors will apparently require 20 kilos of Deuterium per year for 100MW of production
Silly question: how much deuterium is there on Earth? I see the 126/Million proportion of atoms, but not sure how.it converts

[Cikomyr]

Yes, it would do some remarkable stuff. Let's hope they're not just blowing smoke.

Lets be fair a minute. This isnt some random research group trying to milk a subvention.

This is Lockheed Martin's Skunkwork. The creators of fantastic achievements previously thought impossible, and it is running on reputation. Failing to deliver would be a serious blow to their credibility.

[gomipile]

There was some process the military developed a few months back that could create liquid fuel out of saltwater, meant to be used by nuclear carriers. From what I recall, the process was a net energy loss (though the Navy doesn't care - converting ship fuel into plane fuel is very useful anyway) but if we had fusion, we would probably harness enough energy that it wouldn't matter, so we could produce liquid fuel for cars that way.

Technically, the process creates fuel grade hydrocarbons from the carbon dioxide dissolved in seawater. Yeah, if electrical power was essentially free other than facilities and infrastructure, something like that would be the way to go until batteries meet or exceed gasoline car ranges after regenerative braking, etc. is accounted for.

[DavidSh]

How much deuterium is there on Earth?
Here is a rough ballpark figure, trusting in Wikipedia.
The world's oceans mass about 1.4 x 10^21 kg.
The salt content of the ocean is about 35g / kg of water, so can be ignored.
Most water is made up of H_1 and O_16, so water has a molecular weight of 18, hence about 1/9 of the mass of water is hydrogen.
The ratio of deuterium to ordinary hydrogen in typical ocean water is 1/6420 by mole, or 1/3210 by mass.
So the oceans contain (1.4 x 10^21) x (1/9) x (1/3210) = 4.8 x 10^16 kg of deuterium.

I'm not saying this is easy to get at, though.

[Douglas]

Each reactors will apparently require 20 kilos of Deuterium per year for 100MW of production
Silly question: how much deuterium is there on Earth? I see the 126/Million proportion of atoms, but not sure how.it converts

I'm calculating approximately 46670029480835149 kg of deuterium in the oceans. I'm sure that's way too many significant figures, but let me count the digits...

Somewhere around 50 quadrillion kilograms of deuterium, considering only the amount in water. I don't think we're in danger of running out any time soon.

Every conflict over oil would cease - oil would no longer be valuable enough to fight over. Sea traffic would drop significantly, as there would no longer be a need for oil supertankers. This would also mean no more oil spills.

I don't know about coal, but oil is used for a lot of things other than burning it for power production.

[Madcrafter]

Also consider we already produce hundreds of tonnes of heavy water for other nuclear purposes every year, enough to supply several hundred of these generators. This number could probably be increased very easily, considering the number of plants there used to be and the availability of water in most places.

[ace rooster]

20 kilos of dueterium exhausts about 130 tons of the sea water. To put that in perspective, if every reactor had a footprint of 10m by 6.5m, and we literally covered the entire ocean with them (for a combined output of 10,000,000TW), they would take about 6000 years to run the ocean dry of dueterium. Alternatively, if we decided that we wanted to outshine the sun, we would have fuel for a bit over half an hour.

As for all the people saying that the world would be sunshine and happy, I have to say that I am more pessimistic. Any aneutronic fusion device could probably easily be adapted to produce neutrons, and while this does not make weapons manufacture trivial it does make it considerably easier. One current limitation is that most weapons materials need neutrons to produce, and neutrons need enrichment to produce, which is hard. A fusion reactor could short circuit that. This is even assuming that fusion is not achieved with some radically different scheme that can be weaponised directly, which is possible.

The economic landscape would be radically altered by effective fusion*, and I don't see this happening peacefully. Many wealthy people will be made considerably poorer, but still wealthy enough to fight the changes. Conflict regions where one side gets their hands on the tech would flare, and any regions that do not get the tech would turn to terror style attacks on the source. Even unilaterally giving it out would probably spark conflicts due to one side being able to consolidate their power better.

I'm not saying that it should not be pushed for, simply that I would expect the fallout to be messier than most people think. But, as someone once said, growth is always painful.

* By effective I mean viable to the point that oil is obscelete.

Edit: Numbers slightly off.

[Flickerdart]

How about liquid fluoride thorium reactors? Are they a bit more realistic, or do they have the same smell of boondoggle about them?

There were a few experimental ones in the US; IIRC the program was shut down because they wouldn't produce material for nuclear weapons.

[Gnoman]

I don't know about coal, but oil is used for a lot of things other than burning it for power production.

Energy production accounts for the vast majority of oil used. It would remain viable for other uses (although many of those already have alternate sources) such as plastics, pharmaceuticals, and fertilizer, but without being a staple energy source, the value would drop drastically, bulk transport of oil would become unprofitable (it would be easier to refine the smaller amounts used into the chemicals you want very near to the production site, then just move the semi-refined chemicals), and the industry would suffer a massive setback.

[factotum]

We ended up getting more dramatic yields from the later generation fusion bombs but a big part of the push for fusion bombs was to reduce the tendency fission bombs had of spraying radioactive material everywhere. Fusion bombs still did some, but compared to the yield it was negligible if you look at what would have come out of the same number of fission bombs.

I'm pretty sure that fusion bombs were developed to make a bigger bang than was possible with fission devices, not to reduce the fallout problems. A lot of the early ones got most of their power from fast fission of their uranium tamper caused by the massive release of neutrons from the fusion stage, so they were very dirty indeed--the Castle Bravo test is the main reason Bikini Atoll remains uninhabited to this day, for instance. That's not to say that relatively clean fusion devices don't exist--in fact, the most powerful bomb ever set off (the Russian Tsar Bomba) was a very clean one indeed.

[Brother Oni]

It would remain viable for other uses (although many of those already have alternate sources) such as plastics, pharmaceuticals, and fertilizer, but without being a staple energy source, the value would drop drastically, bulk transport of oil would become unprofitable (it would be easier to refine the smaller amounts used into the chemicals you want very near to the production site, then just move the semi-refined chemicals), and the industry would suffer a massive setback.

As an example of this, a few years ago when various motor vehicle production plants shut down due to lack of demand, the pharmaceutical industry ran into supply problems well. This is because a byproduct of vehicle production (acetonitrile) is a very commonly used solvent in that industry and given the sensitivity and specificity of analytical methods, redesigning them to not use ACN would be a lot work, not give as good results, or even not technically possible.