8 ms·
Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change?
- devoutsalsa 5y agoProbably not. ITER takes 440 megawatts of total power to generate 500 megawatts of power, at the cost of many years of development & billions of dollars. [1] [1] http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-close-is-nuclear-fusion-power.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-close-is-nuclea...
- chii 5y ago> ITER takes 440 megawatts of total power to generate 500 megawatts of power not 500 MW of usable power. Have a watch of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
- devoutsalsa 5y agoYeah, you're right. I forgot about the heat efficiency. Even if it generated the full 500 megawatts, it wouldn't even be close to practical.
- erazor42 5y agoFrom your article it's more: "Okay, so ITER will have delivered in that full demonstration that we could have okay 500 Megawatt coming out of the 50 Megawatt we will put in."
- leephillips 5y agoNo, it’s less. Please read the whole thing. The claimed gain is only 0.57.
- simiones 5y agoThat's 50 MW going into the plasma. But they have to draw 440MW from the grid to deliver this power to dump those 50 MW into the plasma (lasers are extremely wasteful). Also note, the 500MW are the power of the plasma - in the best case scenario, maybe 50% of that could be converted into electrical energy, the rest will be lost as heat. So grid-to-grid, they will be taking out 440MW of power and putting back in 250MW. Except that is useless, so they didn't even bother with a turbine the full 500MW of plasma power will have to be vented as heat in ITER itself (DEMO will take over, and aims to deliver net power generation ~20 years after ITER is successful).
- yboris 5y agoShouldn't we be betting for SPARC from MIT and not ITER? https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc
- skywal_l 5y agoITER means International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. It's not supposed to be useful. It is a prototype. And yes, it costs a lot, but if they succeed, it would solve so many problems, it would be worth it. And for scale, compare this to the amount of money being spent on, I don't know, the video game industry[1]. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190509014637/https://newzoo.com/key-numbers/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190509014637/https://newzoo.co...
- leephillips 5y agoNo, read further down in that article. The gain is actually 0.57, certainly not > 1. And that is the plan, not anything demonstrated.
- loourr 5y agoNuclear fission can
- PhileinSophia 5y agoI thought we didn't like that one because it solves all of the "energy problems" that we have. What will we complain and lobby about???
- bell-cot 5y agoSadly, nuclear fission power that works at scale - both on the technology and social sides - seems to be mostly beyond the capabilities of current human societies.
- loourr 5y agoNo it isn't. It's worked for decades and the new forms of it are even more effective. Other countries are doing it with great success.
- zohch 5y ago> Sadly, nuclear fission power that works at scale - both on the technology and social sides - seems to be mostly beyond the capabilities of current human societies. Well yes, because people who benefit from climate change do their utmost to ensure this is the case.
- bell-cot 5y agoWhich explains why grid-scale hydropower, solar power, wind power, etc. have all failed, new construction has all but ceased, and existing installations are being closed down...?
- zohch 5y ago> Which explains why grid-scale hydropower, solar power, wind power, etc. have all failed, new construction has all but ceased, and existing installations are being closed down...? This is news to me, this is not the case where I am, but sucks for you, just goes to show that people don't want to solve the problem. Where I am hydro power works well and most of our power comes from that, but that does not change the fact that many people fight as hard as they can to stop new hydro from being constructed.
- d_theorist 5y agoI used to be so excited about fusion, but then I actually learned more about it. Perhaps I'm missing something, but the benefits over fission seem underwhelming. It's about the same cost on a per-megawatt basis. Modern fission plants are totally safe. Nuclear waste is basically a non-problem, especially with the most recent technology. And fission has the huge benefit of being a mature, proven technology. What's the big benefit of fusion that makes it worth investing so much money? The only thing I can see is that it doesn't require uranium, which can be abused to make weapons. But does that by itself justify the investment?
- scanny 5y ago> Modern fission plants are totally safe. Nuclear waste is basically a non-problem Just removing that as part of the rhetoric around the tech makes fusion invaluable.
- d_theorist 5y agoThat is true actually. Seems silly but it's actually a serious benefit! The main issue with fission is that people have become irrational about it. Maybe we get a fresh start with fusion.
- civilized 5y agoUnfortunately, a lot of the same environmental interest groups that halted the scaling up of fission also hate fusion. It's best to think of fusion as a way to generate effectively unlimited amounts of energy, kicking in 50-100 years from today. This could be super useful for the long-term ambitions of human civilization - energy has been such a hard constraint for so long that people have barely thought about the amazing stuff we could do with an effectively unlimited energy supply. For addressing climate change, it's likely to be too-little-too-late to bank on. But a century from now it'll be nice for cheap fresh water / agriculture / climate control anywhere on this planet, space elevators, interplanetary/interstellar travel, terraforming, cheap fresh water / agriculture / climate control on other planets, etc. This sort of stuff is incredibly energy-hungry and it's unlikely that renewables will be able to supply the requirements alone. (It'd be awesome if one of the private fusion start-ups gets us there a lot faster, but this is what I'm projecting for now!)
- BitwiseFool 5y agoIn a fission reactor, I know the energy goes into the water, which creates steam and that turns a turbine. But it looks like fusion reactors use a near vacuum and high powered magnets. Once two atoms actually fuse, where does that energy "go"? Does the new helium atom just bounce around the containment unit? How do we actually extract meaningful energy from such a closed system? Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER for visuals.
- dboreham 5y agoIn both cases energy comes from neutrons. In the case of a fusion reactor, some neutrons escape plasma containment, presumably then heat up something outside, then heat transferred to water as usual.
- someguyorother 5y agoIn the same way. Most proposed fusion systems use deuterium-tritium fusion where a significant amount of the energy is carried away as neutrons, so direct energy conversion wouldn't be possible anyway. From the article you referenced: > ITER will not produce enough heat to produce net electricity and therefore is not equipped with turbines to generate electricity. Instead, the heat produced by the fusion reactions will be vented. So in a fusion plant, the particle energy would turn into heat (by the particles interacting with matter), this would heat up water (or some other carrying fluid), turning a turbine that produces electricity. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant which contains some diagrams showing just how that would be done. More exotic reactions (e.g. p-B11) have been proposed, where almost no energy is in the form of neutrons. Theoretically, you could then use electrostatic devices to capture the energy directly without any of the mess with Carnot efficiency. However, getting p-B11 fusion going is much harder than d-t.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoAhem... https://marvelfusion.com/ https://marvelfusion.com/
- deleted 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- himinlomax 5y agoNuclear fission is good enough, available right now, causes much fewer deaths than the alternatives, does not pollute the atmosphere, and accidents are extremely rare and nowhere near as dangerous as they've been portrayed. To wit, Fukushima: 1 dead from the nuclear accident, compared to 10000 from the tsunami.
- triceratops 5y agoFukushima didn't kill many people, but it's projected to cost $187b to clean up. Chernobyl has supposedly cost over $300b inflation-adjusted. Gorbachev wrote that in his opinion, it was a major contributor to the collapse of the USSR. Both figures are from Wikipedia. Fission is safe, but even one accident can wipe out decades of profits. Is it still cost-effective when considering that?
- himinlomax 5y ago> but it's projected to cost $187b to clean up. That seems quite high. > Fission is safe, but even one accident can wipe out decades of profits. Is it still cost-effective when considering that? You can put a number on the cost of the Fukushima disaster, but you're not putting one on that of other power sources. Coal burners make the whole world pay, nuclear operators have to deal with their own shit. And yes, I'm not counting Chernobyl-type accidents, because while it would be foolish to claim that events like Fukushima will never happen again, it's equally foolish to not recognize that dodgy old dinky soviet plants with no passive safety measures whatsoever are a solved problem.
- triceratops 5y agoI'm not disputing that nuclear is better than coal, but that's quite a low bar. Usually nuclear is compared to solar (with storage), wind, and hydro. These don't have the pollution downsides of coal. And while dams can fail catastrophically, I don't think the cleanup costs approach those of a nuclear power plant failure.
- Tade0 5y ago
- Pxtl 5y agoI hate things like this. Climate change is an emergency, one that we're far behind on tackling. Talking about future technologies that are many decades away (if ever) is the opposite of helpful. Imagine in 1943 the headline: "Can hypersonic missiles put the brakes on Hitler's Army?"
- darkmarmot 5y agoWell, nukes (which didn't exist then) sure put the brakes on Japan's military.
- Pxtl 5y agoYes, but nukes weren't decades away from being deployed in active intended use-case. Fusion is at least 10 times further-off right now than nukes were early in the war. That's why I pointed to a modern weapon like hypersonics, and not nukes - because we're talking about many decades. And more to the point, nobody waited for nukes. The allies tackled the problem with the tools they had available at the time, and made use of the nukes when they were ready. edit: the comparable timeline would be "currently approved power plants that are planning construction could put the brakes on climate change", I mean, if it were true. Because deadlines for substantial impact on climate change are "next few years, decade or two tops", and fusion will be ready far too late.
- darkmarmot 5y agoI agree that we should be rolling out as many modern, small scale fission reactors as possible, right now, in order to deal with CO2 output. But, at the same time, I think we should pursue fusion with the same gusto that we currently direct towards blowing up 3rd world countries. Also, recent advances might herald fusion in less time than you'd think: https://news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusion-energy-0908 https://news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusio....
- tylermauthe 5y agoThe claims on nuclear fission being just around the corner are wildly exaggerated. Sabine Hossenfelder has a great video [1] on this topic. I want fusion to be real too, but focussing on small scale fission and solar is probably a better idea. [1] - https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY
- WhompingWindows 5y agoAssuming there are multiple breakthroughs on the research, design, and scale-up phase, fusion will only help us in a couple decades, put on the brakes is a 2020/2030s task. Putting on the brakes means slowing down, which means decarbonizing power, transport, industry, and agriculture, amongst other things. We don't need fusion to do that, we need to transform our current system. Fusion could be nice as a future-fuel, perhaps it could power carbon sequestration efforts. But unless we put on the brakes NOW with what we have, this car is going to crash.
- ip26 5y agoFusion could be nice as a future-fuel, perhaps it could power carbon sequestration efforts Agreed, that seems like the biggest opportunity for fusion to fit into climate change.
- FredPret 5y agoWhen a headline asks a question, the answer is almost always “no”.
- willis936 5y agoThis article asks the wrong question. "Can Nuclear fusion bail out our ship before it sinks?" No. "Can Nuclear Fusion help us re-float our ship after its sunk?" Maybe.
- zohch 5y agoWhy would any government or international organization want to put the brakes on Climate change if it is the single biggest reason to increase their power? Do people think it's coincidental that the people who shriek loudest about climate change also shriek loudest about nuclear? And the thing is, I know whoever wrote this drivel for the new yorker knows better.
- arichard123 5y agoSPARC is going to be relatively small in size. If they can make the commercial reactors as small as SPARC then they can be created in a factory. Which will make roll out and cost much better than fission.
- simiones 5y agoSPARC will also not produce net power gain, as far as I know. They are planning to achieve "breakeven", which is energy going into plasma < energy of plasma, promising Q > 2, with an optimistic expectation of Q ~ 10. But best estimates for plasma energy -> electrical energy conversions are 50% efficiency, and energy going into plasma is typically many times smaller than the amount of energy drawn from the grid (couldn't find any numbers for SPARC). SPARC doesn't seem to publish such numbers, but ITER, which is aiming for Q ~ 10 is going to be nowhere near to generating net energy, so SPARC's 2 < Q < 10 is unlikely to be able to do it either. Edit: ITER is also going for Q~=10
- goodpoint 5y agoNo. Almost all electricity that we generate will eventually turn into heat and get released into the atmosphere. Even if nuclear had 0 environmental impact during production, which is absolutely not the case, we still must cool down the planet. We need energy sources that work by CAPTURING energy that otherwise would be turned into atmospheric heat.
- lm28469 5y ago"Can _insert technology we don't have yet and that requires breakthrough_ save use" Yeah sure, why not Nuclear is already the answer but people are afraid and even countries lead by "smart people" such as Germany are slowly decommissioning their nuclear power plants... In the meantime we're using more and more energy while putting all our eggs in the "intermittent energy sources" basket. It might have been fine if we all lived like 1960s era people but I don't see how that would work in today's world
- me_me_me 5y agoGermany is slowly decommissioning their nuclear power plants because of Nord Stream 2. Gerhard schroeder almost immidietly becomes head of NS2 after he steps down as chancellor. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27202794 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27202794 There are no accidents when it comes to big things like that
- mikewarot 5y agoCan captured space alien technology based on element 115 help solve climate change? It's about as likely to generate real commercially usable amounts of power in the next decade. At this point, we don't have new fission plants being built, and we're converting all the coal plants to run on natural gas, which is just going to jack up the prices for consumers who use it for heat. The time to fix this was 5 decades ago.
- FBISurveillance 5y agoBest time to invest into fusion research was 50 years ago. Second best time is now. Nuclear fission is one of a few (if not the only) viable ways to have significant positive impact on climate change short-term (20 years). Small rant on nuclear waste. I don't think it's a problem. I think it's a solution to fuel future generations of reactors (50+ years). I'd go as far as assume that e.g. Finland could import nuclear waste and store it in that new state-of-the-art nuclear waste repository. They would make money now to store the waste, and then make money eventually when tech is there to reuse it and generate power.
- carapace 5y agoIf you're interested in fusion power check out Robert Bussard's tech talk on his design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhL5VO2NStU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhL5VO2NStU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
- gmuslera 5y agoNo. The car will still be running even if we fully stop right now. There is an excess of carbon in the atmosphere, there are feedback loops that are emitting carbon due to the already existing warming, you don't shutdown the greenhouse effect with just a halt or slowdown of emissions because what is already there will keep doing its job. What you can do switching to nuclear (in some industries, at least) is to not increase as much as previous years what we add to the problem. It's not stopping, nor slowing down or keeping the current speed, but just accelerating a bit less than before. Massive carbon capture is needed (orders above the gigantic amount that is added each year, because you need to take out the carbon emitted in the previous years too, and there is the feedback loops playing too), along with bringing new emissions sharply down. And all of that at least for many years after reaching below preindustrial carbon levels (global temperature should drop enough to turn off the positive feedback loops).
- arcanon 5y agoNo, Fusion can not put the brakes on climate change. It is the best long term option for generating heat, but the problem is not about what we add, but instead about what we remove. Carbon Capture is what will matter. Carbon taxes are an interesting attempt at political solutions, but this requires coordination between Russia, CCP, and the USA. We need something that can be done despite what other foreign powers can be made to do, lest we want to wage WW3 over this. Carbon Capture is also proportionately underfunded compared to renewables. Global warming is not something that will stop when we stop being bad; it has momentum. Greenhouse gases are like a blanket we’ve been wrapping around ourselves. We have to unwrap to get back to normal: carbon capture.