Pretty sure we’re still a few decades from making net energy for the grid. So near term means spending a bunch more money on research while nobody does much of anything about climate change.

…I’m not saying don’t spend money on fusion research, I’m just saying it would be nice if we did more to avoid a climate apocalypse. Fusion probably won’t scale in time.

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In the articles that I’ve read, they always give the figures as megajoules: ….achieving a yield of more than 1.3 megajoules (MJ). Sounds really impressive. But if you convert to kWh it’s not so exciting - 0.36 kWh. If that were electricity, it worth about 4 cents!

Fission reactors could help, in the meantime

What's impressive is that they are creating as much energy as the ignition process uses. That's a major hurdle to overcome because up until now it has always taken more energy to run than you get out. It's the last step before making more energy than you need to run it.

I’m certainly more fission positive than I used to be. I wish we could just use less energy tho

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We never will, and we shouldn't. The biggest meter of progress is how much energy we have to use. Sure we shouldn't waste it, But we shouldn't seek to reduce our power consumption as it's critical to the increase of quality of life.

Unfortunately this means absolutely nothing for now.

They delivered 2.05MJ into a crystal and got 3MJ out. Which is great and demonstrates that fusion is possible. However the lasers they used to deliver those 2.05MJ actually used 322MJ of power. They can’t just “make it bigger” and start powering cities. Huge leap for the science but not at all useful for implementation tomorrow.

source

They said themselves that the lasers are especially suboptimal for this-they were made in the 1980’s are very inefficient. but your point is true-but assuming this scales easily-perhaps even logarithmically-(it won’t actually be easy) we could end up on the other side of the looking glass.

So this breakthrough creates free energy? Like socialism? Republicans are gonna hate this right? /s

If rhe results are verified -- that the breakeven threshold has been passed -- the last step is actually building a commercial reactor that economically harvests the energy produced. The technology does us no good if it costs too much to build and maintain.

Every 10 years since the 50's the scientists have made breakthroughs and predicted a viable fusion reactor within a decade, so pardon my skepticism...

US as a net oil producer thanks to fracking destroyed the price of oil and took Venezuela’s government with it. Saudi’s oil is still the best quality so they have remained relevant, and Russia’s willingness to say “fuck it this is Russia” means they give zero fucks about pulling it out and selling it to thirsty Europeans. (Until, you know. That thing. Whenever that is over they will be back though.)

We still need oil for plastics, and it would get much much cheaper-meaning that the plastic patch/ocean micro plastics problem is about to get much worse (unless we pass coordinated standards)

But de-wealthified Middle East will lead to instability and power vacuums. A real mess.

Who makes these reactors? Will the technology be open-source? What’s the limiting component in building them? Will they be the size of power stations now or will they be much smaller and decentralized?

Let’s say a company like GE is cranking out a subdivision sized reactor-they make millions of them for sale every year. Electricity is a commodity.

Lithium/cobalt will be much more in demand than they already are. Reactors are great but we gotta have battery packs and carbon fiber still hasn’t delivered. Lithium is decently abundant but messy to extract. Cobalt is less common and prices are rising fast. Guess who has a lot of it? (It’s China)

If we stop making so much carbon we would slowly start to draw down on climate change-but it would take centuries to fix itself naturally. We could use this wonder power to yank some of the carbon out of the air with carbon capture since that is currently a more expensive solution than it it solves-but still will take centuries to fix without a major breakthrough.

That’s my initial thoughts.

That sounds provably ridiculous and probably pertaining to a cult of economics

We need it badly. The problems with storing spent fuel seem much easier to engineer out than the problems with scaling fusion.

I desperately want fusion of course. A world with free energy would free humanity in so many ways but we aren’t there yet and we have a huge energy crisis to solve.

Edit: spelling

That philosophy is more in line with the Kardashev scale.

Will you do your part?? I’m not being a smart ass, it’s a real question. Years back a read a paper that had some excellent figures in it. It took the worlds energy output, analysed the energy requirements for various nations and then normalised the data to non dimensional units. The way it broke down was that in most of Africa people used about 0.25 of a unit of energy per day to exist, in places like the USA, Australia etc it was more like 4-5 units per day. To sustain current population growth around the world we would need to average it out to about about 1 unit per person on average. This would allow for about 10 billion people to survive at the standard 1 units provides. We hit this population number around 2050. Imagine the adjustment you need to make to go from 5 units a day to 1. Can you do it? I know I couldn’t. Which country should continue to under use so that we can keep 5 units a day? Simple fact is the world needs more energy not less. We have to find a away through that need without killing the planet. At this point I think fission is the best short / mid-term solution.

Edit: stuff.

I've always heard 20-30 years, every decade, for the last 40 years.

This is a significant development though, net gain is a big step.

Scalability is still the massive hurdle to overcome.

Commercial viable fusion is still a very, very long way away. We would need to increase the current energy output (holding energy input fixed) twenty fold in order to produce net electricity, let alone make it economically viable. The reality is while this is scientific progress, it is not meaningful industrial progress. Whether we are at 0.94 or 1.02 Q_Science efficiency, we are not close nor have a clear path to increasing output x20 and reaching a Q_engerinering efficiency above 1.

Your not wrong, but your misrepresenting how good of a thing this is.

It would be like me being all smug years ago saying, "Yeah that solar power thing sure is cool, you can run a whole calculator with it."

And yet here we are in 2022 with solar power being a serious competing energy source for the grid.

If we use less energy or quality of life decreases. That's true for us, and it's true for every known living thing to have ever existed.

I don't want to use less energy. In fact most don't want to and most are not going to. So instead of wishing for something people don't want to be forced on them we do what people do want in a way that is better and less detrimental.

I’m totally pro sustainable energy. We use way more energy than we need to in countries like Canada. I try hard to use less. I ride a bike. I grow food. I’m also not living in a cave.

My original point was that efficiency and more energy alone won’t solve our ecological problems. Fusion will help but only if we start enacting good political policies.

But for sure, the people in Africa need energy too.

What was the big breakthrough anyway. Anything useful

It's not a one to one relationship between energy and quality of life. We can have awesome lives while using energy wisely.

If we can make more energy while taking better care of the planet, I'm all for that. I see no evidence that free markets will take care of the planet. We'll need a combination of free markets and environmental protection laws.

space (interstellar) travel or communities on Mars (why anyway?), are likewise unlikey to be scaled/brought into reality before climate/pollution catastrophes on earth.

i'd take all the money that's being wanked against the wall by psychopaths like musk and bezos with their vanity projects and divert that into fusion research.

The achieved "ignition" meaning the heat energy of the reaction was greater than the energy of the laser beams. It's a legit important milestone. But the energy in the laser beams is just a fraction of the energy it takes to run the whole kaboodle, so a long way to go before they are making more energy than they are drawing from the grid.

I would rather money go to fusion than Mars, definitely, as long as our highest priority is on things that can make a difference starting immediately.

Also, it's hard to say how much technology progress will speed up. The way machine learning is progressing, the future is getting increasingly hard to predict... and you know what they say about predicting the future!

It's not an economic thing, although it totally sounds like one. It's based on the idea that the more power we have access to, the more advanced we are as a civilization therefore we will have a higher quality of life among other things. This is also about us as a whole species, and not about any individuals. All that being said, we still shouldn't waste power and we absolutely have to transition to better forms of power.

Aha. Hey, I really appreciate the friendly answer. I had wondered whether my reply above had come across as too adversarial.

I'm open to the fact that energy is allowing us to advance and evolve in ways I can't entirely understand.

I'll be more thoughtful about saying things like "use less energy." Better to think in terms of using energy wisely.

Take care!

Most of us have replaced all the 60w-100w bulbs in our homes with brighter 5-8w led bulbs.

All kinds of consumer goods now operate on much less energy and do more work for us. Look at computer chips. Look at almost anything that requires electronic circuits.

The air conditioner I just bought has a newer type of motor that uses around 1/3rd of the power of my old air conditioner and cools better.

A lot of consumer spending is build around the idea of things being more efficient. HVAC units, water heaters, fridges, etc.

I could go on. Electricity per kw/h is going to keep going up in price over time for quite a long time... I don't get your attitude on this, unless you own a power plant and set the prices :)

Mainly Thorium reactors.. the one Israel has been working on for like 7 years would help

>I had wondered whether my reply above had come across as too adversarial.

You could say that yeah.

I wonder if there's a way to design fission reactors for easy conversion to fusion when it's available.

There will never be “free energy” like in books…. We figured out how to fix diabetes and now charge people over $300 a month to live…. If you think this will be phased to us any other way you are stupid.

Eh, if nothing else, suitable land has already been cleared and leveled. Large power distribution lines in place. That much can be reused. Cooling water available on site, if fusion reactors need that?

Oh cool, Israel is actually building a thorium reactor? You always hear about them, but I didn’t know anyone was actually working on it…

I should have said “free” You are spot on though someone will want to control it for their own gain. Whatever that looks like.

I'm not talking about it on a personal scale. I'm taking on a civilization scale. Human kind as a whole should look to only increase our power production (as long as we do it sustainably).

Also efficiency is always good as it helps increase the available energy.

I mean, it will still have a cost to build and cost to run and maintain. Just like a coal plant

Near term people have an opportunity once again to remind you that we are 30 years out. It is thrilling

This is the same logic which would have you look at the results of feeding a starving man, and then concluding that obesity shouldnbe solved by having everyone drink a gallon of corn syrup with each meal.

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How much did you pay to post this? Public messages in popular press must be expensive...

This is a good point. The cost of (grid) electricity isn’t a function of “what it costs to produce”; it’s instead “what the customers will bear”.

Remember that fossil fuels themselves are, effectively, a kind of “fiat commodity”. They’re worth exactly what people will pay for them.

For decades we’ve been in a cycle of increasing efficiency and prices. We spend our own money to drastically cut our use of some resource (based upon some technological improvement), and as soon as we do so the seller cranks up prices so we’re spending more for less.

For electricity, there is a kind of endgame. At some point prices are simply so high, and our use of resources so efficient, that utility cord-cutting becomes viable. Suddenly, you don’t need a huge national grid any more. You can trade power with your neighbors, have community-based wind generation, and so on.

Fusion will damage and activate the shielding. To do it on mass scale the costs of storing the activated shielding and replacing the shielding could be high. Even fast nuclear reactors have a similar issue where burner/breeder reactors have a much shorter expected operational life compared to the light water reactors that are expected to operate for 80 years.

No. Just no. You could site the new reactors next to the old reactors, it's a very energy dense reaction in either case, and most of the permitting and site security will be in place.

China has a thorium reactor coming online soon, if not already. India has also been working on one.

The issue with thorium is its definitely harder to start. The actual nuclide releasing the fission energy after neutron capture is U233, so the Th232 has to capture 2 neutrons to fission, as opposed to the one need in the case of U235 or Pu239. Basically most reactors you could build with Th232 you could make with U238 ( which is most of the uranium anyway.

I'm in favor of thorium, just if there's limited resources going to nuclear development anyway, and fuel prices arent an issue with uranium, why dilute your resources? Long term between uranium and thorium, there enough fuel reserves to power the global population power needs as if they were all Americans for some thing like 3000 years. The extremely long lived, but super condensed waste products can be stored deep in the continental crust using convention oil mining technologies where it can ride any that section of the crust gets subducted back into the mantle in like a billion years.

All of those things are society wide effects. Everyone needs lighting.

So there's always paper reactors that go into variable energy use for industrial chemical applications or water desalination or even carbon capture when the grid doesn't want all the power from a particular power plant. The real solution is over developing nuclear to the point that power is cheap. We could even create artificial fuel instead of drilling for fossil carbons, and use that fuel to retrofit transportation instead of relying on rare earth minerals for batteries. The US Navy actually patented a process to use excess nuclear power at sea to convert seawater to jet fuel. They can't do it enough to not go without a refueling tanker for the inboard fuel tanks, but it's a capacity they can use to extend their fuel reserve a tiny fraction.

People like to thinks it's technology that's a problem when it's simply economics. Renewables are doing well today because they're subsidized, and grids have to buy renewable energy first. Fossil fuel production is also excessively subsidized and governmentally encouraged.

Perhaps. but I’m still skeptical. Forgot to mention that they also blew up a diamond doing it. It’ll be great if it’s a viable source of energy and all. Just don’t think I’ll hold my breath

> However, while the fusion reactions may have produced more than 3 megajoules of energy — more than was delivered to the target — NIF’s 192 lasers consumed 322 megajoules of energy in the process. Still, the experiment qualifies as ignition, a benchmark measure for fusion reactions that focuses on how much energy went into the target compared to how much energy was released.

We should have reusable heavy launch vehicles figured out over the next decade. Let's spend $$$ to launch spent fuel in pods with a trajectory leading directly into the sun. It would be silly expensive but problem solved.

I invented an infinite energy machine when I was twelve while I was bored in school, now where did I put that doodle?

Fusion probably will be an incremental improvement (in cost and waste) over fission. Not game-changing.

Fusion probably won't be viable economically, by the time we get it.

"Big" (thermal) fusion will be similar to today's fission plants, as far as I can tell, minus the fuel costs. Still a big complicated reactor, actually MORE complicated than a fission reactor. Tons of electronics and high-power electrical and electromagnets and maybe superconductors to control and confine and heat a plasma, or drive lasers to ignite pellets. You get a thermal flux (neutrons) to drive a big steam plant that drives a generator. So lots of high pressures and temperatures to control, lots of pumps and turbines and other moving parts. Still some radiation. No need for a sturdy containment vessel. Still a terrorist target, still need security.

Fuel cost is about 30% of operating cost [not LCOE, I don't know how that translates; some say fuel is more like 10%] of today's fission reactors. Subtract that, so I estimate cost of energy from fusion will be 70% of today's fission cost. Renewables PLUS storage are going to pass below that level soon, maybe in the next 5 years. [Edit: maybe I'm wrong about fuel for fusion, see https://thequadreport.com/is-tritium-the-roadblock-to-fusion-energy/ ]

And "big" fusion really isn't "limitless" power, either. All of the stuff around the actual reaction (vessel, controls, coolant loop, steam plant, grid) is limited in various ways. They cost money, require maintenance, impose limits, and scale in certain ways. You can't just have any size you want, for same cost or linear cost increase.

Also, ITER (one of the flagship fusion projects) isn't going to start real fusion experiments until 2035, and the machine planned after ITER is the one that will produce electricity in an experimental situation, not yet commercial. So you might be looking at 2070 for commercial "big" fusion ? ITER is not the only game in town, but ...

Now, if we get a breakthrough and someone invents "small" fusion, somehow generating electricity directly from some simple device, no huge control infrastructure, no tokamak or lasers, no steam plant and spinning generator, etc, that would be a different story.

In simple terms, metaphorically, they figured out how to light a piece of coal and have it produce energy. They haven't yet figured out how to build a furnace to do it at scale.

Renewables are cheaper than any of the alternatives, even if we were to remove their subsidies. (1, 2)

It all kind of depends on what investment is put into fusion in the next couple of years, historically investment into fusion is slow and so progress is slow, as the needed legwork on R&D can only be done with a new flagship experiment every one to two decades.

Science advances, to make such conclusions using now for then is kind of moot.

The max energy output expected from NIF is 40 to 50 MJ for energy put in. That's still 8 to 10x less than what is needed to break even for the system.

Even if they swap the laser diodes and whatnot out we're still extremely far off with this design to achieve practical fusion

Many of the costs and constraints on fission and fusion plants have nothing to do with nuclear or new tech. It's the "heat engine", all the heat transfer and cooling and steam turbine and spinning generator etc. That stuff is OLD and mature. Throwing more money at it is not going to change it. That's why fusion is not going to be a big change relative to fission. And why renewables and storage are going to dominate.

I'm not so sure about the idea that steam turbine = old mature, therefore unscalable, kind of goes against reality where Nuclear is in use and how much power it generates.

What do you specifically mean with the generalization "renewables?"

Why’s that such a big deal though

And besides, small fusion reactors just means we will have an Iron Man protecting our national security.

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Because they've been trying to get that far for decades, and failed until now. It wasn't that long ago that people were saying we'd never figure it out.

Basically, this kind of energy, that powers our sun and all the stars, and does so in ways that are much cheaper and easier to keep safe than today's fission reactors, it was a question if we'd ever be able to harness and produce that energy ourselves here on earth. This pretty much proves we can, for the first time.

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I was doing a deep dive on this. I think fuel is going to be a limiting factor and production of it. Essentially a fusion engine just fuses hydrogen into helium. You need Deuterium and Tritium and fuel for this (hydrogen with one neutron and hydrogen with two neutrons). Producing a small amount for a test is one thing, but to produce this fuel at scale for a reactor to power a city is a problem. Also the actual energy generation is an issue. They used to use Beryllium as a neutron moderator to generate heat, but they have a new method now.

The thing is we don’t have to store the spent fuel, it can be put through breeder reactors over and over again to re-enrich it and use it again until the spent fuel is effectively inert. It’s just we so terrified of someone making a dirty bomb.

> old mature

Certainly it is old and mature: it has been optimized to the max because it is in so many power plants and industrial processes. Don't expect some large improvement in steam tech.

> therefore unscalable

Again a matter of steam and temperatures and cooling etc. Scaling nuclear large is less of a problem than scaling small. I doubt SMR nuclear will go very small or be successful. Whereas some renewables scale down to the level of a single house.

> What do you specifically mean with the generalization "renewables?"

The usual definition: solar, wind, tidal, wave, geothermal, hydro.

You are missing the point. ☢️. Remove this from the equation. Source: I worked in nuclear power. 😂

Yes, fusion will have a lot less waste and radiation than fission. Not zero, but much less. And will the public understand the delta ? Maybe not, they're both "nuclear".

It is cost that will mostly kill fission, and probably consign fusion to niches once we do get it working.

I think this attitude is hilarious.

Renewables aren’t enough (without Nuke). Fusion is the only answer. Even if it’s later to scale, it’s the only -real- solution…

I’d go with the opposite; dump all development on renewables and plow into fusion.

Good thing there are A LOT of us and we can just do it alp simultaneously anyway.

This is meaningless to my observation. Like completely. You can’t scale up this model and net produce energy. Nor do we have a method of achieving ignition that is scalable in such a way. I’m not denying that this is important I’m denying that this means we’ll have a viable fusion reactor in the coming months or likely years.

https://youtu.be/Us2Z-WC9rao

Apparently it's surprisingly difficult to hit the sun.

But fusion is decades away. Do you mean fusion or fission?

A shortage of Tritium may leave fusion energy with an empty tank.

https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run-fuel-even-gets-started

I mean fusion, except when I said nuke, I meant fission.

Yeah, every solution is 20 years away. Renewables can’t do it either within 20 yrs. We need to solve energy storage, too for that case.

Yeah, you guys will be disappointed with the timeline, but with Fusion we can decarbonize and begin to repair the damage.

(I also think the issue has been overly catastrophized to some degree but it’s hard to tell how much)

Too bad NIMBY ensures it won’t scale in time either

Honestly, I’m open to any plan if the people planning are actually reading and capable of understanding the science coming out.

My concern about fusion is that people seem to misunderstand the recent breakthrough, and that they will support very unrealistic plans.

To me it looks like a mix of renewables, storage, and next-gen fission is a better plan. PV perovskites and agrivoltaics are super promising.

…but if fusion starts looking more feasible on a timeline that will result in scaled energy before the 2050s, we should ramp up funding. I think it would be crazy to drop perovskites though. Are you following that stuff? Have you looked into off-river pumped hydro for storage? The cheaper solar gets, the better the incentive for storage solutions.

Note: we’ve had some crazy heat waves and heat domes and massive wildfires in BC (over a million hectares burning in a single year). The way things are going, the whole region will burn before fusion makes a watt of net positive energy. If your plan includes reducing carbon emissions while we work on fusion, sure.

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I mean I agree with the multi-prong approach anyway (generally I think the way things are going, we’ll be OK).

Storage developments are very cool, but they’re tricky to scale; scale-up on that stuff takes time. I’ve been rooting for ‘flow batteries’ for some time but they’ve been a bit slow.

I have maybe an opposing view on fusion. Agreed this particular announcement seems a little over-hyped, but I think many others were under hyped in the last 3-5 yrs. Things are really clicking together now. It’s HARD, but it’s the golden goose. I think the first commercial plant will be operating in less than 20, and I think it will scale aggressively, as it’s the golden goose.

Sounds reasonable. I’ll make a personal bet on perovskites but happy for a chunk of my taxes to go toward fusion. I hope you’re right about sooner rather than later!

> I’m denying that this means we’ll have a viable fusion reactor in the coming months or likely years.

You don't have to deny because that's assumed. We WONT have fusion energy in the coming months or years

ITER is the world's slowest fusion project. CFS is doing the same thing with a reactor a tenth the size, because unlike ITER they're using modern superconductors. They'll be starting fusion experiments a decade earlier.

For your "small fusion breakthrough," Helion seems to have a good shot at it. They're building their seventh reactor, for a net power attempt in 2024 with advanced fuel and direct electricity extraction.

Equivalent modern lasers are 40 times more efficient than NIF's lasers. 40MJ output would be plenty.

because, if perfected, we could literally use water as our energy fuel with zero carbon emissions

in the meantime, let’s cut carbon emissions in half by converting to natural gas during the transition period

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Not sure if 1/2 is feasible, but I’m game for making cuts that don’t ruin economic output! We sure are wasting a good chunk of gas…

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Total layman here. If we are using water even oceanic water is it enough to cause il effects?