Heating hot water uses a lot of energy. All houses in warm sunny states should use free solar hot water systems now.
This seems like a good place to remind ourselves that scientist Isaac Newton, no fool, spent years pursuing immortality through various recipes for the Philosopher's Stone.
At what point do scientists decide that fusion energy may all seem like an achievable idea on paper, but perhaps can never really be accomplished in the real world?
____
"Though best known for his study of gravity and his laws of motion, Newton also apparently wrote more than a million words of alchemical notes throughout his lifetime..."
– https://www.livescience.com/54162-newton-recipe-for-philosophers-stone-rediscovered.html
@itsmecraig
Craig, one key difference and reason to hope is that while alchemy never had any basis in 'fact', hydrogen fusion is a real and proven source energy, see "Stars"
From the cheap seats, it looks like higher-temperature superconductors for the magnets is also a promising frontier being pushed.
2
We have to go nuclear before we destroy the planet with carbon. The research should be on making nuclear safe.
1
@scientella: Except Cherynoybl and Fukushima make a hash of that idea doesn't it? Just one accident is enough to spoil not just your day, but the day of a thousand generations of humans to come. A feat rivaled only by the Pyramids or the Sphinx, with none of the tourist revenue benefit.
Don't get me wrong, I get what you're saying. And I tend to agree. It's only that we better be clear on what "safe" means in a nuclear context. There is no such thing.
3
It makes me sad at how little is really known about how little we have researched fusion power. I like that old joke that fusion is always the energy source 20 to 30 years in the future. I have another one for you. The last major fusion facility for energy (the ignition facility is mostly for weapons) was built 35 years ago. It is kind of hard to get much progress when nothing has been built in so long. Unlike what you would think every new fusion reactor brought significant improvements. Of course the amount of time that we have been doing effectively nothing in fusion is longer than the amount of time we have actively worked on fusion.
7
We already have a pretty good fusion generator. It's called the sun. We have known, mass-produced, green and increasingly affordable technology to capture sunlight and convert it into electricity. Storage devices are coming down the price curve. We should get on with replacing fossil-fuel electricity generation with solar-powered renewables.
13
@RAH Cherry-picking is bad for your health.
"A new study by Environmental Progress (EP) warns that toxic waste from used solar panels now poses a global environmental threat. The Berkeley-based group found that solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than nuclear power plants. Discarded solar panels, which contain dangerous elements such as lead, chromium, and cadmium, are piling up around the world, and there’s been little done to mitigate their potential danger to the environment."
1
@Dad
> The Berkeley-based group found
> that solar panels create 300 times more
> toxic waste per unit of energy than
> nuclear power plants.
I have complete confidence that what you actually meant was "waste (EXCLUSIVE OF THE FUEL USED)". And that spent nuclear fuel remains dangerous for a long, long time.
Another clue that your quote is a deliberate distortion is the mention of lead, chromium, and cadmium. These elements are not used in the production of high-output silicon solar PV panels.
3
@RAH yeah that sounds good, but then there is windless nights, and winter.
So, extensive research over the last six decades has allowed many of my friends to retire (more or less at full pay) after working on fusion without producing a single watt of energy. For those who have commented here that we have not spent nearly enough, I can only say that more money does not equate to better results (or even a single watt of energy). Also one has to understand fusion energy does not come out as electrical energy ready to attach to a grid; rather it comes out (mostly) as very high energy neutrons which have to be stopped - yes, stopped - so its kinetic energy is converted into heat. Anyone who thinks that there will be no radioactive products as a result of this stopping process needs to take more physics courses.
No, I am not saying fusion will not work. Obviously it is working in the billions of stars one can see in the night sky. But there is no basis to support the contention that what one can observe in the sky can always be reproduced to here on earth (in a controlled fashion) by pouring more money. Some fundamental piece of the jigsaw puzzle is missing.
Going back to what I started with, no, I don't begrudge my friends retiring at full pay from national labs. What makes me sad is these were men and women of exemplary skills and they have spent a lifetime in pursuit of a dream that did not come to fruition.
10
@SV what you get is what you pay for. The US fusion program has been underfunded since shortly after the Oil crisis. I dont think your "friends" (beause you sound quite critical of them) unknowingly picked a failed field, but rather our society (even today) fails to see the dangers of massive fossil fuel consumption and oil dependence, partly because of convenience, partly because of lobbying by the most powerful and rich corporations in the world that dont want change to their profits. As a result, fusion progress has slowed down. What was conceived as an "Apollo project" became a backburner project.
4
@SV Imagine what could happen if we spent $700 billion/yr on fusion instead of killing fellow human beings. Just imagine.
2
The sun produces energy with very dangerous high energy particles and electromagnetic waves, X-rays, gamma rays. Only our magnetosphere and atmosphere protect life from annihilation. How will a commercial fusion reactor cope with this output?
4
@Alan Burnham
There are several different fusion reactions that could be theoretically used to produce power, but most of these don't lead to the creation of radioactive products. For instance, in D-T fusion, the product is helium-4 (which is quite stable). There are secondary ways in which the neutrons emitted by fusion can lead to the activation of materials within the reactor, but in general there is very little radioactivity in the products of nuclear fusion.
1
@Dad
"... the product is helium-4..." Not quite.
Helium-4 is not the *only* product.
Fusion of deuterium with tritium creates helium-4, AND a neutron plus ~17 MeV of kinetic energy (most of which [14MeV) is in the neutron). That neutron is a high energy particle. In general, the neutron must be stopped (as in fission reactors) by a lithium shield. The heat generated then generates electricity. In other designs, the neutron is used to produce plutonium for use in fission reactors (not exactly clean).
This does not mention the production of gamma rays, X-rays, etc (as in the sun) that must be considered.
2
I love reading these comments from all of us who aren’t on the front lines of this research (or have I missed one of you?). I am not either, but my guiding principal is that research into new technologies will extend human civilization. So, I am all for fusion research. Other commenters have noted how little we spend on it. Big physics needs support! Given human tendencies, we need new methods to save us from ourselves. Fusion is the holy grail and we never should abandon the quest for it.
9
I think it is a reasonable thought that fusion is misunderstood by the scientific community and that fusion always will produce less energy than the amount of energy required to power it.
That, it seems t me, might be a better explanation to the fact that it has never been possible to produce surplus energy by fusion (alone without fission) in scientific experiments, as far as I am aware of.
If this is true one would of course need to also look at the model one uses to explain energy coming from the sun and other stars, but it seems to me that the logical way to look at fusion vs fission is that fission releases energy bound up in mass while fusion consumes energy when binding energy up in mass.
Fusion will produce 'surplus' energy during the process due to restructuring of atomic subparts, but it might just be possible that the energy required to make this process possible is too enormous to make the net final energy something other than a net loss. The hydrogen bomb does use fusion to produce energy gains, yes, but this might be because it enhances the amount of fission possible in the process.
2
@Eirik Forus When fusion occurs, its due to quantum tunneling causing hydrogen atoms to bind, forming helium. Energy is released because two hydrogen atoms have more energy then one helium atom, and when they bind the excess is released into space. The energy itself comes from some of the mass deteriorating into photons.
1
You seem to have forgotten the explosion from a thermo nuclear bomb. Those have been detonated on earth. Luckily, it was not sustained, but certainly released more energy than put in.
@Siqueira I did take it into account under 'hydrogen bomb' in the text above. According to the wiki article on Theronuclear weapon 'Fission of the tamper or radiation case is the main contribution to the total yield and produces radioactive fission product fallout.[5][6]'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon
So it looks to me like the effectiveness of fusion in this process might be because it makes the third fission wave in the bomb possible not because of the fusion itself.
According to wiki article on fusion it has never been possible to produce more output than input with fusion so far:
'Research into fusion reactors began in the 1940s, but to date, no design has produced more fusion power output than the electrical power input; therefore, all existing designs have had a negative power balance.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power
Too many humans are betting the lives of their children and grandchildren on the "magic" of scientific breakthroughs. "Scientists will discover, just in time, the solutions that allow me to continue my current first-world lifestyle," most everyone prays.
Sadly, JIT's window of salvation was thirty to forty years ago. Now we are simply pushing back with our bare hands against a runaway freight train. [Ironically, that hyperbolic image actually runs on coal or diesel.]
We should wish our unborn descendants good luck and godspeed. We've effectively burned their futures into the atmosphere.
Me included, mea maxima culpa.
14
Scientific progress is proportional to the amount of resources allocated. We have an $18 trillion dollar economy and our government has an annual revenue of about $3 trillion a year. How much of that are we spending on fusion research? The Department of Energy's annual budget is about $0.03 trillion, roughly 1% of revenue. I'm sure only a fraction of that is allocated for fusion work.
1
Ugh! When I went to work at General Atomic (no 's') in 1974, their fusion project was already more than a decade old.
ITER will never work since a tokamak with a simple toroidal geometry is inherently unstable. The German stellerator project has a chance due to its incredibly complex geometry in which nonuniform cross-sections were designed with supercomputing simulations.
Lockheed Skunkworks says they'll build compact fusion reactors "soon." Yeah, when? A number of other compact fusion projects are ongoing. But, milestones keep getting pushed into the future.
The focus should be solar, wind, geothermal, a much needed smart grid in the USA (infrastructure!) and SSBs (solid state batteries). Looks like Toyota has more than 200 patents on SSBs right now. If and when they are perfected, that will be a game changer.
And, frankly, the French model should be followed to build a whole slew of new fission reactors in the interim. They standardized construction and seem to be rather good at it, unlike most others. No one wants them in their backyard. We'll that's too bad, but some combination of what I'm talking about here is desperately needed, like a 10 to 15 year program to get this done.
Marco Rubio is clueless when he says calling this border wall baloney a national emergency is not good since POTUS could call climate change a national emergency. Man-made climate change IS a global emergency. We either turn into Venus or a new ice age will save Earth from humans.
14
@Lewis Waldman
A new study by Environmental Progress (EP) warns that toxic waste from used solar panels now poses a global environmental threat. The Berkeley-based group found that solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than nuclear power plants. Discarded solar panels, which contain dangerous elements such as lead, chromium, and cadmium, are piling up around the world, and there’s been little done to mitigate their potential danger to the environment.
I do like calling the sun "gravitationally confined fusion ".
We've had water around for millennia, but no one could rummage up a decent steam engine until the 1700's when there was decent enough metal to confine it. Steel took another 100 years. Patience. Perhaps a lot.
Solar may be the best short term answer if we can pick a storage solutions. Just stick a dozen panels on every roof, plus the existing nuclear and water, your're there.
It wouldn't hurt to ban bit coin mining, cut down on the proliferation of server farms for the like of facebook, et al and in general live the quiet life.
A book made of paper has some serious advantages
14
Fusion is a critical, perhaps existentially important technology. We should spend more on related physics research. Through our "Defense" Department, we spend vastly greater fortunes to protect our access to dirty energy from insecure and often morally dubious providers.
10
Refusing to use the technology that we already know exists around Earth's magnetic core and magnets, is insanity. Scientists have invented free-energy devices, only to have their labs destroyed, their ideas shelved and their credibility annihilated. Free-energy technology took down the twin towers. If you really think two jets crashing into the twin towers laid them down in place, turning everything to cool dust, then you're not trying. We don't have access to this technology because it would be impossible to capitalize on it. That is why we are stuck where we are.
1
@RCJCHC
First: Please explain the factual basis for concluding that something other than two conventional airplanes took down the twin towers. Second: please cite reliable research which tends to supporti the availability of “free energy “.
3
@eric "Where Did The Towers Go: Evidence Of Directed-Free-Energy Technology On 9-11" by Dr. Judy Wood. The book contains physical evidence, not theories or speculations. It is meticulous and if you read it and come up with a different conclusion than I did, I'd be really surprised.
1
@eric So you think 2 airplanes brought down 7 buildings? You know, 7 buildings came down that day...all part of the "twin towers" buildings. How did those other buildings come down that didn't have planes crash into them? Why were firefighters able to walk into the fallen down buildings' rubble immediately without getting burned? Most Americans don't read very much and they don't seek out the answers. There are many who count on that.
1
my money is on flux capacitor research.
7
@bored critic Don't forget cold fusion. Now there's where we should invest our money. That and polywater. And the nuclear powered bomber( a cool billion spent on that project). Anyone remember those things?
2
What's up with these scientists anyhow? If the sun can fuse 620 million metric tons of hydrogen per second, why can't we?
4
@William LeGro........the sun is already providing the ALL the FUSION derived ENERGY we will EVER NEED !!!
We simply have to collect and store but the military industrial complex supported nuclear industry
(see World Nuclear Association) and Big Oil et al..........supported by their 1% oligarchs..........would risk destroying the earth before losing share value in their profitable but toxic oil and nuclear investments......DUH !
3
We really need to determine if the tokamak system at the ITER is feasible. It has some very important basic principles is must demonstrated if fusion can be relied upon for future energy needs.
1)The plant must be able to produce 500 MW power pulses.
2) The plant must be able to produce more energy output than input.
3) The plant must be able to breed tritium since it is not naturally occurring in sufficient quantities and it vital.
That last one is going to be difficult as the breeding medium of lithium is also what will be used to extract heat from a fusion plant to make steam. It would be best if we found out these issues as quickly as possible—and currently, the push really isn’t there.
2
ITER is a massive multi-billion dollar project that has sucks up most of the fusion research budget. There are a number of worthy smaller projects that should that can be funded at the fraction of the cost of ITER, Focus Fusion being one of them.
Governments tend to favor putting money into one or two huge attention grabbing projects rather than more efficiently distributing the limited money into a broader array of projects according to scientific value.
If this bias towards large projects ended, we would see development of fusion grow much more rapidly.
1
This joke dates back to at least 1975, when I heard it as an undergraduate from plasma physicist Mark Heald.
2
@Dan Styer - 1975! :)
I heard a slight variation which makes it better:
"Fusion was, is, and will always be... the future."
3
We already have a fusion reactor. It's called the sun. We should be developing and implementing technologies to harness this plentiful and endless supply of energy.
15
@FXQ
not so plentiful at night.
That is the problem
@Kenneth Cutter
Battery technology is improving faster than solar technology, and that's saying something.
Night storage is not much of a problem any more.
3
@Jeff
After all the "improvements" solar is no where near doing the heavy lifting.
It contributes less than 1% of our needs.
There is no technology on the horizon that will change that significantly.
Like John Hansen says, it is like believing in the tooth fairy.
Anyone looking into He3 fusion from moon rocks?
1
@ML
Yes and no. Fusion with He3 has been proven, but He3 is not available in sufficient quantities to make it viable in any sense on earth....even if the moon has lots of it...the task of getting it back would would not be easy obviously...and tons of it would be required.
A He3 --D reaction requires much higher temperatures to cause fusion than D-T reactions that will be used in the ITER. The extra proton in helium means higher coulomb repulsive forces must be over come...and that requires much higher temps.
3
@Glennmr, Thanks for the response but the viability is in the numbers. Last I heard semi-processed moon rocks would be magnetic skid launched in trans-lunar trajectories to high earth orbit where they would be collected for earth entry in reusable vehicles. Nice to have a return cargo for satellite delivery, eh. I also heard a 100 tons per year of refined rock would be sufficient for Earth's current energy needs. The Chinese just set a probe down on the moon. Are they pursuing this idea? Why isn't it being discussed here in the US and in articles like this NY Times piece? After all, talk is cheap.
1
Hydrogen fusion for the entire earth.....is FREELY,SAFELY,and CLEANLY available......immediately........from our closest star THE SUN !
Any delay or excuse in implementing this ORGANIC and EFFICIENT form of energy.........is caused by the greed of the oil and nuclear industry and their support of predatory debt capitalists !
8
Don't let the cynical joke fool you, we will conquer fusion. Revolutionary technology always seems slow and daunting until you get your first proof of concept. And then it becomes a race to innovation and production. We could have a breakthrough in as little as a decade. And when it comes, we will use the advance for all of our subsequent existence so, relatively speaking, it's a short wait.
3
@CR Hare I agree. We also spend our time, money and resources on weapons instead of development of future power sources. It is all about priorities.
1
I'm all for continuing to develop fusion in the name of science & research & growing our knowledge, but as an energy source, we already have a gigantic fusion reactor running 24 hours per day- we only need to harvest a tiny portion of the energy it sends to us to have all the electricity we need. We don't need complex machines using toxic & radioactive materials to generate power, we just need to get serious about mass producing ever-cheapening PV panels and putting them on every rooftop in our cities & suburbs.
26
@Paul B Sorry to bring you down to reality.
" A new study by Environmental Progress (EP) warns that toxic waste from used solar panels now poses a global environmental threat. The Berkeley-based group found that solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than nuclear power plants. Discarded solar panels, which contain dangerous elements such as lead, chromium, and cadmium, are piling up around the world, and there’s been little done to mitigate their potential danger to the environment."
1
I took Fusion Energy ("Plasmadynamics") as part of my course work for my degree in Mechanical Engineering. Tokamaks were the dominant fusion containment then - and this was 1979.
So I just don't see anything new today in the fusion energy field. Fission is more promising as their have been new developments in fission such as the Molten Salt Reactors.
I think it's time to stop trying to get fusion to work as no large scale fusion containment design has ever succeeded, despite decades of trying and billions of dollars spent.
2
@DWS The problem with nuclear power is the waste material that needs to be stored for much longer than recorded history. There is also the meltdown/accident issue that while less likely with newer reactor designs has made the majority of the public skittish about the prospect for expansion of the industry. Thorium reactors where the byproduct has much shorter half-lives may be a good answer to the problems associated with fission. It will probably take a place like India or China (where public concerns about safety can be ignored) to pioneer widespread use before it will be acceptable in the US or Europe.
1
There is an extremely viable alternative to current fusion reactors and it's actually an alternate fusion reactor design: molten salt (MSRs). They are far superior to current reactors in terms of safety and efficiency. MSRs run at 1 atmosphere, requiring much less complex machinery and because of how they work, they CANNOT melt down. If left unattended and uncooled, they stabilize on their own. Certain designs actually can consume waste products, leaving magnitudes less waste to take dispose of than current reactors do. And they do not require copious amounts of cooling water, so don't need to be sited by the sea or rivers.
Why aren't MSRs in use now? A decision was made in the 50s to develop fission plants around boiling and pressurized water reactors. This was because the Navy chose that design, which was better for ships and subs, forever influencing the commercial sector through design maturation and licensing. The irony is that molten salt reactors were on a parallel track at the time; the first MSR reactor ran at Oak Ridge over 30 years ago, and it ran well.
Fusion is always 20 years away. MSRs are now. There are still some hurdles in their development, for instance, reprocessing and materials, but they are solvable compared to fusion. Why wait - we need a national crash program to build not only MSRs but also other "Gen 4" nuclear designs, none of which are like the designs your grandfather grew up with.
18
Hi Mature White Male: Past MSR's have all been fission reactors, not fusion reactors, so far.
Since Molten Salt refers to the coolant, it is theoretically possible that that Molten Salt could be used in a fusion design, but this has not been demonstrated yet.
@Mature White Male
Molten salt reactors will have significant issues that will be difficult to overcome. The plants are not ready now and will have a development cycle of over 20 years. Salt is not exactly easy to deal with. It is very corrosive and materials that last more than just a few years are not available. The entire plant will need heat tracing to ensure pipes and such are do not solidify. Each plant will need an online reprocessing facility that can extract U233 and remove waste….that has been difficult even when off line. (savannah river is shutting down due to issues and expense--but that should not be the guiding light in this case.)
Cooling systems will still be needed such as rivers or lakes or the ocean or a closed system cooling tower since that stuff is mainly for the steam cycle cooling the condenser.
A pilot plant will be needed first and then subsequent development to see if it can be scaled up. That takes a lot of time.
5
For a few weeks in 1974 or 75 I worked at the Plasma Physics Laboratory at Princeton University where they were building a containment unit for a fusion reaction. I was a helper cleaning soldered joints on the magnet rings cooling system. That was 45 years ago. Not there yet I guess.
6
"Had capitalistic greed not stood in his way, Tesla’s contributions to society could have gone significantly further. Despite his mental breakdowns later in life that were likely caused by detractors and capitalists who refuted his utopian visions for society, Tesla created a plethora of inventions, with the goal of transmitting energy to the world at little to no cost."
Capitalist greed is still the insurmountable obstacle.
3
@jimi99 That is very true, but I am more concerned about our fascination with nuclear weapons and collective suicide.
"Covering 4% of the world's desert areas with photovoltaics could supply the equivalent of all of the world's daily electricity use."
Scientific American, July 1 2013
5
@Doc Who
Doc, I didn't see that quote in the Scientific American. It seems to have come from: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.php?page=solar_where
This is from the July 1, 2013 Scientific American article:
"Cover around 4 percent of all deserts with solar panels, and you generate enough electricity to power the world. In other words, if we’re looking for energy—and of course, we are—those sandy sunny spots are a good place to start.
But statistics are one thing, building a few thousand gigawatts of solar power is quite another. Deserts are dusty, windblown and remote."
How do you get this electricity from those remote desert areas to places where people need it? How do you store that electricity? Solar panels produce no electricity at night and very little during the early morning and late afternoon hours.
2
@John The answer is you don't put them in the desert- you put them on already existing rooftops in the areas where the energy is most needed.
4
@John - Which is harder and more expensive: building a few thousand miles of high voltage transmission lines from desert areas to cities, or inventing and building fusion power plants? We already know how to build solar power plants and erect transmission lines. For that matter, we can build wind farms in remote areas and erect transmission lines from there as well.
I was a physics student in the '80s enamored with the promise of fusion. Still am really. But one question few seem to ask is the cost. Fission power is some of the most expensive electricity out there - especially when you include the horrendous expense of decommissioning, which has been drastically under reported by the industry. Expense is the actual reason we aren't building more plants now. Fusion being a lot more difficult seems assured to be even more expensive than fission!
Renewables are coming on for one reason - they are actually cheaper.
So I envision that fusion power will indeed be practical within 20 years, it will be really really cool and amazing - and very few plants will be built because wind + solar + battery storage will cost one fourth as much.
1
The USA alone has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on "fusion research", with not much to show for it. It appears to be a pipe dream. We have been spending a fortune on fusion research since I was a kid, and I am now an old guy. It seems that we have nothing to show for this.
Imagine if the USA had used that money to continue filling our strategic petroleum reserve. Instead of our current 60 to 90 day supply of emergency crude reserves, we would have , maybe, 5 years of oil in our reserves. As every farmer knows, when the corn bins are full of corn, the price of corn isn't going up.The threat alone of our dumping a small portion of such extensive reserves on into the world oil supply would cause world oil prices to drop, freeing us from the bondage of the many oil producing countries that mean us no good and threaten oil cutoffs if we don't kowtow to their demands.
And yes, we need to address the CO emissions. How idealistic and flawed we have been for so many decades.
1
@Gary
> We have been spending a fortune on fusion
> research since I was a kid, and I am now an
> old guy. It seems that we have nothing to
> show for this.
There is actually a ton of progress to be shown. Although we have not yet achieved "break-even", we're far, far closer than we were in past years; JET, the Joint European Torus, has managed to generate 16 MW of fusion power for 24 MW of power used to heat the plasma, a "Q" (Quality) ratio of 0.67. Right now, ITER is under construction and all signs suggest that they will achieve a "Q" of 10 or more.
And ITER may very well be "scooped" reaching that point by several other projects that are taking different approaches.
It's also worth noting that we (the US and the world) might have been much farther along had President Reagan not slashed funding for the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and other aspects of peaceful fusion experimentation.
7
@Gary
The US hasn't spent anywhere near "hundreds of billions of dollars on fusion research." Fusion has been grossly underfunded.
From the September 22, 2015 MIT Technology Review:
"By comparison, federal support for fusion research looks like a bargain. Since 1953, the U.S. government has spent about $30 billion on fusion energy science (a figure that includes the National Ignition Facility). That’s half a billion or so a year—about the cost of a single stealth bomber. "
This doesn't include private spending. If you have statistics supporting the "hundreds of billions of dollars" claim, please provide them.
7
@John. Measure that in today's dollars.
For the foreseeable future, fossil fuels will be our main source of energy. I don't like that, but try putting a fusion reactor in your car. Better yet, try building ANY fusion or fission reactor in New York City. Finally, try driving an electric car from NY City to my house on a cold, snowy, dark day(like today). Your batteries will kick the bucket long before you get here. Look, I like the theory of fusion. But, but, but, our infrastructure is now and for the foreseeable future based largely uppon fossil fuels. Wouldn't it be better to develop methods of better fuel economies, start building traditional nuclear plants, and find other methods of reducing CO in the atmosphere. I am in favor of co-operating with other countries on some fusion research. I just don't want this to end up like the space station which seems to have given us a very expensive nothing.
We DO have fusion devices. Right here in the US
What do you think delivers the energy of a Hydrogen Atomic Bomb ?
The financing of US experiments on fusion is motivated to verify the codes needed to deliver better hydrogen bombs but are advertised to the public as clean energy .
There is no realistic hope to ENGINEER fusion, ever, into a practical, affordable power source. The energies released
millions of times higher than in a chemical reaction are simple to high to deal with in a cost efficient way
Last point, fusion is not as "clean" an energy as advertised- the high energy neutrons released turn any materials they radioactive.
9
@Nuclear Scientist
This unfortunately garbled post nails it. Extracting power from controlled fusion was seen as a possible future solution when I studied electrical engineering in the 1950s! There is no, repeat no, reason to expect it to happen in anything like an economically sustainable way in the foreseeable future. As many of the posts imply, this is not a scientific problem -- we understand fusion -- but rather an engineering problem to figure out some machine that can use it and produce power at an acceptable cost. There is no sign that that will ever happen.
4
@Nuclear Scientist
> Last point, fusion is not as "clean" an energy
> as advertised- the high energy neutrons released
> turn any materials they radioactive.
One might expect someone writing under the name "Nuclear Scientist" to better-represent the facts of the matter.
In fact, this exact behavior is depended upon in proposed fusion devices as an essential part of their fuel cycle. To lessen the energy required to provoke fusion, the reaction used is fusing a Deuterium nucleus and a Lithium nucleus rather than the basic Hydrogen-Hydrogen reaction used by the Sun.
The source of the Tritium? Neutrons impinging on a Lithium blanket that lines the reaction chamber. In the process, the neutrons heat the blanket and the heat can be used to make steam.
> There is no realistic hope to ENGINEER fusion,
> ever, into a practical, affordable power source.
> The energies released millions of times higher
> than in a chemical reaction are simple to high
> to deal with in a cost efficient way
The engineers and actual nuclear scientists at ITER, MIT, and other such places seem to disagree with you. And we've been harnessing similarly-high reaction energies from FISSION reactions for about 3/4 of a century now.
1
@joel bergsman
And we will never be able to make a clock that can be used on sailing ships.
And we will never be able to fly heavier-and-air ships.
And we will never be able to sail west to reach China.
And we will never be able to reach the moon.
Your post not only ignores history, but is arrogant. Yes, fusion is a hard problem, but to be so sure it won't work is not based on any understanding on your part. It's just extrapolation. If we haven't done it yet and I don't understand how to do it, then it must not be possible. That point of view has been proven wrong over and over again.
7
It's possible that we will lose the planet if we do not replace fossil fuels with fission ASAP. It would ironic if environmentalists, who could not appreciate that nuclear waste and rare accidents are actually human character issues, blocked fission's wider adoption for too long. The real dangers lie in our species' governance, or lack thereof. The key will be subsidizing fission and solar production aggressively, with carbon taxes. The model is there, we must demand its implementation.
13
@Dwight Jones Fission is too inflexible, too expensive and too complex. Even China is reversing course. Nuclear and fossil are the Celluloid film of the 21st century. They'll be obsolete before they know what just happened.
1
There is testimony that black budget agencies in the military are working on or already have energy technology beyond your wildest dreams - cold fusion, zero-point energy, anti-gravitics and more. The trouble is, it may all be lies. Several of the witnesses are already discredited. Some are quite credible - see Dr. Hal Puthoff.
Both categories may be heard at: Siriusdisclusore.com
@Mr. Little That link, Siriusdisclusore.com, doesn't go anywhere. Or has a sinister force behind everything bad blocked it?
@Mr. Little
Almost certainly lies. How could such technologies be kept secret; is such secrecy even humanly possible?
@Mr. Little. I know for a fact that the same energy companies that bought up the water powered engines are hiding the existence of working fusion power technology.
Attention to fusion research, and also the recent hype on quantum computing, are more about the livelihoods of the scientists than about contributing to society, and we need more realistic and comparative ROI analyses to determine priorities. Gravitationally confined fusion (I.e. solar) is proven, and the discussion surrounding it is strong on comparative economics. And it seems to be winning. Why do we not even try with magnetic fusion? We’ll need fusion eventually, as we venture away from earth. But in a very different form from giant monuments such as ITER. Fund some focused effort that address key transformative questions, while recognizing and questioning cases of organizational inertia.
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@H
You don't know what you're talking about: it is magnetically contatined fusion (the tokamak) which is proven. There is no such thing as "gavitationally confined fusion."
@scsmits --
I've never heard the Sun called "gravitationally-confined fusion" before, but it's an apt description.
What do _you_ think holds the big red ball in the sky together?
@H
There's nothing wrong with the sun, just in how we harvest that energy. That's the problem, and we have yet to solve it.
A new study by Environmental Progress (EP) warns that toxic waste from used solar panels now poses a global environmental threat. The Berkeley-based group found that solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than nuclear power plants. Discarded solar panels, which contain dangerous elements such as lead, chromium, and cadmium, are piling up around the world, and there’s been little done to mitigate their potential danger to the environment.
There is confusion over fusion but not fission.
Fission is far, far better than burning carbon for the environment including devastation produced by coal mining and fracking and CO2 and Hg emissions.
But the Luddites fear it.
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@Edward Blau Go have a stroll in Chernobyl or Fukushima without a hazmat suit on & then tell us we needn't fear fission plants.
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@Edward Blau I'm a tekkie, at the other end of the spectrum of the Luddite; but I cannot see what this monstrous, hard-to-control technology with its unsolved waste problem can contribute. Fission's carbon footprint is not that small if you take a good look (https://theecologist.org/2015/feb/05/false-solution-nuclear-power-not-low-carbon). Those who need it most cannot afford it. And: Do you *really* want to spread nuclear fuel in the world, in times like these? *Really?*
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@Edward Blau I don't understand why many people prefer fusion over fission. The materials of a fusion power plant will become radioactive, too. The Luddites will oppose this, too; it doesn't matter if the fusion radioactive waste is less. We can build fission reactors now. We can't bet that fusion will be successful in 20 years.
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Fusion energy is already here. It rains down on us all day long from the sun. It's free, abundant and couldn't be any safer. It scales at will (up *and* down!). We can use it to boil water in Africa or to power Giga Factories in the U.S. The price matches fossil fuels already and continues to fall. All technological problems are solved. What would you bet on?
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@Peter Schneider
You do realize that solar panels are only 15-17% efficient, right? Not to mention that there are serious problems with toxic waste associated with disposal and manufacture. Engineering isn't as easy as it looks. Just ask Elon.
" A new study by Environmental Progress (EP) warns that toxic waste from used solar panels now poses a global environmental threat. The Berkeley-based group found that solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than nuclear power plants. Discarded solar panels, which contain dangerous elements such as lead, chromium, and cadmium, are piling up around the world, and there’s been little done to mitigate their potential danger to the environment."
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@Peter Schneider
The "Safety Zone" from that plant is sufficient: 92.96 million miles!
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It is time to call it the day on fusion, and let's not poor more money into a scientific concept that is a dream never coming true.
No matter how appealing it looks conceptually, there are not just hurdles, but problems for which there are not even conceptual solutions in place. And fusion is far from clean, it generates a lot of radioactively contaminated hardware.
Rather use the resources for work on efficient energy storage (like storage of a day's worth of electricity consumption for a large city), affordable and safe hydrogen storage and fuel cells, maybe thorium reactors, more efficient solar cells... Technologies with enormous potential in areas where there are actual incremental breakthroughs happen time and again.
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There is no hope that fusion will be an affordable energy source within the next 20 years, the time when Earth most desperately needs carbon-free energy sources. And yet some still oppose deploying safe clean carbon-free nuclear fission power. Madness. Our grandchildren will hate us for this.
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@Richard Schumacher I could show you some kids around Chernobyl and Fukushima who already hate us.
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@Richard Schumacher
That's some nice cherry-picking of the facts on fission.
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