Nuclear Fusion Predictions are Nonsense
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- Опубликовано: 15 сен 2024
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Nuclear fusion is one of the most important up-and-coming technologies, and contrary to jokes, it is indeed coming closer. But how long will it take to get a nuclear fusion reactor to put power in to the grid? According to two recent reports, the technology won’t be ready until 2050, too late to contribute to our net zero goals. If you look at national strategy plans, the projections look different. What are we to make of such wildly different perspectives?
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#science #sciencenews #nuclear #nuclearfusion #tech
How far away are we from nuclear fusion? About 93 million miles...
LOL!
hehe
😂
Mars?
I knew it!
They built it in the 50's.
People are already there!
I KNEW IT🤪
@@joemadden4160 The Sun, in case anyone is actually confused.
I'm 76, an ex-Brit living in California. When I was 10, the country of my birth claimed commercial nuclear fusion was only a few years away, using a gizmo called Zeta. 66 years later, commercial nuclear fusion is only a few years away, using ...
Just as we have 20 years on the planet left, well I'm paying CO2 tax for a few years so probably that's why, I saved your butt 👌🏿
@@ForWhomBellstols - Virtually all nuclear energy promoters, are in line with the vast majority of Earth's other 8.0+ billion humans, who continue to assume that we still have at least 20 years left to turn this 'Titanic' around using their favorite nuclear technology. They have become masterful in excluding the following warnings from their consciousness. I urge readers to search for the following two article titles.
IPCC report: ‘now or never’ if world is to stave off climate disaster (TheGuardian)
UN chief: World has less than 2 years to avoid 'runaway climate change' (TheHill)
* This statement was made 5.7 years ago.
@@ForWhomBellstols No reputable scientist is saying there are only 20 years left, but the intensity and probability of natural disasters HAS increased and will continue to increase if no additional actions are taken.
@@TheCatvoladorwill continue to happen either way, the past 200years has been a lul in the usual amount of natural disasters, and with or without human beings the environment will continuously change, getting hotter and colder as the tides will always rise and fall. The "saving the earth" stuff is a fantasy, a dragon that cannot be slain. Focus on keeping your locality clean and planet will be fine.
@@TheCatvolador also the whole "X years left" is bunk, there will be primitive people scattered around in caves even after societal collapse due to accelerated climate change, nuclear war (likely caused by the accelerated climate change), Trump & Giant Meteor winning in 2028, or anything else
"The Future is Later."
Now THAT is an inspirational poster.
yesterday I will try something new
@@drgetwrekt869 there was no yesterday
@@alieninmybeverage But there will be one tomorrow.
Tomorrow never dies...
@@thearpox7873 let me know when it is tomorrow then
I once had an idea for a printer with a built in shredder. This was to improve recycling and productivity by avoiding the need for anyone to read a report ever again. Sometimes I wish I’d something with it.
When I worked at a comms firm in Derby (UK), the network couldn't stop a print if we needed to cancel it, so I used to just take the receving tray off the printer, lean it over the rubbish bin and let it all happen for an hour .. or more .. or a lot more. Happy days :)
@@mobilephil244 Hi from Stockport! Of course, my idea was stupid. What we really need is self-shredding paper.
You did do something with that printer.
You didn't go bankrupt trying to sell a
product that no one would buy.
Or just take the ink out of the printer. That's how all my printers work.
@@michaelhatch1994 That's genius! You don't have to buy ink and you can reuse the paper 10 times over!
“Predicting the future is hard - especially when it hasn’t happened yet.”
The best way to predict the "future" is to look at it backwards from the "future future" and if you want something invented get a British bloke thinking about it!?!
Mmm, you ain't studied Arthur C. Clarke then! GPS with geosynchronous orbits his invention, reminding the USA that they need to take heed of Einsteins relativity and time dilation, clocks work slower when in orbit. Personal mobile computers (phones) being the norm, AI eventually superseding human kind's intelligence.
That and he was a kick ass science fiction writer.
“It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
― Yogi Berra
@@TomTomicMicPreferably an intelligent, educated aristocrat with great wealth and an interest in amateur science but no personal ambition for greater personal political power. Now do you see the flaw? You are a century too late.
I'm so happy someone made a Yogi reference @@zaq55
We're only 20 years from the next announcement of "we're only 30 years away"
Right on schedule.
We're 20! years away.
@@thearpox7873 Brilliant. Just an ASCII code making all the difference
If tritium did not exist at all, they'd still be talking about deuterium-deuterium reactor being technologically feasible on the horizon. And there'd be a myriad of papers, predictions, start-ups, grants, scams, and media articles hyping the ... 'progress'. Don't laugh; it's here, now, at least in predatory journals:
"Proposal of a Deuterium-Deuterium Fusion Reactor Intended for a Large Power Plant"-Patrick Lindecker
@thearpox7873 20! Isn't so bad. We'll just have to wait for 1.76*10^8 times the age of the universe. By then, we'll probably forget why we were doing it in the first place.
We are all pretty frustrated about the whole situation too. We are only talking about changing the whole world like that time we discovered the wheel, the gun powder, electricity, computers..
The thing is, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. No amount of money or effort will change that.
That took AT LEAST decades to have a significant impact, it was not overnight...
@@mikeguilmette776 oh, IT WORKS!
None of those things changed the world as quickly as she seems to suggest. It seems quick in hindsight, but it was still decades.
@@mikeguilmette776
It works buddy, it just aint sustainable yet.
I was really excited about fusion when I was 14 years old. That was in 1973, and it was only ten years away!
It's your fault! you are traveling too close to light speed and slow down time! Catch a break! 😂
It's because the financial interests of the world exclusively funded approaches to fusion that most likely would not work...the Electrostatic Inertial Confinement method is the only reasonable way to approach fusion. Not that you would know anything about it outside of what the fist page of Google tells you. Pollywell, the Farnsworth Fusor...we can build and test 1000s of iterations of these types of devices for the cost of 1 magnetic confinement machine. We have been sent down the wrong technical path for actual fusion and only an idiot can't see that. Robert W. Bussard also said this.
It's '30 years away' because certain president-moron (RR) froze the funding and since then it was on starvation rates. Gee, how can timeline for something we don't fund due to brainless fundie conservaturds be stuck? It's like asking why clock stops when we pull batteries out!
to be fair there was basically no investment in fusion back them, all the government cared about was uranium nuclear reactors to make bombs and fossil fuels. even today we are barely investing in it compared to other technologies.
@@davidj8569
"We have been sent down the wrong technical path for actual fusion and only an idiot can't see that. Robert W. Bussard also said this."
Only an idiot calls people that do not have the knowledge of a technology to make the correct decision, an idiot.
Either begin the process of educating those in government making the wrong decision, or elect people of integrity that are already educated in those areas; to those posts so that the correct decision will be made.
Those fusion start-ups are the latest investment scam.
In the 1970's I wrote a high school paper on fusion. It was *just* 30 years out then. It's been a constant 30 years out since.
One of the great "constants" of known physics...
Oh no! Now that well-funded startups are working on it rather than stodgy academic institutions, fusion will perpetually be 5-10 years in the future, rather than 30!
You went to a fad school. Most places, it’s just 25 years out 😉
It will be 300 years before Fusion is of any use. Yes, it is that difficult. I’ve waited 60. I am a bit pessimistic
J. E. Lilienfeld patented the field effect transistor (FET) in 1925. He was never able to make a working device. It took two decades before anyone could build one and another two after that before commercial devices were available. The FET is the building block of our modern technology. A FET is far, far less complicated to build than a fusion reactor. Standing in 1935, or even 1955 a cynic might have said we'll never have working FETs.
Most people don't know the origin of the "30 year" estimate for fusion. Rutherford's lab assistant, Oliphant, reused Rutherford's equipment and methods to create variations on fusion in the lab, 90 years ago. In an interview when asked how long before it would be commercially practical for generating electricity, Oliphant opined, "30 years". Rutherford heard of his subordinate's prediction, and contradicted, "60 years".
Einstein heard of this fuss, and said, "They will both always be right."
I simply do not understand why we have basically ignored fission technology. I don't really care how the zero carbon emissions electrons get to my house. Now that I am onboard that there is a problem, I am even more confused by the lack of what to me, seems to be an obvious bridge solution. I have nothing against windmills, solar panels, or Small Modulor Reactors. When there truly is an emergency, don't you pick the lesser of all evils and go full steam ahead? If a fraction of the resources that has been put into educating people about the perils of climate change had instead been put into development of Advanced Reactors and education on the safety of this technology, we would have a lot more breathing room in which to determine the best path forward.
The worst thing that can happen to activists is a solution to their cause. In Germany they put back old coal plants while they shut down nuclear power plants.
Many powerful people like Saudi princes and billionaire oil oligarchs benefit from this lack of action. Thank decades of targeted gaslighting for that.
Nope, not in our delusion startup-up-moonshot culture....every time my house catches on fire, I use it as an opportunity to test my entropy reversal machine based on my 10 viewings of Tenet, and I use a catapult and my burning furniture to keep those pesky firefighters at bay until I can get some good diagnostic data on how close I'm getting. Only those with no vision use water to put out fire.
fission is ignored bcs politicians are not exactly the best of the best in terms of IQ
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.
Guess people won't change their opinions of something they once deemed dangerous.
Also I'm not really in the loop, but aren't sm. reactors fission? In a sense they are an advancement on that technology.
(But I'm also not arguing that the money spent could have gone into further refinement of something that already works)
(Though I'd also like to argue that money spent on all the nuclear fusion experiments was well spent, it contributed to gathering knowledge, that may or may not pay off in the future)
I came from the year 2152 and I can happily inform you that nuclear fusion is no longer 50 years away... it's been updated to 15 years away
2167 here. Still 15 years away, realistically 30. However this time we will make it for sure!
@@Dziki_z_Lasu So, time travel is more feasible in your mind than commercial fusion?
Scans.
@@bartroberts1514 Well, that's because a timetraveler historian from 2468 got stuck in 2130 during the great disaster and final unification so we got the technology from there, unfortunatly it can't be used to travel forwards past the travelers local spatial time due to certain limitations.
@@weremuppet7625 Still more credible than commercial fusion.
@@bartroberts1514 Time travel 😂 May Roko the Basilisk almighty be gentle to you.
Thank you for reading a lot of crap that you don't talk to us about. I count on it!
❤❤❤❤. That's what you experts are for.
There has been exactly one development in fusion in the last 90 years since Rutherford and Oliphant that worked as promised, and to all appearances Teller's will be the last.
Show us the data and energy balance calculations for your full fusion LCA, or you don't know what you're talking about.
This never crossed my mind. Thank you, Sabine! 🤯🥳
Yeah, I don't read about fusion anymore. Fusion, even if it worked, would cost way more to exploit than fission, but fission itself is far from competitive, and gets less so by the day. Inertial confinement is a weapons analysis technology, not an energy technology. Helion is not proper to mention in a report because it is a capital extraction technology, not an energy technology.
When I was a young High School student attending a Department of Defense High School in the late 1970s my Physics class visited the Max Planck Institute near Munich to see their Tokamak. They assured us that they were only one or two steps away from an active Nuclear Fusion production system in less than a decade.
That was 1978.
I've been laughing at every subsequent prediction ever since, now nearly a half century later. They all sound the same as those earnest young scientists back then.
It's hard to be optimistic about nuclear fusion.
My prediction is we'll crack it wide open in a generation. And the reality will be devastatingly disappointing.
@@springbloom5940 Sounds like TRANSRAPID
@@springbloom5940 Yeah, stuff like inertial fusion is simply not feasible from an engineering PoV (the only successes are for weapons testing anyway) and by the time we have finally cracked fusion in other ways (if we even do) I doubt it will be economic ...
It might all blow up in your face if you're too optimistic😩
and the optimism is toxic to addresing more realistic solutions. fusion, like carbon sequestration, has become the new psychological crutch for the sort of people who pray for an imaginary parent to come along and solve their problems. it's also become a dream that is conveniently leveraged by business interests who want to prop up business as usual. my opinion of fission is not much higher either fwiw, but i'm aware that the appearance of being a good argument is more sophisticated and difficult to unpick in that case
I've been walking a lot recently, and confidently predict at the current rate of progress I will be able to fly by 2032.
LOL. Me too - but mainly only with my soul - if it exists. Best buy balsa wood, tissue paper, adhesive, and some rubber bands.
Congrats
😂😂😂
Well technically you can already fly. You get on a plane created using the power of technology, following observation of flight in the natural world. Now maybe there might be an analogy with fusion?
You’re videos are sooo much better since your earlier ones. Your presentations are so much more funny, clever, witty, and charming. A+
The late husband of a delightful neighbour of mine was a scientist, an academic who worked on fusion. His reply when asked about the timescale was that “ I have spent my entire career working on nuclear fusion. Achieving it is at least fifty years away, and always will be” !
Sabine, you are so right about tech predictions. But not only academia fail, also big tech companies do.
On purpose! Greetings to Elon!
Rolling the dice is more predictable than these so called scientists
But tech companies get to write it off on their taxes. When Academia fails they write off our taxes.
Friend of mine from college was in the US Army 10-15 years ago (did ROTC in college so he had to serve for … 4 years? I forget).
After he did his time abroad and in Afghanistan he got an assignment as a project manager in the US. One of his projects was the work being done for a fusion reactor powered tank.
Yes. A tank powered by a fusion reactor. When I heard this I was very shocked and said the reasonable thing, “isn’t that technology pretty far out??”
To which he replied, “The Army thinks it will be feasible in 10 years.”
What else could one have expected as the timeline for anything fusion powered!
Electrostatic Inertial Confinement is the only logical way to pursue Fusion power. Pollywell and the Farnsworth Fusor are examples of this. You can build and test over 1000 iterations of the Electrostatic Inertial Confinement devices for the cost of 1 Magnetic confinement system or Inertial (laser) confinement system. Do you people get it? The financial interests that fund these ventures don't WANT fusion power...they want a never ending con job to continually suck money out of taxpayers...that's why we don't have Fusion in the 21st century. Not because it isn't possible, but because most people don't have any earthly idea of the history behind it...or the Electrostatic Inertial Confinement devices that were the FIRST FUSION REACTORS...used mainly as Neutron sources at research labs currently...but again we can build and test 1000s of those things...why isn't anyone pursuing it? Because you can con more money out of taxpayers by producing stuff that doesn't actually work but costs a lot more money. Robert W. Bussard is a name all you people should familiarize yourselves with. That "Tank" that you mentioned, most likely will have some variation of the Pollywell reactor powering it. Electrostatic Inertial Confinement is the only logical way to pursue miniaturized fusion rectors.
@@davidj8569 did a little reading on this - seems interesting, but also still very hypothetical still. And I’m not in a position to compare how much one type of reactor costs vs another so I’ll just have to take your word for it.
HOWEVER! I will say that the original funding for fusion stuff here in the US (and this is from memory so I could be misremembering) was focused on the defense aspect of it all.
With the moratorium on nuclear tests the DoD/DoE/AEC/whoever else is involved needed a way to test the nuclear weapons that we have to make sure the cores still work (as they decade over time because radiation and shit heh). So the funding was put together for the national ignition lab.
At the time the idea of getting useable energy from a fusion reaction to produce power was so far out of reach that devoting the money necessary to study this stuff, for that purpose, was a nonstarter.
From there, and multiple facility upgrades later, we did get a reaction that produced a net energy gain. We “just” need to make the cadence between ignitions 100 times faster or something.
Also learned a bit about what happens when stuff fuses and could run some experiments on the fissile material/fusion .. fuel? … in cores which was what the govt really was interested in.
Sound like some in the Army plays to many SciFi computer games.
@@davidj8569 Yeah, it's a racket.
@@davidj8569 The Farnsworth Fusor has been evaluated by many top nuclear fusion physicists who have determined that the approach can't be scaled up to produce significantly useful quantities of fusion energy. In a Fusor only a insignificant quantity reacts to generate fusion neutrons. Many people find it extremely convenient to explain any failures to develop the technology by applying one, or another, conspiracy theory, as the cause.
I hereby suggest an "All Crap" video... just for fun.
Ayup.
Seconded
I think you overestimate how fast nuclear fusion will change everything. It's dependant on how expensive fusion power plants are going to be, and how complex it is to fabricate the parts. From everything I know about magnetic confinement, I doubt that would see a rapid adoption all over the world, simply because the parts for the reactor are going to be very hard to produce. Now, it's possible that I overestimate the cost, or that a different, easier to produce reactor will make it, but I don't think it's inevitable for fusion to change the world quickly - I think it's at least possible that it's going to take decades from the first viable reactor to fusion having a meaningful positive impact on climate change.
My main concern, and it may not be a valid concern as I am not as aware of these issues as I could be, is if the construction of fusion power plants will favor certain countries over others. This wouldn't 'solve' the energy issue so much as redistribute which countries have an edge in energy. And a shakeup of the entire energy sector will not happen easily.
What isn't in all those "fusion will take over" - fuel availability and cost. As long as recycling/breeding isn't working, it won't take over. We're not (generally) there with fission after decades, so I don't expect it to be ready when the first fusion reactor puts out energy into the grid. There's so much hot air involved, it might be a much cheaper energy source even now … ;-)
@@NemisCassander I think a huge benefit will be that there should be no security barriers to propagating the technology around the world like there are with fission reactors. Cost will be prohibitive, yes, but maybe there will be deals to be made with countries where they get fusion reactors build alongside carbon capture (another technology that needs to accelerate) and get the excess energy for free?
Indeed. The competition is solar panels, wind turbines and battery cells. Each of which are almost trivial to produce now, and cheaper than anything else.
@@traumflugBatteries are absolutely not that cheap.
Solar and wind have extreme mineral resource needs, which are cheap now because China keeps dumping them, but that’s no guarantee for the future, same with batteries.
Oil was also comically cheap before the 70s, to the point the French thought they could run a train on helicopter turbines.
Also, fusion has applications beyond ground power. For example, it could fully decarbonize and generally improve all ships larger than a city ferry, without any of the issue of existing marine nuclear propulsion.
Fusion power plants essentially need a breakthrough. It will be a big deal when it happens, but who knows when it will happen. It’s still worth pursuing given its clear potential for humanity.
At present we should still be utilizing and expanding fission power as we don’t know when a breakthrough will happen with fusion.
It there no profit is the reason why
Not per about a dozen startups. Helion says they have all the parts together now and are building an energy positive demonstrator for - well, they wanted to show it in 2024 but IIRC 2 hard to manufacture components ran some months late. Avalanche just got 40 million USD to show a reactor in Space in 2027. They also say that it is an engineering problem on a solvable scale now.
I've been hearing since the mid-80s that working fusion reactors are just around the corner. Yeah, I had a scumbag neighbor that said the same thing about his rent every month. My idiot neighbor was actually the more reliable, he was slow and full of excuses but he avoided eviction the whole time I was there.
Fission power can save the planet if it’s widely adopted. A bird in the hand is worth ten in the bush.
Too bad thats its literally impossible to widely adopt if, due to the lack of enough fission material for everyone.
@@AliothAncalagon That is as false as assuming that fission will "save" the planet.
@@obsidianjane4413 You can doubt the numbers all you want, the nuclear industry itself admits that there is by far not enough material to widely adopt nuclear fission.
Let me find the numbers of the National Nuclear Laboratory again........ they calculated that there is enough Uranium ore left to fuel nuclear fission for another 90 years if its not expanded beyond the current 10% of global use. Not counting expected price inflation due to scarcity if its actually expanded.
@@AliothAncalagon You are mistakenly presuming that only current fission designs and fuels are possible.
@@AliothAncalagon Hey, clown, it's 'not enough' thanks to stupid brainwashing by "green" idiots killing best reactor designs. Current reactors we use only use up 1% of the fuel in rods. Make throughburning reactors and the amount of fuel go up 100x. Use elements other than uranium and it will go up 1000x times. Use thorium and it will go up 10000x. There is plenty of fuel, we just use it in stupid ways due to mornic laws written by idiots. It's like claiming there is not enough wheat for everyone if you only take 1 grain from every hundredth stalk and bury the rest as "dangerous wheat waste" while raining crocodile tears wheat is so expensive and "dangerous"...
Almost like their goal is not to give a sophisticated overview of the current situation, but to support a particular political view of the person financing the study.
You are getting there! - The same is the situation with their attempt to find Gravity and to unite TR and Quantum Mechanics - Already 100 years they have good and never ending job.
I remember a few years ago when Arianespace executives said that reusable rockets would never become feasible, that their Ariane 5 then 6 rockets would simply remain as the "Mercedes" of rockets making SpaceX's Falcon 9 irrelevant. Since then Arianespace's launch business has been destroyed by SpaceX and its Falcon 9. There might be a common theme here...
@@victorkrawchuk9141 I remember the white Red TINTIN rocken that landed vertically in 1960
yes!
Arianspace's launch business has not been destroyed by SpaceX. There is a lot to be said for redundancy and control.
By comparison, however, rockets are a simple technology.
@@rogerphelps9939Are you saying spacex doesnt have these things?
I'll continue to ridicule nuclear fusion. Even if it works one day (let's say in 25 years, that's what I learned as a child in the 1970s... or was it 10 years?) it will be so incredibly complex and expensive that it won't be able to compete with other forms of energy. And btw., it isn't as clean as many people think it is.
It would be more expensive than fission, and fission is far from competitive. Fission gets less competitive by the day.
Avalanche wants their (fits on a desk) thing ready for trucks. Helion is 2x 40 ft container put in a building with (initially) boron infused concrete. They plan to not sell reactors but the energy - 1 cent per kwh.
Where is the complex and price?
I suppose we could compare the "slowness" of achieving fusion to the development of iron smelting that took thousands of years. That helps put things in perspective.
I like this comparison. Most fusion energy fans prefer to refer to historical examples that took far less time to. develop. They also tend to be clueless about the large numbers of announced technologies that never proved to be commercially practical.
As someone who has to bear the pain of working with the TRL scale all day long, the TRL scale is plain bullshit.
I’ve even gotten designs for perpetual motion machines supposedly at TRL > 7…
If anyone mentions a TRL rating, assume they are completely clueless, and you’ll be right most of the time.
I have a machine that uses respected physics to send the energy output back in time by one nano second to increases the input thus increasing the output so that I have infinite energy. "Quantum wave multiplier" It's the way of the future :P
>
It's OK, I'll see myself out lol
Design for a perpetual motion device at TRL>7?
I don't encounter TRL in my work, but years ago, I worked where they were in use, so I'm familiar enough. Which is why I'm glad I wasn't taking a drink when I read your post, because I'd have made a mess lol
TRL is a NASA standard, if anyone but NASA is giving you a TRL number to sell their concept then it's BS. NASA uses it as a metric to fund and evaluate their tech development for fitness to go on missions to space, in other words it is athe people who will use the tech that decide the ratings, not startups trying to hustle VC's.
Tell us about the crap! The crap is my favorite! 😂
😂
Really? I don't talk about it because I fear it will get tiresome very quickly. There are so many crappy reports and papers, I could go on about this forever, but we wouldn't learn much from it I'm afraid.
@@SabineHossenfelderMaybe a once-a-month crap report, so it doesn't get too salty and take over the channel.
meToo
@@SabineHossenfelder Personally, I would see it as an equivalent to reporting negative results in a peer-reviewed journal. Not flashy, but very important to understand what's being done and where future work should be done.
I genuinely like hearing your content, if not for the science, for finding out what industries/companies I can apply to, lol.
I'm 50, reasonably healthy, and I am sure I will not see fusion working in my lifetime.
Doesn't matter how "Healthy" you are you will never be "healthy enough" to see N.F. Their basic assumption is wrong. There is not N.F. on the Sun.
that's what they told about the berlin wall.
Look at the Sun, or at the stars at night... Or some videos of hydrogen bomb tests. Multiple choices
@@AndrasMihalyi You are the fun guy at parties, right?
@@markotrieste I'm the one, who knows a joke when I hear one. Loosen up. Life is too short to wait for fusion power plants to be built and feeling bitter.
I don’t think it will be a quick adoption. I think it will take decades to go from a working technology demonstration to a economically viable commercial solution
In terms of Enet, fusion still appears one to two orders of magnitude short of breakeven, let alone surplus. Compared to fission the complexity is a nightmare.
I disagree with the idea of achieve fusion will turn in everyone adopting it.
That scenario requires very cheap cost and fast amortization. It's not immediate.
And, let's be serious here. We really don't know if a fusion nuclear reactor will be even competitive enough to be adopted in significant quantities, and that's even a lot less than your scenario of massive adoption.
Nope. Helion plans to not sell their reactors at all - but the energy for 1 cent per kwH. And we KNOW that Fusion will be competitive - there are plenty of scenarios where the alternative sucks so much. COntainer ships? Rip out the Diesel, put in a fusion plant, run the propulsion electric. Done. Electric cars - how you think you power 200 chargers on a station on the highway?
@@ThomasTomiczek Fusion powered container ships will never be a thing. Fusion requires MORE shielding than fission, not less.
@@ThomasTomiczek Sorry, but as no real production plants exists, all projected costs are just wishful thinking. A lot of fusion tech will end on dead ends.
Others has shown that didn't scale as good as they wanted, so the only way to make it work are bigger and bigger machines, and big machines usually turn in slower and bigger budgets that can raise the costs easily. So... just wait the reality to claim about costs.
About chargers, they require electricity. You can move it with any technology, even 100% renewable. That's of course, isn't an argument against nuclear. It's just neutral.
"I read a lot of crap I don't tell you about" sounds like something my mum would day 😂
And these same "expert consultants" earn more than teachers that make real impact on people's lives
Excellent job. You've described something new to me in a simple, easy to understand way.
How do you know "they are not far away"? Sounds like a prediction based on... words?
Another example of failed institute prediction "solar has historically grown at ~24% compounding rate, thus, we assume it will grow at 5% linear rate from now."
When I was a kid in the 60's and watching science films in class like "Our Friend the Atom" (god love the mousetrap fission demonstration), Nuclear fusion was 20 years away. This has of course become the running joke about fusion ever since.
I find these optimistic predictions difficult to comprehend. Even ITER is now saying they won't be fully operational (using deuterium-tritium fuel) until 2039. And ITER isn't even pretending they will ever supply electricity to the grid.
I'm a fusion skeptic. While I believe that it *might* be possible someday to build a fusion reactor that produces more power than it consumes, I don't believe it will ever be possible to build a fusion reactor that is commercially viable. Fission reactors are barely commercially viable and they are orders of magnitude simpler than fusion reactors. Recouping the cost of construction and the ongoing operational costs of a fusion reactor will make them just too expensive.
Actually not. Much of the cost of ITER goes into making something that can be tweaked in order to find the best solution for the follow on demonstration reactor. The cost of ITER is about the same as one commercial fission reactor.
Don't be fooled by the cost of ITER. It's not supposed to be a blueprint for a commercial version.
It's a laboratory with vastly over spec everything and a whole box of (bloody expensive) widgets that won't be needed for generation sites.
It will be used to work out how to make commercial ones viable.
@@rogerphelps9939 Renewables are far cheaper than fission reactors already. Fusion reactors had to be built for about a tenth of the cost of fission reactors to make an impact.
Ikr
It will be like nuclear fission energy: years 2000-2015: "Nuclear is expensive, let's invest in renewables" years >2015: "It's too late for nuclear, I'm sorry"
I remember as a preteen in the early 60.s reading and article that said fusion was only 25 years away. And here it is 60+ years later and we only have to wait 6 more years. I won't hold my breath.
The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed. (W Gibson) This aphorism seems to apply to other domains of endeavour, like thinking and diligent research and reporting.
Thanks Sabine for another piece of the puzzle of why governments are finding it so difficult to govern.
Or my favorite, food distribution. There is enough food produceded to feed all 9billion ofthese dumb primates...but is anyone figuring out how and making it happen does not exist.
The worst thing about fusion always being 30 years away is the promise of "almost there" fusion has been used to stop a lot of "we know how to do this" fission power. And the reality is that it is highly likely that even if a commercially viable fusion design was discovered tomorrow, a viable commercial reactor will take 20 years and multi-billion dollars to build also.
Good Points. Even with existing and wildly promoted new fission reactor power plants the economics are getting less favorable and the deployment timescales ignore warnings such as the following.
All promoters of nuclear energy are in line with the vast majority of the Earth’s 8.0+ billion humans who have masterfully excluded the following warnings from their consciousness. They continue to assume that we have at least 20 years left to turn this ‘Titanic’ around, through the use of their favorite technology. I urge readers to search for the following two article titles.
IPCC report: ‘now or never’ if world is to stave off climate disaster (TheGuardian)
UN chief: World has less than 2 years to avoid 'runaway climate change' (TheHill)
* This statement was made 5.7 years ago.
Actually no - the 30 years were and are governments. Startups work a lot funnier. Helion, i.e. - does one experimental reactor per year. Their next on - v7 - is expected to show energy positive, v8 is supposed to be commercial and a scale up on the extraction. 30 years is really an ITER thing.
I remember when 2001: A Space Odyssey came out in '68. By the early 80s it was obvious that the level of technology in that film was wildly optimistic. That's only one example: It now looks like we will never achieve what was depicted in '68 -- to say nothing of the ridiculous Star Trek series that has us butterflying around the galaxy in space battleships. The real world just doesn't usually operate that way. In the 60s my best friend died of leukemia with the doctors telling her a breakthrough could happen any day. We not only don't have a cure yet, but scientists are saying we may never have a cure. And they have stopped looking for one. They talk now of managing the symptoms and working for remission. It must be said though that we do have the internet; that's certainly an accomplishment.
According to the A. C. Clarke book version, the _Discovery_ was fission powered (as were the primitive nuclear rocket engines of the early 60's). It was designed for round trips to Mars. For the Jupiter mission, it was a one way trip. While they were en route, a more capable ship would be built to bring them back.
All the tech in _2001_ was plausible.
However we just about have the equivalent to the HAL 9000 computer with modern AI (such as ChatGPT). Only about 30 years late (HAL 9000 actived in 1992 in the book). Although ChatGPT consists of large datacenter full of servers & does not use holgraphic\optical memory.
As far as Fusion power, that's totally never going to happen.
I'd rather have rotary telephones and fusion power than smartphones and nothing else.
Only thing that matters: compare Qplasma vs. Qtotal. Qtotal must be greater than 1 for fusion to be a practical solution to the world's energy needs. No one is even close to that number.
Indeed. And to state that TRL (technology readiness level) is 3 or 4, or even 5, it’s such a blatantly false statement that all policies based on that should be stopped immediately
Helion says they are - their 7th reactor is supposed to be, this year.
How about another factor to consider: COST. Nuclear fusion, when IF, it comes about, will be the most expensive way to boil water ever devised. It will be the MOST expensive option by far, even managing to make nuclear fission look like a bargain by comparison (its not). Every single form of energy production will orders of magnitude LESS costly and difficult to deploy and maintain, than nuclear fusion. I found Canada's belief that Fusion will doing......something here in the 2030's funny, but not in a good way. Canada's most recent reactor went online in...............1993.
For many, that truth is a plus.
How about cost per unit of energy produced?
@@MichaelH65496 Use any metric you wish, cost per kw/h, total cost, levelized cost, it wont matter, the cost to end users, or gov'ts, it willl have to be govt would be very high, as utilities would not be able to finance a fusion reactor. Fusion would never be cost comptetivie with any other form of power generation, so it just as well it remains forever stuck in expensive proof-of-concept stage.
@@MichaelH65496 One needs to take a long term look to understand how those numbers are arrived at. Nuclear is in an entirely different realm from fossil fuel plants, so low it almost looks like an error. That is its strongest suit.
Gas and oil corporations play fast and loose with the incalculable cost to human health, simply omitting what it doesn’t want to see, and they play this game with a cynicism that would shame any banana republic. Their pollution has killed many millions in horrific disasters. But those are the good numbers. Air and water pollution kills continuously, easily hundreds of millions over the centuries.
It is so irresponsible to permit this stone age approach now that we know better. For the vast majority of earth’s locations, nuclear provides the only solution for base-level power generation. In concert with other renewables such as solar and wind, nuclear can and will improve humanity’s lot forever.
Sabine the idea that fusion technology will just take off after 'someone gets it to work' is silly. Define 'gets it to work' if you mean net-energy then device is going to be a multi million dollar near lab bench set up powering a light bulb, it will be so far from practicality that it will be like the first photovoltaic. We would expect decades on continued hard research to a commercially practical device and the big private money would come in only near the end.
Sounds like you could do a "Top ten crap takes this month" featurette, tho perhaps regurgitating such depths might make you feel unwell. :)
Actually a good idea. I'll think about that, thanks!
Myth busting can be tricky, repeating the myth often gives it credence.
behavioralpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/BSP_vol1is1_Schwarz.pdf
Back in the late 70s the economist ran an article on fusion where they said the only new knowledge was a new constant of nature - 3. That was the number of years quoted in mid 60s for how long until fusion was economically viable, and it was the same number in the late 70s. And it's the same number today, 50 years later. Fusion will be ready in three years, it's a constant of nature.
5:25 I disagree. Given the state of nuclear fusion research (especially the insane cost and timeline overruns for ITER), I think nuclear fusion will largely suffer the same problems as nuclear fission: it's just way too expensive. It's a useful technology to continue exploring, but wind/solar + storage will still be the economically sensible solution for most of civilization.
Wind/solar+storage isn't remotely economically sensible, compared to fission, you've got that backwards. The only reason there's not more bankruptcies is massive governement subsidies. They're actually run through a financial system of self-loans and subsidies, where the owners are a company in luxemburg who loan out funds to the company running the plants, which takes in massive subsidies to keep going, so the owners take a profit out of subsidies, while the actual power company runs at a loss.
Thank you for educating us. I was disappointed to learn the recent "breakthroughs" a few years ago were largely bullshit. This along with climate change really makes me feel deeply sad about how politics is ruining our future. For the last 50 years we could have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on Solar, Geothermal, and Nuclear but we decided to invest more on hope than science.
Why don't they just admit that the future of nuclear fusion depends on the results of science they haven't done yet and can't be predicted in advance? Commercial fusion energy might be here by 2040, might still be "20 years away" at the end of the century. That's all there is to it.
Because the science wouldn't be founded. It's hard to convince people to give you money, and when you say you don't know when or if you might see any impact from it
I some sense fusion is more engineering problem
Technology Readiness Level 3 or 4 on the 9level measure is probably correct for fusion. After Fusion Energy Gain Factor Q achieves 1.0 reliably and consistently, there is still so much technology to be developed. A practical Q of 5 to 10 is required to power all of the numerous sub sytems and many new materials have to be developed, not least of which are the blankets used to extract the thermal energy from the reactor and the industrial plants required to manage the tritium requirements. Many decades of work by the materials scientists and engineers still to go. Even if the end result is very expensive electricity due to the facility costs, the spin off technologies could be where the eventual utility resides.
The point where fusion will actually become viable will be the point where we discover an as yet unknown and un-theorised property of physics that will immediately make fusion obsolete.
Fusion isn't going to happen.
It will.
@@rogerphelps9939 Not in any meaningful sense.
I’ll turn 60 in December. When I was about 10, maybe 12 years old all the opposing experts are saying that we are roughly 20 years away from nuclear fusion… I’m waiting.
The first nuclear fusion experiments began in the 1950s and has been headed by the experts in nuclear physics and engineering. I've been hearing the same predictions since the 1960s. Todays promoters tend to avoid mentioning the lengthy failure history when they pitch stories that are aimed at satisfying other's craving for hope.
Tokamak is a dead end technology
So can't get any better than that ?
@@fly463 Fusion is still the future, Tokamak is just a very inefficient design and is held back by inherent limitations.
@@JungLeeTheDoctor do we have a better design?
Good enough to produce cheap electricity?
@@fly463 Pulsed fusion systems like inertial confinement and helion's pinch are promising alternatives. Sustained fusion seems a long way off.
In 1975, my college professor told me to focus on fusion because it was the future. I sort of ignored him and spent the next 49 years working profitably on fission reactors. Fusion is still 20 years away.
في في المستقبل البعيد وبفضل التكنولوجيا المتقدمة سوف يتساوى الخيال مع الواقع ويمتلك الإنسان قوى الآلهة ليحول الكون والأكوان المتعددة إلى جنة خالدة ❤
That's what I thought in the early fifties. By the late fifties I was sure that I'd be dead before the seventies. Nice idea, though, and well worth aiming for. Blessings.
Yeah… that is the institutional level of ignorance keeping humanity in the dark.
Nuclear fusion research should be completely abandoned as its going absolutely nowhere and may not even be possible to make useful for power generation.
Is suggest focusing on things that actually matter: like biosphere restoration, improving solar panels, improving battery technology, and making sabine hossenfelder funnier.
2:10 maybe they didn't count it because "being close to ignition" isn't ignition?
By this logic we might as well cancel CERN now, because it will never do anything that counts as actual energy generation.
@@soundtrancecloud5101 If you make a list, rating how close several approaches to Fusion are to commercial viability, you won't include approaches that haven't even made it past the very base requirement of ignition yet. Otherwise you could include my kitchen blender in the list, because it's about as close as that approach to commercial fusion currently.
No idea what you think this has to do with CERN. pretty sure they aren't on this list either.
I remember a joke where at every 50 years the scientists say nuclear fusion will be available on the next 50 years. These kind of reports are produced by people who certainly has interests to protect, not necessarily the truth or an unbiased information.🙏
Mostly careers in not finishing their work.
How do you know that "nuclear fusion is going to change everything"?
How do you know that it's not going to be prohibitively expensive to use?
Consumable chamber walls out of 20% lithium, yeah that's not going to be expensive at all. And mind you that's the *cheapest* way of producing tritium.
@@michaelbuckers That is ITER. No Litium in Helion or Avalanche Fusion designs. No Tritium either. You compare the SLS with SpaceX.
@@ThomasTomiczek Yeah see right now the assumption about any potentially feasible fusion reactor design is that one way or another it will use tritium, either by injecting tritium gas as fuel, or by breeding it from lithium inner chamber blankets. That's because fusing pure deuterium requires half an order of magnitude more power, and it generates almost half as much fusion power in return. Which is to say it's possible in principle, but it's not even on the roadmap for a commercial reactor. Imagine diesel vs gasoline, except if diesel required 10x more chamber pressure to ignite, and produced less power than ethanol. It would require extremely overbuilt engine and it would still be very underpowered. And fusion reactor technology isn't even at the point where it can sustain its own operation, like an engine that generates power in the pistons but it's not even enough to overcome resistance of the mechanism so it just stops as soon as the starter motor shuts off. Fusing pure hydrogen isn't even on the table because it requires even more energy to run and generates even less power.
@@michaelbuckers You may want to check all the startups that have grants by the government or commit to show something this year and NONE use Tritium.
@@ThomasTomiczek I can commit to show something this year using a Farnsworth fusor. It wouldn't even require deuterium, it'll work on pure hydrogen. Where do I sign up for millions in grant money? See it's not the question of whether it's physically possible, it's a question whether it's financially feasible. With lithium-bred tritium, D-T reaction takes way less power to run, and generates way more power in return, and even that isn't anywhere close to being feasible. And it doesn't even have to do with the cost of lithium or deuterium, it's just the fact that the technology for actually converting fusion to electricity in economical manner doesn't exist.
It's like medieval alchemists believing turning lead into gold is just around the corner!
It seems to me that the estimates for nuclear fusion is the timeline for each individual bit that a given team is working on, disregarding all the dependencies that must be met (and hopefully someone else is working on). So the estimate becomes 25 years plus all dependencies, which could be hundreds of years away.
Never heard of critical path analysis?
@@rogerphelps9939 That's immediately where my mind went. Having said that, if there are many dependencies in the overall project, and the slack between critical and non-critical paths is low, a slip in what was a non-critical path milestone could shift the critical path.
Which would make prediction of the overall project length (in this case, practical fusion power) incredibly difficult.
Nach, a large part of th e problem is that those are government initiatives that are planned large - and thus take decades to build. Avalanche has ONE size in mind - small enough to fit on a desk, 100kW electricity max. Want more? Put more there. They iterate pretty much monthly, in different directions at the same time. Helion builds one prototype per year - actually less. It is purely the government with ITER that is megalomanic stupid like - ULA and SLS.
''everything fusion in 10 years!'' was the buzz phrase about the time i was born [1956]. i have long since given up holding my breath. keep up the good work, Sabine.
No offense Sabine, but I'd put money on the idea that YOU would never use Brilliant to learn anything, you know what I'm talking about.
When I was in high school back in 1981, there were tons of articles stating that unlimited electricity from nuclear fusion power was about 20 years away and it will make oil and natural gas obsolete and prices will crash. Here we are in 2024 and no closer to realizing this dream of limitless electric power. It seems to be like a perpetual motion machine, impossible to design and operate in real life.
at 5:50 she has become a sweet lady.. selling you a candy.. Brilliant!
I did some support work on the Sandia National Laboratory inertial confinement project in the mid 1980s. The electrical discharge on the surface of the ionized water tank when they fired the lasers at the pea sized target was spectacular. The good news was that practical sustained fusion would be achieved by 2010. I can't wait for 2010.
Sadly, confined fusion is an enormously difficult problem. At the current rate of progress, I don't see successful sustained fusion before 2100 at the earliest.
We don't have any fuel for these fusion reactors, even if the reactors would work.
Hm. Boron10+Hydrogen=Boron 11. No raidation. Boron is plentiful.
HE3 - millions of tons on the moon. Which we can establish a realtively low cost commercial permanent base on before 2030, thanks to SpaceX. Deuterium chains also work - a little more expensive but plenty.
Appreciating the pragmatic realism here! It's refreshing to see someone cut through both the overly optimistic *and* doom-and-gloom fusion forecasts. Yes, groundbreaking tech like this takes time, but let’s not act like it's 30 years of futility either. Fusion will happen-we just need a clear-eyed view of the challenges and the possibilities. Thanks for keeping it real!
The problem with inertial fusion is all of the energy required to 1) make the projectiles and targets, 2) fire one at the other, 3) reset for the next firing event and 4) operate all of the support infrastructure in-between. Do these things really have the potential to generate enough energy per event to achieve economical viability?
The stellarator looks to me like it has a much higher chance of being economically successful.
Imagine having a career in a lifelong science fair experiment!
Helion Energy has been predicting net energy production being 1-2 years away since 2015...
I just don't understand how we can make any predictions about when something will happen when we don't even know if it is possible to accomplish at all.
We know that fusion, the physical reaction, is possible. We know that it happens abundantly in nature. We know that we can artificially do it on earth, in lab controlled environments. We also know, through thermonuclear weapons, that we can extract far more energy from fusion reactions than we put into them. The question being asked is, can we extract net energy in a controlled environment? And after that, can we make electricity from that process at a reasonable consumer price? Recent events from the national ignition facility have proven that fundamentally, the first step is possible, we can get more energy out of a fusion reaction than is put into it (not accounting for inefficiencies) in a controlled fashion. I am personally doubtful that it will ever be a cheap option for making electricity. As we've learned from fission power plants, it's not the fuel cost that's the limiting factor of price, it's the cost of labor and maintenance to staff a highly complex machine that will drive up the cost of electricity. I think renewables with multi-day storage is the most practical option for achieving low cost carbon neutral energy in the next 10 years. But, fusion energy can still have many transformative uses, particularly for space travel where fuel weight is a vast limiting constraint. The challenges that remain in the way for fusion power are improving confinement at high pressure and temperature. HT superconductors can already be made at scale and supply sufficient confinement to achieve ignition, in theory. But fusion-relevant plasmas are highly unstable fluid systems that are difficult to confine. The breakthrough will come from taming these fluid eddys through more targeted heating systems, and or achieving active confinement control of the magnetic confinement, such that instead of one strong but unchanging magnetic field, the field lines and strength are constantly varied around the plasma, like an active control mechanism. These are the areas of current research, outside of flashy tech startups, that will likely make practical fusion devices achievable, and this progress could break new ground at any moment.
@@SpencergoldeThere's also the recurring cost of replacing critical components when the neutron damage gets too much.
@@Spencergolde Yes, but we still don't know if it is physically possible to overcome those challenges you mentioned. It isn't written in stone somewhere that it is.
@robertbrandywine Certainly, assigning a year at which point this will reach x-maturity level is pretty silly. You can do that for some technologies, like different battery chemistries, where there's research supporting that it works, that it has so much longevity, that there's a demand for it. If you have all that, then you can forecast how long it will take to bootstrap development, get the necessary capital raised, and get manufacturing online. I think some investors feel comfortable with the certainty those forecasts provide and are now expecting it in all technology fields, even ones that don't have proof of concept research yet. I was more saying that it is likely technologically possible, and that the remaining hurdles are understood and are being researched intently, so even though we can't say exactly when it will be viable, we are fairly close. But, economically, even if a proof of concept occurs tomorrow, it'll probably have the same feasibility as current nuclear power once it's matured, and that wouldn't be very competitive with current or near term options for clean grid power.
@@robertbrandywine It is possible, but the Universe is working on a colossal scale and energies. Only on the boundary of the Sun's magnetosphere is 30milion volts per meter. The cosmic accretion disks have enormous power. particles coming from there have 40 million times more energy that the most energetic particles produced in CERN. The Sun is not a "Gas" giant, but is a liquid, because its specific weight is 1.4 kg/L.
The funny thing is that some big AI companies are investing in fusion energy reseach as their new AI models require exponentially more and more energy to train. Green energy can’t be built fast enough and nuclear has political resistance so fusion is their only hope. Let’s see how this pans out.
My take on fusion is simple. Some guy tells me it is no problem to recreate the Sun in miniature here on Earth. I laugh.
Suppose ITER works by 2029. Still not going to make fusion power go commerical. Issue is cost. ITER will cost at least $32B for a 500MWth reactor, with no means to extract energy or breader to create tritium fuel. The cost of a 500MWe Fusion power plant would likely cost around $100B.
To put this into propesctive, a 1000MWe fission plant is about $15B, and a 1000MWe NatGas power plant is under $1B. if an Fusion power tech company tried to pitch the same of 500MWe power plant for $100B to utility companies they would get laughed at & told to leave.
Second None of this Fusion reactors will actually work. Magnetic Confinement (ITER) is never going to work because there is no way to stablitize the magnetic confinement field. The plasma generates magnetic fields which interacts with the containment field causing to fail. To date the longest run is about 5 minutes as wasn't repeatable. The rest are even much worse & will never be useful for power plants. NIF is really a 4th Gen Nuclear weapons program to create Nuclear (b)om(b)s with the need for a fission core.
I predict further predictions!
Even if a functional fusion reactor is developed it's far from clear that it will be an instant commercial success. The reactor is likely to cost quite a bit of money. There will likely be some patented technology in it and licensing said patented technology might not come cheap. Considering such technology doesn't exist right now we have no idea if the reactors will be difficult to maintain or if there will be other complications in building them. Do keep in mind it's necessary for them to be cost competitive with all the existing sources of power.
Nuclear fusion is way to expensive to become ready for market.
It will always be a dream. An expensive one.
Evidence?
@@rogerphelps9939 Look at what we have so far, look at its cost, and compare it to solar and wind, which are cheaper than any other electricity generation currently known to mankind.
@@traumflug ...hardly an argument when fusion is still at the development stage. Nuclear fusion will become the backbone of electricity generation, as it is stable and managable in a predictable way. Renewables are going to make up the rest and chipping in when conditions for output are favourable.
@@ref8893 The more I read such comments here, the more I believe that waiting for fusion is kind of a new religion. Like adventists still wait for Jesus.
@@traumflug You mean, like Avalanche Fusion and Helion, both privately funded with a joke compared to ITER and ready to go energy positive within months nowish? Hm... you look at government programs. That is like SLS vs. SpaceX.
Sabine, Mark here from London UK, - You still got it girl!
I’ve been following you since
The money wasted on Fusion could have been used to solar farm the entire Sahara Desert and extract clean energy from our perfect Fusion Reactor in the sky ... The Sun.
You have to get that electricity out of the Sahara to where it is needed. Not simple.
@@rogerphelps9939 Still a lot simpler and more realistic than fusion power.
I do think we should carry on with ITER. It is a very interesting project for research, innovation and international collaboration. But fusion energy is not realistic
@@Gaihtiefusion has been achieved. We just need ways to commercialize it and make it output more energy than it uses. This is not currently possible.
The dessert would destroy it. Before you destroyed the dessert.
@@GodbornNoven Yes, but to have a few seconds of fusion is not the challenge. ITER is only a demo project, it doesnt even have a turbine to generate electricity.
Next one has to be even larger, as scale does matter a lot with fusion.
or else indeed a different approach.
Who cares about fusion reactors if solar+batteries are absurdly cheap, can be dynamically expanded, are secure against attacks/grid-collapse/disasters, and basically don't have running costs beyond amortization cost? Fusion is great, don't get me wrong, and it would be especially great to see some development into fusion engines in space (which in theory should be easier to create than fusion reactors)... but we don't really need fusion reactors, from what I understand.
How else are you going to drive your laser weapon?
One of Sabine's statement is quite possibly wrong, depending on the circumstances. The world will not automatically drop everything else the moment someone "gets fusion going". That depends on the cost at which they got it going and the general assessment how quickly these costs can be reduced by how much.
Obviously, the later fusion gets going, the more difficult it will become to make it economically attractive (for the power grid). Solar gets cheaper and cheaper, batteries get cheaper and cheaper, wind power has already started its revolution (AWES, airborne wind energy system; superior to the usual ones in every way), power2gas is already working and in the process of becoming large scale and cheap.
If fusion gets going by 2040 then we do not really need it for the grid any more. Electricity cost will be very low by 2050 and only a few percent of the market will be left by renewable energies.
The chance for market disruption would be to have two huge breakthroughs: get it going (until 2030) and get it going very cheaply (until 2035).
hear hear
Not only the fusion power plant will be expensive. There will be a lot of radioactive waste you have to deal with. Even if this has only be stored for a couple of decades this does not mean that it is cheap.
@@Marc-mo8btlike… helium?
@@nottieru like, the shielding of the reactor core that is exposed to ridiculous levels of neutrons all the time.
@@richardmetzler7909do we know for sure the shielding will have to be changed once in a while? Or do you mean from old reactor cores? How long would such a reactor even operate theoretically?
One of my roommates in college was a fission physicist working on the tokamak at U of Wisconsin. He predicted fusion in 20 years. I graduated in the Class of 81.
What's he doing now?
Sure, tokamaks were already 26 year old at the time, we all felt that it is just around corner, although my recollection is that 80-s was a period of pessimism in regard to fusion
We have new 10+ Tesla magnetic materials which are not yet in use. For decades the best was only 3 tesla. The plasma confinement goes up at least the square of the field strength. Thats 10 times, or more. A significant change.
Gotta disagree with ya Sabine. Fusion is a hype train. Fission works now and is just as good as the hypothetical fusion solution would be. We just gotta get past our bugaboos with it.
Fusion does not produce long term radioactive waste, is more renewable (water + Li breeder) and is truly passively safe. No nuclear reactions can take place without confinement.
While it’s true that confinement requirements create a reaction that won’t possibly occur without direct attention, perhaps that’s the real problem. Fusion is just so dang hard. Take the 10 smartest PHD plasma physicists in any project and maybe only 2 of them really understand what’s going on in their device. Fission on the other hand is so dang easy you can take a high school graduate and train him for maybe 6 months and he’ll safely run a naval nuclear reactor.
The concept that fusion won’t generate long lived radioactive waste is not really correct either. The massive numbers of high energy neutrons that are produced invariably activate much of the materials they contact. Maybe not the same problem as fission reactors but still there. And the radioactive waste produced in fission reactors that concerns everyone is such an absolute nothing burger anyway.
Saying that fusion is more sustainable is kinda silly too. There are enough uranium and thorium fuels available on the planet to feed humanity’s energy needs for literally a billion years or more at current human energy consumption rates. I’m gonna say that’s plenty sustainable too.
I appreciate the steady pace of development: Nuclear fusion has been consistently 10 years away for 50 years.
We’re 20 years away from commercial nuclear fusion… and always will be.
Nuclear fission is 1000 times easier and we should be focusing on it. Fusion is simply too complicated to ever become a economical source of energy.
"Pull predictions out of nowhere", a.k.a. rectal inspiration.
when I was at a gubermint FFRDC, it's was called "Rectus Pluckis", and such ideas occurred at meetings called "Group Gropes". At higher TRL, the idea became a WAG, and progressed to 'polishing the cannon ball'.
A good example of transition speed for new technologies is to look at the transition from CRT monitors to flat screens
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Has anyone pointed out that achieving "net power fusion" is NOT necessarilly the same as making it practical at a sufficient scale to deliver on all the wild promises around it? It's quite likely that it will remain horrendously complex, fragile and expensive... Forever. There seems to be very very very little talk about that possible/likely outcome.
There probably wont be a viable fusion reactor until they all start listening to Eric Lerner of LPPFusion.
One point I miss here in addition to technological readiness and rate of development: the cost.
It's hard to imagine a competitive fusion power plant design that consists of a huge vacuum chamber, tons of rare exotic materials trying to resist desperately to extreme neutron radiation, and that relies on exotic rare isotopes (3He, T), etc... while regular nuclear (fission ) reactors (safe, reliable, mature) are struggling to hold their market share.
Fission reactors have lost their market share already. There is still a small market in collecting money to invest in fission startups (similarly as for fusion startups), and another to build fission plants that will never operate. Actual power from new fission reactors is long gone, simply outcompeted in the market. All we have now is scams and apologetics. There is one start-up that builds prototypes for fusion start-ups. It is still viable.
Somebody else mentioned a "fusion adventists" cult. It collects apostates from the "new fission" cult.
Nope, not at all - fission reactors are competitive, them not holding market share is public scare and politics. Fusion from all startups is not really that exotic, has NO to NEAR ZERO neutron radiation - Avalanche Fusion none, Helion initially yes, but below activation and easily shielded and both do not go with rare isotopes. Avalanche goes with Boron10+Hydrogen to Boron11 - radiation neutral. Do some research.
@@ThomasTomiczek Sorry to say, but fission reactors are not competitive mostly because of the skyrocketing of safety costs and partly because of the extinction of proper expertise. Sure, bad PR and insane politics increases the headache.
I did my research years ago, and I was enthusiastic about Helion. Actually, as far as I can remember, they plan to use D-3He fuel, the latter is a rare isotope. Significant neutron generation via D-D side reactions cannot be avoided this way either. Anyway, their gadget can be fueled with several other mixtures of isotopes, if you want to rely on abundant isotopes exclusively.
As regards the direct harvesting of electric energy, I find it pretty exciting, being addicted to high efficiency technologies. But hang on for a second - would it be possible to do it on an industrial, or better to say, global scale? I think, the answer is NO. Building extreme large capacitor banks or whatnot power electronics on a scale of TWh electric production is simply not feasible.
Actually, I was not aware of the activity of Avalanche. However, proton-boron reaction suffers from very low cross-section, or, to compensate this, very high temperatures, compared to D-D, D-T etc. reactions - good luck with that.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a tech fan and science lover. I'm looking forward to a cost-effective, sustainable, power-dense, safe and clean energy source that relies on abundant materials. I am happy to see the multitude of fusion research and cheering for their success.
I had to admit that I followed fusion developments keenly until I came across molten salt breeder fission reactors by chance. This technology is far more mature, cheap, and has the ability to fulfill fusion startups promises. If the same enthusiasm and public support would be behind molten salt breeder, they could be online in not more than two decades.
IPCC predictions are no better: Multi-decade predictions based on hundreds of assumed (guessed) parameters.
Wrong. If anything the predictions have been on the conservative side. global warming is accelerating with a new record for global mean ttemperature being set every year. Open your eyes. The symptoms are everywhere.
And yet scientific climate change predictions from the past turned out to be spot on.
That is, unless you intentionally pick a wrong emission scenario of course, since climate scientists obviously can't predict the progress of the energy transition for the whole planet.
you have to believe!!!!!!! 🙂
The IPCC reports don't make any predictions - those are projections, and they come with uncertainties that are clearly stated. Regarding global temperature, current development is well inside these uncertainties (even models from the late 80s have done quite well in hindsight, sometimes *underestimating* the development). But right, the more detailed it gets, the higher the uncertainties become. Still a good tool to get an idea what we can expect in the next decades. The scientists working on this stuff aren't idiots.
@@helgefan8994 Sure, one or two year predictions are easy. You want to put a big bet on their 60+ year prediction? How is population decline going to affect it? How much power will be used by AI data centers? How fast will EV adoption occur? Will countries start building nuclear reactors again? What breakthroughs in technology will occur? Significant error in any one of those factors can significantly impact a 60+ year prediction.