A nuclear fusion reactor in China, dubbed the "artificial sun," has broken its own record to bring humanity one step closer to near-limitless clean energy.
While neat, this is not self-sustaining — it’s taking more energy to power it than you’re getting out of it. (You can build a fusion device on your garage if you’re so inclined, though obviously this is much neater than that!)
One viewpoint is that we’ll never get clean energy from these devices, not because they won’t work, but because you get a lot of neutrons out of these devices. And what do we do with neutrons? We either bash them into lead and heat stuff up (boring and not a lot of energy), or we use them to breed fissile material, which is a lot more energetically favorable. So basically, the economically sound thing to do is to use your fusion reactor to power your relatively conventional fission reactor. Which is still way better than fossil fuels IMHO, so that’s something.
Even if we crack fusion power today, I can’t see it being deployed cheaply enough and quickly enough to compete with solar/wind+batteries. By the time we could get production fusion plants up and ready to feed power into the grid, it’d be 2050 and nobody would be interested in buying electricity from it.
Even in a world already powered 100% by renewables, fusion is attractive for high energy applications. For a current example see training of LLMs. However there are Industries with immense power requirements like Aluminium smelting that could use fusion power as well.
So far humans have found applications for all energy they were able to produce.
Fusion would provide orders of magnitude more power than solar. There’s a limit on how much we can practically get from solar, fusion would allow us to exceed that.
There’s a limit on how much we can practically get from solar,
Most residential buildings can self sustain from solar. Dense cities not, but there is dual use grazing and agriculture land, and small portions of desert that could power the world. Solar is enough for type 1 civilization. Nuclear plant energy density is overstated due to their + uranium mine exclusion zones, which could produce more solar power than the uranium content available in those mines.
Most residential buildings can self sustain from solar.
Wut? Maybe on the equator, but while I can easily meet my yearly power consumption with solar panels (In fact, I net supply about 1100kWh), during this lovely winter day they generated a whopping 0.3kWh.
‘Too much power’ has never been an issue, and will likely not be an issue ever with solar. There are multitudes of technologies, especially in industry, that are currently impractical because they would consume too much energy.
We can already massively increase generation to meet the needs of those industries whenever we want. They’re impractical due to the cost of meeting their energy requirements, not because it’s impossible.
Unless fusion power plants are going to be free to build or last forever, they have the same practical limit as every other type of generation - they have to be paid for. It isn’t clear that fusion would be a huge step forward in cost per megawatt-hour.
The main attraction of fusion is near limitless clean energy generation. The corollary of near limitless is that per unit price will be extremely low. The tech is inherently scalable to larger reactors, and that means if you’re going to be building a reactor anyway, it’s easy to combine it with nearby industrial development plans to take advantage of it.
I think if we figure out nuclear fusion there will be induced demand for energy, in applications that were previously infeasible: desalination via distillation instead of reverse osmosis, direct capture of CO2 from the atmosphere, large scale water transport, ice and snowmaking, indoor farming, synthesized organic compounds for things like carbon sequestration or fossil fuel replacement or even food, etc.
Geoengineering might not be feasible today, but if energy becomes really cheap we might see something different.
I’d even say that it would make it “easier” to generate elements that are rare on earth for aplication purposes.
The first example already sort of feasible is production (and storage) of Helium.
And if we master (in the far, far future) both fusion and fission, then we can make almost any element “with ease”.
Basically we would be able to do what the alchemist dreamed and be able to “turn stones to gold”.
But nowadays, one of our “new gold” are rare earth like Neodymium for making magnets
And there are other elements that are even rarer and would have massive applications only if they were little bit more abundant than they are now
Now, again, that would be only true in a far, far future if (and a big if) we can truly master both fusion and fission (what I actually want to mean is that my comment is basically an “hallucination” similar to those on r/futurology)
I would think that using fusion or fission for synthesizing elements is going to still be less efficient (among all resources, not just energy) than using the newfound abundant/cheap energy to extract those preexisting elements from mixtures that exist on Earth.
Take neodymium, your example. That’s pretty abundant in the Earth’s crust. It’s just that it’s energy intensive to extract it from the mineral formations that naturally occur. At that point it’s still probably much cheaper, energy wise, to separate a bunch of minerals into their constituent elements, rather than try to synthesize atoms through fusion and fission.
The specifics are a pipe dream but the general principle holds: if energy suddenly becomes more plentiful and cheaper by orders of magnitude, society will find a way to use that new plentiful resource in ways that we can scarcely imagine today. That’s always been true of new inventions, where much of the post-invention innovation comes in the form of finding new applications for a thing that has already been invented.
Long distance transmission creates enormous power wastage, and cities are rarely located in places ideal for large scale wind and solar. Fusion can help deliver power to urban centres, reducing the acreage needed for a solar farm.
There are also inland places in northern latitudes that benefit little from solar. Wind and fusion would be a great energy mix for those places.
Long distance transmission creates enormous power wastage, and cities are rarely located in places ideal for large scale wind and solar. Fusion can help deliver power to urban centres, reducing the acreage needed for a solar farm.
A fusion plant will need either nearby solar or nearby fusion plant, with solar only ok if restarting it can wait until daytime. More likely than not, a fusion plant is needed to help regulate plasma temperature based on reaction rate, and cool magnets. But a 10gw fusion plant still is extremely unlikey to need its output overnight compared to day peak demand. A fusion plant needs to be located near a low property value power plant, instead of close to high property value customers.
There’s a ton of stuff in industry and manufacturing that aren’t practical because of energy. A lot of processes could be run cleaner too, leading to better environment practices.
Helion has an interesting take on fusion reactors that generate power using electro magnetism and Copenhagen Atomics are trying to create Thorium reactors. I hope they will work better than the boiling they use in tocamac reactors
the economically sound thing to do is to use your fusion reactor to power your relatively conventional fission reactor
A new one to me. Considering how expensive these are, it would be surprising that traditional Uranium mining/enrichment wouldn’t still have an edge. But considering that commercial Tritium is exclusively produced from nuclear reactors, there is a circular money pit economy opportunity.
While neat, this is not self-sustaining — it’s taking more energy to power it than you’re getting out of it. (You can build a fusion device on your garage if you’re so inclined, though obviously this is much neater than that!)
One viewpoint is that we’ll never get clean energy from these devices, not because they won’t work, but because you get a lot of neutrons out of these devices. And what do we do with neutrons? We either bash them into lead and heat stuff up (boring and not a lot of energy), or we use them to breed fissile material, which is a lot more energetically favorable. So basically, the economically sound thing to do is to use your fusion reactor to power your relatively conventional fission reactor. Which is still way better than fossil fuels IMHO, so that’s something.
It seems like it’s probably too late.
Even if we crack fusion power today, I can’t see it being deployed cheaply enough and quickly enough to compete with solar/wind+batteries. By the time we could get production fusion plants up and ready to feed power into the grid, it’d be 2050 and nobody would be interested in buying electricity from it.
Even in a world already powered 100% by renewables, fusion is attractive for high energy applications. For a current example see training of LLMs. However there are Industries with immense power requirements like Aluminium smelting that could use fusion power as well.
So far humans have found applications for all energy they were able to produce.
Fusion would provide orders of magnitude more power than solar. There’s a limit on how much we can practically get from solar, fusion would allow us to exceed that.
Most residential buildings can self sustain from solar. Dense cities not, but there is dual use grazing and agriculture land, and small portions of desert that could power the world. Solar is enough for type 1 civilization. Nuclear plant energy density is overstated due to their + uranium mine exclusion zones, which could produce more solar power than the uranium content available in those mines.
Wut? Maybe on the equator, but while I can easily meet my yearly power consumption with solar panels (In fact, I net supply about 1100kWh), during this lovely winter day they generated a whopping 0.3kWh.
We’re not discussing nuclear here, we’re discussing fusion :)
Yeah, but there’s no prizes for producing way more power than we use. We’re not running out of space to put solar panels or batteries.
‘Too much power’ has never been an issue, and will likely not be an issue ever with solar. There are multitudes of technologies, especially in industry, that are currently impractical because they would consume too much energy.
We can already massively increase generation to meet the needs of those industries whenever we want. They’re impractical due to the cost of meeting their energy requirements, not because it’s impossible.
Unless fusion power plants are going to be free to build or last forever, they have the same practical limit as every other type of generation - they have to be paid for. It isn’t clear that fusion would be a huge step forward in cost per megawatt-hour.
The main attraction of fusion is near limitless clean energy generation. The corollary of near limitless is that per unit price will be extremely low. The tech is inherently scalable to larger reactors, and that means if you’re going to be building a reactor anyway, it’s easy to combine it with nearby industrial development plans to take advantage of it.
Bigger, more powerful fusion gear isn’t going to also be more expensive?
Lots of generation technologies scale, and costs fall as they do. That’s not something unique to fusion power.
What I would like fusion to do is power space ships
Why so you can spread the disease known as humanity and increased human suffering to near infinite levels?
Jk. Space would be fun.
I think if we figure out nuclear fusion there will be induced demand for energy, in applications that were previously infeasible: desalination via distillation instead of reverse osmosis, direct capture of CO2 from the atmosphere, large scale water transport, ice and snowmaking, indoor farming, synthesized organic compounds for things like carbon sequestration or fossil fuel replacement or even food, etc.
Geoengineering might not be feasible today, but if energy becomes really cheap we might see something different.
I’d even say that it would make it “easier” to generate elements that are rare on earth for aplication purposes.
The first example already sort of feasible is production (and storage) of Helium.
And if we master (in the far, far future) both fusion and fission, then we can make almost any element “with ease”.
Basically we would be able to do what the alchemist dreamed and be able to “turn stones to gold”.
But nowadays, one of our “new gold” are rare earth like Neodymium for making magnets
And there are other elements that are even rarer and would have massive applications only if they were little bit more abundant than they are now
Now, again, that would be only true in a far, far future if (and a big if) we can truly master both fusion and fission (what I actually want to mean is that my comment is basically an “hallucination” similar to those on r/futurology)
I would think that using fusion or fission for synthesizing elements is going to still be less efficient (among all resources, not just energy) than using the newfound abundant/cheap energy to extract those preexisting elements from mixtures that exist on Earth.
Take neodymium, your example. That’s pretty abundant in the Earth’s crust. It’s just that it’s energy intensive to extract it from the mineral formations that naturally occur. At that point it’s still probably much cheaper, energy wise, to separate a bunch of minerals into their constituent elements, rather than try to synthesize atoms through fusion and fission.
I kinda agree with you tho. It is way more realistically to have asteroid mining facilities before what I said in the previous comment
(And of course, earthly mining already exists and will get more efficient in the future anyways)
This seems like a pipe dream but I don’t disagree that it could open up some new applications
The specifics are a pipe dream but the general principle holds: if energy suddenly becomes more plentiful and cheaper by orders of magnitude, society will find a way to use that new plentiful resource in ways that we can scarcely imagine today. That’s always been true of new inventions, where much of the post-invention innovation comes in the form of finding new applications for a thing that has already been invented.
Indeed
Maybe for deep sea or space?
Long distance transmission creates enormous power wastage, and cities are rarely located in places ideal for large scale wind and solar. Fusion can help deliver power to urban centres, reducing the acreage needed for a solar farm.
There are also inland places in northern latitudes that benefit little from solar. Wind and fusion would be a great energy mix for those places.
A fusion plant will need either nearby solar or nearby fusion plant, with solar only ok if restarting it can wait until daytime. More likely than not, a fusion plant is needed to help regulate plasma temperature based on reaction rate, and cool magnets. But a 10gw fusion plant still is extremely unlikey to need its output overnight compared to day peak demand. A fusion plant needs to be located near a low property value power plant, instead of close to high property value customers.
Nah, it’d be quite useful for interstellar travel as but one example I’m helping with.
With what infrastructure are we even going to use all this electricity?
There’s a ton of stuff in industry and manufacturing that aren’t practical because of energy. A lot of processes could be run cleaner too, leading to better environment practices.
Helion has an interesting take on fusion reactors that generate power using electro magnetism and Copenhagen Atomics are trying to create Thorium reactors. I hope they will work better than the boiling they use in tocamac reactors
A new one to me. Considering how expensive these are, it would be surprising that traditional Uranium mining/enrichment wouldn’t still have an edge. But considering that commercial Tritium is exclusively produced from nuclear reactors, there is a circular money pit economy opportunity.