Can Fusion Solve the Climate Crisis?

[Celerity]

Scientists made a huge breakthrough on the road to emissions-free power. Here’s what that means, and doesn’t mean.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/climate/fusion-climate-change.html

https://archive.ph/fO8up



The news this week that scientists had achieved a breakthrough in fusion technology was hailed as a milestone on the path toward a future of nearly limitless, emissions-free power. But if you think that means the days of burning fossil fuels for electricity will soon be over, enabling the world to more easily meet the goal of limiting warming this century, you may end up being disappointed.

The breakthrough is a huge step toward a long-held dream, one that has captured the world’s collective imagination: The ability to mimic the way the sun generates the energy that sustains life on Earth, and to control that process for the good of humankind. The achievement, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, “will go down in the history books,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm at a news conference Tuesday.

A remarkable achievement

As my colleague Ken Chang wrote, scientists working on a mammoth experiment at Livermore, in which lasers are used to fuse two forms of hydrogen into helium, reported that, for the first time, it had released more energy than the lasers put in. That’s a big deal. Scientists around the world have been trying to develop controllable fusion (as opposed to the out-of-control fusion of a hydrogen bomb) for the better part of a century. While there have been many advances, a fundamental stumbling block remained. Fusion requires so much power, with temperatures of millions of degrees needed for it to occur, that none of the experiments produced a net gain of energy.

That hurdle is now out of the way, at least for this kind of laser-instigated fusion. That makes it easier to envision a future of fusion power plants that would produce essentially no planet-warming carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. They would also have advantages over current nuclear plants that split, rather than fuse, atoms, because the fuel needed for fusion is more readily available and the radioactive waste produced is far less dangerous and problematic.

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[Irish_Dem]

1. If the energy oligarchs cannot get rich off of it, will they allow it to be used?

[Random Boomer]

3. It's not even close to being used

The breakthrough is of scientific interest, but does overcome the challenges of a practical application. The amount of energy aimed at the target is not the same as the total amount of energy required to run all the associated technology (the lasers). Also, the conversion of fusion energy to a usable power source is relatively inefficient, so there's another huge loss in energy output.

We're decades away from any fusion-powered energy sources that could replace petroleum products. We'll be lucky if we still have a civilization capable of fusion research as climate change erodes our way of living.

[Irish_Dem]

4. That gives the oligarchs plenty of time to monetize it for serious profit.

And how to screw us over.

[2naSalit]

2. Not going to...

Be usable widely enough to matter. By the time that could be functional it will be too late to make a difference.

[Mickju]

5. Yes, most likely

[hunter]

6. All these things are thrown up as distractions.

If we think the answer is just around the corner we'll ignore the fossil fuel problem today.

Feel-good stories about new wind, solar, and battery technologies are a similar distraction.

Like it or not, fossil fuel use worldwide is increasing.

[NickB79]

7. Maybe. But it will also supercharge the biosphere collapse we're currently seeing

Giving 8 billion humans unlimited energy will set us on a path to strip this planet like locusts for raw materials to support a 1st World standard of living.

Just look at how much of the global ecosystem has already been badly degraded without climate change biting all that badly (yet).

Cheap fusion means all the planet's oil reserves are available to use for plastic. It means energy to mine ore deposits considered too low grade to bother with. It means giant electric combines turning vast swaths of land into corporate megafarms. How about giant fishing trawlers able to fish anywhere, without worry about fuel costs?

Fusion means converting what's left of the wild biosphere into a human-made biosphere.

[hatrack]

8. Betteridge's Law Of Headlines:

No.

[honest.abe]

9. It could but it might be too late.

Most experts are saying at least 10-20 years before we see an actual functioning fusion power plant.

Perhaps we need a "Manhattan Fusion Project" to push this faster.

[hunter]

10. The amount of physics and engineering talent already applied to this problem...

... has far exceeded the Manhattan Project.

Fusion power is difficult.

[honest.abe]

11. I doubt that.

According to the link below the Manhattan Project cost the equivalent of 23 billion in todays dollars.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project#:~:text=The%20Manhattan%20Project%20began%20modestly,about%20%2423%20billion%20in%202020).

[hunter]

12. My dad had a friend who was building plasma injectors for fusion reactors near 50 years ago.

Controlled fusion research worldwide began in earnest in the early 1950's.

What's 23 billion divided by 70 years?

Mind you many of these fusion researchers did other stuff to make a living, and were not concentrated under one budget specifically doing fusion research. My dad's friend was mostly interested in ion engines for spacecraft and plasma injection for other purposes. The fusion stuff was a side gig of the institution he worked for.

The initial budget for today's ITER reactor was about $6 billion when construction began in 2013 but it's now expected to cost $18 to $65 billion, depending on what you choose to believe. That in itself is a "Manhattan Project" scale of investment.

[honest.abe]

13. I believe the dollar number quoted is based on the actual "Manhattan Project" from 1939 to 1946.

Also there was more research regarding fission research by the Germans, Brits, France and Canada. If you add all that in then the number is much larger.

Cleary fusion research is expensive but the ROI could be tremendous especially if it saves the planet and human civilization.

[hunter]

14. The Manhattan Project cost about $2.2 billion in 1946 dollars...

... out of the estimated $300 billion dollars (1946) that the U.S.A. spent on the war itself.

https://www.energy.gov/lm/doe-history/manhattan-project-background-information-and-preservation-work

Humanity learned fission power plants were possible on December 2, 1942 when Fermi successfully fired up Chicago Pile-1 at the University of Chicago.

It's quite possible fusion power can never be a viable commercial energy source for physical reasons we don't yet understand. We just don't know.

However fusion power research turns out, successfully or not, we have to quit fossil fuels now, not at some indeterminate time in the future.

[NNadir]

15. No. This article is written in the New York Times, hence the energy reporting is nonsense.

The idiot reporter should look up the word "tritium."

Google will suffice.

[Progressive dog]

16. Too little, too late

The fusion being worked on uses tritium which has a half life of 12 years. It is manufactured in fission plants, particularly those using heavy water.

Fusion advocates often boast that the fuel for their reactors will be cheap and plentiful. That is certainly true for deuterium: Roughly one in every 5000 hydrogen atoms in the oceans is deuterium, and it sells for about $13 per gram. But tritium, with a half-life of 12.3 years, exists naturally only in trace amounts in the upper atmosphere, the product of cosmic ray bombardment. Nuclear reactors also produce tiny amounts, but few harvest it.

Most fusion scientists shrug off the problem, arguing that future reactors can breed the tritium they need. The high-energy neutrons released in fusion reactions can split lithium into helium and tritium if the reactor wall is lined with the metal. Despite demand for it in electric car batteries, lithium is relatively plentiful.

But there’s a catch: In order to breed tritium you need a working fusion reactor, and there may not be enough tritium to jump-start the first generation of power plants.

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