Insane factoid (post from Feb 27, 2022) ... this was funded by a Chinese gaming company and built in 2 years for relative pennies??:
MiHoYo, the developer of Genshin Impact, has led a $65m funding round in Shanghai based Energy Singularity which is a company involved in nuclear fusion technology, tokamak devices and operational control systems.
The company plans to build its own Tokamak device by 2024.
Unrelated to what you are citing, but I believe a “factoid” is something that looks like a fact but is not. Like how a planetoid looks like a planet but isn’t one.
I only realized this myself decades after using the term factoid due to pages in highlights for kids.
This is a British vs American English thing. In British English a “factoid” is something that looks true but isn't. In American English “factoid” is a synonym for trivia--something that is true, but of minor importance.
Factoids (true or not) seem to have special appeal for people who like to socialize with others by knowing things - the Cliff Clavens of the world. It has an overtone of superficiality along with triviality.
Until they've made a billion dollars I'd assume the situation is not that rosy. It is easy enough to do a cool science experiment for $65 million. That being said, I applaud anyone achieving any result when it comes to energy.
My first test for Chinese success is "would this have been legal in the US?". I'm not sure who regulates tokamaks but I assume they have a similar risk profile to nuclear reactors (nuclear process releases a vast amount of energy in a tiny space) and so it would be normal if building one commercially was prohibited.
But they don't have the stored energy density of fissile nuclear reactors; they have the stored energy density of a big particle accelerator. Shutting down a particle accelerator (either temporarily or permanently) is way easier than shutting down a fission pile, because a particle accelerator or fusion reactor would just dump the plasma into a graphite bed and dump the stored magnetic field energy into a bunch of large copper bars acting as big resistors.
EDIT: If you shot a hole in a fusion reactor, the cold air would immediately quench the plasma down to room temperature.
The old saying about absolute power corrupting absolutely clearly has parallels in all other fields: Absolute money corrupts vision and focus.
Tesla: "We did it. We have become profitable and created a real product people want. Now we can laser focus on making it better and more reliable and cheaper for everyone!" "haha nope! lets put it all into crypto and humanoid robots and impregnating as many CEOs as possible, let that bet ride bayyybeeee!!!!"
I don't think this is a corruption of focus - MiHoYo has had "Tech Otakus Save The World" as their slogan long before Genshin made its first billion dollars.
Also Tesla: drive the price of EVs down to parity with ICE cars while delivering a superior product, built out the nations charging infrastructure (and got everybody to switch to NACS), and oh yeah: made self driving available to everybody for next to nothing.
ST40 does not use HTS magnets. The magnets are made from copper and LN2 cooled. The company is demoing HTS magnets but has not used them in a working tokamak.
When talking about the price of energy produced by fusion, various estimates put it at 'probably about the same as nuclear fission, maybe a bit higher, but it won't have the proliferation risk/contamination risk of fission'.
However, because the tech was '50 years away', it never made sense for private sector investors, so most investment was from governments.
However, with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear due to no need for massive capital investments in concrete and steel upfront many years before production starts, does it even make sense for governments to go down this route?
AFAIK it's not at all clear that solar and wind are really cheaper when making up a substantial part of a large-scale power grid that meets our current expectations of 100% consistent and reliable power everywhere, no matter what.
The unreliability of solar and wind requires either hot (constantly running and spinning) non-renewable backups or grid-scale power storage (has never been done so ? on cost to build and upkeep) to guarantee reliable voltage and AC frequency. The cost of that should be factored into determine the true cost of these power sources.
The stability of the grid is dependent on the collective physical inertia of the many tens of thousands of huge and heavy spinning turbine-generator sets that make up the majority of the current generating capacity. Most current solar power sources rely on grid-following inverters, which are not stable without a grid stabilized by a preponderance of large spinning turbines. There has been some work on grid-forming inverters that are less impacted by this, but AFAIK there aren't currently any that can replicate the grid stability provided by that physical inertia.
I'm less certain about wind turbines, but I think they have this problem too. I don't think they're controllable enough to be mechanically synced to the grid frequency.
I'd love to be wrong about this, please prove me so if you can! But I don't often hear these points addressed, and we're not helping anything by ignoring the complexity of the real world.
Inverters can easily replace physical inertia, it just requires technology developed within the past 30 years, and most grid folks haven't thought about new technology for far longer than that.
As more and more intermittent renewables get pushed onto grids, they become more reliable. Most outages are from single points of failure from large generators or transmission. Dealing with highly distributed renewables means that grid ops get used to acting fast, and there's greater redundancy instead of so many SPOF. Kind of how cloud services got reliable by expecting there to be failure and designing it into the system.
Storage is advancing super quickly, is super fast to deploy, and can replace a lot of more expensive things like transmission upgrades.
We have all the tech to replace fossil fuels on the grid with the above. The only question is the final cost. It's likely to be far far lower than using existing "hard" energy, because by the time we can deploy 50 TWhs of storage, it will have gotten so cheap. We don't know when costs will stabilize, but they have a loooong distance to fall.
And we have all sorts of other technologies that will make all this far cheaper: enhanced geothermal, enhanced geothermal with temporal storage based on injection pressure and release, iron air batteries, flow batteries, thermal storage for industrial process heat, etc. etc. etc.
For every area of the energy economy, there are two to three solutions that look promising. Fusion and fission look promising for none. That's not to say that they can't have some serious innovation and start dropping their costs, but nobody currently operating in the field has demonstrated a path. Yet.
> grid... grid-scale power storage... stability of the grid ... grid-following inverter ... grid stabilized by ...
The problem isnt solar, or wind, or storage ... the problem is the grid. Were running on a system that was never designed to do what were asking of it, and yes its going to be a number of problems to solve. All of those are jobs, economic action and improvements to reliability and quality across the board.
> I don't think they're controllable enough to be mechanically synced to the grid frequency.
Google, there are a number of ways this gets addressed.
> There has been some work on grid-forming inverters
Yes, we know how, and the race to build them is on... this isnt a hard problem it's just a problem.
> grid-scale power storage (has never been done so ?
Already deployed in a few places with battery systems (hati, Australia both have them. Possibly Hawaii too). We're doing quite a bit of this. Again a quick google will give you a sea of sources.
> Most current solar power sources rely on grid-following inverters
There are now inverters that simulate the rotational inertia. They simlpy shift the phase of the generated waveform just a bit if the frequency starts dropping.
And it doesn't require any expensive additional hardware.
I think the solution will come from storage but also from a massive grid-wide ability to shed non-critical loads on-demand. The current grid is built on early 20th century principles, before we had real-time digital communications.
As a though experiment - imagine a 19th century world suddenly getting all of our current digital tech and wind farms and solar power - there would be no point in trying to create a "static" grid where producers and consumers weren't communicating with each other. Every consumer would negotiate power availabity based on momentary price.
Batteries can mimic inertia better than physical spinning objects.
An operator in Australia has seen massive success and profits over the past few years using batteries to out-compete other grid stabilization. IIRC, they have already made enough to pay off the upfront costs. Even better, Australian government was super against the change, but now most places are positive on them because of the obvious success.
Regarding stability, this physical inertia is also present in rotating wind turbines. But I guess exploiting this at a meaningful scale would recquire a level of interconnectivity which boils down to the same issue of cost.
I am however optimistic about grid-scale storage. There is a long term trend of rapidly dropping battery prices, and with recent developments in sodium ion batteries there is no fundamental reason this won´t continue. Another enabler could be advancements in lifespan. This could allow storage being installed inside or near wind and PV, cutting down on space and installation costs. Even then however, grid improvements would be needed.
Some problems still need to be solved indeed, but in my (mostly uneducated) opinion, they seem easier than achieving economically viable fusion. But they do still require large investments in R&D and manufacturing capability.
Solar and wind are not "unreliable" any more so than any other power source we've used in the past. Just like transformers have been replaced by power electronics in many applications, the reliance on flywheels for frequency stability will be replaced by grid-forming power electronics. There isn't anything magical about this technology.
Another thing that's easy to miss is that, unfortunately, renewables tend to be correlated. An event that reduces insolation over a large area, for example, will affect solar and wind over a large area. So simply over-building is a lot more expensive than it seems when you need to be able to handle tail risks.
I wouldn't hold my breath for any of the startups. None of them (at least non-state backed ones) seem to have realistic way to the goal.
I remember reading a post from one of startups after rejection from NRC. It read like a blog post after being dumped by a girlfriend written at 3 AM, drunk.
On the other hand, it's not like nuclear is going away, e.g. Uganda and Kenya are planning on nuclear reactors. Maybe we should have a better option to offer than the light water reactors.
> However, with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear due to no need for massive capital investments in concrete and steel upfront many years before production starts, does it even make sense for governments to go down this route?
If we would like to stop polluting the air, the future of maritime shipping is nuclear (fusion or fission). China understands that, and invests in R&D necessary to make it happen.
Plus, on ships, there's no competition with solar or wind. And nuclear will actually be quite cheaper than bunker oil, if executed correctly.
I’ll eat my hat if cargo ships go nuclear. Even the US Navy stopped using nuclear for all but carriers. Shipboard nuclear is on another level to regular power plants for many reasons.
I don’t really buy this argument. Maritime alternatives like hydrogen fuel cells and biodiesel seem like far more realistic plays than installing nuclear reactors on thousands of vessels.
A fusion reactor is an extremely intense source of neutrons. The neutrons can be used to transmute elements, e.g. to transmute cheap natural uranium or depleted uranium into plutonium 239, which can be separated easily (in comparison with enriching uranium) and it can be used to make nuclear bombs.
Besides producing plutonium for nuclear bombs, it is also easy to use a fusion reactor to produce any kind of dangerous radioactive isotopes that could be used in terrorist activities.
So no, a fusion reactor that uses the fusion reactions that are possible today will not be any safer than a fission reactor, from the point of view of the proliferation risks.
Neutrons are free. You can make a fast neutron source for a few million bucks today. Making a bigger one that can produce usable power is no big deal. The existence of fusion reactors makes absolutely zero difference to the question "who should have fissile material?" You cannot start or stop ignoring that question whether you have or don't have fusion reactors.
> with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear ... does it even make sense for governments to go down this route?
If this works without the sun shining then, yes, it makes sense. It is always good to have multiple sources of energy even if only as a form of redundancy. Our world depends on power.
For general power delivery to the grid I think renewables make a whole lot of sense. But for specialty industrial processes that require very large levels of constant power, I think nuclear fusion is very interesting. I worry about environmental effects of mass industrialization but at the same time, I wonder what we could achieve if we had 100x more power available for this or that industrial process. Would it be helpful in decarbonizing steel refining or other metallurgical work?
I think if we develop the technology we will find a use for it and be grateful that we have it, even if it’s hard to predict today what those uses will be.
I think fusion has one major advantage compared to other renewables.....its much less resource intensive.
While plasma confinement is currently done via supercooling of electromagnets(from last time I was looking into fusion) that's the major resource sink that I can see. We have massive fusion chambers, but I know some universities have built much smaller scale chambers. And we also can address the helium shortage if we solve fusion.
I'm not sure if fusion will ever get solved or if we will she commercial adoption. I also don't know what the life cycle of a fusion plant would be but its got to be cheaper than the big turbine blades, and more ecofriendly the photovoltaic cells.
It makes a lot of sense, nuclear is nearly 100% reliable. Weather (wind) has wild swings. Solar is -pretty- good but can still swing around a lot and we simply don’t have the grid scale level of batteries that need to smooth it out. I’ve seen estimates that we need battery tech with 10-20x energy density(at current cost levels) what we currently have to make a viable replacement for classical energy sources (coal, natural gas, nuclear)
the cost of solar/wind depends on how much solar/wind is actually deployed.
1kWh of solar delivered midday, when there is 20% penetration? easy peasy.
1kWh of solar delivered at 2AM, when there is 65% penetration? much much more difficult.
These types of price comparisons are always unfair, always apples and oranges, because they always compare a 2AM kWh of nuclear with a midday kWh of solar, and of course solar wins that comparison.
A bit tiring to see the price of solar and wind being compared to nuclear. Nuclear can produce electricity on demand. Solar and wind cannot. You need to pair them with either some humongous energy storage facilities (and then you need to also over-provision), or some other on-demand source of electricity. Once you factored those costs, then you are not comparing apples and oranges.
> However, with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear due to no need for massive capital investments in concrete and steel upfront many years before production starts, does it even make sense for governments to go down this route?
Cheaper per watts generated, which aren't constant. Cheaper for a constant output? Reliable to actually power a full grid through downturns such as storms, winters, etc? No, not really. There are exactly zero currently available widely usable grid scale (being able to have enough capacity to power the grid for up to days at a time) solutions. Pumped up hydro is the only one coming close, but it's expensive and it requires specific geography. Just saying "batteries" or "supply and demand by load shedding" doesn't magically solve this problem.
We don't have enough production of basic materials like steel to scale solar and (especially) wind to cover our entire energy needs, regardless of energy storage. Fission and fusion will become inevitable in a decade or two.
The current production of 1.9 billion tons of steel per year is something you consider insufficient?
I don't know how much steel we need per square meter of PV (e.g. frames can be made from wood), but I do know the area we need for the current global electrical demand of 2 TW even after accounting for capacity factor and not just cell efficiency, and that our current production in each year is sufficient to put a contiguous 2 mm layer behind all of it:
Given the panels are supposed to last 25 years, even at steady-state replacement rates, and assuming zero growth in the steel sector, and assuming none of that steel gets recycled when the cells themselves need refurbishment or replacement, that doesn't seem to be a real problem to me.
Depends on whether we want to reach a qualitatively different (and better) level of civilization, or at best stay at the current level (but in a carbon-neutral way).
Dumb question, but is the basic idea that you need to harvest more heat energy from the plasma than is needed to maintain the magnetic field?
Also, very dumb question but the plasma means that fusion is actually occuring, right?
And does anyone know how this one collects the heat and converts it into electricity or whatever?
Or any other fusion device, how does it actually collect or output energy from the fusion. And how much do they make, and how far off is that from matching the input power?
Maybe it was some protons escaping from the plasma and hearing something external or something.
1. Yes, sorta, but it's more than just the magnetic field. You're also heating the fuel, so you have to offset that too. Plus there are pumps which circulate coolant to carry heat away from the plasma and towards a turbine, so you have to offset their power. Probably a few other things as well.
2. I don't think plasma == fusion. You can get plasma just by heating a gas beyond a certain point. Plasma cutters, for instance, operate on super heated air, no fusion anywhere nearby.
3. I think the wall of the reaction chamber heats up because they're being bombarded by radiation.
Most of the radiation incident on the reaction chamber walls is infrared, radiated from the hot plasma, but there are also more exotic things like stray neutrons also crash into the sides of the thing. These cause the metal to deteriorate over time (and become somewhat hazardous), but they also they impart additional heat energy.
So you have to have two cooling systems, one to keep the magnets actually cold so they they remain superconducting, and another to keep the housing below the point where it melts. It's this second one that let's you pull heat away from the hot metal donut that is a tokomak and use it to make electricity.
Between the magnet coolant and the chamber coolant and the reacting plasma you have some of the steepest thermal gradients anywhere in the known universe.
Thanks..right I know about plasma in general, I just assumed in this case it was caused by the fusion. Maybe not. But they have fusion right? Just not recovering any/enough energy to make up for power requirements.
> Dumb question, but is the basic idea that you need to harvest more heat energy from the plasma than is needed to maintain the magnetic field?
No, since creating and maintaining the magnetic field in principle consumes no energy. All the energy put into a superconducting magnet (1/2 L I^2) can be recovered.
What is needed from a physics point of view is for fusion energy production to comfortably exceed the energy put into the plasma. And there's also a whole host of engineering and economic issues beyond that.
Energy is recovered from DT fusion by stopping the neutrons in a blanket, converting their energy to heat, and taking that heat away in a fluid.
> plasma means that fusion is actually occuring, rigth?
As mentioned plasma is just another state of matter[1], where a significant portion of the electrons and ions a separate rather than combined as atoms.
Fusion happens when you overcome the electrostatic repulsion of nuclei, bringing them close enough together so they can fuse[2]. Typically, in reactors like this, that means you confine (compress) a sufficient amount of material ("fuel") to a small volume and heat it up sufficiently. Both are needed to make it possible for the nuclei to come close enough to fuse. The heat required is so great the material will turn into a plasma.
> And does anyone know how this one collects the heat and converts it into electricity or whatever?
This depends somewhat on reactor design, including fuel used. However they're all fancy steam generators in the end, so not unlike a traditional nuclear power plant in that regard.
From what I know, typically the "surplus heat" of a fusion reactor comes in the form of energetic neutron radiation[3]. This radiation is ionizing and as such shielding is required, and this shielding will heat up as it slows down those energetic neutrons.
In the ARC reactor[4] for example, a liquid shielding "blanket" surrounds the fusion chamber. As the neutrons heats up the liquid, the liquid gets pumped through a heat exchanger to produce steam to run a steam turbine.
edit: I found this talk[5] from one of the folks behind ARC to be very illuminating in how fusion power works and the challenges involved. It's from 2017, but the basics haven't changed.
> the plasma means that fusion is actually occuring
No. Plasma simply means a specific state of a matter. E.g. the fluorescent lamps (the long tubular lights that flicker on start) have a plasma inside when it produces light
Your reply implies that in this specific case there is no fusion. I know that plasma can occur without it, but this discussion is about the specific machine.
I dont believe magnetic containment would contain heat, so just run a liquid through the reactor and use it to heat up water to make steam and drive a turbine. Nuclear plants do this.
Well it's a torus right? So you put a turbine in the middle? I don't think I've heard that explanation before.
Or maybe it can go in the outside. I guess it's like, you need a huge amount of electricity to make the magnetic field strong enough, right? So the question is, how do you collect enough heat without melting key components?
The difference between energy harvested and the energy necessary to maintain confinement is the difference in denominators of Qscientific and Qengineering. Q is power out / power in.
Qscientific is a figure of merit used to know close to a burning plasma a machine is (how many fusion reactions it can do vs. how many it would need to do to be a working reactor).
Qengineering is power put on the grid / parasitic power needed to keep the machine running. Every electrical power source has an analogous concept (keep the lights on, fuel pumped, inverters operating, etc.) There are some noisy non-experts who claim that focusing on Qplasma is deceitful, but it's akin to complaining that engineers are focusing on engine efficiency instead of car efficiency before the engineers have finished making the engine. At the end of the day the scale of parasitic loads scales much less than the power output of a reactor, so the reactor size chosen will be at the economic minimum between "bigger machine is more expensive to make" and "smaller machine produces less power / lower Qengineering / other difficult scaling law things like neutron bombardment on plasma facing components (maintenance schedule)".
Yes, to have a real measure of Q you need to be doing fusion. In many research cases not a lot of fusion is happening and the neutrons are not actively being measured. What is typically done is to measure plasma performance metrics with protium or deuterium then say what the Q would have been if they used deuterium-tritium based on known plasma-performance to Q conversions (Lawson criterion).
Heat collection is done via neutrons. In D-T fusion 80% of the energy is released as a 14.1 MeV (17% speed of light, like a bat out of hell). The remaining 20% of energy is an acceleration of a He4 nucleus (fused byproduct). This He4 nucleus is a charged particle, so it stays in magnetic confinement and imparts its energy on fuel via collisions, helping to self sustain the reaction. The neutron has no charge so it flys straight out of the machine. You can model this as a small ring on the innermost core of the donut shooting neutrons in all directions. So you wrap a neutron-absorbing blanket around the vacuum vessel to slow these neutrons down via collision and heat up coolant in the blanket. You run this coolant through a heat exchanger to make pressurized steam to spin a turbine to... you get the idea.
I would guess that it means that 96% of the components come from within China. Self-sufficiency is important in China right now, and it's doubtful that 'localization' refers to just the company itself.
Though that depends on what the remaining 4% is. Curious about that. (E.g., for an aircraft the engine being local is more important than the seats being made locally.)
It’s a bit difficult to parse the analogy since you’re comparing something that has never been done (and is a notoriously difficult technology to crack) to something that had been done by many others, many times. But, even so, and despite the lack of specific information about the test/achievement, I have a feeling you’re over selling this by quite a bit. If you want to compare to spacex, I’d say it’s more like the first time they demonstrated that they could control a re-entering booster stage with grid fins—a notable step to booster reuse.
No, localization rate is the right translation, you just need to understand the context. They've been on a mad dash to domestically source techonology parts and intellectual property, ever since all the sanctions. Foreign suppliers are seen as unreliable now.
"Localization" in many countries means local supply chain. How regional "local" is depends on context...can mean support local community as in farmers market or give jobs to locals, or in projects like this in the more strategic sense i.e. all of supply chain is in country i.e. chinese.
No. Assuming it's using steam generators like most powerplants (gas, nuclear, and coal), then the only heat released to the atmosphere would be the inevitable entropic losses. This is the same amount of heat lost by nuclear powerplants (although you could argue nuke plants release decay heat that fusion plants wouldn't but that's negligible). Gas and coal plants release that heat as well, but then also release greenhouse gases that heat things up further
The author wasn’t asking about production entropic losses, but whether using massive amount of energy will heat up the planet, and it definitely will. This is why it’s a technosignature. Heat dissipation is the ultimate limit on growth on a planet, but we’re talking about trillions of people living in luxury.
Yes, but the direct heating effect is quite small compared to the effect of greenhouse gases. The world primary energy consumption is around 19 TW, whereas radiative forcing (difference to pre-industrial values) is estimated to be around 1 PW.
High temperature superconductors don't have to work at room temperature. As it doesn't require liquid nitrogen cooling, it's a lot easier to maintain and run.
If they're hitting 25T on a bore larger than a few cm then they're using supercritical 8K helium to cool ReBCO superconductors OR they have a super secret new superconducting material that the rest of the world doesn't know about and hasn't been used in other practical application (exceedingly unlikely, drunk uncle conspiracy theory tier).
Readit News
MiHoYo, the developer of Genshin Impact, has led a $65m funding round in Shanghai based Energy Singularity which is a company involved in nuclear fusion technology, tokamak devices and operational control systems.
The company plans to build its own Tokamak device by 2024.
https://x.com/ZhugeEX/status/1497957735337443331
I only realized this myself decades after using the term factoid due to pages in highlights for kids.
My first test for Chinese success is "would this have been legal in the US?". I'm not sure who regulates tokamaks but I assume they have a similar risk profile to nuclear reactors (nuclear process releases a vast amount of energy in a tiny space) and so it would be normal if building one commercially was prohibited.
EDIT: If you shot a hole in a fusion reactor, the cold air would immediately quench the plasma down to room temperature.
https://www.fusionindustryassociation.org/nrc-decision-separ...
Supporting letter from Helion Energy: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2224/ML22243A083.pdf
Additionally making a fusion plant isn't a stepping stone to making a nuclear bomb
I doubt (nuclear) regulations are stifling much innovation here.
Tesla: "We did it. We have become profitable and created a real product people want. Now we can laser focus on making it better and more reliable and cheaper for everyone!" "haha nope! lets put it all into crypto and humanoid robots and impregnating as many CEOs as possible, let that bet ride bayyybeeee!!!!"
[1]: https://tokamakenergy.com/about-us/#trackrecord
[2]: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.201...
However, because the tech was '50 years away', it never made sense for private sector investors, so most investment was from governments.
However, with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear due to no need for massive capital investments in concrete and steel upfront many years before production starts, does it even make sense for governments to go down this route?
The unreliability of solar and wind requires either hot (constantly running and spinning) non-renewable backups or grid-scale power storage (has never been done so ? on cost to build and upkeep) to guarantee reliable voltage and AC frequency. The cost of that should be factored into determine the true cost of these power sources.
The stability of the grid is dependent on the collective physical inertia of the many tens of thousands of huge and heavy spinning turbine-generator sets that make up the majority of the current generating capacity. Most current solar power sources rely on grid-following inverters, which are not stable without a grid stabilized by a preponderance of large spinning turbines. There has been some work on grid-forming inverters that are less impacted by this, but AFAIK there aren't currently any that can replicate the grid stability provided by that physical inertia.
I'm less certain about wind turbines, but I think they have this problem too. I don't think they're controllable enough to be mechanically synced to the grid frequency.
I'd love to be wrong about this, please prove me so if you can! But I don't often hear these points addressed, and we're not helping anything by ignoring the complexity of the real world.
As more and more intermittent renewables get pushed onto grids, they become more reliable. Most outages are from single points of failure from large generators or transmission. Dealing with highly distributed renewables means that grid ops get used to acting fast, and there's greater redundancy instead of so many SPOF. Kind of how cloud services got reliable by expecting there to be failure and designing it into the system.
Storage is advancing super quickly, is super fast to deploy, and can replace a lot of more expensive things like transmission upgrades.
We have all the tech to replace fossil fuels on the grid with the above. The only question is the final cost. It's likely to be far far lower than using existing "hard" energy, because by the time we can deploy 50 TWhs of storage, it will have gotten so cheap. We don't know when costs will stabilize, but they have a loooong distance to fall.
And we have all sorts of other technologies that will make all this far cheaper: enhanced geothermal, enhanced geothermal with temporal storage based on injection pressure and release, iron air batteries, flow batteries, thermal storage for industrial process heat, etc. etc. etc.
For every area of the energy economy, there are two to three solutions that look promising. Fusion and fission look promising for none. That's not to say that they can't have some serious innovation and start dropping their costs, but nobody currently operating in the field has demonstrated a path. Yet.
The problem isnt solar, or wind, or storage ... the problem is the grid. Were running on a system that was never designed to do what were asking of it, and yes its going to be a number of problems to solve. All of those are jobs, economic action and improvements to reliability and quality across the board.
> I don't think they're controllable enough to be mechanically synced to the grid frequency.
Google, there are a number of ways this gets addressed.
> There has been some work on grid-forming inverters
Yes, we know how, and the race to build them is on... this isnt a hard problem it's just a problem.
> grid-scale power storage (has never been done so ?
Already deployed in a few places with battery systems (hati, Australia both have them. Possibly Hawaii too). We're doing quite a bit of this. Again a quick google will give you a sea of sources.
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Gen...
There are now inverters that simulate the rotational inertia. They simlpy shift the phase of the generated waveform just a bit if the frequency starts dropping.
And it doesn't require any expensive additional hardware.
As a though experiment - imagine a 19th century world suddenly getting all of our current digital tech and wind farms and solar power - there would be no point in trying to create a "static" grid where producers and consumers weren't communicating with each other. Every consumer would negotiate power availabity based on momentary price.
An operator in Australia has seen massive success and profits over the past few years using batteries to out-compete other grid stabilization. IIRC, they have already made enough to pay off the upfront costs. Even better, Australian government was super against the change, but now most places are positive on them because of the obvious success.
I am however optimistic about grid-scale storage. There is a long term trend of rapidly dropping battery prices, and with recent developments in sodium ion batteries there is no fundamental reason this won´t continue. Another enabler could be advancements in lifespan. This could allow storage being installed inside or near wind and PV, cutting down on space and installation costs. Even then however, grid improvements would be needed.
Some problems still need to be solved indeed, but in my (mostly uneducated) opinion, they seem easier than achieving economically viable fusion. But they do still require large investments in R&D and manufacturing capability.
This is out of date. Grid scale battery storage has recently become economic in lots of cases and is ramping up quickly.
For past 50 years, we had ["fusion never" level of funding](https://imgur.com/u-s-historical-fusion-budget-vs-1976-erda-...). Because of climate change, there is a sleuth of nuclear startups.
I wouldn't hold my breath for any of the startups. None of them (at least non-state backed ones) seem to have realistic way to the goal.
I remember reading a post from one of startups after rejection from NRC. It read like a blog post after being dumped by a girlfriend written at 3 AM, drunk.
On the other hand, it's not like nuclear is going away, e.g. Uganda and Kenya are planning on nuclear reactors. Maybe we should have a better option to offer than the light water reactors.
If we would like to stop polluting the air, the future of maritime shipping is nuclear (fusion or fission). China understands that, and invests in R&D necessary to make it happen.
Plus, on ships, there's no competition with solar or wind. And nuclear will actually be quite cheaper than bunker oil, if executed correctly.
I read somewhere that running on bunker fuel was the equivalent pollution of 50m cars.
https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/questions/10757/doe...
I think it was russia? that had nuclear powered ice breakers. Made sense as the constant power demands must be phenomenal.
A fusion reactor is an extremely intense source of neutrons. The neutrons can be used to transmute elements, e.g. to transmute cheap natural uranium or depleted uranium into plutonium 239, which can be separated easily (in comparison with enriching uranium) and it can be used to make nuclear bombs.
Besides producing plutonium for nuclear bombs, it is also easy to use a fusion reactor to produce any kind of dangerous radioactive isotopes that could be used in terrorist activities.
So no, a fusion reactor that uses the fusion reactions that are possible today will not be any safer than a fission reactor, from the point of view of the proliferation risks.
If this works without the sun shining then, yes, it makes sense. It is always good to have multiple sources of energy even if only as a form of redundancy. Our world depends on power.
HVDC lines are already mature enough that the cheapest route is to just wrap the Earth with them to form a planetary grid.
The sun always shines somewhere.
I think if we develop the technology we will find a use for it and be grateful that we have it, even if it’s hard to predict today what those uses will be.
While plasma confinement is currently done via supercooling of electromagnets(from last time I was looking into fusion) that's the major resource sink that I can see. We have massive fusion chambers, but I know some universities have built much smaller scale chambers. And we also can address the helium shortage if we solve fusion.
I'm not sure if fusion will ever get solved or if we will she commercial adoption. I also don't know what the life cycle of a fusion plant would be but its got to be cheaper than the big turbine blades, and more ecofriendly the photovoltaic cells.
They are not cheaper. They produce very low-quality electricity. If you want them to provide any supply guarantees, their price skyrockets.
1kWh of solar delivered midday, when there is 20% penetration? easy peasy.
1kWh of solar delivered at 2AM, when there is 65% penetration? much much more difficult.
These types of price comparisons are always unfair, always apples and oranges, because they always compare a 2AM kWh of nuclear with a midday kWh of solar, and of course solar wins that comparison.
Cheaper per watts generated, which aren't constant. Cheaper for a constant output? Reliable to actually power a full grid through downturns such as storms, winters, etc? No, not really. There are exactly zero currently available widely usable grid scale (being able to have enough capacity to power the grid for up to days at a time) solutions. Pumped up hydro is the only one coming close, but it's expensive and it requires specific geography. Just saying "batteries" or "supply and demand by load shedding" doesn't magically solve this problem.
I don't know how much steel we need per square meter of PV (e.g. frames can be made from wood), but I do know the area we need for the current global electrical demand of 2 TW even after accounting for capacity factor and not just cell efficiency, and that our current production in each year is sufficient to put a contiguous 2 mm layer behind all of it:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281.9e9%20tons%20%2F%2...
Given the panels are supposed to last 25 years, even at steady-state replacement rates, and assuming zero growth in the steel sector, and assuming none of that steel gets recycled when the cells themselves need refurbishment or replacement, that doesn't seem to be a real problem to me.
Also, very dumb question but the plasma means that fusion is actually occuring, right?
And does anyone know how this one collects the heat and converts it into electricity or whatever?
Or any other fusion device, how does it actually collect or output energy from the fusion. And how much do they make, and how far off is that from matching the input power?
Maybe it was some protons escaping from the plasma and hearing something external or something.
2. I don't think plasma == fusion. You can get plasma just by heating a gas beyond a certain point. Plasma cutters, for instance, operate on super heated air, no fusion anywhere nearby.
3. I think the wall of the reaction chamber heats up because they're being bombarded by radiation.
Most of the radiation incident on the reaction chamber walls is infrared, radiated from the hot plasma, but there are also more exotic things like stray neutrons also crash into the sides of the thing. These cause the metal to deteriorate over time (and become somewhat hazardous), but they also they impart additional heat energy.
So you have to have two cooling systems, one to keep the magnets actually cold so they they remain superconducting, and another to keep the housing below the point where it melts. It's this second one that let's you pull heat away from the hot metal donut that is a tokomak and use it to make electricity.
Between the magnet coolant and the chamber coolant and the reacting plasma you have some of the steepest thermal gradients anywhere in the known universe.
No, since creating and maintaining the magnetic field in principle consumes no energy. All the energy put into a superconducting magnet (1/2 L I^2) can be recovered.
What is needed from a physics point of view is for fusion energy production to comfortably exceed the energy put into the plasma. And there's also a whole host of engineering and economic issues beyond that.
Energy is recovered from DT fusion by stopping the neutrons in a blanket, converting their energy to heat, and taking that heat away in a fluid.
Deleted Comment
As mentioned plasma is just another state of matter[1], where a significant portion of the electrons and ions a separate rather than combined as atoms.
Fusion happens when you overcome the electrostatic repulsion of nuclei, bringing them close enough together so they can fuse[2]. Typically, in reactors like this, that means you confine (compress) a sufficient amount of material ("fuel") to a small volume and heat it up sufficiently. Both are needed to make it possible for the nuclei to come close enough to fuse. The heat required is so great the material will turn into a plasma.
> And does anyone know how this one collects the heat and converts it into electricity or whatever?
This depends somewhat on reactor design, including fuel used. However they're all fancy steam generators in the end, so not unlike a traditional nuclear power plant in that regard.
From what I know, typically the "surplus heat" of a fusion reactor comes in the form of energetic neutron radiation[3]. This radiation is ionizing and as such shielding is required, and this shielding will heat up as it slows down those energetic neutrons.
In the ARC reactor[4] for example, a liquid shielding "blanket" surrounds the fusion chamber. As the neutrons heats up the liquid, the liquid gets pumped through a heat exchanger to produce steam to run a steam turbine.
edit: I found this talk[5] from one of the folks behind ARC to be very illuminating in how fusion power works and the challenges involved. It's from 2017, but the basics haven't changed.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_(physics)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Requirements
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_radiation
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_fusion_reactor
[5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk
No. Plasma simply means a specific state of a matter. E.g. the fluorescent lamps (the long tubular lights that flicker on start) have a plasma inside when it produces light
Or maybe it can go in the outside. I guess it's like, you need a huge amount of electricity to make the magnetic field strong enough, right? So the question is, how do you collect enough heat without melting key components?
The difference between energy harvested and the energy necessary to maintain confinement is the difference in denominators of Qscientific and Qengineering. Q is power out / power in.
Qscientific is a figure of merit used to know close to a burning plasma a machine is (how many fusion reactions it can do vs. how many it would need to do to be a working reactor).
Qengineering is power put on the grid / parasitic power needed to keep the machine running. Every electrical power source has an analogous concept (keep the lights on, fuel pumped, inverters operating, etc.) There are some noisy non-experts who claim that focusing on Qplasma is deceitful, but it's akin to complaining that engineers are focusing on engine efficiency instead of car efficiency before the engineers have finished making the engine. At the end of the day the scale of parasitic loads scales much less than the power output of a reactor, so the reactor size chosen will be at the economic minimum between "bigger machine is more expensive to make" and "smaller machine produces less power / lower Qengineering / other difficult scaling law things like neutron bombardment on plasma facing components (maintenance schedule)".
https://x.com/JB_Fusion/status/1506964692627034118
Yes, to have a real measure of Q you need to be doing fusion. In many research cases not a lot of fusion is happening and the neutrons are not actively being measured. What is typically done is to measure plasma performance metrics with protium or deuterium then say what the Q would have been if they used deuterium-tritium based on known plasma-performance to Q conversions (Lawson criterion).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion
https://x.com/swurzel/status/1534556521744457731
Heat collection is done via neutrons. In D-T fusion 80% of the energy is released as a 14.1 MeV (17% speed of light, like a bat out of hell). The remaining 20% of energy is an acceleration of a He4 nucleus (fused byproduct). This He4 nucleus is a charged particle, so it stays in magnetic confinement and imparts its energy on fuel via collisions, helping to self sustain the reaction. The neutron has no charge so it flys straight out of the machine. You can model this as a small ring on the innermost core of the donut shooting neutrons in all directions. So you wrap a neutron-absorbing blanket around the vacuum vessel to slow these neutrons down via collision and heat up coolant in the blanket. You run this coolant through a heat exchanger to make pressurized steam to spin a turbine to... you get the idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Deuterium%E2%80%9...
what...does that mean?
It's a Chinese project.
Also, this is kinda like SpaceX getting a Falcon 9 to orbit the first time but in fusion land.
If it displaced all remaining coal and natural gas burning, temperatures would stabilize.
does anyone know how this differ from outside temperature?