Nuclear Fusion Illusion. Is it time to park the pipe dream?
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- čas přidán 6. 09. 2024
- Nuclear fusion promises to provide unlimited, cheap, safe energy for the future of humankind. It's a lofty goal and it's easy to see why so much research funding has been ploughed into the endeavour over the last three decades. But are the latest "breakthroughs" really as good as they're made out to be, or are we deluding ourselves if we think this technology will have any impact on our global energy challenge?
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Great video. I actually studied this stuff in university, and I have been frustrated for years at how poor the reporting has been from science journalists around the efficiency of fusion. I am very fed up with articles quoting Q-fusion numbers, when literally the only thing that matters is Q-total.
I get that fusion researchers are focusing on Q-fusion, because that's their line of research, and they don't have much control around Q-total, because it involves systems that they don't necessarily build. Maybe somebody else can come up with huge efficiencies in lasers, superconducting magnets, or heat-to-electricity conversion, and these would reduce Q-total without the fusion researchers needing to do anything differently.
But I think at this point, any time a science journalist reports on fusion and quotes Q-fusion instead of Q-total it should be considered journalistic malpractice. It's really not acceptable to keep repeating this misleading term.
Now, I'll leave you with one fun fact about fusion: our sun is not actually hot enough to fuse hydrogen into helium. The only reason it does is because quantum physics is "fuzzy", and there are outliers in any reaction at a quantum level. Just as an electron can "tunnel" through a solid "wall", nuclear fusion can happen at lower temperatures if there is such an insane number of atoms available that even a very low percentage of outliers can fuse. So these reactors on Earth need to be _hotter_ than the sun, because the only reason the sun can fuse elements is because there's a sun's worth of atoms in there.
I agree that there's a lot of confusion regarding Q_plasma because of lazy reporting. That's why I rather listen to scientists such as Hartmut Zohm from the Max-Planck institute, or those working on ITER. They tend to be much more honest in constrast to the click-baity stuff in the media.
Btw., the fusion reaction in the sun is not just different because of the high density/pressure and lower temperature. The sun also uses the much less efficient deuterium-deuterium fusion reaction, whereas in fusion reactors we need to use deuterium-tritium reactions. Otherwise the extremely low density of plasma in tokamaks and stellarators would be insufficient for any considerable amount of fusion.
Also, the sun's fusion process produces less than 300 Watts of heat per cubic meter even in its core, which is a pretty tiny power density unless we consider the sun's enormous volume.
Idk, for fusion scientists the Q-fusion number seem to be the thing to focus on as that is what they presumably focus on. Journalists reporting that number also seems fine as ppl that are following it can see the importand number. But the mainstream focused media should probaply mention both with a link to somewhere where the difference is explained, and why the Q-total might not matter (the pant isn't build with it in mind for example). And the scientist can again be suprised why most ppl are confused XD.
To be completely fair the cost per MWh is probaply the only number that realy matters.
@Shimmy Shai I would like to see a discussion on this. I believe that storage is only required while the level of renewable generation is close to the demand level that cannot be delayed. The reality si that we need to generate much more renewable electricity than required, using the excess for the traditional uses of aluminium extraction and nitrogen fixation. Add to that the generation of green hydrogen needed for shipping, aviation and iron smelting. Also we will see DC power links effectively builting the whole world into an electricity grid (exept of course for Texas...).
@Click Bait Germany has spent 500 billion on wind and solar for 40% electricity production, where some claim that 'solving' fusion is not a matter of how many decades but of a 100 billion dollar investment
To be perfectly accurate the correct number to report would be Q fusion and the Q fusion needed for commercial application with that reactor design. Tokamaks Q > 20, lasers Q >100
The thing is that Q gain changes dramatically as a plasma becomes self heating. I believe JET is about 5% self heated at Q = .33 but at ITER's Q = 10 the plasma is 2/3rds self heated. The combination of this and of the effect of superconductor magnets on tokamaks means that from JET's Q total of .01 (yes, it is much overestimated in this video actually) it is possible that in the early '30's the ARC tokamak will produce a Q total of 3. This depends on self heating plasmas performing as well as externally heated plasmas - but with the current curve of tokamak performance related to size and magnetic field we can expect the Q total of tokamaks to go from 1% to 300% in ten years
If you were choosing between Q total and Q fusion your better number is Q fusion, for really good journalistic accuracy it would be Q fusion and the Q number needed to approach commercialization
We've made progress. When I was young, the joke was, "Nuclear fusion is only FIFTY years away." (Not "twenty")
exactly this. Most weren't paying attention when it was 50 though. So when the naysayers could get away with saying "30 years and always will be" for the last decade or so. It should be pretty obvious to anyone who can remember back even a few years that they've had to update their pessimism to keep up with fusion's slow but steady progress.
When I was young talking of Nuclear Fusion could easily leading you to a Psychiatric Asylum..
But probably it vary from place to place.. In Our State as usually we went Behind... now the Psychiatrists are talking of Making Nuclear Fusion..
We at this point are more for the Nuclear Holocaust..
The joke being that it will never happen. Because it won't. We will lock in 5 degrees of warming before the radioactive dreams of nuclear promoters ever comes to pass.
Now that is progress
As a 90s kid it was 30 years... So in 25 years it has dropped by 10!
I guess that means it is really 50 years away? More likely it will be like other electronics adoption curves, and it will be impossible until you blink and it is everywhere. When that cost benefit curve will hit will be anyone's guess, but when it works it will spread quickly.
As an expensively trained nuclear physicist who teaches others at great expense to be nuclear physicists, I support fusion research because I can't make a latte to save my life.
Likely you are not adding enough tritium.
Latte's as in fusion energy... it's all about the steam.
@Nuclear Energy Advocate what are you saying?? also.. you forgot hydrogen.
Nuclear fission or fusion is a waste on time in the energy business to fight climate change.. Not only due their complexity and huge capital cost, also because just the heat to electricity conversion using steam, that part alone of the plant.. already cost higher than the best places for Solar and Wind. So even building your reactor for free, nuclear does not have any future. Just for the military or some advance space application beyond jupiter orbit.
@Nuclear Energy Advocate so, how many fission reactors do you think we can get built in 8 years? The answer is NONE, zero. It takes on the order of 20 or more years to get through all the permitting and construction. Nuclear keeps on getting more expensive. Solar and Wind keep getting less expensive. There is enough solar energy hitting the planet in one hour to more than meet all of our energy needs for a year.
@@raymondleury8334 Chinese and S Korean companies build them in 5-7, and at a reasonable cost.
I would also mention the response video to Sabine’s nuclear fusion video. One of the main points presented in the response is that most efforts have been solely towards improving Q plasma because it’s much more unknown then the rest of it. Once Q plasma is significantly over 1, the rest of the system can be refined. Like using high efficiency lasers for the inertial confinement fusion.
Magnetic confinement fusion is also mainly an issue of scale. By doubling the size of a tokamak you multiply the amount of plasma (and hence its power) by a factor of 8, but the required cooling and confinement powers scale only by 4. So once we understand how a unity gain plasma acts (the express intention of ITER), we can design a fusion reactor that will definitely have overunity wall plug efficiency. Science is an iterative process.
Though personally I’m more of a mind to follow the high-temperature superconducting magnets of MIT’s SPARC reactor, as the magnetic field can be a lot stronger and make the required tokamak a lot smaller. As we’ve seen with ITER, the logistics of making such a large tokamak are very challenging. But the materials science of making a high temperature superconductor into a durable wire is also challenging. Either way, it will be a while before anything is built that can easily pay for itself, even with overunity, but it will almost certainly happen. I’d give it 50 years max.
@James Barclay
Said, "Science is an iterative process."
The fusion scientists have iterated for more than fifty years - far, far too long. It looks like they're just wasting time that the Earth does *not* have. The biggest problem is they have wasted billions and billions of money that could have been spent on more productive endeavors - much more important and paradigm changing science, such as developing a better nuclear fission plant. What we really can't wait for is nuclear fusion in 2060 because at the rate the Earth's climate is changing, it will be far, far too late.
exactly. Concluding economic feasibility from a research project is far fetched.
Another critic of Sabine's vlog pointed out that research reactors are, by definition, designed so that a number of key parameters can be varies. This adds complexity and cost. Once you have determined the optimal design, engineering a reactor to these fixed parameters would be much cheaper.
Having said that, we are still orders of magnitude away from a viable technology, so I'm not holding my breath.
People have been saying "it's right around the corner" for the last four or five decades already. If we were actually serious about averting catastrophic climate change rather than fulfilling the fantasies of sci-fi nerds, all the money and resources for this should have been put towards replacing coal plants with the reliable fission technology we already have. Just because it is something we are capable of doing doesn't mean it's what we should be trying to do.
It will never happen. High temperature superconductors and practical nuclear fusion reactors are eternal pipe dreams.
As an economist, I feel that the economy aspect of fusion is often forgotten. Fusion not only have to be technically viable but economically viable. If we are struggling to make it break even in terms of energy it is incredibly hard to imagine that it will eventually be more economical than just getting energy from the sun, wind and water.
the hope is that one day we bild one that does break even and starts generating profit.
fusion would not be cost effective against renewables in the short term since the reactors are expensive. but in time they could drive the cost down if they are proven to work.
the benefit we would get from fusion is that fusion could spin up fast and replace peaker plants, and thus not be in competition with renewables because it would fill a different role.
i would not personally invest in fusion anytime soon, but as a species we need to pursue all research that could benefit humanity in the long run. Then i support keeping these projects going and even fund more with government money. It not money wasted since an entire industry of technology is built around the construction of reactors and spinoff technologies could be proven usefull.
@@nilsdock The problem is that this hope is essentially a pipe dream. Paying for those ridiculously expensive reactors is the largest problem, and it does not appear to be solvable in a world where electricity from conventional renewables is already dirt cheap.
This.
@@nilsdock Sorry but fusion using steam will be the same as current steam turbine plants.. which take 2 days to heat up and 2 days to cool down. Actually much worse because you also have to cool down the magnets which will take several days. No instant energy there. It is base load power like current coal fired or nuclear fission system reliant on steam cycle. Totally useless for filling peak power demand. That is why battery technology and pumped hydro is so important as ways to store energy for use when wind doesn't blow and sun don't shine.
I actually think the whole engineering of getting heat out of a reactor surrounded by cryogenically cooled super magnets is ridiculous. The power consumption of keeping the magnets cool while producing intensely high temperatures inside the container merely a meter or so from the magnet is a huge problem. It works for experiments but the efficiency of ITER, if they manage continuous fusion, means that waste heat starts to become a problem.
@@rayhaverfield2485 Nation wide battery tech is also a pipe dream nowadays.
Simply all potential solutions need to be pursued, and thankfully are.
Much more capable scientific committees than the youtube comment section have deemed fusion a worthwhile project. Maybe they deserve some credit.
BTW, tokamaks can follow demand, they'll probably simply always work at 100% because thats what you do if your fuel costs are negligible and want to pay the loan asap.
A minor nitpick, but what we aim to achieve is not replicating processes going on in the Sun. Nuclear fusion in stars is very slow, with only one pair of atoms out of many many billions accidentally fusing and releasing a bit of energy. Any human fusion reactor, on the other hand, would have to achieve conditions far more extreme than those in the middle of the sun, to force a significant amount of atoms to undergo fusion.
And it's also imposible to replicate the inner presure in the core of the sun so we already needed to go hotter to compensate. So that makes fussion on earth realy hard. As always it's easier to break stuff (atoms) then put it together.
Brilliant comment, and I think you've hit upon the crux of the nub of the gist of what is central to the core of the issue.
Hey! Here's an idea. Let's just leave this process inside the sun and other stars!
What do you think mathematical physicists have not calculated the viability based on reactor speed? He is confusing experimental reactors with production reactors. Today's reactors are built to learn and test. The more important values is *run time* , the q times are not important until we have 24/7 operational reactors. We have suddenly gone from milliseconds to recently minutes, ~17 minutes hold millions of degrees in a container. That is getting close to constant running, not far away at all.
@@AORD72 How are the extreme (millions of degrees) temperatures measured? And how are the instruments calibrated?
For info. Way before Moby used the Stardust reference it was made by Joni Mitchell in her classic song Woodstock made famous by Crosby Stills Nash. 1969
My thought exactly. "We are stardust..."
I think she probably got it from Carl Sagan.
@@sunspot42 Carls Cosmos series in which he said about Stardust was over 10 years after Joni M used it. Respect to the great CS.
@@TroggyPB I think Carl was using that terminology in articles he wrote back in the ‘60s. And he might not have been the one to invent it, either.
Very true :-)
Couldn't help but notice you chose a picture of windmills, but I can't help but think we need to focus on nuclear reactors, and the addition of thorium looks like a great solution.
We now have small modular nuclear reactors in production, and several new designs. We could have dozens of those up and running in 10 years. Granted not as fast as wind and solar, but more reliable less destructive, and way more bang for the buck.
If we could get really small with these designs, I think that would be great, let's decentralize the grid as much as possible. It makes us extremely vulnerable.
Sociopaths, with the best intentions, plan to end global warming, and to win the Nobel Prize, by turning off a few billion useless h-eaters with the Double Whammy Virus. AND IF THE VIRUS FAILS, psychopaths have promised to be ready in one minute, with Plan B: Nuclear Winter -- man-caused global cooling. Ewes (that's us, we the sheeple) won't stop borrowing trillions for war. Baaa'd?
Thorium is very undervalued as a fuel
@@AKumar528 AFAIK Thorium doesn't actually fuel the reactor, it just catches the neutrons radiated by the uranium.
A very good, unusually realistic, balanced presentation. Well done, Sir. However, you didn't mention another issue which fusion reactor proponents omit. *Neutron Embrittlement.* Nuclear fusion creates enormous quantities of neutrons, which are unaffected by magnetic containment. Those neutrons smash into the walls of the vacuum vessel†, actively destroying the material. Published estimates posit refurbishment every two years of the vacuum vessel.
Remember, the vacuum vessel is the 'core' of the fusion reactor, so removing it is not trivial. The now radio-active vacuum vessel will have to be safely disassembled, and removed. Then a new vacuum vessel installed, tested and commissioned, before it can go back to generating electricity. The suggestion I read was that process might be measured in months. Plus, there is the issue of safely 'disposing' of the radio active vacuum vessel material
.
I don't think this is a 'nit pick', though I think you did a much better analysis than any fusion reactor proponent I've seen, and I've been following fusion research since the mid/late '80s.
Again, very good, worthwhile video. Plus your balanced analysis is, sadly, rare in these highly polarised times.
Best Wishes to 'You and Yours' for 2022. ☮️
Oddly enough, the only response to this from fusion proponents is "crickets". Fusion as an electricity source might work some day, but that doesn't matter. It will NEVER be economically competitive, for the reason stated above as well as numerous others. The idea that fusion will "save us" is indeed a fairy tale, and a dangerous one at that. It is dangerous because it depletes resources and talent that could be used on something with a chance of being practical.
@@incognitotorpedo42 I totally agree. Fusion research is dangerous, and for exactly the reason you state. Fusion research consumes funds, resources and talent that _must_ be applied to viable, practical solutions, delivered in relevant time frames. I am unwilling to say Nuclear Fusion will *never* be economically competitive. However I SWAG it will not even be economically _viable_ this century.
BRAVO!! Some 50 years ago--whilst in school--our science instructor excitedly burst into the room and excitedly announced that fusion had been accomplished! I knew it was baloney at the time, however supercalifragic it would have been. We are all, understandably, emotionally sitting on edge.😒
The reason fusion was out of reach for so long is that the material technology didn't exist to make it possible. The most important factor to achieve fusion is the strength of the magnet field. The power output is to the fourth power which means if you double the field strength you get 16 times the output. The reason I have little hope for ITER is it used 400 ton 11.8 telsa strength super conduction magnets made from Nb3Sn / NiTi that require cooling to 4 K (-269 C). Compare this to the SPARC reactor at MIT which with it 10 ton YBCO cooled to 77 K produced a 20 telsa field this January. This means the SPARC reactor can achieve 16 times the output of power output with 2.5% the material and the far cheaper cooling cost of liquid nitrogen verses helium. Their are other good design elements of the SPARC reactor like its modular design, use of lithium salts, etc that I can't go over due to space limitations here.
ITER is a solid yet unimaginative plan to guarantee we got to working fusion power through brute force. But using it to criticize the field is a strawman argument at this point. The field has advanced so far since the 90s when ITER was designed.
I keep on screaming about REBCO magnets and nobody is listening - don't they recognize a "jet-engine" breakthrough when they see one?
I believe SPARC magnets will be cooled to 20K with liquid hydrogen, unless they've changed it. The reason for this is that you can get higher fields at lower temp without losing superconductivity, I think
Yeah, keep grasping at that technological solution illusion. How long do you think it will take before we've spent enough billions to achieve 1:1 real total Q? another 70 years? Maybe only 50? Or even 20? Great. Except that we don't have that much time.
@@paulhaynes8045 why do you think we don't have time? Because we won't need any energy solutions in 20 or 50 years in the future?
What we could do now is to build fission plants and they would help us to get over the problem of burning fossil fuels, but they are not a permanent solution. That's why we need fusion to eventually take over from them.
Solar and wind are nice, but because of their intermittency they won't be a full solution,but need a base load system as well.
One note, a lot of investment money is going into smaller fusion designs with some looking to have non-neutronic fuels, such as proton-boron fusion, and no need to breed tritium. This requires higher temperatures but the thought is the small size would make this easier to control. Check out the Fusion Industry Association for more info on the 20 or so private fusion start up companies.
yes, this. It's worth pointing out that the HB11 project doesn't go for temperature but uses laser impulse to apply pressure to the fuel which is ordinaryboron and hydrogen. One of the most promising things is how many routes there are to fusion from big and safe if already obsolete ITER, to pretty conventional but cutting edge Commonwealth Fusion from MIT, to more unconventional ideas like General Fusion using massive pistons to generate pressure or HB11's laser driven project. The biggest challenge at this point for tokamaks isn't breakeven energy - that's almost certainly solved by a new generation of high temperature superconductors that are already available at industrial scale. The hard part now is controlling the plasma and it seems like every week a paper gets published chipping away at that problem. It takes a matter of perverse faith to assume we'll never solve it.
Ah yes. If there one thing the world needs. It nuclear in a smaller package. The U.S military is working on that. Certainly not for nefarious purposes, I hope.
There is an old saying in SciFi that you do not move forward until the supporting technologies catch up. It makes sense (example - you can not go to Greek times and build rifles, the metallurgy and chemistry are not there). Now we have superconducting magnets, real-time super fast computers and a dozen other small technologies. As written below, ITER is already obsolete. When MIT says that the numbers make sense, the numbers make sense. It will happen, not by any US Government thing, by Europe or by China or maybe somebody like Elon Musk or Bill Gates will decide it must be done. My bet is a design for a fusion powerplant in 10 to 15 years. Power by 2050.
true, i think that systems that utilize some of the natural magnetic instabilities of the plasma could be much closer to rendering a viable plant, z-pinch and focus fusion type stuff. i really like the concept behind zap energy and Focus Fusion.
Anything other than the classic D_T reactions will need higher temperatures because of greater repulsion between the nuclei. that brings us back to the containment problem.
Love the props for Sabine, she is a great educator.
I have a challenge of a sort. Nothing too hairy...lol, ok maybe a bit hairy. Lots of the talk these days is pushing towards active mitigation techniques like marine cloud brightening. Which I had heard provides -1.85W/m² for the area it is used. Which got me thinking, what level of effect is required to reverse the warming? There is a lot of math in there and I don’t expect you to pull out your slide ruler for. I bet Sabine could help😁, but you go through a lot of material so in time you might see these numbers presented. I kinda expect the numbers to vary by location, as most of the heating is a northern hemispere thing. Polar efforts would have to be stronger if we want to refreeze the arctic. Just a thought...something to keep in mind perhaps.
Thanks as always, for your fantastic presentations of our current struggle. 🍀
IPCC talk about 'effective radiative forcing' caused by humans, which is +2.3 W/m^2.
@@laskieg, what seems to be missing is the estimate of what it takes to turn this ship into cooling. As this is a carbon forcing event, we must see our efforts in context to the degree of force needed to exceed hopes of just maintaining current levels. I think generally speaking, halting all fossil fuel emissions is impractical and possibly potentially fatal for civilization. The expectation then should be to counter emissions at a certain level exceeding use. Ideas of net zero are not getting the point that we need to drive the system. I am expecting the number we are looking at is -12W/m² over a period of decades. Especially as we intend to reduce the aerosol masking effect by removing coal outright...or will we? I suspect we may have to turn to coal as a way to enhance the cooling effect. One thing we know well...coal burning. Addatives and scrubbers could tailor the atmospheric byproducts, to keep a hold on rapid temperature rise expected from eliminating them. AME is estimated to be +0.5°C to +1°C but may require all internal combustion engines to stop too. Not sure on what they include in the range given.
There might be a misunderstanding here. The current reactors (ITER as most obvious example) are simply not meant to have a large total Q yet. I think increasing the "out-of-plasma-Q" is supposed to be less demanding. Eventually, the energy lost at various places (say the heating of a laser for instance) can eventually serve as heat to warm up water, create steam, --> electricity. It remains to be seen to what degree this can indeed be fixed.
Tritium is certainly a problem.
The scale (and time for deployment) of a project like ITER is also a problem.
He doesn't say it isn't posible, he says it isn't going to be in the time frame needed for climate change prevention. It's quite obvious the inexistent comercial fusion reactors aren't going to be 30% of global energy production in 2050 (looks more like 2100). He says we should think if this huge spending is a good use of limited resources at this point in time.
There is a lot of equipment in ITER that will be completely unnecessary in a power plant. You will also gain in efficiency and scale, either bigger reactors or more powerful magnets.
At least ITER team weren't officially claiming they were going to get a working reactor going.. I remember the early days of fusion when each new reactor was going to be the design that worked.. Now they explain they're just testing a few containment theories and tweaks but the MSM and mainstream science media still over-hyped ITER massively.
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Vanity Science compared to Fission Breeder Reactors (Molten Salt and Fast Neutron Solid Fuel Reactors using much less to potentially almost no Enriched Uranium, producing much less radioactive waste with a much shorter half life). Lowest impact far less problematic tech. based on fully verified physics.
@@PrivateSi ITER could be fastened to a generator and produce power, but it would be much less than the power used. It is a test bed and technology demonstrator.
They hope the follow on version will produce actual electric.
@@seriousmaran9414 .. I've already said all that. I've compared the claims made last century by tokamak junkies to the more reasonable claims they make now - though The (Science) Media still utterly over-hypes all hyper-science vanity projects, as per use-you-all....
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Please explain to me why all feasibility studies and now even WORKING RUSSIAN fission breeder test reactors show it to be the clear answer to our energy needs.. We need 100s of times more electricity globally to meet green targets in a rapidly industrialising 2nd and 3rd world, and we've needed 10x for decades as it is
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Breeder reactor designs use proven tech. and proven physics, Fusion Reactors do not. There is billions of years of low(er)-level radioactives suitable for breeder reactors, including our depleted uranium stockpiles from dirty, old-fashioned Enriched Uranium Reactors..
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Synthetic oil can be produced from mined, refined sea water + captured carbon. There are many greener internal combustion engine and in-car exhaust gas processing and storage solutions that require far less planet rape and use easy to recycle materials too. Fake Greens run the show though, so don't hold your breath..
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Breeder reactors could have transformed the world and brought lasting peace due to the abundance of fuel all around the world. Could have finished the energy revolution by the end of the 60s, from then on firms can only compete on safety record and efficiency... Instead we have Liberal Lefty Commie Zealots owned by global uber-corp interest in LIBERAL SUSTAINABLE PROFITS SCAMS...
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Blah.. blah.. semi rant.. blah.. Please explain to me why a) The proven very feasible Breeder Reactor program was shelved in the US, UK and France.. 3 or 4 main reasons... b) How humanity can replicate the matter-containing gravitational pressure of a star without using HUGE AMOUNTS OF ELECTRICITY or MASS?!?
I'm 71 years old and I have been hearing about the search for viable fusion power since I was old enough to understand what it meant. We are literally no closer now than we were when I was a young man in the '60s and the tokomak was invented. Give it up already!
Thank you and all the people who support this channel
Another interesting problem I heard from a postgrad student at JET was that the high energy particles tended to pulverise the steel framework of the tokomac. It does make me wonder why so little effort is made with thorium salt reactors, when so much is spent on fusion.
MSR's were built, and abandoned, in the 1960's. I've looked into them extensively and don't get why every video or article about nuclear has somebody screaming about this "new" technology and how it's going to be the "next step" for nuclear.
@@GeorgeWashingtonLaserMusket Yes, the fact that if the power is lost, the thorium salt reactor settles into a stable, inert state is a brilliant piece of safe design. The sad reason everyone focussed on fundamentally dangerous, water-cooled uranium reactors is that they produced plutonium as a by-product, which could be used for nuclear weapons. Hey ho.
they keep lying its clean
@@GregHassler It's not new, as many people know, and no one is screaming, but it is safer than water-cooled uranium reactors and it does work, unlike fusion. It also hasn't been abandoned. For a latest example of its real-world viability, have a look at the Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR), now in preparation for commercial licensing.
A small leak happens, as they do, you need maintenance, your molten salt is at around 675C, which it needs to be, now you want to repair your molten salt reactor. What do you do?
look at the large reflective solar plant built in the Nevada desert, billions of dollars and if they had a problem they had to remove their pipes and put in new ones because you simply can't reheat the salt in the system in a way that is feasible.
Maybe there is an engineering trick to solve this problem, but until then, molten salt is dead. You need to be able to do maintenance on your plant, all parts of it.
I think the current approach looks broadly correct: society has essentially stuck fusion development on a background thread and is getting on with other stuff in the meantime. The billions spent so far look to me almost nothing over the timescales we're talking about.
$25 billion spent over decades by 7 nations. While I support assistance to Ukraine I feel compelled to point out that figure is not even twice what the US alone has spent one the war and associated military buildup in Europe, and just 1/4 what Germany alone spent increasing their defense budget since the war started.
There are scaling limits to what more could be done with increased funding. Skilled labor, rare materials, and finite electric output are just three caps on it.
Every penny spent on fusion is one less opportunity to spend it on something that is better, faster and safer to supply our energy needs. Besides fusion creates radioactive actinides and can convert uranium-238 to plutonium-239 and thorium-232 to uranium-233. As if we need more weapons grade materials.
@@jackfanning7952 You're talking about fission, not FUSION.
Investment in Fusion vs Investment in Renewables seems like a false choice...they aren't the only two options in a "budget" zero sum game. This seems like quite an oversimplification and counter productive imo. For example, in 2021 the IMF reported that the fossil fuel industry benefits from subsidies of USD$11m *every minute* (ref: The Guardian, 6th Oct 2021). Might that be a better source of renewable research finance than (admittedly long term) fusion research?
For mine, a large part of "the problem" is the overhyping and resulting unrealistic expectations...commonly created (often inadvertently) between the research community and the media. If I'm a fusion researcher, I might get much more excited about a new Q figure or "breakthrough" than the public should...and that's reasonable and understandable. The media doesn't seem to parse this though, and passes the excitement (or magnifies it) when communicating to the public...over time creating a sour taste in people's mouths after being "mislead" for decades.
Sabine's video explaining Q Total is a serious reality check about the feasibility of Nuclear Fusion, well-worth warching.
I watched it months ago and it was b.s. It pretends that >30 year old designs that are obsolete represent the state of the fusion field. But its on par from someone with videos having clickbait titles like "Reality May Not Exist."
@@j.f.fisher5318 The discussion about misleading use of Q Total is independent of age of the design. Is about ethics. If papers are manipulated to obtain bigger budgets, sooner o later, science loses.
I think Sabine puts ethics first (clickbaits aside 😂). She doesn't like gigantic experiments with gigantic budgets and uncertain results. Not only ITER, she also criticise the race for bigger particle accelerators.
something a lot of ppl always seem to forget when they talk about ITER or almost any other _research_ fusion reactor is the fact that they are designed for fundamental reasearch and finetune the fusion process. they are not ment to produce more power than they need to be run.
Even if Fusion is not achieved in totally this manner, i would assume its still helping discover and build other competencies that we previously were not aware of.
It certainly puts scientists to work for positive achievements. How about an episode on other tech that has come from these efforts?
Critiquing the entire fusion field based on 30 year old designs is a strawman argument that's simply shameful. The field has advanced at a rate faster than moore's law as measured by experimental triple product for 55 years and this ignores half that advance.
Made freaking good magnets, spend incredible lot of time and money
@Science Revolution Wow. Make sure this person, er, crank, doesn't get into a car.
Here in the USA, fusion research has led to the production of some lethal drones and quite a lot of profit from real estate sales.
It helps in killing the planet, everything humanity does now is progressing this legacy of ours only, we use double speak and say "save" instead of "kill." 😊
We actually achieved Fusion 4.6 bn years ago. It's only recently that we realised we could harness it quite directly in the form of renewables.
It is truly the fusion reactor worthy of the highest praise b
THANK YOU for talking honestly about nuclear fusion and its opportunity costs!! We have solutions to our energy problem today yet so many want to waste billions on this pipe dream. Every dollar spent on nuclear fusion is a dollar not spent on real solutions today and it's not like we have time to waste.
What about tomorrow?
@@spectaa3138 Can we worry about it tomorrow?
My view is that it’s more of an investment for the future. Sure it won’t be ready for a while, but I think it would be silly to just sit around on a fantastic possibility and wait until the time is right. The time will never be right, we just have to do it on the way. Besides, $25 billion globally is actually pretty insignificant when compared to government budgets.
I also wouldn’t exactly call what we have today “real solutions” for the sake that they all have their pitfalls, so investing in something else is always a good idea.
No it isn't. Every dollar spent on fossil fuel exploration and subsidy is a dollar not spent on a viable future. Picking on the (generally tiny) budgets of fusion projects is just silly. Worry about things that are actually part of the problem.
I agree. I think that money would be much better spent, perfecting cheap, efficient electrical energy storage. That's what we should be focused on right now, since it is a huge benefit to ANY electrical generating source. Now, we've got cheap wind, we've got cheap solar, we just need a cheap way to firm up the grid, to guarantee 24/7 power availability on the grid, despite the intermittent nature of those sources. That would complete the "third leg of the triangle" needed for a 100% renewable grid.
Dave, always an intellectual, insipring, and frankly aesthetic (compared to so many other podcasts) pleasure to check out your your latest posts on alternative/emerging energy. Thanks.
Thank you neuralobserver. I appreciate your feedback :-)
I agree that both energy research and renewable energy production are underfunded, but I would rather they reroute current fossil subsidies than cannibalise either. We need both.
we dont.. fission and fusion would be too expensive.. solar and wind are incredible cheap and we already know how to solve their intermitency issue in a cost efficient way and solving all our different co2 emmision in the other sectors at the same time.
@@angellestat2730 I mean that fusion research contains several sub-researches that other technologies can benefit from too, even if fusion itself never becomes viable. For example the amount of research in precision magnetic fields, or 'higher' temperature superconductors to save liquid nitrogen/helium. If this 'only' increases the efficiency of maglev trains and MRI devices in hospitals, or wind turbines, we still benefit. In my opinion, the money is there for both, just get military budgets involved and you can fill the atlantic ocean with windmills. This is absolutely the time to invest more in energy tech, not less, but by reallocating other,bigger funds to building renewables, not by suggesting we save money on energy research instead. Still, criticising the cost of ITER is valid, as other government building projects that explode their budgets.
@@Mr_Stone1 any huge amount of investment in any research could possible provide developments in other tech branch.
But If you want better trains, just invest on better trains.
It is a bit silly to think that we need to spent a lot on fusion knowing that it would not help us to solve our climate emergency.
Also.. The IA age is coming.. any project that requires more than 15 years of development, it is incredible pointless, because after that time you would have incredible tools at disposal that would solve all those issues in few days at almost zero cost.
If anyone wants to research on fusion, fine.. but they should do it with their own private funds or investors.
But here we are talking about public funds that are being used to research a tech who does not solve any of our current needs.
In any case.. they should try to accomplish fusion for propulsion on space, that seem orders of magnitude easier that here on earth to produce energy.
@@angellestat2730 We absolutely shouldn't take AGI as a given. Great if it happens (and is, of course, aligned), but we have very little idea how close or far we are.
@@Low_commotion We dont need to reach the level of Agi to support my point.
We just need to agree in some parameters that are quite obvious.
1- Hardware (analog or digital) for neural networks is improving at very high speed.
2- the same can be say of the tools used to develop Ai apps.
3- new methods of learning are being applied, that require less tries and more efficient in the amount of training data required.
Now, Imagine that nobody would have invest it a thing on fusion in the last 60 years.
How much it would take us to reach the level that we are today if we start just now?
You saw how many different approach we see today for nuclear fusion? many from small companies taking advantage of high physics simulation?
Many of the approach already used AI apps to find out the most efficient design.
So.. if we know for sure that we still are several years from the goal, why we keep spending so much in fusion hardware that we know it would not be enough, instead waiting and then discover everything in few years once we have much better tools.
This is similar to the Project Longshot, I dont have any issue with that because it is private funded. But a project like that requires several years on development at our current speed, and it would also take 40 or 20 years more to reach destination.
This mean that each year of extra development would accomplish higher speeds, making pointless all the first sails that would be early launch.
On the other hand I understand not to wait for the AI boost.
Because one thing is to develop something on your own, with your own intelligence and creativity, and a different thing is let than an app would do it for you, stealing any feeling of accomplishment.
Sorry, my answer was quite long :)
Would liked to have seen First Light Fusion mentioned here. Glad you included a link to Sabine's video, which is also very informative.
For the commenters that think we are getting close to a real breakthrough, ITER is going to start plasma testing in 2035, 50 years after planning started. If successful it will point to the next generation reactor, but you can only start planning that after ITER data reviews the critical design parameters. I can’t see that happening before 5 to 10 years of operation. Then you build the high Q reactor where the Q-total has to be high enough to make the excess power commercially viable. How long will that be - the elusive 20 years (but start counting in 2045) or, like ITER, another 50 years? Now you have to build a prototype reactor that generates power to show it really works - I think you will have a tough time raising 10’s to 100’s of billions of dollars for commercial reactors before proving the technology will work for power generation. So optimistically you are talking two 30 year cycles (20 years design, 10 years operational testing) and 20 years to get the first commercial reactors up and going. Starting at 2045, that brings you to 2135. If there the next generation cycles take longer or requires extra design iterations, you will be into 2200’s or 2300’s. In that time there are a multitude of currently existing technologies that will have made huge advancements.
As many commenters have pointed out there are other fusion options beyond magnetic confinement and laser inertial confinement. But, these are all relatively early in development. While a breakthrough is possible, any one who has worked in advance science or engineering knows that the timing of breakthroughs can not be predicted, and there are more breakdowns than breakthroughs.
and ITER is already obsolete. It was designed 30 years ago in a 60 year old field. Using it to criticize the current state of the art in that field is a strawman argument.
@@j.f.fisher5318 Those that pay for ITER - European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, United States, China, Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, Thailand, United Kingdom (under the EU's Fusion for Energy) and Switzerland (as member of EURATOM) - will be delighted to learn this, thank you
Today's reactors are built to learn and test. The more important values is *run time* , the q times are not important until we have 24/7 operational reactors. We have suddenly gone from milliseconds to recently minutes, ~17 minutes hold millions of degrees in a container. That is getting close to constant running, not far away at all.
@@AORD72 They have been working on fusion since before I was born, and all they have is a few milliseconds with a fusion Q
@@j.f.fisher5318 The ideas are 60 years old, the technology is develop as required - which is why they are so expensive and take so long to build. There is no credible and existing technology that is going to put fusion generated electricity on the grid this century.
Having to maintain staggeringly hot plasma in such close proximity to staggeringly cold superconducting magnets, and then having to insert yourself between the two to utilize the heat, has always struck me as being stuck in a cage fight with Maxwell's Demon.
The energy of the plasma isn't meant to be dumped onto the reactor walls. That would actually be pretty bad as that would be a confinement breach. Not only would that screw up the rest of the reaction but it would also lead to the ablation and eventual destruction of the reactor wall given enough time. There is a specific place in these reactors where the plasma is meant to dump it's energy. It's a trench-like structure at the bottom of the reactor called the "diverter"
This video perfectly expresses my frustration with the fusion power movement. It allows people to avoid any change because fusion is just over the horizon and is going to solve all our problems. Why invest in renewables, fusion is just around the corner! Why change our lifestyles to reduce carbon emissions, fusion will come to the rescue! Why build small modular fission reactors, fusion will make them obsolete any day now! I fear that one day we will look back on our fusion efforts and see a tragic misprioritization of funding and talent.
A shame there was no mention of the MIT design. Much higher intensity magnetic fields, a trituim breeder blanket, much more compact design, everything better than the older ITER design, and it's hardly ever mentioned in these fusion put-down videos? Didn't he research the subject first?
using the 30 year old ITER design as a punching bag is just shameful. But with all the clickbait Sabine publishes on her channel I'm not surprised.
@@j.f.fisher5318 They should turn around the old motto and say "Fusion is 30 years away because we're always using a 30 year old design!".
So you're telling me there's a chance.
:-)
The problem with thinking we must divest from fusion to proven technology is the scale. even if iter takes up 25bn and turns out to not be very good, which I think is unlikely, I think there's good reason to believe it will at least achieve its goals, that money is still peanuts compared to what we need, and what is already being spent on current renewables. These 25 bn would also have been invested over the course of 30+ years by then, so it's a complete drop in the ocean compared to the rollout of renewables. Also the scope of fusion was never to save the world from climate change, it was always a physics experiment that has now been glamorized for reasons I honestly can't understand.
25 billion is something like 16 of the US navy's newest destroyers. Or less than twice what the U.S. alone is spending to support Ukraine. It is peanuts in the grand scheme of things. There are far more promising projects but keeping ITER going is still worthwhile as a backstop to ensure humanity has a reactor using proven technology that we can do research on with plasmas generating 10x greater than breakeven power.
Fusion has always been sold as the energy source of the future, not just some scientists experimenting with high energy plasma. Also, if we had invested a fraction of the 35 billion into small modular reactors (SMRs), we could have developed multiple SMRs and begun mass producing them.
I'd say the scope of fusion definitely was to get it as a powersourcen not really a physics experiment (though obviously it is a physics experiment also by need), it just indeed was never meant to combat climate change or such and definitely is a longterm civilization project, taking generations if necessary.
What is the "good reason to believe it will at least achieve its goals"? No one has shown that.
@Science Revolution are you trolling?
I’m 59. I remember the “Here Comes Fusion Power!” articles during the energy crisis of the 1970s. To save us from OPEC and smog and Three Mile Island. So I’ve lived through the “20 years away” promises. I read my first serious article in Analog SF magazine as a goofy teenager. Golly Jeepers, the future’s gonna awesome!
Now, my daughter has her Master’s Degree and moved out. So I’m increasingly skeptical.
Note that the “Mr. Fusion” home energy converter sits on the back of a flying car. Both fanciful Hollywood inventions, now examples of an over promised future.
Being the same age, I recall seeing jet packs demonstrated as a kid. They told us one day soon we'd use them to fly to work - I'm still waiting for mine.
I read an article recently which touted the science of tokamak fusion is proven , and it's now up to the engineers to make it a practical reality.
Well this engineer doubts he will live to see a commercial fusion electricty generator, or people flying to work with jet packs.
The joke was "50 years away and always will be back then." Then it was 30, and now 20. Triple product (density, temperature, and time) has advanced at a steady exponential rate comparable with moore's law. If we'd started tracking moore's law in the 1800s we'd have thought computers were impossible too.
@@j.f.fisher5318 I admire your optimism. There’s still basic engineering questions we don’t have reliable data on, e.g. how will the tokamak walls stand up to the massive flux of 14.1 MeV neutrons. I agree that having the ability to harness nuclear energy safely is a very desirable thing, however we are rapidly running out of time to reduce GHG emissions, so I wouldn’t be counting on Fusion making a meaningful contribution any time soon.
I'm 10 years 'ahead' of you, so I've almost exactly matched the whole fusion illusion. At 16 I watched Armstrong walk on the moon, and then spent the rest of my life wondering if we'll ever got back there. But I still think we'll be back on the moon a very long time before they get fusion to work. Always assuming, of course, that we have the time left to do any of that...
The main problem with tritium breeding is that you need to very efficiently capture the fusion neutrons in the lithium to breed enough tritium. If you lose too many neutrons, either via absorption in other materials or just leaving the system without being captured, you don't breed enough tritium to sustain the cycle.
Another option is to use the neutrons from fission power plants to breed tritium, though this opens up a few more cans of worms.
The fact that tritium is produced by the fission of lithium is not really a problem. The products of this fission reaction are just tritium and helium (and another neutron depending upon the isotope of lithium involved). So it won't generate nuclear waste like fission power plants do. Neutrons that are not absorbed by lithium will make other things radioactive, not not nearly at the scale that fission plants produce.
Fusion, if ever made feasible and economical, has fantastic potential. It represents one of the biggest scientific and technological challenges being undertaken by humans, and should be funded to the hilt until it is proven beyond dispute that it can't be done. Not clear to me why you would be down on fusion given there is always progress being made. Yes, we are still in early feasibility and prototyping stages (and have been there for a long time), but that just means you should not make any conclusions based on current performance and costs. This is on-going research - not a product development cycle. Current funding is only in the single digit $B range. This should be raised 10x or 100x - not reduced. If you want to find money to pay for your windmills, I'm sure you can find other sources of wasted money instead of killing off the one solution that actually would save the planet.
General Fusion is worth "a look" (not saying it's going to work, just worth an objective analysis as it appears to be quite a different approach than the systems you highlight in this video)
:General Fusion is worth "a look" Yea I have waited since the 1970s for it to happen. What if theories on how the Sun works is wrong?
Yeh, 100%. I'm very skeptical of tokamaks and stelerators. I like their design because it tries something different. And it certainly feels like it could work, other teams have shown Inertial Confinement fusion works with lasers. So I'm hopeful. It also by its very design has already considered actual useable power generation. Unlike others where there's no thought out solution for how turn the heat energy into electricity.
@@davescott7680 how to turn the heat energy into electricity is the easy part. you raise steam, make it turn a turbine and connect it to a dynamo. We have mastered this part well.
@Science Revolution what a load of rubbish
@Science Revolution lol, i was just about to like your first comment for admiring your sarcasm.
What did Mark Twain say again?
It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt
Well we need to do both. Fusion is for sure worthy of research funding. I would favor the 25 or so start ups over ITER but I see the value of ITER for its own sake. What we SHOULD do is stop subsiding fossil fuels, fine the fossil fuel companies, and put THAT money towards more immediate climate solutions.
Without what has been done to get iter to its current state, we would not have the startups we have now. Everyone looks at iter as if the science will be starting when construction is complete, but it has already required a lot of R&D that is making other ideas possible. Iter never needs to be completed to be a massive success... And there is a pretty good chance it won't be completed lol. But it has still been worth doing.
Design on ITER started in 1988, and using it as a blanket critiqueof the fusion field is a strawman argument. It's exactly the kind of clickbait that pushed me to unsubscribe from Sabine's channel months ago.
Though in many ways ITER has been rendered obsolete, it has had value as a backstop to more technologically ambitious projects since. It provides a guaranteed way humanity will be able to do research on a fusion reactor that gets 10x the energy out that is put in, using sheer size to achieve the goal. Meanwhile, rapid advances in supconductor research have allowed far smaller designs to theoretically surpass its capabilities. So its probably a dead end, but still good to have around in case the new tech fall short for some reason.
We will need Fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. There is nothing to replace it just yet
@@scottslotterbeck3796 Ok, but we don't need to subsidize them.
@@CaedenV I have trouble believing that as many of the start-ups are using completely different reactor types, so not tokomaks.
The SPARC reactor uses a new kind of breakthrough magnet (REBCO) - they are vastly more powerful than the magnets used in ITER. The magnets are so incredible they enable the reactor to be very small and cheap, so much so that SPARC may very well deliver net-fusion before ITER has even finished the commissioning stage. Fusion is very much here thanks to those REBCO magnets!
Add to that the recent advances in AI control of the plasma and I think there's still good reason to stay optimistic. In general there have been more little breakthroughs in the past five years than there were in the fifty previous ones. I think we're witnessing an acceleration in progress at the moment. My bet is that we'll surpass Q with stable plasma before the decade is done.
"Fusion is very much here thanks to those REBCO magnets!"
Did you not even listen to his video? Stop with the wishful thinking and look at the reality of the problems as his video does.
@@christerdehlin8866 - I agree! AI is a nexus and computers are becoming insanely powerful. I'm a professional programmer with a deep understanding of computers in many facets - I can state with absolute confidence that specialist AI will solve the plasma stability problem very soon - even if we don't understand how it does it.
@@witherbossbros1157 - Did you even look up REBCO magnets to see that there were orders of magnitude more powerful? do you even read science news? Dave is absolutely right - current designs aren't going to cut it - but he and your good self are not yet aware that the "jet engine" of magnets was just invented!! Q factor? the SPARC will smash a Q of 10 in a space the size of a small van and they're already building it.
@@witherbossbros1157 the video was about ITER a 30 year old design that's already obsolete. Breakeven power is basically solved. Most of the focus is on plasma control now.
I tend to agree with Dave's POV. A bird in hand, is worth two in the bush. Potential is the operative word here. Whilst the global warming clock keeps ticking. Resources should be spent on proven eco-friendly technologies. Otherwise we're just letting a family member spend the families fortune at the casino. And the future of the planet hangs in the balance. Do you feel lucky?
There are several different possible fusion mechanisms under investigation by various teams throughout the world. I think by 2050 it will be a solved problem and there will be commercially viable plants. I say keep investing in fusion.
I wish people would not judge fusion based on a list of single points and then doing some kind of "layman's sum" in their head. Perhaps only consider the reluctance to spend ~$20B on ITER (over decades) while society will happily spend ~$14B on 3 weeks of Tokyo olympics. The thing is, the whole success matrix is so complicated that you just cannot hold it in your head. Human brains are worthless in taking exponential factors into account. Such as improved superconductors influence on Qtotal, ability to do fast low-bureaucracy single-site solutions, etc. My 2 cents. Forget fusion saving us from greenhouse effect but also keep encouraging + funding them (they are a bargain).
The actual metric to track the success of the fusion research field is the "triple product" of plasma density, temperature and time achieved in actual experiments, and that has improve at a rate on par with moore's law for 60 years while ITER was designed 30 years ago and is already obsolete. I'd argue it is still worth finishing to have a backstop to newer and more promising tech, to hedge our bets for ensuring humanity is able to take those next steps some day. But ITER is probably a dead end, so using it it critique far more advanced research is a strawman.
I think Fusion will eventualy happen...but it is like solid states batteries...it will be too late and marginally better than existing technology for Earth applications. We already have a fusion reactor, lets focus on getting and storing as much energy as possible from it. Then, when our suns energy is not enough and we are aiming for the starts in a few generations time, fusion may be needed...or who knows what the enabler will be then.
This coment sounds scify...because it is, just like comercial fusion for a planet in the habitable zone of its solar syatem.
No. Solar is too costly and only works 8 hours a day. At best.
@@scottslotterbeck3796 "Too costly"? And you're proposing FUSION as the alternative? LoL. Does LCOE mean anything to you?
@@incognitotorpedo42 I'm proposing nuclear fission. Safe, effective, carbon-free, unlimited fuel, 24/7.
It's very unfortunate that fusion power is too late for addressing climate change, but I believe cutting funding or giving up fusion research would be a big mistake. Researchers have overcome so many challenges such as plasma heating, turbulences, various plasma instabilities and more recently viable materials for the inner walls of the vacuum chamber that should work in actual fusion power plants.
Even tritium breeding methods, which ITER will evaluate in combination with a fusion reactor, have already been successful with other processes, so I highly doubt this will be a show-stopper either.
And in JET, they successfully used sophisticated robots to do construction work inside the radio-active vacuum chamber entirely remotely.
I know the enormous size required for tokamaks or stellarators with a large enough Q makes this a very expensive endeavor (ITER is still just 2.5 times as expensive as the JWST though, which I also support), but a first Demo reactor that actually produces net power would require a Q_plasma of about 40, which is projected to be achievable with a power plant just 30% bigger than ITER (or slightly stronger superconducting magnets).
I really like this channel, but videos like this one and Sabine's that just try to lower the excitement about fusion sadden me, although I'm aware that there's too much hype at times in the media, maybe to get investors for smaller projects.
Nevertheless, I'm confident that magnetic confinement fusion power will be harnessed within my lifetime if we don't scrap the research funding. This might well play an essential part for overcoming humanity's next big filter...
Well said. My thoughts exactly.
Thumbs up for the yt comment algorithm.
Although Sabine's video was a bit negative, it was fair from what I remember which is exactly the goal. This one maybe less so, but it might just be me already knowing fussion is not in on the menu to reach the 2050 target.
we will sooner invent FTL drive and colonize alfa centauri then stop global warming
@@justnothing8692 Preventing global warming is something we could do even without reducing CO2, for example by emitting large amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere to block sunlight. This just might have drastic environmental impacts, like changing the colour of the sky gobally for starters. But it is doable already today, in contrast to FTL drives which are probably completely impossible. Sorry for being pedantic. ;-)
@@helgefan8994 Man I've seen too many movies about trying exactly that and accidentally causing a chain reaction cause we don't fully understand the process and causing an Ice Age. Lets not go there.
I totally agree with your final consideration...
This was a great video. I have left numerous other comments about how we need to stop fighting physics and to use physics instead to fight climate change. Doing fusion is really hard even for stars. You have to squeeze protons close enough together to allow the weak nuclear force to turn protons into neutrons. For example, the core of the Sun has a density of 150 grams/cubic centimeter at the center which is 150 times the density of water. Thus, the hydrogen protons are squeezed very tightly together by the weight of the Sun above. The protons are also bumping around at a very high velocity too at a temperature of 15 million kelvins (27 million degrees Fahrenheit). Yet the very center of the Sun only generates 276.5 watts per cubic meter and that rapidly drops off to about 6.9 watts per cubic meter at a distance of 19% of a solar radius away from the center. Using a value o 276.5 watts per cubic meter means that you need a little more than 4 cubic meters of the Sun's core to produce the heat from the little 1200 watt space heater in your bathroom! The resting human body produces about 80 watts of heat, and the volume of a human body is about. 062 cubic meters. That means a resting human body generates 1,290 watts per cubic meter or about 4.67 times as much heat as the very center of our Sun!
Remember, the chemical energy in carbon-based fuels and batteries uses the electromagnetic force to store 2 eV per atom. The energy stored in a single atom of uranium by the strong nuclear force is 200 million eV of energy or about 100 million times as much energy per atom. That is why we will eventually have to use molten salt nuclear reactors to geoengineer the Earth back to an atmosphere with 350 ppm of carbon dioxide. Currently, we are at 415 ppm and increasing at a rate of about 2.3 ppm each year. It's going to take huge amounts of energy to fix the Earth.
You might want to include some disclaimers in these kinds of videos that explain how this is strictly personal opinion based on only a colloquial understanding of the field from anecdotal information.
.
But hey...you're right. We can't waste time on silly, impossible things like this...or going to space, or going to the moon, or breaking the sound barrier, or splitting the atom, or developing computers, or...
I have always looked at fusion as a technological development across generations. It could very well take us a couple centuries to get it to work well enough to rely on it for energy in a broad sense. I imagine a time in the far future, if we fail to completely annihilate our world, when humans will look back at the miracle of clean fusion energy and marvel at the ages of seemingly fruitless toil of brilliant scientists and engineers who would never live to see the new world their efforts would make possible. I think we should stop even expecting that this technology could be viable in "n years" and just maintain the unbroken effort, while simultaneously developing the renewable energy industry that will carry us through this century.
The present and the future. The way sits in following the example of our glorious sun.
In the meantime, we on the road to eliminate a majority of the world population with the climate emergency. We need to put fusion research on hold until we stop Venusforming the Earth.
@@Praisethesunson all hail Leto! lol
@@CeresKLee Russia might beat climate change to the punch...
@@CaedenV Yes, global thermonuclear war is the end. But I think Putin knows it is bad for business and unlike forever wars.
Several years ago the prestigious magazine "Aviation Week & Space Technology" had a very detailed story on this topic. Point-by-point they went through the specific reasons why fusion power plants are not likely to EVER be practical...and this was from scientist involved in fusion research.
The best nuclear option is to pursue Thorium (LFTR) power stations....abundant "fuel", safer and unlike uranium (235) reactors, don't produce plutonium or long half-life waste products.
Fast reactors of either thorium or uranium do that. The thorium vs uranium difference isn't that great, but both should be used.
We want nuclear to be as safe as possible, but the raving I hear from thorium proponents is almost all hype. There is the most experience and working reactors on the uranium type, and looking at how dumb some of the nuclear catastrophes have been it's a bad idea to push a new technology when we need it ASAP and cannot afford to go through the mistakes and accidents that could happen with a new technology. I am sure there are a lot of people out there who want to make money off thorium and want to push it on the world, and there do seem to be benefits in thorium, but I wish you guys would be more thoughtful and realistic. Get some plants working first with a history of safety and efficiency - prove it, then market it.
@@orkin2525 Thorium is very abundant...Uranium is not.
The 'best' nuclear option is NO nuclear. It's very expensive, generates huge amounts of very dangerous waste, and takes far too long to build. Put that money into renewables and storage instead and we might, just might, survive.
@@paulhaynes8045 France has largely decarbonized its power grid with nuclear. how long has Germany been trying to do it with wind and solar and barely made a dent? unless the country has rare geological formations allowing lots of hydro, or geothermal nuclear is the fastest way to decarbonize.
China and S Korea have been building reactors much cheaper and in 5-7 years. most of the delays and overbuild is because the reactors are prototypes and the legal and regulatory mess to get them even started.
Hi Buddy, which is why I have been shouting about Thorium MSR's for an age. We cannot spend forever pissing about with fusion whilst the planet dies especially as we have a possible solution already.
er...I think I should have watched the whole vid first before commenting... as we have just agreed. Keep up the good work.
By the way ... thank you so much for not having a big loud computer animation annoying opening and music all through your talks ... that make them even better than they already are.
Thank you for the video.
I subscribe to "Science without the gobbledygook".
We have so many great options from micro to macro here now. I think it is a matter of Will and dissemination. Waiting for big break throughs and massive power plants is not necessary and it is lazy.
It isn't a question of can we walk and chew gum at the same time. The question is, will we get up off the couch?
It is necessary to have a thorough, layered and long-term strategy.
I am for all of it! From homes to Fussion, etc.
Good explanation. This is why I'm enamored of Thorium MSRs, which seem to this layperson to be a good solution to most of the issues with fission power. They could provide sufficient power for the planet for as long as necessary until the necessary technical advances to make fusion viable - even 1000 years.
A longer term issue will arise - all power plants generate as much or more waste heat as actual electricity, and the electricity itself all ends up as heat in the environment. So even if these technologies "solve" the CO2 problem, eventually we will be adding such a large amount of heat to the environment that it will also be as much of a problem.
Perhaps the long term solution will be to embrace the Warm Earth that the dinosaurs enjoyed!!😎 Global temperatures were as much as five degrees higher than today. We humans basically grew up during the ice age.
This is the problem with waiting for technology to solve our environmental problems. They never will. If we don't change how we live, and if the governments doesn't move away from the impossible belief of infinite growth of their economies, no technology will save us from our own destruction!
You luddites are always wrong. Technology has always been the solution. The entire point of technology is to solve problems. We have (or near enough anyway) the technologies to mitigate our worst impacts on the environment
@@kokofan50 Just because technology solves problems does not mean that it can solve all of our problems, and does not mean that societal changes should not play a part. Polarization of debate is not helpful.
@@kokofan50 So if governments continue chasing economic growth and people continue to waste too much food, water and energy, technology will still save us?
@@gamingtonight1526 yes. We have invented many techniques and technologies to preserve food, canning, freezing, etc., and there are plenty of technologies working to make better quality food. With enough energy, we can easily desalinate all the water we’ll ever need, and producing electricity is fundamentally a technology problem because we only have electricity because of technology.
@@kokofan50 I hope you're right.
I would like to point out that the reason most scientist focus in Qplasma is that all the reactors we have built are just experimental reactors, wich mean that they have to be able to vary many of their parameters in a somehwhat wide spectrum.
Therefore they aren't maximized for the best possible performance, like a car engine would be after many many many years of expertirse, that's one of the reasons why they take so much time and are so expensive. When you desing a nuclear fusion reactor of up tp 10T of magnetic field for example, you have to make sure you can operate said reactor ina wide range of magnetic intesities maybe from 2T to 10T.
Once a certain combination of parameters results in a Qplasma>1 or like ITER Q>10 then we can design an optimized and cost reduced version of that reactor.
Anyway, this if ever comes to happen, will take +20 years
Great video. This, of course, and unfortunately, is for some of us no news. Many of us have been pointing out the unlikely success of the billions pumped into research.
One thing I seem to remember from Uni days is...Fission produces 10% neutrons and 90% heat. Whereas Fusion produces 90% neutrons and only 10% heat. That's a lot of neutrons for integral structure of construction to handle.
its literally 80% neutrons and 20% Helium for fusion, no reason to exaggerate. And both, neutron and the helium is heat once it hits components.
@Peter Pan Hehe...too cool. As I say...this is something I remember from my uni days, roughly 40 years ago. 80 or 90%, I'm sure you get the gist of my comment. Lots more strain on infrastructure than say, fission?
Exaggerations are ONLY in the pro-fusion camp, my friend.
@@williambreen1001 Assumptions assumptions. That's mostly what we have today if we are go be quite honest. I remember a statement from one of our Swedish anti nuclear politicians back in the 70-80's " Don't worry we will have invented something to fix energy demands within the next 30 years. No problems" Well...here we are, ordering new coal plants.
We probably need to run with what we know...and that's fission. Here in Sweden we have a good source of hydro power. Quite a nice and robust system with fission. Also, we have large quantities of Uran. Then it went political...
Although the sun (obviously) produces loads of heat it actually has a very low power density (much lower than say an internal combustion engine). Even if net-positive fusion could be demonstrated I'm curious then as to how this energy density problem can be overcome. I must be missing something so I'd appreciate some insight from someone who knows what they're talking about!
fusion reactors don't really use the sun as their model. It is just a way to explain the idea to lay folks.
That's quite the problem. The sun is obviously net positive fusion reactor, but is low density. To get high density and contain it safely takes loads of other power-consuming systems. The more fusion power we can create, the more power-hungry systems we need to control and sustain it. The equation hasn't moved in a positive direction in decades.
I think you are right that headlines are too optimistic, but I think your conclusion is too pessimistic. You focused on national labs or international efforts without looking at what the private sector has come up with in the last ~5 years. The advent of easily-manufacturable High Temperature Superconductors (HTS) has changed the equation completely. ITER and JET are designs that are very old, and had to be finalized before HTS were able to be purchased off the shelf, so they used low temperature superconductors. This forced them to design their tokamaks with enormous magnets cooled with helium. See the following video if you'd like some more info: czcams.com/video/uKwWGUT8rCw/video.html
But is it going to be achievable in the next 10 or 20 years? No. So let's concentrate on things that really do give us a chance of surving global warming. We don't have time to play around.
@@paulhaynes8045 This is not an either-or-question though. We can do both and should *not* stop funding fusion, because we'd be giving up all the progress in fusion research we made over the last 60 years.
Trying to go to 100% renewables is important, but this probably won't be possible everywhere. So abundant and reliable energy from a base load fusion power plant might turn out crucial in the long-term. Also if we ever want to do space travel beyond the solar system, fusion power might be the way.
Regarding the advances in high temperature superconductors, I believe they will play an important role, but I also see that this is pretty over-hyped in the media. We probably won't be able to create MIT's proposed ARC or even the SPARC reactor any time soon, because the structural loads created by these HTS magnets are too large for a typical tokamak structure, a problem that is often ignored when talking to investors and the media. Most plasma physicists see these plans as too ambitious. HTS magnets would need to be very thick so that the vacuum chamber would look more like a bicycle tire than a donut, which is a problem.
The first DEMO tokamak that actually produces net power (if funding won't be cut) will probably be at least as big as ITER, maybe with slightly stronger but not too strong magnets to keep structural loads in check.
Thank you, finally I've been looking for at least one person who knows about the immense progress from the fusion private sector. It's clear from this video that he didn't do any intense research at all, he's just basically regurgitating what others have said in the past about the problems facing nuclear fusion energy; without even once mentioning what scientists, researchers and engineers in this field have been doing to combat these challenges. Many of which have already been solved for like the breeding of tritium using a lithium blanket (whether molten salt or otherwise), the Improved confinement and compression of plasma using HTS magnets, as you rightfully mentioned, and the reduction of energy input requirements due to the use of these HTS magnets.
Most youtubers I see posting fusion topics don't even mention companies like Tokamak Energy, Commonwealth Fusion in collaboration with MIT fusion labs, and many other non tokamak fusion companies. If only they did a bit of healthy research, they'd know that all the problems they mentioned are already being accounted for and even solved entirely.
We need to be rolling out green tech NOW, not start in 5 or more years time. the time for research into new tech to save us has gone. It will take at least a decade to switch the world over
If we keep on with this 'paralysis by research analysis' we WILL run out of time.
The window for a viable liveable future is rapidly closing, we need to be at 50% of current fossil fuel use globally and the richest countries MUST take up the slack that poorer countries (who are already impacted by climate change -theyve lost 10-30% of GDP this decade) cannot meet.
It is not a case of every country reaching 50% at the same time, this is simply impossible with such inequality.
Banking on future tech to save us is avoiding the issue, it is hopeism. we have to act now with what we've got. Im not saying to stop R&D, but i see a lack of rolling out of current viable solutions. The tech we have is good enough, but we have been waiting for perfection. this is stalling us.
Failure to stop our trajectory of year on year increasing emissions (even the 2020 global lockdown made next to no difference), according to chapter 9 of IPCC report (not mentioned in the shorter policy makers section) is that up to 700 MILLION people on the continent of africa will no longer be able to live there and will have to be displaced due to drought, famine and resource wars -thats in EIGHT YEARS!!!
Not one single government has stopped it's fossil fuel subsidies!! the very 1st tangible step thats needed to be taken.
Neither type of nuclear will be built and incorporated into the national grid in enough time to save us from ourselves
Basically those 700 million people in Africa have zero power to make any decisions. We're realistically looking at a few billion dying before we take any serious action.
I'm just glad I never got around to having children. Future generations will both hate us, and wonder how we could be so stupid.
If there even are future generations.
@@tsubadaikhan6332 i dont have kids either and it saddens me, but its the right choice imo. Id adopt, but im not in a good place for kids
Greenies are insane, and live in a fantasy world. Y'all are destroying lives, and you don't care.
@@kimwarburton8490 "Neither type of nuclear will be built and incorporated into the national grid in enough time to save us from ourselves" - you may be correct, but then you really should be much more depressed.
There are 3 types of countries/locales that have achieved a low-emissions electricity grid:
Type I - Hydro/Geothermal - Norway, Iceland, Costa Rica, Quebec, Tasmania
Sadly, not every locale has the mountains or geology to support these 2 technologies.
Type II - Nuclear Fission - France, Sweden, Ontario
Nearly every country/locale can support nuclear.
Type III - Wind/Solar - ?????
No significant locale has done this. Denmark is perhaps closest, but their per capita emissions for electricity generation are still above the sustainable limit and nearly 2-3x that of France or Sweden or Norway.
If nuclear fission cannot be incorporated into national grids fast enough, then the only technology PROVEN to decarbonize grids and siteable everywhere is too slow.
@@factnotfiction5915 i think bhutan or nepal is the only carbon negative country n thats cos of a law which guarantees 60% forest n theyve got more than 70% n v agrarian
Who says im not depressed 🤔
Wave tech, green hydro n battery storage is where we need to push for R&D imo
i think this is the best resume in a long time about the state and feasibility of fusion, i wonder what is better: thorium molten salt reactor (already tested and in development for production ) or fusion, when it comes to the climate crisis and the geopolitical turmoil around a war between russia and the west, we better opt for the former
We need to keep in mind that ITER, and its cousins, are research devices. I support them as such, while at the same time thinking it would be a huge mistake to pin massive hopes on a particular outcome. If you never undertake large projects unless you can be sure they will pay off commercially, then you will simply never undertake them. I think a lot will be learned from ITER-including, partly not least, learning how to manage huge projects, and manufacture large, complex devices.
The ITER costing 25 billion $ so far is less than 1billion per year. That's peanuts. Even if you were to spare every single dollar spent on fusion research on renewables it would barely make a dent. Also projects like ITER and JET are already outdated in terms of magnetic field strength.
Lol, first fusion was "50 years away and always will be" then it was "30 years away and always will be," now the naysayers are adding "and always will be" to 20 years??? When construction of the first commercial reactor starts, they'll probably say "It's 2 years away and always will be!" roflmao.
So true.
Yep. When it’s one day away it always will be…
Don't remember where I saw it, but fusion power and Q-factor have been on a exponential growth curve since the 1970's. There was a time when solar and wind were not competitive, but the exponential curve finally kicked in hard enough to change that very recently. Replicating the heart of a star is a bit harder, since it can't leverage existing industry the way solar could utilize existing semiconductor industry or wind could leverage the existing grid-scale generator industry.
Very interesting point.
Reminds me of how High performance computing is taking advantage of the gaming industries GPUs.
Nice reality check on this subject. We're not anywhere close to solve this fusion problem with a workable Qtotal factor.
Near and medium term the best solution is offered by the Ed Pheil designed reactor that burns existing deleted 1% spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive material to 97% spent. It involves existing technology, the fuel is currently being stored for it at great expense, and at the end of cycle the worst radioactive waste needs safeguard for only 300 years .
My impression is that Iter is a cooperative research project conceived a very long time ago to eventually demonstrate net energy production through 'big' fusion. Although some adherents fall into the trap of believing it the best way to reach net gain, others have long realised that's not the case. There has been enormous technological development in multiple spheres since that long ago conception, to the point that fusion power will be reality within the next 5 years. It just won't necessarily be much like Iter.
Which company/strategy do you think can produce net energy in 5 years?
@@pianoforte611 That bet isn't for me to make. Given that all the necessary technology exists, particularly for the 'smaller' approaches, we might expect the most commercially-focused group to get there first. My favourite is...
@@gregansen544 I think you forgot the type the rest of your comment.
I think there is a separate, bigger problem with your initial premise. That if Fusion were to be realized tomorrow, that it would solve our energy problems.
As much as I like the concept of fusion, I am of the opinion that fusion is never (ie for next 1000 years) going to power our civilization because fundamentally it will never be economically viable.
Fusion offers a few main things.
1) low-carbon electricity
2) Unlimited Fuel
3) Small amount of radioactive waste.
But the problem is that *Fission* nuclear power already offers us all these things, and yet it isn't widely used. It's not used because it is not economical. There are possible ways to make it economical that I hope bears fruit, but that is the sticking point.
Fission is low-carbon. It's median Carbon is ~12g/kwh, on par with Wind's low carbon footprint of ~11g/kwh. And some designs like CANDU even get down to as low as 3g/kwh. Even if Fusion was better, the difference between 1 and 3g per kwh is irrelevant, since a carbon footprint ten times that would still be tolerable for our needs. Being *more* low-carbon than fission power doesn't really gain us anything.
Fission has unlimited fuel as well, for all practical purposes. Fusion fuel on Earth exists in enough abundance to run civilization for tens of millions of years. Fission by contrast only has enough fuel to run civilization for 10,000 years, using the fuel as we do today, and a few million years using fuel in ways we've already demonstrated in the lab, in test reactors, and in some commercial scale reactors in France and Russia. Now, tens of millions is much more unlimited than mere tens of thousands or millions of years... but that doesn't really *matter*. Both utilize fuel that is so abundant that it is functionally unlimited for our considerations over any meaningful timeline. Being *more* abundant than fission fuel doesn't actually gain us anything.
Radioactive Waste. Fusion does not produce *no* radioactive waste. It doesn't produce *long-lived* radioactive waste. But it does still produce radioactive waste. Fusion processes produce a large excess of neutrons which will bombard the inside of whatever fusion device is devised, and it will transmute the materials into radioactive isotopes, some of which will have half-lives on the order of tens of years, and thus require custodianship for hundreds of years, based off standards of current radioactive waste from nuclear plants. 10-halflives to safety is the general rule.
Fission largely produces the same profile of waste. All the waste from commercial fission reactors have half-lives under 30 years, requiring a
Good analysis...I've always been a fusion fan, but it seems it's a tougher nut to crack than we originally realized. So they'd need to produce at least 20x the energy to get a Q factor of 10. MIT has created powerful magnets that allow reactors to be 10x smaller...hopefully they will succeed where others have not.
@@williambreen1001 well that's how science works, you don't just give up cause you hit a roadblock....I think MIT's solution could bring us much closer to a commercially viable reactor. ITER also should be able to work out the technological issues as well, that's why it's being built, it's a test reactor. If they succeed then we'll have fusion power in a legit 20-40 yrs. Still a long time frame but certainly not 'never.'
Bro is the king of delivering bad news with eloquence and a dash of cheeky British humor.🤠
This video really cleared up a lot of questions I’ve had reading these articles.
Even when we get fusion working, it would take decades to roll out even 10% of our power from that source. Assuming glitch-free implementation which is unlikely. Even more unlikely, is that fusion is viable this century..
Exactly. We can by all means continue to work on it, but we need immediate solutions which have the potential to bridge the gap in the meantime
@@SaveMoneySavethePlanet ReThinkX has researched alternatives to Fossil Fuel. We have all the technology we need to switch over right now if we can just get Fossil Fuel Companies out of the way which makes me wonder whether Hydrogen and Fusion are just delaying tactics.
I think you have done several videos on various battery technologies. It would be good to do a summary video comparing the strengths and weaknesses of each at this moment and the promise of each being used on the next few years.
There are better ways to store energy. Use excess generating capacity to create liquid fuels.
@@scottslotterbeck3796 Why is that better? Every time you convert you loose some energy.
@@wineberryred Of course! But battery tech is so poor now, and the lithium batteries wear out, can't hold that much electricity.
Liquid fuels, OTOH, can be directly transported and used with existing infrastructure. Methanol (M85) can easily work in automobiles. No great expenditures needed. The technology already exists.
Yes, there are losses. As in every technology. Look into the latest work on using catalysts to pull dangerous CO2 from the atmosphere to make liquid fuels or solid carbon for burial.
See Aldo Steinfeld's work in Zurich. And he's just one. A great partial solution to global warming.
@@scottslotterbeck3796 I disagree that battery tech is poor. Existing battery tech can be used for all existing forms of ground and water transportation. It does need to improve to be used in air transportation. It's getting better every year and the tech with the best economics is going to win.
If we had put as much research into thorium fission reactors as we've put into fusion, we'd have abundant, low-cost, and safe energy right now!
Well China has, so we're way behind the curve in all sorts of tech when compared to China.
Or we could have put all that money into research into renewables and by now we wouldn't be looking at global wearming...
@@jayworley1583 At least _someone_ is doing it...
Brilliant video! I'm a chemical engineering prof with background in nuclear engineering - I bailed from nuclear engineering over thirty years ago when I realized fusion would be too far in the future for my career - I'm very glad to see such a cogent explanation of the problems with the hype surrounding fusion power.
"Willful mass delusion" at 1:06. Yes! Exactly! It is so very rare these days to see clear thinking and honesty.
3:40 Construction at ITER will not be completed in the latter half of this decade, that's a common misconception. That's just when a first phase is supposed to be completed. The completion target is 2035, and that's only if everything goes perfectly to plan (spoiler: it won't). Otherwise excellent video!
So one of the exciting things to happen in fusion research in recent years is a new cheap, mass producible, superconducting 'tape' that generatas very strong magnetic fields while superconducting.
ITAR unfortunately is way to far along to implement those magnets, but any future reactor that does will require far less energy to run the magnetic coils and can be significantly more compact relative to the reactor vessels size.
Also the 5 second JET pull was the maximum length they could run their magnetic containment for before it overheats, because they aren't super conduction. That 5 second pulse was basically proof they can run a sustained fusion reaction for a arbitrary length of time.
I also have to disagree with your assessment of the fission process to create tritium. One of the reasons current nuclear reactors need all that scrutiny is that the fission of heavy elements is a run away reaction that we then moderate to keep it under control. Creating tritium isn't at all. Once the supply of external neutrons stops, so does the reaction. There is no risk of a run away reaction, there is no continues decay heat to deal with, and there is no risk of water/steam coming into contact with the material and creating a hydrogen explosion. So none of the things a nuclear power plant needs all those safeguards for applies to creating tritium.
if you can make tritium, it would be possible in theory to get other elements, depending what do you use as your panel... for example other elements for nuclear bombs.
It also produce radioactive materials that need to be carefully disposal..
Is orders of magnitude less risky, but the same regulations should be follow.
Besides.. Fission or Fusion, does not have any future, they can not compete vs Solar or Wind, no even if you have a comercial fusion reactor today. The LCOE would be still much higher.
@@angellestat2730 1. For nuclear bombs you need high proton atoms such as uranium or plutonium. The lithium FISION reaction can only produce smaller atoms. And the main function chamber can not deliver enough power to fuse even helium atoms (2p + 2p - > 4p ~beryllium) bomb related atoms start way beyond 50p.
2. The energy potential of nuclear fusion is 100x+ greater than solar or wind while not being effected by nature.
Edit : pure fusion produces nuclear waste in dimensions (regarding radioactivity) you would handle in chemistry class.
@@angellestat2730 That cost analysis is only true if you ignore the need for storage and grid upgrades to deal with the intermittent nature of solar and wind.
And while the reaction does produce some radio active elements, it can't make heavier elements. So for inspection were taking more the level of nuclear medical waste, not even nuclear power plant. And just inspections, not the whole huge containment chambers nuclear fission reactors need which is where the real costs are.
@@TheCountess666 All of these problems can be solved, but at what cost? We're overlooking the fact that cheaper technologies already exist and in the next 20 years will continue to mature. Renewable energy plus large scale storage (in several forms) is the future. Fusion will never be viable economically because it will not compete.
@@saumyacow4435 Well that depends on what you mean by "never" if by never you mean within the next couple of decades, then propably not, but if by "never" we mean even hundreds of years from now, then I do believe that nuclear fusion will be neccessary, as energy generation further from the sun is eventually not possible with solar panels. This of course is at present rather irrelevant, but we do constantly learn new things from doing projects which seem irrelevant, so I'd hold off on cutting funding for nuclear fusion, instead I'd look much more into the subsidies for fossil fuels and shifting those to renewables instead.
Yup, let's build lots more fission plants, and thorium plants. Fossil fuel WILL eventually run out. There are exciting technologies using energy (fission plants, solar, et cetera) to pull CO2 from the air and turn it into energy dense liquid fuels such as methane, ethanol, or othe petrochemicals.
Perhaps it's even time to revive the old solar energy satellite sending power to Earth via microwave idea. 24/7, uninterrupted solar power.
An "I told you so" if fusion becomes possible then the problem becomes the amount of heat introduced to the Earth's thermodynamic balance. If lots of fusion reactors and lots of humans using electric equipment that generates waste heat THAT might cause more global warming than CO2.
Although ITER is somewhat expensive, the total money spent, still is lesser than one single summer Olympics.
Hi!
I haven't fully watched the video yet. Just wanted to let you know: If you are interested in first hand experience and information about Fusion, you should seek out Mr. Zohm from the Max Plank Institute for plasma physics. He sometimes even makes videos about the topic, although in German. He might be able to answer questions, if you have any.
Edit: ITER is so slowly built and expensive, because it's an international project. They don't hire a company to do all coils, i. e. Every county contributes one coil. Such that every country in the end has the know how for Bildung such a coil. It would be cheaper and faster, to have one part Bild every coil and so forth, but that's not the point of the project.
If you haven't watched his video, how can you comment? That doesn't make sense.
@@witherbossbros1157 because calling a field whose results over the last 55 years have advanced faster than moore's law "mass delusion" is shameful. Doing so on the basis of the ITER project whose design started 34 years ago and doesn't leverage any of the new mass-produced off the shelf superconductors that are far cheaper and vastly more powerful is simply a strawman argument. And introducing the segment with a joke that used to be 50 years, was updated to 30 years, and now uncritically claiming 20 years as some kind of wisdom is ludicrous.
On top of your excellent points - I have never heard anybody address the following
Even if they could sustain the fusion and extract sufficient energy what are the LCOE gonna be?
The plant it self is gonna be massively expensive and complicated. And while they say the fuel is basically free and abundant it still needs to be refined as Deuterium is 0.1 PPM of hydrogen - While that is likely easy to do, it is not free.
No, fusion is an exciting scientific field of study, but it will never be a major electricity generator outside of a few experiments and state prestige projects
Shhhhhh. Don't say "LCOE" around here! It's like Kryptonite to fusion people.
I pondered the question some time ago , what would the power output of 100 Kg of core of the Sun be if it could somehow be set up and running at the bottom of my garden ? I was rather shocked at the result , less than 100 watts ! Our Sun is an exceedingly lazy fusion reactor , delivering Kg for Kg , less energy than the human body at rest , or about the same as the pipe I was smoking at the time 🙂
Fascinating! I would have expected much greater power output. Perhaps this is because the core of the sun is the heavy elements, which produce less energy than the light ones when fused? If I remember correctly.
@@waylonk2453 No, the majority of the Sun's fusion is of hydrogen. More precisely, since it is hydrogen plasma, protons fusing in an imaginatively named process called the 'proton-proton chain'.
Basically the extreme pressure and temperature at the core of the Sun forces two protons together. Due to the like charge, the protons don't stay together and go off on separate ways. But every once in a while ("once in a while" is on average 9 billion years) one of the protons decays into a neutron instead, leaving a stable deuterium nuclei. Deuterium will rapidly (average of one second) fuse with another proton to create a helium-3 nuclei. There are a couple of different routes things can go from there, the most common being that helium-3 wandering around for 400 years before fusing with another helium-3 to create helium-4 and two free protons. All this to create ~4.19 picojoules of energy (or 1.16 femtowatt-hours if you prefer).
If this all sounds ridiculously slow and inefficient, you're thinking correctly. It is only because the Sun is so beyond our imagination massive that enough of these reactions can be occurring at once that it can produce the staggering amount of energy that it does. So what if a proton takes an average of 9 billion years (~284 petaseconds) to decay and fuse to another proton, there are about 1000 billion billion billion billion billion billion protons in the Sun. With that many protons a one in 9 billion year event happens 3500 billion billion billion billion times every second.
@@waylonk2453 Our sun still fuses only hydrogen and is not yet in the phase of helium burning or heavier elements. At least according our understanding of stellar evolution. The suns core has a really low power density, I like to compare it with a compost heap. But what the core lacks in power density it makes up in volume.
It's a good thing to, we like our star to keep us warm for billions of years. Slow and steady! But yeah, it did strike me as unintuitive when I learned this fact. Not surprising, though.
@@JonMartinYXD Wow, I learned some new stuff today! Since the fusion process produces energy at a remarkably slow rate, it seems like the scale of any human-created fusion here on earth would have to be pretty sizeable as well. Perhaps that's one of the issues with our current proof of concept fusion technology. Specifically, that the reactions aren't large enough to get a good "return on investment" for the amount of energy it takes to set up the reaction. What do you think of this? Thank you for writing.
Finally, someone who speak my language. I know for a long time now that fusion is a dream not a reality. In the end it will never be economically viable and the more money we spent on a dream, the further we drift away from the climate conservation goal.
Nuclear energy is the cleanest you can get, there are definitely ways to improve the current system.
The rush to electrify everything it is creating tones of waste.
Like you I also hope it succeeds. But there are huge uncertainties - how often will the superconducting magnets need to be replaced (due to fast neutron damage), how easy will it be to place replacements precisely, how will the tritium risk be managed (it is very radiotoxic), etc.
the superconducting magnets don't need to replaced, they don't see neutrons. 1m material protects them. We need to replace the blanket materials instead.
We ALREADY have fusion power. The catch is that the machine is the size of the solar system instead of contained in one facility. Solar power is already a better investment than the fossil fuels for energy production but not for storage. There's a bunch of ways we can deal with this. For one we can build intercontinental super conductors to capture the sun on the other side of the planet. Such a system would largely benefit Africa which would ironically be poetic in the history of humanities resource exploitation. We can also adjust the demand side to not need storage such as catenary powered semis or heavily insulated homes so they retain their set temperature for days on end. We can do a whole lot before we even need utility scale storage. While we might in the coming decades have a more viable system for storage I can still confidently say it'll be more expensive than eliminating the need for storage in most cases. Insulating homes for example eliminates much of the wasted heating and cooling to begin with which is currently half of residential power use.
Car batteries connoting the grid with 2-way transfer of power seems a viable storage option w ‘green’ energy sources
@@tonykelpie The grid doesn't need backfed power. It needs a consistent baseload which can't be done relying on people to plug in their cars at specific times. However because car batteries have way more charge than is needed on a given day they can be used to spread out load. Instead of bringing the peaks down you bring everything else up making the baseload flatter. Given how big transportation is in overall energy use this could easily work and it avoids the need for storage thats used for load shifting.
@@Furiends thanks
I think the idea (which is already being piloted) is cars and other electric vehicles are left connected whenever not being driven.
Hi Dave. Thanks for pointing out some of the major issues with Fusion, good to know that we should not rely upon it to fix our immediate problems!
Cheers Hugh.
This is the video that will be used as a rebuttal when anyone says “I feel this channel is overly optimistic”
Aye, Thank You for weeding this information into digestible details and clearing away the hype. You really do excellent work in making the 'corners of the science involved' come out of the darkness and giving a realistic understanding of lots of "promising projects" for changing the future.
whatever happened to "general fusion"? linus tech tips did a video about it 4 years ago, and it sounded promising, claiming to use something similar to steam pistons but with magnets to compress the plasma to increase the tempuratures, similar to a combustion engine.
General Fusion is building a demonstration reactor (Qplasma
Hi Dave, I'm in total agreement over the money side of fairytale fusion. If we think of the years spent on this instead of cheaper alternative energy generation, then it really appears to be vanity on the part of the researchers.
To all the viewers of Dave's channel, let's share it on social media and get it up to 500K, c'mon you know he makes sense 🙏
Bless you William. Thanks for your support :-)
fossil fuel industry subsidies aren't a waste not to mention assualt budget over 1 billion USD
@@justnothing8692although it's a bit off topic, would you care to expand your comment with some examples, not to mention what sources you reference.
I think that this amount of money could be invested in geothermal energy. Instead create energy from atoms fusion, we could harness this powerful energy under our feet.
Only 0,1% of the energy that comes from the core of the planet could supply all electrical energy needs of all people for 2 million years.
Geothermal is like hydro. Very geologically limited, but great to use when it works
I read recently that a lot of geothermal plants are losing steam, so to speak, that after a certain time of just pushing more water through the underground that they start to cool off.
Geothermal would indeed be a good investment, but, I thing the thing we need right now, is cheap, efficient electrical energy storage. A lot of it!!
@@vincentrobinette1507 we would need more than you think we need to go fully renewable. Likely add a zero or two to whatever you think we need.
'Fusion energy is still 20 years away'
Obadiah Stane 'Tony Stark Was Able To Build This In A Cave! With A Box Of Scraps'
I was a researcher at JET 30 years ago and see the promise of fusion but I tend to agree. We wont see it pumping sustainable cheap energy into the grids for many decades to come. We do have access to renewables and have not, in myopinion, exploited geothermal nearly enough. All the energy we could ever need is right under our feet and its a matter of how deep the earths crust is where we live and what investments we make to drill to get it…. Or in the case of the UK, build subsea power cables to Iceland and work with them to build georhermal stations to power the UK.
I liked to hear the question: is our money best spent on this technology. In my opinion on nuclear fusion, absolutely yes. I agree that this nuclear fusion is not going to be the technology that solves global warming. But assuming we get through our current crisis, we don't know what challenges we're going to face on the other side. If we don't invest in long-term R&D, we might fail to solve our next crisis.
The question asked on where our money should be spent is still an excellent one. If we applied that to all the energy related places that we're investing in R&D, subsidies, etc... Well, I'm sure you know where I am going with this if you follow Just Have a Think or other channels that in some form cover energy, climate, or politics.
It's worse than even you describe! For a technology to succeed, it really has to allow us to do something new. There are already a half dozen methods of generating electricity cleanly at scale (PV solar, HAWT wind, concentrating solar with storage, geothermal, enhanced gas turbines, biomass) and every one of them is improving every year. They're already cheaper and cleaner than fission and coal, so they're dead. By the time fusion or some new fission tech comes along, all of the above will be far better than today. They're really unlikely to catch up.
Great point.
Biomass isn't clean at all, it's a dead end scam to keep the logging industry in business despite the damage they're doing being known. It takes many years if not decades to grow trees of a decent size yet biomass generators need to burn woodchips at a constant rate. The result is massive swathes of old growth forests being cut down with tree farm monocultures planted in their place and the declaration that the saplings are just as good. One disease or infestation outbreak and the entire charade is laid bare.
Good point. None of those choices could be used for space ships though.
You forgot the best one
@@nosuchthing8 Which is why fusion might go on to be useful in space (but not on Earth).
Really enjoy your content, but I think this is a very narrow analysis of the Fusion problem. Raising Q total is trivial in comparison to raising Q plasma. Nearly every fusion plant running today, or planned within the next few decades are NOT intended to be power plants. Their objectives are to discover and test plasma efficiency improvements (Q plasma).
In order to do this, they need as many variables to play with as possible, allowing the flexibility to make these breakthroughs that would not be possible in a commercial power plant. Yes, you can build these reactors to run MUCH more efficiently. But that will not be done until we exit the "research phase" and move to commercial production.
As an example, MIT's SPARC reactor is projected to reach a Q plasma of 10, and a Q total of 1. This is still not producing power, and will still use inefficient equiptment designed for experimentation, not power generation. The goal is to prove the concept for their second ARC reactor that WILL be designed to produce power, and will reach a Q total of 4 or above.
Cop out, the current generation of experimental test beds for nuclear fusion are nowhere near being prototypes of a viable fusion reaction vessel, not even close and that hasn't changed for over 50 years.
I agree with the post above the advantages of controlled nuclear fusion even if it were commercially and physically practical, (which I question,) would still be massively outweighed by the advantages of fission, a mature, proven and well understood technology.
I still remember listening to more or less all the same kind of stuff 50 years ago then aged about 16 now and at 65 I've gradually become more and more skeptical about it all.
The chances are that in 50 years from now you may well have reached the same conclusion.
Of course I may be quite wrong ?
@@Eris123451
With Tokamaks, there's essentially two ways to improve the power output. Increase size, or increase magnetic field strength.
When ITER was designed back in 1990, we simply did not have the materials science to generate a high strength magnetic field, so the only option was to build bigger.
We have an entirely new class of superconducting magnets that only recently became viable on an industrial level.
To put how revolutionary this change is to fusion into perspective, ITER (still using old helium cooled superconductors) will reach 13 Tesla at max field strength. These new high temperature (nitrogen cooled) superconductors have been shown to reach 45 Tesla.
The size and complexity of a design using high strength magnetic fields could realistically restart existing coal and gas power stations. Plans are in place for these first power generating reactors by 2030, beating ITER by 5 years.
If you are interested, I'd look into Commonwealth Fusion Systems (spun out of MIT)
news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusion-energy-0908
Or Tokamak energy (startup using a similar concept)
www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/technology/our-approach/
Fusion is an Illusion a lot of the energy put in we don't even count! LOL
As I was watching the beginning of your video on the Q factor, I kept saying to myself, "Sabine already covered this," and I was pretty riled. Then you gave her full credit. I was so relieved, because I think she is tops. Thank you. Good work. 👍