Not "always 30 years in the future" anymore?

[TheVat]

More affordable magnets and tech advances have the fusion community hoping for (economically viable) net positive output by the 2030s.  Here's an overview of what's going on in fusion research, from the Washington Post (non paywall version is the second link):

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/26/nuclear-fusion-technology-climate-change/

https://archive.ph/3L8wC

[mistermack]

The new "high temperature superconductor magnets" are looking more and more like a real game changer in Tokamaks. (high temperature is a bit of a misnomer, they run at very low temperatures, but a lot less cold than previously) 

The ITER project is being assembled at the moment. Their magnets were designed years ago, I haven't been able to establish if it will be able to make use of the new superconductors, probably not, to start with. But you can bet that they will be working on incorporating them as early as possible.

It seems to be likely that the new technology will enable the size of later designs to be smaller without losing efficiency, whereas the philosophy with ITER was 'bigger is better' which it was with the old magnets. I believe that the new magnets enable much stronger field strengths, making a big difference to stability of plasmas. 

[mistermack]

In a way, it's looking like fusion energy WILL save the planet from a climate disaster. 

Because while cheap fusion energy is always thirty years in the future, climate disaster is always eighty years in the future. 

[OldChemE]

I know absolutely nothing on this topic, but an article recently caught my eye that puts this in doubt:  https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run-fuel-even-gets-started

Last year, the Canadian tritium fueled an experiment at JET showing fusion research is approaching an important threshold: producing more energy than goes into the reactions. By getting to one-third of this breakeven point, JET offered reassurance that ITER, a similar reactor twice the size of JET under construction in France, will bust past breakeven when it begins deuterium and tritium (D-T) burns sometime next decade. “What we found matches predictions,” says Fernanda Rimini, JET’s plasma operations expert.

But that achievement could be a Pyrrhic victory, fusion scientists are realizing. ITER is expected to consume most of the world’s tritium, leaving little for reactors that come after.

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

[TheVat]

1 hour ago, OldChemE said:

I know absolutely nothing on this topic, but an article recently caught my eye that puts this in doubt:  https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run-fuel-even-gets-started

 

Nice to talk with someone who shares my own level of knowledge.  I had heard a bit about the problems with schemes to glean tritium from a lithium blanket, but your linked article goes much farther in explaining how paltry the yield might be.

Would be quite anticlimactic to discover there is no practical large-scale fusion (except for the incredibly productive reactor located 93 million miles from here, which is still billions of years away from decommissioning).  If we end up needing the higher temp containments to do other types of fusion, that could be, again, decades away if ever.

 

[exchemist]

9 hours ago, mistermack said:

In a way, it's looking like fusion energy WILL save the planet from a climate disaster. 

Because while cheap fusion energy is always thirty years in the future, climate disaster is always eighty years in the future. 

Do you have a source for the latter statement? I can’t recall coming across such a comforting assessment of the effect of climate change. 

[TheVat]

1 minute ago, exchemist said:

Do you have a source for the latter statement? I can’t recall coming across such a comforting assessment of the effect of climate change. 

I was tempted to reply to Mack, but then wondered if he was doing a little leg pulling.  Surely climate disaster is, by numerous indications,  already underway.  We're at mitigation, not prevention.  

[Ken Fabian]

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

I was tempted to reply to Mack, but then wondered if he was doing a little leg pulling.  Surely climate disaster is, by numerous indications,  already underway.  We're at mitigation, not prevention.  

"Mitigation" usually means prevention, or at least actions taken to reduce and minimise the problem, like emissions reductions - do you mean we're starting to do (by necessity) adaptation?

I don't think urgent short term responses to climate enhanced weather disasters are above the threshold where longer range building of clean energy or other mitigation gets set aside (yet) but that has to be a real concern as global warming impacts become more common and more severe - that we will be too occupied cleaning up and repairing after the last disaster to apply ourselves to fixing the fundamental problem. We are still struggling to get that clean energy growth to levels where it not only covers all new growth in demand but starts eating into existing fossil fuel use but on the other hand clean energy growth remains very strong and crossed a threshold - cost - to where wind and solar the most built new electricity types. I think we will see it continue to grow strongly, with room for some cautious optimism.

That the current global fossil fuel energy crisis is being reframed as a green energy crisis by climate science deniers and FF industry advocates and sympathetic big media - that the solutions to this and future energy crises should be greater use of fossil fuels - is dismaying but hardly new or surprising; gas use was promoted heavily as reliable, low cost and even as low emissions. The gas industry certainly appear unwilling to reduce their current war and misery driven hyper profits down to mere very good profits to prevent economies crashing and burning, let alone to keep those assurances of low cost. Support and investment in genuine clean energy solutions at the scales needed were set back by turning to gas - why spend all that money on pumped hydro when gas is so much easier and cheaper? But I think lots of people - experiencing record climate extremes - are not believing the denier line that it has been green energy policies driven by alarmists and extremists are the problem. I don't think people are as willing to turn to them for genuine solutions.

-----------

I think it is good to follow through with fusion and see how far it can be advanced but it isn't something we can rely on for clean energy solutions within the time scales we have. Given how extremely difficult it is to do at all doing it reliably at low cost looks a big leap; it may never become a serious energy source but may find applications all the same. Success with perovskite or other potentially very low cost solar would probably have a greater global impact in shorter time. And better batteries - which I think we can expect to see, given the levels of R&D currently in play. Putting some efforts into things that have hypothetical potential but cannot be counted on besides fusion look worthwhile too; optical rectenna/nantenna tech is one I think worth pushing harder on, for all that the yields achieved to date are just barely above proving they can work. A LOT less funding for that than fusion but I am not quite sure why fusion captures imagination but something that could generate energy from waste heat and downwelling InfraRed from the sky, day or night, does not.

 

Edited September 3, 2022 by Ken Fabian

[OldChemE]

1 hour ago, Ken Fabian said:

I think it is good to follow through with fusion and see how far it can be advanced but it isn't something we can rely on for clean energy solutions within the time scales we have. Given how extremely difficult it is to do at all doing it reliably at low cost looks a big leap; it may never become a serious energy source but may find applications all the same. Success with perovskite or other potentially very low cost solar would probably have a greater global impact in shorter time. And better batteries - which I think we can expect to see, given the levels of R&D currently in play. Putting some efforts into things that have hypothetical potential but cannot be counted on besides fusion look worthwhile too; optical rectenna/nantenna tech is one I think worth pushing harder on, for all that the yields achieved to date are just barely above proving they can work. A LOT less funding for that than fusion but I am not quite sure why fusion captures imagination but something that could generate energy from waste heat and downwelling InfraRed from the sky, day or night, does not.

 

This is the key point.  Not all pursuit of technology is beneficial in the long run, but technology NOT pursued never produces benefits.  So-- pursuit of success in fusion still seems like the right thing to do.

[Ken Fabian]

1 hour ago, OldChemE said:

This is the key point.  Not all pursuit of technology is beneficial in the long run, but technology NOT pursued never produces benefits.  So-- pursuit of success in fusion still seems like the right thing to do.

I think the totality of R&D is important - that achieving something very hard like fusion will come from advances coming out of a wide variety of disparate research programs. Did these better superconductors come out of ITER or any kind of dedicated fusion research or is it the beneficiary of research for different reasons by others?

[mistermack]

Personally, I think that fusion energy HAS to be pursued, even if it takes a hundred years to achieve economical tech. There's a limit to solar and wind, and gaps in the continuity of supply that we have to plug with fossil fuel. But whether CO2 does eventually cause climate disaster or not, fossil fuels will get harder and harder to find, and more and more expensive. 

We do owe children who are yet to be born something, and if we have grossly overpopulated the planet, we could at least provide them with plentiful cheap power to alleviate some of the damage. 

[Ken Fabian]

On 9/4/2022 at 11:38 PM, mistermack said:

Personally, I think that fusion energy HAS to be pursued, even if it takes a hundred years to achieve economical tech. There's a limit to solar and wind, and gaps in the continuity of supply that we have to plug with fossil fuel. But whether CO2 does eventually cause climate disaster or not, fossil fuels will get harder and harder to find, and more and more expensive. 

We do owe children who are yet to be born something, and if we have grossly overpopulated the planet, we could at least provide them with plentiful cheap power to alleviate some of the damage. 

We shouldn't assume continuity of energy supply cannot be plugged by other means than fossil fuels or fusion - especially when speaking in terms of even if takes a hundred years to achieve. We should be looking wider than that.

Still a lot of potential gains in geothermal, tidal, pumped hydro and other gravity storage. Chemical batteries and capacitors are not truly out of the running for large scale, long storage. Cost competitive SMR's are still possible and nuclear will have it's place even if it remains expensive. There is perovskite solar that may make adding solar to any light exposed surface trivially inexpensive. There are nantennas that could make the IR from the ground below and the night sky above into electricity.

Truly we have an abundance of potential clean energy options and science and technology is better placed than ever before to make them work. They are all worth pursuing but some that look a lot more achievable get a lot less funding than fusion. Not to take funding away from fusion but give more... everywhere. R&D is still showing itself to be a stunningly good investment.

On 9/4/2022 at 11:38 PM, mistermack said:

But whether CO2 does eventually cause climate disaster or not, fossil fuels will get harder and harder to find, and more and more expensive. 

Surely it isn't in doubt that we can expect climate disasters from high CO2, nor that there is a sufficient abundance of fossil fuels to still take global warming into worst case territory. It is fortunate that clean energy innovation, which has surprised us more than once, has a lot of potential for major advances, is giving hope that it may surprise us again. Even as things stand now, with what is in the pipeline, there is hope that it isn't inevitable, that the worst cases are avoidable. Given Carbon Capture and Storage is intrinsically loss making and unscalable I think we have to accept we have to leave most of those fossil fuels unburned.

Edited September 8, 2022 by Ken Fabian