The Washington Post says that fusion power is finally getting close to reality:
Scientists are mere years from getting more energy out of fusion reactions than the energy required to create them, they said. Venture capitalists are pumping billions into companies, racing to get a fusion power plant up and running by the early 2030s. The Biden administration, through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Department of Energy, is creating tax credits and grant programs to help companies figure out how to deploy this kind of energy.
Yet challenges remain, according to nuclear scientists. The U.S. energy grid would need a significant redesign for fusion power plants to become common. The price of providing fusion power is still too high to be feasible.
The grid may be a problem, but I'm also interested in the idea of standalone fusion plants that are purpose-built for specific projects. Take water, for example. California is running out, but we have the Pacific Ocean right next door and it's brimming with water. The problem is that desalination plants require huge amounts of power to run and have never been worth the cost.
So what are the possibilities of building a fusion plant designed from the start to run a desalination plant and not connect to the grid at all? Water for everyone!
I dunno. Maybe it's still too expensive. But that's just a general problem. Even if the boffins get fusion to work, it still has to be cost effective or else no one is going to use it. And if it does become cost effective, why not use the technology to build some self-contained desalination plants for California?
Assuming competitive cost, no reason I can think of, beyond safety in siting and operation given the seismic situation there.
In Newfoundland there's a big wind-powered project afoot to generate green hydrogen by electrolysis; the German chancellor and other bigwigs were just there to get in on it and sign up as customers. Green hydrogen seems like another ideal use for this kind of ungridded power.
"Assuming competitive cost"
Ah, but that's the issue, isn't it? There are multiple assumptions at play here: (1) that California lacks water, (2) that fusion will be a cheap way of providing the power to desalinate the ocean to address that lack, and (3) that fusion is an actual technology that works or will soon work.
There's no reason to think that fusion will be particularly cheap (why would something involving over-the-horizon technology, exotic materials, and massive, massive upfront capital costs be cheap?). Conventional electricity is, generally speaking, in the $30-45 per MWh range. At what price point does desal make sense? $25 per MWh? $10 per MWh? Which would be a valid question if somebody could actually contract for fusion electricity, which they can't because the tech doesn't actually exist.
But this is a silly inquiry, since California doesn't actually have a water shortage. What it has is an archaic system that delivers vast amounts of zero-cost BuRec water to low-value agricultural uses which serves mostly to render agriculture in parts of the country where there IS plentiful uneconomic, instead of sending that water to where it is needed.
Which isn't to say that it would be better to divert that water to keep suburbs and golf courses green, but then again, colossal energy expenditures to desal water and then pump it uphill to water lawns is also stupid.
>What it has is an archaic system that delivers vast amounts of zero-cost BuRec water to low-value agricultural uses which serves mostly to render agriculture in parts of the country where there IS plentiful uneconomic, instead of sending that water to where it is needed.
Yup -- same here in Arizona.
The reason that we don't have fusion power yet is that a fusion reaction is hard to start and hard to keep going. In other words, it's inherently safe; disrupt anything and the plasma quenches, stopping the reaction immediately. This is inherent in the nature of fusion, regardless of which of many approaches being looked at works.
Fusion looks promising, but is the devil we don't know. Fusion plants will produce nuclear waste, not from the fusion products but because of the shielding walls. These will become radioactive due to the high neutron flux, and will probably need to regularly be replaced due to radiation damage.
Put a fusion plant in Mar-a-Lago. Two problems solved at once.
We already have a cheap, safe and mostly reliable source of virtually unlimited fusion power. It is called the sun. And we are using fusion power in the form of solar, wind and hydroelectric power. All we need to do is make those forms of power more efficient and more readily available through extended power grids.
Amen! The vested interests that want to place fusion power plants on the surface of the earth are a satanic death cult.
Fusion power was proclaimed to be just 10 to 20 years away in the 1950s. Then fusion power was proclaimed to be just 10 to 20 years away in the 1960s. Then fusion power was proclaimed to be just 10 to 20 years away in the 1970s. And on and on. I'm not holding my breath for this forecast coming true.
No kidding…
We have a great fusion reactor already. It’s the big ball of plasma we orbit around
Whole idea of fusion seems to be “it makes so much energy” but for the same reason I don’t use a pit of lava to boil water for cooking I just wonder at the practicality. Feels like a “flying car” type of technology
"a big ball of plasma that we orbit around"
And, even at 93 million miles away, plus an atmospheric blanket and planetary magnetic field, it's still so dangerous that we need to wear protection from its deadly emissions.
Just sayin' ...
https://youtu.be/KDOkGx1gAZQ
I do prefer the version from their live LP that could qualify as OI! punk/proto-hardcore.
5 years away is the measure now.
Will we have fusion before FSD for TESLA/other automobiles?
Hence the old saying: "Fusion is the energy source of the future, and always will be".
Fusion wants to be what Dippin Dots are.
Hence the old saying: "Fusion is the energy source of the future, and always will be".
Not soon. While fusion researchers often talk about 'breaking even' that's only about generating enough energy to maintain the temperature of plasma. You need to account for the power to run the system - superconducting magnets, maintaining vacuum, initial heating of the plasma. You also have to allow for the losses converting the heat to electricity which is around 33% at best and fusion will generate radioactive waste as the neutrons generated transmute the metal in the vessel walls to a radioactive isotope. If we're lucky, we'll have nuclear fusion around the same time the California High-Speed system is complete.
This is why I think Kevin is thinking small! As long as we're pondering whether or not we should use fusion to run desal plants, we might as well ask ourselves if antimatter, warp cores, conjoiner drives, etc. might not be better or at least equally promising ways to desalinate water.
And there's a fuel (tritium) shortage.....tritium, which mainly comes from heavy water nuclear (fission) reactors, which are being retired in the West....
https://www.wired.com/story/nuclear-fusion-is-already-facing-a-fuel-crisis/
There's plenty of tritium on the Moon. Not sure if that can be obtained in any cist-effective manner, but you never know.
Groan. Not tritium, helium-3. And the helium-3 scenario doesn't work. Get your science misinformation right.
"There's plenty of tritium on the Moon. Not sure if that can be obtained in any cost-effective manner . . ."
Given that it costs somewhere on the order of $1000 per gram to put something in orbit, and the moon is ~1000x farther away than the height we put stuff in orbit, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that shipping tritium from the moon to the Earth is not cost-effective.
Getting the infrastructure to the Moon is heavy “uphill” lifting. Getting something from the Moon is much closer to “downhill.”
Groan. No, it does not cost $1,000/gm; far from it. Currently the costs are on the order of $2 K/kg and continue to be projectect to drop.
Tritium decays over time; if you have ten pounds of tritium today, in a hundred years there will be half an ounce left. The Moon is four billion years old. As ScentOfViolets points out, you're probably thinking of helium-3.
Tritium is primarily bred from lithium. Lithium is in great demand for batteries, which is good because production is ramping up. Compared to the amount being used for batteries, the amount needed for fusion fuel on any conceivable scale of use of fusion power is inconsequential, and cost is equally irrelevant. In other words, fusion reactor operators will always be able to outbid battery manufacturers for the small amount of lithium the reactors will need.
As a long standing fusion enthusiast, I've been dismayed and disgusted by this country's (and the world's) lack of interest and support for that technology. The budgets for R&D were laughable. One year (1980s) there was only $500 million, and most of it was for decommissioning a TOKAMAK facility. Half a billion dollars? That is miniscule compared to so many other programs we were paying for.
Now there *were* great problems 50+ years ago, largely due to control and containment issues. But we have been in a different situation since, oh, about the year 2000 because of he enormous improvement in computing power. It has allowed inherently unstable aircraft to fly, doctors to sequence DNA efficiently, model proteins, and image the body (and the earth).
Decades ago nobody thought a rocket booster would be able to return to earth standing up vertically. But now that is done regularly because of the increased speed and capacity of control. I fully expect that to be the same for fusion, either inertial-laser or TOKAMAK.
Agreed. We need significantly more investment in fusion. We need a lot more people working on all aspects of the process, to get a lot of accidental breakthroughs and faster incremental development.
It's still very much a material science issue.
And the positive net energy output does not mean it's useful energy coming out, i.e. readily and efficiently converted into electricity.
It's a dumb idea for the same reason that every other idea for solving California's water problem with desalinization is a dumb idea; the vast majority of the water is used for agriculture and the price that agribiz is willing to pay for water is somewhere around $0. It would work great for cities, but there really isn't a problem getting enough water for people. Figure out how to desalinate for a few dollars per thousand gallons and you might have something. All that aside, I really hope that controlled nuclear fusion is now going to happen sooner than the constant "in thirty years" but I will believe it when I see it.
Just what is the price per acre foot of water for agriculture in California these days?
https://aquaoso.com/blog/california-agricultural-water-prices/
As with any business, they'll pay the minimum feasible for resources. But when push comes to shove and there is no more cheap water, they'll pay more as long as they can still profit. And maybe government subsidies come into play, because when drought becomes more widespread and aquifers empty, we're going to need to keep producing food.
Yes, but what we've done by damming the rivers in the West and diverting the water to desert agriculture is shut down ag in the wet parts of the country.
We definitely need to grow food. Unclear whether or not we have to grow it in the desert.
I agree. Move the agricultural to places with better long term access to water by rising the price and restricting groundwater use.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/as-colorado-river-dries-the-us-teeters-on-the-brink-of-larger-water-crisis
In this year's IPCC report, the world is projected to hit the 1.5ºC mark above preindustrial average, by 2030. If you check out NOAA's data, the US has already surpassed 1.5ºC above preindustrial average.
Even taking into account a widespread end of sales of new ICE vehicles by 2030, we'll still be overshooting the Paris Climate Accord target by several decades. Paris had us targeting 2050. I told you that this was going to end up wrong, that the timetable would be shortened. Now that it's 2030, no one's explained to the world just how screwed up humanity's future is.
There just isn't enough time and scale to build solar, wind, nuclear, etc. I will absolutely concede that nuclear plants scheduled for decommissioning will need to be extended. I'm all for new micro reactors. But, the process of certifying these things do not happen overnight, and their construction can take a decade.
It is impossible to solve for climate change without fusion. To think otherwise is to badly misjudge how deep of a carbon hole we're in.
The sad thing is, we haven't done all the easy stuff yet.
Heat exchangers for heating (and air conditioning) and hot water. Unfortunately, many more places will be needing air conditioning....
Solar panels--now over fields of vegetables and parking lots.
Grid upgrades.
Pickens wind farm plan
etc....
As for the damage we've done--a lot will be fresh water supplies....
By 2050, this summer will seem great!
We can't wait 10 years for solar and wind, but we can wait 30 years for fusion. You must be a genius.
That's not what I said.
Wind, solar, and battery storage exist now. Fusion does not. By all means, we should invest in fusion. But if there "just isn't enough time . . . to build solar, wind, nuclear, etc.," that problem is far, far worse with fusion, since that's tech that doesn't actually exist yet.
Put another way: if utility committed to build a few gigawatts of solar and hundreds of megawatts of batteries in 2022, it will be in place by 2025. But if a utility committed to a few gigawatts of fusion power, there's no reason to think that it would be up and running for another decade or two at the earliest.
Sorry, battery storage for at-scale commercial utilities does _not_ exist. Rather than point out yet again or run the numbers -- also yet again -- I'll leave the calculation up to you. Please explicitly list the assumptions incorporated in your calculation, and remember, 'not very much' and 'reasonable amounts' are not numbers.
"Sorry, battery storage for at-scale commercial utilities does _not_ exist."
Au contraire! As per the Energy Information Administration,* "Battery storage capacity is expected to add 10 GW in the next two years, and over 60% of this capacity will be paired with solar facilities. In 2020, battery storage grew by 48% when the year-end capacity reached 1.5 GW. In 2021, battery storage capacity will likely grow by 300% when 4.5 GW is added to the grid."
There are a whole slew of multi-MW battery storage facilities in the US, and more on the way.
__________
*See https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/archive/december2021/
Uh, you do know that the GW is a unit of power, not energy, right? Now, for starters, why don't you tell us how many KwH of storage the nation would need to make an all-renewable grid feasible? Because as of now, there isn't enough lead in the world to provide for the estimated amounts.
"Uh, you do know that the GW is a unit of power, not energy"
Yes, I do know that. I also know that watts (typically mega- or giga-, but sometimes tera-) are often used as a measure of capacity for describing the scale of energy infrastructure. Which is what I was doing. It's pretty common, actually.
Were you the person who, a few years ago, ranted at me that energy storage was infeasible since you'd need enough lithium batteries to store like a week's worth of energy for entire country? If so, I think you are just as silly now as you were then.
If not, I apologize. Anyway, I reject your argument here, because (a) not all the batteries have to be lead-based--iron-based can work just fine, too, as but one example (b) not all storage has to be battery, (c) not all carbon-free energy needs storage (hydro, for example), and (d) whether or not one could have an all-battery-plus-solar grid or whatever you are strawmanning here has nothing to do with whether or not utility scale batteries exist (they do).
I am _exactly_ that person and it is you, not I, who are being silly, as evidenced by your determined resistance to providing the figures I asked for. You don't even have to agree with a commonly-used BOTEC esitmate for the amount of energy that needs to be stored; you just have to supply your own number, justify it, and proceed from there with your cost calculation.
Again, I'm saying we should build out as rapidly as we can using existing technologies, but we will not be saved by them.
Fusion will have to be developed, period. Anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves about the scale of the problem we're facing.
The world's 2050 target has literally baked in our overshoot by several decades.
Every technology that suffers in a hotter climate will fail us.
We need fusion.
If there isn't "time and scale" to build solar, wind, and fission, then there is not "time and scale" to build fusion, either.
Let's not kid ourselves that fusion is going to get us out of our current jam. Even if everything goes flawlessly from now on (which it won't), it will be decades before fusion can be built out to a scale that would make a dent.
Solar, wind, and fission materials, manufacturing and installation constraints of time and scale are not anomalous to the development time and scale constraints of fusion.
France's nuclear power stations are constrained by a lack of water. Power generation has been cut, as a result, and hotter water is being released.
China's massive string of hydropower dams have been mooted by disappearing rivers. Power generation has been slashed by half.
Wind turbine blades are being replaced every 10 years even though their lifespans are estimated to be 20+. And as was seen during Texas' heatwave, a high pressure dome lowers wind movement which slashes output.
Solar materials have physical (efficiency) limits, have lower yields as the temperature increases, and as Texas experienced during snow events, panels do not energize when covered. Then there are production limits based on commodity constraints of silica.
The hotter temperatures get, the greater these constraints will be clear and tighter.
AFAIK, the constraint on fusion relies primarily on the technical side of solving the multitude of problems required to reach scalable fusion and go net positive energy. That requires mostly money, of which the US has spent very little on. The more money spent on fusion, the more expertise is built and more eyes on the problems which means faster development and breakthroughs.
Most futurists see fusion as the ultimate solution. Are they wrong? I think not. Therefore, the problem we have is how soon can we make fusion a reality?
Most futurists see fusion as the ultimate solution. Are they wrong?
Why yes, yes they are. Yet another edition of simple answers to stupid quetions.
Commodity constraints of silica? The last time I heard, 28% of the Earth's crust is silica; a shortage is quite literally impossible.
Using up that silica has environmental consequences. People like beaches and sand dunes, especially when they're part of parks.
You don't need beaches and sand dunes. Mine tailings offer a conveniently fine ground source of lots of silica. If you don't insist on finely ground, basically any rock will do. Remember, 28% of the Earth's crust; that's A LOT of silica.
Environmentalists will still complain about the brine, and the siting and … whatever else they can think of.
make sea salt...after Li extraction...
There's a matter of scale. The world demand for sea salt is not that large.
Case in point: https://calmatters.org/environment/2022/05/california-desalination-plant-coastal-commission/
Or more prosaic: https://sanjosespotlight.com/santa-clara-county-silicon-valley-water-pacheco-dam-reservoir-faces-growing-opposition-lawsuit-sierra-club-amah-mutsun/
OMG, people will try to prevent bad things from happening. Oh Shit! We can't have that. Cut down all the forests! Redirect all water to agriculture! We don't need wildlife and biodiversity!
Why complicate matters by relying on fusion for power?
Does desalination really require a steady supply of power?
Intermittently desalinating seawater only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing would seem to be a great use for existing renewables...
It would be better to evacuate California! Move to Michigan. I guess desalination will be competitive only when they run out of fresh water. So go ahead and water the lawn and take long showers.
I remain unconvinced anyone will ever do what’s needed to stop / reverse the warming. Sea level rise which swamps big coastal cities is going to happen at some point, but it will be slow and people will be able to move out of the way.
Humanity will adapt. And I’m of an age that I won’t see it. The real threat is drought or other changes which affects food supplies (thanks to Russia for providing a preview). We should be prepared to cut off Africa and other undeveloped / overpopulated areas and preserve western civilization. I say that, of course, because I live in the USA. Others will have a different view. And of course, migration will eventually become unsustainable. It’s time to think about that. Sink the boats and build the walls or starve your own kids? That’s going to be the conflict of the future.
Population growth numbers don't support this. While I freely admit that it doesn't take long for a society to start pumping out kids again, the real problem looks like it will be declining populations.
Support what?
The current world population of almost 8 billion is expected to reach 8.6 billion in 2030, 9.8 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100, according to a new United Nations report being launched today.
Fair enough. I definitely won't pretend to be an expert. I literally read an article yesterday about declining population being a problem later this century. I suppose it's all down to who's making the prediction...
The fact eurocentrics have finally found how Marx's overconsumption model(which has been used by second wave Marxists like the Unabomber);++
I don't understand why the grid would need a redesign? I thought our grid system operates based on a hub and spoke meta-design founded in the centralized fossil fuel plants approach? My understanding is that this underlying structure is a critical impediment to widespread renewables adoption--Doesn't fusion mimic this approach?
They will still need water to turn into steam to turn the turbines that create the electricity. It can't be saltwater and the released water is going to be warmer. Where is the water going to come from?
The transmission grid really is a grid with a lot of cross connections and loops. It varies in density, generally with population, but one chunk covers the eastern US, one the western and the third Texas.
I did not pose the question clearly...wouldn't a fusion reactor drop into our existing grid much more easily than 10^6 solar panels?
My understanding is that renewables above a certain scale require significant redesign of our infrastructure. I do not understand why fusion reactors would require some redesign? Doesn't make sense.
More likely that the WP just got it 1/2 right, which would be par for the course.
"wouldn't a fusion reactor drop into our existing grid much more easily than 10^6 solar panels?"
Sure, sure, if you were going to build a fusion reactor in the existing footprint of, say, a big conventional thermal plant. Then yeah, the grid infrastructure is already all there.
But building a fusion reactor (or an antimatter reactor or a darkmatter engine or a casimir effect generator or any other large theoretical power plant that doesn't actually exist yet) in some new location would require building out the grid for it.
Note that the national electricity grid needs to be both considerably beefed up and massively updated if we as a polity are serious about switching over to relatively cleaner sources of energy for transportation.
Approximately twenty percent expansion for electrified ground transportation if I am remembering correctly.
Desal plants do require a LOAD of power so nuclear power would be the way to go. Do you go breeder reactor or standard nuke reactor? Waste of the nuclear version becomes a concern.
Then there's the salt extraction waste. Brine water pumped back into the oceans would kill off a lot of marine life. Given the sheer volume of our oceans is this a problem? I have said this before - dilution is the solution to pollution was a long time mantra among many people who thought nothing of pumping waste or dumping waste into our oceans
The Saudi's will be supplying drinking water to Riyadh that is desalinated. It is estimated that 50% of their drinking water is through desal plants. The Israelis also have extensive desal usage. Both posses things we don't seem to have - enough money and a NEED that causes a coming together of their voting populace.
Case in point is California. Funny that Newsome bans gas powered landscaping equipment next year and bans the sale of new ICE cars by 2035 - but ALLOWS for boats, RV's, ATVs all to be powered by gasoline. C'mon Gavin - if you are serious about your environment ban ICE boats and ATVs.
I'm all for desalinating sea water and using nuclear power for electrical generation. You don't have to use fusion. As an interim measure build a nuclear plant that uses current technology. Let fusion development happen. Fund the R&D. We need the water now.
But if you are going to be serious about banning internal combustion engines Gov Newsome then BE serious. Don't tell Californians that fun activities will continue un-abated because it will keep people happy.
"Both posses things we don't seem to have - enough money and a NEED that causes a coming together of their voting populace."
What "voting populace" do you think exists in Saudi Arabia?
The monied theocracy - which is why the GOP wants to rule the elections nationwide here.
They want their own version of what the Saudi's have.
(It was a poor choice of words on my part though)
We have spent over 2 centuries to get where we are at now. No longer is ANYTHING good for America. The only "good" is whether your political party argues for anything.
The big payoff in desalinization research has been in improved membrane technology. It's not done by boiling water and condensing steam. It's done with a membrane that filters out large ions but lets water molecules through. Pressure, and sometimes an electrical gradient, are required, but the energy requirements are well below distillation.
There's a huge amount of research in membrane technology these days, and, unlike fusion, it is relatively cheap research. You can do it on a lab bench for hundreds of thousands of dollars. We're living in a golden age of materials science with new fabrication techniques becoming common. You've heard the buzzwords: nano-materials, meta-materials, bio-mimetics and so on. As with batteries, we've just started exploring the solution space.
There's still the waste salt problem since these systems produce fresh water and more salty water. I suppose one could argue that off shore dilution would work if one factors in global warming raising sea levels. No one talks about melting ice packs diluting the sea, but that may be one climate change problem we have a way of dealing with. (I'm only half serious here.)
Materials science is the unsung hero of modern civilization. The general public doesn't give it the love it deserves, alas.
There is also the free option of water conservation. How about no watering lawns and golf courses to start!
OMG Heysus, bite your tongue! You want me to have to play off fairways that have rough irregular grass, and off-fairway areas with weeds and dry patches?
You want to turn our verdant paradises into Pinehurst #2? Geez, did you see the last US Open at Pinehurst? That's just MUCH too difficult.
Since only ~25% of the water used in California is for uses like this, you aren't going to put a very big dent in the problem with conservation like this.
Ah but then there's this:
From the L:A Times:
{snip}
California
"According to the outlet, the famous figures received formal notices about their limits from the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, which runs the water service for Calabasas, Hidden Hills, and other LA suburbs. These “notices of exceedance” were reportedly sent to over 2,000 customers in May and June.
Among the list of celebrities in question were sisters Kim and Kourtney Kardashian, who have reportedly exceeded their limits by a combined total of over 300,000 gallons this summer alone.
For some context, the average person uses about 3,000 gallons of water in a month, while generic household faults — such as leaking faucets or toilets — can result in tens of thousands more gallons wasted.
Two of Kim’s properties situated in the Hidden Hills purportedly went over their water limit by 230,000 gallons, while Kourtney’s 2-acre Calabasas home was 101,000 gallons over the permitted mark.
Also among the names outed by LA Times was actor and comedian Kevin Hart, whose 26-acre Calabasas property exceeded its water budget by 117,000 gallons in June.
Meanwhile, Sylvester Stallone and his now-estranged wife Jennifer Flavin’s 3-acre home in the Hidden Hills is said to have exceeded its water limit by 195,000 gallons in May, before going over by 230,000 the following month.
However, the most excessive water usage came from former basketball player Dwayne Wade and his wife, actor Gabrielle Union, who reportedly used a whopping 489,000 gallons of water in May.
{snip}
California the land of exceptions to the rule. The land of fun and celebrities.
God help us
Kim Kardashian was a lifelong liberal Democrat (until she was shamed for her alleged water overuse). Now she has joined her stepfather in the party that wants to detransition Caitlyn Jenner (& isn't too keen on Kim's tendency to miscegenate).
Lol, most Republicans are closeted homosexuality.
No lies detected.
What are they doing with all this water, breeding rare goldfish with pug-shaped skulls that require extra-new water all the time or they can't breathe?
Environmentalists hate, hate, hate desalination plants. I have one on my sailboat. It takes water in, and splits into to streams. One is fresh water, the other is much saltier than the intake, and goes back into the ocean.
On the scale of my little 13-gallon/hour unit, that doesn't cause any problems. On the scale of a municipal desalination plant, the salty return stream causes havoc for the local ecosystem.
From my point of view, the main problem with water in California is they way it is used in agriculture - and agriculture is also environmentally destructive. If it were up to me, I would reduce the agricultural allotment by something like 90%. We could bring in some Israeli consultants to teach farmers how to get by.
This article may be the single worst article written on fusion power....first, power from a fusion reactor would be indistinguishable from any other base-power plant. Fusion makes heat, which drive a generator, which produces electricity....change out the word Fusion with Coal and it's the same thing. So getting this wrong pretty much says the author is a not competent, and Kevin should know better than parrot this nonsense. The author also never digs into the very relevant controversy of fusion power and the is the break even point. Break even in the fusion reaction is not the same as break even in all the energy and equipment needed for a fusion facility....it's many many times more energy that that used to get the reaction to break even. Also, it's also many many many times more expensive than wind or solar, so why are we wasting our time on costly energy when we already have cheap ways to produce green power.
It creates far more power than solar/wind. Your such a loser.
The Bussard fusor produces electricity directly from fusion by generating high energy charged particles that "push" against an electric field to generate current at about 2.3 million volts. It's not a heat engine.
The other day I was reading someone complaining about tidal power stations and how terrible they were because someone needed to keep cleaning out the intake ducts and there was no obvious magic solution to keep them from clogging.
Really, so what?
Cleaning out intake ducts is the least problem we could possibly face.
That's a general problem with low density power sources: they tend to be manpower-intensive, relatively speaking. I remember being very surprised the first time I ran the numbers for a canonical solar pond and finding the main cost driver to be the worker salaries needed for maintenance and upkeep.
Why are so-called alternative energy types so bugs on fusion but treat fission as the Devil's poop, i.e., pure concentrated evil? Other than being techologically illiterate incompetents that is. I've already given mulitple cites on the problems of neutron activation and technical complexity when this topic has come up in the past. Make that multiple cites multiple times, and no, I won't accept the excuse that the same bad-faith actors advance every time, namely they 'forgot'.
Well, to be fair, fusion power doesn't actually exist yet, so people are free to express their hopes and dreams when comparing imaginary technology to technology that actually exists. I'd guess that explains a lot of it.
Yeah, the only time I see fusion in the media is as some sort of nondescript device that fits on a table top and doesn't produce any radiation to speak of.
It's not about Devil's poop.
Fission has a terrible cost record. It wasn't over-regulation. Regulation was only a tiny piece of it. It was crappy engineering, bad project management and a new technology. There was a good article on this over at Construction Physics recently. Builders would pour the foundation for a nuclear plant before they finished the reactor design, then have to dig it out and pour it again. They'd finalize a design, then with the plant half built realize that the next step was impossible without taking something apart. If that's how they worked, soaring costs are no surprise.
Fusion doesn't exist yet. We should keep funding the research for a variety of reasons, but the technology at the point where we can build energy policy around it.
Meanwhile, solar and wind power are here. Battery technology is here. They are all continuing to improve. This was despite an active attempt to suppress them since the 1970s. There was some funding under Nixon and Carter, but the fossil fuel industry and conservatives in general fought every proposal. Reagan made a point of removing the solar hot water system from the White House. The fossil fuel giants could have become renewable energy giants, but it was cheaper and easier to fight against alternative power sources.
The problems with alternative power sources have been less technological or logistical than political, unlike nuclear power which failed to produce inexpensive electricity despite tens of billions in official backing in the 1950s and 1960s. If the communist Chinese government hadn't pushed for solar, we wouldn't have seen the currently low prices. If the US had funded solar through the 1980s, we would have owned the industry and had lots of cheap solar power by now.
If solar and wind could produce giant bombs that could kill millions and poison the landscape for centuries they would be phenomenally popular with conservatives.
Show me these magic batteries that makes storage for intermittent renewables a solved problem. Further, this shows a -- shall we say -- disturbing lack of scholarship:
I live in Illinois and nuclear is cheap cheap cheap. The only thing cheaper, and artifically at that, is the bastard offspring of fracking.
If you google "grid-scale battery storage" you will find the information you seek.
So you pay a cost on replacing that first foundation and the mid-way redesign. And amortize it across the next twenty plants.
So far, the nuclear power industry has been reluctant to build enough reactors of a single design to realize economies of scale.
There's water available in Northern CA, it's public sentiment (channeled through a particularly toxic form of politics) that has prevented to being shipped south for essentially a hundred years.
Point is, it's politics that prevented this happening 50 years ago, and its politics that prevent it happening today. That same politics will insist that fusion plants are unacceptable – they hurt the fish, they generate "toxic rays", they're going to placed in minority neighborhoods, the same litany that we've been hearing for two generations.
There's a certain type of American (not a majority, but a majority among the chattering, credentialed classes) that considers it the height of sophistication and the epitome of performative signaling to stop any sort of material progress in America. This may have begun as some sort of Leninist "heighten the contradictions/hasten the revolution" but by now it has metastasized into an entire self-licking ice-cream cone of religious zealotry.
Don't forget the many organizations that pay six-figure salaries for credentialed 'experts' to scare the crap out of people and convince them that the cure is worse than the disease. Gotta keep the donor checks rolling in.....
Please point on the map where these huge reserves of water are in Northern CA.
You're right, I was a little too fast. It looks like you need to go to the Columbia and Snake River. Which are still eminently doable as technical projects (and have been proposed multiple times since at least the early 60s).
That's what I get for trusting my memory rather than checking it first!
Why stop there? Back in the days of the big thinkers there was going to be pipeline from Alaska/Yukon all the way to California. Special bonus would be all of the salmon sucked along for the ride.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/gzxa1k/nawapa_1960s_proposal_to_take_water_from_alaska/
And if someone could get $100 for 42 or 55 gallons of water a La oil (whatever a “barrel” is) that pipeline would probably exist.
Where exactly is this available Northern California water hiding??
That isn't progress. That is stealing water from one source and giving it to another which will suck it dry in 30 years. Leninist???? What????? You are the Leninist idiot. Taking a bat to your head and beating you to death is a option as well. It's over fool. Accept it.
Rivers receive water from one source and transport it to another place. Humans can do the same thing.
I'm dubious about desalination for agriculture, but the Navy has a couple of spare reactors if you want to give it a try. They're portable since they reside in the $17B USS Gerald Ford. This was supposed to be an aircraft carrier, but since it has trouble with the electromagnetic elevators (to raise ordnance to upper decks), the electromagnetic catapults, and the electric arresting gear, it's really not much use.
The two reactors each generate 700 MW of steam from which you might get 250 MW of electricity each. Of course you can use the steam directly to run pumps and get better efficiency. Moor the thing a few miles out to sea where you don't have to worry about Tsunamis and pipe the brine out into the current.
I don't see why California shouldn't have it; it's doing the Navy no good. If it works out, there are two of these useless ships under construction.
Would these be the elevators of which you speak? https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43652/navys-newest-carriers-problem-plagued-weapons-elevators-saga-appears-to-be-over
Yes, so they claim that after several years of work, they've fixed them. I wonder if they will still work after a year of two at sea. The article talks about the tight tolerances that have to be held. They never take these ships out in storms do they?
It's funny that after decades of trying to develop rail guns and throwing in the towel, they decided to use the technology for elevators and catapults. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Win-win: Use nuclear power to desalinate ocean water prior to use for cooling, then pump that water to fill the thirst of inland populations.
The claim that "The price of providing fusion power is still too high to be feasible" is pretty silly. There is no price for fusion power because we don't know how to generate fusion power.
As for the matter of the electricity grid, that depends on which proposed fusion technology succeeds. I've seen estimates that the minimum viable tokamak/stellarator will generate about 20 gigawatts (for reference a "standard" fission reactor generates about one gigawatt) which would call for huge increases in power distribution. At the other end of the scale, if the Bussard fusor can be made to work it's likely to be viable at outputs of just a few megawatts. Reactors that size could be located close to where they're needed and would make a lot of the current high voltage long distance power lines unnecessary. Other proposed designs fit somewhere in between.
Minimum disruption would be achieved with fusion reactors that produce about one gigawatt output. They could replace existing coal and gas fired power plants one-for-one on the same site. Of course, as we electrify and displace fossil fuels, total electrical generation will have to increase a lot, which presumably would call for beefing up the grid regardless of power plant size.
"... The problem is that desalination plants require huge amounts of power to run and have never been worth the cost."
That isn't the actual problem with desalination plants which is environmentalists are vehemently opposed. See here for example:
"A California coastal panel on Thursday rejected a longstanding proposal to build a $1.4bn seawater desalination plant to turn Pacific Ocean water into drinking water .."
"Poseidon’s long-running proposal was supported by Governor Gavin Newsom but faced ardent opposition from environmentalists .."
I doubt they will be any happier with nuclear powered plants.
11" of sea level rise is baked into the future, already. As temperatures increase, this level will also increase. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01441-2
As I've already said, we're locking in a 20 year overshoot of the IPCC 1.5C target. We're nowhere close to hitting 2050 net zero.
The question isn't if we'll switch to fusion, it's when. The sooner we hit fusion the faster we'll resolve emissions and stop the overshoot.
As part of the Vatican’s war on “modernism” in 1899, Pope Leo XIII condemned as heresy the set of principles known as “Americanism.” But, by 1965, at the Second Vatican Council, the Church had begun to embrace such supposedly odious ideas: pluralism, the separation of church and state, the primacy of conscience, the preference of experience over dogma, and—for that matter—freedom of the press. This was a historic reversal of the Church’s panicked nineteenth-century repudiation of, in Pope Leo’s words, “modern popular theories and methods.”
Now five Catholic Justices on the Supreme Court are reversing the Church’s reversal. (Neil Gorsuch, who is now an Episcopalian but was raised and educated as a Catholic, joined his five colleagues in overturning Roe v. Wade.) These Justices are undermining not only basic elements of American democracy, such as the “wall of separation,” but also the essential spirit of Catholicism’s great twentieth-century renewal. It’s no secret, of course, that the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, which had been summoned by the renewal-minded Pope John XXIII, generated a powerful pushback from traditionalists within the Church. The reforms set in motion by the council—composed of more than two thousand Catholic bishops, who met in St. Peter’s Basilica in four sessions, between 1962 to 1965—upended sacrosanct doctrines and traditions, ranging from the language used in Mass to the idea of “no salvation outside the Church,” to the repudiation of the ancient anti-Semitic Christ-killer slander. Indeed, Vatican II took a step away from monarchy and toward democracy.
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An ultra-conservative blowback ensued, defining the papacies of Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI, and it proved to be obsessed, above all, with issues related to sexuality and the place of women. This focus emerged even before Vatican II ended, when a nervous Paul VI, who had succeeded Pope John after his death, in 1963, made an extraordinary intervention in the proceedings by forbidding the Council from taking on the question of contraception. Paul’s dictum signalled what was to come when, in 1968, he defied a consensus that was emerging among Catholics—even among the bishops—to accept birth control, and formally condemned it in his encyclical “Humanae Vitae” (“Of Human Life”). As if foreseeing that clash, during the council’s deliberations, one of its most powerful leaders, Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens, of Belgium, protested the Pope’s intervention by rising in St. Peter’s and saying, “I beg you, my brother bishops, let us avoid a new Galileo affair. One is enough for the Church.”
But a new Galileo affair is what the Church got. This one, though, is about the relationship not of the Earth to the Sun but of women to men. Moving from condemnation of birth control to a new absolutism on the question of abortion, a backpedalling succession of increasingly reactionary prelates ignored the Belgian cardinal’s warning. Over the last several decades, the Church hierarchy effectively turned the female body into a bulwark against the changes that the Vatican II generation had embraced.
The elevation of the issue of abortion as the be-all and end-all of Catholic orthodoxy echoes the anti-modern battles that the nineteenth-century Church fought.
Oops, keyboard FUBAR
I have read that Neil Gorsuch has never said he is an Episcopalian. He married an Anglican English girl when he was studying there. So, they have attended Episcopal churches since moving to the US. The Episcopalians are pretty enlightened about allowing Christians of other sects to participate in their services, so he doesn't need to declare himself an Episcopalian. (
This article claims you can be both. https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/18/politics/neil-gorsuch-religion )
So it sounds to me that we have six conservative Catholic men and one liberal Catholic woman on the court. Haven't had any protestants since 2010. I don't think we've ever have had anyone not identifying as a Christian or Jew, though probably quite a few weren't really religious.