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What's Stopping a Nuclear Fusion Revolution? Cost (msn.com) 192

Posted by EditorDavid from the fusion-funding dept.
"Over the past year, nuclear fusion has inched closer to reality," the Washington Post reported Friday.

"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." (One fusion company's CEO argues that "Once the technology is shown to work, it's less risky, and the next buyer of that technology could get a commercial loan.")

But even with all this new excitement, challenges still remain, nuclear scientists warn: 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. "We're at a very exciting place," said Dennis G. Whyte, director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center. "But we also have to be realistic in the sense that it's still very hard...."

Phil Larochelle, a partner at the venture capital firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures, said private money is flowing into fusion at such high levels because scientific advancements, such as better magnets, have made cheap nuclear fusion a likelier possibility. Going forward, Larochelle noted that getting nuclear fusion to market probably will require formal cost-sharing programs with the government, which he said could be similar to how NASA is partnering with SpaceX for space travel innovation. "In both the U.S. and the U.K., there's now kind of new government programs and support for trying to get to a [fusion] pilot," he said. "It's a good kind of risk-sharing between public and private [sectors]."

Despite the growing government collaboration, Whyte said, a few challenges remain. The effects of climate change are increasingly irreversible, and the clock is ticking, he said, making fusion energy a crucial need. Companies will have to figure out how to deploy the technology widely. Doing it cheaply is most important, he said. "What I worry about is that we'll get to a system where we can't actually make it economically attractive fast enough," he added. Moreover, to create an electricity grid through which fusion technology provides large amounts of power, many things need to happen. Universities need to churn out scientists more capable of working on fusion technology. Fusion power companies need to build devices that create more energy than they consume. Scientific and manufacturing materials must be constructed in difficult ways if power plants want to scale.

"Can we get there?" Whyte asked. "I think we can if we get our act together in the right way. But there's no guarantee of that."
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What's Stopping a Nuclear Fusion Revolution? Cost More

What's Stopping a Nuclear Fusion Revolution? Cost

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  • No (Score:3, Insightful)

    by barcarolle ( 581253 ) on Saturday August 27, 2022 @06:47PM (#62828587)
    Cost? Partly. Also, science. No, not your ridiculous political The Science, actual science.
    • From a corporate and profit point of view, nuclear has to engage in public relation campaign to remain viable. In many areas wind and solar are the solution that is effective today. I Ln many area nuclear, fusion or fission, is longer term. But if money is spent on wind and solar, and we have plenty of electricity, who is going to spend it on something that is a money put?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Creepy ( 93888 )

        Wind and Solar are DEEPLY dependent on China providing parts, as they provide 95% of rare earth elements used for Wind Turbines and Battery Storage for Solar and require manufacturing to be done in China to get them. They then landfill radioactive elements they dig up with them that would in any other country be forced to manage. So yes, Wind and Power are great for energy, but as far as green... not as much as you think. I actually DO give a shit about Chinese citizen's lives, despite their leadership not

        • Wind turbines don't NEED. They are only used because they provide stronger magnets and give a slight performance improvement and the PRICE they cost at the moment makes it worth.

          And the idea that all rare earth metals come from China is complete idiotic.

    • As much as I admire the progress of fusion technology and the meager advances of generating current results of more energy output than input, successful fusion power as a stable element of total power generation requires much more than the potential of technological success which now has minimal potential. It requires a massive industrial revolution and the rapid current advance of global heating with radical loss of agricultural potentials out of both local flooding and loss of water for essential power p
  • "Can we get there?" Whyte asked. "I think we can if we get our act together in the right way. But there's no guarantee of that." The wonderful point that makes no point and erases everything that came before it. I'm psyched that we may one day harness fusion. I have hopes it will happen in my lifetime. But that sentence tells you the reality we're living in. That we've made advances, but not the kind of advances that mean we've actually turned a corner. Seriously though. Before I die would be great.

    • Yup. The executive summary might as well be

      Venture capitalists hope for government bailout

    • No it just means that Whyte is on the outside, looking in. Like all the rest of us. Big money players are using private equity to move fusion forward, leaving public investors and governments behind. At this point subsidies would look more like a guarantee that research would never be completed.

      Note that Whyte is still at MIT and (apparently) didn't jump ship with any of the Commonwealth folks.

  • Three motherfuckers cock blocking (Score:3)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Saturday August 27, 2022 @06:58PM (#62828599)

    There's the miscreant brothers Rayleigh and Taylor fucking up ICF and then there's their no good cousin Bremsstrahlung fucking up shit in general.

  • "Can we get there?" Whyte asked. "I think we can if we get our act together in the right way. ..."

    I guess things have to come together for fusion to work. :-)

  • Wasting too much money on pipe dreams (Score:3)

    by rahmrh ( 939610 ) on Saturday August 27, 2022 @07:01PM (#62828605)

    Wasting too much money on pipe dreams. Give it up and spend it sorting out the next gen much safer fission plants that we at least know will work and can build.

    • You will anger the anti nuclear power tards with such sane commentary.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MtViewGuy ( 197597 )

      I couldn't agree more.

      We should aggressively invest in Generation IV nuclear power plants that use thorium-232 as the primary nuclear fuel. For example, we should expand on Alvin Weinberg's work on the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), where the nuclear fuel is primarily thorium-232 dissolved in molten salts of fluoride. In fact, molten fluoride salts as fuel could make it possible to "burn up" all the used uranium-235 fuel rods and even plutonium-239/240 from dismantled nuclear weapons, eliminating a

    • Re:Wasting too much money on pipe dreams (Score:5, Interesting)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Sunday August 28, 2022 @02:31AM (#62829155)

      Define "too much money". And then compare it to available capital in the world to solve energy problems. Here's some comparisons for you:

      - the entire budget for the ITER is only 1/3rd of the Google's net income from last year.
      - the entire budget for the ITER is being spent by Intel's R&D department every quarter.
      - the entire budget for the ITER would allow you to build 2/3rds of a single AP1000 GenIII nuclear reactor.

      Now sure the ITER isn't the only game in town, but fusion power isn't "wasting too much money" as much as it is "investing petty cash" on the scale of the national economy to say absolutely nothing of the global one. Given it's potential benefits its hilariously underfunded.

      But hey we're not talking about the ITER, we're talking about R&D from MIT's Plasma science and fusion centre. What's their budget? https://news.mit.edu/2020/psfc... [mit.edu] about enough to get you kicked out of a Bugatti store and told to come back when you're serious about buying a car.

      Cancelling all fusion power R&D and projects won't change nuclear in the slightest.

    • Wasting too much money on pipe dreams.

      We aren't spending much money on it.

  • Articles nearly identical to this one have been popping up for the last 30 years. Everyone agrees that fusion energy would be the answer to our dreams, but he inconvenient problem is that no one can make it work. But the government keeps passing out grant money and that's the most important thing.

    • Re:Same Article 30 years ago (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday August 27, 2022 @07:44PM (#62828663)

      Actually, there is steady progress. No actually involved plasma physicist has ever claimed "30 years" professionally. That is just the stupid reporters. Actual experts know it will take much, much longer because so much stuff has to be invented, build, optimized and tested.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by haruchai ( 17472 )

        "No actually involved plasma physicist has ever claimed "30 years" professionally."
        Except for Richard Freeman Post?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Powercntrl ( 458442 )

      Everyone agrees that fusion energy would be the answer to our dreams, but he inconvenient problem is that no one can make it work.

      Actually, what society needs is abundant cheap electricity. If fusion fails on the cheap part, whether or not it ever works doesn't really matter. We already have plenty of ways of generating expensive green electricity.

      • Even if it turns out not to be cheap, the technologies discovered in the process could still make the effort worthwhile.

    • Could fusion be like a perpetual motion machine... ?

      Fission [energy.gov]: fires a neutron, splits the nucleus, generating energy in the split and causing a chain reaction.

      Fusion [energy.gov]: Fuses two nucleii, releasing energy in the process.

      Nature gathers huge amounts of matter, at least 80 times more than Jupiter [google.com], to create a gravity well to generate the temperatures and pressures to cause the nucleii to fuse. Gravity does the work. All you need are 80 Jupiter masses.

      Scientists are still trying to use the huge temperatures and pr

    • Umm, actually what happened was the government pulled funding in the seventies. The predictions were correct, it's just that the predictions assumed the reactors would get funded and built they weren't. We are only now getting round to building ITER which was basically designed in 1984, right around the time of severe fusion budget cuts. If we had bothered to build it, we would have fusion energy by now. Reference: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]

    • But the government keeps passing out grant money and that's the most important thing.

      The government doesn't give grants for fusion. It throws the left over nickels from the petty cash drawer at the problem. For the money being allocated to grants on fusion science in the last budget you could build less than 5 miles of an interstate highway.

  • Nuclear fusion has low power density (Score:5, Informative)

    by ballpoint ( 192660 ) on Saturday August 27, 2022 @07:08PM (#62828613)

    Given that the sun only produces 200 microwatt per kg of mass, it seems optimistic to expect a quick solution to our energy needs from controlled fusion.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by iggymanz ( 596061 )

      Nah, the Sun uses the wrong fuel. We're not trying to fuse ordinary hydrogen (with a side order of the CNO cycle making ten percent of its energy, even more insanely out of our reach)

      No we're trying the easiest thing of all, D-T fusion. And failing thus far to make more energy than the process takes.

    • Re:Nuclear fusion has low power density (Score:5, Informative)

      by GuB-42 ( 2483988 ) on Saturday August 27, 2022 @08:14PM (#62828709)

      But the sun doesn't work at all like a Tokamak. For once, ITER will be 10 times hotter than the sun core, and ITER will do D-T fusion, which is much easier than pure hydrogen.
      In fact, the sun is a terrible reactor with the energy output of a compost pile and it only works because it is so big and massive.

      And if you take a look at the "Tsar Bomba", you will quickly realize that fusion can have a really high power density. We can already do high power densities, and all research is in making power densities lower and over longer periods. We want to power cities now, not just turn them into craters.

      • We can't _tap_ thee high energy densities. No one has done any effective recovry of energy from a fusion reactor, except to discard it as waste heat.

    • Most of the sun's mass has zero to do with fusion, and the projects here on earth are not about throwing weight at the problem.

  • Why not use the free fusion reactor we have 93 mil (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tekram ( 8023518 ) on Saturday August 27, 2022 @07:09PM (#62828615)
    ..93 million miles away? Always on, generates solar and wind and biomass energy, for free. Always safe - well, don't stare directly at it.

    • Always safe

      It's only a matter of time until it fucking eats our whole planet, what are talking about, always?!

      Probably a good short-term solution, but still...

    • A lot of money has been put into renewables already and for several decades now. Some early installations already need replacing.
      After all this, have world CO2 emissions started going down? Skipping the Covid one-time drop, no they have not: https://www.carbonbrief.org/gl... [carbonbrief.org]
      As someone once said we need "all of the above" which includes fusion and fission

    • I can't see that "free" fusion reactor at night, or on cloudy / rainy days. Not sure how it will help me achieve a sustainable baseload energy supply.

      • Orbital solar mirrors., collecting energy to beam to microwave arrays planetside with low enough energy density to be safe. NASA has published numerous papers on such designs. The mirrors can basically be solar sails, focusing their light onto a microwave generator, and the associated solar sail technology used for harvesting water from the rings of our gas giants and metal, in bulk, from the asteroid belt.

    • Because it's 93 million miles away. Which means that the energy is pretty diffuse by the time it gets to us, and it takes a lot of effort to re-concentrate it.

  • For my entire life practical fusion power has always been 'just around the corner' and that's going back to tokamak reactors, hydrogen pellets. cold fusion, whatever. What they don't tell you is that there are probably dozens to a hundred corners to get past before fusion power will become a reality. In fact this post could have been published in 1990 with only a modification or two and it would have been just as accurate then as it is now.

    I'm sure that one day we will finally have usable fusion power but t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      It never has been. That was just journalists and politicians not listening or plain lying. Actual experts always have estimated a very long process to get there, like 50-150 years at this time.

  • It's only 10 years away, only shortly after there's a flying car in every driveway!

  • Cost is no problem... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by StevenMaurer ( 115071 ) on Saturday August 27, 2022 @07:55PM (#62828683) Homepage

    Cost is only a problem for Tokamak-style reactors. In fact, it's such a problem, such designs with never ever work. All fusion we can achieve releases its energy through fast neutrons, shooting out of nuclei at relativistic speeds. Being neutral, neutrons can't be controlled through magnetic fields and simply slam into the sides of a Tokamak reactor. This "embrittlement" means that it simply can't work even if we could even get close to energy break even (which we still can't despite all the hype). The "heat" literally destroys the reactor on the atomic scale.

    What actually will work, with no cost problems, is Magnetized Target Fusion. A shell of molten metal is made to swirl, creating a vortex much like water going down a bathroom drain. A plasma injector then sends a small spheromak "smoke ring" of artificial plasma deuterium/tritium into the throat of the vortex. This plasma torus lasts long enough for precisely controlled computer controlled hammers on the sides outside to strike, collapsing the molten metal to compress it to fusion conditions. Fast neutrons are produced, but all get absorbed by the molten metal, heating it further. The heat is used to generate electricity.

    There is no "kopeck" problem. No embrittlement problem. The approach already has been shown to work. A full sized demonstration reactor is already being scaled up and is due to be complete and running in 2025. Take a look at what they're doing at www.generalfusion.com.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sfcat ( 872532 )
      Serious question. The heat generated from fusion is often more than 1,000,000C. How efficiently can we extract electricity from that? You need a magnetic bottle to contain that much heat and that makes transforming that heat into electricity a very very inefficient process. Right now we are trying to get a reaction to theoretically break even (meaning it produces more power than it uses assuming 100% extraction of power). But conversion rates in the single digits are far more realistic. Am I missing s
      • Here's an answer [firstlightfusion.com] where they suggest using an enclosing wall of liquid lithium to soak up the direct fusion heat, and then use the hot lithium to boil water. I don't think they're making a magnetic bottle. They've already demonstrated energy+ for power.

    • Cost is only a problem for Tokamak-style reactors.

      It's only a "problem" if you consider a reactor costing less than a typical nuclear power plant a "problem". We have more expensive power plants in operation today than what has been invested in e.g. the ITER.

    • Maybe. But Rayleigh-Taylor instability is the death of a lot of schemes like this. Also "smoke rings" and FRC type configurations have a wide range of possibly instabilities (including the amusing "rocket" instability where the ring spins itself until it explodes.

      This is just one of a great many approaches that "might" work but so far are very far from breakeven. If you have breakeven in 2025, you have my congratulations, and will be wealthy beyond your wildest dreams - and deserve it. But liquid

  • What's stopping fusion? (Score:3)

    by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Saturday August 27, 2022 @08:04PM (#62828695)

    A complete failure to achieve any recoverable energy from any fusion reaction in history, and a fuel supply that is grossly expensive, unstable, and leaks almost as easily as pure hydrogen. Each proposed design has no assurance that it will ever work well by maturing.

  • "The U.S. energy grid would need a significant redesign for fusion power plants to become common."

    I support fusion research but I am sure this is the smallest of the problems.

  • We have fusion. That's what drives solar panels. The question is whether we can build a fusion reactor that can produce power cheaper than the cost of collecting it from the sun. But the reality is there is money to be made in trying, whether successful or not, as long as the taxpayers are footing the bill or naive investors can be convinced its just around the corner. Thus this piece of propaganda.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sfcat ( 872532 )
      Coal is the main input to PV panels as it is required to purify the polysilica. And it isn't a small input; for every 4 watts of power the PV panel produces over its lifetime purifying the polysilica requires 1 watt of coal on average. Unless you like 3rd world style gray skies filled with coal dust or something solar PV really isn't much of a solution. In case you were wondering why everyone ignores you when you trot out this tired old canard.

      • for every 4 watts of power the PV panel produces over its lifetime purifying the polysilica requires 1 watt of coal on average.
        If that is "true" it requires 1Watt of energy: regardless where it comes from. Does not need to be coal.

        Are you really such an dumb idiot or just a paid troll?

  • eh (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bob_jenkins ( 144606 ) on Saturday August 27, 2022 @08:50PM (#62828767) Homepage Journal

    Fusion would be nice for big cities and industry. For suburbs and rural, solar cells will be more convenient (no need for a power grid or even anything outside your neighborhood), unless fusion gets REALLY small and cheap. Even for big cities, fusion will have to compete with solar cells, which have a big head start.

    It'd be hard to do manned interstellar travel without fusion (hard to grow enough food during the voyage between the stars), but that's not going to be a pressing issue for a few centuries yet.

  • The powers that be want reactors because its a source they can control, but solar, tide pools and geothermal are a better solution. We need to waste much less power. If we made fusion reactors everywhere, the power use would still heat the Earth. Duh.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )

      Geothermal and hydro power both generally require geographic proximity to the applicable desirable locations on earth in order to be economically practical.

      Solar is usable anywhere, but then you have the additional burden of requiring power storage for nighttime or even during less than ideal daytime conditions.

      Right now, the only energy production system we have that can actually meet the needs of the world with the overall statistically lowest negative environmental impact and we have the technology

  • A few million here, a few million there spread out over many research projects. Maybe if we weren't so concerned about "diversity" issues and $60B in funding for that [youtube.com] we could put more emphasis on Fusion Research which the DOE announced $50m recently in March. [hpcwire.com]

    What's stopping Fusion? Priorities that are out of whack.

  • "We're at a very exciting place," said Dennis G. Whyte, director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

    I presume he's referring to the lots of fusion research money flowing into MIT place.

    Doing it cheaply is most important, he said. ... Fusion power companies need to build devices that create more energy than they consume.

    Wouldn't positive net power be even more important than cost?

  • Nope. (Score:2)

    by PPH ( 736903 )

    The U.S. energy grid would need a significant redesign for fusion power plants to become common.

    You build a greater then break even plant and we'll figure out how to connect wires to it. This whole "fix the grid" talk sounds like a bunch of old school utilities trying to get a piece of the R&D money. Or worse yet, they have assets encumbered by pending cap gains taxes and want to move them around tax free.

  • True, old reactors were dangerous, but early anything was dangerous, just read about Union Carbide. There are vast areas of land contaminated with conventional industries just like Chernobyl is contaminated by radioactive substances, and mercury/lead/arsenic will also be there for millenia without cleanup methods that are not yet developed.

    Bottom line, a lot has been learned since reactor designs that resulted in these accidents and modern reactors are designed around negative feedback loops in case of over

    • Fission is not perfect but it is the most rational solution to world's energy problem but people are not rational. Look at what Germany did to its nuclear reactors...

  • Scientists are mere years from getting more energy out of fusion reactions than the energy required to create them

    So a few years after we get our flying cars.

  • It's not just cost. There hasn't been a single experiment to achieve sustained fusion, at any scale. If the same amount of money had been invested into solar energy, literally every building in the US could already be covered with solar panels and we would be producing more energy than we need. Of course, the oil companies would be bankrupt, but don't worry... they're doing everything they can to make sure that never happens.

  • war over oil is not too expensive, the US are able to find $900B annually for that.
    just take all that money and do other things with it. free healthcare for all, fusion tech, whatever else...

  • Over-regulation. If we didn't have regulations from the 70's we could probably use newer tech. Also the waste problem needs to be 'solved', which it already was but politics got in the way.

  • ... he would've put a giant Fusion reactor in the sky for us to use. ... Oh, wait a minute ...

  • Another Misleading Headline (Score:3)

    by dcw3 ( 649211 ) on Sunday August 28, 2022 @08:53AM (#62829559) Journal

    Slashdot has become adept at misleading headlines/clickbait. This is the kind of BS headline that makes me come back less frequently.

  • IMHO, a big reason why there's such a push for spending a crapton of money on wind and solar is because those technologies are the equivalent of CFL lighting. GE spent a ton of money developing the CFL light bulb including all the "infrastructure" to manufacture them at scale only to have the rug pulled out from under their cushy cash cow by LED technology which also affected the politicians who were in GE's orbit. The powers that be who stand to make a lot of money on wind and solar are seeing the same t

  • Plasmas are extremely difficult to simulate, a full simulation of a fusion reactor is far beyond even today's computation capability. So simulations always need to make all sorts of assumptions about the plasma and need top be designed for types of reactors. There are still (as far as I know) no good general simulation codes for some field configurations (like FRC).

    The above means that actual physical experiments need to be performed with no assurance that those experiments will work. But in general

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