Google Buys 200 Megawatts of Fusion Energy That Doesn't Even Exist Yet (cnn.com) 31
Google has signed a deal to purchase 200 megawatts of future fusion energy from Commonwealth Fusion Systems, despite the energy source not yet existing. "It's a sign of how hungry big tech companies are for a virtually unlimited source of clean power that is still years away," reports CNN. From the report: Google and Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced a deal Monday in which the tech company bought 200 megawatts of power from Commonwealth's first commercial fusion plant, the same amount of energy that could power roughly 200,000 average American homes. Commonwealth aims to build the plant in Virginia by the early 2030s. When it starts generating usable fusion energy is still TBD, though the company believes they can do it in the same timeframe.
Google is also investing a second round of money into Commonwealth to spur development of its demonstration tokamak -- a donut-shaped machine that uses massive magnets and molten plasma to force two atoms to merge, thereby creating the energy of the sun. Google and Commonwealth did not disclose how much money is being invested, but both touted the announcement as a major step toward fusion commercialization. "We're using this purchasing power that we have to send a demand signal to the market for fusion energy and hopefully move (the) technology forward," said Michael Terrell, senior director of energy and climate at Google.
Commonwealth is currently building its demonstration plant in Massachusetts, known as SPARC. It's the tokamak the company says could forever change where the world gets its power from, generating 10 million times more energy than coal or natural gas while producing no planet-warming pollution. Fuel for fusion is abundant, derived from a form of hydrogen found in seawater and tritium extracted from lithium. And unlike nuclear fission, there is no radioactive waste involved. The big challenge is that no one has yet built a machine powerful and precise enough to get more energy out of the reaction than they put into it.
Google is also investing a second round of money into Commonwealth to spur development of its demonstration tokamak -- a donut-shaped machine that uses massive magnets and molten plasma to force two atoms to merge, thereby creating the energy of the sun. Google and Commonwealth did not disclose how much money is being invested, but both touted the announcement as a major step toward fusion commercialization. "We're using this purchasing power that we have to send a demand signal to the market for fusion energy and hopefully move (the) technology forward," said Michael Terrell, senior director of energy and climate at Google.
Commonwealth is currently building its demonstration plant in Massachusetts, known as SPARC. It's the tokamak the company says could forever change where the world gets its power from, generating 10 million times more energy than coal or natural gas while producing no planet-warming pollution. Fuel for fusion is abundant, derived from a form of hydrogen found in seawater and tritium extracted from lithium. And unlike nuclear fission, there is no radioactive waste involved. The big challenge is that no one has yet built a machine powerful and precise enough to get more energy out of the reaction than they put into it.
I like that we are going to burn our entire world (Score:2)
I'm kidding I'm kidding. It's a lot more shareholder value.
Remember kids, it's a big club and you ain't in it.
Re: I like that we are going to burn our entire wo (Score:2)
But expecting fusion to be in production in 7 years is still risky.
Are they really confident this is just an engineering problem now?
Re: I like that we are going to burn our entire wo (Score:4, Interesting)
Google is an investor in Commonwealth Fusion. I expect this deal isn't about Google actually getting 500 MW in 2032, but a method to a) give CF more money and b) to demonstrate confidence in them. Probably there are some tax advantages over just giving them more money.
Re: I like that we are going to burn our entire w (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But fusion is getting the headlines while these big tech companies are building out nuclear power plants.
The resources that are going to go into building those plants are going to be diverted from other projects. They don't have to be but they will be because there is very very very little money for anything besides corporate profits.
The economy doesn't
Re: (Score:2)
Dude that heat energy has to go somewhere. So even if you have miraculous electricity you're still going to be belching heat into the atmosphere.
The total yearly electrical energy consumption of the entire world converted to heat, is a rounding error compared to the amount of heat trapped by CO2. And as long as we don't have the blanket of CO2 trapping that heat, it quickly gets irradiated out into space. Earth's own internal heat would have long since cooked us if that weren't the case.
Re: (Score:2)
"Dude that heat energy has to go somewhere."
Heat produced just goes to space. Given that there is not too much CO2 reflecting it. Climate change is not due to produced heat, it is due to CO2.
Re: (Score:2)
So even if you have miraculous electricity you're still going to be belching heat into the atmosphere.
Just like any heat engine is doing right now.
And in relation of the heat trapping of CO2 and CH4 and water vapour: that is somewhere 10 or 20 digits behind the decimal point. In other words: completely irrelevant.
Re: (Score:3)
I know this is a joke, but waste heat is not what is causing global warming. We would have to raise the amount of energy we are using by some orders of magnitude for waste heat to make a measurable fraction of global warming.
IMHO I hope Google only paid a few hundred dollars for this.
Re: (Score:2)
So instead of machines serving all of us they are going to survey very very very very tiny group of people. Techno feudalism.
Re: (Score:2)
When it gets to this point, the choice of the population is to starve to death or create a new, parallel system that serves em.
It's normally what happens in communist dictatorships etc..., so you can bet the elites are trying to not get to this point, or the system will just get away from em.
Re: (Score:2)
I hope Google only paid a few hundred dollars for this.
Why? These guys are doing engineering actually useful to human knowledge, even if they fail. I hope Google paid them billions so they continue with the research for as long as possible, hiring as many fusion engineers as possible. These are as many physics graduates that won't need to go for uninteresting careers in a famous internet advertisement company, or worse, as I hear the finance and insurance industries hires graduates that can't find jobs in physics.
Re: (Score:2)
A mega watt hour goes for $4 or so ...
So it would be $800 in total.
Unless they paid a phantasy price to boost the company in question.
I did not read the original article, I would not wonder if the summary is grossly wrong or misleading, and Google bought 200MW production capacity and that could equal to some 100 million dollars.
The Incredible Google PR Clown Car (Score:2)
Google has been courting nuclear for years. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
I believe that Robert Bussard knew that a fusion reactor that produced a net output in power would have had to be quite large. The question he was trying to answer was just how large it would have had to be.
The math was fairly straightforward on calculating energy in versus energy out but there was always a question on just how much energy would be lost to this, that, and the other thing, energy which could not be recovered in any meaningful way. To find this out would have required building larger and la
A Fool & His Money (Score:2)
Whoever at Alphabet signed off on this is a fool. It's an entire culture of spendthrift on longshots caused by the founders of all those companies having hit the jackpot once and them and all their investors blowing their money chasing another one. The whole industry is going to collapse in like 5 years. It's going to make the dot-com bust look like a minor market correction.
Re: (Score:1)
It's an entire culture of spendthrift on longshots caused by the founders of all those companies having hit the jackpot once and them and all their investors blowing their money chasing another one.
This sounds like a fear of missing out. There's some people that claim to have the key to effectively unlimited energy with nuclear fusion and the people at Alphabet want to gamble on that by buying some shares. When they have the money to gamble on these long shots there's a certain method to the madness.
Even if it doesn't work out they can use investments on long shot "sustainable" energy projects to buy some good public relations. They can use this investment for years as evidence that they care about
no jewel (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Literal vaporware (Score:2)
ONE day, it will work, and you're going to love it!
Energy is in killowatt hours (Score:2)
What does it mean to purchase 200 Megawatts? Do they get 200MW indefinitely?
Also, since the energy doesn't exist yet, does the payment either? Or is Google just committing to purchase this much when it becomes available?
No radioactive waste? Hardly. (Score:1)
The system described for fusion sounds like a deuterium and tritium reaction, a reaction that produces neutrons. Neutrons have no charge to them and so cannot be contained in a magnetic or electrostatic field like the hydrogen nuclei used as fuel for the fusion reaction. That means the containment structure will experience neutron activation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The neutron bombardment of the structure cannot be avoided. That is unless they know some kind of new physics. The neutrons will s
Contact me (Score:2)
Please be aware of my matter-antimatter reactor prototype in my mom's basement.
For more info call my mom.
Re: (Score:2)
I have one on my attic, due to lack of a basement.
Unfortunately I ran out of anti matter just recently.
Can I borrow some from you?
how hungry big tech companies are (Score:2)
"It's a sign of how hungry big tech companies are for a virtually unlimited source of clean power that is still years away"
Stupid framing. *Everyone* should be hungry for unlimited clean energy.
Is there *any* benefit sticking to unclean limited energy, if we should be able to have "unlimited" clean energy?