Google Buys 200 Megawatts of Fusion Energy That Doesn't Even Exist Yet (cnn.com) 68
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:3, Insightful)
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:3)
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:5, 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: I like that we are going to burn our entire (Score:2)
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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.
Yep, this is coming off the tax bill that Google doesn't pay.
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Google's average global income tax rate over the last 10 years is apparently 26%.
Re: I like that we are going to burn our entire w (Score:2)
Did Google actually give them ANY money, or did Google simply agree to pay for 200 MW of Fusion Energy when they start producing it?
I suspect it is simply a zero-cost marketing exercise - how can CF price electricity 10 years in advance?
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I've done budgets for geothermal plants and future value, future pricing, is standard practice to estimate cash flow for these types of multiyear infrastructure deals. You are using the future value of the energy sales to estimate your break even point, and lifespan of the plant, and you can sell the energy now based on those spreadsheeted predictions. In the case that the technology is well un
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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
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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But you wouldn't be emitting carbon dioxide. Or is that somehow no longer the problem?
Physics (Score:2)
Dude that heat energy has to go somewhere.
It does, it radiates away into space. That's why the Earth, which receives over 1.3kW/m^2 in energy from the sun, has not been baked to a crisp over the billions of years it has received such energy: it just wamred up the to point that the rate of radiating energy matched the rate at which the sun adds it. Since the rate of radiation is roughly proportional to the temperature to the power 4, adding additional heat sources to the Earth (especially ones many orders of magnitude less than the power of the sun
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Insanity (Score:2)
But expecting fusion to be in production in 7 years is still risky.
It's not risky it's insane. The only way that could possibly happen is if someone came up with a brilliant idea that turned out to be spectacularly easy realize. The problem is that the last ~70 years of fusion research has been filled with the exact polar opposite: brilliant ideas that all looked easy to realize but that all, without exception, turned out to be impossibly hard to make them work.
We'll achieve fusion in the end but expecting it to be 7 years away is insanity - I suspect it is still sever
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Sure it is insane to bet that in 7 years fusion will be working...if in fact Google is relying on this as opposed to that purchase being a fancy way to fund some long term work on reducing power costs and take advantage of tax breaks to basically fund that with tax payer money and not their own.
So it is basically Google spending someone else’s money on something that has a chance of directly benefiting Google. Which I’m sort of ok with because if it does manage to produce that energy (even if
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Maybe some day we will actually get electricity that is “too cheap to meter” out of it.
That is exceptionally unlikely. All current designs for fusion reactors are complex and expensive to make and, even if you have a magic wand that can produce fusion reactors for almost no cost, they are all going to be large power-station sized facilities unless you also discover some completely new physics and that means expensive transmission lines whose size and hence expense depends very much on the amount of power being consumed.
So unless you also think we will have cheap, room-temperature supercon
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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.
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So instead of machines serving all of us they are going to survey very very very very tiny group of people. Techno feudalism.
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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.
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Sadly the elite tend to believe their own propaganda about exceptionalism and think they got to the top because of talent not luck, and that what happened elsewhere and in the distant past is irrelevant because they a
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The cases where they get kicked out of the system are probably the best ones.
Re: I like that we are going to burn our entire wo (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.
The population will need to find a way to do all that while paying rent/mortgages, which might prove difficult.
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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.
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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.
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Indeed. Waste heat is just one of that fake "arguments" by the typical deniers. On the other hand, waste heat is what currently causes France to have to shut down their nuclear reactors.
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That is waste heat inside a very small closed structure, which is different than any kind of Niven-style waste heat destroying an entire planet.
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I am aware.
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How would fusion power "burn the entire world down to the last cinder"? It wouldn't.
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"How would fusion power "burn the entire world down to the last cinder"? It wouldn't."
Wait a few billion years until the sun expands into a red giant.
The Incredible Google PR Clown Car (Score:2)
Google has been courting nuclear for years. (Score:2)
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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.
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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)
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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?
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What does it mean to purchase 200 Megawatts? Do they get 200MW indefinitely?
The contract probably has a term in it, maybe 10 or 20 years, but it's possible that the contract is for as long as the plant is operating.
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
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It'll irradiate the reactor cladding, requiring maintenance every so often. The overall production of waste that can be classified as nuclear waste will be quite small compared to what you get from fission reactors. Plus there is work on hydrogen/boron fusion which is aneutrotic. Not sure if Commonwealth Fusion is actually going down that road but probably not (at first).
Contact me (Score:2)
Please be aware of my matter-antimatter reactor prototype in my mom's basement.
For more info call my mom.
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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?
Re: Contact me (Score:2)
how hungry big tech companies are (Score:3)
"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?
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Copying Microsoft (Score:2)
MS already has a deal to take power from fusion production facilities in 2028:
https://www.helionenergy.com/a... [helionenergy.com]
Investment has always been the complaint (Score:2)
Here is the investment, so burn 10 billion on Fusion boondoggle, and recognize the problem spend 190 Billion on 3 to 10 fission power plants with the old school known product vendors with the same rated capacity and zero technology risk. Same amount of power, lower risk, and send the waste to Yucca. Throw another 10 billion at a solar project, and 20 billion
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People buy stuff that doesn’t exist yet all (Score:2)
I’m not even talking pre-orders of video games coming out in a few months.
The entire Chicago board of exchange exists to sell products (originally farm products, you know tons of corn, bales of hay, barrels of hog bellies, whole cows) at future points in time. It revolutionized the farm economy. Farmers can sell this fall’s harvest today in order to afford repairs on tractors they need fixed in order to actually get the harvest into the ground, and keep it watered and weeded and fertilized.
"Magic Leap" 2.0? (Score:2)