Will We Ever Get Fusion Power?

    South Australia has just chalked up what is undoubtedly a world first – a run of 
    more than 10 consecutive days over which the average production of wind and solar 
    accounted for 100 per cent of local demand.

    No other gigawatt scale grid in the world has come close to this amount of “variable 
    renewable energy”, or for such a long time.

    RenewEconomy reported on Monday that South Australia had just enjoyed a seven day 
    run of wind and solar that produced more than 104 per cent of average demand. Closer     
    inspection proved it was even more impressive than that.


    According to Geoff Eldridge at data providers GPE NemLog2, the supply of wind and 
    solar averaged 100 per cent of local demand for 10 days and 9 hours (a total of 249 
    hours) from 08:20 on Friday, December 9, to 1720, Monday, December 19. [1] 

Was compelling. Belief we're prepared to invest seems lacking.

I think achieving multi second "stable" plasma conditions has been amazing. But, I think that's a cigarette lighter held next to petrified wood (to use an atomic bomb era analogy) away from ignition as a useful energy over time equation.

We're also somewhat behind "what's embrittlement" or "what's xenon poisoning" problems. Things which don't emerge until a few months in your life of run-time. Again, from early fission reactor design, these things can sink a project.

Or, unexpected fission or other nasty behaviours. Things which make it hard to get inside the structure to fix it. The unknown unknowns in this feel huge. But, linear energy in, energy out, and the approach to viable ignition temperature. That's science and engineering at its best.

Fusors tapped out. "Mr fusion" isn't happening.

Of the fusion startups mentioned in the article, I’d say that makes Zap Energy the one worth gambling on (if you’re a gambler that is), as its success apparently depends on exploiting a fluid dynamics effect which was not well known in the past (“shear flow”). If this sufficiently solves the confinement problem, the resulting device looks ludicrously simple in comparison to contemporaries.

Of course it may not work at all, I sure don’t know if it will; but if you had to invest in one of these, that seems like the one where successful power generation actually creates a marketable product.

The entire premise of fusion generation is based on world view where the limiting factor for generating electricity was the cost of providing fuel for combustion to generate heat. This thinking was pretty natural if you looked around the world in the first half of the 20th century when coal and steam engines were still kings of energy. This was a pre-semiconductor and pre-plastic age. That's why they ended up using long of fairly primitive technologies: a chemical (combustion) process to generate heat, a heat capture process to boil a tank of water, a mechanical process to convert the steam pressure into mechanical energy, and an electro-magnetic process to extract usable electricity.

But in an age of advanced materials and semiconductors, it feels more and more that fusion is an attempt to solve a problem that is no longer really relevant. Working towards a "better" heat source for an electricity generation process which still involves steam-age tech is akin to trying to breed faster/cheaper horses to improve modern transport.

The cost of fuel is almost negligible for fission - non-fuel operating costs are killing off perfectly functioning nuclear plants like at Indian Point[1] - so the problem that fusion will "solve" is not actually a significant problem.

I'm convinced that we have moved beyond boiling water and generating heat, etc. in electricity generation. We no longer need massive steam engines to generate electricity. Modern technologies like wind, solar and batteries dispense with all this cost and complexity and the shackles of Carnot efficiency.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center

Will we get fusion power in the next few decades? I wouldn't bet on it, but I also wouldn't bet against it.

> Perón is the only Argentine president elected three times and holds the highest percentage of votes (61.86%) in clean elections with universal suffrage.

However, with advances like REBCO tape and so on, it's far more realistic now. I hope we get it in my lifetime, but I'm not confident.

technical challenges aside, fusion power as a research + building + disvtributil project is so expensive - for the same amount of money we could already build a decentralized solution out of over-abundant solar cells, but it seems looking for the one big thing is still more interesting.

They'll have unlimited energy based on some quantum shit.

We already have technology that can take the electromagnetic waves this fusion power plant produces and directly convert it into electricity without needing pesky intermediaries like boiling water to turn a turbine.

This technology is relatively cheap to produce, extraordinarily safe, can last for decades with minor maintenance, can scale almost indefinitely, and there are many practical improvements we can make to it that are going to applied commercially in years and not decades.

I don't doubt that trying to achieve commercially viable fusion is a worthy engineering and science challenge and that we will learn and develop many useful technologies along the the way - but fusion is probably the hardest engineering challenge humanity has ever attempted and after many decades of R&D there is still no clear path to commercial viability.

Solar panels today work, and they work well, and we can practically throw endless amounts of money building them and it will work. Today. And we needed solutions that work today, not 50 years from now... maybe.

IIRC, the sum total of all fusion research throughout all of history is USD$100-200B. It's obvious governments/industry/humanity doesn't really want it, or they'd go fund it.

It took 12 years to build first unit of Belarusian NPP - of a type that's been built by the dozen for decades, and in a country where all-powerful government controls and owns everything, there is no NIMBY or the "society" thing in the Western understanding at all, and where if you try to protest you just disappear. Can't be done faster. By 2036, fossil fuel electricity will be a thing of the past in some places, and quickly disappearing in all others.

Had we shoved as much money at fusion as we have at, say, horizontal drilling for liquified dinosaurs, we'd have fusion right now.

It must be done, we have no choice (longterm).

If a fusion reactor can be made practicable, then we have a clean, low-radiation power generation system that will still work in the face of nuclear / asteroid-impact / supervolcanic winter.

...granted, any of those events could take out most or all of the hypothetical reactors, but it still seems worth noting to me.

https://brilliantlightpower.com/shareholder-meeting-presenta...