Yves here. Nuclear fusion technology is over my pay grade. Nevertheless, assuming charitiably that human civilization gets climate change enough under control so as to assure modern lifestyles continue, a proposition very much in doubt, nuclear energy seems destined to be a big part of base energy supplies given more reliance on variable solar and wind power. Even though this article touts the professed accomplishments of one Chinese company, it isn’t in the normal interest of a Western business outlet to tout that in the absence of at least some substance to the claims.
Nevertheless, there is also the question of how long it would take to commercialize this advance. My understanding was it would normally take 20 years. However, China still makes heavy use of coal-fired electricity and so has the incentive to greatly accelerate the timetable. But do they have the means?
Reader sanity checks encouraged.
By Alex Kimani, a veteran finance writer, investor, engineer and researcher for Safehaven.com. Originally published at OilPrice
- For nearly two decades, the world’s hopes of building a practical nuclear fusion plant have rested on France-based International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.
- The ITER project costs have surpassed €20 billion ($21.8 billion), more than four times the original budget of €5 billion.
- Shanghai-based Energy Singularity has effectively completed the engineering feasibility verification of high-temperature superconducting for its Honghuang 70 (HH70) tokamak device.
It’s been seven decades ever since scientists started working on nuclear fusion technology, with the allure of almost limitless clean energy proving too powerful to resist. Unfortunately, milestones have fallen time and again, giving rise to the running joke that a practical nuclear fusion power plant could be decades, if not centuries, away.
For nearly two decades, the world’s hopes of building a practical nuclear fusion plant have rested on France-based International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), funded and run by seven member countries since 2006. Like many nuclear power projects, ITER has come under scrutiny for repeated delays and massive cost overruns. Indeed, Charles Seife, director of the Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism at New York University, recently sued ITER for lack of transparency.
According to Seife, ITER project costs have surpassed €20 billion ($21.8 billion), more than four times the original budget of €5 billion (then $5.5 billion) and nearly a decade late from its 2016 delivery date.
Now, however, the fusion sector might finally have something to show to the world for all its troubles thanks to a major milestone by a Chinese startup. Shanghai-based Energy Singularity has effectively completed the engineering feasibility verification of high-temperature superconducting for its Honghuang 70 (HH70) tokamak device, giving China a first-mover advantage in the critical field of high-temperature superconducting magnetic confinement fusion. Energy Singularity has also become the world’s first commercial company to build and operate an all-superconducting tokamak.
“The design work of the device began in March 2022, and the overall installation was completed by the end of February this year, setting the fastest record for the research and construction of superconducting tokamak devices worldwide,” Yang Zhao, Energy Singularity’s Chief Executive Officer, has revealed.
So, how did this little-known Chinese company manage to pull off in two years what ITER has failed to achieve in nearly two decades?
According to Yang, using high-temperature superconducting materials can reduce the volume of a device to about 2 percent of that of traditional low-temperature superconducting devices, allowing the construction period of the device to be shortened from ~ 30 years to just 3-4 years.
According to Yang, the company owns independent intellectual property rights of HH70, with a domestication rate of over 96 percent, adding that all of the device’s magnet systems are constructed using high-temperature superconducting materials. Despite its commendable success, Energy Singularity is not resting on its laurels, with Yang revealing the company plans to complete the next generation high magnetic field high-temperature superconducting tokamak device dubbed HH170 with a deuterium-tritium equivalent energy gain (Q) greater than 10 by 2027. In fusion parlance, the Q value reflects the energy efficiency of the fusion reactor, that is, the ratio of the energy generated by the device to the energy input required to sustain the fusion reaction. Q values greater than 1 means the reactor generates more energy than what it consumes, which is essentially what fusion research has been trying to achieve in a commercial reactor for decades. Currently, the greatest Q factor that scientists have achieved is just 1.53.
Small Reactor Design
Energy Singularity is not the only fusion startup that’s pursuing small reactor designs. Deven, Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems is collaborating with MIT to build their small fusion reactor. Dubbed Sparc, the reactor is ~1/65th the volume of ITER’s reactor. The experimental reactor is expected to generate about 100 MW of heat energy in pulses of about 10 seconds – bursts big enough to power a small city.
That said, small reactors are hardly unique to the nuclear fusion sector. The Biden administration has been a strong proponent of Small Modular Reactors (SMR) that have been making the waves in the nuclear fission space.
Three years ago, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)8 approved Centrus Energy Corp.’s (NYSE:LEU) request to make High Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU) at its enrichment facility in Piketon, Ohio, becoming the first company in the western world outside Russia to do so. Applications for HALEU are currently limited to research reactors and medical isotope production; however, HALEU will be needed for more than half of the SMRs currently in development across the globe. HALEU is only currently available from TENEX, a Rosatom subsidiary.
Last November, Centrus Energy announced that it had made its first delivery of 20 kilograms of HALEU UF6 to the DoE, completing Phase One of its contract. The company managed to complete the first phase under budget and ahead of schedule. Centrus will now immediately proceed to Phase Two of the contract–requiring HALEU production at the rate of 900 kilograms per year.
In January, the DoE issued a request for proposals (RFP) for uranium enrichment services to help establish a reliable domestic supply of fuels using HALEU. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will provide up to $500 million for HALEU enrichment contracts selected through this RFP.
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Let’s just recall that a nuclear fusion power generator comes in at least three generations:
1st generation: build a Tokamak, or anything similar that ‘generates power’ (‘Q much larger than 1’ as mentioned in the article) in a consistent way.
2nd generation: build a device that can a/ sustain fusion for minutes, hours, days and weeks and b/ do something useful with the extraordinary amount of heat being generated.
3rd generation: build a power generation system that is useable and serviceable and can be deployed.
The Tokamak design has been around since ~70 years. Reaching fusion is a milestone, reaching Q>1 is another, doing this for more than 1 second still another.
The nuclear fusion technology is today at about the same level of maturity as nuclear fission in 1939: we know it exists, and we have a few prototypes that exhibit the desired behavior. 80 years later, we are still inventing the SMR.
People have been saying for at least 50 years that fusion will be available in 50 years. That’s still at least two generations away, so way beyond the Jackpot (which imnsho will hit in 2045 at the last).
A few weeks ago Construction Physics did this overview of fusion.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/will-we-ever-get-fusion-power
He doesn’t take a position on whether it will ever be practical but the article does seem to agree with you.
Just like flying cars.
And AI.
This scam has been around for years under other names including big data and quantum computing.
Maybe AI can give us fusion power..
Back in the mid-1970s I did PR for the University of Rochester’s Laser Fusion Feasability Project. It is now called the Laboratory for Laser Energetics. To the best of my knowledge, they are not much closer to success now than they were back then.
New technique may help achieve mass production fusion energy
Can’t help noticing that “nuclear fusion technology is today at about the same level of maturity as nuclear fission in 1939”, given that nuclear fission was given practical effect in August 1945.
Perhaps a Manhatten Project for nuclear fusion with research and brains brought together to make it a reality, rather than dispersed across a dozen nations and private companies keeping their ideas and secrets to themselves for commercial advantage could make it a reality in a similar few years. Unfortunately I suspect the need to save civilised life as we know it will continue to take a back seat to the profit motive.
The profit motive and civilized life are inseparable.
Interesting, though somehow vague. Has Energy Singularity actually pressed the “on” button? Results? Unclear from this article.
Yes. They have injected and contained plasma in their thingy. As far as I understood, they aim to build a Q=10 version by 2030.
That said, containment is just one of the problems with fusion. Cooling that 150-300 million °C beast is a problem not yet solved. The fission reactors of today are having issues due to the lack of enough cool fresh water for their secondary cooling system and they barely reach 1000 °C.
The best option for cooling the mantle before it melts is helium, which can take a lot of heat, but unfortunately is not very good at transferring it (being so light), so enormous amounts will be needed. And on the planet Earth, helium is one of the rare elements.
What does that Q=10 mean exactly? A couple of years ago, there was a great outpour of optimism as one of those experimental fusion lab in the USA relying, IIRC, upon some super-advanced laser technology, had managed to sustain a Q>1 reaction for a tiny amount of time.
When all was clearly laid out, the Q>1 referred to the energy produced with respect to the energy delivered by the laser beams. When the totality of the energy put into the whole installation necessary to drive the reaction was taken into account, that Q factor was reduced to something like 0.01.
So what are they actually measuring in that HH70 tokamak, and how big a step forward is it actually?
Thank you for that. I don’t know a thing about it but at 150-300 million °C, it occurs to me that the only place you might manage that would be in outer space? Plenty of cool there.
A fusion reactor in space? It would not transfer the heat as such because there isn’t much conductivity. But that would not matter as it wouldn’t cause a problem unless you visit the fusion reactor.
It could send high energy packets through the void of space, at the speed of light. These energy packets could beam through the atmosphere, and then be intercepted by devices that turn the energy packets into electricity. Or even directly into edible plants!
We ought to engineer these plants to utilize said light energy. I propose it to be called something like “photosynthesis” as we are integrating the photons into useful energy. The DoE should get on that! It could be revolutionary.
I don’t see a breakthrough here, just some nice incremental progress at best. As the article mentions, others are working on similar projects with various milestones achieved. I’d like to know what has really happened here, but the article is too much of a marketing fluff press release to tell. Hopefully the nerdosphere will react with a more objective take within a few days. Meanwhile this is the same thing we hear all the time about cancer cured in mice, 5x better batteries in a lab, etc. Not a scam, but overblown reporting.
Small nitpick: “gets climate change enough under control so as to assure modern lifestyles continue, a proposition very much in doubt”. Climate change is simply one of the impediments to modern lifestyles; if it were somehow overcome, we would still have resource shortages, destruction of the Earth’s capacity to maintain living beings, etc. So though climate change is the most pressing issue, it’s far from the only one; fact is, insofar as I see it, is that modern lifestyles are doomed, though we might be able to keep some parts of them going on even if we accepted that.
Exactly! Overshoot is our predicament. Collapse is the result.
Having unlimited low cost energy while maintaining capitalism and ‘our modern lifestyle’ would in no time wreck the planet once and for all.
Yes but the AI will build giant sea walls for us like in Blade Runner. Checkmate hippie!
And anyway the development of a matter-antimatter reactor (vide Star Trek) is just around the corner. Double checkmate!
And the waste heat (the unavoidable consequence of doing anything useful with the energy) will raise the earth’s surface temperature to incandescence.
The cultures of contentment are in danger.
Useful US-based overview (2024) of China’s nuclear industry, including state enterprise and financing. It cites Kenneth Luongo a few times – elsewhere he claims Russia has threatened Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, so might be handy to check if he’s one of the usual neolib suspects.
It struck me that the mover-advantage dynamic is similar to Russia’s in arms development and manufacture. I wonder if the thorium reactor program is the most promising.
For what it´s worth: I am no expert at all in nuclear fusion. But my late father was. He first trained as a physicist then studied mathematics and became one of the leading experts on the mathematical modelling of small particles. He worked at the nuclear research facility at Jülich (Kernforschungszentrum) at Berkeley, the Lawrence Livermore Laborities and was Professor of Mathematics in Germany. At his eighties birthday there was the former head of the Dubna laboratory in Moscow (the leading nuclear research facility of the USSR) and other scientists from all over the world. Their specialisation was so arcane and so rare that they knew of each other and read their respective papers even during the Cold War.
Not being able to make head or toe about the possibilities one day I asked my father whether there would ever be a fusion reactor. He laughed and told me absolutely not. It was a physical impossibilty. Maybe for a short time frame but never in the sense that this reactor would produce more energy than went into the building and starting the process. But the politicians didn´t know that. The fusion reactor fantasy was a great way to get research money and furhermore a great way to keep physics departments well staffed and well financed. And certainly there were interesting insights to be gained by trying to build a fusion reactor. But it would never work and no physicist would ever admit that. You don´t slay the goose that lays golden eggs.
It’s a long process to safely transform matter into useful energy for more than an instant…but in a short couple of paragraphs Tom67 has usefully, if momentarily, transformed Naked Capitalism into Naked Physics deployment ;- )
Tom67, thank you. This type of testimonial anecdote is one of the main ways important truths surface, get denied, and turn out to be more accurate by far than the main or consensus narrative.
So when particles fuse, the bulk of the atomic energy is consumed by the strong force that keeps the fused particles together, like the force that keeps protons and neutrons together? So very little energy is available in excess? So does that mean that any small percentage of useable energy from fusion reactions would need to be scaled up massively to be a source of energy? So, stupid question: Why don’t they engineer a perpetual fission-fusion reactor – they could feed each other Seymour.
“Science advances one funeral at a time” – Max Planck
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2024-06-19/China-makes-fusion-tech-breakthrough-with-world-s-first-HH70-Tokamak-1uysdIIXBEk/p.html
June 19, 2024
China makes fusion tech breakthrough with world’s first HH70 Tokamak
China witnessed a historic moment with the completion and operation of the world’s first fully high-temperature superconducting tokamak device, named HH70, in its eastern Municipality of Shanghai on Tuesday, marking a significant leap forward in global fusion technology development for clean energy.
Tokamak devices, often called “artificial suns,” are traditionally large and expensive.
Designed and built by a commercial company, Energy Singularity, the HH70 is smaller and cheaper to produce, paving the way for more commercially viable fusion reactors in the future, said Guo Houyang, co-founder and CTO of Energy Singularity.
The HH70 boasts a magnetic system constructed from high-temperature superconducting materials, a global first. Energy Singularity achieved this feat within two years, setting a world record for the fastest development and construction of a superconducting tokamak device.
The successful operation of the HH70 marks a significant milestone for China. It signifies a major step forward in verifying the engineering feasibility of high-temperature superconducting tokamaks, paving the way for a clean and sustainable energy future…
High-temperature superconductors are a significant improvement towards commercialization, once the (TRL2) problems of sustained fusion are solved. I studied plasma fusion physics in the 1980s, and have seen important (largely incremental) improvements since. Achievement of Q>1 a few years ago was a “trick” – only for a few milliseconds – presumably as a funding argument – equivalent to Will E Coyote being bungee shot up the cliffside to the top, only to fall back.
I am unclear as to whether high-temperature superconductors allow much higher containment magnetic fields.
But once fusion is available, it will still be decades or longer before it replaces existing energy sources—energy demand always can grow to meet supply. One still finds old-fashioned batteries after decades of lithium rechargeables available—and still (planet-wide) burns lots of coal and wood.
Today, wood accounts for 4% and wind for 8% of global energy. Even today, we have not replaced a 50,000-year-old technology!
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2024-03-10/Nuclear-expert-to-CGTN-China-s-4th-gen-nuclear-power-is-taking-shape-1rPL3n3HLgI/p.html
March 10, 2024
Exclusive interview with China’s nuclear power expert: 4th-gen units are taking shape
By Zheng Yibing
During this year’s Two Sessions, Xu Pengfei, a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) National Committee and the chairman of the China Nuclear Power Engineering Corporation (CNPE), gave an exclusive interview to CGTN on China’s latest progress in nuclear energy.
Xu introduced his proposals for this year’s political season, along with the construction of Hualong-1 nuclear power units, the breakthroughs with the fourth-generation reactors and China’s involvement in research work on fusion reaction.
Two proposals on nuclear energy
Xu said the first proposal is to establish a national research and development base for radiation protection. “While we have safety designs for nuclear energy facilities, we stress radiation protection and how to minimize the effect of emergency situations,” he said.
“This will be a strong way of dispelling the public’s confusion about nuclear energy.”
The second proposal is for the establishment of a national data center to share information about all nuclear facilities. “This is to make these data much more useful,” he added.
Hualong-1, in batches
Almost three years after the commercial operation of the first Hualong-1 nuclear power unit, Xu mentioned the performance of such units built by China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC)…
My partner just saw a headline that Sam Altman says he’s using fusion power (for ai) starting in 2028, so I guess he’s read this story! Sorry gotta run (don’t have link)
One such:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sam-altman-backed-nuclear-fusion-200011428.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-18/sam-altman-s-helion-energy-promises-fusion-power-by-2028?srnd=homepage-americas/
https://archive.ph/I95kh/
Altman’s $3.7 Billion Fusion Startup Leaves Scientists Puzzled
With significant backing from OpenAI’s billionaire CEO, Helion Energy promises to deliver a fusion power plant by 2028. Its results so far remain mysterious.
Back. Thanks for posting the links.
Now having read the earlier posts and link I suspect that the fusion plan is the perfect foil for complaints that AI is using to much energy. The missing results in these stories…
Now any complaints can be referred to the fusion (co2 free supposedly) energy source just a year or two away. We know it will likely be just a year or two away for years – as long as AI is around!
Back in my grand dad’s time, people like Altman were called Flim-Flam Men. Petty grift.
I think this reflects a misunderstanding. For a grid to provide power on a stand by basis (the power is there whenever you want it), what you need is enough load. For it to be controllable and not break down, enough of that load needs to be top load that the engineers can dial up and down, like fossile fuels or hydro power. A system can run perfectly on just top load, like hydro power.
What base load like nuclear plants does is supply inflexible load. You do not want to have to turn nuclear plants off because demand goes down, because starting and stopping wears down the reactors faster. (If you have french reactors you can spill some of the power without turning off, but as most reactors can’t do that I will ignore it for now.) What the nuclear plants does is displace your flexible top load for when it is really needed.
Intermittent power sources does really the same thing, it displaces top load.
The grid has to be constructed somewhat differently, but the basic function is the same, to displace top load. Intermittent power sources varies with the weather, nuclear varies with detected risks. For example, when much of the french reactors stood still under 2022, it (together with the lack of gas, but in MWh the nuclear part was much bigger), sent electricity prices in Europe sky high in order to kill enough demand that the supply could provide enough load. As I remember it, it was a newly discovered flaw that needed fixing.
Therefore nuclear plants and wind and solar are competing for investments in the same niche, displacing top load. At present the renewables are cheaper and faster to construct. There could come a time when nuclear and renewables are both needed because all the good places to place wind and solar are taken, but we are far from that (and likely other constraints will kick in first).
I think this analysis omits a crucial factor. Wind and solar are not dispatchable. You cannot command the sun and the wind! Where hydro power and fossil fuel power is dispatchable: flick a switch and the turbines spin (with more or less lag, which can be accounted for in grid design and management).
Nuclear power is also dispatchable. However, it has quite a lag, if the reactor is idling. Days, not seconds (hydro), minutes (gas) or hours (oil and coal). Less lag if only the turbine is idling but that poses operational issues (no self-power, need for alternative steam expansion etc).
So nuclear is well matched to cover the minimum power requirement in the 24h cycle. It is not well matched to cover the rest.
However, solar and wind need substantial battery assistance to cover this additional load (in the absence of substantial reengineering of daily demand curves). Hence the interest in 4th generation nuclear power plants, which run hotter and thus generate enough power and process heat to split water/ammonia for fuel cells or to drive industrial processes. Presumably the output to electricity/fuel/industrial process can be adjusted quicker than the underlying reactor activity.
Solar and wind have a fundamental problem of unreliability (especially wind, winter high pressure systems can see zero wind periods in Europe lasting for days). Every kW of solar and wind production has to be duplicated by something dispatchable unless the use is optional and could be constrained by demand management.
Hi Revenant I suggest you are getting a little muddled up about “unreliability”. ALL power stations break down and need to be shut down for maintenance at some point or other.
For a breakdown at a nuclear or coal power station that can mean the loss of 500MW or even gigawatts of power in seconds. The grid has to be designed with the capacity to replace this generating capacity or shut down this amount of load within minutes. Otherwise the whole grid will black out. Starting up a new coal or nuclear unit will take many hours for coal and/or even days for nuclear which is why both coal and nuclear are useless for this purpose. Even when they don’t breakdown catastrophically coal and nuclear can only vary their output very slowly and within a narrow band, otherwise they both tend to become unstable and then quite literally blow up.
Wind tends to fail less catastrophically. If a wind turbine breaks down it will be only 5 or 10MW which is much easier to replace than 500MW. When the wind dies down it is usually over a period of half an hour or more and is reasonably forecastable which makes it much easier to organise replacement generation or load shutdown.
Solar power as long as it is sunny can go from 100% to zero then back to 100% in seconds. It is easy to predict when the sun is going to go down and there is a nice easy taper off in power.
Batteries can react in seconds. They can also provide a lot of “grid services ” that help stabilise the grid.
To build a reliable grid you have to consider all possible contingencies that will cause you loss of generation and then find alternatives. That is the case whether you grid is based on coal, nuclear, gas, solar, wind, hydro or anything else.
I meant unreliability in the sense that you cannot rely on them to provide dispatchable power, not mechanical failure of an individual unit. You could have wind turbines in full working order from sea to shining sea and without wind you will still have no power.
The “dark start” scenario you outline is just a specialised case of this. In the UK, the Dinorwig pumped storage hydro power station(and others in Scotland?) is specifically tasked with restarting the grid after a grid failure. If necessary, you can probable open to valves manually to empty the upper lake into the lower. It generates a lot of power but only briefly. It is mainly used to balance power daily, pumping water up at night ready to meet demand peaks in the day.
Grids need batteries, whether electrochemical or hydraulic, to buffer demand. However, grids need other things too, like spinning generation to ensure frequency stability (solar generation is DC and cannot do this;wind turbines spin but not necessarily when you need to tweak grid frequency).
We cannot run an AC grid on wind and solar, we need sources of despatchable, spinning AC generation and we need these to be multiple and redundant (for mechanical failure as you note) and we need this for baseload and probably also for peak load. You can layer wind and solar and batteries on top of this foundation. If you don’t want coal and oil, this foundation needs to be nuclear. You probably still need some gas CCGT too because nuclear is not very responsive.
I’m planting fruit trees and growing a garden because I think Mother Nature has figured out this energy stuff over millions of years better than slightly-evolved chimps ever could.
Nyclear fusion work has been around for many decades:
Fusion research in the UK started in earnest in the UK in the later 1940s / 1950s – with work being undertaken at Aldermaston, various universities including Imperial College London and Oxford and the newly formed Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. Zero Energy Thermonuclear Assembly (or ZETA) at Harwell was the most prominent experiment in this period.And
The Nuclear Finisusion work has yet to produce more energy than it consumes.
Unlike many on this site I’m pro fission and fusion.
I think it’s foolish to underestimate what China is capable of.
They have the engineering, money and drive to do it.
I’m pro actual working (in this decade at latest) fission or fusion. Maybe the Chinese can do it someday. Awaiting evidence.
So far I’ve not heard of “working” nuclear electrical generation. By working I think I can express a few qualities that most on this site would agree with: makes more energy than it consumes, does not create inordinate quantities of waste, and is cost effective. “Working” also has to be competitive with the alternatives or people will choose those instead.
[ So far I’ve not heard of “working” nuclear electrical generation… ]
https://english.news.cn/20240423/dd56cbe0c1ce4d4b9d4a7a6e0a04bb99/c.html
April 23, 2024
China’s nuclear power generation reaches 440,000 GWh in 2023
BEIJING — Nuclear power generation on the Chinese mainland reached 440,000 gigawatt-hours in 2023, accounting for nearly 5 percent of total national electricity output, according to the China Atomic Energy Authority on Tuesday…
Your link says China is supplying 5% of its electricity needs from nuclear power. My three criteria for “working” were not addressed. Let’s assume those traditional fission plants at least generate more power than they consume. Fusion a whole different question.
Not willing to just assume those plants don’t produce plenty of waste and are cost competitive. The fact that China is still building plenty of coal plants, and leads the world in solar and wind energy installations, makes me think, no, they don’t see a huge financial savings with nuclear.
Me too MicaT. And complaining about spending 20 billion on fusion at ITER with no results seems to be a problem according to the article. Wait a minute……did we not just send 60 billion to Ukraine on top of the 120 billion we spent in the last two years? Oh and California High Speed Rail……was that not 68 billion and we have about 50 feet of rail? And I am hearing that they can’t develop fusion on 20 billion? Is anybody serious? The Chinese are building some 23 fission plants per year and they have tens of thousands of miles of HSR. The west is grossly underfunding fusion research just as we are underfunding infrastructure and we are not producing enough physicists and engineers to even begin to do much and those that we do produce are largely Chiinese and both political parties have made it clear they do not like Chinese. We might remind ourselves the Chinese built the transcontinental railway through the Rockies….. Let us hope they succeed at fusion which if done properly would enable us to control greenhouse warming.
Subeditor service. Charitably has gained an extraneous “i” in the first para.
If you want to know what a working fusion reactor looks like, go outside during the day and look up.
Sorry, nope. The author either doesn’t know, or discredits himself, by saying the Q>1 has been achieved. Not even close. The sort of closest at Lawrance Livermore needs to increase Q by over 100%.
This is all insane of course. The fiction that there is some silver bullet technology that will allow things to continue as they are, lower costs, etc. is just that — fiction.
This really smells like technology advancement by PR.
ITER is not now expected to be running before 2035, and it’s only an experimental reactor. I think all these commercial tokomaks are getting a bit previous. Maybe one of them will crack it but I doubt it. On the other hand at least people are working on the problem rather than waiting.
Tokomaks are popular because they are easy to build (relatively) and their fuel only needs to be heated a few hundred million degrees. I think stellarators may prove more effective but ideally I would like to see more effort going into burning HB11 fuel which emits less radiation, can be converted directly to electricity (no steam engines!) but does need to be heated to billions of degrees. This is what Helion is doing with its wacky crashing plasma rings, and LPP Fusion with its more modest dense plasma focus approach.
Japan and the US and Taiwan also have good fusion-like companies that are past engineering breakeven. See SolidStateFusion.Org
Don’t bet against fission! Most of these plasma fusion companies are inferior to a manufactured dry SMR, which are coming on line any year we want. The ADVANCE act eliminates the main hurdle… Pathologically skeptical anti_science regulators. Hey 88-2 in the Senate is as bipartisan as it gets. One of the two naysayers doesn’t even have a party… BS himself.
We seem to be willing to throw billions at pie in the sky fusion projects but in the U.S. there has been almost a total ban on research into safer fission plants. There seem to be some designs that are much, much safer than the 1950’s designs we worked with before and yet, no money is plowed into making those workable, with their prospects being much greater than fusion projects.
Is great puzzlement.
The Chinese are building a variant of the Westinghouse gravity water cooled unit. Westinghouse went bankrupt and the Chinese bought them and their patents. I think it is called the AP 1000. We built one in Georgia in the last few years after decades of cost overruns and redos. This is the latest model although some 25 years old. In an emergency gravity is used to use water to cool the reactor.