To what amount can you scale up solar in a particular region?!
Yeah, I know, we're into low-power everything nowadays... but let's say that you end up with a desperate need for smth like 1 TW of power for something like a sea-water desalination plant, massive irrigation needs because climate change fucked you up, or building a huge set of flood barriers (think what Nederlands has now, but you need them 100x larger, 5x cheaper and done FAST) because sea levels rose and people will die if you don't get the massive cheap energy needs for these projects ASAP. Or maybe a huge TW power laser for some space-dev project if you don't want to think of disasters. Or maybe to decontaminate large amounts of water/soil/air after the first large-ish nuclear/bio/chemical war that will take place on Earth.
If you're betting on solar and wind and you end up suddenly needing high levels of cheap (it can be "long-term like 100 years on cheap" if you're a country with a good credit score) power, you're.... fucked! Yeah, fusion won't be scalable to massive energy needs "out of the lab", but in 100 years from now when your grandchildren will need it to save their lives from the consequences of our planetary fuck-ups, it will be!
(And yeah, short term you can scale fission better probably. So investment into "dirt-cheap fission power that anyone can have" is also crucial. But longer term it hits other scalability bounds.).
In a perfect world where we don't totally fuck-up the planet, solar and hydro and geotermal and wind and waves would be enough.
In the real world, where we will fuck-up the planet, things like fusion are desperately needed to un-fuck regions of it and re-terraform them (and also to get into space exploration fast and big, not "snail-paced solar-powered").
Sure there's engineering challenges in that, but no more than some hypothetical case where we need an entire fusion plant in some locality right now.
Maybe the region where solar needs can be scaled is not in your country. Maybe you're at war with that country. Or maybe the company producing that power would only sell you the power at some outrageous price that you don't want to pay. Maybe you want to be the one selling not buying that power, you want to be the one making profit. Maybe your neighbor just considers you're an inferior race so he will not even sell you the power for the flood dams or the desalination plant. Or maybe you're the bad guy, but now because people won't sell you what you need at realistic prices you contemplate of... maybe nuking some sense into them, because if 1mil of your people might die of hunger, why not have 2mil of theirs die burned and irradiated?
Any solutions that assumes people working well together in some "perfect world order" are very dangerous. Humanity ain't "a giant organism". We're a bunch of warring tribes with carefully disguised racist, xenophobic and even purely sadistical tendencies just waiting for an excuse to come out!
We need more technologies that just work and can be used SUSTAINABLY in any random place and at any scale regardless of how bad we fucked up or we're planning to fuck up.
On the one hand, global trade can strengthen relationships between nations and make war less likely. On the other hand, look at how Russia uses the threat of turning off gas supplies to pressure european countries.
Well that doesn't sound like fusion. At all.
This applies to things like ships and submarines, and to spacecraft.
So yeah, solar/etc. sounds great in an ideal scenario in a perfect world, but what if you're not on this world? Solar power isn't sufficient to do serious mining operations in the asteroid belt or to redirect a large asteroid threatening to impact the Earth. It also won't power your aircraft carrier or cruise ship. A clean source of nuclear power would be ideal for all these things, if we can figure out how to make such a thing work.
Yes, we can't do fusion in any practical manner at the moment, but we can't do fission scaled-down either: if you disagree, please show me an example which is economically successful. US Navy ships don't count (not "economically successful"). Someone actually tried building a fission-powered commercial cargo ship ages ago; it didn't last very long. It cost so much to operate that it was retired in a few years and sent to a museum in Charleston SC. With absurdly expensive fuel, nasty waste which needs to be disposed of somehow, and extremely dangerous operation requiring highly-trained personnel, fission plants only make commercial sense when they're scaled up to gigawatt scale power plants. Fusion plants may not be practical yet, but they'll never be practical if no effort is spent on R&D to make them that way.
Scaled down fission reactors like the Toshiba 4S can be sized to power an apartment building or city block. There are numerous micro reactor designs available and a variety of companies working to try to create a market for them.
When it comes to terrestrial reactors then fusion reactors will be enormous (need to generate a lot of power to compensate for the huge risk and the massive costs that it will take to build them) and if you are talking about putting reactors in space then it is foolish to consider anything but fission for at least our lifetime.
Fusion takes longer to scale than any kind of power supply we use. At least H2 + H3 fusion, that is the easiest kind does. You'd be much better building a huge solar array on demand.
> This might sound a bit like a buzz-kill, but I don't think fusion power is necessarily competitively cheap.
> I think it will be comparable to nuclear power with a ~ 10 times higher capital investment to build a fusion-plant.
> Already now solar is said to be cheaper then nuclear.
> But nevertheless humanity should explore fusion since it is more or less the only significant power source not (indrectly) depending on the sun.
> As far as I can see the funding of fusion research is at about the same level as particle physics which definilty does not provide any other than philosophical progress.
Goodness.
There is another way of doing fission, that was demonstrated (working prototype and all) in the 60's: molten salt. You basically dissolve the fissile matter in molten salt, provide initial heat, and you have a reaction going. This has multiple advantages:
- Originally designed for a nuclear plane, it is capable of reacting to load changes very quickly. It's basically easy to power-up, and easy to shut down.
- It is amenable to a passive security set up: when all goes wrong, the reactor shuts down by default. When it does, the radioactive matter is trapped in no-longer-molten salt, such that contamination is limited even if there is a leak.
- It consumes 90% of the fissile matter before it has to go to recycling. (Current reactors do about 10%.)
- It currently produces 5 times less waste than current reactors. There is hope to do even better.
- Last but not least, it can run off thorium, which is 4 times more abundant than uranium, and much better spread out geographically.
With one or two decades and a few billion dollars, we could make commercial grade reactors. They would almost certainly be significantly cleaner, and much safer than current light water reactors. They could adapt to changes of demand in the power grid, or compensate for the volatility of most renewable power sources without the need for a "battery miracle". Overall, they would make a terrific mid-term solution, that could last a couple centuries. More than enough time to come up with something better.
I'm sure with some extra R&D people could make those reactors reliable, but if you search the new generation reactors on Wikipedia, you'll see every one of them ended in some kind of failure.
Another possible cause is path dependence. We have a whole industry around solid fuel, light water reactors. Switching to molten salt throws much of that away.
Much research still need to be done. We may want cleaner salts, we want even less radioactive waste, and we definitely want to accurately assess the safety of this stuff ("passive security" is not enough by itself). This means more prototypes reactors, of various sizes, each more expensive than before. We want a few million dollars for the small ones, then a few billions for the big ones.
It may not be just lack of founding. Materials science has advanced a lot since then, and those problems look solvable now, but I'm not sure they could be solved by the 60's.
To quote "Technologies Underlying Weapons of Mass Destruction",
Reactor-grade plutonium recovered from civilian reactors differs from weapon-grade plutonium in the relative proportions of various plutonium isotopes. Reactor-grade plutonium has a higher rate of spontaneous fission reactions than weapon-grade, generating neutrons that can initiate the nuclear chain reaction during weapon detonation sooner than would be optimal. As a result, using reactor-grade plutonium in a first generation nuclear weapon can significantly reduce both the predictability and the expected yield of a weapon designed by a proliferant state.
None of the states that have either made nuclear weapons or attempted to do so appear to have selected anything but high-quality plutonium or uranium for their designs. Nevertheless, from a technical perspective, reactor grade plutonium can be used to make nuclear weapons, and any state possessing significant quantities of separated plutonium should be considered to have the material needed to fabricate nuclear components for nuclear explosive devices in a short period of time.
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/ota/9344.pdf
If you want to seize on the part where it says that one could build bombs from civilian reactor waste even though it's less straightforward and no nuclear weapons state has ever done that, then I'll point out that the thorium fuel cycle likewise could be used for bombs even though no NWS has ever taken that path (Quoting LANL's "Thorium Based Power Systems and Relevant Safeguards Considerations"):
Thorium is not safeguarded until it is converted into fuel materials. It would seem that if the starting point for uranium safeguards is moved up and thorium begins to play a larger role in the global nuclear establishment, then thorium safeguards should move to the equivalent point in the thorium fuel cycle.
Unlike thorium, U-233 is subject to stringent safeguards. An SQ of U-233 is only 8 Kg, the same as plutonium. U-233 is a highly desirable weapons material despite any practical U-232 content. According to the material attractiveness studies done at LANL, PNNL and LLNL, the additional dose from U-232 decay products is insufficient to stop a determined adversary. While it may be somewhat beneficial to physical protection, the dose rate is not high enough to incapacitate workers. Dose rates can be greatly reduced with shielding and military personnel handling a fabricated weapon should be able to have reasonable dose rates using established techniques. For example, the pit can be stored in lead shielding and only placed in the weapon immediately before use.
http://permalink.lanl.gov/object/tr?what=info:lanl-repo/lare...
The actual military lineage of civilian LWRs is that the US Navy developed pressurized water reactors fueled with enriched uranium to power vessels in the 1950s, starting with USS Nautilus. That variety of reactor had the fewest unknowns when the civilian nuclear industry first developed in the US and the path dependency effects continue today.
However, this was probably not the case for the first reactors. If I recall my documentary properly "la face gâchée du nucléaire" (French and German only I'm afraid), the technology was initially chosen because it could produce plutonium. Therefore it got lots of research, and naturally ended up working best.
Submarines were of course responsible for much of the continued funding. Molten salt got cut off in no small part because the very idea of a nuclear plane was not very good.
That said, I'll need to study this subject more closely before I consider myself properly informed.
The very first reactors were indeed built for plutonium production. Those 1940s reactors built in Hanford, WA, USA used unenriched natural uranium for fissile material, used purified graphite as their neutron moderator, and did not generate any useful energy. In fact they were net energy consumers because they needed an external power source to move water through to keep them cooled.
13 years after the Hanford reactors started, Shippingport became the first civil power reactor in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shippingport_Atomic_Power_Stat...
Shippingport literally started with a surplus naval reactor from a cancelled aircraft carrier project. It was a pressurized light water reactor requiring enriched fuel like most reactors now operating commercially. Everything about it was different from the early plutonium reactors: the fuel, the moderator, the heat exchange... by a funny coincidence, Shippingport was also the only commercial reactor in the US to use the thorium fuel cycle, from 1977 to 1982.
Maybe the misunderstanding started from the fact that the first British power-generation reactors were intended to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Those reactors were quite different from light-water reactors: graphite-moderated, gas-cooled, and using unenriched fuel.
The only up side is that the decay products have a shorter half life. So the waste will only be a problem for a century or so, instead of for millennia.
This may be better than fission, but it's definitely not clean by any realistic definition of the word.
By contrast the byproducts of a fission reaction are set by the fuels used and include really nasty stuff like Strontium-90 and so on. But even fission plants are designed so that the radioactive byproducts are essentially all spent fuel or things contaminated by spent fuel. Neutron activation is a design consideration rather than a source of waste.
Of course the neutron flux will tend to enbrittle the metals used in it's construction which will have the effect of increasing maintenance costs.
> The only up side is that the decay products have a shorter half life. So the waste will only be a problem for a century or so, instead of for millennia.
We have people who live 'for a century or so' but we don't even have languages (now!) that have lasted a millenia.
Wut?
Also, Tibetan maintains the same spellings from 1200 years ago, but that really just means that it's very, very difficult to spell, since the pronunciation no longer matches spelling well.
These make interesting exceptions to the general rule, so I think the original point is still very valid. I'm curious about old vs. modern Syrian, if anyone knows about that.
I'd posit that storage is not a solved problem, and a big part of that is a lack of confidence that we can reliably communicate with the people who will have to deal with this waste in the distant future.
There's also the inherent disdain involved in passing on massive costs and risks to future generations to solve a comparatively short-term problem of ours.
Most importantly they are vastly safer and thus need far less security and far less insurance. Remember a huge benefit for PV solar and wind is they don't need guards.
PS: Another consideration is the half life is short enough that over 20 years things become a lot less radioactive. Fission has some half lives just long enough to be a real pain.
[I guess decommissioning costs might be lower but are they actually included in the costs of operating normal nuclear plants?]
Energy is one big scam, all energy sources are artificially suppressed and sold at grossely inflated prices.
What about the big fusion reactor in the Sky? Shouldn't we go all in on solar? Why is so difficult to harness that source? Maybe the same obstacles make fusion so difficult to pursue.
The largest solar farm in the US, the Topaz Solar Farm in California, covers 25sq/km has a peak generation capacity of 550MW. The source uses the median of the 59 nuclear plants in the US to arrive at its 3.36sq/km (1.3sq/mile) per 1,000MW figure but the largest nuclear plant ever built, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Japan, produces ~8MW on just 4.2sq/km of land which makes it twice as efficient in terms of land use as the median US plant.
That places solar at 13.75 sq/km per 1,000MW compared to nuclear's 0.525sq/km using the best case scenario for the density of existing sources. That doesn't even account for the variable output of the solar plant versus the consistency of nuclear generation. Solar is ultimately far too land hungry to ever serve as the world's primary source of electrity.
Source: http://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/Policy/Pap...
Make everything out of environmentally friendly, lighter and long lasting aluminium rather than steel + concrete.
Have street lighting that is as bright as sunlight over entire cities, allowing us to no longer be dependant on time of day.
Growing food crops indoors with artificial light, saving massive amounts of land.
Desalination to make all our water. No longer extracting it from rivers and aquifers. A cleaner, less polluted water source.
A single energy source - today we use petroleum (cars), natural gas (cooking and heating), electricity (lighting etc.), diesel (transport) and many more in industry. All of those need distribution networks. A single cheap energy source could coalesce a lot of infrastructure.
Please, no. Some of what you said I'm onboard with, but definitely not this. The human impact of perpetual day is large and negative. The negative impact of massive artificial lighting on astronomy is also quite massive.
Will the heat from all that electricity generation affect the environment in significant ways?
At which energy usage scale humanity will be restricted by the planet environment capacity to deal with the generated heat?
I think we're a long way from that yet though.
The real annualized power of the Topaz Solar Farm comes to 6 megawatts per square kilometer, using its 2015 generation total of 1,301,337 MWh. At that areal productivity[1], if you could ignore intermittency, it would take ~95,000 square kilometers to supply the 2013 US electricity demand of 4,986,400,000 MWh.
The US Corn Growers Association estimated that 27% of US corn grown in 2011 was for ethanol, and corn covered 92 million acres:
http://www.ethanolproducer.com/articles/8611/world-of-corn-r...
Converting 27% of 92 million acres to square kilometers, the US is using about 100,500 km^2 to produce ethanol.
But you can't ignore intermittency, so (barring much improved storage, which may happen but can't be assumed) solar PV is not a drop-in replacement for nuclear power.
[1]Other areas of the US get less sun than central California, but newer farms with more efficient panels and single axis tracking increase areal productivity significantly over the fixed-tilt CdTe construction of Topaz, so I think that 6 MW/km^2 is a reasonable number to use.
Because there's a hard upper limit of 1367 watts per square meter.
And, practically speaking, you're not going to reach 10% of that (panel efficiency, angles, cloud cover, air transmissivity, weather, damage, dust/dirt, night/dawn/dusk, conduit resistance, storage loss, etc).
That means the only way to scale up is land surface area, about 10,000 square kilometers of solar panels for 1TW power production, covering about 0.1% of the USA.
(Don't get me wrong, I'm just presenting objective numbers. I'm thrilled about Tesla / Solar City pushing rooftop solar with "invisible" tiles, and think every home should be built with at least the whole roof covered with solar panels. Independence is a big deal, and having at least substantial off-grid power is important.)
We may have to do it eventually, seeing as climate science is drowning under a flood of irrationality and lies.
All we need to invent is the wireless energy receiver!
It isn't enough.
Well it is enough, but there isn't an efficient method to store or transmit the captured power. Solar is awesome, but the places it is most available also happens to be where it is least needed, in general, I'm aware of Saudi Arabia.
It should also be pointed out that Solar is the most [1] green house gas producing method of green energy. Wind, Nuclear, Hydro-Electric, and Tidal are all vastly more carbon efficient.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emis...
... but still tiny compared to any form of fossil fuel or biomass!
Presumably the carbon footprint of solar is largely made up of fossil fuel used in the production and installation of PV panels themselves. This would decline over time as the grid, and vehicles, become greener. Eventually, new panels would be produced using energy from existing panels, closing the loop.
Wind, Nuclear, Hydro-Electric, and Tidal are all vastly more carbon efficient.
The difference is pretty small according to the table you posted. They're all much, much better than fossil fuels.
Coal: 770 Gas: 410 Rooftop solar: 26 Offshore wind: 8 Nuclear: 3.7
So, the word "vastly" above might be overstating things. Solar certainly isn't the most efficient, but it's pretty damn efficient compared to anything produced by biological processes.
I'm not comparing Roof Top solar to Coal or Natural Gas yes very clear winner there. I'm comparing it to Hydro-Electric, Nuclear, Tidal, and Wind where it is by far the dirtiest.
Thank you for making it clear that I was not being unfair, even in my pre-edited state.
They are a small difference compared to extractive mining. Statistics rhetorical tricks aside, the world would be much better off if we were using any mix of the non-extractive power technologies, even if that mix heavily weights rooftop solar.
Fundamentally the fact that rooftop solar is something I can put some money into tomorrow and see the results in six months means it is effective, which offends many people who would prefer that we spend our efforts in ineffective ways, either for ideological reasons (amusing that nuclear doesn't appeal to these types) or because they wish to maintain the status quo. Since the science shows that status quo is going to drown the island I live on inside of 75 years, I'm not a big fan of this point of view. My island is probably already dead, and the 80K people that live here need to find a new home in our or our children's lifetimes, but I am motivated to make choices that don't produce more stories like mine.
It doesn't have to do everything. But it's something, and something you can personally choose to do. As opposed to, oh, for example a geothermal facility, which I can't exactly put in my back yard.
Still, the virtually unlimited energy available via this means is making it increasingly promising. Moving forward, storage technology will help overcome some of the limitations.
If we could store energy cheaply and efficiently, we would not need fusion plants. We would just use solar power. And if we had fusion plants without a cheap and efficient way to store energy, there would still be energy problems like in transportation, wouldn't there? I mean the reason most cars for instance are not electric nowadays is not because we can't generate enough electricity, it's because we can't store enough electric energy in a car.
Perhaps we should not go "all on" anything. Solar is available now, it's getting cheaper by the day, and it's very easy to install and use. But it's intermittent, requires storage, it's not portable except at low levels, and energy density is not that great.
Fusion is obviously not available now. But when figured out, it would have all the strengths of classic nuclear energy without most of its weaknesses.
We should keep deploying solar as fast as possible, while aggressively pushing for fusion research.
And this new fusion power is completely clean and emission free, and what's more, generates no nuclear waste whatsoever! Worst case accident: oops, Fred dropped a solar panel on his toe.
You are. It's just not happening in the US, which has apparently decided that since coal was good enough for the 19th century, it's good enough for the 21st.
Not while most of the biggest economies on Earth relies on extracting and selling resources to satisfy civilizations energy needs.
1.) cost. It's incredibly expensive
2.) speculation. We don't _really_ know if it'll work yet.
Harnessing fossil fuels for cheap energy was so revolutionary that it's necessary for almost all aspects of our life. It would be great to do that with hydrogen too.
It's not like people are questioning whether we could ever produce a fusion reaction. We're questioning whether it's actually viable as an energy source.
https://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg
https://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_...
In 1976, a number of plans for investing in fusion were described, and what actually happened was that less was invested in fusion even than the level at which the program plan predicted we would never achieve fusion. This is the kind of thing that anyone who cares about humanity in general should find upsetting.
Massively abundant, cheap, clean energy should be one of humanity's top priorities.
Working, economic fusion power has a chance to revolutionize life as we know it. The countries that have access to the technology first will be at the forefront of a huge economic, social, cultural, scientific change.
It's more important than going to Mars (and would probably make going to Mars significantly easier). It's more important than nearly anything we're working on.