What we have now that we didn’t have before is the ability to draw a line around an area inside a test reactor and say we can, for very brief periods, get more energy exiting that area than enters it. This is major progress.

It isn’t a self-powered plant, it isn’t a plant that can sell power at any price, it isn’t a plant that is economically viable, and none of that is important to point out.

We have a baby taking its first steps being criticized for not running a marathon.

The economics are much more likely to make it infeasible. If fusion power is forever more expensive than solar+storage is there any point to it? Even fission has been priced out of the market and I never heard anybody claim that fusion will be cheaper than fission.

Fusion will definitely have big up front costs but the fuel costs could be as low as essentially zero or quite high depending on the tech that makes it, and who can say what the maintenance costs might be.

How much energy might be produced for how much operating cost is a really open ended question and there is a wide range of possible answers.

Worldwide oil prices have been going way up, we’re in a much different energy market than at have been for quite a while.

The long-term secular cost of electricity from renewables has been falling, with a trend that can be projected back at least 50 years. The incremental improvements are slow, but very steady. I suspect this is what ncmncm is referring to. In time, that cost curve will make all but the most essential of fuel-based generation, including nuclear fission, economically infeasible.

Yes, storage needs further development. That's also been coming along, and I believe we have sufficient options to address most needs.

I suspect you're referring to recent fluctuations in grid costs within Europe, and yes, that's also a reality, but a short-term one.

Both of you would do well to actively listen to the other, and clarify points of disagreement and/or misunderstanding.

Renewables have a much more complicated cost structure due to production timing issues and capacity issues, that show up especially during winter in a cold climate - which is exactly the issue Europe is having.

They keep getting papered over by advocates, but having had to deal with this directly by building my own off grid energy system - at some point you have to deal with it or you freeze.

Indirectly, I think they’re both touching on different elements of the problem and using incomplete data from both perspectives.

I'm not dismissing or minimising issues involved in a sustainable carbon-neutral energy scheme. But it's within reason.

Fusion power ... still seems not to be.

The challenge with that assessment for renewables, is as California and Germany both are discovering, there are missing elements of the cost equation being used that aren’t being accounted for, but someone has to pay for it or bad things happen. Notably bad even for politicians, like people freezing to death or dying from heat in the summer.

Both are currently pretending (near as I can tell) to understand what it means, and report numbers that seem pretty rosy.

Cost of energy total, however, in both these places continues to skyrocket.

They may be able to continue to avoid it, if folks take the price signal to heart and find workarounds (like finally improve insulation in the stock of older housing and public spaces, or switching energy consumption pattern to flatten peaks). I can tell you that California so far seems to not get the hint.

In Germany it’s the winter heating load, and figuring out how to actually keep themselves from freezing during outlier (but not that infrequent) events.

In California, it’s the aging transmission infrastructure and shifting peak production vs peak demand without adequate storage leading to brownouts, blackouts, and high surge pricing during summer air conditioner loads.

In California they changed new construction energy codes, but it’s mostly BS. With the rate of new construction being tiny compared to existing (old) stock, it’s not going to make a significant difference for 50+ years. A decent portion of existing homes have either no insulation, or 50 year old insulation with poor or zero maintenance, and are grandfathered in.

Energy prices in both places continue to increase, that may do it. Both places are near world records highs already, and have been for some time.

FWIW, David Roberts' Volts newsletter covers the USA-centric stuff.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-the-challenges-of-buil... [2021/08/27]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

> they’re both touching on different elements

There is no silver bullet. We need more of everything, there's always more to the story.

Transmission alone can’t fix this due to national security concerns, which is also a huge factor in the current energy cost problem in Europe - a large portion of European natural gas comes from Russia, and Russia has made it clear they’re willing to use gas for larger policy goals in the past. Including turning it off and causing huge safety issues if Germany and others won’t play ball.

Even solar in the Sahara has this problem, as these lines are easy to cut during a war or ‘accident’, and hard to protect over these distances.

Energy supplies and access to them played a huge role in WW2, and that hasn’t stopped.

The history of the significance of sources, transports, and consumers of oil and gas loom large in recent histories. I recommend Daniel Yergin's The Prize (1991) with its treatments of WWI, WWII, and the Cold War, and Vaclav Smils' Energy and Civilization (2017) which addresses more technically the role of energy in human progress. (There are a few other histories through the lens of energy I could recommend as well if you're interested.) The role of the Suez Canal, of Beruit as a transshippment point for Saudi oil piped across the desert to the Medeterranian, of submarine warfare aimed in large part at oil shipments to Japan and within and from the United States, as well as the central role of the Middle East in post-WWII geopolitics, all come to mind.

A renewables-centric world seems to afford far greater multipoliarity and far less concentration of strategic interests. It's fairly trivially possible to capture or bomb oil wells. It's less feasible to entirely destroy solar collectors --- yes, they're fragile, but the very fact that they do cover large tracts of land makes direct attack expensive. Interconnects, particularly those envisioned across the Mediterranean, would be attractive targets, though also likely armoured and defended. At the same time, distribution of other forms of generation, including wind, hydroelectrc, and geothermal, would make the impact of such attacks, and the likely retaliation on any aggressor (themselves all but certainly a major state power) large.

If I were to draw up risk scenarios, I'd likely put more emphasis on materials sourcing, especially of rare and strategic minerals: lithium for batteries, copper for wiring generally, coltan, rare earths, and the like. These aren't consumables to the same extent fuels are, but access could disrupt an adversary for a considerable time, though all but certainly at a cost of global trade disruptions.

Any large, arid, low-population, sun-rich region becomes a potential energy producer and exporter, in a solar-dominated world. This includes many of the Middle-Eastern petro-states, but also their less-endowed neighbours, much of North Africa, the Southwestern United States, Northern Mexico, potentially regions of western South America, and much of Australia. Where direct electical shipments aren't possible, either production or synfuels created using surplus electrical power (much of it direct analogues of petroleum hydrocarbons) is another option. Carbon-neutral production of such fuels is not especially effient in a round-trip energy sense, and retains some local pollution concerns in combustion (particulates, partially-combusted hydrocarbons, nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide), but would not suffer from either CO2 emissions or sulfur emissions from current low-grade fuels. There is the potential for alternate fuels --- hydrogen, ammonia, methane (arguably a petroleum analogue), and alcohols being among them. I'm leaning in favour of synfuel hydrocarbons myself for numerous reasons, but all would offer the ability to capture sunlight and ship it elsewhere in a far more decentralised fashion than the present fossil-fuel-depedent global economic system exhibits.

Then, the trans-national HVDC transmission lines also being built out will enable access to reduced spot prices, while remaining strategically unnecessary.

Ammonia is useful as fertiliser. It's the 2nd most hazardous material noted in the US (I'd participated in an earlier thread pointeing this out), after the far more prevalent carbon monoxide. As a fuel, ammonia would prove an extraordinary hazard.

Earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29211672

For those millions of tons of NH3 handled industrially, 1153 incidents is very small.

I'd like to learn about realpolitik. Henry Kissinger, Jean Kirkpatrick, etc.

Much as I despise that world view, I'm not sure they're wrong.

At the very least, I'd like to understand them better. Like how the Know Your Enemy podcast surveys modern conservativism. https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy

I've got some books about Kissinger in my queue. I figure I'd start there.

Other recommendations?

I likewise find the PoV unsavory, though ... pragmatic. Yergin's general philosophy (and enthusiastic boosterism of the oil industry) is not my own viewpoint, but his storytelling and knowledge are excellent. Discover enough about the field, however, and the bits he skips over become apparent. The bits he covers, however, are valuable.

Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power (note that this is in two volumes, catalogue listings vary in including both) is similar to Smil's works on energy/history, but focuses far more on the political dimensions and their relationship to the power (physical and political) afforded through energy regimes. It becomes increasingly polemical as it approaches the present, possibly with strong justification.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/sources-of-power-how-energy-f...

First volume -- before oil: https://www.worldcat.org/title/before-oil-the-ages-of-foragi...

Second volume --- oil and beyond: https://www.worldcat.org/title/oil-age-and-beyond/oclc/83762...

What really emerges from all three authors --- Yergin, Smil, and Weissenbacher, is how absolutely transformational the oil age proved to be. It is liquid power in every sense of that word.

On politics, I've been looking at James C. Scott (Seeing Like a State), Francis Fukuyama (Origins of Political Order https://www.worldcat.org/title/origins-of-political-order-fr...), John Kenneth Galbraith (see his Anatomy of Power https://www.worldcat.org/title/anatomy-of-power/oclc/1087969...).

I'm familiar with Realpolitik as a term. There's the related "geopolitics" which arises out of German doctrine, and borrows heavily from principles of the use of naval power. That, if I'm recalling correctly, traces to Alfred Thayer Mahan's treatise on sea power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Thayer_Mahan#Sea_power

Otherwise, this is an area I'm mostly fumbling around in. Appreciate the podcast recommendation.

In exchange, Neal Conan's swan song might also be of interest, "Truth, Politics, and Power". I'm not sure it covers quite the same topic though it's own I've been meaning to listen to.

https://exchange.prx.org/series/37658-truth-politics-and-pow...

Oil prices are rising as production falls. That is falling because exploration is not expected to pay off. It is a fundamental mistake to confuse short-term fluctuations with trends.

Yes, because fusion has the potential of harnessing much more power in a relatively small power plant. Even if it's more expensive, it's TWs you wouldn't otherwise get.

Of course there are more open questions around the other potential ways of achieving fusion, because we haven't thrown as much money at them as we did for tokamaks. So there is a possibility that there are much cheaper designs that also work.

1. No economically viable hot-neutron Tokamak fusion plant will ever be built;

2. Every cent wasted on this, instead of being spent on building out solar, wind, and storage, brings climate catastrophe incrementally closer.

It is just barely possible that something learned while fooling with this stuff will turn out to be helpful for making a practical non-Tokamak fusion system for spacecraft propulsion. The plasma fluid-dynamics physicists employed on these massive boondoggles are who would make that. But the longer they bumble about with this, the longer it will be until they can get started on that.

But in the real world the money going into this is on top of that going into solar / wind / … and not instead of. The nature of the climate crisis is such that we need to stop debating which things to do and just do all the things unless we genuinely run into limits of what we can spend, which we are nowhere near reaching.

For the past decade, total US spending has been at or below $600 million/year, or 0.003% of total US GDP. Even with my low expectations of success or viability, the research itself is worth pursuing. US spending is a large fraction of global fusion spending, and though I don't have an aggregate total, it is also in all likelihood too small to matter.

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/margraf1/

There are vastly larger areas of expenditure that are far more harmful to achieving a sustainable, renewable, carbon-neutral energypath. Pressent fossil-fuel based infrastructure and exploration is among the leading candidates. You should be focusing your ire there, or other similarly significant areas.

Of all the things we waste money on, I don't much resent Dream Big efforts like fusion, space exploration, and stuff.

Fusion power will continue to be high on our agenda and it should but it should never be seen as a solution for climate change because that is wishful thinking. Fixing climate change has a much tighter timescale than we can expect for fusion power.

That being said, my mind was stuck in Animat's state as well for a long time, mainly because of neutron flux. Neutrons were the ultimate end boss at the end of the goal by laughing at your fusion progress and just destroying every containment that comes their way. What excites me these days are modern contenders like HB11 Energy and Helion Fusion jumping directly to aneutronic fusion.

This is the stuff most physicists didn't dare to dream of as of late, mostly because they weren't even close to sustaining the simplest D-T reactions for long, and aneutronic fusion takes even considerately hotter and denser plasmas — as well as being plagued by fuel availability concerns (HE3). But it's something that's within reach due to massive advances in ultra-short laser technology, coil breakthroughs and some other clever hacks like breeding HE3 on site.

That, combined with the other advance of direct electrical harvest instead of thermic conversion puts fusion into territories of believable reach for the first time in my mind. After decades of disappointedly following the status quo, I'm getting seriously excited.

Is anyone actually saying “let’s not do anything and keep pumping carbon into the atmosphere because fusion is almost here!” ?

I mean I’m sure you can find someone saying it (like anything) but there’s no reason to argue against an imaginary opposing viewpoint which isn’t being expressed.

What’s actually happening is people like to argue against things because naysaying is fun and people genuinely don’t really have a solid concept of what progress is being made and what progress is still needed, but go on with their vague impressions and defend their ideas anyway (and often against imaginary opponents).

Long before the natural world experiences a phase change, civilization will collapse. While that will radically reduce carbon output, it seems like a thing to prevent.

Pushing too optimistically a story to the public might make them feel that it's closer than it really is, and possibly modify public policies that would otherwise not have been modified.

There's another technology that's been hyped relentlessly for 50 years, and is always "just around the corner": general AI.

Call me when you think you can build a reactor that can contribute power to the grid AND make a profit for the operators. I won't be holding my breath.

What’s left isn’t just straightforward work, but a lot of finding and fixing inefficiencies and that sort of work.

Fusion (especially DT fusion) has a good chance of never being useful (except for H-bombs).

These comparisons with old embryonic technologies also miss the point that lots of embryonic technologies never go on to success. Focusing on the rare ones that did is survivor bias.

This is the difference between ITER and projects like SPARC though, they both plan to get fusion plasma power breakeven, but ITER's design has zero hope of ever being economical.

Not to mention, trying to fool public opinion about how far away we are from any chance of a fusion power plant is still ethically wrong. Let's not forget that even if ITER achieves all of its goals and milestones, we will be able to start on the power extraction problem in 2030.

And let's also not forget that inertial confinement fusion, while also being presented as a potential fusion power plant concept, with great fanfare occasionally, is simply a weapons research program with no imaginable way of progressing to economical power generation.

The hohlraum is the biggest problem here: the level of precision needed to achieve the exact geometry inside the pellet to actually ignite a plasma means that every hohlraum is (a) extraordinarily expensive (currently in the millions of dollars range), and (b) entirely useless after a single shot - while continuous operation for a 1500 MW plant is estimated to require ~20 hohlraums/second).

For a spaceship design, this would mean that your engine would have to include a smelter and high-precision machining bay to constantly create new micrometer-smooth hohlraums from spent ones. Not even close to a promising technology.

I believe the engineering after that is harder, and likely intractable.

The ARC reactor described in the 2014 arxiv paper uses a lot of beryllium. To provide the 18 TW of primary energy used by the current world economy with these reactors would require 10 million tonnes of Be. The annual mine production of Be is just ~200 tonnes, and the global estimated (by USGS) Be resource (not reserve) is 100,000 tonnes.

The gross fusion power density of ARC from that paper is 0.5 MW/m^3, vs. 20 MW/m^3 for the fission power density of a PWR reactor vessel. ARC is going to be a much more complex and expensive way to boil water than a fission reactor.

"The Helion Fusion Engine will enable profitable fusion energy in 2019,” from NBF 7/18/2014.

“If our physics holds, we hope to reach that goal (net energy gain) in the next three years,” D. Kirtley, CEO of Helion, told The Wall Street Journal in 2014.

“Helion will demonstrate net energy gain within 24 months, and 50-MWe pilot plant by 2019,” from NBF 8/18/2015.

“Helion will attain net energy output within a couple of years and commercial power in 6 years,” Science News 1/27/2016.

“Helion plans to reach breakeven energy generation in less than three years, nearly ten times faster than ITER,” from NBF 10/1/2018.

----

Having quoted that, I consider Helion a less unlikely bet than the DT fusion approaches.

This is a syntagm I did not expect reading on Hacker News in a comment about technology, but about a roleplaying game.

> Brief periods of theoretical breakeven have been achieved before.

Source? I'm not aware of any reactor that has done that.

> Ahead lies "sustained theoretical breakeven" - the thing can be kept running for a while. So far, other tokomak experiments have achieved 70 seconds of plasma containment (Korea) and 120 seconds (China). That's below ignition temperature, though.

Ignition temperature is not set just by the time you run it. The larger you go the longer you need to run before you can get to ignition. ITER will need something like 1000 seconds, but SPARC will only need 10.

> Then, someday, "economic break-even" - it can pay for itself.

For ITER-like designs that's impossible because the massive manufacturing cost.

> This begins with the "first wall" problem of finding something that can survive the conditions just outside the magnetic field. Those conditions include huge numbers of neutrons, which tend to split atoms in the first wall material and cause unwanted transmutation. This causes radiation embrittlement, which is not good for materials.

Radiation embrittlement is only a problem for certain types of materials. Some material types do not absorb neutrons at fusion energies and simply pass them through. This is a complex materials problems and you can't just use steel but there's already many designs that people are experienced with for this and it's well known because of the history of fision energy research with neutrons.

Not in a plasma reactor, yet. The laser Nuclear Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Labs claimed "scientific breakeven" back in 2014.[1] That's the setup where they have a huge building full of pulse lasers focused on one tiny target.

This is breakeven for a very weak definition of breakeven: “thermonuclear energy out” > “energy absorbed by the fuel capsule”. Not "> energy required to run the lasers." That's for a very brief period, nanoseconds. It's taken Lawrence Livermore 45 years of zapping tiny targets with big lasers to get to this point.

This was being touted as a potential approach to fusion energy back in the 1970s. It's not, really. It's mostly a way to study bomb-type fusion without setting off H-bombs. It's now part of "stockpile stewardship", keeping some people working on fusion to prevent forgetting how to make H-bombs.

[1] http://www.hiper-laser.org/News%20and%20events/index.html

There are also just a few elements that do not produce unacceptably long lived radioisotopes under fusion neutron bombardment. This greatly limits the choice of elements from which to make the reactor structure. Right now, the best choice is RAFM steel, but it has a number of serious drawbacks.

RAFM steel is also ferromagnetic, which interferes with the design of the reactor.

https://gcep.stanford.edu/pdfs/qa4ScQIicx-kve2pX9D7Yg/baluc_...