Nope, this is good news.

JET is a 1980s research project into how to contain a plasma and squish it enough to achieve fusion at all, not a practical generator. It doesn't have superconducting magnets, it runs on big lumps of copper, with limited cooling and no way of recovering output power.

In the latest run, they achieved fusion and kept it running until JET ran out of power for its magnets. The plasma didn't touch the reactor walls, didn't destabilize, didn't crap out in any of the numerous other ways. They had to shut it down before it overheated and burned out.

(I've been reading reports for a while about the use of massive amounts of computer power -- and deep learning -- being necessarily to stabilize plasma in a reactor. That seems to be what this demonstrates.)

This is probably JET's swan song. They've pushed it as far as it can go; also, the D-T reaction produces surplus neutrons so tends to generate radioactive waste via secondary irradiation of the reactor core -- which makes it hard to get inside and fiddle with it.

Interestingly one of the things they proved out in this experiment was a new core lining that doesn't get anywhere near as radioactive as the carbon walls they were using before. That was a bit of a big deal in itself: if it hadn't tracked theory as well as it did, it would have invalidated one of the material choices for ITER and knocked it back a fair bit.

For what its worth, the strongest magnets in the world are not superconducting but copper. My understanding is that the high magnetic field interferes with the superconducting mode.

https://nationalmaglab.org/user-facilities/dc-field/instrume...

Not that it has anything to do with plasma research, I just thought it an interesting fact.

Here's a fun table at which field strengths various superconductors fall out of the superconducting mode https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Upper-critical-fields-an...

ITER uses NbTi, SPARC uses YBCO.

This is a really great achievement for a fusion reactor, and actually is a breakthrough that makes me think that it might be on its way to serious commercialization.

Unfortunately, a lot of other fusion news is not similarly fundamental, though, so it can get tiring to see "we made a few extra watts but the reactor still went unstable."

A lot of research into plasma confinement is completely empirical. No theory at all. The scientists try new settings, see how they work, and draw a line on a graph extrapolating from them to higher power settings. That's why you need all these small experiments, which have no hope of generating net energy: because you're trying to solve plasma confinement by tinkering, without much of a map to guide you.

Confined plasmas have complex behaviors that are really, really hard to model computationally. Experimentation definitely beats computation in this field.

I would be surprised if they do not keep pushing for the Q=1 record. This last campaign was in support of ITER. Now that DT operations have resumed they wouldn't go out without a moonshot.

Correct me if I’m wrong but the neutrons eventually cause the reactor to eat itself as well, don’t they? Unless you can build a sacrificial layer inside to absorb all the damage you have to keep building new ones, even if it weren’t radioactive.

Fusion researcher here. Yes, this piece is sensationalized, as are most pieces about fusion, and about science/technology in general, unfortunately. It's depressing that tokamak performance hasn't improved much in all that time. The only two ways to scale up the gain are to build the device larger (like ITER) or with higher magnetic field (like SPARC). The existing devices have been around for many years and have been pushed basically as far as they can go, the only way forward is to build new devices. There's really no reason to expect a breakthrough on tokamak performance that will suddenly change the game. The only really positive news for tokamaks in the last ~30 years is the advent of REBCO superconductors & the success Commonwealth Fusion has had so far in capitalizing on this technology.

It's an easy article to write, and it's easy because so many others have written the same thing.

It's like articles about Facebook and how their value fluctuates and this or that privacy issue is going to be fixed soon. People have heard about the big players, so big players get the attention.

I'm trying to do some fusion research myself, but it's extremely difficult to get anyone to take what I'm doing seriously.

I've got a completely new design, and it still needs to be tested. Do you know how difficult that is when nobody will even look at it, and I have to do everything myself?

I don't even know why I talk about it at all.

I've got some info about it at http://www.DDproFusion.com

Recommendations include:

1) ditching the toxic negative attitude. It pushes away interest.

2) spend an afternoon or a few bucks on a web designer making your site look better than the "time cube" site. It practically screams crackpot theory.

3) build credibility with academics first. People not in the field will assume you're a swindler by default.

1 - I agree, I've been fighting too many battles on too many fronts and my optimism has been taking a hit.

2 - I see, I'll look into presenting more professionally.

3 - I believe Ideas should be evaluated on their merit, and what people think about the idea or myself isn't going to change the physics. It will either work or it won't

3 - It could work, but badly. That is what they are shooting for at ITER.

You have a 48 second youtube simulation video, and one paragraph explaining nothing.

How is this supposed to help people take you seriously? What are your credentials? Why should anyone take you seriously?

Are you an academic? Have you submitted this to academic journals or individuals? Have you tried to make or made any connections to anyone in the field?

Also, are you the guy who bought the warehouse full of CD's?

It's difficult to find the right balance between details and general concepts, and it's clear that I haven't refined my message clearly enough.

I'm not an academic, but have a reasonable level of physics understanding. The concept is simple enough that it should be understandable by people that have a basic understanding of how charged particles behave in a magnetic field.

It should be taken seriously because it's a good idea, and deserves to be studied. I readily admit that a full analysis is beyond my abilities, but I haven't been able to find anyone that can do any better at evaluating it, and I've talked to a lot of people.

I'm moving forward with the self funded construction of the prototype, because with this type of thing, I don't think ANYBODY can say with certainty that it will work or not. Even simulations aren't enough to tell for sure.

And yeah, I'm also trying to restart Murfie among other things.

Can I recommend dropping the use of royal we, with respect to how you describe your work on the project.

This is usually a lot more common in software projects, and it doesn't come across well when most the effort is clearly (at least from a quick overview)from a single person.

I'm sorry I keep forgetting to ask for your permission before I hire or fire someone.

As long as people keep researching it, progress will continue. Just ignore it until the first commercial plant is built and you won’t be disappointed.

Personally I find this news very exciting, but I’m a fairly half-full glass kind of person!

They are forever smashing this or that record, on the verge of break-even, on track to producing free energy without nasty radionuclides. But it is always a con. If they ever do get Q high enough to make energy production conceivable -- it will need Q > 100, when said and done -- a Tokamak reactor will cost 10x much as the equal-grade fission reactor, and cost >10x as much to operate. As fission reactors are today not competitive, and get less competitive by the day, power from Tokamak fusion will not ever be lighting up your house. That is not a bad thing: solar and wind are wholly up to the task, and just need building out. The more there is, the cheaper it gets.

The only reliable product of the hot-neutron fusion research industry is dishonesty.

There is also aneutronic fusion, that might actually have a future, even if only in space: If we are ever to operate in the outer solar system, something of the sort will be needed. Unfortunately it gets almost no money.

"They are forever smashing this or that record, on the verge of break-even, on track to producing free energy without nasty radionuclides."

Hacker News comment in late 19th century: "They are forever making flying machines have a little more lift, on the verge of break-even, on track to enabling free flight without nasty immediate crashes. But it is always a con.... The only reliable product of flying machine research is dishonesty."

Oh? By your logic, we shouldn't say negative things about perpetual motion machines, as they keep getting better and who knows what the future holds!

The truth is that people both over- and under-estimate what can happen in the future. You can't use simple-minded heuristics either way; technoutopianism is at least as dangerous as blind opposition to change.

We have currently demonstrable laws of physics stating why perpetual motion can't be achieved. We have a visible universe of examples of fusion.

Not saying that fusion power on earth is viable (I personally think that it is), but it's disingenuous to compare it to perpetual motion.

I think the obstacles to practical, competitive fusion power, particularly DT fusion, and especially the mainstream approach of JET/ITER, are so great that calling investment in it "the economic equivalent of perpetual motion" is not far off.

Good thing I didn't compare fusion to perpetual motion, then. I was pointing out that his too-simple approach could be easily misapplied, and picked an especially obvious negative example to counter his especially obvious positive one.

At this point we just don't know whether fusion is like airplanes or whether it's like perpetual motion. Unless you are proposing building an actual star, the existence of stars tells us approximately nothing about whether a fusion-based power plant is economically achievable in our lifetimes.

I think it's an interesting idea and I'd love to see it happen. But I think it's important to be realistic in our discussion of it.

The "stars exist!" argument really annoys me. Among other objections, stars don't even use the specific fusion reactions that terrestrial fusion reactors would use.

Stars are, anyway, not subject to economics. It is the combination of Tokamak fusion power generation with economic viability that resembles perpetual motion.

I don't disagree at all with what you say above, and I do not think it's inevitable that fusion reactors will be useful in the foreseeable future. You are right that "You can't use simple-minded heuristics either way". I was just pointing out that they were being used in one direction in the comment I responded to.

> they were being used in one direction in the comment

That's not correct at all. The simple-minded heuristic is along the lines of "technology is bad" or "this new thing will never work".

But the dream of fusion as "too cheap to meter" has been going on for 70 years. The comment you're replying to wasn't talking in general terms, but had specific critique of both the long track record and the practical utility of the product they're shooting for.

It might work and it might not; I have no idea. But your attacking a straw man won't help it get there.

I will let other readers of this thread judge for themselves.

I am asking you to judge for yourself. In particular, to recognize that not only did you ignore his specific critique, you have now ignored mine.

Notably, none of the people getting big grants and promoting their flying machine experiments succeeded, or were even on track to succeed someday.

ITER is the Samuel Langley of the present day.

Solar and wind are not and likely will never be "wholly up to the task" unless you install about 4X as much as you need, which is quite the tall order and certainly changes the numbers. You might say "solar is cheaper per MW than fission" but someone planning your local grid sees "I need to setup 4X the solar MW that I do fission, and I need a battery solution as well" and the numbers look very different.

A great example is Germany over the past year had uncharacteristically low wind for months and months on end, dropping power generation by as much as 30% for the year from that source.

The result? They burned A LOT of gas and coal. A LOT.

The reality is that power use doesn't necessarily follow the sun or the wind, and so buildouts of those technologies need to be done at extreme multiples of baseline need to account for entire seasons of low output (or just burn hydrocarbons...). You have to build your wind and solar to support a hypothetical 10 or 50 year minimum production, and just overproduce at all times.

This is why baseload nuclear generation will remain a fantastic choice for nations for decades to come, even at a higher price. Nuclear runs at night. It runs when the wind is still. It runs and runs and run no matter what, providing consistent and predictable power. For every MW generated by nuclear, you need about 4 produced by solar/wind, to achieve the same up-time and reliability.

And that's before we discuss the ecological concerns of one tiny little nuclear facility versus dozens of square kilometers of solar/battery builds out to match it.

If our society abandons fission in favor of solar/wind only, it will be to our detriment

Base load isn’t an inherent advantage it’s strictly worse than dispatchable power unless it’s cheap, and Nuclear isn’t that cheap. Which is a problem because excess wind and solar makes Nuclear power economically worthless for much of the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation#/media...

Subsides could make up the difference for nuclear as could vastly increased nighttime prices.

PS: It’s only when your looking at islands like say Hawaii where you want that kind of massive overproduction. Across larger areas you never see 100% production from everywhere at the same time, but you also don’t see minimum production from everywhere at the same time.

Those interconnects take a long time to build, mostly due to political opposition, and aren't that cheap either. For example, the 2GW 400-mile Southern Cross has turned out to be a 17-year project, costing $2 billion. https://www.eenews.net/articles/what-a-2b-texas-project-says...

They're not the only ones:

> the 732-mile TransWest Express high voltage transmission line filed its first permit application in 2007, but did not receive all of the approvals until 2020. The Environmental Impact Statement alone took eight years to complete.

Local landowners tend to object to these projects. On average, they take over a decade to complete and that includes much shorter lines, which are quicker. Building underground can help with political resistance but multiplies cost by 5X to 10X.

As of 2020, over 750 GW of proposed generation, most of it wind and solar, were waiting for transmission to be built.

https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/challenges-decarbon...

China builds transmission a lot faster, and we might be able to speed things up with the SITE Act, which gives the federal government authority to override local and state resistance: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/07/america-...

But if our solution set can include unpopular new laws to override NIMBYism, then we can make nuclear a lot faster and cheaper, too.

That’s a solid point, but it only needs 3-4 years to build. “$2 billion project, proposed by Pattern Energy Group LP, likely won’t be ready until 2026 at the earliest, if construction starts in 2023.”

Nuclear also takes 4-6 years to build but can take decades to get permission to start.

Of course. I used "complete" in a later sentence, which is really what I meant, and why I talked about political opposition being the main issue.

Delays in interconnect construction call for local storage, which usually are needed anyway, because long-distance interconnect is not reliable or, often, strategic.

So, the main role of interconnect is to deliver power that is cheaper than replenishing your storage locally, or to use replenishing your storage faster than you could with local generation or by ship.

Far-northern climates will need to keep stockpiles of anhydrous ammonia or hydrogen to burn in gas turbine generators when transmission lines fail, probably synthesized using equatorial solar and shipped, or synthesized using transmission-line delivered hydro power. Each place will use the cheapest power available in each moment.

The LCOE for utility scale solar is around $68/MWh while new nuclear is $88/MWh.

The LCOE for grid storage of power (necessary addition to solar) is $160/MWh.

Double solar with grid storage is as much as $300/MWh at the utility scale using globalized averages reported to NEA, BNEF, Lazard, IRENA 2018-2020. Obviously some countries will be a lot more or less on costs depending on their circumstances and location.

Interconnect isn't enough, all of the US is in darkness for several hours a day. (And Texas will never connect). You require storage, and I still question if 2X is enough to produce enough power during a 10 year minimum without firing up extensive hydrocarbon peaker plants.

Nuclear is nowhere near that cheap, LCOE even with massive subsides in the US sees 2020 nuclear well past 160$/MWH and rising. Wind and solar are both under 50$/MWH LCOE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy#/medi...

The number I quoted is from the same Wikipedia article on LCOE that you used, and I used a globalized average as I said in my post.

Your $50MWh also does not include storage LCOE, and not including secondary costs for solar when Nuclear has no secondary costs is considered "a trick" to lie about solar costs.

Include the costs of gigawatts of Elon's lithium ion batteries, and include the cost of having to 2X-4X solar compared to Nuclear to account for variable solar output due to days and seasons, as I said, and your $50MWh becomes around $300MWh

First demand isn’t flat, so 100% nuclear needs massive amounts of storage to reduce the number of nuclear power plants that would sit idle 90+% of the time. In the end something needs to take up the slack and nuclear doesn’t work by it’s self. If natural gas isn’t an option the only thing left is hydro which is limited or storage.

Your also trying to cherry pick numbers the Wikipedia article also lists “$164/MWh” for nuclear. I found the table you got those numbers from which included multiple estimates from 2018 that used data from 2015 and double counting very optimistic nuclear estimates. Frankly utility solar is already being installed at sub 2c/kWh in the US. 68$/MWh would be 6.8c/kWh which shows how far off your umbers are.

Anyway, I would be happy to see the power plant actually run that cheaply but your looking at very optimistic estimates for something that isn’t even online yet and is getting some serious subsides.

Having said that if you’re data is from “Source: IEA/NEA, 2015.” https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2018/7441-full-costs-2018-.... I can understand why you picked those numbers.

Yeah. Si monocrystalline PV modules fell in price by a factor of 4 from 2015 to 2020.

So many people talking about energy seem to be stuck in an obsolete past.

You are being unfair in the other direction. LCOE for wind/solar needs to be blended by figuring out the optimal mix of wind and solar for your area and adding on 4hrs of battery storage. There is not one set number for this but $200Wh and falling is a fair estimate.

Germany‘s Problem is different. We can generate way More wind energy but we cant Transfer it, thus we can only use the wind regionally. And our transfer projects are estimated to take longer than planned…

> But it is always a con.

I think you should rephrase that, because it's pretty insulting to researchers who have been working incredibly hard on taking steps towards Fusion.

I think the phrase you were grasping for is: "I doubt it will ever be economically viable".

The con is in calling every last incremental improvement a "breakthrough". No, you didn't break through anything. The only upcoming breakthrough is the plasma eroding a hole in the chamber wall.

Be fair. It's the relativistic electron beam from a disruption that's going to do that, not the plasma itself. :)

> solar and wind are wholly up to the task, and just need building out.

This. Every time I read a fusion "breakthrough" story I imagine the history books of the year 3000: "Back in the early 21st century, they spent billions trying to build a star on Earth, when there was a perfectly good one in the sky that produced 1000W per square meter that they could have used for free."

Imagine if we went the other way: "they spent billions on solar infrastructure, so that they could keep the lights on only when the sun was shining".

We don't have the storage. We are not close to sniffing the amount of storage we need to be 100% reliant on solar + wind.

To get a sense of scale: The USA uses on average ~76 twh per day. Tesla produced ~100 gwh of batteries over the whole last year.

So if we nationalized all the tesla gigafactories, it would take us over 760 years to produce enough batteries to store a single days worth of electricity.

I do not think grid storage is solvable with current technology.

So don't use batteries. Pumping water uphill is still the most efficient large-scale technology for electrical storage.

Pumped hydro is a lot more promising than batteries for sure, in that current capabilities is off by a factor of a thousand instead of a million.

The largest pumped hydro station[1] provides up to 24 gwh of storage. So three thousand of these stations (costing $12 trillion) would store one day's worth of electricity.

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

Agreed that pumped hydro is the most efficient storage solution but it's limited by geography: You can only do it where there's an existing significant elevation change. Building a sufficiently elevated lake artifically by heaping thousands of cubic kilometers of dirt is not cost-effective. That is, the energy that would be required to build it would vastly exceed the total energy it could store integrated over its lifetime.

> That is, the energy that would be required to build it would vastly exceed the total energy it could store integrated over its lifetime.

Storage ‘buys’ energy when it’s cheap and ‘sells’ it when it’s expensive, where ‘cheap’ can even mean ‘free’ at times.

You would build it using averagely priced energy (using only cheap energy is impractical, as it would keep machines and personnel tied up waiting for prices to drop)

Also, having a large buffer can mean having to spend a lot less money on excess solar and wind farms. They wouldn’t have to meet all peaks in demand.

Those still could make it economically viable.

Yeah building mountains is not a realistic solution. Thermal storage is probably the best replacement where pumped hydro isn't feasible.

Inventing absurd versions of sound ideas just to have something to criticize is such a standard dishonest argument mode as to have been named.

We all know the name, but its main feature is its dishonesty.

What's the sound idea for build pumped hydro storage on flat land?

There is such a thing as a water tower, but that also is probably not practical utility-scale energy storage.

The sound idea is water stored up an existing hill. On flat land you store your energy some other way: underground hydrogen or compressed air, or iron-air batteries, or liquified air, or any of various other choices that are more expensive and less efficient than pumped hydro. Or just run a wire over to someplace that does have hills.

It is a good thing, then, that pumped hydro is not limited to existing dams, or even to places where a hydroelectric power station would be practical. Pumped hydro does not need the large watershed and elevated river valley a hydroelectric dam needs. All pumped hydro needs is an elevated depression somewhere not too porous. There are myriads of those, and building a penstock up to one is very cheap.

Some places have no hills, so are not candidates for pumped hydro storage, and would need to rely on something else, such as long-distance transmission lines, or liquified air, or synthesized hydrogen, or synthesized ammonia, or underground compressed air, or iron-air batteries, or numerous others, or (most usually) some combination of them.

What a terrible argument. A global energy supply system is a huge thing. That means it will make sense to spend literally trillions of dollars on it. This will mean building enormous capacity to build its components, including as many battery factories as we need.

Once we agree that the solar + wind solution will cost trillions and take decades to scale up anyway, the benefits of fusion start to shine through. We may as well invest all that time and money in scalable production that doesn't exhaust the earth's supply of natural resources.

That sounds like a proposal for just not de-carbonizing until fusion is ready. Is that what you mean? When do you think we could have say 5% of the worlds power coming from fusion reactors?

I'm happy to increase renewable energy production where possible. My point is that saying "we can just be 100% solar" is just as impractical and far fetched as saying "we can just be 100% fusion".

Renewable advocates would be more successful if they were realistic about the problems with significant solar reliance.

I disagree. 100% solar is much less far-fetched than 100% fusion, because the latter is a much larger technological and economic stretch.

What benefits? The fusion solution would be even more expensive, and not available for decades, if ever.

We do not have enough energy storage capability to rely completely on Solar and Wind yet. Both are intermittent producers so to get truly reliable power from them we need storage capacity. There are projects that promise to meet that need but positioning solar and wind as all we need is not a true statement.

> We do not have enough energy storage capability to rely completely on Solar and Wind yet.

How is this an interesting argument? Of course we don't have things before we build them. That's true of nuclear power plants, too. We can likely build out storage faster than NPPs, with more aggressive cost decline with cumulative production.

>We can likely build out storage faster than NPPs

First, this is yet to be determined. Even assuming it is true, which I'm not sure it is, The problem is not limited to storage - you also need massive transmission system upgrades that will cost on the same order of magnitude as an Apollo program. I think in the long term it should certainly be done, but pretending that the cost of solar and wind power is the cost of solar panels, or even the cost of solar panels + storage is not comparing apples to apples.

Energy is huge. The world will likely spend the equivalent of approaching a quadrillion dollars over the next century on energy. The Apollo program, in comparison, was less than a rounding error.

We are down for many, many times the cost of Apollo, regardless. The only question is how much available power we will get for that. The very best one running is solar+wind+storage, far ahead of the others.

I put numbers in another comment, but this isn't a "just build some more batteries" type of problem. The scale of storage needed completely dwarfs our current production capacity. This problem cannot be solved in the near future, with current production/technology.

It is dishonest to pretend batteries are the only viable storage method.

Yes dispatchability is an issue with renewables. We need more transmission too. Both can be solved (and are being solved) with existing technology today, and both are improving all the time. It's both practical and economical today to build an off-grid house with PV and enough Li-Ion storage to bridge the nighttime gap and charge an EV.

With distributed electricity generation e.g. microgrids, the need for big, centralized storage decreases, as does the need for large-scale transmission.

By the time fusion generators exist in a practical form (at least 20 years from now), we won't need them.

> The more there is, the cheaper it gets.

This also applies to nuclear fusion (and, BTW, fission) reactors.

Actually, fission power plants have shown a distressing lack of good experience effects. They got more expensive as more were built, not less expensive.

Fission did keep getting cheaper up until FUD about accidents and explosions caused regulations that strangled it (that and overblown fears about proliferation of nuclear weapons).

Yeah, like all those whiners complaining about how first generation BWR containment was totally inadequate.

Never mind what happened at Fukushima, right? /s

The amount of accidents and their severity does not line up with the disproportion strangling the technology has experienced at the hands of regulators. If we go down that road, all coal plants should be shut down long ago as they’ve been responsible for more radiation-caused deaths than all nuclear deaths combined (including due to the bombs if I recall correctly). That’s not even counting the deaths they’ve caused through air pollution.

Heck, nuclear is still competitive with solar and wind in terms of deaths/MW produced. And this is all the more stark considering nuclear designs stagnated 60 years or so ago. If we hadn’t divested from that technological path we’d have drastically cheaper and safer nuclear energy today and global warming potentially wouldn’t even be a problem.

Tokamak fusion can only ever be far more expensive, per watt and per watt-hour, than existing fission. Fission is getting more expensive all the time.

I'm not that familiar with the subject, but this phrase sounds suspiciously like the 1943 IBM executive saying there is a market for only five computers in the world - i.e. it completely discounts technological progress. Of course, this progress has been painfully slow until now, but comparing it with fission is still unfair - fission is well-researched and it getting more expensive is tied to the inherent dangers of radioactivity (and the ever more complicated measures which try to mitigate them), and the costs of spent fuel storage.

Fission getting more expensive is tied to the very lucrative fully-legal corruption industry. Once a fission plant construction project is started, the money starts flowing, and is practically impossible to stop. If it is ever finished, the money would stop, and nobody actually involved wants that ever to happen, at least not until their kids graduate college. So the project blows through deadline after deadline, and cost overruns pile up without limit, until somebody manages to pull the plug. Once it looks like the money will stop regardless, there is some incentive to deliver a reactor; we saw that in Finland recently. South Carolina is the more typical cancellation after billions are spent, except in that case with a few indictments.

Normally nobody gets indicted, and nobody ever has to give any money back.

Wow this is brutal but feels like it's correct. What a frightening state of affairs.

Is the construction industry really so corrupt? Is government and industry unaware or unwilling/unable to detect this earlier and stop it?

I spent some fair amount of years as both a government employee in DoD and then some years as a defense contractor amd I can tell you the military industrial complex is a real thing. In my contracting days I worked with a handful of DoE engineers that were more familiar with reactor projects and as I understood it, reactor peojects basically follow the same type of workflow as any big DoD prohect. So OPs comment is much in line with my understanding of the issue. It is an unfortunate state of affairs.

I've worked in fusion research and defense. MIC corruption and incompetance is quite high but virtually not present in the fusion research community. The researchers, you know, give a shit. They're not there to make a buck and milk the gravy train. If a machine gets greenlit then they pour everything into getting it to succeed because it might be the only research advancement greenlit in their life. Failure is always an option. Look at NCSX.

What the fusion research community has instead is people who have committed their careers or even lives to a particular field. Getting them to admit they made a mistake is very hard. What did Upton Sinclair say? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Most of them will rationalize as hard as they can for as long as they can.

You sometimes see bitter comments when they are approaching or are in retirement.

The fusion researchers are not who would finance a fusion reactor. The people who finance those would be the ones financing fission plants, and then milking the project for as long as it can be made to run. Since nobody expects a fusion plant construction project to take less than 20 years and $50B after it is proved possible, they will be on it like flies.

This seems... dubious at best? In terms of large nuclear reactor projects recently, we have the Finnish and Flamanville ones as examples of major overruns... but they're the first two examples of a type. Other EPR builds are going much better; one of the Chinese ones is finished and the UK one is basically on track. The timing was bad, in that EPR starts coincided with a general loss of interest in nuclear over Fukushima, but there's nothing too unusual here.

Historically the first build of a type has _generally_ been problematic.

It is, anyway, a bigger problem in the US than in some other places, and, in the US, a bigger problem in public projects than in private projects. So, we see it operating today on NASA's SLS rocket, but not on SpaceX's Starship.

But there has never been a privately financed nuke plant.

The South Caroline indictments were because some of those involved decided to pull the plug. The indictments were revenge for pulling out and derailing the gravy train.

> Tokamak fusion can only ever be far more expensive, per watt and per watt-hour, than existing fission.

Why?

The energy flux density in the most compressed plasma imaginable is orders of magnitude less than in fissile uranium. So, to match power out, it has to be big. Really, really big. And a fusion reaction chamber is a much more expensive affair than a fission pile: super high-tech materials and construction, enormous magnets (blasted by the hot-neutron flux output), piping for thousands of tons of melted lithium that have to be replaced (by robots! because super radioactive) every couple of years as the neutrons destroy them. The (radioactive) lithium itself, and containment for if it breaks out of the piping. Continuous processing of the lithium to extract synthetic tritium for fuel. Heat exchangers for lithium to a working fluid that won't pick up radioactivity, and more heat exchangers from that to water for steam. And then the usual steam turbines, which demand regular, very expensive maintenance. Cooling towers to condense the steam, after.

A hundred billion dollars estimated for one several GW plant, and decades for construction. Meanwhile, solar and wind get cheaper every year, with no bottom in sight. The longer they take on fusion, the less competitive it gets, and it starts out way behind, with no possibility of ever catching up.

This was with previous designs of fusion reactors. Read about proposed Ark and currently constructing Spark reactors. By using stronger superconductive magnets it was possible to reduce the size of the plant by order of magnitude. Spark even has a chance to get to Q>1 before ITER and it’s chamber is less than 2m in diameter. Plus it is possible to replace its parts without disassembling the whole reactor.

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC_(tokamak)

That might be nice if they had solutions to the other problems not addressed (see above). But operating it will necessarily still be enormously more expensive than solar or wind, which cost practically nothing.

Somebody with one leg can do a lot better in a race than somebody with none, but that is not the measure to consider when the competition is with two-legged runners. (Hint: they win.)

In Europe after the last autumn when for months there were little wind and cloudy sky there is a realization that energy based purely on renewables will require much bigger storage and much more solar or at least significantly more expensive solar that works under clouds. Doable, but cost is non-trivial.

So if any of fusion startups can make operating plant within the next 20 years, it can be used. But if that takes longer, then I agree that large-scale fusion will not happen.

Long term darkness/calm is solved with hydrogen. Europe has plenty of underground geology suitable for mass hydrogen storage (it's just like natural gas is stored.) Most of the energy still would go directly from solar/wind to the grid, or through efficient batteries, so the low round trip efficiency of power to gas to power doesn't matter much.

I suspect long-term, large-scale hydrogen storage is not "just like natural gas"... those pesky little H₂ molecules are awfully small, and may leak out rather easily compared to hydrocarbons.

Hydrogen storage is difficult only in metal tanks at high pressure and temperature. Store it underground or liquify it, and the problem dissipates.

Heating and lamp gas composed of of hydrogen and carbon monoxide (!) were once delivered throughout cities through cast-iron plumbing. That was displaced by "natural gas" as increasing numbers of people were found to have been asphyxiated after a lamp flame in their house died, typically from a pressure fluctuation.

Natural gas then had to have mercaptan odorants added after leaking gas accumulated undetected and exploded. Then, valves that would only stay open when hot came into regular use, for pilot lights. Now pilot lights are gone, replaced by spark generators. Hydrogen will displace natural gas in industrial settings, but synthetic methane or propane will probably be needed for domestic use.

There are already underground storage caverns for hydrogen, and more planned. It works fine.

If hydrogen is produced from electricity at scale, it won't be used for energy storage. It'll get sold to chemical plants first. They'll pay good prices.

Yes, surely that will be a major market. It just makes the case easier for renewables, as that's a major source of dispatchable demand that can smooth variation in renewable output without having to pay a cost for turning it back to electric power later.

And, anywhere it is used, it will also be stockpiled. And sold back whenever the spot price rises.

Or to steel smelters.

Electricity -> Hydrogen -> Electricity is insanely wasteful. If this is the only large scale long term storage we can come up with, we have a huge problem...

It would be a serious problem if hydrogen were used for diurnal storage. But for rare event backup, efficiency is really unimportant, since so little of the energy produced will go through that channel. What matters for use cases like that is minimizing capital cost, not maximizing efficiency.

I'll add that the alternative proposal, excess renewables with curtailment, has 0% efficiency on the curtailed power. Using that power for anything at all, including making hydrogen, is more efficient that just dropping it on the ground.

Hydrogen is so useful for so many other things that its (present) poor round-trip efficiency doesn't matter much. And, that efficiency will only ever get better, not worse, and will get better faster the more of it there is.

But hydrogen is very far from the only storage choice, it is just one that is attractive for numerous ancillary reasons: we need to make the hydrogen regardless, so might as well store it too.

You are making a commonly seen mistake there.

Yes, making magnetic fields stronger can give one higher power density than ITER. But one runs into a limit because of power density at the wall. Once you're at that limit, higher magnetic fields don't really help.

ARC's volumetric thermal power density (volume of reactor, not of the plasma) is just 1/40th that of the primary reactor vessel of a commercial pressurized water fission reactor.

60% of the mass of an ARC reactor is in the steel structural supports for the magnets, so it's about at the upper limit for steady magnetic fields in a fusion reactor.

Compare that to a simple molten salt fission reactor. It will simply never be cheaper.

Molten solt reactors do not solve the problem of nuclear waste. It is very expensive to deal with it as it has to be stored for hundreds of years unless some technology would appear to separate that cheaply. Fusion produce like order of magnitude less radioactive waste which will be short-lived.

Plus a fusion plant can be very quick to start and shutdown or throttle down which is very useful for base load.

Molten salt reactors inherently don't. But you can burn up higher actinides resulting in waste that only needs to be stored a few 100 years and pose very little danger even in the most absurd scenarios.

You don't need to separate all the different parts. You reprocess our old waste into fuel for modern reactors. In those reactors higher actinides will be burned up. And the resulting output does not have higher actinides and only needs to be stored as long.

Moltex Energy is currently engaged with the Canadian regulator for such a facility, the process is called WATSS. Doing this is actually cheaper then the deep storage storage facilities proposed in many countries. Sadly because of political bullshit reprocessing has been made illegal in the US.

Such things would have been doable decades ago, and the money for it is already on bank accounts in most countries. But politician force the 'dig a hole for everything' solutions instead.

> Plus a fusion plant can be very quick to start and shutdown or throttle down which is very useful for base load.

Next generation fusion would also be very reactive to changes. Far more then traditional.

But the reality is you actually want to run full power as much as you can, no matter if fission or fusion.

Nuclear waste is not the major problem with fission, capital cost is.

Fusion solves a minor problem of fission while making the major problem worse. It's a great example of misplaced focus.

Cooling down the magnets of a fusion plant is not a quick process, btw. Hell, just getting a fusion plant built with RAFM steel up to operating temperature is a delicate process. Once irradiated, the temperature window that material can operate at is rather narrow (300 C to 550 C; below that it's too brittle and above that it creeps.)

Exactly, capital cost of large civil engineering project and the financing of that is actually the driver of the cost.

If you can build a nuclear plant with 500MW output and reduce the amount of concrete needed by significant factor, all of a sudden your are quite competitive.

Just for comparison, this is one of the furthest along commercial GenIV projects designs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pZC_ajI8Hs

No massive cooling towers. No gigantic containment cylinder. No gigantic low-pressure steam turbine.

In a PWR the core containment vessel is incredibly expensive and can only be built a few places, but its actually not the cost driver. Even so, compare to those, modern GenIV core vessels are vastly cheaper.

Not having to weld 8 inch gigantic steel vessels is far easier. See:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OgTgV3Kq49U/maxresdefault.jpg

And, not building them at all is easier yet. And, massively cheaper.

> So, to match power out, it has to be big. Really, really big.

Fusion has all of the characteristics of something you'll want to do if you are in space. Add to that the fact that its fuel is much easier to acquire than fission and that solar isn't available everywhere and you have a winner.

Meanwhile down to Earth, yes, most likely it will never be an important energy source.

For use in space, you need a reactor whose energy does not come out as hot neutrons. Even gamma rays would be better.

D-He3 (deuterium and synthetic helium) is attractive, except you have to make the He3 by making tritium and waiting for it to decay. pB (hydrogen and boron) is attractive, but much harder to make work than D-He3.

There is work on a D-He3 rocket, tagged "Princeton FRC", that they hope to loft for a trial maybe in 2035. Elon could get it tried out earlier, and ought to. We should be cranking tritium production up immediately so there will be enough He3 when we need that.

I must strongly disagree, particularly for DT fusion.

DT fusion reactors would be very heavy. ARC, for example, would have the weight of a couple of US WW2 destroyers. DT fusion delivers its energy as heat. A fission reactor would be far smaller, simpler, cheaper, and more reliable.

You might make the case for advanced fuels, but that likely means you have to get 3He from somewhere. I suspect beamed power will beat even advanced fuel fusion in all missions in the future (a weak prediction as I will not be around to see.)

But you dont need a lot of fuel for fission and you also need many other things to keep a ship/station running. Isnt fuel in the ballpark of just one of many consumables that you need?

Fission-powered ion propulsion is the best mature tech we have.

In space, the fission doesn't need containment, or even much shielding if it is far enough away from the rest of the ship.

In the cloud tops of Titan, Venus, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune, a nuclear power plant may be as simple as a naked pile suspended near the bottom of a big fabric tube with wind turbines at the top. The radioactively-heated, buoyant air inside holds it up, and, escaping through the turbine, generates power. (Enough is held back so it stays up.)

Perhaps surprisingly, gravity is almost Earth-normal on all four planets. Perhaps more surprisingly, the temperature at a not unreasonably-high pressure is also close to Earth-normal (except on Titan). But getting back to orbit from any of the last three would be very, very difficult, so such a reactor would only ever power robots.

Getting back to orbit from Titan is easy. From Venus, it is pretty hard; and once in orbit you would need to refuel to get anywhere else.

Titan is perhaps the best place in the solar system for nuclear energy. An open Brayton cycle system on Titan wouldn't even require a very hot reactor, when the inlet gas is dense nitrogen (mostly) at around 94 K.

I find it hard to believe that people would be seriously researching this if we already knew there could never be any sensible commercial application.

More likely we just don’t know the way to make it viable yet.

In some hypothetically possible world, policy choices are based the best reasoning from the latest information. We, alas, live in this world, where policy is mainly a product of history. The H bomb legacy looms large here.

We are in the position of the person whose car keys were lost somewhere, but we are looking only under the D-T fusion streetlight because we can't see anywhere else.

> That is not a bad thing: solar and wind are wholly up to the task

Exactly! If we just used every last drop of fossil fuels we had to build, ship, and constantly replace solar and wind generators (and do the same for the massive battery arrays we'll need), nuclear will be a distant memory.

> fission reactors are today not competitive

...because price =/= cost. Fission is the least costly form of energy generation, but our economy is too worthlessly opaque to realize the true cost of building all those beloved solar panels. If we got price and cost more in parity, nuclear would be the painfully obvious choice.

Markets fail yet again, I suppose.

> The only reliable product of the hot-neutron fusion research industry is dishonesty.

I can agree with you there. Every few months there's a "breakthrough!!" article where Qtotal is still < 0.01...cool, that's helpful...

> Fission is the least costly form of energy generation

This has ceased to be true.

When these things become viable they’re likely to be competing with battery storage systems for cheap power to start and restart the reactors. Though I suspect they’re likely to form partnerships, those partnerships will end up being profit sharing and blunt the prospects of such a plant.

> fission reactors are today not competitive, and get less competitive by the day

No, we are just incompetent idiots. This has nothing to do with fissions and everything to do with degradation of contruction and practical egnineering skills - now it takes 30 years and 100 billion dollars to make a small railway in California. Victorian England or China could do this without much trouble.

The english-speaking western nations have definitively and measurably degraded - every time an airport or a port or any major piece of infrastructure needs to be built, its a source of drama and infighting for 30 years. A nuclear powerplant is just a big construction project, and nations that can build a railway without a fuss, have demonstrated their ability to build a reactor without a fuss.

We are going to have to fix this if we don't want to decline into barbarity in the next 100 years. We can trade and launder the world's money and stocks but we can't build a bridge. Eventually the physical really will catch up to us "cough climate change', and you can't bribe laws of nature.

Sure you can 'cheat' by buying pre-built solar panels and wind turbines made in China, but you will have to build storage for them, the only proven viable storage is large scale hydro, so you are back as square one.

I have a suspicion that the layer of our society responsible for management and oversight of these projects, both in government and private sectors, is much more inconpetent than that of rival nations, and maybe that's an area to explore.

The west’s engineering skills are not in decline, though if you have a metric that indicates that, it would be interesting. Europe has not had USA-level problems with building a popular rail network, or other major works.

The main differences in costs and time from 150 years ago are:

(A) Accounting for Extrinsic Costs. as the nations have become more dense and more democratic, peoples voices need to be heard. Environmental, wildlife habitat, etc. are complex issues that have only become important in recent decades. People sometimes get tempted by authoritarian rule because they “get shit done cheaply”, but this is a ruse. By not engaging openly, there are often massive extrinsic costs, so the project is “cheap” by cheating and not counting the true costs. Europe seems to have streamlined this, the USA is still stuck in “might over right” political power struggles rather than compromises.

(B) Cheap labor. Most infrastructure doesn’t require large numbers of high skilled labor, it needs a mix of skilled and unskilled labor. The railways in the 1800s we’re built with large quantities of immigrant labor. This is in rarer supply in the West these days, for a variety of reasons.

(C) Labor rights and safety. Construction projects and rail projects were happy to bury dead workers by the wayside (or in the concrete of the Empire State Building). Or work them to unsustainable hours with limited pay. It took many strikes, some violent, to sort this out. Today’s standards don’t put up with that level of labor abuse.

(D) Investment sources. Many large projects were state funded, or were funded by investors with a lot of patience. That kind of patience is in short supply, as is state funding in the USA due to Republicans being Republicans. Europe seems to be able to pull this kind of funding off.

(E) Contract Grift. There is a lot more incentive and skill to slow roll and milk the cash flow of construction projects, given their complexity. Traditional large works were more vertically integrated and managed by those with incentive to see the job done, rather than paid by the hour. The solution to this is more vertical integration but that’s hard to pull off because of labor shortages.

I’d also note that China has a vested interest in publishing propaganda about its engineering and public works prowess while hiding its extrinsic costs.

One other factor I think is really interesting is what Poppendieck calls, "the tyranny of The Plan": https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of...

The basic notion is that the way non-experts think about the work has changed in ways that have drastically increased system inefficiency.

I know zip about construction megaprojects. But this is definitely true in software. Many executives want to pretend that projects are perfectly predictable, which a) diverts a lot of effort to non-value-creating outputs (fantasy plans, fantasy schedules), b) creates huge inefficiency by favoring fantasy plans over what's actually happening, and c) creates plenty of rework and chaos trying to solve the real-world problems when the gaps between fantasy and reality become too big to ignore.

To me, this problem is mainly rooted in executive culture, and is related to the phenomenon some call managerialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism

Solar costs stay in line because it is easy to count panels, and multiply by by the very public cost per panel. Similarly for wind, and for storage.

But few have the skills to estimate what any part of nuke should cost.

And also because the turnaround time from conception to execution is short, allowing bad practices to be identified and addressed. It also helps that solar construction at the utility scale requires lower skill labor and is more forgiving of mistakes.

One thing I would like to support in your statement is (A)The Extrinsic Costs. This was not accounted for in China and is shaping up to be a very volatile national issue for them for their Railways.

https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/chinas-high-speed-rai...

https://factsanddetails.com/china/cat13/sub86/item1848.html

I agree with everything you listed, except the political quip in point (D). Most of these large projects are funded with federal dollars, and both parties have no shame in clamoring for that money. The comment you're responding to was concerning a bloated project in a blue state. The issue isn't red vs blue- it's organizational. Politicians don't see the intrinsic value of such projects so much as they see the value of money intended for such projects. Unfortunately, grifting has become such an issue that people are opposed to the undertaking of infrastructure projects, but usually their objections only extend so far as their own state lines.

(E) has been going on for hundreds of years in the US is the thing. The difference is that the cost of goods used to be where the primary grift was instead of on labor (T&M contracts historically). But now T&M contracts are not very common at least in DoD but there is still obviously some level of grift but it’s partly due to extremely terrible guidelines for government procurement processes leading to contractors that do the bare minimum getting more money than contractors that exceed expectations (one rare exception of this happening was during the reconstruction of Atlanta’s I-95 when contractors were getting massive bonuses for finishing ahead of schedule contingent upon safety inspections passing - all work completed months ahead of schedule).

Note that South Korea and France have nuclear cheaper than renewables still because their processes over decades have led to basically producing nuclear plants with horizontal scaling, driving costs down dramatically. In essence, all energy production within the borders of a country is a matter of political will moreso than even technical requirements. If a culture wants to push back on X and wins politically, it becomes more expensive and distorts intrinsic costs. If a culture pushes for Y and eventually subsidizes it, it becomes dramatically cheaper even below intrinsic costs and is over-consumed (see: fossil fuels)

It is much simpler than that: fission is mature tech; its cost is not on the way down. Solar costs are still in free fall, wind almost as much so. The cheaper those get, the less competitive fission gets, just standing still.

The corruption tax on fission projects just exacerbates its structural problem.

Fission costs would absolutely be on the way down if we continued to invest in it. Fission is a fundamental aspect of China’s energy strategy. They don’t spend 30 years building these reactors and they don’t consider it fully matured tech.

You can build a fission reactor in five years and it will reliably power a city 24 hours a day for decades and decades. That will never be true for solar.

The west has become comically inept at hard projects. Solar is easy. Just buy panels from China. Funny that China thinks fission is the future. I guess no one told them about solar.

most of that cost is politically based not technical

Fission is being built at all only for political reasons. People who build power plants on their own dime are shunning the technology. No merchant nuclear power plant selling into a competitive market has ever been built anywhere.

China will construct 150 fission reactors between now and 2035 to produce 200 gigawatts of power at a total cost of $440B.

A similar buildout in the US would take 70 years and cost well over a trillion dollars.

Do you think China is building all those reactors for political reasons as opposed to generating reliable power 24/7 for a century?

Do you think China does things without regard to politics?

They have clear political motivation to continue to build nuclear power plants. For example, this keeps their nuclear sector occupied and preserves the technology against deterioration. Even if civilian NPPs are not military, the overall technology has direct connection to their military (as it does in France.)

Even with that, they are installing more renewables than nuclear. And China is pushing aggressively to reduce the cost of hydrogen. They are now exporting electrolysers at < $300/kW, a fraction of the cost from elsewhere. Cheap electrolysers are a crucial technology for pairing with intermittent renewables to get to a 100% renewable grid and remove the last tenuous argument in favor of nuclear.

I seriously doubt they will build that many reactors by 2035, btw.

> They have clear political motivation to continue to build nuclear power plants.

If realizing what a terrible bet solar and wind are is political, then yes I agree their motivation is political.

Strange, then, that they are building more solar and wind than fission.

Why not build both? Nuclear is great, and pound-for-pound is a much better energy source than solar, but you can build solar much more quickly than nuclear. I don't think your rebuttal is particularly damning.

My points against solar I raised to you in another thread stand: to build the panels/batteries we need, it will create an extreme excess of carbon in the atmosphere. That's not to say we shouldn't build solar, but to pretend it can solely serve all of our collective energy needs is myopic give the constraints.

To be clear, I'm all for covering the entire planet in solar panels...after we switch our production to be powered via fission.

I.e., never.

"What a terrible bet solar and wind are", as you claim immediately above, would be a reason not to build out solar and wind, if it were correct. But it's not, and they are.

And, it is at best naive to believe that it takes more energy to produce a solar panel than it will generate. People mining and refining silicon, cadmium, and tellurium and making solar panels out of them do not get power for free. They pay open market prices for energy, which they pass directly on to customers all down the chain to the final buyer. When your panel's production output pays off its purchase cost, its output has (much more than) exceeded the energy used to produce it.

> as you claim immediately above

The claim was regarding nuclear VS solar (either/or), in which case yet, solar is a terrible bet. I stand by that.

> People mining and refining silicon, cadmium, and tellurium and making solar panels out of them do not get power for free

And you say I'm being naive...

Firstly, the price of the panels doesn't even match the price of production because of subsidies.

Secondly, they do get power for free: the well-known, terrible cost of burning fossil fuels at their current scale is not incorporated into the price of fossil fuels. Capitalist markets are not capable of doing so.

So my point is if you were to actually price fossil fuels according to their cost solar panel production would not be competitive with nuclear in any way.

> When your panel's production output pays off its purchase cost, its output has (much more than) exceeded the energy used to produce it.

Sure, it can pay off its purchase cost, but as above, that means absolutely nothing. A more interesting payment would be watts-in, watts-out, in which case I'd wager you get marginal gains. And if the watts-in are generated with fossil fuels, you're doing a lot more damage than you think.

Regarding nuclear, sure it's expensive, but a lot of that is artificial, and a lot of the high comparative cost is due to the price/cost disparity in fossil fuels. And hey, as a bonus, it works at night and on cloudy days and you don't need to build an enormous battery which is another can of worms people love to gloss over.

I see that you have completely abandoned rational argumentation and are just making shit up, so I leave this here.

Guess I struck a chord somewhere.

Struck a rock.

China doesn't need to build 150 nuclear reactors at breakneck speed to keep their nuclear sector occupied. They're making a massive investment in this technology from the education level all the way to the construction level.

China isn't planning to realize a majority of their power supply from solar until after 2045.

Like you, I doubt they'll hit that solar goal. Instead, they'll likely build more reactors.

> This has nothing to do with fissions and everything to do with degradation of contruction and practical egnineering skills - now it takes 30 years and 100 billion dollars to make a small railway in California. Victorian England or China could do this without much trouble.

Not to mention over-regulation driven by a general lack of political will. Its easier to win some votes by bashing nuclear than stand by it, even if it is the most likely alternative for baseload power in a carbon-free energy mix.

>the only proven viable storage is large scale hydro

Japan's experience with sodium-sulfur batteries stands in contrast.

https://www.sandia.gov/ess-ssl/wp-content/uploads/2021/LDES/...

Na-S is less popular for new projects these days because of rapid decreases in the price of lithium batteries, but that's not a fundamental limitation of the technology — and we have no risk of running out of sodium nor sulfur.

In fairness, Japan's construction sector seems much healthier than that of the United States.