$1T to move fusion forward just 5 years from eg 2040 to 2035 could alone have a huge ROI in terms of climate mitigation and decarbonization
Total US energy generation 2021: 4 trillion kwh
Average power generation: 457Gw
Cost of Topaz solar farm: $2.5bn Potential output: 550 Mw Cost per Mw $4.5m
Spend a trillion on similar capacity, you get 220Gw potential output.
But that's assuming you get 550Mw average. In fact, it produces about 1282Gwh output a year, so average is more like 145Mw.
So at a rough estimate, you need more like 10 trillion to meet US electricity demand. And that assumes you have unlimited battery storage for free.
And of course electricity is a small minority of total energy use.
Incidentally, I think it's amazing you get to about 10% of total electricity needs with only $1tr, i.e. around 4% of US national output.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
```python trillion_dollars = 1e12
mw = 550
cost_farm = 2.5e9
cost_dollar_per_mw = cost_farm/mw
num_mw = trillion_dollars/cost_dollar_per_mw
num_gw = num_mw/1000
num_gw
kwh = 4e12
mw = kw/1000
gw = mw/1000
gw ```
That's quite high. Here in Germany they assume 530-800€ per kW_peak for a utility-scale ground-mounted system (2021) [0]. You can add additional CAPEX for inflation and expansion of the grid, but <$1500 per kW_peak (aka $1.5m per MW) should be quite possible. Especially if you include scaling effects.
If you add batteries for night-time balancing, LCOE roughly doubles for now.
Economically, no other energy source will beat non-winter day-time PV in the foreseeable future. Imo, as long as other plants are running during those times, investing in PV is a no-brainer.
[0] https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/cost-o...
No amount of investment into solar power can make the sun magically shine 24 hours a day.
Solar + reverse hydropower, solar + synthetic fuel manufacture, solar + appropriate sized batteries, solar cranes-with-weights, etc.
Solar is so cheap that all those are plausible. Fusion is still far from ready.
Solar panels are cheap and the market appears to be fine with unreliable power[0] if it's cheap enough.
[0] Unreliable, but predictable that is. You can estimate with decent confidence what the weather will be like tomorrow and you can definitely tell what it's going to be a few hours from now, so energy auctions a day ahead are feasible.
HVDC lines help with this a lot. It has gotten to a point where there are serious plans to build a long, undersea HVDC line from the UK to Morocco which, get this, is poised to cost less than the equivalent(GWh delivered annually) Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant:
https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
That's how cheap the combination of solar and HVDC is.
We should be installing more solar & wind, but that alone is not a solution to our problems.
Further, it's possible that fusion plants might be prohibitively expensive to build and maintain, even if their fuel is cheap.
For example, nitrogen fixation for fertilizer currently uses natural gas almost entirely for the source of hydrogen. Vastly cheaper energy means it would make much more sense to switch this to electricity, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.5808....
But I agree with your sentiment, there are a lot of engineering details to consider before one can shout "free energy".
In fact carbon removal might be a great way to subsidize fusion at the outset so that it can be overprovisioned/have a guaranteed minimum price
Energy estimated is 1,200 kilowatt-hours per ton of CO2 removed.
Nuclear fission energy averages 0.4 cents/kWh. That's $480 in energy costs alone (ignoring profit margins for removal, etc).
Why would bleeding edge fusion that requires cutting edge lasers, magnets, and various other containment stuff have a cheaper energy generation cost? I could be wrong, but I don't think nuclear waste (which is the primary difference with fusion) is the primary cost contributor. So why would you want to invest in more expensive fusion to remove all this carbon instead of cheaper fission? Nuclear waste by the way isn't waste. It can be reused in breeder reactors and it's used a lot in medicine (I could be wrong but one of the reasons nuclear imaging has gotten more expensive is because radioactive materials are more difficult to obtain due to reduction in global fission energy).
After decades of R&D fusion should become significantly cheaper than fission per kWh if only due to having less of a regulatory burden and smoother permitting process.
It’s more expensive now, but in the long run it will be cheaper.
I suspect the regulatory environment is from regulatory capture by the fossil fuel industry. Otherwise why would Gen IV reactors, which can’t meltdown, be suffering many regulatory delays? What kind of nuclear proliferation concerns exist for reactors built and deployed within the US?
>Russia accounted for about 55% of Germany’s natural gas imports and 35% of Germany’s oil imports last year, causing Germany to resist a blanket European Union ban on Russian energy.
If every country could assure their energy independence, geopolitics would look very different. Yes, there are still many problems, like natural resources. But if you can assure all your residents can keep the lights on, their houses warm and the economy moving (EV's for transit, technology)... its very reassuring.
Also, there should hopefully be much less pomp and process around fusion compared to fission due to the safety/radiation profile being much safer.
What? Cost is THE problem with nuclear energy.
You must have some bizarre way of framing things to make today statement - you should at least tell us what that is since you must know that you are making a controversial claim.
We aren't "heating up the planet" .. we're "insulating the atmosphere".
Increased C02 (and the close following methane and water vapor increases) serve to trap more of the heat radiated outwards that would otherwise escape.
The vast bulk of that heat comes from the visible light of the sun which passes easily through the atmosphere coming in, gets converted to IR energy as it warms the earth and oceans, and then escapes outwards.
Our changes to the atmosphere have disturbed that balance.
Your comment has some small merit, but you would need to work through the heat output of human generated power and then compare that to the daily heat energy originally from the sun that radiates outward.
We are doing both. We are doing more insulating than heating, but we obviously generate more heat.
If so, how'd you do on the numbers?
Is it x10, x100, x1000, .. more?
This is after all the part that matters.
The original question is a good one. We will use more energy as it gets cheaper (see monster trucks, Las Vegas, Dubai). We should be thinking of what we will do with the waste heat when everyone has a fusion reactor.
To be clear I made a qualified assertion; the phrase "Relative scales of various factors matter here" does the work.
> Obviously we get more heat from the sun than we generate on our own.
Yes - but, again, How much more?
If it's barely twice as much (which seems unlikely) then heat from our activity is a major factor in all this.
If it's 100,000x times more then I stand firm, heat from our activity has effectively zero impact on the AGW issue (although other by-products from our daily routines are the crux of the problem).
If it's some other factor then what relative signifigance does our human heat generation have?
> I have no idea.
It's a shame you didn't grab an envelope and make use of the back, it's a classic Fermi problem [1] of the kind I and my class mates were posed in high school and the kind of thing many other HN commeters would delight in taking a run at.
If you're feeling game you might like to start with the daily heating of the earths surface from the sun, and then look at the petajoules of energy generated and consumed per day and take a stab at guesstimating the waste (unused, released into the lower earths surface layer) heat as a percentage (or google efficiencies, etc).
Have fun!
EDIT: from quick google query it looks like per day earth receives equivalent of yearly power consumption (not only electricity but also fuel). So we would need to x356 our energy consumption which is not that much unreasonable if you could have for example heated outdoor pool for free anywhere in the world.
nothing will stop climate change. The earth’s climate will continue to change regardless of any human interventions
Edit: I'm Canadian, the question is rhetorical.
I'm not very excited in hearing we'll get even more powerful thermo-nuclear bombs.
And yet that's exactly why the NIF was actually built. They do plenty of weapons research: https://wci.llnl.gov/facilities/nif I'm told the building was even built to switch over between civilian and classified use unusually quickly, but I'm having trouble turning up a citation for that right now with just my phone and 2022-Google.
> All of the difficult problems fusion power generation faces with long-term plasma confinement go away when you're just trying to squeeze as hard as you can and are willing to use fission bombs to do it in an otherwise uncontrolled manner.
Not if you want them to fit in a submarine warhead. This sort of work is not easy to do well.
You're both half-right.
The NIF is the replacement for nuclear tests. It's necessary to maintain the arsenal in a working fashion, as the warheads degrade over time and have to be replaced with new ones. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=655921...
The NIF is not for more powerful nuclear weapons, as that's entirely unnecessary. If anything, most interest these days is in less powerful weapons for potential battlefield use.
It's not the only thing they do.
“It’s a big milestone, but NIF is not a fusion-energy device,” says Dave Hammer, a nuclear engineer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Herrmann acknowledges as much, saying that there are many steps on the path to laser fusion energy. “NIF was not designed to be efficient,” he says. “It was designed to be the biggest laser we could possibly build to give us the data we need for the [nuclear] stockpile research programme.”
That's why MIRV was introduced. One ICBM delivering 10 - 20 small warheads result in much greater devastation than an equally heavy warhead in one package, because less power is wasted on air and space.
It's morbid math, but it makes sense.
You're right that increasing the yield was a bad example from my side, but the purpose is to improve the weapons, nothing else.
> What do you think the US nuclear weapons research lab will use their research for?
Why do you think that fusion is not enough? Complete strategic energy independence for the US, and dominance in the electricity sector? That's so, SO much more valuable than better nuclear weapons.
A relatively recent example: development of cancer chemotherapy began with the incidental finding that the chemical warfare agent nitrogen mustard reduced the white cell count of affected soldiers.
We make progress building on the shoulders of giants, but those giants are often standing in dung.
Although, it would be interesting to see fusion reactors on planes and ships powering other types of weapons like lasers and more powerful railguns or faster icbms.
they're working on getting you to click on an ad
This generation was classically educated, without TV or social media in their childhood. They spent the time we're wasting on HN reading _books_ and following the discipline their elders learned in WWI. They had plenty of occasions to tinker.
I claim the brains of those generation was structurally different from ours, and we're talking about the best minds of this generation.
It's a trope to say that our "best minds are working on ads" - the reality is that, no, we webshits are not the "best minds".
"The last generation was better because they read _books_ and had _discipline_ and didn't waste their time on frivolous garbage" is also a trope.
People having been saying "this next generation is inferior to the last one" since the ancient Greeks. If that was consistently true we would already be in an Idiocracy scenario.
Been on Twitter, Facebook, or Hacker News lately ?
More seriously, I really fear this kind of stuff is, to some extend, new : https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones...
(Although, maybe it's comparable to the "opium epidemics" of the 1800s ?)
Ironically, I should stop having this kind of conversation... On social network.
World changing people seem to me to be very much the right people in the right place at the right time. The best way to find them is to try to create those places now.
Opportunities for WWII and post-war era research don’t exist now. Everything with funding is very short term, politicized, and narrowly focused within a micro specialty.
Realistically, I don’t think that will change until it has to.
I'm a pretty smart dude. I'm no big deal on HackerNews or in Silicon Valley, but I look easily 10x as smart as most of the normal people I come across in the real world. And I regularly come across people so much smarter than me, they have to explain things to me the same way I talk to a toddler
I'll bet a lot of geniuses are congregating in cool orgs like those where they can make a real difference in the world.
They're not, and there's zero evidence to back that frequently floated premise up. That's a particularly laughable myth created by those same industry people to feel better about their terrible life choices. If you can't do something meaningful, at least you can pretend to be a genius doing nothing meaningful. It turns out that both things are false, they're not brilliant and they're wasting their lives.
No, the brilliant people are working at TSMC, Intel, AMD, nVidia, Applied Materials, ASML, Illumina, ARM, TI, et al.
They're working on CRISPR. They're working on mRNA vaccines. They're working on stem cells. They're trying to cure HIV just as the same type of people cured hepatitis C. They're working for Moderna, Pfizer, BioNTech, Roche, Novartis, Amgen, Regeneron, Sanofi, Gilead, Merck, Glaxo, et al. They're trying to figure out how to roll back or cure Alzheimer's. They're dedicating a lifetime of work into exploring the human genome, so that future generations have a much better, much more useful map.
They're working on robotics at Intuitive Surgical or Boston Dynamics. They're working on self-driving tech. They've been building out the massive, global cloud infrastructure. They're at NASA, or SpaceX, or ESA and they're doing the work to get us a base on the moon or to Mars. They just got done building rockets that can land upright. They're building a massive, extraordinary, global satellite system in Starlink.
They're working on fusion.
And so on and so forth.
Ad clicks? Yeah right. They're not even in the room.
[1] This is up 1.1% year-over-year, and only up 6.5% p.a. over the last three years - not a pandemic-driven bubble. Source is https://www.redfin.com/county/733/IL/DuPage-County/housing-m...
Maybe he was like you describe long ago but something...happened.
It will be time to unleash resources once they have a working fusion reactor design in order to build fusion power plants and the industrial infrastructure required to supply them.
Until then they should of course get the resources they need but I don't think throwing money at them will necessarily speed things up.
Plutonium was significantly more easy to produce, but it did require some novel engineering for the implosion lens. They weren't sure it was going to work and did, in fact, test the bomb before dropping it on Nagasaki.
I think the Manhattan project is a great example of where more funds can help; if the funds were more restricted, it's entirely possible they would have gone with the "sure thing" of the uranium bomb instead of spending resources on the less sure plutonium bomb. Trying out multiple ideas in parallel often "wastes" money since if you try ideas in tandem, you will always try the high-percentage ideas first.
You mean wars for oil? Fusion would not solve that, that wars were not about energy per se but about control and domination, keeping USD as world reserve currency and US as world hegemon. Look at Taiwan and chips situation, no oil there, there will be always some "oil" out there that you will want to control instead of giving that control to your rivals. It's game theory 101.
people love to invoke game theory but fail to explain why only we spend more than next 10 countries military budget combined. plus its quite unclear what we get out of it because of all the secrecy & likely its mostly inflated costs and kickbacks. The wars in Iraq/Afghanistan themselves have cost close to 3T over time & thats outside of annual budgets. Personally I'd have preferred to take medicare for all for that amount of money.
Unfortunately no, you can't go more calm because projection of force is what keeps status quo and your rivals in place, not liberal values or clearheaded minds. There is no world police, the one with the biggest stick makes the rules. US is not the first hegemon in history of the world, we had Roman Empire, we had Dutch Empire etc, all of the world hegemons were major military powers. There is always some challenger waiting in the shadows to take over your position, you can't just sit and be calm because you will lose what you have, I assure you that others will not just sit calm but claim what's yours if they see sign of weakness, history proves that again and again.
> but fail to explain why only we spend more than next 10 countries military budget combined
Well it's easy to explain, US have it in its doctrine that it needs to have military strong enough to fight 2 wars at a time so it needs to spend more than at least a few countries behind it but a lot of this budget is probably not spent well. The problem here is that when you stop being world hegemon with the biggest stick, your currency stops being world reserve currency which means you can't finance your debt the same way as before, which has drastic consequences to your budget and it would be really fatal for US. Sometimes you just can't stop the music even when you don't like the melody because silence will hurt you.
> plus its quite unclear what we get out of it because of all the secrecy & likely its mostly inflated costs and kickbacks.
Agreed that's inefficient, you probably could achieve the same with lower costs but how much lower I don't know if anyone knows.
But yes, it was clearly a mistake.
Maybe he doesn't actually believe in Starship.
And this could still be true.
People here act like he bought Twitter and then deleted the website. This isn't the case.
Did he overpay, yes, but its still a business that is worth something.
I was told that Twitter would collapse and die any day now a month ago.
It seems to be holding up well enough during the current mega world event known as the FIFA World Cup.
I know it is popular/easy to hate on the man right now, but this is a really strange take.
Given that Musk has been talking about mars since at least 2001, many years before he had the resources he has now, and almost went bankrupt funding spacex's first orbital rocket, it's hard to believe he's pretending.
People seem happy to believe all negative things they hear about him, but discount anything that doesn't gel with this negative image. It's like how the same people who put all missteps of Tesla/SpaceX at Elons feet, will also discount any of the successes and say he has nothing to do with them.
Things like Hyperloop also make more sense in that context.
Musk has very obviously poor impulse control. Someone more contained, patient, less impulsive, would have waited and taken a more strategic approach to acquiring Twitter (which would have left an opening to let the stock implode with the rest of the tech market, after which one could have pounced and grabbed it for far cheaper). On the flip side, that less impulsive person probably wouldn't have started SpaceX in the first place (given the suicidal fiscal task involved and context at the time in the industry), or wouldn't have gone to the financial extremes required to make it succeed (betting essentially all of his wealth on Tesla and SpaceX).
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/technology/commonwealth-f...
Lasers are pretty inefficient. How much energy did it take to make 2.05 MJ of lased light?
Does this breakthrough have a reasonable path to to make more electrical energy than it puts in?
> LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE). Many advanced science and technology developments are still needed to achieve simple, affordable IFE to power homes and businesses, and DOE is currently restarting a broad-based, coordinated IFE program in the United States. Combined with private-sector investment, there is a lot of momentum to drive rapid progress toward fusion commercialization.
It's fusion Manhattan project time.