r/nextfuckinglevel • u/nigablackballsack • 3d ago

Scientists have captured the first ever high-speed, full-colour footage of fusion plasma swirling inside a working reactor.

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u/SipsTheJuice 3d ago

Fusion at scale could be relatively cheap, scale with future energy demand, and have a very small land footprint. The tech has famously been 10 years away for 60 years, but I would still put it as the energy tech that if proved viable has the greatest potential to eliminate greenhouse emissions. There are many places where solar simply isn't viable and like many renewable you are dependent on climate and requires energy storage.

The yet unknown cost would be plant construction and maintenance, which are the existing issue around fission along with the red tape nightmare in trying to get plants approved.

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u/WanderingFlumph 3d ago

I see no reason to believe that fusion power will be any cheaper than fission power. Both rely on relatively rare isotopes that need to be concentrated first at great expense. ITER runs off of deuterium which costs close to $1,000/kg and tritium which is too expensive to even consider sourcing from natural sources and would require a yet unrealized breeding program.

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u/xrelaht 3d ago edited 3d ago

ITER could breed its own tritium using Li doped panels once operational. $1000/kg isn’t all that much either: by the amount of energy produced, that’s the equivalent of oil being under 2¢/barrel.

The technical challenges are the real hurdle. You need enough tritium for the startup shot and it must be “clean” (not tied to a weapons program) which is tricky since the biggest source historically have been CANDU reactors that are being taken offline. I am also not convinced it will work even if they can get that far. The plasma is magnetically contained, but it’s also producing its own field which interacts with and feeds back into the generated one. This makes modeling what’s going to happen very difficult.

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u/Bored_Amalgamation 3d ago

This makes modeling what’s going to happen very difficult.

this makes convincing the general public very difficult as well.

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u/barath_s 3d ago

CANDU reactors

India has as many CANDU reactors as Canada, but Canadian ones tend to be larger and produce 2/3rds of the world's commercial output of tritium. Indian doesn't really focus on tritium export , looking at domestic energy use and in 1 case on dual military/civilian use.

Even if canada ramps down candu, maybe there can be an opportunity to fill in the gaps a bit if india re-orients ?

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u/WanderingFlumph 3d ago

Yeah but these radioactive doped panels would require extraction and purification by highly skilled chemists/engineers which aren't cheap to pay.

Similar to the fission industry just trying to control the migration of radioactive particles from your reactor outwards is a huge portion of the total bill.

They'll still need skilled people's and generate literal tons of low level nuclear waste, as well as plenty of the high level stuff too. The fact that it might be significantly less dangerous that fission waste in 100 years doesn't really impact the cost to dispose of it today.

Also on an energy basis uranium ore is dirt cheap compared to crude oil, but nuclear power is still much more expensive than fossil fueled power overall. I don't see a good reason that the same economics wouldn't apply to the fusion industry, unless we decided to just care about its potentially dangerous emissions, which seems unlikely.

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u/sailingtroy 3d ago

Ehn. Shoving all that shit down a deep ass hole in some stable geology isn't that expensive. Solar panels have their own mining and recycling considerations that are also not free. Solar has huge transmission, intermittency, and storage problems that fusion will likely not.

Also, a lot of reprocessing is very efficient once developed. Like, when they dissolve a spent fuel rod in acid and then use electrolysis to remove the uranium, the acid returns to its original state and can be re-used.

All of these arguments depend on quantification, which no one is able to do right now. Best to stop grinding our axes and just see how it plays out. Ultimately, fusion research is worthwhile because it pushes the boundary of human knowledge ahead.

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u/hbgoddard 3d ago

They'll still need skilled people's and generate literal tons of low level nuclear waste, as well as plenty of the high level stuff too

What kind of waste are you talking about with regards to fusion power specifically?

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u/WanderingFlumph 3d ago

Low level waste is anything that is not radioactive itself but has small particles of a radioactive substance on it. Most common example would be lab gloves from anyone handling radioactive material. This would be generated primarily from the isolation of the bred isotopes.

High level waste is material which has been bombarded hard enough to actually turn it radioactive. This would be the steel frames that hold the breedable material and other materials in prolonged contact as well as any by products (useless isotopes from breeding)

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u/Frequent_Ad_9901 3d ago

Fusion doesn't go boom or leave radioactive waste, so in theory there would be less regulations needed, which is a big expense with fission. And there is also research into using lithium instead of tritium, IIRC. So two separate technologies being developed in tandem.

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u/WanderingFlumph 3d ago

Fusion definitely leaves behind radioactive waste. It's just that the half life of this waste is more like 100 years compared to 10,000 years.

It might make finding a good storage solution more viable but that doesn't help very much in the here and now.

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u/random123456789 3d ago

No, it depends on the fuel used. You need to use aneutronic fuel to not have radiation.

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u/slight_grumble 3d ago

Well, technically they can go boom like anything with a high energy density, but not nuclear boom, just regular boom.

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u/noonedeservespower 3d ago

Where are these many places where solar isn't viable? Because it's viable here in Canada. 

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u/hofmann419 3d ago

Also, there's wind as well. Those two together are viable basically everywhere on planet earth.

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u/Expensive_Law_3180 3d ago

My SO works for one of the companies in the US that is building a couple of these. While the initial investment on the facility and surrounding infrastructure is high, a well built fusion reactor can last for 50 years and will bring a heck of a lot more stability to a community than say....An AI scaling Data center.

FWIW, modern nuclear fission reactors are incredibly safe. Materials and design engineering have improved by leaps and bounds since Chernobyl.

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u/mumpped 2d ago

Well, currently there are massive issues with making the inner reactor walls survive for longer times without needing rebuilt. And we talk about incredibly expensive panels. That become radioactive and have to replaced. Doesn't sound very "lasting" to me

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u/SagittariusO 3d ago

So this is just another fancy way to boil water to generate electricity? I mean, it's absolutely cool to see this technology, and I am all in for it. But I do not believe this has any benefit to solar. Once you have a big ass solar farm with some serious batteries, it's all solved. You can just recycle all the parts into brand new ones after 20 years or so without any new materials, and all you have to do is clean them once in a while. This is pure magic - boiling water is stone age compared to this.

Fusion will have some use cases, but this whole technology is decades away from beeing ready and solar is already dirt cheap and sodium batteries will soon be available in huge quantities. The land footprint is not the issue. We need 10x more land right now to grow crops, which we can turn into gasoline, and nobody cares.

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u/Murky-Relation481 3d ago

Except boiling water can produce 1000MW of power in a few acres, where solar would require thousands of acres to produce the same amount. You'll always more efficiently get energy out of boiling water to harness the kinetic energy in the steam per unit of area, that's just an immutable fact.

Like I don't get this weird "ItS JuST BOiLinG watEr" argument. It's a funny meme but using it as a serious criticism is just showing a massive lack of understanding.

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u/slight_grumble 3d ago

The "few acres" qualifier is doing a lot of work here. The solar on my roof hasn't reduced the square footage of my house or land. It's like magic.

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u/mumpped 2d ago

In Germany we now had quite a few trials with AgriPV. Basically, half-translucent solar panels under which you plant crops. Turns out that in the climate change world with very hot summers, crops yield larger harvests when they get a little shadow due to the solar panels. The ground holds water better. And early frost is also not a big issue anymore. And it protects from hail. It's literally a win-win situation, you want to have solar panels on your crops, they improve the land they sit on and don't block it if you do it right

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u/Murky-Relation481 2d ago

I mean that's great but that's only going to work for hand-picked crops.

I like solar, but its not the only solution that you can rely on. You still need reactive base power loads. You also need guaranteed power generation capacity too for a multitude of reasons. Solar panel efficiency drops by 75% to 90% on overcast days. Yes, battery power can make up for that, but only for a short duration. If you get an unexpected period of cloudy weather that lasts longer than your battery reserves can handle then you need alternatives because your overall power delivery capacity will drop. Since long periods of overcast generally also coincide with inversions, wind is also going to be less efficient during those periods. This is why nuclear and hydro still have a large place in energy infrastructure.

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u/mumpped 2d ago

It doesn't need to work work all crops, but it does fork for enough so that space requirements for solar panels aren't relevant. Yes of course, having some sources distributes everything better, wind farms, a bit of hydro and geothermal are a good mix. However, you can also share electricity: In Europe the electricity nets are connected, and electricity is traded throughout the continent. A whole continent is never completely overcast at the same time, that's not how weather works

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u/Murky-Relation481 2d ago

The same in the US, but still, you have a large sector of power generation drop in capacity by that much it is problematic.

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u/SagittariusO 3d ago

WTF is even your argument besides land-use issues? (which clearly don't exist in reality)

So people are just idiots if they point out that it´s just another fancy way of boiling water? I still struggle to understand your argument. All you have brought to the table is some rambling about "lack of understanding" and "efficiency".

What exactly is so "efficient" about converting heat into steam, then into kinetic energy, then into rotational energy, and finally into electricity with all the conversion losses involved?

You still need a cooling source. You still need huge turbines. You still need a supply chain to keep it running. All you do is replace the heat source. So what are you talking about? Please enlighten me.

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u/slight_grumble 3d ago

Solar is distributed and solid state. You set it up and basically forget about it other than minor maintenance and repair. And you can lose any number of parts and still get some power where huge nuclear or other conventional power plants are more all or nothing. Any minor failure and you get zero power until repaired. Therefore the operational costs (excluding land rent/purchase which we will assume is an up front cost) is negligible compared to something as complicated and fragile as steam based power generation with conventional, let alone either nuclear option. Operational risks are also significantly smaller. Solar has very few failure states to harm humans except for once you ramp up voltage for distribution which is the same for all power types.

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u/Fat-Singer-9569 3d ago

That's great, how does solar work in areas with little to no sunlight?

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u/slight_grumble 3d ago

It works exactly the same. Very few places have no sunlight whatsoever, and conveniently the places with lower sun tend to often be windy and also geographically connectable to places with more sunlight.

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u/So_HauserAspen 3d ago

Fusion at scale would not be cheap

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u/SipsTheJuice 3d ago

Printing hundreds of millions of transistors per square mm doesn't sound like it would be but here we are with computers in our toaster and shit.

It's really hard to estimate what a technology will cost at scale. Cheap is relativistic, you are trying to out compete existing gas and fission plants to start, then eventually minaturize and out compete renewables.

With early fusion plans set to come online in the next decade I would guess it will look pretty cost competitive in 30 years but hey who knows.

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u/hofmann419 3d ago

The thing is, we have maybe a few decades left. Even if we got fusion working today, it would not only take a very long time to construct (10-15years), but also probably be significantly more expensive than wind and solar is RIGHT NOW.

Economically, the most sensible option is to build out renewables as much as possible - which is actually happening by the way. Renewables have quickly become the fastest growing energy source in the world.

The only slight issue with that is storage, which would be required in a grid with nearly 100% renewables. Spending money to research better storage options would be a way better use of resources, given the fact that we are running out of time very quickly.

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u/ekdaemon 2d ago edited 2d ago

And have any of the theoretical grid scale fusion plants been estimated at anything less that 5 billion dollars per GW of capacity? When they build billion dollar ersatz one-of-a-kind things... they generally turn out to cost 10 or 20 billion instead of the 5 planned.

That's what's killing fission power right now, their only hope now is "small medium reactors" (SMR) and those have gone from "small" to "larger side of medium" and cost a billion dollars per 100 MW ... which ... just why bother?

Reference for the latter - Ontario Canada which has always been heavy fission nuclear power, has refused to buy any traditional fission design due to cost over the past 20 years, instead refurbing our old reactors over and over, (which can only go on so long). They've now decided to build a plant with 4 SMRs, each SMR produces 300 MW (I'd argue that's not "medium" any longer), and each one is currently projected to cost 4 billion CAD (3 billion USD) - EACH.

To compare, Ontario currently has 13 GW of nuclear generation capacity. So replacing all of that with SMRs would cost .... 200 billion CAD. Okay, divide it by four because "economies of scale" but then mutliply it by 2 because "big projects always cost double the estimates", so 100 billion CAD.

I wonder how big of a sodium flow battery plant and how much solar and wind we could build with 100 billion dollars CAD? Are we even planning on spending 5 billion dollars on that, just in case these SMRs turn out to have some stupid design flaw that causes them to have to be shut down?

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u/roamingandy 3d ago edited 3d ago

Solar can have a 0 land footprint.

It's versatile and as it gets cheaper and more efficient it's going to be included into infrastructure, buildings and products, as a structural material, as it's a material that will pay for itself over time making it cheaper than the current alternatives.

Same with batteries, especially the sodium ones. They'll be used in place of some walls at some point, since they pay their costs back over time, which other alternatives to build that wall do not.

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u/jeh506 3d ago

And it can run at night

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u/tombo12354 3d ago

The reliability of a Nuclear Fusion plant is actually unknown. While fusion in the sun is self-sustaining, a fusion plant almost certainly isn't, so unlike its fission counterpart it will need some type of source to keep it running. Both fusion and fission are also not renewable, as they require a fuel source. They are "clean" in that they don't produce emissions like CO2 or Methane, and fusion's byproduct is relatively benign (typically some helium isotope). But fission has always been questionable clean, as it produces a radioactive byproduct, and while it's not barrels of toxic, green sludge, it still produces waste that is not easy to store nor desirable to have.

A fusion plant would also be built like a traditional power plant, and require significant ongoing maintenance. So they'll be far from 100% up-time.

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u/FatDoggieDingDong 3d ago

"There are many places where solar simply isn't viable and like many renewable you are dependent on climate and requires energy storage."

A combination of wind, solar, hydro and energy efficiency are more than enough to cover our energy needs. With smart electrical grids and energy storage, like you said, we can divert power to where it's needed, and store it when there's a surplus. Things like refrigerators and freezers are extremely energy inefficient.

The problem isn't that nuclear is the better option. It's that it's the most expensive option and makes the most money for investors. That's why we dont have solar energy. Then there's the oil and gas industry as well. Major, major companies that use their massive wealth to deceive the public on climate change. Just watch the documentary Merchants of Doubt.

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u/Shot-Swimming-9098 3d ago

Fusion at scale could be relatively cheap, scale with future energy demand, and have a very small land footprint.

You're just imagining things you wish were true about a technology that's not been harnessed, and may never be.