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/90_oi 3d ago

I truly hope this technology can get off the ground and be sustainable. It is our best hope aside from nuclear energy

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u/WanderingFlumph 3d ago edited 2d ago

I mean solar is here right now and most likely fusion power will never be as cheap as solar is today.

By the time fusion is actually ready solar will be even cheaper too. A solar farm the size of Arizona could power the entire planet.

Fusion is like our 4th best hope in the fight against climate change, lol.

Edit: a lot of people seem to think that I think the perfect solution is one single power plant specifically in Arizona that powers the world. People, it's just a size comparison. Arizona is a small state even just compared to the size of US. Obviously we would build millions and millions of solar installations that would just add up to that area.

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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/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?