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I recently heard the idea that the price of energy is going to start approaching zero from Chamath Palihapitiya on Lex Fridman's podcast. It hit me as a big, all-changing thing. If fusion is really solved, we can probably mass-produce it within years if not months, so we should start thinking of the implications now
[1] https://matt-rickard.ghost.io/content/images/2022/01/image-1...
I recently heard the idea that the price of energy is going to start approaching zero from Chamath Palihapitiya on Lex Fridman's podcast. It hit me as a big, all-changing thing. If fusion is really solved, we can probably mass-produce it within years if not months, so we should start thinking of the implications now
You (or maybe Chamath Palihapitiya) are making a very very wrong assumption that a working fusion power plant would produce free energy. Nothing could be further from the truth: with any half-way plausible design today, fusion power will be the most expensive form of power generation known to man. While some of the fuel is nearly free (deuterium and to some extent even the tritium), it's more realistic to think of th…
Let's talk about fission - I used to say I'd build 70,000 nuclear reactors if I was in charge of a rich country. Would I have enough fuel to power them all?
Your third paragraph painted a pretty vivid picture in my head, good writing.
I recently heard the idea that the price of energy is going to start approaching zero from Chamath Palihapitiya on Lex Fridman's podcast. It hit me as a big, all-changing thing. If fusion is really solved, we can probably mass-produce it within years if not months, so we should start thinking of the implications now
Who's we? If fusion is solved, the country that has will just become a net energy exporter (somehow, if it's the US, idk how they would ship that power). Nothing much will change for the rest of the world, they will just switch from one dependency to the other.
short haul to Singapore via an undersea cable,
long haul to Germany via cracked Hydrogen reformed as Ammonia (Larger molecule, easier to handle, harmless Nitrogen byproduct).
Can any physics experts chime in? This seems similar to stuff I’ve read over and over but I want to believe…
Yeah, but you can't since the energy produced is in form of heat and radiation and not electricity. That is like using lasers to start a fire and then saying: Look the fire is producing energy in the form of heat! But the heat has to be turned to electricity to power the lasers. And then the fire better produce enough heat to produce enough electricity to power the lasers...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but you can't since the energy produced is in form of heat and radiation and not electricity. That is like using lasers to start a fire and then saying: Look the fire is producing energy in the form of heat! But the heat has to be turned to electricity to power the lasers. And then the fire better produce enough heat to produce enough electricity to power the lasers...
So far as I am aware, coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power stations all generate electricity by producing heat, boiling water, and using the steam to spin a turbine. Once you have heat, the rest seems like well-understood industrial technology. Is there something unique about fusion power which makes its heat more difficult to employ?
But there are also some engineering challenges to work out in employing heat generated like this to drive a heat engine, at least with somethings decent like 30% efficiency.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but you can't since the energy produced is in form of heat and radiation and not electricity. That is like using lasers to start a fire and then saying: Look the fire is producing energy in the form of heat! But the heat has to be turned to electricity to power the lasers. And then the fire better produce enough heat to produce enough electricity to power the lasers...
So far as I am aware, coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power stations all generate electricity by producing heat, boiling water, and using the steam to spin a turbine. Once you have heat, the rest seems like well-understood industrial technology. Is there something unique about fusion power which makes its heat more difficult to employ?
In this experiment 2.1 units of input energy produced 2.5 units of output energy. That energy has to be converted to electricity. Conversion looses like 40% of energy (escapes unsused) – so you have produced 1.5 units of electricity from 2.1 units of electricity input.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In many jurisdictions the cost of delivering a kilowatt-hour is already more than the cost of producing it. So cheap energy is not going to have a substantial impact on normal people unless we switch to wireless electricity delivery or something.
Not just cheap though - near zero. If we have an infinite tap of it, we can afford to waste a lot of it in the process of delivering it. The inefficient becomes efficient when you plug in infinities and zeroes
See: https://reneweconomy.com.au/why-god-parity-will-be-the-end-o...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So far as I am aware, coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power stations all generate electricity by producing heat, boiling water, and using the steam to spin a turbine. Once you have heat, the rest seems like well-understood industrial technology. Is there something unique about fusion power which makes its heat more difficult to employ?
Yes, the fusion needs "huge" amounts of electrical energy input to happen, be it in the form of lasers like here or in the form of magnetic fields like in iter. In this experiment 2.1 units of input energy produced 2.5 units of output energy. That energy has to be converted to electricity. Conversion looses like 40% of energy (escapes unsused) – so you have produced 1.5 units of electricity from 2.1 units of electric…
