201–210 of 309 posts
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Just wait until you find out how much oil and gas the UK imports.
Pretty sure UK needs to import uranium, too.
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A reminder that 40% of the world's shipping is just there to move oil and gas around. If someone was starting from scratch and looking at fossils, the arguments against would be so obvious and compelling that any arguments for would look insane. Nukes aren't much better. The arguments against renewables are purely opportunistic and political. We need clean energy now , not 10/20/50 years from now. We could have clean…
Sounds good, but even in the most optimistic scenario it will take decades to build out significant storage capacity and the supporting grid improvements. None of that will be cheap. Expect electricity prices to continue rising even as the cost of solar generation falls.
Further, the economics will dictate what happens not just our current predictions. It makes a real difference if solar panels are 25% or 30% efficient in 2035+ similarly how flexible demand for charging EV’s is and how expensive battery storage ends up being etc.
I think a line from the end of the article - part of the bear case - "fusion is just another in a long line of energy technologies that boil water to drive a turbine" - should be at the start. The entire premise of fusion generation is based on world view where the limiting factor for generating electricity was the cost of providing fuel for combustion to generate heat. This thinking was pretty natural if you looked…
I think a line from the end of the article - part of the bear case - "fusion is just another in a long line of energy technologies that boil water to drive a turbine" - should be at the start. The entire premise of fusion generation is based on world view where the limiting factor for generating electricity was the cost of providing fuel for combustion to generate heat. This thinking was pretty natural if you looked…
Wind, solar and batteries are products of combustion-fueled industry. The extent to which we have electrified the world industrial base is minimal, and to do so at the current scale on the basis of wind and solar would take a larger quantity of several metals than is available in the crust, to set aside the consequences of a massive expansion in mining, the poor recycling rates for most of the relevant materials, and the fact that, even with a much-improved recovery rate, this would only buy us on the order of several hundred years.
A more promising energy production system for a resource-limited world is thorium molten salt, which is comfortably Carnot in spirit, relatively cheap and easy to build, fuel and operate, no danger of meltdown, no "dual-use" for weapons, can consume existing nuclear waste... And we would do well to explore alternative battery chemistries as lithium is neither unique nor optimal, simply popular, and our hunger for it at present seems to be motivating some unpleasant political machinations.
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Or it’s always in the future because people are trying to do with an accelerator what normally takes the mass of a star to do. Whether or not it’s even possible is up for debate.
It's really not. Inertial Confinement Fusion tests have already produced energy positive results quite a few times. The most recent ICF tests that made the rounds were notable because they were consistently repeatable. i.e. we know a well defined lower bound on the conditions required for energy positive fusion. These bounds are more or less what we expected so sustainable energy positive fusion is essentially guaran…
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There will be times when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. Storage can come to the rescue if this is a few hours, but over much longer time periods will be a problem. It's rare, but not unheard of. Gas will be part of the solution for many years to come.
Transmission loses are 3% per 1000km so moving electricity from morroco to the UK would result in ~6% loss in electricity. Saying > There will be times when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine Is just FUD. The wind is blowing and the sun is shining in many places within 2000km no matter where you live
And oil and gas are energy dense enough (and storing it is cheap/easy enough), it’s possible and common to stockpile months to years worth of supplies. All it takes is some big metal tanks.
Not sure how that is going to play out when it takes a decade plus to build a HVDC line, that line is in a fixed position (so easy to sabotage/destroy) and it’s orders of magnitude more expensive to store electricity - so most places will be lucky to even have a couple of days worth of storage.
I’m honestly not sure which will be more dramatic looking if someone bombs it though.
For somewhere with constant good insolation and low winter energy needs (like the Australian Outback, for instance), not likely to be a problem. Australia has never been meaningfully invaded or bombed either. So centralization is likely not a huge concern for them.
For somewhere with peak energy needs that coincide with minimal insolation (and often wind!), like long dark winters? And temps that can easily result in people freezing to death? And that has a history of conflict with neighbors?
Like Germany, France, Norway, Finland, etc.
Yikes.
However, with advances like REBCO tape and so on, it's far more realistic now. I hope we get it in my lifetime, but I'm not confident.
I think a line from the end of the article - part of the bear case - "fusion is just another in a long line of energy technologies that boil water to drive a turbine" - should be at the start. The entire premise of fusion generation is based on world view where the limiting factor for generating electricity was the cost of providing fuel for combustion to generate heat. This thinking was pretty natural if you looked…
Neither semiconductors nor plastics shift the energy generation paradigm. "Advanced materials"- alright, well, which ones? And do they give us a better return than good old steam? Wind, solar and batteries are products of combustion-fueled industry. The extent to which we have electrified the world industrial base is minimal, and to do so at the current scale on the basis of wind and solar would take a larger quantit…
Yes they do give a much better return than any thermal source according to any recent study of LCOE I've come across. Reflected in investment numbers - renewables account for 70% of new global capacity added last year.
Wind, solar and batteries are products of an energy intensive process NOT a combustion based process.
The shift to electricity as the primary energy source is well underway in multiple industries and sectors. Growth appears slow because industrial equipment is built to last decades. In transport (equally as energy hungry as industry), it's happening a lot faster as with domestic (induction cooking and heat pump sales).
Thorium molten salt, promising? You mean they were back in the 1950s/1960s in Oak Ridge? The first experimental molten salt reactor ran for a few days before springing a leak and being decommissioned. Or the later one in the 1960s which ran for 4 years (only managing to operate for 40% of the time)? There's a whole bunch of reasons that the PWR emerged as the dominant nuclear generation tech from forest of experimental reactor designs in the mid 20th century.
Would love to see comments that actually respond to the article! Everyone here seems to be sharing their general opinions on fusion or a reaction to the article title. The article is actually very detailed!
It's detailed, but dated. Most of the graphs stop between 2000 and 2005. Yet the article is from 2024. Somebody took the easy way out and copied and pasted old graphs, probably. Whatever happened to Lockheed's compact fusion program?[1] [1] https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion...
My long run prediction is that ITER will work and everything people on HN kept insisting would work in 5 years will suffer a similar fate.
I'll stake my claim now that I think Helion is probably not going anywhere (just a vibe, but there's something off about their recent big marketing push).