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Will we ever get fusion power?

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Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#71

Post by s1artibartfast »

jandrese wrote: post #59
JohnFen wrote: post #24

"Ever" is a very long time. Will we get fusion power in the next few decades? I wouldn't bet on it, but I also wouldn't bet against it.

At this point I would bet against commercial fusion power plants. It was always questionable if they would be cost competitive with fission power plants, but now even those are being replaced by renewables and grid storage. The bigger problem is that fusion plants aren't useful for making weapons. Fission plants were basically a side project of the nuclear arms race, which is why they're a dying industry now. The wor…

Strong Wind doesn't exist on asteroids and many planets, so I think there will be a long term need. Solar power decreases with the cube root of distance from the sun,so twice the distance is 1/8th the flux

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#72

Post by jandrese »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #71
jandrese wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I would bet against commercial fusion power plants. It was always questionable if they would be cost competitive with fission power plants, but now even those are being replaced by renewables and grid storage. The bigger problem is that fusion plants aren't useful for making weapons. Fission plants were basically a side project of the nuclear arms race, which is why they're a dying industry now. The wor…

Strong Wind doesn't exist on asteroids and many planets, so I think there will be a long term need. Solar power decreases with the cube root of distance from the sun,so twice the distance is 1/8th the flux

I'm not concerned about commercially viable space colonies in my lifetime.

The real reason for fusion was that fission is not a renewable resource. In a few thousand years there will be a fuel problem with fission and we would be forced to switch to fusion if we had a fully nuclear power system.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#73

Post by s1artibartfast »

jandrese wrote: post #72
s1artibartfast wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong Wind doesn't exist on asteroids and many planets, so I think there will be a long term need. Solar power decreases with the cube root of distance from the sun,so twice the distance is 1/8th the flux

I'm not concerned about commercially viable space colonies in my lifetime. The real reason for fusion was that fission is not a renewable resource. In a few thousand years there will be a fuel problem with fission and we would be forced to switch to fusion if we had a fully nuclear power system.

Who said anything about concern? Im not in charge of making global decisions about fusion research, and I doubt you are either.

That leaves low stakes idle speculation.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#74

Post by choilive »

SoftTalker wrote: post #65
jmpman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will orbiting solar panels ever work? Now that starship is viable, payload cost to orbit will dramatically drop. Is it cheaper to have orbiting solar plants than solar/battery(or whatever long term energy storage)? It’s that baseload problem which makes the manmade fusion/fission attractive.

So you have orbiting panels that will do what? Beam the energy back to earth? Isn't the sun beaming energy to earth directly? What problems do orbiting panels solve?

I actually don't think space based solar to beam it back to Earth will ever really be practical short of a space-elevator style tether to transmit the electricity down. But some of the pros would be as follows.

* Capable of 100% capacity - power generation can be 24/7/365 if in orbits around the sun or stationed at the Earth-Sun Lagrange points.

* Greater panel efficiency - less energy lost to the atmosphere that can be captured by the panels, closer orbits will increase efficiency even more due to more power/area

* Surface area - minimum 1x10^20 square kilometers of area you can build panels

There are of course many cons - but it could be a vital part to a space based industry - you need a lot of fuel or power to really do anything in space, and the power from space based solar could to be used to kickstart a fuel production facility off Earth. Fun stuff but not very terrestrially relevant.

EDIT: Some more numbers: You get about 40% more power/area in space vs on the ground. You need about ~22 TW to "power" humanity. So you need about 70,000 km^2 of space based solar assuming 25% end to end efficiency, which might be a generous estimate. So lets round it to 100,000 km^2. But thats a significantly smaller area than the terrestrial equivalent of about 500,000 km^2. Right now it costs about $1B installed for a square kilometer solar installation, so we if can build solar panels on the Moon or something anywhere close to the same cost as on Earth (very very BIG if), potentially a difference of $400T dollars at todays terrestrial prices.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#78

Post by jfengel »

ffgjgf1 wrote: post #40
audunw wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say it’s clear that solar panels are absolutely working extremely well today, at least as long as you don’t live too close to the poles. Renewables all together is growing faster than nuclear ever did. And solar is now a huge part of that. We have models where solar or solar+wind is providing all the power to everything from small remote weather stations through houses to large islands. Some small countries a…

> all the power to everything from small remote weather stations through houses to large islands Not without very large capacity gas/etc. plants available on standby (unless you’re fine with will below 99% availability)

I'm fine with gas plants available on standby. If they run 1% of the time, then they are no longer a significant contributor to climate change.

Even if they have to run 10% of the time, we've still taken an enormous cut out of greenhouse gases. We would turn our attention to many other sources of greenhouse gas (agriculture, concrete, transportation, etc.)

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#79

Post by philipkglass »

dave333 wrote: post #75

There's a better way to get power or heat from hydrogen that is 200 times better than burning it: https://brilliantlightpower.com/shareholder-meeting-presenta...

Brilliant Light Power is nonsense. They've been promising amazing products for nearly 10 years now. Here's a Wayback Machine capture of their home page from 2015:

https://web.archive.org/web/20151122183613/https://brilliant...

BrilliantLight has developed a commercially competitive, nonpolluting source of energy from water. A SunCell™ catalytically converts H2O-based solid fuel directly into brilliant light which is converted to electricity using photovoltaic panels.

If they actually had this "commercially competitive, nonpolluting source of energy" they'd be selling the machines or selling the electricity by now.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#80

Post by TobTobXX »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #71
jandrese wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I would bet against commercial fusion power plants. It was always questionable if they would be cost competitive with fission power plants, but now even those are being replaced by renewables and grid storage. The bigger problem is that fusion plants aren't useful for making weapons. Fission plants were basically a side project of the nuclear arms race, which is why they're a dying industry now. The wor…

Strong Wind doesn't exist on asteroids and many planets, so I think there will be a long term need. Solar power decreases with the cube root of distance from the sun,so twice the distance is 1/8th the flux

Nitpick: Radiation decreases with the square of the distance (twice the distance, 1/4 the energy). This is because the surface of a sphere (which is where energy is collected) is 2D, not 3D.
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