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>What's the big benefit of fusion that makes it worth investing so much money? 4-20 times the energy density of fissionable materials[0] and fuel that's the most common element in the universe. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#In_nuclear_reac...
And what is the benefit of that?
I'll leave that as an (fairly obvious) exercise for you, dear reader.
I hate things like this. Climate change is an emergency, one that we're far behind on tackling. Talking about future technologies that are many decades away (if ever) is the opposite of helpful. Imagine in 1943 the headline: "Can hypersonic missiles put the brakes on Hitler's Army?"
Well, nukes (which didn't exist then) sure put the brakes on Japan's military.
And more to the point, nobody waited for nukes. The allies tackled the problem with the tools they had available at the time, and made use of the nukes when they were ready.
edit: the comparable timeline would be "currently approved power plants that are planning construction could put the brakes on climate change", I mean, if it were true. Because deadlines for substantial impact on climate change are "next few years, decade or two tops", and fusion will be ready far too late.
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> there is definitely a few benefits to fusion. Absolutely. But these benefits are vastly outweighed by one benefit shared by fission, solar cells, and wind turbines: those things are real.
Fusion isn’t real yet - every technology you listed wasn’t real at some point relatively recently.
Nuclear fission can
Sadly, nuclear fission power that works at scale - both on the technology and social sides - seems to be mostly beyond the capabilities of current human societies.
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Unfortunately, a lot of the same environmental interest groups that halted the scaling up of fission also hate fusion. It's best to think of fusion as a way to generate effectively unlimited amounts of energy, kicking in 50-100 years from today. This could be super useful for the long-term ambitions of human civilization - energy has been such a hard constraint for so long that people have barely thought about the am…
> generate effectively unlimited amounts of energy I don't understand where this concept is coming from. The best ever fusion power experiments so far have not even produced 1 miliwatt net electrical power. ITER, if it succeeds in its 30 year timeline, will not be even close to engineering breakeven (net power generation) - they estimate 0.57 output power/input power ratio - with DEMO hoping to break even 20 years la…
Jokes aside, fusion would provide way more energy per fuel mass than any other source if we could only contain sufficiently hot plasma. Better magnets may be the key, as the other comment alludes.
Nuclear fission is good enough, available right now, causes much fewer deaths than the alternatives, does not pollute the atmosphere, and accidents are extremely rare and nowhere near as dangerous as they've been portrayed. To wit, Fukushima: 1 dead from the nuclear accident, compared to 10000 from the tsunami.
Fukushima didn't kill many people, but it's projected to cost $187b to clean up. Chernobyl has supposedly cost over $300b inflation-adjusted. Gorbachev wrote that in his opinion, it was a major contributor to the collapse of the USSR. Both figures are from Wikipedia. Fission is safe, but even one accident can wipe out decades of profits. Is it still cost-effective when considering that?
That seems quite high.
> Fission is safe, but even one accident can wipe out decades of profits. Is it still cost-effective when considering that?
You can put a number on the cost of the Fukushima disaster, but you're not putting one on that of other power sources. Coal burners make the whole world pay, nuclear operators have to deal with their own shit. And yes, I'm not counting Chernobyl-type accidents, because while it would be foolish to claim that events like Fukushima will never happen again, it's equally foolish to not recognize that dodgy old dinky soviet plants with no passive safety measures whatsoever are a solved problem.
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Well, nukes (which didn't exist then) sure put the brakes on Japan's military.
Yes, but nukes weren't decades away from being deployed in active intended use-case. Fusion is at least 10 times further-off right now than nukes were early in the war. That's why I pointed to a modern weapon like hypersonics, and not nukes - because we're talking about many decades . And more to the point, nobody waited for nukes. The allies tackled the problem with the tools they had available at the time, and made…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fukushima didn't kill many people, but it's projected to cost $187b to clean up. Chernobyl has supposedly cost over $300b inflation-adjusted. Gorbachev wrote that in his opinion, it was a major contributor to the collapse of the USSR. Both figures are from Wikipedia. Fission is safe, but even one accident can wipe out decades of profits. Is it still cost-effective when considering that?
> but it's projected to cost $187b to clean up. That seems quite high. > Fission is safe, but even one accident can wipe out decades of profits. Is it still cost-effective when considering that? You can put a number on the cost of the Fukushima disaster, but you're not putting one on that of other power sources. Coal burners make the whole world pay, nuclear operators have to deal with their own shit. And yes, I'm no…
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ITER will cost about the same as the Manhattan project, around $21bn in 2021 $, and that's just one project. Total investment in Fusion globally is huge and the problem is at the moment there are multiple different feasible ways forward, and it's not clear which will pan out. There's huge risk of wasting large amounts of resources and time, even if we do eventually figure it out.
Creating conditions to split a heavy nucleus for 1 microsecond is much easier to do than fusing light nuclei steady state.
In a fission reactor, I know the energy goes into the water, which creates steam and that turns a turbine. But it looks like fusion reactors use a near vacuum and high powered magnets. Once two atoms actually fuse, where does that energy "go"? Does the new helium atom just bounce around the containment unit? How do we actually extract meaningful energy from such a closed system? Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IT…
In the same way. Most proposed fusion systems use deuterium-tritium fusion where a significant amount of the energy is carried away as neutrons, so direct energy conversion wouldn't be possible anyway. From the article you referenced: > ITER will not produce enough heat to produce net electricity and therefore is not equipped with turbines to generate electricity. Instead, the heat produced by the fusion reactions wi…