Merged How Close is power from Nuclear Fusion

[theprestige]

Then why did you read it?

Morbid curiosity about the truth behind the headline.

 

[arthwollipot]

A fusion reactor releases a lot of neutrons, which can be used to breed fissble material

So do regular fission reactors.

 

[Filippo Lippi]

They're aiming for commercial fusion by 2040

 

[Roger Ramjets]

They're aiming for commercial fusion by 2040

"They might well be able to create a prototype of a commercial fusion reactor by 2040 in the UK".

So not actually commercial by 2040. But where did they get that estimate?

"We're not doing a physics experiment, our plant has to have all the characteristics that a future commercial plant would need,"

So the science is done and we just have to commercialize it? Or is the science not done, which is why a decade was tacked onto the estimate?

"It turned out to be an awful lot harder to create a controlled sun on the planet Earth than everybody thought."

Not everybody. Some of us thought it was virtually impossible, and so far we have been right.

"We think we have plan to solve that. We um... we have a design that includes how we breed tritium and how the whole fuel cycle works to extract tritium from the different parts of the machine... We're pretty confident so long as we can get a couple of tests that we're doing over the next few years to work..."

The materials one... that is a challenge. We've got a bunch of material options that we are looking at...

So the experimentation phase is not over.

"There's a real temptation in all of this to get a device that works and puts energy on the grid, but is actually a dead end when it comes to commercial power... we're really trying hard not to do that,"

The problem with all this is that even if they complete it on schedule, the amount of renewable energy the UK has by then will probably make it redundant. In practice we can expect delays due to things being harder to implement than they expected - if they manage to get it running at all. But at least they are 'trying hard' to commercialize it, unlike other fusion outfits which aren't trying at all.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

Nothing wrong with redundant energy sources. They are just rarely very profitable. And any fusion system will require massive investment.
It will be slow going no matter what.

 

[Puppycow]

I'll venture that Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies to the title of that YouTube video.

Even if we make the big assumption that they will have a working prototype by 2040, what will the economics of it look like? It will probably require deuterium and/or tritium as fuel. If you think the raw material is going to be cheap because it's just hydrogen, you're probably wrong.

Most near-term commercial fusion reactors will use both deuterium and tritium combined in a 50-50 fuel mixture (known as D-T fusion). [1]

While deuterium isn't prohibitively expensive, tritium is about 3 orders of magnitude more expensive.

It may be possible to breed tritium in the reactor itself, which perhaps solves the problem.

This super-heavy, radioactive isotope is very rare in nature. Fusion reactors solve this by using a "breeding blanket" lined with lithium inside the reactor wall; high-energy neutrons from the fusion reaction strike the lithium to continuously generate new tritium. [1, 2, 3, 4]

I guess time will tell, but I'm not holding my breath. I'm 55 and I rather doubt that I'll see it achieved (in an economically viable way) in my lifetime. I just think that we have better, less expensive ways to solve the problem, and it will end up being too expensive to provide large amounts of clean energy, whereas renewables like solar will be more scalable and economically viable.