From Durham University:
Fusion reactors could become an economically viable means of generating electricity within a few decades, and policy makers should start planning to build them as a replacement for conventional nuclear power stations, according to new research.
Researchers at Durham University and Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, have re-examined the economics of fusion, taking account of recent advances in superconductor technology for the first time. Their analysis of building, running and decommissioning a fusion power station shows the financial feasibility of fusion energy in comparison to traditional fission nuclear power.
The research, published in the journal Fusion Engineering and Design, builds on earlier findings that a fusion power plant could generate electricity at a similar price to a fission plant and identifies new advantages in using the new superconductor technology.
Professor Damian Hampshire, of the Centre for Material Physics at Durham University, who led the study, said: “Obviously we have had to make assumptions, but what we can say is that our predictions suggest that fusion won’t be vastly more expensive than fission.”
Such findings support the possibility that, within a generation or two, fusion reactors could offer an almost unlimited supply of energy without contributing to global warming or producing hazardous products on a significant scale.
Fusion reactors generate electricity by heating plasma to around 100 million degrees centigrade so that hydrogen atoms fuse together, releasing energy. This differs from fission reactors which work by splitting atoms at much lower temperatures.
The advantage of fusion reactors over current fission reactors is that they create almost no radioactive waste. Fusion reactors are safer as there is no high level radioactive material to potentially leak into the environment which means disasters like Chernobyl or Fukushima are impossible because plasma simply fizzles out if it escapes.
Fusion energy is also politically safer because a reactor would not produce weapons-grade products that proliferate nuclear arms. It is fuelled by deuterium, or heavy water, which is extracted from seawater, and tritium, which is created within the reactor, so there is no problem with security of supply either.
A test fusion reactor, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, is about 10 years away from operation in the South of France. Its aim is to prove the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy.
Professor Hampshire said he hoped that the analysis would help persuade policy-makers and the private sector to invest more heavily in fusion energy.
“Fission, fusion or fossil fuels are the only practical options for reliable large-scale base-load energy sources. Calculating the cost of a fusion reactor is complex, given the variations in the cost of raw materials and exchange rates. However, this work is a big step in the right direction” he said.
“We have known about the possibility of fusion reactors for many years but many people did not believe that they would ever be built because of the technological challenges that have had to be overcome and the uncertain costs.”
“While there are still some technological challenges to overcome we have produced a strong argument, supported by the best available data, that fusion power stations could soon be economically viable. We hope this kick-starts investment to overcome the remaining technological challenges and speeds up the planning process for the possibility of a fusion-powered world.”
The report, which was commissioned by Research Council UK’s Energy Programme focuses on recent advances in high temperature superconductors. These materials could be used to construct the powerful magnets that keep the hot plasma in position inside the containing vessel, known as a tokamak, at the heart of a fusion reactor.
This advancing technology means that the superconducting magnets could be built in sections rather than in one piece. This would mean that maintenance, which is expensive in a radioactive environment, would be much cheaper because individual sections of the magnet could be withdrawn for repair or replacement, rather than the whole device.
While the analysis considers the cost of building, running and decommissioning a fusion power plant, it does not take into account the costs of disposing of radioactive waste that is associated with a fission plant. For a fusion plant, the only radioactive waste would be the tokamak, when decommissioned, which would have become mildly radioactive during its lifetime.
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“Fusion reactors could become an economically viable means of generating electricity within a few decades….” A few decades? That’s what academia was telling us in the 1960’s when I studied fusion. It’s now been half a century and we’re still talking a “few” decades. I believe we may need a tighter definition of a “few”. I’m pretty sure an academic’s definition of a “few” decades is “sometime after I’m safely retired from milking this particular cash-cow”.
There is great doubt that ITER will ever succeed. This paper does not address the three key ITER issues.
Molton salt fission reactors are a more practical possibility, and they do not need to run on the fertile thorium cycle. A fertile uranium cycle is actually more immediately practical, and also rids us of conventional spent fuel waste. Of whichnthere is already sitting around a 200 year supply. Essay Going Nuclear in my newest ebook has lots of details and footnotes for those seriously interested in reading up on this topic.
The Molten Salt Reactor is what a fusion reactor would like to be, easy to build. http://www.egeneration.org
I loved this line: “won’t be vastly more expensive than fission.” Let’s hope not. The proposed Hinkley Point fission plant in the UK is estimated to cost £24 billion. While it would be big – 3.2 GW – the same amount of money would build 20 gas-fired plants producing 40 GW total – more than 12 times as much electricity, according to an article in the 13 Aug 15 Daily Mail.
There is an interesting variation of a fusion reactor which is already potentially economically viable. The fusion reaction generates a prodigious blizzard of neutrons. This blizzard of neutrons could be used to burn low grade fissionables.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion-fission_hybrid
That way you don’t have to create a fusion reaction which can produce energy on its own – the fusion reactor is there just to activate the fissionable material.
I suppose fusion sounds good. The waste products are mostly Helium-3 and -4, which are non-radioactive. Ultimately, fusion could deplete the oceans’ supply of water (i.e. hydrogen), but that would be far, far, far into the future, and besides it would satisfy the greenies as this depletion would lower sea levels, saving the world’s coastlines from inundation. So Algore would surely approve.
Total change of subject…I’ve been trying to figure out the matter of C02 IR-radiation absorption and emittance. If I understand blackbody radiation correctly, if we take two bodies, one emitting certain frequencies of energy, so let’s say one emits IR in unlimited amounts, at specified frequencies, and we put it close to it a blackbody that is initially at 0 K, the latter body’s temp can’t rise above a certain level, because it will reach a saturation point of photon absorption, and simply radiate its own photons of the same frequency, wavelength and wavenumber as the originally emitting source, in the same flus as it is receiving them.
What are the temperatures that the initially receiving black body could reach, absorbing radiation of C02’s absorptive and emissive frequencies/wavelengths/wave numbers?
Over the course of the last four years we have built the premier fusion energy website for non-practicing fusion and plasma physicists. We provide fusion project news updated daily. We have over fifty fusion videos and a complete section covering both the mainline magnetic tokomak approaches, laser driven inertial confinement, and the very promising Magnetized Target Inertial Fusion approaches. We have a comprehensive section on private sector fusion companies and international projects. Suffice it to say there is much more going on in the field than ITER. The paper “Who Killed Fusion” and the derivative eight article series has been promoted by the fusion communities in the U.S., Europe, China. South Korea and Russia, and I say that having traveled in person to all the major labs worldwide doing fusion work. Please see http://www.fusion4freedom.us or http://www.fuelrfuture.com and feel free to address any questions on the history, politics, and science of fusion to me directly at tt@usclcorp.com or +1-916-482-2020 and I will answer. Regards, Tom Tamarkin, Sacramento, California
Well gee wizzz, Golly, if “experts” say it it must be true. I mean experts can’t be wrong or lie.
There is a Canadian enterprise, General Fusion, that is taking a little different approach to making use of fusion. The company’s magnetized target fusion system uses a 3 metre diameter metal sphere. Molten lead-lithium is pumped into the sphere in such a way as to rotate the molten matter to form a smooth cylindrical vertical vortex in the center. This vortex is used to confine and compress the plasma. On each pulse, magnetically-confined plasma is injected into the vortex. Around the sphere, an array of pistons impact and drive an compression pressure wave into the centre of the sphere, compressing the plasma to fusion conditions. The molten lead-lithium absorbs the resulting heat and is circulated through a heat exchanger to produce steam for electrical generation. A portion of the steam energy is used to power the pistons.
See http://www.generalfusion.com
For scientific papers, click on “Media” on top bar, then click on “Scientific Papers”.
Fusion has a lot of potential, but as has already been pointed out, it’s been just around the corner for a long time. We should not count on it being ready for commercial power production any time soon. Thorium reactors, however, are ready for commercial power production. The thorium fuel cycle is clean, simple and lends itself to inherently safe reactor designs. It should be pursued as an interim technology to allow more time for fusion to be developed.
Not really a matter of creditability of which expert you listen too. We all know that the physics works. Can we make the engineering work? Maybe. It would be nice to know from all the highly classified labs whether in an honest assessment they think it might work! All this crap of “well they haven’t done it yet” is ignorant crap if you haven’t been working in those labs on those projects.
“Fusion reactors could become an economically viable means of generating electricity within a few decades,”
Sure they could.
When Dr. George Miley’s graduate student Brian Dezjuric built an “Inertial Electro Static Confinement” fusion device in 1997, it produced 10 billion high energy (fusion) neutrons per second. If one takes the volume of the Princeton Tokomak and compares to the volume of the fusion region in the IEC it was automatically 60 to 100 times more capable than the Princeton Tokomak ($2 Billion and counting..and never break even, neither is the IEC..) When Drs. Miley and Dezjuric (Brian got his Phd based somewhat on his work on the IEC device over two years..) decided to submit a paper to “Science”, they were treated to receiving a rejection (BASED ON ONE REVIEWER’S WORK) that included a copy of a 1972 paper by the “Oak Ridge Boys”…showing that Farnsworth’s Fusor (the IEC is a variant thereof) NEVER produced fusion reactions, and his “neutron flux” (Farnsworth’s) was merely a noise artifact showing up in the BF6 detectors when the discharge plasma was turned on in the device.
When Dr. Miley contacted the reviewer (violating protocals, Dr. Miley is old enough and secure enough to NOT CARE) and inquired where the 10^10 neutrons per second, which also were measured by activation of Cd samples… hard to fake.., came from said reviewer said he was TOO BUSY TO TALK and hung up on Dr. Miley. (Who promptly submitted the same paper to a few REAL ENGINEERING JOURNALS and was quickly published. Dr. Miley’s work was the trigger for a lot of smaller engineering school’s nuclear engineering departments to do as here: http://www.engr.wisc.edu/ep/ep-research-priorities-fusion-science-and-technology.html Now when you start working with methods that have a cost effectiveness of about a MILLION TO ONE compared to Tokomaks or Stellerators, etc. (I.e., the BIG MONEY WASTERS) suddenly you are “persona non Grata” in the “big buck” fusion world. AND they won’t invite you to play in any Reindeer games! (Sorry, I mean to any conference’s with REAL …translating MONEY GRUBBING AND WASTING conferences, conclaves or journals.) I say a POX on all these blood suckers, and may someone in a GARAGE make the first successful FUSION device, and make the BLOOD SUCKERS all “footnotes” in history.
The problem with this argument is that it is made against what soon will be the inferior type of nuclear fission reactor, rather than the new molten salt reactors, which are vastly superior, cheaper , inherently safe (as safe any fusion reactor) , able to load follow, and able to burn up our nucleare wastes a huge plus which not only mostly rids the world of the problems of disposing of nuclear wasres, but provides free fuel as well. Fuel for these reactors is esentialy inexhaustible and will forever be dirt cheap, as it can be extracted from the oceans. Fusion reactors may be close to matching typical fission reactors, but they won’t be anywhere close to matching molten salt reactors, which look to cost roughly half of a typical reactor to build and much cheaper to operate and fuel. Obviously the argument in favor of fusion conveniently overlooks this new, superior power technology.
I bring up this issue to understand science more. I did pretty well at Berkeley in Physics 7 series. Could have done a lot better if I hadn’t simultaneously been tackling molecular biology, organic chemistry and math, plus distribution requirements. I easily aced “biophysical chemistry”, I wanted to take P Chem for Chem and Chem-Eng majors, but I wanted to get into med school, which did not recognize that a B+ in the latter was way more impressive than an A in the former, in terms of work required and knowledge accrued. Nevertheless, I studied a rigorous P Chem text (that assigned for Chem/ Chem Eng students’ class).
I graduated with High Honors, missing Highest Honors by 0.02 GPA, easily earning Highest Honors in Junior and Senior years,after a slow start coming from a farm-town high school. With a 5th year like Mr. Mann took , I would have sailed to Highest Honors at graduation, compared to Mr. Mann’s Honors (one-level-above-no-distinction). Actually, had I been “smarter” and gone for a PhD, II was on track, had I chosen to remain in it, to earn a PhD at age 24 (versus MM at age 32). I lived in the library stacks in senior year, and went to UCSF to dig up articles not held at Berkeley. I worked in the lab late and night and on weekends, when the grad students were at home. (FWIW, all med students work longer hours than PhD students. I had a friend who was working at Salk late at night, nobody else was there, but the two of us.)
I’m not bragging. Was I smart enough to earn A’s without studying, except to cram night before exams? Not even close. You can’t do that at Berkeley. I was smart enough to learn to listen to and watch profs look their notes, and when they did, RECORD THAT. Then, immediately after lectures, or as soon as possible afterwards, “replay” in my mind what the profs said that I could not keep up in lecture to record, and write that down. Then, after the day was over, rewrite a fresh set of notes. Then each weekend, starting at week-one, peruse these finished notes.
Then at midterms and finals, it was a matter of reviewing the notes, getting to bed by 10 PM, awakening after a good night’s sleep, and acing exams.
In the interregnum, also going to office hours every week from week one, and clarifying my confusion. Which often was profs’ admitting, “I meant to explain that, I ran out of time.” “That’s a really good question.”
Actually, I received a lot of “That’s a really good question,” answers from many profs.
Ultimately, this whole discussion is irrelevant. Yes, fusion is the future, but in the interim, why not simply use knowledge already within our grasp. ‘F’ the greenies and build conventional reactors using technology already at hand.
Ordinarily, I’d not advocate following French ideas, but they seem to have solved their energy problem for themselves. Do I need references?
The World has enough uranium supplies to fuel our current reactor technology for something like 400 years, and reprocessing the “waste” from those reactors (breeders) would extend that timeline out to 4000 years.
That ought to be enough time for us (the human species) to solve the fusion problems. If it isn’t sufficient, then, perhaps, we should simply accept extinction as the result of unwarranted hubris, and accept that we are a failed species.
This is a heartfelt plea for reasonable people to do what makes sense. L
The most likely fusion reactor design is probably LLPFusion … It’s based on a concept called Dense Plasma Focus is not a torroidal (Tokomak) design… this particular design by LPP has reached two of three conditions to achieve fusion “Lawson Criteria”). The team with very little cash and a lot of pluck will be quite close to getting the required densities for creating a fusion reactor.
The configuration of the device is here
http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/next-generation-fusion-power/
Presentation at Oxford explains the economics and physics of such a device
Such a device is quite compact and cheap. It is designed for direct generation of electric power without steam turbines and is aneutronic, so there’s no radioactive waste.
I did not read “The Population Bomb” I did read “Limits to Growth” in 1972. I have read info that the “Club of Rome” met at David Rockefeller’s Swiss Compound. We know for a fact that non-scientist Maurice Strong was a leader in developing the UNFCCC, IPCC. Then the IPCC recruited scientists to establish global warming was caused by human burning of fossil fuels. And then establishing it needed to be stopped.
James Hansen didn’t go to MIT, Harvard, Princeton or Caltech for his B.S. U Iowa, a third-rate science school. Then his department didn’t forward him to first-tier MIT, Harvard, Princeton or Caltech for PhD physics studies. No, Iowa, a third-rate institution retained him. Same for Michael Mann. Yale Physics, Zero Nobel Laureates, only 4 NAAS-Physics members, 2 now; that was too hard, so he dropped down to Geo. But even that was too hard, he did a “postdoc” at UMass without a PhD, headlined the bogus “hockey stick” at UMass, and THEN Yale conferred a PhD. “Oh you published in Nature, no part of which you did here. ” It should have been a UMass PhD. Because that’s where he finished his doctoral work.
There are so many crap “scientists” latching on to funding to prove catastrophic anthropogenic warming. which boils down to “Let the UN Global Governance folks take over humanity’s fossil fuel reserves. If you don’t allow this, millions of people, including your grandchildren will die. If you listen to us, billions of people will die, because in our vision, a sustainable economy will have less than a billion people.”
Most Important word, ‘could’.
Example.
Could NASA figure out how to travel faster than the speed of light, they would then be able to send Elon Musk and 1/3 of the USA thermonuclear warhead stockpile, with a sufficient igniter explosive to detonate Elon and Warheads by Mars-impact thus rendering Mars incapable of human colonization by any means for at least 10,000 years into the future.
And who says the Viking Landers did not contaminate Mars! Ah Ha. The “water” i.e. brine streaks!
Toodles
I want a grant to study power generation from massive earthquakes. The grant must pay me a high salary to develop the mechanism for as long as it takes for several massive earthquakes to occur to test the design. Then I can claim success will happen in a few decades.
When I was at University–a bit less than 50 years ago–I recall learning that the photosynthetic process consisted of, as I recall, 24 chemical reactions, all but two of which stepped down the energy to yield a quantity of energy small enough for the mitochondria in our cells to be able to handle productively. The result was ATP.
I’ve always felt that all of our attempts to generate energy from nuclear reactions should follow the same path. Going straight to fusion using tritium, etc., has always seemed downright ludicrous. We can’t even deal with the materials to house this kind of energy production. Neither the science, nor the technologies to employ the as yet undeveloped science breakthroughs, are anywhere close.
Unlike Uranium or Thorium–nuclear fission technologies which still have their problems–another theoretical approach uses heat generated from heavier metals like isotopes of Nickel, for example. This approach used to be called a “cold” nuclear reaction. Of course it is not “cold” except, perhaps, in comparison to sun-like fusion.
One of these technologies has been used reliably for decades to generate neutrons for medical and laboratory usage. But approaches along this line have so far fallen short of a net energy output. In fact, there is quite a cottage industry attempting to develop the technologies needed to make this a viable energy source. The Navy was heavily involved for many years, along with many Universities and a surprising number of small private groups and individuals quietly exploring their own approaches. Bottom line, the science is just not there yet. (Once the science is, the technologies will likely be easy.) But I look for something like this to be available many decades (or centuries) before we’ll ever see viable energy production from nuclear fusion.
Jerry Pournelle has always said that fusion power has been “about 20 years away” for about 30 years now, and it NEVER gets any closer.
Lawson criterion… Physicists claimed to be within a decade of achieving it when I was studying physics at UM in the early 80’s. Over 30 years have gone by and it’s still “a decade away”. If a commercially viable fusion reactor exists 30 years from now, I’ll be very surprised. When, 100 to 200 years from now, a commercially viable fusion plant is built, I’d expect it to be a pulse type unit that operates as a power amplifier. Steady state fusion anywhere other than within a star is a pipe dream useful only for securing endless research grants from the gullible government.
Fission works. Fission is economical. Using breeder reactors there is sufficient fissionable material to supply the world’s energy needs for roughly a billion years.
The current approaches to fusion appears to fail do to basic engineering problems and basic economic deficiencies. There is no indication that the current fusion approaches will ever be economically competitive, regardless of how much money is ‘invested’ in the boondoogle.
http://cdn.nycitynewsservice.com/blogs.dir/422/files/2012/04/FusionsFalseDawn_Mar10.pdf