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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Policy makers should start planning to build them? Where is this soviet russia? I think you mean investors and entrepreneurs should consider funding them if they can think of a profitable way of doing it. *grumble* university bred champagne socialists *grumble*
Could climate modelers have learn the art of securing endless funding from the noteworthy success of fusion energy researchers?
“Fusion reactors are safer as there is no high level radioactive material to potentially leak into the environment”
Well that may be true for the external environment, but it’s a lot more complicated for the reactor what with all those gamma rays and neutrons whizzing around:
Radiation Shielding for Fusion Reactors:
http://web.ornl.gov/~webworks/cpr/pres/105029.pdf
Also the damage to the stainless steels and the need to change out “liners” is well known, presuming a power generating reactor. The NRC’s safety Journal, published a comparison of the “waste” from fission reactors and projected FUSION reactors. Similar masses are produced. BUT because of the long 1/2 lives of the Ni, Cu, Cr and Fe radioactive isotopes, after 150 or 200 years the TOTAL activity level of the “waste” for a fusion reactor is higher than that of the waste from a FISSION reactor. Bummer..
The referenced paper, Santoro, from ORNL is a 2000 paper. Much has changed over the last 15 years in tokomak design with respect to the size and placement of the Lithium blanket used to breed tritium as well as absorb the neutrons produced in a DT reaction. Furthermore much progress has been made in MTIF approaches which offer simplifier design than the tokomak and greater standoff again employing a lithium blanket. And, once we master a sustained net energy gain with DT we will progress to aneutronic reactions. Allow several decades for the science and technology to evolve.
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
“The advantage of fusion reactors over current fission reactors is that they create almost no radioactive waste.” The statement is false.
In the manner we can potentially build them today, the entire facility will be radioactive waste after months of operation.
http://www.pppl.gov/Tokamak%20Fusion%20Test%20Reactor , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak_Fusion_Test_Reactor ,
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S01/16/32S00/index.xml
Battelle disposed of pretty much the entire facility as radioactive waste, most of it buried in the desert of the Hanford reservation in Washington state. TFTR ran for only a few seconds total of actual fusion power production. 14 MeV neutrons do awesome things to building materials. None of them good from an engineering standpoint.
No, fusion is not near. ITER has been around for decades, and it will be decades more before they give up on it, defining the failure in such a way as to call it success. We will learn from it, and maybe the next thing will succeed. Young people will see. Many of us will not.
Fusion is inevitable. We will do it. Until then we will use fossil fuels for decades and regular nuclear fission will become ascendant. There is much more to fusion as we understand it, so far, than engineers can economically overcome. We just cannot. We will, but not for scores more years. Incrementally, it could take a century, even more. We are likely, though, to have a genius-breakthrough, a game changer. It is unknown and unknowable. We might have to do it the hard way, and that will likely take longer than the lifespan of all living today.
No, the governments do not need to prepare for it. Mostly, the governments just need to work at getting out of the way. That goes for everything.
Plasma fusion is a contradiction of terms. This has been known for at least 60 years that I know of. The people that do plasma research are the same kind of people that research human caused climate change. Just a lot smarter.
All of the so called plasma fusion reactors use heavy isotopes that spit out neutrons to yield energy just like fission reactors. Real fusion would work with Hydrogen and not yield a firestorm of hot neutrons.
Humans will have a warp space drive before plasma fusion becomes a practical power source. Now, LENR is near at hand as a practical solution. Watch that in the next decade…pg
“Obviously we have had to make assumptions…”
“A test fusion reactor, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, is about 10 years away from operation in the South of France.”
The above comments make it clear that their predictions are based on assumptions rather than observations, since they don’t have a test reactor to observe. I have to wonder if models were involved. Plugging assumptions into models seems to be the way science is done these days.
we have enough coal and oil and gas to power the US for 500 years … we should focus on improving efficiency there and also build fission/thorium nukes to give us 1,000 years of power … everything else should be studied as cheaply as possible ,,,
You maybe right. But the Kremlin doesn’t want you to do that.
And the Kremlin is very clever at controlling what everybody thinks and does.
I can remember hearing about the promise of fusion reactors in the 1960’s if not a bit before. It was said then to be just decades away. That is over half a century ago. It was about the time of flying cars, which also, fortunately, have not materialized yet. I think that they should keep up the work on Thorium and molten salt (LFTR) design of fission reactors as they actually work. Actually working is a very big advantage, like coal and oil, over wind and sun.
Actually work? Got a link for that?
As they say:
“Any technology 30 years away from now will be 30 years away from now forever.”
I recently visited General Atomics, and got a couple of hour tour of the DIII-D facility. After a gap in my following of the progress of fusion technology, I was amazed at how much progress had been made. A great deal of it has been in the computer area, where real-time solutions to plasma confinement equations allow the system to tune the control magnets to keep plasma confined for extended periods. GA is not licensed to use tritium in its reactor, or it would already be at a gain sufficient for commercial power use. The ITER will get us there. It has been a long road, but I think we are probably closer than even the optimists assume.
The problem with toks is that they produce too much energy for a given location. The power grid folks like to add power to the grid in about 100 MW to 1 GW increments. (1 GW for base load). Toks come in at around 15GW. What you have to consider is a tok tripping off. That is a huge surge. What is desirable is that no single source represents more than 1% or 2% of the total load.
The Polywell design http://protonboron.com/portal/ is workable at around 100 MW. It needs (like all fusion reactors) to be proved. Cost of proof is around $500 million total. An intermediate step would cost about $50 million.
Am I missing something here? Why are we not focusing on Thorium reactors? Aren’t they supposed to be small scale? And also safe?
There is a greater likelihood that the national grid will be powered by Unicorn Farts in thirty years.
ha
Molten Salt Reactors proved its capabilities in the 1960s over 20,000 hours running the MSRE met all goals. The Seaborg Commission recommended to JFK that all civilian nuclear reactors be based upon the inherently safe MSR design. Due to its inability to aid nuclear weapon development the MSR was shelved.
MSR, burn 99% of their fuel leaving magnitudes less waste and 80% of the waste is inert within decades. They can’t blow up, melt down and are walk away safe as the failure mode is to freeze in safety cooling tanks. They will be 1/3 as costly to build due to no pressure dome, no 170 atmosphere plumbing, no triple redundant water cooling & power backup. They can truly be built on assembly lines and benefit from process improvements. Think of a Boeing 777 being built one a day and having higher safety concerns than a MSR will need; MSRs are far less complicated.
Add to the fact that Europe spent €1 Trillion installing 210 GWs of green energy nameplate and producing only 38 GWs 18% output: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/07/31/european-renewable-energy-performance-for-2014-fall-far-short-of-claims/. They could have built 600 GWs of MSR producing $.03 KWh energy 24/7 http://www.egeneration.org
Obama’s Dept. Of Energy gave China the keys to ORNL’s MSR design; China is on a multi-billion ten year crash program developing our tech planning to own our IP globally.
When have PWR been used to produce bombs?
Within a few decades?
I remember when the joke was, “nuclear fusion it’s only ever ten years away”.
Now it’s a few decades away.
It appears to be further away than it was previously.
Does anyone have a graph of how far away it has been during the post-war period?
I have a theory that Hitler over-relied on innovative military developments after secretly watching episodes of Flash Gordon. In addition to consuming far too much amphetamine.
Could it be that the Caffeine and Hollywood Sci-Fi generation are prone to the same lack of realism.
I’m always astonished at the eagerness with which people embrace even physically impossible predictions.
Admittedly, fusion is conceivable.
But, I wouldn’t bet the house on it.
Currently the LCOE is roughly infinite.
I would like to see that figure come down to a more realistic level.
I think when this happens it will be something resembling a surprise – whether it’s two decades or ten decades.
I’m just hoping there isn’t another, worse kind of “widespread use of fusion” before then.
If there is, then I would hope to be approximately located at ground zero.
In the comments above there was some suggestion that fission is already “economically viable” and so why bother with fusion.
Can anybody explain why here in the UK, we have committed to paying approx. double the current wholesale market price of electricity for electricity provided via the proposed Hinkley Point C Reactor?
If this technology is so “economically viable” then why is the energy produced going to cost us double the price of the energy that we currently receive?
AND – we have had to offer loan guarantees and an assortment of special clauses for compensation in the event of various things. So ultimately costs to the tax payer could conceivably exceed this.
I remember back in the days when “economic viability” revealed itself in the form of cheaply delivered product.
Here in the UK the expression has taken on a new meaning.
It appears to mean only that the public can be suckered into paying for it.
“indefatigablefrog
October 3, 2015 at 12:51 am
It appears to mean only that the public can be suckered into paying for it.”
Not suckered at all. Forced, literally forced to pay for it. No choice, if you want power. Of course the likes of Cameron and Windsor (Charles) won’t benefit at all. That’s where the British public have been suckered.
It has to do with the Asylum being run by the inmates.
Fission should be cheaper than coal. The fear of radiation, both real and imagined, drives the cost up.
“Fusion reactors generate electricity by heating plasma to around 100 million degrees centigrade so that hydrogen atoms fuse together, releasing energy. Fusion reactors are safer as there is no high level radioactive material to potentially leak into the environment”
Pretty safe on the sun but absolutely no go on the earth.
How far a radius does one need around 100 million degrees centigrade [Note, is this figure even possible or real???].
Plus if one could get 100 million degrees centigrade why would one even bother to need the heat from the fusion?
Whatever your using to get there would warm the planet.
The sun’s energy comes from the gravitational force; which sucks. It requires nothing more than a big enough mass of fusible atoms.
Gravity is by far the weakest known force, so it requires literally astronomical amounts of hydrogen like atoms to get enough compression.
There is no other long range force that sucks. The Coulomb force blows, and there’s no way to do that stably that has yet been demonstrated.
Laser implosion ( LL whack-a-mole machine) is uncontrolled compression and totally unstable. So is H-bombs.
There is no arrangement of electric charges that creates an electric filed with a position of stable equilibrium, at which location you can hold (forever) another electric charge, let alone a gazillion of them to squish together.
Your point is good though. But the idea is for the fusion energy itself to sustain the 100 million degrees.
It’s much like the Ivanpah solar powered plant which is actually powered by natural gas required to melt the molten salts or boil the water.
If you need a lot of kindling wood to start a roaring fire; the place where the money is, is in the kindling wood.
Fusion reactions produce neutrons. neutrons are not safe.
Some fusion reactions such as deuterium tritium (DT) release high energy neutrons. Other potential fusion reactions such as He3 deuterium or deuterium deuterium or P 11Boron as examples release energy without neutrons. As a practical matter, based on crosssectional diameters and the energetics of the reaction, DT will be demonstrated first. As vacuum tubes were replaced by transistors and transistors replaced by integrated circuits as our understanding of physics was increased, aneutronic forms of fusion will be common place within a hundred years.
There is absolutely no way to accurately asses the costs of a process and therefore its economic viability, when you are still decades away from realising it.
Almost as big a scandal as the human-caused global warming scam is the scientific establishment’s rubbishing of the work of Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons. Their experiments publicised (OK, inadvisably) in March 1989, but based on five years of personally-funded prior study, have been replicated many times over the past 26 years and yet the message is still the same – impossible, because the “laws of physics” say so.
It was Richard Feynman who said “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” There have been hundreds of experiments demonstrating generation of heat, helium, tritium and the changed composition of isotopes which cannot be explained by current theories. That these experiments have been done by so many different people in so many different laboratories in so many different countries, in my mind, makes vanishingly small that every single one was badly measured or wrongly conceived.
The vested interests of the hot-fusion fraternity, seeing their billions of research funding threatened, are very similar to the dirty tricks performed by the “Team” in discrediting any approach made by scientists sceptical of the climate control knob being CO2. Needless to say, full collaboration of the main stream media is an integral part of the picture.
Apart from a few brave souls, most work on cold fusion is done outside mainstream science by those of advancing years: see how one eminent scientist was treated by googling “John Bockris transmutation”. Echoes of the Willie Soon episode? That an exciting new field is taboo to all but a few who are not prepared to toe the party line has strong echoes in my mind of those climate scientists willing to speak out against the “consensus”. And, of course, the climate alarmists don’t like this idea either – a possible solution to (the non-problem of) CO2-induced global warming that does not involve the destruction of first-world economies.
Fancy nuclear fusion coupled with the good old steam cyle, not much progress.!
Actually, yes, on the fuel side of steam generation. With wood, gas, coal and oil, once it is burnt, it is burnt. With fission, and fissile material, the fuel can be re-processed and used again and again. In fact some reactors can take “waste” and make use of it. As I understand, there are few, if any, technical issues with this. Political issues on the other hand know no bounds in terms of blocking progress.
I am not sure about fusion in this respect.
Fusion power has been two decades away for about 60 years.
This site gives fusion predictions the treatment they appear to deserve:
http://backtothepredictions.com/mr-fusion/ .
What’s the carbon footprint of a fusion reactor? Ask Jagdish Shukla.
The problem is with reactor design. So long as the Tokamak remains the basic concept, progress towards an economical form of Fusion power is going nowhere fast, just like in the last fifty or so years.
The advance of fusion reactors has been outpacing Moore’s Law. They are inevitable, probably with a large scale demonstration within 5 years, commercial operations in 10.
That said, if you read the study, they project HTS will have a relatively minor impact on economics. My money is on someone like Helion or Lockheed Martin, not ITER, to crack the economic fusion nut.
Hmmmm…. except for the fact that there are no fusion reactors on Earth, and are not going to be for along time if ever, and the fact that Moore’s law has to do with things that actually exist and progress, you make a great point.
Not.
You clearly have no idea of the history of the semiconductor industry, and just how many orders of magnitude have transpired as a result of Moore’s law.
Controlled fusion has not yet been proven theoretically possible (I said controlled), let alone demonstrated on ANY scale.
EMS,
Do you think Industrial Heat’s commercial 1 MW LENR plant is an illusion?
Woodford Equity has just invested $49 million in it after doing what they claim was rigorous due diligence for 2.5 years.
LENR is not Fusion.
Exactly. LENR is a more technical term for “cold fusion” based on Low Energy Nuclear Reactions. By definition fusion must overcome the Columbic barrier which requires a plasma state and a temperature > 50 Million K. LENR can apply to the “work” done by Andrei Rossi in Italy. The U.S. Navy has thoroughly investigated LENR and some NASA scientists have opined on it. But please do not confuse with fusion. LENR may produce extremely small amou8nts of energy for reasons we do not yet fully understand but the operative phrase is extremely small.
Although I support fusion research and do hope that it will produce positive results in the near future, this analysis is just like the climate game — give us more money, the results are just over the horizon.