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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We already know how to create fusion. Just construct a gigantic one-cylinder engine and drop a fusion bomb into the chamber at the top of the power-stroke. Presto — a two-stroke IC fusion engine.
I have a friend who worked at Oak Ridge on Fusion Reactors. He said the standard joke in the industry was that Fusion power was always 20 years away, regardless of when the question was asked
Just like my contractor…2 weeks.
I hope this doesn’t come across as a stupid thought but, after all these years when we learned electrical theory and practice, it seems always to be assumed that in order to create electricity we need to heat water, drive a steam turbine and generate electricity from a generator. Hmmmm. Will the world in 2100+ have discovered a new way to create electrical current?
Like the Seebeck effect used in a thermocouple?
Got any idea how inefficient the Seebeck electric generator would be ??
The effect depends on Temperature differentials, so the efficiency just from a Carnot point of view is severely restricted by the maximum Temperature that the hot junction materials can tolerate with reliability.
Once you see the word expert, the chances are that what you are reading is BS.
Plasma containment is easy, really. Don’t need no stinking doughnut. Just put a small “black hole” in the middle of the mess. Caution: Move any instruments (or anything else) you wish to preserve far, far away from the experiment.
Isn’t it the problem of designing a universal container to store the universal solvent?
Sorry, couldn’t resist!
Didn’t I already read that 5 decades ago? And frequently since? It seems awfully familiar. Not that I am skeptical entirely, but the engineering problems always seem to be more difficult than anticipated.
Meanwhile, you can get power from fusion and also dispose of radwaste by properly designed and built fusion/fission reactors.
I really hope it’s true. On the other hand I’ve been reading similar statements for 20 years.
Serious question – what is the last new energy production method to be commercialised? Has anyone come up with anything more recent than fission that works commercially?
Well, way back in the ’70s when I was in the nuclear fuel business, they joked about the “fusion constant”…it was always 20 years in the future.
well under really high pressure and at a Temperature of 10million to 15 million kelvins, the Sun is able to produce about 0.2 milli watts per kilogram of hydrogen in the core. If you have a ton of hydrogen under these conditions, you too could produce 0.2 Watts of power – more than enough to light up a small key chain led flashlight. Of course the good news is the Sun can keep this up for about 10 billion years. For higher production rates, you’ve got to get the temperature higher.
ITER generates 0.5GW and weighs 23000 tonnes, at best for such an incredibly complex machine constructed from expensive and difficult to work materials you could hope for perhaps $500/kg, but probably much higher (eg commercial jets cost $2000/kg). So about $10billion to build.
0.5GW generates about $200million worth of electricity per year, and if it costs nothing to run can sustain a construction cost of (being generous) perhaps $3-4billion. The cost per kg for construction of ITER would need to drop to $150-200 for it to have any chance of being economic. That is quite simply never going to happen for a machine that is bigger, heavier, lower powered and orders of magnitude more complex than a nuclear reactor that costs $3-4billion to build, and still has massive problems with neutron activation, radioactive hydrogen that leaks through everything and hideously complex plasma control and heating systems.
Helion, General Fusion and Tri-alpha as unconventional pulsed machines may end up being far smaller and cheaper and have a shot at being economic, but Tokomaks are most assuredly an economic dead-end outside of far-future space applications.
Smaller, cheaper, lighter and safe Molten salt fast breeder reactors are the sensible long term choice to power human civilisation.
ITER is an international science experiment designed to support a short term sustained net energy gain using deuterium and tritium. It is not an electricity producing demonstration. The huge size and mass is predicated on our best beliefs as to what it will take for the first tokamak to produce a sustained positive energy gain and no attempt has been made to design it as a cost effective energy producing solution. ITER is meant to show through demonstration that fusion can be controlled. It will be followed by another project called DEMO which couples a scaled down reactor to a steam turbine for demonstration purposes. The Tri-Alpha Energy, General Fusion, Helion and other similar private sector approaches are exploring MTIF alternatives to the tokamak and in fact may beat ITER to the first controlled fusion demo and for far less investment and complexity. Remember the Wright Brother’s first plane and compare to a modern jet fighter or commercial craft like a 787. Remember the first triode vacuum tube and compare it to a modern micro-computer ship. See: http://www.iter.org
By sustained positive energy gain, I presume that the total amount of energy that can be extracted from the entire set of hardware necessary for sustained safe energy ‘release’ (energy is not created); exceeds the sum total of ALL of the input legacy energy inputs, necessary to cause that hardware to perform its task.
A Boeing 787 commercial jet aircraft would be a dud, if its engines only produced enough net available energy to keep the cabin lights on during takeoff.
g
More properly stated, energy is converted from mass. The DT reaction is: D + T > He + n + 17.6 MeV
I have some doubts about the economics. Currently, the world most expensive building is the gen3 reactor that they are building in Olkiluoto, Finland. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant
The price is high since the unit is the largest currently (?) and because it’s supposedly very safe. Just think how much would a large scale Fusion reactor cost nowadays. How could it ever pay back the investment?
And if you are wondering, why it’s been built on a country, which has the population of 5 million, and where they are going to build a modern Russian unit in next decade, think of the choices. If we don’t build these, the Russian will build them near enough, and then we are just waiting for an accident. There are currently Chernobyl type heavy water plants operating near by. Finland currently imports energy from Russia.
According to Areva the high costs in Olkiluoto are results of heavy bureaucracy. Greens leading the officials have done their best to slow the construction.
Another big mistake is to combine design and construction. A design prototype is cheaper in experimenting which solutions the officials will approve. The same applies to fusion design, especially ITER though there delivering public money to supporters is the point, not the results.
I don’t know how many greens would work at STUK, the radiation safety unit. And they ware on parlament when both licenses ware given, two separate times. Once they left and then stayed.
Since EU has made foreign work force easy to use, arava hired the cheapest people it found. These made shitty work and lot of things needed to be rebuilt.
And Siemens failed to install the electronics. Same happened with the new metro line. Siemens failed on the automation and now there are human drivers, wich can’t operate the trains so frequently.
Earlier reactors ware build by Russians and then rebuild by Finns. These work well and ware operational in reasonable time.
Harvesting helium could add an extra financial benefit. World helium prices would have to be lydisined up though, if you catch my drift.
When I was earning my masters degree in nuclear engineering, back in the early 80’s, my professor was asked when would we see commercial nuclear fusion. His answer over 30 years ago was “not in your lifetimes”. All of us former students are now at least 50 years old (I am 61) and it appears that he was right.
At prep school I remember the excitement in c.1954 about the ZETA fusion project… unlimited energy in twenty to thirty years. Are we getting any closer?
Its not looking good.
“ITER’s mission is to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion power, and prove that it can work without negative impact.[24] Specifically, the project aims:
To momentarily produce ten times more thermal energy from fusion heating than is supplied by auxiliary heating (a Q value equals 10).
To produce a steady-state plasma with a Q value greater than 5.
To maintain a fusion pulse for up to 480 seconds.
To ignite a ‘burning’ (self-sustaining) plasma.
To develop technologies and processes needed for a fusion power plant — including superconducting magnets and remote handling (maintenance by robot).
To verify tritium breeding concepts.
To refine neutron shield/heat conversion technology (most of the energy in the D+T fusion reaction is released in the form of fast neutrons).”
How much spent and to spend on these quite modest aims?
“Construction of the ITER Tokamak complex started in 2013[6] and the building costs are now over US$14 billion as of June 2015, some 3 times the original figure.[7] The facility is expected to finish its construction phase in 2019 and will start commissioning the reactor that same year and initiate plasma experiments in 2020 with full deuterium-tritium fusion experiments starting in 2027.[8][9] If ITER becomes operational, it will become the largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment in use, surpassing the Joint European Torus. The first commercial demonstration fusion power plant, named DEMO, is proposed to follow on from the ITER project.[10]
Sounds like the mother of all junkets to me.
Cheers
Roger