Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to renewables advocates, renewables will soon be so cheap it won’t be worth pouring more money into researching nuclear fusion.
Renewable Energy Threatens the World’s Biggest Science Project
Inside the $24 billion long bet on fusion power in France.
By Anna Hirtenstein
20 October 2017, 14:01 GMT+10
The world’s biggest scientific experiment is on course to become the most expensive source of surplus power.
Components of the 20 billion-euro ($24 billion) project are already starting to pile up at a construction site in the south of France, where about 800 scientists plan to test whether they can harness the power that makes stars shine. Assembly of the machine will start in May. Unlike traditional nuclear plants that split atoms, the so-called ITER reactor will fuse them together at temperatures 10-times hotter than the Sun — 150 million degrees Celsius (270 million Fahrenheit).
Its startling complexity, with more than a million pieces and sponsors in 35 countries, mean questions remain about over whether the reactor will work or if it can deliver electricity at anything like the cost of more traditional forms of clean energy. With wind-farm developers starting to promise subsidy-free power by 2025 and electricity demand stagnating, even the project’s supporters are asking whether ITER will ever make sense.
“I’m dubious,” said Chris Llewellyn Smith, director of energy research at Oxford University who has spoken in favor of the research project. “The cost of wind and solar has come down so rapidly, so the competition has become harder to beat than you could have conceivably imagined a decade ago.”
…
In the decades it will take to prove itself, renewables are likely to mushroom, thanks to a 62 percent plunge in the cost of solar panels over the past five years. Wind energy has followed similar trends as turbine sizes surged, boosting the spark coming from each unit. Batteries also are spreading, reducing the need for utilities to maintain a constant “baseload” of supply that ITER would feed to the grid.
“The concept of the need for baseload generation is fading away,” said Paolo Frankl, who heads the renewable power division of the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based institution advising nations on energy. “Technically, you could run a system 100 percent on renewables and even 100 percent just wind and solar.”
…
On one level its funny – advocates of a power concept which doesn’t deliver reliable energy trash talking a power concept which has never been demonstrated to work.
But the more serious issue is how it highlights the risk of putting the lions share of nuclear fusion research effort into ITER.
ITER in my opinion is in big trouble.
The President of France, the country which hosts the ITER project, is a hardline green – in my opinion it is conceivable he will respond to political pressure from renewables advocates, and make life difficult for ITER.
ITER itself is a multi-decade bureaucracy of a project which may never deliver.
Even if ITER delivers, what does it prove? At best it will demonstrate that it is possible to produce nuclear power from fusion – at some enormous premium to existing baseload power technology.
Time to diversify the nuclear fusion research effort.
ITER is not intended to produce a viable power generating plant. It is simply a step along the road to one. Even if it turns out that this approach can never be economically viable, what we learn from it will be invaluable. Fusion power has too much potential to walk away from, especially for space travel and extraterrestrial habitation/exploration. Cheap, reliable baseload electricity is the cornerstone of our modern society. To replace it with expensive, unreliable sources is collective suicide.
I don’t think we will learn anything new from ITER. It is just a big tokomak, under the likely false theory that bigger solves the plasma pinch problem. The suns surface shows that to be false.
Tell the researchers who develop individual parts of it. You’ll be lynched. Especially in the area of nuclear fusion, so much new is to be learned. Even if the basic principle is understood, the implementation into material comprehensible components is a tremendous research task. To make matters worse, Iter has the problem that there are involved many countries that have different priorities in energy. It may well be that a country (mostly Germany) will develop some of the necessary components in wind ropes, but a different country will slow down in this respect because it has other strategic objectives. I am thinking here of Far Eastern countries. I also think that the development time of nuclear fusion reactors has not been as long and rampant as compared to the gravity of the task. Think about how long it took before the first ideas of researchers developed technologies into serial maturity. Sometimes centuries passed. Even in the case of the vehicles, the end of the flagpole has not yet been reached. All engines and propulsion systems, whether combustion or electric, can still be improved through research.
But Iter claims to supply cheap energy immediately. Although not yet in industrial scale, but as a model for larger follower reactors. Which can then be built on the basis of the developed components in shorter time periods. This will not condemn mankind either to sober or to inactive creatures, but to take only one concern from it. The first concern which God has imposed upon man after his expulsion from Paradise. Perhaps God sees now the time to mitigate the punishment of the people.
If you also consider the sums spent globally (also by the US under both Obama and now Trump) for warfare, the current expenditure on Iter is only an insignificant fraction of it. The world does not go down on these issues, but perhaps one day it will become a reality that cheap energy is available for all around the clock. Other developments are here in a dead end, more than core fusion. Shale gas, coal and oil are also finite.
Correct Rud. But there are other approaches to fusion that are coming to the fore– such as Dense Plasma Focus– on a very short time line and privately funded… note comments of former DoE head Robert Hirsch.
http://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/PT.3.3708
Correct Paul its a research project and what people make of it they can go convince politicians in their country to pull out if they are in fact involved. Not all countries are involved in the LHC and what individuals comments on here think about it counts for zero.
The economic problem for renewables is that there is no economy of scale.
This is particularly problematic for wind. One can see that this technology has already run its course, since when more power is needed, the turbine is not getting smaller, it is not even staying the same size, but rather it is getting bigger and bigger. The individual unit cost is therefore not decreasing.
When a technology can miniaturise, as in the valve radio, the transistor radio, the IC radio, mobile phones, computers etc, you know that the technology is moving forward, and gains in the efficiency and economy of size can be made thus making the technology ever cheaper. But this is not happening in wind.
There are fundamental physics that also hamper improvements. First there is little energy in wind, and this inevitably means that the turbines have to be large to extract power. Second, wind shielding where the windward turbine takes the power from the wind before it reaches the leeward turbine. This latter problem means that these units will always have to be well spaced thus involving large areas of land.
Further, on shore wind has to be located in remote areas, and it is probable that the best sites have already been used. This requires great expense in coupling these units to the grid. off shore wind will be very expensive as any engineer involved in shipping/the off-shore oil and gas industry knows only too well.
There may be some gains with the efficiency of solar panels, but to date any advances are baby steps.
Finally there is the problem of the intermittent nature of wind and solar, and the problems and expense caused by its non despatchable nature. These problems can never be overcome, and storage presently is both impracticable and extremely expensive.
The people make these claims are simply delusional.
Progress is increased availability of goods which happens if they become 1. more reliable, 2. cheaper which is also realized by miniaturization. Visit a museum and see the first cameras. Hear churchbells and look at your watch.
I’d say at least overly optimistic. Better batteries are always just around the corner.
I don’t believe that. Look at the starter batteries for car engines. Proven technology, works quite well in cold and hot climates. Progress in the last 50 years? Almost none.
There’s a reason why car batteries are still using old technology and haven’t switched to anything newer.
Auto manufacturers would kill to eliminate a couple of pounds, yet they stick with the older, heavier technologies.
Yes. The batteries are reliable, robust and not very dangerous. I guess there won’t be anything better for the next 50 years.
[???? .mod]
lb
Odd. I’m a nuclear engineer. And I fear and distrust lead-acid, NiCd, and Li batteries far more than I do nuclear reactors, radiation, and nuclear bombs. (Nuclear bombs n the hands of North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan I do mistrust, but that is because of the leaders of those countries, not the bombs themselves.
There are very, very few people in the US capable of maintaining and safely working with batteries.
@RACookPE1978
I was comparing the safety of lead-acid car starter batteries with the safety of Tesla’s batteries.
Sorry mod, I know it’s off topic and I’ll stop now.
[No, not off-topic, but phrased so as to be misunderstood, misleading. .mod]
With batteries (or for that matter pump storage), one is simply building redundancy into the system since the battery )storage) cannot be charged at the same time as the renewable power is being fed into the grid.
This means that one is needlessly adding to the expense of the system overall, thereby upping cost and reducing competitiveness. With the use of batteries (or pump storage) it is necessary to build more wind and/or solar than is necessary to meet demand so that there is surplus available energy to charge the battery (run the pumps for the pump storage).
The article is about renewables becoming competitive with fossil fuel generation, and batteries (or pumped storage) do not render renewables more cost effective, they render them less competitive, although they enable them to provide power for a very short period when the wind is not blowing or the sun not shining.
About 6 years ago, in the UK they had two winters when there was a blocking high siting over the country for the best part of the month in late december/January. There was all but no wind, and in December and January, the hours of sunlight is few and due to the inclination of the planet solar irradiance also has reduced effectiveness. Batteries (and pump storage) would have been no solution in these conditions.
I stand by my comment that these people are delusional, not overly optimistic.
fusion fission hybrid is likely the way to go. A thorium reactor requires a fast neutron source to keep it fissioning. A Farnsworth Hirsch fusor is useless for producing power but works as a source of fast neutrons. Do any of you particle physicists see some possibilities here?
ITER is a career-long gravy train for those physicists.
And Not unlike CERN’s LHC, now that Higg’s boson is found, there seems to be little point to continue the experimental aspect without a theory to prove or disprove.
Not clear that Higgs Boson was found. There was an equivocal Press release out weeks before Biggs himself died.
they know there is little hard work for LHC with Higg’s in the bag.
You can’t run an ungodly expensive machine like LHC without a clear theory to test. When you are dealing with billions of particle events to sort, there are too many spurious signals to chase (energy ranges to investigate) to gather the 10^-25 probabilities they need for a discovery.
Go and convince your country politicians to pull out if they are involved you have no standing to make a comment otherwise. I am consistent with CAGW, LHC, LIGO, ITER and all these big science projects in that the people in those countries spending money should have the choice.
“Big Lies” (the idea is that everyone lies on a small scale but they wouldn’t have the odacity to tell a huge, outrageous lie, let alone repeat it and stick by it. If therefore if you do this, stick to it and tie ‘credible’ events to it, it becomes broadly believed by the gullible masses. It is important it have a small truth embedded in it for the most enduring ones) are a propaganda tool with a history stretching back to Plato (‘the Noble Lie’) and used right up to the present by political, advocacy, ideological, and other large influential groups.
How often have we seen useful ijits ‘takedown’ sceptics here, not by parrying with rigorous scientific argument, but with the ‘convincing’ admonishment: “So you are saying that the world’s universities, research institutions, the UN, the vast majority of climate researchers, the Nobel Committee, the Pope and 200 governments are engaged in a massive conspiracy pushing CAGW for ulterior purposes.!” Having witnessed it in action with the climate movement, wherein many prominent personalities involved, emboldened by success, have let the cat out of the bag.
C. Figueres, head of UNFCCC
https://libertyunyielding.com/2015/03/03/u-n-climate-chief-admits-goal-of-calls-for-regulation-is-worldwide-redistribution-of-income/
M. Strong, creator of UNFCCC and IPCC
https://bwi.forums.rivals.com/threads/maurice-strong-dead-anti-free-market-founder-of-un-ipcc.66689/
The big lie keeps expanding even though its scientific underpinnings have been on life support for the past ten yrs or so – Alteconomic analysis: ‘Nuclear is not economic and renewables are now competitive with fossil fuels’.’ Batteries will make baseload power unnecessary. Fusion energy is not needed’ (And the way Europe is going about it makes one think they want it to fail). This is a job for Americans to do.
Please mods, it has a point re topic and I didn’t slander anyone.
1. ITER is a science and physics experiment and will not produce power for the grid. It is a small step to fully understanding how to control fusion. It will be followed by DEMO, an actual fusion power plant. To be commercially viable, we must move away from tokomaks and purse a pulsed power fusion approach such as PJMIF (Plasma Jet Magneto Inertial Fusion) and we must master a anuetronic fuel cycle such as P 11B.
2., renewables as we know them today can and will never be commercially viable because the energy density per collection surface area is far too low. Consider this from the ITER website:
How Much Fuel Does It Take To Power The World?
According to the United States Energy Information Administration, the amount of energy supplied by all fuel sources across the world is tremendous: 155,481 teraWatt-hours as of 2014, the latest year on record.
In order to meet this enormous energy demand in a given year, we need to burn 24 billions tonnes of coal, or 12 billion tonnes of oil, or a bit less of natural gas (10.4 billion tonnes).That’s for fossil fuels.
If we were to use only conventional nuclear energy to power the world, we would need to consume approximately 7,000 tonnes of nuclear fuel (enriched uranium or mixed oxyde).
However with nuclear fusion, only 867 tonnes of hydrogen would suffice…
See complete article at:
https://www.forbes.com/…/how-much-fuel-does-it-take-to-po…/… or click on image below:
155,481 teraWatt-hours as of 2014,
—————————-
7 x 10^13 solar panels at 25% capacity factor.
$ 7000 trillion to build. Wiring, batteries and installation not included.
Can I write you a cheque?
24 billions tonnes of coal,
==================
$48 trillion over the 20 year lifetime of your solar panels.
Has anyone really asked themselves why Russia’s atomic energy agency was so interested in and then acquired 20% of the U.S. uranium deposits? Ya’ think maybe it had anything to do with their opinion on the future of nuclear fusion?
No, probably more like fission – as in nuclear bombs.
Yes, Russia is playing the long game. They will sell the uranium to China over the next 50 years, which is actually not such a long time.
ITER is even worse than most people realize. DOE and ITER scientists deliberately misled Congress by stating the COP would be ~10. They used just a fraction of the total power required to come up with this figure. The actual COP will be 1.6 at best, or possibly even negative.
I know most readers of WUWT don’t believe LENR is real. I think it is. Rossi will be demonstrating his latest E-Cat QX in November and BLP’s Suncell continues to be developed. I forecast there will be commercial units in 2018 or 2019.
I think LENR is certainly real. It appears to be difficult to optimize and control. I think Rossi is very close and others are 2-3 years behind. There are also much smaller fusion efforts underway that I believe are conceptually superior to ITER.
ITER is a giant boondoggle that only a government could love.
USA is one of 7 partners in ITER and if the congress believes they were misled then pull out. The facility isn’t even in USA so it makes no practical difference.
ITER takes up so much of DOE’s budget there is not enough to sponsor promising wild cards. DOE loves it because it is guaranteed money coming in that they don’t have to work for. It is also lifetime employment for hundred of well paid scientists and engineers.
What a black swan a LENR-based commercial unit would be! Fingers crossed! (But not for Rossi’s version.)
Interesting that now I get three positive comments. Last time I was shouted down. I wonder what has changed.
For those that don’t know, Fleischmann and Pons’ original experiment has been replicated more than a hundred times. It is mow understood why the early efforts by MIT & Cal-tech failed.
There is an argument over whether the early MIT experiments failed. Eugene Mallove, the MIT technical editor quit his job because he thought the experiments succeeded but the results were hidden.
MIT has come a long way from the early days. Dr Peter Hagelstein now teaches a seminar on LENR (cold fusion) at MIT. http://www.lenr-coldfusion.com/2013/01/26/mit-cold-fusion-101-videos/
compare vacuum tubes and transistors: the electric fields in transistors are much higher than in the tubes due to miniaturization. By miniaturization it must be possible to integrate thousands of lasers on a chip that locally ignite fusion processes. By intuition I expect great innovations from an integration of semiconductor and nuclear technology.
The arrival of commercial LENR will make the renewable energy industry (solar and wind) peter out. I expect the price of solar will drop as there have been large investments in production of solar and they want to operate for some years to get some money back.
It will take many years for LENR to become widespread, but it will eliminate most fossil fuel powered things in 1 – 2 decades.
A solar panel over 20 years produces almost the same amount of energy it took to build the panel.
All the solar panels in the world have in total produced less energy than it took in total to build them.
Fossil fuels in contrast have provided about 10 times the energy it took to produce them.
No energy source can ever be practical unless it produces considerably more energy than it took to build.
And that doesn’t include the energy to transport, install, and dispose of the cells.
you again, with that stupid arse non-meme
Really, stock, you’re coming off like Daffy Duck.
Please contribute constructively.
So stock, you are still claiming it takes no energy to do any of the things I list above?
Or are you just desperate to change the subject to how stupid you are?
LOL MarkW, you are pretending that I made a claim that I did not make. Shame on you. Yes those installation activities require some energy. Most solar projects that I completed in 1 day produced enough power to fuel my F150 FX4 for the entire lifetime of the vehicle, vanishingly small compared to the 10000 days or so of system life.
Don’t forget the toxic waste disposal ‘elephant in the room’ from the manufacturing of these trillions of short-lived devices over the next century.
Pop, it is MarkW who aspires to be daffy duck with the absurdity of that solar bashing lie that has been debunked for like 5 years. A few years back, it took .6 years of energy to create the solar cell, compared to its 30 to 35 year life.
I am an expert in solar thermal and electric. I get sick of hearing stupid stuff.
And 30 to 35 years is not “short lived”. Simply pot shots that do nothing to further the conversation.
stock:
A solar cell generates partial rated power only 6 hours per day.
Rated power only 1 hour per day.
With conversion and control losses, transmission losses, battery chemical storage losses, battery chemical generation losses, and reconversion losses, you need 5-1/2 to 6 times the number of solar cells generating power to run a single load for 24 hours. (You must install 550 to 600 watts of solar cells to run a 100 watt load. PLus purchase 600-800 watt-hrs of batteries and converters and chargers rated for the maximum current, not the steady-state running current.)
So, your obsession with solar means you immediately force people to buy 6x the number of cells as their rated load. Assuming clear skies, no degregation due to dirt, solar heating, or burned out cells. And NO stored power for a 2-3 days of rainy weather, snow, or haze. Now, solar cells lose capacity immediately on exposure, then lose more capacity slowly over their real lives – 7 -12 years. No cells that I know of are guaranteed 30 year life. (Or flipping that, you provide the rated guaranteed power at 30 years, then we’ll use that to purchase 6x the capacity. )
Thats the stupid meme that you must disconnect from the grid. You simply size the system by system watts time “sunhours”. No other fancy calculations needed. No scary looking factors.
The war on solar uses a component of encouraging / requiring people to unhook from the grid. Which is silly, because lead acid batteries (and pretty much all the rest at this time) cost about $.40 per kwH for the battery cost compared to the useful energy output over the life of the batteries (based on a 50% drawdown)
So that a big no go, even in Hawaii
Solar owners provide energy to the grid when it needs it the most, and put load on the grid when the grid needs it the most.
Greenies who preach the beauty of batteries simply do not know what they speak of. I do battery projects ONLY for those who want the backup power or the future ability to whip the bird to the utility.
all solar panel warranties are 25 years. Sheesh.
And I have worked on old school systems already over 30 years, and done many systems myself that are now over 10 years.
19,000 panels installed over that timeframe, 3 panel failures (hundreds of microinverter failures)
Why insist on spouting non-sense, you might as well be a liberal.
Poor little stock, he really hopes that nobody investigates the lies he tells.
His 0.6 years was only for the cell itself (and it wasn’t an accurate claim in the first place.) it didn’t cover any of the other things needed to turn that tiny chip of silicon into a usable product.
stock, so we can make up for the fact that a solar cell can’t produce enough power over it’s useful life to cover the cost of making the solar system, by making more of them.
And to think, you call other people dumb.
PS: Read the fine print on that 25 year warranty, it doesn’t say what you think it says.
MarkW says: “a solar cell can’t produce enough power over it’s useful life to cover the cost of making the solar system.”
…
Please read this Mark, then get back to us:
..
http://astro1.panet.utoledo.edu/~relling2/PDF/pubs/life_cycle_assesment_ellingson_apul_(2015)_ren_and_sustain._energy_revs.pdf
…
Pay close attention to Fig 4
C Paul thanks for chiming in to show the vacuousness of MarkW, even 2 years including the BOS (balance of system) seems high to me, but that should dispense the “argument”.
Mahalo!
TPES 2015
Renewable 13.5% of global enery. Sounds good doesn’t it.? But wait.
Hydro = 2.5%
Biofuels (scam) and burning waste = 9.4%
Solar wind = 0.7%
GeoT and Tide = 0.8%
The claims about wind and solar, are nothing but complete and utter lies
TPES = Total Primary Energy Supply
I think there’s not much growth potential:
Hydro: Greens are opposing new dams and reservoirs.
Biofuels: You can’t burn the wood faster than it grows.
Wind: The best places already taken?
Solar: Not many success stories so far, see Ivanpah.
GeoT and Tide: Maybe some potential?
Ivanpah, is a terrible example. There are millions of successful installation that have already more than paid for themselves. I have done thousands.
Not excited about geo and tide, making stuff work in salt water and through storm and tsunamis looks like economic wishful thinking.
The only reason why they have paid for themselves is that 90% of construction costs are covered by the government, and the government mandates that all energy generated has to be bought, and at above market rates.
So as we can see, the biggest contributor to renewable BY FAR is burning wood\other and garbage
So when someone says renewable, point out 75% ish of renewable is burning rubbish and wood
72.8% of the world’s renewable energy comes from wood and dung
LOL, yes I burn wood for winter heat, and plant trees. guilt = None
and of course when they talk of cost, they dont factor in what tax payers and energy bill payers put it before they get a joule
“muh green jobs”
https://youtu.be/nJcjgAdsS1k
“The concept of the need for baseload generation is fading away,” said Paolo Frankl, who heads the renewable power division of the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based institution advising nations on energy. “Technically, you could run a system 100 percent on renewables and even 100 percent just wind and solar.”
If this were true, it would be good news for everyone – although a lot of good land would have to be sacrificed.
Of course it’s not, and a lot of suffering will be caused as the zealots find this out the hard way.
Well they did say “technically”, and not practically, so you should give them that.
“Practically” means technically done properly and thoroughly.
Of course fusion will be here in a decade or two. Listen to this very good presentation at MIT:
Then take a look at what Tokamak Energy is doing in the UK.
https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/
Fusion power has and continues to be “just 2 decades away.” That’s the problem. At some point Charlie Brown is going to tire of Lucy and her football ploy.
Charlie Brown is on the government payroll. His living depends on never kicking that ball!
Continuous fusion has been hampered by the completely bunk solar model.
it has been 2 decades away since the 60s because the solar model is bunk
If I remember correctly, fusion was, about 2 decades ago, supposed to be here in about 2 decades.
In the early 70s, my fave science rags promised that practical flying cars were at most 2-3 decades away, along with nuclear fusion & televisions “lightweight & flat, to be hung on walls like paintings”.
Oh, well….we eventually got 1 out of the 3 so that’s something
Plasma instabilities release more energy than we need to put in to create them.
Fusion requires plasma and very intense electrical fields and about 5000c to 6000c temps.
The problem for us is controlling the plasma and generating immensely powerful electrical fields.
Should we master this, this process creates atoms by arranging the components. We see them blown off in the solar wind, they are created by actions on the solar surface. Electrons Neutons and protons are arranged to create them. All provided by solar matter and plasma. (the sun is not gaseous if you see the images from the Swedish telescope)
2 wins in 2017, Dark Matter not found by CERN because it does not exist. Study uses black holes to slap establishment science in the face with their own glove, model shows black holes hold all of the missing matter. (though no one has ever shown any matter is actually missing :D) and tho I don’t buy black holes (neither did Einstein) something is in those locations, as of yet, undiscovered.
Wave particaly duality is finished too in 2017
Striped band interference in results = Strong light coherence
No bands, weak light coherence
ie laser = coherent light, sunlight = incoherent light
The filters used in dual split experiments to detect which slot the particle passed through caused light to be incoherent by causing electrons to undergo inelastic scattering, which lowered the coherence of light and so no interference bands appeared in observations.
Wave particle duality is fundamental to quantum mechanics, another bunk field, that has lost two foundational pillars, Planck’s law (which planck warned not to misinterpret) which incorporates Kirchhoff’s now invalidated law of thermal emission, namely black body radiation spectrum and thermal equilibrium in a cavity. Invalidated in the lab and in thought experiment.
Wave particle duality was just bad logic and even worse philisophy.
but I digress. I am just sick of bad science, which is largely what astronomy is made of
I must agree.
All this effort to emulate the power of the SUN. The sun cannot be a fusion reactor. In fact we have never demonstrated that it is a functioning fusion reactor. We have only held the belief that it must be so,
Just as the world is getting hotter due to greenhouse gasses. In fact we have never demonstrated that any gas can generate heat – and we can never do so.
Yet we pursue both of these fictitious goals with taxpayer dollars, without factual proof. Neither of these dream goals can ever be achieved.
Quantum mechanics can’t be too bad as a theory. It is used to design transistors. And thus the computer you are using.
I visited the JET at Culham in Oxfordshire over 25 years ago. It was the most fascinating and interesting visit to a technical facility I have ever been on.
From memory the salient points were that it would use lithium for a fuel blanket(which may be extracted from sea water).
The waste product after the process had generated the extremely high temperature was Tritium which has a half life of 12 years.
The structure of the taurus would be the only part that would become radioactive and in the event of a catastrophic failure the building would collapse onto the taurus and the only escaping radioactivity would be a very small amount of plasma. At that time a ball of berylium had been vaporised inside the toroid to coat the inner walls and prevent pollution of the cavity during excitation.
I am sure that if fusion generated power becomes a reality it would allow many more peoples to have a reliable and clean energy source.
I came across this really rare video of a reactor starting up. Thought I would share it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UxQdS0pbpKo
When/if fusion gets up running, how will they extract the heat from the 150 million degrees Celsius (270 million Fahrenheit temperature quoted above?
That quite a high temperature to be close to a heat exchanger.
At that temperature you don’t have to be close … AKA the sun 🙂
Silly statement.
At that temperature, you cannot be close!
Put solar panels up 93,000,000 miles away.
Didn’t Al Gore say that the earth temp is millions of degrees 1 kilometer down? Sounds like fusion to me!
Hehe yes he did. You would only need the panels that far away if it was the size of the sun. Remember the energy density is the energy radiated divided by the surface area of the volume of the sphere (assuming a 3D emission). 150 Million degrees is a temperature it doesn’t tell you how much energy is being released and for example the LHC will generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun but its a microscopic but mind you best estimate is it would burn a hole thru your hand if you put it there. They did a funny article about what would happen if you put your hand in the beam
https://www.livescience.com/33884-hand-lhc-beam.html
The ST40 is an experiment that will only operate for seconds. In the end it is not the temperature per se that is a problem since the plasma is floating in a vacum chamber but the energy it radiates. The temperature is high but the plasma is not a lot of materia.
ITER is a something of the expensive scientific/engineering experiment. It really doesn’t get us to actually making electricity in any useful amount. It’s insanely complex using insanely rare materials in insane conditions. It’s not even energy out/in ratio, it will have to be a multiple of this as efficiency of getting from heat energy to electricity is somewhere between 30-40%. It’s so very difficult that making it into a viable commercial project isn’t something rational. But learning how mater behaves and how things can be done has many applications beyond nuclear fusion power plants. We should seriously be spending a lot more on it, it’s only a few billion a year and why it’s taking an insane amount of time to complete.
ITER is estimated to cost 20 billion ? That’s less than what Germany spends on RE each year.
Europe’s total share is 46 percent I don’t know how much it is broken down to each country in Eurpoe. USA, South Korea, China, India, Japan and Russia each contribute 9 percent or there about.
Who is the author kidding?? A full third of the humans on the planet have no access to electricity. Perhaps if you asked those without any what kind of electricity they want, you’d get a different answer to the question of demand.
I await with bated breath for BOTH commercial fusion and liquid-salt thorium reactors. Get rid of the bird and bat dicers, and those ugly pilot-blinding solar panels as well.
Think of all those politically mandated electrical cars waiting to be sold and plugged in…
I remember years ago toys being sold batteries not included, and if you had rechargeables, you had to wait 8hrs before you could use the toy. Christmas was really boring sometimes once the wrapper came off the box.
“those ugly pilot-blinding solar panels” are easily portable and don’t need hundreds of miles of transmission lines if you’re trying to power a remote village.
SEVENTY percent of Mongolian herders are enjoying a better quality of life with solar PV
https://www.exposingtruth.com/70-of-mongolian-nomads-now-have-solar-power/
Are you confusing solar PV with solar thermal mirrors?
solar may be a good option for remote rural villages, they can’t power a modern society. MSR technology (small powerfull reactors) eliminate costly grids, saving nature to the maximum.
I’m confused about the claim that the cost of solar panels has decreased 62% over the last 5 years. when I lived in central Florida my house was north facing with a broad area of the roof ideally facing south. In 2013 I explored the idea of getting a 5KW (or even 10KW) solar panel system for my house. The cost of a 5KW system was ~$14K.
I just checked and the cost of a 5KW system is …. ~14K.
Don’t be, China’s prolific production of solar panels is killing EU manufacturers. The Chinese have millions sitting in containers.
Obviously the US is protected from this somehow, preventing Chinese panels being flooded into the US?
You’d be better off hooking a mountain bike up to a battery and doing 40k a day 😀
About 5 years ago I would buy a quality 230W panel for like $330, Now I get get 300W for around $220
1.32 $/W compared to
.73 $/W
not quite in half.
I have also seen cheap panels as low as .25 $/W
Keep in mind Florida Power and Light (Next Era) is about as corrupt as they get, and their war on solar is being successful at increasing the costs of doing projects.
Well, I have no doubt about FPL, but, I moved from Florida to North Carolina and the latter quote was for 5KW in NC.
Not a complete comparison. The %.73 is for good quality panels, but the contractor quoted installation cost includes inverters, wirig, and labor costs. Plus, the contractors may have included wildly different local subsidies.
From Robert Hirsch, former head of DoE Fusion efforts.
“In light of what has been learned from tokamaks, other plasma-physics research, engineering studies, and the application of the EPRI criteria, moving to a much cleaner fusion reaction would seem appropriate. Of particular interest is the proton and boron-11 reaction, which involves significantly more challenging physics but produces no neutrons directly. The absence of neutrons would largely eliminate the risks due to radioactivity and thereby dramatically enhance economics, regulatory simplicity, and public acceptance. ”
“Thankfully, a few privately funded projects in the US and elsewhere are pursuing p–11B and other concepts. Although more difficult from a physics standpoint, those concepts do not appear impossible, and such systems might stand a chance of being sufficient.
The ITER-tokamak approach fails against the EPRI criteria. However, concepts based on different fusion fuels might succeed. An objective engineering review is urgently needed to verify the insufficiencies of ITER-like tokamaks. A dramatic reorganization of fusion research and a better-focused research program could result in power plants that will be sufficient.”
The key sentence:
“Thankfully, a few privately funded projects in the US and elsewhere are pursuing p–11B and other concepts.”
That effort is being led by LPPFusion that has made remarkable progress with a Dense Plasma Focus approach and already reached two of the three criteria for net fusion energy. They are rapidly closing in on the third criterion, plasma density.
See
LPPFusion.com
“I’m dubious,” said Chris Llewellyn Smith, director of energy research at Oxford University who has spoken in favor of the research project. “The cost of wind and solar has come down so rapidly, so the competition has become harder to beat than you could have conceivably imagined a decade ago.”
Am I the only one that is tired of the propaganda that is coming out of the Universities from people who never created a useful BTU in their life and have no understanding of the real world yet make these outrageous claims just to appease the green politicians and continue to collect their excessive pay.
No body in the real world believes that the total erected cost of wind and Solar have much room to come down given the enormous cost of land , construction and the cement and steel required to install the equipment often in remote areas and get the energy to a place where it can be used. Are they considering the cost of the batteries given the fact that the sun does not shine in the night and windmills don’t produce with too little or too much wind.
And what will be the cost when China has put every one else out of business and has the stranglehold on us like the Arabs had on western society until the unfettered free market began to produce sufficient oil and gas to essentially achieve energy independence from foreign dictators.
Have these people no grasp of history either?
“With wind-farm developers starting to promise subsidy-free power by 2025”
Okay everyone place your bets!! Which will happen first? Fusion goes online or wind farms become subsidy free?? Hmmm, it’s a tough one 🙂
My bet is neither, don’t expect miracles
So producing “sod all becomes cheaper” or so they say. But then we have to accept so many “so they say” arguments from the renewables gang devoid of any data or technical support. How cheap without subsidies will these PART TIME wonder sources of energy be exactly? Cheap nothing is still nothing. Funny…… considering all this price drop propaganda talk that electricity prices continue rising and rising and rising…..strange do you not think?
Wind mills have reached the limit of their development. They can be only SO big then physics takes over. Some crackpot greenologist wrote an article in the mainstream press about putting them in the middle of the Atlantic! Over the spreading ridge I suppose! (You try getting the mainstream press to publish anything scientific and data based which challenges the Gore-on paradigm). And how then do you transmit that power over such distances? The lack of critical thinking and scientific credibility in a lot of the greeny ideas which seem to take on wings all by themselves with physics left way behind beggars belief…. who needs reality when you are producing opium for the masses of dumb fools being turned out of schools on both sides of the Atlantic force fed this alchemy under the guise of credible or proven science…”because I say so” tells the political indoctrinator, sorry excuse my slip, EDUCATOR. We are living in some kind of Ceaușescu/Stalinist/Mauist Orwellian nightmare where toeing the politically correct line is seen as the only way to live ….”Since when did this stop being a democracy”??????
It is about time to bring wind turbines down to earth. I will not waste a nano second of my time on those stupid voltaic cells I see deluded people spending their life saving covering their roofs with! Each wind turbine should be rated output wise in terms of Gas Powered Fire Station units. Of course a gas powered power station is 1 what fraction of that do we assign to even the biggest and part time windmill toy? It MUST be done… just like the energy rating on your fridge or washing machine. I would invite anyone who has done a similar calculation to put wind power in perspective on a power to power perspective. We can then deal with the obscenity of the subsidies later! Ok, my time is up. Back into my straight jacket and into the rubber room.