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314 comments on DrumBeat: November 21, 2006

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LevinK on November 21, 2006 - 2:42pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Of course that "limitless" part is pure marketing.

The phrase "fusion is the energy of the future and will always be" would be idiotic if it were not a reflection on the fact that little real progress has been made in the last few decades.

History shows that all energy breakthroughs/research/developments are requiring vast amounts of money and time. Compared to what has been put on fission, oil, oil shale, tar sands etc. fusion is still way underinvested. The problems comes to the upfront costs which for technologies like nuclear were huge, while for fusion are almost prohibitive. It is a much steeper learning curve and nobody had enough incentative to spend the huge resources on it while fossil and fission were relatively cheap.

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JimK on November 21, 2006 - 4:28pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

History shows that all energy breakthroughs/research/developments are requiring vast amounts of money and time.

This doesn't sound correct to me. Steam engines, water wheels, fission reactors... none of these things required huge investment to get going. Of course each such advance is built on the prior technology. E.g. fission relied on the work of folks like Marie Curie. And refining the technology usually does involve huge investing. But the prototypes demonstrate effectiveness first, and the huge investment follows. It almost never happens that folks make a huge investment in some direction that isn't generating some profit along the way. Real progress relies on working feedback systems to correct little errors that start to accumulate along the way. When people invest huge amounts in hopes of some eventual profit that has yet to appear even in any small degree - the end result is usually a disaster.

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LevinK on November 21, 2006 - 4:43pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Steam engines, water wheels, fission reactors (?)

It took an awful lot of money in research & development for the nuclear industry to get to its current state. Which is still not as decent as I'd like it to be, but still much more acceptable than the level of the disastrous experiments like commercial RBMK reactors or the magneseum cooled reactors in the UK.

Steam engines and water wheels are not very relevant here as they have little to do with the way we do things today.

Maybe the experimental prototypes of all of those were relatively inexpensive. But we already have several working fusion prototypes based ot the TOKAMAK technology. Getting from the laboratory to the full-scale industrial application, maturing the technology, finding the weak spots - all of this costa awful lot of time&money.

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JimK on November 21, 2006 - 5:16pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

It took an awful lot of money in research & development for the nuclear industry to get to its current state.

That's certainly true. Today's steam turbine methods to turn coal into electricity are very refined also, the result of huge investments.

My point was that the first nuclear reactor, under the stadium in Chicago in 1942, got a sustained reaction going without a huge investment.

http://hep.uchicago.edu/cp1.html

This was three years after the basic principle of a fission chain reaction was discovered. This was a working reactor, not just some isolated fragnmentary demonstration of some principles involved.

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BobCousins on November 21, 2006 - 7:20pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Of course that "limitless" part is pure marketing.

We agree on that, but I think it is worth looking at how limited fusion might be.

Even if operating costs are virtually zero, if the capital cost is very high, then the cost per kW could still be more than a fission plant.

A fusion reactor has similar engineering limits to a fission plant, so a fusion unit might produce 1500MW with a lifespan of 40 years. They are still going to need a hefty injection of capital to replace a significant portion of energy generation.

If the capital cost is too high, they may not even be economic with wrt to other forms of generation. In that case, only rich countries with a healthy economy could muster the capital to build them.

We could end up in a situation where we have a theoretical "unlimited" power source, but be unable to afford to build power plants to exploit it.

If anyone has a handle on the numbers, what would be the maximum capital cost of a fusion plant before it became uneconomic to build?

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LevinK on November 22, 2006 - 12:50am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
This is entirely valid point. It has always been the assumption that with technology development costs will drop. But what if the nature of the technology itself does not allow it?

In this case it is entirely possible this to happen, largely because of the material costs for building such a huge plant. I am not familiar what are the limiting factors for fission reactor and if they automatically apply for fusion but your claim that the size will be similar looks reasonable. In this case it does not look good IMO.

Basically the jury is still out. It may turn out that the lower cost of fuel, the simpler safety eqipment and lack of radioactive waste etc. will make up for the other increased costs. But it also may not, we are still in the R&D stage and it's too early to tell. This I guess is one of the goals of building ITER and I am 100% sure that any commercial plant will be built only after it is understood that it will be profitable. 10 bln. is not such a big price tag to find out.

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