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72 comments on Will Nuclear Fusion Fill the Gap Left by Peak Oil?
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For me the crucial excerpts were:
"The Fast Track timetable" - shows the first commercial reactor producing power 40 years from now.
Dr. Briscoe: "... even if the only obstacles were technical ones it will be 2100 before fusion can supply more than 30% of Europe’s electricity."
"All but the most dewy-eyed optimists foresee the production of conventional oil severely curtailed by then [2100 - in fact that occurrence by 2025 is much more likely]. If we are to get to 2100 without major economic collapse or using so much coal, tar and oil shale that the carbon dioxide will have risen to disastrous levels, we will have had to have adopted other energy sources on a major scale, as well as substantially cutting our energy consumption and finding some way of replacing liquid hydrocarbons for transport. Fusion will then be competing in a very different environment."
In other words, the development of fusion under the schedule shown will be so slow that as a solution, it will be entirely irrelevant by the time it can produce any meaningful amount of energy. Why?
A) If we find no usable alternatives to oil and gas, our present society will transition - peacefully or otherwise - to appropriate technology and sustainability based mainly on renewables. Expensive high-tech fusion approaches will then be irrelevant.
B) If we "burn everything" the most likely outcome is massive climate change, large-scale melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets (paper of James Hansen et al., published May '07). Results - catastrophic environmental damage leading to economic collapse, and fusion irrelevant as no organised effort will be able to be made to complete development.
A massive fission programme may be what politicians are hoping will bridge the decades-long gap from fossil fuels to fusion. Maybe others will discuss this in detail, but it seems doubtful that there are the will or resources to build enough in time. Otherwise, IMO, we should either have a Apollo/Manhattan Project scale of effort to develop fusion over a timescale of a decade or two, or forget it. It seems to me that the current level and pace of effort is little more than a political sop to keep fusion proponents happy and quiet.
If your into science, and into earning money. going into fusion research is the best thing you can do, all you need to do to increases your paycheck is tell the people who give the money(governments) that you can 'solve' the current issues, but it can't be done without a increases in funding.
Bottom line: Time's up!
It was an interesting idea well worth researching, but we've lost our window for development and deployment.
Would a larger and more intensive crash program have achieved more timely results? We can speculate, but we'll never know.
I agree, it's a case of too little, too late..
I remember a lecture by my old nuclear physics prof. back in 1993, when we studied fusion, and he basically said that if it weren't for vested interests (ie. Big Oil & car manufacturers, and even governments) we would already have fusion reactors, but funding was almost nonexistant for so long that they never made much progress.
Great article though, I really appreciated the update!
I would like to point out that the time-scale for fusion development was set back in the seventies and was based on the idea that we would run out of fossil fuels at the end of this century. Two things seem to have gone wrong: 1) we've used more energy than anticipated back then, and 2) the coal resource was probably over estimated. But, it is pretty hard to speed things up because you need to first ramp up physics departments to train students who can go to work on an expanded program. The other areas where plasma physics is used a lot, weapons research and astrophysics, probably can't supply an immediate workforce large enough to make a big difference.
I agree that it is hard to see an economic home for large-scale fusion. It's pricing will look like fossil fuel pricing, but renewables are competitive now with fossil fuels and headed much lower so fusion will have to come in much cheaper than anticipated in the article to be considered feasible.
The only role that fusion might play with regard to global warming seems to me to be in a situation where we are faced with a natural runaway and are willing to pay quite a lot to remove CO2 from the atmosphere quickly. An extra energy source might be handy for that. I am intrigued by Dave Rutledge's idea that remaining hydrocarbons may be so few that we won't reach "dangerous" climate change as described at Exeter. I've linked him in at the third paragraph here. (The linked article is about making cellulosic ethanol without having to hassle with existing patents.)
Since, there is not a good way to know really how expensive fusion will be, the current rate of progress should be maintained I think. Just knowing if it can be done is worth pursuing.