Question
Comments
Kevin,
This is a case study for the sociology of science. Fusion power has been something that people have been beating their heads against for so long, it's no longer sexy enough to attract the best minds and funding. It's not that the challenge isn't still there?it's just that it's turned into a sort of career killing white whale.
Hopefully someone will find something that will make it sexy again. Until then, chances are the estimates will continue to get further away.
Polywell fusion has the potentian for proton (Hydrogen nucleus) ? Boron11 reactions. p-B11 reactions produce 4 helium atoms and no neutrons and they are non-radioactive. We will know if this can be done within the next 5 years. If so then we wil have cheap and abundant, non radio-active energy and cheap and abundant space travel.
We have all the fusion power we could possibly use. It's safe and clean. The fusion source is 93 million miles away and we call it the sun.
Thinking we can improve on nature's 3 billion year trial and error development program is precisely how we have gotten into what is apparently an evolutionary dead end.
Every short term solution causes long term problems and some of the created problems are worse than the original ones.
Popular Science has an interesting article along those lines...
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-12/machine-might-save-world
Submitted by Nicholas Beaudrot (not verified) on Wed Dec. 24, 2008 9:03 AM PST.
We're up to 40.
The new ITER reactor's goal is to produce enough juice to power the reactor itself. It's not supposed be online until at least 2011. The goal is to have a commercially viable power plant by 2050.
Since these things inevitably take longer, I think that if by 2075 we have a government-funded power plant that provides some power to the public we will be doing pretty well.
As the other commenters have stated, we're up to 40 years off and, given the lack of progress over the past few years, it might go to 50 soon enough.
Fusion - the miracle energy source that gets farther and farther away as you move towards it!
Kevin,
This is a case study for the sociology of science. Fusion power has been something that people have been beating their heads against for so long, it's no longer sexy enough to attract the best minds and funding. It's not that the challenge isn't still thereit's just that it's turned into a sort of career killing white whale.
Hopefully someone will find something that will make it sexy again. Until then, chances are the estimates will continue to get further away.
Honestly, we haven't really spent much money on HEF in years now. ITER is still moving forward, albeit at a painfully slow pace. The big problem with fusion power right now tends to be from people who assume it has the same safety risks as fision. The French finally got the location stuff worked out like 2 years ago, but they aren't even breaking ground until 2011.
Honestly, if we could push ITER as a working model (and it, you know, works), we could be as little as 10 years away from having a viable fusion plant design, but that is still way outside the realm of need.
Nicholas is right, except ITER isn't supposed to start fusing anything until 2018. Assuming it works, then theoretically commercial plants, requiring over a decade to design and build, would follow.
The "fast track" plan for fusion power has civilian plants in 2050, which basically assumes everything goes really well and lots more funding.
I worked at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory back in 1978 in its three-man public relations group. Probably no one will remember, but there was a moment in the summer of 1978 when fusion power became the biggest news story in the world based on a misleading story about a "breakthrough" at PPPL. There was, I recall, a banner headline in the Washington Post. There was great hope, even an expectation, that finally fusion power was on its way, and with the more powerful machines in the pipeline, its success was almost assured. Needless to say, it petered out, as so many other supposed advances in fusion energy (not even considering the bogus one of cold fusion). And that was thirty years ago.
I check in on fusion power every now and then to see if anything is happening. And the answer is: Nope.
It's sad, really. Had it been technologically feasible, it could have been a great thing. But there comes a point when you just have to say, ain't gonna happen.
It will happen, but 50 years is as good, safe a guess as any.
probably we have missed some simple and elementary changes that will make it economical and doable. Whether that is inertial confinement rather than Tokomak/ Torus, or something else, I don't know.
So yes, as it always has been-- 50 years from full commercial realization. The progress that has been made has been good at the physics level, but we aren't there in terms of a scalable solution-- the 'engineering' if you will.
The problem with global warming is that by that time, we will have/ will not have done the damage that makes the whole thing irrelevant.
ITER seems so big and expensive as to preclude commercial success. A different technology (Focus Fusion) has been mentioned as a possible alternative (see http://www.focusfusion.org/). It utilizes a smaller scale and hence appears more translatable to the market. Although I'm a science geek, I'm knowledgeable about biology not physics and so don't know whether this technology has better prospects than magnetic fusion. I'm at a loss to determine by a quick glance whether it is related to the technology mentioned by Jimbo above, so maybe the physic geeks can come to the rescue here.
Fusion was immediately attractive once discovered because you see a huge payoff. Vast amounts of energy are released and the fuel is abundant. There was just this little problem of how to make it happen. At this point we're just as likely to make cold fusion a reality as hot fusion.
I doubt we'll see fusion power for a hundred years, if ever. Maybe in a thousand years some kid will build a working model for a science fair.
The current model is planned to just break even. Suppose they go the next step and build one that has a 0.5% payoff. That means huge energy flows just to get a small amount of useful energy. The investments in concrete, steel and such will be huge because of this inefficiency.
The attraction for governments is that the can have a concentrated energy source they can control. Damn the costs.
It would be better to develop efficient, inexpensive solar power. In principle, we could have relatively inexpensive cells that are as much as 50% efficient. That would be a huge game changer.
We're in the position of those investigating powered flight before the Wright brothers. We know it is theoretically possible but we don't have the materials and know how to make it happen.
Submitted by Stewart Dean (not verified) on Wed Dec. 24, 2008 10:54 AM PST.
Sort of a worse than Xeno's Paradox: with each unit of time, the arrow covers less than half the remaining distance.....
Submitted by M. Simon (not verified) on Wed Dec. 24, 2008 12:41 PM PST.
The EMC2 folks are making progress with Bussard's Polywell design.
A working (or not) proof of concept reactor could be done in five years. That would give us a definite yes/no answer. Cost for the program estimated at $200 million with milestones along the way so if any show stoppers appear not all the funds need to be spent.
I had gotten my technical computing career starting in Fusion research almost thirty years ago, but don't follow it very closely. The mainstream of development JET => ITER, will probably demonstrate a sort of scientific fusion holy grail (maintaining an ignited plasma). The problem will be in getting from there to an economically viable form of power. The later (engineering/economic) step, is likely impossible,. Any real hope therefore resides with alternative concepts. The problem, at least within the US fusion community, has long been that the politically well-connected PPPL, gas always succeeded in killing off any of the alternative confinement geometries, least they have to share the research pie with other laboratories.
Who cares?
The world has vast commercially exploitable wind, solar, tidal and geothermal energy resources that with today's technology can provide far more energy than we currently use, or could possibly need to sustain a comfortable, prosperous, technologically advanced civilization on time scales that, for human purposes, are equivalent to "forever".
We don't need fusion. We don't need fission. We don't need fossil fuels. We don't, in fact, need ANY fuels.
We can get all the energy we need by harvesting abundant, ubiquitous, clean, FREE solar, wind, geothermal and hydro energy.
See you just dig a really deep hole, line it with something nice and heavy, and set one of those things off. Use the heat transferred to the ground to heat water or something.
Apart from using NUCLEAR BOMBS it'd probably be a pretty good plan.
SecularAnimist: We can get all the energy we need by harvesting abundant, ubiquitous, clean, FREE solar, wind, geothermal and hydro energy.
None of those things are free any more than sailing ships were free - they cost money to build and maintain. Moreover, while all of them are much cleaner than what we use now, none of them are without some sort of environmental impact. So why the hostility to fusion?
I'm no more confident of there being practical fusion power in the next few decades than I am of meeting a Krell. Even if sustainable net energy gain reactions are possible, the engineering to create practical reactors may be nearly impossible, or at least uneconomic. But suppose I'm wrong?
As for the environmental impact of fusion reactors, we have no idea what it will be since we don't know how to build one. There is reason to believe though that the impact will be minimal. As far fetched and difficult as controlled fusion has turned out to be, I still think it's worth funding some research.
Most people haven't even heard of the polywell. Which is a shame, because it has the best chances of harnessing fusion energy in an economic fashion.
(The DOD just concluded a successful research program on a sub-scale design a few months ago. More news later when the next round of funding happens)
Polywell fusion is the most promising approach to controlled sustainable fusion reactions I've seen so far. The comment above about a high school student someday building a fusion reactor has already come true - if you count the Farnsworth Fusor. Granted it will never break even, but it does produce measurable fusion reactions, with about several thousand dollars worth of hardware - and several high schools students have built them for science fairs. It demonstrates you don't need the tokamak approach or gigawatt lasers, and helped Bussard refine the concepts needed to develop the Polywell design.
As it happens, I posted a 5 part series about the current state of fusion research over at Daily Kos back in April, with a big look at the Polywell design.
The last installment, Part 5 is at the link below. The lead paragraph has links to the first 4 installments. Each installment has a link to the next one in the series. If you haven't seen much on fusion before or don't know a lot about it, there's a lot of introductory material and lots of links. There's some good stuff in many of the comments, too. Enjoy!
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/4/26/0025/57752/42/500332
The level of radiation produced by even the cleanest Polywell means they're going to be built on existing Nuclear sites, so they can be monitored properly.
Also, it's not yet proven that a Polywell will producer cheaper electricity than existing nuclear plant. The commercial case still has to be made.
Once you understand that, it's OK to get slightly excited...
This ought to give you a good view of the current status of Polywell:
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/12/16/1718741.aspx#comments
I found Nebel's own statements in the thread commentary extraordinary. One shouldn't over-hype this, but I must admit I'm full of hope.
NIF will come on line next year and will most likely be producing physical Q values in the double digits by 2011. It'll be a game changer. We need to keep up on Funding Possible breakthroughs such as Polywell, and others too.
One thing we should do Immediately is begin development of a type of Fission reactor: Liquid Fluoride Thorium reactor --LFTR (acronym pronounced "Lifter"), which has a power density so great they tried to put a similar thing on a friggin' Airplane! Well it *WAS* the 1950's; What'd they know....
I'm curious to know what you're basing your estimates of the amount of radiation that would be given off by a Polywell reactor. Based on what I've seen so far, there's no way to tell, unless you're assuming a deuterium-tritium reaction which would produce neutron radiation.
The ITER reactor is going to be a nightmare - the amount of energy tied up in the electromagnets, etc. is enough to rival a small nuke if it fails, and the thing will be about the size of an aircraft carrier - and still won't hit break even, or just barely.
The Polywell reactor in contrast is a lot simpler and operates under far less extreme conditions. All you need is a good-sized vacuum chamber to keep the plasma at the right concentrations, something roughly several meters across I believe.
There's speculation that a Polywell reactor might be efficient enough to run on a proton-boron reaction instead, which would produce almost no radiation aside from alpha particles. In fact, since alpha particles carry a charge, it is theoretically possible the nuclear energy from the fusion reaction could be converted directly into electricity, avoiding the whole steam turbine intermediate step.
In any case, the Polywell design is inherently safer than any fission reactor, because there is no way to get a runaway reaction going, and the fuels are far less dangerous than uranium or plutonium. In fact, if it runs on a proton-boron reaction, there's no appreciable hazard, or dangerous waste products.
All of this is of course contingent on actually getting a working Polywell reactor built - but all the available information looks pretty good at this point.
BTW Robert Bussard, developer of Polywell, is known for the sci-fi staple the Bussard Ramjet. One of the weirdest stories is Poul Anderson's evocative but unrealistic "Tau Zero", in which ramjets go so close to c that time dilation makes it seem like a few seconds pass to traverse an entire galaxy (and the end of the universe is right up ahead.)
Wikipedia:
In 1960, Bussard conceived of the Bussard ramjet, an interstellar space drive powered by hydrogen fusion using hydrogen collected with a magnetic field from the interstellar gas. Due to the presence of high-energy particles throughout space, much of the interstellar hydrogen exists in an ionized state (H II regions) that can be manipulated by magnetic or electric fields. Bussard proposed using a large magnet[citation needed] to "scoop" up the ionized hydrogen and funnel it into a fusion reactor, using the exhaust from the reactor as a rocket engine. Since it would pick up its fuel from space, there was no apparent upper limit to the speed such a craft could achieve. There is an upper limit set by unavoidable transverse radiation from the hydrogen captured in the fusion process.
Submitted by capitalistimperialistpig (not verified) on Wed Dec. 24, 2008 7:04 PM PST.
With all the uncertainties in the World it's nice to know that one thing is constant. fusion power is fifty years off, just like it was back in 1960.
Polywell fusion has the potentian for proton (Hydrogen nucleus) Boron11 reactions. p-B11 reactions produce 4 helium atoms and no neutrons and they are non-radioactive. We will know if this can be done within the next 5 years. If so then we wil have cheap and abundant, non radio-active energy and cheap and abundant space travel.
I had absolutely no idea there were so many experts on fusion technology right here on this blog ! However, it's now quite obvious that the main reason we have to workable solutions is that all the experts are spending their time blogging instead.
According to Dr Nebel's calculations, neutron yield from a P-B11 Polywell machine (nonthermal) is about 1.0e12/sec. for a 100Mwe reactor. That's about 8 orders of magnitude less than a comparable D-T machine.
The NRC are going to insist on proper containment and monitoring...
What happened with cold fusion is a shame reflecting on the entire scientific and news media establishment. Almost 20 years later, the most reputable government scientists have to repeatedly make their case that it's not all a hoax. Fund cold fusion now!
rbe1: I had absolutely no idea there were so many experts on fusion technology right here on this blog!
Uh-oh, the secret is out. Keep it quiet and we'll cut you in for a piece of the action. Do otherwise, and let's just say it might not be good for you.
However, it's now quite obvious that the main reason we have to workable solutions is that all the experts are spending their time blogging instead.
Nonsense. We're blogging because we've figured it all out and are now just bidding our time. Very soon now we'll short the stocks for all other energy sources and then announce Mr. Fusion.
Just a quick question for all you smart people out there...
How far away do you think stem cell regeneration is?
How about tissue engineered replacement organs?
Brain-computer interfaces?
The press pumps things so much that it just completely warps people's perceptions of how long it takes to commercialize basic science...
ITER has amazing potential. And I simply do not understand the people who believe that if they are a fan of solar or wind power they can't be a fan of fusion.
fusion reminds me of artificial intelligence, in both cases estimates have grown steadily longer as more and more work is sunk into the projects. LISP was invented in 1958, and a loooong time ago we heard that AI was just around the corner, but we don't hear much about that any longer. maybe the first real AI happened and blacked out the news? that seems more likely than fusion covering its own tracks at least ;-).
A few thoughts from someone actively working on tokamak research right now.
1. It's true that ITER is a while off, and that it's even longer to get to a fusion power plant. So I (and most every scientist I know in the field, as opposed to PR people or reporters) have always been very upfront that fusion should be viewed as part of the long-term solution for sustainable energy production. Solar, wind, probably fission, and efficiency improvements are all highly necessary for starting in on the issue right now. But whenever I've looked at the numbers for how much space you need to cover with solar panels, or how many wind turbines you need, to make them our primary electricity generation mechanisms, it just doesn't look feasible. And this doesn't address the issues of variablity, geographic dependancies, transmission, etc. So I think there's still a clear need for compact (relative to the areas you need to cover with solar or wind power) power plants compatible with exisitng electricity grids which can provide baseline electricity at night, on cloudy days, when the wind's not blowing, etc. And I think all of us in alternative energy research do ourselves a disservice in framing the issue as an either/or one.
2. It's true that tokamaks like ITER (as well as the NIF facility for the inertial approach) are large and expensive, but they're what we've had the most experience with, and have the best models for, so that's why we're pursuing them so strongly. It may be that they aren't the optimal design used in 1000 years, but they have the clearest approach. One of the things we learned in fusion is that as the applied heating power increased, more and more instabilities appeared. We've learned how to handle or avoid most all of these for tokamaks, but it's not clear than many of the alternative confinement approaches have yet.
3. I think its also important to recognize that the 50 year issue is also due to our funding being highly politicized and tied to the price of oil. There's a well-known plot in our field comparing fusion funding relative to the price of oil, and they pretty tightly correlated. So in the 90's, when gas was cheaper than bottled water, the Republican congress killed a number of large research experiments (like the TFTR experiment at princeton) just as they were really coming into their own, and pulled us out of ITER. We didn't rejoin the ITER project until 2003 (I believe) because according to common gossip it was on a list of conditions from the British government for their support of the Iraq invasion. Which in turn lead the Democratic congress last year to cut the US ITER contributions from the budget because it was a Bush project. So when all this goes on, it's really a challenge to address the science and technical issues at the level we'd like. Moreover, a large part of the reason it took so long to find a site for ITER was because both the French and Japanese governments wanted their industries to get the contracts to build it- not just for the jobs/short-term stimulus, but to get the knowledge and expertise for building future reactors.
4. However, I would say we've actually done a pretty good job on understanding a lot of the physics and engineering issues we didn't when we started on ITER. And so if we were to start designing ITER from scratch today, it would probably look a bit different than what is actually being built, just like how the current plan is different than what the original design was.
So apologies for the wall of text- first comment on (any) of these blogs. But I did want to offer the perspective of someone actually working in this field on the issue.
Fusion isn't the answer to global warming, it's escape. Fusion is the only thing that can really provide a good power source for off-Earth humanity: and in order for anything we have ever done to matter, that's required.
Currently the sum important of humanity is zero. Absolutely nothing. We need fusion to have a good chance of changing that.
hot fusion is a deadend.
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon Jun. 29, 2009 4:14 AM PDT.
ITER is the wrong shape.it will never work.
what shape is the sun?
hot fusion is a deadend.
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon Jun. 29, 2009 4:14 AM PDT.
ITER is the wrong shape.it will never work.
what shape is the sun?
