Joe Biden loves windmills and solar panels. He’s happy to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building them and hiding the actual costs associated with creating and maintaining them and hiding the actual real-world electrical capacity they represent. And he underwrites temporary discounts to power companies and private citizens who fall for his grift.
But on a much smaller basis Joe Biden loves him some nuclear fusion. And the basis is smaller because all the fusion he can buy is laboratory fusion. Laboratory fusion is a research and development creature. Large universities with generous DOE and DOD funding get millions (not billions) of dollars to build very powerful lasers to shoot at really tiny pellets of various isotopes of hydrogen and lithium and helium, trying to get them to fuse together to form heavier elements and thereby releasing relatively large bursts of fusion energy.
In 2022 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) was able to get more energy out of a fusion event than the amount of laser energy put in. I believe the ratio was 1.5/1. So, it got out 50% more energy than it put in.
And of course, the crowd went wild! Yay!!!!!! Unlimited energy! Almost for nothing!
Yeah sure. What is neglected isn’t mentioned until the end of the article:
“Plenty of other obstacles remain than those noted above, too. Current calculations compare energy generated against the NIF laser’s output, but that brushes over the fact that the lasers draw more than 100 times the power from the grid than any fusion reaction yields. That means either energy gains or laser efficiency would need to improve by two orders of magnitude to break even in any practical sense. The NIF’s fuel pellets are also extremely expensive, says Kritcher, each one pricing in at an estimated $100,000. Then, producing a reasonable amount of power would mean dramatically increasing the frequency of NIF’s shots—a feat barely on the horizon for a reactor that requires months to load up the next nanosecond-long burst.”
So, let’s review. They put in a hundred times more energy than they produce. Each tiny pellet costs $100,000. They only fuse a few atoms every few months. The infrastructure is state of the art “giant lasers” that probably cost a cajillion dollars to build and ten cajillion dollars to maintain.
Based on these “obstacles” my engineering intuition says the likely date of commercial implementation is about five years after the heat death of the universe. Give or take.
Joking aside. Give me a break. This is right up there with world peace and practical communism for impossible dreams. But the author ends off this depressing list of obstacles by saying:
“Those are the biggest challenges,” Mordijck says. “But I think if we overcome those, it’s really not that hard at that point.”
Here he sounds like every crackpot who wants money to invent time travel or faster than light space craft or perpetual motion.
In the far future I think we’ll extract energy from geothermal sources. In the immediate future we’ll use fossil fuels and nuclear fission reactors. Nuclear fusion will require breakthroughs in physical science and engineering that currently aren’t even imagined.
When I was a kid, the Scientific American articles said we were fifty years away from commercial nuclear fusion. That was fifty-five years ago. I’m still waiting for my cup of fusion.
We would be better off investing in Generation-III nuclear reactors and further advanced concepts such as the modular Pebble-Bed and Thorium-fueled molten salt reactors. These designs are intended to improve safety, and reduce high-level fuel waste. The thorium reactors are especially good at both. Thorium is more abundant than uranium, and is very difficult to process into weapons-grade material (Which was the main reason the Govenment focused on Uranium-fueled reactors, even though experts, including Edward Teller supported Thorium for commercial power plants. In their opinion, the decision to stop development of thorium reactors, at least as a backup option, “was… Read more »
Let’s hope the world moves forward with modern nuclear power generation and the doofuses in the United States working on less practical options freeze to death. Then our descendants can stop eating crickets, move out of their caves and catch up to the 20th century.
“Based on these “obstacles” my engineering intuition says the likely date of commercial implementation is about five years after the heat death of the universe. Give or take.”
I think your projection to be a little pessimistic. Practical fusion can probably be done in a relatively short while, in geological terms anyway.
I’ve always thought that the lefts’ total rejection of fission reactors to be inexplicable in light of reality and realized that the real reason for the total rejection comes from another but unstated agenda entirely.
Agreed. I’ve always said the the left’s refusal to even consider nuclear power shows that they are not serious about global warming.
Also: “Practical nuclear fusion is 50 years away. And always will be.”
I’ll agree on the geologic scale. When our understanding of the thermodynamics of quantum phenomena becomes something more than guesswork maybe something closer to actual engineering will appear. Currently we’re firing cannonballs at fleas and calling it engineering.
The hippies didn’t like nuclear power because they were told it would lead to war with the Soviets. Now they can’t admit they were idiots. Maybe after they’re in the nursing homes reason will reassert itself.