For your enquiring minds, an incredibly detailled interview with a bunch of MIT fusion power researchers. Along with lots of excellent technical details, they “discuss the things we’ve learned about fusion in the past decade, how long it’s likely to take for fusion to power your home, the biggest problems fusion researchers are working to solve, and why it’s important to continue funding fusion projects”. For me, the biggest takeaway is that we could have fusion power a lot quicker if the programs weren’t starved of funding. A measly $80 billion, given what we’ve squandered on wars, doesn’t seem a lot to get abundant, clean power in two decades instead of four.
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Has been their claim as long as I can remember – back as far as 1960 at least. I note in this article they are now saying 50 years, so it’s now even farther away. Advances in solar, wind, battery power have actually happened, and are far less dangerous or polluting.
but $80 billion is pocket change for what we’d get in return.
generated by fusion power? I see that the containment vessel will be somewhat radioactive and need to be dealt with when a plant is decommissioned, but what else is there?
There’s no radioactive waste to deal with and even if the worst occurs and there’s some kind of containment failure, the radiation released wouldn’t be much above background and would be very short-lived. Nor is there enough energy involved to sustain the fusion reaction outside the containment field, so there’s no chance of a big bang, even.
?!?!?!? This is so not true! Both the D-D and D-T reactions release a large fraction of their total energy as neutrons – 3.5 MeV in the 4He product vs. 19.1 MeV in the neutron in the latter (and easier) reaction. That is, five times as much energy is in the radioactive product as opposed to the non-radioactive one.
No, fusion as we currently understand it does not represent some vast improvement over good old-fashioned fission. About the only way it wins hands-down is in the potential for manufacturing nuclear weaponry.
That’s not a trivial advantage, mind you. But that’s not exactly an advantage when thinking purely in terms of a commercial source of energy.
-“He deserves death.”
-“Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
give up war with the nations on the world, have you gone Mad;) Chump change but this type stuff scares people being pure science in all, how sad
to as far as radioactive waste? How do those numbers compare to fission? Just giving the ratio of energy captured vs. energy emitted as waste doesn’t tell me much about the harmful effects of it…
Edit: Wikipedia’s not perfect, but there’s a decent discussion of the hazards, etc. at this link
Double edit: I love this quote: “Assuming a fusion energy output equal to the 1995 global power output of about 100 EJ/yr (= 1 x 1020 J/yr) and that this does not increase in the future, then the known current lithium reserves would last 3000 years, lithium from sea water would last 60 million years, and a more complicated fusion process using only deuterium from sea water would have fuel for 150 billion years.[39] To put this in context, 150 billion years is over ten times the currently measured age of the universe, and is close to 30 times the remaining lifespan of the sun.[40]“
I turned to searching on “hazards of fusion power” and got this from the Encyclopedia of Earth. The biggie seems to be a radioactive Tritium leak, in the D-T process.
From Wikipedia, Neutron Radiation:
The article you site says that:
So yes, far from being a process with no significant radioactivity, fusion generates about the same amount as fission. Iow, it will have all the problems associated with waste disposal that fission does. Further:
Iow, the waste material from fusion is much more dangerous than what you get from fission.
Mind you, I’m all for more throwing gobs more money into researching fusion as a commercial power source (and not just at magnetic confinement schemes). But I’m not going to make the mistake of overselling fusion in the same way that fission was once touted as “power too cheap to meter”.
-“He deserves death.”
-“Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”