A good addition would be the sales price per MWh, price for the power plant, and the loan interest rate.<p>Because IMO all that is extremely critical. I fully support the pursuit of fusion as a scientific endeavor, but given that we're probably at least 30 years away from having anything approaching commercial deployment (assuming ITER is built, works, is followed promptly by DEMO, it works, and is followed promptly by people building more reactors. That's a heck of an assumption), it's not at all a given that it'll ever make a profit. That's a lot of time to build a lot of very cheap renewables.<p>And there's also opportunity costs. I see a lot of hopes put on fusion and don't really understand this chasing of the perfect solution. Even best case, it's not happening in decades, and it'll take decades more to build fusion as anything more than one off multi-decade-long research projects. That's a lot of time for the world to get worse while waiting for fusion to happen, and we might as well just throw renewables at the problem now instead of waiting.<p>So opportunity costs would also make for an interesting thing to calculate. Given that fusion will likely not make a major difference climate/pollution-wise for half a century, what else could we build in that time, and how much and what effect would that have?
> And there's also opportunity costs.<p>That's not really how it works. ITER has a budget measured in billions over multiple years, the global energy industry is trillions every year. The amount needed to do the research is such a small proportion that if there is even a tiny possibility that it could long-term provide a significant proportion of world energy, it's well worth doing the research. The scientific knowledge gain is just icing on the cake.<p>> That's a lot of time for the world to get worse while waiting for fusion to happen, and we might as well just throw renewables at the problem now instead of waiting.<p>We can do two things at once.
ITER is a many stakeholders project, with all it's advantages (the costs can be split among participants, international cooperation) and disadvantages (each government wants a piece of the pie - components are manufactured at many subcontractors, in multiple countries) and politics (for example the multi-year process for selecting a ITER location).<p>The bigger, principal problem of ITER is the used magnet technology (niobium–tin, niobium–titanium). This was safe and conservative choice in 1990s, but as consequence the tokamak has to be big and therefor expensive to build.<p>Commonwealth Fusion Systems is currently building a tokamak based on the same physics as ITER, but with modern magnet technology using rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) high-temperature superconductors. Their ARC tokamak should be smaller and cheaper than ITER.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_fusion_reactor" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_fusion_reactor</a>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Fusion_Systems" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Fusion_Systems</a><p>Of all the fusion energy startups Commonwealth Fusion Systems is nearest to demonstrating a realistic fusion power plant.
Storing renewables for a whole season is an unsolved problem at the moment. Countries at higher latitudes might want fusion for baseload generation during winter.
And later it'll help with climbing the Kardashev scale.
But there's far easier solutions to that than fusion.<p>For example, HVDC. Interconnect and buy power from somebody with more sun. Or just overbuild solar by a lot. It's cheap, so chances are having too much of it still works out economically.
ITER is not our best bet for commercial fusion. ITER was a peace project between the USA and the Soviet Union.<p><a href="https://www.cfs.energy" rel="nofollow">https://www.cfs.energy</a>
Side note, all fusion start ups have built upon decades of science research funded in the ITER program, so opposing ITER to fusion start ups is misleading
ITER is definitely the best bet for a workable fusion concept. There are some unsolved issues left, but its nothing compared to the sci-fi solutions most US startups would require.
I think it's impossible to calculate at this stage since there're no fusion power plants which actually produce net power.
True, but we've built tokamaks and we're building ITER, which so far has an estimated price of between $45 billion and $65 billion.<p>Now of course that's a research reactor full of experiments and instrumentation that wouldn't be part of a normal power plant, but given current experience that I think we can expect we won't suddenly knock down the cost to $100M. It's going to be somewhere in the billions. And we have expectations of that DEMO is going to make 750MWe.<p>We can then plug those estimates into the calculator and basically figure out how cheap and how powerful a fusion reactor has to be for it to make economical sense.
Part of that cost is from ITER being so huge, which is because they use obsolete superconductors. CFS is doing the same thing in a reactor a tenth as big, using newer superconductors that support stronger magnetic fields.<p>The size and also the complicated governance have made ITER very slow to build, which also increases expense. The JET tokamak is about the size of the reactor CFS is building, and JET was built in a year for the reactor itself, plus three years before that for the building they put it in.
I think a lot of the cost is custom parts. Standardization and economy of scale would bring the price down quite a bit.
The market never went that way with fission (except France?). What would be the difference with fusion?
If that happens it will still take decades.<p>It took us a lot of time to standardize computers. We made lots of weird architectures before things settled down.
And outputs for how much power would be generated by an equivalent-cost conventional fission or solar facility.
For those interested not only in simplified energy balance of a fusion power plant as shown in Fusion Power Plant Simulator, but in more realistic engineering of heat extraction from a tokamak I recommend the following lecture by Dr. Dennis Whyte from MIT Plasma Science & Fusion Center.<p>Fusion Reactor First Wall Cooling<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHJyoqDO0zw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHJyoqDO0zw</a><p>One of the designs uses 3D printed silicon carbide vacuum vessel cooled by a layer of molten lead and a layer of FLiBe (a molten salt made from a mixture of lithium fluoride (LiF) and beryllium fluoride (BeF2)).<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLiBe" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLiBe</a><p>The lithium component of FLiBe is used for breeding of the radioactive isotope tritium, which will be extracted from the salt and used for making the deuterium-tritium fuel of the tokamak.
My favorite video that walks through fusion energy design/sizing/cost equations is also a lecture by Dennis Whyte: <a href="https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4?si=U8xaAAvjdnt6yqr8" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4?si=U8xaAAvjdnt6yqr8</a> It’s a really engaging lecture - I’m normally pretty put off by 100-minute lectures on YouTube but this one was both very easy to follow and perfectly scoped. Can highly recommend it - the learnings from it are timeless fundamentals that really make fusion power design and economics accessible.<p>The big takeaway is that better magnets reduce reactor size by the 4th power, and energy output and cost by the cubed power. Finding a material for the magnets which doubles their strength would reduce the size of the reactor by 94% and the cost by 88%.<p>A possible conclusion one could make is that with regular advancements in magnets it’s very possible that the first operational commercial fusion reactors will be relatively low-cost compared to current and planned fusion reactors, and even though they may begin construction after the next generation of super-sized fusion reactors - they might be finished and operational before their “predecessors” with inferior magnets have completed being built.
The wildcard for our civilization that I pay a lot of attention to:<p>will AI help us get through blockers like this?<p>I'm out of the prediction business but my guess is: absolutely, but iff we don't collapse in some way first.<p>Wild to be alive as the centuries-long horse race of industrialization between doom, or the stars, approaches its finish line.
>realistic engineering of heat extraction from a tokamak<p>This is why I love the idea of Helion so much.<p>Who knows if it will ever work, but skipping the thermal transport and doing direct current generation from EMF in the reactor seems like it has tremendous potential for simplifying (and eventually downsizing)
It would be quite outstanding if MIT Plasma Science & Fusion Center released their core courses on OpenCourseWare. Considering the potential impact of this technology and how much it's needed, humanity doesn't seem to be trying that hard to make it work.
> cooled by a layer of molten lead<p>Really gives a perspective on the range of temperatures handled.
I actually like the recirculation simulation. Although all kinds of cyclical engines have recirculation of power as part of their function, in fusion there is an important difference from what people are used to. In an internal combustion engine, the crankshaft and flywheel in a car recirculate power from the power stroke to the compression stroke, doing the same thing as the recirculated energy does in this simulation. But in fusion, this 'crankshaft' is very lossy. I suspect if you have a model in your head of how an internal combustion engine works, crankshaft losses are not a big thing. Teaching people that when they model fusion reactors that they need to include this because it's important, I think would help people develop better physical intuition. The 'lossy crankshaft' model was an important part of why I opted for partial direct conversion with the design I built back in the '90s. Set both eff sliders high to see how much this helps.<p>That said, one big missing thing (other than the economic stuff, mentioned by others) which would add a lot to this simulation would be more about 'where does Q come from?'. Obviously this could be too complicated for a little sim, but perhaps a few simple things could be added like showing how increasing the volume/surface ratio for tokomaks/sphereomaks can help, or how getting rid of certain types of instabilities can improve say mirror or pinch designs. This might help people to understand why certain design decisions (like building ITER so big) were made.
I will quote Prof. Dennis Whyte<p>"The limitations of 20+ year-old Nb3Sn superconductor magnet technology forces ITER to be so large it is taking the entire world to build a single device"<p><a href="https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4?t=1471" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4?t=1471</a>
Well said about the “lossy crankshaft”. As for what determines Q, that’s up next, stay tuned :)
When people get excited about fusion as a source of energy, I’m always reminded of Henry Ford’s famous quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” although apparently he probably never said that.<p>Fusion is that faster horse - promising a cheaper to operate firebox which when attached to a stream engine attached to an alternator can produce electricity.<p>This approach to generating electricity has been superseded by new technologies - first by gas turbines which removed the steam engine and then by wind turbines which removed heat from the process and now by solar PV which has removed all the mechanics.<p>I just can’t see any circumstances under which steam engines are “coming back” and becoming competitive for electricity no matter how cheap the firebox fuel is.
No melt down? This game sucks.<p>On a serious note: I wonder how practical and safe it would be to build fusion pants close to city centers in order to harvest the excess heat for district heating. Would be a boon in e.g. NYC which already has a large district steam system. You can do cooling too, look up "steam absorption chiller."
It already exists in many countries.
They transport it through pipelines .<p>E.g. Temelín Nuclear Power Plant,
Paks Nuclear Power Plant
And many more
My question is more about the safety of locating one smack in the middle of a city. There is radiation to shield but no radioactive fuel waste. HOWEVER, worn reactor parts that need to be replaced will be piping hot when measured with a Geiger counter. So is it safe to build and operate in the middle of e.g. NYC?<p>And further, if they are safe, what is the public's perception of fusion? Do people hear "nuclear fusion" and immediately think nuclear disaster imagery brought about by incidents like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl?
> I wonder how practical and safe it would be to build fusion pants close to city centers in order to harvest the excess heat for district heating<p>The cost/benefit for doing this seems pretty similar between fusion as gas power. We don't usually do this with gas, so I guess it's probably not viable for fusion.
Many cities/towns in the USA have small power plants in them (typically associated with a University, large hospital system, or central business district) which "sell" not just power, but also hot water, and steam. The steam is typically used to heat buildings. Google for "$CITY steam tunnels" or "$CITY CHP plant" to find these in your area.<p>San Francisco has[0][1][2][3] at least five combined heat and power plants that generate electricity and also sell steam to neighboring buildings via 72,000 feet of pipes.<p>I worked at a privately-owned for-profit "factory" in Santa Monica whose primary product was chilled water (their other product was warm water). They built pipelines to nearby large buildings and sold chilled water to them.<p>0: <a href="https://cordiaenergy.com/locations/san-francisco-3/" rel="nofollow">https://cordiaenergy.com/locations/san-francisco-3/</a> (2 for-profit CHP plants)<p>1: Skanska (for-profit)<p>2: San Francisco General Hospital<p>3: Apparently there are some "Muni" CHP plants scattered about SF as well (publicly-owned)
Combined heat and electricity production is uncommon in the US, but much more so in Europe. Especially in the Baltics, Scandinavia and the Netherlands, non-CHP generation is rare. Related: higher energy cost, and elaborate local heat distribution networks.
Don't they already do this for existing types of power plants (gas, coal) that produce waste heat?
Fusion power plants can't "melt down". The amount of plasma inside the vacuum chamber is just around a gram.
That's the joke, isn't it?<p>A fission power plant simulator lets you have fun playing through a meltdown disaster scenario. A fusion power plant simulator is "worse" because it takes away the "fun" of meltdowns. The humor is in reacting to the simulator as if it were a game (some are, but this one isn't).
Might not be similar to nuclear meltdown but still enough to need a lot of money to fix
> <i>Fusion power plants can't "melt down"</i><p>Eh, a core-containment failure (in any magnetically-contained system) would involve superheated hydrogen getting friendly with oxygen. That, in turn, would give neutron-impregnated barrier materials a free ride on propellant. It's not strictly a melt down. But it's in the same practical category of failure.
Ths is a massive misunderstanding of the technology. First of all, the amount of hydrogen in the reactor is tiny. The magnetic confinement severely limits the density of the plasma. The inner containment vessel is a ultra high vacuum chamber. The chemical energy that would be released by a reaction between the hydrogen in the reactor amd oxygen from the air would be less than what is released by popping a hydrogen filled balloon with a lighter.<p>The truly concerning failure modes would be related to release of radiation or activated materials. But that would require damaging the reactor in ways that the reactor is incapable of imparting on itself.<p>Overall, the technology is remarkably safe.
> <i>chemical energy that would be released by a reaction between the hydrogen in the reactor amd oxygen from the air would be less than what is released by popping a hydrogen filled balloon with a lighter</i><p>Thanks for the correction. If you're breeding lithium in the walls, might that be an incendiary concern?
There seems to be a number of different prototypes of blankets, but the average operating temperature seems to be 300-700C. Adding oxygen to some of these designs while that hot may cause metal burning. This said, many of them are ceramic designs and would likely resist combustion.<p>With all that said, it seems to be way less 'dangerous' material than would be in your average nuclear reactor, making it more of an industrial accident versus a planet contaminating mess.
The breeding blanket is entirely contained inside a vacuum vessel, so there isn't any oxygen to react with. Also, the are many blanket designs, but the lithium is never present in its elemental form (precisely because it would be very reactive), but in a stable chemical bond with some neutron multiplier (like lithium-lead alloys or beryllium ceramics). In some design the lithium is even immersed in the coolant itself, which is high pressure helium, so it's not going to ignite in any reasonable way.
> <i>breeding blanket is entirely contained inside a vacuum vessel, so there isn't any oxygen to react with</i><p>When the vessel works. If the vessel breaches, that lithium could ignite. Note a showstopper. But I suppose a risk to be thought about by the engineers (probably not by policymakers).
Commonwealth Fusion Systems plan to use lithium in salt form FLiBe, a molten salt made from a mixture of lithium fluoride (LiF) and beryllium fluoride (BeF2). It does not violently react with air or water.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLiBe" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLiBe</a>
There's only a few grams of hydrogen in the reactor's plasma, it's reaction with oxygen wouldn't be much more exciting than just losing containment. There are engineering challenges that have to be addressed but no worse than the 6 MW research reactor I used to walk by every day to my college classes in the middle of a dense city.<p>The proliferation risk of someone using the neutron flux to produce an atomic or dirty bomb are real but that exists no matter where it is.
I think the proliferation risks will be in future the reason, independent of technological obstacles or costs, why US will not allow to build fusion power plants in all countries around the world.<p>Hybrid nuclear fusion–fission power plants have been already proposed and studied in theory.<p>"In general terms, the hybrid is very similar in concept to the fast breeder reactor, which uses a compact high-energy fission core in place of the hybrid's fusion core. Another similar concept is the accelerator-driven subcritical reactor, which uses a particle accelerator to provide the neutrons instead of nuclear reactions."<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion–fission_hybrid" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion–fission_hybrid</a>
> Hybrid nuclear fusion–fission power plants have been already proposed and studied in theory.<p>I have a hand-wavy hard sci-fi universe I've been rolling around my head for years and I eventually came to the conclusion that fission-fusion drives would be really handy for spacecraft, since it would be much easier to start a fission reaction in a cold/dark ship than fusion because of the power requirements. Otherwise you need some other way to generate 10s or 100s of MW to start the fusion reaction.
Probably not <i>all</i> countries, but any NPT signatory has the right to build nuclear power plants, they just have to submit to inspections.
Fission-fusion or accelerator-driven fission is pure BS. It combines the disadvantages of _both_ and none of the advantages.<p>Modern fission power plants are designed with a reactor vessel to last a century and to withstand high pressures and temperatures. It's built and emplaced permanently in a large concrete shielding structure.<p>In a hybrid design this just won't work. Fuel will need to be right next to a high-vacuum chamber that will need periodic maintenance.
What's the effect of this in a populated area in a certain radius? Compared to nuclear power plants...
> <i>What's the effect of this in a populated area in a certain radius?</i><p>I'd imagine this is, like with fission plants, deeply dependent on the specific design.
Radiologically? Pretty much nothing. The regular industrial safety concerns will matter more.<p>The plant will have some tritium, and the material in reactor walls will get activated by the neutron flux. Some of the activated materials can disperse in case of a catastrophic explosion (e.g. a couple of large airplanes being flown the reactor building).<p>But the material of the walls is not volatile, so it'll stay on the site. And tritium is very volatile, so it'll quickly disperse to safe levels. You'll be able to detect them with sensitive equipment, but it won't be dangerous.
Apologies if I've missed something, but isn't this all just a fantasy? None of the current methods for getting fusion power are even close to being practical -- even the theoretical net output experiments require extensive and sensitive measurement setups just to establish whether or not they are positive energy.<p>We are not in a place where we expect fusion power to be incrementally achieved by the current systems. We need major breakthroughs that are both impossible to predict and may not even exist outside of stars or thermonuclear devices.<p>The idea that we'll get massive improvements in Qsci, while maintaining the same basic structure as existing fusion systems, is in the end a bit silly. What would we estimate our confidence to be that when someone invents the Fromboculator, that the Fromboculator will even have a heating system or "vacuum vessel" or a plasma system.<p>In the end, this looks like it's a steam engine simulator more than anything else, but with some fancy words thrown in.
That wildly overstates how far off we are. To take the most conservative example, tokamaks have very well-known scaling laws and based on those, CFS is generally expected to exceed breakeven with SPARC and get to practical power levels with ARC, over the next several years.
Does anyone have a collection of these little simulator systems? I love playing with them.
The recirculating power for the magnetics should be included (at least for pulsed), as the RTE there tends to drive the design.
Loved this game when it first came out.<p><a href="https://www.myabandonware.com/game/three-mile-island-7mu" rel="nofollow">https://www.myabandonware.com/game/three-mile-island-7mu</a>
Something I've been asking my AIs to do when modelling with them is to ask for the algebra for the model so I may recreate it by hand. Including such a PDF with these links would be helpful because it succintly presents the logic in a denser form than an explainer article.
Yeah, it’s slightly buried - the publication with all the details, including the math is linked to in footnote 3 of the explainer article,<p><a href="https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pop/article/29/6/062103/2847827/Progress-toward-fusion-energy-breakeven-and-gain" rel="nofollow">https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pop/article/29/6/062103/2847827/Pro...</a><p>It’s open access and you can download the PDF directly from there.
For whatever reason the game doesn't load until I switch to the dark mode<p>If I enable advanced mode, the "exiting" in Heating Power (exiting) gets overlapped with corresponding numbers<p>Display menu doesn't allow switching to Energy mode
I think the first thing I thought when every man opened this project was: how to make this thing explode.
This would sell on Steam with a light Godot reskin
Those who like playing with this sort of thing might like to play with this superconductor-coil-as-a-battery exploration where electricity just goes round as storage![1]<p>[1] <a href="https://stateofutopia.com/experiments/wheeeeeloop/wheeeeeloop.html" rel="nofollow">https://stateofutopia.com/experiments/wheeeeeloop/wheeeeeloo...</a>
fantastic PBS Space Time on what the last steps are going to be to finally make fusion possible<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAJN1CrJsVE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAJN1CrJsVE</a><p>(fusion is -always- just a decade away, perpetually, lol)
It's a nice video, but a striking thing about it is that it ends with "I just want my infinite free energy". Where on earth is that supposed to come from?<p>Fusion is ultimately a fancy way to boil water. The tokamak (or stellarator) heats a given amount of water per second, which after losses to power the plant itself and the losses in the steam turbine, makes some finite amount of MWh to output to the grid. This contraption is as the video says very non-trivial to design and build and so it costs some very non-zero amount of money, and lasts a finite time (walls are damaged)<p>Big $$$ / finite_amount_of_mwh / life_expectancy = min_cost_per_mwh, if we want to pay this thing off. Very possibly more than existing methods.<p>I'm extremely on the side of doing scientific research, but I'm baffled by constantly bumping into people who suggest somehow fusion is going to mean infinite free power, or anything even close to that.<p>So far the tech seems headed towards just being an alternate form of a fission plant -- complex, expensive, slow to build, possibly won't ever make a profit. Likely worse, since fission is a known, mature tech.
> <i>fusion is -always- just a decade away, perpetually</i><p>Wasn't it perpetually 20 to 50 years away? I'm not an expert on the space. But new computational methods and magnets seem to be genuine steps forward.
IIRC the one of the first times a group put timelines to a fusion reactor they had time vs funding level of something like 20 years/50 years/never, and the funding level that actually materialised was below the 'never' amount and yet it started the 'always 20 years away' joke. Now I think the timeline was probably still optimistic but fusion is also obviously a very expensive thing to develop and while it's gotten a lot of funding it's still at the 'in the background' level.
the PBS Space Time episode suggests to me the housing walls might be the biggest problem<p>it consumes itself or makes molecules that are destructive to the walls or insanely toxic so can never risk leaks<p>whatever solution they come up with I suspect it will require a lot of constant maintenance on the first generation
Great... Decades, and probably trillions of dollars later, we have a really cool fusion simulator.<p>That's awesome. Maybe we can fly it around the moon and take selfies with it!<p>Might as well roll all the high cost pseudo-science into one big instagram package...<p>p.s. Of course this is in contrast to using the giant fusion reaction that we have running, literally over our heads...
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