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So 1. This is newable. Green, almost waste free, and unlimited.
If we can refine fusion, we will stop global warming and energy insecurity, virtually overnight.
It's not a waste to invest in clean tech R&D. At one point, people said the same thing about solar, and look where we are now
While this is exciting and there are many reasons to continue to research fusion, fighting climate change is very much not one of them. It has all of the real problems of fission, namely high cost, low scale, and difficult construction, but exacerbated to an extreme degree. If new fission projects struggle to get investor funding becuse of low profitability and difficult construction times dispite nearly a century of development, it is unlikely that a technology so complex and expensive that we don’t even had a plan for a power plant yet will do better.
We might have a fusion pathfinder plant by 2050 or 2060, we need to be off fossil fuel by 2030 to 2035. We might be able to built sufficient fission by then if we started now at scale, national average construction times tend to be between 5 to 10 years, but fusion is a tool that might at best replace the power plants we build today, not the coal and natural gas plants we built yesterday.
I bring this up not because I oppose funding fusion and pure science, but because any argument that calls it an answer to climate change is going to fall apart the second you consider any alternative on a cost or time basis.
Fission requires insanely costly wastes management. It is very dangerous and security is a huge costs-contributing factor. This is not the case with fusion, so costs might be lower despite complexity.
Fusion also produces most of the nuclear waste that a fission plant does thanks to undergoing the same nutron activation process, and while it lacks spent fuel rods, thouse are already infinitely recyclable, so the only real waste saveings would be in low grade waste like dust covered clean suits and such.
This also doesn’t help the case for Fusion very much given that even with these disposal costs ITER has costs four to six times any average fission plant for a donor reactor that has no generating capacity and which is mearly to prove that the physics work, something we did for fission with the Chicago pile in 1942 at an estimated inflation adjusted cost of 53 million dollars.
If it’s this expensive for a proof of concept, it is very unlikely that any full plant would be much cheaper. Compare it to things we can actually deploy at scale today like onshore wind or battery backed solar, and it is pretty clear that Fusion is an expensive but important science project, not a serious proposal to power the electrical grid.
Why do you have multiple post of breakthroughs in nuclear tech with negative criticism?
In fact multiple posts appearing to concern troll renewables with statements like “coal is here to stay”??
Because they're all solar punk enthusiasts. Basically modern day hippies but without the common sense.
They really really like renewable energy but they don't have a clue what they're talking about so anytime anyone comes up with anything that isn't solar panels or wind turbines they throw a fit.
All renewable energy comes from the sun, which is a giant fusion reactor. Seems like it might be a good idea to study and understand the concept.
Yeah, fusion is about the longest lasting power source in the entire universe. It quite literally is what the entire universe runs on. Without fusion, there would have been no stars. The universe would be dead.
If it’s not geothermal or nuclear, that energy probably came from the sun one way or another.
Money is neither finite nor a resource
Exactly.
(It's made up, can be changed, value is what is agreed upon)
Not without consequences (inflation, etc)
Fusion is the first step to a post scarcity world. All the new technology, products, agriculture methods, ect. that would be made possible with abundant, clean energy would completely transform the world. I doubt solar and wind could ever provide enough to make those advances.
The comment by op kind of feels weird...
But. More options are always good, and this provides more options, with the added benefit of creating helium (which is a limited resource, and gets mainly harvested when mining fossil fuels at the moment).
So this actually helps solve more than 1 problem, if they can get it to work
I downvotes solely for OP's comment. Nuclear energy has its place, if magically we had enough solar and wind farms constructed and even the grid built that connects the whole world, all of it magically just appearing. We will still not be able to retire fossil fuel power generation immidiately because we don't have a storage technology that scales well enough atm and renewable can't cover baseload as they can't generate 24x7 output.
Renewables are already well researched. It's up to governments to enforce their use if they want.
Fusion can be huge because it can theoretically be scaled up significantly.
Even though both this reactor and ITER have small energy production goals, if they can get a reaction to run for a usable period of time, then it becomes something worth investing into to improve.
Even the USA chucks money at it because it could have military use. Fission power started in a similar way.
You're not even citing the right reactor. LLNL did that experiment, this reactor in Japan is to try to scale it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The world’s biggest nuclear fusion reactor has begun operations in Japan, marking a major milestone towards achieving the “holy grail” of clean energy.
The experimental JT-60SA reactor in Japan’s Ibaraki Prefecture offers the best opportunity yet to test nuclear fusion as a sustainable and near limitless power source.
The opening of the JT-60SA reactor comes just one year after scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California achieved a net energy gain with nuclear fusion for the first time.
Physicist Arthur Turrell, who was not involved in the research, described the achievement of nuclear fusion ignition as “a moment of history” that could define a new era of energy.
“This experimental result will electrify efforts to eventually power the planet with nuclear fusion – at a time when we’ve never needed a plentiful source of carbon-free energy more.”
One of the main objectives for the newly opened reactor, which measures six stories in height, is to replicate the feat of producing a net surplus of energy.
The original article contains 419 words, the summary contains 167 words. Saved 60%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
There's a difference between what works best now to meet our energy needs (renewables) and the furthering of the science behind nuclear technology. We can do both.
The current energy consumption of the planet is 113,000Twh (according to Wikipedia). Since every single Joule of renewable energy is some derivative of solar energy (solar, wind, tide, hydro, but not geo I suppose) the maximum energy we can derive from renewables is 765,000Twh.
The problem with that, is if we start to consume 10's of percent of the total solar radiation through "renewables" that would otherwise go into generating weather and other natural events, well I'm sure you can see the potential problems.
So, we have to get away from carbon intensive electricity generation, but we can't physically rely solely on renewables. Therefore we need fission/fusion.
There's obviously the case of our current economic system causing us to overuse energy in the name of profit (oil is so important because it makes energy cheap and thus easier to make profits), and a change in production/consumption/distribution priorities would likely cause huge decreases in energy needs globally. But we can only really consider energy needs based on what we know.
Whoops, I forgot the "achtually".
I've seen enough anime to know that turning on the experimental fusion reactor in some Japanese prefecture is an event that doesn't end well.
OK - let's ignore the shitshow of responding to OP's hot take.
What kind of research is this particular reactor going to do?