Sunday, June 16, 2019

Further to my fusion power scepticism

First, I have to admit that there is a degree of techno-optimism regarding fusion power, such that it has managed to get an extra-ordinary amount of money devoted to fusion research.   The long delayed ITER project being built in France being the prime example:
Take ITER, an enormous superconducting fusion reactor currently under construction in France. When the international collaboration began in 2005, it was billed as a $US5 billion ($7 billion), 10 year project. After years of setbacks, that price tag has risen to roughly $US40 billion ($55 billion) Optimistically, the facility will now be completed by 2030.
And some MIT associated folk have been making claims which are extremely hard to believe:
Bob Mumgaard, CEO of the private company Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which has attracted $50 million in support of this effort from the Italian energy company Eni, said: “The aspiration is to have a working power plant in time to combat climate change. We think we have the science, speed and scale to put carbon-free fusion power on the grid in 15 years.”
Notice that?  Private money being put into the project - of course there is every incentive to exaggerate how quickly progress can be made.  In the same link, a British scientist comments:
Prof Wilson was also cautious about the timeframe, saying that while the project was exciting he couldn’t see how it would achieve its goal of putting energy on the grid within 15 years.
However, achieving and magnetically containing a power generating plasma is one thing;  building it within something intended to be a long lived, safe, electricity generating facility is a different thing, and one of great complexity.  I think you only need to read the abstract of this article (from this year) to note that they are really just talking now about how they are going to try to address the various engineering problems in a timely enough fashion to allow the presumed breakthroughs to be turned into something useful.

In comments I made in a previous post, I noted that one retired plasma scientist had written articles sceptical that fusion would ever be a viable source for electricity generation.   His name is Daniel Jassby, and he had two articles in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on the topic.  (I strongly recommend people read the second of those, linked at "articles", about the ITER project.)  Of course, other scientists who have worked in the field dispute his pessimism, but even when doing so, they have to admit the nature of the problems:
Fusion neutrons will surely damage the internal components closest to the plasma. In the first fusion pilot plants, materials in the regions with the highest neutron flux would need to be replaced every 6-to-12 months of full-power operation. There are options for new nano-structured materials that are more neutron-resistant. These can be developed and qualified for fusion application using computer simulations and small-scale tests, as well as tests in the pilot plants themselves and in follow-on fusion power sources, as was done for fission. Fusion will have nuclear waste, but the lifetime of this waste will be measured in decades, not millennia. Fusion neutrons can in principle be used to breed fuel for weapons. But because no breeding materials should be present in a fusion power plant, this will be much more straightforward to detect and deter, as compared with fission reactors where the production of large quantities of weapons-usable material is intrinsic to the process. 
There was another retired atomic scientist, William Parkins, who appeared in Science magazine in 2006 expressing engineering scepticism about it ever being viable.  His views were immediately disputed by others in the field, notably in this Nature commentary, claiming that the issues raised by him had already been considered and dismissed in the 1990's. But the counterargument claims that the cost of replacing parts in fusion reactors has already been factored in, and this:
 Ward says that current estimates of the cost of fusion electricity are between 5 and 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. The US Department of Energy predicts that US electricity will average just under 10 cents per kilowatt-hour this year. "I think fusion could compete with coal today in Europe," says Ward, because of the economic costs produced by emissions regulations.
 Excuse me, but given the engineering problems yet to be solved for real fusion generation, I am extremely sceptical of forecasts from the 1990's of the possible cost of fusion power.

This is what's at the heart of my scepticism - put enough money into fusion and the scientific problems of how the plasma can be contained and power harnessed might be solved.  But from an engineering cost point of view, there is a lot of reason to doubt it will ever be a cost effective source of power.

Seems to me that anyone who has witnessed the huge underestimates of cost for other projects involving more in the way of new engineering than new science (like for each new fighter jet program in the US) should also be sceptical of the claims about the cost of fusion power.   And the difference is that defence projects develop their own momentum, with huge corporations having great political influence and able to sell upgrades in defence capability as essential.   The world of electricity generation doesn't have that same dynamic, so it is a bit harder to imagine them getting the unlimited government support in cost overruns that defence related corporations enjoy.

4 comments:

Not Trampis said...

could be CONfusion

John said...

So what shall we do Steve. Just give up on the most abundant energy source available? While we're in the giving up mood let's also give up on curing cancer, dementia, and a host of other medical conditions that we've spent in some cases over a 100 years trying to cure.

Steve said...

John, I don't mind that research is happening - there is still a large science component in it, after all. But scientists can get good at talking themselves into dubious projects that aren't really worth the money. For example, despite the disappointingly limited results of the LHC, there are already some hoping to talk up the next big collider which would cost $10 to $20 billion dollars. Not on solid grounds that it will discover something new.

So incremental technological advances might mean that fusion comes into its own in - I dunno - 75 5o 100 years? But I don't see it as a project that is worth trying to accelerate at the moment. More value is likely to be had from lots of money into innovative energy storage.



GMB said...

This whole field is perverted by psychological operations. The current view of the sun came out I think on the same month as the detonation of the so-called thermo-nuclear bomb. So both the current view of fusion and our view of the sun can be seen as the exact same misinformation campaign.

As it turns out fusion is easy. Its not hard at all. It doesn't require heat and in fact high temperatures restrict the process. Not long ago there was a toy which allowed kids to conduct fusion in their Dads car-shed. Fusion is easy but its an energy loser. So you are right to be skeptical. Its not going to work. The energy of fission isn't anything to do with Einsteinian misinformation of matter turning into energy. There is no such thing. Rather fission is like a cascading reaction to rapid movement which leads to heat. Fission is like a setup of dominoes where tipping one leads to a lot of energy output. No dominoes need vaporise in this process in some sort of Einsteinian fantasy.

Real fusion isn't conducted under high heat and atmospheric pressure. Its a peaceful process that is conducted under electrical pressure. Think of trying to change the tyres with a tyre cannon. Its not going to happen and thats the current psy-op view of fusion.