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Forums - General - Moving from fission to fusion is the Holy Grail of nuclear energy

De85 on 06 April 2010
highwaystar101 said:
Soleron said:
De85 said:
Soleron said:
...

That's not even the last hurdle either.  ITER should be sufficiently large/powerful to achieve scientific break-even, but economic break-even will be even further down the line, probably not before most of us are retired...

Once we achieve the former though, there will be massive commercial interest. I think there will be a rapid pace of development, because tens of companies will realise it is viable if only they manage to make it cheap, and they'll all want to have a monopoly on fusion, since it is green and renewable and reliable and scales well, so it would replace every other form of energy generation (which have at most three of the four).

Look how big the oil market is. What company wouldn't invest a few billion for the certainty (once it's shown to be viable by ITER) of 10% of that revenue?

I agree. As soon as fusion shown to be technically viable, every energy company will want to be the first to adopt it. Then the race to make fusion commercially viable will underway.

I'm not disagreeing with either of you, I think companies will start pusing harder once ITER breaks even, but it will be more than just a few billion to get the ball rolling.  ITER is projected to cost 10B Euros, which will probably only increase as construction moves along, and it would not be an economically profitable reactor due to the massive maintenance costs and relatively low "energy profit." 

An economically profitable reactor would need to be sevarl times more powerful, and would cost several times as much.  And that's just the construction costs for one.  Upkeep would be expensive, and in the long run a great number of reactors would need to be built.

For the record I do support fusion research and think it's an area in which we need to devote significant resources, I'm just not optimistic about the timetable.  



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highwaystar101 on 06 April 2010
gurglesletch said:
highwaystar101 said:
gurglesletch said:
What's wrong with fossil fuels?

Not to get all hippyish, but...

 

What's wrong with that? That's how the world is now and we are all fine.

No, no it's not. The world is not fine, we're not fine. The population of the world is multiplying and our energy needs are constantly growing. If oil, or any other fossil fuel runs out in 50 years (which easy to reach oil will) then we need to replace it with another form of energy. If we get working on fusion now then we will stand a chance of having it ready when the fossil fuels run out in a few decades.

Just look into the long term for five minutes.

Not to mention the untold environmental damage digging for oil already causes.