How much would fusion power wreck the economy?
Discussion
technology is always shaped by politics.
Take solar panels for instance locally there are some 12,000 houses being built Solar panels on the roofs and battery storage is not standard........in the mean time Acres of prime land is being courted by an energy company wanting to build a solar park (there is at least three of these being proposed in the county). The energy company will want to sell you the energy collected for £££'s Yet install solar as a householder you can become network independent or at least require very little from the network. So what does the government do ..... subsidise heat pump that require electricity to operate!! Heat pumps are a 25 year return on investment, solar + battery storage is 4.5 years on current tariffs for me.
Take solar panels for instance locally there are some 12,000 houses being built Solar panels on the roofs and battery storage is not standard........in the mean time Acres of prime land is being courted by an energy company wanting to build a solar park (there is at least three of these being proposed in the county). The energy company will want to sell you the energy collected for £££'s Yet install solar as a householder you can become network independent or at least require very little from the network. So what does the government do ..... subsidise heat pump that require electricity to operate!! Heat pumps are a 25 year return on investment, solar + battery storage is 4.5 years on current tariffs for me.
I dabble with Fusion occasionally:
Short summary:
Tokamaks:
ITER is a proof of principle based on 80's concepts, 90's designs and being put together by academics and consultant engineering companies, its being designed as it goes hence the timescales and the costs. It is literally nothing to do with energy production.
UK STEP, Tokamak Energy and Commonwealth Fusion are all doing some kind of compact Tokamak using high temperature superconductors (HTS) which weren't around when ITER was being developed. ITER has not had the flexibility to go down this route as it is a massive pan governmental organisation.
In theory the (HTS) Tokamaks should be able to achieve engineering break even (fusion energy outputs sufficient to run all the supporting systems) at much smaller scales than ITER. If they can actually do this there is a possibility of developing a device which would be economic as they would be quite compact.
The issues being that the physics that says the HTS Tokamaks will work is based on extrapolations which may not hold up when we actually reach those conditions. This is similar to the inertial confinement (laser fusion) people who every time they created a new more powerful device got new physics rather than useful fusion that the previous models based on earlier devices suggested would happen.
Even if you get engineering break even there are still plenty of issues to solve before a device would be reliable and cost effective. The proponents all know this but they make the bold predictions to keep the venture and government money rolling in.
Non-Tokamak:
The non-Tokamak stuff is a bit more of a wildcard. TAE are trying to do an aneutronic fusion process, which would in theory allow you to generate electricity directly from the reaction and also generate negligible waste (waste is not an economic issue for fusion). Only issue is that the fusion reaction they want to use is orders of magnitude more difficult than the ones we can't currently do. But it is a good dream and they have effectively spent hundreds of millions of tech billionaire cash on basic science.
General Fusion have a device which if it could be made to work would be the closest thing to an industrial fusion plant. The issues are that they haven't got it to work and there are still some materials issues with pounding you reaction vessel with hammers once a second.
Effects:
Firstly this isn't going to happen as a surprise, there is likely 10 years between an engineering breakeven demonstration and practical devices. However once that breakeven happens expect money to be no object.
I would also expect that IP and licencing will be no object either. It is unlikely that anyone will get a monopoly on the technology the winners will just be the countries and companies that move at pace and get the thing industrialised. Similar to how Tesla doesn't have a monopoly on EVs but it is able to make them in much greater quantities and at higher margins because it moved first and at scale.
The impacts of cheap electricity are likely to be:
1: Support for the continued progression of the internet, look up the growth rates of its power consumption within the 21st century it is perfectly possible that it might actually end up using more electricity than the real world. We all end up having hundreds of AI slaves per person doing our thinking in the cloud. In the same way that we have several dozen energy slaves per person making and hauling our goods and persons about today.
2: Quite a lot of manufacturing methods are driven in cost terms by energy. Expect a lot more 3D printing and titanium
3: Transport, literally everything goes electric and we end up using a lot of eVTOL type devices
4: Food, vertical farms and digesters make a lot of our food and we re-wild a lot of the planets surface
Politically this isn't going to be a crisis as it will be a long time coming. Places that lose out by not being able to sell oil gain because they can still have cheap electricity from our magic fusion plant. You can turn that energy into food, green landscapes, buildings and ideas. Quality of life can be much more thoroughly divorced from geography. Ergo somewhere like Saudi might actually see higher quality of life as a magic fusion economy than as an oil economy.
Short summary:
Tokamaks:
ITER is a proof of principle based on 80's concepts, 90's designs and being put together by academics and consultant engineering companies, its being designed as it goes hence the timescales and the costs. It is literally nothing to do with energy production.
UK STEP, Tokamak Energy and Commonwealth Fusion are all doing some kind of compact Tokamak using high temperature superconductors (HTS) which weren't around when ITER was being developed. ITER has not had the flexibility to go down this route as it is a massive pan governmental organisation.
In theory the (HTS) Tokamaks should be able to achieve engineering break even (fusion energy outputs sufficient to run all the supporting systems) at much smaller scales than ITER. If they can actually do this there is a possibility of developing a device which would be economic as they would be quite compact.
The issues being that the physics that says the HTS Tokamaks will work is based on extrapolations which may not hold up when we actually reach those conditions. This is similar to the inertial confinement (laser fusion) people who every time they created a new more powerful device got new physics rather than useful fusion that the previous models based on earlier devices suggested would happen.
Even if you get engineering break even there are still plenty of issues to solve before a device would be reliable and cost effective. The proponents all know this but they make the bold predictions to keep the venture and government money rolling in.
Non-Tokamak:
The non-Tokamak stuff is a bit more of a wildcard. TAE are trying to do an aneutronic fusion process, which would in theory allow you to generate electricity directly from the reaction and also generate negligible waste (waste is not an economic issue for fusion). Only issue is that the fusion reaction they want to use is orders of magnitude more difficult than the ones we can't currently do. But it is a good dream and they have effectively spent hundreds of millions of tech billionaire cash on basic science.
General Fusion have a device which if it could be made to work would be the closest thing to an industrial fusion plant. The issues are that they haven't got it to work and there are still some materials issues with pounding you reaction vessel with hammers once a second.
Effects:
Firstly this isn't going to happen as a surprise, there is likely 10 years between an engineering breakeven demonstration and practical devices. However once that breakeven happens expect money to be no object.
I would also expect that IP and licencing will be no object either. It is unlikely that anyone will get a monopoly on the technology the winners will just be the countries and companies that move at pace and get the thing industrialised. Similar to how Tesla doesn't have a monopoly on EVs but it is able to make them in much greater quantities and at higher margins because it moved first and at scale.
The impacts of cheap electricity are likely to be:
1: Support for the continued progression of the internet, look up the growth rates of its power consumption within the 21st century it is perfectly possible that it might actually end up using more electricity than the real world. We all end up having hundreds of AI slaves per person doing our thinking in the cloud. In the same way that we have several dozen energy slaves per person making and hauling our goods and persons about today.
2: Quite a lot of manufacturing methods are driven in cost terms by energy. Expect a lot more 3D printing and titanium
3: Transport, literally everything goes electric and we end up using a lot of eVTOL type devices
4: Food, vertical farms and digesters make a lot of our food and we re-wild a lot of the planets surface
Politically this isn't going to be a crisis as it will be a long time coming. Places that lose out by not being able to sell oil gain because they can still have cheap electricity from our magic fusion plant. You can turn that energy into food, green landscapes, buildings and ideas. Quality of life can be much more thoroughly divorced from geography. Ergo somewhere like Saudi might actually see higher quality of life as a magic fusion economy than as an oil economy.
Gary C said:
Cheers TS.
Interesting stuff.
Agreed. Interesting stuff.
TS... Do you have a view on Lockheed's design?
When I was working at Cranberry on the AP1000 design we joked that they must have a crashed UFO in basement given their lack of pedigree and sudden announcement of having a working design.
take-good-care-of-the-forest-dewey said:
Gary C said:
Cheers TS.
Interesting stuff.
Agreed. Interesting stuff.
TS... Do you have a view on Lockheed's design?
When I was working at Cranberry on the AP1000 design we joked that they must have a crashed UFO in basement given their lack of pedigree and sudden announcement of having a working design.
They have made it more sensible sized since the original public release.
It did like the comments from the old boss of Culham which was that of this hasn't come out of Lockheed they would be considered a bunch of crazies.
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