In my opinion, the invention or success of fusion would be certain doom for humanity and life on this planet. Humans are already hedonistic and all the problems that exist would just be kicking the can further down the road. For example, why worry about creating pollution if you just think you have all the energy to then clean up the pollution?
I also think that we would light this planet up like a light bulb killing off all nocturnal life. That would spell certain doom for the ecosystems.
Right now fossil fuels powering our society are finite as is natural resources.
If suddenly we had all this energy, it would create an even greater demand on natural resources, not less of a demand.
Fusion would be great, however, humanity is not culturally or mentally prepared to handle such power when they can’t even handle the power of this one time fossil fuel discovery of excess cheap energy.
I greatly fear the success of fusion energy because I have little doubt that human society won’t just continue business as usual obliterating our natural world in every conceivable way. Greenhouse gasses are but a small fraction of the way we are destroying life on this planet so the answer is not a technological one (fusion) but a cultural one. Humans are not going to invent their way out of this situation with technology. There needs to be a cultural and ethical shift along with the education and awareness of the greater world around us.
That is so true. If we can’t even get most humans to care enough to stop polluting their own bodies, which they have to live in 24/7, there’s no way we’ll get them to stop polluting places where they don’t live, such as rivers and lakes.
The lean, fit person is asked the question, “What’s your secret?” And when they reply that there is no secret, that it’s just that they actually follow the known advice about eating habits and physical activity, the one doing the asking is disappointed. They were hoping for any answer other than that one.
This directly parallels our most tenacious environmental probelms.
i mean, if getting (mostly) impact-free power spells doom for our species, then we are doomed either way because we are also doomed without it. I think that’s way too pessimistic. We may still be doomed with fusion for sure, given all the other risks our species faces, both self created and not. And, even if we aren’t ‘doomed’ to an apocalypse our species has a life span like any other and will either turn into something else or go extinct. But the idea that we are doomed BECAUSE we get it, is strange to me.
Or expensive. I’ve read that several not-so-wealthy countries are having good success with sand silos—literally, converted farm silos filled with sand that absorb thermal energy pumped into them during the day, and releasing it back at night.
Of course, then there’s the real environmental issue of vanishing global sand supplies.
Fascinating topic! I am reminded of a conversation I listened to on NPR about electrical vehicles. The representative for fossil fuels cars made this argument of why electric cars are a bad idea (paraphrase): Research shows that the cheaper gas gets, the more people drive. Therefore, if we have cheap electricity cars, people will drive a lot more and that will mean, in the end, MORE use of power and not less. He suggested by this argument that fossil fuels are more green because they make people efficient.
This is flawed logic, at best. It suggests a mathematical model with no constraints, in that if Gas cost zero dollars, people would drive infinitely longer. Of course, people don’t have time to drive eternally. There are constraints to this oversimplified equation. Likewise there are constraints to “unlimited” energy.
One, energy is never going to be free or unlimited, at least not in the near future and probably never. There is always infrastructure and upkeep and the humans to maintain it. There will always be a cost that limits the unlimited. So first of all, we have to discard the idea of unlimited to cheap.
Secondly, we don’t heat the Earth by turning on lights or running our microwave or playing video games. We change the climate by burning fossil fuels, pumping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Along with methane, this traps heat in the atmosphere. So if everyone in the world ran a microwave all day with fusion power, there would be no warming of the planet as a whole. It’s not energy use that heats the Earth, it’s the way we generate that energy.
Thirdly, energy is a very important tool for humanity. It is the essential tool of human culture. There are considerable risks to what vastly cheaper and more abundant power will allow us to do, but there are also vast benefits. Imagine having the energy now to replant vast areas of tall grass prairie cheaply, or reforesting large areas of recently burned forests. Imagine being able to grow food extremely cheaply in cities, cutting down on the inefficiency and waste of producing food in fields. Imagine cheap refrigeration world wide that would cut down the enormous amount of food that is wasted each year. Imagine refilling drained wetlands at a cost even local governments could afford.
Energy is not good or bad. We have to work together as a community to make sure the energy we generate is utilized in a way that is good for both human health and for the environment, to create a culture that truly flourishes with and within nature.
Whether or not humans are capable of that kind of change is another question.
Certainly we have to think in terms of realistic time frames. Turbines and batteries are made of rare earth metals, but they can be recycled. It’s not one use and it’s gone, so the time frame of running out of those metals is many thousands of years. Fusion could run on hydrogen, the most abundant element on Earth. So we are talking about millions, perhaps trillions of years before we run out of that. The Earth will be engulfed by the Sun by then.
I see your point, but what you’re describing is a static biosphere that never changes because animals and plants are always adjusting themselves for the benefit of everyone else.
Of course, that is not what we see when we observe nature. We see populations exploding and crashing, creatures overtaking other creatures, trees marching up a mountainside during warm climates, and then receding when it cools. Species go extinct, not from creating equilibrium, but by not adapting or being eradicated by a competitor. Life in always in flux and never in balance. Otherwise we would all still be bacteria happily bifurcating in the ocean for eternity.
? If a predator breeds less because less prey is available - that is to benefit the predator.
Leaving less offspring is never a benefit in nature. 99% of the species that have lived on Earth have gone extinct. They do this because there is no such thing as a natural balance. Things don’t find balance by adjusting their birth rate, although some kind of equilibrium happens temporarily from time to time. Extinction, even before humans, was, and is, natural. The background extinction of a mammal for example, means that every species of mammal will probably live for about a million years before it goes extinct. If you see it from a few million years distance, natural systems are less like a calm lake and more like a bubbling cauldron stirred by witches three.
But in evolutionary terms, “going extinct” means different things to different taxa. There is a difference between an evolutionary dead-end going extinct vs. the gradual “extinction” of a species because it evolved into another species. Every extant species today is the direct descendant of some species that would be considered “extinct.”
Yep, there is a big problem with how fusion energy inputs vs outputs are reported.
Sabine Hossfender has an excellent video and discussion about this. The link below is both to the video and to a transcription of it:
Here’s the most relevant portion:
The confusion which you find in pretty much all popular science writing about nuclear fusion is that the energy gain which they quote is that for the energy that goes into the plasma and comes out of the plasma.
In the technical literature, this quantity is normally not just called Q but more specifically Q-plasma. This is not the ratio of the entire energy that comes out of the fusion reactor over that which goes into the reactor, which we can call Q-total. If you want to build a power plant, and that’s what we’re after in the end, it’s the Q-total that matters, not the Q-plasma.
Here’s the problem. Fusion reactors take a lot of energy to run, and most of that energy never goes into the plasma. If you keep the plasma confined with a magnetic field in a vacuum, you need to run giant magnets and cool them and maintain that. And pumping a laser isn’t energy efficient either. These energies never appear in the energy gain that is normally quoted.
The Q-plasma also doesn’t take into account that if you want to operate a power plant, the heat that is created by the plasma would still have to be converted into electric energy, and that can only be done with a limited efficiency, optimistically maybe fifty percent. As a consequence, the Q total is much lower than the Q plasma.
Solar power is easier for me to understand. The sun is shining this morning and our solar batteries were already full 2 hours ago … While our coal (and nuclear) powered grid was loadshedding us. Renewables are quietly expanding both privately and big industries. Fighting greenwashed ‘natural’ gas however.
There is no such thing as an evolutionary dead end. This implies a goal or a place to get to and evolution has no road and no end. Species don’t evolve into another species, as an entire population. A distinct portion of the population speciates from the original. Now there are two species. Sometimes one survives. Sometimes neither. But if one population goes extinct, it certainly does go extinct. Species as an entire population do not gradually become another species. Some time in the past, for example, we had a common ancestor with chimpanzees. Chimpanzees speciated from this ancestor as did we. Then there were three for a while. Our ancestor went extinct, leaving two different species behind it. But that ancestor is distinctly and clearly and absolutely extinct, no quotes about it. Extinction is extinction and there is no other way around it, no matter what taxa you’re in.
what Hossenfelder says is technically accurate, but i don’t think this is as big a problem as her video / article make it seem, as she’s just pointing out what is effectively a PR thing. people not close to the science are always misunderstanding the subtleties of the science, and it’s not really the job of the scientists and engineers to frame their results in terms that they know will be underwhelming to the general public, even if they are significant technical achievements.
if you want to talk about PR, i think the bigger points that most people don’t understand are that:
- fusion reactors produce significant radioactive waste that will have be dealt with at some point
- the current approaches to nuclear fusion rely on fuel that is exceedingly rare (some of which is produced in significant amounts only in fission reactors). the scientists assume that at some point, the technology will be developed to “breed” the fuel in the fusion reaction, but the progress towards this is slow, and if they don’t figure this out, fusion as we’re approaching it will be dead before it even got going.
what people need to understand is that building a fusion reactor is not the difficult challenge. a 12-year old with $10K in equipment can – and has – done this. making a commercially viable fusion plant is the difficult challenge that still has a long, long way to go. it’s unclear if we’ll reach that goal in our lifetimes, and it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try… but we shouldn’t pin all our hopes on the promise of fusion as being the solution for all our woes.
My understanding is that one the attractions of fusion is that it does not produce much radioactive waste, and what it does produce is not long-lived.
Or are you referring to damage to and irritation of the containment vessel due to neutron radiation?
As it currently stands we deal with radioactive waste far better than most people realize, but yes, it is still an issue.
Deuterium-Deuterium fusion results in far less neutron radiation and than Deuterium-Tritium, and deuterium is abundant and easily harvestable at industrial capacities (it already is), but the problem is that it requires far higher operating temperatures. If that could be overcome D-D fusion would be the way to go rather and D-T fusion.
Personally, I’d like to see energy production moved to space and power send down from there, but that’s even further off than the perpetual “20 years in the future” that fusion power has been for the last 80 or so years (initial work on fusion power started in 1940s).
when i read any analysis of the radioactive waste expected to be produced from fusion reactors (ex. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/radioactive-wastes-from-fusion-energy-preliminary-position-paper), it looks like significant amounts of waste to me. it may not be as long-lived as some of the stuff coming from current nuclear plants, and it may not emit as much radiation for an equivalent mass, but there’s likely going to be a lot more waste, and you’re still going to have to manage most of it for >100 years and some of it for >1000 years. knowing this, how many people do you think will want a fusion plant in their backyard?
there’s a some uncertainty, of course, because a lot of this will depend on the kinds of materials and technologies developed in the future.
currently, reactors based on DT reaction are much further along than anything else. DT is preferred not only because of the lower temperatures required but because its reactions produce much more energy than DD or most other reactions. my understanding is that one of the test reactors that is designed primarily for DT does occasionally run DD tests, but they’re only just trying to do preliminary viability testing of DD this point. so if you’re going to pin your hopes on anything other than DT, add another decade… or three.
So, from that paper it is primarily from neutron radiation, and, in all honesty, it still looks a damn sight better than coal, fission, or even many “renewables” some of which are less renewable than people think due to the materials used in construction.
so if you’re going to pin your hopes on anything other than DT, add another decade… or three.
I’m not aware of anyone “pinning their hopes” on any particular brand of fusion, and, as with most innovations, it’s an iterative process. Start with one (eg. hybrid cars), then move to the next as you learn more (eg. fully electric vehicles - although that’s not a great analogy as electric vehicles were being made in the early 20th Century, but you get the point).
Fusion has continually been decades in our future, and nothing has yet changed about that, so I’m not overly concerned about which flavor of fusion comes about, and, as I previously said, my own preference would be to move energy generation off planet entirely.
off planet - then we will have random pieces of radioactive junk crashing back on earth. No one responsible because that company went bankrupt years ago. We have asbestos waste heaps, and acid mine drainage. The problems are here. But the solution?
well, solar power is energy generated off planet. we’ve got a giant fusion reactor in the sun, it’s transmitting the energy to Earth, and we just have to receive it and convert it to whatever form works for our particular needs.
That reminds me of something I’ve been wondering about. No civilization lasts forever (although they all think that they will). Have any extinct civilizations left behind waste that would be harmful to us today?