Will We Ever Get Fusion Power?

[hunter]

BRIAN POTTER
Construction Physics
June 26, 2024

Today all nuclear power reactors are driven by fission reactions, which release energy by splitting atoms apart. But there’s another nuclear reaction that’s potentially even more promising as an energy source: nuclear fusion. Unlike fission, fusion releases energy by combining atoms together. Fusion is what powers the sun and other stars, as well as the incredibly destructive hydrogen bomb.

It’s not hard to understand the appeal of using nuclear fusion as a source of energy. Unlike coal or gas, which rely on exhaustible sources of fuel extracted from the earth, fusion fuel is effectively limitless. A fusion reactor could theoretically be powered entirely by deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen with an extra neutron), and there’s enough deuterium in seawater to power the entire world at current rates of consumption for 26 billion years.

Fusion has many of the advantages of nuclear fission with many fewer drawbacks. Like fission, fusion only requires tiny amounts of fuel: Fusion fuel has an energy density (the amount of energy per unit mass) a million times higher than fossil fuels, and four times higher than nuclear fission. Like fission, fusion can produce carbon-free “baseload” electricity without the intermittency issues of wind or solar. But the waste produced by fusion is far less radioactive than fission, and the sort of “runaway” reactions that can result in a core meltdown in a fission-based reactor can’t happen in fusion. Because of its potential to provide effectively unlimited, clean energy, countries around the world have spent billions of dollars in the pursuit of fusion power. Designs for fusion reactors appeared as early as 1939, and were patented as early as 1946. The U.S. government began funding fusion power research in 1951, and has continued ever since.

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https://www.construction-physics.com/p/will-we-ever-get-fusion-power

This is a long article that anyone who cares about energy policy ought to read.

Personally, I wouldn't bet any money on fusion power, and I certainly wouldn't bet the future of human civilization and life on earth as we know it on fusion power.

For a lot of technical reasons fusion may never be a practical energy resource.

Like so many "alternative energy" schemes fusion is often dangled in front of our faces to lull us into complacency as the world burns around us.

If we truly want to "save the world" we have to quit fossil fuels now using tools and technologies that already exist.

Magical fusion power plants and energy storage systems won't save us.

[NotASurfer]

1. It's been estimated as being 50 years down the road since before I was born

Check back in 20 years and they'll still be estimating half a century to go. You just have to make the best of what you've got to work with.

[hunter]

2. My dad's best friend was an engineer working on ion engines and plasma injectors.

I remember visiting the lab he worked in as a teenager, peering through the thick leaded glass portals of the large vacuum chambers they tested these in and seeing the eerie glow of a plasma stream.

The plasma injectors he was building were for some fusion experiment.

That was fifty years ago.

The ion engines became a practical tool for station-keeping on commercial and military satellites.

Practical fusion is still a dream.

[eppur_se_muova]

3. "It's the energy source of the future, and always will be." I've been hearing that for a long time.

Sure would like to see it disproven, but I don't see how.

We know that gravitational confinement of the fusion process works quite well; there are literally numberless examples of it. AFAIK there are no example of other means of confinement.

Fission, in contrast, once occurred naturally in some uranium ore deposits in Earth's crust. That gives some idea of the huge difference in feasibility of the two processes.

Thermodynamically, fusion looks great. Kinetically, it's a whole different issue.

All of that is not to say that people should stop investigating it.