Fusion power won’t save us
“Using the Joint European Torus (JET) — a huge, donut-shaped machine known as a tokamak — the scientists sustained a record 69 megajoules of fusion energy for five seconds, using just 0.2 milligrams of fuel. That’s enough to power roughly 12,000 households for the same amount of time.”
Progress, yes, but incremental.
“And myriad challenges remain. Khan points out that the team used more energy to carry out the experiment than it generated, for example.”
The promise of fusion is “limitless energy.” If there’s net energy consumption, that’s not limitless. It’s not even commercializable.
“The record was announced the same day that the European Union’s climate and weather monitoring service, Copernicus, confirmed that the world has breached a global warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius over a 12-month period for the first time.”
Two resources that are limited in addressing the climate crisis in the third decade of the 21st century are money and time. By 2050, the planet will be engulfed in resource wars, as hundreds of millions of people lose access to fresh water and arable land. Those people know who has resources. They won’t just lie down and die, they’ll come and take them. Time is very short.
Even if fusion power were available tomorrow and all fossil fuel consumption ceased, it’s already too late for conservation to prevent global climate catastrophe. The half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 120 years. Meanwhile, loss of glaciers and sea ice decreases the earth’s albedo, further driving warming. Ocean warming and permafrost melting releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from methane clathrates and microbial action, which drives further warming.
The only way to avert disaster now is through massive financial investment in carbon capture and/or geoengineering. Are there risks associated with these technologies? Yes. But the risks of doing nothing to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas already in the air are much greater.
Fusion energy and climate change
Progress, yes, but incremental.
“And myriad challenges remain. Khan points out that the team used more energy to carry out the experiment than it generated, for example.”
The promise of fusion is “limitless energy.” If there’s net energy consumption, that’s not limitless. It’s not even commercializable.
“The record was announced the same day that the European Union’s climate and weather monitoring service, Copernicus, confirmed that the world has breached a global warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius over a 12-month period for the first time.”
Two resources that are limited in addressing the climate crisis in the third decade of the 21st century are money and time. By 2050, the planet will be engulfed in resource wars, as hundreds of millions of people lose access to fresh water and arable land. Those people know who has resources. They won’t just lie down and die, they’ll come and take them. Time is very short.
Even if fusion power were available tomorrow and all fossil fuel consumption ceased, it’s already too late for conservation to prevent global climate catastrophe. The half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 120 years. Meanwhile, loss of glaciers and sea ice decreases the earth’s albedo, further driving warming. Ocean warming and permafrost melting releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from methane clathrates and microbial action, which drives further warming.
The only way to avert disaster now is through massive financial investment in carbon capture and/or geoengineering. Are there risks associated with these technologies? Yes. But the risks of doing nothing to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas already in the air are much greater.
Fusion energy and climate change
Apparently you missed the news about the giant space parasol.
a Giant Parasol in Outer Space (could) Help Solve the Climate Crisis
NY Times – February 2
@Fred,
LOL!
Obviously, it’s so screwy it just might work!
At least it could stave off global warming long enough so we can use up the rest of our god-given coal and oil. This can help in that effort.
Perhaps the Kochs would help pay for the parasol.
“ one reason sunshades haven’t gained as much traction is that climate researchers have been focused, quite naturally, on what’s happening within the Earth’s atmosphere and not on space.”
Another reason is that it’s so ridiculous it would make a dog laugh.
Well, at least smile anyway.
It’s not ridiculous at all really if you understand that it makes little difference if it is ready in 5 years or in 35 years. You intercept incoming solar energy and the energy balance immediately changes. Ocean heat storage puts a lag into the full response, but it will give up that heat. It’s actually a great idea, one that would produce green jobs.
@Eric,
You’re right that it isn’t ridiculous in theory. It’s only ridiculous if you think about the possibility that it will ever actually be implemented.
Well the successful unfolding of the 5 sunscreens for the James Webb telescope demonstrated that this concept has potential. You would use the opposite, sunward Lagrange point and suspect you would use multiple units (hundreds, if not thousands). It likely would not be the permanent approach, but could slow things down to get another 50 or 100 years to work other approaches.
Let us also not forget that much effort at least should continue to be put into a process that creates energy by fusion of Helium 3 atoms. To find out if that’s actually practical.
Helium nuclei ordinarily consists of 2 protons & 2 neutrons (He4). He3 is short one neutron, but thought to be ideal for fusion.
Helium-3 from the lunar surface for nuclear fusion?
Must figure out if that can happen in a tokamak machine, or will super powerful lasers suffice.
Because there are (thought to be) vast quantities of He3 available on the sun-baked surface of the moon, as it comes from the solar wind that has landed on our neighbor over billions of years.
Otherwise, the plan is to use deuterium (which is hydrogen with a neutron attached to the usual proton in its nucleus, actually pretty rare, but there is so much water on the planet that enough deuterium can be separated out to make fusion practical, maybe.) He3 would be much better, if it works.
We are going to go there & gather it up, robotically for the most part, ship it back to earth to turn it into energy for the masses, soon to be ten billion.
@Fred,
Looks like you didn’t bother to read the link I provided:
“That extreme heat forces the deuterium and tritium to fuse together and form helium, a process that in turn releases enormous amounts of heat.”
I used to study this stuff. There are various ways to do fusion.
The bottom line is that ‘binding energy’ is released when larger nuclei are formed by pushing smaller nuclei together. It just takes a lot of energy to accomplish this. Which is ample inside stars.
Something similar happens in nuclear fission, oddly enough.
Nuclear binding energy – Wikipedia
Tritium is exceedingly rare, but is produced in fission reactors as I recall.
Tritium happens to be radioactive, deuterium is not.
Tritium – Wikipedia
@Fred,
I’ve used tritium in research occasionally since I was a grad student in the late 1970s. Yes, it is radioactive and is made in fission reactors. It’s also dangerous, since it is volatile and can easily find its way into your cells, where it damages DNA.
If that was in the CNN link you put up in your initial post, I didn’t bother to read it. There’s an on-going battle between the tokamak physicists & the laser physicists, has been for many years.
I have been caught up lately in the news from Australia that we are already past the tipping point, global-warming wise.
That much more energy goes into producing fusion than is gained from it has always been the main problem. However, the logic is that eventually the ratio will improve, that even if it only produces a little more than took to obtain it, that’s enough to be ‘endless’. However, it’s got to be pollution free also.
‘Endless’ just to the extent that there is all that deuterium-containing water in the oceans.
Whether there is tritium enough is not clear, but it is mostly obtained from fission reactors which otherwise would be disappearing if fusion could be made to work.
There are other fusion recipes out there. One that doesn’t require tritium would be better.
@Fred,
“If that was in the CNN link you put up in your initial post, I didn’t bother to read it.”
Yep. That was obvious. Too bad. That’s why I put up links.
Me too.
(A lot of superscripts in the text above, the Helium recipe for fusion. One version of it requires only He3, and seems ideal.)
Helium-3 – Wikipedia
The CNN article that Joel linked to ends…
with respect to the experimental result that fusion produced energy for 5 seconds…
Similar results have been produced with laser fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Ignition facility.
LLNL’s Breakthrough Ignition Experiment Highlighted in Physical Review Letters
This was published 5 days ago.
Given the caveats at the end of the CNN post, such fusion developments are most likely too little too late, whether its tokamaks or lasers. So, let’s get going on that Space Parasol.
The ‘success’ of the Manhattan Project brought about a rebirth of interest in physics.
I grew up around Rochester NY, where Eastman Kodak and the University of Rochester had a considerable involvement in The Project. The probably had much to do with interests I developed as a kid.
Anyway, the horde of physicists which came out of that period got really interested in nuclear reactions, fission reactors, and eventually nuclear fusion, a sort of holy grail. And so now, since cold fusion really just didn’t work out. (It is said that when the heavenly father spotted what was going on, he reached out immediately and patched the microcode that runs the universe.) So, whats left are these two large groups with different strategies, each demanding large amounts of money, to bring about ‘magnetically contained’ fusion (tokamaks) or ‘laser compressed’ ‘inertial’ fusion. Both seem unlikely (to me) but the heavenly father has not yet reached out to put a stop to this.
Y’know, unless we do something, we are toast.
Since sufficient conservation is unlikely, we will strive for more electrical energy production.
Alternatively, we can strive to reduce the expanding presence of our kind on this planet.
Which may well happen of its own accord, painfully, in the not too far distant future.
Survivorship brings about a kind of conservation, sad to say.
Umm not sure about the very basic concept presented here.
“The promise of fusion is “limitless energy.” If there’s net energy consumption, that’s not limitless. It’s not even commercializable.”
There is no form of energy production/development that uses less energy to create more energy AKA the “perpetual motion machine”. Some forms of energy are worth pursuing because of energy density. For example, the energy density of a gallon of gasoline is worth commercializing.