So what about fusion?

[Alex Eisenhut]

I like this

www.generalfusion.com

because it looks so cool. Anyone know if this could be legit?

(takes forever to load, we know they ain't spending time or money on a web guy)

[retrolefty]

It's just ten years away. 

[Samogon]

Site is made by web designer rather than scientists. Clean energy, no radioactive vaste, it is just not true.
Fusion reaction produces high energy neutrons which impacting surrounding materials and thus producing so called inducted radioactivity.

[hayatepilot]

It's just ten years away. 

They say that line since the 70s. 

[donotdespisethesnake]

I went to Culham fusion lab as a youth when they were building JET, and they confidently predicted nuclear fusion "in a decade or two" - that was over 30 years ago.

Nuclear fusion is inherently hard to do - as far as we know. In order to make it a practical commercial proposition, there would need to be scientific/technological breakthroughs to make it possible. In comparison, with the light bulb, it was well known that heating a filament would create light - the commercial problem was creating a bulb where the filament lasted more than a few hours, which lead to Edison's observation "genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration".

Nuclear fusion is unlikely to ever be cheap, abundant or clean, if you actually look into the details behind the hype. When people start talking about business plans which include getting raw materials from the Moon, they are clearly hopeless. Business people shy away from multi-billion $ projects, unless there is a pretty guaranteed return on investment. When you throw in nuclear radiation and advanced technology, it becomes even less appealing.

We are a very long way away from practical, commercially viable fusion power. I predict we might build a government sponsored prototype eventually (maybe DEMO), but at such huge cost and complexity no business will ever build one.

As the morning sun shines through my window, surely it is easier and quicker to build wind turbines and solar panels, to exploit the nuclear fusion source we know already works?

[coppice]

I went to Culham fusion lab as a youth when they were building JET, and they confidently predicted nuclear fusion "in a decade or two" - that was over 30 years ago.

Maybe you were hearing what you wanted to here, rather than what they were saying. I was shown around JET when it was under construction in 1980. They said it would take a decade or two to get JET producing reliable, predictable fusion. They got that about right. JET is an experimental tool. It never had the potential to produce much more energy than it consumed, even the most optimistic of expectations. They vaguely talked about future designs taking half a century to achieve sufficient payback to be viable for commercial energy production.

[DenzilPenberthy]

I have a very mixed view on fusion. From a technological viewpoint it's a fascinating problem to work on and I fully support the efforts at JET and ITER etc for this reason. Undoubtedly there are benefits to be had by giving scientists the opportunity to work on this.

But... from a practical point of view... we already have a working fusion reactor - it produces around 1kW/m^2 at the surface of our planet without any problems of confinement or stability or fuelling or waste or radioactivity...

Collecting, storing and using that fusion power is entirely possible and feasible without any significant new technology. It just needs political will and resources to implement.

[donotdespisethesnake]

I went to Culham fusion lab as a youth when they were building JET, and they confidently predicted nuclear fusion "in a decade or two" - that was over 30 years ago.

Maybe you were hearing what you wanted to here, rather than what they were saying. I was shown around JET when it was under construction in 1980. They said it would take a decade or two to get JET producing reliable, predictable fusion. They got that about right. JET is an experimental tool. It never had the potential to produce much more energy than it consumed, even the most optimistic of expectations. They vaguely talked about future designs taking half a century to achieve sufficient payback to be viable for commercial energy production.

Maybe *you* were hearing what you wanted to "here", rather than what they were saying.

It was clear that JET was experimental, they didn't claim it was going to be a commercial reactor, or get anywhere near break-even In fact, they achieved fusion in much less than a decade.

Of course the joke is that *commercial* nuclear fusion is always about 30 years away - which is pretty much what they said. And it is still true today. And will be true in 30 years time...

Anyway, I have no idea what useful point you are trying to make, apart from to score points.

[Jeroen3]

They did a test run on Wendelstein 7-X iirc a few months ago.
A test run that lasted very very short, but a test run nonetheless. I can't find the source anymore, someone might?

[T3sl4co1l]

So, uh, what IS it, exactly?

After the enormous webpage finished loading, all I saw was a few pictures (not nearly as much as should've been downloaded in that time, go figure?), and a little text.  Hardly anything of substance.  They don't seem to have any articles, any diagrams, anything in depth at all.  What a useless piece of Web Two Point Oh-So-Disappointing!

I guess, but again this is a guess because there's so little information there: they're spinning molten Pb-Li alloy (Li would presumably be chosen for making tritium, but the Pb content would only absorb radiation, presumably spoiling nuclear efficiency; so, not sure on that one), so fast that, within its spherical container, a hollow center is formed, like the hollow center where liquid drains through a vortex funnel.  But fast enough that it's more or less vertical.  Then they somehow or another fire a huge ball of plasma (presumably deuterium and tritium) into that hole, and at same time, implode the sphere, nuclear weapon style.  Except explosives would be dumb, so it has to be repeatable, and they use steam powered hammers.

And I guess they claim the hammers are timed correctly, which will be the first large barrier to getting such a system working.  An imploding wavefront is not easy to generate.  It also has to be intense enough to achieve the required peak pressure and temperature, but I don't feel that intensity is as big a challenge as organizing all that metal to move within microseconds.

Obvious drawback: how smooth is the inner wall of that vortex cavity hole thing?  I would expect it's swishy and turbulent.  Which means, as it collapses, it's going to be swirling with bubbles of gas and plasma and streams and droplets of metal, probably forming a combined sparking mist of everything stirred together.  And fusion would largely take place within small bubbles in this froth.

On the upside, lithium would be quite available in the bubbles, which means if there's an option to significantly boost pressures and temperatures to make fusion of lithium nuclei possible (with whatever's available; Li6 + D = Be8 ==> 2 He4 for example), the power output would rise considerably.

I'd like to know how much peak pressure and temperature they're able to get, and how it compares to other methods.

But again, I'm just guessing.

Tim

[alho]

... which lead to Edison's observation "genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration".

If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. … I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.
Nikola Tesla 
New York Times (19 October 1931)

Site is made by web designer rather than scientists.

As sites usually are. Scientist probably won't make very good websites, not that whoever made this site did very good job either.

And I guess they claim the hammers are timed correctly, which will be the first large barrier to getting such a system working.  An imploding wavefront is not easy to generate.  It also has to be intense enough to achieve the required peak pressure and temperature, but I don't feel that intensity is as big a challenge as organizing all that metal to move within microseconds.

A 1 metre diameter mini-sphere with 14 full-scale acoustic drivers has been constructed to test liquid metal vortex formation and compression.
Full scale acoustic drivers have been constructed to demonstrate that they can achieve the required impact velocity (energy) and impact timing control.

Former Tektronix CEO Rick Wills is on their board of directors so I'm guessing they got some pretty good timers.

This TED talk has some info, first 8 minutes is "fusion is great" so skip that.

[Alex Eisenhut]

GF papers here:

http://www.generalfusion.com/blog/category/scientific-papers/

What always gets me, "gets" in a sort of negative way, is how we will have to surpass the conditions at the center of a star to get fusion to work as a power source.

Apparently the center of the Sun has high material density, but very low power density, not much more than a smoldering heap of compost. The Sun is just so freaking huge that even at that low density, it still manages to convert 4 million tons of matter into energy ... per second.

Fusion bombs surpass that for a few nanoseconds, if we could surround the explosion with windmills that might generate fusion power. 

[pmichel]

They did a test run on Wendelstein 7-X iirc a few months ago.
A test run that lasted very very short, but a test run nonetheless. I can't find the source anymore, someone might?

http://www.ipp.mpg.de/3984226/12_15

[coppice]

It was clear that JET was experimental, they didn't claim it was going to be a commercial reactor, or get anywhere near break-even In fact, they achieved fusion in much less than a decade.

Of course the joke is that *commercial* nuclear fusion is always about 30 years away - which is pretty much what they said. And it is still true today. And will be true in 30 years time...

Anyway, I have no idea what useful point you are trying to make, apart from to score points.

Achieving fusion is almost trivial. Lots of reactors have done that. The goal of JET was to achieve stable sustainable fusion. It took a couple of decades to achieve that. They largely achieved their goals in about the time scale they set out on day one. I never heard anyone in 1980 talk about 30 years to commercialised fusion energy. Some said at least half a century. Others said the middle of the next century. How could it ever have been as little as 30 years from that point, when the then current experimental systems like JET were expected to take more than half that time to produce the knowledge needed to move to the next stage?

Progress has occurred. Funding has always been the main throttle control for that progress. When oil goes up, more money goes into fusion. When oil goes down, funding goes down. Its little surprise that progress is less that stellar when the research is treated like that.

[modelman]

We already have enough energy available from nuclear fusion to satisfy our needs for the foreseeable future:  it's called the sun.  It makes hugely more sense to tap this resource than to invest so heavily in controlled nuclear fusion here on planet earth.

Modelman

I went to Culham fusion lab as a youth when they were building JET, and they confidently predicted nuclear fusion "in a decade or two" - that was over 30 years ago.

Nuclear fusion is inherently hard to do - as far as we know. In order to make it a practical commercial proposition, there would need to be scientific/technological breakthroughs to make it possible. In comparison, with the light bulb, it was well known that heating a filament would create light - the commercial problem was creating a bulb where the filament lasted more than a few hours, which lead to Edison's observation "genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration".

Nuclear fusion is unlikely to ever be cheap, abundant or clean, if you actually look into the details behind the hype. When people start talking about business plans which include getting raw materials from the Moon, they are clearly hopeless. Business people shy away from multi-billion $ projects, unless there is a pretty guaranteed return on investment. When you throw in nuclear radiation and advanced technology, it becomes even less appealing.

We are a very long way away from practical, commercially viable fusion power. I predict we might build a government sponsored prototype eventually (maybe DEMO), but at such huge cost and complexity no business will ever build one.

As the morning sun shines through my window, surely it is easier and quicker to build wind turbines and solar panels, to exploit the nuclear fusion source we know already works?

[Kleinstein]

The concept looks not that bad. At least it looks a lot more realistic that laser fusion, and they don't have the nasty neutron damage problem that ITER and following are facing.  But they seem to have similar problems with plasma instabilities as in the tokamak designs - so they may actually learn and profit from the competing experiments, even if they only need a small plasma ring to start with.

Still I think there is quite some work to be done - so I don't think this will be fast enougth to save the climate. It would likely also take quite some time from the first experimental powerstation to an economical one, as it takes experience to make the parts reliable and durable.

[Samogon]

We already have enough energy available from nuclear fusion to satisfy our needs for the foreseeable future:  it's called the sun.  It makes hugely more sense to tap this resource than to invest so heavily in controlled nuclear fusion here on planet earth.

Modelman

Can you estimate how big field needed to support industrial needs for steel producers, chemical plants, manufacturing?

[wraper]

We already have enough energy available from nuclear fusion to satisfy our needs for the foreseeable future:  it's called the sun.  It makes hugely more sense to tap this resource than to invest so heavily in controlled nuclear fusion here on planet earth.

Huge amount of "free" energy is worthless if you cannot effectively tap to it. For example, in my region, using solar panels is very dubious from a financial standpoint. You say as if solar energy is almost free to get which it is not at all, it's quiet expensive. Also it requires huge fields to cover with the solar panels. Yeah go for it if you have useless deserts around, not the case in Europe.

[Samogon]

We already have enough energy available from nuclear fusion to satisfy our needs for the foreseeable future:  it's called the sun.  It makes hugely more sense to tap this resource than to invest so heavily in controlled nuclear fusion here on planet earth.

Huge amount of "free" energy is worthless if you cannot effectively tap to it. For example, in my region, using solar panels is very dubious from a financial standpoint. You say as if solar energy is almost free to get which it is not at all, it's quiet expensive. Also it requires huge fields to cover with the solar panels. Yeah go for it if you have useless deserts around, not the case in Europe.

+++
Solar energy is a religion

[wraper]

BTW, the main issue with solar power is that it isn't continuous. So to use it, there also need to be the backup sources of similar power. Or huge batteries, though if there can be like 10 cloudy days in the row like here, it's not a solution. So solar power on it's own is basically worthless.

[DenzilPenberthy]

BTW, the main issue with solar power is that it isn't continuous. So to use it, there also need to be the backup sources of similar power. Or huge batteries, though if there can be like 10 cloudy days in the row like here, it's not a solution. So solar power on it's own is basically worthless.

My point, and the point that several others are making, is that this is an eminently solveable problem (mostly with existing technology) and much easier than developing nuclear fusion reactors.

[grumpydoc]

BTW, the main issue with solar power is that it isn't continuous. So to use it, there also need to be the backup sources of similar power. Or huge batteries, though if there can be like 10 cloudy days in the row like here, it's not a solution. So solar power on it's own is basically worthless.

Or perhaps a co-ordinated global approach - after all the sun is always shining somewhere on the planet.

[Samogon]

BTW, the main issue with solar power is that it isn't continuous. So to use it, there also need to be the backup sources of similar power. Or huge batteries, though if there can be like 10 cloudy days in the row like here, it's not a solution. So solar power on it's own is basically worthless.

Or perhaps a co-ordinated global approach - after all the sun is always shining somewhere on the planet.

How it would be economically feasible, such power lines would cost much and power losses should be considered. Solar systems are ok for home customers. But for industrial use it is questionable. Most power used by industrial customers. They require high power sources and solar panels not among them.

[wraper]

My point, and the point that several others are making, is that this is an eminently solveable problem

Tell this to the industry how this is solvable in any (economically) sensible way. Transferring electricity over half of the planet is not a solution.

[HAL-42b]

The problem with fusion is that you are still going to get a power bill. No matter how much you support it you will never get to bill anybody for the energy produced.

Big companies invest in it because they can charge people for energy. It is centralized power by its very nature.

Big companies do not invest in solar because they can't write bills for it over and over. There is no shortage of supply they can put a toll booth on.

[wraper]

The problem with fusion is that you are still going to get a power bill. No matter how much you support it you will never get to bill anybody for the energy produced.

Big companies invest in it because they can charge people for energy. It is centralized power by its very nature.

As if you get your solar energy without any bills. It's just in different form. You get huge instant (investment) bills instead of small monthly bills. By the time it pays of, very likely you will need to invest again, like changing batteries, inverters, whatsoever. Yes, likely you can save something over time but it's not like there is no cash flow.

Big companies do not invest in solar because they can't write bills for it over and over. There is no shortage of supply they can put a toll booth on.

No they don't care if it's solar or whatsoever. Why they can't write the bills? Does it stop to be a centralized power? All they care is investments vs profit. And solar power is not easy to exploit. As I said before it's not feasible on it's own because you don't have stable power output over the time.

[wraper]

For solar energy fans. Watch this 5 minute video and then think how this can be dealt with with just a solar power.

[HAL-42b]

Watch this 5 minute video and then think how this can be dealt with with just a solar power.

The answer is trivially simple, but can we stop for a minute and think about how retarded the concept of AC power distribution is? Not only it has zero on site storage and all demands must be met instantaneously but it also has to be phase synchronised across continents.

This is like building circuits without filtering caps.

The simple way to solve it even in the current situation would be to simply change the billing.

1 - Households purchase energy from the utility at constant power. Households and the utility agree upon a rate (say 2kW) and are billed at that rate regardless if they use the energy or not. Energy above this rate is not supplied. It is in the customer's best interest to store what they can't use.

2 - Households have to supply enough storage capacity on site to meet their own peak demands. How they achieve that is up to them as long as they comply to code.


This has two consequences: 1 - utilities do not have to deal with demand peaks. 2 - Consumers with large peaks and irregular power demands must pay for the luxury out of their own pockets.

So if you are particularly efficient you can get by with only 750W of power and very little storage.

If you want both of your kettles and the toaster running at the same time you are running your dishwasher and jacuzzi you have to pay, dearly.

There, solved your peak demand problem. Where do I send the bill?

[Samogon]

There is no free power in the nature, you have to pay for it anyway, if it costly solar installation or big power plant running on tritium. You can only reduce consumption.

[wraper]

1 - Households purchase energy from the utility at constant power. Households and the utility agree upon a rate (say 2kW) and are billed at that rate regardless if they use the energy or not. Energy above this rate is not supplied. It is in the customer's best interest to store what they can't use.

2 - Households have to supply enough storage capacity on site to meet their own peak demands. How they achieve that is up to them as long as they comply to code.

Long time didn't read something so ridiculous. Regardless of this thing won't work in the first place, let's assume it would. 2kW constant rate is just retarded, it's 1.4 MWh per month (go green, yeah). Now, wee need this "storage". BTW you forgot that there is no power at night (solar). Do you even imagine how big this storage need to be, how insanely it will cost, and how much resources it needs and the waste it would create? 

[mtdoc]

Large, centralized solar installations are no solution.

Small, decentralized, community or household based solar could do a lot to meet current electricity needs but this would require a dramatic change in infrastructure and thinking.

Storage is, as always the big challenge for solar PV systems. With small, localized solar installations this is more easily solved with available battery technology, molten salt, pumped water storage, etc - with the best solution dependent on the size of the installation and local resources.

The utility companies - who have the financial and political clout - have no interest in doing this for obvious reasons.

[HAL-42b]

2kW constant rate is just retarded, it's 1.4 megawatt/month (go green, yeah).

Well, an order of magnitude here and there can be fixed. Wasting time with whiny naysayers can't.

[grumpydoc]

How it would be economically feasible, such power lines would cost much and power losses should be considered. Solar systems are ok for home customers. But for industrial use it is questionable. Most power used by industrial customers. They require high power sources and solar panels not among them.

Given the current socio-politic-economic climate I agree it would, in practice, be a non-starter. I am not convinced it could not be achieved from a purely technical perspective.

That said what is economic depends on the cost of the alternatives, you are also assuming that industry will stay where it is at present.

Suppose you woke up tomorrow and there was no other way of supplying power for the planet? Or that we were not constrained by the need for profit?

Could you transmit power from the EU to the USA from a purely technical perspective? Well, maybe - the longest transmission line at present is 2,300km long - that is short of the 2,900km from the coast of Africa to the coast of Brazil but not by orders of magnitude. Admittedly the logistics of submarine cables are different, the longest of those at present is less than 1/10th of that 2,900km span but there is (or was) a proposed 1000km cable.

You'd also need a few of them - the Rio Madeira link transmits 7.1GW, perhaps 1% of North America's needs, that 1000km cable was to have a capacity of 2GW. However I'd argue that it is not so far fetched as to be utterly in the realms of science fiction.

As to PV not providing enough power - well, it is certainly less efficient in terms of space than conventional plant (an argument, I suppose for distributed generation utilising otherwise unproductive space - such as domestic rooftops). But there is a 290MW array somewhere in the 'states is there not - that should do for a bit of industry.

Would shifting terra watts of power long distances be the best solution? No, not really (I wasn't being entirely serious) but at present we have limited capacity to store energey generated from Solar or wind power and I don;t think enough has been done on this side of the equation (there are some developments though eg the Ionex "1MW" battery).

[wraper]

2kW constant rate is just retarded, it's 1.4 megawatt/month (go green, yeah).

Well, an order of magnitude here and there can be fixed. Wasting time with whiny naysayers can't.

Yeah, order of magnitude here - there  , just wow. Even 20-30% make a difference between very feasible and not feasible at all. The advantage of centralized electricity, cloud computing, internet and centralized whatsoever is centralization which makes them so effective. They can supply the needed resources to huge number of people on different times on demand while being not so big by themselves, they are just being effectively shared. Putting storage in every home is just insane, it would need to be very huge to supply the peak demands of particular home yet wasting most of it's time by doing nothing. Get your math right before spewing out some smart ideas.

[EEVblog]

Solar energy is a religion

I hope so.
Having a world full of people devoted to and worshiping solar energy sounds pretty good to me!

[miguelvp]

Yeah, most religions revolve around the Sun!
After all, without it there will be no life in our little rock

[Samogon]

Solar energy is a religion

I hope so.
Having a world full of people devoted to and worshiping solar energy sounds pretty good to me!

Nothing new
But i hope that this fate will not become blind following of single idea. We see now British government canceling solar subsidies. The first excitment fades away due to ungrounded "believes" that it will solve energy problems.

[mtdoc]

All Hail the Sun God!. Behold the Bringer of Light and Lord of Fusion!

[coppice]

Solar energy is a religion

I hope so.
Having a world full of people devoted to and worshiping solar energy sounds pretty good to me!

Really? You don't think that maybe religious devotion destroys objectivity? That maybe lacking objectivity might lead to some poor decisions causing something with real potential to fail miserably?

[Jeroen3]

The opposite of such tv pickup is a solar eclipse. The germans almost crapped their pants due to fear of grid collapse when a full eclipse was due.

Luckily for them they've had stability problems before, and managed to get strict regulations on the behavior of inverters. Iirc they improved the ride-through scenario where the inverter must survive and stay online when the grid dissapears for a shirt time of 100ms, I think. That basically is a dead short to most low power producers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_voltage_ride_through

[Mechanical Menace]

Regardless of this thing won't work in the first place, let's assume it would. 2kW constant rate is just retarded, it's 1.4 MWh per month (go green, yeah).

I think he meant a fixed 2kWh a day, so 62kWh a month. Well that's what I read it to mean. 2kWh may be ridiculously low, but double it and you're using much more than my average consumption and I don't do without my appliances and gadgets.

[wraper]

Regardless of this thing won't work in the first place, let's assume it would. 2kW constant rate is just retarded, it's 1.4 MWh per month (go green, yeah).

I think he meant a fixed 2kWh a day, so 62kWh a month. Well that's what I read it to mean. 2kWh may be ridiculously low, but double it and you're using much more than my average consumption and I don't do without my appliances and gadgets.

doesn't seem like that:

Households and the utility agree upon a rate (say 2kW) and are billed at that rate regardless if they use the energy or not.

Anyway, charging the batteries most of the time if the constant supplied power would be low, would cause very fast battery wear and energy losses as charging isn't nearly 100% efficient. Also Solar power (for what that idea was proposed) and constant rate are two mutually exclusive things.

[zapta]

Big companies invest in it because they can charge people for energy. It is centralized power by its very nature.

Computers used to be centralized and now we have them in our pockets.

Never say never.

[CatalinaWOW]

The proposed constant power idea doesn't violate any physics (after some minor number adjustment).  But it just brushes over the storage problem.  Even if people do fairly extreme things for load leveling there will always be the night.  If people are economically productive they must be working several hours a day, then have domestic duties to perform, maybe even some recreation.  Optimum placement of the sleep hours in darkness (not possible for some fraction of population) leaves a need to do some power consumption in the dark hours.  That storage will be expensive unless some technical miracle occurs. 

If we are going to believe in a technical miracle, why not fusion?

As to the specific approach from this company.  I sure wouldn't invest my money their approach.  Plasmas and high thermal conductivity high density fluids seem like a very tough set of bedfellows.  Add the difficulty of getting fusion style pressures out of an acoustic wave and it seems that there are only two ways to make money here.  One is by finding gullible investors.  The other is by betting against them.

[Kleinstein]

The tricky thing with fusion is, that there is a slim chance that it might actually work and could be even economical competetive.  Before we have done the research we just don't know if it works - we just don't know enough to say for sure it does not work. With the classical tokamak style, we might get to the point that it is likely to expensive even though it would likely work.

Before the potential of fusion is checked, it will be hard to find the large scale investors for solar, wind and the required storage.

However fusion might as well need storage too, as they might want to run the powerplant 168h a week because of the high investments, and they will most likely be rather large plants with quite some downtime.

Billing for a constant power is a poor plan. The demand is just rather fluctuating and is does not make sense to add extra storage just because of an artifical pricing system. The more logical system would be a fluctuation price, depending on time - maybe with the meter showing the price a few hours in advance. So systems like washing mashines or battery chargers or heating / air conditioning could work when costs a lowest because of good supply. In hot areas solar power allready correlates resonably good with cooling demands.

[HAL-42b]

The proposed constant power idea doesn't violate any physics (after some minor number adjustment).  But it just brushes over the storage problem.  Even if people do fairly extreme things for load leveling there will always be the night.  If people are economically productive they must be working several hours a day, then have domestic duties to perform, maybe even some recreation.  Optimum placement of the sleep hours in darkness (not possible for some fraction of population) leaves a need to do some power consumption in the dark hours.  That storage will be expensive unless some technical miracle occurs. 

The idea of constant power delivery is just a thought and not meant to be taken too seriously. It's aim was to offload the problem of peak handling and associated expenses to the end user. I deliberately left the storage aspect moot.

In a free market the end user should be free to come up with a solution that best satisfies them. Wether that would be a lot of storage capacity or change of lifestyle is up to them.

My impression is that people generally do not change their lifestyle just because they are told to, but they do it readily when there is a financial incentive.

So either an expensive storage solution (expensive) or adjust your lifestyle to minimize your peak loads (cheap). The choice is yours.

After people become more receptive of the idea of adjusting their lifestyle to constant energy supply we may step up to the next level - adjusting our lifestyle to variable supply of power like solar. The option of paying dearly for storage is still there of course.

That was the point of the exercise.

[CatalinaWOW]

There is much that can be done to minimize peak loading.  But there are real consequences.  In the extreme, returning to an agrarian society eliminates electrical peak loads completely.  At the other end of the scale things like putting a timer on the washing machine to run after midnight, or even storing low grade heat from low cost intervals to high cost intervals is easy and not too costly, but also leaves the load profile fairly bumpy.  Joe the manufacturer of welded goods can put his primary manufacturing work after midnight to get cheap energy, but will have a smaller set of choices on employees than he would have had otherwise, and somewhere in the chain between his customers and the operations department there will be communications issues due to the lack of a common working hour.   And so on and so on.

Another consequence of minimizing peak loading is system fragility.  By this I am referring to the loss of robustness that results from excess capacity to meet peak loads.  Even at todays tentative steps toward load leveling (mostly levelling over geographic regions as shown in the BBC film) have had this effect.  An unexpected breakdown, or a large weather related event can seriously threaten system stability.  Local generation and storage can have the reverse effect, but comes at the expense of larger total capitalization.

Things that work well for a small number of motivated individuals often don't scale well.

[station240]

However fusion might as well need storage too, as they might want to run the powerplant 168h a week because of the high investments, and they will most likely be rather large plants with quite some downtime.

Actually that raises an interesting question, how many minutes/hours would a fusion reactor need to run to offset the power required to kickstart the reaction ?
I cannot see them being used as rapid start peak generators, for those short transients. Now peak and offpeak(night) is usable.

Fusion is a long term goal anyway, and not just for power generation. Would be real handy to visit other solar systems for instance, where lugging Uranium would be hazardous.
Whatever the final design is, it's going to be a hybrid of some of the current designs (and future ones).

[HAL-42b]

In that case Joe the welder would benefit tremendously from covering his roof with solar panels and even possibly splurging for a storage system that covers 5% of his daily use.

This way Joe benefits from easy access to employees, the utility benefits from even loads, we benefit from less carbon emissions, and politicians don't get any flack for imposing lifestyle changes on people.

The only ones that don't benefit are the energy monopolies - the 'extractables' people.  And since they hold the most money and steer the politics they will make sure that such a scheme never ever takes hold.

[Kleinstein]

With solar and wind power, there is no more the problem of too much power at night and to little from 11-12. The problem is more like to much power on a sunday and to little on some mondays.  So the times when power is plenty or short are not that predictable, though predictions over a few hours can be fairly accurate. So they usually know before when the wind dies out or the sun is covered by clouds.
As the peak power usage if the individual consumers is not that much correlated it does not make sense to use purly local storrage at individual consumers. It's just the beauty of a large network that you fluctuation partially compensate. This is also true for the sources. So a resonable large grid can save quite some storage capacity.

Just with PV installations it might be a good idea to have batteries for short time buffering close to PV installations as the inverters are allready there, and chances are good that the PV modules are working when the grid has excess power. One should still have a global controll for the local storage units. It's much better to shift power over the network than using local storage.

As a fusion reactor would work as a thermal power plant, it would react similar to conventional power plants: taking several hours to turn it all the way on or off. Smaller changes can be faster. Going down all the way is rather undisireble as this gives thermal stress and thus possibly reduced lifetime. Another special point with fusion reactors is, that they may have to run most of the time to keep up tritium production. So to much downtime would mean the need for extra very expensive tritium. So depending on the type of reactor they might want to run them really 24 h a day, even if they have to give away the energy at night.

[ccs46]

My point, and the point that several others are making, is that this is an eminently solveable problem

Tell this to the industry how this is solvable in any (economically) sensible way. Transferring electricity over half of the planet is not a solution.

Telsa had some ideas how to do it... It's entirely possible.

[Kleinstein]

Solar power will likely be not a good solution as the only power source. There is also wind and hydroelectric power. Mixed sources help to reduce the required storrage / backups.  It also depends one where you are: in parts of australia pure PV might work with moderate storage / backup as there is no such thing as 6 cloudy days in a row and on a cloudy day power requirements are relatively  low. It won't work for greenland for obvious resons.

A 100% fusion based power supply would also have it's problems, as there would be way to much power at night. With the expected large units (e.g. 2-5 GW) there is also need for heavy backup as such complicated units might turn down suddenly and unexpected. So you need a mix and some storrage or fast backups.

The real question with fusion power is, whether it can be much cheaper than PV or wind combined with sufficient storrage.
We still don't know, but I think it gets time to explore storrage much more - we need it anyway.

[wraper]

A 100% fusion based power supply would also have it's problems, as there would be way to much power at night. With the expected large units (e.g. 2-5 GW) there is also need for heavy backup as such complicated units might turn down suddenly and unexpected. So you need a mix and some storrage or fast backups.

Storage is a useless idea for fusion or whatever what can output more or less constant power. What about nuclear power stations? Obviously they already work pretty well without any "storage" (if the batteries are meant by that). You just need to have redundant reactors which nuclear power stations do have and some additional power stations which can increase their power output fast. You already have the energy storage in a form of fossil fuel or water in the hydro power plant water reservoirs. Many here do not understand that the storage in their understanding (batteries) is way bigger and more expensive than the power plant itself. Their maintenance cost also would be just horrendous. The resources consumed and the waste produced probably would outperform the damage done by burning the fossil fuel. Remember replacing the batteries in the UPS every few years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity

[CatalinaWOW]

Storage is useful for balancing daily load swings when you have sources like fusion, fission or some fossil fuel plants that don't work well off nominal power levels.  The pumped storage technique you illustrated is one of the few large scale storage methods which has proved practical and economically useful.  But pumped storage, like solar and wind requires some conditions that don't exist everywhere, and don't necessarily scale down to smaller sizes.  It is relatively low density energy storage.

1.  Significant elevation differences within a relatively small distance.
2.  Lots of relatively cheap land for the reservoirs.
3.  Lots of available water.
4.  The economics work best where the facilities have dual uses (irrigation, flood control, hydroelectric generation of power with water that passes through the system). 

[Kleinstein]

Countries like fance and begium that used to have a large part of there power from nuclear power have / had problems with to much power at night - they installed light on the main highways, more or less to waste the excess power at night.
Fusion power would likely be worse in the sense of likely having even larger units and possibly even less incentive to reduce the output at night.

Storage does not need to be batteries, but there need to be alternatives. Often it is just backup power station running on gas, oil or coal. At least in europe the rather large area grid (portugal to poland) also helps.

[T3sl4co1l]

If fusion proceeds in pulses rather than continuous operation, it would make perfect sense as an agile peak-hours supply.  If instead, it depends on a threshold of continuous operation (as with traditional fission sources), it would be more of an alternative to traditional base load sources such as coal and nuclear.

Tim

[CatalinaWOW]

If fusion proceeds in pulses rather than continuous operation, it would make perfect sense as an agile peak-hours supply.  If instead, it depends on a threshold of continuous operation (as with traditional fission sources), it would be more of an alternative to traditional base load sources such as coal and nuclear.

Tim

It seems likely to me that when fusion reaches practicality it will proceed in pulses.  But the size of those pulses will be such that from the users standpoint it is a continuous supply.  The operator will not want to have capacitors or whatever other support equipment is required charged up and waiting to go, and will not be able to afford to watch an enormous capital investment sitting idle, so the pulses will pop along steadily at the best rate possible.  May be hundreds per second, may be one every several seconds, but it will be effectively steady state.

[Kleinstein]

The tokamak design (e.g. ITER) is by principle pulsed (order of minutes if I remember right). However there is a large incentive to run it more or less contineous, with pulses in short sequence:

The magnets need cooling and essentally need to run long term. There is quite some power consumption and cost to have the unit in standby.

Much of the costs are likely invenstments, and little for fuel itself. So they may need the up time to get resonable payback of the investment.

The reactor needs to produce it's own tritium fuel. Due to radioactive decay in the tritium inventory some of this is lost, when the reactor is down. So the system has to run often enough to make up for this loss in tritium. For the tokamak designs so far tritium production rate is expected to be barely high enough and may need quite some extra efford to get it high enough - so there is hardly any room for avoidable down times. This might be different if the initailly mentioned "acoustic" plasma compression works - one of there claimed advantages is a high trtium production rate.

[gildasd]

I went to Culham fusion lab as a youth when they were building JET, and they confidently predicted nuclear fusion "in a decade or two" - that was over 30 years ago.

I went to School next door; European School...
A few years back I met the the father of one of the kids (now a fine young lady) that worked there.
He thinks that they did a fundamental mistake in the JET: they tried to make a "perfect" doughnut and that just does not work in real life.
He now thinks they should have "twisted the doughnut" making the plasma not only go around but corkscrew.
And I did not understand the rest of the explanation...

[SeanB]

An older video, but still has good points in it.  A truly smart man.