What the Fusion Announcement Really Could Mean
It's a big deal, but not as much as many people think.
So to begin with, yes I fell out of practice with keeping up with writing but the new year is as good of time as any to get back into the groove of things. So I figure I’ll start by going over what I think will be one of two things we remember 2022 for in half a century (the other being the Ukraine war)
So with the big announcement from California’s Lawrence Livermore Lab that more energy was able to be produced from a nuclear fusion reaction than it cost to make the reaction is, indeed, a huge milestone. This could have massive ramifications for society at large but I fear many people are making too big of a deal about some parts and not enough about other parts. So lets go over what wide-scale fusion would actually mean in a world where it is technically feasible.
Scalability
So the first thing to look at that seems to be pretty well understood is that the first major challenge is how to get from an experiment in a lab to a very large scale plant that’s able to deliver a large amount of energy to lots of people.
This is currently where the current answer of how this can happen is mostly “we’ll get back to you on that". There are ideas but the main problem is the best way to learn and advance incrementally is through learning from mistakes. The main issue with that is each iteration to learn costs billions of dollars so one of the main things slowing down fusion engineering research is simply funding. It’s hard to get that much money for an unproven technology, though hopefully with this proof of concept there will be a lot more private money interested in getting in on the ground floor of a new energy industry.
All in all, this part is the biggest black box. The main conclusion about scaling up is basically that both skepticism and optimism are warranted.
Though all of that dovetails nicely into the next point:
Cost
The idea of fusion is often touted as something along the lines of “unlimited free energy”. This is where the narrative strays furthest from the possible reality on the ground. Just because the cost of fuel to run the plant is negligible, doesn’t mean there will be free energy in the slightest.
Imagine I said you could have free gasoline for your car. That doesn’t mean driving becomes free. You still have to pay for the car, maintenance, tolls, etc.. Well the same principal is even more important here.
Doing some quick digging on operational costs of power plants and the current market rate of around $180/US ton of coal, as best as my back of the envelope calculations give me is that the price of the fuel is around 5% of the cost of actually running a coal fired power plant (in the US).
The expensive part is building, staffing, operating and maintaining the physical plant. So that goes back to the previous point of scalability that part of what will make this a viable technology is being able to build a plant at a reasonable cost. If the capital expenditure is too much, the whole viability argument goes down the drain. But if it can be done, the likely end result will be electricity at around what current US prices are, though significantly cheaper than current prices in Europe.
Deployment
So if it still costs the same to the user even if it works well, why is it such an important development? Well, I’ll get to environment and health benefits soon enough but even so the massive benefit is that the right now supply of new power is largely limited. What is essentially unlimited with fusion power is the ability to expand. Currently there is lots of opposition to new fossil power plants and building new plants or getting a new coal mine is difficult. Natural gas less so but even then new exploration is often subject to who happens to hold political office.
What fusion unlocks is the ability to build new plants that have extremely little local impact and don’t require more fuel so it’s much easier to expand the total electrical generation capacity. This means we can do things like pumping or desalinating water on a much more massive scale or have the power to effectively run an electric car charging network with little problem. So in that sense “unlimited” isn’t too far off in that we can just keep on adding capacity with no issues. But there won’t be a fundamental change in what is or isn’t cost prohibitive with current prices.
Health and Environment
This is a huge boost and pretty much only positive development. Fusion power’s main disadvantage environmentally is that industrial plants are ugly. There might be some issues with heat discharge depending on how the cooling works but compared to current plants, there’s no comparison. There is basically no waste other than heat that can be put into a river/ocean or into steam. There are no ill effects from mining materials to go into the plant nor particulates that are one of the widest issues of health problems from pollution globally. None of that even mentions carbon emissions, of which there are also zero.
So this minimal impact means that the permitting and construction process should be significantly easier as there’s no real community danger from accidents. (All the standard dangers of working in an industrial facility certainly exist to those employed there, though).
Geopolitcs
Of course one of the biggest changes will be not requiring imports and exports of energy. There will still be a need for fossil fuels, particularly in aviation and shipping, but being able to get the vast majority of energy from cheap electricity. There seem to be a bunch of obvious implications about petro-states but honestly this is just such a fundamental change that it’s hard to even contemplate just how far reaching the consequences would be.
Personal updates
Well….It’s been a year and I think it’s safe to say I am left to look around and wonder what all these hens are doing roosting at home all around me. It will be left at that and personal updates will be few and far between from here on out.