Is nuclear fusion the future of clean energy? 

exactly

This is what im talking about

If the United States had not canceled their thorium reactor project in the 1950s, we'd be in great shape today.

We have no idea if fusion is the future. IMHO the future may be mostly with fission of both Uranium, thorium and Pu cycles and it is all fine. The future should be with much less fossil fuels used, and with cheap, affordable and plentiful electricity. If fusion fits these criterias - great, if not it will be engineering and scientific challenge, not a practical source of power.

It would be a waste of money and a waste of many years building the most expensive and longest to build energy source, when we can build out the cheapest and fastest to build energy sources (solar and wind). And that’s when factoring in the cost of needed battery storage.

Yup

Indeed

Thanks I will not bother watching.

Seems like everyone I hear promoting fusion, makes their livelihood in Fusion research.

Why?

@@dugfunny7988 We only have prototypes and the efficiency is still far from overall breakeven. The scientific and technical challenges are enormous.

We just need a robust room temp superconductor, ez

Check out helion's approach. Appears most promising

Yes something like that but alot more powerful I suppose.

Pretty straightforward. It comes down to material selection. Some materials like aluminum are fairly neutron transparent and don't form long-lived activation products. In general, activation products tend to be short lived, low activity, and non bio-accumulating. It needs special handling and a decade or so of isolation, but it's not comparable to the fission products that come from a fission power plant

General Fusion's design contains the reaction in liquid metal. The "reaction chamber" is constantly cycled... it's how they extract the heat. Must admit, I'm biased towards their design... steam powered pistons compressing a bolt of plasma contained in a vortex of molten metal has to be the most steam-punk energy reactor ever :) Not holding my breath but I do wish them success.

@@4Fixerdave thank you for the heat transfer method. Wish them luck too.

What, none in ruzzia or Saudi Arabia?

And none are commercially viable

There's actually already an operating fusion power plant. It's called the sun.

And not one of them has yet been able to generate electricity at a utility scale! Come on, put up! Build a cost competitive fusion plant that can produce energy electricity for even ten homes!

If some of you guys were alive before Christopher Columbus set sail for the new world he would have never left Europe!

go nuclear! We need more fission!

Anymore than 20% wind & solar the grid becomes unstable due to weather conditions which self imposes a limit for wind & solar, but 20% is an achievable goal. What the world needs is a new fuel and Algae could become that fuel.

@@miken7629 You might need to re-read the comment several times. This is about STORAGE...not about the grid.

@@michelem.6104 "This is about STORAGE...not about the grid." But storage alone, doesnt actually solve all load volatility problems for intermittent generation. You will need all three components. For some reason in the US we are deciding to focus on just one of them (at least from political standpoint), which doesnt make any sense.

You'll dry your non-abundant resources in no time with solar and win as they can't be used for the steel manufacturing industry. Nuclear fusion mass-producing hydrogen is the future.

Well, if the batteries become more and more accessible IMHO first place to use them would be transportation- to reduce its emissions. Even small battery (10kWh) should reduce gas consumption from cars tremendously if mass used in PHEVs(short trips). And if batteries are cheaper and scalable still it would be most efficient to use them with workhorse nuclear fission- least overbuild of both generation and storage for maximum decarbonisation. I don't see the appeal of fusion when not even one estimate can be made about timeline and cost of "potential" future reactor. I personaly don't see how Fusion could be on the same order of magnitude as Fission.

Fervo Energy is another next gen geothermal company. Great tech. They're producing power now.

You shouldn't have expected better from The Economist.

Economists are not STEM.

@@SolaceEasy 🤣 10/10

I searched "Nuclear Fusion" hoping to see some updates. Just another video saying the same for the last cant even remember how many years. By this time, we all know that NF is always 30 years away.

Its definitely a pipe dream. The time horizons for reactor builds & at incredible costs are just too significant to see it helping in time.

So it is the technology, because we no cost efficient technology ready by 2050. You need to build the 4th generation nuclear plants yesterday, for 2050. But they won't be build until the end of the decade and won't come online at least 5 years later. SMRs too, no commercial reactor before the 2030. How is nuclear the solution to a climate crisis we spend 50 years on waiting it to happen? It is like catching the train that already went out of the station. Nuclear will never be ready to play a major role in energy transition. Even in China is no plan for more than 15% nuclear electricity.

There are enough mineable thorium on the earth to satisfy humankind for 1000 years, combined with wind，solar, hydroelectric may extend for another 1000 years. These are mature technologies, while fusion is always twenty years in the future. So leave it to the future generations to do the fusion.

This is speculation. There are no operational fusion reactors with net positive output, let alone as part of a power plant. To say how much a potential products might cost based on current experiments is just conjecture.

"The problem of nuclear fusion is not technology. It is economy." Uh thats not even remotely accurate...... Honestly what do you think they are testing for ITER? Or do you think they got 38 countries to build the most complicated piece of energy infrastructure in the history of humanity for craps and giggles?

Let's nope fusion succeed, or our children will say the exact opposite.

Yea they proved that last December. But yes renewables untill we can reach the goal

@@Melanie____ fusion reaction 2mj in, 3 mj out, but took few 100 mj to power 192 lasers.

@@RavingFan oh okay so you changed your mind to the first comment. Yes net reached and steps taken toward the end goal.. they are in progress of developing it - and yes it’s not commercially available yet.

@@Melanie____ perhaps thorium reactors, also nuclear w/o nuclear waste (consumes most radioactive byproduct). fusion wip since elementary school, still wip n nearly retired. fusion a forever science project.

@@RavingFan I doubt that. history is full of people who said it’s impossible until that thing has been invented. that’s human nature they invent things never done before.

😂 yeaaaa if only someone had tried that before.... oh wait...

The rich do a much better job at managing money and doing research with it than most governments.

Or we just keep colonizing planets to make room, embracing our nature to dominate the galaxy. Constraints are for the birds.

I'm 72. Been hearing my whole life, fusion is just 20 years away. I think under the best case scenario, it is still 20 years away from commercialization.

Archer and Jacobson (*) estimated that 20% of the global total wind power potential could account for as much as 123 petawatt-hours (PWh) of electricity annually [corresponding to annually averaged power production of 14 terawatts (TW)] equal to around 7 times the total current global consumption of electricity (comparable to present global use of energy in all forms). Their study was based on an analysis of data for the year 2000 from 7,753 surface meteorological stations complemented by data from 446 stations for which vertical soundings were available. They restricted their attention to power that could be generated by using a network of 1.5-megawatt (MW) turbines tapping wind resources from regions with annually averaged wind speeds in excess of 6.9 m/s (wind class 3 or better) at an elevation of 80 m. * CL Archer, MZ Jacobson, Evaluation of global wind power. J Geophys Res 110, D12110 (2005).

Dreamer u know u r a dreamer/ greed doesn’t allow for loud progress/ threats demands for money/ no one threatens to bomb wind mills or under ground heat capture which doesn’t come with a threat to humans or buildings just heat & energy…

It is possible, I'm just not convinced such technology is in our reach.

Bruh

we have the power of the atom in our hands but no one seems to understand it

It's always 20 years away

Distributed solar is not so much trouble. Any given house or business is limited by the existing connection, as are the local trunks and feeders. However, for any grid, these add up to match the full capacity in any case. Expect to see more.

in this type of reactor fast neutrons generate heat in some kind of liquid lithium (producing more tritium fuel as it does so) which is heat-exchanged with water, which generates steam for the turbines.

@@MattNolanCustom it's been awhile for me to do those energy equations. The energy from fusion is the excess mater of the proton converted to energy. Orderly the is no fast neutrons but when there is many many reactions once and awhile one will happen... using a deuterium base material there is probably going to have tridium. The energy has to transfer from the fusion reaction to a themo cycle. How is going is happen is what I am curious

@@lewisreiman8124 sounds like your knowledge is based on how fusion works in the Sun. Here it is different. Deuterium and Tritium are fused into Helium and a neutron. The mass deficit manifests as kinetic energy and is split in inverse proportion of mass ratio, so the neutron gets 4/5 of the energy, which comes out around 14MeV, IIRC. The Helium nucleus gets 1/5 and if you arrange things right, it will give a bunch of that back to the D-T plasma via collisions so that you have a self-sustaining heating, requiring little or no external heat once you get up and running - which helps the Q factor massively, of course. Going back to the neutron that every fusion event creates, the idea is to have it slam into a neutron multiplier such as beryllium or lead and then have those secondary neutrons hit lithium to fission it into helium and tritium. That fission is also exothermic. So, we have a hot mess of metals and helium which drives the heat exchangers, provides tritium for future fusion reactions. If the neutron multiplier to neutron thermal loss and other absorption losses ratio is sufficiently over 1.0 you have a closed loop tritium fuel cycle and don't have to make it in heavy water fission reactors. Deuterium is 1 in 6000 or something in all hydrogen, water, on Earth so is abundant and is relatively easily separated. There are other approaches and fuel cycles but they are significantly harder to make work.

What? How can a fusion reactor meltdown?

If the reactor doas not cool probably a meltdown could happen or just a big explosion.

we need fission

It's ok to spend money on nuclear fusion research but we much more need fission now (because it exists and it's the only viable option against fossil fuels)

additional investment should be made

Not necessarily. At this point until you run the ITER tests nobody will be ahead.

yeahhhh, we desperately need more fission

Tritium is produced in every watercooled nuclear reaktor. To seperate it out is a minor problem compared to get fusion reactors working.

Also tritium is radioactive :/

@krautergarten4529 True, you need fission reactors to fuel your fusion reactors, so it's not really the perfect energy source to solve all our problems.

So what are they thinking then? Surely there is a solution?

@musicalintuition it's just one of the many hurdles to nuclear fusion. There are other fuels, but I believe D-T fusion produces the most heat with the lowest fusion activation temp. So it's the place to start.

Yea, I remember them saying 20 years when I was in high school 😂

I'd say at least a century, probably much longer.

@@aaroncosier735 Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end. I think it was Isaac Asimov who said we need the Einstein of fusion to prove its unattainable.

The heat dissipates into the environment. All of the fusion startups try to wow people by saying their fuel is heated to hundreds of millions of degrees, but what they don't mention is that their fuel is a rarified gas. Fuel in a 1 liter reactor vessel at a few microns of pressure heated to 100 million degrees wouldn't even cause a gallon of water to boil. Obviously full size reactors would make more heat than this, but it wouldn't be any more heat than what a coal power plant deals with.

Yet the economist blindly accepts the opitimism of a bunch of the CEOs of the industry. It's like believing Elon Musk, that his cars will have a fully functioning auto pilot by the end of this year

"20 years from 20 years from now."

Nuclear fusion has been vastly underfunded since the 60s.

yeah, we need fission

Thats not what a reactor is

Give the entire world squeaky voices of course! Ask a silly question...

@@MattNolanCustom 😅 HeHeHe

Nuclear fission + renewables is the solution that me must adopt now. Grid-scale fusion will probably come at the end of the century (if it will come). For now it's just research

It is hopeless to rely on fusion power for climate change. There isn't even enough tritium on the planet to run the reactors. It's true that fusion plants can make their own tritium, but developing a system around this will at least delay things to the end of the century. Fission power plants are what the world needs now.

Will you be interested in giving your best to see fusion power plants operational within 3 years? Yeah, I am talking about supporting research that has immense promise.

Man its almost like major players in fusion already said this 20 years ago, but that wasnt exciting enough for news cycles, so journos decided to put their own spin on it and now we are claiming nuclear physicists are somehow dumb people...... ya know instead of the people who made up completely inaccurate bs than what was ever actually published.....

@@henryeze70740% chance of that happening. Absolutely none

you are the cringe one

@@henryeze7074 zero percent chance of that happening, not even remotely possible

Hydro? Not that clean, if you consider the consequences of flooding huge territories.

Every time I see a propellor on a stick I grit my teeth. Bad design grates on my engineering nerves. Allow competition to innovate solutions and we'll be fine. But you'll never get that with big government married to big corporations.

I would argue its far more likely generative fusion reactors would utilize gas capture systems with brayton cycles than use a steam turbine.

@@MattBuild4 Sure. Sunshine and lollipops. Although, to advocate for the devil, one team plans to use coils around the plasma as pickup devices since the plasma induces a current.

yes, it's called nuclear FISSION and it actually exists

Agreed

@@Betweoxwiteganthey have been trying for 70 years, and it is not working yet. It may never work. If it does ever work it might be 10, 20, 30, 40 or more years away. The timescales just don’t work. And this ignores cost issues of complex new technology if they do make it work. Imagine you had cancer, and you kept betting on a treatment that had been under development for 70 years, still did not work, and may never work - instead of using an existing treatment that is known to work (but does need more complex organisation to use.) It would be foolish to do that.

@@glennjgroves Give it time. After all, wind and solar have been around for millions of years before we figured out how to harness them ;)

@@Betweoxwitegan nuclear fission was developed and working relatively quickly. Nuclear fusion is the exact opposite. I am fine with people researching fusion. It is the lie that we “must” have fusion to have clean energy that is repeated along with it that is the issue.

@@silversolver7809 fusion has also been around for millions (actually billions) of years. None of that changes the point. Everything in my comment is still relevant.

@@Betweoxwitegan the lie was in the video. Someone interviewed in the video stated we need fusion to generate clean energy (or something to that effect). If I remember correctly, near the start. Overall we agree. I think any disagreements between you and I would be minor/small.

I understand your concerns about the timeline for achieving self-sustainable fusion. While it may still take some time to develop, it's important to explore a variety of clean energy options. In the meantime, it's great to have backup power solutions like the Segway Portable PowerStation Cube Series, which offers massive capacity and versatile functionality for outdoor enthusiasts and home backup needs.

Yeah we're far from commercial fusion, but it's more like 30-50 years away, not 100. 100 years ago the most basic cars were just being invented, and since then weve made supersonic planes, spacecraft, Mars rovers, and smart phones that can open "portals" across continents with video calling. Innovation is increasing exponentially, image what another 100 years will create, more than just fusion.

Because no current test facilities are designed to create self-sustainable fusion. They are purposedly designed for research into techniques that _will_ enable self-sustained fusion in future reactors (e.g. ITER). Fusion is not something you could Tony Stark out of in a cave.

Why leave out hydro and geothermal?

I like Fission power plants (preferably Thorium though), but have to agree with 'michelem'--it will always come down to $$$. Once built, a huge wind farm/solar farm + stationary storage will probably cost a lot less...AND use a fraction of the employee's to operate it.

​@@JuniperTrekkerWhile true, we don't have the storage capacity to run the world on renewables. Fission plants will be needed until a cheap, reliable, and energy dense storage option becomes available, such as solid state sodium ion batteries. Until this happens, some form of base load supply will be required.

Fission is only costly because pf the extreme regulation and the fact that we use tecnology from de cold war. 4 generation nuclear power plant are easy and cheap.

@@Brunoscaramuzzi because if theres something that we need, its less regulation on nuclear reactors "4 generation nuclear power plant are easy and cheap" citation needed

@@jb76489 There is more if you google it a little. And Nuclear Fusion has problems with nuclear weapon ploriferation and nuclear waste as well. Where there is neutrons flying around Uranium can be turned into Plutonium and Weapons can be build.

I'm pretty sure we'll still be dealing with the climate crisis by the end of this century. Working fusion will be really helpful then.

@@MattNolanCustom At the moment the world is aiming for a 3 degree Celsius warming till the end of the century. If that's the case we won't need fusion anymore as we will be fighting the collapse of human civilization.

Nuclear fission is the most expensive form of energy, while solar and wind are the cheapest. If cheap energy is what you’re after, solar and wind are it.

@@AnonymousOmniscience what is the price of MWh of reliable solar electricity during hours of 6pm-6am? Without natgas "backup"?

@@msxcytb A solar farm with the the needed battery storage is still cheaper than anything else.

@@AnonymousOmniscience according to propaganda, not real world experience...

@@msxcytb The economic realities will show the truth of the matter over time. Look at the “Growth of photovoltaics” on Wikipedia. Solar has been on an exponential rise for decades, while nuclear fission is a sad, risky, slow to build technology that keeps getting more expensive.