Another post in the “energy” category, although it is not really the theme of this blog — but very interesting and important.
For many years fusion power has been the hope and dream of many people. Will it actually help solve our energy problem? Save the day?
A current post at The Oil Drum: Europe talks about fusion power and its future developments.
I am not going to be summarizing the post here. Please read the original post, as it is very well written. The following are just some excerpts/quotes that I think are interesting, as well as some other links on this topic.
Has current research failed so far?
Critics of fusion power have categorised these experiments as so many failures because none of them have produced more output fusion power than was put in. In truth none of them were built with the intention of achieving energy break-even. All were intended to understand and develop ways of controlling the seething monster that a dense plasma at a temperature of many millions of degrees is. For the most part these experiments have, after a fair bit of modification and adjustment, reached the sort of performance hoped for.
Will fusion power be limitless and the end to all other energy sources?
The large scale adoption of fusion energy will see tritium used on a scale vastly greater than has ever been seen before. Something like a 220kg per year of tritium will be consumed for every 1GW of continuous electrical generation, assuming that 4GW thermal will generate 2GW electrical of which 1GW will be used to provide all the inputs to the system leaving 1GW of output power. At present world-wide electrical consumption averages to a continuous 1700GW
Some more details on tritium:
Since ITER will produce only a tiny proportion of the tritium it uses (at least in the early years) because the experimental test blanket modules will only cover a small area of the chamber, ITER alone will severely deplete the worlds tritium stock. If DEMO is heavily overlapped in time with ITER the tritium supply will be very critical and it will be important to get the full blanket and tritium recovery system going as soon as possible if the programme is not to be delayed.
So, summarizing and simplifying: don’t get your hopes up yet. Fusion power might be a welcome addition to the energy mix of the future, but it will never be our only source, at least not unless we are actually developing version 2.0 or higher of the technologies (with the first commercial reactor being 1.0 at the max.). Our future will depend on clean and CO2-neutral energy sources — which will only come as a reliable mix of technologies, ranging from wind power, to geothermal energy, to wave power… and many more technologies. We should embrace all alternatives, and especially prepare for decentralized energy production.
0 Responses to “The future of fusion power”