Also, what do people think of hybrid reactors, which use an energy-subcritical fusion reactor to provide additional neutrons for a fission breeder reactor? This exploits the fact that fission is energy-rich but neutron-poor, while fusion is energy-poor but neutron-rich.

        David Pace said:

Nice data table. While there are certainly some people claiming fusion will be a “holy grail”, I don’t think anyone is actually trying to compare it fission. These energy production methods are not in competition because fission has an industry behind it while fusion is an active research program. Of course, both fields have research arms, but this is like comparing processor chips (industry based) to quantum computing (research based), fields that seek similar goals but are not in competition at the moment. The point is that the money for fusion and fission should be coming from different places and one should not affect the other.

It’s not entirely accurate to say that there are “Decades of failed attempts at “break even”” because break even (while definitely the ultimate goal en route to energy production) has rarely been the task of fusion experiments. There is still a lot of fusion physics that remains to be understood. Experiments are often conducted well away from break even scenarios because there is a wealth of information still to be obtained.

Question: Would you say most fusion research, fusion reactors/facilities and funding exists to the end goal of creating a viable energy source or simply as a pure science kind of pursuit to better understand fusion and plasma physics in general?

I know with ITER all I hear is how they really want to get to the point of putting out energy and demonstrate it as a power source. It sounds like at least that project is more of an energy thing than just understanding it better. Or maybe they just say that to get funding?

        David Pace said:

It’s not entirely accurate to say that there are “Decades of failed attempts at “break even”” because break even (while definitely the ultimate goal en route to energy production) has rarely been the task of fusion experiments. There is still a lot of fusion physics that remains to be understood. Experiments are often conducted well away from break even scenarios because there is a wealth of information still to be obtained.

Yeah, I think you’re right. I changed that. It was a bit deceptive.

Noted and corrected

I do wonder is the ITER thing is funded because it’s a nice way to spend lots of money without actually upsetting the current apple cart. But I’m old an cynical like that. ‘Cheap’ nuclear fusion would upset too many entrenched interested, expensive fusion (or at least comparably priced to fission) is easier to handle.

I think none of our energy plans should incorporate the idea of fusion, or dyson spheres or any such figments from science fiction. True, we will see marvelous things in the future. But the plans that we make for present (or for the next 200 years) should not be dependent on these wish lists.

Having said that, we humans have a very deep problem with understanding exponential growth. If you asked someone 100 years ago to make an energy plan, he would have considered only coal, not even oil. Now just after 100 years, we are close to extinguishing oil reserves and about to tap into nuclear fission power for real.

It is quite possible that something drastic will happen in the next 100 years, we cannot reach the summits of the exponential curve and imagine how it feels like over there. The best we can do is to plan for the present. Future will be doubly exciting. Who knows, we might discover better ways of producing power by tapping directly into mass energy equivalence.. ? Or probably there is an equivalence even more fundamental in physics that will be discovered ??

        An Actual Scientist said:

It drives me crazy though every time I hear someone say “… until we have fusion energy” as if to assume there will be fusion power in 20 years and we just need a contingency plan to get us by until it is available. You cannot bank on there being scientific discoveries that we have not yet made.

You have hit the nail on the head Actual; this is a huge part of the problem in getting everyone that doesn’t buy into the Green agenda, but believes we have to find new energy, onside for new nuclear builds.

It drives me crazy though every time I hear someone say “… until we have fusion energy” as if to assume there will be fusion power in 20 years and we just need a contingency plan to get us by until it is avaliable. You cannot bank on there being scientific discoveries that we have not yet made.

We may have fusion energy tomorrow (in the highly unlikely event that someone comes up with a breakthrough method of creating fusion) or we may never have fusion energy, or we may have it in ten years or one hundred years, or we may have it in ten years and then find it is not worth the trouble.

At the moment our best bet seems to be building the systems we have now only making them bigger and refining some of the design issues. I’m not very hopeful that will lead to an economical and useful fusion energy system. Lets not forget that step one is breaking even in the laboratory on a prototype system and step two is turning that into a mass deployment commercial system, and there’s a veritable canyon between those two steps. We’ve not even really reached step one yet. (we may never or we may in the relatively near future. I don’t know.)