Viable fusion power in a decade? Tokamak Energy dares to dream Brit nuclear fusion biz Tokamak Energy has detailed early progress in a US Department of Energy (DOE) project that aims to deliver commercial fusion energy in the next decade. The Oxfordshire-based company gave an overview of its early design workflow for the US Fusion Development Program at the 66th Annual Meeting of the …
"85 MW of net electricity, which the company claims would be enough to power and heat more than 70,000 American homes."
So 1KW per American home?
Single detached family homes in the USA use 16KWh/year = 2KW average power, and that's not including any gas heating or charging EVs
Hopefully the rest of their plan for commercial fusion power is more realistic
You can drive air con from a district heating system in summer, using absorption coolers. This approach is not very efficient and for commercial viability relies on the fact that many district heat systems are willing to almost give the heat away in summer, or that the local electricity network is heavily constrained and simply can't supply the power for masses of conventional air conditioners.
The advantage of district heating is that it works very well in highly dense urban centers with large numbers of apartment towers all under the control of a single central authority and clustered around a central nuclear power plant = the American suburban dream
>I'm more worried about where the other 715MW of fusion power goes...
Maybe I've grasped the wrong end of the stick, but I interpreted the numbers in the article as "the reactor will generate 800MW of power, but need 715MW of input power to achieve & contain fusion, leaving a net gain of 85MW"...?
You're just substituting their calculations for what an average home uses with yours. Why should I believe your numbers? I use a bit under 10 KWh per day in my American home, so I'm well under both their and your numbers...
That will increase next year when I replace my furnace and AC with a heat pump, but it will probably still be under 1 KW averaged over a whole year (the water heater and oven will still be gas, but that wouldn't add all that much if I got a water heater using a heat pump and electric oven which I run probably an hour or two a week on average) Yes my house is smaller than the average new home at just under 2000 sq ft (I think the new homes average something like 2400 sq ft these days) but larger than the average if all single family homes are considered, let alone all homes including condos and apartments.
I've been running a heat pump for domestic heating for coming up to 5 years and salute your plan!
In our temperate climate here in England, water heating averages out to near enough 50% of the energy the heat pump consumes over the course of the year, and the overall consumption is running marginally shy of 25% of the prior direct (electric) heating. Depending on the relative costs of electricity vs gas where you are (and how cold it gets in winter there), I think you might be missing a trick not using the heat pump for at least some of your hot water too.
"Single detached family homes" probably don't make up all of the US housing stock.
"According to the most recent data from the United States Energy Information Administration, the average American household consumes 10,800 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity a year. That translates to approximately 900 kWh a month and 30 kWh per day"
Meanwhile completely ignoring the fact that we have a perfectly functional and very efficient fusion reactor running continuously only a few million miles away, which is not actually owned by anyone and which shares its energy upon the just and unjust all alike.
Make hay while the Sun shines.
They propose to use the Duterium-Tritium reaction, which produces a high energy neutron. They want to use lithium to capture the neutron to produce heat and more Tritium. There are so many problems with this plan!
- You won't get 100% absorption of the neutrons in the lithium, so you're going to have the building irradiated by high energy neutrons
- You need a specific isotope of lithium. Lithium is abundant, but the refining procedure is difficult.
- Lithium+neutron only produces one tritium, so you have to add tritium from some other source
- Tritium has a half-life of 12 years, there is no natural tritium. Today Tritium is available commercially from the Canadian "CANDU" reactors, as a by-product. No new CANDU reactors are being built and the existing ones are progressively being decommissioned.
So before we get to the engineering challenges, just the powerpoint presentation is not perticularly believable.
There are other reactions available, but at much higher temperatures that we can't currently hold in a Tokamack. Come back in 10 years with a better powerpoint please.
In a presentation at the event, Tokamak's assistant chief engineer, Erik Mårtensson, detailed the company's contribution to the program. It aims to deliver a pre-conceptual design for a fusion pilot plant based on a high-field spherical unicorn with high-temperature superconducting magic.
Fueled by a Deuterium-Fairydust reaction..
I find it quite depressing actually when I see major investors in Fusion: Shell, Exxon, BP, Total..
They aren't daft, they know full well that Fusion has a snowball's chance in Hell of ever being feasible/scalable/profitable, never mind threatening the oil industry, but they know that it pulls public support and engineering resources away from Fission, which really does pose a threat to their business.
Or, they are looking ahead and know damned well their current business model is doom and so, as energy companies (primarily), they are investing in anything that might keep then in the business they know. They're re also investing heavily in solar and wind and even some in tidal energy.
Whatever the greens think, we're still a long way from "big oil" stopping their primary business, but they do know the writing is on the wall. Even the US based ones, whatever Trump might have recently said about oil and coal.
Solar and Wind can never compete with Oil and Gas, because it's neither constant nor dispatchable. Tidal is only marginally more feasible than Fusion. "Long Duration Energy Storage" without an existing mountaintop lake is also about as feasible as Fusion. So if anything, those renewables support the oil and gas industry, by ensuring that we all need gas peaker plants and backup diesel generators. So i'm not surprised to see Big Oil pushing money their way.
I would be surprised to see Big Oil investing in nuclear fission though.
er, It can't and it doesn't.
while we no longer have coal, we are still massively dependent on gas and somewhat-younger dead trees. I have not seen a single day where we have "not fired up any gas plants" - never mind a string of such days in a row.
Don't forget we also have a lot of interconnectors, bringing coal/gas/nuclear power from Europe, although currently three out of four links from France are down, plus one from Norway. I'm sure they are spurious faults, not Russian sabotage.
Go to gridwatch.co.uk, look at the "this year / last year (Day averages)" graph, and find me a day where we have not used gas or biomass.
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