[jiggawatts]

I love how they won't even start putting the actual fuel (deuterium-tritium) into it for another decade, and then it's still just a research reactor, so it has no hope of producing a useful amount of recoverable electricity.

For that, there's the upcoming DEMO reactor, which will demonstrate (hence the name) electricity generation no earlier than 2048, a quarter of a century from today.

In 2050, half way through the century, according to the EU plans for fusion power, there will be one (1) fusion power plant on the continent that can make any amount of electricity, for a net cost of $100 billion.

That $100 billion could have purchased 100 GW of installed utility-scale solar at 2022 prices[1], which continue to drop. By 2050, that amount of money could have likely purchased 200 GW plus batteries, covering about 50% of the European Union electricity demand.

Instead the EU will have a single ~1 GW of fusion power plant, with each additional gigawatt costing ten-plus billion, vastly more expensive than renewable energy sources by that decade.

[1] https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-in...

[mythhabit]

A fusion reactor is the long term game. Sure we could use that money to add more capacity to the grid, but what we need is to take fossil fuels offline and 200 GW would barely make a dent in the production from coal if the consumption continues to increase. In 2022 it was estimated that coal produced 44000 TWh and that number increase at an alarming rate every year.

So we need to do something to meet the futures energy demands, but we also need to do something today. The smart thing is to invest in what we can do today, solar, wind and batteries, and invest what we can do in the near future, better fission reactors is one possibility, and invest in the long term, that could be fusion. It would be foolish to only invest in one of them.

[jiggawatts]

Long term? You say that like the Sun will go out and we’ll need artificial power to survive.

[mythhabit]

If we rely on solar, we need a massive overcapacity. In large parts of the world the output of a solar panel is 50% in the winter compared to the summer, and in addition, we use significantly more power during the winter. And that will be even further exaggerated if fossils do not heat water for district heating in addition to the power produced - but perhaps that is offset by AC usage in the summer. Either way, we would need a significant overcapacity to meet demand, not to mention huge investments in battery infrastructure.

And that does not even take predictable peaks into account (think the pause of a national event with lots of viewers, where people make coffee/tea/snacks at the same time), which needs fossil peaker plants, or even more battery capacity.

[sgift]

Yes, research costs money at first in the hope of getting results later. Comparing it to buying something is only useful if you think what the research does can also be achieved by that. Since you ignore the question of whether Europe even has space for 100 or 200GW of solar power, that this power is only intermediately available (though there's hope that storage will be somewhat solved in 2050 using ... research!) and so on. We could get Fusion faster. That would cost more money. Governments are not willing to invest that, so we stay the course with the slow path.

edit: Also, your 100b estimate is even higher than the - disputed - worst case assumptions of the DOE, which is somewhere between 45 to 65b. Also: http://www.iter.org/faq#Do_we_really_know_how_much_ITER_will...

[Kon5ole]

>Since you ignore the question of whether Europe even has space for 100 or 200GW of solar power

That's a question that can safely be ignored though, Germany alone has installed rooftop solar on a small percentage of homes and is already at 70GW. Space is not a problem for solar, you can install it everywhere. It's so cheap now that it's viable even in sub-optimal locations.

>though there's hope that storage will be somewhat solved in 2050 using ... research!

It is solved already, all that remains to do is to build it. Germany has enough gas storage to last a year, and we know how to generate gas from electricity. It's being done in several places already.

I think the major hold-up is political. Moving energy production from the current government-controlled central power plants to small-scale operations close to the consumer is too disruptive for lots of reasons. But I have hope that eventually we'll get there, it just takes time.

That said, spending billions on things that won't solve any problems for the nest 50 years and using that as a reason to not actually do the thing that will work is inexcusable. At least do both.

[jorvi]

> I think the major hold-up is political.

No, the major hold-up is that saner heads prevail.

I’m pretty green myself, but the vehement hatred most other green people display towards nuclear (whether it is fission or fusion) is mind-boggling.

We will not have the grid storage to do baseload via renewable+batteries. There is not enough production capacity now, and production will not keep up with demand by a long shot.

We need nuclear. Just fucking stop pushing us down a pit where we say in 25 years “well, shit, I guess we did need to start building nuclear 25 years ago. Fire up the coal plants!”.

[Kon5ole]

>vehement hatred most other green people display towards nuclear (whether it is fission or fusion) is mind-boggling.

The hatred is understandable when you read stuff like this: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/05/sellafield-...

One example of many many many. It really seems like replacing one problem with another.

That being said, my main problems with nuclear are 1) we solve the current acute problem much faster with solar+storage than with nuclear and 2) nuclear power drains much of same money that could be spent on solar+storage and 3) nuclear guarantees large expenses for future generations for the foreseeable future.

>We will not have the grid storage to do baseload via renewable+batteries.

Sure we will if we build it - there are no technical hurdles whatsoever to build all the storage we need, both batteries and gas are viable, and we also have pumped storage and other mechanisms. Moreover, since we have at least 10x the workforce with the required skillset to build storage than we have workers who can make nuclear plants, we can mobilize many more at once.

Seriously - if you want to reduce emissions right now, you need to subsidize storage. Green hydrogen, pumped storage, batteries, everything.

If we do this, not only will it start making a difference immediately, but 5 years from now we will have reduced emissions by the same amount as a bunch of nuclear power plants. Effects will be noticeable from year 1.

Meanwhile not a single nuclear power plant will be built in 5 years.

[jorvi]

If the whole western world, China, Japan and Australia all want to switch to grid storage, we cant in a hundred years scale up production enough, especially because ’everything’ else in the world also needs batteries.

Building enough grid storage is a pie in the sky. Don’t fall for it- enough people do and we are all screwed.

[Kon5ole]

I disagree. Making hydrogen and batteries is already so cheap that companies that need lots of energy are doing it for entirely financial and self-serving reasons. You can make hydrogen gas from water using things you have in a typical kitchen drawer.

It is by now technically cheaper for a steel mill to make it's own energy than to buy energy, even if they buy it from a nuclear plant that has already been built, and they can do it in 1-2 years. Once they have done it, they no longer use centrally produced energy, leaving more for the rest of us. Multiply this with thousands of large energy consuming companies everywhere and you have made real progress very fast.

Battery production capacity has grown exponentially and will continue to get cheaper thanks to the electric car transition. Cars get recycled and the batteries can be repurposed to storage, and in a few years when electric cars are the standard, the sales will plummet from the peak leaving enormous capacity available for grid storage. The latest battery chemistries in use in cars today use the most abundant elements on earth.

So, there are no logistical limits, no technological limits, no limited resources to prevent this from happening today, the limits are instead things like battery storage being taxed both when it stores energy and when it delivers energy, private producers being taxed on their own production and so on.

Such regulations are put in place to prevent the loss of control over a major part of the economy, and is IMO the main obstacle to solving the problem.

Talking about making nuclear plants is a nice way for politicians to keep control of the electricity money fountain, but nuclear power is IMO a very poor solution to the problem of fossil fuels since it will always be very expensive, slow to deploy, and a very bad problem all by itself.

[djtango]

where does all the copper and lithium come from to enable this mass electrification and storage of energy?

Let's hope we don't need too much cobalt too?

[Kon5ole]

>where does all the copper and lithium come from to enable this mass electrification and storage of energy? Let's hope we don't need too much cobalt too?

We will save copper since electricity can be produced close to where it's being consumed, eliminating millions of miles of powerlines from central powerplants to everywhere else.

We need no lithium or copper at all in order to create hydrogen, ammonia or methane, and no lithium for iron-air batteries which are more suited for grid storage than lithium-ion.

We probably won't need any cobalt at all for grid storage, it is even being eliminated in electric cars already.

[robertlagrant]

> It is solved already, all that remains to do is to build it. Germany has enough gas storage to last a year, and we know how to generate gas from electricity. It's being done in several places already.

If storage is solved, then I think we would've heard about it.

> That said, spending billions on things that won't solve any problems for the nest 50 years and using that as a reason to not actually do the thing that will work is inexcusable. At least do both.

Who is using this as a reason to not do the other thing?

[Kon5ole]

>If storage is solved, then I think we would've heard about it.

Here's one of many many ways how the storage problem has been solved: https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/products-servi...

>Who is using this as a reason to not do the other thing?

It's not stated directly of course but if you look at the money there is a discrepancy. The largest battery storage facility in Europe cost about 90 million euros, while the EU has granted over 5000 million to the ITER Tokamak project.

So, clearly one thing is being done at a much larger scale than the other thing, deliberately or not.

[rapnie]

Well, if all this R&D investment gives us clean energy for the next centuries at affordable cost, it is an improvement right? And we don't have to cover our land and waters with solar farms that have their own externalities (limited lifetime, waste, harmful materials, etc).

[raffraffraff]

The problem is surviving long enough to make a fusion breakthrough. Fusion may actually be an impossible engineering problen. Fission is cheap and easy by comparison.

[jl6]

Many EU countries aren’t blessed with the square mileage and hours of sunlight required for giga-scale solar. A dense, continuous power source would be very welcome, even at a higher cost.

[gnfargbl]

Then why aren't those EU countries negotiating agreements with other less-well-off countries that are so blessed?

Yes, that would require a cable. But it isn't rational to be in a situation where we believe we can build a fusion reactor, but some relatively simple civil engineering is apparently beyond us.

[wkat4242]

The EU is surrounded by a bunch of dictatorships. Not exactly the ones you want to have you by the balls for something as important as energy.

See what's happening now with the Middle East. Don't want to repeat that dependency. I'm referring to the UAE basically using the climate conference as a sales conference for fossil.

[ragebol]

Though not the EU anymore, but something like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe...

The downside being you still don't have energy independence, if that is a goal.

[offices]

It should be a goal. It's less than 2 years since a former EU ally used our dependence on them for energy as a bargaining tool.

[gnfargbl]

We haven't had energy independence in Europe for decades. That risk is managed by hedging, and there's no reason we couldn't do the same with long-distance solar interconnects.

[adwn]

> We haven't had energy independence in Europe for decades.

Yes, and that has bitten us in the ass big time.

[stavros]

It's odd to me that you're fine with the fruits of all other research, such as solar panels or power transmission infrastructure, but this particular bit of research is an affront.

[Kon5ole]

You don't need new square mileage for solar, you can add it to areas already used for other things. The Netherlands for example have the largest percentage of rooftop solar of all the EU countries, getting over 14% of their yearly electricity production from it.

[numpad0]

Rooftop solar don't work when a single house's worth of roof can generate a whole family, && there are more than one family sharing the land - energy generated from solar is proportional to projected area on the land and not volume or total surface area of buildings on it. I guess buildings are lower-rise in Netherlands(which is good for your psychological health).

[closewith]

Is there any country in the EU (bar the micronations) that doesn't have sufficient space for either solar or wind or a mix of both?

[AndrewDucker]

It is worth doing multiple things, some short term, some long term. If you only ever invest in the solution which pays back right now, then you never get the next step.

We should absolutely be doing both.

[ragebol]

Our energy needs are ever increasing. If we ever want to get to what is currently science fiction, we'll need fusion energy, otherwise we'll eventually blanket the Earth in solar panels.

Maybe they'll be in time to provide energy to slurp carbon out of the atmosphere. Or power huge spacecraft etc etc.

[shermantanktop]

Various estimates put the US’s entire energy supply as requiring enough solar panels to fill a square between 100 and 150 miles on a side. If efficiency goes up (which has upper bounds) and panels are integrated into buildings, solar being that virtually limitless supply doesn’t seem far-fetched.

[specialist]

Fusion is a terrific way to build and retain a knowledge skill stack indefinitely. IMHO, fusion is preferable to nukes (weapons) for that purpose.

[jacquesm]

2048 is twentyfive years from now.

[nosrepa]

ITER has no hope of producing any electricity because there are no turbines on site.