Britain has a chance to be a nuclear fusion superpower. We must not blow it
Our record in energy production is a long list of timidity, under-investment, and indecision
Sigh.
The value of fusion is that we get cheap electricity. The value of cheap electricity is vastly, hugely, greater than whatever amount the capitalists will be able to cream off the top of selling it to us.
The other way of stating this is that a working fusion reactor is a public good. Once one has been created then everyone will know a) that it can be done and b) roughly at least how to do it. We can’t stop people from using a) and b) and people using a) and b) doesn’t diminish the amount we can use. A fusion reactor, in this grander sense, is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. It’s a public good.
The raw fuel is seawater, that’s actually the point of it.
Exactly and precisely because a working fusion reactor is a public good then it doesn’t matter a damn who creates either the first or subsequent ones. Also, it means that it’s not possible to become a fusion superpower. There’s nothing there to own which allows power to be exercised.
‘Our record in energy production is a long list of timidity, under-investment, and indecision’
Well, yes. Otherwise the UK’d be totally fracked by now.
70 years research, billions spent, and not even a pilot project running? It will never work.
And it doesn’t run on seawater. You have to extract the deuterium from the water and get the tritium too. Is that cheap? No.
The other way of stating this is that a working fusion reactor is a public good.
How does your reactor meet the requirement of non-excludability and non-rivalry to be classed as a public good?
Perhaps we could use it to power IronMan suits.
El Draque, my latest fusion fad, General Fusion, proposes turning lithium into tritium by neutron bombardment.
No doubt the Green’ll shriek in horror at this blasphemous sabotage of the glorious push for EV’s.
In the old days, the first tribe (or country) to master a new technology would use it to conquer less advanced tribes (or countries). Since we don’t tend to do that so much these days, there is less of a first-mover advantage.
How does your reactor meet the requirement of non-excludability and non-rivalry to be classed as a public good?
As Tim said, because once it’s known it’s possible to do it, it becomes something everyone can do.
But the article is indeed Torygraph bollocks. The UK does not have an economy large enough to support the development of a leading edge commercial fusion reactor. It’d be the same as if those geniuses in Oxford’s PPE dept came up with a working FTL drive. The Brit economy couldn’t support putting a 50,000 tonnes spaceship in orbit to go to the stars. Doubt if the US economy could.
The transistor was a Brit development wasn’t it? Once the principle was established, anyone could make them & did. You can’t patent the laws of physics.
Think you’re talking about the cavity magnetron not the transistor BiS.
Though I understand the engineers at GEC descended on it like a flock of rabid vultures. Proving your and Tim’s arguments.
Also note that despite the recent headlines about nuclear fusion success, they are still a very, very long way from it being a viable energy source. If/when they ever get there something else may have evolved or been created that makes it useless or no big deal.
So, how’s about we don’t bet the farm on it?
once it’s known it’s possible to do it, it becomes something everyone can do
Oh right, thanks for explaining that.
Andrew M,
“In the old days, the first tribe (or country) to master a new technology would use it to conquer less advanced tribes (or countries). Since we don’t tend to do that so much these days, there is less of a first-mover advantage.”
Because what’s the benefit today? Agricultural land isn’t worth the blood and treasure that it was even 90 years ago.
There’s still some mover advantages. Silicon Valley goes right back to Shockley semiconductor, Grasse is still a big centre of the perfume industry from what started over a century ago. The people who get there first with fusion will probably lead to a gravitational pull of rivals in the same area.
The problem is, when has government intervention ever led to this? Picking which fusion projects are likely to work and throwing money at them probably won’t.
What happened to the planned expeditions for mining Dilithium Crystals, Cap’n?
BoM4 I wouldn’t say that is down to first-mover advantage in your examples as much as its down to where the people with the specific knowledge work and live so easier to attract them to competing companies.
“Oh right, thanks for explaining that”
Yeah but TMB, this is just the probkem. Not everyone, well certainly not at the Telegraph realises that . I guess if the technique is particularly novel or clever then it can be patented and licensed and UK could become world leader in making fusion engines for the rest of the world. Wibble
Surely Norway has a head start on the rest. They have all that heavy water at the bottom of one of their fjords.
I thought we (the UK) were meant to be developing as a “Renewable Energy” superpower? If that’s the case fusion has NO chance of ever becoming a viable affordable source of energy…
Otto – No, it was that I hadn’t realised that Tim, like Captain Potato, was using a Humpty Dumpty definition of a public good.
I use non rivalry and non excludability in my description of public good. Inventions are, classically, public goods. That’s why we have patents, so as to provide the incentive to still invent. For, once you made the first one, folk can copy, can’t they?
‘ The value of fusion is that we get cheap electricity. ’
The value of wind and solar power is that we get cheap electricity – where is it? Soon won’t get any electricity at all.
Nobody can calculate the cost of engineering, constructing and running fusion reactors but it is certain it won’t be cheap.
Fusion energy always was, is and ever will be the energy of the future.
‘ The other way of stating this is that a working fusion reactor is a public good.’
No it isn’t.
The science behind it is a public good but how to engineer it won’t be.
A French engineering company bought two Newcomen steam engines and had them shipped to France where they took them apart in order to copy how to build a French version. They already knew how steam engines worked and built them, but theyvdud not know how to engineer them to be more efficient and not keep blowing up.
It’s a shame that the UK based fusion firms are a bit on the crap side. Helion and Zap Energy seem much more likely to make something that works and is commercially viable.
I still think we should have nuked the Soviets as soon as possible after Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wait until Stalin and the Politburo are meeting and then nuke Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad for good measure.
It would have solved a lot of problems down the line, even unto the Ukraine problem today.
‘… As Tim said, because once it’s known it’s possible to do it, it becomes something everyone can do.‘
No it doesn’t. Knowing something can be done is not the same as knowing how to do it.
Roman Britons knew it was possible to build paved roads, stone bridges and stone buildings but didn’t, because they couldn’t – for about a thousand years.
I believe that fans of Net Zero are under the impression that we can power the national grid using solar panels, wind turbines and a big battery as back up for when it’s dark and not windy. To give an idea of the scale of that particular challenge, a million Nissan Leaf battery packs, if fully charged, could power the grid for just over an hour. Twenty million would last about a day. A hundred and forty million would provide cover for a week. They cost about ten grand each. On average the current turbines and solar panels only supply about a fifth of the required power so we would need to carpet the country with them to keep our battery charged. Who can say whether that amount of wind turbines would have an effect on the weather?
Fusion energy always was, is and ever will be the energy of the future.
I understand it will be used to power the cure for male pattern baldness.
Roman Britons knew it was possible to build paved roads, stone bridges and stone buildings but didn’t, because they couldn’t – for about a thousand years.
More accurately, the Angles and Saxons knew it was possible but didn’t. The Roman Britons were the ones who built most of the infrastructure. They knew how but were culturally smashed, much like the Roman Romans a bit later. The Germanic invaders most likely knew how (it wasn’t rocket science) but regarded such things with contempt.
SBML,
Sure, but getting that first generation is a lot about being one of the first places, so you attract the first dozen people, which then leads to more and more.
Like the Shockley Semiconductor Lab was the size of an Aldi store in Mountain View. Not a huge number of people. But they then quit, started rivals, and they all start bringing people in, and eventually, you have Facebook, Google, Apple all within that area.
If Shockley’s mother had died a bit younger, or her son wasn’t such a nice boy, silicon valley would be in Pasadena. He set up in Palo Alto because that’s where she lived.
A novel way to get cheap energy while you’re figuring out how to build fission nukes, and it’s been almost a year and I don’t understand why it’s not been thought of, is to buy it from Russia.
– A novel way to get cheap energy while you’re figuring out how to build fission nukes, and it’s been almost a year and I don’t understand why it’s not been thought of, is to buy it from Russia.
Probably even those German diplomat twats who laughed at Trump when he warned about reliance on Russian energy would get it now, but some are simply beyond hope of understanding.
The problem is, when has government intervention ever led to this? Picking which fusion projects are likely to work and throwing money at them probably won’t.
More likely it would involve throwing money at the company with the best diversity and inclusion policy.
I still think we should have nuked the Soviets as soon as possible after Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wait until Stalin and the Politburo are meeting and then nuke Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad for good measure.
The powers that be of the time were probably concerned about a couple of things. It would have been a diabolically fucking evil thing to do, and it would have set a bad precedent.
We were at least at war with Japan; and the Americans spent blood and treasure warning those cities they would be destroyed.
More evil than a further 50 years of Communism and the invasion of much of Eastern Europe? Quite frankly if we were 75 years on from the nuking of Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad, I’d imagine things would be far better (for those that survived, obviously) than the Communist Hell that they lived through.
JohnB
Oh, they could.. and did on occasion where it was worth it.
It just wasn’t economically feasible/practical to do so. Especially since they lacked the huge army of slaves ( and the social structure/manpower needed to keep those slaves in line..) at the time to pull it off.
You build with stone if it is “near” you, when all you have is ox-cart transportation. Italy has plenty rock near, so has most of France and Germany. Iberia isn’t to sniff at in that department as well.
The Lowlands/Roman Britain at the time? Not so much. With large and inconvenient Wet Places all over the place. And the Wrong Kind of Rock.
Those bits in Europe didn’t start to build in stone (again) until they solved the foundation problem, which is one of those feats of engineering development that’s largely overlooked because it isn’t sexy, but necessary to build stone buildings on squishy ground, and not have them collapse in a decade or two…
Those bits in Europe didn’t start to build in stone (again) until they solved the foundation problem
Difficult to see what the foundation problem was. Foundations aren’t to stop[ a building falling over sideways. They’re to stop it sinking or sliding sideways. Which is essentially the same thing. For either, you just dig down until you get to something solid & stable & build from there. Buildings don’t care whether they’re above or below ground. As long as they’re stable.
This sort of thing was known since at least the bronze age. Ugg probably knew it.
It was largely a logistics problem. You need a certain level of economy to invest the time & resources to build in stone if stone would not be your first choice building material. In the Mediterranean it might reverse because of a shortage of suitable wood.
Always remember. Nothing ever gets built with a design longevity of much more than 40 years. The life span of the commissioner.
If we can get D-T fusion to work at scale, it produces a lot of its energy in the form of high-speed neutrons, which have the usual issues associated with radioactivity and don’t do the casing much good either. Effective fusion technology really requires D-He³ fusion*, which produces energetic but charged (and therefore somewhat controllable) alpha and beta particles.
* but if you can get D-T to work, it’s not a huge step to D-He³. It just needs slightly higher values of density, temperature and confinement time parameters.
I recently read a historian who argued that the Gauls must have had a pretty decent network of roads and wooden bridges before Caesar, ahem, rearranged their polity. His basic argument was that the Roman Army could not have advanced at the pace that it did without such infrastructure.
Once the Romans are in charge then you get large trade networks and, eventually, larger populations by enforcing an end to tribal warfare, piracy, and robber bands. Roman roads are better if you are going to move legions around in less than ideal weather.
Roman Eastern England earned a few bob exporting wheat to the legions on the Rhine. So you presumably need roads and harbours that the ancient Brits had less need for, and the subsequent German invaders too. There are no legions on the Rhine to feed if you’ve slaughtered them.
@Chris Miller
D-He3 is clean but getting the He3 in the first place is very very hard. If you had tritium (also very rare) you can wait for many years for that to decay and some of it will form He3. Practically you need to do D-D fusion to make the He3, and that D-D fusion will make neutrons and be messy but at least you can do that in a place which noone cares about (Birmingham perhaps?), then ship the small volume of very very expensive He3 to where you want to generate power.
It was the aromas military that built the roads and bridges so they could easily move troops around to quell rebellions and revolts. When they left there was no central power rich enough to maintain the old and build new so they fell in to disrepair.
Local populations didn’t have the wealth or incentives, even if they maintained the knowledge, as that was just inviting strangers in to attack you.
It wasn’t until the Vikings that there was a central power that needed to be able to get around. I’ve heard more than one argument that it was the need to collect Danegeld that led to the centralisation of power that still afflicts us.
@john galt
…we should have nuked the Soviets as soon as possible after Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wait until Stalin and the Politburo are meeting and then nuke Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad for good measure.
It would have solved a lot of problems down the line…
Agreed. But I’m having a a few problems reverse engineering my perfect foresight. Any tips?
My flux capacitor only takes plutonium and my Mr. Fusion is bust. Yours?
…we should have nuked the Soviets as soon as possible after Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Pretty well the McArthur doctrine. Prosecuted a successful war in the Pacific but rebuilt Japan as a successful liberal democracy, turned a route in Korea into a partial victory. He was right so many times, they just had to fire him.
I get it: we have patents to introduce rivalry and excludability into what would otherwise be public goods. By the same token one can write “abject nonsense” in lieu of “arrant nonsense” because there is no rivalry or excludability between words and their meanings. Is that it?
“I get it: we have patents to introduce rivalry and excludability into what would otherwise be public goods.”
Exactly so, yes. Because without r and e (perhaps r and or e) it’s near impossible to make a profit out of having invested in the production. Therefore less investment in such production happens. So, introduce those and offer a short term protection for having done so to create the incentive to so produce. That is in fact the argument.
Ah. Not just me that thought that was an oddly chosen headline.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/magazine/arrant-nonsense.html
@AndyF
D-He3 is clean but getting the He3 in the first place is very very hard.
Lots of ³He on the lunar surface (so I’m told), even more in the atmosphere of the gas giants.
We already get all of our power from fusion. Its called the Sun!
“Britain has a chance to be a nuclear fusion superpower. We must not blow it”
I guess it would make a big bang!
Ottokring…just watched “The Heroes of Telemark” for the umpteenth time!