Fusion reactors could become an economically viable means of generating electricity within a few decades, a team of UK researchers has claimed.
The group, from Durham University and Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, has re-examined the economics of fusion, and taken into account recent advances in superconductor technology.
The research, published in the journal Fusion Engineering and Design, builds on earlier findings that a fusion power plant could generate electricity at a similar price to a fission plant and identifies new advantages in using the new superconductor technology.
Fusion reactors generate electricity by heating plasma to around 100 million degrees centigrade so that hydrogen atoms fuse together, releasing energy. This differs from fission reactors which work by splitting atoms at much lower temperatures.
The report, which was commissioned by Research Council UK’s Energy Programme focuses on recent advances in high temperature superconductors. These materials could be used to construct the powerful magnets that keep the hot plasma in position inside the containing vessel, known as a tokamak, at the heart of a fusion reactor.
This advancing technology means that the superconducting magnets could be built in sections rather than in one piece. This would mean that maintenance, which is expensive in a radioactive environment, would be much cheaper because individual sections of the magnet could be withdrawn for repair or replacement, rather than the whole device.
While the analysis considers the cost of building, running and decommissioning a fusion power plant, it does not take into account the costs of disposing of radioactive waste that is associated with a fission plant.
For a fusion plant, the only radioactive waste would be the tokamak, when decommissioned, which would have become mildly radioactive during its lifetime.
Professor Damian Hampshire, of the Centre for Material Physics at Durham University, who led the study, said: “Obviously we have had to make assumptions, but what we can say is that our predictions suggest that fusion won’t be vastly more expensive than fission.”
Hampshire said he hoped that the analysis would help persuade policy-makers and the private sector to invest more heavily in fusion energy.
“Fission, fusion or fossil fuels are the only practical options for reliable large-scale base-load energy sources. Calculating the cost of a fusion reactor is complex, given the variations in the cost of raw materials and exchange rates. However, this work is a big step in the right direction” he said.
A test fusion reactor, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), is about 10 years away from operation in the South of France. Its aim is to prove the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy.
Its always 5 decades away.
“It’s always 5 decades away…” and was 5 decades ago when thorium reactors were operating under test kicking out juice.
Forget the breeder risk, that can be managed, why aren’t we puting a fraction of the fusion money into small modular fission breeders?
The article claims that “fusion won’t be vastly more expensive than fission,” but fission power is already several times too expensive to compete with other energy sources. The proposed Hinchley Point monstrosity is priced at $10,000 per kW.
Whatever the concept, any DT-fueled controlled fusion reactor would be
1) an installation constructed at extraordinarily high cost
2) that uses nuclear weapons fuel (tritium) partially or entirely produced in fission reactors, and
3) consumes enormous amounts of electrical energy
4) in order to generate relativistic neutron streams that produce large masses of radioactive material.”
It seems arrant nonsense to suppose that fusion electricity could be as cheap as fission. A fission reactor is simple in concept but not that easy to build, while a fusion reactor is horrendously complex, even on paper. One only needs to look at the ITER costs (and ITER is a very simple machine compared with the real thing) to support my point.
First, it’s a shame that the phrase ‘fusion won’t be vastly more expensive than fission’, was chosen. That’s not a particularly positive point to make, and against a poorly quantified cost reference. It is especially unhelpful given one other point referenced from the report that ‘it does not take into account the costs of disposing of radioactive waste that is associated with a fission plant’. Unfortunately, as this is pretty much the biggest issue with fission plant, it significantly devalues the comparison.
With regards to some of the subsequent comments: ‘nuclear weapons fuel…produced in fission reactors’ – fusion reactors need this to start DT fusion but once operational they can produce Tritium from Lithium; ‘consume enormous amounts of electricity’ – true, but they will produce significantly more! (The electricity consumption of oil refineries is huge!); ‘large masses of radioactive material’ – except that they actually produce relatively small quantities, of generally short lived material (uranium content in coal, anyone? ‘NORM’ produced as a by-product of oil drilling?).
Finally, while many new technologies are expensive, they do, generally, get cheaper and more efficient as they are developed. Ten years ago, a 42″ plasma display was the best part of £6000. Newcomen’s condensing engine was the size of a house and developed a few hp. Maybe we should have given up on these, too?
Only a few hours ago I read a new report on *in market* prices on various electricity sources. Wind is now the cheapest form of power in the UK. Not by a tiny amount either.
If you take a look at a conventional power plant you’ll see why. A coal plant, for instance, consists of a big coal burner, a steam generator, a steam turbine, an electrical generator, a cooling system, and lots of pipes between it all.
A wind turbine consists of a pole, turbine blades and a generator. While the lower energy density and lack of dispatch have real effects on the LCoE, in the end its simplicity wins out. CAPEX on wind turbines is down around $1.75 these days, perhaps 1/3 that of a coal plant, and 1/8 that of a fission plant.
Now the problem faces any power source using the Rankin cycle. In fact, even if you generate the heat for free with a magic unicorn horn, it’s likely the case that the wind turbine will still generate power for less once you consider CAPEX interest and ongoing OPEX.
So basically that means fusion can’t *ever* compete. The people working in the field keep working on the technical side of things, and making advances like this one. But that’s like making better brakes for horse carriages, it doesn’t make a difference how good they are, people are still going to buy the car.
As Richard notes in the post above this one, plasma displays used to cost a lot of money. True, but today plasma displays are gone. That’s because LCDs came along, and they will always be cheaper to make. Always, it’s just a fact of the way they are built. And that’s why all the major manufacturers did indeed give up on them. Once it was clear the technology was never, ever, going to beat LCD in the market, it became a niche play for people with more money than brains.
Fusion is in the same place. So is fission. Everyone in the industry is aware of this. There’s some dead-cat-flop going on, but that will be well over “in decades”.
To build a fission plant in the late 1940’s was as expensive as to build a fusion plant today. Be patient, just a few decades and fusion will be the number one soulution for producing electricity.
“Wind is now the cheapest form of power in the UK”
With or without the large subsidies?
To produce an average 1 GWe from wind power requires more concrete and steel than to produce 1 GWe from nuclear. The expected life time of a wind generator is 20 years, a nuclear plant 60 years. Which is the sensible investment in resources?
Best regards
Roger
It is a shame that there is little information on there about the advances being made at Culham…
I had a great conversation with a senior chap there (I will withhold his name in case he/I should not be saying), stating they were in the support systems development phase prior to building a scaled experimental “fusion generation reactor” (It may actually be the ITER he meant…I cannot recall) which they hope to begin construction on in 2018.
I hope the information was correct, because I have been watching this with interest since the late 70s!
Err….from the article, if the cost of dealing with fission waste was not considered and the fusion rector was still comparibly as cost effective as the Fission reactors, doesn’t that make it more cost effective overall by a large order of magnitude…?
Quite which advances in superconducting magnet technology are relevant to the fusion scene is not clear, and nor is it clear how this could greatly affect the cost of building a reactor. In fact the Engineer article talks about repair costs.
Any comment about the cost of fusion should be taken with a large pinch of salt. The last time, a careful study was made – by the European Fusion Development agency in 2005, but no longer on their website – they claimed they pretended their projected electricity costs, calculated for a typical reactor, were for the first reactor, but then that the tenth reactor would be 65% less, before finally reducing this by almost 50% “in a mature fusion industry”. The costs were thus cleverly reduced by a factor of near three!! (See Nature 454, 24 July 2008, pg.397)
Roger B: “The expected life time of a wind generator is 20 years, a nuclear plant 60 years.”
Nuclear: Without subsidy?
The actual lifetime of the 76 turbines being installed at the Pen y Cymoedd Wind Energy Project on the mountain above my home is 25 years, ONLY for the purpose of amortising the initial cost. The reality, in which accountants don’t live, will be 76 functional foundations and towers, still in place a century from now, or longer. The cables, blades and generators can be refurbished or replaced.
A nuclear plant, fission or fusion, will be dead and buried in 60 years and probably cost the same or more to replace on an adjacent site. This is neither affordable nor sustainable, but it will be good enough to tide us over, until we get the intelligent stuff (renewables) built.
Last time I looked, there’s a massive fusion reactor 0.00001581 light years from where I’m sitting. We can get all the energy we’ll ever need from our Sun, guaranteed and free, as long as the Earth remains habitable. Then there’s the additional power from the Moon. What’s the problem?
Dave,
I agree that renewables are a good goal. The problem is that the structure of our society as well as our current infrastructure is not compatible with their variable and intermittent outputs. The current parasitical wind and solar PV systems are not sustainable.
We can attempt to restructure society to accept that certain services are not available 24-7. Some probably have to be such as healthcare and communications. This is not impossible although I think that it comes under very difficult. We survived various periods of rolling blackouts in the past.
The alternative is to rebuild our current infrastructure to include very significant amounts of storage plus much greater carrying capacities over a wider geographical area. This is also not impossible but will require a very large expenditure in cash terms as well as in raw materials. As we will effectively have to have two sources capable of generating/delivering the required energy a rough estimate would be twice the raw materials (with twice the energy consumption and twice the pollution to produce them) and twice the costs.
It is a problem.
Best regards
Roger
(Our current system) “is not compatible with their variable and intermittent outputs.”
That’s true, but it is not a big problem. Grids already run fine on renewables, with little or no storage.
“wind and solar PV systems are not sustainable.” That simply isn’t true.
Infrastructure is being built (international interconnectors) and proposed (Super Grid), but that is the wrong investment. Spend £2bn on before-generator energy storage, built into Scottish off-shore wind/wave farms, and the £2bn NorthConnect cable to Norway becomes worthless.
“As we will effectively have to have two sources capable of generating/delivering the required energy a rough estimate would be twice the raw materials (with twice the energy consumption and twice the pollution to produce them) and twice the costs.” No, we won’t need “two sources”.
Some analyses put that as high as three times. i.e. A total generating capacity of 3x peak demand, if we build a system using current renewables technology without storage. Of course, nobody in their right mind is going to do that. I agree with you “It is a problem”, but only because the people ruining the UK are not in their right minds. That’s where Corbynomics should come to the rescue.
The threat of “rolling blackouts” is a ploy used by an unethical industry to ensure greater profits. They want a more generous capacity market. The government purchase of an existing strategic reserve solves that problem very easily, but the idiots are ideologically opposed to that!
One thing is known to double the costs of everything, including nuclear, and that’s the current economic insanity of servicing debt at the ‘market’ price. (with the CfD)
“Grids already run fine on renewables, with little or no storage.”
But only because they are backed up by thermal power stations which are generally run at lower efficiencies to compensate for the fluctuating demand.
This will become harder to support as the proportion of attached fluctuating sources increases.
Best regards
Roger
no matter how many solar or wind stations there will always be base-load requirements (especially at night on still summers evenings….or worse…midwinter and still!)
Whilst this is often “got round” by the use of “instant hydro” (Dinorwig and Cruichan), that is only to allow the conventional (coal and gas) stations to spin-up!
More needs to be invested (regardless of source of the generation – sustainable or otherwise [sorry, I think “Renewable” is such an inappropriate term, “sustainable” is the term that SHOULD be used]) in the power smoothing technologies…be it battery banks, increased RP hydro, molten salt, hydrogen electrolysys etc.
IMHO, the issue is NOT the ability to generate, but the flexibility and transportability of that power source!
Roger,
“But only because they are backed up by thermal power stations which are generally run at lower efficiencies.” That problem is grossly overstated. The issue as far as the industry is concerned is not being able to run their CCGT plant and make a good profit, because the renewables don’t fall short often enough! This is why they want more revenue from the rigged capacity market.
https://awelshmansblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/rwenpower-express-fears-over-pembroke-power-station-profitability-and-2014-mothballing/
“This will become harder to support as the proportion of attached fluctuating sources increases.” – which is precisely why we stop adding orthodox designs to the system asap, and build renewables with integrated energy storage, like my BGES systems or Seatricity’s designs, which pump water:-
http://seatricity.com/technology/
The problem with a higher penetration of fluctuating windpower etc. is TOO much power, which necessitates curtailment. BGES solves that problem as well.
Bruce,
Before-generator energy storage provides ‘base-load’ better than any thermal plant, because it’s also dispatchable, in seconds.
David,
“because the renewables don’t fall short often enough!” This is exactly why I call the current renewables industry parasitic.
It assumes that someone will have built and is running, at their own cost, a backup system that will be automatically available when it gets dark, the wind stops blowing or the tide turns. This is not a realistic business model. The “renewable” industry should be subsidizing the backups.
The financial justification for a large pumped storage system in Switzerland (just what you need for intermittent renewables) has been removed by solar power supplying the daytime peak the pumped storage systems used to supply. The solar is government subsidized, the pumped storage is private.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/31/utilities-swiss-pumpedstorage-idUSL5N0QV3FK20140831
As I said above, the current situation is not sustainable.
Best regards
Roger
Dave, Through which medium…?
This is not my field, but I am keen to keep abreast of the situation in this area, but as far as I was aware, spin-up time for emergency generation was a major issue….Dinorwig gets round this by having the Turbine spinning on standby by the use of compressed air…..allowing near “instant” power-up (I think I read somewhere about 2 seconds…) but that is unique.
A direct coupled GT also has a noticeable lag from stationary, and that’s among the quickest.
Running conventional Power-stations on zero-load standby (which is both costly and carbon heavy) has been the historic solution, but even then they have to rely on the pumped storage sites for the lag-buffering. Can you point me to a paper that corroborates…?
We are almost singing from the same hymn-sheet, Roger. A different emphasis, perhaps? The problem is over-capacity and over-supply, rather than the loss of power from renewables.
4.) No ‘renewables’ industries manufacture product that is 100% ‘fit-for-purpose’, IF the source of their energy is variable or intermittent. That problem should NOT be passed on to anyone else. . .
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/poll/this-weeks-poll-national-infrastrucure-commission/1021175.article?cmpid=tenews_1644415
I know that there are viable technologies (BGES) which will make ‘renewables’ sustainable. Even if that infrastructure were to cost the same as the historical investment in nuclear power (excluding decommissioning), it would be a far better use of PUBLIC money. When governments only want to wash their hands of any responsibility we, and future generations, are powerless. It will take a Jeremy Corbyn-type revolution to sort out the Tory/New Labour unholy mess.
In Spain, the wind industry plays its part in balancing the grid:-
http://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1209700/integration-success-leads-easy-curtailment
“To absorb all this while maintaining some rapid-response combined-cycle gas on standby, 150GWh of wind power was thrown offline, equivalent to around 30% of that day’s total electricity consumption. In all, between 28 and 31 March, 637GWh of wind was curtailed.”
Wasteful isn’t it. Wind power that fills before-generator pressurised-water accumulators would make grid operations a piece of (automated) cake. That would slash running costs.
What you describe is a market failure, which is cured by non-market solutions.
Hi Bruce,
Sorry, I can’t refer you to any proof-of-concept studies, because none have been done. In trying to get support for any innovation in the UK, my MP and I came up against a brick wall of political and commercial opposition, since the turn of this century.
My proposals are out in the public domain on a number of websites besides The Engineer. Put simply, we should just stop generating electricity directly from the wind, waves and tide, and use their energy to pump water instead. It’s all based on dependable engineering principles dating from the nineteenth century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Hydraulic_Power_Company
So, hundreds of miles of expensive inter-array HV cables, under an offshore wind/wave farm, would be substituted with cheap steel pipe. .
As the pressurised-water accumulators are in close proximity to the turbine/generators, to all intents and purposes start-up is instant. There is no need for features such as these “air-cushioned surge chambers”:-
http://www.waterpowermagazine.com/features/featurepumped-storage-underground-challenges-4302498/
This would be another option, but much more expensive, I believe:-
http://www.gravitypower.net
Some may like to dismiss my proposals as unrealistic, but I think fusion takes the biscuit in that respect, don’t you?
David,
As you say we both agree it is a market/structure problem, not a technical one. From the Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/11925444/UK-energy-crisis-Trafford-gas-plant-in-doubt.html
Best regards
Roger
Thanks for that link Roger.
Alan Whitehead has been exposing the incompetence of government energy policy for years. From my e-mail to him on 24/7/2012:-
“A report by Pöyry Energy Consulting, ‘The Impact of Intermittency’ three years ago, concluded that BETTA was more of a problem than the weather.”
The EMR did nothing about it.
“The most striking thing now about Electricity Market Reform is that there is no ‘market reform’ as such on offer in the proposals going forward to legislation this year. The one thing that really does need reform if it is to deal effectively with transparency and the challenge of low carbon electricity market requirements is the BETTA/NETA electricity trading system, which remains untouched.”
https://alansenergyblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/what-i-said-on-electricity-market-reform/
The proposals I submitted to National Grid’s ‘Operating2020’ consultation on that Pöyry Report in 2009 were, of course, ignored, although their potential was acknowledged.
If we really want to produce enough energy for 8 or 10 billions of people enjoying a decent standard of living we must produce a lot more energy than today. The only realistic and non carbon fix is fission followed by fusion. Wind energy pollutes our countryside, is dangerous to birds and without subsidies is uneconomical.