# Fusion Power - No longer 30 years away? **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [December 18, 2024, 5:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fusion-power-no-longer-30-years-away/1011823 "2024-12-18T17:59:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Gorsnak](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gorsnak/32/7587_2.png) [@Gorsnak](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gorsnak)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2024, 5:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fusion-power-no-longer-30-years-away/1011823/1 "2024-12-18T17:59:44Z")
So apparently someone thinks they can have an operating fusion power plant within a decade. > **[‘World’s first’ grid-scale nuclear fusion power plant announced in the US in...](https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/18/climate/world-first-nuclear-fusion-power-plant-commmonwealth/index.html)** > > If all goes to plan, Virginia will be the site of the world’s first grid-scale nuclear fusion power plant, able to harness this futuristic clean power and generate electricity from it by the early 2030s However, I feel like the following line in the story is doing a lot of work: > [@CNN](#): > > But the path toward it is unlikely to be smooth, not least because the technology has not yet been proved viable. Oh, you don’t say! ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2024, 6:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fusion-power-no-longer-30-years-away/1011823/2 "2024-12-18T18:15:41Z")
I thought it was always 20 years away. Always being 10 years away is a great improvement on that. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2024, 6:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fusion-power-no-longer-30-years-away/1011823/3 "2024-12-18T18:48:12Z")
> [@Gorsnak](#): > > Oh, you don’t say! There is also this > _It is “deep into” building a tokamak able to demonstrate net fusion energy: meaning a reaction that produces more energy than it consumes. It hopes to produce its first plasma – the superheated cloud of charged gas in which fusion reactions happen – in 2026 and achieve net fusion energy shortly afterward._ and this: > _In general, nuclear fusion startups “tend to be a little aggressive in what they’re promising,” Jerry Navratil, a professor of fusion energy and plasma physics at Columbia University, told CNN last month. **There’s a big difference between producing energy from fusion and having a practical system that puts power on the grid and is safe, licensed and operating** , he added._ [empahasis added] In fact, while controlled nuclear fusion in burning (self-heating) plasma is evaluated in terms of Qplasma\>1, i.e. the plasma is producing enough thermal power to keep it at triple product threshold to sustain nuclear fusion, the requirement for net electrical power production is that all of the energetic and energy conversion losses result in Qtotal\>\>1, i.e. the extractable power over that required to maintain plasma confinement is significantly over-unity, notwithstanding the need to breed tritium and to produce electrical power at a cost-effective threshold such that it is actually profitable to run and maintain the system. These are major hurdles above and beyond just the scientific accomplishment of achieving a sustained burning plasma that will likely require further innovations in both control of plasma dynamics and power conversion, especially as the readily extractible yield from the charged alpha particle is only ~20% of the 17.6 MeV of energy released in each fusion reaction, and the remaining energy is in a relativistic ‘fast’ neutron that would damage structural materials. In reality, the most plausible route to net power production from nuclear fusion may actually be using a fusion system as an energetic neutron source to breed fissionable fuel like 232Th or 238U into fissile fuel, and use that in a molten salt reactor or process fuel elements for a more conventional light water fission reactor (albeit not without other issues in handling and disposing of radioactive waste and ‘activated’ materials). The hybrid fission-fusion approach doesn’t The one thing that nuclear fusion startups have been really consistent about producing is _hot air_, which despite the copious amounts is not sufficiently contained to utilize in a heat engine to do anything useful other than spin up ‘tech’ journalists who don’t actually understand anything about nuclear fusion into writing what amount to grandiose promotional statements to encourage investment despite a clear path toward successful power producing nuclear fusion system. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2024, 6:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fusion-power-no-longer-30-years-away/1011823/4 "2024-12-18T18:52:53Z")
No, its always 25 years away. Except when it’s 50. Says someone who first visited the Laboratory for Laser Energetics in 1973. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2024, 6:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fusion-power-no-longer-30-years-away/1011823/5 "2024-12-18T18:54:06Z")
> [@Gorsnak](#): > > [https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/18/climate/world-first-nuclear-fusion-power-plant-commmonwealth/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/18/climate/world-first-nuclear-fusion-power-plant-commmonwealth/index.html) “If all goes to plan” doing comically heavy lifting here. If all goes to plan I’ll win the lottery tonight. I consider that roughly as likely as this bullshit story. ---
**Author:** ![Crafter\_Man](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crafter_man/32/458_2.png) [@Crafter\_Man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crafter_Man)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2024, 7:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fusion-power-no-longer-30-years-away/1011823/6 "2024-12-18T19:11:09Z")
They need a better ceremony, like one that includes [a woman with wires attached to her back](https://www.yahoo.com/tech/fusion-startup-conducts-strange-ceremony-163015150.html). ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2024, 11:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fusion-power-no-longer-30-years-away/1011823/7 "2024-12-18T23:50:16Z")
I was a Computer Science prof. AI was considered a joke by most non-AI people because the AI folk kept saying they were going solve Natural Language in 5 years. This went all the way back to John McCarthy back in the 50s. I was on dissertation committees for AI students who made all sorts of grand promises. 2-3 years later they hadn’t even budged the needle. But now the joke is gone. So I’m willing to give some tech promises more credence. This isn’t one of them. It’s one thing to fuse some stuff in a lab. It’s another thing to do it on a large scale _economically_. The last part is going to be the problem for a long, long time. ---
**Author:** ![Askance](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/askance/32/8281_2.png) [@Askance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Askance)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2024, 2:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fusion-power-no-longer-30-years-away/1011823/8 "2024-12-19T02:00:01Z")
Fusion, it’s the power source of the future! And always will be.