When and if fusion becomes practical it looks like it would be a permanent solution to clean and cheap energy. How would society respond to cheap energy in almost unlimited supplies. Off the top of my head I imagine we would all travel more. It might also become practical to move large amounts of water over long distances. What else might we see.
Entire economies will be destroyed. Off the top of my head, Norway, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, most of the Middle East, and much of Central/West Asia, plus Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and North Dakota, among multiple other places, depend largely on the export, refining, or transport of fossil fuels. Tens if not hundreds of millions of people will be unemployed.
I’m not saying that we should abandon the goals of clean energy for this reason, and indeed, I’m prepared to say that the alternative is much worse. But the world is going to have to deal with this if/when limitless clean energy becomes a thing.
A positive that I can think of: this could, theoretically anyway, make desalination and pumping water cheaper which could, in turn, mean that we could start desalinating water from the Pacific Ocean and pumping it into Western reservoirs, which would certainly be most welcome. Desalination could also result in cheaper and more sustainable irrigation, effectively solving the world’s food problems*.
*I’m well aware that food insecurity is the result of a multitude of factors, not just the relative scarcity of food.
There’s a downside to almost everything. Like if desalination becomes widespread, what will we do with the resulting brine?
Put it back into the ocean? I’m not being facetious or glib here; wouldn’t the overall salinity of the ocean be mostly unchanged if we desalinate and then throw the brine back in? (Oceanology is not my strong suit)
I am not an oceanographer either but I think the problem is that wherever the brine is dumped into the ocean, the local salinity is going to shoot up, which I imagine is bad for the sealife right around there.
OK, I did some math. According to this, a gallon of seawater produces 4.5 ounces of salt*. Lake Mead contains 9.3 million gallons of water, per here. So if we dasilinated enough water to fill Lake Mead (which already has water in it, but never mind that, for the sake of this thought experiment), we would wind up with … approximately 42 million ounces of salt, or about 2.7 million pounds. A cargo ship can carry multiple times that.
I don’t know what any of this means as regards local salinity and whatnot, but it’s been an interesting thought experiment.
*Yes, there will be other dross from the desalination process besides just salt.
“Clean” is good, but I have my doubts on the “cheap” aspect. Hydrogen for fusion may be dirt-cheap, but the facility that conducts fusion and turns it into electricity isn’t likely to be cheaper than current thermal power plants. If we can get the cost per kW-hr down into the range of existing technologies, then maybe we’ll be able to replace existing fossil fuel-based power plants That’s a worthwhile goal in itself.
I would truck the salt, or perhaps pump the brine to the Bonneville salt flats in Utah. The are 30,000 acres of salt there already.
I thought the goal was for a fusion reactor to power itself.
Sure, but it’s not going to build/operate/maintain itself.
How will those costs compare to generating electricity nuclear reactors?
I have no idea. But the OP seems to suggest that fusion will eventually result in energy that costs substantially less than current energy production methods (coal, nuclear, wind, solar, etc.). It may at some point be cheap enough to become a meaningful part of our energy portfolio, especially since it wound be clean and carbon-free, but I’m doubtful about it becoming cheap enough any time soon to radically alter our energy usage patterns (e.g. for large scale water desalination/relocation).
We won’t be able to answer that until we get a working fusion plant. We’re a long way away from that.
Coal, natural gas, and nuke plants all work basically the same way. A boiler heats up water into steam, the steam drives turbine generators, which produce the electricity. But the important thing here is that a boiler for a fossil fuel plant is significantly different than the boiler for a nuke plant.
I think we can probably assume that a fusion plant is going to be similar. The boiler will be significantly different, but the rest of it is going to be an old fashioned steam turbine type of setup.
If you compare with current prices, a natural gas plant is going to be the least expensive, probably somewhere around $500 million for a fairly typical plant. A nuke plant on the other hand is significantly more expensive, probably closer to $10 billion for a typical plant. I think it is safe to say that at least at first, a fusion plant is likely to be on the higher end of that range.
So assuming our fancy shmancy fusion power plant costs $10 billion to build and lasts 40 years, that’s going to work out to $250 million per year if you want to spread out the costs over its lifetime. And that does not include maintenance costs.
They aren’t going to be selling that electricity for cheap.
I’ll just leave this here. Fusion-1 hosted at ImgBB — ImgBB