That's not really how it works. ITER has a budget measured in billions over multiple years, the global energy industry is trillions every year. The amount needed to do the research is such a small proportion that if there is even a tiny possibility that it could long-term provide a significant proportion of world energy, it's well worth doing the research. The scientific knowledge gain is just icing on the cake.
> That's a lot of time for the world to get worse while waiting for fusion to happen, and we might as well just throw renewables at the problem now instead of waiting.
We can do two things at once.
The bigger, principal problem of ITER is the used magnet technology (niobium–tin, niobium–titanium). This was safe and conservative choice in 1990s, but as consequence the tokamak has to be big and therefor expensive to build.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems is currently building a tokamak based on the same physics as ITER, but with modern magnet technology using rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) high-temperature superconductors. Their ARC tokamak should be smaller and cheaper than ITER.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_fusion_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Fusion_Systems
Of all the fusion energy startups Commonwealth Fusion Systems is nearest to demonstrating a realistic fusion power plant.
It is still more sci-fi than conventional fusion developments like ITER.
Source: I work in the field.
For example, HVDC. Interconnect and buy power from somebody with more sun. Or just overbuild solar by a lot. It's cheap, so chances are having too much of it still works out economically.
Sorry, no. Our recent experiences during the energy crisis caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine showed us that we cannot trust energy sources outside our own borders.
> overbuild solar
The effective sunlight in November in Finland is measured in single-digit hours per month. That's not a joke, or an exaggeration. Solar is completely out of the question.
Right now, the only carbon-free solution is fission. Fusion potentially adds another, but that's far off still.
You could trust Sweden, Estonia, etc. since they're all in the EU. Also Norway. But overall good point.
> Right now, the only carbon-free solution is fission. Fusion potentially adds another, but that's far off still.
I've never been to Finland, but I'm sure there's some wind there too.
But on the subject of war, fission turns out to be a huge vulnerability for Ukraine. Fusion would be better but it'd still be extremely expensive infrastructure that could be very easily disabled. So from the war standpoint what's probably most beneficial is a very distributed usage of wind/solar.
Your neighbors have winter at the same time as you. HVDC only solves this problem if it goes very far.
No. I wasn't just referring to loss of supply from Russia. What I was referring to was that when supply from Russia was lost, every country in the EU scrambled to secure their own supply, essentially competing on who could fuck over their neighbors the most. (It was Germany. Germany wins that prize.) No supply outside our borders can be trusted.
> I've never been to Finland, but I'm sure there's some wind there too.
Finland is subject to a weather phenomena where a stable anticyclone forms over the country, resulting in a high-pressure system that's essentially still. In winter, this can result in weeks of dead calm during the coldest temperatures experienced in the country. We already have a lot of wind capacity, and whenever this happens the electricity prices spike sky high.
> But on the subject of war, fission turns out to be a huge vulnerability for Ukraine. Fusion would be better but it'd still be extremely expensive infrastructure that could be very easily disabled.
We are a NATO member, and we have our own long range strike capability. If Russia directly attacks, Moscow will burn, which is why they likely won't. But Putin likes to play these hybrid games, where he tries his best to fuck over everyone without directly attacking.
Who is Japan interconnecting with, or any other country that doesn't trust its neighbors? What is Canada supposed to do when it's ~6000 km from the equator and might not want to rely on the US for electricity regardless?
> Or just overbuild solar by a lot. It's cheap, so chances are having too much of it still works out economically.
Solar is cheap per kWh but those kWh come disproportionately in the sunnier months of the year at any non-equatorial latitude. To build enough for January you'd then have oversupply and a price of zero for the nine months out of the year when you have the most output, requiring you to make back the entire cost in the three months when solar output is lowest. Then you're only getting paid anything for e.g. 12.5% of the kWh you generate (the 25% of the months that have 50% of the average output) which means you need the price during those months to be 8x the average price you need to break even, but then you're not cheaper than existing alternatives. And that's before you even deal with nights or cloudy winter days.
It obviously makes sense to use solar to reduce the need for natural gas plants during hot summer days with a lot of air conditioning demand, or for charging electric cars that can hold off a couple days if it's cloudy. It equally obviously doesn't make sense to try to generate 100% of electricity from the same intermittent source whose output is regionally correlated by season and weather systems.
Most Canadians live quite far south. Toronto is on the same latitude as France’s Mediterranean coast and they of course have plentiful hydropower. Solar is surprisingly useful even in more northerly places like the UK or Denmark since it is anti-correlated with wind power.
"South" in Canada is still north. Calgary (third largest city) is almost 6000 km from the equator. Toronto is the major city furthest south and it's still almost 5000 km.
> Toronto is on the same latitude as France’s Mediterranean coast
Europe is also quite far north. The Mediterranean has warmer temperatures because of ocean currents carrying warm water from the south, not because of its latitude. Toronto is at the same latitude as Wisconsin.
> and they of course have plentiful hydropower.
They get a little over half from that. You still need something to do the other half.
With space. By space-based solar power instead of HVDC.
https://spacenexus.us/guide/space-launch-cost-comparison
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power#Launch...
In 50-100 year we will have another energy storage technology: nuclear fusion power plants.
Now of course that's a research reactor full of experiments and instrumentation that wouldn't be part of a normal power plant, but given current experience that I think we can expect we won't suddenly knock down the cost to $100M. It's going to be somewhere in the billions. And we have expectations of that DEMO is going to make 750MWe.
We can then plug those estimates into the calculator and basically figure out how cheap and how powerful a fusion reactor has to be for it to make economical sense.
The size and also the complicated governance have made ITER very slow to build, which also increases expense. The JET tokamak is about the size of the reactor CFS is building, and JET was built in a year for the reactor itself, plus three years before that for the building they put it in.
It took us a lot of time to standardize computers. We made lots of weird architectures before things settled down.
We have spent about $10T on renewables over the last 20 years. We use more FF today than 20 years ago because renewables don't provide enough power to compensate for the normal yearly increase in energy demand (which is pathetic). The solution is nuclear (fission). It was the solution before we were born. It will be the solution after we die. No amount of politics and propaganda will ever change that. The laws of physics care nothing about what you think.
https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=26.4...