Nuclear Fusion: Illusion, confusion

Recent news about 'breakthrough' power in nuclear fusion is misleading: there are missing details. It's still likely years away—if that—but even it worked right now, we might not want it. Here's why.

In recent days, the media has been hyping a “fusion energy breakthrough” at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) — a part of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

They’re making it into a big story: “National Security implications of a fusion energy breakthrough” appears in certain headlines. For those who aren’t familiar with it, nuclear fusion is the process of “welding” together two hydrogen atoms into one helium atom (to make it as simple as possible to understand.)

This process happens naturally in our Sun, and the result after creating helium like this is that there’s a lot of excess energy in the form of heat left over. With that heat, you can create electricity using steam turbines or other methods. Engineers and scientists have been chasing the science, technology, and processes to create electricity from fusion for many decades, and it’s always been just out of reach (and still is.)

Let’s slow down, see just what all the fuss is about with these headlines, and watch for the sleight of hand here that is distracting us all.

We’ll examine what the actual claim here is about fusion power; what details they’re not telling you that matter; and why—even if this was a viable power source right now—we still might not want fusion power in its current form.

And by the way, I say this as a long-term fan of the idea of fusion energy.

The claim being made is that the National Ignition Facility at LLNL (in Livermore California, near San Francisco) was able to get 3 megajoules of energy out of a plasma reaction while putting only 2 megajoules of energy in. At first glance, that sounds enticing.

OK, but first off: what’s a megajoule? Well, it’s a unit of energy (a Joule) and the prefix “mega” means that it’s a “million Joules”.

Three million Joules out sounds like a lot, huh? Well…not so fast.

It turns out that to heat one liter of water (visualizing half of a 2-liter bottle of your favorite soda gives you a feel for how much water one liter is)—from room temperature to boiling—and then converting that liter (about one kilogram) of boiling water into steam at a temperature of 100C, you’d need about 2.68 megajoules of energy.

So, this reaction that they are talking about —3 megajoules out— is enough to heat and then boil off into steam a little bit more than a liter of water. At first glance, that’s not so impressive sounding.

It’s slightly more impressive, though, when you also take into account the time it takes to pull off this reaction. When you also account for the time span in which energy is created or consumed, you now convert energy in Joules into power in Watts.

From my photo album: the sun is the ultimate nuclear fusion source.

Watts are a unit of power that more people have some familiarity with. However, many people tend to confuse power (in Watts) with energy; a Watt, though, is just energy (in Joules) divided by — or sometimes spoken of as “per unit of”—time (seconds).

If you look at the electricity bill for your home, you’ll probably see numbers expressed in “kilowatt hours” or kWh on your bill. This is a standard unit of one thousand “Watts” multiplied by hours (3600 seconds.)

So, one kilowatt hour (kWh) is the same as 3,600,000 Joules—or 3.6 megajoules. That’s roughly about the same amount of energy that this fusion reactor is creating; however, a kWh is equivalent to this amount of energy used over an hour, whereas this fusion reaction creates the equivalent amount of energy in fractions of a second. We’ll explore this distinction in more depth momentarily.

When you use a thousand Watts for an hour (a hair dryer left running for an hour, let’s say) you use up a kilowatt hour of energy—and this costs you 15 to 30 cents or more, depending on where you live. God help you if you live in Europe or California (where I do.)

To recap, by multiplying power in Watts by the time over which it is continuously supplied (in seconds), you get back to units of energy (Joules.) A kWh — a hair dryer running for an hour —is one thousand Watts for 3600 seconds (one hour) so it consumes about 3.6 megajoules.

So, a rough estimate that you can carry around in your head is this: if the LLNL fusion reactor creates 3 megajoules of energy in one thousandth of a second, then it creates, in a thousandth of a second (a millisecond), roughly as much energy as a hair dryer uses if left running for an hour.

(But there’s a caveat: the fusion reactor consumes 2 megajoules in order to produce 3 megajoules. More on this soon.)

To give you more of a feel for sizes of things: a typical suburban family home needs about 3-4 kWh of electricity during an average hour on hot summer days (10.8 to 12 megaJoules ). Over the span of a year, a typical house uses maybe 11,000 kWh of electricity for that entire year (that’s 11,000 x 1000 x 3600 Joules, or 39,600 megajoules, which a fusion reactor would produce in about 13 seconds if it did one detonation every millisecond.)

One Watt of power is equal to one Joule per second; so if you put 2 megajoules of energy into a pellet in a fusion reactor using a powerful laser, but you do this in just one-thousandth of a second, then you need 2 megajoules / 0.001 seconds = 2 gigawatts of power to do that. A Gigawatt = a billion Watts, so now we’re talking some serious power!

Let’s assume, just to keep the numbers simple, that LLNL can do this fusion reaction in a millisecond, or thousandth of a second. They might do it in less time, but if so, the rough numbers I’m using here just scale up if the time it takes gets smaller than a millisecond.

Two gigawatts of power is quite a lot. If you provide two gigawatts continuously for an hour, that’s roughly what you need to power 500,000 homes for an hour in Arizona during a heatwave.

Fortunately, right now, LLNL is only doing this fusion ignition for fractions of a second, not for a whole hour—so the “grid” is not being loaded down continuously at a 2-Gigawatt load just to allow the fusion boys to play with their mega lasers.

In fact, what they are doing is “banking up” the energy required to pulse their massive laser in large capacitors over hours and days to be able to fire off a single powerful laser pulse when it’s needed for a brief fraction of a second.

Otherwise, the lights in San Francisco (which is near LLNL) might start to dim and go out if they left the fusion reactor running for too long!

Anyway, let’s keep going.

Physicists use the letter “Q” to denote the energy gain—the energy you get out divided by the energy you put in—of a system like this; because we’re talking about the plasma reaction in the fusion plant (a plasma is an “energetic soup of particles”) , we’ll refer to the energy gain as “Q plasma”.

In this case, the gain — Q plasma — is 3 megajoules out, divided by 2 megajoules in, or about 1.5. At first blush, it seems like you’re getting 50% more energy out than what you put in, and that seems like a good thing.

This is the Holy Grail that the fusion industry has been aiming at for many decades and is always falling a bit short of achieving.

But here’s where the nuances come in.

In order to deliver two gigawatts of electrical power to a fusion facility to let it run a plasma reaction for a short time, for example, we would need to run some other conventional power plant (a gas-fired power plant or a nuclear fission power plant etc.) for many hours, in order to juice the lasers and get the whole fusion reaction going.

But efficiencies in energy production, because of the limitations of the Laws of Thermodynamics, are always less than 100%. A super-efficient nuclear fission plant, let’s say, might have an efficiency of about 80%, which means that to produce 2 gigawatts of electricity to fire up the fusion reactor, the nuclear plant would actually need to generate 2.5 GW of raw nuclear power ( 2 GW divided by 0.8) — with the excess 0.5 GW being lost as waste heat to the environment.

Then the nuclear power plant still has to “send” that two gigawatts of power through the grid, which also has an efficiency loss; let’s say the power lines on the grid run at 90% efficiency. To deliver two gigawatts at the “end of the line” to the fusion facility, the nuclear plant would therefore have to put 2.2 gigawatts on the grid at the sending end (2 GW divided by 0.9), which now means the nuclear plant has to actually generate 2.75 gigawatts of raw power in order for the fusion facility to receive its net 2 gigawatts after power is lost due to inefficiencies in both generation and transmission.

It turns out that at every stage of operation—including generating the laser light needed to ignite the fuel pellet—there are efficiency losses. This also includes losses in capturing the produced energy as heat after the fusion reaction occurs.

If we wanted the fusion reactor to be able to generate its own “excess” electricity to sustain the plasma reaction once it was started (after the point of “ignition”), we would still have to account for efficiency losses in capturing and converting the heat that it creates from the fusion reaction back into electricity to “recycle” power back to the fusion reactor to energize its massive lasers.

What all of this means is that you need quite a bit more than that extra 50% of energy (the gain of 1.5 from the Q plasma) in order to “start” the reaction, to “pay back” the energy borrowed from the grid (e.g., the nuclear power plant that produced the 2.75 GW to start with), to power the fusion reaction itself continuously going forward, and then still have enough left over to generate excess electricity after accounting for all of the efficiency losses in order to be able to power homes and businesses.

And then…we also still have a bunch of waste heat that has to go somewhere (typically, in a large power plant it goes to a water pond that releases this heat to the atmosphere, unless you can pump all the excess hot water into a bunch of San Francisco skyscrapers to use as hot water for heating and bathing. But even then…the heat is still going into the environment; it’s just taking a detour through someone’s shower.)

So—we have a way yet to go with fusion power. A Q plasma of 1.5 is nice, but not enough. But here’s the thing. Let’s suppose that magically, next week the Q plasma was 2, or 3, or whatever it needed to be in order to be able to supply more net power to the grid than it takes to operate the fusion plant and overcome all of the efficiency losses.

Even with this “miracle” of nuclear fusion, we would still wind up in a world where there were huge, expensive, centralized fusion power plants generating electricity and distributing it to consumers via the traditional power lines of the grid (which have transmission losses.)

And that means, once again, that there continues to be a centrally controlled “power monopoly”. And this is why I said in the subtitle: “even if it worked, we might not want it.”

What humanity needs, instead, is fully decentralized power. You should have an energy source of your own—preferrably easily movable—that can power your home, or maybe five houses in your neighborhood—right from your own garage: without needing an electric utility company, without needing the grid—and ideally, without needing expensive fuel or expensive reactors.

You’d also like, in an ideal world, to have this clean energy without requiring expensive batteries and without relying on wind or sun for solar power during the day, which is unreliable.

Few people are aware of this, but there are already companies that are working on so-called micro nuclear power plants — extremely safe to operate — that are refrigerator or small trailer sized; these are scaled down nuclear fission reactors of the kinds that have been in use in submarines and spacecraft for years. For example, one of these could potentially provide continuous power for perhaps 10 homes over a 30-year timespan without needing service.

That is, such a power source would do away with the need for a ‘grid’. Why aren’t we focusing more time and money on things like this, instead of billion-dollar fusion reactors owned by your local power company monopoly?

But you already know the answer…control. They want you to believe that it has something to do with safety (“gasp! Micronukes? We’d have a nuclear meltdown in every neighborhood!”) but it’s really about centralization—for the purposes of control.

So you didn’t take your 1,001th booster shot, eh? Then “they” can disconnect you from the grid as punishment (and lock up your e-money so that you can’t access it), because you’re dependent on “them”.

This “decentralized power” idea is the same idea I have covered in my posts here, here and here about Dr. Randell Mills’ device (which he calls the SunCell.)

Dr. Mills has a new compact energy-producing device that creates energy from a novel type of hydrogen reaction: the SunCell, too, can lead us to a world in which anyone can generate enough electricity directly at the point of use to meet their needs—cleanly, cheaply, and safely—and thereby do away with the “grid” and the control over access to power that centralized monopolistic power generating plants currently give to the Energy Barons.

In fact, such a device could do away with money itself—but that’s a topic for another post.

If I could buy a “nuclear fusion reactor” the size of a refrigerator that I could keep in my garage that would let me power my life and run “off grid”, I’d be happy with it. I’d love to have a SunCell, too.

But that’s not what “they” have in mind with these large-scale fusion plants, assuming that they can continue to improve the “Q” factor in order to overcome the efficiency losses and make these things viable. They just want to swap out gas, coal or nuclear fission plants with a big, fat expensive fusion plant but otherwise keep all of the same dependency-creating infrastructure of the grid.

We’re not there yet with fusion, folks. Don’t fall for the hype—and keep your eyes wide open and focused on the bigger issue: continuation of the centralized power generation and the grid—which doesn’t benefit you and me.

The grid benefits the same old Energy Barons that have always kept us enslaved. We don’t need fusion, so much as we need freedom from the grid.

We need freedom from the Matrix.

Here is a video produced last year by Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist whose work I greatly enjoy. In this video, she makes the points about “Q Total” versus “Q Plasma”, and why we aren’t likely to see a viable fusion power plant anytime soon.

Microsoft is getting into the mix: the obvious need on their part is for a power source to sustain their move into AI. But we as a civilization still don’t want grid connected Fusion to perpetuate the “control over power” paradigm.

Microsoft makes world first nuclear fusion energy deal (msn.com)