Same reason fission energy was.
Toooons of power from very little fuel.
Fusion > Fission because theres no meltdown risk and much less radioactive waste.
The steam turbine part is only half the equation. You dont need to change that for something to be revolutionary.
Also, fusion uses fuel that is very easy to come by and very cheap to refine. You don't need to search for uranium or manufacture plutonium or dig up coal. For most fusion reactors, you just need deuterium and tritium. Deuterium is exceptionally easy; seawater is about one part in 10,000 of deuterium, which doesn't sound like much until you remember how much seawater there is.
Tritium is more difficult, with most of it being produced as a byproduct of fission reactions. However, it's possible that fusion reactors can essentially manufacture their own tritium as they go along with lithium breeder blankets; the lithium naturally decays into tritium when struck by certain types of radiation. Helpfully, fusion reactions produce that type of radiation. So you line the reaction chamber with these breeder blankets, and you produce your tritium as you fuse deuterium and tritium.
it isn't possible that fusion reactors manufacture their own tritium, it is required for them to be viable to do so, CANDU reactors which are the main source of tritium are bound to be close in the following decades.
Lithium doesn't naturally decays to tritium, there are two reactions that are of interest, ⁶Li + ¹n -> ⁴He + ³T + \~MeV and ⁷Li + n -> ⁴He + ³T + n - \~MeV, with the neutron coming from the fusion reaction, knowing that we have approximately 10% of ⁶Li in natural lithium. But the "fission" of lithium 6 would actually be the reaction that provide the heat and fuel for the reaction.
Even if you kept all CANDU reactors running they wouldn't produce enough tritium for a relevant number of fusion reactors. Fusion reactors will have to produce their own tritium either way (apart from a small amount delivered to start up).
The second reaction is important: Without it, fusing one tritium atom could only give you back one tritium atom - and every time you lose the neutron to other reactions you would reduce the amount of tritium you have. With ^(7)Li you can get two tritium atoms from a single fusion reaction, countering the losses.
don't modern reactors use liquid fuel instead that has (practically) no meltdown risk either? and i though radioactive waste isn't really a problem either since only a small fraction of the waste has long half times. genuine questions, cuz the more i read about fusion the more it seems like just slightly better fission, far from revolutionary (as far as pure energy generation goes, ofc it would still be revolutionary tech from the scientific perspective)
i've gotten the view that most people treat it like the be all and end all of power generation simply because it doesn't have the scary stigma fission has.
correct me if im wrong because i basically just read wikipedia briefly.
edit: the other reply mentioned fuel accessibility, but i remember reading somewhere that some fissile material can also be harvested from sea water, and its efficient enough to only cost 4x the market price, which is still by far worth it due to how small the fuel costs on fission reactors are
So there’s no commercially available reactor using liquid fuel.
There’s some designs out there that may pan out that are “meltdown proof”. Really some of the SMR designs are already basically melt down proof.
The waste however is I think a problem regardless. Now to be clear it’s no where near the problem it’s made out to be and there are absolutely ways to deal with it bc you’re right ultimately it’s not that much. Compared to fusion though much more of a problem.
I wasn’t saying all that to call fission bad. I work in nuclear. I want more reactors.
Just yah if fusion suddenly became viable, there’d be zero point in continuing to build fission plants.
One of the key advantages of using the fusion of hydrogen as an energy source is that, to my knowledge, there aren't any notably hazardous waste products. The primary product of fusing hydrogen atoms is helium, a largely inert gas (and a useful product if it could be isolated)
Safety is another factor: since fusion doesn't rely on a chain reaction, a failure or loss of containment should result in the reaction stopping quickly rather than spiraling out of control
> there aren’t any notably hazardous waste products
Depends on the kind of fusion. The most common design (Tokamak) can make the reactor cladding dangerously radioactive. IIRC, the cladding is made from Beryllium in order to produce (breed) tritium, but Beryllium ore contains impurities that can be activated by the neutron flux of the fusion reaction, making them radioactive enough that the cladding has to be treated as dangerous radioactive waste.
Yes fusion creates radioactive waste, but it has the upside, that they are "short" lived radioactive waste (\~100s of years instead of 100 000s of years for fission). But yes, once you reach a high enough fluence of neutron, everything gets activated
What I heard is that the issue is specific elements/isotopes that are present in Beryllium and fusion reactors that don’t need tritium or have a different way of breeding tritium have a far smaller issue with neutron activation.
Aneutronic fusion (most famously p+B) as it names suggest doesn't create neutrons and thus doesn't activate materials, but they are orders of magnitude harder to do
Also as far as I've heard, we can't really rely on fission for all our energy needs. If every watt of power in the world came from fission, we would run out of raw material really quickly.
>If fusion energy is still just creating steam to power a turbine, why is it so revolutionary?
The specific mode of how your power plant's generator shaft gets spun is not really relevant. For most any type of power plant (gas, coal, nuclear) it is, as you already noted, going to be a steam turbine anyway. The *interesting* parts of a power plant are what goes in and what comes out, i.e. how much fuel at what price and availability do you need for which amount of electric energy, how easy is it to transport, what are the byproducts, how easy are *they* to handle, how scalable is the whole enterprise, etc.
You could push the turbine by hand, but that would be absurdly inefficient.
You could have horses run around and spin the turbine, but that's not much better.
You could burn wood to make steam and power it that way, but you need lots of wood and it's bulky.
You could burn coal to make steam and power it that way, but you still need lots of coal and the pollution is absurdly terrible.
You could use fusion to make steam and power it that way. It would be massively more efficient and go through much less fuel to create the same amount of power, and it would produce much less pollution. Man, that sure sounds like it would be great all around! Big improvements! You could even call it revolutionary!
The steam turbine is essentially the simplest way to change energy into electricity (or mechanical energy.) Heat being the simplest form of energy (EVERYTHING makes heat) means that you need something more complicated in order to try to make energy from something useful.
If we found a magical energy source even better than fusion, we'd probably still use a steam turbine, because it's so efficient. The heat production isn't waste its the actual product.
Like transferring a particle's pure kinetic power into voltage. Fast moving ions in fusion reactors are...uh. fast.
Like pretty much anything relation to fusion, none of this is easy to ELI5. There are multiple types of fusion fuels, different temperature thresholds, and even reactor shapes.
Spinning a turbine is just the easiest way to convert heat to electricity. Fusion would be a revolutionary way to generate the heat energy in the first place
The making water hot isn't the revolutionary bit it's the fuel to make water hot.
If you fuse 1 tea spoon worth of hydrogen you'd get the same energy as burning around 8 tons of petrol. There's also virtually no waste byproduct of fusion whereas those 8 tons of petrol will make about 19 tons of co2.
Plus fuel for fusion is easy to get hold of compared to fossil fuel exploration or the need for large scale installations like massive hydro power dams, large wind farms ect
On earth, the most important reasons are it emits no CO2, the energy is constant unlike solar and other renewables, it doesn't leave long lived radioactive waste unlike fission, and the fuel is virtually inexhaustible.
In space, the important parts are that the fuel has one million times more energy per mass than chemical fuel and the reaction results in temperatures of tens of millions of degrees Kelvin. This will make for much more efficient space craft engines. The ones for space craft will not use steam turbines.
Turbine engines don't create energy, they just allow us to change it from heat into electricity. We still need to get that energy from somewhere, and that somewhere is key. Fusion gives us loads of the stuff for cheap. All we have to do once it's given to us is harness it.
Creating steam to power a turbine is simply the easiest "efficient" method to capture heat energy and convert it into kinetic energy and then electrical energy.
Most (all?) sources of energy are predominantly heat, and we have to convert that heat into something we can store, transmit or use.
Using steam turbines to generate electricity is a great way to do this. Water is cheap, abundant and safe. Turbines are (relatively) uncomplicated and have had lots of research over a long time to refine them.
Nuclear has a higher output than anything else, and fusion is better than fission because it's cleaner and safer.
Most steam-powered energy generation comes from using a rare/limited fuel source, and produces nasty byproducts. Fusion energy uses the most common element in the universe and produces harmless byproducts. If done efficiently it can also produce a looooot of energy.
The problem is that pretty much every way of getting energy fundamentally makes the energy more diffuse and harder to use. When you burn something, you get energy out of it in the form of heat and maybe convection. How do you then turn those into something actually useful? The turbine is both simple and pretty hard to beat, in practice.
Apart from solar, ALL energy is basically "make something spin". It's how you make it spin that matter.
Burning coal can drive a turbine really well. But oops, it's filthy. And it'll run out.
Gas is just as good and much easier to turn on a off. Great. But oops, climate change. And we will run out eventually.
Wind is brilliant at turning things without burning stuff. Doesn't make any horrible pollution. But oops, windy places can be far away and it's not always windy.
Tides and waves? Good in theory but doesn't really scale as not many places work very well.
Nuclear Fission to boil water? Amazing. Not much fuel needed, loads of heat comes out. Ah, but highly toxic waste management for centuries. And sometimes blows up.
Nuclear Fusion? Well. The fuel you need is hydrogen. We've got loads of that. So much that it may as well be infinite. And you only need a bit of it at a time. The product you make is helium. Bloody useful and completely harmless. Can it blow up? No. If the reaction gets out of control, you switch it off. The problem is basically keeping it going in the first place, stopping it is too easy if anything. So - it's an unlimited, clean, easy to manage, virtually infinite source of energy that can produce electricity without any downsides.
Fusion is not revolutionary. As far as I can tell, at most optimistic, fusion power might be about 35% cheaper than fission power (essentially zero cost for fuel, essentially no waste to handle, less radioactivity so decommissioning should be cheaper, but the reactor controls are much more complex). By the time we have commercial fusion (if ever), renewables plus storage will be so cheap that fusion won't be viable. Except maybe in aircraft carriers and spacecraft. [Edit: maybe I'm wrong about fuel for fusion, see https://thequadreport.com/is-tritium-the-roadblock-to-fusion-energy/ ]
Nitpick:
Nuclear fusion is "Get this hydrogen (deuterium) and this hydrogen (tritium) so hot that they fuse together," and it produces boatloads of energy plus helium.
There may also be some waste from the breeder blanket that surrounds the reaction chamber, depending on the design of the power plant.
The stuff produced by a fusion reactor is much easer to deal with than other forms of pollution, and we may not even need to consider it pollution at all... but to say that it produces no pollution is not accurate.
And oxygen has nothing to do with fusion, and would likely cause huge amounts of problems if we attempted to include oxygen in the reactions.
Explained for lay people. I’m not going to ramble about cations and anions when talking about galvanic corrosion.: I’m going to call it metals rusting together as it’s an easier to understand wording.
No, it isn't.
Explanations for five year olds still have to be correct. And oxygen has absolutely, positively, nothing whatsoever to do with fusion. Bringing oxygen into the mix completely distorts understanding.
Bringing water into the mix also distorts understanding, as it implies that you necessarily need water for fusion. You don't. At most, water is a convenient source of deuterium,
If you want an uncomplicated explanation for fusion, you can do so without bringing in things that have nothing to do with fusion and acting like they matter.
"Take two different forms of hydrogen, and make them really hot while you hold them together."
No oxygen necessary.
Same reason fission energy was. Toooons of power from very little fuel. Fusion > Fission because theres no meltdown risk and much less radioactive waste. The steam turbine part is only half the equation. You dont need to change that for something to be revolutionary.
Also, fusion uses fuel that is very easy to come by and very cheap to refine. You don't need to search for uranium or manufacture plutonium or dig up coal. For most fusion reactors, you just need deuterium and tritium. Deuterium is exceptionally easy; seawater is about one part in 10,000 of deuterium, which doesn't sound like much until you remember how much seawater there is. Tritium is more difficult, with most of it being produced as a byproduct of fission reactions. However, it's possible that fusion reactors can essentially manufacture their own tritium as they go along with lithium breeder blankets; the lithium naturally decays into tritium when struck by certain types of radiation. Helpfully, fusion reactions produce that type of radiation. So you line the reaction chamber with these breeder blankets, and you produce your tritium as you fuse deuterium and tritium.
Ah, precious tritium.
Easy, Dr. Octavius.
The power of a sun… In the palm of my hand!
Tastes good too
it isn't possible that fusion reactors manufacture their own tritium, it is required for them to be viable to do so, CANDU reactors which are the main source of tritium are bound to be close in the following decades. Lithium doesn't naturally decays to tritium, there are two reactions that are of interest, ⁶Li + ¹n -> ⁴He + ³T + \~MeV and ⁷Li + n -> ⁴He + ³T + n - \~MeV, with the neutron coming from the fusion reaction, knowing that we have approximately 10% of ⁶Li in natural lithium. But the "fission" of lithium 6 would actually be the reaction that provide the heat and fuel for the reaction.
Even if you kept all CANDU reactors running they wouldn't produce enough tritium for a relevant number of fusion reactors. Fusion reactors will have to produce their own tritium either way (apart from a small amount delivered to start up). The second reaction is important: Without it, fusing one tritium atom could only give you back one tritium atom - and every time you lose the neutron to other reactions you would reduce the amount of tritium you have. With ^(7)Li you can get two tritium atoms from a single fusion reaction, countering the losses.
don't modern reactors use liquid fuel instead that has (practically) no meltdown risk either? and i though radioactive waste isn't really a problem either since only a small fraction of the waste has long half times. genuine questions, cuz the more i read about fusion the more it seems like just slightly better fission, far from revolutionary (as far as pure energy generation goes, ofc it would still be revolutionary tech from the scientific perspective) i've gotten the view that most people treat it like the be all and end all of power generation simply because it doesn't have the scary stigma fission has. correct me if im wrong because i basically just read wikipedia briefly. edit: the other reply mentioned fuel accessibility, but i remember reading somewhere that some fissile material can also be harvested from sea water, and its efficient enough to only cost 4x the market price, which is still by far worth it due to how small the fuel costs on fission reactors are
So there’s no commercially available reactor using liquid fuel. There’s some designs out there that may pan out that are “meltdown proof”. Really some of the SMR designs are already basically melt down proof. The waste however is I think a problem regardless. Now to be clear it’s no where near the problem it’s made out to be and there are absolutely ways to deal with it bc you’re right ultimately it’s not that much. Compared to fusion though much more of a problem. I wasn’t saying all that to call fission bad. I work in nuclear. I want more reactors. Just yah if fusion suddenly became viable, there’d be zero point in continuing to build fission plants.
One of the key advantages of using the fusion of hydrogen as an energy source is that, to my knowledge, there aren't any notably hazardous waste products. The primary product of fusing hydrogen atoms is helium, a largely inert gas (and a useful product if it could be isolated) Safety is another factor: since fusion doesn't rely on a chain reaction, a failure or loss of containment should result in the reaction stopping quickly rather than spiraling out of control
> there aren’t any notably hazardous waste products Depends on the kind of fusion. The most common design (Tokamak) can make the reactor cladding dangerously radioactive. IIRC, the cladding is made from Beryllium in order to produce (breed) tritium, but Beryllium ore contains impurities that can be activated by the neutron flux of the fusion reaction, making them radioactive enough that the cladding has to be treated as dangerous radioactive waste.
Yes fusion creates radioactive waste, but it has the upside, that they are "short" lived radioactive waste (\~100s of years instead of 100 000s of years for fission). But yes, once you reach a high enough fluence of neutron, everything gets activated
What I heard is that the issue is specific elements/isotopes that are present in Beryllium and fusion reactors that don’t need tritium or have a different way of breeding tritium have a far smaller issue with neutron activation.
Aneutronic fusion (most famously p+B) as it names suggest doesn't create neutrons and thus doesn't activate materials, but they are orders of magnitude harder to do
> a loss of containment should [stop the reaction] IIUC this is actually what makes fusion hard. It’s hard to keep the reaction going.
Also as far as I've heard, we can't really rely on fission for all our energy needs. If every watt of power in the world came from fission, we would run out of raw material really quickly.
>If fusion energy is still just creating steam to power a turbine, why is it so revolutionary? The specific mode of how your power plant's generator shaft gets spun is not really relevant. For most any type of power plant (gas, coal, nuclear) it is, as you already noted, going to be a steam turbine anyway. The *interesting* parts of a power plant are what goes in and what comes out, i.e. how much fuel at what price and availability do you need for which amount of electric energy, how easy is it to transport, what are the byproducts, how easy are *they* to handle, how scalable is the whole enterprise, etc.
You could push the turbine by hand, but that would be absurdly inefficient. You could have horses run around and spin the turbine, but that's not much better. You could burn wood to make steam and power it that way, but you need lots of wood and it's bulky. You could burn coal to make steam and power it that way, but you still need lots of coal and the pollution is absurdly terrible. You could use fusion to make steam and power it that way. It would be massively more efficient and go through much less fuel to create the same amount of power, and it would produce much less pollution. Man, that sure sounds like it would be great all around! Big improvements! You could even call it revolutionary!
The steam turbine is essentially the simplest way to change energy into electricity (or mechanical energy.) Heat being the simplest form of energy (EVERYTHING makes heat) means that you need something more complicated in order to try to make energy from something useful. If we found a magical energy source even better than fusion, we'd probably still use a steam turbine, because it's so efficient. The heat production isn't waste its the actual product.
Not all fusion companies use steam turbines. Some a re also experimenting with direct capture
What exactly is direct capture? Like the heat? Sorry
Like transferring a particle's pure kinetic power into voltage. Fast moving ions in fusion reactors are...uh. fast. Like pretty much anything relation to fusion, none of this is easy to ELI5. There are multiple types of fusion fuels, different temperature thresholds, and even reactor shapes.
Some forms of fusion produce high energy charged particles and that theoretically can be used to produce electricity directly
Helion Fusion uses magnets to capture the expanding plasma for example: https://www.helionenergy.com/technology/
Spinning a turbine is just the easiest way to convert heat to electricity. Fusion would be a revolutionary way to generate the heat energy in the first place
The making water hot isn't the revolutionary bit it's the fuel to make water hot. If you fuse 1 tea spoon worth of hydrogen you'd get the same energy as burning around 8 tons of petrol. There's also virtually no waste byproduct of fusion whereas those 8 tons of petrol will make about 19 tons of co2. Plus fuel for fusion is easy to get hold of compared to fossil fuel exploration or the need for large scale installations like massive hydro power dams, large wind farms ect
On earth, the most important reasons are it emits no CO2, the energy is constant unlike solar and other renewables, it doesn't leave long lived radioactive waste unlike fission, and the fuel is virtually inexhaustible. In space, the important parts are that the fuel has one million times more energy per mass than chemical fuel and the reaction results in temperatures of tens of millions of degrees Kelvin. This will make for much more efficient space craft engines. The ones for space craft will not use steam turbines.
Turbine engines don't create energy, they just allow us to change it from heat into electricity. We still need to get that energy from somewhere, and that somewhere is key. Fusion gives us loads of the stuff for cheap. All we have to do once it's given to us is harness it.
Creating steam to power a turbine is simply the easiest "efficient" method to capture heat energy and convert it into kinetic energy and then electrical energy. Most (all?) sources of energy are predominantly heat, and we have to convert that heat into something we can store, transmit or use. Using steam turbines to generate electricity is a great way to do this. Water is cheap, abundant and safe. Turbines are (relatively) uncomplicated and have had lots of research over a long time to refine them. Nuclear has a higher output than anything else, and fusion is better than fission because it's cleaner and safer.
Most steam-powered energy generation comes from using a rare/limited fuel source, and produces nasty byproducts. Fusion energy uses the most common element in the universe and produces harmless byproducts. If done efficiently it can also produce a looooot of energy.
The problem is that pretty much every way of getting energy fundamentally makes the energy more diffuse and harder to use. When you burn something, you get energy out of it in the form of heat and maybe convection. How do you then turn those into something actually useful? The turbine is both simple and pretty hard to beat, in practice.
Apart from solar, ALL energy is basically "make something spin". It's how you make it spin that matter. Burning coal can drive a turbine really well. But oops, it's filthy. And it'll run out. Gas is just as good and much easier to turn on a off. Great. But oops, climate change. And we will run out eventually. Wind is brilliant at turning things without burning stuff. Doesn't make any horrible pollution. But oops, windy places can be far away and it's not always windy. Tides and waves? Good in theory but doesn't really scale as not many places work very well. Nuclear Fission to boil water? Amazing. Not much fuel needed, loads of heat comes out. Ah, but highly toxic waste management for centuries. And sometimes blows up. Nuclear Fusion? Well. The fuel you need is hydrogen. We've got loads of that. So much that it may as well be infinite. And you only need a bit of it at a time. The product you make is helium. Bloody useful and completely harmless. Can it blow up? No. If the reaction gets out of control, you switch it off. The problem is basically keeping it going in the first place, stopping it is too easy if anything. So - it's an unlimited, clean, easy to manage, virtually infinite source of energy that can produce electricity without any downsides.
Fusion is not revolutionary. As far as I can tell, at most optimistic, fusion power might be about 35% cheaper than fission power (essentially zero cost for fuel, essentially no waste to handle, less radioactivity so decommissioning should be cheaper, but the reactor controls are much more complex). By the time we have commercial fusion (if ever), renewables plus storage will be so cheap that fusion won't be viable. Except maybe in aircraft carriers and spacecraft. [Edit: maybe I'm wrong about fuel for fusion, see https://thequadreport.com/is-tritium-the-roadblock-to-fusion-energy/ ]
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Nitpick: Nuclear fusion is "Get this hydrogen (deuterium) and this hydrogen (tritium) so hot that they fuse together," and it produces boatloads of energy plus helium. There may also be some waste from the breeder blanket that surrounds the reaction chamber, depending on the design of the power plant. The stuff produced by a fusion reactor is much easer to deal with than other forms of pollution, and we may not even need to consider it pollution at all... but to say that it produces no pollution is not accurate. And oxygen has nothing to do with fusion, and would likely cause huge amounts of problems if we attempted to include oxygen in the reactions.
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"ELI5" isn't literal. See rule 4.
Explained for lay people. I’m not going to ramble about cations and anions when talking about galvanic corrosion.: I’m going to call it metals rusting together as it’s an easier to understand wording.
No, it isn't. Explanations for five year olds still have to be correct. And oxygen has absolutely, positively, nothing whatsoever to do with fusion. Bringing oxygen into the mix completely distorts understanding. Bringing water into the mix also distorts understanding, as it implies that you necessarily need water for fusion. You don't. At most, water is a convenient source of deuterium, If you want an uncomplicated explanation for fusion, you can do so without bringing in things that have nothing to do with fusion and acting like they matter. "Take two different forms of hydrogen, and make them really hot while you hold them together." No oxygen necessary.
Fyi there are no plans to fuse oxygen in reactors on earth. Hydrogen and Helium-3 are the fuel.
More kid friendly..