I will admit that I'm not an engineer of any relevant area here. So I offer this only as a matter of general judgment & experience, which you are welcome to say "does not apply." (But please say why it doesn't.)
It's always been my impression that building things on a huge, factory-wide scale is a radically different problem than building a demo, or even reasoning about it. The latter is what you are all doing.
As long as "energy crisis" has been a Thing, I've been hearing about some uber-cool new thing a scientist did, which has the potential to transform everything. Usually that's the last you ever hear of it. I always wonder "whatever happened to X?"
I figure that "X" might look good in the lab, but no one can build a factory around it. The people who build factories (or power plants) are much less starry-eyed than we all are.
That's what we mean by "skin in the game (SITG)." Don't tell me what stocks to buy -- tell me what's in your portfolio.
So if I'm deciding whom to believe in an area where I know next to nothing, I'm much more likely to listen to someone who has, or had, SITG. Obviously if no one's ever built a fusion plant before, then exactly no one has had SITG. That makes it a tough one.
Don't believe me!! I have a solid grasp on why waste-heat-to-power doesn't work (despite free "fuel") and why geothermal doesn't work (despite free fuel). I pray that there is something different about fusion that means it will work... and make no claim to know that it won't. I don't know anything about fusion plants or their economics.
Communication is a difficult thing, especially written communication. I work proactively to get better at it when the opportunities to do so arise.
In your initial response, and in this one, what I "hear" is that what you heard was somehow either dismissive or disrespectful of the experience the OP brought to the table. I am interested in understanding what it was about my words that gave you that impression. I do understand that reality is very complicated and building systems as ones $dayjob in a competitive environment gives you a depth of knowledge that is unmatched.
What I heard in the OP comment was a question, "What makes fusion different?" and in this case the context was why might it be a step change versus other things (some of which the author was involved in) have not gotten traction. And the specific driver was how to compete with costs from extractive technologies like natural gas that are quite mature.
I shared my point of view and reasoning from the perspective that I expected the ratio of the plant construction and operation cost relative to the energy output to be much higher than pretty much any other technology so it's LCOE will be lower.
Do I know that to be the case? No I don't. Can I reason to that position from first principles? I think so, and calling me out on my reasoning as pfdeitz has done a couple of times in this thread is awesome (the most relevant for this thread being that so far we only know how to make fusion plants with a much lower energy/m3 ratio than say nuclear plants)
To your comment about 'whom to believe' I would say I'm not asking you to believe me (and I hope that wasn't a take away from my responses). I was sharing how I thought fusion was different, others have other takes on this, and nobody knows for sure because well it doesn't exist yet. I am curious though, if you feel okay sharing it, if there is anxiety with your belief system.
When I am presented with information and I don't know how much confidence to put into it, I often do similar things which is to look at the source, and to consider how the source arrived at that belief. Ideally I like to hear how they got to that belief which probably comes from reading a bunch of scientific papers that are basically one long essay that use the form: "This is what we believe, this is why we believe it, and this is the evidence we have to support our beliefs." But even in a paper I still hold that belief "lightly." If you see me passing such things on it will usually be of the form, "here is a reference to a paper or article I've read that posits this." As opposed to some definitive statement of truth. For me, I'm not invested in being "right".
I can easily say that most of the best conversations I've had, started with "Chuck you are completely wrong about that and here's why ..." I love conversations like that because it means I'm likely to learn something new, and every time we re-examine what we "know" we often come away with a better understanding of the limits of what we "know" and what we "think" or hypothesize.
Throughout this conversation it has been my intent to be clear that these are things I "think" based on what are, to me, comparable but "solved" problems. Still there are a lot of unknown unknowns such as it is and everything I think could easily be invalidated by one of them. I am always on the lookout for this sort of information. It helps keep me grounded.
Always working on improving communications and critical thinking skills and always open to feedback.
Sorry if I was curt, Chuck. I reread OP's post and your later dialog. It's interesting that you mention something I thought of but I hadn't seen before: the capacity of the grid to handle a very large power source.
I saw "3 Gw" as a comfortable max right now, maybe even that was from you; I don't know how accurate that is, but let's go with it for the moment. Let's say that you can't connect a power source larger than 3 Gw currently, although maybe raising that number is straightforward.
So it seems almost beyond dispute that the capital cost of building a fusion plant will be immense -- far, far larger than any other type, and that would be true for any type of fuel that hasn't been used before, purely because it's Plant #1. Plant #100 always costs way less.
But fusion isn't just any type of new fuel; it's radically different and unknown as to its properties. Will the neutron bombardment break it down in a couple years? Won't there be something that needs regular maintenance? No one knows how this thing will behave in 24x7 use, and yet the cost will be huge.
As OP said, even with free fuel, the capital cost of a geothermal or waste heat plant makes it noncompetitive with natural gas, and your argument is that fusion will produce so much electricity that the inequality will change.
So it costs huge sums to build the thing, and that can only be worthwhile if it produces huge amounts of power. More than 3 Gw. Furthermore, any downtime is horrifically expensive: you have to keep amortizing those construction costs.
So we probably have to upgrade the grid to handle these things and we have to over-engineer the thing grossly to avoid that expensive downtime.
One can argue that these are just part of the learning curve for any new technology. That might be true, but it probably means that it'll be 100 years before fusion is a big win.
No worries, I didn't think you were being curt, I just wanted to be sure I was understanding what you were trying to tell me. My goal is to add light not heat to the discussion (thermo pun).
We definitely approach this sort of thing differently. To use your first example:
"So it seems almost beyond dispute that the capital cost of building a fusion plant will be immense -- far, far larger than any other type, and that would be true for any type of fuel that hasn't been used before, purely because it's Plant #1. Plant #100 always costs way less."
I completely agree that it may turn out that building fusion plants are prohibitively expensive. That isn't "disputing" the assertion it is simply accepting that it may or may not turn out to be the case.
The way I approach it however is this; Let's assume there are a bunch of possible futures. Some of them are like "Fusion plants cost 10x more than even Nuclear plants" and that future is not interesting from discussion point of view because the market won't allow that sort of thing to survive. So let's consider what would indicate that they would be financially feasible.
So looking at that one question, we have a couple of interesting examples. There is ITER which is consuming billions of dollars.
Not all of the expenses there would be present in building the next one as you note. Still, even if they were half as much the plant would be hugely expensive.
Then we have the Wendelstein 7-x stellerator[1],
the HIT-SI system[2] at UW, the Lockheed Martin entry[3], and the MIT ARC project[4].
So in one future one of these alternate implementation strategies "wins" and we get fusion plants that are both functional and affordable.
So if we're going to talk about something we can talk about all the possibilities.
So we can be in complete agreement that fusion may never be feasible while still talking about what would need to be true so that it was[5].
And I'll wrap up with this, you wrote:
"As OP said, even with free fuel, the capital cost of a geothermal or waste heat plant makes it noncompetitive with natural gas, and your argument is that fusion will produce so much electricity that the inequality will change.
So it costs huge sums to build the thing, and that can only be worthwhile if it produces huge amounts of power. More than 3 Gw. Furthermore, any downtime is horrifically expensive: you have to keep amortizing those construction costs."
That wasn't what I was trying to communicate though. IF the cost of production for a fusion plant is comparable to the cost of production of a fission plant, and the fusion plant can produce twice as much energy, then based on the LCOE of Nuclear plants the LCOE of fusion energy would be a market leader. So what I do is look for things that might inform the question, "What's it going to cost to build a fusion plant?" and try to glean any insights I can from what I find.
I also agree that if fusion plants cost much more than nuclear plants to produce the same amount or less energy, then they will not be successful in the market place.
Everyone I've talked to who is trying to build commercial fusion are targeting for much less expensive than nuclear but success is never guaranteed.
[5] Yes, some people will say "Well its a waste of time to talk about something that you don't know if it can even be done." And yet, for me, it is a pragmatic use of time because unexpected things happen all the time. A case I lived through was the GM "EV-1" electric vehicle where many engineers I knew wanted to stop talking about electric cars because GM has "proven" they weren't feasible and no one would buy them because they would take to long to recharge and no one is willing to wait that long at the recharging station. That was all true during those discussions. But Tesla showed what you could do if you built one differently, and now everyone seems to think electric vehicles are the future of all cars. So for me, it isn't worthless to think about these things.
> "Then we have the Wendelstein 7-x stellerator[1], the HIT-SI system[2] at UW, the Lockheed Martin entry[3], and the MIT ARC project[4]."
Well, we're at the limits of my "competence." I guess it comes down to "what does a plant cost to build?" and I have absolutely no clue.
I don't think that "sunny optimism" is always the best attitude in everything, like it's been for us in computers the last 50 years, but you don't seem guilty of that. So: thanks & good luck!
It's always been my impression that building things on a huge, factory-wide scale is a radically different problem than building a demo, or even reasoning about it. The latter is what you are all doing.
As long as "energy crisis" has been a Thing, I've been hearing about some uber-cool new thing a scientist did, which has the potential to transform everything. Usually that's the last you ever hear of it. I always wonder "whatever happened to X?"
I figure that "X" might look good in the lab, but no one can build a factory around it. The people who build factories (or power plants) are much less starry-eyed than we all are.
That's what we mean by "skin in the game (SITG)." Don't tell me what stocks to buy -- tell me what's in your portfolio.
So if I'm deciding whom to believe in an area where I know next to nothing, I'm much more likely to listen to someone who has, or had, SITG. Obviously if no one's ever built a fusion plant before, then exactly no one has had SITG. That makes it a tough one.