I’ve been wandering recently whether nuclear fusion (yes I know it is technically still a “renewable”) could prove all the investment and effort put into the renewables (wind, solar, tidal, wave, geothermal etc.) a huge waste of time and money.

ITER is currently supposed to be up and running in 2020(ish), with plans for a demonstration power plant in progress, for 2030. Of course, fusion may not work, but there seems to be a good chance it will. And with the absolutely fantastic energy output/input ratio, and being completely renewable, surely it will ruin the renewables industry, as it seems it could easily provide worldwide unlimited energy forever.

I only ask because I’ve always dreamt of working with renewables, but I don’t really want to stake a career on an industry that may collapse in the not to distant future (I want to be an engineer).

I’m sure there are people who know a lot more about this then me, so do you guys think there will be a place for renewables if fusion kicks off?
Will it kick off?

No fighting please 🙂

By the way, this isn’t just about my career prospects, I am genuinely interested – and of course I hope fusion does work!!!!!

Well we use renewables to supplement fossil fuels.

Fusion will eventually replace fossil fuels (but it will take a long time to get it up to the power outputs needed) and it completely depends on the CO2 and cost per mW of making a reactor compared to renewables as to whether it replaces renewables too. There is also the security factor which plagues nuclear. Renewables also have a massive headstart in maturity of the technology and have a fantastic promise for the developing world were they need lower capital cost, remote installations (no country-wide power network) and a low risk (ie avoiding nuclear) solution.

So I would think you will be safe considering renewables as a career. Certainly safer that a technology that still doesnt work.

Well I trained as a software engineer in 1977, using mainframes and assemly code (? do you know what that is, not meaning it as rude, but to show change), and as I went through the same career there were several major technological shifts, mainframe, PC, client/server, internet, cloud, I’ve still got a job. Companies and their people move with technology.

http://bigthink.com/videos/fusion-really-is-20-years-away

Nice little video there, I was going to spout the old ‘fusion 20 years away’ line but ITER does sound exciting 😀

Especially if someone can beat the yanks to it

Hadn’t thought about the developing world at all – that’s an interesting point!
Yeah, I guess we are probably talking 2050 at the very earliest for viable production from fusion, by which stage, I will probably be considering retirement, or not if they keep putting the age up 🙂

Thanks for the reply.

And no, I have no idea what mainframes or assembly code are 😉

There are plenty around who know their stuff who think renewables are a waste of time now, let alone in twenty years. They’re not a useful answer. They’re a government sponsored smoke screen which delivers profits paid for by you and me to mutli million pound investors.

There are plenty around who know their stuff who think renewables are a waste of time now, let alone in twenty years. They’re not a useful answer. They’re a government sponsored smoke screen which delivers profits paid for by you and me to mutli million pound investors.

What do you think is a useful answer should fusion fail?

I’ve still got a job. Companies and their people move with technology.

and some stuff just stops as technology replaces it but you still work with computers – how many jobs have they replaced?

There are plenty around who know their stuffare not qualified to comment but are politically motivated who think renewables are a waste of time now, let alone in twenty years.

FTFY

It would be foolish to put all our eggs in the fusion will work and give us limitless power for ever basket- that is what they said about nuclear. We should invest in both IMHO

New technology opens up and takes over all the time. NCSA Mosaic 1.0 (the first proper web browser) was 20 years old the other day. Now imagine a World without them.

Rachel

A good engineer is a good engineer. Worry less about what area you will end up, more about being good.

I actually work in the energy sector so my comments are not politically motivated but based more on supply and demand. We missed the boat somewhat but the answer is nuclear I’m afraid, unless we can radically change people’s expectations on the way they use energy and the carefree convenient way they use it.

and some stuff just stops as technology replaces it but you still work with computers – how many jobs have they replaced?

An related example is people using computers rather than employing them

The two little words that are often forgoten by people pushing energy policies and technologies is “Energy Density” It’s a measure of how much energy can be effectively harvested from a given volume or mass of a substance. Whilst renewables look like a low CO2 solution, they have an enormous penalty in cost and maximum output.

If, as consumers, we are willing to pay high prices for low quantities of electicity (i.e reduce your current consumption) then renewables can play an important part in our energy futures.

The problem, is that in the 1st world, that scenario is highly unlikely imo. People have just got too used to plugging in and switching on without a though of “will the power be on” or “how much will this cost me”

As it stands, our society is sat on the brink of an energy future where the only solution that has sufficient energy density to meet all the demands is a fundamental one (Fission/Fusion i.e. uses the basic universal properties of matter).

The laws governing its development and adoption under our commercial / capitalistic systems are so chaotic that it is impossible imo to guess as to the success or otherwise of Fusion……

The first, and most important step on the ladder is making homes run more efficiently, and I don’t mean by renewables, I mean by making the house fabric and heating systems run more efficiently.

The second rung is finding an alternative to fossil fuels: “Natural” renewables, such as solar, wave, wind, ground source etc all have their important part to play (I personally think we should look into wave/water generation much more than we are). However, I doubt these will ever completely satisfy the demand, even after the first step, so another alternative is needed.

One of the the difficult things about fusion is trying to break even with regard to the amount of energy put in compared to the energy they produce: At the moment, the best they can achieve is 25MW:15MW. I am sure it will happen, but it’s a way off yet.

More time and money needs to be spent on fusion. I should be a governmental priority.

How are the governments nuclear energy plans theses days? Not going anywhere because they’re not willing to pay the subsidy required by the generators – 15 times what the renewables subsidies are….

Considering how much money has been spent on Nuclear since its inception as an energy source you’d think they’d have it dialled in by now.

It won’t happen (and even if it does I’ll have been dead and buried for years and won’t have to eat my words).

That’s as maybe, but you can generate all the time rather than having to wait for clear sky or a breeze. Yet also sell that energy into the grid at the lowest rate, supplying base demand. Maybe that has something to do with the subsidies required.

I’m not says wind/solar/wave/tidal are bad, just that they’re never going to fill the gaps when fossil fuel runs out.

People are going to have to get ready for the day when they flick the switch and nothing happens unless energy stratergies change.

Fusion will eventually replace fossil fuels

For generation of electricity, maybe, but agree it will take a looooong time.

On the wider scale, fossil fuels will still be critical and essential even if electricity generation (and also car propulsion) is 100% renewables.

Still need coal to fire furnaces for steel, alu, concrete, glass etc. Still need oil to make carbon fibre.

When coal/oil run out, making powerstations of any kind will be prohibitive, regardless of what percentage renewable they are.

With the way that shale gas reserves are being found (china has found huge amounts recently apparently) it will be harder for governments to spend the money on fusion, fisson or renewables. The US is already heading towards energy independence again (which will probably mean no more gulf state wars involving the USA).

Even if fusion does work and work well, seems that distributed generation is still worthwhile to reduce grid loss etc?

For those who say nuclear is the answer… 16% of the UK’s electricity comes from nuclear stations, from 16 operational reactors. Now they’re pretty old (several are operating past their design life and IIRC a couple are permanently on reduced power), so let’s charitably assume that a new plant will be twice as powerful.

So, that means we need 42 new reactors, plus a few more to replace the creaky ones. A wee wiki suggests that the government says they’ll cost £2.8bn each, but EON say 6bn euros each. That is a lot of pounds. £140bn by the most optimistic figures just to construct them not to run, staff, or fuel them (or I think to connect to the grid). Plus decomissioning at end of life.

Oh and do we even have the workforce and skill for that? Means increasing the nuclear operator staff by 400% (eh, at a guess), building an awful lot of big complicated buildings and reactors, oh and we need to do it all right now and concurrently because it’ll take a decade or so before the first one switches on.

If nuclear is the answer then none of that seems like good news…

How are the governments nuclear energy plans theses days? Not going anywhere because they’re not willing to pay the subsidy required by the generators – 15 times what the renewables subsidies are….

That sounds like some of the 85.7% of statistics that are made up – seriously, do you have a reference for that? So far as I understand it, wind is subsidised heavily while nuclear is not subsidised at all, as such, just that EdF are asking for a guaranteed price for their nuclear electricity, since the payback payback time for their investment is much longer and more can happen over that time.

PS – just noticed the spellchecker in Firefox, which keeps flipping back to US English, doesn’t recognise the word ‘renewables’. Obviously not a word in common use in the USA…

I’ll just second Greybeard. Renewable tarifs at the moment are insane at the moment. Plus it varies by technology for no apparent reason.

When I see a solar panel on a house I always think of them being anti Robin Hood. Robing the poor to pay the rich.

Secondly some are very badly located. I suspect that a poorly placed panel may never pay back the energy needed to make it, transport it and install it.

, so let’s charitably assume that a new plant will be twice as powerful.

I suspect it will be more then 2X as powerful.

wind is subsidised heavily while nuclear is not subsidised at all

All renewables £3 billion
Gas £3.5 billion
Nuclear £2.3 billion*

http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/04/will-the-public-subsidise-new-nuclear
* mainly decomissioning

Back on topic…..

From an employment point of view:
Fusion as a commercial entity by 2030? So unless you massively over specialise then not really a problem. As said above a good engineer is a good engineer, they are transferable. Even if Fusion is running by then it will not be running everywhere and we will be locked into massive debates over safety and not in my back yard politics. Same as wind really.

As a technology
Renewables as they stand are a good complimentary source of power, I wouldn’t want them for base load – or in other words, powering the hospital that I am in ICU in or powering the 999 call centre. We need to get to the point where the amount of energy we use is reduced and the sources are wide and varied so that we get redundancy. There will be very few days with lots of wind, sun etc. When we do it’s bonus. The renewable industry will happily run in parallel to the others for quite some time.

Look a bit further than some of the posters in this thread – to Africa or the Indian subcontinent for example. Two regions that are growing and developing far faster than any ‘progress’ on this small smug island.
Both regions have grown rapidly, partly because of wireless telecommunications. If they had needed to install the same infrastructure we had en route to mobile comms, they would still be laying cables. They are the future markets for decentralised energy generation. They want the power (far less required than the Western world needs per person) and they want it before the latter half of the 21st Century.
Get into renewables if you want to – just have a broad view of their application rather than a rooftop in the Home Counties.

IIRC winds payback for CO2/energy consumption to make and erect is a couple of years to 5 years. The financial payback is a little longer, but not much. This makes well sited wind a pretty good thing.

Personally I would love to see more investment in tidal power in the UK – we are letting other nations steal a march on us with that one, and the predictable generation is a good thing.

The other thing I would like to see is a shift into storing off peak generated renewable power by cracking water into Hydrogen, either for use in vehicles or for use later on in electricity generation.

Of course if we could get Solar to high efficiencies that would solve every problem right off the bat! The amount of solar radiation energy hitting the planet is quite staggering! Unfortunately I don’t know how much “better” that is going to get as it is a pretty mature technology now, unless there is a radical rethink in how to harness that energy.

Fusion has been 30 years from a commercial reality for at least the last 30 years as it happens, so I am really not holding my breath on that one. Fission is fraught with problems and the carbon footprint is quite massive for that technology too so I can’t see that as a viable option really, at least not as a sole technology to run a country on. I think a renewables core is going to be necessary for many years to come, along with a drive to massively increased energy efficiencies in both the home and industry/commerce.

It’s worth noting that the cheap abundence of fossil fuel based energy is precisely the reason nuclear (both fission and fussion) haven’t been developed further over the last 30 years or so!

After all, if i can sell you a pint of milk for 11pence, you are hardly going to go to the expense of buying your own cow. If i suddenly want £3 for a pint however…………..

In my view, the incredibly short sighted, uninformed and knee jerk reaction of various “green” elements in our society towards the risks of nuclear generation, should also be held responsible for seriously hobbling the development of more efficient and cleaner power for all.

06awjudd – Member

I suspect it will be more then 2X as powerful.

Decided my post was a bit “citation needed”… So, the average per reactor currently is 660MWe. The 3 new reactors planned for Oldbury and Wylfa are designed to output 1350MWe. So not a bad guess it turns out. Probably other reactors can produce more but these seem to be the cool thing just now.

Assuming they build all 3 (not confirmed), they’ll not be in place in time to replace the outgoing reactors due for retirement, and even if they were they will produce less power.

Fusion isn’t the only nuclear option; there’s also the Thorium cycle. It was not developed in the 50’s & 60’s because it didn’t have bomb-making materiel as a by-product.
Nuclear engineering is probably a good thing to get into – the current crop of engineers are beginning to retire, & there is still a need for decommissioning as well as anything else. Learn an Asian language too, as a subsidiary subject. You’ll do well.

If i suddenly want £3 for a pint however…………..

I still wouldn’t buy a cow, they smell, they poo a lot. My lawn would be ruined.

We got the wrong kind of fission technology because back in the 50s we needed plutonium for bombs.