Comment by kragen
6 months ago
Data center cooling towers have to use fresh rather than salt water, but they don't care about bacterial contamination or toxic traces of arsenic, antimony, and fluorine. Agriculture also has to use fresh rather than salt water. I can't think of any circumstances where water that was usable for agriculture wouldn't also be usable for cooling data centers—except when the farmer owns the water and the data center operator doesn't.
I also think the energy usage stuff is kind of nonsense. If energy usage is a major part of your operating expenses, you're probably going to locate your data center where energy is cheap, and cheap energy is always renewable. I'm sure you can find data centers that run off coal plants or other thermal power, but thermal power costs in the neighborhood of 100¢ per peak watt, while solar cells cost 12¢ per peak watt, so thermal power won't be competitive for very long.
Not to mention that this is likely a very short-term debate. Modern AI/ML/compute has been a huge boost to fusion R&D, and tons of AI/tech capital is flowing into companies like Helion and CFS. Necessity is the mother of invention and all.
It may be a valid criticism today, but no one will be complaining about AI's environmental impact after those first few plants go live and mass production begins within the next decade. Knock on wood.
I'm skeptical about that. Helion in particular might work (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlNfP3iywvI) but all the other fusion-energy companies' plans are to convert fusion energy to thermal energy and then convert the thermal energy to electrical energy in the usual way, using steam engines. That's never going to be cheaper than thermal energy powering steam engines, because thermal energy powering steam engines is part of it.
But solar energy is.
Helion's strategy is to directly convert the hot plasma's expansion into electrical energy by, basically, pushing against a powerful magnetic field. This is potentially higher efficiency than steam engines (because it's working at a higher temperature) and potentially higher power density and reliability. So it could at least theoretically get to be cheaper than steam engines. But I think it's more likely to be far more expensive for the next several decades.
I'm definitely more optimistic about Helion. It's the one that would really dramatically change the economics of power generation at scale, and they seem to have substantially engineered around major challenges like not requiring ignition and minimizing losses to Bremsstrahlung radiation. I like that they're laser-focused on launching and delivering commercial value, even if that means a bit less transparency and less focus on research demonstrations than many would prefer.
If Helion delivers Orion on anywhere close to the target timeline, it seems like they'd be primed to kick off mass production and start shipping units all over the country with minimal regulatory hurdles. With sufficiently high productive capacity, it would effectively make all other forms of power generation obsolete at utility scale. Solar would still great for small/decentralized use cases, but there wouldn't be as much reason for a power company to build new solar plants if they had the option to fill the same real estate with a bunch of Helion machines.
That being said, I'm not not optimistic about steam-based fusion power. It would be less revolutionary, but from what I understand would still be a huge advancement. My read is that it would effectively obsolete fission power and plausibly fossil fuel power as well, if not also grid-scale renewables. It would be like having SMRs with higher efficiency and no major proliferation or meltdown concerns that amplify costs. High neutron output and steam conversion add costs and complexity, but if CFS panned out and Helion didn't, I'd hardly turn my nose at that.
I could also see a world where multiple forms of fusion power pan out, and it turns out to be economical for Helion to sell tritium to other vendors like CFS rather than storing it for 12 years until it decays to He3. Maybe we'd even have colocated plants in a certain ratio where Helion provides on-site tritium generation in the exact volume needed for a D-T reactor.
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