More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade(growthbusiness.co.uk)

692 pointsby bilsbiehá 4 anos663 comments

growthbusiness.co.uk

More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

https://www.growthbusiness.co.uk/more-invested-in-nuclear-fusion-in-last-12-months-than-past-decade-2560528/

684 comments

But where are the fusion neutrons? (See Voodoo Fusion [1])

[1] https://vixra.org/pdf/1812.0382v1.pdf

I'm a professional fission guy. I started out in fusion and switched to advanced fission. These days I don't see why we don't just build lots more regular old LWR fission reactors.

Imagining that somehow fusion is going to a) work, b) be cheap (fuel cost is only 5% of total nuclear fission cost so who cares), and c) not have the same stigma as fission is kind of weird in my mind.

For example, there are leaks of tiny amounts of tritium at some fission plants and people lose their minds. Fusion reactors will have many orders of mag more tritium. Will people not lose their minds just the same? Tritium is notoriously hard to contain since it's so small. It can permeate through metal like a hot knife through butter.

Also, lots of people worry about fission and nuclear weapons proliferation. So does fusion get around this? Not really. In fact it's worse. Did you know that the two materials you need to make thermonuclear weapons are tritium and plutonium? Tritium breeding is required by almost all practical fusion power plants (the other reactions are 100s to 1000s of times harder, I don't care what x random fusion CEO says, they're in it for the sweet billionaire side project money).

Plutonium is made by irradiating natural uranium from the dirt with neutrons. Practical fusion reactors have lots of neutrons. Really high energy ones too.

Anyway let's just do fission you guys. It's way easier. It has been working fine since the 1950s. It's zero carbon. Waste problem is solved (see Onkalo, and reprocessing). It net saves millions of lives by displacing air pollution. It runs 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint. We have enough uranium and thorium to run the whole world for 4 billion (with a b) years using breeder reactors (demonstrated in 1952 in Idaho). Get the Koreans over here to build some ARP1400s or the Chinese to build some Hualong Ones until we figure out how to project manage again and then call it good.

godelskihá 4 anos

Honestly, I don't understand why we can't do both. I don't think this has to be framed as a zero sum problem (I think way too many issues are naively framed that way). With reference to the article, the funding levels over the past decade (globally) were roughly $200m/yr. That's really nothing in terms of government money and well within the realm that just the US could sustain such an effort alone. It would be roughly 0.004% of our yearly budget! That's an insanely low amount of money to spend given the potential upsides. You're right that there's weapons proliferation problems with both, but honestly that also seems like a good argument for pulling that funding out of what is already allocated to military budgets (not trying to defend nuclear weapons here, but we do have to acknowledge the existence of the military industrial complex and that they dictate a lot of the US budget).

> Anyway let's ~~just~~ do fission you guys.

So I agree with you. Let's do fission, but not _just_ fission. Let's put a lot of money into it and bring down the costs. The cost of climate change clearly far outweighs the cost of nuclear plants and waste. And that the waste really isn't a problem, as you yourself have extensively written about. These arguments always go "nuclear vs x" and honestly I want to see "fission + fusion + solar + wind + hydro + batteries." I don't see why we can't have it all. The zero sum arguments seem to make such a dream more difficult to achieve.

Also, good to see you back. Always glad to see your input on these posts.

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

Sure, that's a good and fair point. I shouldn't say I oppose fusion R&D. I feel more like we should be more focused on deploying 100s of serialized LWR fission plants right now alongside all the wind/solar/batteries/hydro to solve climate change, while also investing R&D into things like advanced fission and fusion, and geothermal. There's certainly an under-investment in low carbon energy tech in general compared to the world GDP imho.

Still, I do feel that some fusion hype is partially due to people not giving fission enough credit though.

Happy to be back, thanks!

godelskihá 4 anos

Yeah, then we're on the same page.

But one note, I don't think fusion has the same uphill battle that fission does. You mentioned that the fission industry just hasn't been able to properly demonstrate what they can do, but I don't think this is entirely it. We do have to consider the decades worth of campaigning and lobbying by coal and gas that went after nuclear. That these campaigns even infiltrated the biggest green lobbying groups: Sierra Nevada and Green Peace. Fusion doesn't have this same battle to overcome. I'm in the state just south of you and we're very pro green, but our green politicians still talk about fission and "the dangers." Hanford is still discussed with a lot of fervor. Such history and momentum doesn't exist with fusion other than "20 years away." I understand why a lot of people have effectively given up and why a lot of climate scientists don't bring it up, but will admit that they aren't against fission (usually with that precise wording). Honestly, I think it is more on the climate scientists at this point to be vocal about it.

JohnBootyhá 4 anos

    Honestly, I think it is more on the climate 
    scientists at this point to be vocal about it.

I think you hit the nail on the head here.

It's understandable that science-illiterate, climate change-denier types fear fission. The fossil fuel industry has done an excellent job percolating their pro fossil-fuel agenda and fomenting fear of the unknown. This is the unavoidable enemy.

The only way to counter this would be for green types (Greenpeace, etc, as you say) and climate scientists to unite and promote fission. I do not think this is remotely likely, but it is the only thing that would remotely stand a chance of countering the fossil fuel industry in the battle for public mindset and votes. I would be absolutely stunned if this happened before billions are displaced due to fossil fuel-caused climate change, and I actually don't think it will happen even then. The status quo will continue as long as the fossil fuel companies remain rich... so, basically until civilizational collapse.

Simply put, fission got an extremely raw deal. It was stabbed in the back and buried by the people who should have supported it, based on their stated goals and beliefs.

Nothing can survive that.

joakhá 4 anos

This conversation seems to me a bit outdated: building a fission reactor takes one or two decades and its kWh is costlier than alternatives. To get something cheaper, we need to wait for the next gen of technology, in one or two decades. Lucky if we can compete with the costs of solar, wind and batteries in a decade.

Even with the support of greens, government, scientists, etc this is going no where.

Nuclear fission is dead, why trying to revive it? What's the point?

delrothhá 4 anos

> building a fission reactor takes one or two decades

This is not universally true. Looking at South Korea's construction times for example[1], you'll see that it's averaging between 5-7 years per reactor, all the way into the 2000s and 2010s. Japan shows similar numbers[2], and they're currently in the process of restarting their nuclear investments following the accident at Fukushima Daiichi. Same story for China[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea#B...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...

mooglyhá 4 anos

I feel you are cherry-picking those South Korean numbers. If you look at the latest ones that started construction in 2009-2012, it's taken 10 years (and some are still not started). That's "one decade". Extrapolating the construction time inflation, you could imagine any future developments will take longer still.

JohnBootyhá 4 anos

    building a fission reactor takes one or two decades 
    and its kWh is costlier than alternatives

It didn't and doesn't need to be that way. Obviously we need strong regulatory oversight over nuclear power, but a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations imposed by politicians who are (a) pandering to public fear (b) heavily influence by the fossil fuel industry.

Also, talking about kWh cost in the short term is... missing a large portion of the point. Burning fossil fuels is only "cheap" if all the long term damage is ignored. Let's talk about how cheap it is once we start truly paying the price for climate change to the tune of billions of lives and many quadrillions of dollars.

logifailhá 4 anos

> > building a fission reactor takes one or two decades and its kWh is costlier than alternatives

> It didn't and doesn't need to be that way [..] a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations [..]

(Alleged over-)regulation is only part of the story.

"analysis, done by a team of researchers at MIT, is remarkably comprehensive. For many nuclear plants, they have detailed construction records, broken out by which building different materials and labor went to, and how much each of them cost. There's also a detailed record of safety regulations and when they were instituted relative to construction. Finally, they've also brought in the patent applications filed by the companies who designed the reactors. The documents describe the motivations for design changes and the problems those changes were intended to solve."[0]

"while safety regulations added to the costs, they were far from the primary factor. And deciding whether they were worthwhile costs would require a detailed analysis of every regulatory change in light of accidents like Three Mile Island and Fukushima"

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...

JohnBootyhá 4 anos

So how are other countries e.g. South Korea building them faster than the US, yet not suffering nuclear accidents?

I presume the problem is not a lack of engineering talent in America.

mooglyhá 4 anos

> a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations imposed by politicians who are (a) pandering to public fear (b) heavily influence by the fossil fuel industry

People keep on parroting this, but could you list what these "incredibly hostile regulations" entail?

The only "new" thing I know of is the requirement in certain places (like in Sweden) to have ICSS, Independent Core Cooling System, to prevent a Fukushima situation, plus to prevent a meltdown caused by what happened at Forsmark Nuclear Plant in Sweden 2006[1]

ICSS isn't that expensive BTW. Vattenfall cited the cost of adding ICSS to their 5 reactors to about 3 billion SEK in 2020. That's about 300 million US dollars with today's exchange rate.[2]

[1]: https://analys.se/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/forsmark-incide...

[2]: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Swedish-reactors...

endominushá 4 anos

>ICSS isn't that expensive BTW. Vattenfall cited the cost of adding ICSS to their 5 reactors to about 3 billion SEK in 2020. That's about 300 million US dollars with today's exchange rate.

$300m seems pretty expensive to me as a cost to add to what is already the safest energy source in the world by terawatt-hour produced[0]. One-fifth the death rate of rooftop solar. 0.025% as dangerous as oil. Every terawatt-hour of energy a coal power plant produces results in as many deaths as one hundred Fukushima "situations."

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

mooglyhá 4 anos

Rubbish.

Considering a single reactor costs €11-19 billion[1][2] to build in Western Europe currently (Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville (we haven't seen the final bill for that one yet)), an additional 300 million dollars is a drop in the bucket and not the thing that will make the project go from viable to nonviable.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... (final)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan... (projected, not final)

endominushá 4 anos

Step 1: Nuclear reactors are so expensive already, additional costs to increase safety barely matter in their overall price! This additional regulation isn't enough to make a viable plant nonviable.

Step 2: Nuclear reactors are so expensive it makes no sense to provision new ones when renewables are just around the corner! Just keep the current coal power plants running while we take another decade to increase solar grid capacity by a few terawatts.

Step 3: Go to step 1.

See also; heap fallacy. Seriously, coal power generation is so bad that if we had to reduce safety regulations to the point that we were having a Chernobyl-level meltdown every month to replace all coal with nuclear plants, we would be significantly better off for it. It's not even close. We could literally completely deregulate safety of nuclear power plants and be safer overall.

(Per the stats I shared earlier, coal power kills 100,000 people per thousand terawatt-hours produced. The world produces roughly 44,000 tWh of coal energy, resulting in 4.4 million deaths per year. Casualty estimates of Chernobyl vary wildly, but even the most pessimistic estimate produced by Greenpeace, avowed anti-nuclear activists that they are, only totals 200,000. Coal power is almost twice as bad as having a Chernobyl every month)

nlhá 4 anos

I think you underestimate how much lobbying the nuclear industry does.

Here's the former head of the US Nuclear regulator talking about how he worked to reduce safety regulations to make it easier to build nuclear plants. Now he thinks no new nuclear power should ever be built: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/i-oversaw-the-us-nucl...

pawsforthoughthá 4 anos

It stands to reason that the nuclear lobby is out for its bottom line, but let’s not lose perspective on just how devastatingly deadly fossil fuel combustion is by comparison, killing an estimated 8.7 million people per year [1]. That’s 1 in 5 of all deaths globally.

Our perceptions of risk are massively skewed by the (literally) explosive nature of nuclear disasters compared to this silent holocaust to which we’re shockingly normalized.

From Our World in Data [2]:

> Nuclear energy, for example, results in 99.9% fewer deaths than brown coal; 99.8% fewer than coal; 99.7% fewer than oil; and 97.6% fewer than gas. Wind and solar are just as safe.

That’s per unit of energy generated.

Curiously, while most can likely name Chernobyl and Fukushima (perhaps fewer Windscale and Three Mile Island), what of the Banqiao Dam disaster, which killed an estimated 171,000 people the 1970s?

All that said, extrapolating the lethality of nuclear generation to a world with many more nuclear plants is fraught, precisely because there are so few data points.

There’s no escaping the fact that these are incredibly complex and expensive machines, which can fail in unexpected ways, no matter how scrupulously they’re designed to be passively safe — especially when compared to a solar PV park.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...

[2]: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

cycomanichá 4 anos

> building a fission reactor takes one or two decades

> and its kWh is costlier than alternatives

> It didn't and doesn't need to be that way. Obviously we need strong regulatory oversight over nuclear power, but a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations imposed by politicians who are (a) pandering to public fear (b) heavily influence by the fossil fuel industry.

That is not true, there was an HN submission which broke down the cost of nuclear construction (am on mobile and can't easily find it right now) and cost is largely dominated by construction cost, which to a large degree (>50%) are the same as a regular thermal power plant. Regarding regulations, the nuclear lobby is actually very strong, they even managed to reduce regulations for the steam-generating cycle compared to other power plants (I think this was in the US).

> Also, talking about kWh cost in the short term is... missing a large portion of the point. Burning fossil fuels is only "cheap" if all the long term damage is ignored. Let's talk about how cheap it is once we start truly paying the price for climate change to the tune of billions of lives and many quadrillions of dollars.

But the comparison is not to fossil fuels, the comparison is to renewables. If renewables are cheaper and faster (which is the case) they will enable us to move of fossil sources faster than nuclear, so the overall emitted CO2 is less.

samatmanhá 4 anos

Not only are the costs comparable to a carbon thermal plant, the generating equipment is identical, and the cooling needs are also identical.

Solution: build nuclear cores as close to existing coal plants as possible, shut the coal plant down, and move everything from the steam boiler to the wires to the nuclear plant.

Repeat until no coal.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

The cooling needs on a LWR are actually a bit higher, per unit of electrical power output, because the steam temperature is lower than that of a coal plant. The discrepancy is much larger for combined cycle plants.

just_boost_ithá 4 anos

Fuel diversification is important too. That's something Germany seems to have forgotten when they went all in on natural gas.

manmalhá 4 anos

The problem is that the sun is not always shining (and half the year not at the right angle), and wind is not always blowing. Unless a country has access to always-on sources (like sea currents), energy must be stored or things must be burned. Storage is hard and energy intensive to build, and many countries would need a few months worth of storage to never bother about burning stuff again. And that’s _a lot_, you wouldn’t believe the kind of power needed to support some branches of industry, and they won’t shut down in winter of course.

cycomanichá 4 anos

If your grid is large enough (and that is already happening in Europe for economic reasons), you have enough geographic distribution to average out variations. There have been studies that showed you could run the US on something like 500% overcapacity with a fully integrated grid using only renewables and no storage.

Moreover nuclear are slow moving, they typically don't load follow, so even with a combined nuclear/renewables you still either need significant overcapacity or some sort of peaker. So you haven't actually solved the variation problem.

Finally, because cost for nuclear is largely dominated by capex (construction cost, both in dollars and CO2 foodprint), not running the nuclear plant as close to capacity as possible will even more increase the price and also reduce the CO2 lifetime emission. In usual comparisons which puts nuclear on par with renewables, nuclear is assumed to run essentially 24/7 while solar/wind are based on some statistical uptime. If we operate a nuclear not close to capacity its lifetime carbon footprint becomes significantly worse.

dmitriidhá 4 anos

> Moreover nuclear are slow moving, they typically don't load follow

Which is not entirely true: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...

Even older designs could do load following.

logifailhá 4 anos

The problem isn't really to what extent nuclear is load-following, but that the economics of nuclear look even worse than they already do if we want to follow the cheapest generator.

To be blunt: if the sun is shining and it's windy, no-one really wants to buy a nuclear plant's output. Not at an agreed fixed price, or possibly at any price.

The idea of nuclear getting paid the same price - or worse, an index-linked price - for the lifetime of the plant, regardless of what the future holds, and even on those sunny and windy days, just seems horrendously anticompetitive.

If nuclear is as necessary, competitive and flexible as some make out, then go right ahead and build your plant(s). Just don't expect taxpayers to underwrite anything.

dmitriidhá 4 anos

> if we want to follow the cheapest generator.

Energy isn't just about generation

> If nuclear is as necessary, competitive and flexible as some make out, then go right ahead and build your plant(s). Just don't expect taxpayers to underwrite anything.

By the same logic taxpayers shouldn't underwrite any renewables: they are significantly slower than nuclear, and have literally zero base load capacity.

logifailhá 4 anos

> By the same logic taxpayers shouldn't underwrite any renewables: they are significantly slower than nuclear, and have literally zero base load capacity.

The cost for offshore wind projects has fallen so fast in the UK that the many of the latest projects don't need subsidies, see this report from Imperial College (London)[0], in fact they'll be paying the government, see this article from Bloomberg.[1]

I'm pretty sceptical about the phrase 'base load', when it comes up, such as in a HN discussion[2] from a last week, it seems to be used to describe wanting to choose slow and/or expensive power plants.

EDIT: See also this[3] recent HN discussion, in which it was pointed out "California has put emphasis on renewables and if the nuclear power station isn't guaranteed to provide base load then it's too expensive to operate"

[0] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/200353/offshore-wind-power-c... [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-13/high-powe... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32152588 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31610996

manmalhá 4 anos

Building wind and solar to 500% overcapacity sounds like a great waste of resources and space though.

DennisPhá 4 anos

And makes nuclear look a lot more cost-competitive by comparison.

cycomanichá 4 anos

But currently solar/wind are ~3x cheaper than nuclear and falling rapidly. So the 500% overcapacity would likely in the end cost the same as 100% capacity of nuclear. However, with nuclear you need at least 200% capacity as well (maintenance, hot days, not being able to load follow fast enough). So which one is the waste of resources?

DennisPhá 4 anos

Long-distance transmission is at least as slow to build as nuclear, at least in the US. There are projects that have foundered for decades.

adrianNhá 4 anos

Storage is certainly not harder to build than nuclear power plants. Power-to-Gas is technologically quite straightforward. The research that's currently happening is just to make it cheaper until we have enough renewables for grid-scale storage to make sense. The really hard part of becoming carbon neutral is the sectors other than electricity, e.g. heating and transportation, but nuclear power won't help you there.

depressedpandahá 4 anos

Why do you think fission can't help with heating? Heat is one of the by-products of running a reactor.

E.g.: https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-power-could-heat-your-h...

https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclea...

adrianNhá 4 anos

Because the problematic part is switching millions and millions of buildings from gas and oil to either heat pumps or district heating, not generating heat or electricity.

manmalhá 4 anos

Power to gas (incl reverse) is terribly lossy right now.

adrianNhá 4 anos

Surplus renewable electricity is incredibly cheap. Losses matter a lot less than the cost of the infrastructure you need for storage. Batteries have great efficiency, but they're not cheap. We already have a bunch of infrastructure that can handle gas.

V1ndaarhá 4 anos

> What's the point?

Energy density.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

Oh look, a metric no one cares about.

jablhá 4 anos

> Fusion doesn't have this same battle to overcome.

Ha ha, Greenpeace has already per-emptively decided they hate fusion too.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

Greenpeace gives no shit about Emperors having no clothes, so they've been pointing out the grave economic barriers to DT fusion, and also the implications of fusion for proliferation. And they're entirely right about that.

smallnamespacehá 4 anos

People are scared of the word nuclear, and that applies to fusion as well.

cinntailehá 4 anos

> Still, I do feel that some fusion hype is partially due to people not giving fission enough credit though

I wonder if this is more a marketing thing. Fission has a bad rep so people try to evade it by getting funding for fusion or SMRs (I know this is fission too) instead. Which people don't associate with classical nuclear reactor tech. Even though it's probably better to just put that money towards a new AP1000 from a cost perspective.

thinkcontexthá 4 anos

It's extremely unlikely any more AP1000s will be built in the US. All projects that were in the development pipeline have been cancelled due to the spectacular financial failures that Summer and Vogtle have been.

The only way it could happen is if the feds took on construction risk.

cinntailehá 4 anos

That's a fair point, I don't know if there are any other fission reactor candidates that have a better shot at succeeding? Maybe SMRs are the only possible candidates even though the economics ($/kWh) are likely worse, if they can build them on time then at least we're working with a predictable outcome.

[deleted]há 4 anos

Retrichá 4 anos

The issue when you say let’s build X00 new LWR is just cost vs benefit. Something like 5 Trillion in additional nuclear subsidies might slow down climate change a low single digit percentage over the next 30 years. This relates not just to the high cost of nuclear but also the delay between deciding to build nuclear and actually getting low carbon energy from a nuclear reactor.

Spend 1/4th that on solar or wind subsidies and you get vastly more carbon free energy sooner without any concerns for politically inconvenient disasters. 1 nuclear reactor can be quite safe, but 500 of them is 500 times the risk. Even a largely non issue Fukushima style disaster is still a major political and economic issue.

Fission is quite useful, and I hope it continues to provide largely carbon free energy into the future. It’s just not a great use of the resources required to make a real difference.

The outlook for Fusion over the next few decades doesn’t look very good, but it’s also received vastly less investment. It’s IMO a low odds but low cost bet that might pay off but probably won’t.

justforthisandnhá 4 anos

People have issues with really visualizing and understanding order of magnitudes, I get it.

> Spend 1/4th that on solar or wind subsidies and you get vastly more carbon free energy

Have you done the math, or are you just making that figure up? One single LWR generates from 1GW onwards. Do you know how much solar you need to generate the same amount of power? And that's disregarding the obvious issues with non-constant energy output.

Plus - solar and wind, if you factor in the energy required to manifacture the components necessary for their operation, have negative EROI. https://energyeducation.se/wind-and-solar-energy-are-neither...

I have literally no idea why people think that solar and wind are a solution to the energy problem. It's like nobody has actually looked into the math and said "wow this makes me feel good so I'll support it". Let me repeat it, solar and wind have _negative_ EROI. If you invest in solar and wind, you're net losing energy.

> 1 nuclear reactor can be quite safe, but 500 of them is 500 times the risk

Modern nuclear is exceptionally safe. Europe is switching to freaking _coal_ in an effort not to freeze this winter. Statistically, they're killing hundreds of times more people than if they switched to nuclear at the right time. They're shutting down most of their nuclear for unknown reasons as well.

Retrichá 4 anos

> Have you done the math, or are you just making that figure up?

Ran the numbers, people are installing solar without any subsidies. If you look at what subsides could achieve for grid scale solar it gets crazy.

Also, there is no way solar and wind can have negative EROI simply on a cost basis. There is simply no way for an unsubsidized energy source to have a negative EROI and be the cheapest energy source. You believe there is an option for sub 1c/kWh power to be supplying energy to crease that equipment and nothing fits the bill.

freeminthá 4 anos

500 is 1-(1-risk)^500 the risk

Retrichá 4 anos

This isn’t one of those cases where the only thing you care about is if something happens or not as humanity would need to deal with and thus pay for every nuclear accident. As there is no discount if it happens twice vs once every reactor is an independent risk. Thus, 500 reactors is 500x the risk.

You might argue multiple major disasters might result in more reactors being shut down as knee jerk reaction, but shutting down 500 additional reactors is 5x more expensive than shutting down 100.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

... which is much larger than 500x, approaching near-certainty, for any non-negligible value of unit risk.

[deleted]há 4 anos

thrown_22há 4 anos

>Honestly, I don't understand why we can't do both.

Because we're been doing neither for 40 years.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

And, money is fungible. A dollar spent on X is not spent on Y.

This is not a difficult concept.

neilwilsonhá 4 anos

It seems to be, because there isn't a fixed amount of money.

Money isn't the problem. Manpower and materials are the problem.

Spending manpower and materials on X cannot be spent on Y. Manpower and materials are not fungible - at least not in the nuclear space where requirements are very high.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

Do you really need it explained that money represents manpower and materials?

The manpower and materials that go into nuke construction are mostly the same that go into any civil engineering construction: pouring concrete and forming steel. Concrete and steel and work on them diverted to nuke construction is unavailable for anything else.

smaudethá 4 anos

> The cost of climate change clearly far outweighs the cost of nuclear plants and waste.

Um, yes until you factor in failure rates due to incompetence + natural failure. Chernobyl, look it up, massive cost, massive loss of land, death/cancer rate of all exposed nearly 100%.

Until you can solve the "corrupt bureaucrat cuts corners he doesn't understand" problem, and also demonstrate that the failure of a single reactor doesn't cascade and cause every reactor to blow (if you increase the density of reactor distribution a single fallout has the potential to cascade to every reactor).

I remain skeptical about the fuel waste issue being solved, I've heard that a number of times and its not exactly been true, what is usually meant is that the fuel can be re-used somewhat indefinitely, after being repurposed in special containment facilities, not that the spent fuel safety issue is resolved.

And, it won't even solve the climate change issue - even after going 100% electricity and/or renewable fuels, we still have a considerable chemical infrastructure to resolve, and we still have the heat waste issue to resolve (making things electrical doesn't solve energy and chemical expenditure affecting weather patterns, albeit it is better than pumping CO2), an infrastructure which will need to be utilized to create said nuclear reactors.

Climate change will slowly roast us all to death, a nuclear failure will, instantly fry us all to molten pulp, I know which one I prefer.

matkonieczhá 4 anos

> Climate change will slowly roast us all to death, a nuclear failure will, instantly fry us all to molten pulp, I know which one I prefer.

If you believe that even the worst nuclear accident at power plant will "instantly fry us all to molten pulp" in any appreciable range (while climate change is worldwide), the you are mistaken

> death/cancer rate of all exposed nearly 100%.

It is completely untrue. Even among https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_liquidators it is not true.

smaudethá 4 anos

> If you believe that even the worst nuclear accident at power plant will "instantly fry us all to molten pulp" in any appreciable range (while climate change is worldwide), the you are mistaken

I am not wrong, in a world dotted with miniature fission reactors, as the most extreme pro-fission people would like to favor. If you can build one in space, and it powers the whole earth, that's obviously a very different story than building them every city block.

I am also not wrong about the effects of radiation on the human body, when used as a bomb nuclear weapons literally melt people into goo, ofc with a reactor there are various safeguards but the thing causing the flesh-melt is still occurring, so maybe less instantaneous melt and more gradual boils and blisters leading to severe internal cancers as your cascade of nuclear reactors around the city all blow in a beautiful chain reaction...

> It is completely untrue. Even among https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_liquidators it is not true.

It's not untrue if you define exposed, not to be disingenuous, but those actually exposed to the reactor meltdown, did not survive. Those experiencing second hand exposure in e.g. the town, obviously did not all drop dead, but had increased risk of cancer, death, and those globally exposed, well many fewer dead or at risk of cancer.

So unfortunately when speaking so imprecisely it actually is true, just not in the way you imagine. Even your wikipedia article admits among the liquidators the death rate was almost at least 20% by some estimates, and I would presume these people are wearing some protective equipment, so calling them "exposed" is somewhat disingenous in and of itself...

matkonieczhá 4 anos

If you use unexpected definition of "exposed" then it would be better to mention it directly...

Yeah, obviously direct exposure to core kills. In the same way being pulled through hydropower turbine kills, and ending in furnace of gas/coal/wood heated power plant will kill you.

Nuclear power still has vastly lower death ratio per produced energy than other ways generating power anyway.

> I am not wrong, in a world dotted with miniature fission reactors, as the most extreme pro-fission people would like to favor.

You would be still wrong. Building atom bomb factories doubling as power plants (Chernobyl design) in every city, and then deliberately triggering such catastrophe in every single one still is not getting this result.

With miniature fission reactors - also not.

You would not get "instantly fry us all to molten pulp" even in case of deliberate use of all nuclear weapons by omnicidal world government trying to murder as many people as possible.

smaudethá 4 anos

Perhaps I am wrong to the degree of which we are doomed in various scenarios, but I am not wrong that serious effects would occur.

My concern is - catastrophic chaining failure of nuclear plants, which I must assume you would not think would be a good thing, and would cause 'grave public harm', better? Not arguing over exactly how flesh melted the general populous is.

If you remove "instantly fry us all to molten pulp" and replace with "fry us to molten pulp", that may be more true, I don't know that the general public will care much if it is 10% of the populous or 100% of the populous who is getting fried by radiation burns and subjected to carcinogenic materials which we have no methods to contain, effectively it might as well be everyone.

> hydropower turbine kills, and ending in furnace of gas/coal/wood heated power plant

Sure, but we can drain water, and we can put out fires (water, flame retardants). We can manage these systems. Nobody but the most crazy out-of-touch pro-nuclear person is going to try to claim that we can directly control neutrons, free particles, or the half lives of deadly carcinogens, or that we can filter them from our water supplies.

matkonieczhá 4 anos

I am primarily complaining about claim that everyone could die.

That would not happen even in an outright full scale nuclear war.

Exact way of dying (starvation, frying, flash frying, whatever) is not so important to me.

> catastrophic chaining failure of nuclear plants

That is also not going to happen. Even misdesigned soviet atomic bomb factory operating in insanely unsafe mode by incompetents managed to avoid this.

> Nobody but the most crazy out-of-touch pro-nuclear person is going to try to claim that we can directly control neutrons, free particles, or the half lives of deadly carcinogens, or that we can filter them from our water supplies.

The same applies to flood from collapsed dam or emitted CO2 or radiation emitted by coal power plants.

nlhá 4 anos

I'm sorry. I'm probably more antinuclear than you but a lot of the things you are saying are just ignorant.

For example nuclear bombs melting flesh is because of the extreme heat, nothing that is unique to the nuclear process.

You'd be a more effective advocate for anti-nuclear viewpoints by learning some stuff first.

smaudethá 4 anos

Ok, well would you mind linking some good starting materials?

And I think you maybe are more ignorant than you care to admit as well:

"is that a very appreciable fraction of the energy liberated goes into radiant heat and light"

https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/med/med_ch...

To me that doesn't sound like "oh man the temperature in the room just went up", more like "oh man I just got a really bad sunburn".

nlhá 4 anos

> is that a very appreciable fraction of the energy liberated goes into radiant heat and light

That's exactly what I said in my previous comment:

For example nuclear bombs melting flesh is because of the extreme heat, nothing that is unique to the nuclear process.

You see exactly the same "flash burn" characteristics from other very hot weapons eg thermobaric explosives.

The unique thing about nuclear bombs is their scale and the fallout afterwards (both of which are horrific). That "melting flesh" thing is caused by the extreme heat, not by some magic "it's nuclear" thing.

smaudethá 4 anos

Heat is not light, that is not exactly what you said. Sorry. You didn't even mention light.

Physically as well as "mechanically", I suppose, they are very different things. Heat cannot travel at the speed of light, light can. Light can impart heat, but it is a partical-wave with various properties, heat is a general statistical statement about a set of particalls. They are not the same thing at all.

Now, as for how a sunburn works, it's not about heat. The reason you wear sunblock even on a temperate day (cold, even) but with lots of sun, is because UV light, not heat, burns your skin.

So, yeah, actually, this is different from a pure thermobaric explosive, if you want to get technical.

Now I understand you want to argue about whether "melting flesh" is unique to nuclear bombs - I never said it was. The output of a nuclear weapon, or reactor, is pretty darn unique, compared to a traditional heat thermal heat source. I don't think I ever even implied that there was some magical property of nuclear weapons which makes them "melt flesh".

You claim to be anti-nuclear yourself but you seem more interested in classifying the possible things which could be flesh melting, and/or you seem to have little to no knowledge of actual physics, thus I have extreme trouble taking you at your word.

nlhá 4 anos

Heat and light are exactly the same thing.

Heat is just longer wavelength electro magnetic radiation than visible light.

UV is shorter wavelength EM radiation, so same thing (not quite sure why we are talking about sunburn though).

It outputs a bunch of other EM radiation too. That's what an EMP explosion is - one desiged to maximize EM radiation in frequencies likely to destroy electronic equipment.

I sort of assumed people on HN knew this.

jeltzhá 4 anos

So how do you think that we should solve energy storage? Both batteries and dams are dangerous and can lead to disasters. Dams failing have killed way more people than nuclear ever has.

smaudethá 4 anos

Well first of all energy storage, is not production, but as you asked:

1) Reduced need for energy storage. Right to repair for everything, write code that is efficient and lower power, distributed systems which don't require complex centralized systems to run. Taxes on unused compute cycles to help create incentives for this, perhaps.

2) For actual energy storage, something like the sand heat system recently put into use in Scandinavia, or the mechanical earth dams (store energy in potential energy mass, less dangerous than an actual water dam, a lot easier to build). For immediate electric storage at scale you can do e.g. saline water storage tanks which hold mild electric charge, who knows maybe there is some inert chemistry which could be devised for a safer transportable version of a lithium ion battery...

3) For energy production, I am a long time advocate of geothermal. There's no real downside, besides digging holes and I guess maybe a well collapse, but you're limited to loss of whatever is in the whole/immediate surrounding in the case of a cave in, there are no engineering problems to solve except pumping water around, which is a well known task. Solar/wind for ships, airplanes, space vehicles, electric/hydrogen for storage/consumption scenarios where the grid is not accessible (remote locations e.g. the poles, alaska, siberia, African/Asian planes)

matkonieczhá 4 anos

> mechanical earth dams (store energy in potential energy mass, less dangerous than an actual water dam, a lot easier to build)

a lot easier to build?

This claim seems wrong, given that pumped-storage hydroelectricity is in actual use, when this is purely theoretical.

"mechanical earth dams" gives info about water dams - is it existing even as a theoretic design?

smaudethá 4 anos

https://www.energyvault.com/gravity

Its a company with as I understand it proven designs.

Besides, the concept is trivial and applicable and replicable by almost anyone. I don't understand why there is so much skepticism around these things...

matkonieczhá 4 anos

> Besides, the concept is trivial and applicable and replicable by almost anyone.

Has anyone made one operating at major scale? And comparable to say serious pumped storage? At their page I see only "demonstration unit".

I suspect that either it is not solved, expensive or not trivial. And not replicable or there is nothing to replicate or not worth replicating.

For comparison https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektrownia_Por%C4%85bka-%C5%B... can operate at 500MW for 4 hours, was build in 1979 and is a normal pumped storage battery (large enough to be classified, operated and treated as a power plant).

dmitriidhá 4 anos

Nuclear energy as a concept is trivial. There are a lot of details between "concept is trivial" and "it's practical at scale"

tlonnyhá 4 anos

> write code that is efficient and lower power, distributed systems which don't require complex centralized systems to run.

huh?

dfjklseldklkhá 4 anos

This is a really lazy response, but given the possibility that you genuinely don't understand the gp: Writing better software and reducing the (currently massive) waste of energy on enterprise bullshit and cryptomining would have a meaningful impact on international energy usage, and so help climate change.

smaudethá 4 anos

It's marginal compared to the other power expenses to be sure, but computing is another rising power cost. Besides my AC, and cooking, I don't have any regular power expenditures other than digital devices, so it seems reasonable to me to want to optimize power expenditure there.

Regarding the distributed vs centralized, the reasoning is large data centers are inefficient and could be replaced mostly with local, low power systems which are barely on at all, versus constant-on, constant-ready server rack systems.

freeminthá 4 anos

Batteries are dangerous? What do you mean by that?

> Dams failing have killed way more people than nuclear ever has.

And this solely due to one incident under communism where damn was not maintained.

reddoghá 4 anos

Well the 2900 people who died in the Johnstown dam failure immediatly come to mind.

But its much, much worse than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure

If had the same risk management mindset for dams as we do for nuclear, we would also be banning hydroelectic.

justforthisandnhá 4 anos

fastballhá 4 anos

> Death rate 100%

Pretty sure the death rate is 100% for exposure to literally anything given enough time...

dignickhá 4 anos

There are several problems with fission (probably fusion too) as I understand it:

1. Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable.

2. Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait.

3. Decommissioning is expensive and a long way in the future. Is that cost built into the cost per MW? How can we be sure the money will be protected, and will be enough to cover it?

4. Spent fuel. The project you mentioned isn’t complete yet, but even then it’s a huge liability to leave for future generations to manage indefinitely.

Meanwhile, renewables don’t have these problems and are available immediately. We should be building huge factories to produce wind and solar en masse.

Source for the figures: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSK...

formerly_provenhá 4 anos

> 1. Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable.

You can't directly compare cost per generating capacity, because nuclear, gas, coal etc. are available according to schedule, while most renewables aren't. Adding storage around renewables to make them schedulable raises costs.

Schroedingersathá 4 anos

Nuclear in the UK has a capacity factor of around 60%. Availability is in the 70-80% range.

Yeah it's (usually) planned, but it's a decently long time in which you need those gas plants.

Why not just build solar instead and fuel those same gas plants with hydrogen or methane you plucked from the air with your $20-30/MWh unscheduled electricity?

Plus, you can get solar and storage as an off the shelf item today as a retail customer for less per watt than recent reactors in UK/France or even USA. 8kW nameplate solar and 16kWh storage capacity is about $10k which matches 1kW of net from eg UK projects of around 2.5GW net for 26 billion pounds fairly closely.

Yeah if you live far north or have a long cloudy month in winter you'll be relying on that gas plant, but so does the nuclear reactor. Plus you'll be dumping 10-20kWh/day into the grid on the good days. Provides a decent incentive to figure out how to store it, and even if you're only getting 5c/kWh for it, it'll pay for replacement in 7-10 years or so when prices have dropped another 50-80% without sacrificing your kilowatt.

neilwilsonhá 4 anos

Solar requires land area. Storage requires land area. Britain isn't that sunny - particularly not in winter.

Nuclear has a very small footprint on a crowded island.

Plus we have Rolls Royce SMRs who have been building nuclear reactors for a while.

Schroedingersathá 4 anos

That is the admitted cost of Hinkley C and lower bound on the cost of Sizewell (it will go up, they always do). Sizewell is a rolls royce smr. Matching end user retail cost of solar. Right now. By the time sizewell comes online it'll be a fraction. It's also calculated with a 12.5% capacity factor which is winter in the UK. Add in overnight costs and it's extremely one sided.

You could add as much net capacity as the UK has in nuclear in just above the space used for parking cars.

You could add twice to four times that again just on detached house rooftops.

Even as a commercial installation with no other purpose, a 4km square is hardly an insurmountable barrier.

The initial capital budget of sizewell and hinkley alone could provide 30-80GW of nameplate solar or a rooftop system on every building in the country.

If there are trillions in the pot, by all means go ham with fission, but when low carbon sources are fighting for the scraps left over after subsidizing fossil fuels we have to do the thing that is effective first.

neilwilsonhá 4 anos

"If there are trillions in the pot"

There are always trillions in the pot, because the UK is a sovereign country with its own currency. Money is never the issue.

Therefore it's only overnight costs that matter in a build (and hitting the deadline). The real issue is one of manpower and stuff. We don't make solar panels in the UK. We will make SMRs. Therefore we're not reliant on Chinese manufacture, or the whims of export markets to fund them. A problem we're currently having with gas and oil.

To have security of energy supply over time you have to be as decoupled from world markets as possible. We don't want to be in the situation where we're relying on China for replacement advanced manufactures to keep the lights on.

Solar has no reliable capacity in winter in the UK unfortunately. You wouldn't want to rely on solar with several weeks of grey miserable UK winter weather even with storage. The same with wind, which is still suffering from a degradation in capacity due to the as yet unexplained overall reduction in wind speeds - which may itself be a result of climate change.

Schroedingersathá 4 anos

Commenting about fiat currency is a pointless distraction when the purpose of using it is as a proxy for labour and materials. 'Trillions in the pot' is just a proxy for a certain amount of access to raw materials, trading ability and labour power, all of which are finite and don't really increase if you sink your country into hyperinflation.

> Therefore it's only overnight costs that matter in a build (and hitting the deadline). The real issue is one of manpower and stuff. We don't make solar panels in the UK. We will make SMRs. Therefore we're not reliant on Chinese manufacture, or the whims of export markets to fund them. A problem we're currently having with gas and oil.

> To have security of energy supply over time you have to be as decoupled from world markets as possible. We don't want to be in the situation where we're relying on China for replacement advanced manufactures to keep the lights on.

Spending an amount on computers and steel and exotic alloys and uranium ore and then also spending 10x as much on labour is no better than spending that first amount on foreign solar panels. Far better to overpay for solar panels by developing a local industry, or overpay for solar thermal systems (which are still vastly cheaper than fission).

> Solar has no reliable capacity in winter in the UK unfortunately. You wouldn't want to rely on solar with several weeks of grey miserable UK winter weather even with storage. The same with wind, which is still suffering from a degradation in capacity due to the as yet unexplained overall reduction in wind speeds - which may itself be a result of climate change.

Renewable-derived hydrogen is already at cost-parity with fossil-fuel-methane derived hydrogen in some markets. Renewable-derived methane isn't much further off and is one of many ways of solving the storage issue. When a gas plant (which you need anyway) and the renewables to provide enough net power in winter and a massive overprovision during summer cost a fraction of nuclear there's no point.

Plus your argument about energy security completely precludes nuclear as an option for over 50% of the world as they're not allowed to make their own fuel. There are also about as many countries with a credible manufacturing base for solar panels than countries with viable uranium reserves, and there is more than one chemistry that you can make solar cells with.

Finally being entirely beholden to one of four or five corporations worldwide is no better than being entirely beholden to one of four or five countries with the cheapest solar.

dfjklseldklkhá 4 anos

Given the scale of investment we are talking about, it's also plausible that EU based manufacturing of solar panels could emerge given the right incentives.

Schroedingersathá 4 anos

Germany and Norway already have multi billion dollar solar and inverter manufacturing industries.

Nothing to the scale of china, but scaling it is far more viable than scaling the nuclear industries.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

The land area required for most forms of storage is inconsequential.

dfjklseldklkhá 4 anos

This is oft repeated, but once the cost of renewables is low enough it would have (usually un-modelled) second order effects on end users which may make this less important.

Some industries literally can't turn off production without damaging plant, but if some can then where energy cost is ~30% of fossil/nuclear than it might make sense to over-provision industrial capacity and only run it when the sun is shining.

legulerehá 4 anos

Scheduling also raises costs though. Costs don’t go down much for nuclear power plants if you let them run at reduced output. Nuclear also isn’t as reliable as it seems as it can be seen in France.

Renewables even have the advantage that they produce electricity mostly when it’s needed. Photovoltaics during the day and wind during winter when heating is most needed.

fredestinehá 4 anos

macron removed investment and focus on nuclear in his last mandate before realising that being woke made france broke (luckily not like germany broke - you know like in a way that when there is no sun or wind they need to call Putin to send some energy) now he reverted his thinking because money and energy is more important than beliefs when you needs them. just like usa or germany reactivated coal and biden is selling fracked gas to europe at gold price.

Krasnolhá 4 anos

> macron removed investment and focus on nuclear in his last mandate before realising that being woke made france broke

None of those problems OP described have anything to do with that overblown statement. Investment may have been removed for FUTURE projects but not for current operation which is highly subsidised by the French taxpayer guaranteeing the fixed price the Government decides on.

Also Germany reactivated those dirty plants also to help France out. The whole European grid is helping the nuclear nation out and will continue to do so until France diversifies its power generation infrastructure.

fredestinehá 4 anos

the investments included maintenance of existing infrastructure. france has more than half its reactor being off right now. guess what? invest more 5 years before and we wouldnt be there today. so yes. it is not overblown it is factual

Krasnolhá 4 anos

Show me some useful source which says that there have been investments missed 5 years ago and which is why that lead to the current problem. French is ok too.

dignickhá 4 anos

I’m a firm believer in distributed generation and storage, i.e. solar on the roof and battery on premises. This has the added benefits of reducing load on the grid and increasing resiliency. It should be required for all new buildings in regulations.

dfjklseldklkhá 4 anos

In fact, solar on roof often loads the local grid in unhelpful ways (they were designed for asymmetric loads).

I'm in favour of renewables, but done in the way that actually makes most economic and environmental sense. In the Uk we threw money at rich people with £15k to install 4kwh solar rigs on their houses. That money would have been much better spent subsidising large industrial installations.

bakuninsbarthá 4 anos

You can however price this in, and I doubt it accounts for 110$/MW. Furthermore, nuclear energy specifically only runs according to schedule. Reducing or raising output is expensive and slow.

belornhá 4 anos

For simplicity, lets use the cost of for every $ that a KG of green hydrogen costs, this mean that the cost per MW will be 30x of that. So if green hydrogen cost $1/KG you the cost in term of MW will be $30.

The current cost of green hydrogen is somewhere between $2 -> $12. That is the production cost. The market price for green hydrogen sits around $4-$20, since there are multiple industries that demands hydrogen.

For 110 to break even the hydrogen need to cost $3.5/kg, and in order to really displace natural gas, it is estimated that it need to reach $1/kg.

Now I noticed that those $150/MW is not a range, so I took a look. Projected nuclear LCOE costs for plants built 2020-2025 places nuclear around $27/MW to $147/MW depending on financing and country (source: OECD Nuclear Energy Agency’s (NEA's) calculation). Russia has the lowest cost and Slovakia or Japan (depending on financing method) has the highest.

So in summery, it can definitively cost more than $110/MW to produce viable green storage solution, especially in northern countries where low duration lithium batteries is not a working solution for long winter periods with low wind production and the sun is only up for a max few hours per day. Nuclear can also be much cheaper depending on where it is built and how it is financed.

Schroedingersathá 4 anos

Why would opex and amortised capital scale with fuel price?

belornhá 4 anos

The report is likely this one: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2019-12...

The $147 figure is basically the worst case scenario.

illiac786há 4 anos

EDF has published a paper stating they can scale 80% down and then up again, every day, within 30min.

In practice, they have done something like 20% within an hour. It was early 2019, there was such a crazy wind that they had to reduce nuclear production also (after already reducing coal, gas etc. to the min).

I think what they really can do is somewhere in between.

sources, it was on l’energeek, but in French.

juleshá 4 anos

> You can however price this in, and I doubt it accounts for 110$/MW.

What do you base this on?

ncmncmhá 4 anos

Raises cost, but it is still way below cost of nukes.

bratbaghá 4 anos

Cost factor isn't as relevant as you think, as this is an apple's to oranges comparison.

Renewables are too unreliable to act as baseline generation for a country.

In the UK last year for example we had very little wind, so we had to ramp up our gas power output to make up for our shortages in renewables. We burned through much of our gas reserves before the Ukraine war started, because of Renewable power unreliability.

Fission is the replacement for that baseline role that hydrocarbons currently fill, not the unpredictable-but-clean role that renewables fill.

The ideal future has both, with renewables producing as much power as possible and fission running on low capacity and ready to ramp up when renewables fall short.

cycomanichá 4 anos

Just repeating the baseline myth does not make it true. Nuclear does not compete with gas it competes with coal and renewables. It is often technically difficult but more importantly economically prohibitive to run nuclear as on demand sources. So for both renewables and nuclear you need some sort of storage or peakers.

Moreover nuclear is not the beacon of reliability, Frances nuclear plants were running to only 60% capacity due to maintanance and weather (when it gets hot nuclear plants have to shut down or reduce output significantly). Guess who was picking up the shortfall... German renewables and gas.

Finally, cost is absolutely the main measure: if the cost of nuclear is 3x wind/solar (and the cost of solar is falling exponentially) and you want to replace fossil fuels as quickly as possible the obvious way is to build renewables, you can overbuild 300% at the same cost. At that point you're close to being able to run your grid if you are sufficiently geographically distributed (even without batteries). Moreover in 10 years when your nuclear plant is finished building the price differential is like >5x due to the cost decreases.

ascarhá 4 anos

> So for both renewables and nuclear you need some sort of storage or peakers.

One thing I don't understand here is the problem with overproduction. If we actually have excess electricity (as in not needed as electricity later) can't we dynamically use that for active carbon capturing? The efficiency of that process isn't even that important then as the main goal is to remove carbon from the atmosphere with carbon free energy.

Having carbon free overproduction sounds like a good thing to me. It's the occasional underproduction that's hard to handle.

tuatoruhá 4 anos

See Casey Handmer[1]. We are underproducing solar PV by at least 4.8 TW (nameplate) per year: we're only producing about 4% of what we need.

There is no such thing as overproduction, there are only manufacturing bottlenecks in batteries, electrolyzers, and reverse osmosis water plants.

1. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-to-...

toxikhá 4 anos

Calling it a myth doesn’t make it a myth. Power companies have been saying exactly this for years: they need PLANNABLE power generation. Building 3x solar or wind plants means 3x volatility.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

Building 3x renewables in widely distributed places radically reduces volatility.

Wind is always blowing somewhere. Sun is always out somewhere. Storage is transportable.

ascarhá 4 anos

> Building 3x renewables in widely distributed places radically reduces volatility.

Is that actually true? Serious question. That sounds like a claim that seems so obvious, but won't hold up to the degree you might think in reality. Just one scenario I'm thinking of are giant storms that have clouds spanning multiple countries. And in that storm scenario even wind power shuts down to prevent damage.

cinntailehá 4 anos

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2015.12.318 has tried to analyze this for the EU. I'm not convinced that daily data provides the necessary granularity though, but more detailed data for the mentioned time span probably doesn't exist. I would try to find some more articles and check if there is a consensus.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

Such giant storms are rare, and short-lived. A few days' storage outlasts them.

ascarhá 4 anos

A few days of storage is a lot though isn't it?

ncmncmhá 4 anos

How much NG do utilities stockpile?

A few days' would be a lot of batteries, but you don't use batteries for that. A few days' pumped hydro, e.g., is not much at all.

Galaxeblafferhá 4 anos

Is storage really transportable ? Like how much energy in any form could you realistically transport for any meaningful distance without using too much of the energy that you are transporting ? Since you made the claim I'd like you to paint any kind of realistic scenario.

tuatoruhá 4 anos

Hydrocarbons, especially medium-chain liquid hydrocarbons, can easily and safely be transported 10_000 kilometres and further.

Doing exactly that is presently about a quarter of total global international trade by value.

Their advantages of high energy density, safety, and undemanding environmental and handling requirements (distribution can be performed in temperatures from -40 to +40 celsius by almost untrained teenagers), and effectively unlimited storage duration and volume, far outweigh the energy inefficiency of producing them from atmospheric carbon. Especially once PV gets cheap enough.

Edit: I notice I didn't answer your question. For liquid hydrocarbons, I believe the answer is in the single digit percents, perhaps five percent. For LNG, the energy cost is much higher, perhaps as much as a third of the total energy value.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

TFA is entirely about synthesizing transportable hydrocarbon energy storage.

But making methane is inferior to making ammonia, because extracting the diffuse carbon you need from air takes up energy. It does not displace any more CO2 emission, because somebody will burn it and dump the CO2 back into the atmosphere again.

So, the only reason to make hydrocarbons is for things like your chainsaw or A320 that are not worth replacing immediately.

_ph_há 4 anos

High voltage DC lines are quite practical over 1000 kilometers and more - Germany already operates an 1.4GW line to Norway, using the Norwegian grid as a storage for electricity.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

There will be a very great deal of ammonia synthesis, worldwide, just because ammonia is so useful for so many things, ultimately billions of tons annually. Ammonia is very transportable.

Even liquified hydrogen is about as transportable as LNG, which is shipped all over.

snovv_crashhá 4 anos

It reduces volatility, it doesn't eliminate it. There will still be days when the sun and wind aren't out in a large enough fraction of places that there will be a shortage. It is less likely, but it will still happen. Factories can't just shut down, people can't just choose not to charge their cars or boil their kettles if there's a shortage.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

When generation flags and local storage looks likely to be depleted, utilities will order a shipment of ammonia from any of numerous solar farms in the tropics.

Most of the time a utility will prefer cheaper local generation, local storage, or transmission-line power before spending on shipped-in synthetic fuel.

snovv_crashhá 4 anos

I have friends who work in industrial refrigeration, and I have to say, transporting ships full of ammonia around the world is a horrific idea.

Schroedingersathá 4 anos

If the goal is 1 unit net, then min(3x, mean(x)) has massively lower variance than x.

The extra power when 3x > mean(x) is just incentive for developing flexible loads and arbitrage.

toxikhá 4 anos

You’re not listening. They are literally calling for plannable power. I don’t think they’re stupid people either. You cover the base consumption using plannable sources, then use gas/hydro turbines for short term variation. The problem now is that when the wind/solar vary, you can only compensate so much with stored hydro before you empty the reservoir. Then electricity becomes expensive because you burn gas etc, or buy from elsewhere - which is EXACTLY what has happened.

Schroedingersathá 4 anos

When solar is 1/8th the price of current fission projects for the same net capacity and falling by double digit percentage per year you have a hell of a lot of money left over for moving the energy around.

Fission is around $10/watt with a mostly-plannable capacity factor of 60-80%. Fission is a cakewalk compared to fusion.

Solar is around $0.5/watt with a capacity factor of around 25% and falling rapidly.

The operating and capital costs of a gas plant are around the same with a plannable capacity factor in the high 90s.

So by spending $6 on solar, and $2 on a gas plant. You have $7/watt left over to figure out how to turn free electricity into hydrogen or methane at 50% efficiency and store it for a year.

We already have electrolyzers that work for $0.5 to $1.5 watt at around 50% efficiency.

Hydrogen storage is hard, but that left over $5 per 4kWh/yr should take care of it. If it doesn't, sabatier rractors are getting cheaper too.

The only thing we have to do for people to start using them is stop the coal and gas subsidies.

This is also just one of many options. Salt cavern CAES is similarly viable

toxikhá 4 anos

So then according to your analysis there is no problem with solar/wind, and the power companies are basically lying when they say they need plannable power.

Meanwhile people are resorting to paying with their savings to pay the 10-fold increase in their power bills.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

China is selling electrolyzers at $0.30/watt.

tuatoruhá 4 anos

> It is often technically difficult but more importantly economically prohibitive to run nuclear as on demand sources.

I'd just like to point out that the US Navy has an excellent track record running nuclear reactors that ramp up to full and down to zero rapidly, in submarines.

The US Navy does not have quite the same financial constraints as commercial land-based power, but constraints still exist.

I fully agree that solar PV and wind, especially PV, are much more atttractive to investors because you can be earning cashflow from your first MW of capacity while you're installing the second (which takes weeks (or days!) instead of years), and you can iterate and scale this all the way to 10 TW or more of capacity, as the demand requires.

Schroedingersathá 4 anos

> Frances nuclear plants were running to only 60% capacity due to maintanance and weather (when it gets hot nuclear plants have to shut down or reduce output significantly).

It's important to use the real deal-breaking flaws when pointing these things out. The relevant figure is availability because capacity also includes energy that could be produced but was not due to having nowhere to put it.

Availability is 70-80% in France and UK and 80-90% in the US.

But due to the long timeline of refuelling cycles you still need a full baseload backup. So nuclear needs long term storage or other uncorrelated backup more than renewables if anything.

The upside is it's easy to have two uncorrelated nuclear plants, so overprovisioning by 30% is sufficient.

That makes something that is already more expensive than solar with the same overprovisioned net capacity factor, and a green hydrogen plant with capacity sufficient to cover, and full gas backup infrastructure even more expensive though. Probably not enough to cover the costs of hydrogen storage yet or someone would be doing it (ignoring massive nuclear subsidies), but prices of batteries, solar panels, and electrolyzers are dropping rapidly. Hydrogen storage or green methane production only needs to become marginally cheaper to make it start happening even sans subsidies.

jamesromhá 4 anos

> Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait.

This is a fallacy in two ways:

1. Scaling up nuclear projects will decrease construction time and cost. Efficiencies are found by with scale.

2. The opportunity cost of not starting nuclear projects now will surely be worse than attempting 100% renewables. The point is that we can invest in both.

cycomanichá 4 anos

> > Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait.

> This is a fallacy in two ways:

> 1. Scaling up nuclear projects will decrease construction time and cost. Efficiencies are found by with scale.

More than half of a nuclear plant is essentially the same as any large scale power plant (goal, gas...). The opportunity for reducing cost through economies of scales is low. Economies of scales work for things build in factories, much less so for construction projects. That is true in general, not just for power plants.

> 2. The opportunity cost of not starting nuclear projects now will surely be worse than attempting 100% renewables. The point is that we can invest in both.

Why? It's the other way around, the actual cost of building nuclear instead of much cheaper and faster renewables causes an opportunity cost, because we can replace fossil fuels much faster building up renewables.

ascarhá 4 anos

> It's the other way around, the actual cost of building nuclear instead of much cheaper and faster renewables causes an opportunity cost

That's under the assumption the available money, hardware and labor of ramping up solar and building nuclear plants directly competes with each other. That's a pretty strong assumption and I highly doubt there is a strong enough link between any of those three for your argument to have significant impact.

E.g. We should be able to drive rapid solar expansion with government money and subsidies while incentivcing big energy carriers to build nuclear plants.

cycomanichá 4 anos

No that's under the assumption that we have limited funding.

ascarhá 4 anos

That's a non-answer to my comment. Limited funding and a available money is the same thing. The point is the funding isn't so limited that we couldn't do both as we run in other bottlenecks.

cipholhá 4 anos

> More than half of a nuclear plant is essentially the same as any large scale power plant (goal, gas...).

Presumably that's the cheap half of the nuclear plant, because coal/gas plants are pretty cheap to build.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

Coal plants are actually not that cheap to build.

Combined cycle gas plants are cheap because 2/3rds of the power output is from the combustion turbine, which needs no heat exchangers. The steam bottoming part needs two: the boiler running off the exhaust from the combustion turbine, and the condenser to transfer heat to the environment.

troorlhá 4 anos

> Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling).

Do you count in all the subsidies the renewables get from governments, including the production of the solar panels/wind mills, land ownership, utilities and all kinds of tax cuts and preferential treatment? In my country billionaires own massive solar farms and make tons of money at the expense of everyone else.

legulerehá 4 anos

Generally speaking the costs in those comparisons are usually without subsidies. However some subsidies are difficult to disentangle from the costs. For instance it’s difficult for nuclear power plants to get insurance, so often states take that responsibility.

Can you tell where you are from?

raverbashinghá 4 anos

Oil has way more subsidies than renewables. By far

I'm rooting for billionaires to own more and more solar farms please. Let them buy more newspapers and "think-tanks"

Because I'd really like to live on that world where oil has no subsidies, occupies no land and it gets magically transported throught the country

nixasshá 4 anos

> 2. Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait

You've been saying that for last 20 years. It's pathetic by this point. Best time to start doing things (anything) was 30 years ago. Second best time is now

rmbyrrohá 4 anos

> Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable.

Doesn't make it cheaper, only hides the cost. Subsidies are many times perversive. Prices are communicating something. When Gov messes with it, people and organizations tend to make bad decisions for themselves, society, environment or everything.

7952há 4 anos

The UK government system is more nuanced than that. The operator bids for a strike price and communicate something with the bid they offer. That price is then locked in. We will never pay less than that, but we will never pay more either. In successive rounds the strike price is lower. They are setting the price up front to give stability. And that makes sense when most of the cost is upfront. Otherwise renewable prices would just track oil prices.

downrightmikehá 4 anos

The problem is energy companies and the entrenched family assholes that run them. Three Mile Island was being forced to push ahead and use the crane to move the vessel, even though it WAS damaged and would have likely lead to a meltdown. Engineers knew it wasn't safe and were punished and fired for not using the crane unless it was actually checked and in working order. The public is right to be wary of nuclear when these are the types of assholes that put all our lives in danger.

socialdemocrathá 4 anos

If I could upvote this a hundred times. It is easy to mock the public for not getting nuclear power and being paranoid.

People today have really forgotten how much people got lied to constantly about nuclear power. France which they like to pull out as this amazing nuclear country built all the reactors they hype up by faking safety checks on nuclear reactors.

It is just really naive to assume every nuclear plant is run by the books.

People complain about over regulation of the nuclear industry. Yeah… they kind of brought that upon themselves.

mlsuhá 4 anos

If you're surprised by the lack of paperwork in fission reactors, just wait till you see (or... not!) the documentation on coal and ng powerplants!

ncmncmhá 4 anos

Coal and NG are, like fission, on their way out.

bsagdiyevhá 4 anos

You argue this a lot on HN but real world shows the opposite happening.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

How many coal plants are scheduled for construction, this decade?

The only place I have heard of plans to build literally any coal plants at all is in China, but they have not broken ground on them. China also says it will build hundreds of nukes, but has started only a few. It is building out solar and wind farms like nobody's business. China is always happy to cancel plans for what they turn out not to need. They even abandon things they spent big money on that turn out redundant: lately, a record-setting bridge you can read about.

We read about coal plants being shut down and scrapped, everywhere. The only place where coal plants are brought back online is in Europe in response to a regional crisis involving a war. Are you sure you want to stake claims about long-term policy based on emergency response to a war? That seems like a very courageous position to take.

cycomanichá 4 anos

Actually in several instances nuclear operators have managed to reduce regulations compared to coal and NG.

iforgotpasswordhá 4 anos

Exactly. People here on HN unsurprisingly approach nuclear with this naive enthusiasm that's operating under the assumption of a spherical cow in vacuum.

In reality the nuclear lobby heavily got politics to relax safety requirements, operators are corrupt and cut costs at every corner, inspections are not performed at all or not thoroughly, and when important decisions are being made, like where to store the waste, it's where politicians in charge find it convenient, and not where scientists and engineers actually recommend. Then you end up with metal containers in a salt mine, rusting away because thirty years ago who could have known the connection between salt and oxidation.

thrown_22há 4 anos

And how is it better when those assholes kill tens of thousands with coal every year instead?

If we lynched a few of them every time a nuclear reactor blew up we'd have a lot fewer energy related deaths and the market would eventually self correct.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

Coal is on its way out.

It is now cheaper to build a new solar farm to replace a coal plant than just to operate the already built coal plant. It is as cheap to build renewables as to operate an already built and paid for nuke.

Renewables cost is still in free fall. In ten years, renewables will be so cheap that overbuilding 10x, 20x, will be cheaper than operating a nuke.

thrown_22há 4 anos

Ok, we replaced a coal plant with solar panels.

What do we do at night?

Build storage for the solar plant? That's more expensive than a nuclear plant of the same capacity.

Build long range high voltage power lines? Again, more expensive than building a nuclear power plant of the same capacity.

People have been spoiled by the incredible energy ROI, portability and responsiveness of fossil fuels and think everything has the same capacity.

It doesn't.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

Storage is cheap and getting cheaper even faster than solar or wind.

By the time we need storage (after enough renewable generation is built to charge it from) storage will be very cheap. It will not be made of lithium batteries.

thrown_22há 4 anos

By the time storage is ready we won't need electricity because climate change will have made industrial civilization impossible.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

This is the "civilization will collapse before we can get around to reducing our CO2 output enough" argument. Wasting time and money building reactors instead of spending that on renewables brings collapse nearer. If we can't beat the deadline with renewables, we can't beat it at all. Beating the deadline might not be possible, but we will not know until we do, or collapse. Choosing collapse is always wrong.

Storage is easy. It is just now an overwhelmingly better use of capital to build generating capacity, to displace carbon combustion, than to build storage. It is only after you have more than enough to displace almost all your carbon combustion that storage is a very useful at all.

thrown_22há 4 anos

>If we can't beat the deadline with renewables, we can't beat it at all.

Reactors have been ready for 80 years.

We keep putting them off because nuclear is scary and vaporware tech will save us.

Here we are, yet again, 10 years away from the green nirvana that was promised every 10 years since the 80s. Meanwhile Germany is building coal plants again and Britain has melted.

I am not committing suicide because of your fetish for solar panels and wind turbines.

>It is only after you have more than enough to displace almost all your carbon combustion that storage is a very useful at all.

I guess we can just turn society off at night.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

To dwell on might-have-beens is to choose collapse. Fact is, to have built your nukes would have given us rashes of Chernobyls and Fukushimas, every year or two instead of every decade or two.

Germany is not, in fact, building coal plants. Germany is building wind and solar farms.

Until you have enough renewables to charge your storage, you burn NG at night. It would be stupid to burn NG to charge up storage, as stupid as to burn NG when you have storage charged and ready.

thrown_22há 4 anos

>To dwell on might-have-beens is to choose collapse.

Sounds good. Let's build nuclear reactors until we replace all energy generation with them. Dwelling on might-have-beens is to choose collapse after all.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

We have the good fortune that you have no say in future plans.

dmitriidhá 4 anos

> By the time we need storage

We already need it. During summer we have an overabundance of energy. It would be so nice to have it stored and used in winter, wouldn't it?

Oh wait. "Cheap storage" in no way, shape or form translate into efficient storage. You might have to cover half of Europe in batteries to store just a few weeks worth of energy.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

Using batteries to store weeks worth of energy would be foolish. Batteries are too expensive per unit of energy storage capacity. They're suited for diurnal storage.

Long term storage doesn't need to be efficient, because the number of charge/discharge cycles is small and the "cost of inefficiency" is proportional to the number of such cycles.

downrightmikehá 4 anos

Assholes are just that. But the issue is that if nuclear fucks up, that land is useless, and since those assholes run it, it has a high likely hood of happening. Half life of plutonium is 24k years, so it is much worse than coal, because it will kill for generations and last far longer. IE _everything_ in that area DIES for hundreds of thousands of years.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

> I started out in fusion and switched to advanced fission.

You are in good company. Lawrence Lidsky, the fusion guy at MIT who wrote the famous article "The Trouble with Fusion" back in the 1980s, also switched to advanced fission reactors. His critique of DT fusion is still worth reading. The big issue, the lousy volumetric power density of DT fusion reactors compared to fission reactors, is still a huge albatross around the necks of all these private DT efforts.

joakhá 4 anos

And what about non-DT fusion?

Helion, funded by Sam Altman, is doing DD/DHe3 fusion. Non-thermal fusion with direct energy conversion. They are attempting net electricity for 2024.

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

Considering how much less likely the non-DT reactions are than DT ones from a nuclear physics perspective at reasonable plasma temperature, I'd say it's an extra long shot. We'd expect the easy reactions to be done first, followed by the much harder ones.

Every advanced anything company says net electricity by 2024. I'm not holding my breath.

I'd be thrilled to be wrong.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

If the physics issues were the only ones facing fusion, you'd be making a good argument there.

But after the physics comes engineering. Helion's approach is to be more aggressive on the physics in order to greatly ease the grave engineering issues that face DT reactors. I consider these latter issues to be so serious that, overall, I rate Helion as less of a long shot at achieving practical fusion than any of the DT schemes.

smaudethá 4 anos

Not sure why you're being down-voted, easy solutions with numerous problems are generally inferior to more elegant solutions with fewer problems, could you enumerate what these issues are between Helion and DT reactors?

pfdietzhá 4 anos

The problems with DT are low power density due to limits on power/area through the first wall, neutron damage to reactor materials, getting tritium breeding to work, and the need for a large non-nuclear part of the plant (turbine, generator).

Helion potentially avoids or ameliorates all of these problems. Unlike with DT, where 80% of the power is in neutrons, a smaller fraction of power is from neutrons here (particularly when there's enough 3He available to be using that too.) The neutrons from DD fusion are much lower energy than from DT fusion, so they produce much less helium in the reactor materials (helium produced there migrates to tiny bubbles where the pressure grows until it rips the material apart.) With Helion, reactor materials have a reasonable shot at lasting the lifetime of the reactor; this is not true for first wall materials in a DT reactor operating at adequate power density.

Helion's scheme also directly recovers plasma energy, including fusion energy going to ions, as electrical energy, so it can substantially, perhaps completely, avoid the need for turbines and generators.

Helion does not need to breed tritium. All it has to do is capture and store produced tritium from DD reactions (so it can decay to 3He, which would be used), which will be much easier. There is no need for a breeding blanket with lithium, although one could be added if desired. If so, that breeding blanket doesn't have to allow rapid recovery of produced tritium before it decays.

joakhá 4 anos

Also in Helion machine magnets coils are in aluminum. And because aluminum is (mostly) transparent to neutrons they don't get damaged. This is to be compared with the superconductors of tokamaks.

So actually their idea is to put the shield (or the blanket) outside of the reactor, not between the magnets and the plasma. A lot easier to do.

There are still many uncertainties, some because they are secretive and others because they have to figure out a solution.

They seem pretty confident to reach net electricity in 2024, they might be completely wrong on something and/or underestimating the difficulties. We'll see.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

I'm not sure about that aluminum argument. Aluminum isn't transparent to neutrons; neutrons will scatter off Al nuclei just fine. Perhaps the metal is more resilient to the resulting damage.

The real thing to worry about in neutron irradiation of coils is damage to insulators, not to conductors. Insulators are very sensitive to radiation damage.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

That's why I was careful to write "DT". :)

If someone held a gun to my head and forced me to invest in a fusion effort, it would be Helion.

mlindnerhá 4 anos

> His critique of DT fusion is still worth reading. The big issue, the lousy volumetric power density of DT fusion reactors compared to fission reactors, is still a huge albatross around the necks of all these private DT efforts.

That was largely a product of the times, before high magnetic fields could be achieved. ITER has all those problems, but newer ideas do not.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

Your comment just shows you don't understand what he wrote. His critique is affected not at all by the existence of higher magnetic fields.

ITER's volumetric power density is 400x worse than a PWR. ARC's is just 40x worse. Lidsky was pointing out DT fusion reactors are always going to be (generously) 10x lower in volumetric power density than fission reactors, due to limits on handling the power flowing through the first wall. Higher magnetic fields let ARC be better than ITER, but still sucking relative to fission reactors.

iambatemanhá 4 anos

This was a great comment and very helpful.

I think it’s all a PR issue. The public doesn’t really understand and there are a lot of lobbyists pushing every other kind of energy.

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

Agreed. The excitement in fusion indicates a total failure of fission people to effectively explain what they are capable of.

malloryerikhá 4 anos

Maybe the current glow on fusion could actually brighten fission's prospects? At least that thought came to me while reading your original comment because fusion presents an opportunity to update the entire "nuclear" category in people's minds.

Like when a child (or even an adult) says they don't like vegetables and it's pointed out to them that in fact they do like the vegetable called lettuce, so their statement needs updating. Now their attitudes can be reframed.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

People making choices on power are not, in fact, children.

Fission costs too much. Fusion would cost way more. Promoters of both have lied to the public continuously from day one. We have heard enough.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

Or, the failure of (most of) those investing in fusion to understand just what has held back fission. It's not safety, waste, or fuel availability.

JohnBootyhá 4 anos

Yeah. The opposition and scaremongering from the fossil fuel industry and scaremongering science-deniers has been utterly effective. No surprise there.

What's dismaying and frankly shocking is the utter failure of the nuclear industry to mount even a feeble defense in the public eye.

selectodudehá 4 anos

There is zero risk, none, to government regulatory bodies when they say no. Saying yes is putting your ass on the line. The NRC has absolutely no reason to say yes to anything and there is a positive feedback loop for them to regulate nuclear out of existence in the US.

hiptobecubichá 4 anos

That's only true because the public has been convinced that it's high risk high reward. Otherwise, you could say the same about anything. There's no reason to do _anything_ while in office.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

You can repeat this forever, but you will be wrong forever.

The people you credit with nixing nukes do not have that much influence. What did in nukes was nukes themselves. They cost too much, always have, and the constant drumbeat of violated regulations, slipshod construction, and lax operation all together make everyone eager for alternatives.

And here come renewables, totally safe, work at any scale, cheap and getting cheaper. No one will miss nukes, their always-dodgy cost accounting, their burden on public funding, or their promoters' constant dishonesty.

thinkcontexthá 4 anos

In the US the fission people promised a nuclear renaissance with the AP1000. They asked for and received additional subsidies in the form of loan guarantees.

The two projects that resulted were unmitigated financial disasters. All AP1000 projects in the development pipeline were cancelled and no utility in their right mind will order one.

This is entirely the fission people's fault.

tenpieshá 4 anos

"There is a lot of money to be made from implement the wrong solution, as long as you are not part of the problem."

* Adapted from a consultant proverb

AughFuckFusionhá 4 anos

Tf say does the public have? This is a terrible excuse. The public doesn't have any say in the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of decision making that happens in this country.... blame politicians ffs, not people who don't matter.

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

You have clearly never been in the public comment session at a Nuclear Regulatory Commission meeting. The public has a huge amount to do with it.

7952há 4 anos

Have you been to a consultation event for a wind farm? It can get pretty aggressive.

AughFuckFusionhá 4 anos

JohnBootyhá 4 anos

    blame politicians ffs, not people who don't matter.

Politicians and parties base their platforms on polling data and voting patterns.

Sure -- it's a highly inefficient system, and there are plenty other inputs into their behavior.

But at the end of the day, they still have to actually win elections. It's a crap system in many ways but public opinion definitely matters.

AughFuckFusionhá 4 anos

DrBazzahá 4 anos

The nuclear waste 'problem' annoys me because it's absurd in comparison to everything else.

I challenge anyone to go onto google right and give me a firm number of people that have died from nuclear waste, not just nuclear accidents.

I'll start -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...

about 200 for all nuclear accidents. Waste itself? Zero? Which is less than people that have fallen down the stairs, tripped over a cat, or choked on a pizza.

Now search for deaths to humans (and wildlife for that matter) from fossil fuel pollution, oil spills, gas pipeline explosions and so on.

As I've said before if we bury it in a mine, and lose the ability to read that it's down there and dangerous, we've likely lost the ability to dig a mine in the first place.

socialdemocrathá 4 anos

I would rather see some push towards high temperature reactors. Whether gas cooled or molten salt. Point is it that if we have high temperature differentials we can more easily do thermal storage or produce hydrogen. Both are kind of important combos for renewable energy.

Wind, solar, battery and some kind of variant of hydrogen economy is bound to stay/evolve and nuclear light to be built with that in mind so it can be more of a complementary technology rather than living in an alternative universe.

lvenhá 4 anos

I tried to describe this problem in further detail in a post called con-fusion. Kind of sad to see money burn like this. https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

Excellent post with lots of detail, thanks, and wow! I'm not alone in my skepticism it seems.

spawarottihá 4 anos

How long will the fuel last? Sabine Hossenfelder references studies in which we have enough Uranium for 50 years max.

6:08 here: https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

Uranium and thorium fuel on earth can make 100% of today's primary energy for about 4 billion years, using breeder reactors, which were proven in 1952 near Arco Idaho at the Experimental Breeder Reactor 1.

Writeup explaining this with lots of actual scientific references at the bottom here:

https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...

People who say uranium will last 50 years either aren't aware of breeder reactors, which have been the long-term plan for nuclear fission since the 1940s, or they're misleading you. We found a lot more uranium than expected in the interim so they have been put off for a while. But we know they work and have built many.

tejohnsohá 4 anos

This is so depressing. It's nearly impossible to form a confident opinion these days without a ton of effort. I heard Sabine, I said to myself...makes sense...and it looks like she's put a lot of work into understanding all of this, and she is a professional. So that was it.

Now you're saying she's wrong. Very wrong. And you're a nuclear reactor physicist (thanks for comment!) Am I going to go read all of the relevant references for myself and study the state of the art well enough to understand it all? No, I'm not because I'm not a policy maker or advisor.

I feel like there is a legitimate problem with science communication, especially where it can influence government policy.

godelskihá 4 anos

FWIW, as someone with a degree in physics, I don't know anyone with a similar background that watches her content. It's not that she is frequently wrong, it is that the opinions are pretty biased and cherry picking. She seems to be more focused on content creation than the actual physics. Honestly I think PBS does a much better job, and importantly stresses that their presentation is overly simplified. A lot of science is extremely nuanced and a first order approximation can lead you in the complete opposite direction, so it usually is a good indicator at who to trust. Are they telling you the way it is or are they attempting to convey a complex topic as simply and accurately as possible? The difference is often subtle.

in3dhá 4 anos

Definitely. Her content gets posted here a lot but the quality of her videos is just not very good and she’s not great at explaining things either.

AQuantizedhá 4 anos

It's worth mentioning that being a theoretical physicist working in a niche subfield doesn't necessarily qualify you to talk broadly about other fields and assess their societal impacts. I think these types of videos work best when it's clearly just a smart person sharing what they've learned to engage your interest rather than as a substitute for a lecture by an expert.

mtlmtlmtlmtlhá 4 anos

Sabine is very opinionated, which is fine for a theorist, but I do find that she sometimes slightly misrepresents the views she disagrees with in her science communication.

olejorgenbhá 4 anos

She address fast-breeders and thorium in the same video: https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k?t=734 (concluding that they are too complex and expensive)

throw0101ahá 4 anos

> (concluding that they are too complex and expensive)

She states "To make a long story short, they didn't catch on, and I don't think they ever will."

She states her opinion, and there's nothing wrong with that, but (a) others may have a different opinion, and (b) it may be possible to make them more practical if more effort is put into them that has been in the past.

seventytwohá 4 anos

It’s always been this way, and it will always be this way.

Don’t get discouraged. This is all part of the process of finding and disseminating knowledge.

mlindnerhá 4 anos

Sabine I've found to be spreading nothing but FUD personally. I've only watched a few of her videos but she seems to enjoy inflating minor issues into major ones and then proclaiming everything can't work.

[deleted]há 4 anos

pyuser583há 4 anos

Everything I know about breeder reactors comes from the Radioactive Boyscout, which says they sounds great but are insanely unstable and not yet workable.

Is that true? What’s the state of breeder reactors today?

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

Russia has been operating big ones for decades just fine. The US had a few excellent and beautiful prototype ones (EBR-2 and FFTF), but Clinton shut them down. France built 2 big ones, the first (Phenix) was great and the 2nd (4x larger, SuperPhenix) had various non-nuclear problems and shut down with a poor overall history. China and India both have small ones running fine and big ones under construction.

Many Breeder type reactors also exhibit natural safety characteristics, where they can both shut down and remove afterglow heat with no external power or user intervention at all. This is because of low-pressure coolants like liquid metal or molten salt. They can handle loss of heat sink, loss of flow, and tranisent overpower (e.g. rod widthdrawal) without the control rods going in. Normal water cooled reactors could not survive such events without melting.

So there's a strong argument to be made that while regular reactors are very safe, breeder reactors can be even safer.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/002954...

pfdietzhá 4 anos

France has abandoned their fast breeder effort. As in, put the research on the shelf and stopped funding. That should tell you what they think its prospects are.

cycomanichá 4 anos

Except for breeder reactors are even more uneconomical, have even higher proliferation risk. So yes they are a solution if you ignore all the other issues with them.

natmakahá 4 anos

Can you name a single industrial satisfyingly-working breeder reactor? AFAIK, and after ~70 years of research (juge investments in many nations) there is none.

adgjlsfhk1há 4 anos

This is making a lot of assumptions about what uranium is economically viable to extract. Specifically, this link appears to be assuming that it is possible to filter the entire oceans and Earth's entire crust for all the uranium and thorium they store. Those are both obviously unreasonable assumptions.

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

For seawater extraction, you just put enough uranium capture fibers in a few places and the uranium is delivered to you slowly over billions of years via ocean currents. This is well supported by the various articles and entire scientific issue featured in the See Also section.

But if you don't buy seawater extraction, check out the Weinberg 1959 reference (https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3060564), which contains a calculation for how much earth would need to be moved to power the entire world on granite. They calculate that we'd need granite mining from the crust about the same order of magnitude of the fossil fuel mining operations at that time. Of course, mining granite is far less destructive than mining fossil fuel, so it's totally acceptable.

Recall that there is 20x more nuclear energy in average crustal rock than there is chemical energy in coal, per kg. So to a breeder reactor, it's literally as if the entire earth's crust is made of pure coal, 20x over.

Will that last long enough for ya? :)

And with that kind of energy density, it's all economical to extract.

adgjlsfhk1há 4 anos

this has some serious problems in the analysis. First of all, about half of the earth's crust is under an ocean. Second, of the remaining half, it is on average about 10 miles deep. There is no way that digging up 10 miles of rock to get to some scattered uranium atoms is net positive from an energy perspective. The deepest mines in the world are 2.5 miles under ground, and is in a location with a very high concentration of gold. Most of the uranium in the earth's crust is at concentrations of less than 1 part in 1 million, and one ton of uranium can only (being maximally optimistic) lift 1 million tons of rock by about 1 mile, so any uranium lower than that (not in a major vein) will produce negative energy to mine. Also, just because it's technically net energy positive, doesn't mean it's efficient at all. If we want mining to be at least somewhat efficient, we will only be getting roughly 1/3rd of that (since by the time you are lower, you will be losing too much energy to be cost competitive).

This very basic analysis suggests that your link is off by at least a factor of 100, which doesn't inspire much confidence in their results.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

Ocean floor bedrock is basalt, which has much lower U/Th content than granite. Granites are continental rocks.

Geologically, U and Th have been concentrated over the billions of years by about a factor of 1000 in the minerals that have accumulated in continents. Were this not the case, fission power would be completely impractical.

geysersamhá 4 anos

What are the disadvantages of thorium reactors, making them so rare in practice? Cost?

jablhá 4 anos

There's no particular upside that at the moment would justify commercializing the technology.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

If you fully fission the U + Th in an average chunk of crustal rock (using breeding so you can use the 238U and 232Th) then said rock releases fission energy equal to the combustion energy of 20x its mass in coal. So with breeders we can in effect treat the entire Earth's crust as something an order of magnitude more energy rich than coal.

(Whether breeders are practical or competitive is another matter, but then fusion looks pretty challenged in that respect also.)

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

This shocking factlet is repeated, verified, and credited to you in the writeup in my sibling comment.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

So you did, thanks! BTW, the Earth becomes uninhabitable in about 1 billion years, not 4.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

We could get there even quicker with a little effort.

bsagdiyevhá 4 anos

Yea the efforts of people like you pushing anti-nuclear views. Can't wait for the greenhouse gases to make warming even worse while we use NAT gas and coal to smooth over wind and solar.

lawrenceyanhá 4 anos

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it impossible for fusion to generate a nuclear meltdown scenario that fission has the potential for?

dongobongohá 4 anos

Meltdown accident: basically, reactor is turned off, however heat continues to be generated because of a thing called decay heat which is when isotopes generated by the fission reactions decay to more stable isotopes and release energy. It's about 7% of a fission reactor's power and continues for a few hours until it's negligible. 7% of a gigawatt reactor is like having a couple of jet engines going full blast inside the core. This heat has to be removed, and meltdowns happen when people fail to do so - basically pumps break, coolant leaks, or coolant is blocked from cooling down the core. Recent micro reactors get around this because they don't need active coolant or people to cool down the reactor - they just cool off by conduction or simple heat rejection systems. I read recently that fusion reactor will also generate decay heat from all the activated components and this is comparable to a fission reactor. The difference is there's a lot less radioactive crap in a fusion reactor - but the fusion reactor will still meltdown and they are expensive...

mlindnerhá 4 anos

> I read recently that fusion reactor will also generate decay heat from all the activated components and this is comparable to a fission reactor.

I'd like to know where you read that as the entire idea is to build a reactor out of things that don't activate or are very hard to activate. i.e. things that thermalize or reflect neutrons.

Fission reactors produce tons of neutrons too (they kind of have to to work more so than fusion even) and that doesn't leave the containment vessel anywhere near as radioactive as the nuclear waste itself.

lvenhá 4 anos

I think they are talking about me.

Here's two papers about decay heat in ITER: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/092037..., and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092037961...

I used their data to find power density and compared it the micro modular fission (MMR) fission reactors.

“MMR has a lower decay heat power density than fusion systems like SPARC or ARC, DEMO, or ITER and orders of magnitude lower than other advanced fission reactors as show in the figure below. UNSC's MMR has the lowest decay heat power density at 0.075 W/cm3, less than DEMO's 0.083 W/cm3 in the blanket and divertor. A lower decay heat is more manageable by passive cooling systems, allowing the reactor to dissipate heat more easily and without damaging the reactor. The other aspect to consider is the maximum temperatures that can be safely maintained in the reactor. Gas-cooled reactors like the MMR have all-ceramic cores that can withstand much higher temperatures than a fusion's reactors metals, molten salts, and magnets. MMR's low power density is a paradigm shift in nuclear safety, more foundational than fusion, for it can be accomplished cost effectively today.”

mlindnerhá 4 anos

Isn't ITER specifically not designed for that issue given it's not intended for long term operations? They even have the coil magnets directly in the neutron flux.

I don't think using ITER as an example here is relevant.

lawrenceyanhá 4 anos

If there's truly no meltdown risk with micro reactors, I'm all for it.

In terms of fusion, I'd much rather make the tradeoff of increased cost in order to remove issues of vulnerability completely. I want to be able to not even have to think about / plan for dealing with a meltdown scenario.

lvenhá 4 anos

This is it: https://usnc.com/mmr/

I work on it.

lawrenceyanhá 4 anos

This is pretty cool!

ncmncmhá 4 anos

A fusion reactor would have at least a thousand tons of molten lithium coursing through miles of plumbing, that if breached explodes and burns uncontrollably; and the reaction product dissolves mucus membranes.

Fortunately none will be built.

unchockedhá 4 anos

Fuckin’ A… I don’t have a charitable explanation for why folks are holding their breath for another neutron source, while the world burns.

paulcolehá 4 anos

The reality is that there is no charitable explanation. On a global scale, society doesn’t care about what the world is like and what humanity will have to deal with 100, 200, or 500 years from now. We care about things like finding our next meal or finding our next Amazon package on our doorstep.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

We don't actually need or want extra neutrons. We have all the neutrons we will ever want, right where they already are.

Protons will become increasingly valuable, after being separated from oxygen.

deltasevenninehá 4 anos

The main reason is because fission isn't cool anymore. Been there, done that.... Fusion is still super cool with all the big devices they're building.

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

You're probably right that fission isn't considered cool anymore. I guess my heartburn is in that it most definitely should be.

I guess most people don't appreciate the relatively tiny fission plant workhorses producing >50% of all zero-carbon electricity in the USA.

At least we have nuclear tiktok influencers nowadays!

DominoTreehá 4 anos

I feel like the primary reason it's not cool these days is because significant new developments are rare because it's pretty-much been figured out and it basically just works with minimal downsides, and folks think that light water reactors are all the same

johnchristopherhá 4 anos

> It runs 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint.

Isn't that a myth though ? Nuclear plants have planned and unplanned maintenance downtime. They actually have enough of these in my country that it's deemed unreliable or as reliable as wind turbines (depends on who you ask).

smaudethá 4 anos

I think tiny relative to a coal installation? I'm just guessing here, though, all nuclear facilities I have seen are fairly enormous, albeit their size is small compared to the number of required non-nuclear plants it would take to replace their energy output.

johnchristopherhá 4 anos

Obviously my comment is about service availability, not land surface.

cratermoonhá 4 anos

See also "Former fusion scientist on why we won't have fusion power by 2040" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JurplDfPi3U

GeekyBearhá 4 anos

> For example, there are leaks of tiny amounts of tritium at some fission plants and people lose their minds.

If a fusion reactor loses power, fusion ceases. The reactor shuts down.

If a fission reactor loses power, fission continues. A reactor that cannot be cooled melts down.

I don't think people will be as wary when fail safe reactor designs come off the drawing board and are in use long enough to have their own track record.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/08/02/158134/fail-safe...

lvenhá 4 anos

This is not true. Fission reactors have to deal with decay heat, not fission reactions when cooling is lost. This can be managed. Fusion reactors also have decay heat. In new reactors like the Micro Modular Reactor, it's actually less decay heat than a fusion power plant. Please please read my post :https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion#financial-risk-of-powerp...

AughFuckFusionhá 4 anos

> I'm a professional fission guy. I started out in fusion and switched to advanced fission. These days I don't see why we don't just build lots more regular old LWR fission reactors.

Well, a comment posting without financials pretty much underlines why more fission reactors don't get built: the nuclear community is insanely bad at pitching to investors without magic on the line. Unfortunately, investors in our society are the closest things we get to planners so we're pretty fucked.

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

If you add district heating to LWRs their effective efficiency goes from 33% to over 57%. If we adjust markets to value on-demand (including nights/weekends/winters) low-carbon heat and electricity, LWR economics would be good, even in the USA.

They're already expected to be essential for decarbonizing at scale.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...

I have plenty of rants about how LCOE is wholly inappropriate as a metric of overall decarbonized system costs. If you look from that perspective, LWRs built by Koreans, Chinese, Indians, or Russians are an incredible deal.

We just need to have the Koreans come over and re-teach us how to build reactors. It's beautifully symmetric because we originally taught them. They've perfected the knowledge, enhanced it, saved it, and can now teach us.

adgjlsfhk1há 4 anos

That is probably a good idea, but comes with the major political problem of putting nuclear reactors very close to large populations of people who can complain about the zoning.

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

100 km isn't that close.

https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/workshops/nucogen/presentations...

adgjlsfhk1há 4 anos

Wow, point retracted. I'm honestly kind of shocked that heat can be transferred that efficiently.

gwbrookshá 4 anos

This is a solvable problem if there's political will to solve it.

Much of the uncertainty and cost of a new fission plant is tied to regulatory, permitting and litigation costs. No one's suggesting eliminating regulation, but the near-limitless ability to hold up a project with specious lawsuits could be curtailed.

zigzag312há 4 anos

Is there any progress in design of nuclear fission power plants regarding safety?

Fukushima was build in the 70s, so it might have been a bit outdated (as a layman I have no idea). Was there any significant progress in design of nuclear power plants since then? Can they be shut down more quickly and reliably?

Given enough R&D, could safety of nuclear fission power plants be improved further or is that very unlikely?

madacolhá 4 anos

Is there a good estimate / measure of the safety problems of fukushima?

In wikipedia it says that only 1 person has died from cancer, while >2000 died from the evacuation itself

It seems that being less aggressive with evacuations and letting some people be exposed to radiation would have actually save more lives

Though maybe that's only in hindsight?. Maybe at the time there was a considerable risk of something terrible but didn't happen?

dmitriidhá 4 anos

> Is there any progress in design of nuclear fission power plants regarding safety?

> Fukushima...

You mean, hit by the most powerful earthquake recorded in Japan, flooded by a tsunami with 13-14 meter-high waves, evacuated, failed to shutdown, had three core meltdowns and several explosions, and resulted in... 1 death from radiation, 2000 deaths from evacuation and 45 radiation-resulted injuries.

I'd say even this outdated design was very, very, very safe.

zigzag312há 4 anos

Our seismological record-keeping is still very young so, most powerful in recorded history of Japan sounds more impressive that it probably is.

I know that current statistics regarding nuclear power safety are very good. The reason I am asking is because I often see comparisons between latest or even future renewables technology and decades old nuclear and I am wondering if progress on nuclear has already peaked/stalled.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

> 1 death from radiation

So far. The population dose will likely cause many more fatal cancers than that (maybe 200?). That those will be impossible to detect above the normal cancer background doesn't mean we can pretend they aren't there.

dmitriidhá 4 anos

So, after a full-scale catastrophe it's still significantly fewer casualties than from normal operation of coal, for example.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

"Cleaner/safer than coal" is damning with faint praise.

nopzorhá 4 anos

true, but for the pro-nuclear folk who are frustrated by the “fear factor”, it’s a really important point.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

Nuclear fans focus on the "fear factor" so they can pretend that's what's holding back nuclear.

mlindnerhá 4 anos

> Imagining that somehow fusion is going to a) work, b) be cheap (fuel cost is only 5% of total nuclear fission cost so who cares), and c) not have the same stigma as fission is kind of weird in my mind.

The cost of fission comes doubly from the nuclear proliferation risk and the safety risk, neither of which apply at all to fusion. The levels of radioactive waste produced is at basically the same levels as medical practices.

> Plutonium is made by irradiating natural uranium from the dirt with neutrons. Practical fusion reactors have lots of neutrons. Really high energy ones too.

In that case you're intentionally trying to irradiate something, you can do the opposite and engineer for things to not be irradiated, and even then it tends to be long lived low radiation isotopes.

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

No proliferation risk at all in a tritium fountain full of 14 MeV neutrons? Are you sure you know what you're talking about?

These will all be guarded with pseudo military guns guards and gates just like fission, and monitored by the IAEA.

As for radiological safety, see point about tritium. And google tritium leak nuclear plant for good measure.

Youre right that there is less radioactivity in fusion plants, but maybe not enough less to really matter.

mlindnerhá 4 anos

> No proliferation risk at all in a tritium fountain full of 14 MeV neutrons? Are you sure you know what you're talking about?

If you're putting hunks of uranium inside a fusion pressure vessel it'd be really obvious. Tritium itself doesn't have proliferation risk.

> These will all be guarded with pseudo military guns guards and gates just like fission, and monitored by the IAEA.

No they won't. Because even if you crash a truck into them there's no ecological disaster.

> As for radiological safety, see point about tritium. And google tritium leak nuclear plant for good measure.

The tritium stored in the reactor will be in the microgram range.

> Youre right that there is less radioactivity in fusion plants, but maybe not enough less to really matter.

It's several orders of magnitude less. I think that matters quite a bit.

adrian_bhá 4 anos

It is completely premature to claim that the radioactivity will be "several orders of magnitude less".

The neutron flux produced by a fusion reactor will be much higher than in any fission reactor, and it must be absorbed in a shield, to produce heat, which will be the output of the fission reactor.

Choosing an appropriate material for the shield will minimize the quantity of radioactive material that is created per unit of output energy, but it is pretty certain that the radioactivity will not be "several orders of magnitude less".

The best that can be hoped is that it is possible to find a shield material that will produce only very small quantities of long-lived radioactive isotopes, so that, after a storage for not too many years, the radioactivity might decrease to be "several orders of magnitude less".

Nevertheless this remains to be demonstrated.

For example, any piece of steel present near a fusion reactor would produce copious amounts of cobalt 60, but that would decay to negligible radioactivity after a few hundreds years.

Moreover, to ensure the predicted low residual radioactivity, any shield material needs to be free of impurities, which even in very small quantities could produce dangerous radioactive isotopes.

The requirements for advanced purification will greatly increase the cost of the structural materials for fusion reactors. However this is not a new problem. Similar requirements are imposed on the structural materials for fission reactors, but the fusion reactors will not be any better from this point of view.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

DT fusion reactors can produce much less radioactivity, particularly long lived radioactivity, than fission reactors, but there are some caveats.

First, the radioactivity is spread through a much larger volume of material. The cost of dealing with it will have a component related to the volume rather than the total radioactivity. It's not clear that dealing with fusion's waste problem will be cheaper than dealing with fission's.

Second, getting low induced radioactivity, and particularly low production of radioisotopes with long half lives, may require expensively low concentrations of impurities in the reactor materials. For example, the RAFM steel Eurofer 97, a top candidate for a DT reactor construction, contains a small amount of nitrogen. Even this trace caused problems from 14C production pushing the steel over a regulatory limit requiring the steel to be disposed of more expensively due to that 14C content.

(I also have seen a claim from Abdou that the Eurofer 97 for DEMO would cost $3B, just for the raw steel. I'm not clear where this estimate comes from but it could be due to the need to expensively purify the steel of impurities to avoid their activation.)

ncmncmhá 4 anos

A thousand tons of molten radioactive lithium, exposed to air, would make a pretty satisfying boom.

The tritium being bred in the lithium had better amount to more than micrograms, because that will be fuel. Separating the day's few grams of tritium from the thousand tons of molten radioactive lithium coursing through miles of pipe is an exercise not yet tackled by fusion promoters.

smaudethá 4 anos

"Still, the NRC and industry consider the leaks a public relations problem, not a public health or accident threat, records and interviews show."

https://www.ap.org/press-releases/2012/part-ii-ap-impact-tri....

And this is why we should not trust any fission-bearing folk. Or apparently fusion-bearing folk either.

mlindnerhá 4 anos

Tritium leaks are indeed public relations problems, if done in the very small quantities that would be in a fusion reactor.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

> very small quantities that would be in a fusion reactor

Fusion reactors would involve much more tritium than in a fission reactor. In the latter, especially LWRs, tritium comes from rare ternary fission events. In a DT fusion reactor, T is a primary fuel. A 1 GWe fusion plant will burn about 150 kg of tritium a year. To illustrate how much that is: that quantity of tritium would be enough to raise 2 months worth of the average flow of the Mississippi River above the legal limit for drinking water.

Banana699há 4 anos

According to my layman's understanding and Issac Arthur's science and futurism videos, fusion is great because of how universally common the fuel is. Maybe fission fuels are not a big deal on Earth, but they are on the moon, Mars, orbital habs or Europa. Meanwhile fusion is just hydrogen. Literally what's the universe is mostly made of.

So maybe right know fission is as good as fusion (better because it exists), but space is soon, and fusion is better for space.

rewgshá 4 anos

This is one of my favorite comments I’ve seen on HN. If only more people would see this and go bjnovaknodding.gif

hexnutshá 4 anos

Honestly curious, what do you see as a solution to the heat problems reactors are experiencing? There was discussion about the combination of lack of sufficiently cool water and droughts in the new heatwave cycles.

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

Most of those problems are related to fish populations and their tolerance of warm water. I think we will probably need to either adjust the regulations and/or somehow keep the fish farther away from the discharge so that they don't get injured.

Cooling a 375°C core with ambient water can be done even well into climate change conditions.

As for drought, if reactors are cooled by rivers that can dry up rather than oceans or large lakes, then they'll have to consider switching to dry cooling, which is less efficient but works with almost zero water usage. This would work better with higher temperature reactors than typical water cooled ones.

I also am a huge proponent of using reactors district heating and cooling, so we can put that warm water to good decarbonized uses.

hexnutshá 4 anos

Thank you for the reply, it was informative. =^.^=

CTDOCodebaseshá 4 anos

Does it make sense to build nuclear reactors when the environment we are engineering for them to exist in is rapidly changing?

Fukushima showed us the drastic and long lasting consequences of one little design oversight and that was in an environment the reactors where engineered for.

Personally I can't answer this question with the limited knowledge that I have. It seems like a catch 22 type situation.

feethá 4 anos

The consequences from pushing more carbon out are worse than one nuclear plant failure

CTDOCodebaseshá 4 anos

So are you saying that only one plant will fail out of the many we need to build and that our only option is to continue using hydrocarbons for energy?

I'm tempted to be hopeful and say that nuclear will solve all our problems but seeing how the energy industry got us here in the first place I'm sceptical they have our best interests at heart.

feethá 4 anos

By energy industry do you mean oil and gas? Are they the ones building nuclear plants?

Engineering improves over time, considering we seem to have someone who works in the industry in this thread perhaps they can inform us about current failure rates and risks. My assumption is that due to past failures, extra mitigations have been put into place with modern reactors.

CTDOCodebaseshá 4 anos

> By energy industry do you mean oil and gas? Are they the ones building nuclear plants?

Yes I was referring to oil and gas. While they are not the ones building nuclear power plants as we have seen when a particular part of the energy industry becomes entrenched it has a tendency to use its profits to change the narrative around its downsides.

feethá 4 anos

That's purely a problem of capitalism itself rather than any specific industry. If we nationalize power generation we should be able to avoid those problems.

rawoke083600há 4 anos

May I ask your views on Thorium reactors ? Is this the next step/direction in fission reactors ?

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

Thorium reactors are a type of breeder reactor that can breed using slow neutrons, whereas most breeder reactors built so far use uranium and fast neutrons.

There is a lot of hype about thorium online, but almost all of it is about breeder reactors vs. non-breeders. None of the hype is truly thorium specific.

I wrote up a few pages on it around 2014.

https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html

https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium.html

Thorium is often associated with fluid fuel reactors.

https://whatisnuclear.com/msr.html

ncmncmhá 4 anos

Thorium costs more.

There are nice vids on YouTube that explain how thorium is no fix for what ails nukes.

Ultimately, nukes just cost too much to build and operate. They are uncompetitive. Now that we have radically cheaper alternatives, we have no desire to engage with the deceitful, slipshod, heavily subsidized builders and operators of nukes, anymore. Never again.

shawn-butlerhá 4 anos

fusion has better marketing in the marketplace of the uninformed. "Harnesses the power of the sun" vs "nuclear bombs"

I'm sure the greens will try and tear it down it if it ever comes to commercial viability and start calling it thermonuclear power or some nonsense.

adrian_bhá 4 anos

Which is pretty much a complete lie, because the proton-proton and Bethe cycles that power the Sun and most stars will not be used in a fusion reactor, any time soon.

The fusion reactions that are likely to be used in the first fusion reactors are precisely the same as those used in the thermonuclear bombs, a.k.a. H-bombs.

dmeadhá 4 anos

Is it wise to write off safety issues? Chernobyl, Fukushima and three mile island all seem pretty bad.

There is also the Robert Heinlein story "Blowups happen". I'm just not understanding how this can all be hand waved away.

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

They were bad, but just bad enough to roll over and give up on fission.

While Chernobyl killed people from radiation (around 50, with a hotly debated number between 0 and 4000 from long term effects), TMI and Fukushima did not. We have only directly amd definitively linked about 50 deaths to radiation released in commercial fission accidents. It's like a really bad bus crash. And that doesnt even count the social and emotional costs of fear and evacuation, which are large.

But context matters. Particlates from fossil and biofuel cause more death every 7 hours than the high estimate of deaths from nuclears entire history (using 4000 in chernobyl).

So nuclear fission is very safe. It's not perfectly safe, but it is orders of magnitude safer than the average energy source. Oh and it is carbon free so it prevents future deaths from climate change. So yeah.

markvdbhá 4 anos

> They were bad, but just bad enough to roll over and give up on fission.

Competent engineers are perfectly capable of maintaining a nuclear reactor, _technically_ speaking.

Large projects are vulnerable to all vices of human nature though. Idiots in manglement. Greedy people trying to squeeze out more profit. Terrorists. Maffiosi, whether running a country or not. Let's not forget that scale is not just about money or spatial dimensions, but also time...

We have a perfect example: Enerhodar, Ukraine. A working nuclear power plant is in the middle of a war zone right now.

Banana699há 4 anos

This still doesn't address GP's comparison to fossil. Fossil powerplants are no less vulnerable to all of those things you listed, and in fact they were indeed used in wars, from Saddam burning Kuwait's fields in 1991 to Houthi drones attacking Saudi fields more recently to Libyan civil war. None of that is used against fossil the same way it's used against nuclear.

sweezyjeezyhá 4 anos

You keep bringing up climate change, like the only alternative is coal. Do you really think that nuclear fission can be a key player in reducing emissions to net zero? It seems far too expensive and slow to set up for something this urgent.

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

Fossil + biofuel makes 80% of our energy today. Getting rid of that will require vast amounts of zero-carbon energy. Wind and solar need to be built out at breakneck speed if we want to be serious. Much faster than what we're doing now. So does nuclear fission.

I assume you're only looking at the slow and expensive nuclear builds?

China is looking to build 150 new reactors to meet its goals.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-11-03/china-is-pl...

We also have ways of making nuclear reactors extremely quickly if we want to get really serious. In the 1970s we started building a facility in Jacksonville Fl capable of delivering 4 large LWRs per year in a shipyard-like factory. The reactors were to be floated off to their sites (the first of which were offshore). They installed the world's largest gantry crane at the facility. Sadly the oil shocks reduced the energy demand where their first customers were (New Jersey refineries) and the effort failed after they received a construction license from the nuclear regulatory commission. Building zero carbon power plant gigafactories like this can solve climate change, you betcha.

https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-01-26-offshore-power-sys...

7952há 4 anos

Whatever source we use it needs to be built out at breakneck speed. It just seems that wind, solar, and batteries are more amenable to that than nuclear in a basic logistical sense. All of the ways people suggest to make nuclear faster and cheaper already exist in those fields.

sweezyjeezyhá 4 anos

By expensive, I mean in $/kWh - yes we could build enough nuclear power plants to stop carbon emissions, but if the cost of energy is multiple times greater than that of renewables, why not invest in those instead?

I've heard this idea that we should "do everything", but I don't get that, why don't we do the best thing as well and as fast as we can?

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

> but if the cost of energy is multiple times greater than that of renewables, why not invest in those instead?

First of all, we are investing more in renewables right now than nuclear. Much much more.

Second of all, your statement is true for LCOE, but LCOE is an inappropriate metric for systems costs. It does not include the cost of storage, additional transmission lines to reach thousands of distributed wind/solar sites, extra capacity to fill up the storage, the required smart grid tech, etc.

Quoting just LCOE is becoming extremely problematic. Everyone does it, and it's very misleading.

Details of why it's best to also invest in nuclear from a full systems perspective are published and peer reviewed here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.08.006

joakhá 4 anos

Exactly, if you build a coal power plant today, the LCOE is calculated assuming the facility will run, let's say, for 30 years at 80% capacity.

But what happens if you have to stop your power plant in ten years because its (LCOE-estimated) cost is not competitive anymore?

So based on an biased LCOE computation, you sold your coal-based kWh at a third of it's real cost. Bad for the investor, bad for the climate.

sweezyjeezyhá 4 anos

Yeah but we shouldn't be comparing to coal - I already said this.

mileshá 4 anos

> While Chernobyl killed people from radiation (around 50, with a hotly debated number between 0 and 4000 from long term effects), TMI and Fukushima did not.

Japan confirms first Fukushima worker death from radiation https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-45423575

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

That's basically a judge saying it. The scientific basis is very unclear.

mileshá 4 anos

> That's basically a judge saying it. The scientific basis is very unclear.

"In January 2015, the MHLW [Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare] compiled medical knowledge on lung cancer and radiation exposure in a report resulting from a review meeting of medical experts, and published the immediate view similar to that for thyroid cancer. The first claim for case of lung cancer was approved by MHLW in August 2018, and this was also the first case involving death."

--From "Responses and Actions Taken by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare of Japan on Radiation Protection at Works Relating to the Accident at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant 9th Edition (Fiscal Year of 2021)" https://www.mhlw.go.jp/english/topics/2011eq/workers/ri/ar/r...

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

I understand that he received an estimated 74 mSv of radiation, somewhat below the level of 100 mSv acute / 300 mSv annual that has been shown to cause a measurable increase risk of cancer (e.g. from 40% lifetime risk to 40.1% lifetime risk). It's extremely dubious to say that this was definitely from Fukushima radiation. If that dose is accurate, the likelihood of it being from Fukushima radiation is probably less than 1%. Not impossible. But not likely, and far from a sure thing.

For comparison, the 23 firefighters who died from acute radiation syndrome at Chernobyl got doses as high as 13,400 mSv, almost 2000x higher than this guy.

7952há 4 anos

It seems dubious to apply this kind of population statistics to individuals at all.

mileshá 4 anos

> I understand that he received an estimated 74 mSv of radiation

"The ministry said he had been exposed to about 195 millisieverts (mSv) of radiation. The International Commission on Radiological Protection recommends avoiding more than 1-20 mSv per year, and according to Reuters, exposure to 100 mSv a year is 'the lowest level at which any increase in cancer risk is clearly evident.'" https://time.com/5388178/japan-first-fukushima-radiation-dea...

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

That's 100 mSv acute. Did he get it acutely (i.e. in a day or two) or over years? If acute then yes, the measurable increment over a background 40% lifetime risk could be due to Fukushima. So then the question is what's the increment? Let's estimate that it's 1% (based on the noisy data at these still quite low doses). In that case, there is a 1 in 40 chance that his cancer death in 2016 was due to Fukushima in 2011.

It it wasn't acute and accumulated over >1 year, then there's a ~0% chance it was from Fukushima radiation.

JohnBootyhá 4 anos

It's not hand-waving. We've got got what, close to a billion fission reactor-hours worth of data? Perhaps more? We know exactly how safe they are.

Also: "safety issues?" Useless to talk about safety issues in a vacuum. Safety issues compared to what?

- Fossil fuels, which are literally guaranteed to fry this planet?

- Wind, water, solar? Great but not sufficient and/or feasible in all locales.

- An imaginary energy source with zero downsides? Let us know once you work out the details.

You point to Fukushima, thanks to which a region was rendered uninhabitable. I point to climate change caused by fossil fuel, thanks to which large swathes of the planet will soon be uninhabitable. I know which one I prefer. I'd prefer ten or a hundred Fukushimas in exchange for what's about to happen to our planet in the coming decades.

socialdemocrathá 4 anos

But that safety comes in large parts from strict regulations which have made nuclear power very expensive. Many seem to live in this alternative reality where we can have bit super safe, lightly regulated and cheap nuclear.

I am afraid we can only have one of those attributes.

And figuring out how to build cheap nuclear in the West is actually a pretty complex thing. The US cannot even figure out why their roads and railroads cost many times that of other countries. If they cannot figure that out, then how are they going to solve a far trickier problem?

JohnBootyhá 4 anos

    I am afraid we can only have one of those attributes.

While I accept that those two things (safe fission power, and cheap fission power) are in obvious tension with each other, your "choose only one" scenario is a false dichotomy.

A well-functioning, technologically advanced, and motivated country could easily overcome this. Standardized reactor designs, simplified reactor designs such as the newer molten salt reactor designs, etc.

We have the technology to do this safely and cheaper than we're doing it now; we just don't have the will.

Also, any talk of cost must include not only the short-term kWh cost, but the long term cost -- ie, the terrible cost of climate change that we'll soon be paying.

    And figuring out how to build cheap nuclear 
    in the West is actually a pretty complex thing

Yeah, no arguments there. The US is no longer capable of tackling long term initiatives like this, because any change will necessarily upset the corporations that effectively own the government.

Nothing will change until the ice caps melt and half our coastal cities are flooded, and at that point something might happen but probably not anything good.

selectodudehá 4 anos

> But that safety comes in large parts from strict regulations which have made nuclear power very expensive.

Nonsense. The strict regulations are why there have been two nuclear starts in the USA since 1978.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

What you wrote doesn't contradict what he wrote.

[deleted]há 4 anos

pfdietzhá 4 anos

From the viewpoint of a utility, what matters is not large accidents (because their liability is capped) but rather smaller accidents that could ruin their investment. The TMI accident didn't kill anyone, but it gravely damaged the owner of the power plant, as they had just lost a large investment.

Because of this, fusion is likely WORSE from the utility's point of view than fission. While fusion reactors are less likely to have catastrophic accidents with large external effects, they are probably more likely to have localized accidents that ruin the reactor. In any case, a fusion reactor will have to be designed to be extremely reliable because repairing it after any accident will be so difficult, as it will be too radioactive for anyone to get in to repair it. All repairs will have to be done remotely.

freeminthá 4 anos

What accident do you foresee that makes components of a fusion reactor sufficiently radio active?

Containment field failure should leave the components just as radio active as a controlled shutdown as the plasma distinguishes immediately or am i missing something?

pfdietzhá 4 anos

Neutron bombardment will make the innards of the fusion reactor radioactive as part of its normal operation. No accident is required. The induced radioactivity will be so high that hands on access will be impossible, even with the reactor shut down. This will make maintenance difficult.

Maybe the next big VC fad after fusion will be radiation resistant robots.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

Everything in the reactor is blasted with enormous neutron flux, inducing radioactivity in everything.

A thousand tons of molten, radioactive lithium could easily ruin your day, if ever exposed to air.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

I don't see how the lithium itself becomes radioactive. It will be contaminated with tritium, but presumably it's designed so that can be stripped out. Otherwise... maybe atoms of higher Z elements knocked into the lithium from the first micro of pipe surfaces by recoil after neutron collisions?

ncmncmhá 4 anos

It would be hard to get and keep a thousand tons of atomically pure 6Li/7Li, even without neutrons spalling pipe surface atoms into it. And, with enough neutron flux, seems like you should expect to get a fair bit of "relatively unusual" products that your regular H/He extraction process leaves to accumulate.

But these are all second-order effects. A thousand tons of molten lithium is a big enough hazard even without radioactivated impurities. And even getting the 0.0000001% fraction of dissolved 3H out seems... difficult.

sweezyjeezyhá 4 anos

Also hand waving away the fact that the waste products have to be managed for civilisation-length time scales.

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

Deep geologic repositories have a scientific consensus as being safe and appropriate solutions to high level nuclear waste. Finland's Onkalo is mostly constructed and finishing up licensing right now. It's a solved problem.

https://posiva.fi/en/

Number of deaths from stored commercial nuclear waste worldwide? zero.

People always ask: "what about the waste?"

Nowadays we answer: "What about it?"

Air pollution and climate change are vastly more serious and challenging problems than the storage of high-level nuclear waste.

There was just a huge twitter thread related to this with like 33k RTs and over 100k likes: https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148385931513856

dmitriidhá 4 anos

The total amount of waste fuel produced by all of humanity since nuclear power became a thing is magnitudes less than the waste produced by solar panels and wind turbines that will need to be decommissioned due to age (some of them already in the near future)

DennisPhá 4 anos

Only if we never use fast reactors, which fission almost all the long-lived stuff. Take what's left, encase it in glass and bury it, and it'll be back to the radioactivity of the original ore in 300 years.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

Well, except for the 7 long lived fission products. Those are possibly good targets for space disposal.

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

You can separate them out and transmute them in fast reactors as well.

https://www.iaea.org/publications/7112/implications-of-parti...

pfdietzhá 4 anos

I suspect space disposal would be much cheaper.

DennisPhá 4 anos

Sure, the overall mix goes back to the radioactivity of the original ore, not a radioactivity of zero.

baxtrhá 4 anos

Fusion is just around the corner! Just 20 years away!

einpoklumhá 4 anos

> It's way easier.

Is that why power plants go years over time and hugely over-budget?

> It has been working fine since the 1950s.

Oh, yeah, just fine, not a hitch:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident...

> Waste problem is solved

The solution being: Ignore it, I guess?

> net saves millions of lives by displacing air pollution

And we fight wars for peace too.

> It's zero carbon

Not if you count the mining aspect. But even if you didn't: Wind and solar are now 3 times cheaper or more, and take a lot less time to set up. The power output stability benefit is wearing thin.

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

Groan here we go again.

> Oh, yeah, just fine, not a hitch:

Now show me list of the 8 million people who die per year from air pollution.

https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution

> The solution being: Ignore it, I guess?

I mentioned the solutions but didn't provide a link. here you go.

https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html

> And we fight wars for peace too.

See the literature https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/kh05000e.html

> Not if you count the mining aspect.

Nuclear has rock bottom full lifecycle carbon emissions of 12 gCO₂-eq/kWh, including mining. C.f. 11 for wind, 40 for solar, 490 for gas, 800+ for coal. Hard to beat.

> Wind and solar are now 3 times cheaper or more

You're comparing the worst US nuclear builds with wind/solar without storage, transmission, overbuilds needed for storage, etc. LCOE is not an appropriate metric for systems costs. Never was. Lazard are a bunch of kooks. Look at Hualong One costs.

Details on cost comparison for deeply decarbonized grid here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.08.006

einpoklumhá 4 anos

> Now show me list of the 8 million people who die per year from air pollution.

Are you comparing to coal-fired plants? I'm talking about solar and wind.

As for fossil fuels, the expected deaths and environmental from nuclear accidents are - well, TBH, I don't know the math for that, but I would expect it would be on the order of magnitude of the extra deaths from fossil fuel electricity generation.

> I mentioned the solutions

I will actually look into that. However, the website says: "Finland ... No other country has yet reached the implementation phase of final disposal. ... final disposal of high-level spent nuclear fuel has not yet been launched anywhere."

So, that's not what's being used so far. This company's new approach - maybe it's great, I don't know, but it needs to last thousands of years, right? That's a very high bar - and a significant maintenance and hazard-management burden going forward.

> Lazard are a bunch of kooks.

That's a pretty strong claim. But - since I'm not an expert, I can't outright dismiss it. They're a popular source for a "bunch of kooks"... care to elaborate?

> Look at Hualong One costs.

I would look into them, if I could.

jmyeethá 4 anos

> Groan here we go again.

Yeah, we do with more pro-nuclear propaganda and outright falsehoods (again).

> Now show me list of the 8 million people who die per year from air pollution.

No, it doesn't. Here's the exact quote from your source:

> The combined effects of ambient air pollution and household air pollution is associated with 7 million premature deaths annually.

Not "die from" but "is associated with". What does that mean? "Associated with" here means "reduces the life expectancy", basically. That's a far cry from "dies from". The primary relationship with mortality seems to come from particulates. Some of these are natural (eg sand in deserts), some of it isn't (eg cooking fires). It also includes motor vehicle exhausts.

To give you a sense of the level of bullshit going on here, other conditions are getting attributed to air pollution [1]:

> They linked nine causes of death with the pollution: cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, dementia, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, lung cancer and pneumonia.

One study estimates 100,000 Americans die every year from air pollution [2]. That just doesn't pass the smell test and shows you what's going on: it's attributing air pollution to certain medical conditions and then counting deaths from those conditions are air pollution deaths.

Exaggerations and outright lies do your cause a massive disservice.

Pro-nuclear propaganda doesn't address these issues:

1. Not a single nuclear power plant has been built without significant government subsidies;

2. Nuclear power plant falsely reduce costs by externalizing significant costs such as the processing of fuel, the processing of fuel processing waste, maintenance, inspection (eg by the NRC), switching out fuel, processing nuclear fuel, the time-to-build or the failure modes of nuclear plants. Lest we forget, the Chernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone is 1,000 square miles 35 years later.

If these next-generation LWRs are so economical, why isn't someone building them at scale? The standard response is political opposition but what about China?

I swear nuclear fan boys are just as delusional as climate deniers.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/20/us-air-p...

[2]: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2019-04-0...

indymikehá 4 anos

> I swear nuclear fan boys are just as delusional as climate deniers.

No, some of us actually have operated a reactor for a living, and have first hand experience with the technology, and most of the issues people like to discuss. In my case, I served in the US Navy in nuclear propulsion. This whole debate seems crazy. Truth is the tech works, and it should be inexpensive compared to burning fossil fuels. Then there is the absolutely incredible difference in energy density - a two 13mmx13mm fuel pellets contains roughly the same energy as 1 ton of coal, or 260 gallons of oil. As far as renewables go, it has to be much worse for the world to build the 1650 wind turbines, wire them, and so on that it takes to match a typical single civilian reactor. To those of us who have worked with the technology, we know it could really change the world's carbon problem.

The reason the cost is so high - and remember, the cost of technology usually goes down over time in a normal functioning market, is hyper-regulation at every level of government. From mining and refining fuel to building plants to operating them, there is an insane amount of regulation and litigation over that regulation. The over-regulation argument is really annoying, mostly because it is true.

It's also true that there are some issues around dealing with waste. Most of these are easily solved, but will not be for the same over-regulation reasons. We've taken perfectly good tech and through the power of bureaucracy, made it unworkable.

jmyeethá 4 anos

> In my case, I served in the US Navy in nuclear propulsion.

Ah, the US military, famous for building and operating things at low cost.

> Truth is the tech works

Nuclear propulsion works because it has the US military to secure it but more importantly, a carrier or a submarine benefits from not carrying fuel in a way that has nothing to do with economics. You power a submarine with nuclear simply because there's no other way for such a submarine to spend months at sea without refueling.

You say the tech works. OK, but so what? That has almost nothing to do with anything. In fact you're extrapolating the military use case for using nuclear energy for propulsion and saying we should extend that to civilian commercial power generation.

As for the rest about over-regulation, the first point is that you have to deal with the political and legal reality. But really it's a smoke screen because proponents of nuclear power like to talk about operating costs while ignoring capital expenditure (which is massive). From a total cost per kWh over the lifetime of a nuclear power plant, it's not really that cheap.

upwardboundhá 4 anos

I think you're being pretty quick to write off a subject matter expert on a topic that is their own field of expertise.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

Their field involved exactly zero need for economic analysis.

Naval reactor "engineering laboratory technicians" (SMAGs) are reputed among submariners as habitual liars. Strange but true.

indymikehá 4 anos

> Their field involved exactly zero need for economic analysis.

This is just dismissing the argument without addressing the assertion that the vast majority of cost in building nuclear is imposed by overly burdensome regulation.

> Naval reactor "engineering laboratory technicians" (SMAGs) are reputed among submariners as habitual liars.

From personal experience, ELTs were held to the exact same zero tolerance for lies standard I was. If you were caught by anyone lying you were out. Rank didn't even mater, nor did it matter if they were nukes or not. If you lied and it was caught, nuclear career over. I watched many people end their careers over how many push-ups they completed in a fitness test, covering for a buddy who was out with a girl when they shouldn't have been, lying about getting a tattoo, or even lying about what they ate for lunch. It was absolutely brutal.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

I doesn't make up SMAGs' reputation: all I know is what retired "nukes" report. Ask them.

indymikehá 4 anos

I was a nuke.

ncmncmhá 4 anos

Ok, then you must know some others. Ask them. I'll wait.

indymikehá 4 anos

> As for the rest about over-regulation, the first point is that you have to deal with the political and legal reality.

Reality: regulatory compliance is the bulk of the cost.

mathlover2há 4 anos

> One study estimates 100,000 Americans die every year from air pollution

That's still a lot more deaths than commercial nuclear fusion has been associated with in the US. It's also, incidentally, a lot of deaths.

> 1. Not a single nuclear power plant has been built without significant government subsidies.

This is a non-sequitur. Just because something needs government subsidies doesn't make it bad. Things like the Internet, modern solar energy, and the USPS were built with either massive initial subsidies or even complete government involvement throughout their ongoing lifetimes. That doesn't make them bad.

> 2. Nuclear power plant falsely reduce costs by externalizing significant costs such as the processing of fuel, the processing of fuel processing waste, maintenance, inspection (eg by the NRC), switching out fuel, processing nuclear fuel, the time-to-build or the failure modes of nuclear plants. Lest we forget, the Chernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone is 1,000 square miles 35 years later.

Versus coal and oil plants, which externalize the costs of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Also, comparing a shoddily built and designed Soviet plant to modern Western ones isn't a good comparison.

> If these next-generation LWRs are so economical, why isn't someone building them at scale? The standard response is political opposition but what about China?

In the West, it's negative perception that largely predates widespread public awareness of climate change. As for China, it looks like China's getting in on the nuclear game too, precisely because of air pollution concerns. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...

> delusional as climate deniers

Yeah, no. Even if us supporters of nuclear power are wrong, we don't need to be compared to people who are on the level of flat earthers.

jmyeethá 4 anos

> That's still a lot more deaths than commercial nuclear fusion

You missed the point about how this is a completley made up number and even if it wasn't, nuclear power plants (vs emissions from burning fossil fuels) would only address a small portion of deaths anyway.

> Just because something needs government subsidies doesn't make it bad.

No one said bad. Try "uneconomical".

> Also, comparing a shoddily built and designed Soviet plant to modern Western ones isn't a good comparison.

Ah yes, nuclear proponents love to exclude Chernobyl as an outlier because they have no answer for it. In this case, it was a "shoddily built and designed Soviet plant".

So anyone who pays attention to regulation in the United States (and elsewhere) should be aware of the "revoling door", which is also called "regulatory capture". This is where in a given regulated industry (eg oil and gas, pharmaceuticals) people will work for the regulator then private industry then the regulator and so on to the point where that regulation becomes ineffective.

We see another clear example of the Appeals Court for the Federal Circuit being staffed by all ex-patent lawyers who weirdly pretty much side with patent holders every time.

Part of the problem with nuclear is the human component. It's easy to ignore maintenance in the interests of profit. The natural tendency will be for the revolving door to weaken regulation.

So you want to dismiss Chernobyl as being "shoddily built" (and likely poorly maintained) but that's exactly what would happen with nuclear power regulation.

How about a non-Soviet disaster: Fukushima. What will be the reason to dismiss that one? Earthquakes? One in a million natural disaster? Some other reason to exclude another inconvenience?

godelskihá 4 anos

> I swear nuclear fan boys are just as delusional as climate deniers.

Just an FYI, acidburn is a reactor scientist. It feels a bit silly to call them a "fanboy". Also, I can verify they care deeply about climate change.

I'm also not personally actually aware of any nuclear fan boys or scientists that are climate deniers. They just argue "nuclear + renewables" vs "renewables". Why's that so hard to get? They aren't arguing for coal, oil, or natural gas like climate deniers do.

modrianohá 4 anos

8 million deaths annually from air pollution is pretty well supported by a number of methodologically sound studies, with anthropogenic air pollution being responsible for more than half of all air pollution deaths [0].

We let the US nuclear construction industry die, so it's pretty expensive to rebuild a workforce with the skills to build new nuclear plants, and that has contributed to the cost of nuclear power rising above some other power sources [1], but that's only because the cost of CO2 pollution isn't accounted for, which is a massive subsidy for fossil fuel power producers.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/data-review-air-pollution-deaths

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricit...

blubbihá 4 anos

"As of June 2021, China has a total nuclear power generation capacity of 49.6 GW from 50 reactors, with additional 17.1 GW under construction" (1)

Fair enough, I have not checked whether those are the previously mentioned lwrs, but I would argue that those numbers are definitely "scale"

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

tsimionescuhá 4 anos

> Lest we forget, the Chernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone is 1,000 square miles 35 years later.

Ah yes, the Soviet reactor that was built with a known fatal design flaw, then operated well outside of safety parameters during an experiment, is the be-all end-all of nuclear safety.

jcranmerhá 4 anos

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident...

How many industries are there where the list of notable accidents has such few fatalities? I mean, have you actually looked at the accidents on that list? The vast majority of them are basically garden-variety industrial accidents--and there's only so many because people are minded to exhaustively list every mishap that occurs at a nuclear power plant in a way that they're not for, say, a coal power plant.

einpoklumhá 4 anos

Probability of accident * Expected damage of accident = Expected damage of activity/project.

Nuclear has had non-negligible probability of accidents, including dangerous accidents. The expected damage of the dangerous accidents is millions dead and injured, and potential destruction of very wide ecosystems.

An accident in a coal power plant mean a bunch of coal burning. Which is bad, but several orders of magnitude less.

... And that's all while ignoring the question of waste management; and damage to reactors due to attacks at wartime.

Now, has technology improved in recent decades? I'm sure it has, to some extent. But the credibility and trustworthiness of the organizations building nuclear power plants has not improved, certainly not to the level at which lay-people - like myself - are willing to take their word for it. And that includes key world state governments.

tptacekhá 4 anos

At what point do we observe no accident causing millions of deaths or injuries and adjust our "expected damage" calculation? Decades? Centuries?

We can look past the damage caused by an accident at a coal plant and just count the damage caused by ordinary routine operation of coal plants and quickly reach damage figures that eclipse every nuclear accident in history combined.

einpoklumhá 4 anos

> At what point etc.

Your second paragraph suggests that we are not at that point yet.

But to be less facetious - after the regulatory systems in the relevant country reach a state of high trustworthiness and no indications of 'capture' + a few decades' buffer for the trustworthy regulation's effect to permeate.

And this is ignoring the question of chances of damage by war and the issue of waste management, so maximum over the minimum period for each of these 3 considerations.

tptacekhá 4 anos

You're begging the question. I'm not saying one can't advocate against nuclear power on the merits, either because it's too dangerous or because it's too poorly regulating. I'm saying that it can't be reasonable to do so based on the premise that it causes million-victim fatal accidents, because (1) it doesn't, and (2) other mainstream energy sources do cause mass fatalities and aren't condemned.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

Well, Chernobyl will likely end up killing about as many people as have ever died in a commercial jet crash.

mwinthá 4 anos

Waste problem - drive through the US state of Nevada. There’s nothing for hundreds of miles. You could likely just throw the waste out of an airplane over Nevada and be more or less fine.

With containment techniques combined with the ridiculous amount of uninhabited desert the US has, this is a non issue.

nine_khá 4 anos

France, with much less uninhabited land, and vastly more nuclear power plants, somehow manages to place waste in a way that's acceptable for an EU country, and neighboring countries.

(But of course "waste" is not really waste, it's fuel spent for a few per cent; a breeder reactor + reprocessing should burn it again and again and again.)

cyanydeezhá 4 anos

>After decades of cooling, France, like most other nuclear power generating countries, has no long-term solution in place for high and intermediate spent fuel waste disposal.

https://www.power-technology.com/analysis/managing-nuclear-w...

Yes, short term they manage it.

When we are discussing the future, our concern is long term.

danarishá 4 anos

When we are discussing climate change, our concern is not long term.

If we could build the nuclear reactors now, keep the spent fuel (whether or not we're going to reuse it in breeder reactors) as safe as we know how, and solve the long-term problem later, then we'd have a much better chance of there being a later to worry about.

cyanydeezhá 4 anos

Climate change is both.

People proposing nuclear energy as this wonderful overlooked strategy are not consider why it's consistently self limiting.

It's not a "solved" problem inthe long term

dodobirdlordhá 4 anos

The long term plan is to reprocess it, which is why we need to keep it around in the meantime. If we just wanted to get rid of it that would be trivially easy. But we don’t want that because we know in future we’re going to want to get it back from wherever we put it.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

They've given up on fast reactors. Reprocessing with thermal reactors doesn't actually solve the problem, as MOX fuel cannot then be further reprocessed and used in thermal reactors again. You still end up with all the fission products, and now the higher actinides from spent MOX, to deal with.

Having said that, dry casks are a perfectly cromulent way to deal with spent fuel.

dodobirdlordhá 4 anos

The main motivation to not reprocess fuel was nuclear nonproliferation, because it frees up the plutonium for nuclear weapons. But on the off chance that governments ever want to build a giant pile of nuclear weapons it’s sensible to not get rid of the nuclear waste, since if it ever turns out you do want it again it’s very expensive and time consuming to produce. Since you’ve already gone to all of the effort of mining the uranium and producing a bunch of plutonium, best to just keep it around somewhere in case you ever do want it for some reason.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

I'd say the main motivation to not reprocess is that it costs more than not reprocessing. It's a net economic loss.

freetime2há 4 anos

They already tried this in Nevada and failed for political reasons [1]. Dumping nuclear waste in the desert may be a non issue to you (and to me as well), but to a lot of people - particularly people who actually live in Nevada - it is a very serious issue.

The question of how to dispose of nuclear waste - in a manner that is satisfying to the residents of the state where it is being disposed - remains an unsolved issue in the US. And the current policy is to basically just ignore the waste. It’s being stored for the time being at reactor sites in steel and concrete casks - which I don’t think anyone would argue is a sufficient solution.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste...

Cupertino95014há 4 anos

All you're saying here is, "people object to it." Or is there something more substantive?

> in a manner that is satisfying to the residents of the state where it is being disposed

No, that is basically NIMBY. Of course some residents won't like nuclear waste buried underground, 100 miles from them in a place they'll never go and where no one lives. I don't know how to not sound callous about that.

pyuser583há 4 anos

The oil business deals with NIMBYs by making it worth their while. If oils is found on your land, you get lots of cash. “Beverly Hillbilly’s”.

Treat nuclear the same way. Don’t ask towns to host nuclear facilities out of the goodness of their hearts. Make it worth their while.

If nuclear power starts raising real estate value, the NIMBYs shut up.

dragonwriterhá 4 anos

> Treat nuclear the same way. Don’t ask towns to host nuclear facilities out of the goodness of their hearts. Make it worth their while.

The nuclear industry doesn't generate the money for that kind of lubrication; they demand more subsidies and immunities than they already have to build anything as it is.

pyuser583há 4 anos

The Department of Defense doesn’t generate cash, but people love having those bases nearby.

geysersamhá 4 anos

Thousands of salaries is cash.

tsimionescuhá 4 anos

That's a cost to the DoD. The point was that government can easily subsidize nuclear waste storage, just as it subsidizes the military.

RajT88há 4 anos

While you may think it unfair to compare, the 3 coal slurry spills (from power plants) which happened in the US to date had ranges of impact on the order of hundreds of miles and included impacts to drinking water.

I have little doubt the NIMBY's are recalling one or more of these incidents.

And this is just limiting the scope to power plant related waste. If you talk about industry in general you have many decades of weird cancers and nonpotable tap water in various parts of the country. The lack of trust comes from precedent.

freetime2há 4 anos

Yes I am basically saying people object to it. And in a democracy that’s a fairly important detail that you can’t just write off as a “non issue”.

light_hue_1há 4 anos

> Yes I am basically saying people object to it. And in a democracy that’s a fairly important detail that you can’t just write off as a “non issue”.

We do this all the time.

People object to living next to the airport. They object to new roads. They object to schools being built, rail lines, bus stops, even hospitals.

Yet, we weigh the pros for society against the cons for specific people. That's why we have a country with any infrastructure. If we simply gave in whenever someone said no, we would all be dead in an empty field.

dodobirdlordhá 4 anos

Many people also hate renewable energy for ideological reasons. People can be persuaded, or, in a democracy, simply outvoted by a critical mass of supporters. Nuclear power has been losing the propaganda war for decades in the United States, but that’s not a reason to give up on it forever.

AlbertCoryhá 4 anos

So France isn't a democracy? In a democracy, minorities have rights, but they don't have an infinite veto.

As someone else says, "People object to living next to the airport. They object to new roads. They object to schools being built, rail lines, bus stops, even hospitals."

Where I live, the old Orchard Supply store is being turned into a Costco. There are people objecting to that, too.

godelskihá 4 anos

It failed for more than political reasons. Long term repositories are pretty complex and have extremely unique problems to resolve (such as communicating with intelligent lifeforms that may not recognize our danger symbols). Just see all that went into the long term seed storage buildings. But really, we've learned enough in the last (almost) century to learn that we probably don't need long term repositories.

pyuser583há 4 anos

> political problem

But that was the problem with Yucca - it was chosen exclusively for its “scientific” value - remoteness. They didn’t event take transportation costs into account.

If you start with the political aspects, it becomes really, really easy to solve.

How many towns and cities are there with plants shutting down? How many with a history of military and nuclear facilities?

I know one town in particular that is trying to specialize in nuclear work. They have consultants, training programs, etc. Why not call them?

pfdietzhá 4 anos

The reason Yucca Mountain sputtered out was that it wasn't really needed. It's cheaper to just put the spent fuel in dry casks for a few centuries, even if the stuff is then buried (or reprocessed, or shot into space). Given there was no $$ incentive to make YM work, any amount of opposition could stop it.

robotresearcherhá 4 anos

> > It's way easier.

> Is that why power plants go years over time and hugely over-budget?

'Late and over-budget' sounds easier than 'has never been demonstrated'.

jimbob45há 4 anos

The solution being: Ignore it, I guess?

The waste is completely solid and can be safely buried and forgotten. Is that ignorance?

pfdietzhá 4 anos

Fission reactors can be easier than fusion reactors, and still go over time and hugely over budget. This just means fusion reactors are likely to also go over time and budget.

GoodbyeMrChipshá 4 anos

BMc2020há 4 anos

*These days I don't see why we don't just build lots more regular old LWR fission reactors.*

Because they lose money. Nobody, not the USA, Russia, China, France, Japan, Korea has ever made them profitable. They are always subsidized. The CCP bought Westinghouse AP1000s so they could steal their design and they still couldn't make it work. And you can't blame the environmentalists when it's in China.

Full disclosure: I'm not an accountant, but since I started taking an interest in this subject several years ago I've learned about wishing away decomissioning costs by claiming the plants will last 60 or 100 years. Ask the taxpayers of Oregon what 'stranded costs' are. Making 150 square km of Japan uninhabitable is also a bit spendy. IIRC almost all of the Dept of Energy's budget goes to nuclear.

But, nothing will change because military nuclear is a national security issue and that always trumps every other issue.

Back to fusion: Fusion power plants will be at least as big and complicated as fission plants, so it's never going to be 'too cheap to meter' electricity. I do hold out hope for it to be a drive for space craft though.

DrBazzahá 4 anos

> Because they lose money, nobody has ever made them profitable ....They are always subsidized

That's how it appears but that's not an argument against them. Two things: firstly they are regulated because nuclear fuel can be used for warfare, so when a government gets involved things cost more, that's just an unfortunate fact, secondly they've never been commercialised.

Could you imagine if cars or jumbo jets were built ad-hoc? What would the profit or loss be? A better example, perhaps, is Space X vs NASA. How much does a NASA rocket cost (government controlled), versus Space X (private industry) that has had to industrialise a process? And how much profit does NASA make per launch versus Space X?

Nuclear power stations could be industrialised and would definitely be cheaper.

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

Cost for deeply decarbonized grids are cheapest if you have low carbon firm energy like nuclear. The LCOE numbers thrown around today are meaningless wrt systems costs.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...

nuclear plants save a fraction of their revenue in a trust that pays for decommissioning. for thr vast majority of plants this has been and will be more than sufficient. therr are exceptions but it isnt fair to dwell on them given the other successess.

The dose rates are barely above background already in most of the area around Fukushima. I'm with Elon in that I will gladly eat vegetebles from slightly elevated dose areas because I belive the science that says damger starts at 100 mSv acute/300 mSv annual. Getting an extra 40 mSv in a year is not uninhabitable.

civilian nuclear power has pretty much nothing to do with military nuclear so not sure I follow your point there.

And for the record, here's the full Too Cheap To Meter quote, from a Science Writers Dinner in 1954:

"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age"

BMc2020há 4 anos

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I see by your bio you've been on yc since 2013 and a "Nuclear reactor physicist in Seattle. If you want to talk about how best to push the envelope in nuclear for climate change, I'm in!"

Are you J** W***? You haven't updated your blog in a while.

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

I am not J* W*

8bitsrulehá 4 anos

> It runs 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint.

How much cooling water does it use? Who'll want to drink it? How much waterwill 'lots more regular old LWR fission reactors' need, and where will it come from? Oh, and let's see the hands of those who want one in their back yard. 'Whoops'.

> It's way easier. It has been working fine since the 1950s.

Gosh, I never heard 'fine' used in that way before. I could paste in a list of dozens of failures, leaks (including tritium), accidents (public and hushed-up). Look away from San Onofre, that was just a one-time expense. Why, I'd even bet it will continue to be "safe, clean, and too cheap to meter", guys. /s

JohnBootyhá 4 anos

    and let's see the hands of those who want one in their back yard. 'Whoops'

Me. Actually I've already lived in the back yard of one. Extremely populous suburb of a major American city.

Apparently lots of people don't mind having one in their back yard.

dogcomplexhá 4 anos

A friendly reminder that the idea posed by a pioneer of nuclear energy of just dumping big bombs in a hole and harvesting the heat energy with steam/plasma has never been invalidated and remains the most efficiently-simple solution immediately viable

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER

If containment is your concern (though underground blast effects are decently understood, and blast chambers could be constructed with still strongly net economic/energy positive) - this does not need to be built around any population centers. At a cost of 1.5% efficiency loss per 1000 km, UHV power lines can direct it from a single write-off location anywhere on earth. That single location can likely be scaled to supply well beyond the total current global energy production.

https://en.geidco.org.cn/aboutgei/uhv/

brtkdotsehá 4 anos

Lmao, that sounds like something straight out of Futurama.

The Wikipedia article you liked says it “economically unviable”, but fails to provide a source

lostmsuhá 4 anos

Another no container idea (this one is crazy): just blow them in the ocean, that will evaporate some water and speed up evaporation of some more. Harvest energy with existing hydroelectric setuos once it passes the weather cycle.

willis936há 4 anos

There are much less ecologically disastrous and less illegal cloud-seeding techniques. They're still very illegal though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding

therealdrag0há 4 anos

What about earth quakes?

(I didn’t click the links)

magilahá 4 anos

Where is this $1.9 billion over the last decade figure coming from? ITER alone has surely burned through more than double that.

Edit: Sounds like it might only be counting investment in private companies.

Apocryphonhá 4 anos

Crazy to imagine what would’ve happened if in the past it had been more than sub-fusion never.

http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fus...

shadowofneptunehá 4 anos

I've known about this chart for a long while, but recently I've become skeptical of it. What says that fusion would be a success even if that level of funding was reached? The most mature fusion reactor being built, ITER, is gigantic and it's not clear how it could be made cheaper or miniturized.

danarishá 4 anos

That's part of the problem with fairly basic research like what we're putting into fusion. Without making the investment, doing the science and engineering to actually study these things and learn how they work and how we can do them better, we won't know how or whether they can be made cheaper, miniaturized, etc.

This isn't the same kind of problem that most of us are used to dealing with in our daily lives—where the fundamental components, and the fundamental science, that make it all up are well-understood and fairly mature, and what we have to do is come up with creative ways to apply it. This is the kind of "we don't know if any specific avenue of research will ever pay back a positive monetary ROI, but pursuing them is important anyway" science that we need to be doing with or without fusion as a specific goal, because over time, it will produce years or decades of silence, punctuated by small, incremental improvements in our understanding of the universe...and then an amazing breakthrough like practical, commercially-viable fusion power.

But only if we are willing to patiently fund it through those years or decades of boring stuff.

DennisPhá 4 anos

Actually it's quite clear: use REBCO superconductors.

Tokamak output scales with the square of reactor volume and the fourth power of magnetic field strength. Double the field, 16X the output.

Modern REBCO superconductors can support much stronger magnetic fields than ITER will manage. That's why CFS is building a reactor using REBCO which is much smaller than ITER, but should have the same performance. It'll be half the size of JET, which was built in a year. They're planning a net power attempt in 2025 and a lot of independent fusion researchers think they'll succeed.

CFS is a spinoff from MIT, whose Alcator C-Mod had more powerful magnets than any other tokamak in the world.

Stevvohá 4 anos

SPARC's 2025 timeline is a joke. They haven't even started hiring engineers yet, let alone building the thing because they still have no idea how to make a big enough REBCO magnet.

DennisPhá 4 anos

They've already built a SPARC-size REBCO magnet, and demonstrated it at 20 Tesla for five hours.

https://www.ans.org/news/article-3240/mit-ramps-10ton-magnet...

https://news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusio...

It's pretty amazing that they did that without any engineers.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

That chart was about a proposed crash program for tokamaks. It was put together based on an optimistic (and disproved) idea about how tokamak physics would scale. Had that program actually been funded, it would have been a guaranteed failure.

dreamcompilerhá 4 anos

There's a huge amount of hype in fusion these days. Companies are getting big investments just by saying "we're over unity." None of their investors will recoup any money.

Getting above unity is important but it's still a very long way from systemic over unity of the entire lifecycle of the process that turns fusion into electricity on the grid. And that simply won't happen in my lifetime or most of your lifetimes.

What will likely happen during our lifetimes is we develop large-scale electricity storage mechanisms. Together with decentralized microgrids, storage will enable most of the world's electricity to be generated by renewables. The sun is a giant fusion engine, and it's the only fusion engine that will be practical for us during at least the next 50 years.

dx034há 4 anos

Any green gas could be that storage. With solar power around $.01/kwh in some sunny places, converting that energy into storable gas/liquids can be profitable even at low efficiency rates. And we already have an existing network to transport, store and burn gases. Converting those from natural gas to other gases is likely easier than rebuilding everything.

From all that I read, Ammonia is a prime candidate. Especially because there's an existing large market for it, so producers don't have to bet on a new market to ramp up production. But there's no real reason why some power plants, ships and maybe even trucks couldn't be driven by Ammonia in the future.

jillesvangurphá 4 anos

I think investments are happening because recent progress in this space is indicating that this might in fact happen in the next decade or so. The cliche that fusion reactors are perpetually 30 years away, might have actually been correct up to about 20 years ago.

There are no guarantees here of course, but there are now quite a few companies acting like they are going to get their first test plants up and running in the next ten or so years. From there to commercialization is of course still a long and risky path. But it's very different once you can prove that the process works and more energy comes out then goes in.

As you say, fusion reactors will have to compete with absolutely dirt cheap solar, wind, and storage. As well as with future fission plants that may or may not become cheaper than the current state of the art (which is super expensive). Just getting things working is not going to be good enough. It will need to work cheaply.

tsimionescuhá 4 anos

The biggest problem to take any of these companies seriously, even the MIT spin-off, is that no one has ever attempted yet to extract a single watt of electricity from the fusion reaction. The part where the thermal energy is actually converted to electrical power is still entirely at the theoretical design level. While it is nowhere near as complex scientifically as actually containing the plasma, it will still be a huge engineering challenge.

When these companies come and claim that their better magnets will allow them to supply power to the grid 3 years from now when they haven't even arrived where JET is yet, so they haven't even started in the unknowns of actually running the reactor continously and extracting power from it, it is clear that they are gifting with their timeline. And if they are willing to lie about the timeline, I don't see why anyone believes them about the fundamental technology as well.

pydryhá 4 anos

The "30 years away" thing assumed investment.

It's quite weird to think that seeing a potentially endless source of free energy we wouldnt be throwing a trillion dollars or so at it but thats humanity for you.

Scientists were similarly optimistic about space exploration after landing on moon shortly before NASA's budget dwindled.

acchowhá 4 anos

Private Investments usually need returns within a 10-15 year time scale. Once practical fusion gets to that point, we should expect money to come pouring in which will help make it a reality.

We’re seeing something similar happening in self driving cars

Terr_há 4 anos

My pet theory is that it's no coincidence the self-driving-car investment craze started the same time the baby-boom generation started to enter "grandpa can't drive himself anymore" territory.

In other words, I suspect it's not fueled by a technology trend, but by trying to capture a potential customer trend.

cypress66há 4 anos

It seems like a stretch. Self driving car investments mostly coincide with AI getting to a good enough level that it seem feasible.

[deleted]há 4 anos

tim333há 4 anos

Helion are planning for systemic returns over unity quite soon really.

eatonphilhá 4 anos

The article doesn't seem to mention why exactly but I'm guessing it's some combination of 1) visible climate change (extreme heat, wildfires, drought, etc.) so people want better energy sources and 2) the mayhem Russia started seeing as it is one of the bigger energy providers.

Or has there been anything else?

SkyMarshalhá 4 anos

Actual advances in fusion and related energy generation tech. For example, at least one startup, Helion, is developing a way to generate electricity directly from the fusion reaction and magnetic field, instead of indirectly by heating water into steam that then turns a turbine generator. The increased efficiency from that might enable it produce net electricity. And quite frankly, it's way past time that we advanced beyond converting energy -> heat -> motion -> electricity, and shortened that cycle to energy -> electricity.

whatshisfacehá 4 anos

Magnetohydrodynamic generators were invented for coal plants 70 years or so ago but turbines are more efficient.

hobscoophá 4 anos

I thought they were ultimately limited by problems of corrosion at the electrodes?

Helion's scheme to turn fusion heat into pushing E&M fields back through their magnet to generate electricity is pretty different from a standard MHD generator.

DennisPhá 4 anos

And it's only possible because the reactor produces a series of small explosions of alpha particles.

mrshadowgoosehá 4 anos

The taste of immense profit is in the air. In the minds of potential investors, fusion is no longer a "lol maybe in 50 years" technology. Advances in magnetic modeling and magnet technology have resulted in cheaper, easier-to-develop alternatives to the classic Tokamak. Timelines are now believably "this decade" for demonstration reactors.

Energy production/harvesting is a foundational element of our civilization. Literally all of the comforts of modern society require the expenditure of some form of energy. Any entity that develops an unlimited, clean and cheap source of energy essentially has access to a money printer.

credit_guyhá 4 anos

> In the minds of potential investors, fusion is no longer a "lol maybe in 50 years" technology.

No. Potential investors are used to extremely skewed investments results for startups. Most startups fail, but some of those that succeed, succeed spectacularly.

A successful fusion startup is almost guaranteed to have a spectacular success, something that would make Facebook or Uber or Tesla look like small potatoes. Given that, a VC is ok with investing in it even if they think the likelihood of success is only 1%. They would not if they think that likelihood is only 0.01%, because at that level estimates are not reliable (who's to say it's 0.01% and not 0.00001% ?). But if there's a reasonable argument that P(success) ~ 1%, then it's a no-brainer to invest, because even a mistake of 2 orders of magnitude would still result in a positive return.

For the rest of us though, the "fusion is 50 years in the future" can simply be replaced with "there's a 99% chance fusion will not be done in the next 50 years". Or, what the heck, just leave it at "fusion is 50 years in the future" and you'll be much more right than wrong.

rapseyhá 4 anos

The cost effectiveness of fusion is completely up in the air. People speak about fusion as if it somehow is just going to produce infinite power at no cost.

scaramangahá 4 anos

The first part, the taste of immense profit, sure. But the idea that people are thinking of profits on the timescale of "this decade" is almost laughable, given the situation we are already in with climate change.

A much more rational explanation would be "they are trying to grab as much cash as they can right now, for as long as people believe that this is a thing that we should be doing, and may be possible", regardless of whether it's a good idea (it isn't), or whether it would work (doesn't look like it). But sure, maybe they are completely sincere and really believe in it all, who knows?

But the issue isn't just that "all of the comforts of modern society require the expenditure of some form of energy" it's also the case that "exponentially increasing energy expenditure is just accelerating the rate at which we are asset stripping and polluting the earth" and the latter continues to be true even if we stop emitting CO2.

I think it should now be apparent to all that comfort-seeking and suicide are essentially the same process (ask any addict), at least for the definitions of "comfort" that our current political and economic system are organised around. Of course, quite a lot of people still do not experience a lot of "comfort" even with the practically limitless energy that we have from fossil fuels.

Edit: sorry for the ramble, but to summarize, I think you give people too much credit to imagine they can design such a complex money printer with a 10 year plan, and if they could plan to that timescale, they are probably going to see that society so far in to collapse by then, that even with infinite energy, there will not be much value in the money that it prints.

Invictus0há 4 anos

If nuclear fusion were ever developed, I imagine the government would seek to seize its patent protection under the Invention Secrecy Act.

tsimionescuhá 4 anos

> Any entity that develops an unlimited, clean and cheap source of energy essentially has access to a money printer.

Well, one thing that should be clear to anyone watching the space is that fusion will be neither unlimited, clean nor cheap. At the very least, not with any approach being looked at today.

First of all, being based on state-of-the-art science and tech, it's clear that it cannot be cheap for another 20-30 years even if it was working today.

Secondly, fusion reactors will produce large quantities of radioactive waste, probably larger than fission reactors, because everything that comes in close proximity to the reactor will be bombarded by 30+ times as many neutrons than in a fission reactor (or 5x-20x as many for DD fusion), and much higher energy neutrons at that, making it brittle and radioactive. Most of the reactor components are expected to need changing every 2-4 years, by which time they will be radioactive waste. Not to mention, fusion plants will work with large amounts of tritium, which is notoriously hard to contain, making tritium leaks all but guaranteed. So, definitely not clean.

Thirdly, fusion reactors require large amounts of tritium, which is virtually non-existent on Earth and must be created in fission power plants. The neutrons from the fusion reaction can theoretically also be used to recycle tritium (when hitting the lithium blanket), but you would have to recapture 100% of the tritium produced this way to recreate fuel, which is not possible. So, to run a fusion reactor you will be limited by tritium availability, and that will mean you also need a small fission reactor, and that in turn requires uranium - so, not really that unlimited.

Not to mention, even Deuterium is not actually that easy to obtain, as you need to either get it from fossil fuels (the way it is mostly obtained today) or from water hydrolysis, which is another waste of your produced energy.

Overall, fusion seems extremely unlikely to be an economically viable source of energy in the coming decades. Every new reactor will require massive investments, it will waste a good portion of its output to keep itself running (powering the superconducting magnets, pumping coolant, void pumping the reactors, water hydrolisis, lithium processing to extract the tritium etc). It will require highly trained engineers to design, build and maintain. It will have a high risk of catastrophic damage to the reactor itself, easily vaporizing much of the investment in an instant if the magnetic containment of the plasma fails, for example, or melting down spectacularly if the cooling system fails. Virtually all components of the reactor, including the high tech magnets, will require constant replacement as they become brittle from the neutron bombardment - and all the old parts will require expensive radioactive storage for at least a few decades to centuries.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

> Not to mention, even Deuterium is not actually that easy to obtain, as you need to either get it from fossil fuels (the way it is mostly obtained today) or from water hydrolysis, which is another waste of your produced energy.

This is really not an honest critique. The cost of obtaining deuterium is quite low compared to all the other costs of building and operating a fusion reactor.

ianburrellhá 4 anos

REBCO high-temperature superconductors have potentially changed the game. They can support stronger fields which means smaller devices for same confinement. Commercial production seems to only started in the last decade.

MIT's research, spun out as CFS, may be prompting other startups.

epicureanidealhá 4 anos

Is there any fundamental limit we’re hitting on magnetic fields or might we see another 10-100x increase in field strength in the future?

jleahyhá 4 anos

Nobody knows, is the short and boring answer. We don't have a sufficiently detailed understanding of what drives critical field strength in these materials (otherwise we'd have room temperature superconductors or have ruled out their existence already).

pfdietzhá 4 anos

60% of the mass of the ARC reactor is the steel support structure to resist JxB forces. A magnetic field 10-100x higher would exert such strong forces (magnetic pressure scales as B^2) that no material could resist them. So: strength of materials.

willis936há 4 anos

It would be shocking if HTS manufacturing research did anything other than accelerate. If there are fundamental physical limits to run in to then they are very far away. This is deep in the engineering limited area. How much abuse from strain and radiation can your HTS handle? The better your answer at a cheaper cost, the smaller and more powerful of a machine you enable. Humans know how to make pretty strong steel, so the superstructure won't be a limiting factor for a while if ever. Making HTS tapes and divertors that can handle what we ask of them are the material challenges. There is room to be clever with physics to lessen the divertor problem.

hobscoophá 4 anos

Actually, I think the strength of modern steels is a limiting factor for fusion magnets. Plasma "beta"s are only a few %, so for a few atmospheres of plasma pressure your magnetic cage needs to be like a pressure vessel that contains hundreds of atmospheres. And with large holes poked through it for access. If you look at CFS's magnet test from last summer, there's a huge amount of steel.

Filligreehá 4 anos

Some breakthroughs in plasma modelling, too. https://www.sciencealert.com/physics-breakthrough-as-ai-succ...

drtghhá 4 anos

Interesting. By that link, it seems they was able to stabilizing 'droplets' where two plasmas co-existed simultaneously inside Tokamak.

I wonder if they thought if it would be possible to accelerate such plasma droplets in opposite directions for to take Helion's aproach [1] if needed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29119180

ISLhá 4 anos

The really big deal in the last decade has been better magnets -- many of the "novel" approaches attracting recent funding are probably doomed to fail, but the MIT-associated consortia that simply aspire to building better tokamaks with modern magnets look encouraging.

scaramangahá 4 anos

A much more reasonable first guess would be "the desire to increase the next-quarter earnings of industries which make political contributions." Which is the main driving force of all public investment. If politicians can take advantage of climate chaos and put it down as part of their "climate bullshit, whatever" policies then they can get a larger pay day, so why not?

Here in Korea for example, they are building out the worlds most dangerous fission reactors because domestic heavy industry, concrete companies, and so on are extracting very good earnings from that. Meanwhile, Korea is the leader in offshore wind (but only to export to other countries, and it's all manufactured in Thailand) presumably the lack of interest in the Korean government in stimulating domestic demand, and the cheap labour in Thailand are factors, along with oil prices, in why it is so cost-effective.

A belief in the free market would lead us to expect that eventually the green options would become just as corrupt and be able to hold the world hostage and capture policymakers, but it does not seem to have happened yet, maybe there is just a lead time for industries to develop their capacities for political corruption?

V__há 4 anos

There seems to be a lot of innovative ideas and a lot of them seem to be quite doable, which is interesting for investors. One I really like is FirstLightFusion [1]. They are using a ballistic system to shoot at a small fuel cube, which creates a fusion reaction and then use the generated heat to power a turbine. There is a nice behind the scene video with some interview from FullyCharged [2].

[1] https://firstlightfusion.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1RsHQCMRTw

tsimionescuhá 4 anos

Inertial confinement fusion is orders of magnitude less likely to ever be economically viable than magnetic confinement. The targets (and projectiles in this case) will require such high precision to be able to achieve fusion in the moment of impact that it is virtually impossible to imagine this could ever be done economically.

Further, you will need huge quantities of such targets and projectiles, as the power plant will have to destroy them at a rate of one per second or so, in constant operation. So even for a single day, you will require 86,400 targets and as many projectiles - each being a marvel of precision engineering. Also, there is a good chance that you wouldnt even be able to recycle the material from spent targets to make new ones, as they will become radioactive from being in contact with the fusing plasma.

Essentially an ICF plant would actually be running on the world's most expensive fuel, and consuming it at an extraordinary rate.

peter303há 4 anos

MIT's SPARC figured out how to manufacture high temperature superconductor magnets. That shrinks the size of the magnets and power consumption.

oconnor663há 4 anos

Those things might explain some rising investment in alternative energy in general, but I don't think either them would be specific to fusion.

bawolffhá 4 anos

Better high temp super conductor lowering barrier to entry maybe? (im pretty ignorant of this field)

asdf123ahá 4 anos

missing 3) tons of public funding lead to recent advances that the private sector is ready to take over and profit.

capitalism innovation as usual.

jason0597há 4 anos

I am genuinely surprised that there is so much interest in the comments here and excitement about fusion energy powering the future. Yet I see surprisingly few numbers or physics being discussed. Kind of disappointed for a forum that is supposedly technically-minded and able to speak mathematics.

There was this great MIT paper [1] published a while back that's still to be rebuked, talking about the serious technical challenges. Furthermore, there's Maury Markowitz's blogs that have been around for more than a decade showcasing why economically future can never work competitively on the grid [2].

Fusion is great science, it may eventually return a net positive in energy, but it has so many problems that make it impossible to use commercially.

[1]: http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trou...

[2]: https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-wi...

lvenhá 4 anos

One morea article worth reading about the con-fusion https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion

greenthrowhá 4 anos

I don't believe the hype. From what I can see fusion still isn't anywhere near being a viable source of energy, other than in the form or solar power.

felixmezierehá 4 anos

Yes, it will be for the second half of this century, if we make it there.

Side comment: fusion can be seen as a solution to many of our worst problems. But another way to see it is that without a complete change in what societies value and how they act (i.e. a cultural/philosophical/storytelling change), fusion is just going to increase the rate at which we are transforming this planet into a giant pile of garbage, whether its solid and liquid garbage (leading to wiping out 60% of wildlife in 50 years, spilling the phosphorus of our soils into the sea -making them sterile and killing life in the sea- etc etc), or gas garbage (typically greenhouse gases).

We do that by extracting resources nature concentrated for us for free for millions of years and dispersing them all around in our buildings, phones, playstations, fertilizers, fuel etc.

As long as Black Friday is the highlight of the year, there are reasons to think fusion might be more dangerous than helpful.

It’s good to have an increasing ability to transform matter, as long as you are using that ability in the right direction.

Nitionhá 4 anos

Great point that I hadn't considered before. Like how adding more lanes to a road just creates more traffic. I hope things don't go that way but I can see it happening.

CamperBob2há 4 anos

Sigh, this again.

Induced demand is still valid economic demand, and congested roads are still being used productively. There's a reason why sane governments don't regularly "improve" roads by removing lanes.

idlehandhá 4 anos

Governments sometimes demolish highways though. And a lot of the time, the marginal utility of adding another lane to a road is lower than the utility of using that space and public money somewhere else. If we scale a car-centric city to a million inhabitants we often end up with a majority of urban space devoted to roads and parking lots, which cost public money, instead of commercial and residential buildings which generate opportunities for the inhabitants and money for the municipality.

Another problem of car-centric infrastructure is that it doesn't scale as well as public transport - a single bus can, potentially, take 50 or more cars off the road.

serfhá 4 anos

> Sigh, this again.

has this kind of initial dismissal ever won anyone any favor in an argument?

I see it all over the thread, and I find myself having a hard time wanting to consider the argument afterwards even if I am personally aligned with them just because it seems so inconsiderate and rude.

Is it supposed to signal your experience in the field, having heard this argument so many times -- or does it signal the opponents inexperience? Either way I find that approach to come off as arrogant and rude.

CamperBob2há 4 anos

Agreed, it was a low-effort rebuttal to a low-effort post, and I feel bad for contributing to the noise floor on here by taking the bait.

The admins make it clear that neither behavior is wanted, but the argument in question really gets my goat. In my area, road diets and similar ways to deny demand for increased capacity aren't just fallacious arguments, but key elements of public policy that are seemingly engineered to waste time and fuel while contributing to pollution. The only time such arguments are valid are when they've already been applied farther downstream, where the next bottleneck is inevitably cited as a reason why expanding capacity in a given area "won't work."

Similar policies could be applied in many other places, yielding outcomes that pretty much everyone would agree are worse than the status quo, yet for some reason they always find a receptive audience when the problem domain is transportation.

acchowhá 4 anos

> Induced demand is still valid economic demand, and congested roads are still being used productively. There's a reason why sane governments don't regularly "improve" roads by removing lanes.

I guess that depends on your perspective. I see expanding freeways as enabling further sub-urban growth, which is fundamentally unsustainable (from an energy, logistics, and municipal funding perspective).

notatoadhá 4 anos

valid economic demand does not equal "good".

increasing demand on a highway gets more people to where they are going, but if the destination doesn't have more parking spots, you've caused an imbalance in the system. same as the electrical generation - if it suddenly becomes absurdly cheap to manufacture more consumer goods, we've just increased the pressure on the whole system that needs to manage the rest of the lifecycle of those goods after manufacture. sure, some people will make money, but that's not the point.

barneygalehá 4 anos

Sane governments regularly pedestrianise roads and city centres, at least in Europe.

felixmezierehá 4 anos

The point I was making was precisely regarding what is considered "valid" demand. Here, the fact that you appended "economic" after it strongly suggests to me that we don't have the same definition of it.

One of the underlying assumptions of all mainstream economic theories since the XIXe century is that EVERYTHING that comes from nature is infinite and has been provided to us for free, whether it's resources, clean air, a durably nice temperature, animals etc. What has a cost is to pay people and machines to extract those things, but not the things in the first place.

Based on this assumption, we've acted as if nature was infinite and increased our rate of extraction to ridiculous heights, reaching the limits of a system that is sadly, due to the laws of physics, finite. One example : China has used in 3 years roughly as much sand for construction as the US has in the entire XXth century (btw sand is the new gold and a huge black market for it is now in place...)

pastacacioepepehá 4 anos

If the actual costs are internalized (as in, not externalized) I don't think much of this economic demand is sustainable.

Economic demand is just a metric.

You are celebrating a metric without considering if and how it contributes positively to the goal, and I'm not even sure we agree on the goal, if yours is tumor-like growth.

Nitionhá 4 anos

Whether or not that demand is economically valid doesn't really affect the point that demand will increase with more power from fusion, or more lanes for roads though does it? The economy has always been somewhat at odds with the environment.

goodpointhá 4 anos

> Induced demand is still valid economic demand

That does not justify it.

slothtrophá 4 anos

> fusion is just going to increase the rate at which we are transforming this planet into a giant pile of garbage

That rate does not scale negatively with energy prices. It scales positively with population, in the West.

We could just accelerate towards stagnant global population growth. Improving economies and access to contraceptives in poor nations could do that. Everybody wins, except the very richest.

Coercing the population to stop consuming is a non-starter. We could also create stronger incentives and regulations surrounding waste. There are lots of new biodegradable tech companies now, to replace plastics, for instance.

tsimionescuhá 4 anos

> Coercing the population to stop consuming is a non-starter.

Right now we are doing the opposite of that though: the advertising industry, one of the largest in Earth, is mostly about brain-washing people into buying more stuff. We can easily put a stop to this tomorrow while listing nothing of value to society, but instead we fetishize growth so we don't.

slothtrophá 4 anos

You'd have to make a meaningful connection between growth and advertising, and you can't. The reason Western countries are increasing the immigration rate is precisely to perpetuate GDP, fertility rate is otherwise stagnant. This means people aren't individually increasing their rate of purchasing stuff over time, in fact many buy less than their parents did. Look around in your room and you'll probably see the average amount of "useless stuff" purchased by household. Are you drowning in it? Neither is anyone else.

Innovation isn't just for the energy sector either. Consumables create less waste over time. Biodegradables are making a big entry in the market. All this means is that as the population levels out (as it is projected to), consumption will create less and less waste.

At any rate this falls into the same category, coercion. People want things, especially if they improve their lives. Much of what you take for granted now was advertised. Take-out food, vehicles, smartphones and computers and media, etc.

Yeah, "nothing of value". I don't think you get to decide what people value, that's what the market is for.

tsimionescuhá 4 anos

Advertising's purpose is to distort the market.

And yes, people are absolutely buying more garbage than their parents - and certainly their grandparents. Look at clothes, jewelry, furniture, home appliances, cars - those all used to be more or less lifetime purchases, and have become things people change every 5-7 years top (much less for clothes). Not to mention things like buying new phones and other electronics every year or two.

These changes are all products of marketing and advertising to a great extent. Stopping these industries (or at least greatly curtailing their power) would help correct the market back into a more rational place.

lanfeust6há 4 anos

> And yes, people are absolutely buying more garbage than their parents

Source please. 1 in 8 Americans are food insecure, cost of living has been climbing for decades, more than half say they live paycheck-to-paycheck and many say they'll never afford a house. So, which is it, is the economic climate better for millennials and zoomers or worse? Pick one. Because I doubt you would suggest to struggling Americans and Westerners that they are just squandering their money irresponsibly.

> Look at clothes, jewelry, furniture, home appliances, cars - those all used to be more or less lifetime purchases, and have become things people change every 5-7 years top (much less for clothes).

That changed quite awhile ago, with boomers and the ascendance of the middle class, and you just made that number up.

Clothing is not built to last. A suit can with care, but not a t-shirt. Notwithstanding that the waste we're concerned with hasn't to do with cotton material or jewelry, probably not even appliances.

A large amount of waste comes from containers and packaging. That is completely agnostic of the products themselves, there's no reason this can't be improved. There's also nondurable goods, durable goods and food. Check out this fact sheet for municipal solid waste - https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2021-01/documents/20... , and more from the epa.

> Advertising's purpose is to distort the market.

Indeed, and yet it's irrelevant. It doesn't perform miracles.

The most meaningful correction you can make to level of waste clearly has no dependence on advertising. Everything uses too much packaging, and food providers waste an inordinate amount.

felixmezierehá 4 anos

Absolutely agree with tsimionescu

felixmezierehá 4 anos

> That rate does not scale negatively with energy prices. It scales positively with population, in the West.

I wouldn't uses "prices" here as a framing. If you plot the graphs of worldwide energy usage and worldwide garbage emissions (let's take greenhouse gases or amount of artificialized soil as examples), you will see that they are correlated. We have grown to this gigantic population solely thanks to our mastery of energy, that's the one factor that enabled all the rest (abundant food, time to go to college instead of farming, developments in medicine to make your life longer, retirements, consumerism etc.).

What I'm saying is that, looking at what we've done so far with energy, it's not entirely sure more energy will be good for our prospects of survival. We need to have a collective philosophical revolution first.

slothtrophá 4 anos

> If you plot the graphs of worldwide energy usage and worldwide garbage emissions (let's take greenhouse gases or amount of artificialized soil as examples), you will see that they are correlated.

You've mentioned this twice, and so it's worth nothing that important factors also correlated in that period of time: the rapid rise of the middle class following the decimation of wealth from the world wars, which led to a population boom.

Another factor you're taking for granted: fertility rate drops in economies as they get very strong. Western countries boost immigration for this reason: you need more bodies to increase GDP growth (and by extension, waste), if that's what you want. Lower energy prices alone will not lead to people breeding more. If it did, we'd have more kids than our grandparents/great-grandparents did, just as you alluded that they spent more on food.

So on top of the fact that we're projecting GLOBAL STAGNANT POPULATION GROWTH, which means an end to increase in consumption, technological innovation means that consumption produces less waste. You can't account for innovation in energy and nowhere else.

> What I'm saying is that, looking at what we've done so far with energy, it's not entirely sure more energy will be good for our prospects of survival. We need to have a collective philosophical revolution first.

I know what you were saying, and I'm saying it's wrong.

felixmezierehá 4 anos

This is super interesting, let's continue the conversation: population increase is a big factor driving energy consumption (and garbage emissions) indeed. Let's assume we have GLOBAL STAGNANT POPULATION GROWTH from today on. So we stay at 7 billion, no problem (this is of course wrong, nicest estimates say we'll stabilise around 9 billion).

The 2 questions now are: 1) what allowed us to reach this amount of population? 2) can this amount of population remain stable with the current inputs given to the system or not?

My two answers:

1) Energy. Abundant energy is what allowed population to reach such heights (x7 in 200 years). In a nutshell it did so by enabling us to get abundant resources, food, medicine and comfort, the first stages of Maslow basically. It did so at scales that would have defied imagination in previous centuries.

2) There are two possible answers here:

- Yes, it is sustainable, meaning we don't deplete earth's resources faster than they renew themselves, situation which will get better with the improvement of technology and will compensate for more and more people getting into the middle class (i.e. more consumers).

- No, it is not sustainable, meaning we are depleting earth's resources faster than they renew themselves, and this situation will get worse with more and more people accessing the middle class (or worse: higher classes) and so the population will collapse at some point due to shortages of food/pandemics/wars etc.

Data to help answer the questions:

- all serious scientific reports (IPCC, https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound... and others) say that we are currently depleting earth's resources much faster than it can renew them and destabilising many natural systems like climate/life etc to irreversible points

- the average american currently emits 16 tons of CO2/year, the average human emits 4 tons/year, we need to get to under 2 tons/year to make sure the climate does not blow up too much => consequence of this: 5 billion people with a lifestyle a bit closer to the one of americans (i.e. a growing middle class) is much worse than 10 billion with the living standard of people in say, south-east asia or Africa => the living standard is much more important as a factor than the amount of people, if we get more energy with the same amount of people, we'll just keep giving more and more comfort to more and more people, trust me that energy won't stay unused on the side nicely.

- Similar idea to previous point: there is a direct correlation between living standard and amount of destruction of the environment. The rich destroy the planet incredibly more than normal people, even in developped country (symbolised extremely by Brandson & friends). More and more rich/middle class people = more and more energy consumption. This factor is much more powerful than population growth.

- [To be fact checked] I don't remember exactly the numbers but in the past 50 years, optimisations thanks to technology have divided the consumption of machines by 2, while emissions have been multiplied by 4 or 5: so far with what we observe, technology is not a silver bullet to reduce the problem. It is more the cause of the problem by enabling us to do always more and more, with our clumsy, human ways and therefore disrupting nature always more and more.

What are your answers?

slothtrophá 4 anos

We should reiterate that this is a discussion about the outcome of nuclear fusion, which if scaled up, would be poised to greatly disrupt CO2 emissions. This means that the imminent concern in the capacity of sustainability (exacerbation of climate change) is largely addressed, save for the carbon capture / cooling aspect we will want.

We're depleting resources, and we're also still growing. If we're scrutinizing a future with a non-growing population, it makes no sense to assume the same level of depletion. It's a function of demand. Much of new land encroachment isn't for any novel products, it's to increase the output of meat production to satisfy demand (in South America at least, in the U.S. that land-use has not been growing).

This also doesn't take into account technological innovation.

> This factor is much more powerful than population growth.

The rich are too few in number and they're primarily rich by virtue of everyone else's consumption. Notwithstanding that their own practices can be very damaging, it doesn't meet that scale.

> It is more the cause of the problem by enabling us to do always more and more, with our clumsy, human ways and therefore disrupting nature always more and more.

This is purely philosophical. There's no evidence that a zero-carbon world with improved energy efficiency would necessarily lead to environmental destruction.

felixmezierehá 4 anos

I don't feel that you have tried to answer my questions, but let's keep pretending this is a conversation and I will react to your points.

> This means that the imminent concern in the capacity of sustainability (exacerbation of climate change) is largely addressed, save for the carbon capture / cooling aspect we will want.

This seems to show that you have a climate-only lens to look at the problem, even though the point that fusion would greatly disrupt CO2 emissions is 100% correct. The imminent concern is not just exacerbation of climate change.

1) This lens is incomplete because even if we completely stopped emitting CO2 right now we would still go to a destabilisation of the physical world around us due to all the other planetary boundaries being crossed https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound.... For example food supply would be disrupted by the artificialization of soils and disruption of the Phosphorus Cycle, many if not most food chains on which we depend will collapse due to the fact that we are killing or consuming most animal species, among which vital insects (the 6th mass extinction has started and is much faster than previous mass extinctions), water supply will be disrupted more and more etc.

2) It's also incomplete because it doesn't account for the other end of the problem : the depletion of ressources. Fusion means we can extract more and more resources, deeper and deeper, creating an even more unbalanced system if it's not done in a way were resources can regenerate themselves at the same rate we extract them.

With what we have done every time we got additional energy so far, it is likely that getting fusion will increase pressure on planetary boundaries that are not CO2 emissions : you fix a problem by worsening the others.

> it makes no sense to assume the same level of depletion. It's a function of demand.

Good point. It's a function of demand, therefore it makes sense to assume the same level of depletion will increase, since more and more people will get access to middle-class (or more) lifestyle, which is the main driver of demand for resources (as opposed to population growth, which is less of a driver if it's population growth in countries without a middle class).

> This also doesn't take into account technological innovation.

As I said this could be a factor that helps with depleting less resources but so far we have observed the impact technology has been to dramatically increase ressource use and waste overall, not reduce them.

> The rich are too few in number and they're primarily rich by virtue of everyone else's consumption. Notwithstanding that their own practices can be very damaging, it doesn't meet that scale.

We are talking about middle classes here, which are massive and meant to become even more massive. It is also true that the richer you are the more you emit but that's a side phenomenon to understand why the amount of middle-class matters.

> There's no evidence that a zero-carbon world with improved energy efficiency would necessarily lead to environmental destruction.

Then you haven't read or studied resources like https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound... to begin with a simple/mainstream one for example, you haven't looked at the impact of mining and the orders of magnitude of resources we would need for a world where societies keep having the same behaviour as today, with just the "carbon-free" component added.

Anyway this is a bet: there is no proof it would work either, and if it does not the population will completely collapse. Which way do you want to try? An organised de-growth (in terms of GDP, not total wealth if we account for the destruction of nature) were we know we can make it at the expense of less comfort and consumerism, or try to keep growing and just become net zero carbon, with the hope that we can make it, to the risk of collapsing and making the earth uninhabitable?

One more resource you can look at in case you didn't know about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth#:~:text=T...

Being obsessed with carbon creates blindspots with respect to all the other planetary limits, our oceans are being emptied of life because of what we have done so far with abundant energy. The earth system is being destabilised in many other ways than just climate change. We need a global systemic solution, not to fix the problems one by one separately, because by doing that you will often make other problems worse by fixing one.

I'm not saying we don't need more abundant energy, I'm saying we need to change our philosophy, the way we organise ourselves and what we do with it first.

slothtrophá 4 anos

> The imminent concern is not just exacerbation of climate change.

You described no other imminent problem.

to your 1), food supply is a moot point as population will stagnate. The West often overproduces as it stands and is poised to reduce food waste.

to your 2), we're nowhere near depletion of resources, and there's no reason to believe the average person's purchasing power will not only greatly increase to allow for inordinate amount of consumption, but that it would outpace technological innovation which minimizes and recycles materials.

> With what we have done every time we got additional energy so far, it is likely that getting fusion will increase pressure on planetary boundaries that are not CO2 emissions : you fix a problem by worsening the others.

Fusion, to the extent you're portraying it, is a long ways off, and additional energy has not done much for the average person in the last several decades. It's irrational to project outsized negative impact.

> since more and more people will get access to middle-class (or more) lifestyle

Before population stagnation, yes. That's among the driving forces leading to stagnation. But after which, no. "More and more people" necessarily ends at "all of them".

> so far we have observed the impact technology has been to dramatically increase ressource use and waste overall, not reduce them.

Technology to reduce is in it's infancy. Necessity is the mother of invention. These externalities were never much of concern to the oligarchic, financial and political classes - that is changing.

> Then you haven't read or studied resources

You're looking too short-term.

> or try to keep growing

Nowhere do I advocate for this. False dilemma.

We know we can make it by limiting population growth.

felixmezierehá 4 anos

> You described no other imminent problem.

Not sure why what I described previously is relevant if this assertion is true in itself, however let's double-check this in what I wrote above: "whether its solid and liquid garbage (leading to wiping out 60% of wildlife in 50 years, spilling the phosphorus of our soils into the sea -making them sterile and killing life in the sea- etc etc), or gas garbage (typically greenhouse gases)", "all serious scientific reports (IPCC, https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound... and others) say that we are currently depleting earth's resources much faster than it can renew them and destabilising many natural systems like climate/life etc to irreversible points" <= are these not imminent problems? Actually the main problems I've been describing in this post are precisely not climate change, to try and de-center the debate from just this, I'm not sure how you have been reading this...

> to your 1), food supply is a moot point as population will stagnate. The West often overproduces as it stands and is poised to reduce food waste.

Looking at how things currently work is a very bad indicator: since we are depleting resources faster than they can regenerate themselves (earth overshoot day was a few days ago), if we keep doing things as we are doing right now, even with constant population, even with a bit of improvement from technology, even with current overproduction, the food system WILL collapse. My point is: in all matters environment, the current way we do things leads us to collapse even if everything remains constant.

>to your 2), we're nowhere near depletion of resources, and there's no reason to believe the average person's purchasing power will not only greatly increase to allow for inordinate amount of consumption, but that it would outpace technological innovation which minimizes and recycles materials.

This is just not true, wether we stay on a carbon-powered society or if we transition towards a battery/renewables-powered society. And again, there is no need to account for future "increases of things", things are bad enough at the current rate.

> Fusion, to the extent.... The amount of energy person has not increased in the last several decades in developed countries.

> "More and more people" necessarily ends at "all of them".

Absolutely. But don't worry, earth will have burnt long, long, long before even half of the world's population has accessed American middle class levels of comfort, so don't worry about getting to "all of them".

> Technology to reduce is in it's infancy.

What makes you think you can bet on technology reaching levels to reduce it that are acceptable? What if we miss the target and collapse because of this bet? It's a risky one...

> Necessity is the mother of invention. These externalities were never much of concern to the oligarchic, financial and political classes - that is changing.

The necessity has been here for decades but nothing has been done, again, I wouldn't bet too much on the fact that the effect of this is going to be enough to compensate our hunger for freely-available resource extraction and depletion.

> We know we can make it by limiting population growth.

I don't know which credible source on the matter says this but certainly most don't. Sources say that much more than just limiting population growth is needed to make it.

goodpointhá 4 anos

> fusion is just going to increase the rate at which we are transforming this planet into a giant pile of garbage

Thank you for saying this. Unlimited almost-free energy makes energy-saving measures moot, including building insulation. People would heat or cool even open spaces with little regard for the environment.

And all the heat is eventually released into the atmosphere.

Consumerism would be supercharged as well. Indeed we need a huge shift of societal priorities.

(Needless to say, when I point that out HN downvoted me. Here technology is always and only good.)

edit: there you go, already downvoted at -2 for saying the same thing as the parent.

vlunkrhá 4 anos

So the problem fusion is that is will be too good? Interesting take.

goodpointhá 4 anos

No, it's not "too good".

lambdabahá 4 anos

So the fear is we’ll use the extra energy to literally warm the planet? Seems like a scale mismatch. Climate “engineering” like blocking out the sun seems like a much more real danger

slothtrophá 4 anos

Not "warm", because with fusion filling this cache, energy usage wouldn't lead to CO2 pollution. They're suggesting it would lead to increases in consumption which means waste. Notwithstanding that a) life won't necessarily get more affordable for people, and stuff costs money, b) there are innovations now, and expected in the future, which would drastically curtail waste, though some regulatory measures might be necessary to do better with this.

So I'm also skeptical.

lambdabahá 4 anos

I don't see why it goes without saying the extra energy would necessarily go towards consumerism. There is still a long way to go towards getting every human a decent life and opportunity to reach their full potential. There's no way we're getting there without the extra energy. For providing healthcare, nutricious food, education, etc.

felixmezierehá 4 anos

So far, extra energy has been entirely targeted at increasing consumerism: it's the famous "such and such country is finally getting a sizeable middle class".

Translation of "middle class": class of mass consumers.

lambdabahá 4 anos

I guess my idea is most cultures have moved on or are in the process of moving on having realized that "things" is not what they need most, but that's a phase that a culture must pass through. Again, there are plenty of other things to do with that extra energy, it's not like we don't have a choice.

felixmezierehá 4 anos

Exactly we agree: the problem is doing the right choice!

felixmezierehá 4 anos

The graphs of energy availability/consumption and emissions of garbage are correlated. This is a historical fact.

Life is literally as affordable for people as the amount of energy that is available to them, that's the main factor (a bit of optimization of processes also plays but at a more minor order). Food used to be 25% of households' spending early XXth century, when someone would go buy eggs from the local market or farmer. Today it is 10% if you count the margins of industrials, distributors etc. But if you just look at the price of the eggs, then it's probably less than 1%.

What allowed this? Energy! Energy allowed for abundant food, a long life, studying and the general tertiarisation of the economy (giving birth to tech) and of course consumerism. The more energy the cheaper everything is the more people consume, at least as long as we persuade people that buying things is the greatest pleasure in life.

slothtrophá 4 anos

See my response to your other post.

goodpointhá 4 anos

Why people keep asking the same questions? felixmeziere wrote it very clearly in the parent post.

The evidence clearly shows that humanity is not acting rationally and we are letting consumerism run unchecked.

A good example is plastic: we are aware of the health impact of particulate and yet we can't even have a conversation around stopping using plastic worldwide. Rather than a choice it looks like an addiction.

felixmeziere wrote about cultural change.

Additionally, it's very likely that fusion will be viable primarily in developed countries, further increasing energy inequality.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

Fusion will not produce "almost free" power.

ambrozkhá 4 anos

I don't know what makes you so so confident about your prediction, and what you've written about fusion's relationship to waste is, I'm pretty sure, inaccurate.

fzzzyhá 4 anos

I think the point is the more useful energy we have at our disposal, the more garbage we can make easily.

felixmezierehá 4 anos

When you observe historical data, you see that the graphs of the amount of energy we are able to master are roughly proportional to the graphs of our emissions of garbage (construction, pollution, CO2, consumer goods etc.).

I'm not saying I don't want fusion, I'm saying that without getting much better at deciding collectively what to do with it then those graphs will stay coupled, taking us to a sure doom.

Anyway it's likely we'll get there before fusion so it should not distract us from all other necessary transformations the system needs.

idlehandhá 4 anos

Commercial fusion power probably makes it more economical to spend more energy recycling materials.

felixmezierehá 4 anos

Yes, that would be a good use for it. But:

- Designing things to be durable and recyclable in the first place is probably more economical and sustainable (both can be combined though, no problem)

- Recycling is not a silver bullet. Extracting and re-combining all the microscopic parts of different metals in an iPhone to get back the original metal is incredibly expensive or unfeasible, compared to just extracting that metal from nature

- Unlimited energy makes it easier to go deeper and deeper extract resources from earth's crust, generating more and more garbage. What do you think we'll do, when you observe what we've done so far?

goodpointhá 4 anos

And 100x more economical producing more and more new stuff.

twargehá 4 anos

Agree. There have been no breakthroughs. The projects getting funding are just different enough to be not immediately disprovable and continue to spectacularly overpromise without solving any of the real problems. Chamber embrittlement? Nuclear waste? (activation of the apparatus by the 12 MeV fusion netrons is a lot worse than the 100 keV fission neutron.)

JumpCrisscrosshá 4 anos

> have been no breakthroughs

Magnet miniaturisation and CADs like the stellarator [1] refute this.

With respect to waste and embrittlement, those are simpler consumables and waste products than fossil fuels and atmospheric emissions.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator

joakhá 4 anos

And what about Helion Energy tech? Pulsed collision of plasmoids (FRC), with direct energy conversion. Deuterium helium3 aneutronic fusion, no neutrons.

They've received $500M (lead by Sam Altman) to demo net electricity by 2024.

hobscoophá 4 anos

Yes. We're currently living through a golden age of stellarator design powered by new algorithms and optimization techniques.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

Some of the efforts you hear about actually are immediately disprovable.

NewEntryHNhá 4 anos

> other than in the form or solar power

and wind and hydro

robotresearcherhá 4 anos

and fossil fuels, stored for a while.

wetpawshá 4 anos

So was solar and nuclear.

[deleted]há 4 anos

blippagehá 4 anos

Scientists have been futzing around with fusion energy since I was a schoolboy in the 70's, and undoubtedly before. Maybe they'll be a breakthrough, but I think the odds are heavily against them.

Fission, OTOH, seems an interesting bet. The problem with old-style reactors is that there's basically no ESD (Emergency Shutdown) that you can perform. Those radioactive rods are going keep radiating heat no matter what. Newer styles seem a much saner approach, were two different materials must be in contact for a reaction to occur. In an emergency you just let one of them drain out, thereby stopping the reaction.

Coal is an abundant source of fuel with a proven track record. The big problem is with pollution. But there's no rule that says you have to puke out the waste into the atmosphere. It can be processed. After all, oil is pretty shitty when it comes up out of the ground, and needs a lot of processing. This is a costly exercise, of course, but one that we willingly undertake. The question now is one of economics: will the cost of waste processing mean that coal burning is feasible? It's a question that nobody seems interested in asking. We just seem to have the default assumption that coal energy was shitty in the past and must be shitty in the present. "Eww, coal".

sva_há 4 anos

Something I wondered about fusion is, where does all that 'excess energy' go?

I mean don't understand me wrong, it is obvious that is a much better form of energy release than all the other forms of energy production we have; but let us consider we manage to gain energy from fusion, the electricity released still releases heat, so how does it dissipate, if we have near-infitite energy, and anyone can spend as much as they want?

hobscoophá 4 anos

It'll ultimately be dissipated by infrared radiation into space. Earth receives something like 173,000 terawatts of radiation from the sun; this is equal to the amount radiated out as infrared, except for the "radiative forcing" which is the amount by which the world is heating. Radiative forcing is currently something like 1000 TW. All of human civilization is powered by something like 20 TW. If we want to stop global heating we need to use a fraction of those 20 TW to "turn the ship" of size 1000 TW.

MaxDPShá 4 anos

I'd imagine the excess energy goes out into space.

They key difference between nuclear and fossil fuels is the emissions each generates. Fossil fuels burn into greenhouse gasses which trap in heat. If we switch to nuclear, those greenhouse gasses won't accumulate as much.

freeflighthá 4 anos

The near-perfect vacuum of space actually makes it quite bad at absorbing heat, that's why anything we put up there, like space stations and satellites need huge radiators to keep everything cool enough to actually operate.

While thermal pollution in Earths atmosphere is a very real and relevant issue with energy generation and all kinds of other human activities; A whole bunch of French fission nuclear reactors are regularly shut/throttled down during summer heat waves due to lack of appropriate cooling.

The combination of these factors sometimes makes me wonder if the game Oxygen Not Included is a crude simulation of what we are doing to this planet. There the biggest end-game problem is the asteroid colony overheating due to creating a whole bunch of extra heat inside of it from using up fossil fuels, yet lacking any good way to actually vent all these massive amounts of extra heat from the little biosphere.

Matumiohá 4 anos

Oxygen Not Included is a good game, but it probably doesn't have a single mechanic that makes physical sense. For example, it allows you to destroy carbon dioxide (preservation of mass?) by turning water into polluted water. And polluted water emits oxygen.

Back on earth, thermal radiation is sending massive amounts of heat into space. Additional heat we put into the atmosphere will not stay for long enough to matter, compared to certain gases that block thermal radiation.

freeflighthá 4 anos

> Additional heat we put into the atmosphere will not stay for long enough to matter

I'm just not too sure about that; Fossil fuels took millions of years, and massive natural forces, to accumulate in their modern day form, very similar to uranium and other energy resources. That's a lot of energy that went into "making" them over a lot of time.

But humanity is "unloading" all that energy, with all its effects including thermal radiation, into the atmosphere at extremely faster rates than it took to accumulate. And we've been doing it at a literally global and industrialized scales.

We even recognize the problem of thermal pollution on a "micro" level when we throttle and shut down generators, reactors and industrial processes that threaten to overheat the natural water bodies they use for cooling.

I see no reason why these issues can't accumulate and scale up to global levels.

Disregarding that possibility, as if humans couldn't screw up the planet on such scales, are exactly what made us run head first into global warming trough CO2 emissions and littering most of the planet with led and plastics.

orzighá 4 anos

It is a valid question, but to put it in perspective, the sun bathes us in dramatically more kWh than we need to annually power the world every few minutes. So fusion would be a drop in the bucket at a global scale.

adrian_bhá 4 anos

In the beginning, of course.

Nevertheless, the heating of the Earth puts a limit on the total usable nuclear power on Earth, both fission and fusion, it cannot be "infinite", but it must remain forever a small fraction of the power of the incoming Solar radiation, otherwise it would cause an excessive heating of the Earth by itself.

willis936há 4 anos

Ever getting close to this point is what is considered a "good problem". We are always teetering on the edge of oblivion. Being so wildly successful that our industrial heat rivals that of the incident energy of the sun would be incredible. No problems humans have ever faced would be in living memory (including mortality). This is a science fiction future that does not need planning from the minds of today. It would also have many solutions related to adjusting albedo.

googlryashá 4 anos

We could build a bunch of space radiators. But really this isn't something we need to think about for a while...global energy consumption is less than 1/10,000th of the energy deposited in soil and water by the sun.

joakhá 4 anos

The total amount of waste heat is low. Thermal pollution is a local problem (rivers getting hot) but not a global issue.

[deleted]há 4 anos

pixiemasterhá 4 anos

I love the concept of fusion from a scientific point. I’d love to see even more money put into this.

But for real world deployment, we can have decentralized systems that have an ROI of 6yrs (Solar) and 10 yrs (Wind), - i think that’s the thing we should be doubling down on NOW. [https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/145C...]

lvenhá 4 anos

Fusion is generally touted by many as an energy "Holy Grail." Indeed, it appears to have similar qualities, being both perpetually elusive and miraculous, able to solve all mankind's problems. Media reporting tends to discuss the benefits of fusion with misleading and false statements and no discussion of fusion’s negative attributes. The financial and practical perspective of fusion based power is missing. I've written a post about this here: https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion. I cover fusion's issues compared to fission. In particular: far worse neutron and gamma damage, 10x more demanding heat transfer, parasitic power draws, 50-100x larger radiological waste volume, higher financial and nuclear accident risk compared to new new micro reactors, higher cost by any metric, similar or worse proliferation characteristics, etc. My aim was to add a dissenting perspective on the practicality of near-term fusion energy systems.

manholiohá 4 anos

You could say the same thing about Bitcoin. Fusion is in the VC hype cycle but there are no new developments that suggest it can become cheaper and more predictable than fission, which itself is dying, primarily because of financial uncertainties and risks.

On the contrary, physics suggest that performance scales with size, so even the extraordinary expensive ITER project is way too small to achieve engineering break even, let alone financial break-even. You will only hear about scientific break-even, which is a useless milestone because, yes, you get more energy than you put it, but you put electric energy and get fast neutron energy, only you need an order of magnitude more of that to get back the electricity you put in.

Understanding different types of break-even would be an obligatory primer to anyone navigating hyped fusion claims: https://news.newenergytimes.net/2022/04/08/fusion-q-values-a...

pfdietzhá 4 anos

Fusion reactors (after they're big enough to have ignited) have diseconomy of scale, due to the square-cube law. Cost scales (at least) as reactor volume, while power is limited by power/area through the surface of the reactor vessel.

manholiohá 4 anos

But are we hitting that power density ceiling yet? It doesn't seem so, we're not even in the "big enough to have ignited" range, only scraping at the door of "big enough for scientific break-even", but have already blown any reasonable chance for such designs to be cost effective even if they were to be mass produced.

Massive superconducting magnets generating megatons of force, building-sized vacuum chambers that are almost guaranteed to leak some amount tritium, which only adds to the unavoidable regulatory burden imposed by the fast neutron environment, activated structure and every day production of weapon-grade material etc. etc., even if the current technology magically works tomorrow, it's still an economic dead-end.

The present fusion crop is megascience at its worst, draining public funds for something that can't possibly ever work and producing very little substantial science in the way. We need to take a step back and reassess. At least Helion is trying a new path, even if they are likely to end up in a similar dead-end.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

It's not clear there's ANY window for DT reactors between "too small to ignite" and "too large to have competitive volumetric power density".

[deleted]há 4 anos

TT-392há 4 anos

Maybe it is only 19 years in the future this time

thriftwyhá 4 anos

I believe that there might be a way to have a compact and efficient fusion reactor which we just don't know yet (and a time traveller would be able to "hold my beer" us into it)

For example, there's this plasma-producing microwave + cut grape trick, what if you use something like this to supply really hot deuterium plasma?

jleahyhá 4 anos

Then you get super hot deuterium plasma, which is unconfined and so won't fuse.

thriftwyhá 4 anos

Maybe you can generate it in one place and confine it in the other? Not dissimilar to how ICEs work. Produce plasma and then burn (fuse) it in pulses.

willis936há 4 anos

That's actually exactly what existing MCF machines do. The gyrotron (ECRH, same as a microwave's magnetron) resonant frequency is tuned to the confinement field strength of the plasma so it absorbs the energy. On top of that there's a vacuum so air doesn't pull all the heat away and a magnetic bottle so the plasma doesn't touch the wall. Fusion is very far away from happening spontaneously on Earth.

mbgerringhá 4 anos

One novel approach to clean energy deployment would be to spend some of this money to deploy enough solar, wind and batteries to provide the enormous amounts of energy needed for all these sub-breakeven fusion experiments. Then, whether we get a viable fusion reactor or not, we all win.

ChadNauseamhá 4 anos

It seems more reasonable to me to try to figure out what would be a reasonable amount of money to spend on these projects independently, instead of tying the amount of clean energy deployment to the amount clean energy research for no apparent benefit

willis936há 4 anos

We've spent far more on solar than fusion. Why divert the nth dollar rather than diversify?

https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2018/11/f57/Exami...

pfdietzhá 4 anos

The problem with that argument is that it could also be used to justify diverting some money to invest in perpetual motion machines.

The likelihood of the technology paying off has to enter into it somehow.

kortillahá 4 anos

Maybe we should fraud these people trying to invest in a better solution with worse ones!

boringghá 4 anos

Hmm I suspect that this isn't accurate but if it is, also relevant is that in the last 12 months we were at the top of the crazy money market so people were handing out cash and desperate for something with a seeming return to it. Seems like a click-baity title to me.

Gudhá 4 anos

Such a controversial topic these days. I got one am happy billions are being poured into fusion. Yes, massive investments in fission, solar and wind are required. But one by one the technical obstacles are being overcome for fusion. I say give fusion a chance

bloodyplonker22há 4 anos

It means we are closer to success when we see a lot more VC funding of nuclear fusion versus government (taxpayer) funding. VCs don't have the timeline or ability to lose money without much consequence or blame like the government does.

ClumsyPilothá 4 anos

If VC's are so great, they could have invested in fusion 20 years ago and presumably they'd have it solved by now. Why didn't they?

They didn't because they don't have the guts to create entire new branch of science.

Once the government has built research laboratiries, trained physicists and engineers, built prototypes, waited untill those engineers come up with viables plans, then the VC are ready to swoop in and take all the credit.

Thats fine if Venture capital can't make 60 year investments. Whats not cool, is everyone else buying the narrative that we don't need government funding for fundamental research, that VCs will solve all problems in the world as long as we let them run wild and don't tax them

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

It could also mean there are lots more rich people who want to spend money on a gamble to "save the world" and don't care to do sufficient due diligence to dig below the fancy slide decks they get spoon fed in the board room every quarter.

lvenhá 4 anos

You're better off donating money to fusion companies directly than paying taxes to the government. Wish musk had donated his taxesto companies last year instead.

Digital28há 4 anos

This is great news.

That said, what the literal fuck -- we've previously been investing 1/850,000th of global GDP in one of 4-5 truly promising energy technologies while the world burns before our eyes?

rainsfordhá 4 anos

I'd love to see viable nuclear fusion power, but the lack of more investment at the moment doesn't really seem unreasonable. As you said, there are a number of other green alternatives, including traditional nuclear fission power, that have proven they can be real alternatives to fossil fuels and that would benefit from continued investment.

Unless I've missed something, nuclear fusion meanwhile has yet to demonstrate realistic commercial power generation, even as a proof of concept or a complete path to get to that point. In other words, more research is definitely worthwhile, but it also seems possible it will be a dead end at least in the near term. It's hard to argue prioritizing that over other things that have been generating real commercial power for decades. I'm all in favor of an all-of-the-above approach, but prioritization almost always has to be the reality.

Digital28há 4 anos

It's an equal level of insanity that technologies like thorium breeder reactors haven't been getting whole number percentages of first world budgets, especially considering how extremely high of a priority climate change has become and how costly the alternatives (e.g., disaster mitigation) are getting.

twawaaayhá 4 anos

Budgets are decided by elected officials and elected officials are steered by their polling numbers.

Out of all sources of energy only atomic energy is something that we can practically scale at the moment to cover almost all our needs (air travel and maritime shipping being notable exceptions). We just need to think a bit harder how to ensure this is done responsibly and safely. Not saying it is an easy problem, but I think the issue is too little resources are devoted to solving it. I would say this probably isn't harder than sending a man to the Moon. It is just something that should be possible to fix practically with existing technology and just good design.

The cost of humanity that can't decide on what needs to be done is that we are still reliant on fossil fuels and are distracting ourselves with half measures that have a lot of problems that in hindsight were pretty obvious. Like solar energy -- only works when the sun is up, is difficult to scale and we still haven't figured out how to store energy for when it is needed.

Our children will curse us.

AtlasBarfedhá 4 anos

"Out of all sources of energy only atomic energy is something that we can practically scale at the moment to cover almost all our needs"

... what?

Criticism 1: you'd need, what, like 100 nuclear plants planned and approved? If you started now, maybe in three years you'd get like ... 10 approved. five years maybe 20-30.

Criticism 2: nuclear is not price competitive with current wind/solar installations, and CERTAINLY won't be competitive even with efficiency improvements with wind/solar in 10-20 years when any plant actually leaves the boondoggle funding phase and goes online.

Criticism 3: what design of plant? LWR/PWR/huge dome/solid fuel rod/oh shit it melts down in a natural disaster? Yeah uh, no thanks. If nuclear had gotten its act together about ... let's say 30-40 years ago and designed a reactor that:

1) meltdown proof

2) consumes almost all its fuel

3) scalable / easily replaced

Then we might be able to do it. Problem is, the entire nuclear industry was invested in solid fuel rod designs, the military loved it for the weapons isotopes, the politicos blocked funding for LFTR and other designs, the solid fuel rod reprocessors were making bank, there was probably other shadow industries like waste handlers/transporters on the dole.

So... nuclear is a no go. Solar/wind for now, use natural gas and existing nuclear for levelling until storage and solar/wind+storage drop to levels unattainable by nuclear/fusion/naturalgas/geothermal/hydro. Synthfuels for aviation. Long haul shipping can probably be done with swappable batteries and/or synthfuels. ... maybe... hydrogen if it's not the current trojan horse for hydrogen-from-methane being pushed by the oil companies.

Maybe nuclear can be competitive when solar/wind even out, and battery/storage finishes its incredible scaling and tech development. Maybe.

But the path forward is wind/solar, and maybe synthfuels and green hydrogen if the green isn't "green" like clean coal was "clean" coal.

Our children should already curse us. The science was there, and my and ESPECIALLY the boomers picked SUVs, big houses, moving to florida, and lots of cheap crap shipped 5000 miles from overseas labor over dealing with problems.

twawaaayhá 4 anos

First of all, you don't wake up in the morning and have an idea that it would be great to have 5 nuclear reactors so that you don't freeze overnight. We more or less know how much energy we will need in 10 years. You just need to plan ahead.

Dams also need many years to build, but you won't say they are useless because of this...

Second, nuclear is price competitive with wind/solar. The way nuclear is competitive is because it allows removing dependency on fossil fuels and wind/solar do not. We can't afford using fossil fuels anymore because it does not matter if you get lower $/kWh if along we cause drastic climate changes.

Stop thinking in terms of $/kWh produced by the powerplant alone. To compare cost of nuclear vs solar/wind you would need to include humongous batteries that would be needed to smooth out output of solar/wind stations which nuclear powerplants do not need. We don't have the technology to build those batteries in sufficient capacity and so the price of solar/wind is currently very, very high (the price of us all cooking/freezing/suffocating/starving, etc.)

AtlasBarfedhá 4 anos

Humongous batteries or humongous nuclear reactor?

Which will be cheaper? Especially, what will be cheaper in 10 years?

Which will be online faster? As in, can be scaled out in 3-5 years?

With forthcoming 200 wh/kg LFP / LMFP, 140 wh/kg sodium ion, and various other schemes, I will heavily bet on batteries + solar / wind beating out nuclear. I don't know if you're engaging in FUD based on cobalt and nickel chemistries, or just are ignorant of the forthcoming Gotion/CATL production lines for high density LFP and sodium ion chemistries. Those aren't resource limited, they just need to build the factories, and factories are a lot better than nuclear power plants in timescale.

PLUS, storage + solar can be distributed to the home to reduce the amount the grid needs to move from a centralized generator, make the grid and homes much more resilient, and function as a backup battery store to grid storage.

I never see hydro listed on LCOE charts. I'm going to assume it's at the scale of nuclear which is already not competitive. Hydro is actually the best grid storage if you have a mountain and two big lakes or some similar setup. As I understand it, the efficiency is 90% pumping and then getting it back.

LunaSeahá 4 anos

But climate change hasn't been a priority in most western countries (in most countries really).

devonkimhá 4 anos

Cheap, sustainable power is in the interest of most governments that haven’t been essentially paid off to stay on fossil fuels. But because the existing tech is more invested in various political campaigns and parties across most of the world they’ll keep progress from happening in areas of public funding. From our left you’ll get the anti-nuclear zealots and from the right you’ll get the anti-government spending zealots, so it’s pretty much a political loss until fairly recently with the EU designation of nuclear as an option to support nuclear of any sort. While climate change is serious and matters it bothers me deeply when I see older nuclear facilities shutdown while new coal power plants show up the same year. It really seems like backwards progress in much of the US in our energy sector anywhere that hasn’t had massive renewables investments.

pshchá 4 anos

Everyone around me seems to be fixated on gas prices and bigger vehicles. It’s pure myopia.

tsimionescuhá 4 anos

If you look more into it, it's not clear at all that fusion is actually a promising source of power. None of the currently contemplated technologies have any realistic chance of producing power anywhere near competitively in cost, even ignoring the huge research costs left to get there (no currently planned fusion experiment has any hope of producing more power than it consumes).

ac29há 4 anos

> no currently planned fusion experiment has any hope of producing more power than it consumes

ITER [1] is expected to produce more thermal energy than it consumes and is currently under construction. No electricity though.

The follow up plant, DEMO [2], should produce electricity (750MW).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant

lispmhá 4 anos

> follow up plant, DEMO [2], should produce electricity (750MW)

If it will ever be built and then go online. Which is highly unlikely given the slow progress of ITER and its very difficult problems - some it even does not try to solve. Like getting enough Tritium: https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run...

750MW (again using thermal energy, which is probably not the future of electricity production) from such an expensive & complex device? Probably you would need pools of several fusion power plants, since it is unlikely that one fusion power plant will run for a longer periods of time. Maybe a pool of six would provide two running (just a wild guess).

The technical problems will be huge and the costs gigantic. I can't imagine how this will be competitive when in production (with outputs in tens of Gigawatts, to make any impact) in 2060 or later.

tsimionescuhá 4 anos

Yes, I should have said electrical power. ITER isn't even attempting to produce any. DEMO is a concept, not a planned facility; the plans will be drawn up based on the results of ITER, hopefully by 2030. Note that DEMO won't even be a particular plant, several countries participating in ITER are hoping to go on to construct DEMO plants.

paul80808há 4 anos

Exactly. The past of fusion has been grim, but the future looks (probably) bright. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-f...

tovejahá 4 anos

I wouldn't say the (recent) past was grim, but rather that the technology to build an _affordable_ commercial device had not yet been developed yet. We designed and built ITER at such a large size and cost (€20 billion) since high temperature superconducting magnets were not yet available.

In the meantime, all of the experimental devices (JET, AUG, EAST, DIII-D, etc.,) have been gathering evidence on how to operate ITER when it is turned on, and not necessarily focused on achieving breakeven.

stormbrewhá 4 anos

> We designed and built ITER at such a large size and cost (€20 billion) since high temperature superconducting magnets were not yet available.

This is one of those numbers that only seem big without context. Medium-sized cities spend more than this on interchanges and highway development over shorter timespans than any of the various multi-decade price tags that get thrown around for ITER.

tovejahá 4 anos

I agree.

The hefty price tag seems smaller when considering the development and design of ITER began during the cold war.

The literal size is definitely big even without context, which is why it has the nickname: gigantomak :D.

samhainhá 4 anos

Have you heard of MITs SPARC reactor? It’s way more interesting than ITER. It is 3x smaller, with Q greater than 10 (compared to ITERs ~10). It’s also slated to be finished -before- ITER.

willis936há 4 anos

3x smaller major radius. 42x smaller plasma volume.

dtagameshá 4 anos

Doesn't IETR consume more power than it produces? Fusion (like solutions for aging fission plants and their waste products) always seems just around the corner -- yet never arrives.

orzighá 4 anos

For me, it was eye opening to inside its progression in terms of dollars, not years. It’s barely had the chance to get started.

nilsbungerhá 4 anos

This was an awesome overview of current state of fusion attempts!

otikikhá 4 anos

Compare that to what we have invested in crypto globally and weep.

Noughmadhá 4 anos

Compare it to what we have invested in killing each other, and despair.

TaylorAlexanderhá 4 anos

I hate to say it, but this is the result of fossil fuel interests running the largest [1] economy in the world. We will literally spend 1 trillion dollars a year on war in the middle east and associated commitments but couldn't bother to spend a few billion on fusion research. Absurd.

[1] until recently

AtlasBarfedhá 4 anos

It is doubtful that fusion will even be cheaper than old-crappy-PWR-fission.

It is very very very doubtful it will beat wind/solar as they continue to drop in cost, at least not for probably... 40 years. We're looking at 10-20 years to a viable commercial design and construction.

I place fusion like next-gen fission: worthy of continued investment in research and maybe some subsidized consumer plants (if/when fusion becomes viable).

Even with viable fusion, there will likely be degradation/radioactivity of the power generation cores from fast neutrons and other problems.

ajsnigrutinhá 4 anos

On one hand, you had "traditional" companies (oil, coal, gas,...) lobbying against it, and on the other hand, you had the "green" organizations lobbying (and protesting) against it.

champtarhá 4 anos

And if you combine both hands you get Greenpeace energy

no_wizardhá 4 anos

I’d love to see a Manhattan project for nuclear fusion research. Just pour money into it until we crack it. I think out of all the energy alternatives it’s the most game changing.

joe_namehá 4 anos

It's only top 5 most promising if you're heavily weighting based on theoretical upside. We should always be taking moonshots but for climate change and global warming we need to be taking active steps yesterday, and for that fusion shouldn't even be on the list. Fission + some renewables is all we need anyway for almost everything, and carbon capture/removal can take care of stuff that will likely need to rely on fossil fuels moving forward, like aircraft. It's not a matter of way, just will.

apihá 4 anos

The world burning is the basis of the economy for dozens of petrostates and some of the world’s largest corporations.

sacrosanctyhá 4 anos

Fusion isn't a silver bullet even if it works. If it costs more than solar+battery then it's worthless.

otikikhá 4 anos

I agree the cost is important. I disagree in the breaking point at witch it’s “not worth it”. To me, assuming our battery tech doesn’t find a similar breakthrough before, if fusion reaches one order of magnitude above the cost of solar, it is worth it, as a backup. Better to have it and use it when there’s clouds instead of coal or gas

Schroedingersathá 4 anos

If you plug your solar panel into some water when you have surplus sun you get hydrogen which burns fine in a combined cycle plant.

If that's too annoying to store you can get it hot and squeeze it over some nickel to get methane.

Electrolyzation becomes cheaper than mining methane for hydrogen (and thus ammonia) production if solar hits the $0.2-0.3/Watt threshold somewhere (which is predicted to happen in 3-7 years).

It's complicated and expensive, but I'm not sure I'd bet on a sabatier reactor (or hydrogen storage if it gets cheap), an electrolyzer and 4x the solar panels being more expensive than a fusion reactor with the average output of 1 unit of solar.

Plus the sabatier thing means we don't have to upgrade all the heating furnaces and expand the grid to have 8x the capacity.

Fusion will be real handy where power density is king though. And if there's some non thermal way of getting work out of it, I can see it being cheaper.

jayd16há 4 anos

They did say solar and battery.. So taking it literally I think they're correct that if we had a battery technology such that it provided consistent cheaper energy we wouldn't need a hypothetical nuclear backup.

[deleted]há 4 anos

tremonhá 4 anos

No, this is way too shortsighted. Fusion allows us to use other energy sources than our own sun, which means it's essential for viable space missions, and we won't need to compete with the rest of nature (including agriculture!) for our energy needs.

Hydroponics with fusion technology allows us to produce food without relying on the sun at all. I'd say that alone is worth the investment.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

DT fusion, which most of these efforts are focusing on, utterly sucks for use in space. It produces heat in materials, just like fission, except at far lower power/mass and with way more complexity.

As for the future, beamed power will work out to interstellar distances, so energy sources other than our Sun (and other stars) aren't necessarily required.

willis936há 4 anos

Does beamed power also work for return trips?

pfdietzhá 4 anos

Sure. And beamed power also potentially allows one to cool a vehicle more effectively than radiating from a black body, by exploiting anti-Stokes scattering of laser light.

(From your question you might have been thinking of laser propelled light sails. These are best at speeds high enough that fusion is out of the picture.)

sacrosanctyhá 4 anos

I totally agree in the long term for space travel. But for our current energy use, it could be useless if it costs even a little bit too much. Kind of like solar concentrators are worthless because PV got too cheap.

grejhá 4 anos

Totally disagree. Solar + battery will never match the energy density of fusion.

epistasishá 4 anos

And fusion will never be able to stop emitting massive amounts of waste heat that must be dealt with somehow.

I'm not sure what benefit density provides, especially since people obsessed with density seem to only focus on the reaction chamber, which is the smallest part of the massive building and heat rejection apparatus that will be needed.

Rejecting waste heat is a real difficulty, and part of the reason that's France's fission fleet is at less than 50% capacity right now.

Thermal electricity production has a chance of becoming obsolete compared to direct conversion of photons into electricity. When solar plus storage costs less than steam turbines plus heat rejection, then it doesn't matter how cheap or dense the fusion part is in terms of economics.

seanmcdirmidhá 4 anos

Solar is basically indirect fusion.

ksaxenahá 4 anos

Well, with that logic, coal is also indirect fusion

gruturohá 4 anos

Yeah. And Wind, Gas, Hydro, etc.

Basically everything except fission, tidal and a portion of geothermal. Admittedly it's not a terribly useful classification.

bilsbiehá 4 anos

Fission is just solar from different star.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

The energy in fission ultimately came from gravitational collapse, not fusion.

seanmcdirmidhá 4 anos

Solar is less indirect than they. It’s like if we made our own fusion reactor and rather than using it to boil water close by to generate steam, we put the water a few miles out.

Ekaroshá 4 anos

So is all other energy production methods we use... Apart from some fraction of geothermal.

delectihá 4 anos

And even that, the heavy elements of the earth (basically anything heavier than Helium) only exist because of the sun's predecessor, making the heat from the core also just recycling from fusion.

kadonoishihá 4 anos

Tidal would rely on orbital energy.

[deleted]há 4 anos

scattershá 4 anos

And tidal.

sacrosanctyhá 4 anos

Why do we need high energy density? Are you imagining a future society with much higher energy use?

paconborkhá 4 anos

One advantage of other technologies over solar is space efficiency. Obviously we're not physically lacking in space to install solar, but when even solar farms installed in the desert can be shut down by "climate activists" [1], then we really need all the help we can get

[1] https://apnews.com/article/technology-government-and-politic...

boomskatshá 4 anos

The article you linked to states this as the reason for the project being scrapped:

> But a group of residents organized as “Save Our Mesa” argued such a large installation would be an eyesore and could curtail the area’s popular recreational activities — biking, ATVs and skydiving — and deter tourists from visiting sculptor Michael Heizer’s land installation, “Double Negative.”

I also searched the page and the word 'climate' doesn't appear even once. Why do you consider this to be an example of 'climate activists' shutting down a solar farm project, and do you have any other (actual) examples of it happening?

paconborkhá 4 anos

The article mentions both "conservationists" and "endangered species advocates", who I believe tend to consider themselves (and are considered by others to be) environmentalists. Here's an example of a wing of the Nevada Democratic Party (who according to their bio, want a #GreenNewDeal) also being against the development: (edit, forgot the link: https://twitter.com/LeftCaucus/status/1374527780034015244)

For another actual example of this happening, see the scaling back of the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility

jholmanhá 4 anos

You appear to think that "conservationist", "endangered species advocate" and "environmentalist" are all synonyms for "climate activist"? Your previous comment claimed there was opposition from "climate activists", and these are not examples of that. The BattleBorn situation seems to be about about tourism and similar values (not climate activism), the Ivanpah situation looks like it's about species conservation (not climate activism).

Don't get me wrong, I am very frustrated by people who see themselves as environmentalists, for whom climate change (and thus non-carbon energy sources) is not the top priority. I think they have wrong priorities. But that doesn't mean they're hypocrites, they're just (IMO) wrong.

All that said, I agree with your topline observation that we need all the help we can get.

Schroedingersathá 4 anos

That's the biggest reach I've ever heard.

Those are NIMBYS who want their view. Maybe with a mix of oil lobbyists.

belornhá 4 anos

battery for solar installation is at the point where between 2-6hrs of capacity can be economical viable.

Maybe in a few more years/decade/s we will reach a point where in some places in the world it will be economical viable to have exclusive solar and battery, and that assuming prices will continue to drop and that there won't be any resource or physical limitations. Then we got colder climates where solar + battery is unlikely to ever become viable. Exports of solar generated green hydrogen could solve that assuming that the technology for that becomes cheap enough.

Multiple different directions where specific technologies could be economical dominant in the future.

danarishá 4 anos

Solar + battery isn't much help for

- under the earth

- under the ocean

- deeper into space

Granted, we don't need a lot of power in these places right now. But if we have the option...then maybe we'll find some good ways to use it.

freeminthá 4 anos

I don't understand the udner the earth part. We've been able to transport power into mine shafts for pretty long.

Teeverhá 4 anos

Not at all.

There will always be places where solar+battery isn't viable. Northern Canada and Alaska come to mind.

Kon5olehá 4 anos

There are solar panels in use on svalbard island, Norway. Far north of Alaska

Solar needs more space in such locations but space is abundant and also nobody lives there so you dont need much power anyway.

The sun shines 24 hrs a day during summer, so you can generate lots of hydrogen for use during winter.

adventuredhá 4 anos

Along with small and or very high population density nations.

India is going to end up with perhaps two billion people and will have extraordinary population density/spacing problems. They're going to desperately need huge numbers of nuclear fission power plants or fusion plants to provide for that. They will not have the space for epic scale solar farms. Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Philippines, Vietnam, Israel, Belgium, Netherlands (among others) are in the same space vs population situation. And given the population explosion across parts of the Middle East and Africa, it's a certainty nations in those regions will have the same problem as well.

ClumsyPilothá 4 anos

> They will not have the space for epic scale solar farms. ...space vs population situation.

Your math is totally wrong, space was never an issie for solar. It tales 100x less space for a coutry to cover it's power needs with solar, than it does for a country to grow it's own food and feed it's own people. So every country thats not a city-state, like Vatikan, is fine.

All the challaneges of Solar are around intermittency, cost and ofcourse it's less viable in northern lattitudes. But none of them are around space.

pfdietzhá 4 anos

Those markets are far too small to support a nuclear industry. If solar dominates and those places are hurting for energy, the rest of the world will shrug and tell them to deal with it as best they can.

eftychishá 4 anos

Also we are talking about totally different load over time characteristics. And we don't want time plus weather to dictate our industrial and shipping power needs.

Solar is great but not simply alone. (Latitude is less of an issue as (proper) power systems are interconnected markets that sell/buy excess load.)

Digital28há 4 anos

Don't forget that we're perpetually one temper tantrum away from nuclear winter now, which would cripple all solar infrastructure for years. I'm actually a little surprised the DoD hasn't deeply invested in fusion for this reason alone.

edemhá 4 anos

False. At this point environmental impact trumps everything else in my mind.

LegitShadyhá 4 anos

its not worthless either way. plenty of places that dont get large amounts of solar radiation during some seasons where fusion could be useful

bryanrasmussenhá 4 anos

I can't remember who said it but I remember reading a quote one time to the effect that the man who invented a new form of energy for the world without also inventing a new heat sink would be history's greatest monster. Not sure I agree, but does give one pause if prone to pessimism as I am.

kadobanhá 4 anos

I don't get it. Why would a new form of energy need a new heat sink?

Wouldn't any energy we can realistically generate be a drop in the bucket compared to what the Sun throws at us every second? And even if not, what would a heat sink do about it? I think I'm missing something.

formerkrogemphá 4 anos

Perhaps this was referring to humanity's use of fossil fuels?

bryanrasmussenhá 4 anos

no, fossil fuels aren't a new form of energy. The implication would be that a new form of energy would just be used with all the other forms of energy, it may also have been a new cheap form of energy in the quote, implying that we would take a cheap form of energy and overuse it so that the world burned faster.

more_cornhá 4 anos

What if I told you commercially viable fusion power has been 10 years away for the last 40 years? What if I told you it always will be?

Investment in something that might not pay off is wise if it does, and foolish if it doesn’t.

orzighá 4 anos

I think the people who said “10 years away “we’re assuming it would get actual serious investment. I would argue that this is year 1

adhesive_wombathá 4 anos

Indeed, fusion has never been a certain number of years away, it's only ever been number of billions of dollars away, as projected here [1].

Though, luckily, it looks like that was a little over-pessimistic: it's not like the field has been sitting on its thumbs despite having, in terms relative to the potential, negligible funding: [2].

[1]: https://imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png

[2]: https://phys.org/news/2021-11-unveiling-steady-fusion-energy...

barkingcathá 4 anos

the profits in 1 year from silicon valley can solve world hunger by buying every single man woman child 3 meals a day, every day.

stuartdhá 4 anos

Still doesn’t stop the world burning, though

_Algernon_há 4 anos

source?

throwaway71271há 4 anos

700 million people live in poverty

3 meals per day, 5$ per meal for 365 days is 3,832,500,000,000$

stuartdhá 4 anos

If meals cost 5$ all over the planet then there would be mass starvation

adrian_bhá 4 anos

Yes, indeed.

Even in the European Union, it is possible to pay around $5 for all the meals of a day, including not only adequate quantities of vegetables and fruits, but also a moderate amount of chicken meat.

However, for that, you must be cost-conscious, because from the same shops you could buy an equivalent quantity of food, but at a price even 10 times greater, when you choose to buy processed foods, even those as cheap as bread, instead of buying only raw ingredients.

koverdahá 4 anos

beans, $700 / metric ton [1] rice, $500 / metric ton [2]

a meal of 65g dry rice and 55g dry beans per person.

700m * 3 = 2.1b meals per day 115,500 tons beans = $80.9m 136,500 tons rice = $68.3m

Total $149.1m/day

I'm sure at these quantities you can get much better prices of rice and beans, even just browsing on alibaba. I'd guess we can probably get that down under $100m from alibaba. Probably even lower at the quantities we're talking about.

1 - https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/red-bean-wholesales-s...

2 - https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Jasmine-Rice-Long-Gra...

NavinFhá 4 anos

You didn’t include shipping. UPS isn’t gonna deliver canned food to each tent in places like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigray_War#Humanitarian_crisis

[deleted]há 4 anos

the-smug-onehá 4 anos

Five bucks? 1kg of beans in Sweden is like 3 bucks.

jeandejeanhá 4 anos

For a technology that has the promise of clean energy for humanity, I am shocked it's receiving that small amount of funding, while we have been distributing literally trillions globally during the pandemic...

greyhairhá 4 anos

So much more funding now. That will getting it working twenty years from now, just like it has been 'working twenty years from now' for the last fifty years.

jupp0rhá 4 anos

There is a gigantic stable fusion reaction from which we just need to convert energy into electricity - our sun. Bring out the dyson sphere.

alexalx666há 4 anos

Deady epidemic - let’s work from home!

Russians attack Europe - let’s invest in nuclear!

What is the next disaster that will make another common sense thing happen ?

rbanffyhá 4 anos

I’m glad, but I hope we still invest in Plan-B’s because we are literally betting our civilisation on moving away from carbon.

[deleted]há 4 anos

mkl95há 4 anos

Good news. But let's not forget that fission is the present and near future of nuclear energy. And it just works.

rep_movsdhá 4 anos

We already have clean energy - its called Fission, all we need is to start doing it at scale

rjmunrohá 4 anos

> There was also a breakthrough in late 2021, when researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET) facility in Oxford managed to release a record-breaking 59 megajoules of fusion

59 megajoules in useful units is 16kWh, less than 2 days use of my house. That's the biggest fusion reaction ever.

DeIonizedPlasmahá 4 anos

59MJ over the short period of 7s, equivalent to 8.5 MW (https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/3722). A research reactor (not built to be a power plant) that is still capable of powering over 20,000 households while running isn't really as underwhelming as you seem to imply it is.

tovejahá 4 anos

59 megajoules of sustained energy ^over the course of a few seconds^.

Ideally this energy output would be sustained for days within ITER.

JET is not designed to do this, as it has a copper magnet system, which means if you try to sustain such a plasma (confined with around 5 T magnet and around 2 MA plasma current) for longer than a few seconds, you would melt the magnet.

Edit: ITER would operate at 5-10 T, and around 15-20 MA plasma current.

tsimionescuhá 4 anos

Note that these are 59MJ of energy released by the fusion reaction. No attempt was made to actually catch them. And even if they had been captured, they would not have been able to power the magnets + cooling systems used to confine the plasma. We are very very far away from actually producing even 1W of usable fusion power.

tovejahá 4 anos

You are correct that at JET there is no tech installed to absorb the neutrons, nor will there ever be in JET, since (as pointed out above) it is a _research_ device.

Current fusion devices are not nor were they ever designed to generate electricity for a grid.

This is why we build ITER, and DEMO thereafter. Generating 'usable fusion power' is limited to building reactor scale experiments, which to date, has not been done (ITER will be the first).

tsimionescuhá 4 anos

ITER is also not planning to capture the neutrons. It is only planned to produce more thermal energy than the total amount of electrical energy put in.

DEMO will be plants built independently by several nations following the research from a successful ITER. They will be the first time that any attempt is made to actually convert the fusion products into electricity. There are currently no concrete plans for any DEMO plant - those are contingent upon ITER's success.

If everything goes to plan, the first model DEMO plant would begin operation in 2051. So, as I said, we are a long way away from producing even 1W of usable electrical power from fusion.

tiborsaashá 4 anos

The first human flight lasted 12 seconds, don't judge achievements by the numbers.

chris_vahá 4 anos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba ... was slightly larger than that.

Anyway, 59MJ isn't terrible if you can run it at 60Hz. Of course, I agree that the reality is a bit far away.

alexnewmanhá 4 anos

Finally. I wonder if what's going on in ukraine has helped investment.

alex_younghá 4 anos

Why don’t we just leave the fusion where it works best, i.e. the sun?

Put the same amount of spending into building a robotic solar collection factory on the moon and beam the power where we need it. No crazy particles to deal with and zero nuclear weapons byproducts.

jefftkhá 4 anos

A beam of power many times stronger than the Sun sounds like a pretty terrifying weapon

topher515há 4 anos

This is actually one of the classic "disasters" in Sim City 2000[1]. The "Microwave Powerplant" works by bouncing a concentrated beam of sunlight to earth. It provides plentiful, pollution free power... The only downside is sometimes the satellite beam misses, melting everything surrounding it.

[1] https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/Microwave_(disaster)

alex_younghá 4 anos

The microwave beam would be pretty wide by the time it reached the surface. The power levels wouldn’t make an effective weapon but would take up a sizable footprint for the collectors.

jefftkhá 4 anos

If it isn't many times stronger than sunlight, just build more solar panels.

If it is many times stronger than sunlight, that's pretty dangerous!

alex_younghá 4 anos

MW power transmission is about 85% efficient at the receiving end. Solar is much lower than that.

eropplehá 4 anos

Solar is much lower than that, but it has the advantage of being doable on the ground.

Kukumberhá 4 anos

They should have invested in education 20 years ago

Vulture capitalist always show up during the last mile after government (us, the people) paid for kickstarting everything

What's sad is China already ahead despite all of that

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-12-31/China-s-artificial-sun...

https://eurasiantimes.com/artificial-sun-china-claims-design...

charlieyu1há 4 anos

The only true form of green energy other than geothermal.

fission, solar, wind, waterfall energy all have their own negative environmental impacts

joakhá 4 anos

Geothermal, and all thermal power energy, have a big issue: thermal pollution.

You need a lot of water for the cooling phase of the thermodynamic cycle that transform heat into electricity.

That's why during drought episodes fission plants have to be stopped.

There is however a non-thermal path to fusion energy, aneutronic fusion with direct energy conversion. In this scheme, the fusion reaction produces no neutrons and the kinetic energy of ions is directly converted to electricity.

acidburnNSAhá 4 anos

Given how much zero carbon warm water we need, it's easy to see zero carbon thermal pollution as a feature rather than a bug.

https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/workshops/nucogen/presentations...

BMc2020há 4 anos

If I were to ask you the answer to two plus 2, what would it be?

fnordpiglethá 4 anos

It’s happening!

borisskhá 4 anos

When all these starups fail to deliver anything of value in a few years, the investors will disappear.

Commercial fusion power is such a huge challenge IMHO there are only two ways we can get there currently: ITER/DEMO (if it doesn't get overcome by bureaucracy and the members don't loose interest in funding it) or Elon Musk (who is probably the only person who can attract the top talent needed, motivate it to work day and night and secure the funding).

anothernewdudehá 4 anos

Musk doesn't attract talent - the wealth does that, Elon himself is a negative.

dotnet00há 4 anos

Yes, clearly that's why SpaceX was successful in an industry where the adage was "How do you become a millionaire in aviation? Start with a billion!".

game-of-throwshá 4 anos

Has SpaceX disclosed whether they're profitable or still burning investor money?

dotnet00há 4 anos

They obviously aren't profitable right now since they're working on two megaprojects simultaneously, but the Falcon 9 program is obviously profitable and clearly successful given their flight rate and economics.

Kukumberhá 4 anos

SpaceX is not successful as an industry

It is a government funded project at this point

dotnet00há 4 anos

Most of SpaceX's funding as well as most of their launches are private.

Kukumberhá 4 anos

Weird my comment mentioning the source got removed, it was just a link so maybe it got detected as spam

Here is the link of the article: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-su...

You have to be curious about who are their customers

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/07/will-the-ukraine-war...

The EU coming to subsidize them even more

And the fact that they are not profitable says it all

dotnet00há 4 anos

>Here is the link of the article: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-su...

Business Insider is well known for twisting things to fit their biases. Case in point, the first two items on that list are the equivalent of the government paying a pen company to provide them with pens after determining that said company was the best one to supply them.

Relating to SpaceX, the only 'real' subsidy there is the $15 million towards Boca Chica. Although they've paid twice that in donations to local schools there.

>You have to be curious about who are their customers >https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/07/will-the-ukraine-war... >The EU coming to subsidize them even more

Same here, they'd be paying for the service of launching a payload on a SpaceX rocket. Should SpaceX just not do business with governments? They happen to be one of the few people with a reliable rocket available right now that has a short enough lead time.

>And the fact that they are not profitable says it all

Again, dishonest take. They're building technologies with high setup costs, of course they aren't taking profits, they're taking all the money made from Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy and putting it back into Starship and Starlink.

Edit: Oh and of course none of the government money mentioned there accounts for the majority of their funding, which at the moment is largely driven by private funding rounds (because contrary to your biases, investors can see SpaceX's success and potential for even bigger successes) and previous F9 related profits.

borisskhá 4 anos

(1)

pfdietzhá 4 anos

ITER/DEMO won't deliver value either.

borisskhá 4 anos

Why?

pfdietzhá 4 anos

They are not on a path to deliver anything that could be remotely competitive.

timmghá 4 anos

I wonder how this compares to the amount of money invested in crypto startups in the past few years. (I don't mean the value of crypto or the amount of money that was traded into it -- just the amount VCs invested into crypto startups.)

I don't know if that means people that allocate capital think crypto has a better chance of changing the world than nuclear fusion -- or if it's something else. But it is strange to compare the funding of each.

rjmunrohá 4 anos

Not that it has a better chance of changing the world, just that it has a better chance of making them some money back in a reasonable time.

kortillahá 4 anos

>or if it's something else

It’s something else. Many people want their money invested in something with a good risk adjusted returns. Only a tiny subset of investors invest significant portions of their capital into significantly lower expected value outcomes because they like the field.

missedthecuehá 4 anos

There are probably a lot more founders with crypto ideas than founders with fusion ideas.

ricardobeathá 4 anos

That would be an argument for having more investment into fusion.

missedthecuehá 4 anos

Why? If you get 25 crypto startups for every fusion startups, you're necessarily going to see more funding in the crypto sector.

meowkithá 4 anos

Apples to oranges. Investments are compared by their up front costs and rates of returns.

Crypto up front costs are dirt cheap as most of it is open source software, and in a bull mania the rates of returns are astronomical.

Nuclear is a mature industry with R&D for fusion that has some of the largest up front capital costs on the planet for cutting edge materials, controls, land, and safety requirements. To top that off, the rates of returns are abysmal and take forever even compared to coal plants.

ricardobeathá 4 anos

The total of crypto VC investments for 2021 was reported at $33B.

ushakovhá 4 anos

i wonder how this compares to the amount of money invested in autonomous driving startups

tovejahá 4 anos

To those interested in discussion outside of HN, there is a discord community [0] with professional, academic, and hobby fusion afficionados.

[0] https://discord.gg/Rcum9zkBtg

LegitShadyhá 4 anos

Discord is a black hole in the internet. People have discussions you can't search for and isn't indexed on Google etc.

It's convenient but it's worse than a forum for creating knowledge people can search through later. It's a shame it's used for such interesting discussion.

shadowofneptunehá 4 anos

It's a chat room. The conversations are disposable, it is part of the medium. Having a record of discussion is not really what interests me about instant messaging.

tovejahá 4 anos

Thanks for pointing that out. What would be your suggestion/alternatives?

kralljahá 4 anos

> it's worse than a forum for creating knowledge people can search through later

A forum.

willis936há 4 anos

I personally like reddit for public discussions. r/fusion used to be a ghost town with crackpots a few years. These days there are occasional good discussions and the crackpots are chased off.

_dain_há 4 anos

> People have discussions you can't search for and isn't indexed on Google etc.

this is a feature not a bug. the real problem is lack of user ownership over data, not lack of searchability.

stefantalpalaruhá 4 anos

Calmanimalhá 4 anos

hit8runhá 4 anos