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ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

bbc.co.uk

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Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#211

Post by korantu »

vosper wrote: post #175
korantu wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental difference between nuclear and any other source is energy density. It boggles ones mind that your can replace burning 14 thousand tonns of coal _every day_ with something that needs to be refueled once a year.

Sure, but energy density (which is essentially hypothetical in the case of fusion, because we don't have fusion power) has got very little to do with the assertion that nuclear energy (and fusion in particular) is the only way to avert a looming energy crisis?

nuclear energy density is derived from e=mc2, so fusion/fission are in the same ballpark.

Current accepted way is to build solar/wind and redesign grid to deal with intermittency. Solar and wind are even more energy diluted than fossil fuel, they take 500 times more space, more land out of nature/alternative uses.

Nuclear has already demonstrated that it can decarbonise industrial economy up to 80%, see France. and they did it just in 10 years.

This is bascally the reason i think this is the way out of crisis

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#212

Post by ClumsyPilot »

Reason077 wrote: post #127
jjoonathan wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hydro is actually pretty bad in terms of big safety incidents (Banqiao: 171000 dead, Machchu: 5000 dead, South Fork: 2208 dead) and solar/wind have trouble beating nuclear on metrics like death/watt because you need lots of infrastructure per watt. Picture a few large cities with contractors running around every roof tending to solar panels and compare to a few experts at a single nuclear power plant. For the contrac…

> "solar/wind have trouble beating nuclear on metrics like death/watt because you need lots of infrastructure per watt." That may be so. But solar and wind are clear winners when it comes to cost/watt, and that's what determines which gets built.

If the energy source is not providing energy when i need it, i dont care that its cheap at some other time when its of no use to me.

Safety is not a real problema in rebewavles, they are much safe than mining/ fossil fuels of any kind.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#213

Post by foobiekr »

dane-pgp wrote: post #186
hlfy_hn wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is just not true, there's no way you can say this. Solar costs are going down massively. Hydro is dirt cheap already. " ROTFL. You made my day mate. For starters: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

> For a matter of convenience, we lower the energy growth rate from 2.9% to 2.3% per year ... When would we run into this limit at a 2.3% growth rate? Recall that we expand by a factor of ten every hundred years, so in 200 years, we operate at 100 times the current level, and we reach 7,000 TW in 275 years. 275 years may seem long on a single human timescale, but it really is not that long for a civilization. His arg…

Or perhaps it isn’t, when you actually account for everything:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qj4z9p/green-economic-gro...

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#214

Post by ClumsyPilot »

AngryData wrote: post #102
cwhiz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to see some models on how solar power could work in northern cities, or honestly any city. The NYC metro area has over 23 million residents and there is essentially zero space for a solar farm. In the winter it's cloudy almost all day and there are only 9 hours of sunlight. Rooftop solar is an option but the models I have seen show a theoretical max around 1,200 MW which is about 1/30th of the NYC metro…

That isn't even the major electrical cost of supporting those people. The fertilizer needed to feed them, metal refining/recycling, chemical reagent production, shipping fuel, all dwarf the usage by individuals in their homes. Personally I don't think solar is ever feasible for industrial scale work, covering like 1/3 of your landmass is a ridiculously large project and needed to fuel industrial operations that curre…

Where did you get 1/3? You dont need to cover even 0.001% of landmass to supply all of US!

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#215

Post by tenuousemphasis »

f6v wrote: post #49
throwaway744678 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is sound, but the issue is also budget allocation: financial resources are not infinite, and we must choose how to allocate them.

There’s so much things to divert budget from to fuel energy research. Completely unrealistic, but think luxury cars, football player’s salaries, just to name a few.

Military industrial complex? Billionaires? The things you mentioned are literally nothingburger.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#216

Post by sfifs »

cameldrv wrote: post #143
jpdus wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Picture a few large cities with contractors running around every roof tending to solar panels and compare to a few experts at a single nuclear power plant. For the contractors-on-roofs, the slip & falls add up even though they'll never get an HBO mini-series. This is a very flawed and short-sighted argument. Averages don't matter when you are talking about fat-tailed/power law risk distributions. Nobody would be op…

I agree that costs are a major problem with nuclear. It seems to be a problem with all large scale construction projects in the past 20-30 years or so. On the safety tail risks, IMO it's more of a psychological/perception problem than a problem of actual risk. We've had a number of serious accidents in the history of nuclear power, and none of them have led to anything close to the death toll of a single year of runn…

The problem is actually that people are forced off of their homes, personal property and way if life should there be a big accident. For an average householder it's their life savings, friendships, community and way of life wiped out through no fault of theirs. Sure there'll be compensation and resettlement but who trusts governments to do this fairly and painlessly?

It hasn't helped that no civilian nuclear operator has demonstrated the ability to sustain safe operations with zero incidents and consistently prioritize safety over the course of decades. Every operator has a string of nuclear incidents of varying severity and i think more than anything, the Fukushima thing shook people up because while you could excuse away Russian and American accidents with cultural factors nobody perceives Japanese to be careless or irresponsible (and this was expressly the reasoning that led Angela Merkel to reverse her stance)

So yeah in abstract at a nation level, it's not a major risk but for the families possibly affected, it's a catastrophe - as opposed to increased chance of a few people getting cancer over their lifetime from Coal.

Therefore given the asymmetric risk and demonstrated inability of the nuclear industry in ensuring zero incidents, there's naturally grassroots opposition which translates into political pressure that no amount of "risk is so low" data-flashing can wave away.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#217

Post by stjohnswarts »

dantillberg wrote: post #100
cwhiz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to see some models on how solar power could work in northern cities, or honestly any city. The NYC metro area has over 23 million residents and there is essentially zero space for a solar farm. In the winter it's cloudy almost all day and there are only 9 hours of sunlight. Rooftop solar is an option but the models I have seen show a theoretical max around 1,200 MW which is about 1/30th of the NYC metro…

You could imagine building a globe-spanning power distribution network. Solar panels on one side of the planet could provide power at night on the other side of the planet.

That's impossible, unless you have an invention for extremely cheap superconductors that you've been hiding away.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#218

Post by ClumsyPilot »

foobiekr wrote: post #210
godelski wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This appears to be a problem that is solving itself. Developed countries have birth rates below replacement and more countries are becoming developed (with the same trend happening as those countries develop).

That’s all well and good if you reach stability below a level that is sustainable. We aren’t going to be anywhere near that from an environmental point of view.

And whybdo you believe that? We will never surpass 12 billion by most estimates. Where is the sustainability point?

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#219

Post by [deleted] »

godelski wrote: post #187
shadowprofile77 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you mention about billionaires paying for it piques me especially. For someone like Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg or any number of other ultra rich individuals, the PR value of simply stating that they will themselves pay for such a collider up to the cost of its proposed budget (maybe so long as some organization or government promises to cover any cost overruns, or overruns beyond a certain percentage) would be eno…

The discussion of billionaires building "CERNs" came out of a discussion I was having with a friend as a way to quantify how rich these people are in terms more understandable. Graphics like pixel wealth[0] just show scale, but doesn't put things in perspective. But a Forbes analysis estimates the cost of finding the Higgs at around $14bn (rounding up)[1]. I also tried using Super Computers, but at around $300m a pie…

[deleted]

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#220

Post by stjohnswarts »

Reason077 wrote: post #95
gautamcgoel wrote: post #2

I think fusion is cool, but I also think it distracts from more important and promising approaches to clean power. No one has ever demonstrated a self-sustaining, net positive fusion reaction. It will probably take >30 years to make this technology cheap , safe and reliable and another >20 years to deploy it at scale. We don't have 50 years to wait on clean energy, we need it today. We should be focusing our attentio…

> "I bet a concerted roll-out of nuclear + solar could cut US emissions due to electricity generation by at least 30% over the next 20 years." 30% over 20 years in unambitious. The UK has cut grid carbon emissions by 60% in the past 10 years. (2010 average: 467g/kWh. 2019 average: 189g/kWh). Emissions continue to decline every year. This was largely achieved by closing coal power plants, and building a lot of wind (b…

Just switching over all new development to nuclear and ignoring the luddites would basically make us guilt free and green, but that won't happen until we're desperate.
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