Nuclear fusion is close enough to start dreaming
bloomberg.com
Nuclear fusion is close enough to start dreaming
1–10 of 87 posts
Re: Nuclear fusion is close enough to start dreaming
#2"Too cheap to meter". How does this compare with 1950s futurism? It at least has a nod to climate change and carbon capture and fuel synthesis.
Re: Nuclear fusion is close enough to start dreaming
#3> The nuclear fusion startup Helion, which announced last week that it has raised $500 million, says it has developed new technologies that may make nuclear fusion viable — practically, economically and environmentally.
This is the only actual news in the article. The rest is bog-standard speculation.
Re: Nuclear fusion is close enough to start dreaming
#4Think of all the fusion powered direct air CO2 capture we could have <3
Re: Nuclear fusion is close enough to start dreaming
#5> The nuclear fusion startup Helion, which announced last week that it has raised $500 million, says it has developed new technologies that may make nuclear fusion viable — practically, economically and environmentally. This is the only actual news in the article. The rest is bog-standard speculation.
Thanks, glad I didn't buy a subscription to Bloomberg for that.
Re: Nuclear fusion is close enough to start dreaming
#6"Too cheap to meter". How does this compare with 1950s futurism? It at least has a nod to climate change and carbon capture and fuel synthesis.
"Too cheap to meter" == the investment does not pan out to the private sector. That's been the historical problem. No one wants to build a big fancy thing and thing run it at cost.
The reason fission is going for prefab is not only volume lowering costs, but selling gizmos for a profit that the buyer runs at cost does make sense.
(There are some interesting vaguely Marxian dynamics with high tech with minicsule operating costs that should always be considered. That we all drive cars and not ride trains is similar. The car industry surely involves 3+ orders of magnitude more people per mass * distance transported)
Re: Nuclear fusion is close enough to start dreaming
#7I’m an interested layperson at best, but I gather that we know how to build safe fission reactors now, and that the safe storage of spent (or “slightly used” as I’ve heard it called) fuel pellets is a much harder political problem than technical problem.
Gorbachev once speculated that it was actually Chernobyl that brought down the USSR.
I personally wonder if it’s also why we’re going to have a climate catastrophe.
Re: Nuclear fusion is close enough to start dreaming
#8Think of all the fusion powered direct air CO2 capture we could have <3
As usual, everything that is infinite meets another barrier in physics. Initial investment is the barrier for every energy plant. But I also imagine ourselves already using energy like it’s cheap, trying to illuminate the moon with a big ad for Coca-Cola, “since we now have enough energy for it”.
Re: Nuclear fusion is close enough to start dreaming
#9Think of all the fusion powered direct air CO2 capture we could have <3
I wonder how many capture plants and energy would be required to bring it back to a normal level.
Re: Nuclear fusion is close enough to start dreaming
#10> The nuclear fusion startup Helion, which announced last week that it has raised $500 million, says it has developed new technologies that may make nuclear fusion viable — practically, economically and environmentally. This is the only actual news in the article. The rest is bog-standard speculation.
Thanks.
Note it’s an opinion piece published on bloomberg, not an actual bloomberg article.