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Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

wired.co.uk

121–130 of 167 posts

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#121
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dropping about two bombs a day would cause the system to reach thermal equilibrium, allowing the continual extraction of about 2 GW of electrical power. So the idea is to drop 2 nuclear bombs per day to get about as much energy as one gets from a pair of nuclear fission reactors? I seriously doubt that's cost-competitive with fission power.

And, fission is itself not competitive anymore.

Competitive with intermittent sources backed by fossil fuels? No, but those emit carbon emissions. And we lack the ability to add significant amounts of energy storage, so wind and solar will never conceivably break free of it's dependence on fossil fuels during non- production.

It's the most competitive non-intermittent and geographically independent source of carbon-free energy. Because it's the only such source.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#122
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, so then at _whatever_ cost, the cost of producing Tritium is sorta moot, right? Whether it's building reactors or investing a tonne of energy, the cost of creating the amount of tritium needed is met with theoretically infinite profits?

There will never be any marketable fusion power at all, never mind "infinite". Power from Tokamaks necessarily costs at least 10x power from fission, and fission is already not competitive, and gets less so each year.

??? Fission is incredible profitable. It's the only source of reliable electricity we have (with a negligible CO2 impact).

The only reason fission isn't more profitable is politics. Politics are making investment and research into fission needlessly costly.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#123
post #58

> “It would be an absurdity to use dirty fission reactors to fuel ‘clean’ fusion reactors,” This seems like a non-sequitur. If we need to keep around (or even build) a few heavy-water fission plants to enable the fusion industry, what's the problem? The simple phrasing of fission as "dirty" really shows the quotee's biases. You could easily envision a stable energy mix with a few percent of fission, the rest fusion a…

Being triggered by the use of the word "dirty" for fission reactors, in comparison with fusion reactors no less, is far more telling than the use of the word. It creates radioactive waste. Creating waste is dirty. The promise of fusion is not to do this. Requiring the former for the latter is a strange proposition when viewed threw the only lense that makes sense for fusion power: cleanliness, the absence of dirtiness.

The love for nuclear power some internet communities exhibit has far left the realm of the science people often invoke as their reason and gone into full-on scientism. Nuclear scientists have respect for radiation. They wouldn't take offense with the mere mention that it has unwanted byproducts. They built and ran a couple hundred reactors for a few decades, and only two of them managed to render large swaths of the landscape into uninhabitable wastelands, which is quite a feat. But it was only possible because they didn't minimize the danger with the sort of I-would-love-a-reactor-in-my-backyard attitude that seems to be prevalent now. Which is, by the way, not only getting the science wrong, but also the politics: nuclear power is out not because it is dangerous, but because it is too expensive and, at this point, too slow to build.

While science bros have been huffing isotopes, actual scientists, with the help of some eerily effective subsidies, have improved solar and wind power and battery technology to the point where it is competitive and scalable not just to replace nuclear power, but even coal. Why people keep making the same arguments as they did a decade ago, a time span in which those technologies became 80-90% cheaper and more efficient, cannot be explained by the natural sciences.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#124
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, fission is itself not competitive anymore.

Competitive with intermittent sources backed by fossil fuels? No, but those emit carbon emissions. And we lack the ability to add significant amounts of energy storage, so wind and solar will never conceivably break free of it's dependence on fossil fuels during non- production. It's the most competitive non-intermittent and geographically independent source of carbon-free energy. Because it's the only such source.

And yet, not competitive. So, there is something missing in your model. It is for you to figure out what is wrong.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#125
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will never be any marketable fusion power at all, never mind "infinite". Power from Tokamaks necessarily costs at least 10x power from fission, and fission is already not competitive, and gets less so each year.

??? Fission is incredible profitable. It's the only source of reliable electricity we have (with a negligible CO2 impact). The only reason fission isn't more profitable is politics. Politics are making investment and research into fission needlessly costly.

You just go on telling yourself that. The rest of the world will do what it does.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#126
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

??? Fission is incredible profitable. It's the only source of reliable electricity we have (with a negligible CO2 impact). The only reason fission isn't more profitable is politics. Politics are making investment and research into fission needlessly costly.

You just go on telling yourself that. The rest of the world will do what it does.

!?!? Lulz. Okay.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#127
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$25 billion... thinking about how much money we've dedicated for active warfare in the last 2 months alone... clearly we have our priorities.

I struggle to understand this type of comment. You can't respond to the bad guys with a plea for them to stop what they are doing because you would rather spend the money on something else. That isn't to say that battles should not be picked carefully, just that sometimes you don't have a choice and have to deal with a situation and spend lots of $$$ and sometimes blood in order to avoid a worse situation. Even in th…

We do have a choice about Ukraine, just as we had a choice about Syria, Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, etc. We are making the wrong choice now, just as we made the wrong choices before. Although we kill lots of people, many of them innocent rather than "bad", we never actually "avoid" worse situations. In cases like Libya our intervention has worsened human life by every measure. In other cases we might have delayed inevitable events somewhat (e.g. Vietnam couldn't go to war with China until it finished beating us). The "specific action" in every case is spending public funds, which is the purpose of the USA military, intelligence services, diplomatic corps, and news media, and has been since the Korean War. Insofar as they affect security at all, our military efforts usually reduce it.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#128
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competitive with intermittent sources backed by fossil fuels? No, but those emit carbon emissions. And we lack the ability to add significant amounts of energy storage, so wind and solar will never conceivably break free of it's dependence on fossil fuels during non- production. It's the most competitive non-intermittent and geographically independent source of carbon-free energy. Because it's the only such source.

And yet, not competitive . So, there is something missing in your model. It is for you to figure out what is wrong.

It's not competitive with a power source containing fossil fuels. And there's no feasible way to run a grid composed of wind and solar without fossil fuels. Ignoring the fact that wind and solar generation is really wind, solar, and fossil fuels, to offset the intermittency is naive.

In areas without hydroelectric and geothermal potential, nuclear is the most competitive carbon-free and non+intermittent option. Because it's the only option. That's why for all your insistence that nuclear is uncompetitive, it produces more electricity than wind and solar combined.i

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#129
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like every fusion post is bound to have at least one commenter point out that the sun is a working fusion reactor, as if literally anyone in these threads will learn something from this observation.

Roughly $50 billion has been spent globally on fusion research since the 1950s with nothing material to show for the effort; at what point do you stop throwing good money after bad? This strikes me as the learning from these posts.

Saudi Arabia alone exported almost $100 billion in crude petroleum in 2020 [1]. That was significantly less than the previous year.

Given these scales I'm not really sure $50 billion is a lot of money for the entire world to spend on an energy R&D project. In fact, that number seems surprisingly low, do you have a source for it?

[1]: https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/crude-petroleum

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#130
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You control the detonation with either an engineered or natural cavity filled with fluid. You can then use the fluid as a big thermal reservoir to run steam turbines. Per wikipedia: >"Dropping about two bombs a day would cause the system to reach thermal equilibrium, allowing the continual extraction of about 2 GW of electrical power." Now... the part you're not getting is that if you can do all that, you can almost…

Yes, conventional fission would be much cheaper to operate. But it, also, is no longer economically competitive.

So long as carbon-emitting sources are allowed to be used in the mix. That’s the real problem here.
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