Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium • Hacker News Board

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#151

Post by DennisP » Sat, May 21, 2022, 9:31 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #149

DennisP wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I linked you a paper surveying global nuclear costs, showing much lower costs in many areas and no overall trend of increasing costs. Here's the paper again: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151... Skip down to Figure 12 for a quick summary.

Most of those points that were low were either France or Korea. France with EPR has lost whatever mojo they claim to have had (those earlier cost figures are not verifiable) and Korea turned out to achieve low costs by corruption and omitting safety features.

The lowest, sure, but those are around $2000/kW. The bulk of the points on the graph are still below $4000/kW. That includes Japan, India, and Canada, along with a lot of early US reactors.

Also, do you have a source for early French costs being unverifiable? I don't see where that's mentioned in the paper, so it doesn't seem right to just dismiss the data unless there's another source giving us good reason to do that.

As for the EPR, seems to me the conclusion there is just to not build any more EPRs.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#152

Post by tlb » Sat, May 21, 2022, 9:33 PM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #142

tlb wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One problem it solves is making reactors that can't produce material for nuclear weapons. That's pretty important if we want to deploy reactors outside the few countries that already have them.

I live near Indian Point, recently shut down. They tried thorium back when it was new. It cost too much then. Nukes of any stripe are not competitive now, and get less so every year. Thorium cannot save them. Solutions that rely on a steam turbine generally lose to those that do not. A need to fool with fuel and security cost even more. Account for the disaster insurance subsidy and decommissioning cost, and they com…

It's possible the economics have changed since the 50s. The non-proliferation argument certainly has: in the US in the 50s, making plutonium was considered a useful feature of power reactors.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#153

Post by hansthehorse » Sat, May 21, 2022, 11:44 PM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #137

pfdietz wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost certainly it will be more expensive than renewables + storage (note the importance of hydrogen there.) The cost of renewables + storage to provide "synthetic baseload" is likely less than fission. And DT fusion is likely more expensive than fission. https://model.energy/

Yes, we discussed that pretty extensively the other week. It starts out with unrealistic assumptions for fission, including a 25-year lifespan (compared to the actual average age of US reactors of forty years) and twice the discount rate for fission as for everything else. Fix those things and nuclear does better. It also uses US fission prices, which are higher than in most of the world. On top of that, the US has u…

In America the NRC issues a 40 year license to a reactor which then, after a review, can be extended. 40 years is the lifespan of the initial license not the plant.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#154

Post by robertsteinhaus » Sun, May 22, 2022, 5:11 AM UTC

areoform wrote: post #12

Just a quick reminder, we already have practical fusion with tens of thousands of years of runway available to us today. We choose not to do it because it sounds dangerous and it’s not politically expedient. For those unfamiliar, I am talking about Project PACER. The fusion reactor proposed by Teller after the creation of the thermonuclear weapon. It may sound fanciful but it’s based on a simple precept. We can alrea…

Great information! Project PACER was certainly an attempt to introduce fusion reactors with the technology we currently have Mastery of. In the early 1970s, both LANL and LLNL National Labs had PACER fusion programs. Dr. Ralph Moir was the project leader for this program at LLNL. Inertial Confinement fusion is "controlled fusion" to the very same extent as Magnetic Confinement fusion (the same fuels and fusion reactions are used and the same nuclear waste [stable nonradioactive Helium] is produced.

(more info) What are the reasons that nuclear fusion power generation is not yet realized? https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-reasons-for-nuclear-fusio...

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#155

Post by dang » Sun, May 22, 2022, 6:08 AM UTC

westcort wrote: post #131

dang wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please stop doing this? I'm sure these comments are well intentioned, but the pattern has become repetitive ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ) and anything this repetitive is bad for curiosity ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... ). HN threads are supposed to be conversations, and conversation involves people interacting with each other.

Okay I will not post these anymore. I might share the summarization algorithm I wrote that enables me to create these quickly, though. Thanks for helping me understand the ethos of curiosity and the diffs as the underlying principles.

Yes - sharing the algorithm would indeed be interesting! Thanks for getting the point so well.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#156

Post by ncmncm » Sun, May 22, 2022, 9:18 AM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #150

ncmncm wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, you got the wrong answer again. Renewables plus local storage, transmission line, and/or ability to burn imported ammonia or hydrogen suffices, and at radically less cost, with no risk of rendering large areas uninhabitable.

Storage at anywhere near significant levels does not yet exist, and might not be achieved in the time necessary to curb the worst effects of climate change. Ammonia and hydrogen storage has been proposed, for decades, yet remains out of reach at the scales necessary to make renewables viable. Wind and solar is really wind, solar, and fossil fuels. Assuming that we'll be able to replace the last item with energy stora…

You keep repeating this, but you know it is not true.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#157

Post by john567 » Sun, May 22, 2022, 11:38 AM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #146

john567 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What county are we talking about here?

All. Even nominally commercial ones get a whopping disaster liability subsidy, and decommissioning cost is omitted from the price, but charged to ratepayers on top of whatever actual power they are also paying for. It will cost at least a $billion to take apart and dispose of Indian Point, shut down recently because it was leaking radioactive stuff into the Hudson.

See, now I know you're just lying because the equation isn't at all the same across all countries. Maybe you don't like nuclear and that's fine but you don't have to lie about it.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#158

Post by pfdietz » Sun, May 22, 2022, 5:49 PM UTC

john567 wrote: post #157

ncmncm wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All. Even nominally commercial ones get a whopping disaster liability subsidy, and decommissioning cost is omitted from the price, but charged to ratepayers on top of whatever actual power they are also paying for. It will cost at least a $billion to take apart and dispose of Indian Point, shut down recently because it was leaking radioactive stuff into the Hudson.

See, now I know you're just lying because the equation isn't at all the same across all countries. Maybe you don't like nuclear and that's fine but you don't have to lie about it.

It remains the case that NPPs have never, anywhere, been built into a competitive market. They are only built when customers can be forced to pay for them.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#159

Post by ncmncm » Sun, May 22, 2022, 5:52 PM UTC

tlb wrote: post #152

ncmncm wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live near Indian Point, recently shut down. They tried thorium back when it was new. It cost too much then. Nukes of any stripe are not competitive now, and get less so every year. Thorium cannot save them. Solutions that rely on a steam turbine generally lose to those that do not. A need to fool with fuel and security cost even more. Account for the disaster insurance subsidy and decommissioning cost, and they com…

It's possible the economics have changed since the 50s. The non-proliferation argument certainly has: in the US in the 50s, making plutonium was considered a useful feature of power reactors.

That does happen, but has not in this case.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#160

Post by ncmncm » Sun, May 22, 2022, 6:01 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #148

ASalazarMX wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dug more about this because it's an interesting topic. Basically we don't know how long a fusion generator will last before radioactivity forces its decommissioning because none exist yet, but fortunately it's short-life isotopes, about 50-120 years before they become safe. Orders of magnitude better than fission waste. I don't know about fusion vs renewables, because renewables are better, but they need a lot of n…

> Basically we don't know how long a fusion generator will last before radioactivity forces its decommissioning That was one of the main questions the ITER was supposed to answer, wasn't it? AFAIK earlier designs were quite short-lived, but some small changes fixed it. We will know how long they last as soon as we don't have an ITER anymore.

It is scheduled to be done in 2035, which means in practice for projects like this 2040 or 2045, and at $25B meaning $30B+. It will surely be abandoned before then, and we still won't know.

What were these small changes that fixed it? Did they have anything to do with the cost going up by 3x?

Anyway, inducing radioactivity is not what would use it up. That just makes it super-expensive to do repairs. It would get used up through neutron bombardment weakening the crystal structure of the metals it is constructed of.