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

growthbusiness.co.uk

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

#151

Post by [deleted] »

NavinF wrote: post #135
koverda wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 quan…

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]

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

#152

Post by CamperBob2 »

Nition wrote: post #144
felixmeziere wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, w…

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.

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.

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

#153

Post by acidburnNSA »

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.

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

#154

Post by game-of-throws »

dotnet00 wrote: post #129
anothernewdude wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk doesn't attract talent - the wealth does that, Elon himself is a negative.

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!".

Has SpaceX disclosed whether they're profitable or still burning investor money?

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

#155

Post by idlehand »

felixmeziere wrote: post #37
greenthrow wrote: post #5

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.

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, w…

Commercial fusion power probably makes it more economical to spend more energy recycling materials.

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

#156

Post by danaris »

sacrosancty wrote: post #38
Digital28 wrote: post #2

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?

Fusion isn't a silver bullet even if it works. If it costs more than solar+battery then it's worthless.

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.

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

#157

Post by lispm »

ac29 wrote: post #130
tsimionescu wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> 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

> 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.

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

#158

Post by asdf123a »

eatonphil wrote: post #3

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?

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.

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

#159

Post by idlehand »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #152
Nition wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#160

Post by acidburnNSA »

bloodyplonker22 wrote: post #72

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.

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.
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