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

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

#211

Post by sweezyjeezy »

dmead wrote: post #207
acidburnNSA wrote: post #153

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) n…

Is it wise to write off safety issues? Chernobyl, Fukushima and three mile island all seem pretty bad. There is also the Robert Heinlein story "Blowups happen". I'm just not understanding how this can all be hand waved away.

Also hand waving away the fact that the waste products have to be managed for civilisation-length time scales.

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

#212

Post by sweezyjeezy »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #209
dmead wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it wise to write off safety issues? Chernobyl, Fukushima and three mile island all seem pretty bad. There is also the Robert Heinlein story "Blowups happen". I'm just not understanding how this can all be hand waved away.

They were bad, but just bad enough to roll over and give up on fission. While Chernobyl killed people from radiation (around 50, with a hotly debated number between 0 and 4000 from long term effects), TMI and Fukushima did not. We have only directly amd definitively linked about 50 deaths to radiation released in commercial fission accidents. It's like a really bad bus crash. And that doesnt even count the social and…

You keep bringing up climate change, like the only alternative is coal. Do you really think that nuclear fission can be a key player in reducing emissions to net zero? It seems far too expensive and slow to set up for something this urgent.

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

#213

Post by Kukumber »

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!".

SpaceX is not successful as an industry

It is a government funded project at this point

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

#214

Post by acidburnNSA »

sweezyjeezy wrote: post #211
dmead wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it wise to write off safety issues? Chernobyl, Fukushima and three mile island all seem pretty bad. There is also the Robert Heinlein story "Blowups happen". I'm just not understanding how this can all be hand waved away.

Also hand waving away the fact that the waste products have to be managed for civilisation-length time scales.

Deep geologic repositories have a scientific consensus as being safe and appropriate solutions to high level nuclear waste. Finland's Onkalo is mostly constructed and finishing up licensing right now. It's a solved problem.

https://posiva.fi/en/

Number of deaths from stored commercial nuclear waste worldwide? zero.

People always ask: "what about the waste?"

Nowadays we answer: "What about it?"

Air pollution and climate change are vastly more serious and challenging problems than the storage of high-level nuclear waste.

There was just a huge twitter thread related to this with like 33k RTs and over 100k likes: https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148385931513856

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

#215

Post by Kukumber »

They should have invested in education 20 years ago

Vulture capitalist always show up during the last mile after government (us, the people) paid for kickstarting everything

What's sad is China already ahead despite all of that

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-12-31/China-s-artificial-sun...

https://eurasiantimes.com/artificial-sun-china-claims-design...

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

#216

Post by dodobirdlord »

freetime2 wrote: post #198
Cupertino95014 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you're saying here is, "people object to it." Or is there something more substantive? > in a manner that is satisfying to the residents of the state where it is being disposed No, that is basically NIMBY. Of course some residents won't like nuclear waste buried underground, 100 miles from them in a place they'll never go and where no one lives. I don't know how to not sound callous about that.

Yes I am basically saying people object to it. And in a democracy that’s a fairly important detail that you can’t just write off as a “non issue”.

Many people also hate renewable energy for ideological reasons. People can be persuaded, or, in a democracy, simply outvoted by a critical mass of supporters. Nuclear power has been losing the propaganda war for decades in the United States, but that’s not a reason to give up on it forever.

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

#217

Post by acidburnNSA »

sweezyjeezy wrote: post #212
acidburnNSA wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were bad, but just bad enough to roll over and give up on fission. While Chernobyl killed people from radiation (around 50, with a hotly debated number between 0 and 4000 from long term effects), TMI and Fukushima did not. We have only directly amd definitively linked about 50 deaths to radiation released in commercial fission accidents. It's like a really bad bus crash. And that doesnt even count the social and…

You keep bringing up climate change, like the only alternative is coal. Do you really think that nuclear fission can be a key player in reducing emissions to net zero? It seems far too expensive and slow to set up for something this urgent.

Fossil + biofuel makes 80% of our energy today. Getting rid of that will require vast amounts of zero-carbon energy. Wind and solar need to be built out at breakneck speed if we want to be serious. Much faster than what we're doing now. So does nuclear fission.

I assume you're only looking at the slow and expensive nuclear builds?

China is looking to build 150 new reactors to meet its goals.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-11-03/china-is-pl...

We also have ways of making nuclear reactors extremely quickly if we want to get really serious. In the 1970s we started building a facility in Jacksonville Fl capable of delivering 4 large LWRs per year in a shipyard-like factory. The reactors were to be floated off to their sites (the first of which were offshore). They installed the world's largest gantry crane at the facility. Sadly the oil shocks reduced the energy demand where their first customers were (New Jersey refineries) and the effort failed after they received a construction license from the nuclear regulatory commission. Building zero carbon power plant gigafactories like this can solve climate change, you betcha.

https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-01-26-offshore-power-sys...

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

#218

Post by [deleted] »

Terr_ wrote: post #117
acchow wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private Investments usually need returns within a 10-15 year time scale. Once practical fusion gets to that point, we should expect money to come pouring in which will help make it a reality. We’re seeing something similar happening in self driving cars

My pet theory is that it's no coincidence the self-driving-car investment craze started the same time the baby-boom generation started to enter "grandpa can't drive himself anymore" territory. In other words, I suspect it's not fueled by a technology trend, but by trying to capture a potential customer trend.

[deleted]

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

#219

Post by acidburnNSA »

iambateman wrote: post #204
acidburnNSA wrote: post #153

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) n…

This was a great comment and very helpful. I think it’s all a PR issue. The public doesn’t really understand and there are a lot of lobbyists pushing every other kind of energy.

Agreed. The excitement in fusion indicates a total failure of fission people to effectively explain what they are capable of.

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

#220

Post by twawaaay »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #195
twawaaay wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Budgets are decided by elected officials and elected officials are steered by their polling numbers. Out of all sources of energy only atomic energy is something that we can practically scale at the moment to cover almost all our needs (air travel and maritime shipping being notable exceptions). We just need to think a bit harder how to ensure this is done responsibly and safely. Not saying it is an easy problem, but…

"Out of all sources of energy only atomic energy is something that we can practically scale at the moment to cover almost all our needs" ... what? Criticism 1: you'd need, what, like 100 nuclear plants planned and approved? If you started now, maybe in three years you'd get like ... 10 approved. five years maybe 20-30. Criticism 2: nuclear is not price competitive with current wind/solar installations, and CERTAINLY…

First of all, you don't wake up in the morning and have an idea that it would be great to have 5 nuclear reactors so that you don't freeze overnight. We more or less know how much energy we will need in 10 years. You just need to plan ahead.

Dams also need many years to build, but you won't say they are useless because of this...

Second, nuclear is price competitive with wind/solar. The way nuclear is competitive is because it allows removing dependency on fossil fuels and wind/solar do not. We can't afford using fossil fuels anymore because it does not matter if you get lower $/kWh if along we cause drastic climate changes.

Stop thinking in terms of $/kWh produced by the powerplant alone. To compare cost of nuclear vs solar/wind you would need to include humongous batteries that would be needed to smooth out output of solar/wind stations which nuclear powerplants do not need. We don't have the technology to build those batteries in sufficient capacity and so the price of solar/wind is currently very, very high (the price of us all cooking/freezing/suffocating/starving, etc.)

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