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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

#241

Post by pfdietz »

einpoklum wrote: post #161
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…

> It's way easier. Is that why power plants go years over time and hugely over-budget? > It has been working fine since the 1950s. Oh, yeah, just fine, not a hitch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident... > Waste problem is solved The solution being: Ignore it, I guess? > net saves millions of lives by displacing air pollution And we fight wars for peace too. > It's zero carbon Not if you coun…

Fission reactors can be easier than fusion reactors, and still go over time and hugely over budget. This just means fusion reactors are likely to also go over time and budget.

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

#242

Post by AQuantized »

tejohnso wrote: post #225
acidburnNSA wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uranium and thorium fuel on earth can make 100% of today's primary energy for about 4 billion years, using breeder reactors, which were proven in 1952 near Arco Idaho at the Experimental Breeder Reactor 1. Writeup explaining this with lots of actual scientific references at the bottom here: https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-... People who say uranium will last 50 years either aren't aware of…

This is so depressing. It's nearly impossible to form a confident opinion these days without a ton of effort. I heard Sabine, I said to myself...makes sense...and it looks like she's put a lot of work into understanding all of this, and she is a professional. So that was it. Now you're saying she's wrong. Very wrong. And you're a nuclear reactor physicist (thanks for comment!) Am I going to go read all of the relevan…

It's worth mentioning that being a theoretical physicist working in a niche subfield doesn't necessarily qualify you to talk broadly about other fields and assess their societal impacts. I think these types of videos work best when it's clearly just a smart person sharing what they've learned to engage your interest rather than as a substitute for a lecture by an expert.

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

#243

Post by AlbertCory »

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”.

So France isn't a democracy? In a democracy, minorities have rights, but they don't have an infinite veto.

As someone else says, "People object to living next to the airport. They object to new roads. They object to schools being built, rail lines, bus stops, even hospitals."

Where I live, the old Orchard Supply store is being turned into a Costco. There are people objecting to that, too.

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

#244

Post by boringg »

Hmm I suspect that this isn't accurate but if it is, also relevant is that in the last 12 months we were at the top of the crazy money market so people were handing out cash and desperate for something with a seeming return to it. Seems like a click-baity title to me.

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

#245

Post by pfdietz »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #210
cyanydeez wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>After decades of cooling, France, like most other nuclear power generating countries, has no long-term solution in place for high and intermediate spent fuel waste disposal. https://www.power-technology.com/analysis/managing-nuclear-w... Yes, short term they manage it. When we are discussing the future, our concern is long term.

The long term plan is to reprocess it, which is why we need to keep it around in the meantime. If we just wanted to get rid of it that would be trivially easy. But we don’t want that because we know in future we’re going to want to get it back from wherever we put it.

They've given up on fast reactors. Reprocessing with thermal reactors doesn't actually solve the problem, as MOX fuel cannot then be further reprocessed and used in thermal reactors again. You still end up with all the fission products, and now the higher actinides from spent MOX, to deal with.

Having said that, dry casks are a perfectly cromulent way to deal with spent fuel.

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

#246

Post by acidburnNSA »

sweezyjeezy wrote: post #239
acidburnNSA wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

By expensive, I mean in $/kWh - yes we could build enough nuclear power plants to stop carbon emissions, but if the cost of energy is multiple times greater than that of renewables, why not invest in those instead? I've heard this idea that we should "do everything", but I don't get that, why don't we do the best thing as well and as fast as we can?

> but if the cost of energy is multiple times greater than that of renewables, why not invest in those instead?

First of all, we are investing more in renewables right now than nuclear. Much much more.

Second of all, your statement is true for LCOE, but LCOE is an inappropriate metric for systems costs. It does not include the cost of storage, additional transmission lines to reach thousands of distributed wind/solar sites, extra capacity to fill up the storage, the required smart grid tech, etc.

Quoting just LCOE is becoming extremely problematic. Everyone does it, and it's very misleading.

Details of why it's best to also invest in nuclear from a full systems perspective are published and peer reviewed here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.08.006

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

#247

Post by pfdietz »

freetime2 wrote: post #177
mwint wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waste problem - drive through the US state of Nevada. There’s nothing for hundreds of miles. You could likely just throw the waste out of an airplane over Nevada and be more or less fine. With containment techniques combined with the ridiculous amount of uninhabited desert the US has, this is a non issue.

They already tried this in Nevada and failed for political reasons [1]. Dumping nuclear waste in the desert may be a non issue to you (and to me as well), but to a lot of people - particularly people who actually live in Nevada - it is a very serious issue. The question of how to dispose of nuclear waste - in a manner that is satisfying to the residents of the state where it is being disposed - remains an unsolved is…

The reason Yucca Mountain sputtered out was that it wasn't really needed. It's cheaper to just put the spent fuel in dry casks for a few centuries, even if the stuff is then buried (or reprocessed, or shot into space). Given there was no $$ incentive to make YM work, any amount of opposition could stop it.

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

#248

Post by joak »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #19
twarge wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. There have been no breakthroughs. The projects getting funding are just different enough to be not immediately disprovable and continue to spectacularly overpromise without solving any of the real problems. Chamber embrittlement? Nuclear waste? (activation of the apparatus by the 12 MeV fusion netrons is a lot worse than the 100 keV fission neutron.)

> have been no breakthroughs Magnet miniaturisation and CADs like the stellarator [1] refute this. With respect to waste and embrittlement, those are simpler consumables and waste products than fossil fuels and atmospheric emissions. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator

And what about Helion Energy tech? Pulsed collision of plasmoids (FRC), with direct energy conversion. Deuterium helium3 aneutronic fusion, no neutrons.

They've received $500M (lead by Sam Altman) to demo net electricity by 2024.

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

#249

Post by DennisP »

shadowofneptune wrote: post #170
Apocryphon wrote: post #7

Crazy to imagine what would’ve happened if in the past it had been more than sub-fusion never. http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fus...

I've known about this chart for a long while, but recently I've become skeptical of it. What says that fusion would be a success even if that level of funding was reached? The most mature fusion reactor being built, ITER, is gigantic and it's not clear how it could be made cheaper or miniturized.

Actually it's quite clear: use REBCO superconductors.

Tokamak output scales with the square of reactor volume and the fourth power of magnetic field strength. Double the field, 16X the output.

Modern REBCO superconductors can support much stronger magnetic fields than ITER will manage. That's why CFS is building a reactor using REBCO which is much smaller than ITER, but should have the same performance. It'll be half the size of JET, which was built in a year. They're planning a net power attempt in 2025 and a lot of independent fusion researchers think they'll succeed.

CFS is a spinoff from MIT, whose Alcator C-Mod had more powerful magnets than any other tokamak in the world.

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

#250

Post by pfdietz »

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…

> I started out in fusion and switched to advanced fission.

You are in good company. Lawrence Lidsky, the fusion guy at MIT who wrote the famous article "The Trouble with Fusion" back in the 1980s, also switched to advanced fission reactors. His critique of DT fusion is still worth reading. The big issue, the lousy volumetric power density of DT fusion reactors compared to fission reactors, is still a huge albatross around the necks of all these private DT efforts.

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