261–270 of 686 posts
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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.
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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.
Like when a child (or even an adult) says they don't like vegetables and it's pointed out to them that in fact they do like the vegetable called lettuce, so their statement needs updating. Now their attitudes can be reframed.
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> 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…
And what about non-DT fusion? Helion, funded by Sam Altman, is doing DD/DHe3 fusion. Non-thermal fusion with direct energy conversion. They are attempting net electricity for 2024.
If someone held a gun to my head and forced me to invest in a fusion effort, it would be Helion.
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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.
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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.
It's not hand-waving. We've got got what, close to a billion fission reactor-hours worth of data? Perhaps more? We know exactly how safe they are. Also: "safety issues?" Useless to talk about safety issues in a vacuum. Safety issues compared to what? - Fossil fuels, which are literally guaranteed to fry this planet? - Wind, water, solar? Great but not sufficient and/or feasible in all locales. - An imaginary energy s…
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Only if we never use fast reactors, which fission almost all the long-lived stuff. Take what's left, encase it in glass and bury it, and it'll be back to the radioactivity of the original ore in 300 years.
Well, except for the 7 long lived fission products. Those are possibly good targets for space disposal.
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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…
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…
Honestly, I don't understand why we can't do both. I don't think this has to be framed as a zero sum problem (I think way too many issues are naively framed that way). With reference to the article, the funding levels over the past decade (globally) were roughly $200m/yr. That's really nothing in terms of government money and well within the realm that just the US could sustain such an effort alone. It would be rough…
Still, I do feel that some fusion hype is partially due to people not giving fission enough credit though.
Happy to be back, thanks!
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> 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…
And what about non-DT fusion? Helion, funded by Sam Altman, is doing DD/DHe3 fusion. Non-thermal fusion with direct energy conversion. They are attempting net electricity for 2024.
Every advanced anything company says net electricity by 2024. I'm not holding my breath.
I'd be thrilled to be wrong.
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…