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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

#311

Post by socialdemocrat »

JohnBooty wrote: post #226
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.

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…

But that safety comes in large parts from strict regulations which have made nuclear power very expensive. Many seem to live in this alternative reality where we can have bit super safe, lightly regulated and cheap nuclear.

I am afraid we can only have one of those attributes.

And figuring out how to build cheap nuclear in the West is actually a pretty complex thing. The US cannot even figure out why their roads and railroads cost many times that of other countries. If they cannot figure that out, then how are they going to solve a far trickier problem?

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

#312

Post by rewgs »

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 is one of my favorite comments I’ve seen on HN. If only more people would see this and go bjnovaknodding.gif

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

#313

Post by selectodude »

JohnBooty wrote: post #291
acidburnNSA wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah. The opposition and scaremongering from the fossil fuel industry and scaremongering science-deniers has been utterly effective. No surprise there. What's dismaying and frankly shocking is the utter failure of the nuclear industry to mount even a feeble defense in the public eye.

There is zero risk, none, to government regulatory bodies when they say no. Saying yes is putting your ass on the line. The NRC has absolutely no reason to say yes to anything and there is a positive feedback loop for them to regulate nuclear out of existence in the US.

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

#314

Post by selectodude »

socialdemocrat wrote: post #311
JohnBooty wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But that safety comes in large parts from strict regulations which have made nuclear power very expensive. Many seem to live in this alternative reality where we can have bit super safe, lightly regulated and cheap nuclear. I am afraid we can only have one of those attributes. And figuring out how to build cheap nuclear in the West is actually a pretty complex thing. The US cannot even figure out why their roads and…

> But that safety comes in large parts from strict regulations which have made nuclear power very expensive.

Nonsense. The strict regulations are why there have been two nuclear starts in the USA since 1978.

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

#315

Post by lawrenceyan »

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…

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it impossible for fusion to generate a nuclear meltdown scenario that fission has the potential for?

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

#316

Post by credit_guy »

mrshadowgoose wrote: post #202
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?

The taste of immense profit is in the air. In the minds of potential investors, fusion is no longer a "lol maybe in 50 years" technology. Advances in magnetic modeling and magnet technology have resulted in cheaper, easier-to-develop alternatives to the classic Tokamak. Timelines are now believably "this decade" for demonstration reactors. Energy production/harvesting is a foundational element of our civilization. Li…

> In the minds of potential investors, fusion is no longer a "lol maybe in 50 years" technology.

No. Potential investors are used to extremely skewed investments results for startups. Most startups fail, but some of those that succeed, succeed spectacularly.

A successful fusion startup is almost guaranteed to have a spectacular success, something that would make Facebook or Uber or Tesla look like small potatoes. Given that, a VC is ok with investing in it even if they think the likelihood of success is only 1%. They would not if they think that likelihood is only 0.01%, because at that level estimates are not reliable (who's to say it's 0.01% and not 0.00001% ?). But if there's a reasonable argument that P(success) ~ 1%, then it's a no-brainer to invest, because even a mistake of 2 orders of magnitude would still result in a positive return.

For the rest of us though, the "fusion is 50 years in the future" can simply be replaced with "there's a 99% chance fusion will not be done in the next 50 years". Or, what the heck, just leave it at "fusion is 50 years in the future" and you'll be much more right than wrong.

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

#317

Post by acidburnNSA »

AughFuckFusion wrote: post #294
iambateman wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tf say does the public have? This is a terrible excuse. The public doesn't have any say in the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of decision making that happens in this country.... blame politicians ffs, not people who don't matter.

You have clearly never been in the public comment session at a Nuclear Regulatory Commission meeting. The public has a huge amount to do with it.

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

#318

Post by modriano »

jmyeet wrote: post #200
acidburnNSA wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Groan here we go again. > Oh, yeah, just fine, not a hitch: Now show me list of the 8 million people who die per year from air pollution. https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution > The solution being: Ignore it, I guess? I mentioned the solutions but didn't provide a link. here you go. https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html > And we fight wars for peace too. See the literature https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/kh050…

> Groan here we go again. Yeah, we do with more pro-nuclear propaganda and outright falsehoods (again). > Now show me list of the 8 million people who die per year from air pollution. No, it doesn't. Here's the exact quote from your source: > The combined effects of ambient air pollution and household air pollution is associated with 7 million premature deaths annually. Not "die from" but "is associated with". What d…

8 million deaths annually from air pollution is pretty well supported by a number of methodologically sound studies, with anthropogenic air pollution being responsible for more than half of all air pollution deaths [0].

We let the US nuclear construction industry die, so it's pretty expensive to rebuild a workforce with the skills to build new nuclear plants, and that has contributed to the cost of nuclear power rising above some other power sources [1], but that's only because the cost of CO2 pollution isn't accounted for, which is a massive subsidy for fossil fuel power producers.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/data-review-air-pollution-deaths

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricit...

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

#319

Post by lven »

Fusion is generally touted by many as an energy "Holy Grail." Indeed, it appears to have similar qualities, being both perpetually elusive and miraculous, able to solve all mankind's problems. Media reporting tends to discuss the benefits of fusion with misleading and false statements and no discussion of fusion’s negative attributes. The financial and practical perspective of fusion based power is missing. I've written a post about this here: https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion. I cover fusion's issues compared to fission. In particular: far worse neutron and gamma damage, 10x more demanding heat transfer, parasitic power draws, 50-100x larger radiological waste volume, higher financial and nuclear accident risk compared to new new micro reactors, higher cost by any metric, similar or worse proliferation characteristics, etc. My aim was to add a dissenting perspective on the practicality of near-term fusion energy systems.

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

#320

Post by acidburnNSA »

pyuser583 wrote: post #258
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…

Everything I know about breeder reactors comes from the Radioactive Boyscout, which says they sounds great but are insanely unstable and not yet workable. Is that true? What’s the state of breeder reactors today?

Russia has been operating big ones for decades just fine. The US had a few excellent and beautiful prototype ones (EBR-2 and FFTF), but Clinton shut them down. France built 2 big ones, the first (Phenix) was great and the 2nd (4x larger, SuperPhenix) had various non-nuclear problems and shut down with a poor overall history. China and India both have small ones running fine and big ones under construction.

Many Breeder type reactors also exhibit natural safety characteristics, where they can both shut down and remove afterglow heat with no external power or user intervention at all. This is because of low-pressure coolants like liquid metal or molten salt. They can handle loss of heat sink, loss of flow, and tranisent overpower (e.g. rod widthdrawal) without the control rods going in. Normal water cooled reactors could not survive such events without melting.

So there's a strong argument to be made that while regular reactors are very safe, breeder reactors can be even safer.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/002954...

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