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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

#331

Post by acidburnNSA »

AughFuckFusion wrote: post #293
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'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. Well, a comment posting without financials pretty much underlines why more fission reactors don't get built: the nuclear community is insanely bad at pitching to investors without magic on the line. Unfortunately, investors in our societ…

If you add district heating to LWRs their effective efficiency goes from 33% to over 57%. If we adjust markets to value on-demand (including nights/weekends/winters) low-carbon heat and electricity, LWR economics would be good, even in the USA.

They're already expected to be essential for decarbonizing at scale.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...

I have plenty of rants about how LCOE is wholly inappropriate as a metric of overall decarbonized system costs. If you look from that perspective, LWRs built by Koreans, Chinese, Indians, or Russians are an incredible deal.

We just need to have the Koreans come over and re-teach us how to build reactors. It's beautifully symmetric because we originally taught them. They've perfected the knowledge, enhanced it, saved it, and can now teach us.

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

#332

Post by in3d »

godelski wrote: post #267
tejohnso wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FWIW, as someone with a degree in physics, I don't know anyone with a similar background that watches her content. It's not that she is frequently wrong, it is that the opinions are pretty biased and cherry picking. She seems to be more focused on content creation than the actual physics. Honestly I think PBS does a much better job, and importantly stresses that their presentation is overly simplified. A lot of scien…

Definitely. Her content gets posted here a lot but the quality of her videos is just not very good and she’s not great at explaining things either.

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

#333

Post by gwbrooks »

AughFuckFusion wrote: post #293
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'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. Well, a comment posting without financials pretty much underlines why more fission reactors don't get built: the nuclear community is insanely bad at pitching to investors without magic on the line. Unfortunately, investors in our societ…

This is a solvable problem if there's political will to solve it.

Much of the uncertainty and cost of a new fission plant is tied to regulatory, permitting and litigation costs. No one's suggesting eliminating regulation, but the near-limitless ability to hold up a project with specious lawsuits could be curtailed.

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

#334

Post by dodobirdlord »

pfdietz wrote: post #245
dodobirdlord wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The main motivation to not reprocess fuel was nuclear nonproliferation, because it frees up the plutonium for nuclear weapons. But on the off chance that governments ever want to build a giant pile of nuclear weapons it’s sensible to not get rid of the nuclear waste, since if it ever turns out you do want it again it’s very expensive and time consuming to produce. Since you’ve already gone to all of the effort of mining the uranium and producing a bunch of plutonium, best to just keep it around somewhere in case you ever do want it for some reason.

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

#335

Post by natmaka »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #197
spawarotti wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long will the fuel last? Sabine Hossenfelder references studies in which we have enough Uranium for 50 years max. 6:08 here: https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k

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…

Can you name a single industrial satisfyingly-working breeder reactor? AFAIK, and after ~70 years of research (juge investments in many nations) there is none.

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

#336

Post by indymike »

jmyeet wrote: post #297
indymike wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I swear nuclear fan boys are just as delusional as climate deniers. No, some of us actually have operated a reactor for a living, and have first hand experience with the technology, and most of the issues people like to discuss. In my case, I served in the US Navy in nuclear propulsion. This whole debate seems crazy. Truth is the tech works, and it should be inexpensive compared to burning fossil fuels. Then there…

> In my case, I served in the US Navy in nuclear propulsion. Ah, the US military, famous for building and operating things at low cost. > Truth is the tech works Nuclear propulsion works because it has the US military to secure it but more importantly, a carrier or a submarine benefits from not carrying fuel in a way that has nothing to do with economics. You power a submarine with nuclear simply because there's no o…

> As for the rest about over-regulation, the first point is that you have to deal with the political and legal reality.

Reality: regulatory compliance is the bulk of the cost.

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

#337

Post by mlsu »

socialdemocrat wrote: post #304
downrightmike wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is energy companies and the entrenched family assholes that run them. Three Mile Island was being forced to push ahead and use the crane to move the vessel, even though it WAS damaged and would have likely lead to a meltdown. Engineers knew it wasn't safe and were punished and fired for not using the crane unless it was actually checked and in working order. The public is right to be wary of nuclear when…

If I could upvote this a hundred times. It is easy to mock the public for not getting nuclear power and being paranoid. People today have really forgotten how much people got lied to constantly about nuclear power. France which they like to pull out as this amazing nuclear country built all the reactors they hype up by faking safety checks on nuclear reactors. It is just really naive to assume every nuclear plant is…

If you're surprised by the lack of paperwork in fission reactors, just wait till you see (or... not!) the documentation on coal and ng powerplants!

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

#338

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #197
spawarotti wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long will the fuel last? Sabine Hossenfelder references studies in which we have enough Uranium for 50 years max. 6:08 here: https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k

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 making a lot of assumptions about what uranium is economically viable to extract. Specifically, this link appears to be assuming that it is possible to filter the entire oceans and Earth's entire crust for all the uranium and thorium they store. Those are both obviously unreasonable assumptions.

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

#339

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #331
AughFuckFusion wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Well, a comment posting without financials pretty much underlines why more fission reactors don't get built: the nuclear community is insanely bad at pitching to investors without magic on the line. Unfortunately, investors in our societ…

If you add district heating to LWRs their effective efficiency goes from 33% to over 57%. If we adjust markets to value on-demand (including nights/weekends/winters) low-carbon heat and electricity, LWR economics would be good, even in the USA. They're already expected to be essential for decarbonizing at scale. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511... I have plenty of rants about how LCOE is w…

That is probably a good idea, but comes with the major political problem of putting nuclear reactors very close to large populations of people who can complain about the zoning.

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

#340

Post by miles »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #323
miles wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Japan confirms first Fukushima worker death from radiation https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-45423575

That's basically a judge saying it. The scientific basis is very unclear.

> That's basically a judge saying it. The scientific basis is very unclear.

"In January 2015, the MHLW [Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare] compiled medical knowledge on lung cancer and radiation exposure in a report resulting from a review meeting of medical experts, and published the immediate view similar to that for thyroid cancer. The first claim for case of lung cancer was approved by MHLW in August 2018, and this was also the first case involving death."

--From "Responses and Actions Taken by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare of Japan on Radiation Protection at Works Relating to the Accident at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant 9th Edition (Fiscal Year of 2021)" https://www.mhlw.go.jp/english/topics/2011eq/workers/ri/ar/r...

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