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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

#401

Post by freemint »

Retric wrote: post #326
acidburnNSA wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that's a good and fair point. I shouldn't say I oppose fusion R&D. I feel more like we should be more focused on deploying 100s of serialized LWR fission plants right now alongside all the wind/solar/batteries/hydro to solve climate change, while also investing R&D into things like advanced fission and fusion, and geothermal. There's certainly an under-investment in low carbon energy tech in general compared to…

The issue when you say let’s build X00 new LWR is just cost vs benefit. Something like 5 Trillion in additional nuclear subsidies might slow down climate change a low single digit percentage over the next 30 years. This relates not just to the high cost of nuclear but also the delay between deciding to build nuclear and actually getting low carbon energy from a nuclear reactor. Spend 1/4th that on solar or wind subsi…

500 is 1-(1-risk)^500 the risk

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

#402

Post by freemint »

jeltz wrote: post #394
smaudet wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cost of climate change clearly far outweighs the cost of nuclear plants and waste. Um, yes until you factor in failure rates due to incompetence + natural failure. Chernobyl, look it up, massive cost, massive loss of land, death/cancer rate of all exposed nearly 100%. Until you can solve the "corrupt bureaucrat cuts corners he doesn't understand" problem, and also demonstrate that the failure of a single reacto…

So how do you think that we should solve energy storage? Both batteries and dams are dangerous and can lead to disasters. Dams failing have killed way more people than nuclear ever has.

Batteries are dangerous? What do you mean by that?

> Dams failing have killed way more people than nuclear ever has.

And this solely due to one incident under communism where damn was not maintained.

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

#403

Post by markvdb »

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…

> They were bad, but just bad enough to roll over and give up on fission.

Competent engineers are perfectly capable of maintaining a nuclear reactor, _technically_ speaking.

Large projects are vulnerable to all vices of human nature though. Idiots in manglement. Greedy people trying to squeeze out more profit. Terrorists. Maffiosi, whether running a country or not. Let's not forget that scale is not just about money or spatial dimensions, but also time...

We have a perfect example: Enerhodar, Ukraine. A working nuclear power plant is in the middle of a war zone right now.

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

#404

Post by felixmeziere »

slothtrop wrote: post #234
lambdaba wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the fear is we’ll use the extra energy to literally warm the planet? Seems like a scale mismatch. Climate “engineering” like blocking out the sun seems like a much more real danger

Not "warm", because with fusion filling this cache, energy usage wouldn't lead to CO2 pollution. They're suggesting it would lead to increases in consumption which means waste. Notwithstanding that a) life won't necessarily get more affordable for people, and stuff costs money, b) there are innovations now, and expected in the future, which would drastically curtail waste, though some regulatory measures might be nec…

The graphs of energy availability/consumption and emissions of garbage are correlated. This is a historical fact.

Life is literally as affordable for people as the amount of energy that is available to them, that's the main factor (a bit of optimization of processes also plays but at a more minor order). Food used to be 25% of households' spending early XXth century, when someone would go buy eggs from the local market or farmer. Today it is 10% if you count the margins of industrials, distributors etc. But if you just look at the price of the eggs, then it's probably less than 1%.

What allowed this? Energy! Energy allowed for abundant food, a long life, studying and the general tertiarisation of the economy (giving birth to tech) and of course consumerism. The more energy the cheaper everything is the more people consume, at least as long as we persuade people that buying things is the greatest pleasure in life.

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

#405

Post by logifail »

JohnBooty wrote: post #369
joak wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This conversation seems to me a bit outdated: building a fission reactor takes one or two decades and its kWh is costlier than alternatives. To get something cheaper, we need to wait for the next gen of technology, in one or two decades. Lucky if we can compete with the costs of solar, wind and batteries in a decade. Even with the support of greens, government, scientists, etc this is going no where. Nuclear fission…

building a fission reactor takes one or two decades and its kWh is costlier than alternatives It didn't and doesn't need to be that way. Obviously we need strong regulatory oversight over nuclear power, but a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations imposed by politicians who are (a) pandering to public fear (b) heavily influence by the fossil fuel industry. Also, talking about kWh c…

> > building a fission reactor takes one or two decades and its kWh is costlier than alternatives

> It didn't and doesn't need to be that way [..] a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations [..]

(Alleged over-)regulation is only part of the story.

"analysis, done by a team of researchers at MIT, is remarkably comprehensive. For many nuclear plants, they have detailed construction records, broken out by which building different materials and labor went to, and how much each of them cost. There's also a detailed record of safety regulations and when they were instituted relative to construction. Finally, they've also brought in the patent applications filed by the companies who designed the reactors. The documents describe the motivations for design changes and the problems those changes were intended to solve."[0]

"while safety regulations added to the costs, they were far from the primary factor. And deciding whether they were worthwhile costs would require a detailed analysis of every regulatory change in light of accidents like Three Mile Island and Fukushima"

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...

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

#406

Post by smaudet »

matkoniecz wrote: post #387
smaudet wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cost of climate change clearly far outweighs the cost of nuclear plants and waste. Um, yes until you factor in failure rates due to incompetence + natural failure. Chernobyl, look it up, massive cost, massive loss of land, death/cancer rate of all exposed nearly 100%. Until you can solve the "corrupt bureaucrat cuts corners he doesn't understand" problem, and also demonstrate that the failure of a single reacto…

> Climate change will slowly roast us all to death, a nuclear failure will, instantly fry us all to molten pulp, I know which one I prefer. If you believe that even the worst nuclear accident at power plant will "instantly fry us all to molten pulp" in any appreciable range (while climate change is worldwide), the you are mistaken > death/cancer rate of all exposed nearly 100%. It is completely untrue. Even among htt…

> If you believe that even the worst nuclear accident at power plant will "instantly fry us all to molten pulp" in any appreciable range (while climate change is worldwide), the you are mistaken

I am not wrong, in a world dotted with miniature fission reactors, as the most extreme pro-fission people would like to favor. If you can build one in space, and it powers the whole earth, that's obviously a very different story than building them every city block.

I am also not wrong about the effects of radiation on the human body, when used as a bomb nuclear weapons literally melt people into goo, ofc with a reactor there are various safeguards but the thing causing the flesh-melt is still occurring, so maybe less instantaneous melt and more gradual boils and blisters leading to severe internal cancers as your cascade of nuclear reactors around the city all blow in a beautiful chain reaction...

> It is completely untrue. Even among https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_liquidators it is not true.

It's not untrue if you define exposed, not to be disingenuous, but those actually exposed to the reactor meltdown, did not survive. Those experiencing second hand exposure in e.g. the town, obviously did not all drop dead, but had increased risk of cancer, death, and those globally exposed, well many fewer dead or at risk of cancer.

So unfortunately when speaking so imprecisely it actually is true, just not in the way you imagine. Even your wikipedia article admits among the liquidators the death rate was almost at least 20% by some estimates, and I would presume these people are wearing some protective equipment, so calling them "exposed" is somewhat disingenous in and of itself...

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

#407

Post by jamesrom »

dignick wrote: post #381
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…

There are several problems with fission (probably fusion too) as I understand it: 1. Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable. 2. Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait. 3. Decommissioning is expensive and a long way in the future. Is that cost built into the cost per MW? How can we…

> Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait.

This is a fallacy in two ways:

1. Scaling up nuclear projects will decrease construction time and cost. Efficiencies are found by with scale.

2. The opportunity cost of not starting nuclear projects now will surely be worse than attempting 100% renewables. The point is that we can invest in both.

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

#408

Post by tsimionescu »

slothtrop wrote: post #228
felixmeziere wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it will be for the second half of this century, if we make it there. Side comment: fusion can be seen as a solution to many of our worst problems. But another way to see it is that without a complete change in what societies value and how they act (i.e. a cultural/philosophical/storytelling change), fusion is just going to increase the rate at which we are transforming this planet into a giant pile of garbage, w…

> fusion is just going to increase the rate at which we are transforming this planet into a giant pile of garbage That rate does not scale negatively with energy prices. It scales positively with population, in the West. We could just accelerate towards stagnant global population growth. Improving economies and access to contraceptives in poor nations could do that. Everybody wins, except the very richest. Coercing t…

> Coercing the population to stop consuming is a non-starter.

Right now we are doing the opposite of that though: the advertising industry, one of the largest in Earth, is mostly about brain-washing people into buying more stuff. We can easily put a stop to this tomorrow while listing nothing of value to society, but instead we fetishize growth so we don't.

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

#409

Post by jabl »

geysersam wrote: post #356
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…

What are the disadvantages of thorium reactors, making them so rare in practice? Cost?

There's no particular upside that at the moment would justify commercializing the technology.

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

#410

Post by formerly_proven »

dignick wrote: post #381
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…

There are several problems with fission (probably fusion too) as I understand it: 1. Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable. 2. Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait. 3. Decommissioning is expensive and a long way in the future. Is that cost built into the cost per MW? How can we…

> 1. Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable.

You can't directly compare cost per generating capacity, because nuclear, gas, coal etc. are available according to schedule, while most renewables aren't. Adding storage around renewables to make them schedulable raises costs.

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