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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

#411

Post by blippage »

Scientists have been futzing around with fusion energy since I was a schoolboy in the 70's, and undoubtedly before. Maybe they'll be a breakthrough, but I think the odds are heavily against them.

Fission, OTOH, seems an interesting bet. The problem with old-style reactors is that there's basically no ESD (Emergency Shutdown) that you can perform. Those radioactive rods are going keep radiating heat no matter what. Newer styles seem a much saner approach, were two different materials must be in contact for a reaction to occur. In an emergency you just let one of them drain out, thereby stopping the reaction.

Coal is an abundant source of fuel with a proven track record. The big problem is with pollution. But there's no rule that says you have to puke out the waste into the atmosphere. It can be processed. After all, oil is pretty shitty when it comes up out of the ground, and needs a lot of processing. This is a costly exercise, of course, but one that we willingly undertake. The question now is one of economics: will the cost of waste processing mean that coal burning is feasible? It's a question that nobody seems interested in asking. We just seem to have the default assumption that coal energy was shitty in the past and must be shitty in the present. "Eww, coal".

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

#412

Post by justforthisandn »

freemint wrote: post #402
jeltz wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No post body was provided.

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

#413

Post by smaudet »

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.

Well first of all energy storage, is not production, but as you asked:

1) Reduced need for energy storage. Right to repair for everything, write code that is efficient and lower power, distributed systems which don't require complex centralized systems to run. Taxes on unused compute cycles to help create incentives for this, perhaps.

2) For actual energy storage, something like the sand heat system recently put into use in Scandinavia, or the mechanical earth dams (store energy in potential energy mass, less dangerous than an actual water dam, a lot easier to build). For immediate electric storage at scale you can do e.g. saline water storage tanks which hold mild electric charge, who knows maybe there is some inert chemistry which could be devised for a safer transportable version of a lithium ion battery...

3) For energy production, I am a long time advocate of geothermal. There's no real downside, besides digging holes and I guess maybe a well collapse, but you're limited to loss of whatever is in the whole/immediate surrounding in the case of a cave in, there are no engineering problems to solve except pumping water around, which is a well known task. Solar/wind for ships, airplanes, space vehicles, electric/hydrogen for storage/consumption scenarios where the grid is not accessible (remote locations e.g. the poles, alaska, siberia, African/Asian planes)

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

#414

Post by troorl »

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…

> Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling).

Do you count in all the subsidies the renewables get from governments, including the production of the solar panels/wind mills, land ownership, utilities and all kinds of tax cuts and preferential treatment? In my country billionaires own massive solar farms and make tons of money at the expense of everyone else.

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

#415

Post by rapsey »

credit_guy wrote: post #316
mrshadowgoose wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Giv…

The cost effectiveness of fusion is completely up in the air. People speak about fusion as if it somehow is just going to produce infinite power at no cost.

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

#416

Post by cycomanic »

bratbag wrote: post #399
dignick wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cost factor isn't as relevant as you think, as this is an apple's to oranges comparison. Renewables are too unreliable to act as baseline generation for a country. In the UK last year for example we had very little wind, so we had to ramp up our gas power output to make up for our shortages in renewables. We burned through much of our gas reserves before the Ukraine war started, because of Renewable power unreliabili…

Just repeating the baseline myth does not make it true. Nuclear does not compete with gas it competes with coal and renewables. It is often technically difficult but more importantly economically prohibitive to run nuclear as on demand sources. So for both renewables and nuclear you need some sort of storage or peakers.

Moreover nuclear is not the beacon of reliability, Frances nuclear plants were running to only 60% capacity due to maintanance and weather (when it gets hot nuclear plants have to shut down or reduce output significantly). Guess who was picking up the shortfall... German renewables and gas.

Finally, cost is absolutely the main measure: if the cost of nuclear is 3x wind/solar (and the cost of solar is falling exponentially) and you want to replace fossil fuels as quickly as possible the obvious way is to build renewables, you can overbuild 300% at the same cost. At that point you're close to being able to run your grid if you are sufficiently geographically distributed (even without batteries). Moreover in 10 years when your nuclear plant is finished building the price differential is like >5x due to the cost decreases.

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

#417

Post by freemint »

pfdietz wrote: post #236
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.

From the viewpoint of a utility, what matters is not large accidents (because their liability is capped) but rather smaller accidents that could ruin their investment. The TMI accident didn't kill anyone, but it gravely damaged the owner of the power plant, as they had just lost a large investment. Because of this, fusion is likely WORSE from the utility's point of view than fission. While fusion reactors are less li…

What accident do you foresee that makes components of a fusion reactor sufficiently radio active?

Containment field failure should leave the components just as radio active as a controlled shutdown as the plasma distinguishes immediately or am i missing something?

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

#418

Post by cycomanic »

jamesrom wrote: post #407
dignick wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> > 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.

More than half of a nuclear plant is essentially the same as any large scale power plant (goal, gas...). The opportunity for reducing cost through economies of scales is low. Economies of scales work for things build in factories, much less so for construction projects. That is true in general, not just for power plants.

> 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.

Why? It's the other way around, the actual cost of building nuclear instead of much cheaper and faster renewables causes an opportunity cost, because we can replace fossil fuels much faster building up renewables.

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

#419

Post by cycomanic »

manmal wrote: post #380
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…

The problem is that the sun is not always shining (and half the year not at the right angle), and wind is not always blowing. Unless a country has access to always-on sources (like sea currents), energy must be stored or things must be burned. Storage is hard and energy intensive to build, and many countries would need a few months worth of storage to never bother about burning stuff again. And that’s _a lot_, you wo…

If your grid is large enough (and that is already happening in Europe for economic reasons), you have enough geographic distribution to average out variations. There have been studies that showed you could run the US on something like 500% overcapacity with a fully integrated grid using only renewables and no storage.

Moreover nuclear are slow moving, they typically don't load follow, so even with a combined nuclear/renewables you still either need significant overcapacity or some sort of peaker. So you haven't actually solved the variation problem.

Finally, because cost for nuclear is largely dominated by capex (construction cost, both in dollars and CO2 foodprint), not running the nuclear plant as close to capacity as possible will even more increase the price and also reduce the CO2 lifetime emission. In usual comparisons which puts nuclear on par with renewables, nuclear is assumed to run essentially 24/7 while solar/wind are based on some statistical uptime. If we operate a nuclear not close to capacity its lifetime carbon footprint becomes significantly worse.

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

#420

Post by freemint »

danaris wrote: post #156
sacrosancty wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fusion isn't a silver bullet even if it works. If it costs more than solar+battery then it's worthless.

Solar + battery isn't much help for - under the earth - under the ocean - deeper into space Granted, we don't need a lot of power in these places right now . But if we have the option ...then maybe we'll find some good ways to use it.

I don't understand the udner the earth part. We've been able to transport power into mine shafts for pretty long.
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