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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

#471

Post by cycomanic »

ascar wrote: post #433
cycomanic wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > 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 w…

> It's the other way around, the actual cost of building nuclear instead of much cheaper and faster renewables causes an opportunity cost That's under the assumption the available money, hardware and labor of ramping up solar and building nuclear plants directly competes with each other. That's a pretty strong assumption and I highly doubt there is a strong enough link between any of those three for your argument to…

No that's under the assumption that we have limited funding.

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

#472

Post by cinntaile »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #268
godelski wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> Still, I do feel that some fusion hype is partially due to people not giving fission enough credit though

I wonder if this is more a marketing thing. Fission has a bad rep so people try to evade it by getting funding for fusion or SMRs (I know this is fission too) instead. Which people don't associate with classical nuclear reactor tech. Even though it's probably better to just put that money towards a new AP1000 from a cost perspective.

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

#473

Post by 7952 »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #217
sweezyjeezy wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep bringing up climate change, like the only alternative is coal. Do you really think that nuclear fission can be a key player in reducing emissions to net zero? It seems far too expensive and slow to set up for something this urgent.

Fossil + biofuel makes 80% of our energy today. Getting rid of that will require vast amounts of zero-carbon energy. Wind and solar need to be built out at breakneck speed if we want to be serious. Much faster than what we're doing now. So does nuclear fission. I assume you're only looking at the slow and expensive nuclear builds? China is looking to build 150 new reactors to meet its goals. https://www.bloomberg.com…

Whatever source we use it needs to be built out at breakneck speed. It just seems that wind, solar, and batteries are more amenable to that than nuclear in a basic logistical sense. All of the ways people suggest to make nuclear faster and cheaper already exist in those fields.

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

#474

Post by manmal »

adrianN wrote: post #392
manmal wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Storage is certainly not harder to build than nuclear power plants. Power-to-Gas is technologically quite straightforward. The research that's currently happening is just to make it cheaper until we have enough renewables for grid-scale storage to make sense. The really hard part of becoming carbon neutral is the sectors other than electricity, e.g. heating and transportation, but nuclear power won't help you there.

Power to gas (incl reverse) is terribly lossy right now.

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

#475

Post by adrian_b »

stuartd wrote: post #50
throwaway71271 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

700 million people live in poverty 3 meals per day, 5$ per meal for 365 days is 3,832,500,000,000$

If meals cost 5$ all over the planet then there would be mass starvation

Yes, indeed.

Even in the European Union, it is possible to pay around $5 for all the meals of a day, including not only adequate quantities of vegetables and fruits, but also a moderate amount of chicken meat.

However, for that, you must be cost-conscious, because from the same shops you could buy an equivalent quantity of food, but at a price even 10 times greater, when you choose to buy processed foods, even those as cheap as bread, instead of buying only raw ingredients.

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

#476

Post by ncmncm »

pfdietz wrote: post #255
acidburnNSA wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This shocking factlet is repeated, verified, and credited to you in the writeup in my sibling comment.

So you did, thanks! BTW, the Earth becomes uninhabitable in about 1 billion years, not 4.

We could get there even quicker with a little effort.

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

#477

Post by ncmncm »

mlindner wrote: post #377
acidburnNSA wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No proliferation risk at all in a tritium fountain full of 14 MeV neutrons? Are you sure you know what you're talking about? These will all be guarded with pseudo military guns guards and gates just like fission, and monitored by the IAEA. As for radiological safety, see point about tritium. And google tritium leak nuclear plant for good measure. Youre right that there is less radioactivity in fusion plants, but mayb…

> No proliferation risk at all in a tritium fountain full of 14 MeV neutrons? Are you sure you know what you're talking about? If you're putting hunks of uranium inside a fusion pressure vessel it'd be really obvious. Tritium itself doesn't have proliferation risk. > These will all be guarded with pseudo military guns guards and gates just like fission, and monitored by the IAEA. No they won't. Because even if you cr…

A thousand tons of molten radioactive lithium, exposed to air, would make a pretty satisfying boom.

The tritium being bred in the lithium had better amount to more than micrograms, because that will be fuel. Separating the day's few grams of tritium from the thousand tons of molten radioactive lithium coursing through miles of pipe is an exercise not yet tackled by fusion promoters.

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

#478

Post by jules »

bakuninsbart wrote: post #428
formerly_proven wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You can however price this in, and I doubt it accounts for 110$/MW. Furthermore, nuclear energy specifically only runs according to schedule. Reducing or raising output is expensive and slow.

> You can however price this in, and I doubt it accounts for 110$/MW.

What do you base this on?

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

#479

Post by ncmncm »

freemint wrote: post #417
pfdietz wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Everything in the reactor is blasted with enormous neutron flux, inducing radioactivity in everything.

A thousand tons of molten, radioactive lithium could easily ruin your day, if ever exposed to air.

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

#480

Post by thrown_22 »

ncmncm wrote: post #446
thrown_22 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how is it better when those assholes kill tens of thousands with coal every year instead? If we lynched a few of them every time a nuclear reactor blew up we'd have a lot fewer energy related deaths and the market would eventually self correct.

Coal is on its way out. It is now cheaper to build a new solar farm to replace a coal plant than just to operate the already built coal plant. It is as cheap to build renewables as to operate an already built and paid for nuke. Renewables cost is still in free fall. In ten years, renewables will be so cheap that overbuilding 10x, 20x, will be cheaper than operating a nuke.

Ok, we replaced a coal plant with solar panels.

What do we do at night?

Build storage for the solar plant? That's more expensive than a nuclear plant of the same capacity.

Build long range high voltage power lines? Again, more expensive than building a nuclear power plant of the same capacity.

People have been spoiled by the incredible energy ROI, portability and responsiveness of fossil fuels and think everything has the same capacity.

It doesn't.

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