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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

#481

Post by pfdietz »

jabl wrote: post #396
godelski wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, then we're on the same page. But one note, I don't think fusion has the same uphill battle that fission does. You mentioned that the fission industry just hasn't been able to properly demonstrate what they can do, but I don't think this is entirely it. We do have to consider the decades worth of campaigning and lobbying by coal and gas that went after nuclear. That these campaigns even infiltrated the biggest g…

> Fusion doesn't have this same battle to overcome. Ha ha, Greenpeace has already per-emptively decided they hate fusion too.

Greenpeace gives no shit about Emperors having no clothes, so they've been pointing out the grave economic barriers to DT fusion, and also the implications of fusion for proliferation. And they're entirely right about that.

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

#482

Post by CTDOCodebases »

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…

Does it make sense to build nuclear reactors when the environment we are engineering for them to exist in is rapidly changing?

Fukushima showed us the drastic and long lasting consequences of one little design oversight and that was in an environment the reactors where engineered for.

Personally I can't answer this question with the limited knowledge that I have. It seems like a catch 22 type situation.

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

#483

Post by illiac786 »

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.

EDF has published a paper stating they can scale 80% down and then up again, every day, within 30min.

In practice, they have done something like 20% within an hour. It was early 2019, there was such a crazy wind that they had to reduce nuclear production also (after already reducing coal, gas etc. to the min).

I think what they really can do is somewhere in between.

sources, it was on l’energeek, but in French.

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

#484

Post by ncmncm »

upwardbound wrote: post #447
jmyeet wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think you're being pretty quick to write off a subject matter expert on a topic that is their own field of expertise.

Their field involved exactly zero need for economic analysis.

Naval reactor "engineering laboratory technicians" (SMAGs) are reputed among submariners as habitual liars. Strange but true.

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

#485

Post by feet »

CTDOCodebases wrote: post #482
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…

Does it make sense to build nuclear reactors when the environment we are engineering for them to exist in is rapidly changing? Fukushima showed us the drastic and long lasting consequences of one little design oversight and that was in an environment the reactors where engineered for. Personally I can't answer this question with the limited knowledge that I have. It seems like a catch 22 type situation.

The consequences from pushing more carbon out are worse than one nuclear plant failure

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

#486

Post by pfdietz »

mlindner wrote: post #352
pfdietz wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I started out in fusion and switched to advanced fission. You are in good company. Lawrence Lidsky, the fusion guy at MIT who wrote the famous article "The Trouble with Fusion" back in the 1980s, also switched to advanced fission reactors. His critique of DT fusion is still worth reading. The big issue, the lousy volumetric power density of DT fusion reactors compared to fission reactors, is still a huge albatross…

> His critique of DT fusion is still worth reading. The big issue, the lousy volumetric power density of DT fusion reactors compared to fission reactors, is still a huge albatross around the necks of all these private DT efforts. That was largely a product of the times, before high magnetic fields could be achieved. ITER has all those problems, but newer ideas do not.

Your comment just shows you don't understand what he wrote. His critique is affected not at all by the existence of higher magnetic fields.

ITER's volumetric power density is 400x worse than a PWR. ARC's is just 40x worse. Lidsky was pointing out DT fusion reactors are always going to be (generously) 10x lower in volumetric power density than fission reactors, due to limits on handling the power flowing through the first wall. Higher magnetic fields let ARC be better than ITER, but still sucking relative to fission reactors.

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

#487

Post by Retric »

freemint wrote: post #401
Retric wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This isn’t one of those cases where the only thing you care about is if something happens or not as humanity would need to deal with and thus pay for every nuclear accident. As there is no discount if it happens twice vs once every reactor is an independent risk. Thus, 500 reactors is 500x the risk.

You might argue multiple major disasters might result in more reactors being shut down as knee jerk reaction, but shutting down 500 additional reactors is 5x more expensive than shutting down 100.

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

#488

Post by ncmncm »

Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #463
ncmncm wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building 3x renewables in widely distributed places radically reduces volatility. Wind is always blowing somewhere. Sun is always out somewhere. Storage is transportable.

Is storage really transportable ? Like how much energy in any form could you realistically transport for any meaningful distance without using too much of the energy that you are transporting ? Since you made the claim I'd like you to paint any kind of realistic scenario.

There will be a very great deal of ammonia synthesis, worldwide, just because ammonia is so useful for so many things, ultimately billions of tons annually. Ammonia is very transportable.

Even liquified hydrogen is about as transportable as LNG, which is shipped all over.

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

#489

Post by tuatoru »

cycomanic wrote: post #416
bratbag wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%…

> It is often technically difficult but more importantly economically prohibitive to run nuclear as on demand sources.

I'd just like to point out that the US Navy has an excellent track record running nuclear reactors that ramp up to full and down to zero rapidly, in submarines.

The US Navy does not have quite the same financial constraints as commercial land-based power, but constraints still exist.

I fully agree that solar PV and wind, especially PV, are much more atttractive to investors because you can be earning cashflow from your first MW of capacity while you're installing the second (which takes weeks (or days!) instead of years), and you can iterate and scale this all the way to 10 TW or more of capacity, as the demand requires.

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

#490

Post by CTDOCodebases »

feet wrote: post #485
CTDOCodebases wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it make sense to build nuclear reactors when the environment we are engineering for them to exist in is rapidly changing? Fukushima showed us the drastic and long lasting consequences of one little design oversight and that was in an environment the reactors where engineered for. Personally I can't answer this question with the limited knowledge that I have. It seems like a catch 22 type situation.

The consequences from pushing more carbon out are worse than one nuclear plant failure

So are you saying that only one plant will fail out of the many we need to build and that our only option is to continue using hydrocarbons for energy?

I'm tempted to be hopeful and say that nuclear will solve all our problems but seeing how the energy industry got us here in the first place I'm sceptical they have our best interests at heart.

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