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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

#501

Post by pfdietz »

selectodude wrote: post #314
socialdemocrat wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that safety comes in large parts from strict regulations which have made nuclear power very expensive. Many seem to live in this alternative reality where we can have bit super safe, lightly regulated and cheap nuclear. I am afraid we can only have one of those attributes. And figuring out how to build cheap nuclear in the West is actually a pretty complex thing. The US cannot even figure out why their roads and…

> But that safety comes in large parts from strict regulations which have made nuclear power very expensive. Nonsense. The strict regulations are why there have been two nuclear starts in the USA since 1978.

What you wrote doesn't contradict what he wrote.

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

#502

Post by ascar »

cycomanic wrote: post #471
ascar wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's a non-answer to my comment. Limited funding and a available money is the same thing. The point is the funding isn't so limited that we couldn't do both as we run in other bottlenecks.

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

#503

Post by madacol »

zigzag312 wrote: post #449
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…

Is there any progress in design of nuclear fission power plants regarding safety? Fukushima was build in the 70s, so it might have been a bit outdated (as a layman I have no idea). Was there any significant progress in design of nuclear power plants since then? Can they be shut down more quickly and reliably? Given enough R&D, could safety of nuclear fission power plants be improved further or is that very unlikely?

Is there a good estimate / measure of the safety problems of fukushima?

In wikipedia it says that only 1 person has died from cancer, while >2000 died from the evacuation itself

It seems that being less aggressive with evacuations and letting some people be exposed to radiation would have actually save more lives

Though maybe that's only in hindsight?. Maybe at the time there was a considerable risk of something terrible but didn't happen?

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

#504

Post by pfdietz »

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?

Neutron bombardment will make the innards of the fusion reactor radioactive as part of its normal operation. No accident is required. The induced radioactivity will be so high that hands on access will be impossible, even with the reactor shut down. This will make maintenance difficult.

Maybe the next big VC fad after fusion will be radiation resistant robots.

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

#505

Post by pfdietz »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #324
pfdietz wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, except for the 7 long lived fission products. Those are possibly good targets for space disposal.

You can separate them out and transmute them in fast reactors as well. https://www.iaea.org/publications/7112/implications-of-parti...

I suspect space disposal would be much cheaper.

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

#506

Post by tlonny »

smaudet wrote: post #413
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.

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…

> write code that is efficient and lower power, distributed systems which don't require complex centralized systems to run.

huh?

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

#507

Post by pfdietz »

shadowofneptune wrote: post #170
Apocryphon wrote: post #7

Crazy to imagine what would’ve happened if in the past it had been more than sub-fusion never. http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fus...

I've known about this chart for a long while, but recently I've become skeptical of it. What says that fusion would be a success even if that level of funding was reached? The most mature fusion reactor being built, ITER, is gigantic and it's not clear how it could be made cheaper or miniturized.

That chart was about a proposed crash program for tokamaks. It was put together based on an optimistic (and disproved) idea about how tokamak physics would scale. Had that program actually been funded, it would have been a guaranteed failure.

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

#508

Post by pfdietz »

tsimionescu wrote: post #388
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…

> Any entity that develops an unlimited, clean and cheap source of energy essentially has access to a money printer. Well, one thing that should be clear to anyone watching the space is that fusion will be neither unlimited, clean nor cheap. At the very least, not with any approach being looked at today. First of all, being based on state-of-the-art science and tech, it's clear that it cannot be cheap for another 20-…

> Not to mention, even Deuterium is not actually that easy to obtain, as you need to either get it from fossil fuels (the way it is mostly obtained today) or from water hydrolysis, which is another waste of your produced energy.

This is really not an honest critique. The cost of obtaining deuterium is quite low compared to all the other costs of building and operating a fusion reactor.

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

#509

Post by pfdietz »

twarge wrote: post #16
greenthrow wrote: post #5

I don't believe the hype. From what I can see fusion still isn't anywhere near being a viable source of energy, other than in the form or solar power.

Agree. There have been no breakthroughs. The projects getting funding are just different enough to be not immediately disprovable and continue to spectacularly overpromise without solving any of the real problems. Chamber embrittlement? Nuclear waste? (activation of the apparatus by the 12 MeV fusion netrons is a lot worse than the 100 keV fission neutron.)

Some of the efforts you hear about actually are immediately disprovable.

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

#510

Post by ncmncm »

thrown_22 wrote: post #498
ncmncm wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storage is cheap and getting cheaper even faster than solar or wind. By the time we need storage (after enough renewable generation is built to charge it from) storage will be very cheap. It will not be made of lithium batteries.

By the time storage is ready we won't need electricity because climate change will have made industrial civilization impossible.

This is the "civilization will collapse before we can get around to reducing our CO2 output enough" argument. Wasting time and money building reactors instead of spending that on renewables brings collapse nearer. If we can't beat the deadline with renewables, we can't beat it at all. Beating the deadline might not be possible, but we will not know until we do, or collapse. Choosing collapse is always wrong.

Storage is easy. It is just now an overwhelmingly better use of capital to build generating capacity, to displace carbon combustion, than to build storage. It is only after you have more than enough to displace almost all your carbon combustion that storage is a very useful at all.

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