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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

#521

Post by thrown_22 »

ncmncm wrote: post #510
thrown_22 wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>If we can't beat the deadline with renewables, we can't beat it at all.

Reactors have been ready for 80 years.

We keep putting them off because nuclear is scary and vaporware tech will save us.

Here we are, yet again, 10 years away from the green nirvana that was promised every 10 years since the 80s. Meanwhile Germany is building coal plants again and Britain has melted.

I am not committing suicide because of your fetish for solar panels and wind turbines.

>It is only after you have more than enough to displace almost all your carbon combustion that storage is a very useful at all.

I guess we can just turn society off at night.

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

#522

Post by dmitriid »

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 Fukushima was build in the 70s, so it might have been a bit outdated (as a layman I have no idea).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 any progress in design of nuclear fission power plants regarding safety?

> Fukushima...

You mean, hit by the most powerful earthquake recorded in Japan, flooded by a tsunami with 13-14 meter-high waves, evacuated, failed to shutdown, had three core meltdowns and several explosions, and resulted in... 1 death from radiation, 2000 deaths from evacuation and 45 radiation-resulted injuries.

I'd say even this outdated design was very, very, very safe.

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

#523

Post by moogly »

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…

> 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

People keep on parroting this, but could you list what these "incredibly hostile regulations" entail?

The only "new" thing I know of is the requirement in certain places (like in Sweden) to have ICSS, Independent Core Cooling System, to prevent a Fukushima situation, plus to prevent a meltdown caused by what happened at Forsmark Nuclear Plant in Sweden 2006[1]

ICSS isn't that expensive BTW. Vattenfall cited the cost of adding ICSS to their 5 reactors to about 3 billion SEK in 2020. That's about 300 million US dollars with today's exchange rate.[2]

[1]: https://analys.se/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/forsmark-incide...

[2]: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Swedish-reactors...

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

#524

Post by ncmncm »

thrown_22 wrote: post #521
ncmncm wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>If we can't beat the deadline with renewables, we can't beat it at all. Reactors have been ready for 80 years. We keep putting them off because nuclear is scary and vaporware tech will save us. Here we are, yet again, 10 years away from the green nirvana that was promised every 10 years since the 80s. Meanwhile Germany is building coal plants again and Britain has melted. I am not committing suicide because of your…

To dwell on might-have-beens is to choose collapse. Fact is, to have built your nukes would have given us rashes of Chernobyls and Fukushimas, every year or two instead of every decade or two.

Germany is not, in fact, building coal plants. Germany is building wind and solar farms.

Until you have enough renewables to charge your storage, you burn NG at night. It would be stupid to burn NG to charge up storage, as stupid as to burn NG when you have storage charged and ready.

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

#525

Post by matkoniecz »

smaudet wrote: post #406
matkoniecz wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 st…

If you use unexpected definition of "exposed" then it would be better to mention it directly...

Yeah, obviously direct exposure to core kills. In the same way being pulled through hydropower turbine kills, and ending in furnace of gas/coal/wood heated power plant will kill you.

Nuclear power still has vastly lower death ratio per produced energy than other ways generating power anyway.

> I am not wrong, in a world dotted with miniature fission reactors, as the most extreme pro-fission people would like to favor.

You would be still wrong. Building atom bomb factories doubling as power plants (Chernobyl design) in every city, and then deliberately triggering such catastrophe in every single one still is not getting this result.

With miniature fission reactors - also not.

You would not get "instantly fry us all to molten pulp" even in case of deliberate use of all nuclear weapons by omnicidal world government trying to murder as many people as possible.

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

#526

Post by matkoniecz »

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…

> mechanical earth dams (store energy in potential energy mass, less dangerous than an actual water dam, a lot easier to build)

a lot easier to build?

This claim seems wrong, given that pumped-storage hydroelectricity is in actual use, when this is purely theoretical.

"mechanical earth dams" gives info about water dams - is it existing even as a theoretic design?

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

#527

Post by slothtrop »

felixmeziere wrote: post #395
slothtrop wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> That rate does not scale negatively with energy prices. It scales positively with population, in the West. I wouldn't uses "prices" here as a framing. If you plot the graphs of worldwide energy usage and worldwide garbage emissions (let's take greenhouse gases or amount of artificialized soil as examples), you will see that they are correlated. We have grown to this gigantic population solely thanks to our mastery…

> If you plot the graphs of worldwide energy usage and worldwide garbage emissions (let's take greenhouse gases or amount of artificialized soil as examples), you will see that they are correlated.

You've mentioned this twice, and so it's worth nothing that important factors also correlated in that period of time: the rapid rise of the middle class following the decimation of wealth from the world wars, which led to a population boom.

Another factor you're taking for granted: fertility rate drops in economies as they get very strong. Western countries boost immigration for this reason: you need more bodies to increase GDP growth (and by extension, waste), if that's what you want. Lower energy prices alone will not lead to people breeding more. If it did, we'd have more kids than our grandparents/great-grandparents did, just as you alluded that they spent more on food.

So on top of the fact that we're projecting GLOBAL STAGNANT POPULATION GROWTH, which means an end to increase in consumption, technological innovation means that consumption produces less waste. You can't account for innovation in energy and nowhere else.

> What I'm saying is that, looking at what we've done so far with energy, it's not entirely sure more energy will be good for our prospects of survival. We need to have a collective philosophical revolution first.

I know what you were saying, and I'm saying it's wrong.

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

#528

Post by thrown_22 »

ncmncm wrote: post #524
thrown_22 wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If we can't beat the deadline with renewables, we can't beat it at all. Reactors have been ready for 80 years. We keep putting them off because nuclear is scary and vaporware tech will save us. Here we are, yet again, 10 years away from the green nirvana that was promised every 10 years since the 80s. Meanwhile Germany is building coal plants again and Britain has melted. I am not committing suicide because of your…

To dwell on might-have-beens is to choose collapse. Fact is, to have built your nukes would have given us rashes of Chernobyls and Fukushimas, every year or two instead of every decade or two. Germany is not, in fact, building coal plants. Germany is building wind and solar farms. Until you have enough renewables to charge your storage, you burn NG at night. It would be stupid to burn NG to charge up storage, as stup…

>To dwell on might-have-beens is to choose collapse.

Sounds good. Let's build nuclear reactors until we replace all energy generation with them. Dwelling on might-have-beens is to choose collapse after all.

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

#529

Post by ascar »

ncmncm wrote: post #518
ascar wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Building 3x renewables in widely distributed places radically reduces volatility. Is that actually true? Serious question. That sounds like a claim that seems so obvious, but won't hold up to the degree you might think in reality. Just one scenario I'm thinking of are giant storms that have clouds spanning multiple countries. And in that storm scenario even wind power shuts down to prevent damage.

Such giant storms are rare, and short-lived. A few days' storage outlasts them.

A few days of storage is a lot though isn't it?

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

#530

Post by Krasnol »

fredestine wrote: post #458
legulere wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scheduling also raises costs though. Costs don’t go down much for nuclear power plants if you let them run at reduced output. Nuclear also isn’t as reliable as it seems as it can be seen in France. Renewables even have the advantage that they produce electricity mostly when it’s needed. Photovoltaics during the day and wind during winter when heating is most needed.

macron removed investment and focus on nuclear in his last mandate before realising that being woke made france broke (luckily not like germany broke - you know like in a way that when there is no sun or wind they need to call Putin to send some energy) now he reverted his thinking because money and energy is more important than beliefs when you needs them. just like usa or germany reactivated coal and biden is selli…

> macron removed investment and focus on nuclear in his last mandate before realising that being woke made france broke

None of those problems OP described have anything to do with that overblown statement. Investment may have been removed for FUTURE projects but not for current operation which is highly subsidised by the French taxpayer guaranteeing the fixed price the Government decides on.

Also Germany reactivated those dirty plants also to help France out. The whole European grid is helping the nuclear nation out and will continue to do so until France diversifies its power generation infrastructure.

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