More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade • Hacker News Board

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

#531

Post by slothtrop » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #408

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…

> Coercing the population to stop consuming is a non-starter. Right now we are doing the opposite of that though: the advertising industry, one of the largest in Earth, is mostly about brain-washing people into buying more stuff. We can easily put a stop to this tomorrow while listing nothing of value to society, but instead we fetishize growth so we don't.

You'd have to make a meaningful connection between growth and advertising, and you can't. The reason Western countries are increasing the immigration rate is precisely to perpetuate GDP, fertility rate is otherwise stagnant. This means people aren't individually increasing their rate of purchasing stuff over time, in fact many buy less than their parents did. Look around in your room and you'll probably see the average amount of "useless stuff" purchased by household. Are you drowning in it? Neither is anyone else.

Innovation isn't just for the energy sector either. Consumables create less waste over time. Biodegradables are making a big entry in the market. All this means is that as the population levels out (as it is projected to), consumption will create less and less waste.

At any rate this falls into the same category, coercion. People want things, especially if they improve their lives. Much of what you take for granted now was advertised. Take-out food, vehicles, smartphones and computers and media, etc.

Yeah, "nothing of value". I don't think you get to decide what people value, that's what the market is for.

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

#532

Post by thinkcontext » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 1:29 PM UTC

cinntaile wrote: post #472

acidburnNSA wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

It's extremely unlikely any more AP1000s will be built in the US. All projects that were in the development pipeline have been cancelled due to the spectacular financial failures that Summer and Vogtle have been.

The only way it could happen is if the feds took on construction risk.

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

#533

Post by reddog » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 1:31 PM UTC

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.

Well the 2900 people who died in the Johnstown dam failure immediatly come to mind.

But its much, much worse than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure

If had the same risk management mindset for dams as we do for nuclear, we would also be banning hydroelectic.

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

#534

Post by slothtrop » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 1:39 PM UTC

felixmeziere wrote: post #404

slothtrop wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not "warm", because with fusion filling this cache, energy usage wouldn't lead to CO2 pollution. They're suggesting it would lead to increases in consumption which means waste. Notwithstanding that a) life won't necessarily get more affordable for people, and stuff costs money, b) there are innovations now, and expected in the future, which would drastically curtail waste, though some regulatory measures might be nec…

The graphs of energy availability/consumption and emissions of garbage are correlated. This is a historical fact. Life is literally as affordable for people as the amount of energy that is available to them, that's the main factor (a bit of optimization of processes also plays but at a more minor order). Food used to be 25% of households' spending early XXth century, when someone would go buy eggs from the local mark…

See my response to your other post.

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

#535

Post by manmal » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 1:42 PM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #419

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…

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/…

Building wind and solar to 500% overcapacity sounds like a great waste of resources and space though.

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

#536

Post by BMc2020 » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 1:44 PM UTC

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…

*These days I don't see why we don't just build lots more regular old LWR fission reactors.*

Because they lose money. Nobody, not the USA, Russia, China, France, Japan, Korea has ever made them profitable. They are always subsidized. The CCP bought Westinghouse AP1000s so they could steal their design and they still couldn't make it work. And you can't blame the environmentalists when it's in China.

Full disclosure: I'm not an accountant, but since I started taking an interest in this subject several years ago I've learned about wishing away decomissioning costs by claiming the plants will last 60 or 100 years. Ask the taxpayers of Oregon what 'stranded costs' are. Making 150 square km of Japan uninhabitable is also a bit spendy. IIRC almost all of the Dept of Energy's budget goes to nuclear.

But, nothing will change because military nuclear is a national security issue and that always trumps every other issue.

Back to fusion: Fusion power plants will be at least as big and complicated as fission plants, so it's never going to be 'too cheap to meter' electricity. I do hold out hope for it to be a drive for space craft though.

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

#537

Post by thinkcontext » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 1:46 PM UTC

acidburnNSA wrote: post #219

iambateman wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was a great comment and very helpful. I think it’s all a PR issue. The public doesn’t really understand and there are a lot of lobbyists pushing every other kind of energy.

Agreed. The excitement in fusion indicates a total failure of fission people to effectively explain what they are capable of.

In the US the fission people promised a nuclear renaissance with the AP1000. They asked for and received additional subsidies in the form of loan guarantees.

The two projects that resulted were unmitigated financial disasters. All AP1000 projects in the development pipeline were cancelled and no utility in their right mind will order one.

This is entirely the fission people's fault.

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

#538

Post by logifail » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 1:47 PM UTC

dmitriid wrote: post #519

cycomanic wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

> Moreover nuclear are slow moving, they typically don't load follow Which is not entirely true: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12... Even older designs could do load following.

The problem isn't really to what extent nuclear is load-following, but that the economics of nuclear look even worse than they already do if we want to follow the cheapest generator.

To be blunt: if the sun is shining and it's windy, no-one really wants to buy a nuclear plant's output. Not at an agreed fixed price, or possibly at any price.

The idea of nuclear getting paid the same price - or worse, an index-linked price - for the lifetime of the plant, regardless of what the future holds, and even on those sunny and windy days, just seems horrendously anticompetitive.

If nuclear is as necessary, competitive and flexible as some make out, then go right ahead and build your plant(s). Just don't expect taxpayers to underwrite anything.

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

#539

Post by tsimionescu » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 1:49 PM UTC

slothtrop wrote: post #531

tsimionescu wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coercing the population to stop consuming is a non-starter. Right now we are doing the opposite of that though: the advertising industry, one of the largest in Earth, is mostly about brain-washing people into buying more stuff. We can easily put a stop to this tomorrow while listing nothing of value to society, but instead we fetishize growth so we don't.

You'd have to make a meaningful connection between growth and advertising, and you can't. The reason Western countries are increasing the immigration rate is precisely to perpetuate GDP, fertility rate is otherwise stagnant. This means people aren't individually increasing their rate of purchasing stuff over time, in fact many buy less than their parents did. Look around in your room and you'll probably see the avera…

Advertising's purpose is to distort the market.

And yes, people are absolutely buying more garbage than their parents - and certainly their grandparents. Look at clothes, jewelry, furniture, home appliances, cars - those all used to be more or less lifetime purchases, and have become things people change every 5-7 years top (much less for clothes). Not to mention things like buying new phones and other electronics every year or two.

These changes are all products of marketing and advertising to a great extent. Stopping these industries (or at least greatly curtailing their power) would help correct the market back into a more rational place.

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

#540

Post by pfdietz » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 1:55 PM UTC

smaudet wrote: post #371

pfdietz wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the physics issues were the only ones facing fusion, you'd be making a good argument there. But after the physics comes engineering. Helion's approach is to be more aggressive on the physics in order to greatly ease the grave engineering issues that face DT reactors. I consider these latter issues to be so serious that, overall, I rate Helion as less of a long shot at achieving practical fusion than any of the DT…

Not sure why you're being down-voted, easy solutions with numerous problems are generally inferior to more elegant solutions with fewer problems, could you enumerate what these issues are between Helion and DT reactors?

The problems with DT are low power density due to limits on power/area through the first wall, neutron damage to reactor materials, getting tritium breeding to work, and the need for a large non-nuclear part of the plant (turbine, generator).

Helion potentially avoids or ameliorates all of these problems. Unlike with DT, where 80% of the power is in neutrons, a smaller fraction of power is from neutrons here (particularly when there's enough 3He available to be using that too.) The neutrons from DD fusion are much lower energy than from DT fusion, so they produce much less helium in the reactor materials (helium produced there migrates to tiny bubbles where the pressure grows until it rips the material apart.) With Helion, reactor materials have a reasonable shot at lasting the lifetime of the reactor; this is not true for first wall materials in a DT reactor operating at adequate power density.

Helion's scheme also directly recovers plasma energy, including fusion energy going to ions, as electrical energy, so it can substantially, perhaps completely, avoid the need for turbines and generators.

Helion does not need to breed tritium. All it has to do is capture and store produced tritium from DD reactions (so it can decay to 3He, which would be used), which will be much easier. There is no need for a breeding blanket with lithium, although one could be added if desired. If so, that breeding blanket doesn't have to allow rapid recovery of produced tritium before it decays.