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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

#561

Post by lambdaba »

felixmeziere wrote: post #398
lambdaba wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why it goes without saying the extra energy would necessarily go towards consumerism. There is still a long way to go towards getting every human a decent life and opportunity to reach their full potential. There's no way we're getting there without the extra energy. For providing healthcare, nutricious food, education, etc.

So far, extra energy has been entirely targeted at increasing consumerism: it's the famous "such and such country is finally getting a sizeable middle class". Translation of "middle class": class of mass consumers.

I guess my idea is most cultures have moved on or are in the process of moving on having realized that "things" is not what they need most, but that's a phase that a culture must pass through. Again, there are plenty of other things to do with that extra energy, it's not like we don't have a choice.

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

#562

Post by smaudet »

matkoniecz wrote: post #525
smaudet wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 do…

Perhaps I am wrong to the degree of which we are doomed in various scenarios, but I am not wrong that serious effects would occur.

My concern is - catastrophic chaining failure of nuclear plants, which I must assume you would not think would be a good thing, and would cause 'grave public harm', better? Not arguing over exactly how flesh melted the general populous is.

If you remove "instantly fry us all to molten pulp" and replace with "fry us to molten pulp", that may be more true, I don't know that the general public will care much if it is 10% of the populous or 100% of the populous who is getting fried by radiation burns and subjected to carcinogenic materials which we have no methods to contain, effectively it might as well be everyone.

> hydropower turbine kills, and ending in furnace of gas/coal/wood heated power plant

Sure, but we can drain water, and we can put out fires (water, flame retardants). We can manage these systems. Nobody but the most crazy out-of-touch pro-nuclear person is going to try to claim that we can directly control neutrons, free particles, or the half lives of deadly carcinogens, or that we can filter them from our water supplies.

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

#563

Post by willis936 »

adrian_b wrote: post #467
orzig wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a valid question, but to put it in perspective, the sun bathes us in dramatically more kWh than we need to annually power the world every few minutes. So fusion would be a drop in the bucket at a global scale.

In the beginning, of course. Nevertheless, the heating of the Earth puts a limit on the total usable nuclear power on Earth, both fission and fusion, it cannot be "infinite", but it must remain forever a small fraction of the power of the incoming Solar radiation, otherwise it would cause an excessive heating of the Earth by itself.

Ever getting close to this point is what is considered a "good problem". We are always teetering on the edge of oblivion. Being so wildly successful that our industrial heat rivals that of the incident energy of the sun would be incredible. No problems humans have ever faced would be in living memory (including mortality). This is a science fiction future that does not need planning from the minds of today. It would also have many solutions related to adjusting albedo.

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

#564

Post by willis936 »

mbgerring wrote: post #17

One novel approach to clean energy deployment would be to spend some of this money to deploy enough solar, wind and batteries to provide the enormous amounts of energy needed for all these sub-breakeven fusion experiments. Then, whether we get a viable fusion reactor or not, we all win.

We've spent far more on solar than fusion. Why divert the nth dollar rather than diversify?

https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2018/11/f57/Exami...

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

#565

Post by willis936 »

pfdietz wrote: post #511
tremon wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is way too shortsighted. Fusion allows us to use other energy sources than our own sun, which means it's essential for viable space missions, and we won't need to compete with the rest of nature (including agriculture!) for our energy needs. Hydroponics with fusion technology allows us to produce food without relying on the sun at all. I'd say that alone is worth the investment.

DT fusion, which most of these efforts are focusing on, utterly sucks for use in space. It produces heat in materials, just like fission, except at far lower power/mass and with way more complexity. As for the future, beamed power will work out to interstellar distances, so energy sources other than our Sun (and other stars) aren't necessarily required.

Does beamed power also work for return trips?

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

#566

Post by adrianN »

depressedpanda wrote: post #453
adrianN wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why do you think fission can't help with heating? Heat is one of the by-products of running a reactor. E.g.: https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-power-could-heat-your-h... https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclea...

Because the problematic part is switching millions and millions of buildings from gas and oil to either heat pumps or district heating, not generating heat or electricity.

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

#567

Post by dmitriid »

logifail wrote: post #538
dmitriid wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

> if we want to follow the cheapest generator.

Energy isn't just about generation

> 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.

By the same logic taxpayers shouldn't underwrite any renewables: they are significantly slower than nuclear, and have literally zero base load capacity.

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

#568

Post by pastacacioepepe »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #152
Nition wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great point that I hadn't considered before. Like how adding more lanes to a road just creates more traffic. I hope things don't go that way but I can see it happening.

Sigh, this again. Induced demand is still valid economic demand, and congested roads are still being used productively. There's a reason why sane governments don't regularly "improve" roads by removing lanes.

If the actual costs are internalized (as in, not externalized) I don't think much of this economic demand is sustainable.

Economic demand is just a metric.

You are celebrating a metric without considering if and how it contributes positively to the goal, and I'm not even sure we agree on the goal, if yours is tumor-like growth.

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

#569

Post by adrianN »

manmal wrote: post #474
adrianN wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Surplus renewable electricity is incredibly cheap. Losses matter a lot less than the cost of the infrastructure you need for storage. Batteries have great efficiency, but they're not cheap. We already have a bunch of infrastructure that can handle gas.

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

#570

Post by pfdietz »

willis936 wrote: post #565
pfdietz wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DT fusion, which most of these efforts are focusing on, utterly sucks for use in space. It produces heat in materials, just like fission, except at far lower power/mass and with way more complexity. As for the future, beamed power will work out to interstellar distances, so energy sources other than our Sun (and other stars) aren't necessarily required.

Does beamed power also work for return trips?

Sure. And beamed power also potentially allows one to cool a vehicle more effectively than radiating from a black body, by exploiting anti-Stokes scattering of laser light.

(From your question you might have been thinking of laser propelled light sails. These are best at speeds high enough that fusion is out of the picture.)

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