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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

#571

Post by sweezyjeezy »

joak wrote: post #370
acidburnNSA wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if the cost of energy is multiple times greater than that of renewables, why not invest in those instead? First of all, we are investing more in renewables right now than nuclear. Much much more. Second of all, your statement is true for LCOE, but LCOE is an inappropriate metric for systems costs. It does not include the cost of storage, additional transmission lines to reach thousands of distributed wind/solar…

Exactly, if you build a coal power plant today, the LCOE is calculated assuming the facility will run, let's say, for 30 years at 80% capacity. But what happens if you have to stop your power plant in ten years because its (LCOE-estimated) cost is not competitive anymore? So based on an biased LCOE computation, you sold your coal-based kWh at a third of it's real cost. Bad for the investor, bad for the climate.

Yeah but we shouldn't be comparing to coal - I already said this.

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

#572

Post by DrBazza »

BMc2020 wrote: post #536
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:…

> Because they lose money, nobody has ever made them profitable ....They are always subsidized

That's how it appears but that's not an argument against them. Two things: firstly they are regulated because nuclear fuel can be used for warfare, so when a government gets involved things cost more, that's just an unfortunate fact, secondly they've never been commercialised.

Could you imagine if cars or jumbo jets were built ad-hoc? What would the profit or loss be? A better example, perhaps, is Space X vs NASA. How much does a NASA rocket cost (government controlled), versus Space X (private industry) that has had to industrialise a process? And how much profit does NASA make per launch versus Space X?

Nuclear power stations could be industrialised and would definitely be cheaper.

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

#573

Post by bsagdiyev »

ncmncm wrote: post #443
mlsu wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're surprised by the lack of paperwork in fission reactors, just wait till you see (or... not!) the documentation on coal and ng powerplants!

Coal and NG are, like fission, on their way out.

You argue this a lot on HN but real world shows the opposite happening.

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

#574

Post by therealdrag0 »

dogcomplex wrote: post #368

A friendly reminder that the idea posed by a pioneer of nuclear energy of just dumping big bombs in a hole and harvesting the heat energy with steam/plasma has never been invalidated and remains the most efficiently-simple solution immediately viable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER If containment is your concern (though underground blast effects are decently understood, and blast chambers could be constru…

What about earth quakes?

(I didn’t click the links)

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

#575

Post by lostmsu »

dogcomplex wrote: post #368

A friendly reminder that the idea posed by a pioneer of nuclear energy of just dumping big bombs in a hole and harvesting the heat energy with steam/plasma has never been invalidated and remains the most efficiently-simple solution immediately viable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER If containment is your concern (though underground blast effects are decently understood, and blast chambers could be constru…

Another no container idea (this one is crazy): just blow them in the ocean, that will evaporate some water and speed up evaporation of some more. Harvest energy with existing hydroelectric setuos once it passes the weather cycle.

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

#576

Post by dotnet00 »

Kukumber wrote: post #559
dotnet00 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of SpaceX's funding as well as most of their launches are private.

Weird my comment mentioning the source got removed, it was just a link so maybe it got detected as spam Here is the link of the article: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-su... You have to be curious about who are their customers https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/07/will-the-ukraine-war... The EU coming to subsidize them even more And the fact that they are not profitable says it all

>Here is the link of the article: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-su...

Business Insider is well known for twisting things to fit their biases. Case in point, the first two items on that list are the equivalent of the government paying a pen company to provide them with pens after determining that said company was the best one to supply them.

Relating to SpaceX, the only 'real' subsidy there is the $15 million towards Boca Chica. Although they've paid twice that in donations to local schools there.

>You have to be curious about who are their customers >https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/07/will-the-ukraine-war... >The EU coming to subsidize them even more

Same here, they'd be paying for the service of launching a payload on a SpaceX rocket. Should SpaceX just not do business with governments? They happen to be one of the few people with a reliable rocket available right now that has a short enough lead time.

>And the fact that they are not profitable says it all

Again, dishonest take. They're building technologies with high setup costs, of course they aren't taking profits, they're taking all the money made from Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy and putting it back into Starship and Starlink.

Edit: Oh and of course none of the government money mentioned there accounts for the majority of their funding, which at the moment is largely driven by private funding rounds (because contrary to your biases, investors can see SpaceX's success and potential for even bigger successes) and previous F9 related profits.

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

#577

Post by dmitriid »

smaudet wrote: post #555
matkoniecz wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

https://www.energyvault.com/gravity Its a company with as I understand it proven designs. Besides, the concept is trivial and applicable and replicable by almost anyone. I don't understand why there is so much skepticism around these things...

Nuclear energy as a concept is trivial. There are a lot of details between "concept is trivial" and "it's practical at scale"

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

#578

Post by moogly »

endominus wrote: post #550
moogly wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Syste…

>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. $300m seems pretty expensive to me as a cost to add to what is already the safest energy source in the world by terawatt-hour produced[0]. One-fifth the death rate of rooftop solar. 0.025% as dangerous as oil. Every terawatt-hour o…

Rubbish.

Considering a single reactor costs €11-19 billion[1][2] to build in Western Europe currently (Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville (we haven't seen the final bill for that one yet)), an additional 300 million dollars is a drop in the bucket and not the thing that will make the project go from viable to nonviable.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... (final)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan... (projected, not final)

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

#579

Post by bsagdiyev »

ncmncm wrote: post #476
pfdietz wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you did, thanks! BTW, the Earth becomes uninhabitable in about 1 billion years, not 4.

We could get there even quicker with a little effort.

Yea the efforts of people like you pushing anti-nuclear views. Can't wait for the greenhouse gases to make warming even worse while we use NAT gas and coal to smooth over wind and solar.

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

#580

Post by DrBazza »

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…

The nuclear waste 'problem' annoys me because it's absurd in comparison to everything else.

I challenge anyone to go onto google right and give me a firm number of people that have died from nuclear waste, not just nuclear accidents.

I'll start -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...

about 200 for all nuclear accidents. Waste itself? Zero? Which is less than people that have fallen down the stairs, tripped over a cat, or choked on a pizza.

Now search for deaths to humans (and wildlife for that matter) from fossil fuel pollution, oil spills, gas pipeline explosions and so on.

As I've said before if we bury it in a mine, and lose the ability to read that it's down there and dangerous, we've likely lost the ability to dig a mine in the first place.

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