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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

#591

Post by felixmeziere »

lambdaba wrote: post #561
felixmeziere wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly we agree: the problem is doing the right choice!

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

#592

Post by AtlasBarfed »

twawaaay wrote: post #220
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Out of all sources of energy only atomic energy is something that we can practically scale at the moment to cover almost all our needs" ... what? Criticism 1: you'd need, what, like 100 nuclear plants planned and approved? If you started now, maybe in three years you'd get like ... 10 approved. five years maybe 20-30. Criticism 2: nuclear is not price competitive with current wind/solar installations, and CERTAINLY…

First of all, you don't wake up in the morning and have an idea that it would be great to have 5 nuclear reactors so that you don't freeze overnight. We more or less know how much energy we will need in 10 years. You just need to plan ahead. Dams also need many years to build, but you won't say they are useless because of this... Second, nuclear is price competitive with wind/solar. The way nuclear is competitive is…

Humongous batteries or humongous nuclear reactor?

Which will be cheaper? Especially, what will be cheaper in 10 years?

Which will be online faster? As in, can be scaled out in 3-5 years?

With forthcoming 200 wh/kg LFP / LMFP, 140 wh/kg sodium ion, and various other schemes, I will heavily bet on batteries + solar / wind beating out nuclear. I don't know if you're engaging in FUD based on cobalt and nickel chemistries, or just are ignorant of the forthcoming Gotion/CATL production lines for high density LFP and sodium ion chemistries. Those aren't resource limited, they just need to build the factories, and factories are a lot better than nuclear power plants in timescale.

PLUS, storage + solar can be distributed to the home to reduce the amount the grid needs to move from a centralized generator, make the grid and homes much more resilient, and function as a backup battery store to grid storage.

I never see hydro listed on LCOE charts. I'm going to assume it's at the scale of nuclear which is already not competitive. Hydro is actually the best grid storage if you have a mountain and two big lakes or some similar setup. As I understand it, the efficiency is 90% pumping and then getting it back.

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

#593

Post by endominus »

moogly wrote: post #578
endominus wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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/w…

Step 1: Nuclear reactors are so expensive already, additional costs to increase safety barely matter in their overall price! This additional regulation isn't enough to make a viable plant nonviable.

Step 2: Nuclear reactors are so expensive it makes no sense to provision new ones when renewables are just around the corner! Just keep the current coal power plants running while we take another decade to increase solar grid capacity by a few terawatts.

Step 3: Go to step 1.

See also; heap fallacy. Seriously, coal power generation is so bad that if we had to reduce safety regulations to the point that we were having a Chernobyl-level meltdown every month to replace all coal with nuclear plants, we would be significantly better off for it. It's not even close. We could literally completely deregulate safety of nuclear power plants and be safer overall.

(Per the stats I shared earlier, coal power kills 100,000 people per thousand terawatt-hours produced. The world produces roughly 44,000 tWh of coal energy, resulting in 4.4 million deaths per year. Casualty estimates of Chernobyl vary wildly, but even the most pessimistic estimate produced by Greenpeace, avowed anti-nuclear activists that they are, only totals 200,000. Coal power is almost twice as bad as having a Chernobyl every month)

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

#594

Post by pfdietz »

dmitriid wrote: post #522
zigzag312 wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> 1 death from radiation

So far. The population dose will likely cause many more fatal cancers than that (maybe 200?). That those will be impossible to detect above the normal cancer background doesn't mean we can pretend they aren't there.

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

#595

Post by pfdietz »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #320
pyuser583 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything I know about breeder reactors comes from the Radioactive Boyscout, which says they sounds great but are insanely unstable and not yet workable. Is that true? What’s the state of breeder reactors today?

Russia has been operating big ones for decades just fine. The US had a few excellent and beautiful prototype ones (EBR-2 and FFTF), but Clinton shut them down. France built 2 big ones, the first (Phenix) was great and the 2nd (4x larger, SuperPhenix) had various non-nuclear problems and shut down with a poor overall history. China and India both have small ones running fine and big ones under construction. Many Breed…

France has abandoned their fast breeder effort. As in, put the research on the shelf and stopped funding. That should tell you what they think its prospects are.

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

#596

Post by pfdietz »

jcranmer wrote: post #172
einpoklum wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's way easier. Is that why power plants go years over time and hugely over-budget? > It has been working fine since the 1950s. Oh, yeah, just fine, not a hitch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident... > Waste problem is solved The solution being: Ignore it, I guess? > net saves millions of lives by displacing air pollution And we fight wars for peace too. > It's zero carbon Not if you coun…

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident ... How many industries are there where the list of notable accidents has such few fatalities? I mean, have you actually looked at the accidents on that list? The vast majority of them are basically garden-variety industrial accidents--and there's only so many because people are minded to exhaustively list every mishap that occurs at a nuclear power plant…

Well, Chernobyl will likely end up killing about as many people as have ever died in a commercial jet crash.

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

#597

Post by zigzag312 »

dmitriid wrote: post #522
zigzag312 wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Our seismological record-keeping is still very young so, most powerful in recorded history of Japan sounds more impressive that it probably is.

I know that current statistics regarding nuclear power safety are very good. The reason I am asking is because I often see comparisons between latest or even future renewables technology and decades old nuclear and I am wondering if progress on nuclear has already peaked/stalled.

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

#598

Post by freeflight »

Matumio wrote: post #454
freeflight wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The near-perfect vacuum of space actually makes it quite bad at absorbing heat, that's why anything we put up there, like space stations and satellites need huge radiators to keep everything cool enough to actually operate. While thermal pollution in Earths atmosphere is a very real and relevant issue with energy generation and all kinds of other human activities; A whole bunch of French fission nuclear reactors are…

Oxygen Not Included is a good game, but it probably doesn't have a single mechanic that makes physical sense. For example, it allows you to destroy carbon dioxide (preservation of mass?) by turning water into polluted water. And polluted water emits oxygen. Back on earth, thermal radiation is sending massive amounts of heat into space. Additional heat we put into the atmosphere will not stay for long enough to matter…

> Additional heat we put into the atmosphere will not stay for long enough to matter

I'm just not too sure about that; Fossil fuels took millions of years, and massive natural forces, to accumulate in their modern day form, very similar to uranium and other energy resources. That's a lot of energy that went into "making" them over a lot of time.

But humanity is "unloading" all that energy, with all its effects including thermal radiation, into the atmosphere at extremely faster rates than it took to accumulate. And we've been doing it at a literally global and industrialized scales.

We even recognize the problem of thermal pollution on a "micro" level when we throttle and shut down generators, reactors and industrial processes that threaten to overheat the natural water bodies they use for cooling.

I see no reason why these issues can't accumulate and scale up to global levels.

Disregarding that possibility, as if humans couldn't screw up the planet on such scales, are exactly what made us run head first into global warming trough CO2 emissions and littering most of the planet with led and plastics.

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

#599

Post by joak »

pfdietz wrote: post #540
smaudet wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (particu…

Also in Helion machine magnets coils are in aluminum. And because aluminum is (mostly) transparent to neutrons they don't get damaged. This is to be compared with the superconductors of tokamaks.

So actually their idea is to put the shield (or the blanket) outside of the reactor, not between the magnets and the plasma. A lot easier to do.

There are still many uncertainties, some because they are secretive and others because they have to figure out a solution.

They seem pretty confident to reach net electricity in 2024, they might be completely wrong on something and/or underestimating the difficulties. We'll see.

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

#600

Post by cycomanic »

DennisP wrote: post #558
manmal wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And makes nuclear look a lot more cost-competitive by comparison.

But currently solar/wind are ~3x cheaper than nuclear and falling rapidly. So the 500% overcapacity would likely in the end cost the same as 100% capacity of nuclear. However, with nuclear you need at least 200% capacity as well (maintenance, hot days, not being able to load follow fast enough). So which one is the waste of resources?
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