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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

#651

Post by Krasnol »

fredestine wrote: post #648
Krasnol wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

the investments included maintenance of existing infrastructure. france has more than half its reactor being off right now. guess what? invest more 5 years before and we wouldnt be there today. so yes. it is not overblown it is factual

Show me some useful source which says that there have been investments missed 5 years ago and which is why that lead to the current problem. French is ok too.

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

#652

Post by [deleted] »

thinkcontext wrote: post #532
cinntaile wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#653

Post by lanfeust6 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #539
slothtrop wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

> And yes, people are absolutely buying more garbage than their parents

Source please. 1 in 8 Americans are food insecure, cost of living has been climbing for decades, more than half say they live paycheck-to-paycheck and many say they'll never afford a house. So, which is it, is the economic climate better for millennials and zoomers or worse? Pick one. Because I doubt you would suggest to struggling Americans and Westerners that they are just squandering their money irresponsibly.

> 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).

That changed quite awhile ago, with boomers and the ascendance of the middle class, and you just made that number up.

Clothing is not built to last. A suit can with care, but not a t-shirt. Notwithstanding that the waste we're concerned with hasn't to do with cotton material or jewelry, probably not even appliances.

A large amount of waste comes from containers and packaging. That is completely agnostic of the products themselves, there's no reason this can't be improved. There's also nondurable goods, durable goods and food. Check out this fact sheet for municipal solid waste - https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2021-01/documents/20... , and more from the epa.

> Advertising's purpose is to distort the market.

Indeed, and yet it's irrelevant. It doesn't perform miracles.

The most meaningful correction you can make to level of waste clearly has no dependence on advertising. Everything uses too much packaging, and food providers waste an inordinate amount.

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

#654

Post by tptacek »

einpoklum wrote: post #635
tptacek wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what point do we observe no accident causing millions of deaths or injuries and adjust our "expected damage" calculation? Decades? Centuries? We can look past the damage caused by an accident at a coal plant and just count the damage caused by ordinary routine operation of coal plants and quickly reach damage figures that eclipse every nuclear accident in history combined.

> At what point etc. Your second paragraph suggests that we are not at that point yet. But to be less facetious - after the regulatory systems in the relevant country reach a state of high trustworthiness and no indications of 'capture' + a few decades' buffer for the trustworthy regulation's effect to permeate. And this is ignoring the question of chances of damage by war and the issue of waste management, so maximu…

You're begging the question. I'm not saying one can't advocate against nuclear power on the merits, either because it's too dangerous or because it's too poorly regulating. I'm saying that it can't be reasonable to do so based on the premise that it causes million-victim fatal accidents, because (1) it doesn't, and (2) other mainstream energy sources do cause mass fatalities and aren't condemned.

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

#655

Post by slothtrop »

felixmeziere wrote: post #545
slothtrop wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is super interesting, let's continue the conversation: population increase is a big factor driving energy consumption (and garbage emissions) indeed. Let's assume we have GLOBAL STAGNANT POPULATION GROWTH from today on. So we stay at 7 billion, no problem (this is of course wrong, nicest estimates say we'll stabilise around 9 billion). The 2 questions now are: 1) what allowed us to reach this amount of populatio…

We should reiterate that this is a discussion about the outcome of nuclear fusion, which if scaled up, would be poised to greatly disrupt CO2 emissions. This means that the imminent concern in the capacity of sustainability (exacerbation of climate change) is largely addressed, save for the carbon capture / cooling aspect we will want.

We're depleting resources, and we're also still growing. If we're scrutinizing a future with a non-growing population, it makes no sense to assume the same level of depletion. It's a function of demand. Much of new land encroachment isn't for any novel products, it's to increase the output of meat production to satisfy demand (in South America at least, in the U.S. that land-use has not been growing).

This also doesn't take into account technological innovation.

> This factor is much more powerful than population growth.

The rich are too few in number and they're primarily rich by virtue of everyone else's consumption. Notwithstanding that their own practices can be very damaging, it doesn't meet that scale.

> It is more the cause of the problem by enabling us to do always more and more, with our clumsy, human ways and therefore disrupting nature always more and more.

This is purely philosophical. There's no evidence that a zero-carbon world with improved energy efficiency would necessarily lead to environmental destruction.

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

#656

Post by ncmncm »

pfdietz wrote: post #640
ncmncm wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything in the reactor is blasted with enormous neutron flux, inducing radioactivity in everything. A thousand tons of molten, radioactive lithium could easily ruin your day, if ever exposed to air.

I don't see how the lithium itself becomes radioactive. It will be contaminated with tritium, but presumably it's designed so that can be stripped out. Otherwise... maybe atoms of higher Z elements knocked into the lithium from the first micro of pipe surfaces by recoil after neutron collisions?

It would be hard to get and keep a thousand tons of atomically pure 6Li/7Li, even without neutrons spalling pipe surface atoms into it. And, with enough neutron flux, seems like you should expect to get a fair bit of "relatively unusual" products that your regular H/He extraction process leaves to accumulate.

But these are all second-order effects. A thousand tons of molten lithium is a big enough hazard even without radioactivated impurities. And even getting the 0.0000001% fraction of dissolved 3H out seems... difficult.

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

#657

Post by dfjklseldklk »

tlonny wrote: post #506
smaudet wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> write code that is efficient and lower power, distributed systems which don't require complex centralized systems to run. huh?

This is a really lazy response, but given the possibility that you genuinely don't understand the gp: Writing better software and reducing the (currently massive) waste of energy on enterprise bullshit and cryptomining would have a meaningful impact on international energy usage, and so help climate change.

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

#658

Post by dfjklseldklk »

formerly_proven wrote: post #410
dignick wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several problems with fission (probably fusion too) as I understand it: 1. Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable. 2. Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait. 3. Decommissioning is expensive and a long way in the future. Is that cost built into the cost per MW? How can we…

> 1. Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable. You can't directly compare cost per generating capacity, because nuclear, gas, coal etc. are available according to schedule, while most renewables aren't. Adding storage around renewables to make them schedulable raises costs.

This is oft repeated, but once the cost of renewables is low enough it would have (usually un-modelled) second order effects on end users which may make this less important.

Some industries literally can't turn off production without damaging plant, but if some can then where energy cost is ~30% of fossil/nuclear than it might make sense to over-provision industrial capacity and only run it when the sun is shining.

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

#659

Post by dfjklseldklk »

dignick wrote: post #516
formerly_proven wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable. You can't directly compare cost per generating capacity, because nuclear, gas, coal etc. are available according to schedule, while most renewables aren't. Adding storage around renewables to make them schedulable raises costs.

I’m a firm believer in distributed generation and storage, i.e. solar on the roof and battery on premises. This has the added benefits of reducing load on the grid and increasing resiliency. It should be required for all new buildings in regulations.

In fact, solar on roof often loads the local grid in unhelpful ways (they were designed for asymmetric loads).

I'm in favour of renewables, but done in the way that actually makes most economic and environmental sense. In the Uk we threw money at rich people with £15k to install 4kwh solar rigs on their houses. That money would have been much better spent subsidising large industrial installations.

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

#660

Post by dfjklseldklk »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #634
neilwilson wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If there are trillions in the pot" There are always trillions in the pot, because the UK is a sovereign country with its own currency. Money is never the issue. Therefore it's only overnight costs that matter in a build (and hitting the deadline). The real issue is one of manpower and stuff. We don't make solar panels in the UK. We will make SMRs. Therefore we're not reliant on Chinese manufacture, or the whims of e…

Commenting about fiat currency is a pointless distraction when the purpose of using it is as a proxy for labour and materials. 'Trillions in the pot' is just a proxy for a certain amount of access to raw materials, trading ability and labour power, all of which are finite and don't really increase if you sink your country into hyperinflation. > Therefore it's only overnight costs that matter in a build (and hitting t…

Given the scale of investment we are talking about, it's also plausible that EU based manufacturing of solar panels could emerge given the right incentives.
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