Earlier quoted context omitted.
[citation needed]
Are you even serious? https://www.google.com/search?q=three+gorges+dam&newwindow=1...
Do yoy have actual evidence, or just FUD?
ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
221–230 of 466 posts
Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I'm particularly upset about SSC's[0] failure to be built. There are many advantages to housing the smartest scientists in the world within the borders of your country, and those benefits aren't limited to scientific output. After all, a big part of these multi-national projects is the culture war. And let's be real, which is worth more? A super collider that runs for decades or the F35 (which cost more,…
My software startup was a huge beneficiary of the SSC cancellation, it freed up a nuclear physicist to write graphics software for us, which became one of our biggest products. I’m in favor of pursuing basic research, but there is always a cost. When you take a group of your smartest people and focus them on non-economic activities, the economy loses something.
Its pretty presumptuous to assume your startup has economic value, and the SSC didn't.
Plenty of completely economically worthless tech startups.
Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
If as you say... "nuclear power is the only realistic way to solve the looming energy crisis of the 21st century" because... "most people around the world think that nuclear fission is scary" then we are fucked as a species. Science does not respect people's feelings. If people have scary feelings about energy/climate change/wearing masks to prevent a disease that travels in the air, then those feelings need to be ch…
Given the opposition from our left to nuclear and painting any nuclear proponent as a right-wing science denier trying to defund renewable energy I’m not sure what we can do. Michael Schellenberger has been pilloried by our left despite the decades he put into different approaches before arriving at his nuclear advocacy (and perhaps also deeming for a lot of the climate change doom and gloom as alarmists for the 12 y…
Viewing this in terms of left-right politics rather than in terms of hard data is one of the primary reasons that nuclear fails again and again as it is tried in the West.
The problem isn't politics, the problem is construction logistics. Nobody knows how to build large projects effectively anymore, whether it's the Big Dig or something super complicated like miles of piping with precision welds and specialized concrete pours.
If you want to find out why nuclear hasn't worked, look into all the individual cases of construction from Vogtle to VC Summer to Hinkley to the UK's Sizewell C, to all of France's EPR efforts.
What you will find is that political fear and regulations are not the problem. It's just management. And when you go back to the US's failures in the late 70s and 80s, you see a similar story of management failure causing construction financial disasters.
Even South Korea's apparent successes in construction have been rocked by revelations that inspections were skipped and completed through corruption, nor competence.
The primary reason nuclear survives in discussion, IMHO, is as a political wedge issue. Actual political discussion has no connection to reality of the subject matter (as is the case with too much of politics). Shelleneberger is a prime example of the afactual debate when it comes to nuclear. He's looking for ways to convince people, and attract followers, not in rational and informed discussion, and a few minutes of fact checking typically makes short work of his screeds. The anti-nuclear political argumentation is just as bad, and as easily destroyed.
The solution is to elevate the debate, and look for actual ways to build nuclear if one thinks it will be a useful tool. That means abandoning the large reactor model and trying SMRs; however I have little hope of those being economical, unless the waste heat or primary has some specialized industrial uses that are uneconomical from electrically driven processes. But at least the will likely be constructable.
Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which fossil fuels are "less bad" for the climate? They're all very bad. Obviously old coal powerplants are the worst, but there's more evidence every year that the allegedly "clean" natural gas is nowhere as clean as advertised once you account for fugitive methane emissions that in practice are largely untracked. And flooding the market with cheap fossil fuel like methane as a "transition fuel" – another marketing…
> Obviously old coal powerplants are the worst, but there's more evidence every year that the allegedly "clean" natural gas is nowhere as clean as advertised once you account for fugitive methane emissions that in practice are largely untracked. And flooding the market with cheap fossil fuel like methane as a "transition fuel" – another marketing gimmick – will only delay the transition to renewables for obvious econ…
You know, what's not clear at all is that renewables will ever be cheaper than fossil fuels outside of a minority of markets. You're putting a lot of weight on that prediction but despite all the recent progress on costs, if that was going to happen anytime soon, climate change would largely solve itself. Wouldn't that be nice.
Small modular nuclear on the other hand could be economically feasible in places that don't have the money to pay extra for renewables but still want to drop their GHG emissions.
Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I understand it renewables and batteries have their own environmental impacts that can't be ignored. When comparing nuclear with renewables the impacts start to show nuclear as at least a good contender as the future power source. But large scale fusion might drastically lower energy costs. That could enable things like carbon capture.
"Can't be ignored" meaning what precisely? This is a phrase that sounds like pure FUD, and despite spending a lot of time trying to quantify where this supposed environmental damage comes from, I haven't been able to find anything of substance. Similarly, I don't think there's much reason to believe that fission nor fusion will be able to compete with renewables on cost. Even if fusion is a completely free source of…
> won't be long before renewables are cheaper than a steam turbine and cooling infrastructure on a free heat source.
That's an absolutely extraordinary claim. How could a wind turbine ever be cheaper than a traditional generator and turbine, since it consists of a generator + rotor + massive tower in a remote location with a very low utilisation rate?
You know you cannot just assume a trend will continue infinitely, especially if the conclusion is so non-sensical.
Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
#226Sorry I'm a layman at best on the subject, buts whats the difference between this project and, for example, W7-X?
To get fusion there is a couple of ways: There is gravitational confinement (that is how stars do it, but it is impractically large for humans), there is inertial confinement (get enough energy out before it explodes, but that only works for hydrogen bombs and NIF, not for a reactor) and magnetic confinement (that is what we intend to use for reactors). Magnetic confinement works because a plasma consists of charged…
I work at HSX and “produceability” is really a set of three or four constraints. Picking their relative weights in optimizers is still in the “art” category because we simply don’t have the computational resources needed to search all spaces with all simulated plasma parameters. A flux surface is optimized with the preferred model of the day, then coils are optimized to this surface. A few good candidates are chosen then the realized flux surfaces are calculated and plasma parameters simulated. It’s very far from the ideal plug-n-chug that it could be, but these models are also incomplete and benefit from people understanding them. We simply need people tending the machines if we want to make a better stellarator.
On that front: keep an ear out for an HTS stellarator in the next decade.
Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but energy density (which is essentially hypothetical in the case of fusion, because we don't have fusion power) has got very little to do with the assertion that nuclear energy (and fusion in particular) is the only way to avert a looming energy crisis?
nuclear energy density is derived from e=mc2, so fusion/fission are in the same ballpark. Current accepted way is to build solar/wind and redesign grid to deal with intermittency. Solar and wind are even more energy diluted than fossil fuel, they take 500 times more space, more land out of nature/alternative uses. Nuclear has already demonstrated that it can decarbonise industrial economy up to 80%, see France. and t…
All for nuclear, but the amount of land used is higely exadurated. It is actually totally trivial if you run the numbers.
In reality >90% of worlds valuable land use is farming. Factories, cities, houses, etc. all hardly matter.
Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
What part of a wind turbine 'greatly poisons iur planet"? Its an electric generator on a mast. How is it more poisonos than any other industrial object or consumer device?
>What part of a wind turbine 'greatly poisons iur planet"? The batteries they're going to be paired with unless some other storage tech becomes better or windmills become so cheap that we can use less storage or inefficient storage. The windmills themselves are mostly fine since they're just fiberglass, metals and concrete. Mining for the things that go into batteries is just as destructive as the mining done for coa…
They dont have to be paired with batteries, there are several cheaper industrial storage systems like comoressed air and pumoed storage, or concrete blocks moved vertically
Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
The simple answer is that the surface only goes up a factor of 4 if you increase the radius by a factor of 2, but the volume goes up by a factor of 8. So the ratio of (energy containing) volume to surface (where energy get's lost) if getting better with increasing size. There is of course much more complicated answers, all the way up to full-device simulations using gyrokinetic codes like Gene or Gkeyll that take mil…
This is the main issue and I don't want to make it any more complicated. But I do want to explain something because people hear arguments between fusion scientists. Within the field no one really doubts that ITER is going to work (there's a few, of course, but the majority don't doubt). The thing they are arguing over is if it is needed. The big reason for ITER is not to generate power but to demonstrate that sustain…
I’d compare it to the human genome project. Look where we are now with full genome sequencing for the cost of a laptop.
Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Renewables are only safer and cheaper bet once the battery issue is solved and can be made equally green, safe and cheap. The primary reason why nuclear isn't commercial viable today is that combining natural gas and renewables makes for a very cheap energy grid.
Nope. There are other alternatives, and grid scale batteries are viable now. Just cheaper to burn gas/coal and fsck the future! The obvious alternative is pumped hydro, that is well established. Another is demand management, unexplored because the greed heads in control do not believe that our society can work together for the common good. Coming from Aotearoa, as I do, I know that is a fat lie.
I have seen Aoraki with my own eyes, and I understand what you seek to protect.