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Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change?

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Re: Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change?

#31

Post by leephillips »

skywal_l wrote: post #17
d_theorist wrote: post #8

I used to be so excited about fusion, but then I actually learned more about it. Perhaps I'm missing something, but the benefits over fission seem underwhelming. It's about the same cost on a per-megawatt basis. Modern fission plants are totally safe. Nuclear waste is basically a non-problem, especially with the most recent technology. And fission has the huge benefit of being a mature, proven technology. What's the…

Don't you think that the fact that you can use sea water as input and you get hydrogen as output is a huge advantage over fission? Add to that the fact that there is no fukushima style meltdown in a fusion power plant. If something goes wrong, it just stops. Finally, contrary to fission, fusion power plants will be able to adjust their power output as fast as gaz power plants. It takes months to turn on or off a fiss…

> there is definitely a few benefits to fusion.

Absolutely. But these benefits are vastly outweighed by one benefit shared by fission, solar cells, and wind turbines: those things are real.

Re: Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change?

#33

Post by zohch »

Why would any government or international organization want to put the brakes on Climate change if it is the single biggest reason to increase their power? Do people think it's coincidental that the people who shriek loudest about climate change also shriek loudest about nuclear? And the thing is, I know whoever wrote this drivel for the new yorker knows better.

Re: Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change?

#34

Post by WhompingWindows »

Assuming there are multiple breakthroughs on the research, design, and scale-up phase, fusion will only help us in a couple decades, put on the brakes is a 2020/2030s task. Putting on the brakes means slowing down, which means decarbonizing power, transport, industry, and agriculture, amongst other things. We don't need fusion to do that, we need to transform our current system. Fusion could be nice as a future-fuel, perhaps it could power carbon sequestration efforts. But unless we put on the brakes NOW with what we have, this car is going to crash.

Re: Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change?

#36

Post by zohch »

Tade0 wrote: post #24
himinlomax wrote: post #14

Nuclear fission is good enough, available right now, causes much fewer deaths than the alternatives, does not pollute the atmosphere, and accidents are extremely rare and nowhere near as dangerous as they've been portrayed. To wit, Fukushima: 1 dead from the nuclear accident, compared to 10000 from the tsunami.

All good qualities, but there's one problem - cost and time to rollout. Even China, which internally can impose any policy it wants, can't build them fast enough to match e.g. wind in terms of GWh delivered. That has been the case since 2012 or so.

> All good qualities, but there's one problem - cost and time to rollout.

Well those are only problems because the people who benefit from climate change, like politicians, UN and organizations like extinction rebellion, do not want the problem solved.

Re: Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change?

#37

Post by bluedevil2k »

leephillips wrote: post #31
skywal_l wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you think that the fact that you can use sea water as input and you get hydrogen as output is a huge advantage over fission? Add to that the fact that there is no fukushima style meltdown in a fusion power plant. If something goes wrong, it just stops. Finally, contrary to fission, fusion power plants will be able to adjust their power output as fast as gaz power plants. It takes months to turn on or off a fiss…

> there is definitely a few benefits to fusion. Absolutely. But these benefits are vastly outweighed by one benefit shared by fission, solar cells, and wind turbines: those things are real.

Fusion isn’t real yet - every technology you listed wasn’t real at some point relatively recently.

Re: Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change?

#38

Post by zohch »

bell-cot wrote: post #19
loourr wrote: post #3

Nuclear fission can

Sadly, nuclear fission power that works at scale - both on the technology and social sides - seems to be mostly beyond the capabilities of current human societies.

> Sadly, nuclear fission power that works at scale - both on the technology and social sides - seems to be mostly beyond the capabilities of current human societies.

Well yes, because people who benefit from climate change do their utmost to ensure this is the case.

Re: Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change?

#39

Post by orwin »

skywal_l wrote: post #17
d_theorist wrote: post #8

I used to be so excited about fusion, but then I actually learned more about it. Perhaps I'm missing something, but the benefits over fission seem underwhelming. It's about the same cost on a per-megawatt basis. Modern fission plants are totally safe. Nuclear waste is basically a non-problem, especially with the most recent technology. And fission has the huge benefit of being a mature, proven technology. What's the…

Don't you think that the fact that you can use sea water as input and you get hydrogen as output is a huge advantage over fission? Add to that the fact that there is no fukushima style meltdown in a fusion power plant. If something goes wrong, it just stops. Finally, contrary to fission, fusion power plants will be able to adjust their power output as fast as gaz power plants. It takes months to turn on or off a fiss…

>> Add to that the fact that there is no fukushima style meltdown in a fusion power plant. If something goes wrong, it just stops.

Well, so does any gen3 fission reactor. That makes the gen 3.5 EPR "now with core-catcher" an over-engineered, useless and costly project.

>> Finally, contrary to fission, fusion power plants will be able to adjust their power output as fast as gaz power plants. It takes months to turn on or off a fission power plant.

No, it takes up to 6 hours on gen3, depending on design. Some French reactors can go from 100% to 0 in less than an hour, and from >0% to 100% in two (although this is very, very inefficient). A 5% change, in some cases, can be reached in 15s. The issue is that everytime a reactor is not running at 100%, you loose a lot since all the cost stay the same (fuel cost is less than marginal).

The main advantage of fusion is near-infinite available fuel at current energy consumption. That said, with Gen4 and all those new shiny research on surgenerating reactors, the same could be said of fission. I guess the main issue is our appreciation of risk.

Re: Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change?

#40

Post by civilized »

d_theorist wrote: post #30
scanny wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Modern fission plants are totally safe. Nuclear waste is basically a non-problem Just removing that as part of the rhetoric around the tech makes fusion invaluable.

That is true actually. Seems silly but it's actually a serious benefit! The main issue with fission is that people have become irrational about it. Maybe we get a fresh start with fusion.

Unfortunately, a lot of the same environmental interest groups that halted the scaling up of fission also hate fusion.

It's best to think of fusion as a way to generate effectively unlimited amounts of energy, kicking in 50-100 years from today. This could be super useful for the long-term ambitions of human civilization - energy has been such a hard constraint for so long that people have barely thought about the amazing stuff we could do with an effectively unlimited energy supply.

For addressing climate change, it's likely to be too-little-too-late to bank on. But a century from now it'll be nice for cheap fresh water / agriculture / climate control anywhere on this planet, space elevators, interplanetary/interstellar travel, terraforming, cheap fresh water / agriculture / climate control on other planets, etc. This sort of stuff is incredibly energy-hungry and it's unlikely that renewables will be able to supply the requirements alone.

(It'd be awesome if one of the private fusion start-ups gets us there a lot faster, but this is what I'm projecting for now!)

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