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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?

#51

Post by criley2 »

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…

> Look at how much we injected in banks in 2008.

If you're talking about the US, those were loans which, simply put, returned a profit to the US within a short number of years.

https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/

$634 billion out, $743 billion in for about $109 billion in profit for the taxpayers in about ten years.

While I agree that major investment into future technology is important, I think comparing it to short term loans that had collateral in the form of bank equity, and which were repaid with a profit to the government, is a poor comparison.

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

#52

Post by ip26 »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #34

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,…

Fusion could be nice as a future-fuel, perhaps it could power carbon sequestration efforts

Agreed, that seems like the biggest opportunity for fusion to fit into climate change.

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

#54

Post by simiones »

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…

> If something goes wrong, it just stops.

That's not true actually. A fusion plant can leak highly radioactive tritium, poisoning anyone in the plant or relatively near. A magnetic containment plant can lose plasma containment and get a pretty giant explosion, definitely destroying the extremely expensive machinery, and likely also killing many inside the plant. This explosion would also throw parts of the radioactive reactor all around.

It's definitely nowhere near Chernobyl risks, but "if anything goes wrong it just stops" is not as guaranteed as is often made out.

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

#55

Post by goodpoint »

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…

> Modern fission plants are totally safe

Unless there's a war. Unless corruption leads to poor management of the plants. Unless nuclear waste is mismanaged. Unless there is an earthquake or tsunami of completely unexpected intensity.

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

#56

Post by devoutsalsa »

chii wrote: post #4
devoutsalsa wrote: post #2

Probably not. ITER takes 440 megawatts of total power to generate 500 megawatts of power, at the cost of many years of development & billions of dollars. [1] [1] http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-close-is-nuclea...

> ITER takes 440 megawatts of total power to generate 500 megawatts of power not 500 MW of usable power. Have a watch of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY

Yeah, you're right. I forgot about the heat efficiency. Even if it generated the full 500 megawatts, it wouldn't even be close to practical.

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

#57

Post by neutronicus »

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…

Fission already lets you generate zero-Carbon power from cheap fuel, at the cost of constructing a monumentally expensive plant.

Fusion sort of looks like it will give you that dynamic, only more extreme. Fuel even cheaper, plants even more expensive and time-consuming (and risky, given lack of track-record)

Solving the waste problem is nice, but not climate-relevant (and you will still be generating a bunch of activated metal due to all the fusion neutrons)

I agree with you that humanity wants to be fusing a lot of hydrogen in 100 years. I don't think it's super relevant to the challenges of the next 20, though

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

#58

Post by triceratops »

orwin wrote: post #41
bluedevil2k wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The first fission reactor was in activity 10 000 years ago. Well, probably not even the first. Wind power was exploited since the 11th century? Or is it 13th? I'm not that clear on that. Solar cell appeared somewhat late in the 19th century. Fusion is real too, and older than all of those. The issue is the scale.

> The first fission reactor was in activity 10 000 years ago. Well, probably not even the first.

What are you referring to?

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

#59

Post by lm28469 »

"Can _insert technology we don't have yet and that requires breakthrough_ save use"

Yeah sure, why not

Nuclear is already the answer but people are afraid and even countries lead by "smart people" such as Germany are slowly decommissioning their nuclear power plants...

In the meantime we're using more and more energy while putting all our eggs in the "intermittent energy sources" basket. It might have been fine if we all lived like 1960s era people but I don't see how that would work in today's world

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

#60

Post by simiones »

scanny wrote: post #11
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…

> 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.

But it's not true. Fusion power plants produce a steady stream of radioactive waste from the neutron bombardment. They can leak radioactive tritium. They can explode, spewing hot plasma and chunks of radioactive reactor walls in the area around the plant. The scope of the problem is nowhere near a fission reactor meltdown, but it's also not "gone".
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