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Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

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Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#601

Post by Arn_Thor »

Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #295
Retric wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuel is hardly the only advantage, the major issue with fission is the enormous costs of trying to avoid problems or cleanup after them. Thus 24/7 security, redundancy on top of redundancy, walls thick enough to stop aircraft etc. Fission is still by far the most expensive power source even with massive subsides and is only even close to economically viable as base load power backed up with peaking power plants. In t…

this is simply not true. according to IEA https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el... LCOE of nuclear is cheaper than almost all other possibilities we have. sure nuclear is very expensive up front, but a nuclear powerplant can run for 100 years while wind and solar had to be completely replaced every 25 years. your correct that nuclear has had some very expensive accidents, but the chance of a mo…

> your correct that nuclear has had some very expensive accidents, but the chance of a modern gen3+ plant that we'd build today causing any accidents like that in a western country is so very close to 0 that it's not even worth discussing.

But that's precisely why nuclear power plants are so expensive to construct. If the generation technology was inherently less risky, it stands to reason the facilities would be cheaper to build

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#602

Post by moloch-hai »

leeoniya wrote: post #600
moloch-hai wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing disappointing in skepticism about the importance or value of this work. 1. It is, purely, bomb research dressed up as civilian activity for funding purposes. Everyone working on it has top-secret clearance. 2. It has no consequence for any civilian project. The target that produced a couple of MJ cost $10M. (2.4 MJ is 3. Extracting useful energy would require capturing hot neutrons in a "blanket", he…

> Everyone working on it has top-secret clearance. along with 1.3 million others [0]. just sayin' [0] https://news.clearancejobs.com/2022/08/16/how-many-people-ha...

Yes, that is bad.

But that they don't hire anybody without still tells us something.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#603

Post by sanxiyn »

Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #504
Retric wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see a lot of handwaving such as that very close to 0 statement with nuclear but someone’s got to be on the hook. The rate and cost of failures directly relate to insurance costs. A 1 in 100,000 chance per year to cause a 500 billion dollar accident represents a ~5 million per year insurance cost to offset that risk before considering the risk premium associated with insurance. And that’s on top of the normal risk…

that's simply still not true. the last three plants built in Europe (England, France and Finland) has been very expensive because they've all been first of its kind and there hasn't really been built anything else. but if you take a look at what's happening elsewhere in the world KHNP for example has their standardized APR1400 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/APR-1400 reactor that seems to be very affordable Poland ju…

Note that economics doesn't work even with Korean nuclear plants: Korean nuclear is cheaper than Korean gas, but more expensive than European gas, because European gas is pipelined, Korean gas is liquified, and liquified gas is so much more expensive than pipelined gas.

European nuclear initiatives are mostly about strategic concerns to get out of Russian gas. Economically, even the cheapest nuclear power on Earth can't compete with gas, if it is pipelined. (It can compete if it is liquified.) Or you need to penalize gas to unreasonable degrees for carbon emission.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#604

Post by tstrimple »

whiplash451 wrote: post #464
ChuckMcM wrote: post #436

This is great! Why is this great? It is great because between magnetic confinement and inertial confinement approaches to fusion generation it is the FIRST one to demonstrate energy gain. If you are programmer, think of it like your program compiled successfully for the first time. It means that all of the bits between you designing the program, the program being compiled, and the operating system recognizing it as a…

When your program compiles for the first time is usually when the real trouble starts.

It's also when you can start iterating effectively.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#605

Post by Schroedingersat »

zaphar wrote: post #586
peterashford wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries, pumped hyrdo, compressed air energy storage, hydrogen, the (large and growing) EV fleet, thermal energy storage

Batteries have had a lot of problems meeting capacity as a storage solution. Pumped Hydro is pretty good but highly location dependent, Gravity and compressed air I believe show a lot of promise. I don't know enough about Hydrogen or thermal storage to comment. But we are no where near actually solving the energy storage needs to use solar and wind exclusively. Unless we demonstrate real breakthroughs in production r…

Gravity storage is an absolute joke. About the cheapest substance you can use is iron ore because it reduces the size and cost of the frame, and if you had everything else for free it would still cost you over $70/kWh for a box of it to store 1kWh in a 500m high tower.

Renewables with straight gas backup and no other storage are already lower carbon than any other option, and batteries and off river PHES have only just started getting cheap.

The breakthroughs we need to cover the final gap have already been made if you're paying any attention at all.

Stop concern trolling

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#606

Post by unixhero »

peanuty1 wrote: post #382
kelnos wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think fission power's failure is a political and marketing one. I don't agree that the waste disposal issues, or the safety issues, are quite the big deal people make of them. (Not saying there are no unsolved issues, just that the issues that exist are not significantly worse than those present burning fossil fuels, and are better in some dimensions. They're just different, and in some ways very emotion…

Nuclear plants are also very expensive, no?

No western governments have enough money

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#607

Post by moloch-hai »

sushisource wrote: post #521
fundatus wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, and fusion reactors will probably be even more expensive (especially the first ones). Looking at the current prices of renewables, I don't see a market for fusion reactors at all to be honest. After all we already have a giant fusion reactor just 12 light-minutes away from us! We just have to harvest that energy. The direction were already going (mostly market-driven nowadays actually!) is generation from renewa…

This minimizes the main problem with really going full renewables, storage. Fusion is 24/7 output at the same level. Solar and wind are not, which means batteries, and all the problems associated with that. Fusion could obviate the need for grid-wide storage systems which would be a huge advantage.

Not if fusion would cost orders of magnitude more than storage.

"All the problems associated with" what? Modern batteries don't burst into flame. Anyway the overwhelming bulk of storage is not and will not be chemical batteries.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#608

Post by Schroedingersat »

sushisource wrote: post #521
fundatus wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, and fusion reactors will probably be even more expensive (especially the first ones). Looking at the current prices of renewables, I don't see a market for fusion reactors at all to be honest. After all we already have a giant fusion reactor just 12 light-minutes away from us! We just have to harvest that energy. The direction were already going (mostly market-driven nowadays actually!) is generation from renewa…

This minimizes the main problem with really going full renewables, storage. Fusion is 24/7 output at the same level. Solar and wind are not, which means batteries, and all the problems associated with that. Fusion could obviate the need for grid-wide storage systems which would be a huge advantage.

Making the box of salty radiation medicine an order of magnitude cheaper and shoving a bit of hydrogen in a salt cavern solves the storage problem (which is already far smaller than you're pretending) entirely.

Fissions reactors that don't have incredibly strict and expensive regulation are already pretty unreliable, and they're operating within the bounds of known materials rather than an order of magnitude outside of them.

Even the mythical 100% uptime nuclear reactor still needs just as much storage for abritrage because it is so much more expensive.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#609

Post by moloch-hai »

zaphar wrote: post #586
peterashford wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries, pumped hyrdo, compressed air energy storage, hydrogen, the (large and growing) EV fleet, thermal energy storage

Batteries have had a lot of problems meeting capacity as a storage solution. Pumped Hydro is pretty good but highly location dependent, Gravity and compressed air I believe show a lot of promise. I don't know enough about Hydrogen or thermal storage to comment. But we are no where near actually solving the energy storage needs to use solar and wind exclusively. Unless we demonstrate real breakthroughs in production r…

Pumped hydro is not, in fact, "highly location dependent". It needs a hill, but there are many millions of hills.

Storage does not need any "breakthroughs". It will be built out when there is renewable generating capacity to charge it from. In the meantime, NG plants fill shortfalls.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#610

Post by moloch-hai »

Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #524
Schroedingersat wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look at the availability factors of those 'cheap' Korean nukes, there's a lot of overlap with the capacity factor of offshore wind even including curtailment. Then the running cost differences are enough to pay for the wind farm in about 15 years. Then also look at the $20 billion dollar 'service' contract for the Saudi one that doesn't include any labour or running costs. It suddenly costs about the same as H…

please stop calling them nukes, it makes you sound like Greenpeace crazy person that actually think that a nuclear power plant has anything to do with nuclear weapons that nuke is normally referring to. could you please provide some evidence that the capacity factor and supply safety is remotely comparable between APR1400 and offshore wind? What do you think service costs are for offshore/onshore wind and hinkley poi…

We call them nukes because they are nukes.

No one is even slightly confused by the usage.

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