901–910 of 1001 posts
After the Wright brother's first demonstration of powered flight, I like to imagine all the pessimists in this thread would have said that commercial air transport would never be viable because wood and fabric don't have the material properties to carry a ton of steel.
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> > USA probably won't have an effective arsenal within a century. > If other countries joined, it would be a great outcome. Why the optimism? Without MAD, it's nearly certain that we'd have a world war at some point in time. Sooner or later, it will surely happen. If you think it won't happen, or won't cost millions of lives, or won't employ re-developed nukes eventually, please tell me why you think so. (No sarcasm…
I don’t think MAD is all that effective. At this moment in time we’re seeing: * Several concurrent arms races in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe * A high intensity conflict in Ukraine * China threatening a land invasion into Taiwan MAD might be preventing a country like Poland from jumping into the Ukraine conflict, but more likely it’s because of its involvement in NATO. I think collective security organisations a…
Before MAD, for thousands of years, all the big populations were shaped/educated/pushed into limitless sacrifice for the motherland.
> collective security organisations are a far more potent force for peace than nuclear weapons
I think if you take MAD away, the "collective security organisations" would quickly break into good ol' alliances.
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To have a hope of supplying grid power, they need to scale up the energy gain by four orders of magnitude and reactor run time by 12 orders of magnitude. Those are just two of the engineering problems. It'll be a while, and I doubt it will ever compete with solar, wind, and storage.
> [...], and I doubt it will ever compete with solar, wind, and storage. Maybe not on earth, but there are applications in deep space.
Depends on how long the interstellar craft is supposed to travel. If it's under 100 years, fission should be able to do the trick of keeping the craft warm and the lights on for the sealed ecosystem to function during the decades of coasting between stars.
Fusion rockets would be more convenient than fission ones because you can store the hydrogen you need in the form of water and water also acts as a great radiation shield while in deep space. Then, to brake, you use your radiation shield as reaction mass for fission or fusion rockets.
If we are talking about much more than that, fusion is probably a better answer as fission fuel will half-life itself into paperweights over a grand transgalactic tour.
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My son has a masters in nuclear physics and i've always been curious as to why iron causes stars to explode. He does an excellent job explaining things and put it to me like this. Elements to the Left of Iron can undergo fusion and release energy, Elements to the right can undergo fission and release energy. Iron IS the line because it needs energy to do either of these. All elements want to find stability, and Iron…
Fusion to the left of Fe, fission to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with glu(ons) (Yes I know it's technically mesons at the scale we're talking about but it doesn't rhyme so there)
Here's your most exciting paragraph > LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE). Many advanced science and technology developments are still needed to achieve simple, affordable IFE to power homes and busines…
100% agree. We should be dumping as much as we can in getting fusion up and running ASAP. It could be a silver bullet to stop climate change alone, and by driving energy costs lower, enable huge innovations in AI/automation and increasing material wealth. $1T to move fusion forward just 5 years from eg 2040 to 2035 could alone have a huge ROI in terms of climate mitigation and decarbonization
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> Fusion is the path to post scarcity. If/when we get scalable commercial fusion, it’ll be like the transition to oil - society will radically change, in ways we can’t predict. Except this is also true for fission. So if fission has failed to transform society, why do you think fusion will?
Uh because building fission reactors, despite being fairly safe, is still a risk compared to fusion? We don’t want to put fission reactors in every town, but we could one day with commercial fusion. And the sheer amount of energy we could harness would allow us to do insane things.
I recommend you read up on the Gen IV reactor designs. They’re totally safe - meltdowns are impossible because of the way the reactor is built. If anything catastrophic happens, the reaction stops and can never get to a runaway reaction (physically impossible). Look up Gen 4 reactors. Those will be available before fusion even gets off the ground (and I’ll note that fusion has 0 reactors built so who knows what kind of safety issues actually come up when engineering theory hits the road).
Even Gen III reactors are fine to put up everywhere (20x margin over Gen II) and Gen III+ reactors continue with the theme of adding passive safety measures that would prevent accidents like Fukushima and Chernobyl. Critics who rate any possibility of accident as unacceptable will never be pleased but that’s not a reasonable position to take because nuclear energy isn’t built in a vacuum and global warming and existing coal power poses a significantly higher threat and renewables and batteries simply can’t scale no matter how hard we believe.
Fukushima and Chernobyl were Gen II designs which do have a cost advantage and EVEN WITH THOSE ACCIDENTS those designs are safer than existing coal and LNG power plants we are fine with having all over the place (nuclear is slightly safer than wind). Even Gen II designs built today are a fair bit safer than Chernobyl and Fukushima. Fukushima also ignored many and repeated safety warnings from internal and external reports although critics will generally point to this as a general criticism against all reactors (even though Fukushima still failed comparatively harmlessly all things considered).
Even with all of that, the death rate per kWH generated is drastically safer than coal and on par with wind and solar. Also construction costs tend to go down when the regulatory environment doesn’t inhibit building reactors due to political fears that aren’t grounded in the actual engineering.
I’ll also note that China is building many many nuclear reactors and Russia is also following suit. So from a competition/national security perspective, China and Russia both have access to significantly more clean energy and more energy independence than we do.
Look. I understand there are problems with fission reactors. They remain the only feasible way to generate nuclear power in the next 60-100 years at scale. Yes there are downsides and risks. However there’s one big upside vs fusion: it exists. It’s possible to build these plants now without physics and engineering breakthroughs we haven’t made yet. The advantages of fusion are safety, nuclear waste management, theoretical proliferation concerns. There’s no reason to believe construction costs will be significantly lower. Even if they are, we’re not even close to the first real commercial power plant even with this achievement as impressive as it is from a progress perspective.
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I think capital costs & construction times are going to be extremely important. I think the biggest reason nuclear energy stopped being built is it takes too long to get political wins. NuScale and other SMNRs might be able to help with that. However, the capital costs & construction time for Fusion Energy should theoretically be much lower than nuclear reactors. But are we too far away from it being a reality that a…
It will be quite difficult to make fusion cheaper than present day fission. Fusion reactors are new so significant research work will need to be done. There are difficult engineering challenges related to breeding fuel, which involves moving hot, radioactive, and water reactive molten lithium around. Fusion reactors need to be built to high tolerances and will need to be refurbished occasionally due to radiation/heat…
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$600 per ton of CO2. The industry is trying to get to $100 per ton of CO2. Energy estimated is 1,200 kilowatt-hours per ton of CO2 removed. Nuclear fission energy averages 0.4 cents/kWh. That's $480 in energy costs alone (ignoring profit margins for removal, etc). Why would bleeding edge fusion that requires cutting edge lasers, magnets, and various other containment stuff have a cheaper energy generation cost? I cou…
Fusion plants should be able to save a lot of money though simpler permitting processes, not needing the same level of containment structures, needing less security, and less regulator scrutiny. The equipment itself might be more expensive at the start but if we build these plants at scale those costs should reduce over time.
I suspect the regulatory environment is from regulatory capture by the fossil fuel industry. Otherwise why would Gen IV reactors, which can’t meltdown, be suffering many regulatory delays? What kind of nuclear proliferation concerns exist for reactors built and deployed within the US?
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$600 per ton of CO2. The industry is trying to get to $100 per ton of CO2. Energy estimated is 1,200 kilowatt-hours per ton of CO2 removed. Nuclear fission energy averages 0.4 cents/kWh. That's $480 in energy costs alone (ignoring profit margins for removal, etc). Why would bleeding edge fusion that requires cutting edge lasers, magnets, and various other containment stuff have a cheaper energy generation cost? I cou…
Those are figures for current electrical production schemes. After decades of R&D fusion should become significantly cheaper than fission per kWh if only due to having less of a regulatory burden and smoother permitting process. It’s more expensive now, but in the long run it will be cheaper.
This is a really hard question to answer, but do you think in peacetime 1930s if you’d asked someone how long it would take to build the bomb, they’d say “we’re only a few decades away with proper funding”? The pay off achieved by accelerating fusion development seems to justify almost any amount of spending. Is it worth going for it? The most important subquestion for me: is there a sufficiently brilliant living sci…
Science is a collaborative achievement. There isn’t one scientist that can deliver at this scale and complexity.