[HN Gopher] Many scientists see fusion as the future of energy -...
___________________________________________________________________
Many scientists see fusion as the future of energy - and they're
betting big
Author : hhs
Score : 100 points
Date : 2022-10-05 16:32 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nationalgeographic.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nationalgeographic.co.uk)
| dj_gitmo wrote:
| In the third image you can see it's built with Python.
|
| See "The tokamak hall at Culham"
| GOONIMMUNE wrote:
| I love to follow this field because the engineers working on
| tokamaks/stellarators/other fusion devices are dealing with some
| truly extreme technical challenges. However, creating devices
| that economically overcome those challenges at scale seems
| unlikely when solar panels and batteries are aggressively
| decreasing in cost. How will these compete if scientists figure
| out the longevity problem for perovskite solar? Just my opinion
| as a layman. I still think the research is worthwhile because of
| possible future applications (space?)
| wefarrell wrote:
| There's only so much surface area on the earth that we can
| cover with solar panels and global energy consumption is
| exponential. Abundant energy will enable more possibilities
| such as removing CO2 from the atmosphere, desalinating water
| and pumping it into arid regions, and opening up space tourism
| for the majority of the worlds' population.
| jacknews wrote:
| If energy consumption continues exponentially we will cook
| ourselves.
|
| There's plenty of land for solar, and then there are the
| oceans, and it's here now. In the medium term we should look
| at modular fission, and deep geothermal, potentially re-
| deploying fossil extraction technology.
|
| I'm all for fusion as scientific research, but let's drop the
| pretense that using it to generate power is remotely
| realistic for many decades, if ever.
| scythe wrote:
| >global energy consumption is exponential.
|
| From the link:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-
| substitutio...
|
| The trend since 1960 appears instead _linear_. Also,
| population growth is slowing. But it 's fun to extrapolate
| "exponential" trends and look at the big numbers.
| IshKebab wrote:
| We are many orders of magnitude away from needing to worry
| about solar using up precious land.
| ncmncm wrote:
| False.
|
| There is exactly zero need to devote _any_ land surface at
| all exclusively to the solar panels that will provide for all
| our needs. Solar coexists nicely with numerous other uses.
| Similarly, for wind turbines.
|
| Storage may consume some area, but nowhere near what existing
| fossil fuel extraction activities do.
|
| There will be no fusion.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Either you have not seen solar parks taking up arable land
| or you do not understand how this type of land use makes
| the land unavailable to agriculture. This may not be an
| issue when those solar parks are built in a desert but it
| does when they're displacing good farm land like they're
| doing in e.g. the Netherlands. There are experiments with
| less dense solar parks and those with vertically placed
| bifacial panels which should allow combined land use but
| this has not gotten beyond the experimental stage yet.
|
| Of course it is possible to forego on using arable land for
| solar parks, only using rooftops and similar constructions
| for this purpose. Roofs - especially large flat ones like
| used in industry - are natural locations for PV panels and
| it is hard to see why one would _not_ install them on new
| constructions, either on top of traditional roof cladding
| or in place of it. The same goes for large south-facing
| walls.
|
| Wind turbines can be placed on farm land without unduly
| reducing land availability to farming, here the problem
| comes from nearby population complaining about noise
| pollution (infrasound, [1]) coming from those turbines as
| well as 'horizon pollution' [2].
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97107-8
|
| [2] https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/skyscrapers-
| turbines...
| mmazing wrote:
| > There will be no fusion.
|
| Scream it into the ether with veins popping out of your
| head all you want, it doesn't make you correct.
|
| Additionally, there's literally no reason to not pursue
| both avenues.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Nobody is screaming.
|
| Even presuming usable structural materials can be
| discovered (not worked on in 3 decades) and tritium at
| PPB concentration can be extracted from thousands of tons
| of blanket material every day (never worked on at all), a
| working plant would cost more than an order of magnitude
| more on every axis than fission.
|
| But fission is already not competitive. Fission falls
| farther behind better methods each day.
|
| So, no one will build a fusion power plant, and there
| will be no fusion power. "Pursuing avenues" with no
| possibility of desirable results is wasted effort and
| wasted money. We have valid reasons to avoid waste.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| If no one is building fusion power plant, what money or
| effort is being wasted? Also, do you think all of these
| nuclear physicists are able to pivot to working on
| renewable energy, as if they are Silicon Valley tech
| startups? From what point of view of action are you even
| operating from?
| mmazing wrote:
| I wonder how many people said the same thing about
| airplanes, or electricity, or any of the countless other
| amazing things we have accomplished as a species.
|
| Maybe the current trajectory of fusion is unlikely to
| bear fruit, but we'll learn from it. We may learn
| something that makes it far easier to implement. A
| discovery here or there and you change trajectory to
| something that IS worthwhile.
|
| If you never try, you never get there, you can't see
| that?
| bombcar wrote:
| Even if solar and wind can easily supply all our power needs
| for the foreseeable future and beyond, it would still be worth
| experimenting with fusion.
|
| If we can get it to work, we will know much more about the
| universe than we do now, and if we can get it affordable, we
| will have nearly unlimited power. muahahahahaHAAHAHAHAHHA
|
| er, oops
| Analog24 wrote:
| From my understanding this is almost entirely an engineering
| problem at this point. The physics behind it has been
| understood for decades so I'm not sure how much more we'll
| gain in terms of fundamental physics.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Why exactly do you think fusion offers "nearly unlimited"
| power? In any design conceived today, it is in no way
| impressive in terms of power/plant, and fusion power plants
| will be the most expensive power plants ever designed (since
| they are at the extreme limits of materials science and
| several other branches of engineering).
| bombcar wrote:
| Exactly - IF we can get it to work, we'll know much more.
|
| And IF we can do it affordably (these are both big IFs),
| the amount of energy available is huge. I see 1 gallon of
| water to 300 gallons of gas numbers thrown about; that's
| huge.
|
| https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsdeuterium-
| tritium...
|
| (Gotta love their optimism - "when").
| ncmncm wrote:
| Perovskite longevity is up to five years, which at the price is
| already sufficient to be immediately useful in many places.
|
| There will be no fusion.
| rapsey wrote:
| We are much more likely to solve the large scale battery problem
| than the fusion problem in some reasonable timeframe within our
| lifetimes.
|
| Once we solve the battery problem solar and wind become enough to
| power humanity.
| once_inc wrote:
| Honest question: doesn't the production of battery and
| photovoltaic cells require quite an investment of rare elements
| and significant carbon emission?
| rapsey wrote:
| They last 20 years though. The investment pays off over a
| long period.
| [deleted]
| ngvrnd wrote:
| not just a cost question but a resource
| availability/energetic cost of resource extraction
| question.
|
| If it takes more and more fossil fuel use to extract the
| increasingly rare components of the renewables, then
| renewables may not be able to save us.
|
| I don't know if it is true, but it is a legitimate question
| which is worth knowing the answer to...
| ncmncm wrote:
| There are no "increasingly rare components".
|
| So, no, it is not any sort of legitimate question. It is,
| rather, concern trolling.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > significant carbon emission
|
| What is significant?
|
| Photovoltaic panels take around 1/30 of the energy they
| provide to build (that number is constantly going down). So
| if you replace all of our energy production in one go, it
| will take about 1 year of pollution to create them.
|
| What is obviously a crazy idea that will never happen in
| practice. On the real world, the panels are produced more
| slowly, and are replacing the most polluting energy sources
| first.
|
| (Batteries, by their turn, do not need as much energy to
| create.)
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| I imagine OP means the mining and production of batteries
| at grid and transportation scale will require an enormous
| amount of energy expenditure and resources.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Most storage will not be batteries. Most energy expended
| building storage will be from renewables.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| There can be a saturation a point where that becomes
| true, but I can't see how that's possible upfront.
|
| Virtually all of the national and global manufacturing
| and logistics is fossil fuel driven.
|
| I'm not saying it shouldn't be done but unchecked and
| without care our industries will take shortcuts and warp
| good intentions (like ethanol).
| ncmncm wrote:
| Most storage will be built _after_ there is renewable
| capacity to charge it from, therefore available to build
| it with.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| I can see it if it's purely domestic end-to-end.
|
| But at least in the US, we have a bad habit of
| outsourcing our problems away: Out sight out of mind.
|
| If there's any significant portion of the build out
| that's non-domestic, then I have reservations.
| ncmncm wrote:
| No and no. Solar panels use a little bit of silver and more
| copper, and no rarer materials.
|
| There are numerous battery chemistries. _None_ competing for
| utility-scale use involve any rare materials or substantial
| carbon emission. Likely chemistries include iron /air,
| zinc/bromine, and manganese/calcium.
|
| And the _overwhelming majority_ of utility storage built will
| not be "batteries" at all. Compressed air, liquified air,
| synthetic ammonia, electrolysed hydrogen, pumped hydro, and
| buoyancy will probably all be used in various places. Just
| now, almost all is pumped hydro.
|
| Most future storage will be constructed after the majority of
| energy produced is from renewable sources.
| ncmncm wrote:
| There is no "large scale battery problem".
|
| Energy storage is a simple matter of civil engineering: a big
| job to construct enough, but requiring no new technology.
|
| We are not building it now because it would be stupid to build
| storage there is no renewable capacity to charge up from. Money
| is overwhelmingly better spent today on renewable generating
| capacity.
|
| By the time we need to build storage, it will be much cheaper
| than if built today.
| rapsey wrote:
| Large scale storage is not cost effective with current tech.
| It is not just a civic engineering problem.
|
| Solar power is very cheap, but a complete 24/7 solution
| requires batteries. Those are much more expensive than the
| panels. A better battery is all we need. Panels are good
| enough already.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The overwhelming majority of storage used will not be
| batteries, unless some new chemistry's cost is very low.
|
| Large-scale storage will be very cheap, on par with panels.
| It really is just civil engineering. Any competent civil
| engineer can sketch a practical, cheap storage system using
| only century-old tech.
|
| Hand-wringing over utility-scale storage amounts to concern
| trolling.
| [deleted]
| Raydovsky wrote:
| What kind of tech would be used for storage?
| danans wrote:
| For medium duration storage (days to weeks):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed-
| air_energy_storage
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal%E2%80%93air_electroch
| emi...
|
| For long duration storage: hydrogen, ammonia.
| kentm wrote:
| In addition to pumped hydro, you can use flywheels or
| even lifting heavy weights really high up.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Probably neither of those will find substantial use.
| coltonv wrote:
| Not the OP but dams and resevoirs is what he is talking
| about, I assume. Pump water uphill while the sun is out,
| let it feed back downhill and generate power overnight.
| It is century old stuff and it is very much validated to
| work.
| ncmncm wrote:
| There are numerous practical methods.
| throwaway821909 wrote:
| Not the person you're replying to but pumped hydro is the
| most primitive I know of.
|
| Also: why must the highly variable renewables share the
| grid with highly variable demand, use them to make
| hydrogen (only when the sun is shining/wind is blowing),
| feed that into a totally separate power plant, simple to
| manage - if renewables really get cheap who cares if it's
| inefficient.
| metadat wrote:
| Did this page hijack anyone else's back button? Weird.
| once_inc wrote:
| Not for me, no.
| fuddle wrote:
| There is an old joke that physicists like to wheel out every now
| and then. It goes like this: fusion power is just 20 years away
| and it always will be.
| breck wrote:
| Can someone explain to me the 2nd order effects if we made energy
| 10x cheaper? Do we ever have to worry about waste heat? I'm not
| an EE or physicist (maybe in retirement).
| ncmncm wrote:
| Fusion will absolutely not be "10x cheaper", in any possible
| circumstance. Rather, it would necessarily be at least 10x as
| costly as fission; and fission is not now competitive, and gets
| less competitive all the time.
|
| Solar and wind cost are still falling sharply, so you may well
| find power substantially cheaper in the future. There won't be
| any fusion plants at all, because no one will put up money to
| build any.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| There will be a fusion plant in space, because to build an
| interstellar vessel you need a source of power that is not
| dependent upon wind (which is absent in space), nor solar
| (which decreases in power the further you are away from
| stars).
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Unstated premise: there will be an interstellar vessel.
|
| Unstated premise: you can't use a fission plant.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| By the time a proper interstellar vessel is to be
| designed, we will no longer be dependent upon the hoary
| '50s plans of Project Orion.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Energy is about to become 10x cheaper, thanks to the rapidly
| advancing state of PV, wind turbines, and batteries. There is
| no problem of waste heat with these.
|
| Some obvious things: carbon capture and storage, synthesis of
| plastics from air-captured carbon, large-scale desalination.
|
| We'll know at least some other new applications in 2070 - 2090.
| One possibility is direct synthesis of carbohydrates and amino
| acids from the air.
| llsf wrote:
| I am also interested by this question. Energy => machine/labor
| => GDP So, my first naive take would be that we could
| extract/build/ship more for less, and then potentially keeps
| the "growing" economy humming.
|
| Maybe due to my past education/experience, I still feel
| uncomfortable about more waste (if energy is cheap, why not
| like in Quatar build stadiums with AC ? keep AC stores doors
| open in summer, and in winter when the heat is on, etc.)
|
| I have a sense that increasing energy waste will come to 2nd
| order cost on other resources (water, minerals, etc.). Thoughts
| ?
| pstrateman wrote:
| At least for a while fusion isn't about being cheaper.
|
| It's about being abundant.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| There is no world where fusion would be more abundant without
| being cheaper. Sure, it's nice that you only need water to
| get half the fuel of a fusion power plant, but even for
| fission, uranium is a fraction of the cost. The reason
| fission isn't already providing us with abundant power is the
| huge cost of the extremely advanced fission reactors - which
| look like lego blocks compared to a fusion reactor.
|
| And 1 fusion reactor will generate nowhere near the power of
| the largest fission reactors we already have, in any design
| considered realistic today.
|
| Not to mention, the extraordinarily expensive fusion reactor
| you build will become too brittle to hold itself up in the
| span of 10 years at best, because of the neutron bombardment
| - turning your massive investment mostly into highly
| radioactive waste that you'll need expensive robots to
| disassemble and replace.
| ncmncm wrote:
| On the bright side, it would be low-level waste in a
| century.
|
| If you built it underground to begin with, you wouldn't
| need to bury it.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Neither one.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Resistive heating for homes in cold climates becomes
| economical, so many can more easily move off of natural gas /
| propane in northern climates.
|
| Battery advancements and supply logistics become the only
| holdup to clean transportation (right now, there isn't
| sufficient renewable generation or storage to completely
| replace fossil electricity).
|
| Atmospheric CO2 scrubbing becomes more economical, so waste
| heat is not an issue I suspect.
|
| Completely moving off of fossil fuels makes petroleum
| extraction much more expensive, as the primary products are not
| used as much, so anything currently relying on petroleum
| (plastics, makeup, asphalt, etc etc) becomes more expensive
| until renewable synthetic production becomes mainstream.
| mpweiher wrote:
| "However, the long-term (hundred years) global warming by
| CO2-caused radiative forcing is about twenty-five times
| stronger than the immediate effects, being responsible for
| around 92% of the heat-up caused by electricity production."
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
| a3w wrote:
| This seems to be in the ballpark, although the podcast
| "methodisch inkorrect" cited (years ago and in german) a
| perhaps too ideal number of 99%.
|
| Lets agree on a factor of 20 between burning fossils and
| using fission as an energy source for a further guesstimate.
|
| Solar and wind are better than that, since they have primary
| energy requirements for production, but no warmth is
| generated: the albedo of solar panels is as good as grass,
| the warmth generated by a wind turbines would be generated by
| the wind slowing down on a tree, house or mountain as well.
|
| As which is cheapest, that could vary between those three
| technologies. None are regulated as fast as gas turbines, but
| fission power output is perhaps faster to scale than fusion
| or even coal.
|
| Having energy at one tenth the cost (solar/wind is supposedly
| already half to on fifth to cost of fusion) we could feasibly
| consume ten times the energy by replacing fossils, traveling
| more, consuming more and giving 80 % of mankind the final
| lift to 90s-level western accommodations.
|
| So perhaps no net change at all in the ecological balance of
| heating our space ship if we really switch to fission and
| keep the our mind set on growth by more technology.
| rgbrenner wrote:
| It will never be 10x cheaper, at least not to you. Half of the
| cost of electricity is from distribution costs. So even if it
| was completely free to generate electricity, it would only
| reduce your bill by half.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Extensive deployment of renewables is already changing the
| grid substantially. Smaller grids with more local sources may
| be cheaper than the large generator and grid model that has
| so far dominated.
| throwaway821909 wrote:
| Of course greed ruins everything but part of the distibution
| cost is paying for energy (to make equipment, transport it
| around, feed the people involved, etc.)
| tuatoru wrote:
| It's 1972, the microprocessor has been invented, and these guys
| are saying "what the world needs is much bigger mainframes. Much,
| much bigger."
|
| You owe it to yourself to read the paper by Way, Ives, Mealy and
| Farmer in _Joule_ , "Empirically grounded technology forecasts
| and the energy transition". Or at least look at the pictures.
|
| 1. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Commercial profitable nuclear fusion is a maybe by the end of the
| century. We really need to get nuclear fission capacity built out
| ASAP if we're serious about global warming and the overall health
| of the planet. Renewables just won't get us there.
|
| Moreover, we need to overbuild the amount of clean energy
| produced to the point where we can waste it on energy inefficient
| processes for carbon recapture that we know work. Fusion is
| important in terms of helping this to continue to scale / make it
| even more economical / reduce nuclear waste and weapons concerns.
| Ultimately though, it's an iterative step over fission for the
| problems the most urgent ecological problems the world is facing.
|
| EDIT: Did some back of the envelope math. Nuclear energy is worst
| case ~ $200 USD / MWh. At 2,400 kWh/tCO2 for direct air capture,
| that's $14 trillion USD or ~16% of the world's GDP that would
| instantly get us to net 0 yearly emissions. We'd need to invest
| more than that to start reducing carbon levels. This wouldn't
| recover things since damage is already done in many places (e.g.
| coral reef deaths) but it would arrest the worsening of issues.
| Additionally, this has knock on effects that improves the economy
| overall (weaker storms = less money recovering from disasters).
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Do you have any concept of how far away the end of the century
| is? That's 80 years. Think back to 1942.
|
| It's ridiculously arrogant to make predictions like this.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| The most optimistic estimates by the commercial companies
| working in this space is the first commercial reactors coming
| online around ~2050. It takes time to build these reactors
| and integrate them into the existing power systems. I may
| have misstated my position which is that I don't think fusion
| will make up any meaningful part of power by the end of the
| century. The reason is a) requires fundamental engineering
| and materials breakthroughs b) funding for it is a pitiful
| amount compared to what it probably needs c) it's competing
| with other cheaper energy sources d) we don't have any net
| positive energy reactors yet.
|
| The basis of that prediction is just looking at how long it
| took fission to take off and there it was being driven by
| military needs (submarines) and not civilian.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > and there it was being driven by military needs
| (submarines) and not civilian.
|
| I'm surprised that support for fusion isn't part of US DoD
| policy; abundant, cheap, clean energy would be a huge
| military asset. Those explosives zooming back and forth in
| Ukraine are really just energy balls.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Fusion would in no possible world be cheap. Whatever else
| they would be, fusion reactors will be the most expensive
| structures per unit of volume built by man.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Well, I guess I was talking about running costs.
|
| Pardon me if I'm talking out of my ass, but this is what
| I tought:
|
| * The main input to a fusion reactor is electrical power.
|
| * The main output of a fusion reactor is even more power.
|
| So that seems to me to mean that once you've incurred the
| capital cost, the machine produces free energy. My
| reasoning sounds naive and simplistic, because I don't
| know what I'm talking about. But what's wrong with my
| reasoning?
| ncmncm wrote:
| The necessarily super-expensive fusion would be a strict
| liability. It will, in consequence, not be built. All
| work toward that is pure waste.
|
| The DoD _does_ spend a great deal of our tax money on
| fusion, but not for "abundant cheap clean energy". It
| is, rather, for uses like what is occurring in Ukraine:
| death and destruction; and for vaporizing cities and
| ports, distributing radioactive fallout over wide areas.
| m463 wrote:
| in 1942 there were no nuclear (fission) power plants, yet
| today there is probably one within driving distance of your
| house.
|
| additionally there are natural fission nuclear reactors that
| have been going for possibly billions of years... and one big
| fusion one within visual range :)
| ncmncm wrote:
| There are no natural fission reactors operating on Earth,
| and have not been any for billions of years.
| coldtea wrote:
| You could say it for 800 A.D. or 1200 A.D. too, and yet 880
| A.D or 1280 A.D. wouldn't look too different. In fact, you
| could say it for 300 B.C. and 1300 A.D. - a whole millenium
| away - would still be quite similar technologically.
|
| Not all periods have 1942-2022 amount of innovation. In fact
| 1942-2022 is itself bimodal and front-loaded. By 1980 already
| most major innovation had already happened. The rest is
| mostly efficiency improvements and diminishing returns, but
| much much much less major inventions.
| brightball wrote:
| I'm curious about facilities like the one in NJ that produce
| power by burning trash. I wonder how viable they would be on a
| larger scale.
| [deleted]
| ramesh31 wrote:
| > I'm curious about facilities like the one in NJ that
| produce power by burning trash. I wonder how viable they
| would be on a larger scale.
|
| Incinerating already sequestered carbon via burning
| hydrocarbons is a path to nowhere. It's a profitable business
| for sure, but so is mining coal.
| bulbosaur123 wrote:
| >Commercial profitable nuclear fusion is a maybe by the end of
| the century.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD8EdXuU9Ms
|
| 10-20 years max. Deep Mind will work on it.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Will you believe Deep Mind when it tells you it cannot work?
| greenthrow wrote:
| Nuclear takes way, way too long to get online to help with
| global warming.
|
| Renewables absolutely can and are "getting us there." It's a
| solved problem.
|
| Fusion is always some long period of time away. It is not close
| to being a viable source of power, and there are convincing
| arguments it never will be.
|
| And regardless, why do we need to waste so much money trying to
| turn into a viable source of power when we have solar and wind
| now and they are cheaper than any other form of power?
|
| By all means keep researching fusion for scientific reasons,
| but enough with the empty promises about it being the ultimate
| power source. And fission can die off as the existing reactors
| reach the end of their lives. It is too expensive, too
| environmentally dangerous and totally unnecessary.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Renewables have yet to demonstrate the ability to replace
| fossil fuels in any meaningful way. They seem to top out at
| 10-20% of the energy mix. France achieved net 0 many decades
| ago because they went all in with nuclear whereas their
| neighbors that went with renewables haven't gotten anywhere
| close to that.
|
| The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second
| best time is now.
| fulafel wrote:
| Renewables obviously enable us to mostly stop using fossil
| fuels, fossils have just been too cheap because of unpriced
| externalities. (replace is the wrong word because some of
| the fossils use can and should just be stopped and not
| replaced by other energy)
|
| There isn't anything mysterious we expect to empirically
| discover through demonstrations approaching 100%, though of
| course engineering does incrementally improve and progress.
|
| Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_b
| y_renewable...
| dieortin wrote:
| France hasn't achieved net 0, not even close. And there are
| several countries with more than 20% renewable energy in
| their grid.
| chamibc wrote:
| And even those countries in the EU such as Denmark rely
| on France for electricity imports because no country in
| the world has any large scale storage solution for
| renewables.
| ncmncm wrote:
| It would be stupid to put money into storage before there
| is excess renewable capacity to charge it from. So,
| people instead put money into generating capacity.
|
| When we have any use for storage, we will build out
| storage.
| godelski wrote:
| I agree with the first part but not the second. Up until
| recently (when a lot of their nuclear went offline) they
| were one of the lowest emitters in Europe. They were
| comparable to Sweden and Iceland, which have
| substantially smaller (and more centralized) populations.
| I'll agree that thinking nuclear will get us all the way
| to net zero energy emissions is silly, but let's not
| undermine the great accomplishments France has made. They
| have been leagues ahead of the rest of Europe. Even at
| significantly reduced capacity they are still one of the
| lowest emitters.
|
| https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FI
| ncmncm wrote:
| Renewables have long since demonstrated ability to replace
| fossil fuels, and are being built out at an always
| increasing rate, already exceeding 20% in many places.
|
| France is importing power.
| chamibc wrote:
| This is plain wrong. France has been one of the most
| reliable exporters of electricity in EU for over a decade
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Fra
| nce...
| laurencerowe wrote:
| > Renewables have yet to demonstrate the ability to replace
| fossil fuels in any meaningful way. They seem to top out at
| 10-20% of the energy mix.
|
| Denmark has reportedly reached 53.3% of electricity
| consumption with wind and solar.
|
| "The first half of 2022 has been a record-breaking period
| for green energy production in Denmark. Danish windmills
| and solar panels produced 10,9 TWh in the first six months
| of the year - a significant 12% increase from the previous
| record from 2020. Another all-time high, the fraction of
| wind and solar power in the total electricity consumption
| was 53,3%."
|
| https://stateofgreen.com/en/news/green-danish-energy-
| product...
|
| > France achieved net 0 many decades ago because they went
| all in with nuclear whereas their neighbors that went with
| renewables haven't gotten anywhere close to that.
|
| Unfortunately even France no longer seems able to build new
| nuclear generation capacity at a reasonable cost. While
| wind, solar, and batteries get ever cheaper, nuclear has
| gotten more expensive over time.
|
| For what it's worth I used to agree with you that Nuclear
| seemed the only viable way forward, after reading
| https://www.withouthotair.com. However much has changed
| over the past 14 years since it was published.
| orangecat wrote:
| _Renewables absolutely can and are "getting us there." It's a
| solved problem._
|
| I hope that's true. So does that mean there's no need for the
| sweeping societal changes that prominent environmentalists
| are demanding because we'll be able to maintain our high-
| energy lifestyles with nearly 100% renewables?
| Raydovsky wrote:
| Renewables are a solved problem, but storage of energy to
| combat the unreliability of renewables isn't.
|
| NPP's take about 7 years to build. The latest EPR builds are
| taking more due to an over complicated design.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Storage is not, in fact, a problem. Numerous methods using
| century-old tech are cheap and practical, and only need to
| be built out.
|
| They are not being built out yet because there is not
| excess renewable generating capacity to charge them from.
| godelski wrote:
| Because of comments below, I want to piggyback here.
|
| Climate is a pretty complicated topic that is often vastly
| overly simplified. To the point where major mistakes are made.
| Remember, first (and even second) order approximations are only
| useful in limited regimes.
|
| If you're in the camp of "net negative, regardless of costs"
| then it is silly to ignore nuclear. But people seem to confuse
| this as "nuclear VS renewables." We should ABSOLUTELY build as
| much renewable energy as possible. The issue is that the
| world/country/states aren't homogeneous. For example, Southern
| California and the entire Southwest probably needs little to
| zero nuclear power. There's more than enough sun and wind year
| around to exceed demand. But this isn't true everywhere. Where
| this isn't true (and where there isn't hydro availability)
| nuclear is a great option and it is silly to discard it as an
| option. You also can't just transport energy across the country
| without significant losses and drawbacks (e.g.s energy
| security, reduced priority).
|
| So I want to make it clear that you can think nuclear is
| expensive and too slow but still be in this camp. This camp is
| just believes that you shouldn't remove a zero carbon emitter
| from the table. Why tie a hand behind your back? You don't have
| to use that hand, but it may come in handy every once in
| awhile.
|
| As to carbon capture, again this is a complicated topic. Often
| it is overly simplified into "plant more trees." But we just
| can't plant enough trees and the scientific consensus is that
| this won't get us there. There's also plenty of natural ways to
| reduce carbon. Land management is broad term usually used. But
| soil restoration, bogs, and swamps are far less sexy than
| forests (which when young are actually carbon emitters). DCC
| still has a long way to go too, but again, why turn away from
| it? Use every tool at hand. Especially because we have to
| remember that zero emissions typically means "zero energy
| emissions" and that doesn't solve the other half of the problem
| that we have.
|
| I know everyone is passionate about this subject (I am too) but
| I also encourage everyone to recognize that we have more
| similarities and differences. We are mostly arguing about the
| most efficient way to reach the goal, but mind you that if we
| fight too much others can use this to divide us and make us
| overall less efficient. Complex problems require complex
| solutions. Very few people here are experts in climate and if
| you ever talk to climate scientists they will happily tell you
| that their expertise is limited to their niche. It is too
| complex of a problem for a singular person to understand. So
| let's keep that in mind when we're arguing with one another. It
| is good to have arguments and discussions, but turning into
| fights is unproductive and just demonstrates how naive we all
| are. I'll bastardize a Feynman quote: "I think I can safely say
| that no one understands Climate Change."
| roelschroeven wrote:
| > ... forests (which when young are actually carbon
| emitters).
|
| Can you expand a bit on that, since it doesn't match my
| understanding? Where does the carbon come from that young
| forests emit?
|
| My understanding is:
|
| A tree is a carbon sink, i.e. it captures carbon as long as
| it is growing (the carbon goes into its organic matter). Once
| it stops growing it has a constant amount of organic matter,
| a constant amount of carbon, and no net exchange of carbon.
| That is until it burns, or decomposes, or parts of it are
| eaten by animals, or whatever.
|
| The same, but on a larger scale, goes for a forest, or any
| ecosystem really: when total organic matter increases carbon
| is captured from the atmosphere; when total organic matter
| decreases carbon is emitted.
|
| Still to my understanding, young forests are forests that
| grow pretty rapidly and are therefore excellent in capturing
| carbon.
|
| What am I missing?
| borkt wrote:
| A whole lot unfortunately, as the life is not a simple
| topic.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34542151/#&gid=article-
| figur...
| renlo wrote:
| Not OP but planting a man-made forest is bound to require a
| lot of carbon up front; you'd need to transport people,
| plants, etc, to the forest-site, and would possibly need
| prepare the land for planting using machines (which again
| need to be transported, need logistics to transport fuel,
| etc)
| godelski wrote:
| Sure! I'm actually glad you asked, because this is a
| perfect example of first order thinking giving you the
| wrong answer. Your understanding is actually (almost)
| entirely correct! The problem is that a forest is an entire
| system, and not just the trees. Talk about missing the
| forest for the trees :)
|
| So a singular tree grows more aggressively when young, but
| you also have to consider that the tree respires and that
| it drops matter to the ground which microbes decompose and
| respire CO2! But the overall system changes once a forests
| get larger and there is canopy closure. Once we consider
| the entire system (or at least more of the system) we
| reverse our conclusion and find that young forests are NET
| carbon sources (despite individual trees being carbon
| sinks) and that old growth forests are NET carbon sinks.
| PBS Terra does a good explanation of it so I'm linking it
| here[0].
|
| Also, with that said, we should add some information about
| land management. After all, logging cycles and maintaining
| old growth forests is part of land management, but it is
| far from the whole picture. Forrest Fleisch (ironic name)
| frequently writes about this so I'll just leave one post
| here[1] and allow you to dig in more.
|
| I hope this clears things up. I'm not an expert so I don't
| have all the answers myself. But this is what I've gathered
| from conservationists and those studying forests. And in
| all fairness, the prevailing theory was that of the first
| order until relatively recently when we could actually
| measure the entire system. So old information can be
| holding us back, but also I think this demonstrates that we
| as the public understanding can significantly lag that of
| the scientific consensus. While I agree we should challenge
| experts this also demonstrates the importance of relying on
| them.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDdKOmvIKyg
|
| [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/ForrestFleisch1/status/13062
| 21445...
| fallingknife wrote:
| Nuclear is great as baseload, but it is more expensive than
| wind/solar when you just look at pure generation without
| storage. So we definitely need to get nuclear built out, but
| you want as much cheap renewables as you can get the grid to
| support, and as little expensive nuclear as possible.
|
| And it's not what you would use for CO2 capture. For that you
| would use renewables, because it doesn't matter what time of
| the day you do it, or for how long you do it continuously. So
| just direct excess renewable power into CO2 capture.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| The problem with renewables is one of space and materials
| rather than energy production. Nuclear is drastically smaller
| in terms of the land footprint.
|
| Focusing on cost is misleading because the costs are because
| we haven't invested in fission in many decades / regulations
| are fairly insane. For example, the cost argument would go
| the other way in the 90s when wind and solar were much more
| expensive. Also, solar provide energy when there's typically
| peak demand so you can't really load shift for DAC. Wind you
| might be able to do that.
| ncmncm wrote:
| There is in fact no problem of "footprint" of renewables
| for nukes to pretend to solve.
| [deleted]
| tuatoru wrote:
| Yesterday I watched a video about the commercially
| available options for installing an electric power
| generation plant on the balcony of your rented apartment.
| Commercially available, now.
|
| More seriously, off-shore wind takes up virtually no land,
| and on-shore wind and PV can share land use with pasture,
| feed crops and horticultural crops. PV actually improves
| crop yields in dry regions because of the shading and
| reduced stress on the plants. So in some places it has a
| negative footprint. Storage uses no more land than peaker
| gas, and probably less when pipeline right-of-ways are
| counted.
|
| There _really_ is not a land footprint problem.
| reidacdc wrote:
| I've seen the scenario you describe as the "fission bridge to
| fusion" scenario, and as I understand it, a major problem is
| that it can't be done with existing pressurized light-water
| reactors. These systems just don't use Uranium very
| efficiently, they extract a small percentage of the energy from
| the fuel, and then need to be refueled.
|
| This doesn't mean the "fission bridge to fusion" is impossible
| by any means, but it does mean that significant work needs to
| be done in developing and commercializing next-generation
| fission reactors, including breeder reactors, which use much
| more of the available energy from fuel, and possibly novel
| reactor designs that can run on reprocessed fuel from LWRs.
|
| A political complication is that large-scale commercial nuclear
| fuel reprocessing represents a nuclear-weapons proliferation
| risk, and so might imply regulatory burdens, or require
| international agreements on use and control before it can go
| forward.
|
| Refs: Dim recollection from reading Walter C. Patterson's
| "Nuclear Power", and some discussion about peak Uranium
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium).
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Reprocessing increases net efficiency considerably [1]. Few
| people do it since uranium is very cheap relative to the
| amount of energy extracted from it, even without
| reprocessing. But if fuel ever becomes constrained,
| reprocessing would become competitive.
|
| Nuclear weapons proliferation isn't a risk among most
| countries that have nuclear generation programs. Heck, most
| of them _already_ have nuclear weapons. The rest can contract
| out reprocessing to nuclear-armed countries.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Also there are "near-breeder" CANDU heavy water moderated
| reactors: they are a proven technology that exists today
| and can use non-enriched uranium. They also in theory can
| use a plutonium/thorium mixture, so can burn thorium.
|
| They are cheaper as far as fuel, but it turns out that fuel
| didn't become as expensive as anticipated in the 1970s
| (when it was thought that there would be 1000s of
| reactors). They are physically larger, so have a higher
| construction cost that put them at a disadvantage compared
| to conventional LWRs.
|
| The tritium needed for fusion reactors comes from these
| CANDU reactors (some of the deuterium from the heavy water
| is converted to tritium, it is collected).
| aidenn0 wrote:
| My understanding is that breeder reactors are politically
| problematic because of proliferation concerns.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Peak uranium isn't a thing even using today's inefficient
| reactors.
|
| The key insight is that if you're using fission to power DAC,
| then you don't even need to worry about proliferation.
| Countries can continue to use coal and oil while nuclear
| fission is used for DAC. An international agreement that they
| pay a tax to the countries that do have the capability to do
| DAC powered by fission. China and USA make up the vast
| majority of emissions, make up a good chunk of global GDP and
| both have nuclear power plant capabilities & they're not the
| only two countries who have that. Yes, there's an imbalance
| there to think through but it can be remediated a bit (and
| mostly it'll be Brazil and India that we would need to worry
| about assuming we can get China on board). Certainly better
| than doing nothing for decades or even a century.
| paulcole wrote:
| > if we're serious about global warming and the overall health
| of the planet
|
| There's a saying that when someone shows you who they are,
| believe them.
|
| It's pretty clear that "we" as humanity are not serious about
| global warming and the overall health of the planet.
|
| Some of us are making gobs of money and think we'll just be
| able to buy our kids the same great life we've had. Some of us
| are complacent and don't worry too much about the future. Some
| of us are so desperate to survive today that we can't think
| about tomorrow. Some of us realize it's a lost cause.
|
| "Fixing" global warming just isn't going to happen. We spent
| the money we didn't have over the past few decades and the bill
| is coming due soon. At this point it's all about how we cope
| with a world that's going to be unimaginable to many of the
| people alive today.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| > "Fixing" global warming just isn't going to happen.
|
| There will be likely last-ditch efforts from desperate
| governments and technocratic industrialists to do
| geoengineering, with all of the expense and potential
| blowback that entails.
| paulcole wrote:
| Some attempt to darken the skies probably won't happen in
| my lifetime but I sure wouldn't want to be alive in 200
| years.
| fguerraz wrote:
| The real question is no if it's the energy of the future. The
| real question is it going to be in time to save us?
|
| Even if we knew exactly how to make fusion reactor today, how
| long would it take for it to effectively replace all the fossil
| fuel energy? Too long is the answer.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > The real question is it going to be in time to save us?
|
| From what? Global warming? No, it won't.
|
| If somebody creates commercially viable fusion today, it will
| still take some 3 to 5 decades until it is common enough to
| impact our energy generation. And if it is based on breeding
| Tritium, those 3 to 5 decades are dictated by physics. (But
| just the ramp-up on constructing those power plants is enough
| of an issue, no fundamental physics needed.)
| cl42 wrote:
| I personally believe that nuclear fusion is a necessity for long-
| term survival of humanity -- I'm talking centuries out.
|
| I am not a physicist (humble startup dude / engineer / sales
| guy). Is there anything someone like me can do to contribute to
| this space?
| ncmncm wrote:
| You could contribute most by staying out of the way of people
| doing _actually useful work_ on things other than fusion. Any
| work on fusion will contribute exactly nothing to fending off
| global climate catastrophe.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| You do realize that by spamming this entire thread with very
| strongly worded posts and yet very little supporting
| evidence, that you are just making people disregard your
| views?
|
| If you are hoping to educate and convert people to what you
| consider the correct path forward, your current approach is
| definitely not the right one.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| As amusing as it is to see an inverted shtick of the Fusion
| Energy Foundation that matches the same tenor as that
| organization, most proponents of solar and wind probably
| don't see R&D into other methods of power generation as a
| zero-sum game that detracts from their own favored approach.
| Not to mention, research into fusion, and indeed any type of
| nuclear power, is likely overwhelmingly dwarfed by all of the
| efforts spent into greenhouse gas-generating fossil fuels.
| Given that, the aforementioned tenor is rather quixotic and
| misplaced.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Money is fungible. A billion dollars spent chasing fusion
| is exactly a billion not spent displacing CO2 production.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Money is not fungible when it's never in the hands of a
| person or organization who is going to make the binary
| decision of investing in fusion vs. investing in
| renewables. You are creating a false dilemma that does
| not actually exist in real life. Furthermore, if you
| really cared about advancing the cause of solar and wind,
| you would take that tenor and energy towards attacking
| fossil fuels, rather than a completely marginal segment
| of the power generation pie.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| Tell people about General Fusion and invest should they ever go
| public.
| whycombinetor wrote:
| Are we talking like Nutty Professor levels of big? Should we be
| concerned about how big the scientists are getting?
| FernandoTN wrote:
| "Nuclear fusion is 30 years away; and always will be." I wonder
| how this phrase manages to hold after 50 years since its
| inception.
|
| We could compare it to the state of general AI, but at least in
| the machine learning field, progress is being made without
| knowing the feasibility or path to reaching general in AI. In
| fusion it appears that the theory has already been set and
| maintaining the chain reaction going for long enough is the
| limitation (progress being made here), would it be the same case
| that the final steps are still missing without a clear path, or
| would the current progress be enough to eventually reach it?
| jl6 wrote:
| AI research has made slow scientific progress but great
| engineering progress. Fusion has made great scientific progress
| but still has a lot of engineering left to do.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _has made great scientific progress but still has a lot of
| engineering left to do_
|
| It's made serious engineering progress too.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Engineering work halted 30+ years ago. There has been no
| recent work on structural materials that could withstand
| the neutron bombardment, _and_ no work on extracting bred
| tritium at parts per billion concentration from thousands
| of tons of "blanket" material needed for the next day's
| operation.
|
| There is no possibility of any present scheme operating at
| even 10x the cost of fission. Fission is not today
| competitive, and falls further behind each day.
| fallingknife wrote:
| You can get around the tritium problem with boron-proton
| fusion. Also gets around the inefficiency of converting
| to heat / turbines. Obviously not any closer to
| production (and probably further) than tritium fusion,
| though. https://hb11.energy/how-it-works/
| ncmncm wrote:
| There is no reason to expect that p-11B fusion is
| possible.
|
| It might be, in a hundred years, if our present
| understanding is wrong, and somebody figures out how to
| reflect gamma rays.
| fallingknife wrote:
| It's been done by firing lasers at a HB pellet, so I
| assume you mean not possible to be done commercially? And
| why would you have to reflect gamma rays?
| ncmncm wrote:
| Obviously you can fuse about anything by accelerating
| nuclei at each other fast enough. If it takes more energy
| to do it than you can get back, it is of purely academic
| interest. Firing lasers comes up many orders of magnitude
| short.
|
| Another alternative is magnetic confinement, but
| radiative loss goes up with the 4th power of temperature,
| so would be 10000 times as much as for a D-T plasma,
| IIUC.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| This chart rests upon faulty assumptions about the efficacy of
| tokamaks, but it does demonstrate how little interest the U.S.
| federal government has had towards research of fusion.
|
| http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg
|
| https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fus...
| Trouble_007 wrote:
| Timeline of Nuclear Fusion :
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_nuclear_fusion
| johnnymorgan wrote:
| What I want to know is why nobody talks about this..
| https://brillouinenergy.com/news
|
| > Researchers at SRI International have issued a Technical
| Progress Report covering their review and independent validation
| of Brillouin Energy's on-going testing and scaling efforts of its
| most advanced Isoperibolic ("IPB") Hydrogen Hot Tube(tm)
| (HHT(tm)) component prototypes, which generate controlled Low
| Energy Nuclear Reactions ("LENR").
|
| I've been keeping an eye on it since 89 and this seemed
| significant.
| philipkglass wrote:
| It's probably because they appear to be cranks who keep
| promising results right around the corner and never deliver.
|
| Here's a story from 10 years ago about how Brillouin's
| technology can generate electricity for 1 cent per kilowatt
| hour, linked from their official blog at the time [1]:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20130515012248/http://pesn.com/2...
|
| If they had an empirically working device, by now they could
| just be using it generate heat and/or power and leave it up to
| better-funded institutes to figure out the mechanism after the
| fact. Since they're not selling the devices and they're not
| selling power, and they've been "iterating" for years, I don't
| think that they actually have anything.
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20130421190244/http://brillouine...
| ncmncm wrote:
| Making empty promises about fusion tech is a good way to
| collect investors' money with no risk of fraud indictments,
| and no need ever to pay any back.
|
| Work done under government grants is similar.
| johnnymorgan wrote:
| Tbh it was only the SRI confirmation that caught my eye.
|
| I've mostly written this off but was curious what the
| relevance of it was as it did seem to be verified by an
| independent body. The question of if the tech can actually be
| used for power generation..no idea but never seemed likely.
| jacknews wrote:
| "Star machines", "This form of energy ... will be abundant,
| efficient, carbon-free, safe", and "solve all of humanity's
| energy problems in one fell swoop - amongst many other things. "
|
| Humbug.
|
| Even if/when it is possible to build a power plant (many decades
| IMHO) it will be massively costly, the waste from D-T fusion is
| far more of an issue than is being discussed, the efficiency will
| be terrible, barely enough to make the thing workable, etc.
| "Tritium... can be made from another element that is extremely
| plentiful: lithium."
|
| So we're going to burn all the lithium, instead of building
| batteries with it?
| ncmncm wrote:
| There is plenty of lithium, but we won't be burning any except
| in H-bombs. We may hope not there, either.
|
| If we don't fend off climate disaster, there will be plenty of
| that soon enough.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Doesn't really matter, as we can also build batteries with
| sodium, calcium, aluminum, iron, zinc, and with carbon
| polymers. And probably more.
| paxys wrote:
| Been hearing a lot of fusion hype lately. Guess it's that time of
| the decade again..
| ncmncm wrote:
| The pigeons need to be gulled again.
| packetlost wrote:
| The amount of anti nuclear from a few accounts in this thread is
| weird and reeks of weird concern trolling.
| notacoward wrote:
| It's mostly from one person, who somehow gets away with (up to)
| dozens of low-effort comments on every single story about
| nuclear power. I happen to agree with their basic premise, but
| still find it highly suspect that such spammy behavior
| continues to be allowed.
| packetlost wrote:
| They seem like a concern troll-for-hire type of thing tbh. I
| find it concerning that they're allowed to continue to be
| here too
| tuatoru wrote:
| In my own case I'm just trying to get people to let go of the
| idea that nuclear (fission or fusion) is viable for electricity
| generation.
|
| Please read the paper by Way, Ives, Mealy and Farmer[1], look
| at the trends, and draw your own conclusions.
|
| Edit: as I said in another comment: It's 1972, the
| microprocessor has been invented, and these guys are saying
| "what the world needs is much bigger mainframes. Much, much
| bigger."
|
| 1. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Looks like there's a discussion thread here.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/RenewableEnergy/comments/xeydwp/emp.
| ..
| tuatoru wrote:
| Thanks for that. The main criticism is that "it looks like
| a curve fit". Indeed it does; the paper talks at length
| about this very thing. (Mostly in the 400 page
| supplementary paper S1.)
|
| But the thing is, the curves (Moore's and Wright's) apply
| to a lot of technologies undergoing rapid expansion. That's
| actually the science contribution of the paper: setting out
| a better way to make policy-relevant forecasts, and
| hopefully ending the abysmal track record of forecasts that
| is documented in the paper.
|
| (I can see ways to get at least 67% cost reductions in both
| wind and PV from where we are now, and I'm just an
| interested layman. So in at least the near term we will
| likely keep following the curves. Yes, actual work has to
| be done, but there's no voodoo. Just like with
| microprocessors.)
| vladkovalev wrote:
| Helion energy?
| jmyeet wrote:
| Current proposals for nuclear fusion, most notably hydrogen
| fusion variants (ie deuterium-tritium in particular),
| increasingly seem like a pipe dream to me. Fusion seems
| attractive because stars do it but stars also have gravity on
| their side. We hafve to build lmeter thick concrete walls to
| protect against errant neutrons (as mentioned in the article) but
| that doesn't solve the real problem: escaping neutrons are energy
| lost.
|
| You also can't ignore the fact that those neutrons also destroy
| the precise equipement designed to contain the reaction.
|
| Add to this, you need to perfectly contain an ultra-high
| temperature plasma and you run into fairly fundamental issues
| with fluid dynamics (ie turbulence).
|
| I'm disappointed but not the least bit surprised that the pro-
| fission HN crowd tries to hijack this thread into a fission
| energy argument. Is it possible to discuss nuclear fusion without
| bringing the quite unrelated fission issue into it?
| ncmncm wrote:
| There is also the problem of extracting grams of tritium every
| day from a thousand tons of lithium "blanket" so you will have
| fuel to operate from tomorrow.
|
| But the biggest problem is no one will pay more than 10 cents
| for what costs you dollars to produce. The fission people hold
| out hope that people can be forced to pay 50 cents for what
| they can get for 10 elsewhere.
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