3 ms·

To be fair, I never read anything about fusion being 'just around the corner'. We've finally gotten a little smarter about the hype. There were great expectat

To be fair, I never read anything about fusion being 'just around the corner'. We've finally gotten a little smarter about the hype. There were great expectations for fusion about 40 years ago. Here's a shady group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_Energy_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_Energy_Foundation that used the hype to raise money: In 1977, Executive Director Morris Levitt asserted that nuclear fusion power plants could be built by 1990 if the U.S. spent $50 to $100 billion on research.

mchahn 10y ago
>There were great expectations for fusion about 40 years ago. I was at the NY world's fair, I think it was 1960 (56 yrs ago). I remember walking through an exhibit that showed fusion. They had a chitload of capacitors in a bank that dumped all the power into a big electric spark. It looked impressive and sounded great. They implied fusion was almost ready.
eggy 10y ago
I was approached by nuclear fusion advocates during a 1981 Anit-Nuke demonstration in NYC. I have always been scientifically-minded, so it actually set me on a course of reading up on all things nuclear. A lot of the marchers were not generally educated on nuclear science. Aside from military uses of nuclear science, there are a lot of obstacles to developing anything nuclear, fission or fusion. I think we would be further along, and better off, if less scare and more education were available about it. Solar energy, the production, usage, maintenance and storage of panels, wiring, and battery banks are now a safety concern given that more than 25 people a year have died in Australia alone just installing and maintaining them (cleaning them). This is only the roofing aspect of it. What about the production and storage of batteries, the materials and chemicals used to produce panels, etc... Roofing claims more deaths worldwide than nuclear energy has by many orders of magnitude. I believe this bias is due mainly to fear and ignorance, and the contemporary phenomenon of zero-risk. We don't apply the same risk analysis to nuclear that we do to other fields. An example of how this is coming to bite us back is the discovery of the benefits of certain germs after most developed nations embraced anti-septics to an extreme (hand sanitizers, strong kitchen and bathroom cleaners to name two). The biome and snot are in! Even Fukushima was a confluence of old reactors, on a seaboard and a tsunami which claimed almost all of the fatalities if you allow for theoretically higher rates of thyroid cancer and others. Taking a middle position, or better a geometric mean of Greenpeace's and others maximum claims vs. the nuclear industry's playing down of casualties in the three (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima) major nuclear incidents to date, you arrive at a very safe industry that has operated for over 50 years in over 30 countries. Fission reactors that don't need water cooling would allay any need to be near seaboards or water, and their shutdown on failure makes them even safer with no reliance on an outside water source or power as a potential risk. The number of students studying nuclear science tripled from 2004 to 2013, yet the labor statistics show a -4% job growth vs. environmental sciences 11% growth, or a 15% spread. The nuclear engineer job pays roughly 33% more. I still think it is our best bet to date, but I am not saying like others, just pick one. Let's keep at the alternative 'green' energy-producing technologies and nuclear, not either/or.
- im4w1l 10y ago
  The thing with falling-of-roof deaths is that they are poisson distributed. If 25 people fell off roofs then maybe if we are unlucky 50 people will fall off roofs this year. But no amount of bad luck will ever make 10,000 fall off roofs the year after. Deaths from fusion and nuclear on the other hand are very unpredictable. It is easy to imagine that year after year, no people die. And then suddenly millions of people die. That means that equating actual danger with observed-deaths-so-far is just not possible.
  - DougWebb 10y ago
    Millions of people? Where do you get that number? We've had two devastating accidents with nuclear reactors, and one that came close to being devastating. All three were older designs that were more dangerous than the designs we could build today. The combined death toll is in the hundreds to thousands, at best. You don't get up to millions of deaths unless we start firing nuclear weapons at each other.
    - eggy 10y ago
      Exactly why I chose the geometric mean with the nuclear industry claiming less than a 100, and Greenpeace reaching for 850,000, that ballparks you to 9200. If you try and include hypothetical deaths decades later, you would also need to include coal-burning plants particulate causing respiratory diseases affecting longevity, and the fact that there is typically a higher radiation level on the perimeter of a coal-burning plant than right outside an operating nuclear power station. Nuclear looks better with each passing year in spite of the back pressure. Also, I am not sure of the choice of the Poisson distribution suggested above. Roofers are experienced at walking on rooftops, and die due to, well, accidents. That and roofing work is fairly consistent. This number would follow some sort of normal or Poisson distribution, but homeowners are typically only used to a ladder to clean rain gutters out, not roofing or rooftop walking. Death of roofers/installers during initial installation were the numbers I was quoting from Australia. I think homeowner fatalities will top the roofers in areas with increasing solar panel installations. I would think a Weibul distribution with a Beta of 0.5 would better suit this scenario to model all of the inexperienced homeowners cleaning their solar panels monthly, and then dropping off (no pun intended) after reports and education on working at heights diffuses into the populace.

mchahn 10y ago

>There were great expectations for fusion about 40 years ago. I was at the NY world's fair, I think it was 1960 (56 yrs ago). I remember walking through an exhibit that showed fusion. They had a chitload of capacitors in a bank that dumped all the power into a big electric spark. It looked impressive and sounded great. They implied fusion was almost ready.

eggy 10y ago

I was approached by nuclear fusion advocates during a 1981 Anit-Nuke demonstration in NYC. I have always been scientifically-minded, so it actually set me on a course of reading up on all things nuclear. A lot of the marchers were not generally educated on nuclear science. Aside from military uses of nuclear science, there are a lot of obstacles to developing anything nuclear, fission or fusion. I think we would be further along, and better off, if less scare and more education were available about it. Solar energy, the production, usage, maintenance and storage of panels, wiring, and battery banks are now a safety concern given that more than 25 people a year have died in Australia alone just installing and maintaining them (cleaning them). This is only the roofing aspect of it. What about the production and storage of batteries, the materials and chemicals used to produce panels, etc... Roofing claims more deaths worldwide than nuclear energy has by many orders of magnitude. I believe this bias is due mainly to fear and ignorance, and the contemporary phenomenon of zero-risk. We don't apply the same risk analysis to nuclear that we do to other fields. An example of how this is coming to bite us back is the discovery of the benefits of certain germs after most developed nations embraced anti-septics to an extreme (hand sanitizers, strong kitchen and bathroom cleaners to name two). The biome and snot are in! Even Fukushima was a confluence of old reactors, on a seaboard and a tsunami which claimed almost all of the fatalities if you allow for theoretically higher rates of thyroid cancer and others. Taking a middle position, or better a geometric mean of Greenpeace's and others maximum claims vs. the nuclear industry's playing down of casualties in the three (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima) major nuclear incidents to date, you arrive at a very safe industry that has operated for over 50 years in over 30 countries. Fission reactors that don't need water cooling would allay any need to be near seaboards or water, and their shutdown on failure makes them even safer with no reliance on an outside water source or power as a potential risk. The number of students studying nuclear science tripled from 2004 to 2013, yet the labor statistics show a -4% job growth vs. environmental sciences 11% growth, or a 15% spread. The nuclear engineer job pays roughly 33% more. I still think it is our best bet to date, but I am not saying like others, just pick one. Let's keep at the alternative 'green' energy-producing technologies and nuclear, not either/or.

im4w1l 10y ago
The thing with falling-of-roof deaths is that they are poisson distributed. If 25 people fell off roofs then maybe if we are unlucky 50 people will fall off roofs this year. But no amount of bad luck will ever make 10,000 fall off roofs the year after. Deaths from fusion and nuclear on the other hand are very unpredictable. It is easy to imagine that year after year, no people die. And then suddenly millions of people die. That means that equating actual danger with observed-deaths-so-far is just not possible.
- DougWebb 10y ago
  Millions of people? Where do you get that number? We've had two devastating accidents with nuclear reactors, and one that came close to being devastating. All three were older designs that were more dangerous than the designs we could build today. The combined death toll is in the hundreds to thousands, at best. You don't get up to millions of deaths unless we start firing nuclear weapons at each other.
  - eggy 10y ago
    Exactly why I chose the geometric mean with the nuclear industry claiming less than a 100, and Greenpeace reaching for 850,000, that ballparks you to 9200. If you try and include hypothetical deaths decades later, you would also need to include coal-burning plants particulate causing respiratory diseases affecting longevity, and the fact that there is typically a higher radiation level on the perimeter of a coal-burning plant than right outside an operating nuclear power station. Nuclear looks better with each passing year in spite of the back pressure. Also, I am not sure of the choice of the Poisson distribution suggested above. Roofers are experienced at walking on rooftops, and die due to, well, accidents. That and roofing work is fairly consistent. This number would follow some sort of normal or Poisson distribution, but homeowners are typically only used to a ladder to clean rain gutters out, not roofing or rooftop walking. Death of roofers/installers during initial installation were the numbers I was quoting from Australia. I think homeowner fatalities will top the roofers in areas with increasing solar panel installations. I would think a Weibul distribution with a Beta of 0.5 would better suit this scenario to model all of the inexperienced homeowners cleaning their solar panels monthly, and then dropping off (no pun intended) after reports and education on working at heights diffuses into the populace.