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Nuclear fusion is probably still decades away. But I am going tangent here, nuclear fission still have great potentials. Scientists from the Oak Ridge National

by devy 8y ago

Nuclear fusion is probably still decades away. But I am going tangent here, nuclear fission still have great potentials. Scientists from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory actually helped China to built Molten Salt reactors in the 70s during Nixon administration. [1] And since then thorium based molten salt Gen IV reactors have been having renewed interests around the global. China actually tested the whole system feasibility in Giga Watts scale in recent years. [2] Nuclear power is vital part of the energy infrastructure to curb worsening environment due to climate change - it's still considered superior than all the other green alternative energies in terms of either 24/7 availability (vs. solar/wind) or massive scale (vs. geothermal) or location restricted (vs. hydro) or carbon-free (vs. biomass/bio-fuel). China realized that in their dire request to transition out their entire energy reliance on carbon-based energies, it's impossible to do without nuclear. Also, newer reactor designs are much safer and last longer so a lot of the concerns of radioactive waste have largely been alleviated. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10229697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10229697 (2015) [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17813614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17813614 (2018)

toomuchtodo 8y ago
> China realized than in their dire request to transition out their entire energy reliance on carbon-based energies, it's impossible to do without nuclear. Also, newer reactor designs are much safer and last longer so a long of the concerns of radioactive waste have largely been alleviated. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-taste-for-nuclear-power-thats-bad-news/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-... (December 12, 2018 | Sustainable Energy China’s losing its taste for nuclear power. That’s bad news.) HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18675453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18675453 Quick points: Too expensive with necessary safety measures, Chinese citizens don't want it after Fukushima, renewables are already cheaper, and electrical demand growth has declined unexpectedly. My opinion: We should still explore fusion technology and spend on R&D, but fission is already dead. Renewables and storage full speed ahead.
- devy 8y ago
  Fukushima is bad press and also Fukushima was designed and constructed in 1960s, that's Gen I design and let alone they cut corners in safety. Like I said, Gen IV is much much safer and produce much less radioactive wastes. Also nuclear fission might not be relevant if humanity cannot survive after 2040, according to IPCC's climate change report (I am doubtful we will even be able to get nuclear fission power plants commercialized by 2050 TBH.)
  - barney54 8y ago
    Where does the IPCC day the humanity won’t survive beyond 2040?
- kenneth 8y ago
  If fission is dead, then earth is dead. There is no way we'll survive if we continue to burn coal at the rate we do, and renewable don't work at scale yet and storage is not yet solved. Fission is the only thing that can provide us with enough clean energy in the near term (next 50 years).
  - dv_dt 8y ago
    We have to solve the problem in the next 10-12 years. The median nuclear plant construction is 7.5 years, with the US medians being more in the 18-20 year duration - with the very most recent nuclear projects mostly being shut down mid construction because of cost and schedule overruns. Even France, with one the most mature and well run nuclear power programs is concluding that the next wave of power investment makes more sense to make in renewables instead of nuclear. I suspect we will solve our problems with renewables + storage (which are still rapidly declining in cost).
    - Xixi 8y ago
      Regarding France, it seems that we have lost the actual knowledge on how to build nuclear power plants. Which should have been expected given that we stopped building those for quite a while, so of course the know-how is gone. Flamanville, the first EPR in France, was schedule to start running in 2012 for a construction cost of 3.3 billion EUR. It is now expected to start producing electricity in 2020 for a construction cost of 10.9 billion EUR. Emphasis on expected...
sandworm101 8y ago
China's approach to nuclear isn;t just environmentalism. It is largely a national pride project. Fission is an area of science that china knows it can excel in because, frankly, the west isn't doing much. I applaud china's efforts. I think we need fission energy. But I worry national pride isn't reason enough to maintain the program indefinitely. Coal prices are dropping. Will china continue to roll out fission reactors if/when coal falls off the price cliff?
- devy 8y ago
  > It is largely a national pride project It's much less a pride than a survival instinct. Just think about it, Beijing was under siege of heavy smog for over a decade by now. If Washington D.C. was like that for since Trump became the president, would he still advocate coal?
  - jacknews 8y ago
    Though Trump has to worry about those pesky elections.
hirundo 8y ago
> Nuclear fusion is probably still decades away. I wrote that sentence in a 10th grade report on fusion, in 1977. Disappointing that it's likely still true four decades later. In another four decades it's up to you to make this comment. On the other hand, so much has arrived that I never dreamed of in high school, though I consumed scifi obsessively. Not sure I'd swap the internet for cheap fusion energy. But not sure I wouldn't.
- jessriedel 8y ago
  Note that we've never spent as much money as we've always known would be necessary to achieve useful fusion power, so the oft-repeated idea that it's been surprisingly technologically difficult is not actually justified by the historical track record. > Typically, outsiders cannot comprehend how the massive expenditures never manage to yield energy. Typically, insiders cannot comprehend how little is being invested in a project that presents such immense technical obstacles and also such potential. A graph commonly passed around among the insiders—an enduring scrap of twentieth-century budgetary ephemera—depicts the 1976 federal plan to build a working thermonuclear reactor. The graph tracks various scenarios for attaining fusion energy. The “maximum” effort, the most expensive up front, with initial spending as high as nine billion dollars a year, was projected to yield a reactor by 1990. The “moderate” effort, with spending never exceeding four billion dollars in a year, would take fifteen more years. The fusion community might be easy to criticize for its many unmet milestones, but for decades the United States has never come close to even the moderate effort. In 1977, when the American fusion budget was at its peak, government investment in the research, adjusted for inflation, was seven hundred million dollars; by 1991, this had fallen by more than half. It is now half a billion, not appreciably more than the Korean budget. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bottle http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bot... The chart was produced by Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), which was later subsumed into the Department of Energy and presumably represented the expert wisdom at the time. It can be found, in 1976 dollars, as figure 1 here: http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_2009/Who_Killed_Fusion.pdf http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_2...
  - 8y ago
matt4077 8y ago
This reads like a parody of every thread on nuclear technology on HN or, before it, slashdot. It’s always „decades away“, but there’s always pebble bed/molten salt/thorium/whatever technology that’s far better, basically functional, mostly free, and only held up by those darn environmentalists/idiot politicians/liberals/oil lobby/NIMBYs/Elton John/… It feels like the tech community is forever trapped in the science fiction of the 50s, while actual science (and politicians) have created options that, frankly, are far better in every regard, including costs.
- mywittyname 8y ago
  A major issue is that people on HN are largely ignorant of nuclear power generation. It's largely a bunch of wikipedia-educated people debating youtube-educated people. So none of the discussions are realistic, because there's probably four people on HN with any real world subject matter knowledge. There's not the same blind-optimism to solar power generation.
  - Pica_soO 8y ago
    We like big problems more then big solutions. What we like even less, are small solutions to big problems.
  - ggm 8y ago
    There's not the same blind-optimism to solar power generation. Well.. it's hard to be overtly skeptical to a form of lower intensity power which works at scale, but lower intensity. The only claims to be rebutted are ones which overstate the pace of improvement to the forseen asymptote. What's more baffling is the constant jeremiad of hate against solar wind and battery because of prejudice favouring large centrally managed gigawatts. Nobody disputes big lumps of powerstation are good. What we're doing is fighting an ill informed skirmish inside the linear programming and O/R model of future power, rather pointlessly. I would like nuclear fusion and fission power research to continue. I would like the funding to lower intensity power to continue as well. I would like a grown up conversation about how much each should get annually as funding.
DennisP 8y ago
Also uranium-fueled molten salt reactors, using chloride salt. These will be fast reactors and have pretty much the same advantages as the thorium designs. Terrapower, Moltex, and Elysium are going this route (though Moltex is planning a thorium-fueled version as well).
- qwerty456127 8y ago
  Isn't thorium more abundant than uranium and easier to mine?
  - DennisP 8y ago
    It's three or four times as abundant as uranium, and about 400 times more abundant than U235. However, with fast reactors you can get power from all the uranium, not just the U235. Uranium is currently a small portion of the cost of nuclear, so it can't be that hard to mine, especially after we only need 1% as much for the same amount of power. Either keeps us going for thousands of years, and after that we could extract uranium from seawater until the sun goes out.
ohiovr 8y ago
There was a startup recently for molten salt reactors but didn’t conclude successfully https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/612193/nuclear-startup-to-fold-after-failing-to-deliver-reactor-that-ran-on-spent-fuel/ https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/612193/nuclear...
- DennisP 8y ago
  Transatomic claimed to have the fuel utilization of fast reactors without being a fast reactor. That turned out not to be the case. However, there are a bunch of other startups working on molten salt reactors, including Bill Gates' Terrapower, Terrestrial Energy, Thorcon, Moltex, Elysium, and Flibe. The farthest along is probably Terrestrial Energy, which has gotten through the hardest part of Canada's licensing process.
  - ohiovr 8y ago
    I would really like to see the particle beam fission concept explored also due to its versitility and control: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerator-driven_subcritical_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerator-driven_subcritical...
    - pfdietz 8y ago
      It's a niche technology, and doesn't address the main problem of fission (that the reactors are too expensive). At least it serves as a counterargument to those who want to make fusion-fission hybrid reactors.
njarboe 8y ago
There have been a series of breakthrough in helicity injection techniques and the understanding of spheromak physics in the last decade. Some believe that economical fusion power plants are possible with today's technology[1] and need a ~$30 million to prove out a scale model reactor before building a full scale one on the order of $2-3 billion of a 1-2 Gigawatt power plant. This is an order of magnitude less cost that the ITER project, which is spending a lot of money on cement and magnets on a probably doomed technology path of commercial fusion. These same breakthroughs are also likely to be able to produce a fusion engine for spacecraft. This is actually an easier problem to solve than electricity generation as the deuterium can be used as fuel and as a propellant ejected straight out of the plasma core at variable ISP up to around 100,000. No inefficient fusion to electricity to rocket engine cycle is necessary. I am not a fusion scientist, but my father is. For more info and technical references, drop me an email (see profile). [1]https://www.washington.edu/news/2014/10/08/uw-fusion-reactor-concept-could-be-cheaper-than-coal/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2014/10/08/uw-fusion-reactor...
- philwelch 8y ago
  > This is actually an easier problem to solve than electricity generation as the deuterium can be used as fuel and as a propellant ejected straight out of the plasma core at variable ISP up to around 100,000. Jesus. For reference, chemical rockets tend to have ISP in the low-to-mid hundreds, and ion thrusters are in the thousands—not ten thousands, but single thousands. A 100,000 ISP rocket is like a car that can drive from Bangkok to Vladivostok to Lisbon, then back to Istanbul and down to Johannesburg without refueling or recharging. It’s like a phone battery that lasts years rather than days. And it’s all powered by the most plentiful elements in the universe. I’m pretty sure you could generate electricity by flying this rocket around in a circle tethered to an electric turbine if you wanted to. I mean, all of your electricity would probably be in space, because a high ISP usually implies that the rocket doesn’t work as well on the earth’s surface (not as a physical law, just as a limitation of our technology), but of all the monumentally impressive things you can build from a fusion reactor, a 100k ISP rocket has got to be up there. As for ITER, I’m not necessarily bearish on it, but if there’s a credible chance of an alternative design that can be proven for anything <$1 billion...I hate to say it, but any person, venture capital fund, or government with more than $10 billion to their name would be hard pressed to find any better use for it. Even if the damn thing is 95% likely to fail, that’s a 5% chance you literally end up having a stake in the single most valuable technology in the single most valuable sector of the economy—one that will provide untold benefits to mankind. 30 million dollars, really? Like—does Y Combinator know about this? Never mind the “benefits to mankind”—if a single business can be first to market with an economical fusion power plant, that will become the single most valuable business in human history. There’s like five tech companies that are up there in the ranks of “most valuable business in the world”, and they’re approximately the same value as any of about ten oil and gas conglomerates, and those lists usually don’t even count state-owned companies that are even more valuable. (“All the oil in Saudi Arabia”—that’s wealth.) Fusion power would immediately be more valuable than every single oil and gas company in the world put together. Even if nobody bought fusion plants, you could just build the damn things yourself, use them to synthesize hydrocarbons from the damn atmosphere, and undercut the market while simultaneously fixing climate change by making fossil fuel usage a closed loop with no new net CO2 introduced into the atmosphere and an economical method for extracting the excess we already have.
ArtWomb 8y ago
Construction time for nuclear plants average 10-20 years, vs 2-4 years for wind and solar grids. There are other risks to consider as well. From the forthcoming textbook, 100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/NuclearVsWWS.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Nucl...
derblitzmann 8y ago
If I recall the fusion meme correctly, it is perpetually 10 years from now... Assuming it gets properly funded. Though I also believe that fission research and plants still have their place, especially if you care about carbon emissions.
Krasnol 8y ago
> Also, newer reactor designs are much safer and last longer so a lot of the concerns of radioactive waste have largely been alleviated. ...in countries that are large enough to make it "disappear". Meanwhile normal sized countries are still struggling with old waste and new waste. See Germany. Meanwhile reprocessing as it exists is economically pointless, while it reduces the amounts of highly radioactive material enlarges the amounts of mid and low radioactive material and doesn't help with the stuff that has been insufficiently stored already. Also Sellafield and La Hague are probably polluting water. Hooray...
tim333 8y ago
>Nuclear fusion is probably still decades away Maybe but startups are having a crack at it eg. "UK Atomic Energy Authority and First Light Fusion team up for project that aims to deliver fusion breakthrough by 2024" https://web.archive.org/web/20181206125841/https://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/3067747/fusion-island-uk-start-up-reveals-plans-for-pioneering-nuclear-fusion-research https://web.archive.org/web/20181206125841/https://www.busin...
cenal 8y ago
There is also a major advancement in disposal technology: http://www.deepisolation.com http://www.deepisolation.com

by devy 8y ago

toomuchtodo 8y ago

> China realized than in their dire request to transition out their entire energy reliance on carbon-based energies, it's impossible to do without nuclear. Also, newer reactor designs are much safer and last longer so a long of the concerns of radioactive waste have largely been alleviated. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-taste-for-nuclear-power-thats-bad-news/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-... (December 12, 2018 | Sustainable Energy China’s losing its taste for nuclear power. That’s bad news.) HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18675453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18675453 Quick points: Too expensive with necessary safety measures, Chinese citizens don't want it after Fukushima, renewables are already cheaper, and electrical demand growth has declined unexpectedly. My opinion: We should still explore fusion technology and spend on R&D, but fission is already dead. Renewables and storage full speed ahead.

devy 8y ago
Fukushima is bad press and also Fukushima was designed and constructed in 1960s, that's Gen I design and let alone they cut corners in safety. Like I said, Gen IV is much much safer and produce much less radioactive wastes. Also nuclear fission might not be relevant if humanity cannot survive after 2040, according to IPCC's climate change report (I am doubtful we will even be able to get nuclear fission power plants commercialized by 2050 TBH.)
- barney54 8y ago
  Where does the IPCC day the humanity won’t survive beyond 2040?
kenneth 8y ago
If fission is dead, then earth is dead. There is no way we'll survive if we continue to burn coal at the rate we do, and renewable don't work at scale yet and storage is not yet solved. Fission is the only thing that can provide us with enough clean energy in the near term (next 50 years).
- dv_dt 8y ago
  We have to solve the problem in the next 10-12 years. The median nuclear plant construction is 7.5 years, with the US medians being more in the 18-20 year duration - with the very most recent nuclear projects mostly being shut down mid construction because of cost and schedule overruns. Even France, with one the most mature and well run nuclear power programs is concluding that the next wave of power investment makes more sense to make in renewables instead of nuclear. I suspect we will solve our problems with renewables + storage (which are still rapidly declining in cost).
  - Xixi 8y ago
    Regarding France, it seems that we have lost the actual knowledge on how to build nuclear power plants. Which should have been expected given that we stopped building those for quite a while, so of course the know-how is gone. Flamanville, the first EPR in France, was schedule to start running in 2012 for a construction cost of 3.3 billion EUR. It is now expected to start producing electricity in 2020 for a construction cost of 10.9 billion EUR. Emphasis on expected...

sandworm101 8y ago

China's approach to nuclear isn;t just environmentalism. It is largely a national pride project. Fission is an area of science that china knows it can excel in because, frankly, the west isn't doing much. I applaud china's efforts. I think we need fission energy. But I worry national pride isn't reason enough to maintain the program indefinitely. Coal prices are dropping. Will china continue to roll out fission reactors if/when coal falls off the price cliff?

devy 8y ago
> It is largely a national pride project It's much less a pride than a survival instinct. Just think about it, Beijing was under siege of heavy smog for over a decade by now. If Washington D.C. was like that for since Trump became the president, would he still advocate coal?
- jacknews 8y ago
  Though Trump has to worry about those pesky elections.

hirundo 8y ago

> Nuclear fusion is probably still decades away. I wrote that sentence in a 10th grade report on fusion, in 1977. Disappointing that it's likely still true four decades later. In another four decades it's up to you to make this comment. On the other hand, so much has arrived that I never dreamed of in high school, though I consumed scifi obsessively. Not sure I'd swap the internet for cheap fusion energy. But not sure I wouldn't.

jessriedel 8y ago
Note that we've never spent as much money as we've always known would be necessary to achieve useful fusion power, so the oft-repeated idea that it's been surprisingly technologically difficult is not actually justified by the historical track record. > Typically, outsiders cannot comprehend how the massive expenditures never manage to yield energy. Typically, insiders cannot comprehend how little is being invested in a project that presents such immense technical obstacles and also such potential. A graph commonly passed around among the insiders—an enduring scrap of twentieth-century budgetary ephemera—depicts the 1976 federal plan to build a working thermonuclear reactor. The graph tracks various scenarios for attaining fusion energy. The “maximum” effort, the most expensive up front, with initial spending as high as nine billion dollars a year, was projected to yield a reactor by 1990. The “moderate” effort, with spending never exceeding four billion dollars in a year, would take fifteen more years. The fusion community might be easy to criticize for its many unmet milestones, but for decades the United States has never come close to even the moderate effort. In 1977, when the American fusion budget was at its peak, government investment in the research, adjusted for inflation, was seven hundred million dollars; by 1991, this had fallen by more than half. It is now half a billion, not appreciably more than the Korean budget. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bottle http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bot... The chart was produced by Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), which was later subsumed into the Department of Energy and presumably represented the expert wisdom at the time. It can be found, in 1976 dollars, as figure 1 here: http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_2009/Who_Killed_Fusion.pdf http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_2...
- 8y ago

matt4077 8y ago

This reads like a parody of every thread on nuclear technology on HN or, before it, slashdot. It’s always „decades away“, but there’s always pebble bed/molten salt/thorium/whatever technology that’s far better, basically functional, mostly free, and only held up by those darn environmentalists/idiot politicians/liberals/oil lobby/NIMBYs/Elton John/… It feels like the tech community is forever trapped in the science fiction of the 50s, while actual science (and politicians) have created options that, frankly, are far better in every regard, including costs.

mywittyname 8y ago
A major issue is that people on HN are largely ignorant of nuclear power generation. It's largely a bunch of wikipedia-educated people debating youtube-educated people. So none of the discussions are realistic, because there's probably four people on HN with any real world subject matter knowledge. There's not the same blind-optimism to solar power generation.
- Pica_soO 8y ago
  We like big problems more then big solutions. What we like even less, are small solutions to big problems.
- ggm 8y ago
  There's not the same blind-optimism to solar power generation. Well.. it's hard to be overtly skeptical to a form of lower intensity power which works at scale, but lower intensity. The only claims to be rebutted are ones which overstate the pace of improvement to the forseen asymptote. What's more baffling is the constant jeremiad of hate against solar wind and battery because of prejudice favouring large centrally managed gigawatts. Nobody disputes big lumps of powerstation are good. What we're doing is fighting an ill informed skirmish inside the linear programming and O/R model of future power, rather pointlessly. I would like nuclear fusion and fission power research to continue. I would like the funding to lower intensity power to continue as well. I would like a grown up conversation about how much each should get annually as funding.

DennisP 8y ago

Also uranium-fueled molten salt reactors, using chloride salt. These will be fast reactors and have pretty much the same advantages as the thorium designs. Terrapower, Moltex, and Elysium are going this route (though Moltex is planning a thorium-fueled version as well).

qwerty456127 8y ago
Isn't thorium more abundant than uranium and easier to mine?
- DennisP 8y ago
  It's three or four times as abundant as uranium, and about 400 times more abundant than U235. However, with fast reactors you can get power from all the uranium, not just the U235. Uranium is currently a small portion of the cost of nuclear, so it can't be that hard to mine, especially after we only need 1% as much for the same amount of power. Either keeps us going for thousands of years, and after that we could extract uranium from seawater until the sun goes out.

ohiovr 8y ago

There was a startup recently for molten salt reactors but didn’t conclude successfully https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/612193/nuclear-startup-to-fold-after-failing-to-deliver-reactor-that-ran-on-spent-fuel/ https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/612193/nuclear...

DennisP 8y ago
Transatomic claimed to have the fuel utilization of fast reactors without being a fast reactor. That turned out not to be the case. However, there are a bunch of other startups working on molten salt reactors, including Bill Gates' Terrapower, Terrestrial Energy, Thorcon, Moltex, Elysium, and Flibe. The farthest along is probably Terrestrial Energy, which has gotten through the hardest part of Canada's licensing process.
- ohiovr 8y ago
  I would really like to see the particle beam fission concept explored also due to its versitility and control: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerator-driven_subcritical_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerator-driven_subcritical...
  - pfdietz 8y ago
    It's a niche technology, and doesn't address the main problem of fission (that the reactors are too expensive). At least it serves as a counterargument to those who want to make fusion-fission hybrid reactors.

njarboe 8y ago

There have been a series of breakthrough in helicity injection techniques and the understanding of spheromak physics in the last decade. Some believe that economical fusion power plants are possible with today's technology[1] and need a ~$30 million to prove out a scale model reactor before building a full scale one on the order of $2-3 billion of a 1-2 Gigawatt power plant. This is an order of magnitude less cost that the ITER project, which is spending a lot of money on cement and magnets on a probably doomed technology path of commercial fusion. These same breakthroughs are also likely to be able to produce a fusion engine for spacecraft. This is actually an easier problem to solve than electricity generation as the deuterium can be used as fuel and as a propellant ejected straight out of the plasma core at variable ISP up to around 100,000. No inefficient fusion to electricity to rocket engine cycle is necessary. I am not a fusion scientist, but my father is. For more info and technical references, drop me an email (see profile). [1]https://www.washington.edu/news/2014/10/08/uw-fusion-reactor-concept-could-be-cheaper-than-coal/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2014/10/08/uw-fusion-reactor...

philwelch 8y ago
> This is actually an easier problem to solve than electricity generation as the deuterium can be used as fuel and as a propellant ejected straight out of the plasma core at variable ISP up to around 100,000. Jesus. For reference, chemical rockets tend to have ISP in the low-to-mid hundreds, and ion thrusters are in the thousands—not ten thousands, but single thousands. A 100,000 ISP rocket is like a car that can drive from Bangkok to Vladivostok to Lisbon, then back to Istanbul and down to Johannesburg without refueling or recharging. It’s like a phone battery that lasts years rather than days. And it’s all powered by the most plentiful elements in the universe. I’m pretty sure you could generate electricity by flying this rocket around in a circle tethered to an electric turbine if you wanted to. I mean, all of your electricity would probably be in space, because a high ISP usually implies that the rocket doesn’t work as well on the earth’s surface (not as a physical law, just as a limitation of our technology), but of all the monumentally impressive things you can build from a fusion reactor, a 100k ISP rocket has got to be up there. As for ITER, I’m not necessarily bearish on it, but if there’s a credible chance of an alternative design that can be proven for anything <$1 billion...I hate to say it, but any person, venture capital fund, or government with more than $10 billion to their name would be hard pressed to find any better use for it. Even if the damn thing is 95% likely to fail, that’s a 5% chance you literally end up having a stake in the single most valuable technology in the single most valuable sector of the economy—one that will provide untold benefits to mankind. 30 million dollars, really? Like—does Y Combinator know about this? Never mind the “benefits to mankind”—if a single business can be first to market with an economical fusion power plant, that will become the single most valuable business in human history. There’s like five tech companies that are up there in the ranks of “most valuable business in the world”, and they’re approximately the same value as any of about ten oil and gas conglomerates, and those lists usually don’t even count state-owned companies that are even more valuable. (“All the oil in Saudi Arabia”—that’s wealth.) Fusion power would immediately be more valuable than every single oil and gas company in the world put together. Even if nobody bought fusion plants, you could just build the damn things yourself, use them to synthesize hydrocarbons from the damn atmosphere, and undercut the market while simultaneously fixing climate change by making fossil fuel usage a closed loop with no new net CO2 introduced into the atmosphere and an economical method for extracting the excess we already have.

ArtWomb 8y ago

Construction time for nuclear plants average 10-20 years, vs 2-4 years for wind and solar grids. There are other risks to consider as well. From the forthcoming textbook, 100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/NuclearVsWWS.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Nucl...

derblitzmann 8y ago

If I recall the fusion meme correctly, it is perpetually 10 years from now... Assuming it gets properly funded. Though I also believe that fission research and plants still have their place, especially if you care about carbon emissions.

Krasnol 8y ago

> Also, newer reactor designs are much safer and last longer so a lot of the concerns of radioactive waste have largely been alleviated. ...in countries that are large enough to make it "disappear". Meanwhile normal sized countries are still struggling with old waste and new waste. See Germany. Meanwhile reprocessing as it exists is economically pointless, while it reduces the amounts of highly radioactive material enlarges the amounts of mid and low radioactive material and doesn't help with the stuff that has been insufficiently stored already. Also Sellafield and La Hague are probably polluting water. Hooray...

tim333 8y ago

>Nuclear fusion is probably still decades away Maybe but startups are having a crack at it eg. "UK Atomic Energy Authority and First Light Fusion team up for project that aims to deliver fusion breakthrough by 2024" https://web.archive.org/web/20181206125841/https://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/3067747/fusion-island-uk-start-up-reveals-plans-for-pioneering-nuclear-fusion-research https://web.archive.org/web/20181206125841/https://www.busin...

cenal 8y ago

There is also a major advancement in disposal technology: http://www.deepisolation.com http://www.deepisolation.com