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Building a conventional fission plant can easily cost $10B: https://thebulletin.org/2019/06/why-nuclear-power-plants-cost-so-much-and-what-can-be-done-about-it/

Building a conventional fission plant can easily cost $10B: https://thebulletin.org/2019/06/why-nuclear-power-plants-cost-so-much-and-what-can-be-done-about-it/ https://thebulletin.org/2019/06/why-nuclear-power-plants-cos... $200M is laughable - as is the 20 year plan. I recently reread Summa Technologicae by Stanislaw Lem. Written in 1961, it also guessed that fusion will be there 20 years in the future - meaning 1981 :)

swebs 7y ago
>Building a conventional fission plant can easily cost $10B. $200M is laughable The budget for ITER is 20b. The UK is only pitching in 200m. Other countries are pitching in the rest. The USA already pitched in $1b for example. The article only mentioned the UK because it was written for UK readers.
paganel 7y ago
Hopefully this means that we’ll never achieve nuclear fusion in a practical way. As far as I can understand this will practically create energy at close-to-nothing prices, which while it will certainly solve some of our today’s issues (burning fossils is quite bad) at the same time it will also create a lot other bigger issues. For example, if you make it energy-free (i.e. price-free) to cut trees and build highways wherever you want I’m pretty sure the Amazon rain-forest will disappear a lot faster compared to what’s happening now.
- robocat 7y ago
  We also need to capture CO2, not just stop producing it. Nuclear fusion has a chance of being the solution to that problem.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  No, fusion will not create energy at "close to nothing" prices. It promises to be extremely costly, actually.
  - paganel 7y ago
    Great, then it won’t happen (probably I had mistaken it with something else). Everything that makes energy less expensive and/or more easily available creates lots and lots of bad externalities. It’s time we stop believing that technology and technologic advancement will take us out of this mess, it is technology that threw us under the bus in the first place.

swebs 7y ago

>Building a conventional fission plant can easily cost $10B. $200M is laughable The budget for ITER is 20b. The UK is only pitching in 200m. Other countries are pitching in the rest. The USA already pitched in $1b for example. The article only mentioned the UK because it was written for UK readers.

paganel 7y ago

Hopefully this means that we’ll never achieve nuclear fusion in a practical way. As far as I can understand this will practically create energy at close-to-nothing prices, which while it will certainly solve some of our today’s issues (burning fossils is quite bad) at the same time it will also create a lot other bigger issues. For example, if you make it energy-free (i.e. price-free) to cut trees and build highways wherever you want I’m pretty sure the Amazon rain-forest will disappear a lot faster compared to what’s happening now.

robocat 7y ago
We also need to capture CO2, not just stop producing it. Nuclear fusion has a chance of being the solution to that problem.
pfdietz 7y ago
No, fusion will not create energy at "close to nothing" prices. It promises to be extremely costly, actually.
- paganel 7y ago
  Great, then it won’t happen (probably I had mistaken it with something else). Everything that makes energy less expensive and/or more easily available creates lots and lots of bad externalities. It’s time we stop believing that technology and technologic advancement will take us out of this mess, it is technology that threw us under the bus in the first place.