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Fusion is not going to solve the sea level rise problem. You can see this by comparing it to fission. Fission fuels is not expensive on a kWh base, so cheaper
by olau 6y ago
Fusion is not going to solve the sea level rise problem.
You can see this by comparing it to fission.
Fission fuels is not expensive on a kWh base, so cheaper fuel is not really a big advantage.
Fusion plants produce radioactive waste too (perhaps less?), so you don't save yourself from that headache. Which isn't actually that big of a problem either, even if the costs are probably underestimated for fission plants.
Now, the real killer for fission is the cost of the plants. They are just so incredibly complex and expensive that they are not competitive.
Will a fusion plant be cheaper? Probably not. It will most likely, with current tech, be much more expensive. So it won't be able to compete with fission. And fission can't compete (in most parts of the world) with renewables, that are still falling exponentially in price.
So fusion may still be interesting from a scientific stand point, and perhaps things will change in the far future.
An argument I often see is that renewables need storage, and that's true. But so does a fission or a fusion plant, unless you overbuild and accept a bad capacity factor. Some amount of overbuild combined with storage looks like the most economical solution currently - the specifics depend very much on where you are in the world.
- deweller 6y agoFusion does not create any long-lived radioactive waste.
- tyho 6y agoNo, but fast neutrons are created in some processes which induce long lived radiation in reactor materials though.
- willis936 6y ago100 years is not “long lived” in the context of radioactive waste disposal. http://www.acamedia.info/sciences/J_G/fusion.html http://www.acamedia.info/sciences/J_G/fusion.html
- pfdietz 6y agoFusion will likely produce a larger volume of waste contaminated enough to prevent easy disposal. That could very well make the waste more expensive to deal with.
- Gwypaas 6y agoWouldn't the major differentiator be the safety standards? You can't have a runaway reaction, because you need energy input to the magnet field to get more energy out. Instead of creating the right environment to get a chain reaction started if your control rods end up in the wrong place. Drop the magnet field and it all collapses. Even if you lose control of it with the magnet field on the quantity is limited, tokamaks can only sustain bursts before going unstable. Wendelstein like designs would also be limited by the quantity contained. If everything goes completely wrong you simply end up with a dirty bomb from the neutron bombarded core material and an initial burst of radiation. Sure not amazing but not a meltdown releasing vast quantities of heavy radioactive decay materials which can leach into the environment. Remember, fission is messy, it's not a chemical reaction where A+B = C. You get a spread of materials and energies, as seen by the Z number here. [0] Essentially, you can at any point do an unsafe abort which might damage something or if everything aligns it's no more than a dirty bomb, but you will never lose control. Your Swiss cheese model needs to have far fewer and simpler layers compared to fission, vastly bringing at least those costs down. I'm still betting on renewables for the near future, but my guess is at least harnessing fusion will have a place for projects with extremely specific goals in the 50-100 year timescale. [0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/ThermalFissionYield.svg/2560px-ThermalFissionYield.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Th...
- entropicdrifter 6y agoFusion will also be pretty much mandatory for deep space exploration and space colony ships, if we ever get that far
- pfdietz 6y agoNo, it won't. It is inferior to fission, solar, and beamed power.
- pfdietz 6y agoFusion will still require a containment building because of tritium and because of the pressure from volatilized cryogenic coolants. The building will also require very strict control of tritium escape in normal operation. Remember, a 1 DW(e) DT reactor will burn enough tritium in one year to contaminate 2 months total flow of the Mississippi river above the legal limit for drinking water. Fusion will also require highly reliable equipement, just like fission. Not because of safety, but because the fusion reactor will be complicated and very difficult to repair. The reactor itself, even the magnets, will be irradiated and activated beyond the point where hands on maintenance could be performed.
- fennecfoxen 6y agoFission is too expensive because everyone tried to get economies of scale at big complex custom-built one-off plants. Those who see hope for fission look to get economies of scale with a modular approach, mass-producing simple, small, reactors, shipping them from the factory to the site on trucks, and attaching them to the grid. I am not qualified to assess whether that hope is well-founded, but there are real differences in the approach.
- marcosdumay 6y agoBig nuclear reactors are cheaper on the $/MW metric than small ones. Big steam power plants are also cheaper on the $/MW than small ones. It's not that clear how much economy of scale is there with a modular design and if it's enough to displace the diseconomy of making smaller plants. But the one thing that gets cheaper with a small size is safety mechanisms, and those are a big thing.