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What makes you think fusion power will be cheaper than solar, wind, fossil fuels or fission? Efficiency isn't really a good metric when the fuel is free. We se

What makes you think fusion power will be cheaper than solar, wind, fossil fuels or fission? Efficiency isn't really a good metric when the fuel is free. We see that in solar power where expensive high efficiency devices lose out to cheaper less efficient ones. It's more about capital cost and operating cost per unit of energy.

southerntofu 6y ago
To elaborate on the topic, there is ample evidence that nuclear energy is by far the most expensive source of energy, when you take into account the government (for example here in France) entirely subsidizing the construction and hypothetical demolition. I say hypothetical because french attempts at "safely dismantling" nuclear power point are not going so well and are over-budget by an order of magnitude. Then these people who can't even build/dismantle a plant (see the many Areva scandals) would like us to believe they can build an underground storage area for highly radioactive materials that's gonna be safe for at least 100 000 years? Despite growing evidence of the contrary There's also growing evidence that nuclear and renewables tend to be incompatible, mostly because nuclear means a grid with huge centers of energy production, far away from energy consumption (the opposite is true with renewables). https://www.sussex.ac.uk/news/research?id=53376 https://www.sussex.ac.uk/news/research?id=53376
- selectodude 6y ago
  I'm always kind of curious as this "expensive" line of thinking. Yes, nuclear is expensive. Extremely expensive. But is it more expensive than a week's worth of catastrophic grid collapse due to global warming? We have the ability to build nuclear plants. We can reprocess the waste to make more energy with. We can get better at it to drive down the price. It's more reliable as a base load than any renewable. My state gets over fifty percent of its energy from nuclear power plants. I pay a few pennies more per kWh than neighboring states. I'd pay a few more pennies than that to figure out the rest of this issue.
  - southerntofu 6y ago
    > But is it more expensive than... Like you, i don't believe price to be an argument of concern. I'm merely stating this because over and over, both in French media and on HN, i've seen stated that nuclear is the cheapest energy which is a blatant lie. > We can reprocess the waste to make more energy with. Source? From my limited understanding, all nuclear research that produced either less-dangerous waste or re-usable waste was shut down decades ago because there was no foreseeable way to turn that into weapons. The nuclear industry is deeply tied to the military industrial complex and (neo)colonial extractivism (see Françafrique networks for references). > It's more reliable as a base load than any renewable. Source? Here in France there's uncountable accidents/scandals in the nuclear industry and reactors are often stopped for weeks/months at a time. The same cannot be said about hydro power (dams) for instance. > I'd pay a few more pennies than that to figure out the rest of this issue Economic incentives is only part of the problem in my view. We in the industrialized world are aiming for ever-growing (ideally infinite) energy production and consumption, which necessarily leads to ecocide and other environmental damages. Don't you believe reducing our resources/energy footprint as a society is a more sustainable way to address the problem? There are many strategies we can put in place to reduce energy consumption, but these would contradict basic tenets of capitalism. For the most obvious example (from HN's perspective), see planned obsolescence or how/why we build more devices every few years than there are humans on earth (and yet we keep on having to buy new ones, which is severely damaging the environment).
    - selectodude 6y ago
      >Source? From my limited understanding, all nuclear research that produced either less-dangerous waste or re-usable waste was shut down decades ago because there was no foreseeable way to turn that into weapons. The nuclear industry is deeply tied to the military industrial complex and (neo)colonial extractivism (see Françafrique networks for references). The existence of La Hague site in northwest France has been very successful at nuclear reprocessing. >Source? Here in France there's uncountable accidents/scandals in the nuclear industry and reactors are often stopped for weeks/months at a time. The same cannot be said about hydro power (dams) for instance. It's not uncountable. There have been like ten in the entire country over the past fifty years. >Don't you believe reducing our resources/energy footprint as a society is a more sustainable way to address the problem? No. The one actual resource we can make and use is energy. We need to use less consumables. Energy isn't a consumable in our timeline. So many things are predicated on significant increases in clean energy. We could literally suck carbon out of the air with enough energy.
pfdietz 6y ago
Efficiency is also a bad metric if the inputs are different. Usually when I see "efficiency" used in a pro-nuclear argument it's not used in any rigorous way, though. It's just a vacuous cheer word.
- exporectomy 6y ago
  Yes. Even fossil fuels contain far more nuclear energy than chemical energy so the engines we use are ~0% efficient if you actually count that as part of the input, even though we could, in principle, build an engine which does use it. How then do you compare two different nuclear fuels for efficiency?
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    You don't compare them for efficiency. That's a useless thing to do. You compare for other metrics that actually matter, like cost.
    - exporectomy 6y ago
      I know. It was just a rhetorical question to further show the unhelpfulness of efficiency.

southerntofu 6y ago

To elaborate on the topic, there is ample evidence that nuclear energy is by far the most expensive source of energy, when you take into account the government (for example here in France) entirely subsidizing the construction and hypothetical demolition. I say hypothetical because french attempts at "safely dismantling" nuclear power point are not going so well and are over-budget by an order of magnitude. Then these people who can't even build/dismantle a plant (see the many Areva scandals) would like us to believe they can build an underground storage area for highly radioactive materials that's gonna be safe for at least 100 000 years? Despite growing evidence of the contrary There's also growing evidence that nuclear and renewables tend to be incompatible, mostly because nuclear means a grid with huge centers of energy production, far away from energy consumption (the opposite is true with renewables). https://www.sussex.ac.uk/news/research?id=53376 https://www.sussex.ac.uk/news/research?id=53376

selectodude 6y ago
I'm always kind of curious as this "expensive" line of thinking. Yes, nuclear is expensive. Extremely expensive. But is it more expensive than a week's worth of catastrophic grid collapse due to global warming? We have the ability to build nuclear plants. We can reprocess the waste to make more energy with. We can get better at it to drive down the price. It's more reliable as a base load than any renewable. My state gets over fifty percent of its energy from nuclear power plants. I pay a few pennies more per kWh than neighboring states. I'd pay a few more pennies than that to figure out the rest of this issue.
- southerntofu 6y ago
  > But is it more expensive than... Like you, i don't believe price to be an argument of concern. I'm merely stating this because over and over, both in French media and on HN, i've seen stated that nuclear is the cheapest energy which is a blatant lie. > We can reprocess the waste to make more energy with. Source? From my limited understanding, all nuclear research that produced either less-dangerous waste or re-usable waste was shut down decades ago because there was no foreseeable way to turn that into weapons. The nuclear industry is deeply tied to the military industrial complex and (neo)colonial extractivism (see Françafrique networks for references). > It's more reliable as a base load than any renewable. Source? Here in France there's uncountable accidents/scandals in the nuclear industry and reactors are often stopped for weeks/months at a time. The same cannot be said about hydro power (dams) for instance. > I'd pay a few more pennies than that to figure out the rest of this issue Economic incentives is only part of the problem in my view. We in the industrialized world are aiming for ever-growing (ideally infinite) energy production and consumption, which necessarily leads to ecocide and other environmental damages. Don't you believe reducing our resources/energy footprint as a society is a more sustainable way to address the problem? There are many strategies we can put in place to reduce energy consumption, but these would contradict basic tenets of capitalism. For the most obvious example (from HN's perspective), see planned obsolescence or how/why we build more devices every few years than there are humans on earth (and yet we keep on having to buy new ones, which is severely damaging the environment).
  - selectodude 6y ago
    >Source? From my limited understanding, all nuclear research that produced either less-dangerous waste or re-usable waste was shut down decades ago because there was no foreseeable way to turn that into weapons. The nuclear industry is deeply tied to the military industrial complex and (neo)colonial extractivism (see Françafrique networks for references). The existence of La Hague site in northwest France has been very successful at nuclear reprocessing. >Source? Here in France there's uncountable accidents/scandals in the nuclear industry and reactors are often stopped for weeks/months at a time. The same cannot be said about hydro power (dams) for instance. It's not uncountable. There have been like ten in the entire country over the past fifty years. >Don't you believe reducing our resources/energy footprint as a society is a more sustainable way to address the problem? No. The one actual resource we can make and use is energy. We need to use less consumables. Energy isn't a consumable in our timeline. So many things are predicated on significant increases in clean energy. We could literally suck carbon out of the air with enough energy.

pfdietz 6y ago

Efficiency is also a bad metric if the inputs are different. Usually when I see "efficiency" used in a pro-nuclear argument it's not used in any rigorous way, though. It's just a vacuous cheer word.

exporectomy 6y ago
Yes. Even fossil fuels contain far more nuclear energy than chemical energy so the engines we use are ~0% efficient if you actually count that as part of the input, even though we could, in principle, build an engine which does use it. How then do you compare two different nuclear fuels for efficiency?
- pfdietz 6y ago
  You don't compare them for efficiency. That's a useless thing to do. You compare for other metrics that actually matter, like cost.
  - exporectomy 6y ago
    I know. It was just a rhetorical question to further show the unhelpfulness of efficiency.