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"nothing like this will be built again" ITER / DEMO / PROTO plants planned to eclipse everything previous in scale. And with nuclear fission now classified as

"nothing like this will be built again" ITER / DEMO / PROTO plants planned to eclipse everything previous in scale. And with nuclear fission now classified as green tech by the EU, maybe the political will is finally here ;) https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220109-europe-nuclear-plants-need-500-bn-euro-investment-by-2050-eu-commissioner https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220109-europe-nuclea...

bocytron 5y ago
I don't know about DEMO/PROTO, but even if ITER is successful, it won't be able to produce a single Watt of net energy (energy out - energy in)[0] I'm not saying we should not keep investing in fusion research, but at the current state of things, it is still somewhat science fiction. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
wolfram74 5y ago
The fact fission is classified as green /might/ impact fusion's future classification, but who knows. I was listening to a podcast and a disillusioned engineer said "environmentalists favorite nuclear power plant is always one that doesn't exist, as soon as it's ready to be built it's ready to be protested". Probably an instance of many groups under one label acting disparately, but I get the sentiment :/
- bayesian_horse 5y ago
  Nuclear reactors are just bigger pains than even the coal plants they might replace. Especially to replace enough fossil fuel one would have to scale up the problems with mining, waste disposal, and risks of accidents or malicious interference. I know this isn't a popular idea here, but there also lots of physicists who don't believe in nuclear fission as a mid-term or near-long-term solution.
  - schnitzelstoat 5y ago
    This is also true for solar panels too though - they require rare earth materials. And large scale wind farms can have accidents and fires and harm wildlife. Doing anything at scale is difficult.
    - bayesian_horse 5y ago
      I'd be surprised if windmills or solar panels require as much mining per power output as nuclear power... And you don't have to handle them like the are, well, radioactive...
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      Solar panels do not require rare earth materials.
      - hkt 5y ago
        Wind turbines do though - neodynium, if memory serves.
        cesarb 5y ago
        Do they require neodynium permanent magnets? AFAIK, there are generators (including big generators at hydroelectric power plants) which use electromagnets instead. The same applies to electric motors; there are some which use permanent magnets, and some (induction motors) which don't.
        philipkglass 5y ago
        The majority of wind turbines use electromagnets. You can see it in this industry report graphic: https://nawindpower.com/gwec-tier-one-turbine-suppliers-gained-market-share-in-2018 https://nawindpower.com/gwec-tier-one-turbine-suppliers-gain... "Conventional drive" and "Direct drive - EESG DD" add up to 75.5% market share. These designs don't use permanent magnets.
        jhgb 5y ago
  - wolfram74 5y ago
    I'm not one of those physicists, mind you. I think keeping all the problems substantively in liquid or solid phase gives us a better chance than automatically pumping them in gas form into the atmosphere. not to mention the transport efforts go from a daily coal train per powerplant to a single semi every 18 months. All the logistics up stream similarly impacted. I'll grant it's not as straight forward as disassembling and then burning a mountain in west virginia every few years, but the over all footprints way smaller. The radioactive problems as they are, they're still better than the chemical ones from coal plants, if we'd decided to change history in the 40's and replace all the nuclear plants with coal ones we'd have killed millions[0] more people more subtly. [0]https://e360.yale.edu/digest/nuclear_power_has_prevented_184_million_premature_deaths_study_says https://e360.yale.edu/digest/nuclear_power_has_prevented_184...
    - bayesian_horse 5y ago
      That's still not accounting for all the trouble you might run into when scaling up nuclear power. It would also not be enough to do this in highly stable western-style democracies. It's not accounting for all the cost that goes into developing the nuclear industry and dealing with all the consequences. All those cost calculations are either very optimistic or fraught with uncertainties.
      - wolfram74 5y ago
        It doesn't matter if it's hard, it's the steady state power option that doesn't have any marginal carbon output and is essentially site agnostic. We've been deficit spending our power budget for a century and now we're surprised things are going to get a bit harder?
    - bayesian_horse 5y ago
      With the slight difference that the "gas form", meaning CO2 can eventually be reabsorbed by plants... the radioactive waste not so much. It has to be kept separate from animal and Human life for millenia ...
  - navaati 5y ago
    France begs to differ. We basically replace fossil fuel with nuclear here (we only have small peaker gas plants, our baseload is all nuclear and some of our variable load is hydro) and there is no particular scale problem, no accidents (incidents yes, but they don't become accidents, the system works), a few pools of waste but whatever, no trouble to procure the fuel...
    - hkt 5y ago
      The fuel is an interesting point - I gather it comes from former French colonies, mostly. Do you know if this is true? And if so, what are the conditions of the workers and the impact on the economies of countries where the extraction happens?
      - _dain_ 5y ago
        most uranium comes from australia and canada
    - bayesian_horse 5y ago
      Even France is having serious issues both currently and in the future. There is considerable national pride involved, so the picture being painted is often more rosy than it is. Nuclear power in France and elsewhere had a leg up in terms of brain share and political will due to the importance of nuclear weapons, it was patriotic to be for nuclear things but that factor has vanished since the end of the cold war. This is also a factor France has a leg up on Germany who was not allowed to have nuclear weapons due to WWII. Without nuclear weapons programs, nuclear power would probably not have had the same importance. Even when trying to come to a conclusion if nuclear power is worthwhile, one has to realize how much more complex even the equation is. It takes so much more qualified engineers, a much more specialized and expensive supply chain, and then there are huge uncertainty factors with unintentional accidents and malicious interference. Waste storage is a recurring headache and not globally solved. All of this MIGHT be manageable for a first-world democratic country like France, but I really don't like to see China scaling up their nuclear industry, nor would I want to see much of the rest of the world to replace their fossil fuels by those headaches.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  I don't see why - assuming that we actually manage to make power-positive fusion, there's no question that it would be much "greener" than nuclear fission, without the need to deal with spent fuel and without the accident contamination risks.
  - wolfram74 5y ago
    DT fusion releases the majority of it's energy (14 out of 17 MeV) as neutron's, there will be radioactive waste to deal with, and it will rapidly be considered an unacceptable risk compared to coal and natural gas, because reasons that will seem perfectly rational to people at the time.
ncmncm 5y ago
ITER will generate no power. No liquid-metal neutron-absorber "blanket", no steam piping, no turbines. DEMO / PROTO will, if not cancelled, be absolutely monstrous, but generate no more power than a wee fission plant. Until they destroy themselves with their own neutron flux. (They should build them underground, so they will already be buried when it is time to abandon them.) It is inconceivable that any such project will ever produce enough value to pay for the absurd level of capital investment and operational costs just to make them operate at all. Cost would radically exceed the same-capacity fission plant, and fission plants are already not competitive. All the while before ground is even broken to start building any, power generation cost is in free fall, with no bottom in sight. ITER is an end even more dead than the AGR.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- margalabargala 5y ago
  > It is inconceivable that any such project will ever produce enough value to pay for the absurd level of capital investment and operational costs just to make them operate at all In and of itself that may be correct, but they could provide valuable stepping stones to future systems that are much cheaper, simpler, and more efficient, which could not exist without first creating these large expensive projects. The value isn't in the project itself, but in the legacy it creates in terms of future iterations.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Then the value is negative, because money spent on ITER is diverted from actually potentially useful work.
  - _dain_ 5y ago
    Prime example of sunk-cost rationalization. When has such a gargantuan expenditure of time and resources ever produced the promised second-order benefits that outweigh the lack of first-order benefits? Neutron fission was discovered in 1938, ten years later we'd flattened two cities with it, and ten years after that we had working, profitable power stations. Theory to useful first-order application to useful second-order application in two decades. Meanwhile, ITER started planning in the late 80s, began construction in 2007, and won't be fully operational until 2035, assuming no delays (hah). Even then, it won't do anything directly useful. That'll be figured out by grad students who haven't even been born yet, possibly. This just isn't how healthy scientific and technological research looks like. If nobody expects anything of actual tangible value for 20 years, and there are billions of dollars of funding being thrown around, obviously you're going to get people riding the gravy train instead of getting real jobs. ITER is welfare for physicists.
bayesian_horse 5y ago
He meant "like this" in terms of a reactor of a similar design and scale. Because that particular design turns out to be too expensive.

bocytron 5y ago

I don't know about DEMO/PROTO, but even if ITER is successful, it won't be able to produce a single Watt of net energy (energy out - energy in)[0] I'm not saying we should not keep investing in fusion research, but at the current state of things, it is still somewhat science fiction. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY

wolfram74 5y ago

The fact fission is classified as green /might/ impact fusion's future classification, but who knows. I was listening to a podcast and a disillusioned engineer said "environmentalists favorite nuclear power plant is always one that doesn't exist, as soon as it's ready to be built it's ready to be protested". Probably an instance of many groups under one label acting disparately, but I get the sentiment :/

bayesian_horse 5y ago
Nuclear reactors are just bigger pains than even the coal plants they might replace. Especially to replace enough fossil fuel one would have to scale up the problems with mining, waste disposal, and risks of accidents or malicious interference. I know this isn't a popular idea here, but there also lots of physicists who don't believe in nuclear fission as a mid-term or near-long-term solution.
- schnitzelstoat 5y ago
  This is also true for solar panels too though - they require rare earth materials. And large scale wind farms can have accidents and fires and harm wildlife. Doing anything at scale is difficult.
  - bayesian_horse 5y ago
    I'd be surprised if windmills or solar panels require as much mining per power output as nuclear power... And you don't have to handle them like the are, well, radioactive...
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    Solar panels do not require rare earth materials.
    - hkt 5y ago
      Wind turbines do though - neodynium, if memory serves.
      - cesarb 5y ago
        Do they require neodynium permanent magnets? AFAIK, there are generators (including big generators at hydroelectric power plants) which use electromagnets instead. The same applies to electric motors; there are some which use permanent magnets, and some (induction motors) which don't.
        philipkglass 5y ago
        The majority of wind turbines use electromagnets. You can see it in this industry report graphic: https://nawindpower.com/gwec-tier-one-turbine-suppliers-gained-market-share-in-2018 https://nawindpower.com/gwec-tier-one-turbine-suppliers-gain... "Conventional drive" and "Direct drive - EESG DD" add up to 75.5% market share. These designs don't use permanent magnets.
      - jhgb 5y ago
- wolfram74 5y ago
  I'm not one of those physicists, mind you. I think keeping all the problems substantively in liquid or solid phase gives us a better chance than automatically pumping them in gas form into the atmosphere. not to mention the transport efforts go from a daily coal train per powerplant to a single semi every 18 months. All the logistics up stream similarly impacted. I'll grant it's not as straight forward as disassembling and then burning a mountain in west virginia every few years, but the over all footprints way smaller. The radioactive problems as they are, they're still better than the chemical ones from coal plants, if we'd decided to change history in the 40's and replace all the nuclear plants with coal ones we'd have killed millions[0] more people more subtly. [0]https://e360.yale.edu/digest/nuclear_power_has_prevented_184_million_premature_deaths_study_says https://e360.yale.edu/digest/nuclear_power_has_prevented_184...
  - bayesian_horse 5y ago
    That's still not accounting for all the trouble you might run into when scaling up nuclear power. It would also not be enough to do this in highly stable western-style democracies. It's not accounting for all the cost that goes into developing the nuclear industry and dealing with all the consequences. All those cost calculations are either very optimistic or fraught with uncertainties.
    - wolfram74 5y ago
      It doesn't matter if it's hard, it's the steady state power option that doesn't have any marginal carbon output and is essentially site agnostic. We've been deficit spending our power budget for a century and now we're surprised things are going to get a bit harder?
  - bayesian_horse 5y ago
    With the slight difference that the "gas form", meaning CO2 can eventually be reabsorbed by plants... the radioactive waste not so much. It has to be kept separate from animal and Human life for millenia ...
- navaati 5y ago
  France begs to differ. We basically replace fossil fuel with nuclear here (we only have small peaker gas plants, our baseload is all nuclear and some of our variable load is hydro) and there is no particular scale problem, no accidents (incidents yes, but they don't become accidents, the system works), a few pools of waste but whatever, no trouble to procure the fuel...
  - hkt 5y ago
    The fuel is an interesting point - I gather it comes from former French colonies, mostly. Do you know if this is true? And if so, what are the conditions of the workers and the impact on the economies of countries where the extraction happens?
    - _dain_ 5y ago
      most uranium comes from australia and canada
  - bayesian_horse 5y ago
    Even France is having serious issues both currently and in the future. There is considerable national pride involved, so the picture being painted is often more rosy than it is. Nuclear power in France and elsewhere had a leg up in terms of brain share and political will due to the importance of nuclear weapons, it was patriotic to be for nuclear things but that factor has vanished since the end of the cold war. This is also a factor France has a leg up on Germany who was not allowed to have nuclear weapons due to WWII. Without nuclear weapons programs, nuclear power would probably not have had the same importance. Even when trying to come to a conclusion if nuclear power is worthwhile, one has to realize how much more complex even the equation is. It takes so much more qualified engineers, a much more specialized and expensive supply chain, and then there are huge uncertainty factors with unintentional accidents and malicious interference. Waste storage is a recurring headache and not globally solved. All of this MIGHT be manageable for a first-world democratic country like France, but I really don't like to see China scaling up their nuclear industry, nor would I want to see much of the rest of the world to replace their fossil fuels by those headaches.
BlueTemplar 5y ago
I don't see why - assuming that we actually manage to make power-positive fusion, there's no question that it would be much "greener" than nuclear fission, without the need to deal with spent fuel and without the accident contamination risks.
- wolfram74 5y ago
  DT fusion releases the majority of it's energy (14 out of 17 MeV) as neutron's, there will be radioactive waste to deal with, and it will rapidly be considered an unacceptable risk compared to coal and natural gas, because reasons that will seem perfectly rational to people at the time.

ncmncm 5y ago

ITER will generate no power. No liquid-metal neutron-absorber "blanket", no steam piping, no turbines. DEMO / PROTO will, if not cancelled, be absolutely monstrous, but generate no more power than a wee fission plant. Until they destroy themselves with their own neutron flux. (They should build them underground, so they will already be buried when it is time to abandon them.) It is inconceivable that any such project will ever produce enough value to pay for the absurd level of capital investment and operational costs just to make them operate at all. Cost would radically exceed the same-capacity fission plant, and fission plants are already not competitive. All the while before ground is even broken to start building any, power generation cost is in free fall, with no bottom in sight. ITER is an end even more dead than the AGR.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
margalabargala 5y ago
> It is inconceivable that any such project will ever produce enough value to pay for the absurd level of capital investment and operational costs just to make them operate at all In and of itself that may be correct, but they could provide valuable stepping stones to future systems that are much cheaper, simpler, and more efficient, which could not exist without first creating these large expensive projects. The value isn't in the project itself, but in the legacy it creates in terms of future iterations.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Then the value is negative, because money spent on ITER is diverted from actually potentially useful work.
- _dain_ 5y ago
  Prime example of sunk-cost rationalization. When has such a gargantuan expenditure of time and resources ever produced the promised second-order benefits that outweigh the lack of first-order benefits? Neutron fission was discovered in 1938, ten years later we'd flattened two cities with it, and ten years after that we had working, profitable power stations. Theory to useful first-order application to useful second-order application in two decades. Meanwhile, ITER started planning in the late 80s, began construction in 2007, and won't be fully operational until 2035, assuming no delays (hah). Even then, it won't do anything directly useful. That'll be figured out by grad students who haven't even been born yet, possibly. This just isn't how healthy scientific and technological research looks like. If nobody expects anything of actual tangible value for 20 years, and there are billions of dollars of funding being thrown around, obviously you're going to get people riding the gravy train instead of getting real jobs. ITER is welfare for physicists.

bayesian_horse 5y ago

He meant "like this" in terms of a reactor of a similar design and scale. Because that particular design turns out to be too expensive.