7 ms·
As the other commenter mentioned, fuel is limitless and the waste product doesn’t need special disposal. This isn’t just a technical advantage over fission, but
by axg11 5y ago
As the other commenter mentioned, fuel is limitless and the waste product doesn’t need special disposal. This isn’t just a technical advantage over fission, but also a political one.
In its current form though, the CapEx for fusion projects is huge. Fusion won’t play a big part as an energy source if reactors take 10+ years to come online and cost tens of billions of dollars. Fusion proponents will argue that costs will come down, but if the political and entrepreneurial pressure to reduce cost isn’t there, fusion will end up the same as fission.
- willis936 5y agoTo tack on to the last sentence: "as long as there is fossil fuel to burn".
- duvenaud 5y agoThanks. So it sounds like you're saying that, unless there is some radically different plant design in the future, that there won't be an economic advantage to fusion over fission, at least in the near term.
- colinmhayes 5y agoWell fission energy would be much cheaper if most of our energy was produced that way. Economies of scale provide huge opportunities that are currently limited by political will. I don't see a reason fusion can't quickly become a large scale source of power, because unlike fission, there would be much less political backlash.
- sanxiyn 5y agoI am sad to report that in South Korea, which produces fission power very well and does excellent fusion research, the leading anti-nuclear activist (also a member of congress) is vocally against fusion and already proposed to cut 100% of fusion research budget in 2018. (People thought that's too extreme so she haven't repeated it so far, but I don't think her position changed in any way.)
- ncmncm 5y agoBeing against wasting tax money is a principled stance. There is no possibility of current work leading to practical power on a time scale of less than multiple decades, and even then only if a mostly aneutronic form is achieved, which very few are working on.
- anonymousDan 5y agoThis is still not wasted money. We would all still be sitting around scratching our asses in caves with that attitude to scientific research.
- ncmncm 5y agoDoes fooling around with Tokamaks and stellarators count as scientific research? Certainly, containing fusing plasma magnetically requires developing a much better understanding than we now have of plasma fluid dynamics under conditions of high pressure and complicated, variable magnetic field geometry, but studying plasma fluid dynamics for itself does not need multi-billion dollar equipment. Nobody wants to give plasma physicists a dime just to learn about plasma, even though it would be fantastically cheaper than what is being done instead.
- duvenaud 5y agoThanks. So it sounds like there isn't an economic advantage of fusion over fission, except indirectly through less political opposition.
- mchusma 5y agoFusion definitely has long term economic advantages over fission. The fuel is the most plentiful in the universe and the energy released from fusion is much higher than fission. The chart here shows the energy difference pretty well: https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-power/fission/nuclear-fission-vs-fusion/ https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-power/fission/nuclear-... More fuel + more energy from fuel = superior for most uses long term. If we pull it off.
- duvenaud 5y agoOkay, but the other commenters are saying that fuel is around 6% of the cost of running a fission plant. Do you really think fuel availability will be a decisive factor in say, the next 60 years?
- ncmncm 5y agoIn a word, no. Fission is already not competitive, so a technology much more expensive to build and operate is even less so. In ten years, solar and wind will be even cheaper than today, and will be supplying most of our energy needs.
- MagnumOpus 5y agoFission is non-competitive only because governments don't want it to be. France's nuclear fleet built in the 60s/70s with more primitive tech has capital/operating costs of 7c/kWh, which is fairly similar to commercial solar or wind in France - and is the cheapest option once you double the cost of the latter to account for extra storage/smart grids/other intermittency handling. (Not every place is Southern California where there are no clouds and the sun shines all year. Solar is cheap in some places, but not at high latitudes.)
- aqme28 5y ago“In the near term” doesn’t really make sense for fusion. It won’t be economical at all in the near term.
- markvdb 5y agoAs you say, fusion technology inherently has less need for strict regulation. Less harmful waste. Less runaway reaction. Less arms proliferation. This potentially creates room for fusion that never existed for fission: - innovation and entrepreneurial pressure. Best case, we get SpaceX efficiency fusion innovators versus SLS pork barrel subsidy patients. - insurability. Fusion energy production might become privately insurable. - political support. If the political buyin required is mainly limited to capex, that's a very big advantage versus fission. As for short to medium term political motivation, one might hope fusion energy research is to benefit from the tension between Russian and western leadership.
- willis936 5y agoOn the political motivations: one can hope. My view of things at this point is that those with power in the global playing field want to maintain it. Both Russia and the US supply the world with a lot of oil. This grants a lot of political power. If you make oil obsolete then you remove your lever. This sounds like a great thing for humanity, but humanity's interests are not properly represented by the existing political power structures.