22 ms·

But where are the fusion neutrons? (See Voodoo Fusion [1]) [1] https://vixra.org/pdf/1812.0382v1.pdf https://vixra.org/pdf/1812.0382v1.pdf I'm a professional

But where are the fusion neutrons? (See Voodoo Fusion [1]) [1] https://vixra.org/pdf/1812.0382v1.pdf https://vixra.org/pdf/1812.0382v1.pdf I'm a professional fission guy. I started out in fusion and switched to advanced fission. These days I don't see why we don't just build lots more regular old LWR fission reactors. Imagining that somehow fusion is going to a) work, b) be cheap (fuel cost is only 5% of total nuclear fission cost so who cares), and c) not have the same stigma as fission is kind of weird in my mind. For example, there are leaks of tiny amounts of tritium at some fission plants and people lose their minds. Fusion reactors will have many orders of mag more tritium. Will people not lose their minds just the same? Tritium is notoriously hard to contain since it's so small. It can permeate through metal like a hot knife through butter. Also, lots of people worry about fission and nuclear weapons proliferation. So does fusion get around this? Not really. In fact it's worse. Did you know that the two materials you need to make thermonuclear weapons are tritium and plutonium? Tritium breeding is required by almost all practical fusion power plants (the other reactions are 100s to 1000s of times harder, I don't care what x random fusion CEO says, they're in it for the sweet billionaire side project money). Plutonium is made by irradiating natural uranium from the dirt with neutrons. Practical fusion reactors have lots of neutrons. Really high energy ones too. Anyway let's just do fission you guys. It's way easier. It has been working fine since the 1950s. It's zero carbon. Waste problem is solved (see Onkalo, and reprocessing). It net saves millions of lives by displacing air pollution. It runs 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint. We have enough uranium and thorium to run the whole world for 4 billion (with a b) years using breeder reactors (demonstrated in 1952 in Idaho). Get the Koreans over here to build some ARP1400s or the Chinese to build some Hualong Ones until we figure out how to project manage again and then call it good.

deltasevennine 4y ago
The main reason is because fission isn't cool anymore. Been there, done that.... Fusion is still super cool with all the big devices they're building.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  You're probably right that fission isn't considered cool anymore. I guess my heartburn is in that it most definitely should be. I guess most people don't appreciate the relatively tiny fission plant workhorses producing >50% of all zero-carbon electricity in the USA. At least we have nuclear tiktok influencers nowadays!
  - DominoTree 4y ago
    I feel like the primary reason it's not cool these days is because significant new developments are rare because it's pretty-much been figured out and it basically just works with minimal downsides, and folks think that light water reactors are all the same
einpoklum 4y ago
> It's way easier. Is that why power plants go years over time and hugely over-budget? > It has been working fine since the 1950s. Oh, yeah, just fine, not a hitch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident... > Waste problem is solved The solution being: Ignore it, I guess? > net saves millions of lives by displacing air pollution And we fight wars for peace too. > It's zero carbon Not if you count the mining aspect. But even if you didn't: Wind and solar are now 3 times cheaper or more, and take a lot less time to set up. The power output stability benefit is wearing thin.
- mwint 4y ago
  Waste problem - drive through the US state of Nevada. There’s nothing for hundreds of miles. You could likely just throw the waste out of an airplane over Nevada and be more or less fine. With containment techniques combined with the ridiculous amount of uninhabited desert the US has, this is a non issue.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    France, with much less uninhabited land, and vastly more nuclear power plants, somehow manages to place waste in a way that's acceptable for an EU country, and neighboring countries. (But of course "waste" is not really waste, it's fuel spent for a few per cent; a breeder reactor + reprocessing should burn it again and again and again.)
    - cyanydeez 4y ago
      >After decades of cooling, France, like most other nuclear power generating countries, has no long-term solution in place for high and intermediate spent fuel waste disposal. https://www.power-technology.com/analysis/managing-nuclear-waste-france-long-short-game/ https://www.power-technology.com/analysis/managing-nuclear-w... Yes, short term they manage it. When we are discussing the future, our concern is long term.
      - 4y ago
spawarotti 4y ago
How long will the fuel last? Sabine Hossenfelder references studies in which we have enough Uranium for 50 years max. 6:08 here: https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  Uranium and thorium fuel on earth can make 100% of today's primary energy for about 4 billion years, using breeder reactors, which were proven in 1952 near Arco Idaho at the Experimental Breeder Reactor 1. Writeup explaining this with lots of actual scientific references at the bottom here: https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-longterm-sustainable.html https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-... People who say uranium will last 50 years either aren't aware of breeder reactors, which have been the long-term plan for nuclear fission since the 1940s, or they're misleading you. We found a lot more uranium than expected in the interim so they have been put off for a while. But we know they work and have built many.
  - tejohnso 4y ago
    This is so depressing. It's nearly impossible to form a confident opinion these days without a ton of effort. I heard Sabine, I said to myself...makes sense...and it looks like she's put a lot of work into understanding all of this, and she is a professional. So that was it. Now you're saying she's wrong. Very wrong. And you're a nuclear reactor physicist (thanks for comment!) Am I going to go read all of the relevant references for myself and study the state of the art well enough to understand it all? No, I'm not because I'm not a policy maker or advisor. I feel like there is a legitimate problem with science communication, especially where it can influence government policy.
    - AQuantized 4y ago
      It's worth mentioning that being a theoretical physicist working in a niche subfield doesn't necessarily qualify you to talk broadly about other fields and assess their societal impacts. I think these types of videos work best when it's clearly just a smart person sharing what they've learned to engage your interest rather than as a substitute for a lecture by an expert.
iambateman 4y ago
This was a great comment and very helpful. I think it’s all a PR issue. The public doesn’t really understand and there are a lot of lobbyists pushing every other kind of energy.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  Agreed. The excitement in fusion indicates a total failure of fission people to effectively explain what they are capable of.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Or, the failure of (most of) those investing in fusion to understand just what has held back fission. It's not safety, waste, or fuel availability.
  - malloryerik 4y ago
    Maybe the current glow on fusion could actually brighten fission's prospects? At least that thought came to me while reading your original comment because fusion presents an opportunity to update the entire "nuclear" category in people's minds. Like when a child (or even an adult) says they don't like vegetables and it's pointed out to them that in fact they do like the vegetable called lettuce, so their statement needs updating. Now their attitudes can be reframed.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      People making choices on power are not, in fact, children. Fission costs too much. Fusion would cost way more. Promoters of both have lied to the public continuously from day one. We have heard enough.
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    Yeah. The opposition and scaremongering from the fossil fuel industry and scaremongering science-deniers has been utterly effective. No surprise there. What's dismaying and frankly shocking is the utter failure of the nuclear industry to mount even a feeble defense in the public eye.
dmead 4y ago
Is it wise to write off safety issues? Chernobyl, Fukushima and three mile island all seem pretty bad. There is also the Robert Heinlein story "Blowups happen". I'm just not understanding how this can all be hand waved away.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  They were bad, but just bad enough to roll over and give up on fission. While Chernobyl killed people from radiation (around 50, with a hotly debated number between 0 and 4000 from long term effects), TMI and Fukushima did not. We have only directly amd definitively linked about 50 deaths to radiation released in commercial fission accidents. It's like a really bad bus crash. And that doesnt even count the social and emotional costs of fear and evacuation, which are large. But context matters. Particlates from fossil and biofuel cause more death every 7 hours than the high estimate of deaths from nuclears entire history (using 4000 in chernobyl). So nuclear fission is very safe. It's not perfectly safe, but it is orders of magnitude safer than the average energy source. Oh and it is carbon free so it prevents future deaths from climate change. So yeah.
  - sweezyjeezy 4y ago
    You keep bringing up climate change, like the only alternative is coal. Do you really think that nuclear fission can be a key player in reducing emissions to net zero? It seems far too expensive and slow to set up for something this urgent.
    - acidburnNSA 4y ago
      Fossil + biofuel makes 80% of our energy today. Getting rid of that will require vast amounts of zero-carbon energy. Wind and solar need to be built out at breakneck speed if we want to be serious. Much faster than what we're doing now. So does nuclear fission. I assume you're only looking at the slow and expensive nuclear builds? China is looking to build 150 new reactors to meet its goals. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-11-03/china-is-planning-at-least-150-new-nuclear-reactors-video https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-11-03/china-is-pl... We also have ways of making nuclear reactors extremely quickly if we want to get really serious. In the 1970s we started building a facility in Jacksonville Fl capable of delivering 4 large LWRs per year in a shipyard-like factory. The reactors were to be floated off to their sites (the first of which were offshore). They installed the world's largest gantry crane at the facility. Sadly the oil shocks reduced the energy demand where their first customers were (New Jersey refineries) and the effort failed after they received a construction license from the nuclear regulatory commission. Building zero carbon power plant gigafactories like this can solve climate change, you betcha. https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-01-26-offshore-power-systems.html https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-01-26-offshore-power-sys...
pfdietz 4y ago
> I started out in fusion and switched to advanced fission. You are in good company. Lawrence Lidsky, the fusion guy at MIT who wrote the famous article "The Trouble with Fusion" back in the 1980s, also switched to advanced fission reactors. His critique of DT fusion is still worth reading. The big issue, the lousy volumetric power density of DT fusion reactors compared to fission reactors, is still a huge albatross around the necks of all these private DT efforts.
- joak 4y ago
  And what about non-DT fusion? Helion, funded by Sam Altman, is doing DD/DHe3 fusion. Non-thermal fusion with direct energy conversion. They are attempting net electricity for 2024.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    That's why I was careful to write "DT". :) If someone held a gun to my head and forced me to invest in a fusion effort, it would be Helion.
  - acidburnNSA 4y ago
    Considering how much less likely the non-DT reactions are than DT ones from a nuclear physics perspective at reasonable plasma temperature, I'd say it's an extra long shot. We'd expect the easy reactions to be done first, followed by the much harder ones. Every advanced anything company says net electricity by 2024. I'm not holding my breath. I'd be thrilled to be wrong.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      If the physics issues were the only ones facing fusion, you'd be making a good argument there. But after the physics comes engineering. Helion's approach is to be more aggressive on the physics in order to greatly ease the grave engineering issues that face DT reactors. I consider these latter issues to be so serious that, overall, I rate Helion as less of a long shot at achieving practical fusion than any of the DT schemes.
downrightmike 4y ago
The problem is energy companies and the entrenched family assholes that run them. Three Mile Island was being forced to push ahead and use the crane to move the vessel, even though it WAS damaged and would have likely lead to a meltdown. Engineers knew it wasn't safe and were punished and fired for not using the crane unless it was actually checked and in working order. The public is right to be wary of nuclear when these are the types of assholes that put all our lives in danger.
- socialdemocrat 4y ago
  If I could upvote this a hundred times. It is easy to mock the public for not getting nuclear power and being paranoid. People today have really forgotten how much people got lied to constantly about nuclear power. France which they like to pull out as this amazing nuclear country built all the reactors they hype up by faking safety checks on nuclear reactors. It is just really naive to assume every nuclear plant is run by the books. People complain about over regulation of the nuclear industry. Yeah… they kind of brought that upon themselves.
  - mlsu 4y ago
    If you're surprised by the lack of paperwork in fission reactors, just wait till you see (or... not!) the documentation on coal and ng powerplants!
    - cycomanic 4y ago
      Actually in several instances nuclear operators have managed to reduce regulations compared to coal and NG.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Coal and NG are, like fission, on their way out.
      - bsagdiyev 4y ago
        You argue this a lot on HN but real world shows the opposite happening.
godelski 4y ago
Honestly, I don't understand why we can't do both. I don't think this has to be framed as a zero sum problem (I think way too many issues are naively framed that way). With reference to the article, the funding levels over the past decade (globally) were roughly $200m/yr. That's really nothing in terms of government money and well within the realm that just the US could sustain such an effort alone. It would be roughly 0.004% of our yearly budget! That's an insanely low amount of money to spend given the potential upsides. You're right that there's weapons proliferation problems with both, but honestly that also seems like a good argument for pulling that funding out of what is already allocated to military budgets (not trying to defend nuclear weapons here, but we do have to acknowledge the existence of the military industrial complex and that they dictate a lot of the US budget). > Anyway let's ~~just~~ do fission you guys. So I agree with you. Let's do fission, but not _just_ fission. Let's put a lot of money into it and bring down the costs. The cost of climate change clearly far outweighs the cost of nuclear plants and waste. And that the waste really isn't a problem, as you yourself have extensively written about. These arguments always go "nuclear vs x" and honestly I want to see "fission + fusion + solar + wind + hydro + batteries." I don't see why we can't have it all. The zero sum arguments seem to make such a dream more difficult to achieve. Also, good to see you back. Always glad to see your input on these posts.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  Sure, that's a good and fair point. I shouldn't say I oppose fusion R&D. I feel more like we should be more focused on deploying 100s of serialized LWR fission plants right now alongside all the wind/solar/batteries/hydro to solve climate change, while also investing R&D into things like advanced fission and fusion, and geothermal. There's certainly an under-investment in low carbon energy tech in general compared to the world GDP imho. Still, I do feel that some fusion hype is partially due to people not giving fission enough credit though. Happy to be back, thanks!
  - godelski 4y ago
    Yeah, then we're on the same page. But one note, I don't think fusion has the same uphill battle that fission does. You mentioned that the fission industry just hasn't been able to properly demonstrate what they can do, but I don't think this is entirely it. We do have to consider the decades worth of campaigning and lobbying by coal and gas that went after nuclear. That these campaigns even infiltrated the biggest green lobbying groups: Sierra Nevada and Green Peace. Fusion doesn't have this same battle to overcome. I'm in the state just south of you and we're very pro green, but our green politicians still talk about fission and "the dangers." Hanford is still discussed with a lot of fervor. Such history and momentum doesn't exist with fusion other than "20 years away." I understand why a lot of people have effectively given up and why a lot of climate scientists don't bring it up, but will admit that they aren't against fission (usually with that precise wording). Honestly, I think it is more on the climate scientists at this point to be vocal about it.
8bitsrule 4y ago
> It runs 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint. How much cooling water does it use? Who'll want to drink it? How much waterwill 'lots more regular old LWR fission reactors' need, and where will it come from? Oh, and let's see the hands of those who want one in their back yard. 'Whoops'. > It's way easier. It has been working fine since the 1950s. Gosh, I never heard 'fine' used in that way before. I could paste in a list of dozens of failures, leaks (including tritium), accidents (public and hushed-up). Look away from San Onofre, that was just a one-time expense. Why, I'd even bet it will continue to be "safe, clean, and too cheap to meter", guys. /s
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  and let's see the hands of those who want one in their back yard. 'Whoops' Me. Actually I've already lived in the back yard of one. Extremely populous suburb of a major American city. Apparently lots of people don't mind having one in their back yard.
GeekyBear 4y ago
> For example, there are leaks of tiny amounts of tritium at some fission plants and people lose their minds. If a fusion reactor loses power, fusion ceases. The reactor shuts down. If a fission reactor loses power, fission continues. A reactor that cannot be cooled melts down. I don't think people will be as wary when fail safe reactor designs come off the drawing board and are in use long enough to have their own track record. https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/08/02/158134/fail-safe-nuclear-power/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/08/02/158134/fail-safe...
- lven 4y ago
  This is not true. Fission reactors have to deal with decay heat, not fission reactions when cooling is lost. This can be managed. Fusion reactors also have decay heat. In new reactors like the Micro Modular Reactor, it's actually less decay heat than a fusion power plant. Please please read my post :https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion#financial-risk-of-powerplant-loss https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion#financial-risk-of-powerp...
AughFuckFusion 4y ago
> I'm a professional fission guy. I started out in fusion and switched to advanced fission. These days I don't see why we don't just build lots more regular old LWR fission reactors. Well, a comment posting without financials pretty much underlines why more fission reactors don't get built: the nuclear community is insanely bad at pitching to investors without magic on the line. Unfortunately, investors in our society are the closest things we get to planners so we're pretty fucked.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  If you add district heating to LWRs their effective efficiency goes from 33% to over 57%. If we adjust markets to value on-demand (including nights/weekends/winters) low-carbon heat and electricity, LWR economics would be good, even in the USA. They're already expected to be essential for decarbonizing at scale. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435118303866 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511... I have plenty of rants about how LCOE is wholly inappropriate as a metric of overall decarbonized system costs. If you look from that perspective, LWRs built by Koreans, Chinese, Indians, or Russians are an incredible deal. We just need to have the Koreans come over and re-teach us how to build reactors. It's beautifully symmetric because we originally taught them. They've perfected the knowledge, enhanced it, saved it, and can now teach us.
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    That is probably a good idea, but comes with the major political problem of putting nuclear reactors very close to large populations of people who can complain about the zoning.
    - acidburnNSA 4y ago
      100 km isn't that close. https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/workshops/nucogen/presentations/4_Safa_Economics-District-Heating-Light.pdf https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/workshops/nucogen/presentations...
unchocked 4y ago
Fuckin’ A… I don’t have a charitable explanation for why folks are holding their breath for another neutron source, while the world burns.
- paulcole 4y ago
  The reality is that there is no charitable explanation. On a global scale, society doesn’t care about what the world is like and what humanity will have to deal with 100, 200, or 500 years from now. We care about things like finding our next meal or finding our next Amazon package on our doorstep.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  We don't actually need or want extra neutrons. We have all the neutrons we will ever want, right where they already are. Protons will become increasingly valuable, after being separated from oxygen.
socialdemocrat 4y ago
I would rather see some push towards high temperature reactors. Whether gas cooled or molten salt. Point is it that if we have high temperature differentials we can more easily do thermal storage or produce hydrogen. Both are kind of important combos for renewable energy. Wind, solar, battery and some kind of variant of hydrogen economy is bound to stay/evolve and nuclear light to be built with that in mind so it can be more of a complementary technology rather than living in an alternative universe.
lven 4y ago
I tried to describe this problem in further detail in a post called con-fusion. Kind of sad to see money burn like this. https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  Excellent post with lots of detail, thanks, and wow! I'm not alone in my skepticism it seems.
rewgs 4y ago
This is one of my favorite comments I’ve seen on HN. If only more people would see this and go bjnovaknodding.gif
lawrenceyan 4y ago
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it impossible for fusion to generate a nuclear meltdown scenario that fission has the potential for?
- dongobongo 4y ago
  Meltdown accident: basically, reactor is turned off, however heat continues to be generated because of a thing called decay heat which is when isotopes generated by the fission reactions decay to more stable isotopes and release energy. It's about 7% of a fission reactor's power and continues for a few hours until it's negligible. 7% of a gigawatt reactor is like having a couple of jet engines going full blast inside the core. This heat has to be removed, and meltdowns happen when people fail to do so - basically pumps break, coolant leaks, or coolant is blocked from cooling down the core. Recent micro reactors get around this because they don't need active coolant or people to cool down the reactor - they just cool off by conduction or simple heat rejection systems. I read recently that fusion reactor will also generate decay heat from all the activated components and this is comparable to a fission reactor. The difference is there's a lot less radioactive crap in a fusion reactor - but the fusion reactor will still meltdown and they are expensive...
  - lawrenceyan 4y ago
    If there's truly no meltdown risk with micro reactors, I'm all for it. In terms of fusion, I'd much rather make the tradeoff of increased cost in order to remove issues of vulnerability completely. I want to be able to not even have to think about / plan for dealing with a meltdown scenario.
    - lven 4y ago
      This is it: https://usnc.com/mmr/ https://usnc.com/mmr/ I work on it.
      - lawrenceyan 4y ago
        This is pretty cool!
cratermoon 4y ago
See also "Former fusion scientist on why we won't have fusion power by 2040" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JurplDfPi3U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JurplDfPi3U
mlindner 4y ago
> Imagining that somehow fusion is going to a) work, b) be cheap (fuel cost is only 5% of total nuclear fission cost so who cares), and c) not have the same stigma as fission is kind of weird in my mind. The cost of fission comes doubly from the nuclear proliferation risk and the safety risk, neither of which apply at all to fusion. The levels of radioactive waste produced is at basically the same levels as medical practices. > Plutonium is made by irradiating natural uranium from the dirt with neutrons. Practical fusion reactors have lots of neutrons. Really high energy ones too. In that case you're intentionally trying to irradiate something, you can do the opposite and engineer for things to not be irradiated, and even then it tends to be long lived low radiation isotopes.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  No proliferation risk at all in a tritium fountain full of 14 MeV neutrons? Are you sure you know what you're talking about? These will all be guarded with pseudo military guns guards and gates just like fission, and monitored by the IAEA. As for radiological safety, see point about tritium. And google tritium leak nuclear plant for good measure. Youre right that there is less radioactivity in fusion plants, but maybe not enough less to really matter.
  - smaudet 4y ago
    "Still, the NRC and industry consider the leaks a public relations problem, not a public health or accident threat, records and interviews show." https://www.ap.org/press-releases/2012/part-ii-ap-impact-tritium-leaks-found-at-many-nuke-sites#:~:text=Tritium%2C%20which%20is%20a%20radioactive,at%20aging%20nuclear%20power%20plants https://www.ap.org/press-releases/2012/part-ii-ap-impact-tri.... And this is why we should not trust any fission-bearing folk. Or apparently fusion-bearing folk either.
    - mlindner 4y ago
      Tritium leaks are indeed public relations problems, if done in the very small quantities that would be in a fusion reactor.
shawn-butler 4y ago
fusion has better marketing in the marketplace of the uninformed. "Harnesses the power of the sun" vs "nuclear bombs" I'm sure the greens will try and tear it down it if it ever comes to commercial viability and start calling it thermonuclear power or some nonsense.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  Which is pretty much a complete lie, because the proton-proton and Bethe cycles that power the Sun and most stars will not be used in a fusion reactor, any time soon. The fusion reactions that are likely to be used in the first fusion reactors are precisely the same as those used in the thermonuclear bombs, a.k.a. H-bombs.
baxtr 4y ago
Fusion is just around the corner! Just 20 years away!
johnchristopher 4y ago
> It runs 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint. Isn't that a myth though ? Nuclear plants have planned and unplanned maintenance downtime. They actually have enough of these in my country that it's deemed unreliable or as reliable as wind turbines (depends on who you ask).
- smaudet 4y ago
  I think tiny relative to a coal installation? I'm just guessing here, though, all nuclear facilities I have seen are fairly enormous, albeit their size is small compared to the number of required non-nuclear plants it would take to replace their energy output.
  - johnchristopher 4y ago
    Obviously my comment is about service availability, not land surface.
dignick 4y ago
There are several problems with fission (probably fusion too) as I understand it: 1. Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable. 2. Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait. 3. Decommissioning is expensive and a long way in the future. Is that cost built into the cost per MW? How can we be sure the money will be protected, and will be enough to cover it? 4. Spent fuel. The project you mentioned isn’t complete yet, but even then it’s a huge liability to leave for future generations to manage indefinitely. Meanwhile, renewables don’t have these problems and are available immediately. We should be building huge factories to produce wind and solar en masse. Source for the figures: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSKBN1W909J https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSK...
- bratbag 4y ago
  Cost factor isn't as relevant as you think, as this is an apple's to oranges comparison. Renewables are too unreliable to act as baseline generation for a country. In the UK last year for example we had very little wind, so we had to ramp up our gas power output to make up for our shortages in renewables. We burned through much of our gas reserves before the Ukraine war started, because of Renewable power unreliability. Fission is the replacement for that baseline role that hydrocarbons currently fill, not the unpredictable-but-clean role that renewables fill. The ideal future has both, with renewables producing as much power as possible and fission running on low capacity and ready to ramp up when renewables fall short.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    Just repeating the baseline myth does not make it true. Nuclear does not compete with gas it competes with coal and renewables. It is often technically difficult but more importantly economically prohibitive to run nuclear as on demand sources. So for both renewables and nuclear you need some sort of storage or peakers. Moreover nuclear is not the beacon of reliability, Frances nuclear plants were running to only 60% capacity due to maintanance and weather (when it gets hot nuclear plants have to shut down or reduce output significantly). Guess who was picking up the shortfall... German renewables and gas. Finally, cost is absolutely the main measure: if the cost of nuclear is 3x wind/solar (and the cost of solar is falling exponentially) and you want to replace fossil fuels as quickly as possible the obvious way is to build renewables, you can overbuild 300% at the same cost. At that point you're close to being able to run your grid if you are sufficiently geographically distributed (even without batteries). Moreover in 10 years when your nuclear plant is finished building the price differential is like >5x due to the cost decreases.
rawoke083600 4y ago
May I ask your views on Thorium reactors ? Is this the next step/direction in fission reactors ?
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Thorium costs more. There are nice vids on YouTube that explain how thorium is no fix for what ails nukes. Ultimately, nukes just cost too much to build and operate. They are uncompetitive. Now that we have radically cheaper alternatives, we have no desire to engage with the deceitful, slipshod, heavily subsidized builders and operators of nukes, anymore. Never again.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  Thorium reactors are a type of breeder reactor that can breed using slow neutrons, whereas most breeder reactors built so far use uranium and fast neutrons. There is a lot of hype about thorium online, but almost all of it is about breeder reactors vs. non-breeders. None of the hype is truly thorium specific. I wrote up a few pages on it around 2014. https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium.html https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium.html Thorium is often associated with fluid fuel reactors. https://whatisnuclear.com/msr.html https://whatisnuclear.com/msr.html
zigzag312 4y ago
Is there any progress in design of nuclear fission power plants regarding safety? Fukushima was build in the 70s, so it might have been a bit outdated (as a layman I have no idea). Was there any significant progress in design of nuclear power plants since then? Can they be shut down more quickly and reliably? Given enough R&D, could safety of nuclear fission power plants be improved further or is that very unlikely?
- madacol 4y ago
  Is there a good estimate / measure of the safety problems of fukushima? In wikipedia it says that only 1 person has died from cancer, while >2000 died from the evacuation itself It seems that being less aggressive with evacuations and letting some people be exposed to radiation would have actually save more lives Though maybe that's only in hindsight?. Maybe at the time there was a considerable risk of something terrible but didn't happen?
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > Is there any progress in design of nuclear fission power plants regarding safety? > Fukushima... You mean, hit by the most powerful earthquake recorded in Japan, flooded by a tsunami with 13-14 meter-high waves, evacuated, failed to shutdown, had three core meltdowns and several explosions, and resulted in... 1 death from radiation, 2000 deaths from evacuation and 45 radiation-resulted injuries. I'd say even this outdated design was very, very, very safe.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    > 1 death from radiation So far. The population dose will likely cause many more fatal cancers than that (maybe 200?). That those will be impossible to detect above the normal cancer background doesn't mean we can pretend they aren't there.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      So, after a full-scale catastrophe it's still significantly fewer casualties than from normal operation of coal, for example.
CTDOCodebases 4y ago
Does it make sense to build nuclear reactors when the environment we are engineering for them to exist in is rapidly changing? Fukushima showed us the drastic and long lasting consequences of one little design oversight and that was in an environment the reactors where engineered for. Personally I can't answer this question with the limited knowledge that I have. It seems like a catch 22 type situation.
- feet 4y ago
  The consequences from pushing more carbon out are worse than one nuclear plant failure
  - CTDOCodebases 4y ago
    So are you saying that only one plant will fail out of the many we need to build and that our only option is to continue using hydrocarbons for energy? I'm tempted to be hopeful and say that nuclear will solve all our problems but seeing how the energy industry got us here in the first place I'm sceptical they have our best interests at heart.
    - feet 4y ago
      By energy industry do you mean oil and gas? Are they the ones building nuclear plants? Engineering improves over time, considering we seem to have someone who works in the industry in this thread perhaps they can inform us about current failure rates and risks. My assumption is that due to past failures, extra mitigations have been put into place with modern reactors.
      - CTDOCodebases 4y ago
        > By energy industry do you mean oil and gas? Are they the ones building nuclear plants? Yes I was referring to oil and gas. While they are not the ones building nuclear power plants as we have seen when a particular part of the energy industry becomes entrenched it has a tendency to use its profits to change the narrative around its downsides.
BMc2020 4y ago
*These days I don't see why we don't just build lots more regular old LWR fission reactors.* Because they lose money. Nobody, not the USA, Russia, China, France, Japan, Korea has ever made them profitable. They are always subsidized. The CCP bought Westinghouse AP1000s so they could steal their design and they still couldn't make it work. And you can't blame the environmentalists when it's in China. Full disclosure: I'm not an accountant, but since I started taking an interest in this subject several years ago I've learned about wishing away decomissioning costs by claiming the plants will last 60 or 100 years. Ask the taxpayers of Oregon what 'stranded costs' are. Making 150 square km of Japan uninhabitable is also a bit spendy. IIRC almost all of the Dept of Energy's budget goes to nuclear. But, nothing will change because military nuclear is a national security issue and that always trumps every other issue. Back to fusion: Fusion power plants will be at least as big and complicated as fission plants, so it's never going to be 'too cheap to meter' electricity. I do hold out hope for it to be a drive for space craft though.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  Cost for deeply decarbonized grids are cheapest if you have low carbon firm energy like nuclear. The LCOE numbers thrown around today are meaningless wrt systems costs. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435118303866 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511... nuclear plants save a fraction of their revenue in a trust that pays for decommissioning. for thr vast majority of plants this has been and will be more than sufficient. therr are exceptions but it isnt fair to dwell on them given the other successess. The dose rates are barely above background already in most of the area around Fukushima. I'm with Elon in that I will gladly eat vegetebles from slightly elevated dose areas because I belive the science that says damger starts at 100 mSv acute/300 mSv annual. Getting an extra 40 mSv in a year is not uninhabitable. civilian nuclear power has pretty much nothing to do with military nuclear so not sure I follow your point there. And for the record, here's the full Too Cheap To Meter quote, from a Science Writers Dinner in 1954: "It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age"
DrBazza 4y ago
The nuclear waste 'problem' annoys me because it's absurd in comparison to everything else. I challenge anyone to go onto google right and give me a firm number of people that have died from nuclear waste, not just nuclear accidents. I'll start - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_... about 200 for all nuclear accidents. Waste itself? Zero? Which is less than people that have fallen down the stairs, tripped over a cat, or choked on a pizza. Now search for deaths to humans (and wildlife for that matter) from fossil fuel pollution, oil spills, gas pipeline explosions and so on. As I've said before if we bury it in a mine, and lose the ability to read that it's down there and dangerous, we've likely lost the ability to dig a mine in the first place.
hexnuts 4y ago
Honestly curious, what do you see as a solution to the heat problems reactors are experiencing? There was discussion about the combination of lack of sufficiently cool water and droughts in the new heatwave cycles.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  Most of those problems are related to fish populations and their tolerance of warm water. I think we will probably need to either adjust the regulations and/or somehow keep the fish farther away from the discharge so that they don't get injured. Cooling a 375°C core with ambient water can be done even well into climate change conditions. As for drought, if reactors are cooled by rivers that can dry up rather than oceans or large lakes, then they'll have to consider switching to dry cooling, which is less efficient but works with almost zero water usage. This would work better with higher temperature reactors than typical water cooled ones. I also am a huge proponent of using reactors district heating and cooling, so we can put that warm water to good decarbonized uses.
  - hexnuts 4y ago
    Thank you for the reply, it was informative. =^.^=
Banana699 4y ago
According to my layman's understanding and Issac Arthur's science and futurism videos, fusion is great because of how universally common the fuel is. Maybe fission fuels are not a big deal on Earth, but they are on the moon, Mars, orbital habs or Europa. Meanwhile fusion is just hydrogen. Literally what's the universe is mostly made of. So maybe right know fission is as good as fusion (better because it exists), but space is soon, and fusion is better for space.

deltasevennine 4y ago

The main reason is because fission isn't cool anymore. Been there, done that.... Fusion is still super cool with all the big devices they're building.

acidburnNSA 4y ago
You're probably right that fission isn't considered cool anymore. I guess my heartburn is in that it most definitely should be. I guess most people don't appreciate the relatively tiny fission plant workhorses producing >50% of all zero-carbon electricity in the USA. At least we have nuclear tiktok influencers nowadays!
- DominoTree 4y ago
  I feel like the primary reason it's not cool these days is because significant new developments are rare because it's pretty-much been figured out and it basically just works with minimal downsides, and folks think that light water reactors are all the same

einpoklum 4y ago

> It's way easier. Is that why power plants go years over time and hugely over-budget? > It has been working fine since the 1950s. Oh, yeah, just fine, not a hitch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident... > Waste problem is solved The solution being: Ignore it, I guess? > net saves millions of lives by displacing air pollution And we fight wars for peace too. > It's zero carbon Not if you count the mining aspect. But even if you didn't: Wind and solar are now 3 times cheaper or more, and take a lot less time to set up. The power output stability benefit is wearing thin.

mwint 4y ago
Waste problem - drive through the US state of Nevada. There’s nothing for hundreds of miles. You could likely just throw the waste out of an airplane over Nevada and be more or less fine. With containment techniques combined with the ridiculous amount of uninhabited desert the US has, this is a non issue.
- nine_k 4y ago
  France, with much less uninhabited land, and vastly more nuclear power plants, somehow manages to place waste in a way that's acceptable for an EU country, and neighboring countries. (But of course "waste" is not really waste, it's fuel spent for a few per cent; a breeder reactor + reprocessing should burn it again and again and again.)
  - cyanydeez 4y ago
    >After decades of cooling, France, like most other nuclear power generating countries, has no long-term solution in place for high and intermediate spent fuel waste disposal. https://www.power-technology.com/analysis/managing-nuclear-waste-france-long-short-game/ https://www.power-technology.com/analysis/managing-nuclear-w... Yes, short term they manage it. When we are discussing the future, our concern is long term.
    - 4y ago

spawarotti 4y ago

How long will the fuel last? Sabine Hossenfelder references studies in which we have enough Uranium for 50 years max. 6:08 here: https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k

acidburnNSA 4y ago
Uranium and thorium fuel on earth can make 100% of today's primary energy for about 4 billion years, using breeder reactors, which were proven in 1952 near Arco Idaho at the Experimental Breeder Reactor 1. Writeup explaining this with lots of actual scientific references at the bottom here: https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-longterm-sustainable.html https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-... People who say uranium will last 50 years either aren't aware of breeder reactors, which have been the long-term plan for nuclear fission since the 1940s, or they're misleading you. We found a lot more uranium than expected in the interim so they have been put off for a while. But we know they work and have built many.
- tejohnso 4y ago
  This is so depressing. It's nearly impossible to form a confident opinion these days without a ton of effort. I heard Sabine, I said to myself...makes sense...and it looks like she's put a lot of work into understanding all of this, and she is a professional. So that was it. Now you're saying she's wrong. Very wrong. And you're a nuclear reactor physicist (thanks for comment!) Am I going to go read all of the relevant references for myself and study the state of the art well enough to understand it all? No, I'm not because I'm not a policy maker or advisor. I feel like there is a legitimate problem with science communication, especially where it can influence government policy.
  - AQuantized 4y ago
    It's worth mentioning that being a theoretical physicist working in a niche subfield doesn't necessarily qualify you to talk broadly about other fields and assess their societal impacts. I think these types of videos work best when it's clearly just a smart person sharing what they've learned to engage your interest rather than as a substitute for a lecture by an expert.

iambateman 4y ago

This was a great comment and very helpful. I think it’s all a PR issue. The public doesn’t really understand and there are a lot of lobbyists pushing every other kind of energy.

acidburnNSA 4y ago
Agreed. The excitement in fusion indicates a total failure of fission people to effectively explain what they are capable of.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Or, the failure of (most of) those investing in fusion to understand just what has held back fission. It's not safety, waste, or fuel availability.
- malloryerik 4y ago
  Maybe the current glow on fusion could actually brighten fission's prospects? At least that thought came to me while reading your original comment because fusion presents an opportunity to update the entire "nuclear" category in people's minds. Like when a child (or even an adult) says they don't like vegetables and it's pointed out to them that in fact they do like the vegetable called lettuce, so their statement needs updating. Now their attitudes can be reframed.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    People making choices on power are not, in fact, children. Fission costs too much. Fusion would cost way more. Promoters of both have lied to the public continuously from day one. We have heard enough.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  Yeah. The opposition and scaremongering from the fossil fuel industry and scaremongering science-deniers has been utterly effective. No surprise there. What's dismaying and frankly shocking is the utter failure of the nuclear industry to mount even a feeble defense in the public eye.

dmead 4y ago

Is it wise to write off safety issues? Chernobyl, Fukushima and three mile island all seem pretty bad. There is also the Robert Heinlein story "Blowups happen". I'm just not understanding how this can all be hand waved away.

acidburnNSA 4y ago
They were bad, but just bad enough to roll over and give up on fission. While Chernobyl killed people from radiation (around 50, with a hotly debated number between 0 and 4000 from long term effects), TMI and Fukushima did not. We have only directly amd definitively linked about 50 deaths to radiation released in commercial fission accidents. It's like a really bad bus crash. And that doesnt even count the social and emotional costs of fear and evacuation, which are large. But context matters. Particlates from fossil and biofuel cause more death every 7 hours than the high estimate of deaths from nuclears entire history (using 4000 in chernobyl). So nuclear fission is very safe. It's not perfectly safe, but it is orders of magnitude safer than the average energy source. Oh and it is carbon free so it prevents future deaths from climate change. So yeah.
- sweezyjeezy 4y ago
  You keep bringing up climate change, like the only alternative is coal. Do you really think that nuclear fission can be a key player in reducing emissions to net zero? It seems far too expensive and slow to set up for something this urgent.
  - acidburnNSA 4y ago
    Fossil + biofuel makes 80% of our energy today. Getting rid of that will require vast amounts of zero-carbon energy. Wind and solar need to be built out at breakneck speed if we want to be serious. Much faster than what we're doing now. So does nuclear fission. I assume you're only looking at the slow and expensive nuclear builds? China is looking to build 150 new reactors to meet its goals. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-11-03/china-is-planning-at-least-150-new-nuclear-reactors-video https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-11-03/china-is-pl... We also have ways of making nuclear reactors extremely quickly if we want to get really serious. In the 1970s we started building a facility in Jacksonville Fl capable of delivering 4 large LWRs per year in a shipyard-like factory. The reactors were to be floated off to their sites (the first of which were offshore). They installed the world's largest gantry crane at the facility. Sadly the oil shocks reduced the energy demand where their first customers were (New Jersey refineries) and the effort failed after they received a construction license from the nuclear regulatory commission. Building zero carbon power plant gigafactories like this can solve climate change, you betcha. https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-01-26-offshore-power-systems.html https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-01-26-offshore-power-sys...

pfdietz 4y ago

> I started out in fusion and switched to advanced fission. You are in good company. Lawrence Lidsky, the fusion guy at MIT who wrote the famous article "The Trouble with Fusion" back in the 1980s, also switched to advanced fission reactors. His critique of DT fusion is still worth reading. The big issue, the lousy volumetric power density of DT fusion reactors compared to fission reactors, is still a huge albatross around the necks of all these private DT efforts.

joak 4y ago
And what about non-DT fusion? Helion, funded by Sam Altman, is doing DD/DHe3 fusion. Non-thermal fusion with direct energy conversion. They are attempting net electricity for 2024.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  That's why I was careful to write "DT". :) If someone held a gun to my head and forced me to invest in a fusion effort, it would be Helion.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  Considering how much less likely the non-DT reactions are than DT ones from a nuclear physics perspective at reasonable plasma temperature, I'd say it's an extra long shot. We'd expect the easy reactions to be done first, followed by the much harder ones. Every advanced anything company says net electricity by 2024. I'm not holding my breath. I'd be thrilled to be wrong.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    If the physics issues were the only ones facing fusion, you'd be making a good argument there. But after the physics comes engineering. Helion's approach is to be more aggressive on the physics in order to greatly ease the grave engineering issues that face DT reactors. I consider these latter issues to be so serious that, overall, I rate Helion as less of a long shot at achieving practical fusion than any of the DT schemes.

downrightmike 4y ago

The problem is energy companies and the entrenched family assholes that run them. Three Mile Island was being forced to push ahead and use the crane to move the vessel, even though it WAS damaged and would have likely lead to a meltdown. Engineers knew it wasn't safe and were punished and fired for not using the crane unless it was actually checked and in working order. The public is right to be wary of nuclear when these are the types of assholes that put all our lives in danger.

socialdemocrat 4y ago
If I could upvote this a hundred times. It is easy to mock the public for not getting nuclear power and being paranoid. People today have really forgotten how much people got lied to constantly about nuclear power. France which they like to pull out as this amazing nuclear country built all the reactors they hype up by faking safety checks on nuclear reactors. It is just really naive to assume every nuclear plant is run by the books. People complain about over regulation of the nuclear industry. Yeah… they kind of brought that upon themselves.
- mlsu 4y ago
  If you're surprised by the lack of paperwork in fission reactors, just wait till you see (or... not!) the documentation on coal and ng powerplants!
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    Actually in several instances nuclear operators have managed to reduce regulations compared to coal and NG.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Coal and NG are, like fission, on their way out.
    - bsagdiyev 4y ago
      You argue this a lot on HN but real world shows the opposite happening.

godelski 4y ago

Honestly, I don't understand why we can't do both. I don't think this has to be framed as a zero sum problem (I think way too many issues are naively framed that way). With reference to the article, the funding levels over the past decade (globally) were roughly $200m/yr. That's really nothing in terms of government money and well within the realm that just the US could sustain such an effort alone. It would be roughly 0.004% of our yearly budget! That's an insanely low amount of money to spend given the potential upsides. You're right that there's weapons proliferation problems with both, but honestly that also seems like a good argument for pulling that funding out of what is already allocated to military budgets (not trying to defend nuclear weapons here, but we do have to acknowledge the existence of the military industrial complex and that they dictate a lot of the US budget). > Anyway let's ~~just~~ do fission you guys. So I agree with you. Let's do fission, but not _just_ fission. Let's put a lot of money into it and bring down the costs. The cost of climate change clearly far outweighs the cost of nuclear plants and waste. And that the waste really isn't a problem, as you yourself have extensively written about. These arguments always go "nuclear vs x" and honestly I want to see "fission + fusion + solar + wind + hydro + batteries." I don't see why we can't have it all. The zero sum arguments seem to make such a dream more difficult to achieve. Also, good to see you back. Always glad to see your input on these posts.

acidburnNSA 4y ago
Sure, that's a good and fair point. I shouldn't say I oppose fusion R&D. I feel more like we should be more focused on deploying 100s of serialized LWR fission plants right now alongside all the wind/solar/batteries/hydro to solve climate change, while also investing R&D into things like advanced fission and fusion, and geothermal. There's certainly an under-investment in low carbon energy tech in general compared to the world GDP imho. Still, I do feel that some fusion hype is partially due to people not giving fission enough credit though. Happy to be back, thanks!
- godelski 4y ago
  Yeah, then we're on the same page. But one note, I don't think fusion has the same uphill battle that fission does. You mentioned that the fission industry just hasn't been able to properly demonstrate what they can do, but I don't think this is entirely it. We do have to consider the decades worth of campaigning and lobbying by coal and gas that went after nuclear. That these campaigns even infiltrated the biggest green lobbying groups: Sierra Nevada and Green Peace. Fusion doesn't have this same battle to overcome. I'm in the state just south of you and we're very pro green, but our green politicians still talk about fission and "the dangers." Hanford is still discussed with a lot of fervor. Such history and momentum doesn't exist with fusion other than "20 years away." I understand why a lot of people have effectively given up and why a lot of climate scientists don't bring it up, but will admit that they aren't against fission (usually with that precise wording). Honestly, I think it is more on the climate scientists at this point to be vocal about it.

8bitsrule 4y ago

> It runs 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint. How much cooling water does it use? Who'll want to drink it? How much waterwill 'lots more regular old LWR fission reactors' need, and where will it come from? Oh, and let's see the hands of those who want one in their back yard. 'Whoops'. > It's way easier. It has been working fine since the 1950s. Gosh, I never heard 'fine' used in that way before. I could paste in a list of dozens of failures, leaks (including tritium), accidents (public and hushed-up). Look away from San Onofre, that was just a one-time expense. Why, I'd even bet it will continue to be "safe, clean, and too cheap to meter", guys. /s

JohnBooty 4y ago
and let's see the hands of those who want one in their back yard. 'Whoops' Me. Actually I've already lived in the back yard of one. Extremely populous suburb of a major American city. Apparently lots of people don't mind having one in their back yard.

GeekyBear 4y ago

> For example, there are leaks of tiny amounts of tritium at some fission plants and people lose their minds. If a fusion reactor loses power, fusion ceases. The reactor shuts down. If a fission reactor loses power, fission continues. A reactor that cannot be cooled melts down. I don't think people will be as wary when fail safe reactor designs come off the drawing board and are in use long enough to have their own track record. https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/08/02/158134/fail-safe-nuclear-power/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/08/02/158134/fail-safe...

lven 4y ago
This is not true. Fission reactors have to deal with decay heat, not fission reactions when cooling is lost. This can be managed. Fusion reactors also have decay heat. In new reactors like the Micro Modular Reactor, it's actually less decay heat than a fusion power plant. Please please read my post :https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion#financial-risk-of-powerplant-loss https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion#financial-risk-of-powerp...

AughFuckFusion 4y ago

> I'm a professional fission guy. I started out in fusion and switched to advanced fission. These days I don't see why we don't just build lots more regular old LWR fission reactors. Well, a comment posting without financials pretty much underlines why more fission reactors don't get built: the nuclear community is insanely bad at pitching to investors without magic on the line. Unfortunately, investors in our society are the closest things we get to planners so we're pretty fucked.

acidburnNSA 4y ago
If you add district heating to LWRs their effective efficiency goes from 33% to over 57%. If we adjust markets to value on-demand (including nights/weekends/winters) low-carbon heat and electricity, LWR economics would be good, even in the USA. They're already expected to be essential for decarbonizing at scale. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435118303866 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511... I have plenty of rants about how LCOE is wholly inappropriate as a metric of overall decarbonized system costs. If you look from that perspective, LWRs built by Koreans, Chinese, Indians, or Russians are an incredible deal. We just need to have the Koreans come over and re-teach us how to build reactors. It's beautifully symmetric because we originally taught them. They've perfected the knowledge, enhanced it, saved it, and can now teach us.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  That is probably a good idea, but comes with the major political problem of putting nuclear reactors very close to large populations of people who can complain about the zoning.
  - acidburnNSA 4y ago
    100 km isn't that close. https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/workshops/nucogen/presentations/4_Safa_Economics-District-Heating-Light.pdf https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/workshops/nucogen/presentations...

unchocked 4y ago

Fuckin’ A… I don’t have a charitable explanation for why folks are holding their breath for another neutron source, while the world burns.

paulcole 4y ago
The reality is that there is no charitable explanation. On a global scale, society doesn’t care about what the world is like and what humanity will have to deal with 100, 200, or 500 years from now. We care about things like finding our next meal or finding our next Amazon package on our doorstep.
ncmncm 4y ago
We don't actually need or want extra neutrons. We have all the neutrons we will ever want, right where they already are. Protons will become increasingly valuable, after being separated from oxygen.

socialdemocrat 4y ago

I would rather see some push towards high temperature reactors. Whether gas cooled or molten salt. Point is it that if we have high temperature differentials we can more easily do thermal storage or produce hydrogen. Both are kind of important combos for renewable energy. Wind, solar, battery and some kind of variant of hydrogen economy is bound to stay/evolve and nuclear light to be built with that in mind so it can be more of a complementary technology rather than living in an alternative universe.

lven 4y ago

I tried to describe this problem in further detail in a post called con-fusion. Kind of sad to see money burn like this. https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion

acidburnNSA 4y ago
Excellent post with lots of detail, thanks, and wow! I'm not alone in my skepticism it seems.

rewgs 4y ago

This is one of my favorite comments I’ve seen on HN. If only more people would see this and go bjnovaknodding.gif

lawrenceyan 4y ago

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it impossible for fusion to generate a nuclear meltdown scenario that fission has the potential for?

dongobongo 4y ago
Meltdown accident: basically, reactor is turned off, however heat continues to be generated because of a thing called decay heat which is when isotopes generated by the fission reactions decay to more stable isotopes and release energy. It's about 7% of a fission reactor's power and continues for a few hours until it's negligible. 7% of a gigawatt reactor is like having a couple of jet engines going full blast inside the core. This heat has to be removed, and meltdowns happen when people fail to do so - basically pumps break, coolant leaks, or coolant is blocked from cooling down the core. Recent micro reactors get around this because they don't need active coolant or people to cool down the reactor - they just cool off by conduction or simple heat rejection systems. I read recently that fusion reactor will also generate decay heat from all the activated components and this is comparable to a fission reactor. The difference is there's a lot less radioactive crap in a fusion reactor - but the fusion reactor will still meltdown and they are expensive...
- lawrenceyan 4y ago
  If there's truly no meltdown risk with micro reactors, I'm all for it. In terms of fusion, I'd much rather make the tradeoff of increased cost in order to remove issues of vulnerability completely. I want to be able to not even have to think about / plan for dealing with a meltdown scenario.
  - lven 4y ago
    This is it: https://usnc.com/mmr/ https://usnc.com/mmr/ I work on it.
    - lawrenceyan 4y ago
      This is pretty cool!

cratermoon 4y ago

See also "Former fusion scientist on why we won't have fusion power by 2040" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JurplDfPi3U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JurplDfPi3U

mlindner 4y ago

> Imagining that somehow fusion is going to a) work, b) be cheap (fuel cost is only 5% of total nuclear fission cost so who cares), and c) not have the same stigma as fission is kind of weird in my mind. The cost of fission comes doubly from the nuclear proliferation risk and the safety risk, neither of which apply at all to fusion. The levels of radioactive waste produced is at basically the same levels as medical practices. > Plutonium is made by irradiating natural uranium from the dirt with neutrons. Practical fusion reactors have lots of neutrons. Really high energy ones too. In that case you're intentionally trying to irradiate something, you can do the opposite and engineer for things to not be irradiated, and even then it tends to be long lived low radiation isotopes.

acidburnNSA 4y ago
No proliferation risk at all in a tritium fountain full of 14 MeV neutrons? Are you sure you know what you're talking about? These will all be guarded with pseudo military guns guards and gates just like fission, and monitored by the IAEA. As for radiological safety, see point about tritium. And google tritium leak nuclear plant for good measure. Youre right that there is less radioactivity in fusion plants, but maybe not enough less to really matter.
- smaudet 4y ago
  "Still, the NRC and industry consider the leaks a public relations problem, not a public health or accident threat, records and interviews show." https://www.ap.org/press-releases/2012/part-ii-ap-impact-tritium-leaks-found-at-many-nuke-sites#:~:text=Tritium%2C%20which%20is%20a%20radioactive,at%20aging%20nuclear%20power%20plants https://www.ap.org/press-releases/2012/part-ii-ap-impact-tri.... And this is why we should not trust any fission-bearing folk. Or apparently fusion-bearing folk either.
  - mlindner 4y ago
    Tritium leaks are indeed public relations problems, if done in the very small quantities that would be in a fusion reactor.

shawn-butler 4y ago

fusion has better marketing in the marketplace of the uninformed. "Harnesses the power of the sun" vs "nuclear bombs" I'm sure the greens will try and tear it down it if it ever comes to commercial viability and start calling it thermonuclear power or some nonsense.

adrian_b 4y ago
Which is pretty much a complete lie, because the proton-proton and Bethe cycles that power the Sun and most stars will not be used in a fusion reactor, any time soon. The fusion reactions that are likely to be used in the first fusion reactors are precisely the same as those used in the thermonuclear bombs, a.k.a. H-bombs.

baxtr 4y ago

Fusion is just around the corner! Just 20 years away!

johnchristopher 4y ago

> It runs 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint. Isn't that a myth though ? Nuclear plants have planned and unplanned maintenance downtime. They actually have enough of these in my country that it's deemed unreliable or as reliable as wind turbines (depends on who you ask).

smaudet 4y ago
I think tiny relative to a coal installation? I'm just guessing here, though, all nuclear facilities I have seen are fairly enormous, albeit their size is small compared to the number of required non-nuclear plants it would take to replace their energy output.
- johnchristopher 4y ago
  Obviously my comment is about service availability, not land surface.

dignick 4y ago

There are several problems with fission (probably fusion too) as I understand it: 1. Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable. 2. Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait. 3. Decommissioning is expensive and a long way in the future. Is that cost built into the cost per MW? How can we be sure the money will be protected, and will be enough to cover it? 4. Spent fuel. The project you mentioned isn’t complete yet, but even then it’s a huge liability to leave for future generations to manage indefinitely. Meanwhile, renewables don’t have these problems and are available immediately. We should be building huge factories to produce wind and solar en masse. Source for the figures: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSKBN1W909J https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSK...

bratbag 4y ago
Cost factor isn't as relevant as you think, as this is an apple's to oranges comparison. Renewables are too unreliable to act as baseline generation for a country. In the UK last year for example we had very little wind, so we had to ramp up our gas power output to make up for our shortages in renewables. We burned through much of our gas reserves before the Ukraine war started, because of Renewable power unreliability. Fission is the replacement for that baseline role that hydrocarbons currently fill, not the unpredictable-but-clean role that renewables fill. The ideal future has both, with renewables producing as much power as possible and fission running on low capacity and ready to ramp up when renewables fall short.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  Just repeating the baseline myth does not make it true. Nuclear does not compete with gas it competes with coal and renewables. It is often technically difficult but more importantly economically prohibitive to run nuclear as on demand sources. So for both renewables and nuclear you need some sort of storage or peakers. Moreover nuclear is not the beacon of reliability, Frances nuclear plants were running to only 60% capacity due to maintanance and weather (when it gets hot nuclear plants have to shut down or reduce output significantly). Guess who was picking up the shortfall... German renewables and gas. Finally, cost is absolutely the main measure: if the cost of nuclear is 3x wind/solar (and the cost of solar is falling exponentially) and you want to replace fossil fuels as quickly as possible the obvious way is to build renewables, you can overbuild 300% at the same cost. At that point you're close to being able to run your grid if you are sufficiently geographically distributed (even without batteries). Moreover in 10 years when your nuclear plant is finished building the price differential is like >5x due to the cost decreases.

rawoke083600 4y ago

May I ask your views on Thorium reactors ? Is this the next step/direction in fission reactors ?

ncmncm 4y ago
Thorium costs more. There are nice vids on YouTube that explain how thorium is no fix for what ails nukes. Ultimately, nukes just cost too much to build and operate. They are uncompetitive. Now that we have radically cheaper alternatives, we have no desire to engage with the deceitful, slipshod, heavily subsidized builders and operators of nukes, anymore. Never again.
acidburnNSA 4y ago
Thorium reactors are a type of breeder reactor that can breed using slow neutrons, whereas most breeder reactors built so far use uranium and fast neutrons. There is a lot of hype about thorium online, but almost all of it is about breeder reactors vs. non-breeders. None of the hype is truly thorium specific. I wrote up a few pages on it around 2014. https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium.html https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium.html Thorium is often associated with fluid fuel reactors. https://whatisnuclear.com/msr.html https://whatisnuclear.com/msr.html

zigzag312 4y ago

Is there any progress in design of nuclear fission power plants regarding safety? Fukushima was build in the 70s, so it might have been a bit outdated (as a layman I have no idea). Was there any significant progress in design of nuclear power plants since then? Can they be shut down more quickly and reliably? Given enough R&D, could safety of nuclear fission power plants be improved further or is that very unlikely?

madacol 4y ago
Is there a good estimate / measure of the safety problems of fukushima? In wikipedia it says that only 1 person has died from cancer, while >2000 died from the evacuation itself It seems that being less aggressive with evacuations and letting some people be exposed to radiation would have actually save more lives Though maybe that's only in hindsight?. Maybe at the time there was a considerable risk of something terrible but didn't happen?
dmitriid 4y ago
> Is there any progress in design of nuclear fission power plants regarding safety? > Fukushima... You mean, hit by the most powerful earthquake recorded in Japan, flooded by a tsunami with 13-14 meter-high waves, evacuated, failed to shutdown, had three core meltdowns and several explosions, and resulted in... 1 death from radiation, 2000 deaths from evacuation and 45 radiation-resulted injuries. I'd say even this outdated design was very, very, very safe.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  > 1 death from radiation So far. The population dose will likely cause many more fatal cancers than that (maybe 200?). That those will be impossible to detect above the normal cancer background doesn't mean we can pretend they aren't there.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    So, after a full-scale catastrophe it's still significantly fewer casualties than from normal operation of coal, for example.

CTDOCodebases 4y ago

Does it make sense to build nuclear reactors when the environment we are engineering for them to exist in is rapidly changing? Fukushima showed us the drastic and long lasting consequences of one little design oversight and that was in an environment the reactors where engineered for. Personally I can't answer this question with the limited knowledge that I have. It seems like a catch 22 type situation.

feet 4y ago
The consequences from pushing more carbon out are worse than one nuclear plant failure
- CTDOCodebases 4y ago
  So are you saying that only one plant will fail out of the many we need to build and that our only option is to continue using hydrocarbons for energy? I'm tempted to be hopeful and say that nuclear will solve all our problems but seeing how the energy industry got us here in the first place I'm sceptical they have our best interests at heart.
  - feet 4y ago
    By energy industry do you mean oil and gas? Are they the ones building nuclear plants? Engineering improves over time, considering we seem to have someone who works in the industry in this thread perhaps they can inform us about current failure rates and risks. My assumption is that due to past failures, extra mitigations have been put into place with modern reactors.
    - CTDOCodebases 4y ago
      > By energy industry do you mean oil and gas? Are they the ones building nuclear plants? Yes I was referring to oil and gas. While they are not the ones building nuclear power plants as we have seen when a particular part of the energy industry becomes entrenched it has a tendency to use its profits to change the narrative around its downsides.

BMc2020 4y ago

*These days I don't see why we don't just build lots more regular old LWR fission reactors.* Because they lose money. Nobody, not the USA, Russia, China, France, Japan, Korea has ever made them profitable. They are always subsidized. The CCP bought Westinghouse AP1000s so they could steal their design and they still couldn't make it work. And you can't blame the environmentalists when it's in China. Full disclosure: I'm not an accountant, but since I started taking an interest in this subject several years ago I've learned about wishing away decomissioning costs by claiming the plants will last 60 or 100 years. Ask the taxpayers of Oregon what 'stranded costs' are. Making 150 square km of Japan uninhabitable is also a bit spendy. IIRC almost all of the Dept of Energy's budget goes to nuclear. But, nothing will change because military nuclear is a national security issue and that always trumps every other issue. Back to fusion: Fusion power plants will be at least as big and complicated as fission plants, so it's never going to be 'too cheap to meter' electricity. I do hold out hope for it to be a drive for space craft though.

acidburnNSA 4y ago
Cost for deeply decarbonized grids are cheapest if you have low carbon firm energy like nuclear. The LCOE numbers thrown around today are meaningless wrt systems costs. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435118303866 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511... nuclear plants save a fraction of their revenue in a trust that pays for decommissioning. for thr vast majority of plants this has been and will be more than sufficient. therr are exceptions but it isnt fair to dwell on them given the other successess. The dose rates are barely above background already in most of the area around Fukushima. I'm with Elon in that I will gladly eat vegetebles from slightly elevated dose areas because I belive the science that says damger starts at 100 mSv acute/300 mSv annual. Getting an extra 40 mSv in a year is not uninhabitable. civilian nuclear power has pretty much nothing to do with military nuclear so not sure I follow your point there. And for the record, here's the full Too Cheap To Meter quote, from a Science Writers Dinner in 1954: "It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age"

DrBazza 4y ago

The nuclear waste 'problem' annoys me because it's absurd in comparison to everything else. I challenge anyone to go onto google right and give me a firm number of people that have died from nuclear waste, not just nuclear accidents. I'll start - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_... about 200 for all nuclear accidents. Waste itself? Zero? Which is less than people that have fallen down the stairs, tripped over a cat, or choked on a pizza. Now search for deaths to humans (and wildlife for that matter) from fossil fuel pollution, oil spills, gas pipeline explosions and so on. As I've said before if we bury it in a mine, and lose the ability to read that it's down there and dangerous, we've likely lost the ability to dig a mine in the first place.

hexnuts 4y ago

Honestly curious, what do you see as a solution to the heat problems reactors are experiencing? There was discussion about the combination of lack of sufficiently cool water and droughts in the new heatwave cycles.

acidburnNSA 4y ago
Most of those problems are related to fish populations and their tolerance of warm water. I think we will probably need to either adjust the regulations and/or somehow keep the fish farther away from the discharge so that they don't get injured. Cooling a 375°C core with ambient water can be done even well into climate change conditions. As for drought, if reactors are cooled by rivers that can dry up rather than oceans or large lakes, then they'll have to consider switching to dry cooling, which is less efficient but works with almost zero water usage. This would work better with higher temperature reactors than typical water cooled ones. I also am a huge proponent of using reactors district heating and cooling, so we can put that warm water to good decarbonized uses.
- hexnuts 4y ago
  Thank you for the reply, it was informative. =^.^=

Banana699 4y ago

According to my layman's understanding and Issac Arthur's science and futurism videos, fusion is great because of how universally common the fuel is. Maybe fission fuels are not a big deal on Earth, but they are on the moon, Mars, orbital habs or Europa. Meanwhile fusion is just hydrogen. Literally what's the universe is mostly made of. So maybe right know fission is as good as fusion (better because it exists), but space is soon, and fusion is better for space.