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To me this is what made the recent fusion news exciting. As far as I’m concerned, the verdict is in for nuclear plants generating highly radioactive long-lasti

To me this is what made the recent fusion news exciting. As far as I’m concerned, the verdict is in for nuclear plants generating highly radioactive long-lasting waste: people don’t want them. You won’t be able to overcome their opposition. What more is there to say? Let’s move on. If fusion can get to a point where it can solve the long-lasting radioactive waste problem - that would resolve the problem. That would get nuclear power adopted by the masses. We might as well aim for that, however long it takes, because that’s the only politically viable solution.

SSJPython 4y ago
> As far as I’m concerned, the verdict is in for nuclear plants generating highly radioactive long-lasting waste: people don’t want them. You won’t be able to overcome their opposition. What more is there to say? Let’s move on. Why should public opinion override the need for energy security, which is a national security issue? Sometimes, the public makes the wrong decision. The public generally has trouble when it comes to differentiating between the short-term and long-term. Energy sovereignty should not be subject to the democratic will of the populace. Leave it to the experts and the technocrats, not the average Joe and Jane who operate with asymmetric information.
- Mistletoe 4y ago
  Because we live in a democracy?
  - SSJPython 4y ago
    But that's my point: just because a society has a democratic political system does not mean everything has to be run through the same mechanism. Sometimes, the experts need to override the people, no matter how much of a fit they throw.
    - danenania 4y ago
      This is already the case. Unpopular decisions are made regularly by all three branches of the Federal government, as well as by local governments at every level. But even if you can get unpopular policies through, there's still the risk that you'll face consequences at the next election.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - Juliate 4y ago
    A democracy that is also a product of the availability of huge amounts of continuous energy for quite a decent price. Insert blackouts or raise the price of energy to get access to it, day-to-day life, society and economy will not look like quite the same. So a democracy which wants to survive the primary energy turnout ahead (oil has to go, and we are all deeply, highly dependent on it), takes the means to transform its energy usage on one side, and to sustain its energy needs on the other. Removing nuclear-based electric energy will only sustain, at the time being, the production of carbon-based electricity. Fusion looks definitely better than fission, but it's 10s of years away still.
- pydry 4y ago
  Putin threw half the world into recession with an economy the size of Italy's. That's how little our technocrats cared about energy security - we sleptwalked into that entirely thanks to them. Energy security would be better served by throwing the same amount of money at carbon neutral alternatives that are proven, deployed and already 2-5x cheaper. Solar, wind, pumped storage, batteries, etc. For technocrats, civilian nuclear power is just a means to support the military nuclear industrial complex, which represents the apex of hard power. Energy security is of secondary if not tertiary concern to them.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    Why solve the problem today when you can hype a solution that will solve the problem in 20+ years and book some of those sweet profits from fossil extraction in the mean time?
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  > Why should public opinion override the need for energy security Ah, you've made the mistake of believing politics is rational. There's no reason for this other than "politicians would be punished otherwise". Is the public wrong? Yes. What are you going to do about it? You can go round and round about the way things should be. That doesn't make them so. > Leave it to the experts and the technocrats, not the average Joe and Jane who operate with asymmetric information. This is going to be an extremely tough sell. Godspeed.
- silent_cal 4y ago
  The public has no right to object to piles of nuclear waste?
Gwypaas 4y ago
How are you going to generate power with your fusion plant? Steam? Coal and nuclear are uncompetitive simply from the cost of the steam side. Today you can just about give a steam plant free energy and it still makes a loss. Solar or wind does not have this limitation. CCGT gas plants gets around it by having a turbine giving raw mechanical power and then utilizing the same awful steam side to get the last percentage points of efficiency at a much smaller required scale. Unless you can step around the steam turbine I am not so positive on fusions future outside of incredibly small niches. Coal still gets built where gas infrastructure does not exist, but that's about it.
- TchoBeer 4y ago
  Are steam turbines truly so inefficient? Can you source that?
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    The last coal plant in the US cost $600M to build. And the steam turbine and everything else required to turn heat into power comprises the majority of a coal plant.
    - Juliate 4y ago
      And?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - Gwypaas 4y ago
    They run at 30-35% efficiency with a humongous amount of machinery to support them. Heat exchangers, pumps, condensers. Compare that to the simplicity of a jet turbine where you get raw mechanical power out. They take pretty much the same engine as an airplane engine and instead of having the turbofan putting that shaft into a generator. That's all there is to it. Today new built renewables are in most cases cheaper than the marginal cost of paid of existing coal and nuclear plants. Gas is on the edge. That is the reality facing these investments.
dweekly 4y ago
Eh, to a degree it's a marketing problem then. We could relabel modern plants as "Quantum Power" and explain (truthfully!) that they are very different from older style fission plants that were genuinely dangerous.
kzrdude 4y ago
I think that fission will solve some of its long lived depleted fuel problems sooner than fusion will(!) Just like with climate change, for nuclear we need to forge ahead with our best knowledge, engineering and belief in the future and our competency to solve problems. Let's use the best of our problem solving ability. To decline to do what we think is the best just because of long-held stereotypes, that just holds us back.
dsfyu404ed 4y ago
People "don't want them" because of fear peddling by people saying exactly what you're saying right now. Of course you want us to "move on" because that means the asinine state of affairs people like you have created will not be challenged. Waste that is "highly radioactive" cannot be "long lasting" because physics just doesn't work that way. Anything atomically spicy will have decayed into less spicy things in decades, typically a handful, dozens at worst, resulting in waste that's not really any more harmful than heavy metal laced this or that that humanity already deals with in the waste streams of other industrial processes. The fact that nuclear waste decays at all is really a godsend. You can literally just ignore the problem until it goes away. This isn't the case for heavy metals and some other types of pollutants. You can NEVER build a house on an unmitigated lead mine. Furthermore, the actual physical amounts of waste produced by nuclear are tiny compared to other things. Yucca mountain was gonna store waste for literally the entire nation.
myrmidon 4y ago
I've become convinced that fusion power will never be commercially viable in the foreseeable future. Considering: Electrical energy from coal is, right now, barely competitive with renewables (which are still continuously improving!). Thus, any fusion plant would basically need to provide thermal energy for less than the fuel cost in a coal plant + the cost of some burners. That includes: - Vacuum chamber - Cryocooling - Huge superconducting magnet assemblies - Maintenance of all above in a very hostile environment (=> thanks to high neutron flux and thus potentially neutron-activated materials near the fusion chamber) Right now, the only halfway credible pathway to a viable design is ITERs successor plant; everything else is pure vaporware/research project by design, which is obvious from the scale alone. Nuclear fusion is IMO in the same spot as a steam-jet powered carriage (heating water, expelling it backwards out of a nozzle) would have been in 1500AD: - Technically possible? Sure. - Academically interesting? Kind of. - Economically viable? Hell no (and no amount of progress has changed that since!). I'm very open to having my mind changed, but not optimistic :( But photovoltaics/wind/battery storage looks all super promising, so i guess there is that...
digianarchist 4y ago
Fusion has its own waste problem albeit much more manageable than fission and only when the plant is decommissioned.
joshjob42 4y ago
What do you mean by long-lived? Fission products all become harmless ‘ less radioactive than the rocks we pulled out of the ground initially within ~300 years. That is well within the lifetime we can design containment systems for and far too soon for language drift to become a serious problem to communicating risks. Actinides produced, ie uranium that absorbed some neutrons but didn’t fission and so became some other elements lime plutonium, americium, etc., do have half lives in the thousands to tens of thousands of years but are a much smaller fraction of the waste fuel than the fission products. They can also be put back into reactors to burn up. If you reprocess spent nuclear fuel, then you can take all the very radioactive fission products and separate them out, vitrify them, and put them somewhere. You only get about one tonne of those per GWe-yr of reactor power, and as I said, they become harmless in a few hundred years. The bulk of the remainder is U-238, which is most of nuclear fuel anyway. And the remaining ~1% or so is actinides which along with the U-238 can be mixed with fresh U-238 and U-235 to create new fuel rods which then go into reactors. Thus the only thing you really produce out of a fuel reprocessing system is the fission products, which aren’t long-lived. The only reason the US has a bunch of spent fuel with lifetimes of tens of thousands of years lying around is because we banned fuel reprocessing for no good reason in the late 70s. The entire country could run on 3TWe of nuclear power and never have more than 900k tonnes of fission products under management ever, and could be placed in a total of ~8 million tonnes of glass like the French use, taking up a volume roughly equal to a square kilometer at a depth of ~3 meters. Reference for properties of virtified waste: https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/25/047/25047841.pdf https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/... Friendly link on waste reprocessing and properties of spent fuel: https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-radioactive-waste-in-france https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-radio...
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  300 years is too short, but you've got the right idea. Let's do a little experiment. In the left corner we have a nuclear plant and reprocessing facility. In the right corner we have a coal power plant. The reprocessing facility removes the commercially useful isotopes and sells them, removes the unused uranium and plutonium and sends it to the fuel plant and sends the rest to the landfill. The coal plant sends it's fly ash to the landfill. Round 1 (one year's operation): We have waste from each powerplant, we build identical landfills. The coal plant fills it's landfill, the nuke plant only uses a small bit of it's. Round 2: The coal plant uses another landfill, the nuke plant is fine on it's original one. Round 10,000: The coal plant is on it's 10,000th landfill, the nuke plant has finally filled it's landfill. Round 10,001: The coal plant needed yet another. The nuke plant, however, we can take out the first material as it's now down to ambient (no more radioactive than an average bit of earth) and no longer a hazard. Thus we still do not need another landfill, nor will we ever.

SSJPython 4y ago

> As far as I’m concerned, the verdict is in for nuclear plants generating highly radioactive long-lasting waste: people don’t want them. You won’t be able to overcome their opposition. What more is there to say? Let’s move on. Why should public opinion override the need for energy security, which is a national security issue? Sometimes, the public makes the wrong decision. The public generally has trouble when it comes to differentiating between the short-term and long-term. Energy sovereignty should not be subject to the democratic will of the populace. Leave it to the experts and the technocrats, not the average Joe and Jane who operate with asymmetric information.

Mistletoe 4y ago
Because we live in a democracy?
- SSJPython 4y ago
  But that's my point: just because a society has a democratic political system does not mean everything has to be run through the same mechanism. Sometimes, the experts need to override the people, no matter how much of a fit they throw.
  - danenania 4y ago
    This is already the case. Unpopular decisions are made regularly by all three branches of the Federal government, as well as by local governments at every level. But even if you can get unpopular policies through, there's still the risk that you'll face consequences at the next election.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- Juliate 4y ago
  A democracy that is also a product of the availability of huge amounts of continuous energy for quite a decent price. Insert blackouts or raise the price of energy to get access to it, day-to-day life, society and economy will not look like quite the same. So a democracy which wants to survive the primary energy turnout ahead (oil has to go, and we are all deeply, highly dependent on it), takes the means to transform its energy usage on one side, and to sustain its energy needs on the other. Removing nuclear-based electric energy will only sustain, at the time being, the production of carbon-based electricity. Fusion looks definitely better than fission, but it's 10s of years away still.
pydry 4y ago
Putin threw half the world into recession with an economy the size of Italy's. That's how little our technocrats cared about energy security - we sleptwalked into that entirely thanks to them. Energy security would be better served by throwing the same amount of money at carbon neutral alternatives that are proven, deployed and already 2-5x cheaper. Solar, wind, pumped storage, batteries, etc. For technocrats, civilian nuclear power is just a means to support the military nuclear industrial complex, which represents the apex of hard power. Energy security is of secondary if not tertiary concern to them.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  Why solve the problem today when you can hype a solution that will solve the problem in 20+ years and book some of those sweet profits from fossil extraction in the mean time?
HDThoreaun 4y ago
> Why should public opinion override the need for energy security Ah, you've made the mistake of believing politics is rational. There's no reason for this other than "politicians would be punished otherwise". Is the public wrong? Yes. What are you going to do about it? You can go round and round about the way things should be. That doesn't make them so. > Leave it to the experts and the technocrats, not the average Joe and Jane who operate with asymmetric information. This is going to be an extremely tough sell. Godspeed.
silent_cal 4y ago
The public has no right to object to piles of nuclear waste?

Gwypaas 4y ago

How are you going to generate power with your fusion plant? Steam? Coal and nuclear are uncompetitive simply from the cost of the steam side. Today you can just about give a steam plant free energy and it still makes a loss. Solar or wind does not have this limitation. CCGT gas plants gets around it by having a turbine giving raw mechanical power and then utilizing the same awful steam side to get the last percentage points of efficiency at a much smaller required scale. Unless you can step around the steam turbine I am not so positive on fusions future outside of incredibly small niches. Coal still gets built where gas infrastructure does not exist, but that's about it.

TchoBeer 4y ago
Are steam turbines truly so inefficient? Can you source that?
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  The last coal plant in the US cost $600M to build. And the steam turbine and everything else required to turn heat into power comprises the majority of a coal plant.
  - Juliate 4y ago
    And?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  They run at 30-35% efficiency with a humongous amount of machinery to support them. Heat exchangers, pumps, condensers. Compare that to the simplicity of a jet turbine where you get raw mechanical power out. They take pretty much the same engine as an airplane engine and instead of having the turbofan putting that shaft into a generator. That's all there is to it. Today new built renewables are in most cases cheaper than the marginal cost of paid of existing coal and nuclear plants. Gas is on the edge. That is the reality facing these investments.

dweekly 4y ago

Eh, to a degree it's a marketing problem then. We could relabel modern plants as "Quantum Power" and explain (truthfully!) that they are very different from older style fission plants that were genuinely dangerous.

kzrdude 4y ago

I think that fission will solve some of its long lived depleted fuel problems sooner than fusion will(!) Just like with climate change, for nuclear we need to forge ahead with our best knowledge, engineering and belief in the future and our competency to solve problems. Let's use the best of our problem solving ability. To decline to do what we think is the best just because of long-held stereotypes, that just holds us back.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago

People "don't want them" because of fear peddling by people saying exactly what you're saying right now. Of course you want us to "move on" because that means the asinine state of affairs people like you have created will not be challenged. Waste that is "highly radioactive" cannot be "long lasting" because physics just doesn't work that way. Anything atomically spicy will have decayed into less spicy things in decades, typically a handful, dozens at worst, resulting in waste that's not really any more harmful than heavy metal laced this or that that humanity already deals with in the waste streams of other industrial processes. The fact that nuclear waste decays at all is really a godsend. You can literally just ignore the problem until it goes away. This isn't the case for heavy metals and some other types of pollutants. You can NEVER build a house on an unmitigated lead mine. Furthermore, the actual physical amounts of waste produced by nuclear are tiny compared to other things. Yucca mountain was gonna store waste for literally the entire nation.

myrmidon 4y ago

I've become convinced that fusion power will never be commercially viable in the foreseeable future. Considering: Electrical energy from coal is, right now, barely competitive with renewables (which are still continuously improving!). Thus, any fusion plant would basically need to provide thermal energy for less than the fuel cost in a coal plant + the cost of some burners. That includes: - Vacuum chamber - Cryocooling - Huge superconducting magnet assemblies - Maintenance of all above in a very hostile environment (=> thanks to high neutron flux and thus potentially neutron-activated materials near the fusion chamber) Right now, the only halfway credible pathway to a viable design is ITERs successor plant; everything else is pure vaporware/research project by design, which is obvious from the scale alone. Nuclear fusion is IMO in the same spot as a steam-jet powered carriage (heating water, expelling it backwards out of a nozzle) would have been in 1500AD: - Technically possible? Sure. - Academically interesting? Kind of. - Economically viable? Hell no (and no amount of progress has changed that since!). I'm very open to having my mind changed, but not optimistic :( But photovoltaics/wind/battery storage looks all super promising, so i guess there is that...

digianarchist 4y ago

Fusion has its own waste problem albeit much more manageable than fission and only when the plant is decommissioned.

joshjob42 4y ago

What do you mean by long-lived? Fission products all become harmless ‘ less radioactive than the rocks we pulled out of the ground initially within ~300 years. That is well within the lifetime we can design containment systems for and far too soon for language drift to become a serious problem to communicating risks. Actinides produced, ie uranium that absorbed some neutrons but didn’t fission and so became some other elements lime plutonium, americium, etc., do have half lives in the thousands to tens of thousands of years but are a much smaller fraction of the waste fuel than the fission products. They can also be put back into reactors to burn up. If you reprocess spent nuclear fuel, then you can take all the very radioactive fission products and separate them out, vitrify them, and put them somewhere. You only get about one tonne of those per GWe-yr of reactor power, and as I said, they become harmless in a few hundred years. The bulk of the remainder is U-238, which is most of nuclear fuel anyway. And the remaining ~1% or so is actinides which along with the U-238 can be mixed with fresh U-238 and U-235 to create new fuel rods which then go into reactors. Thus the only thing you really produce out of a fuel reprocessing system is the fission products, which aren’t long-lived. The only reason the US has a bunch of spent fuel with lifetimes of tens of thousands of years lying around is because we banned fuel reprocessing for no good reason in the late 70s. The entire country could run on 3TWe of nuclear power and never have more than 900k tonnes of fission products under management ever, and could be placed in a total of ~8 million tonnes of glass like the French use, taking up a volume roughly equal to a square kilometer at a depth of ~3 meters. Reference for properties of virtified waste: https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/25/047/25047841.pdf https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/... Friendly link on waste reprocessing and properties of spent fuel: https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-radioactive-waste-in-france https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-radio...

LorenPechtel 4y ago
300 years is too short, but you've got the right idea. Let's do a little experiment. In the left corner we have a nuclear plant and reprocessing facility. In the right corner we have a coal power plant. The reprocessing facility removes the commercially useful isotopes and sells them, removes the unused uranium and plutonium and sends it to the fuel plant and sends the rest to the landfill. The coal plant sends it's fly ash to the landfill. Round 1 (one year's operation): We have waste from each powerplant, we build identical landfills. The coal plant fills it's landfill, the nuke plant only uses a small bit of it's. Round 2: The coal plant uses another landfill, the nuke plant is fine on it's original one. Round 10,000: The coal plant is on it's 10,000th landfill, the nuke plant has finally filled it's landfill. Round 10,001: The coal plant needed yet another. The nuke plant, however, we can take out the first material as it's now down to ambient (no more radioactive than an average bit of earth) and no longer a hazard. Thus we still do not need another landfill, nor will we ever.