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If someone rang me and asked a question like 'am I in favour of throwing vast sums of money towards research and build of nuclear power plants?', it'd be a reso

by Jedd 3y ago

If someone rang me and asked a question like 'am I in favour of throwing vast sums of money towards research and build of nuclear power plants?', it'd be a resounding yes with a strict qualification of 'fusion, not fission'. (Neither word appears in TFA.) I realise the distinction probably isn't well understood in the general population, but I'm confident a huge part of that is due to every news story conflating the two.

Qwertious 3y ago
Fusion is a waste of money, it's hype is based on lies/mistruths and it's not going to work in time to address climate change. In particular, they constantly conflate different definitions of energy. There's energy in/energy out, there's laser energy in/energy out (lasers currently being 0.5% efficient, so it's a lie of 2 orders of magnitude), there's energy in/out per pellet versus including warmup time, etc. Even if fusion is possible within two decades, it might be prohibitively expensive to build for another decade or two, and we'd need to build a first commercial reactor before we can properly scale it, so I don't see fusion being possible before 2050. So I'd rather that money be sent straight to fission plants, since we know they'll actually work on time.
- Jedd 3y ago
  I agree with the thrust of your arguments around fusion, though I would disagree on some of the conspiracy theory implications. Your pessimism may turn out to be well placed, but with the piddling amount of investment thrown into the subject, it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that comes back to my point - I'd be very happy to have a lot more budget thrown at the problem, because a) it seems extremely unlikely at this point that the technology is outright infeasible, and b) the payoff will be monumental. Your claim: > So I'd rather that money be sent straight to fission plants, since we know they'll actually work on time. is contra-indicated by reality, unfortunately. (If you're going to drop phrases like 'if it's even possible', and 'might be expensive', and so on for your fusion predictions, I'll point at the actual failures of fission nuclear power plant deployments over the past few decades.)

by Jedd 3y ago

Qwertious 3y ago

Fusion is a waste of money, it's hype is based on lies/mistruths and it's not going to work in time to address climate change. In particular, they constantly conflate different definitions of energy. There's energy in/energy out, there's laser energy in/energy out (lasers currently being 0.5% efficient, so it's a lie of 2 orders of magnitude), there's energy in/out per pellet versus including warmup time, etc. Even if fusion is possible within two decades, it might be prohibitively expensive to build for another decade or two, and we'd need to build a first commercial reactor before we can properly scale it, so I don't see fusion being possible before 2050. So I'd rather that money be sent straight to fission plants, since we know they'll actually work on time.

Jedd 3y ago
I agree with the thrust of your arguments around fusion, though I would disagree on some of the conspiracy theory implications. Your pessimism may turn out to be well placed, but with the piddling amount of investment thrown into the subject, it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that comes back to my point - I'd be very happy to have a lot more budget thrown at the problem, because a) it seems extremely unlikely at this point that the technology is outright infeasible, and b) the payoff will be monumental. Your claim: > So I'd rather that money be sent straight to fission plants, since we know they'll actually work on time. is contra-indicated by reality, unfortunately. (If you're going to drop phrases like 'if it's even possible', and 'might be expensive', and so on for your fusion predictions, I'll point at the actual failures of fission nuclear power plant deployments over the past few decades.)