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We already have a fusion reactor at a relatively safe distance called the sun.
by goodpoint 3y ago
We already have a fusion reactor at a relatively safe distance called the sun.
- svantana 3y agoThis looks like it has about 100x higher power density than what solar PV gives at peak. Combine that with 100% uptime and deployment pretty much anywhere, that are some pretty compelling advantages.
- hedora 3y agoHow could that possibly be the case? The current best commercially-available solar panels are 20% efficient. Last-gen stuff is 10-15%.
- jjk166 3y agoWell if you put those solar panels right up against the sun, they'd be much more power dense. But for the moment building a nuclear reactor on earth is a significantly easier engineering challenge than building a solar plant on the sun.
- kgabis 3y agoWe also have this thing called night, as well as weather and seasons.
- awestroke 3y agoAnd we also have this looming thing called climate emergency, which should conceivably motivate us to forge ahead with renewables and adjust our energy usage patterns to match production peaks, lest we doom humanity to extinction
- badtension 3y agoI feel like this is one of the biggest missed opportunities. Why do we insist on our energy system to be infinitely flexible and full power available 24/7? Is a habit of doing the laundry at night worth more than additional millions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere? I understand convenience, laziness and inertia (resisting change) but I also think changing the times when we click "power on" is a simpler solution than mining millions of tons of more lithium, no?
- zdragnar 3y agoYou would have to retrofit every residence to handle daily brownouts (circuits for lights, furnaces and medical equipment stay on, everything else off). You would have to completely rebuild most of the manufacturing industry, as many plants have startup times measured in hours or days. It'd be cheaper to just build nuclear.
- awestroke 3y agoIndustry uses most of the energy. The industry is already moving towards their own price optimizing energy usage and/or storage.
- pjc50 3y agoLike computing, having high uptime has a value all its own compared to an unreliable system. Countries which do have regular brownouts you find people buying their own (inefficient, polluting) generators to get round it. Smart demand-response may yet become a thing, but it's not yet a commodity product. You need a system to send out "turn off" notifications, and a system for measuring that in realtime, and a system for paying people. Some grids _do_ have this, but only for very large consumers.
- bluGill 3y agoMany grids do have this for normal residences, but it only covers your air conditioner not everything (and maybe water heater). By running your AC on half duty cycle all day your house still stays cool enough and they are able to reduce substantial peak demand. For most people HVAC and water heating are the two biggest demands, and also ones where simple management can result in a substantial changes in demand without affecting your comfort.
- kgabis 3y agoRenewables alone won't let us decarbonise, they are too expensive and intermittent. We need lots of nuclear if we want to stand a chance.
- ChrisRR 3y agoI don't know why people always comment this on posts about renewables as if it's some kind of gotcha. When there's no sun, then other countries probably have sun. When there's no sun, there's hydro. When there's no hydro there's wind. When there's no wind, there's tidal. When there's no tidal there's geothermal. And when there's none of those, there's stored energy in batteries. And if for some reason all of those combined can't satisfy the demand, then there's nuclear as a last resort. And if there's none of any of those at all, then we've probably got bigger problems anyway
- kgabis 3y agoThose things don't add up - there's often no wind, no sun, no hydro. Energy storage is also orders of magnitude too small to store reasonable amounts of energy. I would argue we should start with the cleanest source of energy (which is nuclear, of course) and fill the gaps with renewables.
- lazide 3y agoMany of the plans for the future currently involve drastically undersized battery storage and decommissioning nuclear. That’s why.
- ChrisRR 3y agoSo... my point still stands even without nuclear?
- lazide 3y agoI can’t tell what your point is, frankly. That everything is fine until it isn’t, then we’re boned? Or that it will never go wrong, unless we have ‘bigger problems’? (Which are what exactly? alien invasion?) Lack of power either way certainly won’t help! If by design nuclear is offline, fossil fuels are offline, and battery capacity (or other storage) is insufficient for known (but infrequent) weather events, then we’re designing an inevitable and destructive catastrophe as we have no Plan B for when realtime production is insufficient. And that will happen some day, regardless of how much capacity we build. It’s currently the norm on many days. One that will kill a lot of people, especially the physically weaker ones, and be very destructive economically. One that will also play out randomly based on weather, and for which we’ll have no real Plan B. Being flippant about it seems rather macabre.
- hedora 3y agoWe also have space lasers and mirrors. I can imagine some sort of orbital parabolic mirror setup that keeps a few acres at 2000C in the dead of winter and vaporizes any birds that fly over the power plant site. We're nowhere near the point where that would make sense, but it could let us harness more than the earth's surface area of sunlight for energy production. It will probably have to wait until after we plunge ourselves into some a perpetual winter trying to mitigate climate change. Of course, a ring world or dyson sphere would make it obsolete.