7 ms·

When talking about the price of energy produced by fusion, various estimates put it at 'probably about the same as nuclear fission, maybe a bit higher, but it w

When talking about the price of energy produced by fusion, various estimates put it at 'probably about the same as nuclear fission, maybe a bit higher, but it won't have the proliferation risk/contamination risk of fission'. However, because the tech was '50 years away', it never made sense for private sector investors, so most investment was from governments. However, with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear due to no need for massive capital investments in concrete and steel upfront many years before production starts, does it even make sense for governments to go down this route?

sofixa 2y ago
> However, with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear due to no need for massive capital investments in concrete and steel upfront many years before production starts, does it even make sense for governments to go down this route? Cheaper per watts generated, which aren't constant. Cheaper for a constant output? Reliable to actually power a full grid through downturns such as storms, winters, etc? No, not really. There are exactly zero currently available widely usable grid scale (being able to have enough capacity to power the grid for up to days at a time) solutions. Pumped up hydro is the only one coming close, but it's expensive and it requires specific geography. Just saying "batteries" or "supply and demand by load shedding" doesn't magically solve this problem.
imoverclocked 2y ago
> with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear ... does it even make sense for governments to go down this route? If this works without the sun shining then, yes, it makes sense. It is always good to have multiple sources of energy even if only as a form of redundancy. Our world depends on power.
- Tade0 2y ago
  > If this works without the sun shining HVDC lines are already mature enough that the cheapest route is to just wrap the Earth with them to form a planetary grid. The sun always shines somewhere.
  - fooker 2y ago
    If the earth was a uniform sphere without oceans and mountains, sure.
  - zizee 2y ago
    Is this true? What are the costs per km for HVDC? Perhaps you're just talking about the Eurasian continent? What do the people of Western Europe do? Connect to the US? Even then, we've seen with the recent Russia-Ukraine war that control of energy is a useful geopolitical tool with Europe being softer on Russia because of their reliance on their gas.
    - morsch 2y ago
      > reliance on their gas. ... and nuclear fuel and fuel rods from Russia. Which are still not being sanctioned btw. It's peanuts compared to the natural gas, admittedly, on the order of 700 million Euro per year.
  - TheDudeMan 2y ago
    Bunch of projects in the works. But building HVDC lines is not cheap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects
    - Tade0 2y ago
      Same goes for nuclear power plants really. A 2.5GW undersea HVDC line costs $2.5mln/km. The cheapest nuclear power plant in Europe is the Ostrovets power plant in Belarus, the cost of which was $11bln for a 2.4GW plant. For that money you could buy a 2.5GW HVDC line spanning the entire EU.
molszanski 2y ago
One can’t power Tokyo (metaphorical) with sunwind
cm2187 2y ago
A bit tiring to see the price of solar and wind being compared to nuclear. Nuclear can produce electricity on demand. Solar and wind cannot. You need to pair them with either some humongous energy storage facilities (and then you need to also over-provision), or some other on-demand source of electricity. Once you factored those costs, then you are not comparing apples and oranges.
- baq 2y ago
  Nuclear really isn't anywhere close to 'on demand' at least if you consider unit economics. It really wants to be just 'on' instead.
  - cm2187 2y ago
    1) even if it was, over producing electricity isn't really the problem 2) it isn't. Modern reactors are designed to do load following. The French do that nationwide on a daily basis.
    - baq 2y ago
      Technically you can but you spent however many billion euro and aren’t utilizing the capacity. Maybe it still makes sense vs keeping coal and gas underutilized, I don’t know.
      - cm2187 2y ago
        If you allow yourself to use carbon energy (coal and gas) then it absolutely makes sense to use them to compensate for the variability of wind. That's what the UK does. Their cost is pretty much proportional to their utilisation so it makes sense to switch them on and off. You also have hydro but it's a fairly limited (there are only so many valleys you can flood and so much water you can capture - plus historically it's the source of energy that killed the most people). But if you truly decarbonise, and in absence of an economical way to store vast amounts of energy for a long time (wind can be down to pretty much zero for weeks on a typical year), and I don't see any such facility being built at scale, I am not sure what else than nuclear you can use to compensate for the volatility of wind. And because nuclear costs the same whether you use it or not, you then might as well save yourself the construction of a wind farm. That's why I don't understand why we are spending billions building those gigantic wind farms. They only make sense if the intention is to keep using carbon. Otherwise they should spend that money on nuclear.
krasin 2y ago
> However, with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear due to no need for massive capital investments in concrete and steel upfront many years before production starts, does it even make sense for governments to go down this route? If we would like to stop polluting the air, the future of maritime shipping is nuclear (fusion or fission). China understands that, and invests in R&D necessary to make it happen. Plus, on ships, there's no competition with solar or wind. And nuclear will actually be quite cheaper than bunker oil, if executed correctly.
- ok_dad 2y ago
  I’ll eat my hat if cargo ships go nuclear. Even the US Navy stopped using nuclear for all but carriers. Shipboard nuclear is on another level to regular power plants for many reasons.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    This. If you could make ship-sized nuclear reactors easy and affordable, the US navy would be knocking down your door. There's no lack of DoD funding, no lack of operator expertise, and no nimbyism from dolphins, so the fact that the USN doesn't have a reactor in every single Arleigh Burke is purely because it's not economical.
    - photonbeam 2y ago
      They could put out a big production line of cheaper reactors, but the problem is that their navy boats are a target for missiles, which means larger risks of bad incidents. So they pick carefully Cargo generally isnt a target in the same way
      - ok_dad 2y ago
        That’s not why they don’t do it, it’s because it’s way too expensive. That fact alone precludes it from being used on cargo ships. Now ask yourself this: do I want vessels flagged in the countries with the least regulations and the most corruption to be run by a for profit maritime shipping company that skimps on maintenance budgets and crew costs to be running nuclear reactors with highly enriched uranium (weapons grade) anywhere they want around the world, even through pirate territory? Fuck No I don’t. I barely trust the nukes running them in the USN!
mnau 2y ago
> does it even make sense for governments to go down this route? For past 50 years, we had ["fusion never" level of funding](https://imgur.com/u-s-historical-fusion-budget-vs-1976-erda-plan-sjH5r https://imgur.com/u-s-historical-fusion-budget-vs-1976-erda-...). Because of climate change, there is a sleuth of nuclear startups. I wouldn't hold my breath for any of the startups. None of them (at least non-state backed ones) seem to have realistic way to the goal. I remember reading a post from one of startups after rejection from NRC. It read like a blog post after being dumped by a girlfriend written at 3 AM, drunk. On the other hand, it's not like nuclear is going away, e.g. Uganda and Kenya are planning on nuclear reactors. Maybe we should have a better option to offer than the light water reactors.
- beambot 2y ago
  No love for Commonwealth Fusion? They seem to have solid backers, technologists & approach.
  - TaylorAlexander 2y ago
    I’ve been following them since they were giving promising lectures at MIT and I absolutely think they have the most solid approach! Tokamaks are well understood, they supposedly have the same plasma physics as ITER which has been heavily scrutinized and supported by work at JET, and their concept is simple - Tokamak but with very high field superconducting magnets using technology that wasn’t available when ITER was conceived, and apparently higher field strengths mean a smaller reactor for the same power gains. As a lay person the story is simple and that’s good! Then they demonstrated their magnets and got $2B in funding and now they’re deep in the construction phase for SPARC. I encourage anyone curious to look up videos on SPARC on YouTube. It’s very encouraging! It seems honestly very reasonable that they will see sustained net energy gain for their entire power plant before 2030 (tho SPARC is still a demonstrator not designed for continuous service, so “sustained” means like one minute). Here’s some videos: 8 years ago: https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4 https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4 2 years ago: https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4 https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4 Latest update posted yesterday: https://youtu.be/w3Giq6NuPYs https://youtu.be/w3Giq6NuPYs
semi-extrinsic 2y ago
We don't have enough production of basic materials like steel to scale solar and (especially) wind to cover our entire energy needs, regardless of energy storage. Fission and fusion will become inevitable in a decade or two.
- einpoklum 2y ago
  Why do we have to make solar panel infrastructure (grilles, consoles etc.) from steel? I'm sure more common materials can be used.
  - TaylorAlexander 2y ago
    I don’t know if the statement you are replying to is correct “we don’t have enough steel” but what I can say is steel (well, iron) is about the most common material on earth. I’m surprised to see that aluminum is slightly more abundant, but they are similar. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_crust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_crust However this chart shows that iron represents more than 94% of all metals mined. That is, iron (used to make steel) is the most commonly mined metal by far. So actually more common materials can’t be used as no more common metal exists.
    - willis936 2y ago
      Earth is almost entirely iron, but Aluminum floats in iron so it ends up being a large amount of the crust. But yeah, if we're ever like "gee we don't have enough iron" then we've far surpassed all other possible natural resource limits of the planet.
- ben_w 2y ago
  The current production of 1.9 billion tons of steel per year is something you consider insufficient? I don't know how much steel we need per square meter of PV (e.g. frames can be made from wood), but I do know the area we need for the current global electrical demand of 2 TW even after accounting for capacity factor and not just cell efficiency, and that our current production in each year is sufficient to put a contiguous 2 mm layer behind all of it: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281.9e9%20tons%20%2F%20density%20steel%29%20%2F%20%282%20TW%20%2F%20%281kW%2Fm%5E2%20%2A%2020%25%20%2A%2010%25%29%29 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281.9e9%20tons%20%2F%2... Given the panels are supposed to last 25 years, even at steady-state replacement rates, and assuming zero growth in the steel sector, and assuming none of that steel gets recycled when the cells themselves need refurbishment or replacement, that doesn't seem to be a real problem to me.
TaylorAlexander 2y ago
For general power delivery to the grid I think renewables make a whole lot of sense. But for specialty industrial processes that require very large levels of constant power, I think nuclear fusion is very interesting. I worry about environmental effects of mass industrialization but at the same time, I wonder what we could achieve if we had 100x more power available for this or that industrial process. Would it be helpful in decarbonizing steel refining or other metallurgical work? I think if we develop the technology we will find a use for it and be grateful that we have it, even if it’s hard to predict today what those uses will be.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  I am excited for how much bitcoin we could mine if we had a dedicated nuclear fusion plant.
  - TheDudeMan 2y ago
    If you mean "we" as in "humanity", then exactly the same amount. Bitcoin is created per unit time, not per unit energy.
cyberax 2y ago
> However, with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear They are not cheaper. They produce very low-quality electricity. If you want them to provide any supply guarantees, their price skyrockets.
adrian_b 2y ago
It will have the same proliferation risks. A fusion reactor is an extremely intense source of neutrons. The neutrons can be used to transmute elements, e.g. to transmute cheap natural uranium or depleted uranium into plutonium 239, which can be separated easily (in comparison with enriching uranium) and it can be used to make nuclear bombs. Besides producing plutonium for nuclear bombs, it is also easy to use a fusion reactor to produce any kind of dangerous radioactive isotopes that could be used in terrorist activities. So no, a fusion reactor that uses the fusion reactions that are possible today will not be any safer than a fission reactor, from the point of view of the proliferation risks.
- willis936 2y ago
  Neutrons are free. You can make a fast neutron source for a few million bucks today. Making a bigger one that can produce usable power is no big deal. The existence of fusion reactors makes absolutely zero difference to the question "who should have fissile material?" You cannot start or stop ignoring that question whether you have or don't have fusion reactors.
ufmace 2y ago
AFAIK it's not at all clear that solar and wind are really cheaper when making up a substantial part of a large-scale power grid that meets our current expectations of 100% consistent and reliable power everywhere, no matter what. The unreliability of solar and wind requires either hot (constantly running and spinning) non-renewable backups or grid-scale power storage (has never been done so ? on cost to build and upkeep) to guarantee reliable voltage and AC frequency. The cost of that should be factored into determine the true cost of these power sources. The stability of the grid is dependent on the collective physical inertia of the many tens of thousands of huge and heavy spinning turbine-generator sets that make up the majority of the current generating capacity. Most current solar power sources rely on grid-following inverters, which are not stable without a grid stabilized by a preponderance of large spinning turbines. There has been some work on grid-forming inverters that are less impacted by this, but AFAIK there aren't currently any that can replicate the grid stability provided by that physical inertia. I'm less certain about wind turbines, but I think they have this problem too. I don't think they're controllable enough to be mechanically synced to the grid frequency. I'd love to be wrong about this, please prove me so if you can! But I don't often hear these points addressed, and we're not helping anything by ignoring the complexity of the real world.
- fungi 2y ago
  Battery backed renewable energy with grid upgrades is cheaper today and getting cheaper. https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/GenCost https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Gen...
- zer00eyz 2y ago
  > grid... grid-scale power storage... stability of the grid ... grid-following inverter ... grid stabilized by ... The problem isnt solar, or wind, or storage ... the problem is the grid. Were running on a system that was never designed to do what were asking of it, and yes its going to be a number of problems to solve. All of those are jobs, economic action and improvements to reliability and quality across the board. > I don't think they're controllable enough to be mechanically synced to the grid frequency. Google, there are a number of ways this gets addressed. > There has been some work on grid-forming inverters Yes, we know how, and the race to build them is on... this isnt a hard problem it's just a problem. > grid-scale power storage (has never been done so ? Already deployed in a few places with battery systems (hati, Australia both have them. Possibly Hawaii too). We're doing quite a bit of this. Again a quick google will give you a sea of sources.
mlsu 2y ago
the cost of solar/wind depends on how much solar/wind is actually deployed. 1kWh of solar delivered midday, when there is 20% penetration? easy peasy. 1kWh of solar delivered at 2AM, when there is 65% penetration? much much more difficult. These types of price comparisons are always unfair, always apples and oranges, because they always compare a 2AM kWh of nuclear with a midday kWh of solar, and of course solar wins that comparison.
fellowmartian 2y ago
Depends on whether we want to reach a qualitatively different (and better) level of civilization, or at best stay at the current level (but in a carbon-neutral way).
tonetegeatinst 2y ago
I think fusion has one major advantage compared to other renewables.....its much less resource intensive. While plasma confinement is currently done via supercooling of electromagnets(from last time I was looking into fusion) that's the major resource sink that I can see. We have massive fusion chambers, but I know some universities have built much smaller scale chambers. And we also can address the helium shortage if we solve fusion. I'm not sure if fusion will ever get solved or if we will she commercial adoption. I also don't know what the life cycle of a fusion plant would be but its got to be cheaper than the big turbine blades, and more ecofriendly the photovoltaic cells.
TheDudeMan 2y ago
The price of fission will hopefully come down over the next decade via reduced regulations and higher production rates (of smaller reactors).
EasyMark 2y ago
It makes a lot of sense, nuclear is nearly 100% reliable. Weather (wind) has wild swings. Solar is -pretty- good but can still swing around a lot and we simply don’t have the grid scale level of batteries that need to smooth it out. I’ve seen estimates that we need battery tech with 10-20x energy density(at current cost levels) what we currently have to make a viable replacement for classical energy sources (coal, natural gas, nuclear)

sofixa 2y ago

> However, with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear due to no need for massive capital investments in concrete and steel upfront many years before production starts, does it even make sense for governments to go down this route? Cheaper per watts generated, which aren't constant. Cheaper for a constant output? Reliable to actually power a full grid through downturns such as storms, winters, etc? No, not really. There are exactly zero currently available widely usable grid scale (being able to have enough capacity to power the grid for up to days at a time) solutions. Pumped up hydro is the only one coming close, but it's expensive and it requires specific geography. Just saying "batteries" or "supply and demand by load shedding" doesn't magically solve this problem.

imoverclocked 2y ago

> with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear ... does it even make sense for governments to go down this route? If this works without the sun shining then, yes, it makes sense. It is always good to have multiple sources of energy even if only as a form of redundancy. Our world depends on power.

Tade0 2y ago
> If this works without the sun shining HVDC lines are already mature enough that the cheapest route is to just wrap the Earth with them to form a planetary grid. The sun always shines somewhere.
- fooker 2y ago
  If the earth was a uniform sphere without oceans and mountains, sure.
- zizee 2y ago
  Is this true? What are the costs per km for HVDC? Perhaps you're just talking about the Eurasian continent? What do the people of Western Europe do? Connect to the US? Even then, we've seen with the recent Russia-Ukraine war that control of energy is a useful geopolitical tool with Europe being softer on Russia because of their reliance on their gas.
  - morsch 2y ago
    > reliance on their gas. ... and nuclear fuel and fuel rods from Russia. Which are still not being sanctioned btw. It's peanuts compared to the natural gas, admittedly, on the order of 700 million Euro per year.
- TheDudeMan 2y ago
  Bunch of projects in the works. But building HVDC lines is not cheap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects
  - Tade0 2y ago
    Same goes for nuclear power plants really. A 2.5GW undersea HVDC line costs $2.5mln/km. The cheapest nuclear power plant in Europe is the Ostrovets power plant in Belarus, the cost of which was $11bln for a 2.4GW plant. For that money you could buy a 2.5GW HVDC line spanning the entire EU.

molszanski 2y ago

One can’t power Tokyo (metaphorical) with sunwind

cm2187 2y ago

A bit tiring to see the price of solar and wind being compared to nuclear. Nuclear can produce electricity on demand. Solar and wind cannot. You need to pair them with either some humongous energy storage facilities (and then you need to also over-provision), or some other on-demand source of electricity. Once you factored those costs, then you are not comparing apples and oranges.

baq 2y ago
Nuclear really isn't anywhere close to 'on demand' at least if you consider unit economics. It really wants to be just 'on' instead.
- cm2187 2y ago
  1) even if it was, over producing electricity isn't really the problem 2) it isn't. Modern reactors are designed to do load following. The French do that nationwide on a daily basis.
  - baq 2y ago
    Technically you can but you spent however many billion euro and aren’t utilizing the capacity. Maybe it still makes sense vs keeping coal and gas underutilized, I don’t know.
    - cm2187 2y ago
      If you allow yourself to use carbon energy (coal and gas) then it absolutely makes sense to use them to compensate for the variability of wind. That's what the UK does. Their cost is pretty much proportional to their utilisation so it makes sense to switch them on and off. You also have hydro but it's a fairly limited (there are only so many valleys you can flood and so much water you can capture - plus historically it's the source of energy that killed the most people). But if you truly decarbonise, and in absence of an economical way to store vast amounts of energy for a long time (wind can be down to pretty much zero for weeks on a typical year), and I don't see any such facility being built at scale, I am not sure what else than nuclear you can use to compensate for the volatility of wind. And because nuclear costs the same whether you use it or not, you then might as well save yourself the construction of a wind farm. That's why I don't understand why we are spending billions building those gigantic wind farms. They only make sense if the intention is to keep using carbon. Otherwise they should spend that money on nuclear.

krasin 2y ago

> However, with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear due to no need for massive capital investments in concrete and steel upfront many years before production starts, does it even make sense for governments to go down this route? If we would like to stop polluting the air, the future of maritime shipping is nuclear (fusion or fission). China understands that, and invests in R&D necessary to make it happen. Plus, on ships, there's no competition with solar or wind. And nuclear will actually be quite cheaper than bunker oil, if executed correctly.

ok_dad 2y ago
I’ll eat my hat if cargo ships go nuclear. Even the US Navy stopped using nuclear for all but carriers. Shipboard nuclear is on another level to regular power plants for many reasons.
- kibwen 2y ago
  This. If you could make ship-sized nuclear reactors easy and affordable, the US navy would be knocking down your door. There's no lack of DoD funding, no lack of operator expertise, and no nimbyism from dolphins, so the fact that the USN doesn't have a reactor in every single Arleigh Burke is purely because it's not economical.
  - photonbeam 2y ago
    They could put out a big production line of cheaper reactors, but the problem is that their navy boats are a target for missiles, which means larger risks of bad incidents. So they pick carefully Cargo generally isnt a target in the same way
    - ok_dad 2y ago
      That’s not why they don’t do it, it’s because it’s way too expensive. That fact alone precludes it from being used on cargo ships. Now ask yourself this: do I want vessels flagged in the countries with the least regulations and the most corruption to be run by a for profit maritime shipping company that skimps on maintenance budgets and crew costs to be running nuclear reactors with highly enriched uranium (weapons grade) anywhere they want around the world, even through pirate territory? Fuck No I don’t. I barely trust the nukes running them in the USN!

mnau 2y ago

> does it even make sense for governments to go down this route? For past 50 years, we had ["fusion never" level of funding](https://imgur.com/u-s-historical-fusion-budget-vs-1976-erda-plan-sjH5r https://imgur.com/u-s-historical-fusion-budget-vs-1976-erda-...). Because of climate change, there is a sleuth of nuclear startups. I wouldn't hold my breath for any of the startups. None of them (at least non-state backed ones) seem to have realistic way to the goal. I remember reading a post from one of startups after rejection from NRC. It read like a blog post after being dumped by a girlfriend written at 3 AM, drunk. On the other hand, it's not like nuclear is going away, e.g. Uganda and Kenya are planning on nuclear reactors. Maybe we should have a better option to offer than the light water reactors.

beambot 2y ago
No love for Commonwealth Fusion? They seem to have solid backers, technologists & approach.
- TaylorAlexander 2y ago
  I’ve been following them since they were giving promising lectures at MIT and I absolutely think they have the most solid approach! Tokamaks are well understood, they supposedly have the same plasma physics as ITER which has been heavily scrutinized and supported by work at JET, and their concept is simple - Tokamak but with very high field superconducting magnets using technology that wasn’t available when ITER was conceived, and apparently higher field strengths mean a smaller reactor for the same power gains. As a lay person the story is simple and that’s good! Then they demonstrated their magnets and got $2B in funding and now they’re deep in the construction phase for SPARC. I encourage anyone curious to look up videos on SPARC on YouTube. It’s very encouraging! It seems honestly very reasonable that they will see sustained net energy gain for their entire power plant before 2030 (tho SPARC is still a demonstrator not designed for continuous service, so “sustained” means like one minute). Here’s some videos: 8 years ago: https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4 https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4 2 years ago: https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4 https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4 Latest update posted yesterday: https://youtu.be/w3Giq6NuPYs https://youtu.be/w3Giq6NuPYs

semi-extrinsic 2y ago

We don't have enough production of basic materials like steel to scale solar and (especially) wind to cover our entire energy needs, regardless of energy storage. Fission and fusion will become inevitable in a decade or two.

einpoklum 2y ago
Why do we have to make solar panel infrastructure (grilles, consoles etc.) from steel? I'm sure more common materials can be used.
- TaylorAlexander 2y ago
  I don’t know if the statement you are replying to is correct “we don’t have enough steel” but what I can say is steel (well, iron) is about the most common material on earth. I’m surprised to see that aluminum is slightly more abundant, but they are similar. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_crust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_crust However this chart shows that iron represents more than 94% of all metals mined. That is, iron (used to make steel) is the most commonly mined metal by far. So actually more common materials can’t be used as no more common metal exists.
  - willis936 2y ago
    Earth is almost entirely iron, but Aluminum floats in iron so it ends up being a large amount of the crust. But yeah, if we're ever like "gee we don't have enough iron" then we've far surpassed all other possible natural resource limits of the planet.
ben_w 2y ago
The current production of 1.9 billion tons of steel per year is something you consider insufficient? I don't know how much steel we need per square meter of PV (e.g. frames can be made from wood), but I do know the area we need for the current global electrical demand of 2 TW even after accounting for capacity factor and not just cell efficiency, and that our current production in each year is sufficient to put a contiguous 2 mm layer behind all of it: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281.9e9%20tons%20%2F%20density%20steel%29%20%2F%20%282%20TW%20%2F%20%281kW%2Fm%5E2%20%2A%2020%25%20%2A%2010%25%29%29 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281.9e9%20tons%20%2F%2... Given the panels are supposed to last 25 years, even at steady-state replacement rates, and assuming zero growth in the steel sector, and assuming none of that steel gets recycled when the cells themselves need refurbishment or replacement, that doesn't seem to be a real problem to me.

TaylorAlexander 2y ago

For general power delivery to the grid I think renewables make a whole lot of sense. But for specialty industrial processes that require very large levels of constant power, I think nuclear fusion is very interesting. I worry about environmental effects of mass industrialization but at the same time, I wonder what we could achieve if we had 100x more power available for this or that industrial process. Would it be helpful in decarbonizing steel refining or other metallurgical work? I think if we develop the technology we will find a use for it and be grateful that we have it, even if it’s hard to predict today what those uses will be.

janalsncm 2y ago
I am excited for how much bitcoin we could mine if we had a dedicated nuclear fusion plant.
- TheDudeMan 2y ago
  If you mean "we" as in "humanity", then exactly the same amount. Bitcoin is created per unit time, not per unit energy.

cyberax 2y ago

> However, with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear They are not cheaper. They produce very low-quality electricity. If you want them to provide any supply guarantees, their price skyrockets.

adrian_b 2y ago

It will have the same proliferation risks. A fusion reactor is an extremely intense source of neutrons. The neutrons can be used to transmute elements, e.g. to transmute cheap natural uranium or depleted uranium into plutonium 239, which can be separated easily (in comparison with enriching uranium) and it can be used to make nuclear bombs. Besides producing plutonium for nuclear bombs, it is also easy to use a fusion reactor to produce any kind of dangerous radioactive isotopes that could be used in terrorist activities. So no, a fusion reactor that uses the fusion reactions that are possible today will not be any safer than a fission reactor, from the point of view of the proliferation risks.

willis936 2y ago
Neutrons are free. You can make a fast neutron source for a few million bucks today. Making a bigger one that can produce usable power is no big deal. The existence of fusion reactors makes absolutely zero difference to the question "who should have fissile material?" You cannot start or stop ignoring that question whether you have or don't have fusion reactors.

ufmace 2y ago

AFAIK it's not at all clear that solar and wind are really cheaper when making up a substantial part of a large-scale power grid that meets our current expectations of 100% consistent and reliable power everywhere, no matter what. The unreliability of solar and wind requires either hot (constantly running and spinning) non-renewable backups or grid-scale power storage (has never been done so ? on cost to build and upkeep) to guarantee reliable voltage and AC frequency. The cost of that should be factored into determine the true cost of these power sources. The stability of the grid is dependent on the collective physical inertia of the many tens of thousands of huge and heavy spinning turbine-generator sets that make up the majority of the current generating capacity. Most current solar power sources rely on grid-following inverters, which are not stable without a grid stabilized by a preponderance of large spinning turbines. There has been some work on grid-forming inverters that are less impacted by this, but AFAIK there aren't currently any that can replicate the grid stability provided by that physical inertia. I'm less certain about wind turbines, but I think they have this problem too. I don't think they're controllable enough to be mechanically synced to the grid frequency. I'd love to be wrong about this, please prove me so if you can! But I don't often hear these points addressed, and we're not helping anything by ignoring the complexity of the real world.

fungi 2y ago
Battery backed renewable energy with grid upgrades is cheaper today and getting cheaper. https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/GenCost https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Gen...
zer00eyz 2y ago
> grid... grid-scale power storage... stability of the grid ... grid-following inverter ... grid stabilized by ... The problem isnt solar, or wind, or storage ... the problem is the grid. Were running on a system that was never designed to do what were asking of it, and yes its going to be a number of problems to solve. All of those are jobs, economic action and improvements to reliability and quality across the board. > I don't think they're controllable enough to be mechanically synced to the grid frequency. Google, there are a number of ways this gets addressed. > There has been some work on grid-forming inverters Yes, we know how, and the race to build them is on... this isnt a hard problem it's just a problem. > grid-scale power storage (has never been done so ? Already deployed in a few places with battery systems (hati, Australia both have them. Possibly Hawaii too). We're doing quite a bit of this. Again a quick google will give you a sea of sources.

mlsu 2y ago

the cost of solar/wind depends on how much solar/wind is actually deployed. 1kWh of solar delivered midday, when there is 20% penetration? easy peasy. 1kWh of solar delivered at 2AM, when there is 65% penetration? much much more difficult. These types of price comparisons are always unfair, always apples and oranges, because they always compare a 2AM kWh of nuclear with a midday kWh of solar, and of course solar wins that comparison.

fellowmartian 2y ago

Depends on whether we want to reach a qualitatively different (and better) level of civilization, or at best stay at the current level (but in a carbon-neutral way).

tonetegeatinst 2y ago

I think fusion has one major advantage compared to other renewables.....its much less resource intensive. While plasma confinement is currently done via supercooling of electromagnets(from last time I was looking into fusion) that's the major resource sink that I can see. We have massive fusion chambers, but I know some universities have built much smaller scale chambers. And we also can address the helium shortage if we solve fusion. I'm not sure if fusion will ever get solved or if we will she commercial adoption. I also don't know what the life cycle of a fusion plant would be but its got to be cheaper than the big turbine blades, and more ecofriendly the photovoltaic cells.

TheDudeMan 2y ago

The price of fission will hopefully come down over the next decade via reduced regulations and higher production rates (of smaller reactors).

EasyMark 2y ago

It makes a lot of sense, nuclear is nearly 100% reliable. Weather (wind) has wild swings. Solar is -pretty- good but can still swing around a lot and we simply don’t have the grid scale level of batteries that need to smooth it out. I’ve seen estimates that we need battery tech with 10-20x energy density(at current cost levels) what we currently have to make a viable replacement for classical energy sources (coal, natural gas, nuclear)