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I'd rather wait for fusion. Fission is dirty and creates more radioactive waste than we know how to deal with. A tsunami hitting a fusion plant would not do muc

by krunck 2y ago

I'd rather wait for fusion. Fission is dirty and creates more radioactive waste than we know how to deal with. A tsunami hitting a fusion plant would not do much except knock it out of commission. Fission on the other hand ....well, we've seen that already. We've seen many times how messy fission is.

AdamTReineke 2y ago
Plenty of room in old coal mines to stash all the waste we could ever want.
kibwen 2y ago
Fusion will not be economical in our lifetimes. Compared to fission, you've replaced an expensive and dangerous fuel with a cheap and safe fuel, and replaced an expensive containment vessel with the most complex machine ever engineered by mankind, that also needs to be disposable because of the absurd energies contained within. We already have a perfectly good fusion reactor. It's about 1 AU away, and it's beaming more power to us than any Kardashev Type I civilization could ever use (and small-scale fusion will be useless to any Type II civilization anyway).
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  As far as I understand it, no matter what kind of magic fusion device you come up with, it's going to be throwing off lots of fast neutrons which will be absorbed by the equipment generating the fusion reaction So a fusion reaction will gradually irradiate the generator that is creating the reaction. A molten salt reactor which consumes virtually all of its nuclear fuel as the closest approximation to your desire to have nuclear reactors without nuclear waste. Edit: I recall that helium 3 fusion may actually be pretty neutron free. But you got to get your hands on a lot of helium 3
EasyMark 2y ago
Fusion won’t happen in our lifetimes, we just don’t have the science and materials to do it, unless by some miracle AI actually proves its worth and figures out the containment problem, that also seems like a stretch.
Manuel_D 2y ago
The comment about nuclear waste could not be further from the truth. All of the radioactive waste from nuclear electricity generation in the US fits in a volume equivalent to a football field stacked 10 meters high: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... The meltdown at Fukushima amounted to a very small proportion of the total damage incurred by the tsunami. No deaths due to radiation besides a couple plant workers are expected. The exclusion zone was cleaned up and reopened after about a decade. The learnings from this event should be that nuclear isn't actually all that risky, relative to how much carbon-free energy it generates.

by krunck 2y ago

AdamTReineke 2y ago

Plenty of room in old coal mines to stash all the waste we could ever want.

kibwen 2y ago

Fusion will not be economical in our lifetimes. Compared to fission, you've replaced an expensive and dangerous fuel with a cheap and safe fuel, and replaced an expensive containment vessel with the most complex machine ever engineered by mankind, that also needs to be disposable because of the absurd energies contained within. We already have a perfectly good fusion reactor. It's about 1 AU away, and it's beaming more power to us than any Kardashev Type I civilization could ever use (and small-scale fusion will be useless to any Type II civilization anyway).

AtlasBarfed 2y ago
As far as I understand it, no matter what kind of magic fusion device you come up with, it's going to be throwing off lots of fast neutrons which will be absorbed by the equipment generating the fusion reaction So a fusion reaction will gradually irradiate the generator that is creating the reaction. A molten salt reactor which consumes virtually all of its nuclear fuel as the closest approximation to your desire to have nuclear reactors without nuclear waste. Edit: I recall that helium 3 fusion may actually be pretty neutron free. But you got to get your hands on a lot of helium 3

EasyMark 2y ago

Fusion won’t happen in our lifetimes, we just don’t have the science and materials to do it, unless by some miracle AI actually proves its worth and figures out the containment problem, that also seems like a stretch.

Manuel_D 2y ago

The comment about nuclear waste could not be further from the truth. All of the radioactive waste from nuclear electricity generation in the US fits in a volume equivalent to a football field stacked 10 meters high: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... The meltdown at Fukushima amounted to a very small proportion of the total damage incurred by the tsunami. No deaths due to radiation besides a couple plant workers are expected. The exclusion zone was cleaned up and reopened after about a decade. The learnings from this event should be that nuclear isn't actually all that risky, relative to how much carbon-free energy it generates.