6 ms·

Fully agreed. It took us from 1944 to 1965 in fission to go from "ok it makes net energy" to "ok we can make electricity on the commercial market within the rea

Fully agreed. It took us from 1944 to 1965 in fission to go from "ok it makes net energy" to "ok we can make electricity on the commercial market within the realm of the existing alternatives". Fusion is still pre-1944 in that they haven't even demonstrated getting net energy out, let alone put together an electricity-generating machine. I have no doubt at all that we'll make fusion-derived electricity in my lifetime. But I have no idea whether or not we'll make it cheap. They say the fuel is cheap. It's not (tritium and He-3 are hard to come by), but even if it were, keep in mind that a fleet of uranium-fueled fission reactors like the one in France spends about 5-10% of its costs on fuel.

ajross 2y ago
"Within the realm" involves some externalities though. Fission reactors have never been particularly cost competitive with other electrical generation technologies. They were subsidized heavily because people wanted reactors to build bombs, and more broadly to cultivate a technology base of people who could build and maintain reactors to build bombs. Once we had enough bombs, that subsidy got rolled back and fission fell off the leaderboard.
- acidburnNSA 2y ago
  If you spend as much time reading the early 1950s documentation of the nuclear industry, you'll quickly see that commercial nuclear reactor development was very much decoupled from the graphite or heavy-water moderated bomb-making reactors. They separated around 1953 and never came back together. Back then, the fledgling industry was wondering if they could sell excess plutonium for bombs, but the government said that they were not interested in buying it. They said they had more than enough coming from their own specialized bomb-making reactors. Certainly nuclear tech was subsidized originally by the Manhattan project, but very soon after, bomb making and nuclear power went their separate ways. You could much more strongly argue that the nuclear reactor development made to power submarines helped develop the commercial nuclear power industry. This checks out much more cleanly, as Shippingport was led by Rickover himself.
  - jillesvangurp 2y ago
    That is a bit revisionist. Most of the investment went towards reactor technology and research that had a dual purpose of generating power but also being aligned with generating plutonium. That's why the type of reactors used in nuclear sub marines was never commercialized. Simply too expensive for civilian use and they never had a dual use that benefited generating material for nuclear bombs. Commercial reactors today are based on minor variations of nuclear fission that was also strategically relevant for getting plutonium. Different reactors but same mineral supply chains and a lot of overlap in R&D. As soon as the cold war ran to an end, funding for all that fell off a cliff. Including building new nuclear power plants. Coal and gas plants were vastly cheaper to build. And they still are. And back then, nobody cared about pollution. Only now that people are interested in small reactors are these decades old fission reactors getting more attention.
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      The PWR used for power [1] is to first order "the same type of reactor used in submarines" in the sense that it is a thermal (in terms of neutron spectrum) reactor which is cooled by pressurized water. The submarine reactor uses highly enriched uranium and, I believe, burns like a cigarette, which makes it easy to start and stop the reactor without worrying about [2]. It doesn't produce a lot of Plutonium because it doesn't have much U238 in it. I believe the fuel elements are horizontally oriented. It's built tough because it might get knocked around in a war. The commercial reactor has vertically oriented fuel elements and tries to burn the fuel uniformly along the axis because this minimizes cost, because minimizing cost is a matter of maximizing power for a certain sized reactor core, and maximizing power is a matter of maximizing heat transfer out of the interior of the fuel rod and to the coolant, so you want to be producing and removing heat from the whole volume of the core. Temporal uniformity helps with spatial uniformity so the reactor is not so good at starting and stopping, but it can follow loads [3] Notably the west (where natural gas is available) quit building coal burning power plants at the same time it quit building nuclear power plants, partially because of pollution [4], partially because a 100% steam turbine powerset as used in coal and nuclear plants can't compete with a gas-fired combined cycle powerplant which combines a very-low capital cost gas turbine with a steam turbine that is about half the size (and cost) The small LWR is a pipe dream because LWR economics improve as the reactor gets bigger. One reason why we can't build reactors on an N-th of a kind basis is that every time we build one we decide the economics weren't that good and they might get better if we scale the design up. Had NuScale ever built a plant they probably would have tried scaling it up too. It is claimed small reactors could be easier to build but until somebody actually builds one, this claim is hard to take seriously. One path that makes sense is to pick an optimized design for a large reactor and "get good" at building it, it could be an advanced Western design like the AP1000 or something like the Chinese Hualong One which is an improved version of the reactors that France built in the glory days. The Russians are really good at building the VVER, their version of the PWR. The other path is to build a reactor that works at much higher temperatures such as the fast breeder reactor, high temperature gas cooled reactor, or molten salt reactor and couple it to a gas turbine powerset or use the heat to produce hydrogen directly. [5] This is still decades away. [1] Pressurized Water Reactor, there is also a Boiling Water Reactor in which the water boils in the core but it's not a vast difference: these are both called LWRs (Light Water Reactor) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon-135 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon-135 [3] https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12/technical_and_economic_aspects_of_load_following_with_nuclear_power_plants.pdf https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain (SO2 from coal burning plants, ironically, masked the warming effects of CO2 until we cleaned up coal plants) [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  From first principles, ignoring safety (which was pretty lacklustre in the beginning) fission should be cheap though.
  - wqaatwt 2y ago
    To be fair people were fine with multiple Chernobyl’s amount of damage every years from burning coal. And other disasters like Three Miles Island very insignificant.
    - pbronez 2y ago
      > multiple Chernobyl’s amount of damage every years from burning coal. Do you have a source for that? I'd be very interested in a study that quantifies the damage of coal plants in terms of famous nuclear disasters.
      - actionfromafar 2y ago
        Fly-ash contains radionuclides.
        pfdietz 2y ago
        However, 99% of fly ash is captured in electrostatic precipitators and filters. Calculations that include the radionuclides in the captured ash are not being honest.
        actionfromafar 2y ago
        Yes now, but not back when fission plants were first brought online.
        pfdietz 2y ago
        But we can ask: if this is the important issue justifying nuclear, which is more cost effective: adding pollution control to coal plants, or building nuclear plants? If it's not the important issue justifying nuclear over coal, why bring it up?
- wqaatwt 2y ago
  Had that continued we’d be halfway to solving climate change by now, though. Of course “environmentalists” and most others back in those days preferred cheaper coal and gas.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    The irony is how consistently the environmentalists have been campaigning for things that left the environment worse by delaying any possible transition to nuclear power.
  - ajross 2y ago
    Renewables are already 30% of world energy generation and growing rapidly: a quick google says that 86% (!!!) of new capacity is renewable. This part of the climate puzzle is effectively already solved, and didn't need nuclear. Transport fuel and combustion-based heavy industry are the hard nuts to crack, and reactors don't help there.
    - wqaatwt 2y ago
      We’re are just late by several decades…
- Y_Y 2y ago
  I'd note that the externalities may change that calculus a bit. The relative pollution from coal/gas/oil are huge but the cost isn't reflected in the price at the meter.
natmaka 2y ago
Breeding is a counter-example. Fermi envisioned it in the early 1940's. Lab breeder reactors emerged during the 1950's and were satisfying in the 1960's. Big projects aiming at obtaining an industrial reactor were aplenty, worldwide, during the 1970's through the 1990's. They all failed, and remaining efforts are quite sparse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Notable_reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Notable_reacto... Obtaining something adequate (raw size, reliability, safety, ease of use...) isn't always easy. The quest of an industrial nuclear fusion reactor may tank this way.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Breeding is a great analogy to fusion. In fact, the original government interest in fusion was for using DD fusion to make neutrons to breed plutonium (DD fusion doesn't need to use the neutrons to breed tritium).

ajross 2y ago

"Within the realm" involves some externalities though. Fission reactors have never been particularly cost competitive with other electrical generation technologies. They were subsidized heavily because people wanted reactors to build bombs, and more broadly to cultivate a technology base of people who could build and maintain reactors to build bombs. Once we had enough bombs, that subsidy got rolled back and fission fell off the leaderboard.

acidburnNSA 2y ago
If you spend as much time reading the early 1950s documentation of the nuclear industry, you'll quickly see that commercial nuclear reactor development was very much decoupled from the graphite or heavy-water moderated bomb-making reactors. They separated around 1953 and never came back together. Back then, the fledgling industry was wondering if they could sell excess plutonium for bombs, but the government said that they were not interested in buying it. They said they had more than enough coming from their own specialized bomb-making reactors. Certainly nuclear tech was subsidized originally by the Manhattan project, but very soon after, bomb making and nuclear power went their separate ways. You could much more strongly argue that the nuclear reactor development made to power submarines helped develop the commercial nuclear power industry. This checks out much more cleanly, as Shippingport was led by Rickover himself.
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  That is a bit revisionist. Most of the investment went towards reactor technology and research that had a dual purpose of generating power but also being aligned with generating plutonium. That's why the type of reactors used in nuclear sub marines was never commercialized. Simply too expensive for civilian use and they never had a dual use that benefited generating material for nuclear bombs. Commercial reactors today are based on minor variations of nuclear fission that was also strategically relevant for getting plutonium. Different reactors but same mineral supply chains and a lot of overlap in R&D. As soon as the cold war ran to an end, funding for all that fell off a cliff. Including building new nuclear power plants. Coal and gas plants were vastly cheaper to build. And they still are. And back then, nobody cared about pollution. Only now that people are interested in small reactors are these decades old fission reactors getting more attention.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    The PWR used for power [1] is to first order "the same type of reactor used in submarines" in the sense that it is a thermal (in terms of neutron spectrum) reactor which is cooled by pressurized water. The submarine reactor uses highly enriched uranium and, I believe, burns like a cigarette, which makes it easy to start and stop the reactor without worrying about [2]. It doesn't produce a lot of Plutonium because it doesn't have much U238 in it. I believe the fuel elements are horizontally oriented. It's built tough because it might get knocked around in a war. The commercial reactor has vertically oriented fuel elements and tries to burn the fuel uniformly along the axis because this minimizes cost, because minimizing cost is a matter of maximizing power for a certain sized reactor core, and maximizing power is a matter of maximizing heat transfer out of the interior of the fuel rod and to the coolant, so you want to be producing and removing heat from the whole volume of the core. Temporal uniformity helps with spatial uniformity so the reactor is not so good at starting and stopping, but it can follow loads [3] Notably the west (where natural gas is available) quit building coal burning power plants at the same time it quit building nuclear power plants, partially because of pollution [4], partially because a 100% steam turbine powerset as used in coal and nuclear plants can't compete with a gas-fired combined cycle powerplant which combines a very-low capital cost gas turbine with a steam turbine that is about half the size (and cost) The small LWR is a pipe dream because LWR economics improve as the reactor gets bigger. One reason why we can't build reactors on an N-th of a kind basis is that every time we build one we decide the economics weren't that good and they might get better if we scale the design up. Had NuScale ever built a plant they probably would have tried scaling it up too. It is claimed small reactors could be easier to build but until somebody actually builds one, this claim is hard to take seriously. One path that makes sense is to pick an optimized design for a large reactor and "get good" at building it, it could be an advanced Western design like the AP1000 or something like the Chinese Hualong One which is an improved version of the reactors that France built in the glory days. The Russians are really good at building the VVER, their version of the PWR. The other path is to build a reactor that works at much higher temperatures such as the fast breeder reactor, high temperature gas cooled reactor, or molten salt reactor and couple it to a gas turbine powerset or use the heat to produce hydrogen directly. [5] This is still decades away. [1] Pressurized Water Reactor, there is also a Boiling Water Reactor in which the water boils in the core but it's not a vast difference: these are both called LWRs (Light Water Reactor) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon-135 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon-135 [3] https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12/technical_and_economic_aspects_of_load_following_with_nuclear_power_plants.pdf https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain (SO2 from coal burning plants, ironically, masked the warming effects of CO2 until we cleaned up coal plants) [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
actionfromafar 2y ago
From first principles, ignoring safety (which was pretty lacklustre in the beginning) fission should be cheap though.
- wqaatwt 2y ago
  To be fair people were fine with multiple Chernobyl’s amount of damage every years from burning coal. And other disasters like Three Miles Island very insignificant.
  - pbronez 2y ago
    > multiple Chernobyl’s amount of damage every years from burning coal. Do you have a source for that? I'd be very interested in a study that quantifies the damage of coal plants in terms of famous nuclear disasters.
    - actionfromafar 2y ago
      Fly-ash contains radionuclides.
      - pfdietz 2y ago
        However, 99% of fly ash is captured in electrostatic precipitators and filters. Calculations that include the radionuclides in the captured ash are not being honest.
        actionfromafar 2y ago
        Yes now, but not back when fission plants were first brought online.
        pfdietz 2y ago
        But we can ask: if this is the important issue justifying nuclear, which is more cost effective: adding pollution control to coal plants, or building nuclear plants? If it's not the important issue justifying nuclear over coal, why bring it up?
wqaatwt 2y ago
Had that continued we’d be halfway to solving climate change by now, though. Of course “environmentalists” and most others back in those days preferred cheaper coal and gas.
- roenxi 2y ago
  The irony is how consistently the environmentalists have been campaigning for things that left the environment worse by delaying any possible transition to nuclear power.
- ajross 2y ago
  Renewables are already 30% of world energy generation and growing rapidly: a quick google says that 86% (!!!) of new capacity is renewable. This part of the climate puzzle is effectively already solved, and didn't need nuclear. Transport fuel and combustion-based heavy industry are the hard nuts to crack, and reactors don't help there.
  - wqaatwt 2y ago
    We’re are just late by several decades…
Y_Y 2y ago
I'd note that the externalities may change that calculus a bit. The relative pollution from coal/gas/oil are huge but the cost isn't reflected in the price at the meter.

natmaka 2y ago

Breeding is a counter-example. Fermi envisioned it in the early 1940's. Lab breeder reactors emerged during the 1950's and were satisfying in the 1960's. Big projects aiming at obtaining an industrial reactor were aplenty, worldwide, during the 1970's through the 1990's. They all failed, and remaining efforts are quite sparse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Notable_reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Notable_reacto... Obtaining something adequate (raw size, reliability, safety, ease of use...) isn't always easy. The quest of an industrial nuclear fusion reactor may tank this way.

pfdietz 2y ago
Breeding is a great analogy to fusion. In fact, the original government interest in fusion was for using DD fusion to make neutrons to breed plutonium (DD fusion doesn't need to use the neutrons to breed tritium).