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On the bright side, maybe big tech will be the ones to accelerate fusion energy generation to a point of practical usage.
by bicx 10mo ago
On the bright side, maybe big tech will be the ones to accelerate fusion energy generation to a point of practical usage.
- acessoproibido 10mo agoTo me one of the great tragedies of our time is that we could probably solve fusion if we just invested like 50 billion or something in it. Instead wasting so much effort on things like quantum computers seems insane. Solving fusion could usher in the golden age that atomic power failed to produce
- rcxdude 10mo agoThe thing that worries me is that it's still not obvious that fusion wouldn't also be the extremely expensive, slow to build boondoggle that fission is.
- __MatrixMan__ 10mo agoBecause it has the word nuclear nearby and we'll be surprised at how ignorant our regulators can be, or because it'll turn out to be less safe than we think and it'll get red taped to death like fission did, or some non regulatory reason?
- actionfromafar 10mo agoOr just orders of magnitudes more than expensive than paving solar and batteries everywhere. Also a juicy missile target.
- ZeroGravitas 10mo agoBecause most plans for it still involve attaching a giant steam boiler to turn the heat it produces into electricity and that bit alone will cost more than renewable alternatives.
- DANmode 10mo agoAgreed. Call me ignorant, but I’d rather we focus on stuff like increasing photovoltaic cell efficiency (and possibly cost-efficiency) by the 40%-60% we’re leaving on the table keeping them fully loaded and cooking. Simple physics upgrades, like rotating cones, or lines of panels to swap with each other in Arizona-parking-lot conditions, can take us further, faster, and cheaper. Nuclear is only safe after and during spending a bunch of money to keep it that way. That makes me uncomfortable, because we’ve never had more instability in my lifetime, as far as “wildly important things not being addressed”.
- dalyons 10mo agoBecause it’s going to be a ludicrously complicated, massive machine. Those are expensive to build and maintain
- pfdietz 10mo agoThere are fundamental reasons why fusion, at least the DT variety, will be more expensive than fission. It has to do with inherently low volumetric power density of DT fusion reactors. ITER is 400x worse than a PWR; ARC is 40x worse. So, the reactor itself becomes much larger and, because it's also more complex, much much more expensive. The other putative advantages of fusion cannot make up for this. And fission itself is too expensive, so DT fusion loses to a loser. It's a double loser. If you want to see where energy will come from in a deregulated environment, look at Texas. New grid capacity there is solar and batteries. Even gas isn't being installed much; the Texas state government put down $7.2B to fund more gas capacity yet this money has been mostly spurned, I think < $400M has been taken. New nuclear is completely out of the picture there.
- Zigurd 10mo agoFusion will be slow to commercialize. Proof of concept is going to be much harder than for fission reactors. But if and when POC is attained, building commercial fusion reactors will not have as nearly much project risk, much less waste management risk, no proliferation risk, and much less financial risk in decommissioning. If you screw it up you can expensively damage your reactor, but you don't spread fallout, and you don't have to guard your waste like it's plutonium. Neither fission nor fusion are going to put any juice on the grid before the AI bubble resolves, and then the financial calculations will be totally different.
- __MatrixMan__ 10mo agoMaybe it'll be a model running on a quantum computer that points us towards high temperature superconductivity, which would simplify the plasma confinement problem and unlock fusion for us.
- ETH_start 10mo agoThe great tragedy is that we already have a practically unlimited and environmentally safe source of energy, which is nuclear fission. And we simply don't use it at a significant scale because of irrational fears about meltdowns.
- dalyons 10mo agoNo, it’s mainly because it costs too much.
- ETH_start 10mo agoThe cost is almost entirely due to overly cautious rules for nuclear power generation.
- dalyons 10mo agoThat’s not true. They are physically massive, incredibly complicated machines with all kinds of large scale pressure welding, forging, containment systems, 100s of miles of plumbing, and other serious large scale engineering. They will never be anywhere close to as cheap as something as dead simple & mass manufacturable as solar.
- ETH_start 10mo agoIf they were intrinsically costly, they would have been costly in the U.S. in the 1960s, or in France in the 1970s-90s, or in South Korea today. It is because of regulatory ratcheting, and the effects of that (both direct and second order), that costs escalated.
- dalyons 10mo agoNPPs are intrinsically Big Projects. The western world is almost universally suffering from Baumol’s cost disease - we cannot build Big Projects at a reasonable price anymore. Subways, bridges, NPPs, you name it - all cost many multiples of their inflation adjusted 1970 cost. And that’s before they inevitably blow their budget by 2-3x. Until you can somehow fix the labor / housing / management cost issues NPPs will not be affordable, even if you relax nuclear specific regs. Mass manufactured things like solar and wind turbines do not suffer this.
- blibble 10mo ago> Instead wasting so much effort on things like quantum computers seems insane. could be worse, could be all that effort, energy, talent and now nuclear waste to produce infinite pictures of shrimp jesus .... oh crap
- dalyons 10mo agoFusion likely wouldn’t solve much. Fuel and disposal costs are a small part of nuclear costs. It’s amortized capex for the extremely expensive plant, then maintenance. Fusion would make both of those costs worse
- pfdietz 10mo agoExactly right. Fusion's only hope (and IMO it's not a great one) is a system where entire parts of a fission plant can be deleted. Helion does this by not needing turbine + generator, but doing direct conversion of plasma energy to electrical energy. But even so, they have to struggle with capex and reliability. Their reactor is coupled with a huge bank of capacitors (Zap has a similar problem; it's startling how large the capacitor bank is compared to their small fusion cell.)
- delusional 10mo agoOr maybe they wont and we will have ruined the one planet we can thrive to make a chatbot.
- Almondsetat 10mo agoI mean, fission is already a miracle. If you described the tech to the people in the 1800s and told them we just keep using fossile fuels they would laugh at you
- squigz 10mo agoThey do seem like responsible people. I'm sure that'll be fine.