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Over in a different thread it was suggested that even if the tech became viable, nuclear fusion will never find an economic niche when it's competing with renewable and nuclear powers. What do people think about this argument?
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Oct 24, 2020 19:53
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Can't we build solar on raised platforms to allow for wildlife under it?
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Oct 24, 2020 21:09
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Crazycryodude posted:Plants generally need sunlight to survive, and animals generally require plants to survive, so... Some do, but not all of them.
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Oct 24, 2020 21:37
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CommieGIR posted:Russia did some heating with steam systems like this, I think its a lack of motivation to roll out district heating like that. I love how every picture of Russia I see looks like either a Call of Duty level or something out of STALKER. I also imagine maybe in a more sparsely populated country like Finland maybe transferring the heat efficiently might be difficult? Maybe also NIMBY concerns about "radiation"? I'm not an engineer but that sounds like a cool idea, like how in FF6 the town of Marsh is heated from the excess heat of their their steam engines.
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Oct 11, 2021 20:18
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DeadlyMuffin posted:My large public university in the US was heated by the waste steam heat from the (NG) cogeneration plant. It isn't just a nuclear thing. That's really cool. 
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Oct 11, 2021 20:25
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I'm not exactly sure what we mean by the "financial case" isn't the ecological damage of climate change and doing nothing, shouldn't that factor into the cost of new nuclear plants if building them now means less ecological damage in the future?Capt.Whorebags posted:Yeah OK that makes sense, in that nuclear does have a solution for the whole life cycle. Even if part of that life cycle is thousands of years, the footprint is tiny. IIRC the amount of CO2 and methane released by a hydrodam is comparable to a coal plant when you factor in the drowned trees that rot in the reservoir.
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Oct 23, 2021 02:26
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Cross-posting this but China seems like they've been making incremental steps towards fusion: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3155546/chinese-scientists-strike-early-gold-race-nuclear-fusion-power e: Apparently MIT made a pretty big breakthrough as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KEwkWjADEA Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Nov 16, 2021 |
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Nov 16, 2021 17:59
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radmonger posted:The basic claim is that oil/gas companies should not invest in green energy, because they are going to be replaced by new companies doing green things. Instead they should just extract gas and return money to shareholders, while making just enough environmental concessions to avoid being literally arrested. Another example might be tank and warplane manufacturers like Mitsubishi and Porsche who seem to be fine making luxury cars these days. 
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Nov 26, 2021 15:25
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I'm excited!
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Dec 2, 2021 03:16
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Could you build a solar farm on top of like a hydroponics-esque green house? Or maybe raise up a solar farm on a platform that's like a secured grating so sunlight can eke through?
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Dec 15, 2021 04:15
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I think its probably legitimate but like a lot of reporting on nuclear fusion research I think it glosses over the caveats as to whether this will successfully result in a design that produces more energy than it consumes; my assumption is having an ongoing fusion reaction doesn't mean that the magnets don't end up using more power than it produces etc. Assuming I'm correct, its good news and progress but it isn't like they cracked open the holy grail yet.
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Jan 4, 2022 21:45
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It's kinda like there's various bottlenecks and focus/research tends to be towards the bottleneck that's most achieveable in the near future since there isn't manhatten project levels of funding being thrown at it, engineers need to prioritize their research for the most bang for your buck.
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Jan 5, 2022 04:11
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Phanatic posted:The Manhattan Project cost about $23 billion in today-dollars. The Manhattan Project in this case is just a short hand for "massive industrial project requiring political will and a major pooling of the states resources not just to reach a goal, but to reach it first, to meet an existential crisis head on." It should be a trillion dollars basically; or more, at several fusion projects simultaneously.
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Jan 5, 2022 07:59
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QuarkJets posted:Comparisons to the manhattan project are also made kind of silly for a lot of other reasons, like that fusion bombs came along not long after by basically duct taping a hydrogen fuel source to a fission bomb, but there's no obvious equivalent for creating a stable fusion reactor Metaphor's aren't literal comparisons.
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Jan 6, 2022 23:36
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QuarkJets posted:I'm aware. But a bad metaphor is still a bad metaphor Not really? I explained this in an earlier post. Raenir Salazar posted:The Manhattan Project in this case is just a short hand for "massive industrial project requiring political will and a major pooling of the states resources not just to reach a goal, but to reach it first, to meet an existential crisis head on." It should be a trillion dollars basically; or more, at several fusion projects simultaneously. The actual cost of either the Manhatten Project or the B-29 project is myopically irrelevant; the fact that the US not only threw the resources during WW2 at not one, not two, but at least three uncertain programs in order to win the war is the point, because such willingness, the political will to make expensive risky decisions doesn't exist anymore; and climate change isn't seen as the existential threat that ze Germans or later the Ruskies were. I'm not even the only person who makes this comparison, its actually a very common comparison used by the mainstream press! Forbes, the NYT, the Hill, Time Magazine, several major outlets have all used this comparison because it's a useful short hand that describes a majorly transformative industrial project. It's like tut-tut'ing people for suggesting a "Green New Deal" because "Well Actually..."
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Jan 7, 2022 17:28
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QuarkJets posted:Like I explained earlier, a fission bomb is orders of magnitude simpler to make than a commercial fusion reactor, and that's why it's silly to compare the two. It's even sillier to compare fusion energy to a really big propeller plane. Seriously, fusion energy is really hard and will continue to be so. I'm a proponent of giving scientists and engineers all of the money in the world to do amazing important things but I think it's also good to temper optimism, because otherwise you wind up in a situation where people are expecting the moon and when they're disappointed they start shouting "Well what does the Large Hadron Collider even do that's useful, isn't it just a huge waste of money??" Please don't ask me how many times people have asked me this specific question. I don't see this as a relevant distinction (maybe because as I think I see later there's still a miscommunication). My point is about how to communicate priorities using shared symbols; I don't really care that a fission bomb is "easier", and generally I don't think the average voter cares either; it's how Michiu Kaku can have an extremely successful show despite questionable science. Everything of importance from this very moment to 5000 years in the future is going to become increasingly impossibly more difficult; by that logic it is impossible to sell the public on something by appealing to past achievements. I see zero reason to hamstring ourselves because there's of a difference in scale. I don't think there's really any doubt that if nuclear fusion funding was a lot higher there would be a lot more scientific results and that has nothing to do with its difficult but to do with how it hasn't been a priority for policy makers; that's entirely within the wheel house of manhatten project comparisons. Maybe we still wouldn't have been "closer" until better room temperature superconductors became possible to manufacture; but have several "operational" research reactors a decade earlier I also imagine would have been very useful at providing data about the scope of the problems and what solutions are needed until material sciences catch up. quote:It's like saying "we landed on the moon in the 1960s, why haven't we sent colony ships to Alpha Centauri yet?" Hard disagree, first if you're going to say I'm making a bad metaphor/comparison, making up such an example as this is strawmaning. Second, I think its weird to phrase it as a matter of "why haven't we gotten to X yet", that doesn't make any sense to me. We're not playing Jeopardy here; no one said anything from which "Because we need a Manhatten Project for Climate Change" was the offered answer. That seems like a massive misrepresentation of my position; I only said "It'd be nice if we treated Fusion research as seriously as the US treated racing for the atomic bomb", which prompted unhelpful "Well Actually..." type responses. quote:What the gently caress? I don't think I stuttered. What people are asking for in a hypothetical GND to actually tackle Climate Change is several orders of magnitude larger in scope to the original New Deal under FDR. There's no comparison in terms of the actions required; but there's a valid rhetorical comparison.
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Jan 8, 2022 03:49
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QuarkJets posted:I said that it's a silly and counterproductive comparison to make because of the expectations that it sets. I am not saying that you personally have those expectations. Does that clear up what I'm trying to say? It's a bad metaphor on its own merits Again, the idea it sets these expectations I don't think holds water. Regardless of how easy with 20/20 hindsight you're saying it was to create a fission bomb, or the B-29 bomber; most people didn't know that at the time; this is why it is analogous (there was in fact an entire parallel longer range strategic bomber project just in case the B-29 failed!). Because it was a risk, at great cost to the tax payer, with no certainty of its success, with a large war winning upside. Which 100% describes fusion research. Who is it unproductive for? It's already not happening. It cannot get any less funded short a colossal scale industrial accident. "We need nuclear power because it harnesses the power of zeus" isn't an endorsement of wanting to be ruled by literal gods. Schrodinger's Cat doesn't put a literal cat at risk, the plot of a movie doesn't literally dictate any real life circumstances. Analogies are about communicating an idea in its broadstrokes, not about saying everything about the things that are the target of the topic are comparable in every respect.
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Jan 8, 2022 05:04
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QuarkJets posted:I'm not saying that the research is unproductive, I'm saying that the comparison you are making is counterproductive, in that it actually harms the cause that you're trying to support. It doesn't matter that you don't understand the mechanism of harm. It is the kind of stupid thing that a tech journalist would write, by your own admission There's a bit to unpack here; first I at no point suggested you were saying that the research was unproductive. Second, I absolutely did not "admit" to it being a "stupid thing a tech journalist would write" when I was obviously using it as evidence to support my position? Why would I say its stupid? Or even think that? Thirdly, you speak to a mechanism of harm, but your position is speculative no? I don't think I'm forced to agree that a speculative position must mean I reassess my position. 4th, I think its unnecessarily condescending to describe the problem as me not "understanding" the mechanism of harm; I can understand your arguments just fine, I just don't agree with them.
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Jan 8, 2022 06:31
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Yeah it seems a little uncharitable to describe researchers broadly as "playing up the confusion", like "palatable" here seems to be doing a lot of lifting; I don't think fusion research ever been conveyed as anything other than as a dauntingly long and expensive road to maybe get the intended result. It's always been a "if it does work, it would be awesome! But it's a long road until then." I feel like we should shy away from implications that are nefarious-adjacent in regards to researchers who aren't obvious cranks. The Q factor is important because IIRC once it reaches numbers larger than 1 (iirc ideally 10 to 20, but even 6 to 8 would be pretty fantastic progress) researchers and engineers can start figuring out how to make commercialized fusion reactors.
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Jan 8, 2022 23:01
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I was watching a video about the Canadian company and its interesting because they interviewed other researchers who had a chuckle; obviously they're hopeful that they do good research and make progress but IIRC whats happening with them is a similar story to other fusion nuclear research; at first you go in with bright ideas but you slowly accumulate all sorts of engineering challenges and the problem grows in complexity and challenge necessitating more funding and so on. So my thinking is its very novel and maybe has some progress relative to other designs but faces its own problems that slows down said progress? e: A question, I've heard you could use fusion to create other elements, if I recall correctly it can be used to make the rarer isotopes that are easier to fuse? How difficult would that be in either of the three main design "templates" currently, how would that looks like? Having tanks/plates around the reactor to catch stray particles? Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Jan 9, 2022 |
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Jan 9, 2022 03:23
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Aethernet posted:Decarbonising solely with renewables and storage means overbuilding renewables so you can meet demand and charge at the same time. Nukes help with constant demand, but aren't physically necessary, only probably economically necessary. The equation is shifting towards fewer nukes and more storage, though. I feel there's some citations needed here. Especially when storage may require increasingly exotic/rare earth elements or intensive complex production methods that it just may be economically infeasible at the scale your proposing; at least a scale that makes a private market for solar production difficult to sustain because the demand for de facto megaprojects skews the market. Additionally NIMBYism is still going to be a potent concern even with incentives. The fact is in terms of spatial requirements, a nuclear plant, either a hypothetical fusion plant facility or a nuclear plant; takes up a relatively small amount of space for a large amount of production. While renewable, while "cheap" (I'm not sure if their low cost accounts for the environmental impact of their material components though) take up either a lot of space, potentially disrupt increasingly fragile ecosystems, or are geographically bound with diminished effectiveness in some areas. All the while humanity's desire for energy continues to increased by percentages every year, first as a natural result of the equation of population growth and then as a result of rising standards of living; of which mandates for more efficient energy consumption only slow this down so much; you're not sustaining a Kardeschev 1.0+ civilization on renewables alone. The premium on space for renewables is going to be colliding head first on the demand for space for humans to live and to communte. Nukes are just vastly more practical, can go anywhere, and don't require hypothetical future tech for transmission. And even then factoring in hypothetical future tech, fusion just makes it so much vastly more efficient. When considering practicalities and looking ahead at the next couple of decades currently renewables are expanding mostly at the rate of free market economics+government initiatives and subsidies; a good rate but not something at a scale or speed that's going to see human civilization massively reorienting their power grids for; this isn't like a choice; its a matter of economic trends that if like the first successful excess Q energy producing fusion reactor comes online mid 30's then our first commercial plant is probably like mid 40's when renewables probably growing impressively aren't exceeding the demand curve from economic and population growth and can be slotted in without massive and disruptive changes to the grid. If we assume that progress is made on storage they probably just aren't going to be made at a rate where nukes aren't a useful solution.
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Jan 10, 2022 18:44
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"European nuclear fusion experiment announces 'record-breaking' results" - CNBCquote:Engineers and scientists from the EUROfusion consortium were able to produce 59 megajoules of heat energy from fusion across a period of five seconds on Dec. 21, 2021. It surpasses a previous record from 1997, when 22 megajoules of heat energy was generated. Not a lot of specifics but looks promising!
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Feb 11, 2022 01:37
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It's interesting because I remember those presses being brought up before and how "Well China might have a way bigger one but that doesn't mean it's actually utilizing it for anything useful." and now maybe it might actually be useful for making nuclear reactors?
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Feb 11, 2022 19:20
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My current apartment got really drat cold this winter even with the heating at full blast. Felt like there was a draft or a leak. I was able to get away with no heating until about midway through december but early january I nope'd out of that attempt to save on power.
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Feb 12, 2022 18:10
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What's the Swiss Cheese model? Because normally in anything involving engineering I'd associate "Swiss" with "intricately engineered to overperfection and quality". I.e watches, chocolates, etc.
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Mar 7, 2022 16:50
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As Stephanie Sterling says, corporations would rather have all the money, than only some of the money. Getting into the nuclear industry only gives them some of the money, probably less money because it means retiring coal, oil and natural gas plants in order to transition to nuclear. This is the problem and why they resist efforts to popularize nuclear power as a solution to climate change.
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Jun 17, 2022 03:32
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silence_kit posted:I don't really believe the thread thesis which is that world governments, energy companies, and environmentalists (lol) conspired to not exclusively power the world with nuclear energy, and that nuclear power is a perfect technology which cannot fail, it can only be failed. Uh, "economical" and "profitable" are I think very clearly not the same thing? Economical has context. Building a T-34 to smash Germans is not economical compared to making a tractor; a tractor can farm very well, it can even pull other tanks! What tractor's can't do is smash Germans. If we ignore the Germans invading the USSR in 1941 we would conclude that building T-34's was not a economical use of the USSR's resources. Which would be silly. Because we really need and should be including such externallities in order to contextualize properly the economics of that particular activity. As such it follows then if we factor in the fact of man made climate change and the need to rapidly decarbonize our economy; we should easily be able to conclude that nuclear power is vastly more economical than fossil fuels; it just happens to be not the most profitable option for corporations. Building nuclear reactors is well within the economic means of basically every and any government around the globe. The problem is mainly politics, not economics. Most importantly there is basically as far as I can tell from reading this thread, no viable alternative. Renewables are simply incapable of meeting global energy needs of first world and rapidly developing nations at peak hours when needed. And if we want to decarbonize we need to dismantle and shutdown fossil fuel sources of energy, which is impossible while also providing energy needs without an alternative base load source of energy, of which only nuclear (and eventually fusion) can actually provide. I think as CommieGir has often said either we need to treat the problem as a crisis and spend the amount that's needed or it isn't; and thus we should be willing to spend all that is required to get it done. Whatever that expression for having unlimited budget is, but when it comes to averted climate change; money is no object?
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Jun 17, 2022 18:17
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Can't they just sell the excess power to other markets?
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Jun 18, 2022 19:08
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freezepops posted:That simply isn’t true, power use changes a lot based on time of day, season, weather, and year. Desalination is also unlikely to be a good use for load balancing by consuming excess power as desalination plants tend to be large capital expenditures and owners want to run them 24/7 to reduce the cost per gallon of water. If this was already a good use of energy while ramping up/down as required, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be occurring now or wouldn’t line up with cheaper renewable generation. You say this but where's the evidence that this is actually an impediment? How come France with its near-total commitment to nuclear is making excellent profits selling nuclear energy to the rest of Europe? Why is China then building new nuclear plants at a steady pace? Why don't these factors affect other countries with just as large and diverse geographical, demographic, and meteological differences? It doesn't pass the smell test. Right now energy isn't cheap enough for desalination because additional demand for energy would raise rates for everyday consumers; cheap and plentiful nuclear power would encourage additional consumption for heavy advance industries without affecting consumer rates. We see this for example in China, where they have to keep coal plants running or else they get rolling blackouts because there just isn't enough domestic energy production from non-coal sources to keep factories running to meet export quotas. If you built nuclear plants in Texas and connected them to the grid pretty sure these differences all average out and they can still make a profit, especially if the government ceased subsidies to competing fossil fuel generation. It seems to me you could probably give nuclear those subsidies instead so the point in which they made back their investment is a lot sooner and they can be gauranteed a profit point while they work out the optimal average output with any excess going to storage or other networks.
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Jun 18, 2022 19:29
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I feel the interstate highway system isn't really the culprit, as much as more regional trains would be great being able to go on a long distance car trip I don't think is that big of a contributor to the demand, compared to American cities being overwhelmingly car centric and nigh impossible to navigate without a car in some cases.
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Jul 2, 2022 16:33
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Also expensive compared to what? What about accounting for externalities like emissions and climate change? Its more expensive I can imagine to build a nuclear power plant compared to a solar array but the nuclear plant can generate power 24/7, might even take up less space depending on the designs and what we're comparing; the end-user is definitely not going to be paying more for nuclear power electricity compared to Russian natural gas electricity. Anyways, a youtube video extolling a new advance in nuclear fusion has popped up in my timeline and it actually explains the achievement! Wow! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G27M0eRTRZE Paper being referenced: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.185003 Press release: https://news.epfl.ch/news/a-new-law-unchains-fusion-energy/ My poor summary is that this porpoises that there was a density limit to tokomak reactors that limited the amount of useable energy you could get from the reaction (as exceeding this density would cause the reaction to fail), but now it seems to be the case you can actually increase their density limit with more power and this actually pushes the amount of theoretical energy output into the viability zone that would be needed for commercial power. Supposedly the next fusion project DEMO might be able to make use of this development as ITER isn't designed with this new limit in mind, but the old limit. I wonder if this can work together with the more efficient magnets development or if that's only for stellerator fusion reactors?
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Jul 9, 2022 16:40
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:This is the spherical, frictionless cow of policy discussions. Is there a regulatory model that has produced nuclear generation on time/budget in the last two generations? Even with the level of state control in China they can't hit their targets. I think though its important to consider what China's targets are; if they only brought online say half of the total nuke plants desired for their current 5 year plan; well that half could still be vastly higher than other regions. It would be interesting to see more data on the growth of China's nuke industry.
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Jul 11, 2022 17:28
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drat that's unfortunate timing but hopefully the French refurbish those reactors/upgrade them.
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Jul 17, 2022 22:36
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I think they're more saying that even if we had the political will, and much more willing to push on ahead through any red tape, there will be a lot of hurdles, not that we shouldn't do it of course.
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Jul 17, 2022 22:43
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:It doesn't matter if Nuclear was cheaper or not. Fossil Fuels companies at the end of the day are fossil fuel companies because that is exactly what they are! They aren't Nuclear companies and never, ever will be! Also they kinda can't? A fossil fuel company is not going to naturally come about to investing in a technology that competes with their existing profit model. They might dip their toes into it in a region they have no foothold in, but that's about it. No matter how good nuclear is, it is capital intensive and doesn't have sky high variable profit margins so why make "some" money when they could make all the money by sticking to fossil fuels? The difference is low-medium capital investment with medium-high profits vs high capital investment and low profit margins. To get corporations to make the switch you need to make it attractive to them, by making it painful to stick to fossil fuels. The free market is not a rational actor.
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Jul 18, 2022 19:58
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VideoGameVet posted:Well there’s South Australia as an example of doing renewables right. Aren't they not actually a good example because they're still attached to the grid and relatively low in power demand? Or is this 
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Jul 19, 2022 03:55
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Grouchio posted:So since China is halting climate change coordination with the US over Taiwan, what will the impact be on emissions on China's end? My previous estimate is that they'd peak emissions by 2030. China halting "climate change coordination" is probably not going to result in them strangling Dolphins out of spite. I assume they'll keep on doing what they're doing but maybe with less impetus on things that are revenue/gdp growth earners until the US offers concessions.
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Aug 5, 2022 23:41
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silence_kit posted:More importantly, they would have to launch all of the hardware into space and assemble it and a giant phased array RF antenna while in outer space. However building a nuclear power plant is in fact not a boondongle, and is in fact a proven practice that provides considerable benefits; as seen in France and China. mediaphage posted:i think the land use would probably be mitigated by putting something floating in the ocean but then you could just put panels on it!!! Actually could you do the molten salt thing of it being pointed at a giant lake of water or molten salt to convert more safely into energy?
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Aug 18, 2022 17:27
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They can't keep getting away with this!!!
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Aug 20, 2022 15:44
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I'm honestly a little confused and lost track as to what the argument is, SK any chance can you restate your argument? Is it just you disagree with the presentation of this one author and his article? Or that you disagree with it being linked in the thread? I think we all agree the cost of solar will probably continue to go down regardless of how exotic some of the materials and processes might be.
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Aug 27, 2022 18:16
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