The new trouble with fusion and even near-future fission projects is that solar and wind costs have plummeted. It's a lot harder to get investment in anything else when solar is now $.03/kWh.
It's also theoretically possible that working fusion could be cheaper than fission, because fission is as expensive as it is as a result of the perverse coalition of confused environmentalists and self-interested fossil fuel companies lobbying to make it expensive on purpose. But fusion doesn't have long-lived nuclear waste to contend with (not that modern fission reactors do either) and the fossil fuel industry is going to decline one way or another, so that leaves fusion (and fission) with more hope in the future, if the regulations can be fixed once the lobby for them to be purposely stupid wanes.
I actually don't see how environmentalist have had any impact on the cost of fission. Unless, of course, you're just considering all safety costs the result of "confused environmentalists".
If so, you should seriously consider if you have maybe adopted some sort of perverted scientism as a quasi-religion. Because in reality, there's essentially consensus regarding required safety measures within the community of actual nuclear scientists, who have always been the driving force behind improved safety–starting with Richard Feynman during the Manhattan Project.
Regulation is insanely high for lots of stuff that really is not safety critical. Citing for a nuclear project is insanely difficult. The regulated energy market (in the US) simply does not value long term 100 year assets in the way they are set up. Nuclear cites are discriminated against in terms of low carbon benefits and tax credits (Solar gets tax credit when dispatching negatively priced energy). Nuclear cites get routinely sued and the environmentalist know that every month of delay is costing them millions, because up front capital has massive interest. Innovation has come to a virtual stand still, regulation has made it essentially impossible to innovate in nuclear for anything but the most incremental changes. The government has utterly failed at coming up with anything regarding nuclear 'waste', and instead of using one of the many straight forward solution is is basically in political limbo while the nuclear plants still pay millions to the government every year.
If you even want the nuclear regulatory body to take a look at your new design, you have to pay them a lot of money. If you want them to actually regulate it, they will say 'Ok thanks, we get back to you in the next couple of years we don't know how long its gone take and remember that's gone cost you 100 million at least'.
The regulation have hard coded in them that a reactor needs to have certain features, like 'Must have system to cool steam'. Now great, what if my reactor isn't water cooled? Well, pay them a couple 100 million more and 10-20 years and they can probably work out what regulations they would apply to your design. People couldn't build the old designs cheaply and they couldn't design new ones without the government leading the way to a commercial system it was impossible.
Nuclear was on target of replacing fossil fuels in energy production and was growing exponentially and was on target to be the fastest energy transition in human history and then 1 single safety failure that killed nobody wiped out that whole tech tree (Yes that's overly dramatic).
So, I agree more safety regulations were needed, but instead the nuclear industry was basically killed, practically every outstanding project (and there were many) was cancelled and almost no nuclear plants have been built after that. The few that have been built are often close to existing once.
At the same time, coal plants that are MUCH, MUCH more radioactive are allowed to operate. In fact, a nuclear plant that was as radioactive as a coal plant would not be allowed to operate AT ALL.
FYI, it's "baseload power"
> Developers have applied to build 139 GWac of large-scale solar projects in the territory of six grid operators – around five times what is currently online across the country – and that figure doesn’t even cover the entire United States. By any metric, we are looking at an unprecedented boom in solar development over the next five years.
> The six grid operator queues we investigated also showed more than 16 GW of battery projects which have filed for interconnection. And this number should not be too surprising to anyone who is watching the meteoric growth of energy storage.
> Per the US Energy Storage Monitor, from Wood Mackenzie Renewables & Power along with the Energy Storage Association (ESA), total energy storage deployed expanded by 60% in terms of energy and 300% on a power basis in the third quarter of 2018 versus the prior year. Going out mostly until 2023, the report noted that the front of the meter pipeline expanded to approximately 33 GW of power.
Natural gas picks up the slack until batteries (which everyone underestimates; we're going to have an enormous amount of energy storage cumulatively to go 100% low carbon) get a bit cheaper; wind, solar, hydro, and long distance transmission lines combined with utility scale storage is more than adequate to replace traditional base load (and all are possible today, not decades later if we started building fission/fusion commercial generators today).
Are there really any occasions when there is no sun, no wind, no hydro over the whole of Europe? Better east-west interconnects and use of Norwegian hydro as pumped storage should help too.
Not perfect but very scalable and can be implemented a little at a time as the baseload fossil fuel stations slowly go out.
The construction industry employs millions directly and indirectly. Those poeple vote.
Politicians may be dumb about a lot of things, but few are dumb enough to intentionally threaten the livelihood of millions of voters.
They go into much greater detail than the website.
Batteries + large grids averaging out weather and load fluctuations, plus smart grids, plus electric car batteries as buffers when the car isn't needed, plus efficiency gains lowering demand, plus some gravity storage, plus some natural gas.
Nuclear power is actually quite useless, because it's not baseload that's needed when you want to quickly react to changing weather conditions or load, it's peakers (i. e. gas)
There needs to be backup for the occasional times solar/wind/batteries are not enough, but hydrogen (made during the high solar/wind times) is likely cheaper for that than nuclear fission or fusion would be.
* Fusion has the potential to increase the amount of energy we generate by several orders of magnitude.
* Fusion has the potential to be much cheaper than $.03/kWh.
* We have a near unlimited supply of deuterium is the seawater. All countries in the world can gain energy independence.
* Countries cannot claim a nuclear weapons research program is really a nuclear fusion power research program, like they can with a nuclear fission power research program.
* Fusion energy does not suffer from diseconomies of scale. As we produce more solar panels it becomes more expensive to produce more solar panels. As we place solar panels in the best location the next batch will have to use the second best location. These diseconomies of scale also apply towards the current generation batteries that solar panels relay on.
* Some problems, including life or death problems like removing CO2 from the air or desalination of water can be solved much easier with an abundance of energy.
1. The further the spacecraft is from the sun the less efficient solar panels are.
2. Solar panels are a pretty heavy thing to launch.
3. Solar panels have a tendency to degrade in performance over decades.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a25806535/plutonium-s...
Weapons are a physics problem, where you're trying to direct large amounts of energy at unwilling recipients. Nukes are so effective and so feared because they carry a huge amount of energy in a relatively small package. Being able to, as you put it, "generate several orders of magnitude" more energy will almost certainly result in new, better or more destructive weapon systems being devised.
We already use fusion technology in nukes. Hydrogen bombs work by using a fission reaction to start up an uncontrolled fusion reaction.
The hard part is controlling the fusion. So, I disagree - learning how to control fusion will not result in better weapons (at least, from a destruction standpoint).
I am convinced that, in the case that there is a global thermal nuclear war, it would be much better for humanities' long term prospects if there was no radiation involved.
Is this true? Why would solar panel cost go up if you make more? Is there some rare-earth element that's a bottleneck resource?
Also, we're nowhere near using up space for putting solar panels. They're less efficient in places with cloudy weather or in latitudes far from the equator, but otherwise any place to install a solar panel farm is as good as any other; choice of location is dominated mostly by convenience, cheapness of land, proximity to power lines, local politics, and so on. We've only used up a tiny percentage of all the "good spots" to put solar panels.
In the long run it may become a bigger problem. Pumped hydroelectric storage should work great in places where the geography is amenable, and regular battery technology is getting better.
This is the complete opposite of the truth. As we produce more solar panels it has become cheaper to make them. Solar has tracked down an experience curve where costs decline 20% (or more) per doubling of cumulative production.
So from an investment point of view, both Nuclear Fission like traveling-wave reactor or Nuclear Fusion are still worth while. And still required as baseload
Although I think Solar Price isn't the main point anymore. It is Battery, Super Solid state Battery that is cheap will make an even bigger impact. Imagine Everyone's home has an PowerWall like devices that offer 3x more Cycles than current battery and 3x the energy density.