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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

But still a question of if it will make financial sense. Assuming this generates heat and drives a steam turbine, solar, wind and battery is likely to be cheaper than just the steam turbine and the transmission costs, never mind the fusion bit.

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There is value in having the means to generate power independent of environmental factors (sun, wind). A stated goal in the article is also to build small-scale fusion reactors, which would reduce transmission costs. Wind power and non-residential solar power also need similar transmission equipment because you can't have them in the middle of a city. The price of renewable power generation is reaching extremely favourable levels even now, but I'm not sure how realistic it is to expect transmission costs to decrease as far as you seem to expect.

I'm not convinced we'll see a significant amount of fusion power in electricity grids, but for specialised applications, it would make a lot of sense (e.g., powering ships, or a hypothetical Mars colony that would like to keep the lights on during a dust storm). Building such limited numbers will, of course, do nothing to get the price of fusion power down. Maybe subsidies will be able to overcome the cost dilemma posed by this, but there's no clear motivation for providing them if the power sources replaced by fusion would already be majority-renewable.

"A stated goal in the article is also to build small-scale fusion reactors, which would reduce transmission costs."

aka enable them to be installed on submarines and so on.

The power density of even these putative "small" reactors would still be grossly inferior to fission reactors. So using them in space limited applications like subs would make no sense at all.

And even if the reactors were small enough, there is no guarantee they'd be quiet enough.

Fusion has the same advantages as fission but the disadvantages are reduced to a minuscule amount.

CO2-neutral, stable energy generation independent of weather, season, time... with amounts large and stable enough to be independent of storage solution.

Wind and solar need to be regulated because intensity varies. They are location dependent (German North produces a lot of wind, but there's no feasible way to bring it to the South...)

> German North produces a lot of wind, but there's no feasible way to bring it to the South...

Technically feasible or politically feasible? There's a lot of NIMBYism around building new high-capacity power transmission lines in Germany (e.g., Suedlink, Südostlink).

The biggest disadvantage of fission is its cost and complexity. Fusion makes these primary problems much worse.

No, its the irrational level of fear.

No, it's the entirely rational fear of losing billions of dollars on bad investments.

I disagree. The biggest (technical) disadvantage of fission is the creation and use of radioactive materials.

Fusion solves this problem in large part because it uses and produces significantly less radioactive materials... materials that wouldn’t count as a security concern.

Fusion reactors turn themselves into radioactive waste. Neutron radiation is inherent to nuclear fusion and when previously stable non-radioactive substances are subjected to neutron radiation, they may absorb some of those neutrons and become radioactive. (This is called neutron activation.) Some materials are less prone to this than others and that would be considered during the construction of a production fusion reactor, but even so components of the reactor would likely become so radioactive that the only way to perform maintenance on the reactor would be robotics. And when the reactor eventually needs to be decommissioned, it needs to be treated accordingly.

I wasn't aware of these issues. Did some searching and found this article that covers them (and others) in detail: https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-the...

This talk from the MIT fusion lab lays out some approaches they have for solving problems in current fusion reactor design, in particular dealing with the radiation problem in a cost-effective manner. https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4

The ARC reactor is still unacceptably large and expensive. Its volumetric power density is still a factor of 40 worse than a PWR primary reactor vessel.

> And when the reactor eventually needs to be decommissioned, it needs to be treated accordingly.

by that time putting it on a Starship, and sending it to the Sun might become a feasible option.

No, that's clearly wrong.

Make fission 10x cleaner or 10x safer and people still wouldn't build them.

Make existing reactors 10x cheaper, but no safer or cleaner, and they'd be selling like hotcakes.

Ahem. Storytime!

This has recently been upgraded to about four times capacity.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbekreuzung_2 (sorry for tze german, didn't find any english wiki, this are the largest masts in Europe, they have to be, otherwise the large freight ships won't make it into the harbour of Hamburg)

[2] https://eqos-energie.com/_press/eqos-energie-erneuert-leiter... (Press release from the executing contractor.)

[3] https://www.tennet.eu/de/news/news/tennet-startet-umbeseilun... [4]https://www.tennet.eu/de/news/news/tennet-vervierfacht-die-s... (Press release from the begin and end of upgrade project.)

Assorted videos and press releases from a few years before, directly related to the preparation of surrounding infrastructure, their upgrading, and moving heavy transformers around:

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU2OUtETD7I (8 Minutes, for rail nerds only, crossing a bridge in town during normal operations with modern diesel-hydraulic switcher loco, bridge making funky sounds because of weight.)

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7eWzeMxPTo (2m:47s, corporate PR of production site of transformer.)

[7] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Drachenfels&t=ffab&iax=images&ia=i... (Transported by ship from below the Drachenfels near Bonn at the Rhine into the North Sea, and then back on land.)

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88PLBOKZ8-0 (4m:32s, loading onto ship, boring, for transport nerds only, added for completeness.)

[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Vw6h64uzNY (8m:56s, offloading of transformer from ship and moving to substation.) [10] https://baumann-move.com/transformator-uw-heide-west/ (Same, press release of moving company.)

[11] https://www.powertransformernews.com/2019/04/30/abb-transfor... (Another one, same general area.)

[12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKjYD6CCgLo (43m:45s, another one, from ship to another substation, for transport nerds only, FF)

[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCpEw7wRgN4 (Removal of 'old' transformer from substation for shipping and reuse in another substation for the grid of Norderstedt & Hamburg, for transport nerds only, FF)

[14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnvY77LYSKQ (5m:6s, same one, by rail, trough the core of small town northern Germany with cobblestones and Russian 'Taiga Drum/Stalin´s last revenge', for rail nerds, because [15]!)

[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M62_locomotive

[16] https://baumann-move.com/transport-von-zwei-416-t-schweren-t... (Another press release from moving company.)

For being 'unfeasible' that was a lot of action, i think. And this goes on and on, not only in the locations i focused on.

That's indeed a big if, but even if it ends up being cheaper to use solar for most applications I can imagine fusion power would be a nice thing to have locally around major production centres where the power demand is much higher.

Solar is great for decentralized grids where one's neighbour basically buys excess power from you, but transferring gigawatts of power from a large amount of solar panels to something like a major industrial area /might/ be trickier.

Cost of ITER: $100/W(e) (assuming its gross fusion power was converted to electric power at 40% efficiency)

Installed cost of utility scale solar: about $1/W and falling

The cost of fusion (or fission) is so grossly uncompetitive that any use seems unlikely.

There used to be a time when it was cheaper to pay people to perform calculations by hand than to build computers to do so ...

There is no reason to think such cost decline will apply to fusion reactors. Many of the parts in the system are mature (like, all the non nuclear parts like turbines.)

I'm hopeful that the research might bear fruit at some point, so I am glad to see it continue. We definitely shouldn't put all eggs in one basket, though.

We don't have a finished design yet, so who knows what parts are needed (yeah, a turbine is a given, but still...)?

Hope is not a plan, especially when that hope has proved illusory so many times in the past.

So much this. The fusion projects are all huge and expensive. Compare this with the relative ease with which viable fission reactors were made. The first useful (designed for plutonium production, but could produce power) reactor took only a year:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-10_Graphite_Reactor

It didn't take very long for people to tickle the dragon either. Of all the plasma confinement research devices made I have not heard of a single person even getting a shock, let alone an X-ray dose. Fission is an inherently dangerous process to work with.

There are several companies working on fusion designs that can capture electricity directly, such as dense plasma focus, and some of these devices fit inside a shed. If successful, they could be used for trains, ships, spacecraft, as well as base power. Personally, I wish the huge tokamak and laser designs would get less funding because I also question their economics.

Even massive, pervasive investment in renewables just isn’t enough. This is why a lot of prominent environmentalists have started supporting Nuclear.

I think if you graphed environmentalist support of nuclear, you'd see it rise and then fall as renewables performed better and better. 10 years ago it made some kind of sense to cover our bets but renewables and storage have got so much better, while fusion continues to drag on and fission continues to have cost issues that I'm not aware of many prominent environmentalists that are still on board with it in anything other than a small complementary role to renewables.

I do regularly see articles from that one nuclear proponent who tries to get Street cred by claiming to be an environmentalist while attacking basically all other environmentalists as communists that want to return to the stone age and competing renewables as a hoax/environmental disaster/communist plot. But he seems a bit extreme.

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