At the top of my list for when I'll be king for a day is - massive, national-scale investments (think: reaching towards one percent of GDP) in fusion research.
This is a major roadblock, but things look awesome on the other side. We just need to get our stuff together to hop over this fence somehow.
Let’s suppose this proposal works out, ITER will become a very expensive boondoggle. A technological dead end. But if you’d taken the ‘Manhattan Project’ approach and thrown 10x as much money at fusion research 20 years ago we’d most likely have spent most of it on a super-ITER. It might be operational by now and might even have reached break-even on power generation, but in the longer term would now be just as redundant and superseded by this new approach.
The GDP of the EU is apparently $18 trillion, so $20 billion is about .1% of the GDP in a single year, and of course that $20 billion is spread over 1-2 decades. If anything, it seems like as a species, we should have more of these bets going. What if we spent 1% of our GDP on 10 long-shot, high-impact projects? Or hell, half a percent on 5 long-shot projects, and half a percent on solving the dozens of problems that we could solve simply by funding them.
Er, don't you mean the early 20th century?
Rutherford's exegesis of the nuclear model of the atom was published in 1911.[1]
The problem is (1) the earlier you spend big the greater the chance you’ll pick wrong because you have less information to base a decision on and (2) Spending big doesn’t actually improve the odds that the approach you pick will end up being the right one. It just means you find out sooner.
Or maybe someone would have had enough sense to think "you know, what we really need is better superconducting magnets. Let's throw 1% of the budget at that problem."
Eventually there is a break even point (for the closest solar systems, last I checked, it's around 400 years), but in order to know what it is you need to know the amount of time to reach the goal and your rate of increase. I don't know if there's a way to estimate that with fusion research.
Obviously people are free to choose differently and there are exceptions, unique circumstances etc.
And this approach will be superceded by something else. And that will be superceded in turn. Should we wait forever? We'd still live in caves.
These new approaches don't just show up, they come from the knowledge and scientists trained in whatever the previous approaches were.
Lastly, if this approach results in having cheaper fusion power, but needs extra 20 years of R&D, thats time we don't have.
And in fact, it looks like Sparc is more of an exercise in making fusion reactors cheaper, most notably by using different magnets. ITER is more about validating the concepts, with no regard for the price. Besides the fusion itself, ITER will study how to inject fuel and evacuate the waste products as it is running. They will also tackle the problem of producing the large quantities of tritium a fusion plant requires.
So, my understanding is that Sparc is not intended to make ITER obsolete, but instead tackle a different problem. If commercial fusion reactors happen one day, I expect they will have a bit of both.
You then burn it, returning it to the atmosphere.
Net CO2 impact = zero.
We could extract carbondioxide from air, turn it into hydrocarbons and burn that all day/year/century long but producing it from fossil sources is what makes it so bad.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect#/media/File:...
Fusion just replaces the radioactive bit, you still need steam/electricity conversion/transmission/cooling... it's not like a suitcase you can plug wires into, you still need a massive 'factory' to make electricity, just the one bit is a safer.
Also, nuclear fusion is possibly the cleanest energy source we could get. If we touch this, we might have a real path forward.
Furthermore, not only was solar power borderline non existent when those reactors were built, it is also still intermittent. You are just glossing over the biggest challenge of energy - balancing the powe grid. No-one needs energy if it's only avaliable at the wrong time. Energy storage multiplies cost of renewable electriciry several times over, and no country-scale grid has ever operated on wind and solar.
Lastly, energy is actually cheap - you can see that because we can afford transporting a pair of jeans 4 times across the world in the process of manufacture. We could have had zero-carbon grid since the 70s with nuclear - and France did. Even though France has cheapest energy in EU, suppose energy would be 30% more expensive. So what? We would be so much better off in terms of climate change.
24/7 365 grid scale battery backed and thus load following solar runs about 8c/kWh* which is cheaper than nuclear at high utilization. Sure, France’s model of importing and exporting significant chunks of electricity allowed them to ramp up nuclear, but they where exporting power at a loss and utilization still fell into the 80% range.
*Excluding the most northern and southern areas.
We are really talking about a handful of countries. The Nordic countries have cheap alternatives in hydroelectric, wind and geothermal energy. Nuclear may have a few niche applications for northern islands etc, but that’s not really significant globally.
PS: 4% of the UK’s electricity comes from solar and their southern tip is a actually quite decent for solar.
well, that's silly: sunlight is cheaper than uranium.
If just 10% of the resources poured into nuclear development, which is a cost no one that is pro nuclear wants to tally into the bill, were instead invested into solar energy, nuclear power would not have been able to compete with solar power by 1980.
Nuclear power isn't cheap, unless you ignore the insane R&D that was paid for by tax payers by government mandate and never paid back, unless you ignore the massive cost of construction long before one watt of power is produced, and unless you ignore the massive cost of decommissioning, and unless you ignore the never ending cost of spent fuel storage. It is entirely absurd that you believe once a spent fuel storage facility is built, the costs just disappear. The costs never go away. Maintenance. Security. Testing. It isn't free and it isn't cheap.
You keep repeating this idea thay uranium is expensive, by what metric? Where do you get the idea that its expensive?
If nuclear is so expencive, why does France have cheapest elecrticity in EU? And Denmark /Germany have invested in renewables have expensive electricity.
But you raise a decent point about what metric we should choose... I meant the cost of the stuff, but there are other metrics, such as clean up costs, because mining uranium is not clean. There is also a human health cost to populations within the proximity of the uranium mine.
French electricity is likely cheap because the French tax payers already picked up the cost of constructing spent fuel storage facilities and power plant construction, and they will ultimately shoulder the burden of the cost of decommissioning. This is just an educated guess, because that is usually how nuclear economics work. Otherwise, the investors that run the plants and sell the electricity would not be interested.
One failure of Banqiao Dam killed an estimated 240,000 people. That's more than all people who have ever died from anything to do with nuclear, reactors and bombs combined.
Air pollution kills about 2,000 people every single day.
Reactor incidents are like plane crashes - they get attention. Fissil fuels are like car crashes - they kill more people every day and noone gives a shit.
Pripyat is an animal and vegetation haven. Really shows how dangerous our species is to the planet.
Point is, nuclear power plants, even the old ones, are nowhere near as dangerous as the media portrays them.
It is true that today's reactor designs are much safer than RBMK, but I will prefer the reactor can can't go supercritical to one that can any day, especially if it's nearby.
Newer design's can't go supercritical.
Quote: Radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests probably caused 17,000 cancer deaths in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century
And if anything, that shows how bad nuclear weapons are, not the power plants.
McBride and his co-authors estimated that individuals living near coal-fired installations are exposed to a maximum of 1.9 millirems of fly ash radiation yearly. To put these numbers in perspective, the average person encounters 360 millirems of annual "background radiation" from natural and man-made sources, including substances in Earth's crust, cosmic rays, residue from nuclear tests and smoke detectors.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
Sorry, this is just misinformation. Residual radiation worldwide from nuclear testing or Chernobyl is minuscule. We wouldn't even be able to detect anything if we didn't have incredibly sensitive instruments.
The sun is a much larger daily source of radiation. Or a banana.
That’s a significant percentage of total reactors ever built including what was considered a safe design. We could go 1000 years without another incident, but from an insurance standpoint what would you charge a new power plant next to NYC? That means you need them in an a less expensive area, but everyone feels their area is valuable. That causes vast NIMBY issues and heavy regulation.
In theory modern Nuclear should cost less and be both clean and safe, but people gonna people both inside and outside the industry.
Have you ever been near a coal ash pond? You probably haven't because it is an extreme health hazard to get anywhere near it, as it is full of mercury, arsenic, heavy metals and occasionally radioactive slurry.
There about a thousand of these ponds in the US alone totaling maybe 100,000 acres. Meanwhile all the nuclear power plant waste ever produced could fit into a single large hangar...
The Chernobyl exclusion zone is 1,000 square miles. Fukushima had a much smaller exclusion zone but Estimates of radioactivity released ranged from 10–40%[163][164][165][166] of that of Chernobyl. The significantly contaminated area was 10[163]-12%[164] of that of Chernobyl.[163][167][168]
On 12 October 2012, TEPCO admitted for the first time that it had failed to take necessary measures for fear of inviting lawsuits or protests against its nuclear plants. That’s the core issue not physics.* ... A 2008 in-house study identified an immediate need to better protect the facility from flooding by seawater. This study mentioned the possibility of tsunami-waves up to 10.2 meters (33 ft). Headquarters officials insisted that such a risk was unrealistic and did not take the prediction seriously. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission warned of a risk of losing emergency power in 1991 (NUREG-1150) and NISA referred to that report in 2004, but took no action to mitigate the risk.[149] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
France and the US have a solid nuclear track record, but so did Japan.
Fission’s primary form of shielding is generally large pools of water or other coolant which don’t directly become radioactive. Fusion on the other hand needs to maintain a near vacuum so your pressure vessel is under heavy neutron bombardment. However, small amounts of radioactive materials get dissolved in the fission’s water which the goes on to contaminate the primary coolant loop which increased decommissioning costs. Fusion reactors primarily containment vessels becomes extremely radioactive and all the remote handling equipment also needs decontamination, but it’s unclear if the primary coolant loop will need similar types of decontamination.
And by small amounts, divers occasionally go in the same pools storing years of spent fuel rods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_fuel_pool
Running the numbers the real difference is fission reactors need more protection from the outside world and containment for a potential meltdown. Thus thick though still fairly cheap walls, which generally don’t become radioactive. They last for 50 years and don’t actually cost that much to construct. Fusion however is a vastly more complex device which will also increase construction and decommissioning costs.
It would help to actually watch the presentations. They’ve solved a lot engineering problems from Routine maintenance to blanket Renewal.
But.
The fusion produces neutrons.[1] That means that at least some parts of the infrastructure can't avoid becoming radioactive. Decommissioning -- at the very least -- is still a problem.
Any actual nuclear physicists want to chime in here?
[1]Yes, the concept of "Aneutronic fusion" exists: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion>. But read the parts about the required conditions being much more extreme than D-T fusion.
There is significant effort put into using lithium blankets to create tritium at which point arguably the fuels are lithium and deuterium. But that’s also going to require irradiate the relevant equipment.
At scale it’s significantly cheaper to produce.
https://www.fastmarkets.com/commodities/industrial-minerals/...
A 1 GW(e) reactor would burn enough tritium in a year that, if that quantity were to be released into the environment, it could contaminate 2 months worth of the flow of the Mississippi River above the legal limit for drinking water.
Tritium containment at a fusion reactor will have to be damned near perfect. This will be a major problem, as tritium permeates through all sorts of things (for example, plastic seals on containment penetrations cannot be used).
Unlike fission power plants there isn’t going to be years worth of the stuff on site. For one thing 5% of the stuff decays sitting around so you want a tight loop of production to consumption. Further, the reactor is holding low density plasma so there is very little inside at any one time.
That's not how it works. A low molecular weight gas anywhere below the homopause remains well-mixed, and does not separate by molecular weight. On Earth, that's anywhere below 100 km altitude.
As a beta emitter it’s blocked by just a few feet of atmosphere thus rendering the bulk of it harmless. Eventually, some will combine with oxygen and end up as water, but again most of that just ends up in the ocean.
Once in the troposphere, hydrogen of any kind will be oxidized to water within a couple of years, and then rain out. Of more concern would be accident processes that would cause it to be oxidized immediately. For example, any fire or exposure of hot materials to air would cause associated tritium to react.
This is all unrealistic anyway, since the plant will not have 100 kg of tritium on hand at any time. That's about the amount consumed in a year, but the reactor could not afford to have any substantial amount sitting around, decaying, or else the breeding ratio will be too low.
Anyway, for a more detailed description of what I was expecting. A least initially it’s going to act just like hot air. Hydrogen’s is 7% the density of air so Tritium is presumably 21% the density of air. Which is similar to air at 2000f without the particulate matter of smoke.
About 100kg should be roughly 500 cubic meters depending on temperature, but a more reasonable limit of ~10kg is still close to 50 cubic meters of gas. If we are talking a sudden release from say a pressurized tank rupturing outside that’s going to from an invisible but mushroom shaped blob and rise. Where a detonations mushroom cloud stops rising as the temperature cools, this thing only slows as it mixes with air which isn’t that fast. The troposphere is only ~8miles up so it’s likely to reach the stratosphere mostly intact.
If we’re talking a venting pipe or something that releases gas more slowly then you get much faster mixing. However, baring the slowest of leaks we are still likely talking going up hundreds of feet at a minimum and more likely miles before it dispersed enough to act like the rest of the atmosphere.
In the absolute worst case, you still get a lot of vertical mixing of the atmosphere from thermals and rapid dispersion from the wind which doesn’t slow down. Within days you’re talking thousands of cubic miles of atmosphere. So, a short term evacuation of those down wind might happen, but they should be able to return in days.
Nuclear fusion in the existing designs absolutely needs Tritium as one component of fuel, and Tritium can so far only be produced in Uranium reactors, in very small quantities and at an extremely high price.
This surprises me, for a number of reasons.
A fission reactor can be operated safely by a bunch of people with baccalaureates, whereas a fusion reactor will need PhDs, as I understand things. Also, its capacity factor will not be as good as that of fission reactors.
The waste from fission reactors can be made pretty small by reprocessing and in-reactor transformations. The radioactive waste from fusion is whole reactor vessels, which are large and difficult to handle (=expensive).
At commercial scale fusion reactors need ancillary fission reactors to manufacture the tritium they require. So you have two reactors instead of one.
Other factors look similar, except that fusion will carry an investment risk premium because of its novelty and complexity.
So under equivalent regulatory regimes it seems to me that fusion would cost as much or more than fission.
Can you explain why it might eventually cost less?
D is already cheap and even used by fission reactors. Extracting T from the blanket is presumably inexpensive, and one of the things ITER will test, but that’s an unknown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeding_blanket The real question is how expensive the physical reactor is going to be to build and maintain and does that offset the other savings. It’s expected for that cost to drop over time which is why it’s possible to eventually be cheaper than fission.
Finally, DT is easiest to achieve at a 50/50 ratio but DD fusion still takes place. So a lower mix of T is viable once very high Q values are possible, thus eventually zero T designs should be viable.
If you need a bunch of people with PhDs to operate a reactor, then you won't have a reactor. Not only does it mean that staffing is expensive and difficult, but also that it won't be reliable or predictable. If it is predictable, then steady state operation should be offloaded to computers.
A reminder of what could have been:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._his...