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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

> Fission's challenges are in public sentiment, exuberant costs, and dealing with extremely toxic metals.

I'd argue that a lot of the public sentiment problems with nuclear were PR'd into existence by the insanely powerful and wealthy fossil fuel industry to which fission is a very real existential threat. If we're talking about exuberant costs, fusion beats fusion hands down and has yet to deliver a single net watt of power. The waste disposal is more of a political problem than a technical one.

Overall, the problems with fusion are hard technical problems, and the problems with fission are self-imposed political ones pushed by the fossil fuel extraction industry that fission could very realistically replace.

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While it would last a long time at current levels, the supply of fission materials is quite limited when you’re looking into interstellar travel etc. That’s really the promise of fusion it’s an unimaginably vast energy source for the future.

As to more sort term concerns, fission has a lot of very expensive requirements like 24/7/365 security which make it difficult to integrate with vastly cheaper renewables. Baseline power sources like nuclear and coal wind are at a massive disadvantage when integrating with significantly cheaper wind and solar. They lose significant amounts of money during part of the day and need much higher premiums the rest of the day to make up for it.

In today’s energy market there is definitely a place for fission. However, with a 50 year payback period you need to project into future energy markers with even cheaper solar, wind, and batteries. That’s why electricity companies generally view it as a dead end. Fusion is a larger unknown, it’s probably not going to be cost effective but it’s also the kind of long shot that might just pay off.

> the supply of fission materials is quite limited when you’re looking into interstellar travel etc

Yeah, sure, if we're gonna get a big spaceship to even a small fraction of light speed, that would require absolutely stupendous amounts of energy.

But lets worry about that after we avoid cooking ourselves with GHG emissions? We might or might not have enough fission fuel for large-scale interstellar travel, but certainly more than enough to get rid of fossil fuels.

> fission has a lot of very expensive requirements like 24/7/365 security

So will fusion, unfortunately, unless someone figures out aneutronic fusion, which is a much longer shot than D-T fusion most efforts are concentrating on.

I'm all for spending a lot more on fusion R&D though; the potential win is just so enormously large that it makes sense to bet some amount of resources on it, just in case it works out.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where public opinion (skewed by fossil fuel companies or otherwise) is a huge driving force. We can lament what the world would be like if only people were more knowledgeable, but at the end of the day it's the ecosystem we have to operate in.

Fusion power has indeed had high R&D costs, but so has any significant project before the ROI starts to kick in. Fusion power (especially the types that don't generate a neutron flux) is safer and more productive in principle compared to fission, and I have high confidence I will live to see a commercial fusion reactor come online in my lifetime.

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