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Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | Hacker News Reader

Why? Fission is expensive partly because of the safety requirements- and for good reason. Fusion is far safer.

Fission is expensive because of the ungodly amount of red tape that needs to be cut before groudbreaking can happen.

Fusion will face much the same amount of red tape without changes to the law. Doesn't matter that it is safer, it's "nuclear" which is what most laws target.

The UK has already announced regulations specific to fusion, taking into account the expected low hazard of fusion reactors.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-set-to-be-first-countr...

And I'd be willing to bet that China won't put up unnecessary barriers.

Fission is relatively expensive globally, even China has major cost issues. It’s not a question of red tape, people really did try to operate nuclear without massive safety systems for example, that repeatedly failed.

In one case the US army had people manually lifting control rods on a dead simple reactor, someone messed up and the SL-1 melted down killing 3 people. Dig into thing and you can find well over a dozen reactors that melted down and many others that suffered significant damage from one mistake or another. So, now everyone builds and maintains redundant safety systems, but that simply isn’t free.

It isn’t any one thing keeping costs high. I was personally hopeful the Advanced CANDU reactor would drive down costs by avoiding expensive enrichment, but apparently it was overall more expensive.

Enrichment became much cheaper with centrifuges (50x less energy needed than gaseous diffusion.)

Less energy, but no where near 1/50th the cost. Centrifuges simply don’t process that much material per year so you need a lot of them to supply a nuclear reactor.

PS: Number I saw per pound was between 1/8th and 1/30th the energy. Though that may not be up to date.

Seems unlikely that if we had working fusion, unnecessary red tape owing to both fusion and fission being “nuclear” would be the main stumbling block. That seems like something that would be easily fixed.

In principle it should be easy, in practice (in the US at least) it's nearly impossible. The US senate is currently in nearly total gridlock. Passing new laws is crazy hard.

On the one hand you're right, but OTOH I have to imagine "super cheap energy!" would hopefully change some minds quickly...

Those minds are currently being heavily encouraged to keep the money train going on resource extraction. Not clear why that would change, where's the "cheap energy" lobby going to come from exactly?

Everyone paying electric bills.

Sadly voters don't make for much of a lobby these days.

They used to promote fission power as "too cheap to meter". They were lying then, too, and knew it.

There is no physical possibility of Tokamak fusion power being cheaper than the most expensive method in current use anywhere.

A Tokamak fusion reactor would destroy itself in short order: the superconducting magnet windings are blasted with hot neutrons whenever it is operating. The liquified metal neutron-absorbing "blanket" is in pipes that are being blasted with hot neutrons, and will weaken and need to be replaced, but they have become seriously radioactive, so you have to replace them using robots. Which will become radioactive, too. You are processing the molten stuff to refine out tritium you have been breeding in it, that you need for fuel. The power density is very low, so you need an absolutely monstrous machine to get as much power out as from a lump of uranium.

Because it has to be so big, it has to be very expensive, several times as much as a fission plant. And, take much longer to build. That much money with no expectation for any power delivered for many years is catnip for the corrupt, as for any big-ticket public works item where the costs of components are far from obvious. (Cf. NASA STS and SLS, Boston's "Big Dig", California's "Bullet Train to Nowhere", F-35, New York's 2nd Ave subway.)

Fission is expensive because it's complex and must be highly reliable.

Fusion will also be complex and must also be highly reliable -- not because of public safety, but because repairing a fusion reactor will be very difficult. It will be far too radioactive for contact maintenance.

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