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Comment by mchusma | Hacker News Reader

Fusion definitely has long term economic advantages over fission. The fuel is the most plentiful in the universe and the energy released from fusion is much higher than fission.

The chart here shows the energy difference pretty well: https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-power/fission/nuclear-...

More fuel + more energy from fuel = superior for most uses long term. If we pull it off.

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Okay, but the other commenters are saying that fuel is around 6% of the cost of running a fission plant. Do you really think fuel availability will be a decisive factor in say, the next 60 years?

In a word, no.

Fission is already not competitive, so a technology much more expensive to build and operate is even less so. In ten years, solar and wind will be even cheaper than today, and will be supplying most of our energy needs.

Fission is non-competitive only because governments don't want it to be. France's nuclear fleet built in the 60s/70s with more primitive tech has capital/operating costs of 7c/kWh, which is fairly similar to commercial solar or wind in France - and is the cheapest option once you double the cost of the latter to account for extra storage/smart grids/other intermittency handling.

(Not every place is Southern California where there are no clouds and the sun shines all year. Solar is cheap in some places, but not at high latitudes.)

Fission is not competitive because of high operational expenses, very long construction, and very high capital commitment, none of which will follow plummeting solar/wind/storage costs. So it gets less competitive with each passing day.

Wind does not confine itself to lower latitudes.

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