More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

https://www.power-technology.com/analysis/managing-nuclear-w...

Yes, short term they manage it.

When we are discussing the future, our concern is long term.

> in a manner that is satisfying to the residents of the state where it is being disposed

No, that is basically NIMBY. Of course some residents won't like nuclear waste buried underground, 100 miles from them in a place they'll never go and where no one lives. I don't know how to not sound callous about that.

But that was the problem with Yucca - it was chosen exclusively for its “scientific” value - remoteness. They didn’t event take transportation costs into account.

If you start with the political aspects, it becomes really, really easy to solve.

How many towns and cities are there with plants shutting down? How many with a history of military and nuclear facilities?

I know one town in particular that is trying to specialize in nuclear work. They have consultants, training programs, etc. Why not call them?

Fair enough, I have not checked whether those are the previously mentioned lwrs, but I would argue that those numbers are definitely "scale"

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

That's still a lot more deaths than commercial nuclear fusion has been associated with in the US. It's also, incidentally, a lot of deaths.

> 1. Not a single nuclear power plant has been built without significant government subsidies.

This is a non-sequitur. Just because something needs government subsidies doesn't make it bad. Things like the Internet, modern solar energy, and the USPS were built with either massive initial subsidies or even complete government involvement throughout their ongoing lifetimes. That doesn't make them bad.

> 2. Nuclear power plant falsely reduce costs by externalizing significant costs such as the processing of fuel, the processing of fuel processing waste, maintenance, inspection (eg by the NRC), switching out fuel, processing nuclear fuel, the time-to-build or the failure modes of nuclear plants. Lest we forget, the Chernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone is 1,000 square miles 35 years later.

Versus coal and oil plants, which externalize the costs of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Also, comparing a shoddily built and designed Soviet plant to modern Western ones isn't a good comparison.

> If these next-generation LWRs are so economical, why isn't someone building them at scale? The standard response is political opposition but what about China?

In the West, it's negative perception that largely predates widespread public awareness of climate change. As for China, it looks like China's getting in on the nuclear game too, precisely because of air pollution concerns. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...

> delusional as climate deniers

Yeah, no. Even if us supporters of nuclear power are wrong, we don't need to be compared to people who are on the level of flat earthers.

No, some of us actually have operated a reactor for a living, and have first hand experience with the technology, and most of the issues people like to discuss. In my case, I served in the US Navy in nuclear propulsion. This whole debate seems crazy. Truth is the tech works, and it should be inexpensive compared to burning fossil fuels. Then there is the absolutely incredible difference in energy density - a two 13mmx13mm fuel pellets contains roughly the same energy as 1 ton of coal, or 260 gallons of oil. As far as renewables go, it has to be much worse for the world to build the 1650 wind turbines, wire them, and so on that it takes to match a typical single civilian reactor. To those of us who have worked with the technology, we know it could really change the world's carbon problem.

The reason the cost is so high - and remember, the cost of technology usually goes down over time in a normal functioning market, is hyper-regulation at every level of government. From mining and refining fuel to building plants to operating them, there is an insane amount of regulation and litigation over that regulation. The over-regulation argument is really annoying, mostly because it is true.

It's also true that there are some issues around dealing with waste. Most of these are easily solved, but will not be for the same over-regulation reasons. We've taken perfectly good tech and through the power of bureaucracy, made it unworkable.

Just an FYI, acidburn is a reactor scientist. It feels a bit silly to call them a "fanboy". Also, I can verify they care deeply about climate change.

I'm also not personally actually aware of any nuclear fan boys or scientists that are climate deniers. They just argue "nuclear + renewables" vs "renewables". Why's that so hard to get? They aren't arguing for coal, oil, or natural gas like climate deniers do.

We let the US nuclear construction industry die, so it's pretty expensive to rebuild a workforce with the skills to build new nuclear plants, and that has contributed to the cost of nuclear power rising above some other power sources [1], but that's only because the cost of CO2 pollution isn't accounted for, which is a massive subsidy for fossil fuel power producers.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/data-review-air-pollution-deaths

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricit...

Ah yes, the Soviet reactor that was built with a known fatal design flaw, then operated well outside of safety parameters during an experiment, is the be-all end-all of nuclear safety.

We can look past the damage caused by an accident at a coal plant and just count the damage caused by ordinary routine operation of coal plants and quickly reach damage figures that eclipse every nuclear accident in history combined.

Don’t get discouraged. This is all part of the process of finding and disseminating knowledge.

Many Breeder type reactors also exhibit natural safety characteristics, where they can both shut down and remove afterglow heat with no external power or user intervention at all. This is because of low-pressure coolants like liquid metal or molten salt. They can handle loss of heat sink, loss of flow, and tranisent overpower (e.g. rod widthdrawal) without the control rods going in. Normal water cooled reactors could not survive such events without melting.

So there's a strong argument to be made that while regular reactors are very safe, breeder reactors can be even safer.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/002954...

But if you don't buy seawater extraction, check out the Weinberg 1959 reference (https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3060564), which contains a calculation for how much earth would need to be moved to power the entire world on granite. They calculate that we'd need granite mining from the crust about the same order of magnitude of the fossil fuel mining operations at that time. Of course, mining granite is far less destructive than mining fossil fuel, so it's totally acceptable.

Recall that there is 20x more nuclear energy in average crustal rock than there is chemical energy in coal, per kg. So to a breeder reactor, it's literally as if the entire earth's crust is made of pure coal, 20x over.

Will that last long enough for ya? :)

And with that kind of energy density, it's all economical to extract.

Fission costs too much. Fusion would cost way more. Promoters of both have lied to the public continuously from day one. We have heard enough.

The people you credit with nixing nukes do not have that much influence. What did in nukes was nukes themselves. They cost too much, always have, and the constant drumbeat of violated regulations, slipshod construction, and lax operation all together make everyone eager for alternatives.

And here come renewables, totally safe, work at any scale, cheap and getting cheaper. No one will miss nukes, their always-dodgy cost accounting, their burden on public funding, or their promoters' constant dishonesty.

I assume you're only looking at the slow and expensive nuclear builds?

China is looking to build 150 new reactors to meet its goals.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-11-03/china-is-pl...

We also have ways of making nuclear reactors extremely quickly if we want to get really serious. In the 1970s we started building a facility in Jacksonville Fl capable of delivering 4 large LWRs per year in a shipyard-like factory. The reactors were to be floated off to their sites (the first of which were offshore). They installed the world's largest gantry crane at the facility. Sadly the oil shocks reduced the energy demand where their first customers were (New Jersey refineries) and the effort failed after they received a construction license from the nuclear regulatory commission. Building zero carbon power plant gigafactories like this can solve climate change, you betcha.

https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-01-26-offshore-power-sys...

Nonsense. The strict regulations are why there have been two nuclear starts in the USA since 1978.

    I am afraid we can only have one of those attributes.

A well-functioning, technologically advanced, and motivated country could easily overcome this. Standardized reactor designs, simplified reactor designs such as the newer molten salt reactor designs, etc.

We have the technology to do this safely and cheaper than we're doing it now; we just don't have the will.

Also, any talk of cost must include not only the short-term kWh cost, but the long term cost -- ie, the terrible cost of climate change that we'll soon be paying.

    And figuring out how to build cheap nuclear 
    in the West is actually a pretty complex thing

Nothing will change until the ice caps melt and half our coastal cities are flooded, and at that point something might happen but probably not anything good.

A thousand tons of molten, radioactive lithium could easily ruin your day, if ever exposed to air.

Maybe the next big VC fad after fusion will be radiation resistant robots.

But after the physics comes engineering. Helion's approach is to be more aggressive on the physics in order to greatly ease the grave engineering issues that face DT reactors. I consider these latter issues to be so serious that, overall, I rate Helion as less of a long shot at achieving practical fusion than any of the DT schemes.

What do we do at night?

Build storage for the solar plant? That's more expensive than a nuclear plant of the same capacity.

Build long range high voltage power lines? Again, more expensive than building a nuclear power plant of the same capacity.

People have been spoiled by the incredible energy ROI, portability and responsiveness of fossil fuels and think everything has the same capacity.

It doesn't.

    Honestly, I think it is more on the climate 
    scientists at this point to be vocal about it. 

It's understandable that science-illiterate, climate change-denier types fear fission. The fossil fuel industry has done an excellent job percolating their pro fossil-fuel agenda and fomenting fear of the unknown. This is the unavoidable enemy.

The only way to counter this would be for green types (Greenpeace, etc, as you say) and climate scientists to unite and promote fission. I do not think this is remotely likely, but it is the only thing that would remotely stand a chance of countering the fossil fuel industry in the battle for public mindset and votes. I would be absolutely stunned if this happened before billions are displaced due to fossil fuel-caused climate change, and I actually don't think it will happen even then. The status quo will continue as long as the fossil fuel companies remain rich... so, basically until civilizational collapse.

Simply put, fission got an extremely raw deal. It was stabbed in the back and buried by the people who should have supported it, based on their stated goals and beliefs.

Nothing can survive that.

Ha ha, Greenpeace has already per-emptively decided they hate fusion too.

> Spend 1/4th that on solar or wind subsidies and you get vastly more carbon free energy

Have you done the math, or are you just making that figure up? One single LWR generates from 1GW onwards. Do you know how much solar you need to generate the same amount of power? And that's disregarding the obvious issues with non-constant energy output.

Plus - solar and wind, if you factor in the energy required to manifacture the components necessary for their operation, have negative EROI. https://energyeducation.se/wind-and-solar-energy-are-neither...

I have literally no idea why people think that solar and wind are a solution to the energy problem. It's like nobody has actually looked into the math and said "wow this makes me feel good so I'll support it". Let me repeat it, solar and wind have _negative_ EROI. If you invest in solar and wind, you're net losing energy.

> 1 nuclear reactor can be quite safe, but 500 of them is 500 times the risk

Modern nuclear is exceptionally safe. Europe is switching to freaking _coal_ in an effort not to freeze this winter. Statistically, they're killing hundreds of times more people than if they switched to nuclear at the right time. They're shutting down most of their nuclear for unknown reasons as well.

The only way it could happen is if the feds took on construction risk.

I am not wrong, in a world dotted with miniature fission reactors, as the most extreme pro-fission people would like to favor. If you can build one in space, and it powers the whole earth, that's obviously a very different story than building them every city block.

I am also not wrong about the effects of radiation on the human body, when used as a bomb nuclear weapons literally melt people into goo, ofc with a reactor there are various safeguards but the thing causing the flesh-melt is still occurring, so maybe less instantaneous melt and more gradual boils and blisters leading to severe internal cancers as your cascade of nuclear reactors around the city all blow in a beautiful chain reaction...

> It is completely untrue. Even among https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_liquidators it is not true.

It's not untrue if you define exposed, not to be disingenuous, but those actually exposed to the reactor meltdown, did not survive. Those experiencing second hand exposure in e.g. the town, obviously did not all drop dead, but had increased risk of cancer, death, and those globally exposed, well many fewer dead or at risk of cancer.

So unfortunately when speaking so imprecisely it actually is true, just not in the way you imagine. Even your wikipedia article admits among the liquidators the death rate was almost at least 20% by some estimates, and I would presume these people are wearing some protective equipment, so calling them "exposed" is somewhat disingenous in and of itself...

> Dams failing have killed way more people than nuclear ever has.

And this solely due to one incident under communism where damn was not maintained.

1) Reduced need for energy storage. Right to repair for everything, write code that is efficient and lower power, distributed systems which don't require complex centralized systems to run. Taxes on unused compute cycles to help create incentives for this, perhaps.

2) For actual energy storage, something like the sand heat system recently put into use in Scandinavia, or the mechanical earth dams (store energy in potential energy mass, less dangerous than an actual water dam, a lot easier to build). For immediate electric storage at scale you can do e.g. saline water storage tanks which hold mild electric charge, who knows maybe there is some inert chemistry which could be devised for a safer transportable version of a lithium ion battery...

3) For energy production, I am a long time advocate of geothermal. There's no real downside, besides digging holes and I guess maybe a well collapse, but you're limited to loss of whatever is in the whole/immediate surrounding in the case of a cave in, there are no engineering problems to solve except pumping water around, which is a well known task. Solar/wind for ships, airplanes, space vehicles, electric/hydrogen for storage/consumption scenarios where the grid is not accessible (remote locations e.g. the poles, alaska, siberia, African/Asian planes)

Money isn't the problem. Manpower and materials are the problem.

Spending manpower and materials on X cannot be spent on Y. Manpower and materials are not fungible - at least not in the nuclear space where requirements are very high.

https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/workshops/nucogen/presentations...

I work on it.

Here's two papers about decay heat in ITER: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/092037..., and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092037961...

I used their data to find power density and compared it the micro modular fission (MMR) fission reactors.

“MMR has a lower decay heat power density than fusion systems like SPARC or ARC, DEMO, or ITER and orders of magnitude lower than other advanced fission reactors as show in the figure below. UNSC's MMR has the lowest decay heat power density at 0.075 W/cm3, less than DEMO's 0.083 W/cm3 in the blanket and divertor. A lower decay heat is more manageable by passive cooling systems, allowing the reactor to dissipate heat more easily and without damaging the reactor. The other aspect to consider is the maximum temperatures that can be safely maintained in the reactor. Gas-cooled reactors like the MMR have all-ceramic cores that can withstand much higher temperatures than a fusion's reactors metals, molten salts, and magnets. MMR's low power density is a paradigm shift in nuclear safety, more foundational than fusion, for it can be accomplished cost effectively today.”

The neutron flux produced by a fusion reactor will be much higher than in any fission reactor, and it must be absorbed in a shield, to produce heat, which will be the output of the fission reactor.

Choosing an appropriate material for the shield will minimize the quantity of radioactive material that is created per unit of output energy, but it is pretty certain that the radioactivity will not be "several orders of magnitude less".

The best that can be hoped is that it is possible to find a shield material that will produce only very small quantities of long-lived radioactive isotopes, so that, after a storage for not too many years, the radioactivity might decrease to be "several orders of magnitude less".

Nevertheless this remains to be demonstrated.

For example, any piece of steel present near a fusion reactor would produce copious amounts of cobalt 60, but that would decay to negligible radioactivity after a few hundreds years.

Moreover, to ensure the predicted low residual radioactivity, any shield material needs to be free of impurities, which even in very small quantities could produce dangerous radioactive isotopes.

The requirements for advanced purification will greatly increase the cost of the structural materials for fusion reactors. However this is not a new problem. Similar requirements are imposed on the structural materials for fission reactors, but the fusion reactors will not be any better from this point of view.

The tritium being bred in the lithium had better amount to more than micrograms, because that will be fuel. Separating the day's few grams of tritium from the thousand tons of molten radioactive lithium coursing through miles of pipe is an exercise not yet tackled by fusion promoters.

One thing I don't understand here is the problem with overproduction. If we actually have excess electricity (as in not needed as electricity later) can't we dynamically use that for active carbon capturing? The efficiency of that process isn't even that important then as the main goal is to remove carbon from the atmosphere with carbon free energy.

Having carbon free overproduction sounds like a good thing to me. It's the occasional underproduction that's hard to handle.

I'd just like to point out that the US Navy has an excellent track record running nuclear reactors that ramp up to full and down to zero rapidly, in submarines.

The US Navy does not have quite the same financial constraints as commercial land-based power, but constraints still exist.

I fully agree that solar PV and wind, especially PV, are much more atttractive to investors because you can be earning cashflow from your first MW of capacity while you're installing the second (which takes weeks (or days!) instead of years), and you can iterate and scale this all the way to 10 TW or more of capacity, as the demand requires.

It's important to use the real deal-breaking flaws when pointing these things out. The relevant figure is availability because capacity also includes energy that could be produced but was not due to having nowhere to put it.

Availability is 70-80% in France and UK and 80-90% in the US.

But due to the long timeline of refuelling cycles you still need a full baseload backup. So nuclear needs long term storage or other uncorrelated backup more than renewables if anything.

The upside is it's easy to have two uncorrelated nuclear plants, so overprovisioning by 30% is sufficient.

That makes something that is already more expensive than solar with the same overprovisioned net capacity factor, and a green hydrogen plant with capacity sufficient to cover, and full gas backup infrastructure even more expensive though. Probably not enough to cover the costs of hydrogen storage yet or someone would be doing it (ignoring massive nuclear subsidies), but prices of batteries, solar panels, and electrolyzers are dropping rapidly. Hydrogen storage or green methane production only needs to become marginally cheaper to make it start happening even sans subsidies.

That's under the assumption the available money, hardware and labor of ramping up solar and building nuclear plants directly competes with each other. That's a pretty strong assumption and I highly doubt there is a strong enough link between any of those three for your argument to have significant impact.

E.g. We should be able to drive rapid solar expansion with government money and subsidies while incentivcing big energy carriers to build nuclear plants.

Presumably that's the cheap half of the nuclear plant, because coal/gas plants are pretty cheap to build.

The current cost of green hydrogen is somewhere between $2 -> $12. That is the production cost. The market price for green hydrogen sits around $4-$20, since there are multiple industries that demands hydrogen.

For 110 to break even the hydrogen need to cost $3.5/kg, and in order to really displace natural gas, it is estimated that it need to reach $1/kg.

Now I noticed that those $150/MW is not a range, so I took a look. Projected nuclear LCOE costs for plants built 2020-2025 places nuclear around $27/MW to $147/MW depending on financing and country (source: OECD Nuclear Energy Agency’s (NEA's) calculation). Russia has the lowest cost and Slovakia or Japan (depending on financing method) has the highest.

So in summery, it can definitively cost more than $110/MW to produce viable green storage solution, especially in northern countries where low duration lithium batteries is not a working solution for long winter periods with low wind production and the sun is only up for a max few hours per day. Nuclear can also be much cheaper depending on where it is built and how it is financed.

What do you base this on?

In practice, they have done something like 20% within an hour. It was early 2019, there was such a crazy wind that they had to reduce nuclear production also (after already reducing coal, gas etc. to the min).

I think what they really can do is somewhere in between.

sources, it was on l’energeek, but in French.

Nuclear has a very small footprint on a crowded island.

Plus we have Rolls Royce SMRs who have been building nuclear reactors for a while.

I'm in favour of renewables, but done in the way that actually makes most economic and environmental sense. In the Uk we threw money at rich people with £15k to install 4kwh solar rigs on their houses. That money would have been much better spent subsidising large industrial installations.

Engineering improves over time, considering we seem to have someone who works in the industry in this thread perhaps they can inform us about current failure rates and risks. My assumption is that due to past failures, extra mitigations have been put into place with modern reactors.

https://www.ans.org/news/article-3240/mit-ramps-10ton-magnet...

https://news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusio...

It's pretty amazing that they did that without any engineers.

Another problem of car-centric infrastructure is that it doesn't scale as well as public transport - a single bus can, potentially, take 50 or more cars off the road.

That does not justify it.

I guess that depends on your perspective. I see expanding freeways as enabling further sub-urban growth, which is fundamentally unsustainable (from an energy, logistics, and municipal funding perspective).

has this kind of initial dismissal ever won anyone any favor in an argument?

I see it all over the thread, and I find myself having a hard time wanting to consider the argument afterwards even if I am personally aligned with them just because it seems so inconsiderate and rude.

Is it supposed to signal your experience in the field, having heard this argument so many times -- or does it signal the opponents inexperience? Either way I find that approach to come off as arrogant and rude.

increasing demand on a highway gets more people to where they are going, but if the destination doesn't have more parking spots, you've caused an imbalance in the system. same as the electrical generation - if it suddenly becomes absurdly cheap to manufacture more consumer goods, we've just increased the pressure on the whole system that needs to manage the rest of the lifecycle of those goods after manufacture. sure, some people will make money, but that's not the point.

One of the underlying assumptions of all mainstream economic theories since the XIXe century is that EVERYTHING that comes from nature is infinite and has been provided to us for free, whether it's resources, clean air, a durably nice temperature, animals etc. What has a cost is to pay people and machines to extract those things, but not the things in the first place.

Based on this assumption, we've acted as if nature was infinite and increased our rate of extraction to ridiculous heights, reaching the limits of a system that is sadly, due to the laws of physics, finite. One example : China has used in 3 years roughly as much sand for construction as the US has in the entire XXth century (btw sand is the new gold and a huge black market for it is now in place...)

Economic demand is just a metric.

You are celebrating a metric without considering if and how it contributes positively to the goal, and I'm not even sure we agree on the goal, if yours is tumor-like growth.

You've mentioned this twice, and so it's worth nothing that important factors also correlated in that period of time: the rapid rise of the middle class following the decimation of wealth from the world wars, which led to a population boom.

Another factor you're taking for granted: fertility rate drops in economies as they get very strong. Western countries boost immigration for this reason: you need more bodies to increase GDP growth (and by extension, waste), if that's what you want. Lower energy prices alone will not lead to people breeding more. If it did, we'd have more kids than our grandparents/great-grandparents did, just as you alluded that they spent more on food.

So on top of the fact that we're projecting GLOBAL STAGNANT POPULATION GROWTH, which means an end to increase in consumption, technological innovation means that consumption produces less waste. You can't account for innovation in energy and nowhere else.

> What I'm saying is that, looking at what we've done so far with energy, it's not entirely sure more energy will be good for our prospects of survival. We need to have a collective philosophical revolution first.

I know what you were saying, and I'm saying it's wrong.

Innovation isn't just for the energy sector either. Consumables create less waste over time. Biodegradables are making a big entry in the market. All this means is that as the population levels out (as it is projected to), consumption will create less and less waste.

At any rate this falls into the same category, coercion. People want things, especially if they improve their lives. Much of what you take for granted now was advertised. Take-out food, vehicles, smartphones and computers and media, etc.

Yeah, "nothing of value". I don't think you get to decide what people value, that's what the market is for.

I'm just not too sure about that; Fossil fuels took millions of years, and massive natural forces, to accumulate in their modern day form, very similar to uranium and other energy resources. That's a lot of energy that went into "making" them over a lot of time.

But humanity is "unloading" all that energy, with all its effects including thermal radiation, into the atmosphere at extremely faster rates than it took to accumulate. And we've been doing it at a literally global and industrialized scales.

We even recognize the problem of thermal pollution on a "micro" level when we throttle and shut down generators, reactors and industrial processes that threaten to overheat the natural water bodies they use for cooling.

I see no reason why these issues can't accumulate and scale up to global levels.

Disregarding that possibility, as if humans couldn't screw up the planet on such scales, are exactly what made us run head first into global warming trough CO2 emissions and littering most of the planet with led and plastics.

The hefty price tag seems smaller when considering the development and design of ITER began during the cold war.

The literal size is definitely big even without context, which is why it has the nickname: gigantomak :D.

Even in the European Union, it is possible to pay around $5 for all the meals of a day, including not only adequate quantities of vegetables and fruits, but also a moderate amount of chicken meat.

However, for that, you must be cost-conscious, because from the same shops you could buy an equivalent quantity of food, but at a price even 10 times greater, when you choose to buy processed foods, even those as cheap as bread, instead of buying only raw ingredients.

Your math is totally wrong, space was never an issie for solar. It tales 100x less space for a coutry to cover it's power needs with solar, than it does for a country to grow it's own food and feed it's own people. So every country thats not a city-state, like Vatikan, is fine.

All the challaneges of Solar are around intermittency, cost and ofcourse it's less viable in northern lattitudes. But none of them are around space.

For another actual example of this happening, see the scaling back of the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility

... what?

Criticism 1: you'd need, what, like 100 nuclear plants planned and approved? If you started now, maybe in three years you'd get like ... 10 approved. five years maybe 20-30.

Criticism 2: nuclear is not price competitive with current wind/solar installations, and CERTAINLY won't be competitive even with efficiency improvements with wind/solar in 10-20 years when any plant actually leaves the boondoggle funding phase and goes online.

Criticism 3: what design of plant? LWR/PWR/huge dome/solid fuel rod/oh shit it melts down in a natural disaster? Yeah uh, no thanks. If nuclear had gotten its act together about ... let's say 30-40 years ago and designed a reactor that:

1) meltdown proof

2) consumes almost all its fuel

3) scalable / easily replaced

Then we might be able to do it. Problem is, the entire nuclear industry was invested in solid fuel rod designs, the military loved it for the weapons isotopes, the politicos blocked funding for LFTR and other designs, the solid fuel rod reprocessors were making bank, there was probably other shadow industries like waste handlers/transporters on the dole.

So... nuclear is a no go. Solar/wind for now, use natural gas and existing nuclear for levelling until storage and solar/wind+storage drop to levels unattainable by nuclear/fusion/naturalgas/geothermal/hydro. Synthfuels for aviation. Long haul shipping can probably be done with swappable batteries and/or synthfuels. ... maybe... hydrogen if it's not the current trojan horse for hydrogen-from-methane being pushed by the oil companies.

Maybe nuclear can be competitive when solar/wind even out, and battery/storage finishes its incredible scaling and tech development. Maybe.

But the path forward is wind/solar, and maybe synthfuels and green hydrogen if the green isn't "green" like clean coal was "clean" coal.

Our children should already curse us. The science was there, and my and ESPECIALLY the boomers picked SUVs, big houses, moving to florida, and lots of cheap crap shipped 5000 miles from overseas labor over dealing with problems.

DEMO will be plants built independently by several nations following the research from a successful ITER. They will be the first time that any attempt is made to actually convert the fusion products into electricity. There are currently no concrete plans for any DEMO plant - those are contingent upon ITER's success.

If everything goes to plan, the first model DEMO plant would begin operation in 2051. So, as I said, we are a long way away from producing even 1W of usable electrical power from fusion.