Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gwypaas | Hacker News Reader

Both fission and fusion are awful at peaking. For peaker energy you want low capital investment and higher marginal costs.

Fusion and fission are extremely capital expensive with quite hefty marginal costs through the steam side. They're simply awful at solving the last 20%. Even worse when they're undercut badly enough to never run for the first 80%.

View on HN

Whether fusion is good at peaking will depend on which fusion technologies end up working. Helion for one would be fantastic at peaking. It's likely to be quite cheap, wouldn't use a turbine, and could run fusion pulses at whatever rate we need.

it's still a pretty bad peaker. it's cheaper than a tomumak but it still needs a ton of capacitors and incredibly precise machining.

They claim an electricity price of $0.01/kWh even before mass production kicks in. If they achieve that, the economics will work out fine.

I'll believe that when I see it, but that price would be more than good enough to beat renewables.

I find it amusing that Helion's approach also strongly depends on the cost of storage, just in a very different part of storage parameter space.

Helion's approach is I'd guess still dominated by capital cost, not fuel cost, so it's relatively bad at peaking. Granted, if they split the reactors into DD reactors making 3He, and field reactors burning the 3He (with reduced DD), it might make more sense to turn the latter up and down, if they have a relatively larger part of their cost from their fuel.

With the capital costs of every form of ~continuous-output fusion reactor, the only fusion technology that would be good for peaking would be H-bombs.

That has been looked into, in the context of propelling very large spacecraft. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls... )

They can't peak independently, but their reliability and low marginal cost means that they can are well suited to providing peaking capacity in conjunction with storage. Excess power from the reactor can be used to place energy in the storage source, which is then discharged during peak load. Due to the reliability of the nuclear generator, the amount of storage required can be relatively small.

You right, just build high-temperature nuclear and use if for everything, then no peaking is required. And you can also use if for both industrial and residential heat. Solving all your problems at once. If you have electrified transport (electric trains and electric cars) you can have a 100% green economy.

Why would fusion be bad for peaking ? It got none of the fission problems regarding that.

It has exactly the same problems, same as any high capex steam-driven turbine.

Can it start generating electricity without waiting for steam to reach required temperature? For now we can only assume the worst case scenario and group it with fission in "up to 12h startup time". The report in https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956 compares existing power sources

Reply on news.ycombinator.com