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Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

I'd add in that my solar panels aren't really all that valuable in themselves. They're bolted to my roof with little more than some bolts and nuts.

If I have a "Residential scale" nuclear plant in the basement, there are lots of people who would like to re-purpose my nuclear fuel in other ways. (And that's before we talk about how I purchase, and renew, that fuel to begin with.)

Ultimately even "small scale" nuclear comes with massive bureaucratic and security overheads that can't simply be wished away.

In closing I'll point out that my solar system _is_ nuclear. It uses fusion nuclear energy as it's fuel. But I've cunningly hidden the radioactive elements far far away....

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It's a good line, but our sun is making nice clean helium out of hydrogen fusion, those nasty radioactive elements are associated with fission (of big unstable isotopes of uranium, plutonium, thorium etc.)

Yeah I know, but you should never let the facts get in the way of a good story. (And to be fair, all the heavy elements came from the sun (or other suns) to begin with :)

More seriously, solar is the closest we'll ever get to fusion power. Assuming we ever get the tech right, it'll simply be too expensive to roll out significant amounts of fusion production. It would require capital that will always give a better return elsewhere.

To put it another way, would you rather invest $100 billion in a fusion plant, that'll take 5 years to get permitted and 5 years to build, and require staffing by well trained expensive staff, or spend $10 billion on a solar farm in Africa selling electricity to the US at night which can be up and running in 2 years?

Would you be happy to commit your 100 billion today betting that when it comes online 10 to 15 years from now it'll make energy at prices comparable to the solar and storage tech available then?

Fusion may indeed be the future. But who's gonna spend the capital to find out?

The implicit assumption is that ginormous prototype/research reactors are the only possible way for fusion to work.

But if you fund the research, people come up with better lasers and magnets and things. Then you a) have better lasers and magnets and things, which are useful for more than just fusion in the same way that NASA inventions are useful for more than just space exploration; and b) allow the reactors to get smaller:

https://www.iflscience.com/baby-fusion-reactor-less-than-a-m...

I've absolutely no objection to building new things. I'm not against fusion as a "thing we can do". I hope the project in France is successful.

What I'm saying though is that the economics of fusion don't work. The temperature range, magnetic fields etc won't ever be 'cheap'.

Look, going to the moon wasn't economic, but it got us GPS and satellite TV which definitely are. Fusion may give us other unexpected benefits. But it'll never be the 'energy too cheap to meter' that was envisaged in the 1950s.

> What I'm saying though is that the economics of fusion don't work. The temperature range, magnetic fields etc won't ever be 'cheap'.

This feels like arguing that computers will never be cheap, because look how much it costs to build a 1970s mainframe. How could anybody ever afford to have that in their house?

Meanwhile it turns out that EUV lithography requires some fancy equipment but when you mass produce it, the result is that everybody has one in their pocket.

"Small scale" nuclear that people talk about is around 10MW. It would power a handful of neighborhoods if the consumption wasn't concentrated in a short time. But can still power a dozen homes.

What is another problem of nuclear. It's more dependent on storage or alternative generation than solar.

Whether it's 10mw or 1gw, the fuel problems remain. Procuring, securing and disposing of waste gets harder, not easier, with the number of reactors, not their size.

Weapons proliferation is definitely a strike against nuclear. A few other strikes:

  - It still requires mining, so is it any cleaner than solar + storage?
  - Waste is significantly less recyclable than other green energy waste.
  - High cost and long timelines to build.
  - Major risks when damaged by weather, accidents, or damaged intentionally.
  - The biggest proponents of nuclear seem to be the oil/gas industry, and politicians aligned with oil/gas. Hmm...

What, you mean you can't go and buy plutonium at any corner store?

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