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Comment by bicx | Hacker News Reader

On the bright side, maybe big tech will be the ones to accelerate fusion energy generation to a point of practical usage.

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Or maybe they wont and we will have ruined the one planet we can thrive to make a chatbot.

I mean, fission is already a miracle. If you described the tech to the people in the 1800s and told them we just keep using fossile fuels they would laugh at you

To me one of the great tragedies of our time is that we could probably solve fusion if we just invested like 50 billion or something in it. Instead wasting so much effort on things like quantum computers seems insane.

Solving fusion could usher in the golden age that atomic power failed to produce

The thing that worries me is that it's still not obvious that fusion wouldn't also be the extremely expensive, slow to build boondoggle that fission is.

Because it has the word nuclear nearby and we'll be surprised at how ignorant our regulators can be, or because it'll turn out to be less safe than we think and it'll get red taped to death like fission did, or some non regulatory reason?

Or just orders of magnitudes more than expensive than paving solar and batteries everywhere. Also a juicy missile target.

Because most plans for it still involve attaching a giant steam boiler to turn the heat it produces into electricity and that bit alone will cost more than renewable alternatives.

Agreed.

Call me ignorant, but I’d rather we focus on stuff like increasing photovoltaic cell efficiency (and possibly cost-efficiency) by the 40%-60% we’re leaving on the table keeping them fully loaded and cooking.

Simple physics upgrades, like rotating cones, or lines of panels to swap with each other in Arizona-parking-lot conditions, can take us further, faster, and cheaper.

Nuclear is only safe after and during spending a bunch of money to keep it that way.

That makes me uncomfortable, because we’ve never had more instability in my lifetime, as far as “wildly important things not being addressed”.

Because it’s going to be a ludicrously complicated, massive machine. Those are expensive to build and maintain

There are fundamental reasons why fusion, at least the DT variety, will be more expensive than fission. It has to do with inherently low volumetric power density of DT fusion reactors. ITER is 400x worse than a PWR; ARC is 40x worse. So, the reactor itself becomes much larger and, because it's also more complex, much much more expensive. The other putative advantages of fusion cannot make up for this. And fission itself is too expensive, so DT fusion loses to a loser. It's a double loser.

If you want to see where energy will come from in a deregulated environment, look at Texas. New grid capacity there is solar and batteries. Even gas isn't being installed much; the Texas state government put down $7.2B to fund more gas capacity yet this money has been mostly spurned, I think < $400M has been taken. New nuclear is completely out of the picture there.

Fusion will be slow to commercialize. Proof of concept is going to be much harder than for fission reactors. But if and when POC is attained, building commercial fusion reactors will not have as nearly much project risk, much less waste management risk, no proliferation risk, and much less financial risk in decommissioning. If you screw it up you can expensively damage your reactor, but you don't spread fallout, and you don't have to guard your waste like it's plutonium.

Neither fission nor fusion are going to put any juice on the grid before the AI bubble resolves, and then the financial calculations will be totally different.

Maybe it'll be a model running on a quantum computer that points us towards high temperature superconductivity, which would simplify the plasma confinement problem and unlock fusion for us.

The great tragedy is that we already have a practically unlimited and environmentally safe source of energy, which is nuclear fission. And we simply don't use it at a significant scale because of irrational fears about meltdowns.

No, it’s mainly because it costs too much.

The cost is almost entirely due to overly cautious rules for nuclear power generation.

That’s not true. They are physically massive, incredibly complicated machines with all kinds of large scale pressure welding, forging, containment systems, 100s of miles of plumbing, and other serious large scale engineering. They will never be anywhere close to as cheap as something as dead simple & mass manufacturable as solar.

If they were intrinsically costly, they would have been costly in the U.S. in the 1960s, or in France in the 1970s-90s, or in South Korea today. It is because of regulatory ratcheting, and the effects of that (both direct and second order), that costs escalated.

NPPs are intrinsically Big Projects. The western world is almost universally suffering from Baumol’s cost disease - we cannot build Big Projects at a reasonable price anymore. Subways, bridges, NPPs, you name it - all cost many multiples of their inflation adjusted 1970 cost. And that’s before they inevitably blow their budget by 2-3x. Until you can somehow fix the labor / housing / management cost issues NPPs will not be affordable, even if you relax nuclear specific regs.

Mass manufactured things like solar and wind turbines do not suffer this.

Since the 1970s, large construction projects have been layered with several major regulatory regimes that didn’t exist when most affordable infrastructure was built. In the U.S., NEPA (1970) dramatically expanded pre-construction environmental review and litigation risk, causing planning timelines to extend by years. Around the same time, OSHA began rapidly increasing the degree to which workplace processes were regimented, which permanently increased labor-hours and limited on-site automation.

For nuclear specifically, this was compounded by post-Three Mile Island regulatory response. This increased the tendency to use bespoke designs, i.e. discouraged standardization, which prevented automation and the benefits of learning curves. That's why Baumol-style cost dynamics took over.

This same pattern shows up in subways and bridges. It’s not that 'big things can’t be built cheaply anymore", it’s that we changed the rules under which big things are built.

Rational aversion to financial meltdown, you mean.

The idea that nuclearphobia is to blame is a defensive fantasy.

It is not rational aversion. Nuclear is currently 10,000 less dangerous per unit of energy produced than the largest sources of energy: coal, oil and natural gas. We could afford to let nuclear get 10x less safe, so that it becomes vastly less costly to deploy, and a very possible result would be that it would replace the largest sources of energy, and would still be three orders of magnitude less dangerous than the sources of energy it replaced.

Regulation is inescapable, because the maximum damage from a nuclear accident would exceed the value of the company operating the reactor. A rational business treats any liabilities larger that what it could pay as equivalent, regardless of how large they could become, and hence will underinvest in safety measures.

And I'm sure you will agree there is a great and sorry history of nuclear efforts failing to achieve their cost targets. At this point, it is clear that such targets are sales numbers, not something one should actually believe. One cannot make this history go away just by wishing, as nuclear advocates like yourself seem wont to do.

I agree fossil fuels should go, but that's not an argument they should be replaced by nuclear. It's the argument nuclear advocates used to be able to lie back and comfort themselves with, but then you all got blindsided by renewables and storage zooming past you. You have to address those now, not the old competition you wished you were still running against.

Of course regulation is necessary. My point is that current nuclear regulation is disproportionate to actual risk, and that this mismatch has made nuclear uncompetitive relative to energy sources that are demonstrably far more dangerous on a per-unit-of-energy basis.

Even compared to solar, nuclear has a stronger safety record when measured by deaths per TWh, and this is when taking into account the worst nuclear catastrophe, Chernobyl. I am not arguing that the future should be all nuclear, or even predominantly nuclear. I am arguing that the present regulatory regime reflects a mispricing of risk, particularly relative to hydrocarbons, and that this has pushed us into a suboptimal energy mix.

On cost overruns: the strongest correlation is with regulatory ratcheting, which also had harmful second order consequences for cost control from failing to reach larger scale construction, like bespoke designs and loss of construction continuity.

> Instead wasting so much effort on things like quantum computers seems insane.

could be worse, could be all that effort, energy, talent and now nuclear waste to produce infinite pictures of shrimp jesus

.... oh crap

Fusion likely wouldn’t solve much. Fuel and disposal costs are a small part of nuclear costs. It’s amortized capex for the extremely expensive plant, then maintenance. Fusion would make both of those costs worse

Exactly right. Fusion's only hope (and IMO it's not a great one) is a system where entire parts of a fission plant can be deleted. Helion does this by not needing turbine + generator, but doing direct conversion of plasma energy to electrical energy. But even so, they have to struggle with capex and reliability. Their reactor is coupled with a huge bank of capacitors (Zap has a similar problem; it's startling how large the capacitor bank is compared to their small fusion cell.)

They do seem like responsible people. I'm sure that'll be fine.

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