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Comment by rcxdude | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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