☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
TechnologyThis thread is a worse dumpster fire than I thought. I figured people would just make the obvious Spiderman 2 joke.
Electrical power generation from fusion will be orders of magnitude more expensive that from fission, and will be even more material intensive.
Imagine thinking that all the scientists and engineers in China just haven't considered these basic things before embarking on a huge megaproject.
It's neat science and tech and a nice paycheck. So enough motivation. Few people are aware that our high technology civilisation has an expiration date, so let them party while they still can.
I absolutely love how you think you know more than everyone else. Enjoy living in your doomer cult.
In my experience, only a small set of people thoroughly understand limits to growth on a finite planet. Most of them figure it out on their own. And it is a profoundly depressing experience.
Enjoy living in your gaudy pollyanna bubble.
Funny how you just happen to be one of these people, while the entire leadership of China, a nation best known for its long term planning, is just completely ignorant of all this. 🤣
Your theory presumes that people will continue to sustain grain on finite resources, to the point of collapse when those resources are gone. Do you have any evidence supporting such a specific outcome, or are you glooming over theoretical possibilities that would require a consensus in ignorance toward sustainability up to the very end?
No risk of a meltdown, doesn't produce nuclear waste, doesn't need uranium as fuel. Also produces helium securing the balloons for future generations.
Fuel wont be the expensive part. Materials engineering constraints will mean most of the heat sink will need replacing with essentially bespoke parts on a regular basis. No other energy source puts materials under the same trauma as fusion does.
No other energy source puts materials under the same trauma
I'm sure people said the same thing the first time we thought about turning a piston with literal explosions.
The engineering challenges are immense, but these challenges shouldn't be an excuse we use to prop up inferior, dirtier power generation.
We didn't really, steel is a phenomenal material at retaining strength at high temperatures with minimal long-cycle damage and was well industrially established at the time.
The issue with fusion and especially tokamaks is the triple challenge of mechanical loads + radiation loads + high heat flux. There's really no material known to mankind which can maintain the necessary high-temperature strength, while moving enough heat out of the reactor to keep it economical, without critically degrading in a matter of weeks/months due to fast neutron irradiation (let alone decades, as is standard for nearly every other thermal energy source). Hence, the heat sink will need to be replaced regularly.
Add to that the fact that fusion companies are essentially giant bubbles of debt owed to venture capital currently and you don't have a formula for a successful and cheap energy source.
But anyway, we already have fusion energy and it was probably partly used to charge your phone! It comes from the big floating fusion reactor in the sky, only requires a few panels of silicon, and is the cheapest and greenest energy source in existence.
I love solar, but we can't pretend it's without its own challenges.
A utility scale solar installation comparable to an average fission plant would take 15 square kilometers. Not to mention how complicated the infrastructure to actually transmit that power is.
Space is only one challenge though. You have no energy production at night, and energy generation can drop by half to almost three quarters during winter at higher latitudes.
fusion companies are essentially giant bubbles of debt owed to venture capital currently
There's a couple of loud, commercial fusion companies sucking up VC money, but all the serious projects are nationalized (China) or are projects run by public institutes with government funding (EU).
Agreed, a 100% solar grid is unrealistic. A healthy mix of nuclear and reneweables with a strong energy storage buffer is the way forward imo.
It's called energy storage technology.
So then you need 15km² to cover the day, another 5-10km² to cover the night, and then however much space and lithium it's going to take to store all that energy.
And this still doesn't solve the problem once you're a little too far off the equator.
In principle this is correct, but the plant itself is becoming nuclear waste. Not saying this is a deal breaker, just something to keep in mind
It does produce nuclear waste...
Just beacause the fuel isn't radioactive doesn't mean the whole reactor becomes nuclear waste since it's constantly bombarded with radiation.
I don't know why this marketing lie is always presented as fact.
https://www.ipp.mpg.de/2769068/faq9
Is it really waste if you can use all of its "waste" outputs for useful things? Tritium can just be rebreeded into the fusion process, so its 12 year half life will rarely come up. Molybdenum-99 is used in medical imaging and is frankly in short supply, we would eat that up instantly and the world would be better off for it. Tritium is also just very useful medically in general. The largest stable byproduct by far is non-radioactive helium which has many thousands of use cases. The majority of the "waste" (80%) simply dissipates into thin air as pure, harmless neutrons.
You could maybe argue that the internals of a fusion reactor would be embedded with radiation from the tritium supply. Tritium itself is generally not very dangerous to humans. Even if you inhaled pure tritium it cannot enter the blood supply. It would have to be ingested by eating and somehow stay lodged inside of your intestines to do real damage, and in that case it would still be limited by its 12 year half life.
Some of the steel and nickel plating could probably be warped by the fusion process, and this would be considered low-level waste. The less nickel that is in the steel, the less radioactive it will be. Metals are generally not of great concern when it comes to radioactivity because they are very easily sequestered. Even if you were in full body naked direct contact with nickel-63 for a whole year, you would likely be fine. Most of these radioactive metals would decay even faster, generally less than 5 years. The most concerning one is nickel which can become nickel-63 in very small quantities and can last for 100 years. I would like to remind everyone that the sun, rare earth materials for solar and wind, and geologic processes can produce nearly as much radiation as these materials can. We should prevent exposure but even in a nightmare scenario, the situation is manageable and far better than cooking the planet. The highest danger is always from ingestion with fusion materials, but that is very rare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Iran By the way, read about this city if you want to read about a high baseline radioactivity in an inhabited area that occurs from a natural geologic process.
Even your link says that it is not long time waste. Which does not make it zero, but magnitudes better compared to the “usual” waste
No risk of a meltdown, yes, but diamond encrusted platinum infrastructure. Doesn't produce nuclear waste, no: high neutron flux on the inner wall will activate materials, and limit lifetime. Doesn't need uranium, needs to breed tritium (plus excess) literally by the ton, in the lithium blanket. Helium, what, have you smoked waccy tobaccy today?
Yes you've provided a list of engineering challenges that everyone is aware of. It doesn't change the potential.
Helium, what, have you smoked waccy tobaccy today?
It was a joke, but fusion technically produces helium even if it also consumes it for cooling.
https://nomad-laboratory.de/uploads/publications/th/Fusion-Helium_supply_20131213.pdf
In the case of the HCLL reactor with lead as multiplier, various Pb isotopes are produced in the (n, 2n) reaction [26], and there is no α-particle emission. The amount of helium produced annually remains at 0.39 t.
Fission reactors need to use helium as a coolant too though if they're high temperature (like gas reactors) and they don't produce shit except waste.
Here's a thing about potential: you can only be certain of it after you've solved these "engineering challenges". Does tritium breeding factor, EROEI and material footprint (all mined, transported and processed using fossil fuels) mean a thing to you? These factors are not specific to fusion, but they're the most challenging for fusion reactors of currently known designs.
You're right, but simultaneously your rhetoric is completely defeatist before we've even identified what can be solved. We won't know the potential until it's solved but you also can't be sure of the cost.
Collapse is called a predicament rather than merely a problem, precisely because it is a tangled complex of problems that has no solution. See https://escholarship.org/uc/energy_ambitions for why it is so. Or, rather, don't, since if you get it, all you get is a massive depression for your pains.
Notice that we're also running out of time, so things feasible in principle are not reachable in the time window still at our disposal. The next 2-3 decades should make that clearer.
