Fusion energy device sets a record by running for 20 seconds

There is some private industry near me that did build their own private damp to power themselve decades ago, which seem to be an example of one of a greener form of energy fully compatible with capitalism, some form of Nuclear (pretty much the greenest we can have now, at least from a global warming point of view) can also be fully compatible with capitalism.
I hardly call a business building it's own dam to generate their own power as disproving what I've said. Why did they get to use a natural resource to power themselves instead of where you live? What exactly is your source of power? I wouldn't call Nuclear green energy as you still have to deal with the waste product. Also nuclear is more expensive than coal or natural gas.
In the best region, on the best roof for it, you can even have solar panel now you can even have a company installing them, paying themselve with a profit simply by taking a percentage of the electricity bill saving on the client, without the client ever having to pay a cent from their pockets.
Sure but what does the consumer get out of this? You still pay an electric bill, but instead to the solar power supplier. From my experience they still require payment as well, and not a small one either.
If a greener form of energy end up being actually efficient, it will be fully be compatible with capitalism, if it is not compatible with capitalism (in term of energy density, usualbilty, cost) we are in giant trouble and it will have nothing to do with capitalism or not, regardless of the system if a form of energy does not have the density to sustain modern life, it will not be able to sustain modern life and the economical system cannot change anything to that, and a form of energy able to sustain modern life style will have by definition value and will fit in the capitalism system I would think.
Right now a lot of people are losing their homes due to COVID, so a lot of people aren't too interested in solar power on a home they're about to lose. Again the product of capitalism. The up front cost of solar is also prohibitive. My neighbor got it and he spent $25k for it, and it'll take him 10+ years to pay for the installation. He also doesn't have a power wall either, so when the grid goes down, so does his solar power.

Ideally we should all have solar power on every home but who's going to pay for it? Nobody is going to spend over $10k to get solar that has no benefit to them for many years, if not decades.
 
This is a serious question... when fusion reactors are able to have a positive output of energy, how is it going to be captured and used? By making steam and turning turbines?

Unfortunately nobody has figured out a better way. At least not for high energy production. There are thermal couples that are like the metallic strips in an old thermostat. They can create a voltage directly from heat but as I said, not practical for making any meaningful electricity. However, some of the plutonium powered space probes use this. Lump of plutonium produces heat from nuclear decay and the thermal couples use that to power the probe.

A fusion reactor will be completely different from any fission reactor. In fission, you want to keep the fuel cooled. Fusion, you have to keep it in hot plasma state.

Fusion has been such a difficult road for us because of the extreme requirements to create the reaction and sustain it. Either massive pressure like the sun does with gravity or massive amounts of heat. We're not so great at the pressure part on those levels and only barely with the heat option. But the reality is that if we don't try it'll never get built. It's entirely possible, just difficult. Building the first atomic bomb was also very difficult but we managed that one too.
 
Sure but what does the consumer get out of this? You still pay an electric bill, but instead to the solar power supplier. From my experience they still require payment as well, and not a small one either.
After the payments are over you have solar panel that reduce your monthly electric bill and that did cost you nothing.

Ideally we should all have solar power on every home but who's going to pay for it? Nobody is going to spend over $10k to get solar that has no benefit to them for many years, if not decades.
I imagine that is true only on very specific location (latitude, trees and so on), has for who is paying on it, if it is a good location the company that install it could repay themselve over that decade by receiving all the saved money on the electricity bill, with current interest rate that sound possible (if it is not it is probably not an ecological move to do in the first place).

I hardly call a business building it's own dam to generate their own power as disproving what I've said. Why did they get to use a natural resource to power themselves instead of where you live? What exactly is your source of power? I wouldn't call Nuclear green energy as you still have to deal with the waste product. Also nuclear is more expensive than coal or natural gas.
How is a capitalist enterprise using one if not the cleanest form an energy disproving what you have said ? And nuclear costing more than coal or natural gas and still being used is in tension with what you said, has for not calling Nuclear green energy that a good idea there is no really green/clean energy, there is greener/cleaner one, nuclear being the cleanest and greenest in term of climate change aspect.
 
0.8A is off by a factor of 1000
I got our error, our calculation assume 100% of the power is transmitted on a single cable, I imagine that in reality there is 20-50+ 900,000 volt cable each transmitting very few ampere.
 
Solar and wind are bandaids, at best.
Literally the entire planet and all life is fueled by the sun, except for a small fraction of geo thermal vents.

We simply need to understand the molecular processes that organisms use to efficiently convert this. Nothing is a bandaid and will all work in a synergy. Batteries improve as well as how much energy we can capture, etc... Anything is better than coal.
 
Literally the entire planet and all life is fueled by the sun, except for a small fraction of geo thermal vents.

We simply need to understand the molecular processes that organisms use to efficiently convert this. Nothing is a bandaid and will all work in a synergy. Batteries improve as well as how much energy we can capture, etc... Anything is better than coal.

No there is a pretty fixed amount of energy hitting the spot a solar panel occupies. Its not much energy and although there is some room for improvement (current panels are at around 20% efficiency) expecting much more is foolish.
 
No there is a pretty fixed amount of energy hitting the spot a solar panel occupies. Its not much energy and although there is some room for improvement (current panels are at around 20% efficiency) expecting much more is foolish.
Why is that foolish? They recently found how to increase food production by 70% by combining algae proteins into plants. Maybe it makes more sense to create a massive panel and export the energy into batteries. There are so many untapped possibilities it will only get better.
 
Why is that foolish? They recently found how to increase food production by 70% by combining algae proteins into plants. Maybe it makes more sense to create a massive panel and export the energy into batteries. There are so many untapped possibilities it will only get better.

Material science. A good portion of that potential energy is light coming it at such a angle that it is very difficault to absorb in any way. Plants are not that efficient. If they were you would see a nice erie little black spot for each leaf. Instead we see a green reflective surface.

There have been solar plants that just use mirrors to reflect the rays too a central boiler and I believe they are abit more efficient but still not close to 100%. Solar will continue to take up a large amount of space and only be practical in certain areas.

What we should hope for is them to be able to create panels in a less destructive way and do such in a cheap widespread manner. That would make things like solar on most houses possible (and let the free market decide if it is) I would be pissed to be forced to install somthing at a bloated cost as a result of government action.
 
Why is that foolish? They recently found how to increase food production by 70% by combining algae proteins into plants. Maybe it makes more sense to create a massive panel and export the energy into batteries. There are so many untapped possibilities it will only get better.
Thats... not really true at all. While yes in a lab a calorie is a calorie in actual food to digestion processes it most certainly is not. Micronutrients etc play a far larger roll than most people realize.
Just eating algae would be... a very terrible idea.

Additionally biological things do not utilize electricity more than they utilize chemistry. Photosynthesis is just raw chemical fuel more in common with gasoline than electricity. Translating a computer driven future to full chemical fuel would be something for the very far future(500+ years).
 
Material science. A good portion of that potential energy is light coming it at such a angle that it is very difficault to absorb in any way. Plants are not that efficient. If they were you would see a nice erie little black spot for each leaf. Instead we see a green reflective surface.

There have been solar plants that just use mirrors to reflect the rays too a central boiler and I believe they are abit more efficient but still not close to 100%. Solar will continue to take up a large amount of space and only be practical in certain areas.

What we should hope for is them to be able to create panels in a less destructive way and do such in a cheap widespread manner. That would make things like solar on most houses possible (and let the free market decide if it is) I would be pissed to be forced to install somthing at a bloated cost as a result of government action.
So, you're demanding that solar play by some so-called "free market", where Coal and Natural gas get $20B per year in subsidies?
 
So, you're demanding that solar play by some so-called "free market", where Coal and Natural gas get $20B per year in subsidies?


Sure. Power is cheap enough for me so I would say they are doing well enough.

Solar cannot do what coal and natural gas does. There have been subsidies for solar in the past and present. And in the places the government has stepped in it has been a useless program that does nothing but burn homeowners money.

More specifically I'm against any type of policy or program forcing things upon people. I dont have much of a issue with subsidies if it's done in a decent manner. (It wont be and isn't for coal, natural gas, or anything the government goes at)
 
where Coal and Natural gas get $20B per year in subsidies?
I wonder on net what it actually look like, on one hand like almost all industry they have some form of subsidies (or taxation break) but on the other hand coal and natural gaz had excise tax, severances tax, impact fees and many other form of taxation going on.

Calling the ability to deduct on your tax report exploration expenditures right now or amortized has you see fit to optimise your tax can be called subsidies, but it is not money. A lot of them are available to all american manufacturer.

I imagine all of those would still be going on into those type of energy, one benefit of some market going on to the something like solar on houses, is that with a market the first house to have it installed are those that would get the most sun in place where electricity cost the most, i.e. the best place for them and place that actually would be a negative and bad choice in everyway including environmentally (amount of sun and so on) would not do it just to get subvention and if they wait at the good moment they do not have a worst more polluting technology up there for 25 years, but it does not need to be 100% free market to obtain those benefit.
 
I wonder on net what it actually look like, on one hand like almost all industry they have some form of subsidies (or taxation break) but on the other hand coal and natural gaz had excise tax, severances tax, impact fees and many other form of taxation going on.

Calling the ability to deduct on your tax report exploration expenditures right now or amortized has you see fit to optimise your tax can be called subsidies, but it is not money. A lot of them are available to all american manufacturer.

I imagine all of those would still be going on into those type of energy, one benefit of some market going on to the something like solar on houses, is that with a market the first house to have it installed are those that would get the most sun in place where electricity cost the most, i.e. the best place for them and place that actually would be a negative and bad choice in everyway including environmentally (amount of sun and so on) would not do it just to get subvention and if they wait at the good moment they do not have a worst more polluting technology up there for 25 years, but it does not need to be 100% free market to obtain those benefit.
There is more at play industry and politics wise than simple subsidies. California for example banned the export of coal. So now all US coal going to china goes out via Vancouver. Did the ban actually change anything? Are trade deals subsidizing the export?
What about rail subsidies? Rail is a very big exporter of resources in North America. Technically subsidizing rail subsidies energy production. Is this factored in?
Recycling subsidies favor renewables more than NG/Oil. Is this factored in?
Technology(usually HUGE subsidies in Canada/NA) tends to favor renewables over NG/Oil. Factored in?

This is one area that can be datashaped to say whatever the hell you want it to say. It is never black and white nor simple to analyze.
 
How is a capitalist enterprise using one if not the cleanest form an energy disproving what you have said ?
Supplying themselves clean free energy is one thing. They were given access to a natural resource afterall. It's when you pay them to do something for you is when the trouble starts. If a company could profit from recycling their own products, they would because it benefits them. Tesla recycles 100% of their batteries, but again it's to their advantage. Now pay someone to recycle lithium batteries and you'll run into profit problems. "There are very few working, economically viable technologies for recycling the majority of materials in lithium-ion batteries." It's always going to be a cost problem.
And nuclear costing more than coal or natural gas and still being used is in tension with what you said, has for not calling Nuclear green energy that a good idea there is no really green/clean energy, there is greener/cleaner one, nuclear being the cleanest and greenest in term of climate change aspect.
Nuclear is the greenest and cleanest if we ignore that the waste takes hundreds of thousands of years to be safe and if something goes wrong with the power plant then an entire area is no longer livable. These aren't problems to ignore because again capitalism takes shotcuts for profits and this effects nuclear as well. Chernobyl failed because they use cheaper fuel with cheaper rods. Fukushima happened because they didn't follow international nuclear safety standards, which would have been expensive. God forbid that these plants are attacked by a foreign invader to cause massive destruction to the area.
 
They recently found how to increase food production by 70% by combining algae proteins into plants.
You do realize that being able to increase food production is the reason the world is in the fucked up state it's in right? The planet would never be able to sustain 7.5 billion people under normal conditions; and under those normal conditions a lot of the other problems we have nowadays like increasing power requirements would not be as big of a problem, or a problem at all.
 
Supplying themselves clean free energy is one thing. They were given access to a natural resource afterall. It's when you pay them to do something for you is when the trouble starts. If a company could profit from recycling their own products, they would because it benefits them. Tesla recycles 100% of their batteries, but again it's to their advantage. Now pay someone to recycle lithium batteries and you'll run into profit problems. "There are very few working, economically viable technologies for recycling the majority of materials in lithium-ion batteries." It's always going to be a cost problem.

Nuclear is the greenest and cleanest if we ignore that the waste takes hundreds of thousands of years to be safe and if something goes wrong with the power plant then an entire area is no longer livable. These aren't problems to ignore because again capitalism takes shotcuts for profits and this effects nuclear as well. Chernobyl failed because they use cheaper fuel with cheaper rods. Fukushima happened because they didn't follow international nuclear safety standards, which would have been expensive. God forbid that these plants are attacked by a foreign invader to cause massive destruction to the area.


i actually watched the entire video. i also work in the nuclear industry. it was about what i expected. it wasn't horribly biased, but there were a lot of errors and omitted details. i had to raise an eyebrow when they showed the diagram of uranium atom splitting....apparently we use U236 now and not U235? hmm that's news to me.

the CO2 issue....much of that is emitted by the cooling towers. many plants around the world do not use cooling towers. the cooling towers are to handle the large heat load of the turbine exhaust. instead, many use large condensers and pump water through the other side of the condenser. since the water used isn't vapourized, the CO2 is actually far less.

the used fuel bays...well they contradicted themselves by saying 'most nuclear waste is stored in cooling pools' and then saying that the fuel is removed in 10-20 years. given how long nuclear plants have been in operation, most of the fuel is in the dry casks. it's also more like 10 years by the way depending on where in the core the fuel was. it can even be less if it was near the outer edges of the reactor. they also make it sound like without power to pump water through the pool that there will be certain and almost immediate disaster. yes the water will boil and yes that water shields radiation - specifically gamma. it takes several days to boil off enough to matter. all you have to do is top up the water in the pool. portable diesel pumps are useful here if everything else is destroyed.

the dry casks....saying that they are not rated for earth quakes and require 'constant attention' is an outright lie. these things were originally tested by smashing a freight train into them at full speed amongst other extreme tests. they're about 4 ft thick of solid steel. yeah security is required. sure someone needs to check periodically for unexpected failures such as corrosion. i won't lie and say that it's completely infallible or that it is ideal. at the same time, i'd love to see a terrorist try to get into one of these things.

radioactive for thousands of years....yes but it's not that simple. the real nasty stuff is so deadly because it gives off all its energy in a very short time. it also dies off pretty fast. after 100 years, it's not like you'd die if you were to come face to face with a used fuel bundle. all that really bad stuff has decayed away. all that waste is sealed and stored and it's surprisingly not much when you consider how long we've been using uranium for. the waste is all there in the casks....with coal, it's in the atmosphere and not contained at all. even taking the climate change out of the debate, coal emits very large amounts of alpha radiation which is excellent at causing lung cancer.

now what to do with the waste....yes it's a problem and i'll be the first to admit it. i also know that there are solutions. in the industry, nobody calls the used fuel nuclear waste. we call it spent or irridated fuel because it's still fuel. any current technology only uses about 2% of the fuel give or take. we simply have not figured out how to use the rest of it. that's also something being worked on currently. the small modulars you hear a lot about in the news should use about 10% of the fuel up so there's a lot more headroom there. used fuel from a traditional nuclear plant could be used in one of the newer designs such as a molten salt reactor. other countries have been reprocessing fuel for many years now. only reason we don't in north america is because it's cheaper to pull up fresh stuff out of the ground.

as for your comments, yeah i agree with you on capitalism. it has its place, but the purpose of it is to make money and nothing more. safety can go by the wayside...sometimes. the industry also knows that if there's a major failure of some sort, the plant will not be allowed to run again. that's a pretty big financial loss right there. it's taken many years to get there but it really is happening....slowly.

chernobyl....a shining example of how to do everything wrong. yeah there were problems with the fuel rods. they also had no containment and an outright stupid design. graphite and water make a very dumb reactor. the graphite provides positive reactivity and since it's solid there's no way to remove it. positive void coefficient leading to a runaway prompt critical event. lack of backup systems. a single shutdown system that was not passive - control rods had to be driven in by motors. reactivity profile that was notoriously unstable at low power levels. idiots running the place that had no regard for procedures or safety. the list goes on. my point is that this is not the way the rest of the world runs their plants by far. not good business to pay for the cleanup of that mess.

fukishima wasn't a terrible design, but it had flaws that you're correct in saying they ignored for money. bottom line here: current designs for the most part are obsolete. we should have had molten salt reactors and other alternatives many years ago but there's too much FUD. we should be using thorium which is far more abundant than uranium and remains hazardous for far less time. nuclear is probably the best of the worst because all of our power generation technology sucks when you get down to it.
 
They will develop it and not use it because, reasons...... after all, nuclear power is generally clean and look what happened there.
 
They will develop it and not use it because, reasons...... after all, nuclear power is generally clean and look what happened there.
324,000 metric tons of nuclear waste in storage (and growing) that will last centuries. Yep, pretty clean - comparatively speaking I guess.
 
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120-250v is a far different animal than 500,000v
One makes trees explode. One makes trees maybe smoke if the water content is high enough
i actually watched the entire video. i also work in the nuclear industry. it was about what i expected. it wasn't horribly biased, but there were a lot of errors and omitted details. i had to raise an eyebrow when they showed the diagram of uranium atom splitting....apparently we use U236 now and not U235? hmm that's news to me.

the CO2 issue....much of that is emitted by the cooling towers. many plants around the world do not use cooling towers. the cooling towers are to handle the large heat load of the turbine exhaust. instead, many use large condensers and pump water through the other side of the condenser. since the water used isn't vapourized, the CO2 is actually far less.

the used fuel bays...well they contradicted themselves by saying 'most nuclear waste is stored in cooling pools' and then saying that the fuel is removed in 10-20 years. given how long nuclear plants have been in operation, most of the fuel is in the dry casks. it's also more like 10 years by the way depending on where in the core the fuel was. it can even be less if it was near the outer edges of the reactor. they also make it sound like without power to pump water through the pool that there will be certain and almost immediate disaster. yes the water will boil and yes that water shields radiation - specifically gamma. it takes several days to boil off enough to matter. all you have to do is top up the water in the pool. portable diesel pumps are useful here if everything else is destroyed.

the dry casks....saying that they are not rated for earth quakes and require 'constant attention' is an outright lie. these things were originally tested by smashing a freight train into them at full speed amongst other extreme tests. they're about 4 ft thick of solid steel. yeah security is required. sure someone needs to check periodically for unexpected failures such as corrosion. i won't lie and say that it's completely infallible or that it is ideal. at the same time, i'd love to see a terrorist try to get into one of these things.

radioactive for thousands of years....yes but it's not that simple. the real nasty stuff is so deadly because it gives off all its energy in a very short time. it also dies off pretty fast. after 100 years, it's not like you'd die if you were to come face to face with a used fuel bundle. all that really bad stuff has decayed away. all that waste is sealed and stored and it's surprisingly not much when you consider how long we've been using uranium for. the waste is all there in the casks....with coal, it's in the atmosphere and not contained at all. even taking the climate change out of the debate, coal emits very large amounts of alpha radiation which is excellent at causing lung cancer.

now what to do with the waste....yes it's a problem and i'll be the first to admit it. i also know that there are solutions. in the industry, nobody calls the used fuel nuclear waste. we call it spent or irridated fuel because it's still fuel. any current technology only uses about 2% of the fuel give or take. we simply have not figured out how to use the rest of it. that's also something being worked on currently. the small modulars you hear a lot about in the news should use about 10% of the fuel up so there's a lot more headroom there. used fuel from a traditional nuclear plant could be used in one of the newer designs such as a molten salt reactor. other countries have been reprocessing fuel for many years now. only reason we don't in north america is because it's cheaper to pull up fresh stuff out of the ground.

as for your comments, yeah i agree with you on capitalism. it has its place, but the purpose of it is to make money and nothing more. safety can go by the wayside...sometimes. the industry also knows that if there's a major failure of some sort, the plant will not be allowed to run again. that's a pretty big financial loss right there. it's taken many years to get there but it really is happening....slowly.

chernobyl....a shining example of how to do everything wrong. yeah there were problems with the fuel rods. they also had no containment and an outright stupid design. graphite and water make a very dumb reactor. the graphite provides positive reactivity and since it's solid there's no way to remove it. positive void coefficient leading to a runaway prompt critical event. lack of backup systems. a single shutdown system that was not passive - control rods had to be driven in by motors. reactivity profile that was notoriously unstable at low power levels. idiots running the place that had no regard for procedures or safety. the list goes on. my point is that this is not the way the rest of the world runs their plants by far. not good business to pay for the cleanup of that mess.

fukishima wasn't a terrible design, but it had flaws that you're correct in saying they ignored for money. bottom line here: current designs for the most part are obsolete. we should have had molten salt reactors and other alternatives many years ago but there's too much FUD. we should be using thorium which is far more abundant than uranium and remains hazardous for far less time. nuclear is probably the best of the worst because all of our power generation technology sucks when you get down to it.
The average person thinks all waste is HL.
Somehow they also think we still use enriched uranium(many newer reactors dont).
The world also thinks EVERY SINGLE REACTOR is a LWR.

When you tell an average person living down wind of a coal burning power plant exposes them to more radiation than you get working at a nuclear power plant it blows their mind.

One day I pray the BS around nuclear will get washed away. I'm not particularly hopeful though based on the amount of absolutely absurd misinformation there is out there(heck its starting to get spread by non stupid groups even its spread so far).

@Mega6
Just provided a great example of really awful misinformation. Thank you.
Just .02% of that 300k+ ton is actually HLW and thus actually dangerous to humanity.
Over 120k tons have been reprocessed and no longer exist in anyone's reality.
That is just 650ish tons of actual nuclear waste. Think about that for a minute. The total waste for our entire nuclear program that actually is dangerous to humanity is 650ish tons. Most of that was from really stupid periods in nuclear development. If we took a ratio of it compared to new modern reactors it wouldn't even exceed 50 tons.

Yes nuclear is green.
 
And still no storage for nuclear waste, even though everyone has been working on it for 40+ years. Untold billions of dollars spent on disposal with no permanent solution. We pay utilities a half a billion dollars a year in this country to keep their nuclear waste because there is nowhere to put it.

Yeah, sure is green. Glowing Green. :alien:
 
324,000 metric tons of nuclear waste in storage (and growing) that will last centuries. Yep, pretty clean - comparatively speaking I guess.

Compared to what you guys want to replace, it is most definitely cleaner. However, hey, fusion power will have absolutely no left overs I guess, eh? :)
 
Compared to what you guys want to replace, it is most definitely cleaner. However, hey, fusion power will have absolutely no left overs I guess, eh? :)

The physical shielding gets irradiated in a fusion reactor.

fusion reactors burn neutron-rich isotopes have harmful byproducts

Where are you going to get your Tritium supply from? A nuclear reactor - that's where.
 
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The physical shielding gets irradiated in a fusion reactor.

You will need to explain that to me in regards to what is leftover please. Are you saying the shielding will be the thing that needs to be thrown out? After all, there is always waste no matter the process or thing.
 
You will need to explain that to me in regards to what is leftover please. Are you saying the shielding will be the thing that needs to be thrown out? After all, there is always waste no matter the process or thing.
Nothing lasts forever, now does it? You going to build and fire up fission reactor and it will just last forever? No repairs,no upgrades - nothing?
 
The physical shielding gets irradiated in a fusion reactor.
You are utterly misinformed. We can process waste. We can store waste. A pool of water is storage and perfectly fine for the rest of our planets life. The actual amount of dangerous waste is laughably small and far more easy to handle and control than you think.
Disposal of low level waste is routine. The majority of modern high level waste is actually recycled now.

Low level waste barely tickles the meter after a decade. You can bury over 90% of it under your back yard at a depth of 10meters and quite bluntly never know it was there. It's not frangible material nor material that readily dissolves in water.

aSMR produce even less waste.
The troupe that nuclear waste is some kind of problem is just... wrong. It's an out of date concept that has no support in actual modern science.
 
Nothing lasts forever, now does it? You going to build and fire up fission reactor and it will just last forever? No repairs,no upgrades - nothing?
Look up "Neutron degraded structures".
 
You are utterly misinformed. We can process waste. We can store waste. A pool of water is storage and perfectly fine for the rest of our planets life. The actual amount of dangerous waste is laughably small and far more easy to handle and control than you think.
Disposal of low level waste is routine. The majority of modern high level waste is actually recycled now.

Low level waste barely tickles the meter after a decade. You can bury over 90% of it under your back yard at a depth of 10meters and quite bluntly never know it was there. It's not frangible material nor material that readily dissolves in water.

aSMR produce even less waste.
The troupe that nuclear waste is some kind of problem is just... wrong. It's an out of date concept that has no support in actual modern science.
The Fuel Assembly will be nuclear waste as well. As these parts get neutron degraded, they will need to be replaced.

A main issue with this kind of waste is no matter WHAT level it is - be it high or low, NO ONE WANTS IT. It's the whole waste disposal process - super expensive, tons of red tape, nowhere to really put it.

The water cooling needs of a Fission reactor will be huge as well, severely limiting the application sites available.

No one really answered the Tritium Fueling either. It comes from Fission Reactors. So does Fusion ever really replace fission or just supplement?

And of course the bottom line is will we ever get even close to a self-sustaning fussion reaction? Given the immense energy needed to sustain and confine the fusion reaction, I have my doubts.
 
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You do realize that being able to increase food production is the reason the world is in the fucked up state it's in right? The planet would never be able to sustain 7.5 billion people under normal conditions; and under those normal conditions a lot of the other problems we have nowadays like increasing power requirements would not be as big of a problem, or a problem at all.
In developed countries we're losing people, not gaining. Places like United States and Europe have an aging population, which means people aren't fucking enough. If we do gain people it's through immigration. The best solution to preventing an increase in population is education, not starvation.
 
Unfortunately nobody has figured out a better way. At least not for high energy production. There are thermal couples that are like the metallic strips in an old thermostat. They can create a voltage directly from heat but as I said, not practical for making any meaningful electricity. However, some of the plutonium powered space probes use this. Lump of plutonium produces heat from nuclear decay and the thermal couples use that to power the probe.

A fusion reactor will be completely different from any fission reactor. In fission, you want to keep the fuel cooled. Fusion, you have to keep it in hot plasma state.

Fusion has been such a difficult road for us because of the extreme requirements to create the reaction and sustain it. Either massive pressure like the sun does with gravity or massive amounts of heat. We're not so great at the pressure part on those levels and only barely with the heat option. But the reality is that if we don't try it'll never get built. It's entirely possible, just difficult. Building the first atomic bomb was also very difficult but we managed that one too.
Thank you for your reply.
Seems weird that boiling water is still a critical part of our energy cycle.
Devils advocate time.....
With conventional power and nuke plants, water is taken from a lake/river , deionized, boiled, run thru a turbine, condensed, run thru a cooling tower, and discharged back into the lake or river. Some of that energy is used to make electricity, but a lot of the unused heat goes into the environment . And water vapor is a bigger greenhouse gas than co2. So fusion power will also cause global warming, right?
 
Thank you for your reply.
Seems weird that boiling water is still a critical part of our energy cycle.
Devils advocate time.....
With conventional power and nuke plants, water is taken from a lake/river , deionized, boiled, run thru a turbine, condensed, run thru a cooling tower, and discharged back into the lake or river. Some of that energy is used to make electricity, but a lot of the unused heat goes into the environment . And water vapor is a bigger greenhouse gas than co2. So fusion power will also cause global warming, right?
Radiators are efficient, the exhaust heat is not relevant to "global warming" effect. It is all the other factors that people are discounting from this "perfect fusion reactor solution".
 
now what to do with the waste....yes it's a problem and i'll be the first to admit it. i also know that there are solutions. in the industry, nobody calls the used fuel nuclear waste. we call it spent or irridated fuel because it's still fuel.
That's just PR spin. Calling it waste, spent, or irradiated fuel is just to hide the fact we can't use this dangerous stuff. It's not like we can use this stuff for anything, so it's waste.
only reason we don't in north america is because it's cheaper to pull up fresh stuff out of the ground.
And there's capitalism at play here.
as for your comments, yeah i agree with you on capitalism. it has its place, but the purpose of it is to make money and nothing more. safety can go by the wayside...sometimes. the industry also knows that if there's a major failure of some sort, the plant will not be allowed to run again. that's a pretty big financial loss right there. it's taken many years to get there but it really is happening....slowly.
When failing costs money then you can't fail too much. So instead of a flat out meltdown you have a reactor that may leak. In my opinion nuclear power is just too dangerous in the hands of humans to operate properly indefinitely. What can fail, will fail. If a Fusion reactor fails then millions of dollars of equipment is damaged and maybe Brian was standing next to it eating a sandwich when things went wrong. In most other methods of generating electricity, the worst possible outcome is nothing compared to nuclear.
we should be using thorium which is far more abundant than uranium and remains hazardous for far less time. nuclear is probably the best of the worst because all of our power generation technology sucks when you get down to it.
Ah yes, thorium. There are no thorium reactors. The reason for this is always cost. If thorium reactors are successful then it'll put a lot of other power production out of business. Also thorium doesn't make weapons grade plutonium, which means it's even less profitable. Since thorium is "safer" they want to remove some of the safety regulations used in regular reactors to again, cut cost. Which there are safety concerns with thorium reactors as the byproduct is uranium-232/233, which is extremely toxic because it has a very short half-life. It's far worse than plutonium in terms of radiation output, like a magnitude of hundreds of times worse. Which again, can't be used for weapons since it's so dangerous. Wonder why Israel was so concerned about Iran building nuclear power plants, since the byproducts are used to build weapons, which seems to be a concern here in the United States as well. Are we interested in making energy or is the energy a byproduct of producing weapons grade plutonium?
 
The Fuel Assembly will be nuclear waste as well. As these parts get neutron degraded, they will need to be replaced.

A main issue with this kind of waste is no matter WHAT level it is - be it high or low, NO ONE WANTS IT. It's the whole waste disposal process - super expensive, tons of red tape, nowhere to really put it.

The water cooling needs of a Fission reactor will be huge as well, severely limiting the application sites available.

No one really answered the Tritium Fueling either. It comes from Fission Reactors. So does Fusion ever really replace fission or just supplement?

And of course the bottom line is will we ever get even close to a self-sustaning fussion reaction? Given the immense energy needed to sustain and confine the fusion reaction, I have my doubts.
Embrittlement doesn't work that way. When a neutron hits something with enough force it is degraded. This process is similar to how a photon degrades matter(ie sunlight) but much more high energy. Yes radioactive elements can be created via neutrons. No it isn't high level waste. No it is not generally capable of producing more radioactivity. Yes it generally is very short dangerous half-life's that are created.

The issue with people who have no actual contact with the nuclear industry is that they are told all nuclear waste is some horrific thing they should avoid. The reality is most of it is basically harmless. You can find more long term exposure in new york due to radon gas than you will EVER GET from working in a waste disposal site. What you don't seem to understand is most "waste" is less radioactive than every day encounters after an extremely short time. Most of the dangerous radiation is also alpha.... which can be shielded by a sheet of paper. The only time such material is dangerous is if you eat or drink it. Since most of the waste does not dissolve in water and will not decay on its own it is no different than radioactive ORE.

IE your fears are unfounded. Trust me when I tell you that you are exposed to more radiation from airplanes than you will ever be at risk from from nuclear waste. The amount of background radioactives in your life are far more a concern to you than a piece of graphite buried in a glass filled cask in the desert. Living down wind(50km+) from a coal power plant will give you more health risks from radioactivity than living next to a modern nuclear waste dump.

As to fusion power and its waste products.. Yes tritium is required to start an ITER design. After the reaction is stable however only deuterium and lithium are required to sustain the reaction. Fission reactors are not going to go away simply because sometimes you don't need to power half a planet from one reactor and there are certain things we need to power our society that can only come from a fission reactor(crapton of medical tech). Everyone has doubts for fusion. The reality is people think because the sun requires stupendous mass that that somehow invalidates the science. The reality is we pretty much know fusion can happen already and we know it will be massively power positive. The only challenge is finding out how to do that with our current technology or having to wait until we have the technology to actually make the thing work. This is not uncommon. We knew that cellphones and lithium batteries were a thing long before we as a species even had the ability to produce such things. Sometimes you have to wait for material science to catch up. Sucks but it is what it is.
 
Thank you for your reply.
Seems weird that boiling water is still a critical part of our energy cycle.
Devils advocate time.....
With conventional power and nuke plants, water is taken from a lake/river , deionized, boiled, run thru a turbine, condensed, run thru a cooling tower, and discharged back into the lake or river. Some of that energy is used to make electricity, but a lot of the unused heat goes into the environment . And water vapor is a bigger greenhouse gas than co2. So fusion power will also cause global warming, right?
Using dynamo(electric motor) generation is used because it is one of the most efficient ways to translate work to electricity. We still use it because of that single reason.
Steam is ridiculously efficient because its also self cooling and quick cycling. Using a steam loop allows you to transfer heat into kinetic energy which can then be used for work(trains) or power(when attached to an electric motor). Basically without going into serious nerd town because we can cool water with a relatively passive radiator before it "completes" its loop we can put more "heat" into it when it passes through the boiler(or heat exchanger). Since the process naturally lets us quickly remove and add heat we can "keep" more of that heats "work" when we transfer it via a turbine.

As to industrial heat... we as a species don't make enough heat to matter. If you turned off the sun tomorrow all the industrial heat on the planet wouldn't keep the state of Rhode Island warm enough to be habitable.
Ballpark the USAs waste heat should be around 250-450 Twh/y. The sun drops about 1300w of heat per square meter and the US is something like 9.8 trillion meters squared. Drop in the bucket doesn't describe our waste heat.

Also most power plants built now are closed loop. The heat is not added back into the environment by discharge because there is no discharge. There is waste heat transfer from radiant emission though.
 
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