Comment by jl6
4 days ago
Even if fusion is an expensive power source, it may still be desirable in areas which aren’t well suited to wind or solar.
4 days ago
Even if fusion is an expensive power source, it may still be desirable in areas which aren’t well suited to wind or solar.
If we figure it out, it might end up being cheaper than fission eventually.
Compared to fission? It's still quite unclear that fusion will provide improvements over fission.
Without any of the meltdown concerns a fusion powerplant is a lot simpler to actually build than a fission plant. It has a small fraction of the security, reliability, regulatory, etc concerns (not none, just way way less). Unless it's so marginal that it's barely producing electricity I'd be pretty surprised to find out we had Q>1 fusion and yet it couldn't out compete fission anywhere fission is practical.
Modern fission designs mitigate meltdown concerns well enough that I'm not sure the safety & security around a fusion plant would actually be any better/cheaper, although public sentiment may be enough of an advantage. Tritium & neutron activated metals are dangerous enough to require keeping the traditional nuclear plant safeguards IMO. As far as proliferation concerns go, I don't see any reason you couldn't breed plutonium in the neutron flux of a fusion reactor, & the tritium is clearly viable for boosted warheads.
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That's astounding, I've never heard anybody claim that the reactors would be simpler before! Do you have any estimates of anybody working on the problem that thinks that?
Every schemer I have ever seen is quite a bit more complex than a fission reactor. Often, designs will depend on materials that do not yet exist.
That said there is a tremendous variety of techniques that fit under the umbrella term of "fusion," so I'm hoping to learn something more.
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I think that it will depend on economies of scale.
People won't be afraid of fusion, fusion plants can't be used to make bombs, fusion plants could maybe explode, but they won't poison the nearby land (or the whole planet) for decades-eons.
> fusion plants can't be used to make bombs
Helion's reactor, if it works, could become a source of the cheapest neutrons on the planet. It would greatly enable nuclear proliferation by providing neutrons for breeding of fissionable material for bombs.
A 50 MW DD reactor would produce enough neutrons to make half a ton of plutonium per year. Remember, none of these neutrons have to be turned around to make tritium, as they would have to be in a DT reactor.
I wouldn’t bet on a sane response to it. People are afraid of 5G, vaccines, and even masks.
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