Comment by himinlomax
5 days ago
There's just no economic case for fusion. It's useful research, but current fission does the job better, and we already have decades of proven reserves, centuries likely if we kept looking for new reserves ... and then thousands of years from sea water extraction.
There's also many paths to improved fission. Fast neutron reactors, thorium, small fast neutron reactors for industrial heat, thorium reactors, accelerator-driven subcritical reactors ... Millions of years of fuel available and new ways to use the output beyond boiling water for electricity.
Note that I'm not mentioning slow neutron SMR, they're mostly pointless and just an excuse not to build current and perfectly fine PWR/BWR/heavy water reactors.
I like the idea of the passively-safe, waste-reducing LFTR but it's still a materials science issue at this point, and there's no real solution in sight.
Fission still has this huge stigma about "nuclear=dangerous and bad" which clearly isn't true with the growing number of passively-safe designs... but nobody wants to fund development of those into proper commercial reactors.
Meanwhile, fusion is still different and futuristic enough to have support from governments and the general public.
> I like the idea of the passively-safe, waste-reducing LFTR but it's still a materials science issue at this point, and there's no real solution in sight.
Seems ironic that in a thread about fusion with loads of difficult technical challenges that will still require decades of research after 60 years of investment and research have already been poured into it, a minor issue of slight corrosion in LFTR requiring maybe a few years of research is seen as an insurmountable obstacle with "no real solution in sight".
The solution may already be here, in the form of ceramics already used in aeronautics. A French startup is working on a small reactor for industrial heat with them.
Yeah but I still think it would be a great scientific achievement and should be pursued.
Fusion has better security properties than fission, so perhaps it will find some use case in the far future.