The new trouble with fusion and even near-future fission projects is that solar and wind costs have plummeted. It's a lot harder to get investment in anything else when solar is now $.03/kWh.
On the other hand, fusion/fission have the advantage of also working at night. Solar is cheap during the day, but at night it's the cost of solar + storage infrastructure + conversion losses.
It's also theoretically possible that working fusion could be cheaper than fission, because fission is as expensive as it is as a result of the perverse coalition of confused environmentalists and self-interested fossil fuel companies lobbying to make it expensive on purpose. But fusion doesn't have long-lived nuclear waste to contend with (not that modern fission reactors do either) and the fossil fuel industry is going to decline one way or another, so that leaves fusion (and fission) with more hope in the future, if the regulations can be fixed once the lobby for them to be purposely stupid wanes.
What if wind/solar + inefficient storage, conversion losses still turn out to be cheaper than fusion? I'm all for doing fusion research, but fusion might be a completely uneconomical solution to the energy problem.
> perverse coalition of confused environmentalists
I actually don't see how environmentalist have had any impact on the cost of fission. Unless, of course, you're just considering all safety costs the result of "confused environmentalists".
If so, you should seriously consider if you have maybe adopted some sort of perverted scientism as a quasi-religion. Because in reality, there's essentially consensus regarding required safety measures within the community of actual nuclear scientists, who have always been the driving force behind improved safety–starting with Richard Feynman during the Manhattan Project.
Literally the whole nuclear industry government, private and the public went pretty crazy after Three Mile Island and doubled down on those mistakes with Chernobyl. There was a massive bias against nuclear on pretty much every level. Fortunately this is now changing slowly (GAIN for example), at least in the government. Pretty much any not so well informed person is against nuclear, and most of them can not say why other then some wage Greenpeace slogan that is simply scientifically inaccurate.
Regulation is insanely high for lots of stuff that really is not safety critical. Citing for a nuclear project is insanely difficult. The regulated energy market (in the US) simply does not value long term 100 year assets in the way they are set up. Nuclear cites are discriminated against in terms of low carbon benefits and tax credits (Solar gets tax credit when dispatching negatively priced energy). Nuclear cites get routinely sued and the environmentalist know that every month of delay is costing them millions, because up front capital has massive interest. Innovation has come to a virtual stand still, regulation has made it essentially impossible to innovate in nuclear for anything but the most incremental changes. The government has utterly failed at coming up with anything regarding nuclear 'waste', and instead of using one of the many straight forward solution is is basically in political limbo while the nuclear plants still pay millions to the government every year.
If you even want the nuclear regulatory body to take a look at your new design, you have to pay them a lot of money. If you want them to actually regulate it, they will say 'Ok thanks, we get back to you in the next couple of years we don't know how long its gone take and remember that's gone cost you 100 million at least'.
The regulation have hard coded in them that a reactor needs to have certain features, like 'Must have system to cool steam'. Now great, what if my reactor isn't water cooled? Well, pay them a couple 100 million more and 10-20 years and they can probably work out what regulations they would apply to your design. People couldn't build the old designs cheaply and they couldn't design new ones without the government leading the way to a commercial system it was impossible.
Nuclear was on target of replacing fossil fuels in energy production and was growing exponentially and was on target to be the fastest energy transition in human history and then 1 single safety failure that killed nobody wiped out that whole tech tree (Yes that's overly dramatic).
So, I agree more safety regulations were needed, but instead the nuclear industry was basically killed, practically every outstanding project (and there were many) was cancelled and almost no nuclear plants have been built after that. The few that have been built are often close to existing once.
At the same time, coal plants that are MUCH, MUCH more radioactive are allowed to operate. In fact, a nuclear plant that was as radioactive as a coal plant would not be allowed to operate AT ALL.
You are mistaken. Grid level battery storage cannot provide baseline power for days, and until that's a reality we will need a baseline power source that can supply when there is no sun, wind (or hydro, wave etc where available). Fusion & fission plants are the sustainable alternatives for this sector.
> Developers have applied to build 139 GWac of large-scale solar projects in the territory of six grid operators – around five times what is currently online across the country – and that figure doesn’t even cover the entire United States. By any metric, we are looking at an unprecedented boom in solar development over the next five years.
> The six grid operator queues we investigated also showed more than 16 GW of battery projects which have filed for interconnection. And this number should not be too surprising to anyone who is watching the meteoric growth of energy storage.
> Per the US Energy Storage Monitor, from Wood Mackenzie Renewables & Power along with the Energy Storage Association (ESA), total energy storage deployed expanded by 60% in terms of energy and 300% on a power basis in the third quarter of 2018 versus the prior year. Going out mostly until 2023, the report noted that the front of the meter pipeline expanded to approximately 33 GW of power.
Natural gas picks up the slack until batteries (which everyone underestimates; we're going to have an enormous amount of energy storage cumulatively to go 100% low carbon) get a bit cheaper; wind, solar, hydro, and long distance transmission lines combined with utility scale storage is more than adequate to replace traditional base load (and all are possible today, not decades later if we started building fission/fusion commercial generators today).
Yeah, not gonna happen. Forget safety. It's just too expensive.
Batteries + large grids averaging out weather and load fluctuations, plus smart grids, plus electric car batteries as buffers when the car isn't needed, plus efficiency gains lowering demand, plus some gravity storage, plus some natural gas.
Nuclear power is actually quite useless, because it's not baseload that's needed when you want to quickly react to changing weather conditions or load, it's peakers (i. e. gas)
Grid level storage (with wind and solar) can, however, so destroy the market for baseload that nuclear (fission or fusion) become completely excluded.
There needs to be backup for the occasional times solar/wind/batteries are not enough, but hydrogen (made during the high solar/wind times) is likely cheaper for that than nuclear fission or fusion would be.
For domestic power requirements just change building regulations to require a Powerwall style battery and solar panels in every new house. That plus integrating all the electric cars that sit idle all day and the problem gets noticeably smaller. Add in all the old EV batteries and it gets better still <https://easyelectriclife.groupe.renault.com/en/outlook/energ....
Are there really any occasions when there is no sun, no wind, no hydro over the whole of Europe? Better east-west interconnects and use of Norwegian hydro as pumped storage should help too.
Not perfect but very scalable and can be implemented a little at a time as the baseload fossil fuel stations slowly go out.
This is incredibly out of touch. Ignoring the lack of available materials to put a huge battery in every home, the cost is currently about a quarter of the median yearly income across the EU. Adding that much cost to every home is a non-starter.
Investments in fusion is the most rational long term energy investment.
* Fusion has the potential to increase the amount of energy we generate by several orders of magnitude.
* Fusion has the potential to be much cheaper than $.03/kWh.
* We have a near unlimited supply of deuterium is the seawater. All countries in the world can gain energy independence.
* Countries cannot claim a nuclear weapons research program is really a nuclear fusion power research program, like they can with a nuclear fission power research program.
* Fusion energy does not suffer from diseconomies of scale. As we produce more solar panels it becomes more expensive to produce more solar panels. As we place solar panels in the best location the next batch will have to use the second best location. These diseconomies of scale also apply towards the current generation batteries that solar panels relay on.
* Some problems, including life or death problems like removing CO2 from the air or desalination of water can be solved much easier with an abundance of energy.
> Fusion energy does not suffer from diseconomies of scale. As we produce more solar panels it becomes more expensive to produce more solar panels. As we place solar panels in the best location the next batch will have to use the second best location. These diseconomies of scale also apply towards the current generation batteries that solar panels relay on.
Is this true? Why would solar panel cost go up if you make more? Is there some rare-earth element that's a bottleneck resource?
Also, we're nowhere near using up space for putting solar panels. They're less efficient in places with cloudy weather or in latitudes far from the equator, but otherwise any place to install a solar panel farm is as good as any other; choice of location is dominated mostly by convenience, cheapness of land, proximity to power lines, local politics, and so on. We've only used up a tiny percentage of all the "good spots" to put solar panels.
The current diseconomies of scale hitting solar panels is that we have a limit on the number of batteries we can produce, as we are expanding our battery production as fast as humanly possible. We can use solar cells to offset peak performance, but until the storage problem is solved we can't consider using them as a primary power generation at scale in markets demanding 24hr energy access.
I agree that storage is a problem if you get most of your energy from solar, but in most places we're still in the mode of "on a sunny day we just burn a less coal or natural gas".
In the long run it may become a bigger problem. Pumped hydroelectric storage should work great in places where the geography is amenable, and regular battery technology is getting better.
Wind and solar also don't work well for powering spacecraft, space stations, or anywhere else in the solar system further away from the sun than Earth. The surface of Mars or Ceres, for example.
Nuclear actually doesn't work well for spacecraft either, because there's no convenient way to get rid of all that excess heat. It might work well on Mars or Ceres, but solar isn't all that bad; you'd just need more panels for an equivalent amount of energy as you'd need on Earth.
For nuclear propulsion you just use the propellant to cool the reactor. You are still going to want to have a bunch of propellant with a fission or fusion reactor and, like a chemical engine, you can use it as a coolant when it enters the engine.
RTG's are pretty damn good for spacecraft. But they are dangerous to launch. The nice thing about fusion is that a RUD doesn't matter from a nuclear perspective.
I'm talking about spacecraft for humans. Going fast is much more important for humans than robots and nuclear is the only way to go. (BTW RTG's are also nuclear, just really low power and don't allow for adjustable output)
> * Countries cannot claim a nuclear weapons research program is really a nuclear fusion power research program, like they can with a nuclear fission power research program.
Weapons are a physics problem, where you're trying to direct large amounts of energy at unwilling recipients. Nukes are so effective and so feared because they carry a huge amount of energy in a relatively small package. Being able to, as you put it, "generate several orders of magnitude" more energy will almost certainly result in new, better or more destructive weapon systems being devised.
> Being able to, as you put it, "generate several orders of magnitude" more energy will almost certainly result in new, better or more destructive weapon systems being devised.
We already use fusion technology in nukes. Hydrogen bombs work by using a fission reaction to start up an uncontrolled fusion reaction.
The hard part is controlling the fusion. So, I disagree - learning how to control fusion will not result in better weapons (at least, from a destruction standpoint).
On the other hand, our current nuclear bombs initiate a fusion reaction with a fission reaction. The radiation comes from the fission. If fusion research finds a way to initiate nuclear fusion in a payload small enough to fit in a warhead that does not make use of heavy elements then we will not have to worry about radiation poisoning, one of the most horrific aspects of current generation nuclear bombs. This would result in a less deadly bomb while still having the current or higher levels of deterrence. It could be seen as a net positive.
Fallout looms large in the public imagination but it's the giant explosions and loss of infrastructure that would cause the vast majority of deaths in a nuclear war. A bomb offering "all the explosive power of fission-triggered fusion weapons, but clean enough to use routinely" would be a terrible technology for humans to invent.
I'm not convinced such a bomb would be routinely used. It doesn't break MAD. The current trend in warfare is towards precision strikes, and this is pretty much the opposite of precision.
I am convinced that, in the case that there is a global thermal nuclear war, it would be much better for humanities' long term prospects if there was no radiation involved.
> As we produce more solar panels it becomes more expensive to produce more solar panels.
This is the complete opposite of the truth. As we produce more solar panels it has become cheaper to make them. Solar has tracked down an experience curve where costs decline 20% (or more) per doubling of cumulative production.
Most of the articles I read, suggest most sub 3cents /Kwh were only achievable in certain location, certain peak timing, and assume Cheap Capital from Government or other funds, and make barely any profits unless cost reduction are even faster than the current trend.
So from an investment point of view, both Nuclear Fission like traveling-wave reactor or Nuclear Fusion are still worth while. And still required as baseload
Although I think Solar Price isn't the main point anymore. It is Battery, Super Solid state Battery that is cheap will make an even bigger impact. Imagine Everyone's home has an PowerWall like devices that offer 3x more Cycles than current battery and 3x the energy density.
