This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
They're missing a fusion reactor capable of positive energy output?
"Tech bosses think warp drive might get us to Mars faster..."
I bet they think that wormholes are even better
Folds paper
Stabs it with a pen
That's the absolute worst analogy of wormholes as well. They don't fold space, so stop folding the piece of paper.
What? No.....
My whole life has been a lie
Explaining wormholes by folding a piece of paper is a bit like explaining tunnels by folding a piece of paper. It's totally not what's going on.
They don't fold spacetime, they don't need to, they are shortcutting through spacetime via higher dimensions. Rather like tunneling through a hill rather than going over the top.
Tech bosses think nuclear fusion is the solution
No they don't; this is literally the first thing I've ever read claiming that. Tech bosses are perfect happy to power AI with nuclear fission and don't give the slightest fuck about the waste.
(As well they shouldn't, TBH, since it really ought to get reprocessed anyway. But that doesn't excuse them for wanting to waste the power on bullshit.)
Also nuclear fusion has essentially zero waste.
That turns out to not be true, at least not with the tokamak reactors most groups are pursuing.
You see, at some point you need a shield around the reactor to actually absorb all the high energy particles released, and turn that energy into heat. That's the whole point of the reactor, to generate heat and run a turbine. You absorb those high energy particles with a "blanket", that's just what they call the shield around the reactor.
Here's the issue, absorbing all those high energy particles necessarily results in transmuting the material absorbing them. That blanket becomes brittle and eventually needs to be replaced. Not coincidentally, that blanket is also now radioactive, because you've bombarded it with protons and neutrons and it's now partially made up of unstable, radioactive elements.
So while fission reactors have radioactive fuel rods to dispose of, fusion reactors will have radioactive blankets to dispose of. Who knows if this is an improvement.
Who knows if this is an improvement.
The Max Planck Institute for Physics knows and spoiler, yes. Yes it is.
You see, at some point you need a shield around the reactor to actually absorb all the high energy particles released, and turn that energy into heat.
So we have to replace a few tons of shielding that's lightly radioactive every 2-6 years. That's literally a vehicle's worth of waste to power tens of thousands of homes.
If it ends up working though it's not a waste of power is it? And if it doesn't work then, oh well.
Big tech companies do a lot of cramp, but this one I actually don't really mind. You never know we might actually get the Star Trek utopia we've always wanted from this, it's unlikely but it's not impossible.
Quiet!!
If the tech brows wanna dump money into developing renewable energy systems, detaching themselves from our main power grid they currently destabilize. Let them!
I don't see why we are hating on the waste like this. Yes it's very dangerous waste, but the amount is quite small, and if we store them safely, as shown in Tom Scott's video on Nuclear Storage in Finland, it's actually a very good solution for the time being.
"if we store them safely" - here's the problem with the entire argument. Nobody wants to pay for it, so they won't unless they are forced to. Carbon capture is a viable technology but it costs money to implement at a net financial loss, so nobody uses that if they don't have to either. The problem is the same as always - nobody who stands to lose money gives a damn. The planet dying is somebody else's concern tomorrow, and profits are their concern today.
We've already paid for it though. That's why we built Yucca Mountain.
Are you talking about the USA? Because I don't see this mentality much outside of it.
But yeah, make it a law and force them.
At least in Germany it's the same. It gets ignored in the discussions concerning nuclear exit but it's actually the main reason why I'm not aggressively against it: we have save areas for nuclear storage but those fight bitterly to not have it. The areas which are currently used are... Not good. Paying someone else (such as Finland) is out of budget for both state and energy companies. The latter anyway want to do the running but not the maintenance and the building, state should pay for that.
It's really white sad for me. The (true) statement that the dangerous waste needs to be stored carefully got corrupted to "it can't be stored".
I think a even better solution might be to not unnecessarily waste energies 😉
Maybe Tom Scott should make a video about the Asse salt mine. It's where the "yellow barrel == nuclear waste" meme comes from look here a picture.
This stuff is the driving factor behind nuclear energy being a political no-go in Germany: We just don't trust anyone, including ourselves, to do it properly. Sufficiently failure-proof humans have yet to be invented. Then, aside from that: Fission is expensive AF, and that's before considering that they don't have to pay for their own insurance because no insurance company would take on the contract.
Fusion OTOH has progressed to a point where it's actually around the corner, when the Max Planck institute is spinning out a company to commercialise it you know it's the real deal. And they did.
It's also not as if there are not other nuclear power stations in existence. There is plenty of storage capacity as you say.
This is just the standard hating everything tech companies do because, AI equals bad
I hate on the waste that pushes AI in everything.
Ok but that's not my point.
Theyre missing the fact that cold fusion doesn't (currently) exist? (haven't read the article)?
But still right on though
They've seen it being always reached in computer games like Civilization
They think the hard part is in becoming the big boss to decide things. The civilization part is easy, just direct resources where you need the "cool thing completed" notification to appear.
So maybe they will invest to get it further. It's not a 9 women can make a baby in a month .. but sufficient funding for next gen nuclear and fusion will help progress.
Renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind power suffer from “intermittency”, meaning they do not consistently produce energy at all hours of the day.
If only we had some way of storing energy for use later. Oh well.
Lithium batteries and their associated wastes and byproducts are an ecological catastrophe though in fairness
We do not currently have the battery tech to have a fully renewables-powered grid where batteries are used for the regular dips in production wind and solar have.
We likely won't have infrastructure like that in place for decades.
Maybe AI can help us break the fusion hurdles. Oh. It's still telling people to eat rocks, just used to create waifu porn and as a mass spy application? Nothing else, really? Well shit.
I know you're being reflexively downvoted by who hate everything AI, but this is the sort of thing AI should be most useful for, which is finding patterns within large problem spaces with many variables.
They're mocking AI, why would they be being downvoted by people who reflexively hate anything AI?
Wow, I completely misread that post. Now I'm wondering if I replied to the wrong message or if my brain just completely crapped out.
Probably. Proxima fusion is using simulation-driven engineering to pave their way through the design space, no matter how you approach it it's gotta involve dimension reduction in some way and that's ML. They speak of AI but well it's a press piece.
LLMs or diffusion models? Nah, don't think so. This is actual engineers throwing statistics at a particular problem to identify what prototypes they should build, not techbros throwing shit at the wall.
Really shitty scaremongering article. I'd like to know how exactly increased investment in fusion could potentially make it unsuitable for public use, as the article claims?
Man this article is terribly off base compared to the title.
I was under the impression that the major two advantages of fusion were exponentially more power output, provided we can actually sustain it, and no radioactive byproducts....
It depends on the type of fusion.
The easiest fusion reaction is deuterium/tritium - two isotopes of hydrogen. The vast majority of the energy of that reaction is released as neutrons, which are very difficult to contain and will irradiate the reactor's containment vessel. The walls of the reactor will degrade, and will eventually need to be replaced and the originals treated as radioactive waste.
Lithium/deuterium fusion releases most of its energy in the form of alpha particles - making it much more practical to harness the energy for electrical generation - and releases something like 80% fewer high energy neutrons -- much less radioactive waste. As a trade-off, the conditions required to sustain the reaction are even more extreme and difficult to maintain.
There are many many possible fusion reactions and multiple containment methods - some produce significant radioactive waste and some do not. In terms of energy output, the energy released per reaction event is much higher than in fission, but it is much harder to concentrate reaction events, so overall energy output is much lower until some significant advancement is made on the engineering challenges that have plagued fusion for 70+ years.
Fusion will likely happen in this century. Fission is a great temporary power source to get us there alongside renewables.
The best way I have heard it described is that Fusion is going to happen next year but probably not in the next 12 months.
We think Fusion must be coming soon because we understand all of the fundamental principles around how it works, so what we need to do is put those principles into practice. For some reason though that doesn't quite work what we end up with is a machine that makes a lot of noise but doesn't really achieve anything
The real solution is the thing that the fossil fuel companies have been buying up the tech for and burying it for decades...batteries.
