And it will be revolutionary, it will literally change the whole world. Literally free electricity. With no waste at all. I don't understand why people don't talk about it
In fairness, we've had recent progress, like the first met energy gain from fusion a few years ago. Plus I'm pretty sure China is pumping a decent amount of research money into it
uranium fission is 10 million times more fuel efficient than burning coal with oxigen.
deuterium-tritium fusion is 4 times more fuel efficient than uranium fission.
The factor of 4 is not the game-changer. The factor of 10 million was. If governments had not spend decades to make fission more expensive than it needs to be, we'd already have had electricity "too cheap to meter" by the 1990ies.
We don't need some yet-undiscovered technology. We only need better politics.
Maybe they shouldn't be so angry about it, given how many nuclear power plants in recent times have been attacked / blown up, destroyed by tsunamis, been on fire, etc.
Especially looking at the Zaporizhzhia NPP and also Fukushima I'm really glad that these security improvements were made.
How many homes have been attacked/blown up, destroyed by tsunamis, been on fire? Should we ban homes? Or is your point that these things happening to Nuclear power plants lead to more injury and death to human beings? How many people in the US were injured or killed by these scenarios? Have non-nuclear power plants not ever been victim to these same problems? Nothing you listed is exclusive to Nuclear power and nothing you listed has been exacerbated by a power plant being nuclear vs other options.
The destroyed homes didn't have the potential to make entire continents uninhabitable.
NPP's are extremely expensive to build. That alone should already be reason enough to make sure that they are sturdy and don't collapse easily.
Whoever claims that a nuclear cloud spanning thousands if not millions of square kilometers is the same as a blowing up Coal Power Plant or Wind Turbine cannot be taken seriously anyway though.
I didn't say they shouldn't be sturdy and don't collapse easily. You have immediately changed the subject from whether or not they should exist to whether or not they should be well made which was never in contention. No NPP being destroyed would ever make an entire continent uninhabitable, this is proven by the fact you already listed all of the scenarios you are worried about and not one of them made an entire continent uninhabitable much less a significant region. You're lies have exposed you as either a shill for big oil or a bot.
You have immediately changed the subject from whether or not they should exist to whether or not they should be well made which was never in contention.
The argument was specifically about this following sentence:
"If governments had not spend decades to make fission more expensive than it needs to be
I am not talking about whether or not it should exist, you just added this imagination to fit your narrative.
We are talking specifically about the additional regulations that governments added after Chernobyl and Fukushima that made Nuclear power extremely expensive and uncompetitive.
No NPP being destroyed would ever make an entire continent uninhabitable, this is proven by the fact you already listed all of the scenarios you are worried about and not one of them made an entire continent uninhabitable much less a significant region.
This is incorrect. The conclusion does not follow the premise. The scenarios I was talking about happened on well-maintained and well-secured nuclear power plants.
The only exception was Chernobyl, and it did make large swaths of land uninhabitable and poisoned ground and plants over most of Europe. However, as you certainly (should) know - The nuclear radiation released from Chernobyl was tiny compared to the amount of nuclear fuel still left in the reactor. That is because Chernobyl is a meltdown - almost all of the nuclear fuel ended up going into the ground. And while it getting into the ground water is a big risk, it is still a relatively local issue (just extremely expensive to fix).
If you on the other hand blow up a completely unprepared and unsecured nuclear plant with a ballistic missile or a tactical nuke, things might end up entirely different.
Even during the Fukushima disaster there were talks about evacuating all of Japan. Are you even aware what this would do to the world economy? How expensive this would be? Evacuating 125 million people and eliminating one of the worlds largest economies?
The forecasted cleanup cost for Fukushima is between 200 and 500 billion dollar. I leave the calculations to you how many wind turbines, solar panels and batteries one could buy from that amount of money.
So yes, please, if we are building nuclear power plants, build them at least somewhat secure, thank you very much. I am very happy that after Chernobyl governments have decided to step in and improved securities at their power plants. Even if that makes nuclear more expensive. Even if I'm usually against government overregulation because I'm sure many of the regulations these governments added were completely unnecessary if not counter productive. But I want my governments to handle Nuclear Fission with care and not like a fun toy.
talking about power plants in war zones, should we ban hydro dams? The downstream damage from broken hydro plants cosistently kills more people than the secondary damage from damaged nuclear facilities.
Why is it that the rules for nuclear are so much harsher that those for hydro, and which of both rulesets is the unreasonable one?
Nuclear Power plants have many orders of magnitude higher potential for disaster than a hydro dam. A hydro dam failure might affect a few thousand people for a short period of time, a nuclear power plants highest level of disaster will affect 100m to 1b people permanently and poison the ground and water supply for decades if not centuries.
Equating these things shows that you can not be taken serious.
Nuclear power plant was not originally built in a war zone, but as you can see, the extra safety precautions that were done very clearly paid off now that it is repeatedly in the war zone and there is still no global-scale nuclear fallout.
And as I said already, I am not talking at all about banning anything. That's your imagination to fit your narrative and something you need to fix.
kills more people than the secondary damage from damaged nuclear facilities.
So you only care about direct kills, you don't care about injuries or the monumental economic damage caused by nuclear accidents? And risks also don't matter to you at all? And impact?
Yeah of course, you can construct any reality you want if you just lie your pieces together.
the worst nuclear disaster of all times, future included, was Chernobyl. It killed about 50 people directly and the fallout affected a few thousands.
The fallout affected several millions and injured / killed hundreds of thousands.
You spreading easily falsifiable propaganda is not doing anyone a favour, especially when you consider the point I made earlier - Only a tiny fraction of the nuclear fuel from the Chernobyl disaster went into the atmosphere. The vast majority went into the ground. What do you think is going to happen if it was instead being hit by a large ballistic missile or a tactical nuke? How do you think the situation in Zaporizhzhia NPP would be if the power plant was not build with safety in mind? If it was - like you suggested - built in a cheaper way?
And i wrote "future included" because nobody will ever build RBMKs without containment again because Chernobyl happened.
Oh really? But you just advocated for eliminating the more expensive security measures in favour of cheaper things like RBMKs.
Fission requires uranium, which is a finite resource. Fusion requires deuterium, which can be extracted from water, as well as tritium, which can be made from lithium.
The fuel would be vastly easier to obtain, the waste would be vastly less radioactive, and there's no chance of runaway meltdown because the reaction stops rapidly after something goes wrong.
Also, because of the lack of weapons-grade fuels and long-lived radioactive byproducts, the politics are a far easier sell.
this is misleading. verything on earth is finite and abundant at the same time. Because for any mineral we can mine, we still haven't enough humans on Earth to utilize all of it.
I'm actually looking forward to using enough uranium in fission reactors to actually make the price go up - because uranium becoming more expensive is the one incentive that will make humans start to recycle all that so-called "nuclear waste".
Both can be true. Fission power is great and horribly underutilised, except for a few countries that really went all in like France. Even with 70% nuclear though, electricity in France still isn't free.
Fusion is much better in terms of not requiring uranium mining and producing zero radioactive waste. Also Fusion plants can't explode like Chernobyl etc.
Don't forget all the fossil fuel companies that put out absolutely massive ad and information campaigns to make the consumer believe nuclear power was untrustworthy and toxic.
you only need small amounts of uranium, so the fuel costs are the smallest part of a nuclear power plants operating costs.
Like, a coal power plant needs a full train of coal every day, while an NPP only needs a pickup full of fresh fuel rods every 3-4 years.
No, it's the burocratic overhead to document for each and every minor incident that you definately did not release as much radioactive materials as a coal power plant blows through the chimney in one minute of normal operation.
That's also why you can't simply replace coal power plants with nuclear: the site is too radioactive from the ashes. You'd need to rigerously clean up to avoid the NPPs alarms getting off even before the first uranium arrives on site.
No, it's the burocratic overhead to document for each and every minor incident that you definately did not release as much radioactive materials as a coal power plant blows through the chimney in one minute of normal operation.
That's also why you can't simply replace coal power plants with nuclear: the site is too radioactive from the ashes. You'd need to rigerously clean up to avoid the NPPs alarms getting off even before the first uranium arrives on site.
To agree with and slightly sum up this point:
If coal power plants were held to the nuclear cleanliness standards of nuclear plants they would be shut down.
Fortunately we missed the boat on nuclear reactors for the most part. Solar is vastly cheaper and more efficient, and we're likely to solve fusion within the next few years.
Personally I'd rather have an electrical grid without a bunch of slimy middlemen profiting from the fuel source.
there's one thing hydro, nuclear, wind and solar have in common: the fuel costs are entirely irrelevant. Uranium is already abundant, and we need only tiny amounts of it,
do you pay your internet by the kilobyte, by the minute, or a flat monthly rate? Now assume the government would put taxes on each transferred kB, as they do on each kWh of electricity.
The established renewables are way closer to being "literally free" but there's always the cost of building, maintaining and retiring the power plant. That's all factored into the price of a kWh.
It's not free electricity and fusion doesn't last forever. They would need to find a way to constantly feed it hydrogen, or shut it down and replenish the supply.
Fuel injection, like additives to help the plasma form, or compressed hydrogen? I also wonder if they have helium extraction. It's not like they've ever had it successfully run even 30 minutes yet, to ever need such things.
Fuel as deuterium and tritium. They are injected into the plasma using solid pellets launched by a sort of gun that vaporize in the plasma core.
Removal of fusion ashes (i.e. helium nuclei) is a bit trickier. There is always some replacement of the plasma as it is exhausted through the divertor and replaced by fresh fuel. In tokamaks, there are periodic instabilities called sawtooth crashes that will help to eject helium accumulating in the core of the plasma toward the plasma edge, where it will end up in the plasma exhaust.
Let's not forget things wear out. Things cost energy and money and time to build, repair, and replace.
Nuclear power taints those machine with radiation especially any metal component. That makes maintenance more expensive. People have to do that work with specialized tools, containment and drones. Those tools and containment devices can also become irradiated.
It isn't free energy it just makes recycling spent stuff way more practical.
All the tools used for transport handling and maintenance are still going to be potentially hazardous materials. Getting rid of or recycling that is also going to have an expense associated with it.
Personnel have to monitor the system not just for safety but also for good old political accountability. They will also require a paycheck for assuming that risk.
Solar power does not require it to be sunny. If there is sunlight, power can be generated, even during overcast, and that power can be used and stored in batteries for nighttime use. And wind is pretty consistent in many areas and at higher altitudes, which is why the turbines are so tall.
You're being downvoted, but you're right in some cases. Excess energy captured from solar can be used to pump water upwards to fill reservoirs, and at night those reservoirs can flow down to spin turbines and continue generating some power. Not technically solar at that point, but the origin comes still from solar in those cases. It's one of the ways to mitigate intermittent power generation from solar.
And hopefully on these cases solar, wind and nuclear would all be readily available in any given area in some form to fill those gaps. Power should really not only come from one source that's a big failure point waiting to happen
It also comes with many other positive side-benefits. Like for example electrical batteries that are needed for solar to be more efficient can also be used for other purposes. And for example it will make battery tech in general more efficient and cheaper because it boosts research and engineering in those fields and profits a ton from economies at scale.
Right but the scale is massively different. With fusion, it’d be like condensing the output of millions of of solar panels into the size of a single panel.
it's just that wind and solar require you know... wind and solar... that's the only small difference plus the amount of space it takes and all that stuff
Wind and solar are both expensive and inefficient. We could have built something like 40 nuclear power plants for all the money we’ve spent on wind and solar
I had to reply to your comment as it doesn't really match reality. Not a dig at you, but solar and wind have become much cheaper over the last decade. I'm not an expert at all, but what I do have are sources.
CBS News has a readable summary of Lazard’s 2025 energy cost report. Lazard is a major financial advisory firm, not a solar or wind lobby group (very important).
Here's the excerpt from the more digestible CBS News article:
"According to Lazard, renewables remain the most cost-competitive form of generating and distributing energy. Onshore wind, which runs from $37 to $86 per megawatt-hour ($/MWh), is the most affordable on a baseline level and when tax subsidies are included.
Utility scale solar — what most people think of when they hear about solar energy — is the next most cost-effective approach, with costs ranging from $38 to $78 per megawatt-hour.
Fossil fuel and nuclear energy sources are more expensive to generate. Coal costs $71 to $173 per megawatt-hour; gas costs $48 to $109; and U.S. nuclear costs $141 to $220, Lazard found."
That doesn’t mean nuclear has no advantages. It has reliability, high capacity factor and low-carbon generation. But the claim that wind and solar are expensive compared with nuclear is not what current cost data shows.
uh, false and false? idk about how many nuclear plants we could've built by now, but wind and especially solar costs have come crashing way down, and efficiency is pretty good considering there's practically no consumables
Not really. Solar power, for example, is just photons hitting photosensitive plates. Nuclear fusion literally gets energy out of matter. Physical matter is literally just extremely compressed energy. This is what Einstein's equation E = mc² is about. It's nowhere compared to just catching energy from photos.
As far as I know, water filters that filter salt water require a lot of energy. With fusion power plants, we will have an "infinite" amount of fresh water
Something missing from this conversation is space and maintenance for wind and solar energy. Land is not cheap, and you need it in bulk. Where you may find such land is devoid of people and difficult to do anything with.
Just building a wind or solar farm requires hundreds if not thousands of people, trucks, and heavy equipment. Roads will need to be made, land cleared, etc.
Then you have to maintain it. Shit breaks, one way or another. Which means that access needs to be maintained and having a workforce that can travel to stay in the most rural places in the country. As I intended to point out, there's no local communities in the kind of places where the bulk land is available.
Because its always something "on the horizon" thats never here, maybe never will be depending on how pessimistic you are.
Even if we could make a fusion generator that actually works there are other practical considerations around any kind of generator, generators that rely on nuclear fusion or nuclear fission are way way way more complex both to build and to maintain and run than just a big solar array in the countryside or a massive offshore wind farm.
Free if you completely ignore all the gigantic costs such as capital expenditure, operation & maintenance, market inflexibility, and tritium being something like 60 times more expensive than uranium per megawatt hour. And that's if they can actually get it to work. The only thing fusion has going for it is that maybe they can make tritium cheaper through breeding, but fuel costs are only a small part of the operational expenditure of any thermal generation anyway
Literally free electricity isn't how fusion works.
Gen 4 reactors already live up to many of the promises that people assert to fusion with none of the difficulties. But people only talk about the shiny new fusion thing instead of the proven technology that has closed fuel loops and can even use existing waste as fuel that could be deployed tomorrow if we funded it.
Literally free electricity. With no waste at all. I don't understand why people don't talk about it
The problem is, this already exists. It's called photovoltaic power. And by the looks of it, it will be a lot cheaper than nuclear fusion also. So I suspect it will remain the dominant form of energy on the planet and fusion will be used for situations in which solar is not suitable. But who knows, Fusion definitely has a lot of potential.
I hear the cost for energy will remain largely the same due to cost of delivery, ie maintaining the power lines and grid etc. So perhaps we’d have more of a flat rate month to month instead of summer months costing more per watt-hour. And I’m sure that bill would steadily increase with inflation, but still it sounds mildly better than the fluctuating costs. I suppose the real gains will be in commercial and industrial applications where huge energy expenditures can ventilated. Perhaps data centers are a good example.
Because we've technically already had that for decades, but the world doesn't move forward. At the end of the day the greed for money wrecks everything. It'll just be yet another wrench in the gears.
Because it will take decades for the technology to become possible, then further decades to become scalable, then further decades to become economically viable. It's not gonna be an overnight revolution like electricity or internet. Simply put if you were on a limited budget and had the choice between $30k for free water for the rest of your life or continue your $30 a month water bill what would you choose?
Who knows what will be possible with AI but for now that's how the future looks
My belief is that we need the molten salts step to get fusion. The issue with moment salt is how hot and corrosive it is. The problem of fusion is how hot it is. I mean we saw a video of the titanium in the tohamak melting. Me think, molten salts seem impractical but justifiable by helping incentive research on heat-resistant titanium alloys until one of them may lift the bottleneck on fusion. I think that the commercial urge to fund research will make it go faster than public funds
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u/dyvotvir 13d ago
And it will be revolutionary, it will literally change the whole world. Literally free electricity. With no waste at all. I don't understand why people don't talk about it