From Durham University:
Fusion reactors could become an economically viable means of generating electricity within a few decades, and policy makers should start planning to build them as a replacement for conventional nuclear power stations, according to new research.
Researchers at Durham University and Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, have re-examined the economics of fusion, taking account of recent advances in superconductor technology for the first time. Their analysis of building, running and decommissioning a fusion power station shows the financial feasibility of fusion energy in comparison to traditional fission nuclear power.
The research, published in the journal Fusion Engineering and Design, builds on earlier findings that a fusion power plant could generate electricity at a similar price to a fission plant and identifies new advantages in using the new superconductor technology.
Professor Damian Hampshire, of the Centre for Material Physics at Durham University, who led the study, said: “Obviously we have had to make assumptions, but what we can say is that our predictions suggest that fusion won’t be vastly more expensive than fission.”
Such findings support the possibility that, within a generation or two, fusion reactors could offer an almost unlimited supply of energy without contributing to global warming or producing hazardous products on a significant scale.
Fusion reactors generate electricity by heating plasma to around 100 million degrees centigrade so that hydrogen atoms fuse together, releasing energy. This differs from fission reactors which work by splitting atoms at much lower temperatures.
The advantage of fusion reactors over current fission reactors is that they create almost no radioactive waste. Fusion reactors are safer as there is no high level radioactive material to potentially leak into the environment which means disasters like Chernobyl or Fukushima are impossible because plasma simply fizzles out if it escapes.
Fusion energy is also politically safer because a reactor would not produce weapons-grade products that proliferate nuclear arms. It is fuelled by deuterium, or heavy water, which is extracted from seawater, and tritium, which is created within the reactor, so there is no problem with security of supply either.
A test fusion reactor, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, is about 10 years away from operation in the South of France. Its aim is to prove the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy.
Professor Hampshire said he hoped that the analysis would help persuade policy-makers and the private sector to invest more heavily in fusion energy.
“Fission, fusion or fossil fuels are the only practical options for reliable large-scale base-load energy sources. Calculating the cost of a fusion reactor is complex, given the variations in the cost of raw materials and exchange rates. However, this work is a big step in the right direction” he said.
“We have known about the possibility of fusion reactors for many years but many people did not believe that they would ever be built because of the technological challenges that have had to be overcome and the uncertain costs.”
“While there are still some technological challenges to overcome we have produced a strong argument, supported by the best available data, that fusion power stations could soon be economically viable. We hope this kick-starts investment to overcome the remaining technological challenges and speeds up the planning process for the possibility of a fusion-powered world.”
The report, which was commissioned by Research Council UK’s Energy Programme focuses on recent advances in high temperature superconductors. These materials could be used to construct the powerful magnets that keep the hot plasma in position inside the containing vessel, known as a tokamak, at the heart of a fusion reactor.
This advancing technology means that the superconducting magnets could be built in sections rather than in one piece. This would mean that maintenance, which is expensive in a radioactive environment, would be much cheaper because individual sections of the magnet could be withdrawn for repair or replacement, rather than the whole device.
While the analysis considers the cost of building, running and decommissioning a fusion power plant, it does not take into account the costs of disposing of radioactive waste that is associated with a fission plant. For a fusion plant, the only radioactive waste would be the tokamak, when decommissioned, which would have become mildly radioactive during its lifetime.
###
Could become economically feasible in a couple of decades? Think I’ve heard that before. I put that right up there with new battery technology will make solar and wind power worthwhile. Fossil fuels will be with us for many, many decades to come.
It is the same crock they have been feeding us for over fifty years.
Longer than that. I recall hearing the promise of fusion reactors in the 1950s; that was about sixty years ago. Nope. Nothing yet. I’m betting not in my lifetime.
You beat me. I only read about fusion producing power by 2000 back in 1978.
Yeah, and AGW “could ” cause the world to get ” as much as ” 6 deg. C warmer …..
It has been suggested that a small compact fusion reactor could help pigs to fly.
I believe the correct phrase is “Fusion: the energy of the future, and it always will be”. That being said, I would truly like to see it work someday.
I really don’t understand, when a fusion related article appears, why so many are so dead set against it.
We know fusion works and has enormous potential as an energy source.
The fact that it is not working as a practical source right now is no reason to dismiss it out of hand. If a way can be devised to control the process then … power source.
I find the comments on any fusion related ‘article’ to be somewhat akin to what one might have expected (were the net around back then) when individuals, dreaming of flight, back in 1900 said ‘ah … Internal Combustion Engine… just what I needed”. Nay sayers would be babbling on about how man had been dreaming about flight for thousands of years and how we have had it all before.
Fusion ‘works’ with absolutely no doubt. The problem, as with flight back in 1900, is that the technology to make to make it feasible as an energy source is only just becoming available. So, sure, we have been talking about it for decades. We dreamed of flight for thousands of years before the technology became available – What’s yer point?
Very well stated comment. The issue has been lack of proper funding. See my website on fusion at: http://www.fusion4freedom.us and find the article of mine “Who Killed Fusion” and explore the science sections and news sections on fusion. We must get it done. There is no other realistic energy solution for a world projected to have 9 billion people by 2060. And we must address all energy sectors including transportation, industrial, commercial agricultural, and electricity Fusion ultimately can be used to produce synthetic liquid and gaseous fuels for aviation and can be used to “burn up” 75+ years of fission actinide decay chain waste.
@3×2
You’re probably on the youngish side I’m guessing. Those of us who’ve been around a while have been hearing that fusion was “just around the corner” for an awful long time. It’s the boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome, really. Personally, I’d love for it to be true, but I’ve been to this rodeo too many times to think this is “IT”.
I am against fusion reactors as it will be impossible to have world “progressivism” if fusion works.
Even if fusion reactors work really well, that doesn’t mean progressives won’t try to ban them. Fossil fuels work great, but they’re still working hard to get them banned.
And it could be that the hot plasma in the tokamak container could emanate secret wavelengths causing the world’s carbon dioxide molecules to increase and multiply. CO2 molecules comprise four tenths of 1% of known greenhouse gases, so the gravity of the threat is apparent. I have heard through back channels that Al Gore has his team of physicists reviewing the various fusion projects, and their findings are alarming. Yet none of the prestigious science journals, not even Nature, will publish Mr. Gore’s papers (Al thinks they have been bought off by cheap energy capitalists). Michael Moore won’t even return his phone calls. Word is Al is taking the hundreds of millions he got when he sold his cable channel to Qatar and producing a new movie on his own called An Incanescent Truth.
Tom, they comprise 4 hundreds of 1 %.
Greenpeace is against nuclear fusion power.
It’s a great pity about the painfully slow progress on fusion power. Had it been viable in say 1975 the global warming movement would have been stopped dead in its tracks.
For those who remind us that nuclear fusion has always been only 20 years away remember this: How many years from Leonardo’s fantasy flying machines to the Wright brothers flights? Almost 500 years. [NOTE: I make no claims about who invented powered flight or planes.]
http://m.eet.com/media/1176656/davincinflyinghelicopter_010313.jpg
The performance of the fusion reactors has improved continually over the past six decades, with multiple orders of magnitude increases in plasma temperature, density and confinement time. We are currently within a factor of 100 or less from a positive energy balance fusion experiment, so I think we will see success here within the coming decade. However, getting from a sustained fusion facility to a commercially viable fusion based power generator will take longer, barring some breakthrough.
Wow. I am impressed, something has gotten better over the last 60 years, that beats most things, and certainly me. I’ve gone a bit downhill in the last decade or so, but still I need a lot more to be impressed by technological advances over 60 years. Before I am really impressed show me something like the advances in the airplane from 1903 to 1963.
tomwtrevor,
Or like the advances in naval ships from 1880 to 1940.
within a factor of 100 ? so that means they have to improve by a factor of 100 to be viable … good lord … THEY ARE NOT EVEN CLOSE … no wonder no private investor wants to get involved … stick with thorium reactors boys … just as safe and IT WORKS RIGHT NOW … fricking rent seeking morons …
Seems I have heard dat tune a few times before. Always going to be great, always PR releases, but never any evidence of practicality even at a micro level.
Only a factor of 100, wow. So we got to that in 60yrs we will get to break even energy after we have burned all the co² FF powering up experimental fusion reactors, who, like the massive gravity of the sun, cannot contain the plasmas generated.
Or like the advances in computer/electronic hardware in the last THIRTY years.
Within a factor of 100 is close when initially we were off by a factor of a billion or more.
Fusion performance, measured as a combined temperature and confinement time at a useful density has improved considerably faster than the Moore’s Law pace of improvement in semiconductors.
This progress is happening even though we are not pursuing fusion very aggressively currently, probably because there is still plenty of cheap oil and gas.
We can sustain the reaction. Just not as sustained as might be useful right now (for the nay sayers out there that think fusion is just some wet dream) …
“3×2
October 3, 2015 at 11:51 am”
The Tsar was a 3 stage thermo-nuclear device however, only two of the stages were deployed and detonated, The fear being too much fall out if the 3rd stage was detonated, so was excluded. The estimated yield was ~56Mt TNT, more than all the conventional bombs dropped in WW2. As I understand it, in any thermo-nuclear device, the second stage is fusion.
I first heard “within a few decades” when I was a kid watching those news reels in the 60s. Then I saw updates in magazines in the 1970s and again in the 1980s and usenet during the 90s and it has been a constant stream of “breakthroughs” on the web ever since.
Not that I’m hoping against it but like many I think the molten salt (LFTR) design of fission will be what fusion always promised to be but never made it to.
“where are all the flying cars?” as a genuine old fogey, I looked in awe at a giant curtain over a movie screen ( long ago- 1955 ) embellished with rockets flying tourists to the moons of jupiter, etc. right out of buck rogers. oh well.
Me as well, TRM. LFTR looks more viable than fusion.
Last I checked, we were still having some materials engineering problems in LFTR. The salt eats most of the current materials so bad that all the plumbing has to be replaced every two years or so. That means it isn’t viable commercially until the corrosion problems are overcome.
They keep on talking about Tokomaks as if they actually work. It would be nice to show that they do, before talking about the economics.
There would be no way to render them uneconomical, if they actually worked.
It is NOT economics that stands in the way of ANY alternative energy.
Most of those schemes simply don’t produce any net energy availability. It is the technology that doesn’t exist, not the economics.
g
Tokomaks do actually work. They have had fusion reactions in them that produce measurable energy output. Just not enough to balance the energy input to run them. That’s what all the research is about.
It actually says a few, not a couple. Few means at least three, I am pretty sure.
So, this is a non-story. Idle musings.
People always overestimate the effects of new technology at short term, and underestimate them at longer term. That is, people are first surprised by how long it took before the stuff became available, but then they are surprised how profoundly it has changed the world.
I believe fusion will come, and takes decades still, but it comes probably by 2050 and is in wide use by 2100.
The difference between fusion and batteries, is that we know that if we can surmount the containment problem, fusion will work. The problem is we don’t even have a potential storage technology that will work.
In “Back to the Future II” I believe that the DeLorean used a compact Mr Fusion unit to travel forward to 2015. Marty should be arriving any minute now and, when he does, I’ll get a look at that tech.
Sure, its all tickeyboo if you first assume the availability of the necessary adamantium / vibranium / unobtanium alloys within those decades…
The Administranium atoms suck up all the energy produced, so energy balance is very hard to achieve.
Excuse me…
They want to debate the economics of something which isn’t yet even technically possible?
That’s what they always do, to make a living. Have a heart …
I’d rather have a brain than a heart. Hearts can be very misleading–that’s what Liberals/Progressives claim for their superiority.
You can make fusion energy economically viable overnight with the stroke of a pen.
You simply impose a tax on oil. Like $1M per barrel, and give the money to fusion reactor builders.
Economic problem solved.
So let’s get with it.
That’s how the economists would do it.
But economists can’t solve any of the scientific (basic Physics) and Engineering problems.
It takes scientists and engineers to do that, unless it is already known to be impossible.
Still waiting to see how Earnshaw’s Theorem comes into play in this.
g
Ye cannae change the laws o’physics, Keptin . . .! 😉
Oh yeah? You’re going to believe a Canadian who’s acting the role of a Scotsman on a TV show?
No matter what the accent ….. Ye cannae change the laws o’physics.
Ye cannae change the laws o’physics, Keptin . . .! 😉
But ye can certainly build shit that, yesterday, no one believed possible.
Excuse me…
That is just what High Tech companies do every day, and they do it very well.
Lots and lots of LENR news happening too!
http://www.e-catworld.com/
That site is about as reliable as SkepticalScience. Keep your eyes on Brillouin. If anybody in the Lenr space has a chance, it is them. And increasing credible third party data is coming in., from SRI. 5x unity. There is little doubt LENR exists as a function of the weak force. (Classic fusion is the strong force.) but there is great doubt as to whether it can be engineered into useful energy production. See my long subsection on this in the recognition chapter of The Arts of Truth. With references. Dated YE 2012.
The reports on Brillouin do give me a glimmer that maybe somebody at that company understands it a bit better than anyone else or is just plain luckiest person EVER. According to the testers at SRI they are the only ones who can control that massive heat spike into something useful like a square wave. Turn it up, down and keep it going. They might be right or right for the wrong reasons but they are way ahead.
I read some of their documents. They switch from an atom size to a K-shell size to a nucleus size with a surprising ease. I would like to see a positive proof that a reaction they outline actually happens – be it neutrons, X-rays, whatever. Until then I am a skeptic.
Woodford Equity has recently invested $49 million (in addition the Darden’s $10 million) in Industrial Heat. They claim this was after 2.5 years of “rigorous due diligence.” I believe this mean they must have seen an E-Cat working and climbed all over the commercial 1 MW plant that has now been running about seven months.
More on E-Cat: http://fortune.com/2015/09/27/ceo-cherokee-investment-partners-low-energy-nuclear-reaction/
Whoa.. Tom is my neighbor. Need to talk to him about this one.
I agree. I’ve been Rossi’s blog for years now, and he seems to be the closest to commercialization. He has had a 1MW plant operating in NC for a client for 6 months now. This story reminds me so much of the Write Brothers. They were flying for 5 years before they could get their hometown newspaper to make the effort to walk over and see what was up. Whats up with that?
Geez, where is spell check when you need it?!
Are you saying that somebody has a functioning Nuclear Fusion Reactor, that actually produces electricity (or even steam) continuously from a production sized fusion fuel source, in a contained controlled environment.
For the purposes of this question, I accept 1 MW (net, net output) as a “production size”.
Presumably such a thing can be scaled up.
So far, the only fusion reactor I’m even aware of is the National Ignition Facility’s whack-a-mole machine, that can scrunch a pea sized fuel pellet maybe once a week or something useless like that, and I don’t think the fusion energy output is even detectable compared to the total legacy energy going into that building.
So where can we see a picture of this garage sized weak force machine. I thought the weak force was contained within the nucleus ??
Wasn’t Rossi ALLEGEDLY jailed in the 1990s? Wasn’t he ALLEGEDLY convicted of tax fraud?
In answer to G.E Smith’s question. “So where can we see a picture of this garage sized weak force machine.” http://andrea-rossi.com/1mw-plant/
The 1 MW is from four 250 kW reactors shown bottom center. The 50 smaller E-Cats shown inn the center are just on stand-by.
Looks like the oompa loompas moved on from chocolat to fusion.
If this guy is really pumping out a 1/4 MW thermal for 6 months, has US patents in place; then it’s time for him to stop all of the cloak and dagger BS and let some real independent Scientists and Engineers have an unfettered look at the machine.
If “this guy” refers to Andrei Rossi and his U.S. patent application, please note a patent is a granted commercial franchise based on novelty and lack of prior disclosure. A patent in no way implies something works. And I would respectfully suggest that 1/4 MW may be more in the magnitude of 1/4 mW. One needs to due their due diligence on Rossi before coming to any conclusion but frankly the physics and chemistry is not there and the claims are highly suspect.
Gracias, Ric. I have something new to study… Fascinating.
They have been economically viable in a few decades for as many decades I have been around, and I was born when President Truman was in office.
I would prefer to see Thorium come on line sooner in any event.
I overlapped FDR by half a year so have heard this wolf cried many times , too .
One of these times it’s bound to be true .
Amen to Thorium. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors. Someone is proposing to make them nuclear waste burners. Migh get LFTRs in the back door.
http://copenhagenatomics.azurewebsites.net/pdf/CA_Whitepaper2014.pdf
liquid flouride + cooling water. Keep me far far away from that catastrophe waiting to happen.
liquid fluoride and water ?? add a couple of egg whites and you can get my grandfather’s wall paper paste; which can be solidified to make pasta.
That’s why they call it pasta isn’t it ?? And also why I don’t eat any geometry, or color, or shape of pasta.
g
that’s liquid fluoride !!
Stop with the spell fixer. That’s liquid fl-ou-ride !
It isn’t liquid flouride. It’s molten salts containing flouride such as FLiBe. They are non-reactive in water.
OMG, Beryllium!!!! (sigh)
Peter Sable: There is no possible chemical reaction between the liquid fluoride salts and water. The fluorides in a liquid fluoride reactor are salts of elements such as Lithium, Beryllium, and Zirconium. They will not react chemically as they elements are in a more tightly bound state than hydrogen and oxygen in water.
Obligatory reminder that the USA has run a Thorium fuel in the past, done molten salt already, and present CANDU reactors will eat your choice of U or Th or MOX mixed oxides or various waste “spent” LWR fuel. It doesn’t need a long lead time or “development”. Just cut a P.O. to the Canadians for one of the best reactors in the world. (As a Yank that pains me to admit… they play better hockey too, darn it… 🙂
And another check for $1BB just for the heavy water required. It works, but there’s a reason the world isn’t filled with CANDUs.
and they are built sideways to boot
😉
I’m not at all concerned about the financial viability of fusion reactors. They are a cinch to pay off in spades.
What I am concerned about is their actual ability, (not yet demonstrated), to make any net energy available to the power grid.
That would be nice to have as well as a financial success story.
g
So what. If the transportation sector isn’t electrified it won’t mean squat. And you better believe it won’t be cheap! It took over 100 years for the current fossil fueled power generation technology to get to its current state and its still a work in progress.
Does not have to be. “Fossil” fuels can be made from the basic elements, just takes lots of power. I even understand “fossil” like fuels can be extracted from sea water, certainly coal (CTL). So there will never be a natural shortage of liquid hydro-carbons on this rock.
Yes, research on fusion reactors goes way, way back. I had a friend who was an expert in this field who was working on this challenge way back in the late 1970’s. Theoretical work, of course, nothing concrete back then.
I toured the experimental Tokomac (sp?) at Los Alamos in 1978. How’s that working out?
MIT LENR Cold Fusion 101 IAP 2015 Live from Cambridge, MA
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2f5qf1
Here we go again, sadly it sounds a lot like the warmists crying for more funding. This is now only a few decades away has been voiced for what now? about 5 decades? But to be honest I do hope it happens sooner.
The left wont like them any more than they do fission reactors.
Can’t help but think that by now we should either have made or broke this canard. Maybe if we had invested a significant % of the vast sums used demonising plant food we would by now have an answer?
[Identity thief strikes again. -mod]
Fusion reactors have been two decades away for the past 4 and a half decades.
Like
*snore*
I head the same claim 20 years ago. It’s true that fusion reactors will be “economically viable,” just as soon as we figure out how to maintain the reaction and transfer the heat into steam to drive turbines. These are the same major problems we faced 20 years ago.
Fusion is the power of the future, and always will be. ;->
A French Nobel in physics said, ‘Fusion is a very pretty idea. We just put the Sun in a box. The only problem is, we do not know how to make the box.’
Essay Going Nuclear gives the reference.
Ha ha ! they still don’t know how the sun works…pg
Source : http://www.liberation.fr/sciences/2010/08/10/nucleaire-arretons-iter-ce-reacteur-hors-de-prix-et-inutilisable_671121
My approx. translation:
The cost of Iter went from 5 to 15 billion euros. Other research funding might suffer. This is the catastrophe we were expecting. We need to stop that.
(…)
Three major difficulties exist: keep plasma stable, produce large amounts of tritium, invent materials capable of keeping the plasma in a vacuum, in a box of thousands of cubic meters. Only after 2019 Iter will start studying these issues. We believe the hardest challenge is the third one: irradiated by very energetic neutrons (14 MeV) produced by fusion, the container walls will lose their strength. We have been told that we could imagine a material both porous and impervious, isn’t it a contradiction? Nobody has demonstrated that it isn’t.
Which French Nobel?
Here is an extract from an interview of Pierre Gilles de Gennes:
Source http://www.lesechos.fr/12/01/2006/LesEchos/19582-047-ECH_recherche—le-cri-d-alarme-d-un-prix-nobel.htm
Main points:
– We need to understand small scale experiments before building larger experiments.
– We can’t completely explain plasma instability.
– Superconductor are very fragile.
– High speed neutrons generated are comparable to H-bomb.
Well he should have his Nobel taken away.
A Physics Nobel should know that the sun works by gravity, which sucks; and at about 860,000 miles in diameter, they are too damned big to put in a box on earth. Besides they are dangerous, and won’t pass OSHA standards.
But he’s correct of course that we do not know how to make a box which blows instead of sucks, which is all we have to work with, and you need something outside the box to push on that so it doesn’t splode.
Was it Isaac Newton who said that each force has an equal and opposite reaction ??
So you need an infinity of boxes to contain each other. That’s why Fusion will always be the energy of the future.
Earnshaw’s theorem says there is no such box. (well based on the coulomb force which is the only other long range force besides gravity (which sucks).)
>>the sun works by gravity, which sucks.
Sounds like they need to make an artificial gravitational sucky machine. But not too powerful – we don’t want to all end up inside it….
R
It would be nice if someone actually built a working model of a fusion reactor first before discussing their economic feasibility.
I remember the late Carl Sagan (with whom I have a complicated relationship) was very worried towards the end of his life that those who craft public policy were too ignorant of basic scientific principles to direct the flow of the funds and projects that our technologically advanced society requires, in a direction beneficial to the public. Now, 20 years after his death, it seems like his worst fears have been exceeded. Not only are the politicians completely ignorant of real science, but the scientists, too, have grown ignorant of real science and are now themselves charlatan-politicians.
These are dark days for both knowledge and public order.
My family knew him since he began studying with my dad. He used to babysit me! I loved him a lot.
That’s pretty cool. I never met him personally, but he made a big difference in my life through his books. Cosmos helped to bring me out of deep depression I was in when I was a boy of 12. I eventually came to disagree with him on religious and philosophical matters, but he I’m very grateful for everything he taught me.
He’s a great one to talk about directing the flow of funds to publicly beneficial directions.
How much money did he waste in the search for intelligent life in the universe, outside a thin shell, maybe 25 km thick about mean sea level on planet earth. It’s not too apparent there is any inside that shell either.
So far we don’t have even one binary digit of scientific data about ANY extra terrestrial life, whether intelligent or not.
g
Depends on how you define waste, sure they haven’t found signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, they have found some interesting things and the boinc framework allows many different projects to harness wasted cpu cycles on computers, tablets and smartphones all over the world. Using wasted CPU cycles on existing computers is certainly a lot more economical than getting these projects their own supercomputers.
Did Mr. Sagan ever express, in a document, where his OR your verbalization of the fear of direction of funds might be used as a citation ?
Why is nobody talking about Thorium and molten salt reactors
Those things are possible, so there is no money to be sucked up by getting a grant and pretending to “study” it.
‘Cause they exist already. It’s easier to write about imaginary stuff. Nobody can check your work.
Lots of people are, especially in China. They must have huge amounts of thorium sand leftover from all their rare earth extraction.
See http://energyfromthorium.com/
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100026863/china-going-for-broke-on-thorium-nuclear-power-and-good-luck-to-them/
India has massive thorium deposits so is also working on thorium fuel cycles.
BTW, monzanite sand with lots of Th in it is common from the Carolinas down to Florida. Go to the beach and you are walking on the stuff to various degrees. Loads of it elsewhere too. California has a lot, but you are forbidden to use it… like most things here it seems…
We don’t really know how much Th exists as it is not worth looking for any. At least 3x U, of which we have thousands of years cheap on land alone.
Partly because uranium is dirt cheap. Fuel costs for reactors are minimal, so getting a cheaper, more abundant fuel such as thorium does not improve the economics.
Molten salt reactors are an engineering challenge, because the fuel has to be reprocessed continually to remove reaction poisons such as protactinium, which is potentially quite messy technically as well as a proliferation risk. We have run molten salt reactors for years, but only small ones and never one that generated electric power, so these challenges remain open.
It’s the transuranics. When you start with an isotope of 232 its pretty damn hard to get to 239. But when you start mostly with 238 it’s pretty damn easy. And that is the nasty stuff. And Protactinium 231 is only produced in the thorium cycle in the fast spectrum and LFTRs run in the slow thermal spectrum.
The fuel doesn’t have to be continually reprocessed with a 1 salt or 1.5 salt design. There are pros and cons amongst 1, 1.5, and 2 salt designs, though. Protactinium is only an issue if you breed/convert 232Th. But you can also burn just Uranium or Uranium/Plutonium in an MSR.
You will have to replace the graphite core after a reasonable amount of time (5-20 years, depending). And you have to have a means of purging or containing both noble metals (plate them out) and Xe poisoning (sparging).
Yes indeed. It’s funny when desperate antinuclear people (*) try to make two points to demonstrate that nuclear fission is uneconomical and unworkable in practice :
– financial meltdown” of nuclear companies (f.ex. in France: Areva, who is (**) in the plant building and mining and waste treatment business)
– lack of fissile resources on the long or middle term (mining for fissile resources would become uneconomical)
And they think both points go in the same direction or even reinforce each other (spoiler: they don’t).
Areva’s financial problems is used as proof that nuclear is uneconomical. What happened is that Areva lost a lot of money with a mine that is on standby until uranium prices go up (***). Would price go up, Areva could exploit the mine and it wouldn’t be a loss.
(*) people who previously tried to use the scare of accidents (according to some, everybody in Japan is dead now), the scare of controlled releases, and the scare of nuclear waste, without success
(**) or was? I am not sure how what will remain of Areva after the breakup.
(***) an unclear affair with possible corruption in it
Areva suffered a lot when Japan stopped its nuclear fleet as a provider of Japan reactors (including MOX for Fukushima Daiichi).
– Would nuclear restart everywhere in the world, Areva (or whatever replaces Areva) would become profitable (mining, used fuel, plant building).
– Assuming nuclear doesn’t restart anywhere, there is no imaginable fissile resource shortage issue.
So both “economic” points (one present, real, one middle/long term, hypothetic) refute each other! You can argue one or the other, but trying to argue both shows a severe lack of critical thinking or simply of reflection.
Also, enviros seems to think markets are wrong and short-sighted except when they “see the light” and invest in enviros-friendly tech: investment in solar is proof that solar is the way to go, the Areva share going from 33 € (January 2011) to 7 € now is proof nuclear is dead. People selling Areva at less than 7 € are enlightened: they know nuclear fission is a dead end! The market works! Yeah! It’s magic! The invisible hand (#) at work!
The anti-market anti-free trade left (who caricature the “invisible hand of the market” as a fairytale story, or as a sort of god) becomes very pro-market when market goes in the “right” direction (I wonder how they handle their ideas in their head, maybe it’s compartmentised).
Do markets act on short term or long term signals? The anti-market ideologues need to explain which one it is (the answer can involve “it depends” and a long list of special cases, making as many distinction as they want – but they need to answer). If markets with professional experts like the energy market reacts only to short term signals when it comes to fossil carbon, as they say (##), then it must be the case in the fissile resources market, right? Or do resource markets have different behavior and mode of thinking (short term vs. middle term vs. long term) and change over time? Why?
Every time a greeny use a market based (price based) argument, he is assuming some rationality in the market, he is assuming the markets work, for some definition of “work”. That assumption cannot be used to refute economic arguments about “externalities” (which must involve a third party who was not part of a deal (###)), but it can be used when the same person later says that markets are irrational and the “invisible hand” is like Santa Claus for “free-market believers”.
(#) the one they claim doesn’t exist and is a stupid belief
(##) which is why companies are investing billions on oil exploration, lol
(###) yet in some cases they pretend that nuclear workers are enduring externalities (harmful radiations), which is idiotic
Uranium never becomes too expensive or in short suppy. We already know how to make an effectively infinite supply at “low enough” prices.
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/ulum-ultra-large-uranium-miner-ship/
and in a couple of thousnd years when dirt cheap land based U is too expensive we can start doing it too…
/sarc;
Waiting for fuel prices to go up for your favorite get rich project is a fool’s game.
It’s the ones who find a cheaper fuel who rake in the big bucks. If Areva can’t make a go of it unless energy prices skyrocket , Obama style, then they don’t really have a viable solution.
If fissile materials price will not skyrocket, ever then it follows that fissile materials availability issues won’t be a reason to not build fission plants (other reasons might be debated, but not this one), ever. And Areva could build some of these plants (if they prove they are able to finish building one).
All I am saying is that one “fission sucks” argument refutes the other. Using Areva financial problems as a argument mean you are better on low uranium price. Or you say that long term energy decision should be based on short term price trends. Or that the argument of long term availability of uranium was a bad argument.
The antinuclear crowds need to choose a tune, or at least admit members of the crowd hold opposite viewpoints. Or admit they don’t even know what their viewpoint is.
Or maybe they just believe they can have it both ways?
Well, Joseph Bové can use violence to destroy GM field trials in France (even those by INRIA, the national agriculture research institution) and then claim that if we allow “GMOs” in food, Monsanto seeds will dominate Europe, so I guess THEY can have it both ways. (If you are wondering, Joseph Bové – aka José Bové – isn’t in jail, but in the European Parliament.)
Some technology critics think they can use any argument, without looking at what’s in it. The argument “Areva loses money” has low uranium price in it. The “nuclear energy isn’t competitive in the US” has low energy price in it, and low price has frakking in it. The “Germany goes renewable but keeps the lights on” has coal, imported gas, and nuclear energy in it.
Some people think food should be labelled based on the fact that a living thing used to be a GMO when it was growing (now that it’s dead, it’s no longer an organism so it can’t be a GMO). Some even believe that living things who got part of their energy from stuff that used to be a GMO should be labelled.
Do they believe that arguments should be labelled?
The anti-nuclear argument has never really been about any logical argument. The anti’s just grasp at any passing straw that might reinforce their emotional conclusion and throw it against the wall to see what sticks. At the same time, they use lawfare to actually drive the cost of producing a plant up to the point that the economic argument becomes true. It is about a billion dollars to build a nuclear plant and 10+ billion to the courts to fight the resulting lawfare and regulatory hurdles.
The same reason no one is worried that sea monsters will attack Kansas.
Plus on this site they do talk about them.
Good point, I remember a lecturer at Imperial saying that if a fusion reactor could work the neutrons it produced should be used to create fissile material. This would be the most economic way to use it.
I think those panels some people have on their roofs make use of the the only known way to get any usable power from fusion.
[Identity thief strikes again. -mod]
There’s no assurance that even those, get any net power, by the time you consider all the legacy energy it take to make those panels.
That does not doom them, if they provide solar power in remote locations off the grid.
could become an economically viable means of generating electricity within a few decades.
I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.
It is feasible that I COULD bet the farm on it …. My only significant constraints are that I don’t have a farm, and I don’t have enuf money to acquire said farm.
I’m one up on the guys in the article ’cause farms really do exist.
I wouldn’t bet the cucumber on it , let alone the farm.
Switch this thread to cold fusion (LENR), and there will be much more evidence of success. Hot fusion is just repeat slogans. GK
Yeah, we’ve been “within a few decades” of curing cancer for what, 60 years now?
I am waiting for the next big thing. …Proton fusion, ie fusion of quarks…quark bombs and all that. It is just around the corner.
“Fusion reactors could become an economically viable means of generating electricity within a few decades…”
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We’ve been hearing this claim for decades.