That makes no sense.
Elusive fusion reactors to be commercialised by 2025-2030... Or so they say
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With Chernobyl it wasn't just design issues - what is often skipped over is the materials present which contributed to a sustained thermal reaction and aided the release of contaminated particles significantly increasing the scale of the event and scope of global contamination. Those conditions aren't present in designs since.
A significant factor with Fukushima Daiichi, something they've tried to sweep under a rug, was extending its life beyond when it should have been decommissioned and when it started to fail instead of pulling the plug they tried to be too clever modelling the failure to manage it through decline rather than decommissioning it - systems and containment would have reduced the scale of the disaster even with the design problems during its intended lifespan.
Not when it's completely stripped out of all context, as you did. As it was, as part of that post, it made sense.
Fission is technically easy in the sense that it just requires enough suitable material close enough together and it happens automatically and creates a self-sustaining runaway chain reaction. Since it's like that, using it as a power station requires constant careful control. Which requires design and engineering to achieve and maintain that control. And failsafes. And backups. And backups to the backups. That's where a large part of the cost is. Then there's the waste, which is another large part of the cost.
Fusion is technically difficult (in conditions achievable on Earth). Because of that, it can't happen automatically and it can't create a self-sustaining runaway chain reaction. It also has far, far less material inside the reactor at any time. Because of those things (which are a result of the technical difficulty of fusion), using it in a power station doesn't carry the same risks and therefore doesn't require the same level of expense for containment, failsafes and backups. You still need those things, but to a far lesser (and therefore far cheaper) extent. So it has the potential to be relatively cheap. If it can be made to work in a practical sense, with net energy output.
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Soldato
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I was once involved in a focus group for pollster company that was chosen for an electricity/nuclear adjacency bias. And even this supposed more knowledgeable focus group need what you wrote explaining to them. This was about 20 years ago and people who worked in related industries and had lived the previous 20+ years within a few miles of tokamaks and near old decommissioned nuclear piles didn't understand the relative risks of the two nuclears.
I would say though that if we put some effort into it molten salt reactors do offer far higher opportunities for passive safety than the current crop of water reactors. They also offer pathways to substantially reduce our waste load for the very highest radiation waste.
Failsafes may be reduced compared to a fission plant, but the engineering required to produce and contain the plasma are orders of magnitude greater than what is required in a fission reactor.
ITER, which as an experimental reactor is going to be very expensive, is currently (from what I can see) going to come in at lower cost than Sizewell C.
You're basically summarising his point. What's yours?
"The initial budget was close to €6 billion, but the total price of construction and operations is projected to be from €18 to €22 billion; other estimates place the total cost between $45 billion and $65 billion, though these figures are disputed by ITER."
Sizewell C is estimating around £40bn, also Iter will not produce any electricity, to do so would push the price up much further.
Also if you look at cost per TWH, Iter is probably far more expensive at a maximum of 500MW output, compared to SizeWell C's 3.2GW.
Edit: Actually it's even worse than that.
Since steam turbines are only 33% efficient, for Sizewell C's 3.2GW of electricity, that means raw reactor output is going to be almost 10GW.
That puts Iter, a non electricity producing plant that can never run continuously is 10x the cost of Sizewell C on an energy adjusted basis.
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nevermind
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Associate
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nevermind
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Associate
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Fission reactions create fission products... often highly radioactive and some with very long half-lives.
Fusion does not. The byproduct of Hydrogen Fusion is Helium.
A Fusion powerplant would never leave vast areas uninhabitable as the result of any "accident" in the way Chernobyl did.
Using examples of Fission-related disasters as a reasoning for not pursuing Fusion (or worse, erroneously claiming it would destroy the planet) is foolish at best, willfully ignorant at worst.
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Chernobyl was pretty close to a realistic worst case scenario though... theoretically if there had been no attempts to put the fires out and generally contain the situation then a lot more radiation would have been released, but even in the Soviet Union I'm not sure that could ever have been allowed. Turns out that the corium wasn't going to melt through everything and get to the water table even without the miners' hard work. And although the water tanks under the reactor were a concern last I heard was that most modern analysis doesn't think there was much risk of a large explosion even if they had been full of water and corium had dropped in. In fact some corium did drop into some of them before they could be emptied and not much happened. The TV show and it's talk of 2 megaton explosions was essentially complete nonsense.
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Don't the escaping neutrons create radioactive by-products in the surrounding mechanisms?.
Because of how it works. We know how it works. We know what the process involves. We know what the results are. We know what would happen in the event of a containment failure (not much).
I got it from the specialist UN body commissioned to study the matter. Also from the WHO and the IAEA, which are in agreement.
No, they didn't.
Probably. But since my source isn't Russian, that doesn't matter.
Kyshtym. Which wasn't a nuclear power station.
Parts of Cornwall are more radioactive than the Fukushima exclusion zone and have been for millions of years. And no, I am not joking. It's due to naturally occurring radioactive material in some types of rock, rock which is pretty common and very close to the surface in parts of Cornwall.
3 serious incidents, only 2 of which were with power stations. You can't come up with more because there aren't any.
Nuclear fission power stations, even including old designs, even including old power stations built to old designs and used past their safe life, even including old power stations built to old designs and used past their safe life and used incorrectly by people not adequately trained, have an extremely low rate of death per amount of electricity generated. The difference in death rate per amount of electricity generated between fission and renewables is within the margin of error, so fission might be the safest way to generate electricity. And that's with all the above. With modern fission power stations, it would be the safest way to generate electricity.
If you did some learning about how fusion works, you wouldn't be making the mistakes you're making.
If you have any counter-argument to what I wrote, I'll read it. Specifically, tell me how Kyshtym, Chernobyl or Fukushima Daiichi could happen with a modern nuclear fission power station.
Yes (at least for the materials currently considered for use there) but the radioactive by-products created that way are far less dangerous than the radioactive fission by-products and produced in even smaller amounts.
I think both you and Devilman are right - fusion itself doesn't create radioactive by-products (as Devilman said). It's theoretically possible to have a fusion power station that doesn't create any radioactive by-products. But any existing design would.
That is the trade off why the most realistic chance for viable Fusion, ITER, is around $65billion and still only a research prototype.
Just like fission, they will suffer from the lack of scale economics and the significant build time and thus ROI will make them prohibitive.
Renewables and BESS will continue to become exponentially cheaper.
Soldato
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I read an interesting article suggesting that a design similar to ITER would be able to burn high radioactive trans-uranics as part of it's normal fusion operation. So even is they never economically pan out they are a possible route to reducing high level waste inventories.