There's loads of deuterium in the ocean, it just needs power to get it out, which there'll be. Tritium is tougher, you need it to start the fusion, but a lot of fusion designs seem to be setup to then effectively start being self sufficient in creating tritium.
Elusive fusion reactors to be commercialised by 2025-2030... Or so they say
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There's loads of deuterium in the ocean, it just needs power to get it out, which there'll be. Tritium is tougher, you need it to start the fusion, but a lot of fusion designs seem to be setup to then effectively start being self sufficient in creating tritium.
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funny reading the comments about no chance of a meltdown, im sure when fision was brand new they said the same thing and here we are after what 3/4 meltdowns now 
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not including accidents and the like.funny reading the comments about no chance of a meltdown, im sure when fision was brand new they saiod the same thing and here we are after what 3/4 meltdowns now
over a period of 70years
i think i heard the phrase safer than flying.
"The first nuclear power plant to generate electricity for a power grid was the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Union, which began operations in 1954. However, the first nuclear power station to produce electricity for domestic use was Calder Hall in the United Kingdom, which opened in 1956"
i remembered its not deuterium i was thinking of but Helium 3. appologies.
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Thats assuming money will solve the problem.
One of the biggest problems is to do with materials selection. Activation of components needs to be minimised, components need to be interchangeable within the blanket, components need to be able to withstand the collosal temperatures repeatedly over many years of continued operation in order to be viable. When really drill down deep into the technical issues, I think you very quickly realise the scale of the challenges are absolutely vast and nowhere near being solved.
There are a lot of smaller companies like Tokamak Energy who talk a good game and offer the moon on a stick, but the reality is, they just want to periodically make a few headlines, entice a few more hedge fund managers into their scheme following another funding round to keep the whole thing under development. But when you speak to them (as I have in my professional capacity) you soon realise that they honestly don't stand a chance.
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nevermind
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How exactly is it going to destroy the planet? And are we talking fusion or fission?
I wonder how much real danger all that plutonium can do and whatever else dumped around the UK.
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Including all the accidents and like, nuclear power has put much less radiation (per unit of energy generated) into the environment than fossil fuels.
Also, why are we talking about nuclear? Fusion is fundamentally different.
funny reading the comments about no chance of a meltdown, im sure when fision was brand new they said the same thing and here we are after what 3/4 meltdowns now
There us a fundamental difference.
Fission involves bringing radioactive material close enough that it starts to reach critical mass and a chain reaction starts. If care isn't taken then the chain reaction is not controlled and you have an atomic bomb. Enough fuel is present to make Chernobyl happen. The output of an uncontrolled reaction is a load of extremely nasty radioactive elements that absolutely will give millions cancer .
With Fusion, the opposite is the case and very specific and complex conditions are required to be maintained. This is why it has been so difficult to get a working Fusion reactor because it is so sensitive and everything has to be perfect. Hydrogen bombs do this in a different way with the intention that the fusion is almost instant for all material. The total amount of fusion material available at any one time is tiny, so any explosion as well as being far less likely will be far smaller. And the radio active output a lot less harmful and obviously less distributed.
Fusion is inherently safe, fission is inherently unsafe without adding all the safety measures which meads to the high cost.
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Thats an overly optimistic assessement lithium is always going to get discarded, vapes for one 99% of them end up in landfill I'm sure and how many phone batteries get recycled? Also its only worth mining where its concentrated it may be abundant in the environment like aluminium but like that extracting it is quite another
Meltdown occurs when a critical mass of fissionable material lacks inhibitors to stop a runaway fission event, fusion is different you have to make it want to fuse together fission is the opposite you want to stop itfunny reading the comments about no chance of a meltdown, im sure when fision was brand new they said the same thing and here we are after what 3/4 meltdowns now
Tritium is radioactive though putting radioactive material into a reactor sound like a great idea not, weren't we supposed to be getting away from generating nuclear waste? One of the if not the biggest cost associated with existing nuclear plants is decommissioning which means dealing with nuclear waste and long term storage and the expense thereof one of the selling points of fusion was that it supposed to be "clean" energy
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Is it still nuclear waste after it's been fused?
Tritium will be bred by bombarding lithium with the neutrons from the fusion reaction. (This is why Castle Bravo's 1st use of solid Lithium Deuteride fuel was 2.5x the expected yield, as they didn't realise the Lithium-7 would split under neutron bombardment to produce Tritium.)
It's one way of dealing with the damaging neutrons which are not contained by the magnetic field. Without proper protection the entire reactor casing is slowly destroyed from all the neutrons.
It's one way of dealing with the damaging neutrons which are not contained by the magnetic field. Without proper protection the entire reactor casing is slowly destroyed from all the neutrons.
Fusion Energy will never be cheap, simply due to the engineering resources required to make it happen. Maybe in 300 years time it will be comparable to a gas turbine plant.
Fission is technically easy. You simply move rods of uranium/plutonium close together. That's it. And look at the cost and timescales of Sizewell C!
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No, it isn't. I never said money will solve the problem. I never implied money would solve the problem. It might. It might not. I said nothing about that.
all the meltdowns were mainly caused by crappy designs? or the fact they were really generating nuclear fuel and electricity was just a by product (like the UK one)
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Tritium isn't the problem. It would be manufactured on site in tiny quantities as required. And yes, putting tritium in a reactor does sound like a great idea because it's the least difficult form of fusion in the conditions we can create with existing knowledge and technology. Also, it's not radioactive waste. It's used in the fusion. Even if it was radioactive waste (which it isn't), it wouldn't be a problem. It's far from the top tier of radioactivity hazards and there wouldn't be much of it anyway. You could throw all the tritium in a fusion power station in the sea without it being a problem.
The problem is the internal shielding in the reactor, which is bombarded with neutrons. That's what generates radioactive waste. But not much and not quickly and nothing like the high level radioactive waste from existing fission power stations (which itself is far less bad than it's made out to be). But it is a problem. It's one of the avenues of research in fusion - how to minimise that problem. It's theoretically possible to eliminate it entirely, but the necessary knowledge and tech doesn't exist yet so the emphasis is on minimising it.
Fission is technically easy, yes, but in the context of a power station it's too easy. So the engineering resources are spent on limiting it, controlling it and containing it, with safety heavily engineered in and backup systems for the safety systems and backup systems for the backup systems. Unless you're the USSR making RBMK reactors. Then there's the expense of dealing with the monumentally radioactive waste, which has to be handled on site for a while and which is so radioactive it generates a lot of heat and requires constant cooling. The reactor at Fukushima Daiichi shut down safely when the earthquake hit. The automatic safety systems worked. The disaster was caused by the cooling systems failing. More accurately, the primary cooling system failed when the grid went down, the backup cooling system failed when the site was flooded by the tsunami and the backup backup cooling system failed because it relied on batteries and didn't have enough capacity to run for long enough for either of the other cooling systems to be made working again.
I think that fusion could potentially be relatively cheap in part because it's technically difficult.
Kyshtym was caused by a combination of crappy design caused by ignorance (the USSR was using information they'd stolen from the USA, partial information they partially understood) and a downright horrific level of negligence.
Chernobyl was mainly caused by crappy design. Multiple instances of crappy design piled on top of each other. And then the reactor was used for too long and in ways it wasn't designed for and by people not properly trained for the job.
Fukushima Daiichi was mainly caused by crappy design. In particular, two pieces of it. The backup power generation for the cooling system was in the wrong place and the sea wall wasn't high enough. If either or both of those things were done properly, the meltdown wouldn't have happened. That can be shown by what happened at Fukushima Oniichi. Same general location, same design, built at the same time in the same way, hit by the same earthquake and the same tsunami in about the same way. But the sea wall was higher. So the backup cooling system didn't flood despite being in the wrong place and nothing bad happened there.
None of the infamous nuclear disasters could happen with a modern design.
No it doesn't and no we haven't.
Chernobyl was the worst case scenario in pretty much every way. It didn't destroy the planet. It couldn't destroy the planet. Chernobyl did far less harm than the worst hydroelectric power failures.
The number of deaths directly and definitely caused by the Chernobyl meltdown is 31.
The number of deaths almost certainly caused by the Chernobyl meltdown is 60.
The number of deaths probably partially caused by the Chernobyl meltdown is about 4000.
The number of deaths directly and definitely caused by the Banqiao failure is about 250,000.
We've been extremely unlucky in all the meltdowns. The fact they happened at all required bad luck, bad design and at least some degree of negligence.