nuclear power produces long-lived radioactive waste, which needs to be stored securely. Nuclear fuels, such as the element uranium (which needs to be mined), are finite, so the technology is not considered renewable. 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.
fusion technologies have yet to produce sustained net energy output (more energy than is put in to run the reactor), let alone produce energy at the scale required to meet the growing demands of AI. Fusion will require many more technological developments before it can fulfil its promise of delivering power to the grid.
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.
You’ll find that nuclear fission is not very different.
Nuclear submarines for example only need to be refueled once or twice in their multiple decade lifespan.
Yes. They’re both incredibly efficient.
And if somehow, despite that efficiency, we still have problems figuring out how to store that nuclear waste today. I know this ought to be a solvable problem, but we seem to struggle with it.
Then we chuck it in that mountain we carved out.
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!
Huh. Buzzword fueled stupidity might have a positive effect for once.
“AI hype trash accidentally solves global energy issues and ends fossil fuels” was not on my bingo card, but I’ll take it lol
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.
Jon Oliver did an entire segment on that in the fourth season, featuring news segments from the late 70s early 80s
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.
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)?
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.
But still right on though
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.
Do you know what they do in Norway with out-of-use old mines? They lift a load when there’s energy to be stored. They lower it when there’s energy to be spent. I’m sure you know how electric engines work and that the conversion is symmetric.
No battery tech involved.
Battery tech is in general mostly relevant for autonomous devices we carry, for airplanes and ships, for cars.
For the central grid the ways to store energy are almost inifinite.
In situations where that’s feasible, it’s good. But it’s far from feasible all the time.
You certainly couldn’t replace all existing fossil fuels with it, or even scratch the surface really.
Norway can do stuff like this because they have the geography for it, as well as a population that’s like a 15th of the UK or a 60th of the US. They don’t actually need much energy.
They need heating at winter and they have datacenters and a lot of renewable energy.
Also the principles I’ve described is applicable for everything non-autonomous, and one could think of “electric” cars (a bit like trams) which would use contacts on the ground for energy, while when they’d need to be autonomous, they’d use batteries or ICEs.
That kind of “mechanical energy storage” can be created everywhere. I mean, water reserves with hydroelectric stations downstream are already used for that purpose, but for those you need water.
Efficiency is a bit of a problem - you have to maintain the mechanical parts, you first use energy to lift something with losses and then generate energy from letting it slide back…
That’s all a bit off topic, really.
What’s important is that there are ways around lithium for a lot of energy usage of our civilization.
Yes, they need heating in winter… for a tiny population. And they have very little in the way of data centres.
Again, these are only suitable depending on the environment you’re in. E.g. pumped water storage is only effective if you have the terrain to allow for it (a large hill or mountain with space for a large body of water).
I never said lithium was an outright requirement. I said batteries can’t currently take the planet off of fossil fuels, then I said that other energy storage systems are very dependent on the location.
E.g. despite there being a lot of rainfall in the UK, there are only 3 places suitable for pumped water energy storage. It can’t be relied upon for powering a country unless you’re phenomenally fortunate with geography.
Well, I can think of the inverse - separating a piece of coastline and pumping seawater out when you have excess energy, letting it back in via turbines to get energy. In that context UK does have fitting terrain, it’s just underwater.
Seawater is very nasty to machinery though.
Tidal power continues to be researched, but it’s proving very difficult, currently completely unviable. It certainly cannot replace all non-renewable energy.
Can you back this up with links to reputable sources?
Can you back up your original claim - that we can sufficiently power all of our grids with current batteries, and that current battery manufacturing is enough to do so?
With reputable sources.
That’s not how this works. You made a tall claim, without sources. Now it seems you’re not willing to provide proof to substantiate it. Why?
You made a tall claim, and still haven’t substantiated it. Why?
Show me this proof that we have the batteries to eliminate all fossil fuels.
You know that’s how it works, right? You make a claim, you need evidence to support it…
This you?
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.
Put up or shut up.
Right, and I replied to a comment where you claimed we can just use batteries to replace everything but renewables.
Put up or shut up. Where’s the data?
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.
It’s even bad at porn. Very limited means of describing the process, forgetting that there are no bed sheets in a park, same repeating metaphors. Boring.
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Don’t know enough to find the study, but AI did provide novel, and unexpected, solutions to magnetic containment issues.
Think it was a pop-sci version of this:
Nothing else? Please do not speak for other people if you can not grasp what others do with this tool.
What do others do with this tool?
The most time saving for a single task that I had so far was when repairing a Ebike battery that needed a new BMS. Finding the cause and fixing it was only possible because GPT swallowed the relevant sections of the datasheet and spit out code to read/write to the chip. That would have taken dozens of hours for me to understand what does what and under which condition and then make code out of it too. I put it on GitHub so others do not need to suffer.
Write Reddit comments
Sorry, I didn’t mean to leave out the bestiality porn creation as well. That was unintentional on my part.
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.
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.
Man this article is terribly off base compared to the title.
Fusion will likely happen in this century. Fission is a great temporary power source to get us there alongside renewables.
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?
The real solution is the thing that the fossil fuel companies have been buying up the tech for and burying it for decades…batteries.
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Fusion. What they’re missing is fusion powe
I think people still don’t understand what the problem is with fusion. The problem is not that it doesn’t work, it will work, and soon. The problem is that everyone seems to think fusion means cheap limitless energy, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. When fusion does finally work, it will be the most expensive form of energy available. That’s going to be a gamebreaker, right out of the gate.
So far, the only method we know of to guarantee that your reactor will be energy positive is to make it truly enormous. Let me tell you, going truly enormous is not a good way to keep costs down. But let’s say you just spent 8 years building a cutting edge fusion power plant and you want it to work smoothly. Well you better hire a large team of nuclear physics PHDs to keep that reactor working, they must be a dime a dozen, right? You’ll need them for all the maintenance of your cutting edge reactor, get ready for those maintenance costs to mount up. And be prepared to continue paying for all your staff and facilities even while the reactor is (frequently) power down for maintenance.
Also, you do have an economical way to dispose of nuclear waste right? Because fusion reactors are probably going to generate a significant amount of nuclear waste… That’s one of the side effects of actually turning the high energy particles released by the reactor into heat. Those free protons and neutrons get absorbed by a physical shield around the reactor called the blanket. That blanket becomes radioactive over time and needs to be replaced. Congratulations, your clean fusion energy is now producing radioactive waste, and your back to the exact same problems we have with fission.
My advice, keep using the nuclear energy we understand really well at this point, fission. Also, renewables and storage are already a cheaper solution to do exactly the same thing fusion will eventually do. I’m certain that fusion will be a fantastic technology for large spacecraft someday, but I make no promises it will ever become the first choice for general terrestrial power generation.
Fusion does not produce nuclear waste.
It does, it produces low and intermediate level waste, the waste decays over about a hundred years, not thousands. So it’s better, but still an issue requiring management.
Your comment doesn’t stand up. It seems you’ve got something against fusion energy for some reason.
On cost: it’s a best guess, since we don’t yet have a working fusion reactor. The error bars on the cost estimates are huge, so while it is possible fusion will be more expensive, with current data you absolutely cannot guarantee it. Add to that the decreasing costs as the technology matures, like we’ve seen in wind and especially solar over recent decades.
On nuclear physics PhDs: that’s no different to any energy generation, you need dozens of experts to build and run any installation.
On waste: where are you getting this info on the blanket? The old beryllium blanket design has been replaced with tungsten and no longer needs to be replaced. The next step is to test a lithium blanket which will actually generate nuclear fuel as the reaction processes.
This is the important fact that you have omitted, for some reason.Nuclear fusion reactors produce no high activity, long-lived nuclear waste. The activation of components in a fusion reactor is low enough for the materials to be recycled or reused within 100 years
And that is why it’s so important this technology is developed. It’s incredibly clean and, yes, limitless.
As for your advice, there was a time not long ago when we didn’t understand how to build fission plants either, and it cost a lot of time and money to learn how. I wonder if people back then were saying we should just stick to burning coal because we know how that works.
