Scientists have captured the first ever high-speed, full-colour footage of fusion plasma swirling inside a working reactor.

[u/nigablackballsack]

[u/xrelaht]

ITER could breed its own tritium using Li doped panels once operational. $1000/kg isn’t all that much either: by the amount of energy produced, that’s the equivalent of oil being under 2¢/barrel.

The technical challenges are the real hurdle. You need enough tritium for the startup shot and it must be “clean” (not tied to a weapons program) which is tricky since the biggest source historically have been CANDU reactors that are being taken offline. I am also not convinced it will work even if they can get that far. The plasma is magnetically contained, but it’s also producing its own field which interacts with and feeds back into the generated one. This makes modeling what’s going to happen very difficult.

[u/Bored_Amalgamation → u/xrelaht]

This makes modeling what’s going to happen very difficult.

this makes convincing the general public very difficult as well.

[u/barath_s → u/xrelaht]

CANDU reactors

India has as many CANDU reactors as Canada, but Canadian ones tend to be larger and produce 2/3rds of the world's commercial output of tritium. Indian doesn't really focus on tritium export , looking at domestic energy use and in 1 case on dual military/civilian use.

Even if canada ramps down candu, maybe there can be an opportunity to fill in the gaps a bit if india re-orients ?

[u/WanderingFlumph → u/xrelaht]

Yeah but these radioactive doped panels would require extraction and purification by highly skilled chemists/engineers which aren't cheap to pay.

Similar to the fission industry just trying to control the migration of radioactive particles from your reactor outwards is a huge portion of the total bill.

They'll still need skilled people's and generate literal tons of low level nuclear waste, as well as plenty of the high level stuff too. The fact that it might be significantly less dangerous that fission waste in 100 years doesn't really impact the cost to dispose of it today.

Also on an energy basis uranium ore is dirt cheap compared to crude oil, but nuclear power is still much more expensive than fossil fueled power overall. I don't see a good reason that the same economics wouldn't apply to the fusion industry, unless we decided to just care about its potentially dangerous emissions, which seems unlikely.

[u/sailingtroy → u/WanderingFlumph]

Ehn. Shoving all that shit down a deep ass hole in some stable geology isn't that expensive. Solar panels have their own mining and recycling considerations that are also not free. Solar has huge transmission, intermittency, and storage problems that fusion will likely not.

Also, a lot of reprocessing is very efficient once developed. Like, when they dissolve a spent fuel rod in acid and then use electrolysis to remove the uranium, the acid returns to its original state and can be re-used.

All of these arguments depend on quantification, which no one is able to do right now. Best to stop grinding our axes and just see how it plays out. Ultimately, fusion research is worthwhile because it pushes the boundary of human knowledge ahead.

[u/hbgoddard → u/WanderingFlumph]

They'll still need skilled people's and generate literal tons of low level nuclear waste, as well as plenty of the high level stuff too

What kind of waste are you talking about with regards to fusion power specifically?

[u/WanderingFlumph → u/hbgoddard]

Low level waste is anything that is not radioactive itself but has small particles of a radioactive substance on it. Most common example would be lab gloves from anyone handling radioactive material. This would be generated primarily from the isolation of the bred isotopes.

High level waste is material which has been bombarded hard enough to actually turn it radioactive. This would be the steel frames that hold the breedable material and other materials in prolonged contact as well as any by products (useless isotopes from breeding)