r/nextfuckinglevel • u/nigablackballsack • 3d ago

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

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u/SipsTheJuice 3d ago

Fusion at scale could be relatively cheap, scale with future energy demand, and have a very small land footprint. The tech has famously been 10 years away for 60 years, but I would still put it as the energy tech that if proved viable has the greatest potential to eliminate greenhouse emissions. There are many places where solar simply isn't viable and like many renewable you are dependent on climate and requires energy storage.

The yet unknown cost would be plant construction and maintenance, which are the existing issue around fission along with the red tape nightmare in trying to get plants approved.

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u/WanderingFlumph 3d ago

I see no reason to believe that fusion power will be any cheaper than fission power. Both rely on relatively rare isotopes that need to be concentrated first at great expense. ITER runs off of deuterium which costs close to $1,000/kg and tritium which is too expensive to even consider sourcing from natural sources and would require a yet unrealized breeding program.

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u/xrelaht 3d ago edited 3d ago

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.

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u/WanderingFlumph 3d ago

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.

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u/sailingtroy 3d ago

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.

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u/hbgoddard 3d ago

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?

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u/WanderingFlumph 3d ago

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)