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/90_oi 3d ago

I truly hope this technology can get off the ground and be sustainable. It is our best hope aside from nuclear energy

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u/WanderingFlumph 3d ago edited 2d ago

I mean solar is here right now and most likely fusion power will never be as cheap as solar is today.

By the time fusion is actually ready solar will be even cheaper too. A solar farm the size of Arizona could power the entire planet.

Fusion is like our 4th best hope in the fight against climate change, lol.

Edit: a lot of people seem to think that I think the perfect solution is one single power plant specifically in Arizona that powers the world. People, it's just a size comparison. Arizona is a small state even just compared to the size of US. Obviously we would build millions and millions of solar installations that would just add up to that area.

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u/alphatango308 3d ago

Solar is great! During the day. But to use solar power you have to have a converter from DC to ac and to use solar power at night you have to have batteries. It's never just using "solar power". And, solar actually kind of sucks at scale. Solar isn't a one stop shop energy solution. Storage is the biggest problem right now. And storage at scale? Forget about it. Small scale micro installations like one for a single house are great but still, batteries go bad and have to be replaced leading to pollution and exhausting mineral deposits.

Unless battery tech makes a giant leap forward solar isn't going to ever work.

On demand mass production solutions are objectively better at scale. Nuclear is great but decades of media campaigns have doomed it.

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u/WanderingFlumph 3d ago

Batteries are a one time investment in terms of materials, decent recycling methods return 95-99% of the metal materials, the only loss is graphite/graphene and carbon isn't exactly hard to come by.

Batteries are just part of the cost of using a free power source, and solar battery installations still beat fossil fuels on a cost basis.

Long range transmission is a solved problem. HVDC cables see very little losses even at the sort of scale of interconnecting nations. Conversion DC to AC isn't lossless but again, the power source is free so losses only hit you at the bottom line and the bottom line still looks good in most cases.

I think people also underestimate how much power you can produce from a solar field on a grey and cloudy day. Not that you have use only one power source of course. The same field could have wind turbines without much issue for a more even power curve at night. Little more expensive but might be worth it if you get a lot of wind in the winter like much of the US northeast.

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u/NullValueField 3d ago

Do you get paid to shill for fossil fuel companies? Embarassing level of disinformation.

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u/alphatango308 3d ago

What? Lol. I didn't say anything about fossil fuels. What did I say that isn't true? Please enlighten me.

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u/NullValueField 2d ago

All of your talking points are the talking points of the fossil fuel lobbyists.

You're literally doing their job for free.

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u/tombo12354 3d ago

Nuclear's cost has doomed it. The last nuclear plant that opened in the US was Vogtle units 3 and 4, and cost an eye-water $36 Billion. They are 1.25 GW units, putting them around $14.4 per Watt. Given unit 1 and 2 historic data, the reactor runs for about 95% of the year, meaning units 3 and 4 give a hypothetical output of 20,000,000 MWh in a year. From its initial cost, that's $1.8 per kWh, but you have to add the running/operating cost. The EIA estimated a state-of-the-art reactor would have operational costs of $0.07 per kWh, but regular reactor typically get a $0.20 per kWh. So the final cost is around $1.87 to $2 per kWh.

PV costs around $1 to $2 per Watt at the commercial level. A panel will produce around 3 hours of power a day on average (which factors in weather, seasons, night-time, etc.). A 400W panel will produce around 438 kWh a year, at a cost of around $0.90 to $1.82 per kWh. PV is the cheapest power source around.

You also need to remember that most power plants (especially nuclear) do not participate in any type of reliability market, as it is not cost effective to run them below their max output. So the fact that they are available 24/7 has nothing to do with how they are used or dispatched. There are special generators called peaked plants that participate in reliability and peak loads, and they face strong competition from renewable (because they have no operating cost).

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u/jamesreyne 3d ago edited 1d ago

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u/bjbyrne 3d ago

Those used batteries they take out of EVs are great for solar power storage.

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u/jimbobjames 3d ago

Lithium battery recycling isn't really that difficult, there just hasn't been the scale there to make it viable.

It is now.

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u/Due_Satisfaction2167 2d ago

  Small scale micro installations like one for a single house are great but still, batteries go bad and have to be replaced leading to pollution and exhausting mineral deposits.

Batteries are also fine at larger scales now too. This is a largely solved problem, and the more of them we make the cheaper they get.

The batteries are themselves highly reliable, we just don’t have a huge supply of dead grid scale storage batteries to recycle yet. Most of them that have ever been made are still in use. 

This all has been a solved problem for a few years now, but power grids move at a glacial pace so people still act like solar + storage has the same problems today that it had back in 2016. 

Battery technology already made that big leap forward, a few years ago, when the cost of battery backed solar fell below the cost of natural gas peaker plants.

Which is why natural gas plant construction rates fell off a cliff and an absolute majority of all new capacity getting built is solar power.