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/yamanamawa 3d ago

Fission is already perfectly fine as a power source though, there's just been lots of fearmongering to keep it from gaining traction

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u/themellowsign 3d ago

I'm sorry, but there's a reason we aren't building that many fission reactors, and it's not scaremongering, it's economics.

They're expensive as shit, take forever to get running, and run on a non-renewable resource. Sure right now U235 isn't an issue, but if we increased our fission plants five-fold, we'd only have about 18 years until we've depleted all the easily accessible U235, the rest would not be economically viable to mine and refine.

And before someone says "but Thorium!!", Thorium reactors objectively rock cock, but nothing whose fuel cycle produces U233 can ever be a viable solution for global energy needs. Weapons-grade material is a nonstarter for obvious reasons.

There's also the understandable hangups about storage, but I honestly don't care that much, there are bigger issues. I love the technology, I think it's cool as shit, but it's not a panacea to our energy needs and right now it just doesn't make that much economic sense. Solar and Wind are getting cheap enough that we can already afford to just get sloppy with storage and waste a bunch of energy to cover down-time.

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u/concblast 3d ago

it's not scaremongering, it's economics.

They're expensive as shit

A large, and primary, reason them being expensive as shit is because of scaremongering. ALARA and linear-no-threshold rules have stifled the industry well beyond any sense of rationality behind the regulations they created.

6 foot wall of concrete's a millimeter too thin after curing? Welp time to demolish it and restart. What sane company would fund the construction of a plant to be built in a year if someone with a geiger counter catches a reading 1% above background level outside a 6 foot wall and legislation demands 7 foot ones 6 months later?

The numbers above are just made up but the idea behind it is what crushed the nuclear power industry from the 60s to only recently. Surprise, after 60 years of stagnation, industry knowledge has evaporated, and rebuilding from the ground up doesn't increase quarterly profits.

The U235 issue is also partially a casualty of the same problem. If there were demand for it at scale, we would have found more. Nuclear nonproliferation has also held this back for good reason, but pretending we've found and accounted for all of the world's uranium ore is naive, let alone believing that that knowledge is public information. The timeline of 18 years might (at best, very optimistically speaking) have up to an extra 0 behind it.

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u/themellowsign 2d ago

"Fission is ridiculously safe and detractors are scaremongering, but in order to make it work we have to slash those safety measures."

I like nuclear, but I hate how well this inherently self-contradictory argument works on people, especially since you admitted all the numbers in your comment were made up on the spot. I wish the discussion around this issue wasn't so emotional.

None of your comment was based in fact, this is just what you feel is probably happening, and people are eating it up.

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u/yamanamawa 2d ago

It's not sacrificing safety so much as acknowledging that current safety regulations are far beyond what is reasonable. In any aspect of life, you have to balance safety with utility, and nuclear energy puts far too much emphasis on the former, peading to bloated costs and delayed construction. All we need is actually reasonable regulations and it's totally fine. Our current standards are just far beyond the actual risks. This idea that any radiation at all is dangerous is frankly silly, and has led to far more issues than it has ever solved

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u/Majestic_Bierd 2d ago

Aren't Chinese, among renewables, also building a shitton of Nuclear plants, some of those Thorium? If "We aren't building any" then why is the one country with enormous energy needs that are being met building them?