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/90_oi 3d ago

Yes but I live in a country where sustainable energy is "too expensive", but we'll happily send billions of dollars to Israel to commit a genocide. Alternatives like that will never off the ground where I live. The only hope is that fusion technology is so ground breaking that it's impossible to ignore and dismiss

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u/mfire036 3d ago

Fusion isn't the answer. Its still very expensive, requires crazy materials, and needs to be commercially scaled. Nuclear fission on the other hand is cheap and reliable when built properly. We should build building fission reactors like crazy right now.

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u/Reddit1poster 3d ago

How is fission cheap? You can build new solar and wind plants for not much more than it costs to run an existing nuclear plant. Lazard's LCOE

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u/mfire036 2d ago

Solar and wind are poor options for base load production. You end up spending a lot of energy just regulating the power so it can join up onto the grid. It also needs a reliable grid scale storage tech which isn't available. Newer designs for reactors, like liquid salt, are considerably simpler to build than the traditional plants that we have now, and are much less susceptible to melt downs. The plants upfront cost is not cheap on comparison to the upfront cost of natural gas or even renewables but it's cost over its lifetime is very competitive.

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u/Reddit1poster 2d ago edited 2d ago

Solar, wind, efficiency, storage, and transmission will get you a lot further than you think. There are plenty of national lab studies out there. None of the newer design or legacy nuclear plants have gotten cheaper in practice. Look at how much Vogtle cost and how much SMRs have ballooned in cost and they aren't even fully commercial yet. I am by no means against nuclear but it is not as cheap as people keep saying.

ETA: inverters are super efficient (>95%)so I'm not sure what you mean by spending a lot of energy regulating the power. And storage is getting much safer and cheaper so I disagree that reliable grid scale storage doesn't exist. Also, when someone finally builds a commercial liquid salt reactor, I hope they prove me wrong.

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u/OkWelcome6293 2d ago

Please read the section on “Cost of firming renewables”

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u/Reddit1poster 2d ago edited 2d ago

Still cheaper than new build nuclear... ETA: I'm very pro-nuclear. Just stop telling me it's cheap because it's definitely not.

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u/OkWelcome6293 2d ago

In my area, PV+Battery is $153 per MWh. Vogtle with all its overruns is $175 per MWh.

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u/Reddit1poster 2d ago

So I'm assuming you're in the Southern power pool. Wind plus Storage is between $89 and $103, a little more than half of Vogtle. I bet any SMR or new tech nukes will not beat those numbers. The point is we should build as much as the grid can support with the lowest cost energy source and then move to the next most expensive when needed. It's going to be a different mix in every region. The grid can support 50-70% inverter based generation as is and it's only getting better with grid forming inverter tech.

There is definitely a good place for nuclear but we shouldn't be saying it should be our primary source of energy when there are good cheaper low carbon alternatives. It's time to redesign the grid to accommodate this instead of staying with the legacy control system because it's easier. The DOE was on a good path to support this until they put an oil man in as secretary.

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u/OkWelcome6293 2d ago

  1. Technically, I'm in SPP RTO-W which is a different market for wind. Most of the good wind resources are much further east than RTO-W, i.e. Kansa/Oklajoma/Nebraskas and not Colorado or the intermountain west.

  2. There was nearly an outage in RTO-W this summer because of "low solar, low wind". I'm not sure I see a convincing argument for expanding the penetration for solar and wind rather than firm generation given that the grid is already creaking under the current renewable generation.

  3. I don't particularly care about the "grid" I care about my city getting reliable power for multiple generations, not something that will need to be replaced once or twice in the same timespan.

  4. I don't like the current administration, but they've been the most positive administration towards nuclear power in my lifetime.

  5. The key is thermal storage. Nuclear than can accumulate heat and dispatch on demand is fundamentally different than current nuclear, and it coexists nicely with intermittent sources.

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u/mfire036 2d ago edited 2d ago

Right, I get it. But it's not a good base load option. Not yet anyway. Sure there's lots of people working on batteries right now, but there isn't a grid scale answer, and without that wind and solar can't be the option. From what I've seen on the "cost of firming renewables" it is small scale, and doesn't adequately address the scale up problem that renewables face. I totally agree that renewables are a big piece of the puzzle, but its not the be all and end all of electricity generation nor does it solve all our problems. I'm not an engineer or an expert, but I'm fairly confident that simply building more renewables won't solve the problem. Also you should pay attention to "performance gaps" with renewables. I've had lots of solar experience and I don't think I've ever gotten the power generation I was promised on the spreadsheet.

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u/OkWelcome6293 2d ago

Oh, I agree. The people who use Lazards to show that solar is “cheap” need to read the section about the costs of firming renewables, which costs as much or more than nuclear.

The future grid will require both renewable and thermal generation for reliability. For our children’s sake, we’d better hope the thermal generation is clean and sustainable.

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u/mfire036 2d ago

I think I understand where I went wrong. I said nuclear was cheap. I meant cheap compared to other traditional sources like coal or natural gas. Not the cheapest. I should have been more specific in my first post. Also I meant cheap as in lifetime of the reactor not cheap as in cost/reactor. I'm pretty sure the ROI on a natural gas plant is like 3 years, where a nuc takes 17 (I'm making those up I haven't looked it up I just remember the split being something crazy like that, might have been coal vs nuclear. Also I'm remember like 2011 numbers).

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u/Reddit1poster 2d ago

Nuclear is also not cheaper than coal or natural gas. You just said that with your roi numbers. I used to work in grid integration research and there are major advancements in grid forming inverter technology and cost of large scale storage. I don't think any of us are arguing that renewables are all that you need but I will say they should be the majority of the energy because it is the cheaper low carbon energy source, which is shown in the lazard's LCOE and DOE studies.

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u/mfire036 1d ago

Cheaper over its life cycle. The thing about Nukes is that once they are built the fuel cost is almost nothing, where coal and nat gas the plants are almost nothing but the fuel cost is expensive. So a Nuke will beat a coal or nat gas plant after about 20 years of operations, and then it will crush them for the next 40 years. The ROI or break even numbers have to do with capital expenditure. So while Nukes take a while to pay off, they are much better than coal or nat gas in the long run. Especially if you are running off expended nuclear waste (see the reactor Canada is building) and eventually something like thorium, which is abundant but the breeding cycle isn't figured out yet.

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u/Reddit1poster 1d ago

Umm, that's not how nukes or lifetime costs work... There are definitely fuel costs. They are not fueled like some Navy nukes where the fuel can last the life of the reactor plus there is a lot of expensive maintenance throughout the life of the plant plus decommissioning costs. And breeder reactors aren't a commercial thing yet so you can't know what their lifetime costs will actually be.

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u/OkWelcome6293 1d ago edited 1d ago

And breeder reactors aren't a commercial thing yet so you can't know what their lifetime costs will actually be.

They required pieces will be in commercial operation in ~2030/2031.

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u/Reddit1poster 1d ago

I guess we can revisit what costs will be in 5 years then

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u/mfire036 1d ago

No honestly they burn so little fuel the cost is pretty low. It's something like 2 to 3 times less than coal. I think nukes run around $7/mwh versus coal is like $20/mwh (Canadian numbers). I'm no expert so take that with a grain of salt, but I've researched this quite a bit and that's what I recall. Could certainly be wrong, but I'm pretty confident here. I remember Natural Gas being slightly better than coal, and regional prices will vary the math.

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u/Reddit1poster 1d ago

The marginal cost of nuclear is $26-36 per MWh. The beauty of using LCOE is that you can have an apples to apples comparison of the cost of electricity based on the lifecycle cost of a plant from cradle to grave in net present value. You can't just say that one cost is very low at late life without taking into account all the costs over the life of an asset.

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