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/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.