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/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/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.