
Nuclear Fusion Could Rescue the Planet from Climate Catastrophe - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-09-28/startups-take-aim-at-nuclear-fusion-energy-s-biggest-challenge
======
safgasCVS
Consuming less would definitely rescue the planet but everyone not having a
1.5 ton hunk of steel to ferry a 70kg person from robot to robot while
throwing away 40% of food produced goes against our hardwiring of having more
and more. instead we hold out for some unproven brilliant technical innovation
to save us instead of thinking about using resources rationally.

~~~
iamgopal
Lots of mindsets to overcome, but I'm sure, sooner or later we will forced to
get rid of automobile and completely relay on public transport. May be in 50
to 100 years, but there isn't any alternative.

~~~
weberc2
Honesty question for everyone proposing bicycling and public transit: are
these feasible in rural environments? (Especially WRT cycling if you have a
disability or young children and/or have to commute long distances in very
cold or very hot weather)

~~~
dashundchen
Bicycling and transit doesn't have to be feasible for everyone, it just has to
be made an option for trips where it makes sense, which is most trips. Nearly
half of trips in the US were under 3 miles, 72% of those where done in a car.
60% of trips under a mile were made in a car or truck (!). Accommodating all
those trips requires a ton of pavement, parking, gas stations to be built.

[https://www.bikeleague.org/content/national-household-
travel...](https://www.bikeleague.org/content/national-household-travel-
survey-short-trips-analysis)

The vast majority of people making those trips are able-bodied people in
urbanized areas (80% of the US lived in an urbanized area as of 2010).

[https://www.icip.iastate.edu/tables/population/urban-pct-
sta...](https://www.icip.iastate.edu/tables/population/urban-pct-states)

So if you can get bike infrastructure to where people are living, you've
attacked a big chunk of the auto problem.

Per your second point, yes, it can be feasible. The modern rural US is very
sprawling in terms of the built environment but it wasn't always that way.
Rural areas in the US used to revolve around small villages and points of
density that service a wide area, complete with transit connections. Many
German rural villages are extremely bikeable and have regular transit through
their regions and to larger cities.

You still can accommodate people who need vehicles, just the demand on
infrastructure (parking, number of lane miles, subsidies and costs) would be
greatly reduced. As it is now, the children, the disabled, and frequently the
poor can't drive themselves and rely on other people driving them. Cycling can
be done by almost anyone, is much cheaper and therefore much more accessible
than driving.

------
temac
Nuclear fission could, obviously -- I've yet to see anybody propose a
reasonable alternative (with a known tech, not just hypothetical handwaving)
to cover our enormous energy needs -- and even then some work is needed to
migrate direct fossil consumption to electric. Wind and solar consumes
ridiculous amount of spaces and the storage is not solved (we need it for too
for other purposes, maybe not in the same form, but that does not make the
problem disappear for existing usages...). Without storage, it is not a
solution (it does not prevent it from becoming one in the future, but we need
to start to build things _now_ , while storage is being studied). Hydro is
used already, and developing it to the max will not be enough. Nuclear fusion
is not there yet.

So even with pervasive nuclear fission we would have a shitload of problem to
solve, but at least that would be an immediate first step, and could be
replaced _if_ we eventually figure out how to replace it. We haven't figured
out that yet.

~~~
lazyguy2
Storage isn't the problem. The problem is that the governments 'own' all the
nuclear material and anybody operating a nuclear plant is utterly dependent on
government actors to do something with the 'waste'. It is illegal if the plant
operators went about fixing the problem on their own.

And since the government refuses to solve the problem or even really look
deeply into solutions then it's not getting solved and it isn't ever going to
get solved.

Because of this the solutions to recycle spent fuel is still in it's infancy.
Nobody is allowed to do anything, the government isn't really interested in
allowing nuclear power to be competitive, so it's just not happening. No
money, no motivation.

People in the industry are not going to invest millions in developing these
breeder reactors and other ways to recycle fuel if they will never be allowed
to use them.

Theoretically you could recycle the fuel to the point to where most of it is
spent and isn't much of a danger. Recycle the fuel 60 or a 100 times. Then mix
it with clay and cook into into a ceramic so that they are safe to handle,
transport, and store. Massively reduce the danger and radiation levels.

Despite all the talk and rhetoric about CO2 emmissions you see coming from the
state the petroleum industry is still king. People inside and outside of
government are making a lot of money and they have no interest in seeing that
go away.

The dirty secret with things like solar and wind is that in order for them to
work reliably they need to have large number of natural gas generators.
Because of this and other issues they really pose little threat to total
fossil fuel consumption.

~~~
hairytrog
Nicely said. That last point tells you why they get support from oil
companies. It's empty climate signaling. I'd like to see an oil company bet on
nuclear.

~~~
sunstone
My understanding is that models show that with a large enough geographically
diverse combination of wind and solar almost no storage is required.
Furthermore, with the cost of HVDC transmission lines dropping so quickly it's
becoming economic to build such large networks.

~~~
temac
Models shows precisely the inverse at least in Europe (there is mostly no
independent abundance of wind/solar, at least way not enough)

It even shows today with even quite small capacity disturbing market prices.
That's why even "low" production costs can make wind not profitable; you end
up selling your production with very low prices (because there is some
overproduction), in some cases even negatives. You would not have that problem
with storage. But then the production costs of wind+storage are already
high...

------
guscost
Adding another voice to the chorus of fission works, people are irrational,
etc.

If you say to me that science proves the world is in grave danger, _but_ we
can’t use nuclear fission because it is “dirty” or “dangerous” (or even
better, “solving one thing doesn’t matter because the real problem is our
culture/capitalism”), I will immediately stop taking you seriously.

~~~
adamsea
Maybe because TEPCO lies? And the history of other nuclear companies or
agencies supposed to have fidelity to the public and not betray their trust is
also poor?

------
nabla9
Successful large scale fusion energy is not enough. It must be cheap enough to
replace hydrocarbons and be viable within reasonable time scale.

If the cost and time scale does not matter, fission is already good enough.
People are just irrational and can't compare things. Fukushima type accident
every few years would be completely acceptable and compared to coal and
hydrocarbons.

~~~
pjc50
> Fukushima type accident every few years would be completely acceptable and
> compared to coal and hydrocarbons.

This is the most delusional thing I've ever read about nuclear feasibility. No
country will ever accept more than one of those.

~~~
missosoup
> No country will ever accept more than one of those.

And yet most countries accept death toll and land area denial orders of
magnitude higher every single year to keep operating coal plants and ICEs. As
a randomly sampled person, you are almost certainly going to live less because
of the use of hydrocarbons and you are almost certainly completely unaffected
by the use of nuclear power.

This is the same effect as car crashes being just a death toll yearly
statistic that everyone accepts, meanwhile each individual plane crash is
subjected to news theatrics despite flying being orders of magnitude safer
than driving.

Australian mining industry destroys one of the natural wonders of the world
spanning 344,400 square kilometres just while doing business as usual? Meh.
Second worst nuclear disaster of all time results in 371 square km exclusion
zone where people are still safe and wildlife is thriving and with 0
casualties? Stop everything. Ban nuclear.

------
jefflombardjr
This is great. I hope they succeed, but the climate crisis isn't solely about
emissions.

Yes it's the largest most immediate threat. But we will continue to have the
dust bowl, ozone crisis, emissions crisis, microplastic crisis, etc. Unless we
fundamentally address our relationship to this planet.

There's an incredible documentary that was way before it's time called "Who's
Counting?" by Marilyn Waring. I think it addresses some of the fundamental
causes of each crisis that comes up every so often. We're not accounting for
the economic value or the "jobs of nature". We might not even be able to,
because we really don't fully understand it.

------
hairytrog
A new theory on fusion. It's actually a government organized strategy to keep
nuclear scientists/engineers occupied on a sisyphean task that can never be
completed. If they're hard at work on fusion, they're not taking payments from
foreign governments to work on weapons or subs. It's pretty great because the
cause is so high minded and noble that it can attract all the engineers and
it's very difficult so it attracts the brightest too (those suckers are
smart). Indeed, it's so difficult that they (the government non-proliferation
people) may never have to think up a new way to keep the nuclear scientists
occupied. US did something similar in the 90s after the Cold War by
hiring/importing all the Soviet scientists, after WWII by hiring/importing
German engineers. If you're working for us, you're not working for them.

At some point, maybe weapons engineers could start getting paid to just sit on
their hands. Learn to make the bomb, get paid to not make it.

Is fusion a brain sink designed for non-proliferation? It's a pretty effective
non-proliferation tool with total US fusion research at less than $1B/yr.
Compared to a trillion dollar war or 10s of billions in monitoring etc.

~~~
V-2
That's a fun idea, but extraordinary theories require extraordinary (even if
circumstantial) evidence.

~~~
hairytrog
The evidence is that 10s of 1000s of plasma physicists and nuclear scientists
have fruitlessly consumed careers without any result since the 1970s. And,
nuclear weapons and tech have not proliferated substantially.

~~~
V-2
This might point towards cold fusion being indeed a dead end, but not the
existence of a conspiracy behind a "government organized strategy" you
hypothesized. That's quite a leap.

By the way, the idea reminded me of "The Dead Past" by Asimov.

------
viach
Yup, as much as things like magic wand, warp drive, aliens or parallel worlds
colonization, they all can save us.

How dare people say just limiting consumption and CO2 pollution could have any
effect. Let's just bet everything on zero.

~~~
meowface
Of course, but in a world where, practically, we aren't and won't be able to
reduce emissions in time, what do we do? All approaches need to be looked into
simultaneously. And it seems like that might be the world we live in.

In many cases it may be far easier to get billions funneled to researchers and
scientists for moonshot projects like this than to get world leaders to agree
to and enforce billions/trillions of dollars' worth of emissions reductions.

As mentioned in other comments, even if the warming issue itself is solved
"out-of-band", there are still lots of other issues associated with what's
being released. But it's a start, and might be the difference between turmoil
and utter catastrophe. Countless human and non-human animal lives could
potentially be saved which might otherwise not be if moonshot projects like
this didn't exist. Reducing suffering and death, for all time scales, is the
only metric we should be optimizing for at the end of the day.

This problem has to be viewed in terms of what will actually help, not what we
"should" be doing. I'd certainly wish the president of my country would sign
the Paris Agreement; obviously, we should. But a scientist won't be able to
influence that, and probably otherwise won't be able to have much impact
lobbying politicians, so they need to find a way to help any way they can.

~~~
viach
My point is, we are trying to get workaround for the impossibility of reaching
consensus and absence of political will with some complex tech. Probably we'll
manage to do it this time with fusion. But this is a dead end in the long run.

~~~
DennisP
It's hard to see fusion as a dead end, when it could produce as much zero-
emissions energy as we need, and last until the sun goes out.

I hope we do fix the political situation, but doing that may be harder than
achieving fusion, so I wouldn't want to bet entirely on that. And even if we
accomplish it, fusion could still make our task easier if it's cheap enough.
There's no merit to making things harder than they need to be.

------
The_rationalist
Fusion is not necessary at all, thorium is a sufficent holy grail, currently
underfunded because of humanity irrationallity.

~~~
legulere
Thorium also has its issues. Germany had a commercial reactor in the 80s, but
it was abandoned.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300)

~~~
fastball
"Modern" Thorium designs (not really modern, but what people are talking about
today) use liquid fuel, where as THTR-300 used pebble fuel. If you are
comparing a uranium solid fuel reactor to a thorium solid fuel reactor, the
differences are indeed marginal.

Most of the benefits people talk about with thorium are related to using a
liquid fuel in the form of a molten salt (LFTR), which allows for things like
continuous operation, 100% fuel utilization, and "meltdown-proof" designs.

~~~
imtringued
The problem with nuclear is that people constantly talk about how designs that
currently don't exist will solve all the problems. Cost overruns by nuclear
power plants is primarily caused by the fact that almost every plant is
redesigned from the ground up, yet somehow magically every project fails to
consider these modern reactor designs.

~~~
fastball
LFTR designs currently do exist. There are a variety of reasons they haven't
been built and used for large-scale energy production, some of them more
conspiratorial than others.

------
specialist
Suspending disbelief for a moment:

Future perfect nuclear fusion helps us become carbon neutral. Transportation,
structures, agriculture, power generation are now carbon free. Yay!

But it's still not enough.

Carbon is now being added by "natural" causes, in a positive feedback loop.
Thawing tundra, burning forests, ocean acidification. With the imminent threat
of the ocean burping up all that the frozen methane currently stored on its
floor.

Whatever is needed for humanity to become carbon neutral, we need much more to
become carbon negative, to remove carbon faster than nature adds it.

~~~
gridlockd
> Whatever is needed for humanity to become carbon neutral, we need much more
> to become carbon negative, to remove carbon faster than nature adds it.

We have processes to do this, cheap electricity would really help there.

------
simonblack
"Fusion will be available to all in 20 years."

Unfortunately, they've kept saying that every year since the 1950s. If it were
truly possible, we'd be doing it already.

------
legulere
Another article from five days ago:

Nuclear energy too slow, too expensive to save climate: report

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-
nuclearpower/nucle...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-
nuclearpower/nuclear-energy-too-slow-too-expensive-to-save-climate-report-
idUSKBN1W909J)

Fusion is even further out than fission.

~~~
missosoup
Fission isn't far out. Fission has been a readily available solution for
decades. The only obstacle is political. The only reason fission is expensive
is political.

As the climate situation worsens, more and more nations will overlook that
obstacle and roll out large scale nuclear. The only question is, will they be
able to do it quickly enough.

I feel like I'm the only person in the room missing something when watching
the world focus on 'renewable' technology when a much less resource/labour
intensive and much higher energy dense power source is already available. And
it's safer too. [1]

Why is renewable in quotes? Because we don't actually have a way to recycle
solar and wind installations[2][3]. Nuclear is the only currently available
large scale power source that doesn't require a large and continuous supply of
mined materials.

Am I missing something? Am I an idiot? Why is everyone so anti nuclear and pro
'renewable' when nuclear is significantly better by every objective metric?
Looks like the 'ban plastic straws' activism which ignored that straws make up
an insignificant fraction of ocean waste and the vast majority of it is
discarded fishing equipment. Inconsequential feel-good activism is a higher
priority goal than more difficult but effective solutions?

[1]
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-
deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#453cd006709b)

[2] [https://recyclinginternational.com/editors-top-
picks/critica...](https://recyclinginternational.com/editors-top-
picks/critical-question-how-to-recycle-12-000-wind-turbines/26883/)

[3] [https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/waste-crisis-
looms-a...](https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/waste-crisis-looms-as-
thousands-of-solar-panels-reach-end-of-life-20190112-p50qzd.html)

~~~
ZeroGravitas
You're not the only one missing this. It seems very common to miss, but I can
point out what you're missing.

Your link number 1 is supposed to support nuclear being safer than renewables,
and it simply doesn't do that.

There's a few links that regularly get shared, intending to make that point
and they all don't actually make it.

The list of things that nuclear is safer than, is notably missing grid scale
wind and solar. What a mysterious ommision from something that is trying to
argue they are not safe.

Having read your link 2 and 3, I see they also don't support the point you are
making (the first describes how to recycle turbine blades into concrete and is
looking for more applications, the second says solar panels are 90% recyclable
and just wants some government policies to ensure this happens), which makes
me wonder if you're arguing in good faith here?

~~~
missosoup
How does the first link not demonstrate that nuclear, at 90 deaths per
trillion kWh (and this includes all the deaths from the earliest incidents
when humanity was just figuring out how to harness nuclear power), is not
safer than wind at 150, solar at 440, or coal at 100k?

Are you disputing the article? My interpretation of it? The sources it cites?
The error bounds on the estimates? What?

~~~
pjc50
The deaths figure is not the whole story? The areas rendered uninhabitable
matter as well.

~~~
ageofwant
Chernobyl is a wildlife haven. Its got one of the highest levels of
biodiversity in Eastern Europe.

~~~
jhgb
Yes, it's a wildlife haven because we decided to let animals instead of humans
enjoy the tumors (see e.g.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1994720/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1994720/)).
And it turns out that humans are even worse than nuclear fallout for wildlife.
I'm not sure if that means that nuclear fallout is good. It most likely means
simply that humans are bad.

~~~
missosoup
What are you talking about? Not only is wildlife thriving there[1], there are
multiple permanent human settlements in the area, a growing hospitality
sector[2], and a booming tourism industry[3]. If you're looking at elevated
frequency of minor abnormalities, you have a few hundred papers relating those
to agriculture and mining to sift through.

You sound like you've watched too many Hollywood horror films. The only place
to get a meaningful dose is inside the sarcophagus or to venture deep into
buildings that contain dumped cleanup equipment. Both are fairly difficult to
access to wildlife or civilians.

[1] [https://www.businessinsider.com/wildlife-near-nuclear-
reacto...](https://www.businessinsider.com/wildlife-near-nuclear-reactor-
chernobyl-2016-4/?r=AU&IR=T)

[2]
[https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Restaurant_Review-g298058-d10...](https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Restaurant_Review-g298058-d10441517-Reviews-
Desyatka_Cafe-Chernobyl_Kiev_Oblast.html)

[3] [http://www.travelweekly.com.au/article/chernobyl-sees-
touris...](http://www.travelweekly.com.au/article/chernobyl-sees-tourism-boom-
thanks-to-tv-series-on-nuclear-disaster/)

~~~
jhgb
It's not a contradiction that wildlife is thriving there, since, _as I pointed
out_ , humans were even worse for the wildlife. That means obviously nothing
for what effect it would have for humans themselves.

I'm in contact with people from our nuclear physics faculty that are doing
actual research on this, I don't need to read random articles from your
generic newspapers. If I need to know something, I can just go down the hall
and ask them. That the exclusion zone still has significant hot spots is what
they told me.

[EDIT: Your article [1] says basically the same things that I did, most
notably the _" Nature flourishes when humans are removed from the equation,
even after the world's worst nuclear accident"_ and _" The Chernobyl exclusion
zone is still considered an unsafe region for humans due to the high levels of
radiation"_. Thanks for that corroboration.]

------
programminggeek
The real irony is if we truly did solve Global Warming, the propaganda machine
would either decide we are creating carbon emissions from something else, or
go create a new global crisis to panic about.

IE - the words will change, but the freak out will be the same.

------
JohnJamesRambo
Well yes that would be great, fusion is the holy grail, but it is always 50
years away.

~~~
aalleavitch
This attitude probably doesn’t help it in securing funding. Not everything can
be solved with more money, obviously, but if we were putting a fraction of the
money into basic research that we are putting into the petroleum industry I’m
pretty confident we would see that timeline jump very suddenly.

~~~
raverbashing
Check how much the fusion projects got in financing like ITER, Wendelstein 7-X
and others received

The National Ignition Facility also got a lot of funding but it has goals
beyond the study of fusion

~~~
aalleavitch
It’s a lot of money, I’ll admit, but compared to the military budget it’s
chump change.

~~~
beokop
Sure but the military... works.

~~~
aalleavitch
For certain definitions of “works”

------
yyyk
The problem is that Nuclear Fusion is always 30 years away. It was 30 years
away in the 1970s and it's still 30 years away today. Can't rely on a solution
that would probably not be available in time.

~~~
chapium
First we must discover time travel.

~~~
DmitryOlshansky
The only good thing about time travel is that once we discover it we always
had known it.

------
hanoz
Fusion or not, only an abundance of incredibly cheap clean energy is going to
turn back the tide on CO2 and other pollutants, and who knows what problems
that may bring.

------
option
fission is already good enough. Let’s just adopt and build safe designs at
scale

~~~
hairytrog
are you investing?

------
imtringued
If it was that easy we would have built them already.

------
hairytrog
Fusion is cool and it would be a very nice accomplishment for mankind. But
it's kind of like going to the moon. The benefits will be offshoots of the
journey rather than the journey and goal itself. Basically, if we want
commercially viable and global use of fusion, someone needs to fix the
problems below (talking here about D-T fusion designs and not aneutronic
concepts). Not being negative, just pointing at the walls that need to be
scaled.

1\. Cost. The big problem here is that fusion does not address the main
impediment of current nuclear fission. It's going to be really expensive to
build power plants that are about similarly sized to fission power plants and
more complicated (ITER is $65B... other projects are in the $5B range). They
will still be massive construction projects. Renewables have proven that you
have to manufacture your power systems in factories to lower costs rapidly. At
the end of the day, fusion is going to be construction with all its associated
delays, cost overruns, and low productivity. Can't really fix this without
going much smaller and simpler, and that's not really an option based on
physical/engineering requirements.

2\. No current functional prototype. How long does it take from functional
prototype to large-scale deployment, especially considering the massive
regulatory overhaul required? eg. 50 years for aircraft? That might be fast
enough.

3\. Lots of very difficult engineering to deal with all the neutron damage and
extreme temperature gradients. Million degree plasmas, 600 degree coolants,
-40 degree super magnets, all within a few meters = nightmare. It's quite a
hassle, but there are lots of smart people working on this. Can probably throw
more money at this.

4\. Not safer than fission. Yes, no long lived fission products for fusion and
meltdowns are more difficult. But reactor damage and tritium release are
probably more likely than in fission. Fusion power plant would be a lot more
complex (more parts and systems) and has lots of tritium (tritium likes to
escape from where you put it and diffuses through metals) with tritium
processing facility to breed and fuel the reactor. Tritium has 10 year half
life and not good for you when ingested. Essentially, lots of radioactive
material handling + lots of equipment to maintain = higher chance of small
accidents. See page 10 in link at bottom. Can probably throw more money at
this.

5\. Proliferation. Fusion reactors have lots of neutrons and tritium. Neutrons
can be used to breed weapons material simply by placing normal uranium or
thorium in the neutron flux. Tritium is used to boost nuclear weapons (just a
bit of tritium drastically lowers the plutonium required). Is the only we to
solve this state controlled fusion power? How can that be market competitive?

6\. Probably only good for electrical power. While this is really just a
limitation, it illustrates that fusion, should 1-5 be resolved, is not a magic
bullet. You can't do much with it other than make electrical power. The power
plants are too big to use for distributed process heat or hydrogen production.

Lidsky's often ignored 1984 paper: [http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-
content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trou...](http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-
content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trouble-With-Fusion_MIT_Tech_Review_1983.pdf)

~~~
drjesusphd
> lots of tritium

I think (combined with the statement about hot things next to cold things)
you're overestimating how much fuel there is in the plasma. It's density is
about a million times less than air. In most other contexts, that's a very
good vacuum. I don't think there are any consequences to a fuel leak, but I
could be wrong.

The primary issue is neutron activation. The neutrons from the fusion reaction
tends to make inert components of the machine radioactive. Again, short half-
lifes, but a concern that needs to be mitigated.

~~~
DennisP
In fact, the article quotes one of the fusion researchers saying if he stuck
his arm in his 35 million degree plasma, he wouldn't even be burned.

------
starvingbear
Let's just use whatever tech saved us from the climate catastrophe everyone
was preaching was coming 20 years ago. Or the ones before that I heard tell of

