On: Fusion Turns Up the Heat

[sigmoid10]

>more expensive to operate than a fission plant, which is already not competitive.

You're probably referring to this study that claimed fission power plants are not economical anywhere in the world. FYI, this was published by a german institute to justify their politicians' decision to phaseout nuclear power, but it has since been disproven (source also german): https://www.kernd.de/kernd-wAssets/docs/fachzeitschrift-atw/... If you use realistic real world data, nuclear is very much profitable and competitive in many sectors.

[ncmncm → sigmoid10]

Nukes have only ever been "profitable" where heavily subsidized with public money. These subsidies are often cunningly concealed, as for instance the liability cap which amounts to a tax-paid insurance policy. No nuke could afford to operate if it paid market insurance rates -- if indeed anybody could afford to offer to insure one at all. Similarly, decommissioning cost is never included.

And, a system an order of magnitude more costly, as fusion would necessarily be, would certainly be far from competitive, even were regular nukes honestly viable.

Neglecting all subsidies, and also construction cost, current nukes are considered about on par with renewables, but renewables costs are still falling very sharply. So, any nuke started today, without neglecting CAPEX, absolutely could not compete with renewables built at the time it is finally fired up.

Corollary is that existing nukes, where not explicitly propped up by coercive funding, will be mothballed long before their design life is up, and their CAPEX amortized over the many fewer kWh actually produced will mean they cost way more per than originally projected.

[onlyrealcuzzo → ncmncm]

> And, a system an order of magnitude more costly, as fusion would necessarily be, would certainly be far from competitive, even were regular nukes honestly viable.

This is a strawman.

We don't even have fusion. We don't know what it would cost.

It doesn't have the environmental issues, so decommissioning and insurance are lesser issues.

[ncmncm → onlyrealcuzzo]

We do, in fact, know what it would cost to extract the heat in usable form. And that would be enormously more costly than what we do with fission. Extracting a few grams of tritium or helium-3, at a few parts per billion, from a thousand tons of molten, radioactive lithium every day, for fuel, can be no picnic. We can anyway be glad most of the lithium itself is not radioactive, just metal impurities spalled from surfaces of the pipes it ran in.

Decommissioning would necessarily be at least as big a job as a regular nuke, because the whole reactor, thousands of tons of embrittled metal, would have been blasted with hot neutrons for months or years. A good home for a thousand tons of what was molten neutron-irradiated lithium is no easier to find than for spent uranium.

[sigmoid10 → ncmncm]

This argument about subsidies was disproven in the linked paper. And don't forget that fossils is still the most subsidised industry, so it's not like we'd lose anything by transitioning.