Fusion, another step closer?

[Maelstrom]

Just in:
https://www.livescience.com/jet-fusion-experiment-smashes-energy-record

Still only in a 5 second burst, and I have not seen if their was a net gain in energy yet, but a step in the right direction!

[Cikomyr2]

Fusion go go fusion!!!

We can do this people! We can save the world!!

[warty goblin]

Definitely not energy-positive yet - they produced 59 megawatts (https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60312633), the experiment was powered by two 500 megawatt flywheels. I'm assuming they didn't use 100% of the energy in the wheels, but probably a good bit more than 6%. But five seconds is really good, and apparently limited only by their non-superconducting electromagnets overheating. Makes a person very optimistic for the French reactor when it comes online.

[Squire Doodad]

Wait, so we're actually at the "20 years away" part of fusion commercial viability??

[Peelee]

Wait, so we're actually at the "20 years away" part of fusion commercial viability??

Always have been. :smallamused:

[Rater202]

My understanding of fusion has always been "we have the knowledge but we don't have the ability." We know how it works but we don't have the tech to do it.

A good chunk of engineering is just... Making tools and then using those to make tools to make tools to make tools until you have the tools you need to make the tools you need to do the thing you wanted to do in the first place.

Or trying something just to see if it works, then write down what, if anything, about it worked and what, if anything, about it didn't so that you can refer to those notes later when you try to make a better one.

Hence "fusion is always twenty years away" line. It's just people shrugging and guessing when the right breakthrough will happen or when the combination of incremental improvements and trial and error will result in meaningful improvement.

[Squire Doodad]

Still, I think we've gotten it down from always 20 years away to always 15 years away! Now that's what I call progress!

[Eldan]

My understanding of fusion has always been "we have the knowledge but we don't have the ability." We know how it works but we don't have the tech to do it.

A good chunk of engineering is just... Making tools and then using those to make tools to make tools to make tools until you have the tools you need to make the tools you need to do the thing you wanted to do in the first place.

Or trying something just to see if it works, then write down what, if anything, about it worked and what, if anything, about it didn't so that you can refer to those notes later when you try to make a better one.

Hence "fusion is always twenty years away" line. It's just people shrugging and guessing when the right breakthrough will happen or when the combination of incremental improvements and trial and error will result in meaningful improvement.

I've actually seen one researcher formulate it as X billion dollars of funding away. Apparently, funding for fusion has proportionally gone down since the 80s.

[Radar]

I've actually seen one researcher formulate it as X billion dollars of funding away. Apparently, funding for fusion has proportionally gone down since the 80s.
That is indeed the case. The funding data can be found here (http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/margraf1/). Currently we are on a good way of getting the fusion power going with ITER progressing toward completion. While it is insanely expensive, it is a prototype for actual fusion power plants. Based on the data gathered there, more efficient designs will be made and implemented.

I also have fairly high hopes for the high beta reactors developed by for example Lockheed Martin, but their success is so far a bit more uncertain. ITER is just an extension and refinement of already well tested designs. Getting a relatively new reactor design to work as intended is a bit more tricky business. If it works though, it would be far more significant due to the lower size and manufacturing cost.

[Gnoman]

"Fusion is always 20 years away" is the result of fusion constantly being back-burnered in funding and other resource allocation because it is such a long-term project. There's been a few fundamental problems that had to be overcome - the limitations of existing magnets was a big one - but the biggest hurdle is that it has never been a top-priority project. There's no guarantee that we'd have fusion plants today if it had been Manhattan Project-ed back in the 70s, but we'd be a lot closer if it had been consistently given the level of support given to other technologies.

[Maelstrom]

I think, unfortunately (and this is just my speculation, having no true insight) that fusion keeps getting "back-burnered" as a result of the technology having no real direct contribution to military technology. Until it can be miniaturized for use in mobile vehicles to power future weapons, at least... I'm sure there other factors/lobbies that are involved as well, though

[Gnoman]

Nonsense. The energy densities of petroleum products, along with the ease of shipping them around and loading them into a vehicle, make them very hard to replade in military applications. Fusion power could completely eliminate civiliam use of petroleum. That alone would make it a boon to the military.

Fusion is backburnered because it is a long-term project, and a lot of other projects offer faster payoffs even if they have limitations. Same reason why fission plants are often passed up in favor pf natural gas ones even in friendly territories- they take a lot longer to build.

[Cikomyr2]

I think, unfortunately (and this is just my speculation, having no true insight) that fusion keeps getting "back-burnered" as a result of the technology having no real direct contribution to military technology. Until it can be miniaturized for use in mobile vehicles to power future weapons, at least... I'm sure there other factors/lobbies that are involved as well, though

From a geopolitical point of view, effective fusion power would defang any nation that relies on fossil fuel as their core source of income and influence.

[Yora]

The long term effect of widespread available fusion power electricity would have such far reaching consequences that we can't really imagine them now. Since the beginning of human society and industry, the main limiting factor has always been energy. The knowledge how to do all kinds of new things and advancements has almost always existed a very long time before it was possible to gain the required energy and pay for it. Be it human labor, animal power, water power, steam power, or electricity, energy has always been the bottleneck. Getting the raw materials and manufacturing them into the components for a fusion power plant has always been hugely expensive because it's energy intensive. Once you have fusion plants to provide cheap energy, it becomes cheaper to make more fusion plants, leading to a cascading chain of cheaper energy. Nobody has the slightest clue what a global economy might look like where energy only keeps getting cheaper.
I think fusion power will be the biggest game changer since the steam engine, possibly even since agriculture.

[Radar]

The long term effect of widespread available fusion power electricity would have such far reaching consequences that we can't really imagine them now. Since the beginning of human society and industry, the main limiting factor has always been energy. The knowledge how to do all kinds of new things and advancements has almost always existed a very long time before it was possible to gain the required energy and pay for it. Be it human labor, animal power, water power, steam power, or electricity, energy has always been the bottleneck. Getting the raw materials and manufacturing them into the components for a fusion power plant has always been hugely expensive because it's energy intensive. Once you have fusion plants to provide cheap energy, it becomes cheaper to make more fusion plants, leading to a cascading chain of cheaper energy. Nobody has the slightest clue what a global economy might look like where energy only keeps getting cheaper.
I think fusion power will be the biggest game changer since the steam engine, possibly even since agriculture.
It really depends on when or if fusion power becomes cheap. Take solar panels: they do not need fuel and yet the electricity they produce is far from free. Between manufacturing and operational costs fusion power plants might not be competitive with traditional sources of energy for a long time. So this will be a gradual evolution instead of revolution. And the energy cost of building a fusion reactor is just some part of all the cost. Key element is the required precision of its elements, which will not be any easier with excess energy. The same goes with the labor needed for putting all the elements together as complexity of even a simple tokamak (like ITER will be) is far beyond what one would encounter in a traditional power plant.

There is also another reason, why there will be no energy cascade like you predict: you need to be able to use that energy for something. Extending the infrastructure takes time and there has to be a need for larger production output.

[Squire Doodad]

Take solar panels: they do not need fuel and yet the electricity they produce is far from free.

While I acknowledge the point you're making in the post as a whole, do keep in mind that solar panels are quite efficient and inexpensive. They need recycling infrastructure and have some issues, but on the whole they're doing very well. In some areas, it is more efficient to build a new solar farm than it would be to keep an old coal plant running. Solar panel farm restraints are more related to socioeconomic and especially geopolitical issues, which I won't go into here.

[Radar]

While I acknowledge the point you're making in the post as a whole, do keep in mind that solar panels are quite efficient and inexpensive. They need recycling infrastructure and have some issues, but on the whole they're doing very well. In some areas, it is more efficient to build a new solar farm than it would be to keep an old coal plant running. Solar panel farm restraints are more related to socioeconomic and especially geopolitical issues, which I won't go into here.
That being said, they only started getting economically viable fairly recently - it took a few good decades of intense research to go from first commercial products to where we are now with solar energy.

As a sidenote, further use of solar power is also restrained due to its inherent problem of not producing any energy at night and being weather-dependent. Without solving the problem of large scale energy storage, it will remain an addition to the energy mix instead of a main source.

[Squire Doodad]

That being said, they only started getting economically viable fairly recently - it took a few good decades of intense research to go from first commercial products to where we are now with solar energy.

As a sidenote, further use of solar power is also restrained due to its inherent problem of not producing any energy at night and being weather-dependent. Without solving the problem of large scale energy storage, it will remain an addition to the energy mix instead of a main source.

Good point on the time it took - we'd need to throw a lot more weight behind fusion to get it viable soon.

It is worth noting that there's been research on vanadium batteries as a way to better handle energy storage on city level usage, so that may be already solved in some regards. This would require a new set of supply lines for vanadium though, much like how sodium batteries would technically be more environmentally friendly than lithium but there isn't the infrastructure for it quite yet.
In any case, I keep on getting the sneaking suspicion that if fossil fuel R&D subsidies were to be shifted wholly to any given renewable, it'd be vastly more efficient within a year...but that's a whole other matter

[Manga Shoggoth]

The long term effect of widespread available fusion power electricity would have such far reaching consequences that we can't really imagine them now. Since the beginning of human society and industry, the main limiting factor has always been energy. The knowledge how to do all kinds of new things and advancements has almost always existed a very long time before it was possible to gain the required energy and pay for it. Be it human labor, animal power, water power, steam power, or electricity, energy has always been the bottleneck. Getting the raw materials and manufacturing them into the components for a fusion power plant has always been hugely expensive because it's energy intensive. Once you have fusion plants to provide cheap energy, it becomes cheaper to make more fusion plants, leading to a cascading chain of cheaper energy. Nobody has the slightest clue what a global economy might look like where energy only keeps getting cheaper.
I think fusion power will be the biggest game changer since the steam engine, possibly even since agriculture.

It's mostly forgotten these days, but back in the days when nuclear (fission) power plants were going to be our saviours, the hyperbolie was that nuclear power plants would be so cheap and plentiful that the companies would have to pay people to to use the power.

I suspect the limiting factors on any progress have been cost and politics - and energy availability is only a part of that.

[Vahnavoi]

The lesson taught to us by nuclear fission is that it doesn't matter if you have technology and resources to do a thing if you lack the goodwill to ever actually do the thing. At this point, I'm willing to chuck nuclear fusion in the same bin. We wouldn't even need to build fusion reactors if we had continued building fission reactors using the technology we already did use to build the existing ones. It's too late to start now - given how badly delayed some third generation reactors have become, it was too late to start in early 2000s. It will be too late for fusion too, because world energy demand was projected to double or triple from 2010 to 2040. If some other technology doesn't already fill the gap from here to 2035, we'll be talking of trying to make new fusion plants commercially viable in the middle of or even after a global energy crisis.

[Beni-Kujaku]

Fusion doesn't aim at solving the current energy crisis. Even ITER isn't meant to produce electricity on its own, and only its projected successors (the DEMO class fusion reactors) are intended to demonstrate the fusion-based electricity production. Before we see widespread fusion energy implemented, we may have to wait for 2050 or 2070. Nuclear fusion aims at solving the next energy crisis, and providing incredible amounts of energy in the very long term. But for that to even be a possibility, we have to survive that long, with fission and renewable energy, and make the transition between fuel-burning machines and electricity-powered ones, worldwide. But if we can overcome the ecological crisis, then mastery of nuclear fusion will be the greatest reward there can be, to all of us as a species.

[halfeye]

Fusion doesn't aim at solving the current energy crisis. Even ITER isn't meant to produce electricity on its own, and only its projected successors (the DEMO class fusion reactors) are intended to demonstrate the fusion-based electricity production. Before we see widespread fusion energy implemented, we may have to wait for 2050 or 2070. Nuclear fusion aims at solving the next energy crisis, and providing incredible amounts of energy in the very long term. But for that to even be a possibility, we have to survive that long, with fission and renewable energy, and make the transition between fuel-burning machines and electricity-powered ones, worldwide. But if we can overcome the ecological crisis, then mastery of nuclear fusion will be the greatest reward there can be, to all of us as a species.

There will still be heat. Global warming will not be stopped by turning to more efficient methods, though it may be slowed.

I remember when fusion power was fifty years away, and it seems it still is.

[Radar]

There will still be heat. Global warming will not be stopped by turning to more efficient methods, though it may be slowed.

I remember when fusion power was fifty years away, and it seems it still is.
As it is, direct production of heat is not an issue at all - our total energy consumption is still 5 orders of magnitude below what Earth gets from the Sun. Any fluctuations there could not shift the climate.

Emission of greenhouse gasses on the other hand results in cumulative effects that can and do upset the climate balance.

[halfeye]

As it is, direct production of heat is not an issue at all - our total energy consumption is still 5 orders of magnitude below what Earth gets from the Sun. Any fluctuations there could not shift the climate.

Emission of greenhouse gasses on the other hand results in cumulative effects that can and do upset the climate balance.

I am strongly opposed to pollution, I personally think toxic waste is more important than greenhouse gases, but that is a quibble. In the long run heat will be a limiting factor, even if we aren't there yet, supposing we eliminate the greenhouse gases and toxic wastes in whichever order.

[Beni-Kujaku]

I am strongly opposed to pollution, I personally think toxic waste is more important than greenhouse gases, but that is a quibble. In the long run heat will be a limiting factor, even if we aren't there yet, supposing we eliminate the greenhouse gases and toxic wastes in whichever order.

Nuclear toxic wastes are much less harmful to the environment compared to greenhouse gases, especially considering the care that is taken to contain them. New generations of fission nuclear plant can even use what was previously considered waste to produce even more energy. In the end, nuclear waste is not rejected in the wild and doesn't harm nature, while greenhouse gases have a very real and direct impact on biodiversity, not even counting the effect on crops and the increase in extreme weather. Also, in short, the heat we produce with human activities is completely negligible compared to how the sun heats the planet, and compared to the normal variations of temperatures due to the cosmic movements of Earth. Earth loses much more heat into space by means of radiation than all human activities produce. This really isn't a problem, and won't become one for at the very least several centuries, and only if we multiply our energy useage several times.

[halfeye]

Nuclear toxic wastes are much less harmful to the environment compared to greenhouse gases, especially considering the care that is taken to contain them.

I said toxic, and I meant toxic, I did not mention nuclear. OTOH, the nuclear toxins from Chernobyl and Fukishima weren't nothing.


New generations of fission nuclear plant can even use what was previously considered waste to produce even more energy. In the end, nuclear waste is not rejected in the wild and doesn't harm nature, while greenhouse gases have a very real and direct impact on biodiversity, not even counting the effect on crops and the increase in extreme weather. Also, in short, the heat we produce with human activities is completely negligible compared to how the sun heats the planet, and compared to the normal variations of temperatures due to the cosmic movements of Earth. Earth loses much more heat into space by means of radiation than all human activities produce. This really isn't a problem, and won't become one for at the very least several centuries, and only if we multiply our energy useage several times.

Several centuries isn't never.

[Mastikator]

I said toxic, and I meant toxic, I did not mention nuclear. OTOH, the nuclear toxins from Chernobyl and Fukishima weren't nothing.

Compared to the amount of ionizing radiation you absorb on a daily basis from CO2 emitted from burning fossil fuels? Yeah they kinda were nothing.

In fact if you smoke a pack of cigarettes every day you get orders of magnitude more radiation into your system than people who live in Chernobyl today.

[Squire Doodad]

Several centuries isn't never.

It isn't, but focusing on "several centuries if we use drastically more power" is rather short-sighted when we have real and existential threats on an ecological level, such as plastic pollution, GHGs, deforestation, and so on. And all of those have dealt damage already and will continue to do so over timescales of weeks or years, not even centuries.

[halfeye]

Compared to the amount of ionizing radiation you absorb on a daily basis from CO2 emitted from burning fossil fuels? Yeah they kinda were nothing.

In fact if you smoke a pack of cigarettes every day you get orders of magnitude more radiation into your system than people who live in Chernobyl today.

Going by Wikipedia, the exclusion zone still exists, after 36 years, so people don't live in Chernobyl today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone

[Mechalich]

Going by Wikipedia, the exclusion zone still exists, after 36 years, so people don't live in Chernobyl today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone

If you scroll down a little in that article, you'll notice it mentions that a number of people do live in the exclusion zone despite the illegality and that the authorities have declined to throw them out (the number continues to drop because these are almost entirely senior citizens). A significantly larger number of people work in the zone on a regular basis, and stay nearby. Until the year 2000, when Ukraine shut down Reactor #3, the final operational reactor, people continued to work in the Chernobyl power station, on the other reactors that were not damaged by the 1986 meltdown.

[Squire Doodad]

In a general sense, we have the means and ability to handle properly set up nuclear reactors, including ones that cannot be used to make bombs in any way shape or form. Some even are functionally foolproof outside of, like, someone else dropping a bomb on them. However, reactors are still politically volatile; while I'd argue other means of energy are better overall, nuclear is much safer and better than it was in the times of Chernobyl.
Here's a pretty good article about it from Soonish:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/soonish/lostchapter/index.html

[halfeye]

I am strongly opposed to pollution, I personally think toxic waste is more important than greenhouse gases, but that is a quibble. In the long run heat will be a limiting factor, even if we aren't there yet, supposing we eliminate the greenhouse gases and toxic wastes in whichever order.

What was so difficult about parsing this?

I think toxic waste, that is poisons like mercury, some plastics, and DDT and whatever need to be cleaned up. I think we have a longer timeline to sort out greenhouse gases, but we do need to get to them too.

Eventually, if that's all sorted, and population is in the trillions, heat will eventually be a problem, whatever power source we have.

I do still think that widely available fusion power is far nearer 50 years away than 20 years away, even though it was said to be 50 years away 50 years ago.

[Radar]

What was so difficult about parsing this?

I think toxic waste, that is poisons like mercury, some plastics, and DDT and whatever need to be cleaned up. I think we have a longer timeline to sort out greenhouse gases, but we do need to get to them too.

Eventually, if that's all sorted, and population is in the trillions, heat will eventually be a problem, whatever power source we have.

I do still think that widely available fusion power is far nearer 50 years away than 20 years away, even though it was said to be 50 years away 50 years ago.
Unfortunately, we might be already too late to deal with greenhouse gasses before there are severe changes in the climate - once it started rolling (and it does), it is not that easy to stop. I would say we need to deal with both that and toxic wastes right here and now. Getting rid of plastics from the oceans will require some novel approach and without active means is unlikely to ever stop being a problem even if we stop throwing that stuff away.

Heat is a big maybe as 5 orders of magnitude is more than we can actually imagine properly. Currently, the global average is about 350 W of power per person. Ramping it up by 5 orders of magnitude would mean that we would spend 35 MW per each person. Can anyone even think of what could it be used for? If we did have that kind of power at our disposal, setting up industry and habitats on other planets or in space would be trivial (even at far lower power production actually), so way before we reach something like that, we would spread throughout the solar system and the power output would not be confined to Earth.

[Squire Doodad]

What was so difficult about parsing this?

I think toxic waste, that is poisons like mercury, some plastics, and DDT and whatever need to be cleaned up. I think we have a longer timeline to sort out greenhouse gases, but we do need to get to them too.

Okay, I don't know how else to say this, but we're already in the climate apocalypse, or at least having one hell of an appetizer.
California is burning. Oceans are experiencing MASSIVE heat waves. Some towns in the middle east are reaching temperatures during heat waves that are deemed "inhabitable".
And, in spite of it all, there has been...not enough progress made on that front. We're arguably a few years behind where we should be on replacing fossil fuel infrastructure with renewables, though fortunately the renewables themselves are in great shape. There are projects like the one to clean up the Pacific Garbage Patch underway, but there isn't that global sense of unity on it like there was with the ozone problems.

Also, yes, overuse of plastics and toxins in pesticides is part of this problem; fixing GHGs would also involve enough changes to infrastructure that those two can be partially fixed in the process.

We need drastic, ecologically-focused action. Something like the Montreal Protocol, with everyone joining in and making decisive action as soon as possible. This isn't a "we should" or a "my political compass says this", it's a "I want to live in a world where the Amazon is intact" thing.
...yes, this is what keeps me up at night.

[Fyraltari]

Eventually, if that's all sorted, and population is in the trillions, heat will eventually be a problem, whatever power source we have.

Population won't ever reach the trillions, though. The current growth in population is due to the demigraphic transition it's not going to keep up indefinitely.

And even if that were the case, in the centuries after we'd developped mainstream nuclear fusion, we'd start settling other planets anyway.

[halfeye]

Okay, I don't know how else to say this, but we're already in the climate apocalypse, or at least having one hell of an appetizer.
California is burning. Oceans are experiencing MASSIVE heat waves. Some towns in the middle east are reaching temperatures during heat waves that are deemed "inhabitable".
And, in spite of it all, there has been...not enough progress made on that front. We're arguably a few years behind where we should be on replacing fossil fuel infrastructure with renewables, though fortunately the renewables themselves are in great shape. There are projects like the one to clean up the Pacific Garbage Patch underway, but there isn't that global sense of unity on it like there was with the ozone problems.

Also, yes, overuse of plastics and toxins in pesticides is part of this problem; fixing GHGs would also involve enough changes to infrastructure that those two can be partially fixed in the process.

We need drastic, ecologically-focused action. Something like the Montreal Protocol, with everyone joining in and making decisive action as soon as possible. This isn't a "we should" or a "my political compass says this", it's a "I want to live in a world where the Amazon is intact" thing.
...yes, this is what keeps me up at night.

In the very long run, it's going to come to "which humans do we starve to feed the animals?" It aint easy. It also isn't my problem, I'm not going to be here then, and probably neither is anyone else reading this at this time.

Climate change affecting land is one thing, Britain is wet and cold so we have a different perspective on that than hotter places do, but the seas rising 150 metres is something we'll be dead against. The story I'm currently hearing is that it'll take a century to rise one or two metres, then a long time longer for the rest.


Population won't ever reach the trillions, though. The current growth in population is due to the demigraphic transition it's not going to keep up indefinitely.

We don't know that. Poor people keep breeding, it's a valid reaction to being poor. There are countries with a high death rate where the average age is under 30 years old? under 20 years old?


And even if that were the case, in the centuries after we'd developped mainstream nuclear fusion, we'd start settling other planets anyway.

If we can get up into space, coming down to planets again would be a mistake in my view, and we're probably never going to be rich enough to lift a significant proportion of the Earth's population into space, supposing that population hasn't fallen to hundreds.

[Squire Doodad]

In the very long run, it's going to come to "which humans do we starve to feed the animals?" It aint easy. It also isn't my problem, I'm not going to be here then, and probably neither is anyone else reading this at this time.

Climate change affecting land is one thing, Britain is wet and cold so we have a different perspective on that than hotter places do, but the seas rising 150 metres is something we'll be dead against. The story I'm currently hearing is that it'll take a century to rise one or two metres, then a long time longer for the rest.




We don't know that. Poor people keep breeding, it's a valid reaction to being poor. There are countries with a high death rate where the average age is under 30 years old? under 20 years old?

If we can get up into space, coming down to planets again would be a mistake in my view, and we're probably never going to be rich enough to lift a significant proportion of the Earth's population into space, supposing that population hasn't fallen to hundreds.

Okay, wow there is... a lot to unpack here, and frankly the best thing I can say is that you should read up on Malthusian theory, the current impacts of climate change, population growth, and so on. You're certainly not being "stupid" or anything, but there's a lot of recent reports and research you should read up on and take into account.
This is basically my major, but I do not have the energy to go at this blow by blow right now.

Anyone have some of those "# of days above 90 degrees Fahrenheit from 1980-2000 vs 2000-2020" maps handy?

[Rydiro]

Why do people think that fusion reactors solve all our energy needs (fossile fuels, carbon...) when they have no advantage over current fission reactors? On the production side, I ignore the waste aspects for now.

Do you think fusion reactors can be miniaturized to run a car?

[Florian]

Why do people think that fusion reactors solve all our energy needs (fossile fuels, carbon...) when they have no advantage over current fission reactors? On the production side, I ignore the waste aspects for now.

Do you think fusion reactors can be miniaturized to run a car?

Let me start with a joke: Someone tried to calculate the energy consumption of a kangaroo. They calculated the initial hop, were shocked at how much energy that consumes and came to the conclusion that kangaroos should have died out, because their hopping to a source of food would consume more energy then thr food would generate. They overlooked one critical piece of information: Once the kangaroo made the initial hop and is in motion, all subsequent hops consume a negligible amount of energy.....

That's the thought behind a fusion reactor: Start the chain reaction once, keep it going with minimal efford and ressources.

[factotum]

Why do people think that fusion reactors solve all our energy needs (fossile fuels, carbon...) when they have no advantage over current fission reactors?

A fission reactor requires difficult to find stuff like uranium to work, and there's a limited supply of that. It's not as limited as fossil fuels, but nonetheless, will still run out some day. Fusion, on the other hand, uses isotopes of hydrogen, which is the most common element in the Universe. Even when the isotopes you're using make up only 0.016% percent of all the available hydrogen, there's so *much* available hydrogen that it might as well be unlimited. That's why fusion has a significant advantage over fission. Not to mention, it doesn't yet (and hopefully never will) have the same negative opinion among the general populace that fission does.

[Cikomyr2]

Also, fission relies on existing unstable elements being bombarded to create a chain reaction that generates energy and has to be carefully monitored and controlled so it doesnt get out of control. Badly designed fission reactors had accident when these runaway processes happened and had large consequences.

You cannot have a "runaway process" with Fusion, since its all about feeding it your fuel (variants of hydrogen). You cut the supply, you cut the reaction. And the supply itself is not hazardous to health to stock or transport the way uranium is.

[Radar]

Also, fission relies on existing unstable elements being bombarded to create a chain reaction that generates energy and has to be carefully monitored and controlled so it doesnt get out of control. Badly designed fission reactors had accident when these runaway processes happened and had large consequences.

You cannot have a "runaway process" with Fusion, since its all about feeding it your fuel (variants of hydrogen). You cut the supply, you cut the reaction. And the supply itself is not hazardous to health to stock or transport the way uranium is.
Reaction getting out of control is not much of an issue unless you make bad design choices that are currently blatantly obvious. There is still the natural decay to deal with: even with fully suppressed chain reaction (so no or almost no secondary fissions) a typical 1 GW reactor will still produce up to 50 MW of heat so is in need of active cooling.

One thing to mention is that while spent fuel from a fusion reactor will not be radioactive, the reactor itself will become irradiated over time, so used parts will have to be dealt with just like any other nuclear waste. Obviously there will be far less of it than in the case of a fission reactor.

[Lord Torath]

Reaction getting out of control is not much of an issue unless you make bad design choices that are currently blatantly obvious. There is still the natural decay to deal with: even with fully suppressed chain reaction (so no or almost no secondary fissions) a typical 1 GW reactor will still produce up to 50 MW of heat so is in need of active cooling.

One thing to mention is that while spent fuel from a fusion reactor will not be radioactive, the reactor itself will become irradiated over time, so used parts will have to be dealt with just like any other nuclear waste. Obviously there will be far less of it than in the case of a fission reactor.I thought I read something in the recent news stories that ITER's inside surface was going to be made/coated with a material that would not absorb the radioactive particles, and thus would not become irradiated.

[Radar]

I thought I read something in the recent news stories that ITER's inside surface was going to be made/coated with a material that would not absorb the radioactive particles, and thus would not become irradiated.
That I did not hear of frankly. Would be a huge improvement if it works as intended. There is however a question, how well those materials deal with radiation the same way as nothing is for example fire-proof - just fire-resistant.

[Mastikator]

Why do people think that fusion reactors solve all our energy needs (fossile fuels, carbon...) when they have no advantage over current fission reactors? On the production side, I ignore the waste aspects for now.

Do you think fusion reactors can be miniaturized to run a car?

It doesn't have the same bad PR that plague fission power (which is really the biggest draw back to fission- public outcry)

[Quizatzhaderac]

I thought I read something in the recent news stories that ITER's inside surface was going to be made/coated with a material that would not absorb the radioactive particles, and thus would not become irradiated.

ITERS's inside surface will be covered with ceramics made with lithium. When lithium absorbs neutrons, it releases energy, helium, and tritium.

This is important as we'd need a better source of tritium if we want to supply fuel to many fusion reactors. In a way, lithium is the real fuel being consumed by the reactor.

Tritium is radioactive, however the plan is to be able to capture the tritium so produced. The other materials used in the surface (mostly lead, but it's one of things being changed for experiment's sake) are being chosen so that no other radioactive things are produced.

[Cikomyr2]

It doesn't have the same bad PR that plague fission power (which is really the biggest draw back to fission- public outcry)

Said PR was caused by previously mentioned bad design that caused previously mentioned runaway reactions.

You dont hear of oil power plans or coal where they catastrophically lost control of the situation and now the land is unlivable for the next 300 years

[Beni-Kujaku]

ITERS's inside surface will be covered with ceramics made with lithium. When lithium absorbs neutrons, it releases energy, helium, and tritium.

This is important as we'd need a better source of tritium if we want to supply fuel to many fusion reactors. In a way, lithium is the real fuel being consumed by the reactor.

Tritium is radioactive, however the plan is to be able to capture the tritium so produced. The other materials used in the surface (mostly lead, but it's one of things being changed for experiment's sake) are being chosen so that no other radioactive things are produced.

This. In the end, the irradiation of the reactor coating is what really keeps the reactor running. Obviously it will still need to be eventually replaced, but much more easily than a fission reactor, as you can easily have the reaction die out by simply not putting deuterium in there, while fission reaction are so self-sustaining that they require extreme care to be disassembled.

[Rydiro]

Said PR was caused by previously mentioned bad design that caused previously mentioned runaway reactions.

You dont hear of oil power plans or coal where they catastrophically lost control of the situation and now the land is unlivable for the next 300 yearsBut you have heared of oil spills and the hellscape that is burning coal mines in china?
Kinda unlivable too.

[factotum]

Said PR was caused by previously mentioned bad design that caused previously mentioned runaway reactions.

You dont hear of oil power plans or coal where they catastrophically lost control of the situation and now the land is unlivable for the next 300 years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire

[Quizatzhaderac]

...you can easily have the reaction die out by simply not putting deuterium in there,....Actually, I think it might just be as easy as not continuing to actively heat the plasma. Most of the energy produced by fusion is in the neutrons which will always shoot out of the plasma and into the wall.

The rest is in the alpha particles, which will have much, much more kinetic energy than the rest of the plasma, and (I think) be able to break magnetic confinement.


But you have heared of oil spills and the hellscape that is burning coal mines in china?
Kinda unlivable too.No need to go to China. There's a town in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania) that's been uninhabitable for 60 years since a coal mining accident.

[Mastikator]

Said PR was caused by previously mentioned bad design that caused previously mentioned runaway reactions.

You dont hear of oil power plans or coal where they catastrophically lost control of the situation and now the land is unlivable for the next 300 years

The difference in PR between nuclear and coal is like the difference in PR between terrorism and smoking. One might have you terrified, the other is literally murdering you and everyone you love in the most horrible and slow way imaginable.

[Radar]

The difference in PR between nuclear and coal is like the difference in PR between terrorism and smoking. One might have you terrified, the other is literally murdering you and everyone you love in the most horrible and slow way imaginable.
This comparison hits the nail right on its head. I could not put it to words better than this.

[Eldan]

No need to go to China. There's a town in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania) that's been uninhabitable for 60 years since a coal mining accident.

Not only that, but most wildlife in Chernobyl is actually doing fine. Better than before, even, because there's no humans there, killing them. Meanwhile, coal fires and oil spills kill everything.

[Vahnavoi]

The Wikipedia page for energy accidents (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents) includes a graph showing hypothetical deaths if world's energy demands were met by a single source. Fossil fuels are far worse than fission.

The most environmentally damaging part of fission is digging the fuel out of the ground, both due to tonnage of earth that has to be moved and because the actual moving is still mainly powered by fossil fuels. The handling and transportation of fissive material, even of depleted material, is a footnote. Due to fissive material being solid metal and having high density (both physically and in terms of energy), transporting and containing it is actually easier than transporting various liquid and gaseous fossil fuels, nevermind other chemical pollutants. Even after you've put the fissive material in a reactor and started a chain-reaction, I'd argue it's still less volatile than coal.

[halfeye]

The Wikipedia page for energy accidents (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents) includes a graph showing hypothetical deaths if world's energy demands were met by a single source. Fossil fuels are far worse than fission.

The most environmentally damaging part of fission is digging the fuel out of the ground, both due to tonnage of earth that has to be moved and because the actual moving is still mainly powered by fossil fuels. The handling and transportation of fissive material, even of depleted material, is a footnote. Due to fissive material being solid metal and having high density (both physically and in terms of energy), transporting and containing it is actually easier than transporting various liquid and gaseous fossil fuels, nevermind other chemical pollutants. Even after you've put the fissive material in a reactor and started a chain-reaction, I'd argue it's still less volatile than coal.

It may be less volatile (I'd suggest that boiling isn't really the problem anyway, unless we get to a stage much worse than Chernobyl, and coal usually burns before it boils) at the moment, but in a hundred years?

[factotum]

The attitude toward nuclear fission always strikes me as odd. Yes, if something goes wrong then things can go very wrong indeed with nuclear. Same applies to plane flights, though--any individual plane crash can kill an awful lot of people, but flying is still statistically the safest way to travel, because so few major crashes actually happen. Heck, there was one year quite recently (2017) where only 12 people worldwide (of all the millions who travelled that year) died in plane crashes--more people than that get killed in an average week on the roads. Yet people still fly quite happily.

[Peelee]

The attitude toward nuclear fission always strikes me as odd. Yes, if something goes wrong then things can go very wrong indeed with nuclear. Same applies to plane flights, though--any individual plane crash can kill an awful lot of people, but flying is still statistically the safest way to travel, because so few major crashes actually happen. Heck, there was one year quite recently (2017) where only 12 people worldwide (of all the millions who travelled that year) died in plane crashes--more people than that get killed in an average week on the roads. Yet people still fly quite happily.

I figure it's more of a NIMBY thing.

[Lord Torath]

Heck, there was one year quite recently (2017) where only 12 people worldwide (of all the millions who traveled that year) died in plane crashes--more people than that get killed in an average week day on the roads. Yet people still fly quite happily.Fixed that for you!

There's another type of fission reactor called a "pebble bed" reactor, which is much safer that the control-rod version commonly in place (from what I remember from reading from Physics for Future Presidents (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2341767.Physics_for_Future_Presidents)).

There's a lot of hype about handling the radioactive waste, and it is a problem, but not one without a feasible solution - bury it in stable rock formations deep underground. They don't even need to be leak free, just leak less than the ambient radiation.

Regarding Chernobyl, I remember reading reports that the leaf-litter there was not breaking down, due to most of the microbes in the area being killed by the fallout. Which means that a good fire in the region could burn long and hot, releasing huges amount of radioactive smoke. Which, yes, will be a problem, but again, less of a problem than the coal smoke we get every year.

All that said, if we can get Fusion working, I think it'll be miles better than fission.

[Vahnavoi]

It may be less volatile (I'd suggest that boiling isn't really the problem anyway, unless we get to a stage much worse than Chernobyl, and coal usually burns before it boils) at the moment, but in a hundred years?

Volatility means chance of stuff blowing up at moment's notice, which is something uranium rarely does even in an out-of-control reactor, but coal dust will do readily where ever it's allowed to mix with normal air.

Long-term issues with radioactivity are not a matter of volatility at all - there the correct comparison is to long-term issues with carbon dioxide and other chemical emissions caused by burning coal. Depleted uranium is horribly toxic, but not particularly volatile.

[Rydiro]

Does someone know the advantages/disadvantages of thorium fission? I'm not an expert, i just heared of this alternative fuel.

[gomipile]

Volatility means chance of stuff blowing up at moment's notice, which is something uranium rarely does even in an out-of-control reactor, but coal dust will do readily where ever it's allowed to mix with normal air.

Long-term issues with radioactivity are not a matter of volatility at all - there the correct comparison is to long-term issues with carbon dioxide and other chemical emissions caused by burning coal. Depleted uranium is horribly toxic, but not particularly volatile.

Petroleum refinery explosions are quite awful, and disconcertingly common, too.

[Radar]

Does someone know the advantages/disadvantages of thorium fission? I'm not an expert, i just heared of this alternative fuel.
For one, we have much more thorium 232 than uranium 235 as it does not undergo spontaneous fission. This in of itself makes a lot of safety problems a non-issue (procedures during mining, transport and reactor shutdown for example). On top of that, it produces far less waste that is also radioactive for a much shorter time.

There is however one quality of thorium reactors that is both an advantage from the current viewpoint and a reason why uranium was initially chosen instead: it cannot be used to produce plutonium 239.

From other options, typical nuclear waste could be burned up as fuel in fast neutron reactors. There are some works in that direction, but I do not know of any working power plant like that.

[Thomas Cardew]

Does someone know the advantages/disadvantages of thorium fission? I'm not an expert, i just heared of this alternative fuel.

30 second version.

Thorium fission is a relative misnomer, it's not the thorium fissioning. Thorium isn't fissile, it can't sustain the fission chain reaction on its own. What you can do, is blanket a previous reactor, fission or fusion, you just need neutrons interacting with thorium. The thorium will absorb the leakage neutrons from the reactor and transmute up to U-233 which is fissile. After operating the reactor for some time, you can remove/shuffle the thorium in the blanket, take it out and do chemistry on it to extract the U-233. You then use the U-233 as the fissile element in a reactor.

The nominal advantage, particularly for India which has the majority of the world’s thorium reserves, is that thorium is much more abundant than uranium. It’s also appealing to be generating future fuel during your operation. You generate less transuranic ( the super long lived stuff) since you’re burning U-233 and not capturing neutrons on U-238.

The downsides are similar to other breeder reactors. Uranium fuel is still cheap enough it doesn’t make economic sense. You need extract the fissile material, this means you’re doing wet chemistry to pull it out which possess a proliferation risk since you can make bombs with U-233. You’re also still fissioning material and creating fission products. While the distribution is isotope dependent I don’t think U-233 fission produces considerably less or shorter lived products.

In short, it’s not a silver bullet, it makes some sense for certain countries, but it mostly just presents a different configuration of the standard risks of fission reactors.

[Fat Rooster]

For one, we have much more thorium 232 than uranium 235 as it does not undergo spontaneous fission. This in of itself makes a lot of safety problems a non-issue (procedures during mining, transport and reactor shutdown for example). On top of that, it produces far less waste that is also radioactive for a much shorter time.

There is however one quality of thorium reactors that is both an advantage from the current viewpoint and a reason why uranium was initially chosen instead: it cannot be used to produce plutonium 239.

From other options, typical nuclear waste could be burned up as fuel in fast neutron reactors. There are some works in that direction, but I do not know of any working power plant like that.

The waste thing is actually slightly inaccurate... sort of... it's complicated. As for safety problems, arguably thorium has it much worse, because the mining and transport risks are so minor compared to used fuel, and while with uranium we can just bury the waste, thorium needs handling of irradiated materials in order to work at all... mostly.

Firstly; waste. Thorium starts off lighter, so doesn't produce the very heavy isotopes that often have half lives in the problematic region. The region where they last long enough that we can't just wait it out, but short enough that they are intensely radioactive. When people say thorium produces less waste, this is what they are talking about. The second major class of waste is fission products. When fission is successful, you are left with two fragments, and they typically have more neutrons than they are happy with, meaning they tend to be very radioactive too. Most of these are either extremely long lived, or quite short lived, but two in particular are the biggest concerns; Caesium 137, and Strontium 90. They have half lives in the decades and love to get in the water. Thorium fission actually produces more of these two troublemakers.

Where it gets more complicated is that uranium fission is far easier than thorium, so comparing a basic uranium reactor with any thorium reactor is not comparing like with like. Every thorium reactor has to be an efficient thermal breeder reactor, in order to work at all. The uranium reactor designs actually used are not optimised for reducing waste, or fuel efficiency, (unless you are Canadian), so it doesn't really make sense to say that thorium is cleaner or more efficient. That's all down to the reactor. It's like saying a wet log burns cleaner because you need a very good stove to burn it at all.
The statement that you can't use a thorium reactor to produce plutonium is also not strictly true. The true statement is that you can't use thorium to produce plutonium. You can, however, run uranium in a thorium reactor instead, and that will breed plutonium. The transmutation of thorium into U233 has very similar requirements to the the transmutation of U238 to Pu239. Much of the reason our uranium designs are so 'bad' is that they actively avoid the capabilities that thorium requires.

If you really want an efficient reactor, you want a fast reactor. Fast reactors are able to 'burn' those heavy elements that result from uranium fission, meaning they sort of stop being waste. Fast neutron fission also knocks more neutrons off, meaning even less caesium 137 and strontium 90 initially. Those extra neutrons can be made to do something useful, and while it is still theoretical, there are enough to transmute away the caesium and strontium altogether, along with a few other problematic wastes. While it is technically possible to use thorium for fast fission, it is really bad at it compared to U238. Fast reactors have regularly been used for submarines, as well as a few commercial scale ones. They commercially failed because the savings from not producing as much waste did not make up for the increased complexity. I don't see why the same would not apply to Thorium. Many of the most interesting 'thorium' ideas actually work as well or better on fast reactors. Molten salt fast reactors in particular look extremely promising, doing away with the annoying molten metals they typically used.

Don't get me wrong, you can build an incredible reactor that runs entirely on thorium, but the touted problems with uranium they are often claimed to solve already have practical solutions. They just aren't used because the problems aren't actually as big as they seemed, and the novelties required to get thorium to work are just as applicable to improving uranium. Gawking at thorium's potential seems silly to me, when it is dwarfed by the potential of fast reactors to process much of the existing waste, as well as producing even less of it's own.
Interestingly there is some work on integrating thorium into existing reactor fuels (with no external breeding or post exposure processing... of the thorium at least). MOX is currently a blend of uranium and plutonium oxides, and can be used in place of enriched uranium. There is work being done on replacing some of the uranium in this with thorium, which breeds into U233 as the other fuels burn. The primary goal is not actually efficiency, or waste reduction, but stability. The goal is to create a fuel that creates more fuel at a similar rate it burns off at, while also acting as a poison at the start that disappears as reaction product poisons appear. It is aiming to make reactors easier to control and burn more evenly.

Oh, I should also mention that heavy water reactors are likely to get cheaper over the next few years too. Heavy water is a by-product of electrolysis, and we are almost certainly going to need industrial quantities of hydrogen for things like fertiliser production. It is currently gas derived, but with accurate carbon pricing and either nuclear or renewable energy (electrolysis is a good candidate for intermittent demand) should be cheaper.

[Radar]

(...)
I stand corrected. :smallsmile:

Thank you for that.

[halfeye]

Volatility means chance of stuff blowing up at moment's notice, which is something uranium rarely does even in an out-of-control reactor, but coal dust will do readily where ever it's allowed to mix with normal air.

That's not what volatile means in science. I'm getting half a dozen different definitions when I search for "volatile" so it's understandable that people are confused, the one I was thinking of when I wrote was:


Volatile definition, evaporating rapidly; passing off readily in the form of vapor: Acetone is a volatile solvent.


Long-term issues with radioactivity are not a matter of volatility at all - there the correct comparison is to long-term issues with carbon dioxide and other chemical emissions caused by burning coal. Depleted uranium is horribly toxic, but not particularly volatile.

I think a liquid can be volatile without being flammable, eg (though fairly extreme) liquid helium.

[Mastikator]

Does someone know the advantages/disadvantages of thorium fission? I'm not an expert, i just heared of this alternative fuel.

Big con: it hasn't been invented yet and is only theoretical. Arguably the same problem as fusion power :smallamused:

Though there is one type fusion power that has actually been proven to work, is economical and widely used both by private individuals, companies and governments. It exploits the photovoltaic properties of certain materials by harnessing the electromagnetic radiation of an ongoing fusion reaction.

It's really heart warming and encouraging to know we have the technology to save the ourselves from oblivion but nah, screw that it's inconvenient :smallsigh:

[Radar]

Big con: it hasn't been invented yet and is only theoretical. Arguably the same problem as fusion power :smallamused:

Though there is one type fusion power that has actually been proven to work, is economical and widely used both by private individuals, companies and governments. It exploits the photovoltaic properties of certain materials by harnessing the electromagnetic radiation of an ongoing fusion reaction.

It's really heart warming and encouraging to know we have the technology to save the ourselves from oblivion but nah, screw that it's inconvenient :smallsigh:
Solar power has one key problem: inconsistent output. For the power grid you need a steady power source and solar panels give nothing during the night. We could work with that only if someone figures out, how to reliably store energy on up to date unreachable scales. There are works in that direction, but we are far from ready.

Also, solar updraft towers might be a better choice for the main solar power plants as they can produce electricity during the night. We have to see how the prototypes for those will work out though.

[Mastikator]

Solar power has one key problem: inconsistent output. For the power grid you need a steady power source and solar panels give nothing during the night. We could work with that only if someone figures out, how to reliably store energy on up to date unreachable scales. There are works in that direction, but we are far from ready.

Also, solar updraft towers might be a better choice for the main solar power plants as they can produce electricity during the night. We have to see how the prototypes for those will work out though.

So I take it that you know about pumped storage hydroelectricity and have a good reason to think it's more expensive than dealing with anthropogenic climate change? It's not an all or nothing deal either, the more coal we replace with anything else the better. To think that water reservoir batteries are "not great" as some excuse to not transition away from "armageddon level bad coal" seems unwise to me.

There are many alternatives to coal, like fission, solar, hydro, wind. All "have problems" but so what? Do it anyway, none of them pose existential threats to humanity, coal does.

[Radar]

So I take it that you know about pumped storage hydroelectricity and have a good reason to think it's more expensive than dealing with anthropogenic climate change? It's not an all or nothing deal either, the more coal we replace with anything else the better. To think that water reservoir batteries are "not great" as some excuse to not transition away from "armageddon level bad coal" seems unwise to me.

There are many alternatives to coal, like fission, solar, hydro, wind. All "have problems" but so what? Do it anyway, none of them pose existential threats to humanity, coal does.
I never said we should not stop using fossil fuels. If anything I just think that fission and in future fusion power is way better for the core electricity source.

Pumped storage plants work, but as with any kind of hydroplant, can only be built in specific places where you can have two large reservoirs with a big enough height difference, so it is not possible to use it as an overall solution for stabilizing the power grid. There is a reason people try many other seemingly worse option.

One more option for solar power is direct photosynthesis of ethanol (among other possible substances), which can be used as a fuel for cars or fuel cell power generators for example. This easily does away with the daily variation of power production and with good enough efficiency gives an alternative for oil.

By all means solar power should be developed, but it's not like it is a solution to everything.

[Lord Torath]

There are several "concrete battery" storage plants. These consist of 30-ton concrete blocks in 'elevators'. Use the excess power during high-energy production to lift the blocks up, then let the blocks down when demand exceeds production. These are very similar to the hydro-storage systems, except you don't need a body of water.

Liquid metal batteries are another option for bulk energy storage.

[factotum]

The problem we really have is that electricity demand tends to be higher at night because that's when everyone has their lights on, and that situation is only going to get worse as more people charge their electric cars overnight. Pumped storage is extremely space-inefficient (you need big lakes at the top and bottom)--as an example, the Marchlyn Mawr reservoir that forms the upper storage for Dinorwig power station is around 300m across, and the maximum output of that power station is a bit over 1.7GW. Sounds a lot, but when the *average* (e.g. not even peak) electricity consumption in the UK is 35GW or thereabouts, you'd need a *lot* of Dinorwigs to cover nightly demand.

[Fat Rooster]

Big con: it hasn't been invented yet and is only theoretical. Arguably the same problem as fusion power :smallamused:

Though there is one type fusion power that has actually been proven to work, is economical and widely used both by private individuals, companies and governments. It exploits the photovoltaic properties of certain materials by harnessing the electromagnetic radiation of an ongoing fusion reaction.

It's really heart warming and encouraging to know we have the technology to save the ourselves from oblivion but nah, screw that it's inconvenient :smallsigh:
If you are talking about nuclear, then you are bang on (As always, look at France). Solar isn't quite there yet though. The solar part is fine, but we do not have good enough energy storage solutions for it to be able to take over. Pumped hydro requires specific conditions. Current batteries will exhaust materials before we have enough. We are not far off, but it currently is not practical, rather than just inconvenient.


That's not what volatile means in science. I'm getting half a dozen different definitions when I search for "volatile" so it's understandable that people are confused, the one I was thinking of when I wrote was:

I think a liquid can be volatile without being flammable, eg (though fairly extreme) liquid helium.
It is often misused, but easily vaporised is the definition when talking science. It is often confused with flammability and explodyness because it is often responsible for those two factors. Solids and liquids are generally very hard to get to burn, and extremely rarely explosive. Reactions can only occur at a 2d surface with high heat capacity and transfer (though dust can mean it behaves more like a gas). Many things you would consider not flammable do react quite exothermically with oxygen. Tar, for example. The major difference between tar and petrol is that petrol easily turns into a gas. Gasses mix easily, meaning they burn easily, and can also form explosive mixtures easily.

With regards to volatility and radioactivity, another reason Caesium 137 is such a headache is that caesium is fairly volatile. It boils at 670'C. A melting down reactor does produce radioactive gas, even if it is not burning. Don't know how much you care, but forgot to mention it in the last post :smallsmile:


So I take it that you know about pumped storage hydroelectricity and have a good reason to think it's more expensive than dealing with anthropogenic climate change? It's not an all or nothing deal either, the more coal we replace with anything else the better. To think that water reservoir batteries are "not great" as some excuse to not transition away from "armageddon level bad coal" seems unwise to me.

There are many alternatives to coal, like fission, solar, hydro, wind. All "have problems" but so what? Do it anyway, none of them pose existential threats to humanity, coal does.
If it involves creating the geography pumped hydro requires, then yes. It would be more expensive. Pumped hydro is already used in the majority of sites it is suitable in, so while it is extremely good where it works, we are already approaching the limit of it's scaling. Wholeheartedly agree with the second bit though.


There are several "concrete battery" storage plants. These consist of 30-ton concrete blocks in 'elevators'. Use the excess power during high-energy production to lift the blocks up, then let the blocks down when demand exceeds production. These are very similar to the hydro-storage systems, except you don't need a body of water.

Liquid metal batteries are another option for bulk energy storage.

Wait, there are variants of those systems want to use concrete? That is so moronic. In order to produce less CO2 than simply burning natural gas, that concrete block will have to fall ~150 kilometers. That's not including the rest of the system, or the cost to charge it. That is just the concrete. It could work out, if you had a tower 500m tall, and were prepared to wait 10 years for it to even break even in terms of CO2, but I would not call it practical. The gravel based systems are significantly better, but people often overestimate how weak gravity is in terms of actual energy, and you need a lot of material if you plan to use it for any sort of energy storage. Pumped hydro is talking about moving thousands of tons for even an extremely small system.

Pumped hydro uses water because where it is cheap, it is extremely cheap.

Liquid metal is an extremely promising tech, but not deployed quite yet. I'd rather put faith in things we have already.
The thing that surprises me is how little we hear about work on intermittent technologies. Instead of having an efficient process with high capital cost, you attempt to develop a low capital cost process that is able to take advantage in fluctuating energy prices while being less efficient. Rather than faffing around with batteries to power your machine when energy is not available you simply turn it off, and because the capital cost is low you have more machines to produce when energy is cheap.


While I am optimistic that storage will get to the point that we could go full solar, I would rather not put all our eggs in that basket. If nothing else, seasonal variation in our energy supply is not great. We know nuclear works, and it fits straight into our current grid. Really we should have been building it for the last 20 years. It's not like we couldn't see this coming.

[halfeye]

It is often misused, but easily vaporised is the definition when talking science. It is often confused with flammability and explodyness because it is often responsible for those two factors. Solids and liquids are generally very hard to get to burn, and extremely rarely explosive. Reactions can only occur at a 2d surface with high heat capacity and transfer (though dust can mean it behaves more like a gas). Many things you would consider not flammable do react quite exothermically with oxygen. Tar, for example. The major difference between tar and petrol is that petrol easily turns into a gas. Gasses mix easily, meaning they burn easily, and can also form explosive mixtures easily.

I agree with all of that.

Another way to deal with solar power would be to push electricity around the world. There are always regions in daylight. I don't know how efficient that would be, but we have been transferring electricity for hundreds of miles for a long time, this would be tens of thousands, which is two orders of magnitude more, so if the efficiency is acceptable it ought to be practicable with a little engineering. Wouldn't be cheap to start with.

[NichG]

I agree with all of that.

Another way to deal with solar power would be to push electricity around the world. There are always regions in daylight. I don't know how efficient that would be, but we have been transferring electricity for hundreds of miles for a long time, this would be tens of thousands, which is two orders of magnitude more, so if the efficiency is acceptable it ought to be practicable with a little engineering. Wouldn't be cheap to start with.

Losses are a few percent at current distances, so two orders of magnitude increase would mean more power is used in transmission than at the end point...

[factotum]

Yeah, transmitting electricity to the opposite side of the planet would need a quantum leap in technology over what we have now--we'd have to find some method that doesn't use a metal cable.

[Lord Torath]

Wait, there are variants of those systems want to use concrete? That is so moronic. In order to produce less CO2 than simply burning natural gas, that concrete block will have to fall ~150 kilometers. That's not including the rest of the system, or the cost to charge it. That is just the concrete. It could work out, if you had a tower 500m tall, and were prepared to wait 10 years for it to even break even in terms of CO2, but I would not call it practical. The gravel based systems are significantly better, but people often overestimate how weak gravity is in terms of actual energy, and you need a lot of material if you plan to use it for any sort of energy storage. Pumped hydro is talking about moving thousands of tons for even an extremely small system.They may not use concrete. I just know they hoist up heavy loads to change the electrical energy to potential energy, and then reverse the process when the stored energy is needed.

[Gnoman]

Yeah, transmitting electricity to the opposite side of the planet would need a quantum leap in technology over what we have now--we'd have to find some method that doesn't use a metal cable.

More importantly, any sort of global grid would be extremely vulnerable to disruption. Even leaving human action out of it, storms or earthquakes can already cut off whole states/provinces or even smaller countries. Trying to use a global grid to transmit solar power around means that one good typhoon could depower entire continents.

[Bohandas]

Yeah, transmitting electricity to the opposite side of the planet would need a quantum leap in technology over what we have now--we'd have to find some method that doesn't use a metal cable.

What about fiber optics? Like we could bring the light to the photovoltaic cell instead of the other way around, and thereby do the transport at the start and transport light rather than the end transporting electricity.

[factotum]

If you're thinking along those lines then it would be far more reasonable (although still *WAY* beyond anything we can reasonably do at the moment!) to have a high-powered laser firing through an evacuated tunnel, because there will simply be fewer losses from such a system--provided you can get it to work.

[Radar]

What about fiber optics? Like we could bring the light to the photovoltaic cell instead of the other way around, and thereby do the transport at the start and transport light rather than the end transporting electricity.
Throughput not nearly good enough for power transmission. And the losses are still an issue.

edit: Besides, even now the power grid is very delicate and not always has a decent capacity margin for sudden changes in production or use. Infrastructural endeavor to transmit power from one half of the globe to the other is way beyond our means and would probably cost more than any kind of local energy storage project let alone a solid investment in nuclear or even fusion power (when it's ready - hard to estimate costs otherwise).

[gomipile]

Line losses per km in state of the art UHVDC transmission systems are getting lower every few years. Right now, if the lowest losses in a real system were extrapolated to half the circumference of Earth, that would be about on par with the efficiency of hydrogen including electrolysis, liquefaction, transportation, and usage in a fuel cell.

Right now, the longest planned UHVDC transmission system I am aware of is from a proposed solar farm in Morocco to the UK.

They're both in roughly the same longitude, so it doesn't address the storage/duck-curve issue. However, the distance involved could serve as proof of concept for east-west mega power grids further in the future.

[Dragonus45]

I said toxic, and I meant toxic, I did not mention nuclear. OTOH, the nuclear toxins from Chernobyl and Fukishima weren't nothing.



Several centuries isn't never.

As someone who lives in Tennessee I know plenty of people who would rather have had Fukishima happen in their back yard then the Kingston plants ash spill. The actually very rare occasion that nuclear power has an issue like that can be bad but fossil fuels can be even worse long term and harder to clean up.

[Trafalgar]

As someone who lives in Tennessee I know plenty of people who would rather have had Fukishima happen in their back yard then the Kingston plants ash spill. The actually very rare occasion that nuclear power has an issue like that can be bad but fossil fuels can be even worse long term and harder to clean up.

If you are from Tennessee, you should be familiar with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I seem to recall reading that it was in the center of a pretty significant cancer cluster and has had a series of nasty releases over the years.

[Squire Doodad]

Oak Ridge National Laboratory was a nuclear development site founded in the 1940s. A lot of safety standards didn't develop until the 70s or so.
This is very, very different from talking about opening a modern nuclear plant.

[Thomas Cardew]

If you are from Tennessee, you should be familiar with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I seem to recall reading that it was in the center of a pretty significant cancer cluster and has had a series of nasty releases over the years.


Oak Ridge National Laboratory was a nuclear development site founded in the 1940s. A lot of safety standards didn't develop until the 70s or so.
This is very, very different from talking about opening a modern nuclear plant.

It's also false. The author cherry picked two 2 year periods out of 50 years to make his case. It was refuted less than a year later,
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7622322/, and a 9 year health and human services assessment, https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/hac/pha/OakRidgeReservationCancer/Assessment_of_Cancer_Incidence_factsheet_508.pdf, of the surrounding 8 counties showed no increase in expected cancers. Most showed lower than usual rates for specific kinds.

[Squire Doodad]

Reminder that coal ash is really goddamn bad (https://www.vice.com/en/article/7xag7e/toxic-waste-spill-in-north-carolina-coal-ash-part-1?), more than most people would think.
Arguing that nuclear plants are hazardous when they go downhill is fine if you're comparing it to most renewables, but things like coal have inherently dangerous waste products that can't be as easily stored, and deal drastically more damage if we assume competent management on both.

[halfeye]

Reminder that coal ash is really goddamn bad (https://www.vice.com/en/article/7xag7e/toxic-waste-spill-in-north-carolina-coal-ash-part-1?), more than most people would think.
Arguing that nuclear plants are hazardous when they go downhill is fine if you're comparing it to most renewables, but things like coal have inherently dangerous waste products that can't be as easily stored, and deal drastically more damage if we assume competent management on both.

I would by no means argue that coal is good. There used to be a huge mining industry here with lots of silicosis deaths, and then there's Aberfan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster

The thing is though, these tend to be horrors that stop being a problem within a hundred years of stopping mining. Radioactivity can be a problem for thousands of years. We can't assume competant management, if there was competant management there'd be no problem with either. Just because coal can be nasty is no reason to assume nuclear is perfect, it clearly is a lot less safe than wind power or solar energy.

[Squire Doodad]

We can't assume competant management, if there was competant management there'd be no problem with either.
Actually, coal ash has been described in the linked video as having basically no safe solution for efficient long term storage. Meanwhile nuclear waste, which is very much not the "glowing green barrels of ooze" trope btw, has firm solutions that could hypothetically be optimized much further with means we know are viable but haven't done at scale. So competent coal management still poses a major problem in comparison.
Please do not try to dive into an argument about the semantics of what "long term" is defined as.

Also, for the moment, I am going to assume that "will be a threat in a thousand years" is a major upgrade from "will kill everyone and everything within the century". As much as I hate to say it, using nuclear as an immediate-term solution to have 500 years of breathing room to transition back into solar and wind sounds very palatable these days.

[Mechalich]

Also, for the moment, I am going to assume that "will be a threat in a thousand years" is a major upgrade from "will kill everyone and everything within the century". As much as I hate to say it, using nuclear as an immediate-term solution to have 500 years of breathing room to transition back into solar and wind sounds very palatable these days.

Considering the title of this thread it's also useful to consider fission as a stopgap to fusion.

Also, the actual quantity of high-level radioactive waste with long half lives produced by fission plants is relatively small. Only about 10% of the radioactive waste produced by power plants is long-lived, meaning a half-life of >30 years, and because the waste is high-density, the actual volume of said waste is quite small. If Earth went all fission, all the time, for everyone, forever, then yes the amount of waste generated would eventually accumulate to levels difficult to manage, but as a stopgap the issue really isn't that significant.

[NichG]

I would by no means argue that coal is good. There used to be a huge mining industry here with lots of silicosis deaths, and then there's Aberfan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster

The thing is though, these tend to be horrors that stop being a problem within a hundred years of stopping mining. Radioactivity can be a problem for thousands of years. We can't assume competant management, if there was competant management there'd be no problem with either. Just because coal can be nasty is no reason to assume nuclear is perfect, it clearly is a lot less safe than wind power or solar energy.

Thing is, there's no perfect, there's no option to just use nothing, and there's also no instant turning from one tech to another. Things take 10, 20, 30 years to shift.

So in the end, the sensible calculation should look at the overall risk associated with a given energy trajectory, relative to the trajectory you'd get from waiting for some new and better tech.

From now forward? Probably that optimum is to not close down any operating nuclear plants, build a few more to fill renewable gaps in places where renewables are less consistent in their coverage (with some tweaks in ratios based on whether mining for fissiles is worse than mining for battery metals), and otherwise scale up renewables hard.

Historically, though, the optimal path probably should have been all in on nuclear from the 70s on at least, if not earlier. That we didn't do that means an accumulation of ongoing problems today - in the form of general air pollution, coal and oil industrial accidents (seems we get a major oil spill every couple of years...), climate effects, etc which are collectively much worse than if the world had seen another 10 events like Fukushima over the last 50 years.

[halfeye]

Actually, coal ash has been described in the linked video as having basically no safe solution for efficient long term storage. Meanwhile nuclear waste, which is very much not the "glowing green barrels of ooze" trope btw, has firm solutions that could hypothetically be optimized much further with means we know are viable but haven't done at scale. So competent coal management still poses a major problem in comparison.
Please do not try to dive into an argument about the semantics of what "long term" is defined as.

I wasn't about to, until I saw this was hidden. What would give you the right to determine which direction a debate goes in?


Also, for the moment, I am going to assume that "will be a threat in a thousand years" is a major upgrade from "will kill everyone and everything within the century". As much as I hate to say it, using nuclear as an immediate-term solution to have 500 years of breathing room to transition back into solar and wind sounds very palatable these days.

Will kill everyone and everything within the century? Coal? it was in operation for easily two centuries without doing that, there were coal fires in almost every home, even the very poorest, and except for a very few experiments all the locomotives on the railways were coal fired steam until WW2.

[factotum]

Will kill everyone and everything within the century? Coal? it was in operation for easily two centuries without doing that, there were coal fires in almost every home, even the very poorest, and except for a very few experiments all the locomotives on the railways were coal fired steam until WW2.

You realise that isn't the contrary argument you think it is? Look up the Great Smog of 1952 sometime to see what effect unconstrained burning of coal can have...we're talking anywhere between 4,000 and 12,000 people killed directly by the effects (figures are a little uncertain) and people just made ill into six figure territory. And that lasted a grand total of *four days*.

[Squire Doodad]

I wasn't about to, until I saw this was hidden. What would give you the right to determine which direction a debate goes in?
Because it's a tedious and irrelevant point of discussion that I specifically wanted to avoid. Moving on...



Will kill everyone and everything within the century? Coal? it was in operation for easily two centuries without doing that, there were coal fires in almost every home, even the very poorest, and except for a very few experiments all the locomotives on the railways were coal fired steam until WW2.
With all due respect, I'm really not sure where you're going with this. Are you assuming that the damages will be no greater than they were in the early 1900s and increase linearly? Like...do you not see the overwhelming impacts of man-driven climate change? I'm talking about the damages staying on fossil fuels will have for the future on a global scale. That coal was burned at a proportionally higher rate in the past is not relevant here.
Not to mention that coal has major incidents to its name like the aforementioned smog incidents, and oil among other resources have catastrophic spills. Nuclear isn't immune to terrible incidents, but it's naive to bemoan the impacts of nuclear power without considering the effects of oil extraction and the like.



From now forward? Probably that optimum is to not close down any operating nuclear plants, build a few more to fill renewable gaps in places where renewables are less consistent in their coverage (with some tweaks in ratios based on whether mining for fissiles is worse than mining for battery metals), and otherwise scale up renewables hard.

Historically, though, the optimal path probably should have been all in on nuclear from the 70s on at least, if not earlier. That we didn't do that means an accumulation of ongoing problems today - in the form of general air pollution, coal and oil industrial accidents (seems we get a major oil spill every couple of years...), climate effects, etc which are collectively much worse than if the world had seen another 10 events like Fukushima over the last 50 years.
Hmm, this is an interesting read. Does make me wonder what would have happened if Reagan hadn't pulled the solar panels out of the White House, but that's a discussion for another day.

[halfeye]

With all due respect, I'm really not sure where you're going with this.

I am saying it's not literally true. Continuing to use fossil fuels and particularly coal would not be ideal, however the chances that it will wipe out everyone and everthing inside one century are almost nil.

[Mechalich]

From now forward? Probably that optimum is to not close down any operating nuclear plants, build a few more to fill renewable gaps in places where renewables are less consistent in their coverage (with some tweaks in ratios based on whether mining for fissiles is worse than mining for battery metals), and otherwise scale up renewables hard.


It probably makes sense to scale up both nuclear fission and renewables hard. It's hard to imagine a scenario in which having too much energy would be bad, and a large energy surplus could be put to use in other projects like ripping CO2 out of the air - there's a plant in Iceland that uses geothermal power to do this, but there's no reason you couldn't use idle nuclear stations for the purpose in the otherwise utopian scenario where idle nuclear stations were available - or desalinization. Fission makes particular sense for countries that have limited renewable sources or face significant space limitations (since renewables tend to require large amounts of land area) near major population centers.

Large nuclear plants, like large power stations of any kind, take time to produce, but a major fission push now could still pay huge dividends in the second half of this century in terms of the global energy budget.

[Radar]

I am saying it's not literally true. Continuing to use fossil fuels and particularly coal would not be ideal, however the chances that it will wipe out everyone and everthing inside one century are almost nil.
Everyone and everything maybe not, but pretty much all coastal cities are in danger of being permanently flooded due to the rising sea levels and other catastrophic changes to the climate may seriously affect our agriculture around the globe. You can also expect tornadoes and hurricanes more often and of grander magnitude and so on.

[Squire Doodad]

To be fair, while all life dying is unlikely, a mass extinction is still enough of a cataclysm to justify reworking literally everything. Over 3 billion people are estimated to be at risk due to climate change, and there's probably far far more as things go along.
How did I manage to be slightly hyperbolic about this

[Mastikator]

Will kill everyone and everything within the century? Coal? it was in operation for easily two centuries without doing that, there were coal fires in almost every home, even the very poorest, and except for a very few experiments all the locomotives on the railways were coal fired steam until WW2.

Coal kills 8 million people every year and cause injury and illness for tens of millions (https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/news/fossil-fuel-air-pollution-responsible-for-1-in-5-deaths-worldwide/). Coal kills more in a single year than all of nuclear power and nuclear bombs has ever done combined. Coal is the driving force of climate change which is likely to end civilization and has the potential to cause human extinction. There is no future where we keep using coal power.

[Lord Torath]

Living on Earth (https://loe.org/) just ran a segment on nuclear power (https://loe.org/shows/shows.html?programID=22-P13-00012#feature3).

Takeaways:
Relatively carbon-free (depending on how much concrete goes into the construction)
Nuclear pairs well with more intermittent sources like wind and solar
New designs are "walk-away safe", meaning they can't melt down
Nuclear waste can be reused - the medical field needs it for x-ray machines for one thing, and it can be further refined and used for further power generation (France does this)

[asda fasda]

Well this article is only a discussion with Atomic energy lobbyist so not a very reliable source I would say, but I didn't have time to go through all of the article so maybe there is something there I missed. I just focus on radioactive waste issue as this is the one that makes me opposed to atomic power plant.

Lord Torath, for sure you should remove


Nuclear waste can be reused

from your list, all there was mentioned in article is that Korsnick think that in the future there may be a way to use that waste product, and since there is no viable way to use them at the moment, as most of wastes now are just stored at power plants without any long-term plan, that is just wishful thinking. Not to say that same arguments were used for plastic and CO2, that future generations will find it's way around the issue so that's not a real problem.......

As far as I'm concerned the person who earn cash from producing fission energy should be the one to pay for waste management and as long as there will not be a proper way to discount those cost in price I'm against such plants (and as far as I'm aware no one have even an idea how such thing could like like since we are talking hundreds years in the future)

ohh and KORSNICK statment:

so again, I look at it more as a resource for the future

statement is just so "evil corporate" speech, that I don't even know how to grasp it.

[Radar]

from your list, all there was mentioned in article is that Korsnick think that in the future there may be a way to use that waste product, and since there is no viable way to use them at the moment, as most of wastes now are just stored at power plants without any long-term plan, that is just wishful thinking. Not to say that same arguments were used for plastic and CO2, that future generations will find it's way around the issue so that's not a real problem.......
We actually already have the technology to vastly reduce the nuclear waste and at the same broaden the available nuclear fuels. The key problem is getting those solutions commercially viable and spread them around enough. Once they are more widely used, there will also need to be some work done on processing the spent fuel from the existing nuclear plants so that it could be reused in the fast neutron reactors.

So at the very least it is not wishful thinking.

That being said, fission power should probably be viewed as a transient energy source until we fully develop fusion power plants, but we do need to get away from fossil fuels about 30 years ago. Yes, we might be trading one problem for another, but the alternative is to cook ourselves with greenhouse gasses.

[Thomas Cardew]

So I think some technical detail is needed here. I'm going to stick with very broad strokes.

It's important to talk about what level of nuclear waste you're concerned with. While there are official and legal categories waste, I think it's more useful to go back to generalities from physics and talk about what's produced in the reactor. When you cause fission in the reactor you produce basically 3 things: Fission products, Activation Products, and Capture Products. Fission products is the blasted apart remnants of a nucleus. Most of these are highly radioactive with short half lives, a lot of the immediate products have half-lives in seconds or below. The decay products can have longer half-lives but something like Cs-137 with it's 30 year half life is a good bench mark. After ~200 years this will all be gone, decayed away. Activation products are non-radioactive materials that are made radioactive by neutrons from the reactor. This includes things like the cobalt in the steel of the reactor walls. Again this usually has short half-lives, in the minutes/hour/days/years range. Sticking with cobalt, it's longest half life is ~5.3 years. This will all be gone after ~40 years. Capture products are isotopes that are made in the fuel by nuetrons that are captured instead of causing fission, i.e. plutonium and other transuraniuc materials. This is the long lived stuff, with half-lives in thousands of years. A lot of this gets consumed in the reactor, depending on how the reactor is designed and how long it run about 30% of the total power comes from Pu that is made from capture in the fuel. This can go up to 40% if you burn it longer. The reason we don't burn fuel for longer is because the the fuel rod casing material (called cladding) starts to fail. If the cladding fails, you can release radioactive material into your coolant and which is something we prefer to avoid to hopefully obvious reasons. But the material inside is still fissionable.

Here is where we start to skirt real-life politics. The US decided to not allow any reprocessing of its fuel. This was mostly due to proliferation concerns, reprocessing the fuel involves chopping it up and doing some chemistry to extract the still usable uranium and plutonium from the unwanted fission products. The fission products can then be stored elsewhere (at a fraction of the volume because only a very small percentage of the fuel actually fissions) or used for other purposes including medical and industrial. The uranium and plutonium can then be used for either new fuel or potentially diverted to a weapons program which presents a proliferation risk. The US incorrectly assumed if it did not reprocess no one else would. This was incorrect. The French developed Mixed Oxide Fuel (MOX) from plutonium extracted from spent fuel and depleted uranium. This currently fuels about 10% of France's nuclear fleet. Other countries also have reprocessing plants. It is perfectly feasible to use nuclear waste as a fuel source. The French do it everyday. You can also design reactors that let you take fuel to higher burn-up. This would eliminate more and more of the transuranic products.




As far as I'm concerned the person who earn cash from producing fission energy should be the one to pay for waste management and as long as there will not be a proper way to discount those cost in price I'm against such plants (and as far as I'm aware no one have even an idea how such thing could like like since we are talking hundreds years in the future)

ohh and KORSNICK statment:


statement is just so "evil corporate" speech, that I don't even know how to grasp it.

So in the US the nuclear utilities DID pay for waste management. From 1982 there was a tax on electricity generated at nuclear power plants that went into the Nuclear Waste Fund to build a repository. Over $40 billion was collected. The government then failed to build said repository and refused to take ownership of the spent fuel. Instead Congress has done things like apply the money to national debt instead of the intended purpose of waste management.

Korsnick's statement isn't as 'evil corporate' as you seem to think. Spent fuel IS a future resource. A lot of work went into creating it, the uranium had to be mined, milled, and enriched. That costs money but only a small percentage of the uranium was actually consumed. The current price of uranium makes it cheaper to use new uranium and policy prevents reprocessing in the US. But prices and policies can be changed. It can be reprocessed the way the French or Russians currently do. Or you could let it sit for 200 years on a concrete pad in a concrete cask. The fission products will decay and you'll be left with reusable fuel material. 200 years is long time, but not THAT long, not inconceivably long. We've got a pretty good idea how to build a building that would stand up for 200 years.

[Trafalgar]

So in the US the nuclear utilities DID pay for waste management. From 1982 there was a tax on electricity generated at nuclear power plants that went into the Nuclear Waste Fund to build a repository. Over $40 billion was collected. The government then failed to build said repository and refused to take ownership of the spent fuel. Instead Congress has done things like apply the money to national debt instead of the intended purpose of waste management.


I would be happily surprised if the US Congress used this money to paydown the national debt.

[Thomas Cardew]

I would be happily surprised if the US Congress used this money to paydown the national debt.

I took that particular claim from a Stanford report. After more investigation, it appears that the cash got moved into the US General fund, which does... everything, presumably including servicing the national debt which is what they based that claim. Regardless, spending the money now requires a specific congressional appropriation to be spent. So the funds essentially 'exist' on paper but can't be used without specific congressional authorization.

[Mechalich]

I took that particular claim from a Stanford report. After more investigation, it appears that the cash got moved into the US General fund, which does... everything, presumably including servicing the national debt which is what they based that claim. Regardless, spending the money now requires a specific congressional appropriation to be spent. So the funds essentially 'exist' on paper but can't be used without specific congressional authorization.

For the most part all funds collected by the US government move into the US General Fund, it's just how the process works. Only Social Security, Medicare, and a very small class of other protected sources are separate, everything else is just collected and placed in the general fund to be spent to meet bills as they come due to the Treasury. The US government collects monies from thousands of different sources, especially the very wide range of fees and penalties charged by executive agencies, so there's really no other good way to manage the accounting.

[asda fasda]

When you cause fission in the reactor you produce basically 3 things: Fission products, Activation Products, and Capture Products. Fission products is the blasted apart remnants of a nucleus. Most of these are highly radioactive with short half lives, a lot of the immediate products have half-lives in seconds or below. The decay products can have longer half-lives but something like Cs-137 with it's 30 year half life is a good bench mark. After ~200 years this will all be gone, decayed away. Activation products are non-radioactive materials that are made radioactive by neutrons from the reactor. This includes things like the cobalt in the steel of the reactor walls. Again this usually has short half-lives, in the minutes/hour/days/years range. Sticking with cobalt, it's longest half life is ~5.3 years. This will all be gone after ~40 years. Capture products are isotopes that are made in the fuel by nuetrons that are captured instead of causing fission, i.e. plutonium and other transuraniuc materials. This is the long lived stuff, with half-lives in thousands of years. A lot of this gets consumed in the reactor, depending on how the reactor is designed and how long it run about 30% of the total power comes from Pu that is made from capture in the fuel. This can go up to 40% if you burn it longer. The reason we don't burn fuel for longer is because the the fuel rod casing material (called cladding) starts to fail. If the cladding fails, you can release radioactive material into your coolant and which is something we prefer to avoid to hopefully obvious reasons. But the material inside is still fissionable.


Well I'm concerned with all 3 types, are there any reason any of those types are less dangerous to the point it is not material ?
Moreover you are using a lot of percentages and I'm not sure I understand this correctly but I assume there is no way to use 100% of radioactive waste, even from Capture Products Group, right? And this group have half-lives in thousands of years which means even we get to 1% wastes it's equivalent of 100% waste in 100 years in use.

Additionally the fission energy is consisting 4,3% of our world energy mix (as of 2019 https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix) so if we would like to scale it up to even 20% it's 5x times more waste production per year.

More over you are mentioning that this is not really that cheap to use this re-used fuel and that's one of major point in discussion, will this be cheaper then what can we achieve with renewables if generally renewables are cheaper the fission reactors with current price of uranium?

Not to say a lot of this waste management in the future arguments can also be used for coal, coal capturing technology exist so we cane theoretically capture all the coal we burn, the issue is that this will cost much more the we are wanting to pay for energy.

As for additional tax paid by atomic plants you have mentioned, I would said that this is exactly "not-paying" for wastes. Having a flat sum paid (most probably lobbied to be as low as possible) by the company instead of actual cost of waste management and leaving the potential risk and cost to the society was probably a wet dream of every CEO of those plants.....




Korsnick's statement isn't as 'evil corporate' as you seem to think. Spent fuel IS a future resource. A lot of work went into creating it, the uranium had to be mined, milled, and enriched. That costs money but only a small percentage of the uranium was actually consumed. The current price of uranium makes it cheaper to use new uranium and policy prevents reprocessing in the US. But prices and policies can be changed. It can be reprocessed the way the French or Russians currently do. Or you could let it sit for 200 years on a concrete pad in a concrete cask. The fission products will decay and you'll be left with reusable fuel material. 200 years is long time, but not THAT long, not inconceivably long. We've got a pretty good idea how to build a building that would stand up for 200 years.


This is exactly what I mean as "evil corporate". I understand that she is not technically lying there, but she is making a spin in the way that because maybe in the future somehow / somebody will use this waste in an effective way we should not concerned ourselves about the issue now. If this can be used, use it right now and not expect that future generation will take the bill (even if it will be just higher price of uranium) for your profits.

And let me be clear I don't say the fission reactors are evil, but brushing off the waste issue without detailed plan and price tag is. Acknowledge the issue is necessary for development of solution, and be ready to pay for this. For example I acknowledge that renewables also has waste issue, but as those wastes are not toxic and for electronics (which are toxic) we have recycle plants in place already so this one doesn't strike me as a deadly option .

[NichG]

Well I'm concerned with all 3 types, are there any reason any of those types are less dangerous to the point it is not material ?
Moreover you are using a lot of percentages and I'm not sure I understand this correctly but I assume there is no way to use 100% of radioactive waste, even from Capture Products Group, right? And this group have half-lives in thousands of years which means even we get to 1% wastes it's equivalent of 100% waste in 100 years in use.

Additionally the fission energy is consisting 4,3% of our world energy mix (as of 2019 https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix) so if we would like to scale it up to even 20% it's 5x times more waste production per year.

More over you are mentioning that this is not really that cheap to use this re-used fuel and that's one of major point in discussion, will this be cheaper then what can we achieve with renewables if generally renewables are cheaper the fission reactors with current price of uranium?

Not to say a lot of this waste management in the future arguments can also be used for coal, coal capturing technology exist so we cane theoretically capture all the coal we burn, the issue is that this will cost much more the we are wanting to pay for energy.

Nuclear waste basically is born captured, whereas capturing all of the harmful side-effects of the coal doesn't just mean filtering the smoke, it means scavenging CO2 out of the atmosphere, which is much harder to do. And the scales of the things are massively, massively different - providing the same energy as we get from coal doesn't require 1-to-1 amounts of nuclear waste handling.

Human civilization burns 8 billion tons of coal each year. Thats 5 cubic kilometers of coal. Putting aside the smoke, the CO2 from that is 2.4 times the mass of the coal burned (because oxygen from the atmosphere is the majority weight component). Coal and dry ice have around the same density, so that's 10 km^3 of storage needed per year if we wanted to e.g. store the waste CO2 as dry ice.

Current total nuclear waste production is something like ~10000 tons per year (I could only find 2000 tons/yr for the US, but the US has about 1/4 of the world's operating plants). I don't know the distribution of densities for that, or what fraction of extra volume is needed for containment stuff not counted in that, but generally most solids have a density between 1g/cm^3 and 10g/cm^3, and coal and dry ice are around the 1g/cm^3 range. So even if we multiplied the number of nuclear plants by 100x (covering 5 times the current energy needs of human civilization), we'd still be dealing with 10000x less volume that you'd have to store byproducts in at worst compared to coal. If the mass of waste produced figure I found isn't including e.g. the materials added to vitrify the waste, that's about a factor of 10 difference (I found a figure of about 7.2 mass percent fraction of plutonium to additives in borosilicate vitrification) and you're still at 1000x less volume.

And its not like the coal byproducts would become any safer to release after 1000 years either.

This isn't even mentioning the byproducts of extracting coal in the first place. You have to extract nuclear fuels as well, but you can extract a much smaller amount to get the same energy output. Coal is about 8kWh per 1kg. Uranium is 24000000kWh per 1kg for pure U-235, but there's a lot of losses: it's about a 1-to-5 ratio of ore to waste rock, and the ore grade is from 1% to 12% usable uranium. So lets call worst case that you have to extract 1000x more mass than you can use as fuel (and not even count any waste rock, etc for coal). That still puts the Uranium extraction at 24000kWh per kg of material pulled from the earth, so compared to coal you're mining 3000x less material (and dealing with 3000x less mine tailings, etc).

[Bohandas]

Yeah. The solutions for storing nuclear waste aren't optimal, but at least there are solutions and the waste isn;t just floating around in the atmosphere like with fossil fuels

[Thomas Cardew]

Well I'm concerned with all 3 types, are there any reason any of those types are less dangerous to the point it is not material ?

Yes. It is important to disaggregate issues into the relevant problems. Activation Products and Fission products are a short term problem. The solution to these it to either use them for medical purposes or to literally let them sit in a pool of water or on a concrete pad for 7 half lives, after which (.5^7=0.008) less than 1% of any material will remain. For the longest ones this takes 200 years; for most it takes much less time. After 50 years the total radioactivity of spent fuel is 0.1% of its original level after being removed from a reactor. This stuff goes away fast. This is why you can walk around ground zero at Hiroshima or the former nuclear test sites safely today. I’ve done it. The radioactive material has decayed away.

Any of this waste type is a solvable technical problem, to a certain extent it has been solved. Dry casks are licensed for 40 years, renewable for another 40. Even if you assume you have to replace casks 5 times (every 40 years) to get to 200 years, this is still a bounded problem that you can do reliable cost estimates for. And the casks are safe. They are designed to withstand airplane impacts and not release material. They are safe to walk and work around. I have friends who literally climbed on top of them to take measurements.

Essentially all 'low level waste' is contaminated with type of material, the vast majority of waste by volume. This is stuff like tools, discard coveralls, swipes, etc. This material can be handled safely by burning it, putting the ash in glass (vitrification), putting the glass in barrel with concrete and other filler, and burying it in a shallow grave, or just stacking it somewhere. And it will be completely safe to handle.


Moreover you are using a lot of percentages and I'm not sure I understand this correctly but I assume there is no way to use 100% of radioactive waste, even from Capture Products Group, right? And this group have half-lives in thousands of years which means even we get to 1% wastes it's equivalent of 100% waste in 100 years in use.

To answer the first part, yes you could use 100% of the transuranic waste. This is what I mean by different reactor designs. Something like an aqueous homogenous reactor allows to you go to arbitrarily high burn-up because it has no cladding. You will eventually burn all the transuranic material in it. You can also design accelerator based systems to transmute the nuclear waste. France, China, the US, Japan, and Russia are all working on these kinds of systems.

This is stuff is confusing and there’s multiple ways of counting things but the percentages don’t work that way. As you burn fuel you continuously produce some waste but you also continuously consume of it. Burning fuel longer reduces the total Pu content in the fuel. This is part of the reason why weapons plutonium is produced in short burn cycles and one of the things we watch for in nuclear safeguards is short or irregular reactor burn times.



Additionally the fission energy is consisting 4,3% of our world energy mix (as of 2019 https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix) so if we would like to scale it up to even 20% it's 5x times more waste production per year.

Sure but the amount is not really the problem. The total amount of nuclear waste from spent nuclear fuel (ie the long lived stuff) is tiny in tonnage and volume terms. All of the used nuclear fuel in the US would fit on a football field. To an extent, 5x as much isn’t any harder to deal with. To analogize, we’re in storing first piece of SNF costs $10,000 and the second costs $5 territory.




More over you are mentioning that this is not really that cheap to use this re-used fuel and that's one of major point in discussion, will this be cheaper then what can we achieve with renewables if generally renewables are cheaper the fission reactors with current price of uranium?

These are policy questions. It is currently illegal to do this in the US, because it’s considered a proliferation risk. Suppose the US changed policy and made it legal to reprocess fuel. Or allowed the Waste Disposal fund to be used for something other than a geological repository and paid out per ton of eliminated waste? Or allowed the NRC to license new reactors? It is possible to make this cheaper or more expensive through subsidies or taxes, just as renewables are artificially cheapened by subsidies and tax credits. And are you forcing renewables to include in either cost of storage or estimated disposal costs?



As for additional tax paid by atomic plants you have mentioned, I would said that this is exactly "not-paying" for wastes. Having a flat sum paid (most probably lobbied to be as low as possible) by the company instead of actual cost of waste management and leaving the potential risk and cost to the society was probably a wet dream of every CEO of those plants.....
This is exactly what I mean as "evil corporate". I understand that she is not technically lying there, but she is making a spin in the way that because maybe in the future somehow / somebody will use this waste in an effective way we should not concerned ourselves about the issue now. If this can be used, use it right now and not expect that future generation will take the bill (even if it will be just higher price of uranium) for your profits.


The government does not legally allow you to do this. Full stop. You can’t keep the fuel, the government says you have to give it back. You can’t reprocess the fuel. You can’t sell the fuel to someone else to reprocess. I'm also going to drop this line of discussion. It's getting close to board rules and in general I hate arguing policy choices online. I try to stick to just giving technical information or facts.



And let me be clear I don't say the fission reactors are evil, but brushing off the waste issue without detailed plan and price tag is. Acknowledge the issue is necessary for development of solution, and be ready to pay for this. For example I acknowledge that renewables also has waste issue, but as those wastes are not toxic and for electronics (which are toxic) we have recycle plants in place already so this one doesn't strike me as a deadly option .

The renewable waste is toxic. The heavy metals in solar panels are toxic and leechable. Wind power composite blades are toxic waste and more microplastics. The byproducts of lithium mining are horrific. Recycling plants are an unsustainable lie that merely shipped material off to China and later other countries in Asia where the super low cost of labor made it slightly more feasible to extract a tiny portion of them. The rest just went in Asian landfills instead of American/European. Renewables have already killed more people than nuclear. Both are drastically better than fossil fuels.

[Radar]

More over you are mentioning that this is not really that cheap to use this re-used fuel and that's one of major point in discussion, will this be cheaper then what can we achieve with renewables if generally renewables are cheaper the fission reactors with current price of uranium?
Aside from everything else: renewables as they are now, cannot be used as a the main power source unless we somehow solve the massive energy storage problem that would induce and the related grid stability issue.

From reliable and directly adjustable sources we have either fossils or nuclear. Neither is ideal, but if we look at the environmental impact, the choice is very obvious.

[Melayl]

The storage issues with solar and wind don't seem that far from a solution. Looking at trends in battery technology and innovation, I don't think we're more than a decade or two from solving the problem.

Graphene and carbon nanotube (and graphene nanotube) batteries already exist. They already have almost 10 times the capacity of the best lithium batteries, with massively improved life cycles and charge/discharge speeds.

While graphene is difficult and expensive to produce (thus far), it is getting cheaper. If we can also pull CO2 from the atmosphere or capture it from powerplants and other sources and use it for batteries, we could drastically reduce the greenhouse effect while vastly improving our energy storage.

[gomipile]

The storage issues with solar and wind don't seem that far from a solution. Looking at trends in battery technology and innovation, I don't think we're more than a decade or two from solving the problem.

Graphene and carbon nanotube (and graphene nanotube) batteries already exist. They already have almost 10 times the capacity of the best lithium batteries, with massively improved life cycles and charge/discharge speeds.

While graphene is difficult and expensive to produce (thus far), it is getting cheaper. If we can also pull CO2 from the atmosphere or capture it from powerplants and other sources and use it for batteries, we could drastically reduce the greenhouse effect while vastly improving our energy storage.

For grid scale storage, I'm hoping that redox flow batteries become affordable at scale soon. Basically big tanks of electrolyte/electrode solutions flowing through something that's like a love child of a fuel cell and a battery. The basic technology looks to be able to produce very reliable, easy to maintain and repair large scale batteries.

Their mass energy density isn't great, but for stationary grid scale storage, that isn't too big an issue. A lot of the local infrastructure required for set-up or capacity expansion is large tanks and plumbing, which we know how to do. Also, upgrading the battery in place would only require replacing the reaction cell, which would be comparatively tiny. The tanks themselves could be left in place. They might need a thorough wash if the new cell uses different electrolytes, but the facility itself wouldn't have to be rebuilt.

[Radar]

The storage issues with solar and wind don't seem that far from a solution. Looking at trends in battery technology and innovation, I don't think we're more than a decade or two from solving the problem.

Graphene and carbon nanotube (and graphene nanotube) batteries already exist. They already have almost 10 times the capacity of the best lithium batteries, with massively improved life cycles and charge/discharge speeds.

While graphene is difficult and expensive to produce (thus far), it is getting cheaper. If we can also pull CO2 from the atmosphere or capture it from powerplants and other sources and use it for batteries, we could drastically reduce the greenhouse effect while vastly improving our energy storage.
Graphene-based and other supercapacitors do not scale well enough to solve grid-level problems. In case of balancing solar power we are talking about storing enough energy for the whole night. Redox flow batteries that goomipile wrote about might be a far better solution. The question is, if this solution actually can be applied on a large enough scale? Do they require some rare materials or are there some other logistic bottlenecks? How much work would have to be done to accomodate the grid to the new system?

[Melayl]

Graphene-based and other supercapacitors do not scale well enough to solve grid-level problems. In case of balancing solar power we are talking about storing enough energy for the whole night. Redox flow batteries that goomipile wrote about might be a far better solution. The question is, if this solution actually can be applied on a large enough scale? Do they require some rare materials or are there some other logistic bottlenecks? How much work would have to be done to accomodate the grid to the new system?

If redox flow batteries work better, that's great.

However, the articles I've been finding are saying that graphene-based superconductors can, indeed, scale up to grid level. If Im interpreting them correctly, that is...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013468617321540

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34385877/

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/nl102661q#:~:text=A%20supercapacitor%20with%20grap hene%2Dbased,density%20of%201%20A%2Fg.

Someone with a better understanding of electrochemical engineering than I have (which is likely many people) might have a different take on it, though.

[Radar]

If redox flow batteries work better, that's great.

However, the articles I've been finding are saying that graphene-based superconductors can, indeed, scale up to grid level. If Im interpreting them correctly, that is...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013468617321540

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34385877/

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/nl102661q#:~:text=A%20supercapacitor%20with%20grap hene%2Dbased,density%20of%201%20A%2Fg.

Someone with a better understanding of electrochemical engineering than I have (which is likely many people) might have a different take on it, though.
The tested sizes are nowhere near what you need on a grid-level system. Supercapacitors are so far only slowly coming to the sizes and energy capacities of regular batteries. It did not have time to read those papers in detail, so if I missed something specifically about scaling it up to grid-level sizes, please point that fragment.

[Melayl]

The tested sizes are nowhere near what you need on a grid-level system. Supercapacitors are so far only slowly coming to the sizes and energy capacities of regular batteries. It did not have time to read those papers in detail, so if I missed something specifically about scaling it up to grid-level sizes, please point that fragment.

I can't say that such a detail was present. I did originally say 10-20 years, after all. At the rate such developments are progessing, that seems like a reasonable timeframe.
Using the redox flow batteries, assuming they are currently able to scale up (or at least sooner able to scale up) in the meantime is certainly reasonable and intelligent to do.

[Radar]

I can't say that such a detail was present. I did originally say 10-20 years, after all. At the rate such developments are progessing, that seems like a reasonable timeframe.
Using the redox flow batteries, assuming they are currently able to scale up (or at least sooner able to scale up) in the meantime is certainly reasonable and intelligent to do.
Not every technology can be reasonably upscaled regardless of the progress, so I would not count on graphene there. Supercapacitors will most likely make their way to cars, but grid-level storage is just too many orders of magnitude beyond that.

[Mastikator]

I am saying it's not literally true. Continuing to use fossil fuels and particularly coal would not be ideal, however the chances that it will wipe out everyone and everthing inside one century are almost nil.

That may be technically true but there's the issue that the global temperature lags behind CO2. If we stopped adding CO2 to the carbon cycle today the global temperature would continue to warm for hundreds of years.

The problem we're currently facing is that we're paying for the temperature every year whether we emit CO2 or not, and the price rises along with the temperature. The cost is something we can currently afford but truthfully not for long. What you can expect within the century is global economic collapse, we will get to a point where we no longer can afford to keep up with global warming and will make cut backs in living standards/life expectancy.

If we keep adding CO2 to the carbon cycle then in thousands or tens of thousands of years we very well may be in a mass extinction event, and the carbon that kills us is the carbon we're burning today. We're already locked into catastrophe mode for the future, that's the future even if we stop today. And the window to stop annihilation mode is closing. Once we're past that it will be too late if we then switch to fusion or nuclear or whatever.

The path we're currently on is one where the next century will be extremely hard, we will not be able to reverse the damage after that, and then it will be a slow and painful death over the next few thousand years. Technological advancement will stop and go in reverse as society collapses.

[Melayl]

Not every technology can be reasonably upscaled regardless of the progress, so I would not count on graphene there. Supercapacitors will most likely make their way to cars, but grid-level storage is just too many orders of magnitude beyond that.

I don't see why. If you can't make the size of individual cells large enough, just make more cells and connect them together. That's how they make large enough cells for electric vehicles right now, if my understanding is correct.

[Rydiro]

I don't see why. If you can't make the size of individual cells large enough, just make more cells and connect them together. That's how they make large enough cells for electric vehicles right now, if my understanding is correct.I'm rather sceptical about new solutions to energy storage. They are all motivated by the wish to make a currently failed energy production (wind, solar) viable. This tends to cloud judgement in rosy colors.

Wind and solar just arent very efficient. The ratio of energy used to setup your plant to lifetime output is underwhelming.

[halfeye]

That may be technically true

That is what I am saying. Saying things that you know to be false is lying, and it's frowned upon with good reason. If someone lies about one thing, they are much more likely to lie about others.

That Picard quote about debating honestly? it doesn't give "good guys" a pass on lying.

[Squire Doodad]

That is what I am saying. Saying things that you know to be false is lying, and it's frowned upon with good reason. If someone lies about one thing, they are much more likely to lie about others.

That Picard quote about debating honestly? it doesn't give "good guys" a pass on lying.

You seem very insistent on refusing to see the forest for the trees.
Here is an article very explicit about the nature of things, about the IPCC report from the other day. (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/04/its-over-for-fossil-fuels-ipcc-spells-out-whats-needed-to-avert-climate-disaster)
It specifically says

Thirty months: that is the very short time the world now has for global greenhouse gas emissions to finally start to fall. If not, we will miss the chance to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis.
That is all.


I'm rather sceptical about new solutions to energy storage. They are all motivated by the wish to make a currently failed energy production (wind, solar) viable. This tends to cloud judgement in rosy colors.

Wind and solar just arent very efficient. The ratio of energy used to setup your plant to lifetime output is underwhelming.

Wind and Solar are both quite efficient; we have hit a point where in some places, new solar plants are cheaper to make than to keep old coal plants running. From an energy perspective, solar could effectively replace I think it was about 90% of California's energy needs at a reasonable price if batteries improved.
That said they do make use of an unnerving set of rare earth metals; if we want to focus on solar and wind, we definitely need to do several of
*Make efficient recycling plants to reuse the valuable materials in solar panels and stop them from leaching if left in disrepair
*Find alternatives to our current use of rarer materials; for instance, sodium is showing promise as an alternative to lithium ion batteries as ones have been made that are acceptably effective and much easier to make/acquire materials for. However, we do need to make a full supply chain for it.
*Improve energy storage on the grid level, as you guys were saying.

I'm hearing good stuff about vanadium batteries, though I'm not sure how that's going atm.

Overall, there's a major takeaway I'm seeing here - we have the tools to save the world, we just need to use them and should have used them for the last several years.

[halfeye]

You seem very insistent on refusing to see the forest for the trees.

I am very insistent on lies not being the truth. I am saying that lying makes a person an unreliable witness, and that's bad for whatever they speak in support of.

I am very strongly opposed to pollution, and global warming is an aspect of that, I think other aspects are more important but that is a minor quibble, pollution is bad. Lying is a pollution of the truth, that's one reason I'm so against it.

[Mechalich]

Make efficient recycling plants to reuse the valuable materials in solar panels and stop them from leaching if left in disrepair

This part, at least, is very likely to occur. Industry is actually quite good at internal recycling of materials, especially metals, when it makes economic sense to do so. Photovoltaic recycling will almost certainly scale up as more and more panels reach the ends of their life cycles. This mostly hasn't happened yet, since solar panels have a 25-30 year lifespan, so the only panels up for recycling so far are those installed pre-1990s, which is a minute fraction of the total. There will probably be a major push towards solar recycling later this decade. The policy trick with regard to this is to make sure rooftop solar and other small-scale uses (ex. the tiny panels used to power things like highway cameras), don't get frozen out of the process.

[gomipile]

Another promising storage option is sodium ion batteries. Since sodium is a heavier element, the energy density of otherwise similar batteries is about half that of lithium ion. But, the cost of materials per unit of energy capacity is somewhat less, and sodium production/mining is inherently more sustainable than lithium since sodium is very abundant on the Earth's surface.

The energy density would be a problem for high performance electric vehicles, but not for grid scale storage. Since lithium ion batteries have already been used in small grid storage installations despite their flaws, sodium ion seems like a decent drop-in replacement.

[Squire Doodad]

Another promising storage option is sodium ion batteries. Since sodium is a heavier element, the energy density of otherwise similar batteries is about half that of lithium ion. But, the cost of materials per unit of energy capacity is somewhat less, and sodium production/mining is inherently more sustainable than lithium since sodium is very abundant on the Earth's surface.

The energy density would be a problem for high performance electric vehicles, but not for grid scale storage. Since lithium ion batteries have already been used in small grid storage installations despite their flaws, sodium ion seems like a decent drop-in replacement.

Yeah, I can see future lithium ion battery production being reserved for heavier duty situations and sodium ion becoming the main battery for casual consumer use.

For small grid storage, sodium ion batteries do seem feasible, however, for bigger situations like big cities you'd need something larger scale. This is why people talk about redox battery systems. For instance, this article from WIRED (https://www.wired.com/story/electric-grid-needs-big-vanadium-batteries/) covers the viability of vanadium batteries. It does seem that while vanadium batteries are more efficient when handling the at times unpredictable nature of renewables, it will need a big supply chain built around it, which may take some time. Nonetheless, it can be plausibly mined from carnotite in Colorado.

[Rydiro]

Overall, there's a major takeaway I'm seeing here - we have the tools to save the world, we just need to use them and should have used them for the last several years.
I don't think we have the tools. If we did, they would be in use. Large scale energy storage being one major problem. Lifetime efficiency (iirc 1:2 to 1:3) is another.

[Squire Doodad]

I don't think we have the tools. If we did, they would be in use. Large scale energy storage being one major problem. Lifetime efficiency (iirc 1:2 to 1:3) is another.

Energy policy is mixed heavily into politics and the economics of big industries. Putting said tools into use involves shattering the profit margins of fossil fuel industries, or at least making them shift into renewables (like BP is doing).
We very much do have the tools, and if there was a concerted global effort I have no doubt that we could stop climate change without overwhelming difficulty. Even if each country took on individual efforts to fix it, each being reasonably efficient but not working with more than their closest allies, that would do a lot.
That there are geopolitical and industrial forces that complicate such an effort doesn't mean this is physically impossible from a resource perspective.

[Bohandas]

Energy policy is mixed heavily into politics and the economics of big industries. Putting said tools into use involves shattering the profit margins of fossil fuel industries

Indeed. There are some very rich and very unscrupulous people out there with a vested interest in ensuring that things don't get fixed.

[Mechalich]

Energy policy is mixed heavily into politics and the economics of big industries. Putting said tools into use involves shattering the profit margins of fossil fuel industries, or at least making them shift into renewables (like BP is doing).
We very much do have the tools, and if there was a concerted global effort I have no doubt that we could stop climate change without overwhelming difficulty. Even if each country took on individual efforts to fix it, each being reasonably efficient but not working with more than their closest allies, that would do a lot.
That there are geopolitical and industrial forces that complicate such an effort doesn't mean this is physically impossible from a resource perspective.

We definitely have the tools when it comes to power generation, and as far as nuclear fission goes we've arguably had the tools since the 1960s. Other sectors are somewhat more nebulous. Transport, for example, is only just on the cusp of full electrification - viable electric automobiles are available, but full-size trucks and industrial vehicles are just starting to come out, and electric planes remain in the early concept stage. Certain other industries, particularly the production of concrete and certain metals, require extremely high-energy reactions that will struggle to produce carbon neutrality. And even beyond that, greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere from non-industrial sources such as land use changes, animal husbandry, and melting permafrost. Eventually it will be necessary to turn the Earth's CO2 budget negative in order to stabilize the climate. The chemistry for that is currently at the 'test plant' stage in several locations around the world, but long-term storage remains tenuous. Admittedly, a strong role for nuclear generation helps to minimize all these problems.

[warty goblin]

The genuinely galling thing is considering how much farther along we could be had we thrown significant resources at decarbonization thirty years ago. And how much less urgent the problem would be, given the cumulative effects of applying those technologies as they came online over the last three decades.

[Radar]

One of interesting ways of dealing with CO2 in the atmosphere would be artificial photosynthesis. On experimental level it looks pretty good, but I do not know of any commercially viable solution so far, but there are somewhat promising project being developed.

[Rydiro]

Indeed. There are some very rich and very unscrupulous people out there with a vested interest in ensuring that things don't get fixed.I mean you can blame a conspiracy for that. I'm from Germany, where renewable energies have been heavily governmentally invested in for the last 20 years.
It still doesn't work, dependancy on gas went up. Unconveniently, Russia is the largest supplier atm.
If there had been easy solutions someone in the last 20 years could have made LOTS of money with them.

[factotum]

One of interesting ways of dealing with CO2 in the atmosphere would be artificial photosynthesis. On experimental level it looks pretty good, but I do not know of any commercially viable solution so far, but there are somewhat promising project being developed.

Silly question--why go to great trouble and expense building artificial photosynthesis when you can, y'know, just plant trees?

[Mechalich]

Silly question--why go to great trouble and expense building artificial photosynthesis when you can, y'know, just plant trees?

Trees - to store carbon as wood, and grasses to store carbon in soil are certainly useful and important strategies, but they are limited by geography. Ultimately it will probably be necessary to put large quantities of carbon back into the ground (or possibly deep in ocean basins where it can be subducted back into the ground). This isn't really possible with gigantic piles of lumber or even huge quantities of algal slurry. Chemical capture of carbon in a form that can be effectively pumped back into rock is therefore useful. There are several different processes in development for direct carbon capture from the atmosphere and even some test plants - Iceland has one (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/worlds-largest-carbon-capture-plant-opens-iceland-180978620/) - but nothing on anything like the viable scale or efficiency necessary to really tackle the problem. Artificial photosynthesis is an intriguing option in this space because it would ideally drastically reduce the energy costs involved in ripping the carbon from the air (ideally it would generate energy, but that's probably unreasonable), which is currently very costly.

One thing Direct Carbon Capture does argue for is building as much renewable power generation as possible, since any excess energy could be used for this purpose.

[Radar]

Silly question--why go to great trouble and expense building artificial photosynthesis when you can, y'know, just plant trees?
Quite a few reasons actually:
1. Efficiency of carbon capture
Natural photosynthesis might be currently more efficient, but the plants use most of the produced sugar to sustain themselves, so over the whole daily cycle there is not that much carbon actually turned into something else. Furthermore, natural processing of dead wood also puts a lot of carbon back into the atmosphere. Overally, forests do not really produce all that much oxygen netto, so their efficiency at capturing carbon is equally low. Most of the oxygen we breath comes from algae.
2. Scalability
You can mass-produce photosynthesis cells. Can you just as easily deploy a forest where you need it? Artificial cells could be used in any environment, plants not so much.
3. Choosing the product
Plants mostly give you wood, while artificial photosynthesis can be used to produce many different substances depending on your needs. For example, they could produce ethylene which is a substrate for various everyday materials. Ethanol is also an option along with possibly many other organic compounds. Especially interesting are those that we currently get from crude oil.

[NichG]

Silly question--why go to great trouble and expense building artificial photosynthesis when you can, y'know, just plant trees?

As temperatures rise, so does the rate and spread of forest fires, so leaning too heavily on trees would strengthen that feedback... Not to say it's a bad idea to plant trees, especially in places with low rates/spreads of fires, but having a diverse set of options should increase the robustness of the approach.

[Vahnavoi]

Silly question--why go to great trouble and expense building artificial photosynthesis when you can, y'know, just plant trees?

People are planting trees as we speak - artificial photosynthesis is something we're hoping to develop while doing that.

[gomipile]

Regarding artificial photosynthesis vs trees and other plants:

Some of the arguments against trees seem to assume we'd be using a single species of tree. Different trees prefer different climate and terrain, so one could probably cover quite a lot of otherwise unused ground by picking appropriate forestry strategies.

Also, sure, mass produced artificial photosynthesis cells could be deployed anywhere there's enough sun. But with plants a lot of the required infrastructure for installation is already present in the form of dirt. There are even plants that can grow quite happily without topsoil, and in so doing create new topsoil.

So, for the production of useful materials. I'd imaging that genetically engineered plants would be a lot less labor intensive to produce and deploy than artificial photosynthesis cells. Not to mention that there a fair number of unmodified crops that produce durable materials, some of which we could be using a lot more of. Hemp is vastly under-produced in the USA, for example.

Also, I'd agree that it's not either/or. I'm sure if artificial photosynthesis cells become inexpensive and useful, that we'll still want to expand our carbon capturing crop area alongside them.

[Lord Torath]

Regarding the artificial photosynthesis vs trees, I'll go with: both, please!

In other news, Stanford has solar panels that can also generate electricity at night through thermo-electric generators incorporated into the panels:
Solar panels that can generate electricity at night have been developed at Stanford (https://www.npr.org/2022/04/07/1091320428/solar-panels-that-can-generate-electricity-at-night-have-been-developed-at-stanf).

[Fat Rooster]

Silly question--why go to great trouble and expense building artificial photosynthesis when you can, y'know, just plant trees?

Not a silly question at all. The problem is that trees are incredibly busy, and mostly not at making wood. They make wood because they need some of it, but the vast majority of their energy goes into other things, such as fighting off insects, or bacteria, or creating fire suppressants, and probably dozens more things an actual expert could talk about. Even compared to algae, trees are not great at sequestering carbon. The biggest advantage of trees is that we don't need to do anything more for them, but that only really matters in fairly inaccessible and otherwise useless areas. The majority of the land is now exploited to some extent, so we would want to achieve more in the same area than trees can currently achieve, at the cost of a bit more labour.

Artificial photosynthesis is the idea of trying to harness that individual process, which nature has refined for a billion and a half years, while stripping away all the baggage that comes with it. This could potentially be orders of magnitude more efficient at producing useful products than existing lifeforms, due to us subverting 90% of the problems they would otherwise face.

I guess the short answer is that trees are not good enough to dig us out of the hole we have gotten ourselves into, so we have to create something better*. Sure that couldn't possibly go wrong.

* better at a certain job; removing CO2. No universals assumed.


Edit: Only just realised how many people had already answered. Still, initial point stands. Definitely an important question.

[Mechalich]

Not a silly question at all. The problem is that trees are incredibly busy, and mostly not at making wood. They make wood because they need some of it, but the vast majority of their energy goes into other things, such as fighting off insects, or bacteria, or creating fire suppressants, and probably dozens more things an actual expert could talk about. Even compared to algae, trees are not great at sequestering carbon.

Trees can be a highly effective carbon sink, but it depends on how they're deployed. It is possible to manage timber for carbon sequestration, but this is generally not done. The ideal scenario is production of a fast-growing species that within 20-30 years of growth is suitable for use in structural timber and is then converted to building materials that last 200-300 years. We now have construction techniques using wood, such as CLT (cross-laminated timber) and related methods, that allow for the safe construction of mid-sized buildings and even skyscrapers in the 200-300 ft. range (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mj%C3%B8st%C3%A5rnet). Buildings produced in this way can be a carbon sink, which is significant given that traditional concrete+steel building production is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Proper utilization of wood as a resource is one of the many tools in the overall emissions reduction toolset, but not one broadly implemented at this time.

[Ibrinar]

I mean you can blame a conspiracy for that. I'm from Germany, where renewable energies have been heavily governmentally invested in for the last 20 years.
It still doesn't work, dependancy on gas went up. Unconveniently, Russia is the largest supplier atm.
If there had been easy solutions someone in the last 20 years could have made LOTS of money with them.

What brought you to that conclusion? It is working though it would be better if it worked far faster but not working seems baseless. Gas, while there are currently problems with who we are buying it from and it needs to be replaced too, was preferred because it is cleaner than coal and quite flexible. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-emissions-by-fuel-line?country=~DEU as you can see gas as a contributor is relatively stable the last two decades while Coal and Oil were reduced. Co2 is down https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions?stackMode=relative&country=~DEU 30% compared to 1990 . And the price of renewable energy production has fallen while the percentage has risen considerably. If we were at this point 20 years ago I would be downright optimistic.

[Rydiro]

What brought you to that conclusion? It is working though it would be better if it worked far faster but not working seems baseless. Gas, while there are currently problems with who we are buying it from and it needs to be replaced too, was preferred because it is cleaner than coal and quite flexible. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-emissions-by-fuel-line?country=~DEU as you can see gas as a contributor is relatively stable the last two decades while Coal and Oil were reduced. Co2 is down https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions?stackMode=relative&country=~DEU 30% compared to 1990 . And the price of renewable energy production has fallen while the percentage has risen considerably. If we were at this point 20 years ago I would be downright optimistic.
Not working in several dimensions.

1. Economically
While other energy production has been subsidized too, "green" energy has been driving prices. Germany has about 50% higher prices than France, that mostly relies on nuclear power. Prices have already driven power-dependant industries away, eg smelters.

2. Production capacity/backup systems
On a cloudy and windless day, there is no production. There are no storage solutions available of any meaningful size. That means a completely redundant system (usually fossile) has to be kept ready for these days. You can't just go a few days without power. The costs of these backups are often conveniently ignored. So its not working on its own.

Couldn't find good numbers on lifetime energy cost to lifetime energy output ratio. I suspect this ratio isn't all that great either.

[Dragonus45]

Yeah. The solutions for storing nuclear waste aren't optimal, but at least there are solutions and the waste isn;t just floating around in the atmosphere like with fossil fuels

And honestly there is so little of it and it's so much less dangerous then things like coal ash like from the Kingston that I wouldn't care if it was just something we had to stick in a box forever. That it can still have real use after the fact just makes it that much better.

[Maelstrom]

Greenwalds Law reworked, looks like, when operation, fusion reactors could create even more energy than previously thought:

https://www.livescience.com/fusion-reactors-could-produce-more-power

[Cikomyr2]

Greenwalds Law reworked, looks like, when operation, fusion reactors could create even more energy than previously thought:

https://www.livescience.com/fusion-reactors-could-produce-more-power

Ill settle for "sustainable net positive energy generation has been achieved".

Learning that the previously determined density limit on the deuterium was wrong can be a game changer indeed.

[Quizatzhaderac]

Silly question--why go to great trouble and expense building artificial photosynthesis when you can, y'know, just plant trees?If you turn an acre of desert into a forest, you've taken carbon out of the atmosphere.

Leaving a forest alone doesn't change the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

If we manage to afforest the entire Sahara and Gobi desserts (which are things people are actually trying), that'll offset several years of CO2 emissions, but not all of it. It's also uncertain how much dessert can be afforested. Some, certainly, as trees have complicated pro-tree affects of climate, but how much and how quickly it can be done is uncertain.

[Squire Doodad]

To put it a different way - planting trees is great, and has a variety of benefits on ecological, atmospheric, and cultural levels.
However, even if you were to plant a million new trees, that's not the same as a million old growth forest trees as those saplings need to grow for years, so keeping preexisting forests safe is important and setting up artificial photosynthesis to have a different solution is also very useful.

Though it is worth noting that regardless of all of that, eating less meat and participating in tree planting events of various kinds are still great ways to handle the GHG issue. Not to mention taking a longer train ride instead of a plane trip (surprisingly viable in Europe), and so on.
I can also talk at length about how while society-scale implementation of those changes would save the day, so would a handful of corporations being environmentally friendly instead of doing screw-all about it, but that's a much much longer discussion.

[Cikomyr2]

To put it a different way - planting trees is great, and has a variety of benefits on ecological, atmospheric, and cultural levels.
However, even if you were to plant a million new trees, that's not the same as a million old growth forest trees as those saplings need to grow for years, so keeping preexisting forests safe is important and setting up artificial photosynthesis to have a different solution is also very useful.

Though it is worth noting that regardless of all of that, eating less meat and participating in tree planting events of various kinds are still great ways to handle the GHG issue. Not to mention taking a longer train ride instead of a plane trip (surprisingly viable in Europe), and so on.
I can also talk at length about how while society-scale implementation of those changes would save the day, so would a handful of corporations being environmentally friendly instead of doing screw-all about it, but that's a much much longer discussion.

I had an idea the other day about making large fields of perma culture. A self-sustainable ecosystem of feeding plants that absorb carbon and keep growing and self-sustaining. Deliberately engineered and maintained by Farmer Rangers.

[NichG]

To put it a different way - planting trees is great, and has a variety of benefits on ecological, atmospheric, and cultural levels.
However, even if you were to plant a million new trees, that's not the same as a million old growth forest trees as those saplings need to grow for years, so keeping preexisting forests safe is important and setting up artificial photosynthesis to have a different solution is also very useful.

Though it is worth noting that regardless of all of that, eating less meat and participating in tree planting events of various kinds are still great ways to handle the GHG issue. Not to mention taking a longer train ride instead of a plane trip (surprisingly viable in Europe), and so on.
I can also talk at length about how while society-scale implementation of those changes would save the day, so would a handful of corporations being environmentally friendly instead of doing screw-all about it, but that's a much much longer discussion.

Though any individual-level approach basically doesn't scale well enough compared to systematic approaches to move the needle in practice. If you took all the people willing to change their lifestyles and made them maximally negative-carbon, that still wouldn't counter-balance a single regulatory decision...

[Squire Doodad]

I had an idea the other day about making large fields of perma culture. A self-sustainable ecosystem of feeding plants that absorb carbon and keep growing and self-sustaining. Deliberately engineered and maintained by Farmer Rangers.
So kind of like seeding those vast plots of empty grass that are all over the place with edible plants for the city to use? You could probably stick fruit trees near highways or something if you want to, though exhaust would limit this potential somewhat.
The goal is to maximize diversity and carbon capture, so planting native cranberries is great even if their useful yields boil down to feeding a handful of wandering campers over the course of 5 years.


Though any individual-level approach basically doesn't scale well enough compared to systematic approaches to move the needle in practice. If you took all the people willing to change their lifestyles and made them maximally negative-carbon, that still wouldn't counter-balance a single regulatory decision...

I mean that would because it would in turn consist of what a governmental regulatory decision would aim for and probably influence company regulatory decisions
But yeah point taken, the best way to do the most good with the least changes to your lifestyle is to do the easy stuff for yourself and then push heavily in favor of ecologically sound policy. Or at least the less ecologically-destructive ones.

[Radar]

I mean that would because it would in turn consist of what a governmental regulatory decision would aim for and probably influence company regulatory decisions
But yeah point taken, the best way to do the most good with the least changes to your lifestyle is to do the easy stuff for yourself and then push heavily in favor of ecologically sound policy. Or at least the less ecologically-destructive ones.
Otherwise quite a lot of coastal areas (where most people in the world live actually) would face this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8IBnfkcrsM). Ozone layer crisis has shown that a global action can make a huge difference, but with greenhouse gasses it is not that easy as we basically need to shift whole branches of industry into new directions.

[Lord Torath]

New energy storage system: Polymer Batteries

From Science Friday (https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/plastic-battery-grid-storage/)

The CEO of PolyJoule (https://www.polyjoule.com/) was on the program, and hyped the environmentally friendliness of the batteries, which do not require mining of copper, kobalt, lithium, etc, but neglected to mention that plastic comes from oil, merely mentioning that they use plastic feedstock, which already has supply lines in place. He also pushed that at end-of-life, plastic is recyclable, which is a very iffy thing to assert these days, but it may be true, since I don't know specifically what types of plastic these are made of. It is true that the 1% of lead-acid batteries that aren't recycled tend to poison the landscape, and that lithium-ion batteries are pretty nasty when their usable life is over. But plastic decomposition into microplastics is a real problem. I'm kind of disappointed in Ira Flatow for not pushing back on those issues. Oh well.

A couple other notes:
According to the Science Friday segment, these batteries are very safe. They don't catch fire like lithium batteries, and can be punctured when fully charged without risk of explosion or chemical leakage. They are good for over 20,000 charge/discharge cycles (last year they were rated for 12,000 cycles, so it's possible that 20k is not the limit).

They have about 20% of the energy density by volume of standard lithium-ion batteries, so these are not going to be powering your car or cell phone. The CEO says he envisions them being used for Wind/Solar energy storage in large-scale facilities. Or possibly occupying a cabinet in the average person's home.

[Squire Doodad]

New energy storage system: Polymer Batteries

From Science Friday (https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/plastic-battery-grid-storage/)

The CEO of PolyJoule (https://www.polyjoule.com/) was on the program, and hyped the environmentally friendliness of the batteries, which do not require mining of copper, kobalt, lithium, etc, but neglected to mention that plastic comes from oil, merely mentioning that they use plastic feedstock, which already has supply lines in place.
[snip]
They have about 20% of the energy density by volume of standard lithium-ion batteries, so these are not going to be powering your car or cell phone. The CEO says he envisions them being used for Wind/Solar energy storage in large-scale facilities. Or possibly occupying a cabinet in the average person's home.

I mean it sounds like an interesting field of research, plastic feedstock for a portion of batteries is still an improvement over lithium or cobalt mining.
I don't know how long-term viable it is but hey more options are nice I guess.

[Bohandas]

IIRC some plastics can also be produced directly from plants, rather than from oil. I'm not sure if the particular plastics used in this device can be, but I know that some can.

[Mastikator]

IIRC some plastics can also be produced directly from plants, rather than from oil. I'm not sure if the particular plastics used in this device can be, but I know that some can.

Dude we're eating almost a gram of microplastic a day so unless you also recall that plastics can be converted into plants I'm not interested. When oil goes to the grave I hope it takes plastics with it.

[halfeye]

Dude we're eating almost a gram of microplastic a day

Er, no? That is approximately one cubic centimetre, I'm pretty sure we'd actually notice that.

[NichG]

Er, no? That is approximately one cubic centimetre, I'm pretty sure we'd actually notice that.

That's around 0.1% of the total daily mass of food you eat, and plastic is biologically pretty inert, so I don't know that you'd notice.

That said, for similar reasons, I'm not particularly bothered by the idea of it either, short of specific claims or studies showing particular negative effects at scales I care about...

[halfeye]

That's around 0.1% of the total daily mass of food you eat, and plastic is biologically pretty inert, so I don't know that you'd notice.

I still want to see a citation for that. Wikipedia says 70,000 particles a year, with a maximum length of 5mm, which is relatively huge, but I still don't think a gram is a reasonable gross mass without the texture at least being noticable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics


That said, for similar reasons, I'm not particularly bothered by the idea of it either, short of specific claims or studies showing particular negative effects at scales I care about...

[Mastikator]

Er, no? That is approximately one cubic centimetre, I'm pretty sure we'd actually notice that.

Er yes, really. https://graphics.reuters.com/ENVIRONMENT-PLASTIC/0100B4TF2MQ/index.html

People could be ingesting the equivalent of a credit card of plastic a week, a recent study by WWF International concluded, mainly in drinking water but also via sources like shellfish, which tend to be eaten whole so the plastic in their digestive systems is also consumed.
You eat a credit card of plastic every week.

[halfeye]

Er yes, really. https://graphics.reuters.com/ENVIRONMENT-PLASTIC/0100B4TF2MQ/index.html

You eat a credit card of plastic every week.

A gram is a lot. A credit card is a lot too, but I would guess it's less than a gram.

The article (which is journalism not scientific, and quotes the WWF, which is a charity and also not scientific) says in drinking water and shellfish, most weeks I don't eat shellfish at all. I would plainly see 5mm chunks of plastic in drinking water, they may be thinking of nanoplastics which are small enough to be invisible, but they said micro-plastics, which are big.

[NichG]

A gram is a lot. A credit card is a lot too, but I would guess it's less than a gram.

Quick search says a credit card is about 5 grams. To double check, dimensions are ~ 0.1cm by 8cm by 5cm, so that's about 4 cm^3, so it checks out.

[georgie_leech]

While I'm also concerned about the potential harms of microplastics, the specific quoted rate of Credit Card per Week is unlikely to be true. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ntp6BqhSng)

[Lord Torath]

While I'm also concerned about the potential harms of microplastics, the specific quoted rate of Credit Card per Week is unlikely to be true. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ntp6BqhSng)Thanks for that! I've shared it with my family. :smallcool:

Fun little bit about how we might conceivably be able to deal with our plastics disposal problem:
These plastic-munching superworms are living recycling plants (https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/superworms-can-eat-and-digest-plastic) from SyFy-Wire

[crayzz]

The vast majority of micro plastics come from polymeric textile laundering (acrylic, polyester, nylon, etc clothing mostly) and wear and tear on plastic/rubber materials, mostly tyres on roads. How we handle plastic waste disposal isn't really relevant to the issue AFAIK.

[Cikomyr2]

The vast majority of micro plastics come from polymeric textile laundering (acrylic, polyester, nylon, etc clothing mostly) and wear and tear on plastic/rubber materials, mostly tyres on roads. How we handle plastic waste disposal isn't really relevant to the issue AFAIK.

not to the Fusion Power thread anyway.

I get that "how much plastic is released in nature and how much it damages the environment" is a real important topic, and if we want to open a thread to discuss it go ahead.

[Squire Doodad]

The vast majority of micro plastics come from polymeric textile laundering (acrylic, polyester, nylon, etc clothing mostly) and wear and tear on plastic/rubber materials, mostly tyres on roads. How we handle plastic waste disposal isn't really relevant to the issue AFAIK.

I mean nurdles also enter the waters in considerable quantities as a result of raw mats for plastic production being shipped and leaking out. There's lots of different sources that can be fixed.
Bamboo fabrics aren't a good option but bamboo substitutes for, say, plastic cutting boards seems good

[Yora]

Greenwalds Law reworked, looks like, when operation, fusion reactors could create even more energy than previously thought:

https://www.livescience.com/fusion-reactors-could-produce-more-power

That's cool.

Nice that just for once we find the goal to be actually closer than we assumed, instead of further away. :smallbiggrin: