Took long enough

[SignOfZeta]

How about fusion?
Wisconsin's Clean Energy Future: The Rise of Fusion Reactors | Watch

Both the company in the OP and this one have yet to update their YouTube channels with new fake CG in a year. As impossible as the worry free mini reactor from Radient is…it is at least based on a technology that functions. Realta’s fusion reactor is an even more cookie cutter green startup with zero practical chances of success. Radient’s main issue is that their design is impossible to shield. They could give up on some aspects of their idea (dig a mile deep well, line it with concrete and lower the reactor into it?) and still have a project. Fusion however is really Star Trek level stuff.

Next time you see any announcement regarding nuclear fusion as a power source keep this in mind: as of this writing nobody has ever created any nuclear fusion reaction that produced more power than it took to generate. Think about that twice.

When someone in the defense department or some BS startup like this starts talking about fusion just ask about that one thing. “Does it actually make power?” This one doesn’t yet…and neither has any other fusion project. Until that absolutely fundamental checkpoint is achieved it’s not a way to make power, it only consumes power. There is no “rise of fusion power” when there is absolutely zero fusion power anywhere in human history. When they talk about how it’s carbon neutral and that it’s scalable…these are more or less lies. They have no reactor. How can they say how scalable it is if it doesn’t exist in any meaningful manifestation?

SOBs might as well be talking about dilithium crystals. It’s that level of baby talk in some of these hype sheets…

…how did we get to a point in society where the people who are most hyped about science are the most ignorant of its workings?

[Sneak Miester]

we should use dilithium crystals
dilithium is a highly valuable crystalline mineral. These crystals regulate the energy from matter-antimatter reactions

[SignOfZeta]

I laughed out loud at this. Very dramatically phrased and completely incorrect. The National Ignition Facility at LLNL did this a few years ago. It even made mainstream news, so I'm surprised that you didn't know about it, especially when considering the smug confidence of your post.

So far this has only been achieved in a lab and crucially there still isn't a way to capture the energy released by the reaction in a usable form, it has just been measured to know it was more than the energy used to initiate the reaction. We are still a long way from human-generated fusion being a useful energy source.

(You might have meant electrical power, but you did not specify. As written your statement is incorrect. Power is just a rate of energy and that could be in any form)

I remember this one now, IIRC it was a Biden era thing to make nuclear weapon research look like some kind of green energy achievement…I may be mischaracterizing that…and you are correct. Looking at all the hype sheets from 2022 now. More power was indeed produced than consumed…depending on how things are measured. The reaction created more energy than the lasers hitting it but almost certainly nothing close to the total amount of energy needed to sustain the entire experiment. A 1MW laser needs more than 1MW to function, after all. Also important would be the massive industrial loads required to run an experiment like this, such as a massive cooling tower and mucho compute.

This experiment makes fusion power look slightly more realistic than a perpetual motion machine but that’s about it.

I worded my statement very specifically wrong, comically even, but the basic crux is the same. There is no fusion industry that actually generates fusion power. All fusion companies are in a state of pure research and fundraising and power zilch.

UPDATE: I found an article published by Science (an actual publication and not a YouTuber):

https://www.science.org/content/arti...-uh-not-really

[Pyrate Jim]

Some folks here seem to be missing the point.
I'm talking about a viable technology that is already in practice.
We have fission reactors, small, portable, mounted on ships. Can we not have the same on land?
Advancing toward fusion control is the next step of a learning process. Already progressing.

When I was young, there was only black & white television. Now we have artificial intelligence.
Speaking historically, that is perhaps the greatest amount of technological achievement in a single lifetime.

It's been proved that nuclear energy production does work.
You don't see massive cooling towers on a submarine.

[SignOfZeta]

Is your question “why don’t navy ship reactors power our world” then there are multiple reasons for that.

The US military has an essentially unlimited budget. A Navy carrier is, more or less, the most expensive object in the world. It may make power but it will never make money. You can do great things with blank checks… nuke power for civilians requires it be safe, cheap, and that the plant last 30+ years doing this.

As far as I know the only thing “portable” with a navy reactor is that the ship itself is mobile.

The concept of “safety” in the military is totally unlike anything in the private sector. Everyone on this boat has already signed their life away.

You can actually “fast track” things in the military or things on a boat. Nobody can tell the navy to not build something.

The concept of “environmentally friendly” plain does not exist in the military. They are in many ways the largest polluters on earth. If your interest in nuclear power is for greener power I can assure you the military isn’t doing it that way. The US military is driving around in circles in heavy equipment with no diesel after treatment, not just in the US, but in 80 other countries. All day. Every day. Same with the C5s and the smaller boats. They PUMP OUT CO2 all day and all night.

Cooling a ship’s reactor is much easier than cooling a reactor in, say, Phoenix or Cincinnati since it’s sitting in the sea. It has unlimited cooling everywhere it goes. If something absolutely crazy happened and the ship became dangerous you could just scuttle it in the middle of the sea. This is harder to do on land. You need a massive body of water if not the edge of the ocean to run a nuke plant.

[flyweightnate]

I think the major point is easily missed by most people.

Material is free. All cost is energy.

Obviously, that's not completely true, but it's about 99.9% true if you look at any problem long enough. Cars? The energy to mine the iron ore, mine the bauxite, crack the petroleum, run the presses, run the welders, etc. You can "skip" any part of the process by buying a material from a processor at a given rate, but that rate is, in effect, the processor's energy use.

BEVs? Well, that same metric applies. The energy to mine the lithium, mine the cobalt, mine the silver... the sad part is with certain minerals, the energy is in human form, still, and in a functioning society would include the cost of the energy of doctors to heal the disease caused by the chemicals... but I digress. Most of the added cost of a BEV is in the form of energy spent mining, or energy spent building batteries. At scale, research is borderline irrelevant.

Fusion reactions? Well, energy in has to include the infrastructure around the reaction. Not yet viable. Improving regularly.

Fission? This is one of few cases where energy extracted is greater than energy input. Fossil fuels being the other. Even solar, wind, etc. are right on the edge when you consider full lifecycle cost, especially "recycling" (or burying) the leftovers when they inevitably fail early. (Of course, I live in Texas, where hailstorms eat solar farms for breakfast, and I've heard some craaaazy stuff about the wind sector from some colleagues who are intimately involved.)

So I'm excited to see implementation at scale - reduced energy cost is the fastest, most sure way to lift a people's standard of living, by systemically reducing real cost of all goods and services not involving exclusively manpower. Sure, there are some hurdles, but as others have stated, it's not like we don't know how to do fission. Fukushima and Chernobyl have caused far less death and destruction and pollution than the aggregated fossil powerplant (and related infrastructure) failures elsewhere in the same period, even on a per GWh basis, less widespread contamination than solar, and certainly less environmental damage than wind. I'm bullish on it.

[Siress]

Everything is energy. We live in a simulation programmed in the language of energy. I too am bullish on reasonably safe nuclear power. Thorium-based was the last I really looked into, and it baffles me that we haven't been using it for the last decade.

[SignOfZeta]

That may be your point. My point is that the article the OP posted and the follow up fusion one are disposable clickbait that with zero skepticism or thought repeat the press releases of go nowhere startup companies and that if anyone has the attention span for it they can check back on their lack of progress month by month and maybe keep them in mind the next time someone says The Future Is Now and start looking more for proof than promises.

[Pyrate Jim]

That may be your point. My point is that the article the OP posted and the follow up fusion one are disposable clickbait that with zero skepticism or thought repeat the press releases of go nowhere startup companies and that if anyone has the attention span for it they can check back on their lack of progress month by month and maybe keep them in mind the next time someone says The Future Is Now and start looking more for proof than promises.

Like the Green New Deal. How many promises? How much product?
Disposable clickbait or not, it at least shows that the concept has not been forgotten and someone somewhere is working on a practical solution.
What's more it is private commercial enterprises footing the cost. Entrepreneurs and investors looking to make a profit.
Not like Gov't freely spending taxpayer dollars promising 50,000 EV charging stations across the Nation for the good of the environment.
For the cost of 50,000 units, we ended up receiving seven total. That future is now.

Like I said in the first post, students were tasked with the issue 50 years ago.
The mechanics are no more complicated than a steam engine locomotive. The only difference is the heat source to boil water efficiently.

[flyweightnate]

I'm extremely skeptical of this point.
Sure, that's how things should work in any reasonable world, but a capitalist society is driven by profits and not by improving the quality of life of it's people. We've made huge advances in agriculture and medicine in the past hundred years, but there are still far too many sick and malnourished people in this country. I guarantee that if any substantial advances are made in energy production, they will be cynically used by corporations to maximize their profits and won't improve the lives of most people by much. In this world wealth and prosperity are not shared, but hoarded by a handful of greedy scumbags.

Part of the reason is Dodge v Ford Motor, where the Court literally told Ford it had to work for the benefit of its shareholders instead of employees and customers.

So it's actually government mandated to be greedy at all costs.

Shocking, right?

[Pyrate Jim]

I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.

Those words have aged like a very expensive wine.

[SignOfZeta]

I'm extremely skeptical of this point.
Sure, that's how things should work in any reasonable world, but a capitalist society is driven by profits and not by improving the quality of life of its people. We've made huge advances in agriculture and medicine in the past hundred years, but there are still far too many sick and malnourished people in this country. I guarantee that if any substantial advances are made in energy production, they will be cynically used by corporations to maximize their profits and won't improve the lives of most people by much. In this world wealth and prosperity are not shared, but hoarded by a handful of greedy scumbags.

I’m extremely skeptical of THIS point.

Americans are profoundly wasteful with energy. The more that is available the more we waste. Not use, WASTE. The largest possible house, on the largest possible piece of land with the largest heaviest vehicle made driven as fast and as far as possible to work. Waste on top of waste on top of waste with a “poor me” at the end.

If you make energy %5 cheaper we’ll just use %5 more. If you make it %50 cheaper we’ll use %50 more. We will use ALL the energy and then complain about how expensive that was no matter how cheap it is. Then we’ll start a war to steal oil, fail to actually get any, then complain war is too expensive.

Think about junk mail for a second. Junk mail alone. Millions of tons of it are made and delivered to every Americans mailbox. Literally everyone hates it. The post office only loses money on it. Nobody reads it, it goes straight into the trash and then huge garbage/recycling trucks come and take it away to be buried or remade into more junk mail. Nobody wants it, nobody, but nobody can stop it.

A nation putting 15,000 miles a year on a 6000lb truck driving only his own self to work every day will figure out how to waste the entire output of any power power plaint. The thirst for moronic amounts of excess capability has made people numb to reason.

To have an energy system that makes sense you first need a public that can tell the difference between a need and a want but we don’t have that. Those people died out with the WWII generation. We’re trying to figure out how to split the atom on the cheap because we “need” it for important things like data centers to make lying chatbots and useless slop.

[cstx_pb]

In general I agree that our society is very wasteful, but a lot of that stems from capitalism. It encourages waste and consumption. I think we are making a similar point from different directions, that being technological advances will lead to more excess instead of helping those who need it. The one aspect of your post that I disagree with is that the amount of blame placed on typical people vs huge corporations doesn't seem proportional. Sure there are a lot of brain dead morons out there making stupid individual decisions, but even in the aggregate that is insignificant compared to the negative impact caused by the irresponsible behavior of large corporations.

[flyweightnate]

The AI/ chatbot problem is specifically interesting because they use a ton of energy, but are typically billed far below industrial rates in the name of "grid stability". Sure, that's fine... until you need to expand the grid, at which point the cost needs to be distributed evenly per MWh, because this is no longer about grid stability, it's just pure consumption.

[flyweightnate]

Counterpoint:

What is waste?

Waste is when a costly thing is lost or traded for no benefit. Something of value given for no value.

So if we reduce the total encompassed lifecycle cost of a unit if energy by 90%, I'd say we just reduced the waste by 90% - because we are consuming only 10% of the value.

Sure, cheap energy will then push us towards more thermal processing to reduce labor, or other such energy-intensive tradeoffs. But if it truly is cheaper - both to produce, and to eliminate the effect of byproducts of production and consumption - then we have reduced waste.

If energy were free, would it even be possible to "waste" it? It's like asking if an oceangoing vessel can "waste" seawater.

I think that's the holy grail.

Until then, best I can come up with is price signals to at least penalize wasteful use, while promoting beneficial use.

[Pyrate Jim]

Some companies are still at it. Trying to make it work.
Portable nuclear plant brings microreactors to the end of the Earth

[Jsc5150]

The barrier to nuclear deployment is entirely political and bureaucratic, not really technical.


When you haven’t politically solved the waste disposal problem of the last generation of deployment, it doesn’t bode well for the future of the technology.


Additionally, the enshittification of every business structure in the country poses a real threat to private reactors.
Boeing has proved that even world class engineering-led megafirms can be infected by this, and now they have to resort to blatantly assassinating whistleblowers to cover up how f****ing cheap they are at the expense of safety.

Idk if that is necessarily a barrier to the industry in the current regulatory, but it worries me a lot.

But the Navy ain’t gonna stop putting reactors directly in the ocean on the most high value military targets imaginable, so why can’t we use them to keep warm in the winter?

[Pyrate Jim]

Deployment may be advancing.
US transports nuclear microreactor for first time, showcasing potential to deploy nuclear power