Reply To: turn heat into electricity

[asymmetric_implosion]

zapkitty wrote:

A high efficiency, low waste fission system is a real threat to the future of fusion. It’s hard to argue against injecting a few neutrons to start an easily sustained chain of reaction.

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It certainly would not be a threat to aneutronic units… steam and turbines and waste handling eat up any potential savings.

And by the same token any of the smaller neutronic fusion projects such as General or Helion would do as well as the enriched U starter and would be safer to boot.

In my opinion fission breeders would be a power source of last resort… after people realize what the oligarch’s half-assed response to Fukushima is actually doing to Japan [em]any[/em] fission plant is going to have a hard row to hoe no matter how much better it is technically.

Aneutronic fusion should be the first priority and neutronic fusion the second string… and each should be funded accordingly simply because the relative potential payoff of each is worth the investment.

I appreciate that there are more efficient energy conversion systems than steam and turbines but they are and will continue to be the backbone of electricity production for a while. They don’t “eat up” any savings compared to another fission power system. Yes, I am comparing to fission for one reason and one reason alone. Fission power is here and working. The problem of fusion for most folks that work in the power industry is that fusion has yet to produce more electricity than it takes in or even less restrictive, more power generated by the plasma than is required to initiate it.

Fukushima was a disaster without a doubt but it placed a reactor in conditions that it wasn’t designed to operate in or deal with in shutdown. I would argue siting a nuclear power plant is critical and whoever sited it along a coast in a high earthquake area was nuts.

Potential payoff and risk need to be assessed for all these technologies but practicality needs to be mentioned. Fission power works and has worked for over 50 years. Fusion should be the power of tomorrow but we need power now. Even if FoFu or others make a breakthrough tomorrow, it will take a decade to engineer it and start selling electrons. Countries like China and India refuse to wait that long. India is heavily investing in a thorium reactors because they see a path to electricity in less than a decade.

I’m not against fusion or pursuing it but you will not be able to convince people that are interested in the wall plug when fusion hasn’t produced any net power yet. Fission and fusion are on two different levels. Fission is into making it better. Fusion is still in a “we hope, we think and it should”.