alt Hacker NewsI'm not a specialist but here is what I think I know (I'm talking with the point of view of a Frenchman, who consumes most of his electricity from (fission) nuclear power plants):
1/ Uranium is not a renewable (quite the opposite), needs to be mined and treated (which is expensive and very polluting), and not present at the required concentrations in most of the world (this creates geopolitical issues).
2/ Fission nuclear plants require a well functioning [state|government], and no war. A (conventional) strike on a nuclear power plant can have devastating and lasting consequences. Even a random terrorist group can do that.
3/ I've read that "Ultimately, researchers hope to adopt the protium–boron-11 reaction, because it does not directly produce neutrons, although side reactions can" (that's a wikipedia quote, but I've read that already from other sources).
So fusion doesn't seem the best option on the short term, because of the complexity and cost of research, but definitely seems to be the very best option in the middle and long term. And we made the short term catastrophic choice already with coal and oil, it'll be good to learn from that.
Or maybe I'm totally wrong.
Replies
1: Well if society could get at least some of their shit together we could do breeders. Alas, someone shot an RPG at Superphenix and that put a damper on a lot of things...
But it's not impossible. Japan seems to do most things decent from a 'security' standpoint, also interestingly for all of the other 'grey-market' stuff out there in the category of "shouldn't be radioactive but is" I have yet to find anything about AliExpress selling fissiable materials.
2: Yes and no and how much do you want to spend to improve the breach/damage ratio. i.e. PBRs have relatively low risk under a number of circumstances but have higher operating/etc costs.
I should also possibly question, what are the potential failure modes of 'not short timeframe fusion reactions'? I honestly have no clue whether they would quickly cease or if there are other potential side effects.
3: Agreed that neutron stuff can be solved in many ways, I do have some questions about maintaining that across various fusion designs. Big challenge is that we aren't 'there' yet.
> So fusion doesn't seem the best option on the short term, because of the complexity and cost of research, but definitely seems to be the very best option in the middle and long term. And we made the short term catastrophic choice already with coal and oil, it'll be good to learn from that.
Agreed that Fusion is the ideal long term, hopefully my comments didn't cause thoughts otherwise. I think we need more funding into it, and maybe even research as to how to have other renewables (e.x. solar) help feed into the initial startup/restart process for plants. We have had decades without sufficient funding of research.
I will say however, especially in relation to my other point-comments, that other countries (re?)embracing fission in the meantime will likely still lead to discovery of better techniques to deal with 'shared' concerns between fission/fusion such as neutrons/weigner engergy/etc
Deuterium is also not renewable, even if it is more abundant than uranium.
The H1-B11 reaction would be a much better energy source than anything else, but for now nobody knows any method to do it. There is no chance to do it by heating, but only by accelerating ions, and it is not known how a high enough reaction rate could be obtained.