World’s biggest nuclear fusion reactor comes online ( www.independent.co.uk )

The scientists used lasers to fuse two light atoms into a single one, releasing 3.15MJ (megajoules) of energy from 2.05MJ of input – roughly enough to boil a kettle.

Why do we even study this? Renewables are the only way. This is a waste of money which is a finite resource.

caesaravgvstvs ,

Money is neither finite nor a resource

Evil_Shrubbery ,

Exactly.

(It's made up, can be changed, value is what is agreed upon)

CTDummy ,

Why do you have multiple post of breakthroughs in nuclear tech with negative criticism?

In fact multiple posts appearing to concern troll renewables with statements like “coal is here to stay”??

lntl OP ,

Id you're going to judge me on my post history, then read ALL of them.

Creep

SkyeStarfall ,

Post history is public, why would it make you a creep?

lntl OP ,

is it not creepy to photograph children in a public park?

just because things are in the public, doesn't mean what's happening is not creepy

SkyeStarfall ,

It's more comparable to the past things an author has written as opinion pieces.

It's your own choice to post on a public forum.

lntl OP ,

imagine I'm reading through all of your comments and posts for the next hour or so of my life. all of my thoughts are centered on you. what you think, how you articulate, your sense of humor, what memes you like, everything you've made public. it's creepy.

SkyeStarfall ,

I don't care lol

The very reason I post things on Lemmy is so that people read them.

mihies ,

Um, no, it's not. That's why it's public. Feel free to read mine, if you want to waste your time.

LinyosT ,

See that can be solved as easily as just not putting that information publicly online.

If you make information public then someone is going to read it. That’s generally how that works.

CTDummy ,

Oh uh uh mate. I was happy to not reply but as others have pointed out I noticed by seeing multiple posts with your username in all. I then checked your post history to confirm my suspicion.

Your commenting history is public by design, it was programmed that way, for the very reason I used it. So someone can see if a poster has history of posting bad faith shit. The fact that you’re trying the whole “creep” angle means you’re intentionally being disingenuous about it or have no idea how the internet has worked since forums.

lntl OP ,

you're such an intelligent person, why engage?

CTDummy ,

A sad reply but I’m glad to see you’ve given up the pretending. Your post, the replies and the downvotes are probably cause for some introspection, though given this reply you don’t strike me as the type. Have a good one.

Yazer ,

So 1. This is newable. Green, almost waste free, and unlimited.

If we can refine fusion, we will stop global warming and energy insecurity, virtually overnight.

It's not a waste to invest in clean tech R&D. At one point, people said the same thing about solar, and look where we are now

sonori ,
@sonori@beehaw.org avatar

While this is exciting and there are many reasons to continue to research fusion, fighting climate change is very much not one of them. It has all of the real problems of fission, namely high cost, low scale, and difficult construction, but exacerbated to an extreme degree. If new fission projects struggle to get investor funding becuse of low profitability and difficult construction times dispite nearly a century of development, it is unlikely that a technology so complex and expensive that we don’t even had a plan for a power plant yet will do better.

We might have a fusion pathfinder plant by 2050 or 2060, we need to be off fossil fuel by 2030 to 2035. We might be able to built sufficient fission by then if we started now at scale, national average construction times tend to be between 5 to 10 years, but fusion is a tool that might at best replace the power plants we build today, not the coal and natural gas plants we built yesterday.

I bring this up not because I oppose funding fusion and pure science, but because any argument that calls it an answer to climate change is going to fall apart the second you consider any alternative on a cost or time basis.

pedroapero ,

Fission requires insanely costly wastes management. It is very dangerous and security is a huge costs-contributing factor.
This is not the case with fusion, so costs might be lower despite complexity.

sonori ,
@sonori@beehaw.org avatar

Fusion also produces most of the nuclear waste that a fission plant does thanks to undergoing the same nutron activation process, and while it lacks spent fuel rods, thouse are already infinitely recyclable, so the only real waste saveings would be in low grade waste like dust covered clean suits and such.

This also doesn’t help the case for Fusion very much given that even with these disposal costs ITER has costs four to six times any average fission plant for a donor reactor that has no generating capacity and which is mearly to prove that the physics work, something we did for fission with the Chicago pile in 1942 at an estimated inflation adjusted cost of 53 million dollars.

If it’s this expensive for a proof of concept, it is very unlikely that any full plant would be much cheaper. Compare it to things we can actually deploy at scale today like onshore wind or battery backed solar, and it is pretty clear that Fusion is an expensive but important science project, not a serious proposal to power the electrical grid.

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