[skywal_l]

Don't you think that the fact that you can use sea water as input and you get hydrogen as output is a huge advantage over fission?

Add to that the fact that there is no fukushima style meltdown in a fusion power plant. If something goes wrong, it just stops.

Finally, contrary to fission, fusion power plants will be able to adjust their power output as fast as gaz power plants. It takes months to turn on or off a fission power plant.

So yes, there is definitely a few benefits to fusion. And take a step back on the numbers. Look at how much we injected in banks in 2008. If it works (and indeed there is a risk they won't make it work and this is probably where the argument should be) the investment would be amortize over thousands of years...

Can you imaging a guy, 3000 years ago in China, complaining about spending money on a kiln to smelt that thing called iron?...

[leephillips]

> there is definitely a few benefits to fusion.

Absolutely. But these benefits are vastly outweighed by one benefit shared by fission, solar cells, and wind turbines: those things are real.

[me_me_me]

Thats the argument of coal plants for solar and at el sources of energy.

Not feasible, too expensive, doesnt work.

And yet here we are.

[bluedevil2k]

Fusion isn’t real yet - every technology you listed wasn’t real at some point relatively recently.

[ashtonkem]

The problem with “not real yet” is that it applies equally to things that eventually became real, and to things that never came to pass. We once said the same about both fission power and flying cars, and yet I still drive on the ground to get my groceries.

There does seem to be some movement in fusion technology, but it has also been in the “soon” state for decades now. There is no obvious way to balance these two contending data points

[orwin]

The first fission reactor was in activity 10 000 years ago. Well, probably not even the first.

Wind power was exploited since the 11th century? Or is it 13th? I'm not that clear on that. Solar cell appeared somewhat late in the 19th century.

Fusion is real too, and older than all of those. The issue is the scale.

[triceratops]

> The first fission reactor was in activity 10 000 years ago. Well, probably not even the first.

What are you referring to?

[leephillips]

Maybe something like this: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/natures-nucl...

[jazzyjackson]

and man will never go to the moon...

[orwin]

>> Add to that the fact that there is no fukushima style meltdown in a fusion power plant. If something goes wrong, it just stops.

Well, so does any gen3 fission reactor. That makes the gen 3.5 EPR "now with core-catcher" an over-engineered, useless and costly project.

>> Finally, contrary to fission, fusion power plants will be able to adjust their power output as fast as gaz power plants. It takes months to turn on or off a fission power plant.

No, it takes up to 6 hours on gen3, depending on design. Some French reactors can go from 100% to 0 in less than an hour, and from >0% to 100% in two (although this is very, very inefficient). A 5% change, in some cases, can be reached in 15s. The issue is that everytime a reactor is not running at 100%, you loose a lot since all the cost stay the same (fuel cost is less than marginal).

The main advantage of fusion is near-infinite available fuel at current energy consumption. That said, with Gen4 and all those new shiny research on surgenerating reactors, the same could be said of fission. I guess the main issue is our appreciation of risk.

[criley2]

> Look at how much we injected in banks in 2008.

If you're talking about the US, those were loans which, simply put, returned a profit to the US within a short number of years.

https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/

$634 billion out, $743 billion in for about $109 billion in profit for the taxpayers in about ten years.

While I agree that major investment into future technology is important, I think comparing it to short term loans that had collateral in the form of bank equity, and which were repaid with a profit to the government, is a poor comparison.

[neutronicus]

Fission already lets you generate zero-Carbon power from cheap fuel, at the cost of constructing a monumentally expensive plant.

Fusion sort of looks like it will give you that dynamic, only more extreme. Fuel even cheaper, plants even more expensive and time-consuming (and risky, given lack of track-record)

Solving the waste problem is nice, but not climate-relevant (and you will still be generating a bunch of activated metal due to all the fusion neutrons)

I agree with you that humanity wants to be fusing a lot of hydrogen in 100 years. I don't think it's super relevant to the challenges of the next 20, though

[loufe]

Prototypes and early models are extremely expensive but there are encouraging signs that fusion plants could be cheaper. The technology is inherently safer so site-preparation would be cheaper (can be a massive bill for fission), the same consideration could lead to factory-style production of magnets and other similar components, more interest from the public (safe, climate-friendly) and any sea-touching countries (energy-security) would mean more demand pushing economies of scale further, safer means less time passing certification, etc.

[soperj]

>Add to that the fact that there is no fukushima style meltdown in a fusion power plant. If something goes wrong, it just stops.

That's already the case with the CANDU reactors. They also don't need upgraded uranium, and can use uranium from decommissioned nuclear weapons.

[simiones]

> If something goes wrong, it just stops.

That's not true actually. A fusion plant can leak highly radioactive tritium, poisoning anyone in the plant or relatively near. A magnetic containment plant can lose plasma containment and get a pretty giant explosion, definitely destroying the extremely expensive machinery, and likely also killing many inside the plant. This explosion would also throw parts of the radioactive reactor all around.

It's definitely nowhere near Chernobyl risks, but "if anything goes wrong it just stops" is not as guaranteed as is often made out.

[d_theorist]

>Don't you think that the fact that you can use sea water as input and you get hydrogen as output is a huge advantage over fission?

If it reduces the cost. But it doesn't seem to.

>Add to that the fact that there is no fukushima style meltdown in a fusion power plant. If something goes wrong, it just stops.

Same as the most recent fission plants.

[flavius29663]

> Same as the most recent fission plants.

How are these 2 things the same?

On one hand, you rely on a good design and execution to achieve an automatic stop. History has shown time and again that there will always be something that goes wrong: from the cracking rods of Chernobyl to the backup power at Fukushima.

On the other, if you don't design and execute perfectly, nothing works, so there is nothing to shut down. This is the definition of "fail safe".

It's like saying both a meteorite and a rocket will reach 500km/h in the atmosphere, but me it's pretty obvious one is much more likely to do so.