[Schroedingersat]

> The previous poster is ranting against a tiny threat, if even that, to wind and solar while the fossil fuel lobby reigns supreme.

The current tirade of nuclear shilling serves the fossil fuel industry. As does directing funding (often including public money) to all the 'fusion' startups like helion with massive, obvious, unpatchable deal breakers in their plans. A billion going to general fusion could fund tens or hundreds of hysatas or natrons, a non-zero proportion of whom are making real progress towards actual solutions.

Vogtle, Hinkley, VC Summer... the list goes on and on. The people wind up paying for decades even if no power is ever produced. There has never been a commercially viable fission reactor even with the free unlimited insurance.

The fission industry has been burning enough public money every few years for decades to have kick started the renewable economy. A large portion of the massive cost reductions we saw in the last ten years have been technologically available for a very long time -- the only thing needed was investment in the engineering. There are still problems and technologies best served by primary research that will help and have a far better chance of paying off than more money down the fission toilet or towards snake oil fusion scams.

The same tired lines get rolled out every time and they're always wrong. Every discussion about the actual solution gets derailed by some combination of fission shilling, fud about variability or 'don't invest in renewables, fusion will save us'.

[Apocryphon]

Is there any actual book or article or any sort of source at all that shows that nuclear is an existential funding threat to renewables, rather something that has been politically moribund in the U.S. ever since Chernobyl, if not Three Mile Island?

Given how disadvantageous a position nuclear has been at for all of this time, it's probably trivial for pro-nuclear adherents to turn around and call the anti-nuke lobby shills for the fossil fuel industry. And so round and round the circular firing squad goes.

[ncmncm]

Nobody said "nuclear is an existential funding threat to renewables". You made that up from whole cloth.

Stop doing that.

[Apocryphon]

You are the one claiming that any money into nuclear funding detracts from funding of renewables. If that in fact is not an existential threat, then you should probably tone down your verbose vehemence to the former. If it is not an existential threat, then you are thundering against a non-issue.

You stop doing that.

[ncmncm]

I am not, in fact "thundering". You made that up. Stop it. I said nothing about "existential threats" or "threats" of any kind. You made that up. Stop it.

Every last dollar going into fraudulent fusion startups, and via federal grants from taxes into constructing ITER, is in fact diverted from potentially productive research. Fraud is a pure negative.

[Apocryphon]

Okay, so you’re saying something can be a pure negative, while not being an existential threat. Thank you for explaining your position.

[pfdietz]

What is Helion's showstopper? I mean, they're a longshot, but as far as I know there's nothing that guarantees their effort doesn't work.

[Schroedingersat]

Two things.

1) World helium-3 reserves mean they can only be an irrelevant amount of total energy. Otherwise it's just D-D or D-p fusion with extra steps (and all the neutron problems involved).

2) The magnetic energy recovery can at best reach parity with the thermal, which makes it yet another solar freakin' roadways if not a theranos. They play sleight of hand with this in all their marketing materials which indicates they know it's a show stopper but do not want anyone paying attention to it.

The slick marketing, the sexy story, the massive hole in their story, and the startup posturing put them with every other scam startup that promises the world and then folds after an IPO with VCs disappearing with a the later investors' money.

[pfdietz]

In DD followed by D3He most of the energy is coming from D3He, especially if you let the tritium decay (admittedly that takes a while.)

The magnetic energy recovery scheme would allow the energy of compression to be recovered at high efficiency. If this worked, they could have a practical, energy producing system even with Q < 1. I believe they are aiming for Q = 0.2.

The idea that it "can at best reach parity with thermal" seems without any justification. Perhaps we could debug the source of your misunderstanding?