/sci/ - Science & Math

Eh, we'll still need nukes in space.

yeah sure. lets see how everyone feels when everywhere you look is littered with solar panels and fucking wind generators, ruining the landscape.

>>12198687
Fusion power is completely different then fission power anon and the consequences of both technology.

>>12198687
This only considers current nuclear reactors and their shortcomings.

Small modular thorium reactors are MUCH more economically lucrative.
I have no doubt that those will contribute to future power grids, at least partially.

Until a prototype is making net energy I remain skeptical.

Also would like to point out that correlation is not causation on your cute emissions bs.

Reminder that no billionaire would profit from nuclear energy. Makes you think.

>>12198795
boy someone better let peter thiel , bill gates and jeff bezos know that they shouldn;t have invested millions in nuclear projects!

>>12198801
Huh. This just started two years ago, right? In that case I'd say we're about to see some results.

>>12198762
Its not my theory. I'm not an atmospheric scientist

>>12198741
We'll see. Canadastan just green lighted a project. They have enormous reserves of the stuff. The shale oil is never coming out of the ground.

>>12198702
Undoubtedly. Jevon's paradox is not solved by this. Human stupidity is infinite

>>12198697
That analysis did not include fusion reactors. And tech is advancing relentlessly. Good design + materials science + carbon taxes is going to make the difference. The world will look like pic related

>>12198689
Theres some marginal use cases. Medical devices, too.

>>12198801
Those guys lose that much in their seat cushions and don't even notice.

>>12198805
Thiel's project is almost done. All this hullabaloo about SPARC is kinda cute, but DT tokamaks are inefficient,bulky things even with the massive improvements from using HTSC. We need fusion that has low capital costs, and that means direct energy conversion-no turbine, no lithium blanket. Alpha particles from d-he3 fusion are perfect for this. You want a fusion generator, something portable, that can be shipped by conventional truck with minimal assembly. Something you can mass produce cheaply and swiftly in dedicated factories. The goal is to start putting something like a whole power plant's worth of fusion (1-1.5 gw)on the grid every day. That's what we need to go carbon neutral fast enough.

>>12198821
Is this inside information? Helion is almost done?

We need steel-fist-in-velvet-glove style leadership to enforce a global carbon tax regime. If only there were 1 country with the firepower to knock out all the coal-burning power plants...
>“While the world is adding renewable power generation capacity and manufacturing electric vehicles, it is still not enough. No efforts have been made to decarbonize the existing infrastructure. Emissions will continue increasing unless there is an incentive to rationalize the carbon-heavy assets or retrofit with carbon capture and storage — a herculean task without an appropriate tax on carbon,"

>David Brown, head of markets and transitions for the Americas at Wood Mackenzie, said that the appropriate figure for the task is $100 per metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent. An EU carbon credit in its Emissions Trading System is currently priced at just shy of €30 ($35).

>>12198854
Not an insider. I'm basing this off of their positive results in the 2018 ALPHA report,which has somewhat suspiciously vanished off the internet (I'll try to find a copt to show you,hang on) and job listings.

>>12198821

Direct energy conversion on a fusion plasma from alphas hasn't ever been demonstrated. Sick of listening to brainlets touting this as a "solution"

"multi kev" means they're working with very very high-energy plasma systems.

they explicitly need high-energy neutron experts with experience in D-D and d-he3 reactions.

they're building a demo generator right now. Not in 5 years. Right fucking now.

they're actively building and designing high energy capacitor systems,which are essential to a pulsed fusion design.

and notice the word, used so casually-generator. Not reactor. GENERATOR. They're building machines for the explicit purpose of GENERATING now.


This is NOT marketing talk. this isn't investor catnip. these are JOB POSTINGS directed at some of the smartest people on the planet-plasma physics phds.

I feel almost bad for saying anything, but I think people deserve to know what's going on.

>>12198931
Excellent, let the poaching begin

>>12198687
>The study found that in countries with a high GDP per capita, nuclear electricity production does associate with a small drop in CO2 emissions. But in comparative terms, this drop is smaller than that associated with investments in renewable energy.

And what are the author(s) political and financial ties to the renewable energy industry?

We can make working fusion reactors already. They still take more energy to run than they produce. That hasn't changed.

>>12198964
it would be wise to keep quiet about fusion until you had a marketable product and then go full apple-make people demand fusion.

>>12198975
And it would not be wise to demand the entire world shut down its nuclear energy based on speculation that someone was doing that.

>>12198977
Oh anon I'm not the OP-that guy is a faggot. Maybe I'm nuts and Helion is way further off from a product than i think-fission is real now.

>>12198687
>muh vaporware

the thread

>>12198687
Uhh.
Renewables don't work..
It's literally a sham.

>>12198687
What about LFTR breeder reactors? I watched a few videos that seemed to make a lot of sense to me a few years ago, but I'd like to hear an argument why they aren't a viable energy source.

>>12198687
I just read this and unsubscribed from the source magazine on my Google feed. Why you ask? Because their argument is retarded. It’s so, so fucking stupid. ‘If you spend the money on solar or wind instead of nuclear you reduce emissions’ how does that make any sense? Neither plant has significant emissions compared to fossil. What they’re saying is you can buy more solar instead for the same price as nuclear and reduce emissions. But you can never actually achieve that because you need base load generation. So this is just another oil lobby bullshit propaganda crap pushing nuclear out. It’s utter bullshit and completely inconsequential.

>>12198687
Nuclear Reactors will still needed to power future human settlements on the Moon, Mars and perhaps the moons of the outer planets. There the amount of sunlight each object receives drops, making solar impractical, not to mention in the case of the Moon, the long lunar night (two weeks) would necessitate the use of batteries, and on Mars, Martian dust storms will coat the solar arrays just as what happened to the Spirit probe.
The reactors would specifically have to be liquid-fuelled reactors, as solid fuel is at a disadvantage due to the requirement in most cases of needing water as a coolant and neutron moderator (there are of course other disadvantages to solid fuel which aren't really relevant to my argument). Other anons here >>12199176 have already touted LFTR as one option as given that the Moon has deposits of Thorium on its surface, it would be the most appropriate reactor to use, given its predicted inherent and passive safety measures of its design.
We have to stop looking at designing and building reactors only for an Earth setting, if Humans are to thrive in hostile places, they need a steady and reliable source of power, which nuclear power is likely to fulfill.

>>12199200
Nuclear actually has a lower CO2 emission profile than solar or wind, when you do whole lifecycle analysis.

The original article is silly and shortsighted. You could have made the argument in 2014 that rockets are always expendable and SpaceX are wasting their money trying to land them, until they actually figured it out. Nuclear is in a similar situation as legacy space companies, everything is done bespoke, slowly and inefficiently. The market is rife for disruption, but massive amounts of government red tape has slowed this down.

>>12199176
>>12199216

Proposed designs for Thorium fuel cycles have not yet solved the 'Protactinium problem', where between the state of Th-232 and U-233 the fuel becomes useless Pa-233, which not only takes several months to enrich into U-233 but spends that time in the reactor
- not releasing neutrons, effectively dead weight in the reactor
- emitting large amounts of destructive gamma rays, rapidly degrading the equipment and containment vessel to the point of failure

So Thorium currently requires a convoluted open fuel cycle which simply cannot compete with U-238 as a starting fuel. I remain optimistic that it's a matter of 'when' and not 'if' this obstacle is surpassed - it's essentially a materials science challenge being addressed by several laboratories - but for all we know fusion reactors like those in >>12198801, >>12198821, >>12198909, and >>12198931 may be completed BEFORE this, and fission solutions will actually be redundant, if not obsolete, in that case.

>>12199200
>>12199244

I remember Germany being praised for being the renewable king of the EU whilst also being the largest manufacturer of things like cars and industrial equipment. They closed down their nuclear power plants and want to be "nuclear free" by 2020. Because renewables cant keep up with the demand, they built coal power plants to replace the nuclear ones.

did you guess their emissions shot up. all whilst being called eco-friendly

>https://www.wired.com/story/germany-rejected-nuclear-power-and-deadly-emissions-spiked/

>>12199369
>Because renewables cant keep up with the demand, they built coal power plants to replace the nuclear ones.

And they also heavily import electricity from France where their grid is 3/4s nuke, pretty damning desu.

>>12199369
>Because renewables cant keep up with the demand, they built coal power plants to replace the nuclear ones.

And they also heavily import electricity from France where their grid is 3/4s nuke, pretty damning.

>>12199391
yeah Ive heard about that. apparently bmw,merc and others have complained that electricity prices are too high so that's a reason they aren't competitive in terms of price for their cheaper models.

in all honesty it's such a western european attitude. as long as it's not happening here it's not happening.

>>12198687
There are almost daily fusion articles published on popsci, the fact is that there not a single fusion reactor, not even a design that works today (not talking about the sun but man made designed and constructed reactors)

>>12198687
My gut reaction is to defend nuclear power, saying that it is still in its infancy and nuclear engineering is hard as balls. Fusion is also both of those things, except even younger and harder. But even if nuclear is a bust, it still will have been an important step towards fusion reactors, which from my outsider perspective seem like they have always been the end goal anyways

>>12199342
>emitting large amounts of destructive gamma rays, rapidly degrading the equipment and containment vessel to the point of failure
>worrying about gamma radiation of equipment inside a reactor
the only thing gamma does is cause differential heating, neutron embrittlement the main thing to worry about which isn't unique to thorium reactors
Pa-233 doesn't enrich it beta decays, but as far as usefulness of thorium fuel cycles in the thermal spectrum Flibe energy has made a good bit of progress with that, but with a complex filtering system. Thorcon's solution is just to build very cheap reactor cores that can just changed out every 4 year without a complex filtering system
Though Elysium industries isn't targeting thorium as a fuel they have displayed thorium could easily could work in their fast spectrum reactor, but its kind of pointless when you can just use spent uranium fuel instead

Let's assume we had functioning Fusion reactors right now. What would be the point of Nuclear reactors. Would they do anything better than the Fusion ones?

>>12199880
Nope

>>12199200
Theres no reason to get butt-hurt about a statistical analysis. The regression includes 123 countries, and what they actually did. From the source paper,

>We find that larger-scale national nuclear attachments do not tend to associate with significantly lower carbon emissions while renewables do.

The question is, why? Not, hurr-durr, this is oil company propaganda

>>12199444

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Earthquake_resistance

Wew, lads.

>As of 2014, there have been more than 100 serious nuclear accidents and incidents from the use of nuclear power. Fifty-seven accidents or severe incidents have occurred since the Chernobyl disaster, and about 60% of all nuclear-related accidents/severe incidents have occurred in the USA.

Wewwwwww

>>12199404
>bmw,merc and others have complained

Imagine that

>>12198977
No one is demanding nuclear be shut down. Just as no one was demanding all horses be slaughtered at the advent of petroleum economy in the early 19th century.

>>12198687

Exxonmobile pls go

Nuclear

>>12198687
>>The study found that in countries with a high GDP per capita, nuclear electricity production does associate with a small drop in CO2 emissions. But in comparative terms, this drop is smaller than that associated with investments in renewable energy.

Why would you do a correlative study on something complex with confounding factors instead of just doing the math on which produces more CO2 for the energy produced and at what price

>>12198697
Yeah I much prefer cows shitting in fields and 10 block parking lots

>>12202538
>he doesn't want to have food or transportation just electricity and nothing to use it for
brainlet

>>12198702
that's only if you're a pussy who's scared of breeding a little Pu-239 or U-233

>>12199244
it's impossible to disrupt the nuclear industry on Earth due to the governments of the Earth being pissed scared of The Bomb and nuclear power in general
Nuke Mars lmao

>>12198687
>just keep "studying" until you find the narrative you want
Fuck off

This might be off-topic but anyone have a cool Wendelstein 7-X wallpaper? I seen it somewhere but I dind't save it. It was a greyish color.
Idk I really like the asthetics of it.