So about the NIF laser fusion thingy...
https://www.science.org/content/article/historic-explosion-long-sought-fusion-breakthrough

> If gain meant producing more output energy than input electricity, however, NIF fell far short. Its lasers are inefficient, requiring hundreds of megajoules of electricity to produce the 2 MJ of laser light and 3 MJ of fusion energy. Moreover, a power plant based on NIF would need to raise the repetition rate from one shot per day to about 10 per second.

Don't get me wrong, it is a huge breakthrough and very exciting. But:

> “The physics phenomenon has been demonstrated,” says Riccardo Betti of the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester.

That's what it is. A PoC of a physics phenomenon, or rather of the fact that it is possible to make it work at will (ish).

It's going to be decades and billions in funding to get it anywhere near to becoming a viable energy source.

For an almost completely unwarranted analogy (so, more of an illustrative example):

April 1932 - first time an atom was split by humans

June 1945 - first human-initiated nuclear explosion (even with all the resources pumped into the Manhattan project)

December 1946 - first nuclear reactor hosting a self-sustaining, controlled chain reaction

January 1954 - first nuclear-powered sub

June 1954 - first nuclear reactor generating power directly for public energy grid

Took 22 years for fission.

Obviously the history of fusion power will be different than that of fission power.

Also, comparing nuclear fusion to nuclear fission is problematic: for one, nuclear fusion has way, way less radioactivity-related and radioactive waste-related issues than fission. It would be an absolute travesty if fusion was painted with the same brush as fission.

But practical applications of fusion, if any, are decades away.

Today we need to focus on the tried and true: solar, wind, hydro, geothermal.

And yeah, I would not mind some serious re-consideration of the general negativity (see what I did there?) around fission power nuclear plants get, especially the ones that already exist.

Shutting down nuclear power plants and thus pumping out more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere today seems to me… ill-advised.

But that's a whole separate thread. 😉

@rysiek If the Japanese cannot run them safely, then no one can, IMHO. Chernobyl and Fukushima will be no go zones for humans for thousands of years. Pretending that nuclear power is now alright will only serve to reduce the pressure that is needed to force through the real solutions.

@eighthave @rysiek Fossil fuel plants cannot be run safely, even when no accidents occur. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928053-600-fossil-fuels-are-far-deadlier-than-nuclear-power/

@scotclose @eighthave @rysiek Very interesting. Did not know about the dam failure deaths mentioned in that article, though it seems a bit unfair to blame hydroelectricity for that.

@cinebox dam failures are engineering and regulatory failures. Just like release of radioactivity incidents in nuclear power plants.

@scotclose @eighthave

@rysiek @cinebox @scotclose @eighthave this is exactly my problem with some of the pro-nuke crowd, specifically the ones that claim that the only reason why building and maintaining nuclear plants is so expensive and takes so long is because of “bureaucratic red tape” and “regulatory capture”, forgetting that that's the only reason why it's so safe.