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 first of all, people are already returning to the "no go zone" around Fukushima:
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/14/asia/japan-fukushima-katsurao-village-return-intl-hnk/index.html
Secondly, the fact that we're stuck with less-than-very-safe half-a-century-old nuclear fusion power tech is because the nuclear panic stopped development of newer, way safer designs (like PBR for example).
Third, these "real solutions" still need baseload power. And nuclear power plants that exist and are in operation today are still a better choice here than new gas plants.
@rysiek sure, and nature is thriving in the Chernobyl zone, with black frogs that have evolved to manage the high levels of radiation. So we could expand nuclear, have more meltdowns, and thereby expand nature to prevent climate change! 😉 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35233243/
2) Part of why nuclear development stopped is because there was widespread agreement that fission could not be done safely.
@eighthave@social.librem.one @rysiek@mstdn.social well obviously if you don't follow safety procedures and you let the technology fall out of date problems stack up and you get a catastrophic failure.
it can be done safely, the question is really is,
would it be done safely?
i think the answer is apparently obviously no.
if i remember from the articles about these incidents correctly both of them were a result of the machinery being run in abnormal condition from their normal day to day operations (such as turning off the safety measure to show how amazing safe nuclear power is 😮💨).
this isn't a problem with nuclear power itself , it's a problem with our stupidity as humans.
@rysiek
3) Because nuclear is better than bad options still does not make it good. Baseload power can come from hydro, tidal, batteries, and other potential sources. That is where research should go, not fission.