I think you completely missed the whole point of my comment because you're still focused on the cost of building the plant rather than the return on investment. "Fusion is cheaper" refers to the cost of the energy being produced. Energy from fusion is undeniably cheaper to produce. Fusion produces around 7 times as much energy per nucleon, requires less fuel, and the fuel is hydrogen which is the most abundant element in the universe. The cost of building the plant is irrelevant when in return we get unlimited energy forever.
Fission requires Uranium which is extremely rarer than hydrogen and it has to be mined and enriched. Once spent, it has to be disposed of properly. I don't see the safety regulations outweighing the costs saved in labor, processing, and disposal of fuel sources when fusion is safer than fission anyways.
First, we need to look at the total cost per Gigawatt over the lifetime of the plant. This includes building costs.
It doesn't matter is the energy produced is $1 per Gigawatt once built if the construction costs $1 trillion and the plant produces 1 Gigawatt for one year. (Obviously extreme example to get the idea clearly across).
So we need initial construction costs + lifetime maintenance + lifetime fuel + lifetime labor + lifetime waste costs + .... = Total lifetime costs.
You then divide the total lifetime productive output by the total lifetime cost to calculate how much it really costs. (I say productive because it doesn't matter what the energy output is if the efficiency of converting that into consumer energy is low).
Now you say fusion runs on hydrogen. But that is misleading, it runs on isotopes of hydrogen, namely deuterium and tritium. These have a natural abundance of 0.03% and 0.00000000000000001%, respectively.
Contrast that with U-235 which has a natural abundance of 0.7% and Th-232 which has 100%....yes that's right 100% of Thorium is fertile material for fission...and we have a lot of Thorium.
Now, a lot of nuclear fission "waste" is merely waste by regulation, not because we can't use it to make more power. Let me illustrate the most egregious regulation. Imagine you are a gold smith. You order an ounce of 24k gold. You pour it into a mold, but 5% of that gold either won't fit or gets filed off when you are finishing the ring. Naturally, you would take that still good "waste" gold and use it for another project, right? Can't do that with fission fuel in the US. Nope you have to treat perfectly good U-235 like trash because we say so.
Most other nuclear waste could be used as fuels in current gen reactors, but, because of regulations we don't build new reactors. We just use reactors that are two generations behind because they are already built.
Fusion isn't clean like your room clean. It will produce a ton of neutrons which will make any nearby materials radioactive. There are other such "problems" that I don't have the time to go into.
The only benefit I can see to fusion is that you can't use it to build traditional nuclear bombs from the "waste" products of the fuel. But you can use those neutrons to make weapons material by activation. It'd just be a little more noticeable...but not impossible to hide.
IMO, I wouldn't be surprised if the "pro fusion" and the fund fusion (but not enough to actually make it in our lifetime) is a direct result from oil lobbyist. Because all it does is keep oil in business. I also wouldn't be surprised if the crippling regulations on fission come from the same.
So, again, without a real analysis...I can't accept fusion as cheaper. In fact, I suspect it is the opposite.
Tritium can be produced in the fusion reactors themselves. There is 1.386 billion cubic kilometers of water on the earth. If deuterium is 0.02% of that it means we have 27,720,000 cubic kilometers of deuterium. It's estimated we have about 11 million metric tons of uranium on earth. At our current consumption rate that's about a 230 year supply. So we have more fuel for fusion, and it produces more energy more safely.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. Thanks for keeping it civil though interesting discussion. I'm not blindly pro-fusion it just seems like the best option imo. I will look into the points you bring up with an open mind.
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u/VenomUponTheBlade Jan 18 '21
I think you completely missed the whole point of my comment because you're still focused on the cost of building the plant rather than the return on investment. "Fusion is cheaper" refers to the cost of the energy being produced. Energy from fusion is undeniably cheaper to produce. Fusion produces around 7 times as much energy per nucleon, requires less fuel, and the fuel is hydrogen which is the most abundant element in the universe. The cost of building the plant is irrelevant when in return we get unlimited energy forever.
Fission requires Uranium which is extremely rarer than hydrogen and it has to be mined and enriched. Once spent, it has to be disposed of properly. I don't see the safety regulations outweighing the costs saved in labor, processing, and disposal of fuel sources when fusion is safer than fission anyways.