nuclear power produces long-lived radioactive waste, which needs to be stored securely. Nuclear fuels, such as the element uranium (which needs to be mined), are finite, so the technology is not considered renewable. Renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind power suffer from “intermittency”, meaning they do not consistently produce energy at all hours of the day.

fusion technologies have yet to produce sustained net energy output (more energy than is put in to run the reactor), let alone produce energy at the scale required to meet the growing demands of AI. Fusion will require many more technological developments before it can fulfil its promise of delivering power to the grid.

  • TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org
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    14 days ago

    They’re missing a fusion reactor capable of positive energy output?

    “Tech bosses think warp drive might get us to Mars faster…”

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          13 days ago

          That’s the absolute worst analogy of wormholes as well. They don’t fold space, so stop folding the piece of paper.

            • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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              Explaining wormholes by folding a piece of paper is a bit like explaining tunnels by folding a piece of paper. It’s totally not what’s going on.

              They don’t fold spacetime, they don’t need to, they are shortcutting through spacetime via higher dimensions. Rather like tunneling through a hill rather than going over the top.

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      13 days ago

      It seems that today’s elites have made that Soviet transition from doing more to support their prestige to promising more to support their prestige.

  • grue@lemmy.world
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    14 days ago

    Tech bosses think nuclear fusion is the solution

    No they don’t; this is literally the first thing I’ve ever read claiming that. Tech bosses are perfect happy to power AI with nuclear fission and don’t give the slightest fuck about the waste.

    (As well they shouldn’t, TBH, since it really ought to get reprocessed anyway. But that doesn’t excuse them for wanting to waste the power on bullshit.)

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        13 days ago

        That turns out to not be true, at least not with the tokamak reactors most groups are pursuing.

        You see, at some point you need a shield around the reactor to actually absorb all the high energy particles released, and turn that energy into heat. That’s the whole point of the reactor, to generate heat and run a turbine. You absorb those high energy particles with a “blanket”, that’s just what they call the shield around the reactor.

        Here’s the issue, absorbing all those high energy particles necessarily results in transmuting the material absorbing them. That blanket becomes brittle and eventually needs to be replaced. Not coincidentally, that blanket is also now radioactive, because you’ve bombarded it with protons and neutrons and it’s now partially made up of unstable, radioactive elements.

        So while fission reactors have radioactive fuel rods to dispose of, fusion reactors will have radioactive blankets to dispose of. Who knows if this is an improvement.

        • mwguy@infosec.pub
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          10 days ago

          You see, at some point you need a shield around the reactor to actually absorb all the high energy particles released, and turn that energy into heat.

          So we have to replace a few tons of shielding that’s lightly radioactive every 2-6 years. That’s literally a vehicle’s worth of waste to power tens of thousands of homes.

          • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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            10 days ago

            You’ll find that nuclear fission is not very different.

            Nuclear submarines for example only need to be refueled once or twice in their multiple decade lifespan.

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                9 days ago

                And if somehow, despite that efficiency, we still have problems figuring out how to store that nuclear waste today. I know this ought to be a solvable problem, but we seem to struggle with it.

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      13 days ago

      If it ends up working though it’s not a waste of power is it? And if it doesn’t work then, oh well.

      Big tech companies do a lot of cramp, but this one I actually don’t really mind. You never know we might actually get the Star Trek utopia we’ve always wanted from this, it’s unlikely but it’s not impossible.

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    13 days ago

    Quiet!!

    If the tech brows wanna dump money into developing renewable energy systems, detaching themselves from our main power grid they currently destabilize. Let them!

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      “if we store them safely” - here’s the problem with the entire argument. Nobody wants to pay for it, so they won’t unless they are forced to. Carbon capture is a viable technology but it costs money to implement at a net financial loss, so nobody uses that if they don’t have to either. The problem is the same as always - nobody who stands to lose money gives a damn. The planet dying is somebody else’s concern tomorrow, and profits are their concern today.

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        13 days ago

        Are you talking about the USA? Because I don’t see this mentality much outside of it.

        But yeah, make it a law and force them.

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          13 days ago

          At least in Germany it’s the same. It gets ignored in the discussions concerning nuclear exit but it’s actually the main reason why I’m not aggressively against it: we have save areas for nuclear storage but those fight bitterly to not have it. The areas which are currently used are… Not good. Paying someone else (such as Finland) is out of budget for both state and energy companies. The latter anyway want to do the running but not the maintenance and the building, state should pay for that.

          It’s really white sad for me. The (true) statement that the dangerous waste needs to be stored carefully got corrupted to “it can’t be stored”.

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      13 days ago

      Maybe Tom Scott should make a video about the Asse salt mine. It’s where the “yellow barrel == nuclear waste” meme comes from look here a picture.

      This stuff is the driving factor behind nuclear energy being a political no-go in Germany: We just don’t trust anyone, including ourselves, to do it properly. Sufficiently failure-proof humans have yet to be invented. Then, aside from that: Fission is expensive AF, and that’s before considering that they don’t have to pay for their own insurance because no insurance company would take on the contract.

      Fusion OTOH has progressed to a point where it’s actually around the corner, when the Max Planck institute is spinning out a company to commercialise it you know it’s the real deal. And they did.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      It’s also not as if there are not other nuclear power stations in existence. There is plenty of storage capacity as you say.

      This is just the standard hating everything tech companies do because, AI equals bad

  • Kairos@lemmy.today
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    14 days ago

    Theyre missing the fact that cold fusion doesn’t (currently) exist? (haven’t read the article)?

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      13 days ago

      They’ve seen it being always reached in computer games like Civilization

      They think the hard part is in becoming the big boss to decide things. The civilization part is easy, just direct resources where you need the “cool thing completed” notification to appear.

  • IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world
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    Renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind power suffer from “intermittency”, meaning they do not consistently produce energy at all hours of the day.

    If only we had some way of storing energy for use later. Oh well.

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      13 days ago

      Lithium batteries and their associated wastes and byproducts are an ecological catastrophe though in fairness

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      We do not currently have the battery tech to have a fully renewables-powered grid where batteries are used for the regular dips in production wind and solar have.

      We likely won’t have infrastructure like that in place for decades.

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        Do you know what they do in Norway with out-of-use old mines? They lift a load when there’s energy to be stored. They lower it when there’s energy to be spent. I’m sure you know how electric engines work and that the conversion is symmetric.

        No battery tech involved.

        Battery tech is in general mostly relevant for autonomous devices we carry, for airplanes and ships, for cars.

        For the central grid the ways to store energy are almost inifinite.

        • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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          In situations where that’s feasible, it’s good. But it’s far from feasible all the time.

          You certainly couldn’t replace all existing fossil fuels with it, or even scratch the surface really.

          Norway can do stuff like this because they have the geography for it, as well as a population that’s like a 15th of the UK or a 60th of the US. They don’t actually need much energy.

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            They need heating at winter and they have datacenters and a lot of renewable energy.

            Also the principles I’ve described is applicable for everything non-autonomous, and one could think of “electric” cars (a bit like trams) which would use contacts on the ground for energy, while when they’d need to be autonomous, they’d use batteries or ICEs.

            That kind of “mechanical energy storage” can be created everywhere. I mean, water reserves with hydroelectric stations downstream are already used for that purpose, but for those you need water.

            Efficiency is a bit of a problem - you have to maintain the mechanical parts, you first use energy to lift something with losses and then generate energy from letting it slide back…

            That’s all a bit off topic, really.

            What’s important is that there are ways around lithium for a lot of energy usage of our civilization.

            • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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              13 days ago

              Yes, they need heating in winter… for a tiny population. And they have very little in the way of data centres.

              Again, these are only suitable depending on the environment you’re in. E.g. pumped water storage is only effective if you have the terrain to allow for it (a large hill or mountain with space for a large body of water).

              I never said lithium was an outright requirement. I said batteries can’t currently take the planet off of fossil fuels, then I said that other energy storage systems are very dependent on the location.

              E.g. despite there being a lot of rainfall in the UK, there are only 3 places suitable for pumped water energy storage. It can’t be relied upon for powering a country unless you’re phenomenally fortunate with geography.

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                13 days ago

                Well, I can think of the inverse - separating a piece of coastline and pumping seawater out when you have excess energy, letting it back in via turbines to get energy. In that context UK does have fitting terrain, it’s just underwater.

                Seawater is very nasty to machinery though.

                • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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                  13 days ago

                  Tidal power continues to be researched, but it’s proving very difficult, currently completely unviable. It certainly cannot replace all non-renewable energy.

        • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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          13 days ago

          Can you back up your original claim - that we can sufficiently power all of our grids with current batteries, and that current battery manufacturing is enough to do so?

          With reputable sources.

          • IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world
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            That’s not how this works. You made a tall claim, without sources. Now it seems you’re not willing to provide proof to substantiate it. Why?

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              13 days ago

              You made a tall claim, and still haven’t substantiated it. Why?

              Show me this proof that we have the batteries to eliminate all fossil fuels.

              You know that’s how it works, right? You make a claim, you need evidence to support it…

              • IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world
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                13 days ago

                This you?

                We do not currently have the battery tech to have a fully renewables-powered grid where batteries are used for the regular dips in production wind and solar have.

                We likely won’t have infrastructure like that in place for decades.

                Put up or shut up.

                • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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                  Right, and I replied to a comment where you claimed we can just use batteries to replace everything but renewables.

                  Put up or shut up. Where’s the data?

  • RubberDuck@lemmy.world
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    So maybe they will invest to get it further. It’s not a 9 women can make a baby in a month … but sufficient funding for next gen nuclear and fusion will help progress.

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    Maybe AI can help us break the fusion hurdles. Oh. It’s still telling people to eat rocks, just used to create waifu porn and as a mass spy application? Nothing else, really? Well shit.

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      13 days ago

      I know you’re being reflexively downvoted by who hate everything AI, but this is the sort of thing AI should be most useful for, which is finding patterns within large problem spaces with many variables.

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          13 days ago

          Wow, I completely misread that post. Now I’m wondering if I replied to the wrong message or if my brain just completely crapped out.

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      Probably. Proxima fusion is using simulation-driven engineering to pave their way through the design space, no matter how you approach it it’s gotta involve dimension reduction in some way and that’s ML. They speak of AI but well it’s a press piece.

      LLMs or diffusion models? Nah, don’t think so. This is actual engineers throwing statistics at a particular problem to identify what prototypes they should build, not techbros throwing shit at the wall.

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      It’s even bad at porn. Very limited means of describing the process, forgetting that there are no bed sheets in a park, same repeating metaphors. Boring.

    • Eheran@lemmy.world
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      Nothing else? Please do not speak for other people if you can not grasp what others do with this tool.

  • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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    Fusion will likely happen in this century. Fission is a great temporary power source to get us there alongside renewables.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      The best way I have heard it described is that Fusion is going to happen next year but probably not in the next 12 months.

      We think Fusion must be coming soon because we understand all of the fundamental principles around how it works, so what we need to do is put those principles into practice. For some reason though that doesn’t quite work what we end up with is a machine that makes a lot of noise but doesn’t really achieve anything

      • barsoap@lemm.ee
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        That’s been the history of tokamaks because they’re dealing with an inherently unstable situation. It’s like balancing a ball on another ball, saying “yep ok I’ve figured that out”, scaling it up and discovering that between those two balls were actually five other that now that the system is bigger have quite a relevant impact.

        Contrast with stellerators, which are more like balancing a ball in a bowl. Long considered impossible because the magnetic field just has a too complex geometry the Max Planck institute proved that they work as the theory says, and they’re currently working on commercialisation.

  • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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    13 days ago

    I was under the impression that the major two advantages of fusion were exponentially more power output, provided we can actually sustain it, and no radioactive byproducts…

    • skibidi@lemmy.world
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      It depends on the type of fusion.

      The easiest fusion reaction is deuterium/tritium - two isotopes of hydrogen. The vast majority of the energy of that reaction is released as neutrons, which are very difficult to contain and will irradiate the reactor’s containment vessel. The walls of the reactor will degrade, and will eventually need to be replaced and the originals treated as radioactive waste.

      Lithium/deuterium fusion releases most of its energy in the form of alpha particles - making it much more practical to harness the energy for electrical generation - and releases something like 80% fewer high energy neutrons – much less radioactive waste. As a trade-off, the conditions required to sustain the reaction are even more extreme and difficult to maintain.

      There are many many possible fusion reactions and multiple containment methods - some produce significant radioactive waste and some do not. In terms of energy output, the energy released per reaction event is much higher than in fission, but it is much harder to concentrate reaction events, so overall energy output is much lower until some significant advancement is made on the engineering challenges that have plagued fusion for 70+ years.

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    13 days ago

    Really shitty scaremongering article. I’d like to know how exactly increased investment in fusion could potentially make it unsuitable for public use, as the article claims?

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    13 days ago

    The real solution is the thing that the fossil fuel companies have been buying up the tech for and burying it for decades…batteries.