MIT Designs Less Expensive Fusion Reactor That Boosts Power Tenfold

jan_jes writes: Advances in magnet technology have enabled researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak (donut-shaped) fusion reactor. The stronger magnetic field makes it possible to produce the required magnetic confinement of the superhot plasma — that is, the working material of a fusion reaction — but in a much smaller device than those previously envisioned (abstract). The reduction in size, in turn, makes the whole system less expensive and faster to build, and also allows for some ingenious new features in the power plant design.

Comments

Smaller, but still pretty big

[ClickOnThis]

From T(first)FA: the major radius is 3.3 m and the minor radius is 1.1 m.

Re:Smaller, but still pretty big

[vux984]

"Smaller, but still pretty big"

Down from 5m and 2m. That's substantial progress.

Re:Smaller, but still pretty big

[Rei]

It really could be a game changer. REBCO tapes are still pretty expensive but their prices should drop to competitive levels when scaled up. This could cut costs 1/2 to 1 order of magnitude for the same amount of power generation. And beyond that, smaller reactors are much easier to get funds to build, and are more useful in that they can supply power to smaller markets.

The "30 years" joke is annoying; the amount of advancement that's been occurring has been huge. But the projects are so big and expensive that you don't go through iterations very fast. So again the ability to "scale down" is a massive benefit.

Re: Smaller, but still pretty big

[alzoron]

That's like saying we shouldn't use ethanol as a fuel because of all the lives that have been ruined due to alcoholism.

Re: Smaller, but still pretty big

[TheRaven64]

From the first source I found, nuclear deaths per TWh are 0.04 (coal is 15-170, depending on the statistics you pick). While 0.04 is not quite zero, that's where it would end up if you did any rounding...

Wait, they made that joke in the article.

[Sowelu]

Damn it. That'll teach me not to read TFA before failing at first post.

For variable values of "faster"

[gweihir]

Still, it is good that research in that area is still ongoing. We need to find out pretty soon whether this planet has to go all-renewable in order to survive. Working fusion within the foreseeable future would be very much desirable.

Re:For variable values of "faster"

[gweihir]

Go where? Mars? You are kidding yourself.

Re:For variable values of "faster"

[Kjella]

I agree that we need to keep researching, but I think we need to speed it up and "go like hell" and get off this rock even if the process is a bit dirty. I mean, what do we do when renewables aren't enough or some fast moving rock is on its way to destroy our rock or some idiot does something really stupid with a virus or two. Let's go!

Go where? Compared to creating a self-sustaining colony on Mars, Earth's problems are trivial. Hell, compared to a dino-killer asteroid hitting Earth staying would be preferable. And Voyager 1 is 36 light hours out on a 4.24 light year trip to the nearest star. Not that we actually know any better exoplanets to go to either.

Re:For variable values of "faster"

[im_thatoneguy]

but I think we need to speed it up and "go like hell" and get off this rock even if the process is a bit dirty. I mean, what do we do when renewables aren't enough

Any and every problem we face on earth can be addressed more cheaply and reliably here on earth than sending people to another planet.

The Antarctic is full of water, it's more hospitable than Mars our only quasi hospitable nearby option and if you run low on oxygen you can open a window. Once the Killer Virus/Civil Unrest/Meteor Dust has passed you can return to the continents on an inflatable zodiac not launch a hundred billion dollar equivalent rocket mission back from Mars.

If you want to preserve the human race, it's better to have 10 isolated and easy to sustain missions than one vulnerable and barely sustainable colony that can't be easily resupplied or connected with.

Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready

[WillAffleckUW]

Um, not exactly.

Look, it's like laptops or commercial fission reactors.

They were first built for military uses (I had a laptop in 1982 in the Army, and a better one in 1985), and fission reactors were built for submarines and other uses we're not supposed to talk about way before they were commercially available.

So, if your question is "Will there be nuclear fusion reactors on military planes and ships and other things by 2025?" then the answer is Yes.

Will you see one in your city before 2040? Probably not.

Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready

[slew]

People really need to understand that we are nowhere near breaking even on fusion reactors (e.g., producing more energy than you put in) and any fusion reactor designs are purely for research in fusion physics and similar...

FTFY

Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready

[mspohr]

Or... we could spend the money on solar and wind (and battery storage) which we could implement in just a few years using proven technology.
Why wait 20 or 30 years for something that might (or might not) work when we have a solution now that we know works.
Nuclear has gone from "too cheap to meter" to "too expensive to matter".

Re:Which will come first?

[bobbied]

Does anyone want to venture a guess as to which will come first, the Year of Linux on the Desktop, or the widespread availability of this fusion reactor technology?

The jury is still out on both.... Somehow I think I'm going to die before either of those happen, and I have 20 years of work left before retirement..

Re:Failure mode ?

[Rei]

No, don't "see fukushima".

With fission, the challenge is stopping the reaction from running away. With fusion, the challenge is keeping it going. If you suddenly lose containment, what happens is that the hot plasma burns into the walls of the reactor, damaging them. Annnd.... that's it. There's a small amount of tritium there, but it's not a great amount, and tritium isn't that hazardous of a material compared to most radioactive elements. There's some induced radioactivity in the reactor, but it's quite limited because you can choose what to make the reactor out of (and iron's not all that bad for induced radioactivity anyway, it's generally the heavy stuff that's problematic). The lithium blanket is harmless (except for, again, breeding tritium - which is constantly removed). There's beryllium in there, but it's not dangerous when not in gas or dust form. Some work had looked into using lead as a neutron multiplier, which could have indirect breed polonium or other problematic compounds, but beryllium works a lot better than lead.

Re:Failure mode ?

[Bugler412]

that failure mode for fission reactors is from decay heat of fission products in the fuel. That problem doesn't exist with fusion in any form.

Re:Failure mode ?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

TFA makes no mention of what happens if you stop supplying the energy required to confine the plasma.

Getting the right conditions for more-out-than-in fusion is REALLY HARD. So far it's pretty much only been done momentarily - using atomic fission bombs as working parts to apply enough heat and pressure.

So when there is ANY problem in the confinement, the fusion stops.

You're left with the energy in your plasma - several camera photoflashes' worth - and your superconducting magnet - which probably is unharmed and still running.

If the magnet is not properly quenched, at most it's got the energy of a large electrical fire or small bomb - on the rough order of a few hand grenades or laptop battery fires. This might be enough to throw around the small amount of low-level-radioactive material created by months or years of neutron bombardment of the reaction chamber walls and the like.

This is not in the same ballpark - by many orders of magnitude - as the few tons of molten, activated, coreium you'd get from an old-tech fission plant meltdown (all set to become an UNcontrolled, UNcooled, operating reactor if it manages to be puddled into a compact volume), or the fuel assemblies full of recent fission products still putting out, for months, heat enough to melt, ignite, or partially vaporize themselves if the coolant level drops enough to uncover them.

It's the difference between Fukushima or Chernobyl and, at most, a transformer fire in a warehouse with a substantial number of ionization smoke detectors installed.

Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready

[garyisabusyguy]

One of the sure signs of an idiot is an easily repeatable phrase

The primary reasons that Nuclear is expensive is the constant lawsuits and attempts to derail efforts to implement it

And even after all of those efforts, the only reason that Nuclear is more expensive than Coal (the only competitive power generation, solar is waaaay off the mark) is because Coal does not have to contain the waste that it spews from its smokestacks, which contains mercury, uranium and enough CO2 to cook a planet

It is painful that the idiots who carry around signs like "you can't hug a child with nuclear arms" and want to save the planet from nuclear power are the same idiots who are forcing industry to use Coal power

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:uh... magnets don't work on neutrinos

[Ungrounded Lightning]

good luck with that.

Neutrinos don't interact with matter very much at all. Like to the point that it took abandoned mines full of water to catch enough of the neutrino blast coming from the sun ALL THE TIME to make enough blinks to finally prove they really exist.

If you're really worried, put your home's Mr. Fusion in the back yard rather than under your bed. (The inverse square law is your friend.) Remove any granite countertops from your kitchen or granite gravel from your driveway, to more than compensate by lowering the DETECTABLE background. Or move a few feet downhill to reduce your exposure to secondary cosmic rays.

Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready

[garyisabusyguy]

So, your solution to the energy problem is wiping out 29 out of every thirty people now living?

LOL, maybe you need to learn more about nuclear power

Only if it works

[Roger W Moore]

It's only progress if it works. The field of fusion has a well established track record of reactor designs that do not work when built for one reason or another. I'll get excited when they have demonstrated that it works and not before.

Re:Only if it works

[turbidostato]

"Tokamaks work. Their flaw is that they are energy-negative."

So they don't work since the premise to be a "working device" is not fusion, you can easily get that with a bomb, but doing it in a controlled (i.e.: not a bomb) and energy-positive way (i.e.: not a home farnsworth fusor).

Re:Only if it works

[AaronW]

According to TFA it should be energy-positive, producing at least 3x the energy it consumes with room to expand that to around 5x.

Re: Only if it works

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the thermal energy is used to produce steam to drive a turbine, a lot of heat is not a bad thing.

Re:Only if it works

[TheRaven64]

It depends. Building a wood-fired steam engine is pretty easy: the amount of heat is fairly small and a slow trickle of water can take it away (turned into steam, driven past turbines or used to power pistons), keeping the boiler at an equilibrium temperature. Move up to a denser fuel and the engineering becomes harder - you need higher water pressure and to get the steam out faster. Move up to fission and the coolant cycle can get quite large - remember, if you're moving the water past the nuclear reaction then stray neutrons are going to turn it into heavy water and you're not going to want to just dump it (though you might want to extract the tritium for other uses), so you need a closed cycle where you can cool the water down enough that you can feed it back over the reactor in a loop, taking the energy out in the turbines somewhere. You often do this with a couple of loops of coolant, where the coolant that's run over the reactor heats something else which then drives the turbines, so your turbines are not having to pass irradiated coolant.

Scale it up more and it becomes an even more difficult engineering challenge. For comparison, look at a 100W lightbulb and a 100W Pentium 4. Both need to dissipate 100W, but one is doing it over the surface of a large bulb, the other over about a square centimetre on the top of the package - the total heat is the same, but it's a lot harder to keep the P4 cool than it is to cool the lightbulb.

Re:Only if it works

[ultranova]

For comparison, look at a 100W lightbulb and a 100W Pentium 4. Both need to dissipate 100W, but one is doing it over the surface of a large bulb, the other over about a square centimetre on the top of the package - the total heat is the same, but it's a lot harder to keep the P4 cool than it is to cool the lightbulb.

Except, of course, that a lightbulb does not dissipate 100W of heat from the bulb's surface, it dissipates 100W of electromagnetic radiation from the filament. The glass absorbs - and thus dissipates - a fraction of that energy as heat. That's why a lit lightbulb is bright while a running P4 is not, at least not in visible wavelengths: P4 dissipates most of its energy as heat, while the lighbulb dissipates some as a lower-entropy form of energy.

Which is also the answer for a fusion plant: the plasma is very hot, so simply transfer the energy in the form of photons. They are steerable with mirrors, can be converted into heat easily, and could even be directly harvested by solar panels.

Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready

[bobbied]

You do understand that Chernobyl used a flammable material for the neutron moderator and poring water onto the plant, where necessary, caused a significant amount of radiation to become airborne, even after the steam explosion blew it apart. What eventually brought the situation under control was the partial burying of the core in lead and sand to reduce the radiation so a makeshift containment building could be hastily assembled over the blown apart reactor.

Also, the problem with Chernobyl was more about the lack of safety engineered into the system, than a fault of Nuclear power persay. In Soviet Russia times the imperative was to generate power cheaply, and NOW. They literally built a house of cards, with inadequate safety, cut corners on all kinds of safety systems, and had complex interactions between seemingly unrelated systems. Then they skimped on operator training and safety standards. It's no wonder that this reactor design didn't blow up more often. It truly was an accident waiting to happen.

Modern reactors can be designed to be fail safe. One design I saw claimed that you could literally walk away from it running at full power and it was both thermally and physically safe. It would insert the control rods if it got too hot and there was nothing that could stop it. At that point, even a total loss of coolant pumps would not result in a melt down as a number of plugs would melt, flooding the area around the containment vessel and allow the conduction/convection cooling of the core. Even then, if the core continued to heat, it would release the fuel assemblies which would fall into deep pools of reserved cooling water and end up far apart in the bottom of the containment building. All this didn't require ANY operator input, or power to accomplish, it was totally mechanical and automatic and only required the reactor containment system to remain in tact and right side up.

There are a number of very safe and practical designs for nuclear power today, it's just impossible to get a permit to actually build one because the environmentalists won't let that happen..

Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready

[Crashmarik]

He means after epa fines for using coal.

Re:Failure mode ?

[beelsebob]

If you fail to contain the reaction it very rapidly dissipates. That's in fact the whole problem with this type of reactor design - no one (as of yet) has succeeded in keeping the plasma confined for long enough to generate more power than they put in to start the reaction.

Very few eggs should be put in the tokamak basket

[GPS Pilot]

Tokamaks are so unworkable that even a tenfold improvement leaves them wanting. My money's on Lockheed's design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Failure mode ?

[Rei]

Contrats, of all of the many thousands of radioactive isotopes created by man or nature, you picked the one with the 32nd longest known half life. Try compared to nuclides in general.

There's a balance in terms of half life. The shorter the half life, the more intense the radiation - but the shorter you have to deal with the problem. The longer the half life, the less intense the radiation, but the longer you have to deal with the problem. The only way around this is a product that has a very low energy in its radioactive decay. And indeed, that's just what tritium is .

Tritium's decay energy is only 18.591 keV, which is tiny by the standards of radioactive decay - by comparison, U235's decay energy is 4678 keV - 251 times more intense. Furthermore, alpha radiation, while harmless outside the body (like tritium's ultra-weak beta), is (unlike beta) terrible inside it - its biological effectiveness is 20x that of beta. Hence a decay from a atom of U235 inside of you is 5032 times more damaging than a 18.591keV electron (beta). On top of this, you have biological half lives. Uranium's is only slightly longer than tritium's, 15 days instead of 12. But, again, U235 is not normally a problematic radioisotope. 239Pu, 90Sr, 226Ra, 45Ca, etc have biological half lives so long that they're effectively with you until they decay or you die. Oh, and on top of all of this? All of the energy of beta decay doesn't go into the electron; a higher percentage goes into the muon antineutrino, which escapes harmlessly off into space. The average energy of the beta particle from tritium decay is only 5.694 keV. Net result? Before controlling for the difference in half life, U235 is 20540 times worse for the body than tritium.

Now, of course, due to 235U's incredibly long half life, its radioactivity rarely a problem - which is why fresh fuel rods are not considered very dangerous, but spent ones are. People's concerns in nuclear accidents center around the fission products: strontium, iodine, plutonium, etc - things with shorter (but still problematically long) half lives and strong biological effectiveness. Versus them, the ridiculously low energy tritium is almost irrelevant in terms of biological effect, even if present in similar quantities. Combined with the very small amount of tritium that's in the torus at any point in time, it's just simply not even remotely comparable.

Did I even bother to mention that gaseous tritium tends to rapidly escape wherever it is and ascend up and out of the atmosphere? Tritium in the form of heavy water can be problematic in higher quantities, but of course, there's no "higher quantities" of any form of tritium in the torus.

Does Lockheed believe in that design? Where's $$?

[PeterM from Berkeley]

At the ICOPS conference (International Conference on Plasma Science) I asked a couple of professors what they thought of this.

They thought it was pretty telling that Lockheed wasn't investing a lot more money in this concept than they are.

If Lockheed isn't putting significant money into it, maybe you should think twice about putting your money (figuratively speaking) into it.....

That said, I really hope Lockheed does succeed with this, and starts shipping units like crazy and displacing coal power production worldwide.

--PM

Re: Failure mode ?

[Rei]

Injection is relatively easy; one uses pellet injectors. They basically bore tiny pellets of a mixture of deuterium and tritium ice and shoot them into the middle of the core with a tiny gas gun.

Removing the helium "ash" is harder, and requires something called a divertor. The plasma naturally pushes the helium toward the outside, as it's heavier. The divertor basically juts out into the outer edge of the plasma stream and skims off the plasma, acting as sort of an exhaust system. But it's an incredibly hostile environment, and not just because the temperature (it has to operate continuously at thousands of degrees, and that's after water cooling!) - it's being pelted by high energy alphas all the time! Regardless, it provides not just a way to get rid of helium but takes up many megawatts of heat that are used for power generation.

Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready

[garyisabusyguy]

Yes, I live downwind of one of the largest nuclear plants in America

Not a problem for me or three million other people in the same area

Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready

[garyisabusyguy]

Well funded fossil fuel interests who use loud mouthed environmentalists as a reason for their muddle-headed politicians to respond to the environmentalists by acting in the fossil fuel industry's favor

Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready

[Namarrgon]

Then there's other potential-energy solutions like lumps of concrete on inclined rails (if you have hills but no water), kinetic storage flywheels on magnetic bearings, flow batteries with arbitrary-sized tanks of electrolyte, compressed-air storage, reversible hydrogen fuel cells, UltraBatteries.. the list goes on.

Nearly all of these are well-established technologies. All have an efficiency cost, of course, but the cheaper the solar/wind input gets the less this matters. Renewable + storage is absolutely an effective and reliable baseload solution, and already competitive with coal in many cases (even before you factor in coal's huge external costs).

Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready

[MightyYar]

RBMK (Chernobyl) reactors also were advertised as absolutely fail-safe in their time.

I'm not sure that marketing was really considered credible. Here is a Washington Post artcle from 1978 that has a very skeptical tone regarding Soviet "safety".

Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready

[Sardaukar86]

It is painful that the idiots who carry around signs like "you can't hug a child with nuclear arms" and want to save the planet from nuclear power are the same idiots who are forcing industry to use Coal power

Indeed. Where would we be now in terms of CO2 emissions if the goddamn 'green' movement hadn't shat all over nuclear energy?

I suspect that we'd have a great deal more electricity to play with today and that the abundance may have been enough to spur interest in electric vehicles much earlier.

Pure speculation of course. One thing I'm sure of though: we'd be considering the CO2 problem from a much better position than we are now.

Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready

[Sardaukar86]

Do you want to live near nuclear plant? I don't, no matter how new and shiny with latest "bug-free" design it is.

Well done, NIMBY. I hold you arseholes partially responsible for the fucking mess we're in today. Thanks so much for your efforts!

Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready

[garyisabusyguy]

Hanford is a military processing facility, it does not store commercial nuclear waste

Currently commercial nuclear waste is stored on-site, until a national repository can get through all of the legal hoops that it has been forced to jump through

The constant lawsuits against the national repository has limited the amount of safety available for waste storage, but it is still much safer than living downwind of a coal power plant

I notice that you post a lot of opinion about nuclear power, you are either a magnificent troll, or horribly misinformed

Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready

[KagatoLNX]

Did you just claim that the validity of an argument is dependent on the manners of the messenger?

That sounds like something an idiot would say...

Re:Work = Achieves Goals

[Altrag]

All fusion reactors absolutely generate energy. What they don't do is generate more energy than they consume (ie: they're net-negative.)

It would certainly be nice if they can make it commercially viable, but there's plenty of science you can do in an net-negative reactor and advancing the tech is still an overall benefit to mankind -- just not necessarily a financial benefit.

Re:Failure mode ?

[Alioth]

Hazard of a radioactive material isn't merely how "hot" it is, but also how biologically active it is. Radium, while outside the body, isn't a particular problem (IIRC an alpha emitter), if it gets inside you your body uses it like calcium so it stays in your bones, irradiating you from the inside, for a large amount of time. Tritium on the other hand doesn't linger in the body, it remains for a fairly short time period, so ends up being a lot less dangerous than some much-less-hot radioactive elements that would end up getting incorporated in the body.

Re:Failure mode ?

[Rei]

Fusion's 17 MeV neutrons are nothing compared to spallation's neutrons, which can approach (or in some designs even exceed) a GeV. 17MeV neutrons are most eminantly stoppable. Yes, they have a longer penetration distance, and yes, there are some differences in behavior (they tend to cause (n,2n), (n,alpha), (n,d) etc reactions a lot more often while lower energy neutrons usually only do (n,gamma) transmutation), But these are not fundamental differences nor fundamental problems.

Fusion reactors do not use "layers of lead" as shielding. You have some misconceptions about how shielding works. Lead is an excellent shielding material for gamma and beta, but it's terrible for neutrons. It does not moderate them down at any relevant rate due to its high atomic mass, it has a low (n, gamma) gross section, and when it does undergo neutron capture it breeds bismuth - which is fine, except when bismuth undergoes (n, gamma) it breeds polonium, which is really, really nasty stuff. There's also a variety of other neutron reactions lead can undergo which lead to other radioactive products. You don't use lead for neutron shielding. Quite to the contrary, lead is used as a coolant in some types of nuclear reactors because of how little it interferes with neutrons.

Neutrons by contrast are generally best blocked by light elements. Hydrogen is the most effective moderator, although you want both to moderate down the neutron energy and have a high neutron cross section. And of course you don't use pure hydrogen because that's an explosion hazard. So if you want liquid shielding, something like borated water is your best bet. For solids, borated plastics are best.

However, the neutrons in a fusion reactor are not seen as an undesirable thing, but as a critical part of the process to keep it going. Because you need tritium to run it, and tritium doesn't grow on trees, you have to breed it. D-T gives one neutron and it takes one neutron to make one tritium, so if you didn't have any neutron multiplication, the *best* you could possibly do (with no losses and 100% capture) would be breakeven. The reality is that you have to do neutron multiplication to get enough to operate. So the reactors use a lithium-beryllium blanket, of a thickness to absorb the overwhelming majority of the neutrons. Outside of this there will always be stray neutrons that escape, you're not going to want to just stand next to the thing, but it's not going to be a Glowing Ball of Death.

Now, obviously, for structural materials, you're not going to be building it out of borated water, borated plastic, or lithium. Beryllium, mind you, is light and an excellent structural material, but it's super-expensive and difficult to work with, so it's only generally used structurally in key areas. Aluminum (better, lithium-aluminum) is great and undergoes almost no induced radioactivity, but its low melting point limits its use in high temperature applications. Graphite would be great, and is great in some cases - but it undergoes Wigner energy problems if not operated at high enough of a temperature. Composites, which aren't as Wigner energy sensitive, usually can't take the heat. So altogether, one generally deals with iron alloys (steels), with the alloying agents chosen based on what gives the desired properties while undergoing the least problematic transmutation reactions. With proper design, the level of transmutation can be kept pretty low.

Why would it be low? Well, the vast majority of iron is 56 iron. There are also a few percent of 54Fe, 57Fe, and a fraction of a percent of 58Fe. Let's trace the neutron capture paths here.

54Fe becomes 55Fe. This is radioactive, but the half life is only 2,7 years - hardly "forever". It decays to 55Mn, which is stable. If during the 2,7 years average it captures another neutron, it becomes the common 56Fe. If the 55Mn captures a neutron, it becomes 56Mn. 56Mn is radioactive but only has a halflife of 2,6 hours. It decays into 56Fe. So either way we get back to 56Fe with no long-lived product

Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready

[AmiMoJo]

The primary reasons that Nuclear is expensive is the constant lawsuits and attempts to derail efforts to implement it

How is it that NIMBYs and greens are so good at keeping nuclear down, yet fail to stop fracking or coal plants or oil drilling? Why is nuclear so uniquely vulnerable to their lawsuits?

The reason nuclear is dying out is the cost. Simple as that. Governments don't want to spend that much subsidising it and providing unlimited liability insurance any more, power companies don't see it making enough or any money for them. Even France, the biggest proponent of nuclear power in the world, realized that its nuclear program was basically just welfare for power companies at this point, and the power companies are strangely unwilling to build anything once the subsidies are cut back.

Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready

[mspohr]

Ah yes... the mythical baseload. I know there is a surplus of electric supply overnight since you can buy electricity for next to nothing during the night. I'm not sure there is much demand for baseload. Perhaps street lights? ... but they could each have a solar panel and battery to run just fine. There may be some factory somewhere which operates overnight and runs some machinery.
We don't know how the grid will evolve but there doesn't seem to be much baseload demand and what there is could easily be met with wind, natural gas and battery storage. No need to keep a coal or nuclear plant running 24/7 just to satisfy a mythical baseload. Utilities can't give away enough electricity at night to keep their plants running.

The articles write themselves

[q4Fry]

"The sun was too far away from my solar panels, so I built a closer sun."

Re:Good for experiments, not powerplant ready

[Beck_Neard]

Nuclear waste doesn't take up much space, but I fail to see the relevance to the argument. It's easy and (fairly) cheap to decommission wind farms. It's extremely expensive to handle nuclear waste and decommission nuclear power plants.

> Wind proponents seem to forget spinning things require maintenance and eventually simply wear out - who pays to take them down? No-one apparently.

Disingenuous. There is already a huge market for decommissioning wind farms and many places around the world set aside money for this when the farms are being built. On the other hand, the nuclear industry is notorious for not taking decommissioning costs into account (because doing so would make nuclear prohibitively expensive in all but a small fraction of use cases) and leaving taxpayers holding the bag decades later.

Re:Commercial fusion is now 20 years away!

[cheesybagel]

That would be Project PACER.