> Am I understanding correctly in likening the twisted plasma flow in this reactor design to how a twisted-pair cable works?
No.
Consider the fuel in a steady state. What we call heat is microscopically speed, and in this case all the ions are circulating around the torus very rapidly. Now think about the way the magnets are placed around the torus, as a series of rings. Because the rings are closer together on the inside radius, that means there is a stronger field on the inside of the torus than the outside. So that means an ion circulating on the inside radius sees more force than the ones on the outside, and they begin to move in different directions. That is bad.
The idea of the stelerator is to shape the reactor so ions that find themselves on the outside of the torus will find themselves on the inside somewhere else, and that will average out the magnetic force so everyone sees the same results over an extended period. The simplest way to do this is to place two straight sections in the torus to extend it into a racetrack shape, and then take one end and rotate it 180 degrees. The result is a figure-8 shape. Now just trace a line starting on the outside of one of the round ends and you'll see that by the time it gets to the other end its now on the inside.
The X-7 is simply a modification on that basic concept. Instead of a single twist, the magnets are arranged to continually twist the field through the entire reactor. The resulting pattern looks like the stripes on a candy cane. So the ions are constantly circulating from the inside to the outside. This motion also has the very desirable side-effect that it constantly mixes the fuel, which reduces problems with hot spots and areas of higher density that plagued early designs.
Does any of this make a difference? No. There is exactly zero chance this design will result in a practical, economic power producing design. It's science fair all the way. That's fine, but that's not really what they say about these things, is it?
The Meteor was better than the Me 262 in every way measurable. The vaunted "swept wing" on the 262 was actually a bad solution to the problem that they had to change their engines during design and the new ones were heavier. It added nothing whatsoever to transonic performance (nor did the same sweep on the DC-3) but added to the complexity and handling issues. The engines on the Meteor were at least 3x more reliable than the Jumos, and had better fuel economy.
The Meteor soldiered on into the late 1950s, the 262 was already a dead end that the Germans were desperate to replace.
> Supposedly these guys are trying for a more direct way to generate electricity from the plasma
Only in the case where the plasma is being made with fuels that are aneutronic. In that case you might increase the energy efficiency from about 40% to as much as 60%. However, such fuels are about 1000 times more difficult to use for power generation, so the concept is utterly hopeless, which they simply ignore and rely on magical statements about their designs, none of which have ever been demonstrated.
Interestingly, this was actually tried with *coal power* in the 1960s. Magnetohydrodynamic generators would be placed in the exhaust stream, slowing it before it passed into the boiler proper. The idea was to extract the linear kinetic energy before it decayed into random motion, and thereby increase the overall efficiency. However, they proved expensive and complex in spite of no moving parts, and the widespread belief that nuclear was the future ended development. Since then cogen cycles on NG have pushed passed the 50% range, so there's zero interest in MHD these days.
Look for the image of DEMO. The large red part is the answer to your question. The magnets are in green. Red protects the green and removes the energy.
And then you can read the text, and find out why it's all a crock of crap anyway.
I recall reading about when Pepsi overtook Coke. Everyone rejoiced. However, in actual fact, Coke still outsold Pepsi by a wide margin; the overtaking was in grocery store sales which they had managed to do by making the six-pack into an 8-pack for the same price and then measuring by total volume.
And here we have a report that says MS outsold Apple in *online sales*. Hmmm. I suspect that Apple sells the majority, if not the vast majority, of their sales through retail chains. So when I read:
"The report did not take in account customers who purchased their tablets in brick-and-mortar stores, such as Apple’s retail stores or Best Buy."
Then basically I think this is even less of a mini-victory than Fortune posits. Pepsi anyone?
That's simply not true. Nuclear economics scales with reactor size, so larger reactors are more efficient. To compete with ever falling prices of other sources, like natural gas, reactors have grown. As a result they are more expensive to build, and that makes that capital more expensive die to time dimension risk. And that's why the banks won't lend money for reactors and that's the only reason they don't get built. If you wish to see more nuclear power, be sure you actually understand the problem before suggesting a solution, or add you do here, simply throw up your hands and blame"someone" for it.
> He3 is a far superior fuel if you can make it work::rolleyes::
It's ONE THOUSAND TIMES HARDER to make He3 generate electricity. We've been working on D-T fusion since 1948 and it's still not working. You can masturbate to your techno-fetish all you want, but the rest of us have actual problems to solve, now.
> One of the low points of the US nuclear industry was when they lobbied to get thorium research shut down during the Clinton administration
Ummm, you mean the Nixon administration perhaps?
Thorium power, the Bernie Sanders of energy. A bunch of people who have no idea what they're talking about love what they hear and defend the him/the-concept to the death while everyone around them rolls their eyes.
> India has been doing things with thorium
India has been working on thorium since the *1950's* and have *exactly zero* to show for it. This is the sort of thing that makes the eyes roll.
But go ahead, re-post all the conspiracy theories you read on some web site somewhere and call everyone in the world stupid for not believing in your zero-for-a-thousand-tries energy source.
Breeder reactors could burn up *some* of that waste, which is, I'll admit, an advantage. However, in order to do so they need a core fueled by weapons grade material, and the economics are complete pants. The cost of the fuel for the core is higher than the value of the electricity, so the breeder operates at a loss. That's fine, depending on the value of the waste you transmute, but to date the people who have a say have said "no".
Here's a paper on a related concept that covers the economic issues:
http://www.ralphmoir.com/media/tenneyMerged.pdf
It's mostly on the fission-fusion hybrid, but the equations work for any breeder design, including thorium.
Stop there. This is the #1 reason for the failure of nuclear. The *average* cost overrun was over 2x. Once you factored that in, the cost benefits promised simply disappeared.
When this happened with the first generation reactors, they said those designs sucked, we know how to fix them, and that will be generation 2. When the exact same thing happened with with the gen 2 reactors, they said those designs sucked, and designed generation 3 reactors. And then we started to build those designs...
"According to Thiel, a new generation of American nuclear scientists has produced designs for better reactors. Crucially, these new designs may finally overcome the most fundamental obstacle to the success of nuclear power: high cost."
Yeah, except we're building a couple of these, and they immediately went over budget and continue to do so:
When faced with problems like these, the "new generation" said those designs sucked, we know how to fix them, and that will be "new nuclear". And those designs exist only on paper, and offer no reasonable explanation while they will break the 50 year cycle of suck.
The basic problem isn't nuclear, it's big. Big projects go over just as often as little projects, but when they do the magnitude is larger and people notice. A million $1000 cost overruns isn't news, but one $1 billion overrun is, as the articles above note. And, sadly, nuclear needs to be big. Don't believe the hype from the small modular people, the concept is inherently flawed and thats why all the big companies dumped their design efforts and the only people still supporting them are two people and a dog shops.
> why did early attempts at production of fusion power fail to work out
Largely due to unrealistic assumptions on the part of the researchers involved.
Are you familiar with the Lawson criterion? Probably. Are you familiar with WHY he wrote it? Probably not.
He wrote it because he was tired of seeing everyone in the field making utterly ridiculous estimates about performance. There are countless experiments where basic math suggested the system would not work, but they went ahead and built it anyway without bothering to check first. Google "astron". There was so much belief in the ultimate success that no one listened when someone said there were issues.
And that's in spite of one of those people being Teller himself. In 1953 he gave an impromptu talk about stability in magnetic confinement and how he felt that it was a *very* difficult problem and no one was really thinking about it seriously. So, of course, everyone went off and thought about it seriously, right? No, they went off and wrote hand-waving statements about why their particular machine didn't apply, which then failed in precisely the way he predicted.
Lawson was equally tired of this. He sat down to put real numbers to the problem. He started by considering the power input and outputs needed to have the reactor produce net energy, and then worked to find the conditions needed to make that happen. His paper, which you can read here:
(and it's very easy to read, so go ahead and do it) concludes "Even with the most optimistic possible assumptions it is evident that the conditions for the operation of a useful thermonuclear reactor are very severe". In case you don't recognize it, that's British humor: he's saying its almost impossible and everyone needs to stop and think seriously.
So, of course, no one did. They simply waved their hands some more and came up with reasons why they could reach these numbers, and the money kept coming. And coming, and coming. We're *sixty years later* now, Lawson has been dead almost a decade, and we're still trying. In that time we invented the IC, the internet, went to the moon, etc. At what point do you realize no one cares any more? Nuclear cars seemed like a good idea at one time too.
Enough already! The power companies have said they're not interested, how much money do we have to spend to change that?
They are working on the wrong problem. The non-nuclear portion of the system costs more than a wind turbine of the same rating. You can improve the reactor all you want, but unless you make it negative dollars, you're still losing out to existing technologies.
"some users were unable to verify the new certificates, and others could not even connect to the internet. In some cases the programs had to be reinstalled from scratch, deleting the user's existing settings."
Ok, let's look at this...
1) some users were unable to verify the new certificates
Sure, I buy that.
2) others could not even connect to the internet
I call BS, App certs do not have any use whatsoever in the TCP stack. I'm sure people had problems, but it wasn't due to this.
3) the programs had to be reinstalled from scratch, deleting the user's existing settings
I call BS on that too. The app settings are in a text file in the user directories, you can go and open them in your favorite text editor right now. Re-installing an app does not overwrite these settings, which is *the whole reason* they're done this way. It is possible that app did that, but that's a bug in the app and has nothing to do with certs.
> programmed for Windows / web / any operating system
I don't know, programming for Windows any time in the last 12 years has been pretty much flat. I could accuse you of being just as unfamiliar as the person you're replying too.
The web, sure, that's another matter. But then your argument boils down to "it's OK for programming on Android to be difficult, because it is on the web too". That's not much of an argument.
> iOS only captured 47.5 of 341.5 million in Q2 2015
That's an interesting graph for a number of reasons, but what caught my eye in particular is that the iOS and Android lines are an exact mirror image of each other. iOS clearly sells as a gift item, and its xmas-season upticks appear to cause an Android downturn.
And that actually doesn't make sense. If Android is the sort of go-to system for someone "just buying a phone", as opposed to "buying a present", I wouldn't think iOS sales would have any effect at all. After all, my phones have never demonstrated a tendency to die over the gifting season.
A friend of my wife was personally effected by all of this. She researches epidemics and was going to present a paper [the details of which I will not specify]. However, all appearances at conferences for any reason had to be cleared by the Prime Minister's Office (PMO). As there was an election taking place, the PMO couldn't be bothered reviewing anything, they were too busy with important stuff (you know, not epidemics). So she didn't get to go.
I can't imagine a more dystopian fiction. At least in 1984 they had a reason to spy on everyone, it was part of their basic philosophy. But in this case, the only reason for any of this was Harper's deathly fear of bad press. So everyone had to follow the Party Line, including people who's only affiliation with the party was getting funding from the government.
And, in the end, *that* was what led to their downfall. The constant repression of information and dissent, especially within his own party, was eventually too much for anyone to take. The mechanism they put in place to protect the PM from the planet was ultimately the very device that destroyed them.
This is not a "conservative" problem. Conservatives have been excellent communicators overall. Hell, Churchill *lived* for the debate, and I strongly suspect he deliberately let people talk about anything just so he could off a clever quip in response. This was an anomaly. Let's hope it does not happen again.
> Fission does work, is safe, and we know how to use it.
Indeed. Except it costs five times as much to build a fission power plant than to build enough wind turbines to produce the same amount of energy. Indeed, the wind turbines will only operate 30% of the time. But means the wind turbines cost 3 / 5 times as much as the fission plant. And that's precisely why everyone is building wind turbines and practically no one is building fission plants.
And when I say "everyone" and "practically no one", I include the typical poster-children for nuclear - China is installing far more wind power (even CF adjusted) than nuclear. Over the last 25 years we've installed under 100 GW of fission, a period in which we installed 370 GW of wind, the vast majority of that in the last 5. At the current ~60 GW/year rates, the total yearly capacity (which includes CF) will surpass the entire nuclear fleet in three to five years.
It's done like dinner. Many of the larger companies in the space are abandoning it (like AECL and Babcock) or going bankrupt (like Westinghouse).
Now you're going to say something like "wind doesn't work all the time". Well that's the primary argument for space based solar too, but everyone here is panning it. Having worked in the power industry for a decade, let me tell you, no one actually cares. All they care about is CAPEX, ROI and LCoE. Quite the opposite, the main problem the industry talked about from about 1975 to 2005 was how to deal with peaking capacity, not the other way around. We have all the baseload we'll ever need already.
Slashdot Mirror
> Am I understanding correctly in likening the twisted plasma flow in this reactor design to how a twisted-pair cable works?
No.
Consider the fuel in a steady state. What we call heat is microscopically speed, and in this case all the ions are circulating around the torus very rapidly. Now think about the way the magnets are placed around the torus, as a series of rings. Because the rings are closer together on the inside radius, that means there is a stronger field on the inside of the torus than the outside. So that means an ion circulating on the inside radius sees more force than the ones on the outside, and they begin to move in different directions. That is bad.
The idea of the stelerator is to shape the reactor so ions that find themselves on the outside of the torus will find themselves on the inside somewhere else, and that will average out the magnetic force so everyone sees the same results over an extended period. The simplest way to do this is to place two straight sections in the torus to extend it into a racetrack shape, and then take one end and rotate it 180 degrees. The result is a figure-8 shape. Now just trace a line starting on the outside of one of the round ends and you'll see that by the time it gets to the other end its now on the inside.
The X-7 is simply a modification on that basic concept. Instead of a single twist, the magnets are arranged to continually twist the field through the entire reactor. The resulting pattern looks like the stripes on a candy cane. So the ions are constantly circulating from the inside to the outside. This motion also has the very desirable side-effect that it constantly mixes the fuel, which reduces problems with hot spots and areas of higher density that plagued early designs.
Does any of this make a difference? No. There is exactly zero chance this design will result in a practical, economic power producing design. It's science fair all the way. That's fine, but that's not really what they say about these things, is it?
> Gloster Meteor had more design problems
The Meteor was better than the Me 262 in every way measurable. The vaunted "swept wing" on the 262 was actually a bad solution to the problem that they had to change their engines during design and the new ones were heavier. It added nothing whatsoever to transonic performance (nor did the same sweep on the DC-3) but added to the complexity and handling issues. The engines on the Meteor were at least 3x more reliable than the Jumos, and had better fuel economy.
The Meteor soldiered on into the late 1950s, the 262 was already a dead end that the Germans were desperate to replace.
> Supposedly these guys are trying for a more direct way to generate electricity from the plasma
Only in the case where the plasma is being made with fuels that are aneutronic. In that case you might increase the energy efficiency from about 40% to as much as 60%. However, such fuels are about 1000 times more difficult to use for power generation, so the concept is utterly hopeless, which they simply ignore and rely on magical statements about their designs, none of which have ever been demonstrated.
Interestingly, this was actually tried with *coal power* in the 1960s. Magnetohydrodynamic generators would be placed in the exhaust stream, slowing it before it passed into the boiler proper. The idea was to extract the linear kinetic energy before it decayed into random motion, and thereby increase the overall efficiency. However, they proved expensive and complex in spite of no moving parts, and the widespread belief that nuclear was the future ended development. Since then cogen cycles on NG have pushed passed the 50% range, so there's zero interest in MHD these days.
> What I want is an explanation of how this aspect is being considered.
Go here:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/
Look for the image of DEMO. The large red part is the answer to your question. The magnets are in green. Red protects the green and removes the energy.
And then you can read the text, and find out why it's all a crock of crap anyway.
I recall reading about when Pepsi overtook Coke. Everyone rejoiced. However, in actual fact, Coke still outsold Pepsi by a wide margin; the overtaking was in grocery store sales which they had managed to do by making the six-pack into an 8-pack for the same price and then measuring by total volume.
And here we have a report that says MS outsold Apple in *online sales*. Hmmm. I suspect that Apple sells the majority, if not the vast majority, of their sales through retail chains. So when I read:
"The report did not take in account customers who purchased their tablets in brick-and-mortar stores, such as Apple’s retail stores or Best Buy."
Then basically I think this is even less of a mini-victory than Fortune posits. Pepsi anyone?
> As for "conspiracy", are you joking or are you just using that as an excuse for not being
> aware of the topic?
I guess I am just not aware of the topic then. Please, enlighten me on the PR companies in question and how they are keeping thorium down.
That's simply not true. Nuclear economics scales with reactor size, so larger reactors are more efficient. To compete with ever falling prices of other sources, like natural gas, reactors have grown. As a result they are more expensive to build, and that makes that capital more expensive die to time dimension risk. And that's why the banks won't lend money for reactors and that's the only reason they don't get built. If you wish to see more nuclear power, be sure you actually understand the problem before suggesting a solution, or add you do here, simply throw up your hands and blame"someone" for it.
> He3 is a far superior fuel if you can make it work ::rolleyes::
It's ONE THOUSAND TIMES HARDER to make He3 generate electricity. We've been working on D-T fusion since 1948 and it's still not working. You can masturbate to your techno-fetish all you want, but the rest of us have actual problems to solve, now.
> One of the low points of the US nuclear industry was when they lobbied to get thorium research shut down during the Clinton administration
Ummm, you mean the Nixon administration perhaps?
Thorium power, the Bernie Sanders of energy. A bunch of people who have no idea what they're talking about love what they hear and defend the him/the-concept to the death while everyone around them rolls their eyes.
> India has been doing things with thorium
India has been working on thorium since the *1950's* and have *exactly zero* to show for it. This is the sort of thing that makes the eyes roll.
But go ahead, re-post all the conspiracy theories you read on some web site somewhere and call everyone in the world stupid for not believing in your zero-for-a-thousand-tries energy source.
Google "pacer fusion".
Hint: it doesn't work. Not technically, that's easy. Economically, not so easy.
> The picture changes if you can make the sodium batteries as good as lithium
That's just it, you can't. Sodium just doesn't work the same way.
You can "get around" this if you move to using air as one of the reactants, but this version is sealed so that's out.
> Breeder reactors could burn up all that waste.
Breeder reactors could burn up *some* of that waste, which is, I'll admit, an advantage. However, in order to do so they need a core fueled by weapons grade material, and the economics are complete pants. The cost of the fuel for the core is higher than the value of the electricity, so the breeder operates at a loss. That's fine, depending on the value of the waste you transmute, but to date the people who have a say have said "no".
Here's a paper on a related concept that covers the economic issues:
http://www.ralphmoir.com/media/tenneyMerged.pdf
It's mostly on the fission-fusion hybrid, but the equations work for any breeder design, including thorium.
"But after years of cost overruns"
Stop there. This is the #1 reason for the failure of nuclear. The *average* cost overrun was over 2x. Once you factored that in, the cost benefits promised simply disappeared.
When this happened with the first generation reactors, they said those designs sucked, we know how to fix them, and that will be generation 2. When the exact same thing happened with with the gen 2 reactors, they said those designs sucked, and designed generation 3 reactors. And then we started to build those designs...
"According to Thiel, a new generation of American nuclear scientists has produced designs for better reactors. Crucially, these new designs may finally overcome the most fundamental obstacle to the success of nuclear power: high cost."
Yeah, except we're building a couple of these, and they immediately went over budget and continue to do so:
http://www.utilitydive.com/news/nuclear-industry-darkened-by-delays-cost-overruns-at-vogtle-summer-facil/404418/
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/09/03/edf-nuclear-flamanville-idUKL5N1182LY20150903
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/nn-olkiluoto-3-start-up-pushed-back-to-2018-0109147.html
When faced with problems like these, the "new generation" said those designs sucked, we know how to fix them, and that will be "new nuclear". And those designs exist only on paper, and offer no reasonable explanation while they will break the 50 year cycle of suck.
The basic problem isn't nuclear, it's big. Big projects go over just as often as little projects, but when they do the magnitude is larger and people notice. A million $1000 cost overruns isn't news, but one $1 billion overrun is, as the articles above note. And, sadly, nuclear needs to be big. Don't believe the hype from the small modular people, the concept is inherently flawed and thats why all the big companies dumped their design efforts and the only people still supporting them are two people and a dog shops.
> why did early attempts at production of fusion power fail to work out
Largely due to unrealistic assumptions on the part of the researchers involved.
Are you familiar with the Lawson criterion? Probably. Are you familiar with WHY he wrote it? Probably not.
He wrote it because he was tired of seeing everyone in the field making utterly ridiculous estimates about performance. There are countless experiments where basic math suggested the system would not work, but they went ahead and built it anyway without bothering to check first. Google "astron". There was so much belief in the ultimate success that no one listened when someone said there were issues.
And that's in spite of one of those people being Teller himself. In 1953 he gave an impromptu talk about stability in magnetic confinement and how he felt that it was a *very* difficult problem and no one was really thinking about it seriously. So, of course, everyone went off and thought about it seriously, right? No, they went off and wrote hand-waving statements about why their particular machine didn't apply, which then failed in precisely the way he predicted.
Lawson was equally tired of this. He sat down to put real numbers to the problem. He started by considering the power input and outputs needed to have the reactor produce net energy, and then worked to find the conditions needed to make that happen. His paper, which you can read here:
https://www.euro-fusion.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/dec05-aere-gpr1807.pdf
(and it's very easy to read, so go ahead and do it) concludes "Even with the most optimistic possible assumptions it is evident that the conditions for the operation of a useful thermonuclear reactor are very severe". In case you don't recognize it, that's British humor: he's saying its almost impossible and everyone needs to stop and think seriously.
So, of course, no one did. They simply waved their hands some more and came up with reasons why they could reach these numbers, and the money kept coming. And coming, and coming. We're *sixty years later* now, Lawson has been dead almost a decade, and we're still trying. In that time we invented the IC, the internet, went to the moon, etc. At what point do you realize no one cares any more? Nuclear cars seemed like a good idea at one time too.
Enough already! The power companies have said they're not interested, how much money do we have to spend to change that?
They are working on the wrong problem. The non-nuclear portion of the system costs more than a wind turbine of the same rating. You can improve the reactor all you want, but unless you make it negative dollars, you're still losing out to existing technologies.
I'm going to post this blogroll again:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/
> Placebos work, so why shouldn't GPs be allowed to prescribe them?
They do all the time. And if the abstract is accurate, I suspect it costs a lot more than 4 million a year.
Crap, I wrote the exact same thing before seeing this post.
I wrote about the HURD in Dr. Dobbs circa 2000.
Good to see the user base has doubled.
"some users were unable to verify the new certificates, and others could not even connect to the internet. In some cases the programs had to be reinstalled from scratch, deleting the user's existing settings."
Ok, let's look at this...
1) some users were unable to verify the new certificates
Sure, I buy that.
2) others could not even connect to the internet
I call BS, App certs do not have any use whatsoever in the TCP stack. I'm sure people had problems, but it wasn't due to this.
3) the programs had to be reinstalled from scratch, deleting the user's existing settings
I call BS on that too. The app settings are in a text file in the user directories, you can go and open them in your favorite text editor right now. Re-installing an app does not overwrite these settings, which is *the whole reason* they're done this way. It is possible that app did that, but that's a bug in the app and has nothing to do with certs.
Crappy reportage.
Bingo. This article is pants.
> programmed for Windows / web / any operating system
I don't know, programming for Windows any time in the last 12 years has been pretty much flat. I could accuse you of being just as unfamiliar as the person you're replying too.
The web, sure, that's another matter. But then your argument boils down to "it's OK for programming on Android to be difficult, because it is on the web too". That's not much of an argument.
> iOS only captured 47.5 of 341.5 million in Q2 2015
That's an interesting graph for a number of reasons, but what caught my eye in particular is that the iOS and Android lines are an exact mirror image of each other. iOS clearly sells as a gift item, and its xmas-season upticks appear to cause an Android downturn.
And that actually doesn't make sense. If Android is the sort of go-to system for someone "just buying a phone", as opposed to "buying a present", I wouldn't think iOS sales would have any effect at all. After all, my phones have never demonstrated a tendency to die over the gifting season.
Of course that's IDC...
A friend of my wife was personally effected by all of this. She researches epidemics and was going to present a paper [the details of which I will not specify]. However, all appearances at conferences for any reason had to be cleared by the Prime Minister's Office (PMO). As there was an election taking place, the PMO couldn't be bothered reviewing anything, they were too busy with important stuff (you know, not epidemics). So she didn't get to go.
I can't imagine a more dystopian fiction. At least in 1984 they had a reason to spy on everyone, it was part of their basic philosophy. But in this case, the only reason for any of this was Harper's deathly fear of bad press. So everyone had to follow the Party Line, including people who's only affiliation with the party was getting funding from the government.
And, in the end, *that* was what led to their downfall. The constant repression of information and dissent, especially within his own party, was eventually too much for anyone to take. The mechanism they put in place to protect the PM from the planet was ultimately the very device that destroyed them.
This is not a "conservative" problem. Conservatives have been excellent communicators overall. Hell, Churchill *lived* for the debate, and I strongly suspect he deliberately let people talk about anything just so he could off a clever quip in response. This was an anomaly. Let's hope it does not happen again.
> Fission does work, is safe, and we know how to use it.
Indeed. Except it costs five times as much to build a fission power plant than to build enough wind turbines to produce the same amount of energy. Indeed, the wind turbines will only operate 30% of the time. But means the wind turbines cost 3 / 5 times as much as the fission plant. And that's precisely why everyone is building wind turbines and practically no one is building fission plants.
And when I say "everyone" and "practically no one", I include the typical poster-children for nuclear - China is installing far more wind power (even CF adjusted) than nuclear. Over the last 25 years we've installed under 100 GW of fission, a period in which we installed 370 GW of wind, the vast majority of that in the last 5. At the current ~60 GW/year rates, the total yearly capacity (which includes CF) will surpass the entire nuclear fleet in three to five years.
It's done like dinner. Many of the larger companies in the space are abandoning it (like AECL and Babcock) or going bankrupt (like Westinghouse).
Now you're going to say something like "wind doesn't work all the time". Well that's the primary argument for space based solar too, but everyone here is panning it. Having worked in the power industry for a decade, let me tell you, no one actually cares. All they care about is CAPEX, ROI and LCoE. Quite the opposite, the main problem the industry talked about from about 1975 to 2005 was how to deal with peaking capacity, not the other way around. We have all the baseload we'll ever need already.