Yep, and fusion reactors will probably be even more expensive (especially the first ones). Looking at the current prices of renewables, I don't see a market for fusion reactors at all to be honest.
After all we already have a giant fusion reactor just 12 light-minutes away from us! We just have to harvest that energy. The direction were already going (mostly market-driven nowadays actually!) is generation from renewable sources, flexible grids and storage systems to balance everything out.
This minimizes the main problem with really going full renewables, storage. Fusion is 24/7 output at the same level. Solar and wind are not, which means batteries, and all the problems associated with that.
Fusion could obviate the need for grid-wide storage systems which would be a huge advantage.
Making the box of salty radiation medicine an order of magnitude cheaper and shoving a bit of hydrogen in a salt cavern solves the storage problem (which is already far smaller than you're pretending) entirely.
Fissions reactors that don't have incredibly strict and expensive regulation are already pretty unreliable, and they're operating within the bounds of known materials rather than an order of magnitude outside of them.
Even the mythical 100% uptime nuclear reactor still needs just as much storage for abritrage because it is so much more expensive.
Not if fusion would cost orders of magnitude more than storage.
"All the problems associated with" what? Modern batteries don't burst into flame. Anyway the overwhelming bulk of storage is not and will not be chemical batteries.
Economic challenges of quickly building grid-scale battery storage , battery production for the entire globe, NIMBY's etc.
> Modern batteries don't burst into flame
they literally do
> the overwhelming bulk of storage is not batteries
Well overwhelming bulk is a high bar and storage is geography dependent. Germany f.e. can't build as much pumped storage as Australia and Australia built a large amount of battery storage vs PSH.
Lithium-ion batteries burn. But the topic was "modern batteries", which at the instant moment means LiFeP batteries, not "previous-generation batteries".
Lithium is anyway not favored for use in utility-scale storage, where its light weight offers no compelling value. Up-and-coming chemistries include iron-air (no explosions), calcium-antimony (no explosions), and bromine-zinc (no explosions). Hundreds of other chemistries are available.
There is a lot of background on nuclear costs. From https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-nuclear-p... & other sources, I've heard safety standards around radiation were set higher than ever proven necessary, and also ratchet up to obviate any cost gains per unit output.
Safety standards were set higher and higher because accidents kept happening, resulting in some well-known extremely large scale disasters and numerous minor ones. As with every industry, the rules were written with blood.
When you are building a power plant which has the capability of making a significant portion of your country permanently incompatible with human life, you generally want to be really sure you aren't going to have an oopsie.
I accept this as one point; I do question whether the opposite side of the benefit calculation was made - i.e. did we have a public debate where we correctly looked at the tradeoffs of increased fossil fuel carbon pollution, economic impacts from lack of energy and failures to advance, balanced out with honest cost estimates of disaster profiles? It doesn't seem like it. It seems the debates were fairly one-sided; this leads me to believe a better outcome would be weighted more towards pro-nuclear.
Same with wind, "you must pay a fine if you kill a bald eagle", but if you slowly kill all of them with pollution, that's free.
"The fly ash emitted from burning coal for electricity by a power plant carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy."
> Safety standards were set higher and higher because accidents kept happening, resulting in some well-known extremely large scale disasters and numerous minor ones.
I think Chernobyl was the only really big nuclear plant disaster right? And even then, what we've really learned in the long term is that human habitation is more dangerous to wildlife than nuclear radiation (the area around the plant is now a thriving wildlife preserve).
FYI, there were zero radiation deaths from Fukishima, although there were ~2200 from the evacuation. Keep in mind this was during the aftermath of a tsunami.
I think there was a lot of hard work that went into to prevention of anything worse happening at Fukushima. At least that is what I remember from reading the iaea report a couple of years ago. I remember it being a very good and interesting read: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1710-Repor...
There was simply a false assumption about how dangerous radiation was. Some of this still persists to this day.
A nuclear reactor that had the same radiation as a coal plant would not be legal? How does this make any sense at all?
The Safety standards were actually put at to high a level to early, specially given how instantly save nuclear was.
Consider this, how safe were coal plants? Would nuclear instead of coal have saved 100000s of lives since then? Yes of course nuclear would have, even if you had an accident once in a while.
The problem is that there was 0 tolerance for nuclear accident, because of populist nonsense, but if coal plant and supply chain killed 5 people here 10 people and 1000s of people get sick, nobody cares.
So the reality is, that nuclear went uneconomical because nuclear and existing power production (mostly coal, later gas) were no treated the same in terms of their safety requirements.
> When you are building a power plant which has the capability of making a significant portion of your country permanently incompatible with human life
That's not actually what happens. 3 Mile Island or Fukushima didn't even remotely come close to what you describe. And even for Chernobyl this is questionable statement. And Chernobyl was a type of reactor not built in the West, so in the West something that bad simply can't happen with PWRs.
The learning cycle is too long. It takes ~10 years to build a reactor, so if you spot a way to improve on costs or safety it will take another 10 years for the innovation to see the light.
At the contrary in renewables the learning cycle is in months so costs fall exponentially.
That's the real reason of high costs in fission, not red tape or public sentiment.
