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A1_B t1_j0bif25 wrote

Reply to comment by billdietrich1 in Fusion energy breakthrough and national security implications explained by TheScienceAdvocate

It all kind of depends on what investment is put into fusion in the next couple of years, historically investment into fusion is slow and so progress is slow, as the needed legwork on R&D can only be done with a new flagship experiment every one to two decades.

Science advances, to make such conclusions using now for then is kind of moot.

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billdietrich1 t1_j0bj125 wrote

Many of the costs and constraints on fission and fusion plants have nothing to do with nuclear or new tech. It's the "heat engine", all the heat transfer and cooling and steam turbine and spinning generator etc. That stuff is OLD and mature. Throwing more money at it is not going to change it. That's why fusion is not going to be a big change relative to fission. And why renewables and storage are going to dominate.

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A1_B t1_j0bjhrk wrote

I'm not so sure about the idea that steam turbine = old mature, therefore unscalable, kind of goes against reality where Nuclear is in use and how much power it generates.

What do you specifically mean with the generalization "renewables?"

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billdietrich1 t1_j0c4pvs wrote

> old mature

Certainly it is old and mature: it has been optimized to the max because it is in so many power plants and industrial processes. Don't expect some large improvement in steam tech.

> therefore unscalable

Again a matter of steam and temperatures and cooling etc. Scaling nuclear large is less of a problem than scaling small. I doubt SMR nuclear will go very small or be successful. Whereas some renewables scale down to the level of a single house.

> What do you specifically mean with the generalization "renewables?"

The usual definition: solar, wind, tidal, wave, geothermal, hydro.

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