When absolutely everything you write about fusion is based exclusively on one single subset of the knowledge we currently have, which is rather limited, than saying that you are basing your conclusions on a limited set of knowledge is again purely observation. That you do it repeatedly, makes you narrow minded, poorly researched, and dogmatic. I could probably point to the exact argument that you base most of your arguments from, including your lack of knowledge w.r.t. D-D fusion, which is very inefficient at low temperature, but not at high temperatures, but efficiency is a meaningless concept. What matters is net energy at what cost.
Well, that's the third time you've gone out of your way to call me stupid. Though I have clearly explained that any thing you can think of to say about me, personally, is in fact
unsound argument, as is all fallacious reasoning.
The key difference between sound and unsound argument is that a sound argument is valid and has true premises whereas an unsound argument is invalid and/or has at least one false premise. An argument is only valid such that if its premises are true, then its conclusion must be true. When you waste your time insulting someone,
you have already lost the argument. You can not be correct because your argument is necessarily invalid and unsound. But it is invalid twice because you're not only staging the argument on ad hominem, your argument here is overly vague, sometimes called handwaving. This also is fallacy and unsound reasoning.
I just want to repeat so it sinks in, when you argue "you don't know what you're talking about," or "you don't have the knowledge to understand" this employs fallacy, because even if true,
it is irrelevant. It doesn't matter what I know. It also doesn't matter what you know.
All that matters is what was said, not who said what. Any time you focus on an individual rather than their words, you've already lost.
Now please pay attention while I decimate your argument without having to attack you personally.
As well, you clearly are not aware or choose not to accept that D-T and D-D are not the only fusion reactions being explored. Other fusion reactions, including ones that don't produce energetic neutrons are being researched. Eliminating energetic neutrons eliminates containment damage and radioactive byproducts. We are very new to controlled nuclear fusion, and the number of people doing pure research in the field is rather.
This is a straw man argument and not my argument. You may introduce new topics if you wish, but it is not reasonable to lay them at my feet and tell me I don't know anything. But take a look
at this page and roughly determine what percentage of all the fusion projects, ever, that were or are focusing on D-D? You can ignore all the fusion projects using tokamaks, stellarators, magnetic mirror, Z-pinch, and reversed field pinch; they're all D-T. The others probably are, too, I just got tired of checking.
Your claim w.r.t. limited research in solar is patently wrong
Declarative without support and overly vague. If you are talking about the 1% ratio of the costs to develop nuclear energy vs solar, it was extremely conservative. The United States DoE developed the first experimental nuclear power plant to generate electricity at a cost of
~$15B in 1951.
Bell Labs developed photovoltaic technology in 1954. They actually stumbled upon it while researching semi-conductors. I can't find any information on how much it cost Bell Labs, but I do know that it cost taxpayers
nothing whatsoever.
But to give an idea, Bell Labs was funded with 1% of AT&T's profit the year before, and in 1950 that was $3B, so in 1951 Bell Labs operated on $30M or less, which if my math is right is 0.002% of the $15B DoE budget in 1951. So if that 1951 Bell Labs budget is even close to their 1954 budget, and they blew that entire budget on photovoltaic development, then I was only off by a factor of 500. And it only now occurs to me that I remembered wrong: it wasn't a ratio of 1%. Solar development cost a fraction of 1% of the cost of nuclear development. Of course, a good portion of that DoE budget in 1951 was spent on nuclear weapons, so maybe I wasn't off by as much as I think. But the development of nuclear power was mostly to make fuel for nuclear weapons, with electricity as a side effect, so maybe I was. But ultimately the takeaway here is that development of nuclear power was vastly, tremendously massively, mind-bogglingly more expensive than development of solar power.
and take this as a ad-hom, poorly researched and lacking in knowledge. Deployments alone are $50Bill/year. However, solar energy, especially PV, benefits from massive amounts of related research in semiconductor processing, crystal and amorphous semiconductor grown, diffusion and multi-layer processing, and a large range of activities w.r.t. different materials for radiation to electricity production. Even all the spends on things like weather satellites, solar monitoring, etc. contributes to solar power research. Far far more people are involved directly and indirectly in solar energy research especially when you add storage into that mix. However, like fusion, just throwing more money at the problem is not going to solve anything over night. There are simply not enough researchers to progress, and even if there was, no guarantee they move in the right directions.
I don't disagree with you, but this is another straw man.
w.r.t. what will happen in our lifetime w.r.t fusion. How many expected rockets to actually land, under power, on earth, let alone 2 at once? We don't have a successful formula yet. Give up and we never will.
You seem to be arguing that we don't know how much fusion will cost, so maybe it will be free or something. Of course that is ridiculous, it will be the opposite of free. But we actually do know enough about what it will cost to know it will be astronomically expensive, and most estimate it will cost at least 10 times more than the development of fission, which actually cost us in the tens of trillions of dollars from 1945 just up to the late 1970s. It's $10B to build a nuclear power plant when it is cheap. Industrial scale solar plants cost in the area of single to low double digit millions. It's not even close, man.
w.r.t fission, there have been fission reactors since the 60's that cannot melt down. CANDU technology reactors do not melt down. Most reactors need a moderator to stop uncontrolled reactions. CANDU needs to have a moderator to maintain the reaction. Take out the moderator, no reaction. The world is a very very big place with lots of places we could not use. Middle of the Sahara. Northern Canad. Parts of Russia, etc. spots where you could set aside thousands of square miles for storage. Moving to Thorium cycle reduces waste considerably. Nuscales SMR design prevents melt-down as well. MMR type USNC's employs a similar huge ratio between surface area and energy production. The last two have also developed some new concepts w.r.t. fuel delivery. We are in many ways entering a new era of nuclear fission after decades with almost no new research. Like SpaceX, private companies are entering the fray heavily bringing new ideas with an eye on commercialization to the table.
Really fascinating. Truly, you have taught me stuff. Still, this is a straw man. But how much you want to bet CANDU cost a lot more than conventional fission reactors, which is why no one is building them, either?
Renewable are of course going to be part of the mix, but the real cost needs to be considered when they are the only source, i.e. no peaking/replacement source such as gas. They need large amount of storage. As mentioned, not hours, but days and more. Look at the storm of the last week? Large swaths of US and Canada too cloudy/covered for solar, and the wind speed often beyond that wind turbines could operate at. That requires a ton of storage.
idk about you, but I'm pretty happy with how much batteries have gotten better in the last 20 years, and I'll be ecstatic if they get even better. There's a lot going on there with all kinds of innovative chemistries, and I have no idea which one or few will win and become the standards, but I suspect they will be the ones that are profitable.
Call to authority? No, referencing the people who actually have to ensure the power stays on, not the ramblings of one person on the web who thinks he knows more than expert, is not a call to authority, it is accepting there are people, whose job this is, probably know more than I do and certainly you. Nuclear provides highly reliable base load generation, that is relatively immune from fuel pricing pressures, i.e. predicable. That base load generation greatly reduces storage requirements allowing better utilization of renewables without the burden of fossil based backup.
Would you trust a mechanic to tell you what and where transportation will be in 50 or 100 years? Would you trust a maintenance expert or builder to tell you where structures will be in 50 or 100 years? Would you trust an IT technician to tell you what and where computers will be in 50 or 100 years? I have a lot of respect for utility workers, but I think maybe in that question they may have their own self-interest biasing their unsurprising clairvoyance on the subject.
I personally don't buy much into the hydrogen concept, but if someone comes up with a better storage method, that could change. The current compressed methods may be close. Ammonia may be an interesting alternative for high energy density storage requirements. Some interesting concepts for very large scale hydrogen production using solar over ocean water.
OK. I don't really know, but whatever it is, it expect will be economically sustainable and won't cause the entire First and Second Worlds to go broke.
