This is an order of magnitude less cost that the ITER project, which is spending a lot of money on cement and magnets on a probably doomed technology path of commercial fusion.

These same breakthroughs are also likely to be able to produce a fusion engine for spacecraft. This is actually an easier problem to solve than electricity generation as the deuterium can be used as fuel and as a propellant ejected straight out of the plasma core at variable ISP up to around 100,000. No inefficient fusion to electricity to rocket engine cycle is necessary.

I am not a fusion scientist, but my father is. For more info and technical references, drop me an email (see profile).

[1]https://www.washington.edu/news/2014/10/08/uw-fusion-reactor...

Jesus.

For reference, chemical rockets tend to have ISP in the low-to-mid hundreds, and ion thrusters are in the thousands—not ten thousands, but single thousands. A 100,000 ISP rocket is like a car that can drive from Bangkok to Vladivostok to Lisbon, then back to Istanbul and down to Johannesburg without refueling or recharging. It’s like a phone battery that lasts years rather than days. And it’s all powered by the most plentiful elements in the universe.

I’m pretty sure you could generate electricity by flying this rocket around in a circle tethered to an electric turbine if you wanted to. I mean, all of your electricity would probably be in space, because a high ISP usually implies that the rocket doesn’t work as well on the earth’s surface (not as a physical law, just as a limitation of our technology), but of all the monumentally impressive things you can build from a fusion reactor, a 100k ISP rocket has got to be up there.

As for ITER, I’m not necessarily bearish on it, but if there’s a credible chance of an alternative design that can be proven for anything <$1 billion...I hate to say it, but any person, venture capital fund, or government with more than $10 billion to their name would be hard pressed to find any better use for it. Even if the damn thing is 95% likely to fail, that’s a 5% chance you literally end up having a stake in the single most valuable technology in the single most valuable sector of the economy—one that will provide untold benefits to mankind.

30 million dollars, really? Like—does Y Combinator know about this? Never mind the “benefits to mankind”—if a single business can be first to market with an economical fusion power plant, that will become the single most valuable business in human history. There’s like five tech companies that are up there in the ranks of “most valuable business in the world”, and they’re approximately the same value as any of about ten oil and gas conglomerates, and those lists usually don’t even count state-owned companies that are even more valuable. (“All the oil in Saudi Arabia”—that’s wealth.) Fusion power would immediately be more valuable than every single oil and gas company in the world put together. Even if nobody bought fusion plants, you could just build the damn things yourself, use them to synthesize hydrocarbons from the damn atmosphere, and undercut the market while simultaneously fixing climate change by making fossil fuel usage a closed loop with no new net CO2 introduced into the atmosphere and an economical method for extracting the excess we already have.

One thing you should realize about a fusion reactor is that the easiest (which is still really difficult to do) reactions for fusion release a lot of their power in neutrons. These can not be harnessed directly to produce electricity, unlike moving electrons or ions theoretically could be. They can be used to boil water, just like a coal plant, and use steam to run a generator to make electricity. This part of the power plant is expensive. And the fusion reactor is expensive. You don't just get a Mr. Fusion on your car roof outputting Gigawatts of power.

As to it being a great investment, an electric power generation method is only going to be a great one if it is much cheaper than current methods. This is why ITER is such a boondoggle with its $10-$20 billion dollar price tag. It is very unlikely to be the path to putting fusion power onto the grid. Also, who knows if people will be just as afraid of nuclear fusion plants and nuclear fission. If that is the case they will not be economical to build. Maybe a name change is in order?

Relativistic magnetohydrodynamics is a hard subject matter. Investors with $30 million dollars to speculate on such a project are not going to know enough to distinguish a possible project from unlikely ones. Physicists who can know enough to see that some plan might work are unlikely to have the funds to invest. I saw Sam Altman had a fusion book on one of his lists at one point and Elon Musk might know a physicist he would trust, but getting those people to take a look is not easy. I'd be happy to make introductions though. :)

I would kind of expect a completely new technology to be expensive to begin with.

> As to it being a great investment, an electric power generation method is only going to be a great one if it is much cheaper than current methods. This is why ITER is such a boondoggle with its $10-$20 billion dollar price tag. It is very unlikely to be the path to putting fusion power onto the grid.

I'm not sure how that follows--this might not be a great comparison, but the cost of building the first two atomic bombs was orders of magnitude higher than the cost of building the most recent two atomic bombs. Even if it costs $20-50 billion dollars per fusion power plant, it still might work out if each plant can produce enough economy of scale.

> Relativistic magnetohydrodynamics is a hard subject matter. Investors with $30 million dollars to speculate on such a project are not going to know enough to distinguish a possible project from unlikely ones. Physicists who can know enough to see that some plan might work are unlikely to have the funds to invest. I saw Sam Altman had a fusion book on one of his lists at one point and Elon Musk might know a physicist he would trust, but getting those people to take a look is not easy. I'd be happy to make introductions though. :)

Yeah, that makes sense. There has to be some reason that a $30 million plan to build a proof-of-concept viable fusion reactor hasn't been funded yet.

The United States has, according to a quick Google, over 8,000 power plants. If you replaced them with 800 fusion plants, wouldn't you still have enough redundancy to take them offline for maintenance? Sure, having a smaller number of power plants increases line loss, but there has to be some economy of scale where tokamak fusion starts winning.

Thinking even bigger, if you have a 100x or 1000x scale fusion plant and used it for hydrocarbon synthesis, as you suggest, couldn't you use that plant to supply several downstream power plants that burn hydrocarbons and still, potentially, end up net-ahead?

I dunno--my impression is that the theoretical yield of fusion is so high that you can very, very quickly start reaping benefits even if you're doing so in extremely inefficient ways. Once you get above break-even, even if you're only a couple percentage points above break-even, if can build a huge enough reactor, it adds up really, really, really fast. Fast enough that some rich technocratic dictatorship could, say, build a bunch of tokamaks and effectively corner the world oil market without drilling for a single barrel of natural oil. You'd have to think that fusion starts doing things to the cost of energy that Moore's Law did to the cost of computing, to the point where people actually wrap user-facing applications in gratuitous web browsers.

There are theoretical proposals for direct conversion of electricity using the charged particles of certain fusion reactions (usually using Helium-3 mined from the moon) in different reactor designs but those are even further out than the toroidal magnetic confinement reactors (tokamaks, spherical tokamaks, and stellarators.)

In the 1970's a huge demographic block started coming into power, the baby boomers, and for many different reasons they questioned all of this ever increasing "improvements". Humans seemed not to have enough wisdom to wield wisely the new levels of power tech improvements were giving them. The Vietnam "war" against a country that never attacked the USA, DDT and other pesticides were killing all the bugs and destroying natural ecosystems, Russia and the US were building up an arsenal of nuclear weapons that numbered in the tens of thousands and could destroy humanity in 15 minutes, nuclear power was getting started and promised to give us electricity too cheap to meter to fuck up the planet even quicker, we kept tearing down and cutting apart beautiful cities with more and more interstate freeways, modern architecture with its anti-human scale and design, Agent Orange, etc. It was probably a good idea for humanity to take a breather on improving tech. The geeks were denied the power to keep implementing more powerful tech and nuclear powered rockets and airplane research were shut down. Denied working with real world, geeks turned to computers and no one cared. How could one do anything scary with pure calculations?

Well, whole libraries full of books have been written on the subject. For power generation just look at how it is priced for residential costumers. In California the price per kWh goes up the more you use, unlike almost any product. Our philosophy on power generation in the "tech capital of the world" is that we should do less of it, not more. Cheap power is a negative thing. It takes a strong sense of purpose to invest large amounts of money into a project that your peer group is going to say is a bad thing.

As the boomers fade from power, I see some hope of humanity too gain back some of its dreams for a better future using more powerful tools but with more balance on keeping things good for humans. Elon Musk is a good example for a third way, I hope.

Big power plants are a problem. The US generating capacity is about 1,000 Gigawatts [2] so if fusion power plants are huge at 20 Gigawatts, that is only 50 plants. One per state. You can see how one of those going down is going to be a problem. The average plant size is only 0.06 Gigawatts if your 8000 power plant number is correct. (All calculations liable to correction as this is just a quick web comment.)

[1]Thiel's view expanded on his founders fund website:https://foundersfund.com/the-future/#

[2]https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

Hah! Still, I don't think this is a total loss. Sure, we use computers for a lot of dumb stuff, but we also use them to cure cancer, control rockets, design airplanes, find our way when we get lost, produce art, and distribute information. And there was so much low-hanging fruit in computing that this focused effort let to outsized economic growth and basically brain-drained the entire rest of our society.

> Our philosophy on power generation in the "tech capital of the world" is that we should do less of it, not more. Cheap power is a negative thing. It takes a strong sense of purpose to invest large amounts of money into a project that your peer group is going to say is a bad thing.

> As the boomers fade from power, I see some hope of humanity too gain back some of its dreams for a better future using more powerful tools but with more balance on keeping things good for humans. Elon Musk is a good example for a third way, I hope.

It's not entirely clear that this cynicism will die with the baby boomers. They've had decades to instill and pass down their pessimistic attitudes while the hope and enthusiasm that took us to the Moon gradually passed from cultural memory. Even now, the most audacious project that the average millennial can think of is a "Universal Basic Income" so he gets a lifelong stipend to sit at home playing video games.

Musk is a good example of a way forward, but if anything, his story proves my point. Musk is an optimist and someone who actually believes in the American Dream, and it's no coincidence that he's also an immigrant. Optimism and ambition used to be the defining qualities of this country. Someone who believes in them strongly enough to come here usually believes in them more strongly than most of us who were born here. (Probably a corollary to the old observation that recent converts to a religion are more obnoxiously pious than those born in it!)

But America still has enough optimists, and if there ever is a small-scale fusion reactor design that gets proven feasible, it's a lot easier to convince the last surviving well-funded ambitious optimists than to convince the greater public. And if we the West doesn't make it out of this hole, there are still other hungry up-and-coming civilizations out there in the world who will get around to it in due time themselves.

How much fuel do fusion reactors burn?

A 1 GW(th) plant will burn about 100 kilograms of fusion fuel per year. ITER, which has a mass of 23,000 tonnes, will produce 400 MW(th). So, going by that, it would take nearly a million years for a reactor like ITER to fuse its own mass in fusion fuel. That's obviously silly. ITER is clearly not optimized for use in space (and burns DT, in which 80% of the energy comes out as neutrons that are useless as plasma exhaust), but any real fusion rocket will be designed to operate with an Isp much lower than 100,000 seconds.

I think the general public has just completely given up on seeing any kind of new, radical cool tech but with the decline in the anti-tech baby boomer generation a lot of progress of long dreamed projects are starting to happen. SpaceX has lead the way with reusable rockets.

Here is a link to a video from a real company that is actively researching and building fusion rocket prototypes[1].

[1]Fusion drive page: http://www.psatellite.com/tag/dfd/ [2]video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3ao5SCedIk

And here is a link to a technical paper if you are interested[3].

[3]https://w3.pppl.gov/ppst/docs/Cohen2017ibis.pdf

But, who knows? Energy is such a limiting factor that maybe you could, with enough energy, make a gigantic space-ark in space and fill it with hydrogen and have a massive fusion-powered rocket with 100,000 Isp. Maybe that's how we reach Alpha Centauri.

One huge problem with any extremely high Isp rocket is heat dissipation. Any heat hitting the vehicle has to be radiated (there is insufficient reaction mass flow for that to cool the engines, as it does in chemical rockets). So it pays to keep the powerplant separate and beam low entropy energy at the vehicle.

Oh, yeah, shit. I keep forgetting that's the defining difference between science fiction and reality when it comes to space travel.

Cheap unlimited energy leads to heat pollution per the laws of thermodynamics. Asimov Foundation series first book warned about this in passing. Be careful what you wish for!

Long to short, it's close. Money could help accelerate the research into the necessary details.

But a workable, practical fusion powerplant? Not close at all.

There is a point at which a single step is enough to win a marathon; that doesn't mean it would have been enough when the race started.

I wrote that sentence in a 10th grade report on fusion, in 1977. Disappointing that it's likely still true four decades later. In another four decades it's up to you to make this comment.

On the other hand, so much has arrived that I never dreamed of in high school, though I consumed scifi obsessively. Not sure I'd swap the internet for cheap fusion energy. But not sure I wouldn't.

> Typically, outsiders cannot comprehend how the massive expenditures never manage to yield energy. Typically, insiders cannot comprehend how little is being invested in a project that presents such immense technical obstacles and also such potential. A graph commonly passed around among the insiders—an enduring scrap of twentieth-century budgetary ephemera—depicts the 1976 federal plan to build a working thermonuclear reactor. The graph tracks various scenarios for attaining fusion energy. The “maximum” effort, the most expensive up front, with initial spending as high as nine billion dollars a year, was projected to yield a reactor by 1990. The “moderate” effort, with spending never exceeding four billion dollars in a year, would take fifteen more years. The fusion community might be easy to criticize for its many unmet milestones, but for decades the United States has never come close to even the moderate effort. In 1977, when the American fusion budget was at its peak, government investment in the research, adjusted for inflation, was seven hundred million dollars; by 1991, this had fallen by more than half. It is now half a billion, not appreciably more than the Korean budget.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bot...

The chart was produced by Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), which was later subsumed into the Department of Energy and presumably represented the expert wisdom at the time. It can be found, in 1976 dollars, as figure 1 here:

http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_2...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/5gi9yh/fusion_i...

And in hindsight, even given optimistic plasma assumptions, fusion reactors would have been limited by materials and heat transfer issues. These render any DT-burning reactor problematic, independent of the details of confinement.

If that $X had been spent, fusion boosters would be complaining about the debacle of wasting all that money on tokamaks and how that undermined fusion research. And if we spent a newly-calculated $X and, years later, still didn't get fusion, the complaint would be exactly that managerial whinge that we just hadn't shoveled enough money down the hole (or down the right hole).

Pedantic point but also a reminder to avoid fatalism and that as well as extending R&D times, we can also reduce them (see: Apollo).

That being said, the schedule for first fusion is 2025 and D-T operation in 2035 (just under 20yrs). A lot of competitors think they will be successful (at FIRST fusion, not a generator for public use) before then. It is an interesting race.

It’s always „decades away“, but there’s always pebble bed/molten salt/thorium/whatever technology that’s far better, basically functional, mostly free, and only held up by those darn environmentalists/idiot politicians/liberals/oil lobby/NIMBYs/Elton John/…

It feels like the tech community is forever trapped in the science fiction of the 50s, while actual science (and politicians) have created options that, frankly, are far better in every regard, including costs.

There's not the same blind-optimism to solar power generation.

Well.. it's hard to be overtly skeptical to a form of lower intensity power which works at scale, but lower intensity. The only claims to be rebutted are ones which overstate the pace of improvement to the forseen asymptote.

What's more baffling is the constant jeremiad of hate against solar wind and battery because of prejudice favouring large centrally managed gigawatts. Nobody disputes big lumps of powerstation are good. What we're doing is fighting an ill informed skirmish inside the linear programming and O/R model of future power, rather pointlessly.

I would like nuclear fusion and fission power research to continue. I would like the funding to lower intensity power to continue as well. I would like a grown up conversation about how much each should get annually as funding.

Personally I'm a fan of any carbon-free power source. In particular solar and nuclear seem like they'd go together quite well: nuclear baseload, solar for extra daytime demand, and enough storage to handle the remaining discrepancy with the demand curve. (A couple years ago MIT had a grid simulation that let people try out different combinations to see the overall cost, and that was the cheapest I came up with.)

People get testy when they've been victims of fraud. Just ask the ratepayers in Georgia and South Carolina.

In any case, France can not now build reactors cheaply. The recent attempts have experienced disastrous cost overruns (a factor of 3x for Flamanville). New nuclear has failed there just like it failed here in the US.

Actual power cost and deaths per gigawatts? Unbeatable. I used to hate on nuclear, I changed my mind. End the lawsuits and let's get building again.

Power costs of nuclear plants seem to be on the expensive side of things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

Depending on the study, it's either comparable to wind or has substantially higher costs than wind.

Do you really think hordes of scientists around the globe do dozens of studies and have never thought about a point as trivial as this?

I don't think this can be overstated enough. Yearly budgets and disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima are important, sure, but they're on an entirely different tier from what we're about to wreak on ourselves. We're evaluating the risk of these technologies all wrong. Accidents and sacrifices would have been worth it. Even nuclear proliferation leading to all-out nuclear war would have been preferable to what we're about to experience. And that is truly harrowing.

[0] https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8433

Regardless, I volunteer for the danger zone. The 99% worst case is merely evacuation, and expensive power plants pay for lots of nice thing with their taxes.

Also insurance is a perfectly viable way to spread out risk so that no group of people is disadvantaged.

But people are always going to be unrealistic about risk. So I dunno, ask people if they accept a tiny chance of localized disaster, and then ignore everything they say about their own location.

Building out nuclear power in developed countries would mean the globally wealthy assuming a fairer measure of the risks associated with their consumption.

If you only count the reactors that are already built and still operating, they are pretty cheap sources of electricity. The old nuclear projects that were abandoned before completion won't be part of your "power per dollar" denominator. The reactors that were shut down 10 years ago because they were too expensive to keep running will also be missing from the denominator. The late and over-budget reactors that have yet to enter service will be missing from the cost denominator as well. Once you limit the field of inquiry to the surviving, operating nuclear plants, they're pretty affordable.

If you interpret the question as meaning "nuclear energy is currently the second cheapest per watt [to add to a nation's electricity supply]" -- no, that's incorrect for anywhere with half-decent wind or solar resources.

The final question that prevents me from being a 100% renewables triumphalist: what happens to the relative cost of nuclear vs. more renewables + storage as renewable penetration rises? Storage is hardly needed at present penetration levels. Only a modest amount of storage (overnight) may be needed for 50% or even more penetration. But what happens at 80%, 90%, 100% decarbonization of the electricity supply? It's possible that even expensive new reactors will be cheaper than reaching 100% with storage and renewables alone. It remains an open question.

As renewables, getting cheaper, are added and longer term storage becomes needed, nuclear is placed in a horrible position.

That's because nuclear needs to sell its power a high percentage of the time or its economics become ridiculously bad.

So what happens when solar/wind/short term storage are covering things 80% of the time, at a cost (during that period) the nuclear reactor cannot come close to, on a levelized basis? The cost of power from the nuke goes up by a factor of as much as five. Nuclear plants are horrible as intermittent fill-in sources. It instead becomes more economical to add low-efficiency long term storage options (like hydrogen) and to just overbuild the intermittent sources.

Or it could turn out that building very large storage systems, even capacious enough to e.g. ride through Germany's entire winter, is less expensive than building new reactors. I'm just trying to keep an open mind about a future role for new reactors. I'm pretty skeptical about starting new reactor builds right now. My strongest present opinion about power reactors is that it's a shame to close working units while their attached grids are still consuming fossil combustion power.

Small molten salt reactors might also address industrial process heat markets, where they'd have a possible advantage over renewable sources as their heat could be used directly.

A data point in favor of this: Suppose there was a fast developing country that had the resources and requirement to build more power generation capacity than any other society in human history. Suppose, further, that this country was relatively immune to political concerns because it was governed by a technocratic bureaucracy. Just for the hell of it, let’s imagine that most of the techno-bureaucrats have some sort of engineering background. It so turns out that there is a country exactly like this, and their long term energy policy is to build a massive hydroelectric dam on the one place in their country that is particularly well-suited for it, and then build lots and lots and lots of fission plants and invest in fusion research.

UK discounted provision for decommission costs: £100+ billion in 2013 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/23/britain-...

£161 billion in 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20170516093449/https://www.gov.u...

£234 billion in 2018 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision...

... and counting.

UK: 15 reactors, ~10300 gross MWe. They analyzed and now think that decommissioning will cost £234 billion (309 billion USD).

USA: 98 reactors, 100350 gross MWe. 46 billion USD (Nuclear Waste Fund) are in provision.

One order of magnitude more power produced by the stuff to decommission in the US, and nearly 7 times less money to do so.

Decommissioning small and old reactors costs more, and entombing may, at least apparently (short-term), reduce the cost. In theory. Let's check a real and ongoing case: Oyster Creek. According to the EIA its construction costs were $488 million (2007 USD) ( https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/state/archive/2010/newjersey/ ). As soon as the decommission project started the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it will cost "about $1.4 billion to shut down the plant". Not for an immediate and complete decommission, because the plant will stay in a “safe store” condition until 2075, with dismantling ((...)) set for a period between 2075 and 2078 ( https://www.powermag.com/oldest-u-s-nuclear-plant-shuts-down... ). Then new problems (costs!) may arise. Let's bet that, as usual, the taxpayer will pay.

Long-term waste management is another ticking bomb.

Moreover if there is a serious glitch (Chernobyl, Fukushima...), are bets are off. You can obtain an insurance policy for anything, AFAIK even for a space trip, but no insurance company covers such nuke risk.

If they only knew how much they get from bananas, granite counter tops, and airplane trips in comparison to nuclear power and scaled their fear of radiation down to that level, most of these expensive problems would be 100 times cheaper to deal with. How about a massive education campaign about radiation starting in elementary school? Kill the fear. Isn't the whole point of education is that an educated public can make better choices? Let's use that tool.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-... (December 12, 2018 | Sustainable Energy China’s losing its taste for nuclear power. That’s bad news.)

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18675453

Quick points: Too expensive with necessary safety measures, Chinese citizens don't want it after Fukushima, renewables are already cheaper, and electrical demand growth has declined unexpectedly.

My opinion: We should still explore fusion technology and spend on R&D, but fission is already dead. Renewables and storage full speed ahead.

Storage works really well with nuclear, which by itself is very hard to ramp up or down (worse than coal, in contrast to gas and hydro that can work on demand).

Also nuclear fission might not be relevant if humanity cannot survive after 2040, according to IPCC's climate change report (I am doubtful we will even be able to get nuclear fission power plants commercialized by 2050 TBH.)

Even France, with one the most mature and well run nuclear power programs is concluding that the next wave of power investment makes more sense to make in renewables instead of nuclear.

I suspect we will solve our problems with renewables + storage (which are still rapidly declining in cost).

Flamanville, the first EPR in France, was schedule to start running in 2012 for a construction cost of 3.3 billion EUR. It is now expected to start producing electricity in 2020 for a construction cost of 10.9 billion EUR. Emphasis on expected...

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-...

The economic comparisons are ending up that Renewables and even Renewables+Storage is much lower to even costs, at a much lower risk profile. And if you watch energy company investments in renewable and divestment in nuclear projects - the companies studying the matter in detail seem to be choosing the same direction.

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....

The originally proposed construction schedule for Flamanville 3 was 4.5 years. That was a very aggressive schedule. Even reactors completed before Chernobyl, e.g. Cruas 3, took more than 5 years:

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....

The most modern operating French reactor, Civaux 2 (construction started 1991), took 11 years:

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....

Generation III reactors like the EPR and AP1000 were supposed to be simultaneously faster to build and safer due to standardization and careful design. The actual experience of building EPR and AP1000 reactors has torpedoed the "faster" part of that justification. The troubled, prolonged builds have also killed the original lower cost projections.

At this point the the original cost and schedule estimates for EPR and AP1000 projects alike look so optimistic that they were basically fraudulent. These projects were troubled even before Fukushima aroused a new wave of anti-nuclear sentiment among the public.

I still believe the empirical evidence that nuclear power is a very safe way to generate electricity. I also believe the empirical evidence that nuclear reactors are expensive and slow to construct. "Generation IV will be safer and faster to build" -- ok, for a while I believed those same claims about Generation III. The next time I'll believe those claims about a new reactor design is after it has already entered commercial service.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-10/french-po...

This conclusion from the same French agency has been the result since 2015, with prices of Renewable alternatives making that predicted result more and more solid.

How long till we solve renewable production/storage problems? How long to refine those solutions to the point where it takes 7.5 years to deploy the solar equivalent of the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station?

The time between then and now is the amount of years the world will be burning coal.

For bonus points, even if the cost were exactly the same per unit of power, do a cost analysis of which costs more to implement under the different project timelines, using different financing scenarios?

We should also spend a lot of money working on storage solutions, but with the planet at stake it doesn't seem smart to put all our eggs in that basket.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/lightsource-sol...

https://www.energy-storage.news/news/jp-morgan-buys-into-10....

Costs are going down, but MSRs look a lot cheaper than conventional nuclear too, so if we're going to look to the future let's do it with both.

No, there isn't. A problem isn't solved until a solution has been fully implemented.

There is a difference between that and the time it takes to identify a solution in principle.

...in countries that are large enough to make it "disappear". Meanwhile normal sized countries are still struggling with old waste and new waste. See Germany. Meanwhile reprocessing as it exists is economically pointless, while it reduces the amounts of highly radioactive material enlarges the amounts of mid and low radioactive material and doesn't help with the stuff that has been insufficiently stored already. Also Sellafield and La Hague are probably polluting water.

Hooray...

https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/612193/nuclear...

However, there are a bunch of other startups working on molten salt reactors, including Bill Gates' Terrapower, Terrestrial Energy, Thorcon, Moltex, Elysium, and Flibe. The farthest along is probably Terrestrial Energy, which has gotten through the hardest part of Canada's licensing process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerator-driven_subcritical...

Maybe but startups are having a crack at it eg. "UK Atomic Energy Authority and First Light Fusion team up for project that aims to deliver fusion breakthrough by 2024" https://web.archive.org/web/20181206125841/https://www.busin...

From the forthcoming textbook, 100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything

https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Nucl...

Uranium is currently a small portion of the cost of nuclear, so it can't be that hard to mine, especially after we only need 1% as much for the same amount of power.

Either keeps us going for thousands of years, and after that we could extract uranium from seawater until the sun goes out.

http://www.deepisolation.com

It's much less a pride than a survival instinct. Just think about it, Beijing was under siege of heavy smog for over a decade by now. If Washington D.C. was like that for since Trump became the president, would he still advocate coal?