More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

Re:More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than pa... by otikik on Saturday July 23, 2022 @05:47PM (#32207889)

I agree the cost is important. I disagree in the breaking point at witch it’s “not worth it”. To me, assuming our battery tech doesn’t find a similar breakthrough before, if fusion reaches one order of magnitude above the cost of solar, it is worth it, as a backup. Better to have it and use it when there’s clouds instead of coal or gas

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Re:More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than pa... by Schroedingersat on Saturday July 23, 2022 @06:02PM (#32208001)

If you plug your solar panel into some water when you have surplus sun you get hydrogen which burns fine in a combined cycle plant.

If that's too annoying to store you can get it hot and squeeze it over some nickel to get methane.

Electrolyzation becomes cheaper than mining methane for hydrogen (and thus ammonia) production if solar hits the $0.2-0.3/Watt threshold somewhere (which is predicted to happen in 3-7 years).

It's complicated and expensive, but I'm not sure I'd bet on a sabatier reactor (or hydrogen storage if it gets cheap), an electrolyzer and 4x the solar panels being more expensive than a fusion reactor with the average output of 1 unit of solar.

Plus the sabatier thing means we don't have to upgrade all the heating furnaces and expand the grid to have 8x the capacity.

Fusion will be real handy where power density is king though. And if there's some non thermal way of getting work out of it, I can see it being cheaper.

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Re:More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than pa... by jayd16 on Saturday July 23, 2022 @05:52PM (#32207927)

They did say solar and battery.. So taking it literally I think they're correct that if we had a battery technology such that it provided consistent cheaper energy we wouldn't need a hypothetical nuclear backup.

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