Re:AI is bringing old nuclear plants out of retirement
by dalyons on Saturday December 13, 2025 @10:30AM
(#46255214)
Fusion likely wouldn’t solve much. Fuel and disposal costs are a small part of nuclear costs. It’s amortized capex for the extremely expensive plant, then maintenance. Fusion would make both of those costs worse
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Re:AI is bringing old nuclear plants out of retirement
by pfdietz on Saturday December 13, 2025 @10:39AM
(#46255310)
Exactly right. Fusion's only hope (and IMO it's not a great one) is a system where entire parts of a fission plant can be deleted. Helion does this by not needing turbine + generator, but doing direct conversion of plasma energy to electrical energy. But even so, they have to struggle with capex and reliability. Their reactor is coupled with a huge bank of capacitors (Zap has a similar problem; it's startling how large the capacitor bank is compared to their small fusion cell.)