A good place to start if you want to understand the purported rationale for the NIF (stockpile stewardship), I suggest reading and understanding this light introduction to modern nuclear weapons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon
(the rhodes books, Making of the Atomic Bomb is required background reading, as is Dark Sun, if you want to get into the backstore).
In particular:
The NIH experiment recapitulates many of the design aspects of a thermonuclear weapon, but does so in a highly controlled lab environment.
I'm a biophysicist. I know a fair amount of engineering, although I'm not a weapons physicist. Nonetheless, after years of reading about the NIF and various fusion projects I've come to believe that there is little justification for their expenditure. In particular, we can do stockpile stewardship without this device, more cheaply, nor does NIF present an economically viable method to production of power at a large scale in even the most rosy predictions.
I still think the experimental design is cool, but I can't see this as a rational expenditure (HUGE opex and capex) compared to other investments we could be making.
Most likely scenario I see in 20 years is that china will be mass-manufacturing small, safe fission reactors and making a mint selling them to the rest of the world. That's got far less reqiurement for massive capex and opex. It's just that the western nations decided to go stupid about fission because OH GOD NUCLEAR MUTATIONS and stop investing in building more reliable, safer, and smaller plants.
The NIF is probably more useful for coming up with new fusion bomb designs than for stockpile stewardship, as you say, but what makes you say hot fusion can never be economically viable? The sun is proof that nature can do this on a grand scale! It may be a long ways off, but "a long ways" becomes "never" without experimental work like the NIF. Yes, the U.S. is probably doing this primarily to create new weapons just as the space race was really about developing ICBM's. However, the fundamental science being done has huge long-term potential. It's a sad, but true fact that, sometimes, scientists have to use the megalomania of states to fuel research that has the potential to benefit all of humanity.
Fission power is a separate matter. The single most important thing that most people still do not understand is that power grids have almost zero capacity for storing energy. That means most alternative energy sources, such as wind or solar, can never exceed a certain percentage of the grid's production capacity or it will become unstable. On-demand energy generation is still needed, and there's absolutely no reason to fear nuclear power while we're still using coal power, which is far more deadly in every sense! It's not just the West that has this fear either. Look at Japan's recent nuclear shut-down[1] (from 30% of their grid to 0%, replaced with fossil fuels), and tell me that isn't going to influence China!
Whether the sun is capable of fusion isn't super important. We can take advantage of that, but it doesn't mean we can build many safe plants based on an evolution of the NIF design.
If your alternative fuel requires hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in the future, just to show viability of the basic research concept, before it can actually be useful, you will be at a massive competitive advantage relative to alternatives.
What I am saying, is that relative to other potential investments, fusion does not seem to be a worthwhile investment, as the risk/payoff ratio is worse.
As for the rest of your comments, I mostly agree I'm aware that alternatives like wind and solar have limits, but we can still use them to great effect (as augmenters, and ways to reduce reliance of less sustainable sources).
> What I am saying, is that relative to other potential investments, fusion does not seem to be a worthwhile investment, as the risk/payoff ratio is worse.
I disagree. There exists MILLIONS of years worth of fuel on earth, compared to a few decades of oil and gas, and a few hundred years worth old coal or fissionable uranium. That's quite a huge payoff for relatively little risk (compare fusion research funding with other energy subsidies).
yes. I think the california rail system is also an overpriced underperforming system. It will never be finished (it will never make it all the way to SF), so it will never be completely useful, and the history of all large projects like this show huge cost overruns. Do you really want to allocate capital like that for something that's unlikely to be finished, nor likely to achieve its actual goal? When we could spend money to make cars more efficient (electric batteries with central generation) and reduce our total energy consumption, fairly cheaply?
I agree with your other points. But the AIG bailout not only saved filthy rich bankers, but saved the entire world economy.
Private pensions would have been wiped out, who own 95% of the stockmarket. The pensions were chasing gains and were quite happy while the returns were fat. The government cannot afford its own pension promises anyway and would have been wiped out.
Big science projects are paid in installments over many years. If the financial system collapses, for sure the big projects will be mothballed immediately.
The point is that governments have this type of money. In spades. Pretending we're not properly prioritizing one type of research or another is a farce - if you can convince anyone to invest in nuclear fission reactors, whether they do that won't really be affected by how much fusion research is happening. That's not why we don't have nuclear fission right now, but shutting down nuclear fusion might just ensure we never get either.
You think governments have this type of money in spades?
The US does not. We're in a major debt crises and have issues funding our fundamental operations; beyond the immediate government funding, we have severe problems with spending (IE, we can't pay the interest on our spending with our tax revenues).
You're not in a debt crisis, US interest payments on existing debt is about 4% - at most - of the national budget, and your government is shutdown because of a procedural issue.
I strongly suggest you actually lookup the budget figures.
Are you really this pedantic? I used an 'and' and a 'semicolon'. If you parse my sentence you will see I made no such implication directly that the current issue with the House of Immature Children is the cause of, or effect of, our debt crisis. Anyway, do you disagree with Wikipedia? """"Debt crisis is the general term for a proliferation of massive public debt relative to tax revenues, especially in reference to Latin American countries during the 1980s, and the United States and the European Union since the mid-2000s.[1][2][3][4]"""
"We're in a major debt crises and have issues funding our fundamental operations; beyond the immediate government funding, we have severe problems with spending "
Like many wikipedia articles in areas where there has been intense political propaganda efforts, the one on debt crisis [1] which you quote but do not cite engages is badly confused and influenced by propaganda -- and the four sources for the sentence you quote are an opinion piece, a blog post, an infographic, and broken link, none of which (except, perhaps, the content which once was at the broken link) directly support the thesis of the sentence. By Wikipedia's own standards, that article is bad.
And while you say that the current issue with the House isn't the cause or the effect of the debt crisis, the only US examples of so-called "debt crisis" linked from the Wikipedia article you lean on are the current and 2011 debt ceiling debates. So, its ironic that you ask "Anyway, do you disagree with Wikipedia?"
Anyhow, the defining characteristic of a debt crisis is default risk, not debt vs. tax revenue (debt service cost vs. GDP -- not total debt vs. GDP -- is probably the best "easy" numerical measure for fundamental default risk, but the real source of default risk in the US is political games like the ones you discount from the "House of Immature Children".)
So, you're saying we're at a default risk not a debt crisis. OK, I used the wrong term above. Please substitute it as needed; my argument remains the same.
> So, you're saying we're at a default risk not a debt crisis.
No, I'm saying that debt crisis is equivalent to default risk, and that the only significant way in which we are in either (the two being the same) has nothing to do with economic or fiscal fundamentals -- the resources to service the debt are readily available -- and solely to do with the present political shenanigans.
actually, big projects often have to be maintained because otherwise, huge numbers of highly paid scientists are let go. It's easier to shut down short-term, small-employee projects (like annually funded grants).
Well, I think you're underestimating oil and gas, but that's another argument.
Nobody's denying fusion is a great energy source.
But your claim that there is a payoff for low risk is unsupported by reality: we have only ever invested money in fusion (risk) and have never received any useful power for it (payoff). At this time, the risk/payoff ratio is infinite.
> we have only ever invested money in fusion (risk) and have never received any useful power for it (payoff)
Now you're just being silly. You can say this about ANY research project. Better scrap the Manhattan Project before it finishes, we haven't seen any results. You're saying it's impossible to build a fusion power plant because we don't have one now?
Nevermind the fact that magnetic fusion research has been grossly underfunded for over 30 years.
By the time the Manhattan Project started, we had already made signficant progress. Such as Fermi's pile. We knew how to seperate uranium. The math was all there; it was mostly a matter of decision-making and execution.
I never said anything was impossible. But fusion is still solidly an unknown unknown: we have no credible path at this time to even plan a workable test reactor. I'm saying, for the amount invested, the results achieved, and the potential payoff, our money is best spent elsewhere are more boring and conventional things.
That's just not true, and skirts the line of the being a deliberate lie. Fusion has occured in tokamaks, at an efficiency of 65%. ITER, as currently designed and being built, is expected to make a 10-fold return on energy input.
We are precisely at the position of "the math is all there" with regard to magnetic confinement. And so is the engineering and the funding (barely). It's going to happen, hopefully not before it's too late.
I should mention that in the past, I worked on the software backing research tokamaks.
ITER is a research project. It is not designed to produce electricity. It was originally projected to cost over 5 billion pounds to build and has now tripled, but is years from completion. Even if it was successful beyond its wildest dreams, the best result would be that we'd have to spend another $50B to build a plant, and since that one would be the first and only, we wouldn't get much power from it.
BTW, ITER isn't even scheduled to be turned on to produce research results at scale until 2027. That's another 14 years before they even do something interesting!?
A hundred billion dollars is not a whole lot of money. We spent many, many times that on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the results there are passable at best.
A hundred billion dollars is a lot of money. The annual budget of NIH is ~$30B and it funds a high fraction of the most advanced biological research worldwide. The DOE also has a budget $30B and funds (along with this project) many other projects including alternative energies, advanced computing and the Human Genome Project. NSF is (only!) another $7B, leaving around $33B addition funds for a diverse research portfolio.
This kind of expenditure is required to maintain US at or near the highest level of technology research in the world (other countries can compete with us in many ways, such as lower labor costs). There are things that can only be physically done in a single location in the US and nowhere else in the world- and it will be that way until on of the postdocs goes back to Europe or Asia and replicates the result in their lab.
So yes, $100B is a lot of money- and that's the kind of investment that often ends up benefiting the US (and other) economy. The fusion research-- to the extent that what NIF is doing is translatable to other domains-- doesn't really meet this sniff test.
No single corporation controls that much capital; even the largest are just half-way there. Very few organizations can organize and control that amount of money.
I agree that compared to the total circulation of virtual money, $1T is small compared to the total.
Yes, and it's not certain that we will ever be able to have a stable, viable fusion plant. There are even somewhat recent works showing that certain kinds of confinement which were being tried in the early days are not theoretically viable.
We're still a few orders of magnitude away from energy, and we're probably quite a few reactor design innovations and material breakthroughs away, I'd say, as far as my layman knowledge goes.
That may well be true. But it also may well be true that absolutely none of the methods currently conceived are at all viable.
If we are spending money fast because we think we're in a sprint to achieving viable fusion power, but it turns out we're actually in a marathon, then it's quite possible we're wasting vast amounts of money unnecessarily. That's not an argument to stop funding fusion research, but it is an argument to moderate it and possibly even broaden the types of research being done to more projects but at overall lower funding rates.
When has coal power ever created the sort of crisis that occurred in Fukushima?
Because of fission reactors, the safety of entire regions of the world is dependent on a consistent power supply and lack of human error, something that clearly we can not rely on. In the event of a cosmic emp or major meteor strike, these power plants are at risk.
Coal power creates that kind of crisis every day, so we don't bother calling it a crisis anymore.
A total of 240,000 years of life were said to be lost in Europe in 2010 with 480,000 work days a year and 22,600 "life years" lost in Britain, the fifth most coal-polluted country.
This is not really calculable, nor is the number of people killed by coal calculable in any reasonable manner. However the impact of nuclear catastrophe is far far more insidious and lasting, particularly when caused by a global calamity that causes meltdown in many plants.
> particularly when caused by a global calamity that causes meltdown in many plants.
A what?? And how do you manage that? If you have unreasonable fears then there is no point in talking to you. Reason will not remove an unreasonable fear.
I suppose fear of a 9+ earthquake followed by a massive tsunami off the coast of Fukushima was considered unreasonable.
We are on a blob of rock hurtling through an unknown cosmos. Calamities are very possible. It is deeply irresponible to create projects that will make large parts of the earth uninhabitable should the power grid fail for a long period or human stewardship go on hiatus. Meteor strikes, emps, plagues, terrorist attacks, economic collapse,and other disasters are well within the realm of possibility
Because of Greenpeace's history (the death of an anti-nuclear testing activist and the destruction of one of their ships at the hands of French special forces in 1985 [1]), and their current anti-nuclear stance [2], I don't think they would back that position.
They would back the position that wind turbines are safer than coal, so you're not wrong that they might be biased to imply coal is more dangerous than it is.
The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty bans testing of any "nuclear" explosions. Doesn't matter if it's fission or fusion or both. (The United States has not ratified the CTBT, but generally abides by it.)
The Non-Proliferation Treaty bans the proliferation of any "nuclear" weapons. Again, doesn't matter if it's fission or fusion or both.
Pure fusion weapons also essentially destroy current non-proliferation efforts, which are mainly built around controlling access to fissile materials, and only secondarily some technologies.
> It's just that the western nations decided to go stupid about fission
I have many highly intelligent friends who subscribe to your view. Unfortunately they forget that fission is only as safe as the weakest link, and the consequences of failure are severe, especially when near a water source.
My fave quote from the article: "None of our instruments could measure it - it was way off scale. We cleaned up everything and we still couldn't get the dose down."
You called out the need for more reliable, safer, and smaller plants. I would argue that there needs to be a significant improvement before fission is publicly acceptable.
That appears to be an accident handling the output of an isotope manufacturing reactor, not anything involving a power reactor.
> I would argue that there needs to be a significant improvement before fission is publicly acceptable.
I would argue that fission is already held to a standard well above that of almost any human endeavor, even those with roughly similar risk profiles (compare almost any form of mining, or the shipping of hazardous cargo by rail)
> That appears to be an accident handling the output of an isotope manufacturing reactor, not anything involving a power reactor.
That is irrelevant to my point, which is that the biggest risk to reactor safety with current fission tech is human error and negligence.
> compare almost any form of mining
The only form of mining comparable in terms of potential environmental damage is ocean oil drilling[1], which I also oppose.
The point is - human nature (re: greedy and negligent idiots) makes current reactor tech unsafe. The potential fallout (pun intended) is not worth the significant risk.
If your technology has reached the point where human error and negligence is the primary source of risk, you've succeeded. That is the goal of producing all reliable technologies. Of course, at that point, your system design primarily exists to prevent human errors from causing harm (for example, yesterday there was a news report that a Fukushima cleanup worker managed to engage a pump that would dump a bunch of radioactive water in the wrong place. He was saved by a backup system.")
> If your technology has reached the point where human error and negligence is the primary source of risk, you've succeeded.
If all it takes is one earthquake or distracted technician to potentially vaporize a suburb, then your tech has not yet succeeded.
Safety regimes to minimize human error are great, but time and time again they are bypassed due to greed, negligence and idiocy. The Fukushima backup system you mention is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about - but they need to be comprehensive, redundant, and responsibly audited (the part that scares me the most).
The problem with fission is that its disasters are very hard to clean up. Mine collapses or fossil fuel fires are brief events. Most chemical spills either break down, are neutralised, or diluted to harmlessness (although far from all, see the various Superfund sites).
Fission disasters tend to emit nasty metals that are bioaccumulative, don't break down in a short timeframe and may be airborne or waterborne.
(Having said that, it looks like Bhopal was worse than Chernobyl for harm, and the chemical industry is still in business)
Why? What makes you think their corporations cut fewer corners than Western ones? What makes you think their employees/scientists/etc. are inherently more infallible than Western ones?
It wasn't "the Japanese" that didn't do it safely at Fukushima. It was GE, which is about as American as you get, along with Toshiba and Hitachi. Also it was the 1960s, which is the age of the technology deployed in these relative archaisms. See http://blog.rlucas.net/tech_and_market_reflections/fukushima...
It wasn't "the Japanese" that didn't do it safely at Fukushima. It was GE
Was GE responsible for the siting of the backup diesel generators and switchgear behind a seawall that was overcome by the tsunami? That was the root cause of all the problems; it wasn't anything to do with the reactor design itself, other than the fact that it needed active cooling after shutdown (which PWR designs from the same time period also did).
(That said, I agree the BWR design is outdated and modern designs with passive safety features are much, much better.)
But the backup generators could be moved (and were in similar US installations). Raising the backup generators to protect them against inundation was recommended, but the delay there is pure sclerotic TEPCO.
I still don't understand why Chinooks weren't in the air toward Fukushima within 30 minutes of the tsunami with some generators sling-loaded under them (and refueling, etc.). Either from the JSDF or US Military.
As I understand it, the issue was that not just the generators but the switchgear connecting them to the plant's power grid was behind the seawall that was overcome by the tsunami. So bringing in other generators wouldn't have helped, because there was no way to plug them into the grid.
You can usually get portable switchgear, and it was mainly pumps, which should be fairly tolerant even with an emergency cabling job. I'd really consider this a contingency plants should be ready for; if I operated at tepco scale I would probably have actual helicopters under contract (or priority with the military) and strategic equipment in hardened shelters at my plants, just to be able to move it to other plants.
From what I've read there was a leadership vacuum for the initial crisis at tepco. I'm actually going to try to visit as close as I can get to the plant tomorrow or Saturday (in Sendai right now)
Thought experiment... begin the experiment with the assumption that the "system" can produce and sustain 2000 brains capable of safely operating a nuke plant. You can build 1000 slightly less safe but bigger plants, or 10000 smaller slightly safer small plants, but you've still only got 2000 usable nuke level brains to staff them. Either half the big brains are going to be unemployed, or 80% of the only very slightly safer plants are going to be run by morons. Don't amuse me with deus ex machina about automation; I'll counter by changing my thought experiment to only 2000 nuke-capable sysadmins are available or whatever.
I think you're unfairly dismissing magnetic confinment, the limited supply of fissionable material, and the unprecedented issues that accompany the management of dangerous material (or anything for that matter) for 10,000 years.
Fusion research is worthwhile. Of course it's not the only path to sustainable energy, but it's one of the most promising.
In particular: The NIH experiment recapitulates many of the design aspects of a thermonuclear weapon, but does so in a highly controlled lab environment.
I'm a biophysicist. I know a fair amount of engineering, although I'm not a weapons physicist. Nonetheless, after years of reading about the NIF and various fusion projects I've come to believe that there is little justification for their expenditure. In particular, we can do stockpile stewardship without this device, more cheaply, nor does NIF present an economically viable method to production of power at a large scale in even the most rosy predictions.
I still think the experimental design is cool, but I can't see this as a rational expenditure (HUGE opex and capex) compared to other investments we could be making.
Most likely scenario I see in 20 years is that china will be mass-manufacturing small, safe fission reactors and making a mint selling them to the rest of the world. That's got far less reqiurement for massive capex and opex. It's just that the western nations decided to go stupid about fission because OH GOD NUCLEAR MUTATIONS and stop investing in building more reliable, safer, and smaller plants.