“We are probably less than 15 years away from seeing a fusion power station begin to contribute to the grid.”
No way. Not thinking in bets. I’ll bet Ridley big money at good odds his statement will prove false.
The main advances are in magnets and lasers and are genuinely impressive. Those technologies could have lots of positive spillover effects, but they are still not nearly that close to being implemented in a practical reactor and plant. A billion or two from Bezos doesn’t prove much – compare to the recent numbers for investment in new chip plants, which is at least two orders of magnitude larger.
If the standard is “genuinely profitable and competitive without subsidies and other market distortions”, then even 2050 seems optimistic for initial operation of such a plant, let alone the tech being widely distributed enough such that it is “starting to make a big difference”.
Even fission nuclear – which is much, much easier and cheaper and which we’ve been doing for *seventy* years – still can’t meet that standard under the current regulatory regime. Using breeders and recycling, fission is extremely plentiful and cheap – which we’ve known for ages – and if one was going to be optimistic about the technology, one might think that in 70 years we would have figured it out and it would be “starting to make a big difference”.
Imagine someone 85 years ago predicting that fission, if someone could do it, would make a huge difference. That person would have been right about “working plants in 15 years!” Yet, after all that time, the tech is still stuck down at about 10% of total electricity generation, only ahead of burning crude oil, which only makes sense in unique situations like Saudi or Singapore. Even proposed new fission techs seem little more than billionaire vanity / PR projects that require immense government subsidy, and even those seem way off on the horizon. And keep in mind that could have solved the greenhouse gas / climate change issue decades ago, but actually the revealed preference is that we don’t seem to care so much about what is purportedly the world’s most alarming problem and likely source of ultimate catastrophe if it means building lots of fission reactors.
Instead, fission generation is flat or declining in the West, and the only significant source of growth is, naturally, China. North America has been flat for a long time, few new plants, many old plants gradually closing. Europe is abandoning the tech: nuc. gen. peaked way back in 2004 and has now gone back to levels from *35 year ago*. Japan shut everything down in 2011 after Fukishima (their SHTF-with-China plutonium stockpile was probably big enough by then anyway) and they are turning it back on very, very slowly, but even now a decade later it’s still at levels not seen since the late 70s.
Ridley is also wrong about “no waste”. People think fusion is ‘clean’ and unlike fission because it “doesn’t produce radioactive nuclear waste” like fission does, and they are doing so based on naively looking at the nuclear stoichiometry of the principle theoretical reactions.
But the thing is, there are necessarily lots and lots of free thermal neutrons flying around, and they get captured by surrounding materials, turning them increasingly radioactive over time. Ask the people who are running the experimental reactors how “clean” everything is, or check out the extent of regulations and cost of compliance they have to deal with in order to deal with those irradiated materials and do disposal and decomissioning and so forth. If you’re going to have to do that anyway, might as well do fission.
Handle, please clarify your meaning in “their SHTF-with-China plutonium stockpile was probably big enough….”
Sure. The short version is that due to its special domestic and geopolitical situation, Japan – a country perfectly capable of making nukes – needs a way to have its own nukes, without actually “having” nukes.
The way you do that is to have all the tech ready to go, except for the very last step or two in the assembly of the warheads before loading them on missiles. You need Plutonium to do that, because Uranium nukes won’t fit on missiles and need big bombers.
Japan had lots of reactors which made Plutonium as a byproduct. Well, where did it all go? I’m hardly alone in believing they kept it all and made it into bombs they stored in many secret vaults under mountains. Well, *nearly* bombs, just a few critical steps away from push-button detonation. They can’t test, naturally, but given their technical sophistication and the face that the tech is now over 75 years old and practically open source at this point, they probably don’t need to.
There is the additional question of whether they went all the way to near-H-bombs or are satisfied with near-A-bombs. Israel seems to be cool with just A-bombs, though there are people who dispute this. For Japan, my money’s on the H – that’s what they’d need for war with China.
Why keep it all secret and not just become an officially open nuclear country? Well, they technically aren’t even supposed to have a military at all “Article 9”, but this has been reinterpreted and watered down so many times that it’s understood to be effectively null in all but letter. Abe tried to change it officially, but he got sick and resigned before getting it done. But going so far as to build *and* announce having nukes is still a step too far.
Also, there is the sensitive and special relationship with America and security cooperation agreements which put Japan under the US nuclear umbrella.
But … how good a friend is America, really? And how good will it be in the future? If things go sour with China, can America be relied upon 100% to follow through even if it means nuclear war? Or would the US abandon Japan in its hour of need? Would you bet your life and country on the answer to this question? If you found out that the US wasn’t going to follow through, would you want to be in the position of having to amass an arsenal big enough to constitute a credible nuclear deterrent in, what, months? Weeks? Days? When it takes years and years?
Of course not. So, Japan used its reactors to make Plutonium to make near-nukes, just in case. They probably had enough reactors long enough to make enough Plutonium to reach their target capability, so, for this particular purpose, they can afford to idle their power plants for a while.
“We are probably less than 15 years away from seeing a fusion power station begin to contribute to the grid.”
No way. Not thinking in bets. I’ll bet Ridley big money at good odds his statement will prove false.
The main advances are in magnets and lasers and are genuinely impressive. Those technologies could have lots of positive spillover effects, but they are still not nearly that close to being implemented in a practical reactor and plant. A billion or two from Bezos doesn’t prove much – compare to the recent numbers for investment in new chip plants, which is at least two orders of magnitude larger.
If the standard is “genuinely profitable and competitive without subsidies and other market distortions”, then even 2050 seems optimistic for initial operation of such a plant, let alone the tech being widely distributed enough such that it is “starting to make a big difference”.
Even fission nuclear – which is much, much easier and cheaper and which we’ve been doing for *seventy* years – still can’t meet that standard under the current regulatory regime. Using breeders and recycling, fission is extremely plentiful and cheap – which we’ve known for ages – and if one was going to be optimistic about the technology, one might think that in 70 years we would have figured it out and it would be “starting to make a big difference”.
Imagine someone 85 years ago predicting that fission, if someone could do it, would make a huge difference. That person would have been right about “working plants in 15 years!” Yet, after all that time, the tech is still stuck down at about 10% of total electricity generation, only ahead of burning crude oil, which only makes sense in unique situations like Saudi or Singapore. Even proposed new fission techs seem little more than billionaire vanity / PR projects that require immense government subsidy, and even those seem way off on the horizon. And keep in mind that could have solved the greenhouse gas / climate change issue decades ago, but actually the revealed preference is that we don’t seem to care so much about what is purportedly the world’s most alarming problem and likely source of ultimate catastrophe if it means building lots of fission reactors.
Instead, fission generation is flat or declining in the West, and the only significant source of growth is, naturally, China. North America has been flat for a long time, few new plants, many old plants gradually closing. Europe is abandoning the tech: nuc. gen. peaked way back in 2004 and has now gone back to levels from *35 year ago*. Japan shut everything down in 2011 after Fukishima (their SHTF-with-China plutonium stockpile was probably big enough by then anyway) and they are turning it back on very, very slowly, but even now a decade later it’s still at levels not seen since the late 70s.
Ridley is also wrong about “no waste”. People think fusion is ‘clean’ and unlike fission because it “doesn’t produce radioactive nuclear waste” like fission does, and they are doing so based on naively looking at the nuclear stoichiometry of the principle theoretical reactions.
But the thing is, there are necessarily lots and lots of free thermal neutrons flying around, and they get captured by surrounding materials, turning them increasingly radioactive over time. Ask the people who are running the experimental reactors how “clean” everything is, or check out the extent of regulations and cost of compliance they have to deal with in order to deal with those irradiated materials and do disposal and decomissioning and so forth. If you’re going to have to do that anyway, might as well do fission.
Handle, please clarify your meaning in “their SHTF-with-China plutonium stockpile was probably big enough….”
Sure. The short version is that due to its special domestic and geopolitical situation, Japan – a country perfectly capable of making nukes – needs a way to have its own nukes, without actually “having” nukes.
The way you do that is to have all the tech ready to go, except for the very last step or two in the assembly of the warheads before loading them on missiles. You need Plutonium to do that, because Uranium nukes won’t fit on missiles and need big bombers.
Japan had lots of reactors which made Plutonium as a byproduct. Well, where did it all go? I’m hardly alone in believing they kept it all and made it into bombs they stored in many secret vaults under mountains. Well, *nearly* bombs, just a few critical steps away from push-button detonation. They can’t test, naturally, but given their technical sophistication and the face that the tech is now over 75 years old and practically open source at this point, they probably don’t need to.
There is the additional question of whether they went all the way to near-H-bombs or are satisfied with near-A-bombs. Israel seems to be cool with just A-bombs, though there are people who dispute this. For Japan, my money’s on the H – that’s what they’d need for war with China.
Why keep it all secret and not just become an officially open nuclear country? Well, they technically aren’t even supposed to have a military at all “Article 9”, but this has been reinterpreted and watered down so many times that it’s understood to be effectively null in all but letter. Abe tried to change it officially, but he got sick and resigned before getting it done. But going so far as to build *and* announce having nukes is still a step too far.
Also, there is the sensitive and special relationship with America and security cooperation agreements which put Japan under the US nuclear umbrella.
But … how good a friend is America, really? And how good will it be in the future? If things go sour with China, can America be relied upon 100% to follow through even if it means nuclear war? Or would the US abandon Japan in its hour of need? Would you bet your life and country on the answer to this question? If you found out that the US wasn’t going to follow through, would you want to be in the position of having to amass an arsenal big enough to constitute a credible nuclear deterrent in, what, months? Weeks? Days? When it takes years and years?
Of course not. So, Japan used its reactors to make Plutonium to make near-nukes, just in case. They probably had enough reactors long enough to make enough Plutonium to reach their target capability, so, for this particular purpose, they can afford to idle their power plants for a while.
Thanx, gripping stuff!
O/T: I don’t recall, but did anyone here post on The Tablet, on Rauch?
See https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/new-national-american-elite .
“Coup” and “insurrection” will become aspirational the moment the next Republican president is elected.