Nuclear Fusion Won't Be Regulated in the US the Same Way as Nuclear Fission - Sl...
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Last week there was some good news for startups working on commercial nuclear fusion in the U.S. And it came from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or NRC), the top governing body for America's nuclear power plants nuclear materials, reports CNBC:
The top regulatory agency for nuclear materials safety in the U.S. voted unanimously to regulate the burgeoning fusion industry differently than the nuclear fission industry, and fusion startups are celebrating that as a major win. As a result, some provisions specific to fission reactors, like requiring funding to cover claims from nuclear meltdowns, won't apply to fusion plants. (Fusion reactors cannot melt down....)
Other differences include looser requirements around foreign ownership of nuclear fusion plants, and the dispensing of mandatory hearings at the federal level during the licensing process, said Andrew Holland, CEO of the industry group, the Fusion Industry Association... The approach to regulating fusion is akin to the regulatory regime that is currently used to regulate particle accelerators, which are machines that are capable of making elementary nuclear particles, like electrons or protons, move really fast, the Fusion Industry Association says...
Technically speaking, fusion will be regulated under Part 30 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Jeff Merrifield, a former NRC commissioner, told CNBC. The regulatory structure for nuclear fission is under Part 50 of that code. "The regulatory structure needed to regulate particle accelerators under Part 30, is far simpler, less costly and more efficient than the more complicated rules imposed on fission reactors under Part 50," Merrifield told CNBC. "By making this decision to use the Part 30, the commission recognized the decreased risk of fusion technologies when compared with traditional nuclear reactors and has imposed a framework that more appropriately aligns the risks and the regulations," he said.
"Private fusion companies have raised about $5 billion to commercialize and scale fusion technology," the article points out, "and so the decision from the NRC on how the industry would be regulated is a big deal for companies building in the space." And they shared three reactions from the commercial fusion industry:
- The CEO of the industry group, the Fusion Industry Association told CNBC the decision was "extremely important."
- The scientific director for fusion startup Focused Energy told CNBC the decision "removes a major area of uncertainty for the industry."
- The general counsel for nuclear fusion startup Helion told CNBC. "It is now incumbent on us to demonstrate our safety case as we bring fusion to the grid, and we look forward to working with the public and regulatory community closely on our first deployments."
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Protesters, frivolous lawsuits, scaremongering. For many people anything with the word nuclear in it is scary!
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Let them live next to a coal power plant then. I'm generally free for letting people vote as much misery upon themselves as they'd care to as long as it doesn't infringe on someone else's rights. There will be a few places that try something different and if it's more successful eventually others will come to their sense and follow suit or suffer from their own foolishness.
If the rest of the locals don't believe as you do and vote against your values or interests then move. Everyone will probably be happ-
It's not necessarily the locals. It's often some group in a city hundreds of miles away who wish to signal their virtue.
Feel free to guess how many fusion plants will be built inside the Seattle or Portland city limits.
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Unfortunately that is a large part of the reason the world has 400 reactors and 8000 coal plants. Moving away does not really help.
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Well,
even if a coal power plant would be as polluting as you think:
a) the dirt does not fall down close to the plant - oops
b) it takes decades to kill enough (if at all) to have the effect you want
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Seems mild compared to the prevailing panic that whole countries will be wiped out by climate change. People whining about the theoretical (and tiny in relative terms) property damage from nuclear deserve every bit of the very real property damage the next century is going to bring them. Enjoy those encroaching coastlines. Good thing you saved us from scary atoms.
For the entire last half of the 20th century the defacto choice was nuclear or coal. You choose coal, and the blame is indeed going to be wher
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First and foremost climate change is primarily going to affect people in lower income brackets. Those people aren't the ones who decide whether or not you get a nuclear power plant.
But again you have not addressed a single one of the problems that I raised. Just pretend they don't exist. It's incredibly frustrating because talking with you seems like a complete waste of time because you refuse to address the actual concerns us nimbys have-
If you think the risk of an accident is a show stopper then nothing I say is going to convince you otherwise. Most people are quite bad at assessing risk. You are getting the nice safe world you desire. Enjoy.
Government seems to insist it will affect everyone. But that said yes, wealthier people make the decisions and poorer people suffer the brunt of the results, no argument here, that has always been true. At least you admit your phobia about nuclear power will mostly hurt others, and nobody will eve
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Why not try to convince us?
You? Probably because that's impossible. If you're unable to comprehend the difference between a magnetron and nuclear fission, then how the hell is anybody supposed to help you understand fusion?
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Either you need to convince me that you can build a nuclear power plant that can be run safely even though maintenance is being skipped or you need to convince me you have found a way to prevent privatization from causing maintenance to be skipped.
That's it that's all you have to do. You haven't even tried. And then you bitch all day long because people like me are going to continue blocking nuclear power plants until you can address the safety concerns.
I'm not asking to understand fusion I'm asking-
Well,
how should he convince you when you obviously don't know that a fusion plant is inherently safe?
Or would you like to try to convince us what kind of accident could happen in a fusion plant? Except some engineer dropping from a ladder or a waitress in a cafeteria slipping in the kitchen?
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They have. If you're not convinced fusion is safe it's because either you haven't been paying attention, or you have faith in someone who is lying to you
Fusion lacks almost all the problems of fission power:
Chance of a meltdown? Zero. There are no self-sustaining chain reactions as there are with fission - stop feeding it electricity, and the nuclear reaction stops.
Long-lasting radioactive waste? Zero. Depending on the reaction some radioactive hydrogen and helium may be produced, but those are extremely valuable commercial products, easily extracted. (Used in things like MRI machines, etc)
There is low-level waste - things like radiation suits, shielding, etc. that are directly exposed to the reactor core and become neutron-activated - but such waste is short lived (generally speaking, back to roughly the same as a banana within 10-100 years), relatively safe to handle with modest precautions, and easily disposed of in a safe manner.
And the risk of environmental contamination is basically limited to a explosion scattering that low-level waste.
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But there aren't actually any nuclear fusion plants currently producing electricity at scale if all goes well ITER might have a prototype reactor up and running for testing in 2025. But again if I understand it correctly they've been added since 1978. So you'll forgive me if I'm just a little bit skeptical....
That leaves are existing nuclear technology. Which has all of the risks I've listed above.
Again there's a reason why nimbys are nimbys. On the one hand they're not good reasons in the sense th-
How about addressing my concerns? Do you want nuclear or do you just like complaining?
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Long-lasting radioactive waste? Zero.
That heavily depends. For current research reactors: it is completely and utterly wrong!
However the goal is to switch to neutron free reactions when we understand the basics - there is actually quite advanced research going that way.
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I'm only interested in reaching those who can see reason. For other kinds of anti-nukes, I would rather they stay where they are on the other side of the divide.
That would only apply to kinds of nuclear power which have a large contaminant dispersion potential. It looks like some kinds of fission and fusion would not fall into that category.
Not for kinds which don't have that sort of disaster potential.
Unlike, say, the U.S.S.R.--which developed and built the most dangerous power plant design, operated it
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There's more than enough of us to block nuclear power so you don't have much of a choice if you want to see it happen.
There aren't as many of you as you think. Gallup typically shows the US split 50-50 on nuclear, and that's for the half-century old fission plants.
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You forgot the maggots who are scared of the Chinese. China has the patents on this technology. They have facilities to build them. A big draw of these new reactors is they can be assembled on site, not built from scratch.
Any cost effective reactor will be from Chinese components. Assembled in the US as needed.
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What? The Chinese don't have a functional Fusion plant any more than anyone else.
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Lots of countries have functional fusion plants. It's just that nobody has an economically-useful fusion plant -- one that gets you more energy than it really costs you (yes, break-even was recently achieved on technical grounds for impractical definitions of what it costs you, but not the true cost).
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China is not our friend and should not be treated as such, but no question they are able to build big things effectively. We used to be able to do that in the West, but those days are rapidly coming to a close.
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Well, that is actually simple to solve.
If you would stop making China your enemy, they would be your friend.
Wow, that was so simple again.-
If only they were not a shithole dictatorship. Ask Hong Kong how being friends with China is working. How did being friends with Putin work out for you?
Slow learner.
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According to American surveys taken in the middle of the protests, about 80% of Hong Kongers are happy with one country two systems and 83% are happy to be part of China -- even while most were still supporting the protests which they eventually soured on after 2 years of non-stop chaos.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/k... [forbes.com]Sorry, did you want data-free propaganda answers?
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I wasn't aware they had even achieved "break-even" (taking into account the energy needed to start the reaction), let alone a sustained reaction and a practical way to convert it to electrical energy.
Does that mean we're less than the proverbial 20 years away?
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No, humanity are not close to daily operation and to supplying the net.
However, as developments in law are typically (too) slow, it does not hurt to already start thinking about it. -
Correct, commercialization is still very much in the realm of science fiction. It is still impossible to sustain a fusion reaction, let alone harness the energy it creates. What we're currently able to achieve is not scalable in any sense. We can cause the conditions required for fusion for a picosecond using extremely toxic and expensive tritium fuel that actually requires a nuclear reactor just to generate. This entire article is nonsense.
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The EAST reactor in China sustained fusion for 17 minutes.
https://www.ief.org/news/how-c... [ief.org]
Sure there are many hurdles and nobody knows how long it might take, but your statement is off by 15 orders of magnitude which may be a record in itself.
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Tokamak based fusion is fundamentally not a sustained fusion reaction, so it's a bit of a mischaracterization. IMO the more interesting recent result is the published 8 minute sustained plasma from Wendelstein 7X. A Stellerator design is actually designed for a sustained operation and the project is operating mostly on schedule. The goal is to reach 30 minutes in the next operation phase within 3-4 years and at that point, they expect that they can effectively keep the plasma up as long as desired. This doe
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Please watch this before finalizing any opinions. Scheduled to complete in 2024.
SPARC [slashdot.org] -
It is still impossible to sustain a fusion reaction, let alone harness the energy it creates.
You're confusing "unachieved" and "impossible". Consider, for example, the sentence "Nobody has achieved building an aircraft with a 1000tonne payload, but that doesn't mean that it is impossible."
using extremely toxic and expensive tritium fuel
"Toxic"? So toxic and dangerous that your office, school, and quite possibly house has it in regular use. (Look for any escape route signs without a power lead going into th
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Yes. Tokamaks are all but there thanks to new superconductors that function at higher magnetic fields. Look up Commonwealth Fusion Systems, who at least in my mind are the most likely to get there. The reactor building for their âoeSPARCâ reactor is now complete, and the reactor begins construction this month. SPARC is a tokomak that thanks to much higher magnetic fields is expected to achieve a Q_plasma of 5-10 in somewhere around 2025. Once thatâ(TM)s done they expect to build the ARC
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I wasn't aware they had even achieved "break-even" (taking into account the energy needed to start the reaction)
Individual "runs" of both of the experimental systems regularly achieve "technical break-even" (releasing more energy than is required to create the laser pulse (plasma cloud) in which the fusion occurs. But that's not commercial break-even - putting more energy out to the grid than was required to power up the system. The next generation of "tokamak" (under construction in France at this time) sh
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From now on it is only 19 years away... for every 19 years passed of course.
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I think this is mostly about making fusion a more attractive investment, so the moneyed interests might put some real money into it and actually make it happen before China does.
Fusion has basically always been funded at a "never get it done" level, and unless that changes it'll always be decades away. People have this idea that our society has been pouring money into fusion when the opposite is the case. For example, the US has spent about $20B total in fusion research since 1950. This is comparable to the
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The regulations for things that do not exist are always reduced. Once someone comes up with a working fusion system, you can be sure that all sorts of regulations will be created. For one reason, it is not practical to come up with regulations until the technology and its risks are known and for the second until it exists there is no push back from parties other than the regulators and the regulated, but you can be sure there will be as soon as someone actually wants to build something.
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> The regulations for things that do not exist are always reduced.
Indeed! I found exactly zero unicorn and bigfoot regulations.
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We absolutely f&*k%d up nuclear fission. Not as bad as the Russians did, but that’s a rreeaalllll low bar. We were conservative where we should have been liberal, and liberal where we should have been conservative.
If we want to see fusion go ANYWHERE this century, we need smarter regulation.-
But you just don't understand, gays are getting married, men are wearing funny clothes, and someone put a rainbow on a beer can! All that requires much greater attention than critical infrastructure and energy security.
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No one is saying fusion should not be regulated. They are saying it wont be regulated by fission regulations. Thats like putting the horse breeding associations in charge of the department of driving safety. It needs regulation specific to fusion with none of the other red tape inherited.
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Being China's gov't is more likely to gamble with the lives of their citizens per pollution or fallout, that may indeed be the case. The Soviets (mostly) caught up in nuclear weapons in the 40's and 50's by moving fast and breaking people.
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by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 23, 2023 @05:17PM (#63471536)
tritium and deiterium, which are insanely radioactive.
Not really. Tritium has a 12 year half-life. But it's decay products are very low energy, incapable of passing through a few millimeters of air. Deuterium is for all intents and purposes stable.
Crazy video ignored.
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Yes, I have a small tritium key fob I got from amazon. It glows in the dark (or all the time actually but on visible in the dark) but since the shell is 2MM thick it's not any real danger. I think people also use it on gun sights to make them glow.
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Tritium is only a million times more radioactive than Uranium and about 1000 times more expensive than gold and still needs 10 million K to fuse with Deuterium. There won't be any significant power plants fusing anything at least not in our lifetimes. Tritium is made in nuclear reactors of course, it won't be sourced in any other manner. Nuclear reactors on the other hand are here, are safe and will be built in large numbers.
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One day someone is going to turn their watch hands or night sights into a dirty bomb LOL.
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Tritium isn't useful for that. It's not "dirty" because it only emits beta radiation (i.e. electrons) and decays into helium. It would take a lot of work to poison someone with tritium - it's probably bad for you if you drink it straight up in the form of "super-heavy water", but just releasing it into the environment won't do much.
There are industrial and medical radiation sources that in theory could be used for such a thing. It would take a lot of work to get enough radioactive materials together to rais
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Your lack of knowledge on the subject is pretty apparent.
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Here is what will happen. Huge piles of money will be spent but we will not be building fusion reactors to power our world, not in this century anyway. Meanwhile we have a perfectly good solution with nuclear power (fission) and whoever starts building these in mass will win this game.
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I am afraid that the nearest (working) Fusion Reactor is out of jurisdiction of any terrestrial lawmakers and regulators.
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agreed.... it's a moot discussion since we're decades away from true, practical, implemented fusion.
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It is fairly trivial to construct a fusion reactor. We've seen high school students build fusion reactors in their parents' basements and garages for decades. The hard part with a fusion reactor is to get them to do anything useful. One big goal people want to reach with nuclear fusion is power production. I saw a talk on YouTube some time ago where a subject matter expert on nulcear fusion was speaking, Dr. Robert W. Bussard. Dr. Bussard was speaking about his experiments that were funded by the US Na
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They still should escrow some money that is required to clean up all the nuclear waste they are creating. And show proper precations when dealing with dangerious materials like tritium. And they should be accountable for any claims they make and also make it clear in their press releases that there isn't enough tritium for commecial use and it isn't being manufactured enough, and large scale manufacturing of tritium is very problematic.
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