This ain’t that cold fusion scam, it’s the real deal with limitless energy. No more worries about mining for bitcoins, let er rip. Save the climate, nuke the whales.
But no matter in which camp you are, a nearly pollution free source of energy with low space requirements is sexy per se.
And something has changed: All of a sudden private money went into research, reflecting public interest. This is a much different situation than scientist playing around in an ivory tower.
FYI: 1 kWh = 3.6MJ. So it’s more a straw than a harvest.
Still it’s progress, previous “successes” lasted nano-seconds.
BTW: Germany and Belgium are rethinking their exit from nuclear anergy.
(an old Dutch proverb says: It is better to turn halfway, than get lost altogether)
We (NL) are building 2 new nuclear plants to get us through the energy transition.
But coal and oil fired energy plants are definitively going to be outphased.
This news annoyed me in some way.
To me it more or less just look like a grab for more public funding, cuz even if they managed to generate power for 30 toasters for a split second, it is very very very far from what is needed now and in the future with ever increasing needs for power.
Denmark are non nuclear ATM, but i really think we should go with many smaller plants ASAP, one company here are also close to be able to start a production line of those, the huge, super expensive and long time to build plants, well i leave that to others.
Really i see no way around this even if we have a lot or renewables, it would be extremely stupid / irresponsible to rely on power from other countries in the event of days with little / no wind or solar.
Really a country should be able to meet its own energy needs, anything else would be stupid, like we EU boys have just seen with the gas issue.
IF ! you are depending on others, for anything, you will be the looser, or at best in some way or another it will cost you dearly.
No. Both Nexits (Schröder, later Merkel) costed a fortune and the trust of the industry. Trained personnel is also lost. Rebuilding everything costs another fortune. As much as I’d love the return to NPPs, it seems impossible, tho it’s necessary to get rid of coal, gasoline and gas in any forseeable future.
Let me refrase. Both countries were heading to an early retirement of nuclear.
Today they are studying a possible extended life span of the still working units.
To cite my mother: never throw away old shoes before you have broken in new ones.
That goes for relations as wel as for (renewable) energy strategies.
For the sake of ensuring energy independence and keeping future energy costs as low as possible, this is research that should receive public funding. Public funding has helped reduce the cost of solar and other forms of renewable energy already, and the cost of building the necessary infrastructure, and we’d be farther along in that direction if funding had been steadily maintained. It’s unlikely that my own country will be running out of hydrogen molecules anytime soon.
The only news about fusion you should be hyped about is when viable commercial plant is online, i’m betting none of us will be of this world when (if) this happens.
How can it burn the low level waste produced in the mining and refining of the uranium? To say there is no waste produced is not right.
Where does the majority of uranium come from?
I’m not an expert on fusion, but I don’t think fusion uses fissile materials like uranium or plutonium. I think it uses hydrogen and lithium, but somebody with more knowledge of the current experiments can correct me if I’m wrong about that.