Pioneering nuclear fusion power plants are to be fast tracked through the planning process and supported with taxpayer money as Britain attempts to become a world leader in the technology.
Under new proposals by the Government, commercial fusion reactors will be exempt from the usual planning rules governing nuclear power stations.
One of the major changes will be to class nuclear fusion reactors as nationally significant infrastructure projects, with ministers deciding if they should go ahead and preventing local authorities from scrutinising them.
It means companies planning fusion reactors can avoid the years of red tape blocking current nuclear power stations.
Why not do that with fission plants?
Did you mean fission?
Indeed, now fixed. Ta
Because they don’t want people building fission plants.
But don’t worry, you’ll be allowed to build magic Star Trek: TNG reactors as soon as they’re technically and commercially feasible (never).
No one has run commercial fusion plants. People have been running fission plants for 70 years. Surely this should be the other way around?
Because fission works? That would defeat the whole object of Nut Zero!
as Britain attempts to become a world leader in the technology.
We were a world leader in atomic power in 1954. How did that work out?
The Government wants to award contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds by next year to build a prototype at West Burton.
“Hundreds of millions of pounds”, lol. That’s like trying to become a world leader in jet engines on a budget of 30p and a child’s drawing of a plane.
“The benefits of fusion energy for the UK not only include the potential for a low carbon and reliable base load energy source for the future, but the potential to deliver economic and social benefits through the creation of jobs, attracting investment into the UK and the development of high-value skills.”
Who are these clowns trying to kid? Britain is a shitty cheap labour economy, run by scumbags. There’s no “investment” in “skills”, only infinity immigration of sub-80 IQ dependents, many of whom don’t know how to use indoor toilets.
Andrew Bowie, the nuclear minister, said on Wednesday: “Fusion could provide a near limitless source of energy and the UK is leading the way in trying to harness this power and deliver long-term energy independence.”
Jam is always tomorrow, today is always Net Zero beatings.
Atomic lions.
The parallels with Atlas Shrugged are just piling up every day……the authorities in that fictional reality were always hoping that some external source of new wealth would be discovered that would pay for their socialist paradise. It didn’t work out for them, and it won’t for us either.
Everyone used to laugh at Rand for her quaint hatred of socialism and what it would do to a society, who’s laughing now?
Hmm. In Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, Uncle Quentin was working on “a project to deliver heat, light and power for practically nothing.”
70 years ago.
” In Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, Uncle Quentin was working on “a project to deliver heat, light and power for practically nothing.””
And yet he did all this from home. No commuting to a research lab, or even an office, for Uncle Quentin. He could devise a new source of energy in his own shed. The 1950s were indeed a wondrous age……
I suppose to be fair, fission plants contain and produce some very dangerous substances that need to be controlled, handled and disposed-of with considerable care. Whereas, fusion (if it can actually ever be made to work) shouldn’t have those problems and could be treated as no more of a hazard than a factory making widgets.
Since Fusion power is always 40 years away this means that the govt should shift the Nut Zero target to 2064.
Up to a point Lord Copper. The steel etc of the containment Tokamak is going to be pretty hairy for some generations….
Fission plants produce teeny-tiny amounts of truly dangerous stuff. Most of which becomes significantly less dangerous after sitting in a pool of water for a few years. The problem is that the classifications for “high-level” and “medium-level” waste have such low thresholds that things that should just be chucked in a skip and forgotten about have to be “properly” disposed of at enormous and unnecessary expense.
For reference, Cornwall would count as medium-level nuclear waste.
Don’t forget, the moment that fusion becomes economically viable it will be the Worst Thing Ever™ by the following lunchtime. The sole purpose of environmentalism is to make everyone poor and miserable, and cheap abundant energy is the anathema of that.
Matt reminds me that I recently read a report that experience has suggested that estimated half-lives are too long, and the concept should be revisited.
Sorry, not my field and I do not have a reference.
My understanding is that the Brits and Frogs, though not the Yanks, reprocess their spent fuel to use the plutonium to make Mixed Oxide Fuel by mixing it with Depleted Uranium. The fission products have relatively short half lives so they’re deemed safe in a few hundred years.
Of course you’ve still got some Depleted Uranium left over, but that’s less radioactive than the natural stuff.
Not sure why the US doesn’t do this. They probably wouldn’t need Yucca Mountain if they did.
For lack of reprocessing, blame Jimmeh Carter. It was intended to help prevent bomb proliferation by making it hard to process out the plutonium etc.
How’d that work out?
Same reason they don’t build “breeder” reactors. Which should actually be called “efficient” reactors. Our current reactors leave 90% plus of the energy content to decay in a pool instead of using it for heat.
Yeah M.
If I believed in Net Zero, I’d be pushing fission reactors to power our grid, with as many as we could make being breeder reactors.
But we’ve got thousands of years of fossil fuels left, so there’s no need to worry.
We already got fission plant.
Yellow ball in sky makes plants grow, kill the plants, bury deep, wait, do drilling and you have natural gas from that fission.
Lower footprint than coal and wood chips. And excess can be exported to places that still use a lot of coal.
If fracked gas was rebranded gas from nuclear fission it might be a go-er.
There are all kinds of approaches to Fusion. Nobody has produced Q>1, excess power. Which one to pick? Those guys with the sinoff from Culham JET? Home grown and already supported with gov money. But what if they aren’t as good as some other? Or the metalurgical problems mean you can’t keep the thing running? Are they, the govt, willing to back the first success or reinforce failure as usual?
Fission works, do that until the Mr Fusion becomes available. Oh, and insist that whatever power is produced is cheap. Subsidise nothing, wind, waves, sunshine, fusion whatever. If it ain’t cheap it doesn’t get on the grid.
Fusion, damnit.
Not my work…..:
“I’ve solved all my energy problems at my place. I have racks of buttered cats rotating slowly. This may sound strange but is my invention for sustainable energy.
The idea is simple:
Fact 1 – We all know that buttered toast lands butter side down.
Fact 2 – We all know that cats always land on their feet.
So, take one cat, apply a liberal amount of butter to its’ back and drop it…..
Voila!!
Because it doesn’t know which way up to land, it just spins, aprroximately one foot off the ground.
Attach a dynamo and a pulley system and you have free (I steal the butter and the cats) sustainable power.
Each cat is worth half a patio heaters worth of electricity and I have 17 patio heaters in and around the house. You do the maths…..
Please keep this to yourself though as my Dad has a cardboard wind turbine on his allotment and earns loads of money off Ed Davey and if this got out it would ruin him”.
From 2015 or so.
Addolff – I know a guy who powers his air conditioning that way.
He says it’s cool for cats.
@Baron Jackfield The way we do fusion produces the wrong brand™ of Helium.
It is, in fact, a controlled-reaction neutron bomb. Which is as nasty as it sounds. And not “clean” at all.
I do wonder where they got the pipe dream of commercial fusion from, other than the 1950’s…
We’ve just about managed to get an overall positive output from the process once, for all of 5 milliseconds, after some heavy numbercrunching.
With none of that energy actually being converted into something we can use….. Just overall in versus out calculations.
Now… who do I approach to offer a once-in-a-lifetime chance to obtain a stack of Unobtainium needed for those commercial reactors I’ve got sitting in my shed…
@Grikath and others…
I fear that as it’s nearly 60 years since I did my Physics degree that I’m obviously a long-way out-of-date when it comes to the joys of fusion… 🙂
“… can avoid the years of red tape…”. Like they did with the mRNA muckment? Casualty rate still being assessed.
Nuclear fusion – it’s been the fuel of the future for years, and always will be. The Sun is nuclear fusion. We already have nuclear fusion plants – hydrogen bombs.
But where there are troughs, there will be pigs.
Matt,
For reference reference: do you know how many bananas there are in Cornwall?
>Why not do that with fission plants?
Well, fission reactors actually exist. Fusion power generators do not.
Its easy and safe to ‘fast track’ something that doesn’t exist yet – you get your name in the paper with no danger – but its dangerous to your career to approve something that might actually get built within your working lifetime.
>Baron Jackfield
May 9, 2024 at 10:21 am
I suppose to be fair, fission plants contain and produce some very dangerous substances that need to be controlled, handled and disposed-of with considerable care. Whereas, fusion (if it can actually ever be made to work) shouldn’t have those problems and could be treated as no more of a hazard than a factory making widgets.
The only viable form of H fusion (that we would be able to do in the near future) produces neutrons as a by product and those will radioactively transmute the structure of the reactor, leaving radioactive waste.
In addition, the byproduct will be a (small) amount of radioactive helium.
Am I given to understand then that there is not a side hustle with fusion of filling party baloons ?
@Otto…
I dunno… Maybe if you want party balloons that glow in the dark..?
Where does this idea of radioactive He come from – ain’t no such animal* (certainly not as the result of D-T fusion)?
* pedantically, they can be created using a particle accelerator, but in tiny quantities and with half-lives of, at most, milliseconds (in most cases yoctoseconds)
I don’t think helium – He3 or He4 – are radioactive themselves. He4 nuclei are alpha particles but their radioactive effect is because they have lots of kinetic energy and will swipe electrons off other atoms when they slow down. I’m not sure that last is a significant hazard though.
Alpha particles are generally not a big worry for humans unless you breathe in dust that emits alphas. Then your lungs are vulnerable. But if the dust is outside you then your clothes, and perhaps a few sheets of newspaper, would protect you pretty well.
(My physics is ancient too but surely that can’t have changed?)
The α-particles created in a fusion reactor are charged nuclei and are (largely) contained by the huge magnetic fields needed to generate and contain the plasma in the first place (in a tokamak, at least). The problem is the high energy neutrons that (largely) carry away the surplus energy generated by the fusion reaction. Now, if we could fuse deuterium and light helium (³He), the output would be α-particles and protons (or H nuclei, if you prefer), which are more easily controllable. But that needs even higher temps than D-T fusion.
Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho spouts more fantasy BS every day
Soince 1950s we’ve been told “Cheap Fusion power in 10 years”
Meanwhile Govt running a ‘pick a winner’ on SMRs instead of letting them all be sold and letting customers decide which is best