Bring on fusion baby
Then you nuclear naysayers will be silenced
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Yeah it’s more to do with nuclear waste disposal due to its location in the middle of a tectonic(sp?) plate. The best way to store waste is to bury it deep and away from water
I remember eons ago reading that SA was about the safest place on the planet to store waste
bulldoze the shire and put up some tubines
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Show us the money 
Silenced by a black hole enveloping the solar system within an hour?
how would a black hole envelop the solar system
Really really suddenly
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black holes don’t exceed the speed of light
you’re looking at min ~10 hours to about Pluto, 1.5 years if you include the whole Oort cloud
The Chinese switched on an experimental Thorium Salt Reactor a couple of months ago. If they can make it commercially viable, Fusion reactors may be obsolete already…
Not really but Thorium is in plentiful supply and produces vastly less waste than current reactors, which is vastly less waste than fossil fuel generators but you know that already.
You, sir, have spent too long in the covid thread.
Saw this a couple of days ago (not that ‘fusion might be working now!’ stories are really novel at this point) which was a bit interesting (paywall):
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he’s right in saying the science is real - fusion is inevitable
not like those bloody NASA warp bubble stories that pop up every year
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I really want this to be true, but at this point I’ll only believe it when I see it.
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Thorium salts mentioned! That’s Bingo in my Nuclear Power Pie-In-The-Sky game!
The key word there is ‘experimental’. Unless it can be tested, productionised, mass-produced, and rolled out at a massive scale within the next decade or so (a ‘replace over half the world’s fossil-fuel-generation’ sort of scale), then as far as decarbonisation goes, it’s of strictly limited use.
We’re out of time for waiting for some technological silver bullet. We’ve spent 30 years pissfarting around with carbon capture and SMRs. Decarbonisation has to happen very fast very soon, and no reactor which has only just gone online in an experimental capability is going to be ready in time to meaningfully contribute to that. And in the meantime, perfectly functional and very cheap solar and wind tech is right there, waiting for the political will to use it. Remember, we’re at a point where fossil fuels are economically uncompetitive with renewables to a degree that Angus Taylor is handing coalburners taxpayer subsidies to help them out. And nuclear generation capacity of any sort is even more expensive than coal.
Thorium reactors of fusion or similar might come along eventually, and when they do, they might be wonderful power generation options. But we can’t wait for ‘eventually’ any more. We’re out of time, we have a cheaper and proven technology just waiting to be used, and still nobody is explaining what the actual upside is to nuclear power over wind and solar.
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I can’t make up my mind whether I’m pro fusion or con fusion.
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Exactly, which is why building a nuclear plant here is stupid
Neglecting to invest in nuclear technologies however, is also stupid
Wonder what’s the history behind that geographical border quirk?
It was a joint project between countries, which makes it thoroughly less fun to know
That it’s up and running is a significant milestone. Are these types of reactors likely to be commonplace by the 2030’s? probably not but that one has actually been fired up suggests it’s less unlikely today than it was 2x years ago.
That part of France contains the fortress of Charlemont. It was the last holdout of the French army after Napoleons defeat at Waterloo.
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