[jvm_]

It was my understanding that fission and fusion both use the same Nuclear Power Plant sized facility.

Fusion just replaces the radioactive bit, you still need steam/electricity conversion/transmission/cooling... it's not like a suitcase you can plug wires into, you still need a massive 'factory' to make electricity, just the one bit is a safer.

[RealityVoid]

I am really not buying the fact that nuclear is expensive because it's nuclear. I think the fears around it, the overregulation and opposition to it make it costly. Obviously, there have been plenty of plants that were profitable.

Also, nuclear fusion is possibly the cleanest energy source we could get. If we touch this, we might have a real path forward.

[Maursault]

That just isn't the case. Nuclear (fission) has always been the single most expensive way to generate electricity, and the expense has only increased. Uranium is crazy expensive. Security is very expensive. Spent fuel storage effectively never stops costing, and it isn't ever cheap. If nuclear was simply expensive because of regulations, investors would find a way, and you could not beat them away from building nuclear power plants. But that just isn't where the expense lies. Today it costs $20B to build a nuclear power plant, and that does not include the cost of spent fuel storage or decommissioning. Investors are actually pretty shrewd to stay away from that kind of an investment that always loses. The idea of "electricity too cheap to meter" simply never materialized. Today, electricity generated from solar power is cheaper than electricity generated from nuclear power. The main reason the 110 or so commercial nuclear plants were ever built is that the US military vastly overestimated its need for fuel for bombs.

[xyzzyz]

You don't need as much containment as you do for fission, because you don't deal similarly large amounts of highly radioactive isotopes. Consequently, the safety standards required are closer to fossil plants than to nuclear plants, and these safety standards are really what drives the cost of nuclear fission. The steam/electricity conversion/transmission/cooling" are also present in fossil plants, and these are significantly cheaper than fission plants.

[Retric]

It’s not that simple.

Fission’s primary form of shielding is generally large pools of water or other coolant which don’t directly become radioactive. Fusion on the other hand needs to maintain a near vacuum so your pressure vessel is under heavy neutron bombardment. However, small amounts of radioactive materials get dissolved in the fission’s water which the goes on to contaminate the primary coolant loop which increased decommissioning costs. Fusion reactors primarily containment vessels becomes extremely radioactive and all the remote handling equipment also needs decontamination, but it’s unclear if the primary coolant loop will need similar types of decontamination.

And by small amounts, divers occasionally go in the same pools storing years of spent fuel rods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_fuel_pool

Running the numbers the real difference is fission reactors need more protection from the outside world and containment for a potential meltdown. Thus thick though still fairly cheap walls, which generally don’t become radioactive. They last for 50 years and don’t actually cost that much to construct. Fusion however is a vastly more complex device which will also increase construction and decommissioning costs.

[m0zg]

Just the little bit responsible for Chernobyl and Fukushima is not a part of the design at all. No big deal. :-)

[ClumsyPilot]

I am really tired of this line - the taunami killed 18,500 people. The reactor incident killed no-one through radiation and 32 people through physical injuries.

One failure of Banqiao Dam killed an estimated 240,000 people. That's more than all people who have ever died from anything to do with nuclear, reactors and bombs combined.

Air pollution kills about 2,000 people every single day.

Reactor incidents are like plane crashes - they get attention. Fissil fuels are like car crashes - they kill more people every day and noone gives a shit.