Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Power Government United States

Nuclear Fusion Won't Be Regulated in the US the Same Way as Nuclear Fission (cnbc.com) 130

Posted by EditorDavid from the nuclear-news dept.
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."

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Nuclear Fusion Won't Be Regulated in the US the Same Way as Nuclear Fission More

Nuclear Fusion Won't Be Regulated in the US the Same Way as Nuclear Fission

Comments Filter:

  • NIMBYs will still be a problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kernel Kurtz ( 182424 ) on Sunday April 23, 2023 @03:09PM (#63471306)

    Protesters, frivolous lawsuits, scaremongering. For many people anything with the word nuclear in it is scary!

    • 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.

        • Building large power plants inside the city limits of any city is silly. The real estate is too valuable. Logistics are challenging. And any power plant has SOME risks; not just radiation exposure in the case of nuclear plants, but also other types of failures that can cause explosions and the like. Fusion reactors won't go up with a thermonuclear blast, but conventional explosions as can happen at any power plant are still possible, such as catastrophic failure of large transformers. Finally, power is easy

      • 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 happier as a result.

        Unfortunately that is a large part of the reason the world has 400 reactors and 8000 coal plants. Moving away does not really help.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      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.

      • What? The Chinese don't have a functional Fusion plant any more than anyone else.

          • A nice article, and certainly a step forward. You know what the article *doesn't* say? It doesn't say that the experimental reactor achieved any actual nuclear fusion. Because it didn't.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by fermion ( 181285 )
              That is be a use this is all currently fantasy propaganda to keep nuclear relevant and profits flowing. In 10 years when wind is a third or world power generation, we will see if there is any reality. History says no.

        • 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).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I think Fermion is getting confused with Small Modular Reactors or something. The Chinese are building EDF's design for fission reactors, and running into issues with it.

      • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      I don't think that NIMBys are as significant a barrier to fission power as its unfavorable economics. You tie up billions of dollars for a decade in what is, in effect, a bet on future electricity prices. Once you have a plant operational, running it is *marginally* profitable, but overall interest in new plants have been sunk by a combination of the time value of money and the future discount rate.

      Economics is why Texas is a leading producer of wind power, but not nuclear, despite having a deregulated, "

      • You tie up billions of dollars for a decade in what is, in effect, a bet on future electricity prices.

        All energy projects do that. Hydro dams, LNG terminals, offshore oil fields, and indeed wind farms. Protestors do nothing good for the cost of any of them.

        Economics is why Texas is a leading producer of wind power, but not nuclear, despite having a deregulated, "pro-business" political environment. The Comanche Peak power plant applied for two new reactors in 2008, but withdrew its application in 2013 because of low natural gas prices.

        Yes, it is hard to compete with gas and that is probably why almost half of Texas' electricity comes from it. Many people think the idea is to get away from gas, but that will be hard in Texas. That said Texas has a good mix of existing base load inertia (coal and nuclear), and lots of the above mentioned dispatchable gas, which really helps make it p

  • Are they that close to commercialization? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by marcle ( 1575627 ) on Sunday April 23, 2023 @03:29PM (#63471330)

    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?

    • 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.

      • 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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jsonn ( 792303 )
          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

        • > The EAST reactor in China sustained fusion for 17 minutes.

          They did not.

          They sustained a plasma at "fusion relevant temperature" for 17 minutes.

          What is the difference? EAST did not have any actual fusion fuel inside. It was running on a "test gas". EAST is not actually capable of using tritium to my knowledge.

      • 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

    • 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

    • 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

      • > But that's not commercial break-even - putting more energy out to the grid than was required to power up the system

        That is not commercial breakeven either.

        The definition you posted is engineering breakeven.

        Commercial breakeven is when you produce more **money** than it costs to run it.

        • That, "commercial breakeven" is then an even more complex question. It might not make any money at all, and still be worth doing as a modest subsidy to this industry could destroy the tattered remains of the fossil fuel industry, and be cheaper than other techniques.

          If that happened to damage your neighbours industrial base, it might be cheaper and more effective than having a war. I could envisage, for example, China giving thermonuclear power plants to Mexico and Canada on the understanding they use them

    • 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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      You can make a credible case that even the remarkable advances we've seen reported are eseentially insignificant with respect to seeing a *technically* successful fusion power plant, much less an *economically successful* one. To be economically successful it must generate power that can be sold at a profit at current electricity rates. If you throw out *that* requirement, there are endless possiblities that could be generating power right now -- ocean thermal, solar thermal, deep geothermal energy.

      That

  • 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.
  • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

  • I am afraid that the nearest (working) Fusion Reactor is out of jurisdiction of any terrestrial lawmakers and regulators.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • ...where merely wishing makes it so!

    Is the "burgeoning fusion industry" at all inconvenienced by the fact that fusion power doesn't exist?

  • Legislating to control something that has never worked, and shows so little sign of ever existing, seems to be a tremendous waste of legislator time. It's especially foolish if the source of the needed tritium is uranium based nuclear reactors, which seems the only workable earth-bound technology. The proposed lithium sources have never worked to produce enough lithium, and we have other high demands uses for lithium.

    There is an efficient source for tritium and even deuterium, namely solar wind. But if you

  • No, it will be regulated.

  • Thunderf00t did a good video [youtube.com] on why fusion ain't gonna happen any time soon... if ever.

Slashdot Top Deals

Byte your tongue.

Close