They're building a small scale reactor to test the design. And are you really criticizing a private company for taking just 10 years to get to working reactor? Their approach to fusion can't work in small scale tests.
It has worked perfectly thus far, at separating investors' money from the investors. Most private fusion projects operate on similar principles.
We are starting to see similar projects in the renewables space, most notably Energy Vault (NRGV). Their stuff does not work, and cannot work, but it does not matter because the customer is the investors, not the utilities, and what the investors buy is pipe dreams.
Investors make a speculative bet that the people involved will make things work. They also generally understand the risks associated with it and are willing to do it despite that because they think there’s a meaningful non-0 chance of success.
I think with fusion investors would be thinking about generational ROI (20-40 years) instead of 5-10 years.
What I don’t understand is why there isn’t a similar push to really shake things up with fission. Our current power mix will take a century or so to replace. Fission should be a MUCH faster path.
There are very serious companies making investment in fission.
The problem is that there are very few places in the West where there is anything like a market.
In the US, any progress is basically blocked because the only type of reactor that can get a license is a PWR. Anything else is essentially impossible because of incredibly dumb and regressive technology depended licensing schemes. Thankfully even the DoE has realized this and his slowly changing course. However we are talking decades.
NuScale is building a small PWR, that is why they were able to do it in the US.
That is why, most Western advanced fission companies go to Canada. Canada has a good internationally reorganized regulator and a regulatory framework that is sensible.
See their process here, and a list of companies going threw the process:
As you can see Terrestrial Energy Inc. has passed into Phase 2 in 2018 and is thus the furthest along company in terms of bringing a GenIV plant into commercial operation.
What we need to realize is that these companies operate with comparatively little money and thus are operating pretty slowly. If a government would to really push these projects, they could be much faster.
That said, France of course had GenIV plant operating and producing as far back as 1986 but sadly the project was killed by short sited politics.
There is also an interesting US company called Kairos Power. They are attempting to go threw licensing in the US but they have a very complex plan to 'hack' the traditional path of licensing.
My personal favorite design is by Moltex Energy as it is a molten salt reactor that is burning nuclear 'waste'.
Fission would be faster if the path to deployment was realistic, but it isn't. A recently approved small modular reactor design was the first one to be approved in the US in several decades and it still has another 10 years and several more regulatory bodies to go through to build it, let alone start deploying it.
I suggest that the regulatory bodies are acting (likely intentionally) more of a hindrance than a help. It’s highly likely there’s been regulatory capture by the fossil fuels industry given their political clout and significant lobbying experience. It’s not an accident that the recent “climate bill” just has a bunch of concessions for the oil industry [1]:
> it requires the U.S. Department of the Interior to lease 2 million acres in federal lands onshore and 60 million acres offshore each year for oil and gas development (or whatever acreage the industry requests, whichever is smaller). These quotas must be met to allow federal leasing for onshore and offshore renewables development, respectively.
> In an online statement, a senior scientist at 350.org called the bill a “sham” and said that it “contained so many giveaways to the fossil fuel industry” that it “turns all of the gains in addressing the climate crisis into a moot point.”
Nuclear power plants with today’s technology are already safe. Small modular designs are nice but it’s not an either or. We should be building reactors with the best technology available at the time, not waiting for a hypothetical future. In fact, building with today’s technology helps because a) provides clarity that allows for greater private investment b) Wright’s law tells us it’ll have compound benefits where nuclear technology gets cheaper and safer.
Look at China. They’ve already build 47 power plants with another 11 approved [2]. They know what kind of problem oil is and they’re making significant effort to fix it while the rest of the world is sitting on their hands. It plans to build another 150 reactors, 30 of which are outside of China [3]. They’re spending 440B (almost 0.5T) in building out nuclear fission [4].
Fission has a realistic path to displacing all fossil fuels. We should have been doing this for the past 60 years - it would have been even cheaper in the past. Even with all the accidents, nuclear technology has fewer deaths per KWh produced than almost any other technology [5] (on par with solar and wind).
It's a really good article that points out that this additional land will only be leased if the companies request it, and that will be driven by consumer demand. To quote:
> Analysis from Energy Innovation shows that for every one ton of expected emissions from the bill’s fossil fuel provisions, the bill will result in 24 tons of emissions reductions.
...
> The fossil fuel demand-reducing portions of the bill work at cross purposes with the fossil fuel leasing provisions. It’s an odd way to write legislation, but if that’s what it takes to pass the most important climate bill ever, so be it. As I’ve written before, ending U.S. oil and gas production is not the way to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The world has plenty of oil and gas (even though it doesn’t feel that way right now) and the United States will import whatever it doesn’t produce, perhaps from countries with lower environmental standards and higher greenhouse gas emissions profiles than our own. Fighting fossil fuel demand is the way to lower emissions, and this bill does just that.
This isn't really the case, its not a conspiracy. What happened in the US is that because of public opinion and a few issues the regulator was replaced with a very conservative one.
When they wrote the regulation it was written when PWRs were the only commercial type of reactor, so regulations were hard coded to regulate those reactors.
And the DoE would not, at least not for free, even attempt to regulate anybody else. So if you wanted to get a license, you would literally have to pay the DoE to develop a licensing process first.
Even if you had the huge financial power to do this, it would likely be a decade+ before the DoE would even tell you what exactly the requirements are that your design has to pass.
Other regulator such as the one in Canada or Britain don't suffer from that technology dependency. But even without that, the regulator still needs to be motivated to regulate non standard reactor. In Britain this is not the case and that's why Moltex Energy for example, relocated from Britain to Canada.
In Canada, after CANDU was sold commercially, the Canadian regulator was very motivated to actually look into GenIV reactors and SMRs. Thus that is where all advanced reactor development takes place.
This is mostly not a fossil fuel conspiracy, but rather an over reaction based on uniformed politicians and uninformed public.
