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Comment by crinkly | Hacker News Reader

The one company I really want to see involved in dangerous things with clean up and serious environmental risks is the company that has serious production QA problems, an attention span of about 2 minutes, regular bouts of corporate schizophrenia and a policy of forcing half the planet to abandon working hardware.

Nothing good can come of this.

Microsoft needs to start asking if it should do something before it does it.

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Are there serious environment risks with fusion reactors?

My understanding was that very little radioactive waste was created from a fusion reactor and what little there is will decay pretty quickly (decades).

Well we don't have working fusion reactor topology yet but the current "reactor" components are low level waste so safe within 40-100 years. Which is still a hell of a long time. Also they still will require biological shielding and associated materials are quite difficult to deal with (concrete etc).

I expect that the longevity of their attention is considerably less than this, particularly if the LLM boom crashes. ROI will not pay for the disposal later down the line.

The claims of low level waste from fusion reactors implicitly assume that impurity elements (like, say, niobium) that would produce long lived activation products can be reduced to very low levels. This may drive up the cost of materials dramatically.

You are correct. Radioactive materials from fusion reactors are not a significant environmental threat. The bigger problem with fusion reactors is that nobody has yet built a controlled terrestrial fusion reactor that produces net power.

The big risk is tritium leakage.

To show the scale of the problem: if the world were powered by Helion's reactors (for all primary energy), and the tritium produced were just released into the environment and mixed completely with all water on the planet (including oceans, lakes, rivers, ground water, and ice), then it would lift all that water above the US regulatory limit for tritium in drinking water. All the water, including everything in every ocean.

A fusion reactor creates a much more intense flux of neutrons than any fission reactor, which will transmute into radioactive isotopes any substance from which a shield will be made.

So the quantity of radioactive waste will certainly not be little, but more likely much greater than in a fission reactor.

Nevertheless, because there is more freedom in the design of the neutron shield than in a fission reactor, it is likely that it is possible to find such compositions where most of the radioactive waste will decay quickly enough, so that there will remain only a small quantity of long-lived radioactive waste.

However, until someone demonstrates this in reality, it is still uncertain how much radioactive waste will be generated, because this depends on many constructive details.

A lot of components of a fusion reactor, e.g. pipes for cooling fluid and the like, will become damaged by the neutrons and they will have to be replaced periodically, after becoming radioactive. The amount of such waste will depend a lot on the lifetimes of such components. For now it is very uncertain how much time such components will resist before requiring maintenance.

"Microsoft needs to start asking if it should do something before it does it."

Do they? I hope they don't. I would enjoy seeing MSFT implode and losing trust of its shareholders with its cash - itll be forced to return it rather than reinvest.

Or, for another perspective, they're helping force capitalism to work: an opportunity exists to reduce prices.

This is a good way to force the (often monopolistic) providers to get their shit together, as google did with google fiber.

Ah yes a nuclear race to the bottom. Sorry but that will be a monumental fuck up if you have any historical knowledge about how we handle nuclear materials.

Capitalism fails very quickly the moment you try and push past sensible regulation and legislation. Look at the whole US situation right now.

It's expensive as hell already and we still don't handle waste or environmental issues properly. Capitalism isn't going to solve anything other than the price as it'll defer the rest until it's someone else's problem much like it does not on every single damn sector's waste.

I'm not anti-nuclear. We need it. What we don't need is tech companies getting into the market.

We do not in fact need it.

Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are interested in it enough to put money into it. That suggests there is a market need for it, or at least interest, within the current context.

We should assume they're acting rationally, so the real question is, why do they find this interesting at all? Why not dump the money into private solar farms instead?

The world will spend about a quadrillion dollars on energy in the 21st century. Piddling little billion dollar investments look like long shot bets on low probability outcomes. The big spending is on renewables now.

Gates in particular seems to have been a disciple of Vaclav Smil, a person whose arguments against renewable cost reduction were wildly mistaken.

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