Despite which, I believe it’s still true that both fission and fusion research have received orders of magnitude more government support (including tax breaks) than solar power. Politically, nuclear has done better than other non-fossil-fuel alternative energies.
Dude, maybe we need a sealed repository in the desert to store you safely.
Ask this guy.
I’ve been “inert” most of my life. You folks have little to worry about 
Thats true to some extent. But tax breaks are a form of subsidy more than spent research dollars.
But is it still pretty crappy results wise considering how “many” fission research reactors have been built and tested in the past 3 or 4 decades.
Research aint doing much good if you never build anything. At least the fusion guys have been building (very expensive) shit.
If you took a dollar per person per year, you could probably have a new research reactor coming on line every few years. At at least some very large scale testing.
If we HAD been doing that for decades, we would probably have some good ideas pretty much ready to roll. As it is now, it would probably take 10 to 20 years JUST to ramp up for large scale production of the old technology.
Actually, in terms of dollars per watt-hour, nuclear receives far, far less government support than wind and solar. According to the chart on this page nuclear is subsidized $1.59 per megawatt-hour, while wind power gets $23.37 and solar gets $24.34. The total amount of subsidies is greater for nuclear, but the total amount of power generated by nuclear is orders of magnitude greater than that generated by wind or solar, so it works out to a good deal less per useful power generation.
Are you including fusion in that, which has produced, to date, zero kilowatts/ever?
edit: and does that include the startup costs of the Manhattan Project, the Atoms for Peace program, and overhead for nuclear regulatory agencies, security, storage, etc.?
If you’re going to count the Manhattan Project (a weapons program which only developed the technology for nuclear power as a side effect) as development cost for nuclear power, you’ll also need to count the entire history of the semiconductor industry as development cost for solar power. Solar panels are only possible because of all the research that was put into making large, ultra-pure silicon crystals. Of course, once you start chasing costs on all the technology ever required for a power source you run into a silly infinite regress back to the first stone axe.
The chart I linked to gives numbers for subsidies (including tax breaks) to actual power generation, not research efforts. The two costs should be considered separately. Nuclear power generation does receive subsidies and tax breaks, but so does every other type of power generation, and on a per-watthour basis nuclear receives an order of magnitude less money than does wind or solar power.
How much money is paid by the government for development into new nuclear power technology versus solar or wind? I don’t have that number at the moment. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was greater for nuclear, but I wouldn’t think that a bad thing either. The weaknesses of wind and solar power are less due to lack of technological development, and more due to simple physics. Wind and solar energy are both very diffuse (in terms of energy per square meter) and intermittent, and no amount of improvement to solar panels or windmills is going to change that. On the other hand, there are significant areas of improvement possible with nuclear power, with fuel efficiency and waste recycling and advanced concepts like molten-salt thorium fuel cycle reactors, but experimental development reactors are really damn expensive to build.
Helium is chemically inert, but because it is a compressible fluid (gas) it has to be run at much higher pressure than liquid metal coolants in order to get good thermal efficiency, which translates into more sophisticated coolant and heat exchange systems. Although a helium coolant offers a lot of safety advantages, it isn’t better from every engineering standpoint.
Those are fair questions, but also consider that while the usable accessibility for wind power is geographically limited, and solar as a maximum fixed power availability per unit surface area even in direct sunlight, hydrogen fusion is a scalable, compact, and almost unlimited source of energy. Wind power is always going to be supplementary for any urban or industrial use; solar offers more promise, but at the expense of real estate, and for exclusive use requires some kind of energy accumulation/storage system. I would agree that more funds need to be spent on renewable sources, but (at least in a terrestrial environment) no renewable energy sources are ultimately sustainable for a large industrial population.
Stranger
Semiconductors? One example of the poor level of investment in solar power is the assumption by the public that photovoltaic cells are the only kind of solar power.
I don’t think that’s really a fair comparison.
There is a point to be made here. Coal contains naturally occurring radioactive materials, but they are in fairly small amounts. When you burn coal these radioactive materials aren’t part of the combustion so they end up all in the resulting fly ash. And since there is less stuff total in the ash than there was in the coal (all of the carbon for example ended up going out through the smoke stack as carbon dioxide) the concentration of radioactive elements in fly ash is higher than the concentration in coal. However, it still fairly low in concentration and doesn’t constitute a significant radiation hazard.
Fly ash is a waste product, but it’s not a waste product that just sits around taking up space. At the plant I worked at, all of the fly ash was sold to be used to make other products (mostly concrete). The radioactive elements get spread out so far into the environment in such a diluted form that they don’t pose a risk to anyone.
So the point is that it is technically true that we produce more radioactive waste from coal plants than nuke plants. However, to be fair, those radioactive products aren’t all concentrated in one small place and because they are so diluted they don’t constitute a radiation hazard to us or the environment.
I will concede one other point, though. Fly ash is stored in silos and (at least where I worked) it gets carted off by trucks that have covers over them to prevent the ash from spilling out. Ideally, the ash goes from the silo to the truck to wherever it is being used and doesn’t get spilled out into the environment (in fact it’s an EPA violation if it does spill in significant amounts). However, small amounts of fly ash do manage to make it out into the environment, either by going up and out through the plant’s smoke stack, or by blowing out of the truck before the cover gets put on, etc. These are fairly small amounts of ash, but they aren’t zero.
What this means is that the area near the plant does contain traces of radioactive materials due to fly ash leeching out into the environment, with the result that the radioactivity level outside of a coal plant are actually higher than the radioactivity level outside of a nuke plant (which might surprise some folks).
Aren’t the very short half-life residues still producing power?
They are, but not enough to be useful.
They are still emitting, but that isn’t energy/particles than can necessarily be captured to generate power.
There you go: It produces waste, but we’re so unconcerned about that waste that we just go ahead and use it as a construction material. And a Geiger counter will in fact pick up a pretty clear reading from cinder blocks. But if anyone proposed spreading out the waste from nuclear power plants in a similar way, to dilute it in the environment, people would go hysterical.
And the environmental impact from coal ash is far more that a little bit blowing off of the trucks taking it to the concrete factory. Remember the big spill that we had last year? It might not have been as bad as Chernobyl (I haven’t seen numbers on that), but it was a heck of a lot worse than Three Mile Island.