this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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Fusion would provide orders of magnitude more power than solar. There's a limit on how much we can practically get from solar, fusion would allow us to exceed that.
Most residential buildings can self sustain from solar. Dense cities not, but there is dual use grazing and agriculture land, and small portions of desert that could power the world. Solar is enough for type 1 civilization. Nuclear plant energy density is overstated due to their + uranium mine exclusion zones, which could produce more solar power than the uranium content available in those mines.
We're not discussing nuclear here, we're discussing fusion :)
Wut? Maybe on the equator, but while I can easily meet my yearly power consumption with solar panels (In fact, I net supply about 1100kWh), during this lovely winter day they generated a whopping 0.3kWh.
Yeah, but there's no prizes for producing way more power than we use. We're not running out of space to put solar panels or batteries.
'Too much power' has never been an issue, and will likely not be an issue ever with solar. There are multitudes of technologies, especially in industry, that are currently impractical because they would consume too much energy.
We can already massively increase generation to meet the needs of those industries whenever we want. They're impractical due to the cost of meeting their energy requirements, not because it's impossible.
Unless fusion power plants are going to be free to build or last forever, they have the same practical limit as every other type of generation - they have to be paid for. It isn't clear that fusion would be a huge step forward in cost per megawatt-hour.
The main attraction of fusion is near limitless clean energy generation. The corollary of near limitless is that per unit price will be extremely low. The tech is inherently scalable to larger reactors, and that means if you're going to be building a reactor anyway, it's easy to combine it with nearby industrial development plans to take advantage of it.
Bigger, more powerful fusion gear isn't going to also be more expensive?
Lots of generation technologies scale, and costs fall as they do. That's not something unique to fusion power.