this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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While neat, this is not self-sustaining
it's taking more energy to power it than you're getting out of it. (You can build a fusion device on your garage if you're so inclined, though obviously this is much neater than that!)
One viewpoint is that we'll never get clean energy from these devices, not because they won't work, but because you get a lot of neutrons out of these devices. And what do we do with neutrons? We either bash them into lead and heat stuff up (boring and not a lot of energy), or we use them to breed fissile material, which is a lot more energetically favorable. So basically, the economically sound thing to do is to use your fusion reactor to power your relatively conventional fission reactor. Which is still way better than fossil fuels IMHO, so that's something.
It seems like it's probably too late.
Even if we crack fusion power today, I can't see it being deployed cheaply enough and quickly enough to compete with solar/wind+batteries. By the time we could get production fusion plants up and ready to feed power into the grid, it'd be 2050 and nobody would be interested in buying electricity from it.
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 :)
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.