this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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So 1. This is newable. Green, almost waste free, and unlimited.
If we can refine fusion, we will stop global warming and energy insecurity, virtually overnight.
It's not a waste to invest in clean tech R&D. At one point, people said the same thing about solar, and look where we are now
Do you really think PV cells and nuclear fusion are in any way comparable? What a strange take.
In the way the other poster compared them? Yes, in so far as people who complain “the new, developing technology isn’t immediately as optimised and refined as I want it to be” for both.
Do you have a basic understanding of the challenges of getting electricity from a fusion reaction vs the challenges of manufacturing PV panels?
Seeing as you deliberately seem to be missing the point in order to try and feel smarter I’m going to leave you to it. Have a good one.
I asked a question, a relevant one. Your reaction to that question is your problem.
So we should just give up? No.
We can carry on throwing money at it, I'm fine with that. Thinking that fusion is going to save us is dangerous though. We need to be taking action now to get us off fossil fuels and the most cost-effective way to do that is renewables + storage.
The first challenge is that nobody knows how to sustain it and have been researching it for 80 years. That's a pretty big one...
i think a central barrier at the moment is fusion doesn't readily start a chain reaction like fission can. scientists are likely exploring the use of the yield of the fusion reaction to reload the reactor (kind of like an automatic firearm) and these techniques are far from mature in this setting.
PV is a simpler mechanism in every way and we've been studying it for more than 100 years. They're very different both technologically and maturity-wise
The sun is a fusion reactor which is sustaining a reaction for millions of years already. Iter is a concept which tries to emulate this
Fusion is constant, wouldn’t require large amounts of batteries to store energy. There are advantages to each.
thus the term “energy mix”… nobody arguing in good faith says PV is all we need
It’s not though, not withstanding stars. We’ve managed 17 minutes so far. We’re so far away from turning this into a useable power source that it’s absurd.
So? The trick is to keep developing the technology, not give up because it doesn't immediately deliver unlimited energy.
We've been working on fusion in one form or another for nearly 100 years. We're still nowhere near turning it into a useable energy source. I don't really care if research continues or not, I'm sure the research can be useful in other areas but fusion is not going to save us.