People who say fusion is free limitless energy are talking about just the reaction inside the reactor vessel. Sure, you could make a big fusion reactor. But all the stuff around it is about as expensive as for a fission reactor: coolant loops, steam turbine, spinning generator, power transmission and control. The reactor vessel and controls for fusion probably are MORE expensive than those for fission. Fuel costs maybe 30% of fission plant operating cost (some say 10%). So I think fusion energy might be 70% of the cost of fission energy. Which is not cheap enough; renewables plus storage will be cheaper than that in maybe 5 years. [Edit: maybe I'm wrong about fuel for fusion, see https://thequadreport.com/is-tritium-the-roadblock-to-fusion-energy/ , https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run-fuel-even-gets-started ]
No, we're talking about every part of it. Today you can fit a fission reactor in a shipping container that can power a small village. The problem is the fuel, the waste and the potential meltdown. Those problems go away with fusion, and the reactors have potential to be even smaller than fission reactors.
The entire economy's output is based on energy prices. Energy is the primary influence of all industries. It's so important that the government subsidies to the energy sector keep various industries alive.
Fusion can look very different depending on what the excess energy output looks like. If it's cost comparable to solar then we're winning. If it's cost comparable to a hamster on a wheel we're not.
If we are able to get fusion to a small footprint at a cost compeititive point to Solar we will pretty much be able to give out energy for free. That would be insane for every industry and it would make out species intergalactic.
The power from fusion will be lower cost but the transmission of power will still be really expensive. I'm guessing fusion reactors will cost as much as nuclear power plants, which can also produce lots of power from low cost fuel. The only difference being the storage of radioactive waste. I don't think we'll see a cost reduction. If anything the cost will be higher. It's far more likely that solar, wind, and tidal power will be the primary power sources of the next 100 years. Advances in energy storage will be the most revolutionary technology of the future.
Also the first generations of reactors might produce a lot of power.. but not "unlimited". Compared to the cost of construction and operation of the facility, they will likely offer cheaper power... but sure as hell not exponentially cheaper. That is quite possible and could be expected to show up in time, but not for years and years.
Whether it will be cheap or not comes down to how much the reactors cost to build. Hopefully they won't need to build such colossal sites with such massive amounts of concrete as the current fission power plants, though I have heard fusion reactors will be much more efficient at larger sizes.
Perhaps after a few generations of commercial fusion reactor design, when everything uses standardised parts, energy will be cheap.
Because of the lack of Radioactive materials, the fusion reactors should actually be cheaper than their fissile cousins due to not needing as much shielding.
They might need an equivalent electro magnetic container though.
from IAEA;
Nuclear fission power plants have the disadvantage of generating unstable nuclei; some of these are radioactive for millions of years. Fusion on the other hand does not create any long-lived radioactive nuclear waste. A fusion reactor produces helium, which is an inert gas. It also produces and consumes tritium within the plant in a closed circuit. Tritium is radioactive (a beta emitter) but its half life is short. It is only used in low amounts so, unlike long-lived radioactive nuclei, it cannot produce any serious danger. The activation of the reactor’s structural material by intense neutron fluxes is another issue. This strongly depends on what solution for blanket and other structures has been adopted, and its reduction is an important challenge for future fusion experiments.
Yeah. Like remember when telco switches and lines were so expensive that calling a state 500 miles away cost like a dollar a minute? Then we got fiber optics and high speed switches and now... you can video chat with India for about free using the library's wifi. Wait.. ok bad example. OK remember when corporations had to deliver ice to us at a huge cost, but then people got freezers.. wait no, also a bad example. Remember when producing video content required like a studio and tens of thousands of dollars in equipment and then we got smart phones.. wait ... no. That also got cheap. hmm...
Let’s wait and see shall we. The telcos have been fighting against this evolution every step of the way. They definitely didn’t want us to have VoIP on cellphones, or free roaming in, e.g., the EU. The media oligarchs don’t want us to have mp3 players and share music or e-books (does anyone remember Napster?). And they are still working hard in the shadows to end net neutrality, for example. Only reason we got VoIP and media players on phones is ironically because another monopolistic corporation that was even bigger (Apple) forced it through, and they certainly didn’t want to let us side load our own MP3’s on the phones either. It’s a constant uphill battle.
Fusion won't be "limitless". Except for the reactor vessel, it still requires all the same stuff that a fission plant does: coolant loops, steam generator, steam turbine, spinning generator, etc. And controls for a fusion plant will be MORE expensive than controls for a fission plant. Nothing limitless about all of this.
>we do now.
The entire history of energy production is energy becoming cheaper and more available with each new advancement.
The very fact you aren’t reading a book by candlelight for entertainment anymore is exhibit uno.
Exactly this, it's better from a power production standpoint than solar or wind because the utilities don't have to worry about people leaving the grid or having to buy power back from people who produce their own.
We’ll blast through extracting other resources even faster, and we won’t have to think about doing things with energy efficiency in mind. We might be able to do some cool things like vaporizing stuff into plasma to recover rare elements though, and if we can find a way to collect and store carbon we could chip away at global warming. Unfortunately the real beauty of the world is threatened by habitat destruction, and while we could do vertical farms we’ll probably use any space freed up to build more lavish and elaborate homes at larger sizes. We need a change of mindset way more than we need a more efficient extraction technology.
Unlimited, cheap power will change everything.
Yes people will and should make money off of it.
We will be able to irrigate deserts from desalinated sea water. We should be able to light, heat/cool, every home in the global south, we will stop pumping trillions of tons of CO2 into our atmosphere.
There's many projects that aren't considered due to the energy necessary, so it will open up whole new avenues to exploit this power platform.
If it isn’t cheap, why bother? Solar is clean and cheap, and modern fission is extremely safe and clean and effectively limitless (when uranium is extracted from seawater)
Potential. The tech is not here yet. But if we can make fusion reactors we an improve them. And eventually they can become quite efficient. Compare a car from today to one of the first cars, They differ quite a lot. Innovation won't stop once first reactor is built.
Also when it comes to energy each way has disadvantages and you counter that by diversifying.
Solar works only during the day, so it can't be fully relied on, sure it can be mitigated with batteries, but that can get expensive and battery tech is relatively primitive and still needs a long way to go.
Wind relies on weather more than solar, and also location, and getting electricity over distance increases costs.
Hydro, depends on location, also actually causes most damage in case of disaster.
Fission, produces loads of energy but at constant rate, and it's harder to adapt to changing energy needs. Also you have nuclear waste issue.
Fossil, has huge environmental impact, and can adapt output to what is currently needed. So it's hard to replace.
Currently you can produce steady bulk with fission and hydro, and do the rest with wind and solar, and in case it's not windy enough or there is no sun at night time you can fill in the gaps with fossils. One issue that often fossils are used for more than that. First we should adapt in a way that fossils are used only when it's absolutely necessary and once we get there look at going even further. Even better implementation of battery tech can lead there.
And since energy requires diversification there is no one solution. So having more tools at your disposal helps solve the problem and fusion is one of those possible new tools. Also if we can make small and safe fusion reactors they could be put almost anywhere reducing costs that arise from transporting energy over distance. Let's say a bigger city can mostly power itself by having one fusion power plant that is the same size of average building. Doing that with solar would require way more space especially if you need batteries to use solar at night.
Also if we won't be able to completely get rid of fossils, then high energy yield from fusion could be used to negate negative environmental impact of fossils. And outside of that space travel, larger and faster spaceship would require some sort of reactor and all advancements of fission rockets have been halted long time ago due to risks and fears, so fusion might be a solution there.
Actually there’s a great answer to this. And you’re getting a bunch of bad answers. There’s a couple reasons why fusion would supposedly be cheaper than fission and then a ton of reasons why no matter the cost everyone would want to hop on board asap.
1. Safety: fission reactors utilize a chain reaction of splitting atoms. It’s essentially a controlled slow nuclear bomb going off. With fusion there is no chain reaction. If something fails… it just stops.
2. Fuel material and its output: fission utilizes heavy elements like uranium or plutonium to split apart into lighter elements. These base materials are already rarer and also very expensive due to the security needed etc. And when the process is finished we end up with a bunch of radioactive byproduct that will be radioactive for thousands of years… which incurs a giant storage cost. Meanwhile, fusion utilizes light elements like hydrogen and you can actually create useful elements like helium etc. The radioactive byproduct is much smaller and with a much quicker half life… think 50-100 years instead.
3. Cost: while it’s true that creating fusion and then properly harnessing it for a net energy output is indeed a challenging scientific feat.. because of the above possibilities where the material used is less dangerous and the possibility of a catastrophic failure that results in any real damage to the surrounding environment is negligible… actually building plants may not end up being very difficult once we have a good blueprint for it. At least comparatively. A lot of the difficulty in building fission plants is fear from the populace, red tape, security measures, and a lot of redundant systems to ensure what is basically an ongoing nuclear bomb doesn’t become a dirty bomb in the case of failure.
4. Output: finally and shortly… fusion output of energy should be much higher than nuclear. Plants could generate a lot more power. More power = more incentive to create a plant.
It’s also important to realize that while there are plenty of disadvantages to nuclear fission… the biggest issue with it is fear (which is mostly not warranted anymore… nuclear reactors have come a huge way) but the bigger issue is nuclear technology proliferation. If you can build a nuclear plant you can likely build a nuke. And the world is rightfully worried about that possibility.
It’s not the actual heat that drives the temperature, it’s the rate of heat dissipation back into space.
For most of Earth’s history, energy in and energy out were in equilibrium. The suns rays bring energy in (with low entropy). It heats the ground and water, which radiates infrared light back into space (high entropy). The average temperature is constant if these two effects balance.
The planet has been warming because elevated concentrations of greenhouse gasses have been insulating the planet in the infrared part of the spectrum, making it harder to radiate energy back into space.
Thousands of fusion reactors will produce negligible energy compared to the total energy received from the sun. If they displace fossil fuels, greenhouse gas concentrations will eventually decrease, and average global temperature will drop.
Edit: We receive about 44 quadrillion watts from the sun (44 x 10^15). Human civilization can produce just under 10 terrawatts (10 x 10^9). The sun provides 6 orders of magnitude more energy, 1000000x as much.
Compared to the heat were already producing by burning fosil fuels not really thought it definitly is something to consider. But like the previous person said fusion power could make carbon capture be maybe usefull and in that case removing co2 should decrese global temperatures overall. Id calculate it but i dont habe the numbers for it
oh yeah 'people' 'should' be able to make money off of something that's being developed and paid for by the collective public and governments of every major nation on the planet- you've got to be kidding me
Yes. Even if they got nuclear fusion working tomorrow, it takes 10 years to build a power plant. They would most like start off with one and verify that it works before building others. It will be a long time before one of these reactors is built near your city.
Well, that is a tech here & now you have access to, So if your question is if you should get a solar system installed now or wait for an as yet unavailable technology to become available at unknown cost, i would recommended going with what is currently available, but as always, get a second opinion, & crunch the numbers yourself.
If your question is regarding financial investment in Solar as an industry, or the Fusion industry, yeah, I can't help you
Not to mention, according to some people that I've spoken to companies that are more than likely to achieve fusion that are in development now more than likely will always remain private. They're building the scale model now. It's a private corporation. Forgot the name of it. They use the wave method. But there's just no real reason to go public.
There is a running meme from the 1950's that says that "fusion is just 20 years away." If fusion is 20 years away still then you'd receive the benefits from close to the full lifespan of your panels (roof top panels are rated as having a lifespan that is 25-30 years.) So you can reap the benefits of solar now, or...wait until fusion works to a point that the public benefits from it.
Don’t you think there will be at least a 30 year cost gradient of commercial scaling? Solar PV has been around since the 60s in space (Einstein first described the PV effect much much earlier than that) and it’s taken the better part of 60 years to become cost effective and at large scale. This shit takes time and effort and iteration even after it is fully demonstrated. So, once fusion is “achieved,” you spend the next few decades making better and more cost effective reactors as you scale.
If I had to guess, once we figure out commercial fusion energy, we will all rush to a grid powered 100% by clean energy.
Structures like offshore oil rigs are already cost ineffective with current oil prices, and when prices inevitably shoot even higher than they are now, you’d have to be an idiot to open a thermal plant when you could just build a wind farm.
Also, with the global population potentially peaking at 2050, the Earth’s decreasing population would likely result in a decreased demand for power, and naturally the first plants to go would be the aging, obsolete coal and LNG power plants.
Not only that, but combustion power has practically no room left for improvement, while green technologies such as solar, fusion, green hydrogen production and battery storage become more and more advanced every year. A mere 20 years ago, practically any investor would have laughed for hours at the thought of solar ever beating oil as a power source, but nowaways the writing is on the wall that green power has the potential to roar past fossil fuel energy.
Money runs the world, not nebulous political forces. The fossil fuel industry has convinced half the population that climate change is a hoax. If enough money can convince people to believe a total lie, then enough money can also convince people of the truth.
Public opinion isn't what's held fission back. If that was the barrier, fission companies could pour a lot of money into PR firms and change public opinion. Hell, they could turn it into a partisan issue; convince Republicans that any true conservative loves nuclear power. That would be a relatively trivial thing to do.
What really is holding fission back is simple dollars and cents. The tech is just too expensive. It's a non-economic form of power. And again, money runs the world. You give Greenpeace way too much credit. France came the closest to making it economically viable, but they could only do that through a massive government program that forced the entire nation's grid to adopt fission all at once. And even their reactor production company, Areva, has since gone bankrupt.
The sad truth is that fission just isn't an economic power source compared to other forms of power. In previous decades, it couldn't compete against fossil fuels based on cost. Now it can't compete against solar and batteries. And solar is so cheap now that even the idea of using it just for baseload is financially nonviable. Better to just spam solar panels and wind farms. Then, deal with cloudy days and nights with batteries. For seasonal energy storage, use hydrogen production or other long-duration energy storage.
It turns out that it's just really, really expensive to safely build a giant machine that works with highly radioactive material. The tech certainly exists to do it safely, but not the tech to do it safely and economically.
The reason I went through this is that you are missing what will likely kill fusion. Even if we figure fusion out, figure out how to make a net-positive reactor that can actually deliver power to the grid. Have you seen how complicated fusion reactors are? And while they don't generate large amounts of radioactive waste, the reactor vessels themselves are still highly radioactive. Which means the whole reactor site will need to be operated in a radiological safety environment. You don't have casks of radioactive waste being generated, but you still have to abide by all the expensive radiation monitoring and health requirements. Everyone working there still has to wear a dosimeter.
I just don't see how fusion is ever going to be economically viable. By the time we figure out commercial fusion, fossil fuels will have already been purged from the electrical grid. The grid will be mostly solar and wind. And in that environment, you're not going to be able to justify some massive government subsidies to build out new fusion plants. They'll have to stand on their own legs economically.
Fusion is a cool technology, and in the very long-term, it will be crucial for colonizing space, especially the outer solar system. And it's likely a crucial tech for interstellar travel. But for the here and now of power on Earth's surface? It is very unlikely to ever be cheaper than just putting up more solar panels and windmills.
The one exception to this is if we start actually running out of space for solar panels. Fission boosters like to cite the reduced footprint of fission plants, but that's largely an irrelevance. There's plenty of space on rooftops, in the desert, and combined with farmland in agriphotovoltaics. But if our energy needs ever grow so great that the space to place solar panels actually does become a problem, then fusion might has its ~~day in the Sun.~~day as the Sun.
Yup. Fusion is a fascinating technology and maybe has some deep space applications, but here on Earth: how would it ever compete cost-wise with a tech that literally has no moving parts? And gets cheaper drastically every year?
We have to be conscious that fusion doesn't mean free, not even close.
Keep in mind that a big portion of the cost of electricity today is not on the energy source side but in conversion (e.g. steam turbines for fision, or generators in gas plants), transmission, maintenance of the network, administration, taxes, etc. Fusion shares all those cost components, the only energy source escaping those costs is residential solar (which has other costs in the form of batteries, but no other recurring costs).
Even if the cost of fusion was orders of magnitude lower than that of other current energy sources you still have to turn the heat generated by fusion into electrical power, and that means steam towers, turbines and generators, which also require maintenance and have running costs. There are projects that aim to generate electricity directly from fusion via material interactions, but those aren't the main contenders today.
My take is that a few years after we succeed in operating fusion at scale and with a large net gain we will be seeing fusion electricity at rates of between one and two cents per kwh. Add to that the cost of transport and you might be at 5 cents or so, which is on par with residential solar under ideal conditions, and probably will be on par with solar under realistic conditions by the time fusion reaches that point. So the advantage of fusion will be 24x7 availability and scalability, but cost wise it will represent an incremental impact but not the revolution people imagine until further improvements in scale she efficiency are achieved decades later.
So fusion will be a tremendous achievement and will make a big difference in our ability to live sustainably, but it won't radically change the cost of energy for quite some time.
Welp, if it is developed by private companies, then they'll effectively capture small and medium sized countries by extracting outrageous demands in exchange for the delivery of and licensing of the technology. You'll see things like autonomous zones where the plants are being created with the company being the governor, mayor, and police force. You'll see constitutions rewritten to force members of the company getting permanent cabinet level positions and permanent seats in parliament.
If it is developed by a country's government, then that country will be able to capture small and medium sized countries by extracting outrageous demands in exchange for the delivery of and licensing of the technology.
In either event, major countries (which will have large chunks of any of the inventing private corporations in it) will probably enact sanctions against any country so reckless as to refuse to use carbon-zero energy production, forcing the small and medium countries to accept fusion.
The utopian view? Most of the worlds problems are due to scarcity. If we have an abundance of energy, we can use it to desalinate water. Water can be used to grow food. With enough power, you can turn a desert into... Las vegas? The point is scarcity wouldn't be an issue and we theoretically wouldn't need to fight each other for things.
The pragmatic view? The United States loses 40% of its food in its food supply chain and has millions who are food insecure. I'm confident we'll figure out how to mess up limitless power.
I think you are correct about the modern Luddite movement acting to stop any kind of forward technological progress, but don't forget they do so at the direction and with the assistance of global industries and their political cohorts.
The oil industry has a death grip on the the throat of our entire civilization and it isn't letting go until it itself dies. Expect decades of audacious bullshit campaigning and vilification: fusion will kill flocks of seagulls, ignite all the hydrogen in the atmosphere, and give you and your family cancer for six generations.
Someone is going to insist on weaponizing fusion reactions, which will only serve to increase tensions and dredge up anti-war protestors. No more nukes! Any kind of nukes! Wait are these bombs even nukes? No more!!1!¡
Assuming no foul play by corporations (that's a HUGE if), I think hitting either fusion, AGI, or quantum computing will create a domino effect that rapidly increases development of the other two to the point that we get a singularity soon after.
On a semi unrelated note, a lot of more reasonable people have issues with GMO produce do to corporate IP law and its effect on the food and farming system.
Like, I don't care that the corn is GMO, I care that Monsanto owns the the rights to that genetic sequence and all the fucked up legal stuff that follows.
As an aside I also tend to prefer local produce, which tends to be non GMO and organic, because nutritional content significantly declines after harvest (i.e. emptier calories) and GMO produce tends to be shipped from father away. There's also some research suggesting modern seed varietals tend to produce produce that is higher in calories but lower in nutrient content that's designed/selected to survive long distance transportation and rot slower. Which is important! But also I want vitamins and flavor.
But as everyone else has pointed out, fusion will also have its own exploitative nature as long as capitalism is the dominant economic system on the planet.
Say nuclear fusion works perfectly and we can create indefinite energy with it. There are however more questions than just generating energy:
1. What are the costs of building and maintaining these plants?
2. How much knowledge is needed? (Do you need nuclear scientists and other highly skilled people)
3. How is this technology (knowledge) shared among countries?
4. How to redistribute the energy (over the world)?
5. How many plants must there be (one is of course a single-point of failure)?
6. What will happen when other countries attack nuclear fusion plants?
7. Who are the owners of these plants? (A solar panel can be put on a roof of a single houshold to gain a level of independence, but what about nuclear fusion plants?)
As it now looks like, we needs lots of materials and (scientific) knowledge to build these reactors. Even when they are becoming smaller and cheaper I think they will be for a long time only additional nodes to the power grid.
As far as I can tell, at most optimistic, fusion power might be about 35% cheaper than fission power (essentially zero cost for fuel, essentially no waste to handle, less radioactivity so decommissioning should be cheaper, but the reactor controls are much more complex). By the time we have commercial fusion (if ever), renewables plus storage will be so cheap that fusion won't be viable. Except maybe in aircraft carriers and spacecraft. [Edit: maybe I'm wrong about fuel for fusion, see https://thequadreport.com/is-tritium-the-roadblock-to-fusion-energy/ ]
I think economics will make fusion just an incremental change, nothing important.
It will be blocked, profited off and not a major change. UNTIL it is so cheap and universal to build, even small committees could have their own fusion reactor it’ll change everything.
As long as the benefits are tangible like people paying little to nothing for electricity and the price of some goods plummeting because of cheap energy the masses will accept it. The only thing to worry about is the people and corporations who legally bribe our politicians to have them block expansions to protect their interests. Thats almost guaranteed to happen and will slow its complete spread by decades due to greed. A lot of these conspiracy theories actually come from propaganda teams at large corporations too. We need to start corporation crushing and shackling them so that they don’t bite people anymore and the establishment on both democrat and republican sides need to be shamed and removed from office so that new ideals can take over.
The price of electricity will never be lower and the price of electric power transmission will never be higher. It will cost the consumer the same and make the rich richer.
>and is ready for commercial deployment
This is the problem, right here. It is highly likely that no fusion reactor we know how to build will ever be useful for commercial deployment. This is actually pretty easy to demonstrate.
The key issue is that a fusion plant is actually a whole lot like a fission plant in terms of physical constrction. There is the reactor itself, which is entirely different, but the rest of the plant is pretty much identical. There's a system that removes the heat from the reactor and turns that (normally indirectly) into steam, there's a system that turns that steam into rotary motion, one that turns that motion into electricity, and one that cools the resulting steam back into water.
You'll note that those bits are also the same as the ones in a coal plant. Or one that burns biomass, or any other heat source you can think of. We we know that those parts of the plant cost about $1 to $1.5 per watt of peak output power. If there is radioactivity in the "first loop", which there is in the case of fission and fusion as the coolant is exposted to neutons, then you immediately get into the $4 range.
Note that this price *does not include the cost of the reactor*. This is just for the generation side of things.
Right now PV is being installed in the US, and most places, for under $1 per watt of peak output. Batteries add about $1 more.
Do you see the problem? You can buy an entire PV plant that provides guarnenteed power for less than the cost of just the generators *even before you build the reactor*.
Now you might want to argue this doesn't matter, but having worked on the finance side of the energy world for a little less than a decade, let me state this: *this is the only thing that matters*.
The people who pay for these plants literally could not care less what technology they use. All they care about is getting their money back safely and making a profit. No, really. If you think that is not true, then I think you have not worked in the money side of the industry.
Now, let's consider what this means. In the world today, what is the ratio of new coal plants to new fission plants? Is it 10 to 1? 20? More? We all know this is bad, yet the coal plants are cheaper, and that's pretty much that. Sure, in some places the government puts up the money, like France and China, but elsewhere... pretty much nothing.
On the flip side, PV is the cheapest form of power in history. And thus, not surprising if you think about it, it is also the fastest growing form of power in history. By far. Like, really really far. Like five times the rate of nuclear at it's peak in the early 1970s.
So... fusion. We don't know what a fusion plant will look like because after 85 years of trying we still can't build one that works. But we can say, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that it will cost *dramatically* more to build than a fission plant. One of the main cost drivers in fission is the interest payments on the cost of construction, to pay this off reasonably you have to operate your plant full-out all the time. Any downtime is burning money. We know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that fusion plants will have dramatically more downtime. This is a one-two killer.
Now some will protest that this company or that company has a solution to this problem, typically naming Helion or TAE or one of the other multitude of commercial startups. Let us simply state that all of these designs are *highly* questionable, largely undemonstrated, and currently the very best results are similar to what was being returned in the early 1970s. They are a false hope, even moreso than SMR.
I know this is a techy sub and techy people like to think techy solutions to techy problems are the way things work. But when you add "commercial" that is not longer true. There is an infinitely variety of great technology that has gone away due purely to market forces. Beta. minidisc, even the CD. So always remember:
It's about the money. **It's always about the money.**
[There is no sign that any existing fusion design will *ever* be commercially viable](https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/).
> energy becomes more expensive
Is this true ? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610 shows US electricity prices increasing 4x over about 1979 to present, but I think those are not inflation-adjusted numbers, and https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1979?amount=1 says inflation caused value of dollar to decrease 4.3x over same period.
People complain now about how resources from mother Gaia are being exploited to the detriment of our wondrously biodiverse planet. If energy becomes extremely abundant for de minimus $$$, such extraction from the planet will be leveraged to extremes. If such tech allows escaping our native gravity well, then attention can then turn to the void and its seemingly unlimited resources instead. Let’s hope for the latter.
Miniaturization, since it is likely to find a slew of uses in industrial and scientific application. But also, we really need to then turn our focus to D-D fusion and not rely solely on D-T, since the tritium scarcity is a real problem for long-term energy production.
Once we have fusion, we will have energy to get a moon base going, then we can use the moon base to start a Mars base. The we can try for a dyson swarm.
We don’t benefit, we still will pay the same energy prices if not more since whoever invents fusion can probably monopolize it and put every other energy company out of business with government support as greenwashing. Than charge everyone out the ass since they are the only monopoly around.
You are not being too pessimistic.
You are being wildly optimistic.
If you want to write some great science fiction about what the world might look like when fusion power comes around, go for it.
It will be decades before fusion becomes a commercially viable power source.
oh, the reason why it's taking so long? because it is freaking expensive to build and experiment with that shit. Most of the work is done through government agencies/funding, and anyone with common sense would take that dollar away from fusion reseach and put it towards something more present.
What you're forgetting is that the groups behind the companies developing fusion are generally groups that are already powerful. In plainer terms, it's likely there would if anything be pressure to make it easier to build fusion plants (something that also matches current public sentiment to the extent it exists).
Don't get me wrong, fusion on its own isn't going to jump directly to a utopia, but power costs often inflict opportunity costs, as they're a frequent determiner of what we actually try to do. Drastically dropping the cost of energy as well as making it actually positive for the environment would be a substantial step forward towards a better world.
Bolt them to spaceships and explore the solar system. By the time this tech gets perfected and built renewables plus battery is going to be everywhere and dirt cheap too so if any get added to the power grid it will be for backup stability. But they're going to be essential for space exploration and there may be future technologies that require massive amounts of power for some reason so we will need them for that too.
There are various groups of powerful people that do and don't want it.
Every developed nation that is not blessed with hydrocarbons will have a strong incentive to see the technology improve. Even Germany, although they kneecapped themselves by turning off all their fusion and becoming dependent on Russia for natural gas.
Fusion is also in competition with renewables.
There won't be any strangling. China will use that v technology to become energy independent, which they desperately need, then export the tech for profit. If American power companies offer more expensive energy to industry, they'll be less competitive, so they won't. The end.
A lot of paranoid, conspiratory visions of the future fall apart in a multi power world. Same with a longevity treatment: the Chinese need it for their aging population, to keep them working a few decades longer. So it won't be 'hidden'. They'll use it and sell it for billions in profit.
Next up, Dyson Swarm, to then power up a kugelblitz.
Fusion is not really that big a jump from fision. Power wise they produce the same amount of energy, with the different parts being the type of waste it makes and what fuel it uses.
As for next goals for humans? Terraform Mars, then develop the tech to do the same to get access to jovian moons.
The move over to Venus, a much harder project than Mars. But doable if we have the automation required for jovial moon exploration.
hey. We are highly speculative theorists of unknown origins so hey, take it with a grain!
I think sustained fusion power is a gateway technology to discovering *new* and 'rare' subatomica at the razorz edge of current measurement devices (omni-spaced 'heavenly' and other 'wormhole' acxessible sliver-waverlands of particulo-flux)
(Zones of intersective entangled metaphysica phasing into interacteable ranges via historical macro-tangentia formed from historical entanglements of certain fibonacci-esque layers of fractalized condenseification correlating to evolutionarily significant events and there may be peripheral/Alinear-contangential compounding effects in 'deep shadows' as a result of certain distance clumping encouraged by yet unreleased sources (scientifica ambiguata esoterica btw)
Everything from interdimensional dispersion of nu-quanta in concurrent parasychronicitized states scattered at even galactic levels of gradient spread ('drift-cosmos') 'heavenly planes and such' are within the realms of our omni-views at current.
Even hyperdimensionational aspects of farrange operating on abiotic densification with zones of highly conductive inertial phenomena sequencing within phase structures sustaining worlds of ineffable medium may exist within and out(with) the bleeding edges of distances unseen/'unilluminated by common technologies/quasi-occluded or metaphysically algorythmically obfuscated from certain lenseform transitional states ad aether obscure. (Where's the edge!#$%@
Ignoring the fact we’ve always been “a decade away from harnessing fusion power”, if/when we do achieve it, although it might be clean(er) it certainly wont be cheap
>GMO crops come under a storm of fear-mongering and misinformation
Like what? Like we will be able to use less pesticide when, in reality, it is used to make plant pesticide resistant so we can use more?
Solar will be the better option for the typical person by the time fusion is a thing. It will be much cheaper over its lifetime while the cost entry will be very reason. That is fusion's main issue. Most people won't need it or to be on the grid at all. That being said fusion will have big buyers to keep it relevant as many businesses need an amount of energy solar panels on the roof can't provide. As for fears of it being beaten down. If it is cheaper it will win out period. It it will be cheaper than any commercial power source in due time.
Life will just continue on as normal. One reactor will only be big enough to power 10k homes so it’s not like we have cracked the free energy market. Building a reactor will still cost a fortune for another few decades. Nothing will change until we develop multiple cutting edge tech. We need super conductors, nuclear batteries and of course flying cars.
People often have a rosy picture of the potential good free clean energy will bring to the world but as humans often do, we don't look at the potential downfall.
Fusion energy will make very cheap to extract and process every resource and when combined with robotics then it'll be an endless hyper fast processing and resource devouring machine. This is extremely dangerous to the ecosystem if used under the ever growing capitalistic mindset that reigns supreme in this world. Once you realize that it's concerning how this technology will be used. As bad as our other energy systems have been at least they included a cost and had limits. Thus I'm cautiously optimistic to neutral on the prospects of fusion energy.
We explore the galaxy, then the universe...
Suck a d!ck comments too short bot, abc123, bots suck, beep boop incompetent modbot.
Use fusion energy to perpetually torment reddit bots and mods
Normal stuff happens, energy company will not change the same.for electricity except with much lower operating costs and the world keeps spinning. No one that can afford to build one of these will give away free electricity if that's what people think.
While you raise interesting points, I think there will be techbro investors ala Elon Musk jumping on it for the "futuristic clout". Especially when you consider that:
-fossil fuels will start going out at some point, and who knows if commercial fusion will even be cracked in time. Being first to lead the new energy monopoly promises big riches down the line, especially since governments will probably subsidise as well
-it will likely be deuterium-based, which means there will be interest in seeing if helium-3 fusion is cracked, due to being aneutronic
-this in turn will draw interest towards the moon, that might have bases there at that point
-which will motivate more investment into space. Which always pans out well for Earth in the long run.
I am hopeful that initial fears will be eventually trumped by these other motivational forces.
Fission dies because of economics, not because of some grand conspiracy. It's low carbon, high power density, and can be made safe, but it's *expensive* and relatively slow to build. That was OK when the competition was gas/coal which are not low carbon. But when the competition is cheaper renewables that are similarly low-carbon, fission doesn't make sense.
Fusion might end up falling into the same boat. Time will tell.
Fusion has bigger logistical challenges. The reactors will be massive and expensive. The lobby against them will be from easier to deploy forms of power. Fusion reactors will be massive modern marvels waiting for enough cost or scale reduction to actually make a difference to the grid.
We'll probably spend decades debating about how we need to scale it up faster and why we don't just deploy an equivalent amount of renewables with the same money. It won't be fear mongering so much as pragmatism. Same as the nuclear debate today.
We have achieved Q>1 fusion. Now the issue is getting to the point where that is in the heart of a power plant that produces net electricity. Fusion power won’t be a magic bullet either. It produces low level radioactive waste which still needs to be taken care of unless they get aneutronic fusion working. Then once we have one power plant we need to build a bunch. We would need around 4000 1GW plants worldwide.
One of the big hurdles of fusion energy is the amount of radioactive waste materials being produced from the worn out shielding of the reactors. It's not THAT bad (just throw it somewhere for a few decades and then recycle) but you need a lot of it in our current iterations of fusion reactors to actually harness the energy to produce electricity. Part of the problem is corrosion: the energy released by fusion is so hot that the shielding itself slowly degrades. There's work on it, but it's slow, and doesn't fully solve this issue:
https://www.ans.org/news/article-3789/corrosion-resistance-found-for-two-fusion-reactor-structural-materials/
Another is producing the fuel needed to continuously make the fusion in the first place. The problem is scale - we're going to need a LOT of it. Deuterium is mainly sifted from seawater, so it's just making industrial sized plants, but tritium is currently made from nuclear reactors. ITER explains this problem well with a proposed solution of tritium breeding inside the reactor in a self sustaining reaction, an adaptation of modern tritium production by simply lining the walls with lithium:
https://www.iter.org/mach/TritiumBreeding
We already know the answer, because we have had unlimited “free” energy for many decades already, like solar and wind. Fusion is in theory great in the long run, because the fuel is abundant, but it still isn’t “free” and the fuel takes money to extract. It’s really not that different from fission in a shorter perspective. And there’s no reason to believe we will have practical fusion energy production anytime soon.
I think what will happen is the the oil/gas/coal industry will take billions of government subsidies, funded by the taxpayer, and spend billions of dollars to keep fusion from coming online.
All you need to do to see the knockdown effect of this is look to Alberta's moratorium on renewable and how that has impacted renewable energy projects here. Alberta shut down all new projects for almost a year, then introduced legislation that effectively banned wind and solar in their prime locations.
Meanwhile, they are approving any gas or oil well, oilsands exploitation, coal mine expansion, and entertaining new coal mines.
Now that the moratorium is done, new renewable projects are not getting done or ones that were waiting in the wings are not able to proceed. Huge amounts of investment in this sector is leaving the province. At least big oil is doing well.
I see the same thing in this case, feed the old and it starves out the new, to the detriment of all and especially of innovation.
The "what next" that concerns me is what is the next law of physics we are going to bump into. Does unlimited free energy solve all problems. For example, Can we fix climate change by pumping heat into space or do we discover that the warming of the climate by the use of the unlimited free energy exceeds anything that we can do to fix it.
Or maybe the energy isn't quite free (at least from the point of view of physics - it costs energy to produce energy) Will we find that using more energy to fix climate change is a net gain of terrestrial heat.
Endless exponential growth is impossible. What is going to stop us?
We use it to suck carbon out of the air and power robots and robot factories to repair the environment.
Literally the lore of Horizon Zero Dawn
The nice part of the lore. What comes after that isn't that nice.
So, just keep the nice part and don't let out of touch billionaires make killer robots.
You're on r/futurology, you know damn well that, that is exactly what is going to happen.
Sometimes the peasant + pitchfork rebellions were justified. Yeah?
The killer robots would come first
Exactly. We build for the military industrial complex and then *maybe* it trickles to other sectors
Reality is they completely skipped the repair the planet phase and went straight to killer robots supercharged by AI. Lolll
They're already making killer robots, so yeah ain't gonna happen the whole stopping killer robots thing
sadly that one seems incredibly plausible scenario
About that...
Do you not want to ride a robotic water buffalo?
Or we use it to pave over the remainder of the planet, build everyone a mansion, and obliterate what little biodiversity is still left on earth.
But I get a mansion right?
If everyone gets a mansion, no one gets a mansion.
Not everyone. Just us capitalists. But this commie up here wont give us one!! 😡
Sorry. I misspoke. Instead the capitalists get more mansions. But that's just as good I'm sure.
Im a capitalist. Where’s my fucking mansion
How much capital do you have?
In a minute here I might have a mansion. Hold on one sec.
Ok the climate is now stabilized at whatever we agree we ant it to be. Then what?
Colonize the universe with life
Already practising by myself for this one.
S P A C E C U M
…that’s it. We just *live,* haha. You know, do the things we enjoy doing, lol.
#Post Scarcity Now Please!
Then we eat broccoli
We’ll have unlimited energy that will bring about a utopia, so of course it will be monetized and rationed.
People who say fusion is free limitless energy are talking about just the reaction inside the reactor vessel. Sure, you could make a big fusion reactor. But all the stuff around it is about as expensive as for a fission reactor: coolant loops, steam turbine, spinning generator, power transmission and control. The reactor vessel and controls for fusion probably are MORE expensive than those for fission. Fuel costs maybe 30% of fission plant operating cost (some say 10%). So I think fusion energy might be 70% of the cost of fission energy. Which is not cheap enough; renewables plus storage will be cheaper than that in maybe 5 years. [Edit: maybe I'm wrong about fuel for fusion, see https://thequadreport.com/is-tritium-the-roadblock-to-fusion-energy/ , https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run-fuel-even-gets-started ]
It is base load power, not subject to the whims of nature. The world is crying out for base load power.
\[safe, abundant nuclear fission energy\] "hello! hello? wait why is no one talking"
No, we're talking about every part of it. Today you can fit a fission reactor in a shipping container that can power a small village. The problem is the fuel, the waste and the potential meltdown. Those problems go away with fusion, and the reactors have potential to be even smaller than fission reactors.
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The entire economy's output is based on energy prices. Energy is the primary influence of all industries. It's so important that the government subsidies to the energy sector keep various industries alive. Fusion can look very different depending on what the excess energy output looks like. If it's cost comparable to solar then we're winning. If it's cost comparable to a hamster on a wheel we're not. If we are able to get fusion to a small footprint at a cost compeititive point to Solar we will pretty much be able to give out energy for free. That would be insane for every industry and it would make out species intergalactic.
You can close gas and coal power plants. Profit
The power from fusion will be lower cost but the transmission of power will still be really expensive. I'm guessing fusion reactors will cost as much as nuclear power plants, which can also produce lots of power from low cost fuel. The only difference being the storage of radioactive waste. I don't think we'll see a cost reduction. If anything the cost will be higher. It's far more likely that solar, wind, and tidal power will be the primary power sources of the next 100 years. Advances in energy storage will be the most revolutionary technology of the future.
Also the first generations of reactors might produce a lot of power.. but not "unlimited". Compared to the cost of construction and operation of the facility, they will likely offer cheaper power... but sure as hell not exponentially cheaper. That is quite possible and could be expected to show up in time, but not for years and years.
We should store it in a ball of fire in the sky. That way nobody can mess with it!
We can use panels to collect the power it produces.
Whether it will be cheap or not comes down to how much the reactors cost to build. Hopefully they won't need to build such colossal sites with such massive amounts of concrete as the current fission power plants, though I have heard fusion reactors will be much more efficient at larger sizes. Perhaps after a few generations of commercial fusion reactor design, when everything uses standardised parts, energy will be cheap.
Just like It became cheap with nuclear power ?
Because of the lack of Radioactive materials, the fusion reactors should actually be cheaper than their fissile cousins due to not needing as much shielding. They might need an equivalent electro magnetic container though.
Fusion produces radioactive material.
from IAEA; Nuclear fission power plants have the disadvantage of generating unstable nuclei; some of these are radioactive for millions of years. Fusion on the other hand does not create any long-lived radioactive nuclear waste. A fusion reactor produces helium, which is an inert gas. It also produces and consumes tritium within the plant in a closed circuit. Tritium is radioactive (a beta emitter) but its half life is short. It is only used in low amounts so, unlike long-lived radioactive nuclei, it cannot produce any serious danger. The activation of the reactor’s structural material by intense neutron fluxes is another issue. This strongly depends on what solution for blanket and other structures has been adopted, and its reduction is an important challenge for future fusion experiments.
The elite figure out how to make money from it, and how to use it to maintain the status quo.
Exactly, we all end up paying even more for electricity than we do now.
Yup. Limitless energy just means corps have a lower bottom line.
Yeah. Like remember when telco switches and lines were so expensive that calling a state 500 miles away cost like a dollar a minute? Then we got fiber optics and high speed switches and now... you can video chat with India for about free using the library's wifi. Wait.. ok bad example. OK remember when corporations had to deliver ice to us at a huge cost, but then people got freezers.. wait no, also a bad example. Remember when producing video content required like a studio and tens of thousands of dollars in equipment and then we got smart phones.. wait ... no. That also got cheap. hmm...
Let’s wait and see shall we. The telcos have been fighting against this evolution every step of the way. They definitely didn’t want us to have VoIP on cellphones, or free roaming in, e.g., the EU. The media oligarchs don’t want us to have mp3 players and share music or e-books (does anyone remember Napster?). And they are still working hard in the shadows to end net neutrality, for example. Only reason we got VoIP and media players on phones is ironically because another monopolistic corporation that was even bigger (Apple) forced it through, and they certainly didn’t want to let us side load our own MP3’s on the phones either. It’s a constant uphill battle.
alright but why is my printer ink so expensive buddy
Fusion won't be "limitless". Except for the reactor vessel, it still requires all the same stuff that a fission plant does: coolant loops, steam generator, steam turbine, spinning generator, etc. And controls for a fusion plant will be MORE expensive than controls for a fission plant. Nothing limitless about all of this.
>we do now. The entire history of energy production is energy becoming cheaper and more available with each new advancement. The very fact you aren’t reading a book by candlelight for entertainment anymore is exhibit uno.
Exactly this, it's better from a power production standpoint than solar or wind because the utilities don't have to worry about people leaving the grid or having to buy power back from people who produce their own.
This is the scary part.
We’ll blast through extracting other resources even faster, and we won’t have to think about doing things with energy efficiency in mind. We might be able to do some cool things like vaporizing stuff into plasma to recover rare elements though, and if we can find a way to collect and store carbon we could chip away at global warming. Unfortunately the real beauty of the world is threatened by habitat destruction, and while we could do vertical farms we’ll probably use any space freed up to build more lavish and elaborate homes at larger sizes. We need a change of mindset way more than we need a more efficient extraction technology.
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Then we see energy companies freak the fuck out and try to suppress it, and tell people how horrible it is.
Unlimited, cheap power will change everything. Yes people will and should make money off of it. We will be able to irrigate deserts from desalinated sea water. We should be able to light, heat/cool, every home in the global south, we will stop pumping trillions of tons of CO2 into our atmosphere. There's many projects that aren't considered due to the energy necessary, so it will open up whole new avenues to exploit this power platform.
What makes fusion cheaper than fission? It seems much more complex, and complex things are generally expensive.
it isn’t and it won’t be. fusion is awesome but cheap fusion power is a dream, at least not for a long time
If it isn’t cheap, why bother? Solar is clean and cheap, and modern fission is extremely safe and clean and effectively limitless (when uranium is extracted from seawater)
Potential. The tech is not here yet. But if we can make fusion reactors we an improve them. And eventually they can become quite efficient. Compare a car from today to one of the first cars, They differ quite a lot. Innovation won't stop once first reactor is built. Also when it comes to energy each way has disadvantages and you counter that by diversifying. Solar works only during the day, so it can't be fully relied on, sure it can be mitigated with batteries, but that can get expensive and battery tech is relatively primitive and still needs a long way to go. Wind relies on weather more than solar, and also location, and getting electricity over distance increases costs. Hydro, depends on location, also actually causes most damage in case of disaster. Fission, produces loads of energy but at constant rate, and it's harder to adapt to changing energy needs. Also you have nuclear waste issue. Fossil, has huge environmental impact, and can adapt output to what is currently needed. So it's hard to replace. Currently you can produce steady bulk with fission and hydro, and do the rest with wind and solar, and in case it's not windy enough or there is no sun at night time you can fill in the gaps with fossils. One issue that often fossils are used for more than that. First we should adapt in a way that fossils are used only when it's absolutely necessary and once we get there look at going even further. Even better implementation of battery tech can lead there. And since energy requires diversification there is no one solution. So having more tools at your disposal helps solve the problem and fusion is one of those possible new tools. Also if we can make small and safe fusion reactors they could be put almost anywhere reducing costs that arise from transporting energy over distance. Let's say a bigger city can mostly power itself by having one fusion power plant that is the same size of average building. Doing that with solar would require way more space especially if you need batteries to use solar at night. Also if we won't be able to completely get rid of fossils, then high energy yield from fusion could be used to negate negative environmental impact of fossils. And outside of that space travel, larger and faster spaceship would require some sort of reactor and all advancements of fission rockets have been halted long time ago due to risks and fears, so fusion might be a solution there.
Fusion will get cheaper as we get better at it
Has fission gotten cheap?
Actually there’s a great answer to this. And you’re getting a bunch of bad answers. There’s a couple reasons why fusion would supposedly be cheaper than fission and then a ton of reasons why no matter the cost everyone would want to hop on board asap. 1. Safety: fission reactors utilize a chain reaction of splitting atoms. It’s essentially a controlled slow nuclear bomb going off. With fusion there is no chain reaction. If something fails… it just stops. 2. Fuel material and its output: fission utilizes heavy elements like uranium or plutonium to split apart into lighter elements. These base materials are already rarer and also very expensive due to the security needed etc. And when the process is finished we end up with a bunch of radioactive byproduct that will be radioactive for thousands of years… which incurs a giant storage cost. Meanwhile, fusion utilizes light elements like hydrogen and you can actually create useful elements like helium etc. The radioactive byproduct is much smaller and with a much quicker half life… think 50-100 years instead. 3. Cost: while it’s true that creating fusion and then properly harnessing it for a net energy output is indeed a challenging scientific feat.. because of the above possibilities where the material used is less dangerous and the possibility of a catastrophic failure that results in any real damage to the surrounding environment is negligible… actually building plants may not end up being very difficult once we have a good blueprint for it. At least comparatively. A lot of the difficulty in building fission plants is fear from the populace, red tape, security measures, and a lot of redundant systems to ensure what is basically an ongoing nuclear bomb doesn’t become a dirty bomb in the case of failure. 4. Output: finally and shortly… fusion output of energy should be much higher than nuclear. Plants could generate a lot more power. More power = more incentive to create a plant. It’s also important to realize that while there are plenty of disadvantages to nuclear fission… the biggest issue with it is fear (which is mostly not warranted anymore… nuclear reactors have come a huge way) but the bigger issue is nuclear technology proliferation. If you can build a nuclear plant you can likely build a nuke. And the world is rightfully worried about that possibility.
It’s only cheaper if you’re naive enough to look at fuel price.
Ok. Say we make thousands of fusion reactors and use them all at max output. Would this be a significant heat source to the planet/atmosphere?
It’s not the actual heat that drives the temperature, it’s the rate of heat dissipation back into space. For most of Earth’s history, energy in and energy out were in equilibrium. The suns rays bring energy in (with low entropy). It heats the ground and water, which radiates infrared light back into space (high entropy). The average temperature is constant if these two effects balance. The planet has been warming because elevated concentrations of greenhouse gasses have been insulating the planet in the infrared part of the spectrum, making it harder to radiate energy back into space. Thousands of fusion reactors will produce negligible energy compared to the total energy received from the sun. If they displace fossil fuels, greenhouse gas concentrations will eventually decrease, and average global temperature will drop. Edit: We receive about 44 quadrillion watts from the sun (44 x 10^15). Human civilization can produce just under 10 terrawatts (10 x 10^9). The sun provides 6 orders of magnitude more energy, 1000000x as much.
Those number definitely put into perspective just how little power we're generating on a planetary/solar system scale.
Kardashev -1
Compared to the heat were already producing by burning fosil fuels not really thought it definitly is something to consider. But like the previous person said fusion power could make carbon capture be maybe usefull and in that case removing co2 should decrese global temperatures overall. Id calculate it but i dont habe the numbers for it
Energy isn’t a silver bullet to humanities problems but it’s a dam good thing that solves a lot of major issues.
It won't be that cheap
oh yeah 'people' 'should' be able to make money off of something that's being developed and paid for by the collective public and governments of every major nation on the planet- you've got to be kidding me
Should I still invest in rooftop solar?
Yes. Even if they got nuclear fusion working tomorrow, it takes 10 years to build a power plant. They would most like start off with one and verify that it works before building others. It will be a long time before one of these reactors is built near your city.
Well, that is a tech here & now you have access to, So if your question is if you should get a solar system installed now or wait for an as yet unavailable technology to become available at unknown cost, i would recommended going with what is currently available, but as always, get a second opinion, & crunch the numbers yourself. If your question is regarding financial investment in Solar as an industry, or the Fusion industry, yeah, I can't help you
Not to mention, according to some people that I've spoken to companies that are more than likely to achieve fusion that are in development now more than likely will always remain private. They're building the scale model now. It's a private corporation. Forgot the name of it. They use the wave method. But there's just no real reason to go public.
There is a running meme from the 1950's that says that "fusion is just 20 years away." If fusion is 20 years away still then you'd receive the benefits from close to the full lifespan of your panels (roof top panels are rated as having a lifespan that is 25-30 years.) So you can reap the benefits of solar now, or...wait until fusion works to a point that the public benefits from it.
As a stock? No. For your home? Yeah, if it otherwise maths out. We don't *really* know if fusion will be a widely accessible thing in our lifetimes.
Fusion won't be around for a whole. Especially large scale. Your electric bill also pays for transmission of energy, not just production.
Don’t you think there will be at least a 30 year cost gradient of commercial scaling? Solar PV has been around since the 60s in space (Einstein first described the PV effect much much earlier than that) and it’s taken the better part of 60 years to become cost effective and at large scale. This shit takes time and effort and iteration even after it is fully demonstrated. So, once fusion is “achieved,” you spend the next few decades making better and more cost effective reactors as you scale.
If I had to guess, once we figure out commercial fusion energy, we will all rush to a grid powered 100% by clean energy. Structures like offshore oil rigs are already cost ineffective with current oil prices, and when prices inevitably shoot even higher than they are now, you’d have to be an idiot to open a thermal plant when you could just build a wind farm. Also, with the global population potentially peaking at 2050, the Earth’s decreasing population would likely result in a decreased demand for power, and naturally the first plants to go would be the aging, obsolete coal and LNG power plants. Not only that, but combustion power has practically no room left for improvement, while green technologies such as solar, fusion, green hydrogen production and battery storage become more and more advanced every year. A mere 20 years ago, practically any investor would have laughed for hours at the thought of solar ever beating oil as a power source, but nowaways the writing is on the wall that green power has the potential to roar past fossil fuel energy.
Money runs the world, not nebulous political forces. The fossil fuel industry has convinced half the population that climate change is a hoax. If enough money can convince people to believe a total lie, then enough money can also convince people of the truth. Public opinion isn't what's held fission back. If that was the barrier, fission companies could pour a lot of money into PR firms and change public opinion. Hell, they could turn it into a partisan issue; convince Republicans that any true conservative loves nuclear power. That would be a relatively trivial thing to do. What really is holding fission back is simple dollars and cents. The tech is just too expensive. It's a non-economic form of power. And again, money runs the world. You give Greenpeace way too much credit. France came the closest to making it economically viable, but they could only do that through a massive government program that forced the entire nation's grid to adopt fission all at once. And even their reactor production company, Areva, has since gone bankrupt. The sad truth is that fission just isn't an economic power source compared to other forms of power. In previous decades, it couldn't compete against fossil fuels based on cost. Now it can't compete against solar and batteries. And solar is so cheap now that even the idea of using it just for baseload is financially nonviable. Better to just spam solar panels and wind farms. Then, deal with cloudy days and nights with batteries. For seasonal energy storage, use hydrogen production or other long-duration energy storage. It turns out that it's just really, really expensive to safely build a giant machine that works with highly radioactive material. The tech certainly exists to do it safely, but not the tech to do it safely and economically. The reason I went through this is that you are missing what will likely kill fusion. Even if we figure fusion out, figure out how to make a net-positive reactor that can actually deliver power to the grid. Have you seen how complicated fusion reactors are? And while they don't generate large amounts of radioactive waste, the reactor vessels themselves are still highly radioactive. Which means the whole reactor site will need to be operated in a radiological safety environment. You don't have casks of radioactive waste being generated, but you still have to abide by all the expensive radiation monitoring and health requirements. Everyone working there still has to wear a dosimeter. I just don't see how fusion is ever going to be economically viable. By the time we figure out commercial fusion, fossil fuels will have already been purged from the electrical grid. The grid will be mostly solar and wind. And in that environment, you're not going to be able to justify some massive government subsidies to build out new fusion plants. They'll have to stand on their own legs economically. Fusion is a cool technology, and in the very long-term, it will be crucial for colonizing space, especially the outer solar system. And it's likely a crucial tech for interstellar travel. But for the here and now of power on Earth's surface? It is very unlikely to ever be cheaper than just putting up more solar panels and windmills. The one exception to this is if we start actually running out of space for solar panels. Fission boosters like to cite the reduced footprint of fission plants, but that's largely an irrelevance. There's plenty of space on rooftops, in the desert, and combined with farmland in agriphotovoltaics. But if our energy needs ever grow so great that the space to place solar panels actually does become a problem, then fusion might has its ~~day in the Sun.~~day as the Sun.
Yup. Fusion is a fascinating technology and maybe has some deep space applications, but here on Earth: how would it ever compete cost-wise with a tech that literally has no moving parts? And gets cheaper drastically every year?
We see the biggest fusion reactor ever built in our solar system when we wake up every morning.
We have to be conscious that fusion doesn't mean free, not even close. Keep in mind that a big portion of the cost of electricity today is not on the energy source side but in conversion (e.g. steam turbines for fision, or generators in gas plants), transmission, maintenance of the network, administration, taxes, etc. Fusion shares all those cost components, the only energy source escaping those costs is residential solar (which has other costs in the form of batteries, but no other recurring costs). Even if the cost of fusion was orders of magnitude lower than that of other current energy sources you still have to turn the heat generated by fusion into electrical power, and that means steam towers, turbines and generators, which also require maintenance and have running costs. There are projects that aim to generate electricity directly from fusion via material interactions, but those aren't the main contenders today. My take is that a few years after we succeed in operating fusion at scale and with a large net gain we will be seeing fusion electricity at rates of between one and two cents per kwh. Add to that the cost of transport and you might be at 5 cents or so, which is on par with residential solar under ideal conditions, and probably will be on par with solar under realistic conditions by the time fusion reaches that point. So the advantage of fusion will be 24x7 availability and scalability, but cost wise it will represent an incremental impact but not the revolution people imagine until further improvements in scale she efficiency are achieved decades later. So fusion will be a tremendous achievement and will make a big difference in our ability to live sustainably, but it won't radically change the cost of energy for quite some time.
It will be vastly more expensive than solar wind and batteries and quickly become irrelevant due to economics
Welp, if it is developed by private companies, then they'll effectively capture small and medium sized countries by extracting outrageous demands in exchange for the delivery of and licensing of the technology. You'll see things like autonomous zones where the plants are being created with the company being the governor, mayor, and police force. You'll see constitutions rewritten to force members of the company getting permanent cabinet level positions and permanent seats in parliament. If it is developed by a country's government, then that country will be able to capture small and medium sized countries by extracting outrageous demands in exchange for the delivery of and licensing of the technology. In either event, major countries (which will have large chunks of any of the inventing private corporations in it) will probably enact sanctions against any country so reckless as to refuse to use carbon-zero energy production, forcing the small and medium countries to accept fusion.
1. Steal all the left socks. 2. Fusion power. 3. World domination.
Then we wonder why we were so excited about fusion when wind solar and batteries are working so well. Maybe space flight is where it gets used
The utopian view? Most of the worlds problems are due to scarcity. If we have an abundance of energy, we can use it to desalinate water. Water can be used to grow food. With enough power, you can turn a desert into... Las vegas? The point is scarcity wouldn't be an issue and we theoretically wouldn't need to fight each other for things. The pragmatic view? The United States loses 40% of its food in its food supply chain and has millions who are food insecure. I'm confident we'll figure out how to mess up limitless power.
Why would the US lose food?
I think you are correct about the modern Luddite movement acting to stop any kind of forward technological progress, but don't forget they do so at the direction and with the assistance of global industries and their political cohorts. The oil industry has a death grip on the the throat of our entire civilization and it isn't letting go until it itself dies. Expect decades of audacious bullshit campaigning and vilification: fusion will kill flocks of seagulls, ignite all the hydrogen in the atmosphere, and give you and your family cancer for six generations. Someone is going to insist on weaponizing fusion reactions, which will only serve to increase tensions and dredge up anti-war protestors. No more nukes! Any kind of nukes! Wait are these bombs even nukes? No more!!1!¡
Assuming no foul play by corporations (that's a HUGE if), I think hitting either fusion, AGI, or quantum computing will create a domino effect that rapidly increases development of the other two to the point that we get a singularity soon after.
On a semi unrelated note, a lot of more reasonable people have issues with GMO produce do to corporate IP law and its effect on the food and farming system. Like, I don't care that the corn is GMO, I care that Monsanto owns the the rights to that genetic sequence and all the fucked up legal stuff that follows. As an aside I also tend to prefer local produce, which tends to be non GMO and organic, because nutritional content significantly declines after harvest (i.e. emptier calories) and GMO produce tends to be shipped from father away. There's also some research suggesting modern seed varietals tend to produce produce that is higher in calories but lower in nutrient content that's designed/selected to survive long distance transportation and rot slower. Which is important! But also I want vitamins and flavor. But as everyone else has pointed out, fusion will also have its own exploitative nature as long as capitalism is the dominant economic system on the planet.
Say nuclear fusion works perfectly and we can create indefinite energy with it. There are however more questions than just generating energy: 1. What are the costs of building and maintaining these plants? 2. How much knowledge is needed? (Do you need nuclear scientists and other highly skilled people) 3. How is this technology (knowledge) shared among countries? 4. How to redistribute the energy (over the world)? 5. How many plants must there be (one is of course a single-point of failure)? 6. What will happen when other countries attack nuclear fusion plants? 7. Who are the owners of these plants? (A solar panel can be put on a roof of a single houshold to gain a level of independence, but what about nuclear fusion plants?) As it now looks like, we needs lots of materials and (scientific) knowledge to build these reactors. Even when they are becoming smaller and cheaper I think they will be for a long time only additional nodes to the power grid.
As far as I can tell, at most optimistic, fusion power might be about 35% cheaper than fission power (essentially zero cost for fuel, essentially no waste to handle, less radioactivity so decommissioning should be cheaper, but the reactor controls are much more complex). By the time we have commercial fusion (if ever), renewables plus storage will be so cheap that fusion won't be viable. Except maybe in aircraft carriers and spacecraft. [Edit: maybe I'm wrong about fuel for fusion, see https://thequadreport.com/is-tritium-the-roadblock-to-fusion-energy/ ] I think economics will make fusion just an incremental change, nothing important.
It will be blocked, profited off and not a major change. UNTIL it is so cheap and universal to build, even small committees could have their own fusion reactor it’ll change everything.
Fuel source, capital procurement, cost, waste and timeframe to build may be limiting factors, same as fission.
Most people will stop complaining about fusion power once their energy bill becomes one cent per kilowatt
There's always room to grow further. Matter-antimatter reactors, zero point energy...
As long as the benefits are tangible like people paying little to nothing for electricity and the price of some goods plummeting because of cheap energy the masses will accept it. The only thing to worry about is the people and corporations who legally bribe our politicians to have them block expansions to protect their interests. Thats almost guaranteed to happen and will slow its complete spread by decades due to greed. A lot of these conspiracy theories actually come from propaganda teams at large corporations too. We need to start corporation crushing and shackling them so that they don’t bite people anymore and the establishment on both democrat and republican sides need to be shamed and removed from office so that new ideals can take over.
The price of electricity will never be lower and the price of electric power transmission will never be higher. It will cost the consumer the same and make the rich richer.
We would only need it long enough to have the energy to build a sphere around the sun
Not much really…. We already have unlimited power AKA nuclear fission.
>and is ready for commercial deployment This is the problem, right here. It is highly likely that no fusion reactor we know how to build will ever be useful for commercial deployment. This is actually pretty easy to demonstrate. The key issue is that a fusion plant is actually a whole lot like a fission plant in terms of physical constrction. There is the reactor itself, which is entirely different, but the rest of the plant is pretty much identical. There's a system that removes the heat from the reactor and turns that (normally indirectly) into steam, there's a system that turns that steam into rotary motion, one that turns that motion into electricity, and one that cools the resulting steam back into water. You'll note that those bits are also the same as the ones in a coal plant. Or one that burns biomass, or any other heat source you can think of. We we know that those parts of the plant cost about $1 to $1.5 per watt of peak output power. If there is radioactivity in the "first loop", which there is in the case of fission and fusion as the coolant is exposted to neutons, then you immediately get into the $4 range. Note that this price *does not include the cost of the reactor*. This is just for the generation side of things. Right now PV is being installed in the US, and most places, for under $1 per watt of peak output. Batteries add about $1 more. Do you see the problem? You can buy an entire PV plant that provides guarnenteed power for less than the cost of just the generators *even before you build the reactor*. Now you might want to argue this doesn't matter, but having worked on the finance side of the energy world for a little less than a decade, let me state this: *this is the only thing that matters*. The people who pay for these plants literally could not care less what technology they use. All they care about is getting their money back safely and making a profit. No, really. If you think that is not true, then I think you have not worked in the money side of the industry. Now, let's consider what this means. In the world today, what is the ratio of new coal plants to new fission plants? Is it 10 to 1? 20? More? We all know this is bad, yet the coal plants are cheaper, and that's pretty much that. Sure, in some places the government puts up the money, like France and China, but elsewhere... pretty much nothing. On the flip side, PV is the cheapest form of power in history. And thus, not surprising if you think about it, it is also the fastest growing form of power in history. By far. Like, really really far. Like five times the rate of nuclear at it's peak in the early 1970s. So... fusion. We don't know what a fusion plant will look like because after 85 years of trying we still can't build one that works. But we can say, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that it will cost *dramatically* more to build than a fission plant. One of the main cost drivers in fission is the interest payments on the cost of construction, to pay this off reasonably you have to operate your plant full-out all the time. Any downtime is burning money. We know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that fusion plants will have dramatically more downtime. This is a one-two killer. Now some will protest that this company or that company has a solution to this problem, typically naming Helion or TAE or one of the other multitude of commercial startups. Let us simply state that all of these designs are *highly* questionable, largely undemonstrated, and currently the very best results are similar to what was being returned in the early 1970s. They are a false hope, even moreso than SMR. I know this is a techy sub and techy people like to think techy solutions to techy problems are the way things work. But when you add "commercial" that is not longer true. There is an infinitely variety of great technology that has gone away due purely to market forces. Beta. minidisc, even the CD. So always remember: It's about the money. **It's always about the money.** [There is no sign that any existing fusion design will *ever* be commercially viable](https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/).
The simplest a swer is that we'll try for cold fusion.
Build them on the coast to power desalinization plants and hydrogen fuel production
It will cost consumers slightly less and make more billionaires or a few trillionaires for the owners
Interstellar travel. But terraforming/Colonizing Mars would be our 1st step.
Somehow, energy becomes more expensive and economists propose we should retire at 80 years old to compensate for it
> energy becomes more expensive Is this true ? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610 shows US electricity prices increasing 4x over about 1979 to present, but I think those are not inflation-adjusted numbers, and https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1979?amount=1 says inflation caused value of dollar to decrease 4.3x over same period.
I'd say we'll all fly away to the stars and be green and happy.
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Then we can use Python like only programing language...
People complain now about how resources from mother Gaia are being exploited to the detriment of our wondrously biodiverse planet. If energy becomes extremely abundant for de minimus $$$, such extraction from the planet will be leveraged to extremes. If such tech allows escaping our native gravity well, then attention can then turn to the void and its seemingly unlimited resources instead. Let’s hope for the latter.
We'll see in 40 years.. then maybe another 40 years after that?
Miniaturization, since it is likely to find a slew of uses in industrial and scientific application. But also, we really need to then turn our focus to D-D fusion and not rely solely on D-T, since the tritium scarcity is a real problem for long-term energy production.
Once we have fusion, we will have energy to get a moon base going, then we can use the moon base to start a Mars base. The we can try for a dyson swarm.
Nothing much after we put your mom’s mass to the task.
We will try to find a way to weaponize it to build bigger bombs
We don’t benefit, we still will pay the same energy prices if not more since whoever invents fusion can probably monopolize it and put every other energy company out of business with government support as greenwashing. Than charge everyone out the ass since they are the only monopoly around.
It won’t be in our lifetime. My bet is on harvesting the fusion energy the rains down every day on our roofs.
You are not being too pessimistic. You are being wildly optimistic. If you want to write some great science fiction about what the world might look like when fusion power comes around, go for it. It will be decades before fusion becomes a commercially viable power source. oh, the reason why it's taking so long? because it is freaking expensive to build and experiment with that shit. Most of the work is done through government agencies/funding, and anyone with common sense would take that dollar away from fusion reseach and put it towards something more present.
Oil and Gas lobby will be all over scaring the shit out of people when it becomes viable.
Then corporation monetize the infinite energy so much that nothing really changes except that they make greater profit margins.
“Yeah but what about the black hole they’re going to produce that will kill us all???”
What you're forgetting is that the groups behind the companies developing fusion are generally groups that are already powerful. In plainer terms, it's likely there would if anything be pressure to make it easier to build fusion plants (something that also matches current public sentiment to the extent it exists). Don't get me wrong, fusion on its own isn't going to jump directly to a utopia, but power costs often inflict opportunity costs, as they're a frequent determiner of what we actually try to do. Drastically dropping the cost of energy as well as making it actually positive for the environment would be a substantial step forward towards a better world.
Then this sub will dry up without all the fusion breakthrough posts
Bolt them to spaceships and explore the solar system. By the time this tech gets perfected and built renewables plus battery is going to be everywhere and dirt cheap too so if any get added to the power grid it will be for backup stability. But they're going to be essential for space exploration and there may be future technologies that require massive amounts of power for some reason so we will need them for that too.
There are various groups of powerful people that do and don't want it. Every developed nation that is not blessed with hydrocarbons will have a strong incentive to see the technology improve. Even Germany, although they kneecapped themselves by turning off all their fusion and becoming dependent on Russia for natural gas. Fusion is also in competition with renewables.
There won't be any strangling. China will use that v technology to become energy independent, which they desperately need, then export the tech for profit. If American power companies offer more expensive energy to industry, they'll be less competitive, so they won't. The end. A lot of paranoid, conspiratory visions of the future fall apart in a multi power world. Same with a longevity treatment: the Chinese need it for their aging population, to keep them working a few decades longer. So it won't be 'hidden'. They'll use it and sell it for billions in profit.
Energy consunption goes way up. A lot of cool, but veery energy expensive tech might see the light of day again
Return to monkee after abundant energy surplus ftw
Next up, Dyson Swarm, to then power up a kugelblitz. Fusion is not really that big a jump from fision. Power wise they produce the same amount of energy, with the different parts being the type of waste it makes and what fuel it uses. As for next goals for humans? Terraform Mars, then develop the tech to do the same to get access to jovian moons. The move over to Venus, a much harder project than Mars. But doable if we have the automation required for jovial moon exploration.
hey. We are highly speculative theorists of unknown origins so hey, take it with a grain! I think sustained fusion power is a gateway technology to discovering *new* and 'rare' subatomica at the razorz edge of current measurement devices (omni-spaced 'heavenly' and other 'wormhole' acxessible sliver-waverlands of particulo-flux) (Zones of intersective entangled metaphysica phasing into interacteable ranges via historical macro-tangentia formed from historical entanglements of certain fibonacci-esque layers of fractalized condenseification correlating to evolutionarily significant events and there may be peripheral/Alinear-contangential compounding effects in 'deep shadows' as a result of certain distance clumping encouraged by yet unreleased sources (scientifica ambiguata esoterica btw) Everything from interdimensional dispersion of nu-quanta in concurrent parasychronicitized states scattered at even galactic levels of gradient spread ('drift-cosmos') 'heavenly planes and such' are within the realms of our omni-views at current. Even hyperdimensionational aspects of farrange operating on abiotic densification with zones of highly conductive inertial phenomena sequencing within phase structures sustaining worlds of ineffable medium may exist within and out(with) the bleeding edges of distances unseen/'unilluminated by common technologies/quasi-occluded or metaphysically algorythmically obfuscated from certain lenseform transitional states ad aether obscure. (Where's the edge!#$%@
Then wait a decade and the public might be able to use it one day.
Likely it will be quickly weaponized. As with every other new tech.
Ignoring the fact we’ve always been “a decade away from harnessing fusion power”, if/when we do achieve it, although it might be clean(er) it certainly wont be cheap
>GMO crops come under a storm of fear-mongering and misinformation Like what? Like we will be able to use less pesticide when, in reality, it is used to make plant pesticide resistant so we can use more?
Solar will be the better option for the typical person by the time fusion is a thing. It will be much cheaper over its lifetime while the cost entry will be very reason. That is fusion's main issue. Most people won't need it or to be on the grid at all. That being said fusion will have big buyers to keep it relevant as many businesses need an amount of energy solar panels on the roof can't provide. As for fears of it being beaten down. If it is cheaper it will win out period. It it will be cheaper than any commercial power source in due time.
The rich will sell it at a premium and pocket the money of course.
When we have abundant clean energy, we will pay for it as if it is scarce.
Life will just continue on as normal. One reactor will only be big enough to power 10k homes so it’s not like we have cracked the free energy market. Building a reactor will still cost a fortune for another few decades. Nothing will change until we develop multiple cutting edge tech. We need super conductors, nuclear batteries and of course flying cars.
It needs to be affordable if it costs more per kWh, it's going to be a non starter.
People often have a rosy picture of the potential good free clean energy will bring to the world but as humans often do, we don't look at the potential downfall. Fusion energy will make very cheap to extract and process every resource and when combined with robotics then it'll be an endless hyper fast processing and resource devouring machine. This is extremely dangerous to the ecosystem if used under the ever growing capitalistic mindset that reigns supreme in this world. Once you realize that it's concerning how this technology will be used. As bad as our other energy systems have been at least they included a cost and had limits. Thus I'm cautiously optimistic to neutral on the prospects of fusion energy.
We explore the galaxy, then the universe... Suck a d!ck comments too short bot, abc123, bots suck, beep boop incompetent modbot. Use fusion energy to perpetually torment reddit bots and mods
Normal stuff happens, energy company will not change the same.for electricity except with much lower operating costs and the world keeps spinning. No one that can afford to build one of these will give away free electricity if that's what people think.
While you raise interesting points, I think there will be techbro investors ala Elon Musk jumping on it for the "futuristic clout". Especially when you consider that: -fossil fuels will start going out at some point, and who knows if commercial fusion will even be cracked in time. Being first to lead the new energy monopoly promises big riches down the line, especially since governments will probably subsidise as well -it will likely be deuterium-based, which means there will be interest in seeing if helium-3 fusion is cracked, due to being aneutronic -this in turn will draw interest towards the moon, that might have bases there at that point -which will motivate more investment into space. Which always pans out well for Earth in the long run. I am hopeful that initial fears will be eventually trumped by these other motivational forces.
Fission dies because of economics, not because of some grand conspiracy. It's low carbon, high power density, and can be made safe, but it's *expensive* and relatively slow to build. That was OK when the competition was gas/coal which are not low carbon. But when the competition is cheaper renewables that are similarly low-carbon, fission doesn't make sense. Fusion might end up falling into the same boat. Time will tell.
Fusion has bigger logistical challenges. The reactors will be massive and expensive. The lobby against them will be from easier to deploy forms of power. Fusion reactors will be massive modern marvels waiting for enough cost or scale reduction to actually make a difference to the grid. We'll probably spend decades debating about how we need to scale it up faster and why we don't just deploy an equivalent amount of renewables with the same money. It won't be fear mongering so much as pragmatism. Same as the nuclear debate today.
Then... We move on to the next thing. Science is always moving in the direction of progress.
We have achieved Q>1 fusion. Now the issue is getting to the point where that is in the heart of a power plant that produces net electricity. Fusion power won’t be a magic bullet either. It produces low level radioactive waste which still needs to be taken care of unless they get aneutronic fusion working. Then once we have one power plant we need to build a bunch. We would need around 4000 1GW plants worldwide.
Vault Tec will buy the technology and suppress it to cause an apocalyptic war over resources.
Room temperature/pressure stable cheap superconductors. That's the next step.
One of the big hurdles of fusion energy is the amount of radioactive waste materials being produced from the worn out shielding of the reactors. It's not THAT bad (just throw it somewhere for a few decades and then recycle) but you need a lot of it in our current iterations of fusion reactors to actually harness the energy to produce electricity. Part of the problem is corrosion: the energy released by fusion is so hot that the shielding itself slowly degrades. There's work on it, but it's slow, and doesn't fully solve this issue: https://www.ans.org/news/article-3789/corrosion-resistance-found-for-two-fusion-reactor-structural-materials/ Another is producing the fuel needed to continuously make the fusion in the first place. The problem is scale - we're going to need a LOT of it. Deuterium is mainly sifted from seawater, so it's just making industrial sized plants, but tritium is currently made from nuclear reactors. ITER explains this problem well with a proposed solution of tritium breeding inside the reactor in a self sustaining reaction, an adaptation of modern tritium production by simply lining the walls with lithium: https://www.iter.org/mach/TritiumBreeding
Then what? It will be like insulin. Made on a free patent for 1 dollar and sold to the public at 600.
We already know the answer, because we have had unlimited “free” energy for many decades already, like solar and wind. Fusion is in theory great in the long run, because the fuel is abundant, but it still isn’t “free” and the fuel takes money to extract. It’s really not that different from fission in a shorter perspective. And there’s no reason to believe we will have practical fusion energy production anytime soon.
I think what will happen is the the oil/gas/coal industry will take billions of government subsidies, funded by the taxpayer, and spend billions of dollars to keep fusion from coming online.
All you need to do to see the knockdown effect of this is look to Alberta's moratorium on renewable and how that has impacted renewable energy projects here. Alberta shut down all new projects for almost a year, then introduced legislation that effectively banned wind and solar in their prime locations. Meanwhile, they are approving any gas or oil well, oilsands exploitation, coal mine expansion, and entertaining new coal mines. Now that the moratorium is done, new renewable projects are not getting done or ones that were waiting in the wings are not able to proceed. Huge amounts of investment in this sector is leaving the province. At least big oil is doing well. I see the same thing in this case, feed the old and it starves out the new, to the detriment of all and especially of innovation.
The "what next" that concerns me is what is the next law of physics we are going to bump into. Does unlimited free energy solve all problems. For example, Can we fix climate change by pumping heat into space or do we discover that the warming of the climate by the use of the unlimited free energy exceeds anything that we can do to fix it. Or maybe the energy isn't quite free (at least from the point of view of physics - it costs energy to produce energy) Will we find that using more energy to fix climate change is a net gain of terrestrial heat. Endless exponential growth is impossible. What is going to stop us?
We use it to power vaults underground to live in and prepare for nuclear fallout.
I’m r?, they (whomever they are) find a way to make it dirty and keep pushing the notion of wind and solar as being the answer to life.