For decades, government scientists have toiled away trying to make nuclear fusion work. Will commercial companies sprint to the finish?
For decades, government scientists have toiled away trying to make nuclear fusion work. Will commercial companies sprint to the finish?
Even if they miraculously figured out how to build a commercially viable reactor TODAY, it would be too late to be more than a tiny building block of a zero carbon strategy.
Building enough of them, including all necessary global infrastructure would take 30 years. If we continue business as usual till then, it’s already over.
And fusion would only reduce carbon emissions in the energy sector, not in transportation, shipping, resource gathering/refining, etc.
Reducing carbon emissions isn’t the primary goal here though. The primary goal is infinite clean energy. INFINITE power. The plant in France could become operational within 5 years. The harnessing of this power is a milestone for our species.
fusion won’t give us infinite power. It requires tritium last I knew.
What’s the bottleneck there? Is there a reason why we couldn’t scale up production? Genuinely asking.
It costs energy to make. Im not sure really if its net positive overall but its enough that the moon is talked about for its tritium deposits which makes me think its not very easy to make. wikipedia has some stuff on it but its hard to get overall. Anyway though its not some magical unlimited energy. it has inputs and outputs like anything else.
Of course, yeah. I think we would see nearly unlimited, free energy, but there’s obviously still bounds and constraints. I think it could very well be enough energy to be considered limitless for everyday activities and industry, and only run into issues with things like space travel. But we’ll have to see. It’s such a new field in terms of actually having things to show for, there’s a lot we don’t know.
Im very skeptical it would get anywhere near that. Besides tritium I know the reactors need certain shielding that gets worn out and becomes radioactive. tritium can be made from fission plants and fusion makes radioactive elements but given everything else we have seen with technology I am doubting these are going to play off each other in a net positive way that can just be kept on going. Its in some ways a lot like wind/solar/water. The sunlight/wind/maybetidal is unlimited but the materials for the collectors are not and have to be replaced. We are really good at using up energy sources and there are like 8 billion of us.
From what I understand tritium is the easiest but there are other ways to acheive fusion. Once we figure out deuterium-tritium fusion we should be able to work towards something like deuterium-deuterium fusion. You also have methods that can be used to manufacture tritium. One of the later stages of the ITER project is to attempt to use the reactor to breed tritium. If they can pull that off then there would be no need for external sources of tritium.
I mean even given that there are other resources that go into it. Fusion will give us more time but its not going to allow super inefficient things like sucking the carbon back out. I don’t have great hope because given we squandered the last 50 years I doubt more time will help us. All the same though its better to have it than not have it.
I still think it’s prudent to build the plants as a backup plan for zero emissions. The best time build a bunch of nuclear plants was 30 years ago, and the second best is now – because 30 years from now, I don’t want us to still be in the same situation of “we should’ve built them years ago”. Fusion has the capacity to be a nearly limitless, clean energy source. Even if we already have zero emissions when we turn them on, they can give us an abundance of energy we’ve never seen before.
Think about the possibilities if energy was free and unlimited. There’s a lot of stuff today that is limited because they’re energy inefficient. That would stop mattering. Clean water can be generated en masse through reverse osmosis. Everything gets easier to build and to operate. The only operating costs of significance would be maintenance. High speed travel hubs could be built anywhere and everywhere. Even the worst quality soil could be made arable. We could constantly monitor a bunch of parameters for the sake of monitoring them – we could determine for instance if we’re depleting seawater by significant levels when we purify it, and we can course correct it then and there. What could be a second climate crisis otherwise would be nipped in the bud since we wouldn’t have to wait so long to see after effects.
I’m talking like a kid at a candy store, but it’s honestly super exciting to think about. This would be the next step for energy after sustainability, and it would completely transform everything for the better.
Genuinely curious in what world do you think humanity’s energy needs are not going to increase over time?
In the one where areas with a billion inhabitants become unsuitable for human habitation in 20 years, and the resulting mass migration takes down civilization as we know it.
Efficiency will get better, and population will likely start to decline. But I don’t know if more demand from people coming out of substance farming will be more or less than the less usage from efficiency and population decline.