> "All" we need is political action to build more clean power plants

We’re building solar about as quickly as we can, and without cannibalising EV battery supply chains are also maxed out on batteries. Fission power remains uncompetitive with natural gas; you’d have to convince Western consumers to bear higher prices for reduced emissions which nobody is willing to do.

> We already have enough tech to make emission free and cheap electricity.

As much as I am a proponent of green energy, this claim is outlandish. If we had started building more nuclear reactors 10 years ago, sure, but by themselves wind and solar aren’t quite sufficient enough for places like the US to fully replace fossil fuels. There are limitations for both, namely the need for space and acceptable weather conditions. Solar panel energy yield still has potential to unlock, as well. Last update I’d seen about panels said they still only hover around 25% energy yield.

Fission just isn't a competitive source of energy economically. Nobody is willing to pay 10x as much for energy just to get nuclear. Seems clear to me that the actual solution we need are cheap batteries so we can scale renewables

I have a relative who commented one time about how in 1960 year the fusion power was only 10 years away.

I'm pretty sure he was talking about sustainable electric grid usable power. He spent some time with a key in an underground silo though...

While I admire your optimism, this is not realistic. The earth is big and not all parts get the same amount or intensity of sunlight. Nordic countries cannot rely on Solar with batteries, for example.

> it's not relevant to the climate crisis... the already existing technologies have that covered, we only need to deploy them faster

Going all in on solar and batteries either requires nuclear energy, thereby raising power costs, or natural gas, which means we can’t make our 2050 goals. We simply can’t manufacture the panels and batteries fast enough, the latter especially if we also want to decarbonise transportation.

Fusion won’t come fast enough for the climate crisis. But it may be relevant for complete decarbonisation, e.g. replacing the natural gas plants we’re spinning up as quickly as we’re deploying solar.

No, b/c we really need it as a weapon. Fusion lasers will finally provide the death ray of sci-fi. If you think "practical energy source" is what fusion research is really about then you've been bamboozled.

Steam.

The actual problem is reaction vessel wall ablation.

Well, we could always just set up solar panels and use it to capture output from the massive fusion reaction 8.5 light minutes away from us. Does that count as a successful utilization of fusion?

Ah, so it's not charged plate conversion (which seems impossible with pulsed plasma if the plate spacing is too high). Hopefully it works, because I'm _not_ reading another 40 page study/whitepaper on direct energy conversion.

> It’s been getting closer for what, two decades now?

This is low effort. Are you arguing we haven’t made material progress in the last twenty years?

Material science advances in magnets alone should raise your curiosity to not have to wait for a packaged consumer product to notice advancement.

It’s been 30 years away for half a century. Then it was 20 years away for the last few decades. Now it is 10 years away. We’re making progress!

since the late 1950s

Time for Musk to announce fusion powered self driving cars for next sear

> It’s been getting closer for what, two decades now?

No reason for pointless cynicism, this is also against the guidelines. Fusion power is like childbirth - yelling at 9 months that it has been 9 months, and is therefore never arriving, would be delusional.

The Economist always phrases articles to imply that private investment is a magical elixir that will make problems go away.

The fundamental thing behind SPARC is (iiuc) to do this far faster by being drastically smaller. Iter was designed a long time ago based on materials available at the time. SPARC can be much smaller with much stronger magnets.

The argument from SPARC wasn't that iter was incompetent but that being so vast and expensive requires multiple nation states cooperating which is inherently slow. Slow things being more risks as thing a change too (9 years is probably 3 governments here). Making it smaller makes it cheaper, a d cheaper means a smaller collaboration (or single company).

A comparison to Zeno's paradox isn't quite apt, because fusion power can (in this metaphor) go very far beyond the wall.

I think it's better to think of it this way: are you a lay person not in the field? Then most of this work doesn't matter to you. But you should keep funding it.

It doesn't have reaction byproducts, if you don't count the reactor itself, which gets lots of neutrino bombardment and ends up glowing scrap metal.

The actual intended products of the fusion reactions are generally not radioactive and are rather harmless. But most proposed fusion reactions produce neutrons. Neutrons, unfortunately, can hit other nuclei and “activate” them, transmuting them into other isotopes that can be quite nasty. So fusion is far from perfect.

Technically the helium produced is the waste product, but fortunately we have tons of uses for helium.

looks like that article didn't read this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42221756

fusion is the ultimate clean energy source. we shouldn't give up on it just because it's a difficult problem

If we're talking Star Trek humanity cosplay, our best bet would be to sort out communicators first. We're almost there. It already works reliably, just needs to be made to respect privacy and be completely free.

> won't be alive to see the full dream of infinite cheap energy come true.

You won't. Sorry for being cynical, but the true cost of energy is the capital invested in the equipment to harvest it. A fusion reactor would be at the minimum, as expensive as a fission one, which means all that capital will have to be amortised over the years. This doesn't even take into account the cost of extracting deuterium from sea water or producing helium 3 and tritium from lithium. Fusion doesn't even solve the problem of nuclear waste, since it will create radioactive isotopes by bombarding components of the reactor with neutrons.

You want cheaper, cleaner energy ? Solar and wind with battery storage is the best option, and it's already here, no need need to wait for fusion magic that may or may not happen in our lifetimes.

Probably we will just burn the world with the free energy.

I don't see why would it be cheap.

Nuclear is mostly capital costs, not the fuel. Fusion doesn't look any cheaper to build. Like any other bit of complicated infrastructure, it'll have a limited lifetime.

So, power cost is ((capital_costs + running_costs) / amount_produced) * profit_margin

While I'm very much in favor of research, I don't understand the expectation of that it'll make power cheap. I'm pretty sure nothing will beat solar and wind because they're cheap, simple and very amenable to mass production in ways that fusion and fission can never be.

At this point IMO neither fusion nor fission have a future as a main source of grid power. They're still worth researching, and will still have specialized uses in places like submarines and aircraft carriers.

What has changed to make you think it’s finally really close now? I found the short article a little light on details, although as a layman I have noticed people seeming cautiously excited about ITER and speaking about SPARC as if its near-term promises may be credible.

Are there other signals that you’d point to as influencing your shift to optimism?

Lots of people assume that fusion energy will be cheap but this is not true for the tokamak designs, which have the highest chance of success. Helion's approach should be very cost-competitive but it has a high chance of failure.

> Desalination could then be used for agriculture and industry

This is likely going to happen anyway because of the rapidly falling costs of solar power. Although it certainly doesn't hurt to make energy cheaper yet again.

It'd get nowhere. The problem isn't money. One could say there's even too much money thrown at fusion research that could have better use elsewhere. There are just too many incredibly hard problems to solve.

As nice as that would be, if we think about it logically it's not at all in the US governments interests for Fusion to work. Suddenly that massive pot of money from natural resources (e.g Oil) vanishes.

That would solve about ~40% of global climate emissions, and would single-handedly do serious damage to politician's attempt to use climate change as a cattle prod.

Watch them say, "Yay, we've solved climate change" with gritted teeth as they figure out the next useful crisis.