this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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While neat, this is not self-sustaining
it's taking more energy to power it than you're getting out of it. (You can build a fusion device on your garage if you're so inclined, though obviously this is much neater than that!)
One viewpoint is that we'll never get clean energy from these devices, not because they won't work, but because you get a lot of neutrons out of these devices. And what do we do with neutrons? We either bash them into lead and heat stuff up (boring and not a lot of energy), or we use them to breed fissile material, which is a lot more energetically favorable. So basically, the economically sound thing to do is to use your fusion reactor to power your relatively conventional fission reactor. Which is still way better than fossil fuels IMHO, so that's something.
It seems like it's probably too late.
Even if we crack fusion power today, I can't see it being deployed cheaply enough and quickly enough to compete with solar/wind+batteries. By the time we could get production fusion plants up and ready to feed power into the grid, it'd be 2050 and nobody would be interested in buying electricity from it.
Long distance transmission creates enormous power wastage, and cities are rarely located in places ideal for large scale wind and solar. Fusion can help deliver power to urban centres, reducing the acreage needed for a solar farm.
There are also inland places in northern latitudes that benefit little from solar. Wind and fusion would be a great energy mix for those places.
A fusion plant will need either nearby solar or nearby fusion plant, with solar only ok if restarting it can wait until daytime. More likely than not, a fusion plant is needed to help regulate plasma temperature based on reaction rate, and cool magnets. But a 10gw fusion plant still is extremely unlikey to need its output overnight compared to day peak demand. A fusion plant needs to be located near a low property value power plant, instead of close to high property value customers.