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Comment by hannob | Hacker News Reader

> I am always amazed by the (low) price of those projects, compared to the potential benefits

What would be the potential benefit?

In an optimistic scenario you'd end up with a technology that will likely have very high capital costs for construction and also very high infrastructure costs for transmission lines, because you create a lot of energy in one location.

Even in that best case I don't see such a technology playing a huge role in a future energy system. You end up competing with Wind, Solar and Storage decades into the future (i.e. they'll be much cheaper than they already are today).

Of course there's also the much more likely case: It just won't work.

Given that there are much more pressing needs in energy research (how do we manage storage once we get to higher rates of renewables? how do we decarbonize sectors outside of electricity?) there isn't that much in favor of fusion imho.

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I surmise that effective fusion power would completely alter the space race forever, even before we figure out propulsion from this energy source. The scientific benefits from a potential large scale space platform with that kind of energy input would have enormity beyond measure, I'm sure.

Even if we don't leave the planet, the amount of energy that can be produced from a fusion plant would still offer tremendous benefits. You could run massive technological infrastructure directly around such a power source.

While one could say that humans themselves have little use of such a thing, I argue that fusion power could usher in a new age of humanity, despite the cost.

The potential benefit is lots of electricity, which may be abundant that when amortized over the "high capital costs" could be much more cost effective than wind, solar, and storage, or may not be. We have to invest in these relatively small projects to figure that out.

Furthermore, the highly geographically concentrated energy production from fusion power could work really well for energy consumers with a similarly localized nature. I'm thinking large scale carbon capture, energy intensive materials manufacturing or processing, or large scale ocean water desalination.

No, actually fusion is likely to be even more expensive than fission, and fission already cannot compete with wind and solar. Fusion takes the biggest problem of fission, high capital cost, and makes it worse, while reducing fuel costs, which are only a minor part of the cost of fission. It's bass-ackwards engineering.

That line of reasoning sounds backwards.

The benefits would be clean, limitless energy and why is it likely that it will have a high capital cost and why wouldn't that be dwarfed by the availability of clean, limitless energy?

Claiming that somehow storage for renewables is a much more useful goal sounds more like ideology than anything.

Take the money currently going into solar and wind and put it to use there instead.

Solar and wind will never provide anything even close to what is needed for the energy needs of future generations or for any kind of progress in ex space exploration.

The high capital cost of fusion follows from some fundamental aspects of fusion reactor engineering.

http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trou...

“Long touted as an inexhaustible energy source for the next century, fusion as it is now being developed will almost certainly be too expensive and unreliable for commercial use.”

"As it is now being developed"

Lidsky was advocating movement to advanced fuels. Unfortunately, his PhD student Todd Rider shot down most of those schemes (the ones using non-Maxwellian plasmas). After that, Lidsky transitioned to fission and spent the rest of his career working on that.

If fusion is to have a glimmer of hope, it's D-3He (which produces maybe 5% of the neutrons of DT). But 3He is very difficult to get. Mining the moon for it is probably impractical, because the concentration of 3He in the regolith is too low (and the moon could only power Earth for about 1000 years even if it could be mined).

The future is a long time. Most breakthrough technologies are based on often decades or even centuries of research.

Perhaps. On the other hand, there are many more technologies than there are market niches for them to fill, so most technologies will be losers.

I see nothing that tells me fusion won't be a loser. The attachment some people have to it is bizarre. It's like they were told when they were young and naive that fusion was going to be the future, and are unable to revise their programmed opinions in light of contrary evidence.

Well I can tell you for sure that wind and solar are loosers.

So unless you have a better idea I have a hard time understanding what your point is.

How can you tell that wind and solar are losers? Their market shares are expanding rapidly across the world. They seem to be winning in the marketplace, not losing.

They provide less than 1% of the worlds energy needs and even if you project up to 2040 they are still only going to be providing around 3% of the worlds energy needs. How is that winning?

So perhaps you are the one who's been too tied to one specific narrative that's not holding up to reality.

In the magical world in which your argument there would be correct, technologies jump from 0 to dominant market share in a single discontinuous leap.

But we do not live in that cartoon universe. Here in real world, market share increases nearly continuously. On the way from 0 to 100, it passes near all the intermediate points.

What distinguishes a losing technology is not that it ever had a low market share -- all winning technologies did at some point -- but that they stop growing, and start losing market share. That describes nuclear, not renewables.

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