After billions spent and decades of no progress, this is the same repeated article that has been rewritten every other year hyping about the promisses of what, for all purposes, is currently expensive vaporware.
If you follow the literature, you will realize everyone is busy optimizing their manufacturing capabilities instead of going for short term goals of factoring ever larger numbers. We have to go from a regime where grad students spend months/years carefully crafting a handful of small parts to mini-industrial processes which can be used to manufacture thousands or millions of identical parts. It takes time and effort to do build such setups, but progress has been consistent over the last decade or so, and will only get better in the next decade.
[1] You should be aware though that there have been several very solid demonstrations of quantum key distribution, including commercial offerings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_key_distribution
[2] Its like humans on Mars. Everyone knows, in principle its possible, but the challenges are huge and rushing things is simply not a viable option.
I think many are seriously underestimating the engineering breakthroughs needed for a computer that can break 2048 bit RSA. Hopefully I'm proven wrong.
An example: casting You can cast wax nearly for free, given that you salvage the mold materials and carve them by hand, sunlight can be used to melt the wax (~70C), and almost no materials are needed to control heat. Casting pewter is a bit more difficult, as a wooden mold will burn a bit, and you'll need some type of heat control tech, such as an oven or microwave or solar forge (~200C). The temperature has only tripled, but already materials no longer work and costs are significantly higher. I've worked in a titanium foundry and the cost is enormous compared to low energy areas.
But I doubt either can beat what solar and wind are poised to produce. They are cheaper than installed coal now, and are targeting installed natural gas.
Battery will handle the rest of storage/load needs.
According to [1], the current highest factorization using Schor's algorithm is 21=3 * 7 published in 2012, up from the 15=3 * 5 that was demonstrated in 2001. This pace is not all that promising.
Sure, there are other quantum factorizations, but they are either stunts (work only for very narrow classes), or are based on a different algorithm than Schor, which does not show hope to scale up.
[1] https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/59795/largest-int...
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As with the work done to try to figure out how we should handle a big rock coming our way, work on post-quantum cryptography is justifiable because it's something we would really regret not working on if it suddenly becomes necessary and it's not _that_ expensive. But just because the threat justifies relatively modest research expenditure doesn't make it worth a newspaper article that will invariably distort the facts and confuse more than it illuminates.