> Name a single fusion plant that has been running uninterrupted for years.
Minutes, even. Perhaps you meant fission?
Minutes, even. Perhaps you meant fission?
Meanwhile, we have massive grids of solar and battery being installed _today_, and existing installations replacing coal plants.
I'm tired of people talking about fusion (or even nuclear, as it's so mired in public FUD) as if it's some panacea. We have a solution right now: Solar and batteries. It works in places with cloudcover. It works in cold and hot climates. It works at night. It's getting cheaper every year.
Solar and batteries are nice but they're not yet cost effective. They're getting better. But you can't just handwave away real problems from your armchair viewpoint and assume thats all fine.
We don't have working fusion power, at all.
> Solar and batteries are nice but they're not yet cost effective
"Cost effective" is a judgement call, not physics. If I told you that the cost of coal-generated electricity was that your great-grandchildren would live in an impoverished and difficult world, you might not view that a particular cost-effective either, yet somehow that's the "standard" against which things are judged.
Sure we do. Look no further than this article. We can make it, but its not commercially viable.
> "Cost effective" is a judgement call, not physics. If I told you that the cost of coal-generated electricity was that your great-grandchildren would live in an impoverished and difficult world, you might not view that a particular cost-effective either, yet somehow that's the "standard" against which things are judged.
Ah yes, think of the children.
Yes, coal is problematic, but the reality is that energy is expensive and we need a lot of it. If we tried to go full solar right now it would cost trillions of dollars, and the grid would still fail in the winter when heating is most important, and the economy would enter a massive depression as the cost of doing things gets both more expensive on average and extremely volatile.
You say this is a judgement call, not physics, but then go on to just broadly make assumptions about all of the relevant facts. You're not the one being logical and fact based. You're the one observing, yes, we have a climate crisis, and thus assuming that a radical solution for which you have no particular understanding of the economic or infrastructure implications is the right one because it's at least different from what we have now.
Renewables are good. They are getting cheaper. They're growing in capacity. And yet, I guarantee you, we cannot go full solar now. And I also guarantee that you do not have nearly sufficient of a view of the system dynamics to be making statements as bold as you are. This is hard. It's not just evil greedy coal mine operators ruining everything.
Q total is way below 1 (translation: it took far more energy to make the energy that was produced, than was produced). We do not have working fusion power, if "working fusion power" means "you get more out than you put in".
As for the rest of this, I have no idea who you think you're replying to. Just one follow up, neverthless:
> And yet, I guarantee you, we cannot go full solar now.
The USA spent more than US$300M per day on the war in Afghanistan, for 20 years. I guarantee you that if "we wanted to go full solar" now, we could. US$2T buys you a lot of anything, including even today's vaguely clunky battery tech.
That's not what it means. Working means it works. Can you produce fusion power? Yes. Can you do so in a commercially viable way? No. Q is obviously a part of this. Uninteresting semantics.
> The USA spent more than US$300M per day on the war in Afghanistan, for 20 years. I guarantee you that if "we wanted to go full solar" now, we could. US$2T buys you a lot of anything, including even today's vaguely clunky battery tech.
And I'm telling you, no, we could not, because that's not how the world works. From many perspectives, including economics of how to actually acquire all these solar assets many of which are already being consumed as fast as produced and dependent on limited metals supply chains; land availability with reasonable transmission setups; grid capacity to absorb these new generation facilities on the transmission lines; power availability during non peak times; and the preposterous externalities of trying to rapidly undermine the global energy market.
If it takes more than 1W of input power to produce 1W of power from fusion, then I'd say the answer is no. The distinction is not "commercially viable", it's "net energy production". We're not there yet (and are actually quite a lot way from it).
> And I'm telling you,
... that US$2T is a lot of money, and that's just what we spent on 1 war. Yes, there would be complications and side effects and what have you. Money, in our system, combined with the other abilities of the federal government, can do a lot.
Solar is getting so much cheaper, at such a fast pace, that I really don't understand how one can disagree that it's the future of our energy grids. Installing solar is a no-brainer in some parts of the world now, and in the very near future (extrapolating from the last 10 years), it'll be every part of the world soon.
What problems am I hand waving away?
https://www.statista.com/chart/26085/price-per-megawatt-hour...
But this chart is the levelized cost of energy. Its not the price at which you can get it. Energy demands are higher in winter. They are non trivial at night. The cost of energy might be low, but the price at which you can get it may be very high if not enough is available.
I use 6kWh / day. (not sure how! but that's what the power company says)
A decent EV battery holds 20 kWh or more.
Boom. There is my night time storage buffer.
Battery tech and solar is great, but its not the perfect solution.
It's like being back in the 1700s and arguing that research into petrol is a waste of time. I absolutely do not understand this mindset.
We will not be here in 200 years to enjoy fusion if we don't adopt solar and battery _right now_.
Technically, none of us will be here in 200 years.
I very much doubt if climate change will lead to an end to the human species, so I think a better way talk about this stuff is to frame it in terms of our descendants living in an impoverished, less beautiful, more strife-filled world.
But yes, FFS, action yesterday or last week, and make it trillions of dollars worth of action, like an actual war, but for infinitely better reasons.
When I was 16 I remember reading a Scientific American article that was describing how nuclear fusion was around the corner. Within the next 2 years!
It's always been clearly communicated to me that fusion is extremely hard and we're not that close to getting it working.