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Comment by grej | Hacker News Reader

Those have a role in the energy landscape to be sure, but they don’t offer the benefits of fusion because they don’t have the same power density.

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Yes, but they have the incredible advantage that they produce large amounts of energy economically today, whereas, as the article states, it is not yet clear whether fusion will ever be able to produce significant energy, let alone economically.

Wind and solar only produce energy when the weather is cooperating, and it's difficult to predict how climate change will impact future availability. Hydrogen might be economical someday, but currently it's rather difficult to generate, store, and transport.

There is always wind and solar somewhere. It need only be transmitted or stored to be used in other places and times.

Both of those are cheap. People advocating nukes wish they were not.

Hand-waving away the transmission/storage required to make intermittent energy sources "reliable" does not magically make them trivial, or even solved, problems.

I don't really care whether or not nukes are cheap when they're the only reliable low-carbon energy source we have, and when they're the safest energy source we have. Some things are more fundamentally important than economics.

Yet, people deciding where to spend their own money are spending it on solar. Nukes are always built with money coerced from other people.

We can look at simulations using actual historical weather data and actual cost estimates to determine how much it would cost to deal with intermittency of wind/solar using storage. The result is something that looks cheaper than fission (or cheap than fusion is likely to achieve.)

https://model.energy/

If solar/wind is used to make hydrogen when they are available, you have a energy generating loop that provides energy usable at any time.

Fusion does not "offer benefits" of any energetic or economic kind. It is interesting in the same ways that microkelvin cryogenic and gigapascal hyperpressure are, exercising extreme physics.

Fusion does not offer energy density even approaching commercial fission.

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