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Comment by barrysteve | Hacker News Reader

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barrysteve

What hogwash. People crave security more than they do anything else and it's completely toxic.

Space travel can use infinite energy.

Fusion works underground where many renewables do not.

Infinite energy can be used for climate control of the whole planet.

Fusion plants can fuel megafactories even in war conditions.

Fusion can enable more energy expensive technologies like hydrogen batteries, to be trivially affordable.

I'm starting to find the Western malaise that has come around this decade, to be offensive.

It's like the knees have given out and people are just begging for a comfortable death. Come on! We're better than this!

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Where does this idea that fusion == infinite energy come from? Nothing could be further from the truth, all fusion power plant designs have a very fixed amount of power they can generate (limited by the size of the reactor), and the costs to build and maintain one are gigantic, in ways that are unlikely to go down in the next century or so. Scaling them up (building bigger reactors) is extremely hard because of fundamental geometric reasons, and scaling horizontally (many many power plants) is hard because they require teams of experts to run and monitor.

And pretty much the whole plant, with all the expensive magnets, supports, and reactor chamber, has a lifespan of maybe 10-15 years before the constant neutron bombardment makes the materials too brittle to keep supporting their weight. You then need robots to come in and dismantle the highly radioactive components and store them securely for a few 1-200 years while they cool off.

Sure, it's nice that fusion requires relatively little fuel (though even that is not that great, since it requires an extremely rare substance, tritium), but that doesn't mean it's in any way going to scale up infinitely, or even a lot, or even as much as nuclear fission.

I said infinite energy, because that is exactly the phrase required to break people out of the limited mould that traps minds into erroneous thinking.

Neutrons are a problem in JET/Tokamaks. They are less of a problem in other fusion designs.

I feel like I'm the last person on this planet who actually enjoys being uncertain, and uncertain enough to see the big picture.

Most of the problems you have described are getting solved piece by piece in small scale projects, and then the evidence collected from their successes will be combined into a more effective solution that you are willing to discuss.

I'm so tired of the constant emotional vortex sucking the intellect out of the West. Get off my back.

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