China has pulled very far ahead in the quest for capturing and storing fusion energy from the sun, which is what really matters now. Fusion reactors will be cool if they can ever be made to work, but they won't be able to compete with renewables, and will thus only be useful in niche environments.
What do you think is less disruptive for the environment, a 1 GW fusion machine the size of a medium-sized warehouse, or 100 square kilometers of solar panels plus a battery installation?
Renewables are cheap at the margins, but they're not economically competitive if your goal is to support a massive growth of total electrical demand (either because you're a developing country that is growing rapidly, or first-world economy which is decarbonizing and electrifying industry and transportation).
It's not about the environment, it's about the financing. Who's going to put up the money to build the most complicated machines humanity has ever dreamed up, each one a many-years-long construction project very likely to have schedule slippages and cost overruns, when they could get more megawatts for the dollar building easy, reliable, low-maintenance solar parks which start generating revenue within a year?
Some governments will, sure, and perhaps a handful of large, wealthy cities in high latitudes or on small islands, but in general it's difficult to see why an investor would choose to invest in a fusion plant.
100 square kilometers of panels is the total energy consumption of the world now, two thirds of which is extracting, shipping refining and trucking around hydrocarbons which are stored sunlight.
The massive expense is, in the scheme of things, actually quite small. But there's no "there" there with fusion energy: the lower bound on its cost is the cost of fission energy.
Should the doge of Venice have invested any amount of money in Leonardo’s helicopter idea? There essentially was no upper bound in the usefulness of rotary wing vehicles. Yet he probably didn’t spend a single ducat. How silly.
It ain't. The lower bound on cost is the fusion energy at a safe 1AU distance. It's ignited and will produce energy for another dozen billion years. With asymptotically zero cost panels and relatively cheap batteries anyone can harness it anywhere.
That statement doesn't really make any sense. The expense of producing "fuel" for fusion is much lower than fission, and the improved safety profile means the actual realized engineering costs will also be lower.
Yes, in theory, if you could convince the world to accept thousands of new fission plants, you could probably get the cost pretty low, and that low cost would be pretty close to the same outcome for fission. But, good luck with that! Fusion has a much better chance of actually achieving the theoretical long-term economics of fission.
China has pulled very far ahead in the quest for capturing and storing fusion energy from the sun, which is what really matters now. Fusion reactors will be cool if they can ever be made to work, but they won't be able to compete with renewables, and will thus only be useful in niche environments.
What do you think is less disruptive for the environment, a 1 GW fusion machine the size of a medium-sized warehouse, or 100 square kilometers of solar panels plus a battery installation?
Renewables are cheap at the margins, but they're not economically competitive if your goal is to support a massive growth of total electrical demand (either because you're a developing country that is growing rapidly, or first-world economy which is decarbonizing and electrifying industry and transportation).
It's not about the environment, it's about the financing. Who's going to put up the money to build the most complicated machines humanity has ever dreamed up, each one a many-years-long construction project very likely to have schedule slippages and cost overruns, when they could get more megawatts for the dollar building easy, reliable, low-maintenance solar parks which start generating revenue within a year?
Some governments will, sure, and perhaps a handful of large, wealthy cities in high latitudes or on small islands, but in general it's difficult to see why an investor would choose to invest in a fusion plant.
100 square kilometers of panels is the total energy consumption of the world now, two thirds of which is extracting, shipping refining and trucking around hydrocarbons which are stored sunlight.
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Given the massive expense on fusion, with nothing close to the desired outcome, I think we should happily let them spend on it instead.
The massive expense is, in the scheme of things, actually quite small. But there's no "there" there with fusion energy: the lower bound on its cost is the cost of fission energy.
Should the doge of Venice have invested any amount of money in Leonardo’s helicopter idea? There essentially was no upper bound in the usefulness of rotary wing vehicles. Yet he probably didn’t spend a single ducat. How silly.
If tens of billions of dollars isn't a meaningful amount, can you give it to me?
It ain't. The lower bound on cost is the fusion energy at a safe 1AU distance. It's ignited and will produce energy for another dozen billion years. With asymptotically zero cost panels and relatively cheap batteries anyone can harness it anywhere.
That statement doesn't really make any sense. The expense of producing "fuel" for fusion is much lower than fission, and the improved safety profile means the actual realized engineering costs will also be lower.
Yes, in theory, if you could convince the world to accept thousands of new fission plants, you could probably get the cost pretty low, and that low cost would be pretty close to the same outcome for fission. But, good luck with that! Fusion has a much better chance of actually achieving the theoretical long-term economics of fission.
The cost of fission fuel is already miniscule.
Minuscule sounds like a good lower bound to me! What’s the problem then?
The answer to "Is China Pulling Ahead in X?" is going to be "yes" for the foreseeable future.
I'm kinda interested in the demographic trends comparison here...
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