The fusion energy dream is inching toward planet-saving reality

"soon" is relative. The older I get, the more something a century or even two away doesn't seem that far off, and something that could arrive in 20 years seems positively near.

The Long Now project strives to get people to think more long-term, and I've heard that in some parts of Asia governments and organizations plan on far longer time horizons than is common in the West.

The world would be far better off if more of us adopted such a perspective, rather than focusing on only on what can be done now or in the next few years.

That's why research is needed otherwise researching will take the research duration plus the delay imposed by people saying it won't be here anytime soon anyway.

> perfectly viable power sources like solar, wind, solar-thermal etc.

Until humanity has figured viable massively scalable long term power storage solutions we will always be at the mercy of natural phenomena (time of day, wind speed and direction etc). Additionally AFAIK "renewable power sources" don't have the necessary power density to make them viable as humanity's exclusive power source.

Why spend huge sums in a fusion reactor, when we have a perfectly reliable funsion reactor right above us, the Sun, giving power at a convenient form (~500nm light -- far better than heat), at convenient power densities (not too high to overheat panels and not too low to be uneconomical), is available virtually everywhere, etc. It really is like we had already built a reactor and only need to add the last, least expensive, bit of energy harvesting.

The only thing Solar cannot compete well with are fossil fuels, which are essentially like discovering charged batteries buried in the ground (which is great, but they'll run out, and are ruining our environment), or wind/hydro in some places (where energy is begging to be harvested in the form of kinetic energy or potential).

Our salvation (for this crisis :) ) is indeed already within our reach, we only need to act...

https://www.iea.org/weo/?fbclid=IwAR2LwDYcozvpGCOa3bIi2ieMbj...

Do you think it's worthwhile to discourage humanity from attempting new things because there are existing sub optimal alternatives?

Or are you just trying to sound contrarian for internet points?

(Despite what you're saying being the safest, most boring, done to death, remarks on fusion)

Fusion reactions produce lots of neutrons, and neutrons weaken metal, in many cases within a few hours.

It may be that a "successful" fusion reactor is still a failure because it can run for only a few hours, days, or weeks before it has to be scrapped and completely rebuilt.

And nuclear fission first, if you want to be realistic.

For comparison: The total inventory of tritium would be about 500g, about 50 times the amount of tritium released by fukushima, but the other radioactive isotopes that got released there (caesium, iodine, tellurium) that are much more problematic biologically would be missing.

I wouldn't want to be in the building when it fails.

If it uses Tritium then that's going be an environmental hazard (it's radioactive and will get everywhere).

To be honest it's all conjecture right now because we don't have a viable reactor design and failure modes will depend what exactly we build.

The general idea is this: when you fuse elements, you produce heavier elements; if you wanted to fuse these new elements into even heavier ones, you'd need to input much more energy — thus it can be said in layman terms that the products of fusion are 'toxic' to the fusion itself, i.e. the more you do it the less likely it is to go on, until if finally stops (like in real-world stars). For instance, the Helium produced by the Sun is making it harder to sustain the Hydrogen fusion, which will stop before all Hydrogen is depleted.

In addition, the radioactive elements produced by fusion are much lesser than fusion, by orders of magnitude, so it's pretty much 'clean' in that regard for all intents and purposes (50 years of fission probably produced much worse than 1,000 years of fusion would).

And the fuel is available in pretty much limitless quantity — in fact, it would probably make a space industry, starting with mining hydrogen isotopes for fusion, profitable from day 1.

It's basically the closest thing we have to God's tech, and there's not much else in theoretical physics that comes close in terms of benefits in our real-world context. Fusion would essentially hand over the galaxy to us with little to no chance of failure, given enough time.

If we can pull it off, that is. Which remains to be seen, there's nothing new or groundbreaking in this article.

There are still issues, like most fusion reactions produce neutrons, which are not great by themselves, and basically most dangerous type of radiation. They can make regular matter radioactive. But we are far from that stage when this is a problem.

My understanding is that so far, it doesn't look like wind/hydro/solar can scale to our needs within the timeframe that fusion might be viable (and yes, I know, it's "always 20 years away", but hopefully that changes eventually), so it's still a worthwhile pursuit, IMO.

Many dont realise that it's projected to max out at 10bn and then we will have a perpetual declining population / demographic crises.