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>Thus, every cent spent on this project actually takes us farther away from a renewable-energy future, vs. that same money put into building out wind and solar capacity and storage.

I believe you don't understand there is a law of diminishing returns on everything. If I spend 10x more on electronic chip research, I don't get 10x faster electronics, I get 1.2x, because improving becomes harder and more expensive.

The same happens with renevables. There is real state for solar and wind, places with lots of solar light and access to cheap refrigeration, like Algeria or Morocco, or places with lots of wind like the US Great Planes. Once you build on this real state, energy is way more expensive and it gives you worse returns.

On the contrary, it is a very good idea to explore different fields, because it is extremely cheap(the investment in nuclear fusion has been minimal compared to other energy sources) and gives you lots of scientific developments, because of the same law of diminishing returns.

It does not need to give you a new energy extraction mechanism. Just exploring what nobody else has done before, like getting plasmas at millions of degrees, have always provided scientific breakthroughs in the past.

Just putting all your eggs in one basket is not a good strategy.

I understand diminishing returns perfectly, thank you.

Tokamak fusion will never pay back even the money already spent on it, never mind the billions more to make it work at all, or the many tens of billions needed to build a power generating facility, or to build another one two or five years later as the first one destroys itself with neutron flux.

I.e., we are already in diminishing returns on hot-neutron fusion. Probably the only result of any value will be a generation of practical plasma fluid dynamicists, who will be needed for fusion propulsion systems.

Meanwhile, each dollar spent building out solar and wind generates production capacity at least in proportion, with discount for bigger sites: the literal opposite of diminishing returns.

I think what you're saying is that we should let the Sun do fusion because it's really good at that, and we should do photovoltaics and wind because we're really good at that, and maybe leaving fusion on the Sun where it belongs is sensible.

Do you really think we can cover our far-future energy needs with renewables alone?

We can but it means that you'll have solar captors (wind turbine, solar pv) littering the ground _or_ we'll just eat less energy. I'm afraid not many of us are ready for any of these two. Fusion would allow us to go on as usual. If only we had reliable information about the "is fusion for real use possible" question...

For a lot of places in the world you would need more storage than you need production units, especially further away you get from the equator and deserts. Fixing enough production from wind and solar is already well economical up to a point of 100% capacity with some countries already there, but with around 50% of actually energy consumption being from renewable.

We don't even need to litter the ground as ocean based wind farms are quite effective in using the wast amount of oceans we have. If however we are going to stop using fossil fuels we need to convert that energy into a storage medium like hydrogen, having massive pipelines to transport it, have large amount of storage facilities, and built equal amount of capacity of gas burning power plants as we have renewable capacity demands. The economics of that is the tricky bit.

withouthotair.com goes through this scenario of future being fully powered with renewables and it's just not possible.

China cannot meet it's energy demand increase even with building nuclear plants at a massive rate.

I was about to refer to McKay's stuff. Too bad he's gone...

Well, obviously. Because non renewables are not renewable, that is they run out.

Whatever our far-future energy use is going to be, it'll be from renewables alone because that is all there will be.

Renewables also run out.

If the sun stops shining (or turns into a red giant, which is on the schedule), we will have much bigger problems.

> Do you really think we can cover our far-future energy needs with renewables alone?

No, but they don't need to. Nearly all of today's technologies are incredibly wasteful as they are black box and produced within a system that seeks infinite growth.

Just look at the corporate-product produced e-waste [1], the corporate move against 'right-to-repair', and the relentless corporate walling off of the knowledge commons (scientific research) [2]. The effects of black box technologies on the education and knowledge commons are harrowing on their own.

Instead we can have an open source society that doesn't block people from learning, re-using and repairing the tech in our daily lives (and make it all modular). That means we won't use all the bloated technology we use today (goodbye archaic Intellectual Property system):

"The current political economy is based on a false idea of “immaterial scarcity.”

It believes that an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies – for copyrights, trademarks and patents – should restrain the sharing of scientific, social and economic innovations.3 Hence the system discourages human cooperation, excludes many people from benefiting from innovation and slows the collective learning of humanity. In an age of grave global challenges, the political economy keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits." [3]

The way to get there is a better and more open quantification of the material flows/throughputs in society. The breakthroughs behind Valueflo.ws and Holo-REA (Holo-REA is a combination of http://valueflo.ws and http://holochain.org) make this possible. Together these projects enable a fully distributed Network Resource Planning software (in contrast to today's Enterprise Resource Planning systems/software that walls of the material accounting of planetary resources).

"The current political economy is based on a false idea of material abundance.

We call it pseudo-abundance. It is based on a commitment to permanent growth, the infinite accumulation of capital and debt-driven dynamics through compound interest. This is unsustainable, of course, because infinite growth is logically and physically impossible in any physically constrained, finite system." [4]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27152968 / https://torrentfreak.com/fbi-has-gained-access-to-sci-hub-fo...

[3], [4] http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/peer-peer-economy-and-ne...

We have thousands of years of nuclear fission raw materials available, and we'll eventually have to turn to them despite what the anti-nuke people say.

We don't really know our future projected energy costs in a post-climate change world.

Fusion might have a place if there is a massive amount of energy needed to reset the globe to a semi-controllable environment - either carbon control, air conditioning / heating on a city wide scale, natural disaster mitigation, etc.

Changing weather conditions can also affect solar and wind energy sources, which make it less permanent. Fission reactors still remain a crucial investment, but if Fusion ever 'arrives' it could prove a more fundamentally scalable solution - of course, around 50 years in the future.

If we need a massive amount of energy, we already know the way to get the most for our money: build out solar and wind.

In fact we do think we need a massive amount of energy, and society is slowly turning toward the correct answer. Each fragment that catches on invests in solar and wind. Some come late to the party, but everyone gets there in the end. The later you start, the lower your entry cost; but the earlier you start, the more benefit you get.

> This is a fundamental problem in any hot-neutron fusion system. The real reason governments pour so much money into Tokamak fusion projects is as jobs programs for hot-neutron physicists, and subsidy for contractors, to keep them all ready for when they will be tapped for weapons work.

This is quite the claim with no evidence to support it when the more obvious explanation is simply that fusion, if it become a reality, could power entire countries with a single reactor opposed to windmills.

That's not a given. It's also possible that fusion becomes a reality and in practice a working react is roughly the same size as a current fission reactor. Or smaller, or bit bigger. We don't know.

I said “could”.

Fusion is sought after so much as the theoretical limits of the energy output are quite gargantuan compared to anything that exists now.

How much of that theoretical limit can be practically accessed remains to be seen as always, but the theoretical limits lie orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any other potential energy source.

To say that fusion research is simply pursued to create jobs with no evidence is quite a strange claim when the more obvious reason is that the potential gains from it are enormous and that it's possible, and indeed plausible, that it could solve all energy problems in this world for the foreseeable future, and perhaps even in our lifetime.

If they were even a little bit serious about ever getting power out, they would not be starving everything except hot-neutron fusion.

Actions speak louder than words. Their actions are deafeningly clear.

We already have a solution to all energy problems for the foreseeable future: the cheapest ever devised, with costs still plummeting. All we need is to build it out. Building it out slower delays the full solution, in exact proportion.

> If they were even a little bit serious about ever getting power out, they would not be starving everything except hot-neutron fusion.

> Actions speak louder than words. Their actions are deafeningly clear.

Yes, their actions are pumping money into it, and dismiss that without a source by saying they are doing so “simply to create jobs”, which is an absurd idea when they could have created those jobs with other research.

They are pumping money into it because they hope it will bear fruit.

> We already have a solution to all energy problems for the foreseeable future: the cheapest ever devised, with costs still plummeting. All we need is to build it out. Building it out slower delays the full solution, in exact proportion.

No we do not, wind and solar can not currently supply entire countries, even on a theoretical level, the way a single fusion reactor could theoretically supply an entire country from a bucket of sea water per year.

Believing ever harder will be sure to get you there, just as it always has before.

All of the serious promoters of fusion say a production reactor would need to be at least ten times as large as current fission designs. I see no reason to guess they are exaggerating.

The amount of graft to be extracted from a $100B 20-year construction project already has some politicians salivating.

> Thus, every cent spent on this project actually takes us farther away from a renewable-energy future

And, by extension, from a carbon light future through better nuclear in small form factor and molten salt reactors. Renewable is great but efficient, climate neutral finite source energy is, too.

Too bad so much of the green movement is still hanging on to its former peace movement sentiment of nuclear = nuclear weapons.

No, because just operating and maintaining a fission plant is more expensive than building out solar, wind, and storage, and operating those. (Never mind building and decommissioning nukes, another huge expense with nothing comparable for remewables.)

There is no place for nukes, existing or new, in a financially solvent future. Never was, really. It was always the high-cost choice, but (so) offered copious opportunities to divert money to ready pockets, like most high-ticket tax-funded projects in the US.