If fusion becomes a godsent reality, do you think we will see solar and wind companies fighting tooth and nail against it just like we see oil and coal companies fighting those today?
Sure, there might be potential savings compared to fission because less safety concerns, but the reactor complexity is an order of magnitude higher, and its far from clear to me that fusion power will even be able to compete with current (admittedly often state-subsidized) fission on price, MUCH less with the price of renewables now (or, worse, in 20 years)...
Fusion in the long-term answer will provide benefits far beyond just eliminating power station greenhouse gas emissions, I suspect, but there are many technical and economic hurdles that have to be overcome, any of which could be pointed to when questions about allocation of state funding come up.
It could also be that it makes total sense to use 100% solar/wind + battery in everything not city and use fusion in city/for cities.
I would also argue that the 'no longer needed solar' will then be sold and used everywere else until all poor countries also are using solar energy.
Are people unable to learn from Ukraine? Fission/fusion reactors are just one missile away from nation-wide blackout and panic.
This distance could probably be shrunk if some of the gains from matsi for meta-materials translated into fluids engineering, where some kind of "meta" fluid has certain differential properties at a given thermal load (im imagining that the side/region with the thermal load, the particles in the fluid would have some type of glassy dynamics behavior to spontaneously create a radiant barrier back toward the source, would need to talk more with my friend about this since his thesis covered quasi-1d models of glassy dynamics and spontaneous partial arrangements under various conditions on initial perturbation and at steady state).