Fair enough. But do any of those tracks realistically provide a road-map that make this timetable look like something more than wishful thinking?
But: Yes. Just one of those avenues is what MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center[0] has been talking about publicly since at least 2017 -- here's a fantastic talk[1] by them about how to think about fusion research and engineering, different approaches available, and about what is different in a world of high strength magnetic tapes, which they have subsequently worked to produce at industrial scales in partnership with CFS[2][3], which was founded by people from the PSFC to take advantage of this research. The bottom line is: these new very strong magnets allow way, way smaller tokamaks to hit net positive.
The hard research here is mostly done. The magnets it gave us have cleared a path forward at a far more tractable time and complexity scale than ITER can dream of. The work is now an engineering and industrial process problem, which is well under way: serious scientists and engineers around the world are hard at work at over a dozen different startups, working on reactors that could fire net-positively in well under a decade.
Will those reactors fix our energy problems? Hey, there's still fuel, waste, maintenance (neutrons hit hard!), regulations, etc... -- commercialization and politics are their own whole problems. But I would absolutely take the long bet that we'll have at least one net positive tokamak running before 2030.
0 - https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk (really, if you're at all interested, this is simply an amazing talk and clarifies a lot)
2 - https://news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusio...
3 - https://www.cfs.energy/ -- you can see Bob Mumgaard, CFS'CEO, is listed as a speaker at the white house event
If they offered the power exactly at cost, they would get no bids. Fission is today not competitive, and nobody involved can promise that Tokamak fusion could ever be competitive even with fission, never mind with what renewable power will be priced at, by then.
So, no, those reactors will not fix our energy, or any other, problem, unless our problem is too much money and not enough things to waste it on.
The expensive thing about fission is not getting a fission reactor to work, nor keeping it running. It's in getting the reactor greenlit at all, bespoke-designed, and handling supply and waste management. In many places, it is simply not an option due to geopolitics. So fission problem is not impractical because it is cost-prohibitive. Instead, it is impractical because it is responsible-waste-management and weapons-proliferation-regulations and spooky-stuff-difficult-political-battle-PR-nightmares-prohibitive. Sadly, very few people a) want a nuclear reactor in town, b) want to shoulder the risk of building, maintaining, and staffing a fission plant for 50 years, or c) want any "risky" nations to have easy access to them. That, far more than dollar-cost-per-megawatt-hour, is why we don't have nuclear plants everywhere today.
Solar and wind are amazing, and obviously essential to any future we have, but today they cannot do everything, everywhere. Further revolutions in power storage and transmission might enable that (like huge flywheels?) but that's not what we're discussing, we're discussing whether fusion a) can work, b) is useful at all, and c) will ever see large scale use for power production. I do grant that it's _possible_ that a flywheel-revolution could outpace a fusion-revolution.
Because of fission's problems, the niche of fusion over the next 30-50 years may be "nuclear power, but safer": it's more expensive, but it can be sold or built anywhere, the fuel control is not so vital/tough, and the waste is handleable on a timescale we can _at least_ wrap our heads around. Wind and solar currently need baseline plants for supplementation, and fusion may be the ticket to turning off the last remaining gas and coal plants out there, or in supplying power to underpowered nations with less favourable conditions for wind and solar. That is wonderful! That is lightning in a goddamned bottle. Literally! Does it have to be the cheapest option, when for many it's the only option?
Past 50 years, well, history would suggest it'll likely get better. Fission would likely be a lot better today (read: cheaper, smaller) if it were safer to begin with, and solar and wind have gotten astoundingly cheap as they've seen investment and use expand over time, so why shouldn't fusion do the same?
So the argument is: we're now likely to get net-positive tokamaks by ~2030. And if we have any net-positive tokamaks by 2030, then they can likely fill a power-niche that fission just can't. And if we spend 50 years making fusion plants and proliferating the technology, by 2080 it might get pretty damn cost effective. I think that's the bet all these smart people are making, and personally, I'm inclined to take it.
Well, with storage, they can do everything, everywhere. At worst, you make chemical fuels and ship them off to any weird place that has no sun and wind.
And PV is making electricity at $0.013/kWh in Dubai. Fusion will be lucky to come in within an order of magnitude of that.
Any place where renewables, local storage, and power delivered via transmission line are all unavailable, even if only temporarily, can surely get by on synthetic fuel shipped in from places that have reliable-enough power to make and stockpile that. So, it is hard to understand a claim that extremely cheap renewables "cannot do everything, everywhere." Indeed, we all are long used to relying on liquid fuels shipped in from across the globe, and I do not know why we would abandon the capacity.
I also see no need for extremely expensive "baseline plants" when the cost for storage is falling much faster, even, than the cost of the energy to be stored. Besides the very mature pumped hydro, we may turn the similarly mature liquified-air technology to storage. Factories for iron-air batteries are under construction. Synthetic hydrogen, methane, ammonia and even kerosene are known to be practical. Even long-distance transmission will often be a cheap substitute for drawing down storage stocks.
While chemical storage is less "round-trip" efficient than some other alternatives, it offers the important advantages that, when the tanks are full, the product is always immediately useful industrially, so synthesis equipment need almost never sit idle; and extra tanks are very cheap, anywhere more would be useful. Synthesis efficiency will only ever improve.
So, supposing somebody did manage to get "net-positive" Tokamak fusion as early as 2030, it is hard to imagine who would still care, by then. Do wake me up, though, if you find a way to get aneutronic D-3He fusion going that I can use for outer solar system operations.
I agree with everything in this statement except the idea that anything other than inducing a depression will have the US reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. It simply will not happen. Fusion has the potential to be an aid in hitting that by 2100.