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Comment by kumarski | Hacker News Reader

Fusion is pointless.

Fusion reactors make nuclear power plants marginally smaller.

Dispatch and transmission costs are still a thing.

Fusion reactors would have to be enormously bigger than fission plants. And cost correspondingly more both to build and to operate.

There's no net benefit to fusion.

Dispatch and transmission are a thing even if all the software developer/ECE/Physicist folks downvote my comments.

"There's no net benefit to fusion." There's no net benefit to abundant energy... yes, I can't think of any.

Not if it's as expensive as it's likely to be from fusion, no.

You don't get them cheaper by never building them; the energy density of fusion is far higher than fission and doesn't have any danger of runaway chain reactions.

Neither of those is a significant advantage.

Also, I'm not a fan of tinkerbell engineering, where anything is possible if we just believe hard enough.

Not having nuclear meltdowns, and taking advantage of a reaction which produces significantly higher energy output aren't advantages? Welcome to opposite land.

Tinkerbell engineering which has increased confinement time during its period of research faster than Moores law increased transistors on a chip.

It's not like we haven't achieved nuclear fusion from MCF. We have. So maybe you are trying hard to believe it's not possible when already proven.

They are advantages, but they are not significant advantages.

The main problem holding back nuclear is its cost. Fusion, at least of the DT kind, makes this main problem worse.

Energy that is too difficult and expensive to capture is useless. You might as well argue for power from H-bombs. They concentrate energy even more densely than a Tokamak.

What matters most, always, is cost. Things that cost more lose. Renewables, here, win.

Fission doesn't have a thousand tons of lithium hydride just itching to explode in flames and gas the surroundings with that much drain opener.

Shut down the tesla factories then. Where did you intend to store all the energy from renewables?

The batteries in Tesla cars use neither metallic lithium nor lithium hydride.

There's a wide variety of storage options for renewable energy with varying cost and efficiency characteristics. The ultimate solution will likely be some combination of these, along with overprovisioning, dispatchable demand, and transmission.

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