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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

It's a breakthrough at a fundamental level, but at the higher level of looking at the whole fusion installation as a blackbox with a grid hookup it is still nowhere near a net energy producer. Rather, the amount of energy required to sustain fusion just dropped dramatically, so we're closer but we are still quite far from actually making this useful. Still, an impressive step.

To me the major question is if once fusion is viable (assuming we get there) if it can compete on a cost basis with renewables (yes, base load etc).

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The energy budget alone would naively suggest to me that it can't.

Why spend all of the money to create and sustain a fusion reaction in a gravitationally subcritical environment when there is a giant perpetual fusion engine running on gravitational criticality alone a scant 93 million miles away?

Just throw down more collectors, improve storage, and call it a day.

Ah, the handwavey "just". It has so many uses, here including the exact opposite. "Just improve this breakthrough a bit and commercialize it and we can bypass all the problems with conventional solar."

SOOOO handwavey. "Improve Storage" is a thing they've been working on longer than fusion energy. It's proven to be similarly intractable, and prone to bad science reporting ("10-15 years away").

One advantage it has as a goal over fusion-as-energy-production is that gains in storage can be applied to all electrical sources.

More meat on those bones for a sustainable future, to my money.

Good news! They are working on that. As a society, we can research more than one thing at a time.

If your position is that we're spending too much money on fusion research, and not enough storage and solar, perhaps you could share what you think we're spending on those things, and propose a better allocation?

As basic research, it's an excellent announcement and I'm excited about it. There are all manner of interesting applications for laboratory fusion in the matter-reconfiguration space (we still have no solution for replacing helium as a resource, and there's a finite amount of the stuff available planet-wide).

But as a power source?

When the conversation moves to "So when can I run my own fusion reactor in my basement," I tune out given that I can install my own self-sufficiency solar array in my backyard right now. The energy exchange from fusion to electricity problem is already solved as long as one isn't constraining one's fusion source to a truly exotic configuration that is rarely seen in nature (given how common and powerful gravitationally-induced fusion is).

I'll be pleasantly surprised if we get to the point where fusion power generation is commercially viable, but practically speaking that's likely something for my grandkids to get excited about, at the earliest... While we can do the photovoltaics installations right now.

Battery technology has been improving very steadily since the advent of solar and even though it is expensive if you look at the battery storage requirement as a function of PV installed power the only thing that has marred the equation is the incredible speed with which PV has become cheaper.

And no, it's not 10-15 years away, you can buy a battery backed PV system with well over a night's storage capacity today from a large number of vendors. Search for Hybrid PV systems.

> Why spend all of the money to create and sustain a fusion reaction in a gravitationally subcritical environment when there is a giant perpetual fusion engine running on gravitational criticality alone a scant 93 million miles away?

Because Fusion and Gen IV Fission the kind of tech that would also dramatically improve standards of living.

Renewables + storage essentially keeps the present day standards of living without CO2 emissions. Big deal. That proposition won't convince the very high IQ people you need to drop from Wall St. and FAAMG.

People work to improve their standards of living, thinking that it would be possible to mount a global effort to sacrifice ourselves for the benefit of people who'd be alive 200 years from now is a proposition which is solely realistic in the minds of naive and monodimensional people like the Greta Thumberg, Extinction rebellion etc.

Gen IV fission I'd support. I think we're an awful lot closer to that than practical energy-generation fusion.

Our biggest example of how to make fusion work involves a gigantic gravity well, which we are not going to produce on Earth without some very theoretical (and, if made practical, very dangerous) technology.

I'm unclear on how either fusion or Gen-IV fission would improve our standard of living though. Can you give some examples? This is an angle I haven't heard. The average American household (at least) already has all the energy it needs running into it; can't really put much more in without giving the average American household the energy density needed to blow up their neighborhood, which I don't think improves our standard of living.

Fact is, if we keep adding waste heat created from some stored energy, be it fossil, fission or fusion, to the environment, net temperature of the earth has to rise to get rid of said waste heat via additional radiation into space. The cheaper that energy is the more the temperature will rise. In that sense, the only "clean" energy sources are what is radiated in from the sun and what is conducted out from the core.

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