Microsoft Bets That Fusion Power Is Closer Than Many Think

You still need fossil fuels for the chemical industry, transportation, etc.

Even if electricity becomes cheap (we can already do that with wind and solar) changing everything else is a huge task.

I heard a rumor once, and it may be more fictional speculation than reality, that OPEC shows most of the signs of a "going out of business" sale. That they know the market window is shrinking and are doing their best to make the most of it in an "everything must go" fashion.

(The rumor suggested that's why there was a weird sudden drop in oil and gas prices several years back and then prices nearly "flatlined" for a few years there rather than sticking to a slow inflation-locked climb as it had been. The rumor was that OPEC had started to liquidate its reserves as fast as possible without crashing the market.)

If that was the case, one would hope that OPEC members were also smart enough to plan for after the "going out of business sale" and smartly socking away the money into long term investments. (Further speculation: given the real estate booms in UAE and Qatar, especially, and attempts to spin some of those cities as world tourism destinations there may even be evidence that that is what they have been trying to do.)

> Of course there are different levels of obsolence, all the petrol cars won't disappear, unless someone invents a magic liquid to replace petrol/diesel with something that works identically but without the pollution.

I don't think it will need "magic", I think the feedback loops between supply-side and demand-side economics can handle it all on their own, and possibly (probably, IMO) surprisingly quickly once things start to snowball: gas pumps are already low margin "loss leaders" for convenience stores and supermarkets. As prices get higher the usefulness as "loss leaders" shrinks. As EVs spread, demand drops which could drop prices (temporarily) but that also lowers the usefulness as a "loss leader". Any such price drops are almost guaranteed to be temporary because as demand drops, production should drop. Production is capital heavy and much of production once it shuts down, in theory shuts down for good (especially if demand isn't expected to go back up) because the costs for restarts become increasingly too expensive. As the usefulness for gas as a "loss leader" drops below certain thresholds, consumer gas pumps start to disappear. As gas pumps start to disappear, demand for EVs increases, furthering the drop in demand for gas, exacerbating the disappearance of gas pumps. Eventually, as that cycle snowballs, ICE range anxiety returns with a vengeance and petrol cars become museum pieces too expensive to drive.

Because it is a feedback snowball, it could happen seemingly abruptly, almost like magic.

And any country that chooses to keep using a dirty, unhealthy, more expensive, 250-year-old energy supply over helium-3 fusion will rapidly fall behind.

Their combined D-D/D-He3 reaction will emit 6% of its energy as neutron radiation, compared to 80% for D-T. Mostly they'll be lower-energy neutrons, and it's only a 50MW reactor. They don't plan to make it bigger, just to make lots of them.

They're considering doing the D-D reaction in a separate reactor to produce the He3. The D-He3 reaction is purely aneutronic, and while some D-D will still happen, they can tune it so it doesn't happen much. That would mean very little neutron radiation at the power plants.

The things you mentioned have been tried in several wealthy countries and they don’t work. Even if they did, they require a lot of societal wealth to implement and once the global population starts declining so will the economic output and consequently tax revenues, that’s a 1-2 punch for living standards which will also fall. Our economy is 100% dependent on healthy young people which means no kids, no economy. If fertility rates get stuck at 1 or below 1 then the population will halve with each generation and the only thing that will stop it “naturally” is the complete collapse of global civilization and a return to tiny feudal states ruled by probably religious fundamentalist warlords where 99.9% of people are subsistence farmers. Even if you like that outcome for some demented reason consider that there will still be the rusting leftovers of our technology for the idiot barbarians to play with.