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Comment by Neil44 | Hacker News Reader

That is a failure of imagination, like the guy who said let's close the patent office in the 1800s because everything had been invented. We have no idea what such a surplus of energy would make possible that we don't even have the imagination for today.

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If we want such a surplus of energy, at this point it's pretty clear Fusion isn't the way to get it in even the medium term, and maybe even not remotely affordably in the long term. We've already sunk 4 or 5 Manhattan projects' worth of resources into Fusion with essentially nothing to show for it. How many more Manhattans is it going to take?

I'm not against pursuing some of the modern, safety first fission technologies. They may well have a place. Maybe Fusion will eventually become viable, but I think it's very clear now that our technological reach is way longer than our grasp. We poured way too many resources into it long before we actually had any reasonable chance of success. We'd be better off dropping the big super expensive projects that aren't going anywhere, and continue with the many smaller basic technology development projects until it becomes a lot clearer if any of those is going to pan out.

Failure of imagination indeed. There's much more to energy than the regular usage cycle of the average electrical supply grid.

What if creating easily-fusable isotopes is the most efficient way to store "renewable" energy? Fusion is the most concentrated release of power humans are able to muster. What's to say such concentrated power will never be required for any purpose?

That's totally right, fusion might have it's uses in the future. For example, the goal it was originally intended to be used when first tokamaks were created: cheap production of large amounts of tritium, enabling more compact thermonuclear bombs producing much less fallout with very flexible yields. Just not electricity production.

Where will surplus of energy come from? Even if fusion reactors will become mass-produced and cheap, well, it's easy to find a baseline there: they will never be cheaper than a coal boiler producing same steam energy, that's easy to see. Which means, because the rest of the system - turbines, generators, heat exchangers, condensers, steam separators, water treatment facilities, transformers, safety systems etc. - remains the same - a fusion power plant is the same thing as a coal power plant running on free coal.

If you take cost of coal-produced electricity and subtract the cost of coal that went into it, it's still more than current costs of solar with storage.

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