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Comment by willis936 | Hacker News Reader

That isn't remotely close to fusion's biggest challenge. If you can generate 1 GWe for 30 years and deal with a small warehouse of low level waste for a few decades that is a nothingburger.

The biggest challenges to fusion is making a reactor quickly, cheaply, and with reasonable uptime / maintenance.

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Are we mixing up fusion and fission here? Fission has cost problems. Fusion doesn't have cost problems, it has viability problems. We still haven't even produced net positive energy. Then, if that milestone is reached, continuous production is going to be an engineering challenge. I'm optimistic that humanity will be able to get it working given enough time, but it's not a solution to any energy problem right now or the near or even middle future.

I don't see the difference between cost and viability. Of course we can fuse atoms. We've been doing it with regularity since the 50s. Of course we can use magnetic confinement to do it. The only reason we haven't burned a plasma in a magnetic confinement machine is because the machine to do it costs a lot of money. We don't have the industrial throughput as a society to make 1,000 megaprojects simultaneously. Whether you call that a cost problem or a viability problem is irrelevant.

Don't forget making it safely. It's fairly easy to make something safe it everything goes perfectly. Making it safe in the context of human failings is a whole different thing.

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