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I'm a layperson like everyone else here, so I'm just going to rely on the fact that fusion research is ongoing, well-supported by government and private sector
by theothermkn 7y ago
I'm a layperson like everyone else here, so I'm just going to rely on the fact that fusion research is ongoing, well-supported by government and private sector investment, and is an active area of research for hundreds or thousands of intelligent and sane institutionally supported academics, as reasonable and practical justifications for my belief that fusion is not quite as problematic as laid out in Lidsky's dated and superseded work.
However, for a sketch of how to address the talking points of the more strident objectors one encounters in the wild, one can perhaps turn to https://fire.pppl.gov/fusion_critic_response_stacey.pdf https://fire.pppl.gov/fusion_critic_response_stacey.pdf for some ideas. Cheers!
- DennisP 7y agoIn fact, section III of that document specifically rebuts The Trouble with Fusion, based on the state of knowledge 16 years later.
- pfdietz 7y agoThis is all you really need to read from Stacey: "Based on our present understanding, D-T tokamak fusion reactors project a cost-of-electricity that is about 50% larger than the projected cost-of-electricity from advanced light-water reactors in the middle of the next century." We all know what happened to the projected cost of fission reactors -- the projections turned out to be hopelessly optimistic, because of complexity and loss of experience. Fusion would face these problems in even worse form (indeed, ITER's cost ballooned 4x or more past the initial projections.) The experience with fission has enabled us to calibrate the optimism bias in these projections, with damning results. Simply being competitive with fission is no longer good enough for fusion to succeed. It has to be significantly better than fission.