3 ms·
Great stuff, but it's important to realize that even with all the amazing work being done, fusion will almost certainly not be available fast enough to save us
by thenoblesunfish 5y ago
Great stuff, but it's important to realize that even with all the amazing work being done, fusion will almost certainly not be available fast enough to save us from climate change. It's a phenomenal longer-term prospect, but in the next couple of decades we need to look to other technologies (fission being the obvious point of discussion) and building political will to take meaningful action.
- GoodJokes 5y agoYou definitely sound like an expert with italics like “save us from climate change.”
- mchusma 5y agoWhile I certainly agree fission is great, I think fusion is a great thing to work on if you are concerned about climate change. Specifically, it's the type of thing that would likely enable cheap carbon removal.
- NortySpock 5y agoHow is a complicated fusion reactor going to be cheaper than solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries? I think fusion reactors are only going to make sense farther out in the solar system, like Mars, Ceres, and beyond.
- WorldMaker 5y agoSolar and Wind have recently hit economies of scale that they are already outperforming many past fission plants in year-over-year growth, power output, etc. Solar is fun because it's the cheapest "fusion" system possible, just using some of the waste fusion from the big ball in the sky. It is a sort of "fusion magic". There's a lot of hope that solar and wind installations outpace a lot of other energy investments and do offer us a road towards "saving us" from climate change. (Though how dirty we generate power is still only one part of the climate change problem, we still need a lot more solutions to carbon capture the dirt we've already emitted.)