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Kind of useless considering that we'll have fusion reactors within the next 5 years or so.
by janmarsal 4y ago
Kind of useless considering that we'll have fusion reactors within the next 5 years or so.
- rapsey 4y agoThat is quite optimistic.
- bombcar 4y agoFusion has been 5 years away for 50 years now, I think that was the joke.
- phtrivier 4y agoNo, it has been _50_ years away for 50 years. Which leaves room for a joke. "Fusion in 5 years" is either Elon Musk-level of estimating, or Elon Musk-level of trolling.
- ben_w 4y agoI'm sure I heard it as "20 years away and always has been" back in the late 90s. (To me, "5 years away and always has been" feels more like the Apple Glass than Musk: one is endless headlines not actually backed up by anything concrete, the other is just persistently overoptimistic about all timescales by a factor of about 3).
- phtrivier 4y agoI'm concerned we might have a shortage of unicorns to operate them, though, given how much pixies are eating them. Sorry, you meant "in the real world" ? 5-10 years is a realistic tentative date for the first few experiments at ITER. Will be nice for physicists, but it won't light a German bulb for a while.
- it_citizen 4y agoI don't know much about fusion. But it seems to me that the main problem with fission today are the time, capital and expertise required to build the plants. Even if we had a commercializable fusion reactor prototype today, would it be really easier to deploy at scale before we hit 2.5 degrees of global warming?
- kwere 4y agoone thing is a selfsustained reaction in ITER, another is to commercially scale it. Literally a multidecade iteration of various designs. I cant immagine political and public support to build the firsts inneficient fusion powers at a price tag several times the ones for fission power stations (~15B$)