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100% agree. We should be dumping as much as we can in getting fusion up and running ASAP. It could be a silver bullet to stop climate change alone, and by drivi

100% agree. We should be dumping as much as we can in getting fusion up and running ASAP. It could be a silver bullet to stop climate change alone, and by driving energy costs lower, enable huge innovations in AI/automation and increasing material wealth. $1T to move fusion forward just 5 years from eg 2040 to 2035 could alone have a huge ROI in terms of climate mitigation and decarbonization

markasoftware 4y ago
Will not be a silver bullet, electricity production contributes less than half of global CO2 emissions. Still need other solutions for transport, industrial processes, agriculture, etc. Further, it's possible that fusion plants might be prohibitively expensive to build and maintain, even if their fuel is cheap.
- opportune 4y ago
  I’m not thinking about just replacing grid energy, but carbon removal. If we can get fusion scaled up and efficient it should be no sweat to use it to just remove carbon from the air In fact carbon removal might be a great way to subsidize fusion at the outset so that it can be overprovisioned/have a guaranteed minimum price
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    $600 per ton of CO2. The industry is trying to get to $100 per ton of CO2. Energy estimated is 1,200 kilowatt-hours per ton of CO2 removed. Nuclear fission energy averages 0.4 cents/kWh. That's $480 in energy costs alone (ignoring profit margins for removal, etc). Why would bleeding edge fusion that requires cutting edge lasers, magnets, and various other containment stuff have a cheaper energy generation cost? I could be wrong, but I don't think nuclear waste (which is the primary difference with fusion) is the primary cost contributor. So why would you want to invest in more expensive fusion to remove all this carbon instead of cheaper fission? Nuclear waste by the way isn't waste. It can be reused in breeder reactors and it's used a lot in medicine (I could be wrong but one of the reasons nuclear imaging has gotten more expensive is because radioactive materials are more difficult to obtain due to reduction in global fission energy).
    - postingawayonhn 4y ago
      Fusion plants should be able to save a lot of money though simpler permitting processes, not needing the same level of containment structures, needing less security, and less regulator scrutiny. The equipment itself might be more expensive at the start but if we build these plants at scale those costs should reduce over time.
      - vlovich123 4y ago
        The first commercial reactor designs are probably 50 years away and another 50 years before costs come down to be reasonable / we can build enough to start replacing existing fission and coal. This is from the CEO of General Fusion a leader in the space. I think if even the fusion people are saying “build fission today to solve global warming” then that tells you something about the time scale this is happening on. I suspect the regulatory environment is from regulatory capture by the fossil fuel industry. Otherwise why would Gen IV reactors, which can’t meltdown, be suffering many regulatory delays? What kind of nuclear proliferation concerns exist for reactors built and deployed within the US?
    - opportune 4y ago
      Those are figures for current electrical production schemes. After decades of R&D fusion should become significantly cheaper than fission per kWh if only due to having less of a regulatory burden and smoother permitting process. It’s more expensive now, but in the long run it will be cheaper.
      - vlovich123 4y ago
        You hope. It’s not “more expensive now”. It’s infinitely more expensive because we can’t even build one. It’s unclear how much a fusion reactor will end up costing but I wouldn’t use hope to blind myself into thinking it’ll be 10x cheaper than fission. There’s certainly reason to be hopeful because solar and wind are cheaper, but construction for those is also relatively simple and easy to mass manufacture most of it. Fusion reactors will probably look more like fission than not (ie complex to mass manufacture, still require complex structures, need regular complicated maintenance due to radioactive decay in the containment materials etc). Additionally, solar and wind don’t pose real threats to established fossil fuel interests. Fusion would and it’s unclear how they might respond from a regulatory hurdle perspective.
- postingawayonhn 4y ago
  Most of those other things you mention can be electrified with current technology. Once that happens we'll need the electricity to power them.
- discordance 4y ago
  If there’s a glut of cheap electrical energy, there would be a rapid push to electrify things like iron and steel production (8% of emissions), heating (10% of emissions) and transportation (10%)… and so on.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  People should understand that it is all an energy problem, regardless of how that energy is currently delivered. Transportation can be (and, of course, is being electrified), most industrial processes and agriculture currently use fossil fuels as inputs because its the cheapest source of input. For example, nitrogen fixation for fertilizer currently uses natural gas almost entirely for the source of hydrogen. Vastly cheaper energy means it would make much more sense to switch this to electricity, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.580808/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.5808.... But I agree with your sentiment, there are a lot of engineering details to consider before one can shout "free energy".
- ShakataGaNai 4y ago
  There are a lot of bigger picture items around energy. Part of Europe's challenge with the war in Ukraine is that a lot of countries buy Russian gas & oil. >Russia accounted for about 55% of Germany’s natural gas imports and 35% of Germany’s oil imports last year, causing Germany to resist a blanket European Union ban on Russian energy. If every country could assure their energy independence, geopolitics would look very different. Yes, there are still many problems, like natural resources. But if you can assure all your residents can keep the lights on, their houses warm and the economy moving (EV's for transit, technology)... its very reassuring.
stonepresto 4y ago
Way more than that. This would shift the entire geopolitical structure of the world. Humanity would never be the same.
- fosk 4y ago
  Good riddance.
oreilles 4y ago
Cheaper and cleaner energy has never in the history of enery lead to global reduction of pollution, actually pretty much the opposite. Plus, nuclear power is already virtually free and has been available since the 1970s. If stopping climate change was an energy source problem, it would have already been solved then.
- opportune 4y ago
  I’m not anti fission. But the reality is that many are and the NIMBY effect is strong. You don’t necessarily have that with fusion. Also, there should hopefully be much less pomp and process around fusion compared to fission due to the safety/radiation profile being much safer.
- tomComb 4y ago
  “nuclear power is already virtually free” What? Cost is THE problem with nuclear energy. You must have some bizarre way of framing things to make today statement - you should at least tell us what that is since you must know that you are making a controversial claim.
- fastball 4y ago
  Basically the only energy that is cheaper and cleaner than fossil fuels is wind and solar, which have only gotten to that point in the last 1-2 decades, so it seems difficult to make claims about what has happened in "history".
iamgopal 4y ago
How easy is to write $1T, but with that you can basically install enough solar cell to power all of USA energy need.
- willmadden 4y ago
  Solar can't do that without massive batteries that don't exist. Even then it's not viable in areas where there isn't sufficient sunlight.
  - valine 4y ago
    The batteries do exist, but it’s better to use them in cars. If we start diverting our battery supply for grid storage it will drive up the price of EVs.
- bboygravity 4y ago
  No you can't because solar isn't a continious source and fusion is. No amount of investment into solar power can make the sun magically shine 24 hours a day.
  - joe_the_user 4y ago
    Of course you can invest enough and make solar equivalent to continuous power. Solar + reverse hydropower, solar + synthetic fuel manufacture, solar + appropriate sized batteries, solar cranes-with-weights, etc. Solar is so cheap that all those are plausible. Fusion is still far from ready.
    - Helmut10001 4y ago
      I suggest we do not lay all of our eggs in one basket. Climate change can be best countered if we use the sweet spot of all current available and anticipated technologies, including photovoltaic, long & short term storage solutions, and fusion. There is no need to bet on one technology at this stage.
vincnetas 4y ago
With abundant electricity wouldn't we face another type of global warming? We will would start to consume so much electricity that this will heat up the planet?
- defrost 4y ago
  Relative scales of various factors matter here: We aren't "heating up the planet" .. we're "insulating the atmosphere". Increased C02 (and the close following methane and water vapor increases) serve to trap more of the heat radiated outwards that would otherwise escape. The vast bulk of that heat comes from the visible light of the sun which passes easily through the atmosphere coming in, gets converted to IR energy as it warms the earth and oceans, and then escapes outwards. Our changes to the atmosphere have disturbed that balance. Your comment has some small merit, but you would need to work through the heat output of human generated power and then compare that to the daily heat energy originally from the sun that radiates outward.
  - mcculley 4y ago
    > We aren't "heating up the planet" .. we're "insulating the atmosphere". We are doing both. We are doing more insulating than heating, but we obviously generate more heat.
    - defrost 4y ago
      Did you actually read my comment to the end? If so, how'd you do on the numbers?
      - mcculley 4y ago
        Of course I did. It is rude to suggest otherwise. Your blanket assertion followed by your long explanation is confusing and less helpful to anyone asking the original question than it would be without it.
        4y ago
sAbakumoff 4y ago
LMAO. Good luck to get funding passed through GOP-controlled congress with all these oil and gas companies rallied behind. There is zero chance that the USA will ever do that.
propogandist 4y ago
> silver bullet to stop climate change alone nothing will stop climate change. The earth’s climate will continue to change regardless of any human interventions

markasoftware 4y ago

Will not be a silver bullet, electricity production contributes less than half of global CO2 emissions. Still need other solutions for transport, industrial processes, agriculture, etc. Further, it's possible that fusion plants might be prohibitively expensive to build and maintain, even if their fuel is cheap.

opportune 4y ago
I’m not thinking about just replacing grid energy, but carbon removal. If we can get fusion scaled up and efficient it should be no sweat to use it to just remove carbon from the air In fact carbon removal might be a great way to subsidize fusion at the outset so that it can be overprovisioned/have a guaranteed minimum price
- vlovich123 4y ago
  $600 per ton of CO2. The industry is trying to get to $100 per ton of CO2. Energy estimated is 1,200 kilowatt-hours per ton of CO2 removed. Nuclear fission energy averages 0.4 cents/kWh. That's $480 in energy costs alone (ignoring profit margins for removal, etc). Why would bleeding edge fusion that requires cutting edge lasers, magnets, and various other containment stuff have a cheaper energy generation cost? I could be wrong, but I don't think nuclear waste (which is the primary difference with fusion) is the primary cost contributor. So why would you want to invest in more expensive fusion to remove all this carbon instead of cheaper fission? Nuclear waste by the way isn't waste. It can be reused in breeder reactors and it's used a lot in medicine (I could be wrong but one of the reasons nuclear imaging has gotten more expensive is because radioactive materials are more difficult to obtain due to reduction in global fission energy).
  - postingawayonhn 4y ago
    Fusion plants should be able to save a lot of money though simpler permitting processes, not needing the same level of containment structures, needing less security, and less regulator scrutiny. The equipment itself might be more expensive at the start but if we build these plants at scale those costs should reduce over time.
    - vlovich123 4y ago
      The first commercial reactor designs are probably 50 years away and another 50 years before costs come down to be reasonable / we can build enough to start replacing existing fission and coal. This is from the CEO of General Fusion a leader in the space. I think if even the fusion people are saying “build fission today to solve global warming” then that tells you something about the time scale this is happening on. I suspect the regulatory environment is from regulatory capture by the fossil fuel industry. Otherwise why would Gen IV reactors, which can’t meltdown, be suffering many regulatory delays? What kind of nuclear proliferation concerns exist for reactors built and deployed within the US?
  - opportune 4y ago
    Those are figures for current electrical production schemes. After decades of R&D fusion should become significantly cheaper than fission per kWh if only due to having less of a regulatory burden and smoother permitting process. It’s more expensive now, but in the long run it will be cheaper.
    - vlovich123 4y ago
      You hope. It’s not “more expensive now”. It’s infinitely more expensive because we can’t even build one. It’s unclear how much a fusion reactor will end up costing but I wouldn’t use hope to blind myself into thinking it’ll be 10x cheaper than fission. There’s certainly reason to be hopeful because solar and wind are cheaper, but construction for those is also relatively simple and easy to mass manufacture most of it. Fusion reactors will probably look more like fission than not (ie complex to mass manufacture, still require complex structures, need regular complicated maintenance due to radioactive decay in the containment materials etc). Additionally, solar and wind don’t pose real threats to established fossil fuel interests. Fusion would and it’s unclear how they might respond from a regulatory hurdle perspective.
postingawayonhn 4y ago
Most of those other things you mention can be electrified with current technology. Once that happens we'll need the electricity to power them.
discordance 4y ago
If there’s a glut of cheap electrical energy, there would be a rapid push to electrify things like iron and steel production (8% of emissions), heating (10% of emissions) and transportation (10%)… and so on.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
People should understand that it is all an energy problem, regardless of how that energy is currently delivered. Transportation can be (and, of course, is being electrified), most industrial processes and agriculture currently use fossil fuels as inputs because its the cheapest source of input. For example, nitrogen fixation for fertilizer currently uses natural gas almost entirely for the source of hydrogen. Vastly cheaper energy means it would make much more sense to switch this to electricity, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.580808/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.5808.... But I agree with your sentiment, there are a lot of engineering details to consider before one can shout "free energy".
ShakataGaNai 4y ago
There are a lot of bigger picture items around energy. Part of Europe's challenge with the war in Ukraine is that a lot of countries buy Russian gas & oil. >Russia accounted for about 55% of Germany’s natural gas imports and 35% of Germany’s oil imports last year, causing Germany to resist a blanket European Union ban on Russian energy. If every country could assure their energy independence, geopolitics would look very different. Yes, there are still many problems, like natural resources. But if you can assure all your residents can keep the lights on, their houses warm and the economy moving (EV's for transit, technology)... its very reassuring.

stonepresto 4y ago

Way more than that. This would shift the entire geopolitical structure of the world. Humanity would never be the same.

fosk 4y ago
Good riddance.

oreilles 4y ago

Cheaper and cleaner energy has never in the history of enery lead to global reduction of pollution, actually pretty much the opposite. Plus, nuclear power is already virtually free and has been available since the 1970s. If stopping climate change was an energy source problem, it would have already been solved then.

opportune 4y ago
I’m not anti fission. But the reality is that many are and the NIMBY effect is strong. You don’t necessarily have that with fusion. Also, there should hopefully be much less pomp and process around fusion compared to fission due to the safety/radiation profile being much safer.
tomComb 4y ago
“nuclear power is already virtually free” What? Cost is THE problem with nuclear energy. You must have some bizarre way of framing things to make today statement - you should at least tell us what that is since you must know that you are making a controversial claim.
fastball 4y ago
Basically the only energy that is cheaper and cleaner than fossil fuels is wind and solar, which have only gotten to that point in the last 1-2 decades, so it seems difficult to make claims about what has happened in "history".

iamgopal 4y ago

How easy is to write $1T, but with that you can basically install enough solar cell to power all of USA energy need.

willmadden 4y ago
Solar can't do that without massive batteries that don't exist. Even then it's not viable in areas where there isn't sufficient sunlight.
- valine 4y ago
  The batteries do exist, but it’s better to use them in cars. If we start diverting our battery supply for grid storage it will drive up the price of EVs.
bboygravity 4y ago
No you can't because solar isn't a continious source and fusion is. No amount of investment into solar power can make the sun magically shine 24 hours a day.
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  Of course you can invest enough and make solar equivalent to continuous power. Solar + reverse hydropower, solar + synthetic fuel manufacture, solar + appropriate sized batteries, solar cranes-with-weights, etc. Solar is so cheap that all those are plausible. Fusion is still far from ready.
  - Helmut10001 4y ago
    I suggest we do not lay all of our eggs in one basket. Climate change can be best countered if we use the sweet spot of all current available and anticipated technologies, including photovoltaic, long & short term storage solutions, and fusion. There is no need to bet on one technology at this stage.

vincnetas 4y ago

With abundant electricity wouldn't we face another type of global warming? We will would start to consume so much electricity that this will heat up the planet?

defrost 4y ago
Relative scales of various factors matter here: We aren't "heating up the planet" .. we're "insulating the atmosphere". Increased C02 (and the close following methane and water vapor increases) serve to trap more of the heat radiated outwards that would otherwise escape. The vast bulk of that heat comes from the visible light of the sun which passes easily through the atmosphere coming in, gets converted to IR energy as it warms the earth and oceans, and then escapes outwards. Our changes to the atmosphere have disturbed that balance. Your comment has some small merit, but you would need to work through the heat output of human generated power and then compare that to the daily heat energy originally from the sun that radiates outward.
- mcculley 4y ago
  > We aren't "heating up the planet" .. we're "insulating the atmosphere". We are doing both. We are doing more insulating than heating, but we obviously generate more heat.
  - defrost 4y ago
    Did you actually read my comment to the end? If so, how'd you do on the numbers?
    - mcculley 4y ago
      Of course I did. It is rude to suggest otherwise. Your blanket assertion followed by your long explanation is confusing and less helpful to anyone asking the original question than it would be without it.
      - 4y ago

sAbakumoff 4y ago

LMAO. Good luck to get funding passed through GOP-controlled congress with all these oil and gas companies rallied behind. There is zero chance that the USA will ever do that.

propogandist 4y ago

> silver bullet to stop climate change alone nothing will stop climate change. The earth’s climate will continue to change regardless of any human interventions