I agree. This is a Big deal. Like, first-lightbulb big, or polio-vaccine big.
My kids are likely to spend the majority of their lives living a world where energy is clean, cheap, and available to everyone. Climate change is something that is not only going to be stopped, but can be reversed for them. Energy grids can be made to be smaller and mutually supporting, lessening the impacts of disasters. Oil dependency and all the political problems that come with it are going to be gone by the time they are grandparents. Nations like Nigeria and East Timor can have power generation like everyone else. The deserts and oceans and tundra of their lives will be places dotted with little greenhouses and fresh vegetables. If they get this down to the size of a car, then everything opens up for travel and recreation. The only real baseline I have to use here is Star Trek.
Of course, there is a long way to go. There is a lot of work and show-stoppers still out there. And the ideas that I see as their future are just sooooo tiny compared to their reality. I'm thinking of faster horses and they're going to live in a world of supersonic jets. That kind of difference and small thinking of mine.
I'm so happy that, assuming the best with fusion, they are going to live such better lives.
I agree. I am thinking of my future children or myself into my old age. Even if we don’t get commercial fusion until the 2040s, imagine nearly limitless energy (of course we still need to pay for likely massive capex, R&D, and transmission) and its repercussions!
At the very least we can likely pull carbon out of the air faster than we put it in. No more destructive hydropower, no need for fission plants, radically reduced costs for industrial manufacturing. Cheap energy could make raw resource extraction much cheaper and more easily automated. Fast transportation, vertical farming. With the concurrent innovations in battery tech, robotics/automation, and electric vehicles and ships, the future is looking incredibly bright
I think you're hand waving too many of the problems away and letting your imagination run way ahead of reality.
> no need for fission plants
Not sure why this is a goal in and of itself. Everything you said is available today with fission and yet still too expensive to remove CO2. Fission has a more real shot at getting to the right price point before fusion even gets off the ground so why not push for more arrows behind something that's likely to help in our lifetime?
Energy is an input to basically every single thing we make or do. In economic models it’s often been found that “technology” parameters (inversely) correlate almost entirely to energy prices.
If energy cost very little, we could do previously unviable things like vertically farm and let farmland go back to nature, smelt ore onsite, or run simulations/models for a fraction of what they cost now.
That’s what I’m saying. Why are you assuming that energy costs for fusion would suddenly be lower? These plants take a lot to build and it’s not like the primary cost for fission is the fuel. It’s the recoupment of massive capex spend, cooling, maintenance, highly trained personnel.
I’m trying to show you that fusion isn’t going to magically rain energy mana down on us. It’s just fission with less waste (if you discount newer fission designs) except and potentially safer (if you discount newer fission designs) It’s likely significantly more expensive given it’s a more complicated reactor and we’ve built 0 commercially (and even with this achievement we’re not that much closer).
My point is, if you’re looking for boundless carbon-free energy, fission reactors already meet all the needs. Additional investments would get reactors that would generate waste competitive with fusion (and in fact can consume all existing generated waste as fuel) and are similarly safe (no runaway reactions).
I would encourage you, if you’re serious about carbon-free boundless energy, to devote your advocacy to advancing fission reactors. They’re here and there’s a straightforward R&D path to get the new reactors (regulatory hurdles are another thing). Fusion reactors won’t be here in any reasonable time frame (even if we had a workable design today it would take many decades to build them and then upgrade the grid).
Let's be honest: the ecological problems we have today (i.e. the fact that we destroyed 2/3 of trees, mammals and insects) has nothing to do with climate change. We did that because we had enough cheap energy to destroy natural habitats.
The consequences of that cheap energy (fossil fuels) is yet to come, that's the climate change problem. And it is big.
Now let's pretend we get fusion to work: maybe (just maybe) that could help the climate change issue (unless it takes decades, in which case its too late), but that won't change the other big problem we have: with cheap energy, we destroy the planet to build malls and swipe TikTok.
We need to re-learn to live with less energy, that's the only way.
Not that I enjoy being a downer, but I think we're still quite a ways off from a trajectory towards Star Trek society. Clean energy production is absolutely key, with pollution and climate change being big obstacles to a prosperous future, but clean energy doesn't solve all air and water pollution. It won't necessarily scale economically. It also doesn't temper any megalomaniac's pride, to stop them from creating conflict as they try to subjugate everyone else. We live in a very divided, hierarchical world with a fragile order, subject to the whims of people with godlike power over the masses.
One of the most fantastical aspects of Star Trek was the societal evolution into one without interpersonal conflict, the idea being that without scarcity there's no good reason for conflict... I'm just not sure how well that would hold up, knowing people. I don't think all desire for status and power stems from scarcity of resources, and people will continue to lie and do harm to each other as long as they desire power over others.
> My kids are likely to spend the majority of their lives living a world where energy is clean, cheap, and available to everyone.
Being available to everyone does depend on who "everyone" is. If people use the energy to grow food (and more people) until we run into some other population-limiter, we'll always have too many people. Part of achieving sustainability is ending runaway growth. Maybe you can ask people nicely enough to stop reproducing, maybe education will do it, maybe nothing short of force will. Yet our economics were built around continual growth. So, that's all a big problem to solve, still.
The yield numbers don’t factor in all the energy needed for lasers etc. It is still massively in the negative. There is also no feasible way to extract energy from fusion done this way.
I love the optimism but it sets you up for failure and disappointment when you start thinking about all the free energy your children will have from this.
Free energy from a very successful fusion experiment called the sun bathes our planet every day. We know fusion works, but the devil is in the details.
My kids are likely to spend the majority of their lives living a world where energy is clean, cheap, and available to everyone. Climate change is something that is not only going to be stopped, but can be reversed for them. Energy grids can be made to be smaller and mutually supporting, lessening the impacts of disasters. Oil dependency and all the political problems that come with it are going to be gone by the time they are grandparents. Nations like Nigeria and East Timor can have power generation like everyone else. The deserts and oceans and tundra of their lives will be places dotted with little greenhouses and fresh vegetables. If they get this down to the size of a car, then everything opens up for travel and recreation. The only real baseline I have to use here is Star Trek.
Of course, there is a long way to go. There is a lot of work and show-stoppers still out there. And the ideas that I see as their future are just sooooo tiny compared to their reality. I'm thinking of faster horses and they're going to live in a world of supersonic jets. That kind of difference and small thinking of mine.
I'm so happy that, assuming the best with fusion, they are going to live such better lives.