this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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It's good to see some progress in this area. It's something people have been working on for a very long time. I just wish they wouldn't keep pitching it as a 'solution to climate crisis'. It isn't.
Fusion power is not currently viable. Progress is being made, but a lot more research is required before actual usable power plants can be designed; and then a lot more time will be required to actually build them. And even then, we're only guessing about how good these power plants might be. They could be really great and clean, but currently they don't exist at all. People have been working this this technology for a very long time, and it is yet to succeed. So the claims about problems it will solve are just hopeful speculation.
Climate change was once a distant future problem for which fusion power sounds like a good answer, but that was a long time ago now. Today, climate change is a right now problem and fusion power is still a distant future technology. We must not gamble the planet we all live on for a bet that fusion power is just around the corner and will somehow fix all our power needs. That would be a really bad bet to make. Delaying actual meaningful action in the hopes that future fusion will save the world... would be a mistake. So lets not think of fusion as a solution to climate change.
Fortunately we already have a fusion reactor available to us, we just have to get better at harnessing the energy it produces.
Indeed. And we are getting better at that. A lot better. Improvement in solar power have been happening a lot faster than fusion power. It's far better than it use to be, and has the advantage that it is already very good today.
Yes, the goal should be improving solar, wind, and fission until fusion is ready, which might be two decades from now, or never, but advancing beyond fossil fuels should always be a combined effort in multiple fields. If nothing else, they're frequently quite synergistic.
Only for a significant majority of humanity. And species in general. You just gotta hustle and get that bunker built and you'll be all good. Climate change is a hoax anyway, I saw a picture once of the ocean in the 50s, and a recent picture with no reference to tides, and the water levels were the roughly the same from about 500 metres away.
It is also about the philosophy of many people who are focused on fusion as the future. If we just had unlimited cheap power that would solve alllll of our problems…. which is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is really the crisis here.
I think the problem is that climate change isn't a problem yet. Most people are merely inconvenienced by it. When it gets to be a real problem, it will be too late. That is why it is hard to rally people around the cause with more than words.