[yholio]

Yup, a major breakthrough in this glacial field is doubling the energy output in 25 yeas.

So by the time captain Picard is born, we might have a very expensive and massive fusion reactor that will generate the same kind of energy we can generate today with very expensive and massive fission reactors.

Really now, this is pure garbage and does not solve the major problems in the field nor do most of the myriad startups trying to cash in on speculative seed funds.

[ClumsyPilot]

"with very expensive and massive fission reactors"

The laws if physics don't owe us a free lunch. Light, safe and cheap powersource does not exist

Fossil fuels aren't a power source, they wre a power store - that power was collected and millions of years ago.

Also 100% productivity on 25 years is quite good - what did combustion engines improve in that time, 5%?

[onychomys]

The 1997 F-150 made 220bhp and got 18mpg [0], while the 2022 F-150 makes 400bhp and 19mpg [1], so fusion is doing way better than that!

(...i think i chose comparable trim levels to do that comparison, there are a stunning number of choices there!)

[0] https://www.cars.com/research/ford-f_150-1997/specs/103719/ [1] https://www.edmunds.com/ford/f-150/2022/features-specs/

[throwaway894345]

I mean, if you don't invest in the speculative, how do you expect things to advance? Failure at any particular venture isn't a bad outcome.

[JohnJamesRambo]

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we put the massive amounts of money we have put into nuclear fusion and fission into bone simple solar panel purchases. I wonder if anyone has done the math.

There’s a fully functioning fusion reactor 91 million miles from us that sends a lot of energy our way.

[jiggawatts]

The levelized cost of large scale solar power is about 7 cents per kilowatt-hour.

ITER alone will cost $21B minimum and won’t make power. DEMO will conservatively cost about the same, but let’s be generous and round up the total “fusion research cost” to just $30B.

That would buy about 1.5e18 joules, or around the same amount of energy as the electrical generation of the United States… for a month.

So, a drop in the bucket compared to what we use globally…

Even if you use much bigger numbers for fusion research and assume further solar power cost improvements, fusion might still be worth it.

However, it’ll only be worthwhile if the total cost the production fusion plants is not too high. If they end up costing $10B each then the whole thing will be a dead end economically.