Very costly and construction can take ages. The shortest afaik is about 10 years in South Korea. Increasing demands to safety and aditional capabilities drive costs and complexity even more.
Costs per kW/h is generally way higher.
Renewables in comparison can be installed way faster and more flexible.
Technology is generally extremely expensive and unattainable for poorer countries, giving advanced/rich nations another lead in development.
Uranium is kinda like coal, in the sense that it is non-regenerative and can be controlled by capital way more easily than decentralized renewable sources.
Nuclear waste is nasty stuff and disposal/storage is usually highly controversal. Almost no politician wants to deal with it.
My ideal scenario would be:
Massive increase of renewables, storage and general energy efficiency.
Massive decrease fossil fuel energy via stringent regulation and divestment.
More ressources for fusion research as the next step of energy production for baseload power plants. (Keep some smaller renewable sources online though)
Fusion to me is a mistake. It's like hydrogen fuel cells. It's a pipe dream that sucks money, resources, and development away from batteries and other technologies that are feasible.
Maybe fusion will work. 5 more years to start testing test the first large scale reactor. 5 years minimum for more testing. Then say every country starts building right away, that's another 10-15 years.
And that's assuming everything goes smoothly and the designs work properly on the newly scaled up reactor.
Maybe fusion is the thing to save the world - but my perspective is our battle with climate change can't wait another 20 years without phasing out fossil fuels, and we have tech now (solar, nuclear) that's capable of replacing fossil fuels.
I mean, they're in the process of building a tokamak which so long as their math is correct and there aren't any major problems with the simulations should produce 500MW of fusion power from 50MW of heating power.
It's not 15-20 years away, it's 5 years away. They've been building it since 2007 and it's on track to be up and running in 2025.
If they can get fusion working to a point where it's reliable, passively safe, cheap enough to compete with the dropping price of solar and storage, and then build it out worldwide to create capacity, were looking at a minimum of 40 years.
My skepticism isn't that fusion will work someday, it's that we have solutions now that can meet our timescale of actually doing something to mitigate the climate crisis, where fusion (and to a greater extent hydrogen fuel cells) are experimental technologies that take away from the move away from fossil fuels. The longer we wait to replace fossil fuels the happier fossil fuel companies are.
This is why hydrogen fuel cell research is funded by fossil fuel companies - take take momentum away from solar.
Good in theory, but with many cons:
My ideal scenario would be:
Fusion to me is a mistake. It's like hydrogen fuel cells. It's a pipe dream that sucks money, resources, and development away from batteries and other technologies that are feasible.
Fusion is 15-20 years away and always will be.
A friend of mine works here: https://www.iter.org/
Fusion is very viable, you just need to have the infrastructure to start and sustain a much hotter reactor core than fission.
Maybe fusion will work. 5 more years to start testing test the first large scale reactor. 5 years minimum for more testing. Then say every country starts building right away, that's another 10-15 years.
And that's assuming everything goes smoothly and the designs work properly on the newly scaled up reactor.
Maybe fusion is the thing to save the world - but my perspective is our battle with climate change can't wait another 20 years without phasing out fossil fuels, and we have tech now (solar, nuclear) that's capable of replacing fossil fuels.
Isn't that precisely what makes fusion not viable?
I mean, they're in the process of building a tokamak which so long as their math is correct and there aren't any major problems with the simulations should produce 500MW of fusion power from 50MW of heating power.
It's not 15-20 years away, it's 5 years away. They've been building it since 2007 and it's on track to be up and running in 2025.
If they can get fusion working to a point where it's reliable, passively safe, cheap enough to compete with the dropping price of solar and storage, and then build it out worldwide to create capacity, were looking at a minimum of 40 years.
My skepticism isn't that fusion will work someday, it's that we have solutions now that can meet our timescale of actually doing something to mitigate the climate crisis, where fusion (and to a greater extent hydrogen fuel cells) are experimental technologies that take away from the move away from fossil fuels. The longer we wait to replace fossil fuels the happier fossil fuel companies are.
This is why hydrogen fuel cell research is funded by fossil fuel companies - take take momentum away from solar.