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.
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.