I find it funny when people—and I’ve seen comments like this — say we need to build fusion reactors instead of wasting time on solar. It’s like, honey, there’s a big fusion reactor in the sky that is always sending us power and we just need to collect it.
A part of it is that solar panels have a pretty hard cap (at a low ~20%) on how efficient they are at collection: nrgcleanpower.com/learning-cen...
Ok, the hard cap is more like 30%, but the efficiency is still pretty poor. ;)
It might work long term and worth spending pocket change looking at it. In any one location the sun fails daily. German women spend more annually on cosmetics than the world spends on fusion research. Really! www.cosmeticsdesign-europe.com/Article/2014... www.nucnet.org/news/total-i...
to quote: incomprehensible riches can be ours if we can but stretch our arms wide enough to dip from this eternal river of wealth
So this mentions fusion, not fission reactors . My understanding is fission reactors are drop in replaceable for coal plants. While politically NIMBY, means that it doesn’t require infrastructure improvements while cutting down on fossil fuels. It also makes a great backbone for renewables.
But consider also, a lot of power it had already sent us is now stored in chemical batteries underground! We can just dig them up and use, easily! Not trying to bash solar, but equating it with fusion power is a stretch we don't have to make.
But also can we still build the fusion reactor? I've been excited for this literally my entire life, since I read about it as a kid.
We should and are trying, but it’s definitely not the energy source to set our short term hopes on!
Some people really, really want to boil water.
My Children's Encyclopaedia, (1956 pub) states quite confidently that fusion power is only 20 years off.
Why be dependent on chinese minearls?
minerals
a huge percent of the earth's heat does not come from the sun, right? radioactivity?
Somewhere right now there is a Peter Thiel acolyte getting $50 million Series A to build a fleet of drones with shields that block your solar panels unless you buy a subscription for photons from him.
It also takes a long time to get a reactor up and running and then for the cost to pay off.
Some conspiracy theorists push the idea that "wireless electricity was suppressed" and that we should be able to pluck energy from thin air. Turns out we can! but the same people are dead set against solar capture. Not that expect them to be logical or informed...
“I’m pro-nuclear. Not the nuclear that is really expensive to build compared to solar, but actually works. The other kind, where it is ridiculously expensive to build compared to solar, and might someday work!”
Bottom line we need a proper mix of energy supply to control pricing. Many different types of generation leaves us less vulnerable to a dramatic change in any one of them.
I'm not against fusion either, but the big ol' fusion reaction powering all life on earth is a pretty good source of power that can be used right now. Also, fossil fuels are just solar power with extra steps if you think about it.
Crazy to think that, except for certain extremely isolated places, like the bottom of the ocean, nearly every calorie of energy on earth was put here ... by the sun. And a lot of it has ended up perma-trapped inside of biomass. And the sun just keeps blasting us with more energy.
Yeah, I continue to be amazed by the fact that we have biological systems that turn CO2 and Water into Sugar. And the basic loop is simple enough we can teach it to high schoolers!
Science has proven what various native cultures and Buddhists have always said: we're all part of a circular system, and we're just borrowing certain elements and energy before returning it to the earth.
“Fossil fuels are just solar power with extra steps” Genius, I’m stealing that
Corporations love to be that middleman
It's paleo-sunlight. Part of their keto diet.
I appear to be in a salty mood today. Friday combined with their constant tearing down of everything?
One could argue that we are inside a colossal fusion reactor. We are awash in the solar wind, deep inside its termination shock, and we maintain a temperature something like 50x hotter than we'd have outside the heliosphere.
I'm all for dumping some money into researching fusion reactors, but acting like they're going to be relevant before 2060 or something is a complete delusion. Even if we were very close to making it work, building it at scale would still take way too long.
I'm not against nuclear power being used as a supplement but it is usually so expensive to make scalable that you end up defunding alternatives like solar. On an aside, there's a firm near me that's doing some interesting things with nuclear energy called NuScale Power
We trust the sun to grow our crops, melt the snow, drive the rain cycle and keep the Earth at a habitable temperature. Why don’t we trust it to make electricity?
Solarpunk Future Now!
I know, lol. WHAT DO THEY THINK THE SUN IS????? We have solar panels that power our electric cars (and our house) and I can confirm that free energy from the sun is pretty fuckin rad.
Same. I am pretty sure I broke even on the cost of the panels after six years including the gasoline not bought.
And as a bonus, the big fusion reactor in the sky has no problems disposing of waste heat nor of long-term storage of really nasty radioactive byproducts.
Well in the long term they might cause a problem…the really long term
I mean, if we could make our own fusion reactors that would be great and would revolutionize energy, but they have been saying we're 10 years away from making one for like 60 years so I'll believe that when I see it Also yeah we do already have one that our planet orbits around we could use that
i mean, no singular solution is ever gonna be viable a strong mix of green baseload (nuclear is great for that), renewables, and battery storage will always give the best results solar/wind are gonna vary in effectiveness depending on where you put em so making those choices at a local level = win
oh and to be very clear, i mean nuclear fission (proven and reliable, see france), not fusion (extremely cool but we're not there yet)
If people think their power bills are high now, wait until a fusion reactor plant is built. The cost will make iRex ferries pale. Expect power prices to go sky high. We'll be needing 2nd,3rd, 4th mortgages to pay our bills. This is Springfield Monorail stuff.
A practical fusion power-source is like a practical robotaxi; theory that once leaves paper smashes into the physical reality. And as you say nature threw us one 4.5 billion years.
So what you're saying is that we should ditch the solar AND the nukes and just go straight for the Dyson Sphere? Hell yes brother. Kidding, obviously, but the most baffling part is that they're not mutually exclusive. You can build more renewables AND build new nuclear plants (fission though, duh).
Nope, no storage whatsoever. We will run our factories and cars at the exact pace the wells run at. Zero possibility to store energy or transport it. Nope.
We also, and don't let me be too subtle, DON'T KNOW HOW TO BUILD FUSION REACTORS!
We've been "50 years away from fusion power" every year for like the past 80 years
I think it is down to twenty now. (might actually be somewhat closer. But it is not, and let me be clear, NOW.)
Great; so in 20 years it'll be down to ten and then in ten years it'll be down to five Maybe I'll see the first fusion power plant built when I'm 90
Zeno's Reactor.
I used to live next to the fusion experiment at Rochester in the 90s and it was already a long-running “just 20 more years” joke
Ah, don't worry about it, they will ask GPT7 how to build one.
"Include ingredients from Burmese and Siberian cuisine. Use Dominican cooking techniques. Increase heat to 4MK. Serve with mint."
I had to look up Siberian cuisine. The following is NOT AI: "raskolotka: fish, is frozen until it hardens and then it’s beaten with a hammer."
“First, eat six grams of polonium…”
This was an LOL moment at a TikTok commenter who said something like “we’re building new fusion reactors everywhere.” O RLY WHERE
I mean, sure, but none that break even. 😆
Also, we have some uncontrolled ones, but we like to keep those in their silos.
That was implied. We even have fusion generators that DO generate significant net power. Only very, very, very briefly.
(And with an asterisk on the net, as there’s a big, big energy debt that’s built up in the infrastructure and producing the fuel before any fusion power was generated.) Just being nerdy not arguing!
Yeah, I have wondered about the total cost of fission power for a long time. There is a LOT of infrastructure involved in producing nuclear fuel. Especially if you start by mining ore rather than decommissioning warheads. And then the disposal is relatively expensive.
Right! Ultimately net when we work out all that stuff some day :)
Oh oops I meant for fusion, but probably fission too after a plant has been running 30 years. 😅
The cost of producing fusion fuel depends greatly on which reaction is being used. H-H, is trivial, D-T, not really much more, Th, higher, but still in the realm of possible. He3 has more assumptions than a caffeinated reply guy who just got unlimited YouTube.
lol 😂
Fusion /should/ have a smaller waste problem, both because the actual spent fuel is relatively inert, but also because the process should be less likely to irradiate the containment vessel.
Also, the first rechargeable battery was invented over 150 years ago
my great-grandfather had a whole rack of rechargeable liquid batteries he charged using a wind turbine
suffice to say both wind turbine *and* battery technology have improved a lot in the 90 years since then
From one of my favorite things in my catalog collection, the Delco-Light battery system, circa 1942. This was part of a diesel generator system. Battery tech has indeed come a long way
Also we can’t build useful fusion reactors yet and have no idea when we will be able to
And even if we had a working stable reactor what it will output is... heat. We will be making steam and running turbines. We can convert the solar energy directly to electricity with some pretty mind-blowing efficiency, but let's go back to steam turbines.
20 years for real this time. I swear.
According to my octogenarian father it has been 10 years away since he was at school…
Yep. 10–20 years away and always will be has been the joke forever. Same as AGi.
By the time fusion reactors are commercial scale, solar + batteries will be cheaper than the steam side of the fusion plant alone (which is mature tech and not getting cheaper). I’m not sure how fusionistas think they’re going to compete in the real world.
But, but this Helion company has promised fusion power to Microsoft and Sam Altman by 2028, so it must be right around the corner. bsky.app/profile/merz...
In 50 years time...
I thought we were skipping the earth based fusion reactors and going straight to the solar system-sized Dyson Sphere?
STOP TALKING TO SAM ALTMAN
I'm a terrible person so I am going to point you toward this report about Helion, building a purported fusion power plant here in WA state. Sam "Dyson sphere" Altman is the Chairman of the company's board of directors and a major investor.
What the heck! I like how he says "Fusion energy is safe, just like the sun." Um, not entirely! There's a reason you shouldn't look at the sun and why people talk about "yeeting folks into the sun." I also feel like we would have heard if controlled fusion energy had truly arrived.
For any readers of this thread who wonder if Altman could really be *that* big an idiot:
I think a Dyson sphere around a star is in unstable equilibrium and would require active stabilisation measures not to crash and burn.
It certainly would do interesting things to the climate of the Earth.
And yeah, it's hard to understand how it doesn't collapse into an oblate spheroid and then an accretion disk.
It'd be interesting to calculate the strength of materials vs mass for it to maintain rigidity vs. small deviations due to e. g. the motion of Jupiter and other the planets.
