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Comment by legitster

4 days ago

CEA themselves are saying fusion is not going to be ready by 2050.

Don't mistake skepticism for hate. I will be the first one to applaud a commercial fusion reactor. But fusion proponents often use it's pending development as an argument against fission - a technology we already have and desperately need to adopt now.

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legitster

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willis936  4 days ago

As a big proponent of fusion: we should be spending more money and effort on it. We should be spending more money and effort on fission too. Sustainable energy sources shouldn't be fighting for scraps.

kergonath  4 days ago

Yes, there are significant issues. Nothing we do not anticipate solving, but still. It will take time and solving these issues in a resource-effective way so that it can actually work as a power plant will be a challenge.

> But fusion often use it's pending development as an argument against fission - a technology we already have and desperately need to adopt now.

If it helps, CEA is also doing a ton of R&D on fission (and batteries, among others). But there, the real issues are mostly political.

simonw  4 days ago

Now that we've made it to 2025, 2050 doesn't feel nearly as far away to me.

bluGill  4 days ago

20 years ago I would have agreed with you. However today we have proof that wind and solar work, are cheap, and are useful. The world doesn't need fusion or fission, other technology is plenty good.

Unless you can do a science fiction thing of turning off the sun, and harvesting the hydrogen in it to power local reactors in earth orbit to provide the energy (light) we need without letting the vast majority escape our solar system unused. Otherwise that big fusion reactor in the sky provides all the energy we need.

  • legitster  4 days ago

    Wind and solar power are proving very cheap and good at the margin, but it doesn't solve for the massive needs of a modern grid. Unlike plants, we do not necessarily have the option of turning society off when it's not sunny or windy.

    Energy storage is far from a solved problem. Tesla produces ~40 gigawatts of storage capacity an entire year. California alone consumes ~800 gigawatts of power in a day. Even if Tesla dedicated every bit of lithium it had to building storage capacity for just one state, and demand didn't increase, it would realistically still take over a decade to keeping the lights on purely with renewables for a 24 hour period. At which point the first battery packs would be nearing the end of their service life.

    • energy123  4 days ago

      This is an incredibly misinformed and outdated opinion. Tesla produces 40 gigawatts of storage capacity only because demand for storage capacity is currently quite low, and because China is more cost effectively producing storage. As demand increases, production will increase to match demand.

      Most states currently only care about installing solar and wind -- not storage -- because they are still majority fossil fuels, and at the current moment it makes no sense to install storage if you still have fossil fuel to dislodge. The only exception is really California, who are installing storage, but their bottleneck is not the market's ability to deliver enough supply.

      There are also many storage options beyond lithium ion if you only spent a moment to look.

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    • jonah  4 days ago

      There are so many more cost-effective grid-scale options like pumped storage. I think it's daft to "waste" the energy density of lithium batteries on stationary applications.

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    • gpm  4 days ago

      Battery production/year is following an exponential curve right now. Tons of new research on promising new directions is continually being produced and incorporated into batteries. Projecting only continued production at the current rate isn't "realistic", it's wildly pessimistic.

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    • roenxi  4 days ago

      Also if we're planning for the long term; wind and solar sound like bad options for going into major global catastrophes like large asteroid hits or a nuclear war. It'd be better as a matter of principle to be using systems that can cope with massive climate disruptions. I like to bring up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer - an event like that will happen sooner or later and it'd be pretty rough if we've all gone too heavy with solar.

      One of those hopefully-you-don't-need-it concerns but it is starting to become a more pressing with the uptick in wars and unrest that seems to be going on.

      7 replies →