Oh great, you just had to go and get me started on fusion asan energy source. Theoretically, coolbeans, practically speaking, it isn’t happening.
Unlike nuclear fission—the nuclear reaction that iscurrently used in the energy sector—fusion does not create radioactive waste.
Yeah, except for all that radioactive waste that is produced in the process.
A fusion reactor doesn’t generate electricity, the energy produced is inthe form of very high energy Neutron streams and guess what happens when you convert Neutronstreams into electricity, you get more radioactive waste than you get from afission reactor.
Another byproduct is weaponsgrade Plutonium 239, a lot of it, so you can kiss any nuclear nonproliferation effortsgoodbye, fusion reactors will always be producing weapons grade plutonium in largequantities.
Fusion is only commercially viable if the fuel used is tritium,and that isn’t naturally occurring, the only place to get it is from a fissionreactor, so fusion can never be instead of fission, to make fusion viable wewill need to continue with fission.
It produces three to four times more energy than fission anddoes not release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, unlike burning fossilfuels. That is why China is working to build fusion reactors.
The vast majority of the energy a fusion reactor produces needsto go back into the system, there is always a huge "parasitic power consumption", so it consumes about 80% of the energy produced at best, and it goes up as you scale, in the end it’sabout as efficient as fission, which it needs to supply the tritium, so it doesn't solve the problems of fission, it perpetuates them and generates a host of new problems to go with them.
Also, to kick start the fusion process you have to get the temperatureto about a hundred million degrees, that's six times as hot as the sun’s surface (we don't have the pressure the sun does so we need to get it much hotter to make it work). In the end, it takesmore energy to start the fusion process than it produces, and once started, thecontainment will probably take more energy than what is produced too. It takes a boatload more energy to get the requisite containment than what is produced by the reaction today, and I suspect it always will.
Also, when you produce high energy neutron streams theentire plant is bombarded with much higher neutron energies than what happens in a fissionplant, and that knocks atoms out of position in the metals used, so the metal fatigues and becomes brittle, the entire plant degrades structurally pretty quickly which increases chances of an accident, and even if you are lucky enough to be accidentfree, you have to replace the very expensive components of the plant regularly,which probably costs more than the energy the plant produces.
In 2023, China’s fusion testing facilityset a world record for the longest run time for a magnetic confinement fusiondevice, a crucial step toward operation maintenance.
Ah yes, 403 seconds, the "world record" is less than sevenminutes. That containment needs to be continuous,so seven minutes needs to grow to 24/7 or we are screwed.
It plans to construct a nuclear fusion reactor independentlyas a demo project and aims to commercialize nuclear fusion on a large scale by2050.
Never gonna happen by 2050, they won’t get any net energy,all they will get is enough plutonium 239 to blow the world to smithereens a couple hundredtimes, let the conspiracy theorists run with that fact and let’s see what kind of predictions we get.
The Sun is very efficient at using fusion toproduce energy, but the incredible pressure and high temperatures needed occur naturally, wedon’t have that here, and the high cost of producing the environment necessary for fusion makes itcommercially unviable. Everybody wants to believe we can overcome these problemswith science, but it’s more practical to just believe other clean energy sources aremore viable.
Making fusion is like making diamonds, we can do it, but it costs about a hundred times more to do it than the resulting diamond is worth.
There are viable alternatives, wind, solar, geothermal, biochemical, and some shit we haven't even thought of yet, there are a lot of clean energyoptions we need to be putting our efforts into besides fusion.
