Another clean energy boondoggle, which means we will be using more and more carbon in the future.
People forget that until recently France managed to generate 75% of electricity from fission energy using 1970s technology.
French nuclear activists even managed to shutdown a much improved fission energy reactor when an inquiry had given it clean bill of health.
How much cleaner could fission energy be if all the money invested in fusion energy had been invested in fission energy instead?
You know where all the drive towards fusion energy comes from - the carbon industry secretly funding activists and channelling resources from the best form of clean energy to one which for the last 70 years has been promising to be available in the next 30 years.
You could say the same about any "new" energy technology though. Solar was a 'bondoggle' and a complete waste of time and money... right up until it wasn't.
Fusion is at the point Fission was in the 1940s. It works pretty well in a lab using extremely expensive equipment, makes a net loss of energy, and isn't ready for grid-scale production. But that will change if we continue to invest heavily in the commercialization of the technology.
The biggest advantages of fusion energy are its safety and non-proliferation aspects. You can very easily produce Plutonium using a commercial nuclear fission reactor plus some reprocessing facilities. That's not possible with Fusion since it uses non-fissile materials that can't be processed into a weapon. There are very few nations that should be trusted with fissile materials, and therefore very few that should be trusted with fission reactors.
Do you see how the announcement veered of into the weapons advantage this gave the US?
If it all works will the US be willing to allow other countries to have its energy technology if it means "safe" nuclear weapons?
Just think of the advantage it gives. You can bomb out an area knowing that there were will no nuclear fallout denying you access to it once you've eliminated the population.
If fusion is successful will the countries with the technologies make them freely available to other countries?
Take the US for instance. They have provoked Russia into invading Ukraine to keep Ukraine from joining NATO and thus permitting advanced NATO weaponry to be placed on Ukrainian soil, and having succeeded in getting a ban on Russian energy exports to Europe and blowing up the Nordstream gas pipelies, they are charging Europe 4 times as much for LNG while profiting from oil imports from Venezuela whose export to other countries they have sanctioned.
Surprisingly Europe is not charging US energy companies for massive windfall profits, but they are ready to do it to theirs.
Why should we believe that fusion energy will be different? Fusion energy if it becomes available may be "clean", but will it be cheap and freely available?
The countries who can be "trusted" with fission energy are the biggest carbon emitters,so why do you and they believe that they can't be trusted with fission energy so no one else should have it?
If they alone switched to fission energy that would be a huge drop in carbon emissions, so what is stopping them if they are truly sincere about carbon emissions?
People forget that until recently France managed to generate 75% of electricity from fission energy using 1970s technology.
French nuclear activists even managed to shutdown a much improved fission energy reactor when an inquiry had given it clean bill of health.
How much cleaner could fission energy be if all the money invested in fusion energy had been invested in fission energy instead?
You know where all the drive towards fusion energy comes from - the carbon industry secretly funding activists and channelling resources from the best form of clean energy to one which for the last 70 years has been promising to be available in the next 30 years.
More chance of the sky falling on our heads.